Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast, where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
Dr. Steven Gundry (00:24):
Feel overwhelmed about which supplements to take? I hear you. It’s confusing out there with so many types of vitamins to choose from. That’s why today I’ll be discussing the 10 essential supplements that offer the most bang for your buck health-wise. Seven are for everyone’s budget and three are more expensive, if you have extra room in your budget. I’ll also talk about a very trendy supplement touted to be the natural Ozempic. I’m talking about berberine. And finally I’ll be doing some myth-busting today about diets and weight loss methods. Top 10 supplements I take every day. Here’s number one: vitamin C. Now, wait a minute. Vitamin C was one of the supplements I told you was a waste of time. So come on, Dr. Gundry. You can’t have it both ways. Is it a good supplement or is it a bad supplement? Well, as I’ve talked about before, you and I are one of the few animals that do not manufacture our own vitamin C. We have five genes that make enzymes that convert glucose into vitamin C. We unfortunately, the fifth gene is called a ghost gene in us, so you do not have the end enzyme that completes making vitamin C.
(01:51):
That’s okay. You’re in good company. Guinea pigs also don’t have it, and most great apes don’t have it. We think that that gene was silenced because we grew up in the jungle, where there was plenty of vitamin C, and we didn’t need to waste energy, glucose, to make vitamin C since it was readily available in our food. Here’s the bad news: there’s work in rats where we genetically engineer rats to carry the human genes and a ghost gene for vitamin C.
(02:26):
Those rats live only half as long as normal rats. In other words, because they don’t make vitamin C, if you give those rats vitamin C in their drinking water, then they will live just as long as a normal rat, proving that a continuous supply of vitamin C is what makes the difference. So the problem with vitamin C, swallowing vitamin C, is that vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin and, quite frankly, it’s gone within three or four hours after you swallow it, and then you’re essentially left with nothing. And that’s why just swallowing a vitamin C a day really isn’t going to do much for you at all.
(03:17):
On the other hand, you want a continuous supply of vitamin C, and so you want to take time to release vitamin C. And there’s several on the market. I personally take 1,000 milligrams twice a day of timed release vitamin C, and it’s really one of the cornerstones of vitamin that you should take. The famous Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Linus Pauling, the vitamin C doctor who believed that vitamin C was essential for just about everything, including treating the common cold, unfortunately didn’t know that we could not absorb enough vitamin C in mega-doses to do what he wanted to do. But his point is well-taken that vitamin C is really essential for heart health, for your overall health. But it’s got to be in a continuous form.
(04:19):
That being said, if that’s inconvenient, you can get vitamin C tablets and swallow one four times a day. That’ll work. It’s bit inconvenient but that’ll work. There are some chewable tablets of vitamin C, but quite honestly you’ve got to be a very intelligent consumer because a lot of them either have a lot of sugar or a lot of artificial sweeteners. So read the label carefully. It’s easier to just buy vitamin C tablets and take it with a sip of water four times a day, and that’ll do the trick.
(04:58):
Number two: magnesium. Magnesium is one of two really, really essential vitamins for your heart health, for your gut health, for your brain health, for your mood. Magnesium and potassium basically control the movement, stability of cell membranes, particularly muscle cell membranes, including your heart and including your gut. And so the right balance of magnesium is really critical. Milk of magnesia is concentrated magnesium, and anyone who’s used milk of magnesia knows that it really makes your bowels move. I became interested in magnesium as a heart surgeon when we realized that most of our patients were profoundly deficient in magnesium even though their magnesium levels on a blood test were normal, and that’s because we will try to keep our blood level of magnesium normal at the expense of depleting intracellular magnesium.
(06:18):
When that happens, and it happens in almost all of us, our heart becomes very irritable, with lots of skipped beats. And we had to give people two grams of magnesium sulfate IV every six hours for 48 hours after heart surgery to get their body intracellular magnesium back up to normal. And we found and actually published on this, that it was a really good way of preventing post-operative arrhythmias, skipped heartbeats like atrial fibrillation. Magnesium helps you sleep, it helps your mood. You don’t beat your dog anymore. Now, everybody’s got a point where magnesium will act as a bowel movement pill, so everybody has to balance that.
(07:12):
In general, most people can take 300, 400 milligrams of magnesium daily. Now, through the years I don’t really care what form of magnesium you choose to buy. There’s multiple types of magnesium. There’s magnesium aspartate, magnesium citrate, magnesium chelates, magnesium threonate. These all work. Magnesium threonate is very useful for brain health but it’s also very expensive.
(07:44):
You can work your way up to bowel tolerance. And I have some men who are on 1,600 milligrams of magnesium a day. If you are beginning to do a low calorie or ketogenic diet, one of the most important things is to supplement with magnesium because as you mobilize glycogen, which is the sugar storage molecule in our muscles, glycogen is stored with potassium and magnesium. And as it’s mobilized, you pee off potassium and magnesium and it’s removed from your muscles. And that’s where all those often debilitating cramps come from when you go on a low calorie or ketogenic diet. So supplement with magnesium. Now, there’s other ways to do this. As you know, one of my favorites is a electrolyte drink called LMNT. The letters are LMNT. My wife I think is addicted to it. It comes in lots of flavors. I have no relationship with the company.
(08:55):
Gundry MD makes Vital Recharge, also an electrolyte drink. But some women in particular are very sensitive to magnesium in terms of loose bowels, and in that case you can use magnesium oil spray on your skin. Now, magnesium oil is not an oil, but it feels greasy. That’s where the name comes from. But you can just spray it on your legs, on your abdomen, wherever you want to spray it, particularly before you go to bed, and you’ll absorb the magnesium from your skin but it won’t make you move your bowels. And it’s a great trick to remember. Last but not least, Epsom salts is essentially magnesium soap that works really good.
(09:39):
All right, number three: we’re going to go into the territory of B vitamins. But there’s two really essential B vitamins that everyone should have in their armamentarium. The first is methylfolate. Now, methylfolate is not the same as folic acid. Methylfolate is the active form of folic acid. Why is that important? About 50% of us carry one or more mutations of the MTHFR genes. And we laughingly in my office call them the mother-effer genes because if you actually say, “MTHFR,” out loud, we would bleep you from network television. Because most of us have one or more of those mutations, we don’t have the enzymes to connect a methyl group to folic acid to turn it into its active form.
(10:45):
Similarly, B12 needs to be in its active form, which is methyl B12 or methylcobalamin, to work. And since half of us don’t have the enzymes to do that, I like all of my patients to take methyl B12 with a provisor. A large number of people lack a receptor in their intestines called intrinsic factor that is capable of absorbing B12 from the intestines.
(11:25):
So you could take, if you lack intrinsic factor, which is not unusual, you could take all the methyl B12 in the world and you won’t absorb it. The workaround is that you can put methyl B12 under your tongue. And there are multiple sublingual methyl B12s available on the market, but the key is you got to put them under your tongue. Now, some of these come in chewable tablets, but don’t just chew it. Chew it and then stick the pieces under your tongue. My most famous patient years ago who had a methyl B12 deficiency, which we can pick up with an elevated homocysteine level on a blood test, we put him on methyl B12. And when he came back, his methyl B12 levels were still quite low and his homocysteine level was still quite high.
(12:25):
And I said, “You’re not taking your methyl B12.” And he says, “Yes, I am. I take it every day.” And I said, “You’re not putting it under your tongue.” And his eyes got wide. He says, “Well, no. It’s so sweet, I sweeten my coffee with it.” And I said, “Well, you can see that that’s not working.” So he put it under his tongue and we solved the problem. So I don’t say this just for being silly. It really makes a difference in how you access these supplements and how they access you. Now, there are multiple other important B vitamins.
Dr. Steven Gundry (13:03):
Now, there are multiple other important B vitamins and they run the gamut from vitamin B3, which is niacin, vitamin B7, biotin, vitamin B6, vitamin B5, vitamin B2 and vitamin B1, thiamine. All of these are important and many of us, believe it or not, have deficiencies in one or more of these. An easy way around that is to take either a B50 or a B100 supplement, which gives you basically 50 or 100 milligrams or micrograms of all the B vitamins. And it’s an easy way to get all the B vitamins in at one time. Number five, vitamin D3. I’ve said this so many times, you’re probably tired of hearing me say this. Vitamin D3 is probably next to time release vitamin C, the most important vitamin you’re going to take.
(14:09):
Most of us are deficient in vitamin D. Most of us do not get enough vitamin D from sunlight exposure. 80% of my patients in Southern California where we got a lot of sun are vitamin D deficient when they come into my office. Vitamin D is a hormone. It is a longevity hormone. It’s one of the most critical hormones for gut integrity there is. I like my patients to aim for 100 to 150 nanograms per deciliter on a blood test. I and others have never seen vitamin D toxicity. The University of California San Diego says the average American should be taking 9,600 international units of vitamin D3 a day. That’s basically 10,000 international units a day, and that’s what I take. That’s in general what I give all of my patients, but I have some patients who take considerably more to get an adequate vitamin D level.
(15:15):
Vitamin K3. Now vitamin K2 is a very interesting component of vitamin K. There’s vitamin K1, which is present in green leafy vegetables. And then there’s vitamin K2, which is not very present in a lot of things, but vitamin K2 is incredibly important for helping vitamin D take calcium from your blood vessels and put it into your bones. In fact, there’s a very good human study of giving people with calcified coronary arteries, vitamin D and vitamin K2, and reducing the level of coronary calcification. Sounds pretty good. In general, you need about a hundred micrograms a day of vitamin K2, and they come in vitamin MK4 and MK7 forms. I make one at Gundry MD called Essential K2, which uses both forms, but it’s controversial whether you need both. But because it’s controversial, try to find one that gives you both. Number six, long chain omega-three fats, particularly DHA. Now most of us know this as fish oil. Now, the good news is most fish oil that’s commercially available is molecularly distilled. That means that the heavy metals and the pollutants have been removed from the fish oil and it’s very unusual to ever find a fish oil that isn’t molecularly distilled. So that’s not an issue anymore. What is an issue is, what’s in your fish oil in terms of the amount of DHA? We do a test in our office called the omega-three index based on how much DHA and EPA the two long chain omega-three fats that are incredibly important for your brain. And the omega- three index basically looks at how much of this is in your body for the two months prior to the test. And as I’ve written in the Longevity Paradox and other of my books, the higher your omega-three index, the bigger your brain size is and the bigger the areas of memory, the hippocampus. The lower your omega-three index, the more shrunken your brain is and the smaller the areas of memory.
(18:03):
So when mom said fish was brain food, she was right. What we found in my clinics is you need 1000 milligrams of DHA per day to get an omega-three index in the normal range. So I’m not particularly worried about which fish oil you decide to buy. What I am worried about is that that fish oil you take enough to give you 1000 milligrams or more of DHA. And if you do that, I can virtually guarantee you that you’ll have a normal omega-three index and you’ll have a nice big brain and some pretty good memory. Now what if you’re a vegan or even a vegetarian and you don’t want fish oil? There are numerous algae-based DHA, EPA, DPA, but you got to get adequate DHA into your system. Now, if money was no object, and probably for our health, if we spent as much money on our health as we did on our car, on our home, on our vacations, this would not be an object.
(19:25):
But if money is no object, let me tell you about three more, I think very important supplements, two of which are actually relatively new. Number one is carbon15 or C15. Carbon15 is a recently discovered essential fatty acid that quite frankly, no one even knew existed or how important it was until work with dolphin pods that the Navy keeps, and I won’t bore you, but it turns out that carbon15 is essential for mitochondrial health for cell membrane health. And it’s actually ridiculously hard to obtain from your diet. It is available in cheeses, it is available in only certain species of fish like red mullet, but it’s also easily obtained as a supplement.
(20:28):
Relatively new post-biotic is Urolithin-A. I am so impressed with Urolithin-A that I’ve had the Chief Science Officer of Timeline Nutrition on my podcast. Urolithin-A is one of the best products that I have found that keeps your mitochondria in tip-top shape. There are human studies showing that supplementation with Urolithin-A increases muscle mass in humans up to 20%. Pretty impressive. And if you go, well, I’ve heard about this. It’s in pomegranates and walnuts and raspberries. Well, no, it isn’t. The precursor of Urolithin-A is the ellagic acid, which is present in these compounds. But unfortunately, only about 14 to 20% of us have the correct types of bacteria that can convert these compounds into Urolithin-A. And as you’ll learn in gut, check my new book, 50 to 70% of super old people, super centenarians actually have the right bacteria to make Urolithin-A. So if you’re looking for the fountain of youth, you might’ve just found it in. Is it a bit pricey? Yes, it is. But do I think it’s worth it? Yes, I do.
(21:57):
Now, a third group that has gotten a lot of attention recently are various compounds based on vitamin B3. B as in boy, and they range from plain old niacin, nicotinic acid, niacinamide, which is the milder form of niacin, and then the new darlings of the longevity community, nicotinamide riboside or NR or nicotinamide mononucleotide with MNN. And these, all of these compounds have been shown to improve NAD plus levels. And I won’t bore you with why NAD plus levels are important. Please read my book, the Energy Paradox or Unlocking the Keto Code. But all three of these compounds have been shown in humans to dramatically improve levels of NAD Plus. And if you want to live a long time, that’s a really good idea. Niacinamide is cheap, the other two are quite expensive. Is there a benefit of one over the other? That’s perhaps to be determined in future studies, but if money is an object, just get yourself some niacinamide. Berberine, does it really help with weight loss? Well, you probably heard the news that two of the major weight loss companies, Weight Watchers and Noom have decided to market those miracle weight loss prescription drugs as part of their program. Whoa, that’s big news. And I’m not going to mention the names of those drugs, the names that will not be spoken here, but let’s get this clear. Those weight loss drugs work by suppressing your appetite, by stopping gastric emptying so that you always feel full. And oh, by the way, at least 40 to 45% of the weight loss, those drugs make no mistake, they do produce weight loss is from muscle loss, muscle mass reduction. And if you follow anything about aging, you want to keep your muscles. In fact, keeping your muscles is one of the hallmarks of successful aging. So yeah, great. I’m glad everybody loses weight on the drugs that will not be named.
(25:03):
But, weight loss as a goal should not include the loss of nearly 50% of your muscle mass. Okay, so enter berberine and berberine has gotten a lot of interest as maybe the poor man’s natural alternative to these weight loss drugs. And there is some evidence that berberine can act as a GLP-1 inhibitor, which is what these drugs do. But berberine is much more than that. In fact, I am a huge fan of berberine, so much so that berberine is an ingredient in many of my products here at Gundry MD. So I’m a big fan and I know a lot about how berberine works, and it’s so much more than just a natural alternative to these prescription drugs.
Dr. Steven Gundry (26:03):
… alternative to these prescription drugs.
(26:03):
First of all, berberine is a compound in several plants. Oregon grape root, which is totally different than grape seed extract. It’s present in Barberry. It’s present in several compounds. It is a polyphenol, son of a gun and berberine is actually one of the most potent mitochondrial uncouplers that’s ever been discovered. Now, if you’ve read the Energy Paradox, if you’ve read Unlocking the Keto Code, if you read the upcoming Gut Check, you’ll know that uncoupling mitochondria is one of the long-term keys to long-term health. Number two, you know that uncoupling mitochondria is doing a caloric bypass on energy metabolism. It makes your mitochondria waste fuel, waste calories and if you are wasting calories you will lose weight, so let’s get this straight. Berberine, first and foremost and you won’t see this on the internet, is a potent mitochondrial uncoupler and that’s why I really like it.
(27:25):
What else does it do? Well, berberine is known to activate an enzyme called AMPK. Now, AMPK is one of the major regulators of metabolism and energy expenditure in the body. By stimulating AMPK, berberine can actually enhance fat burning and increase calorie expenditure regardless of the fact that it’s a mitochondrial uncoupler. That means you are more efficient at metabolism and will support your weight loss efforts. It also has been shown to reduce blood sugar. It controls blood sugar and it also reduces insulin levels. Now, let’s back up to insulin. Insulin is the hormone that literally handles the sugars and the proteins that you ingest. Simplistically, insulin is a salesperson that sells sugar and protein to your muscles. If your muscles are hungry, then insulin has a really easy job of selling the sugar and protein you ate to your muscles. They basically go, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love what you’re selling. I want buy it.
(28:48):
On the other hand, most Americans, even 50% of normal weight Americans, are insulin resistant. 88% of overweight Americans are insulin resistant. 99.5% of obese Americans are insulin resistant. That means that they do not listen to the sales pitch that insulin is making and they are resistant to the sales pitch. That means that you make more insulin and more insulin to try to convince your muscles to take the sugar and protein out of your blood and unfortunately, that doesn’t happen and that’s why your blood sugar goes up, that’s why your hemoglobin A1C goes up, that’s why your fasting insulin goes up, that’s why you are insulin resistant. Insulin is also a fat storage hormone and the higher your insulin goes, the easier it is for you to make fat out of the sugar and protein that you eat and that’s the catch 22. The more of the stuff you eat, the more insulin you make, the more fat you deposit and the more insulin you need to keep things happening and that’s what’s so bad about our current diet.
(30:28):
Berberine drops insulin levels and drops blood sugar. It’s a great way to start. In addition, what berberine does is it lowers insulin, which then lowers the enzymes involved in fat synthesis and that can eliminate or at least lessen the accumulation of fat and fat cells. Now, it can also reduce the expression of genes involved in fat production and can also increase the expression of genes involved in fat breakdown, which can promote weight loss. Berberine has got a three-mode approach in producing the weight loss that you’re looking for in these prescription drugs that are now so wildly popular, the two weight loss programs are going to use them and that goes counter to everything that we want to do for long-term good health.
(31:39):
Now, drug companies know this. Drug companies want you to be a consumer for life. They’re not peddling quick fix solutions. If a quick fix solution was useful, I can assure you drug companies would not be interested in this. They want you, these companies that are going to use this drug, to be a customer for life and that’s the last thing any of us want for good health. We want good health for life without the aid of pharmaceuticals and that’s what I’ve devoted the last 25 years of my practice and my research to giving you other options and that’s why berberine is a part of my armamentarium in a number of my products because it’s going to give you the benefits from a natural compound, without the drawbacks of being addicted to a pharmaceutical for life.
(32:45):
I love this one. Calories in, calories out. Now, this is the second law of thermodynamics and I won’t take you back to physics class, but the whole idea was that if you eat calories, then you’re going to have to burn those calories and if you eat excess calories more than you burn, then you will gain weight. It makes such tremendous sense, but it’s absolutely completely wrong. How did all of this get started? Well, it got started when a calorimeter was invented and a calorimeter was designed to find out how many kilojoules or kilocalories or kilojoules of energy, any particular food contained. What they basically did is they built a chamber and they simplistically lit the food on fire and they measured how much heat was produced as that food disintegrated into ash, that was the number of calories that that food contained. Sounds simple enough. Unfortunately, inside of your intestines is not a calorimeter and what no one knew, particularly until the advent of the Human Microbiome Project where we understood that there was four to five pounds of hungry bacteria living in our intestines at any one time and that those bacteria would eat a lot of the foods that we ate and depending on the type of food that we are eating, that those bacteria would gobble up a lot of those calories or as I’ve written about in my books, we now know that a lot of these bacteria, obesogenic bacteria, actually make more of these calories easier for you to absorb, so the whole idea that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, with the advent of modern learning, has nothing to do with the calories in, calories out, so it’s a useless weight loss strategy.
(35:23):
Sure, you can go on an extremely calorie-restricted diet and you will lose weight. Guarantee it, but number one, you haven’t learned how to eat. Number two, you haven’t fed the gut buddies that are going to keep you lean and number three, that’s one of the reasons all of these delivery services for, oh I lost 30 pounds on X system or I lost 50 pounds doing this, none of these people sustained that weight. As you know, with the Biggest Loser, yes these people lost huge amounts of weight, but a year later they had all returned actually, not only to their original weight, but actually rebounded above. The other similar advice is, eat less, move more. Now this is just a variation of calories in, calories out. If you eat less, but you exercise more, then that’s the secret. Unfortunately, we know from looking at hunter-gatherers, that the calorie expenditure by a Hadza tribesman who may walk 20 miles a day is exactly the calorie expenditure of an office worker who’s sitting at the desk all day. The whole idea of eat less, move more, which is promulgated for the last 40 years, doesn’t work, nor does it correlate with any scientific study on weight loss.
(37:10):
Now, what does work well, quite frankly, intermittent fasting studies show that there are incredible benefits to time-restricted eating, versus a 12 hour eating window. I’ve written in the last two books, now three upcoming, of the famous Italian cyclist study and just real briefly because you’ve heard me say it before. You take two groups of cyclists. You put them on a training table where they have to eat the same food for three months. One group eats in a 12 hour eating window. The other group eats in a compressed 7 hour eating window. They have to get all their calories in that time period. They have identical performance on the exercise program. The group that ate in the 12 hour eating window had no weight loss. The group that ate in the 7 hour eating window, even though they ate the exact same number of calories, lost weight. The group that had this 12 hour eating window had no change in their insulin-like growth factor one, which is a really good marker for longevity. The group that ate in the 7 hour eating window had lowered levels of insulin-like growth factor one. This has been confirmed at the NIH, at the National Institutes of Aging in rat studies. Compressing the time window has the most benefits in terms of not only weight loss, but allowing you to have more calories than you normally would starve yourself.
(38:49):
Number two, eat multiple small meals. I see people online claiming that multiple small meals a day is good for you. First of all, this is the opposite of what you should be doing. There is no evidence…
Dr. Steven Gundry (39:03):
Instead of what you should be doing. There is no evidence from hunter-gatherer societies that hunter-gatherers eat multiple small meals throughout the day. Most hunter-gatherers don’t eat until around 11:00 or noon, and then they don’t eat again until their main meal of the day, which was dinner. And that’s when they brought everything they gathered or caught back to camp and cooked it or ate it. So there’s no evidence that hunter-gatherers are out having a granola bar while they’re out gathering food or a fruit smoothie. These foods did not exist and there’s no evidence that we were designed to work that way.
(39:40):
Also feeding studies in humans like the one I just talked to, in rodents like at the NIH, show that the multiple small meals actually make you gain weight rather than lose weight. The other problem is that digestion in itself in absorbing food is bad for the wall of your gut, and the gut needs time to repair itself. So the more downtime you have for your gut to repair itself, the better your health and the more chance you’re actually going to have for losing weight. Now this includes not eating before bed. The more I can get you to stay at least three hours away from your last meal before you go to bed, the better your deep sleep, the better your sleep, the better your brain is washed. The brain has a brainwashing cycle, and I know you can’t always do that. But the more you shorten your last meal a day, try to eat at 5:00, try to eat at 6:00, 7:00 at the maximum, and then you’ll have plenty of time to clean your brain out.
(40:58):
All right, number three. Eat more protein, eat less fat. There was a period of time where this was profoundly popular. The second Atkins diet was a high protein, not as much fat diet. Unfortunately, I knew Dr. Atkins, he died at age 72, as an obese man. One of the things he didn’t know was that we have no storage system for protein. We do not waste energy, so we convert that protein into sugar. It’s called gluconeogenesis. So we then have a storage system for sugar, it’s called fat. And multiple studies that I reference in all my books show that a high protein diet actually increases your risk of diabetes, increases your risk of prediabetes, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and kidney damage. Not exactly what I’m looking for in a long-term strategy.
(42:06):
Now, of course we all need protein in our diet, but I agree with Dr. Valter Longo who’s the head of Longevity at USC, that our protein requirements are vastly overrated. And I spell it out. He spells it out in all his books. Protein is not the miracle food that you need to use. Now not all protein has to come from animals. Vegetables, nuts are rich sources of protein, and you don’t have to get your protein by eating animals. In the new book, Gut Check, which will be out in January, you’ll see another reason why certain animal products may not be offering you the health benefits that you think you’re getting, but we’ll save that for later.
(42:56):
Number four, eating more fruit will help you lose weight. Now many people think they should load up on fruit on a diet because fruit is loaded with fructose, and fructose doesn’t have any effect on your insulin, and it doesn’t make you a diabetic. Sorry about that. Dr. Lustig from University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Johnson from the University of Colorado have completely destroyed that myth. Fructose is the most obesogenic food there is.
(43:35):
Fructose is the cause of fatty liver disease, which is rampant in this country. Fructose is the driver of insulin resistance. Fructose is the driver of metabolic syndrome. And if you want to kill off your mitochondria, like I’ve shown in the last two books, fructose is the best way to kill mitochondria and kidneys, that I know of.
(44:04):
Multiple times, I have patients who decide to go on a high fructose diet, a high fruit diet. They’re eating fruit, they’re eating fruit smoothies. Their uric acid becomes elevated, their insulin becomes elevated, they become prediabetic, their kidney function falls. And they go, “What the heck? I read this book about how good fruit is for you.” We see it every day in my clinics. Please give fruit the boot.
(44:34):
Number five, if you want to lose weight, you got to get rid of fat. You got to ditch the fat in your diet. Now this is a holdover from the ’70s and ’80s when all fat was bad. In fact, there are multiple fats that are incredibly good for your health. You have to know which ones to eat. Avocados, people eating an avocado a day have been shown to lose weight as compared to not eating the same calories with an avocado. Olive oil. Multiple studies show that olive oil promotes weight loss.
(45:08):
Omega-3 fats like short-chain omega-3 fats in flaxseed oil, in perilla oil, help you lose weight.
(45:18):
Long-chain omega-3 fats like in fish oil or algae oils help you lose weight.
(45:25):
Flaxseed oil or ground up flaxseeds are another great way to get short-chain omega-3 fats in your diet.
(45:33):
And believe it or not, fats from whole fat dairy contain a compound which I write about called carbon 15 that actually is now known to be an essential fatty acid. It’s so important that I even manufacture my own product, C15, to get carbon 15 fat into your diet in the form of a little gel cap. It’s that important. In fact, studies have shown that people who use full-fat dairy actually have much better health than people who use low-fat dairy.
(46:15):
Now it’s time for the question of the week. The question of the week comes from @Linda-qq5mg on my YouTube video about toxic kitchenware. She asked, “Dr. Gundry, is parchment paper safe to use? Thank you very much for all your wonderful videos. I really appreciate them.”
(46:32):
Well, thank you very much, Linda. Yes, parchment paper is fine to use. You don’t have to be afraid of it. Nothing toxic is going to leech out. Enjoy.
(46:42):
Now it’s time for the review of the week. The review of the week comes from @KJ from Callie Jones 1647, commenting on my YouTube video about healthy food at Costco. He says, “Dr. Gundry, thank you for this video. It helps everyday folks who can’t afford those very expensive high-end organic markets. Some valuable options at Costco. I want very much to make healthy choices, but the reality is my paycheck definitely determines how far I can go. Costco is on my budget. And thank you for understanding and taking the time to make recommendations that are reasonable for the average Joe.”
(47:19):
Well, thank you very much. I do this not because you are some really well-padded high-income earner. I do this because I know what it’s like to really try to make ends meet as you probably hear from one of my videos when I embarked on what I do now, we were to the point where we had to talk to bankruptcy attorneys, but I persevered. And so I know that Costco is really useful. So I’m always looking out for you and we’re going to find ways to make health affordable. Because quite frankly, being sick is the best way to use up your dollars fast.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
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