Speaker 1: 00:00 Welcome to The Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.
Dr. Gundry: 00:14 welcome to The Dr. Gundry Podcast. Most of us know someone who has suffered from cancer, whether it’s a parent, a sibling, a spouse, or a friend. Maybe you’ve been fighting your own fight and battle against cancer. Well, what if there was something you could do about it? Foods that you could prepare to help ward off dangerous cancers. On today’s episode, I’ll be chatting with Liana Werner-Gray bestselling author of The Earth Diet and 10-Minute Recipes. And her brand new book is called Cancer-Free with Food, and how the right foods can reduce your cancer risk.
Dr. Gundry: 00:53 But I also want to talk about if you’ve got cancer, how the right foods can really make a difference. You’re going to learn about Liana’s health journey, which foods to eat and which to avoid because this is The Dr. Gundry Podcast after all. And how you and your loved ones can start living healthier cancer-free lives today. So, Liana, welcome to the podcast.
Liana: 01:18 Thank you so much for having me, Dr Gundry.
Dr. Gundry: 01:19 Well we’re so happy to have you here. Now, when you were 21 years old last year I think.
Liana: 01:28 Thank you.
Dr. Gundry: 01:29 You discovered you had a golf ball sized lump in your neck. Tell me about that and then I want you as a segue, tell me what you thought caused that and what your medical journey was.
Liana: 01:42 I grew up in Alice Springs, Outback Australia with a very indigenous rich culture. From age five we were taught that the healthiest way for us to eat was to go out to our own backyard, and to pull foods straight from the trees or the bush because those were the most nutritious. That was planted in my brain from a young age. Now when I left Alice Springs to go to Brisbane to go to university, I was living on my own and to my own devices. I started to indulge in junk foods, and fast foods, and processed foods really for the first time. And I became very quickly addicted to it, and I knew it was wrong and I knew I was depriving my body of nutrition every single day.
Liana: 02:21 And so I started to notice all these health issues started to happen, but I ignored them because the impulse to eat sugar and fast foods was much stronger at the time. After five years of eating like that every single day and eating copious amounts of junk food. I would eat gummy bears for breakfast, I would eat pizza for lunch, KFC for dinner, McDonald’s-
Dr. Gundry: 02:44 Listeners cover your ears please off.
Liana: 02:47 … It’s awful. Then when I was 21 I ended up in a hospital with the lump in my throat, which at first I just thought it was a swollen gland. I ignored it. And after two weeks it got bigger, it worse. So my naturopath said, “You need to go to the hospital and get this checked.” They did a biopsy and when the results came back and they said, look, you have a 3.7 centimeter mass tumor in your lymphatic system, I went and researched what the lymphatic system was. And I learned that it’s basically the buddy’s surge system. And so I was like, “Wow, that makes sense. I put way too many toxins into my body that my body backfired and was like, “You can’t keep eating like this.” I knew that it was diet related. Also, my gut told me this is diet related. That’s when I started my healing journey, and I wanted to get healthy once and for all.
Dr. Gundry: 03:36 Okay. The people who are listening or watching are going to say, Okay, you had a lump in your neck. It was probably just a swollen gland. You actually have a biopsy that said it was a lymphoma? Yes, is that correct?
Liana: 03:51 I have a biopsy in my website that shows that I have a 3.7 centimeter tumor and on the right side of my neck. And I actually went and got three different diagnosis from different doctors and they all said different things. One said I had stage one cancer, one said I had stage zero cancer, one said I had precancerous. And so at that point I gathered some information about the medical industry at the time and thought, “This seems like Hocus Pocus movie.” And also, they offered me a cervical cancer vaccination at the time and I was like, “How’s this related?” That to me was enough for me to say, “You know what? I’m going to opt out of this.” And it wasn’t stage four cancer. They weren’t saying, “You need to go for chemo next week, you need to go for surgery next week.” They’re saying, “Look, we can do surgery, we can remove it if you want.” And they’ve done surgery for a lot smaller lumps for sure.
Dr. Gundry: 04:43 Sure.
Liana: 04:44 I also don’t want to take away from people who have had stage four cancer or advanced cancer. Mine was very early and I was able to catch that very early. But it was enough for me to say, “You know what? I don’t want to just remove it.” And that’s something that the indigenous people also told me was that, “If we have a sickness or like a tumor or a lump in our body, obviously tumor is not meant to be anywhere in our body.” So they said if you just go and you do medical and you cut it out, that doesn’t necessarily address the root cause. And I wanted to address the root cause once and for all because I knew I had to stop eating like that.
Liana: 05:18 That’s when I said, “You know what? I’m going to go and actually get healthy once and for all, and go back to my roots, go back to nature.” I went and found a medical doctor who was helping people with vitamin C injections and helping people heal cancer naturally. And then I worked with a naturopath and I started juicing six times a day. I drank six vegetable juices a day. And then every time I had a craving for junk food, I thought, “Okay, how can I fulfill this craving in the most natural way possible?” So, I got into the kitchen and I started making recipes. And that’s where these recipes evolved from. I was like, “Okay, I’m craving chicken nuggets. I’m craving chocolate, I’m craving candy, I’m craving pancakes, waffles,” whatever it was, I found a recipe that would nourish my body instead of poison it and make it worse.
Dr. Gundry: 06:07 Now were you brought up in a family that cook?
Liana: 06:11 Yeah. So when my father is a chef and my mom’s also a really good cook. And I hadn’t cooked before that. I was eating processed food for so many years. When I got into the kitchen, I was amazed when I started putting ingredients together, the simple ingredients to make a cookie dough, like tigernut flour or almond flour and some monk fruit sweetner, my recipes have evolved since then. I’ve become a lot healthier. I was surprised when I was making these foods. I was like, “Wow, I can eat this chocolate brownie every single day and get magnesium from it and protein and it tastes good.” And that was helping me not crave the bad stuff.
Dr. Gundry: 06:47 Got you. They didn’t want to necessarily say, “Well you have to have chemotherapy, or you have to have radiation therapy or you have to have this cut out.” Did they propose any of those things to you?
Liana: 07:03 They weren’t aggressive with me at all-
Dr. Gundry: 07:05 Good.
Liana: 07:06 … and also this was in Australia 10 years ago. I think Australia at that time was not as aggressive. But five years after that, my mom was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer in both her breasts and they were very aggressive with her and said, “You need to do surgery and Chemo and radiation.” And so I sat down with my mom and said, “What do you feel like you need to do for your healing? What do you think will is the most empowering choice for you?” And my mom said, “Honestly, I do want to do surgery because I feel like that [inaudible 00:07:35] out, I’ll start fresh. Then I won’t have the cancer anymore.” But she said, “I just honestly can’t do chemo radiation. I feel like if I do that, I’ll put my body under too much pressure and stress and that will make my situation worse.”
Liana: 07:47 And then she also did a nutritional plan. She started juicing as well, getting all that nutrition into her, lots of vitamin C. She also took vitamin D supplements as well. And for the next six months after that, doctors kept calling her pressuring her like, “It’s going to come back if you don’t do chemo radiation.” And my mom would call me in fear and be like, “What should I do?” And I said, “Well, what do you feel?” And she said, “I can’t do it.” She never did it and she’s cancer-free to this day.
Dr. Gundry: 08:14 That’s fantastic story. You started doing all this. You change your food, you fought the junk food, temptations. When did you start noticing something changing?
Liana: 08:28 It took about a month for the tumor to let lose its … It felt very swollen and very hard. So it took about a month for me to feel like it was starting to dissolve. After three months, it was completely dissolved-
Dr. Gundry: 08:43 Fantastic.
Liana: 08:44 … But I made a lot of radical changes.
Dr. Gundry: 08:49 It’s one thing to have a lump in your neck which you can see to empower you to make radical changes, particularly when you’re really young. What keeps you on track now that that thing’s not there anymore?
Liana: 09:06 Well, I suffered every single day from five years eating junk food. Even though I felt like that high for five or 10 minutes eating all the sugar and the fast food, after that I would crash and was absolutely miserable. That was enough suffering to me. And I just remember like saying, “God, if you can heal me from this addiction and these cravings and this chuma, I’ll be happy and grateful every single day of my life, I’m promise.” And so I’ve not wanted to go back to that at all. But also there’s no desire impulse in me at all. When I see these foods, to me they just look dead and there’s no appeal. I’m more excited about making these kinds of foods instead. I’m excited about making like a healthy cookie dough, or healthy chicken tenders.
Dr. Gundry: 09:52 All right, so your initial experience resulted in The Earth Diet, right?
Liana: 09:56 Yes.
Dr. Gundry: 09:56 And so, how is this new book, the Cancer-Free with Food different than the Earth Diet?
Liana: 10:09 Well, the Earth Diet started because I needed something at the time to hold me accountable to sticking to me only eating natural food. And at the time, it started as a blog for 365 days. I said, “I’m only going to eat foods that come straight from the earth as wholesome as possible for one year, and I want you the world, my readers to hold me accountable.” So after the blog, then my readers are like, “Can you put all of these recipes into a book?” And I thought, “Oh, that’s a great idea.” Hay House published my first Earth Diet Book. And then after that, I wanted to make it more specific for people with cancer or people that have cancer in their family like myself.
Liana: 10:51 Both of my grandfathers also passed away from cancer. For people that are predisposed to it, I wanted to say here’s some research that show which foods help us to reduce our risk of ever getting cancer. And if you have cancer, here are some foods that have been proven to shrink tumors and kill cancer cells. I wanted to do research just for that, and I love the cancer community and love helping people with cancer because it’s a terrible disease and a terrible feeling, I’ve been there and it feels like absolute rock bottom. It feels like hell literally. So I want to help people that are in that situation.
Dr. Gundry: 11:34 When you did the Earth Diet and you did this year long journey, you didn’t have to move back to the Outback and eat native plant. You were doing this from Brisbane, right?
Liana: 11:49 Exactly.
Dr. Gundry: 11:49 The big city.
Liana: 11:49 Right. I wanted to find a way to make the natural indigenous lifestyle fit into a very fast paced, busy, modern lifestyle.
Dr. Gundry: 11:57 Good. And can you do it? Obviously you can.
Liana: 12:00 Yes.
Dr. Gundry: 12:00 And you’re going to teach us some of those things. The new book is Cancer-Free with Food. So one of the most toxic foods that everyone should avoid-
Liana: 12:09 The most obvious one is sugar, white sugar and cancer, the body just doesn’t know how to break that down, it’s just way too much toxicity for the lymphatic system and the liver and the whole body. That one is obvious one. Also a lot of preservatives like fillers, additives, I found a lot of research on those that have proven that those create toxins in the body, carcinogens which lead to cancer. So obviously avoiding anything genetically engineered, and then also even microwave foods, because that’s considered a form of radiation. I thought that was fascinating.
Liana: 12:45 And then also I found some studies that were linked to foods that have been sprayed with pesticides. Fruits and vegetables sprayed with pesticides is incredibly toxic, and does increase your chances of getting cancer. And some people say, “Well, that sucks, I just want to be able to go to the supermarket and buy fruit and vegetable.” I know. So do I, but if we’re in this country, in America we have to buy organic produce or grow it ourselves because we’re at risk of getting a lot of pesticide exposure. And then also farmed seafood was really toxic. I was surprised about how toxic farm seafood was, I didn’t think it could be that awful.
Dr. Gundry: 13:21 It’s really bad. And as you know, in all my books, I say, “Please, please only wild caught fish.” And beginning to see actually tricks. I saw on a restaurant menu, actually this past week, that they were advertising ocean raised seafood.
Liana: 13:46 What’s that?
Dr. Gundry: 13:46 It’s that. That’s called farmed seafood. But it sounds so much more … Wild ocean raised, and there was the word raised caught my attention and everybody says, “Oh, but it’s real, ocean is wild, now it’s not-”
Liana: 14:02 They’re smart with their marketing. That’s something people need to be cautious of is the packet might look natural or say ocean raised fish, but it’s just marketing.
Dr. Gundry: 14:12 Yeah, very true. Okay. So a lot of my listeners know that I’ve been talking about the importance of vitamin D and off camera when you’re talking about that. So what are your recommendations for people in terms of vitamin D?
Liana: 14:24 Well, I recommend getting blood work every 12 to 24 months and just checking vitamin D levels and if they’re down, take supplements, but also go out and get sunshine, and don’t be afraid of the sun. I also did a lot of research on skin cancer and there are legit studies that say that more cancer is caused from skin cancer and the carcinogens in skin cancer-
Dr. Gundry: 14:44 From sunscreen.
Liana: 14:45 Sorry, sunscreen and how toxic sunscreen is versus the sun.
Dr. Gundry: 14:49 Very true. That’s part of my seven deadly disruptors and sunscreen is right up there on carcinogens. And it’s interesting, the University of California San Diego just down the road from here, published a number of papers on the effect of Vitamin D and cancer. And they’ve found that most people with cancer have low vitamin D levels and there’s a very strong association in their opinion between low vitamin D and the development of cancer. I’ve certainly seen that in my practice.
Dr. Gundry: 15:24 In fact shockingly, they think the average American should take 9,600 international units of vitamin D through a day to have an adequate level. And in their published research, they have never seen vitamin D toxicity at up to 40,000 international units a day, routinely. I think there’s this huge fear, particularly among practicing healthcare professionals that vitamin D’s toxicity is … oh, it’s horrible. And I see a number of my cancer patients who I run their vitamin Ds 100, 120 nanograms per milliliter and their oncologists say, “You’re vitamin D toxic and get that down.” And next time I see them, their vitamin D level is like 40 and I go, “What happened?” They say, “Oh, my oncologist said I’m killing myself with vitamin D.” And I say, “Well that’s funny.” The data shows just the opposite.
Liana: 16:26 Yeah. It’s because they’re trained in such old school things, same as nutritionists. It’s all old school. We’re still trained that we should [inaudible 00:16:34] promoting corn and grains and that’s awful. Look at the health stats. So I personally take vitamin D supplements myself and it’s also something free that we can get straight from the sunshine, which I talk about in my book also. I talk about, here is some free natural treatments that you can do if you have cancer or want to prevent cancer, and getting sunshine is one of them.
Dr. Gundry: 16:53 Absolutely. Okay, so let’s take a quick break.
Speaker 1: 16:57 Dr. Steven Gundry’s latest book, The Longevity Paradox is out now. Like his first New York Times bestseller, The Plant Paradox, this will be a game changer in helping you reverse disease and live a long vital life. Pick up a copy today at your local bookstore, Barnes and Noble or Amazon, or download the audio book on Audible.
Dr. Gundry: 17:19 All right. Now for some controversy. I tell my patients and readers to avoid foods like quinoa and whole tomatoes, and that you have to detoxify the quinoa with a pressure cooker or you have to get rid of the lectins in tomatoes by peeling and de-seeding them. I actually like tomato sauce that comes from peeled and de-seeded tomatoes. And we actually have some recipes for that. But you recommend both of these things in your new book, how come?
Liana: 17:54 I do. Okay, disclaimer. All the foods in this book, even though they might be anticancer, they have to be for the right person, same as mushrooms. Mushrooms are great, but not for every person. Personally, I can’t eat a lot of mushrooms. My body just doesn’t like them that well, even though they’re super healthy natural food. So with tomatoes, the research I found with them is mostly because of their lycopene. Those study showed that that helps especially with prostate cancer and other cancers. So, for some tomatoes work well, but also for others, it might cause inflammation. And then some peoples, doctors are telling them stay away from nightshades.
Liana: 18:32 But the studies I found, I felt like tomatoes were really helpful in preventative and for healing cancer, so I included that. And then quinoa, there’s a lot of studies that trace back to ancient civilizations that use quinoa as their fuel source, and that’s something that they would eat to keep them energized for days. And quinoa, it depends on where someone’s at with their grains, so I wouldn’t say to someone who’s completely cut all grains, like go and add a grain into your diet. But for someone who eats a lot of breads or a lot of other processed grains, I would say try quinoa and fill up on that instead to help you cross that bridge so that you’re not craving the worst types of grains.
Dr. Gundry: 19:15 Part of what I’ve done throughout my life is to study indigenous cultures and ancient cultures to figure out how they actually detoxified what appeared to me as a very toxic grain for instance. And most people don’t know, and I write about this, that the Incas actually had three detoxification processes before they would eat quinoa.
Liana: 19:38 Oh wow.
Dr. Gundry: 19:39 They soaked it for 48 hours, then they allowed it to form out, they let it rot and then they cooked it and it’s not on the package direction.
Liana: 19:52 See, not a lot of people know this. I didn’t know this.
Dr. Gundry: 19:53 Yeah, that’s why I write about this.
Liana: 19:54 This is awesome I’m going to share this.
Dr. Gundry: 19:56 For instance last fall I went to Sicily because Sicily is a heavily based tomato culture. Almost everything is tomato sauce based. And so I would go and interview chefs and even in small villages. And I said, “What do you think? Why do you guys eat so many tomatoes and how do you fix them?” And everyone said, “Well everyone knows you have to peel and de-seed tomatoes before you can make sauce.” And I said, “Well how do you know that?” They said, “Well because my mother taught me.” “Well how does she know?” “Because my grandmother taught her.” And I could not find a chef in Sicily that didn’t tell me you had to peel in de-seed tomatoes before you could use them.
Dr. Gundry: 20:40 In fact I was lecturing in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, getting interviewed by a reporter and we were talking about tomatoes. And the reporter said, “Well I love it, the fact that you say you have to peel and de-seed tomatoes because everyone in Canada knows that the seed in a tomato is very acidic and toxic and you have to get rid of it.” So everyone knows that. And so you start looking at cultures and say, “Isn’t that interesting?” In fact, the Italians didn’t eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back, their native son, because they knew how toxic they were.
Liana: 21:19 Oh wow. Interesting. Well, and also what I learned from the aboriginals is that you don’t eat the seeds in any fruits or vegetables because if you do that, basically you won’t have any more food. They had to eat the food and keep the seeds and replant them because they couldn’t just go to the supermarket and buy seeds that didn’t exist. So that was in a way of keeping that cycle going. So it totally makes sense to me to remove seeds from all fruits and vegetables because we weren’t designed to eat them. It’s just not the design of nature or the human body.
Dr. Gundry: 21:48 No, it’s true. When I was doing mission work in Brazil years ago as a surgeon and cashews started in South America and the aboriginal South Americans would actually take the cashew nut off and throw it away because it was toxic and they’d eat the fruit.
Liana: 22:07 Oh, wow.
Dr. Gundry: 22:10 So you’d see the entire thing on your plate, they’d give it to you. They go, “Don’t touch that, that’s lethal-
Liana: 22:17 Wow.
Dr. Gundry: 22:17 … just eat the fruit.”
Liana: 22:18 Wow. So does this mean you might be coming to Alice Springs sometimes [crosstalk 00:22:22] country.
Dr. Gundry: 22:22 Right I would love to come out there because I have not studied their culture.
Liana: 22:27 Oh, that’d be awesome. Well, I’m your girl. Can I introduce you to them?
Dr. Gundry: 22:30 Alright, very good.
Liana: 22:31 Dr. Gundry goes to the Outback.
Dr. Gundry: 22:33 That’s right. Oh that would be fun. I’m going to be looking out for you in the Outback folks. Okay. I always ask my guests because my new book, The Longevity Paradox, what’s the one thing listeners can do today to help them live a longer, healthier life?
Liana: 22:52 Drink chlorophyll every single day. That’s my number one tip for everyone always. And that’s something that I’ve continued to do now every single day for the last decade after I healed. I thought, “Why not consume chlorophyll every day? It just makes me feel so alive, so energized, it helps purify the blood, helps put oxygen into the blood.” And chlorophyll could be the form of eating a big green salad, leafy greens or a smoothie or a juice or even chlorophyll droppers or greens powder, which I use also that has … It’s a dried broccoli sprouts, collard greens, kale, spirulina, and I just mix that into water.
Dr. Gundry: 23:29 Okay. But make sure, editorial note that your greens powder doesn’t have wheat grass or barley grass, evil stuff. So what are your top three cancer fighting foods? You brought us some, and for those of you who are listening to the podcast, we’re going to try our best to describe them for you and to make a munching noises that aren’t too gross. So, what have got?
Liana: 23:54 So I made a few different dishes today. Do you want to start with the dessert? I always go straight for the dessert.
Dr. Gundry: 24:05 Life’s too short eat dessert first, is that what you’re saying?
Liana: 24:06 Yeah, always.
Dr. Gundry: 24:07 Okay.
Liana: 24:08 Okay. So I made two different desserts. So first of all, these are chocolate coconut cups. So this is a great replacement for someone who’s craving the Reese’s or chocolate peanut butter cups. So this is something I also ate a lot of during my healing. It’s made with real cacao powder, real cacao butter, and also some coconut manna inside. That makes it nice and creamy. And then when you bite into it, you get that coconut manna buttery inside and it’s sweetened with monk fruit.
Dr. Gundry: 24:41 So this would be like … Easter was a little bit ago, this could be a Cadbury Egg replacement?
Liana: 24:49 Totally. Yes. But also … Would you like to show it?
Dr. Gundry: 24:51 Yeah.
Liana: 24:52 So one of the studies I found is that cacao actually does have anti-tumor activities and it’s a functional food, which I was so happy about. And so, would all your chocolate lovers be happy to hear that chocolate is medicine?
Dr. Gundry: 25:07 Oh gosh. Yeah. Has huge amounts of polyphenols. And particularly in my cancer practice, and I have a big cancer practice, chapter 10 of The Plant Paradox is the Cancer Program. We want everyone in ketosis. Coconut has MCT oil, which will get you into ketosis pretty easily, but that’s delicious.
Liana: 25:34 Like it?
Dr. Gundry: 25:34 Okay. I want to put that down.
Liana: 25:39 Okay. Then I use these two for the chocolate chunks in the cookie dough recipe.
Dr. Gundry: 25:42 Oh, okay.
Liana: 25:43 Now the cookie dough recipe instead of using flour is made with tigernut flour, which I know that you’re a big fan of.
Dr. Gundry: 25:54 Big fan of. I’ve actually been writing about it for years and we have it in our recipes, and people go, “Tigernuts. What the heck are those?”
Liana: 25:57 Yeah, people out there are not or know they’re root vegetable.
Dr. Gundry: 26:00 Correct.
Liana: 26:01 Same amount of iron as red meat. So these are excellent … you’re getting a lot of iron from eating cookies.
Dr. Gundry: 26:08 Wow.
Liana: 26:09 Yeah. Tigernut flour sweetened with monk fruit as well. I put a bit of Cecil in there.
Dr. Gundry: 26:14 Yeah, it almost looks like you have two kinds.
Liana: 26:16 Yeah, so I rolled these ones in cocoa powder.
Dr. Gundry: 26:19 Oh, okay.
Liana: 26:20 I just love that richness of the cocoa powder and then bite into it. And you get that soft, moist, sweet cookie dough inside and then with the chocolate coconut chunks delish.
Dr. Gundry: 26:32 So these are raw-
Liana: 26:33 These are raw no bake and these are a legit five minute recipe. Now you just throw everything into a ball and it’s done. Now you can bake them for seven minutes in the oven.
Dr. Gundry: 26:42 Oh, okay.
Liana: 26:43 If you want a hot melt in your mouth, chocolate chip cookie.
Dr. Gundry: 26:48 So this is actually okay for me.
Liana: 26:50 This is a great replacement, a great upgrade, actually nutrient rich cookie dough.
Dr. Gundry: 26:55 So you’re a junk food addict that created her own junk food, so that you can-
Liana: 27:01 Junk food gone healthy.
Dr. Gundry: 27:03 All right. And I think that’s what we have to do. One of my very good friends, Jimmy Schmidt, who’s won three James Beard award saying, “There’s no way we’re going to stop people from eating the textures and flavors that they crave-
Liana: 27:19 Exactly.
Dr. Gundry: 27:20 … And we basically have to convince them that they can get all those flavors and textures, using things that will make them healthy.”
Liana: 27:29 Yes. And that’s what I aimed for my books to do because I came from that place of being a junk food addict and now being a health and nutrition coach for the past decade, if you tell someone who’s addicted, “You can never eat this again, you can never have cookies, chocolate bread.” They’re like, “Okay bye. See yeah.”
Dr. Gundry: 27:46 No, that’s exactly right. And all of our books in the new one, The Plant Paradox Family Cookbook will be out this fall. What we strive to do is … because a kid wants a chicken [crosstalk 00:27:59] McNugget. So help me with this. How are we going to do that?
Liana: 28:04 So, this is organic chicken. Very important that meat has to be organic. I coded this in Macadamia nut milk, but people could also code it in pasture raised eggs as well. And then the coding is tigernut flour with turmeric and some black pepper and some sea salt. And then you can bake them or fry them. But guess what? All of our life fried these in Dr Gundry’s-
Dr. Gundry: 28:26 Which one?
Liana: 28:27 Dr. Gundry’s Olive Oil.
Dr. Gundry: 28:29 Oh, gosh. The best there’s. Okay. I know you know, but tell our audience why the black pepper and turmeric together.
Liana: 28:39 Well, from the studies that I found that combining those two together, they have more powerful effects in the body. These are one of my favorite recipes sprinkled with Broccoli sprouts. So I try and encourage everyone to sprinkle Broccoli sprouts and these are good cold as well.
Dr. Gundry: 28:54 Yeah, they’re cold right now.
Liana: 28:55 Yeah, you can put them on a salad. You can wrap them up in a coconut wrap.
Dr. Gundry: 29:02 So we could take this for a tailgate party for game day and fool everybody?
Liana: 29:06 Yeah, exactly. This is an immune Burstein, Turmeric black Pepper tea. Sorry. This has lemon, ginger, turmeric, black pepper and some garlic.
Dr. Gundry: 29:16 And some garlic?
Liana: 29:17 Yeah. Nice antiinflammatory, very detoxifying.
Dr. Gundry: 29:21 This is new or did you have this during your treatment course?
Liana: 29:34 I didn’t, I didn’t really know about the Tumeric at that time. I did a lot of ginger there. Everyday I had ginger, a lot of ginger.
Dr. Gundry: 29:35 Talking about preventing cancer naturally or treating cancer with food gets a lot of critics going and particularly healthcare professionals and nutritionists. What do you say? Well, how do you deal with that?
Liana: 29:54 Yeah. I’m very passionate about the subject and it’s a personal story for me. So, when I was thinking of my next book with my publisher, I was like, “Well, what I’m really passionate about is helping people with cancer.” And I was like, “Well, I’m not MD. I’m not even a certified dietician and I’m blonde and young, so that doesn’t really help my case to be real.” So, but I was like, “I just want to go for this.”
Liana: 30:21 So I pitched it to my publisher and they were like, “Yes, we love it. This is meaty. This is good. You can do it.” And at the time I had support from people in the industry that are helping a lot of people with cancer. So I felt more empowered and confident. And then I wrote the book, submitted it, and then I was like, “Oh, actually I don’t want to do this.”
Liana: 30:38 I changed my mind because the backlash is going to be crazy. Every time I personally got cancer, I would get some really aggressive things like, “I hope you and your mom die of cancer.” Like just really hurtful things. Then I was like, “You know what? I need to stop focusing on the critics and those people that are going to try and attack, and focus on the people that I’m helping.”
Liana: 30:58 Because when I think of them, the people that have cancer and that there’ve been many case studies and I interview a lot of cancer survivors in the book and talk about specific foods for specific types of cancer. When I focused on that, that’s what keeps me going. I think this actually works and this rocket science. Food is medicine and this can work in conjunction with a treatment plan. So if someone can do chemo and also be healthy at the same time, there’s no point doing chemo or surgery and eating a Sloppy Joe that the hospital gives you, it’s just going to make everything worse. So …
Dr. Gundry: 31:29 Yeah, I think that’s a great point. There are numerous studies that show certain supplementation, getting your gut microbiome as healthy as possible will either prevent or at least minimize the effects of chemotherapy on your gut, on your digestion, on your brain fog. And you talk about that in the book. So at the very least, even in our cancer center in palm springs, there are Graham crackers and saltines in the waiting room while you’re waiting to go get your chemo treatment. And the head of our center is actually a big fan of mine and follows my program and I’m always picking on him. I say, “What are you doing?” He says, “Well, they want that.” And we’re in business and they need this.
Liana: 32:25 So we just need them to have these kinds of options
Dr. Gundry: 32:28 Yeah.
Liana: 32:29 Yeah, or have like a healthier cracker.
Dr. Gundry: 32:31 Okay. Well, so the critic will say, “Well, this is really expensive to do and if you’re on chemotherapy, you’ve got cancer. You don’t have time to do this.” That’s five minutes?
Liana: 32:42 Yeah. Five minutes to straw. We didn’t tigernut, monk fruit, chocolate chunks, Vanilla Sea salt, done. So this is very time effective. But also I realized that we can’t put a price on our health, if you want to stay living, we have to invest in food. And maybe if we start investing more in organic foods, we’ll spend less on other things that we don’t really need. But also there’s ways to shop more effectively. I found a website that’s like Amazon that you can buy all of these ingredients like tigernut flour that’s much cheaper than if you were to go to a health food store. So you know all about supporting local health food stores for sure. But if you’re on a budget, shop online and get these things at a discounted price.
Dr. Gundry: 33:23 Okay. So for those of tigernuts, I want to talk about tigernuts. For those of you who are listening, these tigernuts that I have in my hand look like little homeless, dried berries, but they’re actually a tuber. They’re not a nut. They actually support indigenous Africans. And having just come back from Ethiopia where 85% of the population of 110 million people are subsistence farmers. You actually by eating these give support to people who really need it.
Dr. Gundry: 33:57 But these guys actually are tubers. They feed good gut bugs. They are one of the best foods for feeding gut buddies. And these are hard as a rock in this form and maybe I could click them. So, having personal experience over the number of years, do not try to eat these things just like this. They are potentially tooth breaking. How do we use them? How do we find them?
Liana: 34:28 Yeah. They can be shocking to someone who just tries to eat them like this. So I would recommend getting the peeled tigernuts and you can also get sliced tigernuts also, but if you do get the whole tigernuts, I’ll soak them overnight and then you can eat them, now they’re nice and soft. They’re also great on for breakfast. But then also you can just buy the tigernut flour or you can grind these up yourself in a food processor and make your own tigernut flour. I’m the one that I use and Dr Gundry uses I believe is organic Gemini. And you can get that … well I shop at vitacost.com. So-
Dr. Gundry: 35:02 Good [inaudible 00:35:03]?
Liana: 35:03 Yeah. So, you can get it from there. Just type in tigernuts and it’ll come up. I also have a code if I can say that. It’s-
Dr. Gundry: 35:10 You sure can.
Liana: 35:10 It’s earth diet. So you get an extra 10% off your entire order. So vitacost.com, type in tigernuts and then put the code Earth Diet when you check out. And that helps people who are really tight for money. Because I don’t want people to have money hold them back from living a healthy life.
Dr. Gundry: 35:27 Yeah. And like you say, if we spent our money on food, we wouldn’t have to spend our money on treatments like people have to go through.
Liana: 35:35 Exactly. And people feel more alive, have more energy than they can do. All the more creative things that bring in more money. So it’s like a whole cycle.
Dr. Gundry: 35:41 Well, and fun fact, if you get the sliced ones, you can actually use them like slivered almonds and they make a very attractive addition to a salad.
Liana: 35:50 Yes. And also a dessert too, you can roll the cookie dough in the slice tigernuts and they look beautiful and fancy. But my favorite way to use tigernuts, I would have to say overall number one is making a tigernut milk. So I’ll do one cup of tigernuts and the recipes in the book, one cup of and nuts to full cups of water and that’s it. Blend it up and it comes out white and creamy and delicious. So since tigernuts are naturally sweet, just like a sweet potato is, there’s no need to add any extra sweetness.
Liana: 36:22 It’s just perfectly creamy and sweet and just so delicious and refreshing. And some amazing studies I found on tigernuts is that when we consume more tigernuts, it helps detox our live and also protect our liver. So I include these studies in the book. I actually list tigernuts as a number 10 top anticancer food in the book. So if someone is going through chemo, it would be really helpful if they are drinking tigernut milk everyday to help their liver.
Dr. Gundry: 36:48 So ditch the cashew milk, ditch the oat milk, we’re going on a tigernut milk crave.
Liana: 36:53 Yeah.
Dr. Gundry: 36:55 All right.
Liana: 36:55 Finally.
Dr. Gundry: 36:55 Very good. Finally, these guys need recognition. Okay, so where do we find cancer free with food.
Liana: 37:05 So you can find it at Amazon, also at Barnes & Noble or any bookstore will also have, it’s a best seller, number one on oncology on Amazon. It’s a top 100 on Barnes & Noble and also a top 100 on Amazon or overall as well. So yeah, please get the book, enjoy it and then share it with anyone that you know who has cancer or anyone who wants to prevent cancer.
Dr. Gundry: 37:26 Well thanks so much for joining us and thank you for the great healthy food. See, you can have junk food that actually heals you rather than kills you. All right, so that’s it for today. I’m Dr. Gundry and we’ll see you next week. Let’s get to this week’s review of the week. Napoleon three 16 writes, insightful, practical, and life changing. I’m a military reservists, project manager and fitness professional. I’ve always attributed my weight gain, chronic lower back pain and lower energy to being so busy and approaching the age of 40 I started following Dr. Gundry in January after my annual lab revealed that I had a low WBC that’s a white blood cell count, high cholesterol and high triglycerides.
Dr. Gundry: 38:09 I’d also been receiving routine injections for lower back disc degeneration. I knew I had to do something if I wanted to avoid chronic pain and illness. After reading the Plant Paradox, I realized why everything that I had been told about nutrition, health and longevity had failed to be effective for me in just a matter of six weeks on the PP program, I lost 22 pounds from 194 down to 172 and I feel incredible.
Dr. Gundry: 38:35 I no longer take the prescription pain medicine or receive injections from my lower back pain. My labs are normal and I feel completely renewed. I attribute 100% of the success to the insights from The Plant Paradox and The Longevity Paradox, which I’ve read twice since it’s released in March and The Meal Plan. Thank you Dr. Gundry and team for your amazing work, my family and I feel so empowered to take control of our health and longevity, Napoleon Napoleon, this is why I do this and thank you so much for writing and keeps me showing up every day to keep finding out ways to help you and thanks for the feedback.
Dr. Gundry: 39:17 If you’d like me to read your review, make sure to subscribe, rate and review my podcast on iTunes. If you’re listening on your mobile device, take a screen shot, share your favorite takeaway and add a tag me in your Insta stories, I’ll make sure to reshare them in mine. Thanks for joining me on this episode of The Dr. Gundry Podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you want to watch each episode of The Dr. Gundry Podcast, you could always find me on youtube at youtube.com/dr.gundry because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
