Speaker 1:
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:
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? At least that’s what our teachers, parents, and cereal companies told us. However, our ancestors didn’t pop their head out of their caves and say, “Hey, mom, what’s for breakfast?” Breaking the fast or break fast wasn’t until our ancestors caught or hunted something to eat, maybe midday to late afternoon. This is just one of the reasons why I teach in all my books to push your breakfast back as far as you can. But, if you’re a breakfast lover, this episode is for you. I’ll reveal the best and worst breakfast options for you to break your fast with for optimal health. Plus, I’ll share my secrets on how to shorten your window of eating to boost longevity and reveal which common foods you can enjoy without breaking your fast.
Three worst breakfasts for your health. Now, despite what you’ve probably been told, breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. That was advertising from the cereal companies. However, there is an old adage, which I actually agree with, that you should eat like a king at breakfast, a prince or a princess at lunch, and a pauper for dinner. Let me give you an example of that. Just yesterday I was talking with one of my patients who did very poorly on time-restricted eating programs. Now, in most time-restricted eating programs, which I recommend personally, we delay break fast, breakfast, until later in the morning, preferably around noon so that your first meal of the day is at noon, and then you want to go six to eight hours maximum during which you eat the rest of your food, and then the rest of the evening and all through the night to the morning you are fasting, promoting ketosis.
That works for a great number of people. It’s been studied extensively in humans and animals and found to improve health in multiple areas, but there’s some people who just don’t do well missing breakfast, and you might very well be one of them, like my patient that I had yesterday. So we devised a system where he compressed his eating window, but he ate breakfast at six o’clock in the morning and he finished his last meal of the day at noon. So he was still eating a six-hour window, but the rest of the day was when he was fasting and overnight. Now, he thrives on that system, and why not? As long as you’re compressing your eating window, it really doesn’t matter when you do that. So for some of you who are breakfast people, that’s a great option. It was just confirmed on his blood work yesterday, to my delight, and actually to his delight, his blood work is the best it’s ever been.
And this was a gentleman who a year ago was insulin resistant, pre-diabetic, and had very impressively bad cholesterol levels, and by the way, quite low testosterone, which is now perfect. So he’s happy, I’m happy. Just another example is there’s a lot of ways to balance how you eat your break fast. But for most of us, breaking our fast later in the day is the way we were designed from an evolutionary standpoint. Our ancestors did not crawl out of our caves and say, “What’s for breakfast?” There wasn’t any breakfast. There was no storage system, there was no refrigeration. We had to find breakfast, we had to catch it, or we had to collect it. And, in fact, most modern hunter-gatherers usually don’t eat until 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning when they find something.
So technically, you can still enjoy break fast just later in the day. Okay, so what are the three most common awful breakfast foods that you should avoid no matter what time of day it is? The first is avocado toast. Now, if you’re like most people, you’ve probably become convinced that avocado toast is a healthy option. Well, sorry to disappoint, but it’s certainly not the case. Don’t get me wrong, avocados are great, but when it comes to avocado toast, there are several reasons I stay far away. Most obvious is the bread. Unfortunately, bread is loaded with lectins. They’re incredibly inflammatory and they do an amazing job of piercing holes in the lining of your gut. But what about whole grain, whole wheat bread? This, sadly, is loaded with a very tiny lectin called wheat germ agglutinin.
Sadly, it’s absorbed through the wall of your gut without having leaky gut, and it binds to sugar molecules in the wall of your blood vessel, in your joints, in your blood-brain barrier, and it binds to insulin receptors on fat cells, and opens the door for you to store that wonderful avocado toast in your fat cells. So please, that’s a no-no. Finally, bread still has four teaspoons of sugar per slice. If you’re having two slices of avocado toast, you’re having eight teaspoons of sugar without tasting that sugar. Now, if you must have bread, try a lectin-free bread. There are plenty of recipes on the internet. Gundry MD Bread Mix is lectin-free and Bread SRSLY rice-free rolls are options if you’ve got to do this. Now, people often order their avocado toast with a poached egg, or one or two poached eggs.
Please, please, please remember that the only safe eggs are omega-3 eggs or pastured eggs. Don’t be fooled when you see organic eggs or cage-free eggs or free-range eggs. That’s not what you’re looking for, so just don’t be fooled. You don’t need an egg on your avocado toast. So what’s the option? Well, quite frankly, in Europe, it’s readily available to have a sliced avocado with olive oil as a breakfast option. Better yet, as I’ve written about in my books, cut an avocado in half, take out the pit, put an egg yolk in both of the holes, put it under the broiler for a few minutes with olive oil, and you will have the best toast-less avocado toast you’ll ever have in your life, and that’s the way to make it a healthy option.
Okay, oatmeal, yes, even organic, even Bob Red Mill. A recent study of 35 oat products in the United States found glyphosate, including some with very dangerous levels in every one of the oat products, including many of our kids’ cereals, including our granola. They found an additional herbicide that’s banned in the United States in almost all oat products because the EPA recently loosened up their enforcement on this ban. So, if you like pesticides and herbicides for breakfast, have a great time. Now, what about Europe? Europe luckily is still fairly free of glyphosate. That may change because as most of you know, Bayer bought Monsanto who makes Roundup, and Bayer is a very generous corporation getting their way with the European Union Parliament. So fingers crossed there’s a lot of resistance in Europe to glyphosate. So, fingers crossed.
Now, why is glyphosate so bad? Well, glyphosate interrupts what’s called the Shikimate pathway and there won’t be a test, I promise. We somehow didn’t realize that bacteria also use the Shikimate pathway as well as plants. Humans do not use the Shikimate pathway so Monsanto convinced the federal government that there was no danger to humans. Unfortunately, the danger is that glyphosate interrupts the Shikimate pathway of bacteria in our gut. In fact, fun fact, glyphosate was patented as an antibiotic, so you do not want to kill off your gut microbiome. And sadly, we now know the ones that are most susceptible to glyphosate are the bacteria that make all the feel-good hormones like tryptophan, like serotonin, and that may be one of the reasons why the level of depression and anxiety in the United States keeps going up.
Finally, there’s one paper recently that shows glyphosate is a direct disruptor of gut integrity, in other words, it causes leaky gut. Finally, it’s a real good way of paralyzing your mitochondria. Mitochondria, you might remember, are those little energy-producing organelles which are actually ancient engulfed bacteria. So it’s no wonder that mitochondria would be impacted by glyphosate. So what? Well, you gain weight, you feel low energy, you’re more susceptible to disease and illness, and I could spend a long time talking about worse. Here’s the bad news, even the organic oats have lectins. And sadly, in my practice, I see that the lectin and oats cross-reacts with gluten in a great number of my gluten-sensitive patients. Now, there’s an alternative and that is lacto-fermented “oats recipe” on Instagram, which I posted about a week ago.
You’ll get all the benefits of “oatmeal” without the oats. Check it out, I think you’ll really like it. Finally, number three, fruit smoothies. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, give fruit the boot. Even the fiber benefits of fruit are gone when you blend it. And please see my interview with the Glucose Goddess, she agrees. And human studies show that when you blend a fruit, it spikes your blood sugar exactly as if you were having fruit juice. And most people now know how deadly fruit juice is. A fruit smoothie does the same thing because you’ve unlocked the sugar from the fiber and you absorb it as if the fiber wasn’t there. So please don’t be fooled that a fruit smoothie is loaded with fiber. It’s going to do the exact same thing to you as fruit juice.
Finally, remember that most fruits sold at big-box stores and most grocery stores are sprayed with chemicals you probably don’t want to consume. Even blueberries are now on the Dirty Dozen list for the most laden fruits with herbicides and pesticides. Buyer beware, there is no human need for fruit, especially in a fruit smoothie. Alternative? My green smoothie from The Plant Paradox is still a classic smoothie drink that does not contain the mischievous ingredients. Number four, bacon and other highly processed meats. What qualifies as a processed meat? First of all, stay away from industrial sausages and bacon. They’re usually loaded with sugar, salt, and preservatives, and they’ve not been cured in the traditional way. All of these products have a really nasty sugar molecule called Neu5Gc, which is really good at causing damage to your brain, your gut, your blood vessels, and your joints.
It’s so associated with heart disease, arthritis, and cancer that a 2010 study published in the Journal of Circulation showed that eating one serving of processed meat a day increases your risk of heart disease by a whopping 42%. Now, there is an alternative, true fermented cured meats from Europe like prosciutto and lacto-fermented sausages, the Neu5Gc is gone. So if you’ve got to have your breakfast meat and want to avoid all the dangers, have some prosciutto from Italy or look at a sausage and look for lactic acid cultures, that means that these sausages were fermented, and you’ll find that not any of the industrial processed stuff that you’re buying in the grocery store will have that on the label. Finally, most yogurts, let’s not kid ourselves, most of these are sugar bombs. Most of them are made from casein A1 cows in the United States. I’ll tell you some alternatives coming up next. So, what can you eat for breakfast? Click on my next video to check out my top-rated breakfast foods. We’ll see you over there.
Before I get into my five favorite breakfast foods, there’s something you need to know. Our ancient ancestors didn’t crawl out of our caves asking, “What’s for breakfast?” They didn’t find break fast until lunch or even dinnertime, but today, most of us are eating constantly for almost 16 hours a day. That produces a real overload on our mitochondria, number one, those energy-producing organelles in most of our cells. And if you think about it, it produces an incredible overload on the working of the wall of your gut. Digestion and absorbing food is hard work and it’s damaging to the wall of your gut and your gut needs, just like you do, some downtime to repair itself. And if you’re constantly eating, you’re constantly exposing the wall of your gut to work. So quite frankly, the more downtime, rest, and relaxation time we can give the wall of our gut, the better.
And that’s one of the reasons why time-restricted eating, or intermittent fasting, is such an effective treatment for so many diseases. In fact, a paper published just last week compared intermittent fasting with metformin, the most widely used drug to treat type 2 diabetes. And intermittent fasting blew away metformin as a way of reducing insulin resistance as a way of getting rid of type 2 diabetes just two days a week of limiting calories. The so-called 5:2 diet was vastly superior in humans to metformin for reducing type 2 diabetes. Great news. Now, as most of you know, I typically limit my eating window to a two-hour window during dinnertime from the months of January through June. But I do break this on some weekends and enjoy breakfast in the afternoon. And when I do, I make sure I’m eating what is actually healthy for me. So let’s go through some of my favorites.
First of all, plain goat or sheep yogurt or plain coconut yogurt is really right up there. A couple of things you can do. Most people do not like the tanginess of these yogurts. But now, thanks to allulose, which is a true sugar, which is actually a prebiotic with no calories, will work great as a sweetener for these yogurts. The other thing about goat and sheep yogurt and also coconut yogurt is they’re loaded with medium chain triglycerides, which will promote ketosis, which is what you’re looking for. Sadly, cow milk yogurt is the wrong casein A1. And really, cow’s milk does not have a lot of medium chain triglyceride. Number two, have an avocado with olive oil and/or MCT oil. Scoop it out, mash it up, add some MCT oil, olive oil, and salt and pepper, and you’re ready to go. I order sliced avocado all the time when I’m over in Europe and it’s readily available and people don’t even blink.
It’s often on many breakfast menus over in France and in Italy. That’s how to have an avocado for breakfast, not avocado toast. If you really want to make it even more fun, cut the avocado in half, take out the pit, put two pasture-raised or omega-3 egg yolks in the pit, throw it in the broiler with olive oil, salt and pepper, and eat it with a spoon. It’s absolutely delicious. Number three, have a handful of walnuts or macadamia nuts or hazelnuts or pistachios. Work by my friend, Dr. Valter Longo, who’s head of longevity at USC in humans have shown eating a nut bar for breakfast does not break your fast, does not knock you out of ketosis. So you can have your breakfast and still act like you’re fasting. And this is actually really great news for those of us who do want to continue our period of ketosis before we break it.
Finally, eggs are perfectly fine as a breakfast food as long as you remember to pay the money for the pasture-raised or the omega-3-raised eggs. In general, chickens are fed flax seeds and/or algae to make omega-3 eggs. Pastured chickens, by law, have to go out and peck for a living. You can even one-up that and get lectin-free pastured chicken eggs from Farmer Dan at Lectinlightchicken.com. And I have no relationship with them except I’m a huge promoter of what Farmer Dan’s doing, and he now has lectin-free eggs for sale. Regardless of how good eggs can be for you if they’re the right eggs, a word of warning. If you have an autoimmune disease and/or leaky gut, so many of my patients with autoimmune diseases and/or leaky gut are sensitive to the proteins in egg whites and the proteins in egg yolks regardless of the source of the egg.
So, be careful and listen to your body. And when in doubt, there’s no human need for eggs. Again, if you’ve got an autoimmune disease, you probably don’t want to make even the healthy eggs a big part of your diet. Number five, it’s fascinating when you look at healthy cultures around the world that many of these cultures have a fermented food as part of their breakfast. Kefirs are everywhere in the Far East. Kimchi is everywhere. Now, people say, “Well, should you have sweet or savory for breakfast?” My answer is neither. You should always think of sour for breakfast. Traditional Korean breakfast is heavy on kimchi. Well, in Japan, they start their day with pickled radishes or nattō, which is fermented soybeans. These are great sources of postbiotics. We used to think that these were sources of probiotics, friendly bacteria, but we now realize that most of these foods don’t have any living bacteria, but it’s the dead bacteria and the products of fermentation which are now called postbiotics that actually make the difference. So sour foods and fermented foods are one of the best ways to start your break fast. That’s a great breakfast.
Now it’s time for the question of the week. Question of the week comes from @Pranjasinha on my Best Breakfast Foods YouTube video. They ask, “Heating an avocado would lower its nutrient content, would it not? And how much avocado is okay to eat a day?” Well, actually, you will not lower the nutrient content of avocados by heating it because what you’re really looking for are the polyphenols, the fiber, and the oleic acid. And heating won’t affect that at all. So go ahead and heat it however much you want. How much avocado a day is okay? Well, a lot of my patients literally eat one avocado a day. And there are some interesting studies in humans that it may promote weight loss. So at least one a day is fine.
Now it’s time for the review of the week. The review of the week comes from @Eatingforhealth on my Best Breakfast Foods YouTube video. They said, “Thanks, doc. Your open mind appears to be jam-packed with knowledge that is detailed, usable, and important. Thanks for sharing. I also have all your books.” Well, thanks @Eatingforhealth. You’re right, I have an open mind. And if you’ve read my books, you know I like to change my mind and my opinions when new evidence comes in, either from what I see in my patients or from well-controlled studies and literature. And I want to pass it on to you. That’s why I do it, and that’s why I’m Dr. Gundry, and I’m always looking out for you.
Speaker 1:
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