Dr. Steven Gundry:
Now, let’s face it, the price of food is going up and up and up, but here’s the good news. Eating well doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, some of the healthiest protein sources I recommend are also incredibly affordable and often overlooked. So in this episode, I’m going to walk you through my top budget friendly proteins, ones that support your gut and even promote better brain and metabolic health. Now I’ll also explain why these foods are so powerful and how to prepare them in ways that are totally Gundry approved.
First up, let’s talk about one of the most convenient and surprisingly powerful protein sources you’ll find on any grocery store shelf, canned wild tuna. It’s affordable, it’s shelf stable, and when you choose the right kind, it can do wonders for your heart and brain health. Now tuna, especially wild caught skipjack or albacore, is a great source of clean protein and heart healthy omega-3s, like DHA and EPA. Now, DHA is critical for brain function, reducing inflammation and supporting cardiovascular health. The nice thing about canned tuna, is that canned tuna is made from small tuna. And good news, so far, tuna companies have not figured out how to farm raise tuna. So by definition, all tuna currently is caught wild. But look for tuna packed in extra virgin olive oil or water, not any other oils. And always look for BPA free cans, and they’re actually remarkable, easy to find. Now, these smaller species of tuna tend to have lower mercury levels than larger fish like Yellowfin, but all canned tuna by definition, is the smaller variety.
So, what do you do with tuna? Unfortunately, I grew up with tuna multiple times per week, and we had tuna sandwiches, we had tuna pasta, you can’t believe the number of ways we had tuna. But in Italy, tuna is routinely tossed over arugula and radicchio, covered with extra virgin olive oil, some lemon juice or balsamic vinegar, and add some crushed pistachios. You can mix tuna with an avocado, chopped herbs and mushrooms for a creamy, gut-friendly tuna salad, and no mayo is required. So there’s really a lot of great ways to use tuna.
Next up, chicken liver, the forgotten superfood. Now we’ve got a protein that most people completely overlook, but it’s actually one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. I’m talking about chicken livers. Yes, organ meats like chicken livers. Now, don’t worry, I’ll show you exactly how to prepare it so it’s not only healthy but delicious too. Now, organ meats from poultry like chicken or turkey or ducks are staples in traditional diets, particularly in France and Italy, and for good reason. Chicken or duck liver is rich in vitamin A in its active form, B12, iron, folate, and high-quality protein. Nutrients many people today are deficient in. There’s actually a pâté diet in France that’s incredibly effective for weight loss, but quite frankly, it’s very expensive.
Now, here’s the problem. Please, please, please don’t hear this and say, “Oh, Dr. Gundry wants me to eat beef, lamb or pork liver.” No, don’t do that. These livers have the highest Neu5Gc levels of any food measure. Sorry about that. I’m talking about chicken or duck or turkey liver. They have Neu5Ac, the same molecule that we have in us. Now, livers are also a great source of choline, which supports brain and liver health. Now the cost, you can often find pasture-raised chicken liver for just a few dollars a pound. It’s usually thrown away. It makes it one of the most nutrient-dense and affordable foods available. And in fact, many of the really great places that I get and recommend my chicken like Lectinlightchicken.com or Primalpastures.com, sell these chicken or duck or turkey livers, gizzards, hearts, at a very cheap price because that’s basically leftover from what they’re really selling.
So what I do, first of all, I can tell you that every time I get off the plane in Paris, France, I make a beeline with my wife to the Moray district to a little French cafe where I always order the sauteed livers and salad, always. And it’s a staple on the menu, it has never left the menu, and that’s what they eat for lunch. Put it on a salad. The Italians, you would not find an hors d’oeuvres plate that doesn’t have liver pâté, chicken liver pâté on the plate, because it’s always there. You can blend cooked liver into pâté with extra virgin olive oil, garlic, and herbs. So, don’t discard the liver, hide it if you really don’t like the flavor, or dress it up with herbs and garlic and then put it in a salad. It’s a great addition to get a lot of protein that’s really good for you.
All right, let’s talk about seeds. Now, seeds are a tiny but mighty source of proteins because when you choose wisely, seeds can be an incredible source of plant-based protein, healthy fats, and gut-friendly fiber. But I want to be clear, not all seeds are created equal. A lot of so-called super seeds like chia, sunflower, buckwheat, and pumpkin seeds, can actually be harmful to your gut. Now sadly, chia seeds in particular are high in lectins and oxalates, which can irritate your gut lining and promote inflammation. And pumpkin seeds, also off the list due to lectin content. Same with buckwheat and sunflower seeds. Recently, because a friend of mine has been promoting buckwheat, I’ve seen several adapters of this advice who had had perfect sealed leaky gut and perfect autoimmune markers suddenly develop leaky gut and reactivate their autoimmune disease by eating Himalayan buckwheat. Please, don’t do that.
So, which seeds do get my stamp of approval? Okay, so here’s some of my favorites. Hemp seeds. Now, hemp seeds are a complete plant protein, meaning they contain all nine essential amino acids. They’re also rich in anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids. They’re easy to digest and they’re loaded with magnesium and fiber. So, how do you use them? Well, sprinkle them on salads, blend them into my green smoothie, or mix into lectin-free granola.
Next up, sesame seeds. I love sesame seeds and sesame oil, especially for their polyphenols and anti-inflammatory properties. They’re great for heart health and hormone balance. So, how do you use them? Well, you can toast them or buy them toasted and add to stir-fries or salads. Use cold pressed sesame oil for flavor and these health benefits.
Tahini. Now, this is one of my favorite swaps for deadly peanut butter.
Next up, flaxseeds. Now, flaxseeds are almost pure short-chain omega-3 fat, alpha-linolenic acid, and lignans and fiber, and they have no lectins. But make sure you only eat ground flaxseeds. Flaxseeds have an outer covering that resists your digestive enzymes. So you have no benefit from eating those flaxseed crackers. You can’t break down that wall. That’s why you have to grind them. Now, there’s two alternatives here. I prefer you buy flaxseeds and buy a coffee grinder dedicated to them and grind your flaxseeds right before you use them. If you buy ground flaxseed, the minute you open the package, start refrigerating it. Flaxseeds because of their high omega-3 content, go rancid very quickly. So either way, but if you buy it ground, store it in the refrigerator.
Now, another one of my favorites are basil seeds. Now, this is a fantastic alternative to chia seeds without the lectins or digestive issues. Basil seeds are gut-friendly and rich in soluble fiber. There’s also a cool new study that’s showing eating basil seeds promotes mucilage production. Now, mucilage is one of the most important protective barriers in our gut, and our gut buddies love mucilage. Okay, so how do you use them? Well, soak two or three teaspoons in one cup of water or nut milk until they gel, and eat them like that. Better yet, check out my basil seed pudding on my Instagram or in Unlocking the Keto Code. It’s delicious and I can guarantee you, your kids will love it and you will too.
So believe it or not, I have patients who come to see me because they can’t gain weight. Now, some of them may be cancer patients, but other of them have autoimmune diseases which have decimated the absorptive surface of their gut wall. Let me start there. Most of you who watch me know that the lining of your gut is at least one to two tennis courts in surface area. When you’re watching the Indian Wells BNP tournament, which is coming up in about a month, I want you to look at how big that tennis court is and then at least double it. Some of us think there’s actually a football field inside of you, but that’s the absorptive area where you can absorb proteins, sugars, and fats.
Now, if you damage that absorptive area, you then shrink the size of that one or two tennis courts down to what I call a ping pong table. And I will submit to you that the reason seniors are told to increase their protein as they get older has nothing to do with the fact they need more protein in there. They need to repair the wall of their gut. In fact, in my program, we actually reduce the amount of protein in their diet, but take away the foods and substances that are damaging their gut wall, destroying the surface area, and lo and behold, they begin to gain weight and they begin to gain total protein in their blood and albumin in their blood, which is about 80% of the protein in your blood, despite purposely eating less protein than they used to before. And at least in my practice, that’s proof that the problem is we’ve damaged, through our food choices through the years, the absorptive capacity of the wall of the gut.
Now, chemotherapy unfortunately kills off rapidly dividing cells. And the lining of our gut contain some of the most rapidly dividing cells in our body. And so, it’s no wonder that not only does chemotherapy make you nauseated, but usually results in weight loss because that’s killed off the lining absorptive area of your gut. And that’s just one of many examples. Now there are other ways to gain weight, but the key is you want to gain weight safely and not overdo it.
Now, one of the easiest ways I’ve found of getting people to gain weight is to have them eat a lot of macadamia nuts. And I’m always fond of telling this story. Usually during January through June, I eat one meal a day, an OMAD diet, usually two to three hours at night, and I fast the rest of the day. And I usually take off 10 to 15 pounds every winter and early spring by doing that. And I’ve been doing it now, this is my 25th year of doing it.
A few years ago I had a woman who literally had to gain weight, I won’t tell you why. And I said, “Just started eating macadamia nuts.” She said, “Oh, that won’t work.” I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll do a macadamia nut challenge. I will eat two cups of macadamia nuts a day for the next month, and you do the same. I’ll see you back in a month and we’ll see how we do.” She said, “You’d do that for me?” I said, “You bet I will.” So I did. In one month eating two cups of macadamia nuts a day, and believe me, they were delicious. I gained 10 pounds. She comes in, she hasn’t gained an ounce, and I’m flabbergasted. I go, “You’re the first person.” I said, “Look at me. Here, I’ll step on the scale.” And I said, “I can’t believe this.” And she said, “Oh, I really didn’t believe you. I thought you were joking. I didn’t need any.” I’m going, what the heck? I just are. I enjoyed the macadamia nut, I just gained 10 pounds. Now, I got it off,
But the point is, I don’t ask people to do things without, quite frankly, trying it on myself. I’ve never asked a patient to take a supplement without first trying it on myself and my family. So, I know it works and believe me, I’ve had numerous patients do the macadamia nut challenge and it always works. Maybe not as dramatically as me, but it definitely, definitely works.
Now the other thing to consider is adding more avocados to your diet. Now, there is a good human study that adding one avocado a day, particularly with salads, promotes weight loss. And there’s a lot of reasons for that, but at some point, two or three avocados a day is usually a very good way for gaining weight, and that’s a pretty doggone good trick.
Finally, carbohydrates, particularly resistant starches carbohydrates like tubers, like jicama, like sweet potatoes, like rutabagas, like turnips, are actually very good ways for gaining weight. Raw carrots, raw beets are a pretty good way of gaining weight. If you cook them, you’ll gain weight even faster. But as you’ll learn in the new book, The Gut-Brain Paradox, there’s some pretty good reasons to eat your carrots, eat your beets, eat your root vegetables raw or only slightly cooked, and I’ll save that for another lecture.
Any of the other starches that don’t have lectins. Millet has no lectins, sorghum has no lectins. And so if you’re a person who wants to gain weight, adding these to your diet really helps. Sorghum spaghetti is a great way to gain weight. I at Gundry MD make a delicious sorghum spaghetti. And so these, which should be in my opinion, limited for normal consumption, you can have these sorts of starches every day.
And remember, we have a system for converting starches into fat, and I can watch it. I’ll give you an example. I like sorghum popcorn. It tastes like popcorn, smells like popcorn, looks like popcorn. But I decided to do an experiment. Triglycerides are the first form of fat that we manufacture in our liver from carbohydrates, sugars, and starches, particularly fruit sugars. So I did a test. I measured my triglycerides, which are really remarkably low most times, and I had a cup of sorghum popcorn before dinner as my snack every day for three weeks, and then I measured my triglycerides. And sure enough, my triglycerides went from about 40 to about 124 in three weeks. Why? Because I was converting those healthy starches into fat, triglycerides. And if you’re trying to gain weight, that’s what you want to do.
Now, I’ll give you an extreme example of one of my patients recently. One of my patients went on the carnivore diet to lose weight and in general feel better. He had some real gut issues and I was fully supportive of his choice. And he lost weight and he felt great. So then unbeknownst to me, he got tired of the carnivore diet and he said, “I’m going to add fruit back in my diet.” And so he did the carnivore diet but added fruit back into his diet. And this gentleman was shocked when in one month he gained 10 pounds, strictly by adding fruit back into his diet. Now that seems, wait a minute, all he is doing is eating healthy fruit.
This is a good point to stop and tell you, a gift that great apes gave us that keeps on giving. About 10 million years ago, great apes suffered a genetic mutation and they lost the ability to make an enzyme called uricase. Now, there won’t be a test, so don’t write it down. What uricase did was basically prevent fructose from being converted into triglycerides and into uric acid. Now fructose, unlike other sugars like glucose, is taken directly to the liver. And because of this genetic mutation, it’s converted into triglycerides in uric acid. Triglycerides are fat, uric acid causes insulin resistance. So, if you wanted to put on fat, the combination of making fat and insulin resistance is the perfect way to do it. So what? 10 million years ago there was climate change, and believe it or not, forests shrunk dramatically. Great apes could utilize the sugar in fruit to gain weight. Regular monkeys couldn’t. And so, they became great apes because they had ability to store fat for the lean times.
Guess who inherited that genetic mutation? You’re right, us. Now, for years it was thought to be called the thrifty gene, that we had a gene that we could store fat for the lean times, which would always be around. It’s recently been discovered that the so-called thrifty gene is that genetic mutation, and that allows you and me and everybody else to take the sugar, the fructose in fruit, and convert it into fat, and I get to see this all the time. Having said that, if you want to gain weight, please, if you’re going to eat fruit, eat whole fruit, because at least you’ll get the fiber that feeds friendly bacteria without the worry.
Now, there’s no one size fits all. What I may recommend to a cancer patient to gain weight, where I really don’t want them consuming fructose, which quite frankly are malignant cells’ favorite food, will be different than someone who has a leaky gut and a poor absorptive surface area. So, there is no one size fits all. That’s another thing to remember.
Half of our muscle mass is actually fat and a nice generous store of sugar called glycogen. When we bulk up by eating, for instance, like oats or corn or other sugary things, our muscles may in fact look bigger. But many times when we do an MRI or a DXA scan, we find that in fact, the muscles are larger but they’re mostly fat. And recently, I have a friend who went one of the GLP-1 inhibitors and he’s really happy, except he’s noticed that he doesn’t have any legs anymore. And he said, “What the heck? I used to have these gorgeous muscles in my legs and they’re all gone.” That’s because these drugs, 40 to 44% of the weight loss is actually in muscles. So, you don’t want marbled muscles and you certainly don’t want wasted muscles. So, those are other tricks. Remember, weight gain, one size does not fit all. So many of my patients, their weight loss is actually from leaky gut and a loss of absorptive area.
Fascinatingly, so many of my frail elderly patients who have been told they got to eat more and more protein and they’re cramming down protein smoothies and they’re cramming down protein powders, a lot of them which contain really damaging lectins like in whey protein, casein and god forbid, pea protein, it’s in everything now. These guys inadvertently were making matters worse because they were damaging their gut wall. And when we took those healthy muscle building, weight gaining foods away from them, then they started adding muscle and they started to gain weight naturally. In fact, I just saw a patient earlier today where that exact same thing happened, much to their surprise. So, there’s safe ways to gain weight, there’s lots of good ways to gain weight, but you got to know your individual circumstance. One size does not fit all.
All right, first off, you got to realize that protein powders are an incredibly new invention. Well, high protein diets have been around for a very long time. Certainly, the Adkins diet was a high protein diet, and it’s been a trend in the nutrition world and it comes and goes. Currently, the carnivore diet is a high protein diet. But in working out world, gym world, personal trainers will try to convince you that you have to get more protein in your diet. And thus, protein powders have exploded in popularity. After all, just look at Costco or your local health food store, the shells are lined with tons of them. Why? Because protein is essential.
Well, I want to take a minute and tell where this idea came from. First of all, let’s agree that protein is essential. Protein is essential for muscle building. It’s essential to build connective tissue, and for wear and repair of cells. How much protein is essential will shock you.
So, there have been some studies done in multiple institutions. The ones I like best have been done by Professor Christopher Gardner at Stanford who’s a protein expert. And you should know how the recommended daily requirement of protein comes about. They take a bunch of people, a bunch of volunteers, and they put them in a laboratory setting and they look at what’s called nitrogen balance, and they find the estimated average requirement of protein to maintain a neutral nitrogen balance. Nitrogen is what makes protein different than say fat or sugar. So, when they find the estimated average requirement, 50% of people will do not well with that estimated average daily requirement, they’ll need more. But 50% of people will actually need less, this was the average.
So the government says, “Well, we don’t want people to miss out on any necessary protein, so we’re going to cover our bases. So, we’re going to actually quadruple the amount of protein that the average person would require so that 98% of people, if we recommend this much protein, will get their daily requirement.” So the average daily requirement, the recommended daily requirement is 40 to 60 grams of protein per day. That’s not what most people need. That’s two to four times more than what most people need. Another way to think about it is, if you actually ate the recommended daily amount, 40 to 60 grams, 98% of us would be eating more protein than we actually needed. Stop and think about that again. If we ate the recommended daily allotment of protein, 98% of us would be eating too much protein.
Well, so what? As Professor Gardner likes to explain, and I’ve explained as many times as I can, we have no storage system protein. We have a storage system for sugar. It’s either in glycogen in our liver or our muscles, or we can store it, convert it into fat in our fat cells, and we have unlimited storage capacity for fat. We have no storage capacity for protein. So unless you are actively making muscle, you can eat all the protein you want and it’s not going to make more muscle. It’s going to be converted into a storage form of energy, which is either glycogen and you fill up your glycogen storage very rapidly, or fat.
And here’s the bad news, looking at radioactive labeled nitrogen in human volunteers, the average protein meal, whether it’s 25 grams or 50 grams or 100 grams, only about 13% of that meal goes to your muscles, only. The rest is either burned as energy, nothing wrong with that, or stored as fat. You have such little requirement for protein. And these experiments have been done in volunteers looking at plant proteins, looking at animal proteins, looking at whole proteins, looking at proteins that have been broken down. And I’m sorry, the vast majority of protein that you eat does not become protein in your muscles. You could eat all the protein you want, you will not build more muscles unless you are actively trying to build muscles.
But then, guess what? You’re getting so much extra protein in your diet if you’re eating the US recommended a daily amount, that you’ll always be able to build more muscle. And this has actually been shown in people who have been given minimal amounts of protein and put on an exercise program, and they still do superbly well compared to people who are put on a high protein diet. Because most of it doesn’t go to your muscles, folks, most of it is converted to sugar and fat. Sorry about that.
So, does eating protein help you build muscle? No, it doesn’t, unless you’re actively building muscle, but you’ve already in a regular diet getting more protein than you actually need. Does it build strong bones? You’re already getting enough protein in a regular diet to build strong bones and you really want to build strong bones, then you need to seal leaky gut, because leaky gut is the cause of weak bones. How about it helps you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight? No, because most of the protein you’re going to eat is converted to sugar or fat. Now, that doesn’t sound like a good plan for losing weight. It lowers blood pressure. No, protein converts to sugar or fat, and the fatter you get, the higher your blood pressure goes. Reduces cravings, promotes satiety. No, the problem with powders in protein is you instantly absorb that protein instead of if you ate a piece of fish or a steak, it would take you hours and hours to break that fish or steak apart into individual amino acids.
So quite the contrary, protein powders are the worst way to cut your appetite because they’ll be absorbed instantly and you’ll go looking for more. Helps you stay fit as you age, prevent sarcopenia, I’m sorry, the vast majority of sarcopenia comes in older age from people living alone and not participating in a family gathering of eating and they forget to eat.
So, why are protein powders so bad? Well, they’re certainly not there to build muscle. You got to remember that protein powder is a pre-digested food. Now, what do I mean by that? The more enzymatic digestion, bacterial digestion that happens to break your food apart into amino acids in the case of protein, into glucose in the case of carbohydrates, into free fatty acids in the case of fat, the slower you absorb these foods and the slower you can distribute them to your cells. But when you pre-digest these things, it’s instantly absorbed and affects your insulin levels and there’s no place to put this, so it goes right into your fat. Believe it or not, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were advertised as the world’s first pre-digested food, which unfortunately was a harbinger of all the awful things to come. So, if you see any processed food or ultra processed food, just realize that what’s happened to this food is it’s been pre-digested for you. So a pre-digested protein is the last thing you want to eat.
A new study looked at people who ate ultra processed foods were linked a 50% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Why? Because of exactly what I said happened. This excess protein gets turned into sugar, which in turn gets turned into fat.
Now finally, most protein powders are either whey protein or casein protein base, and they’re loaded, spoiler alert, with gut busting, artery busting Neu5Gc. So, that’s that miserable sugar molecule that attacks your gut, that attracts your blood vessels, your joints, and your brain, and you don’t want that. What you want to eat is whole foods, and you want to eat them whole. Like our great-great-grandparents always did because there was no pre-digested food, and that’s how you want them to trickle in.
Now, is there a healthy way to use protein powder? Well, yes, but 99% of people aren’t using it the healthy way. If you’re actively strength training, you want to wait about 10 to 20 minutes after you complete your workout and then take your protein powder with a small amount of carbohydrate to have the muscle cells hungry and take delivery of the protein, and this has been shown over and over again in clinical studies. I personally prefer plant-based proteins. Why? Because the proteins in plants will not stimulate mTOR, which will aid you, I guarantee you. But key about plant proteins is they’re usually available with tons of fiber, so that you will slow down the absorption of those plant proteins because of the fiber. For instance, hemp protein is also loaded with fiber, so it’s a very good option.
Now, there’s things to avoid on plant proteins. If you see plant proteins that are made with pea or soybean, there are a ton of them out there. Those are loaded with lectins, and my patients react to them. On the other hand, if you see pea or soy protein isolate, the lectins have been removed. But remember, those are still pre-digested. It’s still a whole lot better to eat the whole food. Now, also be aware that tons of these protein powders have added sugar and they’re often concealed in the form of agave nectar or coconut sugar or maple sugar, and that is not the way to do it either.
Finally, the beauty of my product, ProPlant, is it combines plant proteins, hemp, spirulina, and flax proteins, with fiber and no added sugar so that you get the plant proteins you need, but the fiber slows down the absorption. So, it’s a win-win. You feed your gut buddies and you get the adequate amounts of protein you’re looking for. That’s it for today. Sorry about that, protein powder is not your friend.
Egg whites are crazy these days. If you ask me, this craze is one of the silliest health trends out there. In fact, I actually recommend you do the opposite. Eat primarily the yolks, and give the whites to your dog. The dog will love it. So, egg whites are just protein and your dog will think it’s a great idea, but you’re actually not looking for the protein in egg whites. You’re looking for a couple of cool compounds in egg yolks.
So, egg yolks have two great compounds in abundance. One is called choline and the other is arachidonic acid, the so-called evil long-chain omega-6 fat. Now, choline is actually a major component of the brain neurotransmitter system. We actually have to have choline to make neurons talk to each other in the brain. And in fact, choline is how nerves communicate within the brain. So it’s a critical substance to have in your brain, and it just so happens we acquire it from our diet, and egg yolks are one of the richest sources of choline.
Now, our brain, additionally, is about 70% fat, and half of the fat in your brain is the long-chain omega-3 DHA. The other half is the long-chain omega-6 fat, arachidonic acid. Now, arachidonic acid and omega-6 fats get a really bad rap as the inflammatory fat. And yet, wait a minute, half of our brain is composed of this evil, bad, inflammatory fat. So, what’s up with that? Well, to answer this problem, a few years ago, experiments were done on athletes at the University of Texas. Half the group were given arachidonic acid capsules to swallow and the other half didn’t. And they looked at their inflammatory markers during exercise, and lo and behold, to their shock, the people who got the arachidonic acid, that inflammatory omega-6 fat, their inflammation markers actually went down, and their exercise tolerance actually went up.
So, what’s the deal with that? Well, we have a elaborate system of enzymes that convert short-chain omega-3 fats and short-chain omega-6 fats to join them together to make long-chain omega-3 fats and omega-6 fats. And there’s very strong evidence that short-chain omega-6 fats are very inflammatory, primarily because the short-chain omega-6 fats, many of them convert into aldehydes. And I’ve talked about the dangers of aldehydes before, and these are primarily in a lot of seed-based oils, like corn oil, like cottonseed oil, and these are definitely a no-no. On the other hand, once you make this long-chain omega-6 fat, that’s not the problem. If it was, our brain wouldn’t be 50% arachidonic acid. Is there other evidence of this? In fact, studies out of Japan that I cite in the Longevity Paradox, show that people who have the most arachidonic acid in their brains have the best memory and are big brained compared to people who have not as much acid. And where is a great source of arachidonic acid? Egg yolks. So, there’s two really good reasons to make egg yolks part of your diet and throw the whites away.
But wait a minute, Dr. Gundry, don’t egg yolks increase my cholesterol? They’re loaded with cholesterol. First thing’s first. We manufacture most of our cholesterol in our liver, and eating cholesterol does not raise your cholesterol much, if any. Multiple studies show that eating of eggs does not increase your cholesterol, but even if it did, who cares? That’s not what causes heart disease. In fact, just recently at the annual meeting of the American Cardiology, there was a stunning paper that suggested in humans that lowering LDL with statin drugs, the so-called bad cholesterol that so-called egg yolks raise, is not what is important in heart disease. It’s the amount of inflammation in the blood vessels that was actually correlated to heart disease. And this study looked at HSCRP C-reactive protein, and I think that’s exciting news to those of us who have been following the cholesterol hypothesis of heart disease, personally for over 30 years, and trying to poo-poo it.
Now, I personally feel and talk about in my books that it’s the inflammation that’s set up by the foods we eat and by leaky gut and by certain animal proteins in beef, lamb, and pork, that causes an inflammatory autoimmune reaction on our blood vessels that causes heart disease, and that cholesterol is merely an innocent bystander. No inflammation, no reason for cholesterol to stick to your blood vessels. I talk all about this with Jonny Bowden on episode 173 of The Dr. Gundry Podcast.
Okay, back to eggs. Now, it’s worth repeating that the less animal protein you can eat, the better. Now, why is that? Study after study after study shows that insulin-like growth factor one, or IGF-1, correlates strongly with not only lifespan but also health span. Now, there’s three factors to lower insulin-like growth factor, one is less sugar or things that turn into sugar. The second is less animal protein, including egg protein, and egg protein is in the whites. The third is more time-restricted eating, compressing our eating window. And quite frankly, that’s the most powerful of the three I’ve seen in my practice for lowering IGF-1.
But why is animal protein part of that issue? Well, IGF-1 we think is a very good marker for whether mTOR, the energy-sensing thing we have in our cells that tells how much energy is available, and it’s actually looking for certain amino acids. The amino acids that mTOR is looking for are more prevalent in animal protein than in plant proteins. So animal protein amino acids activate mTOR, mTOR thinks there’s more energy available and that you should grow, and growth factor is elaborated to make you grow. As most of us know, as we get older, there is nothing in us that we want to grow. And that’s why super old people, late 90s, early 100s, as a general rule have very low insulin-like growth factors, IGF-1s. So, I want to empower you to make sure your IGF-1 is low. And so, lessening animal protein from egg white to me makes sense.
Now, I recommend eggs, but as a way of getting olive oil into your mouth is one of my favorite sayings. Believe it or not, two and a half eggs per day will meet your entire protein requirements for 24 hours. So, if this is how you want to get your protein, fine, but just make sure those eggs are pasture-raised or omega-3 eggs. Omega-three eggs, the chickens are fed flax seeds or seaweed or both, and they actually do have much more of that friendly fat, omega-3 in their eggs.
The other important thing to realize is even with eggs, you are what you eat and you are what the thing your animal ate. So, always know what that chicken was eating. So know your farmer, go to the farmer’s market. The word organic really doesn’t help because they could be fed organic soybeans and organic corn, which is detrimental to you. So, look for true pasture-raised chickens and their eggs. Cage-free doesn’t mean anything. If they’re cage-free, they’re still in a warehouse and can be fed anything. So, just look for pasture.
All right, eat your egg yolks, make sure they’re from a properly fed bird, and pour olive oil on it and you’ll be fine. That’s it for today.
Speaker 1:
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