Hi, Dr. Gundry. My name is Tiffany Tobanian. I am a fellow Omahaan. I have learned a lot from your books and from your podcast and fixing my gut issues. But not only that, I’ve taken it further to my own patients. I’m an ambulatory care pharmacist and have worked with my diabetic patients and have actually resolved their diabetes, which has been quite rewarding. So I appreciate everything you do, and, uh, I know that it’s very rewarding to help your patients.

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Hey, let’s talk about the Bible diet. If eating better feels overwhelming, you’re shopping in the wrong place. With Thrive Market, I can scan a barcode and instantly get a better for you swap, no guesswork, no sacrifice. Join with my link, thrivemarket.com/gundrypodcast for 30% off your first order, plus a free $60 gift. I want to open today by reading you some scripture. Uh, okay, now stay with me. Uh, Ezekiel four: nine. Take thou also onto thy wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet and fitches and make the bread thereof. Sound familiar? Well, it should. That’s the verse on the loaf in your health foods freezer section right now. Ezekiel four nine, sprouted bread, sold as the healthiest bread on earth. But nobody reads three verses down, so I will. Verse 12, thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man in their sight.

(02:03)
Yes, you heard me. The original recipe was supposed to be baked over human bowel movements. However, Ezekiel begged God to spare him dealing with human feces, and God relented. Verse 15, “Lo, I have given thee cows dung for man’s dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.” So the health bread verse, it was actually supposed to symbolize famine and siege. I’ve done mission work in Ethiopia, uh, for charity water. And so many of the farmers to this day cook their bread, uh, which is, believe it or not, made out of tef, over cow dung fires. And I actually have several pictures I could show you of that being done. But the point is that Ezekiel was luckily convincing God that we ought to use cow dung than human dung. Now, here’s why I opened with all this. Now, everybody’s talking about the Bible diet or the promised land diet.

(03:20)
Now, they used to call it the Daniel diet. Now, the premise is, well, eat like they did 2,000 years ago. And the internet is cherry-picking verses. So today we’re going to do it right, chapter and verse. Now, what the Bible got brilliantly right about food and where I respectably would fix it. So grab your bottle of olive oil, grab your Bible, and let’s go. So how about the thesis verse? Now, one line sums up their whole diet. Psalm 104: 15, “Wine that maketh glad the heart of man and oil to make his face to shine and bread which strengths man heart. Wine, olive oil, bread.” Now, that’s a meal. Whole, unprocessed, seasonal, and fermented. No factory in sight. So there’s some big wins here. I mean, olive oil everywhere. Oil to make his face to shine. Psalm 104. Olive oil’s got tons of polyphenols. It feeds your gut buddies.

(04:39)
It promotes autophagy. That’s my favorite food. The Bible got it right. Well, now how about cultured dairy? Genesis 18: eight, he took butter and milk and the calf and set it before them. Judges, 5:25, she brought forth butter in a lordly dish. Now that butter was, remember, was curdled cultured milk from goats and sheep. It was fermented a to dairy. Exactly what I recommend. Vinegar. Now, there’s a real ferment. Ruth 2:14, “Eat of the bread and dip thy morsel in the vinegar.” Fermented right there in the Bible. How about Passover, fasting and bitter herbs? Exodus 12: eight. Roast with fire and unleavened bread and with bitter herbs, they shall eat it. Bitter herbs. That’s a polyphenol gold mine. Unleavened bread. I mean, that’s the passover of the rhythm. Build in fasting and autophagy. So much of the Bible talks about fasting as a part of everyday life.

(06:04)
And hey, I’m the original intermittent fasting guy right there in the Bible.

(06:14)
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(07:15)
Okay, so far so good. But here’s where I start pumping on the brakes. Milk and honey. Isaiah 7:15, “Butter and honey, he shall eat.” Butter, yes. Honey? Well, it’s still sugar and mostly fructose, but it was obviously local honey. And I got news for you. Honey was only available in certain times. And we know looking at the hunter-gatherers of Africa, like the Hunza, they only eat honey during a part of the year. It’s not a year-round food. The sweetest fruits were available. Figs, dates, grapes. Now, that’s nature’s candy. But remember, these were not like in our grocery store now, and they were only available during a certain time of year, usually once a year for a short season. So yeah, those are great fruits, but I got news for you. Their grapes were not cotton candy grapes. And guess what? Their grapes had seeds in them and they ate the seeds.

(08:30)
Where do you think grape seed extract comes from? So the grapes that they were eating were just a wonderful polyphenol source, but they only ate them once a year at harvest time. They didn’t have any storage system. How about Brad, the staff of life? Well, it’s also my number one villain, wheat germ, a glutenon, the wheat lectin. But hang on, there’s a plot twist coming at the end. How about lentils and beans? Esau sold his birthright for lentil stew, Genesis 25. Now, they were smart enough to know that their beans had to be soaked before they eat them, including their lentils. Why? The soaking of beans ferments the beans and eats the lectins. All these foods were fermented. They were pretty smart. We forgot that. Now, lots of lamb and red meat is mentioned in the Bible. Now, too much red meat really fires up the aging pathways and produces TMAO.

(09:38)
But let’s be realistic. This red meat eating was usually for feasts. These were poor people. And you wouldn’t dare eat your cow or your goat or your sheep because then you wouldn’t have wool, you wouldn’t have milk for cheeses, you wouldn’t have milks for yogurts, and you wouldn’t have cows to help plow the fields. In fact, in Ethiopia, nobody would think of eating their cow because the cow is out plowing the field, which I watch. So yeah, when I was growing up in Nebraska in the 1950s, very few farmers were eating their chickens because the chickens were farm animals and they were too valuable as egg layers. And the only time you ate a chicken was when the old hand couldn’t give eggs anymore, and she became a stewing chicken. She was so tough that you had to cook her for 24 hours to make her edible.

(10:40)
So I know even from long ago in the 50s that these farm animals were too valuable to eat. And so nobody was roasting their cows every day back in biblical times. Now, there’s a few plot twists. Let me talk about shellfish. Now here I disagree with Leviticus. Leviticus 11 calls shellfish an abomination. Now, this wasn’t such a bad idea back then due to water being used as a waste dump. But quite frankly, shellfish are one of the greatest sources of omega-3s and long chain omega-6s there are. The good news is shrimp and crab are free swimmers. They are not bottom dwellers. There’s a very famous Pulitzer Prize winning book called Beautiful Swimmers, which describe the crabmen of the Chesapeake Bay. The reason they’re called beautiful swimmers is that crabs are beautiful swimmers. And my colleagues in Galveston, Texas assure me that shrimp are free swimmers.

(11:51)
They swim in schools. They are not bottom dwellers. Now, unfortunately, muscles and clams and oysters are rock or bottom dwellers, and even in this day, we know that the foodborne illnesses associated with oysters is usually from the oystermen taking a crap over the side of the boat and contaminating the oyster beds when they’re out there all day long. And these have been traced back to individual individuals. So yeah, that was probably pretty good advice when there was no sanitation facilities, when everything ran off into the ocean and the sea and the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and probably didn’t want to eat those guys, but that has nothing to do with what we do now. I’d overrule that recommendation.

(12:49)
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(13:49)
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(14:38)
Now, the bread, call back to the oven. Now, remember that Ezekiel bread from the top of the show? Here’s the redemption arc. Their bread wasn’t our bread, no glyphosate, no pesticides, no herbicides. Modern industrial wheat is the problem, particularly here in America. Now, even then, as Lauren Cordain has so beautifully written about, wheat was a double-edged sword for mankind. Yes, it fed us, but it came at a tremendous cost. Human beings shrunk by a foot when agriculture started. And believe it or not, biblical scholars have written an entire book on grains and postulate that the grains became part of agriculture because they could be used to ferment beer. And if you think about it, if you crowd nomadic people together in a tight space in a town or a city and make them miserable, the only way to combat that is beer. And if you ever get a chance and wanna know the proof of this, I really recommend The Immortality Key, which was written by a biblical scholar who suggests that the grains were not there for the bread, they were there for the beer.

(16:21)
Something to think about. Okay, so my verdict, well, honestly, it’s certainly better than most modern diets. I mean, it was whole, it was seasonal, uses olive oil, fasting, all ahead of their time. Now, I’d modernize it three ways. I’d really cut the honey and the sweet fruit. The grains, yeah. If you ferment them and use ancient grains and use small amounts, I don’t have a big problem except please realize that sourdough bread, fermented bread, does not break the gluten lectin. It doesn’t. There are multiple papers showing that fermentation does not break gluten into a harmless compound. Meat, please be modest with your meat. I can assure you that these were starving people. They did not use meat as an everyday thing. And I think shellfish get a bad rap in modern society. And with that, the biblical diet is very close to my program. So what’s a gundry-fied Bible diet?

(17:36)
Olive oil, you know, bring it on. Psalm 104: 15. Wild fish, plus my edit, modern shellfish, bitter greens and herbs, Exodus 12:18, goat sheep cheese, yogurt, Genesis 18:18, vinegar and fermented foods daily, Ruth 214, lentils pressure cooked, they’re small, bread, fermented, and using lectin-free flowers like tef, millet, sorghum, all for it. Lamb, fruit, in season, low sugar, like pomegranate seeds. Please skip the figs and dates for most of the year. Honey, eh, a teaspoon of raw once in a blue moon and fast regularly. They certainly did. What do we get? We get ancient wisdom and modern science, a powerful combination. They got the big things right. Enjoy the gundrified biblical diet. See you next week.

(18:46)
Now it’s time for the question of the week. This one comes from @cherryb6105 on my iron deficiency YouTube video. They ask, “What about iron infusions?” The doctors in Australia keep recommending it for people with low ferritin levels. Well, sometimes when you’re desperate, you have to resort to IV iron. However, as someone has used this in kidney failure patients, it’s not without its mischief, and a lot of these iron infusions can cause some real bad reactions. So most people, including most, uh, menstruating females, never have to resort to an iron infusion. Just be careful if you need it and ask plenty of questions about side effects, but great question. Now it’s time for the review of the week. The review of the week comes from @williambervlet, 8145 on YouTube. They said, “I have an olive oil story because you always preach to us about olive oil.

(19:49)
I was constipated, constipated, constipated. Nothing worked. What in the world is wrong with me? You have talked about olive oil so many times as a last desperate resort, I will try it. I was probably using a half a cup a day. Boom. Problem solved. No more constipation. Thanks for all you do. Well, you know, sometimes olive oil is the last resort, but there’s so many other really good reasons to get olive oil into you, but I’m glad to hear everything worked out in the end.

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That’s a wrap on today’s episode. And before you go, I wanna leave you with one task. If anything you heard today made you think, made you wanna dig deeper, or gave you something you’re going to pass along to someone you care about, please take 15 seconds and leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I know that sounds small, but those reviews are how Apple and Spotify decide which shows to surface to new listeners. And this show only grows when people who’ve never heard of it suddenly find it. That person finding this podcast today could hear something that genuinely improves their life or the life of someone they love, maybe even saves one. Everything I share here comes from my research when writing my next book and my clinics, where I’ve been seeing patients six days a week for over 25 years, working with nutrition and supplements as the primary treatment.

(22:05)
This is real world medicine. Help me get it to more people. And thank you. Truly thank you. I’m Dr. G, and I’m always looking out for you.