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 (00:13):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. I’m really excited about this episode because we have got a expert on one of my favorite subjects. Right now, over 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese, which means hundreds of millions of us are at greater risk for heart disease, diabetes and cancer, you name it. Obesity is the cause of all this. My guest today says that this can be traced back decades to the introduction of one specific food into our diet, which now makes up about 60% of the diet of most Americans. And I know you’re scratching your head going, “What is it?” Well, I’m talking about processed foods and ultra processed foods that are loaded with both carbohydrates and fats.
But, my guest today will explain that not all carbs are bad. You can’t wait for this. He’s Dr. David A. Kessler and he knows firsthand the role food companies and the government have played in driving this epidemic. Back in the 1990s, he served as the Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, under both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. He’s been dean of both Yale and UCSF Medical Schools, and trained as an active Pediatrician. What a resume.
And Dr. Kessler has just written a brand new book, it’s called Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs: The Simple Truth About Food, Weight, and Disease. So on today’s episode, he and I will talk about why fast carbs are bad for you, how our diets became so unhealthy, and what we can do about it. Dr. Kessler, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Dr. David Kessler (02:16):
It’s a pleasure.
Dr. Gundry (02:17):
So, you served in two presidential administrations. What was your role there? And what did it teach you about the way the food industry works?
Dr. David Kessler (02:27):
So, I was Commissioner of the FDA under the first President, Bush. I was reappointed by President Clinton. Stayed there seven years, which is pretty long. Pretty unusual for an FDA Commissioner to be under two presidents, especially of different parties. You may remember that when we were at FDA, we did the food label, the nutrition facts and that was probably one of the great battles. I had the privilege of taking on tobacco, I was there for the HIV epidemic, there was only one drug when I got there and by the time we left, about seven years later, that disease had been transformed, not cured, by any means. But there were a lot of drugs on the market. But no doubt, getting that nutrition facts panel, that nutrition facts, that information, that was a real fight with the food industry. They lobbied intensely. They didn’t want to put that information on all packaged foods.
Dr. Gundry (03:51):
Yeah, this is something I actually have multiple food labels in my office that I show patients how to read properly because you’re absolutely right. And I think I want you to stress this some more, food companies actively resisted, even these simple labels and you and I both know, you certainly more than I, the way they tried to prevent real information from getting on to those labels.
Dr. David Kessler (04:27):
It almost didn’t happen. One day the secretary of agriculture said to me, “I’m taking the issue to the president.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “No.” We did not have the department of agriculture in part, because they represented a large part of the meat, saturated fat, products that were high in saturated fat. They didn’t think their products would look very good with that nutrition facts label. And he says, “I’m taking it to the president.” And I said, “What?” He says, “No, we’re going to The Oval Office.” Picture the scene in The Oval Office, it was president Bush, the father, Dan Quayle, the vice president, Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary, Jim Baker, the secretary of state, Secretary Sullivan, secretary Madigan, six guys, who’ve never cooked in their lives deciding the fate of the food label.
We had been up and down. It was August. We were coming back from a little time away with the kids and we had stopped at a McDonald’s and I don’t know if you ever saw they had the placemats, those paper placemats on the trays and we had worked with McDonald’s to get the nutrition facts, a prototype on that placemat for some of their products. And when the secretary of agriculture said, “Mr. President, FDA’s lost its mind. It’s not going to require the industry to spend billions of dollars.” Take out that placemat handed to the president and say, “Mr. President, if it’s good enough for McDonald’s, it should be good enough for the department of agriculture.” And that’s how policy is made in this country because the president sided with us. The six of them were sitting there looking at this McDonald’s placement.
Dr. Gundry (06:40):
So I hope you’re not saying that to change policy in America, you need to stop at McDonald’s, but maybe you are.
Dr. David Kessler (06:48):
Well, sometimes it’s not the science that drives every policy decision but it worked.
Dr. Gundry (07:00):
How insidious in government and at the FDA, but in the department of agriculture is food industry in terms of making policy?
Dr. David Kessler (07:14):
Certainly, it’s a very sophisticated industry. They have lobbyists throughout the town and they are listened to. I’m not sure the word insidious is the right word. If you really step back and ask, how did we get to where we are? I don’t think it’s just a lobbyist of today, but as I’ve been researching for the book, you go back 200 years and if you go to Mount Vernon and you look up at the ceiling and you can see the sheaves of wheat on the ceiling. And Washington wrote to Lafayette that he had hoped that one day America would become the granary for the world and we built this enormous infrastructure.
In part, it was consistent with the soil, the farm lands. We were able to mechanize all of grain production and if you look, the enormity of how much of our food supply comes from starch, it’s just processed grains that have been ultra processed, that have had the structure just pummeled out of it. And if you look at the processing techniques, the extrusion, one of the techniques, the thermo, they heat, the mechanical forces that take that kernel a [inaudible 00:09:29], that energy and just use such force in processing such that the surface area of those carbohydrates get rapidly absorbed into our GI tract. And we never asked what were the consequences metabolically, biologically of just that flood of rapidly absorbable glucose into our bodies.
Dr. Gundry (10:01):
Did food companies know they were doing this, or how did they find that this stuff was so addictive?
Dr. David Kessler (10:10):
Well, there’s a couple of different ways to answer that question. That wheat kernel, that goal, that energy, that which sustain the species for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, they were able to take that wheat kernel and make it into thousands of products. Not only did they use very extensive thermo mechanical forces on it, starch is really the delivery vehicle for fat, sugar and salt. Exactly what they knew, they knew what Americans kept on coming back for. They certainly understood how to make food hyper palatable but I think on the metabolic consequences, we’ve always said these processed foods are not good for us but we really had never understood the extent of their effect on our metabolism.
No one really asked what was the consequences of just flooding our bodies with these rapidly absorbable glucose. It was always a calorie was a calorie. It didn’t make a difference what that calorie was. We basically viewed our GI tract is almost a tube that absorbed these foods. We didn’t understand the sensors, the hormones, the nerves, the implications of what it was to rapidly absorb higher up in the GI track. So the food doesn’t even get down into your lower GI tract to stimulate other hormones and other signals to give feelings of satiety and fullness. So, there are many different levels upon which that rapidly absorbable glucose, and we’ve just never really asked the questions, what are the consequences? Until relatively recently.
Dr. Gundry (12:35):
So what you’re saying for our listeners and viewers is that a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie and a carbohydrate is not necessarily a carbohydrate the way we have been traditionally thought to think about them.
Dr. David Kessler (12:52):
So certainly, a calorie is a calorie when it comes to just energy content. There’s no doubt about the laws of thermo dynamics, but the consequences of different types of carbohydrates and how our body handles them. That, I don’t think has been fully understood and that’s why I wrote the book. It’s really about carbohydrate quality more than anything else, and really destroying the structure of our food. That’s really the bottom line message. What processing does is it takes that kernel, it’s strips away and opens up that endosperm, that starch, and widely disperses it.
So any structure, any fiber, any chance that that food will get lower down on your GI track is lost and then that those thermal mechanical forces very much increase the surface area of that starch and expands it. So our enzymes can get to that and digest that so rapidly that that stimulating hormones, they just have very many consequences. It has consequences at the level of the mouth because the food is so soft, it’s pre digested, we don’t chew, it goes down in a whoosh that affects eating area. It has fat sugar and salt in it that stimulates our brain. It stimulates the GIP hormones that set off these insulin that affect not only metabolism, but also the brain reward circuits and food doesn’t even get a chance to get to the load or GI tract to stimulate other important hormones and signals. And we never fully understood the consequences of that process.
Dr. Gundry (15:14):
I think you bring up a good point. I’ve been fascinated with the Kelloggs brothers among other reasons because they were a seventh day Adventist sanitarium in Battle Creek and I was a professor and chairman at Loma Linda University for many years, which is an Adventist medical school. And I was fascinated that the original premise of Kellogg’s corn flakes and the advertising behind it was it was pre digested food. And what they had found at their sanitarium was that they were very big on grains obviously, but their patients wouldn’t eat them because they were too hard to eat. And so they figured out that if they pre digested it, it would ease the metabolism of breaking down food and that was actually one of the big selling points that started cereal off in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Dr. David Kessler (16:18):
The issue is the food environment. In decades past, certainly in centuries past when we barely had enough food to be an energy balance. I think that those calories that came from those pre digested foods didn’t pose perhaps as great a challenge as the do when you are in the modern day food environment. My greatest concern is the fact that if you look at just to say a remarkable number by a group at the University of North Carolina, if you just look at weight, blood glucose, blood lipids and blood pressure, only 12.2% of Americans currently meet those guidelines. 87% of us are metabolically challenged and the fact is that we’re walking around for most of the day in a positive energy balance.
And my greatest concern is the effect of these processed rapidly absorbable carbohydrates in that context, in that environment, in that physiology because I think that there are some 90 million people who are pre-diabetic [inaudible 00:18:06], those who have diabetes. And when you take these processed carbs and it’s things, I don’t think the Kellogg brothers certainly they didn’t understand the medicine of this, back when they did it, majority of us weren’t as metabolically challenged as we are today.
Add those rapidly absorbable carbohydrates to those who are metabolically vulnerable, to those who are in this cycle of weight gain insulin resistance, add those processed carbs to those individuals. It’s like fire. It’s like their processed poisons for those individuals, and that’s not the way it was centuries ago when we were barely in energy balance.
Dr. Gundry (19:04):
No, I think that’s was great. I want to go back to something you mentioned, which I think is really important, certainly from my work and my research. These incredibly processed carbohydrates, as you say, are rapidly absorbed out of our small intestine and nothing that particularly the slow carbohydrates and the soluble fiber that would normally get down to our large intestine or colon, where most of our microbiome lives. And as you and I both know, and I’ll preach forever that we’ve got to feed those guys what they want and need because they’re one of the keys to satiety, to hormone production. And I think you’re spot-on that these highly processed carbohydrates may have the same amount of energy that they had 200, 300 years ago. But now, the additional fibers that our colon microbiome needs never arrives. Is that your way of thinking?
Dr. David Kessler (20:19):
Steven, you said it more eloquently than I can.
Dr. Gundry (20:24):
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Dr. David Kessler (21:48):
We’re learning more and more about the microbiome is that other hormones, the GLP-1 hormones in the lower part of the gut, what’s the relative contribution, I’m not sure. Think about it for a moment. What are the two sort of real stores of nutrition that I think we could all agree on. We know that real fiber in food and we know that plants and vegetables are correlated in every study with improved outcome. And what is it about that fiber and those plans? That is key. They’re the antithesis of rapidly absorbable carbohydrates. So is it that those vegetables and those fibers are good for us because they get to the lower part of the colon or is it that they don’t have these rapidly absorbable glucose? I can’t tell you the relative contribution, but the real problem and I think that we have people on all sides of the nutrition debate, low carb, low fat-
Dr. Gundry (23:21):
Carnivore diet.
Dr. David Kessler (23:23):
Pick any diet. If you really want to cut through the noise and see what is it that really makes a difference? And that’s why I did the book. The first thing, I think there’s several other things, but the thing that we can agree on is to limit or markedly reduce rapidly absorbable carbohydrates, or as I call them fast carbs. It’s not just sugar, it’s sugar and starch. It’s these rapidly absorbable glucoses that are throwing our bodies into metabolic chaos.
Dr. Gundry (24:00):
So give me an example, what’s the worst culprit out there? Come on, let’s name names. What are the really bad foods?
Dr. David Kessler (24:09):
Well, I walk up and down the supermarket aisle. 60, 70% of our diets, our carbohydrates and the vast majority of that is processed carbs and the vast majority of that is rapidly absorbable glucose. It’s starch. I went back and I love walking up and down the supermarket aisle and just picking up packages. Imagine in your head the following nutrition panel. About 330 calories per serving. Sugar, zero. Total fat, zero. Saturated fat, zero. Total carbs, about 30% of your daily value. Protein, about 4%. No fat, no sugar, just total carbs and some protein. You look at that label, and I thought we had done a good job, what do you think that food is? What’s your guess?
Dr. Gundry (25:40):
I could name so many, but it’s most of the products that you can pick up in a bag.
Dr. David Kessler (25:47):
I just defined the bagel. It’s about 4% salt but it just has total carbs. And the reality is it’s starch. It’s refined flour and it says 0%-
Dr. Gundry (26:06):
Sugar.
Dr. David Kessler (26:07):
Sugar. It says 0% fat. We thought that those total carbohydrates, or at least I thought they were relatively bland. They were relatively innocuous and I just never lumped them in the same categories as fat, sugar, and salt and that was a mistake.
Dr. Gundry (26:26):
Oh, wait a minute. You’re hearing it right here for the first time. The commissioner has told us that that was a mistake. And thank you for saying that because actually I take something like a bagel or even some of these healthy new chips, and I show people the label and they always point to the fact that, “Oh look, it has no sugar, or it has one gram of sugar and it’s great.” And I say, “Wait a minute.” To read a label and I’ll have you say this as well, you look at the total carbohydrates and then you take away the fiber, which doesn’t count in my opinion, or is actually really good and that’ll tell you the sugar. And that’ll tell you the sugar content of that product and then what I do is I have them divide by four because there’s four grams of sugar per teaspoon and I just did this yesterday in my office. And they were eating a healthy taro root chip. Unbeknownst to them per serving, there was actually five teaspoons of sugar in their healthy taro root chips because they’d been processed.
Dr. David Kessler (27:38):
Well, if you take that bagel, there’s no sugar in it. It’s all starch but that starch, certainly that kernel has the chains of the starch molecules have been cut down. That surface area of that starch granule is been increased dramatically. It’s going to get rapidly absorbed and the reality is that it has the same ability to increase blood glucose as some 23 teaspoons of sugar. So even though there’s no sugar in it, that starch has the ability to convert and as rapidly absorb glucose and that is driving us insignificant part in our bodies into metabolic chaos. If you go back and you look at the… It’s really amazing that in 2020, if I say what’s the consequences of this rapidly absorbable glucose from both starch and sugar being absorbed almost constantly in the upper GI? What’s the consequences to our health? And you ask nutritionists that, they can’t answer.
Is it just calories that cause obesity or does in fact that rapidly absorbable glucose, does it increase blood glucose? Does it increase insulin levels? Which comes first? Is it the obesity? Is it the hyperinsulinemia? It almost doesn’t matter because in an environment that of excess caloric intake, we get caught in this vicious cycle of obesity and hyperinsulinemia and elevated glucose. We wonder why we can’t lose weight and keep it off because once you’re in that vicious cycle, our bodies are really just growing out of whack.
Dr. Gundry (29:59):
All right. So you wrote the book to alert us of this danger but the second part of the title is Slow Carbs. So how do we get this train wreck back on the tracks?
Dr. David Kessler (30:13):
Well, so what’s the best slow carb? What doesn’t contain rapidly absorbable glucose when it’s ingested. We sort of knew it but we didn’t quite know it in these terms. It’s why a plant-based diet, it’s why vegetables, those are the ultimate slow carbs. They don’t have this rapidly absorbable glucose. It has very little in it. They do not have the structure just whacked out of it. Structure is intact and it has that that fiber is part of that structure and they are the ultimate slow carbs. We can talk about other types of grains, rye, buckwheat, other grains, they’re intact whole grains that are more solely digestible. But the reality is the best slow carb there is is the vegetable that we’ve been talking about because they have the structure, they have the fiber, they resist this rapid absorption in the upper GI tract.
Dr. Gundry (31:31):
Yeah. As you know, if I could get people to eat greens all day, in fact, one of my original sayings was if you eat greens, you’ll become lean. It’s impossible not to. You’re right, these foods, you can’t break them down fast enough. You don’t have the enzyme systems and you actually need a bacteria to actually break down an intact cell wall.
Dr. David Kessler (32:04):
That’s exactly correct. It’s not rapidly absorbed. It’s the antithesis of these fast carbs. I think it’s very hard to eliminate the reality of all fast carbs from the diet. The question is what do you replace those fast carbs with? And that’s a great debate and love to talk to you about that because I think there’s an enormous opportunity, not only the ability to get back our bodies in to some metabolic normalcy and be able to control our weight and to control our blood glucose. But the real question is what do you do when you want to cut these out? What do you replace those calories with? That brings up the whole low carb debate. I have great friends who have seen the problems with these fast carbs and with these rapidly absorbable carbohydrates.
There was another thing that happened to me as I did the research for the book and I spent a lot of time trying to understand the drivers of acute atherosclerotic heart disease. The nutrition community, I don’t think understandably is focused on that as the cardiology community. But we now know that these blood lipids, the LDL more specifically, the LDL particles who have apoB on that. The reality is that those are causal. They’re certainly in the causal chain of atherosclerotic heart disease. Part of my job at FDA was to insist on these very large drug trials to make sure we had the data and the reality is certainly from the drug data, the lower you get LDL, the more you can decrease atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk.
If we can get LDL down in this country just to 70, let’s say on the average, we can wipe out 70, 80% of atherosclerotic heart disease. It would be as big a contribution as we’ve had from tobacco, but that involves getting the bids down, especially LDL particles and the question is how to do that. The studies on LDL risk, really the real randomized clinical trials come from the drug side and I don’t want to just sit here and advocate on the drug side, but we do know that you could reduce a plant-based diet. We can reduce LDL by some 40% and any cases. And maybe it’s not as powerful as drugs and certain people it is, but in others, drugs are more powerful and can get down lower.
I think as a country, we can do three things. If we can move markedly reduce these fast carbs, if we can get our LDL numbers down and if we engage in just moderate intensity exercise to be able to maintain our insulin sensitivity, limit our fast carbs, get our LDL down however you want to do it and engage in moderate intensity exercise, I think we could dramatically change the health, not only our ourselves and our families, but of the entire country.
Dr. Gundry (36:12):
Yeah, I’ve been preaching for over 20 years now that if I’m looking at a lipid panel, the first thing I do is look at triglycerides, which in general, come from sugar and starch metabolism in the liver and lowering the triglycerides is my number one objective because when triglycerides go down, LDL follows. And the other great thing that happens in all my patients is that as triglycerides go down, HDL goes up and actually the triglyceride to HDL ratio is the ratio that I use in my patients to determine how I’m doing. And I also use oxidized LDL because in my humble opinion, it’s whether these LDL particles are actually going rancid or rusty, that actually stimulates the atherosclerotic cascade at the end of the oil level. But I couldn’t agree with you more if we get processed fast carbs out of the diet, it’s amazing how triglycerides plummet, they just plummet.
Dr. David Kessler (37:25):
I think that’s exactly right. I think it’s a combination. There’s no doubt there are a lot of terms that the blood lipidologists can use. I think we’re talking about the non HDL lipoproteins and that’s really the apoB LDLs and the triglycerides. And I think getting those down however you want to do it, there are a lot of different options and I think we have to be open to that, but reducing those fast carbs and then markedly lowering LDL is probably the greatest chance to improve your health, certainly when it comes to metabolic and cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Gundry (38:14):
Okay. You mentioned getting fast carbs away from people is hard to do. Help me out here. What do you replace these things with on a daily basis? Give me one exchange. What are you trading your bagel for?
Dr. David Kessler (38:32):
Well, one of the things I did in the book even though the book tries to explain the science and tries to be accessible. One of the things I did is to do exactly that in the back of the book, I had one of the great PhD dieticians from London help me do those substitutions. My general view right now is that anything that’s not a processed carb, you could eat. There’s no doubt that those processed carbs fill most of our diet and they’re super palatable, hyper palatable, but you can go to intact whole grains. In breakfast, you can go to any form of protein. You can go to plant proteins.
The real question still remains on saturated fat and I think that the most important thing is to get those fast carbs out of the diet, but for those people whose saturated fat increases their LDL, and I’ve seen that. You switch people to a carnivore or the old Atkins kind of diet, they bumped their LDL on average by about 10%, some as high as 30%. And that’s sending the LDL in the wrong direction but I think the most important thing is just caught out the processed carbs. Anything that’s not processed carbs, I think is fair game.
Dr. Gundry (40:24):
Yeah. I’ll put a word of warning here, at least from my perspective that there’s no such thing as a healthy whole grain because when people read labels, they see the word whole grain, but these are for the most part processed whole grains exactly getting back to what you’re trying to protect against.
Dr. David Kessler (40:45):
Again, I didn’t see it. I didn’t fully understand that but the vast majority of those whole grains, what happens is that they are processed, that wheat kernel is processed just like any other refined carbohydrate and the brand is simply added back. But the rest of that endosperm is highly processed. While there may be some benefit no doubt, to adding that brand back, it is anything but a slow carb.
Dr. Gundry (41:29):
Great. Well, thanks for clarifying that because I actually have examples of whole grain bread and whole grain crackers in my office and I have the patients show me where the whole grains are and they can’t because obviously there aren’t any whole grains in there. It’s all sadly a ruse. I think the labeling was an amazingly good idea, but I think your point when we started the show was the labeling laws have been so manipulated by companies, the pressure that was put on you as the FDA commissioner.
Dr. David Kessler (42:06):
Well, it was a part we didn’t understand the biology of the GI tract. We didn’t understand the differences that it made a difference, whether the food structure was intact. We didn’t understand that where in the GI tract, the food was absorbed, what it stimulated both at the level of the mouth, the brain, the upper GI tract, the lower GI tract, the microbiome. We didn’t understand that. We focused on fat, sugar and salt. Yes, there are issues but we left out the bulk of the problem, which is very honestly starch is processed carbs.
Dr. Gundry (42:52):
Great to have you on the program. Where to people find out about the book? Where do they find out about you and what you’re doing?
Dr. David Kessler (43:00):
The book comes out on March 31st. It should be at everyone’s wherever you buy books.
Dr. Gundry (43:08):
Go to your local bookstore, please.
Dr. David Kessler (43:11):
Local bookstore absolutely and it’s Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs and I try to make it accessible. I try to make it understandable. There are certainly references in there for those in the health community, but it’s meant to be an easy read. The real goal is to change how you look at food.
Dr. Gundry (43:37):
Great. So before I let you go, we always have an audience question, and I’m going to have you help me out on this one if you don’t mind. So Valerie asks, what is the healthiest way to gain weight while adhering to plant paradox recommendations? My husband is 6’6″ and can’t get enough calories to maintain his weight. And I think this is actually a great question because we’re talking about fast carbs and slow carbs, and most people think to gain weight, you got to have these fast carbs. What do you think?
Dr. David Kessler (44:12):
I think there are probably only two instances where fast carbs have a role. One is in the extreme, if you’re feeding somebody intravenously, you’re in an acute situation. But the issue also has to do, and it’s more complicated, I think in the very early year of first year of life. Other than that, I think that anything that’s not a processed carb would be fair game to be able to sustain a weight. Staying away from fast carbs and if you can do that, and compose the diet to be an energy balance, I think that’s the best rule.
Dr. Gundry (45:18):
Yeah, I think that’s really important. So I do have people who do lose a lot of weight by following my program. Most of it, obviously well needed weight loss, but there are certain people who it is difficult to maintain their weight. What I’ve done is actually increased their nut consumption, particularly macadamia nuts and I really urge people in this category to use the non lectin containing grains, which are millet and sorghum, and to use lots of the traditional fiber containing foods like yams, like sweet potatoes, like turnips, like parsnips. And I personally view them as a delivery device for olive oil, as all of my listeners know but on this regimen, knock on wood, we’ve never been able to not get weight on people. But what I see disastrously is exactly what Dr. Kessler has talked about is many people that gain weight, they go back to the bagels and the chips and all these slow carbohydrates, and yes, they do gain weight, but their lipid profile goes out of whack. Their insulin starts going up and very rapidly, we’re back to where we started.
Dr. David Kessler (46:36):
One of the things that I don’t think we’ve done people a service by the one thing we just have not really explained is that you can’t… diets that lasts three months, four months, five months, you lose the weight. Go back, add back those fast carbs and you’re going to gain back the weight. The reality is if you want to lose weight, whatever diet you’re going to choose, you’re going to have to be on it for the duration. The reason why all these diets studies are a hockey puck when you look at the graph, where it start regaining it at six months as people go off it. And the reality is that those fast carbs throw your body back into a metabolic vicious cycle that’s very hard to maintain weight loss when you’re in that metabolic chaos.
Dr. Gundry (47:47):
Very good. A great place to end the program and Dr. Kessler, good luck with the book and hope to meet up with you face-to-face someday.
Dr. David Kessler (47:56):
Dr. Gundry, a real pleasure. Thanks for the kindness, thank you very much.
Dr. Gundry (48:01):
All right, take care. It’s time for a review of the week from Apple Podcasts, Boca Junior 5553. “Love this podcast and the great advice from Dr. Gundry. I am confused about all of the supplements recommended in the plant paradox. Could you give a list of which basic supplements to take daily?” Well, I actually do give those lists in all my books. And really, if I had three supplements to tell any human being to take, it would be vitamin D3. Bare minimum is 5,000 international units a day. If you’re used to in the milligram system, that’s 125 milligrams and fish oil, whether you get it as Omega-3s from fish, or whether you get as long chain Omega-3s from Algae, those are two of the biggest things that you should get.
The third thing is I recommend that everyone take time to release vitamin C about a 1,000 milligrams twice a day. If you can’t find, or can’t afford time release for vitamin C, get yourself some chewable vitamin C tablets, put four in your pocket and chew those tablets every four times a day. It’s one of the best things you can do to improve your long-term heart health artery health and by the way, vitamin C on a continuous basis is really effective at preventing flu as is the vitamin D. So those are my quickie recommendations. So that’s it, we’ll see you next week on the Dr. Gundry Podcast. We got another good one coming up for you.
Disclaimer, on the Dr. Gundry Podcast, we provide a venue for discussion and the views expressed by my guests do not necessarily reflect my own. 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 can always find me on youtube@youtube.com/drGundry because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
