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):
You know me, I’m always working hard on my next book, which means plenty of late nights in front of the computer screen. Well I’ve got to say, all that time in front of the computer screen used to take a huge toll on my sleep and my health. The reason, blue light. Blue light damages our eyes and leads to digital eye strain. Symptoms of digital eye strain are blurred vision, headaches and dry, watery eyes. For some folks, this could even cause heightened anxiety, depression and low energy. Well BLUblox was created to fix this problem and block out the blue light with high quality lenses. Unlike other types of blue light glasses, BLUblox are evidence-based and made under optics laboratory conditions in Australia. The founders were unhappy with the quality and lack of science behind leading blue light blocking glasses brands.
Other companies were mass producing un-evidence backed products made in China with no understanding of how light impacts your health. Well BLUblox was created to change this, with high quality lenses for daytime, nighttime and for color therapy, exactly in line with the suggested peer reviewed academic literature. They have over 40 hip frames and come in prescription, non-prescription and readers. So they have frames for every need. I love mine. In fact, I wear them all the time, especially when I’m working at my computer late at night. So get your energy back, sleep better and block out the unhealthy effects of blue light with BLUblox. And right now, you can get free shipping worldwide and 15% off by going to blublox.com/gundry, or enter code GUNDRY at checkout. Again, that’s BLUblox, B-L-U-B-L-O-X.com/gundry for 15% off, or use code GUNDRY at checkout.
In my new book, The Energy Paradox, you’re going to learn why fiber is so critical for increasing your energy levels. There’s just one problem though. Nine in 10 people are deficient in this critical nutrient. Nine in 10! Now I get it, we all live busy lives. Many of us just don’t have the time to prepare home cooked meals rich in prebiotic fibers and resistant starches. Besides prebiotic supplements, I discovered a great on the go solution to make sure you get enough fiber in your diet every single day. It’s a keto bread by Uprising Food, with a whopping nine grams of fiber in every slice. I like to slice it very thin and toast it up for a great way to break my fast.
They also have fiber rich crackers too. My wife, Penny, adores the savory rye crackers. They taste just like regular rye crackers, but instead of the lectin bomb rye ingredient, they’re packed with gut boosting ingredients like psyllium husk and flaxseed. Now, I recommend trying their sampler bundle so you can decide which you like best. If you go to uprisingfood.com/gundry, you can get the entire sampler bundle. That’s two boxes of the savory rye crackers, two boxes of sea salt crackers and two boxes of the sourdough cubes for just $48. And if you’re one of the first 1,000 people to use my code GUNDRY at purchase, you’ll get free standard shipping. So hurry while supplies last. Again, that’s uprisingfood.com/gundry.
Welcome to this special mini episode of The Dr. Gundry Podcast. Ever since I told my readers to give fruit the boot in my first book many years ago, people have labeled me as some kind of fruit hater. Well my wife, Penny, can tell you I am anything but a fruit hater. I have a yard full of fruit trees and vines. In fact, there are lots of fruits I absolutely love and recommend. So on today’s mini episode, I’m going to share a few of my favorite fruits and why I love them so much, easy tips for eating fruit in moderation and what it really means to eat your fruit in season. It’s a little more complicated than you might think. Okay, let’s start with a question I get all the time. Is fruit really bad for me? Well that depends.
First of all, our desire for fruit is deep seeded. All great apes, as I pointed out in my first book years ago, only gain weight during fruit season and fruit season only occurs once a year in the jungle. It doesn’t occur all year round. Apes didn’t know that you could genetically or hybridize fruit to bear fruit year round. So great apes only gain weight during fruit season. That’s because as you’ll learn in the energy paradox that we use fructose, the sugar in fruit, mainly to add fat to us. Why? Because the rest of the year, there wasn’t much food to eat. And those of us who could store fat, we are the fat storing ape after all, we’re much better off. So we have a distinct desire to get fruit in us and as much as we can find. So that’s why fructose is so desirable.
And number two, fructose unfortunately builds fat, builds triglycerides. And as a heart surgeon and cardiologist, I can tell you that the more fructose you eat, the higher your triglycerides will go, the higher your cholesterol will go, and you’re going to get fatty liver disease and run low on energy. So that’s why it’s not such a great idea. But you have heard me say in all my books to eat fruit in moderation. Now, people always want me to say, “Well what do you mean by moderation?” So here’s the deal. How many servings a day? You may have seen recently that new evidence came out that the idea of eating five fruits and vegetables a day is now being modified. So that in the good old days, people interpreted five servings of fruits and vegetables as basically, “Well I can eat five servings of fruit and that qualifies as eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.”
But in fact, the evidence is completely different. In fact, if you put rats on the five servings of fruits and vegetables a day and give them mostly fruit and some vegetables, they’ll all get fat and diabetic. If you give them mostly vegetables and some fruits, they won’t do that. So recently, the guidelines have been revised that the eat five a day should only be two fruits and three vegetables. Now, there’s a proviso to that because the vast majority of vegetables in people’s diets are actually fruits. Tomato is a fruit. Eggplant is a fruit. Squash is a fruit. Any of these vegetables with seeds are actually fruits. So you got to be very careful. You want to eat vegetables that don’t have seeds. So we’re beginning to realize how mischievous a lot of fruit can be in our diet. So what do you do? In moderation means probably one serving at the most per day. If you want to do two servings, please use low fructose fruits. And we’re going to get into that in the next segment.
One of the biggest recommendations in my best-selling book, The Longevity Paradox, was to eat in line with the seasons. Now, unless you only shop at your local farmer’s market, chances are you don’t know what’s in season and what’s not. So here’s a few tips. Look at the origin of the fruits that you’re buying. If it’s not grown in the United States, it’s probably not in season anywhere near you. It doesn’t matter that I live in California. If I see grown in Mexico or grown in Honduras, that’s not local to me. Particularly in the winter, we all see all these beautiful fruits coming from Chile and Argentina, and they look fresh, but they’re not, number one, and they’re certainly not in season. Bananas are not grown in United States. So a banana is not an in season fruit no matter when you pick it up. So get it produce calendar.
There’s actually a great website called Farm Flavor, where you can find a produce calendar for every state in the union. I’ll put a link in our show notes to it so you can go there. So it’ll tell you what fruits are growing in your state or other nearby states for every month of the year. That way, when you go to the grocery store, you know exactly what’s in season and what isn’t. Now, of course, if you live in California like I do, or Florida, or Arizona, you know that most vegetables and even some fruits are actually available all year round. Strawberries have been hybridized to produce strawberries throughout the year here in California. That doesn’t mean that they’re technically in seasons. Strawberries normally would only grow in the summer in most areas before they were hybridized. So buyer beware. All right, now it’s time to talk about what you’ve been looking for, my favorite fruits.
Deep restorative sleep. It’s one of the keys to health and longevity. Studies show one of the best ways to get better sleep is to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even on the weekends. But I realized that’s not always easy to achieve, especially if you have pressing deadlines or a hard time winding down like I do. That’s why I want to share a little trick with you that I use to help me relax before bed, the meditation app, Headspace. Headspace is a meditation app, but it also has a very cool feature called sleepcast. Sleepcast by Headspace, think of them like bedtime stories for adults, are my favorite aspect of Headspace.
After a busy day, having a soothing voice walk you through a calming story and helping to relax your mind is just what the doctor needed. And right now, you can try it for free for a free one month trial and access to Headspace’s full library of meditation, including those helpful sleepcasts. Just go to headspace.com/gundry to claim your free trial today. Again, that’s headspace.com/gundry. You deserve to have a good night’s rest so you can have the energy and mental clarity you need to do what you love, and sleepcast by Headspace helps you do exactly that. Go to headspace.com/gundry for your free one month trial today.
Ever since I quit ,y work as a heart surgeon and opened my two restorative medicine centers, my mission has been the same, to help transform the health of every single person on the planet. That may sound crazy or even naive, but it really is my top priority. That’s why at 70-years-old, I still see patients six days a week. It’s why I continue writing books and producing The Dr. Gundry Podcast. And it’s why I’m asking you today to do something really important because you can play a big role in transforming lives too, by leaving a quick review of The Dr. Gundry Podcast on iTunes. And if you have any questions for me, drop one into your review and I’ll be sure to answer it on a future episode of the podcast.
The more ratings and reviews we get on iTunes, the more people we can reach with this powerful health message. And the best part is it only takes a moment. Hit pause right now and write us a short review on iTunes. By leaving a quick review today, you can help thousands more people discover their path to optimal health. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Together, I truly believe we can help everyone on this planet of ours achieve optimal health. And that’s a goal worth fighting for.
Believe it or not, there are a number of fruits that are quite low in fructose, and you really want to avoid the high fructose fruits. So my favorite ones are berries, particularly raspberries and blackberries. Surprisingly, blueberries have now been hybridized so much that they have much higher fructose than ever before. So blueberries of the berry family fall way down the list, boysenberries, mulberries, if you can find them, are also low fructose fruit. Now, here’s one that probably surprises you, kiwi fruit. Kiwi fruit, particularly if you eat the peel, the furry hairy part, has huge amounts of fiber and quite low fructose, making it actually one of the best bang for your bucks in eating fruit. Not much fructose, lots of fiber.
Another one is a crispy pear. Now, this is totally different than a ripe [inaudible 00:14:07] pear. A crispy pear is designed to stay crispy and not ripen. And it also has low fructose. But remember, once you allow anything, even a crispy pear, to ripen fully, it becomes a fructose bomb. There are persimmons in the fall that are relatively low in fructose. But be warned. I actually have two different patients who saw that persimmons are allowed on our lists because they have a lot of fiber quite honestly. And they went on a persimmon kick. And you wouldn’t believe what happened to them. Their insulin levels went up, their triglycerides through the roof. They each actually gained about 10 pounds just going on a healthy persimmon kick. And believe it or not that’s what fruit was designed to do, it was designed to have us gain weight.
Passion fruit is fantastic. High fiber, low fructose. Another one of my favorites is a pomegranate seeds. Do not drink pomegranate juice. You are concentrating the fructose whenever you’re having any juice, and that goes along with pomegranate juice. But the pomegranate seeds are actually mostly fiber and some really cool Omega fats that you really can’t get anywhere else but in the pomegranate seed. So those are my favorite in season fruits. A question I get all the time, “Well what happens if you take an in season fruit like berries and freeze them and then use them in the winter? Wouldn’t that be?” Okay. All I can tell you is that none of us evolved even recently to have year round fruit, even if it was picked in season. So it’s really one of the reasons I invented some of my best-selling products was to give you the benefits of the polyphenols and the fibers in fruits, removing the fructose which is the mischief maker. So please don’t fall for that trap.
Okay. So that’s my quick take on fruit. You’re going to see some fascinating new things in The Energy Paradox about fruit and why fructose in all its forms may be one of your biggest energy drainers there are. How about audience question? This week’s question comes from Anastasia [inaudible 00:16:52] on YouTube. She has asks, “Please answer for us. Does long fermentation in sourdough bread destroy WGA?” For those of you who don’t know WGA, that stands for wheat germ agglutinin, which is a very tiny lectin which can go through the wall of the gut without actually having leaky gut. The answer sadly is I have so many of my autoimmune patients who have tried long fermented regular wheat bread and have paid the costs. They almost always invariably reactivate their autoimmune disease, reactivate their leaky gut.
We’re rapidly finding much better flours and bread companies that make fermented safe flours, and please find them, look them up and use them. But particularly if you have leaky gut or an autoimmune disease, please be very wary of sourdough bread in any form that uses wheat, or rye, or barley, or oats. Finally, it’s time for our review of the week. This week’s review comes from Claudette Sheckler, who said this after my recent interview with Sayer Ji. “Thank you for having such a great guest. Just so interesting and a great plethora of information. Oh Lord, pray for our planet. Thank you from Guam.” Well thank you, Claudette. As you know, I’ve dedicated my career to getting this important life-changing information out to as many people as possible, and you can play a big role in transforming lives too.
By rating us and reviewing us on Apple podcasts, you can actually help increase our ranking so more people can find us on iTunes. And that means more people getting access to this powerful health message. By leaving a quick review today, you’ll help thousands more people discovering their path to optimal health. And that’s it for this mini episode of The Dr. Gundry Podcast. So remember, I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you. We’ll see you next week. 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 at youtube.com/dr.gundry, because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.