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Welcome to The Dr. Gundry Podcast where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long happy life.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
My favorite pasta alternatives. Sometimes there’s nothing better than a decadent hearty bowl of pasta. But you may be saying, “Dr. G, isn’t pasta loaded with lectins?” Well, yes, traditional wheat pastas are terrible for your health. But luckily, there are plenty of delicious and healthy alternatives. In today’s episode, I’m sharing my favorite pasta alternatives that you can enjoy right at home while staying slim and healthy. All right, let’s start with millet pasta.
Millet is a seeded grass that most of you know like sorghum, is actually not a grain, even though it’s marketed as a grain, that has absolutely no lectins. And it’s actually very efficient in producing grain with very low water. So as water becomes scarcer and scarcer, millet and sorghum become much more important grain alternatives for multiple reasons. Now, it can be made into a pasta that supports both heart and gut health.
It’s rich in magnesium and potassium, and it can work wonders for your gut. It’s great for digestion and may also support better nutrient retention. There’s a lot of dietary fiber in millet. And as you know, the dietary fiber in millet is what feeds your good gut bugs. And this has actually got a great mouthfeel like al dente pasta, and it holds up to cooking. This one’s made by Big Green. We use these, we like them, and that’s why I’m showing you. All right, next up, shirataki noodles.
Now, shirataki noodles are often called Miracle Noodles, a brand name, or konjac noodles. They’re about 97% water and about 3% glucomannan fiber. Glucomannan is a fiber that comes from the konjac root. Glucomannan is viscous, which means it absorbs water aggressively, and it’s a type of soluble fiber that has been shown to absolutely feed good gut bacteria.
Now, these noodles move through your digestive system quite slowly, which makes you actually really feel full, and they are not absorbed by us, but our gut bacteria think they’re dessert. So anytime you can find shirataki or Miracle Noodles, and I have a lot of recipes on YouTube, a lot of recipes in my books that use shirataki noodles. There’s also shirataki rice. Next up is sorghum pasta. Now, this virtual spaghetti swaps is one of the great superfoods.
Sorghum is full of polyphenols and gut boosting compounds that contains a lot of B vitamins, which play an essential role in metabolism, nerve cell development, and healthy skin and nails. It’s also a great source of magnesium that unfortunately almost all of us are deficient in. What’s more, a half a cup of sorghum provides seven grams of fiber, which is about 25% of all you need on a daily basis.
And quite frankly, I love my Gundry MD Sorghum Pasta. To me, it’s got the best mouthfeel of any of the pastas you’re going to see here today. Sorghum is high in antioxidants that include flavonoids, phenolic acids, and tannins. These antioxidants can absolutely go a long way in reducing oxidative stress. Finally, this grain is a great source of plant-based protein.
In fact, it provides as much protein as quinoa, a cereal grain renowned for its high protein content that unfortunately is loaded with lectins. Next up, fairly new one, green banana pasta. This is organic green bananas. You’ve heard me talk about the benefit of green bananas and now it’s available in a pasta. The great thing about this is it’s loaded with dietary fiber and it also has a really good mouthfeel.
The other wonderful thing about this, it is ready in four minutes of cooking. So if you’ve got kids who are screaming for pasta and no time on your hands, great new product with green banana flour. Next up, palmini pasta made from hearts of palm. Now, I love this because very much like konjac noodles, there is virtually no sugar and it’s mostly fiber. So I prefer this mouthfeel to that of konjac noodles, but it’s an individual preference.
It’s so easy to fix. You fix them almost exactly like konjac noodles. But the beauty of this and konjac noodles is it’s all fiber and no sugar. And before we go, after we’re done with all this, I want to give you a warning about the carbohydrate content in all of these except konjac and palmini. Next up, there are sweet potato noodles and vermicelli. This one is made from sweet potato and purple sweet potato, which you can see the purple color.
Sweet potatoes are another great source of dietary fiber. And these cook up pretty quick. It takes about, oh, six minutes. Not very long they’re ready. Don’t overcook these. These become slimy, but another great change of pace. This particular one is Be Green as well, and it’s lectin-free. Yay! Finally, the old standby Cappello’s. Cappello’s make spaghetti. They make fettuccine. They make other forms. Now, this is made primarily from almond flour, peeled almonds.
It does have eggs. So those of you who are egg sensitive, be careful. This to me tastes the closest to fresh made pasta. In fact, you’ll find this in your freezer section, often in the vegetarian area. It cooks up quick. Again, I think it is closest to fresh pasta that you make at home. Now, word of warning. I have a lot of people who say, “Wow! I had no idea. This is great. I’m going to have it every day from now on.”
Not so fast. Most of these, with the exception of the palmini and the shirataki noodles, still have a significant carbohydrate content. And that carbohydrate, even though it may break down slowly, is sugar eventually. And I have a number of my well-meaning patients who want to go lectin-free, want to avoid traditional pastas that latch on to all of these and use it almost on a daily basis. And they often gain weight.
They often raise their triglycerides. They often raise their insulin, and they’re apoplectic when they see their blood work because they’re eating healthy. View these as treats, have them on the weekend, have them as a special occasion, but don’t make them a mainstay of your diet. Lastly, you’ll see a lot of other pasta alternatives out there made from pea protein, made from legume protein, made from bean protein, made from lentil protein, made from corn.
Please, please, please, stay away. These are lectin bombs hidden in pasta. You don’t want to come near them, particularly since there are so many great lectin-free alternatives. And you’re going to find one or more of these that’s going to hit your taste button the exact right way. Make it part of your diet, but don’t overdo it. Five vegetables that cause weight gain.
All right, let’s start with enemy number one, corn. Now, I come from Omaha, Nebraska, and we learned very early on that if you want to fatten a cow for slaughter, you feed them corn. Corn-fed beef. Where do you think all that wonderful marbling came from in your steak? It came from feeding the cows corn. Corn is a high starch, high sugar food. Now, sadly, 95% of all corn in the United States is genetically modified.
Now, here’s the deal, even if you see the words organic corn, it’s more than likely genetically modified. It just wasn’t sprayed with glyphosate. But the sad thing is most corn in the United States is genetically modified because it is sprayed with glyphosate. And glyphosate, that wonderful herbicide, is one of the best ways that I know of to cause leaky gut and weight gain. And corn is a great way to get glyphosate in your diet.
Now, the other part of corn is it is loaded with lectins. Remember, corn is not a modern food. Corn was introduced to Africa, Asia, and Europe only 500 years ago when Columbus brought it back. Most of the Native Americans knew how to handle corn to make it less toxic. Corn was always traditionally treated with a lie to make the haul nontoxic and to bind the nitrogen binding compound so that nitrogen vitamin B3 was not taken out of your body.
That’s called hominy, and hominy or pozole is actually the safest way to eat corn if you’re going to eat it. Fun fact, matzo flour is actually made from hominy. And so if by any chance you’re going to have a tortilla, make sure it’s made from matzo flour rather than corn tortillas. And interestingly enough, if you look at traditional cultures, they always make their tortillas out of matzo flour because they have treated the corn with lie to turn it into hominy.
And the lectin content and the toxins are far diminished with that treatment. Traditional ancient people always knew how to detoxify potentially bad things. So for now, stay away from corn. What do you use as an alternative? Hey, get yourself some raw carrots. Get yourself some celery. Personally, I like to munch on jicama. Jicama is easy to prepare. But if you even don’t want to slice it up, a lot of the stores now carry prepackaged jicama.
Take it home. Use it as sticks. Dip it in guacamole that doesn’t have egg tomatoes in it and you’ll be great. All right, potatoes. Now, like corn, potatoes, unfortunately, have a very high glycemic index. The glycemic index indicates how fast something turns into sugar, but they’re often treated like a vegetable even though they’re a tuber. Now, potatoes, unfortunately, the more you make the potato light and fluffy, for instance, like an Idaho baker, has a much higher glycemic index than a wax potato, which is much harder to break down.
Take an Idaho baker, mash it up, fluff it up with air, break down all those starch granule, and you have an instant sugar bomb. But that’s not enough. What do we do with a baked potato or even mashed potatoes? We serve it with butter, sour cream, or cheese. And despite all that, there’s still lectin bombs. Now, the good news is you can substitute white potatoes with yams, purple sweet potatoes, or regular sweet potatoes and really reduce the lectin content.
But buyer beware, a purple potato is not a purple sweet potato. And I see so many of my patients make that mistake and wonder why they’re not doing well because they’re eating purple potatoes like I told them to. No, purple sweet potato, not the purple potato that you now see in the stores. Now, if you’re trying to lose weight, any of these starchy vegetables are really not a good option.
And I’ll explain why in just a second when we get to their components. Actually, I’ll do it now. So when you eat a food whole, it takes a lot of time for your digestive enzymes to break that whole food apart and to get the starches, which are long sugar molecules all bound together, glucose molecules all in its chain, the harder it is to break down that whole food, the less likely that you’re going to get to absorb that sugar.
And a lot of those starches will arrive down in your colon for your gut buddies to enjoy. But you can take a perfectly safe starch like cassava and turn it into a chip, like a plantain and turn it into a chip, or a sweet potato and turn it into a chip. And all of a sudden, you’ve got something that now will rapidly be broken down by your digestive enzymes and turn into sugar.
Now, these don’t have lectins, which is a great thing, but I have so many of my patients, well-meaning patients, who are gaining weight or at least not losing weight or are getting more insulin resistance or having higher blood sugar, or even having high cholesterols from high triglycerides, and we look at what they’re eating and they’re eating these healthy snacks thinking that they’re different than the whole food.
And just remember, our great-great-grandparents did not have access to these sorts of foods. They did not exist. They ate foods whole, and always keep that in mind. All right, green peas. Now, this may come as a shocker, but a cup of peas actually has more carbs and sugar than a cup of pasta. Yeah, that’s right. Peas have more sugar than pasta. Once again, peas are loaded with toxic lectins.
So if you’ve got to have this form of starch, please swap them out for pressure cook lentils or beans instead. Now, beans, particularly lentils, can probably help with weight loss because they’re loaded with soluble fiber that gives your good gut bacteria what they want to eat. And quite frankly, they make most people very full, sometimes uncomfortably full. And hopefully if you’re uncomfortably full, you’re not going to go looking for that next meal or even that next snack.
All right, cooked beets and carrots. Now, beets have some amazing compounds, but they don’t call beets sugar beets for nothing. They have a very high sugar content. Now, if you eat beets raw, which I do on occasion, and I have them over in Italy, sliced and served with olive oil and some goat cheese, they’re perfectly safe. But when you cook them, once again, you make those starches readily available and they turn to sugar.
And if you slice beets and then cook them, it gets even worse. Same with carrots. A raw carrot is difficult to break down all those starch molecules. But when you cook them and turn them into cooked carrots, you once again have produced a sugary food that you don’t want. So what do you do? Raw beets and raw carrots are perfectly safe. Shave beets onto your salad. Shave carrots onto your salad. They give gorgeous color.
They’re loaded with polyphenols, but you won’t absorb the sugar. These guys, even though they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing, yes, they don’t contain lectins, yes, the original product was really healthy. Plantains are great for you. Cassava is great for you. Sweet potatoes are great for you. But we’ve taken all these healthy foods, deep-fried them usually in a horrible oil, and then made all of these sugars readily accessible.
Please try to avoid these. If you’re going to use these, use them not to munch on because you won’t just eat one, but use them as a dipping chip to get tahini in your mouth, to get guacamole in your mouth, to get some other wonderful food in your mouth. But don’t just munch these things. I see it over and over again. We’ve taken a really good idea and bastardized it into something that’s not healthy for us anymore.
The three healthiest yogurts and ones you should avoid. Did you know that many mainstream yogurts found in your grocery store have more sugar content than a bowl of ice cream? Yep, true story. And any probiotics in those yogurts are usually not alive by the time it hits the shelves. But you can say yes to yogurt. You just have to know which ones to buy. Here are the four healthiest yogurts to your fridge with today.
Number one, coconut. Now, not just any coconut yogurt. Thankfully, there are many brand options out there are now readily available such as Harmless, Siggi’s, Cocoyo, The Coconut Cult, et cetera. Now, the benefits of coconut yogurt is that you’re getting actually some coconut meat and you’re actually getting MCTs in your coconut yogurt, medium-chain triglycerides.
And if you’ve read Unlocking the Keto Code, you know that MCTs are one of the best ways to produce ketones in your body and uncouple your mitochondria. But don’t be fooled. You want to look for coconut yogurts that have not had any fruit added to them. In a minute, we’re going to see a fruit added yogurt and you’re going to see the difference.
Now, when you’re looking at yogurts, first of all, a lot of times they will add sugars to yogurt, particularly coconut yogurt, because coconut intrinsically doesn’t have any sugar, and bacteria to make the yogurt have to have sugar to ferment. By law, whatever you start with as the original ingredient has to appear on the label. So for instance, yogurt that’s been fermented, there is actually no residual sugar.
The bacteria have eaten it all up. And yet you will see on the label usually under carbohydrates that there is carbohydrates. That’s because there were some put in for the bacteria you’d eat. But for instance, in this package, and there’s four ounces per serving, that’s what most of these are, there’s two grams of sugar per serving. That’s a half a teaspoon.
Contrast that with another coconut yogurt that is key lime flavor. That sounds pretty good. Oops! There’s 23 grams of sugar per serving, and that includes 16 grams of added sugar. That’s four teaspoons of added sugar, and actually a total of six teaspoons of sugar. So even though it says coconut yogurt and Dr. Gundry says, “Hey, coconut yogurt is a really good thing,” if you see a flavoring added, be very wary.
Now, there are exceptions to the rule. My second favorite is actually a yogurt called Lavva Yogurt, L-A-V-V-A. And I have no affiliation with them. But if you’re interested, I’ve had the founder of Lavva Yogurt on my Dr. Gundry Podcast episode 132. Now, this is a unique yogurt that’s made with pili nuts, it’s made with coconuts, and it’s made with green plantains and cassava root.
And it has guaranteed by analysis 50 billion prebiotic bacteria by analysis at the end of shelf life, and the shelf life end is put on the label. These guys are fastidious about their yogurt. Now, what’s so interesting about that is that you’re getting not only the live probiotics, but you’re getting prebiotic fiber that’s actually been activated. So the cool thing about this is that even though this is a fruit flavored one, this happens to be mango, this has total sugars of seven grams.
That’s just about two teaspoons, but there’s some with even less. This one is original and it only has seven grams with no added sugar. So you’re better off looking for something like Lavva. The good news is that this is in most whole food stores. You can go to their website, Lovve Lavva, with two Vs in both, and find it in your local store. Next up, sheep and goat milk yogurt and kefirs.
Here’s the deal, most American yogurts are made from American cows that are Holstein cows or Jersey cows. Holstein cows are completely casein A1 producing cows. Casein A1 is a really nasty lectin-like molecule protein that can cause disruption of your gut, can actually damage your pancreas. And most people who think they’re lactose intolerant in my practice are actually casein A1 intolerant and it’s not the lactose that gives them their problems.
On the other hand, there are casein A2 animals. Sheep produce casein A2. Goats produce casein A2. And now we’re actually finding 100% grass-fed A2 milk products in some of our grocery stores. This particular company, I’ve had on my podcast, it’s Alexandre. They’re really a cool bunch of farmers. The podcast was podcast episode 176, both YouTube and audio.
If you want to hear their amazing efforts in regenerative farming practices, check them out. They’ve got A2 yogurt. Now, the benefit of these is incredibly low sugar content. For instance, this one, total sugars, two grams. That’s a half a teaspoon per serving. Here’s kefir or kefir. Total sugars, five grams, that’s a little over a teaspoon, in an entire cup of this. Here’s a goat yogurt, and there’s a number of them. Capretta. Capra means goat.
This one comes from California. Five grams of sugar, just over a teaspoon. And this one, seven grams of sugar. The important thing is most of the sugars in the plain yogurts are actually gone. They’ve been eaten by the bacteria. So all of these are readily available. There’s other brands on the market. Bellwether Farms has an A2 yogurt from American cows. Search the web. There’s a lot of small producers coming out that are well worth your buying.
All right, yogurts to avoid at all costs. Now, I hate to be a Grinch about yogurt, but I want to empower you with the knowledge so you can make the best choices for you and your family. So all regular cows milk yogurts, please avoid them, including Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt doesn’t come from Greece, folks, and some of our most beloved yogurts are made with A1 milk, and they are just absolutely bad for you.
Avoid any yogurts with candy in them. Yes, they put candy in yogurts. Avoid any of them that have corn syrup sweeteners. And lastly, if you see anything with added sugars, just put it down. For instance, here’s a well-known yogurt maker and it has got nine grams of added sugars and a total of 14 grams of sugar in this healthy Greek yogurt vanilla flavor.
Let’s try blueberry. That’s got to be healthy for us. Oh, nine grams of added sugar. Total sugar is 14. That’s over three teaspoons of sugar in this little package. Three teaspoons. And you’re feeding this to your kids. How about, oh, this is a good one, Noosa Finest Yoghurt. Finest. One container, there is 18 grams of added sugar and 32 grams of sugar per serving. That’s eight teaspoons of sugar.
Now, why are they doing this? Because quite frankly, most people don’t like the tangy taste of yogurt. And so they’re going to induce you to say, “Oh, I love yogurt,” by covering up that tangy taste with sugar. So you’re actually having worse than a candy bar in something that’s supposedly healthy. Now, suppose you don’t like the tangy taste. That’s okay. Get any of these. I recommend using allulose as a sweetener in these.
Allulose is a relatively new true sugar that has no calories, becoming increasingly available. It’s in some Costco stores. If you don’t like Allulose, use Stevia, use monk fruit, use a combination of those. Or worst case scenario, get yourself a teaspoon of local honey and mix that in. You’ll be far better off than taking these lectin bombs, sugar bomb and feeding it not only to yourself, but most importantly, don’t give this to your kids.
These are not health foods. These are health foods. And thankfully, they’re becoming more and more available, yogurt particularly, with certified active cultures, 50 billion active at the time you buy it is the way to go. I have no affiliation with any of these products that I’m showing you today. All right, that’s it. Know your yogurts. There are more and more good ones. Unfortunately, there’s more and more bad ones, and you’re being duped every day. Stay away from these.
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