Speaker 1:
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.
Steven Gundry:
What if the veggies you aren’t eating are the ones your body needs most? In today’s episode, I’m revealing three powerhouse vegetables that can transform your health, and chances are they’re not on your plate yet. Plus, three more veggies you’ll want to add asap. Quick, practical and gut body game-changing. Let’s get into it.
I can’t say enough good things about artichoke. I recently returned from Italy in the south of France. I can tell you that just about every place we went has a sliced raw artichoke salad on the menu. Almost every place we went had sauteed or stewed artichokes on the menu. It’s ubiquitous. Now, why is it there? Well, artichoke hearts particularly and young artichoke leaves are incredibly rich in fiber, particularly a fiber called inulin. Inulin is one of the best prebiotic fibers that you can eat, particularly when it’s contained in things like artichokes. Inulin can be made into what are called plasmagens by gut fermentation.
Now, inulin is usually in the heart or the crown and it’s also in the stem, and particularly in Italy, the globe artichoke is raised because it has a very long stem and the stem is peeled and is eaten because it’s just full of fiber and inulin. We don’t see the globe artichoke here very much, but don’t worry about it. Get your artichoke heart. Years ago, we were at a restaurant in Chicago. The first course was an artichoke, and my wife, having lived in California most of her life, taught me early on how to eat an artichoke. And of course, you pull off the leaves and you scrape the leaf to get that little bit of meat. But a number of the diners in Chicago who were not very familiar with artichoke were trying to eat the leaves, and it was a rather hilarious episode when all these diners had this mouthful of unedible leaves and didn’t know what to do with them. So please don’t eat the leaves, scrape the leaves with your teeth. That’s where the benefit is.
However, baby artichokes, you can eat the whole thing, and I have some delicious recipes. I love them roasted with olive oil and garlic. You can saute them. You can even bread them with tapioca flour. And I have a recipe right here on my channel for this. Also, make a lectin-free artichoke dip. They’re really easy that way. The good news is you can buy frozen artichoke hearts. You can buy them canned. You can buy them brined, but on the canned and brined ones, just check the label for sugar content. Some of them are sweetened.
Root vegetables. I can’t tell you yet how important root vegetables are for your overall health. I’ve got a whole must-read chapter in the upcoming gut brain paradox about how root vegetables are one of the best ways to get bacterial compounds into you that are incredibly beneficial to your overall health. And when I was a kid, we had a vegetable garden as we did for my children, and we’d go out and pull a carrot out of the ground and brush it off and eat it. It wouldn’t even occur to us to wash it. Well, what we didn’t know was that we were actually eating the microbiome of that root vegetable and that microbiome was actually incredibly beneficial to us. So root vegetables have their own unique microbiome that has huge amounts of benefits to our immune health and to our brain health. So that’s why I want you to get root vegetables into your life.
Now, if you’ve read Gut Check, you know that living bacteria are great for you, but equally as important, dead bacteria like if you cooked them, still carry the same information as the living bacteria. And that’s what’s so exciting that now dead bacteria are classified as postbiotics that are important. So don’t be afraid of cooking root vegetables like radishes, onions, garlic, fennel bulbs, jicama. They’re full of prebiotic fiber. In fact, I have a jicama french fry recipe in my book. It’s absolutely delicious. I personally like to use jicama sticks raw as a dip to use tomato-free guacamole and get it into my mouth. I even have an herb-roasted radish recipe, and it’s amazing. Yeah, eat them raw. That’s a great way to do it. But don’t be afraid that you want to get fennel into your diet, but you don’t particularly like the crunchiness of fennel. Cook it. Fennel is very common, particularly in Tuscany and parts of France, and it’s both fresh and salads, but it’s also stewed and sauteed all the time. And very hearty meals contain fennel, and again, it’s a root vegetable.
Now, just because it’s a root vegetable doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for you. Sadly, carrots and beets, when you cook them, you actually break down the cell walls and make that sugar available. They don’t call them sugar beets for nothing, but raw is another thing. Raw carrot is great, and please don’t fall into the trap. A baby carrot is not a baby carrot. A baby carrot is a whole carrot that’s been whittled down to look like a baby. You’re actually throwing away the good stuff. When you buy them at the farmer’s market, don’t wash the stuff off, eat them as long as they’re organic.
Now in Italy, one of my favorite appetizers is a sliced raw beet carpaccio with feta cheese and olive oil and some mint leaves. It’s absolutely delicious and you can make it at home. It’s really easy. So buy your beets at the farmer’s market. Take them home, slice them thin, pour some olive oil on it, if you’ve got some feta cheese, all the better and enjoy. Now, here’s one that everybody wrinkles up their noses about until you’ve had oven roasted okra, just stay with me.
Okra and other prebiotic rich plant foods are phenomenal for you. Okra is loaded with soluble fiber and soluble fiber is what your gut bugs like. And believe it or not, fun fact, okra absorbs lectins. It blocks lectins from getting into you. So the more okra that I can get into you, the better. Now, why do you want these prebiotic fibers? It turns out that prebiotics are what gut buddies want to eat, and as I wrote about in the energy paradox and in unlocking the keto code, there’s a gut-centric theory of hunger. What that means is our hunger actually is controlled by our gut bacteria, and if we give the gut buddies what they want to eat, which is prebiotic fiber, they literally send text messages to the brain. And this has been confirmed in human studies that tell the brain, “Hey, our needs are met down here. You don’t have to be hungry. You don’t have to go look for other food because we’ve gotten everything we need.”
So get yourself some okra. It’s now available, frozen in almost all stores. Thaw it out, cut it in half, put it on a baking sheet, pour some olive oil and salt and pepper on it, put it in the oven at 400 degrees, take it out after about 10 minutes, flip it, put it back in for another 10 minutes. And I can tell you in our household, these fried baked okra never make it to the dinner table because the family consumes them off the baking sheet. They are so tasty.
And if you think you don’t like the sliminess of okra, and that’s been a turnoff, these are not slimy, they’re crispy and they taste better than any potato chip you’ll ever have in your life, and your gut buddies are going to love it and you’ll block whatever lectins you’re eating. In fact, one of the reasons that traditional cultures pos eat cabbages, which are also quite bitter, is that cabbages will store literally forever through an entire winter. So think of storage leaves like cabbages, like radicchio, like bok choy, those are the ones that will keep in your refrigerator and they’ll be ready at a moment’s notice when you come home and need something to eat.
Avocados, you’ve got to have avocados in your house because if there’s avocados in your house, there’ll be an avocado in your mouth. You should have an avocado every day. Studies have shown that people who eat an avocado every day lose weight compared to people who don’t eat avocados. Studies have shown that avocados in a salad or mixed in with vegetables make you absorb more of the vitamins and nutrients and polyphenols in those food than if you didn’t have the avocado. It’s loaded with monounsaturated healthy fats, like oleic acid, which is the major fat in olive oil, loaded with antioxidants, vitamin C, vitamin K, and the B vitamins. There’s more potassium in an avocado than a banana. So if your doctor told you to get potassium from bananas, ditch the bananas and eat the avocado instead.
Should you use avocado oil and ditch the avocados? Well, while avocado oil is a good high-smoke cooking oil, it doesn’t have near the polyphenol content of olive oil, so eat your avocado because it’ll also get you all that wonderful fiber that your gut bacteria need. Guacamole. Have some guacamole in the refrigerator. There are a number of companies that now make guacamole without tomatoes, which is not supposed to be in guacamole, or use those avocados when they’re starting to get really ripe and make your own guacamole, and use ripe Belgian endive as your dipping chip for guacamole, and you’ll get a win-win.
Once again, I have not had a salad in Italy or France that did not contain one or more chicory leaves, radicchio, treviso, the red Italian lettuces. They’re not lettuces, they’re chicory. Frisee, that frizzy stuff. Belgian endive, chicory. There’s a lot of a very interesting chicory family called puntarella that I can actually get in Santa Barbara, but we see it all the time in Italy, both raw and cooked and also in France. Why are these people eating all this chicory? Because chicory has some of the best sources of inulin that you can find, and inulin feeds friendly bacteria. The more you feed your friendly bacteria, the more they take care of you.
The humble mushroom. First of all, mushrooms are increasingly easy to find. Different mushrooms are appearing in our grocery stores. Why? Because mushrooms have incredible properties that you should know about to improve your health, your brain health, and your longevity. First of all, mushrooms contain many polysaccharides. That means multiple sugars. Now, the word sugar shouldn’t throw you off. Polysaccharides are sugar molecules that are bonded together with tight chemical bonds that our digestive system, does not have good digestive enzymes to break apart, to absorb as sugar. But good news is our gut buddies, the gut microbiome have the enzymes to break these sugar molecules apart and they eat them. So these are actually prebiotic fibers in mushrooms that the gut bacteria eat and they in turn make postbiotics. And you’ve heard me talk about postbiotics before.
Postbiotics are actually what helps your gut wall, helps your immune system, helps your blood vessels and helps your brain all by giving prebiotics like are contained in mushrooms to your good gut bacteria. Mushrooms are rich in melatonin. Now, melatonin is not the sleep hormone. Melatonin is actually only one of two antioxidants in your mitochondria. And as you know, the mitochondria are the key to your short and long-term health and energy. So give them some mushrooms to work with. Get the melatonin from the mushrooms and no, eating mushrooms are not going to put you to sleep. Sorry about that. Try some of the newer ones for maximum impact. Shiitake mushrooms, easy to find now in most grocery stores. They’re packed with a polysaccharide called beta-glucan, which is number one great for gut health, but number two has been associated with reducing cholesterol levels in people who take beta-glucan.
How about lion’s mane? It’s known as the brain-supporting mushroom lion’s mane used to be incredibly rare, but now we’re beginning to see lion’s mane in many supermarkets. Why do you want lion’s mane? Because people who eat lion’s mane make a compound called BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor. What that means is that BDNF actually makes neurons grow and divide. So can you imagine that you could actually improve your brain by eating a lion’s mane mushroom? It’s true, you can.
Reishi. Reishi mushrooms are known as the mushroom of longevity. They actually taste kind of like dark chocolate in my opinion. They’re a huge immune booster and a longevity booster as well. Get the simple cremini mushrooms. They’re right next to the white button mushrooms. It turns out that the white button mushroom, most people do well with white mushrooms, but as you know, I see a huge number of leaky gut and autoimmune patients. And when we do food sensitivity testing on these people, a number of them test positive for reacting to white mushrooms, but they don’t react to the other forms of mushrooms. So if you’re all concerned or if you have issues with IBS or leaky gut, go for the mushrooms I’ve just mentioned. Get the brown mushrooms that are in every grocery store and leave the white button mushrooms alone.
Finally, I’ve written and had YouTube videos about portobello mushrooms. They are like a steak in their texture. They make a great pizza crust using them alone. And in my first book, there’s a delicious portobello mushroom pizza that you’ll absolutely love. And my wife and I enjoy it many times. Get mushrooms into your life.
Now, one of the best ways to determine the healthiest vegetables is not necessarily their polyphenol count, but how bitter they are. Interestingly enough, great number of the blue zones. One of the things that is interesting about their vegetable selection is what I call more bitter, more better. And the more bitter the greens are, or the vegetables are, the better they are for you. Plants use bitterness to warn you not to eat them, and they contain compounds that were designed to make insects sick.
Now, you’re not an insect. And as I’ve written about before and in the upcoming book I write about again, the dose makes the poison. As Nietzsche was famous to say, “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” So the bitterness in these vegetables is actually a sign. That’s probably something really good in here that you should be eating. And that’s also why I say eat the rainbow, to get a variety of different bitter compounds and different polyphenols, cruciferous vegetables, you know all of these, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, arugula, rapini, these are all great for you.
Now, they’re some of the best postbiotic producing foods. Postbiotics are the products of bacterial fermentation of the foods you eat. These are actually signaling molecules that communicate very effectively with your immune system, telling your immune system who to worry about, who not to worry about, and they’re signaling systems to your mitochondria. They’re also a great source of sulfur and sulfur-like compounds that actually improve mitochondrial health. They allow you to make a postbiotic called hydrogen sulfide, the so-called rotten egg smell. Hydrogen sulfide is incredibly important in the right amount for vascular health, for the lining of your blood vessels.
Now, here’s a cool trick in terms of their cancer fighting ability. These vegetables should be chopped before you cook them to actually get the benefits of an enzyme called myrosinase. Now, interestingly, plants, these particular plants produce myrosinase in their leaves when they hear or feel an insect chomping on them, and it’s the chomping of the insect that actually activates this anti-insect compound. So fun fact, chop your broccoli, chop your cauliflower before you cook it. Better yet, buy your cauliflower chopped, buy your broccoli frozen, chopped. They’ve already done the work for you.
Now, you can take some of these vegetables to extreme and some of my patients hearing that they ought to have these in their life, eat them literally every meal, every day. Now, you need these vegetables, but you can overdo them. Cruciferous vegetables when taken to the extreme will suppress thyroid function and I see it. It doesn’t happen very often, but with a number of my patients who really dive in to cruciferous vegetables because of their health benefits, I see a gradual increase in their thyroid stimulating hormone. And when I ask them to tell me what they’re eating, cruciferous vegetables come right to the top of the list. And when we back off on those cruciferous vegetables, lo and behold their thyroid function comes right back to normal. Now, if you still want to eat lots of cruciferous vegetables, do me a favor. Get a TSH drawn by your doctor and go to it and then check your TSH three months later and see how we’re doing.
One of my all-time favorite multipurpose veggies, asparagus. I love it because you can quick cook asparagus over high heat, roast it, use it in stir-fry, shave it raw as noodles, and even make it into soup. It’s incredibly nutrient-rich, delicious and just about always available in the grocery store, making it super convenient too. Now, it’s kind of got a bad reputation, especially among people who have only eaten canned asparagus in the past. But the truth is, if you cook it fast over very high heat, it’s got a sweet, nutty flavor and doesn’t get tough, stringy or mushy. So even if you haven’t been a fan in the past, please try it again. Just cook it fast and hot or eat it raw.
Now, another one of my favorite quick cooking veggies is dandelion greens. See, just like asparagus, they are versatile, easy to prepare, and perfect for a busy weeknight meal. You can saute it in about two minutes flat, use it in soups and braises or even toss it with olive oil and roast it to make chips like kale chips, but without the kale. And speaking of nice, crunchy veggies, give celery a try. You’ve had it in chicken salad, Thanksgiving stuffing, and as the base in soups, but it’s way more versatile than most people give it credit for. It’s great raw in salads, either diced or shaved thin. Is fantastic roasted or sauteed, and adds a great texture to just about everything you put it in. And don’t forget the tops and leaves of celery. They’re the most flavorful part after all.
Now, another great flavor-boosting veggie is onion, and of course, it’s cousins, leeks and garlic. They’re all members of the allium family, and whether you eat them roasted, sauteed in plenty of olive oil, caramelized or cooked into a hearty, delicious soup, there’s virtually no way to make them boring. In fact, I start many dinners by sauteing some onions and garlic and olive oil. Doesn’t matter whether I’m cooking leafy greens, sweet potatoes, or some wild-caught seafood. Onions and garlic are the perfect way to start.
Question from Thirsty Pandas on Facebook. Dr. G, I always see you drink a glass of red liquid, assuming Vital Reds during your podcast episodes. Why don’t you drink your other powders? I think you have at least four other drink powders. Why is Vital Reds your go-to? Is that what I should take too versus MCT Wellness, Power Blues, essential Orange, or Vital Recharge, etc? Well, Thirsty Pandra, I’m thirsty in the morning and I actually always start my day off, as does my wife with a glass of Vital Reds. Now, what you don’t see is when I’m filming the rest of the day at Gundry MD, I’m usually drinking MCT Wellness or Power Blues or Essential Orange or Vital Recharge. I like to mix it up, but first thing in the morning, it’s always Vital Reds, and that’s what you see because we start first thing in the morning at Gundry MD every Friday. Great question.
Now, it’s time for the review of the week. A comment on my recent Kiwi video on YouTube from Tinglu Z6C. I just discovered this channel and I’m already feeling more hopeful. The tips on managing diabetes are so insightful. Subscribe right away. Thank you for subscribing. This is a great opportunity to remind people that if you like what you see on YouTube or The Dr. Gundry Podcast, please follow on your favorite platform or hit the subscribe button on the Dr. Gundry YouTube channel. Like most people, you won’t be disappointed with the exciting and important health information that you’ll receive.
Speaker 1:
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