Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
There’s a new Dr. Google in town or WebMD in town. So should you use artificial intelligence for health advice like ChatGPT? So I’m gonna put some questions in that a lot of people ask and let’s have fun. Let’s see who agrees, who doesn’t agree. So here’s an easy one. This, we ought to completely agree on that. What, what is the healthiest … Healthiest diet. That ought to be fun. <laugh> Oh, I like this. Let’s give it a s- give it a second. Uh, there isn’t one healthiest diet for everyone. The healthiest diet is balanced, flexible, and sustainable. Sustainable is actually a very good point. Uh, that’s it. Most health per- experts agree on these core principles. Lots of fruits and vegetables, different colors, different nutrients. Well, let’s start with that one. You may remember in my first book many years ago, I said, “Give fruit the boot.” What did I mean by that?
(01:41):
We inherited a genetic mutation from great apes that allowed great apes and us to take fructose, the main sugar in fruit, and convert it into fat in the form of triglycerides. Why would that be beneficial long ago? Well, it allowed great apes during climate change to take advantage of fruit that was only available certain times of the year and store it as fat to make it through the hard times. We inherited that gene that allowed us to eat fruit when it was available to store fat for the hard times. Unfortunately, we now live in 265 days of endless summer, and there are, for most of us, absolutely no hard times. We also never had occasion to get fruit 365 days a year. And now, of course, we can do that. So what was healthy at certain times of the year when fruit was available now has become a real problem for most people I see.
(03:07):
In fact, most people I see are shocked when we do new blood tests looking for fatty liver that almost everyone, almost everyone, has some degree of fatty liver. And many people, without knowing it, eating a healthy diet, have extreme fatty livers, thanks to partially the fruit they eat, but also the fructose in high fructose corn syrups, which is in almost everything. So fruit in season, local fruit in season, but otherwise give fruit the boot. Oh, next one, whole grains. Now, there’s a bad idea. Brown rice, oats, whole wheat bread, quinoa. First of all, remember, everything that ChatGPT mentioned is loaded with lectins. And for those of you who haven’t listened, 100% of my patients with leaky gut, when they first see me, that’s virtually every patient that I see, has antibodies to whole wheat, have antibodies to oatmeal, have antibodies to corn, and quinoa, unfortunately, is also a lectin-rich food.
(04:30):
So that’s the worst advice I can imagine. Okay, how about protein from varied sources, beans, lentils, eggs, fish, chicken, tofu, nuts, yogurt? Well, beans and lentils have some of the highest lectins of any food group. Now, the good news is, you can soak them and then pressure cook them, or you can buy them from companies already pressure cooked, like Eden brand, like Jovial, think happy person, and have no problem. How about eggs? That’s a touchy subject. A number of my patients actually do react to the components in eggs, whether it’s egg white or egg yolk or both. But eggs, if they’re pasture raised or omega-3 eggs, for most people, can be a good source of protein, but also an incredibly good source of healthy fats for their brain. Fish, you probably know in my last book, I, uh, introduced the chicken and the sea diet.
(05:40):
I’m a huge fan for my patients to eat wild fish and pastured chicken as most of their animal protein. Tofu. Once again, tofu comes from soybeans and soybeans are loaded with lectins that many people react to. Tofu is not a fermented food, and that’s the problem. Fermentation usually destroys the lectins in most products. Nuts, there are some great nuts, but just remember, peanuts and cashews are not nuts and they’re not part of the program. Same way with yogurt. Yogurt, if it comes from sheep, if it comes from goats, if it comes from A2 cows, is a great addition to a diet. But if it’s got sugar on the bottom, if it’s got fruit on the bottom, if it’s got a flavoring like vanilla bean, it’s loaded with sugar. So buyer beware. It’s not a protein source. It’s a sugar source. All right, how about healthy fats?
(06:50):
Hey, we’re in pretty good agreement here. Nuts, seeds. Well, there are certain seeds that aren’t healthy for you. Sunflower seeds are not healthy for you. They’re pure omega-6 fats. They’re also loaded with lectins. Uh, olive oil, hey, good choice. But buyer beware. You’ve got to find high polyphenol olive oil. How’s the best way to do it? Look for not only extra virgin, but also first cold press. And finally, look for the country of origin and the date of pressing. And we’ve got complete videos on how to do this. Uh, avocados, eat them whole. Believe it or not, avocado oil is not a particularly healthy oil. It’s oleic acid, which is a mono unsaturated fat, but it’s the all, it’s the avocado that’s good for you because it’s loaded with fiber. Oh, here’s a fun one. Eat enough calories. America is overloaded with calories. We don’t have to worry about eating enough calories.
(08:05):
Also, the average American eats at least double the amount of protein that’s recommended by the Department of Agriculture, the FDA for needs for protein. And yet you hear every day that we have to add more protein to our diet. Nothing could be more wrong. All right. Other key habits? Drink mostly water. Yeah, I like that, but just remember that most of our water, municipal water, is loaded with antibiotics, chemicals, toxins. Really, you ought to do your homework and get yourself a reverse osmosis filtered water. They’re actually quite reasonable, a lot of countertop ones, and use it that way. Oh, here’s a great advice. Eat regularly. Don’t skip meals. Huh. I guess nobody ever told the hunter gatherers like the Hadzas that they ought to eat regularly. These people don’t usually eat their first meal until 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning when they find food.
(09:17):
Do you really think our ancestors crawled out of our cave and said, “What’s for breakfast?” There was no breakfast. Break fast means when we stopped eating, started eating in the day and when we stopped eating at night. And back in the old days, we usually stopped eating at night when we had dinner and went to bed because there was nothing else to do. So just remember that a lot of these healthy ideas are the best way to get my patients, you, into trouble. So that’s a really idea. Uh, enjoy treats sometimes. Health includes mental wellbeing too. Yeah, but sometimes doesn’t mean all the time. And evidence sh- suggests that if you eat within two to three hours of bedtime, you’re really gonna destroy your brain’s ability to clean out the junk that’s in your brain with every sleep cycle. So enjoy treats, yeah, but make sure those treats are the good ones.
(10:27):
We’re gonna move on from this, but just remember that all of these AI models pull from every website known to mankind. There used to be an expression early on in computers when we programmed computers, garbage in, garbage out. And I see this all the time, even when ChatGPT or other search engines show you these ideas and even show you where they got that idea. A lot of these are actually just from podcasts or websites from someone who’s just stating an opinion who actually has no experience in talking about what they’re talking about. On the other hand, I’ve been now seeing patients for 30 years, six days a week, and looking at their blood work every three months and asking, “What happens when you do this? Let’s see. What happens when we ask you to take something away from your diet? Let’s see.” So that’s totally different.
(11:40):
Let’s try another one. Uh, this is, this should be fun. What should diabetics eat? <laugh>
(11:55):
It’s thinking … Okay. Um, sure. Uh, people with diabetes should eat in a way that keeps blood sugar steady. Uh, great idea. Uh, foods that are generally good f- choices. Carbohydrates, still important, exclamation point. Uh, oh no, here we go again. Whole grains, brown rice, oats, whole wheat bread, quinoa. Gee, where have we seen that before? Uh, neat I say more. This is probably one of the worst things that I can see from my diabetic patients. Now, remember, most of these foods, for instance, um, let’s, let’s talk about whole wheat bread. Really, have you ever seen any whole wheat kernels in whole wheat bread? No, of course you haven’t because they’re ground up and when they grind them up, anytime you grind up a carbohydrate, a starch like wheat mostly is, you expose that to rapid digestion and absorption into sugar. So a piece of whole wheat bread makes your blood sugar go up higher and faster than four teaspoons of straight sugar.
(13:27):
Really? So how in the world could that possibly be healthy for a diabetic? And the answer is it’s not. And I see this all the time in my patients. “Oh, I’m having healthy sourdough bread and I’m a diabetic. “And I’m going, ” Well, what the heck is your A1C going up? Why is your triglycerides going up? “And they tell me, ” I don’t eat any sugar. “Yes, they do. Every time they’re having their healthy whole wheat bread, they’re eating sugar, not anything healthy. Fruits, whole fruit is better than juice. Folks, if you are a diabetic, the rule applies. Give fruit the boot. There is nothing healthy in fruit for a diabetic because it is a sugar bomb the way it has been hybridized. And that’s one of the first things I do for my diabetics is take their fruit away and they and I love to watch their blood sugars and their hemoglobin A1Cs and their insulin levels and their insulin resistance plummet.
(14:44):
They love to see their triglycerides plummet. They love to see their good cholesterol go up all because they gave fruit the boot. All right. Um, beans and lentils. So if you’re going to eat plant-based proteins, like beans or lentils, you have to remember that beans in general are mostly starch, which turns into sugar. On the other hand, lentils are the lowest of the starch and highest in the protein of the beans and lentil family. So if you’re doing a plant-based diet, lentils that are pressure cooked are a much better choice than beans. Here’s one we get all the time. Is high cholesterol really dangerous. This ought to be good.
(15:53):
Okay. Why high … Uh, it says,” Yes, high cholesterol can be dangerous, but usually causes problems over time, not right away. “Well, um, let’s move on. Um, why high cholesterol matters? Cholesterol itself isn’t bad. Your body needs it. That’s right. It’s not usually bad. Thank you very much. The issue is, is too much of the wrong kind. Bad cholesterol, LDL. High levels can build up in blood vessels and form plaque. Over the years, this can narrow or block arterteries, increasing the risk of heart disease, heart attack, stroke, usually later in adulthood. Well, first of all, um, LDL, bad cholesterol, uh, we’ll give you a seminar, but there’s seven different kinds of LDL. There are big LDLs which are fluffy beach balls that bounce around your blood vessels and bounce and don’t stick. Then there are what are called small, dense LDLs. Now, back in the good old days, when I looked at these various fragments, small dense LDLs are typically the one that oxidize.
(17:12):
Now, what’s oxidation? Oxidation is becoming rusty or rancid. And if you like the cholesterol theory of heart disease, which I don’t, but if you like it, you have to have oxidized cholesterol to stick. Most of my patients were able to have them have very high LDL cholesterol levels, but they don’t produce many small dense LDLs, and even if they do, they don’t oxidize them because of the diet they’re on. Secondly, it takes two to tango. Your blood vessels themselves have to be sticky, like fly paper, to attract cholesterol, and that’s from inflammation. That’s why I much prefer the inflammatory theory of heart disease and/or the autoimmune theory of heart disease. You have to have both activated cholesterol and blood vessels that are damaged. After all, cholesterol is just a spackling compound that looks for damage to blood vessels, cracks in ve- blood vessels, and patches it.
(18:31):
That’s how it ends up attaching to your blood vessels. The other thing, sadly, that I see, I have patients who are on statin drugs, on injectable drugs to lower their LDL cholesterol, and yet they still develop new lesions, have new stents, and no one ever bothered to look at the inflammation on their blood vessels, or whether even those lower cholesterol numbers were oxidized. And shockingly, the folks who do get into trouble with these lower levels have oxidized cholesterol and sticky blood vessels. And once we fix that, we no longer have to worry about the levels of cholesterol. Oh, eat plenty of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Uh, guess what, folks? The more fruit you eat, the higher your triglycerides go, and in general, the higher your LDL cholesterol goes. Guess what, folks? The more whole grains you eat, the higher your triglycerides go, the higher your LDL cholesterol go.
(19:42):
So, no, that’s a horrible advice. Well, you know, uh, this, this was fun. Uh, let me know what you thought about this, uh, in the comments, but just remember, ch- what you feed ChatGPT is what ChatGPT is going to use to answer your questions. And again, it just, it’s just, you know, regurgitating what it’s able to see. And a lot of times what it’s able to see is not the current advice that I would give to you if you saw me. The point of these questions was there is no, you know, really generalized answer for almost all of these questions. Each of us needs an individual, um, assessment of what’s good for them and what’s bad for them. Actually, I’ll give you a great example. Um, I see all the time, uh, in my patients who were trying to eliminate lectin, high lectin containing foods in their diet, and there are low lectin containing foods, even grains like sorghum and millet who don’t have any lectins.
(21:02):
And so I decided years ago, uh, that sorghum popcorn, which smells like popcorn, tastes like popcorn, looks like popcorn, but it’s made out of sorghum, might be a really fun food to give my patients because, hey, who doesn’t like popcorn? I ate a cup of sorghum popcorn for three weeks as my snack before dinner, and I watched my blood work. Now, triglycerides in general are the first form of fat that we manufacture from sugars and starches, and I run my triglycerides quite low, usually 40 to 50. Imagine my surprise, I shouldn’t have been, when my triglycerides in three weeks went from 40 to 140 just by adding healthy, no lectin starches to my diet. Now, they’re not good for me if I think I should have a low triglyceride, and I believe most people should. So even though it’s quote healthy, even though it doesn’t have any lectins, it’s still a starch that’s easily absorbed and turned into sugar, which in turn is converted into triglycerides, fat.
(22:31):
So that’s not the healthiest diet for me. From Instagram at TimothyGeorge ask, “Can you go over the most important but not so common blood tests that we should be adding to our yearly physicals, like the ones you mentioned in the energy paradox or perhaps are there others as well?” Amazing book, by the way, Life Changing. I’m lucky to have a general doctor who is very open to your teachings and will order labs that you say. Thank you. Okay, so that’s a great question, Timothy George. Um, I’ve gotten, I, I put a whole list out in the energy paradox, but the, for those of you who have not gotten it yet, so there’s certain tests that you really should get from your doctor or your healthcare provider that are cheap and easy to obtain, and then we can go into more esoteric ones. First of all, your doctor’s almost certainly going to get a fasting blood sugar, a fasting glucose.
(23:39):
Quite frankly, that isn’t half as important as a fasting insulin level. Now, I can tell you, uh, training third year family practice residents like I do in my clinics, that most of them haven’t even heard of a fasting insulin level. So if your doctor looks at you funny, just say, you know, “Humor me, um, please order it, fasting insulin level.” It’ll cost you about $8, quite frankly. That’s number one. If that fasting insulin level is above 10, then you’re in trouble and you have insulin resistance. It’s useful to get a hemoglobin A1C. You see, I got my A1C down on half the commercials on TV. Hemoglobin A1c looks at how you’re handling sugars and proteins for the two months prior to the test, looking backwards in time. But what’s surprising is, a hemoglobin A1C should be 5.6 or less. The closer you get to 5.0, the better.
(24:50):
But you wouldn’t believe the number of people I see with a normal hemoglobin A1C who have elevated insulin levels. The other test that some doctors can order is a HOMA-IR, capital H, capital O, capital M, capital A, dash, capital I, capital R. The IR stands for insulin resistance. A home IR is another really good way to see whether or not you have metabolic flexibility, which of course is one of the major subjects of the energy paradox. And about 80% of us in this country have no metabolic flexibility. Our mitochondria don’t have the ability to switch on a dime to burning sugar for fuel, to burning free fatty acids for fuel. And the longer all of us study the various chronic diseases, including dementia, including diabetes, including heart disease, the more and more we’re realizing that this is a mitochondrial dysfunction problem. So all of these will actually help you point to mitochondria dysfunction.
(26:13):
Now, there’s some good general purpose inflammation markers. The easiest one to get is HS-CRP. The HS stands for either highly sensitive or heart-specific. Either one is just fine. It’s the same test. It’ll give you a generalized marker of inflammation in your body. Another useful one is fibrinogen. If you’re a woman, ferritin is actually a useful marker for inflammation. Now, most doctors associate ferritin with iron levels, but I can tell you it correlates very poorly with iron levels. So if you’re a woman and you have an elevated ferritin level, that means we need to look further into inflammation markers. Uh, so those are some simple markers to get. Uh, we can get more esoteric. One thing that I urge everybody to get is to have their ApoE4 genotype measured. You’ve heard me talk about this. You’ve heard Dr. Dale Bredesen, you’ve heard Dr. Promiter talk about this.
(27:27):
The APOE4 gene determines whether you’re going to make a lipo, uh, protein that carries fats around your body. The APOE4 genotype, which about 30% of people carry, is sometimes called the Alzheimer’s gene. Now you really want to know whether you carry that because if you, whether you follow me, whether you follow Dr. Promiter, whether you follow Dr. Bredesen, this is not sealing your fate that, “Oh my gosh, I carry the Alzheimer’s gene. I don’t wanna know I have that. I’d rather not know. ” You can actively do something to prevent the development of Alzheimer’s if you carry this gene. And it’s well worth your money to find out about that. The other one I would get in terms of a genetic test is the MTHFR mutation. And if you say that out loud, we would bleep you from network television. We laughingly call it the mother effer gene for obvious reasons.
(28:37):
It determines whether or not you carry a mutation that you can’t convert vitamin B12 and folic acid into their active forms, which are methyl B12 and methylfolate. And knowing that actually gives you power to get methyl B12 and methyl folate into you as supplements. So if you have, for instance, anxiety, depression, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide tendencies, you may in fact carry one or more of these MTHFR mutations, and it’s really a good idea to figure out if you have that. Now, for the real nerds in the audience, uh, ask to get an insulin-like growth factor level, IGF-1. It’s one of the best ways of looking at how slow or fast you’re aging, and there’s some fun tricks to play with influencing IGF-1, just a word of warning. If your IGF-1 is high above about 200 to a 250, and you’re over the age of 40 or 50, that increases your risk of developing … Cancer.
(30:00):
On the other hand, if your IGF is very low, it’s very unusual to develop cancer. Insulin-like growth factor is simply that. It is a growth factor that stimulates cancer cells to grow. So that’s a good start and thanks for ask- asking that question. David Favela from Instagram asks, “Do I need amino acids? If I am a vegetarian, where can I get them from? Any specific foods or supplements? Is it true that if I don’t eat meat, I need to supplement because they are only found in meat?” Well, here’s the good news. Um, gorillas and horses, uh, don’t ask about where they can get their amino acids, and as far as I can tell, uh, gorillas and horses do very well, uh, with muscle mass. So amino acids are present in plants and in animals. They are the building blocks of protein. There are essential amino acids that we do not manufacture ourselves, and so we have to obtain them from our diet.
(31:14):
Now, so much emphasis in the vegetarian and vegan community is combining foods so that you don’t miss out on certain essential amino acids. And so much, I think, wasted time is devoted to, oh, okay, grains are devoid of a couple of essential amino acids and beans are devoid of other essential amino acids, but if you combine grains and beans, you’ll cover the base for essential amino acids. Believe me, there are plenty of essential amino acids in a vegan or vegetarian plant paradox program. You will get it from the leaves that you eat. Uh, you will get it from the roots that you eat. You will get it from the nuts that you eat. There are, for instance, several nuts lots like sachainchi and barucha nuts, baroonuts, that have all the essential amino acids covered, and so you don’t have to go looking anywhere else. One thing that is very interesting about vegans is vegans actually have low levels of creatine, which is a protein.
(32:36):
And there are interesting studies that vegans are deficient in creatine, and there are some interesting studies that vegans have smaller brains than non-vegans because they’re lacking creatine. So if you’re a vegan, I do recommend supplementing with a creatine supplement, and they’re not animal derived. You can get vegan creatine and just supplement with creatine as part of your diet. Uh, great question though. From Lucas Wazak on Instagram, “What’s the ideal age to begin? Fasting.” Well, so fasting covers a lot of territory, as I talk about in all my books, particularly the energy paradox. So as I’ve talked about before, if you’re a woman of childbearing age and you want to get pregnant or you’re planning to get pregnant, then quite frankly, time restricted eating, water fasting, juice fasting is not for you. I’ve seen so many patients that, uh, fasting or intermittent fasting has actually prevented them from getting pregnant, and when we had them stop that practice, that started things.
(34:00):
Also, if you or a family member have a tendency to focus on controlling your eating habits, then this is not for you. Um, this absolutely is not the direction you want to go in your relationship to food. On the other hand, if you look at hunter-gatherer societies, I got news for you. They’re not waking their kids up at eight o’clock in the morning for a bowl of oatmeal to send them off to hunt, you know, berries. The kids don’t eat until the adults eat, and many of them do not eat until 10:00, 11:00, or 12:00, noon with their first meal. And in fact, the idea of eating breakfast, as I’ve talked about before, is a modern nuance that was actually fostered in great part by the Kellogg’s Cornflakes Company in 1906, telling you and convincing you with a massive advertising campaign that breakfast is the most important meal, and it simply is not.
(35:11):
So if you want to make this a part of normal family activities of skipping breakfast as an example, or eating an early dinner and not snacking at night, that’s a normal, healthy practice. And the more you introduce your kids to this style of eating early on, you’re gonna set them up for a much healthier lifespan to, to come. Uh, Holly Boico from Instagram asks, “What is the best fiber you would suggest to eat weekly, daily? Thank you, Holly, from Ohio.” Well, so there’s so many great sources of fiber, it’s hard to s- hard to start. Uh, certainly the fiber in vegetables, in leaves, in radicchio, in Belgian Endive, in curly endive, uh, I posted on Instagram recently a salad that I had from a chef, uh, outside of Missoula, Montana for the wellness weekend that was just every last wonderful chicory family of vegetables that was absolutely delicious.
(36:26):
And I’ve mentioned before, whenever we’re visiting s- southern France and Italy, there are chicory vegetables in, in every salad on every plate with every meal. So we’re beginning to see radicchio, which some people call this Italian red lettuce. It’s this bright red and white firm ball that’s in many, many, many grocery stores now. Belgian endive is everywhere now. It’s in Trader Joe’s. Grab yourself ahead of those, pick up some Belgian endives and just mix them in your salads. It’s an easy way. On the other hand, ground flaxseeds is a great source of fiber. It’s a great source of a short chain omega-3 fat called alpha linolenic acid, but if you’re gonna buy ground flaxseed the minute you open the package, put it in the refrigerator because it goes rancid. Preferably, buy whole flaxseeds, grind them in a coffee grinder, and then sprinkle them on your salads, put them in your coconut yogurt, put them in your goat or sheep yogurt.
(37:33):
Great way to introduce fiber. Psyllium husk, you can get cylium, ground psyllium husk anywhere. And don’t forget that resistant starches, for instance, like a purple sweet potato that you cook, then cool and reh- reheat is another great source of fiber and not to forget jikima. Get yourself some jikima. Many places now have it pre-slice, use it as a dipping chip for guacamole. And guacamole has a lot of fiber. Avocados are a great source. Plenty of places to get your fiber. And remember, you’re eating the fiber to feed your gut buddies, and the more you feed them, the better your health.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.
