Well, it’s a new year and as everybody’s probably seen, uh, there’s a new food pyramid and what a change and people are either celebrating or reeling or going, what the heck has happened. Let’s talk about the positives of the new food pyramid. In fact, if you haven’t seen it, uh, it’s reversed of the traditional food pyramid and we’re gonna compare that to the traditional food period in just a second. And the reason it’s reversed, which is I think quite fun, is they’ve completely stood the old food pyramid literally on its head. If you recall, one of the things that drove the old food pyramid was the recommendations that every one of us should be eating six to 11 servings of breads, cereals, rice and pasta group, six to 11 servings per day. Now let’s say a serving is one slice of bread, which was highlighted that yeah, that’s a serving or one bowl of pasta.

(01:48):
So at a minimum you should be having oh six slices of bread and or six bowls of pasta and maybe six bowls of rice. And certainly if you are really doing your job, you should have 11 slices of bread and 11 bowls of pasta. Now think about that. Uh, a slice of bread has about a hundred calories. Each slice of bread has the equivalent of four teaspoons of sugar. So if you were following these recommendations, you should be having somewhere between 600 and 1100 calories, half your daily requirements of calories just in eating basically sugar. So that doesn’t sound like a really good idea, does it? Well, the food, new food pyramid says, well wait a minute, that isn’t a good idea. And you’ll notice that at the bottom of the food pyramid, in other words, limited, uh, is whole grains and that’s the least important thing that you should be eating.

(03:04):
So that’s a real flip-flop and I think it’s well overdue. In fact, I would go so far as saying we really should be eliminating whole grains from our diet because whole grains contain the lectin part of the grain for the most part, and that should not be part of a healthy diet. But that’s a really good step in the right direction. So literally completely flipping that pyramid on its head. Now the next part of the new pyramid is they keep the idea that you do wanna have two to three servings of fruit, uh, three to five servings of vegetables. But one of the things that I and others keep talking about is that our fruit has been hybridized for sugar content and there are high fructose fruits and there are low fructose fruits. And from my and other people’s standpoint, researching the dangers of fructose in fruit, recommending fruit as a general rule doesn’t really help us understand which ones are more positive for our health and which ones are not.

(04:33):
But let’s, let’s kind of keep that because that was actually kind of the previous food mar pyramid. There’s the fruits and vegetables and really it occupies pretty much the same space, so not a big change. Now what they’ve also done is basically say ultra processed foods are out. And remember, most ultra processed foods are basically grain based. They’re basically, you know, based on wheat, oats, corn, rice. And so those are now out of the recommendations. So now you gotta really go, okay, that’s also a very big change. And since so much of our diet, perhaps 80% of what we eat in America is processed or ultra processed foods, that takes away a huge amount of our calories, which are the wrong kind. Now the next thing they go is added. Sugars are out. Luckily we’ve known that for a very long time. But remember, added sugars don’t necessarily account for the amount of sugars that are already in that product.

(05:59):
For instance, I joke with my patients that if they see a product that says no sugar added, what that basically means is there’s so much sugar in here already, we didn’t have to put any more in. And so it’s buyer beware. Just because there’s no sugar added doesn’t mean that there still isn’t a lot of sugar in that product. Next thing they did is healthy fats are back. Now what are healthy fats, eggs, seafood, full fat, dairy, nuts, seeds, avocados are encouraged. Well, fats are cover a huge spectrum. Now here’s part of the problem. If you actually read the guidelines very carefully, they still recommend that only 10% of the fats that we eat every day are saturated fats. Now, keep that in mind because what’s gonna happen next is we’re gonna have an incredibly hard time meeting that saturated fat criteria by following the recommended foods.

(07:19):
For instance, eggs. The yolks of the eggs are very high in saturated fat. Full fat dairy almost by definition, is very high in saturated fat. Most shellfish is high in saturated fat. Does that mean we shouldn’t have those? If we’re going to meet our criteria, does that mean we shouldn’t have butter? Does that mean we shouldn’t have tallow? Does that mean we shouldn’t have lard if we’re trying to meet our goal of not having much saturated fat, there’s a real problem with those two recommendations ’cause they’re diametrically opposed. Now, I am not a fear monger about saturated fat. There’s a lot of really good saturated fats. For instance, steric acid, which is a saturated fat in beef for instance, seems to have no influence on cholesterol levels. We know for years of research that eggs which are high in saturated fat have no impact on cholesterol levels.

(08:32):
We know that shellfish, which are high in cholesterol, actually lower LDL cholesterol. And certainly we see that in my patients. So fat is not necessarily positive or negative. It’s often what the fat is bringing along. For instance, olive oil does not have a lot of saturated fat. It’s mostly monounsaturated fat like avocados. But the main benefit of olive oil is not the type of fat in it, but actually the polyphenol content that olive oil delivers. So fat is neither a negative or a positive, but at least it’s good to see that fat is no longer considered the evil empire. And yet the recommendations say, oops, limit your saturated fat to 10% of your fat intake. But let’s get to the most interesting part. So the top part of the pyramid now really stresses the addition of either animal and plant sources of protein. Whereas in the old food pyramid, the main sources of protein in the diet were actually kinda way up at the not very recommended amounts of protein.

(10:01):
So there’s milk, there’s cheese, there’s yogurts, there’s beef, there’s Turkey, there’s shellfish. And now if you notice, it’s moved way up to the top. So let’s talk about the actual recommendations of protein. So the current guidelines from the USDA about the amount of protein a normal American should be eating to meet a hundred percent of their protein requirements is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. Now what does that mean? Traditionally in medicine when we calculate drug dosages, when we calculate any sort of dosages, we use the example of a 70 kilogram man. So let’s talk about what these protein recommendations are. So the new recommendations for protein is 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Now, most of us in America are trained in pounds, but when in medicine we calculate drugs or dosages, we use the international standard of kilograms.

(11:34):
So there are 2.2 pounds in a kilogram. We typically use a 70 kilogram body weight, a 70 kilogram man as our standard dosing. So that’s 150 pound person. So you can take your weight and figure out basically where you are. Traditionally the recommended USDA guidelines for the maximum amount of protein you need to eat to meet your protein requirements. 95% of people should get 0.8 grams per kilogram of protein per day. So I’ve done the quick calculation for you. So if we have our 150 pound person, that means you need FI 56 grams of protein per day. Fair enough. But the USDA base, these recommendations on the fact that the average person would actually only need half that amount to meet their protein requirements per day. Basically, let’s round it up, 30 grams of protein would meet most people’s protein requirements per day. But to make sure that no one could possibly be left out of protein, they doubled that amount so that in the wildes possible exceptions, you would need 60 grams of protein rather than 30.

(13:30):
And that covers all the bases. Now, research done by uh, professor Christopher Gardner, who’s the head of nutrition at Stanford, points out that in fact the average American eating food, just food gets two to four times the amount of the recommended amount of protein every day, just eating food, not adding additional. And he’s, he laughingly points out, well of course I am different because I’m exercising a lot or that’s the average American and I’m not the average American. I need more. Well, they took that into consideration when calculating this. Alright, but let’s accept that 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram is oodles. Well, what are the new recommendations? Well, let’s take the lowest amount of those new recommendations, which is 1.2 grams per kilogram. That’s 150 pound person that takes us up from 56 grams to 84. So that’s basically 30 more grams of protein per day.

(14:50):
But here’s kicker, you are obviously need more protein. So I’m going for the 1.6 grams of protein per day that takes us up 1.6 times 70 kilograms is 112 grams of protein today. More than double the amount that the USDA says the everybody in America needs more than double. Now here’s my problem. We have a storage system for carbohydrates. It’s called fat. We have a storage system for fat that we eat. It’s called fat. We have no storage system for protein. Yes, we need protein to build muscles, we need proteins for our bones and our repair. But all of that that we need was taken into consideration for the recommended amount of protein that all of us need. Since we have no storage system for extra protein, we convert that extra protein into, you guessed it, sugar. And that protein then is stored as fat because we have an unlimited amount of fat that we can store.

(16:22):
So one of my problems with telling people to eat more protein is we already, as Americans, eat more protein than we could possibly need. And telling people to more than double the protein that they’re already eating is just going to add to the problem rather than to solve the problem. So takeaways for this. Number one, I love the fact that the pyramid has been stood on its head. I love the fact, as I’ve been saying for longer than that is that, and I’ll show you my food pyramid, healthy oils and fats and healthy vegetables are the biggest part of what our diet should be. And then I get a kick, don’t eat anything. In other words, skip a meal is the second most important part. Then shellfish, pastured poultry, low glycemic fruits are the next level. Then fermented dairy products, whole fat fermented dairy products are up there.

(17:45):
And then a dose of properly fermented champagne or red wine, which almost all blue zones consume in moderation is there. And then finally, grass fed beef, grass fed pork grass fed lamb is way up at the tippy top. And that’s because as I’ve written and unfortunately is documented in the literature that beef, lamb and pork and milk have a very nasty sugar molecule called new five GC that we develop antibodies to. And when we eat those foods, we attack new five GC in our blood vessels, in our blood-brain barrier in our brain. And to me that’s not a great idea. Chicken and fish on the other hand, have new five ac, which is the sugar molecule that lines our joints, our blood vessels, our brain, our blood brain barrier. So you’re much better off if you’re looking for more protein to get your protein from fish shellfish wild and from pastured chicken or poultry pastured grass fed milk products which are fermented.

(19:15):
That means yogurts, that means kafis, that means fermented cheeses are great because it actually the bacteria eat the new five gc. So it’s no longer there. So that’s my take on the new food pyramid. I think a lot of positive changes, but I’m worried that these positive changes are gonna be offset by the recommendation of telling Americans that they need to eat more protein rather than less. And since Americans already in a normal diet get far more protein than they need based on USDA guidelines, doubling that recommendation makes absolutely no sense to me or to, to paraphrase Christopher Gardner of Stanford to him. So that’s it for today. Something to think about. Lot of good positive changes, but we gotta be careful that the positive changes are negated by what I think are negative changes.

(20:26):
Hey, it’s a new year and of course it’s time for a new start. Now everybody wants to know, okay, I’ve got New Year’s resolutions. Uh, this is the year where I’m really going to change what I’m going to do. It’s when you finally decide it’s to feel better, to have more energy, to have clearer thinking, and perhaps have a body that actually supports them. But if you wanna make real lasting improvements to your health this year, I’ll be blunt with you, your diet is the single most powerful place to start. So today I am sharing the exact foods. I would recommend someone start eating immediately if their goal was to truly turn their health around. So let’s get started. Number one, the more leafy greens, particularly arugula, romaine radi and the chicory family like Belgian and dive, I can get you to eat the better.

(21:40):
Early on in my practice, uh, I used to draw a little picture for my patients of a one by one inch cube of cheese. And that one by one inch cube of cheese has about 150 calories. And then I would draw a picture of five bags of romaine lettuce that you bought at Trader Joe’s or wherever. And each of those bags have about 30 calories. Now here’s a fun thing to do and I urge you to try this at home. I could only eat about two and a half bags of romaine lettuce at a sitting before I was too full to eat anything else. On the other hand, I could easily eat 5, 6, 7 or more one inch pieces of cheese and not have that same sense of fullness. So what’s the difference? Greens are nutrient rich, but calorie poor cheese, on the other hand, is calorie rich and nutrient poor.

(23:06):
When I talk about nutrients, what we really want to do is we wanna nourish our gut bacteria and the more we eat for them, rather than eat for this two by three inch piece of muscle our tongue, the better our health is, the better our cravings subside. These improve our blood vessel health. They reduce inflammation at the cellular level because quite frankly, if you’ve read any of my books or listened to my podcast, inflammation comes from the gut. Inflammation comes from intestinal permeability. And that starts with giving our gut bacteria the foods they need eat to take care of us. When we give them the foods they want to eat, they literally send text messages to the brain saying, you’re, they’re full. Their needs are met. And you don’t have to look for anything else. So how do you start? Well, the easiest way to think of this is the base for any meal you’re having.

(24:28):
First load up your bowl with leafy greens, either raw or lightly sauteed or fermented. Then add the rest of your meal. And if you want to put wild shrimp on top, if you wanna put some chopped up pastured chicken on top, if you wanna put a piece of salmon, wild salmon on top, great. Now the second thing you do is this should be a vehicle to get extra virgin olive oil, the real kind into your mouth. Now, extra virgin olive oil is medicine. It’s not just fat. Now all my listeners know that high quality olive oil is packed with polyphenols that feed beneficial gut microbes. Polyphenols are a prebiotic for good bacteria. Polyphenols improve insulin sensitivity. And I hope by now most people realize that 88% of Americans are insulin resistant, have metabolic inflexibility, have pre-diabetes. And the last thing we want to do is kick up our insulin levels.

(25:53):
So anything we can do to improve insulin sensitivity, which polyphenols have been shown to do, is a great way to go. Studies have been done in human populations. The Predimed study in Spain, the Leone Heart Diet in France show that extra virgin olive oil protects the brain and the heart. It improves our memory, it improves our blood vessel status. It’s one of the strongest longevity signals we see in blue zone populations. So if you’re not eating this yet, now is the great time to start. Now how do you start it? Well, the easiest way is to drizzle this over every meal you eat, eat, just like you would put sriracha or another topping. Now of course you can cook with it or mix it into almost anything. People go, oh, uh, olive oil, you can’t cook with ’cause it’s smokes at a low temperature. And that must mean that it’s oxidizing.

(27:00):
No, that actually is not true. Smoke point has nothing to do with oxidation. And the good news is, and we’ve had experts on this podcast, olive oil is the least oxidizable oil of any oil, even beets, coconut oil. And remember, you’re using the olive oil to get those polyphenols. And so a big salad, olive oil, anything more that you can do. Well, I’m a huge fan of mushrooms and it really doesn’t matter how you get your mushrooms. You can use your shiitake, you can maye have may taki, you can use lion’s. Maye. The number of mushrooms now available even in most grocery stores is, is endless why mushrooms? So mushrooms are loaded with what are called polysaccharides. That’s a simple word for lots of sugars. Now you go, wait a minute, I don’t wanna eat sugar. These are sugar molecules that are bound together with bonds that are digestive enzymes cannot break down.

(28:12):
However, they are exactly what our gut buddies like to eat. Some of these polysaccharides are called beta glucans. They are eaten by our gut bacteria. In turn, they train the immune system, but don’t overstimulate it. That supports your gut barrier integrity. And I can tell you that leaky gut or gut barrier integrity is the key to brain health, to nerve health, to heart health. So the more that we can support our gut buddies and support our gut barrier improves our brain and nerve growth. By the way, lion’s mane, which we’re seeing more and more, uh, in stores or in uh, supplements, actually builds neurons. It makes compounds called BDNF. So mushrooms are particularly powerful for people with inflammation, fatigue or brain fog. Okay, so how do you use ’em? Well, I want you to try to work your way up to three to five servings per week.

(29:31):
Now saute them, saute them in olive oil, maybe put some onions and garlic with it, and then put ’em on top of your bed of greens or olive oil or add them to soups or salad. The interesting thing about mushrooms is one of the world renowned mushroom experts thinks that we should cook all of our mushrooms. We should not eat mushrooms raw. And there is some reason to suggest that the traditional button mushroom may have a mischievous compound that can do us harm, but that compound is completely inactivated by cooking, by sauteing. So not a bad idea. Number four, I want you to start adding fermented foods into your diet. Now, some of them are obvious, whether it’s sauerkraut, whether it’s kimchi, people either like sauerkraut and QMG, or quite frankly, they really don’t like the taste of fermented foods. But over and over again, we’re realizing that most traditional healthy culture have always used fermented foods in their diet.

(30:58):
Now, if you don’t like these foods, there’s lots of other options. Yogurts are a fermented food. Kombucha is a fermented food, please. Low sugar kombucha. Fer is a fermented food. Coffee is a fermented food. Black tea is a fermented food, pur tea is a fermented food. The easiest thing for me is vinegars. Whether it’s apple cider vinegar, whether it’s red wine vinegar, whether it’s any of the other vinegars, all of these are fermented foods and you’re gonna make a salad and you’re gonna put olive oil on it and most of you are gonna put a vinegar on it. So what an easy way to start getting fermented foods into your diet without kinda holding your nose and saying, eh, I really don’t like the taste of sauerkraut or kimchi. That’s okay. You can get it in so many other ways. What we’ve learned is the more fermented foods that are added to your diet, the more diverse your microbiome population is in your gut.

(32:21):
And I like to make people think that your microbiome is literally a tropical rainforest of all these diverse species. Some good, some bad, but they’re all in fantastic balance. And we know that people who have the best microbiome diversity are the healthiest, have the most intact gut wall, and quite frankly, live the longest in good health compared to people who do not have good gut diversity and fermented foods with the addition of fermentable foods like leafy greens, like mushrooms is kind of the one two combination. Fermented foods reduce immune activation. In fact, in my practice and in many others now, most chronic symptoms, whatever symptom you particularly are suffering from trace back to gut barrier dysfunction. Hippocrates, the father of medicine said 2,500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut. And what we’ve learned is to paraphrase him, all disease begins in a leaky gut.

(33:43):
Okay, so how do we start? Think of ferment foods as a condiment or something you add to your dinner bowl to stop it off. You don’t need a lot, just a few fork fulls per day or just a few tablespoons of a vinegar. Start slow. Test out a few brands and varieties until you find one that you really love. Now here’s the good news. You do not have to have living kraut. You don’t have to have a live kraut. You don’t have to have alive yogurts. We’ve now learned that the benefit of these fermented foods is not the living bacteria in them, it’s the product of fermentation called postbiotics. And so whether you get your sauerkraut in a can or whether you get it fresh, really doesn’t matter whether you get apple cider vinegar or you know any other vinegar, it really doesn’t matter. So find these fermented foods that you like because if you like ’em, you’ll probably use them.

(34:54):
Alright, number five, to add to your diet, the more polyphenol rich foods that we can get you eating, such as dark berries, like raspberries, like blackberries, like pomegranate seeds, like greater than 85% dark chocolate that you get into you. These foods actually are number one foods for your friendly gut bacteria. More importantly, polyphenols activate longevity pathways like A MPK and the sirtuins, which support healthy aging. They support mitochondrial function, they reduce oxidative stress. So how do you start? Well start having a handful of berries with dark chocolate for dessert at night. That’s an easy way. I personally like to take extra dark chocolate and buy some cocoa nibs. These are actually fermented pieces of cacao, and I make kind of my version of a Nestle’s crunch. So I take a little piece of dark chocolate, put some cocoa nibs on top, put it in my mouth, and I’ve got a polyphenol Nestle’s crunch bar.

(36:18):
And it’s delicious. And you’re really loading up on polyphenols. By the way. Cacao is fermented. And so you’re getting a double benefit of a fermented food with the polyphenols. Now here’s a bonus round. Uh, avocados, especially when eaten with other foods, are a real health benefactor. Now, this is not just about healthy fats. Avocados are loaded with a monounsaturated fat called oleic acid. That’s the same fat in olive oil. But oleic acid isn’t either great or bad for you, it’s just a fat. But avocado eating actually has been shown to improve the absorption of fat soluble nutrients from other vegetables. The fiber in the avocado supports satiety hormones, and it does that by feeding beneficial microbes what they want to eat. And those microbes send text messages to your brain like GLP one, like leptin, that’s you’re full and you don’t need anymore. They’re also one of the most lectin friendly fruits when ripe.

(37:41):
Yes, an avocado is a fruit. It’s a single seeded berry. Okay, how do you use an avocado? Well try to eat a half to one avocado per day. Just slice it up and add it to whatever you’re making for dinner that night. For instance, in a salad. Just remember all of these things we’re starting out in New Year. You don’t need perfection, but you do need consistency. Start with these foods, crowd out the ultra processed ones, and your body will begin to respond often faster than you expect. So welcome to the new year. Welcome to the new You. Let’s get started. And I hope these tips have been helpful.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
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