Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast, where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Dr. Gundry:
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Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Well, if you’ve read any of my books you know I am no stranger to controversy. In fact, people have been dismissing my work for years now, even as new research has validated many of my observations. And just the other week, I apparently stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy when I told friend of the podcast Luis [Howes 00:01:13] that fruit wasn’t always the healthiest choice.
Well, today I want to address my critics head-on. On this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, you’ll learn why an apple a day isn’t the best way to keep the doctor away. The best fruits you can and should eat, and why a high fruit diet isn’t the best way to help your body heal. We’re going to have a good time with this and I am more than willing to accept criticism.
Let me give you an example. As a young professor at the University of Maryland, having completed a fellowship at the NIH where I invented a method of protecting the heart during heart surgery, by get this pumping blood and preservatives backwards through the veins of the heart, which have no valves and having the cardioplegia solution come out through what are called the thebesian veins, the thebesian like drama. And this was completely opposite to the method that was used, which was to inject these solutions down the coronary arteries, which for the most part were blocked. And I reasoned that, “Gosh, since veins aren’t blocked, we should put these solutions backwards up the veins. And I did a lot of research in animals to prove this, and then did a clinical trial in patients.
And I presented as a young man, my findings to 10,000 heart surgeons at the annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons and who was selected as my discussing to say I was full of it, the none other than Denton Cooley, who is, was one of the greatest heart surgeons of all time. And he got up after showing my results and he says, Dr. Gundry would have us believe that we should give the heart an enema and have that enema come out lesbian veins. Now this was long before social acceptance norms, and he got a rousing laugh and applause from 10,000 heart surgeons. But two years later my technique became the standard for protecting hearts in heart surgery and to this date, it’s still the standard of protecting hearts.
Why is that? Well, quite frankly, right before Louis [Howe 00:03:58] and I went on, he said, “90% of people who listen to you on my podcast, really like what you say and 10% really it gets under their skin. So why is that?” And I said, “Well, I like to say that I am a challenge to people’s balance.” Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that conventional wisdom is unfortunately often wrong. And back in the day when Leonard Bailey and I were pioneering infant heart transplantation, it was incredibly controversial. And I actually had an entire talk about conventional wisdom. And I’d like to share actually from my memory, a few of the most famous quotes of people who were wrong and bear with me because it’s pretty humorous.
How about the president of the Royal Society of Science in England who declared that rail travel, a steam engine rail train, is impossible because once the train gets going faster than a horse, the passengers will suffocate because the air will be sucked out of their lungs, guess he was wrong about that. The president of the American Cancer Society in 1949, declared that if smoking is a cause of lung cancer, it is certainly an incredibly tiny one. It wasn’t until 1964 that the Surgeon General actually made the connection between smoking causing lung cancer. I’m always amazed with the exploits of General George Patton and George Patton said, “If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
Shaggy, the reggae star sings a song about his mother telling him if you’re the smartest one in the room, your are in the wrong room. Ken Olsen, the CEO of Digital Electronics, the forerunner of the personal computer said, “I think there is a maximum need for 50 home computers.” Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM said there will be a world need for 10 computers. And that was IBM. So conventional wisdom is frequently wrong. I’m going to finish this with my inspiration from Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan has said that the purpose of science is to question the status quo, to have the courage to question conventional wisdom. So if you think I question conventional wisdom, you are right, and I don’t do it willy nilly, I don’t do it off the cuff, I do it based on my research and based on the research of multiple others.
So let’s start off with some of the most stinging criticisms and really good comments. And I’m just reading what was on Instagram or from Twitter. So you say fructose is bad, but fructose is in lots of food. Why is the fructose in fruit as bad as the fructose in a soda? And do you really think fruit is worse than candy? Well, let’s talk about fructose. First of all, I do not think that fruit is bad. Actually I don’t think I have said that fruit is bad if it is appropriately consumed in season and that it’s appropriately consumed in tiny amounts. But let me give you just one great example to answer this question.
So you guys who are listening, can’t see it, but I have arranged on a table in front of me. We have a cup of seedless grapes. And for those of you who are watching, there’s a cup of seedless grapes. It’s about 10, 15 grapes. I have a Hershey’s milk chocolate candy bar, 44 grams. It’s the standard Hershey’s chocolate bar. I have a Glazed donut and looks absolutely fabulous and I have an apple. I’ve mentioned before that this particular apple which is about the size of a good size navel orange now is two to three times the size of an apple that I would have eaten as a kid. And one of my biggest arguments against our modern fruit is that it has been bred for sugar content and it has been bred for size.
So for instance, my brother in law who’s a cardiologist in Indianapolis and I both trained in the university of Michigan. And he’s a cardiologist, I’m a cardiac surgeon cardiologist and one of our favorite tricks for our patients was to hold up the apple and to hold up a glaze donut and ask them, which has more sugar? And of course, every one of our patients and everyone who wrote in on the podcast would say, “Are you kidding? The Glaze donut has far more sugar than the apple,” when in fact the opposite is true.
The glaze donut has about half of the sugar content of an apple, half. And the sugar in the apple is mostly fructose. The sugar in the Glaze donut is sucrose, which is half glucose and half fructose. So there’s actually far less fructose in a donut than there is in this apple. By the way, there’s far less glucose and fructose in sugar, in a glaze donut than in a banana. But it’s nature’s candy, right? You’re right. It’s nature’s candy.
So now I’m holding up the cup of grapes and I’m holding up the Hershey’s chocolate bar and I’m not advertising Hershey’s. The cup of grapes actually has two times the sugar content of this Hershey’s candy bar and it’s mostly fructose and there’s virtually no fructose in the Hershey’s candy bar. Plus the Hershey’s candy bar is mostly fat, which slows down digestion. And the way grapes have been bred there’s actually very little fiber in modern grapes that could slow down digestion, plus grapes used to have seeds in them.
And the benefits of grapes are actually in the peel and the seeds. And I’ve never watched a monkey spit the seeds out when eating grapes, they chew them. And the benefit of grape seed extract by the way is in the seeds of the grape and they’re not there anymore because you didn’t want them in your grapes because it slowed you down from eating that sugar bomb. So yes, grapes are a sugar bomb. And that’s okay if you want to have a sugar bomb, be my guest.
Me, I personally, if I’m going to choose between the two, the way modern grapes are bred, I’m probably better off having a 70% or 90% chocolate bar rather than a bowl of grapes. Why do we like fructose? I’ve written about this since day one, my first book, Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution. One of my sayings was give fruit the boot. Now my editors at Random House were just apoplectic about this because it certainly went against conventional wisdom. And they said, “How can you say such a thing?” And I said, “Well, interestingly enough, my research as an undergraduate was in human evolution and studying how great apes morphed, if you will, into humans based on their diet.
And great apes only gain weight during fruit season. And fruit season even in the jungle occurs once a year. We have two thirds of our tongue as sweet receptors and we have it because when we taste sweet, we should eat as much as possible to gain weight for the times when there isn’t much food. And I’ve talked about this before, but we’re going to do it again. The reason you and I have color vision is because you are a fruit predator. And the plant is manipulating you to be interested in eating it’s fruit because it’s fruit contains it’s babies, seeds, till they were genetically manipulated, not to have seeds. The seeds which you would eat in eating that fruit and they would not be digested for you because they’ve got a thin shell that you can’t digest and you would poop their babies elsewhere.
And the more of their fruit that you eat, the more babies that you would poop out and the better chance that they would have of having more of them. So to convince you to eat their babies, they had a diabolically clever plan. First of all, they told you when the fruit was right by the color of the fruit and fruit ripens it changes yellow, orange or red in general. And isn’t an amazing walk down any snack food aisle, walk down any cereal aisle and you’ll see almost the packaging is some shade of yellow, orange, or red. And that’s because those colors hit your brain and say, “Oh my gosh, it’s fruit season. We should eat as much of this as possible.”
Now here’s the other trick, why is there fructose in fruit rather than some other sugar like glucose? Well, it’s well shown that glucose when you ingest it raises your insulin level and when insulin raises it actually shuts off very quickly your hunger. When you eat fructose, fructose has no effect on insulin because fructose is such a toxin and I’ll get to that in a second, that rather than going in your bloodstream, it goes direct to your liver where it’s detoxified and we’ll get to that in a second. So insulin levels stay down.
So one of the fascinating things, and I’m holding up a generous clump of grapes. There’s about two cups of grapes here. You could easily eat these two cups of grapes and grab another and have absolutely no feeling of satiety of being full. That’s because the plant designed it that way, so that you’d keep eating it’s babies. And it was a huge benefit to us because we could keep eating and keep storing fat.
So I had to send papers, there’s actually books published on the fact that great apes only gain weight. So I had to give my editors large amounts of documents and I printed out one just for fun today. And I’ll read it off, changes in orangutan caloric intake, energy balance and ketones in response to fluctuating fruit availability by Sheryl [Dnot 00:16:50]. And this was published in Springer and basically they studied 60 orangutans in Indonesia and they found low and behold that orangutans, when they were eating fructose went out of ketosis… Anybody paying attention, fructose stops ketosis and only during fruit season did they manufacture fat, the rest of the year they actually spent in ketosis. Again, there’s books written on this subject.
And so fruit eating was incredibly useful to you and me, our ancestors to gain weight for a period of less food. The problem is up until recently, fruit was only available for a very short time period and then it wasn’t available. I happen to have a few blackberry bushes and raspberry bushes in my backyard and believe it or not, if you’re going to have fruit, blackberries and raspberries are probably the best fruits to have. Actually I take it back passion fruit has the lowest fructose of any fruit, and I also have a passion fruit vine in my yard.
My blackberries and raspberries were great for about a month and guess what? There are no longer. There’s no fruit on them. And there won’t be until next spring. I can go to the store and I can buy blackberries and raspberries every day of the year and almost every grocery store. I can on my way from Palm Springs to Santa Barbara, every week, I go past rows and rows and rows and rows of blackberry bushes and raspberry bushes and strawberries that are bearing year round because they’ve been hybridized and they’ve been genetically engineered to grow year round and bear fruit year round. That doesn’t make it good for you or even a smart idea. We weren’t designed for that. We were designed to access fruit in a circadian rhythm based on seasons.
I love walking down in my garden and going, “Son of a god, look at that those blackberries and raspberries don’t produce fruit right now. I better not be eating them, that I can get in a grocery store.” Great apes gain weight during fruit season. You were designed to want fruit. You’re being manipulated by a plant to eat it. Is fruit juice bad for you? Is fructose that bad? Well, here’s a paper from pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. And I am a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, excess fruit juice consumption by preschool aged children is associated with short stature and obesity.
Fruit juice consumption associated with short stature and obesity. Children never ever drunk fruit juice like apple juice as their beverage of choice. That is a modern phenomenon. How about from current opinion and for a chronology diabetes and obesity, fructose consumption and cancer, is there a connection? It turns out that the American Cancer Society did a study where they took women who had successful removal of breast cancer and they divided them into two groups.
One group said, don’t change your diet. The other group said, you need to eat seven servings of fruits and vegetables a day, the current dietary guidelines. Now think about what that says to you and me. If I equate fruits and vegetables equally, which are you more likely to eat if I say you have to eat seven fruits and vegetables? Well, of course you’re going to eat those grapes, you’re going to eat that apple and you’re not necessarily going to have broccoli and bok choy as part of your seven fruit and vegetables.
The other thing is that if a vegetable has a seed in it, then it’s a fruit. A tomato is a fruit, a bell pepper is a fruit, an eggplant is a fruit, a squash is a fruit. So we gravitate to those vegetables that are actually fruits. So what they found was that interestingly enough, the incidence of recurrent breast cancer was higher in the women who followed the guidelines of eating seven fruits and vegetables a day. Why? Because they were eating mostly fruits.
Now, why is fruit such a mischief maker in terms of fructose? It’s because cancer cells actually create energy by what’s called glycolysis fermentation. It’s actually very inefficient but if you have a lot of substrate it’s really good at producing lots of energy. Plus this paper, which I just held up, shows that cancer cells can use fructose, sugar to build proteins that they need to build more cancer cells, whereas glucose, the other sugar can’t be used for that. And that’s why in all of my books, I have documentation of patients who I have managed with aggressive cancers, squamous cell cancers of the skin, brain cancers, prostate cancers, who when we took fruit and seeded vegetables away from them, their cancers regressed. Now I’m not claiming to cure cancer.
But just out of interest, those of you who’ve read the Plant Paradox, you know that book ends with a young man who had the most devastating form of brain cancer, a neuroblastoma, the same cancer that killed Joe Biden’s son and he had a huge resection of it and they left a lot behind. And they sent him home to get his affairs in order and gave him six to 12 months to live, which is par. He had cured himself of prostate cancer years before by following my program and he sheepishly showed up in my office again asking for help. Interestingly enough, we just talked on the phone last week. He has three children, a daughter who’s 13, two sons who are twins, who are 10. They’re all doing great. And he was reminiscing that seven years ago, really of that day was the day we started on the program and removed all fruits and seeded vegetables from him. He has no recurrence of his cancer. His PET scans are normal. He’s on no medications. And he just called to say, “You know, you were right.”
So I’ve had 20 years of taking care of patients on a daily basis. Observing what happens when we give them fruit, take away their fruit and I can tell you, that’s why I wrote in the first book, Give Fruit the Boot.
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How about this one, this is a review. Fructose, a highly lipogenic, that means fat forming nutrient implicated in insulin resistance, hepatic steatosis, that’s fatty liver disease which is rampant and the metabolic syndrome, which is taking our country by storm. And it just so happens that fructose feeding has now been shown to alter gene expression patterns, alter satiety factors in the brain, that means it doesn’t stop your hunger. It increases inflammation, increases reactive oxygen species and portal endotoxin concentrations which you’re going to learn all about in the Energy Paradox, in both human and animal feeding studies, not just rats, humans.
How about this one? This one was one of the questions. In fact, let me read the question because it’s a good one. Our bodies literally run on sugar. Fruit is essential for life. I guess nobody asked an Eskimo if fruit was essential for life because Eskimos don’t eat fruit. There is no fruit. Better call all of my kiddo friends because they’re doing very well without fruit. In fact, our body runs on glucose, not fructose. In fact, if fructose rich diet… I’m holding up another paper from nutrients 2017, a fructose rich diet affects mitochondrial DNA damage and repair. Fructose damages mitochondria.
G, I just didn’t make that up, that’s actually been studied. And of course it would be damaging to mitochondria. That’s why it’s taken to the liver to detoxify it into uric acid and triglycerides. Now I got really interested in triglycerides because triglycerides are the first form of fat from sugars and starches, primarily fructose. And triglycerides are carried by LDL the so-called bad cholesterol. And imagine my surprise when personally I took my triglycerides of 166, that’s a little over normal, stopped eating fruit and my triglycerides fell to 30. And imagine my equal shock when my HDL, my good cholesterol, which was horribly low at 32, and I was told it was genetic went to 80 when I stopped eating fruit. And I published papers of human studies of where this has been done and the paper is called, Our Heart Diet Recommendations all Wrong.
Fruit increases triglycerides and increases LDL and it lowers HDL. Exactly what you don’t want to happen. How about this? High dietary fructose direct or indirect dangerous factors disturbing tissue and organ functions from nutrients, accepted 2017. And basically during fructose metabolism, ATP depletion occurs. It doesn’t help ATP. Why is that happening? Well, it turns out that… You’ll learn this in the energy paradox. We take a compound called adenosine monophosphate turn it into adenosine diphosphate and then at the spinal stage of making ATP, we add another triphosphate and we get adenosine triphosphate, ATP. Fructose grabs AMP, takes it out of the energy making chain and instead turns it into uric acid. So fructose actually steals your ATP. And there you are having your fruit smoothie before you go to work out. The plant has fooled you and the data is actually rather impressive.
How about this one? Published in 2012 in hepatology, higher dietary fructose is associated with impaired hepatic ATP homeostasis in obese individuals, fructose. How about this one? From a journal of a nutrition, vegetable, but not fruit consumption reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes in women. Vegetable consumption but not fruit consumption reduces the risk of diabetes. Oh, here’s a good one from 2010, the journals of gerontology, increased fructose intake as a risk factor for dementia. Well, of course, if it causes endotoxins in your bloodstream, if it damages mitochondria then you might find evidence that fructose increases your risk of dementia. How about this one? Let’s just use the same amount of calories in a test, but take fructose out and replace it with glucose and see what happens to human beings. Isocaloric fructose restriction reduces serum D-lactate concentration, which is the first part of liver de novo lipid synthesis in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome. Taking the fructose away and giving them glucose stopped fat production in the liver.
Oh, one more. How about from 2019, the Journal of the American Heart Association, serial plasma phospholipid fatty acids in the de novo lipogenesis pathway and total mortality caused specific mortality and cardiovascular diseases in the cardiovascular health study. What the heck I’m talking about? Turns out that fructose makes a fatty acid called palmitate, it’s called C16 if you want to look it up. And as you’ll see in the energy paradox, that fructose is where palmitate comes from. And if you follow what happens to individuals with the highest levels of palmitate in their bloodstream, they have the highest all cause mortality, the highest mortality from cardiovascular diseases and the highest amount of heart disease from the amount of palmitate in their bloodstream. And palmitate doesn’t come from palm oil it comes from fructose being made into a fat in your liver.
Okay. Fructose isn’t bad, these are statements. It’s only bad if you have too much of it. I actually think fructose is bad. And I think you can see why there might be evidence of that. That’s why believe it or not when I wrote my first book and every subsequent book, I told you, get yourself a juicer, put it in a juicer, throw the juice away, that’s the fructose and take the pulp and mix it in coconut yogurt and mix it in lava yogurt, mix it in goat yogurt, mix it in sheep yogurt. Throw that in your smoothing, get rid of the fructose. The rest of the fruit there’s some phenomenal benefits that I write extensively about. I want to get polyphenols in you. I just want to get the mischief maker fructose away from you. And that goes to this next question.
Fruits are packed with antioxidants vitamins essential. They should never be tossed into the same category as sugar. Well they used to be packed with antioxidants and vitamins but our soil is now completely devoid of most of the things that you’re looking for in fruit that are beneficial. And in fact, a really good extra dark chocolate bar we’ll have many more anti-oxidants than you will find in fruit. So let’s be careful out there folks. Number five, you have fruit in your products and you say fruit is evil. How can you be so confusing? Well, I’m not confusing at all. I and other people use the extracts of fruits, the polyphenols in fruits. We get rid of the part of the fruit that’s mischievous and that is fructose. Again, I have nothing against fruit. I just wish we could go back to a time when it was packaged better when it was grown properly. And we only had it for a very limited time period.
And that’s what I’ve said in all my books. And I said it from day one, but if you have options choice and you have diabetes, if you have metabolic syndrome, please give a fruit the boot. Let me bring up a recent example from two recent examples. I take care of a lot of diabetics both type 1 and type 2. I’ve never met a type 2 diabetic that doesn’t have to be a diabetic if we can teach them how to eat. And one of the first things I do for diabetics is remove fruit from their diet. And recently I had a very, very bad diabetic who had hemoglobin A1c of 10. Most of you know, I got my A1c down from commercials on TV. Hemoglobin A1c basically looks at the amount of sugar and protein that you’re handling for two months before the test looking back in time on average.
And normal is less than 5.6. I believe that we should all be aiming for 5.0 or below. So this diabetic started with a hemoglobin A1c of 10 and a blood sugar of over 300. Within three months we had his hemoglobin A1c a down to eight. His fasting blood sugar was down to 163, his triglycerides and I remember triglycerides come from sugars and starches, particularly fructose went from over 500 to 163, not bad, not where we want them, but a good start. I saw him recently three months later and I was shocked. His hemoglobin A1c has shot up to 12 and a half. His blood sugar was 360 and his triglycerides were up to 700 and I’m going what happened? He says, Oh, I read this book and the book says if diabetic, I can cure myself of diabetes by eating a fruit diet. And that’s all we’ve been doing.
He said, I’ve been cramming the grapes in, I’ve been eating apples. That’s what I’ve been living on. And I showed him his results. And I said, “Quite frankly, you haven’t been living on a high fruit diet, you’ve been dying on a high fruit diet.” And the numbers couldn’t lie. I had another gentleman who we got all the way down with the plant paradox program to a hemoglobin A1c of 4.9, six months ago. And I saw him back for his six month visit. And one of the first things I noticed about him, he’s a very thin, he’s an athletic individual that he had a pretty interesting, for lack of a better word, beer gut on him, that his wife had noticed. And he had gained about 12 pounds and he was very thin before. And I said, “Hey, it’s interesting, you’re gaining weight.”
He says, “Oh yeah, it’s, COVID, I’m not exercising, I’m not changing. Okay. Yeah.” And he says but let me tell you, he says, I read this book and the book says that the key to health, particularly during this time is a high fruit diet. And he says, “So I have been eating fruit.” He said, “I couldn’t be happier. Who knew that I could have all the fruit I wanted.” And I said, “Well, did it ever occur to you that great apes gain weight during fruit season?” He says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah but this book says that that’s not true.”
And I said, “Well, let’s look at your numbers.” So his hemoglobin A1c which was 4.9, that’s actually gold star work in our office was now six. In our office 6.0 is diabetes. His insulin level, which had been two and three was now 14. He was an insulin resistant diabetic in six months by following a high fruit diet. And by the way his HDL, which used to be spectacularly high at 70, had fallen to 30. And his triglycerides, which would have been as low as 40 and 45 were now up in the 150s which is wildly high for him all because he added fruit to his diet. So, 20 years of experience, I’m not just saying this for controversy, I’m saying this because I take care of patients on a daily basis and I can’t watch them kill themselves, give fruit the boot.
Next one, if what Dr. Gundry says about fruit is true, then how could so many people heal from juice fasting or high fruit diet? Well, I used to be for about nine months a raw foodist and I’ve talked about that before. So many raw foodist find is that the only way that they can maintain their weight because you lose weight dramatically on a raw food diet is to eat large amounts of fruit. And I can tell you from personal connections that almost every raw food chef has had to stop being a raw food chef either because they developed diabetes or their teeth rotted out seriously. And they’ve had to abandon the high fruit diet. There’s a few that pull it off but most and I know that community very well, I know every raw food book ever written. Most of it is unsustainable, sadly.
Juice fasting, quite frankly what’s happening in those and I get into that in the Energy Paradox is you dramatically cut calories. And quite frankly, you can get away with just about anything for a short period of time. It’s the cutting the calories out, it’s reducing the window when you’re digesting things that made all the difference, not the fact that you were on a juice diet. Doesn’t fiber in fruit helps slow the body’s absorption of fructose? Yes, it does. But the problem is fruit has been bred for sugar content and less fiber content. It’s been bred for size so that fiber is unfortunately not very much. Plus if you really want to slow things down, you ought to eat actually protein and fat, which will stop your stomach from emptying in the first place and not allow fructose into your intestines.
So, sorry, fiber, in that kind of situation is overrated. Everyone who eats tons of whole fruit is far healthier than those who don’t, look around. To not eat what comes straight off trees, this thinking is so backwards and illogical, just because a plant wants to seduce you into taking its fruit and depositing its babies somewhere else doesn’t necessary make us particularly smart. One of my great revelations in life was thanks to Michael Pollan’s first book, which was called the Botany of Desire. How plants manipulate us, insects, their predators for their benefit. And that of course is one of the reasons I wrote the Plant Paradox because plants don’t necessarily have our best interests in mind. It was a win-win long ago when we had fruit, we gained weight, we made it through the hard times. It was the perfect way to do it. Just look at the orangutans, but now we don’t do that anymore. You have to cycle fruit.
Okay. So you can point to some studies in animals, but what about humans? Well, I guess I pointed to a bunch of human studies including some of my patients. So that’s it. I love fruit. We all love fruit. We were designed at the basic level to love fruit. Our tongue was designed to love fruit. Our physiology was designed to love fruits because we could fatten up for the winter and even the colors of yellow, red, and orange hit our brain and says, “Eat more of that.” And if you don’t believe me that that’s manipulation talk to any advertising agency and just go down the cereal and the snack food aisle and you’ll see your brain being manipulated by the same colors that the plant manipulate your brain. So I don’t mind being manipulated by a plant but at least I know that that’s what the plant is trying to do to me. I’m an educated consumer. I’m not against fruit but I am very wary of modern fruit.
So just have fruit have a little bit of it, not too much. And only in the season when it would be available where you live 50 years ago. So I know this fruit lecture was a difficult to digest. I’m not against fruit. I eat fruit but berries are your best solution if you’re going to eat fruit. Blackberries have the lowest fructose of the berries followed by raspberries, followed by boysenberries. Strawberries, if you can find them that are truly organic, they’re not bad either. But bananas, apples are way up there. And passion fruit, it’s coming into passion fruit season. And if you want a low, low fructose fruit with tremendous health benefits, passion fruits can’t be beat. And by the way, lemons and limes have as many as you want they’re incredibly low in fructose. Use the peel, use shavings, the polyphenols in lemons and limes are just absolutely spectacular but do it in season, enjoy fruit, just watch that you’re not doing it year round.
And if you really want to have fruit year round, just follow my recommendation, put it in a juicer, get rid of the juice and freeze the pulp in little ice cube trays, and then throw it in smoothies. You’ll get all the benefit in fruit. There’s tons of benefits in the polyphenols and the fiber and fruit if you get rid of the fructose that’s been manipulated in all our current fruits into very high levels. And quite frankly, you and your mitochondria and your liver don’t want that. And I don’t want that for you either. It’s time for our audience question. Oh, this is a good one. I wanted to answer this week it comes from Tamara [Marie 00:46:46] MD on Instagram, who wondered why I would recommend sunchokes when each cup has 14 grams of sugar? That is a great question.
And in fact, each cup does have 14 grams of sugar, two and a half grams of that sugar is fiber, but anywhere from 30 to 50% of the sugar content of a sun choke is inulin. And inulin you and I cannot digest as sugar. We can not absorb inulin as sugar but who wants inulin? You got it. Our gut buddies think that inulin is probably their favorite food. And so sunchokes are a phenomenal source of the sugar molecule inulin that you and I can’t absorb. So why wouldn’t I promote sunchokes? In fact, they’re really one of my favorite foods for feeding gut buddies. But thank you very much.
Remember, just because it says sugar or a carbohydrate, doesn’t tell you what that carbohydrate is, whether you’re absorbing it or whether your gut buddies are getting to at first. So again, an educated consumer is what I’m looking for and that’s why I do this.
Now it’s time for a review of the week. This week’s review comes from Nina [Nava 00:48:24] on iTunes who gave us a fire five star review, thank you very much. And wrote Dr. Gundry has a unique way of educating us on topics that can at times seem too complex or overwhelming. He keeps you entertained with his whip, making the information memorable. If you haven’t listened to his podcast, you are missing out your gut. Well, thank you. Well, thank you, Nina Nava. Your review on iTunes helps us reach the biggest possible audience so we can all live longer, healthier and happier lives. And again, that’s why I do this. And I thank you that you recognize I’ve try to put a little wind in on all this because some this stuff is pretty deep and I want to make it as accessible to any of us. That’s what I’m here for. And so thanks for that and tune in, and that’s it for the Dr. Gundry Podcast and I’ll see you next week.
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast. And if you want to watch each episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, you can always find me on YouTube, @youtube.com/drgundry, because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.