EAT THESE FOODS To Boost Brain Health & Reduce INFLAMMATION | Lewis Howes

Food is medicine and quality matters. When you eat the right foods and you're eating quality foods, can activate all these healing mechanisms in your body by using how does food affect our brain? Well, I wrote a book about 13 years ago called the UltraMind Solution about how the body affects the mind. We often know about the mind-body effect, which is real, but there's also the other direction going on. And it turns out that food is probably the biggest driver of dysfunction in the brain when it comes to mood, behavior, attention, memory. And this is not just sort of hypothetical, but there's a whole department, for example, at Harvard of nutritional psychiatry. There's a whole department at Stanford of metabolic psychiatry. I've had both of them on my podcast, the Doctors Pharmacy, the doctors from those institutions are talking about the role of food and the brain in a mood. And we see depression, anxiety, irritability, stress, It turns out that when you eat the American diet, otherwise known as the SAD diet, the standard American diet, that people are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain. And we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain. When you cut yourself and you get an infection, it's red and hot and sore and inflamed. If you sprain your ankle, it's sore. If you get a sore throat, it's sore and red. When your brain is inflamed, it doesn't hurt. The only way your brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences. And so the food that we're eating, predominantly the sugar and starch and processed ingredients, additives, the lack of good fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils, the nutrient depletion of our diet, I mean 95% of us are deficient probably in omega-3 fats, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency, which all play a role in mood like folate, magnesium is incredible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a role in the brain function. I mean, you hear about winter blues, you know, that's because of lack of vitamin D. So we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood. And, and the clinical trials have been really staggering, showing that people who eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders often caused by the food we're eating. Just an example, when you eat sugar or starch, your cortisol level goes up, which is the stress hormone. Your adrenaline goes up. So if you eat a bagel or a cookie, your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber-toothed tiger. And that can create anxiety.

Internally with the insulin.

Internally, yeah.

I mean, you could be totally fine and calm and take five deep breaths before your meal, but if you eat all that crap, your brain is going.

To feel it, your body's going to feel it. So what happens to the brain when you're eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is and it goes into your gut, does it send signals to your brain and then it starts to, you know, what does that do? Is it inflaming it in that moment?

Does it take time to inflame something? So there's a whole cascade of things that happens when you eat mostly the starch and sugar, that's 60% of our diet, right? It's ultra-processed food. It's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything. And what happens is you get this spike in blood sugar, which then creates a spike in insulin. At the same time, you get an immediate spike in cortisol and adrenaline. That's the first phase of response. Of course, it affects your liver and screws up your cholesterol and all that. But what happens next is even more concerning. It drives all the available fuel in your bloodstream from all the food you've eaten, sugar and starch and whatever bad fats, drives it into your fat cells. And it's a one-way street into your fat cells, called your adipocytes, around your belly, those belly fat cells. Those fat cells in turn create a whole series of chemicals, hundreds of chemicals, hormones, inflammatory markers and messengers, neurotransmitters. It's quite striking when you look at, they're not just like holding up your pants, it's fat there, it's like it's actually doing stuff. And when you eat in that way, it drives hunger, it stores fat, it shuts down your metabolism, and it literally slows your metabolism. And even worse, it locks the fat cells so that fat can't get out. It's like a one-way turnstile. It won't get in. And then on top of that, it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules. We call them adipocytokines. They go to your brain and they create inflammation in the brain. So it's kind of a downstream effect of our chronic eating this way. If you have one cookie or one bagel, it's not going to kill you, right? But if you're constantly eating this stuff, and we're talking about the average American eats a pound almost of flour and sugar a day.

Wow.

A pound. Like 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour. You add that up, and I know I'm not eating that much and you aren't, so a lot of people are making up for the difference.

Right, right.

So food affects your mood for sure.

Yeah, and not only that, it's not even just, you know, it was striking and I don't know if you had David Perlmutter on the show, but he wrote a book called Brainwash and it really speaks to what happens to the brain when you don't eat real whole foods and you eat too much of this American diet that we're all eating. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the amygdala. Now, what does that mean in English? The frontal lobe is the grown-up it's the adult in the room. It's like you think you're gonna punch that guy, but you go, I better not punch that guy.

Right?

Right, right. It's that adult in the room that sort of is your higher self. And the amygdala is your reptile brain. It's your lizard brain. It's gonna just run or fight or flee. Uh-huh. And what happens is literally physiologically these parts of the brain are connected, but when you eat crap, they get disconnected. And so you're constantly reacting from your amygdala with no grown-up in the room. which is why we see this level of divisiveness and hatred and I mean just all the upheaval we're seeing in society now. I think a large part of that has to do with our brains being constantly triggered by this reptilian insult that is driving behavior change. And when we look at the fact of other data to support it, it's not just a theory. In prisons, if you give prisoners healthy food, swapping out all the crap they eat in prisons, which is pretty darn bad. There's a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons. If you add a multivitamin, it's an 80% reduction. Come on. If you look at kids, and this is in juvenile detention centers, they've done clinical trials, 'cause he's got these people locked up, so it's a really great kind of study. Now these kind of studies are hard to do, 'cause mostly we're free, we call them free living humans, who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they.

Want, and they don't follow the study protocol.

When you're locked up, you get what you get, right?

And so they took these kids.

The environment's the same for everyone.

Yeah, all that stuff. that's right.

And they took these kids and they.

And they, these were kids who were disruptive, violent, aggressive, oppositional, suicidal. It was by cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods, it was a 91% reduction in all violent behavior. You know, oppositional behavior, need for restraints went down, suicide went down 100%. I mean, it's the third leading cause of death in that age group. It went down 100%, no suicides. and so you see this incredible data that comes from understanding nutritional psychiatry and you go, wait a minute, maybe some of our messed up society has to do with not only the problems with obesity and the problems with chronic disease and the fact that COVID is landed on a perfect laboratory for spreading in America because we're all so unhealthy and our immune systems are so sick because of our diet, but it's also led to this incredible disruption of our brain and our mood and our behavior, which we're seeing at rampant in society today.

What would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health?

Oh, that's not hard. I mean, in my book, the Pegan Diet, it's called 21 Practical Principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confusing world. And it's really practical and there's a bunch of stuffs at the end. But I think the real dangers are one, high fructose corn syrup because anything with high fructose corn syrup almost by definition is a highly processed food that comes with all kinds of other brad crap. So if you're reading labels, if you just can eliminate that, that would be like number one. Number two would be trans fats, hydrogenated.

Fats, which What's that in? What foods is that in? Is that processed packaged food? What?

Hydrogenated fats?

Is that french fries? Yeah, what's that?

Hydrogenated frats have literally been banned by the FDA, essentially ruled not safe to eat, but they're still out there. You can still find them, it's less, and they used to be really, it makes Crisco shortening. So anything that comes with a baked good or any processed food. And the third thing would be, You should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard can pronounce and recognize. In other words, would you have butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad?

No.

Which is also known as BHT. It's a preservative that's been linked to cancer. It's banned in Europe. We have it in everything here. So if you wouldn't have azodicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries, you probably shouldn't eat it. And yet this is in so much of our foods. In fact, in America it's legal. This is an ingredient used in breads to make them fluffier. Subway used it in their Subway sandwich. Did they have to take it out? Did they variegate it to some extent? Yeah, yeah. So our friend, our friend, shamed them into taking it out, but it's still legal here. It's not illegal. She just shamed them publicly by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the Subway and got them. But in Singapore, for example, if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food, you get a 15-year jail sentence and a $450,000 fine. No, you do not.

Yes, you do.

I swear to God. In Europe, a lot of these chemicals are banned. So basically, just eat real food. So get rid of all those three things that would make you likely to end up in trouble. And then, you know, there's another hierarchy of how do you even upgrade the quality. But the whole principle of the Pegan diet is that, one, food is medicine. Food is medicine. And quality matters. And then it's not just calories, it's information. And it literally can upgrade or downgrade your biology with every bite. And so when you're putting something in your mouth, you're literally speaking to your genes. You're speaking to your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, your mitochondria. Everything is controlled by what we're eating. So the book is really focused on two key principles. One is food is medicine and the other is personalized nutrition. nutrition and medicine. Because, you know, I call it the Pegan diet as a joke between paleo and keto, right?

Sure.

You know, and I had a, I was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardiologist and another one was a paleo doc and they were just fighting. And I was in the middle and I felt like a ping pong ball going back and forth. And I was sort of, I was like trying to break the, break the.

Tension a little bit.

And I said, hey, if you're a paleo and you're vegan, I must be Pegan. And it was kind of a joke. And everybody laughed. I was like, oh, wow, that was good. And then I thought about on the way home. And basically they're identical except for or you get your protein, animals or grains and beans. They both agree that we should eat whole foods. They both agree we should eat lots of vegetables and nuts and seeds and good fats and get rid of processed foods and low sugar and even agree that we should not be eating dairy, which is a whole controversial subject, but they're pretty identical. And so the goal of this book is not to create a dogma, but to create a Big 10 inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way. So what are the principles of healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures, different preferences, different belief systems, And I think, I always encourage people to listen to their body, not to dogma. A lot of our nutrition advice is based on, oh, be keto or be paleo or be vegan or be this or be that, be raw. And the truth is, it depends on you. If I do keto, my body doesn't respond great. I do higher fat, but another person who's a diabetic, they might do great on it. One person on a vegan diet, like Rich Roll, may be able to run triathlons. I mean, you know, just incredible Ironman stunts of heroic effort, but he may be a unicorn or maybe he's figured out how to do it. And other patients of mine see are extremely ill after years of being a vegan because of their nutrition depleted or they don't have protein in their body.

Their body doesn't like it.

I just had a patient, for example, this week who was a young woman, 26 years old, who's been a vegetarian vegan.

She was basically a vegetable and sugar vegan.

And she didn't even like to.

So she would eat sugar as well. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of people who are vegan eat sugar because the body starts to crave the carbohydrates and sugar. So it's not uncommon. And so she wasn't overweight at all, but metabolically, she was super unhealthy. She had acne and her gut was a mess and she had very low protein, very, very low amino acids. She had very low vitamin D, extremely low B12, very low iodine, very low zinc. I mean, and she was extremely unwell and her diet was just so not fit for her. So we had to sort of upregulate it and change it a little bit. I had to get her on some different protein shakes, which she needed. I had to upregulate her vitamins. I had to sort of get her off the sugar. But it takes a lot of work. So the key is how do you personalize the diet and get away from the basically religious nutrition that we have.

Which is either all vegan, vegetarian, keto, Carnivore, there's all these extreme diets.

Exactly, yeah. And again, I only encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room, which is their own body. Theirself, right?

Yeah.

Like how do you feel?

Do you feel great? Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How are you clear? Do you have energy? I mean, what is happening to you? So I think it's important to understand that we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine. There's a whole section here on personalized nutrition and how do you identify your particular needs by various kinds of testing, whether it's genetic testing, whether it's metabolic testing, food sensitivity testing, and how do you actually figure out how to dial.

In your perfect diet? Everyone's kind of swearing by their way is the way, but it seems so extreme in my mind. And, I empathize with vegans and I'm like, yeah, I don't want to hurt animals either. But then, I've tried it for a while and I'm mostly like, gosh, but I miss meats. and it's like, what is the way? And what I'm hearing you say is that there is not one size fits all. You have to really figure out what works for you.

The one size that fits all is quality. Understanding food is information. Just meat, for example. So feedlot meat is an abomination. It's horribly cruel to the animals. It grows the animals in ways that are extremely destructive to the environment by these monocrop corn and soy fields we use to grow feed, the feed loss that produce tremendous amounts of pollution, all the hormones and antibiotics that we use, and the quality of the meat is very different. So it's basically bad for you, bad for the planet, bad for the animals.

So it should be banned 100%. Regulatory T cells play a very important role in preventing your immune system from attacking its own tissue, thinking its own tissue is foreign. So obviously it plays a very important.

Role in autoimmune disease. So how do we get more of these T-cells that are good?

Well, that's, well, you know, I think one thing to keep in mind would be what regulates the gut microbiome? One of the major things that regulates the gut microbiome is what I just said, eating a diverse array of fermentable fiber. Give me an example.

What's a diverse array?

So you have blueberries, you have, you know, you have nuts, mushrooms, you have some dark leafy greens, these have different types of, or you've got onions and garlic, those have a different type of fermentable fiber. That should be differentiated from non-fermentable fiber, which would be cellulose, slgans. Well, just like broccoli has fermentable fibers, but yeah, most of the bulk of fiber in plants is non-fermentable. So, what that's doing is basically just helping move stuff through the intestines, Right, pushing it out.

The fiber.

That's important.

The fiber is pulling it down and cleaning it out.

Cleaning it out, right. And that's also important. But the fermentable fiber, the stuff that can be eaten by this bacteria in our gut, that is the good stuff. That's what's allowing the bacteria to make short-chain fatty acids.

What are the top three to five pea foods? I'm trying to simplify for myself these foods that can really develop that. Yeah, what are the different?

So the thing is different foods have different types and different types feed different types of bacteria. So if you want, you know, like, for what, for example, some people want to hear, oh, well, I can supplement with inulin. I can get an inulin powder. Inulin is a type of fermentable fiber. You can find it, you can find it in a variety of plants, I think onions, for example. But, you know, if you only eat inulin, then you're gonna be You're going to be basically feeding a certain types of bacteria that use inulin or that ferments.

The variety is what you're looking for.

That helps with the diversity because these bacteria are playing different roles.

I have been under the assumption that eating the same thing every day is good. It's like eating a clean, a little bit of chicken, lots of veggies. and eating it pretty much every meal is the right way to go in terms of my health, nutrients, in terms of body composition, how I want to look and feel. Is that something that I should be going away from and diversifying what I eat every day?

Well, it sounds like you just said vegetables. That's a lot in vegetables. There's a lot of types of vegetables, right? So, it's kind of nice. Look, I'm just as guilty for convenience. I'm busy. I know my husband gets tired of it, but I'm like the same, it's so much easier to have the same thing.

Same thing every day.

Same thing every day. Because I find the thing that's healthiest and easiest to make. And you know, there's days where let's say, you know, I'm not working all day, then I can be more creative and I have more time. But generally speaking, it's easier to kind of stick to the same thing.

But if you were going to, let's say you came up with a new company, a product that was a meal that you had to have the same meal every day for lunch and dinner and snack. And, this would be the thing that you could sell to people. What would be included in that meal that you were like, you know what? If you don't have all the variety and time to make these foods all day, but if you could do this three times a day, you're setting yourself up for a really good immune system and good gut bacteria.

The same meal three times a day or different meals?

Yes.

So, I would say basically, I would get salmon. I would get get wild Alaskan salmon. And that's because salmon is one of the best sources of the marine omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA, which are extremely important for health, particularly brain health, but even cardiovascular health. I mean, just there's just been so much emerging evidence showing that the omega-3 fatty acids are really important for brain health and for cardiovascular health.

Piece of salmon.

That would be my protein. And it's also lowest in mercury. There's There's like four micrograms of mercury or sorry, two micrograms of mercury per four ounces cooked. So that's really low in mercury.

Cooked or raw fish?

Well, actually cooking it even lowers the mercury bioavailability even more. So definitely, and raw, you don't want to like, I think there's too much concern with parasites and all that. So I would say cooking me.

Okay, number two.

Number two, I would say I have to. And in fact, I always feel like I'm depriving myself. And I'm kind of quoting my Mentor here a little bit. If I don't have dark leafy greens with a meal, literally, like every meal, I like to have dark leafy greens. And what are the top two or three? I would say kale because I would also like to have my sulforaphane. And sulforaphane, it plays an important role in so many. And there's just so many. So much evidence that sulforaphane, I think, may be important for longevity. So that would be my greens.

Kale.

And yeah, I'd like maybe sauteed. Sauteed would be good. Because you can't really eat raw kale unless you put it in a smoothie.

Exactly.

Which I actually do. I drink my smoothie. I have blueberries. So maybe I would add the avocado. I'd have an avocado and some blueberries, a little cup of blueberries.

And that's it for your meal.

Yeah, that would be my, you- would.

Have wild Alaskan salmon, dark leafy greens, sauteed kale, you- would have blueberries and some avocado.

And avocado.

If you ate those four things every day, multiple times a day, if that's what you could only eat, you feel like it would set you up for good amount of success.

I do. I do. Yes. Well, there's a lot of, so in kale, kale is probably one of the best sources of lutein and zeaxanthin. which are what are called carotenoids. And carotenoids, you're probably familiar with, and people listening or watching this are probably familiar with beta carotene. That's like the probably most famous, that's like the poster child for carotenoids. Beta carotene is a carotenoid. It has antioxidant activity itself, but it also can be converted into vitamin A. Lutein and zeaxanthine are really interesting because they accumulate in two regions. in the rods and cones in the eye, and they've been shown to play an important role in preventing age-related macular degeneration. But they've also really been shown to play an important role in the brain. And there's this accumulating evidence that this stuff is accumulating in the brain, and it really hasn't been known why. And the reason I say that is because lutein and zeaxanthin, because of their molecular structure, they're really good at basically sequestering singlet oxygen. And that plays a role in damaging the eyes, like when you're out in the sun, expose to sun and cataracts and things like that. So that plays a role and you're basically eye aging, quote unquote, right? But in the brain, there's no light. So why is this stuff accumulating in the brain? And there's just been quite a few studies over the past five years or so, maybe last seven years, correlating it with cognitive function and improved cognitive function and delayed brain aging. So, and there's like studies correlating plasma levels of lutein and zeaxanthin with improved cognitive function. There's been randomized controlled trials supplementing with lutein and zeaxanthin improving cognitive function in elderly adults. It's always nice to have a randomized controlled trial because that really helps establish causation. when you have these studies looking at associations, at the end of the day, it's an association and you never know it could be some other factor, right? Playing a role.

Sure.

But, so the lutein and zeaxanthin and kale, you've got some fiber, a little bit of fermentable fiber, you've got the sulforaphane, which has been shown to increase, it's been shown in human studies to increase glutathione in plasma and also in the brain. which is amazing. Glutathione is one of the major antioxidant systems in the body and particularly in the brain. And I know we were kind of chatting before we got started about your former life as a, what I didn't realize even existed was this arena football you called it. And it sounds like that TBI could be a big thing in arena football.

A lot of hits in the head, that's for sure.

Right. Well, glutathione is one of the major antioxidants in the brain and plays a very important role, particularly with any injury in the brain. So, sulforaphane increases glutathione. It increases the enzymes that make glutathione and use it and subsequently increases glutathione levels.

Dr. Justin I saw some, maybe it was another doctor, I'm trying to figure out who said this, that there was some research actually potentially saying that kale was not good for you, that it had some negative side effects as well.

I don't know if you've seen that research or if that's just something, Dr. Justin There's no research I've seen on that. I've heard it. It's one of those things where people like to talk about potential anti-nutrients. What they're calling an anti-nutrient is actually sulforaphane because it can compete with iodine for transport into the thyroid. But there's been studies, so for human studies where they've loaded up with sulforaphane, There's been no effect on thyroid function. Those were short-term, like a week-long studies. There have been long-term studies on animals that actually have hypothyroidism. They were given sulforaphane and believe it or not, actually they were given broccoli sprouts extract, which is one of the.

Best-- I hear those are amazing things. Yes.

So broccoli sprouts have like 100 times more sulforaphane than mature broccoli. Well, anyway, so should we throw some.

Broccoli sprouts on top of the kale or the avocado?

The broccoli sprouts actually, if I could add more, I would absolutely put the broccoli sprouts in there, yes. Okay. But my point was that the animals that had hypothyroidism, it didn't make their hypothyroidism any worse at all. In fact, it helped the antioxidant status of their thyroid and improved some functions. So I think that doesn't mean people with hypothyroidism shouldn't be you know, weary or concerned about consuming too much sulfur or fang, particularly if they're not getting iodine. Most people aren't iodine deficient. It's, it's like in salt. You know, most people are eating foods that already have salt in them. Now, you know, iodine, so iodine deficiency not, is not a big thing, particularly United States. But so I would, I would say that, that, those statements by some people that are kind of more into the, the camp of don't eat any plants.

Right.

Aren't really... Not enough research on it.

Yeah.

There's not. There may be, you might find one study with one case report with a female who had some crazy disease or something and she was juicing like, you know, just ungodly amounts of kale every day where it's like, I mean, okay, like maybe there, maybe you can create a situation. Sure, sure, sure.

Where, you know, it's... There's not enough research backing it though.

Yeah.

But yeah, so... I'm curious about this. You have some great points here. I love your five foods that we should be eating for every meal. Now, as a, I'm a 37-year-old man, but I've got the, I like to think curiosity and imagination of a seven-year-old but I also have the palette of a seven-year-old and I don't like blueberries. I don't like avocado. I'm the pickiest eater. I'm probably a pickier than your child. And, I want to ask you for the picky eaters of the world who don't eat berries and don't like avocado or aren't creative enough to go that far in their limited in their creative thinking in terms of foods, is it better to just have the supplementation, the vitamins and supplements that are the exact same nutrients and just take the supplements and vitamins as opposed to the actual food itself? Or is the organic, fresh caught food always better than the fish oil or the blueberry vitamin? What do you think about that?

Yeah, so I think that there's huge differences when you're talking about eating a food versus taking a supplement. And I do think, for example, a multivitamin supplement is, I take it every day and I think it's great insurance to make sure because there are 40 essential micronutrients, which are vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids and amino acids we have to get from our diet. And they're important for not only helping us not die, for example, scurvy, but also for long-term function, for the way we age. preventing insidious damage. But there's also a variety of these compounds we don't know about. There's the fermentable fibers that are feeding the gut microbiome, which are making all these chemicals like little drug factories in our gut that are regulating the immune system. We've got polyphenols like blueberries have been shown in multiple clinical studies. It's been shown to increase blood flow to the brain and improve cognitive function and memory in both young adolescents, and older adults. And this was thought to be due to the anthocyanins and blueberries. And so there's, food has so many components, probably so many things we haven't even discovered yet. So many compounds that were just, there's this new compound that was discovered in dark leafy greens called sulforaphane or something, which has now been shown to have a specific purpose of feeding the gut microbiome, kind of like the fermentable fiber. So it's one of those things where you know food has so much to it and there's so many parts to the story. It's not just about getting the vitamin, right? It's not just about getting that one mineral. So, and I will say that when I was a postdoc with Dr. Bruce Ames at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, there was a variety of clinical studies that I was a part of where my colleagues had designed this nutrient-dense bar that had a variety of vitamins and minerals. It also had DHA, which is one of the marine omega-3 fatty acids found in fish. And it also had fiber, a fiber matrix. And there was a variety of studies that we were doing in obese and lean individuals.

So, it was like the ultimate food bar. It was like everything you need in this bar.

It was like the micronutrient bar where you were giving the micronutrients, but you were delivering them with a food matrix, like fiber, right?

Yes.

And so, there's all these benefits that were found from this bar that were particularly benefits found in people that were overweight or obese, that we didn't ask them to change their diet, they were eating their same diet, but you give them this bar on top of that and you would have improvements. You would have improvements. And inflammation and HDL cholesterol, which is a good type of cholesterol. So you'd have all these improvements. But if you took away the food matrix, if you took away that food matrix and just had the bar without the fiber and just the micronutrients, some of those benefits would go away. But if you made your fiber by itself, the benefits would go away. It was the whole package. It was everything together that was important. with that said, I do think there is a place for supplementation and particularly with fish oil. I think fish oil is one of those supplements that every day I take it and I think that there is just mounting evidence that it's beneficial. It has to be in the right dose for some people and it's been shown to really lower triglycerides, for example. But again, there's conflicting studies and a lot of times when you look at these clinical trials, it all has to do with dose, it has to do with were they taking a statin, for example, which can sort of mask some of the benefits. You know, there's all sorts of things that are complicated.

It complicates everything.

And then you get all this data and you're like, Wait a minute, but yesterday it was not good for you.

Today it is. I know, right? How are you supposed to know? And there's so much information out there about medical news, about health news, nutrition news, supplement news. How do you know what to trust when there's just so much news out there about what's working and what's not working?

I mean, it's hard to know. It's hard for me to kind of sort through it. You know, then you add this layer of genetics that's also complicating, particularly with the randomized controlled trials. Like, there's genes that people have where they actually need a higher dose of fish oil to have benefits, which is super interesting. There's also genes where people that get omega-3 from the plant source, because there's a plant form, alpha-linolenic acid, ALA, that from chia seeds or flax seeds or walnuts, they don't convert that ALA into the EPA and DHA very well. And those EPA and DHA are ultimately what are regulating everything that's important for health. So again, you know, you have the genetics that comes into it. And this is also the case for studies on saturated fat. You know, the genetics plays a role in that as well. So there's all sorts of, there's so many factors when designing a clinical trial and I think I think the burden is on the researchers. The researchers have to come to a consensus.

Right.

And realize that.

But then a decade later, they may come to a new consensus with new research where it's like we thought, I don't know, leafy greens were healthy, but now it's actually killing you. Right? It's like, not that it's going to happen, but I'm just saying it seems like over decades, what scientists and researchers think sometimes is accurate, we find later evidence that it may not be 100% true.

That is true. That is true. But I think when you have overwhelming evidence in multiple fields and multiple areas, so you have the epidemiological evidence, you have the associative studies, you have the randomized controlled trials, where you start and you give someone something and then you measure an endpoint.

The double-blind placebo testing. Right.

And then you have the mechanistic studies where you start to look at how it's happening and you do these animal studies. You know, that together combined the whole, the whole, you know, comprehensive literature, I would say is, is what really strengthens.

Yeah. The matrix of studies.

When everything starts to come and point to that direction.

I have so many questions. This, this one just came to my mind really quick as I, you know, I live in Los Angeles. I'm from Ohio. So being from Ohio, you grow up eating meat. and cheese and milk. I remember I lived in a dorm. In eighth grade, I went to a private school boarding school. I lived in a dorm with a bunch of other kids in middle school. I actually had a milk dispenser, a five gallon whole milk dispenser. I would drink that every three days by myself. Five gallons within three days. I thought milk was good. You're supposed to drink it all day long. You know, you drink it before sleep, everything. I have a question about being in LA now. Growing up in Ohio, which is all about meat and potatoes, now being in LA, it's all about being vegan. And everything is around, everything is around either keto or veganism or paleo or vegan. It's like you're good, you're bad, you're right, you're wrong. There's documentaries that are coming out all the time about veganism, all that stuff. If you had to, calculate with your wealth of information and knowledge. Who would be healthier, the person who is vegan eating the best foods all day or the meat eater eating the best healthiest foods all day? Who do you think would have a.

Healthier- the meat eater also would be including eating vegetables.

Including plants and vegetables as well.

But this is an omnivore.

Yes, they're eating meat but they're also eating all the other good foods or someone who's eating all the other good foods excluding meat. So, veganism wins.

So, taking out all the processed foods in both camps, right?

Both camps, no whole foods, healthy. One is having meat every day, a portion of meat, and one is not having meat. Who is a healthier, happier human being that lives longer?

Well, I can tell you, I don't know, but we can talk about what the evidence has shown. And I think probably the strongest evidence to date, most of this evidence is unfortunately epidemiological because you're never going to get a randomized control trial that's 50 years long. You know, I mean, you're just, you're not going to, that's not going to happen. It's too expensive and people won't follow the same diet for that long, right? So you won't ever have a longevity study. That's a randomized control trial. Looking at the epidemiological studies, for a long time you'd have study after study coming out showing, oh, vegetarians have a lower what's called all-cause mortality than non-vegetarians or than people that eat animal meat. All-cause mortality means basically dying from all types of diseases that are non-accidental. Diabetes.

Cancer.

Type 2 diabetes. Obesity. Yeah, exactly.

Heart disease. So, Dr. Pompa: so, vegetarians die less.

Dr. Lots of studies have shown that. But the problem with epidemiological studies is there's what are called confounding factors. So, you have people that are also obese, you have people that are sedentary, you have people that exercise, you have people that smoke. So, what about all those other things? How do those come into play? Dr. Pompa: yeah, interesting. Dr. Dr. Pompa: and so, there have now been studies large, large studies that have looked at confounding factors and have found, yes, vegetarians do have lower all-cause mortality, particularly cancer-related mortality, than people who eat meat. But when you take all the unhealthy lifestyle factors away, so people that are not obese, don't smoke, that are physically active, and that don't consume excessive alcohol, if they eat meat, They have the same mortality rate as a vegetarian. But if you take the meat eater and you add one of those in like obesity, then they are going to have a higher, sorry, a higher mortality rate than the vegetarian. So basically, why is that? Meat has a different amino acid profile and part of that amino acid profile can activate a hormone, a very important hormone, but it's got sort of, it's like a double-edged sword hormone. It's called IGF-1, insulin growth factor like one. And this hormone is an important hormone. Like during development, it helps you grow. I mean, it's needed to grow. People that have genetic polymorphisms in genes that affect that pathway and have less of it have stunted growth. So it's important for growth. It's important for muscle repair. Like you want IGF-1 in your muscles to help repair muscles after after you injure them or after you exercise, right? That's the type of injury you're- But.

Can'T you get that from supplementation, from protein or supplements as well?

Well, so this is the bottom line is that the IGF-1, which is activated by essential amino acids, you've got like leucine, for example, methionine. It also is important in the brain for growing new neurons. I'm just telling you the importance of it because the problem with IGF-1 is that as we age and we accumulate damage within our cells, And this happens to everyone. And you have a cell that, let's say a cell gets enough damage, it has a mutation that could potentially become a cancer-causing mutation. The IGF-1 that's around, which is around a lot more in meat eaters, it allows a damaged cell to overcome signals in our body that will usually kill it and say, oh, this has got damage. If we don't kill it, it could become cancer. IGF-1 goes, no, no, no, grow, keep growing. It's a growth hormone.

It's a growth hormone or stimulant.

Exactly what it is, yeah. And in fact, it's going to grow.

Any cancer or any disease.

It's going to allow things to grow more, yeah.

What would you say are the brain foods that would actually help increase our mood, the function of our mood, to feeling better, not in an addictive, I need this all the time, McDonald's hit, but overall calming, happy, healthy mood?

Well, I think that, you know, Omega-3 sources, huge. We know those are really necessary for brain health. Oily fish are the best sources. I think there are some of the mushrooms, the one most studied is lion's mane, which is a very good edible mushroom, but that really looks as if it improves cognitive function and protects the brain. I think anti-inflammatory agents, like turmeric, ginger are great.

Olive oil is great.

Olive oil, of course.

Do you take supplements yourself?

I do. I take a multi-nutrient supplement. I take CoQ10, I take magnesium. I take a number of mushroom formulas.

Really? And you make them yourself?

I don't make them, but a friend of mine does and I'm a great believer in mushrooms. and their medicinal benefits.

How long have you been studying mushrooms?

Geez, probably since the 1970s also. I first became interested in, well, I grew up, my mother was very fearful of mushrooms, as many people were. She said, Don't even touch them, you'll get poisoned. Really?

Yeah.

So, I first got interested in food mushrooms and then started when I began reading about Chinese medicine. to see how much they were valued in Chinese medicine and in Western medicine we never paid any attention to them. So that interested me and I began looking at, you know, what are the effects of these things and why are they so much loved in Asia? And they're really interesting, you know, a lot of these affect immunity, resistance to cancer, viruses, you know, they're just, they're great. So I began, you know, I really became knowledgeable about mushrooms.

Really?

Yeah. So you take them daily or weekly? Yeah, I take. Yeah.

And I eat mushrooms whenever I get the chance. Mushrooms are powerful, huh? They're real powerful.

Wasn't there a documentary called, like, the.

Magic power of mushrooms or something? I'm sure.

Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's.

How many species of mushroom? Countless. I don't think we know. Thousands, right?

Yeah.

Thousands and thousands. and the percentage of them that can kill you is very tiny. So, when you go out, when you learn to pick wild mushrooms, the first thing you want to do is learn the ones that can kill you. And those are fairly easy to learn. And then once you learn those and avoid them, you can experiment. And the worst thing you're going to get is a stomach ache of one sort or another.

For a few hours and you'll be fine. Talk to me about teas, because I'm interested in teas and the power of teas. What is the purpose of tea and why do people drink it so much in general?

Okay, first of all, tea all comes from one plant. It's Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. A lot of things people call teas are herbal infusions that aren't made from the tea plant. So chamomile tea is not tea. It's not tea. Rooibos tea is not tea.

What is it? It's just herbs.

It's an herbal infusion. But if you're talking strictly about tea, it's all from this one species of plant.

Where does the species grow? It can grow anywhere.

Yeah, it's native to China and India, but it can, I hear people are cultivating tea in Oregon now. I haven't tried any of it yet. Anyway, so it can grow over a wide, you know, in, in, in, can't take frost, but it can grow in, you know, a lot of, a lot of different areas. But then there are many varieties of tea depending on how the tea is grown, how it's treated, whether it's steamed, dried, roasted, toasted, how long it's oxidized, and you've got like everything from white tea, which is very delicate, green tea, oolong tea, black tea, and you know there's all sorts of different preferences. When I was growing up, tea was what old people and sick people drank.

Right, right. Or iced tea on ice with a lot of sugar in it. Yeah, right.

And the only tea that we had available was tea in bags. And that's the common stuff is literally the sweepings from the floor of tea estates. So it's been only relatively recently that people in this country have become aware of good tea.

What are the benefits of tea? Why drink tea?

Well, it's agreeable. I mean, throughout for centuries, people have found it to be agreeable. It's a stimulant. It's got caffeine.

All tea, or I guess.

All true tea has caffeine. Some has more than others.

Like a mint tea that's not caffeine.

That's not tea. There is, however, mint flavored tea. So you gotta read the label.

But that's with caffeine.

Yes, that's with tea. It has caffeine. Caffeine, right. Now, the stimulation, however, of tea is very different from that of coffee. Coffee has more caffeine in it, but they have different other things in them. And tea has a compound called L-theanine that you've probably heard of. That's a relaxant. And I think that combination really affects the quality of stimulation of caffeine.

So, it's got caffeine which gives you sharper energy, but also a relaxation.

Yeah, people, you know, I think it describe it as a relaxed alertness. Interesting. Different from the stimulation of coffee, which I personally think is much more jangling.

A jittery alertness versus a calm alertness. A focused alertness.

Exactly.

Now, the other observation I make, I don't want to bash coffee too badly, but I see an awful lot of people who are addicted to coffee, physically addicted. If they try to stop, they have a withdrawal syndrome. It's like lethargy and then a pounding headache and it lasts for 48 hours and instantly relieved if you have some coffee. You don't see that with tea. I need my tea.

Yeah, I need my tea.

Rarely. Exactly. And also, when I was actively seeing patients, I used to say that I would produce one miracle cure a week by getting somebody to stop drinking coffee. And it was from everything from hand tremors to irregular heartbeats, to bladder problems, GI problems, stomach problems, a whole range of stuff. And they had no idea that the coffee was doing it to them.

But you got them off the coffee and they were like, two weeks later, they were fine.

Fine. And these are often problems that have been going on for years and nobody's hearts. Nobody ever told them, though.

You're breaking people's hearts. Right.

But also there's a huge variation in how people respond to caffeine in general and coffee in particular. I see people who have no idea that the one cup of coffee they have in the morning is the reason they can't sleep at night. And I see other people who can drink a pot of coffee at bedtime and fine. So, you got to find out where you are on that spectrum.

Yeah, I can have a cappuccino at night, like 10 o'clock and pass out the next day.

So, you're relatively caffeine insensitive.

Yeah. Not that I need it, I just like a little taste or whatever. And I wonder, and I'll drink it in the mornings and it doesn't give me more energy. I feel like I have energy. Right.

But when people say they get energy from coffee, it's their energy. Coffee just bunches it up. and when it wears off, you're left with a depletion of energy.

Really? What do you mean?

It's their energy that bunches it up. Caffeine isn't giving you a gift of coffee isn't giving you a gift of energy. It's like it's forcing your body to.

Give up chemically stored energy that it.

Would normally not release all at once. Like stored where in the fat cells or in the... No, in all cells. It's in all cells, energetic compounds in all cells. But when you release that energy, when the drug wears off, you have a depletion of energy.

And you feel tired.

Yeah, you have a crash.

And why does tea not do that specifically?

Probably because it's first because it's less caffeine, so it's gentler stimulation and it's also got this other compound that moderates the thing. So, I guess you can find, you could find tea addicts. I don't see them very often. And, I don't see many people who say they get a crash from Tea, tea drinking. And also coffee does have, there are health benefits of coffee, but there's been a tremendous amount of research on health benefits of tea, especially green tea.

Like, what are the benefits?

Overall lower death rates.

Really?

Yeah, there's a huge population study in Japan.

Is that because of the tea or because of all the other factors, the environment, friends?

We don't know. But, there's a clear association between the more tea people drink, lower causes, all causes of death. It's got improved cardiovascular health, lower rates of cancer, all sorts of stuff like that. And, of the various forms of tea, personally I think green tea has been most studied.

Here's the thing, when I drink green tea in the morning with no food, it makes me feel a little upset. Like, I've thrown up before.

I have heard this from people.

I get a little nauseous sometimes.

I hear this from people so you want to have food in your stomach.

Right.

That's fairly simple fix.

Gotcha.

Gotcha. Why is that do you think? I don't know.

And it's- If it's coffee, I'm fine. I mean, interesting. I don't know. I don't drink coffee in the morning and not eat all day.

I do not know why. Maybe there's a compound in the tea that's stimulating something.

Interesting.

So my preferred form is matcha green tea, which is the powdered tea.

Yeah, but matcha doesn't make me feel sick.

Okay, good. I like matcha.

Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. You gotta try our matcha, which is the best.

You guys have, I mean, the best.

Domain in the tea world of matcha.com.

Yeah, what was a good score?

And why, why is, why did you get in, how did you get in the matcha?

When I was 17, I was on a student exchange program. This was 1959. No, actually it was an experimental school called the International School of America.

Your whole life just sounds woo-woo out there, which I love.

This was great. I got to travel around the world for nine months and live with native families in different countries. You've gotten to experience a lot. Changed my life.

But anyway, it's a quick story there before you tell it. My dad, we had seven exchange students live with us when I was a kid.

So it's like we didn't have the money to travel.

Right, but you brought it to you. We brought it to me, so we had people from all over the world teaching us the culture and the food and all that.

It was a substitute for that. Amazing. No substitute for that. For knowing about other cultures.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I lived with With Japanese families outside of Tokyo and Kobe. And the Japanese family outside of Tokyo, there was supposed to be a student studying English, but there was no language.

No one spoke English.

No one spoke English. So the second night that I was there, the mother, through gestures, made known she wanted to take me next door to her neighbor who was a tea ceremony practitioner.

That's cool.

So it was cool. So the three of us sat around, and this woman in kimono made matcha. So first of all, the color of the matcha just blew me away. I mean, it's this brilliant green powder. I'd never seen green like that. And then the whisk that they whisked it in a bowl to a froth is a marvel of Japanese craftsmanship carved from a single piece of bamboo. And that whisk just, oh, I loved. I wanted one of those. So I then in the 1970s, I began going to. Japan fairly regularly for different things. And whenever I'd go, I'd bring matcha back and turn people onto it. Nobody had ever heard of matcha. And I'd make it for people. And somewhere in the 80s, maybe 90s, I started importing matcha from a company in Japan that I met and selling it on my website, drweil.com, way ahead of its time. There was no awareness of matcha.

Starbucks made a mistake. Yeah, yeah.

So, but then watching matcha suddenly become popular here, I was amazed, but also disappointed that so much of the matcha here was terrible.

Well, it's just sugar infused.

But also the matcha itself, because it's such a fine powder, it's got a huge surface area, it oxidizes very quickly. So, if it's not stored properly, it loses that ring color, becomes sort of yellowish green or gray green, it gets bitter. And, a lot of people, that's the only matcha they've tried is stuff like that. So, I really wanted to turn people onto good matcha.

What are the benefits of matcha in general?

Well, it's the only form of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed. And, it's got a higher content of antioxidants and flavor compounds and that L-theanine than other forms of tea. So, it's grown in an unusual way. It's like they're specialty plants and starting about three weeks before they harvest it, they cover the plants with shade cloth. That's about a 90% shade cloth, so pretty dark. And in response to that, the leaves get bigger- To try to get the sun. To get bigger and thinner, they produce more chlorophyll to try to make more energy, and they produce more antioxidants and more flavor compounds. And then The leaves are harvested, steamed, dried, aged, and then they're ground between stones. It used to be done by hand, now they're sort of mechanically driven. But it's these grooved granite stones to this superfine powder. And so, it's a special form of tea that has higher content of all the good stuff.

I'm gonna have to come to Tucson and have you make me some of this stuff. I would love to whisk it up for me.

I would love to whisk it up for me.

Or just go to Japan and find a specialty place.

But meantime you can get it from our website, matcha.com. matcha.com, there you go.

You guys teach how to make it.

To you and there's videos. We sell everything. Everything, everything's all there.

That's exciting.

Yeah, that's fun. So it's been fun to turn people onto that.

So why matcha over jasmine or green?

What's the-- I think it's personal preference, whatever you like. I like the, first of all, I just like the look of matcha. I like the taste of it. I like the ritual of whisking it.

Yeah.

Well, you can do it any way you want.

And is it, you know, the Starbucks way is like you put almond milk in it or something, but how would you, is this with water?

Is this with milk? Yeah, just, I like it just with water, no sweetener. That's just the way I like it. I also like iced matcha. Sort of, I use an electric whisk in room temperature water and then put ice cubes in it. And when it's hot weather, I like that a lot. Wow. I like, to drink green things.

What's the, are you drinking one tea a day? Do you have multiple?

I'd say one a day.

For you?

Yeah, usually one a day or early in the day. I mean, occasionally I'll have another one, but I usually don't need more than one.

What's your nighttime ritual?

My nighttime ritual, I eat early.

What's that?

Five, seven? Four to five, I would say.

That's your dinner.

Yeah, I like to cook. So even if I'm by myself, I usually cook for myself, simple stuff, but I like simple, delicious things. And I like cooking for other people. And then after dinner, I like to often read, watch movies, depending on the weather, of course. I mean, if it's off of Fulton in BC and it's light till 10 o'clock, I'm outdoors.

Right.

Right. You're living the dream. You've done so many different interesting things. What's the thing you're most proud of that you've created?

You know, there is now a center at the University of Arizona College of Medicine named the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.

That's pretty cool.

Yes.

That's pretty cool.

And we're the world leader in education in this field. Wow. You know, as I said, we've graduated over 2,000 physicians from our trainings, we train medical students, we have our curriculum in 80 residency programs, we train other health professionals, we train chiropractors, dentists, nurses in integrative medicine. And I've always said one day we'll be able to drop the word integrative, it'll just be good medicine. And that's coming.

And integrative is, is that the exclusion of medicine, like traditional medicine?

No, it builds on conventional medicine.

So you still can prescribe? Traditional medicine.

Yeah, you know, I've always said if I'm in a serious car accident, I don't want to first go away to a Christian Science practitioner or a chiropractor or shaman. I want to go to a trauma center and get put back together. But then I'd use other methods I know to speed up healing. So, I think the, frankly, one of the things I can see happening, I think that a lot of smaller and community hospitals aren't going to be there in the future. I think nobody's going to be able forward that stuff and that what we call conventional medicine, allopathic medicine, that may become a specialty for dealing with trauma, for critical illness, and there'll be one large facility in cities that has all the hardware, and there'll be new kinds of institutions that'll come into being that I think of as healing centers. That's one possible future.

You've seen the obesity go up in America since the last 50 years. It probably wasn't two-thirds back then. It's probably about one-third maybe, or not even, I don't know what it was back then.

Well, I remember watching, you know, a few years ago I watched the whole Ken Burns documentary on World War II. Okay. It was on PBS. And there were many crowd scenes, both military and civilian, thousands of people. You don't see a single fat person in those crowds.

Is it because they didn't have the.

Money to buy food? Is it because they were-- no, it's not. And you know, the other interesting thing is if you look what people were eating in those days, They didn't know a lot of what we know now.

They weren't processing food as much too.

So, yeah, so I mean, but people ate, you know, they were eating potato, meat and potatoes and pies and whatever. But it was real food made from scratch. You know, they were not eating manufactured food. They weren't eating fast food. There was no fast food then.

Right.

But there's an enormous change in how people looked. You know, I read, there was a book that came out a few years ago that was trying to argue that the obesity epidemic was an artifacts of statistics, the way we were measuring people. Bullshit. You just look at this, you know, it's like unbelievable how people have changed.

Everyone was fit or looked better back then, right? And now everyone looks fatter.

Yeah.

What do you think in the next 50 years we're gonna be as a country in terms of obesity?

You know, I saw this, this is a couple years ago, I read that the military is really having problems finding people who are qualified for military service because of obesity. So if it's really, so if it's threatening national defense, you think, you know, now people are gonna take it seriously, we gotta do something.

Just 'cause they're not in shape enough to pass the test, the physical test? Yeah.

You know, we're in such a mess in this country with regard to food and nutrition, it's hard to know where to start. Where I would start is if we could get people to stop drinking soda, sweet liquids.

Right.

That would be. We had to put it so far.

Ahead of the curve.

Soda pop. And it's not just soda pop. It's also fruit juice. It's energy drinks. It's putting sugar and coffee and tea. All the Starbucks.

Yeah.

That would be.

That would be one place to start.

Just to not drink sweet liquids.

You know, that would.

That would be a big step. What about alcohol consumption? I don't, you know, sure. I think, you know, the whole key with alcohol is moderation.

Yeah.

You know, there's constant arguments about whether it's beneficial or harmful. And I think moderation is the key. I don't think that's nearly as big a factor as sugar.

And when you created the anti-inflammatory diet, right? When was that?

Long ago. And, you know, I have a history of being ahead of the curve in a lot of areas now that I've been able to foresee see trends. I was, I think, the first people to warn people about trans fats 10 years before people took notice of that. So I became aware of this beginnings of this hypothesis that chronic inflammation was the root cause of a lot of different kinds of serious chronic diseases. And that just fascinated me because when I was in medical school, I was taught that cardiovascular disease had nothing in common with cancer, and that had nothing in common with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. And now suddenly it looks like all of these things are linked. They have a common root of chronic inflammation. And if that's the case, the good news is then there's a common strategy for dealing with them if you can reduce inappropriate inflammation. So, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about inflammation. Inflammation is the cornerstone of the body's healing response.

Inflammation is good when you're in pain.

Well, it's good, you know, it's the way the body gets more nourishment and more immune activity to an area that's injured or under attack. So, we all know it on the surface of the body, you know, it's redness, swelling, you know, pain, heat, but we aren't aware of it necessarily internally and especially if it's low level. Inflammation is so powerful and it's so potentially destructive that it's very important that it ends when it's supposed to end and stay where it's supposed to stay. So, you don't want it throughout your body. Now, information persists. If it outlives its purpose, then it causes disease. And, it looks now, if you can't produce enough inflammation, you're vulnerable to infection. If you produce too much inflammation, you're vulnerable to allergies and autoimmunity. And, it looks like if you've got low-level chronic inflammation going on for a long time, you greatly increase risks of cardiovascular disease, of neurodegenerative disease, and cancer. And so I think one of the best things we can do is learn how to contain it. So what are the factors that influence it? It's partly genetic, it's stress, exposure to environmental toxins is a big one. Secondhand cigarette smoke is a very powerful pro-inflammatory agent.

Really?

But diet has a huge influence, and that's one that's potentially under our control. Right. and I think there's no question that the mainstream North American diet is strongly pro-inflammatory. It gives us the wrong kinds of fats, the wrong kinds of carbs, and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly in fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, tea, things like that.

Yeah. So what would be the anti-inflammatory diet?

So a base of high quality produce, you know, and the government always tells us to eat more fruits and veggies.

Okay.

So, you know, you want to eat olive oil should be your main. Main thing.

Fat. Or avocado oil.

Avocado oil, yeah. Gotcha. Nuts, seeds, good. They're good, yep. Yes. In terms of carbohydrate, it, you know, it's not that carbohydrates are bad, it's that you want to reduce consumption of quick digesting ones, the ones that turn quickly into blood sugar. So, everything made with flour. And that's all the snack foods, all the, you know, it's everything. Everything, yeah. And sweeteners in general. I mean, that doesn't mean you live without sugar completely, but you want to really keep that to a minimum.

So is this all flour or is this just more?

It's all flour. I think the one of the almond flour and- well, that's a nut. So that's better. But with grains, I think there's such misunderstanding. If I ask people to name a whole grain food, the usual answer I get is whole wheat flour or whole wheat bread. Whole wheat bread is not a whole grain food. Where's the grain? And the FDA doesn't get that. They let that put labels on it saying this is a whole grain food and good for you. Most whole wheat bread is colored white bread. When you have a grain, the starch is tightly compacted, very dense, and it's surrounded by a, more or less, by a fibrous bran. takes time for digestive enzymes to get in there and convert the starch to sugar. When you mill a grain into flour, whether or not the bran is present, whether or not the germ is present, you convert the starch into a material with an infinite surface area, and it's a snap for digestive enzymes to turn that into sugar. So people don't understand this. You know, it's that there is a big difference between a whole grain that you can you see, your grain cracked into a few big pieces and flour.

Can you eat whole grain? Like, are you supposed to eat the whole grain? We do.

I mean, we eat cracked grains. Gotcha. Or you cook barley and you cook.

Buckwheat and you cook wild rice. Yeah, okay.

That's what we're supposed to be doing. Yeah. But not converting it into flour. That's fine, but not grinding it into flour. Really? Yeah. Or you just use little bits of that because that's the stuff that raises blood sugar quickly and that's what causes insulin resistance and, you know, in a lot of people.

What about oatmeal?

I think relatively, especially steel-cut oatmeal, where you're dealing with chewy grains.

He's okay. Yeah.

Okay.

Steel-cut, but not like the.

Not mush. Not cream of mush.

I eat so much cream of wheat without throwing up. That's so bad for you. When pouring brown sugar on top, man. I know. The sad American diet is what I had growing up.

You know, that is just the standard American diet. It's sad. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. So, this consists of the anti-inflammatory diet. How long do you go on that for?

I think it's the way you live.

You live that way. Yeah.

You know, and in terms, I think it's also good to reduce animal foods in the diet. I don't tell people to become complete vegans or vegetarians, but it is desirable to reduce consumption of animal foods. And also, not only for personal health, but for planetary health.

Right.

You know, when you look, you know, I've been, I've written and thought a lot about the pandemic and, you know, that we are at tremendous risk for these, they're called zoonotic diseases, diseases that jump from animals to people, of which this is one.

If we're consuming it, we're more risk.

Right. But these diseases are becoming more frequent and worse. AIDS is one of these and all these things and COVID certainly. And the reasons that this is happening more and why we're at greater and greater risk, it's climate change, it's deforestation, it's too many people, it's too many people living in too dense concentrations, it's the way we raise animals and treat them. And you look at this and you think, which of these things can we do anything about. It's not clear. The one thing that we could do something about is reducing our dependence on animal foods.

Right, right. That.

Would be one concrete step to help the environment.

Have you seen this documentary Seaspiracy?

No. Yeah, I can imagine.

I love your thoughts on it. So, do you eat just less food? I hear you like fish, but are you eating less meat?

I haven't eaten meat in very long time.

Yeah. Huge fish. A lot of fish.

I eat fish and vegetables mostly. And I eat a lot of plant protein as well. You know, and it's great to see more, you know, good kinds of plant protein foods available.

You said in Japan or Okinawa, they have more pork.

Pork, interestingly. I mean, they like pork, and that's a cultural preference. You know, I don't. I don't. I choose not to eat. animal foods, except for fish.

When did you cut out animal foods?

I can tell you exactly, Thanksgiving of 1970.

Come on. What happened? I was, Turkey was just not cooked right. You're like, what am I doing?

No, it's funny, I did it as an experiment. I was starting to do yoga, and that was part of yoga philosophy, and also I had friends who became vegetarian, so I thought I would just do it as an experiment, see what happened. To my surprise, I lost weight, I had more energy, I felt great, and I stuck with it. Stuck with it. I didn't eat fish at first. I was a lacto-vegetarian for about 15 years. And then, you know, I was, I told you I was going to Japan. It is not easy to be in Japan and not eat fish. Everything's fish. Everything's fish. You know, the sauces, the broth. So, first of all, I was reading about the health benefits of fish. and then I was traveling a lot, so I started eating fish and then that's pretty much what got stuck. Got stuck.

Gotcha. And when you think about the inflammation that people are having a lot, can inflammation also be caused with the mind or is it only through the food?

No, I said absolutely the mind and stress or FF. Absolutely a factor. In fact, there's a whole I mean, there's quite a lot of research on how the brain and the immune system interact and how the mind plays into that. In fact, this is fascinating.

The.

Current theory of depression, which is dominant medicine, it's called the serotonin hypothesis of depression, is that it's a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. That's why we give these drugs that increase serotonin. which don't work that well. There's increasing evidence that they don't work that great. Well, there's an alternative hypothesis that's been out there that's been building, which is right. It's called the cytokine hypothesis of depression. This is an interesting story. It's long been known that when domestic animals get sick, cows, pigs, sheep, that they exhibit a cluster of symptoms that's called sickness behavior. they, and usually sick with some sort of infectious disease, they stop moving, they stop socializing, they lose interest in sex, they stop eating. So farmers had always thought this was a result of fatigue associated with infection. But in the 1970s, to everyone's surprise, it was found that it was mediated by a blood-borne factor that you could take blood from an animal with sickness behavior injected into a well animal, and that animal showed the same symptoms. Come on. So nobody knew what it was in blood. It was called factor X. And then it turned out this was identified as a group of regulatory substances called cytokines, which mediate inflammation. And it looks as if there's a correlation between increased inflammation, increased immune activity, and depression.

What are the main plants that we.

Should never be eating Okay, real quick, up until 10,000 years ago, we lived primarily on the leaves of trees and we ate tubers that grew in the ground, like a sweet potato for a yam.

Love those.

Yeah, they're actually pretty darn good for you. You were actually designed to eat them. And 12,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, we switched over to things that we had never eaten before. and those were the grains of grasses and beans. Now, the reason we'd never eaten them before is number one we didn't need to. There's never been a documentation of an ape eating grass or grains. Beans are so lethal that five raw kidney beans will kill a human being in five minutes by coagulating their blood.

What?

Five raw kidney beans.

Raw kidney beans.

In fact, you know, most people have heard of the poison ricin, the white powder you send to your elected official.

Yeah, yeah.

Lots on the way to Washington. Yeah, that's another subject. So, ricin is the lectin of the castor bean, and we'll talk about lectins next. A lectin is the plant defense system. These are proteins that are designed to basically kill us in one way or another.

Gosh.

And so, Rice and so powerful that about four molecules of rice and will kill a human being instantaneously. There's a great study that was written up in one of the journals about a few years ago. They decided to have a healthy eating day in Boston.

Yeah.

And they serve the kids beans. And because it's so healthy, right? Part of the blue zone. Yes. And they had 30 or 40 admissions to the hospital with severe diarrhea, hypotension, and it turns out that it was all the fact that the beans were undercooked. And beans are a plant baby and we're not supposed to eat those. And so... No beans. No beans.

Zero beans.

Unless you use pressure. Yeah, pinto black. None of it, we shouldn't be eating it. Shouldn't be eating it. You weren't designed to eat it. You have no defense mechanisms.

No matter how it's cooked.

If you pressure cooked it, it's fine. Pressure cook it. What does that even mean? Put it in a pressure cooker. The modern pressure cooker is as easy.

As a rice cooker.

Got it. It's one touch. It's not your grandmother's pressure cooker that.

Blew up in the kitchen. So then it's okay to eat. Yeah, so you can pressure cook beans.

Now the other thing, we weren't designed to eat grains.

Just a quick question before you start there. how much of it can we eat? Does it matter once it's pressure cooked?

Obviously everything in moderation, but I mean.

Yeah, well, I was presenting. 20 beans are gonna kill me or what?

No, if you pressure cook them, they're fine. It's all good.

Okay.

And we talk about how to do this in the plant-based. Paradox, got it. But my personal feeling is the only purpose of eating a bean is to get olive oil into my mouth, and we can talk about that as we go along. Okay. So grains, for instance, everybody heard about gluten.

Yes.

All right, so gluten is a lectin. And again, a lectin is a plant's defense system. It's a protein that actually is designed to act like incoming guided missile attacks on the inside wall of our gut. And these things actually pry open the lining of our gut and actually break through the border. Really? Yeah, they really do.

That's what causes eczema and breakouts. Bingo.

Yeah, exactly. acne, brain fog, irritable bowel. This is actually all part of that process. And so it's fascinating to see people who either have come to see me or have even read the book and then write on Amazon, oh my gosh, you know, I had this horrible eczema and now a month later it's all gone. And all I did was, you know, take grains and beans and nightshades away from my diet. and everything got better. So that brings us to the second kind of group of things we shouldn't eat. All of us are not from the United States, America. We're actually from Europe, Asia, or Africa. Every one of us. So, and even our Native Americans are actually not Native Americans. They're from Asia. You know, get over it.

Right.

So, None of us were exposed to an American plant until 500 years ago when Columbus started trade. So getting to know a new plant, a new lectin in 500 years is speed dating in evolution. I just don't think it can be done. For instance, the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after their native son Columbus brought them back. because they knew how dangerous they were. They were part of the deadly nightshade family. And they, when they started eating them, they always peeled and de-seeded their tomatoes because the peels and the seeds actually have the vast majority of the lectins. And it's interesting. Years ago, I was did my fellowship in children's heart surgery in London, England, and I had a house officer from Italy. And he invited me up for pasta and tomato sauce. So I brought, you know, it'd be nice if I bought a couple cans of canned tomatoes, you know, help out. Sure. And he looks at it, he says, why did you bring me this? We can't use this. So I said, what do you mean? Canned tomatoes? He says, It's got peels and seeds. You can't make sauce with peels and seeds. He says, Ah, Mama Mia, what am I gonna do with you? He says, you, can't use peels and seeds. peels and seeds. And I said, why? He says, They're deadly. And I said, Really? And he says, yeah, everybody knows that. And then I thought back as a child, my mother, my grandmother was French and she taught my mother that you always peel and de-seed tomatoes before you slice them and serve them. So until I went to Yale, I had never had a slice of a tomato with a peel and a seed.

Wow. And.

This was, you know, this has come from cultures. For instance, peppers. Peppers are the same way. They're part of the nightshade family. You'll never open a glass jar of Italian bell peppers and see peels and seeds because they're gone. And the most striking thing is the Southwest American Indians always peel and DC their peppers before they eat them. The hatch chili roast will be happening in another month. And what do they do? They roast their chilies. peel the scarred off part, de-seed them, and then they eat them or they make them into chili powder.

Right.

And, you know, you can prove this in your grocery store. Buy a can of green chilies, chopped green chilies, open it up. You won't see any peels and seeds because they're gone.

So tomatoes and.

Peppers, eggplant, potatoes and potatoes. Now, the.

If you peel them and seed these things, you're safer.

Correct. But you can pressure cook them and they're fine.

And they're okay. Yeah. Got it.

Now, there's two American beans that everyone should stay away from. Peanuts are not a nut, they're a bean.

That is so good though.

94% of human beings carry a preformed antibody against the peanut lectin. We can take rhesus monkeys, our cousins, give them peanut oil and they will develop Atherosclerosis, heart disease.

Really?

If we take the lectin out of the peanut oil and then give them the peanut oil, they will not develop heart disease.

So if you get lectin free peanut.

Butter, there is no such thing.

Dang it.

Okay.

So get almond butter instead. Yes, it's much better.

No peanut butter.

No, stay away from it.

You should eliminate 100% from your system.

Absolutely. We can take, and this has been done, men feed them peanuts, take their bowel movements, feed them to rats, and you will grow cancerous cells in the rat colon because they've been exposed to the peanut lectin.

Yeah.

Love peanut butter, though.

Oh, you know, so I can have as much as I want.

And I went to medical school in Georgia, you know, Jimmy Carter, you know, man, peanuts are Sandwiches.

Yeah. No.

Sorry.

Eliminate it.

Gone. Gone. Say goodbye.

This will help me live longer, have a happier, healthier body.

And then I won't have to operate on you, you know, when you have coronary disease. And you'll go, what?

I eat so healthy.

I'm having my peanut butter.

How many surgeries have you done? Oh, over 10, 000. 10, 000. Do you have the. Is that what it is? The record? No, no one said it's a record setting heart surgeon. Heart surgeries. No. Yeah. No. How many heart surgeries?

10, 000. 10, 000. 10, 000.

Yeah, it's a lot harder. What's the cause of these heart diseases?

So it's the reason why you have to do so many of these. It's all in the plant Paradox. So 17 years ago, I met a guy by the name of Big Ed. It was a 30, 38 year old guy who came to see me at Loma Linda, because I'm one of these surgeons who will operate on anybody.

Wow. Yeah.

Take the rip. Big Ed. 500 pounder. Big Ed. Actually, when I met him, well, he 260. 55 pounds. But he had such extensive coronary artery disease that you couldn't put stents in them, you couldn't do bypasses because there was one main place to land. And he was from Miami and he'd be going around the country carrying his angiogram, the movie of his heart, his cardiac catheterization. And everybody's turning him down. And he finally, after about six months of this, comes to see me and I'm looking at his angiogram and I'm going, you know, I don't like to turn people down, but everybody's right, you know, we're not going to do you any good. And he said, well, wait a minute. Here's the deal, doc. I've been on a diet for the last six months and I've lost 45 pounds. Now this is a 265 pounder sitting across from me. It looks like a biker, big gut. And he says, and I've gone to this health food store and I've taken all these supplements. And he actually brought in this shopping bag full of supplements. He said, you know, maybe I did something in here. And I'm going, yeah, all right, you know. kind of scratching my professor beard and saying, well, you know, I know what you, good for you for losing weight, but it's not going to do anything in here. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine. And I really believe that. So he said, well, come on, you know, it's been six months. I've come all this way. What would it hurt to get another angiogram, another cardiac catheterization? I said, okay. And so we get a new cath on him. And, In six months time, this guy cleans out 50% of the blockages in his heart.

50%.

Gone?

It's pretty darn good. It's unbelievable.

Wow.

For instance, statistically on the best statin drug, you know, like Crestor or Lipitor, with the lowest levels of LDL, we scientists at the American Heart Association get crazy if after five years your plaque burden has decreased a half of a percent. Wow. And we go crazy and we go, oh my gosh, this is a miracle. It's the greatest drug discovery of all time. Right, right. And we go, really? So this guy, 50% are gone in six months. So I actually was so excited, I operated on him and did a five vessel bypass. But if I knew what I knew now, I'd say, hey, great, you know, another year, this will all be clear.

Keep going, you won't need this surgery.

So I start talking about, what he did on this diet. And lo and behold, he gets started on this. I don't have a time out. I said, I had this crazy thesis at Yale University that I did for four years back in the Dark Ages of human evolutionary biology. And my thesis was you could take a grade A, change its food supply and change its environment and predict you would arrive at a human being. And I actually successfully defended it and got honors, blah, blah, blah. And so I had given it to my parents and went off to be a famous heart surgeon. And so he's talking about this. Wait a minute, you know, this is my crazy thesis. And here I am, this big guy, you know, running and I had pre-diet you were.

Yeah.

15 years ago.

Yeah, 15 years ago.

Yeah.

You know, running and eating a healthy low-fat diet.

And why did all the doctors seem like they're bigger? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we're giving all this advice. And so I called my parents in San Diego. I said, hey, you know, you got this thesis? Oh yeah, you know, it's in the shrine. Eternal flame.

Whole room of your accomplishments.

That's right. So I sent it up to me. So I put myself on my thesis and I lost 50 pounds my first year. And I lost another 20 pounds subsequently and I've taken it off. And then I started putting my patients who, you know, at Loma Linda who I operated on, on this program and their blood pressure went to normal, their diabetes went away, their, heart disease didn't come back. And so after about a year of this, I was looking in the mirror on one Friday and I said, you know, I can't do what I do anymore because I can teach people how to avoid me. So I actually resigned my position. My wife still calls it Black Friday.

When was this?

15 years ago.

You resigned?

I resigned. I was doing surgery. Being chairman of heart surgery at Loma Linda. Wow.

Just because you felt like I said it wasn't solving the actual problem.

It wasn't solving the problem. It was just putting a Band-Aid on it. The surgeries. The surgeries, yeah. I was just, yeah, it's famous for four-time, five-time redo surgeries on somebody who kept clogging up their blood vessels. And it's like you could fix them up, but it's like, okay, they're gonna be back in a couple years.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so I set up an institute in Palm Springs where all I asked people to do is every three months, let me take about 10 tubes of blood out of you and we'll send it to some labs and insurance will pay for it. And see what asking you to eat certain foods does and asking you to take certain supplements that you could find at Costco or Trader Joe's does. And that resulted in my first book in 2008 called Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. But then subsequently, I've seen about 50% of my practice is autoimmune disease. And people would come in and say, hey, what do you know about autoimmune disease? And I go, oh, I don't know anything about autoimmune disease, but I'm a transplant immunologist. And that means how do I get the immune system of you to accept the heart of a pig, for instance? And I'm actually hold the world record for the longest pig to baboon heart transplant, 28 days. That's the world record. So I started manipulating the immune system by food. And sure enough, you've got an autoimmune disease, we can teach you to get rid of it by changing primarily getting lectins out of your diet.

That's it, huh?

And changing your gut bugs to be basically friendly gut bugs. And the friendly gut bugs actually tell your immune system that, Hey guys, we're all great down here. We're down at the beach. We're singing Kumbaya, the beautiful bonfire. And your immune system is basically the cops. And the cops go, oh yeah, we know these kids, great kids. Let's go have a donut. And now, so that's how it's supposed to be. But let's suppose a gang member moves into your neighborhood. Now all of a sudden you're putting up bars on your windows and you've got neighborhood watch patrols and you're shooting guys with hoodies without asking questions. So what's happened to most of us? True, some of the foods we eat, like all these wonderful snacks we're talking about, we've let these gang members loose. And the good guys actually can't eat simple sugars and these saturated fats. They want leaves and they want tubers.

Die off.

They die off, exactly. So the gang members are running rampant and now your immune system is going, oh my gosh, you know, the city's taken over by gang members and we're gonna have armed patrols everywhere and anytime we see anything that looks a little odd, we're gonna shoot and ask questions later. And so what's happened to everybody with autoimmune disease is their immune system is just hyper on guard because it's no longer getting the messages from the good bugs chill out, everything's cool, you know, kumbaya, love, love, love, peace and love. And that's what's happened. And it's so cool to get somebody who can just, you know, change the food they eat. They may not want it initially, but when they start feeling better, they go, for instance, on Monday, young lady, 36 years old, lives out in La Quinta, was sent to me with what's called chronic pain syndrome. Now, a lot of doctors toss this off as, oh, you're crazy or you're depressed or you're just anxious and you treat them with antidepressants. And she was in constant pain and it was so bad that she actually had to work from home, really couldn't move and she had a kid and a husband and.

Right.

So she had heard about me. She said, I've heard about you. What do you think? I said, Come on, let's do this. I said, what's happening is that your pain is actually coming from nerve cells inside your gut that are being stimulated by rogue cops, if you will. And they're trying to tell you that you shouldn't move. so let's start. So I saw her a couple months later in January, February, and I said.

How are we doing?

She said, you know, the pain's less, but it's definitely still there. So I said, well, you know, just stay at it. If you can feel a difference, don't give up.

Yeah.

So I walked in on Monday, and I almost didn't recognize her. And I said, she's got a giant smile on your face. I said, so, you know, how you doing? She said, Perfect. I said, what do you mean? And she says, Do you know what it's like to not have pain? And I said, well, yeah, I do. Now. She said, I forgot what not having pain feels like. And it's amazing. She said, I just feel great. It's been so many years, I'd forgotten what feeling normal felt like. She said, but let me tell you a story. You can't cheat. And I said, yeah, I know that, but how'd you find out? She said, well, you know, there was this office party a couple weeks ago. And all they had, they had some chicken and they had some nachos and they had some guacamole. And she said, I noticed that the guacamole had tomatoes in it. Believe it or not, guacamole is not supposed to have tomatoes. Your listeners should realize that guacamole should not have tomatoes.

Sure.

She said, I figured, well, the safest thing to eat is to put some guacamole on my plate and have a piece of chicken because, you know, I want to be nice. She said, I'll tell you, within an hour, my left elbow just started throbbing, and then my hands started freezing up. She said, I actually had to leave the party and go home. And she had to lay down and I couldn't get up for about two hours. And she said, and I was trying to be good. And she said, it's amazing that this could do this.

Wow. This is crazy.

So you essentially were doing heart surgeries, 10,000 of them. And I said, I don't want to be offensive here. I'll make sure I'm saying the right thing, but you're now essentially a functional med doctor.

Yeah, I don't...

In a sense.

Correct. With all due respects to Mark Hyman, Jeff Bland created functional medicine and Jeff's a friend of mine. I don't know what functional medicine is. What I do is restorative medicine. All of us have the power to heal ourselves. Now, the guy who said this was Hippocrates and Hippocrates, brilliant, he believed that any organism had the ability to have perfect health and that every organism had the ability to achieve perfect health as long as the obstacles to perfect health were removed. And Hippocrates believed that the physician's job was to identify the obstacles to that organism having perfect health, the patient, and remove them from the patient. and the patient would do the rest. So what I try to do, I basically do detective work, and I think I'm pretty good at finding the obstacles, and many of those obstacles, believe it or not, are lectins. And the other obstacle is you gotta get the gang members out of your gut by basically starving them to death and giving the good guys what what they want to eat.

Starving them of the lectins.

Starving them of simple sugars and lectins and saturated fats.

Like, remove those things.

Yeah, they have nothing to eat and they leave. For instance, I'll give you an example of something interesting. We actually have bacteria in our gut that enjoy eating gluten.

Really?

Yeah, they love it. But if you go gluten-free, They leave because they got nothing to eat. And then a lot of people who go gluten free and don't notice a whole lot of difference or they just get frustrated and then they have a couple pieces of bread or pizza and then all of a sudden their gut goes, oh, you know. Well, it's because their bugs that could defend them against gluten are gone. And believe it or not, gluten is kind of a low level lectin. There's far worse. The worst ones are in the hall of the grain. So for instance, this whole grain goodness, this only started about 50 years ago.

This thing is whole grain goodness.

No, we've gotten sicker and sicker and sicker, 'cause the outside of the hall has the lectins, and we've been throwing it away. I mean, really, the French, seriously, would they have a whole grain croissant or a whole grain baguette? Really? and the Italians, you know, whole grain pasta. Well, now it's appearing on the menus.

Because the tourists want to see it.

Yeah, but the Italians would kill themselves.

Right, right. Yeah.

The first thing I opened up right.

Here is the most popular nut is not a nut. It's not a peanut.

The peanut.

Oh, my God.

And a cashew.

Cashew is a nut, too.

I can't eat cashews.

No.

The Amazonian Indians always threw the cashew bean away.

What if.

What if I. Manipulate it in a.

Certain way and make it into a sauce. You could pressure cook it. I can pressure cook cashews, then I can eat it.

Yes, and stay away from chia seeds.

No chia seeds?

These are all the things people are.

Telling you to eat right now. Of course, and that's why everybody's getting sicker. Chia seeds, there's two human studies that.

Show that chia seeds promote inflammation in human beings.

What else do we need to be aware of? I used to be a big fan of chia seeds. What do you eat? You eat? what you're supposed to eat. You're supposed to eat leaves. You're supposed to eat tubers, like hikama, like sweet potatoes, like rutabagas. You're supposed to eat tons of olive oil.

Tons.

Tons. I use a liter a week of olive oil.

You drink it or you're cooking with it?

No, I pour it on everything. Oh, really?

Yeah.

Pour it on everything. The only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. This is what I told Dr. Oz. a few weeks ago. Just think the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. In Crete and Sardinia they use a liter of olive oil per week. A Spanish study of 65 year old people for five years, making them use a liter of olive oil per week against a low-fat Mediterranean diet, at the end of five years the olive oil users had improved memory compared to the low-fat diet. The women had 65% less breast cancer than the low-fat Mediterranean diet. And they had less heart disease.

Leader a week.

Olive oil. Leader a week. That's the fountain of youth, huh?

Yep. It really is. Olive oil.

It's a secret. It's a secret.

Okay.

There you go. That's the secret. So let's go back to functional medicine.

Yeah. What does that actually mean?

So functional medicine is compared to regular medicine. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I don't know if people listening really have a great understanding of what's happening right now in science, but it's profound. The shift that's happening in our understanding of the body is it's like Columbus.

Going, Hey, the Earth isn't flat.

Right now, the last few years. It's just like the last decade or two with our understanding of the human genome, of systems biology, of the body as a biological network, as a system, it's like an ecosystem where everything's connected, working together. And so, the way we organize medicine is according to these organs. You've got your cardiovascular system, your neurologic system, your GI system, and so you.

Go to all these specialists.

And everybody treats their part of your body. If you have a migraine, we're actually learning that it might be related to gut flora, or if you have heart attack, I mean now we know that you might be getting cancer because of your gut bacteria. Well, no oncologist is asking you what going on in your gut microbiome. And so now we know, for example, like the microbiome is a great example of this disruption that's happening in healthcare. You know, the microbiome, which is your gut floor, it's really, it's like 10 times as many cells as your own cells. It's a hundred times as much DNA as your own DNA. So we're kind of lazy. We have about as much DNA as an earthworm. Okay. But we borrow the DNA of the microbes in our gut to do things for us. us. We borrow things from plants to do things from us, like, for example, glucosinolates. So the microbiome is this huge thing that's got two to three million genes. We only have 20,000 genes and it regulates your weight. You can swap out poop from a thin person into someone with diabetes and reverse it. Amazing. We've seen people, I've heard stories of fecal transplants, not only curing things like that, but autoimmune diseases and Really? Parkinson's and people with MS and like crazy stories that I'm starting to hear. And there's research now going on aggressively in looking at fecal transplants for all sorts of diseases.

It's transferring poop from one person to another.

Yes.

What does that, how do you do that?

Well, how does that process? Well, they collect the poop. There's actually a, I've never heard of this. Yeah, you've never heard of this. Never heard of this. Oh my God, this is huge. So, so the, what is it called? Fecal transplant. FMT, fecal microbial transplant. The way it came about was some doctor had a bright idea that there was this condition called C. diff, which is an infection of the intestines that happens after antibiotics, is life threatening. And there's a huge amount of people are now resistant to antibiotics because of all the antibiotics in our feed and in the animal production. So there's the drugs don't work. People die. And somebody thought, well gee, if I put the poop from a healthy person into a sick person, let's see what happens. And the doctor did it and the person was cured.

Shut up.

98% effective. 98% effective.

How do you do this? So, to understand this process, you want.

To get into it? Give me the visual version. So, basically they take a fecal transplant specimen, like a donor specimen from a healthy person, and they screen them for all sorts of diseases, and then they spin it up with some saline, and then they inject it in with a straw catheter or a colonoscope. Kalonoscope. And then they're actually also like shit.

It just heals inside or what's it.

Do when it's well it goes in.

It's like massive probiotics, right? Oh, yeah.

And so, it's like an infusion of probiotics. And also there are actually pills now. They actually are making special encapsulated poop pills. Poop pills. And it's not, I mean this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I'm not talking about like stuff that's wacky.

I'm talking about serious medicine that people are doing.

But it's not just for that. Now they're looking in for all sorts of things.

People are cured right after one infusion.

Yeah, it's amazing. So functional medicine is really understanding the body as a system and network and understanding that the focus should not be on treating disease but on creating health. So it's the science of creating health. It's the ultimate biohacking tool. And it's interpreting all the data and the stories from your body that it tells through testing we do. For example, you don't have to do testing, but you can look into the body, look at your immune function and allergies and your gut flora and toxins and nutritional status. It's like doing a soil sample. So I'm like a soil farmer, organic soil farmer rather than an industrial agriculturist. I don't put all these chemicals on my plants to make them better like herbicides and pesticides. I create a healthy soil and then disease doesn't occur. You just disease can't land in a healthy soil. So that's exactly what functional medicine is. We help people get in balance. We take away the things that cause imbalance. We put in the things that help create balance. So for example, I had a woman come, she had a whole list of problems. That's why I call myself a holistic.

Doctor because I take care of people.

With a whole list of problems. So she had like psoriatic arthritis was on a drug that cost 30 grand called Stelara and still was miserable. She also was overweight, had pre-diabetes, migraine, sinus problems, irritable bowel, reflux, depression, insomnia. She had like this whole list of things.

Of course, you saw all these specialists:.

The sinus doctor, the migraine doctor, the autoimmune doctor, the skin doctor, the depression doctor, the gut doctor.

Like, and, you know, everybody's treating her.

With their best practices. Their best drug probably. But, I mean, she's being seen at the top medical center, right? They're not doing bad medicine. They're doing standard of care. In fact, they're doing excellent standard of care. But the standard of care is not the way we're gonna fix these problems. It's outdated or it's not. It's totally outdated. so rather than thinking about how all these were separate, I said, how are these all connected? Interesting.

Right.

How are these all connected? And so there were connections. It was all inflammatory. And I said, well, why don't we put you on an anti-inflammatory low glycemic diet, a Pegan diet, basically, right? Took away and anti allergens. And I, and I cleaned out her gut because her gut was causing huge symptoms bloating and she had yeast reactions. Oh, she had, like, vaginal yeast and anal yeast and itching and. itchy ears and yeast everywhere, yeast on her mouth and thrush. And so I gave her an antifungal, I gave her stuff to clear out the bad bugs in her gut. I put in good bugs, I put in enzymes, I put in things to heal the gut lining.

I gave her fish oil, vitamin D.

Just some basic stuff, probiotics. But it's really eliminating the bad foods, eliminating the bad bugs in her gut and putting in new bugs and putting in nutrients to help her body heal. Two months later she comes back completely symptom free.

No way.

No more arthritis, no more $230,000 drug, no more skin psoriasis, no migraines, no sinus problems, no oral bowel, no reflux, no depression, no insomnia, and she lost 20 pounds.

All from food.

Totally. And what was food and her gut flora? I focused on her gut flora. Why? Because 60% or 50% of the immune system is in the gut.

Interesting.

Yeah, why is it in the gut? Why is it there? because you're sticking pounds of food, a foreign material, every day in your body.

You gotta fight it off in your gut.

Yeah, and you've got, you know, you've got like big bugs in there and poop. It's like the danger zone, right? It's like you're like, and it's one cell away because you're one cell away from a sewer every minute. Really? Yeah, it's one cell between you and that mass of food and poop, right? So your immune system is like, if anything happens like right there.

So when people have autoimmune disease, it's.

Often a gut issue. It's often a gut issue.

People didn't know this before, did they?

No. So now all this is really coming to light and functional medicine is the operating system to interpret the data. It's a new set of lenses to think about how to solve it and it's a system of treatment that helps people get back in balance. That's what's powerful. And then at Cleveland Clinic, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, I call him the Wayne Gretzky of healthcare. He goes where the puck's gonna be, not where it is. Smart.

Right?

And he's basically came after me to go set up a center there. And I'm like, Functional Medicine Center. Yeah, I'm like, I'm not going to Cleveland Clinic. It's like a, you know, it's like, I'm not going to go to a place where I'm going to have to bang my head against the wall where it's traditional medicine, where they don't get.

This, where they're in the dark ages.

I just, it's also known as one of the top hospitals. Of course, but it's the top hospital in the old model.

Yes.

Right, so I'm like, but he knows what's happening. He sees where it's gone. He knows what's happening. He's like, we need this here.

Wow.

And so he's investing tons of money, millions and millions of dollars building this. We're building an 18,000 square foot facility. We started with a little space and we just outgrew it. We're hiring doctors. I have an interview with the doctor right after this. And we're basically growing. We're doing research in all sorts of conditions. We're changing medical school education. We're changing policy. We're doing community work. Amazing. So he's really putting us on the.

Map in the traditional world.

'Cause he's gonna go out of business.

If he doesn't start doing this.

But what's amazing to me, Louis, I thought when I got there, people would be skeptical, negative, make it difficult for me, and my team there, but it's the opposite.

They wanna learn.

Last week when I was there, I had two deans of medical schools, two chairs of institutes, which are big deals, and another doctor as patients.

No way.

Yeah, they're coming as patients.

Because they're not being cured with the medicine.

The executive team, the C-Suite team, is sending all their family members to come see us.

Do you know Dr. Lissa Rankin by any chance?

Yeah.

She's been on as well and she talked about how she had all this medication she was treating herself and then started saying, oh, let me just change the way I eat and my relationships.

And my emotional health.

Exactly. It's all about the medicine. She's like, I got off all the medicine. and then I stopped giving medicine to my patients. I started asking deeper questions.

It's so powerful. So we're, we're at this fulcrum. It's not, it's not just I'm like one lone doctor with a crazy idea. There's a whole movement going on here. We had dinner with James Masel. He's helping move that movement forward. I'm the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine, where we train doctors all over the world in this model and operating system of how to actually do this in practice. So we are, we are literally building an army of doctors that change healthcare and it's pretty exciting and it's actually starting to really hit that hockey stick point where it's changing.

Amazing.

People want it. I mean, people are desperate for this model.

So, if someone is listening and they're on some type of medication or they're just feeling like constantly sick, you know, something is constantly happening to them, what do you think is because there's so much information online that is scary.

It's scary, right?

Here's a MD stuff, just like looking up anything and Googling it and seeing all the nasty photos and just like, ah, what is an approach that someone should take if they have some challenge that's constantly happening in their health? Should they first analyze the food they're intaking and do like an analysis?

Do you have like a process?

Absolutely. It's a great question, Liz. So, you know, what I am is a doctor and what I do is see patients in my office. That's my main job. Yes, I've written a dozen books. Yes, I do a lot of stuff, but that's my main job. And so, I've learned over 30 years of doing this how to create sustainable, practical programs to help people get from sick to well very quickly. And what I've done, because not everybody can come see me and there aren't that many of us out there yet.

You only have so many hours in a day.

And there's not that many functional medicine. I've written books and programs to help people operationalize this in their own life. So, each of within, and look.

I.

Could say, do my program, but I don't really care what program you do, as long as it's based on the basic principles. And there are a lot of my colleagues who are writing great books about this. It's all the same information because it's all the same science, and if you're telling the truth, there's only one story here, the truth. And so, this Effectiveness then is a great program that I put together to make people have so no friction, it's easy, it's very straightforward. 21 days. 21 days, practical, goof-proof, and it tells you what to eat. And when you get to the end of that, you'll see how you feel, because most people in 21 days will change their habits, but they'll also allow their body to reset. It's like putting your body back to its original factory settings, right? And then if something's left over, then you know, gee, maybe I need to go deeper. Like if you still don't feel great, maybe you have Lyme disease, maybe I have heavy metal poisoning, maybe your thyroid's not working. Maybe you have a parasite, maybe you could be eating the perfect diet but still feel bad. So, do the 21 days first. Yeah, but 80% of the time, you're.

Going to cure yourself.

80% of the time, this works for people and then the 20% who have to get extra help, they need to come see somebody.

And the body is pretty incredible in how it can heal itself very quickly once you change habits.

Unbelievable. We did the survey of a thousand people who did this. I mean, they lost weight, yes, and they lost inches, yes, and that's all impressive. And their blood sugar dropped 20 points and their blood pressure 10 points. But the thing that really matters to me is I have everybody fill out what I call the FLC quiz. You know what that is? That's when you feel like crap. Okay. So it's a quiz. How do you, like, you know, do you have bloating? Do you have asthma? Do you have headaches? Can you sleep? Like joint pain, muscle pain, what's your mood? Are you depressed? Like, so you fill out this whole score and zero to four for every symptom and you get a score. They do want it before and after. And now the before and after score, there was a 69% reduction in all symptoms all diseases.

Whoa.

Because you don't have to treat everything individually. If you put in the right information, like I said at the beginning of the show, the body knows what to do.

Wow.

Right? So the information in food is so powerful. If you figure out what to eat, you don't have to worry about how much. You don't have to count fat, grams, carbs, calories, nothing.

I don't do that.

I don't have time for that. Right, right, right. And I don't want to be on an app all day, figuring it out. I just want to know how to get my body to naturally do what it's supposed to do. If you're off by 100 calories a day, you're going to gain like 50 pounds in 30 years. You can't do it by willpower. You have to use science. And the science of using fat and low glycemic food, like low sugar food, is really powerful. It's magical. I mean, I notice my own body. I'm like 56 and I notice- You're young, man.

You're like fit, healthy, energetic. No.

Well, I can tell you, I was always been focused on health, but I was the doctor who was trained to eat low fat and to tell my patients to eat low fat. And I did that. And I also ate a lot of things that I thought were healthy, like pasta was a health food. Pasta was a health food.

I used to eat so much pasta.

Yeah, health food, right? Low fat.

You're basically fasting all the time.

Yeah, exactly. And so I basically changed that and I started eating a lot less starch, a lot less sugar. A lot more fat and I know it's my body like without any exercise I'm like so lean so fit yeah, I'm like wow. I got a six pack and I didn't work out It's like and it's just stunning what happens when you're when you do and my brain is clear. I have more energy my mood's better I mean, I know so you're drinking.

A like a bulletproof coffee, you know that it works yeah, it's amazing I mean, I started doing testing some different things the beginning of this year in January And the first week I did no sugar. The second week, no sugar, no gluten. Yeah. Third week, no sugar, no gluten, no dairy. Fourth week, no sugar, no gluten, no dairy, no meat. That was last week. And I was just to see what happened with the body.

Pulling a band-aid off slowly.

Yeah.

I should have just done it all. It's better to do it the other way. The way I do with my patients, you do a detox. Basically, you get off everything at once. You feel bad for a couple of days. and then you see how you feel. I feel amazing.

Because one of the rules of fitness...

I should have talked to you before this. I don't know what else to say. And then you can add things back one at a time and see what bothers you. Interesting. Because the rule in functional medicine, if you're standing on a tack, it takes a lot of ask to make it feel better. So if something's bothering you, you have to get rid of the cause. But if you're standing on two tacks, taking one out doesn't make you 50% better.

Interesting. So if you're allergic to dairy and gluten, but you just take out gluten, you're not going to feel better.

Right, right, right.

So I did the whole wrong way. Oh, well, it was an experiment. But the thing what I was gonna mention was I started doing Bulletproof in the morning.

Yeah.

And fasting until 1:30.

Yeah.

And not eating after 9:30 or whatever it is at night. And I realized that I wasn't hungry in the mornings when I would do the coffee. And I would only have like half a cup only. Yeah. And I would be fine until 1:30.

MCT oil puts you in ketosis, which is Medium chain triglycerides. It's a super fuel. It comes from coconut, which is in the coffee. It's what I recommend as part of my Eat Fat Get Thin program. Speeds up your metabolism. Even-- you-'re burning fat. It actually makes your metabolism work faster and burn more calories. And it also affects your brain. Your brain is more alert, focused and clear.

So I wrote most of Eat Fat Get Thin on MC2L and coffee in the morning. I love it. I love it.

And why don't you get-- I want to ask you a few more questions. Why did you get into medicine in the first place? first place.

What inspired you 30 plus years ago whenever this was?

Yeah, so I actually majored in Buddhism at Cornell. So I did not even think remotely about medicine or science. In fact, I only took science classes because they were required for my degree at Cornell, but I didn't even do that well in them. I got a C in biology and I think a C in chemistry. I think I might have got a C plus in biology. But it was like the pre-med courses that everybody jumps off the bridge for. And I didn't take it that seriously. So then I just wanted, I got my degree in Buddhism. But when I studied Buddhism, I found that it was actually a healing system. It was a therapeutic system for the mind. And in fact, it was a way of looking at our perceptions, our beliefs, our attitudes, our thinking in such a way that freed us from suffering. And it was powerful. And it also had a tradition of healing. All the doctors in the Buddhist tradition were monks. So I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I kind of got this idea in my head. I was a young idealistic kid, and I had this concept of a bodhisattva, which is this being who kind of betters themselves, but rather than going to be living in a cave and being by themselves and having a happy life, they come back in the service of others to help others, also to reach enlightenment.

Okay.

So, I kind of always had that in my head and I just, I always felt better when I was of service.

Sure. You know, most people feel better when they're in service.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Louis, when we look at the science of this, altruism stimulates the same area in the brain as cocaine or sugar or heroin. Crazy.

Right? So, I get high from helping people. I think Stephen Kotler talks about that in his book, Flow, or about flow. It's so true. People get into flow, you know, and when they're in service, you become in flow and that triggers the same type of chemicals, right?

Yeah, absolutely. You get out of your head. Like I went to Haiti after the earthquake and was, you know, up to my elbows in pus and amputations and blood and disaster and just, it was like the worst scene you could imagine. But like, I didn't think of myself for one second. Right, right. Just in service. I was just in service and I felt good. Like I felt, and I'm like, you know, just grateful and happy. Not happy like, 'cause I was there, it was a miserable place, that was happening with the earthquake, but I actually had this sense of inner peace and inner happiness and gratitude and service. And I think that's really, in the way it's a little selfish. Sure, sure. No, giving is like the most selfish.

Gift you can receive. It's like the best gift you can give. Yeah, so that's sort of how I got it.

And then I realized, gee, maybe I should practice medicine, 'cause it's all about healing. And I said, well, I'll try it. And I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor.

Wow. Back before yoga was cool.

Yeah, that was in 1979.

Wow.

Yeah, I took my first yoga class and amazing. I just went to yoga before I came here, so it's been going on a long time.

Holy cow, that's awesome. Cool. Well, a couple final questions and I want to make sure everyone gets this book, Eat Fat, Get Thin. Why the fat we eat is the key to sustained weight loss and vibrant health. Essentially, everything we've said growing up was, is the opposite of what we were talking.

Sorry, guys.

We kind of blew it. But eat fat, get thin. 21-day process for discovering, you know, and healing yourself, essentially.

Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not just for weight loss. It's actually for anybody who wants to reset their system. Interesting. And gain back control of their body. And, you know, so you, you actually naturally want the things that make you feel good, that you, you don't crave the bad things, that it's not, it's not difficult. I mean, you can't use willpower. It doesn't work. You have to use science.

Right?

And so, it's so great.

I like it. I got three questions for you. One is, if you had an unlimited amount of money that you could spend on one thing to cure one thing in the world, what would that be?

One disease or one thing in the.

World that you think needs curing or solving one issue?

Oof, gosh. I mean, so many things flooded into me when you said that. I mean, I think, you know, the thing that I think is driving so many of our economic and social ills is our food system. And if I had a magic wand, I would put in a, and I'm working actually on a petition right now that I've got 150,000 people on our fat summit, which is an online summit on, and we interview over 30 experts on fat. and it's available. Anyone can go to fatsummit.com and get to see this. And to kind of list what are the policies that would really radically change things, not just in America, but around the world if we became the beacon for this. And I met with the Surgeon General a couple of days ago, and he asked me to come to Washington to help change and shape this policy. So the things that matter are ending food subsidy, ending agricultural subsidies for commodity products like corn, soy and wheat that go into all our processed industrial food. Subsidizing fruits and vegetables and things that actually promote health. Ending food marketing to kids, right? We market junk food to kids. I think we're one of only 50.

Countries.

That we are one of the only countries that doesn't do this. 50 countries control food marketing to kids.

Really?

Regulate. Yeah, us and Syria, no, are the only ones.

Oh my gosh.

I would end all use of antibiotics in animal feed except in animal husbandry except for treatment of disease. Full stop. I would have clear food labeling so that people know what they're eating. Is it good for you? Green. Is it maybe a little tricky? Well, eat with caution. Yellow. Is it bad for you? It might kill you. Red. Like, stop. Simple.

Like when you have cigarettes now, this will cause cancer. This will kill you.

And this is controversial, but I would put a tax on junk food and soda which has been proven to work and reduce consumption. This was just done in Mexico, it was super effective. Done in Berkeley, first place in America, very effective. Interesting. It's like cigarettes. Tax cigarettes. If a Coke was actually $10, I would actually make things cost what they really cost. The only reason that McDonald's meal is so cheap is because the government pays for it and subsidizes it. I met with the Vice Chair of Pepsi, he said, why are you using high fructose corn syrup in your soda? He says, because Mark, the government makes it so cheap for us by subsidizing agriculture and the growing of corn that's turned into high fructose corn syrup. That's why we're using it. It's good business. I wouldn't use it if the government didn't make it so cheap. So it would end subsidies. I would end any food that wasn't promoting health in any federally funded program. Food stamps. You can buy $4 billion now of food stamps are spent on soda for the poor. $4 billion. It's the biggest single amount of item this bought. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can buy a four, a two liter bottle of soda, but you can't buy rotisserie chicken. You can't buy with food stamps online because of some stupid regulation. We're trying to change that. So I would implement a whole series of policies like this. I would also make sure that we really promote science and nutrition in school. So kids know very early on what's going on. There should be no Food that doesn't promote health in schools. We know that there's clear evidence that kids who are fed poor foods, and I don't want to talk about school lunches that are quote healthy, right? I mean, pizza is considered a vegetable. Pizza is a vegetable. According to Congress, pizza is a vegetable. Oh my gosh, that's all I eat every day. And so, you know, we need clear policies that we could change all this in America. And I think people are ready for it, people want it, people know the issue is here, here. We need to end in the kinds of industrial agriculture we're doing that are actually promoting degradation of the environment. And we need to label GMOs because the centralization of seed production has caused huge problems. Glyphosate is now Roundup is used on soybeans. 98% of soybeans are Monsanto soybeans.

98%?

I think it's something like 98% of the world.

Oh gosh.

So the centralization of seed production, even if you debate GMOs are good or bad, they're using all this pesticide. pesticides and herbicides because of these that are actually now getting into the water. Now we know that glyphosate now, according to the World Health Organization and an International Board of Scientists, is a cancer causing agent. And actually I'm excited because in my practice, I'm going to start doing glyphosate testing. Because people don't know what they're consuming. So I would do a series of things that would really, if I had all the money in the world, to really change this. Michael Bloomberg, he sort of tried to do this. He had all the money in the world. and he made huge policy changes in New York. He got rid of trans fats, he changed all kinds of food laws, he actually started to try to regulate soda, but the food industry came down so hard on him. I actually have been involved with developing.

41 FDA approved new treatments for cancer, diabetes, and prevent blindness. So that's my street cred. So when somebody basically says, oh, you.

Know, how'd you get into nutrition?

You know, like, are you one of those doctors that don't believe in modern medicine? And I basically said, no, I actually develop modern medicines.