The Top Foods You'll NEVER EAT Again! | Dave Asprey & Lewis Howes

The number one thing that is wrong with the American diet is seed oils. These are Omega-6 oils. These are the oils that drive insulin resistance. And when you control insulin and you control autophagy, something very interesting anti-aging wise happens. And it's that what do you think.

Is the worst food to eat before you start fasting? Like, what's the worst thing you could do where it's kind of doesn't matter that you fasted because you just had this, this and this, you know, 16 hours ago.

A bunch of fried stuff, especially like french fries from a restaurant especially because they use such bad oils. And what you find from fasting is that sometimes it's effortless and sometimes you just have gnawing hunger the whole time. And the gnawing hunger, it's your fault. It's what you ate before the fast.

Interesting.

So in fast this way, I teach about these six big categories of food that are likely to cause cravings for you. And they don't all cause the same intensity cravings, but these are foods that aren't as good as we think they are. Because we have anything you're gonna eat has three things in it. And most nutritionists only look at two. I'm not picking on nutritionists specifically. Dietitians are even worse. I'll pick on them. These are the guys who feed you Jell-O with NutraSweet in the house. But there's calories in food. And some types of popular wisdom say, well, eat food with less calories. Guys, calories are energy. Energy is what you want. And to say that you are somehow going to feel really good on a low calorie diet, it does not work. As a 300 pound guy who's lost way more than 100 pounds, I'd say I'm a 200 pound guy now, but you go low calorie, lose 20 pounds, gain 30, lose 30, gain 40.

It does not work.

It makes you miserable and it makes you just cranky.

So what's the solution? What's the solution then? Well, the solution is you actually eat enough calories and you eat the right kinds of calories. So let's assume your food has some energy in it. the second thing food has, it has nutrients. So it has vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. This is good. Now, most of the time we stop there and say, okay, you should eat more of this because it has, for some reason, some people say less calories and other people say more nutrients. But the third bucket is what matters. The third bucket is anti-nutrients or toxins. And it's not like any food is perfect, but some have more or less calories, some have more or less nutrients, and some have more or less anti-nutrients. And if you pretend like they don't exist, which is how most nutritional stuff is written. So eat this because it's packed with this, ignoring the fact that you could literally have a bowl of cyanide. And if you put some vitamins in it, they'd say, well, it's low calorie, it's high in vitamins, you should eat that. And so I teach people in Fast this Way, look, here's the things to look for. If you eat that, you're probably gonna have a miserable fast with low energy cravings and be cold. But if you don't eat that, you're gonna have a much easier fast. And then you start to realize, wait a minute, maybe I'm going to choose foods that don't make me hungry as soon as I finish eating them. And if you master that, even when you're not intermittent fasting, you're gonna have lunch. And instead of wanting a snack at two, I'm actually full until dinner. I just don't want to eat, so I don't think about eating. I don't reach for the cookies.

Yeah. So instead of willpower, it's just biology. It's so much easier that way. What would you say would be the.

Top three foods if you could only have three that you would eat before a fast, whether 16 hour or 24 hours? It would be definitely grass-fed steak. There is nothing more satiating than animal fats or butter. This stuff, it's full of nutrients. As long as it's grass-fed, if it's industrial, it'll actually give you cravings. It's not good to eat industrially raised animals. So the idea that meat is good or bad, you got to know what meat, how is the animal treated, and all that. It matters. I wish that it didn't matter. I wish you could just eat gravel, but it doesn't work. So this is something that is the most satiating, something with a lot of soluble fiber in it. You can do broccoli if you want to. You can do some vegetables, preferably cooked. Not all vegetables are going to have the same effect on you. So I talk about things like how the nightshade family of vegetables, which have been a core part of the Bulletproof Diet, like guys, watch out for that. If you eat bell peppers, you're probably gonna feel different than if you eat cabbage. In fact, you'll feel very different. and when I say that, most people, oh wait, I guess that might be true, but we've just never thought about it.

Different in a not feeling as good with the nightshades.

Bell peppers are in the deadly nightshade family. They're clearly not deadly, but they cause inflammation in many people, but in others they handle it pretty well. So, I'm like, watch out for that. But for me, I would say, give me some vegetables, give me some steak, and then the other thing that's going to be really good is anything with fat, dark chocolate, Guacamole, things like that. A salad with a really heavy dressing with real olive oil, not the fake stuff, and with some extra MCT oil in it and some extra avocados on top. So give me the good undamaged fats, not a lot of seed oils. Give me some protein and give me some vegetables. You do that and you can cruise all day long. But if you say, oh, instead I'm going to insert some kind of fancy raw kale salad, Kale gives a lot of people cravings. In fact, it's not very good for you at all. In fact, if you ever eaten a huge kale salad and then being, I'm so full, I'm so satisfied, I'm just.

Bursting with energy, I'm not gonna be.

Hungry for four hours.

No.

Even if you cover it in bacon, it still doesn't work. Kale has stuff in it that pisses your body off. It really does. And it's just how it is. It doesn't taste that good either.

But even if you like the taste of it, it's not particularly a strong health food. There you go. And how does from all the research that you've done, obviously you've tested this for 10 years personally, but from the research and the science, how does fasting the right way play a role in anti-aging in your life and other people's lives?

The number one thing fasting or intermittent fasting regularly will do. And remember, it doesn't have to be a super long one. 14 hours can start, 16 hours is good. We're not talking heavy duty, you know, living in a cave kind of stuff. and that will stop you from having insulin resistance. When you have insulin resistance, it means that insulin levels go up and your body can't hear them so they go up higher. When your insulin is higher, your all-cause mortality goes up. In other words, your chances of dying from every disease you can think of happens. What insulin resistance means is that when there's energy in your body, your cells are weak enough that they can't make good use of the energy. and fasting fixes that problem. When sugar goes up in the body, it forms something called advanced glycation end products. It basically cooks your tissues the way onions brown in a pan. And we know this from 30 years of anti-aging research about the effect of excess insulin and sugar in the body. Fasting will fix that. But on top of it, there's something called autophagy, which is a core part of the recommendations I make, which is do whatever it takes to cause your body to turn its protein digestion mechanisms back on you. Because if it's not busy eating steak and eggs or, you know, tofu, if that's what you're into, it'll turn around and go, oh, there's some extra debris, some junk inside the cells, outside the cells. I can clean that up. And if you go a little bit longer, it says, you know what? I've got enough extra enzyme activity here. I think I will take out the weak mitochondria, these little power plant generators. I'll take out the weak ones and replace them with young, strong ones. And you start upgrading yourself internally. because the stuff that would have gone into digesting the food you eat every two hours because that's what someone told you to do in the 70s. Instead of doing that, you're eating the stuff in your body that makes you old. And when you control insulin and you control autophagy, something very interesting anti-aging wise happens, and it's that you actually have younger and more abundant stem cells in your body. So intermittent fasting has proven to increase stem cells, increases testosterone, human growth hormone, and a huge swath of anti-aging substances in the body. And, it's free. It costs less than eating breakfast.

And, what's some of the new research about stem cells or the new developments that have excited you that everyone should know about?

Well, I've been pretty public about doing a lot of stem cells. I've had my bone marrow taken out twice.

You've been trying to convince me to do this for a while. Consider getting it changed. I still need to consider more.

It'll change your life. Anyone with old injuries like that, I have just no bodily pain and you get younger and there's really intriguing research about stem cells making brains work better, especially if you've had a traumatic brain injury, which I have had. And so you just get younger. And I can't tell you that it was stem cells alone that did this. I live a bulletproof life and all that. But I recently measured my brain's response time. This is an automatic response time. How quickly does the brain respond when a light or a sound comes on? So this isn't a conscious thing. And my response time is the average response time for a 20 year old. The response time goes down with, or goes up with age. So you get slower and slower as you age. So I have a 20 year old's ability to respond to the environment around me, which is pretty remarkable. And I truly think that the stem cells helped with that. There's also things like arterial flexibility where I have the average flexible arteries of a 24-year-old when you just compare and I'm twice as old as that, Lois. So something is working. I think stem cells are a core part of the anti-aging thing. What's happening now though is we're able to pull things that are like stem cells out of the blood instead of out of the marrow. And that's a lot less painful.

And then I'm more open to that than the whole sucking out of my bones. Yeah, it's spinning it up.

You're asleep when you're actually, I was.

Awake one time when they did. Oh man. So wait, what's this new blood drawing stem cell that you're talking about?

It's still getting regulatory approval, but it's called very small stem-like cells. But I'll show you the video sometime and I'm laying on the table and the doctor has this thing and he hammers it with a hammer.

Oh no, I can't.

And it goes, every time I see that video, it's like it's the worst thing ever.

Man, yeah, you go through a lot of pain to have, you know, less pain for the rest of your life.

It's really weird, Louis. It's almost like hunger. You can look at something as pain or just weird. And when I really dug into it, there's the strangest feeling in my skeleton, but it wasn't pain. It was just so outside the universe of anything you would ever or should ever feel that your body could say it's pain or it could just be like... That's different. That's weird. So I can say I've been through much more painful things than that. But, the idea that we could have younger and more stem cells by skipping breakfast is a little bit less money and time than that. And, that's why I think it's such an important practice.

And, what's this blood stem cell process then? It's not available yet, but have you tested it?

There's a very few doctors who are offering it today, and I think it's in a bit of a gray zone from a regulatory perspective.

Have you tried it?

Very small stem-like cells. Of course I've tried it.

How do you feel about it?

Well, I think it's hard to say to compare A versus B. There's a lot more studies on getting stem cells from your fat or your marrow. There's also people getting stem cells from like placental cords and umbilical cords or plus plus plus centos and umbilical cords.

Right. There.

I have mixed feelings about that because if you're getting stem cells from eight different people and how How tested was that? And that makes all of my friends who do stem cells that way irritated.

That I would question it.

Maybe it's perfectly good. I know a lot of people do it and love it. In my mind, I'm like, what? Do we test for every little virus and every little bacteria? And I kind of like the idea of growing my own stem cells, but that's not legal in the US anymore. It was for a while, and that was the most effective. That's crazy. It's coming down. We're at year one of an evolution that's happening. Kind of like cell phones, the first cell phone, some guy in LA in his 300D convertible. The whole trunk is his cell phone.

Yeah, exactly.

And it was like $25 a minute. But with stem cells, it's come down in price a lot. The efficacy is way higher and it's getting better. It works better and better every year, but it still takes a doctor a lot of time to get the needles in all the right places and understand your joints. But man, it's a couple hours of relatively minor discomfort, but then you're better for decades. It's a really big deal, Louis. And I'll tell you, if you fast before you do that procedure, you have less insulin resistance, you have a working metabolism, everything you can do in a hospital, whether it's a surgery, whether you get in a car accident, whatever, everything goes better if you just have a strong metabolism. So, what do we all need right now? We want more resilience. Resilience comes from biology. The people who are best at taking fat or sugar plus air, combining them and getting abundant energy, those are the people who live the longest, have the best life, they have more opportunity for greatness because they simply have more electrons bouncing around in their heads to do stuff with. And it could power your immune system, it could power whatever you're doing in the world. But that's the core of everything I've ever done with Bulletproof, with all the content. How do you make yourself better at making energy. And, it turns out sometimes not eating is part of the equation.

Yeah.

And, I'm curious, everyone swears by the lifestyle slash diet that they live by.

That works for them.

People who are vegan swear by it and the ones who are super healthy have lots of energy. The ones who are vegetarian, I feel.

Like vegans just swear. They don't even swear by their diet. Is that just me?

Who knows?

Yeah.

I mean, they swear by lots of things.

Sorry, vegans, I'm just teasing you guys. The, the, you know, the vegetarian diet, people who live a vegetarian lifestyle for a long time say that this is.

The best for them.

People are carnivore diets, say it's the best for them. Keto. Is there a worst type of diet, even though some of these things might.

Work extremely well for particular body types? What, what is the worst type of diet? Is the standard American diet. And there's three things in it that.

Are just horribly destructive.

The first one is... What?

Sugar.

Sugar? Sugar is there, but I don't think it's as destructive as the other two.

Okay.

So, I'll give them an order from the worst to the best of the worst. So, the number one thing that is wrong with the American diet is seed oils. These are omega-6 oils. And canola, corn, soybean, safflower, sunflower, all this stuff that's in everything at the restaurant. and most packaged foods at the grocery store unless you buy from the right company. It's full of these oils. These are the oils that drive insulin resistance. Your body takes these oils and they're all plant-based oils. And it says, I'm going to try to construct the outer layer of my mitochondria in my cells, these little batteries, but I have the wrong ingredients. So I'm going to make subpar batteries. Like if you go to the knockoff store and you buy the cheap batteries and it lasts a third as long as the good ones, that's what happens when you eat a lot of seed oils. Americans have about 40 times more of that oil in their systems than they should, and it gets built into your tissues.

And that makes you weak.

It is just not good. Seed oils. Seed oils are bad. Second thing is industrially raised meat. It's full of xenoestrogens. These are estrogens that make animals fat on one-third less calories than normal. It's also full of antibiotics, and it's destroying the soil of the planet right now. It also is depleting farmland when we take and we grow corn and soy and grain and we don't actually put the animal poop back into the soil the way we do on my farm. What we're doing is we're sucking all the nutrients out of the soil and we're creating a very, very big catastrophe 60 years from now. We'll be out of topsoil because we stopped having animals walk around and poop on it the way it works when you're doing a regenerative agriculture kind of thing. But worst of all, you eat industrial animals, they're also full of cortisol. And so you do this, they mess up your gut bacteria and they're full of glyphosate because it was on the feed and glyphosate disrupts your gut bacteria, your nervous system activity and is tied to cancer. So we're getting bad oils. Oh, and those animals, because they ate corn and soy, they're full of bad oils too. So now you're like, man, the steak tasted good and I had that nice salad dressing that came out of a bottle that was full of crap oils. and you think you're being healthy, but you're completely wrecking things. And this is some of the stuff that I did when I was heavy, right? And then the third thing would be sugar, right? If you have a ton of sugar, it's directly harmful. If you do the stuff I'm talking about, you can probably have a few grams of sugar and you won't notice that your body can handle it just fine. So sugar is not good for you and it is addictive, but it is way better to eat sugar than it is to eat corn oil. But don't eat either one.

Don't eat either one. Yeah, have sugar every once in a while. But don't eat oil. And, yeah.

If someone said, here's a birthday cake, it's gluten-free, I don't do gluten. And they said, I made it with canola oil. I'd just be like, no. But if they said, I made it with sugar and butter, I'd be like, all right, I'm gonna have some. It's that big. The sugar, okay, your body can process that and it's gone. The other stuff, it sticks and it gets in there and you don't wanna do it. So the worst side of all, is that one with lots of fried stuff and bad oils. But the second worst diet for people who think they're being healthy, this isn't going to be popular, but it is the vegan diet.

Why is that?

There's two things. Okay, I was a devout raw vegan. Okay, I did this for more than a year. I mean, I have bowls as big as my head full of kale and blended and mashed and sprouted.

And, I mean, I'm good with rice.

And beans and everything.

Yeah.

Yeah, all that stuff. So, what happens there is your body doesn't get the essential fats that it needs. We are not made out of plant oils. And I have, in my books, I talk about the studies that show when you change the type of oil you eat, it changes what your body is made of. So, when you go on a plant-based diet, you're getting two things. You're getting plant-based oils, which are not very compatible with you. Vegans will get mad at me and say, Dave, we can convert plant omega-3s to the good ones? Yes, it takes 45 grams of bad omega-3s to make one gram of the good ones if your body can do that, which it won't be able to do because you're on a plant-based diet. And then you get tons of these anti-nutrients from plants that cause cravings. When I was a raw vegan, I was always hungry. And I think that that's a very common occurrence. And I would say, well, that's right. I'm going to put more coconut oil or eat more, you know, fresh young Thai coconuts, all these things. avocados, it didn't matter. It's because plants don't want you to eat them and they cover themselves in defense systems that cause cravings. So I talk about the five big categories of things that are causing problems with us right now. And many plants that are common on a plant-based diet are not very compatible with humans. Like, oh, they have these vitamins. Yeah, they also stick to the stuff that lines the cartilage in your joints and gives you joint pain or they inhibit your ability to absorb zinc and magnesium and iron and things like that. and so what happens is you tell yourself you're doing this to be nice to the animals, but what you're doing is you're making sure that the animals will go extinct because everyone was vegan, we'd have no animals, and then two generations later we'd all be extinct because we'd have no animals to make soil. Because you can't grow carrots without animal poop at the end of the day. You can do it for 20 years, you can do it for 30 years, but eventually you have to build that soil back up. So what's happening on a plant-based diet is the wrong fats and lots of anti-nutrients. and that combination is kryptonite for people. And I've had tens of thousands of former vegans go Bulletproof. And part of the reason I made the Bulletproof diet was because I did harm to myself, including additional food allergies and worse hypothyroidism as a result of being vegan. And in terms of animal cruelty, I calculated deaths per calorie from eating a pound of grass-fed steak every day, which is a lot. You don't need to do that unless you're on the carnivore side of things, which There's an argument for that. Um, but if you do that and the cow is grass fed and local, unless the cow stepped on a frog, you kill less than one animal per year in all of your food. But if you eat boxes of processed soy nuggets, you disrupted the lives of whatever was going to live on that land and whatever the tractors killed. And so the number of deaths per calorie is way higher for any grain product and any, anything other than basically fresh picked vegetables because of habitat destruction and tractor kills. and like I asked a monk this in Tibet. I'm not dogmatic but I want to do what works. So I like to minimize suffering, buy from a local farmer, eat less meat but make it grass-fed and eat very good fats. And if you do that, you'll never have a craving during a fast. And if you don't believe anything I say, you can still be plant-based or vegan and you can still be standard American diet. Dave, I like my industrial animals, you know, go screw yourself. Just do intermittent fasting and you'll still improve. It works for any diet out there. and I'm happy to share the knowledge and I've moved a lot of information, there's 3,000 blog posts and stuff like that. But what I want people to do is figure out the foods that are compatible with your biology. And if you're one of the small percentage of people who's like, you know what? Vegetarian works for me. I know people, it really does. They eat some eggs, they eat some cheese, they eat a substantial amount of butter, and magically that really works for them. And that's okay. But if it doesn't work for you, don't tell yourself it's supposed to work so you'll do it even more. That's the mistake that I made.

Are you friends with some vegans that you've had these conversations with or like Rich Roll or anyone like that?

I haven't had Rich on the show, but I would totally do that. And I've certainly had conversations with vegans a lot. And there's kind of two mindsets there. One of them says you're doing it for your health.

Right?

The evidence does not support that. And here's what's really going on and it's intimately tied to fasting. There's a compound in the body called mTOR and you've probably talked about it on the show before. mTOR is a signaling molecule that says grow. It says, you know, build muscle, you know, build tissue. And when you eat protein, a lot of protein, plant-based will raise it but animal-based raises it much more. So when mTOR goes up, you put on muscle. but chronic elevation of mTOR equals cancer. So that's a bit of a problem. So one solution say, well, I'm going to go plant-based and low protein. The problem with that is that mTOR gets suppressed, but it never goes up. So you get frailty. These are the people who break their hips. These people have the vegan size pants for men, they're like little stick legs. You don't want to be there. So what's the solution? Well, don't eat for a while, then work out, and then eat. And what's neat is that mTOR is like a spring. You can push it down. And when it's down, it's good, except if it never goes up, it's not good. So when you push it down, there's three things that we know of that suppress mTOR, and this is how you build muscle and how you account for the difference in outcomes from vegans versus carnivores, let's say. So to suppress mTOR, fasting does it, exercise does it, and coffee does it. So what you do is eat dinner and stop eating around six. Don't eat after dinner. So you got four hours of fasting before bedtime. You sleep for eight hours, you just fasted for 12 hours. Wait another four hours. There you fasted 16 hours, you had a late breakfast, but before you eat, do some squats, go lift. I mean, it can be a very quick workout, just something heavy. and then you eat. And because all three of those things push the mTOR down, as soon as you eat some protein, the body says, Wahoo! And it spikes the mTOR much higher. And then the exercise has a bigger impact on your tissues. So you got more exercise benefits and less time. Your mTOR was briefly elevated because you only ate once that day or twice that day and then it goes back down and stays down. People feel good on a vegan diet because they suppress mTOR, which is driving chronic inflammation. The problem is you do that forever you'd never get the muscles and the growth, and then you get the anti-nutrients and you get the bad fats. So it's okay to be vegan for a week. It's probably good for you. But then at the end of that week, maybe you should go carnivore. So cycles are good. And I will tell you, being all keto all the time is terrible for you. Being all vegan all the time is terrible for you. And I've done both. That's why intermittent fasting is so awesome, because you can eat both vegetables, you can even have white rice, you can.

Have carbs, you don't have to be.

In keto and ketosis and all that to do fasting.

It's cycling in and out. So be vegan for a day, but just don't be vegan for a year and you'll be fine.

What are the main plants that we should never be eating then?

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. 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, most people have heard of the poison ricin, the white powder you send to your elected official. 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. Oh, gosh. 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 served 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. We have pinto black.

None of that we shouldn't be eating it.

Shouldn't be eating it. You weren't designed to eat it. you have no defense. No matter how it's cooked. If you pressure cooked, pressure cook it, it's fine. Pressure cook it. What does that even mean? Put it in a pressure cooker. 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 quick question before you start there. How much of it can can we eat? Doesn't matter once it's pressure cooked.

You're obviously everything in moderation, but I mean.

Yeah, well, like 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 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.

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. 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, 'cause 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, eggs, plant 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.

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, 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 everything. Sandwiches, yeah. Yeah, no, sorry, eliminated. 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 ten thousand. Ten thousand. Do you have the. Is that what it is?

The record? No.

Someone said it was a record setting heart surgeon.

Heart surgeries. No. Yeah.

No.

How many heart surgeries?

Ten thousand.

Ten thousand. Ten thousand.

Yeah.

It's a lot harder. What's the cause of these heart?

Diseases. So it's a 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 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 rib.

Big Ed.

500 pounder. Big Ed, actually, when I met him, 265 pounds. But he had such extensive coronary artery disease that you couldn't put stents in them, you couldn't do bypasses because they're 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 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, you know, 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, right. You know, I'm 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.

Right.

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. 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, 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. And we go crazy and we go, oh my gosh, this is a miracle. It's the greatest drug discovery of all time. 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 know, 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-diabetes.

You were?

Yeah.

This is 15 years ago. Yeah, 15 years ago. Yeah, 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 given all this advice. And so I called my parents in San Diego. I said, Hey, you know, you've got this thesis?

Oh, yeah, you know, it's in the shrine.

Eternal flame. Whole room of your accomplishments. That's right. so I said, send it up to me. So I put myself on my thesis, and I lost 50 pounds my first year. Wow. 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. Surgeries or doing being chairman of heart surgery at Loma Linda.

Yeah.

Wow. Just because you felt like it wasn't solving the action.

It wasn't solving the problem. It was just putting a Band-Aid on it.

The surgeries.

The surgeries. Yeah. I was just, you know, it's famous for four time, five time redo surgeries on somebody who clogging up their blood vessels.

And it's like you could fix them.

Up, but it's like, okay, they're going to be back in a couple of years.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so I set up an institute in Palm Springs where all I ask 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 have 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 come in and say, Hey, what do you know about autoimmune disease? And I go, oh, 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 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. Uh, and the cops go, oh yeah, we know these kids, great kids. Uh, 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 got, you're putting up bars on your windows and you got neighborhood watch patrols and you're shooting guys with hoodies without asking questions. So what's happened to most of us through 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.

They 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 going to 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, 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, a 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. It was so bad that she actually had to work from home, really couldn't move, and she had a kid and a husband. 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, 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.

Wow.

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, 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, 'cause, 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 said, I 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 was, you know, We're doing heart surgeries, 10,000 of them, and 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 ask-- In a sense, right? Correct. With all due respects to Mark Hyman. Jeff Bland created the functional medicine and Jeff's a friend of mine. I don't know what functional medicine is. Right, right, right. 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.

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 got to get the gang members out of your gut by basically starving them to death and giving the good guys 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.

There's this thing as whole grain goodness.

No, we've gotten sicker and sicker and sicker because 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 it. 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, the peanut.

The peanut. 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 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.

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 cheese. 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 jicama, 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? Wow. Pour it on everything. The only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. That's 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 Mediterranean diet and they had less heart disease.

Liter a week.

Olive oil.

Liter a week.

That's the fountain of youth, huh? Yeah, it really is.

Let me again, the stat on diabetes. How many people have it or are pre-diabetic and what I'm undereducated on this. So how many different types of diabetes are there? Okay, how is it caused?

Okay. Okay. So type one diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Pancreas fails. It's called, we used to be called juvenile diabetes. and you need insulin. It's just, you need it. It's, you need insulin.

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need insulin.

You need insulin. Yeah. To do your pancreas dies because your pancreas makes insulin and helps your blood sugar get balanced.

Keeps, that's the blood.

It's not of the gatekeeper.

That's the glucose into your cells. Okay.

So it's really important. So how does that die? How, how does it die from that? I mean, how does the pancreas die? Oh, well, it's not, how does it get to that point? It's an auto, like an auto, like you get mouthful of sclerosis. Gotcha. It's basically your body attacks your pancreas. Is that from eating a lot of bad foods? Well, there's been links to dairy and actually as a driver of type 1 diabetes. Gluten, 29% of people who have type 1 diabetes have celiac that are undiagnosed. So celiac is a big cause of autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes. So that's a very small number of people. Okay. Very few. One out of two Americans have what we call type 2 diabetes. We used to call adult onset except now kids as young as three are getting type 2 diabetes when drinking soda from the crib. Oh my gosh. I was working in, when I was a resident in an urgent care center and this woman comes in for back pain and she's got her baby in a carriage and I see her feeding this baby this brown liquid in a bottle who's seven months old and I'm like, what is that? Soda? I'm like, what is that? That's Coca-Cola.

No.

I said, why are you feeding your baby Coke? She said, well, he likes it. Oh my gosh. Oh my God, my wife showed me this, video on, on, on social media the other day. It was a baby. Looked like it was maybe eight or nine months old baby having ice cream for the first time.

Oh.

Having sugar for the first time. And you watch the baby eat the ice cream.

I light up.

And then the baby, like, wraps the thing and, like, stuffs in his face. I was like, oh, my God, it was just so crazy. And it's, it's highly addictive. So, yeah, so, so now we're seeing One in two Americans suffer from either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. And that is when you eat too much sugar and starch, and every time you do that, it raises your insulin, your body becomes resistant to the insulin, and so it doesn't work as well, so you need more insulin. And insulin does what? Insulin makes you hungry, it makes you store belly fat, it locks the fat in the fat cells, and it slows your metabolism. It's like a quadruple threat for your body to gain weight. So, it's why we're seeing, you know, and that goes back to what we're growing, right? So, why are we eating all this food? It's because that's the food we produce, right? And so, that's the other part of the problem. So, we have the chronic disease, we have the economic impact, and then we're like, well, why do we have this food? So, as a functional medicine doctor, I'm always asking why, right? Well, why are my patients sick?

Because it makes money, right?

Well, yeah, but I'm going even further why I got interested in this. Why would a doctor care about agriculture and soil and all this crap? Because as I was thinking about my patients' diseases, most of them were caused by food and can be cured by food. Some people, well, if it's- How many.

Are most of them? Is this like 50%?

70%.

80% of anyone that comes in to the hospital or your patients who has some type of disease or some type of sickness?

I mean, unless it's like an environmental thing like mercury or lime or mold, you know, most of the things- Cancer. Cancer is caused by food. Really? 70%.

70% of cancer is caused by food.

And sugar is the number one culprit. Heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease. The big killers are by sugar and food.

Yes. So, if you change your diet, you should be able to prevent- Or cure sometimes. Sometimes cure. Depends how long things are, I guess.

Yeah.

You can prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's.

Yes, 100%. I mean, the studies are there. Even people already have Alzheimer's, when they improve their diet, they can get more functionality back. So, you've got me thinking, okay, well, if a patient's disease are caused by food, what's causing the food? It's the food system. They're like, well, what's causing the food system? It's our food policies. I'm like, what's causing our food policies? It's the food industry that's lobbying Congress. It's got money. It's the biggest lobby group in Congress is agriculture and food. By far, like by twice as much as the next lobby group. By gas and oil or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

And it's like, what? So then I began thinking, well, if I'm gonna help my patients, I can't do it in my office. It's like I'm in the boat bailing the boat with a hole instead of plugging the hole.

You're not going to the source.

Right.

So then I'm thinking, okay, well, what do I need to do as a functional medicine doctor? I need to go to the root cause, right? The root cause and why. And then it became clear to me that it's our agricultural system that's driving so much of the problem. And what we grow has been based on good intentions that were in the 50s and people were hungry. There wasn't enough food. There was a lot of poverty. And so we figured out a system to produce an abundance of starchy calories. So we can have food. So we can have food. And we were great at it. And we have cheap abundant corn, and wheat and soy, which are the commodity crops that are turned into industrial processed food, which is now 60% of our diet. And for every 10% of that you eat, your risk of death goes up by 14%. Yeah, so you're basically feeding Americans a diet we know is going to kill them. The research is so clear on this. There's no scientific debate, and yet we don't do anything about it because we have these dysfunctional food policies. And then the way we grow the food causes climate change. We'll get into that, but the number one cause of climate change is our food system.

Really?

People don't realize that. I didn't know it. I'm like, oh, it's oil and gas.

And all this stuff.

I'm like, what is it? Is it the trucking? Is it the animal feed? And is it the trees? Okay, so first of all, deforestation is devastating. Not only do we destroy the soil.

On which we cut down the trees.

But the trees are carbon sinks, so we lose that. So they're not sucking in the bad air. They're sucking in putting out good. Carbon dioxide.

Right.

I mean, basically plants suck out carbon dioxide. that's what they breathe. We breathe oxygen, they breathe carbon dioxide. So they're a perfect antidote, right? And then the soil also, we're damaging by the way we're farming, we've lost a third of our top soil. It's responsible, people don't know this, but of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the loss of soil organic matter, like healthy rich soil, is responsible 30 to 40% of all greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere. since the Industrial Revolution.

Is that mean why is that?

Does it suck up? Does it suck? Because soil can hold more carbon than is in the atmosphere right now. There's a trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, which is a lot. I don't know a trillion tons. I don't even know how to measure that. And the soil can hold three trillion tons of carbon. And how does it do that? It's an ancient carbon capture technology that is available all over the world. That's free. That can be more effective than all the rainforests on the planet, than all the forests and trees on the planet. It's called photosynthesis. And if you have grasslands, for example, like we had big prairies in the United States, they suck down carbon, they breathe it, and they put it through the plants into the roots, feeds the microorganisms fungi, which then make healthy soil, feeds the bacteria, and you get this incredibly rich live soil that holds tremendous amounts of organic matter that is carbon.

Right?

I mean, carbohydrates comes from the word carbon, which comes from carbon dioxide.

Wow.

Right.

Ding, ding, ding. It all connects. And so we've lost.

So we don't have the soil for it to consume. Yeah. Then we, it just bounces off back into the air, I guess, and we're just consuming it in other ways.

Yeah, and the soil can hold so much carbon. The UN estimated that if we took the five of the five million hectares of degraded farmland around the world, if we took just two million of that and spent 300 billion, which is the total military spend for 60 days around the world, which is not much, 60 days, two months of everybody's military spending.