The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Dr. Steven Gundry Pt. 2 - Hormone Balance, Covid-19 Defense, & Longevity Diets

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

#278: On this episode we are joined again by Dr. Steven Gundry. Dr. Gundry is a best selling author, cardiac surgeon, and medical researcher. On today's episode we discuss hormone balance, how to build our immune system to help defend against Covid-19, and what are diets could look like for increased longevity.  To connect with Dr. Gundry click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by Parsley Health  Everywhere you like there's an offer or a trendy diet, a workout method or a life changing app. What these quick fixes miss that none help you truly understand why you feel so band and how to solve your health issues for good. Enter Parsley Health. A totally new approach to medicine.  Get $150 off an annual membership by going to www.parsleyhealth.com and using code SKINNY at checkout.  This episode is brought to you by Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning space offering more than 25,000 courses. Join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare today with a special offer just for our listeners: Get two months of Skillshare for free. That’s right, Skillshare is offering The Skinny Confidential listeners two months of unlimited access to over 25,000 classes for free. To sign up, go to www.skillshare.com/TSC.  This episode is brought to you by RITUAL Forget everything you thought you knew about vitamins. Ritual is the brand that’s reinventing the experience with 9 essential nutrients women lack the most. If you’re ready to invest in your health, do what I did and go to www.ritual.com/skinny  Your future self will thank you for taking Ritual: Consider it your ‘Lifelong-Health-401k’. Why put anything but clean ingredients (backed by real science) in your body? Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. and get two free months of premium membership. That's two whole months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free. Get started and join today by heading to Skillshare.com slash TSC. That's Skillshare.com slash TSC. This episode is brought to you by Ritual. You guys know I'm a human guinea pig and I'm still here taking Ritual and loving it. Okay. It's filled with iron, vitamin E, magnesium, folate, and omega-3. Kind of everything. It's made in the USA without synthetic fillers. 95% of women do not get the vitamins and minerals they need on a daily basis, so Ritual created a smarter vitamin with the nine essential ingredients women lack most. Go to ritual.com slash skinny today to choose clean ingredients backed by science. Sign up now at ritual.com slash skinny.

She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. So, but if you're reading the label, look at total carbohydrates, take away fiber, which is right below it. That will tell you the amount of sugar per serving in that package. Do not look where it says sugar. That's a lie. Drum roll, please. Welcome back everybody to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show. I'm fired up because we are back in the studio. Feel like we are right back at home. A little rusty maybe. Been on lockdown for a long

time. It feels good to be back. That clip was from our guest of the show today. Part two with this guy because he's been on before, Dr. Stephen Gundry. And on this episode, we're talking everything from hormone balance, longevity, COVID defense, all the above, how to boost our immune systems, masks, no masks. We're diving into it here. And for those of you that are new to the show, my name is Michael Bostic. I'm a serial entrepreneur and brand builder, most recently the CEO of the Dear Media Podcast Network. Across from me, the creator, founder of the Skinny Confidential. Your wife, Lauren Everett. I was going to say something else, but you know. Okay, whatever you want to say. I am so excited for this episode

because we talk so much about hormones and the gut and preventative care. Dr. Gundry is so smart to be able to pick his brain is awesome. I hear you guys on my latest Instagram. You told me that you want to see more on hormone health. So I'm putting together something really fun with my girlfriend Ingrid, and we're going to do like a live chat on hormones a couple times a month. So stay tuned for that. I am not going to shut the fuck up about hormones. I am just not because I feel so much better after getting my hormones balanced. Well, clearly, I mean, everybody, I mean, it's something that we've talked about it before

on this show a little bit, but it's definitely something we haven't taught. And now, obviously, on this episode, it's something I'm actually interested for myself. I want to go and get the balance done. I want to figure out what's going on because, you know, we all go to our general physicians and get yearly physicals,

but they don't necessarily test for all the things you just got tested for. So it's definitely piqued my interest. I think it's piqued a lot of people's interest. So, you know, we got to get it. We got to get it checked out. It's obviously a big part of our life. Yeah. And I think that one thing I found, and I said this in the anxiety episode, is that you can't go to a general practitioner to get your hormones checked. Well, you can, but you're not going to get the same amount of information as if you went to a hormone specialist.

Well, you know what I felt like? I like both. I think you should go to a general physician and get a yearly physical, get all your blood work, get all that, you know, test everything there. And then you should also get your hormone check and compare them against and see how they interact with each other.

Because just doing one doesn't seem like a full solution. You want to go and have like the doctor hold your balls while you cough. Well, I mean, that's not my favorite part. My doctor's an old... Is that what they do? They hold your balls while you cough?

They don't hold them. They just kind of do they cut them and they go and then you feel, I don't even know what they're feeling for. So the doctor just teabags your balls and then you do your fake cough. Yeah. It's a little weird, but you know, whatever. I mean, I haven't got to the point. I know pretty soon I got to get the, you know, the finger in the ass. What is that? That's like later, right? Is that the prosthetic finger in the ass? Yeah. That's like, what is that? That's important. We're getting on a tangent here. I don't want to scare people away from this episode. So just get excited because we do discuss that. We're going to continue to discuss hormones.

I'm not going to shut up about it. I'm going to tell you guys my journey. I do have so much more energy than I did two weeks ago. So, and I'm starting to like lose water weight and weight, and I'm starting to feel much better. With that, let's welcome Dr. Gundry. Michael, can you give them a little intro? Yeah. So this is Dr. Gundry's second time on the Skinny Confidential Him and Her show. The last time was episode 163 and we talked about how

can vegetables be unhealthy was what I titled it, the plant paradox. So go check that one out if you haven't heard it. So who is Dr. Stephen Gundry? For those of you that are not familiar with him, Dr. Stephen Gundry is an author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Plant Paradox, and a cardiac surgeon and medical researcher. He has performed over 10,000 heart surgeries and is the former head of the cardiothoracic surgery at Loma Linda University. God, that's a mouthful. Dr. Gundry is currently the head of GundryMD, which is based in Palm Springs, California. With that, Dr. Stephen Gundry, welcome back to the Skinny Confidential, him and Her Show. This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her. So I just posted this post on hormones and on thyroid, and I've talked a lot about the gut

on my Instagram, and I'm in the midst of losing 25 pounds. So to have Dr. Gundry in studio, back in studio. Almost two years. We just, I was calculating it. We're at 166. This is 278, 279. So I've been doing the math of, you know, basically six a month. It's been a while. And I'm just coming up on my first hundredth podcast.

Congratulations. Wow. You know what? I commend you for that because, you know, running a studio, I always tell people like, don't do this if you're going to do it for 15 or 20 episodes. Don't even bother getting into it. People are like, I'm going to do a season and see how it goes.

Talk to me when you get to 100 because that's no easy feat. I know. So congratulations. All right. I'm talking to you when I got to 100. So I honestly could not be more excited that you're on the podcast today. I have 8,000 questions. My audience has 8,000 questions.

I feel like- Can we get to all of them in an hour? I hope. I feel like- Might take another 100 episodes, but we'll get there. In this episode, just so you are so excited, we're going to talk about COVID and what we can do to up our immune system. And we're also going to talk about hormones. And we're going to talk about leaky gut. And we're going to talk about weight loss. And we're going to get detailed because you are the king of detail. I like details. Okay, so first I guess we'll just start out. What can we be doing right now to make our immune system a fucking killer? Well, you don't necessarily want it to be a killer. Maybe that's not the right word. That's probably like the worst word. I think that's part of the problem. So I have argued that the reason the vast majority of people who are dying with COVID or

getting it severely have chronic diseases is that, in my opinion, and actually Hippocrates' opinion, all disease begins in the gut. And so my research over the last 20 years has shown that so far, every person with a chronic disease, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, you choose the disease, autoimmune disease, has a leaky gut at the basis of that. And if you fix the leaky gut, that disease goes away. That's how I got into this by reversing heart disease by food. So back to your question, 70 to 80% of all your immune system is located lining the gut because in general, that's where mischief comes across. And so we've got all of our,

if you will, army stationed primarily at the gut, also in our mouth and our nose and some in our lungs, but most of it's down there. So if you have a leaky gut, which really by definition means that things are coming across the wall of your gut that aren't supposed to come across the wall of your gut, things like what I'm interested in, lectins, those little sticky proteins, pieces of bacteria, which I don't swear, but I can't resist. They're lipopolysaccharides and they're abbreviated LPSs. So if you want to remember it, it's little pieces of shit because that's actually what it is. They are actually pieces of bacteria. And these guys literally come across the wall of your gut. And on the other side of the wall of your gut is this early warning system. They go, holy cow, look what's coming across here.

We're under attack. Mobilize the forces. Come down here and help out. And one of the reasons we put so much weight on in our gut, and we have a beer belly, is that that's where the battle's being done. And we're actually storing munitions, supplies for our army down there. And that's actually one of the reasons it's so hard to lose weight is because of this war that's going on down there. So if we fix our leaky gut, is it also, it's going to also help fix, I don't want to say fix, but it's also going to help our immune system. Yeah, because your immune system is quite honestly distracted. And if you say, hey guys, you guys got better things to do, go up to the front line, up in your mouth and your nose and your lungs and work up there. You don't have to worry about what's going

on down here. But the other important things is your immune system really, really, really needs vitamin D and vitamin C to work properly. And I've done some podcasts on this. First of all, vitamin D is essential to make the wall of your gut tough and strong. And the vast majority of people have low vitamin Ds in this country, even in Southern California. I was reading a study and it's, and I can't remember the exact one, but it was saying that, and correct me if I'm wrong, the reason I wanted to have you on so much again is because we want to talk to a doctor about everything that's going on here. We don't, politically, we don't know which way to go on this. I don't politically, we don't know which way to go

on this. I don't really care. I mostly want to talk about from the health perspective. From what I've heard, it sounds like close to 70% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D. We've been told to stay inside, but like if vitamin D helps combat things like COVID and boost our immune system, like, is that the right, I understand like social distancing, but I think we're a lot of Americans were confused. It's like, okay, we need vitamin D. We can't get vitamin D if we're indoors. What are we supposed to do?

We need it. We're deficient in it. It's nearly impossible to get enough vitamin D from sunlight. And particularly... In your diet? Yeah, you have to swallow vitamin D. And it's so easy to do.

I mean, it's cheap. It's in every drugstore. You don't have to worry, quite frankly, about the quality of vitamin D3. It's vitamin D3. And you don't have to be scared about the amount. I've personally never seen vitamin D toxicity in 20 years, and I measure it every three months in all my patients. Mark Hyman, my colleague, has never seen vitamin D toxicity. Maybe it exists, but I doubt it. I have run my vitamin D levels greater than 120 nanograms per milliliter for 20 years and I'm not dead. How much vitamin D should we be taking every single one?

Bare minimum. We ought to be taking 5,000 international units, bare minimum. Okay. I've asked all of my patients and me personally to double their vitamin D during this time period. And I have this little trick that I do, and I'm not recommending that your listeners do, but it's probably not going to hurt them. If I feel like I'm coming down with something, a scratchy throat or a little sniffle, I take 150,000 units of vitamin D three days in a row. 150,000. That's 50,000 in the morning, 50,000 lunchtime, 50,000. Just through the vitamin, just through vitamin D.

Just vitamin D. Yeah, they're little bitty things. Yeah, the tiny ones. They're microscopic. I've been taking one every single morning. I'm going to up mine to two or three. Yeah, I went up to two. Like I say, when I decided to keep seeing patients during all this, I didn't have any illness. But for instance, Sunday I took, this is now several months ago, I took 100,000 units. Monday I took 50,000 units. Tuesday I took 25,000 units.

And then I sat at 10,000 units. So vitamin D is so important. Correct. Okay, what are some foods that give us vitamin D that you would recommend? So vitamin D is so important. Correct. Okay. What are some foods that give us vitamin D that you would recommend? There really aren't any. Mushrooms. Okay.

Mushrooms. What kind of mushrooms? Actually, most of the mushrooms have vitamin D. Okay. And fun fact, we just had a world mushroom expert on my podcast. If you put mushrooms out in the sun, you'll increase their vitamin D. That's interesting. So you can dehydrate them out in the sun, you'll increase their vitamin D. So you can dehydrate them out in the sun.

That's interesting. So when it comes to COVID, I think our issue here is there's been a lot of talk about what happens after, but there's not been a lot of talk about what to do before in terms of boosting immunity. So we're touching on vitamin D here, but what else can people do to boost their immunity? Because listen, this thing doesn't look like it's going anywhere. This is something we're going to have to combat for a very long time. It's not feasible that we're going to be able to stay indoors forever and not see each other.

It's just not going to happen. Americans just won't accept it. That's clear. So what are things that we can do to boost our immune system so that we can figure out how to live with this? Hold up. Boy, oh boy, am I so excited to partner with Parsley Health. Parsley is designed to solve your most persistent health problems and heal your body from the inside out. So basically Parsley Health combines modern

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your health coach, then you do advanced testing, you get a personalized health plan, prescriptions as needed, and you can message them anytime. This is the wave of the future. I am telling you, I am like so excited to tell you guys about this. So like Lauren just got her hormones tested. Obviously, if you're listening to this episode, we're talking all about hormones. Think advanced diagnostic testing that looks at everything from your hormones to gut microbiome, an hour long appointments with your doctor. On average, people get, you know, 19 minutes a year with their doctor if they're lucky. So like this, you know, already you're getting three times that with just one visit. Like Michael said, hormones and gut is so big in this episode. And I am on this path right now to tell women to get their hormones tested. So check out Parsley

Health, ask them about their hormone testing, ask them about their gut testing. You guys will love it. Sound like a game changer for you. Parsley Health is offering all skinny confidential him and her listeners an exclusive offer of $150 off an annual membership by going to parsleyhealth.com and entering our code skinny. That's P-A-R-S-L-E-Y health.com with code skinny to get $150 off a year-long membership. Get your hormones tested, get your gut checked. You guys will not be sorry. Yeah. I mean, imagine World War II, Churchill telling everybody, well, let's just stay in our bunkers until the Manhattan Project is finished, and then we'll have the bomb. And it's the same thing.

Do you really think we're going to have a vaccine that's going to be useful anytime soon? No. No, and even if we do, I'm not going to be the first line to test it. I'm not going to be the first one to test it. Plus, I wrote an editorial at Thrive Global a couple of weeks ago. The problem is, if you look at the current flu vaccine, which is very well designed, I don't take it,

but it's very well designed. If you look at 65-year-old people and older who are the big risk of COVID, those people, the flu vaccine was 16% effective, CDC data, 2018, 2019 flu season, 16% effective. So 84% of the people were not, didn't help. It helped none of them. And so it really doesn't matter to me if the virus, if they get a vaccine to this virus

and it works in a monkey or it works in a 21 year old, that's not going to help me very much because our immune system, as we get older and older, begins to get in a tank. As a heart transplant surgeon, one of the things that was exciting was I did little babies, newborn babies, and did a heart transplant, and we could fool their immune system pretty well. And we could take a 75-year-old man or woman and do a heart transplant, and we didn't need much immunosuppression because their immune systems didn't work. So the idea that we're going to have an effective vaccine, so we have to arm ourselves, and we can do that. So vitamin D, number one. Number two, vitamin C. Now, the problem with vitamin C is you lose most of the vitamin C you

swallow very quickly. Three or four hours, it's gone. It's water-solu the vitamin C you swallow very quickly. Three or four hours, it's gone. It's water soluble, so you pee it off. Well, should you take a ton of vitamin C? Problem with that is it gives you diarrhea, and that's no fun. It gets everything cleaned out. We'll get into your love of diarrhea soon. So, yeah, so get timed release vitamin C.

It's available. Get 1,000 milligrams twice a day. But this is something I've written about, and it's just so important to realize. Sugar or sugar-containing foods or foods that turn into sugar, like a bagel, for instance, or like fruit or like a glass of orange juice suppresses your immune system by 70% for up to six hours after you eat that bagel or drink a glass of orange juice. So when we were told as kids to drink orange juice to boost our vitamin C? Exactly the opposite. Exactly the opposite.

And we can really do a really cool deep dive on why that happens. It was actually worked out by Linus Pauling, the famous vitamin C doctor. He won two Nobel prizes for physics, pretty smart guy. But he proved, you want to get really nerdy for a second? Yeah, let's get nerdy. All right. So this is really nerdy or geeky. I guess when I was growing up was nerdy, now it's geeky. So what happens is vitamin C is actually made from sugar, from glucose, and it's a five-step process.

And we unfortunately don't have the last enzyme to turn glucose into vitamin C. But both vitamin C and glucose are carried into cells. And to make a white blood cell work or immune system, you have to have a 50 times concentration of vitamin C inside the cell than running around in your blood. And so there's this motor that pushes vitamin C into your cells. Unfortunately, glucose uses that same motor. And so if you've got a lot of glucose in your blood, glucose gets pushed in the cell and vitamin C doesn't get concentrated in the cell. And so your cell depends on vitamin C for basically developing an explosion that kills the virus or kills the bacteria.

So every time you do something healthy, like have a glass of orange juice or have a whole wheat bagel, God forbid, you're actually suppressing your immune system dramatically for up to six hours after you did that. So how can we get the vitamin C that we should be taking? Is there a brand you recommend? No, so there's, I mean, there's several time-release vitamin Cs. And what I do, I do it even crazier. So I'll take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C twice a day. Can you tell us the brand?

I'm sorry. You know I'm going to go buy it. Do you have a brand? No, I actually don't. Okay. I will. It's almost done. Gundry MDs, it's in development.

Okay. But I don't have it yet. Okay. So you can't go have mine yet. But I brought you some of my stuff. So what vitamin C? So just buy time-release. Just time-release, okay. So you can't go have mine yet. But I brought you some of my stuff. So what vitamin C? So just by time release. Just time release, okay.

There's only a couple that make it. Now, the other thing is get yourself liposomal vitamin C or worst case scenario, go, I don't care where, buy the chewable tablets of vitamin C. Is the liposomal vitamin C the liquid one? No, you can actually get it in capsules. You can, okay. I'm going to show them the one we have. And Taylor, do you mind bringing me a notepad

so I can take notes on this episode with a pen? Take it four times a day. Okay. Okay? So anybody can carry a few chewable vitamin Cs in their pocket and just four times a day. And then you'll have a nice level of vitamin C. I mean, how many vitamins are you taking a day

if you actually added it up? Actually, I published that in Longevity Paradox last year. I take about 120 in the morning and about 80 at night. Holy shit. Holy shit. Got to up my vitamin game. And if you had asked me that 20 years ago when I started this, I literally felt supplements made expensive urine.

And through the years, looking at tens of thousands of people's blood tests every three months, I'm able to tell, you know, whether they're taking not only a supplement, but how much of that supplement they're taking. And even if they changed brands, you know, I mean, I'll get so hilarious, B12, I'm a big fan of methyl B12, and it has to go under your tongue because if you swallow it, quite frankly, it won't work. So I tell people to go put a B12 under their tongue. And I had a gentleman come in and his B12 is low. And I said, you're not taking your B12. And he says, yes, I am. I do it every day. I said, no, you're not. Look at this. Here's the number. He said, I am. I said, yeah, you're not taking your B12. And he says, yes, I am. I do it every day. I said, no, you're not. Look at this. You know, here's the number.

He said, I am. I said, yeah, you're putting it under your tongue, right? And he says, no, it's so sweet. I use it to sweeten my coffee. And I said, but idiot, look. See, it doesn't work. And, you know, if I had thought that 20 years ago, you know, it's like, holy cow, I can see the evidence of this stuff happening.

So you take vitamin D, you really do gnarly vitamin D. You take a time-release vitamin C. Twice a day. Twice a day. And then B12, you're a huge fan of, but it needs to go under your tongue. Under your tongue. Then you want to get some selenium in you. There is a cool study out of China that there are certain soils in China that have a lot of selenium and a lot that don't.

And so they looked at the COVID-19 prevalence in people who had selenium soil versus people who didn't have selenium soil. And lo and behold, the selenium soil folks did much better. And incidentally, there are now four human studies that show the higher your vitamin D, the less susceptible you are to COVID, the lower your vitamin D, the more severe it's going to be, period. So let me ask you this. It's not up to any of us, but we've gone through this now for this, basically the entire year. We're close to the entire year, the first three months. If you were setting the policy, which I know you're not, and we have to be careful here, but if it was up to you and you were telling people, listen, this isn't going anywhere for

the next few years, and we're going to have to figure out how to live. What would, like, what policy would you put in place? Cause clearly just, we can't stay indoors forever. We need to figure out how to boost our immune system. We need to figure out how to continue to live. There's a lot of people right now that are freaked out and scared because they just don't know what to do. They don't know the answer. They don't know what steps to take. They don't know what's right. They don't know who to listen to. You're a medical doctor. If you were giving your patient advice and it was up to them to do whatever they want to do, what would you tell them? Yeah. So this is what, I've done three

COVID-19 podcasts on these subjects because I'm so concerned about it. So you've got to get vitamin D, you've got to get vitamin C, you've got to get selenium. And all you need to eat is three Brazil nuts a day and you'll get all the selenium you need. Wow, that's a good tip. Yeah, that's easy. Is there a certain brand? You know, I can't help any brand. I mean, go to Trader Joe's and get Brazil nuts. I shouldn't tell people that because now I can't get Brazil nuts anymore.

Yeah, Brazil nuts are sold out now. Yeah, they're gone. Get some Brazil nuts. Then there's some other, I think, useful tricks. One is a plant compound that's present in onions, the white pith of citrus and apples called quercetin. Some people pronounce it quercetin. And quercetin looks to be effective against this virus. There's another component of green tea, ECGC, which looks effective against this virus. And I actually ask my patients to have a couple of cups of green tea every day. So I think those are kind of the basic things.

But if you're going to do none of that, you've got to get sugar and processed foods out of your diet. I'll give you a great example. Should be doing that anyway, though, right? Well, yeah. But I had Donald Kessler on my podcast a few weeks ago who used to be the FDA commissioner. He's been dean of Yale School of Medicine, dean of UCSF School of Medicine. Smart guy.

And he is actually the guy who made the labeling laws back during the Reagan years. And he said, let me tell you what happened. He said, we were all set to show everybody how much sugar was actually in everything. And Big Food, when we showed them what we were going to do, said, you can't do that. You can't tell people how much sugar. What do you mean? Fuck up the whole business. Yeah. They said, you're not sugar is in it. He says, what do you mean? Fuck up the whole business. Yeah. They said, you're not going to do this. He says, you know what they did? They walked

into Reagan's office and said, your boy here can't do this. And he said, next thing I know, Reagan's on the phone saying, we can't do that. Wouldn't be nice. So what they did was they hid where the sugar was. So here's the tip. And if they want one tip today, here's the tip. So you look at the package. If you're looking at a label on the back, number one, put the package down because there's no label, for instance, on a head of lettuce. So, but if you're reading the label, look at total carbohydrates. Take away fiber, which is right below it.

That will tell you the amount of sugar per serving in that package. Do not look where it says sugar. That's a lie. And then divide that number. It'll be in grams. Divide that number. It'll be in grams. Divide that number by four, and there are four grams of sugar per teaspoon. So you will see how many teaspoons of sugar there is in that product. I do this.

I have bunches of healthy snacks in my office to show my patients. And, you know, I write about, hey, you know, taro roots, cool stuff, and plantains, cool stuff. And so people go out and buy taro root chips or plantain chips or almond flour tortillas or almond flour tortilla chips. And they come in and their blood work is kind of funky and they're not losing weight. And I go, you know, what are you eating? They say, oh, you know, all this healthy stuff. I said, let me show you this. So let's just take, for instance, a tortilla chip. So in a package of tortilla chips, if you eat 10 of these healthy tortilla chips, we're not talking about corn, We're talking about, you know,

I won't name the brand because I like them, but they're, yeah. Okay. So they're unfortunately like 24 grams of sugar per serving. Divide that by four. There's six teaspoons of sugar in that serving that you were munching on and it's so healthy for you and people don't know because we lied to them i didn't but that was how it came about well this is fitting very wellnessy for this podcast. We all deserve to know what we're putting into our bodies. And that's why we are huge fans of Ritual. This has been all over my social media. It's been on my stories. It's been on my blog. It's been on the podcast. I cannot shut the F up about Ritual. Why I am so obsessed with this brand is I know it's one of those brands that I'm going to recommend to you guys. You're going to take it every day. It's going to become a part of your lifestyle and you're going to be obsessed with the results. So for me to recommend it, it's not one of those

things that's going to be sitting in your drawer collecting cobwebs. Okay. This is something that you can put next to your tongue scraper and you can just pop it in your mouth every day. You're going to get all your vitamins in one vitamin. It's also a vitamin that doesn't taste nasty. So it's minty fresh. And this was really important to me when I was pregnant. I took rituals prenatals and the prenatal is like a lemony taste. So it doesn't make you feel nauseous when you take it. There's so many vitamins out there that you take them and you get that shocky, annoying feeling in the back of your throat. And Ritual's vitamins are not like that at all. You can take them on an empty stomach like I do. They have a delayed release. Like I said, no nausea designed capsule, very, very gentle on the stomach. So what you should know about Ritual

is they use high quality ingredients. You can see everything on their site. They left out all mystery, like shady additives, no synthetic fillers, no extras that we don't need. Okay. Daily changes can lead to big results. So start small today. Rituals offering all skinny confidential him and her listeners 10% off your first three months. Try it out. Satisfaction guaranteed. Go to ritual.com slash skinny to start your ritual today. That's 10% off during your first three months at ritual.com slash skinny. Guys, I know you are going to love this brand. So what are some foods that people think are healthy that are not healthy and what are some modifications people can make to those foods? Well, so number one, the idea of whole grain goodness is just an anathema. Number one. That's a really good word, anathema.

Yeah, it's just, I mean, whole grain goodness. First of all, look at your whole grain bread and do you see any whole grains in there? No, they've all been ground up. And when you grind up a haul of weed or oats or whatever, you release the oils to air and that oil oxidizes and goes rancid. So you have to put a preservative in that package and you don't even have to put it on the label to keep it from oxidizing. You don't have to put it on the label because it's what's called grass, generally regarded as safe. For instance, Roundup is grass. You don't have to disclose that there's Roundup in your package. You don't.

It's generally regarded as safe, even though you just heard Bayer settled $20 billion. So whole grains, they've ground up. So they've gone rancid. To prevent them from being rancid, there's BHT. BHT is one of the best endocrine disruptors that anybody has ever invented. And if you want to put some weight on, BHT is a great way to gain weight. Secondly, we know that in wheat, there's this cool little lectin called wheat germ agglutinin, WGA.

It's so small, you don't need a leaky gut to make it get through the wall of your gut. And it can bind to fat cells and act like insulin and pump sugar into your fat cells so that you will store fat. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. We had the world's largest stockyards at that time. Very proud, very proud. How do we fatten an animal for slaughter? We feed cows and pigs whole grains, primarily corn, and beans, soybeans. That's how we fatten them.

And so if you want to get fat, eat whole grains and beans, and I guarantee you it'll work just fine. What is a brand of bread that you would recommend? So there's no brand of bread that I recommend because the problem is it's still primarily pure sugar. So getting back to Donald Kessler, he says, let me give you a thing that you're going to go to the store and pick up and you're going to think it's great. He says, okay, so here's this thing that you're going to buy and it has 33 grams of total carbohydrates. It has one gram of fiber, and it has zero sugar, and it has four grams of protein, and it's fat-free. And he says,

what is that? And I'm thinking, well, I'll tell you what it is. It's a bagel. And that bagel says it has no sugar, but the way flour has been manipulated now, it is sugar faster than you can digest sugar. So that healthy bagel is swallowing, well, so four, eight teaspoons of sugar that will actually make your blood sugar go up faster than if you actually swallowed eight teaspoons of sugar, that healthy bagel. How can I ever eat a bagel again? I want you to think about it and make a choice and say, gee, now, if you were going to eat a bagel, what you want to do is eat a sourdough bagel that wasn't bought in the grocery store that was bought from somebody who actually made it and there's a fabulous company up in the bay area that now makes sourdough bread out of approved flours like millet and sorghum and just look it up on so if you're eating bread

you're eating sourdough yeah but the purpose of bread is to get olive oil into your mouth. And I brought you some olive oil. So I want to eat the sourdough bread brand that you just recommended with your olive oil on top of it. Perfect. What's the sourdough bread you said? What did you say it was called? Let me

look it up real quick. Okay. While you're looking it up, I got to go back to this because I'm going kick myself if i don't how are we feeling about the masks do the masks no masks you know you don't want that's a great people people get angry about the mass conversation but i just want to know like from a medical experience like what what does it help does it not help so who should wear them who should not wear them yeah so first of all masks unless they're N95 masks, will not filter viruses. So my cowboy bandana is not working.

Yeah, and I've got a cowboy bandana right here. Yep. But, and I agree with a lot of evidence that one of the problems with masks in general is, first of all, you're going to reuse this. And you're not going to wash it every time you take it off. Plus, it's going to make you feel fairly

invincible that you can actually touch your, and you're not going to wash it every time you take it off. Plus, it's going to make you feel fairly invincible that you can actually touch the mask and touch your face so that, you know, I'm holding this microphone, which I'm sure someone's contaminated with COVID, and now I'm going to put my mask on. So now it's already on my mask. But, so what I like about a mask is that it actually impresses upon you that you should social distance from somebody. And I think if we view it with that effect, I'm actually all for masks if you view it as a way of, you know, please.

Because we just have to stay away from each other right now. But the idea that these guys are going to trap a lot of stuff, no. But there are a few pretty decent studies that there may be somewhere between 20% and 50% effective at reducing transmission. Talk about being ahead of the curve. I cannot think of another company, besides maybe Dear Media and this podcast network, that has been so far ahead of the curve.

Guys, Skillshare. We have been talking about this platform for what, Lauren? Four years now? Four years? Long time. We can't shut up about it. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes

for creative and curious people, which is totally our audience. You can explore new skills, deepen existing passions, and get lost in creativity. I personally am a big fan of their photography class. They also have an Instagram stories class. You know, you see my Instagram stories where it's like video and movement. I love that. And my team took a Skillshare class to learn how to do that. And what platform is more relevant now than ever? This, you know, being able to do these classes at home, online, straight from your computer and your phone.

Two of my favorite classes right now are in the productivity category because I think we can all be more productive. The first one is called Simple Productivity, How to Accomplish More with Less by one of our favorite authors, Greg McKeown. He's actually been on this show and he wrote a book called Essentialism, which is an incredible book. You should check that out as well. But he did a class on Skillshare all about how to be more productive. There is also another one called Productivity with Evernote. Use one tool for everything. I've used Evernote.

Lauren's used Evernote for years now. We've done basically since the inception of this podcast, all of our notes are on Evernote and you can do so much more with it. So check that class out as well by Lindsay C. Holmes. There's really no excuse. If you're a listener of this podcast, it's time to get your hands dirty and become a practitioner. Go to Skillshare, you guys. Check it out.

They have something for everyone. You can do this as a side hustle and still work your full-time job. Explore your creativity and get two free months of premium membership at Skillshare.com slash TSC. That's two whole months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free. Get started and joined today by heading to Skillshare.com slash TSC. Again, two free months of unlimited access to thousands of classes at Skillshare.com slash TSC. Yeah. I mean, I think one good thing's coming of this is that, you know, we were really touchy

with everybody shaking hands, grabbing this, you know, he's washing hands. You don't know when you feel impolite. If you don't shake someone's hand. I've never been a guy that wants to just grab people all the time. You know, I like to be, I like a little distance. Yeah, I'm not a handshaker. I like how we can be like, you know, I like the Japanese, we can bow maybe, we do something, do something different. But yeah, I agree. I mean, if we know we transfer germs by touching and we're doing that all the time and people aren't washing, like that's the biggest thing, people aren't taking care of themselves. You know, maybe the mask helps that. But what you're saying here is it's not necessarily going to help

if I cough or sneeze when I'm wearing my cowboy mask. It's not going to, but what about the spread of COVID? Does that? Remember, that's a virus and it's a very tiny virus. And I mean, there have been so many studies on the flu virus, which is actually a slightly bigger virus than the COVID virus. And the masks are pretty much totally ineffective in transmission of flu viruses.

And I can tell you when I've done it on my podcast that hilariously there was a study done in England when I was training there of the effect of surgical masks on infections in the operating room. And so they designed a study, couldn't do it now, but that half the time the surgeon didn't wear a mask and the other half the time he wore a mask and they looked at the infection rates. And lo and behold, the infection rate was actually lower when they didn't wear masks. And now you go, huh, that's impossible.

Well, it turns out that the mask would rub your dander off of your skin and the dander, which had bacteria, would fall into the wound. And so if you didn't have a mask on, there was nothing to rub. And so less fell into the wound. Michael, while I'd love to hear about your dander falling into my- Well, listen, the reason I want to ask is I had an experience, restaurants are opening back up, right? And we go and you show up at the restaurant. So you got to put your mask on to go in, you walk and you go, okay, fine. That's the policy. And you we go and you show up at the restaurant so you got to put your mask on to go in you walk and you're okay fine that's the policy and you get there and you walk four feet to the table okay now you can take off the mask and i'm like what was what was that all about what was the what was it my thing is that and then they go and make your drinks and they take their fingers

and put it in the ice and put it in the cocktail and bring you your drink with the straw that they picked up and put in and then your plate that the expo's touched and also the cook has touched it doesn't really make a lot of sense and to your point about that's why i want you to drink red wine when you go out to eat because nobody's going to put their finger in your red wine but to your ice cubes to your earlier point though about just humans in general i have not yet met a human that is so disciplined and regiment that when they're wearing the mask they don't they don't fiddle with it or touch it or rub their face and i feel like that make that the mask is actually maybe making it worse because you're touching you're fiddling you're moving or even that's just how we are we're humans we're not used to having something covering our face

and so you know these people are i am a surgeon but yeah to me it's well yeah but you know they're out in the back they're making the drinks they're cooking the food and so it just it just seems a little silly to me. You know, I want to be compliant, but at the same time, it's like, you know, this doesn't seem like a long-term solution here. No, uh, it's not. We, I mean, we literally, we have to arm ourselves against, you know, we have to get our immune system ready to go.

I mean, our immune system is really good. It's served, you know, humans pretty long time, but we just have to give it everything in its power. And then I think until, you know, this finally dies off, but we just got to take a few precautions. Will it ever fully die off or will it be like a flu? Well, eventually that's, that's the $64,000 question. That's a thing that, first of all, I'm, I'm an immunologist, but I'm not an epidemiologist,

and there's a difference. The problem, as I see it, is that coronaviruses are, for instance, the common cold is a coronavirus. So this is a cousin of the common cold. And coronavirus vaccines for the common cold don't exist. Why? Because it mutates every few months. As any parent of a child will know, you for in the next 10 years will be getting cold of the month that your child will bring home from school. And your child may have had a cold last month, but here comes a new one. So if this coronavirus, COVID-19, acts anything like other coronaviruses, then it's going to mutate. We know it's mutated once already.

Our strain here in the United States is the European strain, which had mutated from the Chinese strain. So I got news for you. This is, in the United States, not the Kung flu. It isn't. It's a European flu. And if you want to call it European flu, fine. And fun fact, the Spanish flu, which killed millions of Americans, didn't even come from Spain. It actually came from Kansas. But we don't call it the kansas flu you did you get your questions answered about dander because i have some questions about olive oil and weight loss yeah i just but i just kind of want i wanted to hear from your perspective because i think the

way that lauren and i have approached this from the beginning is like obviously we follow the guidelines but it's been more about a study of how to boost our immune systems how to stay away from people how to like get healthier ourselves yeah And I think that- Well, that's what my whole platform is, preventative beauty, preventative wellness. There's some people talking about it, but I would say the majority of the media has not been talking about how to boost immunity. It's been what to do after. And that's a little bit frustrating because everyone's so scared and they don't know what to do. You're olive oil. Last time you were on the podcast, you were raving about how much olive oil you eat, and now you have your own.

Why is olive oil so important to our diets? So, lots of reasons. First of all, two or three of the blue zones, the world's longest living populations, consume about a liter of olive oil per week. That's about 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. There is my favorite study of why we really ought to think about having olive oil in our diet, and a lot of it is a Spanish study called the PREDIMED study, P-R-E-D-I-M-E-D. And what they did was they took 65-year-old people who actually, the original study was looking at people who had just had a heart attack or a stent

in their coronary artery, and they put them on one of three diets. They were all Mediterranean diet, but in one group, they had to have a liter of olive oil per week. And they gave them a liter, which this is close. So this is half a liter. So we're looking at a bottle of the Mountain Valley water. So two of these bottles a week, they would have to have as olive oil, and they'd bring it back the next week. The study went on for five years. And so one group had to have a liter of olive oil a week. Second group had to have the equivalent calories in mixed nuts, primarily walnuts. Third group followed a low-fat

Mediterranean diet based on the American Heart Association's diet. So they stopped the study at the end of three years because the difference in new events of new heart attacks, new stents, was wildly higher in the low-fat group. And the olive oil group and the nut group actually had very few new events. They continued to follow these groups for five years. And what they found was that the olive oil group and the nut group, at the end of five years, they're now 70 years old, had better memory, better functional capacity at 70 than they did at 65. In other words, they got better.

The group that was on the low-fat diet, as you would expect, didn't think as good as when they were 65. Can you lose weight having a liter of olive oil? As a matter of fact, the group that had the olive oil lost weight over the five years, and the low-fat group, surprise, surprise, actually gained weight during the five years and the low fat group, surprise, surprise, actually gained weight during that five years. So yes, olive oil is actually a very efficient way to lose weight. How do you use your olive oil? What are some creative ways to use it besides a salad? Well, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. So you can safely cook with olive oil. Everybody says, oh, it goes bad, it smokes, it becomes oxidized.

No. Turns out we've had two of the world's olive oil experts on the podcast, and olive oil is the least oxidizable cooking oil that you can use. It's actually better than coconut oil in terms of oxidation. Why does it smoke? It has a very low smoke point. That's what that smoke you see coming out. But that has nothing to do with oxidation.

So cook with it, number one. But more importantly, olive oil should come to the table and you pour it on whatever you're eating. So the purpose of broccoli is to have olive oil poured on it. The purpose of a piece of fish is not to eat the fish. It's to pour olive oil on it. That's the purpose. See, I like this.

Lauren, you say I'm not attached to food. Now if I know that the food is a mechanism to get me this type of stuff, I'm in. Food's just a way of getting polyphenols into your mouth. And polyphenols are these really cool plant compounds that i've written about and published about extensively that will change your health for the better and your olive oil's award-winning flavor you gave it to me it's a rich buttery taste and you say it's organic extra virgin olive oil first cold pressed why is your olive oil different than other olive oils out there? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. So this, what a fun story.

Yes, what a fun story. So I get a call from Othmane from Morocco. And Othmane says, I hear you're really into polyphenols. And I say, oh yeah, man. And he says, I hear you're really into olive oil. I said, yeah. He says, what if I told you I have an olive oil that has 30 times more polyphenols than any olive oil that's ever been tested by the French government? Would you be interested? And I said, I'll be right there. So this guy, fourth generation olive farmers, they own, imagine this, a million and a half olive trees in Morocco in the base of the Atlas Mountains outside of, well, it's kind

of halfway between Marrakesh and Casablanca. But anyhow, so he gets this great idea. He goes to his dad and he's a young man. And he says, dad, you know, great wines, the grapes are planted in rocks. They're not watered. They struggle. They have to cope with heat. And the more the vine struggles, the more polyphenols are in the grapes and the better the wine.

And he says, I wonder if we could do that with olives. And his dad says, that's a stupid idea, but yeah, okay, go ahead. So they find this plot of land that's pure rock and they dig up a bunch of the rocks and they decide to plant the olive trees like rows of grapevines, close together, and then they underwater it. And it takes five years to get a crop. Five years come, he presses it, and he takes it to his dad, and his dad basically spits it out. He says, oh my gosh, five years. This is awful. This isn't even extra virgin. This is horrible. I don't know what's in it. So he takes it to the local extra virgin tester. It looks for acidity. He said, no, this is extra virgin.

You're right, it's extra virgin. He says, boy, but there's something about this. He says, if you don't mind, send it to the lab in Paris that analyzes all the French olive oil. So the guy calls him up and he says, are you the guy who sent this? And he said, what the heck are you doing? There's 30 times more polyphenols in this than we've ever tested in our lives. And he said, well, here's what I've been doing. And so sure enough, we fly down there and it's exactly as he says, and then what he's done. So he underwaters it, he doesn't fertilize it, he plants them close together, it's out in the middle of nowhere in the heat of the Moroccan desert, they're stressed and they

make these incredible olives. So then he builds a plant right there so that literally from, you know, from here next door is the plant and the olives. They press them and then it goes directly into these giant stainless steel tanks that are hermetically sealed and there's nitrogen gas put on top of them and cooled so that they can't see any oxygen. And so he made this particular olive oil that I gave you for more two and three star Michelin chefs than any olive oil in the world. And I talked him into letting us have this. But for the people who hate olive oil or don't really want to have a liter of olive oil per week because it's really hard, my wife and I do about a liter and a half a week. So he has a concentrated form of this olive oil that one tablespoon a day

is the equivalent of a liter of regular olive oil and polyphenols so i just give myself a shot of it every day i didn't bring you any wow but it's really great okay so but i love olive oil so this is gonna be i mean we're to use your olive oil on everything. We're going to bring it to the table like you said. Yeah, just bring it to the table. I have a friend who lives in Monaco and her skin is so plump and luscious and beautiful. And she's like, she glows from the inside out. Sophia Loren's secret was olive oil.

Yeah, I need to eat more olive oil. She told anybody who would listen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I even like putting olive oil on my skin. Yeah, that's what I mean. Not only did she, you know, drink it, but she put it on her skin. Yeah, I order it from room service to take my makeup off with.

Perfect. No, I mean, it's true. I mean, instead of using all that other stuff. I just got a thing from London saying, I started putting olive oil on my face and, you know, my skin cleared up. Is it okay if I keep doing that? I'm going, well, duh. Yeah. Yeah.

So I want to talk about hormones. This has been a topic that has been brought up a lot on my platform right now because I went and got my hormones tested and they found out I had a low thyroid and low testosterone and low progesterone. How, okay, I guess this is a three-part question. How can I balance that in the most efficient way? And another question that everyone keeps asking me is, if they want to get their hormones tested,

should they go to a hormone specialist or an endocrinologist? Well, they're often equivalent, but I have a number of endocrinologists refer me their patients to fix hormones. So let me ask you, and you can tell me or you don't need to tell me. So did they measure TSH? Did they measure free T4? Did they measure free T3? And did they measure reverse T3?

Can I text you a picture of the lab that they sent me? I don't have it on me. I don't know what they measured. Okay. So I would tell you, but I just don't know. Okay, so most, unfortunately, most people, most women, most docs test T4 and T3 and TSH. And they don't know, because they were never taught, that free T4 and free T3 are actually the active forms of thyroid. And they weren't taught that some of us will take T3, which most of us agree is the true active form of thyroid, and throw it in a trash can where we

can't get to it. And it's called reverse T3. And until I was taught by the head of pharmacology at UCLA about reverse T3, I wouldn't have known to go look for it. What I think most people should know is that TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, is basically a hormone that your brain makes, your hypothalamus makes, to tell your thyroid gland to make thyroid hormone. And your thyroid gland needs iodine to make thyroid hormone, and it actually needs tryptophan to make thyroid hormone. If the TSH, normally I think someone who I'm treating their TSH should have, the first number should be a one or a two. If it's a three or if it's four or more than that, you got a problem that your brain thinks it's not getting enough thyroid hormone, and it's literally sending out a message saying, you got to give me some more. Now, a lot of times you'll have a normal T4 and a normal T3, and a lot of well-meaning docs will say, well, your thyroid hormones are normal.

Don't worry about the TSH and send you on your way. But if your brain thinks that things are abnormal, then that's what we should be looking at. If I'm giving someone thyroid hormone replacement, and I do, because I see a lot of people with Hashimoto's that we need to fix, and we don't fix it with thyroid hormone, but we got to boost your own production until we fix it, then I'll aim for a zero or a one at most on TSH to know that I've got the right amount. It looks like I need to drive up to Santa Barbara and come get my blood drawn by you. No, you can get your blood drawn down here.

And just send it to you? Yeah, we'll Skype. We were just in Santa Barbara last weekend. And so we can just Skype? Yeah, we'll just Skype or FaceTime or whatever. And what do you think about testosterone and progesterone replacements? Well, and how old is your little baby now? She's five months.

Five months. Personally, I wouldn't worry about progesterone and testosterone at this stage. Okay. Okay. Number two, there's a lot of talk that testosterone is what gives women sex drive. And that if your testosterone is low, you're not going to have any sex drive. Testosterone replacement, in my opinion, and one of my good friends, a gynecologist's opinion, will work in about 15% of women to give women a sex drive.

In the rest of the women, it won't. I have a sex drive. Oh, well, good. I never didn't women a sex drive. In the rest of the women, it won't. I have a sex drive. Oh, well, good. So you don't need to. I never didn't have a sex drive. You don't need testosterone replacement. Yeah, I never, like, listen, you know, I leave it to the medical experts, but I didn't understand the testosterone thing myself. I actually feel like it's made you a little aggro.

Well, quite frankly, what happens, and, you know, I live in two cities where we have what we refer to as Dr. Feelgoods, and they want to give men and women large amounts of hormones, testosterone, progesterone, growth hormone. And I see a number of women, when we look at their testosterone levels, they have testosterone levels higher than a man. And they're growing hair on their face and their arms and they're shaving and they're giving more because that's good for you. And when I show them their hormone levels versus their husband, then the husband, geez,

no wonder you're so grouchy. Wow. I'm pretty, I don't know if I'm on board with the hormone thing. I was like, I listen, I mean, not the hormone, the testosterone thing. I got the, I get the other, like the thyroid, but the testosterone was a little bit. I haven't done anything yet. And before we get into any further biohacking, let's remember. Okay.

That all of these super 95 year olds,olds, 105-year-olds, 110-year-olds who are thriving in villages like Atchiroli or who I profiled, Edith Murray, who died at 106 the day before she had walked her foo-foo dog down El Paseo. She went to sleep, 106, active in two-inch wedgies. These people weren't taking any of these hormones, and I can't tell you, particularly a number of men and women who I see develop cancer, whether it's breast cancer in women or uterine cancer or ovarian cancer or prostate cancer or

colon cancer in men or lymphomas in men, that they're being treated with aggressive hormone therapy, growth hormone and testosterone. And I mean, they call it growth hormone for a reason. It grows things. And I got news for you. As we get older, there is nothing in us that we want to grow. This is a good segue. So what do you think about the thyroid medicine? Is that separate from the hormones? Yeah. So thyroid, again, if, first of all, I assume you were tested for the two antithyroid antibodies. I'm going to send you a picture.

I'm sure that she was. I hope so. So one's called antithyroglobulin, one's called antithyroid peroxidase, TPO. So that's how we make the diagnosis of Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And we were talking off screen before that so many women that I see develop an autoimmune disease, and Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disease, shortly after pregnancy. And pregnancy is this actually marvelous time when your immune system is basically told to take a powder because you've got the world's largest

parasite growing inside of you. Yeah, I didn't get sick once. Right, yeah. And so your immune system is just told, hey, just leave well enough alone. But in the process of labor, of vaginal labor, your gut wall gets extremely ischemic. In other words, blood flow gets cut off from the lining of your gut. And in many people, I'm not saying everybody, in many people that starts a cascade of leaky gut, which then kicks your immune system into super high gear. And then, you know, this is what I wrote The Plant Paradox about, is that your immune system goes looking for other parts of you that it mistakes for lectins, among other things. And it comes by your thyroid and says, oh my gosh, this poor woman, her thyroid is full of these

proteins that we call lectins, we think, and we're going to shoot to kill and she'll thank us someday. And this is what happened with Kelly Clarkson. Kelly Clarkson had Hashimoto's thyroiditis and she was on thyroid medication. And then she got my book, The Plant Paradox, didn't talk to me. And lo and behold, she followed it and, you know, she lost 30 pounds and her Hashimoto's went away and she came off a thyroid. And that's what we see, you know, in our clinics. I'll give you an example. My PA usually sees our patients first and then I see them either three months or six months after, depending. So I see a woman in her fifties who, and I, first time I've seen her, my PA had seen her,

and I always go, okay, you know, let me see why you're here. And she says, well, I'm here because I have Hashimoto's and now have her new lab work in front of me that she doesn't have. And I said, no, you don't. And she said, what kind of quack are you? Of course I have Hashimoto's, that's why I'm here. And I said, well, yes, you did have Hashimoto's, but you don't now. And, you know, I flipped the thing towards her and she said, I don't have it anymore. And she starts bawling. And that's why I do this because I'm not a kid in a candy store. People think that they're labeled with something. And, you know, every other commercial on TV is, oh, you know, good news, you're going to take this immunosuppressive drug that I use for heart transplants. You're going to take it the rest of the life so you can have clear skin or not have Crohn's.

And these are all reversible. Completely. Wow. Completely. I am going to send my blood to you. Yeah, let's take a look. I'm going to stalk you. Okay.

Sounded very creepy. I want to send my blood to you. Yeah, let's check it out. I'm going to stalk you. Okay. Sounded very creepy. I'm going to send my blood to you. I want to suck your blood. Let's make up a girl who's 28 to 35 years old and she needs to lose 20 to 30 pounds and

she doesn't even know where to start. How would you coach her? Well, so the first thing is you got to get rid, we've talked about that already, you got to get rid of processed foods in your diet. And believe it or not, our plain old everyday bread and our plain old everyday pizzas and things like that are ultra processed foods. So they got to go. Sorry about that. My personal feeling is get beans and other starchy foods out of your diet. They may include any of the starchy vegetables like potatoes, even sweet potatoes. Those have got to go.

You got to get rid of fruit. Give fruit the boot. What can you eat? What do you mean? What I want you to become is a gorilla who lives in Italy. Now, by that I mean that a gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every day. And gorilla has 3% to 4% body fat. Even bodybuilders do not have three to four percent body fat in fact as you probably know we are known as the fat ape because we can store fat and in fact

as you found out four months ago we give birth to the only fat babies in the primate world all the rest of them are little skinny things. And long story short, we do that for two reasons. Number one, so your baby will float. And that's the subject of a book in a couple of years. Your baby, you were designed. Why is that? Because your baby is supposed to float because long ago you gave birth in the water.

And it's a long, cool story. And we didn't want to lose, like if you're in a river, you don't want to lose the baby. No, it floats because guess what? You can have your hands free and the baby can hold on to your hair and float perfectly fine while you're getting shellfish off the bottom of, and believe it or not, it's very empowering both for women because you guys are just as good as getting shellfish as a man.

Can I throw Zaza in the ocean and she'll just float? Yeah, she will, actually. She would? She will. All babies are born with a head riding. How long will they float for? Well, it turns out they lose that ability to head ride after about four months. So you may have lost your window of opportunity.

With their big eyes. They literally will come right back up. I'm going to go home and throw a rock. I'm going to go test her. Throw a motion. Just kidding. Don't call CBS. So what else can you eat?

So I think one of the things I like people to do, and this is all part of my next book, The Energy Paradox, which will be out February of 2021, just finishing it. Man, you crank those books out. Yeah, yeah. Good for you. I like to write. So one of the things that really, really, really works is the more I can compress your eating window to a shorter and shorter time period, the better you're going to do in terms of losing weight. It always works.

Now what- Even with women and their hormones. Even with women and their hormones. And yeah, even with, now if you wanted to get pregnant, that is not my advice. And, you know, unfortunately I do see a lot of very thin women who have problems getting pregnant. who have problems getting pregnant, and that's because you've got this incredible sensor in you that says, how much fat does she need to have in you, on you, to if a famine happens tomorrow and you're pregnant, you can carry this baby to term safely without eating. And that gauge is when you will kick out an egg. Now, so, you know,

I take care of Olympic volleyball players, marathon runners, they can't get pregnant. And I said, sorry, you know, go stuff your face, get 10 pounds on, and we're going to give you a few polyphenols to help change your bacterial flora. And lo and behold, they all get pregnant. And, you know, do they want to gain that 10 pounds? No, but they want to get pregnant. So, so yeah, you're, you're designed to carry a little extra weight to get pregnant. So can you give us an example of a day of eating that you would give this girl that I made up? Well, so I'll give you a personal example. I was actually the first person that I know of to write about time-restricted feeding in my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diet

Evolution, which was published in, it was written in 2005, was published in 2007. And I had an entire chapter on time-restricted feeding, entire chapter. And my editor, Heather Jackson from Random House, in the final edit said, you know, we're ditching this chapter. This is so crazy. And you're crazy enough. No one is going to do this. And I said, no, no, no. You know, the one is going to do this. And I said, no, no, no. The literature is unbelievable. I've been doing this for years now from January 1st to June 1st every year. During the week, I eat all my calories in a two-hour period from six to eight o'clock at night. So 22 out of 24

hours, I'm fasting. So you haven't eaten yet today? No. Nothing? Nothing. Not even like a powder? Not even. Not even a coffee? Not even a coffee.

Coffee. With nothing in it? Nothing in it. And I'm having some water now. That's it? That's it. So, and I've done that now. This is, I guess, my 18th year of doing that.

So should everybody go out and do that? No. I guess it's even got an acronym now, the OMAD diet, one meal a day. Yeah, but that's what actually I described low so many years ago, long before, and Jason Fung's a friend of mine, but long before anybody talked about this. So would you tell someone not to eat until six? No, I'm not saying that. But that's one way to do it. Okay.

But the more you can compress your time window, the better. So what I would like people to do is aim for a six to eight hour window of eating. Okay. Okay. That's easy. Another way, which I've written about in all my books, is the 5-2 method. So two days out of the week, you eat only about 600 calories. And then the rest of the week, the other five days, you

do what you want to do. The way I designed that diet, and I've had a lot of success with my patients, is Mondays and Thursdays, you're not going to eat much. Why? Monday, you're coming out of a weekend and you probably overindulged. And so Monday is a good day to cut back. Then you have Tuesday and Wednesday of regular eating. Then on Thursday, you cut back again. Why? Because you're going into the weekend and you'll be okay. You'll catch up. So most people on that regimen, and you call it the 5-2 diet, whatever you want to call it, is we'll lose about a pound a week. And a pound a week is the speed you want to lose weight with. Okay.

So just to get really micro with you, what is a Monday day of eating look like? And what is a Tuesday day of eating like? What are you breaking your fast with? What's for breakfast? What's for snack? What's for dinner? Okay. So first of all, break fast means exactly that, break fast.

So breakfast was break fast. And as I've written in all my books, do you really think our ancestors crawled out of our cave and said, what's for break fast? There isn't any. We have to find it. There was no storage system. So break fast was probably at lunch, or maybe it wasn't lunch. It might've been at dinner. So the more I can get people to skip breakfast, the happier they will be and I will be. On the other hand, maybe you're not a dinner person. If I can get you to skip dinner and concentrate your calories at breakfast and lunch, actually so

much the better. But the farther I can stretch out your eating interval, the better you'll do. What if you're not a lunch guy? Because I may be a breakfast guy and a dinner, but I get irritated with lunch. That's actually how I started. I started skipping lunch. That was how I started. That's what you do. Yeah, because sometimes I just get in a rhythm.

Yeah, lunch is a pain in the neck. It is a pain in the ass. It's a pain, yeah. Okay, cool. So, but what are some like recipes or meals or things that you recommend that they should eat? So that's the great thing about any of this. So, and I talk a lot about this in the energy paradox.

And one of the things that's fascinating to me is that there are a ton of, quote, diets that work very well for short periods of time. For instance, there's the Duke rice diet, where literally all you eat is rice that's all you eat and it'll cure diabetes then of course there's an Atkins diet or the dirty Atkins diet which is a keto diet where you eat primarily 80% of your calories as fat 10% of calories as protein, and another 10% of carbohydrates. That's also effective. And there's the carnivore diet, where basically all you eat is protein. And that works really good too. And you go, well, wait a minute, you can't have it all these ways. You can't eat just carbohydrates and do well. You can't eat just fat and do well, and you can't eat just protein and do well, that's ridiculous. It turns out these are what are called monodiets. And monodiets,

as people learn in the energy paradox, only ask your mitochondria, the little energy generating organelles in all your cells, to handle one thing at a time, either protein, either fat, or either sugar. And if you ask them to do that, they actually do extremely well and have a great time. It's like during COVID, and we all live near or in LA, and we're coming through LA all the time. So I drive from Palm Springs to Santa Barbara twice a week. With good timing, it's under three hours. If I hit bad timing, it's four, maybe four and a half hours. With COVID, I'm under three hours every time. So what happened? Well, let's consider carbohydrates, cars. let's consider protein buses, and let's consider fat trucks. are incredibly great. We can go anywhere really fast.

Let's just say we put back the cars and we don't have the buses and trucks. Italy does this on Sundays. You are not allowed to have a truck or a bus on a highway on Sundays in Italy. And I can tell you traffic is so much better with just cars. And if you think about it in your mind, it's the exact same thing that happens. So what our diet is, our diet, we are bombarding our mitochondria with sugar, protein, and fat continuously throughout the day. And we have rush hour in our mitochondria, literally 18 hours a day for most people. And rush hour is actually what makes us store fat because we can't handle it.

So what do you like to break your fast with? One thing, you just will pick like a hard boiled egg? I mean, for instance, I'll have people do the egg diet on their Mondays and Thursdays. And the good news is an egg has about 70 calories. So they get six eggs a day. Oh, my God. Yeah. Or you get three Quest bars.

You get one for breakfast. You get one for lunch. You get one for dinner. Great. You want five bags of romaine lettuce. Each one has 35 calories. That gives you another 400 calories of olive oil to put on it. And you want to have monster salads three times a day.

Great. Knock your socks off. What about when they're eating on a normal day? Whatever they want, as long as they're eating limited lectin amount of food. So don't get the whole grains in. Don't get the beans in. Don't have the nightshade family. What are a couple things that do get in?

Like, can you name a couple of things you do get in? Yeah, so have all the broccoli you want, all the Brussels sprouts you want. Have three avocados. Have four avocados. Have two handfuls of walnuts every day. Have some- Brazilian nuts. Have some Brazil nuts.

Don't have too many. Actually, selenium, too much selenium is bad. Too much, three Brazilian nuts. Three Brazil nuts. To round this out, I have one more question. What your thoughts are on coffee, alcohol, and Adderall? Because a lot of women are using Adderall to lose weight. Well, if you like speed, go ahead. I know. So coffee's great for you as long as it's black. And there's so many really good studies of five cups of coffee a day is probably preventative for Parkinson's and certainly will diminish dementia. I'm drinking my black coffee. Yeah, but make sure it's black.

Don't put anything else in it. Nothing's in it. Unfortunately, even these wonderful concoctions of Dave Asprey, who's a friend, that will bind all the polyphenol benefits in coffee. So yeah, have a couple cups of coffee a day. Alcohol. Black tea. Red wine. So alcohol follows what's called a hermetic curve, like I've talked about in all my books. Hormesis is, Nietzsche said, that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And so the dose makes the poison. And it turns out that no alcohol is probably not all that great for you. Some alcohol, particularly if it delivers polyphenols like resveratrol and quercetin, it's probably really great for you. Some alcohol, particularly if it delivers polyphenols like

resveratrol and quercetin, it's probably really good for you. And too much alcohol is really bad for you. So the four glasses of wine I had last night probably aren't great. Probably too much. Women in general, there's pretty good data. Women should go for six to eight ounces a day. Men can handle 12, maybe a little bit more. And you like a red wine? Yeah, red wine has far more polyphenols. Over tequila? If you're going to have tequila, get the dark.

Anything that has been aged in wood is going to have polyphenols in it. So like dark Anejo. Yeah, in general, bourbon or cognac or scotch is better for you than vodka. And does Adderall fuck up your metabolism? This is a question so many people ask me. I am not an Adderall fan at all. Just stay away from that stuff. I agree.

Jeez. I know. I agree. And keep your kids off of it too. Keep your kids off. They're full of vitamin D and fish oil, and they will calm down so nicely. I was in third grade. I remember it clearly.

And I was kind of an off the wall kid. I was always running around like class clown, getting in some trouble. Yeah. The teachers, they like had enough of me at some point and they brought my dad in for a meeting and they said, hey, like your son, he can't call, he's all over the place.

Like he needs to get on Adderall. He's got ADHD or so. You better put him on Adderall. My dad ended that in so, I mean, I'm so grateful to him. He ended it so fast. He's like, no, no, no. He's like, I've seen this guy go play video games.

He can concentrate. He's just screwing off in school. We'll go discipline him at home. But we're not putting him on all these drugs. And to this day, I'm so glad because there were so many people in my class that's parents agreed to do that. It caused a lot of fucking problems for a long time.

A lot of my audience asked me that. I am not an Adderall fan, but if you take Adderall fan, but if you take Adderall and it works for you, that's great. You have to do you, but for me, I think that it fucks up my metabolism. Well, and the other thing, particularly when I'm talking about kids or ADHD, have your doctors check them for the MTHFR mutation, the mother effer gene mutations. And these kids, and about 50% of people carry these mutations. It's actually incredibly common. And they have a much higher incidence of ADHD, anxiety, depression, believe it or not, alcoholism, suicide tendency. And it's actually fixable by taking methyl B12 and methylfolate.

And that solves the deficiency. And it's a lot easier to give your kid a little bit of methyl B12 under their tongue than giving them an Adderall. I mean, like this was the school counselor prescribing. It wasn't even, and it was nuts. Should we be taking a methylfolate acid even if we don't have that gene? No, you don't need it if you don't have the mutation. But I can tell you that, and I take care of a number of successful people.

I've actually never met a really successful person who doesn't have one or more of those mutations. Because a little ADHD is really good for you if you know you have it and can manage it, because it actually makes you fascinatingly curious about everything. I might have a little in me. Thank you so much for coming on, Dr. Gundry. Before you go, though, you have to tell us

what the name of the sourdough bread company is. You know I can't forget it. I have a tick where I have to get every detail. And when's the most recent book coming out? I a tick where i have to get every detail and when's the most recent book coming out i mean you have so many great books but when's the next one the current book out is the plant paradox family cookbook which uses an instant pot a pressure cooker uh and it was designed for actually working families feeding their kids i've got and it's a follow-up to the plant paradoxadox? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So there's The Plant Paradox cookbook.

There's the other big book was The Longevity Paradox, which on Amazon is still usually the number one in the longevity books a year out now. And then the next one will be The Energy Paradox. I need energy. Which is, yeah. It's amazing. Believe it or not, it's probably the number one complaint of people who come in my office. Will you come back on when you have the energy? Oh, thank you for offering me to come. Yes, please.

I will. Maybe I'll, you know what I'll do is I'll announce it on my podcast. Okay, guys. So we're going to go on his podcast right now. We'll announce the bread there, and then we'll also leave it in the show notes. Dr. Gundry, I'm going to text you and remind you because I'm annoying, and I'm also going to text you my blood work. Thank you so much for coming on.

You guys follow him on Instagram. He's a wealth of knowledge at Dr. Gundry, right? That's your Insta. DrGundry.com and you can also visit GundryMD.com Yes. And my podcast is the Dr. Gundry Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Go listen now. We're going to go on his podcast and if you're going to start out with his products, personally, I would recommend the olive oil, which he just gifted us. I'm so excited. And then he also has this one called Powder Blues. It's full of spirulina, all different kinds of things. Brand new. We just launched it last week and it sold out. So you actually have a jar that nobody else has. It's delicious. I just had it in my water. Dr. Gundry, thank you so much. I'll see

you next time when you come on for the Energy Paradox. All right. Thanks for having me. Would you like to win some of Dr. Gundry's magical powders? Okay. I'm having one right now in my water, the Vital Reds. It is damn good. All you have to do is let us know who you want to hear next on the Skinny Confidential, him and her podcast, on my latest Instagram, at the Skinny Confidential. And make sure you guys have rated and reviewed the show

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