Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Dr. Steven Gundry: The Plant Paradox | Mental Health | E91

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

How can the Plant Paradox change your life?   Listen on to find out!   In this episode, we are chatting with Dr. Steven Gundry, a cardiothoracic surgeon turned wellness and nutrition guru. After operating on many people with preventable health conditions, Dr. Gundry turned his focus to nutrition to help his patients avoid surgery. He is also a top researcher and author focused on cutting-edge human nutrition.   In today’s episode, we’ll discuss Dr. Gundry’s transition from surgery to wellness, the proven plant paradox and why you should pay attention to what you’re eating. We’ll then dive deeper into diet secrets, why all organic may not be good for you, why you should limit your fruit intake, and other foods you should watch out for.   Social Media:   Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com   Timestamps:   01:12 - How Dr. Gundry Transitioned From Surgery to Wellness 11:02 - Dealing with Naysayers 14:33 - What is the Plant Paradox? 19:31 - The Truth About Beans 23:42 - Why Not All Organic is Good 28:51 - All about Rice and Whole Grains 30:45 - Bleach in Our Food Products 32:27 - Why You Should Give Fruit ‘The Boot’  39:20 - Alternatives to Current Eating Habits 42:22 - We Are What Our Food Eats 45:14 - What is Leaky Gut Syndrome? 49:16 - Dr. Gundy’s Secret to Profiting in Life   Links Mentioned in the Show:   Dr. Gundry’s Website: https://drgundry.com/ Dr. Gundry’s Supplements Line: https://gundrymd.com/ Dr. Gundy’s Podcast: https://drgundry.com/the-dr-gundry-podcast/ Dr. Gundry’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drstevengundry/

You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halitaha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast. And that's on purpose.

I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of ex-FBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and best-selling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, how to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young and, profiting podcast. Today on YAP, we're chatting with Dr. Stephen Gundry, a cardiothoracic surgeon turned wellness and nutrition bestselling author. Dr. Gundry was one of the most famous heart surgeons to ever exist. But at the height of his career in 2002, the doctor felt he had a new calling and turned his focus to nutrition. He wanted to help his patients avoid surgery altogether

through the healing power of food. Dr. Gundry is the author of the Plant Paradox series, which contains six best-selling books on how to lose weight and feel better. His upcoming book, The Energy Paradox, What to Do When Your Get Up and Go has Got Up and Gone, comes out March 2021. He is also the host of the Dr. Gundry podcast and is the founder and director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in California. Tune into this episode to learn about the plant paradox and why you should pay closer attention to what you're eating. We'll also go deep into Dr. Gundry's unconventional diet advice, including including the dangers of beans and other foods with toxic lectins.

We'll also get an understanding as to why organic foods aren't necessarily good for you, and we'll uncover Dr. Gundry's logic for giving fruit the boot. Hey, Dr. Gundry, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Well, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. I'm so excited to have you here because it's not too often that we have a medical doctor on the show. So to give my listeners some context of who you are, you've had a really unique career journey. You know, you really have a passion for helping people live healthier, better lives.

You worked in medicine for over 40 years as a cardiothoracic surgeon. Hopefully I said that right. And a heart surgeon. Close enough. And now you focus on something very different. You focus on nutrition, helping people change their diet so they can actually avoid surgery down the line. And in fact, your nutritional philosophy called the Plant Paradox,

You had a series of books that came out was super popular. It's one of the most well-known nutrition diets out there. And now you spend your days teaching patients about diet and nutrition and helping people live longer, healthier lives with your advice and research that you've done on the topic. So tell us, how did you change from surgery, you know, something very invasive, something pretty reactive, into concentrating more on the preventative side with nutrition and diet? Well, I got to go way back to the dark ages when I was an undergraduate at Yale University, and back in those dark ages, we were allowed to manufacture, design our own major.

And I had this crazy major in human evolutionary biology where I had a thesis that I had to defend. And the thesis was you could take a great ape and manipulate its diet and manipulate its diet and manipulate its, environment and you could prove that what you would end up where there's a human being. And I actually defended my thesis and got an honors and then gave it to my parents and went away to medical school and it became a very, very famous heart surgeon. Did more infant and pediatric heart transplants than any surgeon in the world. And became very famous for protecting the heart during heart surgery. became very famous for redo operations, minimally invasive operations, artificial hearts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Became chairman and professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine for most of my career. And then a little over 20 years ago now, I was confronted with a gentleman that I call Big Ed. And Big Ed, as the name implies, was a very large fellow. He's in his late 40s, and he had inoperable coronary arteries. Now, what that means is he had so much crud in his coronary arteries that you couldn't put stents in them. You couldn't put bypasses in them because there was no place to jump to do a bypass. And Big Head had gone around the country to various centers with idiots like me who would normally take people like this on. And everywhere he went, a big name center turned him down saying, you're hopeless.

So he'd been doing this for about six months. He's from Miami, Florida. And he arrived at Loma Linda, bearing his angiogram, the movie of his heart, cardiac catheterization, from six months earlier. And I was looking at his angiogram. And I said, you know, I got to agree with everybody else who's seen you. I'd love to take you on, but they're right. I'm not going to help you. And they're right.

He says, well, look, here's the deal. It's been six months since that angiogram, and I've been on a diet, and I've lost 45 pounds. Now, this guy was 265 when I met him. And he says, I've gone to a health food store, and I've taken all these supplements. And he actually had brought in a huge shopping bag full of supplements. And he says, you know, maybe I did something here in my heart. And, you know, I'm scratching my professor beard and going, well, you know, good for you for losing weight. but that's not going to do anything.

And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine. You wasted all your money. And, you know, he says, well, look, you know, I've come all the way from Miami. Couldn't we get another angiogram and just see? And I go, you know, don't get your hopes up. Okay. So we get a new angiogram, a new cardiac catheterization.

And in six months' time, this guy has cleaned out 50% of the black. in his coronary arteries. I mean, gone. And I'd never seen anything like that. Never read a report, a medical review of anything like that. So I said, well, wait a minute now. Now I'm interested. Tell me about this diet. So he starts talking and, you know, paragraph in. I go, wait a minute, time out. That's my thesis. from college. And I said, that's exactly what I said, humans ate. And, you know, how'd you get my thesis? And so I actually called my parents who lived in San Diego. I said, hey, you know, do you still have my thesis? And they said, yeah, you know, we got it. It's, you know, it's here in the shrine. And

next to the eternal flame. And I said, well, send it up to me. So in the meantime, I said, well, tell me about these supplements. And he starts pulling them out. And I go, oh my gosh, I was using a number of these supplements to keep hearts alive for 48 hours sitting in a bucket of ice water for transplantation or to resuscitate them. And I was giving them down the veins and arteries. and it never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things. So Big Ed was swallowing a lot of the stuff that I was using to protect the heart. So the irony of all of this is, despite being a very smart heart surgeon, I was a big fat guy.

I was 70 pounds overweight, despite the fact that I was running 30 miles a week. I was doing 5Ks, 10Ks on the weekends. I was going to the gym every day for an hour, and I was eating what was considered a healthy, low-fat diet. And yet I had pre-diabetes, I had eye blood pressure, I had arthritis, I had to wear braces on my knees to run. And what I was told, well, I had high cholesterol. And I told, eh, it's genetic, you know, you're screwed. So, long story short, my parents sent me my... manuscript, which I keep right up here, and I put myself on my diet. And I lost 50 pounds my first

year, and I started taking a bunch of supplements. And lo and behold, my prediative bees went away, my hypertension went away, my arthritis went away, my cholesterol completely flipped normally. And I started putting people I operated on, as a professor, on my program after I operated on them. We were starting to see the same things that were happening to me. You know, we were throwing away their high blood pressure medication, and we were thrown away their diabetes medication. And I did this to prevent them from ever visiting me again for a bypass. And then sadly, about a year into this, looked in the mirror on a Friday morning on the way into work,

and I said, you know, I've actually got this all wrong. I shouldn't operate on people first and then tell them how to avoid me for the rest of their lives. I should teach them how to eat, so I'll never have to operate on. Now, you know, that sounds very altruistic, which it is, but it's really a stupid career move for a heart surgeon. Because even in academics, you can make a pretty nice living as a heart surgeon, but as I, as I subsequently found out, it's almost impossible to make a living teaching people how to eat. Anyhow, I didn't know that then. So I resigned my position at Loma Linda, the height of my career, and set up an institute in Palm Springs, which is just down the road from Loma Linda,

where I decided to research this. I've been a researcher all my life, and I asked people, Hey, I want you to do this. I want you to eat this stuff. I don't want you to eat this stuff. I want to send you to Costco or Trader Joe's, and I want you to buy some supplements. I don't want to sell them to you. And I want to see what happens.

We're going to draw blood on you every three months, and insurance will pay for it. Medicare will pay for it. And let's see what happens. And that's actually what started at all. And lo and behold, and I published my research and presented it. And lo and behold, you could document that things dramatically changed when you changed foods or even added a what seems like a silly supplement. And you

could see when somebody was taking it or when they stopped it. Yeah. So that's a long wind at how I got here. Well, it's an amazing story. So I appreciate you sharing that. I think people would definitely find that story interesting. Something that I just want to say here is that my father was a general and vascular surgeon. He just actually recently passed away. And later in his life, he had something happened with his eye and he couldn't do surgery anymore. And he too also ended up focusing on nutrition. And he was writing a lot of books. He has three books that he never put out that we're going to put out on his behalf about lowering your cholesterol through nutrition. And so I think there might be a trend overall with surgeons realizing that maybe there's something more,

you know, too nutrition, two diet that we've been missing all along. And so I really appreciate that the work that you do. And I know how powerful, you know, nutrition can be because all throughout my child that I heard all about it from my dad. So really cool stuff. Back to your story. When you transitioned and you said that, you know, there wasn't that much money in nutrition, you were at the height of your career. I'm sure, you know, if you were married, maybe you had your wife push back on you or other people, your colleagues might have pushed back on you. How did you, you know, deal with the naysayers when you were making this career move? Well, you know, my wife, bless her heart, I think also didn't know what she was getting into her. She, you know, it's, I think the, you know,

the best career advice is do what you love and love what you do. And everything eventually, I guess, well work out. A lot of times it didn't feel like, like that. We actually had to sell our house. We had to rent. We got to a point where we couldn't even afford, uh, to buy or lease a car, we had to have my parents sign for it because, quite frankly, we're broke. But through all of that, we just, we kept doing it. And we just kept saying, well, yeah, it's okay. We don't have the money we used to. But I was, you know, I was really happy because people would, you know, walk in and they'd, you know, they'd have an autoimmune disease or three or four autoimmune diseases, and they went away, and they're off of their medications.

Or I'll have a person who, just recently we had a gentleman from, oh gosh, now 15 years ago, who was scheduled for a coronary bypass. He had had a heart attack. He was in our hospital. We had him ready to go. Down in the operating room, he goes, I'm so scared. I don't think I can do this. I don't think I'm going to come through.

And I went, okay. you know, I understand. He says, isn't there something we can do? And I said, well, yeah, if you become my best patient, I promise you, I will never operate on you. He said, I'll do it, I'll do it. And that was 15 years ago. And it's so funny kind of on the fifth anniversary.

And we celebrated his 15th anniversary. He's never had an operation. His stress tests are negative. He used to be a horrible diabetic. He's not. And so it's that sort of thing. that says, money and all that cracked up to be, it's given a person a new lease on life that really, you know,

I can operate on 10,000 people, which I have, but to influence now millions of people to take control of their health, you know, I get up every morning. I see patients seven days a week, even on the weekends. I just finished in my weekend clinic in Santa Barbara, And I just keep getting up because every day, you know, usually I get to see something really exciting happening to somebody. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture.

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Sometimes it's not just about the money. It's about the work that you do and the value that you contribute to the world. And you're obviously making a huge impact. You've had so many people benefit from the plant paradox diet. Even people like celebrities, Kelly Clarkson, you know, went on your diet. So can you tell us at a high level? And so did Usher. So did usher. Oh, very cool. Very cool. Can you tell us at a high level what your plant paradox diet is? And I've got

plenty of questions in terms of, you know, diving deep into it. But at a high level, what is it? And how does it benefit people in terms of diseases and autoimmune diseases? Yeah. So at the very basis of the plant paradox diet, the rule number one, it's not what I tell you to eat. That's very important. It's what I tell you not to eat. that actually makes all the difference. And most diets say, you know, eat this, eat this, eat this. And where I start is, okay, there's certain things that really you were not designed to eat that you do not have a good defense system. So plants simplistically, actually in reality, don't want to be eaten. One of the hard things for us to imagine is that plants have a life. And they don't want to be eaten, and they don't want their seeds, which are their babies eaten,

and they have defenses against being eaten because they can't run and hide. And some of those defenses I focused on, which are called lectins. And lectins have actually been known about for well over 100 years, actually 150 years now. And lectins are sticky proteins. And by that I mean that they are proteins that look for sugar molecules to stick to, bind to. And those sugar molecules just happen to line our digestive tract, our swallowing tube, our intestines. They line the surfaces of our joints. They line the surfaces of our blood vessels.

They even line the spaces between nerves, where one nerve talks to another. And not only my research, but many other people's research have shown that lectins disable their predators by attacking one or more of these surface areas. So I happen to think that leaky gut is the cause of all disease. And I'm not the only one who thinks that. Hippocrates, 2,500 years ago said all disease begins in the gut. And in fact, behind me, I don't know if you can see it, the road to health is paved with good intestines. So what I found, based on the work of Dr. Fasano, who's now at Harvard Medical School, he proved that one of the lectins, which is gluten, and most people aren't aware that gluten is a lectin, but it is,

causes leaky gut by binding to the sugar molecules in our gut and actually breaks the wall of the gut apart. And others have shown that lectins are the cause of coronary artery disease. I've published two papers to that effect. There's very good evidence that leaky gut, in particular caused by lectins, is a major cause of autoimmune diseases, and I've published a number of papers on that. when you start looking at these mysterious little guys and then get them out of your diet, all sorts of cool things happen. So where are they mostly? Mostly they're in grains. They're actually in the hall of grains. And so that includes wheat, rye, barley, oats. It includes the pseudo grains like quinoa and buckwheat, rice, particularly brown rice.

And then they're in the nightshade families. They're in potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, bell peppers, even goji berries. Goji berries are a nightshade. And they're in beans, beans and legumes. And so those are the major sources for them. And, oh, peanuts, which are actually a bean and cashews, which are actually not a nut either. that's most of the place where they live. Yeah.

It's so interesting. It's so many foods that conventionally we're told are good to eat. In long-living populations, they always talk about eating beans. They say that beans can help prevent diabetes and heart health and obesity. And so what do you say to that? Is it really black and white? Like should we just not eat beans at all or some of these, you know, peanuts that you're mentioning? What I say is you've got to know your enemy.

and you have to detoxify your enemy. I have beans probably three, four times a week, but I have soaked and pressure-cooked beans. And luckily, for me and my patients, pressure-cooking destroys the lectins in beans. Soaking contributes to leaching lectins, and also, interestingly enough, if you soak beans properly, they actually ferment. Most people don't know this. The foam that occurs when you're soaking beans is actually fermentation, just like the foam that would occur as beer as fermenting or as wine is fermenting. And fermentation is one of the traditional ways that all cultures have made lectin-containing foods safe to eat. For instance, the Inca's soaked quinoa for 48 hours, then they allowed it to ferment, and then they cooked it.

And unfortunately, it's not on the package directions. So often, and I travel the world looking at these long-lived cultures and studying, okay, how'd you do this? And in fact, they all have ways of detoxifying these harmful proteins. And by the way, all the blue zones do not eat beans and grains. That's one of the biggest myths out there. For instance, the Okinawans, the old Okinawans, the modern Okinawans actually are not the oldest living people in Japan anymore. But the older Okinawans, 85% of their diet was a purple sweet potato. 85%. 6% of their diet was fermented soy.

beans in the form of miso. They did not eat tofu. And the other like 4% of their diet was white rice, not brown rice. So the idea that they're long and healthy because they're eating beans and rice is actually not true. That's so interesting. And I'm glad that you say we can still eat beans because my boyfriend is a vegetarian and he wants bean tacos like three, four days a week. And I'm like, what am I going to eat if beans aren't okay? So you say pressure cooking and soaking them will make them healthy. How about like a can of beans that you find in a store, since they're soaking, are those okay or not okay? No, it turns out there's only two companies that pressure cook their beans. One of them is Eden, E-D-E-E-N. And the other one is a fairly new company called Jovial,

just like it sounds a jovial person. And jovial, both of those companies, soaked. their beans and then pressure-cooked them. Both, Eden does not use a BPA lining, and Jovial has all their beans and glass, which is even better. So they're both doing it right. And I have no relationship with either of these companies, so I'm not telling you to get a chip. And the really good news is that you can, I've got a whole shelf, and we can just open a can

of jovial or a jar of jovial or a can of eating beans and knock your socks off. But the beans at the drive-thru to get your bean taco is one of the biggest mischief makers known to mankind. Plus, that taco is either going to be made out of corn, nor it's going to be made out of wheat flour. And both of those are just the perfect lectin load that you can imagine. But rapid and lettuce. Yeah, very true. And speaking of corn, and we're talking about vegetables in general, let's talk about organic and this big word organic that everybody uses, everybody thinks, oh, if it's organic, it's good. Tell us about why that's not true. Well, first of all, we have to understand that the word organic can apply to a lot of very toxic

things. For instance, arsenic is organic. And I think no one would recommend having organic arsenic. Cocaine is all organic. Heroin is all organic. So just because something is organic doesn't mean that it's good for you. What is important is that one of the things that people are going to learn about in my new book, The Energy Paradox, which will be out in March of 2021, is our soils have been so depleted of vitamins, minerals, nutrients, the soils have a microbiome which has been destroyed. And so the food that we're eating today bears absolutely no resemblance to food of 100 years ago. In fact, I love to show a slide to physician groups that I speak to. And the slide says our soil is now so depleted of these essential nutrients that we could eat mass amounts of food grown in our soil and never get the amount of nutrition we need.

And I ask people, okay, you know, when I said, this is a U.S. Senate document. And when was this document in the U.S. Senate? And people go, oh, you know, 2000. And I go, nah. And they go, oh, yeah, okay, 1980. No, it was 1936 that this document was introduced. And we knew way back then that our soils bear no resemblance to what they should have. I'll give you a fascinating example from COVID.

There's a paper. and some people know that we should take selenium to help protect us against COVID. And that paper came out of China, and there are some selenium-rich soils in China, and there are some selenium poor soils in China. And this paper showed that people who lived in selenium-rich-soil country in China had a much lower incidence of getting COVID than people who lived in the selenium poor soils. So that's just one, you know, so this is a micronutrient. And by the way, you can get all the selenium you need by eating three Brazil nuts a day.

That's all you need. Brazil nuts are a rich source of selenium. So long story short, organic is a great idea, but organic, organic, wheat, organic corn, organic rice, organic tomatoes are just as lethal as their conventional variety. On the other hand, organic broccoli or organic sweet potatoes or organic cauliflower, you're much better off having that. But beware, I can't tell you the number of people who have autoimmune diseases, who are eating organic and still have their autoimmune disease.

And it's when we take away, tell them, no, you know, don't eat this stuff. Have all the other organic stuff you want, but stop eating this. In fact, we do some sophisticated tests with leaky gut, and we find that of the people who are sensitive to wheat proteins, gluten being one of them, 70% of people who are sensitive to wheat will be sensitive to corn, and when they eat corn, their immune system thinks they're eating wheat. And that's why I have so many people who come to me with celiac disease, which is the extreme form of gluten intolerance, who have been eating gluten-free for years,

and still have celiac disease. And that's because they've been eating gluten-free, and most gluten-free foods are made of corn. And when we take the corn away from them, then their celiac goes away. So interesting. It's so true. I just went gluten-free, and everything is either corn or rice.

And like you're saying, those both have lectins, right? And I'm glad you brought up rice. It's one of my pet peeves. Don't get me wrong. Rice is wonderful. You just eat it all the time. But we have to realize that four billion people use rice as their staple. But four billion people use white rice as their staple, not brown rice. And are four billion people that stupid that they're taking the good part of rice and throwing it away? No, the lectins are in the hall of rice. And they've been taking the lectins off of their rice. for centuries. So, you know, again, we have to look at how traditional cultures have dealt with these products. For instance, if you think back, I mean, really whole grain pasta, come on, really, you know, whole wheat croissants in France, whole wheat baguettes in France, you know,

the French would laugh you out of the room. And the Italians would too. Of course, now, in the tourist place, back when there were tourists, there's whole wheat pasta in Italy. But it was never part of their staple because they were taking away the haul on these products. And it was only 50 years ago when whole grain goodness was reintroduced. And one of the principles of the plant paradox is, guess what, nobody had these things 50 years ago. Autoimmune diseases were incredibly rare. And now, you know, 50, 90% of the ads on TV are for an autoimmune disease drug. Yeah. It's so fascinating how, like, we, like, had it right potentially, and then now we went backwards and we have it wrong and we have adverse side effects and we're seeing that now.

How about, like, bleach? Because with rice and, you know, all those pasta products, I thought the bleach was really bad for us when they're making it way or do I have that wrong? No, they're actually where the final way of actually getting the hall off of grains was the Swiss Roller Mill, which was invented in the late 1900s. There's a lot of controversy. It's called the Swiss Roller Mill, but Austria claims they invented it, but that's kind of fun. So they invented a very quick way of actually stripping the hall off of, off of, off of four. wheat and grains. So there's really bleached white flour is a whole subject in its own. If you want to go down there, I'm happy to do that because it's actually a big part of the energy paradox. You want to talk about bleached white flour? Maybe we'll get back to it later. I want to talk about fruit, really. Because first of all, I was listening to one of your podcasts and to your

point of the soiled, you know, having no nutrients anymore, I heard that you said that oranges have like 70% less vitamin seed than they did 50 years ago. And I've been noticing as I've been buying fruit lately that it doesn't taste like anything anymore that like I buy a peach and it barely tastes like anything, which is so interesting. So I definitely want to get your opinion on the supplements that we should be taking and why supplements are so important now. But I first want to talk about fruit because I know that you. you say, give fruit the boot. So tell us why we should be giving fruit the boot, because again, this is very unconventional advice. I've been always told that fruit is the candy of nature.

You should eat as many fruit as you want. You can have as much as you want. And according to you, that's not true. So why is that? So again, fruit is not fruit anymore. I'll give you, it has been hybridized for sugar content, and that sugar in fruit is called fructose. Now, just so we all understand sugar cane, what we consider sugar, table sugar, is a molecule of fructose combined with a molecule of glucose, and that makes sucrose. So table sugar is 50% fructose. Most people have heard of high fructose corn syrup, which it's not all that different from table sugar. It's 55% fructose and 45% glucose. So it's, now in everything. So fruit, when I wrote my first book years ago, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution,

one of the points of that book was that Great Apes only gain weight during fruit season. And my editors at Random House said, wait a minute, fruit is nature's candy, fruit's good for you, you should eat all the fruit you can. I said, yeah, but here's the deal. Even in the jungle, fruit only ripens once a year. And they go, what? And I said, yeah, great apes only gain weight during fruit season. And they said, send us some papers. And there's actually an entire book on my shelf dedicated to the fact that great apes only gain weight during fruit season. Now, why is that? Well, it turns out fructose is actually an incredible mitochondrial toxin. So all of the guys who are having your energy fruit smoothie in the morning, you ought to realize that you're actually poisoning

your mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles in all your cells. So fructose is actually not put into our circulation. It's absorbed directly into our liver, where it's detoxified into two things. One is triglycerides, which is fat. The second is uric acid, which causes gas. and hypertension. And fructose, what isn't detoxified, actually paralyzes mitochondria. And if you look at the literature, fructose is the number one cause of fatty liver disease, which is an epidemic right now. It's a major cause of insulin resistance, which everyone will learn about in the energy paradox. So, fructose we use to make triglycerides to store fat for a winter. That's, believe it or not, why a bear eats all those huckleberries and blueberries in the fall

to fatten up for the winter. And fun fact, we use the same metabolic system as a bear. So we, once upon a time, only saw fruit in the summer and early fall. And it was very useful for us because way back when there wasn't. much food in the winter. So we followed that pattern as well. Now, what's happened in the last 50 years is two things. Number one, fruit has been hybridized for sugar content. And look it up, Dr. Google it. A cup of seedless grapes has more sugar than a whole Hershey's Bar, folks. It has about six teaspoons of sugar.

And I can tell you what, I'd rather have to eat. I'd rather have a Hershey bar. Don't eat that either. But my point is, this stuff has been changed. Let me give you a great example from this weekend. There is a chain of high-end supermarkets in Southern California called Bristol Farms. There are competitors for Whole Foods. And I was in Bristol Farms.

Santa Barbara this weekend. And as you walk through the front door, there's a huge display of apples, and they were honey-chrisp apples. And these apples are the size of grapefruit. And they're gorgeous, and size of grapefruit. And then you go around, and there's this little bag, and it says, new, exciting, small apples. And I'll lock up to them. And I go, and the apple is about the size of what we now consider a crab apple. And my wife and I went, oh my gosh, look, those are what we used to eat as kids. That's what we used to grow in our backyard. And that apple would have about four bites, literally. And the honeychris, first of all, the name ought to tell you something, honey crisp. Hmm, I wonder what that tastes like. That honeychrist, we held the apple up. That apple would make about

six honeychris. And yet, we see. say, oh, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Well, all the benefit of an apple is in the fiber and actually in the peel. The rest is sugar. And these things have been bred for sugar content. And your point is exactly right. Oranges have been bred for sugar content. Bananas have been bred to grow year round. There's no bananas that used to grow year round. Give you another example. We have a couple of blackberry and raspberry bushes in our yard. And they produce for about six weeks. And they're done.

They stopped back in July, and we'll see them again next year in the end of May. I could go to the store, and I could buy raspberries and blackberries today. That came from Mexico or came from Chile. and the fact that we can have fruit 365 days a year now makes it endless summer to our genetic program. And we are constantly storing fat for the winter that never comes. So that's why if you're going to eat fruit, eat it organic, eat it local, and eat it in season. Otherwise, give fruit the boot. What's up, Yap, gang?

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So what's the alternative here? Because it's very scary to think that the soil is depleted, that fruit is not the same, that even if you eat fruit, you're not getting the nutritional value, it's mostly sugar, it has fructose, it's really bad for you. So what do we do instead? It's, it's pretty scary. Well, we should eat like our ancestors ate. And interestingly enough, we can debate what the ancient diet was, but our ancestors ate a lot of tubers, I've got to tell you. One of the things that made humans humans is the advent of fire and the harnessing of cooking. And we could give an hour talk on that. But we were the only animal that could break down the cell walls of plants without bacterial help.

And we were able to get a huge amount of nutrition that no other animal could get without fermentation by bacteria in their gut. The other thing that, so tubers actually were a huge part of our ancient diet. We ate a lot of leaves. And one of the things I try to remind people is that gorillas and chimps get most of their nutrition from leaves. And a gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every day. Now, I've tried to do that. It's quite, it's an all-day event and I can't do it. But the point is, a gorilla gets all its protein from leaves.

In fact, the largest animals on earth get all their protein from leaves or grass. And the idea that we somehow have to have animal protein for muscle growth, it just flies against any logic. And there are, of course, some great vegan and vegetarian athletes who have shown that amazing enough, you do not need animal protein. Do I eat animal protein? Yes, it does my wife, yes. Primarily, we eat wild shellfish and wild fish, and it's usually on the weekends. We eat mostly vegan during the week, and we have for years and years. And I think there actually are some benefits to eating wild fish and particularly wild shellfish that we'll get into in another one of my books, but not today.

Cool. Okay. So last question on plant paradox, and then we're going to move into your new book, Energy Paradox. So we're just talking about meat. I want my listeners to understand why you say we are what our food eats. Can you explain that concept to us quickly? Yeah.

So my patience has taught me this. So you are what you eat, but you are what your thing you're eating ate. And so if you feed a chicken, organic corn and organic soybeans, so you have an organic chicken, that chicken is not a chicken. It is an ear of corn with feathers. And I actually learned this in England when I was training there. Way back in the 80s, there was so much fish meal that chickens were fed, ground-up fish. And chickens had pale flesh that smelled like fish and tasted like fish. And my kids, we took them to Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time over there. They go, oh, this is fish. And we go, no, no, no, look, you know, here's a drumstick.

They said, no, it's fish. And they were right because the chicken had become what it was eating. And here's the scary thing. Don't believe me. If you look, corn has a specific carbon configuration. It's called a C4 carbon molecule. You can do analysis of Americans. And 70% of all the carbon atoms that make us, us, are corn, carbon atoms. Five percent of Europeans are corn, carbon. That's because, almost everything we eat has been fed corn or came from corn. And here's the really scary thing. None of us ever ate corn until 500 years ago when Columbus, you know, came to America and started bringing corn back. This is an incredibly modern food that we have no adaptation for genetically. And yet 70% of us are now corn.

This is crazy. There's so many questions I have for you. I'm going to have to have you back on the show. And don't get me wrong. I'm from Omaha, Nebraska, the corn huskers. You know, I love corn. I eat popcorn every night. I'm probably 90% corn.

Please don't do that. Change to sorghum popcorn. It'll change your life. It'll believe me. Get yourself some sorghum popcorn. Sorghum and millet have no lectins. They're phenomenal. Good to know.

Okay, so let's move on to your new book. It's called Energy Paradox. It comes out in March 2021. And a major theme in your book is the fact that leaky gut syndrome can cause fatigue. So can you give us some context into what leaky gut syndrome is? I think you touched on it lightly before. And then also like what this new book is about, how is it different or more enhanced than the plant paradox? So we have an epidemic of fatigue and tiredness in this country. and it's reaching into young people, people in their 20s, in their 30s, and it's not just because you have two kids and they're driving you crazy. It's because of leaky gut. And if you had asked me 15 years ago what I thought about leaky gut, I would have told you it's pseudoscience. But now I can tell you

that all disease begins in the gut. Now, why does fatigue begin in the gut? And it's because when you have a leaky gut, you have not only lectins, but actually bacterial particles that get across the wall of your gut. And 70 to 80% of your immune system lines your gut. And your immune system is designed to recognize foreign invaders and attack them. And your immune system requires huge amounts of energy. And we will divert energy to our immune system at all cost. Just as an example, think about the flu. When you get the flu, you feel like crap, you don't want to move, you're achy, you just want to lay there, you don't even want to do anything. That's because your immune system has actually diverted all of your energy resources to fighting the flu virus. And so you're supposed to feel awful and have no energy because it's all been rationed. What's happened to all of us now is we have chronic continuous, low-grade inflammation. And so all of our energy resources, unbeknownst to us,

have been diverted into this chronic low-grade inflammation that stems from leaky gut. And the book is all about, okay, here's why you got it, and here's what we're going to do about it. And it's a six-week process, and we'll seal your leaky gut and get your energy back. Yeah. And I hear all the time that people are tied. and they think it's because they're busy, or they think it's because I feel like they have all excuses in the book as to why they're tired and they think it's normal. Is it normal to be tired?

No, that's the problem. In restorative medicine, we call people like that the walking well. They figure that tiredness is a part of being normal. Now, I just give you an example. I'm now, you know, I've turned 70 this summer. I work seven days a week. I'm supposed to be repaired. I'm supposed to be at the retirement center, having a great time. So the idea that we should be tired, you know, at 30 because we're busy and, you know, we have all these commitments, that's been fed to people to cover up the fact that there's

something really wrong. And we have to come to grips that fatigue is actually a sign that's trying to get attention. There's something actually pretty doggone wrong. And if we don't get control of it early, that's when, oh my gosh, gosh, I've got pre-diabetes or gosh, I've got high blood pressure, or gosh, I've got arthritis or gosh, my brain, I can't remember things as much as I did anymore, but heck, I'm 40 now and that's normal. It's not. So interesting. Well, I have to have you back on in March to talk about your new book once I get a copy of it. So we can dig deep into that. Great. I'd love to come back.

Yeah, thank you so much. The last question I ask all my guests is, what is your secret to profiting in life? Oh, I started the show with that. Do what you love and love what you do. And particularly now during COVID, look, this is the ultimate opportunity to, okay, things, maybe you don't have a job.

maybe the job isn't doing what you want to do. This is the time, if there was ever a time to do what you want to do. And it's going to take some work. You're probably going to suffer, but it'll pay off because your happiness is worth more than all the money there is. I totally agree. I totally agree. Once you follow your passion, life is just so much more fulfilling, so much happier.

I can totally agree with that. And where can our listeners go to find more about you and everything that you do? So they can, I have a podcast, the Dr. Gundry podcast, wherever you get your podcast. It's now on Podcast One, the largest podcast service in the country. You can go to Dr. Gundry.com. You can go to my supplement line, Gundrym.com. Two YouTube channels. You can find me on Instagram, Stephen Gundry.

If I don't pop up on your inbox someplace when you're searching, I've not done my job properly. Yeah, he's everywhere. And we'll stick all his links in the show notes and some more additional information so you guys can find out more about the plant paradox. So thank you so much, Dr. Gundry, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. And that, Hala, thank you for having me on. And hopefully we'll see you in February or March. Yeah, we'll do. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast.

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