 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Well, more and more of us are cooking at home these days for pretty much obvious reasons. And that's great news, since home cooking is the best way to control the food you eat and manage your health. But how can you make your home cook meals truly extraordinary? Well, to help me out, I'm joined today by my longtime friend and award-winning chef Jimmy Schmidt. Jimmy is a three-time James Beard award-winning chef, that's actually remarkable in and of itself, who's opened restaurants across the United States, written several books about cooking, and has worked with me since 2004 to develop special collaborative dinners, exploring taste and nutritional development. And he's actually helped in manufacturing and designing some of the bars at Gundry MD. So we go way back and I trust his judgment and love his friendship. So in today's episode, Jimmy and I are going to talk about all the nuts and bolts of cooking, how to find the right ingredients, how to create awesome flavors, which is, I got to tell you, Jimmy's forte, and the common mistakes many home cooks make and how to fix them. Years ago, Jimmy and I said that we want you to eat food that you love, but food that loves you back. And I think that has really been a core philosophy for both of us. So, Jimmy, it's so great to have you on the podcast. Good to see you, Dr. Gundry. It's always great to be with you. Thank you so much. All right, so I want to tell everybody how we met. You and I have slightly different versions, but one of the fascinating things about Chef Jimmy is that he was one of the early superstars in Chefdom, back when chefs were first getting recognized as stars in their own right. And Jimmy was a young superstar chef in Detroit, and Donald Trump actually brought Jimmy to the desert, Palm Springs, a number of years ago, to bring Jimmy's culinary talents to the rattlesnake grill in Trump 29 Casino of all things. And it was actually there that I met Jimmy. But before we get into that part, I want people to understand your background and the story of how you got into cooking coming out of Wayne State as this physicist is just a protein biochemist is just too good to miss. So can you take us back memory lane and take us to France, et cetera? Sure, I'd love to. It actually started, I'm originally from Illinois, as you know, Champaign, Illinois down in the farmlands. My father had a farm, although worked for the University of Illinois, and I was determined to be an electrical engineer and run around and chase positively and negatively charged things. And did those studies for a number of years, and then went to France to fulfill the language credits for my degree. And being a poor student, and I was pretty well, you know, down to pennies, took food and wine classes so that I could eat and drink every day while I was in France, which seemed to be a perfect match. And as I started to get into the whole culinary arts in France and started drinking some wine, it all started to click. So I followed my chief instructor, Madeline Cameron, after my studies in France back to Boston and she had a restaurant called Sheleme Madeline in Boston, which was one of the two top restaurants in the United States along with Alice Waters on the West Coast. And I quickly got behind the stoves there and I really loved it and kind of, you know, just followed the course of action of learning more and more about food, that type of thing. So that's how I got kind of diverted off of my doubly background. I had always intended to go on to be a physicist, as you said, to study at Wayne State University, which I moved from Boston to Detroit to pursue that, once again working as a chef for the London Chop House. And that was a great old bastion like the 21 Club in New York of, you know, industry icons as auto industry, you know, eating and drinking their way through business on a daily basis. I found a great platform to, you know, explore my culinary arts. And during that time is when I got recognized. So I thought, you know, this could be a good thing. So I got diverted into the food end of the world. And then Donald Trump called? Yeah, years later. Yeah, Donald Trump actually got diverted from Detroit and went out and did the first rattlesnake in Denver, Colorado in the eighties and then came back and opened up another version of the rattlesnake in Detroit. And the Trump group had offices as they were bidding on the casinos for Detroit above me and ate in the restaurant every day and then commits me to head to the West Coast where it was warmer, much better climate to come out and have some fun. And that's how I ended up meeting you, which was the, you know, the most important thing that came out of ever that desert routine. And it's been nothing but fun. We had a lot of fun out there in the desert. Yeah, so you and I, I think, first met besides me eating at the rattlesnake grill. But we actually, they put on a, the American Heart Association put on a luncheon for women back when the Go Red for Women campaign started a number of years ago now. And they asked you and me, you know, and we hadn't met each other to kind of put on a little demonstration where I was going to talk about healthy eating and you were going to cook healthy eating. And, you know, I'm going, oh yeah, right, you know, I'm going to try to tell the chef how to cook this crazy way. Well, it turns out that you and I had literally made a mind-meld weld and we just, it went, took off from there. And we've become, you know, good friends ever since then. Absolutely. That's been a fun time. We became very, you know, kindred soulmates per se because that was the direction my cooking had gone. I did, you know, hard healthy cooking for all seasons with Alice Waters and Larry Borgeon, as you know, that already started to explore, you know, cooking for big flavors but also to deliver big nutrition so that when we got together on that stage and that book was also picked up by the Heart Association, which was great for sales. But when we got together on stage, it was a natural fit. And since that day, we've, I think we've had a lot of good food and a lot of good fun. That's true. And one of the, you took over at a very famous restaurant in the desert that's now owned by the Waldorf Astoria collection, Hilton, Morgan's in the desert at Laquinta Resort. And we were there for a number of years and folks, Jimmy and I, he would put on these chef wine dinners and one of our signatures of those dinners is that I would come out with each course and Jimmy would tell, you know, why he did such and such a thing and then I'd tell why this great tasting food was actually good for you and people were shocked that decadent, flavorful, yummy food was actually good for their health and in a way, we all want to assume that this decadent food is going to kill us and, you know, we're toying with disaster, but in fact, that's not true. No, it's not true in it. Yeah, those dinners were a lot of fun because usually a wine and food dinner, you're just trying to get the wine to kind of match the flavors in the food, which are, you know, is the best of all marriages from a taste point of view. But if you back up the nutritional parts, as well as many of the nutritional, you know, activators like turmeric and ginger and cardamom and all of these wonderful spices that actually add depth to the meal, they also add depth of nutrition as you taught me and we, you know, continue to explore matching these wonderful nutrients with the wine, you know, so the dinner almost became a marriage of the nutrients in the wine which was, I think, probably some of the first people that ever did that. Yeah, and you're actually, I think you're the one of the few chefs to this day that I know or have watched that if you're going to do a wine dinner, number one, you demand that the wines from the winery be sent down to you long beforehand and then you actually work with each individual wine and decide, you know, what spices, what, you know, what dish is going to pair best with this particular wine. And, you know, that really impressed me, number one, but the idea that you would, you know, bring out flavors within a food to match a wine is pretty impressive. Well, the concept is when you taste the wine, the wine will really tell you what goes with it. So you have to kind of listen to the wine and see what's going on within it because it's a living changing, you know, environment on its own. So pairing up flavors that actually are complimentary or in some cases, you know, aren't so complimentary but strip out the bad flavors in the wine. So my job is to match the flavors, but also to kind of clean up any of the, you know, extra things floating around in the wine while it's developing. You know, the tannins can be balanced with fats and acids and different herbaceous flavors. If you add herbs into a sauce or such, your mind will think those herbaceous flavors from the wine will actually go into the food, which kind of cleans up the wine in some cases. So it's a lot of fun getting all those things to work. And then likewise, those other nutritional spices and such only add to the depth of the nutrition. You know, and I've learned so much from you in this parameter and direction of being a guide down this taste path. I, you know, thank you so much for, you know, sharing with me your knowledge. My pleasure. I think it's been a mutual admiration society. Speaking of which, we were talking off camera, you and I paired up three weeks ago to go to a resort outside of Missoula, Montana called Paws Up. And we put on a wellness weekend there at Paws Up and invited a couple of biodynamic winemakers to join us. And we were joined by your good friend and another phenomenal James Beard award-winning chef, Nancy Silverton. Many people may know her from Osteria Mazza from LA, and she's now expanding kind of worldwide. But let's talk about that because that, I think this is really illustrative. You've been brainwashed enough by me through the years to do lectin-free cooking, but we brought and invited maybe the antithesis of lectin-free cooking in Nancy Silverton, who was a great sport. So, and you invited her, you got her to come. So just take our listeners kind of, okay, how do you take, you know, a lectin queen and say, guess what, this weekend you're going to cook as best we can lectin-free. So how'd that go? Well, first of all, Nancy Silverton is famous for all of her pastry work and her restaurant work and such. But, you know, she was the founder of La Brea Bakery. So, you know, kind of sitting on top the pinnacle of lectin success. So she's made millions out of selling lectins. And then, you know, after the bread comes the pastas. So, you know, yes, it was a stretch of the imagination that Nancy would accept, but she's such a wonderful sport. And she was very intrigued by this whole concept. So I shared with her a slideshow that I did back for the Stanford Brain Mind Summit that we both attended, and you had presented that and said, you know, here's what lectins are, here's what phytates are, and, you know, how to kind of maneuver around them. You know, and in doing so, you know, it's really good for your microbiome instead of fighting against it. And it's a much better alignment. And she took it well to heart and has been thirsting for more and more information on it. So many of her recipes adapt very well into this concept by changing some of those more lectin-enhanced ingredients, you know, naturally. So she was a great sport. Obviously, you tasted the food. We both enjoyed everything that she made. And her thorough flavor style of food that every single component adds flavor, yet add the nutrition onto it too. And now I think she's going to be a good challenger, you know, on a line food that's, you know, better for you. Yeah, my wife, Penny, and I had the opportunity to go to one of her dinner solo performances at the Ojai Valley Inn last weekend. And it was interesting. I got to, you know, meet with her before the dinner and kind of go over what she was serving. And she said, now, look, you're going to find that most of the stuff I'm serving tonight is, you know, it's really compatible. And, you know, thank you for that. There's a couple things that, you know, I'm still going to try to kill you. You know, she was a really good sport. But I think you probably planted a nice seed in her that there are, you know, other ways to do this. Let me think about one of the things that I think you've done amazingly well is figure out how to hide or imitate a great food with a replacement. For instance, years ago, you used to make risotto not using rice. You want to tell us about that? How did you get that crazy idea? Well, you know, first of all, I kind of think of flavors as colors. So, you know, and I'm working on a book called The Color of Flavor. So there's a certain wavelength and, you know, too light in colors. And likewise in food, there is similar, you know, taste spectrums per se. You know, an old trick is to ask a sommelier to describe a wine without using any food. You know, like cherry, it tastes like raspberries. You know, it also leaves them as leather and tobacco. So it doesn't keep a lot of room to work with. You know, maybe some terroir or some dirt. Yeah. So food is very, you know, oriented by colors. So, you know, in looking at that spectrum and trying to, you know, move rice out of the risotto and rice is very white in flavor. So if you want to have a different, you know, an asparagus risotto, you want more green flavors, rice is not going to do it. This brings you to another alternative. So that's kind of a long intro. But what I did was I took celery root and cut it to the size of a grain of rice. And that would be replace the rice in the risotto. Now for the creaminess and that type of aspect of it, the trimmings that from not cutting so great, I cooked those and turned it into a puree of the celery root to make the creamy part of the risotto. So you really actually only cook the kernels or the grains of the celery root to mock the rice for two minutes, you add it into the puree and then you have a lovely risotto that can fool you using celery root. Now originally it was designed to go with white truffles. Now white truffles don't, as you know, taste white. They taste this earthy brownish tan type of color. And funny enough, we used to do the white truffle, you know, celebration every December and those white truffles on top of the celery root risotto was far superior to putting white truffles on top of white rice risotto. So you got better nutrients out of the celery root, a great flavor and likewise better nutrition. So that's kind of the fun ways of bending these ingredients to fit in for better flavor and better nutrition. Then tell our listeners about how you fool somebody into thinking they're eating fettuccine pasta and it's not fettuccine pasta. Well, you can use a lot of different ingredients to achieve that, you know, one of which is celery root, our butternut squash will work in that type of direction. You can even, you know, sheet out cauliflower in that type of direction. So you're basically taking vegetables for their structure and their resilience and turning them, you know, cutting them into the shape of pasta. You know, you can use leeks, you can use celery root, you can use even fresh Belgian endive when it's just slightly heated, still has that crisp resilience to it. And you kind of combine those ingredients together and it really comes off as a risotto because some of them are contributing a crispness, some of them are contributing a creaminess that will pulls it all together. Yeah, I remember at one of your restaurants in the desert, the classic club, you used to fool people with this decadent fettuccine and it was all made out of celery root that you had, you know, thinly peeled and people would order it and I think you called it fettuccine and people say, oh, this is the best fettuccine I've ever had and you go, ha, ha, ha. You know, I'm saving your life and you're thinking it's the most decadent, you know, awful thing in the world. Yeah, I actually got in a fight with a customer one night when I said, hey, by the way, it's good for you and they got in a big fight. It's like, yeah, it's made with flour, it's like, no it's not, it's like, stop lying to me. It's really good. That's right, you can't fool me. It couldn't be. Yeah, so it's fun. Yeah, and I think, you know, that's the fun thing that's actually driven me in all my books to learn, you know, from you on, you know, you can make food that you love that loves you back. You know, you're brilliant in figuring out how to get the textures and the flavors that we associate with these foods and yet bring great nutrition. It's just kudos to you. Well, thank you very much. You're very kind. I'm glad you like it. All right. Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love it. It's really guided so much of what we do. And my recipe developer, Kate, who's sitting here listening to us, I think it's guided her as well. All right. Let's talk about cooking. That's why everybody tuned in. All right. What's the hardest part of being a chef, of cooking? Well, cooking is not hard. It's the timing that's hard. You have to be able to just, you put it on the fire and then you just got to take it off at the right time. So cooking isn't as hard as you think, but it comes down to timing. Now, flavor is very crucial. The use of spices and seasoning to enhance it, especially when you want to make cleaner food. And I think that kind of where a turning point for me was that kind of the color of flavor type thing. White sugar tastes white. White flour tastes white. Nobody runs into the pantry as a kid with a big spoon and takes a scoop of white flour. Maybe some sugar, but powdered flour. So as you start to eliminate lots of these starches and carbohydrates out of your food, it actually cleans up the flavor profile. So using, you know, ingredients, adding ingredient in that benefits taste and benefits flavor and benefits the nutrition. Then you start to line up really much more interesting dishes. What do most people not know about properly using ingredients and creating flavors? Where does everybody make a mistake? Well, I think that in using fresh herbs in that type of direction, they make the biggest mistake of just adding them all in at the end. That's not what any of the big classical cuisines have done over time. Whether it's Chinese or even some of the great Italians and this type of thing, you start off with a little bit of great olive oil or avocado oil to get it started. If you add garlic or onion in at that point, the volatile oils that are the flavorings of the garlic and the onions and the spices are mixed in with the oils, or oil-based, not water-based. So you get all those flavors into the oil first. Then when you cook in that medium, and the oil really transfers the heat from the pan or the air to the food, because if you don't have something to transfer the heat, all you're doing is drying it out in that type of method. If you get the flavor into the oil that you want to keep in the dish and you get that to coat what you're cooking, you're about halfway home. The rest of it is timing and a little bit of patience. Not trying to turn it up and get it done in two seconds. But the crucial part is you cook the little garlic in such, then you throw your red pepper flakes into it, then you would throw your basil into it to make a marinara sauce or that type of direction, or you throw your different herbs into it to make a stir fry with ginger and garlic and chilies and cilantro because the flavors go into the oil and then they stay in your dish. A famous Italian chef once said if he walks into a kitchen and smells basil, he knows they don't know how to cook because the basil smells should be in the dish, not in the air. Oh, interesting. Okay. You know, I just finished up putting my next book to bed and I'm a student of history and I've always been fascinated by the spice trade of the Middle Ages and I actually have a whole chapter that inadvertently talks about the spice trade and it's interesting that people were willing to pay huge amount of money for what we consider culinary spices and you've named off a bunch of them just now and people were willing to risk their lives going around the Cape of Good Hope to get to the Indies and the Spice Islands, which now part of Indonesia and one of the things that I was reading just blew my mind is the spice trade basically came to an end when sugar plantations were established in the West Indies and sugar rapidly became the drug of choice and using culinary spices just fell off a cliff and people switched over to their new favorite drug, which was sugar and I guess I had not realized the power that sugar had in stopping the spice trade as we know it. Yeah, the sugar was a big change and not just from a taste factor like making food taste better, this type of thing but it was a great caloric delivery situation too so perhaps, and I'm only saying perhaps to another historian that many of these spices as you know that they were black pepper and turmeric and these types of things they enhanced nutrient uptake in the body or assimilated it and back at that time in Europe they didn't really have super nutrient-based crops I mean parsnips did not have a lot of calories celery root did not have a lot of calories and it wasn't until the potato being introduced in that society that you could then grow enough calories per acre to feed a whole lot of people, hence the Irish potato famine that's why a couple million people, a million died and a million left because there wasn't enough calories but sugar, man, that was mainline calories but not necessarily good ones as we know. No, you're right, and we forget that the New World was the source of the potato and you're right, so a lot of calorie dense foods we can thank unfortunately New World, corn for instance another wonderfully calorie dense food Oh well, I don't know Alright, everybody's out it's summer, the farmer markets are open how do people find the right ingredients? Do you have to go to the farmer's market? Can you go to the store? Can you use dried ingredients? Help us out. Well, I think farmer's markets are great because you're getting closer to the source and it's fresher nature has been pretty good to us if it looks really attractive and it smells good and it tastes good, it's much higher in nutrients than one that doesn't kind of proven by the eternal hot house, McDonald's tomato that tomato has about 40% less caloric value and nutrients than a fine ripened tomato so if we follow our nose and our taste buds and we're going to find more nutrition yes, you can buy it from grocery stores because they're bringing it in and trying to compete with the farmer's market, which is great and dried items are great I think that you would agree that if they're peeled and seeded they're probably, we're probably better off for it to get to minimalize the lection intake especially on the tomatoes and the peppers and the red shades that people flock to during the summer months so, but that's, yeah, get close to the source think before you eat, get rid of the seeds and get rid of the skins, season them well lots of fresh food is done in salads and such which is good for the green lettuces and Erica O'Bear and all those kinds of things a little less good with the red guys the tomatoes and the peppers but that gets you a lot of fun flavors to play with All right, are there any tools in the home kitchen that you think everybody ought to have or what can you not live without? Oh, that's a good question I think one thing that's great in the home kitchen is mandolin because you can slice things and julienne them very easily to adapt them for textures and flavors in that type of direction No, a mandolin isn't an instrument we play No, not the instrument you play, it's a long slicer thing that will take your fingertips off if you're not careful but they're wonderfully fun it does allow you, you know those little wonderful baby potatoes that you undoubtedly run across during the summer months you know, you can slice them really thin and you can rinse them and such and you can get rid of a lot of the starches that way they cook more thoroughly that probably will reduce some of the other phytates and stuff running around in them during that process which is fun so I think a mandolin is probably my number one go-to item to play with and you use food processors a lot yes, no? no like if you do not whip up like cellarac root mashed potatoes that you taught me how to do I do, I use it for making those purees that's probably my number one thing I use probably the best appliance is you know like a Vitamix I love a Vitamix now a Vitamix is very empowering because you know like the emotion I use for the scallop up at Paws Up Resort that was all you know vegetable base that's roasted fennel and the roasted leeks you know and you throw all those ingredients in there and the ginger and the and Meyer lemons and you put that in it and that will really put together a great emulsification emulsifications are ingredients that usually don't stay together they combine into a sauce or an emulsion so you can add wonderful plant-based nutrient ingredients and to accentuate the sauces and the flavors very easily and then you can put in just a little bit of oils you're not running up the fat and that can completely replace all your vinaigrettes and all your kind of heavier caloric foods in that direction especially if you're having a salad or a piece of fish or something like that it's a lot of fun all right let's talk about restaurant dining because I get questions about that all the time and now we've got the world expert on it all right what's the one secret is there one secret you can tell people about dining in restaurants that they should know a dirty little secret perhaps well I think that the number one thing to avoid is you know fried foods and not so much because that you know like the crispy chicken with the batter on the outside for obvious reason but you know the fryers do not usually have the best oil and they usually have a lot of oils that are soybean based and such that have lectins in them you know so that's probably having a clean oil fryer you know is wonderful like fried and you know some of like the carotene oil which is you know the red palm fruit oil the fried goods actually pick up that orange flavor pick up that of carotene that's a wonderful example of it but not very many restaurants have that and then on the other side of the equation grilling is probably your cleanest method of getting something grilled rather than breaded or broiled or blackened or that kind of thing so any tips for people who are following the plant paradox diet or elected limited lectin diet when they're dining out good friend of mine Tom Guy always used to say the menu just tells you what the chef has got in the back is that true or do you hate to get orders that aren't what you want to do well it can go either way I mean if somebody you know says hey I want this that or the other I'm happy to have lied to them they're our guests that's very easy to do back in the old morgan's day you know people would come in all the time and say I don't do you know I don't eat gluten I don't do this I don't do that and so what can I have on the menu and it was pretty much everything except for maybe the one pasta dish that was wheat based that we had on the menu so you know chefs are pretty adaptive I mean you know consumers have trained them from the gluten era you know and from the allergen area which has become more and more predominant you know the shellfish allergens and fish allergens and like my son has a you know sesame allergen you know people have become aware of these things and you know although the United States only requires eight allergens be listed you know that there's sixteen in the world that'll kill you pretty quick that should be listed so that's the big thing is be very specific about your allergens and be honest don't come in and say hey I'm gluten free but I'd like a double order of bread that doesn't you know sustain us on the fact that you're being sincere with what we need to do for you if if a can you trust a waiter who says I can guarantee you that everything you're going to get is gluten free or is that more just talk it depends I would say it's more talk because I think that they you know most people think gluten is just with wheat and then obviously gluten is elect and so many things that would trigger a reaction are laying out there in the food landscape as you know only too well that would also fall into that criteria and obviously other grains you know do carry those proteins yeah yeah there's in our patient population about seventy percent of people who are sensitive to gluten are sensitive to the proteins in corn and they literally cross react and it is I have so many patients and I've written about this that are eating gluten free and you know are because they have celiac disease or other gluten intolerance and yet they're eating corn and corn chips and corn bread and corn tortillas and they still have all these gut issues and we test them and corn is oh my gosh that's what I live on why you're not living very well obviously and when we take the corn away from them you know they start to get better so yeah the corn has its own challenges as you said with the proteins and then also you know the phytates too the fresh corn with its phytates is an anti-nutrient and it actually goes in and grabs them out of your body you know and hence there's you know papers out there relative to the Aztecs walking off the plantation because of you know the craziness that comes from eating too much corn or not corn that was not treated properly yeah they were not neutralized by the limestone grinding mills that they put it through you know and the side effects you know is dementia and dermatitis or hands would swell up you know and dysentery famous 3D's of life what everybody lives for so I was down in Mexico giving a speech and the guy said that was researching him said that they thought that that may have been the reason why they walked off the plantation and left disappeared yeah yeah and the other thing that's interesting as a you know as a student of the history of food is that so many times we would take a native product that the natives knew how to detoxify like corn like using lye or grinding it in limestone to neutralize those factors in corn and we wouldn't recognize that they were doing that for a purpose and we'd just take corn back and say what what the heck you know this isn't what we thought we were getting there the advancement of you know food cooking techniques and such like that sometimes skips a step and we try to you know not soak beans for three days or such beforehand like our grandmother did you know and heck if you can go get them fresh out of the field they gotta be good for you right fresh more yeah short of the first time that you try that and you're sick for a while that's the best effect so that culinary expertise that usually has been transferred down in the family from the matrons and such you know has been getting lost as of the last hundred years as we weren't in the kitchens as much with our grandmothers and mothers no you know that's very true and I tell the story of my grandmother on my mother's side of the family she was French and she had taught my mother to always peel and de-seed tomatoes before she used them and I mean we even had sliced tomatoes that were peeled and de-seeded and I remember going away to Yale and I had a sliced tomato for the first time that had peels and seeds and I thought why would anybody eat it this way number one it actually didn't taste as good and so you know that was passed down yep and it's fascinating to you know look at these oral traditions and you mentioned soaking beans in Tuscany these guys will soak beans like you say forty eight seventy two hours and they'll change the water and they actually allow the beans to ferment you know you get this foam on the top of the water and they're fermenting and you know any traditional culture would know one of the best ways to get rid of lectins is fermentation right and also phytates too it starts to ferment and starts to quasi-sprout then the phytates have done their job they're there to grab the nutrients to get the things to start to do with steel so it's a combination of both benefits by doing that technique and you know I tell people that's how the ancestors have you know have learned and have figured out the ways to make these things safe and as long as we play by the rules I have nothing against these things well you know I think a lot of our ancestors didn't play by the rules and they were the guinea pigs to figure out hey we better soak these if we don't want to end up that's right you know yeah alright enough of memory lane tell me you I know you are fascinated with salts and as salts as a way of delivering flavor everybody says oh my gosh everyone knows how bad salt is for you give us the argument that salt isn't the evil empire that everybody thinks it is well salt is you know a necessary nutrient in our diet number one you know you can't live very well without salt maybe we can't live at all I don't know for sure that would fall into your spectrum but many of the sea salts of the world all the sea salts of the world have certain micro nutrients in it that we are able to absorb and they also change the flavor and they also you know change the nutrient delivery the you know years ago in the on the Atlantic coast of France you know down where they've got salt marshes and such like that going on I visited this one you know salt farm and what they did was they would bring an ocean water into ponds and you know let it condense and have the you know salinity in it and in that pond had certain aquatic life that would live at that salinity and then as it got down to you know its maximum salinity they wanted they would drain it off into another pond and that next pond would go even higher in salinity with a completely different subculture of plants that would exist so finally they would be drained down into bed you know flatter beds for a final operation and there were these little bright red almost like sea beans growing in the bottom of this thing and then all of those you know aquatic life added flavor and nutrients to the salt so I'm not a big fan of using lots of salt but if you use the salt at the right time it's good for you it enhances the flavor and it has the possibility of delivering other micronutrients as well which I think are a lot of fun when I was bored a while back pre-COVID but you know I categorized 140 sea salts from around the world by their spectrum analysis and their color and they actually line up pretty good you know a white salt kind of goes a white flake salt you know like a cypress goes with certain dishes like eggs and such like that and then you can get into very green types that are very high in you know aquatic life type things that go great with you know scotch and grilled rapini so you can start to get these flavor spectrums to match up with the foods that you like to that's what really interests me of these salt combinations so it's not just a salt but it's a number of salts put together to make this you know richer fuller flavor so should everybody have a library of sea salts at their disposal absolutely I totally agree that that's the best way to go I do and they don't go bad unlike other groups and such like that you know over a course of a year they pretty well lose their effectiveness and flavor salt seems to be little laying around percent entries alright I think that's a good place to end it unless you have any last culinary advice for the home cook that you're holding out because you want people to come to your restaurants I don't have any last hold up I don't alright well you've been very generous with your knowledge and your time and you and I are even as we speak cooking up our next wellness weekend with Nancy Silverton and we've confirmed that the Ojai Valley Inn in Ojai California near Santa Barbara in LA sometime in 2020 we don't have the date yet we're going to have a wellness weekend that'll be awesome, that'll be fun and I've talked to Scott you know who you met from PAWSUP and they're real excited to do some more things with us so that'll be fun yeah so we just got to get it to where you don't freeze it up while you're fishing it'll be all good Jimmy's referring to the fact that my wife Penny caught a very large beautiful brown trout giant, it was huge and she landed it and it was a fabulous catch and release but I caught nothing and just froze to death in the snow but it was worth it for that big fish alright that's enough for the fish stories today and Jimmy thanks a lot where can people find you one thing people should know Chef Schmidt is actually the creator and still makes the world famous bar and was responsible for a great number of the Adkins food products through the years fun fact yeah I've been well been doing that for the last 20 years so a lot of the food research that you know I've done is to try to get proteins to work together proteins are positively charged so they tend to repel you know being an electrical engineer I never practiced it but it paid off in foods because I was able to figure out how to balance out these iso electrical charge so they bind together and then you can make some really fun like we say foods that you love that love you back like dough based products and buns and such like that you give up none of the flavor and texture but you gain all of the nutrient value so a lot of fun things I love it keep up the good work and hopefully everybody will be hosting you at another wellness weekend so keep your eyes peeled for that we'll let you know as soon as the dates happen great take care say hello to the family always my pleasure in my regards to Danny say hello to Jill and Marie bye so hopefully we're going to have another wellness weekend at Ojai Valley Inn during 2022 we have the date pending ok now it's time for our audience question this week's question comes from Debbie Weiss on iTunes who asks I've had a vertebral artery dissection and an aortic aneurysm and I'm wondering if there is a nutritional way to decrease the likelihood of any more events like these from the future so I don't know your story Debbie but there certainly is a genetic condition that is sometimes known as cystic medial necrosis that we are born with that makes it very susceptible to tearing literally the three layers that line our arteries and that's a very common cause of aortic aneurysms and vertebral artery dissection one thing that has become increasingly apparent is that there is a class of antibiotics many of you may have heard of them many of you have taken them Ciprofloxan is one of them that unfortunately has been associated with an increased risk of developing particularly abdominal aortic aneurysms so do be a wary consumer when you may need an antibiotic but just be careful do your research there are a lot of antibiotics out there and just be careful about the ones that can cause mischief on the other hand one of the things just from a food standpoint the more that you eat foods and supplements that produce more collagen bonds the better and interestingly enough one of the things that's missing in most people's diet is vitamin C and vitamin C is actually essential for knitting collagen together literally the rebar that holds our blood vessels together and you can swallow all the collagen you want but if you don't have vitamin C you're not going to knit that collagen into a tight mesh so like I've written my books like I've told you before buy yourself some timed release of vitamin C take about a thousand milligrams twice a day or buy yourself the chewable vitamin C tablets and just chew one about four times a day vitamin C unfortunately is a water soluble vitamin it leaves our system really after a couple of hours so you really want a continuous supply of vitamin C good question review of the week now it's time for the review of the week this week's review comes from Decht on iTunes who left a five star review and wrote hello Decht country love all your podcasts so good so informative I just finished the energy paradox another great informative book I love how the approaches shift using different focuses with each new book well thanks for that very kind review Volpec you know that's what usually I try to do the book builds on the next one and in writing the energy paradox I realized that there was a road that I had not drop driven down traveled down that I needed to go down and so I'm you know I'm really excited about this next book so thanks for noticing I don't just repeat myself I like to bring you a new way of thinking about something I love you out there listening if you have any questions you'd like to hear me answer leave me a review in iTunes along with your question and I'll be sure to answer as soon as I can because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you we'll see you next week before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you