 Well, this next one is from Gerhard. How do the various methods of cooking preparations, from cooking, raw, fermented, how do those come in play, and how should folks think about that? We have to remember that up until very recently we had no methods of food preservation. We had no refrigerators, we had no storage systems. So everything we gathered actually rotted, and fermentation we forget is actually the natural process of what happened to most of our foods. And this was actually utilized because we let bacteria do a lot of the work in eating lectins for us. And that's why traditionally breads were raised with yeast, or with sourdough, which has both yeast and bacteria. And the yeast and the bacteria actually eat a lot of the gluten and a lot of the lectins in grains. So when we think about traditional preparation methods, these were actually pretty good ways to reducing lectin content. But one of the things that really happened to make us human is cooking, actually broke down cell walls and also helped destroy lectins. There's an interesting paper out of China that vegetarians who eat a lot of raw vegetables have the highest incidence of Parkinson's disease among Chinese. And we could go into why I think that is. But I think we have to be, I eat a lot of raw vegetables, don't give me your own. But I think we do have to be cautious that those are the plant in their most potent form in terms of lectins, something to think about. This one's from Christina. What organic fruits are not considered candy that I should be eating this summer for polyphenols? So in my book what I'd like you to do is you take that juicer, which I would ordinarily tell you to throw in the trash, but you buy all those nice organic fruits, particularly the berries, and you put them in your juicer, and you juice them, and then you throw the juice away, I really mean that, and you take the pulp, and then you put the pulp in, oh for instance, coconut yogurt is a great way to have it, put it in a smoothie with coconut milk, get rid of the sugar. The sugar is lethal. Fructose is so dangerous, you'll see in the book that it's a great way to kill your kidneys. It's a great way to make cholesterol, I mean it. We just give fruit the boot, but use your juicer, and we'll show you how to do it in the book. Similarly, this one's from Susan. She's looking for tips or hints to keep the carb-addicted obese person on track. The way to get this, we have a whole chapter called Chapter 10, Dr. Gundry's Plant Paradox Intensive Care Unit, and what you have to do is you have to realize that you're carb-addicted because your mitochondria, the little energy organelles in all of your cells, are actually dysfunctional, and they're constantly having to have sugar because they think they need it. In fact, what they really need is another source of fuel, and that fuel is ketones, and I know you, many people have heard about getting into ketosis. Dr. Adkins thought everybody should get into ketosis, what he didn't know is that eating protein will actually keep you from being in ketosis because we convert protein into sugar, honest, it's called gluconeogenesis. So have some MCT oil or some coconut oil, take a tablespoon two or three times a day, particularly when you're in those weak moments that you're getting kind of the Adkins flu or the low carb flu, a tablespoon of coconut oil or MCT oil is just the thing to get you going again. For M, any suggestions for middle-aged women with hypothyroidism? Yeah, so one of the things that I've seen, there is a huge outbreak of Hashimoto's thyroiditis primarily from what we've talked about before, but there are, there's a mini epidemic of hypothyroidism because everybody has switched over to sea salt, and sea salt doesn't have any iodine in it. One of the only smart things the federal government ever did in the early 1900s is mandate putting iodine in salt because we actually had such an epidemic of hypothyroidism in the early 1900s that as many as four million Americans died of hypothyroidism, and that mandated iodine. So you can get iodized sea salt, if not go just get regular Morton salt or do what I do, I go to Trader Joe's and I buy spirulina tablets, they're organic algae, and I take about four, five hundred milligrams of spirulina a day, and it's plenty iodine. And it's amazing to me the number of women particularly who are just kind of marginally hypothyroid, we put them back on iodized salt or have them get their spirulina and it's all it takes to start making thyroid again. One of the, my favorite parts of the book here is in the back it's the sample meal plans which you, again it's how do you make living this particular diet easier, right? So one of the things you have here is your green smoothies, what do you put in your green smoothies? So a wonderful woman, Irina from Catalyst Cuisine is a young woman in Santa Barbara who cured herself of rheumatoid arthritis by following my program and she's a professional chef. So she always made this smoothie and I actually had her make the first three days of our plan called the kickstart cleanse. And her smoothie is spectacular and my wife whips it every morning. So you take basically a handful of organic spinach, you chop about a half ahead of romaine lettuce, you put a half an avocado, you squeeze a half a lemon, you take some vanilla sweet leaf stevia drops and put that in there and a little water and ice cubes and blend it. Now quite frankly I put in my vital reds, my primal plants and my pre-biothrive and she does too and we may have a recipe for that in there. But this gets you through the day, it gets you tons of greens, it gets you great fats if you want to throw in some coconut oil or MCT oil, particularly if you have insulin resistance or diabetes, it's a great way to start your day. Great, thank you. This next one is from Philo. What is most important to eat to maximize testosterone production? It's not what you eat to maximize testosterone production, it's what you don't eat. I can't tell you the number of men I see with low T and when I take away their sugars and I take away their large portions of protein that their testosterone goes through the roof. Sugar suppresses testosterone production and it's been so enlightening to me to see people that we get off of their sugars, off of their simple carbohydrates, their breads, their pastas, their potatoes and their testosterone comes up naturally. I take all men off of testosterone replacement. The FDA is so afraid of testosterone replacement that there's a black box warning for it. You can make plenty of testosterone, you just have to be sugar-free and cut your meat protein, exactly the opposite of what we thought. This one is from Michael. Is there a better or acceptable type of alcohol? Thanks for asking that, Michael. I appreciate that. If you don't drink, don't start. If you do drink, I think red wine is probably the best of the alcoholic beverages because it gives you a pretty dog on good dose of a lot of plant polyphenols. The most famous one is resveratrol, but curcetin or curcidin is another great compound. Also, almost all red wine has been aged in wood and it picks up the polyphenols in wood. That being said, there's an interesting paper out of France, of course, that champagne and the polyphenols in champagne is suggestive of lessening Alzheimer's in women. My wife likes to hear that because she actually prefers champagne over red wine. If you're going to drink white wine, make sure it's been aged in wood because you'll get the polyphenols from the wood. If you're going to do straight alcohol, use a darker alcohol that's been aged in wood, so the bourbons, the scotch have all been aged in wood. Try to stay away from the white alcohols, the clear ones like vodka. Dark tequila would be fine. Gin actually is okay because it has a juniper berry, which is a really cool polyphenol. This next one is from Larry. How does the plant paradox diet work with type 2 diabetics? Well, it'll make your type 2 diabetes go away and if it doesn't, then you're not following it. I hate to sound like a jerk, but we have never seen a type 2 diabetic not get rid of diabetes by following this program. In fact, just yesterday, a 62-year-old woman with horrible hemoglobin A1C is up in the seven and a half. It's now six months. She's down 40 pounds. She's off of her insulin. She's off of her metformin. Her hemoglobin A1C yesterday was 5.4, which is absolutely normal. She's not a diabetic anymore. Cheryl wants to know, what are the specific blood panels that you order for your patients? What I use, I use a company out of the Bay Area called Cingulex. They're available in all 50 states. It sounds like singularity, Cingulex. There's a number of good panels out there. One is True Health out of Richmond, Virginia. There's another one, Salvio, which is a new one out of the Mayo Clinic. The Cleveland Heart Labs have a good program, and the Boston Heart Labs have a good program. I also use Vibrant America for all my autoimmune testing. These are available. Your physician can order them. In general, Medicare pays for them. Most insurance pays for them. There may be some co-pays, so it's not a blanket statement. But they're payable tests. Jackie would like for you to address Vital Reds. Fabulous stuff. So what I wanted to do is, you know, I love fruit, believe me. We're designed to love fruit. But I wanted to get all the benefits of polyphenols without all the sugar. I basically wanted to have a juicer in everybody's home that you could just eat the pulp. So when I invented Vital Reds, I wanted to get all the polyphenols that you would get in the skins and the seeds, but get rid of the sugar. I also wanted to get BC30, that probiotic that I told you about, into everybody. So BC30's in it. And then there's a pretty nice dose of B vitamins in them. They're amazingly deficient in B vitamins. I measure B vitamins on everybody and it's been striking to see how deficient people are. So Vital Reds are just an easy way of getting polyphenols into you every day. You also make a pitch for large doses of vitamin D. Yes. We are profoundly deficient in vitamin D in this country. About 80% of Southern Californians are deficient in vitamin D. We use sunscreen, which is one of the most poisonous stuff you'll read in the book. Take 5,000 international units of vitamin D3. Dr. Hollick from Boston University, the world's expert on vitamin D, has only seen one case of vitamin D toxicity in his life. And that was a physician who unknowingly from a compounding pharmacy was taking a million international units a day for six months. So I don't recommend a million international units. What do you take vitamin D-wise? I take 5,000, but if I feel like I'm catching something, if I've got a scratchy throat or, believe it or not, I take 150,000 international units, three days in a row, and I take 8,000 milligrams of vitamin C. So what I do is take 5,000 of vitamin D in the morning, 5,000 midday, and 50,000 before I go to bed, three days in a row. It knocks out viruses. It's incredibly impressive. Yeah, you don't keep doing that the rest of your life. But interestingly, most people with autoimmune disease have profoundly low vitamin D levels. And I've had to use 30,000, 40,000 international units a day for months at a time to get their vitamin D level up. The important thing that appears is that vitamin D, number one, it's a hormone. It's not a vitamin. It's essential to make the stem cells in our gut that replace our gut wall grow. And without vitamin D, these guys just sit there. So if you've got a damaged gut, you need vitamin D to make these stem cells grow. And it's been very impressive to me when all these people with autoimmune disease walked through my door that one of the things that jumped out from their labs was a low vitamin D level. Robert's wanting to know if you are doing any live or seminar training for health practitioners anytime soon. I do have docs that come and shadow me for a few days or a week. I'm welcome to have anybody come. It's very difficult to get a traditionally trained doctor to embark on this. We're trained to get people in and out the door every 10 minutes and write them some prescriptions. And my initial visit with anyone is an hour and anyone who's been to my office knows if it's going to take longer than that, it's going to take longer than that. And then my subsequent visits are a half an hour or so. When I decided to do this, instead of being a heart surgeon, my wife still calls it Black Friday because you don't make a lot of money doing this compared to heart surgery. But you sure empower people to take back their health. And all of us went into medicine, hopefully, to change and give people health. That's why we did it. Most of us lost sight of that somewhere along the line. But yeah, anyone, I'm happy to have you. Come on by. So we're closing out at the end of our 90 minutes. And Stephen, thank you so much. You really have changed the way I think about what I eat and empowered me in that regard. Today there are so many different diets and I believe that the logical aspect of what you write about is going back again fundamentally to what our body evolved for. I mean, people have to understand, we actually evolved relatively slowly on a genetic level. If you take a human from 10,000 years ago and they were born and raised today, they could go to MIT or Harvard like you and I can. It's not like they might do better. But in other words, we change technologically, we change culturally, but our genomics, our evolutionary biology changes relatively slowly. And so what we're evolved to eat today is principally what we evolved to eat hundreds of thousands and even in our ape ancestors millions of years ago. So I just found what you wrote to make a huge logical sense to the point where it has changed what I eat, how I think about food. So an honor and a pleasure please. If no other reason to getting this book, because you've learned a lot here and you put out great YouTube videos, I think just the diet plans in the back of the book and what supplements to get is worth it. And I think we need to get you from number two on the New York Times list to number one. And again, to get access to Steven, Dr. Gundry's products and services, GundryMD.com is his website. Steven, an honor and a pleasure. A pleasure, thanks so much for having me on. Thank you, so happy that Tony introduced us.