 What's your opinion on excessive olive oil consumption causing diabetes? Now I've seen this video on the internet, and quite frankly, somebody has got to send this fellow to Spain or Greece or Italy and have them look at the olive oil consumption, which has actually been studied extensively in scientific studies. And I talk about these studies in the plant paradox. In Spain, 65 year old people were divided into three groups and followed for five years to see what happened to their memory. They all ate a Mediterranean diet. Group one had to use a liter of olive oil per week, that's 12 to 14 tablespoons a day. The second group had to eat the equivalent calories in walnuts, and the third group had to have a low fat diet. At the end of five years, the olive oil group and the walnut group, the high fat groups, actually had improved memory after five years compared to when they started, and the low fat group had diminished memory. But interestingly, the group that used the olive oil had far less heart disease than the low fat group. Similarly, in Crete, one of the blue zones, they use a liter of olive oil per week. For breakfast, they have a bowl with about an inch of olive oil and two poached eggs and a spoon, and you actually make olive oil soup. Olive oil has amazing polyphenols that actually protect the inside of your blood vessels and prevent diabetes, not promote it. So please, don't believe this fat makes diabetes theory. It's completely opposite of what published research has shown on the effects of olive oil. And as you remember, my favorite saying is the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. In fact, Ansel Keys, who was the famous nutritionist who invented the K-Rash in World War II, was the original anti-saturated fat nutritionist. He created the idea that we should have a low saturated fat diet. But Ansel Keys retired to a village in southern Italy, south of Naples that I visited called Aciiroli, where they have the largest percentage of people over 100 years of age in anywhere in the world, and Ansel Keys was a huge fan of olive oil. So the idea that one oil is equivalent to another is not true. And the original guy who hated saturated fat was an olive oil connoisseur and consumer, and he lived to 102 years old. Very nice work for a guy who was drowning in olive oil. Wouldn't it be better for us to just eat olives rather than consuming the oil? That's a great question. What you're really looking for in olives and olive oil is actually the polyphenols. These are, as you know, the plant compounds that actually feed good gut bacteria, that modify gut bacteria in preventing them from making harmful compounds, and also change the surface of your blood vessels to become more slippery. Now, it's not the oil that's the important part. That's mono-unsaturated fat, same as avocado oil. But olive oil has huge amounts of polyphenols. As you probably have learned, I am introducing the highest polyphenol concentrated olive oil in existence shortly, and I'm really excited about it because, again, the purpose of eating olive oil is to get polyphenols in your mouth. So do olives have polyphenols? Absolutely they do. And I eat a lot of olives. In fact, in Europe, they give you a little bowl of olives when you sit down for dinner or when you're having a cocktail before dinner or a glass of wine. You always have olives. The problem is you have to eat an awful lot of olives to get the amount of polyphenols that squeezing all those olives are going to give you. So absolutely, eat the olives, they're great for you. But don't forget the concentrated polyphenols in olive oil is actually what you're looking for. All right, is maple syrup approved on the plant paradox? I mean real locally produced maple syrup. So maple syrup is sugar. Let's get over it. It is sugar. There's nothing different about the sugar in maple syrup than any other forms of sugar. But I'll give you the proviso that if you are going to use a sweetener, that maple syrup, particularly a locally produced one of high quality, a little will go a long way. So you don't have to be afraid of it, but at the same time the last thing I want you to do is make my cassava flour waffles or pancakes and then drench it with maple syrup because maple syrup's healthy for you. That's the exact wrong thing to do. So if you want to use it as a little bit of flavoring, that's just fine. And please, when you look at these crazy, paleo approved ice creams and cookies and you see a half a cup or a cup of maple syrup, there is nothing paleo approved about that. That is sugar. And there's nothing that we would have run into maple syrup on a very unusual time period. Same way with honey. We ran into honey every now and then, but we didn't have it every day and we're not having maple syrup cassava pancakes every day. So a little bit, no problem. But don't please buy into these paleo videos.