 The book that you just wrote the plant paradox that is by the way Congratulations number two in the York Times list. Thank you very much awesome. Congratulations, and I hope those of you who have gotten the book Have enjoyed it so far and those of you who have not I urge you to get it Not for the theory. We're gonna talk about the theory in the back of the book. Dr. Gundry has got actually very practical What to eat how to eat recipes? Sort of breakfast lunch and dinner suggestions, which makes eating what you're proposing a lot more palatable and doable because the fact the matter is What what you've identified here is that a lot of the things that we currently eat that we think of as healthy are in fact Not in fact, they're attacking us And let's let's just jump into the meat of that right now Perfect, good. I think that's the important thing to realize like at the end of the day I want our viewers to know what the hell do we eat and what don't we want to eat and why because you've changed my diet like You know 80% of what I'm sorry about that. No, it's fine Really tough to explain to people the entire theory of And I met this guy dr. Gundry through my dear friend Tony Robbins who's a dear friend of ours both so let's jump in What do we what don't we eat and why? Okay plants don't like us They were here first They had a great nobody wanted to eat them when their predators arrived they had a problem They couldn't run they couldn't hide they couldn't fight but their chemists as you and I know of incredible ability almost all drugs come from a plant compound and so they use chemical warfare to keep us their predator from eating them and They use lectins which are proteins that are basically designed to hack our system in many ways but the fundamental principle of lectins are I like people Have people think of these as basically incoming guided missile attacks and lectins like to pry apart the wall of our intestine and Most people don't realize that inside of us the surface area of the intestines is Equivalent to a tennis court and surface area every one of us And the wall of the intestine is only one cell thick and the cells are all held together by little tight junctions like kids playing Red Rover Red Rover and lectins actually flip a switch and Pop these tight junctions apart and then lectins which are foreign protein get through the wall of our gut But they also take with them what we talked about in the book are bacterial particles cell walls Called lipopoly saccharides, right? They're abbreviated LPS's and you're bringing back very many ancient memories for medical school So I don't swear, but I call them little pieces of shit in the book because that's actually what they are And so if you want to think about our immune system our immune system is the border patrol on the other side of our gut And when foreign proteins aliens come across our border our immune system goes Oh my gosh, the illegal aliens across the border. We're under attack. We should scramble the fighter jets We should go to threat level five and wherever we see any protein that looks like a lectin or a little piece of shit We should open fire and ask questions later The idea is to create inflammation and inflammation makes an animal feel lousy or not thrive And that's how plants win So at the end of the day We know one of these lectins the whole society has gone on a gluten-free diet Because you have this, you know, oh, I've got gluten intolerance gluten intolerance everybody talks about gluten intolerance and so forth And that's just one of The minor lectins if you would correct, right? Yeah, we'll talk about all the other lectins that potentially could be hitting you Right. So why did why did gluten get such a special showing? Well, I think there's a there's a couple of things It truly is a lectin and there are Two to five percent of people who clearly carry genes for gluten intolerance for celiac disease The extreme form of gluten intolerance but when we just add if you take people with celiac disease and put them on a gluten-free diet and they're saints and Rebiopsy their intestines two years later 83% of them will still have celiac disease Even though they're eating gluten-free So that actually proves that gluten is just one little piece of this puzzle And what I try to convince people is that most people who are eating a gluten-free diet are eating a heavy Lectin-laden diet so give me the top five or ten things that contain lectins that you That I used to be eating and all of you are eating that you don't realize you're eating So where are lectins prevalent? Okay, so all grains have lectins whether they're Healthy grains one of the things that's happened to us in the last 50 years is we have actually bought hook line and sinker The idea of whole grain goodness. Yeah We've always thrown the haul away from grains. We believe it or not Have been trying to make bread white for 10,000 years and only the poor people got the brown bread The French eat white baguettes the Italians eat white pasta. You imagine Italian eating whole wheat pasta I mean, it's just it's crazy Because we've been getting rid of the the lectins and grains Now the other is beans beans are a modern food as well that pissed me off, man I was like I gone vegan. I was like being a vegetarian and then all of a sudden the you know I was getting my protein from beans. I was so proud and then boom I mean, you're absolutely right beans are really heavy in lectins. Yeah, and Unfortunately, you can soak beans and get some of the lectins out and you can cook beans and get some of the lectins out But they're still heavy in lectins The only way to get it out is a pressure cooker and I was doing a podcast yesterday with a vegan chef Who has a best-selling book and she wanted me on her podcast and she decided to go on the plant paradox program and To test it out. Yeah, and so she was has been on it for about a month And she says okay I'm gonna start this podcast because I did this to prove you wrong Because I'm a thriving vegan and I chose vegan for lots of reasons, but She said you're right. She said I can't believe how much better I feel following your vegan diet There's there's a vegan version in the in the book. There's a vegetarian version in the book She said you took away what I thought every vegan had to eat to be healthy And when I took those out of my diet, she said you're right I hate to admit it, but I'm here on the podcast telling you you were right And this is actually the response I get from almost every human being including myself So grains okay grains of meat and beans and then an American plants So this is interesting, right? I love this again. It's it's about logic, right? most of us didn't evolve in America a 100,000 or a million years ago. We were alive in this savannahs of Africa. Yeah, we all came from Africa Yeah, and none of us from America from America. We're from Europe Asia or Africa Yeah, so none of us have ever encountered an American plant or genomics in encountering correct Yeah, or our microbiome or a microbiome. Yeah until 500 years ago when Columbus started trade Well, there are the American Indians watching who probably but they're Asian Over across the they you came here about 11,000 years ago. So we're all from somewhere else. Sorry about that And we're all originally from Africa. Yes, agreed So genomics evolved for a non-American plant diet And so what are the American plants that we are eating that we shouldn't be so the two beans that are Peanuts and cashews their beans. They're not nuts. They're American Peanuts are some of the most deadly foods ever found The nightshade family potatoes egg plant peppers tomatoes and goji berries Goji berries are American. They were called the wolfberry They were taken to China and trade and they grew extremely well So these are all nightshades and the sad thing is in general the peels and the seeds have the lectins and Italians as you probably know traditionally peel and de-seed their tomatoes before you make sauce and My mother's mother was French and she taught my mother to always peel and de-seed a tomato before we ate them And because that's where the lectins are because that's where the lectins are and they were removing them The same way with peppers You'll never open a glass jar of Italian bell peppers and see peels and seeds because they're gone The southwest american indians always char and de-seed their peppers before they grind them into chili powder or eat them You'll never open a can of green chilies and see peels and seeds because they've been removed Interesting so traditional cultures have dealt with lectins and we've kind of forgotten all that and it's fascinating They dealt with it not by knowing the molecular biology, but by trial and error. Yeah, they they knew how it made them feel in fact, there's the old joke that No sane individual would ever take a second bite of a jalapeno pepper And if you think about it from a plant standpoint the plants go, what do I have to do to stop you eating my babies? so, um So in the book you talk about the and I remember when I first met You were so kind to spend a couple hours and and and made my life very easy by having the Eat these are things you can eat and things that things you shouldn't eat and it just it changed where I shop It changed what I eat it changed everything now, um at the end of the day, I want to now talk about uh, the impact it has because uh, the impact is On number one weight reduction will come to that in a moment, but the second is if you've got an autoimmune disease I mean you have had miraculous results with people with rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or Poly maldromatica or a whole range of other autoimmune diseases. So can you talk about? The autoimmune elements And the weight loss and then cardiac as well. Yeah, I mean are there are those the three major categories? You would say or yeah, in fact the longer I do this now Um You know, I think apocrates Statement keeps ringing in my ears and I think most of us forgot it So apocrates said that all disease begins in the gut But he said that every creature has this Ability to heal itself to have perfect health And he called it the green life force energy kind of hokey, but that's what he called it It sounds better in greek or latin And so the purpose of a physician was to identify the obstacles that was keeping The green life force energy from having perfect health in in a person and to remove those obstacles and then the person would heal himself and What I found I'm a pretty good detective is By removing things from people they all Healed themselves. So I don't heal rheumatoid arthritis I identify what's giving them rheumatoid arthritis get it out of their diet and then they heal themselves Apocrates is right. Yeah, so it's interesting. I was speaking to an infectious physician with a top id doctors here in la and We were talking about the notion that his belief is that all autoimmune diseases all rheumatoid type diseases actually begin Through an infectious process It's your your body having your immune system basically identifying some kind of a alien protein maybe with part of your molecular structure and And turning on an immune cell that attacks it and then when the infection is gone, you're still keep attacking yourself Yeah, I think that's very a reasonable idea We know that there's a lot of people who We can trace the beginning of their autoimmune disease to Ininfection of viral gastroenteritis, you know stomach flu We can trace it to somebody getting a ton of antibiotics and killing off their microbiome Certainly, we've seen people with a stressful encounter I remember one woman very clearly in Santa Barbara Her rheumatoid arthritis started a week after her mother's sudden death when she was about 13 years of age She had remembers it vividly and Now she doesn't have it anymore. But what happened was she had leaky gut from that shock And one thing I like to use is an example. We know that marathon runners Elite marathon runners get a profound leaky gut and you actually see Marathon runners towards the end of a race have bloody diarrhea As they near the finish line And our immune system in marathon running takes this tremendous hit for about two weeks and the gut becomes permeable But so I think again, I think apocrates is right that it starts in the gut Now whether a bacteria gets through whether a lectin gets through whether both accomplish it Lectins are interesting because they are proteins and proteins That look a lot like other proteins in our in our body and it's called molecular mimicry And the idea is when your immune system is activated It it doesn't want to make a mistake and it would rather shoot first and ask questions later So if imagine your fighter jets are scrambled and they come across your thyroid gland and there's Lectins or other proteins that look like lectins and you're in your When you insist it says oh my gosh, you know these poorer women's are her thyroids full of lectins and we should kill them and It's amazing that other people with Hashimoto's thyroiditis that it actually has come from their gut whether it's Permiability and and what you've shown is if you change your diet you can calm your immune system down in that regard Correct. And how fast can you do that? Well, I was naive early on that I thought could be done in a couple weeks It it takes a while primarily because you have to change your microbiome The microbiome can change fairly rapidly, but then you have to go about sealing the wall of your gut We need to think of our microbiome as this tropical rainforest which is an incredible ecosystem in and of itself. There's 10 000 different denizens living in there and they compete for space and they compete for food and so it's an incredible ecosystem And one for instance round of antibiotics as you and I know will wipe out this ecosystem And it may take two years to get this ecosystem back to its complexity So it can take three months six months. I've seen it take as long as a year, but usually three to six months And last fall I had the honor of giving a paper at the international microbiota meeting in paris at the pastor institute of 78 patients with marker proven autoimmune diseases Who following this program became marker negative within the year and stayed marker negative as long as they Spiled the program