 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Today, we've got another question and answer for you. These are questions that people have sent in through email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. So here goes a lot of fun questions. Elle asks, can coconut milk, coconut butter, and dried coconut flakes be inflammatory? I'm a lover of all components of the coconut plant. However, when I consume those coconut products, I get a scratchy throat and feel inflammation around my eyes. That's a great question. So coconut is a true tree nut. And absolutely, people can have tree nut allergies. And interestingly, a lot of people have a particular tree nut that they're allergic to, and they're perfectly fine with all the other ones. So you're not the only person I've heard from that has a coconut allergy. I have several people that absolutely they react the same way to coconut. The good news is, you don't have to eat coconut. I have at least one patient, I think two, that clearly react to avocados with the same thing. Again, it's unfortunate, but if you have a particular nut or substance, then stay away from it. I've found that the longer people are on the Plant Paradox program, and I talked about this in the Plant Paradox book, the less allergies they're going to have, and I now have a number of people with true nut allergies that no longer have allergies to nuts. And so, but stay away from it, if it bothers you. Moranum are. I'm a little confused about whole grains and legumes. Some docs say you should have to eat them. You have to eat them to stay healthy. Some say the opposite. Can you better explain please? And if there are healthy whole grains and legumes, which ones are the healthiest? So you have to remember that up until 10,000 years ago, no human being had a grain or a bean, because quite frankly, they were quite lethal to be consumed raw. If you cook them and if you soak them, you will degrade the lectins, but they're quite frankly still there. Fermentation helps degrade the lectins. But if you look at the history, particularly of wheat and brown rice through the last 10,000 years, the vast majority of Asians who use rice as their staple, for billion people use white rice rather than brown rice as their staple. They've been taking the haul off of the grain. Same way with wheat, for most of recorded history, people have tried to get the haul off of wheat and the whiter the wheat, the whiter the bread, it was more prized by the upper class and only the peasants got the whole grains. So there's a reason for this and the reason was people felt better when they were getting the hauls off of these products. And particularly if you go to Italy, there are long traditions and even South America of soaking beans for days, changing the water every few hours, throwing that out to decrease the lectin content. Also remember that a lot of my colleagues in longevity point to the blue zones as very long-lived people who just happened to eat grains and beans. Well, quite frankly, not all of the blue zones do eat grains and beans, a number of them don't. And even in the blue zone where I lived, Loma Linda, California, the only blue zone in the United States, the beans that we ate were texturized vegetable protein, TVP, which is soy meal, which is pressurized and heated to extreme temperatures and then turned into mystery meat. So even the clever Adventists have treated their beans with the most respect by pressure cooking them. And as I've said before, if you wanna have beans, I'd prefer you have lentils and you'll find some very interesting things in the new book, The Longevity Paradox, about the health benefit of pressure cook lentils. There really isn't a safe grain. If you gotta have a grain, I'd prefer you to use white Basmati rice from India. Cook it, then cool it. And you can even actually add a tablespoon of coconut oil in the cooking. It'll make it even more of a resistant starch. And we're gonna have a resistant starch question in just a minute. Liana asked about lectin-free foods for people with cancer. Absolutely. So as you know, a whole chapter in my book, chapter 10 of the Plant Paradox, the Keto Plant Paradox Program, is among other things dedicated to helping people with cancer. There are some new interesting studies coming out in the longevity paradox and I won't jump the gun because that's a few months away. But eating the plant paradox away now has some very interesting human studies that show not only does it decrease the rates of cancer, but it also, if you have cancer, dramatically decreases the risk of metastases. And a lot of it actually has to do with what these foods do to feed your gut microbiome. Believe it or not, your gut microbiome lives in you and would actually like to keep you around. So the exciting new research is if you feed your gut buddies what they like, they'll fight to keep you around. Decity or decide, are you still fasting if you have coffee with MCT and ghee? How does that affect your liver? Does it technically bring you out of fasting mode? Great question. We actually had a Facebook live about this recently. So here's the deal. MCT oil is medium chain triglyceride, sometimes called liquid coconut oil. MCT oil doesn't act like a traditional fat. It's actually taken directly to your liver and therefore most people, the liver converts it into ketones. Some people mistakenly think that MCT oil is ketones, it's not at all, but it is readily converted into ketones. Ketones can be used by your mitochondria, the little energy organelles in your cells to burn as fuel actually far more efficiently than sugar and glucose. And so it actually doesn't count against you when you're fasting. On the other hand, ghee or butter does count against you because it's a traditional fat and it's not going to be metabolized the same way. So if you got it, I prefer to have black coffee, but if you want to have MCT oil in your coffee, particularly in the first week or so when you're transitioning to the plant paradox system or you're transitioning over to fasting, this is a great way to do it. If you want to go to Dr. McCola's in my podcast where we had actually an entire session on transitioning into fasting. So MCT oil technically doesn't bring you out of fasting mode. What about sardines and extra virgin olive oil? I was eating them almost every day but heard they were high in arsenic. So I cut back, what do you think? Well actually there's organic arsenic and inorganic arsenic and sardines do have arsenic but it's organic arsenic and it's perfectly safe. So don't worry about sardines. As you probably know, the world's oldest living people in the village of Aciaroli, Italy, south of Naples where they have more centenarians per population than anywhere in the world. About 30% of them are over 100. They eat anchovies, which is a sardine every day. That's their main source of protein and I might add the tons of olive oil, they do not eat bread, they do not eat pasta but they eat lentils and you'll hear a lot more about that in the longevity paradox. Do I still need to peel the potatoes to remove all lectins if I cook them in a pressure cooker? No you don't but I'm gonna talk more about that. Are most lectins eliminated from the potato peels by pressure cooking them? So here's the deal with the potato. The potato is in night shade, it's a modern addition to our diet, nobody ate a potato until 500 years ago. Potatoes have a starch called potato starch which doesn't have a lectin in it but potato starch is a resistant starch it's called an R2 starch and really elegant studies have shown that for lack of a better word bad bugs in our gut like R2 starches. The starches good bugs like are called R3 starches, sometimes you'll see it as RS2, RS3, the nomenclature gets a little silly but the starch in potatoes is not what you wanna be feeding your bugs even if you pressure cook them. So put potatoes way down on the list, there's, you do not need them as much as you like them. What about buckwheat? Do they have lectins and gluten? Here's the bad news about buckwheat. When I started this years ago, I was really hoping that buckwheat was gonna be my go-to pseudo grain. It is not a grain, it's a seed. The problem is buckwheat has lectins. It doesn't have any gluten but as most of you who have found us at the plant paradox have realized that gluten is actually a fairly minor lectin and most of the gluten free foods that people who are avoiding gluten have more lectins than the problem they're replacing. So buckwheat unfortunately has lectins, so it's not approved. If you wanna pressure cook it, it will destroy the lectins but just a reminder, you cannot destroy the gluten lectin with pressure cooking and I have some of my wonderful canaries who have tried for well over an hour and can't destroy the gluten protein. It's a tough little bugger. Dr. Gundry, can you make a video about what you think of bone broth? You don't need animal protein, number one. You don't need animal protein, number two. You don't need animal protein, number three. So bone broth, as you'll see in the longevity paradox, animal protein counts against us in terms of longevity. Yes, there are some interesting amino acids in bone broth, particularly glutamine. And glutamine is a darling of the heal your gut community but glutamine consumed long term can be turned into a neurotoxin which has been proven from a neurosurgeon in New Orleans. And so I'm skeptical of the long term use of bone broth products. If you wanna use it early on as a source of glutamine to help with gut healing, I've got nothing really against it but quite frankly, getting rid of lectins is gonna be the number one thing you can do to seal your gut quicker than just consuming glutamine. What about fresh fruit that I can freeze when it's ripe in the summer? Yeah, you can certainly do that but you were not designed to eat fruit in the winter. It did not exist. Now what I like to do and I talk about it in the plant paradox is do this. So you get all that fresh fruit in the summer, you get out your juicer, you take all that fruit, put it through your juicer, believe it or not, throw the juice away. That's the bad stuff. Then you take the pulp, the stuff you were gonna throw away, put it in some ice cube trays. You can either get silicone ice cube trays, you can get the old fashioned metal ones, freeze them, pop them into a glass dish or a stainless steel dish in the freezer. And then when you're making a smoothie in the winter or you're making whatever, you're gonna have some coconut yogurt and wanna add some flavor, put one of those in there. You'll actually, if you take it in coconut yogurt, you'll have the best ice cream in the winter you can possibly imagine. It's easy to do. You'll get the polyphenol benefits of fruit without the sugar. What about freeze dried foods? Does this destroy the lectins? No, unfortunately, lectins are destroyed with high heat under pressure. Cooking does diminish lectins, but there's very strong evidence that not all lectins in beans or in grains are destroyed with just heating. So freeze drying has no effect in terms of destroying lectins. Sorry about that. Dr. Gundry, when you mentioned treating patients with autoimmune biomarkers that eliminated lectins, would a biomarker for lupus be a positive ANA? And by eliminating these lectins, there would be a negative ANA. So ANA, anti-nuclear antibody, is one of the universally accepted markers for autoimmune diseases most often associated with lupus. But you can have a positive ANA with a wide variety of other autoimmune diseases, including mixed connective tissue disease, scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis. I could actually go on and on. But yes, ANA is most synonymous with lupus. Now having a positive ANA does not mean you have lupus. People run to the internet when they have a positive ANA and they go, oh my gosh, I've got lupus. So as you may or may not know, this past March, I gave a paper of 102 people with positive biomarkers like ANA, who went on the program for six months. And 95 out of those 102 people were negative after six months for their biomarkers. And I was one of those people. When I started my program, I had a positive ANA. One very high, but it was definitely positive. And I have a very strong family history of psoriasis on my father's side. He took methotrexate for 50 years because of psoriasis. So I knew I had a good chance of having an autoimmune disease. And within two months, my anti-nuclear antibody was negative. For fun, I cheated and was able to turn my anti-nuclear antibody positive again. And then I turned it off. So I'm kind of proud that I'm one of the patients in my paper and I showed myself to the American Heart Association. So the point is that this is not a autoimmune sentence for life. Autoimmune diseases are curable. At the very least, you can put them in remission with diet. Terry Walls, my good friend, proved that you can get rid of MS with diet. I have multiple MS patients who have gotten rid of MS with diet. So, ANA does not mean you have lupus, but it is indicative that you have an autoimmune attack on yourself. And that's because of a leaky gut. So seal your gut, it'll go away. And one of the best ways to seal your gut is to get rid of lectins. They are the mischief maker. I have a sore throat. What kind of hard candy can I have? Well, if you got a sore throat, first thing you gotta do is reach for your bottle of vitamin D. And I want you to take a lot of vitamin D. That's the first thing. If I feel a sore throat coming on or if I feel, you know, a scratchy thing or sniffles coming on, as you know, I will take 150,000 international units of vitamin D three days in a row. That's nearly a million international units of vitamin D in three days. Now, I've done that for years. As you can see, I'm not dead. If you wanna say, hey, I wanna have my back, take 50,000 of vitamin D. That's 10 of those little 5,000 three days in a row and you'll be fine. But I personally take 150,000. In terms of chewing on hard candy, get the sugar-free like Ricola. But I'd rather you take vitamin D. And believe it or not, saltwater gargles work miraculously for sore throats. Don't forget that old wise trick. Erica, do you recommend banning aluminum foil from the kitchen? What's your take on this? Grew up baking sweet potatoes in aluminum foil in the oven. Curious what you think? Thanks so much for the PP30. Fired up here in Indiana. Hello to Indiana, my sister and brother-in-law and my niece and nephew and their families all live in the Indianapolis area. So wonderful town. I hope you're near there, but there's other great towns in Indiana. So you don't have to ban aluminum foil. What I don't want you to do is eat aluminum. And you're not gonna get a lot of leaching of aluminum if you bake the sweet potato, particularly if you don't eat the skin on the sweet potato. One thing I would like you to do, which I really try to get people to do, bake your sweet potatoes, then put them in the refrigerator and cool them off and then reheat them. It's gonna make a big difference in the amount of resistant starch in that sweet potato. And once you kind of get used to it, what you do is you, on the weekends, bake a bunch of sweet potatoes, put them in the refrigerator and then pull them out when you wanna use them. It's a great trick. The worry about aluminum fry pans is true. And also, I'm very suspicious, as are other people, particularly Dr. Mercola, about the aluminum in antiperspirants. There is some troubling suggestion that aluminum is found in breast cancer in women and in the lymph nodes of women with breast cancer. I'm not saying that there is a causation between the aluminum and breast cancer. I'm not saying that at all. But it's just something that we don't have to have. So why would you use it? There's certainly better alternatives than aluminum in deodorants. But the other thing is don't use aluminum fry pans. You're much better off with stainless steel. You're much better off with ceramic coatings. And if you gotta have a cast iron pan, please get the ones that are ceramic coated. They're far safer. Sassy shepherds from Instagram. Simply, what is the healthiest flower for dog biscuits? Which is better, rice, wheat, coconut, et cetera? I saw your video with Dr. Becker and now concerned about grain-free products. Really hoping for an answer. Love your PP program and want to know what to do to improve my dog's life. So please don't give your dogs rice or wheat or other corn-based biscuits. They don't need biscuits. If you want to use coconut-based biscuits, I think you really wanna give dogs what they were designed to eat. And that is animal products and also greens. We're gonna spend more time on that in the future. And I love being on with Dr. Becker. I think she really knows what she's talking about. What you don't wanna do is give your dogs legume-based products, chickpea-based products, sweet potato-based products. And so you have to be cautious with the new grain-free products. Stay with coconut or stay with known trusted sources of raw beef, venison, chicken that is a trusted source. I give my dogs treats of either freeze-dried or frozen venison from a supplier that I know is wild. But you don't have to find some coconut biscuits or make some of their own. Dogs will love eating what you make. Keith, when I come off a fast and use MCT, it tears my gut up. What do you suggest for first foods coming off a fast? So a lot of MCT oil will really tear up your gut. Particularly, look at whether it is a C8, a C10, or a C12. C12 is notorious for causing diarrhea. A lot of the cheaper MCT oils use C12. Look for eight, which is probably the least mischievous, 10 is also okay. But there's no need to use MCT oil coming off of a fast. What I like to do coming off a fast is I actually just start eating salads. I do wonderful with that. Gives my gut bugs exactly what they wanna eat. Some people who are using a fast for irritable bowel, which definitely works. Using raw vegetables coming off a fast is probably the worst idea. So either really, really cook your vegetables like turn your broccoli and cauliflower into mush, make mashed cauliflower, make mashed celeriac root, or go for resistant starches like a sweet potato and start there. But yeah, MCT oil is not the way to come out of a fast. Angela, I am curious what serving size is recommended for seasonal fruit? Also, is it okay to eat that serving size each day and during which phases is it acceptable? As you may or may not know, one of my original expressions was give fruit the boot. Fruit is not a health food. And as you'll see in the upcoming book, The Longevity Paradox, there's new evidence that the sugar in fruit, fructose, poisons mitochondria. And that's the last thing you wanna do. Now, the other thing that in fruit, fruit has been hybridized to have high sugar content. It's also been hybridized to be bigger. When I was growing up, the apple was a little bitty thing. Now an apple is the size of a grapefruit. And same way, an orange used to be a little bitty thing. Now an orange is the size of a cantaloupe. So we have supersized everything. And if you'll notice, even the names have changed. An apple is now a honey crisp. And it's the size of a grapefruit. The serving size makes a huge difference. So downsize all of your fruit if you're going to eat them and be cognizant that a serving size of fruit today is totally different than what it used to be. So have very little bits of fruit, preferably none whatsoever. Use them as a treat, not as a daily occurrence. I can't tell you the number of people who are diabetics, who stop being diabetics and then say, oh good, I'm not a diabetic anymore. I can start having fruit within two months. They're back to being a full diabetic just because they added healthy fruit to their diet. Fruit is not a health food. I'm sorry, I love fruit. I wish I could have it every day. We're designed to love fruit because that's how we fattened up for the winter. And our computer doesn't understand that we do not have 365 days of summer. And that's how we act. And we have to have a period of growth every year and then a period of regression. And in the longevity paradox, you'll find out how we no longer have a period of regression. And that's why we have so much cancer. That's why we have so much diabetes. That's why we have so much dementia. We never had these things happen to us in the past. And now we do. Prestige 52 from Instagram is yeast high in lectins. I would like to bake rolls with alternative flowers, but nothing rises quite like yeast. No, yeast does not have any lectins whatsoever. So use the yeast, yeast ferments. And actually if there are lectins, we eat the lectins. And that's one of the principles of fermentation that our ancient ancestors used to their advantage to decrease the amount of lectins in foods. So yeast away. Maria, what should I do when I hit a plateau in weight? Maria, I have hit multiple plateaus in my journey of losing 70 pounds. And often they're actually psychological plateaus. I can never forget not being able to get below 200 pounds. I would hit 199 and then the next day I'd be 203. And it literally took me about a month to finally make the plunge below 200. My next stop was 180. And it's fascinating. 180 is another place where I must have spent a month, maybe six weeks, just couldn't get past 180. So there are, I think in my patient population, there's a ton of people that 200 is a major barrier. I don't know what your weight is, but there will be barriers. What I do is, first thing I do is I cut nuts out of my diet if I'm stuck. The second thing I do is I start skipping meals. Early on I think the easiest meal to skip is actually lunch. Later on I find that most people get the most benefit by skipping breakfast. And I go into that a lot in the longevity paradox why breakfast is probably your least important meal. With one proviso, if your social and home calendar allow, the old saying eat like a king at breakfast, a queen at lunch and a pauper at dinner is probably some of the best advice you can do. Unfortunately, just because of circumstances with when the family actually gets together, we reverse that meal and we eat like kings at dinner and that's probably the dumbest time to eat for long-term health and longevity. Sujatha, what can we substitute for Yakon syrup? Also the corn products are unavailable anywhere. Two things, so Yakon syrup, what you're looking for is inulin. And inulin is present in Yakon, but inulin is available as a sweetener. One of the most common ones is called just like sugar. There's also inulin from agave in whole foods. It's been in every whole foods I've gone to. Speaking of corn, corn is usually in the vegetarian freezer section. They're in every whole foods that I've been to. Walmart has corn, so everybody's got a Walmart. The other thing is you talk to your grocer and say, hi, if you get in corn grounds and corn chicken tenders, I'll buy it. And that'll usually get a grocer interested. But you gotta look in the vegetarian freezer section. In word of warning, most of the corn products are not approved, the vegan ones aren't approved, they're loaded with wheat, they're loaded with other lectins. So follow the list on the plant paradox list. Sylvia, which list does pineapple fall on? Yes or no? And coconut water, specifically harmless coconut water. Well, there's nothing harmless about coconut water. Coconut water is pure sugar, and that's why people like it. So please, please, please, there's better sources of electrolytes than coconut water. Eat some coconut instead. Pineapple is a tropical fruit. It's unfortunately loaded with sugar. So it's not on either the good list or the bad list. A lot of the times I leave off something that doesn't appear on any list. For instance, you'll notice that almonds don't appear on the approved nut list unless they're marcona almonds or unless they're blanched almond flour. The reason for that is that almonds do have a lectin in their peel. And I have unfortunately several patients with rheumatoid arthritis who absolutely positively react to that lectin peel in almonds. You also may have noticed you wise readers in the plant paradox cookbook. I snuck in and mentioned that there's a new paper that shows that pecans and seaweed have a lectin that may bind to our pancreas and cause an autoimmune attack on the pancreas. And that breaks me up because as you know, I went to the Medical College of Georgia. I lived in Georgia for many years. And that's kind of basically the state nut along with peanuts. So I don't eat a lot of pecans after discovering that paper. They're on the list because again it's only one paper but there are certain things to be aware of. Meg, coconut oil is now only phase three but no mention of that change for coconut milk, coconut butter or shredded coconut. How about them? Yeah, they're perfectly fine. The deal with coconut oil. Number one, if you're an apoE4 individual and 30% of you in the United States carry that gene and that gene is quote the Alzheimer's gene, coconut oil is probably not your friend. And I say that after looking at a huge number of patients who come to me with that gene for my advice, coconut oil definitely raises what are called small dense LDLs in you unfortunately and you don't want that. The deal with coconut oil in general is that these little particles called lipopolysaccharides are bacterial particles that promote inflammation in you and they ride on a carrier called a chylomart micron and there's not gonna be a test that are made from saturated fats and they literally hitch a ride. They hijack that chylomicron to get into your body and coconut oil unfortunately is notorious for forming chylomicrons to get through your gut wall. So that's the reason that I try to limit coconut oil early on in the phases of the book. Once we seal your gut and once we tone down your immune system, then it's really quite safe except if you carry APOE4. Okay, so thanks for your questions. We'll do this as often as we can. They're always fun. Thank you for listening. If you're interested in participating in the Plant Paradox 30, head to drgundry.com. You'll find all about it. I'm gonna do it. We've got a lot of people signed up or gonna do it with us. So thanks again. I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you and I'll see you at the Plant Paradox 30 challenge coming up soon.