 Olive oil has some of the best polyphenols of all time. You know, since we first met, I've been doing shots of olive oil every night, just, you know, probably not a shot glass, actually, a glass of olive oil. So how much olive oil do you think I should be taking? Well, as a good Greek. Yeah, yeah. Well, as you know, on Crete, the average consumption of olive oil is a liter per week. And that's 12 tablespoons a day. And so one of my favorite sayings is the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. I've heard that. And it's really interesting. The Spanish did a really cool study, I know you're aware of, where they took 65-year-old people and they put them on a Mediterranean diet. And the one group had to use a liter of olive oil per week for five years. And they actually had to come and get the olive oil dispensed to them once a week. They had to bring the empty one back. The second group had to have the equivalent amount of raw walnuts. And the third group had a low-fat Mediterranean diet. And the original study was for memory. So at the end of five years, the olive oil group had preserved memory. It actually improved over baseline. The walnut group had preserved memory, but it was the same as baseline. And the low-fat diet group had diminished memory. But the really cool part of the study, which just got published a few months ago, is that the women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the other two groups. So yeah, drink your olive oil. I mean, it's interesting. People think of fats as something to avoid. In fact, fats are probably one of the most important parts of your diet. Yeah, absolutely. So avocados and olive oil have made a big appearance in my life in the last six months. The Greeks do it. The Sardinians use about a liter of olive oil. It's interesting, right? Because you can actually go and study what the blue-zone populations eat. And what do you find there? And these are the populations around the world that have 100 years old as a normal occurrence in all the villages. So one of the interesting things about these blue zones is that they actually have wildly different diets. For instance, the Cretes and the Sardinians, two of the blue zones, use huge amounts of olive oil. And that is a huge part of their diet. The Okinawans, on the other hand, eat very little fat, but 80% of their diet is a purple sweet potato. There's some fascinating groups of people called the Katavans that really changed my thought on carbohydrates, who eat about 60% of their diet as terro root. And these guys live into their 90s and they smoke like fiends, but there's never been a case of heart disease. There's never been a case of lung cancer. So here's these two groups of people. One eats huge amounts of what appear to be carbohydrates. The other eats huge amounts of fat, and yet they both live a long time. What I went back to my research at Yale, and gorillas eat 16 pounds of leaves every day. But they don't absorb those calories as carbohydrates. The bacteria actually eat those leaves and produce fat. They produce primarily short chain and medium chain fatty acids. So the gorilla absorbs a 60% fat diet. Interesting. So I have to share something that was a really important takeaway that you gave me. So at the end of the day, if you're trying to gain muscle, you know, I bet you if you're a vegan, someone saying, oh, if I want to gain muscle, you know, come on, get some good meat into you. Go and eat, you know, go get a good steak or something. And then you shared a visual insight for me that was like, oh my God, you're right. Can you share that with everybody? Yeah. I mean, a gorilla eats no meat. A gorilla has more muscle than you and I could ever possibly imagine. They're plant eaters. They're plant eaters. A horse eats grass. He's not chewing on burgers. He has more muscle than you'll ever have. All the largest animals on earth, all the most muscular animals on earth are plant eaters. Amazing. And interestingly enough, the great carnivores, like lions and tigers, actually eat the bellies of the animals, which actually contains plant material and fat. And lions will always leave the hindquarters and the legs because it's not worth it for them to eat. They want the abdominal content. Okay, one last question and we'll go to Q&A here. Autoimmune disease is like rheumatoid arthritis. Someone comes to you with RA as an example. What is your advice to them? Get on this diet. Correct. And how quickly will they start to see potentially a change? Yeah, so if you're on biologics for any of the autoimmune diseases, don't take away that you should stop them tomorrow and start this. What you do want to do is you want to repair your gut and more importantly, you want to stop the sieve that you've got. The best analogy I can have for you is that you're in a boat and the boat has holes in it and there's two strategies here to keep the boat afloat. You can start bailing water and if the holes are big enough, you're going to need a bigger and bigger bucket and eventually you're not going to be able to keep up and you'll sink. The other strategy is to plug the holes. And what I think I do by taking lectins away, which are the hole makers, is allow you to plug your holes and then you don't need to bail. You don't take in water. So the more you follow these principles, it's what you don't eat that's important. It's not so much what I tell you to eat. If you eat like it's 9,999 years ago and if you keep that in mind, we ate leaves and tubers and we ate some shellfish and we ate some fish and we ate wild animals but they were primarily at that time fatty wild animals, you know, woolly mammoths. That's actually how we did. So we did not eat grains. We did not eat beans. We did not eat potatoes. We did not eat tomatoes. And then will you actually see changes in your genetic markers on RA after a period of time? We definitely see the rheumatoid factor goes to normal. We see the anti-CCP3 go to normal. You'll still have people, there's clearly a genetic component for propensity to these things, but you can stop that from being expressed. And that's really, as you and I know, epigenomics is really the key. It's not so much the genes you're dealt. It's whether you turn them off or not. Right? Amazing. All right. Let's jump into our beloved audience here. Fabulous. Thanks for the discussion so far. So the first question is around healthy proteins and several similar questions. One, what are the most healthy proteins? What vegetarian protein source do you suggest? And then overall views on eating beef. So you get, there's plenty of protein in plant leaves. And we've not been taught that because it goes against really our commerce. There's plenty of protein in leaves. I take care of a lot of vegetarians and vegans who have been brainwashed to think they have to get protein from grains or beans. Grains are a horrible source of protein. It's really a very small part of a grain. Beans are a better source, but you certainly don't need beans. It was 10,000 years ago where 10 feet tall meant men and women. And the amazing thing is our brain was 15% bigger than it is today. We shrunk dramatically when we were exposed to healthy plant proteins of grains and beans. Of the plant proteins, if you really want a grain-like thing, hemp is quite frankly the safest. And the more we can encourage hemp growing in this country, the better from my point of view, hemp has a lot of miraculous properties that we're only now beginning to realize. So hemp protein is great for you. Stay away from pea protein. Peas have lectins. And I see a lot of vegetarians who are eating their healthy pea protein, and I think that's a mistake. Now in terms of beef. Beef and pork and lamb have a sugar molecule called new 5GC that promotes an autoimmune response in humans who eat them. And we actually prove that we attack the inside of our blood vessels. And cancer cells, tumors use 5GC to evade the immune system and actually to stimulate a growth factor called VEGF to grow blood vessels towards them. Humans have new 5AC, A instead of G, which is incredibly close, but it's actually one of the things that differentiates us from other species. Chicken has new 5AC, fish and shellfish have new 5AC, so we don't react immunologically to chicken and shellfish and fish. So as much as I'm a Nebraska farm boy, beef is mischievous. And so if you're going to have it, have grass fed, but just do it very as a special treat, if any. Along those lines you educated me that it turns out that I'm lactose intolerant and that not all lactose is made the same. Can you actually share, I mean I found this absolutely fascinating that they're out there in the world, there are two different types of cows, one is okay and the other one should be avoided. Yeah, so the original cow, there's a protein in milk called casein A2 and the other protein in milk is whey. And about 2,000 years ago Northern European cows suffered a spontaneous genetic mutation. As we do. As we do. They started making casein A1. Now casein A1 is a very interesting lectin-like protein that has some very strong correlation to attacking the beta cell of the pancreas and I and others are convinced that a lot of type 1 diabetes can directly be traced to casein A1. So casein A1 cows are hardier and they give more milk so that almost all cows in the world are now the wrong breed of cow. They're the Holstein cow, the black and white cow. And so their milk contains casein A1, Guernsey cows, Swiss brown cows, Belgian blue cows are casein A2, all goats and all sheep are casein A2. So it's very interesting, a lot of people who think they're lactose intolerant, what I've found is they're actually casein A1 intolerant because a great number of them can have goat's milk and not react, even though there's plenty of lactose in goat's milk. And one of the eye-openers for me early on was people who were lactose intolerant would go to Italy and they'd have the gelato and come back and say, you know, I love going to Italy because there's no lactose in their gelato. And I said, well, yes, of course there is. They said, well, no, because I can have all the gelato I want and I don't react. And I'm lactose intolerant and no, turns out casein A2 cows are in Italy, France and Switzerland so what you thought was a lactose intolerant was casein A1. And if people have what they think is a milk intolerance or the milk gives them mucus or that I'll have people tell me that they're lactose intolerant and they can't have cheese. Well, there's no lactose in cheese, but the cheese gives them mucus. The mucus is actually our protection against the casein A1 lectin and we make mucus to trap those lectins. Fascinating. Next question, Marcia. Fun one from Francis. Can we design nanotech to allow us to eat anything and still remain healthy and slim? You want to take that one? Sure. So Francis, at the end of the day, of course, I mean the promise of nanotechnology is to allow you to pretty much do anything. I mean, our bodies are nanomachines. We start from a set of 3.2 billion nucleotides, the data set and we manufacture a cell in the human zygote and then replicate that and specialize that to somewhere in the order of 30 trillion of them that make up your body. The vision of nanotechnology as originally portrayed by Eric Drexler and continued by folks like Ray Kurzweil and others is that we're going to use these kinds of nanomachines who go in and can recognize, if you would, lectins and destroy them on the spot. But the fact of the matter is once we have that level of technology, so much more happens in the world that you'll forget about that. It's the small fringe benefit as you blast off on your diamond-oid spaceship towards your space colony. So yeah, but I guess the question is can we, in fact, avoid, can we eat things and avoid having the lectins bother us? And in fact, we don't have to wait for nanotechnology. I use a product you have called lectin shields right now. Talk about that one second. Yeah, so we know that lectins have specific targets, they're sugar molecules. And we even know what sugar molecules, lectins are particularly designed to be attracted to. So I formulated a compound that has about eight known lectin desirable sugar molecules that bind lectins. And it's, can you do anything you want if you take it? I didn't design it for that, but it's certainly protective. I feel like Bill Murray on Groundhog Day, we could do anything we want. But I've taken it to Italy and eaten pasta and potatoes and not suffered the normal consequences of blowing up like a toad. But so yeah, it's possible to bind lectins. And I try to eat a lot of lectin binding compounds. And those compounds have lots of inulin already in them. So for example, radicchio has a lot of inulin in it. Chickery, endive has a lot of inulin in it. And it's really interesting looking at what Italians put in their salads, because Italians traditionally have used lots of inulin containing compounds. And right from the get go, they're absorbing lectins number one. And they're also empowering their bacteria. And the thing I talk about in the book, one of the things that's really changed is our bacteria is really kind of our defensive front floor. And they're there as the initial line of defense against lectins. There are bacteria that love gluten, for instance. And one of the interesting things is if you go gluten free, your bacteria that love gluten leave because they have nothing to eat. And so if you're not even necessarily gluten sensitive and then you re-eat gluten, you will probably feel the gluten lectin. Because the bacteria have gone. One of the interesting side effects of a gluten free diet. We're set. This next one is from Hunter. Will there be a healing crisis in the initial phase of the plant paradox diets as the microbiome rebalances and certain bacteria die off? You know, in the literature of detoxing, we talk about that. Quite frankly, I haven't seen it in my own practice. And I've been taking care of up to 10,000 people now. It's really not reported. We do see some change in bowel habits initially. But we don't see people getting worse and then getting better. They usually always get better. How's that? That's great. This next one is from Neil. We now live longer than ever. If so, what role did our ancient natural diet play in contributing to a lifespan that was only a fraction of what it is today? Well, everybody's favorite question in longevity. Because lifespan, the oldest people have always lived a very, very long time. Ben Franklin lived into his mid 90s and actually very good health. What's happened to us in 1900, life expectancy, was about 40 years. And now we'll be in our mid 80s. What's happened is we've beat the main cause of mortality, which was infectious diseases and accidents. And those now, childbirth and infant death were really two of the main contributors to a shortened lifespan. And so people think that, well, we only lived till we were 40 back in 1900. No, that was the average lifespan because the great majority of us died off very young. But the old people have always been very old. And what we're now seeing is, unfortunately, we have a long lifespan, but we have a horrible health span. And if you actually look at the number of diseases that a 55-year-old currently has and compare them to their parents at the parents' age of 55, the current 55-year-old is actually sicker than his parents. And we're propping people up with fantastic technologies that, unfortunately, I was part of and I'm proud of keeping people alive with art surgery. But the point is you shouldn't need these things. Thomas Edison said, the doctor of the future will give no medication. And what we need to do is have an increased health span. We need to, there's a wonderful Japanese researcher that I quote in the book, and I often get it wrong, so you'll forgive me. But his quote is, eat right, stay fit, live long, die quick. And if you think about it, that's exactly what all of us want. You want to, I sign my books, die young at a very old age, because that's what we want. I don't want to live in a nursing home being wheeled around in a wheelchair, but I want to be running my dogs at 100 or 105. Incidentally, the lady who started my first book and who's mentioned in this book, Edith Moray, just celebrated her 105th birthday on May 5th. And she still walks in to see me with her two inch heels dressed in the nine hair and makeup, and she's smart as a whip. So there is a wonderful future. She changed her diet at the age of 20, listening to a great nutritionist by the name of Gaylord Hauser. And I started taking care of her when she was 90, because she said I talk just like Gaylord Hauser. And I've read his books, and I could have written his books. This guy was so far ahead of his time. He basically said, go home, throw all white food out of your pantry, and never eat a white food again. And she believed him, 105. Amazing. This next one is from Julie and several others. So if you do have to take antibiotics, what can you do to offset some of those negative effects? Yeah. We have to realize that swallowing antibiotics is like throwing napalm in your rainforest. If you have to take antibiotics, and this is something you really have to struggle with with your physician. These are not candy. These are not toys. Broad-spectrum antibiotics have just decimated us in so many ways. So absolutely take probiotics, but take probiotics from spore-forming bacteria. My favorite is what's called BC30. It's made by a company called Galadin. It's in VitalReds. If you don't want to get VitalReds, SHIFT license it. It's called, let's see if I can remember the name of it, Intensive Ball Support, but SHIFT makes it. A digestive advantage is the name of it. So spores get through the acid in your stomach. Quite frankly, a great number of probiotics don't make it pass the acid in your stomach. So keep taking probiotics while you're taking antibiotics, and then keep giving those bugs fertilizer. And those are the prebiotics that we talked about earlier. So you're going to kill off your bugs, but just keep reseeding them. Yep. This one comes from Alex. What is a practical and easy way to test the condition of your gut? Boy, that's a really good question. There's some really cool blood tests that we can do that really aren't available to everybody, although insurance does cover them. Let's put it this way. If you notice that after you eat, you have your belly swells up a little bit. If you're either constipated or your stools are looser than normal, one of my favorite examples is we're the only animal that uses toilet paper. And I want you to let that sink in for a second. Many of my patients come back to me and say, I don't know how to mention this, but I wipe and there's nothing there anymore, and I used to wipe a lot. And is that weird? And I said, no, you've now become a normal animal. It was one of the eye openers for me when I started with this because I could go through a half a roll. And all of a sudden one day I said, well, that's funny. There's nothing here to do. And so if there's something to wipe, your gut isn't right. Oh, I like that. How's that? This next one is from Jim. Rice is a staple food in Asia. What do you suggest? So four billion people use rice as their staple. Four billion people take the haul off of brown rice and eat it white. That ought to tell you something. The haul contains most of the lectins. So if you're going to eat rice, eat it white, but I like you to do one other thing. After you cook it, put it in the refrigerator, let it cool. And then the next day or later that day, bring it out and reheat it. The cooling will turn that rice into a resistant starch, which will resist digestion. And you won't get the big sugar spike. And the friendly bugs in your gut will actually enjoy it more. So of the grains, traditional grains, rice is the safest, but eat it white. And the other two grains that don't have lectins are the ancient grains millet and sorghum. And we've got some sorghum and millet recipes in the book. I highly recommend them. They are a non-haul grain. You can even get sorghum popcorn. It's great.