 Because we've been told for decades to avoid the white carbs, right? I feel like that's still something that's echoed amongst some in the nutritional orthodoxy, right? Avoid the white carbs. Yeah, but I think the other thing that is sad is that labeling laws have been made to hide the actual sugar danger in products. And I actually had the former head of the FDA, Dr. Kessler on the Dr. Gundry podcast a while back. And he was actually in charge of the labeling law, the labeling on the back of a package. And he, as he tells the story, gets a call from President Reagan to get over to the Oval Office. There has to be a meeting. And there in the Oval Office are representatives of big agriculture. And I won't name the names, but they're all there. And they basically said, you can't put this information on a label. And he said, what are you talking about? I'm telling people how much sugar is in there. They said, no, you can't tell people how much sugar is in this product. They'll never buy it. And he said, but that's how much sugar is in there. And they said, well, you're going to have to disguise. You're going to have to put it someplace else that they won't see it. And so they agreed that if there were two sugar molecules bound together with a chemical bond, you no longer had to call it sugar. You could call it a complex carbohydrate. And he uses the example of a bagel, which was great. And he says, okay, we've got a bagel, it's 300 calories. And you look down and it says zero sugar, one gram of sugar. And you go, great. And then you look at total carbohydrates and it's like 40 grams of total carbohydrates. And but no sugar. Well, and as I write in my books, what you got to do is you got to take the total carbohydrates and you got to subtract the fiber, which we don't digest. And let's suppose there's two grams of fiber. So there's now 38 grams of sugar in that bagel, not one gram of sugar. And just for people to grasp what that is, there's four grams of sugar in a teaspoon. So in that bagel, and he does the math, there's like 10 teaspoons of sugar in that healthy sugar-free bagel. And people go, well, I don't taste the sugar. And you're right, it's well hidden. But I'll give you an example from actually yesterday with a patient. I had a patient who's, he's a pre-diabetic. And I've got him on what I think is my ketogenic diet. And his triglycerides are high and he's got insulin resistance. And I'm going, you know, you're eating a ton of sugar. He said, oh, no, I don't need any sugar. And he said, no, it's out of my diet. I, you know, I eat no candy and no desserts. And I said, okay, what did you have for breakfast this morning? And he says, oh, I had sugar-free rice checks. And I go, sugar-free rice checks. And he says, yeah, you know, it's got the heart healthy seal on it. And I said, oh, I tell you what, let's pull up the box of rice checks. And I pulled up on the phone. And sure enough, there's, you know, one gram of sugar and 44 grams of carbohydrate and actually no fiber. So this guy's having 11 teaspoons in his bowl of sugar-free rice checks. And is wondering, you know, he's eating sugar-free and he's wondering why he's still a diabetic and he's got high insulin levels and he's not losing weight. It's because we've been fooled. And the glucose molecules begin to break apart before you even swallow, right? Oh yeah. You know, I mean, white bread has a glycemic index of 100. It's the perfect glucose delivery device that's ever been invented. Wow. So we're talking, we're talking about grains, but I'm assuming that the next food that you might urge our viewers to steer and our listeners to steer clear from is sugar. True. We are a wash in sugar and unfortunately sugar is also well hidden with other names, like, you know, like pure cane sugar. Somehow that's better. High fructose, corn syrup. Normally, and people somehow don't associate that sugar, table sugar, is sucrose. And it's half glucose and half fructose. High fructose corn syrup usually is about 55% fructose and 45% glucose, but it can be manipulated higher. Fructose in and of itself has a much sweeter taste than glucose. And my good friend, David Plummer and I have been on our horse for a long time to please have people recognize how much fructose is hidden in so many of our prepared foods. And fructose is actually the evil sugar. Tell you a fascinating story. Years ago, when I was kind of first getting into this, a major nutraceutical company that made a lot of protein drinks and protein powders wanted to have me consult with them and be an advisor and wonderful people. And almost every one of their weight loss shakes and protein powders had fructose as the main ingredient. And I go, well, geez, this is a non-starter. You know, this stuff is poison. They say, what are you talking about? Fructose is great because it doesn't raise insulin. And that's why it's there. And, you know, it's a miracle. And this was, oh boy, almost 20 years ago. And to this day, people still think of fructose and fruit as, you know, as somehow really healthy without realizing that number one, fructose is hiding everywhere these days, particularly in high fructose corn syrup. But even our fruit has been bred for sugar content. There's now in an apple, there's more sugar than a whole Hershey's candy bar. And when I was growing up, you know, back in the Dark Ages, an apple was the size of kind of a pixie tangerine. And now an apple, of course, is the size of a grapefruit. And the names give it away, you know, like honey crisp or ambrosia. And these things just did not exist. For fun, for one of my podcasts, I bought a little bag of mini apples that were at Bristol Farms Whole Foods and then bought a regular apple right next to it, an organic one. And you could actually, and mini apples was what we ate when I was good. And you could get, I put it together, there were about six mini apples that occupied the space of the current single apple. And quite frankly, an apple a day might have kept the doctor away 50 years ago. But an apple a day now is a really good way to increase your sugar load without knowing it. Oh, Dr. G, don't take my honey crisp apples away from me. I knew it. I knew it. I love them too much. I love them too much. So one thing that you are, we're talking about fructose. And one thing that you often see fructose marketed as is being diabetic friendly. But what I think that you've alluded to is that this is completely misguided. Is that accurate? Yes, that's correct. In fact, in my last book, The Energy Paradox, I really spent a long time debunking the myth that fructose is diabetic friendly. In fact, it's really good at producing diabetes and insulin resistant. Fructose is a mitochondrial poison. And it is such a poison that it is taken directly to the liver, do not pass, go, do not collect $200, do not get into the bloodstream. Where it's detoxified into triglycerides, fat, and uric acid. And as you and I both know, uric acid is pretty bad for everything. It's great for raising blood pressure. It's great for killing kidneys. It's great for causing gout. And it's actually great for storing fat. In fact, great apes only gain weight during fruit season. And fruit does not ripen year round in the jungle. It ripens on a seasonal basis. So as I show in The Energy Paradox, fructose actually is one of the biggest causes in and of itself for insulin resistance. And for actually stopping mitochondrial energy production, it's really good for gaining weight. And as anyone knows, one of the best ways to gain weight is to raise your insulin level. And insulin is the fat-story torment. So anyhow. Yeah. And fructose, as you mentioned, high fructose corn syrup is in actuality only about 55% fructose. Table sugar is about 50% fructose. Agave syrup is something that you see a lot of health-minded individuals reach for instead of cane sugar. But agave syrup, as I understand it, is actually among the highest in fructose concentration in the supermarket. Correct. And agave, yeah. Agave gets, you know, it's healthy and, you know, it's fructose and that's safe. There is agave inulin. And people hear agave inulin. And inulin happens to be this wonderful prebiotic fiber that we cannot digest. We cannot absorb inulin. And it feeds good gut buddies. And I can't tell a number of people who write to me and they say, you're telling people to have agave. And I'm not telling people to have agave. Don't people avoid agave? They say, oh no, agave inulin. I said, no, that's totally different. Yeah. Stay away from agave syrup. It's just pure fructose. Yeah. Speaking of gut, our gut buddies, what are some other ways that we can keep them happy? Because I know that this plays a large role in terms of keeping our immune systems healthy and robust. It plays a large role in regulating levels of inflammation in our bodies, among other things. So talk to me about that, our gut buddies in the microbiome. Well, I talk about, you know, your area of interest. We're learning literally with every passing day that if we want to have good brain health, it's dependent on us having good gut health and good gut buddies. More and more, we're realizing that most of the brain protecting compounds are actually coming from our microbiome. And, you know, who would have guessed before 12 years ago that our brain had anything to do with our gut? The only people who knew were actually women. Now, women have known forever. They have a gut feeling and guys are, you know, we have no gut sense of anything. And they were right about this. And as you know, from your research, what goes on in our gut is really going to affect, well, every organ system, but particularly our brain. I was talking with David Prometer off camera and I said, you know, it's really funny. You're a neurologist and I'm a heart surgeon cardiologist. And the fact is all you and I talk about is the gut and the microbiome. I said, isn't that hilarious that, you know, we've all converged from our various specialties down in the gut where, you know, none of us would even thought of being interested in it. And he says, yeah, you know, Hippocrates was right. You know, 2,500 years ago, all disease begins in the gut and the guy was right. And he didn't have our sophisticated tests, but you know what? It's fascinating. I mean, but, you know, like the heart to some to the untrained person listening, the heart, the brain, the gut, completely disconnected organ systems. So what is then the connection? How does the gut influence the heart, the brain? Well, I got interested in the gut because I became convinced working on my patients that leaky gut was actually the cause of coronary artery disease. And I went out to figure out why that was happening. You know, Dale Bredesen, you know, end of Alzheimer's started looking at the gut because he realized that amyloid is actually produced in the gut. That's where it comes from initially. And he started feeling and finding that amyloid leaking out of the gut and then getting into the brain is a piece of the process that facilitates more amyloid and tau production in the brain. And I think both of us and others obviously began to realize that there are when bacterial particles actually leak through the wall of the gut. This sets up a, we'll talk about the brain for a minute, an early warning system with our microglial cells. Now, microglial cells are the bodyguards of the brain. They're specialized immune cells, as you know. And they're basically, you know, the bodyguards of neurons. And just for our viewers and listeners, neurons talk to other neurons via dendritic processes. They grow telephone lines to talk to the next guy. And what happens is that if the microglia are alerted that mischief is happening down below in the gut and that literally bacterial particles and or lectins are loose, that the microglia to protect the neurons actually begin to munch away on the dendritic processes of the neurons to literally kind of call the troops back into the mother fort and pull up the drawbridge. And this was actually first discovered with Lewy bodies and Lewy body dementia. One of the hallmarks of Parkinson's is a dead neuron surrounded by glial cells. And the shocker was that you could find Lewy bodies in the neurons in the gut, in the gut wall. And they're going, well, what the heck are those guys doing there? Why is a dead neuron surrounded by glial cells? And people started putting two together and said, wait a minute. Parkinson's doesn't come from the brain and then associates with constipation. Parkinson's begins in the wall of the gut and goes to the brain. And it's like, holy cow. We got all this so backwards. Fascinating. There was that study a couple of years ago, right, with patients that had undergone a vagotomy where they had the vagus nerve severed. And there was a, when they tracked these patients over time, there was a dramatic risk reduction for those that underwent this procedure for developing Parkinson's disease. Yeah. 50% reduction in people who had a vagotomy, which was our old way of treating all sort of disease. I did a lot of vagotomies when I was training as a general surgeon. And yeah, so they were able to track these people for 50 years. And people who had vagotomies had much less Parkinson's. And it was actually a study that I cited in the plant paradox that you can actually trace lectins climbing the vagus nerve to the brain in animal models of leaky gut. And so it's like, holy cow. Who could have imagined, except for the things that were happening in the gut was happening to our blood vessels, was happening to our brain. And there is a autoimmune theory of heart disease that I like. And we attack our own blood vessels because of things leaking from our gut, rather than cholesterol being the evil empire. Michael DeBakey, one of the world's most famous fathers of heart surgery from Houston, Texas, used to say the cholesterol has nothing to do with our disease, that it was an innocent bystander. And that it was just kind of a patch that was patching irritated spots on blood vessels, kind of like a, you know, a patch on a pothole. And the more things got irritated, the more patch was applied. But it itself wasn't the culprit, it was just, you know, it was their patching inflammation. Wow, fascinating. So when you see somebody that presents with high cholesterol, do you treat the cholesterol first? Do you look to see what may be causing the cholesterol to be elevated? Yeah, so I actually had a great patient today with that similar story. This is a woman who is now in her late 50s who runs total cholesterol well into the five and 600s. When I'm first met her, she had an LDL cholesterol of 469. Wow. And she actually ate a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of sugars, but fairly thin. And through the years, a couple years, we now have her triglycerides, which used to be about 400. We got her down to 79 today. And now her HDL is actually higher than her triglycerides. And we have very sophisticated ways of now measuring whether cholesterol is activated, whether it's sticky, whether it wants to stick to blood vessels. And for the first time actually this morning, she no longer has, it's called OxPL-ApoB. And it's a really cool measurement of the entire oxidized spectrum of cholesterol that is in us. And there's a few labs that now are offering this. If you can't get that, most labs like Quest and LabCorp will measure oxidized LDL, which is a good second placeholder. And I have people with 200, 300 LDLs, they don't oxidize their LDL, thankfully following my diet. And so I don't worry about them. As long as they're not oxidizing their cholesterol, they can have a high cholesterol. There was this really interesting paper that I was reading just a couple of weeks ago that found, I believe it was a trial where they fed people a diet enriched with olive oil and then compared it to a diet enriched with linoleic acid, which is the fatty acid found predominantly in grain and seed oils like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, grapeseed oil, you name it. All of those industrially refined oils that the standard American diet is just a wash-in. And they found that for the, because the fats that we eat, correct me if I'm wrong or if I'm speaking, if I'm miscommunicating this, integrate themselves into all aspects of our physiology, not least of which are LDL lipoproteins. And so when you enrich your LDL lipoproteins with monounsaturated fat, which extra virgin olive oil is abundant in, it seems to dramatically reduce the risk that those particles are going to get oxidized, that they're going to be able to adhere to immune cells, which could then potentially create the foam cell that initiates atherosclerosis. Did I properly communicate, describe that? Yeah, but there's actually a more important proviso that I think has been missed about monounsaturated fats. A few years ago, I met with the head of the olive oil council in Italy, who was a physician. And he said, you know, people need to understand that monounsaturated fat, oleic acid, is nothing unique, but it's a carrier for the polyphenols that are actually the beneficial part of olive oil. And that the more polyphenols that you have in olive oil, the better. And he says, people should just kind of forget about monounsaturated fats, but should think about the amount of polyphenols that is being carried. And it's the polyphenols that actually prevent the oxidation of LDL. And years ago, I published a paper looking at flexibility in blood vessels and inflammation in blood vessels, which we can measure. And we had people follow a low-lectin diet, but put them on grape seed extract and have them use olive oil and another polyphenol called pycnogenol French maritime tree bark and some fish oil. And we show that when they did this, their blood vessels became flexible. The markers of inflammation on their blood vessels went away. And then once these people had normal looking numbers, a number of them said, oh, good, my blood vessels are great now. I don't have to do the olive oil. I don't have to take the supplements. And a bunch of these people came back for the next blood work and we're back to square one. They're stiff blood vessels. They're inflamed. And I'm going, what the heck happened? They say, oh, well, I was so good. I don't need those anymore. And so we put them back on it. And within three months, we were back looking at normal blood vessels. It's actually kind of fun. Wow. You're kind of famous at this point for saying that food exists to draw extra virgin olive oil into your mouth. That's so true. You know, there's several of the blue zones use a liter of olive oil per week. There's a very famous study out of Spain, the Pred Ahmed study, looking at 65 year old individuals who had known coronary artery disease. They had a standard bypass. And they were followed for five years. They were compared, they were put on a Mediterranean diet with a liter of olive oil per week. And they actually had to take their container of olive oil to the clinic empty and exchange it every week. So I knew now they could have been pouring it out, but I doubt it. And they were compared to a low fat Mediterranean diet. And in fact, the olive oil group had lots of amazing changes. They actually had a diminution in the new events compared to the low fat group who had still accelerated events. From the brain standpoint, it turns out their memory, the olive oil group had improved memory at the end of five years when they hit 70. And they had when they were 65, the low fat group had no benefit. And then an interesting side point of the study was women had a, I'm blanking on the right number, I think about a 70% decrease in breast cancer in the high dose olive oil group compared to the low fat group. And it's like holy cow. So the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. You're right. And that's the Pred Ahmed study. That's a seminal study in the field of nutrition because it's a randomized controlled trial. It was multicenter, large population, long term. Yeah. And the fascinating thing is the low fat vegan community just thinks that study should be thrown in the trash that was fraudulent. And it's like, come on, really? Why is that? Because there are some within the vegan community that think that all oils are unhealthy. Is that right? Right. Yeah. And that came really out of the seven country style trial, which really wasn't a seven countries with Dr. Keys. And the idea that saturated fat was somehow evil and that heart disease was caused by saturated fat consumption. And in the seven countries study, and I talk a lot about it in the new book, Unlocking the Keto Code, Dr. Keys picked the seven countries that he wanted to show was the problem. And so he chose the United States. He chose Japan. He chose Finland. He chose Italy. He chose the Netherlands. And he didn't chose France. And because if you look at France, it totally upsets his model. The French eat three times as much cheese and butter that Americans do. And yet the French have a third of the coronary artery disease that Americans do. And it doesn't fit the model. And sadly, when things don't fit the model, you tend to throw them out. Yeah. It's the so-called French paradox. Yeah. It's, there's a really great book. I'm blanking on the author. It's up here on my shelf someplace. The former food editor for Vogue wrote a book called, I can't believe I eat the whole thing. And he had a whole chapter on why aren't the French dead? And it was all about, you know, this enormous amount of cheese that the French eat. And, you know, why aren't they dead? And I go into actually why that is in the new book. There's actually a really good reason for it. Oh man, well, you can't like leave us hanging like that. Well, I'll give you a tease. Actually, I'll give you a really good tease. I cut it. My editor cut it from the book because it was, it was too, I think, in people's faces. So the Blue Zones, Dan Butler coined the Blue Zone and, you know, with National Geographic. And these are places in the world where people live the longest and healthiest. And they do have some common features that both Dan and I agree with. I happen to have spent most of my career in the only Blue Zone in the United States, Loma Linda, California, where I was a professor. And I'm actually the only nutritionist as far as I know who's spent most of his life in a Blue Zone. And one of the unique things about two of the Blue Zones that gets missed, Sardinia and the Nagoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. And these are supposedly really, really healthy places because they eat a lot of grains and they eat a lot of beans. And in fact, they do eat a lot of grains and they do eat a lot of beans. But if you look at the Sardinians who have longevity, they live up in the hills and they don't come down to the sea. They are sheep and goat herders. The people who live down by the sea, and this has been done, do not have increased longevity. Only the people who live in the mountainous areas. And so you look at the difference in their diet. And there's one difference in their diet. And that is the folks who live up in the mountain need a huge amount of goat and sheep cheeses. You look at the Nagoya Peninsula. Yes, they eat corn and beans. But what makes them unique compared to other parts of Costa Rica is their sheep and goat herders. And they eat a huge amount of goat and sheep cheese. So what is it about goat and sheep cheese that makes them have such longevity? Well, there's actually two factors, actually three. One, goat and sheep milk is 30% medium chain triglycerides. Wow. Wow. So you're getting MCT oil every time you eat a goat or a sheep product, whether it's goat yogurt, whether it's goat cheese. The second thing that cheeses produce in the fermentation process is polyamines. And I wrote about this in the previous books. So polyamines, one of the most famous is spermidine. And your listeners can guess where that name came from. And there's another one called putrosine. And cheeses, aged cheeses are loaded with these compounds. And these compounds actually promote longevity. And the teas of how they pronounce promote longevity, you'll find in the book. And it's not what you think. So the other thing that's cool about MCT oil, as most people know, is that MCT oil is taken directly from the gut to the liver, where it is converted instantaneously to ketone bodies. And ketone bodies are not a miraculous fuel. So anybody who's into ketone, sorry guys, you're going to have to read the book, but ketones are a horrible fuel. But ketones are signaling molecules that tell our mitochondria to actually repair themselves and make more of themselves. And it's a process called mitochondrial uncoupling. And it's the whole premise of why going in and out of ketosis on a 24 hour basis is so good for you. But it's why MCT oil is so good for you because you can actually produce ketones without being on a high fat ketogenic diet. For instance, I would joke about this. So I could have a fruit salad and have goat yogurt. And I would manufacture ketones. And this has actually been shown very well, even though I had that big giant fructose bomb, but I'd still make ketones. If you found this video helpful, I think you're going to love this one. The other important thing to realize is we're seeing an epidemic of auto immune disease, asthma, eczema in our children. This never used to occur. And this is because