 Now that my new book The Plant Paradox has hit the shelves, I'm getting a lot of questions from readers. And today, I want to take a moment and answer a few of the most common questions for you. Why did you write The Plant Paradox? Well, quite simply, Diet Evolution was a great book, but it unfortunately didn't go far enough. So this is actually the evolution of Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. One of the things that I think is unique about me and my practice is that I'm willing to always look again. And when patients came to me after reading Diet Evolution and told me about the changes in their health that was positive, I studied them and why that happened. And in my dedication in the book, The Plant Paradox, I actually thank all my patients who made this possible. This book was written for them because of them, and it's a new guide book that goes beyond Diet Evolution. So what exactly is the difference between Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution and The Plant Paradox? Quite frankly, I've become meaner and nastier in my old age, and I want to take certain foods that I allowed in Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution away for even better health. The other thing that's different in The Plant Paradox is there's real guides to how to incredibly increase your health span. This span is how I say every one of us wants to die young at a very old age. And that's what's in The Plant Paradox. So where can I get The Plant Paradox? Well, you can go online at Amazon.com. You can go to BarnesandNoble.com. You can go to your local bookstore. Oftentimes, Costco will have it. But quite frankly, go to your local bookstore. Give them a chance. I'm a big fan of keeping local bookstores alive and well. Are there recipes and meal plans in The Plant Paradox? Well, you may not know, but I actually did all the recipes in both of my books. And I don't think there's any physician who could actually say that who's ever written a health book. They're all mine. My mother taught me to cook. I've worked with James Beard award-winning chefs to give you some fantastic, easy-to-do recipes at home. So who can The Plant Paradox Plan help? It turns out everybody can benefit from this. The fascinating thing is, through years of research of looking at blood work on my patients every three months, I can tell you that most of us, even if we think we have vibrant health, have some blood indicators that all is not well inside of us. We may not feel it, but these things can appear 10, 20, 30, 40 years later with arthritis or heart disease or cancer. And it's never too early to start making positive changes. And The Plant Paradox is not only for an 80-year-old, but also for a 20-something who wants to have vibrant health. Now, wait a minute. You're saying that plants are bad for me? Why do doctors always tell me to eat my veggies? Well it turns out that, in fact, plants, many plants, don't want you to eat them. They have a life, and they absolutely don't want you to eat their babies, their seeds. The vegetables that I tell you to eat, and I want you to eat vegetables, are actually mostly leaves and tubers and resistant starches. So that's the big difference. But I'm a confirmed plant predator, but you've got to know which plants are going to be good for you and which plants don't have your back. So what's the story with fruit? It turns out that fruit is a modern invention. In times past, our ancestors only ate fruit once a year. That's because fruit only grew once a year in the summer, and we actually used fruit to fatten up for the winter. One of the things that's striking is that when I took fruit away from people and only allowed them to have it in a minimal time period during when it would normally be ripe, their cholesterol numbers plummeted, their obesity plummeted, their weight plummeted, and they felt significantly better. So give fruit the boot. I'm a vegetarian. Can I still follow the plant paradox plan? Can a vegan follow it? So as a professor at Loma Linda, which is a vegetarian institution, I can tell you that this book is empowering for vegetarians and vegans. Every one of the recipes has a vegetarian option, and every one of the recipes has a vegan option. And quite frankly, you'll see as you go through the book that I'm very anti-animal protein, and that includes fish and shellfish, which is a shocker. And you'll find out why I'm against these things. So many diet plans are expensive. How can I do the plant paradox plan in an affordable way? One of the things that's very interesting to me is that I have a lot of lower income families and patients in my practice. I still take Medi-Cal or Medicaid because I think everyone has the right to thriving health no matter what your income. One of the interesting things is most people save significant amounts of money by following this. Because most of us eat processed foods, and processed foods are actually extremely expensive for the amount of nutrition you actually get. Now what you are going to have to do is you're going to have to do a little more work in the kitchen. But the way I've structured my recipes is that many of these things can be prepared in advance on a weekend, for instance, and then you can just bring them out and reheat them. Heck, you can even nuke them in the microwave if you have to. But you'll be amazed how much money you actually save because you're not paying the middleman to do something to food for you. I don't have a fancy health food store in the area. Where should I shop? Quite frankly, stores are getting better and better at getting you good food. Rouse, for instance, has large amounts of organic food. But Trader Joe's is now ubiquitous in most of the United States. It's a great place to shop. The other great thing is that Walmart and Costco now have great organic products, and they're all over the country. We're beginning to see grass-fed beef, grass-fed pork, grass-fed chickens, pastured chickens. So get into Walmart, go into Costco. You'll save lots of money and still get great ingredients. So what else should I know about the plant paradox? So the plant paradox is a new way to think about saving your life, saving your health, and thriving for a very long time. It's not hard to do. Most people who embark on this within a couple of weeks are struck by how much more energy they have, how much their gut feels so much better. And anyone who has brain fog, the brain fog clears. And if someone had asked me that this was possible 15 years ago, I would have laughed them out of the room, but now I get to see it every day, and it brings the program to you.