 You have a bunch of friends on the shelves behind you. Can you describe them for us? I am covered with poop all around me. I have poop over my shoulder, poop by me on the computer here. Poop is so important. This is sort of my poop shrine. Could we suggest more personal hygiene or no? What she's saying folks is she actually has dolls and puppets that are shaped like giant piles of poop and they have a smiley face and eyes, so she's not actually covered in poop. Thank you for being precise there, Steve. Yeah, she is surrounded by poop in her room, I can assure you, but doll poop. Poop emojis. That's right. You know, our microbiome metabolizes the food we eat and those small metabolites get into our bloodstream and these metabolites run the chemistry of life. So for the steps that we can no longer perform, if our microbiome metabolites filled in those gaps, then our ancestral mothers had reproductive success and at that moment in our lineage, we exported that gene from our ancestral DNA to a microbiome DNA, which is why having a diverse microbiome is so, so helpful. So we talk a lot about poop in my clinics. We talk a lot about poop in my clinical trials and I ask people, are you pooping rocks, logs, snakes, pudding or tea? If it's pudding or tea, you need less fiber, so cut back on the fiber, cut back on the raw vegetables. If you're pooping snakes, that's perfect. If they get into your pants, you probably have to back off a little bit, because that's socially not very helpful. If you're pooping logs very comfortably and easily, that's okay. If you're pooping rocks, you need more vegetables, more fermented foods, and more fiber. I think I may have shared with you, but if I didn't, I know you're fondness for nine cups of vegetables and when I was writing the Plant Paradox, I said that when you look down in the toilet bowl, you should see a giant anaconda looking back up at you. And my editor said, wait a minute, there was a movie called Anaconda where it's coming out of a toilet bowl and I don't think we want that visual and so we changed it to snake, but I credit you with that passage in my books. Oh, perfect. I'm happy for that. All right. So what are the worst foods for people with autoimmune disease? Well, sugar is really terrible for us all. It feeds the wrong microbiome. Gluten and casein have a lot of cross reactivity with structures in our brain and that drives increased inflammation and molecular mimicry damaging structures in our brain and in our cerebellum. So that's really bad. The third most common food sensitivity is eggs. So that's why I take eggs out and then soy can be a problem, peanuts can be a problem. So in my plan, I have sort of a stage process. So at the level one, we take out gluten, dairy, and eggs and ramp up the vegetables. Then I get progressively more restrictive as people are willing to go on a more intense journey towards health. Now, I know you're a pretty big proponent of grass-fed meats, organ meats, liver and gizzards. Where does that fit in with all these vegetables? Well, I really like to have people get organic meat, grass-fed meat according to what they can afford. I really like them to have liver once to twice a week. If they can find it heart once a week, it would be ideal. Oysters, mussels, that would be marvelous as well. When you get these organ meats, we get more fat soluble vitamins, more coque in that meat. If it's a grass-fed animal, then you're going to get vitamin K2, particularly in that liver. You'll also get retinol. And if we're thinking, well, I can make retinol or vitamin A from the beta carotene, that depends on the genetic variations of the enzymes that convert beta carotene to retinol. And I tell my patients that if they have a autoimmune illness, if they have a cancer or cancer dysplasia illness, that tells me that they're enzymes that involved in making retinol are less efficient. And they in particular would do very well at eating liver. So in my VA, we would teach people how to make green smoothies, how to make cooked greens. And we talk a lot about how to make liver, so it would actually be quite tasty. And by the way, my kids like liver and onions, when my daughter is going to make an exotic meal for friends, she will include liver in that meal. So what do you say to the argument that meats in general are aging and beef, red meats may contribute to cancer? I know you're from the Midwest, and that's where I came from. So if you're meat, if you have a really high protein intake, you may be increasing your mammalian target of rampa myosin. And that is a pro-growth hormone. And so you could be increasing your rates of benign and cancerous tumors, which is one of the reasons I am not a proponent of the carnivore diet, except you're going to have a high mTOR. I would much rather moderate the meat intake. So compared to the paleo diet, the meat intake that I recommend is actually quite a bit lower. So I think meat is complete protein, it's good for us, if you have grass-fed meats. If we're having factory farmed meat, that's a different kind of meat, and it may be more inflammatory. When people are looking at the research that says the TMAO is a problem, and that may increase the atherosclerosis, what they forget is it has to do with the microbiome. And did that meat become harmful because the person was eating a diet high in trans fats and high in sugar, which changed the microbiome remarkably away from the type of microbiome our ancestral mothers and fathers would have had? Yeah, and I think there's some really exciting research that actually was, to the Cleveland Clinic's credit, done partially by them that there's components in a lot of extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and red wine that paralyzes the enzyme systems of bacteria to keep them from making TMAO from choline and acetyl-l-carnitine. I think this is an interesting but complicated story. If red meat was a problem, our ancestral mothers and fathers would not have had reproductive success. So what change? It's not just the red meat, it may be what we're feeding our conventional farmers, it's certainly what we're feeding ourselves. For eating our six cups of grains, nine cups of vegetables, we have a very different microbiome. And I think it's an interesting question that we're going to continue to tease out. For a person with MS, or for that matter autoimmune diseases, what sort of foods are good for you? And I think you've alluded to that, but what's your prescription? So I want people to ramp up their vegetables, ideally a minimum of nine cups a day. Now, if you're very petite and you're like only four foot ten, yes, it's going to have to be somewhat less. The greens have lots of vitamin K and carotenoids, which are critical for retina health, brain health. And there's more and more research coming out that vitamin K is very important in making myelin and very important to brain stem cells that are going to be involved in making the cells that will be involved in repairing the myelin damage and repairing the synapses. So greens incredibly important. The cabbage family, onion family, vegetables boost the detox pathways. They also boost pathways involved in neurotransmitters, mushrooms, boost your natural killer cells, which are good for your immune cell function. And then the deeply pigmented foods are rich in polyphenols and antioxidants. And we have many, many studies showing that the more color you eat, the lower the rates of dementia, lower rates of cancer, lower rates of diabetes, lower rates of mental health problems. And that we have some great studies that have used even just a cup of blueberries, equivalents in randomized controlled trials that show in just 16 weeks or 24 weeks, we can get improvement in thinking. So those are very powerful reasons to ramp up those vegetables. I encourage fermented foods and seaweed as well. Great. Where does olive oil play in your program? Swim in it, drink it. It's really good. There are so many studies that show the benefits of olive oil for cardiovascular health and for brain health as well. I love for people to use olive oil. I prefer that they use it cold because when you heat olive oil, you lose a lot of the antioxidants and you accidentally make some trans fats in the skillet. So I'd much rather people bake roast steam and then pour their olive oil on cold at the end. So lots of olive oil. I'm very keen on ketogenic eating. I talk now that you want to monitor your lipids and know if you tolerate a coconut oil or if your lipids go up with coconut oil, then you're just going to use the olive oil with your ketogenic plan. Yeah, I think that's something I stress. I take care of a lot of people with the apoE4 mutation. Coconut oil, and I follow their lipids, and coconut oil, particularly in these folks, really makes their small dense lipids go up and they oxidize those small dense LDLs. Yeah, if you're going to go on a ketogenic diet, I have a lot of folks on a ketogenic diet. It's very popular right now and they use lots of butter, lots of bacon, and they're not advising these folks to monitor their lipids. I think that's a disservice. I think you need to know how your lipids are responding. So you can sort out, is olive oil what you're going to use? Do you have to use Pratic Fasting instead? Or are you able to use butter? Are you able to use coconut oil? That's a very important question. So you can start whichever way your culinary tastes take you, but check your lipids, please, and then you can decide which way to continue.