 Okay, now I want to answer some of the questions I hear most often First up, what's the deal with calories? Just how important are total calories? Well quite frankly total calories have nothing to do with just about anything for one thing if you've read any of my books and if you are looking forward to the energy paradox we now know that The second law of thermodynamics does not apply to a human being or from that matter any other animal that that second law is calories in calories out and That you should eat less calories and exercise more and that's the secret to weight loss What none of us understood when those rules came out is that a calorie is not a calorie because they act differently depending on whether or not bacteria in your gut are eating some of those calories and Whether they're keeping those calories for themselves to make lots of baby bacteria or Conversely whether they're converting those calories into more Simable calories that will make you fat and I've gone on and on ad nauseum about this Depending on the type of bacteria within you You will seek out high sugar and high fat foods that will make you fatter depending on the bacteria you will seek out low sugar and Low weight gaining foods that will make you thinner depending on your bacteria The other thing is that foods have different Amounts of energy that are required to break them down for instance We lose about a third of the calories in protein in the process of broke breaking protein down into amino acids We lose a few carbohydrate calories in breaking that down Sadly, we lose very few calories in breaking down fat and there's been some fantastic work particularly out of Dr. Specter's lab looking at giving the exact same amount of calories to individual patients one group got pretty much the standard American diet where 70% of the foods were Ultra-processed the other group got whole foods, but the calorie amounts were identical between the two groups The group that got the ultra-processed foods same amount of calories actually gained weight and had Horrible metabolic profile the group that got the same amount of calories that were in the whole foods Didn't gain weight and had no metabolic consequences. So a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie As I mentioned in the energy paradox, and I'll give you a teaser They looked at some Italian athletes where they controlled the timing of their eating and The Italian athletes had to eat the exact same food the exact same calories If the Italian athletes ate in their meals over a 12-hour period versus a six-hour period Same amount of calories the athletes who ate during the six-hour period lost weight The athletes who ate the same calories during a 12-hour period did not lose any weight So a calorie is not a calorie So ignore the calorie on a label and you'll notice in none of my books Do I show a calorie count on any of our recipes? It's that not important Okay, now what about the daily recommended intake? Isn't that really important for the foods we eat? Absolutely not. No hunter-gatherer No animal has ever read a label looking at the recommended daily food intake That's ridiculous. It turns out in a little while We're going to have some very interesting authors who have looked at why animals eat the foods they eat and Spoiler alert it turns out almost all animals from the littlest to the biggest including humans seek out about 15 percent of the food they eat as protein and universally about 15 percent of the calories that animals eat Should be protein. That's what they're looking for interestingly enough Most of the blue zones one of the things that I talk about Most of the blue zones eat only about 10 percent of their calories of as protein And it may be one of the secrets of the blue zones as I've talked about before What do you think of fortified foods? So fortified foods means that we took the original food tore it apart into a fine powder threw away all the nutrients and We put it back labeling it as fortified with eight essential vitamins or fortified with 12 essential vitamins and minerals if you see the word fortified on a label That means we destroyed the nutritional content of that food and we had to put some back in the process of destroying it Run the other way I've said this on a podcast before but it's worth repeating. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska And my best friend's father was head of what is now con agra it was called consolidated meals back then and they were a flour making company and his mother made amazing chocolate chip cookies and he my Friend and I would come home after school and eat raw cookie dough and the father came in one day Saw us eating the raw cookie dough and said don't eat that stuff There's bug eggs in it and we went what are any bug eggs in here there any bugs and he says well It's just eggs the bugs can't grow in flour because there's nothing that they can live on and as I've told you many times If a bug can't live on that stuff you have no business eating it another fun fact in my house we have a giant jar of Oreo cookies in a glass jar that sits on the counter We inherited it when we bought our house over two years ago Those Oreo cookies have number one never been touched but they've never been touched by a bug or a mold and they are as Pristine in that jar two years later as when we moved in similarly we have another jar of Pretzels that we inherited and those pretzels are just as pristine as when we moved in Michael Poland has a twinkie that he keeps on his desk And I believe it has now been there for ten years He gives it a squeeze every now and then and it's just as Luscious and juicy and fresh ten years as it was ten years ago the point of all this is if Bacteria and mold and insects won't eat those foods That should be telling you something and you shouldn't eat it either Okay, let's talk about specific ingredients on labels. I get questions about all the time Natural flavors first of all there is absolutely no labeling law that defines what a natural flavor is obviously an Artificial flavor is probably something you don't want to look for or pick up on a label But a natural flavor is no guarantee that in fact it's natural How about soy lecithin and soy phospholipids? I get this all the time it turns out that lecithin is a phospholipid and Phospholipids as you're going to learn about in the energy paradox are Incredibly important for the functioning of the inner and outer membranes of mitochondria those little energy producing organelles in most of our cells and You have to have a supply of phospholipids in your diet to actually Generate the membranes of mitochondria So just because something may be derived from soy Doesn't necessarily make it, you know the evil empire that you have to avoid so Soy obviously has lectins, but Lecithin and phospholipids do not contain the lectins so there are components of certain Evil beans that are actually good for you. And as I've told you many times. I Pressure cook beans. I have beans several times a week as part of my diet but if you pressure cook them they will give you the Phospholipids that are actually missing in most of our diets now There's other great place to get phospholipids particularly in shellfish and clams and mussels And that's why I recommend wild shellfish pea protein pea protein lectins are Proteins and you got to be very very very careful when you're dealing with proteins from lectin containing foods like for instance soy protein in and of itself Contains lectins pea proteins contain the lectin now if you pressure cook and extrude Soy protein to make texturized vegetable protein. You'll destroy the lectin But so far I've not seen any papers that show that pea protein as The lectins have been destroyed So be very cautious for looking at brown rice protein pea protein because the brown rice has the lectin So so far stay away from pea protein There are Fruits the squash family have lectins and their peels and their seeds And that's why in general I ask you to avoid those But the same rule applies if you take the peel and the seeds out Pumpkin is not a lectin containing food as long as those parts are removed the reason I don't recommend it as a big part of your diet is remember any fruit is Sugar including a pumpkin and so pumpkins and zucchini still have residual sugar So they're not a huge healthy part of your diet This comes up all the time and it actually came up years ago when quest bars, which we recommend certain quest bars changed their starch into corn based resistant starches and I actually spoke with the company and It's the same thing. There are lectins in corn. There are a number of proteins in corn that 70% of my patients react to when we test them for it, but the starches in Corn and potato Don't contain those lectins. Those are sugar molecules so if you said corn protein or Potato protein then we're talking a different subject, but in general particularly if the corn starch is lower on the label if the Potato starch is lower on the label. You're Gonna be okay in most cases All right, how about oils? I get a lot of questions about this And that's why I did an entire podcast episode dedicated to the topic So please check out the episode 129 on the Dr. Gunngrie podcast More amazing episodes just like this one watch now of Labeling on food, which is basically just doing math. They're not actually They're not accurate at all and it completely negates the complexity of human digestion. That's the most important part But the woman who really pioneered and made