 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Now unless you've been reading my books or listening to me, you're saying imagine reversing type 2 diabetes, stopping cancer in its tracks, and adding a decade of healthy living to the average American's lifespan sounds too good to be true. But as my guests today will explain, you can achieve all of these things with nothing more than food. Joining me today is Dr. Joel Furman. He's a New York Times multiple best-selling author, and he's got a new book out called Eat for Life, and he is absolutely an expert on nutrition and natural healing. Today Dr. Furman and I are going to chat about the popular food that you need to immediately cut back on, why you actually need to slow your metabolism, and the three changes you can make today to radically change your health and your lifespan. Dr. Furman, it's pleasure to have you on the show, and let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of yours. You actually, your book Eat to Live was probably one of the first books I picked up over about 20 years ago when I started my journey into your area of expertise, and it really had a huge influence on my decision that maybe food could reverse heart disease as you've shown, as I've shown, as many others have shown. So let me just start off by saying congratulations on your career, and I salute you and compliment you on what you've been doing the last number of years. I appreciate that. Well, thanks so much, and I know that you know too that how rewarding it is, how the personal satisfaction we get when we have a person with psoriasis that gets well, or lupus whose kidney function goes back to normal, person who's rid of their diabetes, their chronic headaches. It's just using nutritional excellence as a primary therapeutic modality. It's just better for the patient, but so much better for the doctor too. It's thrilling to watch these miraculous health transformations. Yeah, it really is. I'm sure I'm like you, I'm like a kid in a candy store. I look forward to going to work every day to watch somebody reverse what every doctor that they went to said, you can't get rid of this, and it's like, here take your medication and shut up, including most cancer specialists, and hopefully we'll dive into that as well. So you and I actually, we have our differences, and that's okay, but you and I probably agree on 90, 95% of just about everything. So let's start with a basic question. You've kind of coined the phrase Neutritarian Diet. What the heck is a Neutritarian Diet? Well, thanks for that. So I think the word Neutritarian is supposed to represent the pinnacle of health excellence in the dietary community. In other words, what I'm saying right now, what do we hold up as an ideal way to eat to live as long as we possibly can to be disease resistant? It means to eat a diet that's super healthy. And the word Neutritarian means rich in nutrients in the quantity, but also the variety and making sure we're not missing one in particular nutrients, nutrient that could be important for our survival. And the primary principle to a Neutritarian Diet, and I have to preface that by saying the most proven methodology to slow aging and live longer. And the only proven methodology is moderate caloric restriction in the context of micronutrient excellence. So let me say that one more time, you know, because we know we have the most overweight population in the history of the human race and fat on the body shortens lifespan, and everybody eats too many calories. So I'm saying that too much fat, too much carbohydrate, and too much protein, those are called macronutrients. The micronutrients in food are vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, antioxidants, and Americans in the modern world are ubiquitously deficient in those things. And that's why we have a COVID-19 crisis because we have people dying of micronutrient deficiencies and excess calories. We have the malnourished overweight population, where I'm claiming that it's not 70% of Americans that are overweight, like the authorities say. It's more like 90% because they use a BMI of 25 as the demarcation line between a normal weight and overweight. And I'm saying all long-lived societies, all blue zones have BMI's for males below 23 and for females below 22. And using a 23 BMI, then we see 89% are overweight or obese. And among those people who are of a normal weight, the majority of them, about 80% of them are normal weight because they eat a smoked cigarette, so they are alcoholic, so they have some illness keeping them thin. 2.4% of Americans eat healthfully. And that's why we're seeing so much COVID deaths because we have a completely malnourished society. And there's no such thing as an overweight person who's healthy. Every overweight fat on the body is pathogenic, it spews out reactive oxygen species, cytokines, lipokines, makes insulin resistance. So what I'm saying right now, moderate caloric restriction to maintain a healthy weight slows the aging process and lowers your metabolism so you age slower. Everybody's trying to raise their metabolism so they can eat more food and not get fat. I'm saying no, we should be eating less food, a little bit less, so we moderately slow our metabolism so we need less calories and don't get too thin. It's the opposite. And we have to have those calories we choose have to have a high micronutrient bang per caloric buck. And the foods with the highest micronutrients per calorie are generally green vegetables, are most protective against cancer, heart attacks, dementia, and of course, I'm also saying that this anti-cancer lifestyle arms the immune system so we don't get cytokine storm flooded with mucus and lung. So we're not going to die during the epidemic. I wrote this about, I think about eight years ago, I published a book called Super Immunity. And I wrote in that book about, I wrote about how that not only are infectious diseases going to kill more people in the future, but we're laying ourselves at risk of having some novel virus or new bacteria arise from bacterial changing. There's becoming more resistant antibiotics that we're going to have more infectious deaths in the future unless people start eating healthfully because medicines can't buy us good health. We have to start earning nutritional excellence to protect us against these things. And then, of course, COVID-19 comes along and people are dying now that don't have to die if they ate healthfully. So a nutritionarian diet means nutritionally rich with enough variety to get the immune system really strong. I couldn't agree more this past week. There's a paper out of China looking at selenium status. There are some areas in China that have very low selenium in their soil and other places where they have adequate selenium in their soil. And many people listening to us going, well, what the heck is selenium? But it's a micronutrient. And they found that the people who had low selenium status in their diet had a virtually an 80% to 90% death rate from COVID-19 and people who had a high selenium status in their diet virtually did not die from COVID-19, just one micronutrient. And we can look at vitamin D, for instance. So you've been on the cutting edge of this. So it's really hard to convince somebody that selenium, for instance, could make a possible difference in your health. And yet in your book, you make a very strong case, and you always have, that we are lacking in multiple micronutrients and we've overwhelmed in macronutrients. So take us through, what are you going to do about this? Are people listening to you? I think many are, but a lot aren't. The majority of people are committing suicide with food. I think that the fear of cancer is 20, 30, 50 years down the road or whatever it is, that's not enough for them to, let's say, quit smoking or stop eating bagels and hot dogs and donuts and pizza. What I'm saying is that people want a magic pill that they can smoke three packs a day and not get lung cancer or eat burgers and pizza and not get breast cancer, but that's a fairy tale. That's never going to happen. If you eat sweets, commercial baked goods, fried foods and things like that, you're going to have a horrible life, but now it's different. What's different now is COVID-19 can kill people right away who eat that way. Fried foods suppress immunity. What I'm saying right now is I think now is an opportunity to have more people recognize the importance of nutritional excellence. Even though the mass media is not talking about this, I'm getting the opportunity to speak more, I think, at home through Zoom and Skype and things like that, but I do think that more people might be waking up to the fact that we can control our health destiny and don't have to be fearful of being killed by this virus if we get in great health. I just want to say something to make so people aren't so fearful is that I know that when you're overweight, you increase your risk of death by more than 700%. A new criterion is a person who's at their normal weight with a BMI below 23 because they've eaten lots of healthy foods and vegetables. What I'm saying right now is we see that if you're overweight and you change your diet within a few weeks, you start to become less insulin-resistant. Even while you're still overweight, the aromatase activity, the activation of the heightened estrogen starts to come down. The body doesn't spill out as many lipokines and cytokines if you're losing weight at the rate of one kilogram a week. We see that with people having gastric bypass even or lap van that if they're losing weight, their diabetes starts to go away even before they've lost all their weight. I'm saying right now during these times that a new criterion is a person who's at their ideal weight eating very healthfully, but also a person who may still be overweight who's dropping weight at at least a pound every three days. If they're eating right enough to lose weight at least two pounds a week, we're going to see rapid increase in immune system function that's going to afford them more protection while they still haven't gotten to their ideal weight yet. What I'm saying right now, of course, is that the white blood cells are chronically overly stimulated and the normal range of white blood cells on a blood test request is five to ten. When you start flooding your body with these nutrients, particularly ones found in green vegetables, we see people getting a lower white blood cell count as the inflammation goes down. My normal white blood cell counts for my patients and followers might be between 2.2 and 6 might be a normal white blood cell count, because what I'm saying is that the battery keeps its charge, the flashlight keeps its charge when those flashlights turned off. Keep the flashlight turned on, the batteries burn out. We don't want to keep our body at chronic inflammation because then we're not going to respond quickly to a virus, be able to put out the fire from the virus replication. I've also discussed in my prior books that viruses RNA can replicate and take more pathogenic forms and evade immune system capture in an immunosuppressed or nutritionally deficient health. And as you said, a deficiency of any one nutrient, even a deficiency of beta-carotene, of zinc, of selenium, of vitamin D, of a host of different nutrients, what your weaknesses are, what you're missing. Whatever you're missing, that could be something that weakens your immune system. We need comprehensive micronutrient adequacy, including a diet rich in phytochemicals from different vegetables. I have this acronym called G-BOMS, G-B-O-M-B-S, so people recommend to eat these natural foods with anti-cancer effects regularly. And of course that stands for greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. Of course, greens, beans, to try to encourage people to eat their flax seeds, to get the variety of mushrooms, to eat, you know, in other words, seeds. And of course, I want people to eat a big raw salad every day, at least once a day, a large salad every day, and what makes my, which with some cruciferous green on it, like arugula, or shredded cabbage, or baby bok choy. And what makes my advice different than most people is I want their salad dressing or their fat in their diet to come from nuts and seeds, not from oils. It's not walnut oil, it's walnuts, it's not sesame oil, it's sesame seeds, it's not flax seed oil, it's flax seeds. And we make delicious dressings and sauces and desserts and dishes that we take the oil out and we put the whole nut or seed in, because the studies are very, the evidence is overwhelming that when you make that switch, we extend human lifespan, improve immune function, and decrease the calorie-consuming monster. You know, there's what I'm saying right now too, is when you eat a diet low in nutrients, you become a calorie-consuming monster and you can't control the epistap. Yeah, you know, it's fascinating. There's some of my talks, I show a U.S. Senate document that says our soil is now so depleted in nutrients that we could eat huge amounts of food and never actually get the micronutrients that we need. And I ask my audience, which includes many physicians that I speak to, tell me the date that this Senate document was made. And most people guessed, maybe 2000, some people guessed 1990. It was actually 1936. And our soil was so depleted even back then that people knew about this problem, but of course, nobody did anything about it. So let me ask you this. So our listeners say, well, gee, you know, I go to the grocery store and I'm eating a lot of greens. Is there a really big difference of why I should pay a little bit more for organic greens than conventional greens? What's the difference? I think so. I think it's worth it today. I mean, I always say we have an unprecedented opportunity to eat a diet better than our ancestors could have eaten. And in true, we have nutritional deficiencies in soils in the Midwest and the plain states. And particularly the soy, the corn, the wheat, the rice, the grain, the potatoes that are nutritionally deficient. But the green vegetables grown in California, the green vegetables grown in organic farms that use regenerative agriculture. And, you know, we're talking about compost and, you know, bad guano and whatever they're doing. But we do have nutritional rich foods available to us. We don't have to eat the nutritional and barren stuff. And of course, it's the processed foods. Don't forget processed foods are 60% of what Americans are eating today, like pasta, bread, salad oil, mayonnaise, donuts, cookies, crackers, rice cakes, breakfast bars, chips, soft drinks and bars and breakfast cereals. They're eating food with no nutrients and it's zero nutrients. But in any case, I'm saying that when you eat an organic food, you're getting better soil, more nutrient diversity. But also, the leafy greens have a lot of surface area, a little dump of pesticide in the wrong place, a little spray from that thing in the wrong place. And you could be having a huge exposure to toxicity in a head of cabbage or in a head of kale, because it has so much surface. With an apple, you could peel it with a carrot, you could peel it with a peeler, with something like that, with a cantaloupe, you're not eating the skin. With another seed, it grows on a tree, you know, with a sealed hard shell and the fruits go down 20 feet to the soil, you're not going to get a lot of pesticide residue in the center of another seed or an avocado. But with the green vegetables and with berries and with certain foods, you have the possibility of being exposed to harmful substances. Now, I just have to say that oats, conventional oats are contaminated with glyphosate now and the conventional rice is contaminated with arsenic. Thank you for saying that. Absolutely true. There are some reports that even a lot of organic oats are still contaminated with arsenic, by the way. And glyphosate, yeah. So we have to be more careful. We have to be more careful than ever before. And we also have microplastics and seafood, you know, and there's plastics off the shore that even the sardines I used to think were relatively safe and now we're finding even smaller fish have microplastic particles in them. So since you brought that out, what's changed about this new program versus, you know, your thinking in the past? Give us some details. Some changes are the fact that the raw vegetables and the cruciferous green family and the onion family have an enzyme in them. The enzyme in the green vegetables is called myrosinase and the enzyme in the onion is called alienase. And those enzymes produce the organosulfide compounds and the isothiocyanides that are probably the most powerful anti-cancer benefits in the dietary portfolio. But those enzymes are deactivated by cooking. So we want to eat raw onion and raw greens, but if you blend them in a blender, like if you blend the cow, the bok choy, or the, or you blend the onion or the leek or the, while it's raw, then we can still break down the cell wall. So the chemical reaction that forms the ITCs takes place in the blender instead of the mouth. And then you can pour it into the soup or the stew to cook. And the heat will not destroy the anti-cancer ability because you blended it raw. We have to, if we're eating these salads raw, we have to crush them in the mouth really well and chew to a liquid to get maximum anti-cancer effects. Because years ago, I used to say when I first wrote eat to live, I had people put the kale and the, and the, and the onion in the soup hole and they would take it out with the tongs and then put it into the blender to cream it into the soup base. But now I don't have them do that. Now they have to blend the green vegetables while they're raw into the soup base and they have to blend the onion and leek raw. And then once it becomes a puree, a puree, and then they can pour it into the soup to be cooked. So we were trying to retain the act of the viability and the activity of the anti-cancer substances. There's also been a lot of new information out about mushrooms, including ergo-theanine and the ability of mushrooms to control excessive immune response to, so they're, so I think that more than ever before, I recommend eating a variety of different mushrooms or even taking a mixed mushroom extract to make, if you're not getting a variety of mushrooms in your diet, because they're, they found an ergo-theanine receptor on stem cells and a lot of the body cells to stabilize DNA from aging. So we get a lot of anti-aging effects from including mushrooms regularly on diet and that the fact that mushrooms have their full viability for those anti-cancer effects when they're cooked, whereas the greens maintain the viability more when they're raw. So some of those nuances we've more targeted in recent years to help people make a really true anti-cancer diet, which makes it more protection against COVID-19 too. So you have, I know you've used this equation in your book, H equals NC. What does that mean? Why is it maybe the most important principle of your book? Right, that's the thing we're saying about moderate caloric restriction in the context of micronutrient excellence. That H equals N over C means your healthy life expectancy and how youthful, vibrant, intelligent you're going to be as you age and how good health is related to the micronutrient per calorie density of your diet throughout your life. So we're talking here about a person who maybe smokes three packs a day for 20 years is called three packs for 20 years is what's that, 60 pack years? A person has like three grams of salt for 30 years, that's two grams above one gram, that's like 30 years from two grams over, that's 60 salt years. So it's the years that you, the years you can build up of doing the healthy habits affect you positively or negatively. The sooner we start reducing salt, eating healthily, not smoking, so we got to get people started on this program of flooding the body with nutrients. That's H equals N over C means what is your micronutrient exposure as far as the adequacy of it and the breadth or completeness of that exposure and for how many years have you been on a diet with adequate micronutrients where you haven't over consumed calories and it also means when you ask me something the newest things we're finding out is that when you eat a heavy meal late at night and you go to sleep on a full stomach you put on more weight and you inhibit detoxification and age and you increase the aging process. When you eat earlier in the day and you eat a lighter meal dinner or an earlier dinner and when you go to bed on an empty stomach you slow metabolism, you get more rest when you sleep, you redo more free reactive oxygen species and you lose weight easier. I'm trying myself to do this now, to less eat late at night, to try to eat a lower smaller dinner and try to get digestion finished before I go to sleep at night because every once in a while you come home late, you're busy, you're hungry, you eat a bigger meal and I'm trying to get that out of trying to have the people who follow my advice and to have my advice to them and our interactions motivate me to do better too and I want to stop eating late at night and try to eat smaller meals and eat earlier in the day too. So that's another nuance, that's another new thing that's important but it all fits in with this H over N, H equals N over C which means get your nutrients in, don't get as many calories in because you know a little bit extra calories speeds up your metabolism and it makes you age faster, it raises body temperature, it raises the respiratory quotient and that of calories burned through respiration goes up and also it raises your thyroid function and the activation of burning more calories to chew off those calories ages you. It's like if you're making a pact with the devil you're going to be speeding up your stem cells, your stem cells are aging faster and your telomeres are going to show more signs of aging the more you overeat calories. So we have, whereas you under eat a little bit, you slow down those parameters, you lower body temperature, you lower the respiratory quotient and we found out that people in the lower range of normal of thyroid function have less atrial fibrillation, less cardiac arrhythmias and less heart attacks. We used to think that keeping them in a higher range of thyroid function to induce weight loss and lowering cholesterol is better but now that's been shown to be wrong, we don't want to overtreat them with thyroid medication, we don't want to push their metabolism up, we want them to be a little colder and a little lower and not worry about that. Of course not abnormally low but we're saying here don't rev up your thyroid artificially, it's not great for your lifespan. No I agree, I get the opportunity of studying and having as my patients a lot of late 90s early 100 year old people living in Palm Springs and these people almost universally run a low body temperature, they're sitting around 96 and they always actually, the vast majority of them have low-ish free T3 levels and you're right, they're incredibly fuel efficient creatures and they run a low metabolism and that's what I talked about in the longevity paradox and the idea that we need to rev up our metabolism is the exact opposite for longevity purposes. Absolutely, that's great that you're saying that because it's like nobody, it's this is so novel because the rest of the world is saying the opposite. So I'm glad you found the same thing. Yeah, you and I I think both are on PBS and that's what I say in my PBS special. Now here's another thing that you and I both agree on that we need to reduce the consumption of animal proteins. I've written about this and everybody can't believe it. You've been one of the original proponents of reducing animal protein. Why is that so important? There's numerous reasons. One reason is that when you go over a certain level of animal protein, you push up IGF-1 into an abnormally high range and IGF-1 has growth promotion effects that enhances cellular replication that can allow cancer cells to replicate and it also is angiogenesis promoting which can allow cancer cells to glean their own blood supply and replicate. Lower levels are healthier but if you're too low as you age could also be unhealthy. There's a narrow range of IGF-1 that's ideal so tweaking that at the perfect level is an important aspect. The other aspect is too much animal protein can also increase the production of TMAO. Trimethylamine oxide could go too high and when you trimethylamine oxide goes over a certain level it becomes an inflammatory modulator of the endothelium most atherosclerosis. So there's a few reasons why you also build more gram-negative bacteria in the gut and when you have more animal protein and animal fat you also get more insulin resistance so then you have a higher response to a carbohydrate. You have all these keto and paleo people eating a lot of animal protein and animal fat and they say see when I eat a mango or some oatmeal my sugars go through the roof I got to stay on animal products but the reason their sugars go through the roof on those foods is because they've distorted the shape of their insulin receptors which too much animal foods and saturated fat and now when they eat those foods they get an excessive response because they're not going to be insulin resistant and it also makes it harder to lose weight. So yes and you know what also the Seventh Day Adventist II study was very clear and we give more credence to studies that follow people for decades and look at hard endpoints like death and what they found is that more plant protein in the diet made for longer lifespan and more animal protein in the diet made from shorter lifespans even when people went up to relatively small amounts like went up from 10 to 20 percent you still saw more deaths. So what I'm saying right now is that eating a diet that's richer in plant protein with hemp seeds, green vegetables, soybeans, other beans, nuts, pine nuts all these things that we find that as quinoa as plant that we want protein adequacy but we want more of the protein to come from plants because plant protein is not as biologically complete and when it's not as biologically complete the body can turn it into growth form on an IGF one more slowly because it completes it by matching amino acids from the interstitial there's an interstitial what should I say storage of amino acids that if the body can take it can balance amino acids from and it can also add more amino acids by bringing some bacteria digesting the bacteria or slept up epithelial cells but the body doesn't complete protein to make growth hormone excessively unless it needs it when you take an animal protein because it's not efficiently burned as calories or stored as fat as efficiently as carbohydrate or fat it's not stored as efficiently as fat the body will more readily turn the extra protein calories into growth hormone and or produce more nitrogenous waste like urea uric acid and pneumonia so you have more inflammatory wastes more urea uric acid pneumonia more production of hormone more production of inflammatory substances so we're trying to reduce animal protein so you've recently moved to the san diego area and uh there's another uh physician down there uh dr paul saladino who uh is one of the biggest proponents of the carnivore diet and I you probably don't spend a lot of time together yet uh what the carnivore diet folks are saying well uh look at the weight loss that everybody's having they're they're avoiding those mischievous substances called lectins that you and I should talk about sometime and maybe today so what do you what do you say to the carnivore diet folks I think it's really sad that people are getting such dangerous and erroneous information you know because you can look at a short term study to come up with a hypothesis my short term study might defeat people nothing but shrinkies just shrinkies nothing else they'll get sick of eating shrinkies they'll get root get reduced their calories they'll lose weight or i can even just white rice to eat and they'll lose weight their blood pressure go down that doesn't make that a long journey promoting diet because their blood pressure went down they lost weight give them just meat put them into chronic ketosis they lose weight their blood triglycerides improved their diabetes is going away does that that that you makes you come up with a hypothesis that has to be confirmed with large epidemiologic trials that look at hard endpoints and then it's when the hard end point studies a hard end point is not like a triglycerides went down or your glucose went away went better it means that you actually live longer I can give you a cholesterol lowering drug that things look better in the short run but until I see fat hundreds of thousands of people on that drug for decades and I see longer lifespan I'm not convinced that there's some tradeoff that may be hurting your lifespan with that drug we don't know that yet what I'm saying is that people can be tricked into anything they can be fooled into these wrong erroneous notions because they're not trying to make sure they're matching the short term soft end point studies with the long term hard end point studies talking about death and we know that every study that had large numbers of people that went on for decades and looked at animal protein intake or meat intake that the more meat they ate the younger they died and the more cardiovascular deaths they had and the more cancer deaths they had it's dangerous information the per the person is appealing to people's love affair with these illicit foods like meat and I love lamb chops too I would love to be told barbecued ribs and lamb chops are great for you you know but I but unfortunately they're not and we have to have reality here and go with the sign the overwhelming evidence so I think though that person should be there has to you know um I hate to be bad mouthing people but I but it's dangerous to follow the advice of a person like that I even I even ordered his book and I even saw all the nonsense in that book and how each we only showed the short term studies and didn't include any of the data that showed what he's saying is wrong and I thought it was a it really was um you know not a good thing to do for people yeah well tell us how you really feel no you know but you're right uh you know I mean the the Duke rice diet works you eat nothing but rice I used to used to follow a great a great blogger and you probably actually followed his blog Mr. Heisenbug does that ring a bell was in the early days in the microbiome movement anyhow a lot of the vegan people still hold up the rice diet is the perfect diet kempler's rice diet and they're on this idea that and they don't understand you've got to look at people through their luck through the whole life and how they look when they've gotten to be you know we're talking about 85 90 95 years old and see how that affects them it's just not a healthy diet long term we want people to lose weight and to get healthy and to maintain that way of eating that's also going to enable them to age healthily and be vibrant physically active and have their full mental faculties as they age and you're not going to do that on a rice diet or a potato diet right and I was bringing up there was a fellow on this blog site whose whose sign was tater tot and tater tot went on a total potato diet so all he ate was potatoes and he lost weight his numbers looked great and he was using it as an example of well you know the people who say you can't eat carbohydrates because you'll gain weight don't be ridiculous here all i've eaten his potatoes and you know look i'm thin and trim but i think your point is correct these these mono diets and i've written about that in my books these mono bias diets work primarily because just like a twinkie diet you get so tired of eating twinkies you kind of stop eating and it's the same with the adkins diet and he i think admitted this is this mono diet of say a carnivore diet which was the original adkins diet yes you just get sick of eating that way and you really do reduce your caloric intake absolutely and ketosis does burn fat it's just not safe to do it you can yeah it's just not safe to have to have putting your body into such stress you can smoke cigarettes and snort cocaine to lose weight too you know let's let's talk about ketosis when you do reduce calories you are going to produce ketones and i for one think that production of ketones i don't think all the time is a pretty good thing for a lot of reasons do you want to get into ketosis every now and then or do you think we should always be in ketosis ketosis is a natural state when there's no calories around and the but it's a way the body has to burn fat stores and because the brain is able to accept ketones as an alternative energy fuel when it can't get enough glucose but it's only designed as an emergency fuel and there is some evidence that episodically fasting to go into ketosis episodically may have some anti stress or beneficial effects on longevity but that doesn't mean it's beneficial to stay chronically in ketosis we're talking about an intermittent fasting can give you the benefits of of that without having to go into ketosis fully or be able to go in a total fast or a total carbohydrate restriction so there may be some cases in the future like brain tumors that don't respond that may respond to ketosis and i even have you know so there may be some individual application to that type of diet but as a person we're talking about people thinking they should be in chronically in a ketosis to avoid carbohydrates to eat to the point to stay in chronic ketosis as a means of control in their body weight long term that's not that's going to enhance aging and shorten their lifespan and and most likely increase most common cancers we're seeing that already we're even seeing that that in studies that show that vegetables have the most protection against cancer and the anti-inflammatory effect on the endothelium we even show that when you add some fruit and berries to vegetables you get even more longevity benefits and more anti cancer potential so even cutting out some fruit so even though vegetables are the best they still show fruits and vegetables or berries and vegetables are better than just the vegetables alone and then we add nuts and seeds to a diet that's low in fat and we even get more lifespan benefits from it so we're seeing more variety so cutting out a whole class of foods to stay in ketosis lowers your phytochemical exposure and your micronutrient variety that also shortens lifespan where I'm leading to is where do you come down on intermittent fasting and or time restricted feeding in this process I'm an advocate of that you know remember we talked about not eating late at night I'm trying to do it myself somewhat too but of course I think it's good to eat less food once you know on a regular basis you know I used to advocate long term more long term fasting fast don't eat for a full week but I think you can only do that if you know a few times in your life you can but I think the idea of intermittent fasting where you can do it regularly you can do whatever you know two days a week or you can do it a week every month or you can do the more you can incorporate episodes we are actually eating less on a regular basis it's beneficial I think it's it's represented in the equation h equals n over c too that we want to this idea of moderate caloric restriction this idea that you people should snack all the time and eat frequently is a myth the evidence shows that the less frequently eat we eat the better off we are it's not as beneficial to skip breakfast and eat later in the day it's more beneficial to skip dinner and finish eating early in the day that's what we're trying so that's what I'm trying to do once in a while is just have a glass of juice and go to bed or or skip dinner once in a while so I do think intermittent fasting has its role I don't think you need to use processed foods or a special thing you buy or special magic foods you have to eat good natural foods and can chronically incorporate this idea of not overeating in your diet and sometimes restrict calories so you're hungry once in a while you know hunger is a healthiest thing to feel don't keep stuffing your face all the time some nights I go to bed a little bit hungry and I would feel like going and eating something but I say to myself no just have some water and go to bed it's good you're going to bed hungry is going to extend your lifespan no it's very true I I teach people to embrace the hunger people are so worried that being hungry is somehow abnormal and yeah it's good that's right I mean it and also the worst your diet is the more uncomfortable you feel when you're hungry the healthier your diet is hunger is very mild and doesn't feel it's just a tiny bit in your throat it's the people eat bad feel like they detox when they go into hunger and they feel shaky and weak and feel terrible eat healthy hunger becomes changes that you change the perception of hunger that's mild I published a study on that was published in nutrition journal it was entitled the changing perception of hunger on a high nutrient density diet it showed how hunger lessened and became not no longer uncomfortable when you eat very healthfully and that's what we're saying that hunger is good you should be eating when you're hungry you shouldn't even be eating if you're not hungry we should use and hunger makes things taste better too and we shouldn't we're a creature of habit and Americans are ubiquitously overfed and overstuffed and told to eat too frequently and eat all the time all right so give me give our listeners three things to do to start improving their markers of good health right now well I feel lunch is the most important meal of the day and what I'm saying to people to do right now is to have one meal you have a big salad as a main dish and it's a chopped salad so without you know chop the salad up put something cruciferous into it like so like um bok choy kale or rugola and the dressing should not be oil based it should be nut or seed based the biggest myth perpetrated to the population is this idea that oil is a health food it has to be a dressing made with walnuts or almonds or sesame seeds so my dressings are made maybe with tomato sauce with some almonds and and black fig vinegar you know and some roasted garlic or you know or it's made with oranges with sesame seeds and cashews and some blood orange vinegar and a squeeze of lemon the dressing has to be healthy and I'm recommending people make a big bowl of healthy vegetable bean soup on the weekend or something put in the mushrooms and the onions in there and the carrot juice base and the and the leeks and the put you know and if you can out so it's simple it's easy to eat a healthy lunch eat a big healthy lunch and make dinner a smaller lighter meal so I don't know if you can see but I've got my avocado socks on today can't I have an avocado on your program I mean come on it's mono unsaturated fat and fiber of course of course and I'm not against avocado oh well well thank you but there's a lot of fat in there come on well don't forget I want people it's not I want them to keep their calories favorable enough so they're if they're overweight they're dropping a pound every three days they can titrate the amount of fat that your amount of nuts and seeds or avocado they use to make sure they're keep losing a pound every couple of days so they're not overeating so we're using it as a salad dressing as a sauce as part of them you know we make some great dressings in desserts with avocado but if you but you obviously can overdo those foods that can derail weight loss but you got to use them judiciously so you're still losing weight on the program it's been great having you on the program today and really again congratulations on all your work hopefully we'll get back together again and you and I can just have a wonderful talk about lectins maybe I can convince you to pressure cook your beans I love beans as long as they're pressure cooked I learn I do pressure cook my beans oh did you hear that ladies and gentlemen he pressure cooks his beans thank you I have I have chickpeas I might but and also don't forget I take care of a lot of really sickly overweight people with food addicts who are food addicts and we and abstinence and putting them in a controlled environment and some professional guidance to get rid of their food addiction you know food addiction is like cocaine addiction or drug addiction and people need the expertise and they to get well they sometimes need extra care so I'm talking about people don't have to be sick don't be afraid and I'm scared of having this be difficult with a great kind of help and guidance people can come back and be thin again and stay there so people where do people find you how do you do this well they can get to they can find me at drfermin.com but and you know I have a retreat here in San Diego if they're really in trouble and they need some professional care they could stay here for two or three months and get rid of their food addiction and have enforced abstinence but learn the emotional psychological and everything and the cooking and all the techniques so they can go home and know what to do and not be troubled by the being in the prison of their love affair with rich foods that are killing them so I really feel that I can get to people who really need this kind of help and make and change their life very good all right so it's time for our audience question and I want you to chime in on this we've we've kind of nibbled around this question so Paul on iTunes asks I have a close relative who has a rare form of cancer we read a couple recent studies correlating grilling food with a higher incidence of cancers the data they said showed that the carcinogenic compounds created from the heat and also carried by the smoke are definitely a cause for concern they recommend baking and roasting at lower temperatures should we stop grilling our pasture raised boneless skinless chicken breast that we enjoy almost weekly in the summertime please say no thanks so much all right doc firman what say you I say it's well known that those things are carcinogenic the world health organization calls it a class 1a carcinogen of course it's well known so it's so if you this if you're going to eat a small amount of animal product should mostly be cooked as a stew in a soup or a walked vegetable dish with moisture we're talking about when you dry cook foods it's worse and when you cook it over a flame or you fry it or broil it or barbecue or make it darkened or crispy or blackened it's more it's obviously more carcinogenic we want to keep moisture present so we don't dry out and darken or blacken or brown our foods how about grilling vegetables the same thing apply yes and no because when you grill peppers you can take away the black skin because the moisture in the pepper prevents the burning it's so yes we shouldn't blacken or darken our food but remove the darkened or blackened portion if you can and right it's better to cook things with some moisture so they don't get blackened or darkened so the vegetables may not be as carcinogenic but it's not health favorable to darken and blackened food and we're talking about you know eating corn flakes fritos potato chips french fries a pizza crusts and toast should not be darkened or brown nothing should be not overcooked because overcooking food increases there's a mild carcinogen called acrylamides increase when you're over darken or cook in foods in general but the meats get even worse when you do that yeah and I agree you should grill your peppers because and blacken them so you can peel off the skin and you'll obviously take the seeds out of it and that'll de-lectonize it so I agree exactly right do it with moisture do it with slow warm heat away from fire so yeah sorry about that so okay well again really appreciate having you on welcome to California I know you're gonna love it out here and hopefully we'll meet in the not too distant future neighbor thank you all right take care be well okay take care vicka sandra on youtube wrote we really should do what dr. gundry says I'm stocking up on the right veggies and mushrooms and I'm making some of the recipes you suggested on youtube that cauliflower never tasted that good I also put garlic in practically every dish thank you so much for looking out for us dr. g I appreciate these videos big time well thank you very much that's why we go to the trouble of coming up with these recipes and doing these videos because hopefully they're resonating with you and you know I'm always looking out for you so thanks for writing in and we'll keep at it before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes google play stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because I'm dr. gundry and I'm always looking out for you