 If there's one thing I hear from a lot of my patients is this, how can I get my family to follow your diet? Believe me, I've struggled with this myself. A few years ago, my daughter Elizabeth and her husband were both struggling with extra weight. But Elizabeth sees me as dad, not Dr. Gundry. About a year and a half ago though, something changed. Elizabeth and her hubby both adopted my plant paradox protocol and today I'm proud to say they both lost 60 pounds each in great shape. Because I've seen first hand what a difference this program can make for your entire family. The plant paradox family cookbook will equip you with the tools you need to get your whole family eating healthy together. Which is why in today's episode of the show share three easy steps for getting your whole family to start eating healthier today. Plus, I'm going to debunk five of the biggest myths about childhood diets. Tune in, you won't want to miss this one. A lot of people ask me, Dr. Gundry, how do I get my whole family to follow your diet? I get it, changing your diet is never easy. That's why I want to share three quick tips for getting your whole family on board with the plant paradox diet plan. Number one, choose one food or one meal at a time. Throwing everything out, particularly with family who's used to eating things is not going to work. So choose your areas where you think it's best. How about this? We're going to get bread out of the house or we're going to make our own bread and I'll discuss that in a minute. Or we're no longer going to have peas for dinner anymore or we're going to stop eating corn on the cob and you're going to hear ah, ah, ah, ah, but that's all we're going to change guys, okay? We're not going to throw out the fried chicken, we're not going to throw out the pizza until next week. So this is a great way to get people to realize that their lives aren't going to be miserable. Now option number two, offer choices. When I was growing up, quite frankly, peas were the health food that my parents wanted us to eat and they were canned and they were horrible and my sister and I developed great strategies for hiding the peas under anything that we can find. Now looking back I'm sure my parents knew that this was going on but it was their way of letting us not eat the things we didn't want to eat. So let your kids say, give them choices of what we're going to give up this week. Make it even a fun game of what we're going to give up. Get them involved. Now that brings me to number three. Get your kids in the kitchen. I was lucky to have grown up with a mother who loved to cook and loved to teach me how to cook and luckily my daughter Elizabeth and her husband have taken my two grandchildren who are now three and five and brought them into the kitchen and there's nothing better than having your kids prepare for instance waffles or pancakes or cookies or cakes that they can make and they can get excited about. In fact my three-year-old grandchild just thinks making chocolate chip cookies is one of the best activities that he can do and they get to make a mess and have fun at it and then they get to eat what they made and really there's no better way to start out your kids than welcoming them into the kitchen. Now there are a lot of myths out there about healthy diets especially for kids. I want to address five of the biggest myths out there. Let's start with this one. Believe me I hear this all the time. Kids can eat whatever they want without suffering the consequences. Let me tell you why this isn't true. First of all look around. Most of our kids are now overweight or obese and that's because we've gotten the idea that kids can eat anything that they want. So our kids for instance weren't designed to drink another animals milk like a cow. Cow's milk is designed to make baby cows grow rapidly and your kid is not a baby cow. Your kid is supposed to grow slowly. There's more and more evidence, published evidence, that children who grow rapidly have much higher incidences of cancers as a child or in their teenage years than children who grow slowly and one of the causes for this is cow's milk. So no, milk does not do a body good. The other thing that we've been led to believe is that children should be drinking fruit juices because fruit juice is healthy. Fruit juice is pure fructose. It's main lining sugar and be careful of looking at a label and it says no sugar added fruit juice. What that means to you as a parent is there's so much sugar in here already we didn't have to put anymore in. That's a trick to make you give your kids juice. There's a recent study in the British Medical Journal showing that juice consumption increases your risk of cancer as much as other really bad foods do. Juice is not a health food. Now, fruit in general, we're giving our kids far too much fruit early in life. Fruit is a leading cause of obesity in this country. It's a leading cause of fatty liver disease and, by the way, fructose is a toxin that we carry to our liver to produce triglycerides which increase your children's cholesterol level and uric acid which can actually lead to kidney stones and kidney damage and gout, by the way. The other important thing to realize is we're seeing an epidemic of autoimmune disease, asthma, eczema in our children. This never used to occur and this is because so many of the foods that our kids have been given are, number one, loaded with whole grains. Whole grains are a recent addition to our kid's diet. Quite frankly, when I was growing up in the 50s, we had no whole grains. We had wonder bread and nobody actually had autoimmune diseases in those days. We also didn't have broad spectrum antibiotics that are given to kids and adults like candy. We also didn't have non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like a leave or Advil. I mean, there's a leave or Advil for kids, for goodness sakes, and this actually causes leaky gut. The other thing we didn't have was animal products that are fed antibiotics to make them grow. And unfortunately, every time we eat factory-raised chicken, factory-raised beef, factory-raised pork, we're consuming the antibiotics that are in those meats. Why are these animals fed antibiotics? For one reason, that is to make them grow faster and fatter. And antibiotics that we give our kids and that we eat in those animals, guess what? They make our kids grow faster and fatter. So that's the last thing you'll want to feed your kids for a healthy kid. Now, all these things actually make for a leaky gut. And in my practice, I see large numbers of children with Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and all these things can be stopped by getting lectins out of their diet. And as hard as that sounds like, the Plant Paradox Family Cookbook was designed with you and your kids in mind to give your kids the foods they need without breaking your budget and getting it on the table quickly. Most of the recipes used an instant pot or other rapid pressure cooker or a sheet pan. And it's no longer necessary for you to stop on the way home for fast food. You can get a food that feeds you and your family the foods they need in record time. And it's all in the Plant Paradox Family Cookbook. Okay, let's move on to our next myth. Kids need to eat lots of protein. So protein is essential for growing bodies and protein is one of the three food groups that we need and that includes fat and carbohydrates. There's no reason to doubt that protein is essential for muscle growth. But unfortunately, advertising has tried to convince us that we need huge amounts of protein in order to grow healthy. In fact, we really don't need much protein. And one of the mistakes that Dr. Adkins of Adkins Diet Fame years ago made was that he felt protein was safe and that too much protein would just be burned off. In fact, we don't waste protein. So if we eat more protein than we need for building muscle and for repairing cells, we actually convert that protein into sugar. Now it's got a fancy name called gluconeogenesis. But I see time and time again in my practice that most of us, kids and adults, are eating too much protein. You absolutely don't need protein at every meal. And the other thing we have to realize is that there are plenty of protein in plant sources, including nuts, including leaves, and that we don't have to have an animal protein at every meal. So how much protein is right for your child or your grandchild? So an easy rule of thumb is an adult only needs about 20 grams of protein every day. How do you figure out what 20 grams of protein is? Well, most protein bars have about 20 grams of protein. So that's a good rule of thumb. Two and a half eggs has about 20 grams of protein. A small can of tuna has about 20 grams of protein. About three ounces of fish or chicken or meat, that's about a deck of cards, maybe a little less has about 20 grams of protein. So that's a good baseline. Now I know that most of you are actually going to eat a lot more than that, but you always want to remind yourself that that sort of baseline is going to get most of us, including your kids, an adequate nutrition, and enough protein to grow and do well. Now, if your kids are active and into sports, they can stand into weight lifting and weight training, say your kids in high school, soccer, or football, you can certainly add to that amount of protein. But again, try to get the protein from sources other than a giant juicy steak from a factory farm every day. You can get plenty of protein from nuts. You can get plenty of protein from hemp seeds, hemp powder. There's all sorts of alternatives to get the protein into your kids. Okay, myth number five. Here's a myth I know many of you've heard before. You can't get kids to stop eating junk food. Now, don't get me wrong. This one is hard, but it can be done. And it can be done because I've seen it happen in a lot of my patients who are children who have these autoimmune diseases like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis. How do they do it? Quite frankly, it requires parents talking to teachers at school and talking to the child's lunchroom people that your child is going to need to bring in food from home. And one of the keys is to make that food look fantastic and taste fantastic. And that's some of the tools you're gonna learn in the Plant Paradox Family Cookbook. The other thing that's important is to talk with the parents of your kid's friends and make them know that your kid, being nice to their child, by giving them a slice of pizza or a cookie is not being nice to your child. It's actually killing your child. Now, some moms have told me that they really come off as the warrior mom, but when they see their child succeed, it's so worth it. One of the children that I talk about in the book is a young man from Texas, a young kid who had such disabling psoriasis on the soles of his feet and on his hands that as a seven-year-old, his mother had to carry him because it hurt too much to walk. And he couldn't even feed himself because it hurt to hold a fort. Well, over the course of nine months, this was all done long distance. I've met him twice. His psoriasis have completely healed. He now walks, he goes to school. He hadn't been able to attend classes. And it's all because she gave him the foods he needed to heal himself. And quite frankly, the school and his friends are so excited that this is no longer a kid who literally was being carried by his mother everywhere who can now run and play and actually be a normal little eight-year-old that why would they give him this stuff? In fact, we do some specialized tests to see how much junk is getting into his diet. And recently we tested him. His gut looked great, but there was a little bit of gluten in his blood. And I said, uh-oh, somebody's cheating. She said, I know exactly what happened. It was a special day at school and some child brought in cupcakes. And he had one bite before he realized this was really stupid. And she said, you saw it in your blood tests. And he said, he caught himself, but so it can be done. And it really takes the mother and the child knowing the consequences. So, and that's just one example. Then there's so many more. So, how do you do this? Again, one of the easiest ways is children are gonna want cookies and cakes and all the things and macaroni and cheese and all the things that everybody else has. But you can make alternatives to those that taste like the real thing out of alternative flowers, like coconut flour, like cassava flour, like tapioca flour, like almond flour. And my grandchildren love to make these for themselves. You can make a cake that tastes exactly like a cake. You can make a pizza that tastes exactly like a pizza. And so you can have junk food that your kids love, but that loves them back. And that's really what this is all about. Having the food you love that loves you back. Our fourth myth is one I used to hear all the time. Oatmeal is the perfect breakfast food. Let me tell you, oatmeal is really good for fattening horses for winter. My daughter Elizabeth is a horse woman. And she can tell you that the only way to fatten a horse for winter is to give it oatmeal. And quite frankly, if you wanna get fat, oatmeal is one of the best ways to do it. And it'll fatten you and your kids. There's nothing good in oatmeal. It's loaded with lectins. Most oatmeal, even the ones that say gluten-free, cross react with gluten. Of all the oat products recently tested, all of them had glyphosate, whether it was breakfast cereals, whether it was breakfast granola, whether it was breakfast bars. And glyphosate is the last thing you want in your kids. There's much better breakfast options and alternative. I've got a great millet porridge recipe from the book. Millet has no lectins. And if you want something that tastes like oatmeal, try the millet recipe. Now, if you gotta buy oatmeal, cook it in a pressure cooker and make sure you buy organic. Most oats in this country are now sprayed with Roundup. And that's the last thing you want in your kids diet, glyphosate. Because it's a cancer-causing agent. Just look at the news. And it also disrupts the gut microbiome. It kills good bacteria. And it also by itself causes leaky gut. So please ditch the oatmeal. I say my most controversial myth for last. Fruit is great for kids. Oh, come on, what's wrong with fruit? Fruit used to be available only during the summer and early fall because for most of us in the world, fruit does not exist year round. But thanks to 747s from Chile and Argentina and Mexico, you can now have fruit delivered every day that looks fresh. But in fact, fruit is actually candy. We don't call it nature's candy for nothing. It's been bred for sugar content. And it's been bred for size. We now have apples that are the size of grapefruit. And then we have apples with names like honey crisp. What does that tell you? It's pure sugar. So fruit should be viewed as a treat and you should only have it in season. And please, please, please spend the money to get it from your local farmer's market or get it organic. Most fruit is covered with toxic pesticides and herbicides that have no business going into your child or grandchild. Fruit should be limited to a special occasion like for instance, let's have it on the weekends during season, but you don't need fruit every day. Which fruits are the best? Well, the berries are the best. And believe it or not, raspberries and blackberries are actually better than blueberries, primarily because blueberries particularly have been bred for sugar content. When I was growing up, blueberries were little bitter things that you had to put a half cup of sugar on to make them edible. Now, organic blueberries are the size of grapes and we can just munch them like candy because that's what they are. They are nature's candy and we need to treat them that way. And like I've said over and over again, fruit juice has no business in your child's diet. Fruit is main lining sugar. And the last thing you wanna do is get sugar into your children. So please avoid fruit juice at all costs. Because we've been told for decades, right? Like if it's ground, like avoid the white carbs, right? 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 on the back of a package. And as he tells the story, he 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 gonna have to disguise it. You're gonna 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. So, and he uses the example of a bagel, which was great. And he says, okay, we got a bagel, it's 300 calories. And you look down and it says zero sugar, one gram of sugar and you go, oh, 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 gotta do is you gotta take the total carbohydrates and you gotta 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 I, he said, no, it's out of my diet. I, you know, I eat no candy and no desserts. And I said, okay, what'd 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 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 Poehler 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. 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 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 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. Yeah. 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 Honeycrisp 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 Honeycrisp 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 as being diabetic friendly. But you're, 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 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 hormone. So anyhow. Yeah. And fructose, as you mentioned, high fructose corn syrup is, in actuality only about 55% fructose. Right. 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, oh, it's healthy and 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. Telling people to 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, the gut, our gut buddies, the microbiome. Well, I talk about your area of interest. We're learning literally with every passing day that if we wanna 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 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. Women have known forever. They have a gut feeling and guys are, 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 none of us would even thought of being interested in it. And he says, yeah, you know, Hippocrates was right. 2,500 years ago, all disease begins in the gut and the guy was right. And he didn't have our sophisticated tests, but he knew it. It's fascinating. I mean, but, you know, like the heart 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, you know, 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 body cards of the brain. They're specialized immune cells, as you know. And they're basically, you know, the body guards 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 and 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 and I 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 to poverty is that 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 heart 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 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, it was there patching your 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. And she has used, when I'm first met her, she had an LDL cholesterol of 469. And she actually ate a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of sugars, but fairly thin. And through the years, a couple of years, we now have 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 two, 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 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, grape seed 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 gonna get oxidized, that they're gonna 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 grapeseed 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 and I 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. 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 Predomin study, looking at 65 year old individuals who had known coronary artery disease. They had a standard of 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 in exchange of 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 the 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 predimated study. That's a seminal study in the field of nutrition because it's a randomized control 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 it? Right, yeah. And that came really out of the seven-country style trial which really wasn't the 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 to choose 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. 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 happened 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 putracine 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 is 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 gonna 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. So let's dive right in to discuss the power of polyphenols for feeling and looking your best. All right, what the heck are polyphenols? So phenols are a chemical ring structure that's incredibly common in plants primarily and polyphenols simply refer to lots of these phenol rings joined together. Now plants protect themselves from harm. We often don't think about this but plants have to harvest sunlight, the photons in sunlight and their mitochondria, yes, they actually have mitochondria, take sunlight and convert it into sugars and oxygen. And the process of that production is actually very damaging to the energy producing organelles in plants and they literally protect themselves from this damage by manufacturing polyphenols. And polyphenols are actually the way the plant, actually if you will, sops up the damage from what are called reactive oxygen species, ROSs, some people know them as free radicals. So as much as a plant needs sunlight, it turns out the plant is damaged by sunlight simultaneously. So the polyphenols are the plant's method, if you like, of sunscreen. Now interestingly, the more a plant is stressed, for instance, the closer it is to the sun, the higher the altitude, the more it's stressed by other factors like poor nutrients, not enough water, other harsh conditions, the more polyphenols the plant produces. Now, fun fact, most plant polyphenols are actually in the leaves, where in fact the energy production is done. And if you've ever doubted about why polyphenols are so important to a plant, every fall you get to watch a beautiful color display of polyphenols. Now we often talk about the leaves are changing color. In fact, those colors are actually the polyphenols in the leaves that you didn't see because all of the green chlorophyll was hiding those colors. But as the chlorophyll, the energy producing part of the plant dies off, the polyphenols remain. So this fall, when you're looking at the brilliant color displays, you can actually, in your own eyes, see the power of polyphenols that the plant was using to protect itself during that exposure to sunlight. Okay, now I mentioned that polyphenols are concentrated in leaves, but the same thing holds true for the fruit of the tree and the fruit can be damaged by sunlight. So many plants concentrate polyphenols, particularly in the skin of that fruit to protect it from harm. And for instance, great winemakers have known this for a very long time, that the more the vines are stressed, the higher the elevation, the underwater they are, the more polyphenols will be present in the grapes of that particular vine. And great winemakers have known for some time that it was the polyphenols in the grapes that brought all the characteristics and benefits from the wine that the vintners were looking for. But, getting back to the point, for instance, we're gonna talk about olive oil. Olive oil happens to be a great delivery device for polyphenols. And the polyphenols were in the olives and when you eat an olive, you're eating polyphenols, when you squish an olive and extract the oil, the benefit of olive oil is not oleic acid, which is a monoinsaturated fat, the benefit is in the polyphenol content. And one of the best ways to assess polyphenol content in olive oil is that if it makes you cough as you drink it or eat it, that's a very potent sign of the level of polyphenol. But there's actually more polyphenols in olive leaves. And that's why olive leaf extract is actually an incredibly great source of polyphenols. And if you want to munch on a few olive leaves, be my guest. Okay, so polyphenols protect the plant from damage, from free radicals, from reactive oxygen species. And we eat plants and we eat the plant polyphenols either in their leaves when we eat lettuce, believe it or not, we're eating polyphenols. When we're eating red leaf lettuce, we're eating more polyphenols than in green lettuce. In fact, years ago Rutgers University patented a red romaine lettuce that they showed had considerably more polyphenol content than regular romaine lettuce. And I forgot the name of it now, but it was something red. But they received a patent because of the polyphenol content. Okay, so polyphenols protect plants from damage. Now, years ago we used to think that polyphenols were primarily antioxidants. And for years and years and years, we measured the polyphenol content by what was called an ORAC rating, O-R-A-C. That's the oxygen-radical absorbing capacity and looked at whether these compounds could actually absorb free radicals. And for years and years and years, this was the standard by which we judged polyphenol content. Unfortunately, it turns out that these compounds when we swallow them are not doing that at all. And so if you hear people say that the reason to get polyphenols into your diet is that they are antioxidants, number one, don't believe them. And number two, that's not how they work. You'll actually see exactly the power of polyphenols. And it has nothing to do with their ability to absorb free radicals or as antioxidants. But their power is actually far more important. And one of the most recent findings is that polyphenols are actually prebiotics. In other words, if you remember prebiotics are what your friendly bacteria, the probiotics, like to eat. So first and foremost, whoever says that polyphenols are the plant defense system against being eaten and that polyphenols because of that are extremely damaging to your health, first of all, it doesn't know what they're talking about. Number two, that's not how polyphenols work for the plant and they're not a defense system of the plant. That's what lectins are for, that's what phytates are for, not polyphenol. The second thing is people who say polyphenols are bad for you actually don't realize that polyphenols feed friendly bacteria. And there's a host of evidence about the incredible benefit of polyphenols in actually changing the gut microbiome for the better. In fact, I'll give you a little tease. There's a fascinating study looking at the microbiome and inflammatory markers in three trials in human beings. One group had to drink several glasses of red wine per day. The second group had to drink the same red wine that had the alcohol removed and you can go to a store and find non-alcoholic red wine. And the third group got to drink gin in the same alcoholic amount that the red wine drinkers were drinking. And lo and behold, what they found was that both the red wine with and without alcohol changed the gut microbiome to a much more friendly microbiome. In other words, it increased the gut buddies. And the result was that multiple markers of inflammation fell in both of those red wine drinkers, whereas no effect was found in the gin drinkers. Why? Because the gin, even though it had alcohol didn't have any polyphenols. So the idea that polyphenols are somehow a plant defense system is absolutely wrong. And human studies back up the fact that it's the polyphenols, not the alcohol in red wine, that is the beneficial effect. And its benefit is not the polyphenols directly, but it's the polyphenols being eaten by certain gut bacteria and basically fertilizing good gut bacteria. The other thing we know is that polyphenols in general, when you eat them, are incredibly poorly absorbed. Maybe only 10% of all the polyphenols that you eat are ever absorbed. But again, the good news is that these polyphenols are eaten by your gut buddies and it's the products that your gut buddies make from these polyphenols in the form of postbiotics that I talk extensively about in the energy paradox that is one of the main ways that polyphenols benefit our health. So that's actually the exciting new science of polyphenols and how they work. All right, so let's play devil's advocate. Some critics like Dr. Paul Saladino say that the health benefits of polyphenols are overrated. And here's why they say that, because polyphenols aren't absorbed and that polyphenols are dangerous, they're a plant defense system. Well, they're right that polyphenols aren't absorbed very well and who in the world wouldn't want that? I don't know, I certainly would. The other thing that's obvious when we look at any of the blue zones, those areas of the world popularized by the National Geographic journalist, Dan Buckner. And Loma Linda is the only blue zone in the United States, by the way, where I was a professor for much of my career. Blue zones are notorious for having an incredibly high intake of polyphenol rich foods. And we could break them down individually, but let me assure you that each blue zone has its own set and different sets of polyphenol rich foods. We'll just take one example, the Okinawans, the older Okinawans, 85% of their diet was a purple sweet potato. And the purple sweet potato has an incredible concentration of one particular polyphenol called an anthocyanin. It's actually the same polyphenol family that gives the dark blue color to blueberries and blackberries. This is just concentrated in the flesh of a purple sweet potato. And luckily we're seeing purple sweet potatoes in a lot of our grocery stores now. They're now being grown commercially. So 85% of the Okinawan diet was a purple sweet potato. It wasn't beans, it wasn't rice, it wasn't soy. It was a purple sweet potato. So to think that that horrible, dangerous polyphenol was somehow impacting the health of the Okinawans in a negative way, certainly goes against the evidence. Okay, so that's probably the strongest if you look at societies who have great health and longevity, that's probably the biggest signal argument about why we should be getting more polyphenols in our diet. And I could go on and on. The famous predimed study from Spain, which some of my critics say is just one of the worst studies in the world and they're usually low-fat critics. The predimed study from Spain that I've written about in most of my books took 65-year-old people who had had a heart attack and they randomized them into three groups. One group got a liter of olive oil per week. That's about 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. And they actually had to pick up their liter of olive oil once a week, use it, take the empty bottle back to the clinic and get it refilled. The second group had to have the same number of calories in mixed nuts. And most of the nuts were walnuts and hazelnuts. And if you're guessing walnuts and hazelnuts are great sources of polyphenols, you're correct. The third group had a low-fat Mediterranean diet. Now all three, because they lived in Spain, ate a Mediterranean diet. What's impressive is that the walnut and the olive oil group had a 30% reduction in new events, new heart attack, new stents compared to the low-fat group. And the women in the olive oil group had an 87% reduction in breast cancer rate. And what I talk about in the energy paradox is that the olive oil group and the nut group actually had improved memory after five years compared to the low-fat group who had actually decreased memory. And the evidence that I present in the energy paradox makes it pretty clear that it was the polyphenol content in the olive oil and the nuts that was responsible for those effects. And again, another stake in the heart of people who say polyphenols are bad for us. Okay, so now maybe you're wondering, okay, so what are the best dietary sources of polyphenols? Well, it turns out that leaves are great sources of polyphenols. So if you're thinking tea, for instance, it turns out that tea is a great source of polyphenols. And tea, whether it's green, whether it's black, whether you grind up tea leaves like in matcha, and just an aside, please, if you're gonna use matcha tea, buy it from Japan, not China. The Chinese matcha tea is unfortunately full of pesticides, but that's another subject. Polyphenols are concentrated in fruits. So olives are loaded with polyphenols. Cacao, the fruit and the bean are loaded with polyphenols. Coffee, believe it or not, coffee fruit, and coffee fruit extract is available. We use it here at Gundry MD. You can buy coffee fruit powder, but the coffee bean is another great source of polyphenols. Yerba mate tea is another great source of polyphenols. So anytime you can get leaves, you're in great shape. And then when you start looking at most of the spices that we think of as leaves, like parsley, like sage, like rosemary and thyme, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, Simon and Garfunkel. So if you go down to Scarborough Fair, you're actually buying polyphenols. In fact, the Romans were so impressed with the ability of sage to improve their health that the Romans named sage salvia as in salvation. And so when we look at these spices, particularly the leaves, we see that it's the polyphenol content that people were after. Now vegetables, the darker the vegetable, the more the polyphenols. And polyphenols in general have a very bitter flavor. And some of you remember from my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diodevolution, that one of my favorite phrases was more bitter, more better. And that's because the bitterness is actually the polyphenols. And so if you look at countries and cultures with longevity, one of the fascinating things is that they have a preference for bitter foods. And one of the most interesting things about chocolate is that anybody who has had cocoa nibs or 100% dark chocolate knows it's profoundly bitter. And it was actually the Dutch that figured out that people would consume more chocolate if they took away the polyphenol content by treating it with alkali. So if you see on a label of cocoa powder, dutched process or alkali process, you've actually removed the polyphenols from chocolate. And so run from those. There's a number of candy companies, particularly Nestle and Cadbury and Mars, who have actually patented ways of adding polyphenols back into chocolate that they have taken away. In a way, it's kind of like looking at fortification of cereals where all the vitamins and minerals have been removed from cereals and breads. And they're now fortified with eight essential vitamins and minerals. So they're actually patents to add back polyphenols. Why have they done this? Because both animal trials and human trials have shown that the polyphenols in chocolate are actually responsible for improvement in cardiovascular flexibility. I've published papers about polyphenols increasing the flexibility of blood vessels in humans. I've published papers about the ability of polyphenols to stop making blood vessels sticky on the inside. Again, these are human studies of polyphenol extracts improving both vascular health and in other human studies improving brain health. So what a great thing. What else should you look for? Again, talked about olive oil and probably more than you wanna hear. More bitter, more better in olive oil. If olive oil makes you cough, you're on the right track. Red wine. If the wine is made, if the grapevines are made to suffer, to make, to work for a living by being planted in dense rows, by underwatering them, what's called dry farming, by being planted in rocks, by being planted in high elevations, you're going to increase the polyphenol content. So please, if you can, look for organic grown wines, look for biodynamic grown wines. There are a number of wineries now in the United States, particularly here in California, that are biodynamic wine growers. I'll mention two of my favorites, Beckman in Santa Barbara County, Ampelos Vineyards in Santa Barbara County, and also Spears, our organic and biodynamic, the first two biodynamic. A great number of wines in France and Italy and Austria are now biodynamic, and a huge number of them are organic. I just had an organic wine from Sicily last night, as a matter of fact. Look for the label, you're knowing that, believe it or not, you're going to get more polyphenol content, and that's the bang for your buck. Same thing with seasonings. We've had Chef Jimmy Schmidt, three times James Beard award winner on our podcast, and he will assure you, and he assured us, that seasonings are going to be loaded with polyphenols. And again, all the great spices of the Middle Ages were actually pursued because of their polyphenol content. And here's a fun fact. What's the highest polyphenol content of any spice? Come on, think about it for a minute. I'll give you a clue. You probably studded your Easter ham with it. If you said clothes, you're correct. Clothes have the highest polyphenol content of any food. And if you think I take clothes supplements, you're right because of that. If you saw it, I put all my supplements in the longevity paradox, and there's clothes. And it turns out that clothes was one of the highest sought after spices in the Middle Ages, right behind black pepper, which is loaded with polyphenols, and cinnamon, which is loaded with polyphenols. In fact, as you start looking at the Middle Age spices, you'll notice that people were willing to pay huge amount of money for polyphenols. And I got news for you, people don't pay huge amounts of money just to make food taste better. They were looking for the health benefits of polyphenols way back then. And we're only now beginning to realize what the ancients knew that we're only now discovering. Okay, are there foods with high polyphenol content that I don't recommend? Yeah, it turns out that there are some really interesting polyphenols in soy, and I do talk about them in the upcoming book. You can make soy safe in two ways. Number one, you can pressure cook it. Number two, you can extrude it under high pressure and high heat as texturized vegetable protein, which is TVP, one of the favorite kind of fake foods of Loma Linda cuisine. Or you can actually use soy isolates, soy protein isolates, or soy protein hydrolysates, but you'll eliminate the polyphenols in the latter. Beans, pressure cook your beans, soap beans. You'll still get the polyphenol content in beans, but you won't get the lectins. So those are the two provides of. The other thing that's interesting, believe it or not, whole grains have polyphenols. But as those of you know, the problem with whole grains is twofold. Number one, the lectin content of whole grains, you cannot pressure cook the lectins in oats or wheat or rye or barley. I'm sorry, they can't be destroyed. The other problem with whole grains is that so much of our American food supply in whole grains has been sprayed with Roundup. And glyphosate is one of the biggest disruptors of your gut and your energy that we could have ever invented. So long story short, polyphenols were designed to protect the plant from damage. Polyphenols were the sunscreen for the plant. Polyphenols were not insecticides. They were not toxins or poisons. They were to protect the plant's energy factories. And when you eat plant polyphenols, lo and behold, you're not eating antioxidants. You're feeding your gut buddies the food that they need, and they in turn turn those polyphenols into health-promoting compounds. I think you're gonna love this one. We're having an epidemic, particularly in our children, of fatty liver disease. And it's all from the high fructose corn syrup in so much of our processed food.