 The eight foods you need to throw out of your refrigerator ASAP. Alright, number one, sugar laden condiments like ketchup, like tomato sauces, like a lot of salad dressings. Yeah, get them out of your refrigerator. They have no business being there. Now here's our problem. We love sugar. That's obvious. Marketers know how much we love sugar. Two-thirds of the receptors on our tongue are sweet receptors. Why do we love sugar so much? Because way back when the only source of sugar was fruit. And fruit was only available during a short season, even in the jungle. Fruit ripens once a year. And we would be all over that fruit. We would be all over, honey. Get as much as we could because we would fatten up for the lean season. That's why we love sugar so much. Now, you gotta look at the labels. Beware everybody looks at sugar content or added sugars. Look at total carbohydrates to give you an idea of the sugar content. Take away the fiber. There's not much fiber in any of these products. Then whatever number you get, divide that number by four. There's four grams of carbohydrates in a teaspoon of sugar. And you'll be shocked how much sugar there is in these products. Also be aware, the companies know that the serving size has nothing to do with how much of it you are actually going to use. So they'll say, oh, the serving size of ketchup is a teaspoon. Well, nobody uses a teaspoon of ketchup. Or they'll say a tablespoon is the serving size of a salad dressing. And nobody uses a tablespoon of salad dressing. So you always have to look at what you're actually going to use that product for. My advice, make your own salad dressings. Everybody's got some mustard, vinegar, and olive oil laying around. I made my own salad dressing last night with Coleman's mustard. I used a mixture of balsamic fig, apple cider vinegar, and champagne vinegar. And I used a mixture of olive oil and perilla oil on my salad. And I threw in Italian herbs, and it was bellissimo, fantastic. There's also some good, pretty safe salad dressings out there. Primal plants makes a line of salad dressing. Braggs makes healthy salad dressings. Just buyer beware, most of the commercial dressings, particularly the low fat or the no fat dressings, they've substituted sugar for the mouth feel that you're looking for. Now, beware of most tomato sauces. Tomato sauces by law from Italy have to be made from peeled and de-seeded tomatoes. Like Pomi is one that is readily available. I'm working on my own tomato sauce, so stay tuned. But look for brands that peel and de-seed their tomatoes. They are available. Be careful about names that sound Italian. If it's got an Italian sounding name, it probably came from America. So look where the source of the product came from. All right, number two, cow's milk and cow's cheese and yogurts from the United States. Now, in general, we were not supposed to drink cow's milk ever, even babies. As I tell all of my patients, you are not a baby cow and neither is your baby. Cow's milk is designed to make baby calves grow rapidly. And it's loaded with one of my enemy's insulin-like growth factor. It's designed to make things grow quickly. We're designed to grow slowly. And so the last thing we want our kids drinking is insulin-like growth factor. Now, the good news is cheeses don't have insulin-like growth factor, but cow yogurt does. Also, as you know, our American cows in general are casein A1 cows, which is a lectin-like protein, which has been associated with leaky gut and damage to our pancreas. There are A2 milk yogurts and cheeses coming out. Most of the cheeses that come from France, Italy, and Switzerland are A2 milk cheeses. So they're readily available in lots of grocery stores. Swiss Brown is an A2 milk cheese. As you'll learn in my new book, one of the greatest cheeses for you is true-age Parmesan cheese from Italy. And I'm not talking about the Parmesan cheese in the green can that you shake on your pizza. That's not Parmesan cheese at all. Age Parmesan cheese has some amazing health benefits that you should use. Goat, sheep, cheeses, and yogurts and kefiers actually have MCT oils, which are beneficial to you. Buffalo milk cheeses, buffalo milk yogurts, we're beginning to see them more plentiful. They are actually great for MCTs as well. All right, number three. Here's one that's going to drive you crazy. Bagged salads. Now look, I get it. It is so easy to go to the grocery store on your way home from a busy day at work and picked up an already-washed bag of lettuce and cut off the top, throw it in the bowl. It is so easy and so tempting. The problem is that the plasticizers in these salad bags are in general loaded with endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And even though they say it's triple-washed, they are putting chemicals to preserve the freshness of that salad. They do not have to put them on the label. And I've mentioned on previous podcasts, I've been doing experiments with these bagged salads, organic bagged salads, and leaving in my refrigerator way past the expiration date. And they still look absolutely pristine a month later after I put them in my refrigerator. So there's something going on. If a mold or a bug won't eat that salad for a month sitting in the refrigerator, then you probably don't want those ingredients in you. So what's the option? Buy your vegetables, your lettuce, whole. Chop them up. Buy a salad spinner. I've got two that are great fun. One is a pull thing like starting an old lawn mower, and the other one is a big button that you push up and down. Both of them are great for getting your aggressions out. So when the kids are screaming, chop up the lettuce, get the knife out, chop it up vigorously, throw it in the salad spinner, and pump or pull to your heart's content, believe me, you'll actually find that you look forward to making a salad for dinner. Just be careful of these bags, and the salad spinners are great fun. Get a salad spinner. That way you don't have to sop up all the water off your lettuce. That's a pain in the neck. Number four, juices. Get juices out of your refrigerator. Juices are sugar bombs. I'm sorry. There are no real decent nutrients in a glass of OJ, even fresh squeeze. Studies have been done on human volunteers having them drink a glass of OJ, and lo and behold, their white blood cells were paralyzed for six hours after that glass of orange juice. Paralyzed. They couldn't do their job. And in this day and age, with all of our worry about the next bacteria or virus that's after us, why in the world would we want to paralyze our immune cells with a glass of orange juice? And remember, juices are pure sugar bombs, apple juice, orange juice, and don't get me started on no added sugar juices. Yes, when you see the word no sugar added, the interpretation, the translation is, there's so much sugar in here already, we didn't have to add any more. Ditch the juice. What can you use instead? Well, my products like essential orange, like Vital Reds or Power Blues, make a phenomenal, nutritious, beneficial juice that has none of these drawbacks. Squeeze a lemon or an orange or a lime in your water. There are stevia-based drops that can flavor your water, or just drink some water. Number five, flavored coffee creamers. Yes, even the sugar-free ones. Now, these are really bad. So many of these are made with emulsifiers that are actually shown to damage the wall of your gut. So many of these now have pea protein added, even a lot of them that didn't have it. There used to be some great macadamia nut milks that were really good, but now most of them have pea protein. Some of the creamers look on the back of the label. They're loaded with omega-6 fats, like corn oil, like safflower oil, like sunflower oil, like peanut oil. Even the really good sounding ones, like almond creamer, most almond creamers are made from whole almonds with the peel, and the peel contains lectins. Sadly, so many of my patients with leaky gut and autoimmune diseases, when we test them for sensitivity to almonds, almond shows up frequently. So almond milk is not all that great. Well, what about oat milk creamers? Wow, that's all the rage. Here's the deal. Oats in the United States are sprayed with glyphosate. Even multiple organic oats, cereals and granolas test positive for glyphosate. As you'll see in my new book, most oats in the United States are also sprayed with a banned herbicide that causes birth defects, and all of our oats now contain that banned herbicide thanks to a little thing that was done during the previous president's administration to allow this banned herbicide to be used. They're loaded with two toxic chemicals. Please stay away from oat creamers. So what do you do? Well, there's multiple stevia-based sweeteners, creamers. There's fabulous allulose and MCT-based creamers. I make an MCT-based creamer here at Gundry MD. FourSigmatic has great ones. Look on Thrive Market. There's some wonderful allulose or monk fruit and MCT creamers. In addition, sprinkle cinnamon on your coffee grounds when you're brewing, or sprinkle cinnamon after you make the coffee. But please, if you're going to use a creamer, look for coconut-based creamers, blanched almond creamers, or hazelnut milk if you must use a creamer. Number six, get the margarine out of your refrigerator. Now, in the 70s and 80s, we were taught that margarine is so safe, it's so healthy, because it's full of polyunsaturated fats, and the last thing you want in your diet is saturated fat like butter. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Quite frankly, we didn't know how dangerous the polyunsaturated omega-6 fat linoleic acid was for us in making aldehydes. And don't believe the hype that somehow butter is a superfood. A recent study that was published in January of this year looked at people from Finland who had known stable angina. Stable angina is people who have blockages in their coronary arteries. And when they're walking vigorously or exercising vigorously, they get chest pain. It hurts. They stop, and the chest pain goes away. And the next time they do it, the chest pain comes back, they stop, it goes away. That's called stable angina. Angina means chest pain. And actually, believe it or not, stable angina is stable. That's what we mean. What you don't want is stable angina becoming unstable. That means you're about to have heart attack. So they looked at dairy consumption in relation to stable angina becoming unstable. And here's what they found. The more butter that people ate, the more rapidly their stable angina became unstable. The more dairy people drank or used, the more rapid their stable angina became unstable. And that made big news. Dairy's bad for you, butter's really bad for you. I agree with that. What they didn't mention, although it's in the paper, is that the more fermented cheeses that people ate, the less unstable angina they got. Wow. That's the mic drop. But the point is, I'm sorry, folks, butter, even from grass-fed cows, even from A2 cows, is not the answer. That's why in the south of France in Italy, you're offered olive oil with everything, including your bread. That's what you should be using instead of butter. The only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. And certainly, get rid of the margin. Number seven. Oh, this is another one. Lunch meat. Now, sadly, deli meats are loaded with gluten. Sorry, they are. It doesn't have to appear on a label. The other problem with deli meats that most everyone knows by now is that these sort of process meats associate strongly with developing heart disease, developing arthritis, and developing cancer. Now, association does not mean causation. But as you'll see in my upcoming book, the causation factor is now known. So these process meats are one of the best ways to increase your risk of heart disease, arthritis, and cancer. Interestingly enough, the Wall Street Journal had an article about how our sandwiches are killing us. And they went into great detail about how the bread is killing us. But more importantly, it was the deli meats that the sandwiches were stuffed with. Now, their recommendation was to change over to whole wheat bread, which is really bad for you. But the point is, even the Wall Street Journal is beginning to recognize the dangers in these foods. So what do you do? Well, swap for Italian prosciutto, Iberico ham from Spain, and true fermented sausages from Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain. Now, what the heck is a true fermented sausage? Fermentation of ground up meats actually makes these products not only safe, but perhaps beneficial. Let me give you a fascinating story that you'll read about in the upcoming book. The folks with the longest lifespan for a country is a little tiny country between France and Spain called Andorra. And Andorra lifespan, the average age of an Andorran, goes to 89.7 years. Average age. What's so interesting is that they eat sausage every day, and they are goat and sheep herders. And they're cramming down sausages, which are really bad for you, but as you'll learn, fermented sausages are actually remarkably safe. And the longest living people in the world live in Andorra. Buyer beware. Most commercial deli meats, even if they have an Italian sounding name, are not true fermented sausages. So, look for products that actually came from these countries. What else could you use? Well, buy some pasture-raised chicken or turkey, cook it, slice it. It'll be great. Use wild-caught smoked salmon. Or do what my dad did every day, have a sardine sandwich. And sandwiches are great made out of sardines. I actually like them wrapped in a romaine lettuce leaf with some guacamole. And if you're really queasy about sardines, get the peeled and deboned ones, and you'll be actually pleasantly surprised. Number eight. I see this all the time. Please, please, please get grapes out of your refrigerator. Grapes are engineered to be sugar bombs. One cup of grapes is the same amount of sugar as a Hershey's candy bar. And I can tell you what I'd rather have. These are sugar bombs just this past week in my new office in Beverly Hills. I saw a woman who was coming in with profound fatigue and couldn't get out of bed and was listless. And when we looked first at what she was eating, she's addicted to grapes. She can't live without them. Why is she addicted to grapes? Because she's metabolically inflexible. Her triglycerides are sky-high. She's a diabetic. And she's living on the food that's killing her. And grapes, I see this all the time. We love the sugar in grapes. We were designed to eat grapes way back when, because grapes only happen once a year. Now that you're around, get grapes out of your refrigerator. More amazing episodes just like this one. Watch now. Traditional ancient people always knew how to detoxify potentially bad things. So for now stay away from corn.