 There we are certainly living and laughing, but we're learning a lot right now because we are with dr. Stephen Gundry He's the author of a new book. It's a plant. It's called the plant paradox We are discussing hidden dangers of healthy foods What world am I living in? I know I'm so confused. Wow. Our mind is blown, right? But you're our very accomplished heart surgeon you dealt with the weight issues, right? Yep, absolutely And and you were like what I did you did some research and you found yeah, you know my major at Yale when I was an undergraduate was in human evolutionary biology and that's a fancy way of saying We could manipulate an ape change its foods change its environment and come up with a human And I took that all side and became a very famous heart surgeon chairman of heart surgery at Loma Linda University Did all the baby art? And you know I made a bunch of devices that are still used keep people alive during heart surgery, but I Was running 30 miles a week. I was going to the gym one hour a day, and I was 70 pounds overweight. Wow Well because I was eating healthy foods And I couldn't figure out why eating all these healthy foods make gave me arthritis gave pre-diabetes Gave me high cholesterol gave me high blood pressure. I actually did baby heart transplants with a migraine headache every time That's pretty hard to do. Okay, so you basically said you figured out through your research on this that there are some Foods that we all think are very healthy for us. We've been told are very healthy for us Actually are not that good for us because they contain something called lectins correct. What do lectins do to us? And what are lectins? So Plants were here first They had it really good before animals arrived nobody wanted to eat them right now when animals arrived They had a problem they couldn't run they couldn't hide couldn't fight, but they're chemists of incredible ability They can turn sunlight into matter, and we haven't figured out how to do that So what they do is use chemical Warfare we're talking about chemical warfare today to make their predators think twice about eating them or their babies and if predator feels bad or Doesn't thrive the predator says you know every time I eat these plant babies I get heartburn, and I think I'll go eat something else the plant wins the animal wins Everybody's happy except the other plant that he went to eat Now he's gonna have to start developing lectins at some point as well. That's exactly that's here's down the road It's actually chemical warfare And we're actually not designed to eat certain plants and some of the most amazing ones are plants that actually come from America Because believe it or not none of us are from America. We're from Europe Asia or Africa That means none of us were exposed to an American plant until 500 years ago when Columbus started trade The other amazing thing is that none of us no human ever ate a grain or a bean until 10,000 years ago They were inedible and so we've had basically speed-dating in evolution to get used to certain plant compounds and we're losing that and it's Stunning what plants were losing to so what when go back let's go back to lectin itself What is this is this like a thing that it's a protein protein protein that the plant uses to if you will Act like an incoming guided missile attack on their predator now The original predator was an insect and the idea was to paralyze an insect and it actually hit the nerves of the insect Now to a plant we're just a giant insect and it takes longer for that to happen But when I see my patients with neuropathy where they fingers tingle or they can't feel their feet and you see Advertisements for this on TV all the time. It's actually caused by the lectins trying to get your attention Okay, so what foods then do we need to know have these lectins in them? Well, I brought some of the common ones that people think are pretty healthy Don't be afraid We have to understand that we can handle these guys if we know how to Diffuse them. It's kind of like, you know 24 hours. You've got to give me a couple seconds here Get the right wire All right, so this is a time bomb tomato tomato now tomatoes an American plant It's a nightshade family so our potatoes or eggplants and so our peppers The Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after their native son Columbus brought them back because they knew how poisonous they were The skin and the seeds have the lectins So if you take the peel off and D seed it, they're perfectly safe In fact, my mother and my grandmother was French and she taught my mother to always Peel and de-seed tomatoes before she served them. That's a very true story in Greece They do that too. They peel and de-seed the tomatoes and they taste better. They're much better. I never knew why they did it Now I know the other thing you can do is is you can pressure cook any of these things now How about brown bread? It turns out that gluten is a lectin But gluten is actually a very minor lectin. In fact, they're far more important lectins in the hall of the grain Now for centuries, we've been throwing the hall away We've been eating white bread and we've been eating white baguettes and we've been eating white pasta because we've been throwing the lectin's away But now with whole grain goodness. We've been tried to be convinced that this is good for us Yeah, much of our health problems started with the advent of whole grain good. I heard that and I never believed it Absolutely. I'd say it's like, you know that it's not good. I don't know what I heard Believe it or not bread was chosen as our Poison of choice because it promotes weight gain and as you'll find in the plant paradox Things way back when that promoted weight gain was a great idea because there wasn't much to write exactly you had to store the food The other thing that promotes weight gain is beans beans are so toxic That the CDC the Center for Disease Control says 20 to 30 percent of all food poisoning in the United States Is caused by the lectins and undercooked beans? Absolutely. What what five raw kidney beans will kill a human being five raw kidney beans Well, you know whatever you do at home do not eat raw kidney beans. Listen, this is this is such an interesting topic And this is so controversial. I know people at home right now are saying I cannot believe what I'm hearing We're gonna come back and we're gonna continue this conversation. What are the pantry yet? We are talking with dr. Stephen gunnery. He's the author of this amazing book the plant paradox I'm gonna go home and board up the pantry right Sort this whole thing out because the next thing on your list of knots are cashews. Yeah, we've always been told cash Even Cashews are not a nut. Oh Cashews and peanuts are actually beans. They're the legume family and they're from America Cashews are one of the most inflammatory foods that have ever been discovered the Amazonian Indians always take the cashew off The fruit and throw it away because they know how dangerous it is The dermatologic literature is full of stories of skin rashes and breakouts and lupus from eating cashews Believe it or not peanuts have been shown to cause colon cancer Yeah, and if you want to call that would be peanut butter then if you want to cause heart disease peanuts and a Electin in brown bread called wheat germ aglutin are the two best ways to cause atherosclerosis heart disease two best ways Peanut butter and tomato sandwiches Tomatoes, but you can use walnuts. You can use macadamia Almonds if you peel them the skin actually has a lectin. Okay, so so blanched almond So are you know macaron almonds? There's a beautiful Explain to me then so you did all this research. You were 70 pounds heavier. You were going to the gym You were hiking you were running. Nothing was working for you. What did you change? What did you stop eating? What did you start eating? Well, I met a guy who I called big Ed in my first book who Reversed his inoperable coronary heart disease with changing his diet and taking a bunch of supplements from the health food store And he started to explain this diet to me. I said, whoa, wait a minute. This is my research that I did at Yale So I called my folks who live in San Diego and say hey, do you still have my big old research project? And I said, oh, yeah, it's here in the shrine And I said send it up to me. So I said, oh my gosh, you know, this is what I know But I've never done so I started eating how we were designed to eat like what basically we're designed to eat leaves nuts and a lot of oil from olives from avocados coconuts and We're designed to eat what are called polyphenols polyphenols are good plant compounds that actually De-age us my research has shown that it actually makes yeah My research has shown that all men I'm sorry olives coffee Dark chocolate dilates your blood vessels. It actually reverses heart disease Believe it or not coffee drinkers have far less Alzheimer's disease than non coffee drinkers and Turkish coffee drinkers actually have the best-looking arteries of any and the fantastic. That's all we drink in Greece But a person can't live on coffee olives dark chocolate and almond You have to have leave well leaving so animal protein so I I'm kind of a veg Aquarian I eat leaves and shellfish and a few wild fish But most of the food I eat are actually plants But they're plants that you and I have been designed to eat for millions and millions of years and they're basically leaves Plants don't have a big defense system in their leaves They're they will they'd like you to eat their leaves and leave their babies alone So the whole book is about knowing how a plant decided to treat its predator And if you know how the plant thinks and I'm pretty sure I know how the plant thinks they're amazing creatures They if if an insect starts eating a leaf on one side of a tree within 10 minutes The other side of the tree will quadruple its production of lectins It gets a text message from the other side. Hey, bro, you know And here's my final tip the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth The more you approach that there's beautiful studies in Spain Taking 65-year-old people putting them on a liter of olive oil per week a liter a liter That's 12 tablespoons a day and comparing it to a low-fat Mediterranean diet at the end of six years the Olive oil group had better memory than the low-fat diet group, but for women They had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the low-fat Mediterranean How do they do just consume it they drink it they drink it The only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth Baves in it raise it on her face Olive oil boy has some of the highest polyphenol content of any food even if you cook with it Even if you cook that's a myth. I'll avoid was not DNA with cooking. Okay, it all makes this all makes sense Popeye spinach And look what happened to wimpy Plants were here first and they had it really good before animals arrived nobody wanted to eat them Now the problem is plants can't run they can't hide they can't fight, but they're chemists of incredible ability