 Well, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Again, we're going to do something a little bit different today. A lot of you since we've started this podcast have written in with questions either on Instagram, YouTube, email, however you sent them in, we got them. So I thought what we do today is there's a lot of questions that kind of cluster and I'm going to try to answer them the best I can and I hope you have fun with this. I'm certainly going to have fun because I love to see what you guys want to know. So we're going to start with some YouTube questions and should I read the names? I guess it's okay everybody. I apologize if we read your name and I'm sure I'll fracture it so I apologize with that. First one comes from Mark Heinrith. I guess that's right. I just found you and think your research is very interesting. So I'm definitely going to buy your book and thank you Mark and let's move on to the next question. No. However, I'm very confused about the olive oil theory. If you check out Olive Oil is Not Healthy by Michael Clapper M.D. I'm wondering why the opinion between you and him are so different. Would you please explain? Thank you. That is actually a great question and I think the question really comes from there are a number of extremely well-meaning physicians who cluster in the no fat vegan school of dietary recommendations and then there are the rest of us who think that there are certain fats that not only are not bad for you but are actually incredibly beneficial and I think one of the big confusions this actually began back in the 1950s when Dr. President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack and there was consternation as how this incredibly fit relatively young individual who was the general for World War II. How did he get heart disease and so they actually wanted to know the best person to advise him and so that best person was a researcher at the University of Minnesota by the name of Ansel Keys. Now Keys created the K ration in World War II, hence the K. So Dr. Keys was appointed to tell Dwight Eisenhower how he got heart disease. So he was in the process of studying nutrition that was actually his field and he did a series of epidemiologic studies that was eventually published in the early 1970s as the seven countries study. Now the seven countries study actually cause the fat is bad for you movement and in fact it caused the United States government with the McGovern Commission, yes that McGovern, George McGovern, the former presidential candidate, to state that dietary fat was the cause of heart disease and that recommendation prevailed for well over 30 years. In fact it continues to this day. Now Dr. Keys, I've studied extensively, I've read every one of his articles, I've dissected them with a fine toothed comb and what Dr. Keys was actually trying to say was he looked at animal fats, saturated fats from animals and he made a correlation in these seven countries that the more saturated fats from animals that people eat the more heart disease. Now interestingly enough Dr. Keys wrote a paper many years ago that said that dietary cholesterol has nothing to do with serum cholesterol and that's somehow missed in all of Dr. Keys writings. He did not say that dietary cholesterol was bad for you at all, in fact he said just the opposite, it had no effect on cholesterol but he was quite adamant that saturated fat from animals was bad. Now the people who pick him apart primarily from the paleo community and the ketogenic community said no, no, no, Dr. Keys was a cherry picker and he took the worst seven countries and in his study he was actually looking at 21 countries and he threw out all the other countries that didn't match his data and so that's why he called it the seven country study but there's been other people particularly Denise Minger who have re-looked at his data with modern statistical analysis and found in fact that Dr. Keys was pretty right in that if you threw in all those other 21 countries the overall trend would show that animal saturated fats impact health. Now in my new book which will be out in March called the longevity paradox I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about what Dr. Keys knew what he didn't know and what we should take away from that information and I in the book you know come not to bury Dr. Keys but to actually praise him and here's why I praise him. Dr. Keys never said that fat was a problem what he said was that animal fat was a problem and in fact interestingly enough Dr. Keys when he retired from the University of Minnesota retired to a little village south of Naples Italy where he lived right next to the village called Aciiroli which has the oldest percentage of people in the world it was not mentioned in the blue zones because Dan Butler didn't know about it but they have more people over a hundred years of age 30% of the population is over a hundred than any place in the world and Dr. Keys lived right next to that village and I think he lived there not by accident but by choice and I've actually had the opportunity to interview Dr. Keys housekeeper and he ate a huge amount of olive oil as you would anticipate someone who moved to the south of Italy so rather than demonizing oils Dr. Keys actually wanted people to realize that there was a difference between animal saturated fat and plant-based fats particularly monounsaturated fats like olive oil so that's a long-winded way of saying that the father of anti-fat was not anti-fat at all now unfortunately my colleagues of the anti-fat have really not looked at the data that Dr. Keys assembled nor at the data that's been done before so let's get back to olive oil if you look at Dr. Clapper's videos he'll tell you that olive oil is full of fat yeah olive oil is fat and he says that fat makes you fat well if we've learned anything from the ketogenic movement we know that in fact fat does the exact opposite fat does not make you fat carbohydrates make you fat give you an example years ago after World War II the United States had a lot of coconut available to us after we took over or liberated a lot of the Philippines a lot of Indonesia and we had a lot of pigs to feed and interestingly enough it seems like well we've got a lot of coconuts and coconuts are pretty much pure fat so we ought to use those coconuts to fatten pigs for market sounds like a great idea and incidentally I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska during those times more coconut we fed to pigs the skinnier the pigs got the skinnier they got not the fatter they got even though we were basically feeding them pure fat well we're not pigs you say well actually we carry the same metabolic digestive system that pigs do so if you want to call your loved one a big fat pig you're actually speaking the truth so what is it about olive oil that's so evil then well in fact there was a study in Spain that was published just a couple years ago and what they did was they took 65 year old people and they divided them into three groups all of whom ate a Mediterranean diet the first group had to use a liter of olive oil per week now that's a huge amount of olive oil my wife and I try to use a liter per week we usually get there but that's about 12 to 14 tablespoons a day they actually had them come to the clinic once a week exchange their leader of olive oil for a new bottle and that's how they knew they were doing it the second group had to eat a Mediterranean diet but they had used the same calories of raw walnuts as the olive oil group the third group had a low fat Mediterranean diet exactly what Dr Clapper would recommend but they had to eat the same calories which means they had to get those calories from primarily carbohydrates so they were followed for four years the original purpose of the study was to look at memory at the end of four years both the walnut oil group oh sorry the walnut group and the olive oil group had preserved memory in fact both of those groups had improved memory over four years earlier now think about that just let that sink in so at 69 two of those groups had better memory than when they were 65 and that obviously goes against what we think about aging the low fat group on the other hand had diminished memory in other words they followed what we would assume to be in the normal trajectory of getting older so the fat group either olive oil or walnuts their brain was better the low fat group their brain was worse now gets even more interesting they said hey we got a lot of data on a lot of people let's see what else is interesting so they broke down cardiovascular disease and at the end of four years low and behold the olive oil group had the best outcomes in avoiding cardiovascular disease that means stroke heart attack stents bypass surgery or peripheral vascular disease the walnut group was right behind them and guess what the low fat group came in last they had the most cardiovascular disease compared to the other two groups but it gets even better than that women were followed for breast cancer and it turns out that only the olive oil group had a 67 percent less risk of breast cancer than the other two groups the low fat group did the worst so wait a minute we've got all these people eating all this fat I mean a liter of olive oil per week that's a huge amount of calories and yet they do better on every outcome but here's the best part the olive oil group lost the most weight they actually lost weight over the four years even though they were forced the poor devils to drink 12 to 14 tablespoons of olive oil per day the low fat group gained weight during those four years even though they weren't eating the fat so when somebody tells you that fat is fat and fat makes you gain weight I've got some ocean front property and palm springs to sell you it absolutely isn't true and that goes to the theory that calories in equals calories out and that the only way you can gain weight is to either eat less calories or exercise more and we know for a fact that that was actually not true because it never accounts for the bacteria in our gut microbiome eating anything okay so the point is olive oil is one of the best sources for polyphenols and if you watch me long enough you know that polyphenols are actually what's going to make the difference in your health so I'll say it again the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth and ancill keys was right okay Anthony Fernando waiting to read your next book when will it be released well that's a great question too and the good news is it's not just one book it's two books right in a row we've had so much response to the plant paradox and the plant paradox cookbook and we've had literally millions of people adopt this style of eating or want to adopt this style of eating but it's challenging and if any of you have read the plant paradox you know it's quite a thick academic book in a way so we wanted to make it quick and easy and so on January 9th we're going to introduce a paperback first time I've done a paperback in the plant paradox quick and easy and so it's going to be a 30 day challenge and I'm actually really excited about this we are going to give you 30 days of meals we've got all new recipes for you it's really fun and we're going to give you a quick start on how to do this and particularly we want to make this easy for families you noticed in the plant paradox cookbook that we're really interested in helping you know three job families you got two or three kids that you gotta get to 27 soccer games and football practices and whatever else and you don't have time so this is really aimed at making it easy for you quick and easy and at the same time we really want to start a challenge you're going to see it on social media you can join in on the challenge so look for it it's coming very shortly right after the holidays and why not it's the time when we all want to make a change on the heels of that book in on March 19th I think I'm releasing the longevity paradox how to die young at a ripe old age and this is the culmination of 20 years of research of my own and many other people looking at the factors that actually make us continue to be incredibly young and incredibly old age and unlike the blue zones and we'll get to that question in a minute there are actually factors in the blue zones that were not mentioned that are actually the causes of longevity and you're going to be really surprised but if you know me as well as you know the gut microbiome actually determines how long you'll live and let me just give you a little teaser on that it turns out if you look at people 105 years of age or older and look at their gut microbiome the type of bacteria that are living in their guts their microbiome is virtually identical to 30 year old people and it's that identical thing that doesn't exist in most people as they age so the whole book is going to teach you how to keep your gut microbiome young and that microbiome is going to teach you to stay young because you're there home and that's the whole principle of the book it's a paradox how to get old but stay young so stay tuned for both those okay uh jocelyn posanekker dr. gunnery please address red palm oil is it organic i love the taste so much so there's two types of palm oils out there there's palm oil and then there's red palm oil red palm oil should be better called palm fruit oil so a date everybody knows a date palms make dates and just like an olive we know that olive oil is made from the fruit of the olive and we press that fruit and that gives us olive oil but coming out of that fruit is the polyphenols that actually give olive oil its benefit now you can actually make olive oil out of the seed the pit of the olive and it's technically called pumice pu m i c e it's really an industrial oil a lot of bad olive oil is cut with pumice because it really doesn't have a whole lot of health benefit same way with palm oil the fruit of the palm tree is pressed and it has a very red color the reason it has a very red color is that it's full of vitamin e the toco triangles and the tocoferols and there's actually about five different forms of each of these forms of vitamin e and there's huge health benefits to alpha tocoferol and gamma tocoferol as well as delta delta tocoferol and i won't worry with details but it's these various fragments that are in red palm oil or palm fruit oil that aren't present in palm oil palm oil is the kernel so whenever you see palm oil you think eh that's the inferior stuff and i want to stay away from that red palm oil on the other hand has some really interesting health benefits including it's actually shown to really reduce the chance of cancer in fact in all my cancer patients i have them use a preparation of red palm oil as one of their daily supplements so big difference between the two now there's a proviso with all this palm oil is very lucrative to sell and there is tremendous deforestation in indonesia in the philippines as rainforests are mowed down and palm trees are planted so use this sparingly it is not something that every day you want to say wow the more red palm oil i can have the better olive oil on the other hand nobody is chopping down rainforest to plant olive trees there's plenty of olive trees that are over 5000 years old in fact i visited one in sicily last week so stay with olive oil supplement with red palm oil please stay away from palm oil as much as possible slimland one if i would have to take a shot every time he says gut well you're probably watching one of my videos or one of my lectures where i talk about the gut and if anything you've learned so far i learned from apocrates and apocrates said all disease begins in the gut and he said that 2500 years ago and research means look again the definition of research is look again because somebody actually already knew this and so when i started researching it turns out apocrates knew that everything began in the gut 2500 years ago so i apologize for saying gut but since you're going to have a shot every time i say gut i want you to have a shot of olive oil every time you watch that video and i say gut and you'll probably get up to about 12 14 tablespoons a day okay perfect so let's all roll that video all right derrick carlton uh has your position towards coconut oil changes changed any since the harvard professor declared it to be poisoned during her lecture um this is the problem between people who literally misinterpreted ansel keys demonizing fat he did not demonize fat he demonized animal fat and this all comes down to that original pronouncement way back in the 1950s you should also know that in the 1950s because we had so much coconut oil coming into this country because we had inherited or liberated thousands of coconut farms that this country in the 1950s was flooded with coconut oil now it was actually hydrogenated coconut oil we took coconut oil and saturated it even more so that it would be solid at all temperatures uh if you live in palm springs you know that coconut oil in the summer is a liquid and once it hits about 72 degrees below 72 degrees it'll become a solid so i had the interesting pleasure of growing up in the same neighborhood as a young lady whose last name is sockaloff and her father had a heart attack in the 19 in when he was 40 and he blamed his heart attack on coconut oil that he was eating and he was actually a fairly uh well-to-do gentleman and he took out a campaign to demonize coconut oil i can still remember chatting with his daughter who was a little embarrassed by her father but uh mr sockaloff was the beginning of demonizing coconut oil now how did that catch on well it turns out that our manufacturers in the united states had lots of vegetable oils we had tons of soybean oil cottonseed oil corn oil and coconut oil competed directly with what we produced and so it's no surprise to me having been the president of the american heart association for the southern california area for two years that the american heart association would wholeheartedly jump right in against coconut oil because dr keys said that saturated fats were evil and the cause of heart disease and that unsaturated fats were great so the long story short is the demonization of coconut oil really has very little basis in truth now having said that we're going to get to a question about apo e fours and when we do you folks with apo e fours stay tuned because i'm going to tell you please try to avoid coconut oil uh mark pexon hello dr gunnery if beans are so bad how come they are a common food in the blue zone populations oh this is my favorite myth of the blue zones it's really one of the great myths and i'll tell you because i was a professor in one of the blue zones loma linda california for most of my career so are the blue zones actually eating being eating beans well let's start with okinawan the okinawan diet was studied in 1949 by the u.s military in fact the only published data on what okinawans ate when okinawans were long lived was published by the u.s military and in fact the okinawan diet was sick it was 85 percent purple sweet potatoes 85 percent of what they ate was a sweet potato six percent of their diet was white rice and six percent of their diet was soy that was misu it was fermented soy they didn't eat tofu they didn't eat brown rice the other part of their diet was actually lard from pork so 85 percent of a blue zone diet had nothing to do with beans let's talk about loma linda loma linda uses a form of soy beans that's called texturized vegetable protein tvp it's defatted soy that is pressure extruded under high heat to make what we called mystery meat we had every possible meek lookalike we had wham which was spam we had chicken we had shrimp in fact i'll tell you a quick funny story we had a christmas party one year at a local hotel in loma linda and a large buffet and my partner Leonard Bailey and our wives were sitting together and Dr. Bailey came back from the buffet line and bit into a shrimp and he turned to his wife he says you know it's amazing that you can make tvp taste just like a shrimp and she said you moron that is a shrimp he says oh and of course finished it but the point of all this is the adventists don't use beans they use pressure and heat pressurized beans which is exactly what i tell you to do if you want to eat beans and i have nothing against beans as long as you detoxify their lectins by pressure cooking so if you look at other cultures for instance the greeks the sardinians the sardinians actually don't eat a whole lot of beans the greeks definitely do but the work that was done in food and western disease actually shows that the beans and the grains in the Mediterranean diet are a negative factor that are actually compensated for by all the polyphenols in their diet from red wine from olive oil from fruits and vegetables and oh by the way in the Mediterranean diet you peel and deseed your peppers you peel and deseed your tomatoes you peel and deseed your cucumbers and i just got back from Sicily where every chef there that i interviewed confirmed that there is no human way that you should eat a tomato without peeling and deseeding at first everybody knows that so the bean theory of the blue zones is unfortunately not compatible with the facts uh story spotlight what about bananas and pineapples pineapples i'm confused about them also what about citrus fruits like oranges well bananas when they're green are actually one of the best resistant starches there are your gut bugs absolutely love them there's green banana flour that you can buy that we use in some of our recipes pineapples do have bromelain which is actually a very excellent enzyme for digesting fats and carbohydrates but pineapples have a ton of sugar particularly if you allow them to ripen the other problem with pineapples and bananas is that they are picked green and then shipped to this country and they actually have a much higher lectin content than if they were actually picked right so green bananas perfectly safe they're fine for you in fact use them as much as possible the easiest way is if it starts turning yellow you're kind of out of luck peel them throw them in a freezer and then throw them in a smoothie to thicken it it's actually a great way to feed your bugs but in general those are not a great idea citrus fruits so limes and lemons are perfectly safe there's so little sugar content and either of these and they have some excellent polyphenols it turns out if you're going to eat citrus the best part of the citrus is either the rind or the peel and one of the best liver detoxifiers there is is orange peel and one of my products in fact liver support system actually uses orange peel it's called d-lemonine to up your detoxification enzymes in your liver so citrus is available believe it or not citrus is a man-made invention it was hybridized there was not any ancient citrus trees so it's actually a very modern fruit okay we got some emails judy writes you mentioned sourdough bread in your book can we make healthy sourdough bread and if so how this I can't tell you how many times I am told by my patients or people who write in that you said on dr. Oz that sourdough bread is perfectly safe now I saw dr. Oz and his wife this past weekend and he says hello everybody and he's looking forward to the new season what dr. Oz when I appeared on his show and we're very old friends he said you know I am a big fan of grains and I said yes I know and I'm trying to convince you otherwise he says well you gotta you gotta throw me a bone and you gotta give me something that people if they're gonna eat grains and if they're gonna believe me that they can eat and I'm going ah no I said well okay here's the deal if if breads are made in the traditional style with true fermentation of the grain by either bacteria or yeast or a combination like sourdough then that fermentation process is going to denature a number of the lectins in that bread and it will of bad things be safer for you than if you made bread in the american style which has actually no fermentation modern breads in america are actually raised without yeast so we agreed to compromise and in a way I wish I'd never said that and I wish I'd never put it in the book because a lot of people who have autoimmune disease assume they're safe eating sourdough bread and I can tell you when they do that we can see their autoimmune disease or their celiac disease or their irritable bowel come right back up so the short answer is please don't eat sourdough bread if you're going to eat a bread and you know ignore me then sourdough bread done the traditional way not bought in a supermarket pre-sliced is probably the safest of the breads but the only reason you're going to eat sourdough bread is to get olive oil into your mouth and that's what the Italians do and I saw that again in Sicily they only tear off a piece of bread to soak up olive oil actually once again never saw any of the Sicilians eat bread as a food they ate it to stop up olive oil okay all right Alfredo writes I exercise five to six days a week and compete in marathons and triathlons I started to follow your diet as I was recovering from an injury as I increased the exercise workload however I felt constantly hungry I do my best to avoid the just say no foods but it is a daily struggle to fight all the cravings what do you recommend well one of the things I could tell you is to become a gorilla and I say that kind of tongue and cheek but a gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every day and I got news for you a gorilla has more muscle than you and I will ever have a chimpanzee all they eat is leaves and as you know a chimpanzee can pull a door off of a car and you can't and I can't well maybe you can't also a horse all the horse eats is grass and horse has more muscle than you will ever have there's a myth that's been perpetuated by the Department of Agriculture that we have to have animal protein in our diet and remember the Department of Agriculture is in the business of selling agricultural products they're not in the health business and again I grew up in Oman, Nebraska and believe me you know steak for breakfast a side of beef for lunch and a whole hog for dinner and that unfortunately is not how to remain healthy for long and you'll learn in the longevity paradox that just the opposite is true so what do I recommend and I take care of a lot of athletes I take care of actually a number of NFL players who follow my program and do it well you can get all the calories you need from resistant starches and the wonderful thing about resistant starches is they will fill you up so you want to have a bunch of yams or sweet potatoes you want to have a lot of millet or sorghum you want to have a lot of Hikima have a good time you can have sorghum quote oatmeal for breakfast you can have millet oatmeal for breakfast but please pour some olive oil on it you can make my waffles or pancakes and drench them in olive oil and I guarantee you you will be full if that doesn't do it make some planting pancakes from the book I guarantee you you'll be full so fill up on resistant starches fill up on leaves I eat mixing bowls full of salads and I never am hungry so that's how to do it are there any gels like goo that you recommend to take while doing long runs 10 to 24 miles yeah so here's the trick I do with my athletes first of all I tell them don't run that far and you saw in my previous books and you're going to see in the longevity paradox that long runs are a really good way to damage your heart really the evidence is overwhelming that running beyond about six miles causes damage to your right ventricle and it will cause scar tissue and it will cause arrhythmias as you get older and my wife who was a marathoner who ran the 100th running the boston marathon qualified and finished she when I showed her the data hung up her spikes and has never run those sort of distances again having said that lots of people use running as an endorphin rush and I understand that I take care of a lot of runners so if you want to do need a gel to take in long runs buy coconut oil packets they're available at Trader Joe's they're available in health food stores you can get them online there's I think now five manufacturers of them you will get a big blast of ketones they come in a tarot foil package when Tony Robbins and I started working together Tony would do 18 hour days seven days a week on stage and we got him through those long days by coconut oil packets so it's a great trick okay so I'll tell you what we've had a lot of subjects we've got more to do and I promise you because you've been so nice of you know sending me these in we'll do another podcast answering your questions so this is the Dr. Gundry podcast I appreciate you listening I hope you've learned a few things if you're interested in learning more about Annabelle's book which was on our other podcast you can head over to drgundry.com and I'll see you on the next podcast thanks bye