 Rather than think about fat as something you've got to cut out, burn out, poison, what we should be doing is really think about how do we tame our fat, how do we manage it? And that secret is actually lies within our own body. So one thing I love about your new book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, is that it challenges people to rethink the entire relationship between body fat and health. And the truth is, fat is not all that bad. So can you tell us more? That's a good starting off point. Right. Well, I think all of us have had the same personal experience. You get up in the morning, you take a shower, you step out under the corner of your eye, you look in the mirror and you see a lump or a bump that you didn't think should be there. And then you step on a scale and the number may or may not be the number that you are hoping for. And immediately you begin cursing your fitness and cursing your fat. As adults, I think this common experience of vilifying fat has led our entire society, including the medical community, to really kind of be biased against the tissue that isn't just a birthright, meaning that we form body fat in our mom's womb, but in fact is an actual organ in our body and this appreciation of normal, healthy fat being very important for our physiological function. Our physiological health, our immune system, our ability to have a good metabolism is something that's now really becoming sharply coming into focus with some of the latest research on human metabolism. So is it okay to have a little bit of love handle? Is that what you're trying to convince me is okay when I look in the mirror? No, actually what I'm trying to say is that we have a new opportunity to rethink our assumptions about body fat and the fact is that fat is an organ in our body just like our pancreas and our spleen, our liver and our lungs and we need to respect that. We need to tame it and the reason is that fat has multiple functions. It happens to be one of these remarkable tissues like your blood vessels and nerves that do a lot of different things. Our fat actually has different jobs than it actually does. One of the obvious ones is it kind of keeps us warm but not like blubber. It actually keeps us warm because it has the ability to generate heat and that's something that is brown fat which is one color of fat that we need to know about but the other things that fat does it forms a cushion and if we didn't have fat as a cushion not just on the outside of our body but even packed inside the tube of our body if we slipped on a rug and fell our organs might split open and so we have this cushion effect. The other thing that's really important is that our fat cells from the time we're babies act as fuel tanks. The fuel coming from our food and our metabolism storing that energy from our food into our fuel tanks in the same way that you pulled your car over to the filling station when your fuel gauge runs low. Our body fat really is our gas tank so we draw energy from that and then finally this idea of fat being not just an organ but an endocrine organ secreting hormones. Hormones like leptin that acts as a volume switch to our appetite. Hormones like adiponectin a hormone that is a thousand times higher circulating your blood than almost any other organ or any other hormone that's out there. Why is it so important because this fat normal fat hormone participates with insulin to help us our metabolism become more efficient and drawing down and bringing it on board the energy into our body or hormones like resistant which if adiponectin is the gas pedal to allow us to absorb energy faster resistant is the break you know and so in our normal fat function our normal healthy fat which by the way you know if you think about it we vilify fat as destroying our body shape but in fact from the time that we were children where boys and girls are all looking the same way to form those beautiful contours of the human body that's our fat also doing that as well our cheeks how our body is shaped every aspect we have something to respect about fat having the right amount of fat is absolutely vital for beauty and health and having too much of it is very disruptive and so rather than think about fat as something you got to cut out burn out poison what we should be doing is really think about how do we tame our fat how do we manage it and that secret is actually lies within our own body so is there is there a right amount of fat that we should have or is it more important where our fat that we have is located I know you talk a lot about this in the book maybe that's a good place to go now yeah look it's kind of all of the above but let's maybe we should just break down fat into first two colors that it comes in right like we can be really simple about it you go to the hardware store you're going to paint your room and you only have two colors to choose from on the wall of paint well when it comes to fat you got brown fat and you've got white fat and and they're very different by the way which is really quite remarkable white fat is the lumpy bumpy fat it's the wiggly and jiggly as I kind of say it and it can either be near the surface of your skin we call that subcutaneous um uh cutaneous being skin underneath the skin that would be underneath your arm underneath your chin that could be the love handles the the the muffin top around your thighs around your butt that's the kind of fat that we see and oftentimes are you know displeased by so that's one kind of white fat the other kind of white fat you can't see it's not subcutaneous it's visceral and viscera means gut so gut fat is packed inside the tube of our bodies so we can't see it from the outside but if we had a scanner for example we could actually check it out and in fact there are things scans like desks of scans and other types of more sophisticated scans that can detect it but I wanted people to think about this visceral fat as the harmful fat because a little bit cushions your body and and it performs all those normal hormonal functions we talked about but a lot of it outgrows the space in your in your in the cavity of your belly and it turns into a baseball glove that chokes your organs and becomes hyper-inflammable and in fact fat can leak out of that um gut fat and and gets stored in your liver and start destroying and being toxic to your liver so that so uh white fat under the skin in your in your uh impacting your in your body in the tube of your body gut fat perfectly normal to have just the right amount and we'll come back to just the right amount in a second but then that's one color of fat um the other kind of kind of fat is the brown which is really interesting because brown fat is not wiggly jiggly lumpy bumpy brown fat is wafer thin it's paper thin and it's not near the skin surface uh subcutaneous it's close to the bone and where is it located it's not your muffin top it's actually pressed along your neck and it's also formed behind your rib cage under your arms like a bra strap a little bit behind your back a little bit in your belly scattered about and what that brown fat does uh and what makes it brown is that there's an organ there's an organ within our cells called the mitochondria and and Dr. Gardner you'll you'll relate to this because when we were in med school remember all that stuff we had to memorize every organ every cell every I mean it was a nightmare so I always thought about this tiny little brown organ the mitochondria I used to memorize so they call it the mighty chondria and it's mighty indeed because actually it's a fuel cell it's like a little nuclear fuel cell that can generate heat and so the purpose of brown fat which is really remarkable it's also found in animals that hibernate is to actually generate heat to consume fuel that's stored in fat and to generate heat when it's necessary and in response to things like cold temperature but also in response to certain kinds of foods which is really the cool part yeah and I've I've spent my last two books talking about foods that activate brown fat and so I was delighted to see that we're absolutely on the same page with that and yeah and I love about your book that there are you know tricks we can do with food and spices to actually activate brown fat and there's even a third type of fat that I write about that you know about which is beige fat and that is white fat that's transitioning to more of a brown fat more active fat well that that that's that that's at the paint store where the guy starts to mix the white and the brown and you get that intermediate tone shade let's get back to you know where where this fat is located and um in my original book one of my sayings was fat on your ass you're built to last fat in your gut you're out of luck and I actually still stand by that so you and you and I I think agree about this that this too much visceral fat is is really one of the worst prognostic signs that we can actually see in the mirror we didn't most of us don't even need a dexa scam to know that there's belly fat that shouldn't be there why why has that been associated with bad outcomes in our health yeah and and and not only is it associated with bad outcomes and I think it's very important to point out that this visceral fat this harmful fat actually is not just an issue with people who are obviously overweight or obese but even skinny people can have too much of this harmful dangerous visceral fat so let's be really clear visceral fat is normal a little bit it's normal but when it actually grows too much in in excess when it becomes goes from sort of the packing peanuts that you put in a federal express carton a skinny federal express carton when you're mailing champagne glasses and it turns into a baseball glove that you're trying to stuff into the carton and it chokes your organs then it actually becomes a very very dangerous thing now but the reason it becomes dangerous by the way goes back to something really simple and I like to explain it to you this way and it's connected to our metabolism the ideas of our metabolism everyone is used to driving a car and you don't think about the fuel that you need to run your car until you look at the fuel gauge and it's running low when it runs low automatically as a driver we pull over to the filling station pull out the nozzle put in a tank and fill it up when the when the tank is filled the nozzle clicks and then we get back on the car and drive off now when our body works the same way our metabolism pretty much fuels our body the engine of our body so we can go from place to place and thing to thing if we're a little more active we need a little more energy we're less less active more sedentary we need a little bit less energy but we need energy and our metabolism runs that process now we don't have a fuel gauge that's in front of our dash but we have one in our brain okay and our and our organs also sense the levels of fuel so when we're our fuel our body's fuel tank runs low what do we do we don't pull over to the filling station we pull over to the dinner table or to the refrigerator or to the or to the restaurant or to the pantry and we fill up so in the same way that a gas station gives fuel i.e. gasoline to your car which then powers the engine the fuel in our body okay is really coming from our food the quality of the gas of course matters and what you will load your car into i mean you could put some crappy low octane gas into your car from time to time your engine will run just fine but if you put crappy quality fuel in your car over the course of its life your engine is not going to last so long same as our body the quality of the fuel the quality of the food that we eat can make a huge amount of difference not on a meal single meal basis but over time that's where we need to take care of our body now back to the fat for a second when we load up our fuel and sit down to eat of course we're our body the moment we're eating food our pancreas one of the other endocrine organs secretes insulin insulin rises and insulin partners with adiponectin which is that fat hormone and says hey let's draw some of that fuel into the body so that so that the body can actually use it for for energy and anything more than you need to basically run the engine gets stored where does it get stored it gets stored in little tiny fat cells fat cells are like the fuel tank and they can actually blow up when when there's more fuel in it and unlike a filling station where the nozzle has a clicker and and so therefore more no more gas goes into your tank our body doesn't have that clicker so we can keep eating now imagine at the filling station if you didn't have that clicker the tank would fill more gas would come out the fuel would run out of the tank down the side of the car around the wheel pool around your feet and you'd be standing in a toxic dangerous flammable mess similarly when we overeat and overload on fuel now our fuel is called calories but i don't want people to focus on calories in and calories out and counting the calories i want people to think simply that the food that we eat is our fuel but when we actually overload our fuel tanks you got to make more fuel tanks more fat more filling more fat more filling and that's basically how overeating blows up our fat mass and at a certain point the fuel leaks out and that leakage actually is very toxic when fat leaks out lipo toxicity our liver is one of the most sensitive organs to fat poisoning which can happen when we overload and the other thing is that fat as fat expands remarkably and i'm a cancer researcher it actually acts like a tumor meaning that it can very rapidly outgrow its own blood supply our fat needs a circulation too but as it outstrips its blood supply because we're putting just way too much fuel in our body and the tanks are getting bigger and bigger what happens is the center of that fat mass doesn't have enough oxygen and so it becomes inflamed hypoxic and it becomes inflamed and that inflammation starts to seep out around the body now when that happens inside the tube of our body you got bigger mass you got inflammation you got seeping toxic fat just like that overage of leaking gas around your around your feet if you didn't have the clicker at the gas station in a similar way that overage of fuel that that over gigantic growth of fat cells visceral fat especially what it does is it wrecks the hormonal functions inside your body so leptin which is made by fat to help control the epicyte you know what when the fat is that confused and that inflamed i don't know are you hungry or not hungry a dip inectin which helps insulin draw an energy do we want a lot or a little i can't remember what about the resistance to slow things down i don't know we're confused and so this chaos mass chaos it's a riot that happens in that endocrine organ called fat in your body disrupts your uh disrupts really all of your functions and that's where something that is normal healthy and critical vital for your energy when we actually abuse it or when it is abused it needs to actually be put back into balance and that's really why i think the real reason to control body fat is not really about vanity it's about inner health that's where the priority is i want to come back to your you know cancer research because i want to come back to ved jeff but i want to stay on this point because you make a point that just losing five pounds makes measurable differences in this whole process can can you walk us through that because five pounds okay five pounds i i can i can do that that i don't yeah i need to lose 50 pounds but five pounds okay why is that so beneficial what can we see with that just much weight loss yeah i mean it's such an important point i i title a section in my book lose a little gain a lot because we don't normally think that way we think in order to get anything you gotta lose a lot right that's what everybody's obsession with weight losses has always been gravitated towards and i think that you know um what we've discovered in the medical research world is that incremental weight loss pays off in a really big way i'm going to talk about five pounds in a second but even losing a couple of pounds can has actually been shown to have a benefit i mean there've been studies of more than uh almost 5 000 individuals across 25 clinical trials that look at weight reduction now this is actually purposeful intentional weight reduction not the kind you not not the kind of weight you lose when you're in a desert island or you've got cancer this is purposely trying to lose weight and it turns out that if you lose for every two pounds of weight loss okay you can reduce one point of your systolic blood pressure that's actually the top number uh that represents how much force of your blood jetting out of jetting out of your heart now losing blood pressure even by one point makes a big difference because you think about how much how many people actually on blood pressure medications with this idea that high blood pressure is a silent killer that can lead to stroke that force that your heart pumps blood out affects every single organ in your body so for every point you lose you actually gain more protection of your noggin and all the other organs in your body as well and so if you really think about it this has been shown actually it pays off even in terms of heart failure which is also a consequence of of high blood pressure uh and other problems of your vascular system but we know that losing even two pounds all right can lower your risk of heart failure by almost three percent you lose four pounds you reduce the risk by five point six percent in terms of the risk of heart failure now nobody talks about that right nobody thinks about like even these small amounts have big payoffs in terms of your longevity which is you know living well nobody lives well with heart failure you live well when your pump is actually good until the very end now let's talk about five pounds because i think that five pounds is a reasonable goal for almost everyone to actually um look at now this is the study by the way that was done that i cite uh that was led by the american cancer society they looked at a hundred and eighty thousand people from the u.s australia and uh in asia right so this is a lots of different geographical areas lots of different lifestyle habits body sizes and they looked at women who were in their uh midlife so they were in their 50s this is the this is the time of life where a lot of women are struggling with their weight okay and they were trying to correlate uh how much weight that they purposefully tried to lose with the diagnosis of breast cancer and where's what they found that those women in this 180 000 who lost five pounds at least five pounds and kept it off they had an 18 decrease in the risk of developing breast cancer that's an important lowering without taking any medication without doing anything else that just lowering the rest now by the way what's the connection between uh uh body fat weight loss and cancer well remember we talked about this when fat is growing it becomes inflamed inflammation is a setup for tiny tumors sparking up and growing into deadly cancers and remember that basically uh having this inflammation uh and toxicity to your bodies leads to more free radicals in your body it actually disrupts your immune system and your immune system actually patrols your body normally to ward off and to get rid of tiny little cancers that might be forming so this is you know really all the human evidence that I think we need to see to know that there are big payoffs for losing very reasonable amounts of body fat and body weight yeah the other thing I I point out to my female patients and actually my male patients is the fat is clearly an endocrine organ as you mentioned but it's also it makes hormones like estrogen and many of my female patients with breast cancer who are post-menopausal are shocked when I show them their estrogen level their estradiol level and you know it's it's elevated and they go but that's impossible you know I am at a period in five years and I said it's from your fat and they said what and that gets back to your study you're absolutely right that study after study has shown that one of the big impacts of losing fat is you will reduce this hormone uh and son of a gun in my practice they are delighted when let's say three months go by and they're down 10 pounds and now their estradiol is is either dramatically reduced or even unmeasurable and they go what that you know the just from my fat I was doing that it's true and that's why we don't want to vilify fat we want to understand that it it performs this natural it's we need to balance it it's just part of another one of our parts of our body that we need to take care of and I think too often we just live our lives the way that we do without thinking about that part of our body as yet another part that we have to maintain just like when you're taking care of your car you need to have it regularly uh maintained and everything checked out body fat is no different so let's go back to kind of your your concept of let's let's use our body fat to lose body fat and I want to get back to brown fat and the tricks you and I both are very impressed with the power of food uh to control most of what's going to happen to us and uh talk about how the techniques we can use to make brown fat active and make brown fat burn more fat because I think this is really empowering to people yeah well I want to tell a tiny little story in a short time we have that gives people a better understanding that this brown fat thing is is something that is really part of our human anatomy but we didn't always think it was part of our anatomy in fact back I can tell you the discovery of the origins of brown fat like how we even figured it out date all the way back to the 17th century there was a naturalist named Conrad Gessner naturalists are people that study the natural world and back in the the day you know they would actually see animals and and do dissections like we used to do in med school to look at all the organs and draw pictures of them and try to figure out what they did and so Conrad Gessner looked at a hibernating mammal called the alpine marmot it looks like a like it looks like a woodchuck actually um and uh when he he recognized all the organs except for this one little brown mass soft mass between its shoulder blades and because he was seeing these in hibernating animals he just called them hibernomas the oma referring to a mass that's why we call tumors omas carcinoma but he didn't know what it was fast forward to the mid 19th century at UCLA a physiologist who really had the ability to look more deeply under the microscope of brown fat and of course people had then found brown fat in other hibernating animals like bats and and things like that and other animals like that it was identified that oh my gosh this brown fat is actually or this brown mass hibernoma actually made a fat the tissue is actually fat now what's really interesting is what makes brown fat brown and I you know I'm one of these guys like just like you Dr. Gundry I mean as researchers with research backgrounds we always ask why you know it's probably it probably was very annoying probably it was really annoying to our parents absolutely right but but but that's really what you know like people like us ask so why is brown fat brown it turns out that the mighty chondria the mitochondria those fuel cells actually have a lot of iron in them and iron as you know from a from a nail outside turns rusty which is brown and so you have lots of mitochondria lots of these fuel cells these little power plants packed into the brown fat because they generate heat which makes sense to a hibernating animal so for a long time it was thought that only animals had this and then when they checked out babies behind the shoulder between the shoulder blades they're like okay there's a little bit there but it's probably like the appendix of the tonsils which we now know have a real function but when we when you and I were you know in medical school they taught us ah never mind just lose them cut them out just get rid of them and now we know like oh my god they're part of the microbiome they house our immune system so most things that stick around are used for something mother nature is extremely resourceful and doesn't like to waste anything and so the brown fat and babies those kind of melt away becomes less prominent and but it wasn't really until much later when pet scans were developed that look at metabolism that discovery that brown fat was present in adults particularly adults getting a pet scan often for cancer uh or for diagnosis that it was around when they were getting scanned during the winter months in the northeast of of the country cold temperatures turn out just like hibernating animals to um trigger the brown fat so that so cold temperatures is one way that we can turn on brown fat and by turning on the brown fat under the scan the pet scan you see this thing light up like a christmas tree right and and this is actually how they figured out that cold temperature um actually activates brown fat and at the national insistence of health maybe even while you were there uh dr gundry they started to explore there's a whole division that actually studies human adipose tissue or human fat and it turns out that brown fat is actually quite prevalent in the body but because it's paper thin and it's usually not working too hard it's in reserve held in reserve um but it's behind our breastbone under our arms it's around the straps of our neck it's a little bit in our belly and cold temperature will activate them but we figured out there are chemical signals that can be triggered by cold or triggered by stress hormones like norepinephrine or triggered by foods that can actually turn them on and i you know i like to give this a this a little bit of this uh demo um i just happen to be here doing a lot of teaching about metabolism but when it's cold temperature or when you're eating a food like a great example where a lot of research has been done is chili peppers the kind of stuff you put on a pizza okay that'll light up your brown fat so what does it do um it triggers your brain the signal triggers a brain and your brain releases a hormone like noreadrenaline that activates receptors these cellular receptors these light switches electric switches on top of your brown fat that way for thin and when it activates that it triggers the mighty chondria the mitochondria to turn on its engine and what happens this is what it does let me show you it goes like this boom you get a torch light okay and this the fuel that it takes to create this kind of heat is drawing down fuel from another location that other location is stored fat in the harmful fat so this is how good fat brown fat can fight harmful fat which is that excess visceral fat or white fat all right so we now know that capsicum is one of these agents that does this most people probably aren't going to go around having chili peppers for breakfast lunch and dinner although some cultures absolutely do and most of those cultures interestingly enough are usually quite thin are there other tricks or anything in our pantry that we can use to do the same thing yeah well you know actually it's been studied like tree nuts like walnuts for example which contain lots of great dietary fiber and some healthy fats also can groom our gut microbiome good healthy gut is not just good for your immune system and lowering inflammation which can combat the effect of harmful fat but also helps us streamline our metabolism make everything work a little bit better and it turns out that eating just a handful of walnuts a couple of times a week has been shown to shrink your waist circumference now your waist circumference by the way it's another great way to really get an idea like your belt it's a great way to know how much visceral fat you have because when your pants feel a little loose and you've got to actually cinch your belt that one extra inch you're not losing guts you're not losing intestines or liver you're actually losing visceral fat so that's actually kind of what we call a surrogate a kind of a stand-in marker when your visceral fat starts to shrink and in eating tree nuts for example can do that prunes can also do that as well prunes have lots of polyphenols found in the plum as well as dietary fiber that can actually also have that effect a number of other pantry items and refrigerator items one of the things I do in my book by the way that I had a lot of fun doing is writing the section about food in my book the middle section part two I was writing it as an author imagining pushing a grocery cart through the supermarket and inviting the reader to be like when they were when we were all kids jumping into our mom's shopping cart with her pushing us around the produce section in the middle aisles and the seafood section and the beverage section and me literally as the author just whispering your ear here are the foods you should take that can actually activate your brown fat to help the fight the white fat make more beige fat and also shrink your waist circumference and help you lose weight and it's a great technique that you do so you know kudos for that let's get back to metabolism for a second and I love the myth busting that you do in the book that everybody is convinced that you know I'm fat because I have a slow metabolism or I'm now paramedic puzzle and everybody knows that my metabolism is slowing down is there is there truth to this myth or do you want to bust that one as well yeah this was this is perhaps the biggest mic drop that I actually put into this bookie to beat your diet and that is that it's a brand new understanding of human metabolism has emerged just in the last two years that has really led us at the scientific community and the medical community to realize that a lot of things that we used to think just ain't so and this is by the way why you have to follow the science all right so I want to describe a little bit of a I wouldn't describe a very important research study but a little bit of in a way that everyone can understand so there was a researcher at a Duke University named Herman Ponser who worked with almost 90 other colleagues across 20 countries and they set out to look at human metabolism across 6,000 people and they studied them all in exactly the same way so this was actually the most ambitious undertaking ever in human history to study in metabolism 6,000 people from across 20 countries in exactly the same way how do they study them they gave them a little drink of water okay but water we know is H2O the H being hydrogen the O being oxygen and what these researchers did was really really clever they just chemically tweak the hydrogen and chemically tweak the oxygen just a little bit so that when these people drank the water their metabolism would process those atoms and then you could measure what the metabolism was doing in their breath or in their blood or in their urine and they did it exactly the same way in 6,000 people and the most surprising thing is they studied people that were two days old and 90 plus years old so in this research study not only was it a huge study across different parts of the world but they also studied the entire human lifespan from just a couple of days out all the way into the 90s and when they actually looked at the results what the what kind of metabolism these people have at the first analysis of the data they found that everybody's metabolism was all over the map okay just like you would expect all right and what was really remarkable and this is I think the ingenious part of their study we now live in this big data world where we can actually take a huge amount of data and adjust it so what they did is for every individual they were to adjust based on their body size and their body mass they could subtract out the effect on metabolism of excess body fat so for every person in this 6,000 person study they could actually adjust and remove the effect on metabolism of excess body fat and when they did that 6,000 times the result of what what what the what the metabolism these people were was like pulling the cloak off the statue of David for the first time what they found was that all humans go through only four phases of metabolism over the course of our lives and this is so surprising that it has huge implications on how we think about that the changes in our body and and how much we and why we fight body fat and our weight over time so let me just quickly walk through the four phases phase one when we are born we all have the same metabolism but in the first year first 12 months of life from day zero to the first for the first year one years old our metabolism skyrockets like a rocket ship blasting off to about 50 percent higher than what our adult levels are going to be all right so it's really important for those of you who are you know thinking about like the first year of life how do you take care of a baby like there's a lot going on in that first year they're absorbing everything and utilizing everything that's phase one phase two is from one year old to 20 years old okay that metabolism actually goes down down down down down down from one to 20 to adult levels now why is that surprising because any of us who have had kids know that during teenage years your kids are eating two dinners they're bouncing off the wall they're sprouting up like a beanstalk and you go well the reason that is is because their metabolism is escalating skyrocketing right wrong it's not it's coming down they're getting bigger but their metabolism is is is going down towards the landing that's phase two phase three and this is where the real surprise is from age 20 to age 60 this research study showed that human metabolism from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 60 is rock solid we are hardwired to have a rock solid metabolism that's how our operating system works that's how our metabolism is designed throughout the course of our adult lives that's phase three that is through um your college your first job your first baby that's through your menopause um that's all that time in the 40s and 50s wherever you're struggling with their weight saying well it's not my fault it's just because of my age it's myth busted it's you know it's intended your metabolism tend to be rock solid what that means by the way dr gundry is 60 can be the new 20 if you follow your inner metabolism now i'm going to come back to what happens to metabolism why we actually have so much problems in a second but from that's the third phase of force phases from 60 to 90 we do have a small marginal decrease in our metabolism about 17 percent by the time you're 90 your metabolism is about 17 percent of what should have been in 60 and in a 20 all right so what happens that's really amazing at these four phases which i published this graph in my book that i think just changes my mind you know as a doctor who thought i knew a lot about human metabolism i had to revise my thinking and what i tell people is that you know whatever textbook you and i studied in medical school about metabolism that's now being ripped up and a new textbook is being written based on this kind of research and the other things we're talking about and some of those textbooks aren't published yet so you know people who are listening this are hearing really the state of the art of thinking as we are actually seeing it appear as medical professionals now so what actually happens remember i told you this was an algorithm that allowed us to pull fat out of the system and what was found is when you add fat back into the system into the into the operating system what happens is that adding the fat bank and crushes your metabolism so it's it's not the slow metabolism causes you to grow fat and slow and gain weight it's the other way around gaining weight growing too much body fat through behavior in activity over our stress hormonal problems all kinds of other things actually crushes your metabolism it's inside out it's really upending our thoughts but the good news is that means that actually we have the power we have the agency to be able to address something that we used to think with our genetic destiny yeah i think that's i think that's really important and i know the study you're talking about i actually referenced in my last two books and it is it's it's really mind boggling particularly even from medical professionals who you're right we thought we knew how this worked and we were all wrong and it is it is the fat okay let's let's bring it home you again five pounds would make a big difference two pounds will make a big difference what are the action steps and you detail them in the book but can you give us a brief summary what are the action steps to get me to lose those five pounds and keep them off first of all let me kind of disclose something that is that will help you understand where i'm coming from um i'm a scientist i'm a doctor but i'm also somebody who really enjoys the art of eating i enjoy the taste of great food and you and i've had many conversations about the Mediterranean meals that's right um i've enjoyed alone and not yet had the opportunity to enjoy together which is coming one of these days soon one of these days but but here's the thing you know before i talk about like the action steps you know i want to first say that one of the things that makes us human is our ability to enjoy food our humanity is part of sitting down and breaking bread and the reason that over tens of thousands of years we've actually developed sophisticated cooking techniques that people sit down and enjoy and look forward to at family gatherings and at holidays is really part of who we are our own humanity i think that can't be under underscored and so i titled my new book eat to beat your diet because specifically because you know my publisher was like well why don't you write a diet book and what i decided to do is to write an anti-diet book it's a trick title and it's an anti-diet book because i want people to realize that for you to keep your weight off and for you to fight harmful body fat you've got to be able to do something that you can stick to for your entire life and not feel like you are being deprived you know this is why major extreme diets don't work elimination deprivation restriction you know the human nature of porous deprivation you tell somebody they can't do something my brain maybe i'll do a little bit maybe if you're not looking i'll go do something all right that doesn't work and so number one leaning into something that you can get behind and enjoy and aligning the pleasure of eating rediscovering the joy of food while aligning your interest with your metabolism and health and fighting harmful body fat is exactly what i aim for in eating to beat disease and the good news is that you can do it with some pretty easy steps you know and and i like to kind of boil them down first and just sort of like how do you go about eating we're gonna talk about what to eat but how do you go about eating over the course of your day all right look intermittent fasting is quite popular these days and it sounds like it's been invented just a couple of years ago but in fact i want to just clear up clear up everyone intermittent fasting is what we do like that's you know we intermittently eat and we intermittently don't eat when we're sleeping and here's the thing when we're eating we talked about this earlier when we're eating our insulin levels go up to get that energy in to store energy our body doesn't want to burn fuel all right so anything that could so we're not we're in an anti burn fuel burn sort of perspective we're actually storing energy and storing it into our fat as well and when we're not eating insulin levels go down like when we're sleeping and now our metabolism switches gears it's like switching a train track and now it's like okay let's go into fat burning energy burning mode and now you can burn you can draw on that energy that was stored might have been stored during a day when you ate might have been storing uh from yesterday or over the holidays you know and that that's the idea to think about it so when we're sleeping and not eating or fasting we're actually burning our fat so what that's one of the things that we should do is learn that our body's working for us our metabolism is working for us when we're not actually eating so here's a couple of little tricks that make it easier for your body to burn a little bit more uh let's first say that you're gonna eat sleep eight hours a day which i hope most people try to do eleven o'clock you go to bed seven o'clock in the morning it might be a little different but that's eight hours okay now that's the time your body's capable of burning fuel okay when insulin's down if you want to actually increase the time of burn to be able to help manage your weight you don't need to go on anything crazy just let's say you eat dinner at seven o'clock and you finish at eight you put your dishes away don't snack after that don't eat dessert don't nosh and pick in a pantry before you go to bed no bedtime snack when you put the dishes away stop eating let's say eat at seven put your dishes away at eight don't eat anything from eight to eleven when you go to bed you've just gained three extra hours of actually fuel burning which is fat burning uh time for your body get up in the morning all right don't do it so I tell people in everyone I'm a specialist man like don't do what our mommies told us to do which is get out of bed eat breakfast and get under that school bus to get to school all right this is what I do I get up in the morning I get ready take a shower I get dressed I might check my emails I might go for a walk I might check out the garden whatever it is and I don't eat right away I give myself an extra hour okay and it's very natural for me now and now I've gained an extra hour of time where I'm not eating where my body can burn fuel so think about it eight hours of sleep I just three hours before now it's 11 hours one extra hour in the morning I got half my day 12 hours to burn off fuel and very reasonably so 12 fasting 12 not fasting you know people go 16 and 8 right you know of course you fast longer you're going to burn more but even 12 hours works and and and that's been studied in clinical trials so don't sweat it like that like when you eat um as it matters how much you eat goes all the way back to that filling station and when you actually um not overload your tanks so you're growing extra fat and storing extra fuel look if you store a lot of extra fuel you got to pay for it it's going to take longer to burn off over time it's going to be more and more difficult for you actually to burn off everything that's accumulated so don't eat too much quit the clean plate club all right now you get to the interesting part which is what you choose to eat what to eat all right and this is where um there's a lot of logic to what we've heard already from everyone a lot of things in the produce section a grocery store everything from uh you know uh brassica you know your sulforaphane containing broccoli and bok choy and cauliflower your swiss chard all these things um that are actually really tasty if you look at Mediterranean cooking or Asian cooking absolutely delicious sulforaphanes um cause white fat to turn beige turns on brown fat to turn on that space heater flame burning function all right even redirect your stem cells from making more um white fat and make some make more brown fat so go to that go to the produce section and knock yourself out with so many of these great um foods i i put like 150 foods in there in my book but here's the other thing we're always told to shop the perimeter of the supermarket yeah please do that's where most of the good stuff is but in my book i introduce um uh this idea that you should do a treasure hunt in the Middle Isles don't be afraid go in there and look for the treasure it's in there and i try to tell you by writing out as if you were in my shopping cart what's the real gold you want to find for your metabolism and to ignore the fool's gold right go into that mine and look for the real gold um uh beans um uh can be useful for you lentils uh some olive oils really great olive oils um i know that this is an area that you're very passionate about as of i hydroxy tires all the you know there's so many other bioactives in there um dried mushrooms uh uh dried chili peppers uh as well uh apple cider vinegar or actually frankly any vinegar the acetic acid that makes vinegar vinegar actually turns out to prevent little fat cells from filling up as fast and as filled as when you're trying to fill up your gas tank um as as it might want to do otherwise and so lots of ways to actually control by the way including the seafood section and i talk about the beverages and let's not even let's just say we don't have to mention that having sodas with tons of added sugar or diet sodas with um uh non-nutritive artificial sweeteners that poison your gut microbiome let's just move that aside and say look we know that's not good for you but even like fruit juices and things like that they can contain a ton of sugar i read my book that look i love orange juice i grew up drinking orange juice right um but if you had a choice between eating one delicious orange juicy orange versus having a tall glass of orange juice here's where it goes both have bioactives that are fat fighting like hasperidin and aerogenin okay both have dietary fiber if you get juice with pulpinate all right but the thing is i could drink gulp down a tall glass of orange juice in 30 seconds and it would taste really good all right um but i would it would take me a little while to eat a whole orange you know i'll take my time maybe 10 minutes if i'm snacking on it however there's a lot of sugar in an orange but in a tall glass of orange juice it would take eight oranges to make a tall glass and i would never sit down and eat the sugar of eight oranges so when you talk about nutrient dense foods for fruit beverages fruit drinks it's always better to go for the whole fruit to get the taste of it rather than a guzzle down all the other uh the extra sugars it is nutrient dense but you just get a lot more sugar that way so what i talk about for beverages i do mention a few juices that are standouts but uh what i say is that there's a holy trinity of beverages when it comes to body fat metabolism brown fat they fall into the holy trinity is water tea and coffee those three have been shown in the lab in the clinic and in epidemiological studies to actually activate your metabolism helped you optimize your metabolism yeah and i would add a proviso please don't put milk into your coffee or tea absolutely and we know that you know cultures that uh don't add milk to their coffee or tea actually have much better health than cultures who do drink coffee or tea but put milk in them and unfortunately it binds the polyphenols yeah exactly you know um and just really to amplify that point a little bit because you and our scientists and we can comfortably talk about this is that you know dairy is fatty and fat forms little soap bubbles around pretty much anything it gets into because it rather stick to each other when you put dairy into tea or coffee it naturally dairy naturally forms tiny little invisible soap bubbles that wrap around the polyphenols and so when you drink them what's happening is that those polyphenols a lot of them are stuck within the soap bubble and a lot less is absorbed in your gut so you washed a lot of it out it doesn't actually destroy the polyphenols but it blocks it from your body from absorbing it on top of that other additives to coffee and tea that many cultures do that i really think from a health perspective you should cut down or cut out please don't add a ton of sugar to it please don't squirt artificial flavorings into it you know that you would get out of drive through and and you know and and also don't put non-nutritive sweeteners in it either so mother nature gave us you know the gift of these beverages these brews in in their pure form and it's wonderful to actually drink them that way yeah one of my other sayings is more bitter more better and you and i would both agree with that as well that's the way mother nature gave it to us and we should pay attention you're definitely gonna want to see this one make sure you never buy a non-stick cookware that says Teflon and you can still see him lining the store shelves so put him down