 five vegetables that cause weight gain. All right, let's start with enemy number one, corn. Now I come from Omaha, Nebraska and we learned very early on that if you want to fatten a cow for slaughter, you feed them corn, corn-fed beef. Where do you think all that wonderful marbling came from in your steak? It came from feeding the cows. Corn. Corn is a high-starch, high-sugar food. Now, sadly, 95% of all corn in the United States is genetically modified. Now here's the deal. Even if you see the words organic corn, it's more than likely genetically modified. It just wasn't sprayed with glyphosate. But the sad thing is, most corn in the United States is genetically modified because it is sprayed with glyphosate. And glyphosate, that wonderful herbicide, is one of the best ways that I know of to cause leaky gut and weight gain. And corn is a great way to get glyphosate in your diet. Now, the other part of corn is it is loaded with lectins. Remember, corn is not a modern food. Corn was introduced to Africa, Asia, and Europe only 500 years ago when Columbus brought it back. Most of the Native Americans knew how to handle corn to make it less toxic. Corn was always traditionally treated with a line to make the haul non-toxic and to bind the nitrogen-binding compound so that nitrogen-vitamin B3 was not taken out of your body. That's called hominy. And hominy, or basole, is actually the safest way to eat corn if you're going to eat it. Fun fact, masa flour is actually made from hominy. And so if, by any chance, you're going to have a tortilla, make sure it's made from masa flour rather than corn tortillas. And interestingly enough, if you look at traditional cultures, they always make their tortillas out of masa flour because they have treated the corn with lye to turn it into hominy. And the lectin content and the toxins are far diminished with that treatment. Traditional ancient people always knew how to detoxify potentially bad things. So for now, stay away from corn. What do you use as an alternative? Hey, get yourself some raw carrots. Get yourself some celery. Personally, I like to munch on jicama. Jicama is easy to prepare, but if you even don't want to slice it up, a lot of stores now carry pre-packaged jicama, take it home, use it as sticks, dip it in guacamole, that doesn't have any tomatoes in it, and you'll be great. All right, potatoes. Now, like corn, potatoes unfortunately have a very high glycemic index. The glycemic index indicates how fast something turns into sugar, but they're often treated like a vegetable, even though they're a tuber. Now, potatoes, unfortunately, the more you make the potato light and fluffy, for instance, like an Idaho baker, has a much higher glycemic index than a wax potato, which is much harder to break down. Take an Idaho baker, mash it up, fluff it up with air, break down all those starch granules, and you have an instant sugar bomb, but that's not enough. What do we do with a baked potato or even mashed potatoes? We serve it with butter, sour cream, or cheese, and despite all that, there's still lectin' bombs. Now, the good news is you can substitute white potatoes with yams, purple sweet potatoes, or regular sweet potatoes, and really reduce the lectin' content, but buy or beware. A purple potato is not a purple sweet potato, and I see so many of my patients make that mistake and wonder why they're not doing well because they're eating purple potatoes like I told them to. No purple sweet potato, not the purple potato that you now see in the stores. Now, if you're trying to lose weight, any of these starchy vegetables are really not a good option. And I'll explain why in just a second when we get to their components. Actually, I'll do it now. So, when you eat a food whole, it takes a lot of time for your digestive enzymes to break that whole food apart and to get the starches, which are the long sugar molecules all bound together, glucose molecules all in a chain. The harder it is to break down that whole food, the less likely that you're going to get to absorb that sugar and a lot of those starches will arrive down in your colon for your gut buddies to enjoy. But you can take a perfectly safe starch, like cassava and turn it into a chip, like a plantain and turn it into a chip, or a sweet potato and turn it into a chip. And all of a sudden, you've got something that now will rapidly be broken down by your digestive enzymes and turn into sugar. Now, these don't have lectins, which is a great thing, but I have so many of my patients, well-meaning patients who are gaining weight or at least not losing weight or are getting more insulin resistance or having a higher blood sugar, or even having high cholesterol from high triglycerides. And we look at what they're eating and they're eating these healthy snacks, thinking that they're different than the whole food. And just remember, our great-great grandparents did not have access to these sorts of foods. They did not exist. They ate foods whole. And always keep that in mind. All right, green peas. Now, this may come as a shocker, but a cup of peas actually has more carbs and sugar than a cup of pasta. Yeah, that's right. Peas have more sugar than pasta. Once again, peas are loaded with toxic lectins. So, if you've got to have this form of starch, please swap them out for pressure-cooked lentils or beans instead. Now, beans, particularly lentils, can probably help with weight loss because they're loaded with soluble fiber that gives your good gut bacteria what they want to eat. And quite frankly, they make most people very full, sometimes uncomfortably full. And hopefully, if you're uncomfortably full, you're not gonna go looking for that next meal or even that next snack. All right, cooked beets and carrots. Now, beets have some amazing compounds, but they don't call beets sugar beets for nothing. They have a very high sugar content. Now, if you eat beets raw, which I do on occasion and I have them over in Italy, sliced and served with olive oil and some goat cheese, they're perfectly safe. But when you cook them, once again, you make those starches readily available and they turn to sugar. And if you slice beets and then cook them, it gets even worse. Same with carrots. A raw carrot is difficult to break down all those starch molecules. But when you cook them and turn them into cooked carrots, you once again have produced a sugary food that you don't want. So what do you do? Raw beets and raw carrots are perfectly safe. Shave beets onto your salad. Shave carrots onto your salad. They give gorgeous color. They're loaded with polyphenols, but you won't absorb the sugar. These guys, even though they're wolves in sheep's clothing, yes, they don't contain lectins. Yes, the original product was really healthy. Plantains are great for you. Cassava is great for you. Sweep potatoes are great for you. But we've taken all these healthy foods, deep fried them, usually in a horrible oil, and then made all of these sugars readily accessible. Please try to avoid these. If you're going to use these, use them not to munch on, because you won't just eat one, but use them as a dipping chip to get tahini in your mouth, to get guacamole in your mouth, to get some other wonderful food in your mouth. But don't just munch these things. I see it over and over again. We've taken a really good idea and bastardized it into something that's not healthy for us anymore. This next one is sure to surprise you. How about honey nut Cheerios? That's gotta be good for you. It's got 12 grams of added sugar.