 All right. Does this food cause weight gain? Well, I've been getting a lot of questions on social media about my favorite fruit, avocados. If you had any of my books, you know avocados are one of my favorite go-tos for health. So does it really cause weight gain as you might have heard and can you eat too much? Well, let's dive right in with our myth-busting session. So avocados are full of fat and everybody knows that eating fat makes you gain weight. Now where in the heck did this crazy eat fat get fat theory come from? Well, it came about in the primarily 70s and that was actually caused by some reports in the 1950s that fat, particularly saturated fat, was the cause of heart disease. And this was the famous seven countries study where there was an association with the amount of fat in a diet with coronary artery disease. And as you've seen in a lot of my books, this association does not prove causation. And in fact, the seven countries that were selected were cherry picked. And I won't go into that, but fat got evil. And in the 1970s, the McGovern Commission, Senator McGovern, the former presidential candidate, hosted a commission to have U.S. dietary guidelines. And they were very impressed with the seven countries study. And so U.S. dietary guidelines said we should avoid fat period. Fat has nine calories per gram versus four calories per gram of sugars or protein. So in terms of weight, fat basically has twice the amount of calories as weight of protein or carbohydrates. So on the surface, that might look like something that's important. On the other hand, we now know after the failed experiment of low fat diets, that in fact, calories are not calories. What do I mean by that? Both carbohydrates and proteins cause an elevation in your insulin production. And if you listen, you know that insulin is the fat storage hormone. Fat, on the other hand, does not raise insulin. So that just eating fat doesn't activate fat storage, whereas eating carbohydrates or protein can potentially activate fat storage. The second thing to remember is that we, when all these dietary guidelines were developed, no one knew about the microbiome. No one knew what foods the microbiome might want to eat and how much of the food and calories that you were eating and ingesting might potentially be eaten by your microbiome instead of passing on to you. So avocados have a great fat, which is a mono unsaturated fat, oleic acid, which just so happens to be the predominant fat in my favorite fat, olive oil. So you get a benefit of oleic acid, but avocados are rich in fiber. Fiber is what feeds the good gut bacteria. That's what they want to eat. And they take those calories from themselves. Lastly, there's really good clinical trials that show eating an avocado a day compared to not eating an avocado a day makes you lose weight. Plus, adding avocados to anything you eat, particularly salads and vegetables, show that you will increase the absorption of polyphenols and other vital nutrients if the avocado was not there. So avocados give you a tremendous health boost anytime you eat them. There's almost no sugar in an avocado, even the fact that it is a fruit. It's actually a single-seeded berry. And avocados are pretty easy to find. Now, a lot of people say, you know, how can you recommend avocados? They're really expensive. Yeah, but if you think about what most of us spend on a cup of coffee every day or a coffee drink or an energy bar, the energy and benefits that you would get by spending that on an avocado is vastly superior to what you're currently spending things on. Plus, buy avocados in bulk. Get them really green. I was at Costco yesterday and I actually bought myself another bag of avocados. Some of the discount stores sell avocados by them in bulk. Keep them in the refrigerator until you want to ripen them and you can keep them for an extended period of time. I actually have three green avocados in my refrigerator that I put there before I left for Europe a few weeks ago and they're still in perfect condition and ready for me to eat. So don't be afraid of buying avocados in bulk where you can actually save some money. Now, can you eat too many avocados? Well, quite frankly, you can eat too many of anything and we're going to talk about that in one of my other lectures, but it's very difficult to gain weight eating avocados. For one thing, they actually are very filling. So try to get yourself an avocado a day. If that's impossible, go for a couple, three a week. Try to put them whenever you're going to have salads, vegetables, try to put them in there. I like to sneak them into food. Do you remember in the Plant Paradox, my green smoothie uses a half of an avocado. It's great for increasing the thickness of any smoothie you want. Believe it or not, in the Plant Paradox family cookbook, we have a popsicle recipe using avocados. In our cookbooks, we have a avocado ice cream that is absolutely fantastic. The other thing you can do is make hummus with pressure cooked chickpeas and blend in avocado to give it an even better creamy taste. So there's so many ways to get avocado into your diet. I actually like to use pressure cooked beans and chop up an avocado, mix it in with the beans. To me, it's a great way to get an avocado into your life. Can you be allergic to avocados? Well, quite frankly, we check IgEs, which is the allergens, and I haven't met anyone who is allergic to avocados. On the other hand, we also do food sensitivity testing, and we do have a few people who are sensitive to avocado. And if that's the case, hey, you don't have to have an avocado. Just don't have them. Now, there are foods that absolutely can make you gain weight. And bread is one of the best ways. Reference my YouTube lecture. You can check out the benefits of giving up bread for 30 days, and really any processed foods are one of the most potent ways to gain weight. Just this week, I saw one of my patients who is struggling with her weight and is complaining that she eats like a bird and continues to gain weight. And so when we went over what she ate yesterday, she had a bagel with cream cheese as her breakfast, and then she had a sandwich of whole wheat bread for her lunch, and then she and her husband had a piece of fish with a large bowl of rice and a baked potato. And she was eating like a bird, and if you're paying attention, what she's eating is a whole bunch of carbohydrates, and she didn't get the connection that she was basically having a bowl of sugar for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And that's how you gain weight. I've done a personal experiment with a patient years ago with macadamia nuts. I have some patients who continue to lose weight beyond what they want to do by following my program. Those people, I have found that macadamia nuts are the best way to gain weight. And I actually did an experiment with her. I asked her to eat two cups of macadamia nuts a day for two months, and I would do the same. And I did. She came back two months later. I had actually gained 10 pounds in two months without changing anything else except adding two cups of macadamia nuts to my diet. She didn't gain any weight, and I was flabbergasted. And she said, oh, I didn't eat the two cups of macadamia nuts. I thought you were just joking. Well, luckily I got the weight off by stopping to eat macadamia nuts, but macadamia nuts in my practice can really put the weight on if you want to gain weight. And they're actually very beneficial for you, except for the weight gain. Make sure to check out the next one here. I ran 30 miles a week. I was doing 5K, 10K every weekend, and yet I was 70 pounds overweight. Why? Because quite frankly, I was always hungry. And I was eating the wrong food.