Transcript of Episode 198: Are Plants Making You Sick?
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Steven Gundry
Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is episode #198. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome very special guest, Dr. Steven Gundry. We have a very interesting topic for you guys today, one that we haven’t dug into on Cellular Healing TV yet, and this is the topic on lectins. Dr. Gundry wrote a book called The Plant Paradox, which we’re going to dig into in a minute here, that explains all about what lectins are and how they might be affecting our cellular health.
Before we dig in, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Gundry. Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned cardiologist, New York Times best-selling author, and medical researcher. During his 40-year career in medicine, he has performed over 10,000 heart surgeries and developed life-saving medical technology. In 2008, his book, Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution, revealed a new career shift, helping patients to heal themselves and avoid surgery through diet.
In April, his second book, The Plant Paradox, which we have right here—it’s amazing—published by Harper Wave, hit bookstores and is now a New York Times best-seller. His latest book outlines a 90-day plan for some of the world’s most pressing health issues, from obesity to heart disease. Gundry MD, founded by Dr. Gundry in 2016, is a wellness blog, YouTube channel, and supplement company to further equip people with powerful tools in reclaiming their health. He practices medicine at his waitlist clinics, Center for Restorative Medicine, and International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, California. You can learn more at drgundry.com and gundrymd.com.
Welcome, Dr. Gundry, to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you.
Dr. Gundry:
Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think that most people—you said, Meredith, that most people don’t know what lectins are. We’re going to get into that, but yes, they do, because the most famous one of all is gluten, right? Everybody knows gluten, at least our viewers and listeners, and the concerns about gluten, but years ago, in many of my articles, I talked about lectins and phytates, and I’m sure no one knew what they were, but I said, look, there’s other dangers beyond gluten as well, especially with those with compromised digestion, so lectins. Let’s get into them. This is obviously a category that encompasses gluten, these proteins, potential poisons. Tell our viewers about them.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so I got interested in lectins actually years ago with a couple of people who had obvious autoimmune diseases. When my first book came out almost 10 years ago now, a lot of people with autoimmune diseases came in and said, gee, my autoimmune disease is getting a whole lot better eating the way you describe in your first book, and what’s going on? I could’ve been flippant and said, well, this is a very anti-inflammatory diet, and that’s why you’re getting better, but I said, I wonder what it is that I’m taking away from people. I had a no list and a yes list of foods that was really making a difference, and as I started looking at this, one of the big categories that was very clear that I was removing from people’s diets were plants that contain lectins.
Now, lectins are part of the plant defense system. They’re actually a major part of the plant defense system, and what I try to convince people to realize is that plants do not like us. They were actually here first. They had it really good before animals arrived, because nobody wanted to eat them. When animals arrived, they couldn’t run, they couldn’t hide, they couldn’t fight, but they’re chemists of incredible ability. Dan, you can look outside your window and see what plants can do with sunlight, and we haven’t figured out how to do that. They can actually make matter. They use proteins that are called lectins that are sometimes called sticky proteins, and they like to bind to specific sugar molecules, and we know what those sugar molecules are. The molecules that line our gut are loaded with sugar molecules like sialic acid. There are sugar molecules between nerve endings, and this was actually the original target of plants to paralyze insects, which was their original predator. If you could paralyze an insect, that was a pretty good deterrent against being eaten.
Plants used these proteins, and these proteins are actually very good at prying open the tight junctions between the wall of our intestinal lining. Surprisingly enough, you know, but most people don’t realize that the lining of our intestine is only one cell thick, and its surface area is the same as a regulation tennis court, all bound up inside of us. Those poor cells are all lined up side-by-side, and they’re held together like—when I was a kid, we played a game called Red Rover, Red Rover, where we all locked arms in two rows, and you ran across and tried to break through.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I did that.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. In fact, it’s funny. As I lecture around the world, there is the equivalent game in every culture I’ve found, obviously different names, but actually, as an aside, the young kids don’t play it anymore. They’re too busy on their computer instead of knocking people down.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s exactly right.
Dr. Gundry:
What happens is, we know Dr. Fasano’s work showed that gluten, which you mentioned, is a lectin, and other lectins are quite capable to attaching to the wall of our intestine and flipping a switch so that those tight junctions break. When they break, two things happen. Number one, lectins, which are foreign proteins, get through the wall of our gut, but also, what I talk about in the book, there are pieces of bacteria. There are dead cell walls of bacteria, which are called lipopolysaccharides. I call them a little something different in the book. They’re LPSs. You can say little pieces of poop, but I use a little bit more stronger vernacular, even though I don’t swear. These two things, lectins and then these particles of bacteria, make our immune system absolutely go crazy, and one of the fascinating things is that our immune system goes around our body and looks for things that look like these proteins that are loose.
Loren Cordain used the expression molecular mimicry years ago, and I like that, because that’s exactly what I see in my practice. These lectins are cleverly designed to look like other proteins in our body. They are very similar to proteins that line the blood vessel, for instance, and when our immune system is turned on, the immune system does not want a mistake, and it goes, hmm, that protein looks really similar to a protein I’m worried about. I think I’m going to kill this. I’m going to shoot it, and I’ll ask questions later. We talk about, for instance, autoimmune disease as a mistake of our immune system in attacking ourselves, but in fact, it’s an immune system that’s been activated to look for lectins.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s –
Dr. Gundry:
-inaudible-.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay. I’m going to ask the obvious, I think what my viewers would be asking. My gosh, okay, I’m already concerned. What foods am I getting exposed to these lectins in?
Dr. Gundry:
I was being interviewed by a reporter actually yesterday, and I made a statement that sometimes gets me attacked by my critics. I’m now convinced that almost every illness is, one way or another, connected to a leaky gut and to lectins, and if you had asked me that 15 years ago, I would’ve laughed you out of the room, but the more—I see tens of thousands of patients, and I do pretty interesting, sophisticated blood work on them. I can see, when we remove lectins from their diet, that their inflammation markers return to normal, that their autoimmune disease markers become normal, so where are these lectins?
I like to look at this from a period of time when things appeared in our food supply, and up until 10,000 years ago, none of us ever were exposed to grains or beans. For one thing, grains and beans have to be cooked, but even cooking does a pretty lousy job of destroying lectins. We’ll get back to this, but you can destroy lectins with a pressure cooker. The only lectin you can’t destroy with a pressure cooker is gluten. It’s resistant to even pressure cooking. Grains and beans were two of the real big problems originally.
Then, what’s fascinating to me is the longer we’re exposed to a plant or a plant compound, usually, we can develop bugs, bacteria in our intestines, and fungi in our intestines that are capable of eating these things. In fact –
Dr. Pompa:
Questions, yeah.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, believe it or not, we have bacteria that loved to eat gluten. They’re really good at it, and one of the things I talk about in the book is that many people go gluten-free who probably don’t necessarily need to, but when they stop eating gluten-containing foods, these bugs leave. They have nothing to eat, and so they may just be marginally sensitive to gluten, but when they eat gluten again, they don’t have that line of defense against bugs, and they really notice gluten. Then, they go, oh, see, I told you, I’m really gluten-sensitive.
The second thing that happened is, 500 years ago, all of us in America are not from America. Donald Trump may think otherwise, but we are from Europe, Asia, or Africa. Even Native-Americans are actually from Asia, so none of us were exposed to American plants, American lectin-containing plants until 500 years ago when Colombian trade started. Some of our most beloved foods are some of our most mischievous in their American plants. The nightshade family, for instance, is probably the most notorious, and that’s potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, goji berries. Believe it or not, goji berries are an American plant. They were called the wolfberry, and they were taken to China in trade. They actually did very well in China, and that’s why we still get most of our goji berries from China or Tibet.
The nightshades have lectins in their peels and their seeds, and interestingly enough, Americans avoided tomatoes until the mid 18th century, because they were considered part of the deadly nightshade family, and there was a gentleman whose name was Colonel Samuel Johnson, who stood on the courtyard steps in Summit, New Jersey, which is outside of Philadelphia. Most people think he was in Philadelphia when he did this. He ate a bushel of tomatoes on the courtyard step to prove that he wouldn’t die, and Michael Gregor, one of my critics, uses that example to prove that I’m wrong, that a bushel of tomatoes didn’t kill Colonel Johnson and hasn’t killed a lot of people, but in fact, it’s amazing. If you look at cultures that work with tomatoes—for instance, the Italians always peel and deseed their tomatoes or their peppers before they use them.
In fact, the chili pepper flakes and seeds that we put on our pizza were actually the discarded byproducts of getting the peels and seeds out of peppers, and they were thrown away. Now, of course, we think they’re a culinary delight. The Southwest American Indians always peel and deseed their peppers. The Hatch Chile Roast was just a month ago. They do that because the peels and the seeds have the lectins, and they do that before they even grind their peppers into chile pepper in New Mexico, so there’s a long history of cultures dealing with these sort of things.
The other problem-maker is the squash family. The squash family are also American plants. The pumpkins. We’re coming up on Thanksgiving. The squashes. Cucumbers are actually originally from China, and a lot of it is from Persia. Cucumbers didn’t actually enter our general population until Colombian trade started, so they’re actually a modern plant, too.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think you’re mentioning a lot of foods that most of our viewers would be like, well, gosh, I mean, a cucumber? I thought they were—tomatoes? I thought they were healthy, so your argument is that it’s the way that we used to prepare them, taking—most of the lectins are in the seeds and the skins, and we’re not doing that as often now in one argument.
Dr. Gundry:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so what about the Mediterranean diet? Everyone thinks that the Mediterranean diet is the healthiest diet. They eat a lot of baba ganoush. I know these things. I just came from Israel. They eat a lot of different foods that we’re talking about here as a mainstay of their diet.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so I think the best book that was ever written—it’s actually a textbook, which is unfortunate, because it’s never gotten the wide use that it should. In fact, I’ll hold it up, because I have it. I always have it on my desk. It’s called Food and Western Disease, and the author is from Sweden by the name of Staffan Lindeberg. Staffan, I got turned onto him because he has studied the Kitavans, or Kitavans, depending on how you like to pronounce it.
As I write about in the book, the Kitavans were a real puzzle to those of us who considered ourselves low-carbers, and they have been studied extensively, but they basically have no medical care, and they smoke like fiends. They live well into their mid 90s, and there’s never been a case of heart disease and never been a stroke. They don’t have cancer, so the problem is, about 60 percent of their calories come from eating taro root. Another 30 percent of their calories come from coconut, and the rest come from a smattering of fish and some fruits and vegetables, but they drive low-carbers crazy, because they eat an incredibly high-starch diet.
Back to the Mediterranean. Staffan has looked and dissected the Mediterranean diet, as other people have, and what he and others found, and I reference this in my book, is that cereal grains and beans are actually a negative aspect of the Mediterranean diet that’s countered by the polyphenols in red wine, in olive oil, in the fish that they eat, and also in the fruits and vegetables that they eat. Again, the Italians always peel their tomatoes.
In fact, I was lecturing in Istanbul last year, and I went to a sidewalk café and ordered a salad for lunch. Shockingly, out came these wedges of tomatoes that had been peeled, and there weren’t any seeds in them, and the cucumbers, which were in there, had been peeled, and the core had been pulled out, so it was just a ring of the flesh of the cucumber. I’m going, wow, that’s fascinating that this culture did this, and here I’m on a street corner in Istanbul. You can actually see these things in action.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, in certain cultures. All right, look, let’s back up again, because—so, in review, these lectins can act just like gluten, open our tight junctions, drive autoimmune. I believe there was even a chapter in your book about how it can create weight gain, weight loss resistance. Maybe you should talk a little bit about that. Again, leaky gut, yes, but maybe you want to say something else about that. Then, I want people to understand—okay, great, let’s say we avoid this. How do we avoid it, because my gosh, you just named a lot of foods? Okay, Pompa’s already taken a lot of foods off my plate. Now these? I’m in big trouble here, Steven, but talk about the weight loss resistance connection first.
Dr. Gundry:
There’s really several factors that lectins contribute to weight gain, and one of the things that I talk about in the book is, we’ve always assumed that beans and grains came into our diet because they were storageable compounds, and when we started farming, we had to have foods that we could eat during the winter. We couldn’t wander around, looking for animals to eat or for leaves to eat, so most historians, including—this was my major at Yale—believed that grains and beans got -inaudible- because we can store them. I went back and said, well, wait a minute, maybe there’s another reason why we did this, and having grown up in Omaha, Nebraska, Farmland Central, we know that the only way you can fatten an animal for slaughter is to feed them grains or beans or both. That’s how we do it, and that’s how we’ve always done it, so I said, well, wait, a minute, if we fatten animals with grains and beans, and that’s the only way we’ve ever found to do it, maybe grains and beans allow us to store more fat for a given amount of energy than any other food. If you look at that research, in fact, you’ll find that it’s true.
There is a lectin in wheat, for example, called wheat germ agglutinin, and wheat germ agglutinin is actually far more mischievous than gluten, and it’s in the hull of the grain. Gluten is more in the endosperm, the seed. Wheat germ agglutinin is this interesting little lectin that, on fat cells, attaches to the insulin receptor of the fat cell. Now, normally, when a hormone or a message attaches to a receptor, it’s like a plane docking on the jetway, and the passengers get off. In this case, the message is delivered. They’re like, insulin here, store some fat, and then the jet leaves, and the gateway’s open again.
The problem with wheat germ agglutinin, it sticks onto the receptor on a fat cell, and it just absolutely keeps pumping sugar into the fat cell and turning that sugar—it turns on lipoprotein lipase and turns it into fat. The other fascinating thing is that, on a muscle cell, which has the same receptor, wheat germ agglutinin attaches to the muscle cell but doesn’t allow sugar in but actually blocks the airplane from getting to the gate, and that’s one of the theories why, for instance, marathon athletes who just live on carbohydrates, particularly wheat-based carbohydrates are actually so skinny and actually have very little musculature. I talk about that in the book, but marathon running is a pretty dumb idea. No offense. My wife did the hundredth running of the Boston Marathon, and then I showed her the data, and she hung up her spikes. It’s really dumb, but that’s a whole ‘nother subject.
Dr. Pompa:
I agree, but yeah, that’s a whole ‘nother show.
Dr. Gundry:
That’s part one, wheat germ agglutinin. Part two is getting back to leaky gut, and one of the things that’s always intrigued me and many, many other people is, why do we have—why do we store fat that’s so dangerous in our gut? Why do we have a beer belly? Why do we have a deli belly? We’ve got all these guys—we’ve got these foreign invaders coming through the wall of our gut, and most of your viewers know that 60, 70 percent of all your immune cells line the gut. They’re basically our border patrol, so there’s—when these guys get through, there actually is a war occurring right at the wall of the gut. Now, during a war, what you do is—in any war, you have to stockpile supplies for the troops, and where best to stockpile the supplies than at the site of the invasion, so that’s why we actually store fat in our gut, because that’s where the process is going.
Now, the old view was, well, we have inflammation in our gut, and it’s inflammation that’s triggering the fat to be there. The inflammation is coming from our white blood cells attacking lectins and these LPSs that are getting through, and that’s why the fat accumulates.
Dr. Pompa:
Are some people more—we know that there’s different levels of gluten sensitivity. You said that in the beginning, so there are two parts to this question. Number one, are some people genetically, because of their ancestors, etc., more affected by these lectins, some people less, and is it a bad thing, as you’ve kind of said, maybe, just like gluten, that we get rid of all of them? Now we stop producing all of the enzymes, and our microbiome changes, so two parts to that.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so we measure the HLA genes that associate with gluten sensitivity in all of our patients, and there are about ten percent of my population that has one or more of these genes. These guys, I absolutely say, get gluten out of your life. You’re already presensitized to it. On the other hand, we have a number of people—we measure all of the autoimmune markers for celiac in everyone as well, and we have a number of people who have active celiac disease that do not carry any of these HLA markers, so it doesn’t mean that, just because you have celiac, you carry these genes. Conversely, though, if you carry these genes, you probably should stay away from gluten.
Now, the other thing that I think is important in the book is, we’ve been eating these things for 10,000 years and doing a pretty good job, most of us, with it. Why have we had this sudden increase in autoimmune disease? Why do we have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in 30, 40 million women? That gets into what I call the seven deadly disruptors, and we won’t go through all of them today, but a couple things have really, really changed. Number one is broad-spectrum antibiotic use. We not only swallow them. We unfortunately gave them willy-nilly to any patient that walked through the door with a scratchy throat or a sniffle, and what we didn’t know about broad-spectrum antibiotics was that not only do they potentially kill what you took it for but they wipe out your entire gut flora.
It’s like throwing napalm or Agent Orange on a mature tropical rainforest, and people say, well, that’s fine, and I’ll just take some probiotics, and I’ll be fine. Unfortunately, that’s like we burn a forest down, and then we put some seedlings, and we naively think we’re going to have a mature forest in a couple of weeks. In fact, that doesn’t happen, and sadly, most of the probiotics out there are not spores-forming bacteria, and so we actually—most of our stomach acid just destroys these things.
The other part of the antibiotic problem is, we’ve been using antibiotics to feed animals for weight gain for a number of years now, and we’ve been naïve enough to think that that was harmless, either to the animals or to us, but we know that those antibiotic residues appear in their meat. This low-dose antibiotic, while it’s not enough to get the attention of the FDA—well, it is enough, but it’s enough to change our microbiome, and one of the things that they learned about fattening animals is that, if you change the microbiome with antibiotics, the animal would gain weight. Lo and behold, change our microbiome with antibiotics, we’ll do the same thing, particularly if you feed us grains and beans like we do animals. Antibiotics are a big part of this mystery.
The second that I think gets not enough attention is the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory, the NSAIDs, particularly ibuprofen and naproxen, like Aleve and Advil, vice versa. We chew these things like candy. I’ve seen a number of sports injuries that have been taking a lot of Motrin or a lot of Advil or a lot of Aleve and then develop an autoimmune disease. This literature is well known about in the pharmaceutical company, and I show a bunch of them in the book.
What we didn’t, as doctors, know is that the damage that NSAIDs do is to the lining of the small intestine. They don’t damage the stomach, which is really why NSAIDs were really popular, because aspirin damaged the stomach lining, but the NSAIDs, unlike aspirin, we couldn’t see the damage, because our gastroscopes and our colonoscopes couldn’t get into the small intestine. It wasn’t until the pill cameras came out that we swallow that we could start seeing that, in fact, these things are literally like swallowing a hand grenade. It’s amazing to me. We have Children’s Advil, and we give this stuff away like candy.
The pharmaceutical companies know this. In fact, I was talking with Joseph Mercola a few weeks ago, and when he was in medical school—he’s a D.O., but when he was in medical school, he was an extern at a pharmacy, and he remembers distinctly that the FDA prescription Motrin had just come out, and prescription naproxen had just come out, Naprosyn. There was a black box warning that you could not dispense over a two-week supply, because it was so dangerous, and he said –when he was reading my book, he said, that just came flooding back to me. These were prescription meds, and they carried a warning about how dangerous they were. We’ve forgotten all that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It is. I stay far, far away from them. Many people, even healthy-concerned people, take them like it’s no big deal. It’s like, my gosh, it is a big deal. You’re right. It’s like a hand grenade in the intestines, for sure. What about glyphosate? We know that it’s opening up these tight junctions, affecting the microbiome, and now we have a perfect storm going on.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, glyphosate is another one of these perfect storms. They convinced the FDA that glyphosate is not metabolized by humans, which is true, but they didn’t mention to anybody that the shikimate pathway is used by bacteria, and so our gut microbiome is actually pretty well killed off by glyphosate. The other thing that nobody realized was that glyphosate was going to appear in conventional crops. Originally, it was developed just as a weed killer for GMOs, but now we use glyphosate to actually make crops die—conventional crops—so that you can harvest corn, and you can harvest wheat, and you can harvest soybeans, and you can harvest flax, and we don’t wash the stuff off. We then feed it to our animals, or we grind it up into our consumer products, so 24 hours a day, we’re consuming this stuff.
In fact, you probably saw recently that most California wines are loaded with glyphosate and even some of the organic wines, and that’s because—in fact, I was just on the phone with a Texas farmer about this yesterday. They use glyphosate between the rows of vines and also, in Texas, between the rows of plants to kill the weeds, and it obviously gets into the grapes, and it gets into the plant.
The really scary thing that we were talking about yesterday was, as you know, Monsanto is now being purchased by Bayer, and Bayer has been trying—well, Monsanto’s been trying for years to get into the European Union, and they’ve been pretty successful in blocking them, but now that Bayer owns Monsanto, Bayer pulls the strings in Europe, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we see glyphosate in Europe, which will be a disaster.
Dr. Pompa:
What a disappointment, because the wine, of course, it’s outlawed. They’re not using glyphosate, and the other thing is the way that obviously they do the crops in Napa. It’s not dry farm, so they’re irrigating, and then the glyphosate, as you said, sprayed here, it ends up in the water, even in organic –
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. Yep, it’s in the water. Yep.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so it’s horrible, but—so you put these three things together, and no doubt, it’s the perfect storm, which makes these lectins that are actual toxins to protect the plant now even more toxic to us as humans, driving inflammation, driving autoimmune, as you pointed out, even weight gain and weight loss resistance, so this is a big problem.
Okay, so one more question I want to give. Okay, what can we do to—you have a 90-day program in your book, which is great, because people are going to go, okay, how do I get rid of these things? Let me do it for 90 days, and let’s see how I feel, and I would challenge that you do that. Norman Borlaug, he did some hybridization plants, and Bill Davis, that was his big thing is that, it’s what we did that made these different strains of glutens, AKA lectins, so how does that play into this? Did we hybridize things to make it even more toxic, or is that really not a factor in your mind?
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, I don’t think that’s a factor in my mind. In fact, ancient grains are just as mischievous as modern grains. For instance, the famous Iceman of the Northern Italian Alps, who was frozen and perfectly preserved 5,000 years ago, he’s riddled with arthritis, and in the pockets of his cape are both einkorn and kamut varieties of wheat, ancient grains, and unfortunately, you see that these grains are just as mischievous as our modern wheat. I think that’s a bit of a—it’s a great story, but I think we have far better reasons like antibiotics, like Advil and Aleve, and like glyphosate that have really tipped things over. I don’t think it was the wheat variety.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, those three things you pinpoint, for sure. Okay. All right, let’s talk about—hey, I want to see if this makes me feel better. Talk a little bit about your 90-day plan, because right now I’m confused. Here’s what people are going to say, I don’t know what to eat. When people say those words, they eat whatever they eat usually. Know this. Tell them how to do this in 90 days.
Dr. Gundry:
The most important rule, and I wish it wasn’t true, but it’s not what I tell you to eat that’s important. It’s what I tell you not to eat, and that I see over and over again. I was taught this when I was a fellow at Great Ormond Street in London, England, by a gastroenterologist, and I thought he was kind of crazy, but looking back, he was really smart. For instance, our sisters at Great Ormond Street, where I did children’s heart surgery, after an operation, they’d send the morning to the corner little store and have them bring two cups of fresh yogurt to feed their babies. A smart American like me said, what a stupid idea to do, and they’d say, oh, no, Doctor, you’ve killed off all my babies’ bugs, and I must put new bugs in. We’d go, yeah, sure, but this is real, so back to the question.
I like people to eat like it’s 9,999 years ago, just before the advent of modern agriculture. We ate a lot of tubers. There are plenty of tubers besides potatoes. We didn’t eat potatoes, because they’re an American plant, so have some sweet potatoes. Have some cassava. Have some yuca. Have some taro root. Have jicama. We were designed to eat lots of leaves, so all the leaves you want.
One of my favorite sayings is, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth, and getting back to the Mediterranean diet, there are cultures, particularly in Crete and Sardinia and in Spain, that use a liter of olive oil per week, and one of my favorite studies that I always bring up—the study was just finished about two years ago. They took 65-year-old people in Spain, and they divided them into three groups. All had to eat a Mediterranean diet. The first group had to have a liter of olive oil per week, and they actually had to bring their empty liter back to the clinic and pick up a new one so they knew that that’s what they were doing. The second group had to have the equivalent calories in raw walnuts, and the third group ate a low-fat Mediterranean diet. They followed these people for five years, and the original part of the study was to look at memory. The walnut and the olive oil group had preserved memory at the end of five years. In fact, the olive oil group had slightly increased memory. The low-fat group had deteriorated memory.
They then looked at breast cancer, and the women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than either of the other groups. They then looked at heart disease, and lo and behold, the walnut and the olive oil group had diminished episodes of heart disease compared to the low-fat Mediterranean diet. Finally, I think the most interesting thing is, the walnut and the olive oil group lost weight during the five years, and the low-fat group gained weight, so people say, a liter of olive oil? That’s 12 to 14 tablespoons of olive oil a day. I’m going to gain weight. In fact, we know that fat does not make you fat, particularly if you don’t eat it with carbohydrates. Fat and carbohydrates is a great recipe for disaster.
The other thing that I go into in the book, and again, having grown up in Omaha and Milwaukee, it makes me sad to say this, but animal protein in two large international studies has been shown to be equal to sugar consumption in causing obesity and diabetes. Equal. That’s because—this is something that Dr. Atkins unfortunately didn’t know, is that we, as you know, have no storage system for protein unless we’re building muscle, but we don’t waste energy, so we convert protein into sugar, gluconeogenesis, and one of the problems with our high-protein diet in America is the protein is the last to be digested of the various things we eat, and so we’ve already met all of our glucose needs of all of our cells by the time protein is available. Protein is basically automatically converted into glucose and then stored as fat.
This is actually why Dr. Atkins died a fat man. My first book was bought by Random House, and my editor had done all the Atkins diets, all the South Beach diet. I got to know Dr. Atkins’s ghostwriter and pick her brain, and then I got to know his head nurse, and actually she’s still my patient today. She’s in her 90s now. This is what Atkins didn’t know. He was originally a high-fat doctor, but he got into so much trouble with the American Medical Association that he morphed into a high-protein diet, and that’s actually his unfortunate big mistake, and he died a fat man. It’s actually very true. His nurse confirms it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s amazing. Okay, so avoidance, that’s a—what does your 90-day program do?
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, what we do is, we have a three-day kickstart program where people get addicted to this smoothie. There’s a wonderful woman from Santa Barbara who did the recipes, Irena, and she has a website called Catalyst Cuisine. She’ll make meals and ship them all across the country, FedEx, cheap, so she can actually do the whole program, but all of the recipes for the three days are in there. They’re easy to do. I like people to make a green smoothie out of some romaine lettuce, some spinach, half an avocado, some mint, and some lemon juice, and it’s really addicting. My wife has it every day of her life. She can’t get off of it.
The reason we did that is, there’s really good evidence that you can completely change your microbiome in about three days, and there’s also compelling evidence that, if you stray back into the way you’re eating within three more days, your microbiome will return to its former bad state, so what I like to do is really kind of kickstart cleaning up the bugs in our gut and then start having people really avoid all the grains, the pseudograins. Corn is a mischief-maker. Avoid the plants from North America that you think are good for you. The other thing that’s important to realize is, most people—most of the vegetables that people eat in the United States are not vegetables at all. They’re fruits, and one of the things we’ve forgotten is that, up until about 50 years ago, we only had fruit once a year, during fruit season in the summer and early fall.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Dr. Gundry:
Then, there was no fruit, and we, like great apes, used fruit to gain weight for the winter when there’s less food, whether it was a dry season, rainy season, or a cold season. All great apes only gain weight during fruit season, and it’s one of the things I go into in my first book. Tomatoes are a fruit. Cucumbers are fruit. A pepper is a fruit. A squash is a fruit. A pumpkin’s a fruit. We really have to be wary that we take fruit fructose and convert it into triglycerides to store as fat, so we really eliminate fruit. We say give fruit the boot. Sorry about that. If you’re going to eat fruit, eat fruit locally in season. A piece of fruit coming from Chile in February is not natural. There’s no such thing as blueberries in February. That’s what we do. We like people to really increase their olive oil. If they don’t have -inaudible-, we like them to use coconut oil, avocado oil. Avocadoes are great, even an avocado a day, but again, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. I actually pour olive oil on my avocado.
Dr. Pompa:
I do, too. I really do.
Dr. Gundry:
We also have a program for what I call my Intensive Care Program, which is a ketogenic version of my program, and so if you’re a diabetic, if you have cancer, if you have signs of dementia, if you have kidney failure, there’s an entire chapter for you where I get even meaner and nastier, but I want people to eat about an 80% fat diet if you have those conditions, and it really does turn things around quite dramatically.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’re pro-keto. The diet obviously works so well with ketosis when you’re eating moderate protein, high fat. You kind of start eliminating lectins like crazy.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so those watching, because we have a lot of keto people, it’s like, yeah, ketosis is probably the easiest way to avoid lectins, no doubt about it. Meredith, I know you have some questions. I had so many, but I think it’s a fascinating topic, because not a lot of people are speaking this.
Meredith:
It sure is, and something interesting for me that came up when I was reading the book as well was the testimony of a woman who had been following your program and getting a lot of great results in general but still had some persistent eczema on her eyelids, and you kind of really did some detective work with her diet and realized that she was eating chicken that was organic, but this chicken was still eating possibly soybeans and corn and some feed that wasn’t natural to that animal’s diet, so can you speak to a little bit about what we eat eats and how important that is?
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. We are what we eat, but we are what the thing we’re eating ate, and a number of years ago, there were a couple of little articles in the alternative medicine literature that said that, if an animal is eating lectins that it isn’t used to eating, those lectins will appear in its flesh. I kind of said, oh, man, that’s really out there, but I didn’t discount it, and then this particular woman—I now have a number of them—she is a psychologist in Los Angeles who had pretty bad lupus, was on two-drug therapy, and realized that that probably wasn’t a very good idea for the rest of her life.
We got her off of her drugs, and she had some pretty bad skin lesions from lupus. She completely cleared except for a little bit of eczema on her upper eyelids, and so we’re going through the list. She was avoiding the no list like a saint, so I’m going through the good food list, and I get to chicken. I said, now you’re eating pastured chicken, chickens that go out and eat bugs, and she said, oh, yeah, yeah, I eat free-range organic. That’s my favorite food. I went, wait a minute. Free-range is kept in a warehouse, along with 10,000 other chickens, and they’re fed corn and soybeans, even if they’re organic corn and soybeans. I said, I tell you what, stop the chicken, and I said, call me back. A month later, she says, eczema’s gone, that was it, so it was this organic, free-range chicken. Since her—that’s been about five years—I have a number of particularly women who it’s their organic, free-range chicken that’s their culprit in their autoimmune disease.
There’s another gentleman in the book who is actually from St. Louis who travels a lot, and his autoimmune disease and his irritable bowel went away, but he noticed that, when he was traveling, things would kick up, even though he was really being religious, and I said, well, what are you eating? He says, well, there’s only two things I’ll eat when I’m traveling of meats. It’ll be shrimp, and it’ll be chicken, so I said, ooh. Most of the shrimp in a restaurant comes from Vietnam or Thailand, and it’s fed grains, and I can guarantee you you’re not getting a pastured chicken in the restaurant. I said, just—he thought he was getting gluten kind of dusted on it, and that’s why he was reacting, so I said, just humor me, don’t eat that stuff, and just have salads and vegetables, and you’ll be all right. You’ll survive. Sure enough, those were the two factors that had kicked him over.
I think our food supply has changed so much, whether it’s the antibiotics in our food, whether the fact that a chicken, which is an insectivore, is being fed corn and soybeans, which it’s never designed to eat, whether our cows, which are grass-eaters and alfalfa-eaters, are now being fed corn and soybeans. I could talk about, cows get such heartburn from the lectin in corn irritating their esophagus that they actually stop eating, and half the world’s production of calcium carbonate, Tums, is mixed into cow food so they’ll keep eating. Yeah, it’s just—if this is getting a cow’s attention, maybe we should pay attention.
Meredith:
That’s so true, and I’m wondering, too, though—so there’s a lot of things we can do to mitigate some of the effects. Oh, there goes that -inaudible-—which we’re peeling, we’re deseeding, we’re avoiding some of the major offenders, but is there, for some of us who maybe just want to treat ourselves to those lectins, is there maybe a supplement or some kind of gut support that we could take to mitigate some of the damage?
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, it’s one of the reasons I have a product called Lectin Shield. It has seven different ingredients that absorb lectins, and it actually works pretty well. Now, the problem is that it’s not a license to cheat. Some people view it as that, but if I know I’m going to a friend’s house or a dinner party, and I know that I’m not going to be able to avoid the things I should avoid, then I’ll pop a couple when I’m traveling in Europe. I carry several jars, and I put some videos on my YouTube channel, kind of before and after what my belly looks like when I’m unfortunately dabbling in their pasta and bread with and without Lectin Shield, and it’s pretty funny.
Yeah, you can take these, and there are other supplements that work. I’d love you to go to Gundry MD and buy my supplements, but in the book, but in the book, if I tell you, here’s a great supplement, I not only tell you my supplement but I tell you the dosage of the supplement, and you can go to Costco, or you can go to Vita-Dose, or you can go to Amazon. The point is, some of my critics say, the book is to sell supplements. The supplements are way at the end of the book, and supplements are supplements. They supplement what you’re doing the rest of the time with what goes through your mouth, and I’ve had so many people that say, all I’ve got to do is take 20 supplements, and I can get away with murder. I got news for you. You can’t. I see it over and over and over again.
Meredith:
Hmm, that’s so true, and I’m just curious, kind of as the final question, what’s a day in the life look like for you with the diet? Are you having three meals a day? Are you doing intermittent fasting? What kind of—what are you consuming?
Dr. Gundry:
I wrote about this in the book. From January through June, every year for the last ten years, during the week, I eat one meal a day. I fast 22 out of 24 hours. My meal is between six and eight o’clock at night, because quite frankly, that’s when I’m home with my wife. If I had it to do perfectly, I’d probably have that meal between 12 and two in the afternoon, but that’s impractical. On the weekends, I’ll have two meals a day. I do agree with Joseph Mercola that I think you need to break ketosis probably once a week.
Dr. Pompa:
I taught him that. I taught him that, by the way.
Dr. Gundry:
Good, yeah. It’s funny, because I’ve been doing that for years. Joe Mercola, he’ll take things to an extreme, and good for him. Somebody needs to do this, but also good for him, he’ll say, oops, I was wrong about this, and some people just don’t get it that you can be wrong in researching. I was wrong in a lot of things I said in my first book.
Dr. Pompa:
I love that about Joe. You’re right. He’ll just be like, okay, yeah, there’s a better way he does it. We were walking on a walk in Florida when we had that conversation, and he was asking me about things. He was like, I think you’re right, I’m going to try it, and I helped write, I think it was chapter 10 of his book, based on diet variation. Even seasonal variation is huge, and people don’t do it. It has a massive impact on our microbiome, so it sounds like you’re right in line with us on that, as a matter of fact.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so for instance, this weekend, I didn’t have breakfast, and I didn’t have lunch the entire weekend. I didn’t have breakfast this morning. I don’t eat breakfast. Breakfast is the stupidest meal of the day.
Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-.
Dr. Gundry:
It’s like, do you really think we crawled out of our cave and said, what’s for breakfast? We had to find breakfast. There was no storage system, and if we didn’t find breakfast until dinner, that was break fast. That was break fast. The French actually have no word for breakfast. Dejeuner was first meal, and it was lunch, and they had to invent petit dejeuner.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s an American thing, actually. The Italian culture doesn’t eat breakfast, either.
Dr. Gundry:
Have an espresso and go.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Done.
Dr. Gundry:
For tonight, I’m actually going to go home, and we’re going to have a huge mixing bowl of salad with a couple of avocados in it, some radicchio, some Belgium endive, some arugula. I try to get cruciferous vegetables in me daily, if not eating them with supplements. Usually, during the week, we tend to eat fairly close to a vegan diet, and then, on the weekends, we will tend to have wild fish or wild shellfish. I call myself a vegaquarian. I eat mostly vegetables and throw in a few seafood.
Dr. Pompa:
Sorry about that. The dogs, you know?
Dr. Gundry:
I have four dogs, so I understand.
Dr. Pompa:
One of the things I invite—that was the last question, and we’re over time. You’re an interesting guy. You do a lot of the same things we do. When you’re eating one or two meals a day, we would agree that most disease is the abundance, right? It’s eating too much protein and too much carbohydrate, and it’s so much easier not to fall into that when you’re eating one meal. To eat too much of anything becomes much harder when you’re eating one meal, that’s for sure.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, that’s very true, and I agree with Jason Fung, who I’ve gotten to know. In a way, he’s right, that it’s easier not to eat at all. Once you stop eating, it frees up a whole lot of time, and so I do not disagree with him.
Dr. Pompa:
We train our doctors on fasting. We couldn’t get the different conditions as well, our docs, if we didn’t utilize fasting, that’s for sure. Thank you so much, Steven. We appreciate you being on. It’s great information.
Dr. Gundry:
Thanks for having me on. We’ll keep spreading the word.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Pompa. Thank you, Dr. Gundry, for all that you’re doing, for getting this information out, and one last time, if you guys want to check out his book, you can go to drgundry.com and gundrymd.com and check out more of Dr. Gundry’s work. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Have a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.
