Top Foods You Should ALWAYS Have in Your Kitchen | Dr. Steven Gundry

What’s the one thing you do every day, most of us do this several times a day that impacts your health and longevity the most? If you said eat – you get a gold star!

Now why is eating so impactful? Food is information for your gut bacteria. It either feeds the good guys or the bad guys. With every bite, it can either harm your health or help your health…

In fact, I so believe in this, the principle Hippocrates said long ago: ‘let thy food by thy medicine and thy medicine by thy food.” That food and the foods to avoid are my go-to ‘prescription.’For healing my patients and in all my books, too.

So, today, it’s all about the essential and healthiest foods you need to feed your gut buddies so you can thrive!

I’ll talk about the 5 essential foods to always have in your kitchen for health, the best fermented foods to eat and also, reveal the truth behind big food’s misleading nutrition labels.
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Pre-order my newest book “Gut Check: Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health” here: https://www.amazon.com/Gut-Check-Microbiome-Transform-Emotional/dp/0062911775?&tag=dgpodcast.-20
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On this episode you’ll learn:
00:00 – The 5 essential foods I ALWAYS keep stocked in my kitchen to maintain my health goals – no matter how hectic my schedule gets (01:40)
01:53 – How to eat like the blue zones! (it’s simpler than you might think)
02:40 One of my best kept secrets to becoming and STAYING lean (it’s tasty, and easy to incorporate into any diet) (02:40)
04:40 The BEST food for memory and cognitive function (particularly if you’re 65+!)
07:30 – Why fat does NOT make you FAT! And the high-fat content food that can actually help you LOSE weight
12:3- Why you should eat chocolate EVERY single night – and the benefit from it!
34:16 – How to eat cheese and actually LOSE weight (yes, it’s possible!) (34:16)
45:30 How to read through the LIES printed on food labels (and how food companies get away with tricking us)

Dr. Gundry is the author of The Plant Paradox – A New York Times Bestselling book. Please subscribe to The Dr. Gundry Podcast to learn more about Polyphenols, Leaky Gut, Lectins, and other essential information.

– I know life can get pretty busy and a busy schedule can often lead to very poor food choices. That’s why I always keep these five essentials in stock. And you should too. First of all, always have some dark bitter greens and lectin-free vegetables in your refrigerator.

One of my favorite sayings is more bitter, more better. Interestingly enough, almost all long lived societies have preferred referred very bitter greens in their diet. Whether they’re dark green leaves like arugula or Swiss chard or bok choy or radicchio, which many people call that Italian red lettuce,

But is actually part of the chicory family. There are some great varieties of broccoli that are extremely bitter, like broccoli rabe or broccoli rabe. And you can find it usually right next to the broccoli in most grocery stores now. More bitter, more better.

The bitterness is a sign that there are lots of polyphenols in these products and get used to that bitterness. Seek it out, the bitterness is what you’re looking for. Also, one of my favorite sayings is, if you eat dark green, you will become lean. Why, because these polyphenols will uncouple your mitochondria.

And we now know that the polyphenols in these dark bitter vegetables feed friendly bacteria, that polyphenols are some of the favorite prebiotics that bacteria need. And the bacteria in turn will turn these polyphenols into absorbable compounds that will uncouple your mitochondria. So it’s always a great idea to keep these dark,

Bitter vegetables in your refrigerator. And the great news is a number of these, if you buy them whole and please buy them whole, will keep for very long time at cool temperatures. In fact, one of the reasons that traditional cultures eat cabbages, which are also quite bitter,

Is the cabbages will store literally forever through an entire winter. So any think of storage leaves like cabbages, like radicchio, like bok choy, those are the ones that’ll keep in your refrigerator and they’ll be ready at a moment’s notice when you come home and need something to eat.

Second is certain nuts should always be available to you in your pantry. Nuts are a great way to get healthy fats and to help you feel full. Now, pistachios are one of my favorite, and pistachios are the highest source of melatonin in a food that you can get.

And melatonin is not the sleep hormone. People who’ve read “Unlocking The Keto Code” know that melatonin is actually the essential antioxidant in your mitochondria that protect your mitochondria from damage. Melatonin is an incredibly important protector of your brain mitochondria. So have some pistachios, macadamia nuts. Now be careful with macadamia nuts.

They’re mostly monounsaturated fat. They also have a very cool Omega seven fat that’s really good for blood vessel health and omega five fat. That’s good from blood vessel health. But if you’re trying to maintain or lose weight, watch out from macadamia nuts. Walnuts, walnuts are a great source

Of a short chain omega three fat called alpha-linolenic acid. That is one of the best health promoters for uncoupling mitochondria that I’ve ever found. Study after study, particularly the PREDIMED study in Spain, showed that adding about a half a couple walnuts to your diet dramatically improved memory

In people 65 years of age or older. So my mix at my offices that every patient eats while they’re waiting to see me is walnuts, macadamia nuts and pistachios. Those are the top three, but there are others. Hazelnuts are great, pili nuts.

Many people think it may be the healthiest nut in the world. Check out episode 232 with Jason Thomas, The Pili Hunter, and see what we’re talking about. Now they’re great pre-party appetizers. This is the season where we’re always awash in parties and there are so many temptations. The problem is you’re gonna succumb

To those temptations if you arrive hungry and if there’s a drink in your hand. So what I do to prepare, and I actually did this last night, is I have a generous handful of my Gundry nut mix before we head to the party. I’m satiated. The alcohol’s not gonna be absorbed very quickly

’cause my stomach is full. And then I’m not that interested in what is on the appetizer platters. There’s some great nut butter alternatives. As many of you know, peanut butter is not a nut. Peanut butter comes from a peanut, which is a legume. They’re loaded with lectins.

The vast majority of us are sensitive to the peanut lectin. Almond butter is an okay alternative, but almonds have a lectin in their peel. There are several companies that now make peeled almond butter and that’s a go-to for many of my patients. But there are other, alibi more expensive butters.

Pistachio nut butter is great. Hazelnut butter is great. Pili nut butter is great. Tahini, not from a nut, from sesame seeds is great too if you’re looking for kind of that similar mouth feel as peanut butter. So get yourself some new spreads. Ditch the peanut butter and please,

If you’re gonna use almond butter, get the peeled almond butter that you can find in stores or on Amazon. Avocados, you gotta have avocados in your house because if there’s avocados in your house, there’ll be an avocado in your mouth. You should have an avocado every day.

Studies have shown that people who eat a avocado every day lose weight compared to people who don’t eat avocados. Studies have shown that avocados in a salad or mixed in with vegetables make you absorb more of the vitamins and nutrients and polyphenols in those food than if you didn’t have the avocado.

It’s loaded with monounsaturated healthy fats. Like oleic acid, which is the major fat in olive oil, loaded with antioxidants, vitamin C, vitamin K, and the B vitamins. There’s more potassium in an avocado than a banana. So if your doctor told you to get potassium from bananas,

Ditch the bananas and eat the avocado instead. Should you use avocado oil and ditch the avocados? Well, while avocado oil is a good high smoke cooking oil, it doesn’t have near the polyphenol content of olive oil. So eat your avocado, because it’ll also get you all that wonderful fiber

That your gut bacteria need. Guacamole, have some guacamole in the refrigerator. There are a number of companies that now make guacamole without tomatoes, which is not supposed to be in guacamole or use those avocados when they’re starting to get really ripe and make your own guacamole and use like Belgian endive

As your dipping chip for guacamole and you’ll get a win-win. Alright, MCT oil, it ought to be in all of our pantries. MCT oil, as you know, is medium chain triglyceride oil. You’re gonna get all the benefits of a ketogenic diet by using MCT oil without the hassle

Because MCT oil is rapidly absorbed through the wall of your gut, goes directly to your liver and makes ketones regardless of what else you are eating. So you don’t have to go through the trouble of eating a very high fat diet or a low carbohydrate diet or even doing long-term fasting

To get the benefits of MCT oil. You should also have extra virgin organic olive oil. And please buy it in small glass containers because once you open olive oil, it will start to go bad and you should look to use up this olive oil very quickly.

That’s why, as you know, my Gundry MD polyphenol rich olive oil is sold in small bottles so that you will use it up and it won’t go rancid. Sesame seed oil, get yourself some unsmoked, uncooked sesame seed oil, nonroasted sesame sea oil. We now have it available at Gundry MD.

It’s sourced from our same providers in Morocco that our olive oil is. It’s another great addition to your diet and put it in salad dressings, pour it on vegetables. It’ll add a great taste and it’s loaded with fighters against these LPSs that get into your bloodstream and cause high blood pressure.

Finally, dark chocolate. Have a collection of greater than 72% dark chocolate in your cabinet. Chocolate is loaded with polyphenols. Again, the higher the cacao content, the better it is for you. Have yourself one square a day. It’s perfect for dessert whether you want it or not. Look for Stevia sweetened chocolate

Like Lily’s, Costco now carries a big bag of Stevia sweetened chocolate chips by a company called Bake Believe. There are on the market allulose sweetened chocolate. I’ll mention one I have no relationship with. Gatsby chocolate is sweetened with Allulose and you can find it on Amazon. Check out my most recent episode

All about the amazing benefits of chocolate to learn more. Now, recently there’s a new study making the rounds, and this comes around every few years that there are levels of lead and levels of Cadmium in chocolate. And somehow this is exciting. New news, folks, we’ve known that there is lead and Cadmium

And chocolate ever since these levels have been measured. Do not let this fearmongering dissuade you from the benefits that you will derive by eating dark chocolate. Study after study after study of people who have dark chocolate cacao in their diets show improved brain health, improved heart health, improved vessel health.

So please don’t see this latest news about lead and Cadmium and chocolate dissuade you from having chocolate in your kitchen and enjoying it every night. Fermentation actually refers to the fact that most lower life forms like yeast and bacteria have to make energy by a process called glycolysis.

And we won’t take you back to high school biology, but essentially we take, they take sugar molecules, which are a source of carbon, and through a process called glycolysis, they make ATP. The energy currency. Glycolysis is actually a very inefficient process for making ATP.

And you and I don’t use glycolysis, we use mitochondria and the electron transport chain, but glycolysis is basically fermentation. And fermentation takes sugar and turns it into energy for the bacteria or the fungus or the mold or the yeast. And what’s left over is actually what are called postbiotics. And just to review,

Probiotics are friendly bacteria. Prebiotics are the foods that probiotics ferment, during the process of fermentation, you produce compounds that are called postbiotics. And if we had to do it all over again, we wouldn’t use these names, but sorry about that, we’re stuck with it. So vinegar, for instance, is a product

Of fermentation, for that matter, wine is a product of fermentation for that matter. Beer is a product of fermentation. And what’s fascinating is almost all ancient cultures preserved their foods or made their foods edible via the process of fermentation. So fermentation of foods have been practiced actually for past recorded history.

There’s evidence that the Egyptians were fermenting foods 10,000 years ago, really around the time beginning of agriculture. One of the reasons we think that fermentation happened was, number one, there was no storage system. There wasn’t refrigeration, there was no way to actually keep food fresh. And in the process of just storing food,

Fermentation was a natural process that would start regardless of what you expected to do. What’s interesting is many, many, many cultures actively used fermentation to make their food probably far more edible. And interestingly enough, as many of you know, fermentation in general breaks down lectins,

Believe it or not, a lot of bacteria love to eat lectins. They think they’re delicious and they will eat the lectins. For instance, in quinoa. Fun fact, the Incas always fermented quinoa before they ate it. They let it rot and then they cooked it. Now unfortunately, that’s not on the package directions.

Immemorial, beans were always soaked for a considerable period of time. And most people, if they bother to look, notice that if you soak your beans, foam will appear on the top of the water. And that foam is actually the carbon dioxide produced by the native bacteria on beans fermenting the bean.

And so traditionally, beans were diminished in their lectin content because they were soaked for a considerable period of time and onward and onward. So not only does fermentation really reduce lectins, but fermentation gives you postbiotics. And it’s the miracle of these postbiotics that I’ve mentioned in my last two books.

But now in “Gut Check”, which will be out in January, you really get to see how important these postbiotics that have occurred from fermentation really are. Among the main things that fermentation does, one of the main postbiotics is short chain fatty acids. Now many of you have heard me talk about butyrate.

One of the most important short chain fatty acids there is, and as you’ve heard about in my previous books, but you’re gonna see even more in Gut Check, butyrate is really the single most important short chain fatty acid for your health that you can imagine. Now we hopefully have bacteria

That can make butyrate out of fiber, but it gets much more complicated than that. And let me give you a study that I’ve mentioned before and I’ve mentioned it in “Unlocking the Keto Code”, husband and wife team of researchers at Stanford, The Sonenbergs, did a fantastic study with human volunteers

That was published last year. We’ve known for a very long time that fiber is really good for you, right? And fiber is prebiotics. And we’ve known for a very long time that our gut bacteria really, really, really like prebiotic fiber. And the thought was that our gut bacteria can take prebiotic fiber

And make all these wonderful postbiotics like butyrate. And if they do this, everything gets better and our immune system gets better, et cetera, et cetera. Not so fast, say the Sonenbergs. So they took human volunteers, half got a lot of soluble fiber, the other half got the same soluble fiber

But they were given fermented foods primarily in the form of yogurt or kombucha or kefir. And then they watched what happened to their gut microbiome diversity. Diversity means lots of different species. And as you’ll learn in gut check, the more diverse your microbiome, the more different members of that community,

The better your health. And they looked at the immune system, they looked at inflammation markers. Lo and behold, what was shocking was the folks who got the fiber alone actually didn’t improve their microbiome diversity, nor did it have much effect on the immune system, on inflammation. But the group that got the fiber

With the fermented foods had much improved gut microbiome diversity and the inflammatory markers went down. So what’s up with that? Well, it turns out in my research, yes, you want bacteria to be able to make butyrate, but what’s fascinating is many of the butyrate producing bacteria actually have to have precursors for butyrate

To manufacture butyrate, basically assembly line. And so one of the shocking things is that they need, for the most part, other short chain fatty acids to do the conversion. So they need like for instance, acetic acid or propionic acid acetate or propionate to make butyrate. And yeah, they need the fiber,

But they gotta have the precursors to assemble all the parts to make butyrate. And that explains why it was only the group that got the fermented foods that had these short chain fatty acids that then when they got the fiber, they can complete the manufacturing process. It’s also amazing in my studies

Of the longest living cultures of the world that almost all of these cultures have fermented foods in their diet. And some of them might surprise you. So let’s set the record straight on no-go fermented foods. Yogurt, now yogurt is a fermented food. The problem with American yogurt in general

Is that most of our cows make a protein called casein A1, which by itself can be lectin like compound, a very inflammatory compound. Now cows in France and Italy, goats and sheep and water buffalo have casein A2. So what I want you to do is try to avoid American cow milk yogurt.

There’s plenty of goat yogurt available. There’s sheep yogurt available, there’s coconut yogurt available. There’s even pili nut yogurt available called Lava. All of these are great options. The other problem with most yogurts in America is they are loaded with sugar. So you’ve gotta be a wise consumer and actually look for the amount

Of added sugar to the yogurts. So look for the unsweetened variety, and if you want them sweeter, just put some allulose in. And good news, allulose is a prebiotic sweetener that feeds good gut bacteria. Now the second non-starter is most kombucha. Now don’t get me wrong, kombucha is a phenomenal

Fermented food that has great postbiotics, but kombucha is tangy and Americans in general don’t like tangy things. So companies put a whole lot of sugar in so many of the popular kombuchas to cover up that tanginess. So please read the label carefully. There are a number of popular kombuchas

That have as much sugar as a soda, and that’s not what you’re looking for. Also, remember that sugar isn’t going to benefit your good bacteria at all, and it will only feed bad bacteria and yeast that you really don’t want. On the other hand, there are some kombuchas

That are low sugar and they are available, but you gotta read the label and just be careful of the amount of added sugar in these products. Now, sourdough bread, years ago when the Plant Paradox came out, I was invited on the Dr. Oz Show with one proviso.

Dr. Oz, who’s a friend of mine, said, “You are going to have to give me a bread that people can eat, otherwise I’m not having you on the show. True story. So I said, well, there is no safe bread, but if you’re going to eat bread, then sourdough bread would be the safest

Because it is a fermented bread. We have to realize that almost all breads traditionally were raised, were given heft by the addition of yeast and the yeast fermented the sugars, and also the lectins in bread. And that produced a even loaf. The Egyptians are the first credited with doing this.

On the other hand, almost all commercial breads in the United States no longer use yeast to make the bread rise. It’s too inefficient and it’s too unpredictable. That’s why you get big holes and little holes, you want even holes. And that’s not with yeast. So modern American bread doesn’t use yeast

To raise the bread. Now, traditionally, sourdough bread is made with a sourdough starter which uses these yeast and bacteria. But most sourdough bread in the United States, it says sourdough ’cause they use sourdough. But most of the bread was still unfermented. So buyer beware, sourdough bread in the United States

For the most part is not what you are looking for. Okay, so let’s get to the good stuff. ’cause there’s some easy to use, good stuff. Number one best fermented food that’s easy to find and use is vinegar. You gotta give the assembly line to make butyrate what it needs.

And vinegar supplies acetic acid, the short chain fatty acid that it needs. Now, if you want to deep dive about other videos, all about the benefits of vinegar, go to my YouTube channel and check out vinegars. Now, acetic acid is also a communication system between our gut bacteria and our mitochondria.

And acetic acid as well as butyric acid are one of the best ways to uncouple mitochondria. And once you uncouple your mitochondria, you get profoundly good health. Probiotics, even if they were in vinegar are long dead. But those dead probiotics also carry information. So for instance, apple cider vinegar with the mother,

The mother is actually all the dead bacteria and what’s left over of the polyphenols in apples. And those dead bacteria also carry information. And it’s a really exciting information that you’re gonna learn about in “Gut Check”. Dead bacteria tell tales. Now, vinegar is a great way to do this.

Vinegars make you actually uncouple your mitochondria to lose weight. And one of the miracles of weight loss with vinegars is this uncoupling effect. Now, I loved aged balsamic vinegar. It has multiple available polyphenols. It’s actually the richest source of resveratrol that you can get. I happen to have a brand that I recommend.

I have no relationship with them. They’re called Napa Valley Naturals. And you want the grand reserve, it’s really thick and you just need a teaspoon or a tablespoon to make my famous fake Coke. You use sparkling water. I prefer Sanpellegrino, I have no relationship with them. And you put in some balsamic vinegar,

Stir it around and presto chango, you have got a health enhancing compound that tastes really good and it tastes kinda like a fake Coke. Apple cider vinegar, champagne vinegar, red wine vinegar, sherry vinegar, knock your socks off. I’ve got probably eight different vinegars that we mix and match in our salads,

And it’s a really easy way to get these postbiotics that you need. Now here’s a shocker. My second best favorite way of getting these fermented postbiotics into you is raw cheese. Newsflash, raw cheese, what does raw cheese mean? Well, it turns out cheeses, particularly in Europe, do not require pasteurization

To make it into the United States. The bacteria and the yeast in milk actually impart great postbiotics in the process of making cheese. And there’s particularly some raw cheese bacteria that actually promote weight loss and surprise, surprise three of the blue zones that I’ve talked about before,

And you’ll learn more about in “Gut Check” three of the blue zones eat large amounts of raw sheep and goat cheeses as part of their diet. Now there’s also a incredibly interesting component in whole milk, which is called milk fat globulin membrane. And these membranes surround milk fat,

And they actually are one of the strongest mitochondrial and couplers known to mankind, and it’s in whole fat cheese. Wow, so you get a double benefit. Now here’s number three that is gonna shock you. And this is straight from long lived people. Most people probably don’t know that the longest life expectancy

In the world by country is in Andorra. Now Andorra is this little tiny country between Spain and France up in the Pyrenees mountains. And these guys are sheep herders and they eat sausage every day. In fact, a nearby town in France, Talus basically lives on sausage and Talus, despite living on sausage,

Has the lowest degree of heart disease in all of France. Despite having this massive high saturated fat diet. What gives, it turns out that traditionally sausages are cured, are aged by the addition of bacteria, and bacteria eat the sugar molecules in the meat. And they also, fun fact, eat Neu5Gc,

Which is in beef, lamb and pork, which as many of you have read, is a real mischievous molecule that really harms our health. But fermentation of meat, of sausages eliminates Neu5Gc and it also eliminates Neu5Gc in milk products. So strange as it may be, traditional sausage making is a fermented food

That has postbiotics, fermented things and improve your health. So if you want the world’s life expectancy, eat fermented sausages. Now, not so fast, most sausages in the United States are not fermented. You can’t have a Jimmy Dean’s breakfast sausage and get a benefit. Most sausages with an Italian name

Applied to them like pepperoni and salami are not fermented. So buyer beware. But you can find traditionally fermented sausages that are made in France or Portugal or Italy and they are findable and those are actually remarkably good for you. Who knew, so vinegar, aged raw cheeses or aged cheeses from Europe in general

And traditionally prepared sausages. One more last thing. Many of you know I have a very good friend, a three times James Beard Award-winning chef, chef Jimmy Schmidt and Jimmy Schmidt produces sausages and bratwurst. And lo and behold, Jimmy inoculates his sausages and bratwurst with bacteria, FDA approved, I may remind you.

And I was talking to him one day recently. I said, what the heck? How did you know to inoculate your sausages? And he says, are you kidding? That’s the only way you could ever make a sausage legally in Europe. So I’m just continuing a tradition.

So if a three times James Beard Award-winning chef knows what to do, I’m passing it on to you. Eat your fermented foods and buyer beware which ones to avoid. I wanna talk about three of the most misleading food labels out there and how to avoid getting tricked. First off, no added sugar. This may be one of my favorite ones. You see this on juices, dried fruits and a lot of other snacks. What they don’t want you to know

Is that this basically means that this product already has so much sugar in it, we didn’t need to add any more. So if you see no added sugar, your antenna radars ought to be blaring that this is a trick to make you eat huge sugar laden products.

So the other thing you wanna look for, so many labels now say added sugar, and you look at added sugar as what you actually think is in that product. In fact, the systems being manipulated to disguise all the other sugar that’s already there.

So sure if you see a product with a lot of added sugar, you wanna be aware that that’s probably not a product that you wanna use. But even if you see very little added sugar, that doesn’t mean you should go look for the real sugar content.

So how do you find the real sugar content? First of all, don’t look at total sugar. Look at total carbohydrates. That’d be one of the first things under the carbohydrate level. Right below that, you’ll see fiber, take the total carbohydrate number, minus the fiber that will actually tell you

The entire grams of sugar in that product. Now what does that mean? Well, one teaspoon of table sugar has four grams of sugar. So fun thing to do is take that total carbohydrates minus the fiber, take that number in grams of sugar, divide it by four, and that’ll tell you the teaspoon

Of sugar in that serving size. Now remember, companies are very clever, they reduce the serving size to get you a number that you’ll feel pretty good about. The other thing companies have done because of labeling laws is if there is a half a gram of trans fat per serving,

You don’t have to list trans fats on a label. So many companies will take the serving size, reduce it to just the level where they no longer have to show you trans fats on a label. But nobody, quite frankly, is going to eat the serving size

Because in each package there may be two, three, four, five servings in a package. And it’s incredibly unusual for human behavior to not completely eat the entire package. So buyer beware. Let me give you an example. We had the former head of the FDA on our podcast

Of last year uses the example of a bagel. So a bagel usually has around 330 calories. And if you look at the label, it will say zero sugar. But in fact, if you do this math, you’ll find that the total carbohydrates of the bagel is about 33 grams of carbohydrates and zero fiber.

So that means 33 grams divided by four, that’s about eight teaspoons in that no sugar bagel. And as we’ve talked about on other podcasts, when you finely rind up grain products, you actually make the sugar more accessible for absorption than plain table sugar. In fact, that’s why bread has a glycemic index

Of 100 and table sugar, which is half fructose and half glucose by the way, it’s sucrose, has a glycemic index of 85. You’re actually getting more sugar in from a piece of bread than sugar. Wow, and you can’t even taste the sugar in the bread. So buyer beware.

Now, another one of my favorites is organic free range or cage free eggs. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Wrong, first of all, free range and cage free chickens merely describes that the chickens don’t have to be in a cage. It doesn’t mean they’re allowed to go outside. Commercial chicken warehouses can contain

Up to 100,000 birds in a warehouse jammed so close together that they actually support their own weight. Because these chickens have such osteoporosis in their legs that fully 10 to 20% of chickens that are sold for frying chickens actually have broken legs because they couldn’t support their own weight.

And by the way, there’s some fascinating evidence that it’s the lectins in the corn and soybeans that are fed these chickens that are the problem. So a free range chicken by law can be kept indoors for its entire life as long as you open the door to this warehouse

For five minutes every 24 hours. And the chicken has the potential to go outside to a three yard by three yard by three yard patch of dirt or grass. And quite frankly, those 100,000 chickens aren’t gonna get through that door in five minutes. So, but that’s the definition of a free range chicken.

Chickens are fed corn and soybeans. They are full of lectins. And remember, you are what you eat, but you are the thing you’re eating it. And that’s why so many times you’ll see organic cage-free eggs that are quite frankly pale yellow in the yolk. They have absolutely no of the vitamins and polyphenols

And beta carotenes that a chicken would normally eat when eating bugs out the field. And by the way, you can’t certify that the bugs that the chicken should be eating are organic because you didn’t test all those bugs. So look for pastured chickens. If you can’t find pastured chicken eggs,

Your second best choice is omega three eggs. Why, because the chickens are fed either flax seeds or algae or both, and they have omega three fats in their yolks. Those omega three fats are alpha linolenic acid. And if you looked at my last book

And read it, you’ll notice that alpha linolenic acid, ALA, is actually the one fat that made the difference in the famous Lyon Heart Diet study in preventing coronary artery disease. So imagine that you’re going to get a nice dose of ALA every time you have an omega three egg or a algae-based egg.

And there’s several good manufacturers of algae-based eggs. With that in mind, eat the yolks and give the whites to your dog. Your dog is gonna love it. You are gonna get all the benefit of the Alpha-linolenic acid, and you’ll also get a healthy dose of choline for your brain simultaneously.

Okay, number three, light or diet products. Now almost all of these products with this label contain artificial sweeteners like saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, which are practically poisonous. You might know them better by their brand name, Sweet and Low, Equal and Splenda. The problem with these sweeteners is that they actually kill gut bacteria.

So imagine that you’re having a light or a low fat, low sugar yogurt and you’re thinking, hey, this is great. I’m gonna get all these wonderful healthy probiotics from my yogurt. But in fact, as a study from Duke University in 2007 showed that one packet of Splenda, sucralose,

Can kill off 50% of your gut bacteria. So why would you eat a potentially healthy, low fat, low sugar yogurt to get the probiotics when in fact the sucralose in that product is gonna kill whatever you swallow and half of your gut buddies simultaneously talk about a bad idea.

When you kill off your gut bacteria, remember you’re going to drop more and more bad bacteria to replace them. That’s going to cause more leaky gut and you’re going to gain weight due to the inflammation that follows leaky gut. Now, if a diet food is sweetener, it’s often loaded with fat

And artificial flavors instead of healthy fat. One more interesting thing that I’ve written about in the past, but I think it bears repeat. Anytime you have a fruit in a yogurt or you even take one of these low calorie yogurts and you add some blueberries or you add some blackberries, you should know

That that milk product will actually bind to the polyphenols in the fruit that are beneficial to you, and you’ll get absolutely no benefit from those polyphenols. And this has been shown in multiple human studies where people were given blueberries, for instance, or blueberries mixed with yogurt.

And lo and behold, if you look at their blood levels of polyphenols and those metabolites for one hour, three hours and six hours after they ate them, you’ll find that in fact, these polyphenol metabolites went up in the blood of volunteers who ate the blueberries. But when the blueberries were mixed with yogurt

Or with a milk-based smoothie, there was no benefit. There were no uptake of these polyphenol ingredients. So just because it says low fat or low calorie and it’s got fruit and probiotics, doesn’t mean that you’re actually gonna get the benefit that you think you are getting.

More amazing episodes just like this one, watch now. Studies have shown that adding an avocado a day to human volunteers improve weight loss as opposed to not having that avocado. Just remember, eating fat does not make you fat.