The Top Foods You Should Avoid [MASTERCLASS] EP 1360

Today’s Masterclass episode is all about the common foods that you should start avoiding today! Three experts walk us through the lies we’ve been told by the food industry and the best foods that support a healthy mind & body. In this episode,Dave Asprey, entrepreneur and author, shares ways to make your body better at making energy and the best foods to eat before you start a fast. Dr. Steven Gundry, physician and author, tells us the common vegetables you should start to avoid and better ways to prepare foods to optimize your health. Vani Hari, blogger, author and activist, explains why food is healthier in Europe and shines a light on the lies you’ve been told by the food industry. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1360Full Episodes:Dave Asprey: https://link.chtbl.com/1084-podDr. Steven Gundry https://link.chtbl.com/521-podVani Hari: https://link.chtbl.com/757-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Asprey?

  The number one thing that is wrong with the American diet is seed oils. These are omega six oils. These are the oils that drive insulin resistance. And when you control insulin and you control autophagy, something very interesting anti-aging wise happens. And it's that.

• 0:16Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:40Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

• 0:58Lewis Howes?

  What do you think is the worst food to eat before you start fasting? Like, what's the worst thing you could do where it's kind of, doesn't matter that you fasted because you just had this, this, and this, you know, 16 hours ago?

• 1:11Dave Asprey?

  A bunch of fried stuff, especially like french fries.

• 1:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Dave Asprey?

  From a restaurant, especially because they use such bad oils. And what you find from fasting is that sometimes it's effortless and sometimes you're just have gnawing hunger. And the gnawing hunger, it's your fault. It's what you ate before the fast.

• 1:31Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:31Dave Asprey?

  So in Fast This Way, I teach about these six big categories of food that are likely to cause cravings for you. And they don't all cause the same intensive cravings, but these are foods that aren't as good as we think they are. Because we have, anything you're going to eat has three things in it. And most nutritionists only look at two. I'm not picking on nutritionists specifically, dietitians are even worse. I'll pick on them. These are guys who feed you Jell-O with NutraSweet in the hospital. But. There's calories in food and some types of of popular wisdom say, well, eat food with less calories. Guys, calories are energy. Energy is what you want. And to say that you are somehow going to feel really good on a low calorie diet, it does not work. As a 300 pound guy who's lost

• 2:14Dave Asprey?

  way more than 100 pounds, let's say I'm a 200 pound guy now, but you you go low calorie, you lose 20 pounds, gain 30, lose 30, gain 40. It does not work. It makes you miserable and it makes you just, just cranky.

• 2:26Lewis Howes?

  So what's the solution? What's the solution then?

• 2:29Dave Asprey?

  Well, the solution is you actually eat enough calories and you eat the right kinds of calories. So well, let's assume your food has some energy in it. The second thing food has, it has nutrients. So it has vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. This is good. Now, most of the time we stop there and say, okay, you should eat more of this because it has, for some reason, people say less calories and other people say more nutrients. But the third bucket is what matters. The third bucket is anti nutrients or toxins. And it's not like any food is is perfect, but some have more or less calories, some have more or less nutrients, and some have more or less anti nutrients. And if you pretend like they don't exist, which is how most nutritional stuff is written, is eat this because it's packed with this, ignoring the fact that you could literally have a bowl of cyanide. And if you put some

• 3:12Dave Asprey?

  vitamins in it, they say, well, it's low calorie, it's high in vitamins, you should eat that. And so I teach people in fast this way, look, here's the things to look for. If you eat that, you're probably going to have a miserable fast with low energy cravings and be cold. But if you don't eat that, you're going to have a much easier fast. And then you start to realize, wait a minute, maybe I'm going to choose foods that don't make me hungry as soon as I finish eating them. And if you master that, even when you're not intermittent fasting, you're going to have lunch. And instead of wanting a snack at two, I'm actually full until dinner. I just don't want to eat. So I don't think about eating. I don't reach for the cookies.

• 3:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Dave Asprey?

  So instead of willpower, it's just biology. It's so much easier that way.

• 3:50Lewis Howes?

  What would you say would be the top three foods, if you could only have three, that you would eat before a fast, whether 16 hour or 24 hour?

• 3:59Dave Asprey?

  It would be definitely grass fed steak. There is nothing more satiating than animal fats or butter. This stuff, it's full of nutrients, as long as it's grass fed. If it's industrial, it'll actually give you cravings. It's not good to eat industrially raised animals. So the idea that meat is good or bad, you got to know what meat, how is the animal treated? And all that, it matters. I wish that it didn't matter. I wish you could just eat gravel, but it doesn't work. So this is something that is the most satiating. Something with a lot of soluble fiber in it. You can do broccoli if you want to. You can do some, some vegetables, preferably cooked. Not all vegetables are going to have the same effect on you. So I talk about things like how the nightshade family of vegetables, which have been a core part of the bulletproof diet. Like, guys, watch out for that. If you eat bell

• 4:44Dave Asprey?

  peppers, you're probably going to feel different than if you eat cabbage. In fact, you'll feel very different. And when I say that, most people go, oh, wait, I guess that might be true, but we've just never thought about it.

• 4:54Lewis Howes?

  Different, different in a not feeling as good with the nightshades?

• 4:58Dave Asprey?

  Bell peppers are in the deadly nightshade family. They're clearly not deadly, but they cause inflammation in many people. But in others, they handle it pretty well.

• 5:06Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:06Dave Asprey?

  So I'm like, watch out for that. But for me, I would say, give me some vegetables, give me some steak. And then the other thing that's going to be really good is anything with fat, dark chocolate, guacamole, things like that. A salad with a really heavy dressing with real olive oil, not the fake stuff, and with some extra MCT oil in it and some extra avocados on top. So give me the good, undamaged fats, not a lot of seed oils. Give me some protein and give me some vegetables. You do that and you can cruise all day long. But if you say, oh, instead, I'm going to insert some kind of fancy raw kale salad, kale gives a lot of people cravings. In fact, it's not very good for you at all. In fact,

• 5:48Dave Asprey?

  have you ever, you know, huge kale salad and then being, I'm so full, I'm so satisfied, I'm just bursting with energy, I'm not going to be hungry for four hours?

• 5:55Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 5:56Dave Asprey?

  Even if you're covered in bacon, it still doesn't work. Kale has stuff in it that pisses your body off. It really does. And it's just how it is. It doesn't taste that good either. But even if you like the taste of it, it's not particularly a strong health food.

• 6:09Lewis Howes?

  There you go. And how does, from all the research that you've done, obviously you've tested this for 10 years personally, but from the research and the science, how does fasting the right way play a role in anti-aging in your life and, and other people's lives?

• 6:26Dave Asprey?

  The number one thing fasting or intermittent fasting regularly will do, and remember, it doesn't have to be a super long one, 14 hours can start, 16 hours is good. We're not talking heavy duty, you know, living in a cave kind of stuff. And that will stop you from having insulin resistance. When you have insulin resistance, it means that insulin levels go up and your body can't hear them, so they go up higher. When your insulin is higher, your all cause mortality goes up. In other words, your chances of dying from every disease you can think of happens. What insulin resistance means is that when there's energy in your body, your cells are weak enough that they can't make good use of the energy. And fasting fixes that problem. When sugar goes up in the body, it forms something called advanced glycation end products. It basically cooks your tissues the way onions brown in a pan.

• 7:11Dave Asprey?

  And we know this from 30 years of anti-aging research about the effect of excess insulin and sugar in the body. Fasting will fix that. But on top of it, there's something called autophagy, which is a core part of the recommendations I make, which is do whatever it takes to cause your body to turn its protein digestion mechanisms back on you. Because if it's not busy eating steak and eggs or tofu, if that's what you're into, it'll turn around and go, oh, there's some extra debris, some junk inside the cells, outside the cells, I can clean that up. And if you go a little bit longer, it says, you know what? I've got enough extra enzyme activity here. I think I will take out the weak mitochondria, these little power plant generators. I'll take out the weak ones and replace them with young, strong ones.

• 7:55Dave Asprey?

  And you start upgrading yourself internally because the stuff that would have gone into digesting the food you eat every two hours, because that's what someone told you to do in the seventies. Instead of doing that, you're eating the stuff in your body that makes you old. And when you control insulin and you control autophagy, something very interesting anti-aging wise happens. And it's that you actually have younger and more abundant stem cells in your body. So intermittent fasting has proven to increase stem cells, increases testosterone, human growth hormone, and a huge swath of anti-aging substances in the body. And like, it's free.

• 8:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Dave Asprey?

  It costs less than eating breakfast.

• 8:34Lewis Howes?

  And what's some of the new research about stem cells or the new developments that have excited you that everyone should know about?

• 8:42Dave Asprey?

  Well, I've been pretty public about doing a lot of stem cells. I've had my bone marrow taken out twice and I've had-

• 8:48Lewis Howes?

  You've been trying to convince me to do this for a while. I've been considering it. I still, I still didn't consider more.

• 8:55Dave Asprey?

  It'll change your life. Anyone with old injuries like that, I have just no bodily pain and you, you get younger and there's really intriguing new research about stem cells making brains work better, especially if you've had a traumatic brain injury, which I have had. And so you, you just get younger and I can't tell you that it was stem cells alone that did this. I live, you know, a bulletproof life and all that, but I recently measured my brain's response time. This is an automatic response time. How quickly does the brain respond when a light or a sound comes on? So this isn't a conscious thing. And my response time is the average response time for a 20 year old. The response time goes down with, or goes up with age. So you get slower and slower as you age. So I have

• 9:38Dave Asprey?

  a 20 year olds ability to respond to the environment around me, which is pretty remarkable. And I truly think that the stem cells helped with that. There's also things like arterial flexibility where I have the average flexible arteries of a 24 year old when you just compare and I'm twice as old as that Louis. So something is working. I think stem cells are a core part of the anti-aging thing. What's happening now though, is we're able to pull things that are like stem cells out of the blood instead of out of the marrow. And that's a lot less painful. And then-

• 10:10Lewis Howes?

  I'm more open to that than the whole sucking out of my bones. Yeah. It's spinning it up.

• 10:15Dave Asprey?

  You're asleep when you're, actually I was awake one time when they did it. I was asleep the second time.

• 10:18Lewis Howes?

  So wait, what's this new, what's this new blood drawing stem cell that you're talking about?

• 10:23Dave Asprey?

  It's still getting regulatory approval, but it's called a very small stem-like cells. But I'll show you the video sometime and that I'm laying on the table and the doctor has this thing and he hammers it with a hammer-

• 10:35Lewis Howes?

  Oh no, I can't.

• 10:36Dave Asprey?

  And it goes, every time I see that video, it's like, it's the worst thing ever.

• 10:42Lewis Howes?

  Man, yeah, you go through a lot of pain to have, you know,

• 10:46Dave Asprey?

  It's really weird, Louis. It's almost like hunger. Like you can look at something as pain or just weird. And when I really dug into it, like there is the strangest feeling in my skeleton, but it wasn't pain. It was just so outside the universe of anything you would ever or should ever feel that it, your body could say it's pain. Or it could just be like,

• 11:10Lewis Howes?

  That's different. That's weird.

• 11:12Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. So I, I can say I've, I've been through much more painful things than that. But the idea that, that we could have younger and more stem cells by skipping breakfast is a little bit less money and time than that. And that's why I think it's such an important practice.

• 11:29Lewis Howes?

  And what's this, uh, what's this blood, uh, stem cell process then? It's not, it's not available yet, but have you tested it? What have you gained?

• 11:37Dave Asprey?

  There's a very few doctors who are, are offering it today. And I think it's in a bit of a gray zone from a regulatory perspective. So,

• 11:45Lewis Howes?

  Have you tried it?

• 11:45Dave Asprey?

  Very small stem like cells. Of course I've tried it.

• 11:48Lewis Howes?

  How do you, how do you feel about it?

• 11:51Dave Asprey?

  Well, I think it's hard to say to compare A versus B. There's a lot more studies on getting stem cells from your fat or your marrow. There's also people getting stem cells from like placental cords and umbilical cords or placenta's and umbilical cords.

• 12:06Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 12:08Dave Asprey?

  There, um, I have mixed feelings about that because if you're getting stem cells from eight different people and like, how, how tested was that? And that makes all of my friends who do stem cells that way irritated that I would question it. Maybe it's perfectly good. I know a lot of people do it and love it. I, I just, in my mind, I'm like, what? Do we test for every little virus and every little bacteria? And I, I kind of like the idea of growing my own stem cells, but that's not legal in the U S anymore. It was for a while and that was the most effective. So it's crazy. It's coming down. We're, we're like year one of, of an evolution that's happening, kind of like cell phones. The, the first cell phone is some, some guy in L A in his Mercedes 300 D convertible, the whole trunk is his cell phone.

• 12:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:51Dave Asprey?

  And it was like, you know, $25 a minute. Uh, but with stem cells, it's come down in price a lot. The efficacy is way higher. And it's getting better. It works better and better every year, but it still takes a doctor a lot of time to get the needles in all the right places and understand your joints and. But man, it's, you know, a couple hours of relatively minor discomfort, but then you're better for decades. It's a really big deal, Louis. And I would tell you, if you fast before you do that procedure, you have less insulin resistance, you have a working metabolism, everything you can do in a hospital, whether it's a surgery, whether you're getting a car accident, whatever, everything goes better if you just have a strong metabolism. And so like, what do

• 13:36Dave Asprey?

  we all need right now? We want more resilience. Resilience comes from biology. The people who are best at taking fat or sugar plus air, combining them and getting abundant energy, those are the people who live the longest, have the best life, they have more opportunity for greatness because they simply have more electrons bouncing around in their heads to do stuff with. And it could power your immune system, it could power whatever you're doing in the world. But that's the core of everything I've ever done with bulletproof, with all the content. How do you make yourself better at making energy? And it turns out sometimes not eating is part of the equation.

• 14:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And I'm curious, you know, everyone swears by the lifestyle slash diet that they live by that works for them. People who are vegan swear by it. And the ones who are super healthy have lots of energy, the ones who are vegetarian.

• 14:31Dave Asprey?

  I feel like vegans just swear, they don't even swear by their diet. Is that just me?

• 14:35Lewis Howes?

  Who does? Yeah. I mean, they swear by lots of things.

• 14:38Dave Asprey?

  Sorry, vegans, I'm just teasing you guys.

• 14:39Lewis Howes?

  That the, you know, the vegetarian diet, people who live a vegetarian lifestyle for a long time say that this is the best for them. People are carnivore diet, say it's the best for them. Keto. Is there a worst type of diet, even though some of these things might work extremely well for particular body types? What, what is?

• 14:57Dave Asprey?

  The worst type of diet is the standard American diet. And there's three things in it that are just horribly destructive. The first one is, what?

• 15:06Lewis Howes?

  Sugar.

• 15:06Dave Asprey?

  Sugar. Sugar's there, but I don't think it's as destructive as the other two.

• 15:10Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 15:11Dave Asprey?

  So I'll give an order from the worst to the, the best of the worst. Right? So the number one thing that is wrong with the American diet is seed oils. These are omega six oils. And canola, corn, soybean, safflower, sunflower, all this stuff that's in everything at the restaurant and most packaged foods at the grocery store unless you buy from the right company. It's full of these oils. These are the oils that drive insulin resistance. Your body takes these oils and they're all plant-based oils. And it says, hmm, I'm going to try to construct the outer layer of my mitochondria in my cells, these little batteries, but I have the wrong ingredients. So I'm going to make subpar batteries.

• 15:51Dave Asprey?

  Like if you go to the knockoff store and you buy the cheap batteries and it lasts a third as long as the good ones. That's what happens when you eat a lot of seed oils. Americans have about 40 times more of that oil in their systems than they should, and it gets built into your tissues. And that makes you weak, is just not good. Seed oils. Seed oils are bad. Second thing is industrially raised meat. It's full of xenoestrogens. These are estrogens that make animals fat on one-third less calories than normal.

• 16:22Dave Asprey?

  It's also full of antibiotics and it's destroying the soil of the planet right now. It also is depleting farmland. When we take and we grow corn and soy and grain, and we don't actually put the animal poop back into the soil the way we do on my farm. What we're doing is we're sucking all the nutrients out of the soil and we're creating a very, very big catastrophe. 60 years from now, we'll be out of topsoil because we stopped having animals walk around and poop on it the way it works when you're doing a regenerative agriculture kind of thing. But worst of all, you eat industrial animals, they're also full of cortisol. And so you do this, they mess up your gut bacteria and they're full of glyphosate

• 17:03Dave Asprey?

  because it was on the feed and glyphosate disrupts your gut bacteria, your nervous system activity and is tied to cancer. So we're getting bad oils. Oh, and those animals, because they ate corn and soy, they're full of bad oils too. So now you're like, man, the steak tasted good. And I had that nice salad dressing that came out of a bottle that was full of crap oils. And you think you're being healthy, but you're completely wrecking things. And this is some of the stuff that I did when I was heavy, right? And then the third thing would be sugar, right? You just, if you have a ton of sugar, it's directly harmful. If you do the stuff I'm talking about, you can probably have a few grams of sugar and you won't notice, like your body can handle it just fine. So sugar is not good for you and it is addictive, but it is way better to eat sugar than it is to eat corn oil.

• 17:48Dave Asprey?

  But don't eat either one.

• 17:49Lewis Howes?

  Don't eat either one. Yeah. Have sugar every once in a while.

• 17:52Dave Asprey?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Lewis Howes?

  But don't eat oil and.

• 17:54Dave Asprey?

  Yeah. Like if, if someone said, here's a birthday cake, you know, it's gluten free. I don't do gluten.

• 18:01Dave Asprey?

  And they said, I made it with canola oil. I'd just be like, no. Right. But if they said, I made it with sugar and butter, I'd be like, all right, I'm gonna have some. And it's that, the sugar, okay, your body can process that and it's gone. The other stuff, it sticks and it gets in there and you don't want to do it. So the worst diet of all is that one with lots of fried stuff and bad oils. But the second worst diet for people who think they're being healthy was, this isn't going to be popular, but it is the vegan diet.

• 18:23Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 18:25Dave Asprey?

  There's two things. Okay. I was a devout raw vegan. Okay. I did this for more than a year. I mean, I have bowls as big as my head full of kale and blended and mashed and sprouted. And I mean, I'm good with.

• 18:36Lewis Howes?

  Rice and beans and everything. Yeah.

• 18:38Dave Asprey?

  Yeah, all that stuff. So what happens there is your body doesn't get the essential fats that it needs. We are not made out of plant oils. And I have, I have in my books, I talk about the studies that show when you change the type of oil you eat, it changes what your body is made of. So when you go on a plant-based diet, you're getting two things. You're getting plant-based oils, which are not very compatible with you. Vegans will get mad at me and say, Dave, we can convert plant omega threes to the good ones. Yes, it takes 45 grams of bad omega threes to make one gram of the good ones, if your body can do that, which it won't be able to do because you're on a plant-based diet. And then you get tons of these anti-nutrients from plants that cause cravings. When I was a raw vegan, I was always hungry.

• 19:24Dave Asprey?

  And I think that that's a very common occurrence. And I would say, well, that's weird. I'm going to put more coconut oil or eat more, you know, fresh.

• 19:32Lewis Howes?

  Avocado or something.

• 19:33Dave Asprey?

  All these things. Avocados. It didn't matter. It's because plants don't want you to eat them and they cover themselves in defense systems that cause cravings. So I talk about the five big categories of things that are causing problems with us right now. And many plants that are common on a plant-based diet are not very compatible with humans. Like, oh, they have these vitamins. Yeah. They also stick to the stuff that lines the cartilage in your joints and gives you joint pain. Or they inhibit your ability to absorb zinc and magnesium and iron and things like that. And so what happens is you tell yourself you're doing this to be nice to the animals. But what you're doing is you're making sure that the animals will go extinct because if everyone was vegan, we'd have no animals. And then two generations later, we'd all be extinct

• 20:15Dave Asprey?

  because we'd have no animals to make soil. Because you can't grow carrots without animal poop at the end of the day. You can do it for 20 years. You can do it for 30 years, but eventually you have to build that soil back up.

• 20:28Lewis Howes?

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• 21:42Dave Asprey?

  So what's happening on a plant-based diet is the wrong fats and lots of anti-nutrients. And that combination is kryptonite for people. And I've had tens of thousands of former vegans go bulletproof. And part of the reason I made the bulletproof diet was because I did harm to myself, including additional food allergies and worse hypothyroidism as a result of being vegan. And in terms of animal cruelty, I calculated deaths per calorie from

• 22:09Dave Asprey?

  Eating a pound of grass fed steak every day, which is a lot. You don't need to do that unless you're on the carnivore side of things, which there's an argument for that. But if you do that and the cow is grass fed and local, unless the cow stepped on a frog, you kill less than one animal per year in all of your food. But if you eat boxes of processed soy nuggets, you disrupted the lives of whatever was going to live on that land and whatever the tractors killed. And so the number of deaths per calorie is way higher for any grain product and any, anything other than basically fresh picked vegetables because of habitat destruction and tractor kills. And like, I asked a monk this in Tibet. I'm not dogmatic, but I want

• 22:51Dave Asprey?

  to do what works. So I like to minimize suffering, buy from a local farmer, eat less meat, but make it grass fed and eat very good fats. And if you do that, you'll never have a craving during the fast. And if you don't believe anything I say, you can still be plant based or vegan and you can still be standard American diet. Dave, I like my industrial animals, you know, go screw yourself. Just do intermittent fasting and you'll still improve. It works for any diet out there. And I'm happy to share the knowledge and I've for sure moved a lot of, a lot of information. There's 3000 blog posts and stuff like that. But what I want people to do is figure out the foods that are compatible with your biology. And if you're one of the small percentage of people who's like, you know what? A vegetarian works for me. I know people, it really does. They eat some eggs,

• 23:35Dave Asprey?

  they eat some cheese, they eat a substantial amount of butter and magically that really works for them. And that's okay. But if it doesn't work for you, don't tell yourself it's supposed to work. So you'll do it even more. That's the mistake that I made.

• 23:47Lewis Howes?

  Are you friends with some vegans that you've had these conversations with or like Rich Roll or, you know, anyone like that?

• 23:54Dave Asprey?

  I haven't had Rich on the show, but I would totally do that. And I've certainly had conversations with vegans a lot. And there's, there's kind of two mindsets there. One of them says you're doing it for your health. Right? The evidence does not support that. And here's what's really going on, and it's intimately tied to fasting. There's a compound in the body called mTOR, and you've probably talked about it on the show before. mTOR is a signaling molecule that says grow, says, you know, build muscle, you know, build tissue. And when you eat protein, a lot of protein, plant, plant-based will raise it, but animal-based raises it much more. So when mTOR goes up, you put on muscle. But chronic elevation of mTOR equals cancer.

• 24:39Dave Asprey?

  Right? So that's a bit of a problem. So one solution say, well, I'm going to go plant-based and low protein. The problem with that is that mTOR gets suppressed, but it never goes up. So you get frailty. Like, these are the people who break their hips. These people have the vegan-sized pants for men. They're like little stick legs. Right? You don't, you don't want to be there. So what's the solution? Well, don't eat for a while, then work out, and then eat. And what's neat is that mTOR is like a spring. You can push it down. And when it's down, it's good, except if it never goes up, it's not good. So when you push it down, there's three things that we know of that suppress mTOR.

• 25:19Dave Asprey?

  And this is how you build muscle and how you account for the difference in outcomes from vegans versus carnivores, let's say. So to suppress mTOR, fasting does it, exercise does it, and coffee does it. So what you do is eat dinner and stop eating around six. Don't eat after dinner. So you got four hours of fasting before bedtime. You sleep for eight hours, you just fasted for 12 hours. Wait another four hours. There, you fasted 16 hours, you had a late breakfast. But before you eat, do some squats. Go lift. I mean, it can be a very quick workout, just something heavy. And then you eat. And because all three of those things push the mTOR down, as soon as you eat some protein, the body says, "Wahoo!", and it spikes the mTOR much higher. And then the exercise has a bigger impact on your tissues.

• 26:03Dave Asprey?

  So you got more exercise benefits in less time. Your mTOR was briefly elevated because you only ate once that day or twice that day. And then it goes back down and it stays down. People feel good on a vegan diet because they suppress mTOR, which is driving chronic inflammation. Problem is you do that forever, you'd never get the muscles and the growth, and then you get the anti-nutrients and you get the bad fats. So it's okay to be vegan for a week. It's probably good for you. But then at the end of that week, maybe you should go carnivore. So cycles are good. And I will tell you, being all keto all the time is terrible for you. Being all vegan all the time is terrible for you. And I've done both. And that's why intermittent fasting is so awesome, because you can eat both vegetables. You can even have white rice. You can have carbs. You don't have to be in keto and ketosis and all that to do fasting. It's cycling in and out. So be vegan for a day, but just don't be vegan for a year and you'll be fine.

• 26:51Lewis Howes?

  What are the main plants that we should never be eating then?

• 26:53Steven Gundry?

  Okay, real quick. Up until 10,000 years ago, we lived primarily on the leaves of trees and we ate tubers that grew in the ground, like a sweet potato, a yam.

• 27:06Lewis Howes?

  Love those.

• 27:07Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, they're actually, they're pretty darn good for you. You were actually designed to eat them. And 12,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, we switched over to things that we had never eaten before. And those were the grains of grasses and beans. Now, the reason we'd never eaten them before is number one, we didn't need to. There's never been a documentation of an ape eating grass or grains. Beans are so lethal that five raw kidney beans will kill a human being in five minutes by coagulating their blood.

• 27:44Lewis Howes?

  What?

• 27:45Steven Gundry?

  Five raw kidney beans.

• 27:46Lewis Howes?

  Raw kidney beans.

• 27:47Steven Gundry?

  In fact, you know, most people have heard of the poison ricin, the white powder you send to your elected official. Lots on the way to Washington. But that's another subject. So ricin is the lectin of the castor bean. And we'll talk about lectins next. A lectin is the plant defense system. These are proteins that are designed to basically kill us in one way or another. And so ricin, so powerful that about four molecules of ricin will kill a human being instantaneously.

• 28:21Steven Gundry?

  There's a great study that was written up in one of the journals about a few years ago, they decided to have a healthy eating day in Boston. Yeah. And they served the kids beans. Mmm. And, cause it's so healthy. Right. Part of the blue zone. Yes. And they had thirty or forty admissions to the hospital. No way. With severe diarrhea, hypotension. And it turns out that it was all the fact that the beans were undercooked. And beans are a plant baby and we're not supposed to eat those. And so. No beans? No beans. Zero beans? Unless you use a pressure. Pinto black beans.

• 29:05Steven Gundry?

  None of that, we shouldn't be eating it. Shouldn't be eating, you weren't designed to eat it. You have no defense system against it. If you pressure cook, pressure cook it, it's fine. Pressure cook it, what does that even mean? Put it in a pressure cooker. Pressure cooker. The modern pressure cooker is as easy as a rice cooker. Got it. It's one touch, it's not your grandmother's pressure cooker that blew up in the kitchen and. So then it's okay to eat? Yeah, so you can pressure cook beans. Now, the other thing, we weren't designed to eat grains. Now, just a quick question before you start there, how much of it can we eat? Does it matter once it's pressure cooked? Obviously, everything in moderation, but I mean. Yeah, well, like I was presenting. Twenty beans are gonna kill me or what? No, if you pressure cook them, they're fine. So good, okay. And we talk about how to do this in the Plant Paradox. Got it, cool.

• 29:49Steven Gundry?

  But, my personal feeling is the only purpose of eating a bean is to get olive oil into my mouth and we can talk about that as we go along. Okay. So, grains, for instance, everybody heard about gluten. Yes. All right, so gluten is a lectin. And again, a lectin is a plant's defense system. It's a protein that actually is designed to act like incoming guided missile attacks. Wow. On the inside wall of our gut. And these things actually pry open the lining of our gut and actually break through the border. Really? Yeah, they really do. That's what causes eczema and causes breakouts. Yeah, exactly.

• 30:32Steven Gundry?

  Acne, brain fog, irritable bowel. This is actually all part of that process. Wow. And. So it's fascinating to see people who either have come to see me or have even read the book and then write on Amazon, "Oh, my gosh, you know, I had this horrible eczema and now a month later it's all gone and all I did was, you know, take grains and beans and nightshades away from my diet and everything got better." So that brings us to the second kind of group of things we shouldn't eat. All of us are not from the United States, America. We're actually from Europe, Asia, or Africa, every one of us.

• 31:17Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. So even our Native Americans are actually not Native Americans, they're from Asia. You know, get over it. Right. So, none of us were exposed to an American plant until 500 years ago when Columbus started trade. So getting to know a new plant, a new lectin, in 500 years is speed dating in evolution. I just don't think it'd be done. For instance, the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after their native son Columbus brought them back because they knew how dangerous they were. They were part of the deadly nightshade family. Really?

• 32:01Steven Gundry?

  And they, when they started eating them, they always peeled and de-seeded their tomatoes because the peels and the seeds actually have the vast majority of the lectins. And it's interesting, years ago, I was, did my fellowship in children's heart surgery in London, England, and I had a house officer from Italy. And he invited me up for pasta and tomato sauce. Yes. So I brought, you know, it'd be nice if I bought a couple of cans of canned tomatoes, you know, help out. Sure. And he looks at it, he says, Why did you bring me this? We can't use this. So I said, what do you mean? You can't tomatoes. He says, it's got peels and seeds. You can't make sauce with peels and seeds.

• 32:46Steven Gundry?

  He says, oh, mama mia, what am I gonna do with you? He says, you can't use peels and seeds. I said, why? He says, they're deadly. And I said, really? And he says, yeah, everybody knows that. And then I thought back, as a child, my mother, my grandmother was French, and she taught my mother that you always peel and de-seed tomatoes before you slice them and serve them. So until I went to Yale, I had never had a slice of a tomato with a peel and a seed.

• 33:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:16Steven Gundry?

  And this was, you know, this has come from cultures. For instance, peppers, peppers are the same way. They're part of the nightshade family. You'll never open a glass jar of Italian bell peppers and see peels and seeds, because they're gone. And the most striking thing is, the Southwest American Indians always peel and de-seed their peppers before they eat them. The hatch chili roast will be happening in another month. And what do they do? They roast their chilies, peel the scarred off part, de-seed them, and then they eat them, or they make them into chili powder.

• 33:54Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 33:54Steven Gundry?

  And, you know, you can prove this in your grocery store. Buy a can of green chilies, chopped green chilies, open it up. You won't see any peels and seeds, because they're gone.

• 34:02Lewis Howes?

  So tomatoes and...

• 34:05Steven Gundry?

  Peppers, eggplant, potatoes, and potatoes. Now, the...

• 34:12Lewis Howes?

  If you peel them and seed these things...

• 34:13Steven Gundry?

  You're safer, correct. But you can pressure cook them, and they're fine.

• 34:17Lewis Howes?

  And they're okay.

• 34:17Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 34:19Steven Gundry?

  Now, there's two American beans that everyone should stay away from. Peanuts are not a nut, they're a bean.

• 34:28Steven Gundry?

  94% of human beings carry a preformed antibody against the peanut lectin. We can take rhesus monkeys, our cousins, give them peanut oil and they will develop atherosclerosis, heart disease.

• 34:42Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 34:43Steven Gundry?

  If we take the lectin out of the peanut oil and then give them the peanut oil, they will not develop heart disease.

• 34:52Lewis Howes?

  So if you get lectin free peanut butter?

• 34:55Steven Gundry?

  There is no such thing.

• 34:56Lewis Howes?

  Dang it. Okay.

• 34:57Steven Gundry?

  So get almond butter instead.

• 34:59Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 34:59Steven Gundry?

  It's much safer.

• 35:00Lewis Howes?

  No peanut butter?

• 35:00Steven Gundry?

  No, stay away from it.

• 35:01Lewis Howes?

  You should eliminate 100% from your system.

• 35:04Steven Gundry?

  Absolutely. We can take, and this has been done, men, feed them peanuts, take their bowel movements, feed them to rats, and you will grow cancerous cells in the rat colon because they've been exposed to the peanut lectin.

• 35:22Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 35:24Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Lewis Howes?

  Love peanut butter though.

• 35:25Steven Gundry?

  Oh, you know.

• 35:26Lewis Howes?

  So I can have as much almond butter as I want?

• 35:28Steven Gundry?

  And I went to medical school in Georgia, you know, Jimmy Carter, you know, man, peanuts are everything in Georgia.

• 35:34Lewis Howes?

  Sandwiches, no?

• 35:34Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. Nope, sorry.

• 35:35Lewis Howes?

  So eliminate it.

• 35:36Steven Gundry?

  Gone.

• 35:37Lewis Howes?

  Gone.

• 35:38Steven Gundry?

  Say goodbye.

• 35:38Lewis Howes?

  This will help me live longer, have a happier, healthier body.

• 35:41Steven Gundry?

  And then I won't have to operate on you, you know, when you have coronary disease. And you'll go, what? I eat so healthy. I'm having my peanut butter.

• 35:48Lewis Howes?

  How many surgeries have you done?

• 35:50Steven Gundry?

  Oh, over 10,000.

• 35:51Lewis Howes?

  10,000. Do you have the, is that what it is? The record?

• 35:53Steven Gundry?

  No, not a record.

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  Someone said it was a record-setting heart surgery, heart surgeries, no?

• 35:57Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Lewis Howes?

  No. How many heart surgeries?

• 35:59Steven Gundry?

  10,000.

• 36:00Lewis Howes?

  10,000.

• 36:00Steven Gundry?

  10,000. Yeah, it's a lot of heart surgeries.

• 36:02Lewis Howes?

  What's the cause of these heart diseases?

• 36:05Steven Gundry?

  So it's a

• 36:05Lewis Howes?

  And the reason why you have to do so many of these?

• 36:07Steven Gundry?

  It's all in the plant paradox. So 17 years ago, I met a guy by the name Big Ed. It was a 30, 38-year-old guy who came to see me at Loma Linda because I'm one of these surgeons who will operate on anybody.

• 36:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow, Big Ed.

• 36:20Steven Gundry?

  Take the risk. Big Ed.

• 36:21Lewis Howes?

  500-pounder?

• 36:22Steven Gundry?

  Big Ed. Actually, when I met him, he weighed 265 pounds. But he had such extensive coronary arteries that you couldn't put stents in him, you couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't any place to land. And he's from Miami and he'd be going around the country carrying his angiogram, the movie of his heart, his cardiac catheterization. And everybody's turning him down. And he finally, after about six months of this, comes to see me and I'm looking at his angiogram and I'm going, eh, you know, I don't like to turn people down, but everybody's right. You know, we're not going to do you any good. And he said, well, wait a minute. Here's the deal, doc. I've been on a diet for the last six months and I've lost 45 pounds. Now, this is a 265 pounder sitting across from me.

• 37:05Steven Gundry?

  It looks like a, you know, biker, um, big gut. And he says, and I've, I've gone to this health food store and I've taken all these supplements. And he actually brought in this shopping bag full of supplements. He said, you know, maybe I did something in here. And I'm going, yeah, all right. You know, I'm kind of scratching my professor beard and saying, well, you know, I know what you, good for you for losing weight, but it's not going to do anything in here. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine. Right. And I really believe that. So he says, well, come on, you know, it's been six months. I've come all this way. What would it hurt to get another angiogram, another cardiac catheterization? I said, okay.

• 37:45Steven Gundry?

  So we, we get a new cath on him and in six months' time, this guy cleans out 50% of the blockages in his heart. 50% gone. Pretty good. It's pretty darn good. It's unbelievable. Wow. For instance, statistically, on the best statin drug, you know, like Crestor, Lipitor, with the lowest levels of LDL, we scientists at the American Heart Association get crazy if after five years, your plaque burden has decreased a half of a percent. Wow. And we go crazy and we go, oh my gosh, this is a miracle. It's the greatest drug discovery of all time. Right. And we go, really? So this guy, 50% are gone in six months.

• 38:30Steven Gundry?

  So I actually was so excited, I operated on him and did a five vessel bypass. But what if I knew what I knew now, I'd say, hey, great, you know, another year, this will all be clear. Keep going. You won't need this. So I start talking about what he did on this diet. And lo and behold, he gets started on this, I go, timeout. I said, I had this crazy thesis at Yale University that I did for four years back in the dark ages of human evolutionary biology. And my thesis was you could take a great ape, change its food supply and change its environment and predict you would arrive at a human being. And I actually successfully defended it and God honors, blah, blah, blah. And so I had

• 39:14Steven Gundry?

  given it to my parents and went off to be a famous heart surgeon. And so he's talking about this. Wait a minute, you know, this is my crazy thesis. And here I am, this big guy, you know, running and I had pre diet. You were. This is 15 years ago. Yeah, 15 years ago. You know, running and eating a healthy low fat diet. Why do all the doctors seem like they're bigger? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we're giving all this advice. And so I called my parents in San Diego. I said, Hey, you know, you've got this thesis? Oh, yeah, you know, it's in the shrine. Yes. Internal flame. Whole room of your accomplishments. That's right. So I said, send it up to me. So I put myself on my thesis and I lost 50 pounds my first year. And I lost another 20 pounds subsequently and I've taken it

• 39:56Steven Gundry?

  off. And then I started putting my patients who, you know, at Loma Linda, I operated on, on this program and their blood pressure went to normal, their diabetes went away, their heart disease didn't come back. And so after about a year of this, I was looking in the mirror on one Friday and I said, you know, I can't do what I do anymore because I can teach people how to avoid me. So I actually resigned my position. My wife still calls it Black Friday. When was this? Uh, 15 years ago. You resigned? I resigned. From doing surgeries or from? From doing, being chairman of heart surgery at Loma Linda. Wow. Just because you felt like this wasn't solving the actual root. It wasn't solving the problem. It was just putting a Band-Aid on it. The surgeries?

• 40:40Steven Gundry?

  The surgeries. Yeah. I was just, you know, I was famous for four time, five time redo surgeries on somebody who kept clogging up their blood vessels. And it's like. You could fix them up, but it's like. Yeah. Okay. They're going to be back in a couple of years. Yeah. So, yeah, so I set up an institute in Palm Springs where all I ask people to do is every three months, let me take about. 10 tubes of blood out of you and we'll send it to some labs, insurance will pay for it. Wow. And see what asking you to eat certain foods does and asking you to take certain supplements that you could find at Costco or Trader Joe's does.

• 41:18Steven Gundry?

  And that resulted in my first book in 2008 called Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. But then subsequently, I've seen about 50% of my practice is autoimmune disease. And people come in and say, hey, what do you know about autoimmune disease? And I go, oh, I don't know anything about autoimmune disease, but I'm a transplant immunologist. And that means how do I get the immune system of you to accept the heart of a pig, for instance? And I actually hold the world record for the longest pig to baboon heart transplant, 28 days. That's the world record.

• 42:01Steven Gundry?

  So I started manipulating the immune system by food. And sure enough, you've got an autoimmune disease, we can teach you to get rid of it by changing, primarily getting lectins out of your diet. That's it, huh? And changing your gut bugs to be basically friendly gut bugs. And the friendly gut bugs actually tell your immune system that, hey, guys, we're all great down here, we're down at the beach, we're singing kumbaya, beautiful bonfire. And your immune system is basically the cops. And the cops go, oh, yeah, we know these kids, great kids, let's go have a donut.

• 42:44Steven Gundry?

  And now, so that's how it's supposed to be. But let's suppose a gang member moves into your neighborhood. Now, all of a sudden, you got, you're putting up bars on your windows and you got neighborhood watch patrols and you're shooting guys with hoodies without asking questions. So what's happened to most of us through some of the foods we eat, like all these wonderful snacks we're talking about, we've, we've let these gang members loose and the good guys actually can't eat simple sugars and these saturated fats. They, they want leaves and they want tubers. They die off. They die off. Exactly. So the gang members are running rampant and now your immune system is going, oh my gosh, you know, the city's taken over by gang members and we're going to have armed patrols

• 43:28Steven Gundry?

  everywhere. And anytime we see anything that looks a little odd, we're going to shoot and ask questions later. And so what's happened to everybody with autoimmune disease is their immune system is just hyper on guard because it's no longer getting the messages from the good bugs. Chill out. Everything's cool. You know, kumbaya, love, love, love, peace and love. And that's what's happened. And it's, it's so cool to get somebody who can just, you know, change the food they eat. They may not want it initially, but when they start feeling better, they go, for instance, on Monday, young lady, 36 years old, lives out

• 44:12Steven Gundry?

  in La Quinta, was sent to me with what's called chronic pain syndrome. Now, a lot of doctors toss this off as, oh, you're crazy, or you're depressed, or you're just anxious and you treat them with antidepressants. And she was in constant pain and it was so bad that she actually had to work from home, really couldn't move and she had a kid and a husband and so she had heard about me. She said, you know, I've heard about you. Um, you know, what do you think? And I said, you know, come on, let's, let's do this. I said, what's happening is that your pain is actually coming from nerve cells inside your gut that are being

• 44:53Steven Gundry?

  stimulated by rogue cops, if you will, and they're trying to tell you that you shouldn't move. So let's start. So I saw her a couple of months later in January, February and I said, how are you doing? She said, you know, the pain's less, but it's definitely still there. So I said, well, you know, just stay at it. If you can feel a difference, don't give up. So I walked in on Monday and I almost didn't recognize her and I said, she's got a giant smile on your face. And I said, so, you know, how are you doing? She said, Perfect. I said, what do you mean? And she says, do you know what it's like to not have pain?

• 45:36Steven Gundry?

  And I said, well, yeah, I do. Now, she said, I forgot what not having pain feels like.

• 45:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:46Steven Gundry?

  And it, it's amazing. She said, I just feel great. You know, it's been so many years. I'd forgotten what, you know, feeling normal felt like. She said, but let me tell you a story. You can't cheat.

• 46:01Steven Gundry?

  And I, I said, yeah, I know that, but how'd you find out? She said, well, you know, there was this office party a couple of weeks ago. And all they had, they had some, had some chicken and they had some nachos and they had some guacamole. And she said, I noticed that the guacamole had tomatoes in it. Believe it or not, guacamole is not have, supposed to have tomatoes. Your, your listeners should realize that guacamole should not have tomatoes.

• 46:27Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 46:29Steven Gundry?

  She said, I figured, well, the safest thing to eat is to put some guacamole on my plate and have a piece of chicken. Cause you know, I want to be nice. She said, I'll tell you, within an hour, my left elbow just started throbbing and then my hands started freezing up. She said, I actually had to leave the party and go home. And she had, I had to lay down and I couldn't get up for about two hours. And she said, and I was trying to be good. And she said, it's, it's amazing that, you know, this could do this.

• 47:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 47:02Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Lewis Howes?

  This is crazy.

• 47:03Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  So you said, you essentially came, was, you know, were doing heart surgeries, 10,000 of them. And said, I don't want to be offensive here. I'll make sure I'm saying the right thing, but you're now essentially a functional med doctor.

• 47:16Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, I don't.

• 47:16Lewis Howes?

  In a sense.

• 47:17Steven Gundry?

  Correct. With all, with all due respects to Mark Hyman.

• 47:21Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 47:21Steven Gundry?

  Jeff Bland created the, created functional medicine and Jeff's a friend of mine. I don't know what functional medicine. Right, right, right. What I do is restorative medicine. Great. All of us have the power to heal ourselves. Now, the guy who said this was Hippocrates. And Hippocrates, brilliant. He, he believed that any organism had the ability to have perfect health. Hmm. And that every organism had the ability to achieve perfect health as long as the obstacles to perfect health were removed. Hmm.

• 47:59Steven Gundry?

  And Hippocrates believed that the physician's job was to identify the obstacles to that organism having perfect health, the patient, and remove them from the patient. Right. And the patient would do the rest. Yeah. So, what, what I try to do, I basically do detective work. And I think I'm pretty good at finding the obstacles. And many of those obstacles, believe it or not, are lectins. And the other obstacle is you gotta get the gang members out of your gut by basically starving them to death and giving the good guys what they want to eat. Starving them of the lectins. Starving them of simple sugars. Yes.

• 48:44Steven Gundry?

  And lectins and saturated fats, like. Remove those things. Yeah, they, they have nothing to eat and they leave. For instance, I'll give you an example of something interesting. We actually have bacteria in our gut that enjoy eating gluten, lectin. Really? Yeah, they love it. But if you go gluten free, they leave because they got nothing to eat. Yes. And then a lot of people who go gluten free and don't notice a whole lot of difference, or they just get frustrated and then they, and they have a couple of pieces of bread or pizza. Hmm. And then all of a sudden their gut goes, oh, you know. Well, it's because there are bugs that could defend them against gluten. Are gone. Are gone. Hmm.

• 49:29Steven Gundry?

  And believe it or not, gluten is kind of a low level lectin. There's far worse. The, the worst ones are in the hull of the grain. So for instance, this whole, whole grain goodness, this only started about 50 years ago. Oh, this thing is whole grain goodness? No, we've gotten sicker and sicker and sicker because the. Outside of the hall has the lectins and we've been throwing it away. I mean, really, the French, seriously, would they have a whole grain croissant? Or a whole grain baguette, really? And the Italians, you know, whole grain pasta. Well, now it's appearing on the menus because the tourists want to see it.

• 50:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Steven Gundry?

  But Italians would kill themselves.

• 50:09Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Yeah, the first thing I opened up right here is the most popular nut is not a nut, the peanut.

• 50:16Steven Gundry?

  The peanut.

• 50:16Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 50:17Steven Gundry?

  And a cashew, a cashew is a nut, too.

• 50:20Lewis Howes?

  I can't eat cashews?

• 50:20Steven Gundry?

  No, the Amazonian Indians always threw the cashew bean away.

• 50:25Lewis Howes?

  What if, what if I manipulated in a certain way and make it into a sauce?

• 50:30Steven Gundry?

  You could pressure cook it.

• 50:32Lewis Howes?

  I can pressure cook cashews, then I can eat it.

• 50:34Steven Gundry?

  Yes, and stay away from chia seeds.

• 50:36Lewis Howes?

  No chia seeds? These are all the things people are telling you to eat right now.

• 50:39Steven Gundry?

  Of course, and that's why everybody's getting sicker. Chia seeds, there's two human studies that show that chia seeds promote inflammation in human beings.

• 50:49Lewis Howes?

  What else do we need to be aware of?

• 50:50Steven Gundry?

  I used to be a big fan of chia seeds.

• 50:52Lewis Howes?

  What do you eat?

• 50:53Steven Gundry?

  You're eat, what you're supposed to eat. You're supposed to eat leaves, you're supposed to eat tubers, like jicama, like sweet potatoes, like rutabagas, you're supposed to eat tons of olive oil. Ton, tons. I use a liter a week.

• 51:10Lewis Howes?

  Of olive oil? You drink it or you're cooking it?

• 51:12Steven Gundry?

  No, I pour it on everything.

• 51:13Lewis Howes?

  Oh, really?

• 51:14Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, I pour it on everything. The only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. This is what I told Dr. Oz a few weeks ago. Just think the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. In Crete and Sardinia, they use a liter of olive oil per week. A Spanish study of 65 year old people for five years, making them use a liter of olive oil per week against a low fat Mediterranean diet. At the end of five years, the olive oil users had improved memory compared to the low fat diet. The women had 65% less breast cancer than the low fat Mediterranean diet. And they had less heart disease. Liter a week.

• 51:56Lewis Howes?

  Olive oil.

• 51:57Steven Gundry?

  Liter a week.

• 51:58Lewis Howes?

  That's the, that's the founder of youth, huh?

• 52:00Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Vani Hari?

  So, started food babe.

• 52:05Lewis Howes?

  This was only a couple of years ago.

• 52:06Vani Hari?

  Yeah, and I just started writing about things I was really passionate about and I started to realize I had a knack of asking questions nobody was asking before.

• 52:16Lewis Howes?

  Like, what were some of the questions?

• 52:17Vani Hari?

  Well, no one had really asked Chipotle, I guess publicly, online, what's in your food? You say your food's with integrity, but what's actually in your food? What are the ingredients? No one had done that.

• 52:30Lewis Howes?

  Do some of these companies not show ingredients? I thought they have to show ingredients, don't they?

• 52:33Vani Hari?

  Well, they don't.

• 52:35Lewis Howes?

  Or they hide them, or it's like where they already find?

• 52:37Vani Hari?

  They don't, actually, you know, they don't. Not all of them do. And so, there's big, huge companies like Papa John's, who don't release their ingredients online. However, their competitors like Domino's and Pizza Hut do.

• 52:50Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 52:51Vani Hari?

  And Chipotle, back then, when I started asking the questions, didn't.

• 52:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 52:58Vani Hari?

  And thankfully, because of my investigations, they started labeling their ingredients, GMO or not, started removing some of the bad ingredients and they're getting rid of them. The majority of bad ingredients I wrote about, the ones that were very controversial. When I realized someone as large as Chipotle, or Chick-fil-A, or Kraft, or any of these big companies were listening to someone like me, I knew I could no longer stay at that job.

• 53:23Lewis Howes?

  And you started this at the other job that you were doing, right? And then it started to pick up.

• 53:27Vani Hari?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Lewis Howes?

  And I remember when I first heard about you, it was something about Kraft. Like, you basically changed the whole thing that Kraft does now. And I want to talk about that in a second. But I also saw, I remember you doing a video, like, eating a yoga mat. And then, and talking about some word that I can't pronounce. And then later, seeing, like, three months later, seeing Subway come out with a commercial saying they no longer have that ingredient because you were specifically talking about it. And I thought to myself, wow, if one person can... Create enough of a conversation so that a large company like a Subway or a Kraft or Chipotle or Chick-fil-A listens and takes action to change something. I said, that is

• 54:11Lewis Howes?

  really powerful. And you've worked in kind of solving a lot of the issues with Kraft, Subway, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, and Starbucks and having them change their ingredients. And what was the thing with Kraft? What actually happened?

• 54:24Vani Hari?

  Well, one of the things I realized, as soon as I quit my job, which was the scariest thing ever, by the way, because I wasn't, this was a pure passion project. So I didn't know how to sustain myself when I quit my job. And I was in the house and I was sitting here and I'm living in a condo surrounded by the banks that I used to work with in downtown Charlotte and going, oh my God, I have no boss, I have no job, and I'm a food activist now. Wow, this is crazy. I cannot believe I'm doing this. You know, when you're working on a passion project, you know, and you're also working in the corporate world, you're not putting your 100% effort into it, even though it's like kind of taking over your world and your thought and you're sitting at work and you're thinking

• 55:09Vani Hari?

  about your next investigation instead of what you're supposed to be doing. Like, that started to happen, but I was still like straddling these two jobs, right?

• 55:17Lewis Howes?

  You had to take the leap.

• 55:18Vani Hari?

  Right. And then when you put your 100% focus in something, wow, the doors just start opening. And so the first thing I started to investigate was how food in Europe is healthier than the United States. What has happened is Europe has been regulated on a precautionary principle that these chemicals are considered guilty before they're innocent. Here in the United States, they're innocent until proven guilty. And so in Europe, there are several chemicals that are either banned or not used or have warning labels. And one of those chemicals is artificial food dyes, yellow five, yellow six, red forty.

• 56:00Lewis Howes?

  They don't use any of them there? Or they're labeled specifically with a warning?

• 56:04Vani Hari?

  Well, they label them with a warning. So they are banned in certain countries. But in the UK, they have a requirement that you have to put a warning label on it that says may cause adverse effects in activity and attention in children.

• 56:20Lewis Howes?

  Kind of like cigarettes, basically a warning on a cigarette box.

• 56:24Vani Hari?

  Right, but it's a warning on a box of candy or a box of mac and cheese. Like if you were to import a box of mac and cheese from the United States to the UK and sold it in a specialty store, it would have to have that warning. But you know what Kraft did to try to get away with, without putting that warning? They reformulated their product without yellow five and yellow six and used real ingredients, paprika and beta carotene, for European citizens, but not for us.

• 56:51Lewis Howes?

  Why not?

• 56:52Vani Hari?

  So they found out that there was this health issue, right? Associated with especially children. Who, who's the biggest population of mac and cheese eaters in this country?

• 57:03Lewis Howes?

  Children.

• 57:04Vani Hari?

  Children.

• 57:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Vani Hari?

  And to say, you know what? Instead of putting that warning label on the box, we're just going to reformulate for them and we're not going to do it for all of these millions of people in the United States is immoral and unethical.

• 57:17Lewis Howes?

  So why did they do that? Because it's a lot more expensive to put the natural ingredients in, I'm assuming?

• 57:21Vani Hari?

  It is a little bit more cost, but in the long run, it's not that much. I mean, these corporations are making billions of dollars collectively. So it's, it's really unfortunate that these companies have gone unregulated like this and it's up for us consumers to hold them accountable.

• 57:39Lewis Howes?

  Sure, because if we keep buying, they'll keep selling it to us.

• 57:41Vani Hari?

  That's right, that's right. And so I started a petition and...

• 57:46Lewis Howes?

  Against Kraft?

• 57:47Vani Hari?

  Yes, to remove these artificial food dyes. And I tell you, it was...

• 57:50Lewis Howes?

  So you weren't saying, "Don't, don't make mac and cheese anymore." "Don't sell us this." You're just saying, "Take these specific ingredients out."

• 57:56Vani Hari?

  Right.

• 57:57Lewis Howes?

  That other countries don't have in their foods.

• 57:59Vani Hari?

  We should be able to eat junk food without the risk of hyperactivity or cancer, because some of these artificial food dyes are contaminated with carcinogens. You know, we should be able to have things without them harming us. And so I tell you, that... Period of time really changed me because what I realized quickly, the petition got over 200,000 signatures in a week.

• 58:22Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. So you posted on your site or online with the petition?

• 58:26Vani Hari?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Lewis Howes?

  And people could sign online?

• 58:28Vani Hari?

  Right, and on change.org. I actually used change.org back then. And they were an amazing partner. They really helped carry the message. And they really helped guide me too. I'm like, what do you do? How do you do a petition? And how do you do all these things? And now, actually, I'm teaching some of those principles in this book. Like, how do you start your own petition?

• 58:45Lewis Howes?

  Interesting, okay.

• 58:46Vani Hari?

  Yeah, there's an appendix in the back.

• 58:47Lewis Howes?

  Very cool.

• 58:48Vani Hari?

  In the back of the book.

• 58:49Lewis Howes?

  So what happened with these 200,000 names? Did you say, "Hear Craft," like, "Look at this," or what was the next step?

• 58:56Vani Hari?

  Well, they continued to be really, basically, sending us PR to us. And actually, the story of what happened when I went to go deliver those petitions to their headquarters is the first introduction chapter in this book. And it's gut-wrenching. You know, I don't hold back on how I felt when that was happening. And the really unfortunate thing with Craft is that they weren't really willing to hear all of these consumers. Now, this petition has close to 400,000 signatures still to this day. They're starting to slowly take out the artificial food dyes. They've taken it out for kids' products, and they've taken it out for their deluxe products.

• 59:41Vani Hari?

  And I think they're going to eventually get rid of the rest. It's just going to take them some time. But, you know, what's really the most critical point of that petition, what it taught me, is that there are thousands of people really being affected by these issues. Thousands of parents sent me letters. Their kid's asthma went away. Their kid's eczema went away. Their kid's activity improved at school. Their kids got off their ADHD medication. Their autism lesson, the symptoms of autism. I mean, personal letters from parents. I actually took those with me, printed them all out. It was a stack this big.

• 1:00:22Vani Hari?

  Took them with me to Dr. Oz, the show, and waved them in the air on camera at Craft.

• 1:00:29Lewis Howes?

  And what happened?

• 1:00:30Vani Hari?

  Well, that's when I had to go deliver those letters and that petition. And when I was carrying those boxes of signatures...

• 1:00:39Vani Hari?

  I really felt the weight of those parents and those children that have been affected by artificial food dyes and it still remains a problem today and a problem that I'm going to continue to fight for.

• 1:00:49Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's incredible. What do you feel like has been the biggest challenge with all these companies that you've been addressing with the artificial ingredients or the ingredients that are healthy? What do you feel like has been the biggest challenge so far? Which company has been the biggest challenge to work with? Which, you know, and which one has been the most enjoyable, I guess, if you could say that, to work with or has been actually willing to listen to you and take your counsel and say, okay, we do want to make changes. What are some suggestions?

• 1:01:20Vani Hari?

  So let's, let's start with the positive. So, a few years ago, there was something in my fridge that I had no idea what was in it and it was a bottle of Newcastle beer. Everything else I knew what was in it, but the Newcastle beer had no ingredient list and I was like, why doesn't it have an ingredient list? And knowing what I knew about the food industry and how GMOs have infiltrated everything.

• 1:01:43Lewis Howes?

  What's GMO stand for, just so people know?

• 1:01:45Vani Hari?

  Genetically modified organism.

• 1:01:47Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:01:47Vani Hari?

  And have just been...

• 1:01:49Lewis Howes?

  Where scientists have created an ingredient to then go into the food?

• 1:01:54Vani Hari?

  That's right. It's a, it's a new species of plant, basically.

• 1:01:58Lewis Howes?

  That we designed.

• 1:02:00Vani Hari?

  That's right. It's not from nature. This is, this is in a laboratory. They inject either DNA or insecticide or some other type of concoction and put it into a seed and then grow that as new.

• 1:02:12Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, okay.

• 1:02:13Vani Hari?

  So, and, and the problem isn't so much that technology. It's not even about that. It's about the, the fact that they're paired with an increase in pesticides. So the chemical companies who have developed those seeds are the same chemical companies selling the pesticides.

• 1:02:29Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:02:29Vani Hari?

  So it's a pesticide issue. It's really not about...

• 1:02:32Lewis Howes?

  It's not about GMO?

• 1:02:33Vani Hari?

  It's not about biotechnology. It is really about the pesticides and the pesticides is what is really causing a huge environmental impact in the, the rise in cancer rates. If you look at the president's cancer panel, who independently looks at cancer rates, has said that 41% of us are destined to have cancer. Some of those reasons can be related back to these environmental toxins.

• 1:02:57Lewis Howes?

  With pesticides is one of them. So if it says GMO, does it mean it has pesticides attached to a GMO or? So the GMO, is the GMO bad, or is it just a pen?

• 1:03:07Vani Hari?

  Well, I mean, it is creating new proteins that have never before existed.

• 1:03:13Lewis Howes?

  So it's different for your body to digest, and it may react in certain ways?

• 1:03:16Vani Hari?

  There are certain studies that show different things, and what's really concerning to me is that there's no mandatory safety testing on GMO crops in this country before they're introduced. All the other countries around the world, they have this, they require it, or they label it, right? They either say, "No, you can't sell this here, or you can't grow this here, or we have to label it so consumers have to know."

• 1:03:41Lewis Howes?

  Or, "Warning, this may cause certain issues."

• 1:03:44Vani Hari?

  Right, but here in the United States, these companies are spending millions of dollars to prevent their name from being on there. Like, they don't want us to know that genetically modified foods. I mean, think about it. The Super Bowl is happening, right? It's around this time of year, and think about all of the companies that spend millions of dollars to put their name right there, front and center. The biotech companies and the chemical companies are trying to take their name away from this. They're trying to hide this from us. So you've got to wonder, why are they trying to hide so much?

• 1:04:16Lewis Howes?

  I'm interested, though. You know, cigarettes, they have a big tax on them. I believe here in New York, they have a big tax on them to buy cigarettes. And also, they have a big warning label, and a lot of them have like people with like cancer on them. It says, "You will, you know, cigarettes cause death even maybe." I'm not even sure exactly what they say, but there's big warnings on them, but people still do it. Do you think if those warnings were on our food labels in the US, that we would still eat it? Just like people are addicted to cigarettes?

• 1:04:44Vani Hari?

  Well, the GMO label is not even a warning label. It's just a transparency label, just to know what you're buying. I mean, it's like how you know that you're drinking orange juice from concentrate. We should know if our food's genetically engineered. And so when these same food companies did this in Europe... They're still selling food there. It's just labeled there. Got you. So consumers know. You're more educated. Yeah, absolutely. Got you. So it's not, you know, this is a smart business decision for companies, especially to give them this information. Right. But I tell you, there's something funny going on if they want to hide it so bad. Okay. So that's what your first kind of, when you start to investigate, you kind of wonder, well, what's going on here? Okay. And when you look deeper into some of the studies that have been done, they're very alarming and very concerning.

• 1:05:29Vani Hari?

  And now we're seeing the main ingredient round up, which has glyphosate in it, in human breast milk. Wow. Which is a huge toxin. I mean, linked to autoimmune disorders, cancers, all sorts of things. So this is a huge issue. Okay. But going back to that Newcastle beer. Newcastle, tell me about it. I had no idea what was in it. Sure. So I was like, why don't, why don't beer, why doesn't beer, alcohol, wine, liquor, why doesn't any of it have ingredient labels? Why can't I know what makes this raspberry flavored vodka or this beer? And so I started to investigate because it was the one thing that was in my fridge that I wasn't personally drinking. My husband was drinking, I care about his health. And was looking into what was in there.

• 1:06:14Vani Hari?

  And I remember going, it took me over a year, almost, maybe, maybe a little bit less or a little bit over a year to quiz the beer companies enough to even write an article about what I found out about the beer industry. And what I found out was shocking. Most of it had GMO corn added to it. So it's not the basic ingredients of beer, you know, malt, barley, you know, etc., yeast and water. It had, it had caramel coloring added to it so they could use a different kind of malt. Just like Starbucks. Yes, just like Starbucks. And it had artificial dyes added to it.

• 1:06:53Vani Hari?

  It had different types of propylene glycol added to it, which is a derivative of antifreeze. There was things that vegan and vegetarian people would be concerned about. Icing glass, which is produced from a fish swim bladder. Carrageenan, which is linked to intestinal inflammation. So all of these things were in beer that I had no idea what was in it. Because it wasn't on the label. It wasn't on the label. So I felt like this needed to change. That blog post, when I wrote it, went so crazy viral. Millions of people saw it. And I realized that people are really fed up with this. And so I reached out to Anheuser-Busch and Miller Coors.

• 1:07:33Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 1:07:34Vani Hari?

  And at first, they wouldn't respond back to me. They gave me the, the basic mumbo jumbo. Sorry, we're not going to release our ingredients. We're not going to tell you because it's proprietary information. But as soon as I did a petition and got close to, I think, 40,000 signatures overnight.

• 1:07:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:07:53Vani Hari?

  They responded. And the first to respond was Anheuser-Busch. And they were, when you ask, who was really nice to work with? They were incredible to work with. They, um, they emailed me right away. And I told this whole story on the blog. So if you look at old blog posts, you can read this story. But they emailed me right away and they invited me to their headquarters to.

• 1:08:14Lewis Howes?

  In St. Louis?

• 1:08:14Vani Hari?

  Yes. And to learn about their processes.

• 1:08:17Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:08:18Vani Hari?

  And look at their ingredients and meet their head brewmasters. So, you know, I went and did that on my own diamond dollar. You know, wasn't consulting or anything like that. I went there and I met with them. And I've been trying to convince them to develop an organic beer that isn't contaminated with any GMO ingredients, so.

• 1:08:36Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting. Very cool. Okay. Well, are they taking any ingredients out? Or are they doing anything different? Or is it still the same thing?

• 1:08:43Vani Hari?

  Well, they.

• 1:08:43Lewis Howes?

  Are they labeling it?

• 1:08:44Vani Hari?

  Well, they are posting all of their ingredients online now. They've slowly started adding all, all the beers on there. I think they're almost all the way up there. So if you go to tapintoyourbeer.com, I think that's their website. You can see what's in their beer. And some of the things are, you know, really bizarre, like high fructose corn syrup in my beer? I had no idea. You know? I mean, think about all the people who read, um, packages and avoid high fructose corn syrup. And they had no idea that they were drinking it in beer. Now they do.

• 1:09:12Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately,

• 1:09:52Lewis Howes?

  that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.