The True Cause of Diabetes and Insulin Resistance | Interview with Dr. Cyrus Khambatta

and I'm so excited to be talking to our next guest he is now a New York Times bestselling author that is just so awesome and I'm so proud of what he's accomplished he was awesome before but now he's even awesomer because he's added that it's prudential along with his co-author robbie romero if you can guess who it is because i gave you a little hint it's none other than the co-author of mastering diabetes his name is dr. Cyrus Kumada he wrote this amazing New York Times bestseller we're gonna give you the links so that you can check him out and he's going to talk to us today about some really amazing things relating to diabetes and health welcome Cyrus Thank You chef AJ I totally appreciate it and thanks for the opportunity to be here today well it's fun because you are always the interviewer you posted the the mastering diabetes summit er co-hosted in the new kovat summit and Forks Over knives a webinar so this is your turn to say whatever you want to whoever you want about anything you want oh I can say whatever I want so what would you like to start a cyrus because you're type 1 diabetic you're very well controlled on a high carb diet yeah interesting okay so maybe here's a simple place to start why don't I just sort of like give people a little background about my own personal story and then that'll pave the way for like what is one of his diabetes and what causes it and you know we can go into detail there okay so I grew up as like a pretty happy-go-lucky kid I've been an athlete my whole life played everything under the Sun soccer baseball cross-country you name it when I got to college I was 22 years old and out of the blue I started feeling extremely thirsty I was cramp when I would go to sleep at night I was very tired and I was urinating something like I don't know 15 to 20 times a day and so I knew something was wrong I picked up the phone I called my sister and I said hey Shahnaz what is happening to me right now she's a Doctor of Osteopathy and she's brilliant so I explained all my symptoms to her and she started crying immediately she said Cyrus you are explaining to me that you have type 1 diabetes drop everything you're doing and go straight to the health center and I looked at it I listened to her and I was like Shanna I don't have diabetes are you kidding me look at me I'm normal weight I don't eat a lot of junk food and I'm an active guy so that's that right there tells you that I probably don't have diabetes she said Cyrus I don't have time to explain just go to the health center right now and you may need to get sent to the hospital so I go to the hospital they check my blood glucose and my blood glucose is 680 okay that is more than six times higher than it's supposed to be your glucose is supposed to be between 80 and 130 on a daily basis Michael goes was up in the 600 so they took me straight to the hospital they check me in for 24 hours I started drip-feeding insulin into one arm and they started giving me saline into the other arm so saline was for hydration insulin was to bring my blood glucose down over the course of 24 hours they were able to bring my blood glucose down into the low 200s and they discharged me from the hospital 24 hours later with not one not two but three diagnosis number one Hashimoto's hypothyroidism hey I had I had developed hypothyroidism over the course of the six months leading up to that and it was definitive right then and there when they were looking at my previous bloodwork there's no question that I had hypothyroidism number two alopecia universalis and alopecia is basically just a crazy scientific word to describe total hair loss so that's so you can see I have no hair I have no eyebrows no eyelashes no ear here knows no center nothing yeah and then number three type one diabetes turns out that all three of them are autoimmune conditions so I got one two three and all three of us sitting within a six-month period so I leave the hospital with three autoimmune conditions with a prescription for two types of insulin with a blood glucose meter test strips and a life alert bracelet that basically says hey I'm a chronic disease patient if you find me passed out on the sidewalk call 911 so you can imagine at the age of 22 you go from being happy-go-lucky to chronic disease patient with three autoimmune conditions overnight that's a big deal right so it for the first year of living with diabetes I was I was nervous because I didn't know what I had done to create this situation all I knew was that I didn't feel well and that when I checked my blood glucose it was a complete disaster so I followed the advice of the doctors at the time and they said Cyrus eat a low carbohydrate diet why low carbohydrate because that's the one-size-fits-all prescription for people living with any form of diabetes it's been that way for 30 40 50 years and it continues to be the one-size-fits-all solution for people living with all forms of diabetes that's recommended by the medical world so a low carbohydrate diet has many names in today's world it's either the Atkins diet or the South Beach diet or the Paleo diet or the ketogenic diet regardless of how you slice it all of these diets basically are they recommend that you minimize your intake of fruits of starchy vegetables of legumes and of whole grains and that you eat things like meat and fish and dairy and oil and avocados and nuts and seeds and processed meats like bacon and salami and beyond so I was doing that and I was trying to do it in the healthiest way possible so I would eat things like turkey burgers for breakfast I'd have some eggs I'd have sandwiches with really small amounts of bread I'd eat black forest ham I'd have tuna for dinner and I thought that that was is the right way to go about it and I thought it was supposed to make me healthier but my health went in the opposite direction energy levels kept on falling my ability to be active went way down I'm used to exercising at least once a day sometimes twice a day I play soccer I lift weights I ride my bike a lot and you take somebody who's a very athletic dude and all of a sudden you give him diabetes and you restrict his ability to move his body you're gonna make him very unhappy so over the course of the first year my glucose was a disaster my insulin use went up I couldn't use my body the way I wanted to to my joints began to hurt my muscles began to hurt I became anxious and I started to become depressed because I thought to myself well at the age of 23 now I'm living in a body that feels like an 80 year olds something is wrong so at that point I decided that I was going to open my mind to learning about another way maybe there was some other alternate way of eating that could actually improve my health and there was a voice in the back of my head that said Cyrus learn how to eat you don't know how to eat you don't know anything about nutrition and until you learn how to eat you're gonna have crappy health so I said okay fine so started listening to that and I just started picking up the books and attending scientific lectures and watching videos on YouTube to try and understand more information about diet and one thing led to another and I got I got turned on to this idea of being a plant-based eater I did not go into this looking to be a plant-based eater I really did not I just went into it to try to learn something about how I could improve my health and all roads pointed towards being a vegetarian or being a vegan and I said okay let me pay attention to this so long story short I ended up under the tutelage of a doctor named dr. Doug Graham and he is a raw food educator he teaches people how to adopt a raw food diet he was literally the first person that I met who was willing to talk to somebody living with type 1 diabetes and I said ok great so under his supervision he transitioned me to a low-fat plant-based whole food diet and he told me he showed me how to get rid of meat and chicken and fish and olive oil and dairy products overnight and by doing so my energy levels skyrocketed within the first week just skyrocketed hydration through the roof my glucose fell dramatically my insulin use fell dramatically and I started to feel a lot better now the reason why this is such a sort of mind shifting phenomenon is because everything I had learned up to that point said anytime you eat fruits and starchy vegetables you put those into your mouth your blood glucose will go up and your insulin use will go up and the exact opposite happened to me I was eating chef AJ I was eating plates of fruit with bananas and mangoes and papayas and dates and berries and no it seemed like the more fruit I ate the lower my blood glucose became and the less insulin I needed so I put myself back to graduate school to go get a PhD in nutritional biochemistry because I was fascinated by this thing that was happening in my body that I could not explain so while I was at school at UC Berkeley for five years I learned the ins and outs of diabetes what causes diabetes how do you reverse diabetes how do you manipulate diabetes to your advantage and while I was there I uncovered almost a hundred years worth of scientific information about what was exactly happening inside of my own body so I was able to describe all of the phenomenon that was happening inside of my body using science and that was the first time that all these light bulbs went off in my head and I said you know what there's a lot of information here about how people can reverse this thing called insulin resistance which is really the cause of high blood glucose and by understanding what insulin resistance is and how to reverse it you can virtually eliminate pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes off the map and you can get exquisite control over type 1 diabetes so here we are today in 2020 we operate mastering diabetes which is an online group coaching program for people with all forms of diabetes and we teach them exactly that how to transition to a plant plant-based diet and by doing so how to get incredible blood glucose control lowered oral medication use less insulin and how to lose weight permanently and keep it off for the rest of your life it's been a fun journey and it's only really beginning at this point may I ask you you are people are asking yeah for sure how old do people think I am let's let's play that game these 30s I'm 39 I'll be 40 next week or this year sorry oh no because you're a Libra I remember this this fall well let me just read some of the kind comments like from violet he's so handsome god bless him sherry says I've learned so much from Cyrus and Robby over the last few years Cyrus is brilliant and will ever forever change the lives of diabetics yeah people say they believe in so Paul's wondering how you got diabetes in the first place and Stephanie wants to know if your sister also went plant-based oh great question ok so my sister is not plant-based so again she's a brilliant brilliant physician but she herself is not plant-based she understands the plant-based message and I think she's learning more and more but she's also she is a product of a traditional health care model and in the traditional health care model they don't teach you anything about nutrition you know it's not her fault you know there's actually five physicians in my family and none of them learn anything about nutrition right and so unfortunately they don't have the tools to be able to talk about diet but after writing this book and after sharing this information with her and after seeing the the the positive improvements that it makes to her patients which she sends to me she's now a believer that it makes a huge huge huge difference in you know lives of people living with all forms of diabetes and then secondarily you asked me how did I develop type 1 diabetes and the answer is nobody knows the answer to that question ok it's a very it's a it's a it's complicated question because there's many things that the scientific world knows can increase your risk for type 1 diabetes but there's no smoking gun and there's it's almost impossible to try and find out well what we know what perfect storm happened that made Cyrus type 1 diabetic and but didn't make chef AJ type 1 diabetic it could be specific Michael bacteria in present in the food that I was eating either in the dairy products that I was eating or in the meat that I was eating it could be I was exposed to a virus and that virus can actually trigger an autoimmune reaction it could be that I developed gut permeability from a young age it could be that I wasn't breastfed for a significant period of time all of these things can influence your risk for the development of autoimmune conditions and type 1 diabetes is one of those conditions that can result from any one of those lifestyle behaviors I wasn't breastfed at all and I blamed my mom for everything she said well it wasn't fashionable in the sixties my goodness who cares so she didn't do it out of a an inability to do so she just didn't think it was cool you know she's gone now so I don't know maybe she really couldn't get the milk or whatever but I know that like you know my asthma I'm pretty sure if I could have got some milk from the bubi I wouldn't have this my whole life for sure for sure I mean here's the funny thing is that I wasn't breastfed I was bred from one month and then I was transitioned to cow's milk formula and we know from a scientific perspective that's not a smart idea but again I'm not gonna blame my mom for that you know she didn't know at the time she was doing everything she could yeah so obviously you still have alopecia because your hair didn't grow back we have something in common I don't have eyebrows either I mean they look I have them tattooed now but I lost my eyebrows when I was 14 so I'm wondering you must have to wear a sweater and when you exercise right it's you know it's funny sweat definitely does come down this noggin and come into my eyes a lot I think I just subconsciously have become very good edges doing this all day long you know what I'm sweating and what I'm exercising I didn't realize that you had tattooed eyebrows oh I do I have a very good person but I really it was something that always bothered me as a female and I was never good at drawing them on every day so finally a few years ago I got it done and it's working I mean it's because sometimes with the permanent it fades and it looks bad so semi-permanent so I every six months she touches it often but but I still don't have eyebrows so I don't wear a sweatband when I spin I wait yeah right right right yeah it gives all over the boycott are you still hypothyroid yes I am still hypothyroid however the amount of thyroid medication that I use has come down so it's like if you if you could graph my thyroid hormone use over the course of time what you'll find is that I was increasing the amount of thyroid hormone that I had to use in order to achieve normal thyroid status and that was going up and up and up started 37 and a half micrograms then it went up to 62 and a half micrograms then it went up to a hundred then it went all the way upwards of a hundred and 50 micrograms per day and then as I was eating a plant-based diet and improving my insulin sensitivity and feeling like a million bucks a hundred and fifty became a hundred and thirty seven and a half became a hundred twenty-five became one hundred twelve so I'm somewhere in that hundred two hundred twelve range now per day if I could be done with hypothyroidism cool sure I take it no problem but I've actually seen and spoken with a lot of other health care professionals in this world that reversing hypothyroidism is actually pretty darn challenging and it's not something that like you know you can just easily do in the same way that like you can adopt a plant-based diet and lose weight or reverse insulin resistance or reverse coronary artery disease hypothyroidism is one of those things that if you catch it very early in the process you stand a good chance of being normal thyroid but if you catch it six months or a year after it's started then the chances of you fully reversing hypothyroidism are pretty much slim to none you know and obviously I'm not a doctor but the doctors I've interviewed and you are a doctor and has said pretty much the same thing that once you started taking the medicine then you're then it's much harder to get off it then if you caught it right away and then did some of these things that we talked about - exactly right 100% and I mean I would say the same thing is true for many different chronic diseases but hyperthyroidism tends to be something that's like a little bit more stubborn in the sense that you know if it goes on for six months or more the chances of you reversing it are basically zero at that point but you can still improve it without question sure I'll tell you what happened to me and again this is terrible that I was more concerned about aesthetics than hell I just I didn't get diagnosed I was 50 I went on I was 50 micrograms I just didn't want to be on medicine and I did not get off it safely with the help of the True North doctors and I thought I was fine and for a short time I was and then all of a sudden I literally grew a blonde beer it's called lanugo it's a symptom of hypothyroidism I grew it look like a golden retriever I was covered in fur and that just freaked me out I had to get my face wax and I'm like fine I'm taking the medicine not worth it yeah exactly right exactly right there's so many side effects that come along with being hypothyroid that it's just not worth playing like a it's not like there's no shame it I mean it's like it actually that's one of the few conditions that you're not even discriminated against if you have health insurance because it is so common and it's such an inexpensive medicine that it's they don't count it as a pre-existing condition so there's no shame in being hypothyroid 100% there's really no shame you have a thyroid and it's one of those things that's actually pretty easily solvable in the sense of like if you just take tyroid hormone on a daily basis for which from my professional experience there are zero side effects from then your normal thyroid you have normal thyroid status and you don't run the risk of losing your hair or being extremely sluggish or being unable to lose weight and as a result of that you can regain a normal lifestyle in a normal you know overall physiology it's not like a statin medication whereby there's a whole collection of side effects or blood pressure medication which has a longer list of side effects you take that roid hormone and the side effects are slim to none and then you start to feel like a million bucks at that point just feel normal do you find the attendant hold the person CUH you're asking a guy that lives in Costa Rica where it's 90 degrees all year round the answer is yes no question no question and that's probably I moved to the desert where it's 90 and 100 all you because that's the one symptom I would say that number one ways they always called but here I feel great yeah exactly right so you and I are gonna do better in a slightly warmer environment and your right thigh roid hormone thyroid is your master master hormone it regulates your temperature sensitivity your appetite your ability to gain or lose weight your ability to gain or lose hair it regulates that your skin function your digestive function you name it and so when you're low on thyroid hormone or when you're not you know you don't have an ideal thyroid status then your temperature sensitivity is one of the things that can you know be affected very quickly and I've noticed out myself for sure you are gonna love this question and I'm sure you've answered it many interviews ad nauseam Paul says could you ask him if you can ever eat too much fruit in term his condition yeah okay so let's answer that question in in many different ways the question really becomes can you eat too much fruit period or I should say question mark write it regardless of what type of health issue you have even if you don't have any pre-existing health condition no diabetes no heart disease no cancer nothing okay is there such thing as eating too much fruit okay dr. Greger actually has some videos on this and I think he does a good job of sort of scratching the surface and that the big conclusion that he comes to from actually having looked at clinical studies is that people who consume the most fruit actually have the best health or lower or biomarkers so that suggests they have the Batna best health and these include studies of people who have who are eating 30 servings of fruit per day okay they have very healthy bowel movements they got low blood pressure they got low cholesterol they have no indicators of diabetes and their normal weight okay now if you take somebody who's living with diabetes whether it's type 1 like myself or pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes the question as well are you also capable of eating 30 servings of fruit per day 20 servings of fruit per day now here's the here's the irony in this situation when I first transitioned to a plant-based diet and was eating lots of fruit I thought exactly what the rest of the diabetes world thought which is fruit equals higher blood glucose fruit equals more insulin fruit equals more problems living with diabetes and as a result of that I should minimize it but here's the catch when you consume fruits I want you to think about two things as happening number one you're increasing your intake of nutrient-dense of a nutrient-dense class of foods that comes prepackaged with vitamins minerals fiber water antioxidants and phytochemicals okay so you're eating a very nutrient dense collection of foods but in addition to that the more fruit that you consume the less saturated fat rich animal products you are likely to consume okay so the more fruit you eat the less animal products you eat the less processed food you eat the less fat and protein-rich food you consume so two things effectively are happening you're increasing your food intake and you're getting more micro nutrient density and you're also decreasing your intake of foods and nutrients that are known to cause chronic problems such as heart disease weight gain diabetes and high blood pressure okay so the answer to your question is when people come into our coaching program we tell them this every single time we say the people who eat the most fruit have the best results get the best results and when I say get the best results I mean best blood glucose most stable blood glucose they lose the most weight they're able to keep that weight off over the course of time and truth be told they are some of the happiest people I know there's some of the happiest people I know do I have an evidence-based randomized control trial to prove this absolutely not I don't I wish I did but I know empirically from having worked with thousands of people that people who really prioritize consuming food fruit get phenomenal results and you know kiss insulin resistance goodbye it's fantastic oh who asked the question saying will you often hear how bad food is for you due to sugar and Fran says well what if you have low thyroid and Candida can you still eat lots of fruit okay I love it when people say fruit equals sugar sugar makes you fat sugar raise your cholesterol sugar makes you diabetic don't eat fruit okay so let's let's take a step back here if you're gonna equate something as complex as fruit to just sugar that's like taking that's like looking at the rainforests and saying oh the rainforest it's just a bunch of leaves okay it's completely negating the biodiversity that exists inside of a very complex species okay so if you take a mango as an example a mango has carbohydrate and fat and protein and vitamins and minerals and fiber and and antioxidants and phytochemicals kay it has nine classes of nutrients in it but yet when people talk about a mango when they talk about a banana what do they say they say Oh a banana is just a bunch of sugar they don't pay attention to the fat the protein the vitamins minerals fiber water antioxidants and phytochemicals where's the conversation about those guys how come how come all of a sudden those nutrients disappeared from the conversation okay so a fruit is a very complex ecosystem and this ecosystem has inside of it this thing called fiber and fiber is very very very very important okay have you ever seen a an overpass like you're driving along the highway and they're constructing an overpass or they're constructing a highway system if you ever seen one of those before chef AJ okay so they're like they're they're laying the groundwork and they're pouring the concrete and they're creating the structure for these overpasses to go over the highway okay if you pay attention what you'll find is that inside of the supports that hold up the overpasses and the overpasses themselves they have this stuff called rebar okay so rebar is this it's metal that goes inside of a concrete post that's going to hold up a an overpass okay and the purpose of the rebar is to give it seismic structural stability and also to make sure that it's not just a pile of concrete okay so the concrete basically has inside of it this thing that's there to make it structurally stable okay it the same way a mango a banana those fruits have inside of it something that's designed to give it structural rigidity and that structural rigidity is fiber okay so the fiber inside of a mango is the rebar that holds the whole thing together okay and then inside of that rebar you get vitamins minerals fiber water antioxidants phytochemicals plus carbohydrate and fat and protein so why is that important here's why it's important if you take a mango and you cut it open and you put it into your mouth okay it takes time this mango piece is gonna travel down here softly because it's gonna get into your stomach and then it's gonna get in your small intestine by the time it's in your small intestine it's partially digested but then inside of your small intestine you have a whole collection of enzymes that are now specifically designed to start to break this thing apart and get the vitamins out of that fiber Network and get the carbohydrates out and cut the carbohydrate down and get the protein and cut it and so on and so forth that process takes time and that's a good thing because the more time it takes the more normal of a physiological response you will have to that food okay so people think oh I'm gonna eat some food or I'm gonna eat some fruit and all of a sudden my slow glucose is gonna spike and the answer is it could but chances are it's not going to because the fiber is a break it slows down the absorption of glucose and protein and fat and vitamins and minerals and fiber and water and it's oxidants etc etc and that's a good thing versus if you were to go take table sugar and you just take it out of a jar and you stick it in your mouth and you go and it travels down your esophagus and gets into your small intestine there's no fiber vitamins minerals fiber water antioxidants protein fat there's nothing to slow down the absorption of that glucose and fructose into your blood and as a result of that it's going to get inside of your blood and it's gonna get there very quickly right so when people say fruit equals sugar I say no no no no fruit equals nine classes of macro and micronutrients and those nine classes act as a brake to slow down the absorption of glucose not sugar into your blood and oh by the way glucose is a fuel for your muscles you liver your brain and many other tissues so try not to think about fruit as being equal to sugar because from a physiological and biological perspective it's way too simplistic and is just factually incorrect Wow just it's so funny we were talking about a doctor that I mentioned really like he's watching doctor ready he says hello Oh doctor couch shake how you doing buddy you know I just wanted one embarrass you but Emma says he is looking hot three exclamations he's married but yes when you talk about fruit it's there's just such a misconception about diabetes in general not just laypeople but doctors that it's caused by sugar when in fact we know and I'm sure you're going to talk about this it's caused by fat and it's interesting Cyrus because when people come to me for weight loss routine they go I'm a real sugar addict I know really you have trouble with Twizzlers no you have trouble with gummy bears no you have trouble with sour patch kids they're never really sugar addicts they're sugar sugar fat addicts the sugar always comes with that yes these donuts ice cream so nobody I know sugar sugar is not bad it's not exactly right exactly right so I guess that what you're alluding to here is that we can't really talk about you know sugar I hate that word we can't talk about glucose or carbohydrates in isolation of other macro nutrients that are also present in food okay now for the longest time we've been told that diabetes is a condition that is caused by an overconsumption of sugar if I walked out onto the street today and I said the word literally the word diabetes to 100 people and I said give me the first word that comes to your mind when I say the word diabetes what is it 90 plus percent of those people would say sugar right it's a fun experiment just go up to people and say what's the first word that comes out of your head diabetes sugar right and the reason for that is because over the course the last 30 40 50 years the medical institution has made an association between diabetes and sugar and there are plenty of randomized control trials that show that when you take an individual and you give them white refined table sugar that their level of insulin resistance increases and as a result of that their liver gets into an impaired state their muscles get into an impaired state and their blood glucose will climb and you know what that's a true statement okay I am not advocating that anybody consume refined white processed sugar okay because it is problematic we do know that it can cause that it can increase your risk for many Chron condition okay will it cause diabetes it depends there's a lot of other factors that your that factor into it okay but I will tell you this when I this is let's go backwards in time 2012 was all right now 2000 and 2007 when I first got to UC Berkeley I was under the the tutelage of a professor named dr. Mark Hellerstein he's literally like a Good Will Hunting this guy is so smart that when he opens his mouth I have to have a pen and paper with me so I can write down as many things as I possibly can before I lose it okay so mark gave me the opportunity he said Cyrus you get to in your studies over the course of the next five years you get to induce insulin resistance and diabetes in laboratory animals these are mice and rats and then you get to rescue them from insulin resistance and diabetes using any number of different you know interventions so I had two responsibilities number one was to make laboratory animals insulin resistant and then number two was to rescue that insulin resistance and then make them you know quote unquote normal again and it was a fun experiment because you get to learn how to turn on diabetes and how to turn off diabetes now when I first started learning about what was gonna induce insulin resistance I went into the literature with this preconceived notion the preconceived notion was sugar causes diabetes sugar causes insulin resistance so I started reading I'm sorry we don't pulled up one paper after another after another after another and we induced insulin resistance in laboratory rats by feeding them a diet high in saturated fat and I was like wait saturated fat was on let's not all about next paper we induced hyper glycaemia which is code for insulin resistance and high blood glucose we induced hyperglycemia by feeding animals a hyperlipidemia diet that's a diet that's high in fact paper after paper after paper after paper was just a lot high-fat high saturated fat lard and beyond and I was like wait a minute are you telling me that I can induce insulin resistance by feeding animals fat and not sugar right there are papers that actually show you that you can make animals diabetic by giving them sugar but just like you said you know sugar in isolation you give them sugar in a high fat environment and that makes them even more diabetic okay so if you look at the physiology what you'll find is that when you're consuming high-fat foods the the fat that you're consuming comes as this stuff called triglyceride in the food it comes in meat it comes in dairy products it comes in cheese okay it comes even in avocado and coconut oil okay this saturated fat I'm sorry the triglyceride molecule you consume it it goes down into your esophagus it gets into your small intestine inside of your small intestine the triglyceride molecule gets torn apart and the fatty acids that are on this triglyceride molecule get absorbed into your blood and then they get distributed to tissues all throughout your body okay now those fatty acids are supposed to go into predominantly one tissue and one tissue only and that tissue is called your adipose tissue your fat tissue okay so your adipose tissue is everywhere it's in your neck it's in your armpits it's in you know the side of your chest it's in you know for women they have some in their breasts for men they got some of their butts you got some of your legs it's all over the place okay and that adipose tissue is actually a very safe place to keep fatty acids so you consume fat rich foods if those fatty acids ended up only in their adipose tissue then they really would be no problem and diabetes really wouldn't be that big of a deal the problem is that these fatty acids grow into your out of host issue but they also go elsewhere they also go into your muscle literally into your muscle tissue okay wherever you have muscle they can get inside of that muscle they can also get inside of your liver and that's okay in small quantities but when you over consume fat rich foods which is very common in a standard American diet or in a low carbohydrate diet then you overwhelm your muscles and you overwhelm your liver with excess fatty acids and when they become overwhelmed the first thing that they do is they try and block more fatty acids from coming in here's the catch they suck at it there's very poor biological mechanisms to block fatty acids from coming into tissues and as a result of that they say well we can't really block these fatty acids from coming in but we can block this thing called insulin and if we block insulin we can slow down the rate at which these fatty acids come and we can also block glucose from coming in because you know what we don't want any more stuff we don't want any more energy so take keep it outside so they basically mount an a defense or they mount a resistance to insulin and as soon as they mount this release resistance to insulin they become insulin resistant so your your muscle cells actually create their own amount of insulin resistance they initiate insulin resistance as a self-protective mechanism and your liver does the same thing so as soon as that happens the next time you go eat a banana that has glucose inside of it the glucose is supposed to be able to get inside of your liver and muscles and when insulin knocks on the door and says hey liver muscles knock knock I got this glucose in the blood do you want to take it up both of them say no no remember that whole insulin resistance game we're playing sorry I'm not open for business right now go away so they stopped paying attention to insulin they keep glucose in your blood and as a result of that you eat a banana and then you check your blood glucose an hour later and you look at your blood glucose meter you go huh weird my blog because is 174 oh that's weird my blog it goes is 226 what's going on I just ate one banana oh I know I know I know I guess bananas are bad for me that's what people say I guess potatoes are bad for me I guess quinoa is bad for me because every time I eat these carbohydrate-rich foods my blood glucose goes through the roof and the answer is it's not the bananas fault it's not the quinoa fault it's not the potato's fault it's not the mangos fault it's not the papayas fault it's everything that you ate before those foods those carbohydrate-rich foods that caused a traffic jam inside of your muscle and liver that caused insulin resistance and blocked glucose from getting inside of those tissues so if you can go backwards and you can get rid of that insulin resistance that's caused by excess fatty acid consumption then you get to a point where you can shovel literally shovel carbohydrate-rich foods into your mouth and the glucose gets inside of there muscles and liver exactly where it's supposed to be and there is no problem I love the way you simplify it and explain it because sugar isn't the culprit but it becomes the culprit because of the pre-existing environment that wood that it was in it's sort of like when we get these outbreaks of e.coli and they recall spinach it's not from the spinach is from the cow that pooped and you know it yeah Valley yeah you're right you're right you're like don't blame the messenger right the banana is the messenger that the spinach is the messenger blame the cause and go figure out what it is that started the problem and then try and fix that problem and if you can do that then you'll realize that saturated fat is the molecule that's most highly associated with the development of insulin resistance and high blood glucose and I'm not saying that you want to eat a zero saturated fat diet that's like impossible I'm saying just reduce your intake of saturated fat and then that way you can dramatically improve your blood glucose in the same way that you identify the cow that was pooping in a pile that wasn't maintained properly that then ended up causing a coli contamination inside the grocery store right don't you wish Walter kempner was alive so that we could have him on our summits because if sugar was bad and fruit was bad and white rice was bad how the heck did he Traverse diabetes feeding the people well that was three things I know he his rice fruit diet this is this is Walter Kemper back from the 1950s he was a professor at yet Duke University and he basically was trying to teach people how to reverse hypertension and that was his main goal was to reverse what's called malignant hypertension and it was considered incurable at the time so he put people onto this rice fruit diet which he invented rice white rice fruit fruit juice and table sugar he literally added table sugar to people's food and he gave people those four foods which are basically condemned by modern society don't you why rice don't eat fruit don't drink fruit juice and certainly don't have any sugar and he put people on his diet and gave him exclusively those four fruits and what happened blood pressure drop malignant hypertension reversed weight loss reversed type-2 diabetes and significantly improved liver function right amongst other things so you're absolutely right Walter kapner who is one of our heroes and it would be great if he was a lot today and I wish Pritikin was alive to all these people that I wish I had known and I've met people that have known both of them or what's the same Denis Burkitt I wish I could have known all these people another percent I just wasn't that interested this stuff when I was when I was little so I know you've talked a little bit about insulin resistance but I really keep saying please ask him my question the way I asked it which is what is insulin resistance in general for laypeople why is it so important for optimal health okay rhythmic what's up a man I love that guy okay so so here's the what is insulin sensitivity can you please talk about it so insulin sensitivity okay okay so we just did the insulin resistance story right so let's just back up here real quick insulin resistance is the condition that's caused by the excess consumption of saturated fat that causes a traffic jam inside of your liver and muscles that prevents glucose from leaving your blood so it's literally a traffic jam of glucose inside of your blood now insulin sensitivity is the inverse the opposite of insulin resistance if there was a way that you could eat that would dramatically improve or should I say maximize your insulin sensitivity then what would happen is that your liver and muscles would be able to easily uptake glucose from the blood when it was present okay so the way to do that is to allow your liver and muscles the opportunity to communicate with insulin effectively and to be able to communicate with insulin freely and openly such that small amounts of insulin whether that insulin comes from your own endogenous pancreas or whether the insulin comes from a needle or a Shazz syringe like it does in my situation okay you want to make it such that small amounts of insulin are able to transport large amounts of glucose into your muscles and into your liver okay so it really the way to think about insulin sensitivity and the thing that that a lot of medical professionals get wrong is that most people think about insulin sensitivity as just being a measure of either glucose or insulin one of the two and you'll see the salon and the sort of like conversations they oh well your glucose is well controlled therefore you don't have insulin resistance right Oh looks like your fasting insulin is low therefore everything's fine the answer is no no no no insulin sensitivity is a measurement of glucose and insulin at the same time it is a measurement of the ratio of glucose to insulin or you could think of it as the ratio of carbohydrate in your diet to insulin required to metabolize that carbohydrate okay so in someone like me okay previous to a plant-based diet the amount of carbohydrate that I would eat on a daily basis was about a hundred to 125 grams per day so let's just do some simple math here suppose I was eating a hundred and 25 grams of carbohydrate per day I would inject approximately 40 units of insulin so you do the division of the two a hundred and twenty-five divided by 40 is about three so what that means is that on a daily basis it took one unit of insulin to metabolize three grams of carbohydrate okay every three grams of carbohydrate into my mouth required one unit of insulin to keep my blood glucose controlled we don't want ratio in today's world I can now consume 700 grams of carbohydrate per day and I can use 25 units of insulin per day so do the math on that 700 divided by 25 is 28 to one so what that means is that every time I consume 28 grams of carbohydrate I need one unit of insulin so back in the day it was a three to one ratio today it's a 28 to one ratio and that's a huge huge huge difference right as a result of that what that means is that I am now capable of consuming a significant significantly more carbohydrate energy which means significantly more glucose energy in my food and as a result of that I actually can do it using a less insulin than I was able to do it before and that right there is one indicator of insulin sensitivity and the the bigger picture here is that yeah insulin sensitivity is important because it keeps your blood glucose control what insulin sensitivity is also important because the more insulin sensitive you become the better your cardiovascular health the lower your cholesterol levels usually become the lower your blood pressure usually becomes okay the less atherosclerosis you are likely to experience the easier it is to lose weight okay so I like to think of insulin resistance as being the central condition which increases your risk for many many many chronic diseases okay and these chronic diseases include all the forms of diabetes plus cardiovascular conditions they also can increase your risk for the development of Alzheimer's disease fatty liver disease chronic kidney disease the list goes on there's also a whole collection of these unintended or whatsoever I look for in inevitable consequences of diabetes that most people you know think just have to come along for the ride including blindness and retinopathy and neuropathy and erectile dysfunction all of those are related to insulin resistance in our book on page 12 we drew this picture right here and you can see that insulin resistance right there is the center cog inside of a wheel and that wheel has a whole collection of conditions that are influenced by insulin resistance in other words if you become more insulin resistant than your the risk that you run for developing each one of those conditions goes up okay so that's why it's important it's just literally the thing that influences your overall chronic disease risk and the lower you can get insulin resistance the better your overall health will be period end of story that's amazing you know I this would be a great t-shirt this could be everyone could be a different color it would be like beautiful oh there you go that's a great idea I mean it could design it so I'm sure your numbers blow your doctor away or any doctor away yeah it's like the numbers are so far beyond there comprehension that they don't even engage in conversation with me I'll be honest with you dr. Eric chef AJ I haven't I don't really go to the doctor not much anymore because I don't really get that much about you out of the out of the relationship I go to the doctor obviously to get my a1c measured and to make sure that my lipid panel is under control but I used to go to the doctor what ten times a year I go to the doctor two times three times a year now at this point right and that's just a testament of the fact that like my health is in tip-top shape and I don't really have a need to go to the doctor as much I know what you mean the only reason I go is to gloat Jimmy wants to know can I type two diabetic who has had a kidney transplant O'Regan I remember watching a woman I would dr. mcdougal he said that if you have kidney disease you better damn well be vegan and especially if you donated your kidney because now you know you're so what Elliot that's for that yeah for sure so kidney transplant means you got to be on amino suppressive drugs for unfortunately the rest of your life let's put it this way as you become more insulin resistant like I said it increases your risk for many chronic diseases one of those diseases is called CKD chronic kidney disease chronic kidney disease progresses in stages and if you get to chronic kidney disease stage four you then are likely to need dialysis and/or a kidney transplant and and you know what we have seen is that people at stage one stage two stage three can reverse chronic kidney disease and go back to stage zero normal kidney function or very close to stage zero normal kidney function people who are on dialysis and/or get a kidney transplant are still going to benefit from improving the quality of the nutrients in your diet and here's why your kidneys are highly highly susceptible organs and these organs just like your brain just like the blood vessels all throughout your body just like your pancreas just like your liver are influenced by and highly susceptible to the nutrients inside of your diet so when you're consuming a diet that is high in saturated fat high in animal-based protein high in very particular types of amino acids that can be that are typically sulfuring aided amino acids they can create of the perfect storm for the nephrons inside of your kidney which are these like microscopic little nets they can they can create a very inflammatory environment for those nephrons okay you have billions of nephrons inside of your kidney and when those nephrons actually end up decreasing in their function because the blood is too acidic because there's inflammatory there's inflammatory proteins are being secreted by them those nephrons as soon as they basically stop functioning then the the overall function of your kidney starts to go down okay so what you want to do whether you have your own endogenous kidney or whether you have a kidney transplant 'add is preserve the function of those nephrons and preserve the function of your overall kidney and the easiest way to do that is to eat a diet that is high in fiber low in saturated fat and low or hopefully non-existent in animal-based protein and when you do that the chances of you are optimizing your kidney function over the course of time go way up absolutely well said and it works for diabetes and it works for heart disease it works for weight loss and food addiction an autoimmune disease it's almost like I hear dr. Greger and my voice in my head saying is there nothing a plant-based diet cannot do dad I do I know it's funny because you know a lot of people say if plant if a plant-based diet was a was a pharmaceutical drug it would literally be a not billion dollar drug it would be a trillion dollar drug because it's basically it's a it's a medication if you will that can reverse practically all chronic disease right so don't think of it as just being like a pill like viagra that can improve the blood flow to your sexual organs right or a blood pressure medication that can reduce the pressure inside of your blood vessels it does all of that at the same time and reverses diabetes and limits your risk for cancer and improves the function of your brain etc etc right so just imagine if there was a pill that could do that people would be going gangbusters for it and the pill actually is called broccoli and carrots and make us yeah absolutely you mentioned saturated fat do things like avocado nuts and seeds have saturated fat k wants to know how do high fat foods like these affect you if eaten in moderation for sure ok so the question really becomes what is moderation okay moderation means did something different to every single person ok you might take a look at you know a whole avocado and say well I'm an eat one avocado every other day and I'm gonna eat a bunch of fruits and vegetables as well that's moderate right I might take a look at an avocado and say okay well I'm gonna eat a quarter of an avocado every other day that seems moderate to me right so this term that like moderation is the answer is really too vague for us to like learn anything from what we have found is that there are foods that are richer in fat and richer in protein okay that we put into the yellow light category and these include avocados nuts seeds coconuts olives and one other that I'm forgetting off top of my head okay these foods all we put in a yellow light category because you can eat them in fact we encourage you to eat these foods but again a little bit goes a long way okay when I say a little bit goes a long way what I mean is that we have found that if we can limit people's total fat intake to approximately 30 grams of total fat per day not just saturated fat but total fat per day then you stand the chance of maximizing your insulin sensitivity than most okay so whether that fat comes from nuts or seeds or avocados or olives or coconuts it doesn't matter the total amount of fat that you get from those foods plus the fact that you're getting from bananas plus the fact that you're getting from butter lettuce and from black beans and so on and so forth all of that put together if you can keep that less than 30 grams per day then you can optimize your blood glucose control very well and you can keep yourself very insulin sensitive right and you are the guys you and Robbie that that's right well actually I had met dr. bit Dino before but it was your interview and mastering diabetes that got me to know him because you you can even have enough fat not eating that seeds in avocado meaning omega-3 yes if you're willing to eat enough greens that's absolutely right you absolutely right yeah and and there's this whole you know a lot of confusion here about omega-3 fatty acids and whether you can get enough on a plant-based diet we don't have to go into like mad detail about that right now but the answer is yes it's very easily doable and you don't have to be consuming very many fat rich foods in order to make that possible absolutely I haven't I have not added any fat to my diet and eight and a half years and I did yet the last man standing you know I I you know would be so funny if I do drop dead and I'll put on my tombstone because she didn't eat nuts or beans right right right that becomes like your claim to fame right there so sure you wants to know what you think of fruit and vegetable smooth so I'm guessing that's like a green smoothie fruits and vegetables smoothie the answer is they're awesome they're awesome for you okay so let me just put it this way in general what we do advocate is that you consume as much food in its whole state that hasn't been run through a food processor or a blender as possible okay so I would rather that you actually chew your vegetables and chew your fruit rather than putting them through a blender and then turning it into a smoothie and consuming it and the reason for that is because just like we were saying earlier rebar aka fiber is good it acts as a brake and it slows down the ability of nutrients to get inside of your bloodstream and that is a good thing when you throw a bunch of fruits into a blender you break the rebar aka fiber and as a result of that it's it's it's a little bit easier for nutrients to get inside of your blood and they get there a little bit quicker okay so if you're an active individual and you exercise frequently and you're close to your normal body weight and your blood pressure is low and your fasting insulin is low you have a greater chance of being able to consume smoothies without any you know what sort of like for without without getting a high blood glucose or without you know consume over consuming on calories but if you are significantly overweight if you are sedentary if you have a high degree of insulin resistance you have high blood pressure you have high cholesterol then the chances of you consuming smoothies and getting away with it go down okay so you're gonna have to judge that for yourself based off of you know overall whether or not you are in a more insulin-resistant state or a more insulin sensitive state and the more insulin sensitive you become the higher your opportunity is for consuming things like smoothies and stuff that's gone through a food processor makes perfect sense mama for kiddo says should we limit the amount of dates we eat for weight loss or blood sugar maybe you can explain Cyrus are some people say dates or a fresh fruit but if that's true why is the caloric density of them 1300 calories out high pot dates were dried fruit yeah okay so dates are you can buy them in the grocery store as you know quote-unquote fresh and when you do that you literally are going to buy a branch you're gonna buy a branch and then the dates are gonna be like attached to that right and and you can pick them off and they are they are extremely juicy I don't know if you've ever seen this in the grocery store have you seen that before I've seen them and actually in the kosher grocery store but I'm gay capital of the world and it's mostly dried meats here yeah right you're in the India Valley so you know you get dried dates all over the place so if you find fresh dates in the grocery store trust me you will know because you are literally gonna buy a branch off of a tree and stick that in your shopping cart okay the date that is fresh that comes in that state it's very juicy and you put it in your mouth and it just kind of like it kind of like ooze is all over your mouth right now the dates that you buy in the grocery store at Whole Foods or at Trader Joe's or in any other you know major grocery store come in a package and the amount of water in them is actually significantly less have they been put into a dehydrator know they've been air-dried over the course of time so in the India Valley they literally pick them off of the date palm and then they'll put them into like a warehouse and they'll store them properly so that over the course of another couple of weeks or months they actually become smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and then they become more dehydrated they still have some water content in them but they're just more dehydrated and as a result of that they're calorie density goes up and up and up and up and up okay so the answer is they're not like a fully dried fruit and they're not a fully under eyed fruit they're basically something in the middle okay dates are a yellow light food I've probably eaten conservatively over the course of the last 15 years let me do the math on this 300 times what's 300 times 15 4,500 okay I've probably eaten fourth I kid you not 4,000 pounds of dates since I first became a plant-based eater like it is absurd how many dates I used to eat at least a pound a day right and did it cause my blood glucose to go i high no it did not again because I exhibit the characteristics of somebody who's very insulin sensitive I exercise frequently I'm at my normal body weight excellent lipid panel and my glucose tolerance is very high so I can get away with eating dates let's put it that way okay very nutrient-dense food highly recommend them but I'm unable to get away with them because I'm so active so what I would recommend doing is when you're going to consume dates have a few of them at a time literally like two to three dates at a time and that's it and then put them away dates are absolutely addicting they're sweet they're candy and you can easily say oh I don't eat that many dates right you eat a couple now you could couple more a couple more before you know it you've eaten 12 dates for the day and at what is it 18 grams of carbohydrate per module date okay that can add up to a significant number of grams of carbohydrate and/or a significant number of calories correct me if I'm wrong a chef AJ but I think one medjool date is something like 70 calories 70 actually it's 75 I mean you can have a pound of zucchini for the same amount of calories that's exactly right so if you snack on dates and you have a couple for breakfast and a couple for lunch and a couple for dinner okay before you know it you've eaten let's say you had six dates at 75 calories that's 450 calories and that can happen very quickly so the answer is if you want any dates be very cautious of them they can pack on a significant number of calories but they are I mean they're incredibly tasty don't get me wrong and well this problem is when I hate dates I always like to stuff with peanut butter or almond butter I know I know so tasty have you ever tried that stuff the PB to powder I haven't because I does it ever come without sugar because I'm just pretty strict on the no sugar do they make PB 2 without sugar now you know I've seen different brands of it PB 2 itself I think either contains sugar or sometimes they put like a cocoa powder in there as well but there are other brands that I think do not have any sugar in them if I'm not mistaken and if you can get your hands on that it's like a defatted peanut powder that you can just put a little bit of water in and it replicates peanut butter and then you can stick it inside of your dates and eat them again and they fit taste like many bucks so as a food act in recovery I don't want to replicate you know I'm gonna be interviewing dr. Tom Campbell soon and he calls these cold foods and they okay great these segue foods you know Trent you know for me it's a slippery slope but for if people that need it absolutely so feel about vegan keto there's some newer plant-based doctors that are saying wait it doesn't affect heart disease and if I'm understanding you correctly Cyrus in terms of insulin resistance and sensitivity even if we could eat high fat and not have it affect our weight or our heart health it doesn't seem like it's going to be very good for those that are in have an insulin resistance yeah it's not a good idea it's not a good idea here's why oh I'm sorry let me back up let me back up if you are trying to maximize your insulin sensitivity okay eating a high year carbohydrate low-fat plant-based diet just like we've been talking about is your is your get out of jail for free card it's your best chance at achieving maximal insulin sensitivity there are people who say okay well what if I want to continue to eat a ketogenic diet right does that mean that you know and I understand that you're a message of eating a high saturated fat and/or animal-based diet it could be more problematic what if I were to eat a plant-based ketogenic diet that's low in carbohydrate value but is coming with mainly vegetable and you know plant matter and the answer is sure it's better it's definitely better than eating a ketogenic diet from animal sources but your insulin sensitivity is not going to be maximized in fact you are going to be quite insulin resistance as a result of eating lots of avocados and nuts and seeds and and olive oil and coconuts okay so your level of insulin resistance baseline will be higher and as a result of that your ability to eat carbohydrate rich anything is gonna be lower okay so the more insulin resistant you become the lower your glucose tolerance is now is that a bad thing okay the answer is from a cardiovascular perspective it improves your health if and only if you compare to somebody who has poor cardiovascular health to begin with okay so your average person your average person who's living with some form of insulin resistance has elevated lipids may have a slightly high blood pressure okay and maybe experiencing fzero sclerosis okay that's a person who's eating a standard American diet or eating a low carbohydrate diet when you consume that if that's your baseline then moving to a plant-based ketogenic diet will improve your health but what I'm saying is don't stop there okay you're gonna improve your health by going to a plant-based ketogenic diet no questions asked but you're gonna improve your health even more by going towards a low-fat plant-based whole food diet right so if I'm giving you an option of improving your health a little bit or improving your health a lot a bit which one are you gonna take right it really depends on yeah you're gonna take you're just like me you're gonna take the thing that's gonna maximize your chances of you know improving your overall health right so what I tell people is like listen a plant-based ketogenic diet is is going to be better than eating a standard American diet or low carbohydrate diet so good do it but I want you to realize that there's an even better way and the even better way that's associated with lower risk of chronic disease and maximizing your insulin sensitivity is a low-fat plant-based whole food diet so why wouldn't you try that amen to that brother so a lot of people are asking how long does it take to have good insulin sensitivity reverse insulin sensitivity permanently lower your anyone see control your blood Sugar's how long will it take if they if they are compliant okay if you're compliant at least 25 years I'm joking if you're completely here's what I here's what I noticed when I transition to a low-fat plant-based whole food diet like I said earlier under Doug Graham supervision I did it overnight I went cold turkey because I wanted to and that's the kind of personality I have and I was in I was in a pretty crappy state at that point with my own personal hell so I made that transition I did it overnight I do not recommend doing it overnight because it was it became challenging but I started to see improvements in my blood glucose and it reduced a physiological requirement for insulin within 24 hours it was a very quick change did that mean that I reversed insulin resistance in 24 hours no not even close okay it took me many many many months to get to a point where I had truly minimized my insulin requirements where my blood glucose was very stable and where my energy levels were extremely high and my lipid panel was nice and you know was was my total cholesterol was low my triglycerides were low and my blood pressure was fantastic okay it took it took a little while to get there for me it took me about you know three months or so but that was also because I was also coming from a perspective of you know it's already normal weight and I was already quite active to begin with okay what we have found in our coaching program is that if you are eating the way that we described by eating mainly green light foods with a small amount of yellow light and tried to eliminate completely red light foods from your diet you can expect then at the very minimum it would take let's say three months to completely reverse insulin resistance more likely approximately six months now we've had some people in our program that have been doing this for three years and they continue to you know be part of the coaching program and that's fantastic because we'd love to see much of a baked into this whole process okay but you can see evidence of improved insulin sensitivity immediately literally within 24 to 48 hours but to fully go through the process of dropping your blood pressure and improving your lipids and getting to your ideal body weight and getting a great a 1 C value that is gonna take three months six months and at that point you're gonna be completely changed from the inside out Wow do you have time for two more questions absolutely I got whatever you want because I just realized the whole reason I asked you to allow me to interview you was to ask you a specific question about brains and I got so involved in hearing your passion be these and the questions that I almost forgot to ask my question you guys which is why I brought in here in the first place when did I actually read in this book so I I I worked with a very small segment of the plant-based world I'm not trying to be the big be all and end all and veganism for everybody I work with people that identify as food ethics or people that suffer from processed food addiction and the end that are usually trying to lose weight as well and I've run this program for over eight years and I work with just only a few thousand people but that's not nothing and what I found is they do better with savory breakfast meaning that if they start their day in a savory way whether it's beans and greens or vegetables and sweet potatoes and broccoli and that for many of the people in this group when they start their day in a sweet way it just kind of sets their day up to have more sweet cravings and what I'm talking about is a breakfast that compared to like an Egg McMuffin is a suitable breakfast that many plant-based doctors recommend oatmeal and fruit but they don't eat the whole grain oat groats or even a steel-cut oat it's usually the roll though and the reason I believe that roll notice process is I used to be a pastry chef at a restaurant so being a pastry chef in a non-vegan restaurant and one day we ran out of flour and there's the order had come and I literally used rolled oats I didn't even cry in them because our the Vitamix was broken and they completely dissipated it's like the cake was perfect it's like the rolled oat is so you can rub it in your finger and it dissipates and rolled oats you can cook them in five minutes as opposed to the Oprah in an hour so I I made a comment even that Instagram or Facebook I said that if you're if you're struggling with cravings or trying to lose weight that eating oatmeal fruit for breakfast is like eating cake because the oats which are high in fat and processed are like sugar and the like flour and the food is and people were bashing me out it's like they I was disrespecting Esselstyn who adores my book can be Google and I love these guys but then I read something in your book that I thought was very interesting on page 222 it says we have found that eating oatmeal can cause unwanted blood glucose elevations in people living with a medium high or very high level of baseline insulin resistance so what do you think about rolled oats okay I'm so glad you brought this question up because it can become very very confusing Brenda Davis I like to call her Brenda pedia because there's literally nothing that that woman does not know okay she opened my eyes to this thing that she refers to as the whole grain hierarchy okay so she said she said listen the the food that that is used the grain is important but the level of processing of the grain is more important in determining how likely you are to be satisfied how calorie-dense the resulting product is what your blood glucose is going to do and what it could possibly do to your body weight okay so if you are just paying attention to the grain okay whether the grain is oats or whether the grain is barley or whether the grain is quinoa and you're not paying attention to how it's actually processed and/or cooked then you're missing the bigger picture so I said okay teach me so she said let's take let's take Oaks as an example just like you were talking about okay I'm gonna show you this this is a picture that came directly off of Brenda's website and I'm just gonna read it for you because it's a little bit small okay at the top of the whole-grain hierarchy you have what's called an intact whole grain so in this situation when we're talking about oats we're gonna be talking about oat groats you can literally buy oat groats in the bulk section of your grocery store and you can prepare the old groats and eat the oak groats without doing anything else to them you just literally boil them and you can consume them and they taste fantastic and you have yourself the most intact ver of oats okay underneath oat groats there's another layer of like if you process oats to the next level you're gonna end up with steel cut oats so steel cut oats are slightly more processed that oat groats okay and you can buy steel cut oats in a can you can go Trader Joe's you can go anywhere and you can get them you can make them in your kitchen and they still taste fantastic but they're a little bit more processed okay the next level of processing are called rolled oats okay so when you roll an oat you end up with this flat almost like paper like consistency and then you can take those oats and you can cook them and you can eat them and they still taste really good but again they're just a little bit more processed then the steel cut oats were okay and then down further on this hierarchy or as you process these growths even more the oats even more you get to ground oats okay and this is usually a flower so you can get to oat flour at that point now you're dealing with the oat that has been ground into a powder and then you can take that powder and you can reconstitute it and create something else out of it and then you end up even lower on a hierarchy the puffed oats and the puffed oats are the folks that have the most processing and they're gonna be the most problematic for blood glucose for satiety for weight gain for food addiction and beyond okay so your question was what do I think of rolled oats and my answer is well rolled oats are right in the middle of the hierarchy so my answer is rolled oats are not good enough if you're gonna eat oats feet as high on the hierarchy as you possibly can eat the oat groats if you possibly can if you can't get your hands on old growths or you don't know what they are you don't know how to prepare them and get the steel-cut oats but as soon as you go down from steel cuts and you go down into rolled or you go down into an oat flour or you going on into puffed now you're just asking for problems you're asking for a feeling where you're not gonna be satisfied you're asking for the potential to be taken on more calories then you want to be taken on because the calorie density is gonna go up you're asking for your blood glucose to do weird things okay and you're asking for more problematic metabolic issues down the road okay so eat as high as you possibly can on any of the whole-grain hierarchies and just ask yourself a question when you're looking at something in the grocery store what had to be present in order for this thing to come into existence okay in order to make a bread you usually have to have a flour which means that you took barley you ground it to a flour and then you reconstitute it into a bread not good enough that's very low on the hierarchy scale okay why don't you just eat the the spelt or the buckwheat or the oats or the barley without any processing and when you do that then you can maximize your chances of getting the most micronutrients the least amount of processing and you can maximize your overall health doesn't kiss you right now my wife didn't see that you know the shoe fits so last question and Paul has been chomping at the bit I promise and I asked it so what are you eating a typical day what do I eat a typical day okay let me take you into my kitchen let's have some fun here all right what I units okay we're kind of low on food right now but I'll show you this basket is normally full of these guys no these are not the bananas these are plantains so on a daily basis I'll probably eat six plantains okay and as you can see these plantains are like they're very big you know this is not like your average tiny banana we also have these bad boys these are mangoes these are Costa Rican mangoes that smell like they just came off of the tree and this is also a pretty big mango I mean comparison to my head it's like I don't know a quarter of the size of my head or something this is actually a small mango but I'll probably shout out on like four of these per day at least okay so the bulk of my calories are coming from plantain they're coming from mangoes they also come from these these guys which you might have seen before too this is a marital papaya and these things are dream we cheap and they're very tasty and this thing is like you know pretty much the size of my head so that makes up the bulk of my calories and they usually am eating lots of fruit for breakfast and then for lunch and usually by the time I hit the middle of the afternoon is when I transition over towards more beans and vegetables so the beans that I love to eat are currently in the instant pot making as we speak and those beans are garbanzo beans I'm a huge garbanzo bean fan so I love eating garbanzo beans and what's it so I'm a huge fan of eating garbanzo beans and so I eat those on a daily basis and then in addition to that I also eat things like non starchy vegetables a lot and those are things like onions and broccoli and cauliflower and as you can see here a bunch of tomatoes and then we also got red peppers I love eating cabbage and so I'm eating those foods pretty much in the evening hours almost exclusively and I make sure that I get my fill of fruits before that and then I'm pretty happy camper that's amazing to you do you eat them raw Meredith wants to know um I eat them raw actually I eat them very raw because most people think you can't eat your contains raw but the answer is you can if you just wait for them to be you know kind of a little bit squishy like a banana and then I eat them and they're actually very filling and very very tasty that's amazing to you do you add as dr. Goldhamer would say any chemicals to your food that will smooth or blew your brains to tiny mechanism like sugar oil or salt all the time I add sugar oil and salt to every single thing that I eat I'm just kidding no I don't know I believe you when you say it you're like your face is like okay thank you so much I've no I don't I don't add I don't we don't have sugar in our house we don't have salt in our house we don't have oil in our house we just don't have it and so therefore like even if I wanted to add it I wouldn't know how to do that I don't have the ingredients to do it and and you know it actually pisses people off when they come over to our house they're like hey where's the Sultan like we don't have it right hey can I get a little oil to put on this salad they're like and we know we don't have it right and people are like what do you mean you don't have olive oil now I don't have olive oil I don't know what to say you're great I'm talking to you and Yuri inspired me to reconnect with dr. mark Helen Berg or your professor because I was going to interview him and then it kind of slipped my mind but if he's the one who schooled you he's got to be brilliant yeah that man that man's a brilliant man and I'm happy to connect you guys one more time but you know he can go into a lot of detail about the physiology of heart disease and diabetes and weight gain and triglyceride metabolism and he's got a lot of he's got a really really deep understanding of human physiology I hear your instant pot beeping in the background which me oh I'm to let you go thank you so much not just for this wonderful interview but for all the work that you and Robby do and I hope one day to actually meet you in person I feel like I know you anyway but I can't I don't even know if you're tall or shorter or anything like that I know I know one day we're gonna get to hang out big time and we can eat a bunch of mangos together I mean I'm just curious I know how you say to eater I'm 610 actually I'm pretty fun I'm just kidding no I'm not I'm 511 well thank you so much and thank you guys so much for watching please come back tomorrow well I'll be interviewing my and new dr.neil barnard and at 2 p.m. vegan bodybuilder Derrick tree sighs thanks so much for watching and thank you Cyrus this has been so much fun Thank You chef AJ I don't appreciate all the work that you're doing to really really really make a huge difference in this whole food plant-based world and I mean you're did the the quality of the information and the consistency with which you publish stuff is mind-blowing so thanks for the opportunity to be here I totally appreciate it of course that's because I choose wonderful guests like you okay bye bye bye bye

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 27,118

Rating: 4.8943896 out of 5

Keywords: chef aj, chef aj recipe, plant based, plant based diet, diet, vegan, healthy, weight loss, food addiction, podcast, author

Id: TbrtaaeVYKY

Length: 79min 11sec (4751 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020