Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food. Hippocrates

I’ve been pulling up posts from last year now that I’ve passed my one year anniversary of blogging. It’s interesting to see what was on my mind a year ago. There is no corresponding post for today from last year. Maybe we were too busy getting ready for a wedding. Watching what we were eating so our bathing suits would look as good as they could.

We worked hard to get a few pounds off for the wedding but they have crept back on. The weight I lost when I cut out the cream in my coffee and moved to a more plant-based diet has stayed off.

I’ve been bringing eggs, cheese and meat back into my diet. I picked up The Plant Paradox by Dr. Steven Gundry, and then his earlier book Dr. Gundry’s Diet Revolution. I never embraced veganism but I did embrace plant-based. Deprivation doesn’t work for me. I choose what I eat, and I don’t pass up something I really want. If every day was a buffet it would be hard, too many choices means too much food.

Dr. Gundry tells us “Meat is bad for us because it is good for us, and plants are good for us because they are bad for us.” This is the food paradox. He tells us we can outwit our genes, which kill us off once we’ve outlived our usefulness. This phenomenon is genetic pleiotrophy, meaning genes that activate one sequence of events during part of our life cycle activate the opposite events when called upon to change direction. He says, “The foods of developed nations are so “good” for our genes that they are “bad” for us and our entire society.

He tells us we should:

Fool our genes into thinking that we are not fat enough to kill yet.

Convince them we’re not working overtime, struggling to survive.

Get them to reverse their effect so they undo the damage they – with our help – have already done to our body.

He tells us our diet allows us to grow faster, become stronger, and females can produce babies at younger ages and have more of them. But, all this high-calorie food has a price, because of the “calorie counter” for each species on earth. Within our master computer is a program that monitors the number of calories we consume and compares it to a standard that allows each human (like all other animals studied) to grow, reproduce and raise young, and then get out of the way in order to conserve precious food resources.

Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live. Jim Rohn

Dr. Steven Gundry is a heart surgeon who realized that bypasses and stints aren’t the answer to heart disease, diet is. He said even though he ran twenty miles a week, and put in an hour per day at the gym he still weighed 228 pounds. He was still plagued with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and frequent colds. He says his activity level, food consumption, and “pain” all conspired to inform his genes that he wasn’t a very successful animal, which he says activates killer genes, as does taking more than our fair share of food.

I’ve believed we are what we eat for a long time. Dr. Gundry puts a new spin on it. When he turned fifty he realized that the people he was operating on looked a lot like him, they were all part of the “Big Boy Club,” men who weigh over 220 lbs.

Where we carry our fat is important. Dr. Gundry says, “Fat on your ass, you are built to last. Fat in your gut, you are out of luck.”

He says we miss the point in the controversy over meat versus plant-based. The anti-nutrients in plants, when taken in the correct dose activate the hormesis response which prolongs our life with low doses of poisons that effectively tell our genes to protect us.

Marmoset monkeys which eat nothing but fruits are unable to reproduce in zoos unless their diet is fortified with 6 percent animal protein. It turns out the perfect zoo fruit was missing the worms and bugs naturally present in fruit in the wild. So it would appear some animal protein is a good thing.

Dr. Gundry’s diet is a balance between high protein and plant-based. He tells us the ratio of omega 6 fats to omega 3 fats is critical in balancing inflammation and anti-inflammation hormones. Ground squirrels won’t go into hibernation if the ratio is disrupted in the laboratory.

He says there is a contest between individuals and their genes, in earlier periods individuals were the winners, and species were the losers. Our modern way of eating is the perfect diet to increase our species but to cut down individuals sooner.

For years diet has been an experiment for me. Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution and Plant Paradox is just a continuation. Does he have all the answers? If we tweak our diet and lives resulting in progress isn’t that what we are looking for?

We are what we eat so let’s not be fast, cheap, easy, or fake.

If diet is wrong medicine is of no use. If diet is correct medicine is of no need. Ancient Ayurvedic proverb

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, health, and love.

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Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution: Turn Off the Genes That Are Killing You and Your Waistline Paperback – Mar 3 2009

by Dr. Steven R. Gundry (Author) 4.1 out of 5 stars 141 customer reviews

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