Steven Gundry

“As my mentor in Medical School, Dr William Strong taught me: Never wear a white coat; it separates you from a fellow human being. I never have from that day on. You are your patients guide, counselor, and defender, not their ruler and dictator.”

“I grew up in Omaha and Milwaukee, and was always a very inquisitive kid.”

“It's a bit of a myth that too much cholesterol causes heart attacks.”

“When we look at 105-year-old people around the world, they carry the diverse gut microbiome of 30-year-old people.”

“The more I removed vegetables that have lots of seeds, such as cucumbers and squash, the better my patients felt, the more weight they lost, and the more their cholesterol levels improved.”

“Lectins bind to receptors on the surface of each cell lining the gut, breaking down the tight junctions that normally make an impenetrable barrier between the intestinal contents including bacteria and ourselves.”

“Often, lectins can get in the way of important cells communicating with one another. And when that happens, the body's response is usually inflammation or some other type of reaction to toxicity, like nausea, diarrhoea, or vomiting.”

“I found a book in my elementary school library when I was ten called 'All about You' which was a book on the human body. I was hooked.”

“I'll never forget a Podcast I did with Dr Joseph Mercola when my bestseller, 'The Plant Paradox' had just come out. He was wild about the book, and apoligized that he had never heard of me before the book. He asked what I had been doing for so many years. I replied that I was merely following the Buddha's advice to 'chop wood and carry water.'”

“For a two-job working family, a pressure cooker gets a meal on the table in seven to 15 minutes, start to finish.”

“My wife and I were actually driving in the south of France when we got the word that Kelly Clarkson had come out that 'The Plant Paradox' had changed her life. I'm a big fan of hers. I like her music and I would love to work with her.”

“Quite frankly, I don't know how I could live without my Blendtec.”

“Getting all of the nutrients you need simply cannot be done without supplements.”

“Nothing is worse than washing a head of lettuce or greens, then trying to blot the water with paper towels. A salad spinner lets you rinse, then spin all the water off completely. Plus, it's fun to use.”

“Lectins are like little barnacles that look for specific sugar molecules in our blood, the lining of our gut, and on our nerves. When they find a good spot to land, they cling to those cells, breaking down their ability to communicate with our immune systems.”

“The amazing thing is when people change nothing except removing major lectins, they start losing weight and they still are eating lots of calories, but we're not storing it as fat anymore.”

“One fateful morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I shouldn't be operating on patients and then teaching them to eat to avoid me in the future; I should teach them to eat so that I wouldn't have to operate on them in the first place!”

“The most troublesome plant lectins are found in the hulls of grains, in beans and legumes, and the nightshade family - specifically the peels and seeds of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.”

“When major lectin-containing foods were introduced to our diet about 10,000 years ago in the form of grains and beans, our health dramatically changed for the worse.”

“The longer I have been at this the more I think that lectins are the cause of leaky gut and all diseases.”