Steven R. Gundry

RULE NUMBER 1: What You Stop Eating Has Far More Impact on Your Health Than What You Start Eating.

Thousands of years ago, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, had described the body’s ability to heal itself, which he called ‘veriditas’ (green life force). He believed that the physician’s job was to identify which forces were keeping the patient from healing himself and then remove them. Veriditas would take it from there.

In my clinics, anyone who has a hemoglobin A1c level less than 5.0 earns a gold star (really). What’s yours? If it’s above 5.6, you are in big trouble in the longevity race.

Every meal you eat and when you eat it, how and how much you exercise, the products you use in the shower, the supplements you take each day—all of these small choices add up to have a real impact on your life span and your health span.

There’s a lot of wisdom in the old maxim ‘Eat like a king at breakfast, a queen at lunch, and a pauper at dinner.’ Unfortunately, our culture promotes the opposite—eating a large, late dinner (or, even worse, a snack right before bed) that forces your body to spend its efforts digesting your food during the night, when it should be focused on cleaning out the gunk in your brain.

But a high triglyceride level is indicative of health problems. As a guide, your HDL level should be equal to or higher than your triglyceride level, which basically signifies that you’re recycling more fat than is being stored. But during our current 365-day growth cycle, the vast majority of people have the exact opposite ratio.

Exercise is another perfect example of hormesis—limited stress you put on your body to make yourself stronger. Like other examples of hormetic stressors such as calorie restriction, exercise stimulates autophagy, the recycling of old, worn-out cellular components.

I believe that the true secret of these long-lived peoples lies not in what they do eat but in what they don’t eat. And what they don’t eat is large amounts of animal protein. With apologies to my friends in the paleo and ketogenic communities, the facts don’t lie. Not a single one of the Blue Zone populations consumes significant amounts of animal protein, and I believe that is their secret to a longer, healthier life.

As Hippocrates famously and wisely said, ‘All disease begins in the gut.’ The good news is that all disease can be stopped there as well.