Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Does this food cause weight gain?

Well, I've been getting a lot of questions on social media about my favorite fruit, avocados.

If you had any of my books, you know avocados are one of my favorite go-tos for health.

So, does it really cause weight gain as you might have heard and can you eat too much?

Well, let's dive right in with our myth-busting session.

So, avocados are full of fat and everybody knows that eating fat makes you gain weight.

Now, where the heck did this crazy eat fat get fat theory come from?

Well, it came about in the primarily 70s and that was actually caused by some reports in the 1950s that fat, particularly saturated fat, was the cause of heart disease.

And this was the famous seven country study where there was a association with the amount of fat in a diet with coronary artery disease.

And as you've seen in a lot of my books, this association does not prove causation and in fact the seven countries that were selected were cherry picked.

And I won't go into that, but fat got evil and in the 1970s the McGovern Commission, Senator McGovern in the former presidential candidate hosted a commission to have US dietary guidelines.

And they were very impressed with the seven country study and so US dietary guidelines said we should avoid fat period.

Fat has nine calories per gram versus four calories per gram of sugars or proteins.

So, in terms of weight, fat basically has twice the amount of calories as weight of protein or carbohydrates.

So, on the surface, that might look like something that's important.

On the other hand, we now know after the failed experiment of low fat diets, then in fact, calories are not calories.

What do I mean by that? Both carbohydrates and proteins cause an elevation in your insulin production.

And if you've listened, you know the insulin is the fat storage hormone. Fat on the other hand does not raise insulin.

So, that just eating fat doesn't activate fat storage, whereas eating carbohydrates or protein can potentially activate fat storage.

The second thing to remember is that when all these dietary guidelines were developed, no one knew about the microbiome.

No one knew what foods the microbiome might want to eat and how much of the food and calories that you were eating and ingesting might potentially be eaten by your microbiome instead of passing on to you.

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