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Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution: Turn Off the Genes That Are Killing You and Your Waistline Paperback – Illustrated, March 3, 2009
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–Mehmet Oz, M.D.
Does losing weight and staying healthy feel like a battle? Well, it’s really a war. Your enemies are your own genes, backed by millions of years of evolution, and the only way to win is to outsmart them. Renowned surgeon and founder of Gundry MD, Dr. Steven Gundry’s revolutionary book shares the health secrets other doctors won’t tell you:
• Why plants are “good” for you because they’re “bad” for you, and meat is “bad” because it’s “good” for you
• Why plateauing on this diet is actually a sign that you’re on the right track
• Why artificial sweeteners have the same effects as sugar on your health and your waistline
• Why taking antacids, statins, and drugs for high blood pressure and arthritis masks health issues instead of addressing them
Along with the meal planner, 70 delicious recipes, and inspirational stories, Dr. Gundry’s easy-to-memorize tips will keep you healthy and on course.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarmony
- Publication dateMarch 3, 2009
- Dimensions6.11 x 0.66 x 9.11 inches
- ISBN-100307352129
- ISBN-13978-0307352125
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Greg Renker, co-founder of Guthy-Renker
"A seasoned veteran of bypassing your heart blockages teaches you how to avoid his services. Dr. Gundry has crafted a wise program with a powerful track record."
—Mehmet Oz, Professor and Vice Chair of Surgery, NY Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center
“After an impressive career as a physician and surgeon in the treatment of heart disease, Steve Gundry has been inspired to apply his experience, intellect and scientific background to preventive health measures. This practical and easily readable book describes Gundry’s advice for heart health and general physical improvement. While people have no choice in their heredity and genetic composition, they can work with the inherited genes and improve their personal comfort and possibly extend life expectancy. His personal experience with control of obesity contains timely advice on this issue affecting modern society.”
—Denton A. Cooley, M.D., President and Surgeon-in-Chief, Texas Heart Institute, Houston, Texas
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
YOUR GENES ARE RUNNING THE SHOW
If you're anything like me, I know you're champing at the bit to get going on Diet Evolution, but hold your horses. I've found that most of us can stick to a program only if we understand how and why we got to our present state of affairs. The next four chapters will do just that.
You can thank Mom and Dad for your beautiful baby blues, as well as your hair color, height, and build. All these traits were encoded in copies of their genes--half of them her's, the other half his--that now reside in your body. Any children you have will in turn have copies of half of your genes and half of your partner's, and so on through generations to come. Determining our appearance and myriad other characteristics is just one way in which our genes rule our lives. As you'll soon learn, they also play a more clandestine role.
The answer to why almost all attempts to lose weight fail resides in your genes and the lies they've been feeding you. Once you understand how genes behave, and how their behavior controls your behavior, you'll be rewarded with an understanding of how you can lose those extra pounds, regain your health and vitality, and set the stage for a long, vigorous life. I'm sure you have heard that if you feed your genes right, all your health problems will disappear. But here you are stuck in the same old rut. I'm going to prove to you that you're in poor health and overweight because you're feeding your genes exactly what they want. Let me assure you, your genes are using you for their health and longevity, not yours. In fact, your longevity stands in their way. So sit back, open your mind, and be willing to suspend everything you've ever known about yourself. But first let's get down to basics.
GENES AS MICROCOMPUTERS
I've found that it helps to think of genes as tiny computer programs. On your computer, the letter A, for example, is "coded" as 1000001. Whenever I strike A on the keyboard, this code of 0's and 1's tells my computer to make an A appear on the screen. Think of your body as a computer and your genes as its operating system. Genes are pieces of information composed of hundreds or even thousands of sugars and proteins arranged in sequences that "spell out" the process the gene wants a cell to perform. They contain all the information needed to tell each cell what to do, but in this case, the keys that turn genes on or off are circulating hormones, neurotransmitters, and numerous other information carriers, particularly compounds in food. To continue the computer metaphor, these codes work much as typing an Internet address into your Web browser "tells" it what information you want.
Your genes are totally dependent on your body to protect them and house them until a new computer, in the form of your offspring, can take on these tasks. We need our genes as much as they need us: your body only works when its operating system--your genes--tells it what to do. Over millions of years, the communication between our genes and the human body has undergone continuous improvements and upgrades, all to ensure perpetuation of the genes. Despite myriad improvements--much like Vista replacing Windows, or Panther replacing Tiger--the basic operating system of your genetic program remains the same.
Okay, you head-shakers, if all this just seems too fantastic to believe, let me ask you why you have no trouble accepting the fact that you can watch Oprah on your cellphone, thanks to invisible electrical impulses from outer space that communicate with cell towers to activate tiny computer programs in your handheld appliance. An invisible but equally powerful, comparable process also happens in our bodies. Why do you think that after two months female dorm mates find their menstrual periods have synchronized? Their hormones sent messages through thin air--rather like text messaging--for them to ovulate at the same time. Hormones or plant chemicals stimulate genes to either switch on or off, determining what's going to happen in each cell, each part of the body, and each person.
YOUR GENETIC AUTOPILOT
Indeed, whether you realize it or not, your fate is being controlled by a hidden system that runs most of your cellular, hormonal, nervous system, and aging processes without your conscious input. It does this, so that the "thinking you" doesn't screw up the process of moving genetic material forward in time. If you've seen Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which intergalactic astronauts travel in a spaceship autopiloted by a computer they nickname "Hal," you can envision what's going on in your body. Hal takes care of running all the spacecraft's functions with minimal human input, but when the astronauts try to take over the vehicle, they realize that Hal is in total control and they're just along for the ride. When they attempt to thwart Hal, he tries to destroy them! Your autopilot is usually invisible, but I'm convinced that we constantly receive warning messages from it when processes head in the wrong direction.
For example, right now you're breathing without thinking about it, but the moment you do, you become conscious of your inhalations and exhalations. Now, let's do a quick test. Stop reading and time yourself as you hold your breath as long as you can. Were you able to go for two minutes? Up to three minutes? Or were you gasping for air at thirty seconds? You mean you were forced to take a breath? How can that be? Aren't you in charge of your body? I ask you to perform a simple task such as holding your breath, and now you're telling me that it was not under your control. Congratulations, you've just met your autopilot, your second self. This mechanism is there for a very important reason: to keep your genetic code from being wasted, in case you get the crazy notion to stop breathing when you're asleep or unconscious, among other things. That's just one of many examples of how Hal's mission is more important than yours!
We now realize that this operational program is far more than a second nervous system over which we have little or no control. Rather, it's a highly sophisticated system of specialized cells and the genes within them, including those that produce and sense hormones, govern your immune system, line your gut--all in constant communication with each other without your conscious input. If you're still having trouble with this concept, consider the autopilot program on an airplane. Once the human pilot inputs data about the destination into a computer, the autopilot controls direction, speed, thrust, flaps, pitch, and yaw. The autopilot doesn't "see" where the plane is going, doesn't "feel" how fast it is flying, but based on information sent from sensors in the plane or bouncing off satellites, it pretty much "knows" where it is in space and time, allowing it to "fly" the plane and land safely. But input the wrong information and the autopilot will dutifully fly you directly into a mountain, because that's where you told it to go. You'll understand more what I mean by this in the next chapter, when I'll explain how your current way of eating is giving your autopilot the wrong information, programming you for disaster.
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Product details
- Publisher : Harmony; Reprint edition (March 3, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307352129
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307352125
- Item Weight : 10 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.11 x 0.66 x 9.11 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Genetics (Books)
- #13 in Whole Foods Diets
- #25 in Weight Loss Recipes
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

STEVEN GUNDRY MD, F.A.C.S., F.A.C.C., is a cum laude graduate of Yale University with special honors in Human Biological and Social Evolution. After graduating Alpha Omega Alpha from the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine, Dr. Steven Gundry completed residencies in General Surgery and Thoracic Surgery at the University of Michigan and served as a Clinical Associate at the National Institutes of Health for years. There, he invented devices that reverse the cell death seen in acute heart attacks; variations of these devices subsequently became the Gundry™ Retrograde Cardioplegia Cannula. It has become the world's most widely used device of its kind to protect the heart from damage during open-heart surgery. After completing a fellowship in congenital heart surgery at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, in London, Dr. Gundry was recruited as Professor and Chairman of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center. There, he and his partner, Leonard Bailey, pioneered infant and pediatric heart transplantation. Together, they have performed more such transplants than any other transplant surgeons in the world.
During his tenure at Loma Linda, Dr. Gundry pioneered the field of xenotransplantation, the study of how the genes of one species react to the transplanted heart of a foreign species. He was one of the original twenty investigators of the first FDA-approved implantable left ventricular assist device (a kind of artificial heart). Dr. Gundry is also the inventor of the Gundry Ministernomy, the widely used minimally invasive approach to aortic- or mitral-valve repair, the Gundry Lateral Tunnel, a "living" tissue that can rebuild parts of the heart in children with severe congenital heart malformations; and the Skoosh™ venous cannula, the most widely used cannula in minimally invasive heart operations.
One of the fathers of robotic surgery, and a consultant to Computer Motion (now Intuitive Surgical), Dr. Steven Gundry received early FDA approval to use robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery for coronary artery-bypass and mitral-valve operations. He holds patents on devices for connecting blood vessels and coronary artery bypasses without sutures, as well as for repairing the mitral valve without the need for sutures or a heart-lung machine. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs (ASIAO) and was a founding board member and treasurer of the International Society of Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (ISMICS). He recently completed two successive elected terms as President of the Board of Directors of the American Heart Association, Desert Division.
Dr. Gundry has been elected a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the American College of Cardiology, the American Surgical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the College of Chest Physicians. He is a member of numerous other surgical and medical societies. As a medical researcher, Dr. Gundry has published three hundred articles, chapters, and abstracts in peer-reviewed journals on surgical, immunology, genetics, nutrition, plant-based diets, and lipid investigations.
In 2002, Dr. Gundry met someone who would change the trajectory of his career… and life. He crossed paths with an "inoperable" patient named “Big Ed”. Using a combination of dietary changes and nutraceutical supplements — Big Ed lost weight and cleared most of his arterial blockages. An obese, chronic "diet" failure himself, Dr. Gundry adapted his Yale University thesis to design a diet for himself based on evolutionary genetic coding.
On this diet, he lost weight — to the tune of 70 pounds — and reversed his own ailments, such as migraines, pre-diabetic status, and arthritis. He stopped eating sugar, grains, peanuts and cashews, nightshades and other lectin-heavy foods. Having experienced weight loss and the results of eating a lectin-free and gluten-free diet himself, and inspired by growing research involving the NIH’s Human Microbiome Project, his commitment to better health and longevity through a better diet solidified. His work creating nutraceutical products and supplements advanced.
No longer satisfied with repairing the damage of chronic diseases, Dr. Gundry open his own practice— The International Heart and Lung Institute and Center of Restorative Medicine in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, California. His mission is to prevent and reverse chronic diseases of "aging" while increasing longevity with diet and nutraceutical products.
In order to help even more people heal themselves, Dr. Gundry began writing books outlining his eating program and eventually, he would create his own supplement line, Gundry MD. He’s always researching new methods, discovering better health solutions, and evolving his wellness philosophies. These theories are outlined in his bestselling books: Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution: Turn Off the Genes That Are Killing You and Your Waistline; The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain; The Plant Paradox Cookbook: 100 Delicious Recipes to Help You Lose Weight, Heal Your Gut, and Live Lectin-Free; The Plant Paradox Quick and Easy: The 30-Day Plan to Lose Weight, Feel Great, and Live Lectin-Free; The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age; and The Plant Paradox Family Cookbook: 80 One-Pot Recipes to Nourish Your Family Using Your Instant Pot, Slow Cooker, or Sheet Pan.
He is now the leading expert on the lectin-free lifestyle as the key to reversing disease and healing a leaky gut. Dr. Steven Gundry freely shares his research on how to maintain a healthy microbiome and live a long, vital life via his best-selling books, YouTube channel, Gundry MD blogs, and weekly health podcast, The Dr. Gundry Podcast.
The Gundry MD site is a resource to learn about which foods to eat, like olive oil and pressure cooked lentils, and which to avoid, such as grains and goji berries. His work on balancing bacteria in your gut and aligning your lifestyle with the proper circadian rhythms has been groundbreaking. And he continues to research blue zones, best autoimmune practices, and lectin-free living. Gundry MD also provides information and tips about dealing with challenges like rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer's disease, and other health concerns that present in later years of life. He also explores the tenets of the Ketogenic diet (and other diets) and shares his expertise on all things “lectins”.
Gundry MD is also a proud sponsor of charity: water. charity: water is dedicated to building new ways to get clean drinking water to communities in need. A portion of every Gundry MD product sold is donated to charity:water.
Dr. Gundry lives with his wife, Penny, and their dogs in Palm Springs and Montecito, California. His two grown daughters live nearby. For more information about Gundry MD, tune into his podcast and YouTube episodes. www.gundrymd.com / www.drgundry.com
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Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2016
Top reviews from the United States
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You have to read the entire book before you start, it took me months to prepare to begin my lifestyle change. This plan is much easier to start in the late fall/winter time. The no fruit was hard at first, but I added berries and tomatoes back in as soon as I could. I still continue to not eat fruit for a period of time each winter. I started this after years of yo yo diets. But once I began eating this way, I could not go back to processed chemical food. I now consider myself a purist. I honestly maintain this lifestyle using a lot of trim healthy mama recipes now. They are (almost) in line with Dr Gundrys ideas, they are sugar/gluten free sisters from New Zealand.
In the world of epigenetics, Dr. Gundrys book is the best approach in the business. Cancer feeds on sugar, and this approach is a great way to rebuild your body as a fighter. Dr Gundry has personally answered many emails from me, and supported me using this with my Autistic son.
I truly hope to be the woman in the first chapter of his book. I look younger now than I did 10 years ago and I weight less than I did on high school. This book helped me become a smart food consumer.
Top reviews from other countries


The book was great help as I have regained my body back. And I would strongly recommend that you give it a try.
Avoid or reduce, Sugar, wheat/grains, potato, rice and you may use it in small quantity after 2 weeks.
You may eat greens, root vegetables, protein and berries freely.


