AMA #36: Fruits & vegetableseverything you need to know

Don't confuse the optimal diet for you in a state of health versus the optimal diet for you in a state of sickness that's trying to restore your health. They aren't necessarily the same thing.

I think everybody kind of has this narrative that fruits and vegetables are like, 'good.' Fruits and vegetables are good. Everybody should eat their fruits and vegetables, have their 5-6 servings a day ... But the reality of it is we don't really know that much.

When we work with patients who are metabolically healthy, I've never once restricted the amount of fruit they consume. When I work with a patient who has type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, I will actually restrict how much fruit they consume.

Metabolic syndrome is basically defined in a somewhat binary fashion, which is you have 3 or more of the 5 criteria or you don't. Those 5 criteria are truncal obesity, high blood pressure, high fasting glucose, high fasting triglycerides, and low HDL cholesterol.

Then you look at a whole bunch of other data, and you think, no, any harm associated with those fats is purely due to the confounders of what they track with—the seed oils that show up in low-quality foods and junk foods. It's not the seed oil that's the problem; it's the junk food that's the problem.