What's the best diet for fat burning? Well, different doctors believe different things, which is why today we're exploring how to become a fat burner. We'll compare Steven Gundry MD's plant paradox diet with Dr. Will Cole's Keto Diet variation - "ketotarianism." Watch, listen, and learn how to become a fat burner once and for all.


Dr. Will Cole:
Website - https://drwillcole.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/drwillcole
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/drwillcole/
Buy Ketotarian here - https://www.amazon.com/Ketotar....ian-Mostly-Plant-Bas


Dr. Gundry: Well, welcome to The Dr. Gundry Podcast. Today, we're speaking with Dr. Will Cole, the author of Ketotarian. It's available for pre-order right now, and it's gonna be out on August 28th, which is just a couple days. This book covers the mostly plant-based plan to burn fat, boost your energy, crush your cravings, and calm inflammation. Pretty big claims, Dr. Cole. Tell me more about this.
Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. It was really born out of my clinical experience, and seeing patients for the past decade plus, and seeing what works, what doesn't, and on labs, and how patients feel. And myself, it also was born out of my own wellness journey. I grew up and my parents were into wellness, so in the 80s and 90s, in rural Pennsylvania, I was the kid drinking weird herbs and botanical tonics, and not the most common things you'll find in the 80s and 90s in Pittsburgh, but that was me.
I grew up into wellness, and then in my late teens, I wanted to ... I learned about CAFOs and factory farming, and our food supply, and I did the well-intentioned thing at 18 and 19, and became more plant-based, and a vegan for 10 years. Then my health was declining over that 10 years. I wasn't feeling good. I had digestive issues. I had fatigue. I wasn't doing so well, and I had to come to grips with, "Was I eating optimally for my body?" Then that's also around the time that I found functional medicine. At Southern California University of Health Sciences, I heard of a guy called [inaudible 00:01:56] who you may know. He's one of the kind of forefathers of functional medicine, still speaks for IFM, and that's when I kind of learned, "Hey, look. Was I eating optimally for my biochemistry?" That's when I started shifting to this more ketotarian way of eating, which is why I wrote Ketotarian. It's this plant-centric ketogenic approach, and it's the amalgamation of the best of both worlds, and that's really where Ketotarian was born out of.
Dr. Gundry: Okay. That actually brings up a lot of great points, because as you know, I was a professor at Loma Linda University for many years, and I was eating mostly a vegetarian diet, and as you talk about in the book, I take care of a lot of vegetarians and vegans, and I call them pasta, and grain, and bread-atarians. They're not truly what I think you and I would think of as vegetarians. I, myself, now, I call myself a "veg-aquarian," because I eat primarily vegan during the week, and then I eat primarily shellfish or an occasional wild fish on the weekends. It sounds like, as I've read your book, that that's pretty much what you're advocating as well. Why do you think that you had kind of lousy health as a vegan? Let's hear it from your own words.
Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. I definitely depended on carbs to varying degrees just to get through the day, calorically and just energy-wise, and that was the selection of food in the grocery that were available to me, and they're normally delicious, too, when you're depending on all the sugar and carbs. Even it was the healthier food option, right? It was the sprouted grains. It was the different varying treats, vegan treats. A lot of it was whole foods, but it came down to legumes and sprouted grains, and lectins, lectins, lectins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That worked for a time, and what I kind of see now is certainly I would say it's better than the standard American diet, but just because something's better doesn't make it optimal.