3 Healthiest Vegetables You NEED To Eat TODAY! ｜ Dr. Steven Gundry

Now, one of the best ways to determine the healthiest vegetables is not necessarily their polyphenol count, but how bitter they are

Interestingly enough, great number of the blue zones. One of the things that is interesting about their vegetable selection is what I call more bitter, more better

And the more bitter the greens are, or the vegetables are, the better they are for you

Plants use bitterness to warn you not to eat them. And they contain compounds that were designed to make insects sick

Now, you're not an insect. And as I've written about before and in the upcoming book I write about again, the dose makes the poison

and as Nietzsche was famous to say, that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger

And so the bitterness in these vegetables is actually a sign that's probably something really good in here that you should be eating

And that's also why I say eat the rainbow to get a variety of different bitter compounds and different polyphenols

So with that in mind, first on the list is cruciferous vegetable

You know all of these, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, arugula, rapini

These are all great for you. Now, they're some of the best postbiotic producing foods

Postbiotics are the products of bacterial fermentation of the foods you eat

These are actually signaling molecules that communicate very effectively with your immune

system, telling your immune system who to worry about, who not to worry about, and they're

signaling systems to your mitochondria. They're also a great source of sulfur and sulfur-like compounds that actually improve

mitochondrial health. They allow you to make a postbiotic called hydrogen sulfide, the so-called rotten egg smell

Hydrogen sulfide is incredibly important in the right amount for vascular health

for the lining of your blood vessels. Now, here's a cool trick in terms of their cancer-fighting ability

These vegetables should be chopped before you cook them to actually get the benefits out of an enzyme called myacinase

Now, interestingly, these particular plants, produce meresanase in their leaves

when they hear or feel an insect chomping on them. And it's the chomping of the insect

that actually activates this anti-insect compound. So fun fact chop your broccoli chop your cauliflower before you cook it Better yet buy your cauliflower chopped buy your broccoli frozen chopped

They've already done the work for you. Now, you can take some of these vegetables to extreme

And some of my patients, hearing that they ought to have these in their life

eat them literally every meal every day. Now, you need these vegetables

but you can overdo them. Cruciferous vegetables, when taken to the extreme, will suppress thyroid function

And I see it. It doesn't happen very often. But with a number of my patients who really dive in to cruciferous vegetables, because of their health benefits

I see a gradual increase in their thyroid stimulating hormone. them. And when I ask them to tell me what they're eating, cruciferous vegetables come right to the

top of the list. And when we back off on those cruciferous vegetables, lo and behold, their thyroid

function comes right back to normal. Now, if you still want to eat lots of cruciferous vegetables

do me a favor. Get a T.S.H. drawn by your doctor and go to it and then check your T.S

PSH three months later and see how we're doing. All right. Number two, artichokes

I can't say enough good things about artichoke. I recently returned from Italy and the south of France

I can tell you that just about every place we went has a sliced raw artichoke salad on

the menu. Almost every place we went had sauteed or stewed. artichokes on the menu. It's ubiquitous. Now, why is it there? Well, artichoke hearts, particularly

and young artichoke leaves, are incredibly rich in fiber, particularly a fiber called inulin

Inulin is one of the best prebiotic fibers that you can eat, particularly when it's contained in

things like artichokes. Inulin can be made into what are called plasmalogens by gut fermentation. Now

Inuline is usually in the heart, the crown, and it's also in the stem

And particularly in Italy, the globe artichoke is raised because it has a very long stem

And the stem is peeled and is eaten because it's just full of fiber and inuline

We don't see the globe artichoke here very much, but don't worry about it

It's your artichoke heart. Years ago, we were at a restaurant in Chicago

The first course was an artichoke. And my wife, having lived in California most of her life

taught me early on how to eat an artichoke. And, of course, you pull off the leaves

and you scrape the leave to get that little bit of meat

But a number of the diners in Chicago who were not very familiar with artichoke were trying to eat the leaves And it was a rather hilarious episode when all these diners had this mouthful of unedible leaves and didn know what to do with them

So please, don't eat the leaves, scrape the leaf with your teeth

That's where the benefit is. However, baby artichokes, you can eat the whole thing

And I have some delicious recipes. I love them roasted with olive oil and garlic

You can saute them. You can even bread them with tapioca flour

And I have a recipe right here on my channel for this. Also, make a lectin-free artichoke dip

They're really easy that way. Now, most people don't want to do the trouble of steaming an artichoke

The good news is you can buy frozen artichoke hearts. You can buy them canned

You can buy them brine. But on the canned and brine ones, just check the label for sugar content

Some of them are sweetened. Number three, root vegetables. I can't tell you yet how important root vegetables are for your overall health

I've got a whole must-read chapter in the upcoming gut brain paradox about how root vegetables

are one of the best ways to get bacterial compounds into you

that are incredibly beneficial to your overall health. And when I was a kid, we had a vegetable garden

as we did for my children, and we'd go out and pull a carrot out of the ground

and brush it off and eat it. Wouldn't even occur to us to wash it

Well, what we didn't know was that we were actually eating the microbiome of that root

vegetable. And that microbiome was actually incredibly beneficial to us. And so root vegetables

have their own unique microbiome that has huge amounts of benefits to our immune health and to our

brain health. And so that's why I want you to get root vegetables into your life

Now, if you've read Gutcheck, you know that living bacteria are great for you, but equally as important, dead bacteria, like if you cooked them, still carry the same information as the living bacteria

And that's what's so exciting that now dead bacteria are classified as postbiotics that are important

So don't be afraid of cooking root vegetables like radishes, onions, garlic, fennel bulbs

hecima. They're full of prebiotic fiber. In fact I have a Hickama French fry recipe in my book It absolutely delicious I personally like to use Hikama sticks raw as a dip to use tomato guacamole and get it into my mouth

I even have an herb-roasted radish recipe, and it's amazing. So you don't, yeah, eat them raw

That's a great way to do it. But don't be afraid that you want to get fennel into your diet

but you don't particularly like the crunchiness of fennel. Cook it. Fennel is very common, particularly in Tuscany and parts of France

And it's both fresh and salads, but it's also stewed and sauteed all the time

And very hearty meals contain fennel. And again, it's a root vegetable

Now, just because it's a root vegetable doesn't mean it's necessarily good for you

Sadly, carrots and beets, when you cook them, you actually be able

break down the cell walls and make that sugar available. They don't call them sugar beets for nothing

But raw is another thing. Raw carrot is great. And please don't fall into the trap. A baby carrot

is not a baby carrot. A baby carrot is a whole carrot that's been whittled down to look like a baby

You're actually throwing away the good stuff. When you buy them at the farmer's market

Don't wash the stuff off. Eat them as long as they're organic

Now, in Italy, one of my favorite appetizers is a sliced raw beet carpaccio with feta cheese and

olive oil and some mint leaves. It's absolutely delicious. And you can make it at home

It's really easy. So buy your beets at the farmer's market. Take them home, slice them thin, pour some olive oil on it

If you've got some feta cheese, all the better. and enjoy. Now finally, chicory. Once again, I have not had a salad in Italy or France that did not

contain one or more chickory leaves. Radicchio, Treviso, the red, Italian lettuces. They're not

lettuces, they're chikery. Frise, that frizzy stuff. Belgian and dive. Chiquary. there's a lot of a very interesting chikering family called Puntairella that I can actually get in Santa Barbara

but we see it all the time in Italy, both raw and cooked and also in France

Why are these people eating all this chickory? Because chickory has some of the best sources of inulin that you can find

and inulin filen feeds friendly bacteria. The more you feed your friendly bacteria, the more they take care of you

More amazing episodes just like this one. Watch now. Shataki mushrooms, easy to find now in most grocery stores

They're packed with a polysaccharide called beta glucan, which is number one great for gut health

but number two has been associated with reducing cholesterol levels in people who take beta glucan