What You’ll Discover Inside:

• The Protein-Aging Puzzle: Could your quest for longevity be triggering the very cellular damage you’re trying to avoid?
• The Silent Gut Saboteur: What’s really happening inside your gut when protein goes up and fiber disappears—and why you might not feel it… until it’s too late.
• Your Brain on Protein Overload: Is an unseen toxin quietly hijacking your memory, mood, and mental clarity?
• The mTOR Trap No One Warns About: You’re activating this “anti-aging” pathway—but could it be the hidden reason your body isn’t detoxifying properly?
• The Protein Source Dilemma: Are plants powerful enough to meet your protein needs—or is there a hidden cost either way?
• Your Unique Protein Blueprint: The critical test most people skip before deciding how much protein they really need.

Resources and Links:

• See the Full Transcript here
• Grab your FREE Protein Comparison Charts
• Join the Next-Level Health Practitioner Facebook Group for free tools and training
• Visit INEMethod.com for advanced health practitioner training and tools to elevate your clinical skills and grow your practice
• Explore More Episodes on ReInvent Healthcare and Functional Endocrinology here

Dr. Monisha Bhanote’s Resources & Links

• Get the Free Bio-Hacker’s Cell Care Cookbook: Download Here
• Visit her website: drbhanote.com
• Follow on Social:
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube

Dr. Monisha Bhanote’s Bio

Meet Dr. Monisha Bhanote, the integrative pathologist turned longevity expert who’s not afraid to challenge outdated health norms.

She’s quintuple board-certified (yes, five times), and while most doctors stop at treating disease, Dr. B goes deeper—down to the cellular level. Her mission? To help you understand how your gut, brain, and mitochondria are constantly in conversation—and why that’s the real secret to aging well, feeling energized, and preventing chronic disease.

Dr. Bhanote blends modern science with ancient wisdom to deliver the kind of truth bombs that make you rethink everything you thought you knew about your health. She’ll break down the dangers of silent inflammation, the myths of “normal” lab ranges, and why your nervous system might be the real root of your fatigue, brain fog, or belly bloat.

She’s not here for wellness fluff. She’s here for results. From redox reactions to the gut-brain axis, Dr. Bhanote translates the complex into the practical—so you can take back control of your health with rituals that actually work.

As the bestselling author of The Anatomy of Wellbeing and founder of WELLKULÅ, she’s leading a global movement grounded in her signature philosophy: #CellCare—the art and science of taking care of your body at its most intelligent level, your cells.

Whether she’s speaking on international stages, hosting sold-out longevity retreats, or guiding clients through her virtual integrative practice, Dr. Bhanote is rewriting the future of medicine—where prevention is personalized, lifestyle is the first prescription, and you are your own best healer.

 

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Transcript

Dr Ritamarie 

Could the current protein craze be silently fueling a health crisis that no one's talking about? That is the subject of today's episode, and I have a very special guest with me today.

 

Meet Dr. Monisha Bhanote. She's a board certified physician, not just a board certified physician, a quintuple board certified physician. And she is fascinated with changing the system, with turning it around, so the future of medicine is very different from what it is today, where people are empowered to get to the root causes. She's not talking about health fluff. She's talking about really immense changes that can help to turn around the whole landscape of what a person is living and the landscape of medicine. 

 

So welcome to being here. 

 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote (1:20)

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me in your home. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (1:23)

And I'm excited that you're here, because we haven't met in person before today. We've met online, and we've been in the same circles, and it was super exciting when I heard she was in town this weekend. I said come on over, let's do this in person. 

 

So I'm really fascinated with the work that you're doing, right? As a quintuple board certified physician. So tell us a little bit about what those five board certifications are, and how most people have one certification, maybe two. You have five. What fueled that and how does that fuel what you're currently doing? 

 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote (1:54)

So yes, five is a lot. That's a lot of studying. Most of my lifetime has been studying and then a little bit of work here and there. I come from a family where it was like, I got the choice very long ago I can be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. So I was, my dad's an engineer, so I'm like, I'm not going to do that.

 

No fun. So I was actually pre-med and pre-law when I was in undergrad. Overachiever. There's an overachiever in all of us. Then when I was in college, I was like this law stuff is a lot of reading and there's no pictures. There's absolutely no pictures, right? Whereas pre-med, at least we got some colorful pictures to look at. We can do something a little bit more.

 

And I'm like, all right, fine. I still ended up double majoring and went to medical school with the idea that I was going to treat patients. I went, finished medical school, trained and got into a residency in internal medicine. And I'm doing my residency in New York, and I'm seeing patient after patient, whether that's an emergency room on the floors and the ICU and the clinic, all these places I'm seeing patients, and I'm like, okay, I'm doing the right thing. I'm giving them the diagnosis. I'm giving them the medication that I studied so hard to remember all the mechanisms of action and pharmacology and all this stuff.

 

And I'm like, but they're not getting better. So what is wrong here?

 

They get better and then they wouldn't. Then, they'd have side effects. Overall, like the results weren't where they needed to be, or what I felt medicine could truly be. And so then I'm like, all right, I’ve got to get to the bottom of this. I’ve got to see what's really going on with disease. And so I then went from an internal medicine program into a pathology program. And most people, when they think of pathology, they think autopsies and all that stuff. Yes, there's some autopsies, but that's not what pathologists do on a daily basis.

 

So I studied three types of pathology, anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, and cytopathology. So that is three of my board certifications. And anatomic pathology is basically any tissue that gets taken out of the body. 

 

And this is really important to recognize, because I have had surgeons, clinicians, who are doing procedures call me and ask me, is this benign or malignant? And I'm like, if you're removing something from somebody's body, you better have a clue of what's going to come back on a report. And I mean, this happens even with colonoscopies or cervical biopsies. 

 

I'm like, nobody's learned pathology. They've learned the diagnosis and here's the treatment, but they haven't learned what's actually going on. Right. In fact, most people skip over pathology. They're like, okay, let me just get past that. 

 

So in the early years of med school, I just need to get to how to treat people. But so I was doing anatomic pathology, and anything from a small biopsy all the way up to organectomies, right? So now we're removing kidneys and looking at kidney tumors, we're removing lobes of lung and looking at lung tumors. We're removing colon resections and mastectomies and all these different things. And 

 

I'm going, okay, so there's a clear division between healthy tissue and disease tissue. And you know, obviously I'm seeing it on the microscopic level, but I'm also seeing the changes that are happening. So it's not like it goes from healthy to poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma. No, there's a process that's happening there. 

 

There's more to this. Then in addition, at that same time, I was studying clinical pathology, which is all your blood work stuff. So, looking at peripheral smears, looking at blood banks. So anytime you have a surgery or have a trauma, we need blood. So transfusion reactions, making sure that people are getting the right kind of blood for them. 

 

And then one of the fellowships I did was in cytopathology, which cytopathology is looking at single cells under the microscope to see what are the cytologic abnormalities and changes, and this is enough to make a diagnosis of a certain disease. And I know you as an endocrinologist, so you probably think about thyroid disease. 

 

When I'm thinking about thyroid disease, I'm going, all right, so if I stick a little needle in somebody's neck with ultrasound guided, and I'm going after a nodule, is this nodule going to be a nodular goiter? Is this nodule going to be Hashimoto's? Is this nodule going to be a papillary thyroid carcinoma? Is this nodule going to be a follicular carcinoma? Like what is this going to be? Because there's all different morphologic changes happening here. And that's what cytopathology is. You know, not just the thyroid. 

 

We were diagnosing everything, corn needle biopsies from liver lesions, lung lesions, anything that can be taken out. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (6:55)

And I want to ask you something about that though. With thyroid, so many people just get, you have thyroid cancer. Or, you just have cysts, and you probably have autoimmune. Is that the standard of when somebody gets a biopsy of their thyroid. Is that the standard of what the pathologist is looking for, or is that you're going more deep with that? 

 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote (7:16)

No, we're definitely going more deep with that. When a nodule is biopsied, we are looking at the cytologic changes, because for each of these diseases there's specific changes that's going to happen.

 

We now have, and we didn't have this early on in my training, but now we have Bethesda criteria, which helps us put this category of benign follicular nodule to an atypia of undetermined significance to then a follicular carcinoma to papillary thyroid carcinoma. And we now have this criteria that can help us because that will also help the clinician guide the next steps. Does this need to come out? Is this a surgery? Is this just a watch and wait? Or if it's benign, is it Hashimoto's benign, or is it a hyperplastic nodule? What exactly is going on here? 

 

And we can also now do some molecular tests on these samples, which is pretty cool, right? Because we're looking for certain mutations that are associated with certain cancers, especially in the atypia of undetermined significance. Because sometimes those are a little bit more challenging. The features are super subtle. We're looking at nuclear irregularities. We're looking at cytoplasm. We're looking at if they're making follicles. What are they doing? 

 

Dr Ritamarie (8:28)

But is the patient hearing this?

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (8:31)

Gosh, no. I actually ran into a patient recently at a conference, and she's coming to me. She has breast cancer, and I'm like, okay, so tell me what kind of breast cancer do you have? And she's like, it's ER positive, HER2 negative. And I'm like, okay, but what kind of breast cancer do you have? Because what they know is what their oncologist is telling them, because their oncologist is focused on the actual treatment. What is a drug I can give you? If you're estrogen positive, I can give you hormone blockers. If you're HER2 positive, I'll give you something like Herceptin or something, right? But there's 30 different types of breast cancer.

 

So nobody is really talking or understanding about what kind of disease you have. And then if we put everybody in the category of, we're all going to have the same treatment based off of NCCN guidelines, okay, it's this size, which requires this surgery, which requires this kind of chemotherapy or this type of radiation, and then this many years of a hormone blocker. 

 

Everybody's different. And you know, this individual didn't even know the type that she had. And when I said to her, I'm like, well, I've seen your report. This is what you have. She's like, I've never heard that. This is the first time I'm hearing this. And I'm like, yeah, because nobody's reading your report.

 

Or maybe you don't understand it, and your clinician is not talking to you about it, because he's just treating you as, you have breast cancer. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (09:57)

And the reason I ask is because there's so much information right now. And the patients that I see always want to know more, want to know more, want to research it. Right. And if the person was actually told what kind of cancer, what the cells were like, they could better decide on the treatment. Because there's a lot of them that are like, I'm not doing conventional treatment. 

 

Yeah, I want to do alternative treatment.  And there's some who say just do the conventional. But if they know and if they're given that description, they may make better choices 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (10:32)

They may, and you know I have a lot of patients come to me, and I'm like I want all your pathology reports, because I want to know exactly what type of tumor you have. 

 

Because if you come to me, and let's just continue with a breast example, if you you come to me, and I see your report says an invasive tubular carcinoma and it's small, five millimeters and stuff, and tubulars are very on the lower end of malignancy for breast cancer. And maybe the person's like, well, I'll get it out, but I won't do chemo, and I won't do hormone therapy or whatever. They wouldn't give chemo for that. I won't do hormone therapy, but I'll get it out. Well, I'll be like, okay, that's fine. That's not too bad of a choice. 

 

Now, if somebody comes to me, and they have an invasive ductal carcinoma, micropapillary type, which I know goes into lymph nodes and is super sneaky, because it's got this like retraction artifact. And it has all this stuff that I've seen with so many hundreds of thousands of specimens. I should mention I also have a breastbone and soft tissue fellowship. So I've been doing this a long time. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (11:33)

So that makes six. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (11:35)

Well, no, five medical board certifications, three fellowships. You could kind of turn actually one of them into four fellowships, because I doubled down and did breast fellowship and bone and soft tissue fellowship at the same time. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (11:46)

So in other words, you just like to learn, and you like to do, and you want to collect degrees. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (11:50)

No, no, no. All these certificates are sitting in a garage that doesn't matter to me. Right. It's really the mystery of the human body that I know is modifiable. Right.

 

That there's changes we can have, right? So we go from the microscopic to the modifiable and microscopic to metabolic to modifiable. And that's a very important thing about reinventing healthcare, right? Like seeing what else is it that we can do? 

 

But, you know, depending on the diagnosis, I would be like, gosh, that one really scares me. I know what I've seen, and it's more aggressive. It shows up. It won't disappear on green juice. You know we need to have a serious conversation about this. But these conversations aren't readily happening, because what I'm seeing is we go from these extremes of, “No, I'm not doing this. I don't want chemo. I don't want my hair to fall. I don't want radiation. I don't want all this stuff. So I'm just going to go do this alternative,” which may or may not work. And that's the scary part.

 

Nevertheless, I'm doing all of this in the pathology, and I was doing this for quite a bit of time, and I'm sitting in a room, we have tumor boards, and in the smaller community hospitals, maybe once a week. I worked in a few bigger centers, the cancer centers, where we were doing a tumor board literally every day.

 

It would be a room full of a pathologist, an oncologist, a radiologist, a surgeon. And we're going over the cases of the week. Here's this person. They have this diagnosis. This is what the surgeon's going to do. This is what the oncologist is going to treat with. This is what radiation is going to do and all this. I'm going, gosh, okay. This is great. 

 

But then we're seeing these people come back with maybe a different tumor, with maybe a recurrence a few months later to a decade later. So what we're missing is what's going on in the body, right? The underlying ecosystem, like what is this imbalance that is allowing people to create this disease? And if they knew, would they change it? That's the other part. 

 

it's kind of funny, one of the hospitals I worked at, I won't name it, but it's a big cancer center, and I remember seeing on the news that Chick-fil-A donated all these chicken sandwiches to the breast cancer ward. And I'm going, and this is the news you want to talk about? First of all inflammation, inflammation, inflammation, PIP, IGF, inflammation. I'm like in my head I'm going, God. Okay, where do I start with this, right?

 

So that's where I think I went and I'm like, all right, if anybody's going to talk about this, it's going to be me. There's not many pathologists who kind of leave behind their desk, because frankly, it's a great job. I mean, being a pathologist is an amazing, amazing job. You never get bored learning. There's always something to do. You're a doctor's doctor, so you're dealing more high level. But then I was like, God, I can't sit with this in the sense of when I feel like I can help people, I need to tell them, you know? 

 

And so then I went and trained in integrative medicine at the Andrew Weil’s Center for Integrative Medicine, which is a two and a half year fellowship. And I did get boarded in that. And then I trained in culinary medicine, really using food as medicine, which now brings me to the current place of being an integrative pathologist where I'm really taking this microscopic, metabolic, modifiable approach to the human body.

 

Dr Ritamarie (15:21)

Because you'll find something else you need to dig into. So I want to step into this modifiable. And there's a lot of talk about inflammation and how certain foods cause inflammation, other foods don't. But I really want to wind this around. And from your standpoint, as a pathologist and knowing the cellular and knowing the biochemistry. We're in this craze about protein, right? And you told me some scary things, before we got started. I was already at the, my God, this protein craze is dangerous.

 

But tell me more about what are those hidden dangers that are in this protein craze? “Get 2 grams of protein for every pound of body weight,” or you know that kind of stuff. How many steaks do you have to eat to get that? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (16:08)

Well, you don't need to eat steaks to get that. There's definitely a protein craze going on right now, and you know rightfully. 

 

So in a sense, as we age our body doesn't utilize protein as effectively, so we do need to increase our protein. And the current guidelines are more of a guideline that was set a long time ago. So you don't get protein deficient. Nobody's protein deficient, okay? So that 0.8 mark is just so you are at least getting that.

 

But what I'm finding is that certain individuals, people over 65 years of age, athletes, people with chronic illnesses can really benefit from having a range of their protein being from 1.2 to about 1.8, topping it at 2, because there's not greater benefit beyond. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (17:00)

Grams per kilogram. Kilograms. Right, which is divide that.

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (17:04)

So a 150 pound person divide that by 2.2 for their weight in pounds times that by 1.8. or 1.2, so you're kind of getting in there. But there's no significant benefit to going over that two points. 

 

So what we're seeing is that the type of protein you eat also matters. So it's not just like, OK, I think we can all agree. Let's eat a little bit more protein. You know, I usually say 20 to 30 grams per meal. 

 

If you actually eat more than that in a meal and then you're like, I'm only eating one meal a day and trying to do more, your body is going to have a hard time with it. And so with that, what happens is that depending on what kind of protein you're eating, And not everyone can afford grass-fed, clean, hormone-free. That's not what most people are eating. 

 

No. They're not. Maybe the few celebrity influencers are like, this is my normal. That's not the normal diet when people are eating protein. Grilled chicken is a big one. I know a lot of women will do grilled chicken and broccoli. I'm losing weight. I'm going to focus on the grilled chicken and broccoli. Basically lunch is a grilled chicken breast, and dinner is a grilled chicken breast and all this. And what they don't realize is that grilled chicken has a compound in it.

 

It's called PhIP. And research has shown that that compound can actually make breast cancer more metastatic. 

 

Now one in eight women already have breast cancer, right? So now it's a problem. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (18:44)

They're probably having a glass of wine with it. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (18:45)

Let's not even get to the alcohol. That increases it even more. There's other things that are going on. So much of the meat that's being eaten is either grilled, it's fried, or it's roasted. And it creates these compounds, these chemical compounds called AGEs, advanced glycation end products. And AGEs are exactly, exactly what they sound like. They are aging you, and they cause inflammation in the body. 

 

AGEs will actually activate a pathway creating inflammation in the body, okay, specific compounds that it does. And when that inflammation is created, that also creates DNA instability. So DNA instability is happening, mitochondrial dysfunction from animal protein does happen. Advanced glycation end products is one problem that we see. 

 

Now, if you're barbecuing a bell pepper or an eggplant or something like that on the barbecue grill, that doesn't happen, because those proteins are different, okay?

 

So this is only in animal proteins when it's barbecued, fried, and all that kind of stuff. You won't get it if you put vegetables on the grill.

 

Dr Ritamarie (19:54)

And what is the reason that you do? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (19:56)

Because of the inherent proteins in there that convert into AGEs when they're heated. When heated? When heated, they convert into these products. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (20:03)

You also get them, or is this something different, with frying or applying dry heat to starch. So fried potatoes. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (20:15)

I haven't seen it with that. I do know that I see AGEs a lot, and I had one patient that used a lot of Parmesan cheese and put Parmesan cheese on everything like an entire lot.

 

And his inflammatory markers were so high. The only thing we took out was the Parmesan cheese, and his C-reactive protein came back to normal. Because that's another one, that bacon, all these kinds of foods. So AGEs is one problem. 

 

The second problem is TMAO. Yes. So too much TMAO, which is also another compound that gets created from having red meat or processed meats can create cardiovascular problems in the body. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (20:58)

And it's the markers that we look at for cardiovascular. And then the TMAO is produced in the gut, And it's by certain organisms that are living in the gut. And they produce this TMAO, which is cardio damaging.  

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (21:15)

And not only that, the other one that gets produced with a high ultra-processed diet, high meat diet, alcohol, sugar diet, standard American diet, is beta-glucuronidase, which beta-glucuronidase is another enzyme that is produced by the gut bacteria, which what that one does is, when it's in okay amounts, it does what it's supposed to do. It helps break down the estrogen so the estrogen leaves the body and that's fine. 

 

When it's in excess due to the bacteria that created and make excess of it, instead of taking the deconjugated estrogen out of the body, it actually reactivates that estrogen and brings it back up into circulation, which increases your risk of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and colon cancer. 

 

And beta-glucuronidase is something that we can measure. And you can measure it, right? You can do the stool test.

 

So that is one. So I gave you AGEs. gave you TMAO, beta-glucuronidase. The other one, so this is an interesting one. So mTOR. 

 

mTOR is a pathway that gets activated. And a lot of people are talking about mTOR for aging and longevity and all this kind of stuff, right? When we eat a lot of meat, it actually gets over-activated. When it gets over-activated, it's going to prevent your body from having autophagy and prevent your body from cleaning itself. So now imagine, I'm thinking about my biohacker friends here, some of them. I'm doing intermittent fasting over here, but then when I eat, I'm going to eat this 100 grams of protein. So the fast you just tried to do to get into autophagy, and then you messed it up, because now you've activated this mTOR with this excess protein here. 

 

It's an interesting Biochemical pathway that's happening.

 

Dr Ritamarie (23:09)

So autophagy, just to have a reminder for everybody, is basically cells gobbling up. So we have all these damaged cells in the body, it gobbles them up and eats them for lunch, right? It's a good process. It's a cleansing process and usually we get into that after maybe 16 to 24 hours of fasting. And there's differences depending on the person and all that.

 

That's a positive thing. If mTOR is processing, and actually autophagy happens all the time, but that’s maximum autophagy that you get from fasting. 

 

So if we're interrupting autophagy with too much protein, what's the implications of that? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (23:51)

Well, so that excess protein is activating this mTOR, and it's really disrupting your metabolic pathways. So when metabolic pathways are disrupted, it increases the risk of insulin resistance, which is another problem we're starting to see now. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (24:08)

It's a full-blown epidemic. 93% of the population is in pre-insulin resistance or insulin resistance. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (24:18)

And then we're also increasing our cancer risk, right? Nowadays, cancer is not even like, I heard the C word. It's like everybody knows somebody who had cancer, right? And there's been research done on early onset colorectal cancers. 

 

So early onset colorectal cancer. So these are young people. Colon cancer used to be a disease of the elderly. It's not anymore. We're seeing it in people in their 30s and 40s and stuff like that. And early onset colorectal cancer is influenced by the gut microbiome.

 

Now the food you eat will change your microbiome. When you are eating a high protein, low fiber diet, okay, you don't have a very nice, healthy gut lining with the mucin layer and all that. And you might have some hyperpermeability, and now these toxins are entering and then going through the bloodstream and causing inflammation and releasing more cytokines. 

 

When you have a high fiber diet and predominantly whole foods, plant-based, eating real food, you will then create a nice mucin layer that blocks these pathogenic organisms, pesticides, toxins, whatever, from entering the body and going and circulating elsewhere. 

 

I was just talking to another patient, well this was an individual at the conference that I was just at, and he’s young in his 30s, and he had colon cancer. He had recto-signoid cancer, right? And he's telling me his story, and I'm like, tell me what was your life like before this? And he's like Mountain Dew, diet soda, Doritos, you know the whole processed diet that we just think it's food that people are eating. 

 

He found out about this cancer and then he actually thought he was going to heal it holistically in a sense like, okay I'm not going to get surgery or whatnot but now rectosigmoid cancers, the way they grow, they grow in an apple core lesion, meaning they kind of just start compressing and pressing. So now you're eating, but you can't get your bowel movement through, because there's no space for it to kind of go through. So it got to a point where it was like, okay, the holistic treatments aren't working, and he needed surgery to get it out. And he did, and he's fine and everything. 

 

But he then went from eating the standard American diet, all this ultra-processed chemical-laden food to eating a quote vegan diet, but he was not the healthy vegan. He was like, “So I basically went from Doritos, and now I'm eating veggie straws.” And I'm like, okay, but then he learned what we understand as a healthy diet, and I promise you, all my patients tell me, I'm eating such a healthy diet. Everybody says that. Everybody says that. I'm like, why don't we let your gut microbiome tell me if you're eating a healthy diet. 

 

Like let's just let the test tell us. And even I have a lot of vegan patients, and they're like, “I'm eating a healthy diet.” I'm like, okay, let's just look at it.

 

Let's evaluate it. There’s no judgment or anything. So it is interesting, because I think our relationship with food and these fads. We do everything in like decades, right? So there was a decade of no carbs and there was a decade of no fat. Now that it's a decade of all the protein, right? So we tend to do this, because we don't learn the foundations of how the human body works. Because guess what? Nobody studied pathology. 

 

It comes back to how does disease develop. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (27:46)

Nobody's studying at that level, and the university, and the medical school level. Nobody's studying the effect of food on the body, on the cells.

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (27:56)

That's where culinary medicine comes in, right? So really using food as medicine and looking at the diets that change things.

 

So we have a MIND diet for people with cognitive stuff. We have a DASH diet for people with kidney or high blood pressure, right? But at the end of the day most of the diets, what they have in common is, they're not ultra processed diets, right? They're not extreme where you're eating far ends of let me just eat protein and remove all the fiber, which at the end of the day, our gut microbiome needs. You're literally eliminating something that could help you.

 

And not many people, at least in the cancer world, even think about or look at the gut microbiome as a treatment mechanism. And we know, there's great research on this now, that people who do go through conventional therapy and say they're doing immunotherapy or something like that, if their gut microbiome has healthy bacteria in it, it can actually make the treatment more efficacious.

 

Dr Ritamarie (28:57)

So one of the things that surprised me when we were having our conversation earlier was that you said that the excess, large amounts of protein can have a negative impact on the nervous system in the brain. And that's something people aren't aware of, or they wouldn't be pushing so much protein. So tell us the downside of too much protein, and where does that sit? Like is it having 200 grams of protein a day? Is it at twice your body weight? So where does it sit in terms of the amount, or is it personalized per person?

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (29:27)

Well, one, it is personalized per person, but I would say if you were to calculate it, I would put it at that 2.0 mark, you know, 2 per kilogram. 

 

Two per kilogram of body weight, same weight calculation. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (29:40)

So we're going to calculate it. All right. Let's calculate that. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (29:45)

Okay. So if somebody weighs, let's say they're a 175 pound male. 175 pound male. So I'm going to divide that by 2.2 to get the weight, so that's 79.5 kilo. So I'm going to times the kilo by 2. So now times 2. So now if this person is eating 159 grams of protein, they are eating way too much. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (30:10)

And that's common. We're seeing it all the time on these YouTube videos, and the people are recommending 150 to 200.

 

I saw somebody recommending, for a woman, 150 grams of protein a day. And that wasn't even an athletic woman, bodybuilder. She was more the average. So the average, let's say 65 and up woman who's concerned about her bones, and they all are, right? We're all like postmenopausal. Everybody's concerned about their bones and is kind of moderately doing, kind of following the standards of guidelines, which is, you know, walking 20, 30 minutes, three, four times a week. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (30:50)

Gosh, that's not enough. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (30:53)

No, it's nowhere near enough, right? But that average person. So let's just say she's walking 45 minutes, six times a week, right? And she's concerned about her bones, but she's not doing any heavy lifting, which for most women in that age range, they're not. Where would you put their protein needs? And they're not sick. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (31:10)

I would put them down to like 1.2. If they're not very active, they're pretty sedentary, just walking as their activity. Yeah. I would put them closer to the 1.2. But also personalized too, because here's the other thing, I'm finding that sometimes when people get older, they're also not eating as much food. And we need food. 

 

I don't want people to be afraid of food, but you also need fiber. And here's the problem with too much animal protein is you don't have fiber. It doesn't have fiber, right? So cheese, which us women love, right? So dairy, meat and sugar have no fiber. 

 

When I think about it, somebody is having a bagel or sandwich or pastry for breakfast. And then for lunch, maybe they're having a Caesar salad with grilled chicken on it. And then for dinner, maybe they're having some cheese with a glass of wine. And I'm just thinking about this whole cascade, this metabolic cascade that's happening, this inflammatory process. 

 

And not only is the inflammatory process changing your gut microbiome, which many people don't think about from the gut microbiome that your immune system lives there. 70% of our immune system is in the gut. Why are we developing autoimmune diseases? Because our gut is not healthy, right? But not even that. 

 

If we think about just what somebody is doing on a regular basis, eating out, we can have a whole conversation about oil separately, but I like to think of food as molecular code. It's information for your cells. So it's your choice. What kind of molecular code you want to give it. You can give it the kind that's going to keep you healthy and strong, or you can give it the one that's going to create disease. 

 

And from the inflammation perspective, one of the last things we didn't talk about was nitrosamines.

 

I travel a lot, so airports are very fascinating to me, because it's like, what are you going to eat at an airport?

 

Well, me? Very little. Just sitting and watching people having these meals and what they're eating day in, day out, and I'm like, heart attack, inflammation, arthritis. It's like I can see it, right? And once you see it, you can't really turn back. Many of the places will have deli sandwiches. There's all different pastrami. Just like sandwiches, sandwiches, and different kinds of things. But what many people don't realize is that processed meat has nitrosamines in it. And these compounds, well, frankly, they cross the blood brain barrier.

 

Okay, so now if they're crossing from the end to the blood brain barrier and going to the brain, they can actually damage your neurons, because they damage DNA cells and neurons. Brain cells are very sensitive, right? So now you're damaging your neurons, and your brain cells, and it could also promote the deposition of amyloid. So now people who are eating this kind of diet, and we're seeing so much dementia, it's vascular dementia. We're seeing a lot of  dementia in people. What is your diet? It’s a big part. A significant part. Right.

 

So this is where that modifiable part comes in. You have to understand what you do every day, like your lifestyle, your 24 hours of a day, the choices you make. It is all a signal to yourselves, and what they are going to do for you. 

 

You can't ignore it. You can't. You can ignore it maybe in your 20s, but I promise you, it's going to catch up with you.

 

Dr Ritamarie (34:55)

Even in your 20s, it's going to catch up. it'll catch up. It's setting the stage for the diseases that we see later. Right? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (35:02)

You actually don't want to ignore it ever. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (35:05)

But you get away with it in the fact that you don't necessarily show the symptoms. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (35:10)

So this comes up to the lab test, right? 

 

So, when we think about lab tests, I went to my doctor, my doctor said my labs were fine. See you next year, blah, blah. Those lab tests, as a person who's been a laboratory medical director who has validated this testing where we give that reference range and everything. That reference range is really just meant as a baseline. It's not meant for health per se. It's meant to identify, all right, do we have a disease process that we can now give medication for? 

 

And this is why when people get lab tests, the conventional ones that they go, and they get their annual blood work, and everything's mostly fine. It's because they don't have enough abnormalities in there to give you a drug. Now that's going to show up when about 50 to 75% of your organs are already damaged. 

 

We don't want to wait. We don't want to wait that long. It's too hard to reverse.We have all this more in-depth testing in the integrative and functional space where you can, if you actually understand how to interpret tests, which is also very critical.

 

Dr Ritamarie (36:19)

Which is very critical, and that's what we teach, that's what I teach my students. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (36:23)

Yes, if you can interpret tests properly, which I told you most people, most clinicians can't, because they're so used to this.

 

Dr Ritamarie (36:33)

They use the lab. That's how they do it. H, L, H, L. Everything's fine. Scan down. 

How long does it take you to look at a lab and understand it? It takes me quite a while, because I'm looking at ratios. I'm looking at ranges. I'm not going, there's no L's or H's. In fact, I don't even use those ranges, because I think those are so crazy. So I pop them into another program which shows these functional ranges, but that's the point.  

 

Do we want to wait for disease and pathology to make their ugly heads known or do we want to catch things when they're going astray? And when there's no need for a drug at this point, but there is a need for a lifestyle change. There is a need for a diet change.

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (37:17) 

And I'm going to give you one of the more common examples of this, because this is one that absolutely drives me bananas is that reflux.

 

Okay. Reflux is a mechanism that's happening where the acid from your stomach is going up through your lower esophageal sphincter into your esophagus and that reflux that you feel. 

 

So when somebody has reflux, what do they get? They get medication. They get acid blockers, because the goal is let's not make that go up. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (37:47)

The goal is let's not make acid, because they're not changing that. They're still in reflux, but it's not acidic anymore. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (37:57)

But it's pathologic, because what happens is you have the stomach here and at that GE junction and then you have the esophagus. The stomach has specific cells, okay, and has specific cells with specific functions. The esophagus has squamous line cells. When the acid or not acid but the fluid continues to go up, the squamous cells that are sitting there can't handle it.

 

And what do they do? They're like, “Hey, I'm getting out of here and other cells are going to take over.” So metaplastic cells come in, known as goblet cells or intestinal metaplasia. Okay. And so then this person is going to get scoped and upper endoscopy every six months to see, “Okay, we see this process where we're seeing intestinal metaplasia, but now we’ve got to focus on dysplasia,” which dysplasia is precancerous. Okay. And so they're getting scoped every six months. They maybe are told, change your diet, but not the specifics. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (38:55)

They're told not to eat tomatoes. Or don't do coffee. Basically don't eat these things that are acidic versus what's really going on. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (39:05)

So now you have this person who's on a PPI that they shouldn't first of all be on it for more than a couple of weeks, but is on it for 20 years. Okay. And they keep going back in, and they're like, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. The medication, in my head, is working, because that's what I was told. And now this person goes from intestinal metaplasia of goblet cells to low-grade dysplasia.

 

It's like, gosh, now we’ve got to keep tracking this even more. Now we're at low-grade dysplasia. Well, low-grade dysplasia, because they haven't changed anything in their lifestyle, and all they're doing is taking this medication, goes to high-grade dysplasia, which eventually will turn into invasive adenocarcinoma, which then means you're getting your esophagus, and your stomach taken out. You're getting that whole part of you, and you will never eat the same again. No. 

 

And then there's this whole other cascade, because now you've been on PPIs for 20 years and now you have increased your risk of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and osteoporosis. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (40:00)

You're not digesting all that protein you're eating. Because we need acid in the stomach to break down the pepsin. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (40:07)

Yes. That's my pet peeve number one is the reflux. 

 

My second one, because I spend a lot of time in GI and gastroenterologist’s offices looking at their biopsies and all this other stuff, is the gallbladder.

 

When a person gets their gallbladder removed, they are not told that they need to change their diet. “Hello, you do not have bile storage anymore, and you continue to eat the fat your body is not breaking down.” Any food, even if it's healthy food, if it is not broken down, will create inflammation. 

 

Okay. So we could go on and talk about this for an eternity, because there's just so much. I just want to say it like lab values are something that should be interpreted by a clinician who actually understands lab values. 

 

Don't just go with what's on the piece of paper. This is why, with caution, patients now can go do their own labs, but they don't understand. They don't understand them, right? I mean clinicians don't even understand them. So now you're asking a patient who can go order their own blood work and get labs. Like everything looks fine. No.

 

Dr Ritamarie (41:12)

I think it's good that people can do it, because most doctors don't order the proper tests. But usually in conjunction with the education and working with a clinician or a group or a program. We put together programs to help people read their own labs, because I think it's great, because if not, the doctor's not going to run lipoprotein(a) and find out that this person is high. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (41:33)

Yeah, that has more to do with insurance and stuff like that. So it's a little more complex than that. But at the end of the day, I think the message is, and I kind of use this terminology, hashtag cell care, because I really want you to focus on your cellular health. So if you are experiencing any symptom, whatever it is, listen to what your body is saying. Listen to yourselves. Listen to that communication, because it is literally communicating with you. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (41:59)

Yes, absolutely.  I want to wrap it up and wind it back to the protein. 

 

So the protein craze is there. If you are on social media at all or on YouTube at all, everybody and their brother is showing you the muscles and showing you that you need to eat. You know, when somebody was saying, a very popular influencer with hundreds of thousands, maybe even up to a million followers, was saying the amount of protein that a woman needs to eat is equivalent to, they need to eat 20 eggs a day. So let's just discuss the danger of, first of all, 20 eggs a day. And she said it with a straight face. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (42:37)

Wow. The only thing I can say about that, is that person does not know the inside of a human body and what actually happens when you eat that way. And I don't know many people who've actually done this. I've actually had my hands inside human bodies where I can go and peel back the calcific atherosclerosis and the plaques. I can see the shrunken kidneys. I can see the atrophic brains. I mean, I know what happens. 

 

And, if I didn't think things happen, and I didn't believe in the power of using food as molecular code as much as I would, I would be eating all that stuff too. But I myself have changed my lifestyle because of what I've seen and what I know. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (43:19)

You eat plant-based now. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (43:20)

I am plant-based. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (43:22)

How long have you been doing that? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (44:24)

Since 2014. So over a decade. And I remember, because I'll tell you, my last meal, I like to do things on New Year's. So my last meal, December 31st, 2013, before I went plant based was the biggest macaroni and cheese. 

 

Of course, because we love our cheese. I'm not going to deny it, right? Was the biggest macaroni and cheese, catering size from Panera, that I could get, because Panera was one thing that I used to order for our lab parties and all that stuff. So it was on speed dial, right? And so I had this catering, I'm like, gosh, this is absolutely disgusting. I can't believe this. right. And then the next day I wake up, and I'm done. 

 

Cheese and dairy really concerned me when it comes to breast cancer, because, like I said, I've done a breast cancer fellowship, and it's really, quite concerning. 

 

My youngest patient I had was 18 years old. Her genetics were totally normal. Totally normal. All the mutations, all normal. So no BRCAs. And all she wanted to do was go back to school. She's like, I just want to focus on school. I don't want to go through all of this treatment and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, my God, but you know, and this is a whole other conversation outside of food, but we are living in an age where people are just exposed to so many chemicals. I mean this was a girl who was like in Ulta and Sephora, since she was like a little kid. All the beauty products, all these different things that we are just exposed to, and our body can't handle it. A body does not know how to eliminate it. We don't have the tools,  and one of the most powerful tools can be your diet. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (45:06)

Wow. Okay, so you've been doing it, and you've been integrating this into your work with patients. And I've been doing it for 40 years, by the way. I reversed all my health conditions. 

 

Does this mean, when you have people coming in, are you insistent that they all go 100% plant-based? So let's talk about that.

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (45:30)

So most of the patients that come to me are not plant-based when they come to me. They're eating the standard American diet, or they're eating a more luxurious, highly animal-based diet. So we kind of work on shifting their understanding from the cellular level of what is going on in their body with their symptoms. What are we seeing in their gut microbiome? What are we seeing in their testing from their oxidative stress levels to other toxins maybe in the body? What are all these things that are going on? And how can we slowly shift it? 

 

Because at the end of the day, it's supposed to be a lifestyle, right? We don't want to go and do another diet. We're not just going into a vegan diet, and that's going to fix my problem. 

 

No, this is about how can we heal the body? And so I usually start with going from whatever they're at to more of an anti-inflammatory diet, a Mediterranean. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (46:30)

What are you taking out? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (46:33)

What am I taking out? Ultra-processed food. We are reducing the amount of animal protein they have. Okay, so instead of three times a day, which three times a day times seven days is 21 times a week. We might go down to, depending on the individual, once a day. And then eventually one to two times a week is kind of the goal. But it's also not to starve yourself, because we want to increase the things they're not eating. 

 

So fruits and vegetables. People aren't eating them. And I'm sorry, but apples and bananas is not enough. When I talk to people about what are you eating? It's so basic. 

 

The American Gut Project tells us we need 30 different fruits and vegetables a week. 30 different. And most people are eating maybe three? Like not even close. So we start there and everybody's on their own journey. Some people grasp on right away and some people take some time. But what all people who end up doing it do, or most of my patients, is because of the way we do it, they feel better. 

 

And that's the kicker. “I didn't know that I could feel good.” “I didn't know what having a healthy bowel movement was, because I didn't know what not feeling bloated is”. It's kind of fascinating to see the light bulbs go off and I've got energy. What is this? 

 

Dr Ritamarie (48:07)

Wow. So the last thing on the protein I want to talk about, is we talk about people who are doing keto and carnivore. So carnivore is pretty extreme. They're eliminating all fiber. And keto, if it's animal based, I call it dirty keto. 

 

If it's an animal based keto, they're eating less, they're eating some fiber, but that little piece of lettuce that's allowed on their plate. So some people take it to an extreme. 

 

So let's talk about the carnivore, cause that's the extreme. And when you talk to them, they're saying, we don't need fiber. And all those phytochemicals are actually dangerous, and they're plant chemicals, and they're hurting us. These are the things that people who are doing carnivore are saying.

 

And how do you compute this? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (48:55)

I don't think they actually understand how the human body works. Because many of the individuals who I have seen who are doing this extreme, like, let me take out the fiber, let me take out the vegetables, let me take out the oxalates, because the oxalates are…,  all this silliness that's happening, are not necessarily healthy.

 

Also there's a big difference between doing it for a short amount of time to kind of clean up like an elimination. You're going from cleaning up all the junk and processed food and now you're going into a carnivore. You're going to feel better, because you took out all the food. 

 

Let's talk about it for real. That's not going to last, because you're going to create inflammation in the body. You're going to create this dysbiosis or imbalance in your gut microbiome.

 

You're going to reduce the bacteria that are beneficial for you that can keep disease away. You're not going to make short chain fatty acids. Short chain fatty acids, which one of them is butyrate, is made as a postbiotic from your prebiotic food you're eating. So you're going to create inflammation. You're going to create oxidative stress. You're going to create disease. It's not sustainable. It is absolutely not sustainable. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (50:17)

So those who say, temporary relief, they're getting rid of the ultra processed foods. They're getting rid of oxalates, and some people have a problem with oxalates, because of their gut being damaged. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (50:28)

Very rare people. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (50:30)

It's not very high. Maybe 5% of the population, maybe. Lectins, the same thing. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (50:36)

I just wrote an entire article about lectins, because that's another one. 

 

I taught a cooking class to my patients two weeks ago about lentils and lectins, because they're so afraid of it. I'm like nobody's eating raw lentils. Nobody's eating raw beans. Okay. So when you cook them, the lectins actually are gone. So you don't really need to worry. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (50:55)

And fermenting does that, too. 

 

Okay. So we've come full circle. Let's close with, the people listening are health practitioners of all kinds, health coaches, nurses, doctors, naturopaths, et cetera. And also what I call the nerdy nutrition geeks who like to get into all this cellular stuff and really understand it. 

 

Let's talk about plant protein. So people are saying it's incomplete, which was debunked a long time ago, but the amino acid profile isn't as rigorous. 

 

Most proteins,I was just researching recently, but even egg protein is only 

like 49% maybe bioavailable, maybe it was 32%. It was really low bioavailability of all protein, which supposedly goes down as we age, because our stomach acid goes down. Worse for people who are on PPIs. 

 

Tell us, just talk about plant protein versus animal protein. And can someone who needs to get, let's just say they do need 1.6 times their body weight or 1.8 times their body weight. Can they get that through a plant-based diet and how?

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (52:02)

Absolutely. Have you not seen all the plant-based athletes out there? I mean I could name quite a few. I know when I walked into your house, I saw Robert Cheek’s book, and if you go look at him, he's all muscle. He's plant-based, right? 

 

So there's quite a few if you want to be that muscular, but plant-based protein is When I'm thinking of that, I'm thinking of real foods, right? So I'm thinking of like lentils and beans and tofu. I probably eat a block of tofu every day, because I don’t have allergies to it or anything like that. 

 

Hemp seeds, two tablespoons of hemp seeds, and you can get like 10 grams of protein. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (52:40)

Kale is a good source of protein. Vegetables are a good source of protein. That's the thing that people say, oh those don't count. They do count. I have put my recipes for green smoothies in the chronometer and other apps and come out with 30 grams of protein in my smoothie.

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (54:55)

None of us have protein deficiencies, okay? Most of us do not. Most of us are getting too much protein. So with the plant-based protein, I think it's more of, we're not used to eating it in our diet, because it's not part of the standard American, we can’t easily get it out, you know? 

 

Right? Like nowadays, we might see some quinoa somewhere. Nowadays, we might find some tofu, but not all places. And we also don't know if it's organic, non-gmo.

 

Dr Ritamarie (53:24)

And what about people who are allergic, which is the top allergen? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (53:29)

Beans, lentils, might see black beans or chickpeas here and there, but it's not a very common or prevalent thing. 

 

So you actually have to 1, learn how to prepare it, which many people don't cook. You need to learn how to have it consistently, because sometimes what happens is people say, I ate beans, and now I'm bloated. 

 

So you have to shift that microbiome slowly if you're going to do that. So that might look like just two tablespoons of  lentils or beans until you can build it. Because your microbiome will change for the better.

 

Dr Ritamarie (54:04)

It will. And for those of you who are allergic to soy or are concerned about soy and estrogen, that's the big thing. Like stay away from soy. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (54:13)

No, not at all. I have all my breast cancer patients on tofu. So the recommendation is to have at least one to two servings of whole unprocessed soy. So that means either edamame, that means organic, non-GMO tofu, or soy milk, which is basically just soy milk and water, like soybeans and water, okay? 

 

And there's tempeh, which is a fermented version, and the studies that actually show individuals who consume soy have a 30% decreased risk of breast cancer. Remember, if we circle back around to one of the biggest problems we're having in the US is breast cancer. So individuals who have been consuming soy for a lifetime, like in the Asian population, have a lower risk until they start eating the American way, right? 

 

Even individuals after they've been diagnosed with breast cancer, and they start eating soy have better outcomes. So there's no concern for that. 

There was a study that came out a long time ago where there was a lot of misinformation. 

 

Nobody's nobody's eating soy protein isolate. I mean, well, shouldn't be. Don’t eat soy chicken nuggets or hot dogs or all that. I'm not saying that processed soy. Even that, the amount that was given in that research study, nobody would consume in a lifetime. 

 

So I am not concerned about it. So you should have seen the biggest block of tofu I had for lunch today was absolutely amazing. Fabulous. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (55:41)

So here's the thing. So tofu doesn't have to be made with soybeans. I've made lentil tofu. I've seen recipes for chickpea. I bought fava bean tofu. And I saw somebody make split pea tofu, and that's actually quite easy to make. So we can include a recipe or something in the show notes. 

 

Because, you don't have to eat soy, and I don't eat much. I don't eat soy hardly ever. I mean, I eat it, my husband's allergic to it. My son was allergic to it. So we don't keep soy in the house, but occasionally I have some tofu, but there's a lot of plant-based sources of protein and nuts and seeds are highly overlooked.

 

What are your thoughts on protein powders? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (56:26)

Not particularly a fan of them. I don't really use them very often, because it comes back to being more processed. So as little processed as we can get.

 

You know, if I was going to choose something processed, I would probably get a nice piece of vegan chocolate or something and have that over protein powder, I'm not going to get a lot of protein, not for protein. But my point is, if I had to choose a processed food, I would pick something that I want to really enjoy than have a  protein powder. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (56:59)

But for people like a woman with osteoporosis who can't eat that much, is protein powder okay? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (57:07)

Possibly, but you really want to look for clean protein powder, because about 75% of the ones on the market do also have a lot of heavy metal contaminations and other contaminants, pesticides, and all that kind of stuff. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (57:22)

Those are mostly rice. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (57:24)

Yeah. So just be very selective about it.

 

Dr Ritamarie (57:26)

I have found, and I'm a fan of, if people want to do protein powders, single ingredient protein powders, right? There's a few, there's a fava bean, there was a mung bean, there's a chickpea, pumpkin seed, sunflower seed. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (57:39)

I make mung bean pancakes. See, I just like the food. 

 

I do have a lot of lentils. I do a four lentil soup or dal, four lentil dal that I make. I make pancakes, which is chickpea flour pancakes with scallions and cilantro and all this stuff. And yeah, so awesome. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (58:01)

Awesome. So we've gone full circle here. The last thing we'll end with is personalization. There's no one size fits all. Everybody has to choose what's the best for them, right? Not what some study showed, because there's a lot of people quoting studies and debunking studies and all this stuff that's the latest craze on social media. 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote (58:21)

Not just one study, not what social media is telling you. Start listening to your body. Start listening to your body and paying attention to the cues that it's giving you, because we're listening to all this external information without paying attention to what's going on here. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (58:38)

We're making decisions that are for a population, and you may give me a great study, and it's got a hundred thousand people, and it comes out with the idea that 75% of these did well with whatever. What about the other 25 percent? You may be in that other 25 percent. So we have to personalize it, and we have to pay attention. 

 

And if you're out at the gym, and you're heavy lifting, and your muscles are wimpy, and they're not growing, there's a good chance that something's wrong. It may be that you don't have enough protein. It may be that you're not digesting protein. It also can be something else. So you have to pay attention. That's my feeling. 

 

This has been a great discussion. We are talking to Dr. Monisha Bhanote, and she is the author of, The Anatomy of Well-being, and she has come full circle. She comes with so much wisdom and so much training in pathology and cells and cancer therapies, all this stuff to put it together in a way to work with people to help them not make cancer anymore, to get them to the point where the body is working properly. 

 

And don't just listen to influencers on social media who tell you to eat 20 eggs a day. I'm sorry. There's something wrong with that.

 

All right, so thank you, thank you, thank you. Any last parting words on how do people find you? 

 

Dr Monisha Bhanote Bhanote (1:00:00)

I'm easy to find on social media. I'm Dr. Bhanote. So whether that's on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, all the platforms, my website is drBhanote.com. 

D-R-B-H-A-N-O-T-E. Yes, and I think I have a cookbook that I'm providing you guys. It's a Cell Care Cookbook, which is, well, it is plant-based, gluten-free recipes, but they're easy to make. I love cooking in under 15-20 minutes, and eating my food. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (1:00:42)

Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And all of us as health practitioners in the new future, the reinvention of healthcare, we have in our power to truly change lives.

 

Our conversation at the beginning talked about being in an internal medicine residency and seeing people weren't getting well. I'm just shocked that not more people in that situation, not more physicians, are noticing that we just keep doing the same things we learned in medical school, but people aren't getting well. 

 

So we have the power to help people to change it, make different choices to change their cellular biology, to change the way their body handles the environment, and to be healthy. 

 

So go out, do what you do, and until next time, shine on.