August 27, 2019 • 38 mins
Is there really a fountain of youth? Well, not exactly… but renowned cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Steven Gundry has come pretty close to cracking the code to living longer and healthier. In this interview, he’s pulling back the curtain on the secrets of those who look and feel young at any age, and what everyone can do starting right now. He's the author of the book "The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age."
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
You know it's trite, but you are what you eat,
but you are what the thing you're eating. Eight. And
if I can get people to change certain foods that
they've accepted as healthy all of their lives, all sorts
of things happen. Hi, I'm Dr Oz and this is
(00:48):
the Doctor Oz Podcast. Is there really a fountain of youth? Well,
perhaps not exactly a fountain youth, but renown cardiothoracic surgeon,
good friend Dr Stephen Gundry has come pretty cool to
cracking the coat today. He's pulled. He's here. He's gonna
pull back the curtain on the secrets of those who
look and few younger in the age, and he's gonna
reveal how everyone listening right now can do exactly that.
(01:10):
Dr under the actually being here before we get this
issue of aging. That's talking about someone who aged very beautifully,
a man who actually you made national international news with
Dr Leonard Bailey baby Faye, Baby Faye, and this whole
idea of taking his genographs, taking animal hearts and put
them in the babies who we couldn't get hearts for it.
You're a young surgeon at that time, almost watching from
(01:32):
the outside, just it's almost impossible to envision to have
been being conceived, much less executed, and he just passed away.
So I'd like to celebrate him for seconds. Since you
guys work so closely together, give us one that background. Yeah,
you know, we he was affectionately known as the Gentle Giant,
and he's he's very tall individual. But he hugged everybody,
(01:53):
and most surgeons are not huggers, as you probably aware.
You know, we're fired fire, let's get in and drop
our bomb and get out. But Leonard Bailey, Um, I mean,
he really was the general Giant, and he had such
a strength of convictions and love of people, and he actually,
(02:14):
I think taught me more humanity than than any of
my mentors. And he was my partner for you know,
for most of my career, and I learned so much
from that man. So we're both heart surgeons. Leonard specialty
as well. Within the field. The idea of transplating an
animal heart into a human was extraordinarily controversial. That's one
of the reasons that made international news when you tried it.
(02:36):
What was give us give me some of the inside
story of how that came about, Uh, why you finally
did it? And what you what in retrospect, what are
your thoughts about it? Well, you know what what happened
with on that day is that, you know, Dr Bailey
had been experimenting on animals on primarily um baboon to
(02:58):
go to go to baboon, and had actually developed this
to a fine science, and he had some really great
immunologists who were working with him, a sand Nelson Candarella,
and he pretty much had convinced at least himself and
the entire team that this was feasible. And I remember
this was back in the day when there really was
(03:20):
no good treatment for hypoplastic left heart syndrome. And quite honestly,
the baby is born with no real heart and there's
no left heart, and they're just barely alive because you
were in your mother's belly, but you're nothing outside. Yeah,
and except for you know Bill Norwood in Philadelphia, babies
were sent home to die and the mother was given
the option. You know, we can keep the baby here
and let it die, or you can dig it home
(03:41):
and let it die. And that was the option. And
one day he talked to a mother and said, you know,
this is what's going to happen. But you know, I'm
convinced that I've got this figured out enough that it's
certainly worth a worth a while to try this and
and even if we fail. He actually told the mother this,
(04:03):
I think that this will be the start of something
that can help children in the future. And she said,
you know, let's let's do it. My baby is going
to die. And he remember his press conferences, he took
a lot of hate. People would call him, they would
(04:24):
show up at his house and say, we're going to
kill your two boys. So that you know what the
mother Baboon felt like by you taking this baby Baboon's heart,
and I mean, it was that radical. And he just
kept He actually just said, look you, my goodness. You know,
we we eat animals and we think nothing of taking
(04:48):
those animals from their mothers and eating them. And you know,
we take pigs and take their hearts and we take
their valves and we think nothing of this. So is
the slippery slope maybe so? Well, you know, much of
my career working with Dr Bailey was looking at Zeno
transplants using pigs as a model. It was actually a
(05:10):
lot of the work in using pigs as a Zeno
transplant that actually made me discover this autoimmune attack on
the inside of blood vessels. That was the final stop
in doing Zeno transplants with pigs. We now know that
we can genetically engineer pigs to get rid of that
sugar molecule that you and I know new five g C.
(05:33):
But uh, you know, I think if he hadn't done that,
I think the whole field of infant hart transplantation probably
wouldn't have happened because that that moment he knew that
you could do this um and do it successfully. I
mean maybe Fay lived for twenty odd days and baby
(05:55):
Fay actually died we think from an a bo miscom
habibility of blood type miscompatibility rather than anything else. So, uh,
what I have done? No, Uh, I think he was
actually the right person at the right time. He I
mean this, this guy was the calmest person under fire
(06:19):
I think I've ever been. The amazing thing to me
is you were there. This is equivalent everyone of putting
a man in the moon. You know, putting an animal
heart into a human and then jump starting a process
was a lot with lots of other derivative benefits. And
you've taken your career from there to where most people
know you now as a gentleman who's figured out more
about aging than most of us. Dr election radically reinjured
(06:45):
her some of the thought processes around foods that are
quote unquote good for you, bad for you, and breaking
down some of those berries and making us realize there's
subtle things in there that plants you to protect themselves
and we should have all along at least expected that.
And why wouldn't we protect itself from us the way
we protect ourselves from other predators. Right, So I think
that's siv into that little bit, But I wanted to
(07:07):
make you established a hard science background that there's an
opportunity to reinvent yourselves no matter where you are in
your career, and you've done that. So I applaud you
on that aging which is what the longevity paradox about.
Why do you think we've gotten aging at least somewhat wrong?
What are the big breakthrough ideas that you've garnered over
a career of challenging orthodoxy. Well, I think the main
(07:27):
point point of the book is the aging process we've
been taught is something that's inevitable, that obviously we are
going to die. And then my epilogue, I talked about
we're all going to die, get over it. Whether you're
Dave Asprey and you're gonna die at eight or you're
gonna be me and die at a hundred fifty. We're
all gonna die, even Dave. So the point is we
(07:51):
we've come to think of aging is not a very
pleasant thing to look forward to. And that's actually why
it's called the longevity paradox. We all want to live
a long time, but when we look at what that involves, um, hippon,
knee replacement, heart surgery, stance, cancer, dementia, Uh, you know,
(08:15):
sitting in an old hole folks home. There's a new
movie out that I guess, um, I've forgotten who the
protagonist is. That she checks into the nursing home. She's
she said, what are you here for? She said, I've
kind of here to die. And I think that's a
very interesting way of looking at And you know, I
practice in Palm Springs, which is, you know, nicknamed God's
(08:35):
Waiting Room for a very good reason. But so I've
had the benefit I'm actually the only now nutritionists who's
actually spent most of their career in a blue zone,
low Melinda, California, And some of my critics say, you know,
you're all wrong. You know, what do you know about
blue zones. Well, I'm the only one who's actually lived
there and studied these people. And so getting back to aging,
(09:00):
the amazing thing is um not only my research, but
a lot of other very smart people's research has shown
that we actually age by the lining of our gut
slowly breaking down or quickly breaking down. And one of
the things I like people to imagine is our our gut,
(09:21):
which is the lining of our gut is the size
of a tennis court and it's only one self thick.
And that gut, that lining is actually our skin turned
inside up. And we know that when people get older,
people look at your skin and it gets thin, and
you know, you touch it and it peels away and
(09:42):
there's bruising all over the place. Well, that's actually a
reflection of how strong the inner wall of your gut is.
And there's there's beautiful experiments that have been done in
this cute little worm called c. Elegans, And every experiment
that's ever been done and see el agans has been
(10:02):
duplicated in higher animals, including rhesus monkeys, and it's predicted
what happens to us. And these even this little tiny worm,
the bacteria that live in its gut, it's microbiome as
that back those bacteria break down this little single cell
wall of its gut, it ages. And the faster it
(10:25):
breaks down this wall, the faster this little critter ages.
And I've become convinced that Hippocrates was absolutely right that
all disease begins in the gut. And he knew this
twenty five hundred years ago, and we didn't know any
of this until five years ago. The human Microbiome project
(10:47):
was finished, and this guy years ago, so hey, guess what.
All disease begins in the gut. So you know, I
see arthritis get reversed by changing diets and getting Lecton's
out of your diet. I see. The thing that started
me off on this was watching a gentleman who I
call Big Head, reverse his coronary artery disease by changing
(11:10):
his diet. And I see it all the time, and
people who I've actually had ready to go on the
operating table and they got scared and say, is there
another way? And I say, well, yeah, but you know
you're gonna have to listen to me. And these people,
now these are diabetics, multi vessel coronary art disease, had
(11:32):
a heart attack. Some of these people now we're celebrating
their fifteenth year after telling me I don't want to
go through this operation. They have normal stress test, normal antigrams.
There's lots more will be come back. Yeah. So what
(11:56):
was the paradox? What was the surprising part the fifth
any in your own health but also those of your
patients that got you realized. But you know, we missed
some of the story here. And what are the big
changes people have to make that void be on your
our table more importantly, to live gracefully in the longevity.
You know it's trite, but you are what you eat,
but you are what the thing you're eating. Eight And
(12:20):
if I can get people to change certain foods that
they have accepted as healthy all of their lives, all
sorts of things happened. Let me let me give you
an example. Um, The whole idea that we should be
eating healthy whole grains as a staple of our diet
actually began in the late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen
(12:43):
hundreds from those famous Seventh Day Adventice the Kellogg's brothers
and the Collogs brothers in Battle Creek, Michigan, actually had
a sanitarium that they wanted people to eat whole grains
for good all movements. And what most people don't know
is they actually firmly believed that if you ate whole grains,
(13:06):
it would tamp down your sexual desires and it would
prevent masturbation. I kid you not look it up because
you're off stuffed, and you were you were feeling bloated,
so you didn't feel like I'm cutting out cutting out
a whole grains for my wife. So and they actually
(13:27):
um their food was so horrible with their whole grains
that people were making tooth teeth on them, and they
were so against sugar. And then Will said they actually
one of their patients was w C Post post toast
ease and grape nuts, and he stole their idea. And
(13:48):
Will got so mad at his brother. He said, this
is ridiculous. You know, this guy is now making a
fortune on our idea, and we're going to do this
and we're going to put sugar in it and we're
gonna rinded up so fine and people will actually eat
the stuff and it was called predigested food, and they
started an advertising campaign to convince people that number one,
(14:12):
this should be your breakfast and number two, you know,
a bowl of Kellogg's corn flakes was predigested and was
the perfect way to treat you know, irritable bow and
which actually caused irrible bow. But we've been eating greens
for a long time, brothers, that's true. We moment and
(14:33):
I were in southern Turkey in this place called go
Beckley Teppe, which is a civilization or at least the
remnants of one that was from twelve thousand two years
ago and to nine thousand six BC, and they were
still hunter gatherers. They were not they hadn't had the
agricultural revolution, but they they had jars of green there
(14:54):
that they they've uncovered. So we've been eating greens for
at least twelve thousand years. It wasn't the Kelloggs that
ga of that, no, but that's been the modern iteration
of grains. But you know that that was my research
at Yale is an undergraduate and you could take you
could look at early man up until the agricultural revolution,
and we were about six ft tall at that point
(15:17):
and our brain size was bigger than it is today,
and after the agricultural revolution we shrunk about a foot
and it's actually and our brain size shrunk and we've
never recovered. Now I propose that that's because of the
ill effects of these things. In fact, the very famous
frozen man in the Alps of northern Italy about five
(15:40):
thousand years old. He's riddled with arthritis and osteoporosis. And
in he's wearing kind of a tunic, and in the
pockets of his tunic is iron horn wheat, the ancient wheat,
and it's in his pockets. And I think it's you
just sit there and look at that and say, you know,
(16:01):
that's what these people were eating, and look at the
ill effects of them, and maybe we should learn from that.
I'll take it one step further. Yes, there are blue
zones that eat whole grains, and there are blue zones
that eat beans. But we have to remember that Okinawa,
which is a blue zone, believe it or not, they
(16:22):
do not eat whole grains. Most of their diet is
the purple sweet potato. They do not eat soy They
eat miso and natow. They don't eat soy beans or
tofu and they eat white rice. Only about six percent
of their diet is white rice, not not brown rice.
And you know four billion people in this world who
(16:43):
use rice as their staple eat white rice instead of
brown rice. So maybe these people are a lot smarter
than we think. It was just because they could store
it for a longer time, so you could go through
periods of faminine. No, actually, whole grain store is just fine.
It's when you grind up whole grain that you expose
the germ and the fats to oxidation. And that's why
(17:05):
in this country when we have a whole grain product,
we have to put so many preservatives to prevent oxidation,
most of which are endocrine disruptors. So this whole idea
that whole grains are healthy for us, I got to disagree.
And even the adventis Um. The advent is Is use
(17:26):
a lot of soy products, but their soy product is
texturized vegetable protein t VP. That's soy that has been
extruded under high heat and high pressure to make that product.
And I think these Adventus were incredibly clever. That's their
mystery meat and so pressure cooking, high heat, high pressure
(17:49):
will destroy most lectins. And if you look at traditional cultures,
even back ten thousand years ago, the storage systems were horrible,
and so most of these grains naturally fermented, and most
of these cultures had fermentation processes to d nature electus.
(18:11):
Fermentation is a really good way to kill off lectans.
It really is to this day the same way with beans.
When you study cultures that do use beans, and I've
studied a lot of them, they soak their beans for
forty eight hours and they change the water every four
to six hours because lectons will leach out in water,
(18:33):
and so then you cook your beans for a very
long time. In Italy and tuscany where they do eat
a lot of beans, they will cook their beans for
days in a glass pot after they've soaked it for
forty eight hours. The at Chols in southern Italy, south
of Naples, the town with the largest amount of people
(18:53):
over a hundred years of age in any town, over
thirty percent of the population is over a hundred years
of page, and they have a phenomenal diet. They do
not eat bread, they do not eat postum, They eat lentils,
they eat anchovies, They have a huge amount of olive oil,
and they eat little anchi little anchovies as their only
(19:14):
animal protein. So what produced do they eat? So they'll yeah,
so they'll eat vegetables. They eat a lot of a
lot of lettuces. They love lettuces, a lot of cruciferous vegetables.
Just as an interesting aside, one of the most popular
cells in Italy is tricolori, and tricoloria is ridicio, Belgian
(19:34):
en dive and arugula. Two of those, radiquiol and Belgian
and dive or chickory and chickery plants have the highest
amount of inulin of any really plants the chickory family.
And it just so happens in the book The Longevity
Paradox that this cute little microbe called ackerman sea mucinophilia
(19:56):
loves inulin. And I think those Italians are clever because look,
their favorite salad is two inuline containing plants and arugula,
which is a cruciferous vegetable because on a broccoli and
they pour olive oil over it and they pour balsa
mcmner grow over. And this bacteria you mentioned, achamancia, I'm
told I've read that it's found in higher percentages and
(20:19):
skinny people, which is again so paradoxical. And I don't
know if giving achamancia to use you don't go out
there start to eat. You can't, Yeah, you can't. Nobody
has figured out how to way to get it into
us yet, but it's actually there. And interestingly enough, we
now know that met Foreman though, you know, the most
famous diabetic drug works not by any mystical magical thing
(20:43):
of changing our glucose metabolism. It actually increases the proportion
of acramancam usinophilia. So I I interrupted. You were moving
on from the oldest lived population south of Naples two
and the anchovies are so. One of the uniting feature
(21:04):
of the Blue zones is not that they eat grange
and beans. It's not that they eat a low fat diet.
I mean it's three of the Blue zones actually use
a leader of olive oil per week. That's a lot
of olive oil. Um. I try to do that, David
Promotor does that. The unifying feature is that all of
(21:25):
these communities do not eat a lot of animal protein.
Animal protein is a minimal part of their diet. And
it makes me very sad. Uh. You know, I grew
up in Olmhna Braskian the beef state, you know, be
for breakfast, beef for dinner, and then a side of port,
you know whatever. But the exposure to low melenda and
(21:46):
getting to know Dr Gary Fraser, who has been in
charge of the Adventice health study. I mean, here you
have a community where you can under a microscope follow
these people, and Adventice will cheat. Um, they're supposed to
be vegetarians or vegans, but occasionally fish will sneak in
and chicken will sneak in. But he's tracked these people,
(22:10):
these long, long, long lived people, and the longest living
Adventice or vegans, followed by the Lacta Wovo vegetarians, followed
by the Pascatarians. And you just recently published a paper
that says, sorry, guys, any addition of animal protein will
(22:31):
increase your risk of heart disease and early death compared
to none at all. Now I think you'd mitigate against that.
And a lot of the book is okay, you know,
I want my cake and eat it too, uh, don't
we all? And one of the ways to mitigate against
this is number one. Valter Longo from USC Gerontology Center
(22:55):
has shown that if you eat a low calorie vegan
diet for five days a week a fasting mimicking diet
of about eight to nine hundred calories five days in
a row. You will act as if you were on
at calorie stricted diet for the entire month. You will
(23:17):
activate stem cells as if you were on a water fast.
You will activate your you will renew your immune system
as if you were on a water fast. And yet
you can still eat. So in my book, and Walter
Longo has given me a nice shout out on the book. Um,
I say, hey, five days a week, you know, eat
(23:41):
five days a month, sorry, five days a month, you
four or five days in a row. Just eat a
vegan diet which is not too hard to do, believe
it or not. And I give recipes on it, and
you're going to get You can cheat. You can have
your cake and eat it too, but please don't make
your cake out of your wheat. More questions after the break.
(24:12):
The foods that surprise us, that have lots of lectons.
If you don't mind it, everyone define electins so they
know what it is. And then I love you to
walk us through examples of some of the mistakes we
make that maybe we can have hacks that have you
already mentioned pressure cooking and soaking beans, but there are
other examples you give share with me in the past
as well. Sure, so, electons are the defense system, one
of the defense systems of a plant against being eaten. Uh,
(24:35):
it's a sticky protein that is that binds too sugar molecules.
Are they all bad? No, there are actually some good
lectings out there. There are some pretty interesting lectons in garlic.
That's actually very beneficial, I believe or not. Lectons are
very important communication system between cells. And you and I
know about lectons because we were taught about blood types.
(24:58):
Man electons were for is discovered in typing blood. We
introduce a lectin into a tube of blood and if
that lectin binds to one red blood cell, it will
bind to another and they will agglutinate and that will
tell us what your blood type is depending on the
lectin that is on that sticks to a sugar molecule.
(25:20):
For instance, I've got a paper where I make I
think my second really good case that lectins are a
cause of an autoimmune attack on the surface of our
blood vessels, and that removing lectins from humans diet actually
reduces dramatically that inflammation on the surface of blood vessels.
(25:42):
So I propose, and other people proposed this, that inflammation
and autoimmune attack on the blood vessels is actually the
major cause of heart disease. And you know, one of
the greatest our surgeons of all time, and Michael de Baking,
who you and I both had the pleasure of knowing
when he was alive, always said back in the fifties
(26:04):
that cholesterol had nothing to do with plaque in the arteries.
It was an innocent bystander that basically was an ambulance
that got caught up in this war that was going
on on the surface of the blood vessel. And I
think it was right. So it means push you a
couple of dies that are popping now Paleo diet thoughts. Yeah,
So interestingly enough, The Plant Paradox my original big blockbuster
(26:32):
of and it actually still is. It's still simultaneously the
number one paleo diet on Amazon and the number one
vegetarian diet on Amazon simultaneous. It's the Pagan diet Mary Vegan. Yes,
I mean, it's crazy but iconic book. Only two or
three years after two years exactly two years So the
(26:53):
interesting thing about the paleo and with the keto diet,
I look at ketosis on every one of my patients.
Most people who think they're doing a ketogenic diet or
a paleo diet are not in ketosis. That's because in general,
both the paleo and the keto diet emphasizes a large
amount of animal meats and proteins and fats. And I
(27:17):
think that I talked about this in the book, that
Ansel Keys, who is the original what everybody says was
the anti fat fanatic, he was actually very afraid of
animal saturated fats. He actually did not fear plant based
fats like olive oil, like avocados for instance. In fact, hilariously,
(27:41):
dr Keys retired to a village right next at Roli,
south of Naples, and he died just shy of his
hundred second birthday. So he's actually the longest lived nutritionists.
And I've had the pleasure of interviewing his housekeeper, and
his housekeeper said that the guy just drank olive oil
day and night. And so here's the original anti fat
(28:04):
guy who's held up by his fingernails by the paleo community.
And yet he never said that fat was bad. What
he wanted to have people avoid was animal fat. And
I've read all of his work many many times, and
I think what the connection he didn't get with animal
fat is that animal fat is almost always associated with
(28:25):
animal protein, and it was the protein that was the troublemaker. Now,
having said that, as you know of people carry the
Appoe four gene, which is nicknamed the Alzheimer's jam, and
I and others have shown that animal fats, saturated fats,
including coconut oil, is really mischievous to people who carry
(28:49):
the Apoe for gene, they do not transport fats properly.
And you know, Dale Brettison the end of Alzheimer's uses
my program in his program, the Recode program. So I
think I think saturated fats in a keto diet or
paleo diet are mischievous for most people. Having said that
(29:13):
fat is actually good for most people as long as
it's plant based fats like avocado oil, like like olive
oil is still the best. M CT oil is probably
safe for most people, which is a derivation of coconut oil.
Uh and avocados. Avocados are phenomenal for its are okay,
(29:33):
coconuts are great. Coconut milks, okay, But for the apple
E four is, please stay away from coconuto because it's saturated. Yeah.
And when I've studied, study lots of apple four folks,
because they come to me, and these people really, they
will kick up their small dense l d ls, they
will kick up their oxidized l deals whenever we expose
(29:56):
them to these sorts of saturated fats. Would you tell
someone with that gene profile to eat no fat? No
I hate Yeah, just lots and lots of avocados. Yeah,
avocados are great. No, there's no saturated fat. It's all
monoan saturated fat. Monoline saturated fats are fine. But the
(30:17):
other interesting thing is there's a beautiful paper out that
shows that people with the appoe forging highly benefit from
taking fish oil. And there's some beautiful studies out recently
that shows that with fish oil in the appoe forging.
And I'm sorry to get technical, but you actually have
to take a phospho lipid that's present in krill oil
(30:41):
to deliver fish oil into your brain properly if you're
an a and uh so, just to take a take
a rapid questions which vitamin do you do you think
we get the least of that we should blown us
up on vitamin D three. We are profoundly deficient in
this country in vitamin D three. Every one of my
autoimmune patients that I see, and I now my practice
(31:04):
is autommune disease walks in with a low vitamin D.
Vitamin D is critical for sealing the wall of your gut.
It's critical to turn on stem cells. There's a beautiful
paper that I cite that shows, if you believe in
the telomere theory of aging, those little caps on chromosomes,
that people who have the highest level of vitamin D
have the longest telomeres and people who have the lowest
(31:26):
levels of vitamin D have the shortest levels. And I
have yet to see vitamin D toxicity. The University of California,
San Diego says the average human being should take nine thousand,
six hundred international it's a vitamin D a day. Do
you take a multi vitamin every now and then? I really, um,
you know, I have several of my own products that
(31:49):
pretty much cover the bases. But yeah, multi vitamin is
not going to hurt you. But trace minerals are probably
far more important than just the multi vitamin. The other
thing that's important for most people who know is it
or more people will carry a mutation of the mt
h f R gene, better known as in my clinic
(32:10):
as the mother effr gene. What do you do with
that one? So you gotta take methyl B twelve, and
you gotta take methyl full eight, and you gotta put
the methyl B twelve under your tongue. It will not
work if you swallow it or chew it or suck
on it. You can get a shot, or you get
a shot, but why bother? You know you can get
(32:31):
a methyl B twelve from Costco and it's cheap. Are
you vegan? No? I'm not. Yeah, yeah, I'm what I
call a pescatarian. Uh not pesctarian, sorry, I vegge aquarian.
So my wife and I in general will eat vegan
during the week and then on the weekends we usually
(32:53):
have wild shellfish or wildfish. I have one more question
from it before you wrap up. You mentioned the microbiome
at the beginning of this, and I feel like your
book has a lot on the microbiome, and we do
all about the microbiome, so we just really briefly summed
up its people think they take a generic probiotic and
they fix their microbiome. Please give us, like the very
(33:16):
the headline of how we actually do fix it. So,
the vast majority of probiotics that we swallow never make
it into our gut number one, because the stomach acid
destroys them. Number Two, these probiotics are not normal flora
in our gut. They basically, if they make it in,
go on vacation in our guts for a couple of
weeks and then they leave. You know, they kind of
(33:37):
hang out at the beach down in Florida and then
they leave. What's fascinating is that we actually have a
little collection of important microbes at the bottom of what
are called crips in our micro villa, and they're protected
down there. And even if we wipe out our microbiome
with antibiotics, if you give these guys what they want
(33:57):
to eat, they will come out of hiding and repopulate.
So the key is not the probiotics. The key is prebiotics,
the things that these guys like to eat, and prebiotics
are things like inuline. I mean, it's probably the best prebiotic. Yeah,
tubers are great. You know, get yourself some yams tuber
(34:19):
that's a night shade, so a sweep potato or a
yam ruda, Bega's turnips, the things you know our grandparents
used to eat in large amounts. He came up. You know,
grab yourself some hicum U get yourself some guacamole. And
you know, spoiler alert, guacamole is not made with tomatoes.
And use the hicama to dip your guacamole. You know,
(34:40):
it's the perfect food for your gut bugs. I've been
hearing a lot about colostoms, maybe something that might help
people who are trying to either take probiotics or take
prebiox and help their intestinal regrowth. Thoughts on that. Yeah,
So colostrum is kind of the first um melk of
of any animal and including humans, and it's loaded with him,
(35:01):
you know, globulins and that. I don't have any professional
connection with these guys, but there's a there's a product
that you can find in your drug store called dia Rescue,
and I take it on all my international trips, particularly
if i'm doing it. I did a mission in Ethiopia
a couple of months ago, and it cures diarrhea, and
(35:23):
it's primarily clostrum with a couple of really cool at
An ingredients, and luckily I had some on the trip.
I didn't need it, but basically cured our group that
we're traveling with. The they're actually integration partners on the show,
which is why I knew about them. But I'm asking
that about them, but about the actual colostrum itself. Should
(35:44):
because I know that that more and more folks are
telling me that they might help our intestines address issues
with a microbio. You've got to seal the wall of
your gut, and you've really got to take control of
what I call the gang members and our guy. There's
there's two fighting, you know, opposing forces, and your gout.
(36:06):
There's good guys what I call gut buddies, and then
the gang members. And the gang members do not like us.
They throw rocks through our windows as opposed to all
of our gut buddies. We are actually a condominium for
our microbiome. N of us is not us. It's bugs
(36:27):
and worms and viruses, and we are their home. And
the principle of this book is if we eat to
take care of the ninety percenters, then they will take
care of their home. And the really cool thing is,
do you look at a hundred five year old people
who are thriving around the world and you look at
their microbiome number one, it's very diverse. There's lots of these,
(36:51):
but they have the microbiome of a thirty year old
healthy individual at the same microbiome, and they have the
same microbiome as my of my favorite animal, the naked
mole rat. And there's a lot about the naked mole rat.
And please have your listeners google naked naked mole rats
(37:12):
the uglies. What do you love so much about the
naked mole rat? So the naked mole rat rats live
about two years. The naked molerat has been clocked at
twenty or thirty years of age. There is no known
death of a naked mole rat. And what they do
is they have the same genes as all the other rats,
(37:33):
but they eat. They live in underground tunnels. They eat
tubers and fun guy and mushrooms. And the book is
all about how eating tubers and fun guys and mushroom
will make you a naked mole rat. And guess what,
all the other rats eat grains and they don't make
it very long. On that note, the longevity Paradox How
(37:56):
to Die Young at the right bold age by Gundry,
as you can either a little canaked mole rat hor
or hopefully you've been better and hopefully you will not
look like a negative noble rap another pipe tash spectacular contributions,
so they're sure, but Dr Gundrew, good to see you
get my friends, thank you for having me always. Good
to see you both
You know it's trite, but you are what you eat,
but you are what the thing you're eating. Eight. And
if I can get people to change certain foods that
they've accepted as healthy all of their lives, all sorts
of things happen. Hi, I'm Dr Oz and this is
(00:48):
the Doctor Oz Podcast. Is there really a fountain of youth? Well,
perhaps not exactly a fountain youth, but renown cardiothoracic surgeon,
good friend Dr Stephen Gundry has come pretty cool to
cracking the coat today. He's pulled. He's here. He's gonna
pull back the curtain on the secrets of those who
look and few younger in the age, and he's gonna
reveal how everyone listening right now can do exactly that.
(01:10):
Dr under the actually being here before we get this
issue of aging. That's talking about someone who aged very beautifully,
a man who actually you made national international news with
Dr Leonard Bailey baby Faye, Baby Faye, and this whole
idea of taking his genographs, taking animal hearts and put
them in the babies who we couldn't get hearts for it.
You're a young surgeon at that time, almost watching from
(01:32):
the outside, just it's almost impossible to envision to have
been being conceived, much less executed, and he just passed away.
So I'd like to celebrate him for seconds. Since you
guys work so closely together, give us one that background. Yeah,
you know, we he was affectionately known as the Gentle Giant,
and he's he's very tall individual. But he hugged everybody,
(01:53):
and most surgeons are not huggers, as you probably aware.
You know, we're fired fire, let's get in and drop
our bomb and get out. But Leonard Bailey, Um, I mean,
he really was the general Giant, and he had such
a strength of convictions and love of people, and he actually,
(02:14):
I think taught me more humanity than than any of
my mentors. And he was my partner for you know,
for most of my career, and I learned so much
from that man. So we're both heart surgeons. Leonard specialty
as well. Within the field. The idea of transplating an
animal heart into a human was extraordinarily controversial. That's one
of the reasons that made international news when you tried it.
(02:36):
What was give us give me some of the inside
story of how that came about, Uh, why you finally
did it? And what you what in retrospect, what are
your thoughts about it? Well, you know what what happened
with on that day is that, you know, Dr Bailey
had been experimenting on animals on primarily um baboon to
(02:58):
go to go to baboon, and had actually developed this
to a fine science, and he had some really great
immunologists who were working with him, a sand Nelson Candarella,
and he pretty much had convinced at least himself and
the entire team that this was feasible. And I remember
this was back in the day when there really was
(03:20):
no good treatment for hypoplastic left heart syndrome. And quite honestly,
the baby is born with no real heart and there's
no left heart, and they're just barely alive because you
were in your mother's belly, but you're nothing outside. Yeah,
and except for you know Bill Norwood in Philadelphia, babies
were sent home to die and the mother was given
the option. You know, we can keep the baby here
and let it die, or you can dig it home
(03:41):
and let it die. And that was the option. And
one day he talked to a mother and said, you know,
this is what's going to happen. But you know, I'm
convinced that I've got this figured out enough that it's
certainly worth a worth a while to try this and
and even if we fail. He actually told the mother this,
(04:03):
I think that this will be the start of something
that can help children in the future. And she said,
you know, let's let's do it. My baby is going
to die. And he remember his press conferences, he took
a lot of hate. People would call him, they would
(04:24):
show up at his house and say, we're going to
kill your two boys. So that you know what the
mother Baboon felt like by you taking this baby Baboon's heart,
and I mean, it was that radical. And he just
kept He actually just said, look you, my goodness. You know,
we we eat animals and we think nothing of taking
(04:48):
those animals from their mothers and eating them. And you know,
we take pigs and take their hearts and we take
their valves and we think nothing of this. So is
the slippery slope maybe so? Well, you know, much of
my career working with Dr Bailey was looking at Zeno
transplants using pigs as a model. It was actually a
(05:10):
lot of the work in using pigs as a Zeno
transplant that actually made me discover this autoimmune attack on
the inside of blood vessels. That was the final stop
in doing Zeno transplants with pigs. We now know that
we can genetically engineer pigs to get rid of that
sugar molecule that you and I know new five g C.
(05:33):
But uh, you know, I think if he hadn't done that,
I think the whole field of infant hart transplantation probably
wouldn't have happened because that that moment he knew that
you could do this um and do it successfully. I
mean maybe Fay lived for twenty odd days and baby
(05:55):
Fay actually died we think from an a bo miscom
habibility of blood type miscompatibility rather than anything else. So, uh,
what I have done? No, Uh, I think he was
actually the right person at the right time. He I
mean this, this guy was the calmest person under fire
(06:19):
I think I've ever been. The amazing thing to me
is you were there. This is equivalent everyone of putting
a man in the moon. You know, putting an animal
heart into a human and then jump starting a process
was a lot with lots of other derivative benefits. And
you've taken your career from there to where most people
know you now as a gentleman who's figured out more
about aging than most of us. Dr election radically reinjured
(06:45):
her some of the thought processes around foods that are
quote unquote good for you, bad for you, and breaking
down some of those berries and making us realize there's
subtle things in there that plants you to protect themselves
and we should have all along at least expected that.
And why wouldn't we protect itself from us the way
we protect ourselves from other predators. Right, So I think
that's siv into that little bit, But I wanted to
(07:07):
make you established a hard science background that there's an
opportunity to reinvent yourselves no matter where you are in
your career, and you've done that. So I applaud you
on that aging which is what the longevity paradox about.
Why do you think we've gotten aging at least somewhat wrong?
What are the big breakthrough ideas that you've garnered over
a career of challenging orthodoxy. Well, I think the main
(07:27):
point point of the book is the aging process we've
been taught is something that's inevitable, that obviously we are
going to die. And then my epilogue, I talked about
we're all going to die, get over it. Whether you're
Dave Asprey and you're gonna die at eight or you're
gonna be me and die at a hundred fifty. We're
all gonna die, even Dave. So the point is we
(07:51):
we've come to think of aging is not a very
pleasant thing to look forward to. And that's actually why
it's called the longevity paradox. We all want to live
a long time, but when we look at what that involves, um, hippon,
knee replacement, heart surgery, stance, cancer, dementia, Uh, you know,
(08:15):
sitting in an old hole folks home. There's a new
movie out that I guess, um, I've forgotten who the
protagonist is. That she checks into the nursing home. She's
she said, what are you here for? She said, I've
kind of here to die. And I think that's a
very interesting way of looking at And you know, I
practice in Palm Springs, which is, you know, nicknamed God's
(08:35):
Waiting Room for a very good reason. But so I've
had the benefit I'm actually the only now nutritionists who's
actually spent most of their career in a blue zone,
low Melinda, California, And some of my critics say, you know,
you're all wrong. You know, what do you know about
blue zones. Well, I'm the only one who's actually lived
there and studied these people. And so getting back to aging,
(09:00):
the amazing thing is um not only my research, but
a lot of other very smart people's research has shown
that we actually age by the lining of our gut
slowly breaking down or quickly breaking down. And one of
the things I like people to imagine is our our gut,
(09:21):
which is the lining of our gut is the size
of a tennis court and it's only one self thick.
And that gut, that lining is actually our skin turned
inside up. And we know that when people get older,
people look at your skin and it gets thin, and
you know, you touch it and it peels away and
(09:42):
there's bruising all over the place. Well, that's actually a
reflection of how strong the inner wall of your gut is.
And there's there's beautiful experiments that have been done in
this cute little worm called c. Elegans, And every experiment
that's ever been done and see el agans has been
(10:02):
duplicated in higher animals, including rhesus monkeys, and it's predicted
what happens to us. And these even this little tiny worm,
the bacteria that live in its gut, it's microbiome as
that back those bacteria break down this little single cell
wall of its gut, it ages. And the faster it
(10:25):
breaks down this wall, the faster this little critter ages.
And I've become convinced that Hippocrates was absolutely right that
all disease begins in the gut. And he knew this
twenty five hundred years ago, and we didn't know any
of this until five years ago. The human Microbiome project
(10:47):
was finished, and this guy years ago, so hey, guess what.
All disease begins in the gut. So you know, I
see arthritis get reversed by changing diets and getting Lecton's
out of your diet. I see. The thing that started
me off on this was watching a gentleman who I
call Big Head, reverse his coronary artery disease by changing
(11:10):
his diet. And I see it all the time, and
people who I've actually had ready to go on the
operating table and they got scared and say, is there
another way? And I say, well, yeah, but you know
you're gonna have to listen to me. And these people,
now these are diabetics, multi vessel coronary art disease, had
(11:32):
a heart attack. Some of these people now we're celebrating
their fifteenth year after telling me I don't want to
go through this operation. They have normal stress test, normal antigrams.
There's lots more will be come back. Yeah. So what
(11:56):
was the paradox? What was the surprising part the fifth
any in your own health but also those of your
patients that got you realized. But you know, we missed
some of the story here. And what are the big
changes people have to make that void be on your
our table more importantly, to live gracefully in the longevity.
You know it's trite, but you are what you eat,
but you are what the thing you're eating. Eight And
(12:20):
if I can get people to change certain foods that
they have accepted as healthy all of their lives, all
sorts of things happened. Let me let me give you
an example. Um, The whole idea that we should be
eating healthy whole grains as a staple of our diet
actually began in the late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen
(12:43):
hundreds from those famous Seventh Day Adventice the Kellogg's brothers
and the Collogs brothers in Battle Creek, Michigan, actually had
a sanitarium that they wanted people to eat whole grains
for good all movements. And what most people don't know
is they actually firmly believed that if you ate whole grains,
(13:06):
it would tamp down your sexual desires and it would
prevent masturbation. I kid you not look it up because
you're off stuffed, and you were you were feeling bloated,
so you didn't feel like I'm cutting out cutting out
a whole grains for my wife. So and they actually
(13:27):
um their food was so horrible with their whole grains
that people were making tooth teeth on them, and they
were so against sugar. And then Will said they actually
one of their patients was w C Post post toast
ease and grape nuts, and he stole their idea. And
(13:48):
Will got so mad at his brother. He said, this
is ridiculous. You know, this guy is now making a
fortune on our idea, and we're going to do this
and we're going to put sugar in it and we're
gonna rinded up so fine and people will actually eat
the stuff and it was called predigested food, and they
started an advertising campaign to convince people that number one,
(14:12):
this should be your breakfast and number two, you know,
a bowl of Kellogg's corn flakes was predigested and was
the perfect way to treat you know, irritable bow and
which actually caused irrible bow. But we've been eating greens
for a long time, brothers, that's true. We moment and
(14:33):
I were in southern Turkey in this place called go
Beckley Teppe, which is a civilization or at least the
remnants of one that was from twelve thousand two years
ago and to nine thousand six BC, and they were
still hunter gatherers. They were not they hadn't had the
agricultural revolution, but they they had jars of green there
(14:54):
that they they've uncovered. So we've been eating greens for
at least twelve thousand years. It wasn't the Kelloggs that
ga of that, no, but that's been the modern iteration
of grains. But you know that that was my research
at Yale is an undergraduate and you could take you
could look at early man up until the agricultural revolution,
and we were about six ft tall at that point
(15:17):
and our brain size was bigger than it is today,
and after the agricultural revolution we shrunk about a foot
and it's actually and our brain size shrunk and we've
never recovered. Now I propose that that's because of the
ill effects of these things. In fact, the very famous
frozen man in the Alps of northern Italy about five
(15:40):
thousand years old. He's riddled with arthritis and osteoporosis. And
in he's wearing kind of a tunic, and in the
pockets of his tunic is iron horn wheat, the ancient wheat,
and it's in his pockets. And I think it's you
just sit there and look at that and say, you know,
(16:01):
that's what these people were eating, and look at the
ill effects of them, and maybe we should learn from that.
I'll take it one step further. Yes, there are blue
zones that eat whole grains, and there are blue zones
that eat beans. But we have to remember that Okinawa,
which is a blue zone, believe it or not, they
(16:22):
do not eat whole grains. Most of their diet is
the purple sweet potato. They do not eat soy They
eat miso and natow. They don't eat soy beans or
tofu and they eat white rice. Only about six percent
of their diet is white rice, not not brown rice.
And you know four billion people in this world who
(16:43):
use rice as their staple eat white rice instead of
brown rice. So maybe these people are a lot smarter
than we think. It was just because they could store
it for a longer time, so you could go through
periods of faminine. No, actually, whole grain store is just fine.
It's when you grind up whole grain that you expose
the germ and the fats to oxidation. And that's why
(17:05):
in this country when we have a whole grain product,
we have to put so many preservatives to prevent oxidation,
most of which are endocrine disruptors. So this whole idea
that whole grains are healthy for us, I got to disagree.
And even the adventis Um. The advent is Is use
(17:26):
a lot of soy products, but their soy product is
texturized vegetable protein t VP. That's soy that has been
extruded under high heat and high pressure to make that product.
And I think these Adventus were incredibly clever. That's their
mystery meat and so pressure cooking, high heat, high pressure
(17:49):
will destroy most lectins. And if you look at traditional cultures,
even back ten thousand years ago, the storage systems were horrible,
and so most of these grains naturally fermented, and most
of these cultures had fermentation processes to d nature electus.
(18:11):
Fermentation is a really good way to kill off lectans.
It really is to this day the same way with beans.
When you study cultures that do use beans, and I've
studied a lot of them, they soak their beans for
forty eight hours and they change the water every four
to six hours because lectons will leach out in water,
(18:33):
and so then you cook your beans for a very
long time. In Italy and tuscany where they do eat
a lot of beans, they will cook their beans for
days in a glass pot after they've soaked it for
forty eight hours. The at Chols in southern Italy, south
of Naples, the town with the largest amount of people
(18:53):
over a hundred years of age in any town, over
thirty percent of the population is over a hundred years
of page, and they have a phenomenal diet. They do
not eat bread, they do not eat postum, They eat lentils,
they eat anchovies, They have a huge amount of olive oil,
and they eat little anchi little anchovies as their only
(19:14):
animal protein. So what produced do they eat? So they'll yeah,
so they'll eat vegetables. They eat a lot of a
lot of lettuces. They love lettuces, a lot of cruciferous vegetables.
Just as an interesting aside, one of the most popular
cells in Italy is tricolori, and tricoloria is ridicio, Belgian
(19:34):
en dive and arugula. Two of those, radiquiol and Belgian
and dive or chickory and chickery plants have the highest
amount of inulin of any really plants the chickory family.
And it just so happens in the book The Longevity
Paradox that this cute little microbe called ackerman sea mucinophilia
(19:56):
loves inulin. And I think those Italians are clever because look,
their favorite salad is two inuline containing plants and arugula,
which is a cruciferous vegetable because on a broccoli and
they pour olive oil over it and they pour balsa
mcmner grow over. And this bacteria you mentioned, achamancia, I'm
told I've read that it's found in higher percentages and
(20:19):
skinny people, which is again so paradoxical. And I don't
know if giving achamancia to use you don't go out
there start to eat. You can't, Yeah, you can't. Nobody
has figured out how to way to get it into
us yet, but it's actually there. And interestingly enough, we
now know that met Foreman though, you know, the most
famous diabetic drug works not by any mystical magical thing
(20:43):
of changing our glucose metabolism. It actually increases the proportion
of acramancam usinophilia. So I I interrupted. You were moving
on from the oldest lived population south of Naples two
and the anchovies are so. One of the uniting feature
(21:04):
of the Blue zones is not that they eat grange
and beans. It's not that they eat a low fat diet.
I mean it's three of the Blue zones actually use
a leader of olive oil per week. That's a lot
of olive oil. Um. I try to do that, David
Promotor does that. The unifying feature is that all of
(21:25):
these communities do not eat a lot of animal protein.
Animal protein is a minimal part of their diet. And
it makes me very sad. Uh. You know, I grew
up in Olmhna Braskian the beef state, you know, be
for breakfast, beef for dinner, and then a side of port,
you know whatever. But the exposure to low melenda and
(21:46):
getting to know Dr Gary Fraser, who has been in
charge of the Adventice health study. I mean, here you
have a community where you can under a microscope follow
these people, and Adventice will cheat. Um, they're supposed to
be vegetarians or vegans, but occasionally fish will sneak in
and chicken will sneak in. But he's tracked these people,
(22:10):
these long, long, long lived people, and the longest living
Adventice or vegans, followed by the Lacta Wovo vegetarians, followed
by the Pascatarians. And you just recently published a paper
that says, sorry, guys, any addition of animal protein will
(22:31):
increase your risk of heart disease and early death compared
to none at all. Now I think you'd mitigate against that.
And a lot of the book is okay, you know,
I want my cake and eat it too, uh, don't
we all? And one of the ways to mitigate against
this is number one. Valter Longo from USC Gerontology Center
(22:55):
has shown that if you eat a low calorie vegan
diet for five days a week a fasting mimicking diet
of about eight to nine hundred calories five days in
a row. You will act as if you were on
at calorie stricted diet for the entire month. You will
(23:17):
activate stem cells as if you were on a water fast.
You will activate your you will renew your immune system
as if you were on a water fast. And yet
you can still eat. So in my book, and Walter
Longo has given me a nice shout out on the book. Um,
I say, hey, five days a week, you know, eat
(23:41):
five days a month, sorry, five days a month, you
four or five days in a row. Just eat a
vegan diet which is not too hard to do, believe
it or not. And I give recipes on it, and
you're going to get You can cheat. You can have
your cake and eat it too, but please don't make
your cake out of your wheat. More questions after the break.
(24:12):
The foods that surprise us, that have lots of lectons.
If you don't mind it, everyone define electins so they
know what it is. And then I love you to
walk us through examples of some of the mistakes we
make that maybe we can have hacks that have you
already mentioned pressure cooking and soaking beans, but there are
other examples you give share with me in the past
as well. Sure, so, electons are the defense system, one
of the defense systems of a plant against being eaten. Uh,
(24:35):
it's a sticky protein that is that binds too sugar molecules.
Are they all bad? No, there are actually some good
lectings out there. There are some pretty interesting lectons in garlic.
That's actually very beneficial, I believe or not. Lectons are
very important communication system between cells. And you and I
know about lectons because we were taught about blood types.
(24:58):
Man electons were for is discovered in typing blood. We
introduce a lectin into a tube of blood and if
that lectin binds to one red blood cell, it will
bind to another and they will agglutinate and that will
tell us what your blood type is depending on the
lectin that is on that sticks to a sugar molecule.
(25:20):
For instance, I've got a paper where I make I
think my second really good case that lectins are a
cause of an autoimmune attack on the surface of our
blood vessels, and that removing lectins from humans diet actually
reduces dramatically that inflammation on the surface of blood vessels.
(25:42):
So I propose, and other people proposed this, that inflammation
and autoimmune attack on the blood vessels is actually the
major cause of heart disease. And you know, one of
the greatest our surgeons of all time, and Michael de Baking,
who you and I both had the pleasure of knowing
when he was alive, always said back in the fifties
(26:04):
that cholesterol had nothing to do with plaque in the arteries.
It was an innocent bystander that basically was an ambulance
that got caught up in this war that was going
on on the surface of the blood vessel. And I
think it was right. So it means push you a
couple of dies that are popping now Paleo diet thoughts. Yeah,
So interestingly enough, The Plant Paradox my original big blockbuster
(26:32):
of and it actually still is. It's still simultaneously the
number one paleo diet on Amazon and the number one
vegetarian diet on Amazon simultaneous. It's the Pagan diet Mary Vegan. Yes,
I mean, it's crazy but iconic book. Only two or
three years after two years exactly two years So the
(26:53):
interesting thing about the paleo and with the keto diet,
I look at ketosis on every one of my patients.
Most people who think they're doing a ketogenic diet or
a paleo diet are not in ketosis. That's because in general,
both the paleo and the keto diet emphasizes a large
amount of animal meats and proteins and fats. And I
(27:17):
think that I talked about this in the book, that
Ansel Keys, who is the original what everybody says was
the anti fat fanatic, he was actually very afraid of
animal saturated fats. He actually did not fear plant based
fats like olive oil, like avocados for instance. In fact, hilariously,
(27:41):
dr Keys retired to a village right next at Roli,
south of Naples, and he died just shy of his
hundred second birthday. So he's actually the longest lived nutritionists.
And I've had the pleasure of interviewing his housekeeper, and
his housekeeper said that the guy just drank olive oil
day and night. And so here's the original anti fat
(28:04):
guy who's held up by his fingernails by the paleo community.
And yet he never said that fat was bad. What
he wanted to have people avoid was animal fat. And
I've read all of his work many many times, and
I think what the connection he didn't get with animal
fat is that animal fat is almost always associated with
(28:25):
animal protein, and it was the protein that was the troublemaker. Now,
having said that, as you know of people carry the
Appoe four gene, which is nicknamed the Alzheimer's jam, and
I and others have shown that animal fats, saturated fats,
including coconut oil, is really mischievous to people who carry
(28:49):
the Apoe for gene, they do not transport fats properly.
And you know, Dale Brettison the end of Alzheimer's uses
my program in his program, the Recode program. So I
think I think saturated fats in a keto diet or
paleo diet are mischievous for most people. Having said that
(29:13):
fat is actually good for most people as long as
it's plant based fats like avocado oil, like like olive
oil is still the best. M CT oil is probably
safe for most people, which is a derivation of coconut oil.
Uh and avocados. Avocados are phenomenal for its are okay,
(29:33):
coconuts are great. Coconut milks, okay, But for the apple
E four is, please stay away from coconuto because it's saturated. Yeah.
And when I've studied, study lots of apple four folks,
because they come to me, and these people really, they
will kick up their small dense l d ls, they
will kick up their oxidized l deals whenever we expose
(29:56):
them to these sorts of saturated fats. Would you tell
someone with that gene profile to eat no fat? No
I hate Yeah, just lots and lots of avocados. Yeah,
avocados are great. No, there's no saturated fat. It's all
monoan saturated fat. Monoline saturated fats are fine. But the
(30:17):
other interesting thing is there's a beautiful paper out that
shows that people with the appoe forging highly benefit from
taking fish oil. And there's some beautiful studies out recently
that shows that with fish oil in the appoe forging.
And I'm sorry to get technical, but you actually have
to take a phospho lipid that's present in krill oil
(30:41):
to deliver fish oil into your brain properly if you're
an a and uh so, just to take a take
a rapid questions which vitamin do you do you think
we get the least of that we should blown us
up on vitamin D three. We are profoundly deficient in
this country in vitamin D three. Every one of my
autoimmune patients that I see, and I now my practice
(31:04):
is autommune disease walks in with a low vitamin D.
Vitamin D is critical for sealing the wall of your gut.
It's critical to turn on stem cells. There's a beautiful
paper that I cite that shows, if you believe in
the telomere theory of aging, those little caps on chromosomes,
that people who have the highest level of vitamin D
have the longest telomeres and people who have the lowest
(31:26):
levels of vitamin D have the shortest levels. And I
have yet to see vitamin D toxicity. The University of California,
San Diego says the average human being should take nine thousand,
six hundred international it's a vitamin D a day. Do
you take a multi vitamin every now and then? I really, um,
you know, I have several of my own products that
(31:49):
pretty much cover the bases. But yeah, multi vitamin is
not going to hurt you. But trace minerals are probably
far more important than just the multi vitamin. The other
thing that's important for most people who know is it
or more people will carry a mutation of the mt
h f R gene, better known as in my clinic
(32:10):
as the mother effr gene. What do you do with
that one? So you gotta take methyl B twelve, and
you gotta take methyl full eight, and you gotta put
the methyl B twelve under your tongue. It will not
work if you swallow it or chew it or suck
on it. You can get a shot, or you get
a shot, but why bother? You know you can get
(32:31):
a methyl B twelve from Costco and it's cheap. Are
you vegan? No? I'm not. Yeah, yeah, I'm what I
call a pescatarian. Uh not pesctarian, sorry, I vegge aquarian.
So my wife and I in general will eat vegan
during the week and then on the weekends we usually
(32:53):
have wild shellfish or wildfish. I have one more question
from it before you wrap up. You mentioned the microbiome
at the beginning of this, and I feel like your
book has a lot on the microbiome, and we do
all about the microbiome, so we just really briefly summed
up its people think they take a generic probiotic and
they fix their microbiome. Please give us, like the very
(33:16):
the headline of how we actually do fix it. So,
the vast majority of probiotics that we swallow never make
it into our gut number one, because the stomach acid
destroys them. Number Two, these probiotics are not normal flora
in our gut. They basically, if they make it in,
go on vacation in our guts for a couple of
weeks and then they leave. You know, they kind of
(33:37):
hang out at the beach down in Florida and then
they leave. What's fascinating is that we actually have a
little collection of important microbes at the bottom of what
are called crips in our micro villa, and they're protected
down there. And even if we wipe out our microbiome
with antibiotics, if you give these guys what they want
(33:57):
to eat, they will come out of hiding and repopulate.
So the key is not the probiotics. The key is prebiotics,
the things that these guys like to eat, and prebiotics
are things like inuline. I mean, it's probably the best prebiotic. Yeah,
tubers are great. You know, get yourself some yams tuber
(34:19):
that's a night shade, so a sweep potato or a
yam ruda, Bega's turnips, the things you know our grandparents
used to eat in large amounts. He came up. You know,
grab yourself some hicum U get yourself some guacamole. And
you know, spoiler alert, guacamole is not made with tomatoes.
And use the hicama to dip your guacamole. You know,
(34:40):
it's the perfect food for your gut bugs. I've been
hearing a lot about colostoms, maybe something that might help
people who are trying to either take probiotics or take
prebiox and help their intestinal regrowth. Thoughts on that. Yeah,
So colostrum is kind of the first um melk of
of any animal and including humans, and it's loaded with him,
(35:01):
you know, globulins and that. I don't have any professional
connection with these guys, but there's a there's a product
that you can find in your drug store called dia Rescue,
and I take it on all my international trips, particularly
if i'm doing it. I did a mission in Ethiopia
a couple of months ago, and it cures diarrhea, and
(35:23):
it's primarily clostrum with a couple of really cool at
An ingredients, and luckily I had some on the trip.
I didn't need it, but basically cured our group that
we're traveling with. The they're actually integration partners on the show,
which is why I knew about them. But I'm asking
that about them, but about the actual colostrum itself. Should
(35:44):
because I know that that more and more folks are
telling me that they might help our intestines address issues
with a microbio. You've got to seal the wall of
your gut, and you've really got to take control of
what I call the gang members and our guy. There's
there's two fighting, you know, opposing forces, and your gout.
(36:06):
There's good guys what I call gut buddies, and then
the gang members. And the gang members do not like us.
They throw rocks through our windows as opposed to all
of our gut buddies. We are actually a condominium for
our microbiome. N of us is not us. It's bugs
(36:27):
and worms and viruses, and we are their home. And
the principle of this book is if we eat to
take care of the ninety percenters, then they will take
care of their home. And the really cool thing is,
do you look at a hundred five year old people
who are thriving around the world and you look at
their microbiome number one, it's very diverse. There's lots of these,
(36:51):
but they have the microbiome of a thirty year old
healthy individual at the same microbiome, and they have the
same microbiome as my of my favorite animal, the naked
mole rat. And there's a lot about the naked mole rat.
And please have your listeners google naked naked mole rats
(37:12):
the uglies. What do you love so much about the
naked mole rat? So the naked mole rat rats live
about two years. The naked molerat has been clocked at
twenty or thirty years of age. There is no known
death of a naked mole rat. And what they do
is they have the same genes as all the other rats,
(37:33):
but they eat. They live in underground tunnels. They eat
tubers and fun guy and mushrooms. And the book is
all about how eating tubers and fun guys and mushroom
will make you a naked mole rat. And guess what,
all the other rats eat grains and they don't make
it very long. On that note, the longevity Paradox How
(37:56):
to Die Young at the right bold age by Gundry,
as you can either a little canaked mole rat hor
or hopefully you've been better and hopefully you will not
look like a negative noble rap another pipe tash spectacular contributions,
so they're sure, but Dr Gundrew, good to see you
get my friends, thank you for having me always. Good
to see you both
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