Dr. Steven Gundry Confronted On Lectins, Optimal Diet For Humans, Cholesterol & Exercise

God's country you have been a cardiothoracic surgeon okay you've done thousands of operations yet you have spent the last decade or two trying to promote healthy diets and Healthy Lifestyles now right at the top I'm very interested as things stand today in 2023 do you believe that there is an Optimum diet for humans to follow and if so what would that diet be yeah I think I just put my next book to bed actually this week I turned in the manuscript and I've I've been I've been teaching peop people how to eat for for 25 years now and with each I guess passing year and with better and better testing uh I think that there are um certain things that people need to eat and certain things that people probably ought to avoid but there's provisos and I spent a lot of time looking at super old people in my practice I've been blessed to learn from a lot of them and I have spent actually a lot of research years looking at super old people around the world and trying to figure out what makes them tick and so for instance my my big Blockbuster book was the plant Paradox which came out about six years ago and since that time um I've learned a whole lot more than I knew back then so I every time I learned something new I'm one of those idiots who say Hey you know I probably wasn't right about this and I've changed my mind and and here's why I've changed my mind and so if people will allow me uh I'll change my mind about things now I appreciate that and I definitely want to talk about some of the things that you have changed your mind on or certainly evolved your view on in terms of general principles though for people to follow because here's the reality that I see and I'm sure you're aware of as well is that people are very confused these days about nutrition and I've often thought that actually one of the problems is these days that we have nutrition experts because what it used to be is that we would learn how to eat from our culture from our parents from our grandparents we didn't need nutrition experts to teach us what we should be consuming but somewhere along the line with modern living with us moving with the way we're now living with the way jobs change with the way pollution has changed the way farming has changed we've got to a situation where many of us feel sick a lot of the time and we're looking for helpful information to get us feeling better now the problem is is that people hear different nutrition experts who they respect say some quite different things and I I really want this conversation to be practical and helpful for people you have got a huge amount of experience you've written many different books so I guess what I'm trying to get let's see what the start is are there some core principles that you think we can all agree on and are worth people trying to implement into their lives yeah I'll uh I'll give you a famous saying from uh what we in the United States feel is the Godfather of fitness and his name was Jack LaLanne and um Jack LaLanne died in his in his late 90s actually died in ammonia he wouldn't take antibiotics but that's an aside and I knew Jack LaLanne in his later years and Jacqueline used to have an expression that if it tastes good spit it out now a lot of my advisors say would you stop saying that because you're you're scaring people that you want them to eat bark and twigs and bitter tasting stuff and nobody will do that and I said well no that's actually not what Jack meant uh and what he meant and I think he was absolutely right is that we actually should be eating for the 100 trillion the living beings in our gut and in our mouth um the microbiome instead of eating for this two by three inch piece of muscle in our mouth called the tongue and if we if we eat for them and give them what they need were their home and they in turn will take care of us and this is this is you know Hippocrates 2500 years ago said all disease begins in the gut and I spent the last 25 years trying to figure out how he knew that because he was right and another way of explaining that is death begins in the gut and my research lots of other people's research who have led me to conclude that that's exactly right um if we eat not for ourselves but for what our microbiome needs the rest is a piece of cake they'll they'll take care of everything else it's really interesting in your latest book not the one you just turned in but your your latest book unlocking the keto codes a lot of the principles you outline in that book really are about supporting our gut microbiome aren't they and I found the concepts in that but really really interesting you know tying this into the theme of what you are changing your mind on what you are evolving your view on it's really interesting in that book how you spoke about certain things you got wrong with the ketogenic diets so I want to if we could go into that what did you previously think and then when you did the research what did you evolve your thinking to be well so I've I've had a ketogenic version of my diet really in all my books and one of the things that surprises people when they look at quote my ketogenic diet is there's a lot of um bitter greens there's actually a lot of carbohydrates in it and there's a lot of polyphenol containing foods and I didn't really have a whole lot of of fat in the diet now I had specific fats in the diet that we can get into and a lot of those specific fats in the diet were looking at uh the blue zones and what the blue zones ate and what made them blue zones and I I see people six days a week in my office you know when I do blood work on my patients every three months and the reason I started doing that is well I take certain foods away from people or give them certain foods or I'd ask them to get a supplement at a health food store or they'd take it away and we could see patterns and these patterns were actually pretty obvious so in answer to your question I would have a number of people do a traditional high fat low carbohydrate ketogenic diet and when they were doing that yes they would lose weight and a lot of them felt a whole lot better but when I actually looked at their blood work inflammatory markers simple ones like hscrp or fibrinogen or myeloperoxidase and more complex ones like tumor necrosis Factor Alpha and il-16 and il-6 these people who were losing weight on this high fat diet actually had inflammatory markers that looked quite impressive and yes a lot of them they're LDL the so-called bad cholesterol would go up and I quite frankly could care less about LDL and get into that if you want but uh they would oxidize their LDL it would become rancid or Rusty and I I come from the school that cholesterol isn't bad for you unless it's oxidized so so we'd see all these parameters that they'd be losing weight and they'd actually be feeling pretty good but we'd see all these inflammatory markers climb and so when I asked them to stop doing that and they'd see it you know on the reports they go well then those inflammatory markers subsided and so those are the historic sort of things that informed me that perhaps the traditional ketogenic diet is not a great idea yeah let's just um pause here for a second because I think there's a lot of terms now that are used in nutrition like the ketogenic diet and I think we could take 10 people doing a ketogenic diet and they may well be eating in very different ways and I really feel when it comes to nutrition we've we've got to be careful how we talk about these things right so something I started saying on this podcast quite a lot is that nutrition these days tends to be quite a divisive topic and I always I mean that's the understatement of the year but I always say in the intros to my podcast that look guys when you're listening to nutrition information what information you need is going to depend on your current state of health your goals and your previous relationship with food for example if you are overweight and you have type 2 diabetes the nutrition advice you need maybe a little bit different from someone let's say who is underweight and who has been struggling with that say anything disorder right so I'm always quite conscious of that now when I put out information to say look who is this for so if we go back to a ketogenic diet for it for for instance as you just mentioned it's pretty well established I think that if you are overweight if you have type 2 diabetes that for some people a form of low carbohydrates or ketogenic diets can be useful to help someone lose weight and stabilize their blood sugar right so that's the context and you're saying that the way some people do that is ending up causing other problems so in the short term they feel good and some of them maybe not all of them but some of them and I've heard you say this previously have got increased markers of inflammation increased oxidized cholesterol and increased blood vessel stiffness I've heard you talk about these things really really interesting so by seeing that what conclusions did you draw what changes would you then ask those patients to make and did you see those markers start to change yeah so and again I think this gets back to Jacqueline and Hippocrates and I don't put them as equals but anyhow um what happens at least in in this group of people is um the gut microbiome has evolved with us over over millions of years and the gut microbiome for lack of a better word uh enjoys um starches polysaccharides that normally if we were eating a whole food diet a lot of the undigestable starches and that we can't digest would would get to our colon where the vast majority of our microbiome sets and they love to ferment these undigestable sugars and in that fermentation process if we're lucky and we have the right diversity of microbiome then they make uh some phenomenal compounds which are classified as short chain fatty acids the most important of which is butyrate and butyrate uh is probably the most signaling molecule most important signaling molecule that we have available to us to do to make our brain work to make our mitochondria work to make us lose weight you name it make us feel better you name it butyrate is the key when we do a very low carbohydrate diet or even a FODMAP diet where we remove all these fermentable sugars from our diet um we stop the process of making the short chain fatty acids and those short chain fatty acids are you know they educate our immune system they keep the wall of our gut intact uh they keep everything running and that's what and they they make our blood vessels flexible you know these are all generally classified as post-biotics and so we'd see this on our patients and then when we we gave them back not only fermentable fibers but also what I think is amazing to me and I write about in in the unlocking the keto code is you can't just give people fermentable fibers uh beautiful work out of Stanford by the Sonnenberg husband and wife team has shown that you can take two groups of human beings give one group a lot of fiber and the other group same amount of fiber but give them fermented foods in in this case it was mostly yogurts but uh ferment vinegars or fermented foods the kimchi is fermented food and look at what happens to their microbiome diversity and also their inflammatory markers and what I think was shocking about this study it was that the people who got all the fiber didn't change their gut microbiome diversity that didn't get more diverse and their inflammatory markers didn't improve but the addition of fermented foods to that fiber improve the microbiome diversity and made the inflammation go away and you go what how's that happen well the long and short of it is all of us all of our various cultures wherever we originated in the world all had a process of fermentation of various substances that we eat and I mean it's phenomenal when we look back at what cultures do that cultures from recorded time uh detoxified plants with fermentation preserved foods with fermentation and I think this this paper out of Stanford maybe starts to unlock okay what what is it that all these cultures knew that you know save their lives improve their lives and that's kind of what I'm interested in yeah it's really interesting and goes back to what I was saying right at the start of this conversation that we used to learn what to eat from our family from our culture and certainly not for everyone but for a lot of us that was all we needed to do when it came to nutrition certainly and it may be a different era maybe before this modern hyper-industrialized uh World in which we live so I guess it's going back as to what can we learn what have we forgotten what do we need to relearn what you said about fermented foods is really really interesting because so far Dr gundry what we've spoken about what you've spoken about is that we need to eat in ways that improves our gut's health now I mentioned also that nutritionists have become very controversial but most people I think would agree these days that eating to improve our gut health is a good thing Professor Tim Spencer in London would agree with that the sonnenbergs in America as you just mentioned they would agree with that okay so I don't think so far that's that controversial what you just said that it isn't necessarily the fiber but more the fermented foods that we should be focusing on now that's very interesting because there's a bit of nuance there so when you say fermented foods what specific types of foods are you talking about I think you mentioned yogurt and kimchi are there any others that we can think about bringing into our own diets well I think one of the most interesting things um and I've I've talked about this in past folks including the current one is um is vinegars and vinegars um it turns out uh that we do have hopefully uh what are called butyrate producing bacteria and they're certain bacteria that can take these uh starches and make this short chain fatty acid butyrate out of them but what's fascinating particularly in researching my new book is we certain bacteria need the products of another bacteria to do their job and in fact it's it's so intertwined that there may be basically an assembly line of bacteria and the the poop of one bacteria is the food that a second bacteria needs to eat to produce a poop that the third bacteria needs to eat and so on Down the Line until we get to the bacteria that can make butyrate out of all these other things almost like a car assembly line if the first guy falls down on its job the guy ready to make butyrate doesn't have the things to work with what's fascinating is and I think this goes back to what the the sonnenbergs found is a great number of butyrate producing bacteria actually have to have another short chain fatty acid acetate acetic acid vinegar to actually make butyric and unless they have acetic acid they can't manufacture butyrate no matter how much fiber you give them to work with and I think that to me is really again interesting why why is it that the cultures fermented things I'll give you another wonderful example that I think is a fascinating paper it was published in February of this year and it came out of the um out of the Netherlands and you're probably aware of it where and it got a big splash that you take a take a bunch of people with stable angina now stable angina is stable and people have blockages in their coronary arteries and it's enough that if you're exercising fairly vigorously you get chest pain or chest heaviness angina and if you stop the chest heaviness goes away and you go about your business until you go too fast and the engineer comes back and it's actually a stable disease that's what it means it's stable it really doesn't change so what they wanted to do is they wanted to compare Dairy usage and these people with stable angina and see if Dairy impacted their stable angina did it become unstable did they develop a heart attack and they had a beautiful little graph and the paper said Gee the more butter people eat the more their stable angina becomes unstable the higher the risk of a heart attack and everybody nods their head and said yeah okay butter saturated fat Butter's bad for him okay get it then the more Dairy that people consumed um same sort of thing not as dramatic as butter but more Dairy more chance of the the stable engine I'm becoming unstable interesting that that's what got the news dairy's bad for you now down in the bottom of the paper there was a kind of a side that said you know the funny thing is the more cheese people ate the less unstable engineer they got in other words their angina actually got better and it was statistically significant and there's a beautiful graph that anyone can pull up on the paper and you can just see it the more cheesy the better your engineer gets and you go what the heck you know butter is really bad for you dairy's right behind it but cheese well it turns out the cheese is a fermented food true cheese not our processed cheese and there are tons of important compounds in cheese uh that actually explains a lot of longevity in people who eat a lot of interesting cheeses that I allude to in unlocking the ketoko so there's another interesting example that goes against conventional wisdom and yet it's I mean it's rather blatant when you look at really the studies of the impact of fermented milk products on health yeah and it's not necessarily the milk product but it's actually the fermentation process and the products of fermentation that are actually what makes things happen yeah absolutely fascinating and I and I guess it really speaks to this idea that we have to be a bit more specific when we're talking about foods like Dairy is a big umbrella term what does it mean cow sheep goats are we talking about fermented unfermented and all of these things potentially in a certain individual will give us a different response and so we have to be aware of that I did find that section in unlocking the keto code on Dairy really really interesting I want to get to that because I think I think it's super fascinating when you pass that out but let's just go back to this traditional ketogenic diet as you call it and I as I say that I'm aware that many people practice a ketogenic diet in a variety of different ways right so what we're saying is some people who choose to go down that path maybe they've read it in a book they've seen it on a podcast their Doctor is recommending them to do it they are changing their diet and they're experiencing weight loss more energy and they're feeling really good now I think that's step one step two and I kind of feel that this is where we should all be going with our diets a little bit is we need to experiment what works for us use Frameworks from experts but then figure out what works for us now the problem with that is potentially is if like those individuals those three patients you mentioned if they are feeling great on this ketogenic diet that maybe has got a lot of fat in maybe a lot of saturated fats who knows what else you're saying that some of those patients have got markism increased inflammation reduced blood vessel flexibility and oxidized cholesterol right so my first question with relation to that is if someone's going to experiment with their own diet based on what they've heard so far or your previous sports or other people's books what are those key blood markers do you think they should be checking whether it's three months or six months or yearly whatever it might be to sort of give them the confidence that yeah I'm on the right line said this diet not only do I feel good but my blood tests my labs are also good have you got some key markers that you go to that give you a a pretty high degree of confidence actually yes this is working for this individual yeah I think and they're becoming I won't say mainstream yet um because I I have third year Family Practice resonance rotate through my clinic and for a month and these people who are about to go into practice and um so if I if there was one blood test to tell people um how they're doing predict their future it would be a fasting insulin level and fascinatingly none of the third year Family Medicine residents have ever heard of measuring a fasting insulin level and this is you know a good medical school in the United States they know about hemoglobin A1c which basically looks at the last two months of how you're handling sugars and proteins but we see a number of people with a quote normal hemoglobin A1c who have very high insulin levels that are driving their hemoglobin A1c into a normal range but they are tremendously metabolically inflexible um and it's they don't see it it's kind of like the original Jaws movie you could be swimming happily on the top of the water and there's a great white about to engulf you and you would be oblivious to the fact that that great white was just underneath you so the fasting insulin level is is very useful and even on a ketogenic diet it's very useful and what kind of level would you want to see on that ideally personally I'd like at least on the American scale six and under uh most people will say nine and under is fine the closer you get to one the better um my wife runs less than one you know I hate her uh I can I can run it two or three um anyhow but uh but that so that's kind of the goal but the vast majority of people with when pre-diabetes just just yesterday I saw a woman who has been told she's a pre-diabetic and she's quite happy with that because she's not a diabetic um and yet uh she has very high fasting insulin levels she has measurable insulin resistance and uh when I told her well calling you a pre-diabetic is like telling you you're a little bit pregnant and that got her attention because there's no such thing as being a little bit pregnant and so she had she'd been gone going on for years with her well-meaning Physicians saying you know you're pre-diabetic she ran high triglycerides she eats a very high high starch diet which is was part of her culture she's um uh Middle Eastern and that was their culture and so in that context she didn't really worry about okay my triglycerides are high I'm a pre-diabetic that's kind of me but then when we go in she has lots of inflammation in fact she came to me because for the past two years she said chronic muscle inks and people have chalked it up to statin drugs and they've removed them and her chronic muscle aches really didn't get any better and I won't go into her any further but just on on your subject so a fasting insulin level is I think incredibly important yeah that's really interesting if I could just again on this just pause for a second because going back to this traditional ketogenic diet so for people who are not aware typically people will drastically cut down on carbohydrates if not completely eliminate them which stops raising blood sugar which stops uh spiking insulin you know this is a very simplistic take on this just to I know a lot of people will be familiar with this but for those who aren't I just want to make sure that they're up to speed and can follow the conversation those people who were doing those ketogenic diets and feeling great I'm guessing had good fasting insolence or perhaps they didn't because a lot of people who are doing that yes they had markers of inflammation they had other markers which he didn't like but on that one mark of fasting incident I'm guessing that that was okay for them right yes indeed so fast engine is a helpful Market but it's not sufficient in and off itself because those cases you're talking about which in some ways prompted you to write unlocking the keto codes those guys had a normal fasting insulin or an optimal one yet they had some other problematic markers so beyond fasting insulin what are some of those other markers that you think are really important for people to look at so let me give you an example of a paper that actually just came out yesterday uh it took 18 individuals uh who uh were going to practice a traditional high fat low carbohydrate ketogenic diet and the purpose of the paper was to look at lipids and they wrote that their Baseline LDL was about 127 don't quote me but about 127 little high for most people I could care less but a little high for most people these 18 individuals when they went on the ketogenic diet most of them which actually surprised me uh more than doubled their LDL some people went to ldls of I kid you not at least in this paper five and six hundred wow and these Physicians who were following them they did the ketogenic diet for a year and some of these people the researchers convinced them if they were going to continue on this because it was a Year's study please start taking a Statin drug because we're scared to death um interestingly enough during this study period nobody had a cardiovascular event then when they stopped the study their LD Hills came back down and the purpose of the study was wow you know be careful a ketogenic diet is really raising your risk factors for heart disease now the problem with that study and that gets to part two is they did not look at either inflammatory markers but more specifically they did not look for either oxidized LDL they did not look for a better test which is called Ox phospholipid apple b Ox plf will B which even takes into account another particle called LP little Aang oxidation they didn't look at any of that nor did they look at markers of stickiness of blood vessels like lppoa2 or the plaque test they didn't do any of that and so all they were looking at was an LDL going on and they'd even look at Applebee going up but the point was and I see this in my practice all the time I have people who run ldls of 400. and yet they don't have oxidized LDL they don't have Ox plfob they have absolutely no stickiness of their blood vessels and when under duress we do a CT coronary angiogram on them they have absolutely no plaque in their blood vessels no now is that everybody no but the idea of just studying LDL from a ketogenic diet and saying oh my gosh the LDL went through the roof doesn't tell me anything quite frankly yeah there's a couple of things there very interesting thank you for sharing that I've not seen that and it came out yesterday so I will after this conversation I'll go and try and dig it out but the first thing you mentioned that one of the conclusions you mentioned that the researchers made was that the ketogenic diet is increasing your risk of a cardiovascular events or words to that effect now again to be more subtle and nuanced we can't let's say that there was an increased risk we can't say it was a ketogenic diet we can simply say it the way that they were doing their ketogenic diets again I'm I'm really Keen that this conversation is helpful for people and I know there are multiple ways of doing a ketogenic diet information is not enough to make change in your life you have to take action so to help you take action after watching this video I've created a free nutrition guide for you this contains the five most important practices I've seen in over two decades of seeing patients they work for you no matter what your dietary preference there's a step-by-step action plan to help you implement those changes in your life if you want to receive that free guide right now just click on the link in the description box below which I think that Nuance is not often brought in so that's the first thing the second thing I guess is this thing about LDL then you know we're going into some very controversial territory right because there is a school of thought now which is saying that LDL should be as low as possible for as long as possible right so this is a cumulative risk that builds it throughout your life so whatever the level is you want it lower and actually I spoke to Peter attia recently on my podcast and I actually said to Peter I said look some people who follow Whole Food based low carbohydrate diets and are feeling better often sometimes that LDL level will go up and there is a school of thought within that community that will say if your inflammation is down if your triglycerides are down which of course it generally will be on a low carbohydrate diets if all these other markers are down is that LDL a concern right and Peter's view was very much well why why why choose sure have inflammation down have a low fast insulin but also bring your LDL down as low as you can that was very much his View you are a very well respected cardiothoracic surgeon you have done heart operations you have seen blood vessels right you've seen diseased blood vessels how would you pass that out what would your perspective be on that in relation to LDL you've said several times in this conversation LDL you're not that bothered about that but oxidized LDL you are first of all maybe explain the difference between those two things and then how you would ask someone to proceed if their LDL is starting to go up yeah um I have a great real respect with people for Peter I've spoken with him on actually Mutual patient management um he is old school trained particularly from the east coast in the United States I'm West Coast trained in lipids and quite frankly the west coast and the East Coast United States do not see eye to eye and agree on lipid management but let me put on my uh cardiothoracic surgeon hat Michael DeBakey um Don mccooly's mentor one of the fathers of heart surgery always used to say back in the 50s that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease cholesterol is merely an innocent bystander that gets trapped up in inflammation and that occurs on blood vessels and is basically a spackling compound that patches cracks and potholes and the more cracks and potholes that occur the more cholesterol will catch it and that can lead to a bigger patch I use the example in the book Let's suppose I am an alien who has been sent down to orbit Earth and to report back to high command things I observe on Earth and one of the things that I could report back is that I'm pretty sure ambulances cause car accidents because every time I see a car accident there's an ambulance and you know Association does not mean causation but that would be a potentially valid observation and I think DeBakey was trying to say that is that yes we do see cholesterol in plaques but the cholesterol did not cause the plaque the cholesterol was there patching inflammation now that gets back to where I think Peter and I probably disagree uh for years the cholesterol hypothesis was propagated because statin drugs clearly lowered LDL cholesterol and it appeared that the lower rldl went the less plaque and probably the last cardiovascular events we saw and so we made the association and that it was the lowering of LDL that was actually what was causing the process well then fast forward for a few years and we now know that statin drugs work by blocking toll-like receptors on blood vessels and toe-like receptors and I write about in my books I call them tlrs tiny little rabies are what sends out the signal in terms of inflammatory cytokines to call the immune system into action and so what was actually happening I think with statin drugs is that you were suppressing the inflammatory signal you were in you were suppressing inflammation and the more you gave of this the more you would suppress inflammation but the more you gave of it the lower your LDL would go down and so yeah again Association is not causation and so if there is no inflammation on a blood vessel then there's absolutely no reason for that ambulance so cholesterol to show up yeah and so so that's number one um I've gotten more and more and more interested in the processes that guard our blood vessels just like we have a mucous layer that lines are gut which is incredibly important in lots of ways and we can go into that if you want we have a similar mucous layer that lines our blood vessels called the the glycocalyx you also have that a similar mucous layer that forms our blood-brain bearing we also have a similar mucous like layer that supports our joint services and it turns out these mucous layers are fascinatingly made out of certain sugar molecules glycans and I think that heart disease brain disease joint disease all comes from a breakdown or attack on these various sugar layers on the west coast um Berkeley uh the University of California Berkeley years ago developed a system of looking at the various sizes of LDL particles and there's basically seven of them big ones and little ones and it became fairly obvious that the little ones uh were the troublemakers and the big ones actually didn't seem to be of any trouble at all I used to tell my patients that the big ones were beach balls that bounced along and the little ones were leg lead Sinker weights if you went fishing you put on your line and as long as we were making big ones we were fine and as long as we weren't making too many of the little ones we were fine and that was kind of the West Coast theory of heart disease um recently because of these advents of measuring oxidized LDL or I think oxidized phospholipid ample B we can further differentiate those individuals who have sticky cholesterol for lack of a better word and those people who have Teflon lined cholesterol balls and to me that's you know opened up I guess my eyes as to okay who do I really need to be worried about yeah no don't get me wrong I use statin drugs if if I break and I use the example if I break my leg skiing I'm going to wear a cast and I'm going to wear the cast till my bone heals and then I'm going to take the cast off I view statin drugs as okay I have an inflammatory event that has you know started this I've just put a stent in somebody or in the past just in a bypass I want to block as much inflammation as I can until I can correct the factors that started that inflammation in the first place so I'll use a Statin drug but it's not like I'm going once I correct the problem to me there's no good reason to continue a Statin River yeah I really appreciate you going through that Dr gundry as I said before you know improving our guts health is something that there's General consensus on I would say by most people these days but what we do about Rising LDL levels in the face of improving Health from every other metric or many other metrics does seem to be one of these quite Hot Topics at the moment very very controversial I appreciate you putting forward your perspective on that I think certainly as a MD who's practicing the UK for all of his career I think one of the problems is that we just don't have access to a lot of these tests right in the National Health Service even still to this day in 2023 you can't get a high sensitivity CRP you can just get a normal CRP right for lipids you are just getting total cholesterol LDL HDL triglycerides yes so without the nuanced testing that you are doing with your patients and also Peter is doing in his Clinic with his patients where you're getting these sensitive markers I think it's quite hard for clinicians to feel confident in the face of what they've been taught and me personally in my mid-40s once scare I pay privately for these Advanced cardiac tests because I want to know what's going on you know yes I have an NHS doctor but I also no well it's not on offer I want to check my LP little a I want to check my APO B I want to check my other peroxidase I want to see all of these things to make a balanced view on myself and of course I hope that that's more mainstream and more widespread in the near future so I think this is one area which we'll have to park and say a little bit controversial but I I really also appreciate your very clear perspective on that and I also would say that of course any intervention has pros and and has potential downsides so yes while statins may be indicated for some people in certain situations you know a fair degree of people struggle to tolerate them they have cognitive dysfunction afterwards they we know that they can negatively affect our mitochondria and I want to get to mitochondria shortly because you've written a lot about that in multiple books of yours so I think everything needs to be weighed up and I think this General point that we're we're sort of highlighting throughout our conversation is we can't really just take one thing in isolation we have to look at the whole picture of the patient what else is going on what are the other markers telling us so yeah let's just park that for the moment unless you have anything to come back on from what I've just said yeah actually I do um long before we had these tests uh one of the things I would really follow is the triglyceride to HDL ratio not HDL to LDL not triglyceride stage deal triglycerides as a general rule are the first form of fat that we manufacture from sugars and starches and triglycerides when I'm managing things what I want in in an ideal world is HDL the so-called good cholesterol to be higher than triglycerides um women are pretty easy good about doing this men struggle more but triglycerides at the very least the closer I can get triglycerides to HDL the better I'll give you a personal example when I started on myself 27 years ago um I I had an LDL of about 166. I had an HDL of 32 horrible and I had a triglycerides of about 160 in the United States 150 is considered the upper limit of normal and I was told by my colleagues that wow you're screwed um you inherited this from your father and there's not much you can do about it and you know go go take a Statin well when I met Big Ed the guy who changed my life um I altered my diet and within three months of altering my diet my triglycerides went from 160 to 40. wow and my HDL of 32 went to 80. and my LDL went to about I don't know 80 is that recall so I had the same genes I had when my cholesterol profile was wildly out of whack but I just told my genome that basically it was the middle of winter by the way I was eating and to shift these things around uh we have some fun games that we play if uh I'm the lowest I've ever gotten my triglycerides was 30. and my wife's done a 22 just to piss me off and we have little games that if anybody can get below 40 in my clinic they get a little gold star and literally a gold star and they put it on their forehead and walk out um and as triglycerides go down HDL goes up and as triglycerides go up HDL goes down and it's I mean it's you can watch it every time I actually have never seen it not happen now the one exception when we have people on a profound weight loss ketogenic diet um for the treatment of cancer some of these people will have very high triglycerides fasting triglycerides and I thought they were cheating until I realized that what these people were doing is they were extracting so many free fatty acids out of their fat cells and using free fatty acids and ketones as their only available fuel that the triglycerides I was measuring were these transport molecules carrying all these free fatty acids around so but that's the exception to the rule in general and and Tim Spector has talked about this personally now he uh manufactures a lot of triglycerides when he starches and his wife can eat the same amount of starches have three croissants for breakfast and she doesn't make those triglycerides so you're right there there is individuality in all of that yeah and I think that's where we're moving to a nutrition isn't it general principles but then we have to personalize we have to test probably to check is this working for me you know a do I feel better have I got more energy have I got more Vitality but also are my blood markers going in the right direction as well I definitely want to at some point in this conversation talk about lectins I want to talk about mitochondria but I think there's a wider questionnaire which is what on Earth is a cardiothoracic surgeon doing talking in depth about nutrition you mentioned Big Ed of course this patient who I think in many ways changed the trajectory of your career so what if you could outline those but also outline what dietary changes did you make Dr gundry to have such a profound change in your lipid profile well um and I won't as an undergraduate at Yale back in the Dark Ages um we were allowed to design our own major pay course of study for four years where if we were lucky we just worked with a full with a bunch of full professors and I was chosen to do this it was basically like doing a master's in college and we had you had to have a thesis and your four years of study was to defend your thesis write your thesis and my thesis was that you could take grade ape manipulate its food supply and manipulate its environment and prove that you were would arrive at a human being that was my thesis and I defended my thesis and actually got an honors and gave it to my parents and went away and became a very famous heart surgeon and never kind of thought about it again so when when I met this gentleman who I call Big Ed who dramatically reversed inoperable coronary artery disease inoperable blockages in his coronary arteries in six months time by changing his diet and going to a health food store and taking a bunch of supplements when I asked him to describe the diet that he had adapted hi stopped him a few cents in and said wait a minute that's my thesis and in college and uh you know wow and when I asked to see all the supplements he was taking all right was yeah am very famous for protecting Hearts from dying during heart transplant enduring heart surgery and I had a concoction that I would put down the veins and arteries of Hearts to protect these Hearts the cells and a lot of the stuff that I was putting in my cocktail to protect the heart from dying he was swallowing and you know never occurred to me to swallow them so long story short my parents sent me my thesis and I was a big fat guy um I weighed 228 pounds even though I was running 30 miles a week going to the gym one hour every day I was uh a very large version of Peter attia I was a Clydesdale Runner and I was eating a very healthy low-fat diet because I was professor at Loma Linda University a Blue Zone and that of course is healthy for you so I basically got rid of my low-fat healthy carbohydrate High carbohydrate diet and began to eat as as if long story short it was Winter and I began to eat a large amount of leaves and I stopped eating fruit and I started taking a bunch of supplements that I got from Costco over you know Trader Joe's or health food stores and I lost 50 pounds my first year my lipids flipped in three months and I want you know I lost subsequently another 20 pounds and I've kept it off now for 25 years uh when I started doing this with my patients who I operated on we started to see the same things people's diabetes would reverse people's arthritis would reverse people's blood pressure you know would plummet they call and say hey what kind of supplement are you giving me that my blood pressure's going down and I'm going you know there's no supplement that does this is that you know and you know come on in here let's check and sure enough the blood pressure was a lot lower and we go well let's back off on you know this this drug this went on for about a year at Loma Linda and I had a really an epiphany one morning that I was going into work and I said you know I got this all wrong instead of operating on people and then teaching them how to eat so they'll avoid me in the future because quite honestly it's very famous for re-operations every five seven years you'd redo what you did and that I thought there must be a better way so I resigned my position wow and said I need to teach people how to eat and then I'll never have to operate on them again and that's really stupid for a heart surgeon as my wife reminded me year after year um you can't make much money teaching people how to eat but because I am and was a researcher when I set up my clinic but I just said hey I want to ask you to take away certain foods I want you to add certain foods I want you to go to a health food store buy some supplements I want to measure blood work on you every three months and if you want to play you know you're you're my research project and you'll learn something I'll learn something and that's how it all started well thank you for sharing that it is a really um it's really invigorating to hear that that you were very successful you were in the prime of your career you were doing certain things and then a patient an empowered patient and and I've heard you tell that story before and I believe that actually you didn't advise him to make these changes he made these changes off his own accord and persuaded you to rescan him and redo tests where you saw the Reversed coronary artery disease which is really quite profound because it's still not conventional wisdom that we can reverse established atherosclerotic cardiac disease you know whereas you and the other dots as well are talking about this through changes in our lifestyle you mentioned yourself you ate as if it was Winter you cut out all fruit you put more greens into your diet but but what else did you do I mean what about meat fish protein these sort of things because people will want to know okay okay that's gonna do that sounds incredible what did you do back then or I guess the more pertinent question is Dr gundry how long ago was that and although it was successful what you did if you were doing it now would you make any modifications to the diet that you chose back then yes um and that's again maybe when we started our conversation every thankfully because of my patients um I'm I'm able to see okay this this tweak works this tweet doesn't work or it doesn't have much of an effect and the one one of the chapters in the new book is called the plant Paradox 2.0 so it's kind of all right what have I learned from you know the Bible since I since it came out and so one of the things maybe we'll dive into that part um the Loma Linda is a Seventh-Day Adventist institution and Seventh-Day Adventists as a general rule are vegetarians and a lot of them are vegans those who do eat animals um certainly use dairy products and eggs a lot of them eat fish and chicken if they're going to uh so I I grew up in in Omaha Nebraska and Nebraska is called the beef estate for a reason um because of it's a very heavily beat beef eating beef producing area of the United States um so I I have no no dog in the fight of his animal protein good or bad for you uh but one of the things that I've I guess learned and so I made my changes when I was um 45 years old I'm now I'll turn 73 in a month and you know so far so good um and it's one of the things that I've seen from my patients that I've seen certainly for myself is there's a fascinating um problem two problems number one whole grain goodness as we call it in the United States the end the re-introduction of whole grains into our diet is really only come in the last um 60 50 years before a great number of cultures have labored to take the outside part of grains away believe it or not why do the French not eat whole grain croissants why I knew the Italians not eat whole grain pasta why do four billion people in the world who eat rice eat white rice and throw the brown away uh people have and it's a lot of work to take the hall off even interesting corn traditionally corn was soaked in lye or lime to remove the hall and it became Harmony and then that flower was ground up to make Masa flour and it's fascinating that there are really nasty plant defense proteins in the Hall of virtually all grains except sorghum and Millet which doesn't have a hull and that's been a lot of what's made me inFAMOUS or famous and but cultures have always tried to get this Hall off even cultures that don't take the hall off the Incas did not de-haul quinoa but the ink is fermented their quinoa and their quinoa fermentation interestingly enough breaks down lectins Bean soaking all cultures that use beans soak their beans and it turns out that beans have bacteria on the surface of the bean that during soaking ferments the lectins on the surface of the bean and that's all that foam that you see coming out in a pot of beans when you're soaking them now that is the fermentation of those beans and unfortunately the the champions of beans and Grains don't bother to tell anybody that cultures have always figured out a way no detoxifying these plant compounds before they eat them and it's to our detriment that we don't you know those cultural Traditions alive getting back to what you and I have just started about yeah it's it's really interesting and for me as I hear that I think about the importance of taking this wider more nuanced perspective on health so for example if you look at something just through the lens of blood sugar right how much is this food going to elevate my blood sugar you may well go well actually instead of white rice I'm going to have brown rice right even though it doesn't always transpire that way some Studies have shown but you may go down that route but a lot of people struggle with digestion with brown rice they don't feel good afterwards they don't like the taste often of it and certainly for me you know my parents are Indian you know I'm in an Indian family I'm Indian by Heritage and backgrounds why rice is a big part of the diet I grew up eating and what wearing a CGM a continuous glucose monitor has taught me one of the things that's taught me is that I can still eat white rice but I don't need to have a big bowl Affair a big place of it just a little bit and I can enjoy it it can um it can be a nice accompaniment with something else I'm eating and my blood sugar is relatively stable so I've learned about quantity being quite important but if you just look at it through the lens of blood sugar you may say no you can't have these things so I I think that's really interesting so getting back to that original points even if you if you if you don't mind expanding so 28 years ago when you made those changes were you bringing in whole grains then as well uh what were you doing and then how would that change now based upon the new things that you've learned so um no I actually took whole grains out of my diet um and it's funny my my first book was called Dr gundry's diet Evolution and came out in 2006 and my my editor at the time um I had totally gotten rid of whole grains it was it was kind of an Atkins with a lot of leaves diet I guess you could say and um so meats and fish in it as well at the time yes yeah correct and uh so that was kind of phase one of those when you're writing diet books editors love phases um it's just something they do and so phase two once you got things under control uh we introduced healthy whole grains and soy and you know I argued with her I said no you know this has no place in it she said you don't understand nutrition books the party line is you know you have to reintroduce you know whole grains because everybody knows that whole grains are you know really important I said yeah but you're missing the point um no these are bad for you and she said you don't understand you signed the contract we own your book um and we if you don't want to go with this then you know have a nice day and goodbye and you don't get to publish the book no really and they said yeah really so that's in that book and so the second time around now when the plant Paradox came out Harper Collins bought the book and I said look there's going to be things in here that you guys are not going to like that goes against conventional wisdom and and I'm sorry but it's non-negotiable they say oh no we love this stuff this is you know this is crazy and it's controversial and it was and is but so yeah we got rid of all these things initially yeah really interesting so I want to get to the controversy about that book because I think it's it's really interesting to sort of unpick what was controversial and actually what your view is on that today before we do that though just to finish off whole grains you mentioned that you've been studying the blue zones a lot there is a view that actually in some of these more traditional cultures let's say the blue zones that they will eat whole grains or they'll have breads with their meals and they'll have you know traditionally made breads that maybe are fermenting 12 16 hours quite low gluten containing by the time that we eat them as opposed to a lot of the Breads in the UK and certainly In America which are very very quick turnover is it true do these guys have whole grains in their diets and how does that then fit with what you just said about whole grains yeah and I I I've alluded to this in other books but I go deep into it in in the next book what's fascinating about the blue zones and you know I I've spoken with Dan Butner and he's a nice guy and uh Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had a verse a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest and um when you look Through The Eyes of someone who is primarily a vegetarian um and you are looking for places to back up your view then you don't see the other parts so for now I say this because I'm sorry the only nutritionist who spent most of his life a career in one of the blue zones Loma Linda California the only Blue Zone in the United States and just so we're clear blue zones have nothing to do with uh Ocean or anything like that a blue zones actually refer to the fact that there was a meeting in Montpelier France where uh and I won't mention the doctor's name who was actually had no interest in nutrition and Longevity back he got out a map and he took a blue felt tip marker and he circled places that he thought had exceptional longevity and it was the blue felt tip marker that was actually where the word blue zones came from so since that time let's let's take a couple of examples that I use in the book um Sardinia so sorry Danny is quote a Blue Zone and not so fast there are two major areas in Sardinia now people who live down by the water the coast and people who live in the mountainous region uh there's very good papers that I allude to a site that only the people up in the mountains have extended longevity to people who live down by the water don't the people who live down by the water primarily Fish Eaters the people who live up in the mountains are sheep herders and fascinatingly only the men in the mountainous region have the exceptional longevity the women don't they have no different longevity than any place else in Italy and it's the men who have the longevity and 85 percent of the men smoke only 25 percent of the women smoke the um and we can have fun with that all you want um the nagoyan peninsula in Costa Rica yes lots of people eat corn and beans there's a wonderful paper that I cite showing that the corn and beans are a negative aspect of that diet that's compensated for by the fact that these people in this peninsula are sheep herders and they eat a lot of sheep yogurt and sheep cheeses and so it's actually so so far two of the blue zones are sheep herders the uh Crete Carrier are sheep herders they eat a lot of sheep yogurt and cheeses they also have a fascinating plant called purslane and everybody has actually seen personally and it's a weed that is in every sidewalk crack wherever I've lived in the world um it's pretty flower called moss rose or portulaca but purslane is loaded with a short chain omega-3 fat all alpha linolenic acid ala and it was the basis of this purse Lane that the famous Leon Heart Diet trial was founded anyhow so now we got three of the five blue zones that are sheep herders oh by the way all of them all the men smoke dramatically south of Naples that I visited more centenarians in a place in the world the men are big time smokers they're sheep and goat herders and they eat a ton of Rosemary but we can get in there when you want to Loma Linda one of the things that shocked me when I was recruited to come to Loma Linda is their diet is 50 percent fat primarily dairy fat yogurts cheeses Butters they also use a ton of mayonnaise and I used to argue with the dietitians that they were killing my patients with this high fat diet and they go excuse me we're some of the longest living people in the world go away we know what we're doing and I go but this you you're killing my patients true the true story um so tons of dairy in in these blue zones now the final Blue Zone Okinawa the okinawans are unique in that they can't grow rice in Okinawa and back in the 1600s they luckily were able to import a purple sweet potato from China that actually thrived in Okinawa and 85 percent of their diet is a purple sweet potato they don't eat beans they ferment their soy they use Nano and miso but they don't eat soy they don't eat tofu and rice is just a tiny tiny fraction of their diet now the other thing that's unique about the okinawans in the rest of Japan they are called the spice eaters because the Okinawan diet has a huge amount of incredibly spicy bitter vegetables grains that they use and nobody else in you know Japan uses so their nickname the spice eaters so I'm sorry if we're gonna be honest we should call the blue zones white zones you've thrown a lot up there with your analysis of these blue signs um I love the section on Dairy in your last book because uh you you really highlighted how beneficial certain types of sheeps and goats Dairy particularly fermented cheeses or fermented kefir can be for our health there's a general point there for me Dr gundry though which is and I guess this is a point where touching on throughout this conversation I guess it's something I'm very passionate about that we love to take things in isolation the media too even you know humans do you know to simplify you know what is it is it the beans or is it something else you know is it the meat or is it the vegetables and I just think that any individual who I see in clinic I'm always trying to assess the totality of their life and their lifestyle so for example you're mentioning how some of these long-living men in some of these blue zones or white zones whatever you want to call them are smoking it's interesting isn't it that there can be these populations who are smoking yet they are living to a ripe old age in seemingly very good health and certainly the way I look at it and I'm interested in your perspective Dr gundry is that we all do things in our lives some are Health promoting some are not Health promoting right and we all make choices and you know some of the uh negative things will negate some of the positive things but it's about balance isn't it overall what are your health behaviors pointing to right so alcohol for example yes we can call alcohol and mitochondrial toxin we can look at it in a reductionist way and say there are no benefits to drinking alcohol for argument's sake right but then we can also look at some long-living populations and go yeah but they're seemingly having a they're living low stress Lifestyles and they're having you know maybe half a glass of red wine in community most evenings so therefore I come down to think well in that setting with active lives with low levels of stress when they're well slapped when they're generally having minimally processed foods local in season you know they're doing a lot of good stuff so maybe something that many people would call the mitochondrial toxin alcohol maybe in that context it's it's not actually causing that many problems whereas if you're living let's say in a western City and go sat down at a desk all day and you're hyper stress and you don't have any friends or parents or family nearby you have no sense of community and you're drinking wine to help you de-stress from your life maybe it's going to have a different effect on the body and that concept so yeah I wonder if if I could have your perspective on what I've just said to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits we can all make short-term change but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life often they don't and that's why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take that really really effective if you want to get hold of that free guide right now all you have to do is click the link in the description box below yeah you're absolutely right I mean for instance the the catavans um who Stefan lundenberg spent his career um studying and this island community in Papua New Guinea the the kittens are big time smokers uh and they have no zero coronary artery disease there's no stroke and they have virtually no cancer and you go but but but you know they're they're smokers and you look at these other communities and they're smokers now let me put on my heart surgeon hat for a minute um back before our uh insulin resistance diabetes Heyday the vast majority of people that I operated on for coronary artery disease were smokers now in a way it was great because uh these smokers were skinny bless their hearts um and their blockages and their coronary arteries were very distinct they were uh at the proximal part of blood vessels actually wherever a Bend was and once we got past that blockage quite frankly the rest of their blood vessels were pristine they were gorgeous there was no plaque there was no calcification it was Heaven on Earth for heart surgeons skinny patients once you've jumped past this blockage sewing was a piece of cake then Along Came normal patients now who have insulin resistance they're overweight or obese they have metabolic syndrome these people their coronary artery disease was diffuse in other words there's lump after lump after lump after lump when we would operate on these people they literally would have inflammatory almost scars on the top of their blood vessels that we would literally peel off just to get to the blood vessel and the inside was just a bunch of mush and I'm a transplant surgeon as well and so when we started doing heart transplants people despite excellent immunosuppression through the years would get coronary artery disease in their blood vessels but the coronary artery disease looked identical to someone with diabetes all this mush all along and that to me made me put two and two together and went well wait a minute we know that the coronary artery disease and our transplants is because of the immune system is attacking the foreign lining of this blood vessel and we haven't done a perfect job of stopping the immune system from recognizing this is foreign and it looks exactly like our metabolic syndrome diabetic patients this is an inflammatory process attacking a blood vessel which we started talking about now what about smokers so the problem with smoking and I talk about nicotine is is really good for you now Don't splash the Airways then I want everybody to smoke that's not what I'm saying nicotine is one of the best mitochondrial on couplers there is in fact there's a UK study that I've cited that you're probably aware of looking at 60 000 positions and the Physicians who smoked had half the incidence of Parkinson's and dementia than this than the Physicians who didn't smoke so there's something there and it's nicotine now the problem with nicotine even though it's a great uncut mitochondrial coupler it's a great addictive substance as any Tobacco Company person knows so I'm not I'm not yelling for everybody to take up nicotine and don't chew nicotine gum and don't wear a nicotine patch but why is it that these smokers did okay well so nicotine smoking produces oxidative stress and one of the things about oxidative stress we deal with oxidative stress animals deal with oxidative stress by producing vitamin C we unfortunately don't have the final Gene we have a silence Gene of the five sequence to take glucose and turn it into Vitamin C that final Gene is silence so we can't make vitamin C all animals make vitamin C except us and a few new world monkeys and guinea pigs and all animals went under stress pour out vitamin C smoking so bending blood vessels breaks collagen collagen is the rebar in our blood vessels and as they bend it breaks and collagen sticks out into the bloodstream and normally vitamin C actually re-knits collagen if all of your vitamin C is used up in smoking then that exposed collagen invites scar tissue and so to me that explains why these smokers at Bends in their arteries major bends in their arteries developed blockages but everything else was crystal clear um and one of my form friends who recently passed away Bill Sardi has done some beautiful experiments with rats who had that final Gene sequence and so they couldn't make vitamin C and these rats lived only 50 as long as a normal wrap but when they put vitamin C back in their drinking water then they live the same life as a normal rap so what about all these blue zones who are smokers well they're just loaded with vitamin C containing foods in their diet in fact olive oil um a component of olive oil a polyphenol called hydroxy tyrosol doubles vitamin C production in humans and so you start going well son of a gun these guys you know have taken a potential Vice and kind of negated the negative aspects of that Vice and gotten the benefit which is nicotine and that I think explains quite a bit of how they get away with a potential terrible thing it's really fascinating to think about that and again I want to be clear you're not promoting that people start taking up smoking I'm certainly not no this is just that you know just so there's no doubt there at all um but it's interesting isn't it why you can live to old age and good health and smoke and yes is is Vitamin C part of the picture it's low stress is there movement the fact that they're sheep Putters you know what is it and I guess maybe your next book will help tease that out for us what what are those factors because I actually don't believe it's one factor I I believe it's the multiple lifestyle environmental inputs that that person is getting over the course of their life that actually is telling us what's going to happen and you know how many times do we hear about these people at 108 or 112 you know like I think I read about a French lady the other day who has a whiskey and a and a cigarette every day and and you know again we can't draw conclusions from that as to what how all of us should be living but it's nonetheless very interesting how so many people who live to old age in good health aren't thinking about living to old age and good health it's just happening and I do I do sometimes think about what what does it say about Western culture that we you know are so obsessed these days with anti-aging oh you know we have we have a joke in our clinics that uh 150 is the new 100 but you're right um and I I worn all of for instance my female and even male patients who want to vigorously pursue hormone replacement therapy so that they have the hormone levels of a 20 year old all of these super old people I got news for you I've never been on hormone replacement and you know that as I tell my female patients look you were designed to have us make estrogen for one reason and that's to have children and I was designed not to make much estrogen because I wasn't designed to have children and once your eggs reach a certain point where they're probably not a good idea to pop out near estrogen should fall so you don't pop your eggs out and and you're done and the idea that estrogen don't get me wrong estrogen therapy started at the right time may be beneficial but we don't need to go down that line but most of these super old agers they've never been on hormone replacement a couple of things that have come up in this conversation so far lectins and the term mitochondrial uncoupling now um when I read unlocking the keto codes that was the first time I'd come across this concept of mitochondrial uncoupling and again my summary and again um please feel free to correct this if if you see this differently but really what that book showed me and what that book was trying to teach I think was that the benefits the supposed benefits that many people are reporting on ketogenic diets is not coming from the ketones rather it's coming from the fact that the mitochondria are being uncoupled and you outline in that book that actually you don't necessarily need to follow a ketogenic diet to get the benefits of mitochondrial uncoupling in in that book you outlined all kinds of things that we can do that may give us some of those benefits including intermittent fasting you know increasing polyphenols increasing fiber polyamines cold therapy fermented foods is that a accurate ish summary of the kind of main argument you were trying to put forward in that book correct um one of the papers when I was researching um the energy paradox uh there's a PhD researcher uh Dr brand who in 2000 wrote a fairly small paper called uncoupling to survive and in it he makes the argument that if we're starving to death uh we would want to save our mitochondria at all costs because if mitochondria die then who cares if well number one you're not going to survive but since mitochondria make ATP for us we've got to keep them alive and what he proposed was if you're starving you're making a lot of ketones it's one of the only ways to make ketones take free fatty acids out of fat cells put them into the liver and make ketones and ketones are useful because they're small enough that they can get through the blood-brain barrier reef fatty acids can't fasten up and they can be used as a fuel to keep neurons alive and until you finally find some glucose but ketones are actually a signaling molecule that basically say hey times are tough there's no food that's the only reason you're making ketones or you're exercising like Peter or Atia um you that's the only two ways you're going to do it and you mitochondria are under threat and so protect yourselves by doing two things number one stop trying to make ATP aggressively because making ATP damages mitochondria and number two make more of your cells so that each one of you individually will not have to carry a big workload and in in the new book and I do it on on podcasts let's the example I use is let's suppose we have a dog sled and we have one dog pulling the slip well the dog can pull the sled you won't go very fast and you won't go very far before the dog gets tired and you have to stop now if we hook up by more dogs to the same dog sled now each dog has to do a six of the work you'll go a lot faster and you'll go a lot farther the consequence though is you now have to feed six dogs rather than one dog and so what happens when you make each mitochondria work less by what's called uncoupling and it's a real thing it was discovered many many years ago and add more mitochondria to share the workload than the downside of that is they waste fuel if you will and you actually lose weight and so the actual consequence of a ketogenic diet is that you actually waste fuel and you waste fuel on purpose so that you don't damage the energy factories mitochondria and that's actually one of the main reasons why uncoupling exists in the first place the other interesting thing about uncoupling is uh are 30 percent of all the fuel we absorb is wasted through uncoupled mitochondria and that waste is actually thermogenic when mitochondria on a couple you generate heat and so we actually generate Heat by mitochondrion coupling and what's interesting is brown fat and the reason Brown fat is brown is because of its dense with mitochondria the brown fat is thermogenic because these mitochondria uncouple and so not only will ketones uncouple mitochondria but there's all other tricks that son of a gun long lived people have learned long-lived societies have learned and that's polyphenol containing foods intermittent fasting um you know what my job with all my patients you really think our ancestors crawled out of the cave and said what's for breakfast um there was no breakfast we had no storage system there were no cupboards there are no refrigerators we had to find breakfast subsequently we learned how to preserve foods and that actually gets into we preserved Foods the only way we could and that was fermentation yeah um it's absolutely fascinating because when I think about health when I think about diets and Lifestyles I'm always trying to think about what's the unifying philosophy what's what's the unifying components you know why is it that some of my patients can go Whole Food plant-based and seemingly Thrive whereas others go low carbohydrate Whole Food based and are also thriving and I've always felt that these dietary Wars are a little bit problematic because from clinical practice I've seen people do seemingly quite different things and still do well so what is the unifying feature okay well all the diets that work well in the short term and long term I think help lower inflammation right that I think pulls them all together all diets that tend to do well in the short term and long term I think help us be metabolically flexible and I know you've written about metabolic flexibility we have time we'll talk about it today but then I thought I'd never thought about mitochondrial uncoupling until your work with unlocking the keto code where I thought wow if this is true this is another unifying concept that shows why potentially some quite different diets and Lifestyles still can harness and encourage really good health outcomes now since that has come out Dr gundry has there been any pushback like is mitochondrial uncut playing well accepted science or is it still a hypothesis that you're trying to put forwards no it's not my hypothesis uh mitochondrion coupling is very well proven science there are now we know there are five uh mitochondrial and coupling proteins uh upcs that were actually discovered in in the 1970s and these uncoupling proteins actually um are emergency exits out of the electron transport chain and in the book I use the example of the Mido Club where things can get it's the hottest club in town and things can get pretty Rowdy and people are trying to couple uh when they go to these clubs and unfortunately things can get so rowdy that you've got to disperse uh the Heat and the energy and it's actually what happens is you know protons are supposed to couple with oxygen and exit through a one-way turnstile and generate ATP and that process of the electron transport chain is it is really nasty generating reactive oxygen species and so you need to have literally pop-offs like a pressure cooker if a pressure cooker gets too high you've got to release that pressure so you have a pop off out and what was discovered is that mitochondria have these pop-off valves and these uncoupling proteins these emergency exits are manipulable they are controllable by chemical signals by uh for instance ketones uh uncouple mitochondria they've open these trap doors polyphenols open these trapdoors and my favorite example which I talk about a lot is this compound that was discovered after World War II called 2-4 dinitro phenol dnp and it's a fascinating story uh munition workers in France and Germany during World War One were noted to be profoundly skinny and they were always running a temperature and they were eating incessantly but they were profoundly skinny and it wasn't until after the 1920s when it was discovered that in the process of manufacturing gunpowder there's a chemical called 24 dinitrophenol remember that word phenol it will show up in polyphenols uh and a couple of um Stanford doctors uh said hey these guys were really skinny and obviously this stuff makes you really skinny and I think it's a weight loss drug so they actually wrote over a hundred thousand prescriptions for uh two Ford dnp to humans and it was miraculous um and a normal dose you would lose a pound a week if you up the dose you could lose up to five pounds per week and it was a miracle except the more you took the higher your temperature went you actually developed cataracts and to the extreme you died now subsequently well the FDA ban dnp in 1938 but subsequently it was discovered the dnp was the first discovered oral mitochondrial and coupler and that explains why they lost so much weight and it also explains why they ran such high temperatures because they were generating Heat now there's been a lot of interest in looking at precursors of dnp to see if you could control the side effects and there's several companies that are really looking into this but the long story short is we know from actual fact that phenols uncouple mitochondria and so you go then well gosh let's look at the spice trade let's look at polyphenol consuming populations and you go son of a gun um these things you know work the original drugs and that's why people paid nobody paid a lot of money to put black pepper on their steak uh they pay a lot of money to get the uncoupling benefit of black pepper yeah it's so interesting to look at Foods through that lens um of course people can read the book and get all the detail on on all the things that you recommend you would touch on intimacy fasting there's a section on that fiber as I said prebiotics post-biotics polyphenols you mentioned a quick summary of foods containing polyphenols for people well the fun thing uh let me go back so plants have mitochondria that are called chloroplasts and plants use photons which is equivalent to our oxygen and photons from sunlight are extremely damaging to plant mitochondria Just Like Oxygen is actually extremely damaging to our mitochondria but it's can't live with it can't live out so plants manufacture polyphenols in their leaves or in their fruit to protect the mitochondria from damage from sunlight and to repair that sunlight and they actually uncouple chloroplasts so now when we eat polyphenols and it's best in in the in the fall we get to see all the polyphenols in the leaves of trees that we didn't see because they were covered up by the green and as that green chlorophyll goes away there's the polyphenols all the yellows oranges Reds purples all these magnificent colors those are the polyphenols the problem with polyphenols are we absorb them incredibly poorly but some of the exciting New Evidence is that polyphenols are one of the favorite foods of our gut microbiome our microbiome just thinks polyphenols is sliced bread and that's a poor analogy but um so they in turn make polyphenols absorbable bioavailable and so these the benefits so whenever you see a beautiful colored something that's the polyphenols and for instance olive oils loaded with polyphenols uh cacao dark chocolate loaded with polyphenols coffee loaded with polyphenols tea loaded with polyphenols and so on and so forth uh red wine has its benefit because not only the polyphenols in the grape skins and the seeds but also great amount of red wine is aged in Oakwood barrels and wood has polyphenols that are absorb yeah thank you for the context set of mitochondrial and cut playing why is it that you're so passionate about recommending sheep and goats products so these blue zones um are shape herders goat herders and sheep and goats first of all a lot of people now have heard of medium chain triglycerides MCT oil and medium chain triglycerides are a fat that's unique in that they are absorbed directly through the wall of our gut rather than on chiro microns and that's a long story but they go directly into our liver and they're converted for the most part into ketones regardless of what you're eating so you could have a a joke a fresh fruit salad and have a tablespoon of MCT oil and you will generate ketones despite eating a very high carbohydrate load which is interesting uh so it turns out that all of the various uh medium chain triglycerides are named after goat copra so there's caprylic acid caprolic acid Capra go why because it turns out that goat and sheep 30 of all the fat in goat and sheep milk are medium chain triglycerides cows don't really make a lot of medium chain triglycerides humans make a lot of medium chain triglycerides in our in our milk uh water buffalo you have a lot of medium chain triglycerides uh turns out donkey milk actually has a lot of medium chain triglycerides so isn't it interesting that these super long live Blue Zone white zone people are sheep and goat herders and that a lot of their diet is sheep yogurts and goat yogurts and kefirs and cheeses and part of what I propose is these guys live a long time because they're uncoupling their mitochondria now there's another fascinating globule in whole mouth regardless of the animal that a milk fat globule membrane and it's a membrane that actually in in animal milk surrounds the fat globules only in in fat and it's not in skim milk that's removed and it in and of itself and there's good papers is a mitochondrial uncoupler so isn't it interesting for instance getting back to that one paper butter has a negative effect on angina butter doesn't have any of these whereas cheese has these things in fact I'll give you a little heads up Harvard researchers have determined one assistant professor has determined that whole fat whole fat ice cream eating actually reduces the risk of diabetes and that certainly goes against party line and conventional wisdom yet every which way you break it down the same thing comes up and it's actually because of the fat glabul membranes in the whole fat milks and they're in cheeses yeah well if we had more time I'd like to explore that because I'm certainly not recommending hofa ice cream to my patients um no I'm not recommending that everybody have ice cream for the first diabetes I mean in terms of what we have got General agreement on so far fermented foods is something that's very good for us uh polyphenols you know how we might get them dark chocolate tea coffee colorful vegetables whatever it might be good for us olive oil really really good for us for a variety of different reasons you're making the case for goats cheese and sheep's cheese and why specifically they may be beneficial for us in terms of a food that you have become globally associated with um for potentially recommending that some of us all of us avoid is lectins now lectins are in a lot of different foods as you said you publish the plant Paradox six years ago it blew up globally it was controversial how do you see the lectin uh collecting situation now what's your current view has it evolved and also the question I really want to understand from you is do you recommend that everybody thinks about avoiding lectins or is it more so for people who've got impaired gut microbiomes and potentially severe autoimmune disease where you may see more of that benefit oh about 80 percent of my practice now is is autoimmune diseases um a lot of them have been kind of all over the United States the world looking for somebody to to fix it and they kind of end up in my office um every every human and I I measure leaky gut tests on on these people on a lot of my patients and every human being so far with an autoimmune disease has leaky gut 100 percent 99.5 percent of people with leaky gut have antibodies pre antibodies to wheat germ or gluten the various gluten molecules and non-wheat proteins as well as 70 of them have antibodies to corn they cross react with a gluten-like molecule in oats barley Rye I have gluten and so I can say unequivocally that the vast majority of people number one athlete he got for reasons I've gone into before but they have antibodies against uh numerous like and containing foods we also test them against antibodies to various lectins and most people carry antibodies to one or more beans a great number of people carry antibodies to the lectins and cucumbers to tomatoes to potatoes to Peppers um interestingly in the new book I write about a new class of lectins that I did not want to go into in the plant Paradox because I didn't want to be even more controversial but there's a class of lectins called aquaporins and we'll leave it at that but spinach has an aquaporin and some of my Ms patients uh uh our big time spinach eaters and they carry an antibody to the spinach aquaporn and when we take spinach away from them um that was the final thing that flipped things around now having said all that the exciting thing the reason I do this is if we follow these people nine months to a year and I publish this these people their antibodies against all of these components subside disappear they are gone a hundred percent of them lose these antibodies and I've had people who have been gluten free for 10 years still have antibodies to wheat germa gluten and gluten when we take away the other lectin-containing foods from them then they lose all these antibodies and we can reintroduce these Foods because we've sealed and they're leaky gut seals and I guess that's the point yeah one of the things that I've tried to make people understand is that cultures have fermented foods have taken halls off of grains from from the beginning of Agriculture because fermentation reduces lectins and so it is taking the hall off of things and these people didn't know that that's why they were doing it but they absolutely felt there yeah I I really appreciate that and then and you know maybe I can persuade these other parts too one day where we actually explore that a bit more because I think it's a really really interesting point again it speaks to this theme throughout our conversation that context matters what's going on with you at this current time and you know Dr Fasano's uh theory on autoimmunities which I really really like is that in order to have any autoimmune disease you need three things genetic susceptibility some form of environmental uh stressor whether it's food pollution stress whatever it might be and you need increased intestinal permeability also known as leaky guts if you've got those things and you have an active autoimmune disease then it stands to reason that the diet you need at that point may be different from someone who's got an intact gut barrier who doesn't have the genetics who's actually feeling really good so you know when we say should someone avoid gluten or not avoid gluten well it kind of depends just to sort of close off the loop there for this conversation at least I know you're in clinic I want to be respectful to your time I think we can say for some people um that having a more restrictive diet maybe uh you know not having license for a period of time whilst other things are being done to repair their body and they've got barrier you know that could be a helpful scenario basically and you wouldn't necessarily say that everyone out there has to now stop eating lectins no but one thing I think that's very important for people to realize and I've written about it before but I'm going into it even more America is Awash with glyphosate Roundup all of our food it's been sprayed on all of our grain crops um not as a GMO product but to desiccate them and it's in our wine it's it's everywhere it's in our organic food and one of the amazing things is uh so I'll have I have a number of patients with autoimmune disease that we put into remission and they they come over to France or they come over to Italy I just use those as examples and they go oh my gosh uh a croissant I'm going to have a croissant or a bad guy and I'm going to have a baguette or I'm gonna have a pizza or I'm going to have pasta and they do great they do not react they do not get bowel issues and they come back and say ah Dr gundry's cured me I can have these Foods again and then they start eating our American version of this and they eat our American bread our American um pizzas or whatever and within a couple weeks they flare and they go what the heck and one of the things that I've really become convinced on is that you luckily have far less glyphosate in your foods and in certain countries it's banned now and glyphosate is will absolutely cause leaky gut without any other yeah I'm glad you raised that point there's so many threads there that I I want to continue talking about maybe if we have a part C we can actually explore some of those at some point in the future just to finish off Dr gundry I really appreciate your commitment to sharing the knowledge that you're learning with people all over the world to try and help them improve their health I appreciate the fact that you have openly acknowledged where you might have got things wrong in the past and where you actually have evolved your view I think that's a really wonderful thing for us to see and for us all to try and practice in our own lives just to finish off then could you just summarize the people who have felt inspired by this conversation inspired by your work say okay Dr gundry that's it I'm sick of being tired all right I'm sick of not having energy to do the things that I want I want to get on top of my health what are your top tips for me what food should I start to include what should I avoid what can I do right now I wonder if you have any closing comments to help people some of my most difficult patients I actually asked them to become a gorilla who lives in Italy and by that I mean I want you to eat a lot of leaves and pour olive oil on it and if you do that you'll cover almost all the bases that you need for for good health my wife and I are primarily what we call veg aquarians and by that I mean we do eat a lot of leaves and vegetables and on the weekends we usually have wild shellfish like clams oysters mussels um shrimp and there's I think a lot of reasons to do that what about fruits you mentioned that 28 years ago when you made all these changes you completely eliminated fruits we area genetic mutation like grade eight that allow us to take fructose in fruit and virtually instantaneously converted into fat to store fat for the winter and there are literal huge books looking at great apes only gain weight during fruit season and fruit season lasts a finite period of time even in the jungle and fruit has been unfortunately engineered hybridized for sugar content for fructose content and one of my favorite sayings and I'll repeat it here today give fruit the boot if you want to improve your health if you really want fruit get yourself a juicer juice the fruit throw the juice away and take the pulp and mix it in Goat or sheep yogurt and that's where all the polyphenols are and you'll do yourself a favor oh that's going to be right at the end there's so many threads that I want to dive deeper into but again we'll say that for part C if people are new to your work and they go look that's gonna you've you've published so many books where do I start which book would you currently Point them towards well I'm liking the keto code actually summarizes everything in the past with my new thoughts uh the new book will drop January 4th of 2024 I can't tell you the name yet I know it but I can't tell you um but go to my YouTube channels I have two YouTube channels come to Instagram Dr Stephen gundry you can come to my website drgundry.com you can come to gundrymd.com my supplemented food company um yeah in fact I just got a wonderful email from from a woman two days ago that she I I popped up on a podcast and she started watching it and she said you know I was skeptical but I her health was so awful she I started putting in into place things you recommended and she said now 60 days later she said I couldn't even leave my house now my life has turned around I'm active uh I no longer have bowel issues um and now I can help my son who suffers from PTSD and my anxiety is gone and now I'm going to help him just from watching a YouTube video that captivated her if you enjoyed that conversation about the foods to bring into our diets I think you are really going to enjoy this one about the foods to consider taking out we need to realize whatever we put into our body is either going to take our health down or build our health back up and it all works at the level of the defense system

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 204,294

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: s8Bsr6AROl4

Length: 124min 58sec (7498 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023