Rapid Weight Loss and Diet | Steven Gundry, MD discussing with Randy Alvarez

the Wellness hour an in-depth discussion with today's top physicians and medical leaders and now your host Randy Alvarez you're watching a special edition of the Wellness hour the leader in medical news and information I'm Randy Alvarez my first guest is dr. Steven gondry dr. Gundry is a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon he's on the program today in fact we've been trying to get him on the program for the last year he's here to talk about his new book the diet evolution dr. Gunther welcome to the program thanks for having me Randy what has happened you know I had you on the show about probably in 2001 be about right and you were big and heavy yep and you were a little bit down in supplements at the time and a lot has changed read your book by the way and I try not to endorse a lot of people on the show best book I've seen on diet ever thank this is a must read this is very good I appreciate let's talk about your background first what qualifies you I mean you're a heart surgeon you were doing transplants you've invented things that are being used nationwide well I guess you should tell the story well how did it all come to this I went to Yale University as an undergraduate and back in the dark ages I had a special major where I could do anything I wanted for four years with three professors so I chose to study human evolutionary biology okay and that's just a fancy way of saying I investigated how our genes of our ancestors interacted with their environment as we evolved interacted with foods we ate with where we live and I had this big thesis and that was about the end of it and then I went to medical school and I actually decided to become a heart surgeon and became a children's heart surgeon as well and about 1989 I was recruited to come to Loma Linda University and became the chairman of heart surgery there and my partner Leonard Bailey and I did all the baby heart transplants that people remember we've done surgeries I guess in Israel I think you said but we've been all over the world what do you do robotics or did robotic surgery where Passard where we would control a robot here and then be the robot would be elsewhere that from we're actually sitting in a convention in San Francisco controlling something over in France so ok you changed also the way they thought about you you thought we protect the heart ok yeah when I was at the National Institutes of Health I got interested in how we keep a heart alive during heart surgery and traditionally when we work on the heart during heart surgery we cut off the flow of blood to it so it stops moving but you try to keep it alive by putting ingredients down the blood vessels of the heart well 1/2 of heart surgery the blood vessels are blocked and that's why we're there to unblock them ok so that preservative solution doesn't get to where it needs to go so one day I was studying a paper by a physiologist from 1898 where he pumped blood backwards into the veins of a cat heart so the cat heart as long as he kept putting oxygenated blood into the vein of the cat heart would keep beating outside the cat just fine with blood going backwards through the veins because after all the veins have no valves in them inside the heart and they eventually get to the capillaries the same way the arteries do only the opposite direction ok so I started experimenting with giving these preservative solutions into the veins of the heart there's a central vein called the coronary sinus and I invented a little catheter a tube that could deliver these things and sure enough just like you'd expect it worked perfectly and initially when we started doing it in humans people thought we were absolutely crazy in fact Denton Cooley one of the most prominent heart surgeons around from Texas Heart Institute described as giving the heart an enema ok and but everyone who tried it found out that their hearts worked far better than the traditional way and now it's really the gold standard for protecting the heart but then Cooley isn't he the same guy that said that your pig heart wouldn't last I wonder a few days that's true what would you do with that well we I'm very interested in xenotransplantation and that's a fancy way of saying take a heart from one species and put it into there's for instance a a baboon heart transplant - human baby Fae was one species to another okay but obviously you don't want to go around sacrificing baboons or monkeys to keep humans alive on the other hand we eat pigs and pigs are very anatomically similar to humans both and their habits and their hearts so the problem is a pig is so hugely different genetically from a human that the minute you put a pig heart into a human or an ape it's blood supply just thrombosis clots within a couple of minutes okay so what we did was we did some manipulations with the pig to give it supplements if you will to have it not react to human blood so the amazing thing is that it was actually my first introduction to the power of supplements in being able to change the genes of one animal to accept the blood of another animal but those hearts survived 28 days when it was predicted that they could only go for maybe an hour okay and that was really in the back of my mind when I met Big Ed who really talked about let's say he moved to the desert and you met a patient you say that started your new career yeah actually he was referred to me while I was still at Loma Linda I'm famous for operating on people that nobody else wants to operate on okay and big Edie was a 48 year old guy still alive and he was sent to me as a guy who prayed on he had inoperable coronary artery disease that basically means that every blood vessel was so clogged up that you couldn't put stents through you couldn't do bypasses around and he'd been going around to doctors saying you know how about it will you take me well every doctor looked at his angiogram the movie of his heart and said you know there's nothing I can do for you all right so I saw Big Ed about six months after his angiogram and at that time Big Ed had lost 45 pounds and he had gone to a health food store and he'd gotten this huge bag of supplements and he brought it in with him and he says you know doc everybody says I'm inoperable but you know I've lost 45 pounds and I've been taking all these supplements maybe I've done something in here well you know I scratch my professor beard and at that time I was pretty obese on a big boy and I said well good for you for losing weight but it's not going to change anything in here and I know exactly what you did with all those supplements you made expensive urine and you've wasted all your money you said that I said that and I believed it okay he says well what do we got to lose why don't we get another angiogram and see what my blood vessels look like I said okay so the next day this guy gets his angiogram 50% of the blockages were gone gone is that unheard of by the way to do I've never seen I've never seen it you know you hear these stories of how I cured heart disease bla bla bla but a lot of times they come from kind of funny so we had never seen I had never seen it so when you saw that what what now what goes in on in your mind I had to believe it because you know there it was because I had an angiogram from six months previous okay and the only thing he had done is lose weight and take a huge number of supplements so I actually started kind of looking through his bag of supplements I said give me the supplements right and some of the supplements he was using were similar to the compounds I was using down in the lab to do my experiments in keeping hearts alive for 24 hours for heart transplants day and I said you know I'm so stupid here I've kind of trusted in modern medicine with these chemicals that we're using but where did the chemicals come from well they all started with a plant compound that was changed a little bit so you saw this guy comes in remove some of the plaque from his arteries yeah okay then what so you go on this quest yeah I go on this quest and on what I did was I started myself I went to the health food store I did a lot of research on the Internet and said son of a gun you know this guy was just kind of haphazardly doing it what if I did this and this and this and then my mother sent me my thesis from college on human evolutionary biology and is about 165 pages describing the ancestral diet that we ate in the Pleistocene era now this is not a Paleolithic diet but actually applies the same diet and what does I mean Paleolithic diet is typical caveman diet you know high animal protein wild foods nothing wrong with that in fact the first part it's like your induction part exactly the first part of the book is very similar to a Paleolithic diet but in fact that diet is only about a hundred and fifty thousand years old that's meat and low glycemic that's exactly that's the paleo that is the Paleo diet but you say that's good for weight loss initially great for weight loss like you're at the next level with your what the problem is it's going to gets us into trouble long term if long-term wellness is actually what our goal is and I'm actually convinced that most people if they are given a choice want to die young at a very old age what does that mean that means as long as you are fit as long as your brain works as long as you can do what you want to do as long as you feel well you want to keep on living and enjoying that even if you're very old okay okay what happens to most people is baby boomers like ourselves have far more ailments now than our parents did at our age far more we take far more medications I mean let me give you an example last week and John McCain 71 years old gets his medical records released what happens is that all the talking doctors come on the TV and say well he's a very healthy 71 year old he takes eight medications which is standard for someone his age he's being treated for high blood pressure he's being treated for high cholesterol he's being treated for kidney failure he's being treated for pre-diabetes he's being treated for arthritis and he takes medicines for all he's considered healthy he's considered healthy and I'm going what do you say that wait a minute okay how in the world was he born with you know a hypertensive medicine deficiency was he born with a kidney medicine deficiency was he born with a pancreas deficiency these medications certainly helped them absolutely but the problem is come into my hospital I'll show you 400 people who are in there because they're management of their diseases which has been very good hasn't kept them out of the hospital okay and I'm actually now convinced that for most of us the reason we're in the hospital is because our genes are trying to get rid of us okay and you show you outlining your book how to turn that exactly exactly now with a John McCain are you convinced you could get him off those medications absolutely his blood pressure goes down yeah I wouldn't have believed this seven years ago I would have thought yet he's a healthy guy you know he's getting old he's going to have all these things that's normal that's not normal you go to countries that haven't eaten the way we eat or you find patients and I have them who have eaten a great way all their lives and they don't have those problems the lady who opens my book it was a real revelation early when I got out to the desert I think I was on your show yeah and she came in and you know there's a chart in the front of the wall and I look in the door and there's this very striking thin handsome woman very erect and I figure she's about 65 and I pull open the chart and her age says 95 going yes sorry I have the wrong room well she was 95 and she I couldn't use her name because she allows me to her name is Edith Marais and Edith when she was 20 years old went to a revival by a guy by the name of Gaylord Hauser and if you've ever used spikes seasoning or vegetal seasoning that was Gaylord Hauser's miracle ingredients Gaylord Houser gave a seminar basically said go home and throw every white food out of your pantry and never eat a white food again this young lady 20 years old did exactly that she went home and through Emerson while she waits to hang out who can live like that realistically the point is cravings keep all of us from doing that's my only argument here great question about Chris let's go let's take a break and come back about credit because you say you could wipe out crazy yes okay with with very little food with very little food all right you're watching the Wellness hour the leader in medical news and information I'm Randy Alvarez today's topic we're here with dr. Gundry world-famous thoracic surgeon and we're talking about his brand new book the dr. Guthrie's Diet evolution excellent book I've read the first half over right back there's a new secret to looking younger and advancement so profound it took a team of scientists years to create a time machine called zoom getting zoomed is the fastest way to erase years from your looks zoom is the most advanced teeth whitening ever only your dentist has nothing works like it zoom gel gently penetrates the submicron pores of tooth enamel the patented sunlight super activates the gel through a unique photo fenton reaction breaking down the stains double bonds in just forty five minutes years of discoloration disappear transforming your smile - Wow - find a zoom dentist near you go to zoom now calm or call 888-996-9697 I'm Randy Alvarez we are here with dr. Guthrie world-famous for as a cardiothoracic surgeon and we're talking on his new book hot book doctor Gondry's diet evolution okay and you called it evolution because I thought it was a revolution and I took a second look what why evolution well it is a revolution but it's actually the principle of the book is to evolve our eating style the problem with many very very good diets that I really think are a good way to eat they're almost impossible for the average person who's been eating a typical American Western diet to immediately transition into okay it's just too hard a step and this is what you know we let off the brake you know you said you you met the woman get rid of everything why get off bread eat lean vegetables or low glycemic vegetables and lean proteins but who can do that we know we have to do I mean everybody really watching this and as a weight problem has tried all of these things yet they can't follow cravings are out of control you say they can be wiped out so tell me a little about cravings your take well let me tell you I I see a lot of patients who have gastric bypass surgery I used to do gastric bypass surgery we now know that gastric bypass surgery works it's not because the stomach is stapled into this little tiny ball that you can't get food through okay it turns out that we bypass part of the intestines so that food literally speeds up through the intestines there are little receptors little monitors at the bottom part of your bowel that actually monitor how fast nutrients are flowing by now why the heck is it there well it turns out that all animals in the wild don't get obese they actually have triggers that stop the meeting I'll say that or else yeah there's they can eat all the food these triggers are among other things these little receptors and as the food goes by these receptors say up plenty of food going by they release some hormones that go up to the brain that says you're not hungry so the brain says oh okay we've got plenty of food don't need to eat all right the gastric bypass patients with that bypass in their the food is actually flowing past these receptors much faster than normal interesting so the receptors say plenty stuff going by here you're not hungry I say they're full and one of the amazing things about gastric bypass patients within a couple days this insatiable hunger that they've had all their lives goes away because a lap band people out to them say that they're still hungry but they just eat let the Lap Band people who just have their stomach you know stay with you our are hungrier than ever but they just can't eat they can't get past that blockage they've just got this little thing and they're the ones who don't lose weight the way gastric bypass patients do and they're the ones who rupture their stomach or rupture their esophagus trying to get food and so what does that mean well it means that if we have large numbers of micronutrients and most of us know about nutrients proteins carbohydrates and fats those are the three main nutrients we're now realizing that it's the micronutrients these weird little tiny chemicals and they're called phytochemicals vitamins plant that are in plants in general they also used to be in the animals we ate because animals up until 50 years ago ate grass the cows ate grass the chickens ate grass and bugs the fish ate algae now almost all of our animals eat grain products that don't have these micronutrients so make a long story short if you consume a lot of leaves if you will or how do you do that who can do that is that what you're doing actually I eat large amounts of salad people just I'll have mixing bowls full let's accomplish this Fast Pass Fast Pass what you do is you get yourself some green powders or green or red powders you can go to any health food store you can go to my website and see what I recommend it's an order that stuff it's in the book and you say my cravings are you know cravings will go away my patients are shocked and I was shocked because I was always a ravenous oh he's not enough food who can live off that powder it way that isn't enough food but then okay you can manage what you eat because most of us say oh you know I just can't deal with the cravings when I'm on a you know I could be really good for two weeks or four weeks but that's all based on control the problem is once that control is removed and you say okay you know I can't go back the way I want to eat these cravings just drive you crazy the cravings actually come from a hormone that your brain produces called ghrelin and ghrelin is the ultimate hunger hormone ghrelin says if you're losing weight there's a problem you're obviously not getting enough food and when we look at people who are dieting without these supplements their growing levels are sky-high all right the amazing thing study with college students they put them in a sleep lab where they controlled how long they slept and they let them sleep for eight hours and they measured ghrelin levels which is the hunger hormone and the ghrelin levels were extremely low they then brought them back a couple weeks later and they let them sleep for six hours when they woke them up they measured ghrelin levels and the ghrelin levels were very high as if they were really hungry it turns out that the amount of sleep and actually the amount of darkness that were exposed to controls growing so the next time they brought it back this is both most fun they told them that they were only going to let him sleep for six hours but they let him sleep for eight hours all right when they woke him up at eight hours their ghrelin levels were extremely high their brain had already been preconditioned that they were only going to get six hours of sleep and was prepared to be hungry yeah and so if you think about it you see in the news all the time about how Americans and the world over are getting less and less sleep we're sleeping about an hour and a half less than in 1960 and one of the things that drives most people is their lack of sleep because if an animal is not sleeping the only time an animal's not sleeping is when there's a predator outside the door some arts country you know they're free the old advisory of eight hours of sleep is an extremely good idea here's the other thing in the winter and day length is short and nights are long we would have been sleeping when the Sun went down until the Sun came up a very long time because there's not much food in the winter we are our appetites are suppressed because of that because it'd be stupid to go out looking for food alright in the summer when there's lots of daylight that's when all the food that's available that's when the food's in the summer you have a bigger appetite it's when growing levels are at their highest because believe it or not our genes are so well designed that they say hey sun's out the food's here you'd be an idiot not to pack it away and that's when we all want to be in the best shape is it the summer yeah that's true the cravings go up interesting yep there's science behind everything you're saying absolutely it's fascinating it's talk a little bit about what you eat because we're you know we're just about out of time but I want to talk a little bit about you you you use you cycle things you like today what's your typical good give me a typical but a typical day is I'll I'll take a green and red drink in the morning I'll take a scoop of ground-up flax seeds a scoop of green powder a scoop of red powder and I'll change my powders every couple months just because I want a slightly different mix of these micronutrients okay every company's got a little bit different mix interesting and then I'll take a very large handful of supplements is that line any of that you know I'm the ultimate original anti supplement guy and now I am so impressed with the power of these things so this helps your appetite because it's passing through the intestine very quickly yeah right yeah okay absolutely tells your brain I'm done Jose your brain how does this take to happen it happens almost instantaneously my patients come in after after two weeks and they say this is really weird I'm not hungry I even forget to eat meals is that okay and it's not the protein I don't hear any protein great question we get so much protein in our American diet way way way too much there's some incredibly good studies done by Colin Campbell out of Harvard looking at the amount of animal protein that people in Chinese villages eat and their longevity and their wellness okay the amazing thing is as the animal protein levels go up their longevity and wellness goes down our one-to-one basis interesting now that doesn't mean you have to be a vegetarian or a vegan did you eat me I do eat me but I uh but I eat mostly wrong now don't go running out and eat a raw chicken breast but for instance if you're going to a restaurant have some beef carpaccio you know thinly sliced beef that's raw steak tartare but it turns out that there is so much protein and vegetables for instance is it really enough though it's a huge amount there is more usable protein in a hundred calories of broccoli than there is in a hundred calories of filet okay more protein I mean you look at a horse you see them out eating burgers to get a different system than we do though is that the ticket gorillas gorillas actually has our dental system a gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every day now they're vegetarians aren't they well they're they're actually not vegetarian interesting turns out that most herbivores which is the correct term those that eat herbs or vegetables are actually omnivores because they're eating bugs that are attached to the grasses and the leaves and the fruit date I mean most of us I mean every pop that look is about protein well lose our muscle our heart will get weak yep our skin will fall apart well that's an important point and in Phase one when we're really trying to lose fat and not muscle mass our brain particularly when we're on a low-carb diet our brain is constantly looking for sugar because it actually wants sugar it loves sugar that's why people who go on in Atkins diet or even a South Beach they they feel awful for a few days and that's because of ketosis and everybody knows about the words ketosis your brain will burn fat for fuel but it doesn't like it it's never happy doing that kind of wants sugar so unfortunately the brain calls down to your muscles and says hey guys I need some sugar we can actually make sugar from protein in our muscles you can't turn sugar into protein but you can take protein and turn it into sugar it's called a clue Konya Genesis what happens is your brain is constantly calling down to your muscles looking for sugar well you can bypass that by consuming small amounts of protein like a concentrated protein powder several times a day during the early phases of weight loss what that does is it will break down into sugar very very so the early phase does include protein and you have that tear down phase yep the restoration phase the longevity phase that's that's where you are alright so we're going to have you back I want to thank you so much excellent excellent book where did you pick this up by the way I got it at a local bookstore yeah you can get it at Barnes & Noble borders most local bookstores have them amazon.com in the in the desert area Costco's carrying it probably is going to go national and Costco shortly is that right well congratulations good for you good for you you've been watching the Wellness hour the leader in medical news and information I'm Randy Alvarez if you would like to see the second part to this interview visit our website at wellness our comprar now I wish you could help thanks for watching the Wellness hour the leader in medical news with your host Randy Alvarez the authority on health issues you

Channel: The Wellness Hour

Views: 487,477

Keywords: randy alvarez, the wellness hour, palm springs weight loss, weight loss, diet, Infomercial Production, The Wellness Hour, Randy Alvarez, News That Makes You Healthier, Health, Wellness

Id: cxYFKfD4Jjc

Length: 28min 17sec (1697 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2011