What You Know About the KETO DIET Is WRONG! This Is What NEW STUDIES Are Showing | Dr. Steven Gundry

there's no doubt that our epidemic of alzheimer's and parkinson's and memory loss is laid at the feet of our metabolic and flexibility dr stephen gundry welcome back to the show tom thanks for having me great to be here dude it's really good to have you i really enjoyed this book as i've said many times on this podcast i judge a guess by whether the research is going to move me forward in my life and unlocking the keto code is really intriguing and i'm super grateful that i'm going to get to drill down on some of these so keto changed my life so i used to struggle profoundly with inflammation and when i discovered keto it changed everything for me to change my relationship to hunger to inflammation to all of it and in the book you make it very clear that we don't understand some fundamental things about ketosis and ketones and so let's start with what don't we understand well i guess the best place to start is what we thought we understood about ketones and ketones and ketosis have been known about since the late 1800s and i hope that a lot of people in the keto community know that the ketogenic diet the actual word ketogenic diet was founded in 1930 at the mayo clinic as a treatment method for children with seizure disorders epilepsy how did they figure that out because that does not seem like a super obvious at least for me as a lay person not a super obvious conclusion to draw that that's sugar-based well what they found was that children who had severe epilepsy spent so long post seizure and it's got a medical term called post-ictal state where they're okay they're not seizing but they're not really waking up and they spent so many so many hours in this post-seizure state repeated seizures and then just kind of in a coma that they didn't eat very much and they were literally starving and they made the observation that kids who were starving because they had so many seizures paradoxically had less seizures the more they were starving and so researchers first at boston and then at the mayo clinic said wait a minute we know that ketones happen when you're starving that's when it happens so it must be that ketones are doing something to these kids brains and are there other ways other than starvation to produce ketones and one of the ways they found was well look if you deny carbohydrates and really cut back on proteins and give kids mostly fat to eat then they will make ketones even though they're not starving to death these kids did very well on a ketogenic diet 50 of them had complete seizure control recently i've got a young man who's a high school student who despite two meds was still having seizures so bad he was in special ed and fallen way behind his mother brought him to me in my clinic in santa barbara and we put him on my ketogenic diet which is kinder and friendlier and the kid woke up he's off of his medications he's now was he doing any kind of keto before that no okay not at all so it went from meds to meds and keto or keto only keto only we took him off his message wow he woke up uh wasn't you know drugged and now he's taking advanced classes and he's actually playing soccer for his soccer team in high school and he could not do any of this i mean can you imagine a kid with a severe enough seizure disorder to be on two meds now actively playing high school soccer um that's crazy just by choosing this come back into vogue so i had somebody on the show when this was still inside quest his son had um seizures epilepsy and he said they didn't even tell him about ketogenics because they said compliance was so low that they didn't even mention it to parents anymore and he had to like go do his own research and he found some obscure article and like a journal from the 1950s he was like hold on a second did the same thing put his son on boom total total remission has not had a seizure in like 20 plus years yeah well that's a great point so the ketogenic diet the high fat ketogenic diet for seizures once phenobarbital and dilating came and the new seizure drugs came it died because kids couldn't do an 80 fat diet they actually had growth retardation and they just wouldn't follow it right so what happened actually in the 80s was people discovered medium chain triglycerides mct oil and this oil was the miracle oil that some of these tv shows were done and what they found was that mct oil could convert into ketones in the liver and we'll get into why that happens and they found that if you put kids on a mct oil based diet you could give them far less mct oil far less fats and you can give them tons of carbohydrates which i'm a parent and grandparent now and you cannot deny children carbohydrates as much as you as much as we think we should so these kids could have more carbohydrates more protein they could grow and develop normally but they'd still stop their seizures how much do you have to reduce the carbohydrate intake if you're using mct oil you can't just you can't just add mct oil right you still have to modify really so no matter how much carbohydrate i'm intaking what's amazing is and this is human studies you can take a tablespoon of mct oil which is not much and you can actually within a half an hour generate a generous amount of ketone body production from five at least point five point eight one wow from one tablespoon of mct oil i've never tried it so i can't deny it but man knowing how hard it is to produce ketones without it that's scandalous yeah and that was the beauty of this and so when i you know i actually started writing this as after i wrote the energy paradox which we've talked about and i was trying to explain you know where ketones fit into all this in terms of energy production and as you know i like to back up what i say with research either my own or somebody else's and as i was trying to explain how beneficial ketones were for energy production for protecting mitochondria for turning mitochondria into fat burning efficient machines when i started looking at you know the research to back up what i was saying i went holy cow i'm wrong about this and so is everybody else ketones aren't some fact how did you deal with that most people cannot especially if they've talked about it publicly they can't change their position hopefully that's makes me one of the more believable nutritionists around because i'm always willing to say i was wrong so what was the first thing that made you go wait a second i don't think we were on the right path well one of the most you know amazing things and i i've had a ketogenic diet in all my books for the last 20 years i've had a ketogenic program for my patients and looking back when you actually look at the list of things i allow on my ketogenic diet there's tons of carbohydrates and yet it works extremely well and i've been using mct oil for my program from kind of day one so i and i've written that ketones make you an efficient fat burner and i firmly believe that so i was going to prove how ketones actually make your mitochondria incredibly efficient at making energy right and probably the best way to explain this is we know that ketones were discovered during starvation and nobody quite figured out why they were produced until the 1930s but then how ketones came about to be known what they did really started in the late 70s 80s up to the year 2004 at both harvard with george kale and dr owens and dr veach at the nih and they wanted to know okay what were ketones doing there we don't do things by accident and so they started to look at okay human beings clearly have starved for multiple times we didn't as a species as a species we didn't have 7-elevens next to us we we didn't have fast food we we didn't have refrigeration we didn't have storage systems and we had to find or kill food and there were famines and there were times not much food so we were designed when we found food to store a lot of it as fat and i've written about this in previous books great apes interestingly enough only gain weight during fruit season and fruit season doesn't happen year round in a jungle it really only happens in the summer and early fall we gained weight because the winter and spring was actually times of less food so it became beneficial to take fruit and convert it into fat so we can make it through the winter and that defect it's actually a genetic mutation that allowed great apes to do that we inherit it as well so we're really good at storing fat mm-hmm in fact yes we are yes we are in fact and better than most we're called the fat ape for a reason uh we we best all apes at storing fat so when we don't have any food normally and i talk a lot about in this book and you and i have talked about this most of us should have metabolic flexibility in our mitochondria and mitochondria are the little energy producing organelles that take we the food we eat and produce atp our energy currency and mitochondria for anybody that doesn't know are like aliens they start of our cell they have their own dna which is crazy and i still don't understand that as possible but nonetheless it is true and at some point two cells combined and they were able to handle oxygen by the mitochondria wrapping inside of the cell which is bananas and there's actually a gaggle of them inside of every cell yes there's a bunch of them unlike our high school biology textbook that might have had shown one or two mitochondria per cell there can be thousands of mitochondria and they're actually engulfed they're in golf bacteria from two billion years ago and they actually carry right their own dna and the cool thing about that an important part of the book is that mitochondria can divide and make more mitochondria without the cell they're living in dividing so if a mitochondria gets the right stimulation and that's part of the book they'll make lots more of themselves and to share the energy load so getting back to starvation normally you and i hopefully when we run out of sugar we can immediately start burning free fatty acids and that's the flexibility you're talking about sugar can burn fat yeah we should be a hybrid carb uh if we burn gasoline we'll call that sugar when the gasoline runs out we've been storing energy in our battery and when the gasoline runs out we switch over to battery power until we go fill up at the filling station unfortunately here's the weird thing 50 percent of normal weight individuals have no metabolic flexibility fifty percent of us just because of modern diets we're eating all the time we're never in a quote unquote starvation phase correct if you're if you're overweight eighty eight percent can not shift between burning sugar and fat if you're overweight uh if you're obese 99.5 percent of people cannot shift to burning fat and what does that mean why does that matter well you normally if you and i stop eating tonight whenever about eight hours after we stop eating we should actually run out of glucose as a fuel and we should shift over to burning free fatty acids and ketones as a fuel until we get our next meal that's normal and by 12 hours of not eating we actually ramp up ketone production to pretty much take over our brain's need for fuel temporarily and your brain actually if it runs out of sugar starts dying so the implication for the brain is never without sugars believe it or not the brain normally would run out of sugar in about eight hours after we stopped eating normally runs out of sugar and it shifts over to using ketones as a temporary fuel the reason it can shift over is once we stop eating we start liberating free fatty acids fat from our fat cells so you're saying it would die if we didn't have ketones correct got it okay so normally those free fatty acids come out of fat cells every one of our cells except the brain can use free fatty acids as a fuel and use them very well and this has been again proven at harvard in the nih our muscles love free fatty acids my research on the heart years ago showed that the heart prefers burning free fatty acids instead of sugar it's favorite fuel in fact we protect the heart during heart surgery by putting fats into the heart how through the veins and the arteries i invented you inject fat yeah well we dissolve it in our cardioplegia whoa so um without that metabolic flexibility then what happens what happens is what we're discovering right now is that your brain cannot get life-saving ketones to burn as an alternative fuel and your brain runs out of glucose as a fuel because you don't have any available in your brain for several hours a night until you eat again neurons die and [Music] there's no doubt that our epidemic of alzheimer's and parkinson's and memory loss is laid at the feet of our metabolic and flexibility okay so that is certainly terrifying yeah but means that we can do something about it so going back to where we left off so we go into starvation mode we start kicking off these ketones that feels like the sort of story up to before this book correct people understood that so where do you begin to go wait a second we have a problem here okay so we can make ketones uh we make ketones from free fatty acids they go to the liver and the liver generates ketones now the liver interestingly enough can't use ketones as a fuel they're incapable they don't have the enzyme to do it can you use free fatty acid yes okay the liver loves free fatigue which it gets as fat is oxidized we get free fatty acids and we can snatch them out of the bloodstream and use them right and they're a great fuel fabulous fuel so what everybody thought but they can't cross the blood-brain barrier that's the problem right because they're kind of too big and fat if you will so by as luck would have it ketone bodies ketones are water-soluble small fats and they can get through the blood-brain barrier so the brain can use ketones until glucose arrives the next morning or for several days now that piece of the puzzle wasn't no so people like cahill people like george veach said wow ketones are clearly what made humans survive for a long time because we could use them as a fuel without burning up our muscle to make glucose we can convert muscle protein into sugar it's called gluconeogenesis and they actually showed that if you literally had to live on glucose as a fuel your muscles would be gone after about a week of starving so the only way for gluconeogenesis to happen is from muscle tissue yeah but you can also make gluconeogenesis from breaking glycerol molecules off of triglycerides and convert that into glucose okay so there is a way to get sugar from fat got it we're really good at turning sugar into fat we're really bad at turning fat back into sugar we just don't have the enzyme system to do it so when this ketone was found everybody said wow that explains everything we can run on ketones and be great not so fast dr owens at harvard showed that at full ketosis human beings can only meet 30 percent of their calorie needs by burning ketones the rest have to come from free fatty acids and glucose so that's kind of weird if they're such a great fuel [Music] the brain it turns out even at full ketosis only 60 percent of the brain's needs can be met by ketones and the brain still needs 30 to 40 percent of its fuel as glucose even at full ketosis so when i read that research i went well wait a minute this is not some super fuel the body doesn't even view it as a super fuel but we don't do things for you know not a good reason what the heck are ketones actually doing that's so beneficial and that's what when i went down the rabbit hole and came out with unlocking the keto code because ketones are not a superfilm they are actually a signaling molecule that tells mitochondria to protect themselves at all costs from damage and to save themselves at all costs if you are starving to death because quite frankly if we're starving to death if you don't protect your mitochondria that make energy that's the end of us that you die you're done so uh i read a silly little paper it's actually maybe one of the most important papers i've ever read by uh dr uh martin brand in the year 2000 and it's a simple paper called uncoupling to survive and i hope all your viewers and listeners dig it up you know check with google it's there and what he said well it just you know talk about a paradox and he said look in extremis the mitochondria has to survive so the mitochondria is instructed by ketones to literally start wasting a lot of the calories that it would normally process into atp and throw them away my brain broke when i read that part of the book i know and i took down a note i was like hold on and i know you answer it but i was like there has to be an evolutionary advantage to this i cannot see how in a moment of starvation we would want to kick off extra energy and quote unquote waste it at least for me this is all coming together at a moment where it feels like there's these breakthroughs in science which are all pointing to the depression of the mitochondria and their ability to produce energy in a good way which is weird yeah yeah i you know i and most ketogenic diet experts have always taught that ketosis you teach your mitochondria to be energy efficient to get energy out of every glass calorie because you're starving to death so you need to turbocharge and supercharge your mitochondria to eke out every last drop of energy and that makes incredibly it's intuitive it feels right it feels really good but what bran said no you're wrong they do the exact opposite and you go no no no no no there's no food why in the world would you waste food so what he showed was and i i have a fun time in the book talking about the mito club yep let's hear about it yeah so so mitochondria make energy by energizing electrons and protons in this long tube called the electron transport chain inside a mitochondria and i liken this long tube to the hottest hippest club in town where people go to the club to couple to meet someone to hook up to hook up and if they hook up they exit the club and let the imagination run some energy get some energy to make and this club is it's hot it's crowded there's there's hormones through the roof there's alcohol flowing and everybody's bumping into each other and everybody's trying to couple with everybody else normally oxygen should couple with a proton and exit the back door and make atp oxidative phosphorylation some people have heard but because it's crowded and there may not be a lot of available protons that people want to couple with electrons could also couple with oxygen and they're not supposed to and they get they make nasty free radicals and reactive oxygen species and punches start being thrown chairs are flying and beer is flying and there's bouncers in the club to try and calm this down and everybody knows about antioxidants uh turns out there's only two antioxidants in mitochondria surprise surprise melatonin which most people don't even know is an antioxidant the sleep hormone and glutathione um there's only two so they're the bouncers so getting back that club is hot it's energy there's damage being done you gotta keep this club under control so everybody's trying there's only one way out of this club through this back door but people are getting frustrated and they want to leave because it's a bad day to couple and they're not coupling so it turns out there's emergency exits in the club where things get too hot if people get too frustrated they can push open an emergency exit and leave the club the mitochondria have emergency exits there's actually five emergency exits in our electron transport check and they're controlled by uncoupling proteins now i spent six months trying to figure out a better word for uncoupling uh and because people think of uncoupling like gwyneth paltrow getting divorced i uncoupled my marriage but uncoupling means that instead of joining a proton with an oxygen molecule to make atp the proton leaves the club leaves the mitochondria without making energy so what bran showed and others have subsequently confirmed is that mitochondria at rest you and i sitting here 30 percent of all the calories that enter our mitochondria right now are going through these emergency exits and never making atp 30 just here normally normally and you're not in starvation mode just normally you and i sitting here and you go what a stupid idea you and i have to eat 30 percent more calories every day just to make our normal amount of atp and you go well why would i do that well it turns out generating heat is what those calories do and you and i are warm-blooded animals is that the only way we generate heat it's actually the only way we generate okay so the emergency exit is how we stay warm correct and it turns out that brown fat which a lot of people have heard out brown fat is our energy our heat producing fat does that mean that brown fat has more mitochondria it's so many mitochondria that it looks brown under the microscope okay they are crammed in there and we thought brown fat only existed in babies to keep them warm and there is a lot of brown fat in babies but we now know that you and i actually have brown fat and the more brown fat we have the healthier we are and we'll get to that and what brand eventually showed is if you look at the super old people folks 105 and above who are thriving they have the most uncoupled mitochondria of anybody and you go what so wait a minute uncoupling mitochondria must have huge benefits that none of us knew about let's get back to ketones so ketones tell mitochondria that trouble is a foot and to protect your cells at all costs so the first thing you do mitochondria is don't damage yourself by making energy and making energy is very damaging to my mitochondria so waste you know making energy waste more calories protect yourself cool it a bit but secondarily that makes no sense because you gotta have enough atp to survive so simultaneously the mitochondria is instructed to make more mitochondria to share the workload now think about this the iditarod is you know being run and let's have a one one dog dog slip well yeah the dog can pull the sled but he's not going to go very far before he tuckers out but if you hook six dogs to the sled each dog has a sixth of the workload the one dog has so they can go a lot farther with six of them doing less work now the consequence of that is they actually are going to eat more food than the single dog to accomplish the same thing so now you go wait a minute a ketogenic diet is a really good weight loss diet it can't be because the mitochondria are more efficient because if they're more efficient they can get more calories more food more energy out of the body right and in fact you lose weight so what happens is you actually in a ketogenic diet if you do it right and uncouple your mitochondria you waste fuel you feed six dogs instead of one and that's where the benefit of ketosis comes from what's up everybody tom billy here and i have a question for you at the start of this year you likely set some goals for yourself and i want to know how those are going most people give up on their goals and dreams by february but i have some good news if you're not on target to succeed at the things that you want to achieve this year it's not too late and trust me when i say you are not alone everyone gets stuck and loses momentum towards their goals at some point myself included if you know what you're doing and you're willing to take massive action though you can get back on track the trick is not to think about being stuck as a problem with your motivation or to interpret your lack of results that you're getting as a sign that you're not smart enough the trick is to recognize that the game that you're playing is a game of neurochemistry it's about managing the way that you think about yourself and framing things in the right way if you use your brain more effectively repeat things that empower you you can actually find ways to solve problems faster create positive habits and behaviors that you know are going to help you reach your goal i want you to take massive action right now so i've pulled a workshop from impact theory university called the six steps to getting unstuck and i want you to watch it right now it's gonna help you get back on track with your goals and make the rest of this year your most successful ever to watch it go to unstuck class.com and register for access i'll walk you through the same process that i use to get through obstacles and make fast progress towards my goals whenever something slows down all right guys enjoy this and be legendary take care okay so now i'm trying to pin down the evolutionary advantage so i'm in starvation mode yep that's when i'm producing ketones why on earth would starvation mode trigger my mitochondria to waste more energy and become less efficient to protect themselves at all costs so it's purely a protective mechanism it's an evolutionary protective design to save the mitochondria at all costs dear human body i cannot keep taking this rate of damage for you i have to conserve the only way to conserve is to release more of these out of the emergency exit so i don't have to process them take on the free radicals and all the damage so go out my temperature theoretically should feel like it's going up subjectively uh believe it or not a lot of people do and we will get into the munition workers in france and germany in world war one which actually proved his theory nobody knew that that proved to siri but that's what happened to them yeah you actually should raise your temperature just as a fun fact you ever notice when you have a cup of coffee or tea even if it's iced coffee or iced tea many of us go gee you know i'm kind of glistening even though i'm having an iced coffee you actually produce more heat having a cup of coffee because both the caffeine and the polyphenols in coffee and tea uncouple your mitochondria and have them generate heat so interesting okay so i my mitochondria is protecting itself by uncoupling they're getting rid of this stuff they're making more of themselves okay to share the workload each one is working less hard so that they aren't being damaged right but you're recruiting more mitochondria and the amazing thing is during ketosis or other things that stimulate mitochondria to uncouple you actually generate more mitochondria and mitochondria in starvation will devote all the protein manufacturing in the cell to make more of their proteins and they'll actually not make muscle protein screw the muscles their energy hogs we're not going to build muscle if we're starving we are going to build more mitochondria to work less hard screw everybody else all right here's where this gets complicated for me though so that all makes sense i'm i'm tracking with that uh in the book you talk about how it does um the way that it further stops the muscles from taking the energy is that it makes you insulin resistant so and when you look at like what happens with fructose and uric acid there's a similar thing going on which is hey raise insulin which seems like it's bad in a modern context but from a survivor famine context it's actually brilliant because it traps the fat makes you use it more slowly it's hard to get out to make sure that you don't burn through the energy and end up dead but the munitions facility that you alluded to the way that we end up dead real fast is this process on a runaway train is it just that i can exit people out the emergency exit way faster way more dramatically than i can stop the fat from pouring out walk people through what happened in the munition factory okay um in world war one it was noted that munition workers in france and germany who were assembling shells and working with gunpowder were extremely thin even though they were eating huge amounts of food and they could not keep weight on and they were running a temperature 24 hours a day and it wasn't until the late 1920s when they realized that these guys basal metabolic rate bmr was elevated and it took a couple of doctors at stanford in 1930 to say son of a gun we've discovered the compound that did it in these munition workers and it was called 2-4 dinitrophenol and keep that word phenol in everybody's mind will come back oh yes it will and it's called dnp so they actually said oh my gosh dnp raises the metabolic rate and it is the world's best weight loss drug that nobody's ever heard of so in the 1930s in america alone over a hundred thousand prescriptions for dnp were written by physicians and it was a miracle weight loss drug you took a little bit of dnp every day you'd lose a pound a week that's insane but if you took a lot of dmp you could lose five pounds per week you talk about a miracle and just a little bit more and you can be dead yeah now here's the problem what happened was as more and people more and more people got on the bandwagon and saw they could lose a huge amount of weight people were running temperatures they started noticing that thyroids were having a problem then a lot of people developed cataracts and this was before cataract surgery and as i joke can you imagine being able to fit into your skinny dress and not see how good you look in the mirror because you're blind and then people started dying dying like flies and so the fda in the late 1930s 1938 is one of the first official acts banned dnp for sale but it turns out that in 1978 it was discovered that dnp worked because it was the first known oral mitochondrial uncoupler and dnp was so effective because it literally turned human beings from being toyota priuses which were very fuel efficient to being ferraris which are incredibly fuel inefficient now as i talked about in the book there might be reasons you and i would want a ferrari rather than just wasting fuel but the point is we these people through fuel out all these side exits of their mitochondria what does it become when it takes the emergency exit it actually produces heat that's why all these people were running kicks off is just nothing else in fact looking back at gundry md we have a number of products with thermogenic compounds compounds that we've known for years produce thermogenesis make heat lo and behold every one of these compounds uncouples mitochondria and lo and behold that's why they're thermogenic compounds they make e okay so now i think we come back to phenols polyphenols specifically what are those why do they matter and how do we begin to get into the new friendlier ketogenic diet so dnp dinitrophenol phenol where have i heard that word before polyphenols polyphenols are used by plants to protect their energy producing organelles which are their mitochondria but they're called chloroplasts so let's go back to us for just a second oxygen we have to have oxygen to make atp normally oxygen is very damaging to our mitochondria all these free oxygen radicals blah blah blah so we can't live without oxygen but we can't live with with it and so we have to you know sop up the damage the oxygen that does plants on the other hand have to have sunlight and they kind of reverse engineer they take photons from sunlight combine it with co2 and they make glucose and atp sunlight is damaging to the plant mitochondria the chloroplast so they actually generate polyphenols to protect their mitochondria from damage their chloroplasts we get to see every fall the polyphenols in plants because the green chlorophyll goes away and all those beautiful colors of yellows oranges reds dark colors are the polyphenols that the plant generated to protect and uncouple the mitochondria of plants and it turns out the way they protect the mitochondria is to uncouple them to make them work less hard and the less hard their mitochondria work the less damage sunlight does to them now we eat plants and the polyphenols in plants do two things number one we don't absorb polyphenols from plants very well but our bacteria actually love polyphenols they're actually a prebiotic fiber for bacteria and the bacteria then convert those polyphenols into absorbable polyphenols which then go to our mitochondria and uncouple them it's i can every time i say this i hear the lion king the circle of life playing in my head you know oh you know we eat the plants but then we die and the plants eat us so the plants are protecting themselves with polyphenols when we eat the plant polyphenols we uncouple our mitochondria the same way there's the benefit of polyphenols okay so they are technically we're getting like a metabolite of the bacteria processing the polyphenols correct it it isn't showing up as a ketone so how many things trigger the uncoupling so we know ketones do it as a signaling molecule we've got a whole host of polyphenols or some polyphenols better so a whole host of polyphenols you you choose the polyphenol i'll show you a paper that shows the action of that polyphenol is to uncouple mitochondria i'll give you from last week um one of my compounds at gundry md is called total restore which is a my humble opinion a really good gut repairing compound gut wall compound one of the things that i used long before i used that was a compound called wormwood and people probably have heard of wormwood it's in a lot of compounds to repair the gut and just for fun uh last week uh i i saw a paper that a type of wormwood uh worked by uncoupling mitochondria and i went what the heck i didn't know wormwood could do that so i started googling wormwood and uncoupling mitochondria do this in your spare time great fun and lo and behold five papers come up that wormwood mechanism of action is uncoupling mitochondria and so you start going down this this rabbit hole and you find out that there's literally just one thing that makes all the difference in a person's health and that is hitting the right dose of mitochondrial uncoupling and getting the compounds that will do that and just to peak everybody's interest there's an interesting theory of aging called the rate of living hypothesis and the rate of living hypothesis is that basically you only have so many calories that you're granted in your life yeah if you use up those calories quickly that's the end if you use up those calories slowly that's great and it fits pretty good little tiny animals don't live very long they have really super high metabolic rates big animals like an elephant live a long time and they have fairly low metabolic rate the problem with that theory is birds birds are very small in the scheme of things but a hummingbird in captivity which has one of the highest basal metabolic rates measured can live 10 years a parrot can live 80 to 100 years yeah guess what birds do better than any creature mitochondrial uncoupling bingo they are they have the most uncoupled mitochondria of any species okay now because i've read the book i feel like i'm cheating a little bit but uh so birds probably are dinosaurs that crossed and so are we assuming that due to asteroid impact they became birds because they were already good at mitochondrial uncoupling and that's how they were able to survive that period i think this beautiful theory i don't think anybody's actually you know actually spouted that out loud but yeah i mean they are the last dinosaur it's very interesting so given that we are descended from mammals that also survived that period it certainly makes a lot of sense that we would have survived if we already had that ability and then i know humans like by the time we became humans there were twice that i think we were forced through these really narrow periods where there were very few humans left yeah we were down 60 000 years ago we were down probably to one woman and probably a few guys she's not that small yeah she's mitochondrial eve all of us uh can be traced back to one female whoa yeah all of us and you know just just so everybody knows mitochondria actually they have their own dna their own genome mitochondria are only transmitted from the female you and i know we're just drones we have no useful purpose other than being a drone so we we don't give any mitochondrial dna so you can actually look at mitochondrial dna so there's mitochondrial dna in the egg yep that's crazy yeah but there's none of the sperm uh no mitochondria go into the egg that's real and what's really cool and i've talked about this before i mean what's really do we get all of our microbiome initially from our mother passing through the birth canal hopefully yep and so our bacteria are female and our mitochondria are female and as i've talked about and other people have proven these female bacteria talk to their sisters the female mitochondria and they literally text each other and that language was discovered and got the nobel prize of postbiotics and i talk a lot about postbiotics as well the communication system between the microbiome and their sisters the mitochondria and it's like i mean this is crazy i mean the design you just have to sit there and marvel at the design and then you start marveling at okay how do we tweak the benefits of this design how do we maximize the benefits of that design and that's why one of the cool things is yeah we can uncouple mitochondria via a ketogenic diet a high fat ketogenic diet no question about it but do we want to do that 24 7 no because eventually like you mentioned you will become insulin resistant to stop the muscles from stealing the calories and you'll eventually start losing muscle mass eventually if you continue 24 7 ketosis for a long time so you want to cycle in and out of ketosis on a 24-hour basis and the book shows okay here's some tricks um let's do intermittent fasting time restricted eating let's stay in ketosis for 15 16 hours a day so what window do you recommend so uh dr matheson from the nih from the national institutes of aging wrote a beautiful paper a couple years ago that shows probably six hours is the best window okay six hours of eating uh 18 fasts 16. yeah fast six hours does he have an opinion on number of meals in the six hours it actually doesn't matter and i go into that and again there's a lot of fun nerdy stuff in here a guy by the nail raphael decabo also at the nih showed that all the calorie restriction literature and calorie restriction you know cutting 30 percent of all the calories you eat every day is really the only bona fide proven way to extend lifespan across multiple species but the problem is it's unsustainable there is a calorie restriction society in the united states uh it's hilarious they're they're miserable individuals they're cold they yeah they're miserable they're hungry uh why aren't they warm because if they're putting themselves in starvation mode they're triggering this whole thing they've literally now gone into a thrifty gene mode they've got it so far so you've passed through passing through this correct then you know they're they're so far down the line but cabo said hey wait a minute i think we've got this calorie restriction wrong because we're controlling the animal's food and we're putting the food in their cage and we're giving them x amount of food i wonder if the time of day that we put the food into the animal's cage and the time they're eating the food and the time they're not eating the food was really what the difference was so he designed an experiment which is really kind of cool he designed an experiment based on the rhesus monkey studies of the university of wisconsin and the national institutes of aging and these were calorie-restricted monkeys but only the university of wisconsin study showed extended longevity the nia study showed no extended longevity and they had different diets and he said i'll tell you what i think you guys are both wrong i betcha is the time of eating so he designed an experiment where they had a calorie restricted group of both diets four rats but he had a third group that that all their food came out at three o'clock in the afternoon and the animals ate it quite rapidly and they still actually they ate up all the calories in about eight to 12 hours and then they were fasting about 12 hours at least and that's a long time for a rat they compare them to rats who got their food all day long and all night long the rats who got food all day long all night had no metabolic flexibility they couldn't make a change between burning sugar and burning fats right the rats who got full calories but had it put out at three o'clock in the afternoon had metabolic flexibility the rats who were calorie restricted also had metabolic flexibility so then they looked at longevity the rats that had a full day's calories but eight at three o'clock in the afternoon lived 11 percent longer than the rats who got a full days of calories that they ate all day and all night now for us that equates to a 10-year increase in lifespan now is that on the same amount of calories on the same amount of calories that's crazy well it's not so crazy because the italian athlete study proves the point in humans and what's that this is a really cool study they took italian cyclists and they put them on a training table for three months and most people know what a training table is you guys here it is this is this is the food you're getting and everybody had the the exact same food the exact same amount of calories all they did is change how often the guys got to eat one group they got three meals a day the one group got breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning got lunch at one o'clock in the afternoon had to finish dinner by eight o'clock at night a 12 hour eating window the other group same food got breakfast at one o'clock in the afternoon lunch at four o'clock in the afternoon and had to finish dinner at eight o'clock at night same amount of calories followed for three months same exercise program the group that ate a 12-hour window stayed the same way the group that ate in a seven-hour window lost weight lost significant amount of weight but their performance was the same here's the best part maybe the take-home message you and i know there's probably our best method to predict longevity is a blood test called insulin-like growth factor one igf-1 probably the best indicator of whether m-tor is activated or not the guys who ate the seven hour window their igf-1s plummeted the guys who ate the 12-hour window had no change in their igf-1 so the take-home message was it wasn't the calories the guys were eating it was the time period that they were eating the calories now why is that early on i mentioned that most of us if we have metabolic flexibility start making ketones about eight hours after we stop eating and by 12 hours we've really started you know kicking up our ketones so those are the 12 hour guys they're just kicking into ketone big time and then they stops the ketone production the other guys they're kicking into ketones and then they're waiting another five hours to get their first bite of food so they're producing ketones five additional hours so they got five hours every day to uncouple their mitochondria before they go back and stop the process so it's the cycling in and out of getting the benefits of ketosis without full ketosis that makes all the difference it's amazing okay so now that we understand the mechanism which at least for me is huge once i understand it i don't know there's something happens in my brain i can really get behind it give us a quick thumbnail sketch animal meat plant like how should we be eating what's what's that look like in a rough nutshell well here's one of the big revelations for me um as you know i i'm the only nutritionist that spent most of my career living in a blue zone loma linda california uh it's the only blue zone in the united states by the way and one of the things that shocked me when when i moved to loma linda was the amount of fat and particularly dairy fat in the adventist diet and i met with the nutritionist at the hospital and because the the food in the hospital cafeteria and adventists are vegetarians or vegans about 36 percent of adventists are vegetarians about 5 are vegans number are pescetarians but so a great deal of the adventists are vegetarians or at least pescetarians right and yet 50 of their diet was dairy fat from whoa yogurt 50 50 yogurts and cheeses and i'm going you you're killing you know my patients you know i'm a heart surgeon you know i'm a cardiologist you're killing my patients they go uh no we're not we're the longest living people in the united states no you know do your homework here you're killing our patients so as i was researching this book um i said you know the advents eat a lot of cheese and dairy let's look at the other blue zones so you look at sardinium which is another blue zone you look at the nagoyan peninsula in costa rica which is another blue zone you look at accaria which is a greek island and lo and behold the sardinians are unique in that the sardinians are basically two populations there's the folks who live up in the mountain and the folks who live down by the sea it turns out only the people who live up in the mountain have longevity that's interesting and they're sheepherders and goat herders and they eat huge amounts of goat and sheep cheese the folks who live down by the sea don't aren't goat and sheep eaters and they don't eat goat sheep cheese so there was a beautiful paper we didn't put it in the book but i'll tell you that showed that the difference was the fact that these guys were eating goat cheap cheese so now you go wait a minute what's so cool about going cheap cheese something in there that's uncoupling mitochondria i have a hunch you got it it turns out that 30 of the calories in goat and sheet milk are medium chain triglycerides mcts in fact most of the mct fats are named after the latin word for goat capra there's capric acid caprylic acid goat because goat milk and sheep milk have tons of mcts and remember mcts are unique in that they go directly to the liver and generate ketones so these guys were generating ketones just by eating goat cheap cheese let's jump to the nagoyan peninsula now a lot of bean eating and corn eating in costa rica and on the nagoyan peninsula but what's so unique about the nagoyan peninsula is that they're goat and sheep herders and there's a beautiful paper that showed the difference is the goat and sheep cheese not the beans and corn but cows don't do it for some reason no they don't make mcts let's jump to acaria two factors in acaria they're goat and sheep herders they have yogurt every day they have goat and sheep cheese every day and they eat a weed common weed called purslane as a major part of their diet people see purslane growing in sidewalk cracks all the time it's moss roses portulaca that people have in their gardens they eat it as salads turns out that priscillaine has an amazing short chain omega fat called alpha linolenic acidic profile in the book alpha linoleic acid is magnificent for uncoupling mitochondria so it turns out that four of the five blue zones get their benefit by uncoupling mitochondria and it turns out that the okinawans 85 of the ancient okinawan diet was a purple sweet potato it wasn't rice they don't do it it wasn't soy beans they only used miso it was the purple sweet potato which is full of the purple polyphenols do they not have now the okinawans are eating a western diet so all of these guys were uncoupling their mitochondria all right so eating goat and sheep cheese yeah purple okinawan potatoes and we're gonna uncouple until the end of time it basically yeah so i mean the great thing is you don't have to suffer eating an incredibly boring high fat diet if you have goat and sheep cheese and my wife and i literally have goat or sheep cheese every night before dinner now but you're plant leaning right so oh yeah yeah but you know again when i when we talk about eat the rainbow and everybody talks about eating the rainbow what we're actually saying is eat polyphenol laden plants that's literally what we're saying because the rainbow are those polyphenols right and i go into the ancient spice trade from the middle ages yes you do and it turns out you look at those spices that people were ready to pay exorbitant amount of money for in fact you asked an interesting question in the book and you said was this the original drug trade yeah and that's interesting because when you start to learn the history of like the spice wars like people were killing people in like genocide levels for spices yeah and in fact 50 of the people on these ocean voyages on for the spice droid died jesus and so it had to be something pretty worthwhile this was drug trade and they were the trade they were actually doing was for polyphenols i mean for instance cinnamon was huge clothes were huge and they even have a fun chuckle um the gift of the magi in the bible two of the three gifts were actually frankincense and myrrh which are polyphenols and both are shown to uncouple mitochondria so interesting how they brought those little babies jesus mitochondrial and couples yes they did they knew yes they did it's really incredible dr gundry this is phenomenal the book was really really interesting thank you so much where can people get the book where can they follow along with you uh hopefully everywhere books are sold amazon.com barnesandnoble.com please go to your local bookseller they need your help the pandemic's been a disaster for them they'll have the book i've had multiple new york times bestsellers they stock my books and they'll stock this one um yeah and then your 200th episode's coming out 200th episode of the dr gundry podcast is coming up wherever you get your podcast we're on podcast one the largest podcast carrier um youtube youtube yeah i got two youtube channels find me on instagram please find me at drgundry.com find me at my supplementedfoodcompany.gundrymd.com hopefully find me there it is all right guys the book's incredible i really feel like there's something interesting happening right now with a lot of these discoveries coming together around what's happening with mitochondria uh insulin resistance in an advantageous way that goes awry in a western diet but it's really really intriguing i encourage you guys to dive into it i think it will make it easier to implement the stuff in your life speaking of things you can implement in your life if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,304,094

Keywords: Dr. Steven Gundry, Unlocking the Keto Code, Gundry MD, Tom Bilyeu, Tom Bilyou, Impact Theory, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, interview, health tips, health advice, ketones, mitochondria, free fatty acids, metabolic flexibility, metabolism, weight loss, gluconeogenesis, brown fat, mitochondrial uncoupling, polyphenols, DNP, intermittent fasting, mTOR, restricted feeding, Blue Zones, insulin resistance

Id: 9GP5MChn_tw

Length: 65min 52sec (3952 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022