The INSANE DIET & NUTRITION Guide To Ending Inflammation & REVERSE AGING | Dr. Steven Gundry

probably about three months ago I started getting really itchy and then just like in like my chest would itch like crazy my back would it's like crazy I'm like what is going on because I'm really religious on my diet I don't cheat in my diet but a couple times a year like I'm really hardcore about it and then it started with like a little spot on my neck and then it was like I had to wear like long sleeve everything I was just one big rash it was it was insane and I've never had anything like that in my life and so I was like this I know this is something I'm eating just like in my gut I can feel that that's true but I haven't changed my diet I was like what could this be and before I give you the punchline of what I think it is what when you hear stuff like that where do you go well you're the best way to think about your skin is your the lining of your gut is actually your skin turned inside out that's fascinating and so you have from your mouth all the way down to your anus a tube that's got the surface area of a tennis court and everything that you swallow is actually outside of you as it's moving through the inside skin has to do the same functions as the outside skin and that is kind of keep things away from us but it's got a fatal flaw it not only has to keep things out but it has to let things in like the proteins and the fats and the sugars that we eat so that's where the Mischief can happen but when I see someone with an external skin problem it's always a reflection of what's actually happening in the gut what is that process what does it look like how can people that are watching this now if they're struggling from something how do they begin that process of repair so you know I think the first thing you do is get major lectin-containing Foods out of your diet you won't like me for a couple weeks but most people even within a couple weeks begin to notice a difference now what are those there are foods that we actually evolutionary were not designed to eat beans are so lethal raw that there's very good published studies in humans that they can cause massive bloody diarrhea and there's some pretty good studies in monkeys rhesus monkeys and red velvet monkeys that they can actually cause heart disease and even kidney damage from the lectin content what's fascinating from a human evolution standpoint is that humans up until the dawn of Agriculture were actually very tall creatures most humans were about six feet tall and our brain size was about 15 percent bigger than it is today and when if you look chronologically by 8 000 years 2000 years into grain and bean eating we actually shrunk about a foot and our brain size has never recovered from 10 000 years ago so these are anti-nutrients grains and beans that's number one number two two thousand years ago northern European cows suffered a genetic mutation spontaneous mutation where they stopped making the normal protein in milk casein A2 and began making casein A1 now casein A1 has a lectin-like protein that is converted into a compound called beta caseiomorphine which can cause a direct immunologic attack on the beta cell of the pancreas the insulin producing cell in the pancreas and there's some pretty good evidence and it's accumulating every every year that one of the causes of type 1 diabetes or juvenile diabetes is casein A1 milk and it actually correlates very well in countries that have casein A1 cows they have much higher incidence of type 1 diabetes than countries that have casein A2 cows cheeses for instance are safe from France Italy and Switzerland sheep goats and water buffalo are all casein A2 and what is it about that that's so problematic it actually makes a it's a lectin-like compound that stimulates an immune response so just as I would get from the beans or whatever you'll get the same thing okay so it's a it's a very new addition to our diet now the newest addition to our diet is some of our most precious foods are American North American or South American foods for instance in the nightshade family potatoes eggplant peppers tomatoes and Goji berries so the the nitrates the peel and the and the seeds have the lectins and Native American Indians in the southwest always peel and de-seed their peppers they Char their peppers they deseed them and then they either grind it into chili or eat them that way but they always do that the Italians always peel and de-seed their Tomatoes before they make sauce and is this like a cultural intuition kind of thing where they where do I what I like to do is I go around the world studying cultures and figuring out why did they do this how did they detoxify lectins for instance rice was invented 8 000 years ago four billion people use rice as their staple yet four billion people take the hall off of rice and eat it white and surely there can't be four billion dumb people who don't know any better that white rice is bad for them and brown rice is good for them in fact they've been taking the hall off of rice for 8 000 years same way believe it or not up until William William and Harvey Kellogg in the early 1900s did the idea that whole grains were good for us and if you look back 50 years and when the whole grain goodness really caught on you'll notice that a lot of our current health issues including this epidemic of autoimmune disease didn't occur this epidemic of dementia didn't occur and so whole grains are one of those wonderful myths that got perpetrated by a few individuals the other individual that perpetrated this English surgeon by the name of Dr Burkett and Dr Burkett did some missionary work in Africa in the middle of the sen of the last century and he is a colon surgeon a guy who would operate on colon Cancers and he went down there to do some work and nobody had colon cancer he actually went around and watched and looked at the bowel movements of these Africans who were eating huge amounts of tubers things like yams for instance or celerac root or jicama and their bowel movements were huge and he goes wow you know look at all they're eating all this fibrous stuff and it must be that the fiber in their diet is keeping them from having colon cancer so he came back to England and he espoused the the fiber theory of preventing cancer now the problem is in England they didn't have a lot of these sorts of tuberous foods but they had tons of what's called insoluble fiber in the form of wheat and rye and barley and even oats so he didn't know the difference between insoluble fiber and soluble fiber and so he said we should all be eating fiber and so that's actually where that whole idea that the hall was actually good for you now the ironic thing is he actually died of colon cancer that is very ironic very ironic there's a saying among surgeons that we always die from the disease we treat so well then so that there's so many interesting points in there talk to me about how animal Meats end up because you don't eat hardly any um how how does lectin find its way into animal meat we raise animals with antibiotics and this was discovered by by accident years ago when they were thinking that antibiotics might be needed for crowded conditions of you know Stockyard animals but the researcher found out that by giving antibiotics to these animals they grew faster and got fatter much quicker than the animals who didn't get the antibiotics so it was approved by the Department of Agriculture and the FDA to give antibiotics to animals for the purpose of growth those what we didn't know is that those residual antibiotics are incorporated into the meat the beef the chicken the pork you name it and so we actually every time we ingest Factory raised meats or even farm-raised fish ingest micro doses of antibiotics micro doses of antibiotics are incredibly effective at killing off your microbiome so in the last 40 years we've had this you know incredible you know the the worst storm that could possibly happen for our microbiome and for our leaky gut so then our lectins their elect and like substances in the meat but is there actually lectin itself great question there was just paper published from Ohio State a few weeks ago that shows that lectins and soybeans can be found in the meat of animals that you feed them to now I used to think that this was kind of fanciful in the alternative medicine world you know you are what you eat but you are with the thing you're eating ate and as I started seeing more and more autoimmune patients we had case reports of particularly there's a woman psychologist in La that I talk about in the book who had horrible lupus was on Two drugs and we got her off of all her drugs by following this program and her her lupus cleared she had rashes and um she she came back to see me and she said you know everything's great but I've got this eczema this little rash on my upper eyelids and so we're going through the list I said well something's getting into you and we get to pasture-raised chicken and I said now you're you're eating past your raised chicken cheese oh yeah I eat organic free-range chicken all the time it's my go-to food I said free-range chicken and she said yeah yeah you know organic free range I said well the federal government in 2007 passed a law that says you can keep 100 000 chickens in a warehouse feed them organic corn and soybeans and not let them out of the warehouse except open a door for five minutes every 24 hours and the chicken has the potential to go outside and that is the current government definition of organic free-range chicken wow so she was eating the lectins of soybeans and corn in the chicken that she was eating I trained in London England for children's heart surgery and my kids were four and six years old and they missed Kentucky Fried Chicken terribly in a Kentucky Fried Chicken opened in London now in those days there was so much fish available in England that the chickens were fed ground up fish meal and the the chicken breasts were actually translucent like fish and uh so you know we go to Kentucky Fried Chicken they both grab a drumstick and they bite it under the drumstick and my four-year-old goes oh oh you tricked us this is fish ooh this isn't chicken and I'm going oh no no no no look you know drumstick you know Colonel Sanders that's chicken no it's fish well she was right it wasn't a chicken it was a chicken with feathers that was actually a fish so we have to realize that our chickens are no longer chickens they're an ear of corn with feathers Americans are 70 percent carbon atoms from corn a substance that we were never exposed to until 500 years ago Europeans are five percent corn in fact France in 1900 banned corn is unfit for human consumption wow so what I want people to do is is eat and party like it's 9 999 years ago before we started all this mess and when we do that with people and teach them how to do it it's amazing what happens to them well let's talk about that because if I had only heard some headlines about you I would have thought oh red meat I'll get after it because I eat a ton of red meat and think I'm doing healthy things so you don't eat a lot of meat why not so we found that there was a molecule sugar molecule on the wall of pig blood vessels that's totally different from the sugar molecule that's in ours but it differs by only one actually atom and it's new it's called new 5gc in pigs cows and lambs and we carry what's called new 5ac and I have nothing against red meat but if you look statistically the red meat eaters do have significantly more coronary artery disease and significantly more cancer now why cancer well it turns out that cancers tumors in humans use new 5 GC to Shield themselves from detection by the immune system the problem is we don't manufacture new 5gc nor can a cancer cell which means they acquired it from external sources namely beef lamb and pork now fish doesn't carry it they have the same molecule that we do and chicken have the same molecule that we do so I urge people if they're going to eat animal protein and I I do to use wild shellfish or wild fish as their main source of animal protein do I eat meat yeah I mean do I eat beef I do but I get grass fed and grass-finished beef and I use it as As a treat not as a Mainstay of my diet and then what's your take on eggs the yolk of the egg may be the most beneficial food that has ever been invented and as long as the chickens are fed what they're designed to eat when I actually ask people to mainly throw the whites away so we'll do a four egg omelet but four of them are yolks and just use one white and what is it in the whites or about the whites that make them problematic okay it's animal protein and let's look at another reason not to eat animal protein sadly so animal protein there we there's a sensor in all of our cells called mtor and it senses energy availability in its senses sugar availability but it senses certain amino acid availability so if you avoid or lessen your amount of animal protein your mtor will fall now we have no way of measuring clinically mtor but we can use a surrogate for that which is insulin-like growth factor igf-1 and in my super old people and I study a lot of super olds 95 and above they all have extremely low insulin-like growth factors and why why is that a number you want to get down because super old people always run low insulin-like growth factors they always do and in my upcoming book the longevity Paradox if you look at societies of the blue zones the longest living people on earth the common factor that they all have in their diet they have very diverse diets there's no Universal diet that these people follow and I was a professor at one of the blue zones well Melinda for most of my life the thing that separates or unites all of those various diets is they eat very little animal protein and one of the things we notice about super old people is they run low body temperatures they're running 96 degrees whereas you and I are running 98.6 and they become incredibly efficient creatures my mentor Dr Morrow always said that you only have so many heartbeats and when you use those up that's the end and he's actually right in a lot of ways but the corollary to that is let's suppose Your Design is that you only get so many calories in your lifetime and you can use them quickly or you can spread them out and that's why that's why fasting is so useful and intermittent fasting is so useful because it's actually an easy way just to reduce your calorie intake and it's you know once you learn how to do it it's it's an easy way to make this system work how do you pull it off so I'm a huge proponent of intermittent fasting and fasting in general how do you do how do you make it an easy process so I started uh 11 years ago at January 1st to June 1st but during the week I would eat all my calories in a two hour window from six to eight o'clock at night so the 22 out of the 24 hours every day five days a week I was fasting 22 hours now why six to eight o'clock at night because that's when my wife and I were at home and um now this is as you know for a professional driver on a closed course what most people who try to do this don't realize about 80 percent of us in America are insulin resistant we have much too much insulin production and I won't bore you or the listeners but most people can't do prolonged fasting for even more than a few hours because they can't access the fat that they've stored and they crash and it's often called the Atkins flu or the low carb flu where they have to be able to transition over to using ketones as a fuel now you can get there fairly quickly and we have tips in the book on how to do that you actually have to use exogenous ketones for a while things like MCT oil things like coconut oil even red palm oil there's a little bit of exogenous ketones in butter it's called butyric acid yeah it's um intermittent fasting is really really powerful for alleviating brain fog for changing your relationship to hunger is how I always think of it as just fundamentally different and then getting your Machinery used to actually accessing your body fat and all that we're designed to use up fat we just have to you know use the tricks to get to that fat for most people who are overweight or obese what's so frustrating for them is they try things like intermittent fasting and they're pretty miserable they get headaches and they're very hungry their brain is going hey you know what what's the deal you've cut me off it's water water everywhere and not a drop to drink and we see so many overweight and obese people and I was 70 pounds overweight I was obese running 30 miles a week and going to the gym one hour a day and going why how come I'm such a fekka I couldn't get to my fat stores because I had an elevated insulin level when I first you know got my insulin album wow um what's that now I have a very low insulin no that stuff is fascinating in terms of the complexities of really breaking through and figuring out for you what do you have to do to lose fat keep it off and yeah it's a very complex thing and to that end not necessarily my question is not really about fat loss but um given what we've been talking about lectins and autoimmune and all of those joints aches pains all the things that come along with it psoriasis all of that what should people be eating so we we've got a rough sense of what we should be avoiding but what should we be actively pursuing okay so uh the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth there are three long-lived Societies in the blue zones that use a liter of olive oil per week that's about 12 to 14 tablespoons a day can I use it to saute you can use it to saute believe it or not there's a wonderful paper from the NIH showing that olive oil does not break down into harmful compounds that's amazing but bring olive oil to the table so if you're going to have a steak please pour it on your meat as they do in Italy they always bring a bottle of olive oil so you can have steak Florentina and just drench it with olive oil the steak is there to get olive oil into your mouth broccoli is there to get olive oil into your mouth a salad is there to get olive oil into your mouth so there are wonderful cruciferous vegetables you can have all the bok choy broccoli cauliflower have cauliflower pizzas there's a great recipe in my cookbook for cauliflower pizza uh can I have Japanese sweet potatoes yes please oh they're so good yeah but the purpose of the sweet potato is to get olive oil into your mouth yes which works for me just fine if I can saute or use an air fryer yeah have you done yes everything oh my God they're like french fries they sure are so yeah so those are great for you things like Yucca or Yucca make phenomenal french fries but parboil them first and then put them in the airfryer also any tuber so like celerac root is fantastic jicama so get some guacamole believe it or not true guacamole does not have tomatoes in it that's an American whatever and get yourself some hika mistakes Trader Joe's has them lots of plain old grocery stores have them use that as your dipping chip other thing I like people to get is vegetables in The Chicory family the more chicory you can get in your life Radicchio the kind of Italian red lettuce is pure inulin and your gut bugs will love I love it for you I want to believe that we can sort of age in Reverse so we can get stronger better looking more robust as we age but that is not conventional wisdom but you debunk it right off the bat yeah hit us with it we want to be a Benjamin Button so you know we want to actually de-age and I really think it's possible in fact when people look at my pictures really at the height of my surgical career in the mid 90s and then compare those pictures to me now there's actually no doubt that I'm actually a younger man than I was almost 30 years ago better skin like what are we judging that by better skin better yeah better texture my skin one of the things I talk about in the book extensively is your your skin is actually a mirror of the lining of your gut your the lining of your gut which is the surface of a tennis court is actually your skin turned inside out what is it that makes you think that the gut is so influential in aging specifically because people think of like I'm going to get arthritis it's wear and tear it just is what it is I've used my joints so much that you know they're they're going to be tapped out like it it actually does make intuitive sense and so what you talk about in the book is really sort of kicks people into a new way of thinking about it so why is the gut so tied to what we think of as actual aging so uh here's the deal uh there's a there's a wonderful animal model for aging that involves a little worm called sea elegans uh it only lives about three weeks so you can do an intervention in it and kind of instantly know what's going to happen and so in this model the influence of the bacteria the microbiome and the wall of this little creatures got the the lining of the gut is only one cell thick and they're all kind of held together with what are called tight junctions a locked arm and arm like a game we played Red Rover Red Rover that kids don't play anymore so the bacteria are foreign if you will and there is an interaction with the bacteria in the gut and what this model shows is that as those bacteria begin to break holes in the gut break down the gut then you can show that that is when aging starts and the more the wall breaks down the faster you age the truth is hitting your career goals is not easy you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else but there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day you'll not only get control of your time you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal to help you do this I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any High achiever needs to dominate and you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description all right my friend back to today's episode so let's uh break down what is aging exactly like what are we so I think most people would sort of go to Mobility Aesthetics and maybe accumulation of disease like how would you define aging specifically so aging to me is the either quick or slow breakdown of the gut wall how do we know that well we can take a look at 105 year old people around the world you can look at their microbiome the collection of bugs in their gut they will have a very diverse set of bugs they'll have you know it takes a village this really incredible tropical rainforest and those microbiome that collection will be identical to a healthy 30 year old so what that says is that these healthy 105 year olds are healthy because they have the microbiome of a 30 year old and it's this microbiome that is not attacking the wall of their gut that's actually existing with the wall of God and we I talk a lot about this crazy bug that may be the key to longevity and it's got a great name Ecker monsia mucinophilia say that three times say that once yeah so this bug lives in a mucous layer that aligns our gut and if we're lucky and the way we're designed we're supposed to have a layer of mucus lining our gut before we get to the cells and that mucus is there to number one trap my favorite subject lectins which are plant proteins that are looking for sugar molecules and number two it's to protect the wall of the gut from bacteria that might do us harm so ackermansia lives in the mucous layer and it actually eats the mucus now here's the best part the more mucus it eats the more our gut cells produce mucus and it actually increases the mucous layer and the book is actually lots of tricks on how to make this guy happy because the thicker our mucus the younger we are in fact fun fact metformin we now know works by increasing the amount of acromancia in our gut not by some magical mystical thing happening in our body in fact interestingly about 25 of people when they start metformin get diarrhea and it's actually because the gut microbiome changes dramatically on on Metformin and one of the reasons is that necromancia becomes predominant interesting so at a cellular level what's happening with metformin something that simply triggers the body to produce mucus in general is it is it changing the microbiome you called it a rainforest earlier is it changing the makeup of that rainforest or is it just actually compelling the body to create more mucus no I think it's actually changing it's selecting out for acromancia now how does it do that because there's actually kind of a shag carpeting on the lining of our gut so plants have Roots going into the ground we know the roots actually absorb nutrients because of the soil microbiome all the bacteria all the fungi actually deliver the nutrients into the roots of the plant well we have a root system and that root system is this shag carpet that makes the line camera got a tennis court okay so the reason it's so big in surface area is it loops around itself with little one cell thick protrusions called microvilli okay okay these are our Roots they literally are Our Roots at the bottom of these microvilli or what are called Crips at the bottom of The Cribs there is a pocket of bacteria that are essential and they're down there in storage in fact fun fact we now know the appendix is not useless it's one of these storage systems to repopulate our gut if you lose your appendix you're screwed for that part of your story system but down at the bottom of these Crypts are these little collection of bacteria and at the bottom of these Crypts are our stem cells that actually repopulate these microvilla so what happens is if we damage this lining and boy do we damage the steining swallow and ibuprofen it's like swallowing a hand grenade take some food with Roundup in it Roundup will destroy the lining of your gut it's really good stuff Roundup in itself will destroy your bacterial population all right really fast because I think this is important and for some reason um even though I've had you on the show before I really read the book like the way that you've started talking about some of the places that you're going to find also known as glyphosate in the system that basically they're part of why they're doing it was originally created as a or patented as a antibiotic which that was already shocking and then you said they use it as a way to be able to dry the crops out so they can Harvest them on a specific day very good but then you said they don't no one wipes them off and so it ends up in Cheerios and other things and I was like what like I thought if I was washing my vegetables I was going to be fine so this was a little bit startling to me yeah you know you know a little off subject but they've looked up recently a study of 35 of oat products in the United States and all of them had glyphosate in them some of them at very high levels some of our breakfast cereals most of our granolas most of our granola bars most California wines including a couple of organic wines have glyphosate in them because the the fields are sprayed the weeds are sprayed with glyphosate between the vines to kill the weeds research at MIT has shown that not only does glyphosate kill bacteria because bacteria use the same reproductive pathway that plants use it's the shikamate pathway humans don't use the sugar mate pathway and so Monsanto when they invented it said hey this kills plants but don't worry it doesn't kill humans because we don't use the same pathway for life and everybody said oh that's great you know this is a miracle what they didn't tell anybody is the bacteria use the same pathway and again they patent this as an antibiotic they didn't patent it as an herbicide what else are people doing that is um breaking the bonds or killing the bacteria the antibiotics in their food or that they're taking themselves in fact studied just out this morning shows that women who take antibiotics just you know because a urinary tract infection sore throat have a much higher incidence of heart disease than women who don't that's scary now this gets into something in your book that was super freaky uh I've never heard somebody say and I'm not saying that no one's ever said it I had never heard anybody say until reading this that heart disease is an autoimmune disease yeah so because it ties into this point how is heart disease autoimmune disease how does that start in the gut what does that whole Chain Reaction okay so um Michael DeBakey one of the Premier Originators of heart surgery from Houston Texas would always say that cholesterol has nothing to do with causing heart disease that it's an innocent bystander that literally gets sucked into inflammation at the wall of the blood vessel and I use the example of let's say you know I'm an alien and I'm you know circling above LA and I report back that I'm pretty sure that ambulances cause car accidents because every time I see a car accident there's an ambulance there and the ambulance must have caused it well you know causation Association is not causation so the fact that we see cholesterol in deposits and I see it you know every day in the operating room there's cholesterol in these plaques doesn't mean that the cholesterol cause the plaque so I learned this as an infant heart transplant surgeon what we found was we thought naively that if we got these hearts in as a newborn that the immune system of the newborn would not be mature enough and would say oh yeah that you know that's my heart I don't know any better and it wouldn't attack it well we're partially right but as the years went and we studied these kids they started to get coronary artery disease their blood vessels got thicker and thicker that is super interesting and we're going well what the heck so did they look just like somebody who we would have associated with too much cholesterol in their diet it looks just like diabetic coronary arteries interesting just like and so when you actually look at the blood vessels the kids the lining of the blood vessel is from the donor from a foreigner the blood going through is from the kid and the blood says wait a minute these are foreign cells and they're I'm going to attack them just think of a splinter under your finger you you know it's all red so that's inflammation and what was happening was then cholesterol was basically coming as a patch an ambulance and it was getting caught up in this inflammation so then we look at these adults who obviously don't have heart transplants and you go well that's funny this looks just like a kid who has you know somebody else's heart and there's a attack on the blood vessels that looks identical as if it was a foreign object so that got me going you know this is an immunologic reaction and in just a few weeks and I can't tell you the paper because it's embargo and I'm giving a paper at the American Heart Association vascular biology meeting that makes a pretty good case that lectins which are a foreign protein that can stick to sugar molecules on the surface of blood vessels uh are the cause of atherosclerosis in humans and that removing lectins reduces the markers for that all right really fast then we talked about this in our first issue or first episode but I think it Bears repeating like what's the real quick uh breakdown of lectins and the the rhetoric you started using around kidney beans I found really interesting yeah so lectins are the plant defense system one of the plant defense system I'm pretty doggone a good one plants do not want to be eaten they don't want their babies eaten and they have evolutionary pressures to keep being eaten and have their babies not being eaten and lectins are one of the ways to do this they are sticky proteins that look for specific sugar molecules to stick to and that incites an inflammatory response wherever they stick we talked about joints wearing out joints do not come with a sell-by date or use by date there is no evidence that the wear and tear theory has anything to do with a human body we can constantly rebuild cartilage but like I talk about in the book cartilage is broken down by certain cells and rebuilt by other cells and we can if you had arthritis we could stick a scope in you suck out some of the fluid we could actually find bacterial particles in your joint fluid wow okay so really fast because I know where you're going with that but now now connect those dots how do those parts get into the joint lectins broke down the wall of your gut and on the other side of your gut is 65 of all your white blood cells 65 of your immune system is lining your gut what are they doing there because the gut is where the outside world gets through and they're there to sound the high alert and attack them when they get through one of the reasons we store fat in our gut we're on the reasons we have a beer belly or a wheat belly is we are actually putting fat down where the action is it's to supply the troops that's why we put it there in fact when I operate on people with Advanced coronary disease there is a layer of fat that is on the surface of the blood vessels and there is a perfect correlation to the amount of inflammation and disease in the blood vessel with the amount of fat surrounding the blood vessel whoa this is in humans published studies so we don't this is not conjecture and I reference this in all my books wow okay so here's my understanding of fat 45 seconds ago which may now be changing um one that fat is essentially an organ but I think of it as an energy storage unit that we can certainly access and and break down and turn it into energy that the body is very efficient at Burning ketones certainly the brain um so what exactly is it doing at these areas of inflammation so maybe 15 years ago we thought the fat was actually causing the inflammation because wherever we found fat there were lots of white blood cells what I think recent information is proven is that the fat is not the evil guy that we thought it was that the fat is there because of the inflammation and the inflammation is there because you have a leak in your gut you have a leaky gut yes your white blood cells require huge amounts of energy to do their job okay and so you it just it's just like any army you got to have a supply line you have to have food for the troops all right now let me ask a really difficult question I have no idea if this even makes sense but it makes sense to my Layman's mind so many people have gotten to a metabolic point of dysfunction so extreme that they really never access their fat stores true so if they're existing in that state and they have metabolic syndrome and the body's like yo here's the fat take it I we have inflammation get ready white blood cells you can have all the energy that you could ever use but the body doesn't know how to click over into that mechanism because insulin levels are elevated is the fat getting there and the white blood cells are unable to use it or that's a whole different thing and they're still able to use it that's part of the problem it's part of the problem you know let me use an example I used to use with my patients the the flu virus so the virus has a has a barcode on it that our immune cells or scan literally and say oh you know that's a nasty virus that's the flu virus we know this guy we need to get ready to attack this and we need to get all of our immune system up and running and we need to make sure the immune system has enough power to do this so what do we do we actually make you me hurt hurt to move because if we move the muscles are going to take all the energy if you lay down then all the energy is available for this battle to go after this virus our immune system literally reads barcodes to tell whether somebody is a friend or a foe and lectins have fascinating barcodes that mimic other proteins in our body and when this immune system is ramped up the immune system goes around the body and looks for proteins that are lectins and let's say they come to a thyroid and they go oh my gosh you know this poor woman's thyroid is full of what appear to be lectins they're not quite the same but it's close enough and we should you know shoot to kill and we'll ask questions later okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna walk through the process that we've just discussed because wow for me anyway and for anybody listening that's like me once I can picture it once I can understand it then it's like I can begin to manipulate it and predict what I should do and not do okay so you eat something it could be lectins which you'll find in the skin and seeds of nightshade vegetables is one example or peanuts or peanuts uh so you eat these things they like a glyphosate like um ibuprofen apparently they will go in and they'll disrupt my microbiome they break down the single the bonds between the Single Cell lining of my gut that allows either entire elements of proteins in the case of lectins or pieces of bacteria I'm assuming dying pieces dead pieces there's a broken arm bacteria it turns out when bacteria divide and they do all the time I mean there's trillions and trillions and trillions of them you make about anywhere from a half a pound to a pound of dead cell wall bacterias every day and so those pieces are normally excreted with your poop most of your poop is actually bacteria that's so weird that's what it is so anyhow our immune system is so afraid of bacteria they're supposed to stay on their side of the wall that if they see the signature of that bacterial cell wall it doesn't know that it's not a whole bacteria it doesn't know that it's dead so we can take in human volunteers LPS's dead bacteria inject them into your bloodstream and you will go into septic shock whoa as if we put living bacteria in you whoa because what's actually happening is my immune system is going crazy exactly the immune system doesn't know any better and so holy cow you know there's there's thousands and millions of bacteria all of a sudden in us and you know we got to do something and they just start attacking ah like crazy monkeys going nuts yeah exactly and so those particles whether they're the lectins which by the way on lectins really fast the whole notion of thinking about plants not as these inert things which until starting to read you I always did I just thought appliances is completely inert when you talk about them as being sort of the world's most sophisticated chemical warfarist that's where it's like whoa then you begin to realize maybe what's really going on okay so these lectins or particles of bacteria get into the bloodstream immune system scans it maybe they've ended up in the thyroid maybe elsewhere and it just [ __ ] goes nuts starts attacking you get inflammation which has a whole host of knock-on effects from could be um cholesterol trying to patch could be the fat wrapping around the blood vessels or the arteries or whatever the case may be and you know we're we're now most of us are now convinced that Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and dementia is neuroinflammation okay and what's and what people are picking up on because they're all going to talk about the beta amyloid plaques and you've talked about how some of the companies targeting that may actually be accelerating your onset of dementia which is really terrifying really bad um is that this is again the alien blaming the ambulance for car accidents yeah so most amyloid is actually produced by bacteria in the gut and Dale bredesen keeps saying he says it's not the amyloid in the brain that we should be looking at and no wonder 40 billion dollars of investment in anti-amyloid drugs has been a total and useless failure 40 billion dollars he says because amyloid is produced in the gut by bacteria and we know certain bacteria that make it and certain that don't and why would we give the amyloid producing bacteria what they want to eat which is simple sugars and saturated fats the Western diet plus the amyloid can't get out of the gut unless your gut is leaky it's too big a protein to be absorbed so Dale and I for years have been saying Hey guys you're looking at the wrong spot to go after Alzheimer's so really fast let me ask are you saying the beta amyloid plaques are not actually create it in the brain and that they would never make their way to the brain you won't make them unless they get to the brain and then stimulate more production that's so weird why would the brain have the ability to produce something in the brain that would never be turned on unless it started from a problem in the gut that seems way counterintuitive it's basically so we now we now know we have we have a leaky brain and there's meaning things are crossing the blood-bearing barrier they should not it would have never done it and there's actually a beautiful new paper that probably explains why cholesterol and amyloid and dementia actually um coexist in people with the Apple E4 gene they quote Alzheimer's Gene I got interested in apple E4 which 30 percent of people carry as a heart surgeon because it causes heart disease and Dale bredesen got interested in it because it causes dementia Alzheimer's and lo and behold we now know there's an intimate connection between carrying the Apple E4 Gene and how cholesterol can be mischievous to you and your brain and not necessarily somebody who doesn't carry that Gene what is the Apple e Gene what is it doing great question so it's a it's a carrier molecule of among other things cholesterol and if you carry a four mutation or a double four mutation you do statistically have an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's you also have an increased risk of developing heart disease because it's doing because it changes the way cholesterol is transported interesting it's more efficient it's getting more ambulances to the scene it's actually worse let's suppose the Apple E4 is a Subway and it's carrying cholesterol and it stops at a subway saw stop and cholesterol gets off and it goes into the cell does its thing and the cell says okay I've got plenty thanks a lot you can take the rest of the cholesterol back and take it someplace else so it gets back on the subway and the subway moves on with the Apple E4 Gene what happens is it carries the cholesterol to the cell on the subway but when the extra cholesterol tries to get back in the subway doors are closed super clear all right and that's the problem you know this is a transport promise drop the stuff off just fine but normally it'd be picking up the stuff that you know isn't needed but it so it builds up yeah so it's kind of a double whammy so now let's walk people through step by step because we haven't even gotten to mitochondria in detail yet which we'll get there in a minute it's such an important part of the story but so first I want to begin to help people to understand what it is that breaks the Junction in their gut because that's such a huge part of this uh what is it that triggers the breakdown let's start with that well so there's you know there's three kind of major components so first of all and we don't need to talk about this extensively but lectins are plants read the plant paradox they're plant proteins that were designed by plants to protect themselves and their seeds their babies from being eaten by making their Predator ill to pay attention number two particularly if we're eating a typical American diet with lots of saturated fats lots of fats in general and lots of sugars we in our gut have classes of bacteria and we have 10 000 different bacteria and I divide them into gut buddies good bacteria and gang members gang members love saturated fats and simple sugars and the problem with these gang members is that they divide and die and pieces of these bacteria called LPS's lipopolysaccharides and in all my books I call them little pieces of [ __ ] because that's literally what they are these guys actually hop on fat molecules and ride through our gut even without a leaky gut and when they get to the other side the immune system cannot tell the difference between a living bacteria and a bacterial cell wall it's so impressive that for instance we could take you or me and inject these LPS's into our bloodstream and both of us would go into septic shock as if living bacteria had been put into us so believe it or not in the American diet 24 hours a day were causing leaky gut we're assaulting our immune system with these LPS's and it's no wonder that just from fat we all you know are just a giant ball of inflammation okay so um for my own sake it'll be interesting to tease out some of the ideas around fat but first I want to stay on this point just for a second of how people end up getting in a state where they're prone to having that Junction break so I'm going to make some assertations you tell me or assertions you tell me if these are correct assertions or not um so one that part of the problem is a breakdown in the actual microbiome so the Integrity of a well-balanced microbiome so you've probably done something to assault that microbiome for a long time it could be a very non-diverse diet so some of the bugs are just dying out and so because they're starved to death correct and so you get you know some dysbiosis there you've got people just shoveling sugar in their face that comes in a gazillion different forms that causes all kinds of Havoc not only in the microbiome but elsewhere and you know we'll get into some of the other ramifications I'm sure later and biotics which are causing that glyphosate which is causing that so it's like there are so many things that are assaulting our guts and the reason I'm I'm prefacing all of this is because one thing that I've had tremendous success with in my life is high fat low carb so I'm curious to see like it in my n of one experience fat of certain kinds anyway do not seem to be problematic and of one I'm well aware of that so you know everybody freaking out that that is not empirical data I understand um but you know there's also obviously a pretty interesting carnivore movement so is it certain types of fat is it only fat when you've compromised your microbiome or is it no no fat is in and of itself an assault upon even a healthy microbiome so I'm I'm the guy who's famous for saying the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth so I'm absolutely not anti-fab and in all my books I have a ketogenic plant Paradox chapter of exactly that but having said that interestingly enough most fats even including olive oil are transported across the wall of our gut using these carriers called chylomicrons and it's the chylomicrons that these LPS's hop onto so interesting the chylomicron is a metabolite of some kind no chylomicrons are the moving van that literally carries fat across your gut wall fat transverses your gut well in a totally different way than sugars or proteins the exception to that is medium chain triglycerides now medium chain triglycerides MCT oil are a saturated fat but they are a unique saturated fat in that they're water soluble so they transverse the gut wall without chylomicrons number one and they don't enter our lymphatic system where chylomicrons go they go directly from our gut through our portal vein into our liver and in the liver MCTS actually tell the liver to make Ketone bodies so whenever you eat MCT oil or eat MCTS in other forms you will automatically do not stop do not pass go do not collect 200 you will automatically make ketones in your liver and they'll be released so help me understand the difference then so if if not all fats are bad what are the fats that are bad that are causing this problem I didn't I didn't get that so sadly a lot of the saturated animal fats are some of the biggest Mischief Makers but the other specifically because they're feeding the wrong bacteria they're feeding the wrong bacteria and if you don't have these gram-negative bacteria in your gut in huge amounts you will not produce LPS's lipopolysaccharides so you could have a very high fat diet as long as you don't have these gang members in your in your life and those gang members got there quite frankly by eating a lot of sugar so help me then understand so um there you said there is a time for a carnivore diet I'm guessing and there's a pair a pretty narrow band where you would recommend that but what would that narrow band be so we we will use it uh for an Elimination Diet where we've got someone who is really intolerant to plant lectins in general and we do see these people uh they're totally intolerant to Raw plants most of the time um the lectins in plants can be cooked away there are exceptions beans you cannot cook the lectins away wheat you cannot cook lectins away you can't pressure cook wheat to get rid of lectins Oats have a molecule that mimics gluten corn has virtually identical molecules to a gluten in fact 70 percent of people who are sensitive of gluten react to Corn as if it was wheat and so many patients yeah so many patients that I see on a gluten-free diet for celiac disease for extreme leaky gut they're eating corn because it's gluten free and when we take corn away from them so many of them resolve the problem and you know it's like oh my gosh you know I've been eating corn chips and corn muffins and cornbread and I thought that was you know gluten-free well it is but it cross-reacts so if you if you combine a carnivore diet with what I recommend in the book which is time restricted eating or compressing your eating window you can I want to say get away with a carnivore diet for a period of time there's a very famous young lady who follows a carnivore diet who really wants to get off the carnivore diet but you can't and I think we've seen this and if we were going to really simplify why she can't I'm guessing it's it is simply a question of the microbiome right like if we could repopulate her microbiome whether through fecal microbial transplant or magic whatever but if we could repopulate her gut then theoretically she would be able to get off it the only reason that people get trapped in something like that is because of the changes in their microbiome yes one of the things that I um I think is critically important for our health in so many ways that I talk about in the energy paradox is we now know that the the microbiome number one has to be diverse we know that the Western diet produces the worst kind of non-diverse microbiome that you could possibly you know wish for and you don't wish for that that's number one number two if you don't give the microbiome plant fibers which are Prebiotic fibers these are soluble fibers that we can't digest but the microbiome eats the microbiome can't produce what are called post-biotics and I spend a lot of time in the book talking about this exciting discovery of postbiotics yeah it helped me understand what the difference between a postbiotic and a metabolite is okay so literally when bacteria ferment fibers then they the fermentation process produces both short chain fatty acids like butyrate like acetate like propranate and they produce a series of gases hydrogen gas hydrogen sulfide gas the rotten egg smell methane carbon dioxide nitric oxide we used to think that these were just farts that everybody made and they didn't do anything but about 10 years ago I usually present a talk at the World Congress of microbiota which is which happens in Paris before coven and the organizer is Professor from Paris Dr Marvin Edis he pulled me aside about eight years ago and he says you know the microbiome talks to mitochondria and I'm going oh that's interesting how do you know that he says well it has to because mitochondria the little energy producing organelles in all of our cells are actually engulfed bacteria and the bacteria of the microbiome talk to their sisters and they control what happens to the mitochondria they either tell them to produce energy or things are bad in the engine room cut back on energy production I'm going well this is fascinating but why hasn't anybody discovered this he said you watch we will and sure enough he was right so we now know that these they're now called post-biotics the gases are called gasso Messengers or gasso transmitters and the short chain fatty acids we now know nourish the gut wall number one and also nourish brain cells number two so the discovery of this language and it's literally called a trans Kingdom language where set a bacteria talk to us in particular our mitochondria and it won the Nobel Prize for medicine a few years ago with the discovery is it specifically the gas or is it the gas and the post-biotic so the gas is a postbiotic so are the short the short chain fatty acids correct okay yeah they're all classified what do they do is it is uh Hey nitric oxide has arrived therefore do this and the flip side nitric oxide has not arrived and therefore do that correct so for instance we know that hydrogen sulfide the rotten egg smell if you produce the right amount of hydrogen sulfide you will not produce atherosclerotic disease plaque in coronary arteries despite a monstrously high level of cholesterol in the diet but if you don't produce the right amount of hydrogen sulfide it's as if you know let the hell loose from LDL that sounds like a life-changing uh Revelation I've never heard that before so I can have freakishly High uh cholesterol but if I get the right signal from the my microbiome correct in the form of gas then my body's like we're good we're not gonna form the the plethora sclerotic plaque that's like the hardest word in the English language that's crazy why are people not talking about that because there's no money in it you know as statin drugs or make a lot of money um you know and this is you know when I look back at the man who changed my life 25 years ago Big Ed and watched him clean out the you know inoperable plaque in his coronary arteries did you see him under the knife or was he uh not surgical so interesting enough he had so much plaque in all his blood vessels you couldn't put stents in them you couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't any place to land and like so many people he would go around the country looking for idiots like me to operate on him to take him on that's kind of what I did and he spent six months going to Major centers and I've named them before um and everybody turned him down said yep go away nothing we can do for him well during the six months he went on a diet and he started taking a bunch of supplements from a health food store and he lost 45 pounds in six months now he was still a big guy I call him Big Ed because he was 265 when I met him so he arrives in my office carrying his angiogram the cardiac catheterization from six months previous and I look at it and I go you know everybody's right nothing we can do for you you know sorry and he says wait a minute you know look I've been on a diet I'm taking all these supplements maybe I did something and I said well you know good for you for losing weight but that's not going to do anything in here he says look what do we got to lose let's do another angiogram and I said okay so in six months putting a camera in his veins putting dye in his veins and taking a 3D picture of where the blockages are and in six months time 50 of the blockages are now gone now he's still got blockages but now there's Open Spaces where I could land a bypass so if I knew what I knew now I'd say great job see you in six months they'll probably be all cleaned out but I didn't know that so I said great you know we're going to do an operation on you and we did a five vessel bypass and I'm pretty smart and then I said um tell me about this diet and let me look at those supplements and son of a gun this guy had actually put himself on a diet that was my thesis as an undergraduate Yale on what turned a great ape into a human being and I was so shocked that you know this guy did this that I put myself on my thesis and I lost 70 pounds I was a big fat art surgeon you weren't always running 30 miles a week and going to the gym one hour a day so that's a long way of saying that he actually was the guy who opened my eyes that we've got this all wrong yeah it's it's bananas man every time I talk to you I mean forget your book which is already just chock full of enlightening things but that that's really crazy what is up my friend Tom bilyu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline all right I've just released a class from Impact Theory university called how to build Ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work I will see you inside this Workshop from Impact Theory University until then my friends be legendary you so you say in the book you make a prediction that in the future we're going to realize uh a couple things one you say that you refer to the gut as the first brain and not the second brain but the other thing is this gut gas brain access and I've never heard anybody talk about it before and just to to re-anchor everybody we're talking about energy and your body's ability to generate energy and you've got your gut Which is far more complicated than anybody could possibly realize it's communicating to the organs inside your cell or the organelles inside your cells that generate the actual energy that are themselves bacteria that have their own DNA which is fascinating unto itself and all of this then is also having an effect I won't just say communicating because I think it's more than that having an effect on the brain which is then having massive effects whether it's fatigue whether it's the the fogginess which was the worst part of what I went through so you just blew my mind with the whole gas communication thing and how it can even play out with plaque now mitochondria we have to talk about the the idea of um the the traffic jam that ends up happening I think it's really important for people you've already mentioned time restricted but now talk to me in in the context of that traffic jam because this to me was a big player in why you feel lethargic if you feel like you're lacking energy yeah so mitochondria produce energy from either glucose which comes from the carbohydrates we eat or amino acids proteins that we eat or from pre fatty acids fats that we eat or that we have stored that we produce and normally mitochondria use one of those substances at a time and quite frankly if we actually ate Whole Foods like I talk in the book like our great grandparents did normally carbohydrates sugar molecules would arrive first for processing and mitochondria are really good at using one thing at a time then after the carbohydrates are gone protein takes a long time to digest into amino acids and they arrive second fat literally takes a circuitous root it's not even absorbed into our bloodstream it's absorbed into our lymph system and then comes around later but what's happened with our processed foods and our Ultra processed foods is that we have had made perfect pre-digested sugar amino acids and small fat molecules that literally instantaneously enter our bloodstream and Wham into our mitochondria simultaneously and it's literally since both of us live in the LA area it is like rush hour traffic in L.A with all of these streets leading into our freeways and nothing moves and what we're doing now the average American work by Sachin Panda at the sock Institute in San Diego to show that the average American is eating for 16 hours a day and 60 percent of the food we eat is processed so we're just constant in rush hour it's like the 405 24 hours a day as you and I know and nothing moves so if we look at energy production as literally cars moving down through a freeway it's no wonder that even though we're eating huge amounts of calories we have no energy because we've literally log jammed the mitochondria and just as a fun fun side note the first pre-digested food that was actually advertised as a benefit was Kellogg's Corn Flakes it was actually advertised as the first pre-digest digested food and why anybody would want to have their food pre-digested like most of our food is now you can thank Kellogg's for doing that over a hundred years ago dnp dinitrophenol phenol hmm 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 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 chloroplasts 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 weed 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 Gunnery 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 use long before I use 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 last week I saw a paper that a type of wormwood worked by uncoupling mitochondria and I went what 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 literally just one thing that makes all the difference in a person's health and that is hitting the right dose of mitochondrial and coupling 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 process 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 uh 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 what yeah guess what birds do better than any creature mitochondrial and coupling Bingo there it is 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 yeah that crossed and so are we assuming that due to asteroid impact they became Birds because they were already good at mitochondrial and coupling and that's how they were able to survive that period I think it's a beautiful Theory I don't think anybody's actually you know actually spouted that out loud but you know 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's 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 they were very few humans left yeah we were down six thousand years ago we were down probably to one woman and probably a few guys she's got that small yeah she's mitochondria leave all of us can be traced back to one female whoa yeah all of us and you know just just so everybody knows mitochondria actually uh they have their own DNA their own genome mitochondria are only transmitted from the female you and I know we're just drones we 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 crazy yeah but there's none of the sperm no mitochondria go into the that's real and what's really cool and I've talked about this before I mean what's really 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 um of post-biotics and I talk a lot about post-biotics as well the communication system between the microbiome and their sisters the mitochondria and it's like I mean it's 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 on a couple 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 book shows okay here's some tricks 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 18 fast 16 yeah fast six hours because they 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 name of Rafael De Cabo 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 Bonafide 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 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're literally now gone into a Thrifty Gene mode so far through this correct then you know they're they're so far down the line but the Cabo said hey wait a minute I think we've got this calorie restriction wrong because we're controlling the animals 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 you design 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 we 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 animals ate it quite rapidly and they still actually they ate up all their calories in about eight to twelve hours and then they were fasting about 12 hours at least and that's a long time for a wrap 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 ate 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 to eat 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 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 it a 12 hour eating window other groups 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 mtor is activated or not the guys who ate the seven hour window their igf ones 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 right 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 but the only nutritionist that spent most of my career living in a Blue Zone Loma Linda California 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 five percent are vegans a number are pescetarians but so a great deal of the Adventists are vegetarians or at least pescetarians right and yet 50 percent of their diet was dairy fat from whoa yogurt 50 percent 50 percent yogurts a lot and cheeses and they're going you you're killing you know my patience 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 uh we're the longest living people in the United States you know do your homework you're killing our patients so as I was researching this book um I said you know the Adventists eat a lot of cheese and Dairy let's look at the other blue zones so you look at Sardinia which is another Blue Zone you look at the nagoyan peninsula in Costa Rica which is another Blue Zone you look like at a carrier 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 ah see that's interesting and they're sheep herders and goat herders and they eat huge amounts of goat and cheap cheese the folks who live down by the sea don't aren't goat and sheep herders and they don't eat cheap 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 and 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 percent of the calories in goat and sheep 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 uh goat because of 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 their 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 calves don't do it for some reason no they don't make MCTS hmm let's jump to acharya two factors in acaria their goat and sheep herders they have yogurt every day they have goat and sheep cheese every day and they eat a weed a 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 it turns out that purslane has an amazing short chain omega fat called alpha linolenic acid than a 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 percent of the ancient Okinawan diet was a purple sweet potato it wasn't rice they don't do it that wasn't soybeans they only use miso it was the purple sweet potato which is full of the purple polyphenols anymore now the okinawans are eating a western dye 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 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 of the people on these ocean voyages on for the spicejaroid died Jesus and so you 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 I even have a fun chuckle um The Gift of the Magi uh 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 so they brought those little baby Jesus mitochondrial and cups yes they did yes they did uh I was on my way to Orange County to a PBS fundraiser um and I get a call on the phone on the way down to Orange County that the person a young Millennial who was going to do the fundraiser with me uh called in and said she didn't have it in her to come in today to uh to do the fundraiser and I thought oh gosh you know anything wrong they said no she's just you know she's exhausted and she's tired and she just doesn't have an inner but don't worry we got another person we'll be fine but that phrase stuck with me for for days afterwards that you know a millennial would be calling in and saying I don't have it in me and I realized that when I first started my restorative medicine practice over 20 years ago at least half the people I saw uh would we would use a medical code a diagnostic code called fatigue and malaise and uh it never really then it always went away and so it never really occurred to me that I was you know treating an energy problem but when she said that I said oh my gosh you know I'm an energy doctor all along and I need to tell people what's going on so if that was the impetus for the book all right so one of the things you go into in the book um is around cellular energy and so and mitochondria specifically and I've been asked a lot about how I maintain my energy levels you know whether it's running a company or speaking or whatever I once stood and answered questions for 11 and a half hours um and one of the questions was you know how how do you generate the energy and my answer was well the only real truthful answer to that is it's at a cellular level so it has to do with diet it has to do with exercise and you do get some benefit from psychological energy but I had always been you know since my sort of mid to early 20s I've been working out I've been very conscious about my diet and so it just sort of felt second nature until during covid probably I don't know this is maybe six months ago now I started to get psychotically fatigued brain fog just like so tired I I was like am I losing my will to fight to live it was really unnerving and I thought okay what would you tell somebody if they were asking you this question and I said well my answer would be I don't know what's going on with you but I promise it's your diet and so I was like okay well if that's true what's going on in your diet and uh for me I started thinking about the only thing that I was eating a lot of was this like pecan pudding and it was delicious and I loved it the most I can't even begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this thing and because it was like raw pecans and everything I thought you know it can't be that but it's the only thing I need a lot so let me cut it out and it changed in like 48 Hours it was surreal so I know the punch line because I've read the book but walk people through how it's possible that something I'm eating simply by removing it could restore my energy yeah the I about eighty percent of the patients I see now are autoimmune disease patients who have kind of been all over the country all over the world and have not gotten a resolution in their autoimmune disease or they're on immunosuppressant drugs and they don't want to be and what we find a hundred percent of the time and I can assure you it's a hundred percent of the time that all these people suffer from leaky gut and or you know intestinal permeability if you want the exact term and 2500 which is just for people that don't know it is is literally the aligning of our intestines is the same surface area as a tennis court we it's only one cell thick right it's only one cell thick and the cells are stuck together with what are called tight junctions so everything we eat including all the bacteria that live in us are only one cell away from us from and 80 percent of our immune system white blood cells are sitting right behind this wall waiting for troublemakers to come through and your example is actually really good hidden in one of my books the plant Paradox cookbook the original one there's a little line that says pecans have a very interesting lectin and I can't tell you the number of people who are sensitive to the lectin and pecans particularly if you eat them raw so you quite frankly undoubtedly are one of those people who are sensitive to pecans and these little Pro proteins lectins actually made your gut porous so so what well the whole book is literally about that your immune system requires huge amounts of energy to do battle with whatever is coming across your border and it really fast on that that was one thing from the book that um I was wondering is is there data coming out because in the book you talk a lot about the hadza tribe the studies that are coming out how people compared you've got the hot stuff moving around all the time hunting and Gathering and then you've got somebody sitting at their desk and when you measure the energy output of those two people you would think the sedentary person was way lower in energy output but they're actually the same now is it just your hunch that that isn't true or is there actual data around the um the sort of energy requirements of the um inflammation basically but I'll use a great pre-covered example that I use in the book you catch the flu the and everybody gets really achy you feel awful you don't want to move you don't want to read you don't want to think you just want to you know binge watch Netflix laying in your bed and everybody says well yeah of course that's the flu virus the flu virus is causing that to happen and in fact it isn't there's nothing in a flu virus to do that but our immune system recognizes the flu virus as a troublemaker and mobilizes the troops and the troops if you will require huge amounts of fuel so we ration fuel to energy hungry mussels and we ration fuel to then energy hungry brain how do we ration fuel the muscles we make muscles hurt so that it doesn't feel good to move how do we ration fuel to the brain we make the brain not work and so your immune system takes all this fuel for the fight and it's fascinating to see that you know what we thought was the flu virus causing the problem in fact is our own immune system saying you lay back sit down for the count I need all this energy and in fact that's I think in other data shows that that's what happened to these sedentary workers their energy expense was just the same as if they were walking 10 miles a day but they were burning the fuel of inflammation the fire of inflammation as I call it yeah one thing that um you know sort of bringing these pieces together in my own life my wife went through a really brutal um gut problem many years ago which frequent listeners of this podcast will have heard many many times uh and I remember she used to say it just feels like my gut is inflamed it feels like my gut is inflamed and I had heard people talk about that the immune system is right there and I was like why would the immune system be in the gut that seemed so bizarre and then when you think okay well if that Junction breaks something gets in now the body has to go crazy you really are inflaming that whole area now the question becomes is that what's causing the fatigue or like the just the energy reallocation or is this something that has to do with leaky brain and foreign substances are getting into the brain that cause like that brain fog like how does this all begin to manifest as symptoms yeah that's you're exactly right number one it's enough in and of itself to steal enough energy to have to be tired but I think more importantly we're now realizing for the most part if you have leaky gut you will have leaky brain in in one of two potential ways and I outlined them in the book one which is probably the most frightening is that we have a blood-brain barrier which is a single set of cells that keeps really anything in your bloodstream away from your brain which is kind of a Sacred Space it's it's so sacred that let's suppose you get a brain tumor or you get an infection in your brain we can't give you chemotherapy through your veins and it will won't get in your brain we can't give you antibiotics through your veins and it won't get into your brain it's that protected yep what we're now able to do with a blood tests is actually fine disruption of the blood-brain barrier and number two we actually see inflammation in the brain itself particularly with these Secret Service protecting agents of the brain the microglia they are actually the immune system of the brain and they're they're handlers for the neurons which are the real important cells of the brain and the microglia are you know the bodyguards the handlers and if the microglia sense that there's problems in the gut that already there's lack of a better word an army that's penetrated our borders that the Army will soon be up to the brain the microglia actually cause neuroinflammation and literally begin to preemptively preemptively here's as I talk about in the book neurons send out these dendrites to talk to other neurons very much like an airport has A Central Terminal and then satellites where you go out to catch the planes think of the neuron as the Central Terminal and the satellites or where you're going to catch plane or talk to another neuron if the microglia think that an attack is imminent they go oh my gosh we gotta call the guys back from the satellites so since the dendrites are actually how we talk to another nerve how we think how we create memory imagine if microglare are actively popping these guys you know away no wonder we have brain fog and you know it was something so you're 80 years old and you don't think as clear as you did when you were 30 and we go yeah you're 80 years old that's okay but now we have 30 year old women particularly who have brain fog and so many times their physician go oh you're a young mother you have two kids um you know you're not getting enough sleep of course you have brain fog but when we see these people because they're not getting any better and we actually do these tests they light up you know their blood grain barrier with all these inflammatory markers and we see this neural inflammation that we can now measure this morning I saw a 48 year old woman who has Parkinson's disease 48 years old yeah healthy as a horse you know kind of out of the blue after started after a funny viral illness a couple years ago but long story short we've been working with her for about six months and I saw her back for her visit and when we first checked her she had not only leaky gut she had markers for an autoimmune disease lupus anti-nuclear antibody and she had leaky brain and she actually had an attack on The Movement Center of her brain anti-cerebellum antibodies and we're going well no wonder you know you got this you know let's get after this and we've now been six months each time we check her her leaky gut is better and better it's about a halfway to where we want her her autoimmune markers are gone her leaky brain is about half of what it was when we started and her anti-cerebellar marker is pretty much gone still mildly positive and so you can kind of track what's happened to her by looking at how leaky your gut is and we've gone through what she's sensitive to and some really healthy foods she's sensitive to like you were sensitive to a really healthy food and once you get a leaky gut even what would normally be a healthy food if it can get past this leak your immune system says hey wait a minute this isn't supposed to be in here in this form it's supposed to be digested and what are you doing there and it literally makes an antibody just like if you've got a shot for covid you made an antibody to the spike protein in covid so we make an antibody to pecans and it's like what what the heck so every time you eat pecans your immune system goes wow you know we gotta we've got to sum of the troops this is awful we've got to take all the energy to help poor Tom I used to struggle profoundly with inflammation and when I discovered keto it changed everything for me it changed 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 research is first at Boston and then at the male 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 falling way behind his mother brought him to me in my clinic in Santa Barbara and we put them 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 went from meds to meds and keto or keto only keto only we took him off his mouth wow he woke up uh it 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 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 19 50s 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 procedures once phenobarbital and dine Lantern 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 the MCT oil could convert into ketones in the liver and will 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 and 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 in taking 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 5.5 at least 0.5.81 from one tablespoon of Keto 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 food how do you deal with that most people cannot especially if they've talked about it publicly they can't change their position hopefully that's make 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 Cahill 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 um we didn't have 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 is 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 inherited as well so we're really good at storing fat in fact yes we are yes we are in fact I'm better than most we're called the fat ape for a reason we we best always 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 ornament 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 the inside of ourselves they have their own DNA which is crazy and I still don't understand how that's 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 Bunches of them unlike our high school biology textbook that might have said 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 or write 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 it can burn fat yeah we should be a hybrid car 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 of normal weight individuals have no metabolic flexibility 50 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 88 cannot shift between burning sugar and fat if you're overweight 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 uh 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 it 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 stop 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 he's 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 yeah 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 and you're bearing for several hours a night until you eat again neurons die and 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 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 people understood that so where do you begin to go wait a second we have a problem here well okay so we can make ketones we make ketones from free fatty acids they go to the liver and the liver generates ketones now liver interestingly enough can't use ketones as a fuel they're incapable they don't have the enzyme to do it can it use free fatty acid yes okay liver loves free fatty which it gets as fat as 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 but 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 known 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 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 the brain it turns out even a 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 is 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 coat because ketones are not a super fuel they are actually a signaling molecule that tells mitochondria to protect themselves at all cost 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 I read a silly little paper it's actually maybe one of the most important papers I've ever read by Dr 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 talk about a paradox and he said look in extremists 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 and signs 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 Turbo Charge and supercharge your mitochondria to eke out every lost drop of energy and that makes incredibly just intuitive It Feels Right feels really good but what bran said no you're wrong they do the exact opposite and you go no 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 Mido 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 of mitochondria and I liken this long tube to the hottest hippos 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 they let the imagination run some energy get some energy so make some energy and this club is is 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 or flying and beer is flying and there's bouncers in the club to try and calm this down and everybody knows about antioxidants 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 there's only two so they're the bouncers so getting back the 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 chain 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 uh 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 thirty percent just here eagerly normally and you're not in Starvation mode just normally you a nice fitting 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 and 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 in it 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 uh 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 the trouble is a foot and to protect yourselves 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 got to 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 slept 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 can't be because the mitochondria are more efficient because if they're more efficient they can get more calories more food more energy for the buck 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 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 yeah 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 as Siri but that's what happened to them yeah you actually should raise your temperature um just as a fun fact you ever notice when you have a cup of coffee or a 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 one couple 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 grew 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 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 survival 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 then 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 we'll 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 peop 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 Joe can you imagine being able to fit into your skinny dress and not see how good you look in the mirror uh 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 a kicks off is just nothing else in fact looking back um at gundry MD we have a number of products with thermogenic compounds compounds that we've known for years produce thermogenesis and 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 fecal microbial transplants which are really interesting so I think we have sort of a really basic understanding your book goes into a lot of details so people should definitely check it out because it's so interesting the more that I understand the stuff but we have a basic understanding so far in the time that we've had together today now how can fecal microbial transplant help with that why does that work and why didn't it get widespread adoption so back in the 70s when broad spectrum antibiotics came out they they were truly Miracle drugs because before that we had to actually culture a bacteria find out what antibiotic it was sensitive to and then give that antibiotic you know and that would take oh gosh 48 72 hours to do when broad spectrum antibiotics were invented it was you know it was a shotgun approach no worry we don't know we don't have to know what you have uh here take this we're going to wipe out everything which was great in a lot of ways but what we didn't know was that we also wiped out every last living bacteria for the most part in our gut and we're so naive back then that we didn't realize that that microbiome was incredibly important and so we developed a lot of people all of a sudden with what was then called pseudomemembranous intercollitus it's now called C difficile Clostridium difficile and so these guys got horrible infections in the lining of their gut and nobody had any treatment for it these people were dying in hospitals after getting broad spectrum antibiotics and we're going what the heck so uh my one of my mentors who is the chairman of department of surgery at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta um said you know this has got to be we've wiped out most of the bacteria in the gut and this is an ecosystem where there are checks and balances so all of a sudden now we've wiped out most of the checks and balances and there's probably a rogue bacteria that's taken over it's party time you know so clever party time so he says we got to get you know good stuff back and he said where are we going to get that and he starts looking around at the medical students true story and he said you know medical students they're pretty healthy so once a week this is the mid-1970s they would pass around this plastic bucket it was called the honey pot and we'd take it into the John and take a crap you know you actually had to hold it you know get get to school and you know take a crap and he'd take it to his lab and never forget we had wearing blenders you know and marginize all this medical student pooped and put it in enema bags and give these people fecal enemies this is in the 70s and he would have before and after pictures and he'd go to meetings and show you know this horrible inflammation this horrible infection in the colons and then a weak layer it's pristine it's beautiful you know people are singing Kumbaya inside the colon and and everybody goes oh he's making this stuff up that can't happen and so people did not believe it because we had no idea no one had had sequence the human microbiome that was really only five years ago well now since the sequencing of the human microbiome it's you know you go well of course you know there were 10 000 different species of bacteria in in you and me and in fact a month ago they found another thousand and normally there are beautiful checks and balances but it's when these checks and balances get disturbed by taking a round of antibiotics or as simply as eating meat where the chicken or the pork or the beef was given antibiotics you know when we eat that they have residual antibiotics in them and we eat the antibiotics talk to me about the hollom hollow hollow biome yeah yeah I so there are a number of researchers that think we should use holobiome rather than microbiome microbiome pretty much attempts to define the bugs that are living in our gut right we have an oral microbiome and we actually have a cloud of bacteria that live in the air around us and there is this Theory which I really do like that our personal space is actually determined when your holobiome your Cloud bumps up against mine dude that would be so weird well if that's true well I mean because you feel something like yeah yeah you feel that and there's certain people that you're you're allowing in closer right and it gets so Twilight zoning that I you know I always play that music in my head we know the kissing for instance is a universal human great ape and often animal characteristic and there's some pretty cool wacky suggestions that I really like that kissing you are exchanging your oral microbiome and your bacteria are actually deciding if your person next to you is compatible with them you've heard of that whole study where they have women just smell these t-shirts and rank them in order of desirability and the women are like I have no idea why you're making me do this but they put them in order of most genetic diversity or difference from their own to uh most similar to their own yeah that's surreal yeah and women you know and I I say this as often as anyone else say women have a gut feeling far better than men and that is because women actually are far better capable of listening to their microbiome and I get kind of deep into the fact that our microbiome is inherited from our mother we get it from our mother and all of the mitochondria the little energy producing organelles in us are actually engulfed bacteria that are inherited from our mother and they have their own separate DNA and their maternal DNA and there is now actually very good evidence that the bacteria in our microbiome communicate via text messages that now have been measured to mitochondria they're sisters and about how things are going in the the body in the outside world it's so crazy so and so women trust your gut yeah uh going back to the microbiome coming from your mother I've become probably a little like oversteppy like I normally like hey whatever you want to do until I hear somebody saying that oh I have a plan C-section so look if you need one obviously get one Jesus absolutely but if you don't need one I'm like make sure that you smear the baby in the vaginal fluid at a minimum and people always like whoa but just trying to pass that microbiome on and you said there was a recent study that came out about autism and fecal microbial transplants and how the link between a successful maybe the wrong word microbiome and an unsuccessful one can manifest as autism talk to me about that study yeah there's um we've known for actually a long time since the microbiome was identified and sequenced and we know that number one kids with autism have a lot more irritable bowel they have a lot more GI issues and they actually have a very different microbiome than quote normal and there has been a suggestion for years that maybe it is that microbiome that is contributing I'm going to say cause autism there's even more exciting work in Gynecology and obstetrics that the might there is a microbiome in the vagina that we know about but there is a microbiome of the placenta itself and there's some actually exciting work that perhaps the microbiome of the placenta is the most important in terms of educating the neonate the fetus's immune system do you only encounter that as you're actually born in you go through it during so the whole time you're washing it then why would a C-section be so problematic well so one of the theories of autism is that this is an in utero problem that happened to the kid before he was born or she was born reasons I say he is the boys have it far more than girls and that now there is interesting evidence that we should be working on the maternal microbiome during before pregnancy and certainly during pregnancy we need to start early in making sure the microbiome is right so getting back to autism there was a recent study just published and don't quote me on the exact details but it comes out of Australia and because of this connection with autistic kids having funny bowels and a funny microbiome they with an Institutional review board permission did oral fecal transplants in a large number of autistic kids and they did this for about six weeks almost immediately 50 percent of the autism symptoms subsided fifty percent and the paper has now followed these kids for two years and the fifty percent reduction in symptoms has continued wow and if that does make the case that you know the gut and the microbiome has such an incredible effect on the brain I don't know what does no kidding now that we know that and your your book goes into great detail including recipes and all kinds of stuff what's a quick overlay of lifestyle and dietary choices that people should make if they want to die young at a ripe old age as the sub headline of the book goes so we know that there are ways to give these good guys like echromancia what they like to eat and they love resistant starches they love tubers like yams like jicama like taro root like Yucca or Yucca they love mushrooms and there's a beautiful recent study out of South Asia of people basically having a 90 reduction in Alzheimer's if you eat two cups of mushrooms a week what so there is this incredible compound in mushrooms I'll probably fracture it ergo theonine thionine that actually crosses the blood-brain barrier better than turmeric curcumin and actually protects against neuroinflammation and it turns out that mushrooms absolutely positively feed these friendly bacteria and mushrooms contain this compound called spermidine it's a polyamine that study after study shows promotes longevity okay so those are some of the things also inulin containing compounds so inuline is present in chicory you can buy inulin made out of Yacon route and any store as a sweetener so inulin feed Zachary moncia and so it's present in chicory it's present in Radicchio Belgian endive uh Jerusalem artichokes sunchokes they're just pure inulin so the more of this stuff you eat the more of this bug you're going to grow so that's number one so eat for them number two exercise beautiful study in women women have more Alzheimer's disease than men and so you look at an exercise program in women women who exercise regularly routinely kind of from midlife on have a 90 reduction in Alzheimer's whoa and compared to women who don't exercise routine and in the women who are going to get Alzheimer's it's 11 years later than if they didn't exercise so I mean think about that if we had a drug that had a 90 reduction in Alzheimer's yeah how much would we pay for that you know you and I would be a problem every day uh we wouldn't have 40 billion dollars wasted on amyloid drugs but it's available by housework by gardening by getting a dog and walking it twice okay that's interesting so when you say housework why do you say that I think people will be confused by that it turns out that uh give me an example my my mother actually scrubbed her floors until the day she died at 90. uh even though there were swifters and things like that and she did it as an exercise program exercise changes the gut microbiome to a friendly microbiome meditation yoga changes the gut microbiome seems impossible it's so interesting that they're in a two-way communication yeah yeah it literally and there's there's even some really cool stuff that yoga postures actually move this microbiome around in your gut and they actually get signals probably electrical signals so all these chakras that you know in eastern medicine it's probably all this part of this really amazing communication system that Western medicine is just going oh come on that's all Voodoo yeah because we couldn't measure it before yeah so exercise is really important lastly I really want people to have a brainwash day at least once a week so in the last couple of years we've learned that there is a lymph system in the brain called the glymphatic system and it no one actually believed it existed but now it exists and the Brain actually in deep Sleep which happens very early in the Sleep Cycle goes through a literal wash cycle shrinks by about 20 percent and all of these toxins like amyloid like Tau like bad pieces of protein are actually squeezed out of the brain like ringing out a sponge and it happens in deep sleep and happens early in the Sleep Cycle so we have to have a lot of blood flow to our brain to do that the brain uses huge amounts of blood flow but we have to have even more so the evidence is that you need about a three or four hour window before the last meal of your day before you go to sleep why because digestion is actually really energy expensive so we put huge amounts of blood flow down into our gut if you eat near the time you go to bed that blood flow is down in your intestines and it doesn't go up to your brain so there's actually a recent study of men who had unstable angina or heart attack and they followed those men who ate late at night had a much higher incidence of a new engine or new heart attack and so they're all really actually interconnected so one day a week I asked people finish your last meal at six o'clock if you go to bed at say 10 right if it's 11 finish it at seven do not snack before bedtime and allow yourself to have a brainwashed better yet skip a meal and that gets in probably to the fourth point you've got to have periods of extended lengths of time between eating we were supposed to go prolonged periods of time before our next meal and break fast we've talked about this before it ruins your you know your morning stuff was you break your fast and there's no definition of when you know it's supposed to be breakfast that was from the Dural Kellogg's Cornflake company telling people they had to eat breakfast um yeah yeah that the whole lifestyle that you just painted like makes all the sense in the world like when you start looking at the research even just like so one I can certainly speak to the anti-inflammatory properties of a lot of things that you're talking about which that has been revolutionary in my life intermittent fasting has had a whole host of benefits for me anecdotally and then certainly I think there's a lot of data backing things up you've talked a lot about how eating is just an excuse to get olive oil in your mouth man I hope you're right about that one because I have really taken that to heart there does seem to be some pretty tremendous benefits to that it's it's really pretty extraordinary yeah I mean it really is um you know and I I show a lot of studies I think the probably the best one is the predimed study out of Spain where just simplistically they took 65 year old people divided them into three groups one they all eat a Mediterranean diet Spain one group had to use a liter of olive oil per week the second group had the the equivalent calories in walnuts primarily the third group had a low-fat Mediterranean diet followed for five years the initial study was look at memory the olive oil group and the Walnut group had improved memory after five years the low-fat group lost memory the people in all groups with known coronary artery disease or stroke the olive oil group had a 30 percent reduction in new events the low-fat group had an increase a continued in advance so this stuff is miraculous it actually grows neurons the polyphenols and olive oil and here's another crazy fun fact now there's a chemical that I talk about called tmao discovered by the Cleveland Clinic tmao is made by our gut bacteria primarily from animal proteins particularly choline and carnitine cholines and egg yolks we need choline for our brain but our gut bacteria love it they make it out of these and tmao damages blood vessels do the Cleveland Clinic's credit they said well wait a minute the Mediterranean diet seems to be very good for preventing heart disease and yet these guys eat fish they you know they eat cheeses they eat salamis what gifts so they actually discovered that there are polyphenols in certain olive oils balsamic vinegar and red wine that paralyze these enzyme systems in the bacteria it doesn't kill the bacteria paralyzes the enzymes so you could eat all the choline and carnitine you want but you will not make tmao so olive oil balsamic vinegar make a spritzer of balsamic vinegar and sparkling water yeah you got me on that yeah and a half glass of red wine and so you will prove you can still have your you know your meat and eat it too not much I like that all right tell people where they can find your book uh uh anywhere on amazon.com barnesandnoble.com audible I actually did the audible of this book so if you want to hear my voice longer and longer I read the book my man uh you can find it at gundrymd you can find me at drgundry.com come to my YouTube channel I've got a podcast the Dr Henry podcast yes I'm on Instagram Facebook um what's the one change that people could make that would have the biggest impact on their longevity the one change and I you know I get on my soapbox is you got to get your vitamin D level up take at least 5 000 IUS of vitamin D no a day a day the University of California San Diego has shown that the average American to have an adequate vitamin D level should have 9 600 international units a day the average American whoa if you look at cancer patients they almost always have a low vitamin D every one of my patients with autoimmune disease walks through the door with a low vitamin D if you look if you like The telomere Theory of Aging where the little caps on the end of chromosomes and it's a good theory of Asian the higher your vitamin D level the longer your telomeres are interesting and vitamin D getting back to those little Crypts down in the down in our shag carpet those stem cells actually have to be stimulated to move by vitamin D and if you don't have vitamin D they will sit there and you will have a leaky gut there it is so that's number one number two take timed release vitamin C twice a day or chew a 500 milligram vitamin C four times a day all right we're one of the few animals that don't produce vitamin C and you gotta have it for so many functions particularly of women they have to know that collagen will not repair all their wrinkles without vitamin C you know instead of trying to patch up these problems I think the idea of letting our genes keep us healthy is really um it's it's it's kindness It's really about about reconnecting to that incredibly beautiful gift that we've received from all who have come before us

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,593,033

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: H6aKwKfEk8k

Length: 177min 8sec (10628 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023