This Man Thinks He Knows What Causes All Disease | Dr. Steven Gundry on Health Theory

in today's episode of health theory with dr. Stephen Gundry we talked about why eating too much meat may actually shorten your life how these things called lectins that you're probably stuffing your face with cause leaky gut the single healthiest food on the planet and the seemingly healthy foods that are actually probably killing you everybody welcome to health theory today's guest is dr. Steven Gundry he's a heart surgeon medical researcher former president of the American Heart Association and New York Times bestselling author of the deeply fascinating book plant paradox he's performed 10,000 surgeries and holds the record for longest survival of a pig to baboon heart transplant and what I want to know is how do you somebody who eats a primarily plant-based diet how did you come to the conclusion that there are some plants that are okay and some that are actually outright bad for us well it actually all started with a major at Yale University as an undergrad back in the dark ages you know where we could actually design our own major and we could actually develop a theory that we wanted to defend and my theory was that you could take a great ape manipulate its food supply and its environment and prove you would arrive at a human being over generations over your long period of time okay and so I actually defended my thesis and got an honors and gave my thesis to my parents and went off to become very famous heart surgeon cardiologist and one of the things I discovered way back then was that we evolved in concert with the plants that we're eating or the animals that were eating but back then we were eating leaves and there's actually now evidence that the thing that makes us human as opposed to a chimpanzee is there's a distinct change in the gut microbiome between when chimps and gorillas evolved off and we evolved now you can actually tell a human being by their distinctive gut microbiome instead of a chimpanzee for instance we share 98% of all of our genetic material with chimps and gorillas and yet we're profoundly different and what makes us profoundly different from them is not our genes it's actually the genes of our microbiome unfortunately my wife has had some very real experience with just how important the microbiome is you're the only person I've ever heard talk about that I'd love to hear more about that so if we were going to prove your thesis out and what would we be doing to the diet to create that effect in the microbiome that would express such a radically different species lectins are plant proteins that part of one of the major defense systems of a plant against being eaten one of the things that's hard for us to conceptualize is that plants do not want to be eaten they actually have a life and they were actually here first when insects arrived plants had a problem because they couldn't run they couldn't fight they couldn't hide but they have a huge advantage and that's their chemists they can turn sunlight into matter and we haven't figured out how to do that yet so what they do is they make proteins that are sometimes called sticky proteins or lectins that stick to certain sugar molecules in us particularly in our gut lining just by the way if anybody has sinusitis or runny noses when they eat certain foods you are actually producing sugar molecules in your mucus to trap lectins and I have so many people who had chronic sinusitis including myself when we finally got lectins out of our diet they completely went away so lectins bind to sugar molecules lectins cause the wall of our gut to actually separate and people have heard the term leaky gut I used to if you'd asked me fifteen years ago if I thought leaky gut was was a problem I would have said it was pseudoscience now with the advances in understanding how the microbiome works and an understanding how lectins work I think everyone who has a disease has a leaky gut now I'm pretty dumb Hippocrates said this 2500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut so one of the things we know about research is research is research look again because somebody already knew this and Hippocrates knew it 2500 years ago it's really interesting and I'm I have heard that quote so many times and it's one that I just accept and go oh wow what a great insight what do you think led him to that at even now people have a hard time conceptualizing the microbiome because it's invisible so how did he come to that conclusion he had this interesting theory he believed that we all any creature has what he called the translation is green lifeforce energy that actually wants perfect health for that creature and that it's a driving force unfortunately he believed as I do that there were external forces that were preventing that expression of green lifeforce energy so he thought the purpose of a physician was to identify those external forces that were keeping the green lifeforce energy from expressing itself and remove them or teach the patient to remove them and then the patient would heal him or herself because the green lifeforce energy would take over now that sounds kind of New Age and touchy-feely but he was absolutely right and one of the things that I guess I and and other people have discovered is that one of those external contributing factors are lectins and if you remove certain lectins things you'll start to heal yourself let me give you another example if we're out on the ocean in a boat and the boat springs a leak in the bottom of the boat and water is rushing in we have two options the one option is we grab a bucket and we start bailing the bigger the hole is like the old commercial we're gonna need a bigger bucket and I think that most systems for healing the gut are just giving people buckets to bail whatever is it's a lot easier to plug the dumb hole and then you don't need buckets and so if lectins are one of the major ways that we get leaky gut then if we get lectins out of our diet that's how we plug the holes unfortunately for us the lining of the gut is only one cell thick and so imagine one cell thickness keeping everything you eat or everything living in you like bacteria separated from you and they're all held together locked arm an arm with tight junctions so what dr. Fasano showed with gluten which is a lectin is that gluten makes its trouble by causing leaky gut so once those spaces are open not only do lectins get through which are foreign proteins they're splinters but also pieces of bacteria call or living bacteria also get through the wall now on the other side of the wall is your Border Patrol your immune system in 65% of all the white cells in our body are up against this wall why are they there because that's where the problem is gonna happen if it's going to happen so when these foreign proteins get across the wall the immune system basically sounds the alarm sounds the air raid sirens we go to threat level five we scramble the fighter jets and we actually go to war status and as I talked about in the book that war status has manifested in multiple ways whether it's brain fog whether it's arthritis whether it's depression or anxiety whether it's coronary artery disease which is how I got interested in and in the first place and all these things come right back to what Epocrates said 2500 years ago that if you want to cure the disease head to the gut and I see this for instance I had so many allergies as a young adult and in college that I had to get all allergy shots and you know you're allergic to things well my allergies were just because my immune system was just on hyper overload I don't have any allergies anymore I didn't outgrow my allergies through the last 17 years I've told my immune system to chill out there's nothing to be interested in here because there's nothing coming across the border that's super interesting probably that three months ago I started getting really itchy and then just like in like my chest would itch like crazy my back would itch like crazy I'm like what is going on because I'm really religious on my diet I don't cheat on 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 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 you're 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 out side of you as it's moving through the inside skin has to do the same functions as the outside skin and that is 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 that you know I think the first thing you do is get major electon containing foods out of your diet you won't like me for a couple of weeks but most people even within a couple weeks begin to notice a difference now what are those they're foods that we actually evolutionary we're 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 mom 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 we're actually very tall creatures most humans were about six feet tall and our brain size was about 15% bigger than it is today and when if you look chronologically by eight thousand years 2,000 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 2,000 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 a one has a lectin like protein that is converted into a compound called beta cassia morphine which can cause a direct MU logic attack on the beta cells of the pancreas the insulin producing 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 8 - cows cheese's for instance are safe from France Italy and Switzerland sheep goats and water buffalo are all casein a - 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 I make second you'll get the same thing ok 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 nightshades 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 D seed them and then they either grind it into chili or eat them that way but they always do that the Italians always peel and deseed their tomatoes before they make sauce and is this like a cultural intuition kind of thing where they what 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 haul 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 whole 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 scent 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 and he actually went around and watched and looked at the bowel movements of these Africans who were eating huge amounts of tubers of things like yams for instance or seller AK route 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 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 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 t 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 there are elect and like substances in the meat but is there actually lectin itself great question there was just a 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 and the alternative world you know you are what you eat but you are what 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 talked about in the book who had horrible lupus was on to drugs and we got her off of all her drugs by following this program and her lupus cleared she had rashes and 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 rays chicken she so yeah I eat organic free-range chicken all the time it's my go-to food there's a free-range chicken and she said yeah yeah you know organic free-range they said well the federal government in 2007 passed a law that says you can keep a hundred thousand 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 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 and a Kentucky Fried Chicken opened in London and 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 so you know we go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and they both grab a drumstick and they bite in there the drumstick and my four-year-old goes oh oh you tricked us this is fish oh this isn't chicken and I'm going oh no no no no looking from stick you know commanders that's chicken now 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% carbon atoms from corn a substance that we were never exposed to until 500 years ago Europeans are 5% corn in fact France in 1900 band corn is unfit for human consumption Wow so what I want people to do is is eat and party like it's 9999 years ago before we started all this mess mmm 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 neu5gc 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 neu5gc to shield themselves from detection by the immune system the problem is we don't manufacture neu5gc 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 me 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 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 lights that make them a problematic okay it's animal protein and let's look there's another reason not to eat animal protein sadly so animal protein they're weak there's a sensor in all of our cells called mTOR and it senses energy availability and 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 hi gf1 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 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 blues ohms 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 while Melinda for most of my life the thing that separates or unites all of those various diets is they 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 what 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 it how do you make it an easy process so I started 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 6 to 8 o'clock at night so that 22 the twenty-four hours every day five days a week I was fasting 22 hours now why six to eight o'clock a night because that's when my wife and I were at home and 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 our 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 stored and they crash and it's often called the adkins 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 and butter it's called butyric acid yeah it's intermittent fasting is really really powerful for alleviating brain fog for changing a relationship to hunger is how I always think of it it's 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 but we just have to you know use the tricks to get to that fat for most people who were 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 the brain is going oh hey you know what what's the deal you've cut me huh it's water water everywhere and not a drop tur 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 or in the gym one hour a day how come I'm such a fat guy I couldn't get to my fat stores because I had an elevated insulin level when I first you know got my insulin oven Wow what's that now I have a very low it so well mmm 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 questions not really about fat loss but 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've got a rough sense of what we should be avoiding but what should we be actively pursuing ok so the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth there are three long live societies in the Blue Zones that use a leader 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 blood bring olive oil to the table so if you're gonna 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 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 in your mouth yes which works for me just fine if I can saute or use an air fryer yeah have you done yes there yeah oh my god french fries they sure are so so those are great for you things like yuca or yucca make phenomenal french fries but parboil them first and then in the airfryer also any tuber so like seller a crude is fantastic he come up so get some guacamole believer not true guacamole does not have tomatoes in it that's an American whatever and get yourself some heat thymus tix Trader Joe's has them lots of plain old grocery stores to have them use that as your dipping chip the 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 in Ulan and your gut bugs will love a little bit for it alright before I ask my last question where can these guys find you online so go to Gundry md dot-com you can sign up for my daily newsletter there's also a Gundry md youtube channel where every day I'm giving crazy hints and recipes to live this lifestyle it's not a diet it's a lifestyle hmm sure alright I think I know the answer to this but what's the one big change that people can make in their life that would have the biggest impact on their health the biggest change that people can make is just get these foods that you are not designed to powder of your life for a while and watch what happens the grains and the beans and the nightshades and stop eating peanuts and cashews they're beans they're not nuts and I can't tell you in the number of people who have gut issues or even heart disease issues that peanuts and cashews were one of the big mischief makers that's interesting awesome the country thank you so much really incredible alright guys if you want to join me in this one I am gonna be trying out this diet I am so interested I've never ever considered really even for a second going low meat low animal proteins so but reading his book and going into the research I'm intrigued there's something about the breakdown that he gives about lectin in the way that it impacts your body and the way that it impacts the lining of the gut it just there was it all made so much sense to me and then looking at it from an evolutionary standpoint again it just made a lot of sense so I'm gonna be trying this in experimenting so join me if you will I think that he is one of the most interesting voices in the space talking about it in a way that doesn't just become psychotic Dogma it's really just looking at what actually happened we didn't get a talk about his time as a surgeon which I am sorry for it's really interesting remember ten thousand operations that he did and he has seen a lot of hearts opened up looked inside of arteries so that level of understanding of what it's actually doing to your body I think is so important and I certainly consider that when I think about taking somebody's advice or not but I believe see for yourself see if it works for you or not because I have been itchy this will be a great experiment and I will see whether it works or not so I'm really excited to help you guys will join me and he has another thing he has so many tips go check out his website I'm telling you right now it's fantastic and one of the things he says to try as you guys know I drink diet coke and so I'm actually gonna try cutting that out by drinking soda water so just the nice sparkling mineral water San Pellegrino is his recommendation to the best high in sulfur content yeah so give that a shot and you pour one to two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar and I tried it today that's actually pretty good I was shocked there's no diet coke I'm not gonna lie but if it means that I live forever then I'm all for it so hopefully you guys would give this stuff a try and hopefully you will dive much deeper into his world there's something about his voice and the way that he's coming at this and I was really intrigued by so I look forward to learning more all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're gonna get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 767,979

Rating: 4.6323972 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, health theory, steven gundry, dr steven gundry, plant paradox, lectins, what are lectins, one cause one cure, This Man Thinks He Knows What Causes All Disease, Dr. Steven Gundry on Health Theory

Id: q4KfKapvnuI

Length: 37min 23sec (2243 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 16 2018