Food Myths Busted: What to Eat to Live to Be 100 with Dr. Steven Gundry

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and today I am thrilled and honored to have Dr. Stephen Gundry on the show. Hello, Dr. Gundry.

Hello Brad. Thanks for having me.

Oh, my pleasure. So the most recent time I saw you, I've seen you a couple times and heard your things all over the web and whatnot, was at Tony Robbins last event. We brought 47 people were sitting VIP caddy corner to the stage and we got to see you speak on Sunday as part of his new lineup of amazing guest speakers about health and wellness. I've been to upw, this is my fifth time coming up.

Wow.

The content changes pretty rapidly and Tony's always updating it. But like some of those old videos from the 80s went away and then we had you and you know, we had. Oh God, Bulletproof coffee. Dave Asprey. Yeah, it was just a great panel and lineup that this time. So I was just really grateful to see that. And you've, you've written two best selling books now. You got Dr. Gundry's Diet, Evolution Revolution.

Evolution, Evolution, you got it.

And the Plant Paradox. And I'd love to dive into all that. So if you don't know, Dr. Gundry is. He's awesome. I'm going to have him tell us why he's so awesome. Just for a minute it here, tell us kind of the hero's journey so far and where, you know, you've landed here today.

Well, real briefly, I started my career at Yale University back in the dark ages and I had a special major in human evolutionary biology where I basically got to defend a thesis that you could take a great ape, manipulate its food supply, manipulate its environment and predict that you would create a human. And I actually successfully defended my thesis and got an honors and gave it to my parents and then went off to medical school and became a very famous heart surgeon and chairman of the department of cardiac surgery at Loma Linda University here in Southern California. And along with Leonard Bailey, did all the infant baby heart transplants for a very long time and became famous for inventing devices to protect the heart that are still the most widely used devices today. And then my career had a major shift in around 1999 when I was introduced to A gentleman who I call Big Ed, who had inoperable coronary artery disease. He was 48 years old. All the blood vessels in his heart were so clogged up, you couldn't put stents in them. You couldn't do bypasses. And long story short, Big Ed had gone on a diet, had lost 45 pounds, even though he was 265 pounds when I met him, and he'd been taking a bunch of supplements from a health food store. And it turns out in six months time, he cleaned out half the blockages in his heart, which shocked me. And I wanted to know how he did it. And he started telling me. And lo and behold, what he told me he did. To eat was actually my thesis at Yale. So why it was poignant was I was a big fat guy, even though I was running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour a day, and eating a healthy, low fat, vegetarian diet at Loma Linda. And I had high blood pressure, arthritis, high cholesterol, prediabetes, migraine headaches, doing baby heart transplants. And I thought I was doing everything right. So I actually put myself on my thesis and lost 50 pounds my first year and lost another 20 subsequently and kept it off for 16 years. And then I started treating my patients this way at Loma Linda, who I operated on. And lo and behold, their problems went away. Their diabetes went away, their arthritis went away. So after about a year of doing this at Loma Linda, on what my wife calls Black Friday, I resigned my position to set up an institute where I teach people how to eat. And all I would ask people to do is let me take their blood every three months and send it off to labs that Medicare insurance would pay for. And let's see what we did. And that resulted in my first book in 2008. And then I got inundated with lots of people with autoimmune disease. And they would come to my office and say, what do you know about autoimmune disease? And I'd go, absolutely nothing. But I know a whole lot about the immune system because I'm a transplant immunologist. And if you want to play, let's play. So we've been playing ever since, and about half of my patients have or had autoimmune disease. And that resulted in my second book called the Plant Paradox, where I noticed through blood work that great number of people are sensitive to these plant compounds that are called lectins. And when I asked people to remove lectins, all of a sudden, all sorts of really cool things happened. So that's what I do now.

I love it and I really resonate with a lot of that story because I was actually on the path to become a doctor. I want to be Dr. Hart, the cardiologist, because I was really significance driven and ego bound and all that. And I just wanted to be super cool. So I got my undergraduate degree in biology from Binghamton, which is not Yale, but it's still pretty good. They call it the public Ivy. Dr. Gundry. Ah, very good. But you know, when I went into that world, I started seeing how fat and miserable and overworked all these doctors were and I'm like, wait a second, if they're miserable and fat and overworked, then maybe there's another way for me. And I worked on ambulance for a couple years and I had some experience with that. Certainly didn't go down the rabbit hole like you have. But I really respect the heck out of whoever can make it through all that and still do good for themselves and good for others. So I really resonate with your story because overcoming that in your own life and then helping your patients and really getting to the core of it and never giving up and saying, oh, it's this or it's that or just taking it for what it was, you've really helped a lot of people and I think your books have helped even millions more. So I just want to say I'm grateful for your contribution to the medical profession. But let's talk about the most up to date, right? What are people? If you could tell people two or three things about their health or diet or exercise right now, that's the cutting edge, what would you tell them?

Well, you know, our whole health has been turned upside down in the last 50 years throughout Lot of things that I talk about in the plant paradox, which are the seven deadly disruptors. And basically, if I had to tell people what makes them tick, it has really very little to do with what they perceive of themselves as them. And it has far more to do with the bugs, the microbiome, the bacteria and the funguses and the worms that live in and on us. And one of the things that always makes people shake their heads is that 90% of all the cells that make you, you and me, me are actually non human cells. And 99% of all the genetic material, all the genes that are in us, are actually non human genes. And everybody's heard about the Human Genome Project, but quite frankly, human genes are actually not very numerous. And everybody talks about genetic defects, but in Fact, it's whether turning genes off or on, which is called epigenomics, is actually the key to most things. But the really amazing thing is, is that our bacteria actually control much of what happens to us in every way, shape and form. Bacteria, as much as people don't like to think about it, are basically, we're a condominium for bacteria. We're their home. And the more we're realizing how we need to keep their home in great shape, the better it is for us. And I'll give you an example. We know from recent work that we can take feces from young animals, bowel movements, and feed them to old, decrepit animals. And the old, decrepit animals will become young again. Yeah. And it's actually because I like to think of it as. As a gentrification of the neighborhood. You put a bunch of young bacteria in this old decaying house, and the next thing you know, they're knocking down all the walls and rebuilding, and it actually, they're rebuilding the house that they're now living in, these old, decrepit body, making it young again. So the idea that young bacterial species can actually make, you know, a rat young again is pretty mind blowing.

But that's amazing. I mean, it kind of lends credence to your dog going to eat poop when it walks down the street. You know, it's like there might be an evolutionary perspective from that. Maybe it's, you know, he's lacking something that he needs from an evolutionary perspective.

Well, you know, the Hansa in Africa have been studied extensively by Jeff Leach and others. And when they go out on hunting parties, they'll butcher the animal, antelope or gazelle or whatever, and they'll immediately cut into the belly and they'll start eating all the feces in the animal as one, before they even take the animal back. And if you actually study great carnivores like lions and tigers, you realize that the first things they eat after the kill is they're all gathered around the belly of the animal and they're eating all the innards out. And in fact, lions will often leave the muscles, the limbs alone because they've gotten all the good stuff out of the belly. And then the hyenas come along and pull, pull off a carcass or a leg and take that back.

That's fascinating.

Yeah. So there's, there's definitely things we can learn from not only research on the microbiome, but how ancient people or modern ancient people have been behaving towards the microbiome.

So for those people who may be shaking their heads and saying, well, I'm not going to eat poop, what's the next best thing?

Well, what you want to do and what I try to do is I try to figure out what my bugs want to eat. And I think through the years, thankfully for thousands of patients who've let me look at what they eat and the effect it has on inflammation and the effect it has on markers of aging, we've got this down to a pretty good science. And the simplistic way of looking at this is that there are, There are over 10,000 different species of bacteria that have been discovered that live in our gut and on us. And believe it or not, there's also a fungiosome, the funguses that live in us that are just now being figured out, and they probably just as important. But essentially there's what I call good bugs and bad bugs. And bad bugs are kind of like gang members who have taken over an otherwise very nice community and terrorizing the neighborhood. And all the, all the good guys are hiding in the corners and the cops are running around. Well, you boarded up all the windows and we've got neighborhood watch patrols that are shooting guys with hoodies without asking questions. And I view that as kind of our state of inflammation. On the other hand, if you got a bunch of good bugs, the good bugs are all kind of singing Kumbaya. And they actually, as strange as it seems, send text messages to our immune system, to our border patrol, to our cops, that, hey, everything's great, you know, we're a bunch of good kids and just chill out, we've got things under control. The bad guys don't have a chance against us because there's a lot more of us. And everybody relax. And the good guys actually send messages to our brain to relax. We know now that most of the feel good hormones like serotonin are actually manufactured by bacteria in our gut. Good bacteria. We also now know now that bad bugs actually send text messages to our brain that make us crave the foods that they like. And the foods that they like are simple sugars and saturated fats. And there's overwhelming evidence now that the more bad bugs that you feed with these foods, the more you actually crave these foods. Not for you, but actually to feed these bacteria. And it's one of these unfortunate perpetuating cycles that the more kind of crap you eat, the more crap resides in your intestines and the crappier you feel.

You have this kind of self defeating feedback loop is it similar with like. So just to kind of bring it back to the last time I saw you speak. Dave Asprey was also talking about my mitochondria and how they have an effect as well. Where do you stand on that as far as the research you've seen? And what do you think the mitochondria want if they're kind of the powerhouses for the body, if energy is what we all want, if we want to feel great, like, how do we really feed them the proper way, in your opinion?

Yeah, great question. In a couple weeks I'm going to Berlin for the Microbiota conference that happens once a year. And actually I've been asked to speak on how our microbiota, our microbiome, the bugs in our gut, communicate to the mitochondria. And the really cool weird part about this for your listeners is mitochondria, these little energy organelles, are actually engulfed bacteria. They actually have their own DNA. They divide actually separately from the DNA in our cells. And of fascinating curiosity, all mitochondria are inherited from the mother. And we can actually date people and where they came from by looking at mitochondrial DNA. So all of these engulfed bacteria are actually female. Now why that's so interesting is that when our mom gave birth to us, hopefully we came out through the vagina and mom actually inoculated us by essentially taking crap on us. Many people believe this to this day that mom crapped on me, but she actually inoculates you with her set of bacteria. There are those of us who firmly believe this is on purpose because they are female derived bacteria that can actually talk to the female derived mitochondria. And there are some new papers that have come out that show in fact that these bacteria produce compounds that can actually stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis, make mitochondria grow, and in the same token can actually make mitochondria shrink and become less active depending on the information they receive from the microbiome. And this again, it gets back to young bacteria. The way they make these old animals young is they're actually sending these messages to mitochondria, which are the factories to actually grow and divide and ramp up. And it's, I mean, it's so Star wars crazy to think that a set of bacteria living in our gut could control our energy, control potentially how long we're going to live. I mean, it's just, it's like really, that's what it's about. Just. Actually, my last patient of this morning is 101 years old and I've been following her for about 16 years now. The lady who I talk about in the book, in both books, is Edith Murray, who's now 105 and a half. And both of these women are fascinating because if. If you saw either one of them, you'd look at their skin and you would swear that neither of them is over 65 years of age. And in fact, Pearl, who I was talking to just now, keeps saying, she says, you know, it's amazing. People keep saying, what do you do for your skin? What are your secrets? And she said, well, she said, I keep telling them. And you taught me how to eat 16 years ago. And if you eat like this, your skin will look like this, this. And I think that tells a whole lot. Your. Your skin is a pretty good window to what's going on with not only your microbiome, but what you're actually feeding your microbiome. Just to digress, a number of years ago, my wife and I were raw foodists for about nine months, and quite honestly, I think had the. Probably the best health either of us have ever had. The problem with raw foodism is that it's incredibly impractical to do, particularly if you're traveling. And most raw foodists finally give it up. Even the great raw food chefs give it up. But one of the things that was typical of the raw foodist community is you can usually spot somebody a mile away by looking at their skin. They just have this glow. And so I still eat about no, 85, 90% of my food raw. And people, one of the first things when they meet me, they look at my hands or they look at my face and they say, what are you doing? How do I get that glow? Have you been out in the sun? Well, no, I eat my glow. There you go.

I like it. So raw food. And then you've also been quoted, I remember you saying that vegetables are just a way to get olive oil in your mouth. Or am I misquoting? I thought that was a really great one.

That's really true.

And then there's another one that I use, and maybe you're familiar with Dr. Udo Erasmus, his oil as well, which is really great. And that seems to be really good for the skin and nails. And I'm just going on what I've tested. I've done every diet you could think of, from paleo to raw. I went raw vegan for three and a half months. It was great, but I was kind of missing something. So now I'm like, I. All right, mostly veggies, like you kind of like, you know, 75, 80%. And then I'll do like, oh, when I need meat, I have some meat. When I need fish, you know, I try to get a sushi once a week, that kind of thing. And that seems to work for me as far as what I need in my body type. But do you feel like there's different prescriptions for different people based on their blood type, or is it like, what do you kind of, what do you lend credence to? What do you kind of say? That's not. There's no science to back that up.

Yeah. So the blood type diet is interesting. What people don't actually realize. Dr. D' Amato is a chiropractor, and I quite frankly, love chiropractors. He, his dad was actually very, very interested in blood types and was actually very instrumental in blood typing. And when the blood type diet came out, it was actually a lectin avoidance diet. And most people don't realize how important the avoidance of lectins were to that diet. But it caught on because I think Dr. D' Amato realized that most people are a type O and that his diet works really well for type O's because it's the hunter gatherer diet, and that resonates with all of us. And it basically says you can eat meat or chicken and. But it was an avoidance diet of major lectins. And actually, I personally think that that's how it worked. Everybody absolutely went after him. That blood type has nothing to do with it. But you can actually prove that. The, the way we blood type people's blood is to actually introduce lectins into a sample of blood. And depending on what the lectin binds to on the red blood cell, it will actually agglutinate blood. Well, we actually have those same blood type receptors on the lining of our gut. And interestingly, there are people who have type A blood who seem to be far more susceptible to catching colds and flu and illnesses. And it's probably because their sugar receptors on their gut wall are totally different than the sugar receptors of type OS lectins. The reason that get back to blood type diet, lectins are the plant defense system. And lectins are what are called sticky proteins. And they're actually looking to bind to sugar molecules, and they like to bind to lots of different sugar molecules, including sugar molecules that are in our joints, sugar molecules that are between our nerve endings, but also sugar molecules that are in the wall of our arteries and the sugar molecules in our gut. And where they're fascinating in the gut is that they actually, if they can get to the one cell thickness that lines our gut, they can actually turn a switch that produces a chemical, and there won't be a test called zonulin. And zonulin actually separates the cells in our gut. And when those cells separate, you get leaky gut. And not only do lectins pour through the wall of your gut, but also bacterial particles that I call lpss. I don't swear, but I can't help calling them little pieces of sh T in the book, because that's actually what they are. And so lectins, plants don't want to be eaten. It's hard to believe, but they don't. They have a life. They want their seeds to survive. And plants are really smart. They've had 400 million years to work out defenseless systems against their predator. And they're really good at this. And we have to give them their due, but we have to know how we can avoid some of the problems they cause. And we can now actually measure zonulin in people. And it's really fascinating to take people who think they're doing a pretty good job avoiding lectins and measure their zonulin. Lo and behold, back I had a woman this week has been doing a great job, but she decided to reintroduce tomatoes and peppers that she peeled and de seeded. And she has some autoimmune disease issues. So we decided to see what her zonulin level would do with this. And sure enough, her zonulin level was mildly elevated when she reintroduced tomatoes and peppers, even though she was peeling and deseeding them. So there's a lot. We can really do a deep dive on what people are doing these days. So this is not conjecture on my part. It's not anecdotes. This pretty good hard science looking at what happens at the cellular level.

And to kind of wrap your point in as well, I think that's great. By the way, this reminds me of being back in Dr. Van Buskirk cell biology class, because you just spelled it out so clearly this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens. And this is really fascinating. So thank you. But to kind of wrap it in with what you're saying about the blood type diet, the reason it worked was because I also think paleo, which also says, hey, you know, if you listen to Mark Sisson, avoid lectins at all costs. What are some of the most prevalent plants or types of foods that people eat that have lectins that they may not be aware of.

Yeah. So all plants have lectins. The important part is that the kind of. The longer we as a species have been eating particular plants in general, the more our immune system has become to understand that lectin. But more importantly, the more our microbiome, the more our bacteria, which actually do a pretty good job of eating lectins. As an aside, there's actually bacteria that love to eat gluten. They love it, enjoy gluten. So the longer we've been exposed to a particular lectin, the more most of us become tolerant to those lectins. So, long story short, we're used to eating leaves and we're used to eating tubers, things like sweet potatoes, things like yuca, things like taro root, jicama. But then 10,000 years ago, we were exposed to lectin containing foods that we had never eaten. That's grains and beans. And beans are one of my favorite targets because it drives my vegan critics crazy.

Don't say hummus. I love hummus.

Hey, if you pressure cook your chickpeas, go right ahead.

But hummus, I'm calling up Cedars right now. I'm telling them, you got to pressure cook my hummus because I eat that stuff by the cartload.

Yeah. So pressure cook them and you'll be just fine. In fact, I've got a pressure cooked hummus recipe in the Plant Paradox Cookbook, which will be out in April. So, yeah, you can have your hummus, but you got to pressure cook your chickpeas. So the lectins and beans are really pretty nasty. And just to remind your listeners, ricin, which most people have heard of, the white powder that we send to our elected officials is the lectin of the castor bean. And this lectin is so potent that a few molecules of ricin will actually kill a human being by coagulating their blood.

Don't accept any male undelivered from Dr. Gundry. I'll tell you what.

That's right. And so cooking and rinsing beans definitely helps, but there are absolutely still lectins present in cooked beans. And you'll even if anybody goes out and buys a crock pot a slow cooker, there'll be a warning label on that crock pot that says, warning, do not pressure do not cook beans in this crock pot, because the temperature never gets high enough to break any of the lectins down. The other mischief makers are grains in general. Now, cultures have been pretty smart. We've been taking the haul off of a lot of grains for a long time. Rice has been around for 8,000 years. And interestingly enough, 4 billion people who use rice as their staple actually take the hull off of brown rice and eat it white. Now, for years, we thought that was pretty stupid. In fact, the authors of the Okinawan diet and the Okinawans eat a little bit of white rice. It consists of about 6% of their diet. They eat white rice. And the authors of the diet said, gee, just imagine how much healthier the Okinawans would be if we could convince them to eat brown rice instead of white. Well, that's, I mean, no, you're studying a culture that's some of the oldest living people in the world. And maybe we should say, hmm, I wonder if it's the white rice instead of brown rice that might be helping them out. The other thing, as an aside, maybe we can get into the blue zones. The blue zones are not blue zones for the reasons that the bean and grain people think they are. Grains have two nasty things. Gluten is a lectin. It's actually a fairly minor lectin, but you can take celiac disease people, so celiac is the extreme form of gluten intolerance. And you can put them on a gluten free diet and you can follow them for two years and then re biopsy their intestines. And that's still the definitive test for celiac. And about 75% of people, people with celiac on a gluten free diet at the end of two years will still be positive for celiac by biopsy. Now why is that? Because the problem is most gluten free diets are devoid of gluten, but they're not devoid of other lectins in the other grains. And that's been certainly one of my discoveries with my celiac patients and my autoimmune disease patients, many of whom have been gluten free. And they've gotten better, there's no doubt about it. But they're not all the way better. And it's when we take the other lectins away from them that things get really good. In fact, when the book was just released, we had a very wonderful vegan authoress who put herself on my diet, the vegan version of my diet, for a month before we did our podcast. And you know, to her credit, thank you very much, and she said, you know, if I'm going to talk to this guy and he's got a vegan form of his diet, you know, I ought to see if he knows what he's talking about. So we get on, and she says, okay, full disclosure here. I really credit the vegan diet with changing my health. Best I ever felt. I really thought that I couldn't feel any better. But she said, I got to tell you, I feel lighter. The GI upsets that I really thought was just me gone and nice. She's actually contributing a recipe to the new cookbook, so she's become a big fan. So I have a few other interesting vegan critics who won't bother to try it, and that's all I ask them to do. There's plenty of vegan recipes. What do you got to lose?

Yeah, I always say, like, it's like a wardrobe of beliefs or a wardrobe of diets. You can go in, try on a hat for a couple, you know, a couple days or a week or a month and see how it feels. And, yeah, if you don't like it, put it back in the closet, pick out a new one.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's what I've done for the last 16 years. I've asked people to try this, and let's look at your blood work. Let's listen to you. And what we found was when we take these things away from people, all their inflammation markers, all their autoimmune markers would go away. Then, as the book said, a lot of them would try to reintroduce a little something, and we could actually see it. The inflammation markers come right back up. So it's not. Again, it's not conjecture, it's not anecdote. We can actually measure these things. But you're right. Try it on for size.

Yeah. And I kind of want to hack my own diet, right? Because I'm thinking about the way I eat on a typical day. Now when I'm traveling, obviously, it's a little more difficult to get what you want, but I fast every day. I've been fasting for five years. Intermittent fasting has changed my life. I'll eat starting between 12 and 2, depending on what the day looks like. I'll have fats, kimchi, you know, greens, probiotics. All the. All the pieces that, you know, they feel good. And that'll keep me going through four or five. And then I'll start, like. What I'm really trying to swap out is like, I'll start snacking on hummus and carrots or something that's just more calorically dense after I've had, you know, the good fats. And I've taken that as Far as I can, I got the Udo's oil, all of that, and I'll put some olive oil on it and things like that, you know, following your advice. And then at night, I'll typically eat like a sweet potato or something more carb rich so that I'm good to go for my runs in the morning. I run about a marathon a week, so not all at once, thankfully. But I'm trying to talk you out of that. Yeah, what could I kind of start swapping out to even go a little bit further? Knowing what we know about beans, I guarantee that all commercially produce hummus is not pressure cooked. So what would be some of the things that I could get the calories that I need while maintaining my lifestyle and health?

So one of the great things, there's a company called Eden E D E N that pressure cooks all of their bean products, so all of their garbanzo beans, all of their pinto beans, etc. So you don't have to buy a pressure cooker, but so you can just go and get Eden. And I have no relationship with them, just a fan. The other thing I really try to convince people, go spend 70, 80 bucks and buy a pressure cooker. One pot makes a great one. Cuisinart makes a good one. And once you get a pressure cooker, the modern one is not your grandmother's pressure cooker that exploded, you know, routinely. And it makes food preparation so fast. Particularly busy families, you can have, you know, you can have a mess of beans and rice in 15 minutes and, you know, feed an entire family just to give an example. In fact, speaking of beans and rice, I saw gentleman recently with some really nasty autoimmune diseases. And he originally is from Brazil. He's in his 40s now and growing up in Brazil, his mother pressure cooked rice and beans almost every day. And the pressure cooker broke. It blew up. And it was apparently rather traumatic when he was 11. So his mother stopped pressure cooking their rice and beans. And he can chronicle a series of horrible health events that literally started a few weeks after his pressure cooker blew up. He developed tonsillitis, he lost his tonsils, he developed irritable bowel, and he became a little sick, little weakling. And then he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And he found me because he heard me talking about how pressure cooking and he says that just, you know, a light bulb went off and he said, I can tell you the day I started to get sick was when my mother's pressure cooker blew up.

You Have. You're having me get flashbacks too. I dated a Brazilian woman. She pressure cooked everything. Yeah. I'm like, I've never seen anybody use one of these things. It was like the old school one that had like the spinning steam top. I was like, what is this craziness? But it worked. Hey, you know, so can you pressure cook lectins out of anything? And you make most of these foods now eatable, edible, or are there still that are.

Yeah, lentils are great for pressure cooking. Beans, you can pressure cook tomatoes, you can pressure cook eggplant. The things you can't pressure cook, which is very sad. Gluten cannot be destroyed by pressure and heat. So you can't pressure cook wheat, you can't pressure cook rye, you can't pressure cook barley, and you can't pressure cook oats. Oats, Even if it says gluten free. Has what? Gluten like molecule that's a mimic of gluten and it can't be broken with a pressure cooker. And a lot of my canaries in the book have tried even hours of pressure cooking, which is ridiculous, and they still react to them. But most everything else, you can pressure cook without any problem whatsoever.

So you're saying there's a chance?

Yes. I mean, you can have all the hummus you want. Just, you know, open your can of Eden and put it in a Cuisinart and, you know, make yourself some hummus, pour some olive oil in there.

And so Eden, what kind of products do they create? I'm just curious.

Yeah, every bean product there is. Eden makes canned or. Yeah, canned beans. Canned beans. And they're all organic and there's no BPA in the can. They're really smart dialed in. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, if you were to create a food company, I don't know if you have one or not, or if you have any affiliations with one, but like, what would be the piece of the market that you feel like is not yet served based on the research you've seen? Like, what would you create in the world if that was the case?

You know, Gluten free was an interesting start. The problem with most gluten free foods is they're basically sugar delivery devices. And so you got to be very careful. I do think that looking at people are going to eat snack foods no matter what. There are ways to produce cookies that are lectin free. A good friend of mine, Jimmy Schmidt, who actually made almost all the Atkins bars, he's won three James Beard awards. So shout out to Jimmy he's got a line of cookies coming out that unfortunately, I don't have anything to do with, but they're pretty much lectin free. But, I mean, start looking for cassava chips, taro root chips. There's some really interesting stuff coming out of South America using cassava crackers. I'm trying some out right now that are going to be on Amazon very soon. So we've got to look for these, what are called resistant starches that are pretty much lectin free. Our next go to food group. And resistant starches, for those of people who haven't heard about it, are sugars that we don't digest very well. That's why they're called resistant. They're resistant to digestion, but they are loved by good bacteria. Good bacteria thrive on this stuff. And again, the more you do a deep dive into who's living inside of you, the more you want bacteria that enjoy eating resistant starches. And the more you give them, the more they keep you healthy, the more they keep bad guys away. So. And you look at cultures that primarily eat resistant starches. For instance, the Okinawans. The Okinawans. If you look at the traditional Okinawan diet, 80% of the Okinawan diet was a purple sweet potato. 80%. And 6% was rice. And 6% was actually soy, mainly miso, which is fermented soy. And the blue zone, folks. And Okinawa is a blue zone. Point to the Okinawan diet as proof that rice and beans is what makes you old. You know, I mean, really super old. No, it's a resistant starch. The sweet potato and the rice and beans was a minor part of their diet. It's the same way. There's this island people called the Kitavans, which are fascinating. They are in the South Pacific and they live into their mid-90s with no medical care. But they've been studied extensively by a Swede by the name of Stefan Lindenberg. And these guys, taro root is about 70% of all their calories, and almost all the rest of their calories are in coconut oil. They eat a little bit of fish. They eat some fruits and vegetables. But these guys smoke like fiends. And they have never been found to have coronary artery disease. They've never been found to have a stroke, and they've never been found to have lung cancer. And so they've been. Yeah, they've been feeding the bugs. And just recently, I went down to the south of Italy, south of Naples, to visit a town called Acciaroli, which is the newest discovered Blue Zone and the Acciarolis are fascinating people. They, it's a little town, a fishing village and a third of the population is over a hundred years of age. And they also smoke like fiends. And they eat, get this, anchovies for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They cook them with rosemary. They actually chop, chew rosemary most of the day. They use a ton of olive oil and they drink quite a bit of wine. And one of the interesting parts about them is that they are considered sex fiends. Even in their 90s and early, at least the men apparently some of the women say yeah, it's just the guys, they're just horny. But so they, they don't eat beans, they don't eat grains, and they just eat these little fish and yet they, and they eat rosemary. So. And lots of olive oil.

So I'm liking it. Okay, so real quick before we have to do run, what are your thoughts on some of the fats that people are eating besides, you know, olive oils? Coconut oil seems to be pretty solid. I'm a big fan of grass fed butter on occasion when I have my potatoes and things like that. What are the fats that, that you recommend to most people?

Well, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. And I could show you the data. Olive oil has polyphenols. It's not so much the oleic acid. It has polyphenols which actually change our gut bacteria for the better. They change us for the better. A beautiful study out of Spain that was published about two years ago now took a bunch of 65 year old people and they put them on a Mediterranean diet. They divided them into three groups and they followed them for five years. One group had to use a liter of olive oil per week and they actually had them come back to the center and exchange their old bottle for the new bottle every week. That's 12 to 14 tablespoons a day. Wow, a lot of olive oil. The second group had to eat the equivalent amount of walnuts and the third group followed a low fat Mediterranean diet and they followed them for five years. The initial study was to look at memory. And the really amazing thing is that the olive oil group and the walnut group had preserved memory. After five years, the low fat group had diminished memory. Statistically significant. Then they subdivided groups and they found that only the olive oil group, the women in the olive oil group, had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than either of the other two groups. And a new part of the study showed that the olive Oil group lost weight during the five years and the low fat diet group gained weight and despite using a liter of olive oil per week, they lost weight. So olive oil is so good for you, I can't stand it. And bring the key is you can cook with it, it's fine. It's safe to cook things in olive oil. High heat does not break down olive oil. There's good paper to show that. But the real key is act like an Italian or a Spaniard or a Greek and you bring the olive oil to the table and you pour it on things. You know, the purpose to me of eating a fish is to pour olive oil on it, purpose of broccoli is to pour olive oil on it, etc, etc. If you're going to have grass fed butter, please make sure the cow is a casein A two cow in general, get grass fed butter from France, Italy or Switzerland. There are a few casein A2 Butter Producers. There's now an A2 Milk Company that's now in the United States. It's rapidly expanding, so be on the lookout for that. Avocado oil is great. Avocados in general are fantastic for you. There's some interesting papers looking at eating an avocado a day actually makes you lose weight. And there's paper just released today that I'm going to blog on showing that you have to have oils like olive oil, like coconut oil, like avocado oil to absorb the nutrients and polyphenols in the vegetables you eat. And then if you don't have it, you're not going to absorb these polyphenols.

That's perfect. Thank you, Dr. Gundry. So one of the things we love to do on the Make More Marvels podcast, I never tell anybody beforehand is we want to connect you now, since you've been so generous with us, to whatever it is that you need next. So what is the connection, the resource, the opportunity, the person, the system? We call them Crops. That's our little acronym that can allow you to move your mission forward faster. What can we do to help?

Well, this is a ground root, this a grassroots thing. These things will never change if we ask the government to change, if we ask the Department of Agriculture to change. So you've got to make buying decisions with your feet, with your hands, and you got to make companies produce the things that you want to eat. And you know, if you want to contact me and let's set up a company to make this stuff, that'd be great. We're in the process of trying to figure out how we start certifying people to do what I do to look at the labs. I can tell you we can train anybody to do this. It's actually pretty easy. I'm a surgeon. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, at least according to internists.

You mean it's not rocket surgery?

No, it's not rocket surgery. So, yeah.

And then how can people get in touch with you, Dr. Gundry?

So easiest way is through gundrymd.com they can also go to my other website, drgundry.com but easiest way is through gundryMD.com.

And that's G U N D R.

Y r y Gundry gun dry.

I love it. Dr. Gundry, thank you. And on behalf of the whole Make More Marbles community, thank you so much for doing the work that you do and inspiring so many others to change their lives as you change yours. And we just want to say how grateful we are for having you and thank you for being on the show.

Well, I appreciate you having me on the show. Appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast. For more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing, abundant life in your health, wealth, relationships, whatever that means to you, head on over to makemoremarbles.com, check out our cool explainer video about what we're about, and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher or Google Play wherever you're listening to your podcasts. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.