Dr. Steven Gundry - How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age (with Jacqlyn Burnett)

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Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode I am joined by Jacqueline Burnett who will be helping me enhance the conversation with our guest. Today's guest is Dr. Steven Gundry. Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned heart surgeon, four time New York Times best selling author and physician scientist. Dr. Grundry is the leading expert on the Lectin Free diet as the key to reversing disease and boosting longevity, as explained in his 2017 book, the Plant Paradox. In his latest book, the Longevity how to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age, he provides an innovative plan to actually getting younger as you age. His fifth book in the Paradox series, the Plant Paradox family cookbook, released November 2019 and his next book, the Energy Paradox will be published in December 2020. That being said, this podcast was absolutely amazing and Jaclyn Burnett helped me bring out such a great conversation with Dr. Steven Gundry. So that being said, make sure you take a moment to share this episode with a friend as well as screenshot this podcast and tag myself, Jaclyn Burnett and Dr. Stephen Gundry on Instagram so that we can share it as well. And that being said, enjoy the episode. What's going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Dr. Steven Gundry here with us as well as Jacqueline Burnett who will be helping me enhance this conversation. Thanks so much Dr. Stephen Gundry.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So I've been a huge fan of everything you've been putting out regarding content and your books and I know that you have your book the Plant Paradox and I want to start off by asking you one simple question, which you talk about a lot, and that is lectins. And the question is, what are lectins for those who may not know?

So, lectins are primarily plant proteins that are sugar seeking molecules. That is, they're looking for sugar to attach to. And they're used primarily as a defense system by plants so that they don't get eaten. And they are babies, their seeds don't get eaten. And one of the things that's hard for most of us to imagine is that plants are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as we are. And they want to live and they want their children to survive, but they can't run, they can't hide, they can't fight. So they use lectins as one of their systems to make their predator think twice about eating them.

Very cool. So regarding everything you talk about, not only in the book, and I want to hand it to Jacqueline, because I know she's a huge evangelist for everything that you've been putting out there. So, Jaclyn.

Yes. So as someone you know, like myself, I have a relative who has autoimmune diseases and I actually took the time to even read, read your book out loud to him because I found it so valuable. All the information that you put out, I love everywhere that you started, from the evolution of plants to how they've grown to be what they are, can you dive in to how removing lectins from your diet can actually help your overall being? Because our body, we're all living in symbiosis of our body. So talk to me about the gut and how when removing lectins, you're helping your overall being.

Yeah. So, yeah, you're right. We are just a giant symbiotic organism. And a great number of us think that the only reason we exist is as a home for our microbiome, those 100 trillion bacteria and viruses and etc. That live in us, on us, and that we are just a condominium for bugs. And those bugs actually are very important as producers of almost all the compounds we depend on. They actually affect our brain in more ways than you can imagine. I'm currently writing my next book called the Energy Paradox, and you'll be amazed that the effect our microbiome has on everything, including our energy levels. So, getting back to your question, the lining of our gut is only one cell thick, and the lining of our gut is the same surface area as a tennis court. Yeah. Everybody look down and there's a tennis court inside of you which is hard to believe. The problem is there's only one cell separating you from your microbiome and the food you eat, which many contain lectins. And. And you. And that is your immune system, which is a very timely topic. Right now, about 60% of all your white blood cells line your gut, because that's where mischief can come across very easily. And my research and many other people's research show that lectins are capable, among other things, of causing leaky gut. In fact, they're one of the major causes of leaky gut. And when these proteins get across the wall of our gut, they are recognized as foreign by our immune system. And our immune system does the proper thing and attacks them and unfortunately creates inflammation. Now, Dr. Cordain from Colorado State a number of years ago proposed that lectins also are a cause of what's called molecular mimicry. And that is the proteins in lectins look a lot like the proteins in other parts of us. For instance, our thyroid gland, or for instance, our skin in psoriasis, or our joints like rheumatoid arthritis. And if we have a leaky gut and if our immune system is activated, we will by accident attack our own tissues, mistaking them for lectins. So I have written a number of papers about lectins being a principal cause of autoimmune disease and that the removal of lectins from people's diets puts their autoimmune disease in remission. If you want to call it cure, that's fine with me. But about 94% of people in my study, after six months of being on a lectin limited diet, resolved their autoimmune disease. All their biomarkers for autoimmune disease are gone. Kelly Clarkson is probably my most famous example. She had Hashimoto's thyroiditis. She doesn't have Hashimoto's thyroiditis anymore. She follows my program.

Yeah, very cool. What would you say are the three most important changes that people can do today to help or improve our gut health and longevity?

Great question. So the first thing you got to do is get rid of lectin rich foods, and those include all whole grains. If you're going to eat beans, which are incredibly high in lectins, pressure cook them. Pressure cooking destroys most lectins except gluten, by the way. Gluten is a lectin. That's actually why it's so bad. But the vast majority of gluten free foods contain very mischievous lectins, like, for instance, corn, like quinoa like buckwheat, peanuts and cashews are beans. They're not nuts. And you wouldn't believe the mischief peanuts and cashews do to people. So that's. That's number one. Number two, the vast majority of people, even in sunny climates like Arizona or California, for example, have very low levels of vitamin D. And vitamin D is incredibly important for helping seal the gut and also camping down the immune system, telling the immune system to kind of chill it when things come across the gut ball. The third thing I think is very exciting is the more olive oil I can get down somebody's mouth, the better their health is going to be. And studies of blue zones, where some of the longest people in the world live. Three of the blue zones are in the Mediterranean.

What's the blue zone if people don't know?

Yeah. Blue zone was defined by Dan Buckner, who's a journalist, as places in the world who have extreme longevity. For instance, I'm the only nutritionist who has ever spent most of his career living and working in a blue zone. And that is Loma Linda, California, when I was professor at Loma Linda University for most of my career. And so a blue zone, where the Loma Linda is the only blue zone in America, believe it or not, there are no other blue zones. So another blue zone is Sardinia in the Mediterranean. Another blue zone is Crete. Another blue zone is Okinawa in Japan, just as an example.

Very cool.

Can you talk to me about. You know, some people eat a lot of corn and they're not affected by any. They don't feel like they're affected in the short term. And then some people might eat corn or hot sauce, which is high in lectins, and. And all of a sudden their stomach just gets really upset. You know, my relative can't really eat too many lectin foods because of that might happen. And I am super health conscious. So, you know, I'm not really lectins, although I will say hot sauce is my downfall. But tell me about that. Why are some people more effective than.

Well, so if you eat a fermented hot sauce, like Tabasco sauce, just as an example, fermentation in general kills off lectins. The bacteria actually eat the lectins. So fermented hot sauces are just fine. And other fermented foods, fermentation will actually destroy most lectins. One thing it doesn't destroy, unfortunately, is gluten. So even though people say, well, Dr. Gundry says sourdough bread is better for you, if you have an autoimmune disease. Not even true sourdough bread is in your diet. About my studies, I just published a study a month ago looking at people who are sensitive to gluten and 70% of them are actually sensitive to the molecules in corn. And I see so many people with celiac disease, which is the extreme form of gluten intolerance, who are eating a gluten free diet, most of which is corn or brown rice. And we found that when we test them, it's corn that's their big mischief maker. And when we take these gluten free foods away from them, their intolerance to gluten goes away and their celiac disease goes away.

That's, that's amazing.

And getting back to your other question, the other thing that's really destroyed us, particularly here in the United States, is we take a lot of antibiotics. We take a lot of antibiotics for really no good reason. Most of the time when we come in to a doctor with sniffles or a scratchy throat or even a cough, which are caused by viruses, we're given antibiotics. Because, you know, if my colleague doesn't give you antibiotics, you'll go next door and you know, you'll get them from him. So what the heck, I'll give them to you. And those antibiotics, we didn't know, actually kill off the vast majority of our microbiome. So it's, you know, it's like swallowing napalm. We just destroy this incredible rainforest in our gut. The other thing which I've seen now over the last 20 years is the use of non steroidal anti inflammatories, things like ibuprofen, naprosyn, Aleve, Advil. These actually are like swallowing hand grenades. They actually blow little microscopic holes in the lining of our gut and just one will do it. And I've seen a number of actually young athletes who sustained an injury and were put on, you know, high dose ibuprofen or naproxen and they suddenly developed an autoimmune disease out of the blue. And you know, healthy young athletes, and it was this high dose, you know, just kind of swallowing Advil all day for a few weeks that made their gut leak and that started the process. And luckily we've been able to reverse all those simply by getting those compounds out.

Very cool. Can you give us some examples of some of the favorite stories of full recovery of patients on the plant paradox diet? Because I know you have dozens of them.

Actually. I'll tell you a most recent story which actually didn't solicit I was on a podcast with a writer of a book by the co writer, the co founder of the whole 30 and Hartwig is the last name. And he, we were doing a podcast, had him on my podcast and he said, let me tell you an interesting story I don't think I've ever told anybody. So, you know, I'm quite an athlete. I'm a physical therapist. That's how I got interested in nutrition. And a few years ago I had this injury to my shoulder. I had tendonitis in my shoulder, I had tendonitis in my elbow, kind of tennis elbow. And he said I did everything, I'm a physical therapist. You know, I used heat, I did the whole bit, nothing was helping. I rested, it wouldn't go away. And he said, you know, I wonder if it's something in my diet. He says, so just on a guess, he says, I took away grains and beans out of my diet. And he said, son of a gun, in a month it was completely gone. He said, that's the only thing I changed, I didn't do anything else in. So he was saying, he says, how did you know? I said, because these little guys don't like us. And they are a major cause of inflammation. And think about it from a plant standpoint. I always like to think like a plant. If my predator feels bad or every time my predator eats me or my babies, the predator goes, ah, you know, my arm is killing me, my shoulder's killing me. I don't think I'm gonna eat that thing anymore. Well, the plant wins, the predator wins and everybody's happy. And really that's what happens throughout time in that, you know, animals are pretty smart. And if an animal hurts or an animal isn't thriving, or if an animal isn't making babies, then the animal pretty soon figures out, you know, I'm not gonna eat that baby, that thing, because I feel bad. Unfortunately, as all of us know, humans are pretty stupid and we eat these things and then we take antacids or we take Advil and we keep eating and doing these things going, ah, that's just kind of a part of life and moving on.

Yeah, I'm plant based myself, so I'm very fascinated just about the evolution of plants. You know, as you mentioned, the plant paradox. Plants know they're going to be eaten, so they tell you when it's time to eat them. Can you talk about about the plants when they're ready beating those types of plants and how we can make sure we're eating lectin safe foods.

Well, so the good news is there are lectins in all plants. For instance, recently we've discovered that there's a very interesting lectin in spinach that some people react to. Now, I don't want to cause widespread spread panic and I don't want the purpose of this podcast. Dr. Gundry says, don't eat spinach.

I love spinach.

But there is a lectin in spinach. And there's a famous expression from Nietzsche saying, that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger and bitter. Plants actually want to warn you that, are you sure you want to eat a lot of me? Because you're probably gonna, you know, pay the consequence. But small amounts actually benefit us. It's called hormesis. It's what I've talked about in a lot of my books, that little bits of poison, if you will, are actually beneficial. So one of the interesting things is about fruit. Up until 50 years ago and 60 years ago now, the only time anybody had fruit was when it ripened on a tree or a vine. It was local. And I grew up in the Midwest and I knew about what was called the green apple two step, which if you ate green apples, and we're not talking about Granny Smith apples, we're talking about unripe apples, you would get pretty bad intestinal cramps and diarrhea. Your body was actually getting rid of the lectins in those green apples rapidly. Now, when apple. Let's use an apple is picked unripe in Chile or Argentina in the winter and then shipped here, the lectins are still in that unripe fruit. Now, we may put ethylene oxide gas and make them look ripe, but the lectin content is still very high. So one of the things really important is if you're going to eat fruit, and we can have a discussion about how fruit may be one of the most toxic foods you can eat. If you're going to eat fruit, eat it in season, and that is a very limited time. And eat it locally. Support your farmer's market if, you know, if we ever open them again. But that's another story. But please, please, please don't go to Costco and buy, you know, these five pound, you know, jars of strawberries from Chile or blueberries from Chile, because that is not the same. It's a totally different plant.

Interesting. So you talk a lot about, you know, longevity, and in your book the Longevity Paradox, the title is how to Die Young as a Ripe Old Age. Number one, I want to ask you what is the longevity paradox?

Well, you know, we all want to live a long time, but the paradox is we don't want to get old. And if you kind of look, you know, down the road, you kind of look at people getting old, you go, you know, that actually doesn't look very good to me. I don't want stents, I don't want a hip replacement, I don't want a knee replacement. I don't want to be in a nursing home, particularly right now. I want to, you know, I want to remember my grandkids, not and, you know, I want to remember my wife or my husband. And that's not happening. So the paradox is, okay, how do you accomplish that? And you know, the exciting thing is it's modern research has shown that there are absolutely things that we can do to die young at a ripe old age. And one of the things that getting back to this gut microbiome, if you look at 105-year-old people around the world who are thriving, and I can assure you there are thriving 105 year old people, very cool. They have the same diverse microbiome as healthy 30 year olds. Yeah. Whereas if you look, most people, as they get older, their microbiome diversity gets smaller and smaller. Smaller, you get fewer and fewer species. So what you want is this really unbelievably, you know, ecology of 10,000 different bugs talking to each other. And the book is, okay, how do you do that? Number one? Number two, what do you eat to make sure the bugs that are going to keep you alive because you're their condominium are happy? And there's some, you know, there's some wonderful tricks. The third trick is the more you compress your eating window, the time that you actually eat food to smaller and smaller amounts, the longer you are going to live, number one, and the better you're going to live long, number two. And that's actually something that anybody can accomplish. So I'm not talking about restricting calories. We don't have to eat, you know, 30% less calories every day for the rest of our lives. First of all, it's really hard. There is a calorie restriction society and they're pretty grouchy and irritable and they're cold. But for instance, this is now my 18th year. From January through June, during the week, I fast 22 out of 24 hours.

Wow.

So I eat all my calories. I eat all my calories from 6 to 8 o' clock at night. So I don't eat breakfast. I Don't eat lunch. And I condense my calorie window. So 22 out of 24 hours, I'm fasting. And this is my 18th year of doing that. Now you're going, well, why do you do that? Well, because, number one way long time ago, probably even a hundred years ago, we did not have a lot of food in the winter and we did not eat a lot of calories in the winter. We know that, for instance, hibernating animals who don't eat calories in the winter live twice as long as their cousins who don't hibernate. So you can take rodents who are hibernators and rodents who aren't hibernators, and the hibernating rodents live a very long time. Bears don't eat for five months and they actually lose fat, but they don't lose muscle mass, which is fascinating. And I've actually told people I'll put them on the grizzly, grizzly bear diet and just take away their food for five months. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's a lot of books. Very cool.

That's amazing. And I want to touch on too, you know, gut health, people call it almost like your second brain. It is so important to the way that we operate throughout our day. Now, for someone who is like, I don't care about my health, you know, I am super successful. I don't care about living forever because I just want to enjoy right now. Can you talk about the importance of gut health, of your overall health so that you can actually optimize and become larger than you are already?

Yeah. You know, we're such smart creatures that we can't fathom the idea that little single cell organisms could have any effect on our brain, on our well being. But in fact, the exact opposite is true. I had Dr. Daniel Amen on my podcast recently, who's, you know, one of the leading psychiatrists, and he's now convinced that most depression and anxiety actually comes from gut dysbiosis. Our gut bugs, or I call them our gut buddies, are actually responsible for making all these wonderful hormones that actually make us feel good or conversely, make us feel depressed or anxious. Interestingly, I cite a study that lectins, if you inject lectins into the bellies of rats, they will become so stressed and depressed that they cower in the corner of their cage and not come out looking for food. If you think about it, yeah. If you think about a great defense system against being eaten is to have, you know, animals so Scared he won't go looking for food. What I'm doing in the energy paradox is showing that there are some other compounds that we had no idea that these bugs made that. Now tell our brain cells that everything is great down in the engine room and you go about your business. Have a great time. It tells our muscles that they can produce energy properly. And there's some really cool studies looking at endurance athlet, changing their gut microbiome and improving their endurance performance. So this is actually coming full court around to realizing that if we want to maximize our health, we've got to maximize the health of our gut buddies. And, you know, there was the godfather of fitness. You guys look him up sometime. Was a guy by the name of Jack Lalanne. And Jack Lalanne made it to 96. He died of pneumonia when he wouldn't take antibiotics. That's one of the times you probably want to take antibiotics. But that's another story. And Jack LaLanne actually had a TV show in the 1950s and 60s. And I can remember my mother watching Jack LaLanne work out, do calisthenics. But Jack used to say most people know him with the Jack lalanne juicer. He became quite a pitch man in his later years. But he used to say, if it tastes good, spit it out now. And I like to quote Jack, I got to know him actually in his later years. But what he actually meant by that was the things we should be eating, we should be eating for the bugs in our gut and not for this 2 by 3 inch piece of muscle, you know, our tongue. And the more you, the more you eat for them. They're gonna take care of you in so many ways that you. You'd be shocked. And I can't tell you the number of people with, for instance, depression and anxiety who change over to the plant paradox program. And the next thing you know, they're going, wow, not depressed. And we wean them off of their antidepressants. There really isn't anybody that we can't get off of these anti anxiety and antidepressant drugs.

And what do you say to them? Or I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead. What do you say to someone who, you know, their doctors recommended they take ibuprofen every day because they're older and that's what they should do. Or they have an autoimmune disease and they actually are taking drugs every day. What do you say to that person? They're like, well, I can't get off. I can't stop doing this. So they're limiting belief there. What do you say to that person?

Well, you know, I spent the first part of my career as a transplant surgeon and using transplant drugs to suppress the immune system. And these same drugs and cousins of them are the vast majority of commercials on TV throughout the day and every night. And I tell anyone who comes to see me and about 70% of my practice is now autoimmune diseases, I go, look, you don't have a heart transplant, you don't have a kidney transplant, you don't have a liver transplant. So what the heck are you doing on a transplant drug? You know, that makes no sense. And particularly right now, the fact that we're actually seeing these commercials on TV telling you, hey, go suppress your immune system. What a great idea. Right now. It's like, really? Yeah. So, you know, and let me just add another comment on that. The reason people with chronic disease conditions like hypertension, like diabetes, like heart disease, are more susceptible to COVID 19 is not because of these conditions. These conditions are actually telling me and other doctors that you have a leaky gut and that leaky gut and gut dysbiosis is the cause of these diseases. And your immune system, which I told you is 60, 70% of it, is down in your gut, is distracted down in your gut. And so when a virus comes along in your mouth and nose, normally your immune system should be up there ready to go attacking this thing, but it's been distracted. You can't fight a two front war. That's the other scary thing for young people in this country because unlike other countries, we are seeing a number of younger individuals getting the coronavirus and suffering from the coronavirus, even dying. And a number of us are arguing that that's because our western diet, our wonderful standard American diet, is one of the best leaky, gut producing diets in the world. And no wonder, you know, this country is more susceptible to the coronavirus compared to other countries young people.

Two more quick questions. One being, I want to take it back because I know we haven't touched on that yet, but what got you into studying the plant paradox and everything that you've created through your research at an early age? Because there's a lot of young listeners, I'm 19 years old right now, and a lot of young people that are entrepreneurs starting their own business or diving into their career careers. I'd love for the people to know where was Dr. Steven Gundry in his teenage years and how it led you into this research?

Yeah, great question. I was blessed to have a grandmother who actually gave me a whole series of books which were called the ZIM books of biology. And they were little paperback books on every subject in biology. Birds, reptiles, you name it, plants. And I would devour those. And then when I was 10 years old, in my school library, there was a book called all about you, and it was about the human body. And believe it or not, my fifth grade science project was how to do an appendectomy complete with illustrations.

Wow.

And so when I, in my undergraduate years at Yale, back in those dark ages, we were able to actually design our own major and do a thesis. We would actually propose a thesis and have to defend it. And so my thesis was, you could take a great ape, manipulate its food supply and its environment, and argue successfully that you would create a human being. And I defended my thesis and gave it to my parents, who left it in the shrine, you know. And then a little over 20 years ago now, when I was a very famous heart surgeon at Loma Linda, I was referred to a gentleman who I call Big Ed in all my books. And Big Ed had inoperable coronary artery disease. All the blood vessels in his heart were clogged up. He couldn't put stents in them. You couldn't do bypass. And Big Ed, over six months time, by changing the food he ate and taking a bunch of supplements from a health food store, cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coronary arteries. And I was taught that that could not happen. And when he started to describe the diet that he ate, about, I don't know, a paragraph into him telling me what he was doing. It's a. Wait a minute, you know, timeout. That's my thesis from Yale University. And I said, how'd you know my thesis didn't. And I was a big, giant fat guy. I was 70 pounds overweight. I was running 30 miles a week. I was going to the gym one hour every day, eating a very healthy, low fat diet. And I called my parents, said, hey, you still got my thesis? And they said, yeah. I said, send it up. First year, I lost 50 pounds. Subsequently, I lost another 20. And I've kept it off for 20 years. And that day I started researching, you know, could this be applied to human beings? So, yeah, that's how I got into this.

Very cool. I want to be respectful of your time, and I know that you're a busy guy, but you have a podcast, you have books that are out there, and I want the listeners to find out where they can learn more about everything you have going on. So please spend this time to give the listeners some, you know, guidance of where they can follow you and best find you.

So you can. I do have a podcast, the Dr. Gundry podcast. Wherever you get your podcast, you'll see it every week. Got some fascinating areas that we, that we cover. Interesting guests. You can find me at drdundry.com you can find me and my supplement line at gundrymd.com I have four New York Times best selling books, I have six national best selling books and worldwide selling books. Plant Paradox has been translated into 36 foreign languages. So it's reached, you know, reached all over the world. And the reason it's reached is, quite frankly, it works. If it didn't work.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. You couldn't sell that many books. So also have two YouTube channels, Instagram, so wherever you want to find me. And probably if you're on the Internet, you probably see my little smiling face popping up at you, wanting you to take one of my supplements.

Absolutely.

Remember, I used to think supplements made expensive urine. I really did. But I actually measure the effect of supplements on my patients every three months with blood work. And I can not only tell when they're taking one, I can even tell when they change brands. It's that specific. So supplements do not make expensive urine.

I got it. Well, I will make sure to link that all down below. And so that being said, Dr. Stephen Gundry, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Jacqueline, thank you so much. Here and thanks so much again.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple original series. The world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh, my God.

Go, go, go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.