A Healthy Gut Can Reverse Disease with Dr. Steven Gundry | 1123 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an interview with a guy who's probably done more than you might know. His name is Dr. Gundry, well known guy and a friend. He's written the plant paradox and the longevity paradox and the energy paradox and, and he's maybe best known for his work on lectins, one of the plant toxins that he and I agree are causing some problems in people. Not always in the same people the same way, but a big deal. But what you probably don't know is he's also a pioneer in robotic cardiac surgery, amongst other many different things. And on that note, I actually had my first robotic surgery yesterday with a robot inside my abdomen, floating around, stitching up a very small hernia that's been there for a while that I decided to preventatively get repaired. But I've never done robotic surgery before. So it's kind of cool to be on the phone with someone who years ago has been a pioneer in robotic surgery because it's kind of amazing what you can do. So Dr. Gundry, appreciate your work in the world of traditional and alternative medicine. Thanks for being here.

Well, good to see you again, Dave and hopefully you'll have a quick and speedy recovery. And good for you.

I am recovering quickly. I haven't had to use painkillers and for listeners go to daveasprey.com heal and there is mini half hour documentary of everything I do before and after surgery so that I can heal faster. So you just want to be stronger when you go in and stronger when you get out. There you go. It's free. Now this is your sixth time on the show. In fact, that's putting you up there to be one of our most common guests. Last time was number 912 and so it's been a few hundred episodes since you were on. I find you just have this incredible energy and curiosity about the world which you've been able to maintain through, I'm going to say, multiple segments of your career in medicine. And we're going to talk about your new book called Gut Check about reversing diseases and mental, physical, emotional health and things that are powered by your gut. But before we get into that, what's keeping your energy so high?

Well, you know, I still see patients six days a week, even on Saturdays and Sundays. And in a way, I guess I don't have to do that anymore. But one of the things that energizes me is that most every day, I get to see someone reverse a disease process that they walk through the door with with dietary advice and supplements. And not only do we see it in a physical manifestation, but we can measure it by lab tests for leaky gut. We can look for autoimmune markers that resolve. And like I say, not a day goes by that I don't get to witness what I guess I would have called miraculous long ago. But I don't think of them as miraculous anymore. I think of them as something that I would expect to see if things were working the way it ought to work.

That's awesome. Going from miraculous to, well, just how it's supposed to be. It's kind of funny. I was at Joe Polish's Genius Network event. This is a guy who's been a marketing mentor for more than a decade for me and a dear friend. He's been on the show, too. And he had someone on stage who reversed stage four cancer in a couple months, doing all of the biohacks and then some. And what he found in his research was that he found more than 2,000 people who had reversed it. And all of them said the same thing when they went into their doctor and said, do you want to hear how I did it? The doctor said, you couldn't have done it, therefore it's a miracle.

Right.

So how did you step over that line from being a western medical doctor to saying, that wasn't a miracle, there's a reason for it?

Well, you know, I want to rehash things, but over 25 years ago, I met this guy who I call Big Ed, who had inoperable coronary artery disease and 48 years old, and every blood vessel in his heart was clogged up, and you couldn't put stents in it. You couldn't do bypass. And basically, in six months time, this guy, by following a diet and taking a bunch of supplements from my health food store, that he did pretty Willy Nilly, reversed 50% of the blockages in six months. And I was taught that that was impossible, and I decided to figure out how he did it. And so I've spent 25 years now trying to figure out how he did it. And then every year, I get closer. And the new book, Gut Check, is the next iteration. I don't write a book unless I find something new that I think people should know about. Because you and I both know. First of all, it's fun to write a book because you and I both head down rabbit holes that we probably never thought we were going to go down. I hilariously don't do an outline when I start writing a book, because invariably if I did, the outline would totally be thrown in the trash, kind of a third way in. And, you know, each. Each time I'll give people new information. And the great thing about Gut Check is it basically is my attempt to summarize What Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, that all disease begins in the gut and how that guy knew that. I mean, nobody knew about the microbiome. But we're beginning to realize, I hope, that there's a whole lot more that we need to know about the microbiome and the wall of the gut and intestinal permeability, AKA leaky gut and what you can do to fix it. And, you know, I think he properly should have said, all disease begins in a leaky gut. And I'll still stand by that. But conventional wisdom, you know, I think it was. What was it? Maybe Paul Sagan said science only advances by questioning conventional wisdom. And so I think that's probably what we should do.

Well said. Although I think Hippocrates might have been mistaken because there was things that didn't exist in his time. Today, I would say all disease starts in the gut or in Monsanto or Bayer or Dow Chemicals factories. Does that sound like it might be part of the problem?

Absolutely. Just remember that sickness is good for business.

This show not sponsored by Big Pharma.

You and I will never have a contract with any of them, I suspect, but probably not. Yeah. You know, and I talk about glyphosate and all these other wonderful herbicides and biocides before, but I get into it even more, and Gut Check, that was.

Why I brought it up, the idea that somehow we can spray this crap that is affecting microbes in the soil without affecting microbes in the soil that's in our. In our gut. Doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You know, it was. Was actually patented as an antibiotic, as a fungicide. And so it's the idea that the shikamate pathway, which doesn't exist in humans, does exist in bacteria, and that's what it targets. And what's really scary is not only can glyphosate cause leaky gut directly, but glyphosate, as I talk about in Gut Check, really targets the tryptophan pathway bacteria in our gut. And tryptophan is rather important for. For making serotonin, 5 HTP, even dopamine. And so many of the Things that we now see happening to us. Anxiety, depression, cognitive decline. Parkinson's can be at least partially laid at the feet of glyphosate and its cousins. You know what's interesting to me is about 80% of my patients are autoimmune patients who aren't getting better with traditional treatment. And 90 plus percent of these people resolve their autoimmune disease. Published data from me at the American Heart association, within nine months to a year. And what's really interesting about these folks, including me, is that these folks will resolve their Hashimoto's or psoriasis or Crohn's rheumatoid arthritis, and they'll go over to Europe and they'll be tempted and they'll eat croissants and baguettes and pizzas and pasta. And they do remarkably well. And almost to a person they go, oh, Dr. Gundry has cured me. I can have all these things now. No, no, no, no, no, no. And they come back and they start eating our stuff. And within weeks they flare and they're on the phone going, well, I thought you cured me. I said, no, you just went to a glyphosate depleted environment and you just learned firsthand the power that glyphosate has over destroying us.

I was in Turkey recently and Dubai for a couple weeks, and as an experiment for the world of biohacking, I ate 2 kg of baklava over that time, which is like 4 pounds. Not only did I not gain any weight, I took my gluten, digesting enzymes and all that kind of stuff. No symptoms, no brain fog, none of that stuff. And I know glyphosate is a big part of it, but European wheat is soft wheat and American wheat is hard wheat. And it's the species that makes a big difference as well. I don't touch wheat here. If I lived in Europe, I wouldn't eat it very often. But if I'm there for a couple weeks and I'm having a treat, I don't mind doing that. Recognizing that it's kind of like taking a puff of a cigarette at a party that you might do once a year. It's not good for you, but it's probably not going to kill you if you did it that one time. Is that a good mindset?

Yeah. I think one of the things that I talk about in Gut check, which I haven't talked about before, is my. Most of my patients now, we not only do testing for leaky gut, but we also test for the various antibodies IgG antibodies to the various components of wheat, wheat germ agglutinin, the various components of wheat gluten, like Leiden and glutenin and non wheat proteins. And here's what's shocking. Every one of my patients with leaky gut, and that's very. Virtually everyone who walks through the door has 100% have antibodies to gluten, 98% have antibodies to wheat germ agglutinin, and 100% have antibodies to non wheat proteins. 100% across the board. Even people who have not eaten gluten for 10 years being gluten free. So that's bad enough. What's exciting and the reason I do this is if you follow these people and watch them repair their leaky gut within nine months to a year, 100% of them no longer have antibodies to these components of wheat. Their antibodies to gluten are gone. Their antibodies to wheat germ agglutin are gone. You can actually retrain your immune system. You can make it stand down. But I think the message is when people say, oh, you know, gluten sensitivity, that's a myth. Well, it's not a myth. It's much bigger in this country than I think anybody realizes. That's one of the take home messages from Gut Check. If you've got an issue of gluten, at least in this country, and the other components of wheat, particularly whole wheat, like wheat, germagglutin is only in whole wheat.

Whole wheat is dumb.

It's really dumb. And I just had a debate recently with a vegan cardiologist who wanted me to become convinced that every study of heart disease prevention, whole grains, was one of the keys to heart disease prevention.

I feel like that's almost a religious thing at a certain point. It's like you can show all these, these mechanistic things where we know this chemical does this and it does it reliably and repeatedly. And it does it in animals, and it does it in humans, and it does it in yeast. And they just look at you and say, but that can't be. Because whole grains. I feel like it's that Idiocracy movie, like, well, we're spraying Gatorade on our crops because electrolytes, even though the crops are dying, it doesn't matter, because electrolytes, in ancient times, you would feed whole grains to the very poorest segments of the population, usually who were enslaved because they wouldn't starve to death. And it was, it was bad for them. But since you didn't care about how what their outcomes were. They were basically free labor with no choice about it. You'd feed them the worst food. That's what whole grains are. And then if you could afford it, you'd scrape the bad parts off and you'd eat the inside, which is why white rice is better than brown rice, too. But today you have these like, is it like a form of masochism or like self loathing that causes people to like whole grains? Knowing this historically, knowing everything, or is this just propaganda? Why? Why are we stuck on this still, like, the evidence is so clear?

Well, as I responded, you know, sickness is very good for business. And, you know, when I first decided to look into this, I, like most of my colleagues, were convinced that, let's just take coronary artery disease, for instance. This was a process that was going to occur. It was going to occur in virtually everybody. And your only hope was to slow it down, not reverse it, slow it down. I remember I was a discussant of the American Heart Association a number of years ago about a new statin drug. And this statin drug, over the course of about two years, reduced plaque formation by 0.01% compared to the placebo. And this was hailed as a major advance. You know, and I'm going on the discussion. Wait a minute. You know, this is so insignificant that you needed statistics to prove your point. It didn't change outcomes at all. It just got the plaque a little bit smaller. That's totally different than making plaque reverse. And so, so many of these outcome studies really are looking at the wrong thing. They're trying to say, well, we've slowed this process down a little bit, and that's a wonderful thing. And that's the best we can do. And that's not true. We can reverse these processes by finding out what the culprits are.

Wow.

It's like Stefan Lindenberg, who unfortunately has passed away, but he spent his life studying diet and disease in the western diet. And one of the things that he concluded was that grains and beans were a negative aspect of the Mediterranean diet. That was compensated for by all the other positive aspects.

But the blue zones. Tell me about the blue zone.

Well, I spend a whole chapter debunking the blue zones. Interestingly enough, the Nagoyan Peninsula in Costa Rica, and these folks do eat corn and beans. Indeed. What's so unique about the Nagoyan Peninsula as compared to the rest of Costa Rica, who also eat grain, corn and beans, is that they are sheep herders and they. Yeah, in fact, it's like a gerrymandered D district and they published studies show that the beans and grains are the negative aspect of their diet. Even the people admit it is. That's compensated by the fermented sheep products, yogurts and cheeses that only they eat. But that doesn't do well if you're trying to convince people that a vegan diet full of grains and beans is really good for you.

All right, guys, that means you want to go out and you want to read Gut Check, Dr. Gundry's new book because it provides evidence based counterpoints to the Blue Zones. And I also want to point out that Dan, the author of the Blue Zones diet, is a fantastic human being with good motivations. He's been on the show. I like him. We're both interested in longevity, as is Dr. Gundry. So good intentions don't always create accurate results. And in this case there's so many holes in it. And the most glaring one is aside from the sheep's, you know, Manchego paradox, you could write a whole book about that, probably Manchigo being sheep's cheese, if you're not into cheese. But we're also looking at Hong Kong, which wasn't included. It has the highest meat consumption of anywhere on earth, even above the US where people live the longest. Isn't that weird? Right? So it feels like we're kind of running into this China Study paradox, which is also a book that is a paradox where there's so many scientific mistakes and data cherry picking mistakes that just don't fall for it. Go to Peru. I was just there. And this is the birthplace of rice and beans and corn as a way to feed people when there was not enough food. And the average Peruvian is about as high as my waist. And in the parts of China, by the way, China, meat consumption is going up as they're all trying to trick us to eat less. In the US the average height is 3 inches higher of their children when they eat meat. And they're trying to make us eat bugs and corn and stuff that's just bad for us. Yikes. What about bugs? Are bugs free of lectins? Should we be eating bugs? What's your take?

No, I think, I think bugs have a place in our diet that's easy. So, and interesting enough, chitin in insect shells and in shellfish is one of the best absorbers of lectins there is. In fact, when I shrimp I actually eat shell and all because it's actually a great source of a lectin seeking sugar molecule, chitin.

It's Interesting. You can get powdered chitin to bind to lectins in capsule form. In fact, you make one of those, don't you?

Yeah, I do, yeah.

So these lectin absorbing compounds, it can work for that. Problem is if it's, if you're chewing it up, you're probably not getting much surface area. And the second thing is there's a lot of allergic stuff that happens over time with people who are exposed to chitin. From what I've seen, probably not when it's purified in powder, but when it's, it's in, you know, ground up bugs. And then there's the amount of carbohydrate versus protein. They're very low in protein, they're high in parasites. The omega 6 ratio in bugs is not good. I checked that a long time ago. So I'm kind of thinking that they're going to feed glyphosate soaked corn to bugs and grinds, not do that.

It's the same.

That's Bill Gates. I think he's got it in his business model. Right. It's just not okay.

So very good point. You know, you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating. A point. One of the things I think that's scary that I talk about in gut check is you can take a organic free range chicken and feed it basically corn and soybeans and. And you will have an omega 6 to omega 3 ratio of 25 to 1 in a commercial chicken. Should be 3 to 5 to 1 in a traditional diet. And so even though it's organic and even though it's free range, it's basically an ear of corn with feathers. And people go, oh, I eat so healthy. And then when I see the healthy things they're eating and take these things away from them, all of a sudden things start resolving.

Wow. So you're telling people to avoid eating chicken?

I actually telling people more and more and more to avoid beef, lamb and pork and milk products that aren't fermented. With the exception. Yeah. Because of NEU 5 GC the.

We're going to talk about that one.

Okay, we're going to take them in.

What about chicken? Yeah.

What's your take on if you get a lectin light chicken? And I have, I send people to lectinlightchicken.com Farmer Dan in Texas and I have no relationship with him except I'm a huge fan. He feeds his chicken lectin free diet, he pastures them. He now has other farmers doing this in Fact, I just had a Thanksgiving turkey from Lectin Light Chicken, and he's now got this ratio down to about 5 to 1 in terms of omega 6 to omega 3. And we just tweaked his formula a little bit. I'm hoping it'll work out, adding more flaxseed to his formula. But he won't give his chickens any lectin containing grain products anywhere.

That's what we do for our chickens on the farm on Vancouver Island. They eat as many bugs and as much protein and fat as they can get because they're, they're carnivores. They're.

Yeah, we forget they're carnivores. You're right.

They will. They will strip a carcass if you let them. Like you could throw a dead cow in with your chickens and the next day all that would be left would be bones. They're that ravenous. So. And maggots are their favorite food, by the way. So, you know, they'll leave the corn forever if I even fed them corn. So the problem there is, you know, there aren't many chickens fed that way and. And you're still not getting the same kinds of fats in ruminants. Now, how much in gut check? I mean, I don't think that there's a lot on new 5GC, unless I'm. I've read all of your books, but I don't have them all. What's in what book? So I think you cover that in the book before in the longevity paradox.

Well, actually it's in the plant paradox, but there's all new information in gut check that makes me really pause much more than I did before I, I got interested in neu5gc, which is a sugar molecule.

Let's define that for people.

Yeah, there's a sugar molecule that lines are got. There's a protective layer of sugar and lipids that line our blood vessels called the glycocalyx. And there won't be a. This also occurs in our blood brain barrier, and it also occurs on our joint surfaces. And it's composed in humans of a very, very similar sugar molecule called Neu5Ac. Neu5Ac differs from Neu5Gc by one molecule of oxygen. They're otherwise ident identical. What's interesting is that if we feed humans neu5 gc containing food, it's immediately absorbed in our small intestines and we develop antibodies to neu5gc, vigorous antibodies. And the more neu5gc foods we eat, the More antibodies against it we make. Now, we've known that for a considerable period of time. What's new is we thought, and I wrote about this in the Plant paradox, that because Neu5ac and Neu5gc are so similar, that perhaps because we make antibodies to neu5gc, that we would attack the lining of our blood vessels, our blood brain barrier and our joints, which have neu5ac in them because they look so similar. Molecular mimicry, autoimmunity. And that was the theory. Well, there's no theory involved anymore. So association does not mean causation. What we now know is that Neu5GC can be substituted for Neu5AC in our various glycocalyxes. And the more Neu5GC we eat, the more it's substituted for Neu5 acid. So that means that it is an antigenic substance and we now incorporate it into our glycocalyx, into our blood brain barrier. And interesting, animals who make neu5gc aggressively keep it out of their brain because it's such a big cause of neuroinflammation. But if you incorporate it into the blood brain barrier, you then attack the blood brain barrier and it gets into your brain, same way with the joints. So the bad news is that it's no longer, in my humble opinion, association, it's a causation. And that's the mechanism. So what can you do about it? Well, here's the great news. If you ferment food, milk products, the bacteria eat Neu 5 GC. It's a sugar molecule, they love it. It's if you ferment sausages, and traditionally all sausages are made by bacterial fermentation, all the neu5gc is gone, it's eaten. That may be one of the reasons the Andorrans, which have the highest life expectancy in the world, this little country between Spain and France in the Pyrenees mountains eat sausage every day. And they're sheep herders, they don't drink sheep milk, they eat yogurt and they eat cheeses. For instance, Parmesan cheese has no neu5gc in it. So to me, that's the exciting news, that people used to eat nose to tail and they had no refrigeration, so they always preserved their foods by fermentation, including their meats. So have yourself some sausage, not Jimmy Deans, but have some from Italy or Portugal or Spain or France. But I now with this new information, can you have grass fed grass, finished beef? Yes, but I Think we have to be aware that it'll get incorporated into your glycocalyx. But the good news is the more neu5ac containing foods, which is fish, shellfish and chicken, properly pastured chicken will actually kick out neu 5 GC out of the glycocalyx. And that's proven research too that I talk about.

Did you come across any of the research showing that grass fed animals have substantially lower amounts of neu5 gc vs grain fed?

No, I didn't.

Unfortunately, there's a couple studies that I came across around that. Cause I really went, went deep on this a while ago and I can actually feel a difference in systemic inflammation if I eat grain fed versus grass fed. And I am almost exclusively grass fed at this point. I mean, on rare occasions if I'm at a restaurant, they have some sort of, you know, wagyu that's not grain fed. Sure, fine, whatever. And also even before that, before I understood all this because I was working on improving my nervous system, you can get supplements, I think they still make them that contain what's called sialic acid, which is basically the, the overarching class of this. So you can take neu5gc, the good stuff, as a pill. You could even preload with that before eating a big corn fed steak. Or we could just stop making industrial meat and do distributed agriculture so animals crap everywhere and build soil that, that sucks up carbon and the way the world's supposed to be and we're building that world. And you know, if these billionaires think they can buy up all the farmland, I'm thinking they might be wrong. Because at a certain point, if a crop dust or a tractor comes by spraying stuff and you're next door, I think there's a lawsuit, if not outright sabotage that's going to start happening because people don't like their kids getting poisoned anymore. Like we've kind of had enough of that. So I'm, I am not worried and my lab tests are supporting this, but I'm grass fed. So if you wanted a good argument, I would love to do this, this fermented meat thing. When I was a raw vegan, when I got really sick, as always happens from that stuff. This was back in maybe 2003, 2004, man. I mean, so much of the pain, all the stuff from the lectins, and in my case I think oxalates are even worse than lectins. But the whole thing was just a shit show and caused a lot of autoimmunity and even some Things I'm still reversing. That's why I'm so passionate about this vegan nonsense. But at the end I said, all right, I'm going to incorporate raw meat. And there was a very early guy who's since passed away who was, oh, you have to eat raw meat, but it has to be fermented. And all these followers were eating jars of fermented stuff and going back to Eskimo studies and saying, look, you know, they hang the salmon up in the tree for three days, then feed it to the dogs. And then the dogs are really powerful, but if they eat fresh salmon, the dogs don't do so well. And so there's all this stuff about fermented meat. And his followers are saying, well, I think I'm detoxing because I eat it and I get all these symptoms like, yeah, those are called food poisoning, but I never fermented it that way. But histamine and you, you leave meat out like fermented sausage. Yeah, it's going to eat up that new 5GC, but you're going to end up with some aggressive meat eating funguses that also will eat you and you're going to end up with large amounts of histamine and even people who have good histamine tolerance, which I don't. Maybe that's what the raw vegan diet did to me. But anyone like Long Covid has histamine sensitivity at this point. So how do we balance fermented foods, which are high in histamine, against avoiding neu5gc, against getting all of the nutrients in red meat? Because I tell you, chicken is not that good of a protein source compared to beef and a mineral source as well, especially most of the chicken you can buy.

Well, one of my problems that I see in my patients is iron overload, not iron deficiency. Yes, menstruating women can develop iron deficiency, no doubt about it. But iron ages us and I've written about it. So limiting iron, particularly as we get older, seems to me like a good idea. But I guess in answer to your question, there are other fermentation products that we've written about and others have written about. All the polyamines, spermidine, for instance, putresine, all of these are actually very useful compounds for longevity. I bet you you take spermidine. I do.

Oh yeah. I think I was the first guy to write about it in longevity circles. Before you could buy it, there was no sperm in supplements. I was taking a Japanese probiotic I was importing without us labeling in order to get my spermidine levels up. And now you can just buy it, which is great.

Yeah, we had, you know, at Gundry md we had a spermidine supplement. We do. We actually have several.

Oh, cool.

That we had to hold because it was not generally recognized as safe. Grass. The minute it was generally recognized as safe, out came our spermidine supplements. I was so, you know, devoted to it. But again, you gotta play by the rules.

Well, this is a big problem in the world. I, I'm sorry. I didn't hire the government to tell me what supplements I'm allowed to take. Since I didn't pay them to do that. I didn't elect them to do that. I don't think they have a right to do that. And I don't recognize it. So there's that. I will take the supplements I choose. And if you'd like to block me from doing that, then you're no longer my government. There we go. I've had enough of that. I think we need to have an offshore oil platform where you can go buy your supplements, get healthy and then come back into the land of. That might not be safe because hey, there's a reason I drink.

That's like vitamin D toxicity.

Yeah, exactly. Who knows what you might do? So, yeah, speaking of which, take your vitamin D, right? Or was that. Look, I don't think your coffee cup's big enough that, that's a problem there.

There's actually 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different types of tea in this coffee mug.

That's impressive. Well now here, let me ask this question. Okay. Oxalates. I've been, I've, I wrote more about them in my last book. Oxalates are like lectins. They're an anti nutrient. I'm starting to think they're way more implicated in diseases of aging than I ever would have imagined when I wrote my last couple books and it turns out matcha in particular, but green tea has relatively high levels of it to the point that some of the people I've been chatting with, like me, who are really watching this carefully, they notice changes in muscle soreness and joint stiffness from two cups of matcha. They'll drink it one day, the next day, like, oh, look, symptoms are back. Do you worry about oxalates?

You know, we normally would have a bevy of oxalate eating bacteria in our microbiome. And one of the things to me that's interesting is if you look at people who have oxalate forming stones or oxalate stones they lack oxalate eating bacteria in their gut microbiome. The people, at least in my practice who are convinced that oxalates are a problem somehow no longer react to oxalates once we get all the other mischief makers out and including glyphosate containing foods. So I think our problem is we, and I've written about this, we used to have a fantastic defense system against the plant defense system against being eaten. And that was our microbiome. There are bacteria that love to eat gluten. They're long gone. There are bacteria that love to eat oxalate. They're long gone. So I think a lot of these issues that we see in our current health is the fact that for the past 50 years we've been virtually decimating our offensive front four that's protecting the quarterback. And now we're getting guys out of the bleachers to come and try to be the front line and you, the quarterback, are getting smacked all the time. And that whole defensive system is gone. And we've done it. Among other things, we starve these guys to death. We've given them absolutely nothing to eat. We poisoned them with antibiotics. You and I both know the recent research looking at fast food glyphosate and antibiotics and almost all fast foods in this country. Panera Bread has the highest glyphosate content of any fast food restaurant. Holy cow. And it's healthy.

It's crazy what's going on out there. I suspect that we're right on the cusp of genetically engineering gut bacteria to do the things we want them to do. I had the first genetically engineered FDA approved probiotic on the show for episode 1000. This is a probiotic that eats alcohol because 80% of the damage or 80% of the aldehyde formed by alcohol is formed by bacteria in the colon. So they give you a 24 hour bump in things that metabolize aldehydes so you don't get all the aging effects from alcohol. I still don't think alcohol is good for you. But I would take a genetically engineered gut bacteria that would just ravage any presence of oxalate and my God, I would love to do that. There was a company about 10 years ago who was making a probiotic that ate oxalates. It was somewhere in Europe and it was over the counter and then they got attacked by regulatory authorities. So now they're looking to make it a drug. I'm pretty sure that they failed, which if you really make a dent in the market for kidney Stones. I mean, that could be terrible economically. How dare you?

Really bad.

I like to quote Greta Grundelberg a lot. How dare you? So, yeah, how dare you. It's a serious thing. You go back to the 20s and 30s before we had glyphosate. Oxalate poisoning from foods was all over medicine. They were talking about it all over because. And also people use oxalic acid at home to clean their sinks and people would touch it with their hands and they'd get kidney stones and all these other things. It feels like that kind of went away. So I balance my lectins, I balance my oxalates, and I do sense if I have, you know, beets and green tea, man, I, I feel it the next day. But maybe it's because we're raw vegan. And I loaded up every, every cell in my body with razor sharp crystals. So I look at that, a new, new 5 GC. Doing the grass fed thing. I don't think I'm perfect, but I, I'm better than I've ever been. And now I'm looking like you, like, how do we bolster defenses? Like, like you have your pills that capture lectins. What is that called, by the way? That product that you make is Lectin Derm.

Lectin shield.

Lectin shield. Okay, good. So that's a great idea. You should take that if you're going to go to Europe and eat 2 pounds of baklava.

Trust me, believe it or not. Yeah, I take about, I take about 10 of those when I go to Europe and know I'm going to be mischievous. You know, you bring up an interesting point I think you may have noticed in the news, I think it was last week, and I, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on her name. The scientist who won the Nobel prize for the CRISPR. She just formed a company and raised $70 million to head after the microbiome. She's out of Berkeley and she's going to use viral vectors to change our microbiome for the good. Now, interestingly enough, using viral vectors isn't a novel idea. Eli Lilly was formed by using bacteriophages for the treatment of infectious diseases, Bacterial. Infectious diseases. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. And much of the genetic changes in bacteria is actually because of viral genomes being implanted in bacteria. So the idea has some merit, but I'm not sure I want to infect my bacteria aggressively with viruses. But we'll see. But she just raised $70 million there's.

Definitely some interchanges that we are going to engineer in ourselves. And the trick is to make sure you get to choose. And it's not one of these ideas like, oh, this seems like a good idea. Let's infect mosquitoes so that anyone who's bitten by a mosquito is allergic to the foods that nourish them. And by the way, yes, that's I believe, a Bill Gates plan. Let's take away consent. So anyone who's doing anything to bacteria, it needs to be non inheritable, like the ones that I had on my show called Zbiotic, the ones for, for alcohol. And that stuff dies and it can't reproduce and so there's protections. And I just had gene therapy for longevity on myself. You go to daveasprey.com gene therapy for info on that and that only lasts for two years and it doesn't enter the germline. So it's really important that we don't let these companies just engineer additional weaknesses into humans to create larger market size. Because if they do that, I think there's a word for it, it's called evil. And I don't know if we're going to go there. There's some stuff you've written about that I really want to get into. I mean you just, we can talk about all this stuff that so few people know about and we're educating them as we talk. So love getting to hang out with you. But you talk about hormones and gut bacteria in a new way in Gut Check, that's actually worth it. You talk about microbial endocrinology, which probably makes every endocrinologist listening go, what the hell are you talking about? That can't be. Therefore it doesn't exist. Which by the way is the most religious statement ever said. So talk to me about what that is. Microbial endocrinology.

Well, you know, with kind of each advance in looking at circulating hormones and where they come from. For instance, when we first talked about the gut brain access, it was well, there's neurons in the gut and there's lots of neurons in the gut. And these neurons are the source of serotonin. And so the feel good hormone is made by neurons in the gut. They go up to the brain. The brain isn't the source of it. Well, step back. And now it turns out that it's the microbiome that makes most serotonin and not the neurons. And now we're beginning to realize that there's a microbiome that's in charge of almost all Hormone production. For instance, there is an estrogen microbiome. The feel good hormone oxytocin is made by L. Reuteri or L. Rootari, whichever you like. And so this love hormone, oxytocin that women produce the minute they see their baby is produced by bacteria. And you can actually modulate those bacteria. And people, for instance, with anxiety and depression have a microbiome that's totally different, totally dysbiotic compared to people who don't. And you can do animal studies of taking depressed rats and feeding their feces to happy rats and the happy rats will get depressed and so on and so forth. The scary thing is, and maybe the good news is a lot of women in particular don't realize that their estrogen, particularly postmenopausal women, may be being produced by a gut microbiome that's produced, producing that. And maybe, just maybe, they may not want that to be produced during that time. The other thing that's interesting to me, as I look at these long lived societies, the idea of menopause and menopausal symptoms seems to be virtually non existent in these societies. They transition from having periods to not having periods without this crisis of mental health, physical health that we seem to produce in the United States. And that's interesting when, when I talk to these women in Italy and I ask them, you know, what it was like and they go, huh, what are you talking about? What do you mean what it was, what it was like? One day I stopped having periods. Have a nice day. Bye. So I think the more we learn about the microbiome and remember the human microbiome project was just completed in 2017, the more we're getting an idea of what all these guys have been doing all along. They've always been there. We just didn't know they were there, number one. And we didn't know what they were doing and where all this stuff came from. We couldn't imagine that bacteria, these stupid little infectious devils would be responsible for making serotonin, you know, how dare they. And you know, I spend a whole chapter talking about toxoplasmosis and how it is really good at manipulating human behavior. A single cell organism.

I love it that you talk about that. My, my very first book, the Better Baby book. And there's thousands and thousands of babies who would not have been born without that book. I keep getting these messages from people. I read it and I'm still reading it now and it just, it makes me happy. I think, I think I did the world a solid, even though it wasn't a major bestseller because pregnancy books never are, but it's what got my kids to exist so that.