Anti-Aging Secret: Genes DON’T Control Your Longevity! THIS Predicts Cancer! Naveen Jain

Just from looking at your oral microbiome, VIOME can predict whether you have cancer.

We have now analyzed over 1 million samples. We now know more about human body than any living entities on Earth. Stop blaming your ancestors for your problems. Less than 1% of your genes come from your ancestors. Your genes have less than 10% impact on your health. 90 to 95% of everything in your health and your longevity, it is something you get to control. I have always thought you were just one of those people who believe in eating red meat. I wanted to look at the damn data and say, you know what, is Dave Asprey actually right or is he wrong? So this is my confession.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

Today I'm interviewing one of my favorite.

Guests of all time on the show who's been on before and his name is Naveen Jain. He's the founder and CEO of viome Life Science. And the reason that I love getting regular updates for you from Naveen is that he's one of the most forward thinking people I've ever met when it comes to health. And he's cracked the code on the microbiome. I've been working with this team for about eight years at Viome. They've added 10,000 new bacteria and probably more since then, to the library of what goes on inside the gut. But he's gone way beyond that to the point where just from looking at your oral microbiome, VIOME can predict whether you're, whether you have cancer, like really, really big things. Things that the FDA fast tracked.

So you've probably heard plenty of my.

Episodes about probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics and things like that. But there's always another level with Naveen and we're going to talk about what AI is doing for you and your ability to see what's happening inside your gut and to take control of it. We'll talk about immune function and specifically longevity. You'll also hear about some concepts that I haven't introduced on the show before and I'm pretty excited about it. Naveen, my dear friend and fellow leader.

Of the Apollo Group entrepreneur Mastermind with me, welcome back to the show.

Well, first of all, this is an absolutely the one podcast I look forward to every time. And it doesn't matter how many times you and I have chatted, there is so much stuff to talk about and I always look forward to sharing all the latest with you.

All right, let's get into it. I'm going to assume that listeners know that we have bacteria in our gut and they affect all sorts of things in your biology. If this is your first episode ever, you may not know that you're going to have to do a little bit of catch up. So let's assume we've all heard microbiome and maybe they've even heard about the viome test and how it's looking at RNA versus DNA. What I want to know is what do we specifically know about the microbiome and aging?

Aha.

So first of all, let me just start with microbiome. So microbiome resides not only just in our gut, which is where most people think it is, it's actually is in your mouth. So oral microbiome, you, you have a skin microbiome, you have a nasal microbiome, you have, you know, so microbiome is all over us and inside us. There are 100 trillion of these microbes that are in symbiotic relationship with us as humans. So we as Homo sapiens or our fellow humans, 99% of all the genes that are expressed in our body don't come from a mom and dad. So my first thing is stop blaming your ancestors for your problems. Less than 1% of your genes come from your ancestors, right? 99% are these microbes that you actually get to control. And I think we're going to get a little bit more into it. On the longevity side, the same message. Your genes have less than 10% impact on your health, period.

Right?

So 5 to 10% of the impact comes from your genes. 90 to 95% of everything in your health and your longevity, it is something you get to control, it is your lifestyle, Right. So blame the choices you make every day, don't blame your ancestors.

So that's the first message question for you there, Naveen.

Yeah Mthfr comt these are common genetic.

Mutations that affect your ability to absorb things. Don't those matter somewhat?

They do and they do matter. And my point about saying they matter 5 to 10% and that means now once you know what they are, you are able to get the right nutrition that takes into account of that.

Right?

So I'm not saying that if you, no one is different. These between you and I, you are handsome, you are tall, you are, you know, all the good qualities a man needs to have and lots of hair. Even then, 99.9% of our genes, our DNA is identical, right? So it's only the 0.1% that's different between different humans. Right, that I'm not suggesting that the genes don't matter at all. But point is, their impact is so small and the nutrition and lifestyle can overcome that. That means you may have a particular propensity for a particular thing to happen, but you can control that by changing your lifestyle, right? So by eating the right nutrition, you're able to overcome your genes and actually be able to live healthy, long life, even with the mutations you may have.

Okay, well something like a microbiome test, like the viome test, that's looking at what your microbes are doing.

Will, will that tell me if I need more methylated B vitamins?

Since you mentioned about viome. So viome basically does three things. It is analyzes. So you basically get a kit at home and you analyze your, we analyze your saliva. So you spit in a tube and we analyze all of your RNA in your saliva. And when we say rna, these are the expression of your genes. So you remember your genes never change, but, but what they do and what they're expressing is always changing, right? So same DNA, the identical DNA makes your hair, your lungs, your liver, your kidney, your skin and everything in your body comes from the identical DNA. But yet it can produce every single part of our body, different organs, including our neurons, all from the same DNA. So it's really the expression of the DNA that causes these different organs to be produced. That means the gene expression can change what your DNA does. So DNA is like an Alphabet and RNA is the story you are writing. So we analyze the rna. So when we look at in your saliva, we are looking at all of your oral microbial gene expression. And then we also looking at all of your human gene expression in your saliva. Remember all this stuff, your human gene expression that's in your saliva, the inflammatory markers, everything that's happening, we are measuring that. Then we measure the stool, the bottom of the digestive tube. So remember we are like a donut, there is a tube that goes through us. So we measure the top of the digestive tube and then we measure the bottom of the digestive tube by taking a touch of your stool. And now we are measuring all of your gut microbial gene expression. So all the RNA of your stool that gives us a gut microbial expression. And then we also get all the human gene expression that's coming from epithelial cells which are the gut lining that are shedding in your stool. So we get all of that, then we take the finger prick of your blood. So about three to four drops of your blood. That gives us everything else you want to know around your body. So now we are looking at your mitochondria. So that means now, Dave, your audience is the only audience. I can talk about mitochondria. Otherwise people look at me, am I an alien? What the hell am I talking? But at least with you, I can have a conversation. The mitochondria is actually an organelle inside our human cell. It is believed it used to be an ancient bacteria captured inside the human cell. So they are not just mitochondria. Every single organelle actually has its own function and could be honestly a separate organism in the early part, that actually got captured into one single cell as a symbiotic relationship. So when we are analyzing your blood, we analyzing your mitochondria, that means all of your mitochondrial gene expression. So this is something people may not know. Your mitochondria has its own DNA. It is different from the DNA that you think of your mom and dad. This particular mitochondria comes from your mom. So just so you know, your mitochondria come from your mom. And that's really the ancestry of your maternal side that you're seeing in your mitochondria. So we analyze your mitochondria and then we analyze all of your inflammatory markers. So in the fingerprint blood, you'll be seeing all the cytokines, which most people, technical word would be all these interleukins, right? So we'll be measuring all of your interleukins, the cytokines, all of your mitochondria. And then we're looking at everything in your gut. Microbial expression, oral microbial expression, and then we combine everything. So by looking at all of these rna, then we use AI to see, all right, how are they interacting with each other, what is going on and what could be done about it. So once we realize that certain genes are underexpressed or certain genes that are overexpressed, then we say, what are the substrate? The substrates are these ingredients that could come from food, they could come from supplements, they could come from other types of products, ingredient ingredients that actually now can impact these pathways. So if you want certain genes to be overexpressed, then you actually can find a substrate that will amplify that. And if you want certain genes to be under expressed, then you can find the ingredient that will suppress that. So you talked about methylation. Methylation is a fundamentally an epigenetic, which is over genetics. And purpose of methylation is to actually reduce the expression of a certain gene. That means when certain genes are methylated, they are underexpressed or not expressed, and then that expression can be changed. And it changes as you age, and it changes based on your diet and lifestyle. And when I say lifestyle, I mean the stress and the exercise and the sleep and all that good stuff that you do every day.

So what that means is that if you do have some genetic issues, you're going to pick that up by looking at rna, because RNA is what the DNA ultimately is making based on your environment. And for listeners, this is a big deal. I, I still think it's useful to know your MTHFR status, but if you're managing it actively with viome, if you are under or over methylating, and these are major issues for longevity and cognitive performance and inflammation that affects at least half of people have some kind of a thing going on there. The upside of this is that MTHFR has become relatively famous. My friend Gary Brca talks about this a lot, and it's been a through line even in my first fertility book. There's about 19 other major genetic differences between people that have to do with sulfur, have to do with dopamine, have to do with nitric oxide, all these different things that are around human performance.

And aging and your brain.

So looking at what the body's actually doing allows you to look at that whole stack of those things instead of looking at your genetics and saying, oh, I have this propensity, but I don't know if it's happening or not. So should I take more of this supplement or less?

That's pretty interesting. So let's go back to aging.

What have you learned in the last year about aging and the microbiome that we didn't know before?

Oh, my God. So there's so much stuff. And first thing is, so first of all, first one to share with you, first person, you know, that we have now analyzed over 1 million samples. Wow. Million samples. That means we now know more about human body than any living entities on earth, period.

Right.

We know everything about human body by analyzing 1 million samples. And one thing that I was just looking at the data and this is my confession now. So I have always thought you were just one of those people who believe in eating red meat because just somehow you do. So I wanted to look at the damn data and say, you know what, is Dave Asprey actually right or is he wrong? So this is my confession. 58% of the people actually benefit from eating red meat.

Wow.

Right?

42% of the people could potentially be harmed based on their gut microbial activity. So this is what happens as, you know, the red meat and especially obviously you Gotta eat the. Not the stuff that you get, which is farm, you know, which is industrial produce. You want to get a grass fed red beef. Grass fed, grass fed beef. All the beef contains is choline and carnitine. And the choline in the red meat, your microbes can actually convert them into something called tma, trimethylamine that gets absorbed in your blood and your liver actually can convert that TMA into something called tmao, trimethylamine oxide, which is what causes the atherosclerosis and many other diseases.

Right.

Now, interesting thing is the expression of the enzyme in liver that converts the TMA to TMAO is called FMO3. Interestingly that FMO3 enzymes can be accelerated or actually overproduced when you have a certain oral microbial activity. So for example P. Gingivirus, when it produces ginger pain, increases the activity of FMO3, vitamin B. Vitamin B actually increases the production of enzyme FMO3, right. So if you're eating a lot of red meat, then you should cut down some of that vitamin and you should make sure that your gut microbes are not producing a lot of TMA and that you can analyze. So when you do a volume test, we can show you what is your TMA production and how it's going to impact your heart health. Right? And that's basically as most people who have listened to me before now know, that there is no such thing as universal healthy food. If food can be good for you today and it may actually become bad in a year as your body changes, or if it works for your spouse or if it works for your neighbor, doesn't mean it's going to work for you, right? So really interesting stats. Spinach and kale, your two favorite foods, right. Are actually interestingly, almost half the people are harmed by these things because the oxalates in them is actually is very difficult to digest by. The same thing is true for cashews and almonds, right?

Yes.

Avocado I thought was a superfood for everyone. It turns out that it has a very high uric acid and the people who already have high uric acid and if you're eating lot of avocado is going to turn into a gout or heart disease. And that's the fundamental thing is to know that there is no such thing as universal healthy food, you have to know what is going to work for you. The pomegranate is another one that I just wanted to say because Vogue just published a thing the IT food. The IT for all food is pomegranate and what I was going to tell you is that pomegranate in itself actually doesn't really have any nutrition. However, pomegranate has something called allergic acid. The allergic acid in some people, when they have the right microbial activities, they can convert them into something called urolithin A. Ula. Urolithin A gets absorbed in your body and urolithin A is an unbelievably great substrate for your mitochondria.

Right.

But simply eating pomegranate or drinking a pomegranate juice doesn't mean you're gonna benefit from it. And that's the reason we are actually now learning it's not just about the probiotics. In fact, the postbiotics actually turning out to be a better solution than taking the probiotics because even the things like Akkermansia, which lot of the people are now falling for because some people are advertising as GLP1, the problem with that approach is Akkermansia can actually cause Ms. So if you don't believe me, just go Google Akkermansia and Ms. And you'll see that Ekkermansia can also cause Ms. The trick really is to understand. But post bio, postbiotic akamensia is actually really good. There was a study that recently came out that how Ekkermansia postbiotic actually is better in terms of impact and efficacy than the live probiotic. Live Akkermansia.

Now I want to make sure for our listeners, I've done, I think three or four episodes on Akkermansia as a way of controlling blood sugar. And what I believe and what I've seen from the majority of evidence is that if you have a healthy lining of your gut, Akkermansia is beneficial. If you have a leaky gut, Akkermansia might not be beneficial. And since it's probably going to be there anyway and since it helps with metabolism, I actually do take Akkermansia, but I don't have leaky gut because I do all the other stuff.

But you should try the postbiotic Akkermansia. It's really, really good.

Is that something that you guys are making?

We have the company actually in Europe that makes it and we just actually start, we add, we adding them to all of our products.

Okay, very, very interesting. And guys, postbiotics, if that's a new term for you, a postbiotic is part of the system of probiotics. You have something called prebiotic. This is what are the gut bacteria going to eat and your food, some of it's prebiotic, some's not. And then you have the probiotic, which is the bacteria that does the eating. You have the postbiotic, which is the metabolic compounds made by gut bacteria. And they can be beneficial postbiotics like the one we just talked about, or like urolithin A and urlithin A is one of my superstar longevity ingredients. The scientists from Timeline have been on over and over talking about this. But you can also have toxins like lipopolysaccharides and MMPs and other things that are really bad for you made by your gut bacteria. And you're always going to have some mix of good postbiotics and bad postbiotics made. And when you get the data, which is what Viome's all about, you end up saying, oh, what bad things am I making? How could I change my diet so that my gut bacteria make less of the bad and more of the good? And even tmao, which we talked about, this is about every five years the New York Times or some other article will come out, usually funded by Kellogg's or someone, I believe, and they'll say.

Ah, red meat bad tmao.

And here's the thing. If you have gut bacteria that make tmao, eggs, fish and red meat will all turn into tmao.

That is absolutely correct.

Right? So that means you might for a month or maybe three, do what VIOME says. Don't eat any of that stuff. It'll be a miserable three months because you'll be malnourished because you don't get all that healthy red beef cooked, rare and juicy. Nivian's going, gross. He's a vegetarian. We always, we always teach each other at dinner, but during that time the bacteria would go away and then you can resume eating it. And so I, I think that if, if the 5842 is based on TMAO, that means 42% of people have the bad bacteria. But once they get rid of it, the amount of people who benefit from some amount of red meat may be higher than that. But if everyone had tmao, I'd say skip meat for a little while. Oh, and skip eggs and go on some sort of fasting, weird macrobiotic thing. But only until your gut bacteria are fixed. How long does it take to change your gut bacteria based on your diet?

Very interesting. So that's with another study we just did, and it turns out it is six months. So in six months, your gut bacteria changes enough that you actually have. So it changes, obviously it takes down anywhere between Three to six months. But what we saw, the P value was very, very low at six months. That means there is significant amount of change in six months.

Right.

But after three months or so you start to see a real impact on it. But after six months, actually it is very different from what it was.

Got it. So it can take up to six months. And I've seen studies that say three days of changing what you eat. If you eat zero fermentable foods, I mean, you'll know that your gut bacteria change because you stop farting. I mean, so you can make rapid change.

That's actually the gut microbial expression. So what happens is your expression of these microbes changes faster than the microbes themselves.

Right.

So the, in fact the gut bacteria, you know, it's very hard to kill someone because their tendency is to live. They want to do everything they can possibly do to live.

Right.

To get rid of them is going to take a time. You have to starve them for a long enough time before they give up because they try to survive on anything they can get around themselves.

Right?

So I mean, Akkermansia is really the full name of Akkermansia is actually Akkermansia mucin filla and Mucin Filla is a lover of mucin. It actually lives inside the gut lining, the mucin. The mucin is where the Akkermansia lives. When you go on a long fasting and you don't feed your bacteria, what do you think they're going to do? It actually eats your mucin, it actually starts eating the mucin itself and that causes the leaky gut. So what I was trying to say was the postbiotic as you define is very interesting, is that what they do is you take a live bacteria, you feed them the stuff that they need and it starts to produce things like Akkermansia will produce something called butyrate and then you heat kill the bacteria and that becomes the everything together that becomes your postbiotic. So it has all the goodness of the metabolite that you wanted and it also has the cells that the bacteria has. So it has all the sensing mechanism that your immune system will sense that it is there. And it turns out that the postbiotic Ekkermansia it is higher efficacy and lower risk of developing a disease than the live probiotics. So I think, and again, GLP1 now knows about GLP1, the Ozempic and Manzaro. What's really interesting is your body can actually do the same thing that Ozempic does. If you eat the Right. Set of foods, your body itself will produce the GLP one.

Right.

So this really interesting is having the right prebiotic, postbiotic and having the good set of organism microbial activity. You can actually, if you can have the right set of foods and supplements, you can in fact start to produce the GLP1 and start to lose weight naturally.

Right.

In fact, this new class of probiotic related thing, some people call it parabiotic and this is dead bacteria.

And the first paper that made me.

Interested in this I read about almost 20 years ago and I was looking.

At, well, what's the best way to.

Filter water to make sure that you're not getting parasites from your water? A lot of tap water, even in the US has parasites. And when you're overseas, it's very, very common. There's a group who use ultraviolet light to kill everything in the water. And then people would drink the water.

And those people had much healthier immune.

Systems than people who drank water that had been filtered to remove all the things. So the presence of dead bugs helps your immune system in a way that we're really just discovering. And what you're doing with viome is you're adding heat killed Akkermansia to get the metabolic benefits. Yes, that's a, that's actually a really interesting avenue for longevity that a lot of people haven't looked into. In my own practice, I take specific prebiotics that feed the good guys. I take a bunch of different postbiotics and of course I'm a fan of VIOME because, well, I've been an advisor and investor and we've worked together on it for a long time. So I didn't realize that you'd added the Akkermansia stuff.

Another thing is phages. And I think you and I, very early days of my own, we talked about phages. So think about it. When we are analyzing all the rna, we looking at everything, we're not just looking at bacteria because most people think, oh, the gut microbiome is all about bacteria. No, we look at all the bacteria, we look at all the viruses. And by the way, the viruses can be the viruses or the phages. So there are two types of viruses. The viruses that can actually infect with the human body. And then there's something called phages. These phages are viruses that only infect the bacteria. Interestingly, that changes what these bacteria do. So you may have the certain organisms, but you may have the phages that are infecting these bacteria. So you may have a certain organism, but it's Going to perform completely differently because not infected by phages, right? So we look at all your phages, we look at all of your fungi, so we're looking at all the fungus, we're looking at all the yeast, we're looking at every single organism in your gut, every single organism in your saliva, and then we're looking at everything, all the RNA in your human body, and that's where we start. And then based on all the data, so now we have collected in each person, when they do that biometric full body intelligence test, we now getting close to 30 million biomarkers from every single person. So you're not like you're doing a blood test and you do a quest blood test and you get 50 things or 100 things or 400 things. Right now we're getting 30 million biomarkers from every person and then we analyze all of these rna, use the AI, look at everything you have. And now based on all this stuff we are able to say, hey, this is your biological age, this is your cognitive health, this is your heart health, this is your gut health, this is your oral health. And then you can go as geeky as you want to be, as nerd as you want to be. And we tell you, hey, this is your LPS production, this is your uremic toxin production, this is your sulfite production, this is your uric acid production. And we go through every single thing that you want to know and then we actually say for each one of these scores, and today the new app is coming out in January, this is, you're gonna love this, every score. Now we say when this score is low, these are the five diseases that you are actually increasing the risk of developing. If you have high LPS or if you have high sulfide, or if you have low butyrate, this is what's gonna happen to you. Now here are the ingredients just for you in the dosages you need to actually improve these scores, right? So we are able to now say, hey, don't eat kale and here is the reason why. Or don't eat avocado because you have high uric acid, but you can eat red meat if you want because your TMA is very low and your FMO3 is not being over expressed. And you can actually eat red meat if you want. It's very nutritious and good for you, right? So we go through all the foods, tell you which foods to eat and why, what foods not to eat and why, and every food now we can tell you what it's going to do this food has these substrate or ingredients, each of these ingredient. This is the score it is going to impact. And this is going to be good, and this is going to be bad, Right? So we literally go through every single food, tell you what foods to eat and why, what foods not to eat and why. And then we go through every ingredients in your supplement. We go through vitamins, minerals, herbs, digestive enzymes, amino acids. And then we tell you you need 22 milligrams of lycopene, 79 milligram of amylase, you need 72 milligram of berberine. And we literally give you every vitamin, mineral, herbs, and we custom make those supplements for each individual on demand every month. There is no pre made stuff. We have a compounding pharmacy that makes it for every individual every single month. And then we have the personalized probiotics and prebiotics for your gut. And I think, I'm not sure, Dave, you saw these oral lozenges. These are now made for you, right? And this is another one that I think you may or may not have seen. These are our personalized toothpaste. So this is for morning and this is for evening. It has all of the postbiotics enzymes that you need to adjust your oral microbiome. And the morning one removes the plaque on contact and removes the gum inflammation.

Right?

That is. So basically now you adjust your oral microbial activity, you adjust your gut microbial activity, and then we give you all the supplements to reduce the inflammation in your body and increase the mitochondria.

Wow. If you look at risks of Alzheimer's and heart disease and your oral microbiome, we've known about this for a long time. And interestingly, my last biome test, it showed that my oral microbiome had some of the things associated with cavities, which is crazy. I mean, I take vitamin D, I have very hard bones. This doesn't make any sense, but I have a crown from 18 years ago that was loose, so it came off. And I went into the dentist and they said, oh, look, you have three really shallow cavities underneath it. And they didn't show on X rays, right? So like, oh, okay, you actually detected something that no dentist could see just by looking at the volume test on my saliva. So they went to drill them out and even though they were just on the surface, it took three diamond bits just to get them out because my bone density is super high and that's why I didn't get get big cavities from it. So knowing what's Going on in there is a big deal. And I am a huge fan of when I go to bed, take one of the viome lozenges and I'll put it in and then I put in a bite guard. Because if you grind your teeth down as you age, it will affect your posture, it'll affect so many things that you would not believe your nervous system. So you got to not be grinding your teeth at night. And then I tape my mouth closed with the good bacteria in there so it stays moist and I don't get dry teeth, which makes them turn yellow. When you wake up, you don't have morning breath and you have really healthy bacteria, not just in your mouth, but that go throughout your entire GI system. So for me, this is a fundamental part of aging. The other thing is even, you know, one or two millimeter pockets, you don't want those. So really good oral care is a relatively cheap and high impact longevity thing that you want to do. It's don't let your teeth get ground down over time. Put a bite guard in your sleep, tape your mouth so you get nitric oxide and have the probiotics, the viome oral probiotics that are in your mouth that are good for your teeth because that seeds the rest of your gut. So I, you guys, I think one.

Of the more important thing, I think more than the teeth, the gum it is, remember our tube that goes through us? It is supposed to be really tight. Everything that's inside supposed to stay inside and everything outside supposed to stay outside. And that's the reason 70% of our immune system along our gut lining, when you have inflammation in your gums, now you have leaky gums just like your leaky gut. And now the all microbes are able to get into the blood and now you have a chronic inflammation. And that's the fundamental problem is that anytime people think, oh why do I care if I lose teeth, I can get the implant. It's not that the big thing is once you have inflammation in your gums, you're going to have that inflammation in your whole body. And we have now seen that when you have this. So by the way, 84% of the people have P. Gingivitis in their mouth, only 16% of them will ever develop a periodontitis or any of the gum disease. Only when the P. Gingivirus starts to express ginger pain, that's where it becomes pathogenic. So pre gingiviris doesn't become pathogenic unless it starts to produce ginger pain. And that's what causes the massive amount of inflammation in your gum. And as you mentioned, when you have a poor oral health, it is directly connected to diabetes, it's connected to heart disease, it's connected to your sexual health because the nitric oxide is produced in your oral cavity. And by the way, it is now connected to many types of cancer, including oral cancer, throat cancer and colorectal cancer. And you're swallowing one and a half liter of saliva every single day. That means what's happening in your mouth is also going in your gut. And what happens in the gut is not your vagus. What happens in your gut goes into whole body. It's not what happens in the gut, it stays in the gut.

Right?

It is actually connected through vagus nerve, it impacts your brain. So we have now shown that your gut microbial activities can directly relate to your mental health. So whether it is a depression, whether it is anxiety, in fact addiction, and many of the things are actually connected to your gut microbial activity. And things like Alzheimer are now shown they can come from your oral microbiome and also from gut microbiome, infracting your blood brain barrier, making it permeable. And now you have infection in the brain and your gilial cells are actually not releasing the amyloid beta to protect from the inflammation and overproduction of that causes the whole bunch of neurodegenerative diseases.

The old way of handling this, well just use Listerine and kill everything, which we know it's really bad for you because it destroys all the nitric oxide. Let me ask you this. If I did sterilize my mouth, say with hydrogen peroxide or something, so there's nothing, and then I add the viome lozenge back in, that's going to make sure that there's pretty much nothing bad in there and only good stuff. No, no, no.

Unfortunately our mouth is constantly exposed to the environment, right? So it's not what you put in. It's also everything that every time you're speaking you're breathing a whole bunch of microbes from your environment, right? So it's constantly being exposed to everything.

I mean, before bed bed you could kind of sterilize your mouth and then take all.

But the point is you do want the diversity. So the thing is you never ever want just to have only six or seven types of organism that are in any probiotics. The diversity of these microbes matter because they perform so many different functions. And the worst thing is they all rely on each other for feeding each other. So they produce something that other bacteria use and they actually all have to cooperate together to live together, right? So to me, the colony matters. And that means taking Listerin is one of the worst thing you can do for your oral health because like taking antibiotics, right, it literally kills everything. And to some extent, once you have a poor microbiome, you'll start to get lots of the diseases. In fact, if there was no microbiome in your body, you couldn't live. I mean, most of the mice that actually are what they call germ free mice, when they kill all of their microbiome, they actually are very weak and they live long.

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All the research I've seen on germ free mice says that they don't get fat no matter what you feed them. And they're super ripped. And they do live a long time until they're exposed to one bacteria then they get weak and die. Right.

What, what happens is the germ free bacteria are not able to eat anything because every time you eat a food.

There'S something in there so they have to sterilize everything. These are weird lab things. And it's funny, there probably is a point where if, if you could have a human that was always germ free entirely, which is, which is impossible.

You probably have a weird long lived healthy person who couldn't do anything but.

In the bubble, basically be living in a bubble and you can never get out of the bubble. So you may as well be in a cocoon somewhere.

Yeah, it's not the lifestyle that I want but it's interesting to see how important having the we'll call the symphony.

Of bacteria is because it's not feasible.

To be in a germ free environment. That's correct. I wanted to go back to Akkermansia for a minute and share a personal experience. And this is why I don't recommend the keto diet for long periods of time or frankly even a carnivore diet.

For long periods of time.

When I was testing out the, the.

Edges of the bulletproof diet before I wrote the book, and this is a book with almost a million copies sold globally, it, it changed the way we.

Think about some, some of our health. I went on a zero carb only meat diet for somewhere around six months. And the first couple months, man, I felt really good.

I'm really good.

Better than normal because I dropped inflammation from probably bad bacteria and some plant toxins. And problem was then I started getting disruptive brain fog all the things and I had high levels of lipopolysaccharides and I had leaky gut because the Akkermansia ate all the gut lining back or mucus that was possible and then started eating the lining of the gut. This is why in the bulletproof diet like use keto as a scalpel and do it for a week and then eat some carbs. Do it for a week, eat some carbs. Because your gut bacteria will poke holes in your gut lining if you don't feed em on occasion. Um, what are the implications for long fasting from this as well?

I mean honestly I, I think the fa taking a low caloric diet, there's a lot of decent research on that and what we are seeing is that in these long fasting including intermittent fasting, I think I've sent you a bunch of research. I mean the research does not look really, really good. In fact, the large for the gut microbiome, specifically both gut microbiome and overall longevity. So the one large research that was done, about 100,000 people, it shows people and that was a, you know, it was one of the research that was posed. So that means they looked at the people who were on a, on the diet like keto diet, intermittent fasting and they saw the people who followed the intermittent fasting actually died sooner with heart disease.

I looked at that study, Naveen, and that was one.

But the next study I was going to tell you about that came out recently that intermittent fasting did help with the losing weight and that was probably for people who actually ate less amount of calories. But it turns out for longevity or anything else, there was absolutely no benefit that they saw.

You have to look at the first big study. Their definition of intermittent fasting wasn't what.

Anyone does in longevity. They're basically people who skipped meals.

There was a lot of, there's a lot of limitations in that data.

That is true on the first one. Yes. The second one was actually intermittent fasting data.

Yeah.

The second one is different.

The first one, I wouldn't use that.

One as a good data source.

That's why I say it was not a good, good data. However, what I was trying to say was that it's not a good thing. But at least what I'm saying is that long fasting has never been good because at the end of the day when you don't eat your bacteria are going to eat something. And if you're fighting the evolution, evolution always wins. Evolution won everyone zero.

There is though, I mean even in Ayurveda there's a long history of, of.

Of doing occasional fasts.

Absolutely.

I think about a five day fast once, you know, once every six months or something that there's pretty good shifts in it and your gut bacteria in five days is not going to eat you but 40 days. I've also interviewed experts who've done this for years for cancer and all. Sometimes a big reset like that. But then if you get leaky gut, there's nothing in your gut to leak at least. But then they have to rebuild the gut lining. And that's something I wouldn't really.

But generally in India and Ayurveda they normally do one day fasting every week but they don't like five days fastings are rare. I mean maybe once a year or so but generally it's a two to three days of one year fasting. But generally it's more like one day type of fasting. So my feeling that it really is that I think low calorie, if I were to generalize something, would be a probably a low caloric diet. That means just eat less every day. And that's probably the best advice I.

Can give that this is a, this is a really tough thing, especially with women. I've seen so many women. In fact, this happened to me too when I was £300 and I was.

Trying to lose weight.

I'm working out six days a week, 90 minutes a day. I'm on a low calorie diet and I cannot lose weight because eating less calories than your body needs creates stress, it raises cortisol, it causes all kinds of havoc. So it feels like an adequate calorie diet for long periods of time.

You're right. But point is, you actually do adjust a bit. So when you eat lot of large meal, you actually crave a lot more meal and you start to slowly, slowly cut down just a small portion, you don't feel as hungry, number one. And number two, remember, I'm just talking about generalization. Overall, what I found is you can eat as much as you need, honestly, and not gain weight if you're eating the right food. And you know, and coming back to, again, not talking just about wine, understanding what foods are going to cause inflammation in your body at the end of the day, the obesity or inability to lose weight or diabetes or many of these chronic diseases are probably related to chronic inflammation. So really understanding that what is the root cause of what's causing the inflammation in your body? And eating the right set of foods, you never have to be hungry. I'm never hungry. I eat as much as I need. I just don't eat the foods that cause me inflammation.

It, it's that that is such a gift. Once I figured out my kryptonite foods, I can eat as much as I.

Want and I do not.

Yeah, I, I mean as much as I want. Even when I first did the bulletproof diet, I did 4, 500 calories a day. And I cut exercise and cut sleep just to show I'll gain a little.

Weight, but much less than, than the.

Math of calories would dictate. I actually lost weight on that. I don't think it's good for you. In fact, I know it's bad for you to do that. But I have not paid attention to counting calories and hunger is an afterthought in my life. It's crazy. And to be as lean as I am, around 4.8% on the last time I measured it. And to never be hungry, it feels impossible, but it comes from figuring out the right foods.

Yes.

And even when you say low calorie diet, if I was eating Fruity Pebbles, no matter how many calories, I'm probably going to get fat.

And what I was simply saying was that people who want to go intermittent fasting for losing weight is probably. I'm saying you're better off, just not.

Oh, man, I've seen so many people set free. But even then, during the intermittent fasting that I've been recommending, you're taking polyphenols, which are prebiotics. This is coffee or tea. And you might even be taking things that increase your body's ability to burn fat, like ketones or MCT oil.

I want to go back on a keto diet. I mean, I think a lot of the listeners, they simply do not listen to what you say.

No, they don't.

People just think, oh, my God, Dave talks about keto diet. I'm going to go on a keto diet for the next two years. And I've had people who just completely destroyed their hormones, they completely destroyed their brain and energy, because you never see them to go there for two years. I mean, the people just somehow don't listen.

Yeah, that's why I wrote the whole book. If you want to go on the keto diet, read the Atkins Diet Revolution that was. Was printed in 1972, and I did that in the 80s or 90s or something. I lost 50 of my hundred pounds and it took me another 10 years to lose the second 50 pounds. Because you have to understand, ketosis is a. It's like a scalpel and use it for brief periods of time. You go in and out, and then it's really beautiful. For losing weight, increasing cognitive function. But the endless ketosis I don't think is great. And even when I'm on a keto diet, for people who have read more than one of my books in Superhuman, I go into gut bacteria, thanks to data from Viome, and actually published my biome data in that book. And I quadrupled the number of species of bacteria in my gut by taking prebiotics while doing ketosis. You can do that too. But if you're just eating meat and salt, do it for two weeks and see how good you feel. Now you know what plant toxins are doing to you. And then you've got to get some stuff in to feed your gut bacteria. And then you find out what stuff is going to work for you. You can do it the old way, you can do it the viome way. But I do have a question for you, Naveen. Now, I have noticed and just anecdotally and also from studies, huge numbers of people have a buildup of oxalate throughout their body. It's in their knees, it's in their muscles, it's in the myelin, it's in the brain. These white matter lesions in the brain. So if you have that and it's present, adding oxalate to the system seems like a bad idea. When you're saying 60 something percent of people spinach is a superfood, why do they need more oxalate?

Oh no, I said more than actually half the people are harmed. They actually harmed by spinach and kale. So almost half the people should not be eating things.