Dr. Steven Gundry: Is Fungus Secretly Running the World—and Your Gut? : 1270

Some companies out there would have us believe that all we have to do is swallow a few of the appropriate bacteria and we'll reseed our gut and everything will be fine.

What if the thoughts in your head weren't yours? What if cravings weren't about willpower? What if your Microbiome was addicted? Dr. Steven Gundry is one of the most respected and rebellious minds in medicine. He's a world renowned heart surgeon who left the OR to fix something far more broken. Our gu and the way we think about them. The New York Times best selling author of the Plant Paradox is back on the show. And in the gut brain Paradox he makes a radical. Your gut bacteria may be the puppet.

Masters of your mind.

The brain bacteria connection, the lack of bacterial exposure actually weakens brain defenses.

They shape your cravings, they hijack your neurotransmitters. They trigger addiction, depression, even obesity.

And it gets weirder.

These bugs can move between people like a virus, through the air, through social contact. You don't just act like your friends. You might be hosting their microbiome. This is not self help.

This is molecular warfare.

And the battleground is your gut. But here's the upgrade. With the right tools, you can take back control. Your bacteria can heal your brain. Your terrain can shape your destiny. And the forest inside you can regrow your cravings.

Aren't you.

Your thoughts aren't random. Your gut is running the show. But you can rewrite the script, rebuild the forest and take back the controls.

Our gut, micro, microbiome are puppet masters and whether we like it or not, probably directly control much of our decision making and thought processes. We know that there's an alcohol seeking microbiome.

If the bacteria are controlling us to a large extent, what's controlling the bacteria?

The gut brain game is rigged. It's time you played to win. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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If you've been living under a rock or something and you've never heard of Dr. Steven Gundry, you are going to love this episode. And if you've heard one of his previous episodes on the show, this is the incredibly knowledgeable and well credentialed and well experienced physician who Took a step outside of just being a physician a few years ago and wrote the Plant Paradox. And since then he has written something called the Gut Brain Paradox. And it's a book that makes me happy because it's talking about some of the things that directly affected my life when I weighed 300 pounds and had brain fog and arthritis and all that kind of stuff. And it's a non obvious thing that's controlling your body and controlling your mind. And in fact it kind of feels like there's little puppet masters doing it. So in the interview today, we're going to talk about what's happening in your gut and your brain. This is not the first episode we've talked about these kinds of things. Dr. Gundry has a different angle and he has spent so many years as an incredibly detailed robotic heart surgeon guy. Like the kind of things that are at the very apex of what you do as a practicing doctor. So I love PhD researchers, I love biohackers that go out and do the work. It might be one of those things on ourselves and find the pathways. And I love doctors who are willing to step outside of what they might have learned in medical school because their results oriented. And I don't know of a better example of a guy who does that than Dr. Gundry.

Thank you.

Welcome to the show, my friend.

Thanks for having me back. It's great to see you again as always.

Let's get into your book. If your gut bacteria control neurotransmitters, how much of mental health is gut health?

Well, I propose, and I try to document it in the book, that how you introduce this episode is probably exactly right. That our gut microbiome are pupper puppet masters and they, whether we like it or not, probably directly control much of our decision making and thought processes. And that's a bit disturbing to us. Incredibly intelligent super evolved creatures, that bacteria that have been around for 3 billion billion years might have something to say about the fate of the body that they live in. And that's what the book is about.

That was just Lactobacillus talking, right?

That's right.

In my former life as a computer hacker, I was a network engineer and I've worked a lot on decoding the ways that individual parts of the body, even subcellular components like mitochondria, how do they talk with each other and how do our cells talk with each other to form an intelligence that's outside our brain? And we know that there's kind of like a kombucha or a sourdough ferment going on in the gut with a bunch of different things working together that we can modify it. How the heck is that talking to our brain? Because it's not just talking by neurotransmitters. They're not fast enough, right?

Correct. With each passing year, since the human microbiome project was finished in 2017, which wasn't that long ago. Nope. The ability to decode the communication system and the control system that these guys exert has. It's just been mind boggling, and it's at so many levels. For instance, recently attended, believe it or not, there's a meeting of the Society of Extracellular Vesicles.

I want to go there. Just like be a fly on the wall. Those would be the most interesting and nerdy conversations ever.

Oh, yeah, they were just. Did you go. Yeah, yeah, I actually, I actually presented there, as a matter of fact.

Do you have like vesicle T shirts?

No, I don't have any, but. So, as you know and as I talk about in the book, the bacteria, for that matter, plants can deliver pieces of genetic information, instructions, mitochondria, via little packets, I'll call them text messages that can go through the gut wall plasma, blood vessels can go through the blood, brain barrier, join with another cell and deliver its contents to instruct the cell what to do to change the expression of the genome. And it's all part of this. You're right. Incredibly well designed, complex system that luckily we are just now beginning to decipher, to decode.

Can I get a little philosophical with you?

Sure.

If the bacteria are controlling us to a large extent, what's controlling the bacteria?

Well, believe it or not, sometimes it's plants and fungi that are controlling the bacteria and viruses. In fact, you know, it's funny, since you're a biohacker and we're in systems work as a computer hacker, the original title of the plant paradox was the Matrix.

Of course it was.

And you know, and the Matrix of course describes the input and output systems of a computer. And way back then, I propose that this is the Matrix. And unfortunately my editors and publishers said, oh, no, that's. That's too masculine a term. And people are going to think of the Matrix, the movie.

I remember Trinity as well as I remember Neo in the movie. So I don't know that it's that masculine, but all right.

Yeah, so, but that's. And it was more conjecture then, because that was 2017, but now it is the Matrix.

I'm glad that you went beyond just neurotransmitters because the fact there's serotonin in the gut, it's probably gonna get into the brain, but it's gonna take a while. Right. And for it to have effect. And some of the behaviors that we exhibit are real time changes. I kind of wonder. I know that the fungal biome, especially my gut, because I had toxic mold that was a major part of brain fog for me. And fungus contributes to leaky gut, which we're going to get into. But how do you unpack now that you focus on the gut so much? We have yeast, we have mold, we have fungus, we have virus. And when we have these other parasites that have been controlling us and all life on Earth for a long period of time, how do you know that it's a virus in the gut versus a bacteria in the gut versus something else?

Well, I don't think we know yet, because, again, it's just. It's beginning to get unpacked. For instance, there's some beautiful evidence that fungi in the soil can actually penetrate plant cells and deal literally negotiate what they're going to extract from the cell, from the soil, whether it's phosphorus or carbon atoms, and actually decide, okay, if you give me plant this, I will give you that. And we can actually now watch fungal elements go through a plant root from cell to cell in this incredibly complex life form. And we know that bacteria can. Flagellated bacteria can actually penetrate the cell wall of our intestines and exchange information. And it's like, holy cow. This is, you know, this is a ultimate symbiotic organism that operates on a level that we are starting to appreciate the complexity.

I believe that that complexity will be unveiled over the next two or three years because of some of the cool things with AI, it's just a matter of gathering the data, knowing what data to feed into it. Because Paul Stamets, who's been on the show, the most storied mushroom guy I've ever met, he published a paper recently showing how fungus directs where insects go. So the fungus is telling plants what to do. It's telling insects where to go. Oh, and then we have antibiotics made by fungus that kill bacteria, and of course, bacteria fight back against it. I almost wonder if, at the end of the day, if we could step a million miles away from Earth, whether fungus is actually controlling everything as some sort of dark orchestrator, because we know what a little bit of penicillin does to our gut. Bacteria completely blows it out.

Right, right.

Given that there's antibiotics pretty much in all water at this point, that's in municipal systems. And we've kind of polluted the world with that. What is it doing to our guts?

Well, it's unfortunately a desert wasteland. And, you know, the husband and wife microbiology team at Stanford, the Sonnenbergs, are kind of the doomsayers of the microbiome. And they, they, I think, to paraphrase them, think it's pretty hopeless for us that whereas we should have a tropical rainforest, a balanced terrain with all of these different elements, fungi, molds, viruses, bacteria, parasites, all kind of imbalance. Like any tropical rainforest is, there are all these elements that are in competition but need each other. They think, and it's pretty true, that we have a desert wasteland that wow. And we have literally nothing. For instance, we know that super agers, among other things, have a very diverse microbiome. They have the microbiome of a 30 year old, not a 95 year old. And they have a microbiome that's really good at handling xenobiotics. They can eat plastic. And whenever I talk about that, people wait a minute, they can't eat plastic. Well, plastics are petrochemicals. They're carbon atoms. And these guys like carbon atoms and they have the ability to break down these carbon atoms.

So super centenarians have bacteria that can do that?

Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Yeah. And for instance, if toxic mold was as bad as you think, let's talk about that. Then everybody in New Orleans ought to be dead.

There's definitely some weird neurological things happening in New Orleans post the hurricane.

But what's really interesting, though, is that these super agers have bacteria that are really good at consuming these toxic mold products because they are their competitors.

They also have HLA Dr. Four genomes that handle toxins in general. Well, you could put those guys to work in a mercury mine and they wouldn't get sick. That's true. They have some superpowers built in.

Wow.

So many different pathways to go down here.

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If it is a wasteland and we take that it's hopeless kind of perspective and our guts are just wrecked. Okay, so then let's just engineer whatever the heck it is we want in our guts and let's have a shot of, of whatever the bacteria would have made in our guts and just do it every morning and just not worry about it and go on with life. How hard is it?

It looks pretty hard. It's not the answer, unfortunately. What's really interesting and what I've discovered with my patients, you know, and I still see them six days a week and look at their microbiome and look at the products of that we can measure of their production. One of the things that was in a way disappointing and certainly there's some companies out there would have us believe that all we have to do is swallow a few of the appropriate bacteria and we'll reseed our gut and everything will be fine. And as I tell my patients, I use the example. Well, as you know, one of my offices is in Palm Springs in the desert. And let's suppose I sell them grass seed and they come back three months later and say, you sold me bad grass seed because I planted it and it didn't grow. And I said, well, what did you do with it? Well, I took it out to the desert and threw it on the sand. And I said, well, did you water it? No, you didn't tell me to. Did you fertilize it? No, you didn't tell me to. Well, what did you expect? And what we're finding is. And we can see this in our patients, let's suppose I find out that one of these keystone species, Akkermansia, is really devoid in my patient's microbiome. And there are some nice Akkermansia products out there to reseed Akkermansia, and then I give it to them for six months and then I relook and wait a minute. You're swallowing Akkermansia every day and there's no detectable Ekkermansia in your gut? Huh. Or you're swallowing Akkermansia every day, and guess what? There's absolutely no short chain fatty acids like butyrate being produced in your gut. But you promised me that Akkermansia was the keystone species for producing butyrate in your gut. And where is it? So it takes, to quote Hillary Clinton, a village.

I'm imagining as someone on your very favorite diet, the carnivore diet. And they're. They're taking Akkermansia and they have no soluble fiber, no prebiotic fiber whatsoever, other than maybe collagen, which you might argue.

Yep.

What's going to happen to the Akkermansia?

Well, it'll probably be delighted to eat the mucus layer, which it will eat. But if you do a carnivore diet correctly, with nose to tail eating, these guys will be more than happy to eat the collagenous parts of the. And ferment it.

Yeah.

So there is a way. Now, unfortunately, I think most of the carnivore folks aren't doing that correctly. And I can see pretty impressive inflammation in these folks. But even though they feel great. Yeah. And that's kind of universal, they feel great because we've removed a lot of the mischievous plant compounds that exist and.

Can we pause for just one second? You are the first very well credentialed doctor to just straight up and say not all Plants are good for you like this. And, and you really put it out there. And at the same time you're saying, don't eat red meat.

You know, you're, you're so.

And guys, just, if this is your first time, Dr. Yonder and I don't agree on every single thing. And I don't have any problem with that because we're both learning. At least I am. I don't know, maybe you're not. Yeah, but it's one of these things, just to be really clear. So when I said it's your favorite diet as a carnivore diet, that was a joke. I saw a little rise. What you're saying here is it's theoretically possible. And we learned about a study from gut bacteria in leopards. I read about that in the bulletproof diet in 2014 that said, oh, you can turn collagen into butyrate, but I haven't made out with a leopard lately. So it's unlikely that I have that bacteria or that most people who are on a carnivore diet do. I don't have a problem with doing it for a little while. But you better replete the mucus layer by having some sort of carbs. And then you're saying, oh, but some plants are toxic. They're not all good. You're the only one who started saying this when was plant paradox. That came out.

2017.

2017. There you go. So just very forward thinking stuff. What I'm curious about is if you put on your future hat in your new book, what is the one mind blowing concept that people will say, wow, he was so ahead of the curve on because I know there's multiple and so I don't know which one's the best one.

You know, I think the one I, I that maybe surprised me the most was that there is an addictive microbiome.

What does that mean?

There are bacteria that I propose actually make you seek out certain materials that they enjoy eating or bathing in.

Those food cravings might be caused by the type of bacteria.

Think. Yeah, we know that, for instance, there's an alcohol seeking microbiome. And some of the things that amazed me is first of all, addiction rehab is not very successful. The residivism rate is about 90%. Yeah. In, in whatever addiction you want to tackle, whether it's smoking, alcohol, Social media. Yeah, social media. That's true. In our attempts to treat it by mind control or mind changes clearly isn't successful. Not to say we shouldn't use that, but there's Got to be something else driving it. So, for instance, you can look at people in alcohol rehab and look at their gut microbiome. And there are gut bacteria that associate with alcoholism. Now, if you look at the percentage of those guys, high percentage versus low percentage, the people with this big concentration of these bugs fail terribly during the val. And yet the people with the lower percentage of these bugs are the ones who are probably going to be most successful. Opioids is the same thing which was opioid probiotics. In our gut, we have opioid seeking probiotics and they like this stuff. And what's really interesting is they use pain by causing leaky gut to get you more pain, which you will seek more opioids, which they will then use. And the more they use it, the less effect in relief you get. And so you have to get more and more and more. And this has been shown by giving and that these are animal studies, but giving addicted animals antibiotics to wipe out their microbiome, and all of a sudden small doses of these opioids now have an incredible effect. But if you reintroduce that opioid seeking microbiome into these animals, all of a sudden the effect is completely abated again because they've taken it all and it's just mind blowing.

So you know that we pick up our microbiome from those around us just by spending time with people. There's a cloud for 8ft outside of you.

I know. You're already violating my speech space.

Yeah, I was. I wasn't going to say anything. Sorry about that. Taco Bell. So I haven't had fast food in 20 years.

You're right. I mean, we.

If you hang out with people who are. If you're an opiate addict, you hang out with other people who are opiate addicts are going to pick up the bacteria. That's exactly right. Oh, my God.

We've known this about obese people for many years. Obesity is a contagious disease. We you hang out with obese people, you will become obese because you've caught those bugs that are floating in this cloud. Like the old Peanuts character.

It sounds like body positivity isn't your.

Favorite movement or intuitive eating is not exactly my favorite.

Snickers is another word for intuitive eating if you let that run things.

Yeah, it's so hard to grasp for us intelligent beings that number one, we could catch an obesity microbiome. We could catch an opioid seeking microbiome. And yet it's like, oh, well, you know you hang out with a bunch of guys who are shooting up. Well, of course that's what you're going to do. But I propose, and many other people propose, that we've given each other these things. And the good news is, good news of the book is this is all because certain species have become predominant in a terrain that should have been balanced. And it's one of these or more get a dominant hand that that's what. What is the card displayed? And, you know, this was actually proposed by Antoine Beauchamp back in the 1800s when he was battling for supremacy with Louis Pasteur about the germ theory. And I introduced the book with the famous battle of the two titans of the microbiology movement. And unfortunately, Pasteur apparently was a much better public speaker.

If you're not good at marketing and you're an inventor, your invention probably won't ever see the world.

That's right.

Yeah.

Marketing, as you know and as I know. Yeah. Is.

It's part of doing your job.

Yeah, yeah. So Pasteur luckily discovered that bacterial contamination of the fermentation of wine by yeast was what made wine go bad. And the king of France in the time thought that was a pretty important point. And so Pasteurs germ theory got precedent over Bashamp's theory. And Bashamp said, no, no, no, no, no. All these guys are neither good nor bad. They all exist in a terrain, a terroir of a balance. And as long as all these guys are in their place, they're. They're codependent. But if one of them gets out of balance, that's when we see disease. And the purpose of treating the disease is actually to get the balance back and the disease will go away. Now, he lost. Yeah. And as you know, or I know, the germ theory really was what drove modern medicine.

And unfortunately, it feels like terrain theory that says that the environment makes the bacteria and the organism healthy or not healthy. And germ theory both have uses and that they might both be true.

Well, yeah, again, but when a certain bacteria gets out of hand, that can produce a disease, absolutely no one, I hope, disagrees with that. But it's the restoration of that balance that's really important. I just read an article that children who are given apple juice as their beverage of choice have a much higher incidence of asthma than children who are given their beverages like orange juice as their beverage. Because apple juice has a huge percentage of fructose as its sugar content, as opposed to other juices. I'm not pro juice, but as opposed to other juices that don't have that excessive fructose. And they've shown that it's the fructose in the apple juice that actually changes the gut microbiome composition causes leaky gut, which then starts the inflammation process. So all these parents who have been giving their kids apple juice because it's so healthy, and they then have a kid with asthma.

Wow.

Oops.

I fail to understand why anyone wants to do apple juice on a regular basis. It's just of all the ways we could deploy human resources to put apple juice in little. It doesn't. It doesn't make sense.

But maybe in a sippy cup.

Yeah. I just don't get it. But you're. You're a confusing guy. Dr. Gundry, you're saying I'm not a fan of juice. We totally agree on that. Like, some plants are toxic. Right. But also don't do a full carnivore thing. So you have a very unique perspective. But there's a reason, like, the way your mind works is really fun to ask. So I want to go a little bit deeper. You talk about how these gut bacteria can get out of balance, and the traditional approach, the one that I always learned was, okay, well, eat some of this plant or some of this fiber and let's try and get it back. And at what point do you just say, my microbiome is, I'm just going to take some antibiotics and I'm going to wipe it out. I'm going to clear cut the forest because it's all invasive species, and then I'm going to eat the right stuff and I'm just going to grow it back. Is there a case for that?

Yes and no. But we have to realize that the term antibiotic means against living things, which we are. And Antoine, mitochondria, as you and I know, are engulfed bacteria. And sadly, there's now some really good evidence that taking antibiotics actually damages the gut wall and damages our mitochondria, which probably isn't a really good idea. In fact, I know, unfortunately in my practice, I see a lot of people who get treated for sibo, small intestinal bacteria, overgrowth by being given antibiotics and to kill off those guys who are in the wrong area. Just came back from the big microbiome meeting that I go to every year. This time I was in Malta and we had one of the world's experts in sibo from Hong Kong University, and he said, nobody realizes that that's probably the stupidest thing you could possibly do for sibo because you're actually going to make things worse, because you're going to damage the wall of the gut from the use of the antibiotics. And all of us just sat there and go, finally somebody actually said something that made sense. Because I see all these people, and almost to a person, they get worse after they're treated with antibiotics. And he pointed out, look. Look at what's happening to the mitochondria. Isn't that.

Isn't there some other drug, I'm forgetting its name, that'll cause you to have a thicker lining of mucus. Couldn't you just take that with antibiotics? I'm thinking that if I have all eucalyptus trees growing, and those are from Australia, and they're crowding out the native forest and they don't go away, so we just have to burn it down and plant the new stuff. Isn't there some safe way to do this, or do we have to deal with it? I've seen people with gut bacteria numbers that are completely alien. And I think I was one of those 15 years of antibiotics for chronic sinusitis and strep throat. When I was a kid, you know, every month I would take it.

Yeah, me too. In college, I had sinusitis and I was given antibiotics literally every week, you know, okay. At the clinic.

Right.

And I kept getting worse. Exactly.

And then you get fatter and all this stuff happens. So what do we do for listeners? They're like, I fart death all the time. My gut is wrecked. I've tried eating fiber and I bloat. And they're kind of stuck and feeling helpless.

Well, let me give you a couple of examples that was pointed out to me. Our other home is in Santa Barbara, and the Santa Barbara has whale watching. And for many, many years, the only whale that you would go out and watch was the California gray whale. Not only do we have gray whales, but now we have a huge population of blue whales. We have humpback whales. Wait a minute. They're supposed to be in Hawaii. And now we have several pods of killer whales in the Santa Barbara Channel. It's like, what the heck are those guys doing there? And that's happened over the last 20 years. Why? Because these whales follow their food sources and we. Because of climate change, we now have a totally different food population that these whales have moved to to take advantage of. So getting back to Sibo, we know that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. About two thirds of the bugs in these people are oral bacteria, and about a third of them are colonic bacteria. What's interesting about the oral bacteria is the oral bacteria really like simple sugars and thrive when they're exposed to simple sugars. And they happen to have moved where they can get lots of simple sugars in a fairly oxygen rich environment. Right. And so they're, they've just migrated to feeding territory where they never would have been when, if we were our great great grandparents, we had been eating whole foods and we had been eating whole foods, whole. To me, the treatment is ch. Don't give them the foods they want to eat and they won't stick around, they'll go elsewhere. Why don't we just. We know that these good bacteria like soluble fiber, they need soluble fiber. They do a lot of great things with soluble fiber. We know that. So let's take some volunteers, let's give them a bunch of soluble fiber in the form of inulin. It's good soluble fiber, is it?

It is good. Inflammation.

No, if it comes in real food, like asparagus, like artichokes, like chicory, radicchio, I eat a lot of radicchio. And you give them a bunch of inulin and you look out there, microbiome diversity, and you look at markers of inflammation. So you give them all this. Their microbiome diversity doesn't change and their inflammation doesn't change.

It's not working.

They go, see, it's a desert wasteland. And they go, well, wait a minute, maybe we're missing something here. Maybe there's more to it than that. So they do the same experiment and they give these people fermented foods. In this case, it was in yogurts and kefirs. Kefirs and the onion. This time the gut microbiome diversity increases and the inflammation markers go down. So what were they getting? Well, they weren't getting living bacteria. In my previous book I have a chapter, Dead Men tell no Tales. Dead bacteria do, yes. So they were getting not only dead bacteria, which carry messages, which are now classified as postbiotics, but they were getting the products of fermentation, which are postbiotics, which include short chain fatty acids. And then, and only then was a cycle completed where you could get the necessary components to get started. So I think, using their data and certainly what I see in my patients, that there is hope, as long as we get the recipe right of what all these guys need. And it's an assembly line, it's a Tesla assembly line. And you've got to have different pieces of stuff being made. So bacteria A needs to eat something and poops out substance B, that bacteria B needs to eat to poop out substance C and so on down the line. And if you're missing those substances or you're missing those bacteria, then the whole thing falls apart. So it's, it's really complex. Dave.

You can say.

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I'm reminded of a hermetic principle that as above so below and in alchemy similar what I learned from building a regenerative farm at a 5 acre gravel pit. It was vertical walls, just destroyed land. And we said, we're going to restore this. So we brought in a top expert on that and we worked for about a year and we said, we want to plant some trees. And he just laughed and said, that won't work. What do you mean? You know, we live in a forest here. It's on Vancouver Island. And he said, planting trees is not an ecosystem. And that's why when I see all those people saying, you know, for every. Whatever you do, we plant a tree, it doesn't matter because the tree will die and it can't reproduce. So we had to do to restore this, it takes 20 years. We had to bring in all this woody debris, old stumps and things, and bury them in the soil so that the microbes and the fungus networks could form and now a real forest will grow. But planting trees isn't enough. And the probiotics you're talking about, they're just trees, but you need the underbrush and squirrels and God knows what else.

Yeah, okay. Unfortunately, unfortunately, but it can be done.

Okay, we're at this cool place now where we can look at someone's neurotransmitters. We can measure them, say, aha, you have a blockage here. You need some more tyrosine or tryptophan or something. We can look at your B vitamin pathways and we can say, you're short on this one. And we can do this with relative quantitative rigor. It's a real science. Still some edges, but we're getting there. I think we're going to be able to look at the Tesla assembly line in our gut with a very detailed ability to see what's going on and say, you know what, you're mostly there. You're just lacking bolts if it's a car. So let's put some more bolts in there. And to do very precise precision microbiome manipulation. That seems crazy difficult with what we can do with AI right now. It seems like knowing the problem is going to be not that big of a deal. But make, making or manufacturing all the little compounds you might need could be a little bit harder. You see an incredible transformation in your career. How long until we can take a look at my poop or some other sample for me and go, you know what you're missing? Butyrate. Just butyrate. And if you take lactate or propionic acid, you're screwed. Don't do that. How close are we?

I think we're getting closer. You know, when I started doing this 25 years ago, I was pretty naive, and I thought, oh, I could seal your leaky gut in a couple weeks. And then when I literally started measuring, when we had the tools, I realized that really, for most people, it takes nine months to a year to actually accomplish this. And you can undo it actually, really quick. I've proved that on myself. But luckily, I can restore my wall very quickly, but most people can't. And what I've learned in writing these books is, yeah, I can. I can give you compounds to say, seal your leaky gut. But like I say, if you keep swallowing razor blades, you're going to tear right open. But what was missing? Why was it taking so long for these people to do it right? It's because they had intestinal dysbiosis, and they did not have the guys on this assembly line to make these products that were necessary. And you're right. What's exciting is we now can begin to identify who's missing, what these missing guys need to eat, or what substances they produce that we could introduce. And I think we can actually speed up the process. That's what's exciting to me. And you're right. I think personalized medicine will really evolve. Yeah, we need to know our genome, but I think more importantly, we need to know how plants, fungi, various substances epigenetically activate or turn off a genome. Let me put on my cardiology hat for a second. Everybody goes and gets a coronary calcium score. And first of all, coronary calcium scores do not correlate very well with plaque and the coronary arteries. That's.

Maybe we should just get a cholesterol test instead.

Oh, yeah, that's a good idea, because.

That doesn't correlate either.

That doesn't correlate at all. So where does this coronary calcium come from? Well, there's. You know, there's. There's only. Really, there's only two tissues that can make calcium. Those are osteoblasts, bone cells. And actually, there's some bacteria that are really good at producing biofilms, igloos of calcium. Anyone who's had their teeth clean knows that you can calcify plaque in your mouth. So recent paper which just blew me away showed that if LPSs turn on a type of white blood cell called a macrophage, macrophages migrate into the smooth muscle of the coronary artery.

Wow.

And using text messages with exosomes tell smooth muscle cells to change from being a smooth muscle cell to. To Becoming an osteoblast and make calcium. Now people go, wait a minute, it's a smooth muscle cell. It's. How in the world did it become a bone cell?

So they're making calcium phosphate then. But a meaningful percentage of that calcium is calcium oxalate, right?

Yeah, but they're just making bone.

Okay, wow, that's creepy.

And why would they make bone? Because we can actually measure in my. In my patients, we can actually look at blood vessels stiffen at a challenge from an infection. For instance, we can see blood vessels stiffen for two to three weeks following tooth cleaning because you release about 2 billion bacteria into your bloodstream with every tooth cleaning. That's not to say you shouldn't get your tooth cleaner, but. So lo and behold, the coronary calcium is actually coming from an epigenetic change from a macrophage activated by lpss telling, hey, we better protect the wall of this blood vessel.

And the LPSs are bad bacteria poop from your gut that went through the lining?

Yes, basically. Wow. Yeah, it's like, holy cow.

That. That just blows my mind. I got to ask you this. You can have a bowl of very high oxalate food or a bowl of very high lectin food. Which one are you going to eat?

Well, I want to have oxalate eating bacteria in my gut, Oxalobacter. And I want to have lectin eating bacteria in my gut. Believe it or not, there's bacteria that love to eat gluten. They love to eat lectins. Most of us, those are gone. People I've found who are sensitive to oxalates don't have any oxalate eating bacteria. And lo and behold, when we get their gut back into order, all of a sudden they're able to tolerate oxalates. And they go, wow, you know, I. There's something here. I said, yeah, those guys are back. They're eating it.

I knew a guy who actually went out and ate duck poop in an attempt to get oxalate forming bacteria in his gut. I do not recommend that for obvious reasons, but he was kind of desperate. And you're saying that you would want to have both. We know that the ability to metabolize oxalate in the gut by bacteria is still relatively limited in humans. Even if you have them there, you can't eat all rhubarb all day without problems. And even if you have the ability to handle lectins with your bacteria, there's an upper limit. You're going to exceed your upper limit. Which one's more harmful. Lectins or oxalate.

My humble opinion is lectin's a win every time.

No kidding.

In terms of the. The best plant defense system ever invented. Wow. I would.

There's. There's no. I mean, I mean, you know, a lot. I'm. I'm like. I think I fall on the oxalate side depending on the dose, because hyperoxylosis from environmental exposures, you can cause calcium to form throughout someone overnight if it's a high dose. So. And it also depends on which lectins.

Right.

You know, some of them are more deadly than others, and I. I would rather minimize my amount of both and have high handling capacity in my body at the same time.

True.

And I think we probably both agree on that. You don't want to over consume either one.

No. Okay.

You've also, though, said, eat a whole food diet now. Whole wheat is full of oxalate and lectins, and white flour has 2 milligrams of oxalate and just about no lectins. So if I was going to eat some grain, shouldn't I not eat the whole grain and just get some extra fiber somewhere else?

Well, that was one of the crazy things that I learned in researching this book. We know from epidemiology that whole grains seem to be associated with some positive health outcomes in a lot of people. And we can debate that all day. And you and I have debated it all day against other people. Totally. Yeah. And one of the shockers was finding that LPSS are actually present in soil. LPSS are present in grains. Lpss. For instance, leaves have their own microbiome. Right. Olives have their own microbiome. Believe it or not, there's a cool microbiome in olive oil that actually is really good for you. So this microbiome has lots of LPSs. And if you eat LPSs, you actually train the immune system that these guys aren't the evil empire. And just like allergy shots, you can train the immune system to become tolerant of them and ignore them. And I talked in the book that maybe, just maybe, that these LPSs in whole grains properly detoxified with fermentation. We gotta remember that all cultures always, always detoxified plant compounds with fermentation, but they were getting doses of LPSs. And the really cool thing it may be, spices are great for you because of polyphenol content, but spices contain huge amounts of LPSs.

This is crazy. So some LPS might be good for.

You and others orally ingested. Orally ingested to train the immune system. And that's the, you know, that's a part of the hygiene hypothesis.

I have a confession to make. I went to Europe last year twice, Turkey, actually, in Dubai. And I don't have any issues digesting the wheat over there. So I ate like four pounds of baklava. It was delicious.

Tell me that.

And I don't. I don't regret it, but I came back and said, you know, my primary carb, if I'm going to have starch, is going to be white rice washed carefully for reasons we both discussed around just lowering toxins and whatever.

Yeah.

And I know that it's probably not what you'd recommend, but it's probably better than some.

No, white smiley race from me is what I recommend. My patients, if they got to have.

Cooked and cooled, and I am. I'm 5% body fat right now, so some carbs are probably a good thing. In fact, the reason I was doing it was I would like to put on get up to 8% fat. So I said, you know, I really enjoyed the bread over there. So I ordered some white flour from France with no glyphosate in it, and I fermented the crap out of it, and I made a loaf of sourdough bread and I ate it. And you know what happened? It was delicious. Nothing bad happened. I did take enzymes to help me with any extra leftover gluten, but I cannot touch a teaspoon of American gluten or American flour without it wrecking my microbiome. Is that all glyphosate?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I really do.

Okay.

I.

It's not the hard red wheat thing with extra gluten.

You know, half of my 80% of my patient population is autoimmune patients, and 94% of them go into remission within a year of published data. And their leaky gut gets only 94. I'm sorry, kind of step aside. Those. It's those 6%. They're just troublemakers.

One day will work better than pharmaceutical drugs, but you're about 36% efficacy. Oh, my God. That's an impressive number.

Yeah. No. And so. And you know, they're. They're excited and they. They go over to Europe and they can't resist, and they have the croissants and the baguettes and the pizzas, and they do not react. And to a person, they go, oh, Dr. Gundry's cured me. I can have this stuff work. And they come back to the United States and like, three Weeks late, and they start eating our stuff. They go, I'm cured. Three weeks later, like clockwork, you know, their psoriasis pops, their joint swells from rheumatoid arthritis, their ulcerative colitis flares and.

They go, what the heck?

You. You cured me. I said, no, you weren't eating our dumb food. You were eating glyphosate, primarily free food over there. But proviso, Europeans can't produce enough wheat to meet their needs. And they used to get it from Ukraine. Now Ukraine isn't producing that wheat.

And that we will probably have depleted uranium and God knows what in it for a long time after all the destruction.

Yeah. So what they've been doing is importing American wheat. Oh, no. And then sending it back to us. And I just saw this with one of my well meaning patients who was importing double zero flour from Italy to make his pizzas.

You can't trust Italian flour. It's high in glyphosate. It's got to be French.

Yeah, and he flared and he says, but, but it's double zero Italian flours. No, believe it or not, they get most of their wheat now from the United States.

This drives me insane. Bayer Monsanto has been trying to force glyphosate into Mexico and South America and into Europe. And people there maybe are just smarter than Americans are. Like, let's use it in our ketchup. So now they're saying, oh, we can just bypass that. We'll just send them the poison flower from the US this madness has to stop. It's crazy. Is there a gut bacteria that will stop glyphosate or at least make it less harmful?

There's got to be. Somehow. There's been no interest of a gut bacteria to eat glyphosate.

Can we make one? Hey, let's. Genetic one.

Yeah. Let's start a company.

I'm not even kidding. I'm all over that. That would change the world.

It would.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, we'll do it. Guys. If you want to fund our company, we're down. Lots and lots of listeners are into manipulating their dopamine levels because this makes you want to do stuff things like cold plunges do that. There's a new concept in heavily meditated about how doing something that hurts a little bit every day will change your dopamine sensitivity. What can I do with my diet so that my dopamine systems work better.

I think the more you get your terrain back into balance, all of this smooths out. It's the it's the derangement of these various neurotransmitters that makes a big difference. I'll use an example from Pharmaceutical World. A ton of my patients were on antidepressants, SSRIs, serotonin reuptake inhibitors. And if those actually worked as they were, then I should be able to take a Prozac today and tomorrow. I'd be the happiest guy in the world because the serotonin wouldn't be broken down my brain. And there'd be plenty that doesn't happen. It takes a month or more if they're going to work to notice an effect. Well, now we know that these things actually change the gut microbiome. And unfortunately, the gut microbiome doesn't change on instantaneously. So they actually work by changing the microbiome into producing more of these neurotransmitters like serotonin.

So having a healthy microbiome is going to help your dopamine.

Yeah.

And it's funny, even things like metformin, which some people still use in the longevity world, it's not something that's on my list of to do. It also works because it's metabolized in the gut. So half the maybe 90% of pharmaceuticals are really just signals to the gut bacteria to change what they do.

Yeah. So, you know, that's one way to change your gut microbiome. And, you know, 30% of patients who start on metformin stop because they get bowel changes, diarrhea.

It is bad for your mitochondria too.

Yeah, Unfortunately. Yeah. Wow.

Dr. Gondry, you are one of the most unique things, thinking human beings out there in the medical field. And I say that just out of truthfulness, not trying to kiss your butt.

And.

I really appreciate the way you think about it and the way you communicate it. And guys, the new book is called the Gut Brain Paradox. And as I already said, Dr. Gunder and I haven't come to the same conclusions on everything. And it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that you do what works for you and that you measure the results and you try something, whether it's, you know, avoiding red meat because of something we didn't talk about in this episode, we talked about in the last episode, try it for a month. And if, you know, angels come out of the sky, keep doing it. And if it doesn't work, then change something. You will find great wisdom in the Gut Brain Paradox that's worth your time to read. So I suggest you pick it up.

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