How Nutrition Can Reverse Disease and the Impact of Lectins – Dr. Steven Gundry - #417

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that joint pain is not anything new. But did you know it might have played a role in the American Revolution? Hippocrates called gout arthritis of the rich because of lifestyle factors that came in like drinking lots of excessive alcohol and quote rich food. But if you were diagnosed with gout, it actually was cool, like from a social perspective. So people with gout were successful. And one of those well to do gout sufferers was a British statesman called William Pitt the Elder, who happened to be absent from Parliament because of a gout attack on the day the British government decided to levy those taxes on tea imports that led to the Boston Tea Party. So if it wasn't for our old friend gout, there might not have been an American revolution. Who would have thought? I've heard that a lot of people in the biohacking community and just people want to take care of themselves have had trouble with how much they overpay for life insurance because life insurance companies haven't caught up with all the new science that changes the way different types of food and exercise and diets are viewed by the scientific community. Life insurance companies are still telling you to eat fat free toast and crap like that. So for example, if you're committed to the bulletproof diet, you, you might have an increased level of good cholesterol called hdl. That's protective. But some life insurance companies are gonna lump all cholesterol into one negative category based on science that's actually been rejected by the American Heart association. But the life insurance companies still do it. And that decision can increase what you pay for life insurance. So if you're listening to this podcast, you care about your health and a company called Health IQ advocates for health conscious lifestyles and they think you should actually be rewarded for it. So they use science and data to get you lower rate on insurance from the health companies. Things for people who are health conscious. Cyclists, runners, even vegans and vegetarians, weightlifters, people on Bulletproof in fact, research has shown that people with a high health IQ are 42% less likely to be obese and have a 57% lower risk of early death and they get to be in the hospital less. So a lot of people don't know their health IQ and they don't know that their health IQ can save them money on life insurance. So it's worth checking out right now. Bulletproof radio listeners can learn more and get a free life insurance quote by going to healthiq.com bulletproof that's healthiq.com bulletproof to learn your health IQ and to learn more about life insurance for people who pay attention to their health. Today's guest is a remarkable guy. He is, let's see, he was a two term president of the board of directors of the American Heart association and and served on the board of directors for the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs and is a renowned cardiologist, a medical researcher and a New York Times best selling author who had a 40 year career in medicine where he conducted over 10,000 heart surgeries. Developed different life saving medical technologies and then decided that he could advocate for lifestyle change to avoid surgeries altogether. In 2016, he launched a wellness blog and YouTube channel to help people learn about this stuff and just wrote a new book that came out in April and hit the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and New York Times bestseller list. The book is called the Plant Paradox and the author is none other than Dr. Steven Gundry. Welcome to Bulletproof Radio.

Hey, thanks to having me. I'm really excited to be here.

You wrote the Plant Paradox? When I first saw this coming out, I was kind of excited because, well, you have, I would call them unimpeachable credentials, as in, you've been doing this for at least a couple weeks and your book is all about how plants protect themselves from being eaten, which is something that's missing from a lot of this nutritional dogma that's out there. And some of the thinking behind the Bulletproof diet is that there's a list of suspect foods. And one of the big things that makes things like garbanzo beans and, and bell peppers and pretty much all grains suspect is the defense mechanisms that are present in these things. And just out of the blue, your book comes out after you've been researching this stuff for 10 years with some profound stories and really good research that says, look, these plant compounds are not doing us favors. And here's how to tell the difference. What led you go down this path of looking at plant toxins versus all the things you could have done? I mean, you're like, like an artificial heart guy.

Well, about 17 years ago, my, my arc in life was changed very much like yours was. I was a very famous professor and chairman of heart surgery at Loma Linda University. And a guy from Miami who I call Big Ed was sent to me with inoperable coronary artery disease. All of his blood vessels were clogged up. You couldn't put stents in them, you couldn't do bypasses. And he'd been going around the country to surgeons who take this sort of thing on, and I'm one of those. And he finally got to me and he'd been going around the country for about six months now. This is a very obese guy. When I met him, he weighed 265 pounds. And I'm looking at his coronary angiogram, the movie of his heart, and I'm going, you know, I'm really not going to help you. I agree with everybody else. There's just nothing we're going to do. And he says, well, look, you know, I've been at this for six months. I've gone on a diet, I've lost 45 pounds and I went to a health food store and I bought this big bag of supplements. I've been taking these supplements every day. Maybe I did something in here. And so I'm looking at him going, well, good for you for losing 45 pounds. But it's not going to change anything here. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine, which I actually believed back then.

I'm totally okay with having expensive urine. It means my body used what it wanted and I peed the rest out. My goal is to have the most expensive urine on the planet and Godspeed.

Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to catch Ray Kurzweil with the expensive urine.

I think I'm. There you are too.

120 different ones in the morning and 90 at night. But we can go into that later.

Oh, good, good, good.

So anyhow, so this guy, we got another angiogram on him and I was so impressed that I actually operated on him. And if I'd known what I know now, I would have said, hey, great going, let's clean the rest out. But I wasn't, I was kind of stupid back then. So after we were done, I said, hey, you know, tell me about this diet and let me look at those supplements. So he starts describing the diet and you know, a few sentences in I go, wait a minute, timeout. I had a special major at Yale University back in the dark ages where I had a major for four years where my thesis was, you could alter a great ape's food supply and alter his environment and you could prove that you would arrive at a human being. And that was my thesis, which I defended successfully and got an honors and then tucked it away in my parents home and went on to do heart surgery. So he's starting to describe this diet and I'm going, wait, that's my thesis. So this is rather poignant because like you, I was a very obese individual. I weighed 230 pounds, I'm 5 10, I was running 30 miles a week. Oh, going to the gym one hour every day and eating a healthy, low fat Adventist diet.

Excuse me, Dr. Gundry, you're obviously lying. You're sneaking Snickers bars all the time. If you were doing that, you would have lost weight. Did your colleagues tell you that? Yeah, I love this.

And you know, and I could go on any diet known to mankind. You know, the Atkins diet. I could lose 20 pounds and then gain 25. The Ornish diet. I could lose 20 pounds and gain 25. The cabbage soup diet and the egg diet. So it was just. And, you know, and I had high cholesterol and prediabetes, and I had such bad arthritis that I actually had to wear braces on my knees to keep running. And I got migraine headaches every day. Imagine doing baby heart transplants with migraines. It's not a lot of fun, but. So I was told that this was genetic because my father was almost identical in all his lab works and about the same size, and there was really nothing I could do about it. So I called my parents. When I listened to Big Ed and I, they sent my thesis up to me. I've got it actually up here in the shelf. And I put myself on my thesis and I looked in his bag of supplements. And I was using a bunch of these supplements intravenously down in the lab to resuscitate hearts that had been dead for an hour, and then putting them in a bag of ice water for 48 hours. And it had never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things like carnitine.

And things like that, or.

Yeah, like carnitine. Like actually grapeseed extract, lipoic acid, like pycnogenol, coenzyme Q10. And so I started taking a bunch of supplements and I started taking. Sending my blood work.

Let me pause you for a second there.

Yeah.

How long ago was this?

This was 1997.

So it takes a lot of balls for former president of the American Heart association to take one supplement and you started taking all these things. What led you. That's almost anathema to your profession at the time. What made you do that?

Well, you and I know that our ancient ancestors interact with 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. And all of those plants have polyphenols, flavonoids, that not only turn on our individual genes, but more importantly, they alter the gene expression of our microbiome. And we would encounter these things on seasonal basis. And one of the things I keep telling even my hardcore organic food eaters is, look, if you think visiting a farmer's market every day of your life that you are going to acquire 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. I've got oceanfront property in Palm Springs to sell you. It just can't be done. So what I decided to do was turn not only myself, but my patients into an ongoing research project, because at my core, that's what I do is research. So When I. So I started doing this on myself, and I lost £50 the first year. And I've. And I did that on purpose. And then I've subsequently lost another £20. And I've kept it off now for 20 years. And I gave up long distance running. That was one of the stupidest things that anybody could ever do.

You're making me happy, man.

Just ask Mark Sisson his opinion of long distance running. Now I have.

Right.

Yeah. So anyhow, I started doing this on patients that I operated on, because at that time I still thought, well, I'll put in some new plumbing, but let's keep the plumbing from clogging up, because I was famous for doing redo operations and redo. Redo operations. And that just kind of gets silly. But you know that our profession is convinced that this is an ongoing process. Maybe we can slow it down a little bit, but it'll finally get you. And of course, that's all wrong. So I set up an institute in Palm Springs where I asked anybody who wanted to play with me that every three months we'd send their blood work up to the Bay Area, to Virginia, down to Texas, wherever I could find an interesting lab that could give me what are called inflammatory cytokines. And then we started tweaking foods, and we started tweaking supplements. And very rapidly, after the publication of my first book in 2008, which was Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution, a ton of people with autoimmune diseases started coming to my office and they'd say, what do you know about autoimmune disease? And I go, I don't know anything about autoimmune disease, but I know a whole lot about the immune system because I'm a transplant immunologist and I'm famous for having the longest pig to baboon heart transplant survival, 30 days. Baboon with a pig heart. The previous record was five hours. So that's. That's good. So we looked at immune markers, and lo and behold, these set of plants came right up on the top of the list. And for instance, our favorites, the grains and the beans, appeared, you know, really very quickly. And as you know, because my research at Yale was human evolutionary biology, we never ate a grain or a bean until about 10,000 years ago when agriculture got started. Now, the interesting thing, most people don't know that we were very tall creatures 10,000 years ago, we stood about 6ft tall. But the shocking thing is our brain size was about 15% bigger than it is today. And everybody goes, no, no, no, no, we're little creatures and we got bigger. No, we are big. Within 2,000 years of agriculture, we had shrunk to 4 foot 10 inches.

Wow.

Now why? Because quite frankly, plants don't like us.

Amen.

And they don't want us to eat them and they don't want us to eat their children, their babies, their seeds. And plants have a problem when animals arrived because they couldn't run, they couldn't hide, and they couldn't fight. But as you and I know, they're chemists of incredible ability. They can turn sunlight into matter. And I haven't figured out how to do that yet. So what they do is they use chemical warfare. And one of their favorite attack mechanisms is the protein a lectin. And lectins are so beautifully, diabolically designed to wreak havoc on an animal predator. I couldn't have done it better myself.

But it's. Isn't it true that our bodies naturally produce tons of our own lectins, like all animals are full of lectins.

Absolutely true. Lectins are a communication system and lectins are patterns that turn receptors off and on.

So we have our own onboard set of lectins. But plants have other lectins.

Correct. And one of the interesting things is the longer we've been exposed to a plant lectin, the longer we've had to adapt from not so much our genome, but our bacterial genome. And one of the cool things that I like to talk about is we basically uploaded our early warning defense system to our microbiome. And because the microbiome is capable of rapid alteration in gene expression, and the microbiome actually sends text messages to our immune system to tell us how things are going in the outside world and whether we're being attacked by proteins that are foreign to them or to us. And that's part of the plant paradox in that as I talk about, there have been seven deadly disruptors which have really screwed up this communication system and how we have been previously protected from a lot of lectins. So to give you example, there's lectins in leaves, and a lot of them are fairly nasty. But we're a tree dwelling ape. You know, we, we came from tree shrews. So I tell women if they want to call their husband a rat, they're, they're pretty doggone close. And we've been eating leaves for 40 million years. And you know, we share 99% of our genes with chimps and gorillas, and a gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every Day. And as I laugh with my carnivore Paleo colleagues, Gorilla has more muscle than we'll ever have ever dream of. And all they eat is leaves, so must be something to it.

So I mean, I believe that paleo recommends way too much protein because it's a terrible fuel source. And I've been on high protein diets like you have in in my Quest to lose £100. And that said, if we ate only leaves, I rarely come across a profoundly healthy vegan. Oh, I agree. Yeah. So there's a comfortable middle ground. I'm like, look, you should be low to moderate high quality protein and you should eat low anti nutrients of all sources, including lectins in your book the Plant Paradox, which by the way, I have a lot of authors on bulletproof radio who have noteworthy books. If you liked the bulletproof diet or head Strong, you really ought to read the Plant Paradox. There's some overlap in our recommendations, there's some differences in our recommendations. But if you're wondering why some foods make you weak, there's stuff in here that goes way deeper than I ever did. In my chapter on lectins, there's a whole book on lectins and it's worth it. So just a quick plug and no, Dr. Gundry didn't ask me to do that. I only have people who have cool stuff. If you're watching on YouTube, go to bulletproof.com YouTube to find it. That's what the book looks like. And you can tell it's all dog eared because I went through and I learned some stuff. So if you're saying we're meant to eat leaves, but some leaves contain lectins. I remember my daughter, when she was maybe two, we had a little garden in our backyard and she learned she could grow up, she could eat Rosemary and she's 10, she still goes out and eats herbs from the garden just, just raw the same way I do. But she didn't know. And we had some squash grown as a pumpkin, I think. So she takes a leaf from the pumpkin, eats it and farts for the rest of the day and crying with cramps and all this kind of stuff from one leaf because of the lectins in the plant, right?

Yes.

So in my experience. Here's another one. I'm profoundly lectin sensitive. I figured this out a while ago. And if I eat one bite of potato especially, the nightshades for me are just kryptonite, but all the grains suck. So if I eat one of those things, I get the Upper back pain that I had my entire adult life until I figured this out. It was always on the upper spine. I had arthritis on my knees since I was 14, and so I would never touch this stuff. My son, who's 7, they started putting one potato in the soup they make at school, and sure enough, he needs a massage every night in his neck for the entire week from that one thing. But my daughter can eat a potato with no effects, at least none that we can see right away. I tell her, don't eat potatoes. They're probably not biologically very good for our family. Why the difference in responsiveness between two of my own offspring? What's going on there?

That's a great question. And half of my practice now is autoimmune diseases. And the really cool thing is there's usually a family history component. And when you do, I do family trees. And it's fascinating that there's usually IBS, or there was diarrhea, constipation, or lots of hypothyroidism, lots of rheumatoid arthritis. So there's clearly a genetic predisposition. And we look at all the markers that are known for autoimmune diseases, and clearly a lot of people carry these. But what's interesting is in my book, there are people who react to these almost instantaneously. And I call them canaries in. You know, coal miners used to go into the mines and they couldn't smell the methane gas, so they carry canaries with them. And the canaries would flirt around and they might have a much higher metabolism rate. And if the canary keeled over or stopped singing, you ran. So there are people like you and actually people like me that react virtually instantaneously. And that's a huge benefit, actually. But what's been fascinating to me is that I'm now absolutely convinced that every one of us is sensitive to the majority of. And we may not feel it until 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago when we have bone on bone arthritis, or we have three blood vessels that are clogged up and you go, gee, I eat a healthy low fat diet and I run 40 miles a week. And that doesn't make any sense. But when you kind of start breaking it down at where lecture invite disease. I mean, it's just been fascinating to me to watch people who are scheduled for hip replacement or knee replacement, and we put them on this program and six months later they've regrown cartilage in their joints and they cancel their operation.

You said something there. So I grew up in New Mexico, where green chili, which is a member of the nightshade family, that's very high in lectins and it's soul food. So I love this stuff. I used to slice habaneros and just put them on whatever I was going to eat and cry when I would eat. And I tell you, I put a little bit of cayenne on my food. My joint symptoms returned. The symptoms started when I was 14 and I was diagnosed with arthritis. But my dad, mid-70s, he's had one hip replacement, and I've been harping on him for a while. You always have to convince your parents and you think at this point he'd listen, and he does. To be perfectly honest, he's very into the bulletproof thing. Now the time he wasn't. And I said, dad, could you just stop eating cayenne pepper and just try this just for two weeks? And he goes, you know, argues against it and eventually says, I'll give it a try. And he calls me two weeks later and he said, you know what? He said, I don't think I'm going to have to have my other hip replaced after two weeks of just not eating these things. And he was already avoiding grains and mostly bulletproof. But you can't give up green chili because life isn't worth living without green chili, which is what any New Mexican will tell you. But it is. And so I don't eat my favorite food either, because it's just not worth the pain. And you're saying everyone's affected by this? In my case, I feel crappy right away. So it's an obvious thing. What's the normal onset time? Let's say you eat this stuff as a kid. Most of us are given. They put cayenne in half the stuff. You can get the healthy kale chips or whatever, and a lot of other lectin containing maybe some quinoa and some garbanzos and all these other random foods that are full of lectins. How long should you expect before you start seeing bad things happen to you that seem to have no cause?

Well, you know, it is amazing. I have a lot of parents who bring younger kids to me with asthma or eczema, have a pretty big population of Crohn's kids. And these are the kids invariably that they got. They had a lot of ear infections or a lot of sore throats as a little kid, and they got a lot of antibiotics, well meaning by their pediatricians. But what I've discovered in 10 years now is that all Those runny noses and ear infections and sore throats were actually caused by our response to lectins. And mucus production is actually our fundamental way of trapping lectins. Lectins are proteins that seek out sugar molecules to bind to. And mucus is mucopolysaccharide saccharides. That's multiple sugars. So we throw down this defensive shield to trap lectins. And if anybody eats spicy food, they'll notice that their nose starts running. And it's even got a medical term called gustatory rhinorrhea. And the hilarious thing is that it's actually us trying to protect ourselves from lectins. So it's really cool when these kids with eczema or asthma or tonsils, when we take lectins away from them, and it's difficult because our culture is just, I mean, lectin centric, then they clear up so fast, and then the kids actually notice if they reintroduce one of these little troublemakers. Like one kid, a couple of grape tomatoes flared his asthma. One kid had a couple of bites of pizza at a party, and his eczema just blossomed. Then they know, they become so sensitive that it's no fun to eat these foods anymore.

Most definitely, my kids feel the difference from the stuff they're sensitive to, and they haven't been exposed that much. But can you explain Greece? I went to Greece recently and there was almost nothing. I'll have the fish. And don't put anything on it, because every single vegetable available in Greece is an eggplant, a tomato, a potato, or a pepper. And these are all like super high lectin nightshade family foods, and maybe a grape or something, if you're lucky. But why is everyone in Greece not just falling dead from heart disease early on? In fact, the Mediterranean diet is from there.

Yeah, well, you know, the funny thing is that the pleasures of that Mediterranean diet, eggplant and peppers and cucumbers and potatoes and tomatoes, were all brought by Columbus. And none of these people actually ate any of these foods until 500 years ago. In fact, the Italians were so afraid of tomatoes that they didn't eat them for 200 years. And then they decided that the peel and the seeds actually had the major lectins. And so any Italian will tell you, you cannot make tomato sauce without peeling and de seeding a tomato. In fact, interestingly enough, I study cultures on what they do to avoid lectins. And the Roma tomato was hybridized to have the most pulp to skin and seed ratio. So you Just throw a Roma tomato in boiling water for 30 seconds, pull the skin off, cut it in half, squeeze the seeds out, and into the pot it went. And it's amazing how cultures have adapted to this. My grandmother on my mother's side was French, and she taught my mother that you could not serve a tomato safely without peeling it and de seeding it. And so all my life I ate peeled and de seeded sliced tomatoes. And it wasn't until actually one of my first days at Yale that I was served a tomato with peels and seeds. And I thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen in my life that who would eat something like that? So go ahead. Getting back to Greece. Interestingly enough, the arthritis rate in Italy and Greece and Sardinia is incredibly high. And it was one of the things, the Sardinians actually have one of the longest lifespans of an E, but they actually have one of the highest autoimmune disease rates in all of Europe. And I'm convinced that it's actually these healthy foods that have been blocked by the other healthy foods they eat. I mean, they drink a ton of olive oil. You know, a liter of olive oil a week is considered a great idea. And I actually like that idea. And they, they drink a lot of polyphenols in wine and most of. And they, and the Greeks eat huge amounts of various plants. You know, purslane is an amazing plant in and of itself. And it turns out that we used to think purslane was a heart healthy plant because it has a lot of omega 3 fats. It turns out the modern research shows that purslane is so good for you because it has huge amounts of prebiotics, inulin, which feeds friendly bacteria. So our first guess about purslane was wrong about the omega 3 fats. It was actually that it was incredibly high in microbiome friendly fiber.

And the microbiome friendly fiber effectively increases short chain fats, not the Omega 3s, because when your gut bacteria digests, it makes the short chain. You've got the short ones, you got the medium ones, you got the long ones. And they can all be saturated, which is kind of weird.

Yep. And the nice thing about your, you know, your MCT oil is that it's a medium chain saturated fat that does not have to travel on chylomicrons to be absorbed. And I spend a lot of time in the plant paradox showing people that MCT oil is incredibly useful because these little particles of bacteria, which are called lipopolysaccharides, LPSs, I don't swear. But in the book, I can't resist calling them little pieces of shit, because that's actually what they are. These pieces of bacteria ride on chylomicrons through our gut wall. And I'm convinced that they're a big, major problem in everyone's health.

Now, there are two kinds of chylomicrons with different molecular weight. Do LPSs ride on both of them?

Yeah, they can. Both. Yeah, they can ride on all of them. But the really cool thing about MCT is that it does not need a chylomicron to be absorbed through the intestinal wall. That's quite unique.

It is in several different studies. It's also protective against LPS toxicity in the rest of the body. So even if another fat, like a saturated fat, say butter, was to carry something through in the presence of an mct, the MCT has a protective effect. That's one of the reasons that I put those together in bulletproof coffee was because if you have a high fat diet without enough vegetables, without maybe activated charcoal to bind lps, you will contribute to inflammation. So saturated fats that are damaged or with an unhealthy microbiome might not be a good idea. Right?

Correct.

Now, you mentioned something about kids with strep throat and antibiotics. That describes me to a T. I was obese as a teenager. I was on antibiotics for more than 15 years every month. A chronic strep throat. But I lived in a basement that had toxic black mold in the walls, which also triggers autoimmunity. In fact, the big categories of suspect foods in the bulletproof diet are high mycotoxin foods, high lectin foods, high oxalic acid foods, which tend to actually, an oxalic acid is also triggered by fungal infections like candida in the body and triggers gout in addition to uric acid and things like that. And so I'm saying, look, these affect different people differently, but they're not good for any of us. What interactions between the autoimmunity or just between lectins and these other poisons made by fungus and in some cases bacteria and water damaged buildings. What have you seen in your practice?

Ah, great question. There's a wonderful woman. I didn't put her in the book because she's actually a very private individual. What she came to me, she was from San Diego and had been building, had bought a house and that was newly constructed, but she didn't know that it was constructed during a lot of wet weather in Southern California. Yeah, she had a ton of toxic black mold in her house, and she moved out. And she. You would know her name because she'd come a bit of a world expert on toxic mold.

She's probably been in my documentary then, because I did. Yeah, maybe not.

She moved out to the desert, and she literally could not go anywhere. She couldn't go to doctor's offices. She couldn't sense it. So she came to me, she says, you know, I hear you're different. And I said, I'll tell you what I think the fundamental problem is. Lectins are sensitizing you, your immune system, to fire at any foreign substance. And, you know, kick ass and take names and we'll figure out who everybody is later. So I said, humor me. Take lectins out of your diet and let's see what happens. And sure enough, within two months, she was back. All of her immune system activation that I measure was down to normal. And, you know, she says, oh, you're a genius. You know, it was the lectins. I said, well, no, no, no, the molds were getting you. But it was, you know, I took away the other primary signal. So your immune system calmed down.

It's death by a thousand cuts. It's overall inflammatory load on the body. And the whole approach for the whole bulletproof lifestyle for me is like, how do you lower inflammation? And there's cryotherapy and cold showers, specific exercise, breathing, meditation. Those are all just ways of chiseling away at inflammation. Taking lectins out is a huge. That's like a bulldozer, right? And I would just say there's a lot of people who've been exposed to toxic mold or who have chronic Lyme, which is always toxic mold exposure mediated. If your Lyme doesn't go away with normal treatment, you have toxic mold that broke your immune system. And I know that's controversial, but anyway, that's 15 years of work.

There's a lot of us who see chronic Lyme, and I think a lot of us agree that it's really no longer the Lyme per se that's the problem, but it's this ongoing chronic inflammation. And you know what? My job as a detective is to say, okay, you've been through God knows how many antibiotic treatments, and you still have all these markers for inflammation. You feel like crap, and you go all over the world and there's some wonderful people doing this. But I said, let's add this piece of taking lectins away from you, because I can tell you that lectins are really good at potentiating inflammation. And so I get a lot of people with Lyme that haven't gone down this route. And knock on wood, you know, nobody's got a hundred percent track record. If somebody says they got 100% track record, don't believe them. A lot of times this works just great.

There's a prominent person in the health field who advocates a high legume, high bean kind of a diet. Came down with chronic Lyme and we had some private conversations. I'm like, you need to get some brain octane. You need to do cyclical ketogenic. And lo and behold, magically things did resolve. And I've seen this over and over where it's one thing in the diet that's holding you back so then you can't handle other things. And growing. Systemic resilience is actually a core part of my anti aging strategy where I want to turn off inflammation, I want to monitor my inflammation markers, and then I want to keep doing everything possible to be able to just stay on top of that so that the body can repair itself. So I'm working on a method of stack ranking. Like, how do I know which lectins matter most? For me, like you're saying cucumbers. Most people tolerate cucumbers pretty darn well. In the overall scheme of lectin containing foods, I would put them at the bottom of the list. White rice is another one. We're like, you know, we polish the brown stuff off for a reason. So most people tolerate those. Yeah, it could be from eggs. If you tolerate eggs, they're a superfood. If you're allergic to eggs, stay the hell away because they're full of lectins. Stuff like that. How is someone listening to this show going to know? Do I just avoid every food with every lectin? And pretty much I eat the most boring, restrictive diet and I go to restaurants and I'm just like, Dave. And I tell them, just put salt on my food already. I don't want your other crap. How far down do you have to go on this list and do you have it stack ranked or is there a genetic test? How do we know?

Well, yeah, I mean, one of the things I published, one of the things I published years ago at the American Heart association is there's a hormone called adiponectin. And adiponectin is actually supposed to be a darling of weight loss and health. And I started noticing that my patients with autoimmune diseases had elevated adiponectins. And I said, gee, that's interesting. It's supposed to be good for you. And. And then I started looking at the literature, and it turns out that people with rheumatoid arthritis have elevated adiponectins. And then there's a beautiful study from the New England Health Study showing that skinny women with elevated adiponectin levels have a very high incidence of dementia. And that doesn't make any sense. So I started looking at another inflammatory cytokine called TNF alpha, and I showed that if people had an adiponectin level from a particular lab called Cingulex, which is in the bay area above 16, that they were sensitive to major lectins and that usually their TNF alpha was elevated. And I showed in 800 people that if you took the major lectins away from them that their TNF alpha would fall to normal, but their adiponectin would remain elevated. So I propose, and I still use it to this day, that an elevated adiponectin level is a marker for lectin intolerance. Now, the only. Yeah, now the only people who that won't show up on are obese people. Obesity will absolutely depress adiponectin. But the fascinating thing is when I take obese people and put them on my lectin limited diet, that as they lose weight, their adiponectin heads up into the abnormal range. And I, you know, I go, ah, I knew it. I knew you were lectin sensitive. And, you know, and here you are. So I think that's a really great, good way to start. It's a cheap test. You can. Anybody can draw it on. On anybody. And I think if you're 16 or above, you ought to pay attention. Okay, so how's that to start?

That's helpful. So, you know, if you've got a problem, and then how do you know if you have a problem with cucumbers versus bell peppers? Is there a way to differentiate?

Yeah. So great question. So what I'll do, and I talk about this in the book, let's, you know, kind of clean up your act. You can hate me for a few weeks.

Amen.

And then let's start reintroducing a class of foods. Let's use small cucumbers. Let's use small zucchinis. Let's immature. Let's peel the skins. Give it a try for a couple weeks now in my office, when we reintroduce foods, we'll draw inflammatory markers on them. And if the inflammatory markers go up, they may not even have felt it because it's so subtle, but we'll go there's a great story in the book about a woman who had rheumatoid arthritis her entire life. And we got her off lectins. We got her off all of her immunosuppressants. I mean, these things are long term deadly, as anyone in the transplant field knows. Just ask Glenn Frey how he felt about immunosuppressants. Right. So she got off everything, and she was thriving for several years. And I eventually kind of see her back every six months. And I'm looking at her labs, and she's got this TNF alpha that's up for the first time in two years. And I said, you're cheating. And she said, me? Are you crazy? You know, I feel so great. You know, I'm off of drugs. My. You know, my hands work. Why would I cheat? I said, I'm telling you, there's something in your diet. And so we start going down the no food list, and we get down to American nuts and peanuts. And cashews are American beans. They're not nuts at all. And so are sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and chia seeds. So she gets down to cashews. She said, oh, my gosh, I've been on a cashew kick. I forgot all about cashews. In fact, I've got a bag of cashews in the car right now that I was eating on the way here. And I said, that's it. I said, okay, come back in two weeks. Throw away the cashews. Sure enough, her marker went right down.

It's interesting. I totally recognize that some people are going to react to cashews. And so I use cashews in the bulletproof collagen protein bars because you basically need a binding agent. And I looked at immune reactivity to nuts, and cashews are one of the lowest nuts. Macadamias are too oily. You can't use them for that purpose. Otherwise I would have. Yeah, they're faster. Yeah. But you could put a couple of them in something. But they drip oil. And I have the highest fat load of any bar out there by design, which is awesome. And lots of brain octane, which is also a liquidy oil. So it was a tough call because I'm like, I'd rather use no nuts. So everyone's happy. But I mean, almonds, how are almonds from a lectin perspective versus cashews?

They're pretty nasty.

Yeah.

But it's actually the peel of the almond that has the problem. And actually cashews, it's the outside peel that has the vast majority of the.

Toxins, and they're steamed, chose them, is that you have to basically cook off the outer layer of the cashew and you're just getting the inner thing. It's just like polished rice. It was the lowest toxin thing I could come up with versus, I don't know, I could have used sodium caseinate or milk protein isolate, which are just crap proteins that companies throw in these low carb bars and they do it because it's cheap, but those are also inflammatory via other pathways. It's hard. But I agree, if someone's really tough on lectins, cashews might not be right for you, but, man, they're probably one of the better nuts. Do you agree with that or no? It's okay to disagree.

The really sensitive folks, the guys with autoimmune diseases, I can't tell you the number of folks that peanuts and cashews are real problematic. I can tell you personally that sunflower seeds will throw my immune system out of whack. In the doctor's dining room at our hospital, I usually munch on walnuts when I'm walking by and they ran out of walnuts and they had this big container of sunflower seeds, and this was actually last year. And I said, oh, what the heck? You know, I haven't had sunflower seeds in years. I need something crunchy. So I started eating about a quarter cup of of sunflower seeds, and I. I run my dogs about two and a half miles every morning, jog. And I got plantar fasciitis and tendonitis in my left foot, which I've never had in my life. And I'm going, where the heck did that come from? You know, I didn't trip, I didn't do anything. I didn't change shoes. And then, you know, a light bulb went off, and I said, son of a gun, it's the sunflower seeds. So I stopped them, and the plantar fasciitis resolved within three days.

You are one of the top event correlation doctors, as far as I can tell from your thought process. You're saying you draw lab panels for inflammation. You don't have to draw a lab panel. All you have to do is wake up in the morning and make a fist. And if you have a harder time making a fist, your grip strength is low, or you have a pain in your feet that you didn't have a flu before. It's a pretty sure sign that you were exposed to something. And it's usually a lectin. It was moldy food. It might have been histamine containing food, it might have been oxalic acid containing food. It's usually one of those. And it might be something else, but it's usually one of those. Or you drank some beer which had ochratoxin A or something, but those are primary things. But if you have no inflammation, you wake up and your muscles all work really well, your grip strength is strong, there's a pretty good correlation with no inflammatory markers, at least in my experience. You have a little bit more clinical experience than I do, given that I'm an unlicensed biohacker. But do you, do you buy that?

Yeah, I do. You know, the amazing thing is what I want to do because I'm a researcher is I wanted to prove this with biomarkers. I don't want to just say, hey, Dr. Gundry, you went out, I went on your diet and I feel great. That could be the placebo effect, but I wanted to correlate the fact that they felt great and that we were throwing away their blood pressure meds and the diabetes meds with the actual markers. And that's. And it's funny thing is I publish all my stuff in academic places like the American Heart association, like the European, European Atherosclerosis Society. I don't go to the kind of touchy feely places to show my data. So because I want people to realize this is, this is science backed, it's not conjecture. And that's what I hope I bring to the table.

Well, you have the great scientific background, the real medical background, and correlating this stuff to inflammatory markers is really important. And also understanding pathways. So let's go to pathways for a little while. In my perspective as a computer hacker by training and a biohacker now is I always look for how do I manipulate and modify the system. So we assume we know how the system works, but there might be missing pieces. That's okay. You can still have something without knowing everything about it. And one of the things that I published in Head Strong was a bunch of different pieces of data about how lectins inhibit mitochondrial function. And your mitochondria are the power plants in your cells. You know this. I'm just saying that for listeners that power plants or batteries in your cells and certain lectins, and I'm guessing it's different lectins for different people based on your mitochondrial DNA, they literally inhibit this. And when your lectins hit your mitochondria, it changes your leptin, not leptin. L E P, T, I, N and leptin resistance precedes insulin resistance precedes type 2 diabetes. And it's a sign that your body isn't making energy the way it should. You don't make enough energy, you're going to get brain fog. Then you won't be headstrong. That's why the book is called that. So are we looking at correlations between mitochondrial DNA, this is the power plant wiring of the body, and specific lectin sensitivity, or are we looking at nuclear DNA, which is like the physical hardware, the walls and the foundation, the meat of your body? Do we know?

No, And I'm actually even more interested in bacterial DNA because, as you know, we get all of our mitochondria from our mother. All mitochondria are female and they're all.

Bacteria by origin, right?

That's exactly right. They are all bacteria by origin. We, you know, cells engulf them millions of years ago, billions of years ago. And there's a really cool theory which I ascribe to that. We get all of our initial bacterial load from our mother.

Absolutely.

She craps on us.

And so it never stops in some cases.

Yes, that's right. If you're lucky. So there's a theory that the president of the Microbiota Society has that we get our female bacteria to talk to our female mitochondria and they actually text message each other.

Yeah.

And that they're. That one of the problems with early antibiotics that probably screws this whole thing up is our original female to female connection. And no offense to guys, our mitochondria are female. They're not. Is that that early connection? The wires get cut and when a new population of bacteria move in, then they don't have the intimate connection to talk to mitochondria. So what I think, yes, lectins can target mitochondria, there's no question about that. But I want to get them closer to the source where I can manipulate them, and that's in our microbiome. And what I want to do is I want to reestablish those connections between the microbiome, a healthy microbiome, and not only our immune system, but mitochondria. So that's where I like to do my hacking.

The text messages, the signals between the gut bacteria and the mitochondria. What's your theory for how that message is sent?

So these are. There's a famous quote, and forgive me because I forgot the artist's name is that reality is a scanning pattern.

I like that quote. But I don't know who it's from.

Yeah, I'll send you a picture of it. So I got interested in pattern matching very early on because of immunology. And you got interested in pattern matching because that's how you hack a computer. We're just looking at patterns. And so all, all communication happens at either the cellular membrane or the mitochondrial membrane or at the nuclear membrane. And this is where information is exchanged. And, you know, we're so stupid, we don't realize that you can take a nucleus out of a cell and that cell can do just fine and tons of information and respond outside information without having a control center. And so we've got it all backwards. The cellular membrane is where all the hacks or all the communication goes on. And that's how it happens. So these bacteria produce hormone like substances that enter either our lymphatic circulation or enter our blood. And they then attach to membranes, either the cell membrane or the, they're quite capable of passing through the locks in a cell membrane and attached to a mitochondrial membrane and they exchange information. We're just, you know, as you know, we're now just scraping the surface on this, but that's where all of us are trying to figure out how to keep these little swallowed bacteria happy.

There's definitely the whole, the chemical and hormonal communication that happens in. One of the things that came to light, so to speak, when I was doing the research for Head Strong, is the effect of biophotons, where your gut bacteria make 5,000 times more photons than your mitochondria make. And your mitochondria listen to these and send from these things. It's one of the reasons that I'm all over sleeping in a dark room, pitch black room, because it actually allows your mitochondria to hear your gut bacteria better. Because if there's a little blue or green, all these other LEDs out there, it actually changes this weird communication network that would be invisible to you. It's just almost too bizarre. So I don't know. I do that and it works.

I agree with you, totally agree with you. Room is so important because, you know, photons can go actually right through the retina.

Yep. In fact, I'm going to have to talk about these things. I did some research on mitochondria in the eyes and I don't know if there's a lectin connection here, but I'm asking you. And it turns out that 5% of the retinal cells are melanopsin sensors. They have Extra mitochondria, but they take light and they don't send it into your visual processing at all. They send it into the SCN in the brain which controls your daylight cycle. So we made these. I say we. I'm a backer of the company who did this called the glasses, called Truedark. These are glasses that block every spectrum of light that's documented into effect melanopsin. So you're basically tricking the mitochondria in your eyes into believing it's absolutely pitch black. And I doubled my deep sleep. If I wear these for an hour or two before bed and I don't get jet lag at all. If I use these on long flights.

How do I get one?

Wow. It's almost like we arranged this ahead of time. Except we didn't. You can tell because I'm unwrapping them on the video. But these are on the Biohacked website. But the reason I'm asking here is we're getting into these bio signaling things. What do lectins do for biophotons? What do lectins do for sleep? What do they do for vision? Take me down that road.

Okay, so one of the guys I talk about in the book, his name is Tony. Tony had alopecia and he had huge white spots on his hands and his arms and some on his face. Michael Jackson had alopecia.

Or alopecia or both.

Vitiligo. Sorry, sorry.

Okay.

I was seeing a patient without pecia earlier today. Yeah, vitiligo. Okay. Loss of pigment. And when he went on my program years ago, his vitiligo disappeared. All of his cells grew back. And he said, so, you know, how'd that happen? Now I could have been, you know, a wise guy and said, well, my diet's very anti inflammatory. And so that's how it happened. And I went, nah, nah, nah, nah, that's too easy. So I looked into melanocytes. And melanocytes are modified nerve cells.

Yeah.

Now, the original predator of plants were insects. And lectins were designed to paralyze insects by stopping the communication between nerves. Makes great sense. And so I said, wait a minute. These are modified nerve cells. And lectin's targets are nerve cells. So it was the lectins that were doing this. And fascinatingly, I lost touch with him. And he saw me at a conference about four years ago and his vitiligo was back. And I said, hey, you know, what's the deal? And he says, oh, you know, I'm eating sloppy and I Said, well, let's do this experiment. You know, let me give you the two page list again. You know, come, come back on it and let's see what happens. And we were just on a panel at Harvard three weeks ago on a wellness symposium. And he was sitting right next to me and he held up his hands and they were clear. And he says, I gotta tell you, I am living proof that lectins target melanocytes. So I've been fascinated that lectins have the potential to target the melanocyte receptors in our eyes and screw up our deep sleep cycle.

It goes deeper than that, and this is profound stuff for me. You'll notice I have a relatively dark tan that's by design inside the eyes we have the retinal melanin that's deep inside the eye that isn't protecting you from sun. And in head strong. I write about some researchers in Mexico who for 10 years and 6,000 patients were trying to figure out why is there so much oxygen in the eye, more oxygen than the blood, blood flow can account for. It seems to violate laws of physics. And what they figured out is that melanin in the eye, or neural melanin, has the ability to break water down into free electrons and free oxygen in the presence of infrared light, which is what your mitochondria make. So it turns out this is acting as an extra oxygen source and as an electrical capacitor when you need extra energy and the eyes need the most energy and the brain needs the most the most energy. So if you're eating lectins and they're damaging your ability to make melanin, you're screwed. And what is melanin made of? Melanin is made of branched, interconnected polyphenols, which is why you and I keep talking about take your polyphenols, drink your coffee, drink your tea, eat your chocolate. I'm not a fan of red wine because of the mycotoxins and the glyphosate and just the relative low polyphenol count. But okay, fine, have some red wine.

And just drink it from Europe.

Drink it from Europe. Take your glutathione while you're at it. As a matter of fact, bulletproof.com wine. I have a source for mycotoxin tested wines where they ship it to you, which is kind of cool. And I've had some good luck with that as well. But yeah, you gotta be careful on that stuff. Okay, so I just got off track there, talking about all these polyphenols and what's going on in the brain. So my theory, now that we're just forming in our conversation here, which is fascinating, I love getting a chance to talk with smart guys like you, is that potentially some of the brain fog, in fact, you write about brain fog in your book too, could be caused by the fact that these compounds, the plants made to kill insects, are harming our ability to have robust energy production in the brain and the eyes.

Yep. Yeah.

Do you see changes in visual contrast sensitivity from people who eat lectins?

Very interesting. Years ago, my wife and I decided to do a completely raw food diet.

Oh, I did too. Ruined me.

The interesting thing. We ate mostly leaves and olive oil. We actually had some raw prosciutto. So we weren't vegan raw food, which is really dumb. But one of the things that was reported in the. In the raw foodist literature was that color intensity got much more intense and that hearing actually got more intense. And I gotta tell you, you know, placebo effect may be one thing, but I didn't tell my wife this. And both of us, oh, I don't know, a month into it, said, you know, it's really weird. Visual colors are, you know, it's like they pop. And I, we had a tree that was full of bees every year. And when I was about a month into this, I would be outside, and it was like the. The roar from the bees was almost deafening. And I'm going, what the heck? You know, are they all around me? And no, you know, they were in a tree away. So I really do think that lectins, in other words, we removed all the grains from our diet, all the beans from our diet. But I think there's something to all this so roundabout.

There's a lot of science to be done here. And the plant paradox, your new book, is definitely putting it out there in the public sphere and in a way that I honestly didn't think that this would reach public awareness this fast. And I've been on the mycotoxin kick. That's why I did a documentary on it. Because environmental mold, not just food mold, but the stuff you're breathing and all, is such a huge inflammatory trigger for so many people. But lectins are at least as important. They're just even harder to explain. So I'm grateful that you wrote a book that explains it well, and I'm grateful that you have such great experience and such good credentials that it's very hard for someone to say you don't know what you're talking about. They Sound like loons if they say that. And it's okay to say you're wrong or there's a mistake. But directionally, your book is absolutely something that's important and I think will just make its way into the national consciousness. Where is it possible that that salad they're serving you is just completely jacking you up? Because they put all sorts of weird stuff on it. Weird by an evolutionary biology perspective, but not weird by what your mom ate.

Yeah.

Talk about fertility and lectins.

Well, as you know, there is a huge increase in infertility and men's sperm counts are pretty plummeting. Men's testosterone levels are plummeting. We could go so far. Personally, I think a lot of these are some of the seven deadly disruptors that we talk about. Glyphosate is right up there on anybody's list. But it's interesting and even talk about this in the book. From a plant standpoint, the less of their predators that are alive or that reproduce is a very good thing. So from a plant standpoint, having compounds that interfere with reproduction of your. Of your predator would be really high on your priorities. And people say, well, wait a minute, you say that plants think. Well, plants definitely, definitely think. Not in the way we think of thinking, but they are sentient beings. And even if they weren't, evolutionary pressures affect plants equal to animals. And that means.

Can I just plug. To support what you're saying there, you have to read the Secret Life of Trees. Anyone listening who thinks plants aren't sent to you, just read that book. They change their toxins based on predation really quickly. So what you're saying there is credible and proven. So all the skeptics who just didn't listen to that.

No.

Listen to what he says. So keep going anyway.

Yeah. And I'll give another plug. One of the books that really started me down this path was Michael Poland's first book, the Botany of Desire.

Yeah.

And about how plants manipulate animals to do their bidding. And, you know, anybody. Yeah, the Secret Life Trees. The same way these, these guys not only think but. But they, you know, the evolutionary pressures are that if you come up with a compound or compounds that either make you less edible, but more importantly make your predator either leave or die or not reproduce, then that compound will be selected. And they've had 400 million years to do this. And, you know, we've been around 2 million. Maybe they've. Boy, practice makes perfect. And the more we realize that, you know, this has been an ongoing battle from the day the first insect crawled onto land and said, man, this is the Garden of Eden. Look. Look at everything there is to eat. And the war started right then. And people have to realize that it's an ongoing battle. And they're really clever.

They are really clever. So they're going to inhibit fertility for that reason.

Yeah. And, you know. Yeah, exactly. And the problem is we, over the last 10,000 years, we've evolved to eat an incredibly lectin rich diet of things we weren't even designed to eat. You know, 75% of all the carbon atoms in the average American come from corn, and 5% of the carbon atoms in a European come from corn. And nobody ate corn until 500 years ago. I mean, it's just such a foreign compound.

It's a high lectin and a high mycotoxin food.

Oh, yeah. Huge mycotoxins in corn. Yeah.

All right, I've got a hard question for you. If you had to eat a plate of french fries made with potatoes fried in canola oil from a restaurant or smoke a cigarette, which would you do?

You know, I have to go back to my friendly neighborhood, the Kitavans. Or Kitavans. Right. They smoke like fiends. They eat taro root. And actually taro root makes great french fries. And they live into their mid-90s. And there's never been a case of heart disease, and there's never been a case of lung cancer, and there's never been a stroke. And I actually tell my smokers that the other things are actually going to kill them faster. And if I have to have them have a vice and give up the things I want them to give up, I'm going to fill them so full of vitamin C every day and so much glutathione every day. But I'll. I'll trade them their. Their cigarettes, at least temporarily. So I would choose to have neither. But I've actually never had a cigarette in my life, so.

Me either. I don't. I don't smoke.

I. So I don't intend to take you up on that bet, but it sounds.

Like your answer is you would. You would say the lower harm is the cigarette.

Correct.

So I am in agreement with that. Dr. Kate Shanahan was on, and we did that. And. Okay, you're former president of the American Heart Association. Right. And we all acknowledge smoking is a crappy habit. Right. It's just that fried, high lectin foods fried in bad oils are even worse, and yet we have so many people, oh, I would never smoke a cigarette. And they're munching on like death in a little wax paper wrapper. And so I'm like, don't do either one either. And who knows? Nicotine actually has some health benefits in low doses.

Oh, got you.

That's right.

Oh, yeah. I mean, nicotine is fantastic. I mean, it's great for your brain. Parkinson's disease, it's just currently, it was a bad delivery device. Yeah.

I supplement with a microdose nicotine spray. The lowest toxin containing one I can find, has a little bit of artificial sweetener I don't like, but it's the least harmful one. And I'll deal with that simply because it is a cognitive enhancer associated with all sorts of good stuff. But I'm not going to light it on fire before I take it. All right, Dr. Gundry, I could talk to you for hours. And this has been such a fun interview. And thank you for writing the Plant Paradox. I've got a final question for you. If someone came to you tomorrow and they said, look, based on everything you know in your life, not just your life's work here, but everything, what would you tell me if I told you I want to perform better at everything I do as a human being? So three most important things, what are they?

So number one, you know, obviously get lectins out of your life. Number two, practice intermittent fasting. The longer, the longer you go between meals, the better, the farther away you go between your last meal and the time you go to bed, the better. And number three, absolutely stay away from blue light.

Yeah.

So if those, those are my top threes. But believe it or not, probably the one in the middle is the one that most people could do on a moment's notice, but most people don't.

And you know, the one in the middle being.

Intermittent fasting.

Intermittent fasting.

And it's interesting, my, my first book came out nine years ago and I had a whole chapter on intermittent fasting. And even back then, from January through June, I only ate one meal a day. I didn't eat breakfast, I didn't eat lunch and I ate all my calories between 6 and 8 o' clock at night. So that 22 out of 24 hours I was fasting. And believe it or not, for the last nine years, I've continued to do that. In fact, June 1st was when I finally broke fast. I break fast June 1st. So I actually had lunch today for, you know, the first time in six months. But my editor thought I was such, you know, out there crazy that we cut it down to about a page. And I said, no, no, no, this is so important. She says, no, you know, you're really kooky anyhow, but this is way out there. And now, of course, you know, every time a new book comes out on it, I, you know, I just kind of chuckle and I look through my original manuscript.

So it is true that fasting is a low lectin diet.

Yeah, exactly.

By the way, it's almost three in the afternoon where I am recording today. I haven't had anything to eat today yet, just my coffee. Awesome. It is indeed. Although I'm starting to get ready for some sort of good, delicious dinner without any lectins in it. You can count on it. All right, Dr. Gundry, where can people find out more about your work other than picking up your book online or wherever books are sold? Called the Plant Paradox.

So they can go to gundrymd.com they can sign up for a free newsletter. I post tons of recipes on my YouTube channel and I post tons of blogs, but best place to start is gundrymd.com awesome.

Well, thanks again for being on Bulletproof Radio.

Hey, great to chat with you. Big fan and hope to try it again.

Count on it. If you liked today's episode, you know what to do. Go ahead and pick up a copy of the Plant Paradox, read it, and see if there's something you can do in your diet to make you perform better, make you feel better. Because here's a little secret. When you have less inflammation, when you have fewer lectins, when you have fewer anything else that pisses your body off, you have more energy. When you have more energy, you're a nicer person. When you're a nicer person, everyone around you likes their lives better too. So it's really a good investment. So pick up a copy of the Plant Paradox. And while you're at it, if you haven't read Headstrong, these books are very compatible. You'll learn things from both of them. And since Dr. Gundry and I have both spent thousands of hours writing these books, if you can spend 20 seconds reviewing them on Amazon, we will know. And we are thanking you in advance.

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in places, a consultation, or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.