Infections Found in Leafy Greens | Dr. Steven Gundry x Dave Asprey

It's also interesting that the vast majority of parasites people get are coming from plants, aren't they? Oh, and raw plants like salad greens and fruits. And you get all these. These radical vegans saying you're parasites and meat. No, no, no. We cook the meat, dumbasses. That kills them. It's the salad that's causing parasites. Correct. Can you walk people through that?

Well, and it's interesting if you look at most of the big, know, epidemics of even bacterial infections and parasitic infections, Giardia is a classic. Particularly if you go to Mexico or South America or happen to buy foods, particularly organic foods from Mexico, leafy greens, you may very well end up with a good case of giardia, which is more than happy to take over your intestinal tract for. For quite some time. And people go, but I eat, you know, so healthy. Well, so many times the organic vegetables are fertilized with manure and we forget that we are what we eat, but we are what the thing we're eating ate. And so you just, you gotta be careful out there.

I had something happen to me a while ago in Phoenix. I had a salad at a restaurant. Next morning I had disaster pants and I would crap 20 times a day. And it was horrible. So I got all the parasite samples, all the gut bacteria, all the things you do at a GI doctor. Nothing. They could not find it. I went to a specialist who sent it off to Africa. Couldn't find it. And finally I found this old, old guy right next to Central park in New York City, recommended by a friend. And he wrote six textbooks on tropical medicine in his career. And he also ran public health for New York State for several years. This is his 80s. Just most fascinating guy I've met in a long time. And he, he says, oh, all these young doctors, they never look in there to find where the parasites are. Good parasites aren't going to leave. They're going to stay inside. Bend over, like, oh, God. So he gets his, you know, little flashlight hose thing and goes in and got there it is 10 inches up. I'm like, 10 inches. Good God. Thankfully, it was a flexible hose. He goes, all right, I got a sample. Call me in two hours. I'll tell you what you got. Okay? This is after thousands of dollars of taking different stuff, of trying everything. Calls me and says, you got. You have a kind of amoeba that tunnels through the lining of your gut and forms cysts in your brain. Fortunately, your gut lining looks like it's still intact. Like, thank you, collagen. Thank you. Eating all the good stuff. He said, oh, and you have giardia. It looks like it's been there for a while. And take these. He gave me two pills. I don't remember what they were. I should have written them down. It was $1,200 at the pharmacy. And I stopped shitting after two days of being on the right medication for this thing. And he's saying, no doctor knows this stuff anymore. It's a lost art. But he said, why did you get this? Because whoever prepped that salad at that restaurant, they had the 3:00am job. You know, who gets the job at 3:00am the people who just came in from Central and South America were most likely to have parasites because that's their entry level jobs in restaurant, as you're learning the language. So it's a sanitation issue. But it wasn't from eating steak. It wasn't from eating pork, dirty pork. It was from eating salad. So if you're a vegan and you think, I have parasites, let's do a parasite throwdown. I have less parasites than me.

You know, that's interesting. Almost all of my patients who have these really bad GI issues with, you know, chronic diarrhea or new acute onset diarrhea or abdominal cramping, almost always their ova and parasite tests are completely negative. And I think you're right. I think this is just a bad test to make this diagnosis.

Do you take anti parasitics regularly, Herbal or pharmaceutical, just to be on the safe side?

Well, you know, interesting. Turmeric has some interesting anti parasite qualities. So does berberine. And so I take both of those nearly constantly. Quercetin also has some anti parasitic properties, so those are useful to help with your armamentarium.

Can we talk about berberine for a minute?

Sure.

All right, so for listeners, berberine's an herb that does something similar to metformin from a longevity perspective, a blood sugar control perspective. Metformin is something that some people in the longevity field have been taking for a while to reduce their speed of aging. I started taking it in 2003 when the first study came out and stopped taking it in 2006 because it wasn't working the way it was supposed to work. And I've been generally opposed to it. I've tried it a couple more times. It reduces mitochondrial function. So I don't think metformin is a good thing. And most people who start metformin and they're big cheerleaders, I'm like, give them three years. VO2 max goes down. It's not the right drug. So berberine came online. So of course I'm taking berberine, but I had two episodes of abnormally low, potentially fatal heart rate during times of stress and you know, down to 30 beats a second. The blood pressure, 60 over 30 kind of things. You can have something called heart lock that you're surely familiar with from that. And yeah, well do a search on PubMed for Berberine and vagal tone and all the other things that are related to heart lock. And what you'll find is that there are many, many, many, even ER reports of people taking berberine having abnormally low heart rate. It happened to me and one of the times I'm lucky I had an EpiPen was in the back of an Uber and it could have been really, really bad. That was after a medical procedure. Both of these were. And James Clements, who's been on the show and is another one of those, those guys in the longevity field. I've known him for 25 years. He's, he's the guy who flew around and gathered DNA from everyone over a hundred so George Church could analyze it. James had the same experience with him. We couldn't figure out why our heart rate kept going lower and lower and lower. So berberine is not without risk. And I saw these people just, you know, dihydroxy berberine. You know, I'm doing enemas with it now. It's going to save my life. Guys, it's, it's, it's a double edged sword. All pharmaceuticals are, and so are some of the plant compounds. But I was gonna say if you, with your cardiology background, you come across any of that in yourself or in patients or you ever, you ever seen it?

Luckily, knock on wood, I, I haven't seen that particular effect of berberine. I think some people say, well, if some is good, a whole lot is a lot better and is a slippery slope with, with supplements. I'm the first to tell people that.

Gotcha. So I think you should use it. But if you see a heart rate and your aura ring are telling you weird stuff, you should pay attention to that. Interesting. Melatonin can do something too. A very high dose melatonin can cause cardiac irregularities. I can see it on my oura ring. When I took 40 milligrams, I ended up in the hospital with arrhythmias until 2. Right. Until 2 in the afternoon. Like, oh, I figured that one out. 40 milligrams of melatonin will reliably do that to me. Even though some people take a hundred milligrams to deal with cancer. So it's one of those things where you just have to have your own fainting couch and then you're fine.