Keto Gets an Upgrade with Dr. Steven Gundry | 912 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is going to be a lot of fun because we have our live studio audience, about 65 of them today from the Upgrade Collective, which is my membership and mentorship group. They're dialed in live, they're chatting together amongst each other and with me during the interview. So it's upgrading my ability to ask really good questions and, and that means I had to have a really, really good guest to be our victim today. And it is none other, none other than a good friend, Dr. Gundry, a well known author guy who invented cardio robotic surgery and just a very, very learned healer across multiple things including nutrition. And I've promised you guys for these shows this year that I'm going to focus on telling you what you're going to get up front. So you know, whether you want to time on this show or go to another episode of the show, it's all about the time that you spend and what you get back from it. Because if I convince you to waste your time and I do that to 250 million hours worth, which is the amount of downloads of the show, I would be a mass murderer. Since I don't want to be a mass murderer because I'm not in politics or big pharma, I guess I'm going to have to just make it worth your while. So what that means here is why do we have Dr. Gundry on? Because we're going to talk about the biology behind keto. Some of this stuff you've heard in my early book, like the bulletproof diet. But there's some new stuff we know about keto that he's put in his book that's really, really cool. Including something called mitochondrial uncoupling. So if you want to solve the thing, is keto bad for me? Is keto bad for women? Should I do keto? Should I not do keto? Well, I have my opinions on that, but we've got another experts opinions with some newer science. I think you'll find a lot of agreements and some learning between the two of us, which is what you're going to get out of this. And you're going to get eight keys to unlock the keto code, which is the name of Dr. Gundry's new book. So this is going to tell you, when should you do ketosis? When should you not do ketosis and why. Dr. Gundry, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. My esteemed colleague, Dave Asprey.

Anytime someone with your medical credentials calls me a colleague or Anything but a janitorial staff sort of thing. It's a great honor. Seriously. I write science books. I know a lot. But your medical credentials are just impeccable in terms of what you've done in cardiology. And we've talked about other shows, but for new listeners, how did you get out of traditional cardiology into writing a book about ketosis? Because that's like switching personalities almost.

That's right. I have a split personality. No, I mean, almost. 25 years ago, my life was changed as a heart surgeon when I met a guy who I call Big Ed. He's a real guy who essentially cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coronary arteries, which were inoperable, by changing his diet and taking a bunch of supplements from a health food store. And it was the most remarkable thing I had ever seen. Couldn't believe it. And so I spent the last 25 years figuring out how the guy did it. And I'm still figuring it out, but I'm one step closer now with this book.

Okay. It's a constant path of learning and the very best healers. And I'm not saying just doctors here, you start out with a set of knowledge and training, and then you evolve over time, and you talk to your colleagues and you talk to researchers and you slowly incorporate it. But so many doctors that I know go down this path of, well, I learned this. And then you sort of turn the crank because you have three minutes per patient. So you don't get a chance to do the learning and evolving and kind of self assessing. How did you, during the course of your career, build the time or the process in to do the work it takes to evolve? Because you're very unusual this way.

Yeah. So once I figured out that Big Ed did something that was reproducible, I actually, after about a year of doing this with patients that I operated on at Loma Linda University, literally resigned my position and said, I've got this all wrong. I shouldn't operate on people and then teach them how to avoid me in the future. I should teach them how to avoid me. And never by learning how to eat and never have to operate on them. Now, as a career choice for a heart surgeon, that's really stupid, is my wife liked to remind me for 20 odd years. So I actually resigned my position and set up a clinic in Palm Springs. Yeah, I mean, I just one day said, you know, this is. I gotta do this because I think there's a better way. Again, stupid. And so I approached my clinic as a research Project because I've been a researcher all my life, and I'd ask people to come in every three months that I'd tell them, look, I don't want you to eat certain things. I want you to eat certain things, and I want to send you to health food store, and here, pick up some of these supplements, and I want to look at your blood work and every three months, and insurance will cover it, and let's see what happens. And lo and behold, you could absolutely see and track these changes. And I started publishing my results because I'm a researcher. And that, you know, led me to, among other things, the plant paradox, which is going to celebrate its fifth anniversary this April. And as you know, the plant paradox was one of those marvelously disruptive books. And you and I agree on almost everything in your books, and the plant paradox about disrupting things like lectins. And so that just kind of kept going with the plant paradox. Interestingly enough, I saw a large number of people with autoimmune diseases. In fact, my practice has morphed to, I'd say 70, 80% of my practice now is autoimmune patients who have been pretty much everywhere in the country, in the world, major medical centers not getting an answer, not getting any better, using pharmaceutical drugs that they don't want to be on. And lo and behold, published data from me, 94% of people, after a year, their autoimmune disease is gone, in remission. So. And so that just kind of builds on things. And this book actually came out. Came out of my head when I was writing my last book, the Energy Paradox. And I've had a ketogenic version of my program in all of my books. And I like ketones as you and I know, and you like them as you and I know. But I like to document the reasons I like things, not just conjecture. And so I started to really dive into the literature in the last book about how ketones work. And the more I dove into even human literature, I realized that, holy cow, I had been wrong about telling people how ketones benefit you. And it was just like, you know, this epiphany, this aha moment. I went, holy cow, you know, I've been wrong about this for 20 years. And so I literally called my publisher and said, there's a book about this. And they said, oh, now we don't need another keto book. I said, no, no, there's a book about this. Please let me write it. And so, bless their hearts, they did. And so unlocking the keto Code is the results of this new research. So there you go.

Well, it's, it's great because we simplify everything. Mitochondria are the power plants of the cells. And it actually, it's sort of like saying humans are the warriors of the planet. Well, yeah, we also like farm and we do a bunch of other stuff. So the fact that mitochondria can make energy, they also make hormones, they also make signaling molecules, they also make antioxidants, and they're also environmental sensors, but no one talks about that. So we get very one sided. Sort of like the war on cholesterol. Well, let's look at it. It's present, let's just kill it. But the complexities are missing. Right? And I know I can use those with you because especially cholesterol, you'll laug because of your history in cardiology. So let's look at the view of ketones almost as a drug because they have drug like effects that have nothing to do with fat burning molecules. Tell me the new lens you have on ketones from the book.

So I suspect that our audience and our listeners are very ketone trained. They're, they know what ketones are, et cetera. So we don't have to go back to square one.

Let's do the one sentence version because there's always new listeners. I know our live audience is up to speed on it, but you know, there's hundreds of thousands of people hearing us, so. Okay, someone doesn't know.

So just so ketones have been known about since the late 1800s. And the ketogenic diet was actually coined by doctors at the Mayo clinic in the 1930s, 30s as a treatment for childhood epilepsy. And it was discovered in the 1920s that children with epilepsy who were starving, and some of these children literally did starve because they were having epileptic fits all day. But when they were starving, their seizures went away. And when they started eating after their seizures went away, their seizures came back. And so some bright people said, gee, when you're starving, you're producing ketones and maybe the ketones are suppressing the seizures. So how do we make ketones besides starving a kid to death, which is not ethical. And they came upon the ketogenic diet, which at that time was an 80% fat diet, 10% carbohydrates and 10% protein. And that was actually quite miraculous. 50% of kids had, well, good control of their epileptic seizures. And that diet was really standard of care until drugs like phenobarbital and Dilantin came about and then it pretty much fell on its face because people don't realize that the ketogenic diet for kids actually produce growth retardation. And quite frankly, as any parent would know, kids really don't like eating 80% fat and not many carbohydrates. They rebel. And so, yeah, and I think it's important to realize that we have good human data on a ketogenic diet, that perhaps it's not the world's best diet for growth. And maybe we'll come back to that. So what intrigued me after looking at this, the ketones became extremely popular in the 1970s with work by George Cahill in Boston, with Veech at the NIH and also George Cahill's assistant, Dr. Owens at, @ Harvard. And what Veach went kind of over the edge. And Veach said, you know, ketones are the natural way that we should be, we should actually be starving all the time. And that ketones are actually a superior fuel and it's superior for the brain, it's superior for muscles. And he made the COVID of timer Newsweek, I've forgotten which. And the idea that we should always be in ketosis really caught on. And that belief has continued really to this day. And that belief, quite frankly, based on Cahill's and Owen's work, is incorrect. Why do I say that? K. Helen Owens in Human Volunteers showed that with fasting, which is the quickest, fastest way to make ketone, bodies, which are made by the liver from free fatty acids that are liberated from fat cells, are a method of getting fuel into the brain quickly. Free fatty acids cannot get into the brain. They're too big and too slow to move across the blood. Brain barrier ketones, on the other hand, are small water soluble molecules that can get into the brain. So they could provide a fuel source when you can't use free fatty acids in the brain. And that's why they came about. So. But Owens showed that even at full ketosis, humans, humans will only drive 30% of their energy needs from ketones. 30%. And at the brain at full ketosis will only get 60 to 70% of its energy needs from ketones.

When you say the brain, are you talking about neurons or are you talking about glial cells?

So neurons in the brain, how's that?

Okay.

All right, yeah.

So you, you, what I found was that glial cells preferred glucose and could use ketones. But in studies, neurons would use all the ketones present, even in the presence of glucose. So when you look at A brain in total, it wasn't going to get all of its energy needs because there was a mismatch in the ratio between glucose and ketones that was optimal. Are you seeing something different than that or is that still accurate?

No, I think that's still accurate. I think the great contributions of Cahill and Veach was that if a human couldn't use an alternative fuel source to glucose to fuel the brain, to fuel muscles, then a human would run out of glucose in a matter of days. Days. And when you look at how long humans can go starving on a water fast diet, the record is held by angus Bavari for 460 odd days under a medically supervised water fast. So humans can go an incredibly long time starving. So what they tried to say is, well, the reason we can go a very long time is because of ketone production. And I think that's been a mistake because as I show in the book, there's actually a far more important reason that we can go a very long time starving than using ketones as a fuel. Because quite frankly, ketones aren't that great a fuel. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, if ketones aren't that great of fuel, what the heck are they doing that makes them so useful and interesting? And that gets back to your comment of ketones are in fact signaling molecules.

Dr. Gundry, when you say ketones aren't that great of a fuel, what I've seen is that when you put a ketone into a Krebs cycle, it makes more electrons than when you put glucose into a Krebs cycle, which would make it a better fuel.

But free fatty acids are even a better fuel. That's why, that's why muscles, if they get the choice, choose to use free fatty acids as a fuel rather than ketones. And I think that's an important distinction.

It is. Is there a type of free fatty acid that the muscles like better? Because you can have lots of different types of fatty acids floating around.

Yeah. I don't know exactly which they like better, but to give you an example, we know from race walkers who are on a ketogenic diet that they can perform equally to a carbohydrate loaded race walker, except they actually have to breathe harder and use more oxygen than they would basic using a carbohydrate diet. And that's actually a key to how ketones actually work in a totally different manner than as an energy source.

That's really interesting. It makes me wonder if that original idea of blending butter into yak Butter tea that the Tibetans had. What they were looking at was a very low oxygen, low fuel environment and trying to maximize energy production to stay warm. So they had warm liquids, they have to warm it up, they blended it, which makes exclusion zone water that can easily be used to make ATP. And I funded the research at uw, so I believe that's real because I've seen it on a microscope. And then it may be that the free fatty acids from the butter, which doesn't have much MCT in Tibet from yaks, but that may be something that's then saying, look, I got a ton of energy in and the water was prepared so I could actually feel good at high altitude because those guys do mass magic power stuff with like no energy. So perhaps it's a saturated fats. In fact, I've got other research. I'll bet you steric acid is better than corn oil. But we don't, we don't have the research yet.

Right, right, right. Yeah, but they're. You know, one of the things that's really cool about butter is it does contain butyrate. Butyric acid. Yeah, not, not a whole lot. But it certainly has butyrated. And tea is actually an amazing source of polyphenols. And as we get into the book, polyphenols are another great signaling molecule that accomplish what ketones do in a different manner. So one of the things that changed my whole thinking on this was so wait a minute. Ketones maybe aren't the world's greatest energy source, but ketones must be doing something else that is very beneficial, particularly if you're starving. So there was a paper, and I urge all of your listeners and all the audience today just pull up this paper from Martin Brand, B R A N D from 2000. And it's a very simple paper and it's called uncoupling to survive. And you go uncoupling, that's when you get divorced or you separate from getting engaged.

No, consciously conscious uncoupling, It's a thing.

So it turns out that there is a way to blow off steam, to blow off calorie use by mitochondria when it's overloaded, when it's taxed, which is called uncoupling. And it uncouples respiration, burning of oxygen from the production of ATP. That's where the term comes from. I wish I, I wish there was a different term, but it's in the literature and so I use it in the book. And it's too bad because it's hard to explain. Easiest way to explain it is a pressure cooker. If the pressure gets too hot and the pressure cooker has a release valve and you release steam off the top of the pressure cooker. As you and I know, making energy by mitochondria is very hard work and it's incredibly damaging to the inner workings of the mitochondria and reactive oxygen species, free radicals, you name it, it's, it's hard work. So mitochondria have a system of literally venting excess protons in the electron transport chain out emergency exits. And there are actually four, five uncoupling proteins that open up, pop off valves, release valves in mitochondria. And this was discovered actually in the late 1970s. We now know that ketones actually signal mitochondria to uncouple, to literally waste calories, to literally protect themselves from damage. And the paper by Martin Brand, Uncoupling to Survive took this to the extreme. And he said. And do you know the paper, Dave?

I think I referenced it in my anti aging book.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's a fascinating theory and it makes no sense to anyone who thinks that ketones make you more efficient at burning fat. What he said is, in extremists, when you're starving to death, mitochondria have to protect, protect themselves at all costs because if the mitochondria dies, you're done. That's it. Who cares about your muscles, who cares about anything else? Without the mitochondria, you end as an organism. So he said that mitochondria will uncouple incredible amounts of fuel from ATP production to prevent damage to themselves. In other words, the pressure cooker release valve is reduced, really open. Now that doesn't make sense on the surface because why would you waste fuel? Well, part two is ketones tell mitochondria to make more of themselves to produce mitogenesis to share the workload. And I use the example, let's say I have a dog sled and I have one dog and he's trying to pull through the snow. I'd probably make a lot more progress if I had six dogs attached to my sled than one. The six dogs would maybe do the exact same amount of each dog would only have to do a sixth of the amount of work of that one dog. Now they'd have to eat more, but they'd have to work a lot less harder. So the principle was, okay, we're not going to work as hard as mitochondria, but we're going to Invite more mitochondria to grow. And you and I know that mitogenesis.

Is a party, right? You got to do that.

Bingo. And mitochondria can make more of themselves within a cell without the cell dividing. And so the benefit of ketones is, hey, each of you mitochondria don't work very hard. Make more of your cells to save, to share the workload. And number three, because we gotta keep you guys around, put in repair mechanisms to make sure everything about you works well. And when you look at that paper and you go, holy cow, what a, what a crazy weird idea. And now I get it. And then he goes on to show that super long lived people, and you and I are both into the longevity field, have the most uncoupled mitochondria. And so then you go, wow, maybe this is a very cool strategy for longevity. And as you and I both think the mitochondrial damage theory of aging is a pretty doggone good theory of aging.

It's one of the seven pillars. But what we're getting at here, I like to go back to old style cars, which is still the majority of them, the non electric cars. And one of the biggest things that I did on my Ford F150, keep in mind, guys, I live on a farm where if I bought a Tesla, you know, five years ago, people would have probably chased me down and said I was too bougie for my neighborhood. So I bought an F150. It had a twin turbo and all that kind of stuff. But the first thing is I put on new exhaust, I reduce the back pressure on the engine and this raises horsepower quite a lot. Right. And what you're describing here sounds kind of like the same thing. You're reducing back pressure on the mitochondria and it says, oh, because there's less pressure, I can afford to have more cubic inches in the engine. I can have a bigger engine, which looks actually more like having two engines under the hood. Right, because you've doubled the number of mitochondrias. So what ketones are doing is they're reducing back pressure on the mitochondria. And if you don't reduce back pressure, you get more reactive oxygen species, you get more stress on the cell. Right. Am I translating that into the right race car thing? And yes, my Ford F150 did have 550 horsepower when I was done with it and sounded like a Ferrari, but still wouldn't fit in parking garages. So I traded it for a 10 year old BMW there. I don't know what that has to do with anti aging. But that's what I did also twin turbo, zero exhaust pressure. There you go.

There you go. Yeah. And actually in the book, I use the example. For instance, traditional keto says, okay, you're going to be turning. You're going to turn yourself into an efficient fat burning machine. And. Right. Well, it turns out that you actually turn yourself into an extremely inefficient fat burning machine because you actually turn your mitochondria into Ferraris rather than Toyota Priuses. And Ferrari. If you wanted to be an efficient user of gasoline, unlike an F150, you would buy a Prius, which would get you 50 miles per gallon of gas. So let's call gas fat.

But you would never date again. Right.

If you have a Prius that never, that'd be the end. But you could get a deluxe parking place in LA someplace. On the other hand, if you wanted to really waste gasoline, you would buy a Ferrari. Now, there might be other reasons to buy a Ferrari rather than wasting gasoline, like a prime parking place at your favorite restaurant in Venice Beach, Dave, But. Right, right. So the idea that we would be efficient fat burners goes against actually why a good ketogenic diet would make you lose weight. You actually waste energy. You waste calories by telling your mitochondria to literally pitch a bunch of the calories out of the electron transport chain to literally protect themselves, but at the same time build more mitochondria. So I think we're both saying the same thing in a different way. And it explains why a ketogenic diet doesn't make you an efficient fat burner. It actually makes you a fat waster. And it's there for a purpose. And we can delve into that even more.

So the keto diet makes you efficient at wasting fat. Now, there's still probably a dozen of these calorie counting trolls, usually young men who've been bullied in high school, who have these Instagram pages and say, but Newton's law is calories in, calories out. You can have French fries as long as you don't have too many, and you can work them off at the gym. What do you have to say to that crowd?

Well, first of all, none of those nice people ever accounted for the existence of the microbiome. I mean, we didn't know about them. Come on. I mean, we've only known about them really for what, 12 years now? This. You know, we did not know the existence of probably the biggest organ system, the most important organ system in our body. We didn't know about it and we didn't know that. And you know, I've written lots about this. We didn't know that A lot of the good bugs, the gut buddies, as I call them, like to eat the foods that we give them and keep them for themselves and make more of themselves and use up a lot of the calories that we eat. On the other hand, as I've written about before, if you got the gang members, the bad guys, they love to eat sugars and saturated fats, but they like to pass a lot of that on to us. They're actually efficient at extracting calories and passing it on for absorption. Plus, they actually, as you and I know, take over your brain and literally tell your brain to seek out these marvelous, horrible foods for their benefit. So the idea of calories in, calories out, number one, sorry, it doesn't work because the microbiome. But as I point out, even if.

You'Re very angry, can you make it work just through the force of your anger online or no.

Oh, no, no, it doesn't work. Then unfortunately, you'll be labeled as an aggressor and get kicked off.

That's right.

That's right. The really cool thing. And I, Reese, point this out in the book. There's actually two really cool studies. Actually, there's more than that. But let's talk about, let's. Let's talk about MCT oil for a second. Your favorite subject.

Love this stuff.

All right, so mcts, as hopefully most of our listeners know, are unique fats. They do not require chylomicrons to be absorbed through the wall of the gut. They, unlike other fats, go direct through the portal vein into the liver where they, whether they like it or not, stimulate the production of ketone bodies. So the beauty of MCT oil is that, in fact, I hate to say this, is that you could have a fruit salad and put a couple tablespoons of MCT oil in your coffee day or pour it on your fruit salad and you would make ketones.

You would indeed.

You would indeed. Even though you're eating a high carbohydrate diet. So we've done human studies looking at a MCT based diet versus an olive oil diet. Equal calories. And the MCT oil based Diet lost about 4kg more than the olive oil diet. Oh, my gosh, the exact same calories.

But MCTs are actually lower in calories than olive oil on a per gram basis because there's slightly less electrons in there. So calorie nazis all right, let me rephrase that. That's a rude word. Calorie bullies, I don't want to get banned for that, so whatever. So calorie bullies out there, guys, world leading cardiologist, some weird science guy who drinks butter in his coffee. The science says that you can just delete your account or you can change what you say, go to your followers, say guys, I effed up. It turns out different calories do different things to the body. I'm going to learn and I will lead you on this way. If you do that, you will take a bunch of people who you are making sick and you'll make them get on the path to wellness. You're welcome. All right, that was my PSA, Dr. Gundry. Thank you.

All right, now let's take another scenario that I talk about in the book which also destroys that logic. You take the Italian cyclists study and you put them on a training table for three months. Everybody's got to eat the exact same food and they have to finish their plate. So one group of athletes eats breakfast at 8 o' clock in the morning, eats lunch at 1 o' clock in the afternoon and has to finish dinner by 8 o' clock at night, a 12 hour eating window. The other group of athletes, cyclists, have breakfast at 1 o' clock in the afternoon, break fast guys have lunch at 4 o' clock in the afternoon and have to finish dinner at 8 o' clock at night. A seven hour eating window. You follow them for three months. The athletes who have the compressed eating window at seven hours, even though they're eating the exact same calories as the other athletes, lose weight, they keep their muscle mass, their insulin like growth factor, which I think is still one of the best markers we have for whether MTOR is activated, plummets. The athletes who ate the exact same food in a 12 hour window, none of that happens. So now you go, okay, same food, different time schedule. One group loses weight, the other doesn't. So so much for calories in calorie out. What magical mystical thing was happening? Well, as it turns out, these guys were. We start. Let me back up. Most normal people, and most people are not normal. Most people do not have metabolic flexibility. The ability for the mitochondria to shift from burning free fatty acids or ketones to burning glucose back and forth. In fact, as I talk about in the book, only 50% of normal weight individuals have metabolic flexibility. 50%, that's it. So all of you guys saying, hey man, you know, I got a great figure, I'm normal weight, 50% of you are already metabolically inflexible. Overweight people, 88% percent are metabolically inflexible. And guess what? If you're obese, 99.5% are metabolically inflexible. Okay, so normally, if you're metabolically flexible, after about eight hours after your last meal, you're actually making ketones. A normal individual makes ketones after about eight hours. By 12 hours, you're really ramping up ketone production. So the 12 hour guys only had maybe a four hour window of ketone production, the four hour window, but the other guys had about a 16, 18 hour window, actually a 17 hour window where they had an additional five hours where they were making ketones. And if you accept the idea that ketones were uncoupling mitochondria and allowing mitochondria to do a caloric bypass and turn into a Ferrari, that's why they lost weight and the other guys didn't. It's the power of ketones uncoupling mitochondria that did it. Cool.

So this is a whole new view on ketosis, and I love it that you're talking about this because I've seen this disturbing trend and I'm going to just hand it off to Robert Atkins. I have a copy of his book from the year I was born. Like, if only I'd have known about this early pioneering ketosis, maybe I wouldn't have been so fat as a teenager and a young adult. So I kind of keep it around as a reminder that the knowledge was there, but it wasn't evenly distributed. So then I realized over the course of time, the type of fat really mattered. That was my question. Which free fatty acids? Because you know, it's like, sure, eat pork rinds all day long. It's no problem as long as it's not a carb. So the calories are bad, people are wrong. And the if it's not a carb, you can eat it. I'll cut dirty. People today are wrong. But when I did the bulletproof diet, the idea there was cycling ketosis. It had intermittent fasting built in. It had specific types of fatty acids. But this was through trial and error. But I don't know specifically which kinds the body likes. I do know that if you replicate the type of fatty acids that you'd find in the brain, it's 45% saturated. Which is why I'm like, hey, guys, eat 50% of your fat calories from saturated. But we don't know. I just know it works, but maybe it'd be better if it was 32%. It's just the science isn't in any papers I could find. So you're clearing something out about ketosis that needs to be said, which is that it's a tool, but you don't have to be on zero carb, because zero carb breaks your gut bacteria, which is like cycling, at least, or having some prebiotic fiber is a part of it. You and I both are huge fans of that. You wrote about that in your last book. We talked about it in one of the. By the way, you're the only guy who's been on, I think, five episodes.

Oh, my God.

I just love interviewing you. So I know we've covered that. Do prebiotics work well with mcts and with ketosis? Is there anything to worry about there?

No. In fact, I think one of the fascinating discoveries that we should talk about, which kind of comes into this. So prebiotics, what good bugs like to eat, are made into, among other things, short chain fatty acids like butyrate, like acetic acid, like propionate, and they're also made into gasotransmitters, which I went in into the last book. Butyrate is actually an amazing fuel source in and of itself. It's also a really great anti cancer material. It's a HDAC inhibitor. Butyrate is actually a substrate for beta hydroxybutyrate, a bhb.

It's super ketosis, right?

Yeah. But it turns out butyrate and acetic acid, vinegar, also uncouple mitochondria. So you get a one, two punch by giving gut bacteria prebiotic fiber. Now, here's another interesting thing. We'll talk about polyphenols in a second. So polyphenols. Most people know that most of the polyphenols that we eat from plants really don't get absorbed directly. Only about 10% get absorbed. But it turns out they're an amazing prebiotic fiber for gut bacteria. And those of us. And we've talked about TMAO in the past, Dave, but yes, we have. It turns out that some gut bacteria love to take animal protein, animal fat, and turn it into a compound that the Cleveland Clinic thinks is really deadly, called tmao. Damages your blood vessels, but it turns out that polyphenols paralyze the enzyme system and bacteria so that they can't make TMAO no matter how much animal fat and protein you eat.

Yeah. Which is apologism for animal rights terrorists. They're trying to. They're trying to lie to you to tell you that their bizarre artificial plant based only diet is the way to save the planet or you. But it's not because they care about the planet. You. They just don't want animals to die because they don't face reality. So thank you for that. The TMAO thing. Also, it turns out choline from soy, soy lecithin also turns to tmao. And, and it's healthy bacteria. And that comes from. Do you eat polyphenols? Okay. Everyone should eat polyphenols. We can all agree. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox there too. But that TMAO thing is such a scam.

Yeah. And it's interesting. I have several longtime vegan patients and I take care of a lot of vegans and vegetarians because of my association with Lormalinda. But I have vegans who have TMAO levels in the hundreds. And that's impossible according to the Cleveland Clinic because. But you're right, they eat a lot of choline from soy. They eat a lot of soy based products. And I've literally sent this stuff off to Cleveland Clinic. So we don't believe it. It's a, it's not right. They're eating, you know, they're eating animals. Look, you know, these guys are religious, blah blah, blah. You know, they're perfect Adventists that it would kill them to eat an egg and yet they produce tmao. But they don't eat a lot of polyphenols.

But that's the other thing.

Yeah, so let me talk about polyphenols. Here's the other. Here's the other wake up call. When I started looking at uncoupling back in World War II, it was noted that munition plant workers in France and Germany lost considerable amounts of weight. They were running a low grade temperature and no matter how much they eat, they could not keep weight on. And shortly after the war in the 1920s, it was discovered that one of the compounds used in manufacturing gunpowder and munitions was 2,4 Dinitro. Dinitrophenol. 2,4 DNP. Phenol. Folks remember the word phenol. Some enterprising physicians at Stanford in 1930 said, Son of a gun. 2, 4 DNP looks like it was causing these people to lose lots of weight. We don't know why they're losing weight, but it looks really good. So they started prescribing 2.4dnp as a prescription drug for weight loss. And it was miraculous. Over 100,000 prescriptions were written in the early 1930s for weight loss. If you took a little bit of dnp, you lost about a pound a week. If you took a lot of dnp, you lost up to five pounds per week. I mean, that's a miracle. The problem was that people started running fevers, they started having thyroid dysfunction, people started developing cataracts and going blind. And this was before cataract surgery. And as I joke, you know, it's too bad you can't see how good you look in that dress because you're now blind. But, and then people started to die. So the FDA, in one of its first acts, actually banned 2, 4 DNP for sale and prescription. But on the, on the dark web, you can get DNP. Subsequently, in 1978, it was discovered that when Peter Mitchell got the Nobel Prize for the electron transport chain discovery, it was discovered that DNP was the first oral mitochondrial uncoupler. And there's been a lot of research. You probably have an investment in a company that makes low dose DNP or the precursor. But, and if you, and if you don't, you should, Dave. But DNP was the first mitochondrial uncoupler that was known. So now fast forward. Dinitrophenol. Polyphenols are mitochondrial uncouplers. And can we talk about why plants make, why plants make polyphenols?

They make them, presumably because many of the polyphenols repel animals and particularly insects and molds and bacterial infections. So they're defense molecules and also to protect themselves from ultraviolet light.

Yeah, it turns out that plants have mitochondria that we call chloroplasts, but they're, and their mitochondria in reverse. So we use oxygen, and oxygen is very damaging to our mitochondria. And so we protect ourselves against oxygen. You can't live with it, can't live without it. Plants have to have photons from sunlight, but photons, sunlight is very damaging to plant mitochondria, chloroplasts. So plants use polyphenols to, believe it or not, uncouple their mitochondria, their chloroplasts. And when you uncouple mitochondria, they're protected from damage. And you're right, stress, elevation, closer to the sun, bad conditions. This is a protective mechanism, a sensing mechanism to protect the mitochondria. So when we eat the polyphenols from plants, we in fact harness that power. Somebody said, man, it's the circus circle of life from the Lion King. And you know it's kind of cute, but. Yeah. So we. So the more polyphenols we eat, and then in the book, I just start rattling off all the polyphenols. You're having a delightful polyphenol right now. In coffee, you also get the benefit of caffeine, which is also a mitochondrial uncoupler.

It is.

And on previous episodes, you've dropped a drop of nicotine under your tongue. And it turns out, folks, nicotine is a superb mitochondrial uncoupler.

Oh, I gotta show you this.

There it is. That.

That would be a caffeine. Caffeine. My left bicep. I had a mitochondrial uncouple. My left bicep because it was smaller than my right. I was trying to fix it.

Yeah. And so. So you start looking at the literature and you go, well, wait a minute. How come caffeine. How come people who drink five cups of coffee have so much less Alzheimer's and Parkinson's than people who drink better?

They're just better than people who drink only one cup. Right.

Because they've uncoupled their mitochondria. Smokers. There's a British physician smoker study that I talk about. British physicians who smoke have dramatic decrease in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's than British physicians who don't smoke. Now, I did not tell anybody to go smoke. Do not, if you smoke, stop immediately.

But one or two milligrams. And there's evidence. I interviewed Dr. Nicotine from Vanderbilt about this. But you're explaining why nicotine, in addition to.

Exactly.

To the performance enhancing aspects. That's where anti aging comes from. From mitochondrial activity.

Right, Exactly.

I love this. Okay, question for you then. Nicotine raises PGC1alpha. What do you know about ketones and mitochondria and MCT oil and all of the other polyphenols and PGC1alpha.

It should increase it.

Yeah, they increase it. Okay. And PGC1 Alpha is what happens when you exercise. So all of these are like miniature cellular exercise without going to the gym.

Right. And myokines actually uncoupled mitochondria, which explains one of the benefits of exercise. In fact, you know, when. When I wrote this book, the title I wanted. But that's another subject is the secret to life is just one thing and it's not what you think from the city slickers movie. So it turns out if you look at super long people, longevity cultures, and let us not leave blue zones before this interview because I got a blockbuster for you on blue zones.

Oh, yeah. Let's do that.

But if you look as I talk about in the book birds, there is a, there's a very popular theory of aging that is the, the expense of energy production and that basically says the cost of living hypothesis. Little animals don't live very long lives. They have a really high metabolic rate. Bigger animals live longer lives because they have a lower metabolic rate and you only get so many calories to use up in your lifetime and then you're done. That's the cost of living hypothesis. The problem is that birds don't follow that hypothesis. Birds live an incredibly long time. Parrots can live 80 to 100 years. Hummingbirds in captivity can live 10 years even though they're burning huge amounts of energy. It turns out that the reason birds live so long is of all animals, they have the most uncoupled mitochondria. And they get that mitochondria uncoupling. For instance, hummingbirds get retinol from the, the syrup in, in the flowers. And birds eat a lot of nuts and seeds which are loaded with polyphenols. So birds uncouple their mitochondria. So why wouldn't we want to do that?

And I think that's also why. Apparently hummingbirds who just eat from feeders don't do so well because they're just getting sugar with no polyphenols.

But if you put brown sugar in.

Even they do better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, they actually get retinoic acid from the, you know, the SAP in the flour and that's how they do.

Well, there you go, guys. This is kind of mind blowing stuff when, when you think about it, because what it, it comes down to when you unlock the keto code, in the book, we've talked about most of these things. Intermittent fasting or time controlled eating is one of your things. Hallelujah, brother. We're so aligned on that. Polyphenols. Heck yeah. We've both been beating that drum for a long time. And I think you introduced new knowledge about polyphenols in this book that's really, really useful, specifically around uncoupling activities of some of them, not just antioxidants and using them as probiotics for the good guys, which is a big part of the way I think mcts and coffee go together. Because fat suppresses gut bacteria. But when polyphenols are present, the ones that grow back are the probiotics that eat polyphenols are the ones you want the bacteriadates family. So there's this beautiful M versus just if you had straight say, sugar and fat, fat is antimicrobial, but then sugar feeds the sugar eaters. Right? So that's why it matters so much. And then you talk about dietary fiber, we talked about that. And how that makes butyrate. We're both so into that, the carnivore diet. People though, like our mutual friend Paul, Paul Saladino, I mean, James Saladino, as I like to miscall him a few times and I tease him all the time, I think he's going to end up going with low inflammatory fiber, like, like, not rough fiber, but at least prebiotic fiber because he's already moved from just meat to meat and honey, meat and honey and low inflammation plants. But what would you say to the less flexible carnivore people who say meat is all you need as long as you eat the whole animal. What, what's your take on that?

So I, I again, I get blood work on people every three to six months and I have a number of people that say, you know, I believe it. I'm going hardcore carnivore. And I can tell you that their blood work, particularly a high, a high fat carnivore diet, they have so many markers of endothelial, endothelial inflammation that you won't pick up on a regular blood test. They have markers of endothelial dysfunction that you won't pick up on a standard blood test. And when I show, show them this and every one of them's done it, they go, oh my gosh. But I, you know, I feel so good. I said, yeah, but you know, this is what's, you're kind of like the swimmer in Jaws who's, you know, up on the ocean and there's a great white shark coming for him. And I can see the great white shark and it really scares me. That's because as you and I know, a true carnivore diet, you really change your gut microbiome for the worse. And I'm glad, you know, I've talked to Paul off camera and you're right, he has added things other than animals to his diet and good for him.

I actually respect him quite a lot because he's willing to be flexible. And you get dogma in a lot of these, including if it's plant based, it's good for you. It's an impossible burger. It's probably not. Oh, if it's from an animal, it must be good for you. Maybe not. So there's this nuance and you cover it really well. And the eight keys from your keto code book are really cool because we didn't talk much about fermented foods as a source of probiotics, but that's one of them. Tell me about fermented foods.

So, you know, there's obviously we think of fermented foods as a source of probiotics, friendly bacteria, but the vast majority of probiotics and fermented foods never make it past stomach acid to colonize your gut, number one. But there's very good evidence, particularly out of researchers from Stanford, showing that if you take people and give them a high fermented food prebiotic diet versus a prebiotic diet, that the folks who get the fermented food prebiotic diet have much better microbial diversity and much lower markers of inflammation than the people who get the just prebiotic diet. So you go, well, what gives? It turns out that the fermentation process produces acetic acid. Vinegar also produces several of the other short chain fatty acids. And it turns out that those are signaling molecules that change gut bacteria and uncouple mitochondria. So the beauty is that you could actually have apple cider vinegar, which is going to benefit you by its uncoupling power, not the amazing mother that's in there. And the mother is actually some pretty cool prebiotic fiber. So it all kind of starts to go, oh my gosh, that's how apple cider vinegar work. That's how fermented foods work. Plus, as you know, fermentation is a really good way of breaking down lectins, one of your and my favorite subject. And that probably explains why most traditional cultures let their food rot, let their grains rot, let their beans rot before they eat them or cook them, because it, you know, breaks down lectins, but it also provides great short chain fatty acids.

You know, I, I have a question. Actually, a couple questions come out from that one. I feel like a lot of the rotting was around one of the other things, not just lectins, which sometimes cooking removes, depending on what they are, pressure cooking, whatever. But phytic acid is a massive issue in those traditional foods. And phytic acid is one of those things that carnivore people don't talk about. And my next book I'll be talking about that in addition to some other things. But it's another one in the first chapter of the Bulletproof Diet. I'm like, this is one of those five things in plants that'll trash you, but you still ought to eat some plants, just not the wrong ones. Right? And that's why I love seeing your Plant Paradox book come out because you really explained it and you have such credibility where now you can go into restaurant and say, I have a thing with nightshades. And I actually know no waiters who go, oh, yeah. And then they just don't put red peppers on there and like, oh, thank God. That's cool, because I am one of those people. But when we get into fermented foods, histamine is a major issue. If you don't ferment it right or you ferment the wrong foods, especially like fermented tofu and all of that, there are tons of people who get mast cell activation, they get hives, they get allergies because they can't handle it. So when you talk about fermented foods, how do I know that I'm not getting a load of histamine in order to get some uncouplers?

Well, interestingly enough, I see a lot of people with histamine intolerance. And all I can tell you is when we repair their leaky gut, and quite frankly, every one of these individuals has leaky gut. When we test them, when we repair their leaky gut, their histamine intolerance goes away. And I was talking with Valter Longo a couple weeks ago, and I think we agree on. We agree on a lot things, but.

Yeah, yeah.

But I think one of the things that he's coming around to realize is traditional cultures or cultures that have not been exposed to antibiotics, that have not been exposed to glyphosate Roundup, have not been exposed to NSAIDs, have a wonderful diverse gut microbiome, and probably do not have a leaky gut. And so they can. They have a microbiome that will really take care of most of what comes down the pipe. On the other hand, I think he's now beginning to research this. We're sitting ducks. Our microbiome is a. Is a wasteland. It's a desert here in Palm Springs. And most people who come to see me have literally wide open leaky gut. It's not pseudoscience. We can measure it thanks to Alessio Fazano, who's now at Harvard. I mean, this is. This is proven science, folks. It's not voodoo medicine. And we can heal a leaky gut and we can actually turn off these release of mast cells. And that's exciting to me. The other thing I think we should realize is there's this whole class of fermentation products that are called polyamines.

Yes.

And their polyamines, it turns out, are really good Mitochondrial couplers, for instance. Spermidine is a great mitochondrial coupler.

Get as much of that as I can. Yeah, that. That's really good stuff. You couldn't buy it until very recently. Bacteria.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now you can. Now you can buy it. It's luckily a few months ago recognized by the FDA as generally recognized as safe grass. And we've got a product that comes out tomorrow at we bins. Yeah, it's called Bio Sync. You'll love it. I'll get you some that has spermidine in it and a lot of other cool stuff that you, you will love. I'll get you some. But that's off the subject. Can I. Can I talk about goat cheese and sheep cheese?

Yes, I eat sheep cheese most days now, believe it or not. But I want to hear what you have to say about it.

So there's a fascinating. So goat and sheep milk, about 30% of the calories in both of those milks are MCTs, medium chain triglycerides. Cow's milk almost has none. Buffalo, water Buffalo. About 30% of the calories are MCTs. So then you go, well, that's pretty interesting. And as you know, Dave, MCTs are named after goat. Capra, almost all. So why? Because they were discovered in goat milk. So you start looking at cultures that use goat cheese and sheep cheese, and all of a sudden this. Two fascinating papers turn up the blue zones. And folks, I'm the only nutritionist who's ever spent most of my career living in a blue zone. Loma Linda, California. Nobody else who writes about it has ever lived in one. They've only visited. They're tourists. So you look at blue zones and let's take Sardinia and Costa Rica. The Naguaya Peninsula of Costa Rica, two blue zones. But Sardinia is an island. It turns out that the only people who qualify in the blue zones are the people who live up in the mountains. The people who live down by the sea don't have longevity. So you compare the diet between the two, and it turns out the folks living in the mountains are goat and sheep herders, and they eat a lot of goat and sheep products. The folks who live down to.