77. Dr. Steven Gundry: Everything You Know About Healthy Eating is a Lie!

It turns out that plants and animals are constantly at war and they use biologic warfare to convince their predator that it wouldn't be a good idea to eat them. And we, on the other hand, had an amazing defense that we had built up against these plant compounds. We had an amazing diverse gut microbiome that loves to eat anything that came down the pipe. If you take what I said about a few plants to the extreme that no plant wants to eat eaten, then the answer is.

Ultimate human. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, Gary Breca, human biologist, where we go down the road of everything. Anti aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. Today I have one of the OGs in, in my opinion of the space, someone that I've actually been following for a number of years. I actually am a big fan of his products. I put my clients on his products. I'm personally on some of his products. So today is going to be a real treat. He is a distinguished cardiologist, a medical researcher, a New York Times bestselling author. He read a book that brought my attention to him years ago, 20, in 2017 or 2018 called the plant Paradox, which was an eye opening book for me on my biohacking journey. So I am really excited to have you on the podcast podcast today. So welcome Dr. Stephen Gundry.

Well, thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

I'm delighted to have you here. And you know, I really feel, I talk about this on my podcast all the time. The majority of my guests, and I think you're no exception to this rule, fit my father's definition of life. My dad was a salty old Navy captain. He had a very simple definition for life. And he said life is what happens to you when you're on your way to doing something else. And I feel like knowing a little bit about your story and I'd love for you to tell your story that you were on your way to doing something else and you kind of banged a U turn, if you will. And, and I also feel that some of the most impactful people in the world that have, that are making a real difference, full of purpose and passion are those people that solve the problem in their life. Maybe it was overcoming addiction, maybe it was weight loss, maybe it was chronic disease, lime or what have you. And that became their purpose and their passion, their, their mission in life. And what was that moment for you on your journey?

Well, you know, I, I have to keep crediting this crazy guy from Miami, Florida, who I call Big Ed.

I'm from Miami, Florida.

Well, there you go. Who unfortunately changed my life. Luckily for the better long term. But I was, you mentioned I was a very famous heart surgeon. One of the things that made me famous, and there's a bunch of us, we'd will be willing to take on any case, no matter how difficult. Fourth time redo, piece of cake, you know. You know, three vowels and four coronaries.

Yeah. Okay, the really risky stuff.

Yeah, the good stuff, right. The blue plate special, as we used to call them. What? There are people who get a diagnosis of inoperable coronary artery disease. And that basically means you got so much crud in all your coronary arteries that you can't put stents in them because it's too clogged up. You can't do bypasses because everything's clogged up. Where are you going to put a bypass?

Right.

And these people exist. So these people would have a number of centers that they'd head to. And there was a. We all knew each other and you know, oh, I'm going to New York and I'm going to Mayo and I'm going to Texas hard and I'm going to Stanford. And then usually the last stop was me at Loma Linda, California University. We all knew each other, we're all good friends. And so the guy who I call Big ed was a 48 year old guy from Miami, Florida, who. Big Guy, hence the name Big Ed.

Yeah.

Who had inoperable coronary artery disease. And Big Ed started on the circuit and would go all to all these centers and he'd take his angiogram, the movie of his heart around and everybody look at him and then say, well, not touching. Yeah, nothing I could do. You know, I'd love to help you, but I can't. This guy spent six months doing this, going to these centers and I was the last stop and I looked at his angiogram and I said, you know, I gotta agree with everybody else, I gotta agree with my buddies. There's, there's nothing I can do for you either. He says, well, look, here's what's been going on. I've been on a diet for the last six months and I've lost 45 pounds. Now there's a big. Still a big guy. He weighed 265 when I met him, so he was 300 before. And he said, I went to a health food store and I've been taking all these supplements. And he literally brings in, it has a big shopping bag, right. And he Says, you know, maybe, maybe I did something in here. You know, I'm scratching my professor beard and going, well, you know, good for you for losing weight, but that's really not going to do anything. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine. You've wasted your money, which I firmly believe. Yeah. And he said, well, geez, I've come all this way. What would it hurt to get another angiogram? A new cardiac catheterization? Rolling my eyes. And yeah, okay, don't get your hopes up. So the next day we get a new angiogram, and 50% of the blockages are now gone. In his heart in six months time.

50% of the blockages gone. And these are atherosclerotic lesions.

Correct.

Wow.

Yeah. And never seen anything like it. Now I said, great news, there are places I can do a bypass on you. So I did a five vessel bypass on them. And, you know, if you, if all you've got is a hammer, everything look like, like a nail right now. If I had known what I know now, I would have not even done the bypass. I would have said, hey, let's keep going, you know, good for you. Yes. But I didn't know that. So after we're done, I'm going, tell me about this diet of yours. And, you know, what were you doing? And so he starts elaborating. And just almost with serendipity, I went to Yale as an undergraduate back in the dark ages. And back in those days, we could design our own major where we could work with a few professors and we'd have to do a master's thesis and defend our thesis. And I was selected to do that. And my thesis was, you could take a grade 8, manipulate its food supply, manipulate its environment, and prove you'd arrive at a human being.

Wow.

Yeah. And believe it or not, I wrote my thesis and I defended my thesis, got an honors right, and gave it to my parents and went off to become a famous heart surgeon. So Big Ed's telling me about this diet and I'm going, son of a gun, that's my thesis from Yale.

No.

Yeah, I said, son of a gun. How did you, you know, how'd you figure out to do that? That's the ancient human diet.

Yeah.

And then I said, let me look at those supplements I'm going through. One of the things that made me a famous art surgeon is I had designed a way to protect the heart during heart transplant, during bypass surgery by putting some, all sorts of ingredients down the Veins and arteries of the heart to protect it. And I'm looking through his bag of supplements and a lot of the ingredients I'm dissolving in a solution and putting down the veins and arteries of the heart to protect it. He's swallowing the same ingredients.

Wow.

And it never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things. Yeah. Now why is that point? Because even though I was at the top of my game, a famous art surgeon, blah, blah, blah, I was 70 pounds overweight despite running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour every day. Wow. Eating a healthy, low fat diet. I had migraine headaches when I did baby heart transplants. I had arthritis so bad I had to wear braces on my knees. I had high cholesterol, prediabetes and high blood pressure. And I was told it was normal because I was now approaching 50 and my father was much the same way. And it's genetic.

Here we go.

Here we go.

That's my favorite.

Yeah, it's genetic. So after meeting Big Ed, I said, son of God, I've seen something that I would have never seen. And he's using what I described at Yale. Called up my folks and I said, hey, do you have my thesis? And they said, oh, yeah, you know, it's in the shrine next to eternal flame. I said, well, send it up.

The chisel and the hammer.

Yeah. So I started, I put myself on my program and I started taking a bunch of supplements that I was putting down the veins and arteries of the heart. And. And I lost 50 pounds my first year.

When you say put yourself on your program, what, what did it entail?

Basically, I changed the food. I ate. I stopped eating what I was told was healthy food. I stopped eating low fat. I stopped eating healthy grains. I stopped eating a lot of fruit that I was told was very healthy. And for instance, my LDL cholesterol when I started was about 170. My HDL was 32, ridiculously low. I was assured it was genetic and couldn't help it because your father was the same way.

Yeah.

My triglycerides. Yeah, we're 170. 150 was, quote, normal and nothing you can do about it. Take. Take a statin. So imagine my shock when three months later, my. My LDL cholesterol, which had been 170, went down to 70. My HDL, which was 32, went to 80.

Wow.

And my triglycerides, which have been 170, went to 30.

Wow.

I had the exact same genetics. I just changed the information that I gave My cells, what time of year it was basically right. And that's what I mean. Just in three months. And my migraine headaches disappeared. My arthritis disappeared.

Wow.

My hypertension disappeared. And so with that, when I operated on patients, the next thing I did was.

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Hey, now you got new plumbing. I don't want to see you back again. Because I was famous for reoperating on people because you clog them up every five to seven years. And we'll see you in five and seven years. We'll go under the hood again, right? So I said, I want to keep you away from me from now on. And here's, here's what I want you to try. And I'll never forget one of the first patients, few weeks after we sent him home, they said, hey, you know, my, my blood pressure is really low. What kind of supplement are you giving me that is lowering my blood pressure? And I look at my nurse practitioner, I go, I don't think there's anything that's doing that, you know, get in here. So their blood pressure be really low. And most of these people we send home on 2, 3, 4 BP meds.

Yeah.

I go, well, let's, let's stop one of those. And, you know, the next thing, a couple weeks later, well, my blood pressure is really low again. Are you sure it's not one of these supplements? Get back in here. What? We'd start throwing these meds.

Normalizing.

Yeah.

Wow.

And person after person, a person would call up and say, you're not going to believe this, but, you know, I don't have hip pain anymore. And I know that's not your thing, but isn't that interesting?

Yeah.

And I'd go, yeah, that's really interesting because I don't have knee pain anymore.

Right.

And so it went. So after a year of this, at Loma Linda on a Friday morning, I'll never forget, I was looking in the mirror before going to work and I made a bad decision. I said, you know, I've got this all wrong. I shouldn't operate on people and then teach them how to eat to avoid me in the Future, I should teach them how to eat first, and I'll never have to operate on them in the first place. Now that's a really bad career move for, for a heart surgeon. It really is. It really is. As my wife, just good heart, but bad judge, bad business.

Yeah.

As my wife liked to remind me for many years. So in this crazy leap of faith, I resigned my position at the height of my career and set up a clinic in Palm Springs, which is just down the road from Loma Linda. And I asked people, look, I'm going to take insurance. I want you to eat certain foods, don't eat certain foods. I'm going to send you to a health food store, Costco, Trader Joe's. I want you to buy some supplements. We're going to test your blood every three months. What do you say? And that's actually how it started. And then we could see in people's blood work all these, not only they felt it, but we can see it on the blood work.

Yeah, you know, we, we were talking beforehand, and I try to be very transparent with, with my journey and my labs very often. I'll post my labs to Instagram. We were talking before, before the podcast that I've got. You know, my cholesterol panel, LDL cholesterol is around 109. My HDL cholesterol is north of 80. My VLDL is below 10. I think it was 7 on my last exam. And my triglycerides around 45. So for me, that's a textbook perfect panel. But I have the lipo. And externally, when I look at my diet, my lifestyle, red light therapy, you know, adequate sleep, stress management, exercise. I schedule travel and meetings around sleep and exercise. I shouldn't have my opinion, elevated lipo, a right. Which is a cardiac risk marker.

It's probably the most important cardiac risk marker. Now, why was it not given the attention it needed? Because up until a few years ago, there was no drug available to lower lp. There was a supplement available to lower lp.

But you told me about.

There aren't cute little drug reps coming into the office telling you about a supplement that's essentially free, whereas there's some pretty powerful drugs. And I saw actually, as a surgeon, that many of my patients with impressive coronary disease carried lp. And the traditional wisdom was, well, there's nothing you can do about that. So lower LDL as much as possible.

Right.

And what I saw was, and I've written about this, the more statins that we gave you, yes, your LDL went down, but your LP went up and invariably the people who would fail statin therapy to keep them from getting new stents or new bypass or new heart attack, their LP was the actual troublemaker. And we were actually making it worse rather than better by giving people statin drugs.

Right. I'm sure that if I went to a traditional cardiologist or primary care, they'd say, get on the statin right away. That's exactly LDL of 109.

Yeah. Oh my.

Low triglycerides. There's no way I would even consider it. But you recommended a supplement for me which I'm, I'm going to take and start to track the progress. But one of the things you talked about was slow release niacin.

Y.

That's amazing because that's back to your original theory of, you know, supplements that can actually have a profound effect on our physiologic outcomes. And one of my big mantras is that we're usually not as diseased or pathological as we think we are. Very often we're nutrient deficient, um, and very often when you put the right nutrients back into the human body, really profound things happen. Um, one of the reasons why I'm a believer in your bio complete three because I believe that pre, pro and postbiotics have profound impacts on the gut microbiome. And the gut microbiome is. Yeah, I think now the, you know, you're being vindicated because the, you know, the real science is really beginning to catch up to the gut brain connection and Dr. Pearlm's work and some of your work. And I think it's just astounding to me how a lot of modern medicine thinks that the head and the brain is sort of separate over here and the body is over here. And you could be diseased in the body, be fined in the mind. You could have conditions of the mind to be fine in the, in the body. And obviously nothing is further from the truth. So this. So let me take you back to 2017, 2018, when you wrote the book the Plant Paradox. Because that was 17. Yeah. Was it 2017? This is when I first really started to follow your work and you were talking about lectins and how peanuts weren't even peanuts, they're seeds, they're legumes. And I really started to go down the rabbit hole of that. I think you were actually maybe working with Tom Brady at the time and it made so much sense to me. And since that time you still feel that you, you have the same view towards certain plants and certain food sources. You have your must avoids and your must haves and talk a little bit about how that's evolved for you.

Yeah, I think one of the things that maybe I got criticism for was, well, goodness sakes, plants have had these anti animal compounds since the beginning of time. And if it was that big a problem, then why is it just now becoming such a problem? You, you made this up, didn't you?

Right.

Well, no, I saw a lot of those criticisms. Yeah. It turns out that plants and animals are constantly at war. Plants were here first. They do not want to be eaten. They don't want their babies eaten, except in certain circumstances. Circumstances. And they use biologic warfare to convince their predator that it wouldn't be a good idea to eat them by either stunning their growth, making them infertile, making them hurt. That's usually the main driving factor. And we on the other hand, had an amazing defense that we had built up against these plant compounds in terms of acid in our stomach, for instance, acid breaks down proteins. Lectins are proteins.

Right.

We had an amazing diverse gut microbiome that loves to eat anything that came down the pike. There are actually bacteria that love to eat gluten, for instance.

Right.

There are bacteria that love oxalic acid oxalates. They love them.

Right.

But as I pointed out with the seven deadly disruptors, guess what? Everything's changed in Approximately the last 50 years where broad spectrum antibiotics were introduced, which I remember when they were introduced in the mid-70s, they were miraculous because we no longer had to get blood cultures and cultures and find out what bacteria was growing and test antibiotics and just blast everything. Just blast everything.

Yeah.

And you know, I mean, it was miraculous. We had no idea that, yeah, we were killing the bad guy, but we were wiping out our entire intestinal microbiome. So now rather than, you know, the, the offensive front four protecting Tom Brady, those guys are all injured. We've gone through the second string, we've gone through the third string. And now the water boy is now.

Trying to protect, trying to protect Tom Brady.

Yeah. And he's getting slam. So what was true, really about 50 years ago, not to mention glyphosate, not to mention proton pump inhibitors. We know, terrible. We no longer have this defense system. And that's number one. Number two, the thing we didn't realize was that this defense system, our microbiome, I call them the gut buddies, have to have certain foods to eat to not only foster their themselves, but like we mentioned before, feed us and feed us and the wall of our gut and our Brain, our heart, all these really important compounds. And in the last 50 years, we've completely voided most of the food we eat of these compounds. So it's not so much that the foods are processed or ultra processed, but in the process of processing, we've taken away all the stuff that used to be there with every bite. You know, our great great grandparents, as I like to say, not only ate whole food, which they did. Yeah. But they ate their food whole. Then there's a huge difference between that and one of the rather hilarious things that was advertised for Kellogg's Cornflakes. Kellogg's Cornflakes was actually advertised as the world's first pre digested food.

No.

Yes.

Really?

Because what do you mean by pre digested food?

All the work of digestion was done for you by the Kellogg's Cornflakes company, so you no longer had to do any work.

That's so nice.

Isn't that nice?

So nice.

And they didn't bother to mention that there was now absolutely nothing to eat. For the other, most probably the most important part of you is that 100 trillion bacteria.

Right.

That now are starving to death every day. And so it's a one, two punch.

Yeah. And, and so the, you know, the plant paradox, I think, exposed a lot of truths about plants. But you also don't think that all plants are poisoning us.

No.

By any, by any stretch.

Some people want to credit me as the father of the carnivore diet. Because if you take what I said about a few plants to the extreme, that no plant wants to be eaten.

Right.

Then the answer is don't eat plants.

Right.

And I've been accused of being not the father of the garden.

I've actually never ever seen you say don't eat all plants.

No, I, I'm a plant predator.

Yeah. You just gotta night shades and.

Yeah. You just gotta know who's your friends and who aren't your friends or what cultures always did is they detoxified them, usually with fermentation.

Yeah.

One of the years ago, I was reading a book about the Incas, who of course ate quinoa. But little did I know that. And everybody said, well, keno is good for you. Look at ink was great. Right. Little did I know that they actually fermented their quinoa. They let it rot and then they cooked it and it's not on the package directions.

Right, Right. You know, I get, I get a lot of my, almost all of my vegetables from an Amish farm and they do a lot of fermenting of, of their veggies. Oh yeah, I get our raw goat milk, raw buffalo milk. In fact, if you've never had a raw buffalo milk latte, you haven't lived. It's delicious. But I've noticed that, you know, even in our two teenagers eating a, what I think some people would consider a substantive amount of dairy, Kefir. Kefir vegetables, raw yogurts, raw cheeses, grass fed meats, their skin actually really cleared up going through the teenage years with the, you know, with, with their sebaceous acne that. Oh yeah, that they had. Which would be the opposite of what you would think they would say avoid dairy, avoid gluten, you know, all of all these things. And avoid saturated fats and, and you know, that's the miracle cardio skin. And maybe, maybe get on Accutane and, and we were able to do it with largely, I would say, leaning towards a carnivore diet. We do eat veggies and steamed veggies, but we get it all from this Amish farm and it's just amazing. A lot of it is key for fermented veggies. But so in broad strokes, who are our friends and who are our foes in the plant kingdom?

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Well, one of the things hearkening back to my research at Yale was we were plant predators. Great. We're a great ape. We inherited a very interesting mutation from great apes that allowed great apes to actually take over the world during climate change. About 14 million years ago, they had a genetic mutation that they could. They lacked an enzyme called uricase, which breaks down uric acid into a harmless substance. Why is that so interesting? It turns out that I believe about we fruit. Fruit is actually fructose primary, the primary sugar and fructose in fruit is fructose. Fructose is a toxin that's taken from the gut directly into the liver. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Doesn't, isn't absorbed into the bloodstream. Why? In the liver, fructose is converted to two things. One, triglycerides. Number two, uric acid. Uric acid is a really good way to raise blood pressure and it's a really good way to increase insulin levels.

Right.

It allowed great apes to take less available fruit in the forest and store fat for the winter, for the lean times. And the rest of the monkeys couldn't. And that's actually why great apes extended across the globe. That's why there's orangutans in Asia, etc.

Okay.

They were able to out compete other monkeys. We inherited that mutation, which means we could out compete during fruit season and store fat for the winter that other animals couldn't. And that's why we unfortunately took over the world. Now it was for years it was called the thrifty gene. It wasn't the thrifty gene. It was this genetic mutation that great apes had for fructose. For fructose. And one of the problems that I see now is we only, even great apes only gain weight during fruit season. The average great ape gains about eight pounds during fruit season. Fruit season only happens once a year, even in the jungle. And it only happened for our ancestors once a year in the summer and the early fall. Now we have 365 days of endless summer, always fruit season. And so one of the things that drives us is this storage of fat for the winter. But the other thing that I learned was that we never encountered a grain or a bean until the agricultural revolution of 10 to 12,000 years ago. Never. Why? Because they were toxic until we learned how to cook them.

Right.

If you look at that civilization, from hunter gatherers to the agricultural, within 2,000 years, we shrunk a foot. Really? Yeah. Most of us were about 6ft tall 12, 000 years ago, and we shrunk.

Wow.

That much from. From lectins. Wow. Yeah. And these are brand new compounds that we didn't have a defense system against.

And what lectins. Cause I mean they're like little spikes that kind of get stuck in our gut.

Yeah. I think the easiest way to think of them are these little spikes that's more complex than that. The method of how they worked was worked out by a professor who's now at Harvard, a pediatric gastroenterologist by the name of Alessio Fazano. And he's a really funny guy. Anyhow, I've been on a couple panels with him, but he figured out that gluten, which happens to be a lectin, is a protein that's trying to attach to a sugar molecule on the surface of our intestines.

Okay. Now, inside the luminal wall.

Inside the luminal wall and our intestines are the same surface area as a tennis court. So when we're watching Wimbledon in a couple weeks, there's a tennis court in you and me. We have a bad design. That tennis court is only lined with one cell thickness of cells, so that everything we swallow and all the bacteria that live in us is separated from the rest of us by only one cell.

Wow.

Now, those cells are glued together with what are called tight junctions. And I use the example. We all played a game as a kid called Red Rover, Red Rover, where we all locked arms and you came right across. It's too dangerous now. It's not about. Yeah, oh, yeah. Terrible, terrible.

It's like riding your bikes today.

Somebody's going to get hurt. Yeah. So we're all kind of stuck together. So what he found was that if a lectin can attach to the sugar molecule lining your gut, and it used to be very hard because there was all this defense against getting there.

Right.

But now it's wide open because you.

Had all of this microbiome.

Exactly. And you got all this mucus, you've got all this acid in your stomach, which is now gone because we're all taking antacids.

Right.

Don't get us started. If it can attach, it makes a compound called zonulin. And there won't be a test. We promise.

This is right up my alley.

Zonulin then breaks that tight junction, literally cuts it. So now you got a gap right? Now, through that gap, lectins, which are foreign particles, can leak through, bacteria can leak through, and even undigested food particles can leak through. Now, what's really a great design is we knew this was going to happen. So that 80% immune system, 80% of our immune system is sitting right behind that wall, because that's where the action's going to come.

Right?

Now, if this happens every so often, and we know it always does. The immune system says, oh, you know, these are foreign. I'm going to attack them. I'm going to cause inflammation and we're going to destroy these guys. But I'm also going to have a picture. I'm going to take a photo of what these guys look like. I'm going to look at their barcode. All of these we recognize from reading a barcode. And our immune system literally has barcode scanner. So they put in place memory. So if I ever see this guy again, I'm going to be ready.

So memory T cells waiting.

Yeah, just right. Just waiting. And now what's happened is this was a once in an every day, every so often occurrence. Now our complete defensive system is gone. Now these harmless plant compounds of hundreds of years ago now have a direct access to where they want to get. Now we're breaking those bonds every day. And now our immune system is on high alert every day, 24 hours a day. And how do they send alert out to the brain, the heart, wherever it's inflammation, inflammatory cytokines. So now we have chronic inflammation because this is happening every day.

And how do we measure this? Would this be like elevated levels of K?

Yeah.

Well, so reactive proteins.

Yeah. C reactive protein is one of the easiest ways. Fibrinogen is another way. There are better tests that we use. I actually measure IL6, IL16, IL10, tumor necrosis factor alpha.

Right.

And early. When I was doing this, 20 odd years ago, lo and behold, all these. And that was before we could actually measure leaky gut. We can measure it easily now. All these people with, for instance, autoimmune diseases or arthritis or heart disease had these elevated markers of inflammation and you go, son of a gun. In fact, we were talking about dentists. One of the first papers that I wrote on heart disease prevention was I took a bunch of people with an elevated C reactive protein. Half of them I made them floss every other day, and the other half I didn't make them floss. Now why every other day? I hate to floss. My wife flosses twice a day. She's a nut. I could bring myself to floss every other day. So I kind of designed it for me. Lo and behold, the people who we got to floss every other day dramatically dropped their C reactive protein. Really? Really. In fact, I was honored by the American Dental Biologic Dentist Association.

I just had a biologic dentist on.

Right before you for my contribution. This was 15 years ago. And you know, little did I know back then that the Same thing that was happening in leaky gut was happening in leaky mouth. And. Yeah, so.

And we find some of the same bacterial flora that are causing tooth decay and that are causing cardiovascular disease.

Correct.

And you would agree that the oral cavity and cardiovascular health are linked.

Absolutely, yeah.

Because I think there's a school of thought that there's no linkage between them. In fact, I did a podcast with a biologic dentist that I think had miraculously changed my life and my wife's life and. And both of my daughters. And it got censored all over social media, it got checked by the fact checkers, and the flag that was over it was that the oral cavity has no connection to other areas of the body. It does. It's not. It's not connected to the heart, to liver, lungs, pancreas, kidneys, or other areas of the body. And therefore pathology in the mouth doesn't lead to pathology elsewhere in the body. You would staunchly disagree with that.

Oh, yeah. We used to take plaque out of coronary arteries when we operated on them and found all these cute little oriflora bugs in the plaque. One of the things that convinces a lot of my patients that we probably should be a big. Paying attention to the mouth. People get coronary calcium scores all the time. Personally, I think they're a waste of money and a waste of time, but we won't go down that road today.

Right.

There are really only two things that are capable of producing calcification. Number one is bone cells, osteoblasts that make bone. Right. It can calcify things.

Right.

Number two is bacteria in your mouth are really good at producing biofilms with calcium in it. In fact, plaque is a biofilm of a bacteria that has calcium in it. And isn't it interesting that the only other place that we see calcium is in coronary arteries? And there was a. Only one paper that really got my attention looking at this was they took people with coronary artery calcification. One group was given a low dose antibiotic for six months, tetracycline, which is very effective against oral bacteria.

Okay.

The other group did. Lo and behold, the coronary calcium score went down. Went down, down in the antibiotic group. Wow. Which, you know, association does not prove causation.

Right.

But my patients go, well, yeah, wait a minute, I got, you know, I get plaque in my teeth and you're right, they have to chip it away.

Yeah.

And I said, and, yeah, and we can see chips of calcium on your coronary arteries. Maybe I could convince you that pay a little more attention to your mouth as well as your gut.

Right. So what is. So what testing do you recommend that people get to really look at heart health and, you know, how do they take the next step forward? Because I think there's a lot of confusing. You know, I came from the mortality space where we actually studied trends in mortality. We had very specific data, day date, time, location and cause of death for hundreds of millions of lives. And we would triangulate that back into the record. One thing that we did not use were randomized clinical trials were placebo controlled randomized clinical trials. We used data. We used big data. We knew, for example, that there was not a correlation that we saw between elevated LDL cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. So simply having elevated level of LDL cholesterol would not cause us to table rate your life insurance policy nor to reduce your life expectancy because the data didn't support it. And I'm going more than 10 or 15 years. Thank you for saying that because I get a lot of flack for that. But I said we just used data, right? It wasn't. We also knew that we saw downstream consequences, presumably from cell wall, cell membranes, reduction in vitamin D3, cholecalciferol, and significant hormonal issues in patients that were put on heavy statin therapy. So even though the statin drug studies would say ldl, high cardiovascular risk, high push LDL down, cardiovascular risk down, we would see the downstream consequences because we had data, day date, time, location, cause of death. And I think that a lot of people like yourself, which are, in my opinion, a little ahead of your time, are going to be vindicated in a way because big data is going to circumvent the system and prove that this one randomized clinical trial done in isolation, extrapolated out to the massive population, was, you know, actually wrong. We realized 10, 15 years down the road, we made a mistake. Sort of like the broad spectrum antibiotic.

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Yeah, well, a lot of these drug trials again, most research unfortunately in the United States now is driven by drug companies. I had the pleasure of being trained at the nih and back in the good old days, the NIH was really the major grant granters of research. Now it's just a pittance compared to drug companies. And I'll never forget, and I won't mention names, but we would do experiments and one of my colleagues had an experiment that didn't reach statistical significance. And our boss, and we had an entire wing of statisticians at the nih. Oh boy. And our boss, good statistician, he says, you take that up there and you don't come back until you bring me statistical significance. Oh yeah. And that was a really important part of my education. And so you look, you can, you can make something statistically significant as long as you know how. What the question to ask task. So, so much of the cardiovascular data is based now on relative risk reduction.

Yes, relative, relative. Peter TIA talks about this relative risk.

Reduction and that is just the most bogus way of making an argument of something being statistically significant that you could possibly. And you know, I've used statistics all my life and I, I know how to manipulate them to get the answer I want. And that's scary that I know how to manipulate statistics at the answer I want.

Right.

So, so, so statistics are not the question is answered wrong. So I'll give you a great example that I would have thought would have been the end of the cholesterol theory of heart disease. And in the last two years, you're right, we try to push LDL cholesterol down and down and down.

Right.

First of all, there was an association, not strong, but there was an association that lowering LDL cholesterol seemed to mitigate somewhat new heart attacks. Okay. We didn't know at that time, and this was 20 odd years ago, that statins are an anti inflammatory drug and they actually block what are called toll like receptors, which is how the immune cells read these barcodes. Right. We didn't know that. So we assumed that was the LDL going down, that was the effect of the statin. Now we know that as the statin drug went up the dose and the LDL went farther and farther, there was more suppression of inflammation on the blood vessel wall. Fast forward a couple Years ago a drug company said, hey, there's a really powerful anti inflammatory drug that's cheap as anything called colchicine that we use to treat gout from uric acid. And it's really good. It just tells your immune system, you know, look the other way, white cells shut up, but it tears up your gut and you know, we'll use it works great, but people go, right, okay, I'll never get gout again. Right. So a drug company says, hey, we could make an ultra low dose of colchicine and we could patent it because it's a new drug use. Yeah. And let's take people on maximal medical therapy, on maximal statins and who've had events and let's divide them into two groups. One will give this ultra low dose anti inflammatory colchicine and the other one will give a placebo, both on maximal medical therapy. Okay, let's follow them. There have been two studies now. Both times there was an additional 30% risk reduction in the low dose colchicine group versus the maximal medical therapy without colchicine. Wow. Yeah. And then when they looked at, okay, what's the action? Lo and behold, it was the CRP coming down, the C React protein. So that actually caused the effect. And when they finally broke out the data, there was absolutely no correlation to serum LDL level. It was the CRP level that was. Now you would have thought that that would have been big news, right? Only one problem. Statin drugs are the biggest money maker of any pharmaceutical drug, no question.

So just never saw the light of day.

Low dose colchicine is pennies.

So for we're winding down a bit before, for those folks that are listening that haven't been able to follow your work and just broad lifestyle recommendations because I think there's a lot of noise out there in, in the marketplace. Clearly you are a fan of grass fed grass finished meats.

Yes, with proviso and I, I warned in the plant paradox 7 almost 8 years ago now that there's a really mischievous sugar molecule in beef, lamb, pork and milk called Neu5GC. And we don't make Neu5GC. We make a very similar sugar molecule called Neu5AC. Okay. Fish and poultry have Neu5AC. Like us, we make vigorous antibodies to Neu5GC when we eat Neu5G. And what's exciting in the new book gut check is neu5gc can substitute for neu5ac in the lining of our blood vessels, in the lining of our joints, in our blood Brain barrier. And our brain abhors neu5gc. And cancer cells use neu5gc to promote local inflammation, lowering the oxygen tension and they survive and grow.

Exactly right.

And that sadly, we used to think there was clearly an association with red meat and dairy and heart disease, cancer, arthritis and dementia.

Right.

Association does not mean causation.

Right.

But now with the new research that NEU5GC can substitute for NEU5AC.

Right.

It's now a causation. Now, here's the good news. The more neu5ac food you eat, you'll displace the neu5gc.

Wow.

Number one, the best news is that if you ferment your milk product with kefir or cheeses or traditionally made sausages, the bacteria will eat the Neu 5 GC and there won't be any Neu 5 GC in it. So for instance, Prosciutto has no Neu 5 GC.

Wow.

Even though it came from pork.

Okay.

A traditional sausage has no new 5 GC.

Wow. So you're saying maybe improve and increase your fish poultry intake pasture.

Yeah. Most of our poultry is.

Yeah.

Poison.

Terrible pasture raised, you know, and you.

Know, knock your sock socks off with great charcuterie when, you know, when you're over overseas or look for the words lactic acid starter culture on any salami or anything like that, you will find producers in the United States that have lactic acids.

Start a culture and then what about your grass fed grass finished meats?

So use them in moderation. Now, I don't know when this will air, but a good friend of mine who's won three James Beard Award, Jimmy Schmidt has just gotten USDA approval for lowered NEU 5 GC beef and really hot dogs by the fermentation process.

So he takes the meat post slaughter.

Correct. From grass fed grass finished animals and ferments. Ferments it. And it's delicious. And it's low in new 5 GC. So you can have your cake and eat it.

And how do they find that producer? What'd you say his name was?

It's called JR Ranch.

JR Ranch. GR Ranch is about to get flooded.

Sorry.

Get ready, Junior.

I mean, he and I have my. Bless his heart, he took.

Community is coming for you. In a good way.

Yeah, it's delicious. It's really good. Super Lainey here. It's the best hot dog I have ever.

And the hot dogs.

Yeah, hot dog.

Really?

Can you imagine a hot dog that's good for you?

Well, I can't No, I can't imagine.

A hot dog.

Yeah, it's good for you. Wow.

And he's got grass fed grass finished meats. And then he has a fermentation process.

That removes the new 5 GC.

And I'm just. Forgive me for a moment. I don't think I'm familiar with how you ferment meat and how you ferment vegetables.

You actually. Yeah, you introduce bacterial cultures. In fact, amazingly enough, I didn't know this, but he and I have become good friends through the years. He had a company that sold grass fed grass finished beef, and he wanted me to endorse it. And I said, jimmy, I can't because of this stupid molecule. And he said, well, you know, why couldn't we get rid of it? I said, well, traditional cultures have always gotten rid of it. And he says, okay, how do I do that? And I said, well, when you're making bratwurst, how do you make bratwurst? He said, well, it's easy. We put bacterial cultures in the sausage. And I said, really? He said, oh, yeah. The FDA has to know exactly what we're putting in there. USDA has to know. I said, really? He says, oh, yeah. All traditional sausages are made that way. I said, jimmy, you already got the ability. I said, you know, ferment the meat. Let's do some tests. And lo and behold, you know, he writes me back about three months later. He says, that's it. There's no new 5 GC. As. Bingo. Go for it, buddy. Wow. Yeah.

That's amazing.

And so he just got USDA approval.

Yeah. That is fantastic. Well, Junior is getting. Going to get flooded. I know you're tight on time. I really, I can't. I can't even tell you how much I appreciate you giving us your time today. My audience is going to go crazy over this. Where can my audience find you? Find out more about your work, your teachings. How do they get a copy of your book? Where can they find out more about you?

Well, the Dr. Gundry podcast is on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast from. Gundry, Maryland is my supplement and food company. Dr. Gundry.com I've got two YouTube channels. If I don't show on Instagram, if I don't show up waving at you when you're surfing the web every day, I've done a very bad job.

You haven't done your job, okay? And I wind down every podcast by asking my guests same questions. No right or wrong answer to this question. And that is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human.

The ability to wake up every day with a new question that needs an answer to. Wow.

So I'm a huge fan of intellectual curiosity, which I think is what you just identified, so.

Correct.

I agree with that. It's fun to be a little kid for the. Your whole life.

Right? Yeah. That's why.

That's why I love the industry that we are both a part of. Well, thank you for your time today, Dr. Gondrey. I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show and carving out some time here in London. We're in London, uk, and this will air very soon. And poor Junior is about to get flooded. As always, guys.

Thanks, Gary.

That's just science.