How You’re Doing Keto All Wrong with Dr. Steven Gundry

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Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Welcome and thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. Here I put the power of health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness. In each episode, I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more. So if you want to get healthy and get off the dieting for life merry go round, I'll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better fast. All right, so today on Ask the Health Expert, I've got Dr. Steven Gundry. So it's going to be ask the cardiothoracic surgeon and actually ask the nutrition expert. And, well, here's what's super fun. I have known Dr. Steven Gundry for, gosh, I think now, 20 plus years because we both were in Palm Springs together. So I used to go to his office way, way, way back when. And it's just been fun to watch everything he's been up to over the past two decades. So I think I got him right when he was probably stopping surgery or no stopping, starting the nutrition party. Just stopped doing surgery a couple years ago. But he has the International Heart and Lung Institute and the Centers for Restorative Medicine both in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. Beautiful places to live. He's got the Dr. Gundry podcast and four New York Times best selling books including the Plant Paradox. And we are going to talk today about his latest book, Unlocking the Keto Code, which isn't really about keto. So if you're going, I don't, I don't care about keto. No, this is like what makes keto work and how you can take that information and basically, you know, live longer, better. It's really about the longevity of it and it's super cool, actionable information as always because that's what he's all about in providing. So I will be right back with Dr. Stephen Gundry. Stay with me. Hey, J.J. virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel Gifts, hosting, you know, all the things. And suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. On your laptop or on your phone. Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal. This time, don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin. The holidays are almost here, but there's still time to score great gifts at Dick's Sporting Goods. Find everyone's must have gifts from Nike, FP movement, Adidas, and more. Need your gifts fast? Stop by your local Dick's or shop dicks.com for fast shipping, curbside pickup or same day delivery. Every holiday starts at Dick's. All right, so on this episode of Ask the Health Expert, I'm going to ask my favorite cardiothoracic surgeon. And you know, I would say you're a definite nutrition geek, advocate and expert and pioneer. I've got Dr. Steven Gundry with me yet again, a crowd pleaser. Welcome back.

Hey, thanks for having me, jj. I'm glad to know that Tampa is still alive and you're still alive. So that's good.

I am. So I am excited about this because we're going to bust some myths. We're going to share some new concepts, get in a little bit on. We never really talked about your book on unlocking the keto code, so I know you've got some stuff in there too. So we have a lot to talk about here today.

Okay.

For those of you who don't know, Dr. Gundry, I would just love you to give me a brief like how the heck did you go from, you know, cardiovascular cardiothoracic surgeon into getting so dialed into nutrition and lifestyle?

Yeah, real briefly. I was professor and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery at Loma Linda University here in Southern California and pioneered with my partner, Leonard Bailey, infant heart transplant and invented a bunch of devices to keep the heart alive during heart surgery and transplant, and was one of the fathers of computer assisted heart surgery, blah, blah, blah. And I was also very famous for operating on people who nobody else wanted to operate on. And there were a few of us idiots around the country. And I was introduced to a gentleman from Miami, Florida, who I call Big Ed in all the books. Many years ago now, he was 48 years old and inoperable coronary artery disease. All his blood vessels were so clogged up that you couldn't put stents in them. You couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't any place to land a bypass. And he was big, fat guy, big head. He weighed 305 pounds. And he would go around the country carrying his angiogram, the movie of his heart, looking for somebody to operate on him. And he had spent about six months going around the country, and everyone who saw him turned him down. And he eventually wound up in my office. And I looked at his angiogram from six months earlier, and I said, you know, I. I gotta agree with everybody else. There's nothing I can do for you. I'm sorry. And he said, well, yeah, but. But I've been on a diet for six months and I've lost 45 pounds. Now, he was 265 when I met him. And he says, and I've gone to a health food store and I've been taking a bunch of supplements, and he actually brought in this shopping bag and he said, you know, maybe I did something in here. Now, you know, I'm scratching my professor beard and going, well, you know, good for you for losing weight, but that's not going to do anything in here. And I know what you did with all the supplements. You made expensive urine, which is what I firmly believed back then. And he said, well, look, I've come all this way. Why don't we get another angiogram? So I agreed. And this guy, in six months time, had cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coronary arteries. 50%.

I mean, holy smokes.

Yeah, I had never seen anything like that. In fact, I've been on the program committee for the American Heart association and the American College of Cardiology multiple times through the years. And astounding results of a statin trial for Instance would show a 0.01% reduction in plaque over five years. And that was astounding. And, you know, we would trumpet it to the media and wow. And here's Big Ed cleaning out, you know, 50% reduction in six months. And I'm going, what the heck? You know, what, what have you been eating? And this guy starts telling me what he's been eating. And back in the dark ages at Yale as an undergraduate, we could design our own major. So I designed a major that you could take Great Ape and manipulate its food supply, manipulate its environment, and prove you'd arrive at a human being. And I defended my thesis, got an honors, and gave it to my parents and went off to be a famous heart surgeon. So when big guy's telling me about his diet, I go, wait a minute, this is what I. This was my thesis. And I said, let me look at those supplements again. Famous for protecting the heart during transplant and operations. And I designed a glop that you put down the veins and arteries of the heart before you cut it out. That protected it. And Big Ed is swallowing a bunch of the things that I put in this glop. And it never occurred to me to swallow it. I was a big fat guy, even though I was running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour a day and eating what I thought was a very healthy low fat diet. And so I put myself on my thesis and started swallowing a bunch of Big Head supplements. And, you know, I lost £50 my first year and 20 subsequently. And I've kind of kept it off for 25 years now. But what I did was I took the patients that I operated on and I said, here, you know, I want you to start eating this way and go to Costco, go to Trader Joe's, there wasn't an Amazon back then, and. And buy some, some of these supplements. They're cheap and I want to keep you away from me in the future. And they had some remarkable changes. Their diabetes went away, their high blood pressure went away, their arthritis went away. So after about a year of this pet, Loma Linda, I had an epiphany that I was actually doing this all wrong. Instead of operating on people and then teaching them how to eat to avoid me in the future, I decided I should teach them how to eat so they could avoid me right now. Now, as a heart surgeon, that's a very bad career move.

Bad business decision there, Very bad. As my wife, it seems to have worked out.

It did work out. After many, many years of not working Out, My wife likes to remind me many times. And so I resigned my position and set up a clinic, as you know, in Palm Springs.

Yeah, I know. We were neighbors.

We were neighbors. I remember you used to come into. And we chat.

There you go. The way back when.

Yeah, so. And I guess the rest is history. We found that in fact there were certain foods that were mischievous, that there were certain foods that were pretty good for you, and that there were, quite frankly, a number of supplements that had some pretty remarkable powers that I actually wrote about, published papers about. And then the plant paradox happened about five and a half years ago. Now that kind of upended, I guess, conventional thinking about how plants don't necessarily want us to eat them. And there you go.

And it's important that you and I both agree on this concept that I think really disrupts nutrition, that foods that are considered healthy could actually be hurting you. And getting that word out, which is almost like saying, hey, the earth is flat, you know, hey. But you know, we really do, especially in this day that we're really moving into bio individuality and personalized nutrition. It's like an important message out there. Now we're gonna talk longevity because you are my favorite person to yak about longevity with, with all of your info on the blue zones, et cetera. But I wanna first dig into your latest book. I know you got more stuff you're working on. I wanna get into that too. But we never got a chance to talk about unlocking the keto code. And I loved the provocative statement of they're doing keto all wrong. And so I think it's important to dig into this because I still remember the keto from the days that keto was pork rinds and Diet Coke. You know, remember those days? And then I used it some with my son, with his brain injury, of course, because it was super important. But you know, for someone now, because whenever these things, you look at a diet and the diet gets popular and then the diet becomes a junk food, food diet. It happens every single time. Like the gluten free diet and all the garbage. That's it, that's now gluten free. So, you know, what's your take on the keto diet? How has it been misused, how do we upgrade it and how do we use it?

Well, as you know, with your son's brain injury, ketones in a ketogenic diet was first used for children with seizure disorders before there were any anti seizure medications. And it was designed at the Mayo Clinic. And the name ketogenic Diet actually came from the Mayo Clinic in 1930. So it's.

No, it's not a fad. I always love it.

Actually, it worked remarkably well. And when drugs came out, it really kind of fell by the wayside, at least for kids. But it had a resurgence in the 1990s in a different form as anybody who takes care of people on anti seizure medications and kids on anti seizure medications. These medications, for lack of a better word, depress brain function. That's what they're supposed to do. These kids, although their seizures were controlled, they weren't exactly the brightest light bulbs in school. People got the idea that the other thing that's problem with the highest, with a high fat diet, the original ketogenic diet was 80% fat, 10% protein and 10% carbohydrate. And getting a kid to eat a low carbohydrate diet is nearly impossible. And most of us working in nutrition realize that getting an adult to eat a low carbohydrate diet for any length of time is virtually impossible. So they got the idea that if you used MCT oil, medium chain triglycerides as a fat, that interestingly enough, you could give kids a lot less MCT oil as a percentage of the fat they ate, give them more carbohydrates and give them more proteins and they'd still have seizure control. They became fascinating, as I did when I wrote the Plant Paradox and I a ketogenic version of all my books. I used MCT oil for that purpose. And MCTs are fascinating in that unlike any other fat that we eat, MCT oil is immediately absorbed through the wall of our gut. All other fats have to be packaged, and I won't go into that, but they go direct to your liver, do not pass go, and they are converted into ketones. Now, ketones are not a miraculous fuel. And that's one of the points of the book when, when I wanted to try explain how ketones work. Of course most people think, oh, it's a clean burning fuel. Your body prefers burning ketones over carbohydrates. It's, you know, it's rocket fuel for your brain. Well, unfortunately, it's not. Research at the nih, where I was an associate research at Harvard has shown that even at full ketosis in human beings, 70% of your body's energy needs cannot be met by ketones. Only about 30% can be met by full ketosis. And even the brain, which certainly can do well on ketones, your brain still needs 30 to 40% of its fuel. Is glucose even running at a full ketogenic diet? So with that in mind, I said, gee, there's something wrong with this super fuel concept. So if ketones are not this phenomenal super fuel, what the heck are they doing? Why is it beneficial to the brain? Why is it beneficial to at least sometime during the day be making ketone? And a rather obscure paper. It's short, I recommend anybody read it. A fun little read written by a PhD by the name of Martin Brand in the year 2000. The name of the paper is Uncoupling to Survive. Easy to remember now. Uncoupling has nothing to do with Gwyneth Paltrow.

That's cute.

So what the heck is uncoupling? Normally making energy, making ATB by mitochondria is incredibly hard work. It's incredibly damaging to mitochondria. And all of us know about reactive oxygen species, et cetera, et cetera. And mitochondria get damaged making ATP. And the object of the game is to energize electrons in the mitochondria and pull protons into the mitochondria and couple a proton with oxygen and make ATP. And I describe this in the book as the Mito club, the hottest hippest club in town. It's difficult to make ATP. Interestingly enough, mitochondria to protect themselves have a built in pressure release valve. Very much like a pressure cump, pressure cooker has a pop off valve. And these are little trap doors, escape hatches. There's five of them in each mitochondria. They're controlled by what are called uncoupling proteins. And uncoupling refers to. Normally a proton should couple with an oxygen and in that process make ATP. If you uncouple, you don't connect a proton with oxygen, then the proton actually escapes without making energy. And it turns out that that's actually pretty doggone good for you. Depending on how much of that is allowed to happen. What's really interesting is you and I sitting here, 30% of all the calories we eat never are used to make ATP. They are uncoupled in our mitochondria and esc. Now you go, well that's kind of a dumb design. Why would anybody do that? We are a warm blooded animal and it turns out those molecules escaping those protons generate heat. And so just sitting around, we need to generate heat.

So would more escape if you're in a colder, like if you're doing a cold plunge, you're like boom. Okay, just because I cold Plunge every morning. Now, Steven.

It turns out that cold plunges work by actually stimulating your mitochondria to uncouple to produce more heat. Quite frankly, up to a limit. Maybe we can talk about that. The more your mitochondria are told to uncouple by, for instance, a cold plunge or asana reverse engineering, same thing happens. Or by certain foods or certain dietary practices, like going into ketosis, work by uncoupling mitochondria. So it turns out the ketones are actually a signaling molecule that tell mitochondria that there's no food. Times are rough. We don't know when the next meal is coming. And protect yourselves at all costs, because you little mitochondria, if you die, we're done. Who cares about the muscles? Who cares about your skin? Who cares about your hair? If you guys die, that's it. And so the uncoupling to survive theory that Dr. Brand proposed has actually been confirmed by some fascinating studies. You look at 105 year old people speaking of longevity, around the world, they have the most uncoupled mitochondria.

So here's the question, because obviously if all of your mitochondria were uncoupled, you wouldn't be making any energy and that would be a problem too.

Correct.

So there must be the beautiful sweet spot, right?

Yeah, there's, there's two sweet spots. So when mitochondria get the message to uncouple and they not only protect themselves, but they're actually signaled to make more of themselves to share the workload.

Oh, that's a very good thing.

It's a very good thing. And I like to use the example of a dog sled. If I had one dog on my dog sled. Yeah. It could pull the dog sled. Wouldn't go very fast, wouldn't go very far because the dog would get tired. But if I hooked another five dogs up to the dog sled and had a 16 dog sled, each individual dog would do a sixth of the work. It would go a lot faster and a lot farther. The only downside would be I'd have to feed six dogs instead of one dog. That actually explains why a ketogenic diet and uncoupling mitochondria makes you lose lose weight.

Yeah, I was gonna say that's actually a good thing. If you need more calories to maintain your body. That's awesome. Who doesn't want to have to have more, you know, more calories? That is super interesting. Wow. This episode is brought to you by McAfee.

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I'll just give you one more fun example. Most of us have heard of the theory, the theory of aging, that goes into the cost of living hypothesis, and that is if you're running a very high metabolic rate in general, you don't live very long. And if you run a low metabolic rate, in general, you live a lot longer. And most of the time, this appears to be correct. Little tiny animals have a very ra metabolic rate. They don't live very long. Big animals like elephants, US Blue whales have a relatively lower metabolic rate and they live a lot longer. Makes sense. The exception of that is birds. Birds are actually some of the longest living creatures, and yet they're quite small. A parrot can live 80 to 100 years. A hummingbird, which has one of the highest metabolic rates ever measured. A hummingbird's heart rate is 1100 beats per minute. And yet a hummingbird in Captivity can live 12 years, about the same as our dogs. And so when people said, well, what the heck? How's this happening? It turns out that hummingbirds have, and birds in general have very uncoupled mitochondria. And that actually explains why they live so long, because their mitochondria don't undergo the damage that that high metabolic rate would appear to do.

Okay, so here's the important question then, because, you know, when I think back to why people believe ketogenic diets work, it's because it forces your body to use ketones and fat for fuel. And the only glucose you're going to keep, you're going to keep it for your brain, all of that stuff, and you're more satiated. So the reality is it's this mitochondrial uncoupling. So the question is, does it require you to be in ketosis or even mild ketosis, do mitochondrial uncoupling, or are there other things that you can do that also have this effect? Like cold plunging?

Yeah. So that's unlocking the keto code. Once you know the code that ketones are telling your mitochondria to uncouple, then you start saying, well, are there other ways to achieve the same thing? And that's the exciting thing in the book that in fact you don't need to eat a high fat diet to uncouple mitochondria. Time restricted eating is a really great way to uncouple mitochondria. But.

And how much time restricted when you say time restricted since that's all over.

The board, probably the sweet spot is an eight hour is a six hour eating window. What does that look like? You have break fast at noon and you finish your dinner at 6. Variations on the theme. I do. As you know for the last 23.

Years your winter routine.

I've been doing my winter routine of an OMAD diet, one meal a day for six months and I eat all my calories in a two hour window. Work out of the NIH suggests that there's probably no additional benefit of that compressed an eating window over a six hour eating window. There's a beautiful study that I talk about in the book with Italian athletes which really confirms I think the benefit of how this system works. They took Italian athletes, bicyclists and they put them on a training table. Everybody had to eat the same thing for three months. They divided them into two groups. One group ate it in a 12 hour eating window. They had breakfast at 8 o' clock in the morning, they had lunch at 1 o' clock in the afternoon. They had to Finish dinner by 8 o' clock 12 hour eating window. The other group had breakfast at 1 o' clock in the afternoon, they had lunch at 4 o' clock and they had to finish dinner at 8 o' clock. 7 hour eating window. Follow them for 3 months. Only the group, even though they eat the exact same calories, the exact same food, only the group at a seven hour eating window lost weight. They had the same exercise performance. But the best part, the longevity part is the group with the short window had dramatically lowered insulin like growth factor ones IGF1, which so far is our best marker for knowing whether MTOR is activated or not.

So do you think because honestly I'm still hearing out there that the reason intermittent fasting works, you know what I'm going to say is because you're cutting calories. Why are these things getting ignored and why are they not talking about the hormonal impact and what's going on with MTOR when you do this? So I'd love you dive into that.

Yeah. And again the Italian study has clearly shown, as have other studies, but this human study showed that it has nothing to do with calories. There's another human study that I Talk about in the book replacing some of the calories in an equal calorie diet with MCT oil instead of other fats. And the other fat just happened to be olive oil. And in that program, even though the calories were identical, the fat calories were identical. The group that had The MCT oil lost 5 kg more than the group that was using olive oil.

That's over what period of time and.

How much a three month calorie and.

How much did they shift? Like, how much did they change of olive oil to nut?

So I try, yeah, I try to get people to get a minimum of 3 tablespoons of MCT oil a day into them. Now, women, as you may or may not know, are fairly sensitive to MCT oil initially. You get queasy stomach, you get diarrhea. I have to start my women patients slow. I've found in my practice that, interestingly enough, powdered MCT is much better tolerated than liquid MCT for females. There's a lot of great powdered MCT coffee creamers. I happen to make one at Kundri md, which I use every day. But, and I designed it particularly for my female patients. So you can get MCT. MCT is tasteless. You want to try to get C8. MCT combines easily with olive oil and salad dressings and that's an easy way to get it into your system. Or you can just pour it on vegetables. You can't cook with it. So that's a. So, yeah, calorie in, calorie out. Sorry, just.

It's still out there. It is still out there.

And don't get me started. Calorie in, calorie out does not even account for what the microbiome is going to eat of what you consume. Nor does it compensate for the fact that we now know there are obesogenic bacteria which are more than happy to convert lots of what you swallow into absorbable forms that you will absorb and get fat. Whereas they're the opposite, what I call gut buddies will take all those calories for themselves and make more little gut buddies and don't give you any. And so, yeah, calorie is not a calorie.

So there's that. I mean, just the basic macronutrients. Knowing that that protein's gonna have a more thermic effect than fat or carbs. I mean, it's like you cannot ever look at like that whole model. It just still drives me nuts. But yes, then you bring in the hormones, then you bring in the gut microbiome, and it's just so much more than just calories. And then you just do these studies. And I feel like these studies just continue to get ignored anyway. But you're getting it out there, and I super appreciate that. I have to go through one thing with you, Steven, because you, you mentioned this before we started. And I go, if there's one other area besides calories that lights me up. And I get asked all the time on social about this. And it's the other myth that just will not seem to die. It's the high cholesterol. Scary, scary myth. You know, and, you know, I look at. I look at looking at total cholesterol, kind of looking at body weight, like. Like you gotta know what it's made up of. But then you get people who, even with high. They come in with high LDL free. Can you just, as a cardiothoracic surgeon who has dealt with this, unpack this and tell people what they really should be looking at and be concerned with?

One of the great fathers of heart surgery, Michael DeBakey from Houston, Texas, one of the true fathers. I got to know him in his later years. He said back in the 1950s and 60s that he really thought cholesterol had nothing to do with heart disease with plaque, and that cholesterol was an innocent bystander that happened to get caught up in inflammation on the surface of blood vessels. And as I've talked about in my books, you could think of cholesterol almost as a patch or an ambulance. And I joke that if I was an alien orbiting the earth, wanting to report back to high command, what do I observe? One of the things that I could report back is that I'm pretty sure that ambulances cause car accidents, because every time I see the car accident, there is an ambulance. And of course, association does not mean causation. And just because we see cholesterol in a plaque doesn't mean that that cholesterol actually caused the plaque. It might be there for a completely different purpose. And I've certainly taken that to heart. As a heart surgeon, the interesting thing is that I have a number of patients who come to me with very high cholesterols. Now, I'll give you an example from just this week. I have a lady in her. Her late 60s, very healthy, but she runs a total cholesterol in the 400s. She has LDLs in the high 300s, and she has actually very good HDL, and she actually has very low triglycerides. And I won't go into triglycerides, but her she's her physicians, well meaning, have been trying to get her to take statins for her entire life. When she tries statins, she gets some of the typical statin complaints and so she just won't do it. We do some really interesting, sophisticated blood tests looking at whether the inside of your blood vessels are sticky, whether they're attractive to cholesterol. And I've published several papers about this and there are now more and more sophisticated looks at whether these particles of LDL actually have any interest in causing inflammation. Those of you who can ask for it, there's a fascinating new blood test called ox, ox, capital P, capital L, which stands for phospholipids, Dash apob, apo, capital B. This test actually discriminates very well whether or not your cholesterol has any interest in sticking to blood vessels, whether it's activated. This lady we've been following through the years and she never has an activated OX BL Apple B disease despite having a LDL cholesterol in the 300, despite having small dense LDLs. And I've told her, hey, you know, have a nice day, you know, enjoy your cholesterol. I'm not going to do anything. Well, one of her well meaning cardiologists couldn't take it any longer and he a week ago got a CT coronary angiogram, which is actually a really good test. Looking for plaque, in fact for seeing plaque is better than a coronary angiogram. Lo and behold, surprise, surprise, this lady who's 68 years old has zero coronary plaque, zero coronary calcification, which is a joke anyhow, but don't get me started. Perfect coronary arteries, exactly what my blood test would have predicted. Now you'll never guess, armed with that information, what her cardiologist told her, you.

Need to take statins.

Yeah, yeah. I don't care what I just saw. I don't care that that blood test would have predicted what I just saw. I need to get your LDL down.

Now, is that just because he has to stay within the standard of care, otherwise he's going to get in trouble by the big scary hospital board? Like, what the heck is that?

Well, yeah, for instance, so you know, when I, when I operate on a patient and I gave up heart surgery.

About, well, you fix people so they.

Didn'T need to do it anymore when I, you know, before I could discharge somebody from the hospital, I would have to put them on a statin drug show that I documented, that I sent them home on a statin drug. Now of course the next thing I tell them is now don't you dare take that. But yeah, so a lot of this is you gotta do it to be in compliance.

What's a poor like? Thankfully people are listening to this and know better. But what do they do? Like what's someone do who is getting this information? How do they find a person like you to come and see? Guess they can fly to Palm Springs or Santa Barbara. Right. But you know, outside of that, what does that someone do because it's so prevalent?

Yeah, well, it's, you know, I just actually we just soft launching my telemedicine Gundry Health. So that nice. You don't have to come and fly to see me. I've trained a bunch of doctors around the world and we're going to do this.

Excellent. That is such great stuff. I am so thrilled to hear that.

Gundry Health.

There you go. And we're going to link all this in the show notes, your website books, all of this. I'd love to close with something. So what you don't know is when we talked last, you know, we were talking about food and we started talking about olive oil and you just sent me all your awesome olive oil. Holy smokes. And then I was heading off to Italy and so I just decided, you know what you told me that study was a liter of olive oil a week. And I'm in, you know, the other country, we were like just arugula and olive oil. Arugula. It was fantastic. So I just would love to leave everyone with the olive oil because you talked about MCT and olive oil but we haven't gone into just why you want to make sure that you're incorporating olive oil into your diet and then we'll link to that too because you've got some fantastic olive oil.

So olive oil is mostly oleic acid, which is a monounsaturated fat which isn't particularly interesting. Sting as a fat, it's not miraculous. But olive oil, if it's done right is loaded with polyphenols, a number of polyphenols. And it turns out that it's the polyphenol content of olive oil that makes it so spectacular. There are so two of the blue zones. Both Crete and Sardinia use a liter of olive oil per week. There's a very famous study out of Spain called the predimed study where people with known heart disease were forced to use a liter of olive oil per week. They were given a container, they had to come back to a clinic once a week and Exchange it. And they were followed for five years. These were 65 year old people and they were compared to a low fat Mediterranean diet. One of the things they found was a 30% reduction in new coronary artery disease in the olive oil group, but an increased amount of coronary disease in the low fat group. But one of the most amazing parts of this study was cognition. The people in the olive oil group had improved memory at the end of five years. Now think about it, you take 65 year old people and you get to 70 and your memory is probably not going to be quite as good. These guys improve their memory over five years, whereas the low fat group, their memory decreased as you would expect. And so it's not only just for your heart and it's these polyphenols. And the punchline of all this, and it's in the book Unlocking the Keto Code. Polyphenols are one of the best ways ever found to uncouple your mitochondria.

And I'd love to been on that study that had to go out there and get a literally of real olive oil. Because here's the other part, and this is why I love what you've put together with that polyphenol. High polyphenol olive oil is don't go to the grocery store and buy that crappy olive oil. Just give one big blurb about that because I still think people are getting duped by that stuff too. Or go to this or go out to dinner and ask for olive oil and they'll tell you it's an olive oil blend.

That's right, people. Early on we have to kind of train ourselves to get used to the taste of olive oil because that taste is actually bitter. And that bitter is the polyphenols. And you do have to understand that that bitterness more bitter, more better. The polyphenols take some getting used to. And these blends, there are really very poor rules standards for olive oil. And olive oil is. Olive oil is shipped in tankers from one country to, for instance, Italy. And it could say bottled in Italy and you go, oh great. Italian olive oil is fabulous. But it could have been in a tanker mixed with olive oils from five, six different countries, cut with other oils like soybean oil. And there's no commission to test it. There's just not. And there is, it's true. There's an Italian olive oil mafia that's in the business of convincing. You know, 60 Minutes did a huge expose on this a few years ago. And so much of Our olive oil is tainted and it really has been cut to lower the polyphenol content. So you'll say, oh, I'm using olive oil and it's so healthy, and there's basically nothing good in it.

Well, how do you know?

Well, there actually are some quality producers in the United States. Even Costco, quite frankly, has a very good olive oil that's called Toscana. It's Kirkland brand. It comes in a square, tall container. I've actually been to the plant in Tuscany where it's bottled. It's certified. There's a little certification on it. Biryani. A great company out of California. Phenomenal family. California Olive Ranch does a really good job. But don't get the blends. Get the actual.

No blends.

Yeah, stay away from the blends and.

Ask your questions at the restaurant.

You know, if you want the highest polyphenol ever recorded.

Gundry md I know a guy who's got some.

Yeah, I've got some. I know.

That was, like, the best present ever to get. Holy smokes. I always like the boxes that I get from. From you. Like, I always know there's something amazing inside. So you'll be able to check all that out. What I'm going to do is I'll put this all@jjvirgin.com Dr. Gundry, and that is G U n D R Y. And I will link to all of your goodies and goodness. There's you. You've just produced so much great stuff. And what I love is not only is your information well researched and actionable, but then you have the tools to be able to go and do it like the olive oil. So it's really good. And also, for those of you listening, when we sat down to start this interview, he took a big gulp of something. I'm like, all right, what was that? I was like, it looked like wine, but I'm like, it's a little early, so I don't think so. So MCT.

Wellness Vital Reds. Love it.

You're clearly walking your talk there.

That's just big, giant gulps of polyphenols and I'm uncoupling my mitochondria even as we speak.

Amen. Well, I uncoupled this morning. I'm clearly going to go uncouple some more. So it's been amazing, as usual. I always love having you on the show. You will be a regular and I appreciate your time.

All right, thanks for having me. Good to see you. You too.

All right, obviously we talked about a lot of super cool stuff and very actionable. I'm going to put everything we Talked about at jjvirgin.com forward/doctor stephengundry I will tell you that his polyphenol rich olive oil is amazing. I was like so excited when I got it. I'm like send more. So you'll definitely want to check all of that out and I'll just put the information. You know, I use a sunlight and sauna every morning. I meditate to Dr. Joe Dispenza in my sunlight and sauna and then I go outside and get my cold plunge. So I will put information about all three of those things because I was sitting there going it's like the best lifestyle little mitochondrial uncoupling hit that you can do just that trifecta. So we'll info on that as well and I will see you next time. If you've not yet subscribed, subscribe to JJ.com and I will look forward to the next show with you. Bye.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.