The Gut Brain Paradox: How Your Microbiome Controls Your Mind with Dr. Steven Gundry

Dr. Stephen Gunry, welcome back, back, back. I can't seem to get rid of you. That's right. You just keep showing up on my show.

I apologize. And it's great to see you as always.

But you always have something new and provocative to talk about.

Oh yeah, let's mix it up. Let's stir the pot.

Let's stir the pot. You're good at that.

Huh? Well, my mother trained me as a good cook, so maybe I like to stir the pot.

There it is. Well, this one's fun because it's like, what the heck is a cardiovascular surgeon doing getting into gut and brain? What are you doing?

Well, you know, David Perlmutter and Dale Bredesen and I, when we're talking together, have a great laugh and go, what the heck are two brain doctors and a heart surgeon doing talking about the microbiome and the gut. And we all realized that what we were treating turns out all stemmed from the gut. And I laugh because a heart surgeon has to be a general surgeon before they can be a heart surgeon. And a general surgeon is basically a gut surgeon. And I used to laugh when I took my general surgery boards Answering all these gut questions. And I go, I could care less about the gut. I'm trying to be a heart surgeon. Leave me alone. And everybody would laugh. And so now, you know, here I am back in the gut and here's, you know, Bredesen and Perlmutter. All we talk about is bacteria and gut and gut wall. So I'm in good company.

Yes, yes. Yeah, those are two of my— Dave Perlmutter is one of my besties. Him and his wife. We just love them. Yes. So when we talk about bacteria, since you threw it out there, I love this, this statement that you say that you're— you— we're not thinking with our brains, we're thinking with our bacteria. What the heck is that? Are we just like meat suits for microbial overlords or what? What's going on?

Uh, I, I believe that is true. I think we've, we've underestimated these little creatures. Bacteria have been around for 3 billion years. We, in our current form, have maybe been around 100,000. And there is an argument that can be made, and we can get as nerdy as we want to, that We exist merely as a home for the microbiome and that they direct us to find what they want to eat and they direct us to do what they want us to do. And people go, "Oh, come on now, bacteria." Really? These— well, bacteria are sentient beings. We have to get over this. No, they don't think. They don't have a brain. But bacteria see. They don't have eyes, but they can count who's around them. They know who their friends are. They know who their enemies are. They can even— I mean, they can squirt out nasty killing antibiotics against people, bugs they don't like. They'll even save some of their own kind from viral attacks, which is really cool, but we— that's really nerdy. So we now know that hunger is actually directed by the microbiome, and GLP-1 is actually made by bacteria. And it's not— that's where it comes from. And it's a signaling molecule from bacteria that says, hey, we got plenty to eat that we needed, and you don't have to be hungry anymore, and, you know, stop eating. Now, that— all that ancient communication system, as I talk about in The Gut-Brain Paradox, is pretty much gone, or it's been hijacked by a bunch of bad actors. And the book is how the bad actors took over and the good guys are hiding in the corner, cowering.

Do you think, like, when I hear that, this has been kind of my running hypothesis on the GLP-1s, because I think what the GLP-1s have done, if you're paying attention, has made us go, huh, Shouldn't this have been around the whole time? And is a big problem here is that we've so trashed our guts that we're not producing GLP-1s like we have to, we should. And so now we're having to, to do an exogenous boost of them. That's doing a whole lot of things, not just hunger, but, you know, inflammation, insulin sensitivity, all sorts of good things. Yet the media would have you think otherwise. So, I mean, do you think there's something to that of— and GLP-1's probably just the tip of the iceberg of the things we've messed up.

Oh yeah, absolutely. For instance, like I tell my patients, our great-great-grandparents ate whole food and they ate that whole food whole. Now, what I mean by that is when we used to eat whole food and we ate it whole, we didn't have smoothie machines and protein powders, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of the food we ate had a lot of things, fiber that we could not digest, right? We didn't have the enzyme system. We didn't have the fermentation vats, that, you know, cows have. We didn't have a small bowel fermentation vat, a midgut fermenter like a gorilla. We had most of our microbiome down in our large bowel. So this stuff that we couldn't digest would drift down and our microbiome down in our colon would go, "Oh yeah, you know, here it comes. Yum, yum, yum. This is exactly what we like." and we got it, thanks a lot, you don't have to eat anymore, our needs are met. Now, how do we know this is true? Well, there's a cool study that I reported out of China a few years ago where they took volunteers, they put them on a 14-day water fast diet. All they got was water. Half the group got 100 calories of soluble fiber, non-absorbable soluble fiber. We couldn't digest it, but the gut bacteria could.

Would that be like 25 grams of it?

Yeah, about 25 grams. Yeah, so there's, so not much. And these guys who got that had absolutely no hunger for 14 days. The other guys—

14 days.

14 days of a water fast. With 100 calories of non-absorbable fiber. No hunger. The other guys, of course, you know, were pretty miserable until ketosis caught in anyhow. But they had no hunger. And so it actually, they've written a bunch of papers about it. It's called the gut-centric theory of hunger. And I really like it because to me it confirms that you're right. When these guys got what they wanted, They sent all these messages like GLP-1, like CCK, and all of these gasso messengers like hydrogen sulfide, like hydrogen that said, we're good, you don't have to eat anything anymore. And again, look at all the skinny people that existed in, you know, the 1800s, the 1900s, 1940s, '50s, everybody was skinny. And they ate lots of food. There's no question about it. And so, but they were eating whole food. So now what's happened is, number one, when we eat food that's mostly processed and ultra-processed, we have stripped all of the bad stuff out of it that we couldn't digest. And so now our gut microbiome, what's left of it, Says, "I hear you chewing up there. I heard you swallow and I'm waiting down here and nothing's coming around." And it's like, what the heck? You know, you've been cheated. Go get some more. And so we go get some more and the same thing happens. And I wrote about this years ago with artificial sweeteners, with non-caloric sweeteners. We have, sweet receptors on our tongue, not sugar receptors. And so when we taste sweet, which way back when was only fruit or honey, then the brain says, "Oh, sugar is on the way. Hey pancreas, squirt out some insulin, handle it." And brain says, "Pretty soon I'm gonna get a little glucose, I'm gonna be happy." and then nothing arrives. And of course insulin drives down the sugar and the brain says, "You got cheated, go find some more." That's why, you know, when I was running 30 miles a week and eating healthy low-fat diet, but drinking 8 Diet Cokes a day, I was—

I was right there with you.

Yeah, I was 70 pounds overweight and going, "What the heck?" And I was always hungry.

Head scratching.

I was always hungry. Of course I was. So I think this is just another example of we're just, we're not giving these guys what they want to eat. Now what's doubly bad is the guys who can utilize simple sugars and saturated fats now occupy kind of a higher area in our gut where they can get to these simple carbohydrates and utilize them. And the good guys really are not good at utilizing simple carbohydrates. They, they like to break down complex chemical bonds. So now we've got all these simple sugar-seeking bacteria, and they now tell the brain Hey, this is what we like, and go find some more of this stuff. And they've hijacked what we've been sought to look for.

This is why, honestly, when I hear about intuitive eating, I go, in the— in a land of ultra-processed food, intuitive eating makes zero sense. Because what you've just described is our gut bacteria basically controlling our hunger, our behaviors, our cravings, you know, and making these decisions for us. And yet we're gonna try to tell someone they could intuitively eat. I mean, come on.

Yeah, no, you're right. And I talk about this in "The Gut-Brain Paradox." We just, we kind of have to get over how smart these guys are and how they are able to control really our thought processes for their benefit. I talk about— I have a whole chapter on addiction and addictive behavior, and it is fascinating. I'll use alcohol as an example. There are alcohol-seeking bacteria, and you— first of all, I treat a lot of addicts as part of my practice, and one of the things that's interesting is the recidivism rate of rehab treatment is about 90%. 90% fail. You choose the addiction, 90% fail because we're trying to manipulate their minds. But I argue in the book, and I'll argue right now, that we should be trying to manipulate our gut microbiome. For instance, you look at alcoholics, you can— there's a gradation of alcohol-seeking bacteria. And alcoholics who have a lot of these alcohol-seeking bacteria, they are almost impossible to wean, you know, to get them off alcohol. Whereas— and these are human studies— the people who have far less of this population of alcohol-seeking bacteria do a whole lot better in whatever 12-step program. And it's fascinating that, I mean, the human studies. So the more of these guys you got, the worse you're going to do. The better chance with less of these guys. That's one example.

A 12-step program. Think if you went, because I remember we both lived in Palm Springs and I would have clients. I ended up with a lot of clients that moved to Palm Springs after they went to Betty Ford. And then I had some clients that got to go back to Betty Ford. And I remember one of them, we had her on a very specific supplement regimen to help with all this. And then she goes into Betty Ford and they take it all away and they have candy all over the place. I'm like, so she, she can't have the supplements, but she can have candy. Like, how could you imagine if instead they actually went through and did a gut rehab?

Yeah.

What a difference. Now you have another provocative statement, uh, and you, you say that people with eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia, may actually be rewarded with their gut microbiome. Like that. Okay. Controversial. Is there some science back or is this you spouting off?

No, no, there's science and it's in the book and I've certainly seen it in, in my patient population and I, Talk about an unfortunate— well, now fortunate young lady who was literally hospitalized with anorexia and bulimia on a feeding tube. And I think it was like so many of these young women, I don't know, her fourth or fifth time institutionalized. And these people, addicts in general, are very intelligent individuals. And they, they were really smart. Anyhow, so her parents approached me that, you know, she was on a feeding tube in the hospital, and we negotiated with her caregivers that we were going to start— first of all, we did a leaky gut test, then we did a gut microbiome test, and it was, you know, It was horrible. All sorts of bad guys and leaky gut.

What kind of test did you do?

So I use Vibrant Wellness.

Oh yeah, I love them.

Yeah, so, and I have not been very impressed with gut microbiome tests, but I must say, and I have no monetary relationship with them, but their Gut Zoomer is a very useful test. I get a lot of useful information, and we can go into that. But so she has horrible microbiome, no gut diversity, lots of bad guys, quote unquote, and she's got really leaky gut. So we, with her feeding tube, we put in all the stuff she doesn't react to in food and put in a lot of a nanoencapsulated butyrate and butyrate-producing bacteria and a lot of other gut-building bacteria. And knock on wood, she came off her feeding tube within a couple of weeks, actually expressed interest in food, and now she's home. And she's been— she's been out now. She's in college now for over a year and hasn't relapsed.

Now, did you redo her Zoomer, her gut Zoomer?

Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. And you know, the sad thing is when I started doing this a billion years ago, I thought you could cure leaky gut in a couple weeks, and I was very naive.

Wouldn't that be great?

Yeah, wouldn't that be great? You probably thought that too.

Anyhow, yep, just 7 days, 7 foods.

Yeah, the 7-Day Reset. There you go.

Well, that was never supposed to be just 7 days. That was a tagline.

But yeah, yeah, I mean, it takes 9 months to a year for most people. I have one person who I've written about before who took us 4 years to seal his gut and rebuild his microbiome. Now, this was a Devastated individual who was literally homebound. He couldn't walk outside the door before he'd go basically into anaphylactic shock. He had an unbelievable girlfriend who took care of him. And he's basically bedridden. And long story short, it literally took us 4 years. And he's great now. They're married. I mean, his long-suffering girlfriend, I guess it was worth it. I mean, he's a great guy, but it took 4 years. So, but it usually doesn't take that long. That's just an example.

Yeah. So I think of all of this and I especially think what has happened over the last couple years with the pandemic where all of a sudden hand sanitizers and, you know, you look at it, 'cause prior to that it was like, oh my gosh, we're overusing antibiotics. Then you get into this where they're still like everywhere. I remember just going into the restaurants where they were trying to insist that you use a hand sanitizer, so I would fake it, 'cause I'm like, you are not messing up my skin biome with that hand sanitizer. But all of this, the hand sanitizers, the antibiotics, what is that doing to us?

Yeah, I mean, you and I travel on airplanes a lot, and they're still passing out these. You walk into the cabin, here, here's your hand sanitizer.

Oh, and I had a woman behind me the other day, I'm like, oh my gosh, she was like, She cleaned it, and first of all, I can't breathe now 'cause she got the stuff all over. But I'm like, if you've gotta do this, if you've got to sterilize your entire thing, I think you should probably just stay home in the bubble. Like, don't go, what are you doing?

You have to breathe the air. Yeah, I mean, I talk a lot in the book, some of the things that surprised me about the benefit of root vegetables and spices. There's a, there's a nasty cell wall of gram-negative bacteria called lipopolysaccharides that are mischievous, and we measure LPSs in people and anti— and antibodies to LPSs. Why are LPSs? And LPSs stand for little pieces of shit, even though I don't swear. That's how to remember it, 'cause that's what they are.

Sometimes you just gotta.

Sometimes you gotta. And so these things can really wreak havoc on our immune system. Our immune system thinks they're living bacteria. Fast forward, as I talk about in the book, when I was reading about root vegetables and their own microbiome and the microbiome of spices, one of the things that kind of jumped off the pages was that the microbiome of spices and of root vegetables is heavily LPSs. And you go, "Well, wait a minute." Spices are good for you and root vegetables are good for you. What's the deal? So then there's this whole fascinating body of research that I lay out in Gut-Brain Paradox that I, as a teenager, had horrible allergies and, you know, allergic to ragweed and grasses so bad that I had to get allergy shots. And for people who have had allergy shots, you start with a little tiny dose of that antigen that would normally put you into anaphylactic shock. In fact, the first dose did. I had to get epinephrine, the whole bit. Anyhow, and you start with little doses and you build up tolerance so that the immune system gets trained that, "Oh yeah, I recognize that guy. Yeah, okay, I don't really have to be as afraid of him as I used to be." And so you build tolerance. So it turns out if you swallow LPSs, then your immune system becomes tolerant to LPSs via the oral route. If you, for example, inject LPSs into the small bowel directly, the animal just get really sick. But if you swallow them, then you basically train the immune system that these guys aren't very bad for you. In fact, they might be your friends. Wow.

And do you need to do the same kind of dosing where you start small and build up, or can you just go for it?

No, you can just go for it, which is the great thing. Which to me, you know, spices have lots of really cool polyphenols, but to find out that spices may actually be good for you and root vegetables may be good for you because you're dosing with LPSs and you're telling your immune system, eh, don't worry about those guys that are coming through your colon. They're, they're okay. So rosemary potatoes, there you go. Well, sweet potatoes.

What's interesting with all of this is, you know, when you look at that American Gut Health Project and you go, okay, 30 different plants a week, the saving grace of that is spices count. Yeah. And you look at every other culture that seems to be eating better than us, and they have this diversity of spices that we just don't— what do we have? We have garlic powder, pepper, salt and pepper, you know. Yeah, ridiculous. You mentioned polyphenols. I gotta ask you about this study that just came out. I know you know what I'm talking about here, the olive oil makes you have new fat cells study. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Like, break that one down for us. So just for everybody listening, there was a— the headline, I was like, oh, this is of course they're gonna put this everywhere 'cause this headline is amazing. Olive oil makes you create new fat cells. And we have two things. Most of us don't create new fat cells. We just fill up the ones we have. So this is even more scary. So what's that all mean? Well, can olive oil push it?

Well, yeah, almost every olive oil study, human study, shows that consuming olive oil even in large amounts actually reduces body weight rather than makes you gain weight. It is a tremendous source of polyphenols depending on the olive tree and how it's grown. So, and I always bring this up and I get so much pushback. If you look at consumption of olive oil per capita. The Greeks lead the world. The average per capita consumption of olive oil in Greece is 26 liters per year. So that breaks— yeah, that breaks down to a half a liter per week. Now, the little kids aren't having a half a liter a week, which basically means that most adults are having about a liter of olive oil per week. And there, except for my big fat Greek wedding, there's not a lot of fat Greeks in Greece. So if, if olive oil was really going to make you fat, we, we should have seen this in Italians and Spaniards and Portuguese and Moroccans. And I'm sorry, it just doesn't happen. In fact, one of my favorite studies, the Predimed Med study out of Spain made people use a liter of olive oil per week, and they had to bring their liter back to the clinic every week and get a new one. And they were— had to use it for 5 years, and they got better heart health. They actually lost weight. They had better memory compared to a low-fat diet. And one of the things that isn't talked about, but women had much lower breast cancer in the olive oil group than in the low-fat diet group.

It makes me wonder if this, and I didn't read the study, so shame on me. I just read the headline and went, this is ridiculous. And I knew I was interviewing you so I could ask you, but I just wonder if it's more that they're getting the oleic acid and they're getting it from other crappy damaged toxic seed oils or something.

Well, the problem with oleic acid, and I had the pleasure of talking to Minister of Olive Oil in Italy at a meeting a couple years ago, and he says, you know, oleic acid isn't a particularly interesting fat. It's just a monounsaturated fat. There's nothing really good about it, nothing really bad about it. But because it's in olive oil, everybody says, oh, you know, monounsaturated fat's really good for you.

He says, when it's really the polyphenols.

Yeah, he says it's the polyphenol. A delivery device for polyphenol. And let's just get over, forget about, you know, oleic acid.

So a lot of our stuff here, which has no color to it, like it's basically devoid of the important stuff.

That's exactly right. And unfortunately Americans don't like, we haven't been raised with, this is pungent, bitter, makes you cough. So it's all been kind of bred out. It's all been blended out.

Not surprising.

No.

At all. Like we just made the white bread of olive oil here in the United States.

The wonder olive oil.

Well, I'm literally at a friend's house and I, we brought some groceries over to cook and all she had in the, the cupboard was this plastic bottle.

Of course.

From Costco olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, but it's like pale, like it's deodorant, the whole bit. I'm like, this is not olive oil, this is garbage. Like, I luckily found one glass bottle of macadamia nut oil in the back, but I couldn't find— like, I was like, we got to go to the store, I got to send you all the oil, we can't do this. So, all right, I, I love that. And you know what, I think that a discussion, especially since it's the gut-brain paradox, if we're talking leaky gut, let's move into leaky brain and how we tie this all together.

Yeah. And again, that's where Perlmutter and Bradisson and I really have a wonderful time. Yeah. So again, the wall of our gut is only one cell thick. It's at least the surface area of a tennis court. My colleagues in London think it's two tennis courts. I tend to agree with them, but let's just say it's a tennis court. So when we're all watching Wimbledon, there's a tennis court inside of us and we have a design flaw. And it's only that this tennis court is one cell thick. And they're held together, and your listeners know, with these little locked arms, tight junctions. Because everything we swallow and all of our microbiome is separated from us by only one cell. Because of that, about 80% of all of our white blood cells are sitting on the other side of this wall because mischief can come across, and it comes across every day, and we've got our troops there, and they attack it and create some local inflammation, and that was it. Now, um, almost all of us have leaky gut. Now, the hordes are coming across the wall constantly. Our immune system is getting overrun, and they're going, "Oh my gosh, you know, this army is too strong to hold back. They're breaking through our front lines. They're coming for you." And they send text messages up to our immune system in the brain, the microglial cells and the astrocytes, literal cytokine text messages that we can't hold them back, they're coming, protect yourselves, protect the neurons, you have to, you're the bodyguards of the neurons. And so what happens is kind of twofold and it's really scary and a lot of this came out of Harvard. These microglial cells, think of them as Pac-Man, and the neurons have all these dendrites that are talking to other neurons, and here's the neuron. So the microglial cell says, "Oh my gosh, we've gotta get everybody back to the fort." And so they literally eat these dendritic processes back, and they pull up everybody, and they literally pull up the drawbridge. To protect this neuron. And so you see these dead neurons surrounded by these microglial cells, and among other things, that's called a Lewy body. But what's also important, we have to remember during— after 9/11, all of a sudden we had concrete barriers that sprung up in front of our airports, in front of our courthouses, in front of our federal buildings, anything that needed protected, because a terrorist was going to bring a truck or a car bomb and smash through the front door and blow up. So we put all these concrete barriers to keep the terrorists at a distance. So when I tell my patients who are worried or who have tau proteins or amyloid plaque that— guess what? Those are concrete barriers that your immune system has erected because the horde is coming or is already there. And Bredesen in particular, to his credit, has called, you know, called for that these are anti-inflammatory, antibacterial barriers that have been erected. And the idea that we ought to take them down with these amylloid plaque-busting drugs, which have only made things worse rather than better, is just crazy because the problem is coming from the gut.

So amazing. So you could have the barriers. The barriers aren't the issue. The issue is in the gut. So if you fix the gut, you fix it.

Yeah. And that's, you know, I start the book with a fascinating physician, 62-year-old woman. Who came to me out of Northern California with 5 years of Parkinson's on 2 meds. Wasn't working. She had the mask of Parkinson's. Her husband did really all the talking. Horrible tremor. And so she had horrible leaky gut. She had a lot of neuroinflammation. She had a broken blood-brain barrier. And we can measure these things.

How do you measure your blood-brain barrier?

There's actually antibodies to the blood-brain barrier. Vibrant does both what's called a NeuroZoomer and a NeuroZoomer Plus. The NeuroZoomer will measure antibodies to the blood-brain barrier. So you can measure that. I've always said if you have leaky gut, I can virtually guarantee you have leaky brain. And that's stood the test of time, at least in my clinic. Anyhow, so you have to— so this lady had leaky brain. She had neuroinflammation. A lot of— she had a lot of anti-dopamine antigens, antibodies. And so we sent her home on the program, and my PA talked to her on the phone after 6 months, and Things were getting better. So, and her leaky gut was getting better. And so I saw her a year after I had first seen her back in my office, and I actually didn't recognize her. She didn't have a tremor, big smile on her face. And her husband jumped up and he gives me a big bear hug and he grabs my shoulders and pushes me away and he looks into my eyes and he says, "Thank you for giving me my wife back. This is the girl I married. You know, she's back running." She was a marathon runner. She says, "She can beat me now. Thank you." And all of a sudden, you know, all 3 of us are hugging and misty-eyed. So that's a wonderful story. And of course, she didn't have leaky gut, she didn't have antibodies anymore to wheat, and et cetera. So, and that's who's in the book. Now, fast forward to this year, earlier this year, I saw her on her, 2-year anniversary. And I had the benefit of seeing her leaky gut tests and her antibody tests. And so I said, "So," you know, and she looks good, looks good. I said, "How's it going?" She says, "You know, fine, but I can feel I'm slipping." I was like, "Uh-oh, did she start cheating on the diet or something?" Well, that's what I'm wondering. So, Well, these people are so motivated, they usually don't, 'cause—

They know the other side.

They know. Yeah, they've been there, right? Most of my bad autoimmune patients, once they in remission, they don't wanna go back. So, and sure enough, she's got leaky gut, not bad, but it's there. And she has antibodies to gluten. And I'm going sneaking in or something. Yeah, I said, where's this coming from? And I said, you know, I know you're not cheese. Oh geez, you know, I wouldn't dare do that. And I said, and shampoo. No, he said, are you, are you going out to eat much? They said, no, it's not worth it, uh, blah blah blah, or if we go we could carry our own salad dressings. I said, something, something's getting in you, um, your husband. I said, anything else changed in your lives? And her husband perks up. He says, yeah, 6 months ago our 32-year-old son moved back into our house because he's been so impressed with mom that he's changing careers and he's going to nursing school because he's going to be a nurse. You know, great. And he's living with us.

And I said, that's so great.

Yeah. And I said, Well, he follows the program, right? He said, oh no, he won't follow the program. And I went, really? He says, wait a minute, if he's slicing bread on our cutting board, regular bread, and then we're using that cutting board to slice our bread, which is made out of sorghum flour, blah blah blah, could she be picking it up from Him? I said, oh, thank God, you know, we've got it figured out. Now, if you had asked me this 25 years ago, whether a couple of molecules of gluten could do this, I would've laughed you outta the room. But I have so many canaries in my practice. Yeah. That she just needs a few of these little molecules to start the cascade starting.

Well, when you get that hypersensitive, Yeah, it's— yeah, yeah, that's, that's amazing. I know, I started going, she changed lotion, she did. Like, it's, it's a thing. Well, thank God you are testing these things. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, and you caught it, you caught it early, right, before it became a total thing. What— so you keep talking about, you know, I sent her off on the program. Can you just give us a little— and I know that, that this, this probably in the book, a lot of this is in the book, but, you know, a couple key takeaways of someone listening right now going, oh, you know, who says, I definitely would love to have an optimal gut microbiome. What are some of the things that they could do right now while they're waiting for their book to arrive?

Well, the first thing they can do is make sure, if you're an average American, that you're taking 10,000 international units of vitamin D3 a day and supplement that with a little vitamin K2. The University of California San Diego, and you're down in San Diego right now, has a big vitamin D research unit. And they think the average American should be taking 9,600 international units a day.

That's, I mean, 'cause you still hear people going, "Oh, don't go over 2,000." I'm like, wow.

They have never seen vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day. I have never seen vitamin D toxicity. It may exist, but I've never seen it. And I have some patients early on that I have on 40,000, 45,000, 50,000 a day. If I feel I'm coming down with something, I will take—

Yeah.

I will take 150,000 international units of vitamin D3 3 days in a row. So basically I'm taking half a million international units of vitamin D3 in 3 days, and I'm not dead yet. And I don't have kidney stones and I don't have kidney failure and my calcium isn't high and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I learned, yeah, so that's number one.

I learned that. Now do you have people also do some lab tests and just monitor? Are there levels you're trying to get them to or just have them dose it?

Yes, yeah, we look at vitamin D levels every 3 months in our patients. And many people, particularly, With leaky gut, it's really, you have to use a lot of vitamin D. And once the leaky gut seals, you can lower the doses. And in fact, before the days of leaky gut, this is how I followed my patients who I thought had leaky gut was watching their vitamin D levels. And what we now know is that number one, vitamin D contributes to a diverse gut microbiome. And the higher your vitamin D, the more diverse the microbiome. But more importantly, there are stem cells that line our gut and our gut turns over when it's one of the fastest turnovers of any cell line. And so these stem cells have to grow and become a gut cell. They're sensitive to vitamin D and vitamin D literally has to push them to differentiate into a gut lining cell. And if you don't have much vitamin D, they literally sit there and twiddle their thumbs. The third thing that I've learned in autoimmune research is that our immune cells are kept in check with vitamin D. Vitamin D tells them to not get so trigger happy. And what's interesting, for instance, in rheumatoid arthritis, we've learned that the immune cells in rheumatoid arthritis do not listen to vitamin D like they should. And you gotta literally hit 'em over the head with a sledgehammer of vitamin D to get 'em to quiet down. So it's really threefold. Repair the wall of your gut, get a more diverse microbiome, tell your immune system to, you know, take a powder. And so that's the number one thing people can do. I learned this, I learned most of what I've learned from my patients either asking me a question or showing me something. And I learned this in Palm Springs about almost 25 years ago now. I saw a husband and wife for the first time, 78 years old, and perfectly normal looking people sitting across from me. And their vitamin D levels were both about 270, nanograms per milliliter. Wildly high. And high, Cleveland Clinic says, Quest says 150 is maximum. Most docs think 80 is toxic. And so here they are at 270, and I'm looking at them, and I'm looking at their labs.

Were they supplementing or just golfing all the time?

No, oh, we can't do with the golfing. So I said, "You take a lot of vitamin D, don't you?" And they said, "Oh yeah, it's a longevity hormone." Looking at them, "Really? Yeah, right. That's cute." And I'm looking at their calcium's normal and I'm going, "Any kidney stone?" "No." And their kidney function's fine. And there's this theory that maybe you get numb fingers and toes. "Is any numb fingers and toes?" "No, why?" And I said, "Well, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you know, you should be dead." And they said, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "Well, I've been taught that above 80 is, you know," toxic. And he looks at me and he says, you don't know much about vitamin D, do you, sonny? And I go, well, just what I've been taught in medical school. And they said, well, why don't you read about it? So I did. And of course, vitamin D is— you got schooled— is an amazing longevity hormone. And it's interesting, some of the oldest living people actually have very high levels of vitamin D.

Well, I think it's probably one of the big links with autoimmune nowadays.

Oh gosh, yeah.

Think about it, like Well, the rise of sunscreen and the rise of autoimmune.

Yeah. 80% of my patients in Southern California have—

I've never seen a normal vitamin D or an optimal, I'd say normal, forget that. But I've never seen a vitamin D above, say, 50 without supplementation.

They're like 12 to 20. Mercola has done it, but he's walking in a Speedo. He's in South Florida. Yeah. Walk on the beach for an hour and a half every day. And you know, I don't have the ability to walk on the beach for half an hour, an hour and a half every day in a Speedo. But he can only get to about—

I don't really wanna see that either, you know, guys. Okay, anyway, so vitamin D.

So vitamin D, that's number one. Number two, I can seal your leaky gut. And I, you know, I have, to my number 1 and number 2 best-selling compounds at Gundry MD, shameless plug, Bio Complete 3 and Total Restore. So those are the one-two punch. But I keep telling everyone, and I see this every day, I can seal your leaky gut. It'll take a while, but I can seal it. But if you keep swallowing razor blades, you're gonna tear it right open. And what are razor blades? In my humble opinion, things like lectins, things like oxalates, things that have glyphosate in them, which is almost every food that we consume here in the United States. And if you keep swallowing ibuprofen and Naprosyn, you will create holes in your gut. Swallowing an ibuprofen is like swallowing a hand grenade. Really is.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Oh no, do you know, Early on, when I had my— I blew out my knee at 17, and in my 20s, my knee doctor in LA told me I could use as much Advil as I wanted. Yep. Well, it got me into this career, you know. That's why I got so interested in leaky gut, because I destroyed mine. Yeah, you know, because I just— oh, okay, just—

oh yeah, I wanted— yeah, I see a number of athletes who have been prescribed this or told just chew it like candy. And all of a sudden they come, they've got Crohn's and they've got psoriasis and they've got Hashimoto's and they're going, what the heck? I was very healthy. I said, yeah, 'cause you just, it was the perfect storm to create leaky gut.

Yeah, yeah. I avoid that like the plague. Okay, what's number 3?

Well, that was kind of number 3.

So wait, we had number 1 was D.

Number 1 was D. Number 2, there are—

Oh, quit the razor blades. But the razor blade was— That was ibuprofen. And lectins and oxalates.

No, and lectins.

Yeah.

All right. Yeah. The 3rd one was ibuprofen.

Okay. All right. And much more in the book.

And move from America.

Yes. I was just going to say, it is the thing we know as soon as we leave the country, as long as we're not going to the UK or Canada. But as soon as you go to Spain or Portugal, it's like, oh my gosh.

Yeah, not a day goes by that, knock on wood, but I have a remission rate of 94% with autoimmune disease within a year. And these people will go to Europe on vacation and they can't help themselves. They have croissants and baguettes and pizzas and they don't react, they feel fine. And then they come back here and they go, "Oh, you know, Dr. Gundry cured me." No, he didn't, but, "He cured me and I can have all this stuff." And they start eating our bread, our organic sourdough bread, and they have our organic pizza or whatever. And within 2 or 3 weeks, their arthritis flares, their psoriasis pops, and they call me up and go, "What the heck? I thought you cured me." I said, "No." They didn't have glyphosate over there.

Yeah, you can't cure someone from glyphosate if they're like— you're never going to be able to eat glyphosate. Glyphosate, there's— it's— that is another razor blade. It is amazing to me because— and I talked to my husband about this— I go, we do everything to eat clean here, and yet the minute we go to Europe, we feel fabulous. We come back and we're getting— we're ordering you know, meats from the right place, like everything. And still it's—

yep, you know, yeah, I just—

garbage here.

I just took on an actor patient, a young guy, and I was talking with his wife and she says, you know, it's the weirdest thing over here. He struggles. He basically, you know, eats like a bird over here and he, you know, he's fat and he can't control his weight. And we go over to Italy, you know, on location and, you know, he's plowing in the pasta and the pizzas and the guy loses weight. And she said, what the heck? You know, it's not fair. And I said, yeah, we'll get into that. You're right.

Yeah. Understatement of the year.

Yeah, what the heck?

Oh well, but at least there are answers and doing the good work. Thank you for that. This is a really fascinating book, The Gut-Brain Paradox. We'll put all of your interviews, your products, all your nitty-gritty details at jjvirgin.com/gutbrainparadox. We have so many links for you, so I'm going to move them all to that one thing. So that everybody can track you down, get your stuff, get your book. This new book is— every book you've outdone yourself. So you just keep outdoing yourself again. And that's hard. Most people write their first book, it's their best book, and it kind of is a downhill slide into home from there. But you just keep going and digging in, finding new research and getting more controversial.

I know. I just signed a contract for 2 more books. It'll be number 11 and number 12. So aye, aye, aye, aye, aye. You are crazy. Well, because each book actually leads me down another rabbit hole. And this current book led me into a new rabbit hole. So you'll see.

We'll see where we go next. All right. Well, I appreciate you. Thank you for taking the time.

I appreciate you being here for me to come on.

Thank you. Yeah. Maybe next time we'll do one in Palm Springs.

There you go. A reunion tour.

Yes.

Yes.