"Fix Your Diet To STAY HEALTHY Until You're 120+ Years Old!" | Dr. Steven Gundry

Five raw kidney beans will kill a human being in five minutes by coagulating their blood. To prevent Alzheimer's and to prevent Parkinson's and dementia, one of the things you got to do is the care and feeding of your microbiome, and that includes your oral microbiome. People with chronic medical conditions are the people who are most susceptible to viruses in general.

If you want to get the most out of your body and your mind and optimize your health, then you have to watch this video. It's all about how to cure disease and boost the immune system with Dr. Steven Gundry.

Up until 10,000 years ago, we lived primarily on the leaves of trees and we ate tubers that grew in the ground, like a sweet potato for a yam.

Love those.

Yeah, they're actually, they're pretty darn good for you. You were actually designed to eat them. And 12,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, we switched over to things that we had never eaten before. And those were the grains of grasses and beans. Now, the reason we'd never eaten them before is number one, we didn't need to. There's never been a documentation of an ape eating grass or grains. Beans are so lethal that five raw kidney beans will kill a human being in five minutes by coagulating their blood. What? Five raw kidney beans.

Raw kidney beans.

In fact, you know, most people have heard of the poison ricin, the white powder you send to your elected official. Yeah, lots on the way to Washington. Yeah, that's another subject. So ricin is the lectin of the castor bean, and we'll talk about lectins next. lectin is the plant defense system. These are proteins that are designed to basically kill us in one way or another. And so, ricin, so powerful that about four molecules of ricin will kill a human being instantaneously. There's a great study that was written up in one of the journals about a few years ago, they decided to have a healthy eating day in Boston.

Yeah.

And they served the kids beans. and because it's so healthy, right? Part of the blue zone.

Yes.

And they had 30 or 40 admissions to the hospital with severe diarrhea, hypotension. And it turns out that it was all the fact that the beans were undercooked and beans are a plant baby and we're not supposed to eat those. And so no beans. No beans.

Zero beans.

Unless you use a pinto black. None of it, we shouldn't be eating it. You weren't designed to eat it. You have no defense against it. No matter how it's cooked. If you pressure cooked, pressure cook it, it's fine. Pressure cook it. What does that even mean? Put it in a pressure cooker. The modern pressure cooker is as easy as a rice cooker.

Got it.

It's one touch, it's not your grandmother's pressure cooker that blew up in the kitchen.

So then it's okay to eat. Yeah, so you can pressure cook beans.

Now the other thing, we weren't designed to eat grains.

Just a quick question before you start.

There, how much of it can we eat?

Does it matter once it's pressure cooked?

Obviously everything in moderation, but I mean. Yeah, well, like I was presenting.

20 beans are gonna kill me or what?

No, if you pressure cook them, they're fine. It's all good. Okay. And we talk about how to do this in the plant-based. Paradox, got it. But my personal feeling is the only purpose of eating a bean is to get olive oil into my mouth, and we can talk about that as we go along. Okay. So grains, for instance, everybody heard about gluten.

Yes.

All right, so gluten is a lectin. And again, a lectin is a plant's defense system. It's a protein that actually is designed to act like incoming guided missile attacks on the inside wall of our gut. And these things actually pry open the lining of our gut and actually break through the border. Really? Yeah, they really do.

That's what causes eczema and breakouts.

Yeah, exactly. acne, brain fog, irritable bowel. This is actually all part of that process. And so it's fascinating to see people who either have come to see me or have even read the book and then write on Amazon, oh my gosh, you know, I had this horrible eczema and now a month later it's all gone. And all I did was, you know, take grains and beans and nightshades away from my diet. and everything got better. So that brings us to the second kind of group of things we shouldn't eat. All of us are not from the United States, America. We're actually from Europe, Asia, or Africa. Every one of us. So, and even our Native Americans are actually not Native Americans. They're from Asia. You know, get over it. Right. So, None of us were exposed to an American plant until 500 years ago when Columbus started trade. So getting to know a new plant, a new lectin in 500 years is speed dating in evolution. I just don't think it can be done. For instance, the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after their native son Columbus brought them back. because they knew how dangerous they were. They were part of the deadly nightshade family. And they, when they started eating them, they always peeled and de-seeded their tomatoes because the peels and the seeds actually have the vast majority of the lectins. And it's interesting. Years ago, I was did my fellowship in children's heart surgery in London, England, and I had a house officer from Italy and he invited me up for pasta and tomato sauce. So I brought, you know, it'd be nice if I bought a couple cans of canned tomatoes, you know, help out.

Sure.

And he looks at, he says, why did you bring me this? We can't use this. So I said, what do you mean? Canned tomatoes? He says, it's got peels and seeds. You can't make sauce with peels and seeds. He says, ah, mama mia, what am I gonna do with you? He says, you can't use peels and seeds. I said, Why? He says, They're deadly. And I said, Really? And he says, yeah, everybody knows that. And then I thought back as a child, my mother, my grandmother was French and she taught my mother that you always peel and de-seed tomatoes before you slice them and serve them. So until I went to Yale, I had never had a slice of a tomato with a peel and a seed.

Wow.

And This was, you know, this has come from cultures. For instance, peppers. Peppers are the same way. They're part of the nightshade family. You'll never open a glass jar of Italian bell peppers and see peels and seeds, 'cause they're gone. And the most striking thing is the Southwest American Indians always peel and DC their peppers before they eat them. The hatch chili roast will be happening in another month. And what do they do? They roast their chilies, peel the scarred off part, de-seed them, and then they eat them or they make them into chili powder. Right. And you know, you can prove this in your grocery store. Buy a can of green chilies, chopped green chilies, open it up, you won't.

See any peels and seeds because they're gone.

So tomatoes and peppers, eggplant, potatoes and potatoes. Now the if you peel them and.

Seed these things, you're safer.

Correct. But you can pressure cook them and they're fine. And they're okay. Yeah.

Got it.

Now, there's two American beans that everyone should stay away from. Peanuts are not a nut, they're a bean. 94% of human beings carry a preformed antibody against the peanut lectin. We can take rhesus monkeys, our cousins, give them peanut oil and they will develop atherosclerosis, heart disease. Really? If we take the lectin out of the peanut oil and then give them the peanut oil, they will not develop heart disease.

So, if you get lectin-free peanut butter.

There is no such thing.

Dang it. Okay.

So, get almond butter instead. Yes, peanut butter. No, stay away from it.

You should eliminate 100% from your system.

Absolutely. We can take, and this has been done, men feed them peanuts, take their bowel movements, feed them to rats and you will grow cancerous cells in the rat colon because they've been exposed to the peanut lectin. Yeah. Love peanut butter though. Oh, you know, so I can have.

As much as I want.

And I went to medical school in Georgia, you know, Jimmy Carter, you know, man, peanuts are everything. Sandwiches in Georgia. Yeah, no, sorry, eliminated. Gone. Say goodbye.

This will help me live longer, have a happier, healthier body.

And then I won't have to operate on you when you have coronary disease. And you'll go, what? I eat so healthy, I'm having my peanut butter.

I heard this from an oral hygienist or a dentist or doctor who said a lot of the disease we capture.

Is through the mouth. Yeah, correct. Dale Bredesen, who wrote the End of Alzheimer's, who's become a good friend of mine, he and I are fascinated with the effect of the oral microbiome on dementia. And for instance, in the plant paradox, I wrote about, there's kind of a fun study in rats where you can take LPSs, lipopolysaccharides, which are the outside wall of bacteria. They're not living bacteria, they're just the dead bacteria. And in my book, you know, I don't swear, but I call them little pieces of shit because that's what they are. LPS is little, they literally are dead bacteria. And so these, you can take rats and you can swab one of their noses with LPSs. They're not living bacteria. They're pieces of dead bacteria. And the other side of the nostril, you can just put a cotton swab with nothing on, right? And you do that every day. The rats who get the swab up one side of the nose, their other side of their body gets Parkinson's disease.

No way.

Gets Parkinson's disease. The other side, you know, the opposite side doesn't. And you go, what the heck is going on? Well, if you think about it, your nose and your mouth are gateways to your brain. I mean, literally the back of your mouth and the top of your nose is your brain. Your brain's just sitting there. and so this is a direct shot into your brain. And as I talk about, I talked about in the Plant Paradox, but I really go into this in the Longevity Paradox, that to prevent Alzheimer's and to prevent Parkinson's and dementia, one of the things you got to do is the care and feeding of your microbiome. And that includes your oral microbiome because this is a direct shot. and you gotta take care of it.

So how do you take care of that?

So there are, believe it or not, certain bacteria, one's called P gingivitis that is now been isolated from the brains of Alzheimer's patients. And how did it get there? Well, it got there through your mouth, through bad dental hygiene, through gingivitis, that's how the name.

So you can get Alzheimer's through through your mouth. Not taking care of your teeth.

Exactly. Really? Yeah. And in fact, years ago, you know, I'm such an incredible nerd, there's a very famous marker of inflammation called the C-reactive protein, CRP. Almost everybody listening is probably at a CRP. There's a more specific one called highly sensitive CRP. Years ago I noticed that a lot of my patients with heart disease had elevated CRPs. And I said, you know, my wife flosses twice a day, literally. I mean, she's a nut. It's good, right? Yeah, it's great. I hate to floss.

I hate.

So I designed an experiment with, like, 500 people, and I asked them to floss every other day. Okay. And we'd measure their CRPs, and then we measured their CRPs every three months for a year. And the people who I could get to floss every other day, and that included myself, their CRPs came down to normal and they were elevated. And the people who flossed more than every other day, they had even lower. And so I wrote this paper for the American Heart Association that says that since CRP is very highly associated with developing coronary artery disease, that coronary artery disease in fact partially comes from the mouth. And if you want to prevent coronary artery disease, you ought to floss. I got honored by the American Institute of Oral Biology for my research. Everybody give me a big hand. But these dentists are right. You've got to, this is, there's a barrier between the bugs that live in your mouth and you and it's at your gum tooth interface and you've got to preserve that barrier. The same thing happens in the barrier in the wall of our intestines. So here's the deal. Your intestines are your skin turned inside out. That's all it is. That surface area of the intestines is the same surface area as a tennis court.

That's big.

Yeah, that's big. And everybody's kind of looking down there, there's no tennis court in there. Yeah, how'd they do that? Well, and we can do this because it's kind of fun. I'm fascinated with plants, as you know, the plant paradox. And plants are actually very intelligent human beings. They actually see, a new book has proven that plants see. So plants have a root system in the soil that they get their nourishment. And those roots are surrounded by a microbiome of the soil. And there's fungi and bacteria. And it's actually that microbiome that gets the food into the plant, gets all the nutrients into the plant. So we actually have roots and this surface area, those of you who remember high school biology, we have all these little projections called microvilli and think of it kind of as a shag carpet. And so we have roots that go into our intestines and everything we eat is actually the soil.

So our intestines are like the roots.

Yeah, our intestines. Out of our intestines are these roots. And the soil is what we eat. But the main component of the soil is the microbiome. So you've got four to five pounds.

Of bugs in my gut.

In your gut. And they're there. We used to think they were just a bunch of crap.

We actually need it.

We are not only need it, they control everything that's going to happen to you.

Do I want 10 pounds of bugs or do I just want four or five?

Well, actually the more diverse set of bugs you have, the more kind of mixing pot United Nations of bugs, the better off you're going to be.

In fact, why is that?

It turns out if you take, you look at what's called microbial diversity. In other words, you know, how many that we now know that there are at least 10,000 different species of bacteria that live in your gut. In fact, a few weeks ago, another thousand was found that nobody realized. So, your gut is basically a tropical rainforest and you've got all these creatures and things happening and one creature depends on another and if you tip the balance off, it's like introducing wolves back into Yellowstone Park, right? Whoops, we needed wolves, who knew? So there's this intense kind of communication dependence and the more diverse your microbiome is, the longer you live and the longer you live well.

So why is that?

Turns out that this root system is dependent on the nourishment it gets from all of these bugs.

Got it. So it would be like if you're trying to grow a plant or a tree in a desert, it'd be challenging because there's not enough soil.

Yeah.

And it would only thrive for as long as it can.

Yeah, in fact, you know, I should.

Put an oak tree in a desert, I guess, or whatever. It needs more nourishment. than it's receiving there.

Right, and you can actually, there's really cool experiments where you can have two identical plants planted right next to each other, and depending on the microbiome in that soil, one plant will thrive and the other won't. But we can go down a rabbit hole, it turns out in a forest, if trees sense that one of their neighbors is not doing too well, they will actually send roots and supports over to that tree.

That'S pretty interesting.

Yeah, too. Okay. Again, we won't go down.

Yeah, we go down everywhere. Okay. So. So all this. So what I'm hearing you say is that the gut, the microbiome and these bugs have a lot to do with how you can live well now and also for extending life. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah. So you take 105 year old people around the world and you look at their. And these. These are thriving people.

Not like about to die, but they can move around. They can.

Yeah, it's like Edith Morray who starts the book. That lady was 105 and a half when this picture was taken.

Wow.

And so she was in two inch wedgies. She walks her little Pomeranian and she's smart as a whip and she was one of the women who really changed my life. Her name's Edith Morray. She's Michelle in all my books. So anyhow, so you take these people and you look at their gut microbes they have the gut microbiome, the diversity of a 30 year old individual. And if you look normally at people as they age, their gut microbiome becomes less and less diverse. You ultimately have only a few species. So it's this, number one, it's this huge diversity that makes a big difference. Number two, we now know that there are certain bugs that really make the difference. And the longevity paradox is actually teaching people how to nurture the bugs that are very interested in keeping you alive. Another way of looking at this, you're basically a condominium for these bugs, for bacteria.

So how do we attract all these diverse good bugs?

I'm so glad you asked. So we know that good bugs like to eat certain foods. And a lot of this was actually based on, there's this fascinating creature called the naked mole rat. And naked mole rats, make sure everybody who's listening or watching Googles naked mole rats. And here will be my first controversial statement of the day. Naked mole rats have sometimes been described as a penis with buck teeth. Okay, so Google it.

There you go.

You'll see it. So these are probably one of the ugliest creatures in the world. Naked mole rats live in the Sahara Desert and they live in colonies very much like termites or bees. And they live in subterranean tunnels. And naked mole rats appear to have no end mortality. In other words, naked mole rats live at least 10 to 20 times longer than any other rat. Rats live about two years. Naked mole rats have lived 20-30 years. In fact, no one has actually known that you could actually have an end life of a naked mole rat. So they've been the darling of longevity researchers for a very long time. And in fact, hilariously, When I was a professor at Loma Linda, which is a blue zone, I had behind my desk this giant iridescent naked mole rat picture from the San Diego Zoo. And everybody goes, what's the deal, you're a famous heart surgeon, what the deal do you got this naked mole rat behind your desk? I mean, it's bright pink and purple. And I've been fascinated with naked mole rats because they're the longest, you know, living creatures. So naked mole rats have the same diverse microbiome as 105 year old people. Really? Really? And what are. What the heck is going on? Well, it turns out naked mole rats, unlike any other rat, eats Roots, eats tubers and eats fungi that are growing in this Subterranean area. So if you think I would like you to eat some roots and tubers and mushrooms, you're absolutely right, because the evidence is rather striking that the bugs that like these things are what keeps the naked mole rat living so long, unlike any of its other rat cousins who eat grains, and we can be sure to be talking about that soon. So this is the only rat that eats tubers and mushrooms and roots. and they have the microbiome of 105 year old people who are thriving. In fact, a study published last week out of Singapore showed that humans who eat two cups of mushrooms per week do not get Alzheimer's disease. And it's because two cups of any type of mushroom. Any type you want.

Just go to the grocery store. Go to the grocery store.

Turns out button mushrooms are second best of all mushrooms in terms of a compound that we now know is the secret of mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, which of course is the prized mushroom of Italians, is number one for these compounds. Now these compounds are polyphenols. They're actually cousins of polyphenols that are in green tea. And what happens with these compounds is that they're actually eaten by bacteria. Bacteria love to eat polyphenols. And the bacteria then, for lack of a better word, poop out these compounds that have been changed a little bit. And it's those compounds that enter our circulation. And a particular compound in mushrooms that's been manipulated by bacteria protects the brain from damage.

From Alzheimer's or Alzheimer's.

Wow.

So mushrooms.

Mushrooms. Eat your mushrooms.

Every week.

Every week.

What if there's a diverse of mushrooms or if you eat the same mushroom.

All the time, does it matter? It really doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. And again, the plain old humble button mushroom will do it for you. Just have a couple cups a week. Now, what I do is, you know, I take a bunch of different mushroom blends and- Mix it up.

Yeah, mix it up.

United Nations of mushrooms. Yeah, and I take mushroom capsules and I have a product that's actually lots of different mushrooms.

You just squeeze in your coffee.

Or whatever.

There you go.

Yeah.

Okay. I have a question now. So for people that want to live longer and be healthy while they live longer, not having to get surgeries all the time.

Right.

If you had three to five minutes Max to talk to someone who said, I just want to live long. I want to know the secrets to living longer. I got to figure out the keys, and you've got three minutes with them. What would you say in three minutes? are the things they must do every day or as often as they can for the rest of their life to extend their life.

The first thing they must do is realize that the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. The only purpose of food and preferably it'll be mushrooms that you pour the olive oil on. That's number one. The evidence that the polyphenols in olive oil if you really, you know, wanted to live well for a very long time, olive oil is the key. Two of the blue zones, actually three if you count the Achirolles, use a liter of olive oil per week. Now that's a lot of olive oil. It's like 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. So there's a beautiful study out of Spain that I talk about. where you took 65 year old people, and we'll dumb it down real quick. Two groups. One group had to use a liter of olive oil per week for five years. Then they changed their olive oil once a week at the clinic. The other group had to eat a low-fat Mediterranean diet, both Mediterranean diets of Spain. At the end of five years, the olive oil group had better memory, had improved memory than when they started. the low-fat group lost memory. The women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the low-fat group. People in both groups who had coronary artery disease, the group that got the olive oil had a 30% less incidence of new events versus the group that had the low-fat diet. And so if, you know, three blue zones and this study doesn't convince you that you better get olive oil into you, olive oil who grows brain cells. And it's not the oil per se, it's actually the polyphenols in olive oil. Olive oil, the polyphenols literally make your blood vessels slippery. And I've actually published data on this, that your blood vessels, you cannot stick cholesterol to blood vessels if you have olive oil in your system. So, you know, drink the dumb stuff. Do you drink it? Yeah, I do.

Wow. Yeah, I take a shot of it. Craig's always talking about How he can drink as much as possible.

But what I would urge people to do is, so you can cook an olive oil. This myth that olive oil oxidizes when you cook it is one of the worst internet myths there is. It turns out that olive oil is the least oxidizable oil. It's even better than avocado oil or coconut oil. It does not oxidize.

Oxidize, meaning like evaporate.

No, I mean it gets damaged.

Damaged, got it.

Okay. It turns out everybody sees olive oil smoking and they figure that's damaged.

It's not. It's not.

So you can burn it as much as you want. You know, cultures have been using olive oil to cook with for 5,000 years. And you know, there's not a lot of dead Italians from cooking an olive oil. Okay, so you gotta get olive oil. So that's number one.

Number one.

Number two, you gotta take vitamin D3. You got to.

Vitamin D3.

Not D. Yeah, well there's D2, there's D1. What's vitamin D3 and why is it important? So D3 is the active form of vitamin D. that we use, you will be shocked that people who have the highest levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream live the longest and live well compared to people with the lowest levels of vitamin D3. It turns out that you have to have vitamin D3 to activate stem cells activation. And we can, vitamin D is also.

Through the sun, is that correct?

Right. But it's nearly impossible to get enough vitamin D through the sun.

Really?

Nearly impossible. 80% of Southern Californians are vitamin D deficient because we're slathering sunscreen on us and we're wearing long sleeve shirts to protect ourselves. We're inside a lot. You know, I live in Palm Springs. It's pretty hot in the summer. Really? We tend not to go out a lot in the summer. So we don't have enough vitamin D. And so you have to swallow vitamin D. The University of California San Diego published a study that the average human being to have an adequate level of vitamin D3 should be taking 9,600 international units a day. So basically 10,000 international units. They found no one who had vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day.

You can't overdose on vitamin D. I.

Have yet to see vitamin D toxicity. and I've been measuring vitamin D levels for 20 years in patients every three months. I personally run my vitamin D level greater than 120 nanograms per milliliter for the last 12 years to prove I'm not dead. And so far, so good.

Right.

And here's, you know, just, you know, tell you how crazy this is. If I feel I'm getting something, if I'm coming down with a scratchy throat or something, I'll take 150,000 international units of vitamin D3.

How many capsules is that?

Three days. Well, so you can get 5,000s, right? So that's 10 capsules three times a day for three days. So I'm basically taking half a million international units of vitamin D to ward off a virus.

Everyone always says you should take vitamin C when you start to feel like a scratchy throat.

It really doesn't work. Vitamin D is probably one of the best antivirals that's ever been discovered.

So vitamin C really doesn't help that.

Much, or it really doesn't help that much. We can get into vitamin C, and I think everybody should take a time release vitamin C twice a day. And it's actually for a different purpose.

What's the purpose?

All right, a quick version. All right, quick version. So you and I are one of the few animals that don't manufacture our own vitamin C, us monkeys and guinea pigs. and we have actually all the genes to manufacture vitamin C. There's actually five of them. The last gene is turned off. It's called a ghost gene. Why do we do that? Well, we manufacture vitamin C from sugar, from glucose, and it's actually very expensive to manufacture vitamin C. So the theory is, and I like the theory, is we grew up in Africa with lots of vitamin C containing plants. in our diet. And so it was unnecessary for us to manufacture vitamin C. And the theory goes we'd have some extra glucose leftover that we could store as fat to make it through the winter when times are rough. And we're the only fat storing eight. So the problem is vitamin C is essential to repair collagen and everybody collagen. Okay, the reason smokers get wrinkles is collagen is broken because you actually repair cracks in collagen with vitamin C and smokers use up all their vitamin C with what's called oxidative stress. So they don't have any vitamin C. In fact, here's another controversial statement. If I've got a smoker with heart disease, I'm willing to trade him his smoking with him taking large amounts miles to vitamin C while I get the rest of his diet squared away rather than tell him to stop smoking. Now the reason I say that is, and I talk about this in the book, there's this fascinating island people called the Kitavans in New Guinea who smoke like fiends. They eat 60% of their diet is taro root, the other part of their diet is coconut oil, and they live into their mid-90s with no medical care but they've been studied extensively extensively, there has never been a case of a heart attack, heart disease, or a stroke in these smokers. What they do do is they eat a lot of vitamin C containing fruits and vegetables as part of their diet.

Olive oil as well?

They don't have any olive oil. They have coconut oil. That's their coconut. They don't have any olives down there.

So you can do without olive oil and still live a long life.

Yeah.

But you think olive oil will... Yeah.

Since olive oil is so readily available, you might as well. might as well. Okay, so anyhow, back to vitamin C. Yeah. You have to have vitamin C to repair the cracks in blood vessels. People remember scurvy, where people would die, they bleed to death on long ocean voyages. Actually, 50% mortality on those old ocean voyages, just dying from scurvy. And the British Navy, the reason they're called limeys is because the surgeon in the British Navy realized that if he gave them limes take on the voyage that they wouldn't die of scurvy. That's why the British Navy is still called Limeys. So vitamin C repairs the cracks in collagen and our blood vessels are flexing all the time. And so these cracks have to be repaired. And if they're not repaired, you basically bleed to death. We have a system of repairing those cracks and it's called cholesterol. And cholesterol will patch those cracks.

Interesting.

So, if you have plenty of vitamin C throughout the day, you'll be able to repair those cracks. And there's a wild study, I mean, head down a rabbit hole, you can genetically engineer rats to lack that final gene to make vitamin C. And they will live half as long as a normal rat. If you then put vitamin C in their water, they will live as long as a normal rat who can manufacture their vitamin C, but they're drinking the water throughout the day. So, vitamin C unfortunately... We have to manufacture it. We have to manufacture it and we've got some interesting tricks to do that coming up. But in the meantime, the average person should take like 1000 milligrams of timed-release vitamin C twice a day to cover their ass.

Wow. Okay. So the first thing I heard you say, this three minutes is turning into 20. It's okay. No worries.

The first thing I heard is olive oil. Oh, and olive oil is actually one of the tricks to activate the dose gene. Polyphenol and olive oil.

Okay. You will actually make vitamin C. Okay, there you go. So there you go.

Another good reason.

So have olive oil and vitamin D.

You have lots of vitamin D. Three. D3. D3. And then what's next to live a long life? Next is you gotta get some form of long chain omega-3 fat. better known as fish oil. And vegans have no excuse anymore. There is algae based DHA and EPA. But here's the deal. Your brain is about 70% fat. So if you want to call me a fat head, you know, I will pat you.

Yeah, yeah.

And I can just see now the internet lighting up. Fat head. So, half of the fat in your brain is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA. So, half, basically half of your brain is fish oil. And as I talk about in the Longevity Paradox, you look at people what are called the omega-3 index, which basically looks at how much DHA you have in you over the past two months. People with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains and the largest areas of memory, the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest memory areas, hippocampus. So mom was right when she said fish is brain food. She was absolutely, she didn't know why it was, but we now know it's DHA is really what makes your brain.

So what would you say are the four or five different foods that heal leaky gut?

Yeah.

And defend against viruses and...

So it's not, it's not what I tell you to eat that's important. It's what I tell you not to eat.

Okay, what are the four or five?

That's rule number one. So first thing is don't eat grains, period.

No grains.

No grains.

Zero grains.

Zero grains. And that includes rice, that includes corn, I just gave a paper at the American Heart Association three weeks ago at the Lifestyle and Epidemiology Annual Meeting where we looked at people with leaky gut and they had already been on a gluten-free diet. So that means they were avoiding wheat, rye, and barley. And they still had leaky gut.

They're eating rice, is not gluten or? Right.

Yeah, rice doesn't have gluten. Quinoa doesn't have gluten. Buckwheat doesn't have gluten. Corn doesn't have gluten. But we test these people. 70% of people who react to gluten will react to corn as if it was gluten.

Wow.

And I see so many people who are eating gluten-free who still have autoimmune disease and/or leaky gut. So when in this paper we took away not only their gluten but all lectins, major lectins, and that includes the nightshade family, unfortunately, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, kind of the Tom Brady diet to use another football example. He eats very similar to my program. Take away peanuts and cashews, which are beans, and have people, if they're going to eat beans, pressure cook their beans. Pressure cooking will destroy all lectins except gluten. And then we take away certain milk products, American cow milk products, and we showed in this paper that not only will they heal their leaky gut, which just by removing those things, But in nine out of ten people that we've now retested multiple occasions, they no longer react to gluten by their immune system. Now, I'm not saying that, guess what, if you follow my protocol, then you can have all the bread that you want. No, but it is intriguing that you can re-educate the immune system.

To defend itself against food.

To not get interested anymore because the gut is sealed.

So you could have it once in a while and it shouldn't affect it or penetrate through.

Correct.

But if you keep doing it every day, every meal, then it's going to.

Be the same thing.

So zero grains, no rice, no corn, until you heal the gut, then maybe every once in a while.

Yeah, and then what we do is we actually ask people, okay, let's reintroduce something and see how you feel. Don't get too comfortable though. Yeah, don't get too comfortable. And what we do in really bad autoimmune folks is that we will, you know, every three or six months, we're retesting their leaky gut and their autoimmune status. And, I mean, it's really kind of humorous sometimes we see that when people reintroduce things, their leaky gut starts again. I'll give you a great example, personal example. So years ago, when we first started doing autoimmune testing, we obviously do it on ourselves and so I did it on myself and my staff comes running in, oh my gosh, you know, Dr. Gundry, you have lupus. I said, I don't have lupus. Come on, you know, where's the lupus? no, no, no. You know, you're positive for anti-nuclear antibody, which is one of the good markers for lupus, an autoimmune condition. And I'm going, well, you know, that's interesting. My family, my father's side of the family has massive psoriasis. My dad was on methotrexate for 51 years.

It's like a steroid or like a cream.

Yeah, it's one of the immunosuppressants. Wow. Yeah, he was on an immunological.

So you wouldn't have psoriasis all over?

Yes, well, yeah, oh, you would have psoriasis everywhere.

Everywhere.

And so I said, and my aunt had it and my cousins had it. So I'm going, you know, that makes sense. I obviously have a predisposition to an autoimmune disease. And I said, I think I'll turn it off because I'm always experimenting with food. That's my job. And so I ate perfectly. I followed the rules for two weeks. Re-measured my anti-nuclear antibody. Done. Gone. Turned off.

After how many weeks?

Two weeks.

Wow.

I said, Eh, that's pretty interesting. So we actually did a study that we presented at the American Heart two years ago of 102 patients with biomarker-proven autoimmune disease, like anti-nuclear antibody, like rheumatoid arthritis, like Hashimoto's, Kelly Clarkson just to give you an example. And retested them at six months. And most of these people were on immunosuppressants, like what you see on TV every day. And we can- Drugs. Drugs. And in six months time, 95 out of the 102 people were negative for their marker of autoimmune disease and they were off their drugs. 94% success rate. That's not bad.

Pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Pretty good.

So, so then, so two years ago, I was in New York City working on actually the Longevity Paradox. And I said, you know, I need to rechallenge myself. Let me, you know, things are going great. So I was there for about four days. I had pizza, I had bread, I had ice cream, I had pasta, I had tomatoes.

Oh, Tastes good.

And I felt fine. So I come running back on a Monday to the office and I have them draw my blood. Boom. I'm positive for anti-nuclear antibody again. Wow. And I went, oh shucks. And I said, well this is interesting. I'm gonna turn it off. So I, you know, ate normally for two weeks, retested, Boom, turned off.

So.

When I give pronouncements on autoimmune disease, one colleague came up to me one time. She said, what do you know about autoimmune disease? I said, How dare you talk about autoimmune disease? She said, oh really? Well, you know, I can make mine come and go. And that's the point. you can stop these things. And all it is is a manifestation of leaky gut.

Okay, so three things you said so far of leaky gut, I'm hearing you say no rice or corn, which is zero grains, no nightshades, which are tomatoes. Does that mean like tomato sauce or if things are prepared a certain way?

Yeah, so here's the deal. Peel and de-seed your tomatoes. Peel and de-seed your peppers. The Southwest American Indians always peel and de-seed their peppers before they eat them or grind them into chili. They've known that from time immemorial. The Italians always peel and de-seed their tomatoes before they make sauce. And I get to interview chefs all over Italy. They all say, you know, you gotta.

We do this.

Yeah, you gotta. Yeah, you gotta do this. And I said, well, how do you know you got to do this? Well, my mother. Just know. Yeah. Yeah. My mother taught me. Well, how'd you know?

My grandmother taught her. Yeah, they know. Now, here's something that's interesting. Peanuts and cashews. I'm a big fan of peanuts. And I think the last time you came on, maybe the first time you came on, you were like, you can't eat peanuts anymore. And I didn't eat them because I was having, like, little rashes every now and then. And I was thinking it was probably, like, the almond butter, nut butter, just. consuming so much almond butter and peanut butter. And so I really cut back and I was like, okay, no peanut butter for a while and cut back on almond butter and felt fine. About a couple months ago, I started eating a lot more peanut butter and noticed it started coming back. And so I shut it off again and it went away. Now, why is peanut butter an issue? Why is it such a big thing?

So 94% of human beings are born with an antibody to the peanut lectin. And so now you go, so most of us inherit an antibody against the peanut lectin. And you go, well, wait a minute. When I was growing up, and probably when you were growing up, very few people had peanut allergies. Now, it seems like everyone does. Everybody's got peanut. Well, because our immune system used to be taught by our gut microbiome that, hey, you know, there's some nasty stuff out there, but we got your back and we're gonna handle it long before you ever have to deal with it. And you just, let's just, you know, use a Southern California example. There's a bunch of kids on the beach and they got a bonfire, not in the time of social distancing, right? and they're having a great time and the cops are looking at the beach and they're like, oh yeah, we know those kids are good kids, they're not troublemakers. We'll go have a donut and a smoke and just chill. So compare that, that you're in a disadvantaged part of a community and there's gang members and there's shooting and the cops, everybody is a suspect until proven otherwise and the cops approach you with you know, an uzi rather than an ice cream cone. And what's happened to us is that for the most part, our lines of defense against bad things like a peanut lectin are gone. Our gut is leaky so that our cops are always on hyper alert. So a little benign little peanut lectin comes in now it breaks And the cops go, oh my gosh, kill it, kill it. And that's why we got EpiPens with all of our little kids. Now, the same thing happens, most of us, number one, don't have a great microbiome that is able to fend off viruses, fend off bacteria like they should. After all, they are defending their home.

Right.

But more importantly, probably because most of us have leaky gut, most of our immune system that should be up in our nose, in our mouth, protecting us against a virus is down in our gut attacking whatever is coming through the wall of our gut. And it's completely distracted. Now, where I'm going with this is, you hear on the news that people with chronic medical conditions are the people who are most susceptible to viruses in general, to the flu, to the coronavirus, to whatever. And well, why is that? Why would having high blood pressure make you susceptible, more susceptible to dying from a virus? that actually doesn't make any sense. But if having high blood pressure is actually a sign that you have a leaky gut and that most of your immune system is actually down in your gut rather than patrolling the periphery like it should. And your immune system is, I mean, all the troops are down distracted. Then it makes completely sense that you would be susceptible to this. Let me give you a great story. Years ago, I was at the, I present a lot of papers at the microbiota meeting in Paris every year. And there was a fascinating paper that there are smelling neurons, olfactory neurons that live in our nose. that live in our kidneys and live in our heart. And you go, why would I need, why would my kidneys need to smell anything? Why would my heart need to smell anything? And it actually intrigued me until I realized in writing my next book, which is called the Energy Paradox, that these smelling organs in our kidneys and our heart smell bacterial farts, the fermentation products of bacteria. And they can smell good farts and they can smell bad farts. And if they smell bad bacteria farts, they actually activate the blood pressure system to make your blood vessels more rigid and give you high blood pressure. And what was striking to me, and I didn't know the reason way back when, is when I had people with high blood pressure and we put them on my program, one of the first things, the first calls I would get is, what are you giving me? What supplement am I taking that's making me lightheaded and dizzy. And, you know, I look at my nurse and I look at me, I'm going, There isn't a supplement that does that. You know, come on into the office, let's see. And of course, their blood pressure is really low. And we go, okay, you know, let's cut that high blood pressure pill in half. And then they call back a couple weeks later and say, I'm dizzy again. And we bring them back in. Sure enough, their blood pressure is low. Okay, let's get rid of that blood pressure. What we were doing, is we were changing the bacterial signals in their gut, and they were now getting, if you will, good farts that they were smelling in their kidneys, and their blood vessels were reacting. And we eventually developed tests that we could prove that, in fact, that happens, and publish that data as well. So this is not science fiction, it's not conjecture. And so we now know that there's this incredible symbiotic organism that is us. And the more we learn about the really important part of us, the more it almost makes sense on how we work. And returning to Dr. David Kessler, the head of the FDA, he said, you know, when you and I, Steve, were going through medical school, we were taught that the intestines was just a hollow tube. And all they were there for was to absorb protein, fat and carbohydrates, end of story. That's all we were taught. And he says, who could have guessed that living down there were 100 trillion, five pounds of bugs that were essential for the functioning of everything? It's like Dr. Amen says, who would have guessed that mental illness is coming from the gut?

They're connected. The heart and the brain and the gut.

Yeah, the gut-brain connection. He said, who would have guessed? Because all of us thought, that's just a tube. And yeah, there's a few bacteria down there and they're really bad and we poop them out and, you know, it's just waste. Right. Now we know. They are us.

Thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, make sure to leave a like below and a comment and subscribe. subscribe to this channel. And if you want to learn how to heal your body with food, then make sure to check out my interview with Dr. Mark Hyman right over here. And for a full playlist of the School of Greatness interviews, check it out right now.

People don't connect the dots between how they feel and the food they're eating.