How To FIGHT VIRUSES & NEVER GET SICK AGAIN | Dr. Steven Gundry & Lewis Howes
In this extensive interview on the School of Greatness, host Lewis Howes talks with Dr. Steven Gundry, a former cardiac surgeon turned longevity researcher, about the central role of the gut microbiome and its symbiotic relationship with human health. Gundry explains how the microbiome directs metabolism, immunity, and even mitochondrial function, arguing that "all disease begins and ends in the gut." He contrasts the lifestyle of Blue Zone populations—low animal protein, high plant diversity, community, and olive‑oil‑rich diets—with typical Western habits that rely on processed foods, lectins, and chronic medication use. The conversation covers specific mechanisms such as telomere lengthening with vitamin D, the TMAO pathway from animal protein, wheat‑germ‑agglutinin–induced vascular inflammation, and the protective compounds in olive oil, red wine, and coffee fruit. Gundry critiques over‑use of NSAIDs and statins, promotes targeted supplementation (grape‑seed extract, magnesium, methylfolate, methyl‑B12, inulin, etc.), and describes his own protocol of dozens of supplements to compensate for modern diet. He also discusses fasting, time‑restricted eating, and detox strategies (activated charcoal, chlorella) to eliminate heavy metals released during fat mobilization. Throughout, he emphasizes listening to the gut, personalizing nutrition to one’s microbiome, and the importance of community, movement, and sunlight for longevity. The interview ends with Gundry’s three core truths: gut health is the root of disease, trust your gut, and find a soulmate.
Chapters
We missed the fact that there was this symbiotic, sentient being that was not only living in us, but was directing us.
I think you gotta have a dream.
The School of Greatness.
Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. We have the icon, Dr. Stephen Gundry in the house. I'm super glad that you're here. You're one of our most popular guests.
Oh my gosh, no.
You are one of our most popular guests. And you have so much great information, yet every time we come out with an episode, there's always some controversy. There's always a few people that are questioning your research that are thinking, well, what about this and what about this? We get 90% amazing comments from people that are like, Yes, I love this information. 10%, question it. Why do you think People like to question or poo poo on a few of your research or topics or books. Why do you think that is?
You know, people, you know, I am, I guess, an irritant to established thoughts and, you know, I think people see me as a challenge to their thinking.
What they've always known.
Yeah.
And, you know, most of what I espouse now, I didn't believe any of this until a little over 20 years ago.
I mean, you personally too.
Me personally, yeah. I mean, for instance, I thought supplements made expensive urine. I firmly believed that. I told my patients that. And then, you know, I saw what happened to Big Ed all these years ago, and I said, maybe I should look into this. started playing with myself with supplements. And then when I started 20 years ago this restorative medicine practice, I approached it as a research project because I've been a researcher all my life. And so I tell patients, look, go to Costco, go to Trader Joe's, there wasn't an Amazon back then, go to health food store and I want you to buy grape seed extract or I want you to buy fish oil or I want you to buy magnesium. And I want you to buy methylfolate, and I want you to buy methyl B12, and let's see what happens on your blood work. And let's see what happens to you. And eventually, you know, I got so good, you'd see the results. And then they'd come back in three months, and one of these wouldn't be where it was. And I said, you,'re not taking such and such. Oh, yes, I am. Well, no, you're not. And he said, how do you know? I said, well, because here it is on your blood work. And we've even published results of looking at people's vascular flexibility, how their blood vessels expand and contract, which in longevity, you are only as young as your blood vessels are flexible. And so there's this cool machine.
Is the telomere connected to Blood? It's different, right?
So telomeres are the ends of chromosomes. They're the cap on chromosomes. And if you like the telomere theory of aging, which is just one of the theories of aging, then you want long telomeres. And for instance, getting back to a supplement, it turns out that people with the highest vitamin D levels in their blood have the longest telomeres.
Really?
Really?
More vitamin D equals longer telomeres. Yeah, so equals longer life, hypothetically.
Longer health span.
Health span.
Yeah.
So, you know, the longer you live living well is kind of how you win the game. Yeah.
Right?
It's interesting, my girlfriend just sent me a clip. She's going through health nutrition school right now for herself because she wants to learn about everything she's putting in her body, workout, nutrition, lifestyle. And she just sent me a clip of Dan from the Blue Zones talking about Blue Zones. And I just watched a short Netflix series last week where they went to Sardinia, I think it is. And they did the research on the Blue Zone in Sardinia. And from my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, most of the people in the Blue Zone in Sardinia at least Don't take supplements.
Correct.
They just walk up at the hills every day. They spend time with their loved ones. They go to church. They are part of the community. They eat more carbs, I think it was, than protein, I believe. And they just have a rich lifestyle, right?
So.
But most people don't have that kind of environment. So you're saying we need to have supplements to create more of that environment?
So that's actually a really good segue. It turns out that if you look at hunter-gatherers, at least that we can examine, they eat about 200 different plant species every year on a rotating basis. And they're eating the animals that were eating those plant species as well. And so what I tell anyone who will listen is if you think that you can eat 200 different plant species, all grown organically and eight feet of long soil. Yeah, yeah. Then I'll put in with you that you probably don't need any supplementation, but none of us do that. And in fact, if you look at even, you know, avid organic eaters, most of us have these maybe 20 go-to foods that we eat on a rotating basis.
I have like five, maybe.
Well, I'm glad you said that.
I eat chicken, I eat broccoli and sweet potato pretty much all day.
Yeah, so it turns out when I was first doing this, it turns out that most people have five go-to meals per week that they repeat over and over and over again. And they just, is that bad for.
Us or is that good for us?
It depends.
I think, I throw in mushrooms in there, I throw in onions, all the stuff you tell me to do.
Yeah, I think it depends. But I think, again, if you live in a blue zone. And, you know, I'm the only nutritionist who ever spent his career in a blue zone. Yeah.
There's seven blue zones.
It depends on who wants to argue about them with Dan and me. There were blues, blue zones discovered since he wrote his book, like the Acheiroles.
But you lived, you practiced in a blue zone doing 10, 000 heart surgeries, and you told everyone. Not to do supplements. Correct. You weren't prescribing these other blue zone methodologies.
Nope.
You were practicing traditional medicine.
Correct, because you know, you, you know, thank goodness there's coronary bypass surgery to, you know, fix you up. Fix you up, fix you up.
Don't worry about what you eat, just fix the heart this way and then you're good.
You're good, and I'll see you in five years when you clog these guys.
I need another check in or you need this medicine or whatever.
Yeah, and you know, And I got very good and very famous for doing re-operations over and over again on people. In fact, the most re-operations I ever did was ninth time in.
Nine times on one person?
Yeah, well, I was the ninth one.
In to their- I knew the ninth one person in. They had done eight other surgeries before- Somewhere else. On the heart.
On the heart.
Holy cow, how are they still alive? Well, and how do you survive through that much trauma?
Your body really, Hippocrates used to say that all of us have this green life force energy that translated from the Greek, which sounds very California, but it's true. The more I kind of witnessed this, you, any creature has this innate desire to do well, to have perfect health. But Hippocrates used to say, and I've written this in my books, that Hippocrates says there are external forces that keep this green life force energy from blooming. And the doctor is supposed to be a detective and find out what are these external forces. and remove them, teach the patient how to remove them, and then the patient will take care of himself. It'll bloom. And the guy was right about so many things, and he's right. So for instance, all I do is do detective work, find out, okay, why have these things happened to you? And let's remove these. Let's see what happens.
Hey, it's Lewis here and I would love to connect directly with you. Text me the word YouTube to my.
Number.
614-350-3960 to receive weekly inspirational messages from me.
Like just this morning.
Yes, tell me.
Just this morning. I put out an Instagram a couple days ago about some really cool millet pasta that is now available. and it's really good. And millet doesn't have any lectins.
It's not a grain, is it?
Millet is a grain, but there are only two grains that don't have hulls and don't have lectins: millet and sorghum.
Okay. So it's better for you.
Oh yeah.
Because it doesn't have lectins.
So it doesn't have lectins.
Whereas rice has lectins, is that right?
Yeah, all of rice has a lectin. Wheat has lectins. And so somebody writes in and says, well, you know, you don't know what you're talking about because there aren't any lectins in pasta because you cook it and the lectins are gone. And whole wheat pasta doesn't have any lectins and because you cook it. And I'm going, well, sorry, but gluten happens to be a lectin. Sorry about that, it is. And guess what, pasta, you know, wheat pasta has gluten and you can't break gluten down with heat. Sorry about that. In regards to your whole wheat pasta, the hull has wheat germ agglutinin, which is another really nasty lectin and not to go down this trail, but it attaches to a sugar molecule on the lining of our blood vessels called Neu5Ac and we can get in Neu5Ac, and it sticks there like a splinter and your immune system, your white blood cells attack it and then cholesterol slaps onto it. And so you lift weights, right? So if you're lifting weights, you build calluses around a ring, right? Those calluses are to protect you from that constant trauma.
From ripping off your skin.
And one of the things that what is interesting is these plaques and arteries are actually calluses from irritation. And one of the best ways to irritate the inside of your arteries is to eat whole wheat pasta. And so that's a round way of saying.
Yes, but in Loma Linda, in Sardinia and other blue zones, at least from what I understand, they eat rice, they eat pasta, right?
Yeah, well, yeah. So Sardinia actually uses a bread that's kind of half wheat and half buckwheat.
It's like less gluten or something or is it?
Yeah, less gluten. But Sardinia has the highest incidence of autoimmune disease of all of Europe.
So they live a long life in spite of eating gluten?
Correct.
It's for the other factors of lifestyle, of community, of exercise that keeps them living a longer life.
Right, plus they're not taking antibiotics at every turn, they're not taking ibuprofen for pain that blows holes in your gut wall. They're getting up with the sun, they're going to bed with the sun. So there's lots of factors. They drink, Sardinia uses a liter of olive oil per week. They're one of the blue zones that do that.
Which is something you believe in highly.
Which really makes up for a lot of, a lot of mischief. And we're with each passing year, we're figuring out, okay, how is this stuff doing all this? I'll give you another example. So the Cleveland Clinic a few years ago discovered a chemical called TMAO that I write about in all my books that they say damages blood vessels. It really damages it hurts them. And they have punch of papers that show it. And they proved that TMAO is manufactured by gut bacteria eating animal proteins, certain animal proteins, and breaking it down into TMA. And then it goes to your liver and makes TMAO. So they found some vegans, and vegans didn't have any TMAO in their bloodstream. They go, oh, look at that. Isn't that cool? Here vegans, we want you to eat some animal protein and they got some of them to agree. And let's see if you make TMAO. And lo and behold, they didn't make TMAO. So they had a different set of gut bacteria. So they said everybody should be a vegan. Well, that didn't go over well. So one of their researchers to their credit said, hey wait a minute, you know, the Mediterranean diet, not a lot of heart disease, and you know, they're eating salamis and they're eating cheeses, what's with that? So they say, hey, that's a good question. So they found that there is a compound, I may get it quite wrong, but it's 1,1,3-dimethylbutanol that paralyzes bacteria. The enzyme system- Good bacteria or bad? It doesn't matter, just paralyzes their enzyme system so they can't make TMAO. even if you fed them meat.
TMAO is bad.
Is bad. According to Cleveland Clinic.
Okay.
So they said, well, where is this chemical? And it turns out it's in olive oil, it's in red wine, and it's in balsamic vinegar. So they went, wow, there's this chemical in these foods that are native to the Mediterranean diet that kills the TMAO. That prevents TMAO from being made.
Interesting. And it's olive oil.
Olive oil, red wine, and balsamic vinegar.
Interesting. Two out of the three I don't like.
Well, well, so. So, you- have to have more olive oil. So the point of all this is, is holy cow. There are components of, you know, a really healthy diet that's preventing, if you believe the Cleveland Clinic, the manufacture of this compound even though you were eating meat.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So you could eat meat and still not get away with it and get away with it if you're doing these other three things.
Correct.
Heavily. Which Sardinia sounds like they do.
They do.
Interesting. So they have the highest concentration of, or one of the highest concentrations of autoimmune diseases. Correct. In Sardinia. And you think that's in Europe? In Europe. You think that's because of the gluten intake? The.
Yeah.
My.
Yeah. humble opinion is it's because that they are actually the highest bred and- Carbs, eaters pasta in Europe.
Yeah, they do very low protein, I.
Think is the- yeah, and I agree with that.
Less protein.
Less protein.
Why is that?
Well, again, in the longevity paradox, I think what's missing in the discussion of blue zones is not the commonality of foods that they eat. because they have wildly different diets. I mean, the Okinawans eat 85% of their diet is sweet potatoes.
Yeah.
And they have very little fat. And whatever fat they have is actually pork fat, lard. And they eat very little rice and they eat very little soy. And the soy they do eat is miso, is fermented. So to say a blanket statement, all the Blue Zones eat grains and beans is actually not true. Sardinia uses a liter of olive oil a week. Crete, another blue zone.
They put it on their bread, on their pasta.
The only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. Correct. A liter of olive oil a week in Greece. So, a very high fat diet. And so the difference, I think, in all the blue zones is that all of these blue zones, including Loma Linda, have very little animal protein as a part of their diet. And the Adventist Health Study, which has been ongoing for a very long time, looking at the factors in longevity in the Adventists who are, you know, the longest living people in the United States.
Is that Loma Linda?
Yeah, Loma Linda. Is the vegans of the Adventists have the least heart disease, the longest lifespan, and A colleague of mine, Gary Moray, who's been studying this for years, has shown that for every little bit of animal protein that enters the diet of an Adventist, the more heart disease and the more mischief you see.
Adventist?
Yeah, so the Adventists, we could do a whole thing on the Adventists. Because actually the Adventists, well, We owe breakfast cereal to the Adventists. William Kellogg and Harvey Kellogg were physicians at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was an Adventist health sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. And both of them really wanted their patients to eat whole grains. Frosted Mini-Wheats. Well, yeah.
Throw a bunch of sugar on it.
And we could really go down this rabbit hole because It was thought that whole grains would prevent young men from having evil sexual thoughts and masturbate.
Really?
Really.
I need to Google and find this resource. Yeah, yeah. Wow. But you had sugar, that was crazy.
They couldn't get people to eat whole grains. It tastes bad. They could taste bad. So they said, okay, we're gonna homogenize.
50 grams of sugar on it.
Yeah, we're gonna homogenize this. and we're gonna make corn flakes. They actually learned to make corn flakes from C.W. Post, who was also there.
Interesting.
And the reason Kellogg's corn flakes exist is because one of the brothers said, you know, nobody's gonna eat this until we put sugar in the horse. And the one brother said, no, no, no, we can't put sugar in it. So they broke. And so the Kellogg's Corn Flakes company was actually the first company that advertised a pre-digested food, which was, and it was easier on your digestion. And that breakfast was by far the most important meal of the day.
Wow. Good marketing.
Exactly. We should be breaking so many myths of what we actually believe is the truth is the product of good marketing.
What is the, I mean, it sounds like for the first half of your career, you had a certain set of beliefs based on your training and the information that was provided to you in the medical space.
Yeah.
And I would say you're in your second half of your career now, right? You're in phase two of it, I guess.
Yeah.
And you've had to relearn and unlearn and research and test and guinea pig on a lot of these different things. What are the things that you think are true now that in 20 years are going to be false? or are going to evolve into a different way of thinking?
Well, gee, I hope everything in 20 years is different than what I think now. I mean, I really do. Because we'll have far more research. And remember, research means look again. Research.
And look back and look at the information.
Yeah, one of my mentors at the NIH, Andrew G. Morrow, always used to say, There is nothing new to be discovered. but there's everything to be rediscovered. And I think when you kind of look at it that way, you go, I mean, for instance, Michael DeBakey, one of the fathers of heart and vascular surgery in Texas, back in the '50s and '60s when cholesterol came into the forefront, he always used to say, look, cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. It's an innocent bystander. And just get off of this. It's gotten trapped in an inflammatory process, but it didn't cause the inflammation.
What caused the inflammation?
So, for one thing, if you have a little wheat germ agglutinin stuck to the inside of your blood vessel like a splinter, that's a really good cause of inflammation. So, you know, and I wrote about this in Longevity Paradox, let's suppose I'm an alien sent to orbit the Earth to send back to high command my observations. And one of the things that I could send back to high command is I've been watching the freeways in LA, you know, and I can tell you without a doubt that ambulances are the cause of accidents. Because every time there's an accident, I see an ambulance. Right. And so, interesting. So again, causation is not correlation. Correlation is not causation. So we could make an observation, which I could make in the operating room every day, that I see cholesterol plaque on the inside of that artery. So cholesterol must have caused that plaque. But DeBakey would say no. Cholesterol is basically a callus that is piling up on an irritation to protect that underlying structure.
Yeah.
And that's why we see these plaques regress when you take away the irritation. Just like if you stop lifting weights, guess what? Your callus goes away.
How do you take away the irritation?
Stop eating those things.
And what are those main things? So, I mean, I want to talk about meat for a second. Do you eat meat?
Yeah, it's good. Yeah, I do eat meat, but not a lot.
Not a lot. And.
But I'm hearing-- Speaking of irritation.
Because meat causes irritation.
So there's a, okay. So I mentioned Neu-5AC, the little wheat germ agglutinin likes to stick to, it's a sugar molecule. You and I have the lining of our blood vessels with a sugar molecule called Neu-5AC. There won't be a test.
Okay, I'm not going to remember-- who knew?
Okay, just remember who knew.
Who knew?
So beef, lamb and pork have a different sugar molecule lining their blood vessels called Neu5Gc. They differ by literally one chemical. What happens is these two molecules look very, very similar. And in us, when we eat Neu5Gc...
Beef, lamb and pork.
Beef, lamb and pork. Many of us make a antibody to that sugar molecule because it's foreign. And that antibody, when it sees our blood vessels with its Neu5Ac, it mistakes Neu5Ac for Neu5Gc. And in a case of mistaken identity, you attack your own blood vessels.
So that's- B-flammin' pork or so bueno.
So that's why. if you look at large studies, there is an association with red meat and increased heart disease. It's not that red meat has any evil substance in it. It's this dumb sugar molecule.
And so it's a molecule within the red meat.
Yeah, it's in all the blood vessels in the red meat. That will attack your... That you will make an antibody to because it's foreign.
To attack against it.
And then you'll attack your own blood vessels.
And what happens when you attack your own blood vessels?
Inflammation. And then the cholesterol comes and you get a callus and then you have heart disease. It's all at the end.
But what about all the people that are swear by the carnivore diet and eating more meat and this is actually what's gonna make you leaner and your skin's gonna clear up. There are some people that swear by that research.
And unfortunately, some people credit me as the father of the carnivore diet. Oh, because the carnivore diet is eliminating all forms of plant material which have lectins. And Paul Saladino said, you,'re the guy who started me down this path.
You know, I couldn't eat all these plants, so I gotta eat meat.
Yeah, it's obvious that plants hate us. You were right, you know, there's not a good plant in the world. You're wrong about that. You can't be too careful, and if you just eat meat, you'll be fine. So it's the ultimate elimination diet. And I have nothing against it as a- A carnivore diet? As a short term diet, as long as, for instance, you're getting grass-fed, grass finished beef, you're getting wild fish, and so on down the line. What I have a problem with is, first of all, there is no society, long-lived society, that has followed a carnivore diet. There is none.
No blue zone.
There's no carnivore blue zone.
Right.
And- They're mostly vegan blue zones, right?
Mostly vegetarian. Vegetarian. Blue zones. So- They'll have some egg, they'll have some- Exactly.
They'll have some- yeah.
And they're actually Some cool studies that Parmesan cheese extends your lifespan.
You're speaking my language.
Yeah. So anyhow, find the society that lives with all meat. They're all meat. Interesting. I mean, even the Eskimos, even the Nordic herders knew that they, for instance, couldn't live on protein alone, that they actually had to have a huge amount of fat in their diet to balance the protein.
Okay, so I had Dr. Rhonda Patrick on and I asked her and she does a lot of studies and she's, I think, wearing a glucose monitor. She's constantly testing like what's working. She said grapes were the worst thing you should eat because it spikes you.
So much more than any other type of sugar. That's very true.
Grapes are the ultimate sugar bomb. Yeah, it's horrible for everything. For everything. Which is you think as a kid, oh, have some grapes. You feed your kids these things, which.
Is worse than a candy bar, it sounds like. Oh, yeah. Parents are feeding their kids apple juice and grape juice. And this is... Apple juice is no good.
Holy cow. If it's like fresh apple juice or.
Is it with these sugar added to it? So, when it says no sugar added on the label, what that means is there's so much sugar in here already, we didn't have to put any more in.
Right. That's... What's the difference between an apple and apple juice?
Well, they're both horrible for you.
Apples are bad? Oh gosh. I thought apples were good for you.
With all the different vitamins and An apple when I was growing up was this little bitty thing about that size and maybe four bites and you were done with an apple. Now it's the size of a grapefruit and they got these names that ought to warn you, you know, Honey Crisp.
It's the most. That's the best kind. That's the best kind.
Yeah, and it's like, wait a minute. It's so good. But yeah, because.
So much sugar.
It's pure fructose. And fructose is, and you'll see in my upcoming book, the Energy Paradox, paradox, that if you want to impair your energy production, fructose is the gift from God to impair your energy production.
To hurt you.
To hurt you.
Bananas too?
Any fructose is just lethal to your mitochondria.
So we just got to eliminate all fruit?
So for instance, your fruit smoothie protein shake that you guzzle down to go work out, is probably the worst possible thing you could do for your mitochondria and your energy. The worst.
Well, here's what I have been doing. I've been doing more of just, I just tell them half a banana.
So, I have a green.
I have a green.
If you have a green, it is a prebiotic fiber. So, it is, it's a starch that you actually can't digest. but it gives your microbiome, your gut buddies, exactly what they want to eat to actually energize you.
Put no fruit in it.
Yeah, well, use a green banana. It works for me.
Green banana, gotcha.
You remember, I mean, the godfather of fitness, Jack LaLanne, always used to say, if it tastes good, spit it out. I mean, yeah, he used to say that. And, you know, one of the other things that I put in the new book.
How long did he live till?
96. And he actually probably, and I got to know him in his later years, I got to pick his brain. He probably wouldn't be dead. He got pneumonia and from what I'm told, refused to take antibiotics. And there are places where antibiotics are really useful.
Right, when something like that happens. How bad, you mentioned before you said a lot of interesting things. You mentioned about ibuprofen and other medicines that people take just to eliminate minor pains and aches and headaches. How bad for your body is taking a medicine in general, like an over-the-counter medicine for something smaller?
So, we used to, most over-the-counter medications used to be prescription medications.
Like a Tylenol or Advil.
Yeah, like an Advil, like Motrin and ibuprofen.
You still have to write a prescription for that.
Exactly. And there used to be a requirement that you could only take it for two weeks because it was so lethal. Wow. Just like...
Lethal in what way? It's like killing you, but it's...
It makes giant holes on the inside of the wall of your gut. It's like swallowing a hand grenade. And drug companies knew this. And the literature is there. I show it in the Plant Paradox. They knew this. And that's why I carried a warning that you cannot take this. This is a prescription only medication, and you can't take it for more than two weeks because it's going to blow holes in your gut.
And then it's going to take you a month to recover and heal.
Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you the number of athletes that came to my clinic with an autoimmune disease out of the blue following a sports injury that they were taken, you know, Advil like candy for the pain. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, they come up with lupus or rheumatoid arthritis or MS. And they go, what the heck? And their doc said, oh, well, you just got an autoimmune disease. Have a nice day. And here's a medication that you're gonna take the rest of your life that we use in heart transplants.
Wow.
And it turns out when we looked at them and saw what they were doing and we took that away from them, Give them a few months, they heal their gut, and boom, their autoimmune disease goes away.
Goes away. But as a doctor, you must have.
Prescribed, oh yeah, prescription medications for years. I had a knee injury, I had a meniscus tear, and I was swallowing Celebrex right and left and Advil, and it wasn't helping. And then I was getting fatter and sicker, and I'm going, what's the deal? I guess it's just getting old. I'm 40 years old at that point. So then when I stopped all that stuff and started healing my gut, low and behold, 70 pounds came off and my arthritis went away, my migraines went away, my high blood pressure went away. This is so interesting because I never.
Took medicine growing up as a kid. I think I told you I grew up in a Christian Science family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was more about healing through the mindset, healing through prayer, healing through your thought. Yeah. 'Cause my, well, this is the way my dad taught me. He was just like, you know, there is no such thing as a physical body. You are an idea. You are a thought, and a thought cannot be harmed. So therefore, you cannot feel physical pain. You cannot have an injury in the kingdom of God. And so, but I remember being like, but this really hurts. You know, it's like, ah, this is like, my hand hurts. Oh, I just got smashed with a football. You know, it's like, I broke three ribs. I'm like, there's pain here. And so it was always contradicting thought. And my grandfather would always say, you know, Christian Science stands for CS, which is common sense. And, you know, if you break something, go to the hospital, get it taken care of, and then go back to healing the mind and then go back to nutrition, things like that. Like, use it when you need to, but don't abuse it. Would you say medicine today is something we should use when you really need it, but you shouldn't be taking stuff for little minor aches and pains. You should be focused on healing from within the gut. Yeah. Would you prescribe that?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, for instance, I'll prescribe a statin drug for somebody who's just had a heart attack, who has stenosis, or who I did a bypass on, just temporarily. Until two weeks. Until I can correct the infection goes away. Well, until I can correct the things that got him into this problem. It's like, you know, if you break your leg, you're gonna wear a cast, but you're not gonna wear a cast the rest of your life.
Right. Some people take the medicine forever.
Yeah, it's like if somebody came in with pneumonia like Jack Lalanne and I go, oh, you have pneumonia and you're gonna have to take this medication the rest of your life to treat your pneumonia. And you'd look at me like, what are you talking about? Give me the 10 days of antibiotics. No, no, no. I want to manage your pneumonia. And so it's the idea of I want to manage your heart disease. I want to manage your diabetes. I want to manage your high blood pressure. Well, what I and many other people have now realized is that's ridiculous. You want to find out why you develop that, teach you to get rid of that, and then it all goes away.
So, it's good to take the medicine during that time when you need to and then find a solution in other ways afterwards. But don't continue on it. Is there any disease or infection or ailment that requires lifelong medication.
I haven't found one yet.
Because some people say like I've been on medication for 10 years and I take 6 to 10 pills a day.
You have to stop your immune system from getting all excited about every little thing.
From attacking itself.
Yeah, so I mean let me give you a great example. So, 95% of human beings are born with an antibody to the peanut lectin. That is.
You pop out of the.
Womb and you actually have an antibody to peanut.
But antibody means what?
Means you have a little, you basically have a piece of protein that recognizes the peanut lectin as a foreign material. When you eat peanuts and it says, attacks again. Yeah, oh my gosh, here's this little troublemaker and it attaches to it and it literally sends out a beacon that calls your immune system, says, here it is, come and get it. It's a foreign agent and kill it.
And that causes inflammation.
And that's what causes inflammation.
So, the 5% of people, you're saying.
I have a chance. Well, no, but here's the deal. When I was growing up, nobody had peanut allergies.
Oh, really?
Kids didn't carry EpiPens to school. There were peanuts on airplanes. Why? Because our immune system, because of our gut microbiome, all these hundred trillion organisms literally talk to your immune system and they literally send text messages. that says starting literally from birth, we actually now know before birth, it tells your immune system, okay, here's what you ought to be interested in, here's what we're interested in, here's where we have your back. I've got the most incredible front four blocking you, so if you need, you know, you need five, ten minutes to find the receiver downstream, don't worry, nobody's gonna get hurt.
Yeah, nobody's gonna get hurt. It's not, we got you covered, but if you're eating it all day long.
Yeah, so it just says, just chill out, these guys aren't important. But now what's happened is our microbiome is decimated, our gut is leaky, now all sorts of material are coming through the wall of our gut and our immune system is going, I gotta be afraid of everything. Anything that looks foreign, I ought to go after it. And so that's what's happened. so, for instance, I had such bad allergies as a kid and as a teenager and as a young adult, I was getting allergy shots, you know, every.
You were?
Every week. Now I don't have any allergies. I can be exposed. For instance, met a cat at a neighbor's house last weekend and very friendly cat. And I said, you know, I used to be really allergic to cats, you know, just pet a cat and, you know, I started waiting and, you know, it was running. And Kat and I became good friends, you know, I rubbed my eyes, and...
Nothing.
Nothing.
Wow.
Nothing. So, I've taught my immune system, or rather my bugs have taught my immune system, just relax.
And you build the good bugs through the good foods.
Yeah. Yeah.
Feed the bugs. It's like Jacqueline, give them what they want.
Not what your tongue wants.
Not what your tongue wants. Like Jack says, Do you wake your dog up for a cup of coffee and a donut. Oh, man, that's donuts though.
So, okay, back to this. Dr. Roderick Patrick, I asked her when I interviewed her, I said, okay, if you could only eat four things, just say hypothetically, you could only have four things that you can eat every single day, which is not the way to thrive because you want to have lots of diversity and all these different things. But if you could only have four things, I said, what are the best four things you could eat? She said, Wild salmon, avocado, kale, and blueberries. If you could only have four ingredients every single day, I'm curious what are your thoughts on those four or would you have a different four? If you could only have four things every day to help you live a long, healthy, happy life, what would that be?
So.
You could certainly do better than blueberries. Blueberries unfortunately have been bred for sugar content. So, your best berries, and there's a lot of things to like about berries, are actually blackberries and raspberries. Third on the list is strawberries and blueberries are actually quite a ways down the list.
Okay.
So, I'd be pomegranate seeds would be on my list. Not pomegranate juice, but pomegranate seeds.
The seeds.
The seeds.
That's one of the four things you should eat every day.
Exactly.
Why pomegranate seed?
A couple things. Pomegranate has some really cool, let's just use polyphenols, that really tell your immune system to behave itself. Number one, number two really keeps your vascular bed flexible, and number three has some compounds that probably really really help your brain long term. Really?
Interesting. Okay, so pomegranate seeds, what's number two?
So coffee. And particularly coffee fruit.
So what is coffee fruit?
So coffee fruit is what's thrown away. Coffee bean is a bean inside the fruit. And for instance, you know, olive seeds aren't very good for you, but olive fruit is incredibly good for you. and it makes olive oil. So it was discovered a number of years ago that coffee fruit, the literally stuff you throw away, has probably the highest percentage of BDNF brain-derived neurotrophic factor of any compound in the world. And so, you know, I just had Dale Bredesen on my podcast last week, and Dale says, oh yeah, if you want to protect your brain, get coffee fruit extract.
So is the coffee bean the seed of the fruit?
Correct.
So the bean is still.
So coffee is still really good for you. As long as you don't mess with it.
So just black coffee?
Yeah, black coffee.
Not adding some ghee or some. You don't like that?
You don't need to.
Okay, you don't need to. I like Bulletproof Coffee, but yeah, okay.
And Dave's a good friend of mine and we have a good time together.
You like the coffee fruit better than the The bean.
Yeah.
Yeah, the coffee. Well, do both.
Coffee is good too. Black coffee.
Black coffee is great for you.
No sugar, no cream. Okay, cool. Number three, what would you say?
Number three, bivalve shellfish. Forget the wild salmon.
Okay, forget the wild salmon. What's shellfish?
So clams, oysters, scallops. Those things. if you want to have a great functioning mitochondrial system, if you want a great functioning brain, there are such cool, what are called phospholipids, that you make most of the inner and outer membranes of mitochondria out of. And just to toy with your brain, if you look, there's a There's a phospholipid, particularly in shellfish, scallops, that's called plasmalogen. And there won't be a test on this either. So you can take Alzheimer's brains and you'll find that they are profoundly deficient in plasmalogen. And there's two studies in Japan of supplementing people with mild cognitive impairment with plasmalogens. And lo and behold, their brain wakes up and starts working again. With shellfish. With shellfish.
What's another, that's not shrimp, is that? Yeah, that's also shellfish, but it's not a bivalve.
Bivalve is, Bivalves, oysters, and scallops. Scallops, yeah. Something that's, oh, sorry.
Ooh, muscles.
Muscles, oh, I like that. Muscles are great. So I'm two for four, I like that. Okay.
Yeah, so that's what I'm taking on the island with.
Okay, and the fourth thing, So the fourth thing is any form of chicory. So chicory, radicchio. You know what radicchio is? Everybody thinks it's an Italian red cabbage.
Okay.
Come on, it's in every grocery store.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so chicory, Belgian endive is chicory. Caprese, you know, the Belgian endive, you go to Trader Joe's, they look kind of like a tulip bulb. Okay. A tulip that hasn't opened yet. you peel off the leaves and you use it as a dipping chip for guacamole.
Okay, okay, okay, yes.
So it turns out- Chickory?
Like a celery?
No, it's not part of the celery family. Okay. But the chicory family has inulin. And if you want to feed your friendly bacteria what they want to eat to take care of you, their home, you got to give them inulin. And the best source is chicory. And that's why you go, you have any salad in the south of France and in Italy, and I will guarantee you there will be some form of chicory. Interesting. So I want you to start eating radicchio. Okay.
Radicchio. And then you gotta pour every.
You gotta pour olive oil on everything. If you do a plus to it.
You put olive oil on. Okay, that's the fifth thing. Okay. Olive oil and coffee instead of ghee. Now, let's say you can't get any of this stuff. Are there supplements for all these things out there?
Of course.
Coffee fruit supplement.
I take two different kinds every day. Really?
Oh my gosh. Okay, chicory supplements, is all this stuff?
Inulin. And you can get inulin, you can get it as a sweetener, for instance, just like sugar, which I have no relationship with them.
Gotcha.
Is basically inulin.
So if you can't get all this stuff at your local a grocery store, get the supplements as a second best.
Correct. I mean, that's why I take about 120 supplements in the morning and about 80 at night.
Wow. Yeah.
I mean, what in- Because you're not.
Eating all the food.
Right. I can't possibly, you know, do what I can't be a hunter-gatherer. I mean, I can't be a gorilla that eats 16 pounds of leaves and twigs every day. Believe me, I've tried. It's, you can't do it. Yeah.
I'm curious about the different diets that are out there. You got vegan, you got vegetarian, you got keto, you got carnivore diet, you got all these different diets, right? Paleo, and they're constantly evolving and changing every two, three years. I think there's something that is the thing. I feel like keto is the thing right now that everyone's talking about. Paleo was five, six years ago. It's the only thing people talked about. Correct. Does each person need to eat differently, or does every person, should they be eating the same based on their blood type, based on their genes, based on their their family history based on the region of the world they live in, should we be eating specific for us or should everyone be eating the same?
We should be eating for our microbiome, period.
For our unique microbiome.
Yeah, and that's what we should be eating for because our microbiome constitutes the vast majority of genes in our body. 99% of all the genetic material that exists in us and on us is non-human genetic material. And our microbiome has the distinct advantage of rapidly reproducing and constantly changing and exchanging information from one bacteria to another. And so I happen to think that we've uploaded most of our decision-making processes to our bacterial cloud to take the work off of our genes. Because these guys, in the new book, the Energy Paradox, we now know that it's, I'm not going to spill the beans, so to speak, but we now know that that system, that microbiome literally gives instructions which we now can measure. We've broken the code. We've only speculated that they've done this, but now I didn't break the code, but scientists have broken the code of how in fact they talk to us and direct us. We really exist for our microbiome. And as long as... And what is our microbiome? The microbiome are the bacteria, the fungi, the yeast, the bugs. The bugs.
Yeah.
And 97% of the bugs in our microbiome are foreign.
The genes.
The genes are foreign.
Yeah, they are our human genes. They're bacterial genes. They're fungal genes. They're viral genes.
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. You and I... How many percentage of human genes do we have?
Well, believe it or not, we only... The human genome, we only have 20,000 genes.
How many total genes are there?
You name it. I mean, so the bacterial genome is trillions and trillions of genes.
Of bacterial genes.
Yeah, of genes.
And there's only 20,000 of ours.
And in fact, everybody thought when the Human Genome Project came out that we were going to prove that humans are by far the most complex species and in fact.
What do we find out?
It turns out Corn has more genes than a human.
No way.
Yeah.
Corn has more genes than a human.
And the sand flea has the most genes of any animal. Yeah, so this is all proof of.
The human genome project, right?
Everybody was so upset at the human genome project. What's wrong with you guys? Of course we have the most genes. Gene is more. And a piece of corn. Yes. More genes than you.
A piece of corn is more complex than you.
You mighty Louis Althusser. So, I mean, you're like this to a sandwich. And when you were sitting on your sister's couch, I know you said, you know, I am like this to a sandwich.
Exactly. Exactly.
So.
Okay, microbiome is the most important thing in our story about that. And we need to, you need to eat for that. More of the microbiome. Is that a microbiome, microbacteria?
No.
Well, that's a type of bacteria. Microbiome.
And microbiome is a part of our genes? No.
They feed off our... All the genes that if we did a gene survey of every gene that we could find in you, 99% of all the genes that we could find in you would not be human.
They would be so crazy to think about.
They would be foreign.
That's crazy, isn't it?
Well, yeah. So we need to live. Yeah, we've got this completely upside down.
When do we discover this?
What's important? Really, only in the last 10 years, since the human microbiome project.
It's crazy.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
And these are like super smart scientists and the human.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, we just had no idea when I was in medical school and up until the human microbiome project. we assumed that the GI tract, the stomach and intestines was just this hollow tube and you put some digestive enzymes there and all of a sudden you know you got proteins, you got fats and you got carbohydrates and then whatever was left the garbage you pooped out your rear end and that was it.
That was what we thought before 10 years ago.
Yeah and then all and Then all of a sudden they went, holy cow. For instance, there were books written about the gut-brain axis because we knew that the second largest collection of neurons was lining the gut and there's more neurons lining the gut than there are in the spinal cord. So it was called the second brain, the gut, the neurons in the gut. Well, now, as you'll see in the Energy Paradox, we were wrong about that. Those neurons are there to actually get messages from the gut to the brain. Talk to the brain. And then talk to the brain. So we missed the fact that there was this symbiotic sentient being that was not only living in us, but was directing us.
Wow. And we also need it to survive for their benefit. They live and feed off of us.
Yeah, we're their home.
It's crazy.
And as I wrote in the Plant Paradox and the Longevity Paradox, we know if you have, for instance, fat and sugar loving bacteria, which I call gang members, they will hijack your brain and make you go find those more sugars, more fats that they want to eat.
That's what causes addiction. You're addicted to it because it's craving, it's saying, you need more for you to feel good. What about mitochondria? What's the connection there?
So, the mitochondria are sisters of bacteria. Mitochondria are, so they are bacteria. They are engulfed bacteria that two billion years ago took up residence in another cell and in exchange for living in that cell, they said, We'll make energy for you. And as long as, so they have, so they are bacteria.
It's good, right?
They have, yeah, yeah.
And that's where, They create energy.
They create energy. They make energy.
Everything.
Yeah.
And so they want more mitochondria. For healthier mitochondria.
Yeah, the best part is, so you and I inherited all of our mitochondria from our mother. Dad's did nothing for that, sorry.
Okay.
We're just drones, right? It's just useless. So our mitochondria are inherited from our mother, which are ancient bacteria. And our microbiome is initially inherited from our mother because, as I told Maria Shriver, your mother took a crap on you as you came out the birth canal. And if you breastfeed, it turns out one of the huge benefits of breastfeeding we now know is that the woman inoculates her child with more bacteria and more fungi.
So it's good to breastfeed.
It's really important to breastfeed.
How long for you to breastfeed for?
However long you don't want to reproduce.
Wow.
Usually it's impossible to get pregnant when you're breastfeeding. Gotcha.
Gotcha. Okay.
About 10 years ago, I usually go to this microbiota conference every year in Paris and present my work. And the organizer, about 10 years ago, he said, you realized that the microbiome talks to the mitochondria. And I went, Really? And he says, well, think about it. He says, They're related, they're sisters. And I said, well, come on, where's the proof? And he says, you, watch, we're gonna find the proof. You just watch. And I said, you, know, I believe you. You're kind of the smartest guy I've ever seen in this field. And sure enough, you watch and you wait, and in the energy paradox, it's gonna blow your mind that there is now documented proof. I alluded to this in the longevity paradox that the microbiome talks to the mitochondria. And they basically tell the mitochondria if things are good down in the engine room, you guys, you know, churn out the energy. And if things aren't good down in the engine room, you guys probably ought to back off on producing energy because troubles ahead. Save yourselves.
Interesting. So, don't create energy when the gut is under attack.
Being good.
Why is that?
Why? Because everything's not working down there.
So, when you create energy, when things aren't working in your gut and your digestive system, what happens then?
Well, you don't create energy. That's why we have this epidemic of tiredness.
So, you won't create energy because the gut is not allowing it to signal to create it. Yeah. Huh? Because it's got so much it's probably trying to create it. It's just trying to defend itself.
Yeah, I mean think about it. We are overfed but undernourished.
Yeah.
I mean we have more conveniences, more everything. We have more food. We have energy bars, we have energy drinks, and everybody needs five cups of coffee to get through the day.
And.
It'S like, what a paradox. We should have the most energy of any species ever. We should have a lot more energy than those Sardinians who are climbing up hills in their 90s. But we can't get out of bed without a double espresso with some ghee.
Exactly.
Wow. And it's all because we stopped taking care of our microbiome.
Microbiomes are the key.
All of, you know, so these ultra processed foods, the ultra processed foods have taken away all of the stuff that the microbiome would normally eat.
Don't eat processed foods. Even if it's a healthy processed food.
There's no such thing.
All processed food is bad food?
Yeah.
I mean, even these, you know, miracle impossible burgers and, beyond.
Well, those are very processed.
They're very processed. And they're loaded with lectins, so knock your socks off.
They taste good. I had a Beyond Burger and I actually was like, wow, it tastes like a burger. Put a little cheese on it, some onion.
It's like, don't let a two by three inch muscle in your mouth dictate your life.
So what's better to eat if I'm hearing beef, lamb, and pork are...
So go have some muscles.
Okay, so if you're going to have a Beyond Burger or a beef burger.
Grass fed, grass finished, which one should you eat?
Well, neither, because they're going to be.
On a bun, but with no bun. So for instance, animal style. Yeah, exactly, animal style. So yeah, wrapping in some lettuce. Exactly, right? Yeah, and which one? Have some grilled onion. Of the two of them, they both have glyphosate, so just don't, oh, you mean the beef? Grass fed, grass finished beef.
Is better than the process.
Please look for grass finish.
Gotcha. Okay.
Because it's perfectly legal. There's no rule of what grass-fed means.
Yeah, you can just.
No, you could feed a cow grass for one day of its life and then take it to the feed lot and you can still leave it.
Wow.
That's crazy.
So you got to see grass-fed grass finished.
So I want to go back to the food you should be eating for your, your. Specific, well your specific type, your body type, your skin type, your blood type. Does this matter if you're a heavy workout lifter or extreme ultra runner? Does it matter the difference types of food to the quantity of food you should be eating?
Well, so if you're actively building muscle, you're going to need to eat more protein. But the idea that that protein should come from an animal or a plant doesn't hold water.
It doesn't matter where it shouldn't come from an animal's womb.
Well, so, I mean, a gorilla has more muscle than you and I will ever have.
Yeah.
You can do PX90 all your life and you'll never be as strong as a gorilla. Yeah.
But is that because of its genetic makeup and its functionality in nature? It's true.
One of the things we think happened was that we decided to not have as much of our intestines devoted to making protein available for muscle work. It's one of the theories of why we could never do that. But a horse only eats grass and weeds.
Look at the lion, the king of the.
Yeah, a lion, incidentally, all the great cats actually eat the abdominal contents first.
They eat the gut.
They eat the gut.
The intestines, the heart, the liver. Why is that? It's got more iron and fat. It's got more protein.
Plus, interestingly enough, it's got a bunch of microbiome. And the Hanses, when they make a kill, they actually out in the field strip all this chyme and stuff out of the intestines and they smear it on the cells and eat it. Almost as the best part. Almost as the best part. And you know, and the great cats will leave the muscles for the hyenas.
Really?
Yeah.
It's not good meat.
They want the good stuff. They want the fat and all the microbiome.
They eat the gut and they leave the rest. Unless they're still hungry.
Go ahead, pull up a video. You watch them, they're all sitting around the gut. Nobody's out there munching on a leg. I mean, there's six of them and they're all in the guts.
Is that just a natural instinct for them?
I'm sure their guts basically tell them.
This is like sugar for them.
It's like, I mean, let me give you an example from the new book. There's a fascinating study out of China. The more we're realizing that most of the signals to eat are actually coming from the microbiome. And there's some researchers in China that said, you know, one of the things about fasting, is you really get hungry and you really get hungry for a while. And I wonder if you're getting hungry because the microbiome is saying, hey, where's the food? Come on, go get some food. Because we know the gang members tell you to go get the crap. So what they said is, well, what if we had people fast? water only fast, but we give them 100 calories of prebiotics, fiber, sugars that we can't digest, but the gut microbiome can eat. Let's see what it does to their hunger sensation. And so they've done seven-day fasts, they've done 14-day fasts, and the amazing thing is they found that they had no hunger.
And this was 100 calories a day.
Of non-digestible fiber that it turns out that the gut microbiome said, we got this. Thanks very much. That's all we need. It's great snack.
You're not hungry anymore.
You're not hungry. We're not hungry. So you're not hungry. And it's like, holy cow. Let's turn everything we know on our head.
When do we learn this?
You'Re gonna see it in the book, Energy Paradox.
Yeah.
Wow.
Now, I just did a four-day fast last week. I finished it. I started on Saturday morning. I didn't eat Friday night and I went into Saturday or I had a dinner Friday night and I didn't eat Saturday morning. I went and did a workout and I said, you know what? Let me see if I can do a full 24 hours. I'm feeling good. I'm not feeling hungry. I've never done a full 24 hours. I've done like 18, 20 hours. Let me see if I can do a full 24 hour. see if I eat later for dinner tonight.
And I said, you know what?
I feel pretty good. I'm just drinking water. I said, let me see if I can wake up in the morning, I'll have breakfast, see if I can push it. And Sunday comes around, it's feeling good, and I have a coffee, black coffee, I have water, and I have a celery juice. And I'm like, you know what? I feel pretty good. Let me see if I can do another day. And I go four days like this, right? Where I have celery juice, black coffee, lots of water for four days. I felt amazing. I didn't really feel hungry. And it's a week, a week and a half, about a week and a half later now. And I feel like I just, I feel like it's still getting rid of like dead weight or something. It's like, I don't know what happened and I don't have enough research, but what happened to my body after four days of fasting Is that good for me to do once in a while? Does it benefit my longevity? What does it do for the gut and everything?
Yeah, so that was, so first of all, the vast majority of Westerners probably shouldn't embark on a prolonged fast, a three or four day fast, because we store heavy metals, we store pesticides, we store herbicides in our fat to protect us from those things. A swordfish has got lethal levels of mercury in it, but the swordfish is swimming around just fine because the swordfish, the fat has the mercury in it. It's like tuna, tono, you know, sushi lovers, dono is fatty tuna. So that's where all the the heavy metals are concentrated in the fat. So when we go on a fast, we start using fat from our fat stores. And as we liberate that fat, out come all the heavy metals, all the pesticides. Now, it goes to our liver, and the liver doesn't have a good detoxification system for particularly heavy metals. So you need phase one and phase two detoxification systems to work, and I have a product to do that. But the big thing is, the liver doesn't know what to do with heavy metals. So it says, I'm just going to throw this out in the bile, and I'm sure that's how I'll get rid of it.
In the poop.
In the poop.
Yeah.
The problem is we recycle. the mercury and the lead and the cadmium out of our intestines. So you actually set up this vicious cycle that you never get rid of those heavy metals. And this was actually proven.
So the four-day fast was probably not the best thing to do.
For you, you're probably okay because you don't have a lot of fat in you. But if you're going to do that, you've got to take activated charcoal. You've got to take chlorella, which will bind heavy metals.
And then-- you- will help eliminate it. Exactly.
You'll bind it and you can't reabsorb it. I suppose they're putting it through the liver and hurting the damn liver. Well, no, it'll come out the bile.
But then it'll be grabbed by chlorella and activated charcoal.
So if it's not grabbed by those two things, then what happens? So then you just recycle it. It goes back in your bloodstream. I mean, this was actually shown by a very famous professor, Ray Wolfe, Roy Walford from UCLA who was in Biosphere 2. You're not old enough to remember Biosphere 2. Biosphere 2 was this crazy experiment in the Arizona desert where they built these geodesic domes and they wanted to prove that man could live on Mars for a year and grow their own food. And so they locked the biospherians in this geodesic dome and the object of the game was they had to grow all their own food, produce all their own oxygen, everything self-contained, like kind of a little terrarium. So, needless to say, it was a horrible failure. And so these guys lost a third of their body weight in the first six months. And Ray Walford was a professor of pathology at UCLA here. And Ray's job was, he thought it was great because he was actually the father of calorie restriction. And he says, oh, look at this. Everybody's cholesterol is falling, everybody's insulin is falling. Wow, we're really skinny, but look at all the great things. And then part of it was he says, you know, we ought to be looking for heavy metals and stuff like that. And it turns out he wrote this obscure paper, and it's in several of my books, and it'll be in the Energy Paradox. He found that heavy metals went sky high in the biospherians and stayed elevated for a year after the end of the experiment.
Because they just recycled it.
Because they were just recycling it.
They weren't eliminating it.
And so we as... We don't want.
Heavy metals in our body.
We as Westerners don't want that. So how do we get rid of them? So you've got to bind them. You've got to bind them with chlorella and activated charcoal.
So if we take those two things on a consistent basis... Like every day. every day, even just like a charcoal supplement, right?
Yeah, just an activated charcoal supplement.
You take it every day. It helps eliminate. What is it?
Charcoal and chlorella.
Chlorella. Okay. Wow. So if you take those two supplements every day, it should help eliminate heavy metals and make you feel better. And your mitochondria will be happier.
Yeah.
Michael B. Will be happier.
Everybody will be so happy.
Okay, good. So, what does heavy metals cause? Does it cause inflammation?
Does it cause... So, heavy metals are actually a really good mitochondrial poison.
They kill the mitochondria, which hurts your.
Levels to have energy. Correct. And speaking of which, fruit is probably, fructose is probably, if you wanted to invent the best mitochondrial poison, it would be fructose. You're hurting my feelings here.
I hate so that's true. sugar.
It's fructose, which is different.
High fructose corn sugar.
Yeah, that's where one of our candies. It's in every candy. It's in every candy.
High fructose corn syrup and then apples. Yeah, but I hear apples are supposed to be great. How is that? They're bad for you. They're great for you.
Like you, you know, you heard that if all great apes only gain weight during the summer. during fruit season. And believe it or not, fruit only ripens once a year in the jungle. And they do that because winter is a time of less food, whether it's a dry season, rainy season, cold season, there's less food. So we're designed to seek out fruit sugar to gain weight.
In fact, for rainy days.
For a rainy day. Yeah, yeah. And that's why two-thirds of the sensors on your tongue are sweet receptors. Two-thirds sugar taste receptors. And remember, you and I have color vision because we are fruit.
Oh, look at this.
We are fruit predators. And the plant- Plant shiny. Yeah, the plant wants to tell you that it is ripe and its babies won't be digested by you. And now's the time and that the fructose is at the highest. That's why when you go down- Down there. That's why when you go down the snack aisles or cereal aisle.
Red, yellow, green.
Red and yellows. Red and yellows. Yeah. Because it's your brain and your brain says fruit. That's going to help me gain weight.
And it helps that.
It helps.
Would you say that sugar is the main cause of obesity? No. What, what do you think is the main, the main thing?
Flaky gut.
Leaky gut is the main cause of obesity, but does sugar cause a leaky gut?
No.
And I talk about this in the Energy Paradox. You can actually design diets that are primarily pure carbohydrates. In fact, there are many diets that are pretty much pure carbohydrates. The Duke Rice Diet is one of them. And you can actually lose lots of weight.
That sounds bad for people.
The gut, it turns out, and you're gonna have to stay tuned for the energy.
You have to pre-order the book to get that.
Available now for pre-order. Be out February 7th.
Exactly.
But we'll come back.
So, all right, so leaky gut is the cause of obesity.
Yep. It is.
And so if you heal the leaky.
Gut, you have a war going on in your intestines. and as things come across the wall of your gut, your immune system, 70 to 80% of all your white blood cells are down in your gut and a war gets started. And interestingly enough, the Army has to have provisions and we store fat, particularly in our gut, as provisions for our Army. And in fact, I've published data that the war on the inside of our blood vessels, on our coronary arteries, we have fat, epicardial fat lining our blood vessels. And that epicardial fat isn't there in people who don't have coronary artery disease. So that is the stockpile for fueling the army. So if you stop leaky gut, you lose weight.
Wow. Just like that.
Just like that. And you know, and that's, I think we talked about this last time, one of the problems with COVID-19 and chronic diseases is that my humble opinion and others is that all chronic diseases stem from leaky gut. What you put in your mouth and in our immune system is distracted by everything that's going on down here and we don't have a lot of troops up where they ought to be in our nose and mouth. And when COVID hits and gets, then you have a hyper response, a cytokine storm, because your immune system, it's like the peanut allergy. It's like a oh my gosh, there's a silly little peanut antigen, let's go crazy. And so it's these unfortunate people who have obesity, who have diabetes, who have insulin resistance. And 80% of Americans are insulin resistant, metabolic syndrome. And so it's kind of, people go, well, America is, not doing very well with COVID Well, we are the perfect setup for COVID to attract COVID.
Yeah.
To get it and do poorly.
Because we're already, don't sleep well, don't eat well, have obesity, have leaky guts, autoimmune disease, we already have disease that we're fighting, so our immune system is under attack all the time.
Correct.
So it's easier to catch.
It's easier to catch, but then once you catch it, and the immune system finally says, oh my gosh, it's there. Then the immune system just goes into hyperdrive and the cytokine storm. So it sneaks in, but then once it's in, the immune system goes crazy.
Can foods protect us against COVID or viruses?
So interestingly enough, there's some actually good work in fasting that was first prompted by the concentration camps in World War II. And there is no silver lining for.
That, but if there was a silver lining.
If there was, one of the things that first started people questioning what we knew about the immune system was that these people were starving on purpose. And those that survived never got ill. They never caught colds. They never got the flu. They didn't get cancer. They had nothing. And it was one of the striking things. Here are these emaciated people that you would think one cold virus would, that'd be the end of it. It turns out their immune system is just perfectly prepared to protect them really at all costs. And we learn that in the Energy Paradox with what happens with fasting and what things your body does to make sure that you're going to emerge still around at the other side of however long this is going to take. And so yeah, so the fasting or time-restricted feeding. So limiting the eating window is really one of the best things we can do right now.
You have like a three to six hour window?
Yeah, so you know, I tend to eat one meal a day during the week. And it's even got a name called OMAD, one meal a day. It's kind of cute. I didn't make it up. But yeah, and I tend to do that on the weekends.
Is it like an early dinner type of thing or is this a, the.
More you can kind of stop eating the four, three hours before bedtime, the better off you are.
Yeah.
And Dr. Dale Bredesen, the end of Alzheimer's, you know, firmly believes this.
Three hours before.
Three hours before.
Don't eat anything.
Just don't eat anything.
Water's fine.
Water's fine. Yeah.
So COVID has been, you know, it seems like it's picking up around the world, right? It's what it seems like in a lot of places. It doesn't slow down in USA or Mexico, it's spiking and all these other places. What can people do now to protect themselves against COVID and other viruses in general, since it doesn't look like it's going away, at least the conversation for a year, maybe the end of next year, who knows? Who knows how long it'll go. What can we do? And it's many factors, many lifestyle factors obviously included, but what can we do in your mind?
Well, in terms of supplements, there's now five papers that show the higher your vitamin D level, the more you're protected from COVID and the less severe it's going to be. Now, five different human papers. So I think that's number one. Vitamin D. Vitamin D3.
Vitamin D3. Get it in your system.
Get it in your system. Get timed-release vitamin C. Vitamin C doesn't stick around very long. If you can't get vitamin C, get the vitamin C tablets and chew 500 milligrams four times a day. I do like curcumin or curcetan, which is present in onions, apples, and the white pith of citrus, but please take it with fat.
Apples are good. It's got something in it that's good.
It's got something?
So if you take it out of it and do that as a supplement.
Green tea extract. extract is very useful. Drinking green tea, zinc. Zinc get about 30 milligrams of zinc per day. And, you know, elderberry. Elderberry is probably pretty useful in all this. But I think one of the things I think we should learn is that the, the countries and even our states that, that really dracoonianly shut down and practice social distancing and practice masks well wearing. Look, masks are not the greatest thing in the whole world. We don't have to live or die on all these studies that say yes they're helpful or yes they're not helpful. But they, you know, every long study shows that masks probably have some effect and It's like, I remember when seat belts were introduced in cars, and there was a huge hue and cry. Fighting against seat belts.
Against seat belts.
And even in the medical literature.
You're gonna make this a law for me?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, not only that, but they're in the medical literature. There was seat belt injuries of the abdomen. I remember training, oh, that's a seat belt injury. And so you can always muster an argument that, oh, that's dangerous. But we as a society have decided that we can mandate public safety issues. And guess what? You better have a seatbelt on in your car now. And we can mandate airbags. And we can mandate that you can't drive drunk, even though you'd love to. So the idea that we can't mandate for the public good, sorry, you can't go 100 miles an hour, although lots of people are doing that now. So, you know, I have an associate in Toronto who, when they were really shut down, they used cell phones to, you were allowed out of your residence one hour per week to go get groceries.
Wow.
And they tracked you on your cell phone.
Oh my goodness.
And to get around it, people would leave their cell phones in their house. And they knew that the cell phone was always there. And they go, that's funny. That person has to go out. And yeah, so that's draconian, that's horrible. But they shut it down. We used to feel so sorry for Italy, all these poor Italians singing from their balconies, but they shut it down.
Now they're better now.
And now they're better. And now they're opening them up.
New Zealand is like, no cases.
New Zealand's got no cases.
What does that do for our long-term happiness and health to isolate more longer and longer?
Well, I don't think we have to isolate, but you know, and Governor Newsom, I think, did a great job here early, and we were all patting ourselves on the back, and then- It opened up. It opened up, and it clearly opened up too big. And let's face it, the bars were one of the biggest issues. I mean, you Millennials, it's all about--.
I don't go to bars.
It's all about yourself.
I hear you. You want to have fun.
I didn't really mean that. But yeah, so we just put the gum mask on. Believe it or not, masks don't cause oxygen deprivation. They don't increase your CO2.
They're just uncomfortable.
Yeah, I've worn a mask most of my life.
That'S right.
In surgery, so maybe I'm biased. But just, you know, put the dumb thing on and social distance. Exactly. And that part's easy. I mean, I go out to eat now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Outdoor seating. Yeah, outdoor seating.
It's working. That's great.
So, Dr. Andrew, this is amazing. And I want to have you back on when your next book comes out, the Energy Paradox. Energy's coming out in February, but you can pre-order it now. anywhere online, Amazon, and go to your website, you're on social media. Dr. Steven Gundry on Instagram, Dr. Gundry on Twitter, Dr. Steven Gundry on Facebook. You've got a lot of great products.
Information, free stuff at your website.
The Dr. Gundry podcast.
Dr. Gundry on Facebook. It's a great podcast. I love that podcast, by the way. Thank you. I've listened to it several times.
Thank you. I had a good time.
And one of your stories is in the Energy Paradox.
Oh, I like it. I made the cut.
Yeah, so far.
Do this. I like that.
Final edit. Final edit.
Exactly. I wanna ask you a question. I think I'm gonna ask you in the first interview, but I wanna ask it again. It's called My Three Truths. So imagine you have a very long life and you live as long as you want, right? But for whatever reason, the body shuts down and you gotta call it quits. and this is many years in the future. And you have created every type of content, book, you've seen things change in science and all this stuff has evolved and people are living longer than ever. But for whatever reason, all your content has to go with you to the next place. You can't leave your books behind or any, this, this information is gone, but you get to leave behind three things that you've learned in your life that you know to be true. And this is the only things you could share with the rest of the world. This is all we'd have to remember you by.
That's it?
Three truths, three lessons that you've experienced that you would share. What would you say are your three truths?
All disease begins and ends in the gut. I wish I had thought of that. I mean, Hippocrates thought of that. And I guess the second one is trust your gut.
Yeah, that's a great one.
Number three, actually number three is, You do have a soulmate and do not settle until you find that soulmate and don't let them out of your sight ever again.
Ooh, that's great.
How's that?
I like those three. You've been married once?
Twice. But I'm married to my soulmate who I was supposed to get married to first time around.
Did you know her before?
Oh, gosh, yeah. We were supposed to get married.
You were supposed to get married?
Yeah, we met, I was in a singing group at Yale, and-- what was.
Your singing group called?
Called the Baker's Dozen. Like the Wyeth and Pooch.
Okay.
Not as nice, famous as the Wyeth and Pooch. But we were a Capitol recording artists. We actually opened for Dion Warwick at the Doral Hotel in Miami, and-- So, anyhow. So we were singing for our supper at Half Moon in Montego Bay, Jamaica, when I was 20 years old. And my wife now was sitting in the audience and we made eye contact and we actually spent the night talking. And by the end of the night, she walked into her parent, I had to leave and she walked in and said, I just met the man I'm gonna marry. And-- Told her parents. Told her parents. So it just met them. And unfortunately, she was going to school here at UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara. I was going to school at Yale. And her parents lived in Connecticut. My parents lived in Atlanta, Georgia. This was Jamaica?
Yeah.
Well, I was singing in Jamaica.
You met her in Jamaica.
She was in Jamaica. She was on vacation. Oh, wow. They were on vacation.
So we had this crazy long-distance relationship. Pen pals back then.
Well, we actually, phone, we'd call each other on the phone for an hour every Sunday night because the rates were later, you know, landlines. Of course. And then on holidays and things, I'd either go to her folks' house or she'd come to our folks' house. My parents got to know each other. We picked out China. And then I got into medical school at Georgia, Augusta, Georgia. And she was up here in Santa Barbara and I flew out after my first year of medical school and I said, you know, it's time to fish or cut bait. You know, it's time to get married.
This long distance is tough.
Yeah, this is tough.
You gotta make it either go all in or get out.
Yeah, yeah. You know, you need to come to Georgia. And she said, I hate Georgia, really. You need to come to Santa Barbara. I said, well, there's no medical school. And back then, getting into medical school, School was hard. Hard.
Yeah.
I mean it was, thank you. And so I said, no, I can't do it. And she said, well, you know, it's just not gonna work. So we said goodbye at the airport, Santa Barbara Airport.
Wow.
Six weeks later, I was engaged to a woman who I actually did not know up until she... Six weeks later you were engaged. Talk about a remarkable... When you want to get married, you want to get married.
So you were looking to get committed and you-- wow. And so then that didn't work out after how many years?
20 years.
And then you reconnected.
Well, we had two kids. And my parents, I said, you gotta leave. It's just awful. That's beyond that. But so I was separated. I was professor at Loma Linda University where I became very famous about doing infant heart transplants. And one day the Today Show picks us up and Bryant Gumbel's interviewing me and the parents and I'm going, you know, there's not particular, I do hundreds of these infant heart transplants a year and this one isn't particularly interesting. I wonder why they picked this one up. So I'm on the TV and who should be watching from her kitchen in Atlanta, Georgia? But my wife Penny, and my current wife, the woman who I was supposed to be marrying, and she writes me a nice little note and says, you know, you always told me you were going to be a famous heart surgeon and congratulations on your success. And I'm sitting in my office in Loma Linda and my longtime secretary comes in and she says, this is personal and confidential.
Now you're in California and you're supposed.
To be in New York City.
I'm in California.
And she's in Georgia. And so I open up the thing and of course my secretary is staring at me. She says, well? I said, Barbara, this is the love of my life. What should I do? She says, well, call her you idiot. And so I had a case to do in the operating room. So I go down to the OR and I pick up the phone and dial her on a Tuesday and she's gone three, two, one. He ought to be calling right about now and pick up the phone. And that was 1995. And we got on an airplane and we've been together ever since.
Wow.
She raised 25 years. 25 years. And just celebrated 25 years.
And you were married for 20 years.
Yeah.
And now you're married for 25 years.
I know.
Yeah.
And she raised my youngest daughter, saved her life. Wow. And now my youngest daughter, you know, calls her, you know, Mom.
Wow.
Yeah.
So if you could go back in time, so if I convinced her to come that much more, would you said, I'm going to come and be or just keep going long distance?
Well, you know, she always says, you know, I. I just think I wasn't ready. And I don't think I would have been my useful partner.
Timing is everything, right?
And she had a miserable marriage. She gets. She canceled her wedding three times. She actually would make her dad take out another announcement in the New York Times 'cause she knew I'd read the New York Times.
Oh my God.
And that I'd stop it. And... Wow. It was that nutty.
But I mean... You found your way back though.
Yeah, I mean, the minute-- on the phone, it was like...
Timing.
It was like, no, I mean, it's like there was no time that passed. It was just gone. So, there is a soulmate. And do not sub.
And we'll end it like that. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. You want to learn about the key foods you need to eat to master your health, make sure to watch this video right here.
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.
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