The DAILY HACKS To End Inflammation & Increase Your LIFESPAN | Dr. Steven Gundry

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.

The more diverse your microbiome is, the longer you live and the longer you live well.

So why is that?

Turns out the distinctive set of bugs that has now been found in pancreatic cancer in humans that predicts. And so there's exciting new thing that you could take a swab of your tongue and sequence which bugs are in there and you can go, oh, oh crap, you know, you've got a pancreatic cancer microbiome. Now, the good news about that is, is that you can alter that microbiome. But a paper just this morning They literally stuck needles into the pancreas of people that were looking for pancreatic cancer. And they were looking for pancreatic cancer cells, but they're looking under the microscope.

And they go, wait a minute, there's.

A bunch of bacteria sitting here inside this pancreas. What the heck are those doing in there? So then in 105 people, they sequenced those bacteria and they were all exactly the same sorts of bacteria and they actually all came from the mouth.

Wow. Yeah. I heard this from an oral, I guess, 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. LPSs, 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.

Yeah, it's 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 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 has probably had 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 it.

So I designed an experiment with, like, 500 people, and I asked them to floss. every other day. 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 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 tent. 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, you know, plants are actually very intelligent human beings. They actually see a new book has proven that plants see anyway. 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, the intestines. Out of our intestines are these roots.

Got it.

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.

But 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, was found that nobody realized. So your gut is basically a tropical rainforest. And you've got, you know, all these creatures and things happening, and one creature depends on another. And if you, you know, you tip the balance off, it's like introducing wolves back into Yellowstone Park.

Right? Whoops. We needed wolves.

Who knew? Yeah, right. 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'll 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 or... Yeah, in.

Fact, you know, 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.

Right.

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. Okay.

Again, we won't go down there.

Yeah, we go down everywhere. Okay, 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.

Pick 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 a hundred and five 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. her name's Edith Moray, she's Michelle in all my books. So anyhow, so you take these people and you look at their gut microbiome. They have the gut microbiome, the diversity of a 30 year old individual.

Wow.

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.

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, your famous heart surgeon? What the deal? 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 is 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 the subterranean area. So if you think I would like you to eat some roots and tubers and 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.

Get some mushrooms.

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 then enter our circulation. And a particular compound in mushrooms that's been manipulated by bacteria protects the brain from damage, from Alzheimer's or anything like that.

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. What I do is, you know, I.

Take a bunch of different mushroom blends and mix it up.

Yeah, mix it up.

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 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.

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 on 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, oxidize means gets damaged.

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

It's not. Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset and I think you're gonna love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies and step-by-step guidance, the Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. So what would be the main ingredients or food of the new style of keto diet that you're recommending? What would be the 10 main foods we should be eating then within that diet?

So here's another really cool thing. The principal ketone that we use once we're in ketosis is a fat called beta-hydroxybutyrate. A lot of people have seen it as BHB.

Okay.

Right? That is made from butyrate, which is made from prebiotic fiber being digested by our gut bacteria into post-biotics. And these short-chain fatty acids like butyrate are a product of prebiotic fiber digestion. So, one really easy way to make the substrates of ketones is to eat a high fiber diet, soluble fiber. So, you know, asparagus, the root vegetables, leeks, onions, garlic, the chicory family vegetables, radicchio, chicory, frisée, Belgian endive. I just had a big radicchio salad last night. So those actually make the precursors for what we're looking for. Here, ever hear of apple cider vinegar?

Of course.

Of course, yeah.

I don't like it.

Ever wanna know how apple cider vinegar works?

Tell me.

It turns out it is- People swear.

By apple cider vinegar.

Yeah, so it is a short chain fatty acid called acetic acid or acetate. And it just so happens to be a backbone for making a ketone, acetoacetate. But more importantly, both butyrate and acetic acid are mitochondrial uncouplers in their own right. So have yourself some apple cider vinegar.

Doesn't taste good.

Put it in sparkling water like San Pellegrino. Have some balsamic vinegar, put it in some water and drink it. Put it on your salads. Now, have some other fermented foods. It turns out that the fermented foods are not doing anything for probiotics. It turns out that they have these postbiotics already in there. And fermented foods like wine have postbiotics. And fermented foods like cheese have postbiotics. And these are a class of class of postbiotics called polyamines. And one of the most famous ones is spermidine.

Spermidine.

Spermidine, and you can guess where that comes from. There's another one called putrescine, putrid rotting. And these things are potent mitochondrial couplers. That's why men in Italy who eat a lot of Parmesan cheese, which is aged Parmesan cheese, live longer and have much better vascular health than men who don't. That's why those Sardinians and those Costa Ricans who are eating lots of goat and sheep cheese have such great health. So have yourself some goat yogurt, stir in some polyphenols, get yourself polyphenol of your choice. I like to do what's called reverse juicing. Take fruit, put it in your JackolanE juicer. I know you got one in the cupboard. Throw the juice away. You know how much I hate fruit juice. We lit up the internet with that one.

A lot of sugar.

A lot of sugar, a lot of fructose. But take the pulp, which is pure polyphenols, and freeze it or just take it and put it in your goat yogurt, your sheep yogurt. You can get goat yogurt at Trader Joe's. and you will just have this uncoupling burst. You'll have breakfast, but you'll generate ketones. You can even have some pistachios and you'll generate uncoupling.

What does goat yogurt taste like?

It really doesn't taste very goaty. Fun fact, MCT is a component of five different fats. And four of them are named after the Latin word for goat, capra. So there's capric acid, caprylic acid, caprolic acid. So it's named for goat. So it came from the fact that goat milk has all this MCT. And sheep milk is fantastic.

Similar, right? Yeah, same thing.

So, Manchego cheese from Spain. in Portugal. That's sheep cheese.

Okay.

So, you know, have yourself a slice of cheese for breakfast.

Now, the Costa Ricans and the Sardinians that are in the blue zones, how much goat milk, sheep cheese are they eating on a consistent basis?

They have it almost every day.

A little bit every day or just.

A little dab will do you. Let's talk about it in the book.

Do they have cow's milk? Do they eat other cheeses?

Do they have So cow's milk cheeses don't have MCT, but if you ferment any cheese, you're going to produce postbiotics like all these cool polyamines, which will uncouple your mitochondria.

Is that a blue cheese then?

So blue cheese is great, but- I love blue cheese. Yeah, blue cheeses are great.

So that's good for you.

Yeah.

Even if it's cow blue cheese, it's okay.

It turns out years ago there was a wonderful book, and I'm blanking on his name, but it was called the Man who Ate Everything. And he was the food editor for Vogue. And he wrote a fun book about his life. And he had a whole chapter about cheese. And he said, you know, the chapter was entitled, why Aren't the French Dead? Because the French actually three times the amount of cheese that Americans eat, about eight times the amount of butter.

They have skinnier.

They have a, yeah, they're skinnier. Why are they skinny?

Some people say because they smoke cigarettes.

I'm glad you brought that up. Do you know one of the best mitochondrial and couplers there is? Nicotine.

Oh man, it's not good for your health, but it'll make you... That's right.

Yeah, that makes you burn calories. And I write about this in unlocking the keto code. So that's why most smokers are very skinny because they're wasting fuel. But the other thing that's interesting is the French, despite all this cheese, they have much less heart disease than Americans, much less. And he made a point of that. He said, why aren't they all dead if this theory of saturated fat is so right? And then I had a British doctor by the name of Tim Spector on my podcast who makes the argument that if you look at cheese-eating Britons that they actually have better health than non-cheese-eating Britons. And he said, we shouldn't put down cheese. So I then said, okay, I'm going to find out why this is so important. And it turns out it's It's the fermentation process of cheese. It's the MCTs in sheep and goat. But one other factor, it turns out that there is a miracle, essential fatty acid in cheese called carbon 15.

Okay. In all cheeses?

In all cheeses. And work from the dolphin study of the of naval dolphins found that C15 is an essential fatty acid. And the Framingham Heart Study, the longest heart study of all time, started in the 1940s, show that two components in dairy are only one of four fats that improve heart health and longevity. And it turns out two of them are in dairy. So the idea that we should be avoiding dairy is a bad idea. But having said that, there's a protein in American cow milk that happens to be lectin-like. So get your cheeses from France, from Italy, from Switzerland, get goat and sheep. They don't have any of that. So and then you'll be safe. You'll actually get health benefits from eating cheese. What a take-home message.

So, is it, you know, I'm a fan for the stinkier the better.

Yeah, exactly.

For me, it tastes better.

Putrescence is one of these polyamines. So, the stinkiness, whether you knew it or not, was uncoupling your mitochondria.

Interesting.

Yeah, my wife and I usually every afternoon, you know, have a glass of red wine and several pieces of stinky cheese.

What do you, okay, so I'm hearing the high fiber, is the key apple cider vinegar.

Yeah, any vinegar.

Any vinegar.

Your name is the vinegar.

The, obviously, the famous olive oil.

Olive oil is great source of it.

You, 'cause you told me in a previous interview we did that you want your, your, your poop to look a certain way. I don't know if you remember this. You want it to look like a snake? A snake looking at you.

Exactly right.

When you look down at it, you.

Look in the bowl, you want to see a coiled snake looking up at you.

And that comes from high fiber.

Yeah, that's from fiber. It turns out, it's not, what's looking back at you is not plant fiber. It's actually mounds and mounds and mounds of bacteria. And the good bacteria, bad bacteria. Good bacteria.

You want good bacteria.

Bad bacteria don't like that stuff. Bad bacteria want sugar and saturated fats. Give me, give me, give me. And they, as we've talked before, they control your brain to go find it. The good bacteria want soluble fiber and they want it because they make more babies and that's that big poop you're seeing. But the benefit is, When they ferment that fiber, they produce postbiotics, which are fermentation products that uncouple your mitochondria. So it's a win-win. We should be eating for them and they'll take care of us.

The gut bacteria.

Yeah. I mean, there was a cool study that I talked about in the Energy Paradox. They took some Chinese volunteers, men, They put them on a 14-day water fast. Tough.

That's tough.

Half of the group were given 100 calories a day of prebiotic fiber powder mixed in water. 100 calories. They couldn't digest those. We can't digest prebiotics. Only bacteria can digest them. The guys who got the prebiotic fiber had no hunger despite a 14-day water fast. And it actually prompted their proponents of what's called the gut-centric theory of hunger. And the theory, which I really like, is if we give our gut bacteria, the good guys, what they want to eat, they send signals to our brain. So, hey, you know, great, we got everything. You don't need to go look for anything. We're happy, we're satisfied. And we know this actually to be true because as we talked on your program before, we can take skinny people and give them a fecal enema with bad bacteria from obese people and they'll become fat. Wow. Because these bacteria literally take over our brain and what we want or what they want. So I think it's really cool like hey, you know, have 100 calories of prebiotic fiber. Grind up some flax seeds, put them in your yogurt, grind up some psyllium husks, put them in your yogurt, grind up, you know, juice your fruit, put the pulp in the yogurt, sheep and goat, and man, you're uncoupling. I can just, you're an uncoupling machine. It's just going to be an uncoupling machine. speaking of which. So there's the, there's the, there's a theory of aging called the rate of living and it's been popular almost for 100 years and that is small animals have a very high metabolic rate and they don't live very long and that's because their metabolic rate is just really high. Large animals on the other hand have a slower metabolic rate and they live a long time, you know, elephants us. Blue whales can live 200 years. But there's one problem with that theory, and that's birds. Birds are really small, and yet they live an incredibly long time. A hummingbird in captivity can live 10 years. This little dinky. Yeah. And a parrot, you know, can live 80 to 100 years.

Isn't that crazy?

And. So people said, well, what do I do? They have a really high metabolic rate. This doesn't make sense. Guess who has the most uncoupled mitochondria of any animal?

Little birds.

So they have all of their uncoupling proteins activated. And it turns out, in the case of the hummingbird that I write about, the hummingbird uses the polyphenols in the nectar of the flowers as the uncoupler.

And that's interesting.

Yes, so if you want to live a long time, uncouple to survive and thrive. I can tell you that if it's in a package, it is probably a simple carbohydrate, even what would appear to be healthy, so plantain chips.

No. I can't eat those. Come on.

Read the label and it will scare you to death. Will I eat plantain chips? Sure I will, but I will use them as as a dipping chip to get guacamole in my mouth.

Or olive oil.

Or olive oil, yeah. So, yeah, I know. So, stay away from simple carbohydrate. The best way to suppress your immune system is sugar. Sugar absolutely suppresses white blood cell function. So, please don't eat like that. But luckily, the stores are, and the other thing, I remind all my listeners is that we are the only creature that needs or uses toilet paper. Right. And if you follow my program... You won't need it. You will not need toilet paper.

I have many friends that say they don't need a wipe.

Yeah.

Maybe you take one little piece just to make sure.

Just make sure.

Just insurance. You never know.

Yeah. And so, you know, I know when, you know, I've I got some issue that, you know, I need more than one piece of toilet paper. Yeah, so if you're, if you need toilet paper, I got news for you, you got a leaky gut.

You're eating the wrong stuff.

So, no simple carbs, essentially if it's in a package, it's probably not good. No sugar, it suppresses the immune system. What else? Either hurts the immune system, and what boosts the immune system?

Yeah, so what boosts the immune system? It turns out that Olive oil, the polyphenols in olive oil actually really boost the immune system. So do components of mushrooms. And, you know, I make one and we'll get you some called M Vitality.

Which is a mushroom extract.

But mushrooms in general, even the humble button mushroom will actually boost your immune system. And it does that actually by having the sort of complex sugars that your gut bacteria really, really needs.

Wants and needs.

Exactly. and so it's more of an indirect effect. You give your gut bacteria what they want and need, they in turn will tell the immune system, hey, we got this, and you know, relax and enjoy yourself. The other thing, every human being that I see initially with leaky gut or autoimmune disease has a low vitamin D level. I had Mark Hyman on my podcast recently, and Mark has never seen vitamin D toxicity. I I've been measuring vitamin D levels for over 20 years now. I have never seen vitamin D toxicity.

You can't have too much necessarily.

Yeah, I have yet to see it. Could it exist?

If you have a whole bottle of day, maybe it's not good.

Well, and actually Dr. Holick from Boston University who's really the world expert on vitamin D has seen it only once and that was in a physician who by accident was taking a million international 10 units of vitamin D3 a day for six months. That's a lot.

That's a lot. Now, what is that a whole cup full?

Is that a day or a week? Well, he had been getting it from a compounding pharmacist and it would have been mislabeled. So he wasn't doing it on purpose. But for instance, I run my vitamin D level greater than 120 nanograms per milliliter and I have for 18 years to prove I'm not dead. So many of the labs now are coming around to saying 120 is absolutely normal and it's not. vitamin D detox. I have patients, I may have told you this story, it's a great story. Years ago, I had two people in their late 70s, first time, and we get vitamin D levels. Back in those days, we could actually quantify the vitamin D level, and the vitamin D was 270. Both of them. And, you know, I'm looking at them and I was young and naive, and I'm thinking, you know, why aren't these guys dead? and I said, you guys take a lot of vitamin D, don't you? They said, oh yeah, yeah, it's an anti-aging vitamin. It actually is. I said, well, how long have you been doing that? And they said, oh, all of our lives. And I'm going, you look pretty healthy to me. And in theory, vitamin D can give you kidney stone, toxic vitamin D levels. never seen it, but in theory, any kidney stones? No, why? And the other theory is it makes your fingers and toes numb. And I said, any fingers, toes numb? No, why? And I'm going, you know, huh? So that's when I actually started researching vitamin D. And for instance, the University of California San Diego says that the average American should take 9,600 international units a day to have a safe level of vitamin D. The other thing that's fascinating is most people with cancer have low levels of vitamin D. And there's some very interesting trials of boosting vitamin D in people who have cancer to prevent recurrences. So, right now, I think everybody should be taking 5,000 international units, but right now- A day? A day. Right now we're probably wise to boost it to 10,000 a day. I'll give you an example. Last week when this started and I still see patients every day. I took 100,000 units on Monday, I took 50,000 units on Tuesday and I took 25,000 units on Wednesday and then hit 10,000 units. If I feel I'm coming down with something, you take more vitamins? I will take 150,000 units three days in a row, 50,000 three times a day for three days. That's nearly a half a million international units of vitamin D in three days. And I'm not dead. I have my patients do the same thing. None of them have died, none of them have gotten vitamin D toxicity. But I can tell you it always cuts, whatever. It's one of the most effective antivirals there is. The second thing we need to do is we need to get, if you can, time to release vitamin C. Linus Pauling was right. Vitamin C is incredibly antiviral.

But what he didn't know is we.

Can'T absorb enough vitamin C and keep it in our bloodstream because it comes out very, very quickly. so get yourself some time release vitamin C. The stores are empty, Amazon's empty. Right. But in the future, borrowing them in the future, borrowing that, it's still there. I go to health food stores every day and just kind of check and see what's there and what isn't. Get yourself just the chewable tablets or get the capsules and take it four times a day. Take 500 to 1000 four times a day. Yeah.

It's still better than nothing.

It's still better than nothing. Zinc is a great idea. Get about 30 milligrams of zinc. I'm a big fan of quercetin, sometimes pronounced quercetin. It's a compound that's present in the white pith of citrus. It's in apples and it's in onions. And it actually may be the compound that the old wives tale, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. So quercetin is also a very antiviral.

I mean, their immune system is strong. then you don't get sick.

You don't get sick.

And it doesn't matter how strong the virus is, you should be able to defend against it. It's when it's weak when you start to get sick.

That's exactly right. And you know, I mean you have different parts of your immune system lined up on all your mucous membranes ready for, you know, what's coming. And what's unfortunate is in a lot of our patients with leaky gut and with with autoimmune diseases, we can actually measure that they're very deficient in the immune system that makes, for instance, IgA, which lines our walls of our gut and IgM, which is the second line of defense. And we can see that when we get their gut sealed, that wow, their immune system is back. All their numbers are back up to normal.

We are a society of weak immune systems, it seems like.

Oh, yeah. We're just, I mean, we're just we're just set up. And it all kind of goes back to how we eat and the types of foods we eat. And the amount of antibiotics we take. We didn't know that the broad spectrum antibiotics that all of us took for every little sniffle, for every little cough, that hurts us. We're killing off our microbiome. It was like putting napalm on this tropical rainforest.

How important is probiotics right now?

That's a great question. So we are unfortunately, just because of our lifestyle, very deficient in probiotics.

So should we be taking them?

We should be taking them, but most probiotics are pretty worthless because they're not protected from acid in the stomach or bile in the first part of the duodenum, which will kill them. Most probiotics never make it to the gut. So you gotta look for a probiotic that is actually encapsulated- Time release. that's either a spore-forming probiotic or that's encapsulated so it resists gastric and bile digestion. For instance, Gundry MD makes a 24-strain probiotic.

I think yours, yeah.

That is in a capsule that prevents digestion. All of our probiotics in like Vital Reds, in like Bio Complete 3, are spore-forming probiotics that cannot be killed by gastric acid. So it doesn't matter if you see, oh, this has got a hundred billion probiotics. If it doesn't have a system for getting it into your gut, it won't get into your gut. But what's more important than probiotics, and we need them, what's more important is prebiotics. So that's the food that the probiotics have to eat. And that gets back to the crazy nine cups of vegetables every day.

So you need the prebiotics, the vegetables in your gut for the probiotics to feed off of.

Exactly. So you gotta give them what they eat. So I could tell my patients in Palm Springs, if I sold them grass seed and say go plant some grass seed and they come back a month later and say hey you sold me bad grass seed, it didn't grow. And I go well what'd you do? And they say well I put it out on the sand and I said well did you water it? No, you didn't tell me to. Did you fertilize it? No, you didn't tell me to. I said well of course it's not going to grow. So you could swallow all the probiotics in the world but if you don't give them what they need to to eat and that's soluble fiber, they're not going to grow. And that's the sad thing we've learned is we don't feed these bugs what they need. And that's why, you know, for instance, I make pre-bio thrive, which is a bunch of different prebiotics.

What would be some of the alternative foods that we could eat and consume if we got rid of all these? Because it sounds to me I'm just eating broccoli and cauliflower all day. So what are some of the alternatives.

That are also I mean, there are great pastas out there made out of cassava flour. I make one at Gundry MD made out of sorghum flour. Again, have no relationship. Jovial makes phenomenal pastas out of cassava flour.

Cassava flour.

Cassava. Yeah, like taro root. Oh. And I tell you, I actually, one of the restaurants, Italian restaurants in Montecito keeps, you know, cassava pasta for me and I just had a big bowl of penne pasta a couple nights ago.

It doesn't affect your, you don't feel.

Like this, you know, hangover and it's got this mouthfeel. It's really good now. It's, you know, al dente. So the idea that you have to, you know, suffer these things is is, is old school. And I think one of the, one of the big benefits of the plant Paradox being so popular is that consumers wanted Alternatives and companies rise to the occasion, and they're making lots of stuff.

Okay.

There's lots of now pasta sauces, peeled and de-seeded tomatoes, you know, again, there's lots pressure-cooked beans. So it's actually it's been exciting to.

Watch.

These things come about. Right.

What about... so what other foods? We've got the cassava flour pasta.

What about I mean... so there's actually increasingly now a lot of fairly safe ice creams out there that can use alternative like like coconut milk as an example. There's actually some ice creams that use a sweetener called allulose, which I'm very high on.

Allulose.

Allulose is a rare actual sugar. It was first discovered in figs, but it has no caloric value. And they actually, it's primarily produced from corn. but before everybody has a fit by GMO, allulose, most corn in the United States is genetically modified and that's a whole nother story in itself. Most corn in the United States is sprayed with Roundup as is all our wheat, as is all of our everything. So, but allulose is actually a prebiotic. So, A prebiotic is fiber that feeds good gut bacteria.

So get non-GMO, and it's easy to find.

It's on the internet, a lot of stores are getting it. But it's starting to appear in bars, it's starting to appear in ice creams, and so.

Protein bars and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Any other, what about for like the nuts? What's a replacement for nuts?

So number one nut, and we'll talk about this in a little bit is pistachios.

I love pistachios.

Pistachios have so many crazy health benefits and their number one health benefit, spoiler alert, is they are the highest source of melatonin of any food. Really? Really. And everybody says, well, wait a minute. I don't want to go to sleep after I eat pistachios. It turns out that melatonin is only one of two actual antioxidants that are used in mitochondria to protect mitochondria. The other one is glutathione. All the other antioxidants that people talk about, you know, vitamin C, vitamin E, blah, blah, blah, have absolutely no effect on oxidative stress in mitochondria. There's only two, melatonin and glutathione. So melatonin is not a sleep hormone. Melatonin has a much higher purpose and that is to actually repair mitochondria to uncouple mitochondria.

Gotcha. We'll go into that for sure. Yeah. So pistachios is the number one.

Pistachio is the number one.

Can you have too many nuts of pistachio macadamia?

You can't, so if you want to gain weight, macadamia nuts are the way to do it. And I've actually had some weight gaining challenges for some of my really skinny people. And if you want to gain weight, macadamia nuts are the way to do it.

Mac, what about pistachios?

Pistachios is pretty hard.

Macadamia nuts are so good.

Oh, I know.

That's part of the problem. That's why.

That's why you gain weight. Yeah.

You really do gain weight with macadamia.

So you can have more pecans. And walnuts are great. Hazelnuts are great. Pine nuts are great. Okay. Yeah. So pecans do have a lectin I wrote about in the Plant Paradox cookbook that we often see on food sensitivity tests. Pecans. But, you know, I just tell, tell people, go easy, because, you know, I went to medical school in Georgia, and it's the eat nut.

Yes.

Help the economy.

What do you think is the best diet or food eating plan to go on to help you reverse age?

Believe it or not, my keto, my new keto program. Really? Yeah. To help you reverse age.

Why do you think that? What's the difference between that and the plant Paradox diet?

So this is the plant Paradox taken to its kind of ultimate conclusion. The Plant Paradox had a ketogenic program, but people were shocked with the amount of carbohydrates that were available to them in my ketogenic program, and nobody could quite figure out why, but it was really effective, particularly at losing weight. And I didn't even realize why until I was writing the Energy Paradox, and then It was like, oh my gosh, why this works has been sitting here in plain sight and I didn't see it. And no keto expert has ever seen it because we've all been kind of led down the garden path that ketones and being in ketosis is, you know, it's a miracle fuel and burns fat and makes you an efficient fat burner. And let's look at it this way. If you become an efficient fat burner, which is what every keto says that you will be, efficiency means you get more out of something. You get more efficiency. In other words, if you want to save gas, you buy a Toyota Prius, which is very inefficient at getting the most miles out of a gallon of gas. On the other hand, if you want to be fuel inefficient, then you buy a Ferrari, which is really good at wasting gas. Now, there might be other reasons to have a Ferrari rather than a Prius, but we won't go there. So fat has nine grams, nine calories per gram. Amino acids and carbohydrates have four calories per gram. So fat has more than twice the calories by weight of carbohydrates or proteins. So if you become an efficient fat burner and you're eating fat, then you ought to gain weight.

Why don't people gain weight?

Believe it or not, a ton of people gain weight on ketogenic diets.

Why is that?

Because they're actually eating the wrong kinds of fats and the book shows why eating the wrong kind of fats do this. Most people eating a high saturated fat diet, you know, cream cheese and bacon, actually become insulin resistant and insulin and they actually develop high blitcheR and that insulin insulin goes up and insulin is actually the fat storage hormone. So when you're eating a lot of fat, you actually can get fatter and fatter. And I profile a patient of mine who I call Miranda in the book who had been doing a true supervised ketogenic diet for two years and she had gained 30 pounds in two years and was really pissed.

And she's like, all the experts say that you're supposed to follow this.

Yeah, and I mean she was doing it, she showed me her food diaries, and yet when we measured her, she was insulin resistant, she had high insulin levels, she was pre-diabetic, and I mean she was apoplectic, and she's literally, what are you talking about? I'm a saint on this diet. I said, yeah, this is what we see. That's why 60% of people who try a ketogenic diet give it up quickly because they don't see the results that are promised. And it's clear after I wrote Unlocking the Keto Code why people aren't getting the results that were promised.

What are people doing wrong on the old way of doing the keto diet and how should they approach it now with the new information?

So, one of the big problems is that and this is shocking information. You look at normal weight individuals in the United States, 50% of normal weight individuals are metabolically inflexible. And I've used those terms before, but let's define it again.

Okay, what is that?

Normally, you and I can burn glucose, to make ATP in our mitochondria. But we can also, if glucose runs out, burn free fatty acids, fat, as a fuel. And normally, the second glucose runs out, we should be able to switch over to burning fat as a fuel, just very much like a hybrid car. When you're running on gasoline, the battery, which we'll call fat, is being charged. When the gasoline runs out, the battery can discharge and power the vehicle. 50% of normal weight people are metabolically inflexible. They can't do that.

They can't switch on and off.

They can't switch to very fat. Now you look at overweight people, 88% of overweight people are metabolically inflexible. They cannot switch over to burning fat.

So, how do you switch over then?

And get this, 98.5% of obese people are metabolically inflexible. They cannot make the switch.

Is that meaning they can't make the switch on a day-to-day basis?

On a 24-hour basis, they can't switch and burn. They can't.

But if you But intermittent fast for a couple days.

I'm glad you asked that. Have you been reading up on it? Yeah, so it turns out that when we have, and metabolically inflexible people have normally high insulin levels. Simplistically, insulin is a fat storage hormone. That's why back in the old days when we gave people insulin who were diabetics, they got fatter and fatter. because we were injecting them with the hormone that stores fat. So when we eat, insulin comes up, insulin knocks on your muscle cells and says, hey, you know, Louis just had a great meal here. I want to sell you this stuff. Open the door. And your muscles say, oh, yeah, yeah, good. I'm hungry. Give it to me. So your, your insulin sensitive now. Unfortunately, most people, insulin levels are high almost all the time because your muscles are full, they don't want anything to eat, they go go away, don't come back, but insulin keeps trying, so it keeps pushing. When insulin is high, it has a second effect. It blocks the release of fat from fat cells. Now think about it, if you and I just killed a bison and we we were gorging on bison, we would want to store most of what we ate as fat because probably we weren't going to kill a bison for a while. So insulin, when it's high, is storing fat. But insulin, you wouldn't want to burn fat while you're doing that. So insulin says, no, no, no, it's staying here in the storage tanks. So there was a very good purpose for that. But normally, if you and I stopped eating after about eight hours, your blood sugar levels would pretty much be used up, insulin would fall, and then fat would come rolling out of your fat cells, out of your hybrid battery, and you'd start burning fat as a fuel, and everything's fine. But if you go on a ketogenic diet when you're metabolically inflexible and all your eating Eating is fat.

What happens then?

You can't get to that fat and you crash and burn. And that gives you the keto flu, the Adkins blues, your athletic performance plummets.

Your energy goes down.

Your energy goes down. You get that headachy feeling.

You say, Give me some carbs. Yeah.

Give me some carbs. Yeah. And your brain's going, what the heck? you know, I got nothing here. I got nothing. And that's what's really cool. So normally, all of your cells, all of my cells are delighted to burn free fatty acids. It's a great fuel. The problem is free fatty acids are actually big molecules and they can't get through the blood-brain barrier. They're too big. So that's a problem. Everybody else in you can do fine, but if your brain can't burn free fatty acids because they can't get there. It could do it if they could get there. So we have this clever system that when free fatty acids are out flowing, some of them go to the liver and the liver converts them into water-soluble short-chain fatty acids called ketones or ketone bodies. the liver can't use ketone bodies, so it throws them out into the bloodstream and ketone bodies can get past the blood-brain barrier. So they can serve as a backup fuel for the brain during the time you're sleeping, during the time you're starving, or during the time you're eating a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet. But everybody got the idea, thanks to some research out of Harvard and the NIH years ago by Kaye Hill and Veach, that because ketones could provide an alternative fuel, that it must be a super fuel, and that we should always try to be starving.

In fact, getting into ketosis, right?

Get into ketosis. Get into ketosis. well, one of the proteges of Dr. Cahill, Dr. Owens in 2004, just, you know, fairly recently, showed that even at a full ketogenic output, a full ketogenic diet, only 30% of our power could come from ketones. 70% still had to come from free fatty acids and glucose. And even at full ketosis, your brain still has to have 30 to 40% of its energy met by glucose, not ketones. And so as I was researching this for the Energy Paradox, I went, well, wait a minute, something's not right here. Something isn't making sense. These aren't a perfect fuel at all, but we clearly make them and one of the reasons we make them is to keep our brain kind of going while times are tough. Makes sense. But they must be doing something else. And that's when I discovered what ketones actually do.

What do they do?

They are signaling molecules. They are messengers to, believe it or not, tell mitochondria. Mitochondria are the little energy producing organelles in almost all of our cells. To protect themselves at all costs, number one, to make more of themselves to carry the workload which is called mitogenesis. And here's the best part. To protect themselves, they should waste fuel. They should burn fuel. They should burn it, but don't make it into energy. They should become a Ferrari.

Why is that?

Well, that was the $64,000 question. Because think about it. If you're starving to death, you would think that you would want your mitochondria to become the most efficient, get every last ounce of ATP out of every last calorie in you. And the last thing you would want them to do is waste them. So, a researcher by the name of Martin Brand in 2000, Wrote a little tiny paper that said, the paper's name, look it up, it's great, Uncoupling to Survive. Uncoupling to Survive.

Sounds like a relationship.

Yeah, yeah, well we now, yeah, we.

Think of, Conscious uncoupling.

Yes, yes. So, and I think we may have to get out the chalkboard, but, so what he said was, so if you're starving to death, If your mitochondria die.

Then.

You'Re not going to be here.

If your mitochondria die, yeah.

If they don't make it, you're over. And who cares about your muscles? Who cares about anything else? You got to keep your mitochondria alive. And turns out making energy is really, really hard work.

Okay.

It is incredibly damaging work for mitochondria and they injure themselves in the process of making energy. They make energy by coupling protons with oxygen, if you will, marrying a proton to an oxygen molecule and they make ATP. Great. So it turns out that normally, you and me sitting here right now, 30% of all the calories entering into our mitochondria never couple up with oxygen to make ATP. They are uncoupled from making ATP. So in mitochondria, there's an electron transport chain. that was the Nobel Prize was awarded to Peter Mitchell for this discovery. So the mitochondria have these membranes and in the book I call it the Mito Club. And the Mito Club is the hippest place to be for all the millennials. And the Mito Club, the patrons enter one direction. And so we've got protons and we've got electrons and we've got oxygen and it is the hottest place to be and everybody wants to be in the club and there's actually bouncers in the club and those bouncers happen to be melatonin and glutathione and they kind of keep things okay. so there's only one exit out the back. And so the object of the game is, you know, for a proton and oxygen to couple and on the way they go and as they leave they actually make the energy molecule ATP. And that's how we make energy. So this is the electron transport chain. I mean it is hot and steamy and lots of damage sometimes oxygen couples up with an electron, those are free radicals, those are reactive oxygen species, those are bad, you don't want that to happen, and the protons get really mad because, you know, why are they coupling up with who they want to go with? So everything's kind of really bad. Now it just so happens that there are emergency exits, okay? And along this row and they're supposed to be closed except for emergencies. But these can be opened by what are called uncoupling proteins and there happen to be five of them.

Okay.

So if things are really steamy, if things, if chairs are thrown, punches are being thrown, protons can escape out the emergency exits. and not participate in making ATP.

What happens when that happens?

Things quiet down. Things return back to a nicer level. And more people can actually join into the club. So the point of all this is you can actually process more calories through the mitochondria, but you actually do a caloric bypass by wasting these calories.

Before it makes ATP.

Exactly.

And that is beneficial why?

Lots of things. Number one, it generates heat.

Okay.

And it turns out you probably know that there is brown fat and beige fat and white fat. So brown fat is brown because it is loaded with mitochondria. And brown fat makes heat. And it turns out that that people who have more brown fat actually are much healthier than people who... You're burning.

More fat too, right?

Burning more fat. So how this whole discovery came about is actually one of the funniest things in medicine. Back in World War I, it was noted that factory workers in Germany and France who were making gunpowder, munitions, were really skinny despite eating huge amounts of food. And they were running temperatures. And nobody could figure out what they were doing. And then a couple doctors at Stanford in 1930 said, I think we figured it out. These guys were using a chemical called 2,4-dinitrophenol.

Okay.

DNP, you can find it on the dark web. Anyhow, so, and they thought that this DNP was making them waste huge amounts of calories. They didn't know why, but they thought they were generating it in heat. It increased their metabolic rate. And they go, oh, my gosh, this is the greatest weight loss drug ever known. So they actually started prescribing DNP to human beings. And a hundred thousand prescriptions of DNP were written in the United States alone in the 1930s. And DNP was miraculous. A small dose you could lose a pound a week. At a higher dose you could lose five pounds a week. I mean, think about that. who wouldn't want that? Only one problem. So these guys got really hot, they ran fevers, it actually affected their thyroid, it caused cataracts, and this was before cataract surgery, and then there were a bunch of deaths because they got so uncoupled that they couldn't produce enough ATP to stay alive.

Interesting.

They died.

Okay.

So, one of the first official acts of the FDA when they were formed was to ban the sale of DNP. Now, and every now and then you'll read on the internet about a bodybuilder who was using it and who died. So, it turns out the DNP was the first known oral mitochondrial uncoupler. And the reason it was so effective is that it made you literally throw tons of calories out the back door, out the side door.

Too many though.

Yeah, too many. And it turns out there's a lot of research in controlled low-dose DNP. A lot of money looking into, okay, how can how can we find that sweet spot? And I talk about it in the book. So what we want to do is there's a Goldilocks rule with mitochondrial uncoupling. We want just the right amount of mitochondrial uncoupling. Yes, the right amount. So now we go back to ketones and we go, okay, so what the heck? If ketones aren't this great fuel, what exactly are they there for? and it turns out the ketones are a signaling molecule to tell mitochondria to uncouple and to uncouple to survive like Bran said and to protect themselves at all costs. Now, we most of us have accepted the mitochondrial theory of aging that mitochondria eventually gets so damaged and they're the powerhouses and kind of things fiddle out. And it's a pretty good theory. So the idea is let's keep the mitochondria repairing themselves, not harming themselves by trying too hard to make fuel, and to actually tell themselves to make more of themselves simultaneously, in a way, try to make brown fat in all of our tissues. And it turns out, interestingly enough, if you look at super old people, they have the most uncoupled mitochondria. Really? Really.

Why is that?

Because of the foods they eat. And it turns out, I mentioned 2,4-dinitrophenol for a reason. It has a phenol group. and where have you heard the word phenol when I have talked to you? Polyphenols, lots of phenols.

Yes.

All right, here's where it gets really good. All right, so plants have to produce energy and they have their own version of mitochondria, which are called chloroplasts. And they take photons from the sun. and mix it with carbon dioxide and produce glucose, ATP, and oxygen. So it's actually the reverse electron transport chain. Photons, sunlight, just like oxygen is really damaging to mitochondria, sunlight is really damaging to plant chloroplasts. Their mitochondria so plants produce polyphenols to uncouple their mitochondria to protect their mitochondria from sun damage and also other stressors. And so the more a plant is under stress, or even the higher a plant is in altitude, the more polyphenols it makes. and surprise, plants produce melatonin as a major protector of their chloroplasts and is an uncoupler. It turns out that melatonin in itself is an uncoupler. So what happens when we eat brightly colored plants, eat the rainbow, what we're actually doing is we're eating Uncouplers. And the more uncouplers you eat, the more you will protect your mitochondria. So now we go back and look at something like the Mediterranean diet. Well, it turns out that olive oil is full of polyphenols, red wine is full of polyphenols, these bright colored vegetables are full of polyphenols. but each one of them is documented to produce mitochondrial uncoupling. Another interesting aspect of the Mediterranean diet is that there are two blue zones in the Mediterranean.

Sardinia.

Yeah, Sardinia and Greece is scar. But there's another blue zone in Costa Rica on the Nicoya Peninsula. I got really interested in why those guys were so unique.

In Costa Rica.

In Costa Rica, in the Guayana Peninsula. And the only people in Sardinia that constitute the blue zones are the Sardinians who live up in the mountain. The Sardinians who live up in the mountains have incredible longevity. The Sardinians who live down by the sea don't.

Why is that?

I'm glad you asked. It turns out the Sardinians in the mountains are sheep goat herders. And fun fact, 30% of all the fat in goat and sheep milk are medium chain triglycerides, MCT oil.

30% MCT oil.

In goat and sheep milk, who knew? It's not present in cow milk. And it turns out that the Nagoya Peninsula also eats lots of goat and sheep cheeses. And so you can actually look at what happens when these people are eating goat and sheep cheeses. And it turns out that, to come full circle, MCTs are fats that don't behave like any other fat. They go right through our digestive wall. they go directly to our liver and they are immediately made into ketones. Do not pass go, do not collect 200. So, for instance, you could have, you could bite into an apple and have some MCT oil or better yet have a delicious piece of goat or sheep cheese. and despite the fact that you bit into an apple and had all that fructose running around your system.

The spiking of that, yeah.

You'd be in ketosis. Really? Yes.

How is that possible? Because you're coupling the two foods?

No, because the MCTs are going to your liver and your liver is making ketones despite what else you eat.

Despite the fructose that you eat.

Yeah, interesting. So that's unlocking the keto code. The cool thing is, you don't have to go on a miserable high-fat diet to activate what you're trying to get from ketones, and that is to unlock mitochondria. So the cool thing is you can have some MCT oil. You can mix it in your salad dressings. You can have it with olive oil, which has uncoupling power. You can have some pistachios. which are full of melatonin, which will uncouple, you can have a glass of red wine, which will uncouple your mitochondria. And red wine has lots of melatonin. And so you can literally have your cake and eat it too, as long as you know the tricks of foods to uncouple your mitochondria. Final thought. So why does intermittent fasting work so well. In the Energy Paradox, I wrote about these fascinating studies with Dr. De Cabo from the NIH who was convinced that calorie restriction didn't provide the benefits because of calorie restriction. He thought that there was another mechanism. And in animals, what we do when we calorie restrict animals is we give them their 30% less food portion once a day. We put it out, here you go, that's it. When you're getting 30% less food, you eat what you got very quickly.

Right now, right now.

It's gone. And he thought that what was happening was that the calorie restricted animals were actually eating much quicker and they were fasting for a longer period of time during every 24 hours.

They weren't nibbling throughout the day.

Exactly. And so he set up an experiment where he would give animals calorie restricted food or he would give animals regular food to eat all day. But the third group, he would put out their food only once a day at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. It would be a full day's portion. But it turns out that these mice who could only start eating at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, only ate for about 10 hours before it was gone. The other guys nibbled all day long. They got to eat all day long. When they looked at all the results, it turns out that the time-restricted mice lived 11% longer than the guys who munched all day. The calorie-restricted, time-restricted mice lived about 30% longer. But if you do the math, If we timed restricted like a mouse, we would get an extra 10 years of good life. Really? 10 years. Okay, so what's happening?

What does that mean, time restrict? Is only eat in a certain amount of time?

Normally eat in a certain amount of time. So here's the deal, normally after about eight hours of not eating, we start producing ketones, normally. And those ketones, remember, are not a fuel, they are a signaling molecule to make your mitochondria protect themselves. We reach maximal ketosis after about 12 hours. And so if you go a 12-hour window, you're getting a nice effect of ketones. But let's suppose we push that out an additional four hours to a 16-hour fasting.

Okay.

Now, We've got a good, actually 10 hours of ketone production telling our mitochondria to uncouple and protect themselves. So it worked out from Dr. Mathison who worked from the NIH that probably for us, a six hour eating window may be perfect. So an 18 hour fasting window. Now, why shouldn't we, if that's so good for us, why shouldn't we be in ketosis 24/7? The problem is the sweet spot, the Goldilocks rule. Continuous ketosis starts to impact muscle production because if you're always in ketosis, your mitochondria are being told that this is, you know, we're starving to death. Protect yourself, forget about those muscles. They don't, you know, who cares about them? Protect yourself and don't make muscle protein. Make protein for yourself and make sure the muscles don't get anything by producing insulin resistance so that whatever is around can't get into the muscles. So that's why continuous ketosis is so dumb and dangerous and why intermittent ketosis is so important on a 24-hour basis.

Well, it just seems really hard to be always in ketosis. It's like how does your brain function after a certain amount of time?

That's a really good question because we now know that even at full ketosis, your brain still wants 30 to 40% of its fuel is sugar. And where does the sugar come from? It has to come from your muscles.

So you're losing the muscle then.

Yeah. And you know, I have a colleague who went all in on this 24/7 keto thing for a very long time. And despite the fact that he exercises like a fiend, he got sarcopenia, he got muscle waste. Really? And it finally dawned on me, what the heck am I doing? So the cool thing is, ketones are really cool, but not why people think they're really cool. And you don't need to do a high-fat diet.

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 left over that we could store as fat to make it through the winter when times are rough and we're the only fat storing 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 of 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. 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. Might as well. Okay, so anyhow, back to vitamin C. You have to have vitamin C to repair the cracks in blood vessels. People remember scurvy, where people would die, they'd 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 to 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. So if you have plenty of vitamin C throughout the day you won't 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. Okay. But in the meantime, the average person should take, like, a thousand milligrams of timed release vitamin C twice a day. Okay. To cover their ass.

Wow.

Okay, so the first thing I heard.

You say this three minutes is turning into 20 minutes. 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 ghost gene. A 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. Have lots of vitamin D. Three. D3.

D3.

And then what's next? To go long life.

Next is you got to 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 tag you.

Yeah, yeah.

And I can just see how 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. 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 sushi is good.

Sushi is actually not a good idea.

Oh wow.

Most of the people I see with high mercury levels are sushi eaters or dentists. So, and particularly sashimi grade tuna.

God, that's so good.

You just wanna just kind of want to stay away from it.

Ah, sugarfish is amazing though.

Yeah.

And it's got the grains too.

Yeah, it's got the grains, you know.

So, so no sushi.

Yeah, so once in a while.

Yeah, once in a while. Okay, absolutely.

Yeah.

But yeah, so fish oil is incredibly important.

Yeah.

And what I try to get people to do, and again, I measure this every three months in all my patients, and we're talking thousands and thousands of patients over the last 20 years, you want to get about a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Now, how do you do that? Well, you get fish oil. I mean, you can go to Costco, I don't know.

Right, right, right.

And you look on the back and you find serving size and make sure it says one. serving size. They love to fool you. They may say two or three, and then you look down below and you see DHA and you look to see how much DHA is in a capsule and you add it up and say, oh okay, there's 250 milligrams of DHA in this capsule, so I need to take four.

Wow, four a day.

Yeah, a thousand a day. Okay, DHA.

We got olive oil, we've got vitamin D3, we fish oils. What else do we need to live longer?

So you got to have polyphenols in your diet. So, polyphenols. What the heck is a polyphenol? How do you remember polyphenol? Think about polywanna phenol.

Okay.

Phenols are plant compounds. Polyphenols are plant compounds that plants use primarily to protect themselves against stress and sunlight. Just interesting fact, we know that red wine is beneficial for you because of actually two polyphenols. The most famous is resveratrol. The other one is quercetin. The higher the grapes are grown, the higher in altitude the grapes are grown, the more polyphenols they make because they.

Need more to protect themselves.

Yeah, exactly.

It's basically sun tan. you know, they've actually protected themselves against sunburn.

Interesting.

Also, the more the plant is stressed, the more polyphenols it makes to protect itself.

Right.

Okay, so polyphenols are traditionally in dark colored berries. So, for instance, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. Interesting fun fact, the leaves olives of these trees or vines have more polyphenols than the actual fruit does. So for instance, black raspberry leaves have far more polyphenols than black raspberries. And I take black raspberry capsules, by the way, and it's in the book. So olives, for instance, are loaded with polyphenols and olives that are stressed Produce better. They are even better. Olive leaves have more polyphenols than olives. So olive leaf extract is an easy way of getting the huge amount of benefits without drinking a liter of olive oil.

So what about leafy greens? Do you want stressed out looking leafy greens or do you want healthy, thriving looking?

Excellent question. It turns out that the reason organic vegetables in general are better for you besides the fact that they haven't been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and probably Roundup, and we can get into that, is the fact that these creatures, these plants, actually have to work harder and they have to produce more polyphenols to protect themselves against insect predation. And so that's actually the reason you want to eat organic. So when you're going to the farmers market and the poor little organic vegetables have got potholes of insects. They're dying and they don't look very good. You go, I want that guy. That guy is struggling. He is going to just be so loaded with polyphenol.

Really?

And correlation with that is the more bitter, the better. Because polyphenols in general are very bitter. For instance, when we were developing, you know, my signature product, Vital Rest, it's pure polyphenols primarily and they're bitter. So we did lots of taste testing to figure out how the heck we're going to mass these really bitter compounds. So more bitter, more better. In fact, as I talk about in the book, I had the pleasure of knowing Jack Lalanne who you would know is really the godfather of fitness and nutrition. in the United States. I knew him in his later years. Jack used to have a saying, if it tastes good, spit it out. Now, what he really meant by that is bitter things, nasty tasting things is actually what is going to give the bugs that are actually going to keep you alive what they want to eat. More bitter, more better. So, the more polyphenols, the more bitter greens I can get into you, the better.

But you can get that through capsules and other things too.

Yeah, you can.

And in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm a nut about taking a bunch of supplements because if you look at even really good organic eaters, most human beings only eat maybe 20 different plant species.

I probably eat like three.

Yeah. Yeah.

Most people do.

Like five, maybe.

Yeah.

You know, and, you know, ketchup is not a vegetable.

It's a tomato.

And we can't do that. So our, our ancestors. And even looking at Modern Hunter gatherers like the Hansa tribe, they go through, they eat 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. And you think about all those plants. are grown organically. They're in six feet of loam soil. They got their cool microbiome. So they're just replete with all these nutrients and polyphenols. And so, you know, if people think that they can actually do a great job eating healthy without supplementation, I got oceanfront property in Palm Springs. I'm happy to sell them.

Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Okay, so I want to get one more thing. I've heard that in order to extend your life, you need to, I can't remember the name, extend something at the.

End of your... Telomeres.

Telomeres.

What is that? Or telomeres.

So how do we, is that true? You have to extend this.

So that is one theory of longevity. And it is a good theory. I like the theory. It's controversial. Vitamin D. Turns out that people with the highest levels of vitamin D have the longest telomeres.

There you go.

So why wouldn't you do that if you like that theory?

There you go.

So that's vitamin D is... Vitamin D. It's if anybody is... If anybody takes away, it's vitamin D.

So you've given four things so far. Let's give me one final thing that can extend our life and the quality of our life as well.

Great.

So the last thing we want to do is we want to turn off as much as we can the sensor called mTOR, originally called the mammalian target of rapamycin. It's subsequently been discovered in all organisms besides mammals. And so now it's called the mechanistic target of rapamycin. And so mTOR is an energy sensor. and it's in all of our cells. And basically we come from a circadian rhythm system of plentiful food at one time of the year and very little food at another time of year.

Right, fruit sometimes, none of the other times.

Exactly.

And we use fruit to gain weight for the winter and that's a whole other subject. So mTOR senses energy availability. and it senses sugar molecules and it also senses amino acids, protein. Now it turns out that it's very sensitive to particular amino acids rather than all amino acids. The ones it's most sensitive to are amino acids contained in animal protein and animals include fish, animal protein includes eggs, it includes cheeses and besides meat. So beautiful work that's been done.

A lot of it done by now.

My friend, Walter Longo from USC, from the Longevity Center. Is that the mimicking, fasting, mimicking diet?

I've taken that a couple of times.

He got a patent for Prolong.

Yeah, Prolong. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Got a patent for it. So Prolong, yeah. So Prolong is a vegan low amino acid diet that you do for five days.

Yeah, it's tough the first time.

It is for me. Now, in the book I wrote about in the Plant Paradox actually before he made promo, but I write about it again and he and I and he's even given me a nice shout out on the back. If you, the idea is you want to reduce mTOR as much as you can and the longer, the more you suppress it the longer you live. And here's the reason. you, if times are rough and you sense that times are rough, your body, your immune system actually goes around and looks at all the cells in your body and says, who's pulling their weight? Who is really, you know, contributing to this effort? And who's a slacker? Who looks a little weird? Who's not, you know, not doing? And it actually instructs cells to commit suicide, and it's called autophagy. and it tells cells, sorry, you're not out of here, you die. And so it gets the fittest of the fittest to survive.

It makes you stronger.

And you have to have these periods of time. You have to call the herd, as we say. So unless you do that, you have all of these cells that just kind of build up the debris. They're called senescent cells. Some people we call them zombie cells. And it's the amount of these zombie cells that is actually going to make you deteriorate long before you should.

It gets sick and it gets worse.

Exactly. So you gotta call the hurt. So how you do that? Five days in a row, once a month.

Once a month you do this?

Once a month, five days in a row, five days in a row. You follow a vegan diet, of about 900 calories and I got some great recipes, it's easy to do and you do it five days in a row. It's as if you did calorie restriction every day and what this does is not only call the herd, but it activates stem cells. Now everybody says, oh stem cells, you.

Know, it's the future.

You've got oodles of stem cells in you already. Where do you think we get the stem cells? We, you know, take a liposuction and suck out your fat and then we spin it around and we get your stem cells and inject you right back in.

They're already there.

You just have to call them into action. So, when someone does that, when they.

Pull it out of you, they're essentially just killing off the dead cells and then putting the good ones back in.

No, they're actually, you know, they're centrifuging out the stem cells. Stem cells are in fat.

They're everywhere actually.

So, you, but you got to activate the crazy thing. So, you activate them by this modified fat. fast or you do intermittent fasting or time restricted fasting. For instance, for the last 12 years, during the winter from January through June, Monday through Friday, I don't eat breakfast, I don't eat lunch, and I eat all my calories in a two hour window from six to eight o'clock at night. So 22 hour, 24 hours, I'm fasting for how long? For six months.

Six months you do that? -Oh my gosh.

-Now why do that? Because way back when.

-You'Re just drinking olive oil and vitamin D all day? -No, during the night, during that 18.

Hours, yeah, just drinking it. -Yeah. -Okay, wow. -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 through. -And the cops go, oh my gosh, you know, kill it, kill it. And that's why we got EpiPens with all of our little kids. Now, the same thing happens. We, 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. But more importantly, probably, because most of us have leaky gut. the 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 whatever. And well, why is that? Why would having high blood pressure make you 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. Yeah. Let me give you a great story. Years ago. 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, you know, that live in our nose, that live in our kidneys and live in our heart. And you go, why would my kidneys need to smell anything? Why would my heart need to smell anything? 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. come on into the office, let's see. Of course, their blood pressure is really low. And we go, okay, let's cut that high blood pressure pill in half. And then they call back a couple of 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 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, 5 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?

The gut. Wow. And 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. Wow.

Now, there's so many things you've covered here that I want to close a loop on a couple of these. I'm trying to figure out the solution to my peanut butter problem. What's the nut butter that I can eat? meat that's actually okay.

So, is there one? Yeah, so interestingly enough, we have a number of people with rheumatoid arthritis who react to the peel of an almond. There is a lectin in the peel of almonds.

So, you take the peel off.

You take the peel off.

So, these skinned almonds are okay.

Yeah, so like Marcona almonds and you can find them.

Really?

Yeah.

It shouldn't be an issue then.

It shouldn't be an issue. Yeah. So, If you're gonna choose.

That's interesting.

So walnuts are a great choice, pistachios are a great choice. Every time I eat a walnut, I sneeze. So there are some tannins in walnuts that certain people react to. So stay with pistachios, macadamia nuts. I love macadamia nuts.

They're really good.

Mac nuts are okay. So get yourself some peeled almonds.

I'm gonna do that now. Try it. Okay. You said American milk. milk is something that we should not have in order to fix leaky gut. Is there such thing as non-American milk that is okay to drink?

Yeah, so most people can have sheep milk, can have goat milk. Interestingly enough, goat milk traditionally was called mother's milk because the components in goat milk are very different than cow milk. They're far more similar to human milk. I actually tell mothers if they're going to give their child some animal milk, please make it goat milk rather than cow's milk. Okay.

Is there any other foods that we should not eat to heal our leaky gut?

So.

The more you, and I know.

You talk about this in Plant Paradox.

As well, but the more you, there are There are a few people that actually react to either the white or the yolk of eggs. Most people don't. But we test for those. And here's just something to throw out. I don't want to cause widespread panic. There is probably enough of that in.

The world right now.

That's right, yeah, we got plenty. There is a lectin in spinach that I was unaware of, but thanks to a company called Vibrant America, they discovered that there are a class of lectins called aquaporins. And they're present in tobacco, they're present in spinach, they're present in corn, they're present in soybeans, they're present in green peppers, and I think that's it. Anyhow. they actually can cause leaky gut and they can cause leaky brain. And I stumbled upon this because I have a few people with really bad IBS and really bad autoimmune disease who are saints. They follow my program, they never cheat, why would they?

Why do they still have it?

Why do they still have issues? And so when we had these new tests, lo and behold, almost every one of these people reacted to spinach.

No way.

And they ate a lot of spinach. And knock on wood so far, when we took the spinach away from them, that was the key. Now, don't everybody go home and throw out your spinach. But if you're following my program and my program does have spinach in it and we're still having problems, consider giving up spinach. There's no human need for it.

For spinach. Now you said, what was her name?

Is she a Dr. Terry? Is that her name?

Terry Wahls, there. Terry Wahls.

You said she was doing like 10.

Or 12 cups of veggies a day for nine cups of vegetables. The snake looking back at you. Now what should those, now why is it important to have nine cups of.

Vegetables and what does that do for your microbiome in your gut every day? So getting back to Dr. David Kessler, head of the FDA, we thought that carbohydrates were carbohydrates and you know and complex complex carbohydrates, starches were fine because they're complex carbohydrates. Everybody's wrong. Food manufacturers have figured out how to make a complex carbohydrate, a simple carbohydrate, and make you think it's a complex carbohydrate. So when you read a label, number one, if you have to read a label, you should put the package back because there shouldn't be a label on a head of lettuce. Right. To give you an example. you have to take, and if anybody, if the take-home point from this is what we're saying will save so many people's lives, read total carbohydrates on the label, then take away the dietary fiber. That'll be the next thing under it. So that will tell you the amount of grams of sugar per serving in that package. Do not look at where it says sugar. Do not look at added sugar. It is a lie.

So, it says zero sugar, zero added sugar.

Yeah. So, let me give you an example that he used on my podcast, which was a great example. He said, what would you find in a store? The label says it's 300 calories. It has zero fat. It has zero grams of sugar. and it has four grams of protein and it has 35 grams of carbohydrates.

Is that broccoli? I don't know.

What is that? It's a bagel.

A bagel.

A bagel. And 300 calories. 300 calories. Wow. Zero sugar.

I said zero sugar. I thought the.

That's just. It's a lie. The label law lies. to you. It's got 35 grams of carbohydrates. Now, to make that a teaspoon of sugar, which is sugar. It is pure sugar. In fact, it is better than sugar the way it has been manufactured. So you take to figure out how much that is, there's four grams of sugar per teaspoon. So let's take his 35 grams of sugar, divide by four. Let's make it easy, make it 36 grams. That's nine teaspoons of raw sugar in that bagel.

A bagel.

So that's number one. All of a sudden you have, how.

Many grams of sugar would that be?

That's, well, so a Coke, a 12 ounce Coke is about 12 grams of sugar. So you're basically chugging a Coke when.

You eat a bagel.

And it'll actually get into your bloodstream faster than if you chugged a Coke.

No way. How is it going faster because it's been broken down.

You actually have to digest the sugar molecule in the Coke. You don't have to digest the sugar molecule in a bagel. Really? Yeah, main lines. So that's number one. Number two, what nobody knew was the bacteria that most of your bacteria live down in your colon and your lower part of your small intestine. and they're waiting for the complex carbohydrates that you do not digest normally. They're waiting for their meal that always used to come. And that meal never comes anymore because everything's been so finely processed that we don't get those complex carbohydrates down to them. so they starve to death. Now what's really cool is that those guys take that meal and they make all these really cool compounds that number one, keep the wall of the gut intact, allow the wall of the gut to heal itself. They make compounds that actually are text messages to the mitochondria in all of our cells and particularly in our brain that guys down in the engine room are working under full power and we've got Scotty beam me up sort of thing, you know, give me warp drive five and we've got the power and you know it's okay to go into hyperspace. If they don't make those compounds, your mitochondria go go, geez, I'm not, I got nothing to work with here and we got no backup system. I'm gonna sputter down to a crawl. And people wonder why they're fatigued, even though they're eating more than ever and they're eating all these sports drinks and they're having, you know, 27 cups of coffee and going, you know, where's my energy? And it's because we no longer have this beautifully designed symbiotic relationship and we starve the most important part of us. And that's why Jacqueline said if it tastes good spit it out.

So why nine cups of vegetables then?

Because that is actually giving those guys what they want to eat. Now Terry didn't know this back then but her first book was Minding My Mitochondria or Feeding My Mitochondria. But now we know it's actually we gotta feed those guys. We have to eat eat for them.

Mitochondria.

We got to eat for the bacteria.

They live in our gut.

So, not the mitochondria?

Yeah. So in the longevity paradox, here's the really scary thing. Mitochondria are actually engulfed ancient bacteria. Billions of years ago, cells invited bacteria to live inside them. in exchange for a nice place to live, the cells said, we'll give you what you want to eat in exchange for you making ATP energy for us. And obviously it was a good deal and because that's continued now. So within us, all of our cells have engulfed ancient bacteria that produce energy for us. And what's so really fun is the bacteria in your gut are the sisters of the mitochondria, which are bacteria in our cells, and they actually talk to each other.

Okay.

And here's what's really cool. You and I inherited our mitochondria from our mother. Dad did not give us any mitochondria.

Okay.

So all mitochondria are female. And if everything went okay, you and I inherited our gut microbiome from our mother, who literally took a crap on us as we exited the birth canal. And, you know, most everybody kind of knows that, you know, mom took a crap on me. Yeah. Ladies, if you hate your mother, no, she didn't take a crap on you. But your mother gives you your initial dose of bacteria. And that's actually why cesarean section babies who don't get that dose take up to six months to get a normal immune system compared to a vaginal delivery.

What do you think? I mean, a lot of research has changed since you wrote the Plant Paradox. I mean, new research comes out in the world.

Sure.

As more people are studying around health. What do you think is going to evolve in the next five to ten years? Like that hasn't come out yet, that is going to be the next new science in five to ten years, that maybe you're testing or you're seeing other people testing or you just have a hunch about?

Well, I think one of the things that is interesting is this whole food sensitivity idea that we could be eating what would normally be what would seem to be very healthy food like broccoli.

Yes.

And yet if we have a leaky gut, that broccoli in itself could be our enemy initially. Interesting. And I think it actually, it's fascinating when I do, and I do it more and more now with people who have really followed the rules pretty well, but it've gotten better, but they're not all the way. When we do, you know, the leaky gut tests and the food sensitivity tests, it flashes and people go, oh my gosh, you know, I can tell you, you know, when I have ginger, you know, I don't like ginger, it bothers me. And yet ginger is really healing. we have tons of people react to ginger or they'll say, oh yeah, you know, I knew that I didn't like this. I didn't know why, but you know, there it is. So I think we can really, you know, kind of customize people for...

Interesting.

And I think, you know, this is not new, but I think the more we come to realize this, you know, Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut. And the guy was right. And I think what we are beginning to realize is you name the disease, it's from something going on in the gut, leaky gut. I now think heart disease is from leaky gut. It's just a manifestation. So, you know, and I paraphrase Hippocrates, all disease begins in the gut. But all disease can end in the gut.

That's true. When we fix it.

Yeah. Which I think to me is really empowering.

Food is medicine. Yeah. Can kill you or can heal you.

Very true.

Now, here's something we haven't talked about yet, which all the keto people are going to want to hear and learn more about. Because on the keto diet, what I'm used to knowing is that you eat as much meat and cheese and milk as you want.

Right.

It's like you can eat all the.

Meat in the world. yeah, well, that's a high protein keto diet.

Okay.

Yeah. There's so many crazy versions. There's the high protein, there's the dirty, there's the clean keto.

So what is. I mean, so.

Yeah, but you're right.

All the longevity experts, including yourself, have talked about something around the Mediterranean diet, like having more vegetables.

Yeah.

A lot less meat. You know, if you're gonna have meat, have fish.

Fish. Yep.

And where does meat come in with this now?

Yeah, so those are good questions. There's several problems with beef, lamb, and pork. And I wrote about this in the Plant Paradox, and with each passing year it gets stronger and stronger evidence. There is a sugar molecule in beef, lamb, and pork called Neu5Gc. and I talk about who knew? Nu-5 GC is on their blood vessels. We have a different sugar molecule called Nu-5 AC. We share that sugar molecule with fish and chicken. Fun announcement you saw about the pig heart going into... done by a good friend of mine, Bartley so tell people what happened. So they engineered, I used to hold the longest record for a pig to baboon heart transplant, ungenetically modified, 30 days.

Where the baboons stayed alive.

Yeah, yeah, working, you know, and you made the transplant. Yeah, I did the transplant. I had the record. Unmodified. Now, what they did, what we knew back then, this is crazy, is the pig had this dumb sugar molecule on it. that we react to. It had Neu5Gc. And so what they've done with that pig is they've genetically bred that pig to have our sugar molecule Neu5Ac. So when our guys go past the wall of the pig's blood vessels, we see, you know, our sugar molecule. So why is that important? Well, we know that we can develop an antibody to Neu5Gc in beef, lamb and pork. And it looks so similar to the antibody that lines our blood vessels that we attack our blood vessels by mistake when we see our own. And that may explain why meat eating is much more associated with coronary artery disease. Number one, we also know that cancer cells use Nu-5GC to hide from the immune system. They literally cloak themselves. We don't manufacture Nu-5GC. We have Nu-5AC. So they have to acquire Neu5Gc from our diet. And that may explain why meat eating associates higher with cancer development because of this molecule. And so that's one reason. Second reason that the Cleveland Clinic would propose and vegans would propose is that a lot of our gut bacteria will take components in meat, even chicken, even fish, and turn it into a compound that can really damage blood vessels called TMAO. And I've written about it in all my books. Most of us have got bacteria that when we meet will make TMAO. Fun fact, if you eat a lot of polyphenol containing foods or take polyphenol supplements like resveratrol, like grape seed extract, those polyphenols paralyze our gut bacteria so that they can't make TMAO. kill them. It paralyzes the enzyme system. And that may explain why Italians can eat sausages and, you know, whatever and not have much heart disease. It's because of the rich polyphenol diet that's suppressing that production. So those are, yeah, those are some of the argument.

So if someone's going to be on this specific diet, how much meat should or can they have?

Well, so what types of meat? Yeah. So what I try to do is limit people to about two to four ounces of animal protein a day.

And less the better is what I'm.

Yeah, really. The less the better. Use it, you know, use it.

A couple of times a week.

Yeah, use it as a garnish.

Not the main thing.

Not the main thing. A little. Yeah, you know, I mean, if you want a big giant, you know, Caesar salad with no croutons and, you know, you want three grilled shrimp on, you know, great, you know, that's a wonderful meal. But we really, our protein needs are so overestimated and we could get into an hour discussion on that. But we really only need two and a half eggs. Gives you all the protein you need in 24 hours.

You don't need a lot more meat.

You don't need a lot more meat. Don't get me wrong, I grew up in Omaha.

You know, I mean, steak all day.

Oh yeah, you know, steak and bacon for breakfast, you know, steak and eggs for lunch, you know, side of pork for dinner. I mean, that's living.

Yeah, exactly.

Not living very long.

That's living to die quick. So, high fiber, Yeah, high soluble fiber, less meat, less meat, and really less lamb, beef and pork is what I'm hearing.

Yeah, less lamb, beef and pork.

Like if you're gonna have a steak, do it once a month.

Yeah, you know, actually, you know, my wife and I will have a grass-fed, grass-finished six ounce filet once, three, every three months. And it's really good and we enjoy it, but, you know, it's really good.

But eating that every day doesn't, from your research and your experience for what.

Decades doing heart-- yeah, well, I've been doing nutritional research now with patients for, you know, this is my 22nd year.

But you were a heart surgeon for how long?

Oh, for too long. No, I was a heart surgeon for 50 years.

50 years. So, working with the heart for that long and seeing what people were eating to get to that place.

Right. And the exciting thing, you know, subsequently, is watching people reverse heart disease by.

Changing what the, by limiting some of these things. Now, to go back to the, the pig heart, what, what has happened now? So there was a pig heart transplant from a pig that was modified genetically modified to have a sugar molecule that.

We, that we have instead of his sugar molecules. And so, lining his blood vessel.

And so this happened what, a week or two ago?

Yeah, last week.

So your colleague did a heart transplant of the pig into a human being.

Correct.

And the human's alive.

Yeah. Now just remember, baby Fay, my colleague Leonard Bailey, she lived for 14 days with a baboon heart in her. So there's this kind of grace period where this intense rejection against a foreign substance takes place.

So it's not going to feel good.

For... With pigs, the rejection was so immediate that before my research, the longest a pig in a baboon could go was about four hours. Because the intense rejection was after that sugar molecule on the blood vessel. So it's gonna, I mean they've done.

Some really a heart-to-heart transplant from human to human.

We sure will attack.

It's traumatic.

It's exact will attack. But yeah, but they've done their homework. This has been going on now for well over 20 years. A lot of the research that I started at Loma Linda and it's gone to fruition and you know the FDA has allowed a compassionate use for this guy. But, they've done very good homework on looking at what the protein molecules that our immune system is looking for that's different in a pig and then genetically modified. That's crazy.

So, we'll see how what happens.

Yeah. So, is this guy awake? Oh yeah, he's awake.

He's talking. Is he able to talk right now?

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, so I mean this was not one of these last ditch spur of the moment. This has been going on for a very long time. Wow. I started this research at Loma Linda in our xenotransplant lab in 1989. So it's been going on now.

How many heart transplants did you do?

We usually did baby heart transplants. We did over over one a week for multiple years. We don't do them as much anymore because we've refined the way of repairing babies' hearts where they can actually survive the operation.

That's good.

And so we don't need it as much anymore.

In adult transplants?

We need so many adults, we don't have any donors. So, I mean, there's a tremendous this need for this. And artificial hearts, you know, I was one of the first 20 surgeons selected to put in the artificial heart. Even artificial hearts are not great. I mean, they're a nice stopgap, but so if this can happen, it would just be phenomenal.

So the plant paradox is that there's certain plants that absolutely positively do not want us to eat them.

At all.

In any circumstances.

Under any circumstances.

They cook them or chop them or slice them or skin them. Doesn't matter.

They were here first and they had it really great before animals arrived because nobody wanted to eat them. And my research at Yale was in human evolutionary biology. So plants have the same evolutionary drive as animals. They want to grow. and they want to have babies, seeds.

They want to protect themselves.

And they want to protect themselves.

They don't want to die.

Exactly.

So when animals arrived, they had a problem because animals can run, they can hide, they can fight, but plants are stuck. But plants are chemists of incredible ability. So they can turn sunlight into matter like around your wall here. And so what they use is chemical warfare to to actually defend themselves and to even make animals do their bidding. Because, for instance, just throw out an example, most plants want you to eat their fruits because the fruit can take seed to go reseed them. So you'll eat their fruit. The seeds in the fruits are inedible and you'll either spit them out or if you swallow them, they'll survive going through your intestines. and you'll poop them out someplace else. Fertilize.

Fertilize. It's perfect.

And they're away from mom and dad. So for instance, if an apple falls underneath the apple tree, that poor kid doesn't have much of a chance, 'cause mom or dad is gonna shade them the next year. But if it gets carried off, you know, even 100 feet away, and then it gets dropped, the plant does this on purpose. And in fact, you and I, love fruit because you and I were designed to eat fruit once a year in the summer to gain weight for the winter. So it was a really good trade-off between, for instance, great apes and plants. But the fascinating thing is manufacturers, food chemists know this and we are drawn with color vision and only animals that are fruit predators actually have color vision because you want to know when the fruit is ripe, when it has the highest sugar content. And the plant wants you to know when it's ripe because that's when the seed finally has an impenetrable shell. And it doesn't want you to eat it before that time. So it tells you, okay, now's the time.

Shiniest object. It's time to eat it. Yeah.

Yeah. So.

What colors does it use? In general, it uses reds and oranges and yellows to denote ripeness. So the next time you're going down the snack aisles looking for all the great munchie stuff, you'll be shocked that most of the companies use oranges, reds, yellows to get your attention because it goes direct into the deep center of your brain and says, oh, oh, that color means I should eat it. I'm going to get a lot of calories and I'm going to be the big winner for the winter. Wow.

But if you're doing that every day.

For many years in a row, you're.

Always storing fat for the winter.

That's exactly right. And that's part of the plant paradox, is that once upon a time we only had fruit in a very limited time period.

Now we have it accessible all the time.

There were no 747s bringing blueberries to Costco in February.

They just weren't.

So one of the weird things about our computer program is like Tony Robbins.

Is always fun to say we we.

Run version 1.0 of our operating system. We've never had an upgrade and the same goes to the foods and the plants and the fruit we eat.

So we were supposed to eat fruit.

Once a year and when we were eating fruit our brain says oh my gosh it's summer and winter is right around the corner. You know, we should eat this stuff because winter's a tough time, whether it's dry season, a rainy season, a cold season. And we better store up fat, just like a bear. You know, bears eating all those blueberries and huckleberries, and they're storing fat for the winter. So if you're eating blueberries at Costco in February that came from Chile, your operating system doesn't know it's February.

It says, Heck, it's August.

And winter's right around the corner, so I better eat some more of this stuff. And this is one of the things that's happening to us in particularly the American society, but now most of the Western country. We're eating things that we have no business eating 365 days a year. And most of us are just getting ready for the winter that never comes.

Especially if they live in LA.

Yeah.

It's never getting cold.

Yeah, never comes.

You don't need to store that fat.

You really don't.

Yeah, but that's, you know, that's part of the problem.

Wow.

So, huh?

What are the main plants that we should never be eating then?

Okay, real quick. 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.

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.

But it'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 is 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 serve the kids beans 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. So, no beans.

No beans.

Zero beans.

Unless you use pressure cooked beans. Pinto black.

None of it, we shouldn't be eating it.

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. 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? It doesn't matter once it's pressure cooked.

Obviously everything in moderation, but I mean.

Yeah, well, I was presenting.

20 beans are gonna kill me. 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. 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 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 it, 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, oh, mama mia. What am I going to 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 because they're gone. and the most striking thing is the Southwest American Indians always peel and de-seed 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. And you can prove this in your grocery store. Buy a can of green chilies, You popped 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.

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 to 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, there.

Is no such thing.

Dang it.

So get almond butter instead. Yes, it's much better.

No 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, I love peanut butter. Oh, you know.

So I can have as much almond milk as I want.

And I went to medical school in Georgia, you know, Jimmy Carter, you know.

Man, peanuts are everything.

Sandwiches and joy.

Yeah, no, sorry.

Eliminated.

Gone. Gone. Say goodbye. Lectins, the science is getting better and better every year. Lectins, thanks to a professor at Harvard, Alessio Fasano, proved that in fact lectins like gluten can attach to the wall of our gut and kind of flip a switch and produce leaky gut. And so it's not science fiction, it's not pseudoscience. We can now measure leaky gut, we can quantify leaky gut, and you wouldn't believe the number of people who have leaky gut that have antibodies like they've been vaccinated against the various forms of wheat. And gluten is just one of the lectins in wheat. There's plenty more.

So is gluten harmful for everyone or is it some bodies can handle a certain amount and it's okay or is it like if you have gluten it's going to affect you in a negative way no matter who you are?

Excellent question. So I've actually published data that we can take people with gluten sensitivity and with leaky gut and with antibodies to gluten and over a year period of time take away the foods that they're sensitive to and heal their leaky gut, seal it up. And with the passage of time, those antibodies to the various forms of wheat disappear. They go away. It's like you keep needing a booster shot for COVID. You literally lose the antibodies, you lose the memory that you were interested in gluten. That's really exciting.

What does that do to your body when you lose the antibodies to gluten?

So I think that you can now reintroduce gluten and get away with it.

Got it, okay.

In fact, I've written about this on my personal self. Years ago, we started doing autoimmune tests on everybody, including ourselves. And there's markers for autoimmune disease like lupus, like Hashimoto's. And so my assistant comes running in and she says, Doc, you got lupus. And I go, I don't have lupus. And she says, yeah, you have anti-nuclear antibody positive. And I said, huh, that's interesting because my father's side of the family had massive psoriasis, which is an autoimmune disease. And he was on methotrexate for 50 years. Long story short. So I said, yeah, okay, I've got a very strong family history for an autoimmune disease. and I'm always experimenting with food. I said, that's really cool. I'm gonna try to turn it off. And so I went two weeks perfectly following the Plant Paradox program. Measured it two weeks later, gone. Okay, that's good information.

If you stayed on that track, it would stay probably gone, but if you.

Went back on the- oh, it was gone for years.

But if you went back on the-.

So I decided to test it. You know, you gotta experiment on yourself. So I was, we were editing the Longevity Paradox in New York City and we, we needed to do some more editing, finished on a Friday and I had to stay over for Monday to keep editing. So I said, you know, I got a whole weekend here. I'm gonna test the system. So I had pizza, I had bread, I had pasta, I had tomatoes. Yeah, I had ice cream. And so I come back, back to Palm Springs and I test my anti-nuclear antibody and sure enough it's positive. I said, oh wow, this is great. And so I said, I wonder how fast I can turn it off. So I went one week retested negative. So what does that tell me? Tells me that I can produce leaky gut in myself, but I can fix it really fast. What I've learned from my patients over 22 years is when you've got really leaky gut, it's not going to fix in a week or two. It can take three, six, nine months a year. I have one patient we just celebrated, it's been a year and a half, we're finally done with it. And the really cool thing, once you heal a leaky gut, you no longer have particles coming across your gut wall and 80% of your immune system is sitting lining your gut. All of your white blood cells are just there waiting because troublemakers can come through. And so if troublemakers are constantly coming through, the immune system is on hyper alert. And you know, people hear about cytokine storm in COVID, with the immune system hyper alert, they're ready to fire at any little thing. Example, I like to use, believe it or not, 95% of us are born with an antibody to the peanut lectin. Born with it.

What does it mean when you have an antibody to that?

So, you literally have been vaccinated.

So, it means you can eat the food.

And, it won't affect you. It will.

It will affect you. so 95% of us have it where it will affect us in some way.

But when I was growing up, every little kid had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at school. There were peanuts on airplanes.

Baseball games.

Yeah, in baseball games you're having peanuts. And nobody had a peanut allergy. Nobody had EpiPens. Now of course, if some, you know, poor little kid brings a snack of peanuts, three EpiPens are coming out and kids are having these tremendous allergic reactions. And you go, wait a minute, why is that? Why, you know, my generation didn't have that. Never had that. Never had that. That's because back in the good old days, almost nobody had leaky gut. And so our immune system could defend against it. No, the immune system goes, yeah, I know that. I'm not very interested in that. You know, that's not a big deal. But now, our immune system is walking around with Uzis, you know, and anything that looks even remotely worrisome, you're going, okay. And that's why all of us, I mean, autoimmune diseases are off the wall. 60 million women have Hashimoto's thyroiditis in America.

Wow.

It's like, huh? And, you know, when I was in medical school back in the dark ages, I mean, these were incredibly rare diseases. They were so rare that these series of tests looking for autoimmune diseases, we call them funny tests because we almost never ordered them. You never used them. Yeah, let's get those funny tests.

But now people use them every week.

Oh yeah, I get autoimmune tests on every patient. And it's shocking how many people have it.

Okay, so we, so gluten and lectin, so what are the main foods that have the most gluten or the most.

Well, so wheat, rye, and barley have gluten. Oats have a protein that cross-reacts with gluten. And I can't tell you in the number of people who are eating oats that they're one of the culprits.

What if it's when it, when they say gluten-free free oats, is that run? What does that mean when it's gluten-free oats?

It basically means nothing. because there's a protein in oats that isn't gluten, but it looks a lot like gluten and our immune system can't tell the difference. Similarly, 70% of people who are sensitive to gluten react to corn as if it was gluten. And that's why so many patients, and I've written a paper about this, who are gluten free, eating gluten free leaky foods still have leaky gut and autoimmune diseases. And when we take away their healthy gluten-free foods like corn, like oats, like quinoa, then their leaky gut goes away and autoimmune disease goes away.

What about when you process the almonds or the oats into almond milk or oat milk?

Part of the problem with with oats is that almost all of our oats in the United States have been sprayed with Roundup. And a ton of our organic oats have Roundup on them. And Roundup glyphosate is a major leaky gut disruptor in and of itself.

So even if it says organic oats, gluten-free organic oat milk, no human being.

Ate a grain until 10,000 years ago. No human being ate a grain of rice until 8,000 years ago. These didn't exist. Human beings used to be as tall as you 10,000 years ago. Then we shrunk down to my size after we started eating grains.

Really?

Yeah. We shrunk about a foot after agriculture. Literally shrunk. Our brain sizes decreased. at least 15% after the dawn of agriculture.

Because of the foods we were eating.

Because the foods we were eating. Yeah.

That's fascinating. Okay.

So, darn it.

So, when you process it into a milk, you know, what does that mean? Is it better? Is it worse? Is it the same? How does the gut take it in?

It really doesn't make any difference.

Oh, come on.

It doesn't make any difference. Well, for instance, I'll give you a great example.

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Originally, the Plant Paradox program was called the Matrix after the movie. And my editors at Harper Collins thought it was kind of too macho manly. Not touchy-feely enough. True story.

Right.

And so we called the plant paradox and the rest is history. But originally almonds were not allowed on the program because I had a ton of people with autoimmune diseases that almonds, they would react to even almond flour. But the plant paradox, you know, take away a lot of stuff and my editor said, hey, come on, you're a mean guy, you know, give us something, give us something. I said, well, almonds, the peel of the almond has the majority of the lectin. So, I'll tell you what, let's have blanched almonds like Marcona almonds. That's why those people do that. And let's give them blanched almond flour, okay? And everybody's happy. So, it works for 90% of people who just pick up the plant paradox with an autoimmune disease. They resolve their issues without even visiting me. But about 10% of people even visiting me, playing by the rules, still they're better. We can measure that they're better on their leaky gut, but they're not all the way. And so we do these tests called food sensitivity test. Now that's totally different than food allergy test. Food sensitivity, believe it or not, basically says that if you've got spaces in the wall of your gut that undigested food particles, like let's just use almonds, which would normally be digested into simple sugars, simple fats, simple amino acids and absorbed through the wall. Now, pieces of food can potentially go across the wall undigested and your immune system says, what the heck? I've never seen a piece of broccoli before. You know, what's that doing in here? That's foreign to me and I'm going to attack it. And I'm going to make a memory of what that broccoli looks like. And anytime I see anything that looks like broccoli, I'm going to attack it. So we see these people who are, you know, they're having almond flour cookies and, you know, almond bread, almond milk. and then we test them for food sensitivity, and up comes almonds. And yeah, I just got some wonderful story. I had this woman with psoriasis, horrible psoriasis, on two drugs. And anyhow, we got rid of all of her psoriasis, got her off of all of her drugs, and she had this two-inch patch of psoriasis in the middle of her back, and that's all she had.

Still love.

Yeah, and she says, look, you know, I'm really happy. it's nowhere else.

No one sees it.

Who cares? But isn't that, and she goes, isn't that interesting that there it is? And I said, yeah, I said, would you mind if we did a food sensitivity and just kind of see if there's a couple things that we ought to get rid of? And sure enough, almonds, you know, pops up. And so she got her results a couple weeks before I saw her. And so she comes in and she said, I got my results. And guess what? She's, I've given up almonds two weeks ago.

And now look.

It's down to an inch. It shrunk. 50% in two weeks just by getting rid of almonds.

And she did that for another two or three weeks.

Yeah, now it's gone. Now it's gone.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah.

I think they were food sensitivity or food allergy tests, one of the two, because I had a little patch of psoriasis right here, like a little different skin, you know, it was like kind of a raised little impact. It wasn't like spreading, but it was a little patch here and then kind of come and go. And on all these tests I took, they were like, you have no sensitivities. No, like, since these to allergies.

I'm not sure which one it was. Probably allergy tests.

We used to do those.

I never thought they were any good, even though.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

I never thought I got.

The sensitivity. The sensitivity. Anyways, they said that I didn't have any allergies or sensitivities. I'm not sure which one. but a lot of it, what I realized was based on stress. It was based on a lack of sleep and a lot of stress that I was facing internal, internal emotions that I wasn't able to process and essentially abandoning myself in certain occasions, which made me kind of feel like I had a heightened immune system, I guess, which I think was the cause of this.

And stress in itself can actually produce leaky gut. Really? Oh, yeah. I have particularly a number of women who can point literally to the day and hour that their autoimmune started, their leaky gut started. So were they a sudden death of a mother, for instance?

Divorce.

Yeah, divorce is right up there.

So were they still eating like perfectly to, you know, the diet they were supposed to eat, but they were like, why do I have this? this, you know.

Yeah, I mean, they were eating, quote, a normal diet, and they've been fine up until that.

And then stress heightened the leak.

Right. And then, kind of once you produce that leak, then your immune system... Yeah, they're open. And interesting enough, your immune system actually comes up to the border of the wall of your gut, and, you know, there's a war going on there. And as the war goes on, you actually have friendly fire. So your own immune system worsens the problem and so it just perpetuates. The other thing we've learned is that viruses are actually really good at making leaky gut. And my humble opinion is a lot of the long COVID we're seeing is actually because of leaky gut from COVID COVID loves to attack to attack the mucous membranes of us, including our gut. So a lot of people present with COVID with diarrhea, for instance.

So we've got gluten, lectins, wheat, rye, barley, oats.

The nightshades.

The nightshades.

Tomatoes, peppers, goji berries.

Goji berries are supposed to be healthy for you, right?

Goji berries are actually nightshades. Darn it. They're actually American plants. They're called the wolfberry in America. and they were taken over to China and trade in Colombian trade and they grew extremely well. But yeah, goji berries are nitrates.

So all these... And potatoes.

And potatoes. Not sweet potatoes. Not jams and sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes are fine. But potatoes are... And beans.

But beans you can detoxify really easily with prolonged soaking, prolonged cooking, but most importantly, a pressure cooker.

Okay.

And there's two brands of beans now. I have no relationship. Eden and Jovial that soak and pressure cook their beans before they ship.

They send it to you.

Yeah. And, you know, people say, well, you know, you hate beans. No, I have beans several times a week. There you go.

As long as they're pressure. So what about potatoes?

Is there a way to eat potatoes in a pot?

In a way?

So most of the lectins are in the peel.

The skin.

The skin. Same with tomatoes and same with peppers.

So if you take the skin off.

The tomatoes and deep seed the tomatoes.

And pepper, then you can eat them in sauce or.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, in fact, in Italy, you cannot make tomato sauce without peeling and de seeding tomatoes.

Interesting.

You'll never open a jar of Italian red peppers and sea peels and. seeds because they're gone. You'll never open a can of chili peppers in the United States and see peels and seeds because they're gone because the traditional cultures have always known to do this. And how'd they know? Because their mother told them and blah, blah, blah. And, yeah, I mean, the Italians wouldn't eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back, their native son, because they knew how bad they were for them. Wow. In fact, Americans Germans didn't start eating tomatoes until the late 1800s because they were believed to be deadly.

Really?

And they were calling him part of the deadly nightshade family. And then this, I've forgotten his last name, I think it's Colonel Mitchell, he wasn't a colonel at all. He stood on this, he put an announcement in the paper in a suburb of Philadelphia that he was going to commit suicide by eating a bushel of tomatoes. so on the courthouse steps. And he proceeded to eat a lot of tomatoes and he doesn't die. Seriously. And I actually talk about it in Plant Paradox. And that actually opened the floodgates to Americans eating tomatoes.

They said, okay, he's fine, so we.

Can start eating tomatoes. Yeah, yeah, look, he didn't die.

Yay.

It's a myth.

But people thought if you eat this, it's gonna kill you.

It's gonna make you sick.

Interesting.

And we still have a lot of people who do react with pain to the Nightshade family.

So potatoes are fine if they're peeled.

Yeah.

What I'm here to say is just don't eat the skin.

Or pressure cook them.

Or pressure cook them, then they're fine.

Yeah.

Okay. Are there any others that you have in mind?

Peanuts and cashews. Cashews are actually poison ivy. They're the same plant as poison poison ivy and why anybody would, you know, want to munch on poison ivy. Yeah, it's beyond me.

But they taste so good.

Well, I agree. I used to love them. Oh, man. I haven't had a cashew in I don't know how long.

So what do you see when people are eating cashews, when they take the food sensitivity tests, who have, who stop eating cashews? But there's probably a number of foods they're eating that affect them than remove them all.

Correct. Yeah, we remove them all and some of them make people cry. I have an executive high up in one of the social media companies who developed just a devastating, painful autoimmune disease and the meds were making him even sicker and long story short, got referred to me and we did these tests and among other things, he was sensitive to both egg whites and egg yolks. And so, you know, how it goes. Now, the problem was this guy lived on omelets. He had an omelette every day. He loved omelets. And, you know, he was, you know, I can't do this. I said, look, you know, come on, help me out here. I said, we'll get him back.

I promise.

Just. But you got to fix the leak. Yeah, we got to fix the leak. So. And sure enough, you know, his pain went away. We got him off his meds. So about nine and we could measure as he got's getting better and better and better. And he's a happy guy, but he still wants his omelet. So nine months in, we retest him and now he can tolerate egg whites, but he's still not good with egg yolks. But now he's a happy guy. He can have an egg white omelet. Here's the best part of this story. So we go over this data two days later. I get a phone call from and he says, oh, I'm in such pain. I said, what'd you do?

I have an omelet.

He says, well, I had an omelet for breakfast, an omelet for lunch, an omelet for dinner, and then I just had another omelet. And I'm in such pain. What'd you do that for? I said, you know, you haven't seen this in nine months. You gotta put it in.

Slowly, yeah.

I got it. Yeah. Dom, sorry. You know, the light bulbs went off this morning. that was dumb. But now he's eating egg yolks. And so the really cool thing, really cool thing is you can retrain the immune system and you can seal leaky gut so that you can have these foods back as long as you, you know, take some precautions. Well, you got to fix, you know, why, for instance, you got heart disease in the first place. And I was taught, as all my colleagues were taught, that heart disease is kind of inevitable, that that's the leading cause of death for both men and women.

It's inevitable for all of us, that's.

What we were taught. Yeah, pretty much that's what we were taught.

That's a good point.

Yeah, and then even if you get it, let's say you get coronary artery disease, the best we can do is slow it down to slow the progression. And what I realize, thanks to Big Ed, who I talk about in all my books, who reversed his coronary artery disease.

This is a man who had 100 pounds overweight.

Yeah, he was really overweight. He was late 40s, he had inoperable coronary artery disease. everything was clogged up. Wow.

And this guy went, so you opened him up?

No, well he had gone to six different centers in the United States saying, you know, do something. And everybody who saw him said, well, no, there's no place to do bypasses, there's no place to do stents because everything's clogged up, have a nice day. And so this guy spent about six months doing this. and he went on a diet during this time and he went to a health food store and he bought a bunch of supplements, kind of willy-nilly quite frankly. And so when I met him, he was still a huge guy, weighed 265 pounds, and he brings me his angiogram, the movie of his heart from Miami, Florida. And I look at it and I go, you know, I agree with everybody else. There's nothing I'm gonna do for you. And he says, well, yeah, that's what everybody says. but here's the deal, you know, I've gone on this diet, I've lost 45 pounds in the last six months and I've taken all these supplements and you know, maybe I did something in here, you know, and I'm scratching my perfection.

So the video is from six months prior.

Prior.

Wow. Okay.

And I said, well, good for you for losing weight and you know, I know what you did with those supplements. You made expensive urine, which I fully believed. And he said, well, Well, why don't we do another angiogram? What would it hurt? So I go, don't get your hopes up, but okay. So this guy has cleaned out in six months time half the blockages in his coronary artery. Gone, shrunk. And you go, I've never seen this before. That doesn't happen.

This was what, after 30 years of doing this?

Oh yeah. 35 years. Yeah, yeah. that doesn't happen, you know, come on, that's impossible. You don't clean things out.

The only way to clean it out is through surgery.

Right. Yeah. Or put a stent in. So let me give you an example, and this is kind of off the subject. So if you work out with weights and you happen to wear a wedding ring or an aura ring, you get calluses, right? So calluses are your body's response to protecting itself against an irritation. And you build up layers and layers and... Right? So it turns out that these plaques inside arteries is a response to an irritation. And you build up... Callus. Callus. And think about it, if I took off this ring and started working out with weights, this callus would go away because there's no longer any irritation. And what Big Ed showed me was he had removed the irritation, so he no longer needed calluses and his heart started to heal. And it literally goes away. And so that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years, is teaching people how to remove the irritation to the inside of their blood vessels and the calluses miraculously go away. They don't miraculously go away. You don't need them anymore. Right.

And was there a moment when you were doing deep in your practice where you were like, I'm not going to work on another heart until they actually follow this plan and start losing weight and start eating the right things. And then if there's no hope, then maybe I'll dive in. But was there a point where you're like, never again will I I do?

Well, yeah, so I mean.

I wrote.

About this in the Plant Paradox that I had this gentleman in his 60s, bad diabetic, came in with a heart attack, scheduled him for surgery the next morning. We're in the pre-op room and the guy is trembling like a leaf. And he says, I can't go through this. And I've learned enough that if somebody is that terrified, don't go put them to sleep and do it because something probably is not going to work out very well. Fear. So I said, okay, I'll make you a deal. I said, you, gotta follow everything I do, tell you to do, and if you do it, I can guarantee you I will not have to operate on you, but if you don't do it, you're coming back here and we're gonna do this? Well, that was now 10 years ago. He's not a diabetic. He has no coronary artery disease. He comes in twice a year now and just, you know, we do stress tests on him. And, you know, and he became one of my best patients. Wow. And, you know, you were gonna do a stress test. Yeah, we were wheeling him into surgery and the guy's shaking like a leaf. I don't think I I can do this. I said, okay, here's the deal. Wow.

That's crazy.

Oh, yeah. We always reminisce. He says, you know, it's been 10 years now. And, you know, I followed what you told me. And I said, yeah, here you are. You don't have a scar in your chest. I said, you're really bad for business.

What were the few things you told him that he went out and did? Was there, like, some specific, exact things he did?

Yeah. Well, I. I do this in, in all my. so were actually, Jack, my staff always told me, Don't say this story because people get the wrong idea. Jack Lalanne, I got to know Jack Lalanne late in his life. He was actually an advisor to our Arthritis Institute in Palm Springs. And so, you know, Jack was the godfather of fitness. I mean, come on, let's give him a stool.

The juicer.

The juicer, that was his big mistake. But anyhow, so Jacqueline used to have this expression is that if it tastes good spit it out and my you know, I obviously like to sell books and my you know, my staffs don't say that because then they think they're gonna eat twigs and weeds and it's gonna taste awful and you know, you got to eat bad tasting food. Well, that's not what he meant. He actually meant that you should not be eating for the this two inch by three inch piece of muscle, your tongue. But you should be eating for the microbiome, for the bacteria and all the other cute little viruses that actually live.

In your gut, live in your mouth.

Live on your skin. And if you eat for them, they will take care of you because you are actually their home. We're merely a condominium for bugs.

And how many bugs do we have in our body?

So, yeah, we have well over a hundred trillion bacteria. And since the Human Microbiome Project was finished about five years ago now, I mean, we didn't know that these guys really existed. In fact, I was It was on my podcast, the Dr. Gundry podcast, we had Dr. David Kessler, who was head of the FDA in the Reagan years, who made the guidelines for the labels, the labeling laws on the back of packages that show saturated fats and carbohydrates. And the labels, by the way, if we get into this, are completely wrong. They were forced on the Reagan administration by big food companies. And so anyhow, if you feed bacteria what they want to eat, and that's this all in the Longevity Paradox, they will take care of you. They will not, they'll take care of the wall, the lining of your gut, and they, you will not actually age, which is kind of cool.

So if you take care of them, of the bugs in your body, you will not age.

Right, so you got a hundred trillion bacteria. You have over 10,000 different species of bacteria and just last year they discovered another 1,000 and so who knows? Right. So 99% of the genetic material that exists in you and me is non-human genetic material. We're only, our genes are actually so unimportant it's kind of humorous. And when people take a family history, what they're actually finding out is if your parents taught you how to eat, and most people's parents teach the kids how to eat, and your parents had diabetes, or your parents had high blood pressure, or your parents had coronary artery disease, and you ate like your parents did, the odds are that you will do that. For two reasons, the food choices that you made, but more importantly, you inherited your bacteria from your parents. actually your siblings. There's a phenomena called the hallmarks of aging, which are these underlying things that go wrong as we age. And these are phenomena that seem to underlie all disease.

So the idea is if you treat these things, if you correct these problems.

Called the hallmarks of aging.