The Foods You MUST Eliminate From Your Diet & Common Keto Diet Myths w/Dr. Steven Gundry EP 1237

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What would you say are some of the worst foods that people often eat, like, on a daily basis, that we should start eliminating or avoiding?

Well, don't get me started because, you know, you gotta. Gotta get rid of major lectin containing foods in your life.

Okay, give it to me.

So gluten happens to be a lectin, and lectins are plant defense proteins that plants produce to convince their predator, like us, that we shouldn't eat them or their babies. And lectins, the science is getting better and better every year. Lectins, thanks to a professor at Harvard, Alessio Fazano, 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 that the number of people who have leaky gut 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 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. Disappear. They go away. It's like. It's like you keep needing a booster shot for, you know, for Covid. You literally lose the antibodies. You lose the memory that you were interested in gluten. Gotcha. And 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. She says, doc, you got lupus And I go, I don't have lupus. And she says, yeah, you know, you have antinuclear 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.

Wow.

I said, okay, that's good information.

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

But if you were gone, 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 we were editing the longevity paradox in New York City, and 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.

Ice cream.

Tomatoes. Yeah, I had ice cream. And so I come back to Palm Springs and I test my antinuclear 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 got really leaky gut, it's not gonna 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. Wow. 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. Well, 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's 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.

Have an antibody 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, baseball games. You're having peanuts. And nobody had a peanut allergy. Nobody had EpiPens. Now, of course, if some 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 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 called funny tests because we almost never ordered them. 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 gluten and lectin. So what are the main foods? So the main 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 they say gluten free oats run, what does that mean when it's gluten free?

Oats 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 foods still have leaky gut and autoimmune diseases. And when we take away they're healthy gluten free foods like corn, like oats, like quinoa, then their leaky gut goes away and their 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 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, okay? Literally shrunk. Our brain sizes decreased 15% after the dawn of agriculture.

Because of the foods we were eating.

Because of 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. Come on. Doesn't make any difference. For instance, I'll give you a great example. Originally, the plant Paradox program was called the Matrix after the movie. And my editors at HarperCollins thought it was kind of too macho, manly, not touchy feely enough. True story, right? And so we called it 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 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 peeled 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. 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. 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. Almond milk. And then we test them for food sensitivity and up comes almonds. And 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 2 inch patch of psoriasis in the middle of her back. And that's all she had still left. Yeah. And she said, 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, 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 said, 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. Wow.

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 different patch. It wasn't, like, spreading, but it was a little patch here, and it kind of come and go. And on all these tests I took, they were like, you have no sensitivities? No. Like sensitivities to allergies? I'm not sure which one.

They were probably allergy tests. We used to do those. And I never thought things they were any good, even though I did them. Gotcha. Gotcha. I never thought I got used to it.

The sensitivity is better.

Sensitivity.

Anyways, they said that I didn't have any allergies or sensitivities. I'm not sure which one it was, but a lot of it. What I realized was based on stress, 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, a divorce? Yeah, divorce. Right up there. Yeah.

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? You know?

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

And then stress heightened the leak.

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, 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.

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Quints.comlewis 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 the mucous membranes of US Glucose gut. So a lot of people present with COVID with diarrhea. For instance. Instance. Mmm.

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

Barley, oats, the nightshades. The nightshades, tomatoes, peppers, goji berries. Wait a minute.

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.

And potatoes. Not sweet potatoes. Not yams 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. Yeah. 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. Well, I have beans several times a week.

There you go.

As long as they're pressure cooked.

So what about potatoes? Is there a way to eat potatoes?

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 peppers, then you can eat them in sauce or anything.

Exactly. 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 see 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 of 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. In fact, Americans didn't start eating tomatoes until the late 1800s because they were believed to be deadly.

Really?

And they were calling it 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 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, look, he didn't die.

Yay.

It's a myth.

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

Yeah. It's gonna make you really sick.

Make you sick.

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 is what I'm hearing you say. Just don't eat skin or pressure cook them or pressure cook. Then they're fine.

Yeah. Okay.

Are there any others that you have in mind? Is that the main one?

Peanuts and cashews. Cashews are actually poison ivy. They're the same plant as 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. I am addicted cashew, and 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. Then they 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 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 out it goes. Now, the problem was this guy lived on omelets. He had an omelet. Every day of his life.

He loves omelets.

And he was. I can't do this. I thought, look, come on, help me out here. I said, we'll get him back, I promise. Just.

You gotta fix the leak.

Yeah, we gotta fix the leak. So sure enough, you know, his pain went away. We got him off his meds, so about nine months and we could measure his leak. He got 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 him, and he says, oh, I'm in such pain. I said, what'd you do?

I have an omelette.

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

Slowly. Yeah, introduce.

I got it. Yeah. Dom. Sorry, the light bulbs went off this morning. That was dumb. But now he's eaten 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.

Moderation.

Some precautions. Yeah.

Okay, so 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. Taro root. Oh, and I tell you, I actually one of the restaurants, Italian restaurants in Mono keeps, you know, cassava pasta for me, and I just had a big bowl of penne pasta a couple nights.

Ago, and it doesn't affect your. You don't feel like this?

No. And it's got the gluten hangover and it's got this mouth feel. 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 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. There's lots of now pasta sauces, peeled and deseeded tomatoes. You know, again, there's lots of 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 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 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 other story in itself. Most corn in the United States is sprayed with Roundup, as is all our wheat, as in 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 allulose 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. Starting to appear in bars, it's starting to appear in ice creams and so.

Protein bars and stuff like that.

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. And we'll go into that for sure.

Yeah.

So pistachios is pistachio number one.

Macadamia nuts are great.

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 gain weight with macadamia.

So you can have more potassacci.

Walnuts are great. Hazelnuts are great. Pine nuts are great. So pecans do have a lectin. I wrote about in the plant paradox cookbook that we often see on food sensitivity. Yes, pecans. Pecans. But I just tell people, go easy, because I went to medical school in Georgia and it's the state nut healthy 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. You know, 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 a miracle fuel burns fat, burns fat and makes you an effect 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 efficient, efficient 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 9 grams, 9 calories per gram. Amino acids and carbohydrates have 4 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 to 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 blood sugar and that 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, really? And was really pissed.

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

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 said, 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, because 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 to burn fat.

They can't switch to burning fat.

Interesting.

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

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? Yeah. So it turns out that when, 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 Louis, just had a great meal here, I want to sell you this stuff. Open the door and your muscles say, oh yeah, good, I'm hungry, give it to me. So you're 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 were gorging on bison, we would want to store most of what we ate as fat for, because probably we weren't going to kill the 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.

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Lewis 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 you're 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 Atkins blues. Your athletic performance plummets. Your energy goes down, your energy goes down, you get that headachy feeling and.

You say, give me some carbs.

Yeah, 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 flow 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 Cahill and each 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, get into ketosis, right? Get into ketosis. Get into ketosis. Well, one of the proteges of Dr. Cahill, Dr. Owens, in 2004, this, 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 cost. 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, 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.

Well, we, now we think of uncoupling.

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, if they don't.

Make it, you're over. And who cares about your muscles? Who cares about anything else? You gotta keep your mitochondria alive. And turns out making energy is really, really hard work. 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 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 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 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. So if things are really steamy, 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. 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 people who have more brown fat actually are much healthier than people.

You're burning more fat too, right?

You're 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 100,000 prescriptions of DNP were written in the United States alone in the 1930s. And DNP was miraculous. One, a small dose, you could lose a pound a week. At a higher dose, you could lose £5 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 Brand said, and to protect themselves at all. Costs. Now, 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 chloroplast. 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 as 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. And 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. But there's another blue zone in Costa Rica on the Nagoya Peninsula. And I got really interested in why those guys were so unique in Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, in Nagoya 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 and 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 eat 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 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, 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. The holidays are back at Starbucks. So share the season with a peppermint mocha. Starbucks signature espresso, velvety mocha and cool.

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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 uncaple. 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. Dicabo 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 restricts only eat in a certain.

Amount time 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, 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. Matheson, 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, 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 the whatever is round can't get into the, 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's the sugar come from? It has to come from your muscles.

So you're losing the muscles.

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 wasting. Really. And it finally dawned on I said, 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 to get the benefits of what ketones do.

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.

So here's another really cool thing. Yeah. 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. That is made from butyrate, which is made from prebiotic fiber being digested by our gut bacteria into postbiotics. And the 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, frise, 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 heard of apple cider vinegar?

Of course.

Of course.

I don't like it.

Ever want to know how apple cider vinegar works?

Tell me.

It turns out it is.

People swear by apple cider virus.

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.

Drink it.

Have some balsamic vinegar. Put it in, you know, some water and drink it.

Okay.

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 cheeses have postbiotics. And these are a class of postbiotics called polyamines. And one of the most famous ones is spermidine.

Okay, Spermidine.

And you can guess where that comes from. There's another one called putresine. 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 jack o lane juicer. I know you got one in the cupboard. Throw the juice away. You know how much I hate fruit juice.

Exactly.

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, capros. 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 menchingo cheese from Spain, in Portugal, that's sheep cheese. So have yourself a slice of cheese 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.

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

It turns out years ago there was a wonderful book called, and I'm blanking on his name, but 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 skinnier?

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 burn.

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 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.

In all cheeses.

In all cheeses. And work from the dolphin study of, of naval Dolphins found that C15 is an essential fatty acid. 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, it turns out that 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. 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 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.

You name the vinegar, obviously the famous olive oil.

Olive oil is a Great source of.

It because you told me in a previous interview we did. That you want 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.

Snake looking at you.

Yeah, exactly.

Right. When you look down at it, 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 or bad bacteria? Good bacteria.

Okay. You want good bacteria.

Bad bacteria don't like that stuff. Bad bacteria want sugar and saturated fats. Gimme, gimme. 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, and 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, 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 back 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, have 100 calories of prebiotic fiber, grind up some flaxseeds, put them in your yogurt, grind up some psyllium husks, put them in your yogurt, grind up juice, your fruit and put the pulp in the yogurt. Sheep and goat and man, you're uncoupling. I can just.

You're an uncoupling machine.

You're just going to be an uncoupling machine. Speaking of which. So 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 brrr. And a parrot can live 80 to 100 years. Isn't that crazy? And so people said, well, what the deal? They have a really high metabolic rate. This doesn't make sense. Guess who has the most uncoupled mitochondria of any animal?

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.

Yeah. So if you want to live a long time uncouple to survive and thrive.

I like that. 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 these things around health, what do you think is going to evolve in the next five to 10 years? Like, that hasn't come out yet. That is going to be the next new science in five to 10 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, say, 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 have gotten better. But they're not all the way. When we do the leaky gut tests and the food sensitivity tests, flashes, and people go, oh, my gosh. I can tell you when I have ginger, I don't like gingerbread. 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. And I think, you know, this is not new, but I think the more we come to realize this, 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 when we fix it.

Yeah.

Which I think to me is really empowering.

Food is medicine.

Yeah.

It can kill you or it 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 as 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, cool. 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, but you're right.

All the longevity experts, including yourself, have talked about something around the Mediterranean diet, like having more vegetables, a lot less meat. If you're gonna have meat, have fish. And where does meat come in with this now?

Yeah, so that's. Those are good questions. There's. 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 a stronger and stronger evidence. There is a sugar molecule in beef, lamb and pork called neu5gc. And I talk about who knew? And neu5gc is on their blood vessels. We have a different sugar molecule called Neu5AC. We share that sugar molecule with fish and chicken. Fun announcement. You saw about the pig heart going into. I saw that yeah, done by a good friend of mine, Bartley Griffith.

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.

Well, the baboon stayed alive.

Yeah, yeah, working.

You made the transplant?

Yeah, I did the transplant. I have 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 our sugar molecule. So why is that important? Well, we know that we can develop an antibody to Neu5 GC 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 neu5gc to hide from the immune system. They literally cloak themselves. We don't manufacture Neu5GC, we have Neu5AC. 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 in all my books, most of us have gut bacteria that when we meet, we'll make tmao. Fun fact. If you eat a lot of polyphenol containing foods or take polyphenol supplements like resveratrol, like grapeseed extract, those polyphenols paralyze our gut bacteria so that they can't make tmao. It doesn't 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 arguments.

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

Yeah, so what I try to do is limit people to about 2 to 4 ounces of animal protein a day.

And less the better is what I'm hearing.

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

Couple times a week.

Yeah. Use it as a garnishment.

Not the main thing.

Not the main thing.

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, 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. Gotcha. Don't get me wrong, I grew up.

In Omaha, you know, I mean, eating steak all day.

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

Yeah, exactly.

Not living very long.

That's living.

Died quick.

So high fiber.

Yeah. High soluble fiber.

Less meat. Less meat. And. 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 finish six ounce filet once, three, every three months. And it's really good and we enjoy it and. But, you know, it's really good.

Yeah, but even that every day doesn't. From your research and your experience for what, decades doing heart.

Yeah, well, I've been. Well, and I've been doing, you know, 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 first for that long and seeing what people were eating to get to that place.

Right. And the exciting thing subsequently is watching people reverse heart disease by changing what.

They eat, by eliminating some of these things. Now, to go back to the pig heart, 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 molecule 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.

And 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 now.

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 pig blood vessel. So it's gonna. I mean, they've done some.

Even a heart to heart transplant from human to human.

Will attack is traumatic. Exactly. Will attack. But. Yeah, but they've done. 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 Long Melinda, 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 modify them.

That's crazy. So we'll see how. What happens.

Yeah. So. But yeah.

Is this guy awake?

Oh, yeah, he's awake.

He's talking.

He's 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.

This has been studied.

This research 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?

Oh, geez. We usually did baby heart transplants. We did 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. And so we don't need it as much anymore.

But in adult transplants, we need so.

Many adults, we don't have any donors. So I mean, there's a tremendous 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 lots of good information here. You've got the book that I want people to get, which is called Unlocking the Keto Code, the revolutionary new science of keto that offers more benefits without deprivation, which I think that's the key there People don't want to deprive themselves.

Correct.

No one wants to starve themselves, deprive themselves of foods that they enjoy. But you're going to have to supplement things, you're going to have to replace certain things for other healthier options and you're gonna see extreme benefits in this process.

So you've got this bump and really, if you want to get really most of the benefits of keto without doing keto, time restricted eating control and eating is key.

And I've seen that from so many of the Dr. Longo from USC Sinclair, all these longevity experts talking about time restricted, how that just seems to be universally tested now to help you in longevity with weight loss, all these things.

Yeah. And the amazing thing is it works by uncoupling mitochondria.

That's what it helps with.

That's how it does it.

Interesting.

That's the underlying mechanism. None of us really knew the underlying mechanism. Like I say, it was there. Sterilizing.

You just knew it.

You just see results.

You didn't know why, why it worked. And now we know how it works.

That's interesting.

So you and I want to become a parrot. Exactly.

Live for a long time. DrGundry.com has all of your information, Dr. Gundry, on social media as well. They can get the book at your site. Are you offering any other bonuses?

Yeah, we are offering a bonus for I think the first 2000. They'll get the energy paradox as well. Which really writing the energy paradox was the impetus to write the keto code because as I was trying to explain all these wonderful benefits of ketones, I ran smack into a brick wall and said, what the heck? They don't work the way all of us have been saying they work. And then I said, well, okay, they work. How are they working? And it's by literally wasting fuel, doing a caloric bypass. And there's a lot better ways to lose weight than taking DNP.

Worth. It'll kill you.

Yeah. Which will kill you.

You've got many books that people can get. You've also got the Gundry podcast, which you do weekly, I believe.

Yeah.

Where you share a lot of this research and information.

Yeah. We're coming up on the 2 200th podcast. I like it. I like it coming along. Yeah, it's very popular. We're on podcast one now. It's great.

It's exciting. How else can we support you besides getting the book? Following you on social, listening to the show, what else can we do?

Oh my gosh, go to gundrymd.com and check out the supplements, including my incredibly high polyphenol olive oil oil.

This thing is powerful, which is powerful. I've got a bunch of this stuff in here.

30 times more polyphenols than regular olive oil.

I take the vitamin D that you have there. I love that stuff. So it's always good stuff. You got great stuff over there. What else? Anything else we can do?

That'll do it. Okay. Get the book. It'll rock your world. It'll go, what the heck? I didn't know that.

Well, Dr. Gundry, I always appreciate you coming on. I acknowledge you for constantly furthering the research and sharing new things with people to help them unlock, really, their health in a different way. So I really acknowledge you for constantly pushing the envelope, finding these new things, sharing it in an interesting way so we can understand it, and excited about the new book. So thanks so much.

Thanks for having me again. Pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards growth, greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys. So share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

And.

And now it's time to go out there and do something great. Hey, it's Chris K. From Target. Wishing you and yours a very merry Christmas.

Hit it, Dasher.

Give me some Jingle Bells.

Dancer, Prancer.

Let's hear a beat.

And mouse chorus. Oh, it's a beautiful job, everybody.

All right now, bring it home. Happy holidays, everybody.