These Foods Will KILL YOU! (Don't Eat This To LIVE LONGER) | Dr. Steven Gundry

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. The best way to suppress your immune system is sugar.

All of us have the power to heal ourselves.

Many of us are so unaware of the foods we eat and how it affects our bodies. And in this interview, Dr. Steven Gundry teaches us the key foods to be eating to live a longer, healthier life. [Finance] How can we boost and protect our immune system in time of pandemic crisis, stress and overwhelm? What are the things we can do right now?

So, the first thing you do is you absolutely positively stay away from simple carbohydrates. And 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 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 carbohydrates. And what's really scary in times of pandemics is the grocery store shelves are empty of bread and bagels and pasta and tomato sauce.

That's good for you.

And milk and ice cream and orange juice. There's five to six teaspoons of sugar in a cup of orange juice.

So it's actually good when the shelves are cleared of all the bad things.

That's right. Believe it or not, right now, Most of everything in the grocery store is actually good for you because it's all been cleared out of all the bad stuff. But what worries me is all that bad stuff is being consumed. 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. Maybe you take one little piece just to make sure... Just make sure... Just insurance.

Yeah. You never know. Yeah. And so, you know, I know when, you know, I've got some issue that, you know, that I need toilet paper. 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 thing. 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 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. measuring vitamin D levels for over 20 years now. I have never seen vitamin D toxicity.

You can't have too much necessarily.

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 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?

Well, he had been getting it from a compounding pharmacist and it had 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 got 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, 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, 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, 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. But in the future, barring 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 1,000 four times a day.

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 very antiviral. and there's an exciting new paper that was just published yesterday that astaxanthin seems to prevent the inflammatory response to the coronavirus. Astaxanthin, it is a compound that actually makes salmon red and salmon eat algae and plankton that have that produced astaxanthin. It's, you know, it's, it's a really cool compound.

Wow.

Yeah.

If you think it's possible that we could defend and arm our bodies and our immune system could be so strong that if any virus, like the coronavirus, came in our mouth and was in us, that we could reject it and not Attached to our bodies.

Correct. That's the whole idea.

Really?

It's possible to do that. You are designed to defend it. To defend it, to defend the wall. Yeah. Really? Yeah.

It's like a fullback running through, just blocking everyone so you can score.

Yeah, you are designed to do that.

I mean, the 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 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. But that's what's happening. So again, the reason people with chronic diseases are susceptible to the virus is not because they have a chronic disease. It's because that is a sign that of a leaky gut in your immune system is impaired.

Hey, it's Lewis here and I would love to connect directly with you. Text me the word YouTube to my number 614-350-3960 to receive weekly inspirational messages from me. So have olive oil and vitamin D. You have lots of vitamin D. Three. D3.

D3.

And then what's next to a 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 now the internet lighting up. Fat head.

So half of the fat in your brain.

Is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA. So half, basically half of your brain is fish oil.

And as I talk about in the Longevity Paradox, you look at people what.

Are called the omega-3 index, which basically looks at how much DHA you have in you over the past two months. People with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains, and the largest areas of memory, the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest memory areas, hippocampus.

So mom was right when she said.

Fish is brain food. She didn't know why it was, but we now know 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.

Oh, 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, 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 when we're talking, you know, 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. 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.

1000 a day.

Yeah.

1000 a day. DHA.

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

So you gotta have polyphenols in your diet.

So, polyphenols. What does that have to do with polyphenol? How do you remember polyphenol? Think about polywanna phenol. 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 or 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 suntan. 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 of these trees or vines have more polyphenols than 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 like, you know, 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 farmer's.

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 he is going to.

Just be so loaded with polyphenols.

Really?

And correlation with that is the more bitter, the better. Because polyphenols in general are very bitter. For instance, when we were developing my signature product, Vital Reds, 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 mask these really bitter compounds. So more bitter, more better. 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 ancestors, and even looking at modern hunter-gatherers like the Hunza tribe, they go through, they eat 250 different plant species on a rotating basis.

And you think about it, 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.

The nut butter that I can eat that's actually okay. 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 the skinned almonds are okay. Yeah, so like Marcona almonds. And there are actually a couple of companies that now make peeled almond butter, and you can find them.

Really?

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.

Yeah, so get yourself some peeled almonds.

I'm gonna do that now.

Try it.

Okay. You said American 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. And so 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 yeah, the more you, there are a few people that actually react to either the white or the yolk of eggs. Most people don't.

Okay.

But we test for those. And here's just something to throw out. I don't want to cause widespread panic. There is a lectin.

There's 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 spinach.

Now, you said, what was her name? Is she a Dr. Terry?

Terry Walls.

You said she was doing like 10 or 12 cups of veggies a day.

For... Yeah, 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?

This is, so getting back to Dr. David Kessler, head of the FDA, we thought that carbohydrates were carbohydrates and, you know, and complex carbohydrates, soarches 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. To give you an example. But you have to take, if the take-home point from this is we'll 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.

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... Wow.

300 calories?

300 calories.

Wow.

Zero sugar.

How does that have zero sugar?

I thought the bagel... That's just it. I thought it was sugar. The label law lies to you. It's got 35 grams of carbohydrates. Now, to make that transition... Which is sugar. It is pure sugar. In fact, it is better than sugar the way it has been manufactured. So, to figure out how much that is, there's 4 grams of sugar per teaspoon. So, let's take his 35 grams of sugar, divide by 4. Let's make it easy, make it 36 grams. That's 9 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 when it's.

Just being 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 5. and we've got the power and it's okay to go into hyperspace. If they don't make those compounds, your mitochondria go, geez, 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 27 cups of coffee, and going, 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 Jack Lalanne 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 for them.

Mitochondria.

We gotta eat for the bacteria.

The plant paradox is that there's certain plants that absolutely positively do not want us to eat 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. 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 actually defend themselves.

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 contains seeds 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. And we fertilize.

It's perfect.

And they're away from mom and dad. So for instance, if an apple you know, falls underneath the apple tree, that poor kid doesn't have much of a chance because mom or dad is going to shade them the next year. But if it gets carried off, you know, even 100 feet away and then 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, 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.

Yeah.

But if you're doing that every day.

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 were on 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. Winter is right around the corner, you know, we should eat this stuff because winter is 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, a bear is 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 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.

My staff always told me, don't say this story because if people get the wrong idea. Jack Lalanne, I got to no Jack LaLanne late in his life. He was actually an advisor to our Arthritis Institute in Palm Springs. 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 Jack LaLanne 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 going to eat twigs and weeds and it's going to 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 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 on our body?

Yeah, we have well over a hundred trillion bacteria. And since the human microbiome project was, you know, finished about five years ago now, I mean, we didn't know that these guys really existed. In fact, I 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 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 100 trillion bacteria. You have over 10,000 different species of bacteria. And just last year, they discovered another thousand, 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 and actually your siblings.

So it's not the genes of your parents that mean you are susceptible to heart disease or Alzheimer's or whatever, right? It's not the genes of your parents, it's typically the foods they ate that you're probably eating the exact same foods that cause the same type of problems.

Correct, yeah. I mean there are, there is an Alzheimer's gene and my program, according to Dale Bredesen, is the best way not to activate that gene. And there are certain genes that people inherit that make the world's meanest, nastiest, stickiest cholesterol the most doctors don't even measure. NO, by the way, if you're prescribed a statin drug, you know, a lipid-lowering drug, it actually worsens the this other particle. So yeah, there are genes, but there's such a small part. Nature magazine had a big article in late 2018, I think proving that only about 7 or 8% of what will happen to us is based on our genes and 97 or 98% of what's going to happen to us is based on our environment and our food choices.

Our decisions.

Our decisions, yeah.

Now you said we can, you know, aging is essentially a choice is what I'm hearing you say, but if someone watching this saying, well Dr. Gundry, you've got white hair, you look older than when you were 10 years old.

Yes.

So how can you say that you can eat certain things that can reverse aging or can make you not age when you look older than when you were younger?

That's true.

I'm definitely chronologically older, but recently on my podcast, I had Dr. Terry Wahls, who I think is very famous, rightfully so, for reversing her MS, her multiple sclerosis. Squarrosus. And she did it via diet. She did it initially by eating nine cups of vegetables a day. And I dare people to try to eat nine cups of vegetables.

A lot of fiber, right?

A lot of fiber. And we'll get back to fiber because I think that's probably the key. And this is actually what Jacqueline was trying to say, if it tastes good, spit it out. And Terry became famous for telling people that when you look in the toilet every morning, you should see a very large coiled snake looking back up at you. And in fact, in the Plant Paradox, in the original manuscript, I had said, when you look in the toilet, you should see a giant anaconda looking back up at you. And my editor, Julie Wills, called me up, she said, Do you know there's a movie where an Anaconda is coming.

Out of the toilet?

Coming out of the toilet. And I said, oh yeah, she said, I don't think we want that visual in your book. And she said, Let's take that out. But what we didn't know, what you didn't know, I didn't know, is that that giant coiled snake is not the fiber and the roughage that we ate. It's actually bacteria that have eaten the fiber.

No way. And bacteria inside of us. That's coming out.

That's coming out. So most of your poop is, if you will, baby bacteria.

No way.

And so the more, so we want.

To get the bacteria out of us.

No, you want them to grow and prosper. And the more they grow and prosper.

It's like our aliens in our body.

It's like, you know, you're absolutely right. And one of the things that is kind of hard to embrace is we probably only exist as a place for bacteria to live on Earth.

Wow.

And, you know, intelligent.

If there was no bacteria inside of us.

We're done.

We would die.

So we know that we can breed germ-free mice and interesting fun fact that I put in the longevity paradox, my fifth grade science project was to build a germ-free mouse environment. This was in 1960. And so this isn't my first rodeo. So we can build, we can raised germ-free mice that have no bacteria in them, have no bugs in them. And they live short lives.

Really?

They have horrible immune systems.

They get sick.

They get sick, yeah. And they, so they're a basis of so much of what we know. And so you can, so bacteria are incredibly important. We know now that these bacteria actually teach our immune system from day one. In fact, scary, we used to think that the placenta, where the baby, the womb, the uterus that feeds the baby is sterile. Of course it has to be, 'cause the baby has to be sterile. The placenta is full of bacteria.

Feeding the baby.

Feeding the baby. And it turns out that the bacteria in the placenta actually give information to the baby's immune system before the baby even pops out of the womb.

So we need these viruses, these good viruses.

We need these viruses and bacteria. We need them. And in fact, fun fact, long ago the only way to treat bacterial infections were viruses that could actually infect bacteria and kill viruses. And Eli Lilly Company from Indianapolis got its start, this giant pharmaceutical company, as what's called a bacteriophage company. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. And it turns out that viruses actually are really useful in us as well. We have trillions and trillions and trillions of viruses in us right now.

What's the difference between a good virus and a bad virus?

If the good virus is doing what it's supposed to do. Okay, let's do a deep dive into microbiology.

Okay. And what is the definition of virus?

Okay, so a virus is probably the smallest reproductible form of life, however we want to define life. So most living things are capable of reproducing themselves one way or another, dividing or multiplying one way or another.

Just like humans.

Exactly. So a virus unfortunately has to have, cannot replicate itself. It has to borrow another and take over the cells' machinery to manufacture more copies of viruses. And that's how they get reproduced. But in the end, every living creature is here just to make a new copy. And you and I only exist was to make a new copy. And, you know, I hopefully actually only exist so my bacteria can make new copies of themselves. I'm a, I'm a condominium for my inhabitants.

Duplication.

And if, if they're happy and I'm a good landlord to them, they will keep the place nice. And they actually would like me to stick around a very long time because I'm their home. So if I give them my tenants what they want, they'll keep me around.

Okay.

All right, so getting back to Terry Walls. Yes. So Terry Walls and her giant anacondas. And whenever we do a podcast with her from Iowa, she has these dolls of poop.

Really?

Yeah.

I gotta meet this person.

Oh, yeah. So, We've become friends through the years and our diets recommendations are very similar and becoming more and more similar as time goes on. And recently, she and her wife began doing time-restricted feeding. For the last 18 years during the winter, I only eat calories two hours a day. 22 out of 24 hours. I'm not eating any calories and I've done that for 18 years now. So that's pretty interesting time-restricted feeding. Time-restricted feeding means you limit the number of hours you eat in the day. So she and we had talked about this. So she and her wife actually really started doing this and I see her about once a year. And I noticed on the podcast, she looks the best I have ever seen her. And so we're talking about this. And she said, well, you know, I started after kind of reading and listening and longevity paradox, this is something real. And not just me, other people have done this. and we started doing it. And I started doing it and then my wife said, you know, there's something here, I'm going to join you. And they have kids and now she's saying, our kids have noticed that we are getting younger. And I said, well, you know, you're right. I said, because I've known you through the years and you clearly are younger now than when I knew you a few years ago. And she said, yeah, our kids. notice and they're calling us Benjamin Button because we're de-aging. So I think this whole anti-aging thing is wrong. I think it is really quite possible to de-age. And as I talk about in the Longevity Paradox, what's fascinating is that, and you can prove this in animal models, that you age as your microbiome changes, number one, but more importantly, The wall of your gut should be impermeable, even though it's only one cell thick. And the surface area of your gut, my gut, is the same as a tennis court. So inside of you and me is a tennis court surface area. And the problem is that that wall of our gut is only one cell thick. And these cells are held together with tight junctions. Best example for anyone who's no longer young is Red Rover, Red Rover, which we all played as a kid, where we locked arms and people ran across and a big guy like me.

I always ran through. Oh, let's go.

Oh yeah, and you're the guy, you.

Know, and the two girls. Break the, yeah, the two girls, ah, here comes Lewis. Ah. And they don't get to play that in school anymore, by the way, it's too dangerous. Oh, right. Yeah.

Tooth get hurt.

There's people like you. So they're all locked arm and arm. And as long as they're locked arm and arm, all those, you know, 100 trillion bacteria and all the other toxins stay on their side of the wall. On the other side of the wall, 60 to 70% of all your white blood cells, all your immune system is lined up on that wall. Why? because that's basically the border. And if your invading army is coming through the border, you want to have your army on the other side. And what's cool is as long as that wall is intact, you do not age. But as that wall becomes leaky, and that's the whole story of the wall, leaky gut, Then you begin to age. And Hippocrates 2,500 years ago said all disease begins in the gut. And he was absolutely right. All diseases begin and I add on end in the gut.

I started manipulating the immune system.

By food.

And sure enough, you've got an autoimmune disease. We can teach you to get rid of it by changing primarily getting lectins out of your diet and changing your gut bugs to be basically friendly gut bugs. And the friendly gut bugs actually tell your immune system that Hey guys, we're all great down here. We're down at the beach. We're singing Kumbaya, the beautiful bonfire. And your immune system is basically the cops. And the cops go, oh yeah, we know these kids, great kids. Let's go have a donut. And now, so that's how it's supposed to be. But let's suppose a gang member moves into your neighborhood. Now all of a sudden you got, you're putting up bars on your windows and you got neighborhood watch patrols and you're shooting guys with hoodies without asking questions. So what's happened to most of us through some of the foods we eat, like all these wonderful snacks we're talking about, we've let these gang members loose. And the good guys actually can't eat simple sugars and these saturated fats. They want leaves and they want tubers.

They die off.

They die off, exactly. So the gang members are running rampant and now your immune system is going, oh my gosh, you know, the city's taken over by gang members and we're going to have armed patrols everywhere and anytime we see anything that looks a little odd, we're gonna shoot and ask questions later. And so what's happened to everybody with autoimmune disease is their immune system is just hyper on guard because it's no longer getting the messages from the good bugs, chill out, everything's cool, you know, kumbaya, love, love, love, peace and love. And that's what's happened. And it's so cool to get somebody who can just, you know, change the food they ate. They may not want it initially, but when they start feeling better, they go, for instance, on Monday, young lady, 36 years old, lives out in La Quinta, was sent to me with what's called chronic pain syndrome. Now, a lot of doctors toss this off as, oh, you're crazy or you're depressed or you're just anxious and you treat them with antidepressants. And she was in constant pain. It was so bad that she actually had to work from home, really couldn't.

Move, and she had a kid and a husband.

So she had heard about me. She said, I've heard about you.

What do you think?

I said, Come on, let's do this. I said, what's happening is that your pain is actually coming from nerve cells inside your gut that are being stimulated.

By rogue cops, if you will.

And they're trying to tell you that you shouldn't move. So let's start. So I saw her a couple months later in January, February, and I said.

How are we doing?

She said, you know, the pain's less, but it's definitely still there. So I said, well, you know, just stay at it. If you can feel a difference, don't give up.

Yeah, yeah.

So I walked in. on Monday and I almost didn't recognize her. And I said, she's got a giant smile on your face. I said, so, you know, how you doing? She said, perfect. I said, what do you mean? And she says, do you know what it's like to not have pain? And I said, well, yeah, I do. Now, she said, I forgot what not having pain feels like.

Wow.

And It's amazing. She said, I just feel great. It's been so many years, I'd forgotten what feeling normal felt like. She said, But let me tell you a story. You can't cheat. And I said, yeah, I know that, but how'd you find out? She said, well, there was this office party a couple weeks ago. And all they had, they had some chicken and they had some nachos and they had some guacamole. And she said, I noticed that the guacamole had tomatoes in it. Believe it or not, guacamole is not supposed to have tomatoes. Your listeners should realize that guacamole should not have tomatoes.

Sure.

She said, I figured, well, the safest thing to eat is to put some guacamole on my plate and have a piece of chicken, because, you know, I want to be nice. She said, I'll tell you, within an hour, My left elbow just started throbbing and then my hands started freezing up. She said, I actually had to leave the party and go home. And she said, I had to lay down and I couldn't get up for about two hours. And she said, and I was trying to be good. And she said, it's amazing that this could do this.

Wow. This is crazy. So you essentially was, you know, were doing heart surgeries, 10,000 of them, and said, I don't want to be offensive here. I'll make sure I'm saying the right thing, but you're now essentially a functional med doctor.

Yeah, I don't...

In a sense. Correct. With all due respects to Mark Hyman, Jeff Bland created the functional medicine and Jeff's a friend of mine. I don't know what functional medicine is. Right, right, right. What I do is restorative medicine. all of us have the power to heal ourselves. Now, the guy who said this was Hippocrates, and Hippocrates brilliant.

He.

He believed that any organism had the ability to have perfect health and that every organism had the ability to achieve perfect health as long as the obstacles to perfect health were removed. And Hippocrates believed that the physician's job was to identify the obstacles to that organism having perfect health, the patient, and remove them from the patient. And the patient would do the rest. So what I try to do, I basically do detective work. And I think I'm pretty good at finding the obstacles. And many of those obstacles, believe it or not, are lectins. And the other obstacle is you got to get the gang members out of your gut by basically starving them to death and giving the good guys what they want to eat.

Starving them of the lectins, starving them.

Of simple sugars and lectins and saturated fats.

Like, remove those things.

Yeah, they have nothing to eat and they leave. For instance, I'll give you an example of something interesting. We actually have bacteria in our gut.

That enjoy eating gluten. Really? Yeah, they love it.

But if you go gluten free, they leave because they got nothing to eat. And then a lot of people who go gluten free and don't notice a whole lot of difference or they just get frustrated and then they have a couple pieces of bread or pizza and then all of a sudden their gut.

Goes, oh, you know, Well, it's because.

Their bugs that could defend them against gluten are gone. And believe it or not, gluten is kind of a low level lectin. There's far worse. The worst ones are in the hall of the grain. So for instance, this whole grain goodness, this only started about 50 years ago.

There's this thing as whole grain goodness.

No, we've gotten sicker and sicker and sicker because the outside of the hall has the lectins. And we've been throwing it away. I mean, really, the French, seriously, would they have a whole grain croissant or a whole grain baguette?

Really?

And the Italians, you know, whole grain pasta. Well, now it's appearing on the menus because the tourists want it. But the Italians would kill themselves.

Right, right. Yeah, the first thing I opened up right here is the most popular nut is not a nut, the peanut.

The peanut.

Oh my gosh.

And a cashew.

Cashew is a nut too.

I can't eat cashews?

No, the Amazonian Indians always threw the cashew bean away.

What if I manipulate it in a certain way and make it into a sauce? You could pressure cook it. I can pressure cook cashews, then I can eat it.

Yes, and stay away from chia seeds.

No chia seeds? These are all the things people are.

Telling you to eat right now. Of course, and that's why everybody's getting sicker. Chia seeds, there's two human studies that.

Show that chia seeds promote inflammation in human beings.

What else do we need to be aware of?

I used to be a big fan of cheese.

What do you eat?

You eat what you're supposed to eat. You're supposed to eat leaves. You're supposed to eat tubers. Like jicama, like sweet potatoes, like rutabagas. You're supposed to eat tons of olive oil. Tons. Tons.

I use a liter a week of olive oil.

You drink it or you're cooking with it? No, I pour it on everything. Oh, really?

Wow.

Pour it on everything. The only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. That's what I told Dr. Oz a few weeks ago. Just think the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. In Crete and Sardinia, they use a liter of olive oil per week. A Spanish study of 65-year-old people for five years, making them use a liter of olive oil per week against a low-fat Mediterranean diet. At the end of five years, the olive oil users had improved memory compared to the low-fat diet. The women had 65% less breast cancer than the low fat Mediterranean diet. And they had less heart disease. Leader a week.

Olive oil.

Leader a week diet.

That's the fountain of youth, huh?

Yep. It really is.

Olive oil.

It's a secret.

It's a secret.

Okay.

There you go. That's the secret.

If you enjoyed this, make sure to click the subscribe button, like this video, and turn on that notification bell. And if you wanna learn about the key foods you need to eat to master your health, make sure to watch this video right here. One out of two Americans have what we call type 2 diabetes. We used to call it adult onset, except now kids as young as three are getting type 2 diabetes from drinking soda.