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Language: en
probably about three months ago I
started getting really itchy and then
just like in like my chest would itch
like crazy my back would it's like crazy
I'm like what is going on because I'm
really religious on my diet I don't
cheat in my diet but a couple times a
year like I'm really hardcore about it
and then it started with like a little
spot on my neck and then it was like I
had to wear like long sleeve everything
I was just one big rash it was it was
insane and I've never had anything like
that in my life
and so I was like this I know this is
something I'm eating just like in my gut
I can feel that that's true but I
haven't changed my diet I was like what
could this be and before I give you the
punchline of what I think it is
what when you hear stuff like that where
do you go
well you're the best way to think about
your skin is your the lining of your gut
is actually your skin turned inside out
that's fascinating and so you have from
your mouth all the way down to your anus
a tube that's got the surface area of a
tennis court and everything that you
swallow is actually outside of you
as it's moving through the inside skin
has to do the same functions as the
outside skin and that is kind of keep
things away from us but it's got a fatal
flaw it not only has to keep things out
but it has to let things in like the
proteins and the fats and the sugars
that we eat so that's where the Mischief
can happen but when I see someone with
an external skin problem it's always a
reflection of what's actually happening
in the gut what is that process what
does it look like how can people that
are watching this now if they're
struggling from something how do they
begin that process of repair
so you know I think the first thing you
do is get major lectin-containing Foods
out of your diet you won't like me for a
couple weeks but most people even within
a couple weeks begin to notice a
difference now what are those there are
foods that we actually evolutionary were
not designed to eat
beans are so lethal raw that there's
very good published studies in humans
that they can cause massive bloody
diarrhea and there's some pretty good
studies in monkeys rhesus monkeys and
red velvet monkeys that they can
actually cause heart disease and even
kidney damage from the lectin content
what's fascinating from a human
evolution standpoint is that humans up
until the dawn of Agriculture were
actually very tall creatures most humans
were about six feet tall and our brain
size was about 15 percent bigger than it
is today
and when if you look chronologically by
8 000 years 2000 years into grain and
bean eating we actually shrunk about a
foot and our brain size has never
recovered from 10 000 years ago so these
are
anti-nutrients grains and beans that's
number one
number two two thousand years ago
northern European cows suffered a
genetic mutation spontaneous mutation
where they stopped making the normal
protein in milk casein A2 and began
making casein A1
now casein A1 has a lectin-like protein
that is converted into a compound called
beta caseiomorphine which can cause a
direct immunologic attack on the beta
cell of the pancreas the insulin
producing cell in the pancreas and
there's some pretty good evidence and
it's accumulating every every year that
one of the causes of type 1 diabetes or
juvenile diabetes is casein A1 milk and
it actually correlates very well
in countries that have casein A1 cows
they have much higher incidence of type
1 diabetes than countries that have
casein A2 cows
cheeses for instance are safe from
France Italy and Switzerland
sheep goats and water buffalo are all
casein A2 and what is it about that
that's so problematic it actually makes
a it's a lectin-like compound that
stimulates an immune response so just as
I would get from the beans or whatever
you'll get the same thing okay so it's a
it's a very new addition to our diet now
the newest addition to our diet is some
of our most precious foods are American
North American or South American foods
for instance in the nightshade family
potatoes eggplant peppers tomatoes and
Goji berries so the the nitrates the
peel and the and the seeds have the
lectins and Native American Indians in
the southwest always
peel and de-seed their peppers they Char
their peppers they deseed them and then
they either grind it into chili or eat
them that way but they always do that
the
Italians always peel and de-seed their
Tomatoes before they make sauce and is
this like a cultural intuition kind of
thing where they where do I what I like
to do is I go around the world studying
cultures and figuring out why did they
do this how did they detoxify lectins
for instance rice was invented 8 000
years ago four billion people use rice
as their staple yet four billion people
take the hall off of rice and eat it
white and surely there can't be four
billion dumb people who don't know any
better that white rice is bad for them
and brown rice is good for them in fact
they've been taking the hall off of rice
for 8 000 years
same way believe it or not up until
William William and Harvey Kellogg in
the early 1900s did the idea that whole
grains were good for us and if you look
back 50 years
and when the whole grain goodness really
caught on you'll notice that a lot of
our current health issues including this
epidemic of autoimmune disease didn't
occur this epidemic of dementia didn't
occur and so whole grains are one of
those wonderful myths that got
perpetrated by a few individuals the
other individual that perpetrated this
English surgeon by the name of Dr
Burkett
and Dr Burkett did some missionary work
in Africa in the middle of the sen of
the last century and he is a colon
surgeon a guy who would operate on colon
Cancers and he went down there to do
some work and nobody had colon cancer he
actually went around and watched and
looked at the bowel movements of these
Africans who were eating huge amounts of
tubers things like yams for instance or
celerac root or jicama and their bowel
movements were huge and he goes wow you
know look at all they're eating all this
fibrous stuff and it must be that the
fiber in their diet is keeping them from
having colon cancer
so he came back to England and he
espoused the the fiber theory of
preventing cancer
now the problem is in England they
didn't have a lot of these sorts of
tuberous foods but they had tons of
what's called insoluble fiber in the
form of wheat and rye and barley and
even oats so he didn't know the
difference between insoluble fiber and
soluble fiber and so he said we should
all be eating fiber and so that's
actually where that whole idea that the
hall was actually good for you now the
ironic thing is he actually died of
colon cancer
that is very ironic very ironic there's
a saying among surgeons that we always
die from the disease we treat so
well then so that there's so many
interesting points in there talk to me
about how animal Meats end up because
you don't eat hardly any
um how how does lectin find its way into
animal meat we raise animals with
antibiotics and this was discovered by
by accident years ago when they were
thinking that antibiotics might be
needed for crowded conditions of you
know Stockyard animals but the
researcher found out that by giving
antibiotics to these animals they grew
faster and got fatter much quicker than
the animals who didn't get the
antibiotics so it was approved by the
Department of Agriculture and the FDA to
give antibiotics to animals for the
purpose of growth
those what we didn't know is that those
residual antibiotics are incorporated
into the meat the beef the chicken the
pork you name it and so we actually
every time we ingest Factory raised
meats or even farm-raised fish ingest
micro doses of antibiotics
micro doses of antibiotics are
incredibly effective at killing off your
microbiome
so in the last 40 years we've had this
you know
incredible you know the the worst storm
that could possibly happen for our
microbiome and for our leaky gut
so then our lectins their elect and like
substances in the meat but is there
actually lectin itself great question
there was just paper published from Ohio
State a few weeks ago that shows that
lectins and soybeans can be found in the
meat of animals that you feed them to
now I used to think that this was kind
of fanciful in the alternative medicine
world you know you are what you eat but
you are with the thing you're eating ate
and as I started seeing more and more
autoimmune patients
we had case reports
of particularly there's a woman
psychologist in La that I talk about in
the book who had horrible lupus was on
Two drugs and we got her off of all her
drugs by following this program
and her her lupus cleared she had rashes
and
um she she came back to see me and she
said you know everything's great but
I've got this eczema this little rash on
my upper eyelids and so we're going
through the list I said well something's
getting into you and we get to
pasture-raised chicken and I said now
you're you're eating past your raised
chicken cheese oh yeah I eat organic
free-range chicken all the time it's my
go-to food I said
free-range chicken and she said yeah
yeah you know organic free range I said
well the federal government in 2007
passed a law that says you can keep
000 chickens in a warehouse
feed them organic corn and soybeans and
not let them out of the warehouse except
open a door for five minutes every 24
hours and the chicken has the potential
to go outside and that is the current
government definition of organic
free-range chicken wow so she was eating
the lectins of soybeans and corn in the
chicken that she was eating I trained in
London England for children's heart
surgery and my kids were four and six
years old
and they missed Kentucky Fried Chicken
terribly in a Kentucky Fried Chicken
opened in London now in those days there
was so much fish available in England
that the chickens were fed ground up
fish meal and the the chicken breasts
were actually translucent like fish
and uh so you know we go to Kentucky
Fried Chicken they both grab a drumstick
and they bite it under the drumstick and
my four-year-old goes oh oh you tricked
us this is fish ooh this isn't chicken
and I'm going oh no no no no look you
know drumstick you know Colonel Sanders
that's chicken no it's fish
well she was right
it wasn't a chicken it was
a chicken with feathers that was
actually a fish
so we have to realize that our chickens
are no longer chickens they're an ear of
corn with feathers Americans are 70
percent carbon atoms from corn a
substance that we were never exposed to
until 500 years ago Europeans are five
percent corn in fact France in 1900
banned corn is unfit for human
consumption wow
so what I want people to do is is eat
and party like it's 9
999 years ago before we started all this
mess
and when we do that with people and
teach them how to do it
it's amazing what happens to them well
let's talk about that because if I had
only heard some headlines about you I
would have thought oh red meat I'll get
after it because I eat a ton of red meat
and think I'm doing healthy things so
you don't eat a lot of meat why not so
we found that there was a molecule sugar
molecule
on the wall of pig blood vessels that's
totally different from the sugar
molecule that's in ours but it differs
by only one actually atom and it's new
it's called new 5gc in pigs cows and
lambs and we carry what's called new 5ac
and I have nothing against red meat but
if you look statistically the red meat
eaters do have significantly more
coronary artery disease and
significantly more cancer now why cancer
well it turns out that cancers tumors in
humans use new 5 GC to Shield themselves
from detection by the immune system the
problem is we don't manufacture new 5gc
nor can a cancer cell which means they
acquired it from external sources namely
beef lamb and pork now fish doesn't
carry it they have the same molecule
that we do and chicken have the same
molecule that we do
so I urge people if they're going to eat
animal protein and I I do to use wild
shellfish or wild fish as their main
source of animal protein do I eat meat
yeah I mean do I eat beef I do but I get
grass fed and grass-finished beef and I
use it as As a treat not as a Mainstay
of my diet
and then what's your take on eggs
the yolk of the egg may be the most
beneficial food that has ever been
invented and as long as the chickens are
fed what they're designed to eat when I
actually ask people to mainly throw the
whites away so we'll do a four egg
omelet but four of them are yolks and
just use one white and what is it in the
whites or about the whites that make
them problematic okay it's animal
protein and let's look at another reason
not to eat animal protein sadly
so animal protein
there we there's a sensor in all of our
cells called mtor and it senses energy
availability in its senses sugar
availability but it senses certain amino
acid availability so if you avoid or
lessen your amount of animal protein
your mtor will fall now we have no way
of measuring clinically mtor but we can
use a surrogate for that which is
insulin-like growth factor igf-1
and in my super old people and I study a
lot of super olds 95 and above
they all have extremely low insulin-like
growth factors and why why is that a
number you want to get down because
super old people always run low
insulin-like growth factors they always
do and in my upcoming book the longevity
Paradox if you look at societies of the
blue zones the longest living people on
earth
the common factor that they all have in
their diet they have very diverse diets
there's no Universal diet that these
people follow and I was a professor at
one of the blue zones well Melinda for
most of my life
the thing that separates or unites all
of those various diets is they eat very
little animal protein
and one of the things we notice about
super old people is they run low body
temperatures they're running 96 degrees
whereas you and I are running 98.6 and
they become incredibly efficient
creatures my mentor Dr Morrow always
said that you only have so many
heartbeats and when you use those up
that's the end and he's actually right
in a lot of ways but the corollary to
that is let's suppose Your Design is
that you only get so many calories in
your lifetime
and you can use them quickly or you can
spread them out and that's why that's
why fasting
is so useful and intermittent fasting is
so useful because it's actually an easy
way
just to reduce your calorie intake and
it's you know once you learn how to do
it it's it's an easy way to make this
system work how do you pull it off so
I'm a huge proponent of intermittent
fasting and fasting in general how do
you do how do you make it an easy
process
so I started uh 11 years ago at January
1st to June 1st
but during the week I would eat all my
calories in a two hour window from six
to eight o'clock at night so the 22 out
of the 24 hours every day five days a
week I was fasting 22 hours now why six
to eight o'clock at night because that's
when my wife and I were at home and
um now this is as you know for a
professional driver on a closed course
what most people who try to do this
don't realize about 80 percent of us in
America
are insulin resistant we have much too
much insulin production
and I won't bore you or the listeners
but most people can't do prolonged
fasting for even more than a few hours
because they can't access the fat that
they've stored
and they crash and it's often called the
Atkins flu or the low carb flu where
they have to be able to transition over
to using ketones as a fuel now you can
get there fairly quickly and we have
tips in the book on how to do that you
actually have to use exogenous ketones
for a while things like MCT oil things
like coconut oil even red palm oil
there's a little bit of exogenous
ketones in butter it's called butyric
acid yeah it's um intermittent fasting
is really really powerful for
alleviating brain fog for changing your
relationship to hunger is how I always
think of it as just fundamentally
different and then getting your
Machinery used to actually accessing
your body fat and all that we're
designed to use up fat we just have to
you know use the tricks to get to that
fat for most people who are overweight
or obese what's so frustrating for them
is they try things like intermittent
fasting and they're pretty miserable
they get headaches and they're very
hungry their brain is going hey you know
what what's the deal you've cut me off
it's water water everywhere and not a
drop to drink and we see so many
overweight and obese people and I was 70
pounds overweight I was obese running 30
miles a week and going to the gym one
hour a day and going why how come I'm
such a fekka
I couldn't get to my fat stores because
I had an elevated insulin level when I
first you know got my insulin album
wow
um
what's that now I have a very low
insulin no that stuff is fascinating in
terms of the complexities of really
breaking through and figuring out for
you what do you have to do to lose fat
keep it off and yeah it's a very complex
thing and to that end not necessarily my
question is not really about fat loss
but
um given what we've been talking about
lectins and autoimmune and all of those
joints aches pains all the things that
come along with it psoriasis all of that
what should people be eating so we we've
got a rough sense of what we should be
avoiding but what should we be actively
pursuing okay so uh the only purpose of
food is to get olive oil into your mouth
there are three long-lived Societies in
the blue zones that use a liter of olive
oil per week
that's about 12 to 14 tablespoons a day
can I use it to saute you can use it to
saute believe it or not there's a
wonderful paper from the NIH showing
that olive oil does not break down into
harmful compounds that's amazing but
bring olive oil to the table so if
you're going to have a steak please pour
it on your meat as they do in Italy they
always bring a bottle of olive oil so
you can have steak Florentina and just
drench it with olive oil the steak is
there to get olive oil into your mouth
broccoli is there to get olive oil into
your mouth a salad is there to get olive
oil into your mouth so
there are wonderful cruciferous
vegetables you can have all the bok choy
broccoli cauliflower have cauliflower
pizzas there's a great recipe in my
cookbook for cauliflower pizza uh can I
have Japanese sweet potatoes yes please
oh they're so good yeah but the purpose
of the sweet potato is to get olive oil
into your mouth yes which works for me
just fine if I can saute or use an air
fryer yeah have you done yes everything
oh my God they're like french fries they
sure are so yeah so those are great for
you things like Yucca or Yucca make
phenomenal french fries but parboil them
first and then put them in the airfryer
also any tuber so like celerac root is
fantastic jicama so get some guacamole
believe it or not true guacamole does
not have tomatoes in it that's an
American whatever
and get yourself some hika mistakes
Trader Joe's has them lots of plain old
grocery stores have them use that as
your dipping chip other thing I like
people to get is
vegetables in The Chicory family the
more chicory you can get in your life
Radicchio the kind of Italian red
lettuce is pure inulin and your gut bugs
will love I love it for you I want to
believe that we can sort of age in
Reverse so we can get stronger better
looking more robust as we age but that
is not conventional wisdom but you
debunk it right off the bat yeah hit us
with it we want to be a Benjamin Button
so you know we want to actually de-age
and I really think it's possible in fact
when people look at my pictures really
at the height of my surgical career in
the mid 90s and then compare those
pictures to me now there's actually no
doubt that I'm actually a younger man
than I was almost 30 years ago better
skin like what are we judging that by
better skin better yeah better texture
my skin one of the things I talk about
in the book extensively is your your
skin is actually a mirror of the lining
of your gut your the lining of your gut
which is the surface of a tennis court
is actually your skin turned inside out
what is it that makes you think that the
gut is so influential in aging
specifically because people think of
like I'm going to get arthritis it's
wear and tear it just is what it is I've
used my joints so much that you know
they're they're going to be tapped out
like it it actually does make intuitive
sense and so what you talk about in the
book is really sort of kicks people into
a new way of thinking about it so why is
the gut so tied to what we think of as
actual aging so uh
here's the deal uh there's a there's a
wonderful animal model for aging that
involves a little worm called sea
elegans uh it only lives about three
weeks so you can do an intervention in
it and kind of instantly know what's
going to happen and so in this model the
influence of the bacteria the microbiome
and the wall of this little creatures
got the the lining of the gut is only
one cell thick and they're all kind of
held together with what are called tight
junctions a locked arm and arm like a
game we played Red Rover Red Rover that
kids don't play anymore
so the bacteria are foreign if you will
and there is an interaction with the
bacteria in the gut
and what this model shows is that as
those bacteria begin to break holes in
the gut break down the gut then you can
show that that is when aging starts and
the more the wall breaks down the faster
you age the truth is hitting your career
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free by clicking the link in today's
description all right my friend back to
today's episode so let's uh break down
what is aging exactly like what are we
so I think most people would sort of go
to
Mobility
Aesthetics and maybe accumulation of
disease like how would you define aging
specifically so aging to me is the
either quick or slow breakdown of the
gut wall how do we know that well we can
take a look at
105 year old people around the world
you can look at their microbiome the
collection of bugs in their gut
they will have a very diverse set of
bugs they'll have you know it takes a
village this really incredible tropical
rainforest
and those microbiome that collection
will be identical to a healthy 30 year
old
so what that says is that these healthy
105 year olds are healthy
because they have the microbiome of a 30
year old and it's this microbiome that
is not attacking the wall of their gut
that's actually existing with the wall
of God and we I talk a lot about this
crazy bug that may be the key to
longevity and it's got a great name
Ecker monsia mucinophilia say that three
times say that once yeah
so this bug lives in a mucous layer that
aligns our gut and if we're lucky and
the way we're designed we're supposed to
have a layer of mucus lining our gut
before we get to the cells and that
mucus is there to number one trap my
favorite subject lectins which are plant
proteins that are looking for sugar
molecules
and number two it's to protect the wall
of the gut
from bacteria that might do us harm
so ackermansia lives in the mucous layer
and it actually eats the mucus
now here's the best part the more mucus
it eats the more our gut cells produce
mucus and it actually increases the
mucous layer
and the book is actually lots of tricks
on how to make this guy happy because
the thicker our mucus the younger we are
in fact fun fact
metformin we now know works by
increasing the amount of acromancia in
our gut not by some magical mystical
thing happening in our body in fact
interestingly about 25 of people when
they start metformin get diarrhea and
it's actually because the gut microbiome
changes dramatically on on Metformin and
one of the reasons is that necromancia
becomes predominant
interesting so at a cellular level
what's happening with metformin
something that simply triggers the body
to produce mucus in general is it is it
changing the microbiome you called it a
rainforest earlier is it changing the
makeup of that rainforest or is it just
actually compelling the body to create
more mucus no I think it's actually
changing it's selecting out for
acromancia now how does it do that
because there's actually kind of a shag
carpeting on the lining of our gut so
plants have Roots going into the ground
we know the roots actually absorb
nutrients because of the soil microbiome
all the bacteria all the fungi actually
deliver the nutrients into the roots of
the plant
well we have a root system and that root
system is this shag carpet that makes
the line camera got a tennis court okay
so the reason it's so big in surface
area is it loops around itself with
little one cell thick protrusions called
microvilli okay okay these are our Roots
they literally are Our Roots at the
bottom of these microvilli or what are
called Crips
at the bottom of The Cribs there is a
pocket of
bacteria that are essential
and they're down there in storage in
fact fun fact we now know the appendix
is not useless it's one of these storage
systems to repopulate our gut if you
lose your appendix you're screwed for
that part of your story system but down
at the bottom of these Crypts are these
little collection of bacteria and at the
bottom of these Crypts are our stem
cells that actually repopulate these
microvilla
so what happens is if we damage this
lining and boy do we damage the steining
swallow and ibuprofen it's like
swallowing a hand grenade
take some food with Roundup in it
Roundup will destroy the lining of your
gut it's really good stuff Roundup in
itself will destroy your bacterial
population all right really fast because
I think this is important and for some
reason
um even though I've had you on the show
before I really read the book like the
way that you've started talking about
some of the places that you're going to
find also known as glyphosate in the
system that basically they're part of
why they're doing it was originally
created as a or patented as a antibiotic
which that was already shocking and then
you said they use it as a way to be able
to dry the crops out so they can Harvest
them on a specific day very good but
then you said they don't no one wipes
them off and so it ends up in Cheerios
and other things and I was like what
like I thought if I was washing my
vegetables I was going to be fine so
this was a little bit startling to me
yeah you know you know a little off
subject but they've looked up recently a
study of 35 of oat products in the
United States and all of them had
glyphosate in them some of them at very
high levels some of our breakfast
cereals most of our granolas most of our
granola bars
most California wines including a couple
of organic wines have glyphosate in them
because the the fields are sprayed the
weeds are sprayed with glyphosate
between the vines to kill the weeds
research at MIT has shown that not only
does glyphosate
kill bacteria because bacteria use the
same reproductive pathway that plants
use it's the shikamate pathway humans
don't use the sugar mate pathway and so
Monsanto when they invented it said hey
this kills plants but don't worry it
doesn't kill humans because we don't use
the same pathway for life and everybody
said oh that's great you know this is a
miracle what they didn't tell anybody is
the bacteria use the same pathway and
again they patent this as an antibiotic
they didn't patent it as an herbicide
what else are people doing that is
um breaking the bonds or killing the
bacteria the antibiotics in their food
or that they're taking themselves in
fact studied just out this morning
shows that women who take antibiotics
just you know because a urinary tract
infection
sore throat
have a much higher incidence of heart
disease than women who don't that's
scary now this gets into something in
your book that was super freaky uh I've
never heard somebody say and I'm not
saying that no one's ever said it I had
never heard anybody say until reading
this that heart disease is an autoimmune
disease yeah so because it ties into
this point
how is heart disease autoimmune disease
how does that start in the gut what does
that whole Chain Reaction okay so
um Michael DeBakey one of the
Premier Originators of heart surgery
from Houston Texas would always say that
cholesterol has nothing to do with
causing heart disease that it's an
innocent bystander that literally gets
sucked into
inflammation at the wall of the blood
vessel and I use the example of let's
say you know I'm an alien and I'm you
know circling above LA and I report back
that I'm pretty sure that ambulances
cause car accidents because every time I
see a car accident there's an ambulance
there and the ambulance must have caused
it well you know causation Association
is not causation so the fact that we see
cholesterol in deposits and I see it you
know every day in the operating room
there's cholesterol in these plaques
doesn't mean that the cholesterol cause
the plaque so I learned this as an
infant heart transplant surgeon what we
found was we thought naively that if we
got these hearts in as a newborn that
the immune system of the newborn would
not be mature enough and would say oh
yeah that you know that's my heart I
don't know any better and it wouldn't
attack it
well we're partially right but as the
years went and we studied these kids
they started to get coronary artery
disease their blood vessels got
thicker and thicker that is super
interesting and we're going well what
the heck so did they look just like
somebody who we would have associated
with too much cholesterol in their diet
it looks just like diabetic coronary
arteries interesting just like and so
when you actually look at the blood
vessels
the kids the lining of the blood vessel
is from the donor from a foreigner the
blood going through is from the kid
and the blood says wait a minute these
are foreign cells and they're I'm going
to attack them just think of a splinter
under your finger you you know it's all
red so that's inflammation and what was
happening was then cholesterol was
basically coming as a patch an ambulance
and it was getting caught up in this
inflammation so then we look at these
adults who obviously don't have heart
transplants and you go well that's funny
this looks just like a kid who has you
know somebody else's heart and there's a
attack on the blood vessels that looks
identical as if it was a foreign object
so that got me going you know this is an
immunologic reaction and in just a few
weeks and I can't tell you the paper
because it's embargo and I'm giving a
paper at the American Heart Association
vascular biology meeting
that makes a pretty good case that
lectins which are a foreign protein that
can stick to sugar molecules on the
surface of blood vessels uh are the
cause of atherosclerosis in humans and
that removing lectins reduces the
markers for that all right really fast
then we talked about this in our first
issue or first episode but I think it
Bears repeating like what's the real
quick uh breakdown of lectins and the
the rhetoric you started using around
kidney beans I found really interesting
yeah so lectins are the plant defense
system one of the plant defense system
I'm pretty doggone a good one plants do
not want to be eaten they don't want
their babies eaten and they have
evolutionary pressures to keep being
eaten and have their babies not being
eaten and lectins are one of the ways to
do this they are sticky proteins that
look for specific sugar molecules to
stick to and that incites an
inflammatory response wherever they
stick we talked about joints wearing out
joints do not come with a sell-by date
or use by date there is no evidence that
the wear and tear theory has anything to
do with a human body we can constantly
rebuild cartilage but like I talk about
in the book cartilage is broken down by
certain cells and rebuilt by other cells
and we can if you had arthritis we could
stick a scope in you suck out some of
the fluid we could actually find
bacterial particles in your joint fluid
wow okay so really fast because I know
where you're going with that but now now
connect those dots how do those parts
get into the joint lectins broke down
the wall of your gut and on the other
side of your gut is 65 of all your white
blood cells 65 of your immune system is
lining your gut
what are they doing there because the
gut is where the outside world gets
through and they're there to sound the
high alert and attack them when they get
through
one of the reasons we store fat in our
gut we're on the reasons we have a beer
belly or a wheat belly is we are
actually putting fat down where the
action is it's to supply the troops
that's why we put it there in fact when
I operate on people with Advanced
coronary disease there is a layer of fat
that is on the surface of the blood
vessels and there is a perfect
correlation to the amount of
inflammation and disease in the blood
vessel with the amount of fat
surrounding the blood vessel whoa this
is in humans published studies so we
don't this is not conjecture and I
reference this in all my books
wow okay so here's my understanding of
fat 45 seconds ago which may now be
changing
um one that fat is essentially an organ
but I think of it as an energy storage
unit that we can certainly access and
and break down and turn it into energy
that the body is very efficient at
Burning ketones certainly the brain
um so what exactly is it doing at these
areas of inflammation so maybe 15 years
ago we thought the fat was actually
causing the inflammation because
wherever we found fat there were lots of
white blood cells
what I think recent information is
proven is that the fat is not the evil
guy that we thought it was that the fat
is there because of the inflammation and
the inflammation is there because you
have a leak in your gut you have a leaky
gut
yes your white blood cells require huge
amounts of energy to do their job okay
and so you it just it's just like any
army you got to have a supply line you
have to have food for the troops all
right now let me ask a really difficult
question I have no idea if this even
makes sense but it makes sense to my
Layman's mind
so many people have gotten to a
metabolic point of dysfunction so
extreme that they really never access
their fat stores true so if they're
existing in that state and they have
metabolic syndrome and the body's like
yo here's the fat take it I we have
inflammation get ready white blood cells
you can have all the energy that you
could ever use but the body doesn't know
how to click over into that mechanism
because insulin levels are elevated is
the fat getting there and the white
blood cells are unable to use it or
that's a whole different thing and
they're still able to use it that's part
of the problem it's part of the problem
you know let me use an example I used to
use with my patients
the the flu virus so the virus has a has
a barcode on it that our immune cells or
scan literally and say oh you know
that's a nasty virus that's the flu
virus we know this guy we need to get
ready to attack this and we need to get
all of our immune system up and running
and we need to make sure the immune
system has enough power to do this so
what do we do we actually make you me
hurt
hurt to move because if we move the
muscles are going to take all the energy
if you lay down then all the energy is
available for this battle to go after
this virus our immune system literally
reads barcodes to tell whether somebody
is a friend or a foe and lectins have
fascinating barcodes that
mimic other proteins in our body and
when this immune system is ramped up the
immune system goes around the body and
looks for proteins that are lectins and
let's say they come to a thyroid
and they go oh my gosh you know this
poor woman's thyroid is full of what
appear to be lectins they're not quite
the same but it's close enough and we
should you know shoot to kill and we'll
ask questions later okay so I'm gonna
I'm gonna walk through the process that
we've just discussed because wow for me
anyway and for anybody listening that's
like me once I can picture it once I can
understand it then it's like I can begin
to manipulate it and predict what I
should do and not do
okay so you eat something it could be
lectins which you'll find in the skin
and seeds of nightshade vegetables is
one example or peanuts or peanuts uh so
you eat these things they like a
glyphosate like
um ibuprofen apparently they will go in
and they'll disrupt my microbiome they
break down the single the bonds between
the Single Cell lining of my gut that
allows either entire elements of
proteins in the case of lectins or
pieces of bacteria I'm assuming dying
pieces dead pieces there's a broken arm
bacteria it turns out when
bacteria divide and they do all the time
I mean there's trillions and trillions
and trillions of them you make about
anywhere from a half a pound to a pound
of dead cell wall bacterias every day
and so those pieces are normally
excreted with your poop
most of your poop is actually bacteria
that's so weird that's what it is so
anyhow our immune system is so afraid of
bacteria they're supposed to stay on
their side of the wall
that if they see the signature of that
bacterial cell wall it doesn't know that
it's not a whole bacteria it doesn't
know that it's dead
so we can take in human volunteers
LPS's dead bacteria inject them into
your bloodstream and you will go into
septic shock whoa as if we put living
bacteria in you
whoa because what's actually happening
is my immune system is going crazy
exactly the immune system doesn't know
any better and so holy cow you know
there's there's thousands and millions
of bacteria all of a sudden in us and
you know we got to do something and they
just start attacking ah like crazy
monkeys going nuts yeah exactly and so
those particles whether they're the
lectins which by the way on lectins
really fast the whole notion of thinking
about plants not as these inert things
which until starting to read you I
always did I just thought appliances is
completely inert when you talk about
them as being sort of the world's most
sophisticated chemical warfarist that's
where it's like whoa then you begin to
realize maybe what's really going on
okay so these lectins or particles of
bacteria get into the bloodstream immune
system scans it maybe they've ended up
in the thyroid maybe elsewhere and it
just [ __ ] goes nuts starts attacking
you get inflammation which has a whole
host of knock-on effects from could be
um cholesterol trying to patch could be
the fat wrapping around the blood
vessels or the arteries or whatever the
case may be and you know we're we're now
most of us are now convinced that
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and dementia
is
neuroinflammation okay and what's and
what people are picking up on because
they're all going to talk about the beta
amyloid plaques and you've talked about
how some of the companies targeting that
may actually be accelerating your onset
of dementia which is really terrifying
really bad um is that this is again the
alien blaming the ambulance for car
accidents yeah so most amyloid is
actually produced by bacteria in the gut
and Dale bredesen keeps saying he says
it's not the amyloid in the brain that
we should be looking at and no wonder 40
billion dollars of investment in
anti-amyloid drugs has been a total and
useless failure 40 billion dollars he
says because amyloid is produced in the
gut by bacteria and we know certain
bacteria that make it and certain that
don't and why would we give the amyloid
producing bacteria what they want to eat
which is simple sugars and saturated
fats the Western diet
plus the amyloid can't get out of the
gut unless your gut is leaky it's too
big a protein to be absorbed so Dale and
I for years have been saying Hey guys
you're looking at the wrong spot to go
after Alzheimer's so really fast let me
ask are you saying the beta amyloid
plaques are not actually create it in
the brain and that they would never make
their way to the brain you won't make
them unless they get to the brain and
then stimulate more production
that's so weird why would the brain have
the ability to produce something in the
brain that would never be turned on
unless it started from a problem in the
gut that seems way counterintuitive it's
basically so we now we now know we have
we have a leaky brain and there's
meaning things are crossing the
blood-bearing barrier they should not it
would have never done it and there's
actually a beautiful new paper that
probably explains why
cholesterol and amyloid and dementia
actually
um coexist in people with the Apple E4
gene they quote Alzheimer's Gene I got
interested in apple E4 which 30 percent
of people carry as a heart surgeon
because it causes heart disease and Dale
bredesen got interested in it because it
causes dementia Alzheimer's and lo and
behold we now know there's an intimate
connection between carrying the Apple E4
Gene and how cholesterol can be
mischievous to you and your brain and
not necessarily somebody who doesn't
carry that Gene what is the Apple e Gene
what is it doing great question so it's
a it's a carrier molecule
of among other things cholesterol and if
you carry a four mutation or a double
four mutation you do statistically have
an increased risk of developing
Alzheimer's you also have an increased
risk of developing heart disease because
it's doing because it changes the way
cholesterol is transported interesting
it's more efficient it's getting more
ambulances to the scene it's actually
worse
let's suppose the Apple E4 is a Subway
and it's carrying cholesterol and it
stops at a subway saw stop and
cholesterol gets off and it goes into
the cell does its thing and the cell
says okay I've got plenty thanks a lot
you can take the rest of the cholesterol
back and take it someplace else
so it gets back on the subway and the
subway moves on
with the Apple E4 Gene what happens is
it carries the cholesterol to the cell
on the subway but when the extra
cholesterol tries to get back in the
subway doors are closed super clear all
right and that's the problem you know
this is a transport promise drop the
stuff off just fine but normally it'd be
picking up the stuff that you know isn't
needed but it so it builds up yeah so
it's kind of a double whammy
so now let's walk people through step by
step because we haven't even gotten to
mitochondria in detail yet which we'll
get there in a minute it's such an
important part of the story but so first
I want to begin to help people to
understand what it is that breaks the
Junction in their gut because that's
such a huge part of this uh
what is it that triggers the breakdown
let's start with that
well so there's you know there's three
kind of major components so first of all
and we don't need to talk about this
extensively but lectins are plants read
the plant paradox
they're plant proteins that were
designed by plants to protect themselves
and their seeds their babies from being
eaten by making their Predator ill to
pay attention number two particularly if
we're eating a typical American diet
with lots of saturated fats lots of fats
in general and lots of sugars
we in our gut have classes of bacteria
and we have 10 000 different bacteria
and I divide them into gut buddies good
bacteria and gang members
gang members love saturated fats and
simple sugars and the problem with these
gang members is that they divide and die
and pieces of these bacteria called
LPS's
lipopolysaccharides and in all my books
I call them little pieces of [ __ ]
because that's literally what they are
these guys actually hop on
fat molecules and ride through our gut
even without a leaky gut and when they
get to the other side the immune system
cannot tell the difference between a
living bacteria and a bacterial cell
wall it's so impressive that for
instance we could take you or me
and inject these LPS's into our
bloodstream and both of us would go into
septic shock as if living bacteria had
been put into us so believe it or not in
the American diet 24 hours a day
were causing leaky gut we're assaulting
our immune system with these LPS's and
it's no wonder that just from fat we all
you know are just a giant ball of
inflammation
okay so
um for my own sake it'll be interesting
to tease out some of the ideas around
fat but first I want to stay on this
point just for a second of how people
end up getting in a state where they're
prone to having that Junction break so
I'm going to make some assertations you
tell me or assertions you tell me if
these are correct assertions or not
um so one that part of the problem is a
breakdown in the actual microbiome so
the Integrity of a well-balanced
microbiome so you've probably done
something to assault that microbiome for
a long time it could be a very
non-diverse diet so some of the bugs are
just dying out and so because they're
starved to death correct and so you get
you know some dysbiosis there you've got
people just shoveling sugar in their
face that comes in a gazillion different
forms that causes all kinds of Havoc not
only in the microbiome but elsewhere and
you know we'll get into some of the
other ramifications I'm sure later and
biotics which are causing that
glyphosate which is causing that so it's
like there are so many things that are
assaulting our guts and the reason I'm
I'm prefacing all of this is because one
thing that I've had tremendous success
with in my life is high fat low carb so
I'm curious to see like it in my n of
one experience
fat of certain kinds anyway do not seem
to be problematic and of one I'm well
aware of that so you know everybody
freaking out that that is not empirical
data I understand
um but you know there's also obviously a
pretty interesting carnivore movement
so is it certain types of fat is it only
fat when you've compromised your
microbiome or is it no no fat is in and
of itself an assault upon even a healthy
microbiome so I'm I'm the guy who's
famous for saying the only purpose of
food is to get olive oil in your mouth
so I'm absolutely not anti-fab and in
all my books I have a ketogenic plant
Paradox chapter of exactly that but
having said that interestingly enough
most fats even including olive oil are
transported across the wall of our gut
using these carriers called chylomicrons
and it's the chylomicrons that these
LPS's hop onto
so interesting the chylomicron is a
metabolite of some kind no chylomicrons
are the
moving van that literally carries fat
across your gut wall fat transverses
your gut well in a totally different way
than sugars or proteins the exception to
that is medium chain triglycerides now
medium chain triglycerides MCT oil
are a saturated fat but they are a
unique saturated fat in that they're
water soluble so they transverse the gut
wall without chylomicrons number one
and they don't enter our lymphatic
system where chylomicrons go they go
directly from our gut through our portal
vein into our liver
and in the liver MCTS actually
tell the liver to make Ketone bodies so
whenever you eat MCT oil or eat MCTS in
other forms you will automatically do
not stop do not pass go do not collect
200 you will automatically make ketones
in your liver
and they'll be released so help me
understand the difference then so if if
not all fats are bad
what are the fats that are bad that are
causing this problem I didn't I didn't
get that so sadly a lot of the saturated
animal fats are some of the biggest
Mischief Makers but
the other specifically because they're
feeding the wrong bacteria they're
feeding the wrong bacteria and if you
don't have these gram-negative bacteria
in your gut in huge amounts you will not
produce
LPS's lipopolysaccharides so you could
have
a very high fat diet as long as you
don't have these gang members in your in
your life and those gang members got
there quite frankly by eating a lot of
sugar so help me then understand so
um there you said there is a time for a
carnivore diet I'm guessing and there's
a pair a pretty narrow band where you
would recommend that but what would that
narrow band be
so we we will use it uh for an
Elimination Diet where we've got someone
who is really intolerant to plant
lectins in general and we do see these
people uh they're totally intolerant to
Raw plants most of the time
um the lectins in plants can be cooked
away there are exceptions beans you
cannot cook the lectins away
wheat you cannot cook lectins away you
can't pressure cook wheat to get rid of
lectins Oats have a molecule that mimics
gluten corn has virtually identical
molecules to a gluten in fact 70 percent
of people who are sensitive of gluten
react to Corn as if it was wheat and so
many patients yeah so many patients that
I see on a gluten-free diet for celiac
disease for extreme leaky gut they're
eating corn because it's gluten free and
when we take corn away from them so many
of them resolve the problem and you know
it's like oh my gosh you know I've been
eating corn chips and corn muffins and
cornbread and I thought that was you
know gluten-free well it is but it
cross-reacts so if you if you combine a
carnivore diet
with what I recommend in the book which
is time restricted eating or compressing
your eating window
you can I want to say get away with a
carnivore diet for a period of time
there's a very famous young lady who
follows a carnivore diet who really
wants to get off the carnivore diet but
you can't and I think we've seen this
and if we were going to really simplify
why she can't I'm guessing it's it is
simply a question of the microbiome
right like if we could
repopulate her microbiome whether
through fecal microbial transplant or
magic whatever but if we could
repopulate her gut then theoretically
she would be able to get off it the only
reason that people get trapped in
something like that is because of the
changes in their microbiome yes one of
the things that I
um I think is critically important for
our health in so many ways that I talk
about in the energy paradox is we now
know that the the microbiome number one
has to be diverse we know that the
Western diet produces the worst kind of
non-diverse microbiome that you could
possibly you know wish for and you don't
wish for that that's number one number
two
if you don't give the microbiome
plant fibers which are
Prebiotic fibers these are soluble
fibers that we can't digest but the
microbiome eats the microbiome can't
produce what are called post-biotics and
I spend a lot of time in the book
talking about this exciting discovery of
postbiotics yeah it helped me understand
what the difference between a postbiotic
and a metabolite is
okay so literally when bacteria ferment
fibers then they the fermentation
process produces both short chain fatty
acids like butyrate like acetate like
propranate and they produce a series of
gases hydrogen gas hydrogen sulfide gas
the rotten egg smell methane carbon
dioxide nitric oxide
we used to think that these were just
farts that everybody made and they
didn't do anything
but about 10 years ago I usually present
a talk at the World Congress of
microbiota which is which happens in
Paris before coven and the organizer is
Professor from Paris Dr Marvin Edis
he pulled me aside about eight years ago
and he says you know
the microbiome talks to mitochondria and
I'm going
oh that's interesting how do you know
that he says well it has to because
mitochondria the little energy producing
organelles in all of our cells are
actually engulfed bacteria
and the bacteria of the microbiome talk
to their sisters and they control what
happens to the mitochondria they either
tell them to produce energy or things
are bad in the engine room cut back on
energy production I'm going well this is
fascinating but why hasn't anybody
discovered this he said you watch we
will
and sure enough he was right so we now
know that these they're now called
post-biotics the gases are called gasso
Messengers or gasso transmitters and the
short chain fatty acids we now know
nourish the gut wall number one and also
nourish brain cells number two
so the discovery of this language and
it's literally called a trans Kingdom
language where
set a bacteria
talk to us in particular our
mitochondria and it won the Nobel Prize
for medicine a few years ago with the
discovery is it specifically the gas or
is it the gas and the post-biotic so the
gas is a postbiotic so are the short the
short chain fatty acids
correct okay yeah they're all classified
what do they do is it is uh Hey nitric
oxide has arrived therefore do this and
the flip side nitric oxide has not
arrived and therefore do that correct so
for instance we know that hydrogen
sulfide the rotten egg smell
if you produce the right amount of
hydrogen sulfide you will not produce
atherosclerotic disease plaque in
coronary arteries despite a monstrously
high level of cholesterol in the diet
but if you don't produce the right
amount of hydrogen sulfide it's as if
you know let the hell loose from LDL
that sounds like a life-changing uh
Revelation I've never heard that before
so I can have freakishly High uh
cholesterol but if I get the right
signal from the my microbiome correct in
the form of gas
then my body's like we're good we're not
gonna form the the plethora sclerotic
plaque that's like the hardest word in
the English language
that's crazy why are people not talking
about that
because there's no money in it you know
as statin drugs or make a lot of money
um you know and this is you know when I
look back at the man who changed my life
25 years ago Big Ed and watched him
clean out the you know inoperable plaque
in his coronary arteries did you see him
under the knife or was he uh not
surgical so interesting enough he had so
much plaque in all his blood vessels you
couldn't put stents in them you couldn't
do bypasses because there wasn't any
place to land and like so many people he
would go around the country looking for
idiots like me to operate on him to take
him on that's kind of what I did and he
spent six months going to Major centers
and I've named them before
um and everybody turned him down said
yep go away nothing we can do for him
well during the six months he went on a
diet and he started taking a bunch of
supplements from a health food store and
he lost 45 pounds in six months now he
was still a big guy I call him Big Ed
because he was 265 when I met him so he
arrives in my office carrying his
angiogram the cardiac catheterization
from six months previous and I look at
it and I go you know everybody's right
nothing we can do for you you know sorry
and he says wait a minute you know look
I've been on a diet I'm taking all these
supplements maybe I did something and I
said well you know good for you for
losing weight but that's not going to do
anything in here he says look what do we
got to lose let's do another angiogram
and
I said okay so in six months putting a
camera in his veins putting dye in his
veins and taking a 3D picture of where
the blockages are and in six months time
50 of the blockages are now gone now
he's still got blockages but now there's
Open Spaces where I could land a bypass
so if I knew what I knew now I'd say
great job see you in six months they'll
probably be all cleaned out but I didn't
know that so I said great you know we're
going to do an operation on you and we
did a five vessel bypass and I'm pretty
smart and then I said
um tell me about this diet and let me
look at those supplements
and son of a gun this guy had actually
put himself on a diet that was my thesis
as an undergraduate Yale on what turned
a great ape into a human being
and I was so shocked that you know this
guy did this that I put myself on my
thesis and I lost 70 pounds I was a big
fat art surgeon you weren't always
running 30 miles a week and going to the
gym one hour a day
so that's a long way of saying
that he actually was the guy who opened
my eyes
that we've got this all wrong
yeah it's it's bananas man every time I
talk to you I mean forget your book
which is already just chock full of
enlightening things but that that's
really crazy what is up my friend Tom
bilyu here and I have a big question to
ask you how would you rate your level of
personal discipline on a scale of one to
ten if your answer is anything less than
a ten I've got something cool for you
and let me tell you right now discipline
by its very nature means compelling
yourself to do difficult things that are
stressful boring which is what kills
most people or possibly scary or even
painful now here is the thing achieving
huge goals and stretching to reach your
potential requires you to do those
challenging stressful things and to
stick with them even when it gets boring
and it will get boring building your
levels of personal discipline is not
easy but let me tell you it pays off in
fact I will tell you you're never going
to achieve anything meaningful unless
you develop discipline all right I've
just released a class from Impact Theory
university called how to build Ironclad
discipline that teaches you the process
of building yourself up in this area so
that you can push yourself to do the
hard things that greatness is going to
require of you right click the link on
the screen register for this class right
now and let's get to work I will see you
inside this Workshop from Impact Theory
University until then my friends be
legendary
you so you say in the book you make a
prediction that in the future we're
going to realize uh a couple things one
you say that you refer to the gut as the
first brain and not the second brain but
the other thing is this gut gas brain
access and I've never heard anybody talk
about it before and just to to re-anchor
everybody we're talking about energy and
your body's ability to generate energy
and you've got your gut Which is far
more complicated than anybody could
possibly realize it's communicating to
the organs inside your cell or the
organelles inside your cells that
generate the actual energy that are
themselves bacteria that have their own
DNA which is fascinating unto itself and
all of this then is also having an
effect I won't just say communicating
because I think it's more than that
having an effect on the brain which is
then having massive effects whether it's
fatigue whether it's the the fogginess
which was the worst part of what I went
through so you just blew my mind with
the whole gas communication thing and
how it can even play out with plaque now
mitochondria we have to talk about the
the idea of um the the traffic jam that
ends up happening
I think it's really important for people
you've already mentioned time restricted
but now talk to me in in the context of
that traffic jam because this to me was
a big player in why you feel lethargic
if you feel like you're lacking energy
yeah so mitochondria produce energy from
either glucose which comes from the
carbohydrates we eat
or amino acids proteins that we eat or
from pre fatty acids fats that we eat or
that we have stored that we produce
and normally mitochondria use one of
those substances at a time and quite
frankly if we actually ate Whole Foods
like I talk in the book like our great
grandparents did normally carbohydrates
sugar molecules would arrive first for
processing and mitochondria are really
good at using one thing at a time then
after the carbohydrates are gone protein
takes a long time to digest into amino
acids and they arrive second
fat literally takes a circuitous root
it's not even absorbed into our
bloodstream it's absorbed into our lymph
system and then comes around later but
what's happened with our processed foods
and our Ultra processed foods is that we
have had made perfect
pre-digested sugar amino acids and small
fat molecules
that literally
instantaneously enter our bloodstream
and Wham into our mitochondria
simultaneously
and it's literally since both of us live
in the LA area it is like rush hour
traffic in L.A with all of these streets
leading into our freeways and nothing
moves and what we're doing now the
average American work by Sachin Panda at
the sock Institute in San Diego to show
that the average American is eating for
16 hours a day
and 60 percent of the food we eat is
processed so we're just constant in rush
hour it's like the 405 24 hours a day as
you and I know and nothing moves so if
we look at energy production as
literally cars moving down through a
freeway it's no wonder that even though
we're eating huge amounts of calories we
have no energy because we've literally
log jammed the mitochondria and just as
a fun fun side note the first
pre-digested food that was actually
advertised as a benefit was Kellogg's
Corn Flakes it was actually advertised
as the first pre-digest digested food
and why anybody would want to have their
food pre-digested like most of our food
is now you can thank Kellogg's for doing
that over a hundred years ago dnp
dinitrophenol
phenol hmm where have I heard that word
before
polyphenols
polyphenols are used by plants to
protect their energy producing
organelles which are their mitochondria
but they're called chloroplasts
so let's go back to us for just a second
oxygen we have to have oxygen to make
ATP normally
oxygen is very damaging to our
mitochondria all these free oxygen
radicals blah blah blah so we can't live
without oxygen but we can't live with
with it and so we have to you know sop
up the damage the oxygen does plants on
the other hand have to have sunlight and
they kind of reverse engineer they take
photons from sunlight combine it with
CO2 and they make glucose and ATP
sunlight is damaging to the plant
mitochondria the chloroplasts so they
actually generate
polyphenols to protect their
mitochondria from damage their
chloroplasts
we get to see every fall the polyphenols
in Plants because the green chlorophyll
goes away and all those beautiful colors
of yellows oranges Reds dark colors are
the polyphenols that the plant generated
to protect and uncouple the mitochondria
of plants and it turns out the way they
protect the mitochondria is to uncouple
them to make them work less hard and the
less hard their mitochondria work the
less damage sunlight does to them
now weed plants and the polyphenols in
plants do two things number one we don't
absorb polyphenols from Plants very well
but our bacteria actually love
polyphenols they're actually a Prebiotic
fiber for bacteria and the bacteria then
convert those polyphenols into
absorbable polyphenols which then go to
our mitochondria and uncouple them
it's I can every time I say this I hear
The Lion King The Circle of Life playing
in my head you know oh you know we eat
the plants but then we die and the
plants eat us so the plants are
protecting themselves with polyphenols
when we eat the plant polyphenols we
uncouple our mitochondria the same way
there's the benefit of polyphenols Okay
so
they are technically we're getting like
a metabolite of the bacteria processing
the polyphenols correct
it it isn't showing up as a ketone so
how many things trigger the uncoupling
so we know ketones do it as a signaling
molecule we've got a whole host of
polyphenols or some polyphenols better
so a whole host of polyphenols you you
choose the polyphenol I'll show you a
paper that shows the action of that
polyphenol is to uncouple mitochondria
I'll give you from last week
um
one of my compounds at Gunnery MD is
called total restore which is a my
humble opinion a really good gut
repairing compound gut wall compound
one of the things that I use long before
I use that was a compound called
wormwood and people probably have heard
of wormwood it's in a lot of compounds
to repair the gut and just for fun last
week I saw a paper that a type of
wormwood
worked by uncoupling mitochondria and I
went what what the heck I didn't know
wormwood could do that so I started
Googling wormwood and uncoupling
mitochondria do this in your spare time
great fun and lo and behold five papers
come up that wormwood mechanism of
action is uncoupling mitochondria and so
you start going down this this rabbit
hole and you find out that there
literally just one thing that makes all
the difference in a person's health and
that is hitting the right dose of
mitochondrial and coupling and getting
the compounds that will do that and just
to Peak everybody's interest there's an
interesting Theory of Aging called the
rate of living hypothesis and the rate
of living hypothesis is that
basically you only have so many calories
that you're granted in your life process
yeah if you use up those calories
quickly that's the end if you use up
those calories slowly that's great and
it fits pretty good little tiny animals
don't live very long they have really
super high metabolic rates big animals
like an elephant uh live a long time and
they have fairly low metabolic rate the
problem with that theory is birds birds
are very small in the scheme of things
but a hummingbird in captivity which has
one of the highest basal metabolic rates
measured can live 10 years a parrot can
live 80 to 100 years what yeah guess
what
birds do better than any creature
mitochondrial and coupling Bingo there
it is they have the most uncoupled
mitochondria of any species
okay now because I've read the book I
feel like I'm cheating a little bit but
uh so Birds probably are dinosaurs yeah
that crossed and so are we assuming that
due to asteroid impact
they became Birds because they were
already good at mitochondrial and
coupling and that's how they were able
to survive that period I think it's a
beautiful Theory I don't think anybody's
actually you know actually spouted that
out loud but you know I mean they are
the last dinosaur it's very interesting
so given that we are descended from
mammals that also survived that period
it's certainly makes a lot of sense that
we would have survived if we already had
that ability and then I know humans like
by the time we became humans there were
twice that I think we were forced
through these really narrow periods
where they were very few humans left
yeah we were down six thousand years ago
we were down
probably to one woman and probably a few
guys she's got that small yeah she's
mitochondria leave all of us can be
traced back to one female whoa yeah all
of us and you know just just so
everybody knows
mitochondria actually uh they have their
own DNA their own genome
mitochondria are only transmitted
from the female
you and I know we're just drones we we
have no useful purpose other than being
a drone so we we don't give any
mitochondrial DNA so you can actually
look at mitochondrial DNA so there's
mitochondrial DNA in the egg yep
crazy yeah but there's none of the sperm
no mitochondria go into the
that's real and what's really cool and
I've talked about this before I mean
what's really
we get all of our microbiome initially
from our mother passing through the
birth canal hopefully yep and so our
bacteria
are female
and our mitochondria are female and as
I've talked about and other people have
proven
these female bacteria talk to their
sisters the female mitochondria and they
literally text each other and that
language was discovered and got the
Nobel Prize
um
of post-biotics and I talk a lot about
post-biotics as well the communication
system between the microbiome and their
sisters the mitochondria and it's like I
mean it's crazy
I mean the design
you just have to sit there and Marvel at
the design and then you start
marveling at okay how do we tweak the
benefits of this design how do we
maximize the benefits of that design
and that's why
one of the cool things is yeah we can on
a couple mitochondria via a ketogenic
diet a high fat ketogenic diet no
question about it
but do we want to do that 24 7 no
because eventually like you mentioned
you will become insulin resistant to
stop the muscles from stealing the
calories and you'll eventually start
losing muscle mass eventually if you
continue 24 7 ketosis for a long time so
you want to cycle in and out of ketosis
on a 24-hour basis
and book shows okay here's some tricks
let's do intermittent fasting time
restricted eating let's
stay in ketosis for 15 16 hours a day so
what window do you recommend so uh Dr
Matheson from the NIH from the National
Institutes of Aging
wrote a beautiful paper a couple years
ago that shows probably six hours is the
best window okay six hours of eating 18
fast 16 yeah fast six hours
because they have an opinion on number
of meals in the six hours it actually
doesn't matter and I go into that and
again there's a lot of fun nerdy stuff
in here a guy by the name of Rafael De
Cabo also at the NIH showed that
all the calorie restriction literature
and calorie restriction you know cutting
30 percent of all the calories you eat
every day is really the only
Bonafide proven way to extend lifespan
across multiple species
but the problem is it's unsustainable
there is a calorie restriction Society
in the United States uh it's hilarious
they're they're miserable individuals
they're cold they they're miserable
they're hungry uh why aren't they warm
because if they're putting themselves in
Starvation mode they're triggering this
whole thing they're literally now gone
into a Thrifty Gene mode so far
through this correct then you know
they're they're so far down the line but
the Cabo said hey wait a minute I think
we've got this calorie restriction wrong
because we're controlling the animals
food and we're putting the food in their
cage and we're giving them x amount of
food I wonder
if the time of day that we put the food
into the animal's cage and the time
they're eating the food and the time
they're not eating the food was really
what the difference was so he designed
an experiment which is really kind of
cool you design experiment based on the
rhesus monkey studies of the University
of Wisconsin and the National Institutes
of Aging
and these were calorie restricted
monkeys but only the University of
Wisconsin study showed extended
longevity the Nia study showed no
extended longevity and they had
different diets and he said I'll tell
you what I think you guys are both wrong
I betcha is the time of eating so we
designed an experiment where
they had a calorie restricted group of
both diets four rats
but he had a third group that
that all their food came out at three
o'clock in the afternoon and
animals ate it quite rapidly and they
still actually they ate up all their
calories in about eight to twelve hours
and then they were fasting about 12
hours at least and that's a long time
for a wrap they compare them to rats who
got their food all day long and all
night long
the rats who got food all day long all
night had no metabolic flexibility they
couldn't make a change between burning
sugar and burning fats right the rats
who got full calories but had it put out
at three o'clock in the afternoon
had metabolic flexibility
the rats who were calorie restricted
also had metabolic flexibility so then
they looked at longevity
the rats that had a full day's calories
but ate at three o'clock in the
afternoon lived 11 percent longer than
the rats who got a full days of calories
that they ate all day and all night now
for us that equates to a 10-year
increase in lifespan now is that on the
same amount of calories on the same
amount of calories that's crazy well
it's not so crazy because the Italian
athlete study proves the point in humans
and what's that this is a really cool
study they took Italian cyclists and
they put them on a training table for
three months and most people know what a
training table is you guys here it is
this is this is the food you're getting
and everybody had to eat the exact same
food the exact same amount of calories
all they did is change how often the
guys got to eat one group
they got three meals a day one group got
breakfast at eight o'clock in the
morning got lunch at one o'clock in the
afternoon had to finish dinner by eight
o'clock at night it a 12 hour eating
window
other groups same food
got breakfast at one o'clock in the
afternoon
lunch at four o'clock in the afternoon
and had to finish dinner at eight
o'clock at night same amount of calories
followed for three months same exercise
program
the group that ate a 12-hour window
stayed the same way the group that ate
in a seven hour window lost weight lost
significant amount of weight but their
performance was the same here's the best
part maybe the take-home message
you and I know there's probably our best
method to predict
longevity is a blood test called insulin
like growth factor one igf-1
probably the best indicator of whether
mtor is activated or not
the guys who ate the seven hour window
their igf ones plummeted the guys who
ate the 12-hour window had no change in
their igf-1
so the take-home message was it wasn't
the calories the guys were eating
it was the time period that they were
eating the calories now why is that
early on I mentioned that most of us if
we have metabolic flexibility start
making ketones about eight hours after
we stop eating and by 12 hours we've
really started you know kicking up our
ketones
so those are the 12 hour guys they're
just kicking into Ketone big time and
then they right stops the Ketone
production
the other guys they're kicking into
ketones and then they're waiting another
five hours to get their first bite of
food so they're producing ketones five
additional hours so they got five hours
every day to uncouple their mitochondria
before they go back and stop the process
so it's the cycling in and out of
getting the benefits of ketosis without
full ketosis that makes all the
difference
it's amazing okay so now that we
understand the mechanism which at least
for me is huge once I understand it I
don't know there's something happens in
my brain I can really get behind it give
us a quick thumbnail sketch animal Meat
Plant like how should we be eating
what's what's that look like in a rough
nutshell well here's one of the big
Revelations for me
um as you know I
but the only nutritionist that spent
most of my career living in a Blue Zone
Loma Linda California it's the only Blue
Zone in the United States by the way
and one of the things that shocked me
when when I
moved to Loma Linda was the amount of
fat
and particularly dairy fat in the
Adventist diet
and I met with the nutritionist at the
hospital and because
the the food in the hospital cafeteria
and Adventists are vegetarians or vegans
about
36 percent of Adventists are vegetarians
about five percent are vegans a number
are pescetarians but so a great deal of
the Adventists are vegetarians or at
least pescetarians right and yet 50
percent of their diet was dairy fat from
whoa yogurt 50 percent 50 percent
yogurts a lot and cheeses
and they're going you you're killing you
know my patience you know I'm a heart
surgeon you know I'm a cardiologist
you're killing my patients they go uh no
we're not uh we're the longest living
people in the United States you know do
your homework
you're killing our patients
so as I was researching this book
um I said you know the Adventists eat a
lot of cheese and Dairy
let's look at the other blue zones so
you look at Sardinia which is another
Blue Zone you look at the nagoyan
peninsula in Costa Rica which is another
Blue Zone you look like at a carrier
which is a Greek Island
and lo and behold the sardinians are
unique in that the sardinians are
basically two populations there's the
folks who live up in the mountain
and the folks who live down by the sea
it turns out only the people who live up
in the mountain have longevity ah see
that's interesting and they're sheep
herders and goat herders and they eat
huge amounts of goat and cheap cheese
the folks who live down by the sea don't
aren't goat and sheep herders and they
don't eat cheap cheese
so there was a beautiful paper we didn't
put it in the book but I'll tell you
that showed that the difference was the
fact that these guys were eating goat
and cheap cheese so now you go wait a
minute what's so cool about going cheap
cheese something in there that's
uncoupling mitochondria I have a hunch
you got it it turns out that
30 percent of the calories in goat and
sheep milk are medium chain
triglycerides MCTS
in fact most of the MCT fats are named
after the Latin word for goat Capra
there's capric acid caprylic acid uh
goat
because of goat milk and sheep milk have
tons of MCTS and remember
MCTS are unique in that they go directly
to the liver and generate ketones so
these guys were generating ketones just
by eating goat cheap cheese let's jump
to the nagoyan peninsula now
a lot of bean eating and corn eating in
Costa Rica and on the nagoyan peninsula
but what's so unique about the nagoyan
peninsula is that their goat and sheep
herders and there's a beautiful paper
that showed the difference is the goat
and sheep cheese not the beans and corn
but calves don't do it for some reason
no they don't make MCTS
hmm
let's jump to acharya two factors in
acaria their goat and sheep herders they
have yogurt every day they have goat and
sheep cheese every day and they eat a
weed a common weed called purslane as a
major part of their diet people see
purslane growing in sidewalk cracks all
the time it's Moss roses portulaca that
people have in their Gardens
they eat it as salads it turns out that
purslane has an amazing short chain
omega fat called alpha linolenic acid
than a profile in the book
Alpha linoleic acid is magnificent for
uncoupling mitochondria
so it turns out that four of the five
blue zones get their benefit by
uncoupling mitochondria and it turns out
that the okinawans
85 percent of the ancient Okinawan diet
was a purple sweet potato
it wasn't rice they don't do it that
wasn't soybeans they only use miso
it was the purple sweet potato which is
full of the purple polyphenols anymore
now the okinawans are eating a western
dye
so all of these guys were uncoupling
their mitochondria all right so eating
goat and sheep cheese yeah purple
Okinawan potatoes and we're gonna
uncouple until the end of time
it basically yeah so I mean the great
thing is you don't have to suffer
eating an incredibly boring high fat
diet if you have goat and sheep cheese
and my wife and I literally have goat or
sheep cheese every night before dinner
now but you're plant leaning right so oh
yeah yeah but you know again when I when
we talk about eat the rainbow and
everybody talks about eating the rainbow
what we're actually saying is eat
polyphenol Laden plants that's literally
what we're saying because the rainbow
are those polyphenols and I go into the
ancient spice trade from the Middle Ages
yes you do and it turns out you look at
those spices that people were ready to
pay exorbitant amount of money for in
fact you asked an interesting question
in the book and you said was this the
original drug trade yeah and that's
interesting because when you start to
learn the history of like the spice Wars
like people were killing people in like
genocide levels for
of the people on these ocean voyages on
for the spicejaroid died Jesus and so
you had to be something pretty
worthwhile this was drug trade and they
were the trade they were actually doing
was for polyphenols I mean for instance
cinnamon was huge clothes were huge and
I even have a fun chuckle
um The Gift of the Magi uh in the Bible
two of the three gifts were actually
frankincense and myrrh which are
polyphenols and both are shown to
uncouple mitochondria so interesting so
they brought those little baby Jesus
mitochondrial and cups yes they did yes
they did
uh I was on my way to Orange County to a
PBS fundraiser
um and I get a call on the phone on the
way down to Orange County that the
person a young Millennial who was going
to do the fundraiser with me uh called
in and said she didn't have it in her to
come in today to uh to do the fundraiser
and I thought oh gosh you know anything
wrong they said no she's just you know
she's exhausted and she's tired and she
just doesn't have an inner but don't
worry we got another person we'll be
fine
but that phrase stuck with me for for
days afterwards that you know a
millennial would be calling in and
saying I don't have it in me and I
realized that when I first started my
restorative medicine practice over 20
years ago
at least half the people I saw uh would
we would use a medical code a diagnostic
code called fatigue and malaise
and uh it never really then it always
went away and so it never really
occurred to me that I was you know
treating an energy problem but when she
said that I said oh my gosh you know I'm
an energy doctor all along and I need to
tell people what's going on so if that
was the impetus for the book
all right so one of the things you go
into in the book
um is around cellular energy and so and
mitochondria specifically and I've been
asked a lot about how I maintain my
energy levels you know whether it's
running a company or speaking or
whatever I once stood and answered
questions for 11 and a half hours
um and one of the questions was you know
how how do you generate the energy and
my answer was well the only real
truthful answer to that is it's at a
cellular level so it has to do with diet
it has to do with exercise and you do
get some benefit from psychological
energy but I had always been you know
since my sort of mid to early 20s I've
been working out I've been very
conscious about my diet and so it just
sort of felt second nature until during
covid probably I don't know this is
maybe six months ago now I started to
get psychotically fatigued brain fog
just like
so tired I I was like am I losing my
will to fight to live it was really
unnerving and I thought okay what would
you tell somebody if they were asking
you this question and I said well my
answer would be I don't know what's
going on with you but I promise it's
your diet and so I was like okay well if
that's true what's going on in your diet
and uh for me I started thinking about
the only thing that I was eating a lot
of was this like pecan pudding and it
was delicious and I loved it the most I
can't even begin to tell you how much I
enjoyed this thing and because it was
like raw pecans and everything I thought
you know it can't be that but it's the
only thing I need a lot so let me cut it
out and it changed in like 48 Hours it
was surreal so I know the punch line
because I've read the book but walk
people through how it's possible that
something I'm eating simply by removing
it could restore my energy
yeah the I about eighty percent of the
patients I see now are autoimmune
disease patients who
have kind of been all over the country
all over the world and have not gotten a
resolution in their autoimmune disease
or they're on immunosuppressant drugs
and they don't want to be
and what we find a hundred percent of
the time and I can assure you it's a
hundred percent of the time that all
these people suffer from leaky gut and
or you know intestinal permeability if
you want the exact term and
2500 which is just for people that don't
know it is
is literally the aligning of our
intestines is the same surface area as a
tennis court we it's only one cell thick
right it's only one cell thick and the
cells are stuck together with what are
called tight junctions so everything we
eat including all the bacteria that live
in us are only one cell away from us
from and 80 percent of our immune system
white blood cells are sitting right
behind this wall waiting for
troublemakers to come through
and your example is actually really good
hidden in one of my books the plant
Paradox cookbook the original one
there's a little line that says pecans
have a very interesting lectin and I
can't tell you the number of people who
are sensitive to the lectin and pecans
particularly if you eat them raw so you
quite frankly undoubtedly are one of
those people who are sensitive to pecans
and these little
Pro proteins lectins actually made your
gut porous
so so what well the whole book is
literally about that
your immune system requires huge amounts
of energy to do battle with whatever is
coming across your border
and it really fast on that that was one
thing from the book that um
I was wondering is is there data coming
out because in the book you talk a lot
about the hadza tribe the studies that
are coming out how people compared
you've got the hot stuff moving around
all the time hunting and Gathering and
then you've got somebody sitting at
their desk and when you measure the
energy output of those two people you
would think the sedentary person was way
lower in energy output but they're
actually the same now is it just your
hunch that that isn't true or is there
actual data around the um the sort of
energy requirements of the
um inflammation basically but I'll use a
great pre-covered example that I use in
the book
you catch the flu the and everybody gets
really achy you feel awful you don't
want to move you don't want to read you
don't want to think you just want to you
know binge watch Netflix laying in your
bed and everybody says well yeah of
course that's the flu virus the flu
virus is causing that to happen and in
fact it isn't
there's nothing in a flu virus to do
that but our immune system
recognizes the flu virus as a
troublemaker and mobilizes the troops
and the troops if you will require huge
amounts of fuel
so we
ration fuel to energy hungry mussels and
we ration fuel to then energy hungry
brain how do we ration fuel the muscles
we make muscles hurt so that it doesn't
feel good to move
how do we ration fuel to the brain we
make the brain not work
and so your immune system takes all this
fuel for the fight
and it's fascinating to see that you
know what we thought was the flu virus
causing the problem in fact is our own
immune system saying you lay back sit
down for the count I need all this
energy and in fact that's I think in
other data shows that that's what
happened to these sedentary workers
their energy
expense was just the same as if they
were walking 10 miles a day but they
were burning the fuel of inflammation
the fire of inflammation as I call it
yeah one thing that
um you know sort of bringing these
pieces together in my own life my wife
went through a really brutal
um gut problem many years ago which
frequent listeners of this podcast will
have heard many many times uh and I
remember she used to say it just feels
like my gut is inflamed it feels like my
gut is inflamed and I had heard people
talk about that the immune system is
right there and I was like why would the
immune system be in the gut that seemed
so bizarre and then when you think okay
well if that Junction breaks something
gets in now the body has to go crazy you
really are inflaming that whole area now
the question becomes is that what's
causing the fatigue or like the just the
energy reallocation or is this something
that has to do with leaky brain and
foreign substances are getting into the
brain that cause like that brain fog
like how does this all begin to manifest
as symptoms yeah that's you're exactly
right number one it's enough in and of
itself to steal enough energy to have to
be tired but I think more importantly
we're now realizing for the most part if
you have leaky gut you will have leaky
brain in in one of two potential ways
and I outlined them in the book
one which is probably the most
frightening is that we have a
blood-brain barrier which is a single
set of cells that keeps really anything
in your bloodstream
away from your brain which is kind of a
Sacred Space it's it's so sacred that
let's suppose you get a brain tumor or
you get an infection in your brain we
can't give you chemotherapy through your
veins and it will won't get in your
brain we can't give you antibiotics
through your veins and it won't get into
your brain it's that protected
yep what we're now able to do with a
blood tests is actually fine disruption
of the blood-brain barrier and number
two we actually see
inflammation in the brain itself
particularly with these
Secret Service protecting agents of the
brain the microglia they are actually
the immune system of the brain and
they're they're handlers for the neurons
which are the real important cells of
the brain and the microglia are you know
the bodyguards the handlers and if the
microglia sense that there's problems in
the gut that already there's lack of a
better word an army that's penetrated
our borders that the Army will soon be
up to the brain
the microglia actually cause
neuroinflammation and literally begin to
preemptively preemptively here's as I
talk about in the book
neurons send out these dendrites to talk
to other neurons very much like an
airport has A Central Terminal and then
satellites where you go out to catch the
planes
think of the neuron as the Central
Terminal and the satellites or where
you're going to catch plane or talk to
another neuron
if the microglia think that an attack is
imminent they go oh my gosh we gotta
call the guys back from the satellites
so since the dendrites are actually how
we talk to another nerve how we think
how we create memory imagine if
microglare are actively popping these
guys you know away no wonder we have
brain fog and you know it was something
so you're 80 years old and you don't
think as clear as you did when you were
30 and we go yeah you're 80 years old
that's okay but now we have 30 year old
women particularly who have brain fog
and so many times their physician go oh
you're a young mother you have two kids
um you know you're not getting enough
sleep of course you have brain fog but
when we see these people because they're
not getting any better and we actually
do these tests they light up you know
their blood grain barrier with all these
inflammatory markers and we see this
neural inflammation that we can now
measure this morning I saw a 48 year old
woman who has Parkinson's disease 48
years old yeah healthy as a horse you
know kind of out of the blue after
started after a funny viral illness a
couple years ago but long story short
we've been working with her for about
six months and I saw her back for her
visit
and when we first checked her she had
not only leaky gut she had markers for
an autoimmune disease lupus
anti-nuclear antibody and she had leaky
brain and she actually had an attack on
The Movement Center of her brain
anti-cerebellum antibodies and we're
going well no wonder you know you got
this you know let's get after this
and we've now been six months each time
we check her her leaky gut is better and
better it's about a halfway to where we
want her her autoimmune markers are gone
her leaky brain is about half of what it
was when we started and her
anti-cerebellar marker is pretty much
gone still mildly positive
and so you can kind of track what's
happened to her by looking at how leaky
your gut is and
we've gone through what she's sensitive
to and some really healthy foods she's
sensitive to like you were sensitive to
a really healthy food
and once you get a leaky gut
even what would normally be a healthy
food if it can get past this leak your
immune system says hey wait a minute
this isn't supposed to be in here in
this form it's supposed to be digested
and what are you doing there and it
literally makes an antibody just like if
you've got a shot for covid you made an
antibody to the spike protein in covid
so we make an antibody to pecans and
it's like what what the heck so every
time you eat pecans your immune system
goes wow you know we gotta we've got to
sum of the troops this is awful we've
got to take all the energy to help poor
Tom
I used to struggle profoundly with
inflammation and when I discovered keto
it changed everything for me it changed
my relationship to hunger to
inflammation to all of it and in the
book you make it very clear that we
don't understand some fundamental things
about ketosis and ketones and so let's
start with what don't we understand
well I guess the best place to start is
what we thought we understood about
ketones and ketones and ketosis have
been known about since the late 1800s
and I hope that a lot of people in the
keto Community know that the ketogenic
diet the actual word ketogenic diet was
founded in 1930 at the Mayo Clinic as a
treatment method for children with
seizure disorders epilepsy how did they
figure that out because that does not
seem like a super obvious at least for
me as a lay person not a super obvious
conclusion to draw that that's
sugar-based well what they found was
that
children who had severe epilepsy spent
so long post-seizure and it's got a
medical term called Post ictal State
where they're okay they're not seizing
but they're not really waking up and
they spent so many so many hours in this
post-seizure state repeated seizures and
then just kind of in a coma that they
didn't eat very much and they were
literally starving and they made the
observation
that kids who were starving because they
had so many seizures
paradoxically had less seizures the more
they were starving and so research is
first at Boston and then at the male
clinic said wait a minute we know that
ketones happen when you're starving
that's when it happens
so it must be that ketones are doing
something to these kids brains and are
there other ways other than starvation
to produce ketones and one of the ways
they found was well look
If you deny carbohydrates and really cut
back on proteins and give kids mostly
fat to eat then they will make ketones
even though they're not starving to
death these kids did very well on a
ketogenic diet 50 of them had complete
seizure control
recently I've got a young man who's a
high school student
who
despite two meds was still having
seizures so bad he was in special ed and
falling way behind his mother brought
him to me in my clinic in Santa Barbara
and we put them on my ketogenic diet
which is Kinder and friendlier
and the kid woke up he's off of his
medications he's now was he doing any
kind of Keto before that no okay not at
all so went from meds to meds and keto
or keto only keto only we took him off
his mouth wow he woke up uh it wasn't
you know drugged and now he's taking
advanced classes and he's actually
playing soccer for his soccer team in
high school and he could not do any of
this I mean can you imagine a kid with a
severe enough seizure disorder to be on
two meds now actively playing High
School soccer
um
so I had somebody on the show when this
was still inside Quest his son had
um seizures epilepsy and he said they
didn't even tell him about ketogenics
because they said compliance was so low
that they didn't even mention it to
parents anymore and he had to like go do
his own research and he found some
obscure article and like a journal from
the 19 50s he was like hold on a second
did the same thing put his son on Boom
total total remission has not had a
seizure in like 20 plus years yeah well
that's a great point so the ketogenic
diet the high fat ketogenic diet
procedures once phenobarbital and dine
Lantern came and the new seizure drugs
came it died because kids couldn't do an
80 fat diet they actually had growth
retardation and they just wouldn't
follow it right so what happened
actually in the 80s was people
discovered medium chain triglycerides
MCT oil and this oil was the Miracle Oil
that some of these TV shows were done
and what they found was the MCT oil
could convert into ketones in the liver
and will get into why that happens and
they found that if you put kids
on a MCT oil-based diet you could give
them far less MCT oil far less fats and
you can give them tons of carbohydrates
which
I'm a parent and grandparent now and you
cannot deny children carbohydrates as
much as you as much as we think we
should
so these kids could have more
carbohydrates more protein they could
grow and develop normally but they'd
still stop their seizures and how much
do you have to reduce the carbohydrate
intake if you're using MCT oil you can't
just you can't just add MCT oil right
you still have to modify really so no
matter how much carbohydrate I'm in
taking what's amazing is and this is
human studies you can take a tablespoon
of MCT oil which is not much and you can
actually within a half an hour generate
a generous amount of Ketone body
production 5.5 at least 0.5.81 from one
tablespoon of Keto of MCT oil I've never
tried it so I can't deny it but man
knowing how hard it is to produce
ketones without it that's scandalous
yeah and that was the beauty of this and
so when I you know I actually started
writing this as after I wrote the energy
Paradox which we've talked about and I
was trying to explain you know where
ketones fit into all this in terms of
energy production and as you know I like
to back up what I say with research
either my own or somebody else's
and as I was trying to explain how
beneficial ketones were for energy
production for protecting mitochondria
for turning mitochondria into fat
burning efficient machines
when I started looking at you know the
research to back up what I was saying I
went holy cow
I'm wrong about this and so is everybody
else ketones aren't some food how do you
deal with that most people cannot
especially if they've talked about it
publicly they can't change their
position
hopefully that's make makes me one of
the more believable nutritionists around
because
I'm always willing to say I was wrong so
what was the first thing that made you
go wait a second I don't think we were
on the right path
well one of the most you know amazing
things and I I've had a ketogenic diet
in all my books for the last 20 years
I've had a ketogenic program for my
patients and looking back when you
actually look at the list of things I
allow on my ketogenic diet there's tons
of carbohydrates and yet it works
extremely well and I've been using MCT
oil for my program from kind of day one
so I and I've written that ketones make
you an efficient fat burner and I firmly
believe that so I was going to prove how
ketones actually make your mitochondria
incredibly efficient at making energy
right and probably the best way to
explain this is we know that ketones
were discovered during starvation
and nobody quite figured out why they
were produced until the 1930s but then
how ketones came about to be known what
they did really started in the late 70s
80s up to the year 2004
at both Harvard with George Cahill and
Dr Owens and Dr Veach at the NIH
and they wanted to know okay what were
ketones doing there we don't do things
by accident
and so they started to look at okay
human beings clearly have starved for
multiple times
um we didn't have a species as a species
we didn't have
7-Elevens next to us we we didn't have
fast food we we didn't have
refrigeration we didn't have storage
systems and we had to find or kill food
and there were famines and there were
times not much food so we were designed
when we found food to store a lot of it
is fat and I've written about this in
previous books great apes interestingly
enough only gain weight during fruit
season and fruit season doesn't happen
year round in a jungle it really only
happens in the summer and early fall
we gained weight because the winter and
spring was actually times of less food
so it became beneficial to take fruit
and convert it into fat so we can make
it through the winter
and that defect it's actually a genetic
mutation that allowed great apes to do
that we inherited as well so we're
really good at storing fat in fact yes
we are yes we are in fact I'm better
than most we're called the fat ape for a
reason
we we best always at storing fat
so when we don't have any food normally
and I talk a lot about in this book and
you and I have talked about this
most of us should have metabolic
flexibility in our mitochondria and
mitochondria are the little energy
producing ornament organelles that take
we the food we eat and produce ATP our
energy currency and mitochondria for
anybody that doesn't know are like
aliens the inside of ourselves they have
their own DNA which is crazy and I still
don't understand how that's possible but
nonetheless it is true and at some point
two cells combined and they were able to
handle Oxygen by the mitochondria
wrapping inside of the cell which is
bananas and there's actually a gaggle of
them inside of every cell yes there's
Bunches of them unlike our high school
biology textbook that might have said
shown one or two mitochondria per cell
there can be thousands of mitochondria
and they're actually engulfed they're in
golf bacteria from two billion years ago
and they actually carry or write their
own DNA and the cool thing about that an
important part of the book is that
mitochondria can divide and make more
mitochondria without the cell they're
living in dividing so if a mitochondria
gets the right stimulation and that's
part of the book they'll make lots more
of themselves and to share the energy
load so getting back to starvation
normally
you and I hopefully when we run out of
sugar
we can immediately start burning free
fatty acids and that's the flexibility
you're talking about sugar it can burn
fat yeah we should be a hybrid car uh if
we burn gasoline we'll call that sugar
when the gasoline Runs Out we've been
storing energy in our battery and when
the gasoline runs out we switch over to
battery power until we go fill up at The
Filling Station
unfortunately here's the
weird thing 50 of normal weight
individuals have no metabolic
flexibility
50 of us just because of modern diets
we're eating all the time we're never in
a quote unquote starvation phase correct
if you're if you're overweight 88
cannot shift between burning sugar and
fat if you're overweight if you're obese
99.5 percent of people cannot shift to
burning fat and what does that mean why
does that matter
well you normally if you and I stop
eating tonight uh whenever about eight
hours after we stop eating we should
actually run out of glucose as a fuel
and we should shift over to burning free
fatty acids and ketones as a fuel until
we get our next meal that's normal
and by 12 hours of not eating we
actually ramp up Ketone production to
pretty much take over our brain's need
for fuel temporarily
and your brain actually if it runs out
of sugar it starts dying
so the implication for the brain is
never without sugars believe it or not
the brain
normally would run out of sugar in about
eight hours after we stop eating
normally runs out of sugar
and it shifts over to using ketones as a
temporary fuel
the reason it can shift over is once we
stop eating
we start liberating free fatty acids fat
from our fat cells so he's saying it
would die if we didn't have ketones
correct got it okay so normally those
free fatty acids come out of fat cells
every one of our cells except the brain
can use free fatty acids as a fuel and
use them very well
and this has been again proven at
Harvard in the NIH our muscles love free
fatty acids my research on the heart
years ago showed that the heart prefers
burning free fatty acids instead of
sugar it's favorite fuel in fact we
protect the Heart during heart surgery
by putting fats into the heart how
through the veins and the arteries I
invented you inject yeah yeah well we
dissolve it in our cardioplegia whoa so
um without that metabolic flexibility
then what happens
what happens is what we're discovering
right now is that your brain cannot get
life-saving ketones to burn as an
alternative fuel
and your brain runs out of glucose as a
fuel because you don't have any
available and you're bearing for several
hours a night until you eat again
neurons die and
there's no doubt that our epidemic of
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and memory
loss is
laid at the feet of our metabolic and
flexibility
okay so that is certainly terrifying but
means that we can do something about it
so going back to where we left off so we
go into starvation mode we start kicking
off these ketones that feels like the
sort of story up to before this book
people understood that so where do you
begin to go wait a second we have a
problem here well okay so we can make
ketones we make ketones from free fatty
acids
they go to the liver and the liver
generates ketones now liver
interestingly enough can't use ketones
as a fuel they're incapable they don't
have the enzyme to do it can it use free
fatty acid yes okay
liver loves free fatty which it gets as
fat as oxidized we get free fatty acids
and we can snatch them out of the
bloodstream and use them right and
they're a great fuel fabulous fuel
so what everybody thought but they can't
cross the blood-brain barrier that's the
problem right because they're kind of
too big and fat if you will
so
but as luck would have it Ketone bodies
ketones are water-soluble small fats and
they can get through the blood-brain
barrier so the brain can use ketones
until glucose arrives the next morning
or for several days
now that piece of the puzzle wasn't
known so people like Cahill people like
George Veach said wow ketones are
clearly what made humans survive for a
long time because we could use them as a
fuel without burning up our muscle to
make glucose we can convert muscle
protein into sugar it's called
gluconeogenesis
and they actually showed that if you
literally had to live on glucose as a
fuel your muscles would be gone after
about a week of starving so the only way
for gluconeogenesis to happen is from
muscle tissue yeah but you can also make
gluconeogenesis from breaking
glycerol molecules off of triglycerides
and convert that into glucose so there
is a way to get sugar from fat got it
we're really good at turning sugar into
fat we're really bad at turning fat back
into sugar we just don't have the enzyme
system to do it
so when this Ketone was found everybody
said wow that explains everything we can
run on ketones and be great
not so fast
Dr Owens at Harvard showed that at full
ketosis
human beings can only meet 30 percent of
their calorie needs by burning ketones
the rest have to come from free fatty
acids and glucose
so that's kind of weird if they're such
a great fuel
the brain it turns out
even a full ketosis only 60 percent of
the brain's needs can be met by ketones
and the Brain still needs 30 to 40
percent of its fuel is glucose even at
full ketosis
so when I read that research I went well
wait a minute this is not some super
fuel the body doesn't even view it as a
super fuel
but we don't do things for you know not
a good reason what the heck are ketones
actually doing that's so beneficial and
that's what when I went down the rabbit
hole and came out with unlocking the
keto coat because ketones are not a
super fuel they are actually a signaling
molecule
that tells mitochondria to protect
themselves at all cost from damage
and to save themselves at all costs if
you are starving to death because quite
frankly if we're starving to death
if you don't protect your mitochondria
that make energy
that's the end of us that you die you're
done so I read a silly little paper it's
actually maybe one of the most important
papers I've ever read
by Dr Martin brand in the year 2000 and
it's a simple paper called
uncoupling to survive and I hope all
your viewers and listeners dig it up you
know check with Google it's there
and what he said well it just talk about
a paradox and he said look
in extremists the mitochondria has to
survive so the mitochondria is
instructed by ketones
to literally start wasting a lot of the
calories that it would normally process
into ATP
and throw them away my brain broke when
I read that part of the book I know and
I took down a note I was like hold on
and I know you answer it but I was like
there has to be an evolutionary
advantage to this I cannot see how in a
moment of starvation we would want to
kick off
extra energy and quote unquote waste it
at least for me this is all coming
together at a moment where it feels like
there's these breakthroughs and signs
which are all pointing to the depression
of the mitochondria and their ability to
produce energy
in a good way which is weird yeah
yeah I you know I and most ketogenic
diet experts have always taught that
ketosis you teach your mitochondria to
be energy efficient to get energy out of
every glass calorie because you're
starving to death so you need to Turbo
Charge and supercharge your mitochondria
to eke out every lost drop of energy and
that makes incredibly just intuitive It
Feels Right feels really good
but what bran said no you're wrong they
do the exact opposite and you go no no
no no no no there's no food why in the
world would you waste food
so what he showed was and I I have a fun
time in the book talking about the Mido
Club
yep let's hear about it yeah so so
mitochondria make energy by
energizing electrons and protons in this
long tube called the electron transport
chain inside of mitochondria and I liken
this long tube to the hottest hippos
Club in town where people go to the club
to couple to meet someone to hook up to
hook up and if they hook up they exit
the club and they let the imagination
run some energy get some energy so make
some energy
and this club is is hot it's crowded
there's there's hormones through the
roof there's alcohol flowing and
everybody's bumping into each other and
everybody's trying to couple with
everybody else normally
oxygen should couple with a proton and
exit the back door and make ATP
oxidative phosphorylation some people
have heard
but because it's crowded and there may
not be a lot of available protons that
people want to couple with
electrons could also couple with oxygen
and they're not supposed to and they get
they make nasty free radicals and
reactive oxygen species
and punches start being thrown chairs or
flying and beer is flying and there's
bouncers in the club to try and calm
this down and everybody knows about
antioxidants turns out there's only two
antioxidants in mitochondria surprise
surprise
melatonin which most people don't even
know is an antioxidant the sleep hormone
and glutathione there's only two so
they're the bouncers so getting back the
club is hot it's energy there's damage
being done you gotta keep this club
under control so
everybody's trying there's only one way
out of this club through this back door
but people are getting frustrated and
they want to leave because it's a bad
day to couple and they're not coupling
so it turns out there's emergency exits
in the club where things get too hot if
people get too frustrated they can push
open an emergency exit and leave the
club
the mitochondria have emergency exits
there's actually five emergency exits in
our electron transport chain
and they're controlled by uncoupling
proteins now I spent six months trying
to figure out a better word for
uncoupling uh and because people think
of uncoupling like Gwyneth Paltrow
getting divorced I uncoupled my marriage
uh but uncoupling means that instead of
joining a proton with an oxygen molecule
to make ATP
the proton leaves the club leaves the
mitochondria without making energy
so what bran showed and others have
subsequently confirmed is that
mitochondria at rest you and I sitting
here 30 percent of all the calories that
enter our mitochondria right now
are going through these emergency exits
and never making ATP thirty percent just
here eagerly normally and you're not in
Starvation mode just normally you a nice
fitting here and you go what a stupid
idea you and I have to eat 30 percent
more calories every day
just to make our normal amount of ATP
and you go well why would I do that well
it turns out generating heat is what
those calories do and you and I are
warm-blooded animals and is that the
only way we generate heat it's actually
the only way we generate okay so the
emergency exit is how we stay warm
correct and it turns out that brown fat
which a lot of people have heard out
brown fat is our energy our heat
producing fat does that mean that brown
fat has more mitochondria in it it's so
many mitochondria that it looks Brown
under the microscope okay they are
crammed in there and we thought Brown
fat only existed in babies to keep them
warm uh and there is a lot of brown fat
in babies but we now know that you and I
actually have brown fat and the more
Brown fat we have the healthier we are
and we'll get to that and what brand
eventually showed is if you look at the
super old people folks 105 and above who
are thriving
they have the most uncoupled
mitochondria of anybody
and you go what
so wait a minute uncoupling
mitochondria must have huge benefits
that none of us knew about let's get
back to ketones so ketones tell
mitochondria the trouble is a foot
and to protect yourselves at all costs
so the first thing you do mitochondria
is don't damage yourself by making
energy and making energy is very
damaging to my mitochondria so waste
you know making energy waste more
calories protect yourself
cool it a bit
but secondarily that makes no sense
because you got to have enough ATP to
survive
so simultaneously the mitochondria is
instructed to make more mitochondria to
share the workload
now think about this the Iditarod is you
know being run and let's have a one one
dog dog slept well yeah the dog can pull
the sled but he's not going to go very
far before he Tuckers out but if you
hook six dogs to the sled each dog has a
sixth of the workload the one dog has so
they can go a lot farther with six of
them doing less work
now the consequence of that is they
actually are going to eat more food than
the single dog to accomplish the same
thing so now you go wait a minute a
ketogenic diet is a really good weight
loss diet
can't be because the mitochondria are
more efficient because if they're more
efficient they can get more calories
more food more energy for the buck right
and in fact you lose weight
so what happens is you actually in a
ketogenic diet if you do it right and
uncouple your mitochondria you waste
fuel you feed six dogs instead of one
and that's where the benefit of ketosis
comes from okay so now I'm trying to pin
down the evolutionary Advantage so I'm
in Starvation mode yep that's when I'm
producing ketones yeah why on Earth
would starvation mode trigger my
mitochondria to waste more energy and
become less efficient to protect
themselves at all costs so it's purely a
protective mechanism it's an
evolutionary protective design to save
the mitochondria at all costs dear human
body I cannot keep taking this rate of
damage for you
I have to conserve the only way to
conserve is to release more of these out
of the emergency exit so I don't have to
process them take on the free radicals
and all the damage so go out my
temperature theoretically should feel
like it's going up subjectively uh
believe it or not a lot of people do and
we will get into the munition workers in
France and Germany in World War one
which actually proved his theory nobody
knew that that proved as Siri but that's
what happened to them yeah you actually
should raise your temperature
um just as a fun fact you ever notice
when you have a cup of coffee or a tea
even if it's iced coffee or iced tea
many of us go gee you know I'm kind of
glistening even though I'm having an
iced coffee
you actually produce more heat having a
cup of coffee because both the caffeine
and the polyphenols in coffee and tea
uncouple your mitochondria and have them
generate Heat
so interesting okay so I my mitochondria
is protecting Itself by uncoupling
they're getting rid of this stuff
they're making more of themselves okay
to share the workload
each one is working less hard so that
they aren't being damaged right but
you're recruiting more mitochondria and
the amazing thing is during ketosis or
other things that stimulate mitochondria
to one couple
you actually generate more mitochondria
and mitochondria in Starvation will
devote all the protein Manufacturing in
the cell to make more of their proteins
and they'll actually not make Muscle
protein
grew the muscles their energy Hogs we're
not going to build muscle if we're
starving we are going to build more
mitochondria to work less hard screw
everybody else all right here's where
this gets complicated for me though so
that all makes sense I'm I'm tracking
with that in the book you talk about how
it does
um the way that it further
stops the muscles from taking the energy
is that it makes you insulin resistant
so and when you look at like what
happens with fructose and uric acid
there's a similar thing going on which
is hey raise insulin which seems like
it's bad in a modern context but from a
survival famine context it's actually
brilliant because it traps the fat makes
you use it more slowly it's hard to get
out to make sure that you don't burn
through the energy and end up dead but
the Munitions facility that you alluded
to
the way that we end up dead real fast is
this process on a runaway train is it
just that I can exit people out the
emergency exit way faster way more
dramatically then I can stop the fat
from pouring out walk people through
what happened in the munition factory
okay
um
in World War one it was noted that
munition workers in France and Germany
who were assembling shells and working
with gunpowder were extremely thin even
though they were eating huge amounts of
food and they could not keep weight on
and they were running a temperature 24
hours a day
and it wasn't until the late 1920s when
they realized that these guys basal
metabolic rate BMR was elevated and it
took a couple of doctors at Stanford in
to say son of a gun we've discovered the
compound that did it in these munition
workers and it was called 2-4
dinitrophenol and keep that word phenol
in everybody's mind we'll come back oh
yes it will and it's called dnp so they
actually said oh my gosh dnp raises the
metabolic rate and it is the world's
best weight loss drug that nobody's ever
heard of so in the 1930s in America
alone over a hundred thousand
prescriptions for dnp were written by
physicians and it was a miracle weight
loss drug you took a little bit of dnp
every day you'd lose a pound a week
that's insane but if you took a lot of
DMP you could lose five pounds per week
you talk about a miracle and just a
little bit more and you can be dead yeah
now here's the problem
what happened was as more and peop more
and more people got on the bandwagon and
saw they could lose a huge amount of
weight
people were running temperatures they
started noticing that thyroids were
having a problem then a lot of people
developed cataracts and this was before
cataract surgery and as I Joe can you
imagine being able to fit into your
skinny dress and not see how good you
look in the mirror uh because you're
blind
and then people started dying dying like
flies and so the FDA in the late 1930s
1938 is one of the first official acts
banned dnp for sale but it turns out
that in 1978 it was discovered that dnp
worked because it was the first known
oral mitochondrial uncoupler and dnp was
so effective because it literally turned
human beings from being Toyota Priuses
which were very fuel efficient to being
Ferraris which are incredibly fuel
inefficient
now as I talked about in the book there
might be reasons you and I would want a
Ferrari rather than just wasting fuel
but the point is we these people through
fuel out all these side exits of their
mitochondria what does it become when it
takes the emergency exit it actually
produces heat that's why all these
people were running a kicks off is just
nothing else in fact looking back
um
at gundry MD we have a number of
products with thermogenic compounds
compounds that we've known for years
produce thermogenesis and make heat lo
and behold every one of these compounds
uncouples mitochondria and lo and behold
that's why they're thermogenic compounds
they make
fecal microbial transplants which are
really interesting so I think we have
sort of a really basic understanding
your book goes into a lot of details so
people should definitely check it out
because it's so interesting the more
that I understand the stuff but we have
a basic understanding so far in the time
that we've had together today
now how can fecal microbial transplant
help with that why does that work and
why didn't it get widespread adoption
so back in the 70s when broad spectrum
antibiotics came out they they were
truly Miracle drugs because before that
we had to actually culture a bacteria
find out what antibiotic it was
sensitive to and then give that
antibiotic you know and that would take
oh gosh 48 72 hours to do
when broad spectrum antibiotics were
invented it was you know it was a
shotgun approach no worry we don't know
we don't have to know what you have uh
here take this we're going to wipe out
everything
which was great in a lot of ways but
what we didn't know
was that we also wiped out every last
living bacteria for the most part in our
gut and we're so naive back then that we
didn't realize that that microbiome was
incredibly important
and so we developed a lot of people all
of a sudden with what was then called
pseudomemembranous intercollitus
it's now called C difficile Clostridium
difficile and so these guys got horrible
infections in the lining of their gut
and nobody had any treatment for it
these people were dying in hospitals
after getting broad spectrum antibiotics
and we're going what the heck
so uh my one of my mentors who is the
chairman of department of surgery at the
Medical College of Georgia in Augusta
um
said you know this has got to be we've
wiped out most of the bacteria in the
gut and this is an ecosystem where there
are checks and balances so all of a
sudden now we've wiped out most of the
checks and balances and there's probably
a rogue bacteria that's taken over it's
party time you know so clever party time
so he says we got to get you know good
stuff back and he said where are we
going to get that and he starts looking
around at the medical students true
story
and he said you know medical students
they're pretty healthy so once a week
this is the mid-1970s
they would pass around this plastic
bucket it was called the honey pot and
we'd take it into the John and take a
crap you know you actually had to hold
it you know
get get to school and you know take a
crap and he'd take it to his lab and
never forget we had wearing blenders you
know and marginize all this medical
student pooped and put it in enema bags
and give these people fecal enemies this
is in the 70s and he would have before
and after pictures and he'd go to
meetings and show you know this horrible
inflammation this horrible infection in
the colons and then a weak layer it's
pristine it's beautiful you know people
are singing Kumbaya inside the colon and
and everybody goes oh he's making this
stuff up that can't happen and so people
did not believe it because
we had no idea no one had had sequence
the human microbiome that was really
only five years ago well now since the
sequencing of the human microbiome
it's you know you go well of course you
know there were 10 000 different species
of bacteria in in you and me and in fact
a month ago they found another thousand
and normally there are beautiful checks
and balances but it's when these checks
and balances get disturbed by taking a
round of antibiotics or as simply as
eating meat where the chicken or the
pork or the beef was given antibiotics
you know when we eat that they have
residual antibiotics in them and we eat
the antibiotics
talk to me about the hollom hollow
hollow biome yeah
yeah I so there are a number of
researchers that think we should use
holobiome rather than microbiome
microbiome pretty much attempts to
define the bugs that are living in our
gut right we have an oral microbiome and
we actually have a cloud
of bacteria that live in the air around
us and there is this Theory which I
really do like that our personal space
is actually determined when your
holobiome your Cloud bumps up against
mine dude that would be so weird well if
that's true well I mean because you feel
something like yeah yeah you feel that
and there's certain people that you're
you're allowing in closer right and it
gets so Twilight zoning that I you know
I always play that music in my head we
know the kissing for instance is a
universal human great ape and often
animal characteristic and there's some
pretty cool wacky suggestions that I
really like
that kissing you are exchanging your
oral microbiome and your bacteria are
actually deciding if your
person next to you is compatible with
them you've heard of that whole study
where they have women just smell these
t-shirts and rank them in order of
desirability and the women are like I
have no idea why you're making me do
this but they put them in order of most
genetic diversity or difference from
their own to uh most similar to their
own yeah that's surreal yeah and women
you know and I I say this as often as
anyone else say women have a gut feeling
far better than men and that is because
women actually are far better capable of
listening to their microbiome and I get
kind of deep into the fact that
our microbiome is inherited from our
mother we get it from our mother
and all of the mitochondria the little
energy producing organelles in us are
actually engulfed bacteria that are
inherited from our mother and they have
their own separate DNA and their
maternal DNA and there is now actually
very good evidence that the bacteria in
our microbiome communicate via text
messages that now have been measured to
mitochondria they're sisters and about
how things are going in the the body in
the outside world it's so crazy so and
so women trust your gut yeah uh going
back to the microbiome coming from your
mother I've become probably a little
like oversteppy like I normally like hey
whatever you want to do until I hear
somebody saying that oh I have a plan
C-section so look if you need one
obviously get one Jesus absolutely but
if you don't need one I'm like make sure
that you smear the baby in the vaginal
fluid at a minimum and people always
like whoa but just trying to pass that
microbiome on and you said there was a
recent study that came out about autism
and fecal microbial transplants and how
the link between a successful maybe the
wrong word microbiome and an
unsuccessful one can manifest as autism
talk to me about that study yeah there's
um
we've known for actually a long time
since the microbiome was identified and
sequenced and we know that number one
kids with autism have a lot more
irritable bowel they have a lot more GI
issues and they actually have a very
different microbiome than quote normal
and there has been a suggestion for
years that maybe it is that microbiome
that is contributing I'm going to say
cause autism
there's even more exciting work in
Gynecology and obstetrics that the might
there is a microbiome in the vagina that
we know about but there is a microbiome
of the placenta itself
and there's some actually exciting work
that perhaps the microbiome of the
placenta
is the most important in terms of
educating the neonate the
fetus's immune system do you only
encounter that as you're actually born
in you go through it during so the whole
time you're washing it then why would a
C-section be so problematic well so one
of the theories of autism is that this
is an in utero problem that happened to
the kid before he was born or she was
born reasons I say he is the boys have
it far more than girls
and that now there is interesting
evidence that we should be working on
the maternal microbiome during before
pregnancy
and certainly during pregnancy we need
to start early in making sure the
microbiome is right so getting back to
autism there was a recent study just
published and don't quote me on the
exact details but it comes out of
Australia
and because of this connection
with autistic kids having funny bowels
and a funny microbiome they with an
Institutional review board permission
did oral fecal transplants in a large
number of autistic kids
and they did this for about six weeks
almost immediately
50 percent of the autism symptoms
subsided fifty percent and the paper has
now followed these kids for two years
and the fifty percent reduction in
symptoms has continued wow and if that
does make the case that you know the gut
and the microbiome has such an
incredible effect on the brain I don't
know what does no kidding now that we
know that and your your book goes into
great detail including recipes and all
kinds of stuff what's a quick overlay of
lifestyle and dietary choices that
people should make if they want to die
young at a ripe old age as the sub
headline of the book goes so we know
that there are ways to give these good
guys like echromancia what they like to
eat and they love resistant starches
they love tubers like yams like jicama
like taro root like Yucca or Yucca they
love mushrooms and there's a beautiful
recent study out of
South Asia of people basically having a
90 reduction in Alzheimer's if you eat
two cups of mushrooms a week what so
there is this incredible compound in
mushrooms
I'll probably fracture it ergo
theonine thionine that actually crosses
the
blood-brain barrier better than turmeric
curcumin and actually protects against
neuroinflammation and it turns out that
mushrooms absolutely positively feed
these friendly bacteria
and mushrooms contain this compound
called spermidine it's a polyamine that
study after study shows promotes
longevity okay so those are some of the
things also
inulin containing compounds so inuline
is present in chicory you can buy inulin
made out of Yacon route and any store as
a sweetener so inulin feed Zachary
moncia and so it's present in chicory
it's present in Radicchio Belgian endive
uh Jerusalem artichokes sunchokes
they're just pure inulin so the more of
this stuff you eat the more of this bug
you're going to grow so that's number
one so eat for them number two
exercise
beautiful study in women women have more
Alzheimer's disease than men and so you
look at an exercise program in women
women who exercise regularly routinely
kind of from midlife on have a 90
reduction in Alzheimer's whoa and
compared to women who don't exercise
routine
and in the women who are going to get
Alzheimer's
it's 11 years later than if they didn't
exercise so I mean think about that if
we had a drug
that had a 90 reduction in Alzheimer's
yeah how much would we pay for that you
know you and I would be a problem every
day uh we wouldn't have 40 billion
dollars wasted on amyloid drugs
but it's available by housework by
gardening by getting a dog and walking
it twice okay that's interesting so when
you say housework why do you say that I
think people will be confused by that it
turns out that uh give me an example my
my mother actually scrubbed her floors
until the day she died at 90. uh even
though there were swifters and things
like that and she did it as an exercise
program exercise
changes the gut microbiome to a friendly
microbiome meditation yoga changes the
gut microbiome seems impossible it's so
interesting that they're in a two-way
communication yeah yeah it literally and
there's there's even some really cool
stuff that yoga postures
actually
move this microbiome around in your gut
and they actually get signals probably
electrical signals so all these chakras
that you know in eastern medicine it's
probably all this part of this really
amazing communication system that
Western medicine is just going oh come
on that's all Voodoo yeah
because we couldn't measure it before
yeah
so exercise is really important lastly
I really want people to have a brainwash
day at least once a week
so in the last couple of years we've
learned that there is a lymph system in
the brain called the glymphatic system
and it no one actually believed it
existed but now it exists and the Brain
actually in deep Sleep which happens
very early in the Sleep Cycle goes
through a literal wash cycle
shrinks by about 20 percent and all of
these toxins like amyloid like Tau like
bad pieces of protein are actually
squeezed out of the brain like ringing
out a sponge
and it happens in deep sleep and happens
early in the Sleep Cycle so we have to
have a lot of blood flow to our brain to
do that the brain uses huge amounts of
blood flow but we have to have even more
so the evidence is that you need about a
three or four hour window before the
last meal of your day before you go to
sleep why because digestion is actually
really energy expensive so we put huge
amounts of blood flow down into our gut
if you eat near the time you go to bed
that blood flow is down in your
intestines and it doesn't go up to your
brain
so there's actually a recent study of
men who had unstable angina or heart
attack and they followed those men who
ate late at night had a much higher
incidence of a new engine or new heart
attack and so they're all really
actually interconnected so one day a
week I asked people finish your last
meal at six o'clock if you go to bed at
say 10 right if it's 11 finish it at
seven do not snack before bedtime
and allow yourself to have a brainwashed
better yet skip a meal
and that gets in probably to the fourth
point
you've got to have periods of extended
lengths of time between eating
we were supposed to go prolonged periods
of time before our next meal and break
fast we've talked about this before it
ruins your you know your morning stuff
was you break your fast and there's no
definition of when you know it's
supposed to be breakfast
that was from the Dural Kellogg's
Cornflake company telling people they
had to eat breakfast um
yeah
yeah that the whole lifestyle that you
just painted like makes all the sense in
the world like when you start looking at
the research even just like so one I can
certainly speak to the anti-inflammatory
properties of a lot of things that
you're talking about which that has been
revolutionary in my life intermittent
fasting has had a whole host of benefits
for me anecdotally and then certainly I
think there's a lot of data backing
things up you've talked a lot about how
eating is just an excuse to get olive
oil in your mouth man I hope you're
right about that one because I have
really taken that to heart there does
seem to be some pretty tremendous
benefits to that it's it's really pretty
extraordinary yeah I mean it really is
um you know and I I show a lot of
studies I think the probably the best
one is the predimed study out of Spain
where just simplistically they took 65
year old people divided them into three
groups one they all eat a Mediterranean
diet Spain one group had to use a liter
of olive oil per week the second group
had the the equivalent calories in
walnuts primarily the third group had a
low-fat Mediterranean diet followed for
five years
the initial study was look at memory the
olive oil group and the Walnut group had
improved memory after five years
the low-fat group lost memory the
people in all groups with known coronary
artery disease or stroke the olive oil
group had a 30 percent reduction in new
events the low-fat group had an increase
a continued in advance so this stuff is
miraculous
it actually grows neurons the
polyphenols and olive oil and here's
another crazy fun fact now there's a
chemical that I talk about called tmao
discovered by the Cleveland Clinic tmao
is made by our gut bacteria primarily
from animal proteins particularly
choline and carnitine cholines and egg
yolks we need choline for our brain but
our gut bacteria love it
they make it out of these and tmao
damages blood vessels do the Cleveland
Clinic's credit they said well wait a
minute the Mediterranean diet seems to
be very good for preventing heart
disease and yet these guys eat fish they
you know they eat cheeses they eat
salamis what gifts so they actually
discovered that there are polyphenols in
certain olive oils balsamic vinegar and
red wine that paralyze these enzyme
systems in the bacteria it doesn't kill
the bacteria paralyzes the enzymes so
you could eat all the choline and
carnitine you want but you will not make
tmao
so olive oil balsamic vinegar make a
spritzer of balsamic vinegar and
sparkling water yeah you got me on that
yeah and a half glass of red wine and so
you will prove you can still have your
you know your meat and eat it too not
much I like that all right tell people
where they can find your book uh uh
anywhere on amazon.com
barnesandnoble.com
audible I actually did the audible of
this book so if you want to hear my
voice longer and longer I read the book
my man uh you can find it at gundrymd
you can find me at drgundry.com
come to my YouTube channel I've got a
podcast the Dr Henry podcast yes I'm on
Instagram Facebook
um what's the one change that people
could make that would have the biggest
impact on their longevity
the one change and I you know I get on
my soapbox is you got to get your
vitamin D level up
take at least 5 000 IUS of vitamin D no
a day a day
the University of California San Diego
has shown that the average American to
have an adequate vitamin D level should
have 9 600 international units a day the
average American whoa
if you look at cancer patients they
almost always have a low vitamin D every
one of my patients with autoimmune
disease walks through the door with a
low vitamin D
if you look if you like The telomere
Theory of Aging where the little caps on
the end of chromosomes and it's a good
theory of Asian the higher your vitamin
D level the longer your telomeres are
interesting and vitamin D getting back
to those little Crypts down in the down
in our shag carpet those stem cells
actually have to be stimulated to move
by vitamin D and if you don't have
vitamin D they will sit there and you
will have a leaky gut
there it is so that's number one number
two take timed release vitamin C twice a
day or chew a 500 milligram vitamin C
four times a day all right we're one of
the few animals that don't produce
vitamin C and you gotta have it for so
many functions particularly of women
they have to know that collagen will not
repair all their wrinkles without
vitamin C
you know instead of trying to patch up
these problems I think the idea of
letting our genes keep us healthy is
really
um
it's it's it's kindness It's really
about about reconnecting to that
incredibly beautiful gift that we've
received from all who have come before
us