Kind: captions
Language: en
average american is eating for 16 hours
a day
and 60 percent of the food we eat is
processed probably about three months
ago i started getting really itchy and
then just like in like my chest would
itch like crazy my backwood dish like
crazy i'm like what is going on because
i'm really religious on my diet i don't
cheat on 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 so 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 they're
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 2 000 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-caseomorphine
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
caseinated to 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 exactly 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
nightshades 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 de-seed 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 were they
when 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 eight thousand 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
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 uh did some missionary
work in africa in the middle of the cent
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 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 of 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 worst storm that could possibly
happen for our microbiome and for our
leaky gut
so then are lectins
there are lectin-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 what 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 l.a 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 pasta
raised chicken she says oh yeah i eat
organic free-range chicken all the time
it's my go-to food
free-range chicken and she said yeah
yeah you know organic free range they
said well the federal government in 2007
passed a law
that says you can keep
a hundred thousand 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 soy beans
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
and 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 into the drumstick and
my four-year-old goes ew oh you tricked
us this is fish ooh this isn't chicken
and i'm going oh no no no no look
drumstick you know curly 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
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 as
unfit for human consumption
wow
so what i want people to do
is
is eat and party
like it's 9999
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 adam and
it's new it's called new five gc uh in
pigs cows and lambs
and we carry what's called new five ac
and
i have nothing against red meat
but if you look statistically the red
meat eaters do have significantly more
coronary heart disease and significantly
more cancer now why cancer well it turns
out that
cancer tumors in humans
use new 5-gc
to shield themselves from
detection by the immune system
the problem is we don't manufacture new
5 gc nor can a cancer cell which means
they acquired it from external sources
namely beef lamin 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 uh 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 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 and it
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 loma linda for most of my life
the thing that separates or unites all
of those various diets as 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 the 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 it how do you make it an
easy process
so i started
11 years ago
at
january 1st to june 1st
during the week i would eat all my
calories in a 2-hour window from 6 to 8
o'clock at night so that 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 store
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 a 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 the
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 how come
i'm such a fat guy
i couldn't get to my fat stores because
i had an elevated insulin level when i
first you know got my insulin always
wow
um
what's that now i have a very low
insulin
now 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's
not really about fat loss but
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
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 airfryer yeah have you done
yesterday
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 jicama sticks
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 love it for it hello my friend
you know that i believe success requires
you to see failure as the ultimate
learning tool success requires you to be
disciplined and gritty and to never ever
quit on your dreams i say all of that
because one thing is certain the road to
achieving your goal is not smooth or
linear i wish it was but it's not it's
going to be bumpy sometimes scary some
days you'll take two steps forward and
slide 10 steps back and that's why
success also requires you to know how to
pull yourself out of a rut and get
unstuck fast life is short you can't be
messing around with your goals you've
got to make progress every single day so
i've pulled a class from impact theory
university called how to get unstuck
which you can watch for free with the
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right i'll see you on the inside
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 this 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 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 that
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 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 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
antibiotics 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
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-fat
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 kylomicrons that these
lps's hop onto
so interesting the kylomicron microns a
metabolite of some kind no chylomicrons
are the
uh moving van that literally carries fat
across your gut wall fat transverses
your gut wall 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
kylo microns 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
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
there's a
pretty narrow band where you would
recommend that but what would that
narrow band be
so we we will use it
for an elimination diet where we've got
someone who is
really intolerant to
plant lectins in general and we do see
these people
they're
totally intolerant to raw plants
most of the time
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
the lectins oats have a
molecule that mimics gluten
corn has virtually identical molecules
to
gluten in fact 70 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 corn bread 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
um 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 uh 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 um 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
postbiotics and i spend a lot of time in
the book
talking about this exciting discovery of
postbiotics yeah help me understand what
the difference between a postbiotic and
a metabolite is
okay so
literally
when
bacteria ferment uh fibers
then they
the fermentation process produces
both
short chain fatty acids like butyrate
like acetate like proprionate
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 uh
world congress of microbiota which is
which happens in paris
before coven
and the organizer is professor from
paris uh 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
well 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
postbiotics
the gases are called gaso messengers
or gaso 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 of 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 okay are the short the
short chain fatty acids consider the
post biotic 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
hold on
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
in the form of gas
then my body's like we're good we're not
gonna form the the
sclerotic plaque that is like the
hardest word in the english language
uh
that's crazy
why are people not talking about that
because there's no money in it you know
as statin drugs are
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 yeah 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 yup
go away nothing we can do for you 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 head
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 a lot but
what have we got to lose let's do
another angiogram and
i said okay so in six months putting a
camera in his veins yeah it's doing
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 we
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
gonna 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 with 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 even though i was 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 you forget your book
which is already just chock full of
enlightening things but
that that's really crazy so you say in
the book you make a prediction that in
the future we're gonna 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 axis
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 free 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 all
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 worked by sachin panda at the
salk institute in san diego show that
the average american is eating for 16
hours a day
and 60 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
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
predicted 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 all right my
friend i have a big announcement my
incredible and talented wife lisa is
about to launch her new book radical
confidence in it she has managed to
perfectly capture the process of how to
go from feeling lost and insecure to
taking control of your life and doing
amazing things despite feeling fear
sometimes a lot of fear now let me tell
you nobody knows lisa better than me but
when i read radical confidence for the
first time and heard her describe what
it was like for her to go from having
these big exciting dreams as a kid to
then as an adult scheduling her life
around the tv shows that she wanted to
watch or how lonely and isolated she
felt instead of pursuing her dreams it
was brutal for me i would never say
though that it was worth it for her to
go through all of that just so that she
could write something down that allows
others to avoid it but i will say that
at least she was able to capture the
strategies that she used to break out of
that rut find her voice and begin doing
incredible things despite her
insecurities and fears that she wasn't
going to be good enough to achieve great
things so while it hurts me to know the
dark place that lisa went through i
really am excited for people who are
going through something similar right
now to read this book radical confidence
is an instruction manual for how to
become the hero of your own life even
when you're scared to death look i know
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it is to get off track in life or to
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it's even easier for people to feel so
insecure and unprepared that they don't
even want to pursue the things that they
want but what lisa shows people in
radical confidence is that the radical
part is that you can accomplish
extraordinary things even when you feel
fear that's what radical confidence is
being afraid and unsure and having a
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massive progress pre-order your copy
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radicalconfidence.com they're only
available if you pre-order so act now
then once you've done that we'll get
back to today's episode all right guys
read the book and get ready to be the
hero of your own life peace out
the whole notion of thinking about
plants not as these inert things which
until starting to read you i always did
i just thought of plants as is
completely inert when you talk about
them as being sort of the world's most
sophisticated chemical warfares 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
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 neuro inflammation 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
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 that beta
amyloid plaques are not actually created
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 counter-intuitive
it's basically
so we now we now know we have
we have a leaky brain and there's
increased meaning things are crossing
the blood-bearing barrier that should
not have never done it and
there's actually a beautiful new paper
that probably explains why
cholesterol
and
amyloid and dementia actually
coexist
in people with the apoe4 gene
they quote alzheimer's gene
i got interested in apoe4 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 apoe 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 4 mutation
or a double 4 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 so
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 apoe4 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 problem it's dropping 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
this is so interesting to me it's crazy
uh we have a lot of ground to cover here
so one i want to talk about 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 detail so
people should definitely check it out
because it's so interesting the more
that i understand this 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 well you know we don't
have to know what you have uh here take
this we're gonna 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 were 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
pseudomembranous enter colitis
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
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 to school and you know take a crap
and he'd take it to his lab and never
forget we had wearing blenders
and homogenize all this medical student
poop and put it in enema bags
and give these people fecal enemas 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 week later 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 sequenced the human
microbiome that was really only five
years ago
well now since the sequencing of the
human microbiome
it's you go
well of course you know there were 10
000 different species of bacteria in in
you and me 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 body
polo biome yeah
yeah
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 that kissing for instance is a
universal
human grade ape and often animal
characteristic
and there's some pretty cool wacky
suggestion 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 will 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 their sisters
and about how things are going in the
the body and 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 um saying that
oh i i have a planned 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
that we know that number one kids with
autism have a lot more irritable bowel
and they have a lot more gi issues and
they actually have a very different
microbiome than quote normal
and there's been a suggestion for years
that maybe it is that microbiome that is
contributing not going to say cause
autism
there's even more exciting work in
gynecology and obstetrics that there
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 is immune system do
you only encounter that as
um you're actually born and 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 the 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
fifty percent of the autism symptoms
subsided
fifty percent
and the paper has now followed these
kids for two years
and the 50 reduction in symptoms has
continued wow
and if that doesn't 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 eckhermancia what
they like to eat
and they love resistant starches they
love tubers like yams like hikima like
taro root like yucca or yucca
they love
mushrooms and there's a beautiful recent
study out of
uh
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
uh i'll probably fracture it ergo
thionene thionine
that actually crosses the
blood-brain barrier
better than
turmeric curcumin
and actually protects
against
neural inflammation
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 inulin is present in chicory now you
can buy inulin made out of yacon root
and any store as a sweetener
so inulin feeds acrimoncia and so it's
present in chicory it's present in
radicchio belgian endive
jerusalem artichokes sunchokes they're
just pure inulin so
the more of this stuff you eat
the more of this bug you're gonna 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 mid-life on have a 90
reduction in alzheimer's whoa and
compared to women who don't exercise
routine
[Music]
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
popping that 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
give me an example my my mother
actually scrubbed her floors until the
day she died at 90
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
uh 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
because we couldn't measure it before
so exercise is really important
lastly
i really want people to have a brain
wash 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
it 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 wringing
out a sponge
and it happens in deep sleep and it
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 heart attack and so
they're all really actually
interconnected so
one day a week i ask 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 brainwash
better yet skip a meal
and that gets in probably to the fork
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 dear old kellogg's
cornflake company telling people they
had to eat breakfast
i remember my freshman year of high
school after i got arrested cleaned my
life up my dad kicked me out you're not
kicking me out but had me go to rehab
outpatient rehab the best decision ever
changed my life got into fitness and all
that
but i really struggle in school and i
really believed that i was dumb