Kind: captions
Language: en
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
dr stephen gundry welcome back to the
show tom thanks for having me great to
be here dude it's really good to have
you i really enjoyed this book as i've
said many times on this podcast i judge
a guess by whether the research is going
to move me forward in my life
and unlocking the keto code is really
intriguing and i'm super
grateful that i'm going to get to drill
down on some of these so keto changed my
life
so
i used to struggle profoundly with
inflammation and when i discovered keto
it changed everything for me to change
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 researchers first at boston and
then at the mayo 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 fallen way behind
his mother brought him to me in my
clinic in santa barbara
and
we put him 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 it went from meds to
meds and keto or keto only keto only we
took him off his message wow he woke up
uh 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 that's crazy just by choosing this
come back into vogue 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 1950s
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 for seizures
once phenobarbital and dilating 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 that mct oil
could
convert
into ketones in the liver and we'll 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
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 intaking 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 from five
at least point five point eight one wow
from one tablespoon 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 fact how did you
deal with that most people cannot
especially if they've talked about it
publicly they can't change their
position
hopefully that's 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 kale 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
we didn't as 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 as
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
inherit it as well so we're really good
at storing fat mm-hmm in fact yes we are
yes we are in fact and better than most
we're called the fat ape for a reason uh
we we best all apes 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
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 they start of our
cell they have their own dna which is
crazy and i still don't understand that
as 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 a bunch of them unlike our high
school biology textbook that might have
had 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 right 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 can burn fat
yeah we should be a hybrid carb 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 percent of normal weight
individuals have no metabolic
flexibility
fifty percent 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 eighty
eight percent can not
shift between burning sugar and fat if
you're overweight uh 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
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 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 stopped 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 you're 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 fat 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
in your brain for several hours a night
until you eat again
neurons die
and
[Music]
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
yeah 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 correct people
understood that so
where do you begin to go wait a second
we have a problem here
okay so we can make ketones uh we make
ketones from free fatty acids
they go to the liver
and the liver generates ketones now the
liver interestingly enough can't use
ketones as a fuel they're incapable they
don't have the enzyme to do it can you
use free fatty acid yes okay
the liver loves free fatigue which it
gets as fat is 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
by 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 no
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 okay 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
[Music]
the brain it turns out
even at 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 as 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 code because ketones are not a
superfilm they are actually a signaling
molecule
that tells mitochondria to protect
themselves at all costs 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 uh i read a silly little paper
it's actually maybe one of the most
important papers i've ever read
by uh dr uh 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
you know talk about a paradox and he
said look
in extremis
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 in science 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
turbocharge and supercharge your
mitochondria
to eke out every last drop of energy and
that makes
incredibly
it's intuitive it feels right it feels
really good
but what bran said no you're wrong
they do the exact opposite and you go 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 mito 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 a mitochondria
and i liken this long tube to the
hottest
hippest 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
let the imagination run some energy get
some energy
to make
and this club is it's 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 are
flying and beer is flying
and there's bouncers in the club to try
and calm this down and everybody knows
about antioxidants
uh 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 um there's only
two so they're the bouncers so getting
back
that 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 check
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
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 30
just here normally normally and you're
not in starvation mode just normally you
and i sitting 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
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
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 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 that trouble
is a foot
and to protect your cells 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 gotta 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 slip
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
it can't be because the mitochondria are
more efficient because if they're more
efficient they can get more calories
more food more energy out of the body
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
what's up everybody tom billy here and i
have a question for you at the start of
this year you likely set some goals for
yourself and i want to know how those
are going most people give up on their
goals and dreams by february but i have
some good news
if you're not on target to succeed at
the things that you want to achieve this
year it's not too late and trust me when
i say you are not alone
everyone gets stuck and loses momentum
towards their goals at some point myself
included if you know what you're doing
and you're willing to take massive
action though you can get back on track
the trick is not to think about being
stuck as a problem with your motivation
or to interpret your lack of results
that you're getting as a sign that
you're not smart enough the trick is to
recognize that the game that you're
playing is a game of neurochemistry it's
about managing the way that you think
about yourself and framing things in the
right way if you use your brain more
effectively repeat things that empower
you you can actually find ways to solve
problems faster
create positive habits and behaviors
that you know are going to help you
reach your goal
i want you to take massive action right
now so i've pulled a workshop from
impact theory university called the six
steps to getting unstuck and i want you
to watch it right now it's gonna help
you get back on track with your goals
and make the rest of this year your most
successful ever to watch it go to
unstuck class.com
and register for access i'll walk you
through the same process that i use to
get through obstacles and make fast
progress towards my goals whenever
something slows down all right guys
enjoy this and be legendary take care
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 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
to siri but that's what happened to them
yeah you actually should raise your
temperature
just as a fun fact you ever notice when
you have a cup of coffee or
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 uncouple
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
screw 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
uh 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 survivor
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 than 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 1930
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 will 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 people
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 joke can you imagine being able to
fit into your skinny dress and not see
how good you look in the mirror 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 kicks off is just
nothing else
in fact
looking back
at gundry md we have a number of
products with
thermogenic compounds compounds that
we've known for years
produce thermogenesis
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 e okay so now i think we come
back to phenols polyphenols specifically
what are those why do they matter and
how do we begin to get into the new
friendlier ketogenic diet so
dnp
dinitrophenol
phenol
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
that 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 chloroplast
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
we eat 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 gundry 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 used long
before i used 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 uh last week uh i i saw
a paper
that
a type of wormwood
uh worked by uncoupling mitochondria and
i went 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's literally
just one thing
that makes all the difference in a
person's health
and that is
hitting the right dose
of
mitochondrial uncoupling 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
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
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 yeah
guess what
birds do better than any creature
mitochondrial uncoupling bingo they are
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 that crossed and so are we
assuming that
due to asteroid impact
they became birds because they were
already good at mitochondrial uncoupling
and that's how they were able to survive
that period
i think this beautiful theory i don't
think anybody's actually
you know actually spouted that out loud
but yeah 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 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 there were very few humans
left yeah we were down 60 000 years ago
we were down
probably to one woman and probably a few
guys she's not that small yeah she's
mitochondrial eve all of us uh can be
traced back to one female whoa yeah
all of us and you know just just so
everybody knows
mitochondria
actually
they have their own
dna their own genome
mitochondria are only transmitted
from the female
you and i know we're just drones 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
that's crazy yeah but there's none of
the sperm
uh no mitochondria go into the egg
that's real and what's really cool and
i've talked about this before i mean
what's really do
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
of postbiotics and i talk a lot about
postbiotics as well the communication
system between the microbiome and their
sisters the mitochondria and it's like i
mean this is 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 uncouple 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 the book shows okay here's some
tricks um
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 uh
18 fasts 16. yeah fast six hours
does he 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 nail raphael decabo 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
bona fide 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 yeah 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've literally now gone into a
thrifty gene mode they've got it so far
so you've passed through passing through
this correct
then you know they're they're so far
down the line but cabo said hey wait a
minute i think we've got this calorie
restriction wrong
because we're controlling the animal's
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 he designed
an 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 he 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
the animals ate it quite rapidly and
they still actually they ate up all the
calories in about eight to 12 hours and
then they were fasting about 12 hours at
least and that's a long time for a rat
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 eight 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 the 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 the 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 a 12 hour eating window
the other group 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
m-tor is activated or not
the guys who ate the seven hour window
their igf-1s 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
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
i'm the only nutritionist that spent
most of my career living in a blue zone
loma linda california uh 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 5 are vegans
number are pescetarians but so a great
deal of the adventists are vegetarians
or at least pescetarians right
and yet 50 of their diet was dairy fat
from whoa yogurt 50 50
yogurts
and cheeses
and i'm going you you're killing you
know
my patients 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
we're the longest living people in the
united states no you know do your
homework
here
you're killing our patients
so as i was researching this book
um i said you know
the advents eat a lot of cheese and
dairy
let's look at the other blue zones
so
you look at sardinium which is another
blue zone
you look at the nagoyan peninsula
in costa rica which is another blue zone
you look at accaria 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 that's
interesting and
they're sheepherders and goat herders
and they eat huge amounts of goat and
sheep cheese
the folks who live down by the sea don't
aren't goat and sheep eaters and they
don't eat goat sheep 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
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 of the calories in goat and sheet
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
goat
because 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 they're 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 cows don't do it for
some reason no they don't make mcts
let's jump to acaria
two factors in acaria
they're goat and sheep herders they have
yogurt every day they have goat and
sheep cheese every day and they eat
a weed 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 turns out that
priscillaine has an amazing
short chain omega fat called alpha
linolenic acidic 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 of the ancient okinawan diet was a
purple sweet potato
it wasn't rice they don't do it it
wasn't soy beans they only used miso
it was the purple sweet potato which is
full of the purple polyphenols do they
not have
now the okinawans are eating a western
diet
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 right
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
spices yeah and in fact 50
of the
people on these ocean voyages on for the
spice droid died jesus and so
it 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 they even have a
fun chuckle um the gift of the magi
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 how
they brought those little babies jesus
mitochondrial and couples yes they did
they knew yes they did
it's really incredible
dr gundry this is phenomenal the book
was really really interesting thank you
so much where can people get the book
where can they follow along with you
uh hopefully everywhere books are sold
amazon.com
barnesandnoble.com please go to your
local bookseller they need your help the
pandemic's been a disaster for them
they'll have the book i've had multiple
new york times bestsellers they stock my
books and they'll stock this one um
yeah
and then your 200th episode's coming out
200th episode of the dr gundry podcast
is coming up wherever you get your
podcast we're on podcast one the largest
podcast carrier um
youtube youtube
yeah i got two youtube channels
find me