Do you feel like you’re doing everything right—eating well, staying active, and trying to keep your life in balance—yet still struggle with feeling sluggish or out of sync? The issue might be your gut.
In this episode of A Really Good Cry, I chat with Dr. Steven Gundry, a renowned heart surgeon and expert in gut health, about why your gut plays a bigger role in your well-being than you might realize. We explore how gut health impacts everything from your mood and mental clarity to digestion and inflammation.
Dr. Gundry also reveals why some “healthy” foods might actually be harming your gut—like how your daily protein shake could be causing more harm than good. He shares practical tips for healing your gut, boosting your energy, and improving your overall health with simple, everyday changes.
Tune in and learn how taking care of your gut can impact your body and mind.
What We Discuss:
00:00 Intro
01:05 What is the gut microbiome?
05:49 Your gut microbiome is smarter than you think
07:56 Ancient wisdom knew this about your gut
16:05 How to Tell If Your Gut Is Unhealthy
21:19 Are You Eating the Right Foods for Your Gut?
33:34 Protein Trends Might Be Harming Your Health
38:54 The Best & Worst Oils for Your Gut Health
47:37 Signs You Have Leaky Gut (Without Realizing It)
51:57 The Truth About Antibiotics
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- https://drgundry.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/drstevengundry/
- https://www.facebook.com/DrStevenGundry/
- https://twitter.com/drgundry
- https://www.youtube.com/@DrGundry/featured
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What are some of the signs and symptoms that someone
would be experiencing that you've got a bad gut and
you need to do something about it.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
If you have any complaint, then it's actually coming from
your gut. Whether it's a headache, whether it's acne, whether
it's examo, whether it's high blood pressure, diabetes, it's all
coming from the guy.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Doctor Gundry is a renowned heart surgent and the author
of several best selling books, including The Plant Paradox and
The Longevity Paradox.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, twenty five hundred years ago,
said that all disease begins in the gut.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
So for somebody who's listening to this and is thinking,
you know what, I want to make my gut better, like,
what are the first few basic things somebody can do?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
It takes most people nine months to to literally seal
their leaky gut. So the first thing I tell everyone
to do is.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I'm Rady Wukia And on my podcast A Really Good Cry,
we embrace the messy and the beautiful, providing a space
for raw, unfiltered conversations that celebrate vulnerability and allow you
to tune in to learn, connect and find comfort together.
Doctor Gundry, thank you so much for being here today.
I am so excited to have you. We had been
(01:09):
on a panel before, and as soon as I heard
you speak, I was like, I have to get him
on my podcast because I really appreciate it so much
of what you spoke about. So thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Well, thanks for inviting me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Well, I'm just going to give a little introduction for
anybody who doesn't know who doctor Gundry is. Doctor Gundry
is a renowned heart surgeon and the author of several
best selling books, including The Plant Paradox and The Longevity Paradox.
He just told me he's on his ninth book now
and he just came out with a new book called
The Gut Brain Paradox. Improve your mood, clear brain fog,
and reverse disease by healing your microbiome. Congratulations, Well, thanks
(01:42):
very much, nine Verkus. That is incredible and you've spent
over forty years in the medical field and you are
one of the leading experts in gut microbiome, So thank you.
I appreciate all the work that you do and I'm
so excited to get into it because I read this
stat that said only a third of the American population
even knows what the term gut micro biome is. So
I want to wheel it back and start off by
(02:03):
asking what exactly is the gut microbiome.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, it's amazing that
even physicians don't know what the gut microbiom. Mark Hyman,
doctor Heyman, is a friend of mine, and he and
I were talking off camera a few months ago. He
has a daughter who's a third year medical student at
a very prestigious medical school. In her third year, she
(02:26):
has yet to have a course on the microbiome. No,
you know, if doctors aren't being trained about the microbiome,
then no one should be embarrassed that they haven't heard
about the microbiome. And I'm a slow learner. Hippocrates, the
father of medicine, twenty five hundred years ago, said that
(02:46):
all disease begins in the gut. The guy was right.
The reason I'm a slow learner is I've been studying
the gut now for thirty years and the revelations that
were learning out these marvelous creatures that live in us
and on us, and the effect they have on everything
(03:11):
that happens to us is just remarkable. Microbiome is kind
of used to describe the denisens that live in our
intestines and that our gut from our mouth all the
way down to our rear end. The vast majority of
them live in our large bowl or colon, and there's
(03:33):
about five to six pounds of these guys. To put
actual numbers on them, just in our gut, there's a
hundred trillion bacteria alone. There's about eight trillion trees that
have been counted in the world, eight trillion trees in
the world, and so there's a huge quantum number more
(03:57):
bacteria in each of our guts.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Incredible.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
There's also a thousand different species of bacteria that live
in our mouse. There's about seven hundred different species of
bacteria that live in our skin, and you and I
actually have a cloud of bacteria surrounding us, surrounding us,
and so that whole group is called the holo biome,
(04:23):
but I think it's easier just for nomenclature to call
it the microbiome, and that doesn't mention all the viruses
that are in there, all the molds and fungi that
are in there, and all the other critters, including worms
that are in there.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
And what would you say is the main role of
the microbiome.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
We're a symbiotic organism, and by that we have agreed
to have these guys live in us for the purpose
of doing actually a lot of things for us. In exchange,
(05:04):
we feed them what they need to eat. Of course,
we haven't been doing good job of that recently. But
we take for granted that much of the computing power
of our computers is not housed in our computer at all.
It's up in the cloud. It's in some supercomputer somewhere else.
(05:28):
But we can access that computing power from like our smartphone.
Humans have very few genes. We actually have fewer genes
than a sand fleet. Believe it or not, we have
fewer genes than corn, and yet we're supposedly the most
(05:50):
complex thinking animal there is. So many of us think
that we've actually uploaded our day to day decision making
computed power to our microbiome. Why because even though individual
bacteria don't have as many genes as humans, the vast
(06:13):
mass of this bacteria, which are constantly reproducing and constantly
changing genes and sharing information with other bacteria, even viruses,
we're pretty convinced that we've made most of the decision
making power, computing power for us our microbiome.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I feel like nobody really knows that, even when you
were saying that it's a symbiotic relationship. In my mind,
I feel quite connected to my body, and I feel
like I know my body quite well. But I've never
thought of it as a symbiotic relationship that I am
feeding these gut microbiome, and the gut microbiome are doing
so much for me. You always think that the body
is here for me to use and to utilize, but
(06:58):
you don't realize that there's so much living within us
that it's actually a relationship that we have with everything
that's within our body and it's alive, and the microorganisms
that have so much intelligence.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
It's hard for us, intelligent thinking creatures to conceive that
these onesell organisms have intelligence, that they're sentient beings. And
yet we know that they can actually see other bacteria.
They can actually know how many of their kind are
(07:32):
near them. It's called quorum sensing. It's almost like planning
a rage party or something, a rave party. They can
actually know when to make an action, They can know
who a bad guy is and they can actually make
combinations of chemicals to try and make those bad guys
go away. They can even try to save each other.
(07:54):
I just came back from a big microbiome meaning in Malta.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
That sounds fun.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, I usually present there every year, and I did
this year. But one of the most amazing things is
that bacteria, believe it or not, are predated upon by viruses.
They're infected by viruses called phages, and to try and
to save their kind from viruses, they'll share anti viral
(08:23):
information with each other through little text messages like Okay,
you know there's viruses on the way, here's how to
outsmart them. And so we're finally beginning to able to
see how complex this society is that lives within us.
One of my patients is a Buddhist scholar and he
(08:46):
reads Sanscript and we were talking about this not too
long ago, and he said, you know, I wonder if
the Buddha knew this, because Buddha and Hippocrates were actually contemporary.
And he came back he says, guess what In Sanskrit,
the Buddha says enlightenment comes from the intestines. Wow. So
(09:09):
it's like, WHOA, he did know it?
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Hypocri I do think there's so much in ancient wisdom.
I've studied Iraveda very briefly, and I study a lot
of texts that are sanscrit and it just blows my
mind that we disregard knowledge that has been around for
thousands and thousands of years, but we accept things that
(09:33):
have been around for fifteen years, ten years, five years
so easily. And I think there's this really interesting balance
between everything and needing to be scientifically proven and how
it's scientifically proven versus knowledge that has come down from
generations and generations and generations. And I would love to ask,
how do you balance that? As someone who is part
of the doctor world, part of the medical industry, but
(09:56):
you're quoting things from Hippocrates and from such ancient wisdom,
how do you balance that in the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
If you had asked me even twenty years ago what
I thought about leaky gut, I probably would have told
you it was pseudoscience. Wow, there's a professor who's now
a pediatric astorondrologist at Harvard who is actually found how
(10:23):
leaky gut happens, how to quantify it how to measure it.
And I've been measuring leaky gut in my patients now
for fifteen years. And we can not only quantify it,
but measure it, and we can watch it heal, you know,
we can watch it it worse, we could put now
(10:44):
science on what was seemingly pseudoscience. And what's really exciting
about the microbiome long ago, when back in the dark ages,
when I was in medical school, we used to kind
of think that the gi track the gut was well,
we'd eat some stuff, we'd squirt some enzymes in it,
(11:08):
magic happened, we would absorb nutrients and whatever we didn't
need went out the rear end. Well, now, since the
Human Microbiome project, which only got started in two thousand
and seven and finished in twenty seventeen, very recent history,
we now know that the magic that was actually these
(11:29):
gut microbiome and now we can not only count their numbers,
we can identify who they are, and we can actually
figure out what those guys are doing, and we can
we discovered I wrote two books about this language that
they communicate with us and with themselves that are called
(11:52):
post biotics. And most of us have heard about pro biotics,
which are the quote friendly. A lot of us are
beginning to understand that the probiotics need food to eat,
which are prebiotics, which are mostly soluble fiber. And what
(12:14):
we didn't know was, Okay, what do they do once
they eat? They produce these compounds which are now called
post biotics. This is an amazingly complex messaging system that
uses gases that use short chain fatty acids and literally
(12:37):
text messages called exosomes and extracellular vesicles. I just came
back from the Society of extracellular vesicles. There is such
a thing where we can now actually see and measure
these text messages that bacteria send to us that actually
(13:05):
make us do things.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Wow, like what give me an example.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
We know that people who are depressed or anxious have
a depressive micro biome, have an anxious microbiome that literally
send out messages to make us depressed, to make us anxious.
(13:33):
I got into this because it's a great number of
my patients, most of whom have autoimmune diseases. We're on
one or two antidepressants or anti anxiety medications, and early
on used to see a lot of men for heart
disease and for diabetes and high blood pressure. And I
always felt that the sport was a two person sport,
(13:56):
so I would make their wives come in, yes, and
get a history and physical from them as well. And
invariably the wives were usually skinny and just so happened
to be on one or two antidepressants. And I go,
how come you're on antidepressants? She said, jeez, if you
were married to him, you'd be on an antidepressant. True story,
(14:17):
but a huge number of my female patients were on
antidepressants so long that they often wouldn't even think that
were writing depression as a complaint. And I said, you know,
I think you're going to find that as we go
along that you're probably not going to need your antidepressants anymore.
I don't want you to stop them, but let's just see.
(14:40):
And I write about one of my patients who, as
we went along, she was on two antidepressants. And I
saw her usually you see him every three months, and
about nine months in she had a sheepish look on
her face when I saw her, and she said, don't
get mad at me, but I'm off my antidepressants. I'm
(15:00):
not mad at you. That's what I would have expected.
I didn't want to tell you, but we had changed.
She had changed her microbiome, she had stopped her leaky gut.
She was no longer getting signals to her brain that
she was under attack. If you will, and she said,
(15:23):
the amazing thing is, you won't believe how much better
my brain works now, because that fog of the antidepressants
was going on.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So interesting and.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
What's really exciting. Most antidepressants are what are called serotonin
reuptake inhibitors SSRIs, and supposedly they work by preventing the
breakdown of serotonin in our brain, the fuel good hormone. Okay, well,
if that's how they actually worked, then one would think
(15:55):
I could swallow one of these and the next day
my depression would be gone because my serotonin would not
be broken down. It takes at least a month for
these things to have any effect, so then you go, well,
what's the mechanism that these things are acting? And sure enough,
(16:16):
it turns out that these drugs actually change the microbiome
to a non depressive microbiome, and microbiome change doesn't happen overnight.
It takes actually quite a period of time. So unbeknownst
to any of us, the action of these drugs was
(16:40):
actually happening down in the gut, not in the brain. Wow,
and I got brain paradox.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Yes, I need to read that book. Actually, that sounds
so fascinating when people are thinking about their gut. Now
we know that there's from what you've just told us,
there's a correlation between our gut and our emotions, our
depressive points in our life, our anxieties. But what does
a normal person that doesn't know much about the gut,
how can they know that they've got something wrong with
(17:08):
the gut? And how do you know what a healthy
gut looks like? What do you feel like? What does
it feel like?
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, you know, it's interesting women. I have a wife
and two daughters. Women have a gut sense and men,
unfortunately somehow don't get that. But you guys are really
much more in touch with your gut. And I think
(17:35):
it's intriguing that autoimmune diseases are actually far more common
in women than they are in men. And here's another
shocking finding is, believe it or not, dementia and Parkinson's
and Alzheimer's is much more common in women than it
(17:57):
is in men. And I mean, you guys are the stronger.
I mean, come on. And one of the reasons is
is because you guys, your gut microbiome and the wall
of your gut, your intestinal permeability is no offense. Really lousy. Yeah,
(18:19):
we now know that what happens in the gut is
not like Las vegas. It doesn't stay in the gut.
And what happens in the gut actually is transmitted, among
other things, to the brain, both good things and bad things. Right,
And so we now know that, for instance, Parkinson's and
(18:40):
Alzheimer's is actually caused from the gut, not the other
way around, and that the brain is actually trying to
protect itself from this perceived attack. These hordes that are
going that are leaving the gut and coming up to
attack the people hear about amyloid plaques and TAW proteins
(19:04):
in the brain, these are actually defensive mechanisms that the
immune system of the brain is throwing down like barriers
because of this attack that's on the way from the gut. Wow.
And we're just now really beginning to understand how you
know this is happening, and what we can do not
(19:28):
only to stop it, but to roll back the damage.
And that's what's the exciting party. All of this is fixable.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
That's at least that's hopeful. That is hopeful. And so
what are some of the signs and symptoms that someone
would be experiencing to know that they need to be
working on their gup, like that you've got a bad
gut and you need to do something about it.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Well, for instance, I'll give you a personal example. I
was a very famous heart surgeon did baby hard transplants,
and I did baby heart transplants with migraine headaches. And
I don't recommend that my father had migraine, so I assumed, well,
he had migraines. I have migraines. Imagine my surprise when
(20:14):
I started changing my diet many years ago, thirty years ago,
that my migraine headaches went away. Yeah, and I am
in migraine headache in thirty years. And a lot of
what I wrote about in my earliest books were people
with migrain headaches, people in my family with migraines, who
(20:35):
their migraine headaches went away when we changed their gut.
And you know, I made some bold statements in my
biggest best seller, of The Plant Paradox, that if you
have any complaint. Then it's actually coming from your gut.
Whether it's a headache, whether it's acne, whether it's examo,
(20:56):
whether it's the heartbreak of psoriasis, whether it's high blood pressure,
whether it's diabetes, whether it's coronary arteries. It's all coming
from the gut. And like Hpocrty said, all disease comes
from the gut, and I paraphrase him to say, well,
all disease can be reversed from the gun. And that's
(21:20):
that's why I still see patients six days a week, Wow,
even on Saturdays and Sundays.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Really they need it.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Well I need it because I get to see what
I would have called a miracle thirty years ago because
it was so unexpected, so unable to be explained by science,
if you will. But now I hope not a day
(21:48):
goes by that I don't get to see, you know,
a miracle what I would have called a miracle. Now
it's like I wonder, you know, I'm like a kid
in a candy streaking Yeah, bad example, but I just
can't wait to who I'm going to see today that's
going to tell me this great story And what are
some of.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
The basic things that people can start with you know,
sometimes everyone sold supplements and everyone sold so many things
that can be really expensive to go and get your
checks done, to get your gut checks, to get your
bloods checked. You know, health nowadays can be quite an
expensive journey. So for somebody who's listening to this and
is thinking, you know what, I want to make my
gut better, where do I start?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:27):
What are the first few basic things somebody can do?
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah, So the first thing I tell everyone to do
is start taking vitamin D three.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Here in southern California, eighty percent of my patients when
I first see them are vitamin D defish. Yeah, the CDC. Yeah,
and you know we live in southern California and its
sunny in London. Yeah, London.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
London does not get the sunshine, so I imagine they
definitely need some bit of indeed.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah, and so we don't. We do not get enough
vitamin D from the sun, and we're told to slather
on sunscreen and protect ourselves, so we do not have
enough vitamin D. And vitamin D is absolutely positively essential
to keep number one, the wall of our gut intact.
Number two. It turns out that the higher level of
(23:18):
vitamin D, the more diverse your gut microbiome. In now,
what I mean by that, we know now that this
gut microbiome is kind of like a tropical rainforest, And
just like a tropical rainforest, there's these diverse number of
species and they're all kind of dependent on each other.
Each does a particular job, and if one of them
(23:41):
kind of overgrows, the other guys kind of gang up
and keep things imbalance. What happens is vitamin D actually
promotes this diversity of the gut microbiome. So that's number one.
The University of California, San Diego down the road as
a huge vitamin D research group. They think the average American,
(24:05):
average American should be taking nine thousand, six hundred international
units of vitamin D three a day. That's basically ten
thousand international units. For people who don't use the international units,
that's two hundred and fifty microgram. You can buy these
little five thousand iu vitamin d's anywhere, and they're little
(24:26):
bitty things, and so there's no excuse to just pop
a couple of these in your mouth. I've never seen
vitamin D toxicity. I don't think it exists. The University
of California, San Diego hasn't seen vitamin detoxicity at forty
thousand international units a day.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
And is there a difference between taking liquid form or
a capsule? Does one absorber than the other?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Believe it or not? Most of the time the capsules
work much better than the liquid. Yes, most of my
patients on the liquid I think the what's better? But
when we change them over to the capsule form, their
vinament d's go up much better.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Okay, that's good to know. I always don't maybe they.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
No, everybody seems to think that, but quite the opposite
of my practice. So that's number one. Yes, number two,
you got to give these I call them gut buddies,
the good guys, things that they need to eat. And
in general, that's prebiotic fiber. What the heck is that? Well?
(25:33):
Pre biotic fiber long ago? Are great grandparents, great great
grandparents ate a lot of tubers, whether they were root
vegetables in general, artichokes are a great source of prebiotic fiber.
The chickory family vegetables is one of the best. Asparagus
(25:56):
is a great source. Even things like plantains are a
great source. Green bananas are a great source, not ripe banans.
They're unfortunately pure sugar. So getting these into the is
really important because this is what these guys want to eat.
But there's a very important proviso, and I like to
(26:19):
give credit where credit is due. There's a husbanoid team
at Stanford, their microbiologists by the name of the Sonenbergs,
and they did a really great experiment with healthy human volunteers.
They asked them to eat a lot of probiotic fiber.
In this case it was inulin, and inulin is in chickering.
(26:42):
They looked at their gut microbiome diversity and a more
diverse is better. And they looked at their inflammation markers
and they game all this fiber and their gut microbiome
diversity didn't change, and their inflammation markers change. They go,
what the heck? You know, this is what these guys
(27:03):
want to eat. You know what? What what? So they said,
h I wonder if back in the good old days,
our ancestors ate a lot of fermented foods, whether they
knew it or not. Even something as simple as bread
up until seventy years ago was fermented in the process
(27:24):
of you know, raising bread. We ate a lot of
fermented foods. The only way you could preserve dairy was
via fermentation to make it into a yogurt or keyfear
or a cheese. In fact, the only way you could
preserve meat long ago was by fermentation, by literally bacterial
(27:47):
fermentation of sausages. Fun fact, preshudo is actually a fermented food.
So they said, maybe we should get of these guys
fermented foods, sauerkraut, another one, kambucha, not the high shirt.
And please, we'll give them some yogurts, and we'll give
(28:10):
them some kiffirs, and we'll also give them the inum. Yes,
the combination of the fermented foods and the injun Now,
all of a sudden they've got microbiome diversity bloomed and
their inflammation markers went out. So it was one two punch.
(28:31):
So you've gotta give the bacteria what they need, but
they also need these precursors, which are post biotics. That's
one of the huge things that's missing from our diet.
So we don't have any fiber in our diet, yes,
and we don't have any fermented foods in our diet.
But you gotta have both.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Amazing fiber fermented foods, Vitamin D.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Then the third thing, let's tell us.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Heal somebody's leaky gut. When I started doing this years ago,
I was naive and I thought you could do it
in two weeks. Boy was I wrong. It takes most
people nine months to a year to literally seal their
leaky gut. I, for instance, make supplements of gunder a MD.
They're pretty dog on good and sealing leaky gut, and
(29:21):
I'm happy to sell them to you. But if you
keep swallowing razor blades every day, you will just slice
that right open again. Now, what are the razor blades? Well,
that's what made me famous or infamous. And those are
some of the foods that we think are really good
for us. And these are lectin containing foods. And lectins
(29:45):
are plant proteins that are the defense system of the
plant against it or its babies, its seeds being eaten.
Probably the most famous is gluten. A hundred percent of
my patients with leaky gut are sensitive to gluten in wheat, rye, barley,
(30:08):
And there's also a gluten like molecule in oats, and
so I at least temporarily take those away seventy percent
of my patients are sensitive to the proteins in corn
and gluten free people are eating mostly corn products and
(30:29):
that's why they don't in general get any better. And
I see them all the time. Next are in the
night shade family of vegetables. The white potato, the tomato,
the peppers, the eggplant, and gogieberries are actually night shades.
So the good news about that is the lectins are
(30:51):
in the peels and the seeds, so if you peel
and deceed them, you do just fine. Finally, beans, beans
are loaded with lectins or the mums peas, they are
just full of it. But if you ferment them, if
(31:12):
you soak them. Have you ever ever soaked beans in
a pot? Yes? Okay, do you em or not? It's
the scum that heavns, that scum and all those bubbles,
that's no, that's the fermentation. It's breaking down the lectins.
Bacteria eat lectans, so the fermentation process destroys lectans, and traditionally,
(31:36):
for instance in Tuscany, you usually soak beans for forty
eight hours before you cook them.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, my mum only soaks her beans. She doesn't buy
any canned beans. She only soaks all her beans and
her lentils.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Yeah. Now the good news is there are two companies
that pressure cook beans and take the work out of it.
Pressure cooking destroys lectins except gluten. It won't destroy gluten
so eden Brand, and again I have no affiliation with
these people. Eden Brand beans de M and there's no
(32:11):
BPA in their cans. And then there's an Italian company
called Jovial, Yeah, that soaks their beans and then pressure cooks.
There's a glass jar, so triple good. You know, there's
quick ways around this. So I'm a big bean fan.
As long as you basically detoxify them, you go. Doctor
(32:33):
gunrays me. I don't hate beans. But one of the
things I see that's really disturbing to me is all
this pea protein that is now being put in things.
Pea protein is a bean, it's a lagome. And just
recently I had a patient who's been doing extremely well
(32:53):
and he had hashimotives, thyroiditis. We resolved it, he had leak,
he got, we resolved it, and he recently called me.
He says, hey, you know, I just had my thyroid
checked and my thyroid's acting up, and what the heck?
(33:16):
And I said, did you change anything in your diet?
He said, are you kidding me? You know? You know me,
I'm so clean. I said, jad any drinks? Yeah? He said,
oh yeah, I added a new drink that you know.
It's a green drink and it's really good. It's clean.
And I said, take a screenshot. Number two ingredient was
(33:38):
pea protein and I said, what the heck are you
doing with that? And he said, what do you mean?
I said, it's pea protein. He said, well shoot, and
he said, all right, I'm stopping it. So I actually
just talked to him ten days later. He said, you're
not going to believe this. My energy level is through
(33:58):
the roof after I stopped that stuff. Why didn't you
warn me? Standing around looking at everything you eat? But
I see this over and over again when people are
adding these super foods or super drinks that usually there's
a culprit, and then you just have to look at
(34:18):
the label really carefully.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I am last year because I was trying to increase
my muscle mass, and I had my trainers and people
telling me you have to increase your protein. You have
to increase your protein. And I'm plant based, so I
don't eat me or make sure anything, and so I
started taking protein shakes and I was having sometimes two
protein shakes a day, both of them made from pea protein,
(34:41):
and my gut as time was going on, I could
feel it. I was like, my gut is not happy.
And I was like, no, but I have to have
this because they're telling me I need to hit one
hundred and thirty grams of protein at least. And I
was trying my best, and I went away over the
holidays and then I went to India where I do
like my spiritual retreat and during that time I had
time to think and I was like, my gut has
(35:02):
been telling me for so long you are not happy,
and I've been ignoring it for so long. I came
back here and I was like, I'm not doing it.
Like I could feel my body was deteriorating in other
ways and again like it was not just affecting my gut.
I was feeling my slump again in the afternoon where
I'd felt like I had no energy even though I'd eaten,
and I was progressively feeling like I was getting worse
(35:24):
and worse. And I was like, how can it be
that because I being told that this is what I need.
But now I've just started having proteins from whole sources
rather than trying to have it in powders and through
protein bars and through all those this process synthetic ways
of having them, which by the way, mostly have pea protein.
And that's so interesting that you've said that.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
It's very cheap.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
And the other thing we miss is, again our great
great grandparents, there was no such thing as a protein powder.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
They ate whole things now, whether they ate whole plants
that were usually fermented, or they ate whole pieces of animal,
that was very different. And it took a long time,
number one, for those to be digested into individual amino
acids that would then be absorbed and there would be
(36:24):
lots of leftover things, prebiotics that our gut buddies were
waiting for. Well, now we've stripped these things down to
basically powdered amino acids, and what people don't realize is
they're instantly absorbed. And here's the bad news. There's a
(36:46):
professor of nutrition at Stanford by the name of Christopher Gardner.
He's basically a vegan, but the US government sets a
quote minimum required USDA per protein. Right. Well, what people
don't know is that when setting these standards, the average
(37:09):
American needs about well, the standard is zero point nine
grams of protein per kilogram. Yeah, right, Where did that
standard come from? What turns out that fifty percent of
Americans only will get all of their protein requirement with
(37:32):
less than half of that they extended to cover ninety
five percent of people. So basically their recommendations are twice
the amount that a normal person needs. Twice. Yes, And
what's really exciting is every day we recycle twenty grams
(37:55):
of protein by eating our mucus and our dead selves. Seriously, So,
Walter Longo at USC and I both say that really
all we in Christopher Gardner, all we mostly need is
about forty grams of protein a day. And here's the
worst part. Read the papers. About eighty two percent of
(38:19):
all the protein that we consume is converted not into
muscle and bone, but is converted to sugar. Why because
we do not have a storage system for calories that's
based on muscle. We have a storage system for calories
that's based on turning sugar into fat. And so we
(38:44):
don't waste that protein we converted into sugar it's called
glucotoneogenesis so that we can store it as fat. Well.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I will tell you I've been not doing it for
three weeks and I went up in muscle more than
I did when I was on it, and my inflammation
has gone down. My body feels so much better, and
that's only three weeks of being in remission from having
so much protein. And I also read that most people
(39:14):
in America there's there's more danger of people being eating
too much protein than there is of people being deficient
of it.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
We are overprotinized in this country.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
I know why it's become such a focus. There's always something,
isn't it. There's always a.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Cycle, always something. There's always a TikTok trend. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
it usually usually has very little basis in fact.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yes, okay, So now that we're on things that you
know people should be avoiding, are there any other give me,
like your top five things that people may not be
realizing that they are eating but it's actually damaging their gut.
I know we spoke about the leatins and just p protein.
Is there anything else that you recommend people look out
for when they're reading labels?
Speaker 2 (39:59):
One of the things that we really should be looking
at is the type of oils that are in most
of the products. I think the seed oil fear is
a bit overblown. Frankly, there are actually superb seed oils.
(40:21):
And my favorite of all time is the number one
oil of Korea and most of China, which is perilla
seed oil. People usually have never heard of perilla. Do
you know the coldiest plant, these very beautiful multi colored
leaves that people have in their gardens or sometimes is indoor.
(40:43):
So that's a perilla plant.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Oh, okay?
Speaker 2 (40:47):
From that, well, they if you let them bloom, then
they make seeds and they press the seeds and that's
where perilla oil is come. Now. The cool thing about
perilla oil is it's almost pure a short chain omega
three fat called alpha linolenic acid short ALA. Now supposedly
(41:16):
the evil short chain omega six fat is linolaic acid,
and they sound very similar. So ala from perilla oil
is one of the best ways, experimentally and in my
practice to keep bacterial particles out of our bloodstream, which
(41:38):
are called lipopolysaccharides their abbreviated lps's. I don't swear, but
how you remember it is little pieces of shit because
that's literally what they are. And so this inflammation that
we feel, this believe it or not, loss of muscle mass,
(42:02):
is these little guys getting through the wall of your gut.
And it turns out perilla oil blocks them from doing that.
I put my patients basically on pure perilla oil for
several weeks. I don't even give them my favorite olive oil,
and I just take it away. Now here's the other thing.
(42:25):
The next best that you can get with the highest
amount of ala is organic canola oil. Now, most canola
oil is sprayed with g life essay. But now we
are finding producers who are making organic canol oil. So
(42:46):
canola oil is not the evil Empire. If it's organic,
it's not the best I think perilla oil is. And
most parilo oil is organic. But I'm not afraid to
tell my patients. Look, if you can't find par oil,
it's pretty easy now to find organic canola oil.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
My gosh, I feel like I've just been hearing how
canoda oil is the devil for so long.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Let me tell you about the devil because I get
a lot of pushback about this. So canola is hybridized
rape seed oil. And if you're in Europe. Rape seed
is everywhere. It's basically a cousin of mustard and it's
blooming everywhere. So yeah, it is. So. There was a
(43:33):
human trial a number of years ago called the Leone
Heart Diet. Most people call it the lion Heard diet,
but it was in Leone, France, Lyon, and they took
two groups of people who had heart attacks, had heart disease,
and they randomized them to two diets. One was the
(43:55):
low fat American Heart Association diet. The other was a
diet where they were made to use a margarine spread
from rape seed oil alpha linylenic acid. Rape seed is
almost pure alpha, it's basically kenobol. The trial was supposed
(44:15):
to go six years. They stopped the trial after three
years because the people who were using the rape seed
oil margarine, the high ALA margarine, had so much better
results with no new heart attacks, that they stopped the
trial as unethical to continue against the American Heart Association
(44:38):
low fat diet. When the researchers broke down, well, what
was it that was the difference between the two diets.
It was only the level of alpha linolenic acid ALA
in their blood that was the only difference. So every
(45:01):
time I hear canola oil is the devil's oil. Well,
that's funny. That was the trial and that was the
component of the oil that caused the difference.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
That is incredible. How how like so much can get
misconstrued and misunderstood in so many ways. And then and
then there's social media, which which amplifies it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
Yeah, and so it's like, come on, folks, Yeah, most
canol oil up until the last few years was sprayed
with glycyssate. Okay, I'm glyphys it's the evil Empire. But
now that there's organic canol oil, let's not be afraid
of it.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
And are there any other oils that you recommend people
stay away from? Or what are the best oils to
cook with? So you've said, what was it called again?
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Perrilla? So the cool thing about perilla it's pretty tasteless.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
And is it easy to find?
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, you can go at any Asian store and get
it so on Amazon, there's numerous producers up right now,
so yeah, it's pretty easy to find. I am a
huge fan of olive oil. Whenever we're looking for oils,
we really there's nothing unique about this monolin saturated fat
(46:17):
olaic acid there's nothing. It's not a great oil, but
it's a carrier for what are called polyphenols, and polyphenols
it now turns out are some are plant compounds that
are microbiome our gut buddies love to eat, and the
(46:38):
more polyphenols that they are given, the happier they are
and the more diverse they are. So olive oil is
a really great way to get polyphenols into your diet.
It's not the olaic acid. There's nothing unique about olaic acid.
And you know this new trand algae oil is all
(47:00):
olaic acid, so what it doesn't have any polyphenols in it,
so you know, there's nothing wrong with it. But if
you're looking for a health benefit, you're not going to
get a health benefit from a monoinsaturated fat. There's no
evidence of.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
That, okay. And then cooking with oils, you know, you
hear about cocone oil being a good oil to cook
with because there's a high smoke point, and that you
shouldn't cook with otive oil because it's got a low
smoke point.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
So I've had some of the world experts on olive
oil on my podcast and they assure me and you
that olive oil is actually the safest cooking oil that
it has a low smoke point. The smoke point has
nothing to do with oxidation. In fact, olive oil oxidizes
less than coconut oil.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Wow wow yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
And it was that dangerous, then why has it been
used as a cooking oil for five thousand years? And
why do most of the Blue Zone use olive oil
to cook with and consume? I mean, interestingly enough, the
per capita consumption of olive oil in Greece is a
(48:12):
half a leader per week, per week, so that means
most adults are actually actually having almost a leader per week.
My gosh.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Okay, I want to ask a few more questions because
this is so interesting. Tell me what some of the
signs are that people will have leeki cup if they're
looking out for it. What are some of the signs
of symptoms they can expect?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
So if you have either constipation and or diarrhea or
loose bowel moments, I can virtually guarantee you you have
leaky gut.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
Okay, as simple as that, simple.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
As that, if you have IBS, you have leaky gut.
If you have some disease that somebody tells you you have,
like you know, if you've got a patch of eggs,
you have leaky gut. If you have acne, you have
leaky gut. If you're depressed, you have leaky gut. If
(49:10):
you're anxious, you have leaky gut. If your loved one
has heart disease, you have leaky gut. If you got
brain fog, you have leaky gut. Honest, I mean we
can measure this, yeah, and we can watch the brain
fog go away when you repair your leaky gut. As
(49:30):
I tell my patience, if you have leaky gut, you
actually have leaky brain. And there's this amazing barrier. So
we have a barrier between all of our microbiome in us,
which is the wall of our gut. And we have
that wall of our gut is the surface area of
(49:51):
one or two tennis courts. So when we were watching
the Australian opener, we watch the Indian well BNP in
a couple of weeks, there's one or two tennis courts
inside of us, and the lining of our gut is
only one sell thick. That's a design flaw. So all
(50:14):
of these one hundred trillion bacteria, we need a fence
to keep them on their side of the fence. Yes,
you know, good fences make good neighbors. And what we've
learned is if that fence gets broken or is leaky
or intestinal permeability, then not only can bacteria and pieces
(50:39):
of bacteria get through, but also other particles of undigested
food and our immune system. Eighty percent of all of
our white blood cells are downlining our gut because that's
where trouble can come through. Are down there. We have
the same sort of barrier that protects our brain. It's
(51:00):
called the blood brain barrier. And we can measure if
somebody has leaky gut. We can measure the leakiness of
the blood brain barrier, and it's leaking. And so it's
no wonder that our brain doesn't work properly. We now
know that bacteria can get into our brain and that's
(51:23):
not exactly what we want.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
No, And is it possible for someone to heal their
gut without having to say a professional? Can they do it?
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Just why I write these books? Yes, it's the handbook.
So my current book is called Gut Check, which is
all about this. But the gut brain paradox is specifically
for those people who have a mood disorder, who are
depressed or anxious, or who have a loved one who
(51:54):
has memory issues, have cognitive decline, has Parkinson's, and has
addiction problems. It turns out addiction is driven by a
gut microbiome dysbiosis and by leaky gut and the gut microbiome,
these bad guys actually control the addictive behavior to get
(52:18):
you to give them more of the things they want,
and they use pain as the main way. And how
does the pain occur by leaky gut?
Speaker 1 (52:27):
I can. I've got people in my family and friends
who have multiple things that you just said that could
probably be linked to leaky guts. They have the addiction,
they've had the exema, they've had depression, They've had so
many of these things combined. That's so interesting. I have
to send them your book. When it comes to antibiotics,
does a one dose of antibiotic really cause havoc in
(52:49):
the gut?
Speaker 2 (52:49):
As absolutely? Some research suggests that one course of antibiotics
will basically burn down that tropical rainforest and it could
day burned down for two years. Wow. I was in
medical school in the seventies when broad spectrum antibiotics were
introduced and it was miraculous. Don't get me wrong, they
(53:10):
are life saving. I'm not saying don't take them if
you need them. But what we didn't know. We didn't
even know these guys existed down there, and so we
didn't know that just by swallowing these antibiotics, we were
killing off our gut microbio. The other scary thing that
people don't know is that antibiotics in and of themselves
(53:35):
caused leaky cut. And one of the saddest things is
well meaning physicians treat people for SEBO small intestinal bacterial
overgrowth and they give them antibiotics. That's the last thing
somebody should treat SEBO with CIBO. Believe it. I was
(53:55):
a lot less common than people think, But I've never
treated SEBO with antibiot and we just put them on
our program and miraculously the seaboat goes away. The problem
with broad spectrum antibiotics we still use them, Willy Newly, Yeah,
we use them mostly for viral infections, which they don't
work on Nope. And we feed them to our animals
(54:19):
to make them grow quicker and faster and fatter, so
that when we eat these animals, we eat the antibiotics
that are in their flesh, and so we're constantly killing
off this fabulous tropical rainforest. Now, since we live in
southern California, yes, forests burned down, we could go plant
(54:45):
seedlings and swallow probiotics. Think about it, it will take
twenty years for those seedlings to grow up and make
a forest again. And yet we're naive to think, well,
I'll take some probiotics and don't worry. It doesn't work
that way. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
Oh no.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
In fact, that the Son and Bergs believe that most
of us have a desert wasteland for instead of a
tropical rainforest.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
And so what should people do if they have taken
us of antibiotics or you know, is there a way
to avoid taking antibiotics?
Speaker 2 (55:22):
Well, most of the time, you have to realize that
the vast majority of infections that we encounter are actually
viral infections, and antibiotics have no place in viral infects.
Speaker 1 (55:35):
So many of my friends would have a cough, go
to the doctor and they would be like, you may
not need antibiotics, but you know, if it continues for
a couple of days, start taking it right, And they
don't really know what the actual cause is.
Speaker 2 (55:47):
Exactly. Yeah. When I was a medical student, we rotated
through private practice physicians offices as part of our training,
and I was in a pediatrician's office and he would
the nurse would swab the kid's throat for strep throat
and put it on a petri dish, and then as
(56:08):
the mother left, then the nurse would give the mother
a prescription for antibiotics and for some decongestice. And I'd
watch this and I'm going, you're not going to have
the result of that culture for forty eight hours, and
it probably won't be strep throat. It usually isn't. Why
(56:32):
did you give her antibiotics? And he looked at me
and he said, look, you take give the mother something
to do. The kid will get better on his own.
If I don't give the mother those antibiotics, she'll go
down the street to my competitor and he'll be happy
to give it to her. And it's interesting there's now
(56:53):
been studies of er doctors. If the person coming in
with an illness questions the er doctor about whether they
really should have that antibiotic, the er doctor is half
as likely as normal to give them to them. But
if they come in requesting antibiotics, they'll absolutely get them
(57:17):
because they came into the emergency room and you got
to do something for them. That's human nature.
Speaker 1 (57:23):
And is it something that people can be taking instead,
Like if they get a viral infection, what should they
And let's say, for me, I haven't taken antibiotics for
over ten years now, I refuse to take them. Good
for what is there, you know, to somebody who's worried
about not taking them, what is something that they could
be doing for that viral infection that could help support
out the time.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
If our immune system is not preoccupied with what's going
on down in our god, then our immune system is
available to fight viral infections. And if you'll notice during COVID,
if you thought about all the people who were really
susceptible to you know, COVID, diabetaches, high blood pressure, heart disease,
(58:07):
et cetera. Those are the people who actually have those
conditions from leaky gut. And what we know now is
if eighty percent of your immune system is busy down
in your gut distracted, then they're not available up in
your upper airways and respiratory track. We also know that
(58:28):
bacteria are really good at fighting viruses. They actually have
really cool tricks to fight viruses, and yet we've wiped
them out. Lastly, I am a huge proponent of very
high dose vitamin D for a viral infection. Now, I'll
tell you what I do. This is not a recommendation,
(58:48):
it's what I do. I take one hundred and fifty
thousand international units of vitamin D three three days in
a row. If I feel like I'm coming down with
something that's basically a half a million international units of
vitamin D three. I'm not dead yet.
Speaker 1 (59:08):
No, you're not. You look very healthy to me.
Speaker 2 (59:10):
Now, again, that is not my recommendation to the general public.
That's what I do personally. At the very least, you
should think about taking fifty thousand international units of D
three three days in a row.
Speaker 1 (59:24):
Okay, so taking probiotics when your antibiotics doesn't really do much.
Speaker 2 (59:31):
It is a good idea, but you got to do
a whole lot more than that. The first thing is
more prevented. Try not to get those yes antibiotics in
the first place.
Speaker 1 (59:43):
I want to ask you seven more questions, but I'm
going to wrap it up and hopefully I get to
have you on one more time to ask you all
the other questions I have.
Speaker 2 (59:49):
I'd be delighted to come back. You've got to make
the LA traffic passer.
Speaker 1 (59:53):
Yes I will, I will. Thank you so much, doctor Gundry.
This was so informative and I really hope, I know
this is going to help so many people with their
gut and their overall hell. So thank you, thank you,
thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Good
to see you again.
Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
You too,
What are some of the signs and symptoms that someone
would be experiencing that you've got a bad gut and
you need to do something about it.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
If you have any complaint, then it's actually coming from
your gut. Whether it's a headache, whether it's acne, whether
it's examo, whether it's high blood pressure, diabetes, it's all
coming from the guy.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Doctor Gundry is a renowned heart surgent and the author
of several best selling books, including The Plant Paradox and
The Longevity Paradox.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, twenty five hundred years ago,
said that all disease begins in the gut.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
So for somebody who's listening to this and is thinking,
you know what, I want to make my gut better, like,
what are the first few basic things somebody can do?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
It takes most people nine months to to literally seal
their leaky gut. So the first thing I tell everyone
to do is.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I'm Rady Wukia And on my podcast A Really Good Cry,
we embrace the messy and the beautiful, providing a space
for raw, unfiltered conversations that celebrate vulnerability and allow you
to tune in to learn, connect and find comfort together.
Doctor Gundry, thank you so much for being here today.
I am so excited to have you. We had been
(01:09):
on a panel before, and as soon as I heard
you speak, I was like, I have to get him
on my podcast because I really appreciate it so much
of what you spoke about. So thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Well, thanks for inviting me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Well, I'm just going to give a little introduction for
anybody who doesn't know who doctor Gundry is. Doctor Gundry
is a renowned heart surgeon and the author of several
best selling books, including The Plant Paradox and The Longevity Paradox.
He just told me he's on his ninth book now
and he just came out with a new book called
The Gut Brain Paradox. Improve your mood, clear brain fog,
and reverse disease by healing your microbiome. Congratulations, Well, thanks
(01:42):
very much, nine Verkus. That is incredible and you've spent
over forty years in the medical field and you are
one of the leading experts in gut microbiome, So thank you.
I appreciate all the work that you do and I'm
so excited to get into it because I read this
stat that said only a third of the American population
even knows what the term gut micro biome is. So
I want to wheel it back and start off by
(02:03):
asking what exactly is the gut microbiome.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, it's amazing that
even physicians don't know what the gut microbiom. Mark Hyman,
doctor Heyman, is a friend of mine, and he and
I were talking off camera a few months ago. He
has a daughter who's a third year medical student at
a very prestigious medical school. In her third year, she
(02:26):
has yet to have a course on the microbiome. No,
you know, if doctors aren't being trained about the microbiome,
then no one should be embarrassed that they haven't heard
about the microbiome. And I'm a slow learner. Hippocrates, the
father of medicine, twenty five hundred years ago, said that
(02:46):
all disease begins in the gut. The guy was right.
The reason I'm a slow learner is I've been studying
the gut now for thirty years and the revelations that
were learning out these marvelous creatures that live in us
and on us, and the effect they have on everything
(03:11):
that happens to us is just remarkable. Microbiome is kind
of used to describe the denisens that live in our
intestines and that our gut from our mouth all the
way down to our rear end. The vast majority of
them live in our large bowl or colon, and there's
(03:33):
about five to six pounds of these guys. To put
actual numbers on them, just in our gut, there's a
hundred trillion bacteria alone. There's about eight trillion trees that
have been counted in the world, eight trillion trees in
the world, and so there's a huge quantum number more
(03:57):
bacteria in each of our guts.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Incredible.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
There's also a thousand different species of bacteria that live
in our mouse. There's about seven hundred different species of
bacteria that live in our skin, and you and I
actually have a cloud of bacteria surrounding us, surrounding us,
and so that whole group is called the holo biome,
(04:23):
but I think it's easier just for nomenclature to call
it the microbiome, and that doesn't mention all the viruses
that are in there, all the molds and fungi that
are in there, and all the other critters, including worms
that are in there.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
And what would you say is the main role of
the microbiome.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
We're a symbiotic organism, and by that we have agreed
to have these guys live in us for the purpose
of doing actually a lot of things for us. In exchange,
(05:04):
we feed them what they need to eat. Of course,
we haven't been doing good job of that recently. But
we take for granted that much of the computing power
of our computers is not housed in our computer at all.
It's up in the cloud. It's in some supercomputer somewhere else.
(05:28):
But we can access that computing power from like our smartphone.
Humans have very few genes. We actually have fewer genes
than a sand fleet. Believe it or not, we have
fewer genes than corn, and yet we're supposedly the most
(05:50):
complex thinking animal there is. So many of us think
that we've actually uploaded our day to day decision making
computed power to our microbiome. Why because even though individual
bacteria don't have as many genes as humans, the vast
(06:13):
mass of this bacteria, which are constantly reproducing and constantly
changing genes and sharing information with other bacteria, even viruses,
we're pretty convinced that we've made most of the decision
making power, computing power for us our microbiome.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I feel like nobody really knows that, even when you
were saying that it's a symbiotic relationship. In my mind,
I feel quite connected to my body, and I feel
like I know my body quite well. But I've never
thought of it as a symbiotic relationship that I am
feeding these gut microbiome, and the gut microbiome are doing
so much for me. You always think that the body
is here for me to use and to utilize, but
(06:58):
you don't realize that there's so much living within us
that it's actually a relationship that we have with everything
that's within our body and it's alive, and the microorganisms
that have so much intelligence.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
It's hard for us, intelligent thinking creatures to conceive that
these onesell organisms have intelligence, that they're sentient beings. And
yet we know that they can actually see other bacteria.
They can actually know how many of their kind are
(07:32):
near them. It's called quorum sensing. It's almost like planning
a rage party or something, a rave party. They can
actually know when to make an action, They can know
who a bad guy is and they can actually make
combinations of chemicals to try and make those bad guys
go away. They can even try to save each other.
(07:54):
I just came back from a big microbiome meaning in Malta.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
That sounds fun.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, I usually present there every year, and I did
this year. But one of the most amazing things is
that bacteria, believe it or not, are predated upon by viruses.
They're infected by viruses called phages, and to try and
to save their kind from viruses, they'll share anti viral
(08:23):
information with each other through little text messages like Okay,
you know there's viruses on the way, here's how to
outsmart them. And so we're finally beginning to able to
see how complex this society is that lives within us.
One of my patients is a Buddhist scholar and he
(08:46):
reads Sanscript and we were talking about this not too
long ago, and he said, you know, I wonder if
the Buddha knew this, because Buddha and Hippocrates were actually contemporary.
And he came back he says, guess what In Sanskrit,
the Buddha says enlightenment comes from the intestines. Wow. So
(09:09):
it's like, WHOA, he did know it?
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Hypocri I do think there's so much in ancient wisdom.
I've studied Iraveda very briefly, and I study a lot
of texts that are sanscrit and it just blows my
mind that we disregard knowledge that has been around for
thousands and thousands of years, but we accept things that
(09:33):
have been around for fifteen years, ten years, five years
so easily. And I think there's this really interesting balance
between everything and needing to be scientifically proven and how
it's scientifically proven versus knowledge that has come down from
generations and generations and generations. And I would love to ask,
how do you balance that? As someone who is part
of the doctor world, part of the medical industry, but
(09:56):
you're quoting things from Hippocrates and from such ancient wisdom,
how do you balance that in the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
If you had asked me even twenty years ago what
I thought about leaky gut, I probably would have told
you it was pseudoscience. Wow, there's a professor who's now
a pediatric astorondrologist at Harvard who is actually found how
(10:23):
leaky gut happens, how to quantify it how to measure it.
And I've been measuring leaky gut in my patients now
for fifteen years. And we can not only quantify it,
but measure it, and we can watch it heal, you know,
we can watch it it worse, we could put now
(10:44):
science on what was seemingly pseudoscience. And what's really exciting
about the microbiome long ago, when back in the dark ages,
when I was in medical school, we used to kind
of think that the gi track the gut was well,
we'd eat some stuff, we'd squirt some enzymes in it,
(11:08):
magic happened, we would absorb nutrients and whatever we didn't
need went out the rear end. Well, now, since the
Human Microbiome project, which only got started in two thousand
and seven and finished in twenty seventeen, very recent history,
we now know that the magic that was actually these
(11:29):
gut microbiome and now we can not only count their numbers,
we can identify who they are, and we can actually
figure out what those guys are doing, and we can
we discovered I wrote two books about this language that
they communicate with us and with themselves that are called
(11:52):
post biotics. And most of us have heard about pro biotics,
which are the quote friendly. A lot of us are
beginning to understand that the probiotics need food to eat,
which are prebiotics, which are mostly soluble fiber. And what
(12:14):
we didn't know was, Okay, what do they do once
they eat? They produce these compounds which are now called
post biotics. This is an amazingly complex messaging system that
uses gases that use short chain fatty acids and literally
(12:37):
text messages called exosomes and extracellular vesicles. I just came
back from the Society of extracellular vesicles. There is such
a thing where we can now actually see and measure
these text messages that bacteria send to us that actually
(13:05):
make us do things.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Wow, like what give me an example.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
We know that people who are depressed or anxious have
a depressive micro biome, have an anxious microbiome that literally
send out messages to make us depressed, to make us anxious.
(13:33):
I got into this because it's a great number of
my patients, most of whom have autoimmune diseases. We're on
one or two antidepressants or anti anxiety medications, and early
on used to see a lot of men for heart
disease and for diabetes and high blood pressure. And I
always felt that the sport was a two person sport,
(13:56):
so I would make their wives come in, yes, and
get a history and physical from them as well. And
invariably the wives were usually skinny and just so happened
to be on one or two antidepressants. And I go,
how come you're on antidepressants? She said, jeez, if you
were married to him, you'd be on an antidepressant. True story,
(14:17):
but a huge number of my female patients were on
antidepressants so long that they often wouldn't even think that
were writing depression as a complaint. And I said, you know,
I think you're going to find that as we go
along that you're probably not going to need your antidepressants anymore.
I don't want you to stop them, but let's just see.
(14:40):
And I write about one of my patients who, as
we went along, she was on two antidepressants. And I
saw her usually you see him every three months, and
about nine months in she had a sheepish look on
her face when I saw her, and she said, don't
get mad at me, but I'm off my antidepressants. I'm
(15:00):
not mad at you. That's what I would have expected.
I didn't want to tell you, but we had changed.
She had changed her microbiome, she had stopped her leaky gut.
She was no longer getting signals to her brain that
she was under attack. If you will, and she said,
(15:23):
the amazing thing is, you won't believe how much better
my brain works now, because that fog of the antidepressants
was going on.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So interesting and.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
What's really exciting. Most antidepressants are what are called serotonin
reuptake inhibitors SSRIs, and supposedly they work by preventing the
breakdown of serotonin in our brain, the fuel good hormone. Okay, well,
if that's how they actually worked, then one would think
(15:55):
I could swallow one of these and the next day
my depression would be gone because my serotonin would not
be broken down. It takes at least a month for
these things to have any effect, so then you go, well,
what's the mechanism that these things are acting? And sure enough,
(16:16):
it turns out that these drugs actually change the microbiome
to a non depressive microbiome, and microbiome change doesn't happen overnight.
It takes actually quite a period of time. So unbeknownst
to any of us, the action of these drugs was
(16:40):
actually happening down in the gut, not in the brain. Wow,
and I got brain paradox.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Yes, I need to read that book. Actually, that sounds
so fascinating when people are thinking about their gut. Now
we know that there's from what you've just told us,
there's a correlation between our gut and our emotions, our
depressive points in our life, our anxieties. But what does
a normal person that doesn't know much about the gut,
how can they know that they've got something wrong with
(17:08):
the gut? And how do you know what a healthy
gut looks like? What do you feel like? What does
it feel like?
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, you know, it's interesting women. I have a wife
and two daughters. Women have a gut sense and men,
unfortunately somehow don't get that. But you guys are really
much more in touch with your gut. And I think
(17:35):
it's intriguing that autoimmune diseases are actually far more common
in women than they are in men. And here's another
shocking finding is, believe it or not, dementia and Parkinson's
and Alzheimer's is much more common in women than it
(17:57):
is in men. And I mean, you guys are the stronger.
I mean, come on. And one of the reasons is
is because you guys, your gut microbiome and the wall
of your gut, your intestinal permeability is no offense. Really lousy. Yeah,
(18:19):
we now know that what happens in the gut is
not like Las vegas. It doesn't stay in the gut.
And what happens in the gut actually is transmitted, among
other things, to the brain, both good things and bad things. Right,
And so we now know that, for instance, Parkinson's and
(18:40):
Alzheimer's is actually caused from the gut, not the other
way around, and that the brain is actually trying to
protect itself from this perceived attack. These hordes that are
going that are leaving the gut and coming up to
attack the people hear about amyloid plaques and TAW proteins
(19:04):
in the brain, these are actually defensive mechanisms that the
immune system of the brain is throwing down like barriers
because of this attack that's on the way from the gut. Wow.
And we're just now really beginning to understand how you
know this is happening, and what we can do not
(19:28):
only to stop it, but to roll back the damage.
And that's what's the exciting party. All of this is fixable.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
That's at least that's hopeful. That is hopeful. And so
what are some of the signs and symptoms that someone
would be experiencing to know that they need to be
working on their gup, like that you've got a bad
gut and you need to do something about it.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Well, for instance, I'll give you a personal example. I
was a very famous heart surgeon did baby hard transplants,
and I did baby heart transplants with migraine headaches. And
I don't recommend that my father had migraine, so I assumed, well,
he had migraines. I have migraines. Imagine my surprise when
(20:14):
I started changing my diet many years ago, thirty years ago,
that my migraine headaches went away. Yeah, and I am
in migraine headache in thirty years. And a lot of
what I wrote about in my earliest books were people
with migrain headaches, people in my family with migraines, who
(20:35):
their migraine headaches went away when we changed their gut.
And you know, I made some bold statements in my
biggest best seller, of The Plant Paradox, that if you
have any complaint. Then it's actually coming from your gut.
Whether it's a headache, whether it's acne, whether it's examo,
(20:56):
whether it's the heartbreak of psoriasis, whether it's high blood pressure,
whether it's diabetes, whether it's coronary arteries. It's all coming
from the gut. And like Hpocrty said, all disease comes
from the gut, and I paraphrase him to say, well,
all disease can be reversed from the gun. And that's
(21:20):
that's why I still see patients six days a week, Wow,
even on Saturdays and Sundays.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Really they need it.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Well I need it because I get to see what
I would have called a miracle thirty years ago because
it was so unexpected, so unable to be explained by science,
if you will. But now I hope not a day
(21:48):
goes by that I don't get to see, you know,
a miracle what I would have called a miracle. Now
it's like I wonder, you know, I'm like a kid
in a candy streaking Yeah, bad example, but I just
can't wait to who I'm going to see today that's
going to tell me this great story And what are
some of.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
The basic things that people can start with you know,
sometimes everyone sold supplements and everyone sold so many things
that can be really expensive to go and get your
checks done, to get your gut checks, to get your
bloods checked. You know, health nowadays can be quite an
expensive journey. So for somebody who's listening to this and
is thinking, you know what, I want to make my
gut better, where do I start?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:27):
What are the first few basic things somebody can do?
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah, So the first thing I tell everyone to do
is start taking vitamin D three.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Here in southern California, eighty percent of my patients when
I first see them are vitamin D defish. Yeah, the CDC. Yeah,
and you know we live in southern California and its
sunny in London. Yeah, London.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
London does not get the sunshine, so I imagine they
definitely need some bit of indeed.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah, and so we don't. We do not get enough
vitamin D from the sun, and we're told to slather
on sunscreen and protect ourselves, so we do not have
enough vitamin D. And vitamin D is absolutely positively essential
to keep number one, the wall of our gut intact.
Number two. It turns out that the higher level of
(23:18):
vitamin D, the more diverse your gut microbiome. In now,
what I mean by that, we know now that this
gut microbiome is kind of like a tropical rainforest, And
just like a tropical rainforest, there's these diverse number of
species and they're all kind of dependent on each other.
Each does a particular job, and if one of them
(23:41):
kind of overgrows, the other guys kind of gang up
and keep things imbalance. What happens is vitamin D actually
promotes this diversity of the gut microbiome. So that's number one.
The University of California, San Diego down the road as
a huge vitamin D research group. They think the average American,
(24:05):
average American should be taking nine thousand, six hundred international
units of vitamin D three a day. That's basically ten
thousand international units. For people who don't use the international units,
that's two hundred and fifty microgram. You can buy these
little five thousand iu vitamin d's anywhere, and they're little
(24:26):
bitty things, and so there's no excuse to just pop
a couple of these in your mouth. I've never seen
vitamin D toxicity. I don't think it exists. The University
of California, San Diego hasn't seen vitamin detoxicity at forty
thousand international units a day.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
And is there a difference between taking liquid form or
a capsule? Does one absorber than the other?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Believe it or not? Most of the time the capsules
work much better than the liquid. Yes, most of my
patients on the liquid I think the what's better? But
when we change them over to the capsule form, their
vinament d's go up much better.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Okay, that's good to know. I always don't maybe they.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
No, everybody seems to think that, but quite the opposite
of my practice. So that's number one. Yes, number two,
you got to give these I call them gut buddies,
the good guys, things that they need to eat. And
in general, that's prebiotic fiber. What the heck is that? Well?
(25:33):
Pre biotic fiber long ago? Are great grandparents, great great
grandparents ate a lot of tubers, whether they were root
vegetables in general, artichokes are a great source of prebiotic fiber.
The chickory family vegetables is one of the best. Asparagus
(25:56):
is a great source. Even things like plantains are a
great source. Green bananas are a great source, not ripe banans.
They're unfortunately pure sugar. So getting these into the is
really important because this is what these guys want to eat.
But there's a very important proviso, and I like to
(26:19):
give credit where credit is due. There's a husbanoid team
at Stanford, their microbiologists by the name of the Sonenbergs,
and they did a really great experiment with healthy human volunteers.
They asked them to eat a lot of probiotic fiber.
In this case it was inulin, and inulin is in chickering.
(26:42):
They looked at their gut microbiome diversity and a more
diverse is better. And they looked at their inflammation markers
and they game all this fiber and their gut microbiome
diversity didn't change, and their inflammation markers change. They go,
what the heck? You know, this is what these guys
(27:03):
want to eat. You know what? What what? So they said,
h I wonder if back in the good old days,
our ancestors ate a lot of fermented foods, whether they
knew it or not. Even something as simple as bread
up until seventy years ago was fermented in the process
(27:24):
of you know, raising bread. We ate a lot of
fermented foods. The only way you could preserve dairy was
via fermentation to make it into a yogurt or keyfear
or a cheese. In fact, the only way you could
preserve meat long ago was by fermentation, by literally bacterial
(27:47):
fermentation of sausages. Fun fact, preshudo is actually a fermented food.
So they said, maybe we should get of these guys
fermented foods, sauerkraut, another one, kambucha, not the high shirt.
And please, we'll give them some yogurts, and we'll give
(28:10):
them some kiffirs, and we'll also give them the inum. Yes,
the combination of the fermented foods and the injun Now,
all of a sudden they've got microbiome diversity bloomed and
their inflammation markers went out. So it was one two punch.
(28:31):
So you've gotta give the bacteria what they need, but
they also need these precursors, which are post biotics. That's
one of the huge things that's missing from our diet.
So we don't have any fiber in our diet, yes,
and we don't have any fermented foods in our diet.
But you gotta have both.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Amazing fiber fermented foods, Vitamin D.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Then the third thing, let's tell us.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Heal somebody's leaky gut. When I started doing this years ago,
I was naive and I thought you could do it
in two weeks. Boy was I wrong. It takes most
people nine months to a year to literally seal their
leaky gut. I, for instance, make supplements of gunder a MD.
They're pretty dog on good and sealing leaky gut, and
(29:21):
I'm happy to sell them to you. But if you
keep swallowing razor blades every day, you will just slice
that right open again. Now, what are the razor blades? Well,
that's what made me famous or infamous. And those are
some of the foods that we think are really good
for us. And these are lectin containing foods. And lectins
(29:45):
are plant proteins that are the defense system of the
plant against it or its babies, its seeds being eaten.
Probably the most famous is gluten. A hundred percent of
my patients with leaky gut are sensitive to gluten in wheat, rye, barley,
(30:08):
And there's also a gluten like molecule in oats, and
so I at least temporarily take those away seventy percent
of my patients are sensitive to the proteins in corn
and gluten free people are eating mostly corn products and
(30:29):
that's why they don't in general get any better. And
I see them all the time. Next are in the
night shade family of vegetables. The white potato, the tomato,
the peppers, the eggplant, and gogieberries are actually night shades.
So the good news about that is the lectins are
(30:51):
in the peels and the seeds, so if you peel
and deceed them, you do just fine. Finally, beans, beans
are loaded with lectins or the mums peas, they are
just full of it. But if you ferment them, if
(31:12):
you soak them. Have you ever ever soaked beans in
a pot? Yes? Okay, do you em or not? It's
the scum that heavns, that scum and all those bubbles,
that's no, that's the fermentation. It's breaking down the lectins.
Bacteria eat lectans, so the fermentation process destroys lectans, and traditionally,
(31:36):
for instance in Tuscany, you usually soak beans for forty
eight hours before you cook them.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, my mum only soaks her beans. She doesn't buy
any canned beans. She only soaks all her beans and
her lentils.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Yeah. Now the good news is there are two companies
that pressure cook beans and take the work out of it.
Pressure cooking destroys lectins except gluten. It won't destroy gluten
so eden Brand, and again I have no affiliation with
these people. Eden Brand beans de M and there's no
(32:11):
BPA in their cans. And then there's an Italian company
called Jovial, Yeah, that soaks their beans and then pressure cooks.
There's a glass jar, so triple good. You know, there's
quick ways around this. So I'm a big bean fan.
As long as you basically detoxify them, you go. Doctor
(32:33):
gunrays me. I don't hate beans. But one of the
things I see that's really disturbing to me is all
this pea protein that is now being put in things.
Pea protein is a bean, it's a lagome. And just
recently I had a patient who's been doing extremely well
(32:53):
and he had hashimotives, thyroiditis. We resolved it, he had leak,
he got, we resolved it, and he recently called me.
He says, hey, you know, I just had my thyroid
checked and my thyroid's acting up, and what the heck?
(33:16):
And I said, did you change anything in your diet?
He said, are you kidding me? You know? You know me,
I'm so clean. I said, jad any drinks? Yeah? He said,
oh yeah, I added a new drink that you know.
It's a green drink and it's really good. It's clean.
And I said, take a screenshot. Number two ingredient was
(33:38):
pea protein and I said, what the heck are you
doing with that? And he said, what do you mean?
I said, it's pea protein. He said, well shoot, and
he said, all right, I'm stopping it. So I actually
just talked to him ten days later. He said, you're
not going to believe this. My energy level is through
(33:58):
the roof after I stopped that stuff. Why didn't you
warn me? Standing around looking at everything you eat? But
I see this over and over again when people are
adding these super foods or super drinks that usually there's
a culprit, and then you just have to look at
(34:18):
the label really carefully.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I am last year because I was trying to increase
my muscle mass, and I had my trainers and people
telling me you have to increase your protein. You have
to increase your protein. And I'm plant based, so I
don't eat me or make sure anything, and so I
started taking protein shakes and I was having sometimes two
protein shakes a day, both of them made from pea protein,
(34:41):
and my gut as time was going on, I could
feel it. I was like, my gut is not happy.
And I was like, no, but I have to have
this because they're telling me I need to hit one
hundred and thirty grams of protein at least. And I
was trying my best, and I went away over the
holidays and then I went to India where I do
like my spiritual retreat and during that time I had
time to think and I was like, my gut has
(35:02):
been telling me for so long you are not happy,
and I've been ignoring it for so long. I came
back here and I was like, I'm not doing it.
Like I could feel my body was deteriorating in other
ways and again like it was not just affecting my gut.
I was feeling my slump again in the afternoon where
I'd felt like I had no energy even though I'd eaten,
and I was progressively feeling like I was getting worse
(35:24):
and worse. And I was like, how can it be
that because I being told that this is what I need.
But now I've just started having proteins from whole sources
rather than trying to have it in powders and through
protein bars and through all those this process synthetic ways
of having them, which by the way, mostly have pea protein.
And that's so interesting that you've said that.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
It's very cheap.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
And the other thing we miss is, again our great
great grandparents, there was no such thing as a protein powder.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
They ate whole things now, whether they ate whole plants
that were usually fermented, or they ate whole pieces of animal,
that was very different. And it took a long time,
number one, for those to be digested into individual amino
acids that would then be absorbed and there would be
(36:24):
lots of leftover things, prebiotics that our gut buddies were
waiting for. Well, now we've stripped these things down to
basically powdered amino acids, and what people don't realize is
they're instantly absorbed. And here's the bad news. There's a
(36:46):
professor of nutrition at Stanford by the name of Christopher Gardner.
He's basically a vegan, but the US government sets a
quote minimum required USDA per protein. Right. Well, what people
don't know is that when setting these standards, the average
(37:09):
American needs about well, the standard is zero point nine
grams of protein per kilogram. Yeah, right, Where did that
standard come from? What turns out that fifty percent of
Americans only will get all of their protein requirement with
(37:32):
less than half of that they extended to cover ninety
five percent of people. So basically their recommendations are twice
the amount that a normal person needs. Twice. Yes, And
what's really exciting is every day we recycle twenty grams
(37:55):
of protein by eating our mucus and our dead selves. Seriously, So,
Walter Longo at USC and I both say that really
all we in Christopher Gardner, all we mostly need is
about forty grams of protein a day. And here's the
worst part. Read the papers. About eighty two percent of
(38:19):
all the protein that we consume is converted not into
muscle and bone, but is converted to sugar. Why because
we do not have a storage system for calories that's
based on muscle. We have a storage system for calories
that's based on turning sugar into fat. And so we
(38:44):
don't waste that protein we converted into sugar it's called
glucotoneogenesis so that we can store it as fat. Well.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I will tell you I've been not doing it for
three weeks and I went up in muscle more than
I did when I was on it, and my inflammation
has gone down. My body feels so much better, and
that's only three weeks of being in remission from having
so much protein. And I also read that most people
(39:14):
in America there's there's more danger of people being eating
too much protein than there is of people being deficient
of it.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
We are overprotinized in this country.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
I know why it's become such a focus. There's always something,
isn't it. There's always a.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Cycle, always something. There's always a TikTok trend. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
it usually usually has very little basis in fact.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yes, okay, So now that we're on things that you
know people should be avoiding, are there any other give me,
like your top five things that people may not be
realizing that they are eating but it's actually damaging their gut.
I know we spoke about the leatins and just p protein.
Is there anything else that you recommend people look out
for when they're reading labels?
Speaker 2 (39:59):
One of the things that we really should be looking
at is the type of oils that are in most
of the products. I think the seed oil fear is
a bit overblown. Frankly, there are actually superb seed oils.
(40:21):
And my favorite of all time is the number one
oil of Korea and most of China, which is perilla
seed oil. People usually have never heard of perilla. Do
you know the coldiest plant, these very beautiful multi colored
leaves that people have in their gardens or sometimes is indoor.
(40:43):
So that's a perilla plant.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Oh, okay?
Speaker 2 (40:47):
From that, well, they if you let them bloom, then
they make seeds and they press the seeds and that's
where perilla oil is come. Now. The cool thing about
perilla oil is it's almost pure a short chain omega
three fat called alpha linolenic acid short ALA. Now supposedly
(41:16):
the evil short chain omega six fat is linolaic acid,
and they sound very similar. So ala from perilla oil
is one of the best ways, experimentally and in my
practice to keep bacterial particles out of our bloodstream, which
(41:38):
are called lipopolysaccharides their abbreviated lps's. I don't swear, but
how you remember it is little pieces of shit because
that's literally what they are. And so this inflammation that
we feel, this believe it or not, loss of muscle mass,
(42:02):
is these little guys getting through the wall of your gut.
And it turns out perilla oil blocks them from doing that.
I put my patients basically on pure perilla oil for
several weeks. I don't even give them my favorite olive oil,
and I just take it away. Now here's the other thing.
(42:25):
The next best that you can get with the highest
amount of ala is organic canola oil. Now, most canola
oil is sprayed with g life essay. But now we
are finding producers who are making organic canol oil. So
(42:46):
canola oil is not the evil Empire. If it's organic,
it's not the best I think perilla oil is. And
most parilo oil is organic. But I'm not afraid to
tell my patients. Look, if you can't find par oil,
it's pretty easy now to find organic canola oil.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
My gosh, I feel like I've just been hearing how
canoda oil is the devil for so long.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Let me tell you about the devil because I get
a lot of pushback about this. So canola is hybridized
rape seed oil. And if you're in Europe. Rape seed
is everywhere. It's basically a cousin of mustard and it's
blooming everywhere. So yeah, it is. So. There was a
(43:33):
human trial a number of years ago called the Leone
Heart Diet. Most people call it the lion Heard diet,
but it was in Leone, France, Lyon, and they took
two groups of people who had heart attacks, had heart disease,
and they randomized them to two diets. One was the
(43:55):
low fat American Heart Association diet. The other was a
diet where they were made to use a margarine spread
from rape seed oil alpha linylenic acid. Rape seed is
almost pure alpha, it's basically kenobol. The trial was supposed
(44:15):
to go six years. They stopped the trial after three
years because the people who were using the rape seed
oil margarine, the high ALA margarine, had so much better
results with no new heart attacks, that they stopped the
trial as unethical to continue against the American Heart Association
(44:38):
low fat diet. When the researchers broke down, well, what
was it that was the difference between the two diets.
It was only the level of alpha linolenic acid ALA
in their blood that was the only difference. So every
(45:01):
time I hear canola oil is the devil's oil. Well,
that's funny. That was the trial and that was the
component of the oil that caused the difference.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
That is incredible. How how like so much can get
misconstrued and misunderstood in so many ways. And then and
then there's social media, which which amplifies it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
Yeah, and so it's like, come on, folks, Yeah, most
canol oil up until the last few years was sprayed
with glycyssate. Okay, I'm glyphys it's the evil Empire. But
now that there's organic canol oil, let's not be afraid
of it.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
And are there any other oils that you recommend people
stay away from? Or what are the best oils to
cook with? So you've said, what was it called again?
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Perrilla? So the cool thing about perilla it's pretty tasteless.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
And is it easy to find?
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, you can go at any Asian store and get
it so on Amazon, there's numerous producers up right now,
so yeah, it's pretty easy to find. I am a
huge fan of olive oil. Whenever we're looking for oils,
we really there's nothing unique about this monolin saturated fat
(46:17):
olaic acid there's nothing. It's not a great oil, but
it's a carrier for what are called polyphenols, and polyphenols
it now turns out are some are plant compounds that
are microbiome our gut buddies love to eat, and the
(46:38):
more polyphenols that they are given, the happier they are
and the more diverse they are. So olive oil is
a really great way to get polyphenols into your diet.
It's not the olaic acid. There's nothing unique about olaic acid.
And you know this new trand algae oil is all
(47:00):
olaic acid, so what it doesn't have any polyphenols in it,
so you know, there's nothing wrong with it. But if
you're looking for a health benefit, you're not going to
get a health benefit from a monoinsaturated fat. There's no
evidence of.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
That, okay. And then cooking with oils, you know, you
hear about cocone oil being a good oil to cook
with because there's a high smoke point, and that you
shouldn't cook with otive oil because it's got a low
smoke point.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
So I've had some of the world experts on olive
oil on my podcast and they assure me and you
that olive oil is actually the safest cooking oil that
it has a low smoke point. The smoke point has
nothing to do with oxidation. In fact, olive oil oxidizes
less than coconut oil.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Wow wow yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
And it was that dangerous, then why has it been
used as a cooking oil for five thousand years? And
why do most of the Blue Zone use olive oil
to cook with and consume? I mean, interestingly enough, the
per capita consumption of olive oil in Greece is a
(48:12):
half a leader per week, per week, so that means
most adults are actually actually having almost a leader per week.
My gosh.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Okay, I want to ask a few more questions because
this is so interesting. Tell me what some of the
signs are that people will have leeki cup if they're
looking out for it. What are some of the signs
of symptoms they can expect?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
So if you have either constipation and or diarrhea or
loose bowel moments, I can virtually guarantee you you have
leaky gut.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
Okay, as simple as that, simple.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
As that, if you have IBS, you have leaky gut.
If you have some disease that somebody tells you you have,
like you know, if you've got a patch of eggs,
you have leaky gut. If you have acne, you have
leaky gut. If you're depressed, you have leaky gut. If
(49:10):
you're anxious, you have leaky gut. If your loved one
has heart disease, you have leaky gut. If you got
brain fog, you have leaky gut. Honest, I mean we
can measure this, yeah, and we can watch the brain
fog go away when you repair your leaky gut. As
(49:30):
I tell my patience, if you have leaky gut, you
actually have leaky brain. And there's this amazing barrier. So
we have a barrier between all of our microbiome in us,
which is the wall of our gut. And we have
that wall of our gut is the surface area of
(49:51):
one or two tennis courts. So when we were watching
the Australian opener, we watch the Indian well BNP in
a couple of weeks, there's one or two tennis courts
inside of us, and the lining of our gut is
only one sell thick. That's a design flaw. So all
(50:14):
of these one hundred trillion bacteria, we need a fence
to keep them on their side of the fence. Yes,
you know, good fences make good neighbors. And what we've
learned is if that fence gets broken or is leaky
or intestinal permeability, then not only can bacteria and pieces
(50:39):
of bacteria get through, but also other particles of undigested
food and our immune system. Eighty percent of all of
our white blood cells are downlining our gut because that's
where trouble can come through. Are down there. We have
the same sort of barrier that protects our brain. It's
(51:00):
called the blood brain barrier. And we can measure if
somebody has leaky gut. We can measure the leakiness of
the blood brain barrier, and it's leaking. And so it's
no wonder that our brain doesn't work properly. We now
know that bacteria can get into our brain and that's
(51:23):
not exactly what we want.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
No, And is it possible for someone to heal their
gut without having to say a professional? Can they do it?
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Just why I write these books? Yes, it's the handbook.
So my current book is called Gut Check, which is
all about this. But the gut brain paradox is specifically
for those people who have a mood disorder, who are
depressed or anxious, or who have a loved one who
(51:54):
has memory issues, have cognitive decline, has Parkinson's, and has
addiction problems. It turns out addiction is driven by a
gut microbiome dysbiosis and by leaky gut and the gut microbiome,
these bad guys actually control the addictive behavior to get
(52:18):
you to give them more of the things they want,
and they use pain as the main way. And how
does the pain occur by leaky gut?
Speaker 1 (52:27):
I can. I've got people in my family and friends
who have multiple things that you just said that could
probably be linked to leaky guts. They have the addiction,
they've had the exema, they've had depression, They've had so
many of these things combined. That's so interesting. I have
to send them your book. When it comes to antibiotics,
does a one dose of antibiotic really cause havoc in
(52:49):
the gut?
Speaker 2 (52:49):
As absolutely? Some research suggests that one course of antibiotics
will basically burn down that tropical rainforest and it could
day burned down for two years. Wow. I was in
medical school in the seventies when broad spectrum antibiotics were
introduced and it was miraculous. Don't get me wrong, they
(53:10):
are life saving. I'm not saying don't take them if
you need them. But what we didn't know. We didn't
even know these guys existed down there, and so we
didn't know that just by swallowing these antibiotics, we were
killing off our gut microbio. The other scary thing that
people don't know is that antibiotics in and of themselves
(53:35):
caused leaky cut. And one of the saddest things is
well meaning physicians treat people for SEBO small intestinal bacterial
overgrowth and they give them antibiotics. That's the last thing
somebody should treat SEBO with CIBO. Believe it. I was
(53:55):
a lot less common than people think, But I've never
treated SEBO with antibiot and we just put them on
our program and miraculously the seaboat goes away. The problem
with broad spectrum antibiotics we still use them, Willy Newly, Yeah,
we use them mostly for viral infections, which they don't
work on Nope. And we feed them to our animals
(54:19):
to make them grow quicker and faster and fatter, so
that when we eat these animals, we eat the antibiotics
that are in their flesh, and so we're constantly killing
off this fabulous tropical rainforest. Now, since we live in
southern California, yes, forests burned down, we could go plant
(54:45):
seedlings and swallow probiotics. Think about it, it will take
twenty years for those seedlings to grow up and make
a forest again. And yet we're naive to think, well,
I'll take some probiotics and don't worry. It doesn't work
that way. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
Oh no.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
In fact, that the Son and Bergs believe that most
of us have a desert wasteland for instead of a
tropical rainforest.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
And so what should people do if they have taken
us of antibiotics or you know, is there a way
to avoid taking antibiotics?
Speaker 2 (55:22):
Well, most of the time, you have to realize that
the vast majority of infections that we encounter are actually
viral infections, and antibiotics have no place in viral infects.
Speaker 1 (55:35):
So many of my friends would have a cough, go
to the doctor and they would be like, you may
not need antibiotics, but you know, if it continues for
a couple of days, start taking it right, And they
don't really know what the actual cause is.
Speaker 2 (55:47):
Exactly. Yeah. When I was a medical student, we rotated
through private practice physicians offices as part of our training,
and I was in a pediatrician's office and he would
the nurse would swab the kid's throat for strep throat
and put it on a petri dish, and then as
(56:08):
the mother left, then the nurse would give the mother
a prescription for antibiotics and for some decongestice. And I'd
watch this and I'm going, you're not going to have
the result of that culture for forty eight hours, and
it probably won't be strep throat. It usually isn't. Why
(56:32):
did you give her antibiotics? And he looked at me
and he said, look, you take give the mother something
to do. The kid will get better on his own.
If I don't give the mother those antibiotics, she'll go
down the street to my competitor and he'll be happy
to give it to her. And it's interesting there's now
(56:53):
been studies of er doctors. If the person coming in
with an illness questions the er doctor about whether they
really should have that antibiotic, the er doctor is half
as likely as normal to give them to them. But
if they come in requesting antibiotics, they'll absolutely get them
(57:17):
because they came into the emergency room and you got
to do something for them. That's human nature.
Speaker 1 (57:23):
And is it something that people can be taking instead,
Like if they get a viral infection, what should they
And let's say, for me, I haven't taken antibiotics for
over ten years now, I refuse to take them. Good
for what is there, you know, to somebody who's worried
about not taking them, what is something that they could
be doing for that viral infection that could help support
out the time.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
If our immune system is not preoccupied with what's going
on down in our god, then our immune system is
available to fight viral infections. And if you'll notice during COVID,
if you thought about all the people who were really
susceptible to you know, COVID, diabetaches, high blood pressure, heart disease,
(58:07):
et cetera. Those are the people who actually have those
conditions from leaky gut. And what we know now is
if eighty percent of your immune system is busy down
in your gut distracted, then they're not available up in
your upper airways and respiratory track. We also know that
(58:28):
bacteria are really good at fighting viruses. They actually have
really cool tricks to fight viruses, and yet we've wiped
them out. Lastly, I am a huge proponent of very
high dose vitamin D for a viral infection. Now, I'll
tell you what I do. This is not a recommendation,
(58:48):
it's what I do. I take one hundred and fifty
thousand international units of vitamin D three three days in
a row. If I feel like I'm coming down with
something that's basically a half a million international units of
vitamin D three. I'm not dead yet.
Speaker 1 (59:08):
No, you're not. You look very healthy to me.
Speaker 2 (59:10):
Now, again, that is not my recommendation to the general public.
That's what I do personally. At the very least, you
should think about taking fifty thousand international units of D
three three days in a row.
Speaker 1 (59:24):
Okay, so taking probiotics when your antibiotics doesn't really do much.
Speaker 2 (59:31):
It is a good idea, but you got to do
a whole lot more than that. The first thing is
more prevented. Try not to get those yes antibiotics in
the first place.
Speaker 1 (59:43):
I want to ask you seven more questions, but I'm
going to wrap it up and hopefully I get to
have you on one more time to ask you all
the other questions I have.
Speaker 2 (59:49):
I'd be delighted to come back. You've got to make
the LA traffic passer.
Speaker 1 (59:53):
Yes I will, I will. Thank you so much, doctor Gundry.
This was so informative and I really hope, I know
this is going to help so many people with their
gut and their overall hell. So thank you, thank you,
thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Good
to see you again.
Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
You too,
Host
Radhi Devlukia
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