On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Dr. Steven Gundry ON: “Healthy” Foods You Shouldn’t Be Eating & the Warning Signs of a Leaky Gut

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Dr. Steven Gundry sits down with Jay Shetty to talk about the power of our gut as a second brain. Our gut bacteria, when fed with the right food, helps our body avoid inflammation which is the main trigger for illnesses and diseases to develop. Eating right is eating healthy. Dr. Gundry is a well-known cardiothoracic surgeon and heart surgeon. His mission is to improve health, happiness, and longevity by making simple changes to our diet. Dr. Gundry teaches people how to avoid surgery by using his unique vision of human nutrition. Currently, he is Director and Founder of the International Heart & Lung Institute as well as the Center for Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, CA. What We Discuss with Dr. Gundry: 00:00 Intro 01:39 “You are what you eat, but you are what the thing you are eating ate.” 06:46 What happens inside of us when we consume products? 10:04 When the energy expenditure goes to inflammation which is driven by a leaky gut 15:24 The gut is the second brain 19:05 Women are more in-tune with their gut than men 22:26 Ancient wheat are just as mischievous as modern wheat 27:33 The hidden truth about sugar in Nutrition Facts labels 33:17 Two types of gut bacteria 35:39 The Gut-Centric Theory of Hunger - bacteria's guide our sense of hunger 42:56 Time-Restricted Eating better known as Intermittent Fasting 46:26 For longevity, we have to adapt metabolic flexibility 49:19 Enlist the power of your gut bacteria 53:40 Dr. Gundry on Fast Five Episode Resources: Dr. Steven Gundry | Website Dr. Steven Gundry | Twitter Dr. Steven Gundry | Amazon Dr. Steven Gundry | Facebook Dr. Steven Gundry | Instagram Gundry MD The Steven Gundry Podcast The Steven Gundry Podcast | YouTube The Steven Gundry Podcast | Facebook Like this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to intercosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. These foods are designed to be addictive. There was an old statement that's any white substance is addictive. White flour is addictive, white sugar is addictive, cocaine is addictive, heroin is addictive. You choose the white, it's addictive. Unfortunately, sickness is good for business.

And I'm sad to say, I turned against that over 20 years ago. I could still be patching people's coronary arteries up and doing bypasses. But I found I could actually keep people away from me by teaching how to eat. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you who come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. Now, you know that I like to find people that can share with you really great insights

about your mind, about your body, about your diet, about your food. And today I'm sitting down with none other than Dr. Steven Gundry. Dr. Gundry, it's such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. We were sharing earlier that we share a mutual friend in Lewis House and I've seen you on a show many times and I'm really glad that we get to sit down together. Well, I appreciate you having me on because, you know, I have the Dr. Gondry podcast and maybe by appearing here, I can become the number one health

podcast. So thank you. Yeah, well, we go all across health. So we do mental health, physical health, spiritual health, but today I'm really, really excited to talk to you about food, our gut, diet, what we take in. Now, we've all heard the famous phrase that you are what you eat. We've heard it for years and years and years and years and years. And as someone who's been doing this for years and years and years, how true is that statement? And what comes to mind when you hear that statement? Well, I always add the second part of that sentence, which is probably far more important than what you just said. You are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate. And that's actually one of the big surprises in the last 20 years of my career that so many

times it's, yeah, we got to choose what we're going to eat, but we have to choose what that animal ate or what that plant had been fed or fertilized or sprayed with to really make a good outcome. And it always shocks me. And how do we get aware of that? I feel like one of the biggest challenges in this whole field is, you know, we have all these labels of organic or not organic or whatever it may be. I find like as an uneducated consumer, I'm speaking about myself, it's so difficult to know what it's been spread with, what it hasn't been spread with, what it's been exposed

to. Where do you start? So I guess organic is a good place to start, but as I've learned from my patients through the years, so many of us are sensitive to, for instance, wheat. The lectins in wheat that organic wheat is just as deadly to you as wheat that's been sprayed with glyphosate, roundup. On the other hand, most people, I think, still are unaware that glyphosate

roundup is one of the best ways to destroy your gut that anyone has ever developed. And now people associate glyphosate with GMO, genetically modified organisms. But in fact, glyphosate is now routinely sprayed on conventional crops. Conventional wheat, conventional oats, conventional flaxseed, conventional soybeans, conventional canola. And it doesn't have to be declared on any label. So not only speaking of UR what you ate, these crop foods are fed to our animals. And those animals literally not only pass on glyphosate into us when we eat them, but as I talk about,

most animals are still given antibiotics to make them grow faster and grow fatter. And those antibiotics are passed into us as well. And one of the things that we didn't know when broad spectrum antibiotics were introduced about 50 years ago is that we didn't know about the gut microbiome, nobody knew about it until about 10 years ago. And we had no idea that these broad spectrum antibiotics were literally throwing napalm on our tropical rainforests in our gut. And so most of us inadvertently are swallowing antibiotics every day and are swallowing glyphosate every day without our knowing.

And sadly, looking at, for instance, organic oats, a huge number of organic oat products have glyphosate. And, you know, I had Dr. Mark Heimann, who's a friend of mine. I loved them. We had them on the show. Yeah, on my podcast. And Mark's a pretty careful eater. And he still has significant amounts of glyphosate in himself.

And he's going, you know, what the heck, You know, how? What am I going to do? And so if he and I are really kind of sensitive picky eaters, imagine what the average consumer is getting in their food. And is there a way of someone measuring how much glyphosate is in their body like you were saying? Yeah, we can actually measure glyphosate. You can measure glyphosate in blood. You can measure glyphosate in hair. When we're looking for mischief in some of our patients who aren't doing better with doing, by following the rules, many times we're shocked that glyphosate is right up there on their culprits. And when you say deadly, let's talk about that, because I think for a lot of people,

we don't really understand. Like you were saying that from a gut perspective, we only started understanding about microbiome probably around 10 years ago, at least in Western medicine. Great. In Eastern medicine, the gut is at the heart of your health. And that's kind of what I was especially exposed to through my wife

as I was mentioning. But when you say that we only found out 10 years ago, I think there's still a whole group of people who are just not aware of how central their gut is to their health. But also when you say deadly and you say things like wheat, it's like, well, wheat's and everything. How do you help people understand what you mean by deadly and what's actually happening, happening inside of us when we consume these products? Yeah, so I mean, Hippocrates, father of Western medicine, 25, 100 years ago, said all disease begins in the gut. And one of my colleagues from Harvard, Dr. Fessano, has paraphrased that, he, I think, stole it from me, but that's okay. All disease begins in a leaky gut.

And certainly I've been preaching and publishing that almost all diseases, whether it's heart disease, whether it's cancer, whether it's dementia, whether it's arthritis, certainly whether it's autoimmune diseases, begin in a leaky gut. Now, people are beginning to hear and understand leaky gut. If you'd asked me 15 years ago, what I thought about leaky gut, I would have told you it was pseudoscience. Now we can measure it, we can see it happen. Anyone with an autoimmune disease, I can assure your listeners has a leaky gut.

And the good news is when we seal a leaky gut, and it's actually quite possible to do, the autoimmune disease goes away. Goes away. And stays in remission. So getting back to, we have a wonderful set of bacteria, viruses, fungi, you know, got over a hundred trillion different organisms. And all these little one-celled creatures are really probably the most important organ in our body that we really are we're totally unaware of. And there's this incredible symbiotic relationship between our gut microbiome, our skin microbiome, our oral microbiome, and everything that happens to us.

We now know that they control our immune system. They control our mood. They control quite frankly, whether you or I are gonna develop heart disease. They control whether you or I are going to get dementia. And a lot of people, particularly I think in the West, say, oh, come on now. You know, we're the most advanced, highest organism that's ever happened. And our brains are the most exquisite things.

And you're trying to tell me that a one cell organism is actually controlling our fate. And yes, they are. What are some of the basic things? Let's make this really simple for everyone listening now. What are some of the basic do's and don'ts of strengthening our guts, strengthening our digestion, making sure we're not giving in to some of these basic challenges that we may come across.

You said, you and Dr. Mark Heimann, maybe on the very safe end, I'd love to hear what you guys do eat on a daily basis, and you, of course, because you're here, but I would love to hear what the basic sign, then what you do, at the very extent, because I feel like you're someone who's obviously so well researched, read, you've seen it. Effect people's lives, you must be on one end of the spectrum. How do people start on that journey?

Well, so one of the things I talk about in my current book, The Energy Paradox, which I think is very illustrative. Some Duke researchers, who I've had on my podcast, were fascinated with this hunter-grather tribe in Tanzania called the Hanzas. The Hanzas are incredibly healthy. They have no diseases. They walk.

The men walk. We'll wait 10 miles a day hunting. The women walk. We'll fortify miles gathering. And they're very thin. They're very fit. They said, you know, we should look at their energy expenditure, compare them to desk workers in the United States.

And our supposition, our hypothesis is that these guys are lean and fit and everything because they're walking, they're always moving and their energy expenditure is gonna be a whole lot higher than the desk workers. And of course, that's why the desk workers are also fat and miserable. Turns out when they did the measurements, they found out that these hanzas are actually expending the exact same amount of energy as the desk workers. Now, when we make a hypothesis in research and we can't prove our hypothesis, then that really bothers us. We sometimes fudge and say, wow, of course,

this is what we expected to find because everybody has the same amount of energy expenditure, whether you're doing a whole lot or just sitting in a desk. And to me, when I read that article, and that's why I wanted them on the program, that didn't pass the SNF test. It didn't make sense. And I said, so sure. Okay, they're both expending the same amount of energy, but clearly those desk workers aren't walking eight to 10 miles every day.

Where is their energy expenditure going? And it turns out from my research and many other people's research, it's going to inflammation. And the inflammation is actually driven by leaky gut. Now the best way to compare this, we have the lining of our intestines is the same surface area as a tennis court. So when we're watching Wimbleton right now, that huge surface area is actually inside our gut and everybody kind of looks down there. There a minute, there's no tennis court in here. Well, in fact, there is. And we have for lack of a better word as a design flaw that that tennis court, the lining is only one cell thick. Right. And those cells are all held together by what are called

tight junctions. When I was a kid, we played Red Rover, Red Rover, where two lines of kids locked arms and you tried to run across. Most cultures actually have that game. And so they're all locked together because there's only one cell standing between everything you ate and all of these bacteria and you. And on the other side of this one cell wall is 80% of our immune system, 80% of all of our white cells are literally waiting on the other side because, quite frankly, that's where mischief can come through. And so normally that wall has some pretty interesting defenses itself against being broken through. But one of the things that Dr. Fessano, who I mentioned before, found was that gluten, which is a plant protein, which is called a le lectin, which I guess I became famous for, is able to actually

attach if it can get to the wall of the gut, an attach to receptor, and actually break the tight junction. And now you've got a gap. And through this gap, you can get proteins, bacteria, bacterial particles, and leaky gut, and our immune system goes, oh my gosh, we're under attack. We got a rally, the troops, the troops need food, the troops need supplies, and give us all the energy you've got. And so most people don't realize is that the vast majority of us in the West, particularly, all of our energy is being devoted to this war that's going on inside of us. That's incredible.

Yeah, it's just, it's insane that example with the Hunses, you said. Yeah, that's fascinating that all of our energy expenditures all here. And so that's why we feel more drained, it's why we feel more stressed, it's why we feel more overworked and exhausted and fatigued. And I think what's really fascinating about this is I think that so many of us today feel that our, a lot of our pain is mental, but it's actually starting here. Would you say that's true?

Does that make sense? Yeah. You know, we've talked about for a number of years, we've talked about, you know, the gut brain connection and the gut is the second brain. Well, we now have kind of added to that the microbiome gut brain connection. And what's fascinating, and I talk about it in the energy paradox, is that these bacteria, primarily, make compounds that actually communicate to our brain. They are actually a language. They're literally called a Trans Kingdom language. Where bacteria talk to our neurons, to our mitochondria, the little energy producing cells,

to our immune system, and they literally send them text messages. A few years ago, usually every year, I'm pretty COVID, I present a talk at the World Congress of Microbiata in Paris. And the organizer, Dr. Edie's, took me aside, it must have been six years ago, and he said, I'm gonna tell you something. The microbiome talks to the mitochondria, talks to the brain. I said, okay, I believe you, but why

haven't we discovered the language? He says, oh, don't worry, it will be discovered. I guarantee you it happens. And sure enough, the language was discovered. And it's literally, I think as important as breaking the enigma code, which was the German code in World War II. Yes, remember that? Yep. And so, yeah. And so breaking this code, it actually won the Nobel Prize for medicine. So there is truly a language that bacteria use to tell us kind what's going on there in a way. The real guardians of what is coming into us. And the cool thing about bacteria, everybody thinks our genes are so important. But we actually have fewer genes than corn.

We actually do not have the most genes of any animal that are sanfully as more genes than we do. And the neat thing about bacteria is they have their own genome, but bacteria divide so rapidly, they can actually change their genome very, very quickly. And so many of us think that we've actually uploaded most of our computing power to the bacterial and viral genome inside of us, because it's to the bacterial and viral genome inside of us, because it's a much bigger cloud than our genes. A good way to learn about a place is to talk to the people that live there.

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That's incredible. Wow. I guess we're just getting so much, I mean, it feels like for years we've just got so much wrong. We've had the wrong information, we've made the wrong decisions, we've just got so much wrong. We've had the wrong information, we've made the wrong decisions, bringing it back to the basics of someone listening right now and saying, Dr. Gondry, I can actually relate to what you're saying. I experience what you're saying. If someone's listening to us right now, and they're just like, I feel like I have a leaky gut, or I'm on the way there, or I already know, and I'm struggling even further. What are some of the things that we need to cut out and what are the things we need to adopt in a very simple way because I feel like for most of us, we don't have the time to read and research and journal and

I'm hoping that after this podcast, many people are going to go and order your books, the energy paradox and the plant paradox. I think that would be fantastic insight and use for all of our listeners today. But, uh, simplify it from what would you encourage as a stop eating this, start eating this, and why? Well, you know, it's interesting. You mentioned, uh, some people have a gut feeling. And it's interesting. Women in general have a much better gut feeling than men. And interestingly enough, women by far have far more autoimmune diseases than men. And interestingly enough, women by far have far more autoimmune diseases than men.

And fun fact or sad fact, women actually developed far more Alzheimer's disease than men. And even though they're clearly the stronger sex. So women actually are really in tune with their gut far more than men. And we have this epidemic of a lot of immune diseases, Hashimoto's, thyroiditis, for example,

IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, and these are real things. These are not imagined. I just saw a young woman actually from LA, who's been to every specialist in the world with Oh, depression, anxiety, stomach issues, and they can't find anything wrong with her. We finally did a leaky gut panel

and food sensitivity panel. And it turns out that, to know, to me, it was obvious that she had a profoundly leaky gut. And that so many of the foods that she was being told to eat were actually causing her leaky gut. And, you know, she, she really, she's only 12 years old and she just started crying. She says, you mean, I'm not crazy. You mean, this is, this isn't in my head? Because they wanted to put her on antidepressants and bars and I said, no, I said,

this is, look, it's real. We can measure this. So getting back to your question, the Hanses, for instance, have a incredibly diverse microbiome. Hanzas, for instance, have a incredibly diverse microbiome. They've got hundreds of thousands of species of bacteria and they're got, and a lot of those bacteria actually like to eat the things that are troublesome to us. For instance, there are bacteria that like to eat gluten,

believe it or not. And they go, gluten, yummy. The problem for most of us is all of us have been given antibiotics for dumb things and all of us inadvertently have been eating the antibiotics that our animals have been fed and so and glyphosate believe it or not was patented as an antibiotic. It was not patented as a weed killer. And Monsanto knew this. And yet, so every time we meet these things, we actually kind of

kill off the first line of defense that has been established for eons of time and dealing with plant compounds that don't like us. dealing with plant compounds that don't like us. That was the premise of the plant paradox that plants, believe it or not, do not want to be eaten. They have a life. They, you know, we're here first actually. And they don't want their kids eating their babies, their seeds.

So they protect themselves with compounds that are designed to make an animal sick. And some of those compounds are these proteins called lectins that can cause leaky gut. So where are these things? Well, these things are in almost all grains. They're in pseudo grains like quinoa or buckwheat. They're not in millet and sorghum. So folks, if you're interested in eating grains and I have nothing against eating grains per

say, millet and sorghum are perfectly safe foods. They don't have any lectins. Wow. Do quinoa and buckwheat have lectins? Yes, it does. No, they actually have some of the worst lectins there are. Oh, wow. Sadly, in fact, when I first worked on this, I really wanted buckwheat not to have

like, what about Farrow? Farrow's the same problem. Okay. Any of these fancy names for ancient wheat are just, it's still wheat. Sorry about that. And ancient wheat is just as mischievous as modern wheat. Beans and legumes have some of the highest lectern contents of any food. Now, the good news is that pressure cooking or fermentation of, for instance, quinoa or

buckwheat or any of the beans are perfectly safe. For instance, everybody says, oh, your anti-bean, I'm not anti-bean. I just want to get rid of their offending compounds, because, quite frankly, they're anti-me. Right. So, and I mean, there's amazing research, looking at the most famous one was the healthy eating day at a school in Boston. And 23 students and teachers went to the hospital with

bloody diarrhea, traced to undercooked beans that they were fed on their healthy eating day. But get a pressure cooker. I've got a whole book, the plant paradox family cookbook on how to pressure cook these things. Luckily, there's a couple of companies now that pressure cook their beans, Eden brand, EDEM, and now Jovial brand, which is an Italian company, easy to remember, Jovial, Jovial happy person. Oh, I want some happy beans. Yeah. And I have those several times a week. There's beans have some great benefits as long as you defuse them. Got that. The same way with the nightshade family,

and you and I off camera, we're talking about nightshades, and those are eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and believe it or not, Goji berries are part of the nightshade family. That's a strange one. I know. Goji berries were actually from North America. And they were called the Wolfberry. And they were taken to China in trade during early trading days.

And they thrived in China. And so they're in nightshade from America. And the peels and the seeds of nightshades are the troublesome things. So many cultures, for instance, the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back, because they knew how deadly they were. And really, to this day, the Italians always peel and de-seed their tomatoes before they eat them. The Southwest American Indians who love chili peppers always peel and de-seed their chilies before they either eat them or grind them into chili powder.

In fact, anybody who wants to do this experiment just go to the store by a can of green chilies, chopped green chilies, open it up and you'll notice they're peeled and de-seeded Because culture has figured out how to do this. Like, for instance, the Incas loved Kienwa, but they soaked Kienwa, they fermented it, they let it rot and then they cooked it. And it's not on the package directions. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah, let it rot. Yeah, let it rot.

That's, yeah, I had no idea about that about Keenwa and Buckwheat. So that's massive news to me. But I'm sure, you know, and I'm trying to think for everyone who's listening to us, and you've heard this a million times because you're sharing things that are quite... They shouldn't be, but they are, and I find it really funny when someone says, well, Dr. Kandri, you're against beans, because I'm just like, I mean,

I don't think you have a vendetta against beans or people who own bean production companies or whatever it is. So I always find that fascinating whenever I hear that, because all I'm hearing is just being healthy requires a completely rewiring of our diet. And that is hard to hear. It's difficult to hear.

Is living the healthy way expensive or no? Are some of these changes expensive changes or are they affordable changes? That's a great question. I actually still see Medicaid and medical patients, you know, even though my accountant said, we'd just stop doing that. Well, I believe everybody has the right to good health. But we found that so many disadvantaged people, poor people, they actually end up saving money when they do this because profit margin is huge in processed foods. And about 70% of the food we eat is processed or ultra processed.

And when you say processed, you mean from packages? Yeah, from packages. Yeah, from packages. And people say, well, I always read the label. Yeah. And one of my advice is, look, if you're reading a label, put it down. There's no label on ahead of lettuce. And labeling laws have been changed to actually fool you. Oh, gosh. Yeah, it's crazy. We had the former head of the FDA on my podcast recently.

And he is actually the person who was put, put the labeling on the back. And he was actually called into the Oval Office. And I won't tell you who the president was, because that's really not important. And big agriculture was in the head of the Department Agriculture was in there. And they said, you can't put this system on a package.

And he said, well, wait a minute. That's what's in there. And they said, you can't do that. You cannot tell people how much sugar is in our products. And he said, there it is. And they said, you're going to have to change the label, you're going to have to hide the sugar. And this is coming from have to hide the sugar. And this is coming from the head of the FDA. And he said, for instance, let me give you an example. It's a great example.

He said, you look at a label out of a bagel. And he said, bagel says 300 calories. And you look down and it says one gram of sugar. And you go, oh great. No sugar in a bagel. And it doesn't taste sweet. He says, no. And he says, there's actually 12 teaspoons of sugar in a bagel and it doesn't taste sweet. He says no. He says there's actually

12 teaspoons of sugar in that bagel and I go, I know that and you know that why I don't Why doesn't the consumer know? He says we hit it It's under total carbohydrates and you take total carbohydrates on the way. Well, and this is all in all my books Take away the dietary fiber, which is actually what we feed good bacteria with, and that will tell you the amount of sugar in that serving. Then, just for fun, there's four grams of sugar, there's four grams of carbohydrates and a teaspoon of sugar, there's four grams of carbohydrate and a teaspoon of sugar. So divide that total carbohydrate by four

and it'll actually tell you the teaspoons of sugar you're eating. And I have a bunch of packages in my office and when I show a patient a healthy product and they go, wait a minute, there's five teaspoons of sugar in those 10 little cassava chips I'm eating. I said, yep.

And they go, whoa. Yeah. Yeah. How is the FDA getting away with that? How is that okay? Because that's a good for business. Yeah, but it's so, it's so hard to believe that people are doing that to their own family, their own kids, their own, you know, parents, grandparents, like it's everyone's

consuming it, right? It's just scary to believe that it would be different if they were really healthy and their family was really healthy and then they would just, but remember, we're, and we are, you know, a profit driven society and these companies are beholden to shareholders. And whether they like it or not, the bottom line is they have to produce a profit. And as you know, and Mark Heimann and I know, these foods are designed to be addictive. There was an old statement that any white substance is addictive, and we, you know, white flour is addictive, white sugar is addictive, cocaine is addictive, heroin is addictive. You choose the white it's addictive, and they've made a science out of

addiction. And again, unfortunately sickness is good for business. And I'm sad to say, you know, I turned against that over 20 years ago, you know, I could still be patching people's coronary arteries up and doing bypasses. But I found I could actually keep people away from me, dumb, by teaching how to eat. Yeah, yeah. And I wanna talk to you about that. It feels like there's two, and you can actually guide us better on this,

but it feels like there's two transitions there's, and I know this from changing my own diet, having met my wife and her, having a big impact on me, but when you look at diet, there's the change of habit, and then there's like a change of palate and taste. And like addiction, as you're saying, like we are addicted, we're craving these things that are terrible for us, whether it's fries

or whether it's gluten. Like I know that my wife's always telling me to avoid any of the mock meat, or you know, because we're both plant-based. So my wife and I are both plant-based in our diets, but she's always telling trying to avoid anything with gluten in it that's processed vegan meat or whatever it may be because she's dead against gluten.

And so when you do this, it's almost like, what is the process you've seen people go through in trying to change their habit, or in a change their palate? How difficult it has been, what has helped people the most? How have people actually broken through that one month of being excited and I know you created a 30 day challenge How how have people gone from 30 days to make that the next three decades of their life rather than 30 days and back to where they were? Well, that's a good segue into stuff we were talking about earlier

There's essentially Simplistically two suck two types of gut bacteria. And I call the good guys your gut buddies. And then I call the bad guys the gang members. And they co-exist. The gang members, again, these guys send signals to our brain. The gang members love simple sugars and saturated fats, and they actually tell your brain to go get these things.

And one of the things that they're unique about is they're really good at making you fat when you eat these things. They actually extract more calories and pass it on to you. On the other hand, the gut buddies hate simple sugars, hate saturated fats. They like complex carbohydrates, fibers, and they actually take most of that and keep it from themselves, make more little bacteria. And they tell you, hey, this is the stuff that we want to eat. And so I can take a meat and potatoes guy and who said, salad, you know, vegetables,

ah, you know, I hate that stuff. And kind of make him eat this stuff for a couple of weeks and he'll come back and he'll go, this is bizarre, I've been taken over by a foreign life form. He says, I kill now to get a salad. If I don't get a salad, I'm ready to push somebody out of the way to get it. He said, this isn't me.

And I said, well, actually, it is the new you. You have been taken over by the gut buddies, and they're now directing your taste. Let me give you one more exciting example. There was a recent Chinese study looking at fasting, and there is a new theory called the gut centric theory of hunger that I talk about in the energy paradox. That theory is that these bacteria actually guide our food choices and our hunger, whether we want to eat or not. Not our brain, not our willpower. So they took a bunch of volunteers and they put them on either a seven or 14 day water

fast. Part of the group were given 100 calories of prebiotic fiber. That means we can't adjust it, but the gut bacteria can't eat it. Just 100 calories. The guys who got the 100 calories of prebiotic fiber, even going on a 14-day water fast had absolutely no hunger. The folks who didn't get it were hungry, and you go, well, what's the deal? Well, it turns out the guys that got the prebiotic fiber, their gut buddies said, thanks a lot, we're fed, got what we need, you don't have to go looking for food. And in a way, that's really incredibly exciting. And actually,

empowering. Wow. Because if we, if we give them what they want, they'll take care of us. The therapy for Black Girls podcast is the destination for all things mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. Here, we have the conversations that help Black women dig a little deeper into the most impactful relationships in our lives, those with our parents, our partners, our children, our friends, and most importantly, ourselves. We chat about things like what to do with a friendship ends, how to know when it's time to break up with your therapist, and how to end the cycle of perfectionism.

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Ensure that your resolution turns into ongoing progress. Listen to how to money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty, and on my podcast on purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hot some minds on the planet. Oprah, everything that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow it. Kobe Bryant, the results don't really matter. It's the figuring out that matters. Kevin Haw. It's not about us as a generation at this point. It's about us trying our best to create change. Lumin's Hamilton. That's for me been taking that moment for yourself each day,

being kind to yourself because I think for a long time I wasn't kind to myself. And many, many more. If you're attached to knowing you don't have a capacity to learn. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw, real-life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to on-purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. I got to know Jack Lillane in his later years. Jack Lillane was the godfather of fitness

as far as I'm concerned. And Jack Lillane had an expression. He says, if it tastes good, spit it out. Now, all of my staff say, we just stop saying that because now you're going to make people think you want to meet non-tasty things. Well, he wasn't really saying that. What he was saying, he didn't know back then, is if you eat for them,

then you'll take care of you. I think he was absolutely right. Yeah. And is that transition? And it is crazy though that most of the stuff that's good for us is just, our palette's just not trained to like it. Correct, right?

That's just the way it is. And I've found that as I've had my wife in my ear over the years, and she's like almost coached me and guided me through this from a physical health point of view, I've seen my palette start to change. and it's changed around stuff that I was addicted to. Like I was addicted to chocolate or sugar because that's what I grew up having.

And so for me now when I'm generally not eating any raw sugars or whatever, I'm eating natural sugars and trying to remove it completely, but I can notice that my palate slowly started to change. It's taken a lot of time and effort. What are some of the, tell us about some of this products and supplements that you've created to help this transition. And I'm asking because, you know, I'm already like straight after this, I'm going to be coming to your clinic to get checked out and get your help because I'm already, you know, fully, what's

the right word? I'm fully immersed in what you're saying today. Like I'm thinking through everything you're saying and I'm just so happy that you're doing this. It brings me so much joy that someone's actually speaking about these things in a scientific, clear and researched way because I think it's so needed today. What, tell me what you eat first of all on a daily basis. I think it'd be good for people to hear. What Dr. Mark Heimeneitz, have you feel like sharing that with us? And what was your journey to get there personally?

Yeah, because you didn't know this when you were born. You haven't been living like this for. No, but yeah, you make a good point. And I use this example for my patients, you know, a little child in Japan Doesn't come out of the womb wanting to eat seaweed totally And yet, you know almost from day one they are exposed to seaweed and think it's the best thing You know they ever had yeah, and so

Almost all of our preferences are culturally driven. And there's nothing wrong with culture. There's, let's embrace culture. But for instance, breakfast. Breakfast is actually a very modern invention. If you follow 100 gathers, there is no such thing as breakfast, because there's no storage system. Nobody's got a refrigerator. There's

not even a cupboard. And so they have to find breakfast and breakfast means break fast. And most of them don't eat until 11 o'clock in the morning. Interesting. I just got back from France. The French actually have no word for breakfast. Desionne was the first meal. When all the tourists arrived, they made up a word petite desionne, you know, little first meal. And that's breakfast. But breakfast was an industrial revolution product.

Men would have to go to factories very early in the morning. There were no breaks, there were no lunch breaks, and they get home late at night. And so their wives would make them a breakfast before they went to work because they were going to fast. They were basically going to do Ramadan every day of their lives. You know, a pre-dawn meal and then a post, Ramadan every day of their lives. You know a pre-dawn meal and then a post sunset meal, which I write about him in the book Ramadan Fasting is really useful, but that's his side point. So the Kellogg's Corn Flakes Company, which was founded in 1906, actually 1906 made breakfast cereal the most important meal and interestingly enough They and the United Fruit Company with a jikita banana paid physicians in the early 1900s to tell people that breakfast was the most important No other day.

Wow. And so you know it's again I lived in England training and children's art surgery and the brits were never exposed to cereal until 1942 when the allies and when the Americans came over. And I have a lot of patients from, for instance, the Middle East. They were never exposed to cereal until 1960. And you can just watch our cultural spread. Yeah. Take over. And marketing.

Yeah, just great marketing. It's addictive food too. Absolutely. It's really simple carbohydrates. All right, so. No, no, this is good. This is great. I love here.

I love here. I love how you're able to, your research and obviously your depth of knowledge of interweaving like history, with food, with culture, with, you know, what's happening economically. I just think that that's what I'm finding so fascinating about this. I don't think I've ever sat down with someone who's broken it down in this way for me. And actually when you start seeing that, it's easy for anyone listening to connect the dots and go, oh, yeah, that is right. I only like that because of I was born in this area or this is what we did or this what my family did. And now I realize that that doesn't mean it's healthy or good for me. But yes, tell us about your

diet. And then I'm going to get you to analyze mine. So I want to share with you what I eat for breakfast lunch at dinner. And then I'll get you to break down what I need to change and I'd love that. So for the last 21 years now, from January through June, I don't eat breakfast, I don't eat lunch during the week. And I eat all my calories in a two hour window from five to seven at night. So 22 out of 24 hours I'm fasting. You don't eat at all. At all. Not even like a snack or a bar or nothing.

Wow. I have about. And you have a busy life just to clarify. You don't sit around on a beach all day. No, so you're like today you're like, I've got another meeting to go to like, Well, I have a, so I see patients. I see patients six days a week. I see patients Monday through Thursday Friday. I'm at Gundry MD here in LA.

Saturday and Sunday, I have patients in Santa Barbara at my other office. So tomorrow Saturday, I will have a full patient schedule. Sunday I will have a full patient schedule. So six days a week I'm seeing patients, one day a week I'm at Gundry MD. So, and I don't eat during those times. How long have you been doing that? 21 years. Wow. And so then in this? I was actually, as far as I know,

the first person to write about intermittent fasting in my first book, Dr. Gendry's Diet Evolution. Yeah. It's actually a hilarious story, but tell us. So I had an entire chapter on time restricted eating or intermittent fasting, whatever you want to call it, compressing the eating window from when you start eating in the morning until when you finish at night. And there's more and more and more and more

evidence that if we can reduce that eating window to six to eight hours a day. Yeah, mine's eight right now. Yeah, six to eight hours a day. It's going to have profound short term and long term effects on our health. And we can actually measure that with some cool tests called insulin-like growth factor and do that experiment on a person and watch their insulin-like growth factor plummet. So anyhow, so I wrote an entire chapter in my first book in my editor, Heather Jackson, said, look, this book is so crazy anyhow. This is nuts. And she said, I'm going to cut this chapter. I said, no, no, no, you can't do that. This is really important. You know, I've been doing this for five years already. And, you know, here's the data. Here's the research. It's, you know, it's proven in animals, blah, blah, blah.

The Ramadan diet is a version of that. You know, we know human studies. You can't do it and she said I'll give you two pages to make your case. Wow Okay, so She came up to me as lecturing at the mind body green symposium two years ago pre-COVID and She was in the audience and she came up to me. She's first of all, you know, congratulations on everything. But she said, secondly, I have to apologize. You were right about intermittent fasting. You were so far ahead of your time. I apologize. Well, you're forgive me. I said, it's okay. No, I'll never forgive you. That's good.

Yeah, so it's very powerful. And literally the second half of the energy paradox is to how to get people to implement this. The problem with intermittent fasting, 80% of Americans, Westerners, are pre-diabetic, insulin resistant, whether they know it or not, and their doctors don't know how to diagnose it, quite frankly. And when people embark on trying to extend the period of time where they're not eating,

they literally fall flat on their face. They get headaches, they get weak, they get energy loss. The energy is gone. And that's because we can't convert from burning glucose sugar as a fuel to burning fatty acids as a fuel. And that's what's called metabolic flexibility. And if you want to live a long time, if you want to have a brain that works late in

the life, you have to have metabolic flexibility. You have to be able to change, almost like a hybrid car, change from a gasoline engine to a battery. And that's basically the analogy. And most of us are stuck using sugar as a fuel. And can we build that? Exactly. So, but you can't just jump off the cliff. Yes, of course. Yeah, no one needs to do that overnight. Yeah, and so what I do in the book is say, okay, let's suppose you eat breakfast, break fast, that seven o'clock in the morning.

Tomorrow I want you to eat breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning. Come on, give me an hour, and we're gonna do that for a week. Okay, next week, we're gonna do it at nine o'clock in the morning, and we're gonna practice that for a week. Okay, next week, we're gonna do it at nine o'clock in the morning, and we're gonna practice that for a week. It's like going in the gym. You know, you're not gonna pick up a 50 pound dumbbell

and do bicep curls. Definitely. And can you? Oh, yes. We gotta train you. So we have to train your mitochondria, your... You're trying to squash that eating time. Yeah. And so over a six-week period, we can get most people to having their break fast at noon. And then if I can get people to quit eating at around seven o'clock

a night, there's tremendous evidence that if we got a three-hour window before we go to bed, we'll actually have a period when we go to sleep called brainwashing, which I write about, and Dale Bredison writes about. We literally clean the toxins out of our brain, like a washing machine. But if we eat too close to bed, all the blood flow that would normally do that is down in our gut digesting. But that's what we do. If we do this in a stepwise progression, it's also the same as weaning off sweet taste. Yes. Yes. There are actually a number of good natural no calorie sweeteners out there. I eat monk food.

Monk food is really quite good. That's what I eat. My new favorite is aloealose, because aloealose is actually a prebiotic, and it's a natural sugar. And what did they put it in for you to eat it? It's a white powder. Unfortunately.

But yeah, it's readily available now. And a lot of stores have not you can find it online and It's a it's a really unique Sweetener, but one of the things you want to do is retreat from sweet and so if you're used to putting a teaspoon of monk fruit in your coffee or whatever in your yogurt then Put it down to a half a teaspoon. Won't be as sweet as you like, but in a week or so, you'll say, you know, this is really quite sweet.

Well, then put a quarter of a teaspoon in. That's an easy way. Don't jump off cliffs. Totally, yeah. Because most people just fall flat on their face, they fail and they say, ah, this isn't for me, this doesn't work. Yes, yes, exactly.

And then it's just a power, it's a battle of willpower. And, yeah, this should never be a battle of willpower. And what I try to do is try to get folks to enlist the power of their gut bacteria. And if you, you know, if you start giving your gut bacteria what they want to eat, I mean, it's just amazing what happens to people. It's just amazing. It's really exciting. And that's why I see patients six days a week.

I'm like a kid in a candy store. And let me just tell you a real quick story. Please. We've got this young. We've got this young family in Texas, mother with two children, the boy, actually I take care of both boys. I saw this young man when he was eight years old. He had such severe when he was eight years old. He had such severe psoriasis on his hands and feet, that his hands and feet were bloody.

And he had been to specialists, he'd been on drugs, and it was just the saddest thing. His mother sent me pictures of this. She said, I carry my eight-year-old son around because he can't walk. He can't go to school. We've been everywhere, you know, can you help? And I said, yeah. So,

you know, we looked and he had massively, he got multiple autoimmune diseases like psoriasis, like lupus. And we put him through, okay, what are you sensitive to and put him on that program. Okay, what are you sensitive to and put them on that program? And he completely cleared up over a course of a year. And then he went to school, we started going to school and there was a birthday party at school. And he ate a birthday cupcake and literally within days, he started having these lesions on his hands and feet.

And we checked, he completely sealed his leaky gut on his blood work. So we checked his blood work and boom, everything was kind of back to square one. That's amazing. So I just, that's incredible. I just talked to them on the phone this week. And he's now 12. He's never. He's a young patient. Oh, I see lots of young kids. And now he's in school. He's

thriving. He's a smart kid. He know and mother, you know, sends me pictures. His hands are normal. His feet are normal. And, you know, it's like, no wonder I get up every day. You get, you get this kid. and the mother was carrying him around because he couldn't walk because his feet were bleeding and he couldn't hold a pencil because his hands were bleeding. And that's beautiful. It's all because he had a leaky gut.

Yeah, that's incredible. Dr. Gundry, you're gonna have to come back for a part two because I could talk to you for another hour, but we're running out of time. Oh, no. So I'm going to have to ask you our final five, we end every episode with a final five, a fast five round where you have to answer each question in one word or one sentence maximum. It's really tight. So seven words sentence. So these are your final five. Dr. Gondry. The first question is, what is the best food diet advice you've ever received? It's what I tell people not to eat. That's important. The more I tell people what not to eat, the better their health. Great. Second, what's the worst

food diet advice you've ever received? Eat multiple small meals throughout the day to keep your energy up. Okay, good one. Question number three, what would you say is, I don't want to take, what is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Pet my dogs. Nice. Question number four, what's the biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 months? Oh in the last 12 months the power of

Food to prevent COVID. Oh wow, okay, and the fifth and final question if you could create one Lord that everyone in the world had to follow What would it be? Listen to your mother had to follow. What would it be? Listen to your mother. That's brilliant. Dr. Ghandry, thank you so much for joining us on on purpose today. I want to recommend to everyone who's been listening and watching Go and Grab a copy of the Energy Paradox, which is Dr. Ghandry's new book, And Go and Grab a Copy of the Plant Paradox. I promise you you won't regret it. I know that I'm going to be seeing Dr. Ghandry a lot more after this. I'm hoping he'll make some time for me. But Dr. Gondry, we'd love to invite you back on for a part two.

I think we have so much more to talk about and we've just scratched the surface. So thank you so much for your time today and thank you for sharing your insights with us. Great. Happy to come back. Yeah. What if you could tell the whole truth about your life, including all those tender and visible things we don't usually talk about? I'm Megan Devine. Host of the podcast, it's okay that you're not okay.

Look everyone's at least a little bit not okay these days, and all those things we don't usually talk about? Maybe we should. This season I'm joined by stellar guests like Abbermote, Rachel Cargol, and so many more. It's okay that you're not okay. New episodes each and every Monday, available on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. The world of chocolate has been turned upside down. A very unusual situation. You saw the stacks of cash in our office. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree and recently, varieties of cacao, thought to have been lost centuries ago, were rediscovered in our office. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree, and recently, Variety's cacao, thought to have been

lost centuries ago, were rediscovered in the Amazon. There is no chocolate on Earth like this. Now some chocolate makers are racing deep into the jungle to find the next game-changing chocolate, and I'm coming along. Okay, that was a very large crack it up. Listen to the obsessions of wild chocolate on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Our 20s are often seen as this golden decade.

Our time to be carefree, make mistakes and figure out our lives. But what can psychology teach us about this time? I'm Jemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s. Each week we take a deep dive into a unique aspect of our 20s, from career anxiety, mental health, heartbreak, money and much more to explore the science behind our experiences. The Psychology of Your 20s hosted by me, Gemma Speg. Listen now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen now on the iHotRadio AMP Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.