The Bossticks - Dr. Steven Gundry - Can Vegetables Be Unhealthy?, The Plant Paradox, Gluten or No Gluten?, & Diet

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

#163: Dr. Steven Gundry is an author of the New York times best selling book the Plant Paradox, a cardiac surgeon and medical researcher. On this episode we discuss how our bacteria control our behavior and bodies, the plant paradox and how vegetables could be hurting us, gluten allergies, gut health, weight loss, and human optimization. We also dive into the evolution of the human diet. To connect with Dr. Stephen Gundry click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) WOO MORE PLAY is the all natural and organic coconut love oil that is changing the way we have sex. With only 4 all natural ingredients WOO is the perfect personal lubricant to spice up your sex life.  All Him & Her Listeners will receive 20% off your entire order plus free shipping when when visiting www.woomoreplay.com & using promo code HIMANDHER at checkout. This episode is brought to you by THRIVE MARKET. We use Thrive for our online grocery delivery on a weekly basis and we also now get our wine at Thrive! They provide the highest quality products and ingredients delivered straight to our door with unbeatable prices.  Be sure to grab our deal by going to to https://thrivemarket.com/skinnywine to receive 25% off your first order (Max $20) + free shipping and a 30 day trial. This episode is brought to you by Poshmark. To try Poshmark go to www.poshmark.com. Listeners of The Skinny Confidential Him & Her get $5 off your first purchase! Just enter the invite code: confidential5 when you sign up.   

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

Aha! In fact, most people don't know that we actually have bacteria in our gut that enjoy eating gluten. They think it's delicious. If you stop eating gluten, those bacteria have nothing to eat and they leave. And so a lot of people who go gluten-free, even as an experiment, lose the bugs that protect them from gluten. Now, there's pretty good proof that gluten absolutely positively affects how neurons in your brain talk to each other. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back to the skinny confidential him and her show.

If you are new to the show, thank you for joining. That clip was from our guests of the show today, Dr. Stephen Gundry. Dr. Gundry is an author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Plant Paradox, and a cardiac surgeon and medical researcher. On this episode, we discuss how our bacteria can control our behavior and bodies, the plant paradox and how vegetables could be hurting us, gluten allergies, gut health, weight loss, and human diet evolution. For those of you are new to the show, my name is Michael Bostic. I am a serial entrepreneur and brand builder, most recently the CEO of Dear Media, which is a podcast network focused on female voices and audiences. isn't sitting next to me is my lovely wife, a little bit jet lagged in a beanie for some reason in the studio, Miss Lauren Everts.

Hi, guys, Lauren Everts of the Skinny Confidential. It's a blog, a brand, and a podcast. And I am so fucking excited for this episode. I can't even tell you. This is definitely one of my favorite episodes. Yeah, we discovered Dr. Gundry about a year ago. And for listeners that have been listening to us for a long time, if you've been paying attention, you've seen us, or me primarily, referencing him.

in the past when we interviewed nutritionists or health experts or fitness experts because his views on plants and vegetables has been somewhat controversial, also somewhat enlightening, definitely has got a lot of different conversations started around vegetables, vegetables that could be hurting you, vegetables that are good for you. And in this interview, we really dive into it with them because he has a lot to say about the topic of vegetables and how they could be affecting our diet. And I feel like this is so fitting because we just got off a plane from Europe and I couldn't believe when I lifted my shirt up today to check out my stomach and it was flat. I ate so much pizza, so much pasta, so much bread, so much Berliners just like stuffed my face and we get into why my stomach was flat, whereas if I go to

New York for five days, I gain literally seven pounds. So that's really, really interesting. We also talk about intermittent fasting, which a lot of you have been asking me about. And I think having a doctor on here to talk about it is super interesting. And then we also get into specifics on why you need olive oil. And he gives brands and all the details for you guys. I learned about why I need to incorporate more cursiferous. I don't know how to say that word. Cuciferous. Okay, let's not name our firstborn that. A vegetable's into my diet and whether or not I should be juicing or doing smoothies. I learned specifics on intermittent fasting. And we even talked about wine and champagne. Yeah, so on this show, we try to bring on all walks of life, as those that are familiar with the show know, all different perspectives.

But what was so important for me to have, you know, an actual doctor about gut health on this show or around gut health on this show is that we wanted to, I wanted to get the actual science behind our gut and how we process food. For me, I struggle with figuring out diets and which diet trends to follow. And it usually doesn't click in for me until I have some, you know, basically scientific backing as to what. why I should do certain diets. And so Dr. Gundry provided a really unique perspective because not only is he an expert in the field, but he's an actual doctor that has performed over 10,000 heart surgery. So he's actually been in the human body and seen it firsthand. The gut is obviously so important. You guys, we've talked about this with Ingrid. She was on the podcast. She has a lot of the same theories that he has. And I think going into the scientific research of it is so important.

this episode for me was probably one of the most educational episodes we've ever had. Yeah. And for those, you know, what I try to do is you always got to go into these type of conversations with an open mind. There's instantly going to be critics. There's instantly going to be people that don't agree. But what I tried to do in all these conversations, when I think Lauren tries to do is we try to go in with an open mind to decipher what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. And I think anybody that's listening needs to do the same. Are you a fan of sweet and salty kettle corn dates and organic? apple cider vinegar. Well, I have you covered if you are. So I actually curated a page on Thrive

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Who is Dr. Stephen Gundry? Dr. Gundry is an author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Plant Paradox, and a cardiac surgeon. He's also a medical researcher. He's performed over 10,000 heart surgeries and is the former head of the cardiothoraphic surgery at Loma Linda University. Gundry is devoted to teaching patients how to live a healthier life through diet and lifestyle choices.

With that, let's welcome Dr. Gundry to the him and her show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her. All right, so tell us what you were just talking about because that was so interesting and I'm mad that we didn't have the mic on. You have to tell the audience what you just said. Okay. In the plant paradox, I talk about, among other things, the seven deadly disruptors that are really behind all of our autoimmune, irritable bowel crisis that we're having in not only America, but around the world. And one of those disruptors is an enzyme that people have never heard of, and it's in almost every food that you eat. And it's there legally.

And it does not have to be on any of the ingredients list because it's what's called generally regarded as safe. Grass, G-R-A-S. And if it's generally regarded as safe by the FDA and the Department of Agriculture, it does not have to appear on an ingredient list. So what the heck is transglutamines? Your alert listeners hear the word gluten in transglutaminase. And transglutaminate is actually what makes gluten so mischievous. And it's an enzyme that has been shown to cause leaky gut, disruption of the wall of the gut. And it's an enzyme that actually has been proven to cause what's called gluten ataxia,

which looks all the world like Parkinson's disease, except if you take gluten and transglutaminate out of your diet, all of a sudden your Parkinson's disease goes away. And it's a cause of peripheral neuropathy, your fingers feel funny, your toes feel funny. And today a new paper came out proving, once again, what I had talked about before, that if anybody wants to find it, It's in science daily, and could this widely used food additive cause celiac disease? And lo and behold, transglutaminase has been proven, as I've said before, to cause celiac disease even when you're not eating gluten. And what it does, it's in everything. So if you have a gluten-free bread or a gluten-free crack or a gluten-free cookie, yes, technically there's not any gluten-in-in-in-it.

But gluten is what we use to raise food, make it look fluffy. And everybody wants fluffy stuff. And gluten's really good for that. The problem is if you take gluten away, you can't make things fluffy. So what companies do is use transglutaminase to do the raising agent instead of gluten. And it's legal and it's not gluten, but it's worse than gluten. And this paper just came out today that said, yep, it's in everything and it's actually the major cause of celiac disease. Okay, but here's my question.

What if you're not gluten-free? What if you're not gluten-intolerant, I guess, is the question? Because I'm not gluten-intolerant. Is it still okay if someone like me eats gluten, or would you advise against it? First of all, how do you know that you're not gluten-intolerant? This is what I want to get into with you. Well, I've had my blood tested and nothing's ever come up. what part of your blood has been tested looking for gluten intolerance.

Oh, shit. I don't know that. Here's a thing, Dr. Gundry. So listeners that have listened to this show for a while may be excited to hear this interview because I've actually, I read your book a while ago, and I've referenced you a couple of times in your studies. With past guests, we've had a lot of health experts or nutritionists on this show, and I've said, you know, what do you think of the plant paradox? And we haven't interviewed you yet, but they kind of brush over it. People don't acknowledge it.

So I'm really excited. forgive me if I'm up and down looking at the computer here because I have a lot of notes and a lot of stuff to ask you. But I guess a good place to start is let's talk about gluten and gluten intolerance in general because it's a hot topic and I'd like to get your take on it. So I will eat gluten when I'm over in Europe, quite frankly. I do it actually protecting myself with a lot of my product called lectin shield, and that's not a plug. But maybe it is a shameless plug. So over in Europe, traditionally foods are raised, like breads, are raised with fermentation. So we either use yeast fermentation or bacterial fermentation like sourdough.

And in the process of that, if it's a full fermentation process, most of the gluten is actually eaten by the bacteria. In fact, most people don't know that we actually have bacteria in our gut that enjoy eating gluten. They think it's delicious. If you stop eating gluten, those bacteria have nothing to eat and they leave. And so a lot of people who go gluten-free, even as an experiment, lose the bugs that protect them from gluten. Now, I just had Dr. David Perlmutter on my podcast, Dr. Gendry podcast, a couple weeks ago, because his book is the fifth anniversary of grain brain. and he and I both think, and there's pretty good proof, that gluten absolutely positively affects how neurons in your brain talk to each other. Now, the argument is, well, wait a minute, Leonardo da Vinci, you know, smartest guy in the whole world,

was obviously eating pasta and bread in Florence, Italy when he was really smart, and how come he's not so stupid? Well, everybody's got a different tolerance to gluten, and particularly over. in Europe in traditional bread raising, that gluten was actively destroyed by the process of making these things into bread or raising things. That isn't happening in the United States. The United States, beginning in the 1950s, Americans wanted consistent, fluffy bread that didn't have lots of holes in it. And in fact, Wonderbread, which I was raised on, was the original way we, we

had bread and it wasn't raised with fermentation. It wasn't raised with any yeast or any bacteria. It was actually raised with transglutaminase. And that's actually how most breads are now raised in the United States. They're not traditionally raised. And so gluten is never destroyed by bacterial fermentation. So long-winded answer, if you go to Europe, you're probably safe. fur in eating those foods. And I have a lot of patients who originally came from Europe, who are here in L.A. and they had horrible IBS or horrible autoimmune diseases. And we got them in remission or cured, whichever word you want to use. They then went back to Europe and they ate their traditional foods. They ate their traditional breads. They ate their traditional yogurts. They said, wow, I'm cured. I can now eat

this stuff again, and they come back to the United States. They can't. They can't. And they call up and say, what the heck? You know, I thought I was cured. You know, are I supposed to be able to eat? No, you're back in the United States. Okay, guys. So basically in business, fitness, and health, everyone's setting goals for themselves, especially with the new year and planning ahead to get to their achievements. But when it comes to relationships, I feel like no one's treating it the same way. People don't take as much time to plan the outcome of their relationship, plan the intimacy of their relationship. I just texted Lauren this morning and I said, hey, let's get back on that date night schedule. Let's pick a night each

week and go somewhere like planning it out how you would plan the future success of a business or your fitness goals or your brand. The same thing should go into a relationship. A hundred percent. It's a new year and so many people are like, I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to stop drinking. I'm going to read more. I'm going to meditate more. But what about I'm going to have sex more? I feel like sex, maybe sometimes it needs to be on the calendar, you know? Maybe that isn't the most sexiest thing, but it's important to make it a priority. I second that. I think that everybody should be planning more sex, especially you, Lauren. I think you should be planning more sex with me. I'm on it. And how I'm doing that is with Wu. Okay. Woo, it needs to be in the bedroom. It needs to be in

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that. We actually just got back from Europe last night. And normally when I go- You guys look pretty good for that. Oh, thank you. And it's going to be deceiving. It looks going to be deceiving. And normally when I get back from somewhere like New York for two weeks, I notice I'm fluffy. And today I went into the bathroom. I ate pizza, pasta. We drank. We drank. We lived it up. And I raised my shirt in the mirror today, and I could tell that I had dry muscles still. Like, I wasn't puffy and bloated. And we literally ate pizza and what are those things called that we got every day?

Berliners. Berlinners are like the little donuts of sugar. These little donuts every single day. Is that, does that have something to do with, am I crazy that I'm not bloated when I get back from Europe for two weeks after stuffing my face? No, that's exactly what we're talking about. There's a famous book a few years ago, why French women don't get fat. I love that book. And, you know, it's actually written by an American who lived in France.

And she noted that, in fact, these things didn't happen over there, even though they were eating all these terrible things. And there's two factors there. And I think this is a big sound of alarm. Number one, they raise, you know, breads and things and pizzas with traditional fermentation practices. So you're actually destroying or really inhibiting gluten. Number two, up until this year, there was no Roundup in Europe. It was not legal. Roundup is glyphosate made by Daryl Monsanto, who's now owned by Bayer.

Roundup was declared legal by the European Commission this past year because Bayer is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world and is based in Europe. And, of course, they paid off everybody. So now Roundup is legal in Europe. So we're going to see a change in ingredients? You're going to see a change. Everywhere? Everywhere. Even in, like, the little tiny villages in Tuscany?

So here's the other deal with the little tiny villages in Tuscany. I go out and meet with farmers. I go out and meet with winemakers. And I noticed over the last couple years that their fields of wheat are actually very short. And I went, that's interesting. This is short wheat. Short wheat is a genetic change that the United States introduced to agriculture about 15 years ago for ease in harvesting. And it did not exist in Europe, but I noticed it in Tuscany.

And I was walking the field. And they said, oh, yeah, you know, we get this from America. The other thing that's really scary, as you know, I have a home in Montecito, and we have a recent place that opened. with a Italian chef and he makes pizza and I said, I went to meet him. I said, you know, where do you get your flour from? He says, oh, you know, we get it from Italy and it's super fine, blah, blah, blah. And I said, oh, this is great. He said, well, not so fast.

And I said, how come? He said, well, Italy can't produce enough wheat to meet demands. So Italy actually imports American wheat to Italy, grinds it, and then sends it back as Italian flour. I give up. Yeah. Oh, my God. Now, the important thing for that, and everybody who's listening really needs to know this, almost all of our corn, our wheat, our soybeans, our canola, our oats are sprayed with Roundup

glyphosate to harvest them. So they don't have to be GMO to have Roundup. Roundup is now used as what's called a desiccant. It kills the plant, and quite frankly, dead plants. are easier to harvest. An industrial agriculture, you want to have your million-dollar harvesting machine at a field on a particular day

and it wants to be dry, so you spray the whole field with Roundup. Now, that Roundup is not washed off. There's not some little guy washing off all the grains. They're fed to all of our animals. They go into all of our cereals, all of our breads, all of our cookies, all of our crackers.

It does not have to appear on the label. So let's let's now go way back. Let's, and I talk brief on this, but I'm not an expert like yourself. Let's talk about human evolution and how our diets have evolved over time, right? Because I think that has a lot to do with how we process food and grains and all these things. Can you speak on that particularly originating in places like Asia, Africa, Europe, and then how it's changed in the United States? Because we're a relatively young agricultural country compared to the rest of the world. Right.

Yeah, we, quite frankly, we started off as tree-dwelling apes 40 million years ago, and we evolved to eat leaves and trees and actually the fruits of those trees. A whole different class of animals, the herbivores evolved to eat grasses and weeds, and they're actually totally different plant species, and they have totally different proteins in them called lectins. lectins is what I guess I made famous. Lectins are plant proteins to protect the plant from being eaten. As strange as it may seem, plants do not want to be eaten.

But they didn't start out that way, correct? Well, yeah, plants actually needed no defense system because they were originally here on Earth all along. They were here about 360 million years ago, and there were no predators. Now, insects arrived about 60, 80 million years later. And insects were the first plant predator. Now, plants had a problem because they couldn't run, they couldn't hide, they couldn't fight, but they're chemists looking outside your window, and those plants are turning sunlight into matter, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet.

So they chemically produce warfare against us by a number of mechanisms, but one of those are called lectins. And lectins are sticky proteins. They're designed to stick to sugar molecules. They stick to the sugar molecules that line our gut. They stick to sugar molecules that line our joints, blood vessels. That's how I got interested in them and indeed our nerves. So we've evolved to handle lectins, and our microbiome, the bugs that live in our gut, have evolved to handle certain plant lectins for millions and millions years.

Do other animals know to stay away from these? Oh, yeah. But we do not. We don't. We're really stupid. When an insect, for instance, eats lectin-contained foods, the insect actually gets paralyzed, and that was the first way that lectins work. In fact, people don't realize that if an insect or a bunch of insects are chewing on one side of a tree,

within 10 minutes, the other side of the tree, those leaves will produce up to 10 times more lectins. They actually, you know, there's text messages going back and forth between the leaves going, hey, guys, you know, there's some problems over here. Better get ready. And so these are complex organisms, and they want to survive. So if an animal feels bad, the animal says, you know, every time I eat these stupid plants, I don't feel very good, or I'm not reproducing, or my feet are going numb, I'm going to go eat something else. Incidentally, reason caterpillars come out in the spring is because the new young leaves have far less lectins than the big old leaves. And so if you're a plant predator, you ought to have your babies born when the lectins.

aren't going to affect you as much. Cool. So let's go back in layman's terms here because we're talking about a lot of high-level stuff. So for people that are listening and they're confusing and say, okay, are plants bad for me now? Your answer to that would be. So I'm a plant predator. If you've ever been with me, I eat tons of plants, but you've got to know who you like and who you don't like. For someone that's listening that has no clue where to start, can you give us the yes list and the no list, like five of each?

Yeah, kind of to finish the answer to your original. question. None of us, our ancestors, ate a grain or a bean until 10,000 years ago when agriculture started. The reason we didn't is because the lectins in grains and beans are so lethal without cooking and preparing them properly that it'll kill you. For instance, ricin, the white powder that we kill people with is the lectin of the castor bean. And only a couple molecules of it will kill you. So we're all originally from Africa. And we have never been exposed, for instance, to grains and beans until 10,000 years ago. And that's a blink in evolution.

What's even worse that most people don't realize is that up until 500 years ago, when Colombian trade started, Christopher Columbus, we had never been exposed to a plant from North or South America. And all of us in America are either from Europe, Asia, or Africa. even Native Americans are actually from Asia, and they're not native either. Sorry, guys. And so none of us were exposed to American or South American plant compounds until 100 years ago. So some of our favorite foods, like peanuts, like cashews, like quinoa, like squashes, like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant.

Cheea seeds. Chia seeds. I can't tell you the number of women who have autoimmune disease that a chia seed is one of their big provokers. What about flaxseed? Black seeds are great. So why? Okay. It turns out the plant has a strategy. If it encases its seed in a hard shell that you cannot digest, it wants you to eat that seed because you will eat those seeds and you won't chew most of them and they will go through

your intestines intact and you will poop them out someplace else with a nice, generous dilap of fertilizer and it's great. It's a chance for reproduction for that plant. Exactly. The plant wants you to do that. Believe it or not, that's why the plant wants you to eat its fruit because the seed, like an apple seed is imperviable to digestion. So it wants you to eat that whole seed. One of my side hustles is selling my clothes online. I think that everyone should have a side hustle. I've been very, very outspoken about this. And I think as a woman, we are constantly either donating our clothes or giving them to friends. And I think as a woman, it's so important that when we're done with clothes that we donate them or we sell them. So how I like to sell my clothes is on Poshmark, okay? First of all, I found out about Poshmark because there was this skirt that this girl was wearing. It was like this pink floral skirt. And we were out to dinner and I went up to her and I said, I have to know where you got this silk skirt. It was this beautiful, like long silk skirt that sort of hit the ankle,

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Buy the skirt, rock it on Instagram. It's so fun. So I've made a nice side hustle off of selling my clothes, and I can also simultaneously shop for things that are maybe possibly sold out. So some things that we love about Poshmark. You can download the app for free, tons of brands to shop from. Honestly, like guys, they have everything from makeup, like I said, the Kylie Jenner lip kits, to Michael Coors, to J.Crew, to Nike,

guess kind of everything poshmark is the easiest way to buy and sell fashion items also make up so definitely go and check it out shipping is easy for both the seller and the buyer it's super fast super efficient listeners of the skinny confidential him and her get $5 off your first purchase all you have to do is enter the invite code confidential five when you sign up that's invite code confidential five happy shopping so i was reading and tell me if i'm wrong here i'm to remember you were mentioning this is why certain fruits are color the way they are, right? Because they want to attract the being to eat it and then they're like a peach, right? And then they want that peach seed to. So this is the reason. And is this why we as humans are attracted to certain colors like marketers, you know, marketers like myself come and use reds, yellows, oranges.

Bingo. Yeah, the only animals that have color vision are fruit predators. So birds have color vision. Great apes have color vision. We have color vision. Your dog does not have color vision because he's. He could care less if a squirrel is gray or red or whatever. If it's moving, he wants to eat it. So they don't need to see color. And so the plant is so unbelievably smart that the plant doesn't want you to eat its fruit until its shell of the baby is hardened and you can't digest it. So to tell you that it's time to eat the fruit, it changes color. And the color it uses to tell you it's ripe is what marketers know is the yellows, orange, reds,

the purples. And then you know, you want it. Yeah, urgency. So can you give us a list of five yeses and five noes when it comes to vegetables or fruit? So in general, if it's green, eat it, and you'll become lean. So all of the cruciferous vegetables are just fantastic. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale. Cucumber? Cucumber? No, it's a squash. Now, if you peel it and deseed it, it's perfectly fine. And in fact, if you're in France in the south of France or even in Italy, you will actually see that the cucumbers are peeled and seeded and deceded on the trays of fresh vegetables that are brought to the table. Let me ask you this, though, real quick, there's a curveball. Why are tomatoes red? So the plant actually wanted you to eat those, but you

weren't exposed to those plants before. And sadly, the nightshade, they're called the deadly nightshades for a reason. And the peel and the seeds have the lectins in them. And Italians always peel and de-seed their tomatoes before they make sauce. In fact, I was in Sicily this fall talking with chefs and they use a lot of tomatoes in Sicily. I said, you know, you guys use a lot of tomatoes. And I said, why? And he said, well, as long as you take the peel and seed out, it's fine, it's perfectly safe. It's good for you. And I said, how'd you know that? And he said, my mother taught me, my grandmother taught her. And everybody knows that. So to clarify, you're not against nightshades necessarily or tomatoes.

You're just, you're against the seeds and the peel. Yeah. So I, my grandmother was French and she trained my mother. Always had to peel and de-seed tomatoes. So growing up, I never had a tomato without a peel and a seed. And it thought it was really weird when I first had a slice of tomato with peals and seeds and said, this is really weird. This may be a weird question, but how do you de-seed a tomato? Is there a de-seater that you recommend?

I am so glad you asked that question. The clever Romans hybridized tomatoes to make the Roma tomato, you know, those kind of long oblog ones, to have the most peel-to-seed ratio. So those clever Romans, what they did is you drop the tomato into boiling water for 30 seconds and cut it in half, the peel pops right off, and then you squeeze the seeds out, and you've got a perfect tomato to work with. That's so easy. It's so easy.

You just drop it in, like, hot boiling water and then squeeze the seeds and it comes out. Yeah, it's really cool. So you're looking at the peel and the seeds is not poison, but it's just you want to avoid it at all costs. Yeah, exactly. And if you really don't want to go to that trouble, Italian tomato sauces, Italian tomato sauce, Pace are made without the peeling seeds by law. So you can get it from Italy. The other thing, get yourself an instant pot and put the whole tomato in there.

A pressure cooker will destroy all lectins except gluten. It is the best device to do a plant paradox friendly lifestyle. And they make things so easy. It's so quick. So I mentioned this earlier. Like I said, we have a lot of notes here, and we've kind of glazed with this one, but you are an actual, you are a very accomplished heart surgery of over 10,000 heart surgeries. What did you see as the most common reason for people coming to visit you? I know, obviously they become very sick and they need the surgery.

But is there something that you saw that was common across? the majority of your patients? In the good old days, most heart surgery, coronary bypass surgery, was done on smokers. And they had a particular type of disease that was actually, they had narrowings in the first part of their coronary arteries, but the rest of their arteries were gorgeous. And so for surgeons, you know, and all these smokers were nice and skinny. And so for surgeons, you know, we're just kind of rubbing our hand saying, oh, man, this is a chip shot.

I can do this, you know, like dunk in a basketball for Kobe Bryant. As time progressed, we started seeing patients who had diabetes or pre-diabetes. And believe it or not, over 80 million Americans now have pre-diabetes. About 60 to 80 percent of all Americans that I see have pre-diabetes. And telling someone they're a pre-diabetic is like telling a woman she's a little bit pregnant. So these people have crud up and down their coronary arteries. And I got interested in this because I'm a surgeon and a cardiologist, but most cardiologists have never seen the inside of a coronary artery.

They see shadows on x-rays. So we'd see all this crud on the inside of the coronary arteries, and this crud would look exactly like the babies that I do heart transatlore. plants on who had a immunological attack against their coronary arteries from rejection. And so I posited, and I talk about this in my next book, which is called the longevity paradox, that the crud that we're seeing in coronary arteries is not a cholesterol problem. It's actually a immune attack on our coronary arteries by our immune system. And it actually all comes from leaky gut. Okay. So let's talk about leaky gut.

I want to talk about the gut. Okay. Tell us, just give us in layman's terms, like Michael said earlier, just what is the gut? So we can understand that. Okay. So there is a tube that goes from your mouth all the way down to your rear end. And that tube is actually your skin turned inside out. And it's actually a tunnel that goes through you. Your gut has the surface area of a tennis court.

And you've got to kind of sit there and visualize that, that right now, inside of you, there is a tennis court surface area where, and that tennis court surface area is only one cell thick. Now, most of us, not including the current young generation, that's kids, not millennials, played a game called Red Rover, where we had two lines of kids and we locked arms and people came running across and you tried to break through. Actually, all cultures have this game. But kids don't play it anymore. He can't do it on a computer. So anyhow, it's a close-line little Jimmy. Yeah, boom. Boom.

Exactly. So these cells that line our gut are only one cell thick. And they're held together locked arms by what are called tight junctions. And so this entire barrier, this entire foot tennis court is just one cell thick. And they're all held together with these tight junctions. Now, lectins. have this really cool thing is they will attach to one of these cells to a sugar molecule, and they make another chemical called zonulin,

and zonulin breaks these tight junctions, makes them pop apart. So once that happens, lectins, which are foreign proteins, and bacteria and pieces of bacteria, go through the gap. It's like the gap in our border. Now on the other side of our border is your immune system, basically your cops. 60% of all of our white blood cells are lined up right around the wall of our intestine. Why? Because that's where the bad guys are going to come through.

And so when we get a leaky gut, and believe me, I now think that 100% of all diseases that people have are caused by a leaky gut. 100%. 100%. I haven't seen one yet that isn't caused by a leaky gut. And if you had asked me what I thought about leaky gut 15 years ago, I would have said it was pseudoscience. It was, you know, oh, boy, you know, I need to have a flowing robe to talk about this. It's absolutely not.

We now know because of sophisticated blood work that we can get on any human being, you've got leaky gut. If you have arthritis, if you have Parkinson's, if you have Alzheimer's, If you have cancer, if you have heart disease, if you have diabetes, it's all because of leaky gut. So let me play devil's advocate because I've got to do. For the critics of this theory or critics of you, what would your answer to them be? What they said, I don't agree with that. So I'm not saying that I don't.

I'm just playing. Let me have your blood. And we'll send it off to an independent lab. And we'll look for markers of leaky gut, such as zonulin, which is this chemical that breaks these bonds, anti-zonulin, anti-actin. We can measure whether there are pieces of lectins in your bloodstream. We can measure whether there are activation of what are called inflammatory cytokines in your bloodstream that cause these various disease processes.

And it is fascinating. Let me give you an example. I've had myself as one of the subjects in a paper I gave at the American Heart Association last March of 102 patients. with biomarker-proven autoimmune disease, things like lupus, like MS, like Crohn's, like ulcerative colitis, Hashimoto's, like Kelly Clarkson had. And in six months following my program, 95 out of 102 people, including myself, were biomarker negative and off of all medications.

I have a marker called anti-nuclear antibody, which is often associated with lupus, and I was positive and I turned it off by following my program. And then just to prove my point, I turned it back on by cheating. And then I turned it back off. So we can actually prove that this is happening. So what if someone's sitting at home? What are three things that they can do today to change leaky gut? Okay.

So the first thing is get all grains out of your life. Sorry about that. I know. Sorry about that. And corn. Does beer count? Beer count. Beer count. Okay. Change to red wine. If you can't tolerate red wine, and some people can't,

rosé will do in a pinch. But champagne is actually proven in France, of course, to limit dementia in women who drink champagne. Yeah, Michael. See that? Yeah. And my wife shows me that paper every time she wants some champagne. That's one thing you can do. Now, the second thing is, the more olive oil that I can get into you the better. Now, one of my sayings is the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. And seriously, that's what you want to do.

So if you're going to eat some eggs, I want you to pour olive oil on it. If you're going to have some broccoli, I want you to pour olive oil on it. Bring it to the table. Do you have a specific brand in the U.S. that you really like? Yeah, you know, there's actually, people are always worried about this. There is a lot of adulterated olive oil. There's a great California company called California Olive Ranch. It's almost in every store now.

And it's a good company. It's cheap. It's not adulterated. It's grown here in California. There's another great company called Bariani, which I've gotten to know the owner and probably the best olive oil in the United States that you can find. The other great company is O olive oil, and you can see that as well. In a pinch, go to Costco.

Costco has a square bottle, Kirkland, Toscana. It's got a label on the top that says it was produced in Tuscany. I've actually toured the plant. By law, it has to use tuscan olives. It can't be brought in from any other place. And if you really want to go out on a limb, I now produce an olive oil from Morocco, which is 30 times more antioxidants than any other olive oil in the world. Okay.

So now we got that answer. So let's go back. Why olive oil? So olive oil contains what are called polyphenols. And how do you remember that? Just remember polywana phenol, like polywana cracker. Polyphenols are really what makes the difference in our long-term health, in terms of our brain health, in terms of our heart health, in terms of our longevity.

Many people know that red wine has a polyphenol called resveratrol, which clearly increases lifespan. So olives have an incredible polyphenol, several of them, that actually have been shown to, in a new paper, we actually will start producing vitamin C. We do not have the enzymes to make our own vitamin C, but one of the polyphenols in olive oil has now been shown to allow us to make vitamin C, and we could spend an hour on why that. that's so important. A huge paper out of Spain a couple years ago called the Perimen study took 65-year-old people, put them on a Mediterranean diet, divided them into three groups, but we'll simplify. One group had to use a liter of olive oil per week. That's about 12 to 14 tablespoons a day. The other group went on a low-fat Mediterranean diet, same calories, followed for four years. The group that had the olive oil had not only the same

memory, but improved memory after four years. These are 69-year-old people. The low-fat Mediterranean diet group lost memory, as you might expect. The women in the olive oil group had 67% less breast cancer rates than the low-fat Mediterranean diet. And the olive oil group had significantly less heart disease and stroke compared to the low-fat Mediterranean diet. Okay, some people are going to say olive oil makes you gain weight? What about that? So that group, the olive oil group, using a liter of olive oil per week, lost weight, whereas the low fat group gained weight, even though their calories were controlled. Get me the olive oil. Yeah. Yeah. What is your third tip? So the third tip, the more you feed the bugs in your gut what they like to eat, the better off

you're going to be long term. Now, what are they like to eat? They love cruciferous vegetables. So substitute cauliflower rice for regular rice, and you'll be just fine. Sweet potatoes, tarot root, yucca, hecama. So what I do is I go buy some guacamole from Trader Joe's or Costco. They make it without tomatoes. You know, spoiler alert, there are no tomatoes in traditional guacamole. It does not exist.

And so I take heikama sticks. And I use that as my dipping chip. And it works great. You get the crunch you want and you'll get guacamole, which is avocado. And avocado, by the way, has the same oil as olive oil. But it doesn't have as many polyphenols as olive oil. Let me ask you this because we haven't touched on this at all. And I don't know if I've, and I think you touched on this a little bit in your book, meat, red meat, poultry, fish.

How do you feel about it? So I was born and raised in Nebraska and Milwaukee. And so, you know, meat is king. Yeah, they have some good meat over there. And unfortunately, the evidence is getting stronger and stronger for a variety of reasons that red meat. And red meat is beef, pork, and lamb is really mischievous in terms of actually cancer and also in increasing or decreasing our longevity. And the longevity paradox, which will be out in March, goes into this even deeper than I do in the plant paradox. And it makes me very sad to say that because I will have a grass-fed, grass-finished piece of beef four times a year.

But that's about it. That's another important thing. People have to understand when they see on the label grass-fed beef or organic beef, what that means is, absolutely nothing. If a cow eats grass for one day and then is taken to the feedlot and fed grain, you can put grass fed. If you see the words organic, believe it or not, that means they were fed organic grains or beans because they were certified as organic. Same way with organic salmon. Nobody followed the salmon around to see if it was eating organically. That means the salmon was in a pen feeding organic grains and beans, and that's not what salmon eat.

So the consumer has to be so smart and say, you know, everybody is trying to trick me. And so if you find grass-fed and grass-finished beef and want to include it as a tiny portion of your diet, go right ahead. Same way with chickens. Almost all chickens are fed grains, even pastured chickens. So you've got to know your farmer. pastured eggs, omega-3 eggs are probably pretty safe, but believe it or not, the yoke's the best part, throw the white away. Okay, throw the white away.

Wow, that's different. Yeah. Why throw the white away? So, animal protein ages us. If you want to age rapidly, eat animal protein. See, Michael, with that schnitzel the other night you ate? So, yeah, and quite frankly, stop putting your weight protein powder in your shakes. It's animal protein.

And if you want to age rapidly, You know, there's a very famous song that women spend the first 15 years of their life trying to look old, and then the rest of their lives, they try to look young. Let me ask you this. And how much do genetics play in this? Because I'll give you an example. My dad is 75 now. The guy has an immense aversion to vegetables, doesn't eat him. He has been eaten red meat his whole lives from Illinois.

And he's in perfect health, perfect cholesterol, and looks great. I might not attest to that. How does that happen? Because most people, they saw his diet and the way he would say there's no way this diet should work. So there's a recent paper out studying several million of people looking at the effect of genetics on outcome in terms of diseases and longevity. And of these multiple millions of people, actually from all around the world in this study, genetics plays 8% in what's going to happen to you, only 8%. So everything else is environmental and food. So when people think about genetics, what's really interesting, and I talk a lot about this in Longivity Paradox,

I had a lot of the diseases that my dad had as I was getting him in middle age. And, you know, I was told, well, it's genetic. You know, your dad has high blood pressure. He's pre-diabetic. He has high cholesterol. He's getting coronary artery disease. You can't help it. Well, lo and behold, when I changed my diet, all of these problems went away. So it's not the genes you're born with, but I learned to eat like my father. And so I actually carried the same microbiome as my father. And it turns out that you could take identical twins and raise them in different families, which has been done.

The twins have no microbiome that look anything like each other. They have a microbiome that looks exactly like their family that they were raised with. And it turns out that college students will share microbiomes, husbands and wives. If they eat alike, we'll share our microbiomes. There's a really cool study that shows the reason we kiss and deep kiss is you actually want to have your bacteria in your mouth, check out if you're compatible with the bacteria of that person you're kissing. And there is some pretty good evidence that the bacteria in our mouth actually choose who we're going to fall in love with by giving some really cool hormones to your brain.

My bacteria chose you, Michael. Too much information. It's so romantic. Isn't that nice? I have kind of a plot twist question. What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting? So I started writing about intermittent fasting over 12 years ago. And it was actually a huge chapter in my first book called Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution.

And my editor killed most of the chapter. She said, this is so crazy that people are going to think you're weird anyhow, but nobody's going to do this. And I said, yeah, but here's the data. Here's everything. She said, no, no, I'll give you two pages. So I was actually, as far as I know, the original person who talked about intermittent fasting. And I do it kind of a weird way. From January 1st till June 1st every year, during the week, I fast 22 out of 24 hours.

I eat all my calories between 6 and 8 o'clock at night. So 22 out of 24 hours, I'm not eating a thing. I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat lunch. On the weekends, I eat two meals. But I do that for six months, and I've done that now for 12 years. So why do I do that? Well, because believe it or not, we're designed to go through a period.

of time without food or very limited access to food. That would usually have been in the winter. And the winter could have been a dry season. It could have been a wet season. It could have been a rainy, a cold season like Minnesota right now. But there was always a time of less food. And we're a unique ape. We're called the fat ape for a reason.

We are able to store fat. And if you think about it, there really aren't any fat gorillas or chimpanzees. that big gut of gorilla is actually a fermentation tank, but that's another story. So we have the ability to store fat. So that means we could go two, three days, months without eating. And no other Great Ape can do that. That's why there are no guerrillas in Siberia. That's allowed us to, you know, take over the world.

Is this why maybe the human body is confused because it constantly feels like it's going into the winter season, so it's storing unnecessary fat? Yeah, what we do is we get triggers to actually make us store fat. And one of the triggers is daylight. And daylight has a lot of blue light. And blue light actually tells us to eat because during the summer, there's intense blue light and a long period of blue light. And so we're actually stimulated to eat from that blue light because

the winter is coming and we'd be dumb not to pack on the pounds because we can use it. And people who did that obviously survived and so that's part of our genetic programming. The problem is now LED lights, fluorescent lights, lights on our computers, on our tablets, on our cell phone are primarily blue light. So we 24 hours a day are now exposed to blue light. And believe it or not, movie theaters have known this for years. That's why all those coming attractions, everybody all of a sudden is getting up and heading to the concession stand and bringing back, you know, the 14 pound tub of popcorn with the Diet Coke. That makes a lot of sense.

And so we're constantly being stimulated by blue light. So here's another thing your listeners can do. there's programs on all of our phones, on all of our computers to have a dim, and some of them are automatic. And they go with sundown and sun up. If that's not enough, buy yourself a pair of blue blocking sunglasses. And they're like $10 on Amazon. And some of them are really cool. You can all look like Bono.

And just put them on the minute you go in the house, you can still watch TV, you can still be on your tablet. but you can still, you know, do anything you want, but you'll block blue light. I have to get specific with you on something. When you're fasting for 22 hours a day, are you drinking anything? Are you having tea, coffee, or just water? Yeah, I'm having, I'm actually having green and mint tea. And I have about five cups a day, and I do that to keep my iron levels low. Iron ages us dramatically.

And tea, green tea or black tea, will actually leach iron. out of you. Is there a specific brand? I actually vary, but there's a interesting fermented green tea from China that has some very interesting anti-aging properties called Pew A-T-E-H-R, P-U-Dash-E-H-R. And I have that every day. Is it called pure air? Yeah, yeah. I love that tea. I talked about that on the skinny confidential. Yeah. So do this, and believe it or not, it feeds an increasingly.

incredibly important gut bug called acermansiae mucinophilia. And it turns out that people who have this bug don't get diabetes and for lack of a better word, they live forever. Okay. Is there a specific brand of purity or can you get any just pure tea from China? Get the organic ones. There's several good ones. Okay. Sorry, Michael. I have one more question about intermittent fasting. Michael's going to kill me. When you're intermittent fasting on the weekends, what time do you eat? On the weekends? So I usually almost never eat breakfast. Breakfast is the least important meal.

Remember, breakfast means break fast. And the longer you go between the nighttime meal to the first meal of the day, the better it is for your brain, the better it is for your gut bugs, believe it or not. So I'll usually have a salad for lunch on the weekends. And when you talked about coriferous, is that how you say it? Cruciferous. Cresiferous vegetables. Can you juice or put them in a smoothie and what do you recommend?

Yeah, so put them in a smoothie. Please do not juice your vegetables. If you do juice your vegetables, please throw the juice away. Take the pulp, which is what your gut microbiome wants to eat and then put it in whatever you're going to do. But the best thing is buy yourself a blender. I mean, a magic bullet works fine, a neutral bullet. If you want to invest in a Vitamixir, that's great.

There's some other really good ones out there. Ninja makes a good one, for instance. So that's an easy way to do it. You really want the whole vegetable, not the juice. So we've covered a lot of ground here like I knew we would, and we could just keep going on and on and we're limited for time here. We've got to do this again sometime. But for the listeners that are out there and like, okay,

there's been so much covered in this interview and they're feeling overwhelmed and they're stressed on how to begin. What would your parting words be or how would you coach somebody that came to and said, I need to get started to fix my diet, but I don't quite know where to start. Okay. So on January 8th, my new book, The Plant Paradox, quick and easy will be released and you can get it at anywhere you want to buy a book. We have a 30-day challenge that's going to start January 15th and end on Valentine's Day.

And the book gives you 30 days of recipes. It makes this science not so nerdy. It actually, I call it the Plant Paradox for dummies, but it isn't. It's simplified on how to do this, how a working family can do this, how a family with kids can do this. So you can actually go to at Plant Paradox 30 to sign up for the challenge. And you don't have to do the challenge, but I'm going to do it. We've had a lot of fun celebrities. that are going to join in.

So, and we're going to be posting every day. And anyone can do it. Where can they find you on Instagram? So on Instagram, where am I? I met Dr. Stephen Gundry. That's where I am. I don't know where I am. We'll pimp your Instagram out in the show notes.

And all, and your site is just Dr. Stephen Gundry? Yeah, Dr. Stephen Gundry. And on Amazon, Dr. Gundry. Dr. Gundry.com. Thank you so much for coming on. You are so, so knowledgeable. I learned so much. Well, sorry about that.

Thank you, Dr. Thank you. Thanks for having me. As always, let's do another fun TSC giveaway. If you guys want to win the skinny confidential meal plan, simply tell me your favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram. Lots of fun, healthy, very on-brand recipes. Thank you guys so much for listening.

Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so you can get all the updates and you've rated and reviewed it on iTunes. See you next week.