The Dr. Hyman Show - The Science Of Your Gut Microbiome: How Healing Your Gut Can Improve Your Physical and Mental Health with Dr. Steven Gundry

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

View the Show Notes For This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal Get Ad-free Episodes & Dr. Hyman+ Audio Exclusives Dr. Steven Gundry is one of the world’s top cardiothoracic surgeons and a pioneer in nutrition. He hosts a top-rated health show, The Dr. Gundry Podcast, is the founder and Director of The International Heart and Lung Institute Center for Restorative Medicine, and is the founder of Gundry MD, a line of wellness products and supplements. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Plant Paradox, The Plant Paradox Cookbook, The Plant Paradox Quick & Easy, and The Longevity Paradox, along with national bestsellers The Plant Paradox Family Cookbook, The Energy Paradox, Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution, and Unlocking the Keto Code, and has had more than three hundred articles published in peer-reviewed journals on using diet and supplements to eliminate heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and multiple other diseases. He just released his latest book, Gut Check: Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Mitopure, Beekeeper’s Naturals, and Momentous. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. Support essential mitochondrial health and save 30% on Mitopure. Visit TimelineNutrition.com/Drhyman and use code DRHYMAN30. Listeners can save 20% off sitewide on Beekeeper’s Naturals. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/hyman and use code HYMAN. Head over to livemomentous.com/mark for 20% off creatine, collagen, and all of their best-in-class products. In this episode we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): How Dr. Gundry and I discovered the significance of the gut microbiome (8:05 / 5:29) Hallmarks of a healthy microbiome (15:21 / 12:45) Feeding the microbiome (17:11 / 14:35) Maintaining a healthy, impenetrable gut wall through mitochondrial uncoupling (23:03 / 20:27) The role of polyphenols in the gut microbiome (32:50 / 27:55) Research on the microbiomes of centenarians and their ability to produce Urolithin A (48:23 / 43:28) The mood, brain, gut connection (1:02:32 / 57:37) Cancer and the gut microbiome (1:05:42 / 1:00:47) Dr. Gundry’s tips for gut health (1:18:31 / 1:13:36) Get a copy of Gut Check: Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health.

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let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever wondered how the microbiome plays a role in our health across all manner of diseases and health conditions, you're going to love this podcast because today I'm bringing you a fascinating conversation with one of the leading thinkers in health and wellness, Dr. Stephen Gundry, about one of my favorite topics, the gut microbiome. Stephen Gundry is one of the world's top cardiothoracic surgeons and a pioneer in nutrition. He hosts a top-rated health show called The Gundry Podcast. He's founder and the director of the International Heart and Lung Institute Center for Restorative Medicine and founder

of GundryMD, a line of wellness products and supplements. After a distinguished career as a professor and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery at Loma Linda University, Dr. Gundry changed his focus to curing modern diseases via dietary changes. He's the author of New York Times bestsellers like The Plant Paradox, The Plant Paradox Cookbook, The Plant Paradox Quick and Easy, The Longevity Paradox, and many more. He's had more than 300 articles published in peer-reviewed journals using diet and supplements to eliminate heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and multiple other diseases. He also just released his newest book, Gut Check, Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health.

Now, there has been an explosion of understanding and research around the microbi physical, and emotional health. Now, there has been an explosion in our understanding and research around the microbiome, and yet despite regulating so many of our bodily functions and being so critical to our overall long-term health, conventional medicine has just not integrated this knowledge into teaching or practice. Dr. Gundry and I begin our conversation by talking about how we each came to learn about the significance of the gut microbiome through our medical careers. And he shares then the keys to a healthy microbiome. And we go in-depth on the role of something called polyphenols, which are newly discovered compounds that act on the gut in remarkable ways. These colorful plant compounds found in food and how they feed our gut bacteria. And we're just at the beginning when it comes to understanding

every interaction and reaction that takes place in our gut microbiome. You've likely heard about prebiotics and probiotics, but now Dr. Gundry explains the importance of postbiotics, as well as how they are made in the gut and how they influence our health. We dive deep into the latest understanding of how compounds like urolithin A and resveratrol regulate so many areas of our health. Dr. Gundry explores the relationship between the gut microbiome, depression, and mood disorders, as well as how it relates to the effectiveness of immunotherapy drugs on cancer treatment. And finally, we talk about the prevalence of leaky gut and the top foods Dr. Gundry recommends to avoid in order to create a healthy gut microbiome. And now, on to my conversation with Dr. Gundry. So, Stephen Gundry, how are you doing, man? It's good to see you again.

Mark, great to see you. I hear we're actually fairly near each other today, so welcome to the left coast, as we like to say. The left coast. I don't know if I'm going to dive into that trap. I'm going to just stay off of that topic. But I'm excited to have this conversation with you, Steve, because you've been pioneering a lot of the work around thinking what causes such problems of inflammation in our society and how that's linked to so many diseases. You've written so many books about it. You've helped people really change their lives and their diets. And your new book is the book I actually wanted to write about 20 years ago, but I thought no one's going to want

to read about poop. So I didn't write it, but I wrote other books and I included it kind of sideways, but the microbiome and the gut is having its moment. It's sort of the wonder kid of science right now. There's billions of dollars of research pouring into this. Our understanding of the nuances and complexity of what's going on in our gut is so huge. And you really unpack this in your new book, which everybody should get a copy of. It's out now. It's called Gut Check, Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health. That's a tall order. It is indeed, but I don't know how many people are going to be watching this versus listening to it, but I have a very large painting right behind me. Is that your quote? The road to good health is paved with good intestines.

That's good. And, you know, the amazing thing is, you know, Hippocrates 2,500 years ago, the father of medicine basically said that all disease begins in the gut. And the longer I've been doing this now, 25 years, the guy was right. And you and I have spent, you know, the vast majority of our adult careers now figuring out how he knew this and applying this. And so, you know, Gut Check is, you know, my, I like to think it's my best book. Plant Paradox was a biggie, but I think this is kind of Plant Paradox 2.0. I agree. I think this is one of your best books.

I think it's such a deeply researched, well-thought-out book about how the gut plays a role in so much of what's going on with our chronic disease crisis in America. And I include mental health in that chronic disease crisis. And I think that as a functional medicine doctor, we didn't really quite know why or what, but we knew how. And so we would really be focused on taking care of the gut as the first principle in helping anybody with anything. So when people would come to see me as a functional medicine doctor 25 almost 30 years ago i would start with the gut no matter what was going on i would make sure their gut was healthy i would do a gut reboot we had this thing called the 5r program and functional medicine we still do to

remove the bad stuff replace the things that are missing like maybe enzyme to re-inoculate with healthy bacteria repair the gut lining by providing the right nutrients and polyphenols and so forth replace prebiotics and restore, which basically means deal with stress and how that affects our gut as well. So it's really been a methodology we've used for decades in functional medicine with profound effects. And I remember, see, when I first started doing this, I would follow this protocol because I learned it at these conferences.

And I was like, all right, I'm going to try this and see if it works. But I don't know if it's actually going to work. And she'll say, oh my God, my arthritis is gone. My depression is gone. My autoimmune diseases are gone. Obviously, my gut issues are gone. And I was like, my migraines are gone. I'm like, what? How does this work? And I've been a student of this for now decades. And it's just incredible to see the emergence of this science now informing conventional medicine. But I would say this, and I think this is why your book is so important. Even though the microbiome is receiving such great attention and there's much science going into understanding it and how to use it, the average practitioner or even the

exceptional practitioner out there, if they're trained in traditional medicine, is not paying attention to this at all. I mean, my daughter now is in medical school in Utah. And I said, Rachel, what are you learning about the microbiome? She's like, nothing. I'm like, wow. I think, you know, my daughter in medical school has not learned anything about this. And it's unfortunate because it's key to being able to help so many people with everything from heart disease to cancer, to diabetes, to Alzheimer's, to autoimmune disease, to allergies, to digestive problems, to depression, to anxiety, to ADD, to neurodegenerative. I mean, the list goes on and on, right?

So can you talk about how you came to understand this and also, you know, how our gut microbiome is directly linked to our health and longevity? Like, what's going on? Holy cow, where do we start? Yeah, no, but let me continue on what you just said. I have the privilege of seeing third-year family practice residents rotate through my clinic for a month at a time. And they're, you know, about to go into practice. This is their final year. And just probably won't surprise you, but it might surprise our listeners that not one

of these individuals have ever heard of ordering a fasting insulin level. Oh, my God i know that's don't get me started on that no none of them have ever heard of you know a homa ir which is a way of looking at insulin resistance yeah and they go well what does that have to do with anything? I go, well, so you're right. I mean, one would have hoped, you know, you and I, we didn't know about this. You know, we thought that the GI tract was a hollow tube and crud went in and some digestive enzymes happened and whatever was left, we pooped out. And that was the end of the story. But the human microbiome project, which really just completed in 2017, opened our eyes to this incredible tropical rainforest of, you know, 100 trillion different bacteria that we just didn't even know were there. And so what that's been able to do is, okay, now we know they're there. There's like a hundred thousand petabytes of data in our microbiome. Like it's doing stuff all the time. And, you know, I argued in one of my

previous books that what I think we've done, since they have so many more genes than we do, and that genetic information is constantly being modified by viral genomes being inserted and cross-filtering of genes between bacteria, that I propose that we've actually done most of our computing, we've loaded it into our cloud computer or our brown computer. And the more we see the influence that these guys have on everything that's going to happen to us, the more you realize what an amazing, elegant design and what a brilliant idea to outsource most of our computing power to this tropical rainforest within us. Yeah.

And this is not that new of idea. You know, Dennis Burkett, which you learned about Burkett's lymphoma in medical school, he was a British scientist and he went to Africa on a missionary trip and he noticed, you know, all the villagers and the traditional tribal populations had no chronic disease. They were really healthy. And as soon as their cousins essentially moved into the city, they would get all the Western diseases. And for some reason, I don't know how he got this idea, but he decided to study their poop. And he basically found that the urban dwellers had stool weight of four ounces.

And the hunter-gatherers and tribal people had stool weights of two pounds. And I just came back from Africa, you know, and saw the elephant poop. It's like, it looks like a basketball, you know, like one little piece of it. And then they have huge amounts of fiber. And I saw, you know, the Hadza population, which is one of the last hunter-gatherer populations on the planet. Now, they have 20%, up to 20% of their diet is honey, which is all you think, oh, that's bad, you know, sugar. But the other thing they do is they're hunter and gatherer. So they gather a lot of tubers, these roots.

And these root vegetables, I don't know if you can call them, more like chewing on wood, but they basically dug one up, they dug up this wild yam, and they eat about 150 grams of fiber a day. And that mitigates any of the harm from the honey that they're getting, and they actually don't have these chronic Western diseases. So I think in our society, we've just done such a disservice. We saw the same thing in this study years ago about Burkina Vassal, like these kids who are eating Western diets versus study years ago about Burkina Faso, like these kids who were eating Western diets versus, you know, these traditional diets in Burkina Faso.

And they had profoundly different microbiomes, profoundly different health outcomes, no allergies, no autoimmune disease, none of the stuff we see here. So it's so intimately tied to our microbiome. And yet, it's shocking to me that in traditional medicine, even though we sort of now acknowledge it, there's no roadmap to do anything about it. And that's why gut check is such a great roadmap, because it provides people an understanding of what's going on, why it's a problem, and actually what to do about it. So I want to dive into this a little bit more with you. You know, when your microbiome is messed up, it causes all sorts of things. It screws up your

immune system, your hormones, your mental health, it shortens your life, it increases your risk of autoimmune disease, heart attacks, dementia, as well as arthritis, diabetes, cancer. What is gone wrong and what is the definition or the hallmark of a healthy microbiome? Well, one of the things we're supposed to have a huge number of different species of bacteria. And if you take the Hanza, for example, they have a phenomenal teeming tropical rainforest of different diverse species. And just like with any ecosystem, there's one species dependent on another species. I like to use the example of Yellowstone Park when they took out the evil, nasty, bad predator wolves, because they're evil and nasty, and we need to get rid

of them. And whoops, look what happened. The big bad wolf. And so one of the things that's interesting to me is, as I talk about, you really have to have diversity. You look at the hodzas. They have a very diverse microbiome. And we know that the bad guys are actually useful. And you want a few of these bad guys.

And they bring stuff to the table that we couldn't even anticipate just like a wolf is important in Yellowstone Park. So the Hansa's have this really diverse microbiome. You look at people who they were compared to in England, their microbiome is just a kind of a tropical wasteland. There's no diversity. Now, what's happened to us, you've already mentioned, the microbiome really wants to be fed prebiotic fiber. And back in the good old days, our great grandparents, actually, even here in the United States,

were doing a pretty good job of feeding the microbiome prebiotic fiber. We now have stripped all the fiber out of all of our foods in convenience sake, if nothing else. And, you know, you've been a huge spokesperson against processed and ultra processedprocessed foods. But I think people realize how bad these things are, but they're bad because we're literally starving the microbiome to death. And that's number one. Number two, one of the things that has been a revelation to me through the years, I've always been a big proponent of polyphenols. And these are the, you know, bright, dark colors in fruits and vegetables.

And you may remember a number of years ago, we thought that, number one, we've known that polyphenols are not well absorbed in our gut. And when we did all these experiments with polyphenols and cell cultures, there seemed to be a tipping point where polyphenols seemed to be pretty good, but then you got too many of them and all of a sudden they were really bad. There was even some research out of David Sinclair's lab that too much resveratrol might harm heart function. And we got into this, well, they cause hormesis. What's hormesis? Well, that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Well, now, because of the Human Microbiome Project,

we realize, and I talk about this in Gut Check, that polyphenols are actually one of the favorite foods of the microbiome. And they eat the polyphenols, and then they activate the polyphenols into an absorbable bioactive compound that then actually benefits us. And we miss the middle man yeah in in all of this and that's exciting because the whole book is man there's a middle man that we've we we didn't know they were there and now we're beginning to figure out why they're there and why we've got to have them there if we want to function as a proper animal. Yeah, I think this is really important. Two points that you brought up. One was the microbial diversity is really important. And this means, you know, the difference between a

sort of a complex Amazonian rainforest and a monocrop cornfield. It's exactly right. That's exactly right. An Amazon rainforest is incredibly robust. There's so many redundant systems. There's so much complexity. In complexity, there's health. So the more complex the ecosystem, the more healthy it is.

A monocrop cornfield, one bug or one disease, it's gone, right? And I think this is what's happening to us. We're seeing this dramatic decrease in microbial diversity. And we're going to talk about how to boost our microbial diversity because it is a bit tough to change our microbiome as we get older, but it's not impossible. And I think that this is a huge factor. This is sort of declining diversity. It's almost like it's like industrial agriculture for our gut versus regenerative farming, right? We want to know how to tend our inner garden and make it a complex, robust ecosystem. And I think it's just such an unappreciated thing. The other thing I want to drill down on is the polyphenols,

because you kind of mentioned it, and I just want people to really get this because historically, even in functional medicine, we talked about prebiotics and probiotics and healthy foods and so forth and fiber. And somehow, this polyphenol story, I didn't quite get it. And I don't know if you know this, Stephen, but a number of years ago, I got a root canal that went bad. I had taken out, I got guess what drug clindamycin. I ended up with C. difficile colitis. I ended up that turning into full blown colitis. My gut was inflamed from top to bottom. I was in bed for five months. I almost died. I lost 20 pounds. I had plenty of bloody problems a day. And I did my own stool test. Now, I've probably seen more than any doctor alive. Literally, they used to call me Dr. See Every Poop at Canyon Ranch because they made fun

of me for how many stool tests I used to do. And I did my own and it was probably the worst I'd ever seen. Like literally just calprotectin off the chart, no short chain fatty acids, no acromantia, no healthy bacteria. It was a mess. And I was like, wow, this acromantia thing, you know, and I started to kind of research about it, and I started to realize that, you know, we didn't have a probiotic then, and we do now, but we didn't have a probiotic then that you could take to replenish acromantia. The only thing that could make it grow was polyphenols. It loves pomegranate and cranberries and green tea. And so what I did to recover was actually create what I call my acromantia shake. I literally took concentrated pomegranate concentrate, concentrated

cranberry concentrate, matcha powder, and a bunch of other polyphenols, and I would make this thing with prebiotics and probiotics and polyphenols in this cocktail. And it was incredibly effective. And I was like, wow. And then I started using this with my patients, and it was profoundly effective. So I think we're going to get more into the polyphenols in a little bit, but I want to have you dive into something that I think is a fairly new concept when it comes to addressing what is the result of our poor diet, lack of fiber, lack of polyphenols, lack of prebiotics, lack of probiotics, and this lower microbial diversity, which is this phenomenon that happens called leaky gut. And you are a person who talks a lot about this. And one of the things you talked about, which I thought was novel

in the book, was this whole idea of mitochondrial uncoupling and how it helps us maintain a healthy gut wall. So we laid in the good stuff, but not the bad stuff. Yeah. So I spent the- What the heck is it? What the heck is it? First of all, I wish it wasn't called mitochondrial uncoupling. Um, I did not invent that term. It's a scientific term and I spent two books, my two previous books trying to explain it. And maybe I'm not as good an explainer as I should be. But when people hear the word uncoupling, they think of Gwyneth Paltrow getting, separating from her previous spouse. So uncoupling, there's a, Dr. Brand in the year 2000 wrote a very, very simple paper called Uncoupling to Survive.

And anyone who hasn't read it, it's a really easy read. And all you got to do, type in Google unc energy, taking glucose and carbon atoms and oxygen and put them through the electron transport chain, which I call really hard work and is very damaging. And as you and I know valves within our mitochondria, very much like a pop-off valve in a pressure cooker. Okay. Can I stop you there? Because I don't know if everybody knows what mitochondria are. They're basically these energy powerhouses in the cells. They take the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat and they burn it like an engine. They combust it and out comes energy in the form of ATP, water that you pee out, carbon dioxide that you breathe out, and all these waste products called free radicals. So that's what you're talking about. So now just so people have a context

about what that is, I think you can kind of go into it now. Making energy is really damaging. And so we actually have all these built-in pop-off valves. Now, the word coupling comes from you're trying to couple protons with oxygen to make ATP. You're trying to couple them together. says, okay, let the oxygen come in, but let a bunch of these protons not participate in making energy. Uncouple them from oxidative phosphorylation. Let them loose. So mitochondrial uncoupling was discovered way back in 1978 when the electron transport chain was fully developed. So we, it turns out, at baseline, you and I sitting here right now, 30% of all the calories that enter into our mitochondria never get made into ATP.

They are- 30%. 30%. While we're sitting here, they are wasted and they are uncoupled. Now you go, well, wait a minute, that's really stupid. Hunter gatherers are starving all the time. We were starving all the time. Why in the world would we waste 30% all of our potential power well it's because

two things we're warm-blooded animals and it turns out that uncoupling generates heat and we know all about hopefully a lot of people know about brown fat and brown fat is brown because it's so full of mitochondria that it literally looks brown. But brown fat is what we generate heat with. And that's because the mitochondria in brown fat are profoundly uncoupled. So they make more heat, more energy. They like less energy, but more heat. More energy. They make less energy, but more heat. Now that's part two of the weirdness. So Dr. Brand said, well, the weird thing is if you're starving to death,

the last thing you want to die is your mitochondria because your mitochondria are responsible for making energy. And if you don't have your mitochondria, that's it. You're a goner. the more signals that you're in trouble, you're starving, or things are bad, the more you ought to uncouple your mitochondria to protect them from damage. And now, part two of that is, with uncoupling your mitochondria, you send a signal to make more mitochondria to handle the workload, mitogenesis. And I use the example in the book, let's suppose we've got a dog pulling a dog sled, and let's call the dog the mitochondria,

and you and me the sled. The dog will pull the sled, you won't get very far, you won't get very far you won't go very fast but it'll work on the other hand if you added five more dogs to the dog sled and now have a six man six dog sled you'll go a lot faster you'll go a lot farther each dog will have to do a sixth of the work and they won't tire as fast, but you have to feed them more. You have to feed six dogs. And when you look at it that way, you understand how mitochondrial uncoupling is actually an incredibly beneficial thing to happen for an organism. And one of the wildest things is what he showed and others now have shown is the people who live the longest have the most uncoupled mitochondria. So to me, I want to sit around and teach people how to uncouple their mitochondria. And how do you do that?

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So let's get back to polyphenols. How come there's all these pretty colors in the fall, you know, all the beautiful oranges and reds and dark purples. Those are the polyphenols that were in the leaves of the plants that we didn't see because of the green chlorophyll. Well, what the heck are polyphenols doing in the plants? Well, it turns out that sunlight is really damaging to plant mitochondria. Their equivalent is our chloroplasts. And so photons from sunlight are as damaging to plant mitochondria as oxygen is to us. So plants make polyphenols, are you ready, drumbeat, to uncouple their mitochondria to protect them from the harmful sunlight and other environmental stressors. Okay, so that's what polyphenols do for plant mitochondria.

Now, when we eat them, our bacteria, we now realize, love polyphenols. They then make polyphenols available for absorption to us. And those polyphenols just happened to uncouple our mitochondria. So 20 years ago, we knew that, you know, all these polyphenol bright color diets were really good. We had no idea why they were so good. yeah now we know interesting so in a way i'm just sort of thinking the paradox of the uncoupling because if you're saying uncoupled mitochondria produce more heat but less energy uh they also induce mitochondrial biogenesis making more mitochondria which is a good thing but it also seems like don't we want to create more energy too? So isn't it kind of a paradox that we both need uncoupled and coupled mitochondria, one to produce heat, one to produce energy?

It makes absolutely no sense that if you're starving to death, you would waste more energy. And what he showed was that the more you protect your mitochondria from damage by having it work a little bit less and then stimulating more mitochondria production to carry the load. It's like the six dogs. It's six dogs. Exactly. And, you know, you mentioned now that we've learned about urolithin A, which we can get into. We're going to get into that. I want to get into that. Yeah. Okay. So we now know that, you know, here's some compounds that are made from polyphenol metabolism by gut bacteria that, lo and behold, make more mitochondria.

And it's like, what a cool design. Yeah. I mean, to me, honestly, Stephen, I just marvel at this. And I just, you know, I sort of came up with this term years ago as I began to understand the relationship between plants and humans. And actually, I took a quick course at Cornell. It was called Plants and Humans. And it was all about the interaction of plants and humans over the year, not necessarily from a microbiome perspective, but how we use them, everything

from psychedelics to building things to eating, whatever. And this concept I came up with is called symbiotic phytoadaptation, meaning we basically have co-evolved with plants to use their molecules to regulate our biology in ways that are optimizing our health. And it's not because the plants care or give a crap about what's happening to us, right? Although maybe they do, because we're all in this symbiotic relationship. But they want to use us to distribute their seeds, you know, fruit seeds. Yeah. Right. Fair enough.

Fair enough. So, you know, in Africa, basically, you could tell where the elephants went because they'd be eating palm trees in one area and they would poop them out all over. So there's like palm forest, like from the elephants that were spreading their seeds. But back to the polyphenols. The polyphenols, like you said, they're plants' defense mechanisms. They're their own defense mechanisms. So in a sense, they're their immune system. And sometimes they are a little bit toxic to us, like you mentioned. So it's really about understanding how do we use them properly and create this concept of phytohormesis, which can be good and particularly in longevity

and other things. But what you're talking about here is that the microbiome interacts so intimately with not just fiber and probiotic foods or fermented foods, but with these polyphenol classes of foods, which we really haven't understood until recently. And I think, you know, why don't you sort of explain the difference and then we can get into some of the specific polyphenols and what they do in the microbiome, between polyphenols and antioxidants. What's the difference? And you talk about gut buddies that are the missing link, the good buddies that are the missing link to process these polyphenols. Yeah, it's interesting.

For years, I used to, believe it or not, there's an international meeting on polyphenols every year. And the organizer. I believe there's a meeting on everything every year. Well, of course. And I used to present every year. One year in Lisbon, the head of this is a professor from France by the name of Marvin. He got up to start the meeting. He says, anybody here who thinks that polyphenols

are antioxidants you can leave the room because yeah he said because you are so far behind the research that i don't have time to catch you up and arrogant but okay yeah okay well it turns out the guy was right uh polyphenols are not antioxidants. They aren't. And one of the things I think I've talked about in this book and others, there's actually only two antioxidants in our mitochondria. One really surprises people, and that is melatonin. The second antioxidant is glutathione. And a lot of people, okay, great, i get it uh but those are the only two antioxidants within our mitochondria wait what about this catalase and superoxide dismutase and yeah but those aren't those are enzymes those aren't antioxidants yeah but they produce

antioxidants right yes yeah but the only two they're active in mitochondria glutathione and melatonin interesting wowatonin. Interesting. Wow. So keep going about the difference between antioxidants and polyphenols. So we're going, okay, well, wait a minute. We know that polyphenols are really good for us, blah, blah, blah. And if they're not antioxidants, what are they? Well, they're essentially signaling compounds. And the book goes into, there is such an amazing

communication system at multiple levels between the gut microbiome and us, our genome, our cellular working mitochondria specifically. And I think one of the most amazing things in terms of the design is a lot of people, we think, are convinced that mitochondria are ancient engulfed bacteria that about 2,000, 2 billion years ago, a non-eukaryotic cell, and I won't go into other reasons, ate a bacteria. And the bacteria said, hey, hey, wait a minute. Instead of you eating me, I'll tell you what. Why don't I make ATP for you? And in exchange, you give me something to eat, protect me from the environment. And for every molecule of glucose, I'll make 32 molecules of ATP. And this cell goes, oh, wait a minute, that's a pretty good deal.

Because with fermentation, for every molecule of glucose, I only get two molecules of ATP. So you mean I can get eight times as much ATP if I allow you to do the work for me? And the guy says yeah so we think that so ancient bacteria are our mitochondria they actually have their own dna and they can divide without the cell dividing they actually have a cellular membrane that looks exactly like a bacterial cell wall. Yeah, it looks like a little bacteria. It does look like a little bacteria. Now, I argue and others have argued that those are the mitochondria, our sisters of our bacteria.

Now, why? It turns out all of our mitochondria we inherit from our mother men sorry guys we don't give any mitochondria yeah yeah yeah it's all maternal we're just drones so those mitochondria we get all of our initial microbiome from our mother, not from our father. And so there is a really cool theory, which I like, is that the maternal microbiome communicates with the maternal mitochondria, and there is a language that these share. And with every passing year, we get to understand that language better. And part of that language is gasotransmitters. And it sounds crazy, but the farts that you make are actually important talking points between the microbiome and, among other things, the mitochondria. We also know that...

Wait, wait, I'm confused. How does your microbiome and mitochondria produce farts? No, the farts are actually there to talk to the mitochondria. So let me give you a great example. I don't know about this is good okay i got we got to go into this because i never heard this before oh you're gonna love this you're gonna love it all right so there are gases that are made from fermentation of prebiotic fiber and those gases for instance one of the most common gases is hydrogen gas,

the smallest molecule there is. Hydrogen gas is easily diffusible through the wall of the gut. And hydrogen gas, turns out, may be incredibly important in mitochondrial function. Let me give you just one teasing example. This work came out of Japan. Japanese looked at early onset Parkinson's disease patients. Then they looked at their gut microbiome compared to normal. And the gut microbiome in these Parkinson's patients did not produce hydrogen gas. And the regular group group did and they went oh that's interesting i wonder what would happen if we give these people hydrogen water hydrogen gas dissolved in water which is easy to do lo and behold their parkinson's system uh symptoms improve. Interesting. Because Parkinson's is a mitochondrial disease. Exactly. And so there you go. Son of a gun. You mean hydrogen and gas that I'm making as a process

of fermentation is actually a signaling molecule that tells my mitochondria things to do. I spend a lot of time talking about hydrogen sulfide, the so-called sewer gas or rotten egg smell. And hydrogen sulfide is incredibly important in terms of vascular health, if nothing else. We used to think that hydrogen sulfide was toxic, but that's because we didn't know where it became toxic and where it actually had benefit. Same with carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is actually a really cool regulatory gas that we make. Same with carbon dioxide. And we can go on and on.

Methane. We make methane gas, which is actually a gasotransmitter. Gasotransmitter. That's a whole other term. You come up with all this stuff I never heard before. This is pretty good. Gasotransmitter. That's what they're called. Or if you want, you can call them gasomethanes. So what is the mechanism? So methane, how does it work as a neurotransmitter then? So methane actually, it literally, so these are all, I used to call them text messages. You're the best, Stephen. I love how you think. You make these things so funny and simple to understand. It's great.

They literally are text messages about what we want things to do, the cellular system. I mean, just not to change the subject, recently, in fact, just this week, and actually it's a great point. You and I probably have been told or taught that lignans in flax seeds and flax seed oil are really good for you and have some really kind of cool anti-cancer properties yeah yeah right particularly in women yeah yeah particularly in women and we've known that this is true and there's some cool studies and we go okay yeah you need lignans well a paper just came out that lignans are eaten by the microbiome and the microbiome, get ready for this, make micro RNA. Micro RNA is the communication system that, you know, cells tell, you know, things to do, the work to do the micro rna is absorbed through the gut

and the micro rna literally stops cancer cells from doing their thing it turns them off so and this just came out this week and it's like no no actually this is something i've heard about for years that the micro rna from plants is getting absorbed and modulating our biology. And we've seen this in many other conditions. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. So it's not just like vitamins, minerals, polyphenols. Now we've got even the genetic material produced from bacteria is being absorbed and modulating our biology. So we are literally, I don't know, maybe, maybe we're just like walking little transport systems for the microbiome. I don't know if humans are really the in charge here. Oh, I completely agree with you.

I mean, you know, and the point of gut check is, look, if you take care of your microbiome, they'll take care of you because you're their home and they have a vested interest in you. And if you keep trying to starve them to death, if you keep trying to poison them like we do with our antibiotics and glyphosate, then it's no wonder that we're in the shape we're in. Yeah. Well, I want to dive into this because it's maybe a little abstract for people, but I want to make it really practical because I think there's some really fascinating research around some of these polyphenols called elagitanins that are in foods called pomegranates, we can eat, or walnuts, berries. And you have this great term called gut buddies. Like literally these gut buddies is the good guys living in there. The problem is we don't have that many friends anymore.

We don't have any good buddies left or maybe very few good buddies left in our gut microbiome. So when you don't have these, it can have serious health consequences. And you talk about this particular symbiotic relation between some of the foods we eat, our microbiome, and compounds they produce, something we call postbiotics. I just had a podcast with Uma Naidoo, and she was talking about psychobiotics. Yeah. Not crazy bacteria, but bacteria that act like psychiatric drugs to modulate mood, which I thought was great.

But this whole concept of prebiotics and probiotics, people understand. Fibers, prebiotics, and probiotics are like taking lactobacillus. But then there's these postbiotics, which are things that are made by your bacteria from eating certain foods that are molecules that then you absorb and regulate your biology in ways that have profound impacts on your health. So one of those metabolites is called urolithin A. And I've talked a little bit about it on the podcast, but this is such a great story because it illustrates it well. And there's so much research around it. So it's one of the most researched factors around this whole postbiotic phenomena. So can you explain, you know, the data around

this phenomena of urolithin A on super centenarians and their microbiome versus people who don't have this, this microbiome that actually can metabolize these phytochemicals. And so basically you can eat pomegranate all day long, but you're not going to make urolithin A, right? Right. Like 20% of the general population is able to do this. That means 80% of us aren't. But in the super centenarians, a lot more have this microbiome that actually makes urolithin A. So can you explain this whole interaction between our alleged tannin content in our diet and the bacteria that are regulating it and this metabolite that it creates for your left knee and what that does and how it relates to our health in general, our mitochondria and mitochondrial uncoupling

that you talked about? Yeah, maybe it's a bad... I mean, that was a lot, but it's like really important. And I think it's such a beautiful story because it illustrates this phenomenon so clearly for people and why it's important to take care of your gut buddies and invite more good gut buddies in there. Yeah, you know, I hate to use the expression, but it takes a village. And what we're learning and what I want people to understand from gut check is we used to think, OK, you need prebiotic fiber, and your gut buddies will take prebiotic fiber, and they'll make postbiotics. And by the way, gasotransmitters are postbiotic. And that's a good thing. But what we now know is you may have to have four or five guys each doing one job almost like an assembly line and if the first guy doesn't make

the next product the second guy can't make what he needs and it may need four or five different bacteria to get the end product so let's take for example urolin A. We know that the precursor is in pomegranates, in walnuts, in raspberries. But you're right, only about 14 to 20% of individuals, you could give them all of these precursors, they will never make urolithin A. And so you then look at super old people, and at least 50% of them make urolithin A. It could be as high as 70%. So we now understand that there are multiple guys that are involved in making this compound. And if you don't have those multiple guys, you could eat all the pomegranates in the world, but you'll never come up with this compound. So what's so cool about this compound is, and this is work out of Switzerland.

I've had the folks from- Amazentis. Yeah, Amazentis on my podcast several times because I'm so impressed with what they've done. So this stuff is actually makes mitophagy, makes mitogenesis. And actually, and I off camera with them, I'm pretty convinced it's because of mitochondrial coupling. And they have a recent paper that shows it has some really cool anti-cancer properties as well.

And I'll argue it's because of mitochondrial uncoupling. But it's fascinating that these super old people have this say, prebiotics fiber. And they looked at their gut microbiome diversity, and they looked at their markers of inflammation, which was HSCRP, C-reactive protein. They took a second group and gave them the same prebiotic fiber, but they also gave them fermented foods. It was primarily yogurts and vinegars. And lo and behold, the group that only got the prebiotic fiber had no change in gut diversity and no change in inflammatory markers. It was the group that got the fermented foods plus the fiber that had a change in the gut microbiome diversity and lowered their inflammation. And again, it's this conversation, it's this communication that makes the difference.

Was it because of the fermented foods that had bacteria in them and the probiotics in them? Was that the reason? Or was it because of the polyphenols in those? It's even better than that. I've got a whole chapter in Gut Check that dead men tell no tales, but dead bacteria do. And it turns out that there's folks don't eat your yogurt to have active yogurt cultures. Most of those probiotics will be killed by your stomach acid.

But it's the dead bacteria cell wall, and it's the postbiotics that are made during fermentation that is what you're actually looking for. And we now know that these compounds carry messages that are read by other bacteria. And one of the things that was interesting in acromantia research is that dead acromantia have much the same effect as live. Really? Yeah, as live. And it's like, what? Well, I have three male dogs. they're i'm not gonna ask why but

they're rescues but that's okay um they they're out sniffing at everything and they're putting urine on anything they can and you go what my dog on what are they smelling i don't smell anything well they're getting messages. The other dogs have left for them. And we now know that bacteria leave messages that other bacteria read. And it's those messages that are necessary to tell the other bacteria what to do with that prebiotic fiber. Yeah, interesting. Really interesting. It takes a village.

It takes a village. I want to dig into more of this real FNA story because I think, you know, when I looked at the research on this, this is really well done research published in peer-reviewed journals. It's not like, oh, I heard about some supplement and I'm just taking this. And when they did the work,

this is in JAMA, Open Network, and Cell Reports, and Neurotherapeutics, the data is really impressive. and basically what what it does is kind of shocking to me when you think about you take this basic food you have bacteria in your gut it makes this molecule called urolthin a it gets absorbed in your bloodstream and then go goes work in your body. And they found that it increases without exercise. This is crazy. Without exercise, increases muscle endurance, muscle strength, increases your fitness level measured by VO2 max, which is like what you'd have to do wind sprints to fix. It increases ATP production. It reduces C-reactive protein, improves your metabolic profile, meaning your insulin resistance.

It reduces muscle loss. It stimulates mitophagy or cleaning up the old mitochondria. It improves mitochondrial gene expression. It inhibits something called mTOR, which we've talked a lot about on the podcast, which is important for longevity. It basically causes autophagy or cleaning of your cells. It upregulates SIRT1, which we'll talk about in a minute, which is a really important set of transcription factors that is involved in longevity and insulin resistance and DNA repair. So basically it helps all the things with aging. It even improves your immunity by improving stem cell regeneration for T cells. And it has anti-tumor activity. So I'm like, whoa, wait a

minute. You're talking about eating a pomegranate, having some bug in your gut, and having all these downstream effects. And just to be clear, everybody, we're talking about one food and one compound. We're talking about not all of the other things that are going on in your gut with, you know, trillions and trillions, like probably 40 trillion on in your gut with, you know, trillions and trillions, like probably 40 trillion bacteria in your gut and two to three million bacterial genes doing all kinds of stuff. That's a hundred times as much genetic material as we have. And what genes do is produce proteins. So that means they're producing all these molecules.

And I was sort of on a panel with Stan Hazen at Cleveland Clinic. And he was like, yeah, I said, Stan, how much of the metabolome comes from our microbiome? Meaning how much of the things that we can measure in our blood, not when we get on a regular lab test, but when you do these scientific studies, comes from the microbiome? He said, probably a third to a half. And I'm like, what? A third to a half? So we literally are kind of in this constant dance with our gut. And this is why your book is so critical, this gut checkbook, because it helps us to really understand on a granular level, the science of why. So we go like, oh yeah, okay, I get to take probiotics, whatever, you know, take prebiotic, whatever, but you actually give us the science of why. So that's the urolithin

story. Let's talk about resveratrol and SIRT1, which is this really important transcription factors that are in the mitochondria that actually were first discovered by Lenny Gortet at MIT and David Sinclair. And the whole resveratrol story, people don't realize you had to drink about 750 bottles of wine to get the amount of resveratrol they did in this time. Yeah. Work, work, work, work. I don't know if I could drink that much wine and you'd die. You'd die. But basically, it's been shown to help with cardiovascular disease, but also maybe impacting the brain and metabolism, maybe even more than the heart. So how can this resveratrol compound that comes from grapes... And by the way, I don't think we can get it from red wine. I think

that's going to cause problems. And you talk about it in your book. I'm, I don't think we can get it from red wine. I think that's going to cause problems just, and you talk about it in your book. I'm like, don't drink so much. So like we can get into the alcohol story there, but I think the key is the phytochemical. So talk about how, how our resveratrol can be used to help or treat and prevent neurogenic metabolic diseases and how it relates to the gut microbiome? Well, again, I think resveratrol is a very poorly absorbed compound. And again, we've known that for years. And so, and David Sinclair is a friend and we've through the years talked about his love of resveratrol and mine, and he loves pharmacologic doses of it uh but what's really cool about resveratrol is that it is a it's a signaling molecule and it literally activates

31 and it's a really good way to come full circle of uncoupling mitochondria as well. But it literally tells, it tells, it repairs DNA breaks. It actually fosters the production of short chain fatty acids like butyrate. And the more we look at the downstream effects of resveratrol activated by the microbiome, we're beginning to see, okay, well, why is it that, you know, the French paradox works? And, you know, it's just, it's, we've, the middle guy that allows resveratrol to work is the microbiome making it an absorbable compound. And that's what none of us knew until really the microbiome project got finished. Amazing. It's quite amazing. I mean, I think the other thing that, you know, I want to dive into, because I mean, we could talk for hours and I don't, unfortunately, we both have work to do. That's right. We have other jobs, patients, patients and all that. But I think, you know, the other issue is sort of the microbiome and the

brain and mood. And you talk about, you know, major depression is a big issue and depression is the biggest cause of disability in this country. And how the microbiome of people who are depressed is different. And in 2022, there was a study of microbiomes of over 1,000 people with depression, and they found changes in about 13 bacteria. And these bacteria are known to produce various neurotransmitters. So can you kind of unpack that for us and just give us a little taste of the mood, brain, gut, microbiome connection? Yeah, I guess, you know, I suppose we should have known this. But

again, now that we're being able to look at individual bacteria and the compounds that they produce, you're right. Brand new studies in the last year or so have shown that depressed individuals have a depressive microbiome. And you can constitute these particular abnormal species. What's really interesting is, let me step back one, we've known that glyphosate, which is a lovely weed killer, was actually patented as an antibiotic. And one of the recent findings about glyphosate is that glyphosate targets the tryptophan pathway bacteria in our gut. Now, why should that be interesting is because tryptophan makes 5-HTP, makes serotonin,

which, and GABA for that matter. And so glyphosate is really good at knocking out all the feel-good bacterias, specifically in our gut. And isn't it interesting that this epidemic of depression and anxiety correlates pretty doggone good with the advent of glyphosate and yeah and now we know well you can say oh well glyphosate's bad for you but wait a minute glyphosate is after the bacteria that are essential for our mood. Yeah, I think that's so key, Stephen, yeah. It's like, what have we done? Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's the unintentional side effects that happen

from things we think we're trying to do good. Oh, weed killer, great, herbicide, we need it, blah, blah, blah. But these, you know, people say, oh, glyphosate, cancer, this and that. Maybe, okay, there's been some, you know, lawsuits that have been successful around non-hodgkin's lymphoma i guess if you douse yourself in it but what's really striking me glyphosate in really small amounts it wipes out your microbiome it doesn't take a lot it's not like you have to like drink roundup in order to actually mess yourself up it literally is in small

amounts and that that has led to maybe an increasing epidemic of low microbial diversity that we're seeing and an increase of all these chronic diseases, including psychiatric disorders, which could be really from this sort of altered microbiome, in part from glyphosate. I mean, there's a million other reasons, obviously, xenobiotics and other toxins and other things that are really, really important. I think, you know, the thing I want to sort of dive into a little bit more is, is cancer, because people don't think about cancer and your microbiome. But there was a, Charles Eng, who was a, was the head of the Genomics Research Center at Cleveland Clinic when I got there, she was so

happy to see me. She said, what took you so long to get here? And I'm like, well, I don't know. I didn't, I didn't want to, I didn't really want to go to Cleveland Clinic, but they dragged me over there. And she just told me about all her research on the microbiome in breast cancer. I was like, fascinating. And they were really, this is like, you know, some Russian lab, you know, trying to do some research. This is like Cleveland Clinic. And they're digging into this. Stan Hazen, you know, digging into the microbiome and heart disease. And so can you talk about how the microbiome determines not only a risk of cancer, but also

how we respond to certain immunotherapy drugs that are now basically some of the best drugs we have against cancer. But if your microbiome is not right, the drugs don't work. Right. Yeah. You know, a number of years ago now, there was a paper, and I'm sure you're aware of, that looked at the tongue scrapings of people with pancreatic cancer and the oral microbiome. And there was a very strong correlation between the oral microbiome and predicting pancreatic cancer. And people go, wow, this is great. Now we'll have a diagnostic test and we'll just scrape people's tongues and we'll know who's

at risk for pancreatic cancer. And then people went, wait a minute. What does that have to do with cancer? Well, now, of course, and now, of course, we go, wow, there is, like I talk about in the book, there is a colon cancer microbiome. There's an ovarian cancer microbiome. There's a breast cancer microbiome. There's a pancreatic cancer microbiome. There's a lung cancer microbiome that is distinct to those cancers. And the question is, did they cause the cancer? Are they facilitating the cancer? And that answer is not there yet. But like you mentioned, we know that certain

patients are going to respond better to chemotherapy if we actually do targeted antibiotics to change the microbiome and and other people aren't gonna and it's this whole personalized medicine but we're now going holy cow why didn't we realize that there is this microbial component to cancer. And again, I'm not saying cause and effect, but they're there. And we certainly owe it to ourselves to figure out, well, okay, what part are they playing in this? Yeah. Yeah. This story is definitely being unpacked. We're not quite there yet, but our friend Will Lee talked about his mother who had stage four uterine cancer and did her microbiome test and found low acromantia or no acromantia. And he then did some research and showed that, geez, people did not respond to these checkpoint inhibitors in immunotherapy,

which are great at advancing cancer, if they didn't have acromantia. It's like, wait a minute, how come this powerful drug doesn't work if you don't have this one little lowly bacteria? But literally, we are just uncovering how powerful these microbes are in regulating so many aspects of our health or response to therapies. And I think he was able to give her these polyphenols that we talked about and boost her acromantia. And she got the immunotherapy again and was cured of stage four cancer. It worked.

Yeah. So think about that. A probiotic or polyphenols curing stage four cancer in conjunction with a drug that wasn't working before that's kind of radical shit yeah and you know you brought one other thing which is actually a good segue you brought up xenobiotics and yeah so xenobiotics are all these environmental toxins, these endocrine disruptors, plastics. Petrochemical products like BPA, PCBs, PFAS, everything. All the- Phthalates. Phthalates, all the crap.

All this awful stuff. Yeah. When you, and I write about this in the book, when you look at these super old people's microbiomes, you know, 95 and above, and they're thriving, they have a microbiome that eats xenobiotics. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you go, well, son of a gun. And people go, well, wait a minute, xenobiotics. I said, look, you can engineer bacteria that eat oil spills, for goodness sakes. They just want it. That's right. They're just looking for carbon atoms. Right, that's right.

So, yeah, and one of the hallmarks of these guys, besides the fact that they make urolithin A, is that their microbiome eats xenobiotics. And it's like, well, of course. Now, do we know which microbes do that? Not yet. Where can I buy some? Yeah, where can I? Or what do I need to eat to grow them? Do we know which microbes do that? Not yet. Where can I buy some? Yeah, where can I?

Or what do I need to eat to grow them? Do we know? Well, you see, that's what's really kind of fun about all this. Because I never heard this before. And I think I just, the reason I say it's important is because we're doing our best. We still can't eliminate our exposure to these compounds. They're everywhere. And they're in us.

And so if we can take some kind of probiotic to offset the harm from the xenobiotics, I want that. Yeah. Well, again, thank God for this human microbiome project, because we would have had no idea. And now we can start looking at these guys. I'll give you an example. There's a, why are, why are the French and Italians so skinny? Well, there is a particular bug in raw cheeses that is capable of inducing basically GLP-1. It's a GLP-1 agonist. And it's only present in raw cheeses. If you pasteurize the milk, the bug is dead and it doesn't work.

And so you go, son of a gun. How do these guys know this? So it gets better every year. Oh, my God. Well, I have to tell you a story then because I went to Sardinia researching my book Young Forever. And there were two different things that were cheeses they were pretty raunchy but one of the ways they make cheese there is they basically don't have rennet so they take the ancient methods where they would take a baby goat or sheep that was

you know breastfeeding and then after it had a bunch of the milk it would kill the baby sheep or goat which is awful but anyway that's what they did and then they would had a bunch of the milk, it would kill the baby sheep or goat, which is awful. But anyway, that's what they did. And then they would take the stomach of it and they would grow this kind of cheesy stuff in there. And it would become cheese in the stomach. And then they would use that as starter for other cheeses. But you could literally eat the cheese from the stomach. And I went to this big festival there and I kind of partook.

It was very strong, that's all I can say. And then the other thing was this guy, Olinto, who I read about in my new cookbook, who I went to his house and he really grew all his own food. He had his own pigs and chickens and rabbits and fruit trees. It was quite amazing. And he made me kind of a nose-to-tail meal. And at the end, he brought out this this thing this big cheese wheel thing

with a kind of like a cheese lid on it like a like a big wheel with a cut out the top and he like telling me the story how basically this is a aphrodisiac and that he he his grandmother gave it to his grandfather and and he said it's so strong that she could still have sex with him two weeks after he died. Now, this cheese was so weird. It was full of worms. Now, it was illegal, right? It's illegal. You can't do that.

But he did it anyway. And so it was this ancient thing that he used to do was cheese with worms. So I had a little of the cheese with worms, too. All right. So I won't tell you the end of the story. but anyway, you're going to make it up for yourself. Well, you didn't die. Thank goodness. I didn't die. I didn't die. Now, the other thing I want to talk about is, um, is mental health going on the mental health thing a little bit more. I recall a patient I had who had the most severe OCD. Now we had a question from X. We asked some questions to ask. And one

was talking about OCD and how OCD is caused by ammonia producing bacteria that cause brain malfunction. And what's the protocol and what's the success in treating it? And I had this patient, she seemed like a normal person, but she had the craziest OCD. She wouldn't clean up her house for years. She wouldn't move up anything off the floor. It was like a nightmare in her house and, and she couldn't control it. And so we did some tests and turns my normal work up and she had a bunch of inflammatory stuff going on. I did a stool test and I also did an organic acid test and organic acids are a way of also looking at metabolites of the microbiome that come out in your urine because they don't not only come in your blood but then they get excreted in your urine

and and i found she had like off the chart levels of something called dhppa which is a female derivative but it's a psychoactive metabolite from bugs in the gut i'm like well okay well i'm just going to treat her gut. Let's see what happens. So I basically gave her Flagyl to kill this compound that comes from clostridial producing bacteria, clostridial bacteria that produces DHPPA. And it was like a miracle. It was like literally her OCD went away overnight. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy. And that's kind of what those kinds of patients were the ones that got me to write my book, The Ultra Mind Solution, you know,

almost 15 years ago, because I call myself the accident psychiatrist. So what's your experience with this kind of stuff, with treating the gut microbiome, clearing out the bad stuff, populating with good bugs, prebiotics, polyphenols? What kind of things have you seen? And what's your protocol? Well, you know, that's what's so exciting is exactly what you're saying. I see a lot of people with depression or anxiety, just use that as an example. And they've been on antidepressants for a couple billion years, one or two of them. And one of the things I point out in the book is that we're now beginning to realize that at least SSRI antidepressants actually change the microbiome to a more favorable microbiome. So the effect is probably not this

drug on serotonin re-update, but it's actually changing the microbiome. But you don't need the drug to change the microbiome. So you get rid of glyphosate-containing foods, and I get such grief. Please, folks, don't eat oats. Please stay away from oat milk all of our oats are contaminated with glyphosate even the organic varieties um i have nothing against oats per se but it's just a carrier for glyphosate and if you want to wipe out your happy bacteria go have some oat milk and knock your socks off just don't do it so oat milk is the go-to thing we should be having then right you want to be miserable you know what do you what do you call it oat oat juice or nut juice or something yeah how do you milk an oat

you know the other thing i can milk a goat but i don't know how to milk an oat. For instance, the love hormone, oxytocin, that women secrete when they see the sight of their child or with the onset of breastfeeding, oxytocin, the love hormone, we now know there are bacteria in our gut that make oxytocin. So L-reteric is an oxytocin-producing bacteria. And you can actually take L-reteric as a supplement. And it'll also grow hair, by the way, and improve your skin. But the side effect that nobody was looking at was, son of a gun. This bacteria makes the love hormone. And me, I'd like to have lots of love. That sounds good. That sounds good. So, Stephen, you know, your book is just chock full of this. We've just been dancing around, having fun, talking about some of the things you talk about in your book. And there's so much more in there. Gut check, unleash the power of your microbiome

to reverse disease and transform your mental, Physical, and Emotional Health. But before we close, I want to have you talk about some of the practical applications. What is your gut check program in a nutshell? It's in the book. People can look at it. But what are the take-homes for people here? We've talked about polyphenols, pre- and probiotics. We talked about fiber.

We talked about the harm of xenobiotics and glyphosate and cleaning up your diet. What should we be doing from the Dr. Gundry perspective to check our gut and what I say is sort of tend to our inner garden? So here's one of the shockers. It's in the last chapter before the recipes. About 80% of my practice now is autoimmune patients who, yeah, yeah. Um, anyhow, a hundred, a hundred percent of my autoimmune patients have antibodies to wheat germ agglutin, all the various components of gluten and non-gluten proteins a hundred percent if you look at my patients with diabetes a hundred percent have antibodies to wheat germagluten and gluten if you look at my patients with coronary artery disease a hundred percent of them have igg antibodies to the various components of wheat. Do you use the Cyrex test or

what do you use? No, I actually use Vibrant Wellness. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But that doesn't surprise me anymore. But the place to start is get rid of most grains. sorghum and millet are the exception, as a great place. Why do I say that? Number one, if you follow these people, and all of these people have leaky gut, by the way, we haven't even got into that. All of these people have leaky gut. If you go, if you do the gut. Does anybody not have leaky gut? That actually is a great question. And I have met one person in my life who walked into my office that didn't have leaky gut. It's not whether we have it or not. It's how leaky is it?

That's exactly right. So I think, you know, anybody eating gluten, and this is according to Dr. Alessio Fasano, world expert from Harvard. He's like, look, anybody in gluten has a little bit of leaky gut. Now, most of us can manage it and deal with it and fine. But, you know, if you really have a serious issue with inflammation in your body, a chronic disease, gut issues, you know, it's like gluten, gluten, gluten, gluten, sugar, boom, out. And then, you know, that's a lot of problems for people. Yeah, it really does. And I published this. If you get this stuff out of your system, you will lose all antibodies to gluten, to wheat germ and gluten, and within nine months to a year,

they will be gone. And I have people who are gluten-free for 10 years who still have very strong anti-gluten antibodies. And those will disappear once you get the other problems out of the way one of the things i preach is look i can give you supplements to repair your leaky gut and they're very effective and i make them and other people make them but if you keep swallowing razor blades every day then you're just going to tear the thing open. So it's kind of one, two, you got to really stop swallowing razor blades. And part of, part of the program is, okay, here's where the razor blades are. And I give some people some new surprises about where the razor blades might be. Interestingly enough, almonds are way up there in the razor blade

factor. Really. This was tipped off to me years ago. I had so many people with rheumatoid arthritis that almonds were a trigger for them. And when I started researching it, there's electins in the peel of almonds. And that probably explains why, particularly in Portugal and Spain, mothers teach their daughters to soak almonds to remove the peel. Blanch them. You blanch the almonds? Blanch them. Does that remove the problem of almonds? It does for most people.

But my real troublemakers, when we test them against blanched almond flour, they still react to it. And so just in general, get rid of almonds. The other thing that surprises a lot of people, particularly with MS, there's a whole class of lectins that I've never written about because I don't want to sound any crazier than I already think I am. There's a class of lectins that are called aquaporins. Wait, did you just say, I don't want to sound crazier than I already am. am. There's a class of lectins that are called aquaporins. Wait, wait, did you just say, I know what it sounds crazier than I already am. I love that. That is such a good line. I might use that. All right. Yeah. You're welcome to it. So there's a class, they're called aquaporins. And I won't, with the interest of time,

there's an aquaporin in spinach and there's aquaporins occur in us, in the wall of time, there's an aquaporin in spinach. And there's aquaporins occur in us, in the wall of our gut, in our blood-brain barrier, and in our myelin sheath. And if you develop antibodies to the aquaporins in certain plants, you can have an autoimmune attack against your own aquaporins. And surprisingly, there's an aquaporin in spinach. And women in my practice who have MS are big spinach eaters. And to almost a person, they react to the aquaporin in spinach. And when we take the spinach away from them, and I have nothing against spinach, folks, their issues rapidly resolve. Some. Yeah.

What's good for the goose isn't good for the gander, though, sometimes, right? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Because, you know, we evolved eating all kinds of stuff. And I think we were very resilient and robust and able to eat all kinds of foods. But what happened is that we messed up our microbiome and our gut so much that we become intolerant. So I always say it's not what you're sensitive to or allergic to,

it's why are you so sensitive and allergic? And I've seen really amazing things when you really repair the gut. Often people be able to tolerate things. Like years ago, I had chronic fatigue syndrome from mercury poisoning and mercury interrupts enzymes everywhere in your body and particularly in the gut. And I had diarrhea and maldigestion and I had SIBO and SIPO and my, I couldn't eat anything. And literally all I could eat was like Turkey and broccoli basically. And, and, and for, I was so miserable and I would get rashes and sores on my tongue and autoimmune stuff and brain fog and my stomach would explode and blow up like I had a, you know, someone blow up a tire

and saw my intestines. And, and literally after learning about functional medicine, this was, you know, decades ago, I was able to heal myself, heal my gut. And now I'm like, you know, kind of good. I mean, I, I really don't have any gut issues and I really have a highly functioning gut. Even this was even after, you know, repairing it again after like another couple of decades, I got mold poisoning and C diff. And the point is you can fix it. So it's not just about always avoiding the thing you're sensitive to. It's about fixing the reason why you're so sensitive in the first place. And then, and then, and then if there are razor blades like modern gluten, I would agree. That should, you know,

probably not so much meaning. Yeah. And that's the exciting thing. The reason 80% of my practice is now autoimmune disease is you can, 94% of people resolve their autoimmune issue on gut check, which is not bad um yeah now you know like my stepfather used to say to me what happened to the other three percent well and that's why i keep seeing patients six days a week because i want to know okay why is it and that's it's funny i get to learn something new every day well steven that's so great it's so great what you're doing and you keep learning and you keep growing and keep getting younger, I hope. And hopefully we'll both be at this game for a long time. And, you know, it's, it's, it's refreshing. You were, you know, you were a

head of, you know, cardio, cardiovascular surgery at Loma Linda, you know, you know, you're not some lowly family doctor like me. And basically you, you, you kind of have, have shifted into this because it's just what makes sense. It's where the science is going. You're following the science and not staying with stuff you learned in medical school. And I just really acknowledge that. It's rare. It's unusual. You're a good guy.

And keep up the good work. And I can't wait to do this again with you in person sometime soon. And we can talk more about poop. All right. Yeah. Who would imagine all we talk about is poop from now on? Oh, well. Damn. And damn. You know, about is poop from now on. Oh, well. And Dan, you know, I should have read that book like 15 years ago. I was like,

no one's going to want to read about poop, but now it's the thing. So anyway, I'm glad you wrote it. And everybody should get it. Check it out. Go wherever you get your books and check it out and check out Stephen's work. Go to drgundry.com. You can listen to his podcast. What's your podcast called? The Dr. Gundry Podcast. Who knew? What an original name. Anyway, but I thank you so much again.

Great to see you. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at DrMarkHyman. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.

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