The Dylan Gemelli Podcast - Episode #19 Featuring Dr. Steven Gundry PART 1!! MASTERING THE GUT MICROBIOME! The Gut’s influence on overall health, the role of microbiome, Mitoch...

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Episode #19 Featuring Dr. Steven Gundry!! MASTERING THE GUT MICROBIOME! Dr. Gundry tells all, taking a deep dive into the gut's influence on overall health, the role of our microbiome, treating leaky gut, the importance of mitochondrial health, a discussion on Urolithin A, bonus Dr. Gundry nutrition, the BIG RELEASE OF HIS NEW BOOK "The Gut-Brain Paradox" and more!! Dr. Gundry is one of the most well respected and influential Doctor's on the planet and listening to his insights is a major benefit to all listeners!!   Check out Dr. Gundry's homepage and order his new book here https://drgundry.com/   Follow Dr. Gundry on instagram https://www.instagram.com/drstevengundry/?hl=en   Follow Dr. Gundry on youtube https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-gundry-podcast/id1434371530   Listen to the Dr. Gundry podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-gundry-podcast/id1434371530   ______________________________________________________________________ Today's episode is sponsored by Apollo Neuro!   Get the Apollo Neuro for $90 OFF!! USE CODE GEMELLI to save https://apolloneuro.com/gemelli _______________________________________________________________________________ To PURCHASE MITOPURE visit Dylan's landing page and use code DYLAN to save 20% OFF!! https://shop.timeline.com/DYLAN     TONUM supplements for the MIND AND BODY!   USE CODE "DYLAN" to save!!  https://www.tonum.com/DYLAN     THE BREAKTHROUGH MIMIO HEALTH FASTING MIMETIC SUPPLEMENT!  20% OFF with code Gemelli  https://mimiohealth.sjv.io/c/6588260/3323599/30611     TRULY Increase Your NAD LEVELS with WONDERFEEL NMN: https://getwonderfeel.com/?utm_source=DylanGemelli&utm_medium=podcast     MESCREEN: The world's first and only at home mitochondrial efficiency test Save $100 with CODE   DYLAN   https://mescreen.com/cart/47561239626013:1?discount=&ref=DYLAN       HIRE DYLAN ON THE MINNECT APP HERE: expert.minnect.com/@DylanGemelli     Follow Dylan on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok @dylangemelli and PLEASE SUBSCRIBE and leave reviews!!   MAKE SURE TO GO TO DYLAN'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL for MORE video content!!    https://www.youtube.com/@DylanGemelliBiohacking Email Dylan for booking, collaborations and/or to apply for the Dylan Gemelli Podcast [e-mail] Visit Dylan's Homepage https://dylangemelli.com

Today's episode is sponsored by Apollo Neuro. Apollo is the leading doctor recommended wearable technology. Apollo's award-winning smart vibes AI works effortlessly behind the scenes, automatically integrating into your life to deliver gentle, personalized vibrations that activate your vagus nerve, helping you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and wake up balanced, focused, and ready each day. Not only that, but the Apollo Neuro is the first and only wearable that improves your HRV. Apollo is effortless. Simply wear it throughout the day and night and let it do the work

for you. It's safe for anyone and everyone with no side effects and is the only wearable that can be worn anywhere on your body. Optimal health requires both the mind and body to be in line and Apollo is the key to establishing that connection. Check the description below to save $90 with my special discount. Take control over your health today with Apollo Neuro. All right, everybody, Welcome back to the Dylan Jameli podcast. I'm sure you can see my guest next to me, and I could not be more excited. You know, I get the benefit of interviewing some amazing people, and I never want to slight anybody because I talk to some thoroughly intelligent and just amazing all-and-all people. But I have been looking forward to this one ever since I found out.

I landed it. So I want to introduce everybody to Dr. Stephen Gundry, cardiologist, heart surgeon, medical researcher, author, so on. so forth. Doctor, thank you so much for being here with me. I really appreciate it. Great to see you, Dylan. Yeah, you too, you too. Well, I know your time is very limited. So I'm going to rack you brain for everything that I possibly can today. Now, first of all, I know that you have a new book coming out. So I really want to talk about that first. It's really exciting. I've had the blessing of being able to read some of it and get a firsthand look. So can you kind of just get into what it's about and what motivated you to go with this topic?

Sure. Well, you know, it's called the gut brain paradox. And like my other kind of paradox books, the idea is that much of our thought processes, believe it or not, are controlled by these little one-cell organisms that live, in us, on us, even in our brain, and that it's hard for most people to grasp that single-cell organisms have the power to manipulate this giant complex organism and if you will make us do their bidding for better or worse. and that we're actually a, what's called a symbiotic organism, that we exist for the benefit of the other people who live in us, that is, our microbiome. And if everything's going right, they exist for our benefit.

But like the book says, unfortunately, things have gotten all cattywampus, as the old expression was. that we've not looked out for their welfare. And quite honestly, they're not looking out for our welfare. And maybe we can get that back to where we can all love each other again. And the book goes into how to do that. So just real quick, what is the microbiome and how does it really influence brain function and mental health?

So here's the crazy thing. The microbiome, we have at least 100 trillion bacteria that live in our gut. There's probably 10,000 different species that are still being identified. And that has nothing to do with the funguses and viruses and molds that live in us. We have over 700 different organisms in our mouth. We have over 1,000 different organisms that live in our cells. skin. And we have these guys living in every orifice that communicates with the outside world. So, for instance, guys, our prostate has its own microbiome.

Ladies, your breast has its own microbiome, and so on and so forth. And we're beginning to realize that this collection has been there for, for as long as there have been animals. Believe it or not, termites have their own microbiome, and fun fact, termites cannot digest wood. They can eat wood, but they depend on their microbiome to digest the wood for them. And that's just one example.

We are dependent in many, many ways on our microbiome to digest foods that we eat, to protect us from foods that we eat. And what's really startling is that we're dependent on them to tell our immune system, who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, to tell our brain whether to be worried about something. And chapters of the book make some pretty amazing claims, which backed up by research, that they're anxious people have a completely different microbiome than non-anxious people. People who have altruistic motives, and we're seeing a lot of altruism in L.A. with the fires, have a very different microbiome that makes them altruistic.

And kids with autism have a very different microbiome. that make them autistic, et cetera, et cetera. And there's even a chapter that I submit that much of addictive behavior is actually driven by the microbiome to get you to get substances that they want. So it's very complex. And the book wants to kind of have you kind of dive into,

number one, how complex this whole system is, and how important it is to understand this system, and the good news is to manipulate this system with some of our food and behavior choices. And that's the good news. That's where I was kind of going. And I just want to point out one of the things that I've always loved about you

is you've always kind of been ahead of the curve with things and on top of things before others are bringing things to light that maybe others are at least hesitant to go. with, so I appreciate that. Now, my one question was, and you were kind of getting into that now, is can changes in your diet and lifestyle, kind of restore a balanced microbiome, can it improve mental health? Anything like that to do with that, diet and lifestyle? Yeah, that's what's actually so interesting. One of the reasons I decided to write this book is about 80% of my practice is in autoimmune disease patients who either aren't getting relief from the various immunosuppressive

drugs they're on and want to get off of them or otherwise want lifestyle changes, maybe diabetes, etc. But one of the things, a lot of these patients are women. And one of the things that struck me through the years is that a great number of these people, among other problems, were on antidepressants. And many of them kind of lists their antidepressants, but don't even list depression or anxiety as an issue. Right. And yet, there they are on them. And they go, you know, they go, oh, wow, I've been on these for so long.

I forget, you know, that I'm on them. And one of the really interesting things is we know that there's a depressive microbiome. There is an anxiety microbiome, and you can prove this in animal studies. But one of the exciting things through the years, and I've been doing what I do now for 25 years, is that a lot of my patients, when we were working on correcting whatever reason they came to see me, was that a great number of them, in fact, most of them, weaned themselves off of their antidepressants.

And they go, hey, isn't that unusual? Isn't that weird? I didn't come in here to get rid of these, but I don't need them anymore. Isn't that interesting? And I got, well, actually, it turns out that in the process, of restoring the functioning of your gut microbiome

and the functioning of your gut barrier function. You don't need those things anymore because they're, you know, the good guys are back in town, if you will, and they're, so it's exciting. So you're insinuating that antidepressants are the answer to everything then, correct? Am I hearing that right? Well, you know, it's interesting,

and I've written about, this in a previous book, which was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. Antidepressants, most of them are what are called serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, SSRIs. And yes, serotonin is the feel-good hormone. And we've learned through the years that much of our serotonin is actually produced by our microbiome, not by our nerve cells at all. And it's, and it's, and it's, and it's, and it's, and If serotonin re-uptake inhibitors actually work by making more serotonin in your brain, then I should be able, if I'm depressed, swallow Prozac, and tomorrow feel great because I've got more serotonin in our brain.

Right. Nope. Takes about a month for these things to kick in. So then you go, well, but wait a minute. So interestingly enough, these drugs change your microbiome to produce more serotonin and have more serotonin producing bugs in your microbiome. And that doesn't happen overnight. It takes at least a month to achieve.

So when you realize that, you go, son of a gun. these aren't working the way they said they're working they're changing the microbiome and if you can change the microbiome with the drug why wouldn't you change the microbiome without the drug get off the drug quite frankly so you know and that I started to kind of get into this when I was about 1819 when I that's when I started to have kind of to deal with anxiety and it was something that my mom has had, her bomb, like my whole family. And I don't want to accept, oh, it's hereditary and all of that. But the first thing that they did was put me on Bouspar.

And it made me so terribly sick for like a week. And I was in college at the time. And I had to get up out of class several times and throw up. And I was really, really lethargic. And, you know, they wanted me to keep taking it. And I said, no, I'm not doing this after a month. But I didn't, I would have never thought or understood at that time that, that, that, what the core problem was you just accept it and move on and that's it so okay let me ask you this

then because how this ties in together on the mental side just how much does the correlation with the biome plan to other facets of health let's just say heart health cardiovascular health or like liver health any other sort of area of the body or anatomy is is like it seems to me correct me if I'm wrong because you would know more than me that the gut my microbiome and health is tying into all areas of our health. Am I on to something there? Well, you and I are very slow learners. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, 2,500 years ago, said all disease begins in the gut. Really? Really? All disease begins in the gut. And like I say, I'm a slow learner, but I've been spending 25 years realizing

that he's actually absolutely right. I'm a heart surgeon and a cardiologist, and I kind of initially started this to keep people away from me reversing their heart disease with diet and food. And it became increasingly apparent when I started working in transplant,

children's heart transplant, and adult heart transplant. that what I was seeing in children who got a heart transplant is that they would get a particular type of coronary artery disease, where the plaque was kind of diffuse along their coronary arteries. And interestingly enough, that plaque looked virtually identical to my insulin-resistant and diabetic patients, very different than, say, a smoker's coronary artery disease. Right. And I realized that son of a gun, the reason I was seeing plaque and kids is that the blood vessels

of the new heart I put in them came from somebody else. And where their blood was interacting with the lining of that blood vessel was attacking that blood vessel. Okay. And they would build up, if you will, a callus to protect against that plaque. So it was an autoimmune, it was an immune attack against that blood vessel. And lo and behold, what I was seeing in my diabetic patients was exactly the same thing. So I said, wait a minute, this is an autoimmune attack against the blood vessel of

this patient with diabetes, where in the world was that coming from? And it was coming from the fact that, in my opinion, and now a lot of other people's opinion, autoimmune disease is coming from a leaky gut, from intestinal permeability. And so that's, you're right. And Hippocrates was right. So you can reverse coronary artery disease by, stopping this attack on the blood vessels. And how do you stop the attack?

Repair the gut. And that's how you do it. So what is, this is a two-part question. What's the best way to test for a geeky gut or gut issues? And once you find out, hey, I'm, you know, I've got an issue here. What do we got to do to correct that? Is it medication? Is it diet? What are your recommendations or methodologies on how to correct that issue?

Well, I made a bold statement when I wrote the plant paradox, which came out eight years ago now, that whatever problem you have, whether it's acne, whether it's eczema, whether it's autoimmune disease, whether it's migraines, whether it's high blood pressure, whether it's diabetes, you name the, whether it's joint pain, you name the problem, I'm going to try to convince you it's from a disbiotic gut microbiome and a leaky gut. And if we fix that, that problem will go away. Okay. I'll give you an example of a patient I saw yesterday.

I still see patients six days a week, even on the weekend. I started at eight and finished at five. So this lady has a long history of eczema, and it would pop up, it was kind of on her chin when I saw her yesterday. And so we had just done leaky gut tests on her. And we also did a series of autoimmune tests. And number one, she had leaky gut. Surprise, surprise.

And number two, she had a marker, which is called Aalmonds, anti-nuclear antibody. Very common autoimmune markers. Some people call it lupus, but it's very common in people with psoriasis and other conditions and eczema.

And so as we were kind of reviewing this, she says, well, wait a minute, I have an autoimmune disease. And I said, well, yeah, you have eczema. That's an autoimmune disease. Right. No, it's eczema.

And I said, well, you know, it didn't just happen. Yeah. And she says, yeah, but, you know, I can put steroid cream on it and it'll get better. I said, yeah, because that steroid cream is telling your white blood cells to stop attacking your skin. Yeah. And she said, that's what it's doing? I said, yeah. She said, well, why am I attacking my skin?

I said, because you have a leaky gut and your white blood cells look at the, you're certain proteins in your skin that look very much like what they're looking for in the foods you eat. And it's called molecular mimicry. And it was actually first proposed by a professor at Colorado State by the name of Lauren Cordane, kind of the father of the paleo diet, years ago. And now most of us working in autoimmune disease realized that molecular mimicry from weak. gut is how autoimmune disease happened. So here's a lady who's had eczema most of her life, and now the good news is we know

why, and believe it, and now we can fix it. It'll take about nine months to a year to repair her leaky gut. When I started this 25 years ago as naive, and I thought, oh, we can fix leaky gut in couple weeks. It takes work. And the book is, okay, I've been doing this for 25 years. Here's, and I've been seeing patients six days a week for 25 years, asking them to take certain foods out of their diet, put certain foods in their diet, go get some supplements that'll help, et cetera, et cetera. Here's what works. And I've hopefully taken the guesswork out of this.

So beautiful. All right. So when it comes to your like how you shifted to this, because obviously you have a tremendous cardiology background. What was it that triggered this, you know, study into microbiome or realization like, okay, we got to start looking at this. Like what, because obviously something clicked for you or something happened. So what, what was the defining?

moment or time that that occur? So 30 years ago when I was professor and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery and pediatrics at Loma Linda University School of Medicine here in Southern California, I was one of these famous heart surgeons who would take on impossible cases. And there were, there's always a few of us idiots around the kind of. who, you know, if everybody else turned you down, yeah, come on, I'll do it. And so I met a guy who I call Big Ed in all my books. He was 48 years old from Miami, Florida.

And he had had a coronary angiogram, a movie of the blood vessel was at heart, where he had inoperable coronary arteries. That means he had so many blockages that you couldn't put a stent in because there'd be a blockage right beyond that. And you couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't any place to land a bypass because everything was all clogged up. And so he would go, spent six months

going around the country to these various centers that would take people like him on and everybody turned him down. And so he arrived in my office after six months of doing this. And I was kind of his last stop. And I looked at the angiogram that he brought from Miami of six months earlier. And I said, you know, I'd love to help you.

But they're all right. They're right. There's nothing I can do for you. And he says, yeah, that's what they all said. But let me tell you what I've been up to. Still see his fate. He says, I've been on a diet for the last six months. And I've lost 45 pounds.

this was a guy who was 265 pounds when I met him. So he was well over 300 pounds. Wow. And he said, I went to a health food store, and I've been taking all these supplements, and he literally brought in a giant shopping bag of supplement. And he says, you know, I've been taking these supplements. He said, you know, maybe I did something in here. So I'm scratching my professor beard and going, well, you know, good for you for losing weight,

but that's not going to do anything in here. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine, which was, I believe. I said, you've wasted your money. And he said, look, I've come all this way. What would it hurt to get another angiogram of my heart? Another cardiac catheterization. I'm rolling my eyes and I say, eh, don't get your helps up.

But, yeah, okay, let's do it. So the next day we get a new angiogram. And in six months' time, this guy has cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his heart. Really? I'm looking at the two. Now, that's impossible. At least that's what I believed back then. Right, right.

But I'm looking at it. And I'm going, what the heck? So there's a saying, if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yeah. So I said, this is great news. You know, now there's places that I can do a bypass. And we did a five-vessel bypass on the guy. And he did fine.

So afterwards, the researcher in me says, tell me about this diet. Yeah, all right? I'm curious. Yeah, you're curious, aren't you? So he starts rattling off what he's been doing. and I had the blessing back in the dark ages of going to Yale University in the dark ages, in the dark ages when we could actually design our own major.

It was kind of like a master's program. So we would have a thesis, and we had to defend the thesis. So my thesis was you could take a great ape, manipulate its food supply, manipulated its environment and proved you would arrive at a human being. Got fun. And I defended my thesis and I got an honors and I gave it to my parents and went off and became a famous art surgeon. So as big Ed is talking, I'm going, wait a minute, you know, time out. That's my thesis from Yale University of what ancient man ate.

And so that's number one. Number two, I go, let me look at those supplements. So I was famous for keeping hearts alive during heart surgery. I invented a catheter and a method to protect hearts. And we would put lots of interesting ingredients in the veins and arteries of the heart to protect it from dying. And I'm looking at a supplements. And a lot of the supplements, I'm putting down the veins and arteries. of his heart intravenously.

And it never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things. Wow. Now, why that's so poignant or serendipitous is that at that time, even though I was a very famous heart surgeon, and I was

70 pounds overweight, even though I was running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour every day, eating a low-fat, mostly vegetarian diet. And I, you know, at pre-diabetes, I had hypertension, I had horrible cholesterol, I had migraine headaches, I don't recommend doing baby heart transplants with a migraine headache.

And I had such bad arthritis, I had to wear braces on my niece to run. And I was told it was genetic because my father was exactly the same way. Right. And, you know, get over it and, you know, take drugs, blah, blah, blah. So I called up my parents and saying, he still have my parents. thesis and they said oh yeah you know it's in the shrine I said well send it up to me and so I started on that and I started taking supplements and I lost 50 pounds my first year and subsequently lost another 20 and I've kept it out for 30 years and my blood work changed dramatically my arthritis went away my

migraines went away my blood pressure fell my cholesterol any of so I would operate on patients at Loma Linda, and I'd go, you know, I don't want to see you ever again. Normally, if we operated on somebody, we'd see them back five, seven years, and we'd do it all over again. I was very famous for re-operating on people. So I said, you know, here's what I want you to do. I want you to eat this. I want you to go to Costco or Trader Joe's or the Al's Food Store and buy some supplements. And they started reporting the same things.

know, like, oh my gosh, you know, my blood pressure is so low, I threw my blood pressure medicines away. Or, oh, you know, I was scheduled for a knee replacement. Well, my knee doesn't hurt anymore. And is it okay if I don't have my knee replacement? So after about a year of doing this at Loma Linda, I had an epiphany, a Black Friday, what I call Black Friday, my wife. And I said, you know, I've got this all wrong.

I shouldn't operate on someone and then teach you. them how to eat to avoid me in the future. I should teach them how to eat. And I'll never have to operate on them. So now that's a really dumb career move for a heart surgery. But I resigned my position at Loma Linda. And I moved down the road to Palm Springs, which is near Lomelinda. And I set up a clinic. And I basically said, hey, we're going to get blood work on you every three months, Medicare, insurance will pay for it. I want you to eat certain things and don't eat these things, and I want you to go buy some supplements. And let's see what happens, okay? And so that is kind of how all this crazy stuff started. Okay, so I'm going to relate to you real quick,

and then I'm going to run it by you and see what you think. So everything that you just said, the low-fat diet, all of the working out, arthritis, all of these things. So, And mind you, I'm a nutritionist, so I know better, but still not doing the right things. I'm doing the exact same thing you are for, you know, you start to get into a routine and think it's right. And before you know it, five years has passed. Yeah, I'm teaching something totally different. So what I'm going to do is explain to you what I did and see how it correlates to your diet changes and we'll kind of compare and contrast here. So I've been living on literally my wife cooking, I don't know, 13, 14 servings of vegetables a day.

and then living on eggs and oatmeal for like five, six years. And I'm talking, I'm burning, I don't know, 3,500 calories a day just in working out. That's not sedentary burn or anything else. And I'm eating 16,700. And the only fat I'm getting, and you're not going to like this, and I changed this, is strictly through peanut butter, which I cut the peanut butter out and switched, and I'll tell you about that too. But now I woke up one day and I said, you know what?

I went in there and she about her face hit the floor. I said, here's what I want to do. I'm going to start having ground beef. I want you to make me avocados. We're going to do this. We're going to that. We're going to this. I went from 15 grams of fat today to almost 100.

My carbohydrates low, 100, 125 of my protein is pretty high because I'm trying to keep maintained size. About 250, I weigh 185. You know, you could argue one pound or whatever. So within that time frame, three, four months, my pain has gone to like zero. My attentiveness and my ability to focus, even on five. and six hours of sleep and through stress is on an all-time high. My skin's glowing. I feel like I'm in my 20s without the alcohol and all the party, you know, back then. Like, it's been, and you know what else? I live in really cold weather and I've just, I'm always cold. Now it's like,

no, I'm good. I'm walking. This morning I went for a walk. It was five degrees outside. No problem. I mean, I'm bundled up, but no problem. And so that's been my personal shift. And, you know, I'm cooking with grass-fed butter. I'm having. having good venison and, you know, the ancestral liver or, you know, heart all mixed in together, whole eggs, not just the egg whites, you know, cutting out just a complete polar opposite of what I was doing, walnut butters, pistachio butters, you know, everything's different. And that was thanks to you, by the way. So, am I on to something with what you had seen or what you did for your changes and what you recommend? Because that, my body, and I have a looming and I'm testing, you know,

the breath during the day. And I'm a daddy guy. We're a CGM. I'm doing everything, right? So how does that correlate to what you taught and done? And am I on to something there too? Because everybody's different. But what do you think about that?

Well, one of the reasons that, you know, the plant paradox was such a huge success. It still is, was plants don't particularly like us. Right. They were here first. they don't want to be eaten. They can't run. They can't hide.

But they're chemists of incredible ability. I mean, they can turn sunlight into a matter, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. Right. So they use basically biological warfare to make their predators think twice about eating them. Now, unfortunately, we're not very smart, and we'll keep eating them.

even though we're in pain or our brain doesn't work or whatever, because everybody knows that plants are good for you. Now, way back when, like I talked about in this book and the previous books, is we used to have a really great defense system against these plant compounds. We had bacteria that would eat, for instance, gluten in wheat, and love it. So we had a fantastic defense against the plant defense system. Unfortunately, over the last 50, 100 years, we've pretty much decimated that defense system. Antibiotics that we take that are fed to our animals, glyphosate Roundup.

Believe it or not, most people don't know that Roundup was patented as an antibiotic. Not as a weed killer? Really? Patented as an antibiotic. No idea. And it turns out that glyphosate is really good at killing off the gut microbiome, particularly the gut microbiome that makes all the feel-good hormones like serotonin that kills off the tryptophan pathway bacteria.

So, and so forth and so on. So we're quite honestly sitting ducks for a lot. lot of these plant compounds that wish us harm. The other thing that we did not know about is that I had former head of the FDA on my podcast a couple of years ago and we, he and I are very much the same age. And back when we were trained, we kind of thought the gut was this hollow tube and whatever we swallowed went in there and magic. happened and we absorbed, you know, proteins and minerals and sugars and fats, and then whatever we didn't need, what pooped out the rear end, and that was that simple. We didn't even

know that a hundred trillion bacteria were living in our intestines. And it wasn't until the Human Microbiome Project, which started in 2007 and ended in 2017, that we literally discovered not only were those guys there, but that those guys were responsible for much of what happened to the magic that happened in this silly hollard two. And, you know, it's like, wow, you know, it's like we send these deep sea vessels down, you know, 20,000 feet into the pitch blackness at pressures that would crush any living thing. And there's all these animals down there. And it's like, what the heck?

They can't live in there. And you go, what the heck? Look at there's fishes. And so now we're going, what the heck? Look at all these guys that we didn't even know existed. Right. And now we're being able to piece out exactly. what each one of these guys does,

and the communication system that these single-cell organisms have with this really smart control center up here. And the purpose of the book is, guess what? The bus driver is not driving the bus. The passengers are driving the bus, And this is just kind of a receiver of the information that's being passed up by the folks who are actually in control. Oh, my God.

I love it. You know, I love the forward thinking. And when you break something down, I think sometimes because I know how people have you have, which is why I followed, because it's so forward. But I think that people are resistant because it makes too much sense. some of the things that like some of the things you say are so logical if you just sit and listen but i think because we're so trained and like one track minded on everything that you just like want to accept that never listen to anybody else do you because i know like anybody that does what you do they they face some kickback on things and i've never see you respond or anything

if you just do what you do and it's a beautiful thing do you do you find it difficult to overcome that or do you just kind of just forget about it and just kind of you're driven to do what you do? Because I see how you handle it. It's beautiful. I love it. It inspires me to handle things better. So how do you handle kickback on some of the things that you say? Because, you know, I get it. It goes against the grain, but that's how we move forward and find things that we didn't know we're there. Well, you know, like General Patton said, if everybody's thinking the same way, then somebody is. isn't thinking. I love it.

It's so true. I love it. Or if the artist Shaggy has a song that his mother told him, if

you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Oh, I love it. So, anyhow, you know, I've been on Mark Hyman's podcast.

And Mark, and he's a friend of mine. And Mark has a daughter who's a third-year medical student at a very prestigious university, I won't mention. She has yet to get a course on the microbiome in her third year of medical school.

That's craziness. And I've been on a podcast where supposedly a famous cardiologist told me that gastroenterologists think that the microbiome has nothing to do with health. And it's like, okay. Okay. Okay. You know, it's funny, years ago, there was a pediatrician in Boston who noticed that practicing pediatricians were 20 years behind current research knowledge.

And he set up, Don Bergen, was his name, is his name. And he set up an organization called the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, where he asked people from various disciplines to literally investigate the status of the knowledge in your particular discipline. And it turns out I was selected in cardiology and cardiac surgery. And long story short, we published a bunch of papers about that. this in cardiology and cardiac surgery, the practicing physician was about 20 years behind common knowledge. Now, research now. And this institute, we tried to put into effect,

bringing people up to common knowledge. And there is tremendous amounts of resistance to doing this for many, many, you know, good reasons. So, and Any of them. Yeah, one person when I really didn't go after one of my detractors, said, you know, you're kind of like a silverback gorilla who's just kind of sitting there as the little baby gorilla is crawling all over in him, picking on him. And he's just kind of sitting there. And he says, why don't you just reach out like a big smart silverback gorilla and swack him across the room? And he says, you just sit there. I got better things to do. No, I mean, all you can do is really, what I always say is kill them with kindness and facts and move on. And that's beauty. Never let anything get in the path. So, and you talk about that.

So, you know, I realized starting like 2010 when I discovered peptides, how forward thinking I was with alternative therapies and medicines. But it really hit home. And I'm going to bring this up now. And I don't want to talk too much about me because I want you to answer these questions. but I kind of filled you in on the LP little A that I found out about myself. And when I really realized like, wow, I told you I went to the Mayo Clinic and they wanted me to stay on the statin and it would be bad practice to do the PCSK9s or take an alternative, you know, alternative avenue. And I had done so much research and knew, like I talked about with you, that statins were going to increase my LP little A and that diet, like they were telling me, well, change your diet and exercise more. I can't exercise more.

I'm already exercising three hours a day. What are you talking about? So, you know, and I got into a little spat with my mom and my wife in the four-hour drive home from Mayo Clinic and then come to find out, you know, we talked and they saw. But here's my question is when it comes to cholesterol and taking blood panels, because I do hormone optimization, but I do coaching now specifically on cholesterol and addressing, we need to look at different biomarkers.

We need to look at LP little A-A-A-A-P-O-B as opposed to LDL-HDL-H-DL-R triglycerides with our main focus being there. So let me ask you a few questions. Sure. When it comes to focusing on LDL in total cholesterol, I see, you know, the doctors told me to get my LDL down to 30-some. That's where they wanted it. And I know way better than that. Why should, why is that a bad idea? And two, why, or do you agree with me that we should be looking at APOB and LP-L-P-L-A and particle sizes

far more than we are focused on the other ends of the spectrum? Well, so we, in training, there are kind of still, actually, there's kind of an East Coast mentality of cholesterol and maybe a West Coast mentality based out of Berkeley. Berkeley was where these particles were first discovered. And there are, for instance, seven different kinds of LDL, and three of them are actually pretty good for you. Four of them probably not very good for you. There's five different kinds of HDL,

but only one of them actually goes around and cleans up your blood vessels. We call it Pac-Man, F-O-A-1, and so on. And then there's another interesting little particle called L.P. Little A and so on that we talked about. And I was very interested in these particles and whether these particles oxidize or not. And on the East Coast, there's a protein that coats all cholesterol particles called APOB. It's actually a protein. And there's one APOB for every particle of LDL.

no matter how big, how small. So counting apple B became popular in the East Coast. On the West Coast, we weren't very interested in it because we could look at the particle sizes. Subsequently, we realized that it was whether or not these particles were oxidized, whether they were rusty, that they might be interested in sticking to blood vessels. But Michael DeBakey, one of the things,

the fathers of heart surgery from Texas said in the 1950s and the 60s that cholesterol has nothing to do with plaque in the coronary artery. It's an innocent bystander and that basically inflammation was the problem. And I've written about this before. If I was an alien circulating around Earth and reporting back to high I command what I observe. One of my observations, which I could defend, was that I'm pretty sure ambulances cause car accidents.

Because every time I see a car accident, I see an ambulance. So I'm pretty sure that there's a strong correlation between ambulances and car accidents. And there is an association, but that does not mean causation. Right, right. So my work in transplant, again, convinced me. that these cholesterol plaques that I was seeing in transplant patients was cholesterol sticking to an inflamed surface that was being attacked by our immune system. And interestingly enough, I saw the exact same thing in my diabetic cancer. In fact, a diabetic's coronary arteries looked exactly like one of my

pediatric heart transplant patient. Exactly. And if the pediatric heart transplant patient, what we knew was attacking that foreign blood vessel with inflammation and cholesterol was patching it, then the same process was happening in my diabetic patients. So, to answer your question, it takes two to tango.

You have to have cholesterol that might be interested in patching. things and oxidized cholesterol. There's a better test now. We talked about oxidized phospholipid apopi. And you have to have blood vessels that are raw or inflamed and that you need to patch it. I'll give you an example. I used to work out with heavy weights and I had some pretty cool calluses around my rings

in my aura ring. Yeah. And I pretty much stopped working out with heavy weights. And lo and behold, without me doing anything, those calluses went away. Now, I didn't take a drug to make the calluses go away. I had a lifestyle intervention where I stopped traumatizing my skin and I built up a cushion. You stop that. And if you think about it, those are cushions that have been built up to patch an area of trauma.

So when I watched Big Ed miraculously regress his literally calluses, I went, son of a gun, he doesn't need those calluses on his blood vessels anymore. because he stopped traumatizing the blood vessel. And because he didn't need them, they regress. Wow. Well. Like you said, because I've been told multiple things that I just didn't accept. One, you can't reverse a thorough sclerosis. You can't reverse plaque.

That's what I was told. And I was also told that you test your LP L.A. once. And you're just kind of, you're just kind of screwed. Yep, you're screwed. Yep. And so miraculously, like I told you, my LPA was. was 330 and now it's 96 and I'm going to continue to get that thing down. I am bound to determine to get it lower and keep doing what I'm doing. But the point is, when you hear those things,

that could cause you other problems because it can throw you into depression and bring up, you know, other areas of problems because that will increase inflammation, cause other problems. So yeah, yeah, I think it's important to do your research and look at different ideologies out there. I want to shift gears with you because you. You've been taught, I've watched you talk about something that I have taken a really deep interest in right now that I'm doing a lot of focus on and that's your allithinae. And so I've watched everything that you've talked about on it because I have been about, ever since I met the people at timeline and it's really started to learn about might appear. And I've been studying, I've been taking biology courses extra for certifications I'm getting. And so I've taken a really deep dive into that.

Can you tell me, like, how the importance of mitochondria health and kind of just like myophagy, just break it down because I'm trying to put this information out there, understanding and realize just how important it is because it wasn't on my radar. It wasn't in my wheelhouse. And now that I see, I'm focusing more on gut and cellular health and mitochondria, really, because I think that's kind of the important areas. Sure. I mean, the exciting thing, and I wrote an entire point.

book about it called The Energy Paradox. So mitochondria are these little intracellular organelles that we learned about in high school biology. And they're the cellular power plants that make ATP. But we now know that mitochondria are actually ancient engulfed bacteria. And we're pretty certain a couple billion years ago. a cell ate, a bacteria. And the bacteria, it's kind of like Jonah and the whale. The bacteria said, hey, before you finish eating me, let's make a deal. If you let me live inside of you and give me a few things to eat,

I'll produce ATP for you beyond your wildest imagination. Now, normally, we, most like a bacteria, will make ATP with what's called glycolysis fermentation. And essentially, you take one molecule of glucose and you get two molecules of ATP. Okay. In a mitochondria, you take that one molecule of glucose and get somewhere between 32 and 34, molecules of ATP. Now, you talk about a return on your investment. So, apparently this was a really good deal. And all, you know, advanced organisms, whether they're plants or animals, have mitochondria. And plants, we call them chloroplasts, but it's essentially the same thing. And so

So, mitochondria actually have their own DNA, and it's bacterial DNA. And the cool thing about mitochondria is mitochondria can divide and reproduce more mitochondria without the cell dividing because they have their own DNA. What's even cooler, and it's really wonderful, nerdy stuff, only mitochondrial DNA is only in females. Females pass the mitochondrial DNA. Male sperm have no mitochondrial DNA. It's only in the A.

So it's actually female mitochondria that we have. Now what's so really cool is these were ancient bacteria. We get our bacterial load initially from our mother. When we are passed through the birth canal, our mother takes crap on us. And that drove Maria Shriver crazy when I mentioned that. So we're inoculated with female derived bacteria, and we have female mitochondria. And I make the argument that these are sisters.

And I have two daughters, sisters like to talk to each other. And so we now know that there is a really, really cool communication system between our microbiome and our mitochondria. And they're always exchanging information. And it's that information exchange. that's so exciting. Getting to mitopure. What's interesting, so we've known for a number of years

that there's some pretty cool polyphenols in pomegranates, in walnuts, in raspberries. Elagic acid is one of them. And we've known for years they're really good for you. Well, it turns out that if you have the right set of backers, You can take these compounds and make the end product, which is called urolithinate. Now, most of us mere mortals don't have the right set of bacteria. Only about 20% of us can eat a bunch of pomegranates and make uralithin egg.

But what's intriguing is super old, super agers, you know, 95 and above who are thriving, about 70% of those folks have the right bacteria to make urelythine. So why is that so cool? Well, eurlythine basically tells mitochondria to recycle themselves. It's called mitophagy, self-eat. And mitochondria wear out, and one of two things happen. they wear out and kind of die, that's a bad thing. And it spews dead pieces of mitochondria around,

and our body views them as dead bacteria and doesn't like that. It causes inflammation, seriously. Wow. But if you recycle your mitochondria, then they become new fresh mitochondria, and you don't expose our immune system to these bacterial pieces. And so the cool thing about your all the right bacteria to make it, you can just swallow your allithinae.

So would that theoretically slow down the aging process by reproducing your mitochondria or getting rid of the dead mitochondria? We sure hope so. Yeah, that's what we think happens. That much of brain health, for instance, is mitochondria get damaged and become dysfunctional. And the book actually goes in that why that happens even in more detail. So, yeah, keeping our mitochondria fresh and happy and making lots of them, unlike that picture that we all got in high school biology of that one little mitochondria

that looked kind of like a radiator. Yeah. There can be a thousand mitochondria in a heart muscle cell. There can be a thousand mitochondria in one single neuron, a thousand of them. And the other thing that's really exciting now, and I allude to this in the gut brain paradox, is we now know that mitochondria can actually be transferred to other cells that might need them. The other scary thing is that bad mitochondria can be transferred to cells where they can do damage. And bacteria can actually do part of this in a good way or a bad way.

So the science of personalized medicine is going to get more and more deeper and deeper into these various communication systems between all of the factors that live in us. That's what's exciting. We're beginning to understand the language that bacteria, and even fungi and even plants used to talk to us and control us, if you will, get over it. You know, we're the home to these bacteria. And quite frankly, they'd like to stick around in their home. And if we give them what they need, they'll return the favor.

on the other hand, if we give the bad bacteria what they want, they'll wreak havoc on it. Right. No. Yeah, totally. Wow. Man, I just, this has been awesome. I can literally talk to you all day. I'm so bummed that I looked at the timer now and I want to be very respectful of your time.

But this was amazing. I really appreciate you making the time for me today and for my audience. Like I said, I have a thousand other things. talk to you about, but I'm very thankful I got what I did today. So I appreciate it. Now, your book is obviously coming out. When can we, you can't you? You can pre-order it now, can't you? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's already up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble or wherever you get your books. And it's really in April? April 15th. Tax Day. It's an easy way to remember it. Perfect. Get your refunds and go buy the book. That's right. Exactly. Perfect timing.

So we're, and I'll link everything in the description. What's, the best ways to follow you? Where are you the most active? Well, I've got two YouTube channels. I'm on Instagram, the Dr. Gundry podcast, wherever you get your podcast, Dr. Gundry.com, my supplement and food company, Gundrymd.com. So hopefully you can find me. I don't think it's going to be too hard at all, but I'll make sure it's all listed. So, like I said, thank you so much. It's been amazing. I appreciate all your time and your efforts. and I hope to continue to get to talk to you and learn from you, and I'll always support you.

So thank you again, Dr. Gundry. Appreciate it. Great to see you, Dylan. You too. All right, everybody. Well, that wraps up another one. I hope everybody enjoyed this one as much as I did. Stay tuned for plenty more to come.

Dylan Jameli and Dr. Stephen Gundry, signing off.