Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Is Your Gut Controlling Your Mood? Dr. Steven Gundry on the Microbiome-Brain Connection

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Dr. Steven Gundry spills the bacterial-beans on his book, "The Gut Brain Paradox," revealing how your belly's tiny tenants control your mood swings and brainpower. Think your tummy is just for digestion? Think again! It's the mastermind behind your mental mojo, influencing everything from the blues to those brain fog moments. Dr. Gundry explains his modified carnivore diet - yes, you can still enjoy some cheesy goodness and meaty delights, but hold the glyphosate. Get ready to rethink your next meal as we uncover the connection between your gut and your grey matter. Spoiler alert: your brain might just be taking orders from your belly! To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep283 Steven R. Gundry, MD, is the director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs, California, and the founder and director of the Center for Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. After a distinguished surgical 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. His bestselling books include Gut Check, Unlocking the Keto Code, The Energy Paradox, The Plant Paradox Family Cookbook, The Longevity Paradox, The Plant Paradox Quick and Easy, The Plant Paradox Cookbook, and The Plant Paradox, and has written 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 is the host of the top-ranked nutrition podcast The Dr. Gundry Podcast and founder of Gundry MD, a wellness brand. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of The Resetter podcast, I am bringing you back Dr. Stephen Gundry. So Dr. Gundry, he is the most well known for his original book that just took over the world and stunned everyone, which is called The Plant Paradox. And in that book, he really brought forward some controversial thoughts that still hold true today, which is that plants have toxins on them. And some people's gut microbiome actually will respond negatively to those toxins. And he specifically called them oxalates and lectins, which many people know now, they're unable to handle these plant toxins, especially when they have a severe gut situation. What he's bringing us now is so good.

I am so excited to bring this to you all. He just put out a book called The Gut Brain Paradox. And it's about how our gut microbiome controls our brain. If you have never heard this concept before, please listen, take notes, listen again, send it to a friend. Because what Dr. Gundry is bringing forward is going to change so many people's opinion on depression and anxiety and neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson's and aging conditions like Alzheimer's. When we break down all of these mental health challenges or brain challenges, we start to see that there is a gut bacteria issue that needs to be repaired.

and it can be repaired by things like fasting. And you're going to hear some really cool information on different types of diets like the carnivore diet. And we're going to look at is depression actually your life circumstance or is it an imbalance in your microbiome? I really hope it gives you a new lens on not only how your brain works, how your moods work, but also gives you an idea if you have any loved ones with a little. any kind of neurodegenerative issues or anybody who's dealing with Alzheimer's or dementia,

let's bring it back to these microbes. They're really, really powerful. So Dr. Stephen Gundry, the gut brain paradox. And as always, I hope you enjoy this incredible conversation and it moves the needle on your health and your life. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. So Dr. Gundry, let me welcome you back to the Resetter podcast. I'm excited to have this chat with you. And it's great to see you again, Mindy. So thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So it was interesting. You and I chatted a.

about this book back in October when I was on your podcast. Yeah. And, you know, my first thought was, why aren't we talking about the gut brain access enough? And why, it seems when I have read the research, looked at what these microbes do to our thoughts, I have questioned why we are even approaching mental health from a mindset standpoint. So can we start with this question? when we're looking at our thoughts, our behaviors, the way that our brain functions, what is controlling our brain more?

Is it the microbes or is it actually neurons in our brain? Well, I submit and have some pretty good evidence in the book that it's the microbes. It's the passengers on the bus that are actually driving the bus. And we really ought to get over this. You know, bacteria have been around for three billion years. We've been around 100,000 thereabouts. And, you know, they probably have worked out some pretty good survival skills during three billion years and probably want to direct our behavior to get them what they want.

Unfortunately, bad guys can also direct our behavior to get them what they want, right? Right. So, okay, so when we look at the gut microbiome, just to bring everybody into the conversation, we've got good guys, we've got bad guys, do we have microbes that are neutral? Like, just give us an idea of what that ecosystem looks like before we dive into how it affects the brain. Sure. You know, I started the book with one of the great scientific Titan warfare in the 1800s between two French. chemist Louis Pasteur and Antoine Beauchamp. And they were both fighting, to put it mildly, over microbes and whether germs, bacteria in specific, were bad guys like Pasteur got.

And Beauchamp said, no, no, no. All these organisms exist in what he called. a terrain, an ecosystem. And I use a tropical rainforest as an example. And there are all these interdependent species. And they're neither good guys nor bad guys. Obviously, some things eat other things, et cetera, or need a product of one plant or animal to survive. But as long as things who are in balance, this ecosystem, the terrain, keeps everything on a level playing field. But when imbalance happens, when one or more species becomes dominant, that's when you see a disease process, an infection. And Pasteur was a great public speaker, as I understand,

and I've read actually every book written about both of them. He figured out that French wine went bad by bacterial contamination. and the French king thought that was pretty important information. So Pasteur won and Bouchamp lost, but in several accounts, there's no proof, but in several accounts on Pasteur's deathbed, he called Bouchamp's aide Bernard to his bedside, and he said, you know, he was right. It is the terrain some. Yeah, I've heard that story as well. you know, I researched that story during the pandemic. I was, I was like, when's the last time we've had a pandemic? And when I went back and looked at the 1918 Spanish flu, that was the time those two men were arguing. And now we have more reference point to it because we've been through our own pandemic. Because what out of that, pretty within a couple of years came penicillin. Yeah. And then once penicillin came into the world, it was like a miracle. And you can. And you

can understand why. Think about how fearful we've all been. But, you know, to your point in the book, where do we sit now with bacteria, now that we've created all of these antibiotics? Like, if anything is proven, is it the terrain or is it the microbes? I think it's the overuse of antibiotics. Would you agree? Yeah. And not only that, but as I've talked about before and also in this book, People need to know that glyphosate, the active ingredient roundup, was patented by Monsanto as an antibiotic, not as a weed killer. And we're now, luckily through animal studies, particularly, we now know that glyphosate decimates our microbiome. And in effect, decimates the triptophan serotonin producing microbiome. And is it any wonder that we've got this incredible epidemic of depression and anxiety?

I mean, you know, I mean, 20 to 30 percent of females in this country are on antidepressants. I mean, it's like, holy cow, yeah. Yeah. Is it affecting women more? Is a woman's gut more susceptible to things like glyphosate than a man's leading us to depression? Well, I think you guys have always had a gut sense. Yeah, we do. Yeah. No joke. No joke. You know, I have a wife and two daughters and some female dogs, so I get it. You know, I've been educated all my life. Well done. But, and, you know, autoimmune disorders affect women far more than men, although men are catching up. Because everybody's got an autoimmune disorder now, and that's another story. But yeah, women are more.

more susceptible. And my theory is that you guys, your immune system has to learn tolerance to the largest parasite ever created, and that's your fetus. And your immune system has to do kind of a 180 in trying to accept a clearly foreign body for nine months or so without trying to kill it off and then go back to normal functioning. And I think that's this glitch that makes women in particular more susceptible to autoimmune diseases. And I happen to think, like Apocryde's said 2,500 years ago, that all disease begins in the gut. And certainly in my practice, which is 80% autoimmune patients, every autoimmune patient has gut dyspiosis. and abnormal terrain.

Every autoimmune patient has leaky gut, intestinal permeability. Everyone, 100%. Wow. Wow. Where are we in understanding the impact of microbes on our human cells?

I also dove into this and saw that when you look at the human genome project, it came out like late 70s, early 80s, but then they followed it up with the human microbe project, and then that really was ongoing for a long time. It may still be, and it really showed that it influenced how human cells behaved. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, the human microbiome project finished in 2017. Actually, the date I published The Plant Paradox. And what that's done is, you're right, it's really opened our eyes into the fact, our genome isn't very interesting.

It's actually not a really unique, big genome. I mean, corn has more genes than humans do. That's crazy. A sand flea on beach has more genes than humans do. But what's really interesting is, so we've got a hundred trillion bacteria just in our gut alone. And these guys are constantly dividing. And they're constantly sharing genetic information with each other. They're constantly getting genetic information from viruses, phages that attach to them.

And so they're constantly in this recombination of genes. And I and others have proposed that just like you and I are talking on our computers here, this computer doesn't have a lot of functioning power, doesn't have a lot of memory, we have uploaded most of the processing power up to the cloud, which is supposedly infinite processing power. Because this microbiome is so genetically active, is such a good interacting substance with our environment, everything we swallow goes through our gut, that we've uploaded the processing power of decision-making to the back-term. cloud in our guts.

And I think, and so those are watching on video, so my phone is a really good receiver for information from the cloud. In fact, there's four pieces of information and they just came. And I propose that our brain is merely a really good receiver for the information that's coming from our bacterial cloud. And if we accept that, then things start to make sense. Like, why does somebody just have this sugar craving that they can't give up? Why is the recidivism rate of any addiction treatment program about 90%?

There's only about a 10% long-term success rate. You choose the addiction. It's usually a 90% long-term failure. Why is that? Because we're trying to manipulate this when the book, and I suggest we should be manipulating the gut microbiome. Is there a way for us to know based off of behavior or symptoms if our gut microbiome is well balanced and serving us well? Like, I could be depressed because of a life situation.

How do I know if that depression is being amplified by an imbalance in my microbes or actually is just a life situation? Well, that's true. We now know that depressed individuals, have a specific, identifiable microbiome, anxious individuals. One of the shocking things that I discovered is people who have an outgoing personality, kind of from day one, actually have a unique microbiome that makes them an outgoing personality. That's cool. I mean, that's kind of cool. Yeah, that's really cool.

So, and actually, I hope my daughters aren't with them. As somebody with an outgoing personality, I'm like, oh, I like that. Yeah. So, yeah, embrace your microbiome outgoing personality, right? So, yeah, so, and these experiments have been conducted in rodents. You can take a germ-free mouse, have them eat poop from a depressed human individual, and they'll get depressed. Now you go, well, wait, how you know if a rat's depressed? Well, they're actually mazes and tests to.

Measure depression in rats, it's actually pretty easy. And so, and there was a, there was an experiment done in the 1930s. Back in those days, severely depressed individuals were institutionalized. And so they, they took these very depressed individuals, and they gave them enemas and cleaned out their guts. And then they gave them fecal enemas from happy people. Yeah. And they actually got happy.

And it's like, what? Are you sure? Well, yeah, now we're sure because now we know how that happened. I have been a part of a beautiful mixture of health care practitioners for years, and one of them in there said to me one time, Hey, Mindy, I'd take your poop if it's going to make me drop weight and put a smile on my face. I was like, I think that's a compliment. But it is interesting when we start to see that these bacteria are not. just controlling our minds, but controlling our metabolism, controlling our immune system. Again, I just, what where my brain goes is how does the individual human understand if they have the right mixture of bacteria or not? Is there a way for us to tell?

Well, it's getting better and better. Again, women have always had this gut feeling. And that's It's actually pretty intuitive. If you think something's off in your intestines, it is. We now know, for instance, Parkinson's is a disease that comes to the brain from the gut, as does Alzheimer's. And one of the striking things, when we start looking at the history of Parkinson's patients and even Alzheimer's patient, they all collectively have gut issues that they can cite. Or they have history. of chronic antibiotic use, etc., etc. But they all will tell you this. But now with the modern microbiome testing that we have on stools, because of the human microbiome project, we can identify the genetic code of all of these species.

And now we can actually number them. We know the ratio that they're supposed to have. I talk about in the book, there's, when you're looking at a tropical rainforest, there are ecological terms looking at the diversity. And one's called Shannon's Index and the other is Simpsons Index. And we can now apply those indexes to the microbiome. That's cool. And you can, you know, you can give a patient a map of, okay, you know, here, these are the guys that

are the bad guys and they've kind of taken over. And you're good guys, man, they're, they're high. in the corner, and we got to coax them out, we got to starve the bad guys. And that's actually a big part of the book is, now, don't despair about all this. There is something that can be done. And I wouldn't see patients six days a week if I just wanted to give them the bad news. Right, of course, of course. Explain the mechanism behind this. I had a really wonderful conversation about a year ago with Dr. William Lee. And we actually specifically honed in, on the astrobalome and the set of bacteria that break down estrogen. And we started geeking out

on how these bacteria go up the vagus nerve and then go up into the brain and start to stimulate different parts of the brain. And before you know it, we were also geeking out on fermented sour dough and how it can impact the bacteria that make oxytocin. So bring this into some kind of complete understanding for the layperson. Is it these microbes are just hanging out in the gut? And is it the vagus nerve they travel up? How do they get to the brain? And then how do they decide what part of the brain they're going to stimulate? Well, the vagus nerve is just one tiny piece of this puzzle. In fact, I mean, we used to thought when I was in medical school that the vagus nerve is how the brain talked to the gut. And lo and behold, now we know. We

know that for every one nerve fiber heading from the brain to the gut, there's nine from the gut heading up to the brain. So we had it, you know, backwards. But the vagus nerve is just really an old-fashioned telephone line, but the sophistication of how these guys control us is now, thanks to the human microbiome project. For instance, I recently was lecturing at, I get ready for this, the Society of Extra Cellular. Vescal. Oh, that sounds interesting. So what the heck is a, you know, so these are exosomes or extracellular vesicles.

These are little packets of information. I look at them as kind of a link on an email that I click, well, to come on your show, I click the link and it instantly brought me here. So we now know that bacteria and plants and fungi can pop up. out little pockets of information that have genetic instructions, can have microRNA, MRI, and even living mitochondria, and pop them out, and the way these are designed, they can go through the wall of the gut, they can go through blood vessels, they can go through the blood brain barrier, unobstructed, merge onto a target cell, and release lease that information and change the epigenetic expression of that cell.

Sane. Yeah. And it's like, holy cow, I thought it was pretty cool that bacteria could send messages up with the vaguely nerve. But now, are you kidding? They're sending, you know, text messages with a link to open it up, and it's going to change, you know, my behavior. And talk about sophistication.

Wow. And it's like, wow, is this complex. How could we imagine that these little one-cell organisms have this incredible, complex control over us? And once you see all that, you go, whoa. What kind of behaviors do they control just so people, is it everything in our brain? You know, we certainly know, I get this question a lot, you know, GLP1 agonists or in. We now know it's the microbiome that actually produces GLP1. And it's the microbiome production of GLP1 that if you're feeding the good guys what they need to eat,

they basically send GLP1 up to the brain and said, hey, great news. You ate everything we need. You don't have to go looking for anything else. We're great. You don't have to be hungry. Now, unfortunately, those guys have mostly been killed off or starved to death. And most of the processed foods and ultra-processed foods that we eat are very simple sugars and saturated fats that a whole different set of bugs can utilize. And in the old days, our grandparents ate whole food and they ate them whole.

And so we, in the digestive process, would get, you know, glucose and amino acids and fats, but then there'd be a whole lot left over in terms of polysaccharide resistant starches that would filter down to the colon where most of these guys live. And there'd be plenty of left over. And then these guys say, yep, we got it, no problem. And one of the things that I tell my patients who have this food noise in their head is, well, we could eat a podcast host admitted right before the podcast yesterday that she had consumed eight. Oh my gosh. Oh, my gosh. That would never happen with me, but that's quite an admission. I'm, yeah. I say, so let me tell you what just happened. I said, you ate those Oreo cookies.

And they're simple sugar and fat. And these microbes who love this stuff gobbled it all up. And there was nothing left that was coming downstream. And the guy's downstream go, wait a minute. I heard her chewing up there. She swallowed something. I know it's coming. And then nothing arrives.

And they go, what the heck? I just heard you eating. You got cheated. We didn't get anything. Go find some more food. So they send out grilling another hormone to make you hungry. And no wonder these things just set up the cycle of food noise. And that food noise is actually your microbiome.

The good guy is going, you're starving me to death. What the heck? What are you doing? So you're eating, but you're not feeding these microbes that will, send your brain the right signals to turn off hunger. That's exactly right. And so now we've come up with a drug to be able to replicate that. Is that correct?

That's correct. Yeah. So what food should we be avoiding so that we don't destroy these microbes? Well, it's a two-step process. You can't give these bad guys the food that they can take advantage of, these simple sugars and these fats. You got to starve them. They can't utilize long-changed starches. They don't have the fermentation mechanism to break them down.

On the other hand, the good guys do have that mechanism. But it's not as simple as it sounds. I wish it was. For instance, there's a husband and wife microbiology team at Stanford, the Sonnenbergs, who are real doomsayers of the human microbiome. They really think, and they're right, that we basically have a desert wasteland of a microbiome rather than a tropical rainforest. And they don't really think we'll ever be able to reestablish our rainforest. I disagree with them.

But they did a beautiful experiment that I talk about in the book. And in a previous book, they took volunteers. And everybody knows that the good guys want prebiotic fiber. They want soluble fiber. And they use a soluble fiber inulin, which is present in the chicory family of vegetables, Radicchio and Belgian Andive. Oh, my favorite. And the great thing is you can find in almost every grocery store now.

It's not in the weird health food section anymore. And asparagus has inuline, artichoke hearts have inulins. So they gave volunteers lots of inuline. And they looked at their gut microbiome diversity. city, and they looked at markers of inflammation. And they gave them all this stuff. And nothing changed. The gut microbiome didn't change. There are inflammation markers and say, yeah, and go, hmm, well, wait a minute. That's what those guys want to eat. They said, you know, we're missing something here. There's got to be some precursors that I've written about for many books now called postbiotics. These are essentially the products

of bacterial fermentation of eating things. And we should give these people, in addition to the inulin, we should give them some fermented foods. They chose yogurt and kifers. You could have chosen sourcrow or kimchi. You could have chosen vinegar. And we'll do the same experiment. Give them the inuline, but give them this.

Now, with the addition of these postbiotic foods, these fermented foods, the gut diversity increased and the inflammation markers decrease. So to talk about Hillary Clinton, it takes a village. And that's really what has to happen. So bringing more fermented foods in is really key to the diversity of, yeah. Yeah, I can really, you know, after, you know this as a podcast host, when you interview a lot of people, you start to see conflicting theories all over the place. But one of the unifying theories I see amongst everybody who has a slant in nutrition is

everybody's pretty pro-fermented food. Is there any person who should not be eating fermented foods? Well, some people actually have to kind of take it slowly, just like some of my patients introducing really any plant material. into them when they've got a really destroyed wall of their gut can be mischievous. We've certainly seen people, I'll give you an example, there's a keystone species in our gut called acrimoncea, musinophila. And it's a really important species, and it lives in the mucus layer of our gut, which really protects our gut from mischief. And it eats mucus. Now you think, well, wait a minute, mucus is good, and it's eating mucus. That sounds like a bad thing.

But the more mucus it eats, the more mucus is produced by the wall of our gut. So it's actually a plus win. And we can measure acrimoncia in our patients. And most people with leaky gut or with an autoimmune disease or dysbiosis really don't have any acrimoncya. And so you could give some of these people acrimoncia, and there's several companies that make it. both in living form and in dead form, and that's another subject. And some of these people get really severe abdominal pain when they introduce acrimancia.

And I think in those people, their mucus layer is so devoid that acrimoncia begins to really start chomping on the cells themselves, trying to get some nourishment. And William Davis makes a case for this. And I've seen it in my practice. Some young children who their mothers gave them acrimancy. It had a bad reaction. So it just, it's more complex than meets the eye. So is our probiotics a risky adventure to dip into?

Would you be better off trying to search for these bacteria in food? Well, I think, yeah, back in the good old days, these bacteria, and more importantly, these bacterial products were in the foods we ate. Right. And you look at these ancient cultures, fermentation was really, number one, the only way to preserve food. We didn't have refrigerators, and it was the only way to preserve food by actually eating the sugar molecule. So wine is preserved grape juice, and it has the products of fermentation. So some of my patients say, dog, Godin, I'm having fermented foods every night. God bless you, Dr. Gundry, and great suggestion.

And not just changing the subject, but there is a cool human trial of looking at gut microbiome diversity, comparing red wine, the equivalent calories in grape juice, and the equivalent calories in gin. And lo and behold, it was actually the red wine that, promoted gut diversity and improved gut wall health, the grape juice had no effect, and the gin actually had a very negative effect. Wow, you just put a huge smile on my face. I'm like you, a very, I have a soft spot for a good bottle of wine. So does it matter then? Is it need to be biodynamic, natural? I mean, of course it goes down that path. Well, yeah. I mean, most of our California wines have glyphosate in them.

A few years ago, I was talking to Michael Mondavi, who is Robert Mondavi's son who runs Mondavi. And he said it took us 10 years to get glyphosate out of our soil in our vineyards, 10 years. Wow. Wow. It's crazy. Yeah. This stuff is just everywhere.

Would you say glyphosate's one of the worst pesticides for the microbiome? Well, I mean, antibiotics are even better, but again, glyphosite is an antibiotic. We should realize it's, it is an herbicide, but it was, again, patented as an antibiotic. And there's some really good animal studies using human diet equivalent amounts of glyphosate that show that the animal's microbiome is just totally, changed for the worse. All the good guys are wiped out. The bad guys are pretty resistant to it. And so you wonder, why we have so much anxiety and depression. I'll give you another example, which was really educational for me. Again, most of my patients, we treat their autoimmune disease, and we have a really good success rate. Ninety-four percent my published data are in remission, of all their meds in a year. Amazing. Awesome.

You know, the psoriasis goes away, the rheumatoid arthritis goes away, their Crohn's goes away, you name it. And they go over to Europe on vacation. And they can't resist. They have croissants, and they have baguettes, and they have pizza,

and they probably have some tomatoes. And they do not react. They go, and they go, wow, you know, Dr. Gundry's cured me. I can have all this. And they come back. And they start having, our bread and our pizzas and you know what else.

And within weeks, they're on the phone going, what the heck? You know, this patch of psoriasis is baggera? What the heck? You know, this finger just swelled up. What the heck? I thought you cured me. I said, no, you weren't eating glyphosate over there.

Wow. And you could tolerate that just fine. But you came back and I see it all the time. It's just, it's so sad. We did, in my clinic, we did a lot of heavy metal detoxing, and glyphosate just drives those heavy metals even deeper into the brain. What's your best strategy for other than avoiding glyphosate, but that's near impossible? Is there any other way we can heal our gut from the abuse of glyphosate? Well, there is some evidence that humic acid does protect.

against glyphosate. I, for one, have my patients take about three grams of glycine every day, particularly night helps sleep. And it's useful because glyphosate will compete for glycine in DNA. And you kind of flood the zone. We're hearing that in politics now. But you can kind of flood the zone with glycine to stop glyphosate from binding. where glycine would go in. And, you know, time will tell, but it certainly won't hurt but might help. Yeah, is this why the carnivore?

You have one thing I love that you put in there in your book is about a modified carnivore diet. And I can tell you as a community, our community has been experimenting with something I call carnivore fasting, where we do 17 hours of a fast, and then the rest of the day you're just eating meat. And of all the different types of fasts,

and food combinations, I've seen that one cause people to drop the most amount of weight compared to any other combination. Is it partly because of this glycine component to animal meat? And can you talk a little bit about your modified carnivore diet? Well, I think it's actually more that you're really eliminating glyphosate primarily from your diet. And you're eliminating most lectin-containing foods in a garden-war diet. And it's interesting, if you look back at, you know, some of the famous diets like the Atkins diet or the South Beach diet or diets before that,

these all had in common that they eliminated most carbohydrates. And the weight loss was usually quite spectacular. And then people would get bored of it or they'd get out of it. Yeah, it is boring. Yeah. And they'd reinterduring. these healthy foods, carbohydrates, healthy carbohydrates, and their weight would come right back up. And I was very impressed with that. I got to know Dr. Atkins' nurse and got to know his

ghostwriter very well. And Adkins never realized that what was happening with his diet was that he was eliminating all these mischievous compounds. And it was the elimination, the elimination diet that was most effective. But when they added these compounds back, then, you know, people gained weight again. Right, right. So, okay, so explain them what your modified carnivore diet is. Well, there, there was, there's a very interesting sugar molecule. And the word sugar shouldn't sound like sugar sweet. Right. We, we have a sugar molecule in us, poultry and fish and seafood that's called New 5, capital G, little C, new 5 G, C, new 5 AC, sorry. And so we share a new 5 AC with all of these animals.

Unfortunately, beef, lamb, port, and milk have a very similar sugar molecule called new 5GC. They differ by one molecule of oxygen, otherwise they're identical. When humans swallow Nu5GC containing foods, we make aggressive antibodies to it. We hate it. We view it as one of the most dangerous compounds we've ever encountered, even though it looks virtually identical to our sugar molecule new 5AC. So what? Well, we now know that New 5. which lines our gut, well, lines our blood vessels, lines our joint service, lines our blood

brain barrier, it can be displaced by New 5GC in the diet. And the more New 5GC eating foods, containing foods, the more New 5AC is displaced. So what? Our immune system attacks that new 5GC is foreign. And it causes leaky brain. It causes joint inflammation, it causes heart disease, and it causes impressive neuroinflammation. How I really started to see this is some people have accused me of being the father of the carnivore diet because if you take my anti-plant stance to the extreme, then you should never eat a plan. That's not what I said.

You got to know your friends and you got to know your enemy. and you've got to detoxify your enemies. But so a number of my patients have tried the carnivore diet, you know, mainly beef. And they all feel great. They lose weight. They never felt better. And yet when I look at their inflammatory markers,

like TNF alpha or IL-6, they're going up and up and up. And I'm going, what the heck? So I said, you know, I'm glad this is working for you. Would you mind trading, you know, pastured poultry and wild fish and wild shellfish for this? Or if you'll eat fermented meats, fermented sausages, true fermented sausages, prosciutto is a fermented meat. And it turns out the fermentation process eats in the new five gills. It's gone.

Okay. I said, let's try that. What did you humor me? Because, you know, I draw blood on every three months. And sure enough, their inflammation markers went away. And that, to me, has certainly convinced me in my practice that this molecule is mischievous unless you detoxify it by fermentation. And that explains, so milk has new 5GC.

And that explains there's a very strong association with milk drinking and heart disease and dementia and arthritis. But there's a reverse in fermented milk products. The more yogurts you eat, the more fermented cheeses you eat, particularly goat and sheep cheeses and yogurts, the better your markers get. And because the fermentation process has eaten all. all those sugar molecules. So there's no new 5GC in fermented dairy. Wow. So, okay, so you're modified is fermented dairy and then poultry and fish, but shellfish, shellfish staying away from pork and beef. You can have pork and beef if it's in a sausage form that's been fermented. Now, how do you know? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So traditional cultures, fermenting.

their sausages, you know, they eat nose to tail, so they have to preserve everything. And so they introduce bacterial cultures into their product. And there are still, you can read a label, and if you see lactic acid cultures on the sausage label, that's a fermented sauce. And companies have gotten very clever. They know that consumers are now looking for the word lactic acid. and not so much the word cultures. So a lot of them just inject lactic acid and don't inject the bacteria. So I've had some patients come in,

oh, look, I found this sausage. Look, it's got lactic acid. I said, do you see the word culture? No. And I said, they fooled you. Oh, man, it's not fair. That's so true. You have to have like a PhD in chemistry

to be able to read a nutrition label these days. It's really embarrassing what they've done to our brains around nutrition is so sad. Oh, yeah. For instance, pea protein or soy protein are just so low delectins. But pea protein or soy protein isolates the lectins have been removed. So I, well, actually, if my patients have to, and I take care of a lot of vegan patients, I said, as long as you see, you know, protein icing. isolate on the pea or the soy, that'll be okay. But pee protein is so cheap that it's in everything.

Yeah. And they refine everything, right? They just, they take the goodness, they steal it down, and we think it's healthy. It's really quite manipulative. So, well, of course, I have to ask you what you think of fasting on the microbiome, and especially in relation to the new, book and how our microbiome affects our brain, what's the research you found there? You got to have a reparative time in the wall of your gut. Just like our brain needs reparative time. It needs downtime. It needs to go through a washing cycle. And digestion is hard work. It requires huge amounts of energy. And the cells in our gut are really being damaged by this process. And, you know, the average American now eats 16 hours a day kind of from the sun up.

Crazy. Yeah. And there's absolutely no rest time. So one of the great things about fasting that you and I know is kind of the longer you can continue a fast after not eating before you break your fast, which was breakfast, break fast, then the more reparative time there is. And the ketone production is actually uncoupling mitochondria. And it's this uncoupling of mitochondria that allows them to have more mitogenesis, to have mitophagy. And it's a win-win. So that's a part of my programs for the last 25 years now.

Yeah. And do you think what you break your fast with matters? No, I think if you're looking at a, you know, a 24-hour cycle of, you know, with a six to seven-hour eating window, there's nothing that you have to break the fast width that I've seen. To like refeed the microbes after they've had a little break. Yeah, haven't you? And talk a little bit about the circadian rhythm of microbes. You even in this new book talk about the moon cycle, which is of interest. to me because the way we look at hormones and how hormones come in and how they're connected

to the moon cycle if you really dive into the nuance. So I found it fascinating that you're talking about the moon cycle of bacteria. Explain that. Yeah, there's been conjecture through the years that jet lag is actually caused by a change in the circadian rhythm of our microbes, not by jet lag per se. And again, think about it. Bacteria been here for, three billion years. And they've been exposed to the tidal pull of the moon, the gravitational pull, for three billion years. And the idea that they can't see the moon when they're inside of us really is meaningless. They can certainly feel lunar cycles. And so it makes sense that they, after three billion years, would cycle their activity with the gravitational pull of the moon.

any of it, I moonlighted as an emergency room doctor for many years in residency. And it is absolutely true. We added extra staff on full moons. Oh, yeah. We always had, there were more car accidents, there were more craziness, there were more stabbings. And you could say, oh, that's an old wife. You don't spend money for extra staff unless you know you're going to use them. Oh, yeah.

We had it marked on the calendars, the lunar cycles. Wow. So in your research, so then what does that look like? Certain microbes come in when the moon is waxing and some is when it's waning? Yeah, they get more active and, you know, it shifts, you know, on a lunar clock basis. Affecting our behaviors. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, and we know that, for instance, you know, anxiety changes with lunar cycles.

schizophrenia really changes with lunar cycles. And as I like to try to say in the book, well, it's actually because those microbes are changing with the lunar cycle. There's a very good identification of schizophrenic microbes, just as an example. You can identify them. And can somebody do an average, like, stool test and then see what, like, when there's so many stool tests out right now. And if you do one, do you get a really good snapshot or are these microbes kind of waxing and waning all the time? And so we don't really have a clear way to test them.

Yes and no. You're right. It is a snapshot. But the stool tests are getting better. I pooh-poohed them for many years. I didn't use them in my patients because it was. It was just a snapshot. But now we can actually identify who they are, how much of the products that we now know are produced by gut microbes, the postbiotics. We can measure all the short chain fatty acids, the percentage. And we can begin to see, oh, geez, okay, we're missing this group or this group is overgrown. And now we're beginning to realize, okay, well, what are these guys need to eat? And what are we going to do to starve these guys? And so it's kind of a fun balancing act. Yeah, and yet we're not sophisticated enough yet in our knowledge on, I mean, if there's trillions of bacteria.

So in your book, do you address some of that? Like if you're deficient in this microbe or you have too much of this one, how you can use food to balance that? Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that was discovered just a few years ago about polyphen. these very, you know, dark and bright colors and fruits and vegetables, polyphenols are produced by plants to actually protect their mitochondria from sun damage, from environmental damage, by uncoupling their mitochondria. That's how they work. And we thought for years that polyphenols were antioxidants. They're not. And we've known for years that polyphenols aren't absorbed very well. And we're going, well, gosh, people who eat lots of polyphenols. phenol seem to do better. Well, it turns out polyphenols are one of the best prebiotics for the gut microbiome. And they love this stuff. And they're the ones who then change these polyphenols into absorbable compounds that then can uncouple our mitochondria. And is olive oil the best polyphenol around? Well, there are some great polyphenols in olive oil. But spices are a great source of polyphenols.

polyphenols. Interesting little tidbit of crazy information. Olives have their own microbiome. The leaves have their own microbiome. And there's a bacteria on olives called L. Pentosis. And don't take note. So L. Pentosis is actually one of the most important bacteria to foster the growth of Acrimoncia, by the way. And wouldn't you know that olive, of oil has L. Pentosis in it. And so, yeah, olive oil is great polyphenols, but son of a gun, you're drinking a bacteria that makes acrimonccia, you know, really happy.

And wow, polyphenols and a bacteria that makes, you know, no wonder, I mean, the Greeks per capita use a half a liter of olive oil per week per capita. Wow. Wow. So are they the happiest people on the planet then? I believe so. If you've ever seen them dance, it's true. I do have to give your olive oil a shout out because you gave me, when I was on your podcast, you gave me a couple of those products. Wow. So tasty. That was what I was, I was just taken at spoonfuls every morning. Yeah, exactly. Really, yeah. It's really, really, really.

good. Yeah, it has 30 times more polyphenols than any other olive oil that's been described. Yeah. It was, I can, you, and you can smell it in all the world. Yeah. It's almost like wine. Like, it just has this really different smell than what I get in a restaurant for, for, for example. Yeah. So what are you hoping to accomplish with this book? And, you know, you've written a lot of books and you probably have an extremely curious brain. But, Why this book? And what are you trying to bring forward to the culture right now? Well, number one, I think what I want to do is take away the shame that we all go through of, oh, it's my fault that I'm a sugar addict, or it's my fault that I'm an alcoholic, or it's my fault that I like drugs, or it's my fault that I'm depressed. And, you know, my mother beat me when I was two years old and I don't remember it. But the point of all this is that these are not your fault.

These are control mechanisms that our gut microbiome uses. And the good news is it is changeable. And I think it's time to stop the shaming of, I hate the more, the mental illness or the shaming of depression and the shaming of food noise and food cravings. And let's get people a way of taking control over this that doesn't involve, don't give me wrong, therapy is wonderful, but it doesn't involve therapy. We want to do therapy for our gut microbiome. Oh, well said, well said.

How long does it take to change the microbiome? So when I started this 25 years ago, I was a pretty nice. naive, and I thought we could seal a leaky gut in two weeks. I literally thought that. It usually takes nine months, two a year for most people to seal their leaky gut. Can be faster. I've seen it faster. But the longest it's ever taken me is four years in a young gentleman who had such leaky

gut that he could not get out of bed. He could not walk outside except to go into anaphylactic shock. and was literally bedridden, cared for by his girlfriend. She's a saint. They're now married. He's a normal human being. He has a job. He does everything he wants to do.

But it literally took us four years to get his microbiome in shape and to seal his leaky gut. But now he's a functional human being. So that's an exception. But the good news is most people, it doesn't take that long. Yeah. I've seen studies where even like you, one of the more interesting ones was a national geographic article where a journalist went and lived in an African. Hansa.

Yeah. And then came for three days, ate porcupine, did a few other, you know, lived off the dirt, came back and his whole microbiome was different in three days. Absolutely. Yeah, that's possible. The problem is he came back and his microbiome completely reverted back to normal. in the next three days. That's the sad part.

So, yeah, you got a, and there have been researchers from scripts who have gone and had fecal transplants from these hunter-gatherers to get, you know, whatever, and lived for a few days, and then they all left because you didn't feed them what these guys were feeding. So, yeah, so fast. I guess they were on vacation for a couple days. That's right. That's right. It was like a, it was like a spa for the microbiome.

Milder, living with the Hads and Tribe. There you go. Yeah. Well, Dr. Gundry, you continue to be a leading edge and bringing great conversations to the health world. And probably of all the ones I've seen you bring, I really hope this one sticks. Some people grab it and start to get to know these bacteria because, like you said, the shaming, the depression, the anxiety, we're just all over the place in trying to

understand that. and you have really brought it into a focal point. So I just want to say thank you for that. It's really time. So appreciate that. My pleasure. Let's shame the bad bacteria. That's right.

Come on. Get out of it. Yeah, that's right. They don't care. Let's go ahead and shame them. That's right. Have you no shame? Right.

Exactly. Okay. How do people get your book and tell us what we can do to send your message into the world? Well, they, you know, they can watch the Dr. Gundry podcast where I've had the pleasure of having you on, I think two times. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. My YouTube channels, my Instagram, Dr. Gundry.com, Gondrym.D.com is my food and supplement company. Hopefully I pop up while you're scrolling or your feeds and I say hi.

Hopefully. Amazing. And the book is anywhere, books are sold. Yeah. Anywhere. Please support your. support your local bookseller. They had a horrible time during COVID,

and they're just coming out of it. That's what I always say is go to the Indies if you can because they need us, so agreed. Well, you have done it once again, so I don't know how you keep popping these books out. Is it once every two years? Yeah, about once every year and a half. Wow.

About my schedule. Wow. This is book nine in the series. Amazing. Amazing. Well, we appreciate you, your commitment, your brain, and keep dreaming up new things for us to noodle on. We really appreciate it. Oh, don't thank my brain.

Thank my microbiome. Well, good. I owe everything to them and my wife. Well done. Well done. That was so good. Appreciate you. All right.

Thanks, migrates. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me in today. day's episode, I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.