Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Dr. Steven Gundry on The Plant Paradox, Fixing Leaky Gut, and Giving Fruit the Boot | Human Behavior | YAPClassic:

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

In 2001, Dr. Steven Gundry met a patient with severe heart disease that couldn’t be corrected by surgery. Steven turned him away, saying he could do nothing to help him. However, the patient made some unusual changes to his diet, and within six months, he cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his arteries. Dr. Gundry then made it his mission to teach people about how to avoid intense surgeries down the line by making simple changes to their diet now. In this episode of YAPClassic, you’ll learn about how gluten and other lectins are harming your gut, why autoimmune diseases have become more common, and how to properly prepare your beans.  Dr. Steven Gundry is a cardiothoracic surgeon turned wellness and nutrition expert and bestselling author. His mission is to improve your health, happiness, and longevity by making simple changes to your diet. He is the Director and Founder of the International Heart & Lung Institute as well as the Center for Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, CA. In this episode, Hala and Steven will discuss:  - How one patient inspired Dr. Gundry to become a nutrition specialist  - It’s not about what you eat; it’s about what you don’t eat  - How gluten and other lectins are harming your gut  - Why “organic” doesn’t mean healthy  - The secret reason we aren’t getting enough nutrients  - Why you should stop eating fruit  - How to eat like your ancestors ate  - We are what our food eats  - A busy schedule isn’t an excuse for chronic fatigue    - And other topics… Dr. Steven Gundry is a nutrition expert and bestselling author. His mission is to improve health, happiness, and longevity through a unique vision of human nutrition. During his 40-year career in medicine, he performed countless pediatric heart transplants, developed patented, life-saving medical technology, and published over 300 articles and book chapters on his research. He is the Director and Founder of the International Heart & Lung Institute as well as the Center for Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, CA, where he operates his private practice.  In 2008, his best-selling book, “Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution,” focused on diet and nutrition as a way to help people avoid surgery. His work in finding solutions to reversing disease through nutrition has continued, resulting in his first “Paradox” series of books: “The Plant Paradox” in 2017 and the sequel in 2018, “The Plant Paradox Cookbook”. LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘masterclass’ for 25% off at yapmedia.io/course. Resources Mentioned:  Steven’s Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Dr.-Steven-R-Gundry/author/B001IGQJQY?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true  Steven’s Website: https://drgundry.com/  Steven’s Supplements and Products: http://gundrymd.com  The Dr. Gundry Podcast: https://drgundry.com/the-dr-gundry-podcast/  Steven’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drstevengundry/?hl=en  Steven’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrStevenGundry/  Steven’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/drgundry?lang=en  Steven’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-gundry-5b99a042  Sponsored By:  Shopify - Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/profiting More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/

Hey, hey, young and profitors. Today, we're pulling an episode from the archives and we're replaying my interview with Dr. Stephen Gundry. Dr. Gundry is a cardiothoracic surgeon turned wellness and nutrition expert, and during his 40-year career in medicine, he performed over 10,000 heart surgeries, developed life-saving medical technology, and published over 300 articles on his research. In this episode, Dr. Gundry shares his unconventional diet. advice, like cutting out fruit and avoiding certain organic foods. We also talk about the real

reason most Americans aren't getting enough nutrients, the root of most autoimmune diseases, and some of the hidden dangers of eating various plants and legumes. I hope this episode encourages you to pay more attention to what you're putting in your body, but make sure you're doing your own research and making your own conclusions about what you put in your body. I want to make sure that you guys are making your own decisions about what's right for you and your diet. Without further ado, here's my interview with Dr. Stephen Gundry. Hey, Dr. Gundry. Welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Well, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. I'm so excited to have you here because it's not too often that we have a medical

doctor on the show. So to give my listeners some context of who you are, you've had a really unique career journey. You really have a passion for helping people live healthier, better lives. You worked in medicine for over 40 years as a cardiothoracian. surgeon. Hopefully I said that right. And a heart surgeon. Close enough. And now you focus on something very different. You focus on nutrition, helping people change their diet so they can actually avoid surgery down the line. Your nutritional philosophy called The Plant Paradox, you had a series of books that came out was super popular. It's one of the most well-known nutrition diets out there. And you spend your days teaching patients about diet and nutrition and helping people live long

healthier lives with your advice and research that you've done on the topic. So tell us, how did you change from surgery, you know, something very invasive, something pretty reactive, into concentrating more on the preventative side with nutrition and diet? Well, I got to go way back to the dark ages when I was an undergraduate at Yale University and back in those dark ages. We were allowed to manufacture, design our own major. And I had this crazy major in human evolutionary biology where I had a thesis that I had to defend. And the thesis was you could take a great ape and manipulate its diet and manipulate its environment.

And you could prove that what you would end up with is a human being. And I actually defended my thesis and got an honors and then gave it to my parents and went away to medical school and it became a very, very famous heart surgeon. Did more infant and pediatric heart transplants than any surgeon in the world. And became very famous for protecting the heart during heart surgery. Became very famous for redo operations, minimally invasive operations, artificial hearts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Became chairman and professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine for most of my career. And then a little over 20 years ago now, I was confronted with a gentleman that I call Big Ed. And Big Ed, as the name implies, was a very large

fellow. He's in his late 40s, and he had inoperable coronary artery disease. Now, what that means is he had so much crud in his coronary arteries that you couldn't put stents in them. You couldn't put bypasses in them because there was no place to jump to do a bypass. And Big Head had had gone around the country to various centers with idiots like me who would normally take people like this on. And everywhere he went, a big name center turned him down saying, you're hopeless. So he'd been doing this for about six months. He's from Miami, Florida. And he arrived at Loma Linda, bearing his angiogram, the movie of his heart, cardiac catheterization, from six months earlier. And I was looking at his angiogram, and I said, you know, I got to agree with everybody else who's seen you.

I'd love to take you on, but they're right. I'm not going to help you. And they're right. He says, well, look, here's the deal. It's been six months since that angiogram. And I've been on a diet, And I've lost 45 pounds. Now, this guy was 265 when I met him. And he says, I've gone to a health food store, and I've taken all these supplements. And he actually had brought in a huge shopping bag full of supplements. And he says, you know, maybe I did something here in my heart. And, you know, 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.

And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine. You wasted all your money. And, you know, he says, well, look, you know, I've come all the way from Miami. Couldn't we get another angiogram and just see? And I go, you know, don't get your hopes up. Okay. So we get a new angiogram, a new cardiac catheterization.

And in six months' time, this guy has cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coroner. artery. I mean, gone. And I'd never seen anything like that. Never read a report, a medical review of anything like that. So I said, well, wait a minute now. Now I'm interested. Tell me about this diet. So he starts talking and, you know, paragraph in. I go, wait a minute, time out. that's my thesis from college. And I said, that's exactly what I said, humans ate. And how'd you get my thesis?

And so I actually called my parents who lived in San Diego. I said, hey, you know, do you still have my thesis? And they said, yeah, you know, we got it. It's here in the shrine. And I said, well, send it up to me. So in the meantime, I said, well, tell me about these. supplements. And he starts pulling them out. And I go, oh my gosh. I was using a number of these supplements to keep hearts alive for 48 hours sitting in a bucket of ice water for transplantation

in order to resuscitate them. And I was giving them down the veins and arteries. And it never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things. So, big. was swallowing a lot of the stuff that I was using to protect the heart. So the irony of all of this is, despite being a very smart heart surgeon, I was a big fat guy. I was 70 pounds overweight, despite the fact that I was running 30 miles a week. I was doing 5Ks, 10Ks on the weekends. I was going to the gym every day for an hour.

and I was eating what was considered a healthy, low-fat diet. And yet I had pre-diabetes. I had high blood pressure. I had arthritis. I had to wear braces on my knees to run. And what I was told, well, I had high cholesterol. And I told, eh, it's genetic. You know, you're screwed.

So, long story short, my parents sent me my manuscript, which I keep right up here. And I put myself on my diet. And I lost 50 pounds my first year, and I started taking a bunch of supplements. And lo and behold, my pre-diabetes went away, my hypertension went away, my arthritis went away, my cholesterol completely flipped normally. And I started putting people I operated on, as a professor, on my program after I operated on them. And we were starting to see the same things that were happening to me. you know, we were throwing away their high blood pressure medication, and we were throwing away

their diabetes medication. And I did this to prevent them from ever visiting me again for a bypass. And then sadly, about a year into this, looked in the mirror on a Friday morning on the way into work, and I said, you know, I've actually got this all wrong. I shouldn't operate on people first and then tell them how to avoid me for the rest of their lives. I should teach them how to eat, so I'll never have to operate on. Now, you know, that sounds very altruistic, which it is, but it's really a stupid career move for a heart surgeon because even in academics, you can make a pretty nice living as a heart surgeon, but as I subsequently found out, it's almost impossible. to make a living, teaching people how to eat. Anyhow, I didn't know that then. So I resigned my position

at Loma Linda at the height of my career and set up an institute in Palm Springs, which is just down the road from Loma Linda, where I decided to research this. I've been a researcher all my life, and I ask people, hey, I want you to do this, I want you to eat this stuff. I don't want you to eat this stuff. I want to send you to Costco or Trader Joe's, and I want you to buy some supplements. I don't want to sell them to you. And I want to see what happens. We're going to draw blood on you every three months, and insurance will pay for it, Medicare will pay for it. And let's see what happens. And that's actually what started at all. And lo and behold, and I published my research and presented it. And lo and behold, you could document that things dramatically changed when you changed foods or even

added a what seems like a silly supplement. And you could see when somebody was taking it or when they stopped it. Yeah. So that's a long wind at how I got here. Well, it's an amazing story. So I appreciate you sharing that. I think people would definitely find that story interesting. Something that I just want to say here is that my father was a general and vascular surgeon. He just actually recently passed away. And later in his life, he had something happened with his eye and he couldn't do surgery anymore. And he too also ended up focusing on nutrition. And he was writing a lot of books.

He has three books that he never put out that we're going to put out on his behalf about lowering your cholesterol through nutrition. And so I think there might be a trend overall with surgeons realizing that maybe there's something more, you know, too nutrition, two diet that we've been missing all along. And so I really appreciate that the work that you do.

And I know how powerful, you know, nutrition can be because all throughout my child that I heard all about it from my dad. So really cool stuff. You've had so many people benefit from the plant paradox diet. Even people like celebrities, Kelly Clarkson, you know, went on your diet. So can you tell us at a high level? And so did Usher. Oh, very cool. Very cool. Can you tell us at a high level what your plant paradox diet is and how does it benefit people in terms of diseases and autoimmune diseases? Yeah, so at the very basis of the plant paradox diet, the rule number one is it's not what I tell you to eat

that's very important. It's what I tell you not to eat that actually makes all the difference. And most diets say, you know, eat this, eat this, eat this, and where I start is, okay, there's certain things that really you were not designed to eat that you do not have a good defense system So plants simplistically, actually in reality, don't want to be eaten. One of the hard things for us to imagine is that plants have a life and they don't want to be eaten and they don't want their seeds, which are their babies eaten. And they have defenses against being eaten because they can't run and hide. And some of those defenses I focused on which are called lectins. And lectins have actually been known about for well over 100 years, actually 150 years now.

And lectins are sticky proteins. And by that I mean that they are proteins that look for sugar molecules to stick to, bind to. And those sugar molecules just happen to line our digestive tract, our swallowing tube, our intestines. They line the surfaces of our joints. They line the surfaces of our blood vessels. They even line the spaces between nerves, where one nerve talks to another. And not only my research, but many other people's research have shown that lectins disable their predators by attacking one or more of these surface areas. So I happen to think that leaky gut is the cause of all disease. And I'm not the only one who thinks that. Hippocrates, 2,500 years ago said all disease begins in the gut. And in fact,

behind me, I don't know if you can see it, the road to health is paved with good intestines. So what I found, and based on the work of Dr. Fasano, who's now at Harvard Medical School, he proved that one of the lectins, which is gluten, and most people aren't aware that gluten is a lectin, but it is gluten causes leaky gut by binding to the sugar molecules in our gut and actually breaks the wall of the gut apart. And others have shown that lectins are the cause of coronary artery disease. I've published two papers to that effect. There's very good evidence that leaky gut, in particular caused by lectins,

is a major cause of autoimmune diseases, and I've published a number of papers on that. So when you start looking at these mysterious little guys and then get them out of your diet, at all sorts of cool things happen. So where are they mostly? Mostly they're in grains. They're actually in the hall of grains. And so that includes wheat, rye, barley, oats. It includes the pseudo-grains like quinoa and buckwheat, rice, particularly brown rice. And then they're in the nightshade families. They're in potatoes, eggplant, tomato, tomato. tomatoes, peppers, bell peppers, even goji berries. Goji berries are a night shape. And they're in beans, beans and legumes. And so those are the major sources for them. And oh, peanuts, which are actually

a bean and cashews, which are actually not a nut either. That's most of the place where they live. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world.

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Is it really black and white? Like should we just not eat beans at all or some of these, you know, peanuts that you're mentioning? What I say is you've got to know your enemy and you have to detoxify your enemy. I have beans probably three, four times. week, but I have soaked and pressure-cooked beans. And luckily, for me and my patients, pressure-cooking destroys the lectins in beans. Soaking contributes to leaching leching lectins, and also, interestingly enough, if you soak beans properly, they actually ferment. Most people don't know this. The foam that occurs when you're soaking beans is actually fermentation, just like the foam that would occur as beer is fermenting or as wine is fermenting.

And fermentation is one of the traditional ways that all cultures have made lectin-containing food safe to eat. For instance, the Inca's soaked quinoa for 48 hours, then they allowed it to ferment, and then they cooked it. And unfortunately, it's not on the package direct. So often, and I travel the world looking at these long-lived cultures and studying, okay, how'd you do this? And in fact, they all have ways of detoxifying these harmful proteins. And by the way, all the blue zones do not eat beans and grains. That's one of the biggest myths out there. For instance, the Okinawans, the old Okinawans, the modern ones,

Okinawans actually are not the oldest living people in Japan anymore. But the older Okinawans, 85% of their diet was a purple sweet potato. 85%. 6% of their diet was fermented soybeans in the form of miso. They did not eat tofu. And the other like 4% of their diet was white rice, not brown rice. So the idea that they're long and healthy because they're eating beans and rice is actually not true. That's so interesting. And I'm glad that you say we can still eat beans because my boyfriend is a vegetarian and he wants bean tacos like three, four days a week. And I'm like, what am I going to eat if beans aren't okay? So you say pressure cooking and soaking them will make them healthy. How about like a can of beans that you find in a store since they're soaking,

are those okay or not okay? No, it turns out there's only two companies that pressure cook their beans. One of them is Eden, E.D.E.N. And the other one is a fairly new company called Jovial, just like it sounds a jovial person. And Jovial, both of those companies soak their beans and then pressure cook them. Both Eden does not use a BPA lining, and Jovial has all their beans and glass, which is even better. they're both doing it right. But the beans at the drive-thru to get your bean taco is one of the biggest mischief makers known to mankind. Plus, that taco is either going to be made out of corn, nor it's going to be made out of wheat flour. And both of those are just the perfect lectin load that you can imagine. But wrap it in lettuce. Yeah, very true. And speaking of corn, and we're talking about vegetables in general. Let's talk about organic and this big word organic that everybody uses, everybody thinks, oh, if it's organic, it's good. Tell us about why that's not true.

Well, first of all, we have to understand that the word organic can apply to a lot of very toxic things. For instance, arsenic is organic. And I think no one would recommend having organic arsenic. Cocaine is all organic. Heroin is all organic. So just because something is organic doesn't mean that it's good for you. What is important is that one of the things that people are going to learn about in my new book, The Energy Paradox, is our soils have been so depleted of vitamins, minerals, nutrients. The soils have a microbiome which has been destroyed. And so the food that we're eating today bears absolutely no resemblance to food of 100 years ago. In fact, I love to show a slide to a physician groups that I speak to. And the slide says, our soil is now so depleted of these

essential nutrients, that we could eat mass amounts of food grown in our soil and never get the amount of nutrition we need. And I asked people, okay, you know, when, I said, this is a U.S. Senate document. And when was this document in the U.S. Senate? And people go, oh, you know, 2000. And I go, nah. And they go, oh, yeah, okay, 1980. No, it was 1936 that this document was introduced. And we knew way back then that our soils bear no resemblance to what they should have. I'll give you a fascinating example from COVID. There's a paper, and some people know that we should take selenium to help protect us against COVID.

And that paper came out of China, and there are some selenium-rich soils in China, and there are some selenium-poor soils in China. And this paper showed that people who lived in selenium-rich-soil country in China had a much lower incidence of getting COVID than people who lived in the selenium-poor soils. So that's just one, you know, so this is a micronutrient. And by the way, you can get all the selenium you need by eating three Brazil nuts a day. That's all you need. Brazil nuts are a rich source of selenium. So long story short, organic is a great idea, but organic wheat, organic corn, organic rice, organic tomatoes, are just as lethal as their conventional variety. On the other hand, organic broccoli or organic sweet potatoes or organic cauliflower, you're much better off having that. But beware, I can't tell you the number of people who have autoimmune diseases who are eating organic.

and still have their autoimmune disease. And it's when we take away, tell them, no, you know, don't eat this stuff. Have all the other organic stuff you want, but stop eating this. And one of the principles of the plant paradox is, guess what, nobody had these things 50 years ago. Autoimmune diseases were incredibly rare. And now, you know, 50, 90% of the ads on TV are for an autoimmune disease drug. Yeah. It's so fascinating how we like had it right potentially and then now we went backwards and we have it wrong and we have adverse side effects and we're seeing that now. I was listening

to one of your podcasts and to your point of the soiled, you know, having no nutrients anymore, I heard that you said that oranges have like 70% less vitamin seed than they did 50 years ago. And I've been noticing as I've been buying fruit lately that it doesn't taste like anything anymore that like I buy a peach and it barely tastes like anything, which is so interesting. So I definitely want to get your opinion on the supplements that we should be taking and why supplements are so important now. But I first want to talk about fruit because I know that you say give fruit the boot. So tell us why we should be giving fruit the boot because, again, this is very unconventional

advice. I've been always told that fruit is the candy of nature. You should eat as many fruit as you want. You can have as much as you want. And according to you, that's not true. So why is that? So again, fruit is not fruit anymore. I'll give you, it has been hybridized for sugar content, and that sugar in fruit is called

fructose. Now, just so we all understand sugar cane, what we consider sugar, table sugar, is a molecule of fructose combined with a molecule of glucose, and that makes sucrose. So table sugar is 50% fructose. Most people have heard of high fructose corn syrup, which it's not all that different from table sugar. It's 55% fructose and 45% glucose. So it's now in everything. So fruit, when I wrote my first book years ago, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution, one of the points of that book,

was that Great Apes only gain weight during fruit season. And my editor at Random House said, wait a minute, fruit is nature's candy, fruits good for you, you should eat all the fruit you can. And I said, yeah, but here's the deal. Even in the jungle, fruit only ripens once a year. And they go, what? And I said, yeah, Great Apes only gain weight during fruit season. And they said, send us some papers.

And there's actually an entire book on my shelf dedicated to the fact. that great apes only gain weight during fruit season. Now, why is that? Well, it turns out fructose is actually an incredible mitochondrial toxin. So all of the guys who are having your energy fruit smoothie in the morning, you ought to realize that you're actually poisoning your mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles and all your cells. So fructose is actually not put into our circulation. It's absorbed directly into our liver, where it's detoxified into two things. One is triglycerides, which is fat. The second is uric acid, which causes gout and hypertension. And fructose, what isn't detoxified, actually paralyzes mitochondria. And if you look at the literature,

Fructose is the number one cause of fatty liver disease, which is an epidemic right now. It's a major cause of insulin resistance, which everyone will learn about in the energy paradox. So, fructose we use to make triglycerides to store fat for a winter. That's, believe it or not, why a bear eats all those huckleberries and blueberries in the fall to fatten up for the winter. and fun fact, we use the same metabolic system as a bear. So we, once upon a time, only saw fruit in the summer and early fall, and it was very useful for us because way back when there wasn't much food in the winter. So we followed that pattern as well.

Now, what's happened in the last 50 years is two things. Number one, fruit has been hybridized for sugar content. A cup of seedless grapes has more sugar than a whole Hershey's bar, folks. It has about six teaspoons of sugar. And I can tell you what. I'd rather have to eat. I'd rather have a Hershey bar. Don't eat that either.

But my point is, this stuff has been changed. Let me give you a great example from this weekend. There is a chain of high-end supermarkets in Southern California called Bristol Farms. There are competitors for Whole Foods. And I was in Bristol Farms in Santa Barbara this weekend. And as you walk through the front door, there's a huge display of apples, and they were honey-crisp apples. And these apples are the size of grapefruit. And they're gorgeous, and size of grapefruit.

And then you go around and there's this little bag and it says new, exciting, small apples. And I'll walk up to them and I go and the apple is about the size of what we now consider a crab apple. And my wife and I are way, oh my gosh, look, those are what we used to eat as kids. That's what we used to grow in our backyard. And that apple would have about four bites, literally. And the honeychris, first of all, the name ought to tell you something, honey chris. Hmm, I wonder what that tastes like. That honeychrist, we held the apple up.

That apple would make about six honeychris. And yet we say, oh, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Well, all the benefit of an apple is in the fiber and actually in the peel. The rest is sugar. And these things have been bred for sugar. content. And your point is exactly right. Oranges have been bred for sugar content. Bananas have been bred to grow year-round. There's no bananas that used to grow year-round. Give you another example. We have a couple of blackberry and raspberry bushes in our yard,

and they produce for about six weeks, and they're done. They stopped back in July, and we'll see them again next year in the end of May. I could go to the store and I could buy raspberries and blackberries today that came from Mexico or came from Chile. And the fact that we can have fruit 365 days a year now makes it endless summer to our genetic program. And we are constantly storing fat for the winter that never comes. So that's why if you're going to eat fruit, eat it organic, eat it local, and eat it in season. Otherwise, give fruit the boot. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hello, young improfitters. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up,

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Because it's very scary to think that the soil is depleted, that fruit is not the same, that even if you eat fruit, you're not getting the nutritional value. It's mostly sugar. It has fructose. It's really bad for you. So what do we do instead? It's pretty scary. Well, we should eat like our ancestors ate. And interestingly enough, we can debate what the ancient diet was, but our ancestors ate a lot of tubers, I've got to tell you. One of the things that made humans humans

is the advent of fire and the harnessing of cooking. We were the only animal that could break down the cell walls of plants without bacterial help. And we were able to get a huge amount of nutrition that no other animal could get without fermentation by bacteria in their gut. The other thing that, so tubers actually were a huge part of our ancient diet. We ate a lot of leaves. And one of the things I try to remind people is that gorillas and chimps get most of their nutrition from leaves. A gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every day. Now, I've tried to do that. It's quite, it's an all-day event, and I can't do it.

But the point is, a gorilla gets all its protein from leaves. In fact, the largest animals on earth get all their protein from leaves or grass. And the idea that we somehow have to have animal protein for muscle growth, it just flies. lies against any logic. And there are, of course, some great vegan and vegetarian athletes who have shown that amazingly enough, you do not need animal protein. Do I eat animal protein? Yes, does my wife, yes. Primarily, we eat wild shellfish and wild fish, and it's usually on the weekends. We eat mostly vegan during the week, and we have for years and years. And I think there actually are some benefits to eating wild fish and particularly wild shellfish

that we'll get into in another one of my books, but not today. Cool. Okay. So last question on plant paradox. And then we're going to move into your new book, Energy Paradox. So we're just talking about meat. I want my listeners to understand why you say we are what our food eats. Can you explain that concept to us quickly?

Yeah. So my patients have taught me this. So you are what you eat, but you are what your thing you're eating ate. And so if you feed a chicken, organic corn, an organic soybeans, so you have an organic chicken, that chicken is not a chicken. It is an ear of corn with feathers. And I actually learned this in England when I was training there way back in the 80s. there was so much fish meal that chickens were fed ground up fish. And chickens had pale flesh

that smelled like fish and tasted like fish. And my kids, we took them to Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time over there. They go, oh, this is fish. And we go, no, no, no, look, you know, here's a drumstick. They said, no, it's fish. And they were right because the chicken had become what it was eating. And here's the scary thing. Don't believe me. If you look, corn has a specific carbon configuration. It's called a C4 carbon molecule. You can do analysis of Americans. And 70% of all the carbon atoms that make us, us, are corn, carbon atoms. Five percent of Europeans are corn, carbon. That's because almost everything we eat

has been fed corn or came from corn. And here's the really scary thing. None of us ever ate corn until 500 years ago when Columbus came to America and started bringing corn back. This is incredibly modern food that we have no adaptation for genetically. And yet 70% of us are now corn.

Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I'm from Omaha, Nebraska, the corn huskers. You know, I love corn. I eat popcorn every night. I'm probably 90% corn. Please don't do that. Change to sorghum popcorn. It'll change your life. It'll believe me. Get yourself some sorghum popcorn. Sorghum and millet have no lectins. They're phenomenal. Good to know. Okay, so let's move on to your new book. It's called Energy Paradox. It comes out in March 2021. And a major theme in your book is the fact that leaky gut syndrome can cause fatigue. So can you give us some context into what leaky gut syndrome is? And then also like what this new book is about, how is it different or more enhanced than the plant paradox? So we have an epidemic of fatigue and tiredness in this country. And it's it's reaching into young people, people in

their 20s and their 30s, and it's not just because you have two kids and they're driving you crazy. It's because of leaky gut. And if you had asked me 15 years ago what I thought about leaky gut, I would have told you it's pseudoscience. But now I can tell you that all disease begins in the gut. Now, why does fatigue begin in the gut? And it's because when you have a leaky gut, You have not only lectins, but actually bacterial particles that get across the wall of your gut. And 70 to 80 percent of your immune system lines your gut. And your immune system is designed to recognize foreign invaders and attack them. And your immune system requires huge amounts of energy.

And we will divert energy to our immune system at all costs. Just as an example, think about the flu. When you get the flu, you feel like crap, you don't want to move, you're achy, you just want to lay there, you don't even want to do anything. That's because your immune system has actually diverted all of your energy resources to fighting the flu virus. And so you're supposed to feel awful and have no energy because it's all been rationed. What's happened to all of us now is we have chronic, continuous, low-grade inflammation. And so all of our energy resources, unbeknownst to us, have been diverted into this chronic, low-grade inflammation that stems from leaky gut. And the book is all about, okay, here's why you got it, and here's what we're going to do about it.

And it's a six-week process, and we'll seal your leaky gut and get your energy back. Yeah. And I hear all the time that people are tired and they think it's because they're busy or they think it's because I feel like they have all excuses in the book as to why they're tired and they think it's normal. Is it normal to be tired? No, that's the problem. In restorative medicine, we call people like that the walking well. They figure that tiredness is a part of being normal. Now, I just, giving an example. I'm now, you know, I've turned 70 this summer. I work seven days a week. I'm supposed to be repaired. I'm supposed to be at the retirement center, having a great time. So the idea that we should be

tired, you know, at 30 because we're busy and, you know, we have all these commitments, that's been fed to people to cover up the fact that there's something really wrong. And we're, we're just we have to come to grips that fatigue is actually a sign that's trying to get our attention. There's something actually pretty doggone wrong. And if we don't get control of it early, that's when, oh my gosh, gosh, I've got pre-diabetes or gosh, I've got high blood pressure, or gosh, I've got arthritis or gosh, my brain, I can't remember things as much as I did anymore, but heck, I'm 40 now and that's normal. It's not. So interesting. Thank you so much. The last question I ask all my guests is, what is your secret to profiting in life?

Oh, I started the show with that. Do what you love and love what you do. And particularly now during COVID, look, this is the ultimate opportunity to, okay, things, maybe you don't have a job. Maybe the job isn't doing what you want to do. this is the time if there was ever a time to do what you want to do and it's going to take some work you're probably going to suffer but it'll pay off because your happiness is worth more than all the money there is i totally agree i totally agree once you follow your passion life is just so much more fulfilling so much happier so i can totally agree with that um and with Where can our listeners go to find more about you and everything that you do? So they can, I have a podcast, a Dr. Gundry podcast, wherever you get your podcast. You can go to Dr. Gundry.com.

You can go to my supplement line, Gundrymd.com. Two YouTube channels, you can find me on Instagram, Stephen Gundry. If I don't pop up on your inbox someplace when you're searching, I've not done my job properly. Yeah, he's everywhere. And we'll stick all his links in the show notes and some more additional information so you guys can find out more about the plant paradox. So thank you so much, Dr. Gundry, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.