772 How to Live a Long Life with Dr. Steven Gundry

DIE YOUNG AT AN OLD AGE. How many fad diets have you tried? There’s a reason that they don’t work. Health and diet are not one-size-fits-all. We all have a special set of genes that tell us what foods we need. But it’s more than your genes. Doctor’s will ask you if you have a history of a disease in your family. That’s because you not only share the same genetic make-up, you probably eat the same way. It’s a combination of the two that will determine your health. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about the secret to longevity with one of the world’s top health experts: Dr. Steven Grundy. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is episode number 772 with New York Times bestselling author Dr. Steven Gundry. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  The Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our minds strong and clear." Welcome to this episode. We've got Dr. Steven Gundry back on the podcast. He came on about a year and a half ago, and his interview took over the internet. Over a million views on the video on YouTube, and the audio just continues to thrive. It's been crazy, the amount of comments and engagement that this has taken on. So we decided to bring him back. His last book, The Plant Paradox, I think was on the New York Times Bestseller list for over 30 weeks. It's taken over the world and it's transformed so many people's lives.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  We have a new book on, which is all about how to live a longer life. And if you want to live longer, if you want to learn the secrets, the keys, he really breaks down five main principles. If you could do five key things to help you live longer and healthier, he breaks them all down. And a few of these things, I really had no clue that this is even part of the human makeup to help us extend life. But when he talked about it, it made a lot of sense. So make sure to dive into this. And for those who don't know who Dr. Steven Gundry is, he's a doctor and bestselling author. He's a former cardiac surgeon who did close to 10,000 heart surgeries. And he currently owns his own clinic.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  He is constantly looking to improve the health and lives of others. We talk about his story a little bit in here, but he's been transforming the lives of so many people for many years. And in this interview, we talk about how eating the same food as your parents can result in the same health Issues and disease, not necessarily your DNA. Also, the importance of oral health to prevent most of the diseases we get. Most people aren't aware of this. The importance of olive oil, vitamin D3, and fish oil to live a longer life and what you really need for your body. And how organic vegetables are better for you, even though they may not look as polished as other vegetables. That and so much more. We dive into a lot of things in this interview.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Make sure to share this with your friends, all about how to live a longer, healthier life. If you want the fountain of youth, this is it. And make sure to share with your friends, lewishouse.com/77. Big thank you to our sponsors. And without further ado, let's dive into this episode with the one, the only, Dr. Gundry.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got the legendary Dr. Stephen Gundry in the house, my man. Good to see you.

• 3:06Steven Gundry?

  Pleasure to see you again.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Glad you're back on. The last interview we did blew up on the internet.

• 3:12Steven Gundry?

  I'm sorry.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, in a good way.

• 3:14Steven Gundry?

  Oh, shoot.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  In a good way. Plant Paradox has been a massive New York Times bestselling book. How many times on the list? Was it how many weeks?

• 3:21Steven Gundry?

  I think it was 34 weeks.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  34?

• 3:23Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, 34 weeks. And then the subsequent books, Cookbook was on 14 weeks, something like that. And the other one joined the list as well, so.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  It's incredible.

• 3:33Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  34 weeks in a row, or it kind of like go off?

• 3:36Steven Gundry?

  It actually went off for two weeks and then hopped right back on.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Oh, alright.

• 3:39Steven Gundry?

  Just kind of funny. And then it ran forever. And then Kelly Clarkson, God bless her, you know, cured her Hashimoto's by following my book.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Wow. Really? She did?

• 3:49Steven Gundry?

  Had a big fit, yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  And she talked about it publicly?

• 3:51Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, she talked about it publicly. She, everybody noticed that she had lost like 40 pounds and said, hey, what's the deal? And she said, oh, you know, I'm reading this crazy Plant Paradox thing. And I used to have Hashimoto's and I was on thyroid and now I'm not on it, it's gone.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 4:06Steven Gundry?

  It's, it's, it's.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  It's pretty cool.

• 4:08Steven Gundry?

  Pretty cool.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  So the book's been out for a year and a half.

• 4:10Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, almost two years.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Almost two years.

• 4:13Steven Gundry?

  Almost two years.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  And it's just been blowing up.

• 4:15Steven Gundry?

  And yeah, it's still just, it's been translated into 34 languages now.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 4:22Steven Gundry?

  Just signed the deal for Slovakian.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 4:26Steven Gundry?

  You know?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Taking over the world now.

• 4:28Steven Gundry?

  Big fans in Slovakia.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  There you go. I love it.

• 4:31Steven Gundry?

  Hello Slovakians, I love you.

• 4:34Lewis Howes?

  And you, what are some of the things you learned through the process of the last couple of years that people were, people were finding out about themselves and discovering about other things? You've got this new book about living longer, longevity paradox. So what were some of the things that you've learned over the last couple of years about health in general with people?

• 4:52Steven Gundry?

  So I think one of the things was probably one of the most controversial statements in the plant paradox was that your bad health is not your fault.

• 5:03Lewis Howes?

  It's your DNA, right? It's your genes?

• 5:05Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, it's your genes and DNA. And I go into a lot of this in the longevity paradox, that in fact, your genes have very little to do with what's going to happen to you, both in the immediate period and in long term. And there's a big, huge study looking at millions of people around the world and their outcome, looking at their genetics, their DNA. And their DNA has only probably about a 6% influence on you, your health, what's going to happen to you. So that means-

• 5:45Lewis Howes?

  Including like diseases?

• 5:46Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, diseases.

• 5:47Lewis Howes?

  So why do we always, when we go to the doctor, they say, well, did your father have a stroke or a heart attack? Did your mother have dementia?

• 5:55Steven Gundry?

  So when I ask that question, and I do, what that tells me is that if your mother had diabetes, or your father had coronary artery disease, that tells me that if you eat like your parents did, then you will most likely have those diseases, not because you inherited that from your parents, but you learned to eat from your parents. And it actually goes beyond that. Not only did you learn to eat from your parents, but you shared the microbiome, the bugs in your gut that your parents had.

• 6:37Steven Gundry?

  In fact, as we talk about in the book, you can take identical twins and raise them apart.

• 6:45Steven Gundry?

  And they will actually have microbiomes more in common with the family that they were raised with than their identical twin. And the outcome, health outcomes of those identical twins will not parallel genetics. They will parallel the microbiome that they acquired.

• 7:07Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 7:08Steven Gundry?

  Living with that other family.

• 7:09Lewis Howes?

  So you could be separate from your twin for, what, fifteen, twenty years, living different, live with different, I guess, health benefits and, and one more than the other, see each other and almost look different.

• 7:22Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And you can actually, you know, there, there've been some studies of twins who have been raised apart and clearly they're identical, but depending on how they ate and their microbiome that they acquired, they can look quite different.

• 7:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow. This may be a dumb question, but if you're an identical twin, do you have the exact same genes?

• 7:44Steven Gundry?

  Exactly.

• 7:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 7:46Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, identical.

• 7:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 7:48Steven Gundry?

  You are literally the same.

• 7:50Lewis Howes?

  The same.

• 7:51Steven Gundry?

  Genetic person.

• 7:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay, interesting. Wow, okay, so you talk about this microbiome, the gut, that's really like the brain, right?

• 7:58Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Lewis Howes?

  That's the brain.

• 8:00Steven Gundry?

  It is the brain.

• 8:01Lewis Howes?

  So, and there's always, there's bugs inside of us right now.

• 8:04Steven Gundry?

  Yep, trillions.

• 8:05Lewis Howes?

  Trillions of like little bugs, insects.

• 8:08Steven Gundry?

  Well, not insects.

• 8:09Lewis Howes?

  Not insects.

• 8:10Steven Gundry?

  No, they're bacteria.

• 8:11Lewis Howes?

  Bacteria.

• 8:12Steven Gundry?

  So, not only bacteria, but they're also viruses, there's also fungi, there's all sorts of molds and mushrooms and things like that growing in you.

• 8:19Lewis Howes?

  Mushrooms in my gut.

• 8:20Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. Well, in fact, fun fact, recent study shows that women's breast milk has bacteria and funguses in the breast milk that feed the microbiome, that seed the microbiome of the baby. We've known for quite some time that, you know, the microbiome, and the microbiome again is, is all these other inhabitants of us and.

• 8:50Lewis Howes?

  Like, for example?

• 8:52Steven Gundry?

  Okay, so, getting back to genetics.

• 8:56Steven Gundry?

  Ninety percent of the cells that make up you, me, are non-human. They are bacteria, viruses, fungus, parasites, worms. Wow. So ninety percent of you and me is not me, is not you. It's all these other guys. Wow. So you're basically a condominium for what I call bugs. And if we look at the genetic material that constitutes us, the genes, the genetic material, all the DNA of all these other guys, is ninety-nine percent of all the genetic material that's in you and me.

• 9:36Steven Gundry?

  So the book is, let's take care, forget about the one percenters, our genes. Let's understand that ninety-nine percent of the genetic material in us is non-us, but that's the important guys. Why is it so important? Because they control our fate. And the point of the longevity paradox is that knowing what these guys want, and I call them bugs, good bugs and bad bugs, knowing what these guys want to eat, and knowing how these guys relate to the wall inside of our gut,

• 10:18Steven Gundry?

  the inner lining of our gut, and that crosstalk across that wall will determine what's going to happen to you. Long term? Long term. Wow. And even short term. Just this past week, just as another great teaser, we now know that the oral microbiome, the bugs that live in our mouth, can predict who's going to develop or who has pancreatic cancer. Really? Really. At what age, any age? Choose your age. There is a distinctive set of bugs

• 10:56Steven Gundry?

  that has now been found in pancreatic cancer in humans that predicts. And so there's an exciting new thing that you could take a swab of your tongue and sequence which bugs are in there, and you can go, oh crap, you know.

• 11:17Steven Gundry?

  You've got a pancreatic cancer microbiome. Now, the good news about that is, is that you can alter that microbiome. But a paper just this morning, they literally stuck needles into the pancreas of people that were, you know, looking for pancreatic cancer. And they were looking for pancreatic cancer cells, but they're looking under the microscope and they go, wait a minute, there's a bunch of bacteria sitting here inside this, you know, pancreas, what the heck are those doing in there? So then in 105 people, they sequence those bacteria and they were all exactly the same sorts of bacteria and they actually all came from the mouth.

• 12:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Doesn't most, I heard this from an oral, I guess hygienist or dentist or doctor, who said a lot of the disease we capture is through the mouth.

• 12:11Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, correct. Dale Bredesen, who wrote The End of Alzheimer's, who's become a good friend of mine. He and I are fascinated with the effect of the oral microbiome on dementia. For instance, in the, in the Plant Paradox, I wrote about, there's kind of a fun study in rats where you can take LPSs, lipopolysaccharides, which are the outside wall of bacteria. They're not living bacteria, they're just the dead bacteria. And in my book, you know, I don't swear, but I call them little pieces of shit, because that's what they are, LPSs, they literally are dead bacteria. And so these, you can take rats and you can swab one of their noses with LPSs, they're

• 12:56Steven Gundry?

  not living bacteria, they're pieces of dead bacteria. And the other side of the nostril, you can just put a cotton swab with nothing on it, right? And you do that every day. The rats who get the swab up one side of the nose, their other side of their body gets Parkinson's disease.

• 13:14Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 13:15Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, gets Parkinson's disease. The other side, you know, the opposite side, doesn't. And you go, what the heck is going on? Well, if you think about it, your nose and your mouth are gateways to your brain. I mean, literally the back of your mouth and the top of your nose is your brain, your brain's just sitting there. And so this is a direct shot into your brain. And as I talk about, I talked about it in The Plant Paradox, but I really go into this in The Longevity Paradox, that To prevent Alzheimer's and to prevent Parkinson's and dementia, one of the things you gotta do is the care and feeding of your microbiome. And that includes your oral microbiome.

• 13:58Steven Gundry?

  Because this is a direct shot and you gotta, you gotta take care of it.

• 14:03Lewis Howes?

  So how do you take care of that?

• 14:04Steven Gundry?

  So there are, believe it or not, certain bacteria. One's called the P gingivitis that is now been isolated from the brain Alzheimer's patients. And how did it get there? Well, it got there through your mouth, through bad dental hygiene, through gingivitis. That's how the name.

• 14:23Lewis Howes?

  So you can get Alzheimer's through?

• 14:26Steven Gundry?

  Through your mouth.

• 14:26Lewis Howes?

  Not taking care of your teeth?

• 14:28Steven Gundry?

  Exactly.

• 14:28Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 14:29Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. And in fact, years, years ago, you know, I'm such an incredible nerd. There's a very famous marker of inflammation called the C-reactive protein, CRP. Almost everybody listening is probably had a CRP. There's a more specific one called highly sensitive CRP. Years ago, I noticed that a lot of my patients with heart disease had elevated CRPs. And I said, you know, my wife flosses twice a day, literally. I mean, she's a nut.

• 15:01Lewis Howes?

  It's good, right?

• 15:02Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, it's great. I hate to floss. I hate it. So I designed an experiment with like 500 people and I asked them to floss every other day. Okay? And we'd measure their CRPs and then we measured their CRPs every three months for a year. And the people who I could get to floss every other day, and that included myself, their CRPs came down to normal and they were elevated. And the people who flossed more than every other day, they had even lower. And so I wrote this paper for the American Heart Association that says that since CRP is very highly associated with developing coronary artery disease,

• 15:42Steven Gundry?

  that coronary artery disease, in fact, partially comes from the mouth. And if you want to prevent coronary artery disease, you ought to floss. I got honored by the American Institute of Oral Biology for my research. You know, everybody gave me a big hand. But these dentists are right. There's a barrier between the bugs that live in your mouth and you. And it's at your gum-tooth interface and you've got to preserve that barrier.

• 16:13Steven Gundry?

  The same thing happens in the barrier in the wall of our intestines. So here's the deal, your your intestines are your skin turned inside out. That's all it is. That surface area of the intestines is the same surface area as a tennis court.

• 16:36Steven Gundry?

  That's big. Yeah, that's big. Everybody's kind of looking down like there's no tennis court. How's it fit in there? Yeah, how'd they do that? Well, and we can do this because it's kind of fun. I'm fascinated with plants, as you know, the plant paradox. And, you know, plants are actually very intelligent human beings. They actually see. A new book has proven that plants see. Anyway, so plants have a root system in the soil that they get their nourishment. And those roots are surrounded by a microbiome of the soil. And there's fungi and bacteria. And it's actually that microbiome that gets the food into the plant, gets all the nutrients into the plant.

• 17:20Steven Gundry?

  So we actually have roots. And this surface area, those of you who remember high school biology, we have all these little projections called microville. And think of it kind of as a shag carpet. And so we have roots that go into our intestines. And everything we eat is actually the soil. So intestines are like the roots. Yeah, our intestines, out of our intestines are these roots. Got it. And the soil is what we eat. But the main component of the soil is the microbiome. So you've got four to five pounds of bugs. In my gut. In your gut. And they're there.

• 18:04Steven Gundry?

  We used to think they were just a bunch of crap. But we actually need it. And we not only need it, they control everything that's going to happen to you. Do I want 10 pounds of bugs or do I just want four or five? Well, actually, the more the more diverse set of bugs you have, the more kind of mixing pot, United Nations of bugs, the better off you're going to be. In fact. Why is that? Turns out, if you take, you look at what's called microbial diversity. In other words, you know, how many? We now know that there are at least 10,000 different species of bacteria that live in

• 18:46Steven Gundry?

  your gut. In fact, a few weeks ago, another thousand was was found that nobody realized. So your gut is basically a tropical rainforest and you've got all these creatures and things happening and one creature depends on another and you know, you tip the balance off, it's like introducing wolves back into Yellowstone Park, right? Oops, we needed wolves, who knew?

• 19:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Steven Gundry?

  Right? So there's this intense kind of communication dependence and the more diverse your microbiome is, the longer you live and the longer you live well. So.

• 19:31Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 19:32Steven Gundry?

  Turns out that this root system is dependent on the nourishment it gets from all of these bugs.

• 19:46Lewis Howes?

  Got it. So like if you're trying to grow a plant or a tree in a desert, it'd be challenging because there's not enough soil.

• 19:53Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Lewis Howes?

  And it would only thrive for as long as it can or?

• 19:56Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, in fact, you know.

• 19:58Lewis Howes?

  You put an oak tree in a desert, I guess, or whatever, it needs more nourishment than it's receiving there.

• 20:02Steven Gundry?

  Right. And you can actually, there's really cool experiments where you can have two identical plants planted right next to each other and depending on the microbiome in that soil, one plant will thrive and the other won't.

• 20:17Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 20:18Steven Gundry?

  But we can go down a rabbit hole. It turns out in a forest, if trees sense that one of their neighbors is not, you know, doing too well, they will actually send roots and supports over to that tree.

• 20:31Lewis Howes?

  That's pretty interesting. So all this has, so what I'm hearing you say is that the gut, the microbiome and these bugs have a lot to do with how you can live well now and also for extending life. Is that what I'm hearing?

• 20:42Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. So you take 105 year old people around the world. And you look at their, and these, these are thriving people.

• 20:51Lewis Howes?

  Not like about to die.

• 20:52Steven Gundry?

  No.

• 20:53Lewis Howes?

  They can move around, they can.

• 20:54Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, it's like Edith, it's like Edith Murray who starts the book. That lady was a hundred and five and a half when this picture was taken.

• 21:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:03Steven Gundry?

  And so she was in two inch wedgies. She walks her little Pomeranian and she's smart as a whip and she was one of the women who really changed my life. Her name's Edith Murray, she's Michelle in all my books. So anyhow. So you take these people and you look at their gut microbiome. They have the gut microbiome, the diversity of a thirty year old individual.

• 21:30Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:30Steven Gundry?

  And if you look normally at people as they age, their gut microbiome becomes less and less diverse. You ultimately have only a few species. So it's this, number one, it's this huge diversity that makes a big difference. And number two, we now know that there are certain bugs that really make the difference. And the longevity paradox is actually teaching people how to nurture the bugs that are very interested in keeping you alive.

• 22:04Steven Gundry?

  Another way of looking at this, you're, you're basically a condominium for these bugs, for bacteria.

• 22:11Lewis Howes?

  So how do we attract all these diverse, good bugs?

• 22:14Steven Gundry?

  I'm so glad you asked.

• 22:17Steven Gundry?

  So we know that good bugs like to eat certain foods.

• 22:22Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 22:22Steven Gundry?

  And a lot of this was actually based on, there's this fascinating creature called the naked mole rat. And naked mole rats, make sure everybody who's listening or watching, Google's naked mole rats. And here will be my first controversial statement of the day. Naked mole rats have sometimes been described as a penis with buck teeth. Okay. Okay, so Google it. There you go. You'll see it. So these are probably one of the ugliest creatures in the world. Naked mole rats live in the Sahara Desert and they live in colonies, very much like termites or bees. And they live in subterranean tunnels.

• 23:03Steven Gundry?

  And naked mole rats appear to have no end mortality. In other words, naked mole rats live at least 10 to 20 times longer than any other rat. Rats live about two years. Naked mole rats have lived 20, 30 years. Wow. In fact, no one has actually known that you could actually have an end life of a naked mole rat. So they've been the darling of longevity researchers for a very long time. And in fact, hilariously, when I was professor at Loma Linda, which is a blue zone, I had behind my desk this giant, iridescent naked mole rat picture. Really? From the San Diego Zoo.

• 23:48Steven Gundry?

  And everybody goes, what's the deal, you're a famous heart surgeon? And what the deal, you've got this naked mole rat behind your desk? I mean, it's bright pink and purple. And I've been fascinated with naked mole rats because they're the longest living creatures. So naked mole rats have the same diverse microbiome as 105-year-old people. Really? Really. And what the heck is going on? Well, it turns out naked mole rats, unlike any other rat, eats roots, eats tubers, and eats fungi that are growing in the subterranean area.

• 24:29Steven Gundry?

  So if you think I would like you to eat some roots and tubers and mushrooms, you're absolutely right. Because the evidence is rather striking that the bugs that like these things are what keeps the naked mole rat living so long, unlike any of its other rat cousins who eat grains. And we can be sure to be talking about that soon. So this is the only rat that eats tubers and mushrooms and roots. And... They have the microbiome of 105 year old people who are thriving. In fact, a study published last week out of Singapore showed that humans who eat two cups

• 25:12Steven Gundry?

  of mushrooms per week do not get Alzheimer's disease.

• 25:17Lewis Howes?

  And it's because- Two cups of any type of mushroom?

• 25:19Steven Gundry?

  Any type you want.

• 25:20Lewis Howes?

  Go to the grocery store, get some mushrooms.

• 25:22Steven Gundry?

  Turns out button mushrooms are second best of all mushrooms in terms of a compound that we now know is the secret of mushrooms. Porcini mushrooms, which of course is the prized mushroom of Italians, is number one for these compounds. Now, these compounds are polyphenols. They're actually cousins of polyphenols that are in green tea. And what happens with these compounds is that they're actually eaten by bacteria. Bacteria love to eat polyphenols. And the bacteria then, for lack of a better word, poop out these compounds that have been changed a little bit.

• 26:04Steven Gundry?

  And it's those compounds that enter our circulation. And a particular compound in mushrooms that's been manipulated by bacteria protects the brain from damage.

• 26:17Lewis Howes?

  From Alzheimer's or dementia or anything like that?

• 26:19Steven Gundry?

  Wow.

• 26:20Lewis Howes?

  So mushrooms.

• 26:20Steven Gundry?

  Mushrooms. Eat your mushrooms.

• 26:22Lewis Howes?

  Every week?

• 26:23Steven Gundry?

  Every week.

• 26:24Lewis Howes?

  What if there's a diverse of mushrooms or if you eat the same mushroom all the time, does it matter?

• 26:28Steven Gundry?

  It really doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. And again, the plain old humble button mushroom will do it for you.

• 26:34Lewis Howes?

  Just have a couple of cups a week.

• 26:36Steven Gundry?

  What I do is, you know, I take a bunch of different mushroom blends and-

• 26:41Lewis Howes?

  Mix it up.

• 26:41Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, mix it up.

• 26:42Lewis Howes?

  United Nations of mushrooms.

• 26:44Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, and I take mushroom capsules. And I take, I have a product that's actually lots of different mushrooms you just squeeze in your coffee or whatever.

• 26:57Speaker 00

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• 28:25Speaker 00

  Okay, I have a question now. So, for people that want to live longer and be healthy while they live longer, not having to get surgeries all the time.

• 28:32Steven Gundry?

  Right.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  If you had three to five minutes, max, to talk to someone who said, "I just want to live longer. I want to know the secrets to living longer. I got to figure out the keys," and you've got three minutes with them, what would you say in three minutes are the things they must do every day, or as often as they can for the rest of their life, to extend their life?

• 28:55Steven Gundry?

  The first thing they must do is realize that the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. The only purpose of food, and preferably it'll be mushrooms that you pour the olive oil on. That's number one. The evidence that the polyphenols in olive oil... If you really, you know, wanted to live well for a very long time, olive oil is the key. Two of the blue zones, actually three, if you count the Echeveroles, use a liter of olive oil per week. Now, that's a lot of olive oil. So like 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. So, there's a beautiful study out of Spain that I talk about,

• 29:39Steven Gundry?

  where you took 65-year-old people. And we'll dumb it down real quick. Two groups. One group had to use a liter of olive oil per week for five years. Then they changed their olive oil once a week at the clinic. The other group had to eat a low-fat Mediterranean diet. Both Mediterranean diets of Spain. At the end of five years, the olive oil group had better memory, had improved memory than when they started. The low-fat group lost memory. The women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the low-fat group. People in both groups who had coronary artery disease,

• 30:20Steven Gundry?

  the group that got the olive oil had a 30% less incidence of new events versus the group that had the low-fat diet. And so if, you know, three blue zones, and this study doesn't convince you that you better get olive oil into you, olive oil grows brain cells. And it's not the oil per se. It's actually the polyphenols in olive oil. Olive oil, the polyphenols literally make your blood vessels slippery. And I've actually published data on this, that your blood vessels, you cannot stick cholesterol to blood vessels if you have olive oil in your system. Yeah. So, you know, drink the dumb stuff.

• 30:59Lewis Howes?

  Do you drink it?

• 31:00Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, I do.

• 31:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 31:01Steven Gundry?

  I take a shot of it.

• 31:02Lewis Howes?

  Craig's always talking about how he can drink as much as possible.

• 31:05Steven Gundry?

  But what I would urge people to do is, you can cook in olive oil. This myth that olive oil oxidizes when you cook it is one of the worst internet myths there is.

• 31:15Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 31:16Steven Gundry?

  It turns out that olive oil is the least oxidizable oil. It's even better than avocado oil or coconut oil. It does not oxidize.

• 31:25Lewis Howes?

  Oxidize, meaning like evaporate?

• 31:27Steven Gundry?

  No, oxidize means gets damaged.

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  Damaged.

• 31:30Steven Gundry?

  Damage, okay. It turns out, everybody sees olive oil smoking and they figure that's damage.

• 31:35Lewis Howes?

  It's not. So you can burn it as much as you want.

• 31:38Steven Gundry?

  You know, cultures have been using olive oil to cook with for 5,000 years. And you know, there's not a lot of dead Italians from cooking in olive oil. Okay, so you gotta get olive oil.

• 31:49Lewis Howes?

  So that's number one.

• 31:49Steven Gundry?

  Number one. Number two, you gotta take vitamin D3. You've got to.

• 31:53Lewis Howes?

  Vitamin D3, not D.

• 31:55Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, well, there's, there's D2, there's D1.

• 31:58Lewis Howes?

  What's vitamin D3 and why is it important?

• 31:59Steven Gundry?

  So D3 is the active form of vitamin D that we use. You will be shocked that people who have the highest levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream live the longest and live well compared to people with the lowest levels of vitamin D3. It turns out that you have to have vitamin D3 to activate stem cells activation.

• 32:30Lewis Howes?

  And we can, vitamin D is also through the sun, is that correct?

• 32:33Steven Gundry?

  Correct, but it's nearly impossible to get enough vitamin D through the sun.

• 32:37Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 32:37Steven Gundry?

  Nearly impossible. 80% of Southern Californians are vitamin D deficient because we're slathering sunscreen on us and we're wearing long sleeve shirts.

• 32:46Lewis Howes?

  We're inside a lot still.

• 32:47Steven Gundry?

  We're inside a lot, you know. I live in Palm Springs, it's pretty hot in the summer. I tend not to go out a lot in the summer. So we don't have enough vitamin D. And so you have to swallow vitamin D. The University of California San Diego published a study that the average human being to have an adequate level of vitamin D3 should be taking 9,600 international units a day. So basically 10,000 international units.

• 33:13Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:14Steven Gundry?

  They found no one who had vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day.

• 33:21Lewis Howes?

  You can't overdose on vitamin D.

• 33:23Steven Gundry?

  I have yet to see vitamin D toxicity. And I've been measuring vitamin D levels for 20 years in patients every three months. I personally run my vitamin D level greater than 120 nanograms per milliliter for the last 12 years to prove I'm not dead. And so far, so good.

• 33:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 33:42Steven Gundry?

  Right? And here's, you know, just

• 33:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:46Steven Gundry?

  To tell you how crazy this is, if I feel I'm getting something, if I'm coming down with a scratchy throat or something, I'll take 150,000 international units of vitamin D3.

• 33:57Lewis Howes?

  How many capsules is that?

• 33:58Steven Gundry?

  Three days, well, so you can get 5,000, right? So that's 10 capsules, three times a day for three days. So I'm basically taking a half a million international units of vitamin D to ward off a virus.

• 34:13Lewis Howes?

  Everyone always says you should take vitamin C when you start to feel like a scratchy throat.

• 34:17Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, it really doesn't work. Vitamin D is probably one of the best antivirals that's ever been discovered.

• 34:22Lewis Howes?

  So vitamin C really doesn't help that much, or?

• 34:24Steven Gundry?

  Really doesn't help that much. I'll add, we can get into vitamin C and I think everybody should take a timed release vitamin C twice a day and it's actually for a different purpose.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  What's the purpose?

• 34:35Steven Gundry?

  All right.

• 34:35Lewis Howes?

  A quick version.

• 34:36Steven Gundry?

  All right, quick version. So you and I are one of the few animals that don't manufacture our own vitamin C. Us, monkeys and guinea pigs. And we have actually all the genes to manufacture vitamin C. There's actually five of them. The last gene is turned off. It's called a ghost gene. Why do we do that? Well, we manufacture vitamin C from sugar, from glucose. And it's actually very expensive to manufacture vitamin C. So the theory is, and I like the theory, is we grew up in Africa with lots of vitamin C containing plants in our diet. And so it was unnecessary for us to manufacture vitamin C.

• 35:20Steven Gundry?

  And the theory goes, we'd have some extra glucose left over that we could store as fat to make it through the winter when times are rough. And we're the only fat storing ape. So the problem is vitamin C is essential to repair collagen and arachid collagen. Okay? The reason smokers get wrinkles is collagen is broken because you actually repair cracks and collagen with vitamin C. And smokers use up all their vitamin C with what's called oxidative stress. So they don't have any vitamin C. In fact, Here's another controversial statement. If I've got a smoker with heart disease,

• 36:05Steven Gundry?

  I'm willing to trade him his smoking with him taking large amounts of vitamin C while I get the rest of his diet squared away, rather than tell him to stop smoking.

• 36:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 36:19Steven Gundry?

  Now, the reason I say that is, and I talk about this in the book, there's this fascinating island people called the Katavans in New Guinea, who smoke like fiends. They eat 60% of their diet is taro root. The other part of their diet is coconut oil. And they live into their mid 90s with no medical care, but they've been studied extensively. There has never been a case of a heart attack, heart disease, or a stroke in these smokers. What they do do is they eat a lot of vitamin C-containing fruits and vegetables as part of their diet.

• 36:56Lewis Howes?

  Olive oil as well?

• 36:58Steven Gundry?

  They don't have any olive oil. They have coconut oil. That's their coconut. They don't have any olives down there.

• 37:03Lewis Howes?

  So you can do without olive oil and still live a long life?

• 37:06Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Lewis Howes?

  But you think olive oil will...

• 37:08Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, since olive oil is so readily available.

• 37:11Lewis Howes?

  Might as well.

• 37:11Steven Gundry?

  Might as well. Might as well. Okay, so anyhow, back to vitamin C.

• 37:15Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 37:17Steven Gundry?

  You have to have vitamin C to repair the cracks in blood vessels. People remember scurvy, where people would die, they bleed to death on long ocean voyages. Actually, 50% mortality on those old ocean voyages, just dying from scurvy. And the British Navy, the reason they're called Limies, is because the surgeon in the British Navy realized that if he gave them limes to take on the voyage, that they wouldn't die of scurvy. That's why the British Navy is still called Limies. So vitamin C repairs the cracks in collagen, and our blood vessels are flexing all the time. And so these cracks have to be repaired. And if they're not repaired, you basically bleed to death.

• 37:59Steven Gundry?

  We have a system repairing those cracks and it's called cholesterol. And cholesterol will patch those cracks. So if you have plenty of vitamin C throughout the day, you won't, you'll be able to repair those cracks. And there's a wild study, I mean, head down a rabbit hole. You can genetically engineer rats to lack that final gene to make vitamin C. And they will live half as long as a normal rat. If you then put vitamin C in their water, they will live as long as a normal rat who can manufacture their vitamin C. But they're drinking the water throughout the day.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Steven Gundry?

  So vitamin C, unfortunately.

• 38:42Lewis Howes?

  We have to manufacture.

• 38:43Steven Gundry?

  We have to manufacture it and we've got some interesting tricks to do that coming up.

• 38:49Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 38:49Steven Gundry?

  But in the meantime, the average person should take like a thousand milligrams of timed release vitamin C twice a day.

• 38:57Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 38:57Steven Gundry?

  To cover their ass.

• 38:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow, okay. So the first thing I heard you say, this three minutes is turning into 20.

• 39:02Steven Gundry?

  It's okay.

• 39:03Lewis Howes?

  No worries. The first thing I heard is olive oil.

• 39:06Steven Gundry?

  Oh, and olive oil is actually one of the tricks to activate the ghost gene, a polyphenol in olive oil.

• 39:11Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 39:11Steven Gundry?

  You will actually make vitamin C.

• 39:12Lewis Howes?

  Okay, there you go. So there you go.

• 39:14Steven Gundry?

  Another good read.

• 39:15Lewis Howes?

  So have olive oil, vitamin D, have lots of vitamin D, three, D3.

• 39:19Steven Gundry?

  D3.

• 39:20Lewis Howes?

  And then what's next to live a long life?

• 39:22Steven Gundry?

  Next is you gotta get some form of long chain omega-3 fat, better known as fish oil.

• 39:28Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 39:29Steven Gundry?

  And vegans have no excuse anymore. There is algae-based DHA and EPA. But here's the deal. Your brain is about 70% fat. So if you wanna call me a fat head, you know, I will pat you.

• 39:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:46Steven Gundry?

  And I can just see how the internet lighting up, country is a fat head. So half of the fat in your brain is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA.

• 40:01Steven Gundry?

  So half, basically half of your brain is fish oil.

• 40:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 40:06Steven Gundry?

  And as I talk about in the longevity paradox, you look at people, what are called the omega-3 index, which basically looks at how much DHA you have in you over the past two months. People with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains and the largest areas of memory, the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest memory areas, hippocampus. So mom was right when she said fish is brain food. You know, she was absolutely, she didn't know why it was, but we now know it's, DHA is really what makes your brain.

• 40:49Lewis Howes?

  So sushi is good.

• 40:50Steven Gundry?

  Sushi is actually not a good idea.

• 40:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:53Steven Gundry?

  Most of the people I see with high mercury levels are sushi eaters or dentists. Uh, so, and particularly shishimi grade tuna.

• 41:04Lewis Howes?

  God, it's so good though.

• 41:06Steven Gundry?

  You just wanna, you just kinda wanna stay away from it.

• 41:09Lewis Howes?

  Ah, sugar fish is amazing, though.

• 41:12Steven Gundry?

  Tono.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  And it's got the grains, too.

• 41:14Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, it's got the grains, you know, so.

• 41:16Lewis Howes?

  So no sushi?

• 41:17Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so.

• 41:18Lewis Howes?

  Once in a while?

• 41:18Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, once in a while.

• 41:19Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 41:19Steven Gundry?

  Absolutely. But, yeah, so fish oil is incredibly important.

• 41:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Steven Gundry?

  And what I try to get people to do, and again, I measure this every three months in all my patients, and we're talking, you know, thousands and thousands of patients over the last 20 years. You wanna get about a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Now, how do you do that? Well, you get fish oil, I mean, you can go to Costco, I don't care. And you look on the back and you find serving size and make sure it says one serving size. They love to fool you. Uh, they may say two or three, and then you look down below and you see DHA. And you look to see how much DHA is in a capsule. And you add it up and say, oh, okay, there's 250 milligrams of DHA in this capsule, so I need to take four.

• 42:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow, four a day.

• 42:09Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, well, I mean.

• 42:10Lewis Howes?

  Thousand a day, yeah.

• 42:11Steven Gundry?

  Thousand a day.

• 42:12Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 42:12Steven Gundry?

  DHA.

• 42:13Lewis Howes?

  We got olive oil, we've got vitamin D3, we have fish oils.

• 42:19Lewis Howes?

  What else do we need to live longer?

• 42:21Steven Gundry?

  So you gotta have polyphenols in your diet. So what the heck is a polyphenol? How do you remember polyphenol? Think about polywannaphenol.

• 42:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 42:31Steven Gundry?

  Phenols are plant compounds. Polyphenols are plant compounds that plants use primarily to protect themselves against stress and sunlight.

• 42:41Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 42:42Steven Gundry?

  Just interesting fact. We know that red wine is beneficial for you because of actually two polyphenols. The most famous is resveratrol. The other one is curcetin or curcetin. The higher the grapes are grown, the higher in altitude the grapes are grown, the more polyphenols they make.

• 43:03Lewis Howes?

  Cause they need more to protect themselves.

• 43:05Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, exactly. It's basically suntan. Uh, you know, they, they've actually protected themselves against sunburn.

• 43:11Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 43:12Steven Gundry?

  Also, the more the plant is stressed, the more polyphenols it makes to protect itself.

• 43:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:19Steven Gundry?

  Okay. So, polyphenols are traditionally in dark colored berries. So for instance, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. Interesting fun fact, the leaves of these trees or vines have more polyphenols than the actual fruit does. So for instance, black raspberry leaves have far more polyphenols than black raspberries.

• 43:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 43:49Steven Gundry?

  And I take black raspberry capsules though, by the way, and it's in the book.

• 43:53Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 43:53Steven Gundry?

  So olives, for instance, are loaded with polyphenols. And olives that are stressed produce-

• 44:01Lewis Howes?

  Even better.

• 44:02Steven Gundry?

  Are even better.

• 44:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 44:04Steven Gundry?

  Olive leaves have more polyphenols than olives. So olive leaf extract is an easy way of getting the huge amount of benefits without drinking a liter of olive oil.

• 44:15Lewis Howes?

  So what about like, uh, you know, leafy greens? Do you want stressed out looking leafy greens? Or do you want healthy, thriving looking?

• 44:23Steven Gundry?

  Excellent question. It turns out that the reason organic vegetables in general are better for you, besides the fact that they haven't been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and probably Roundup, and we can get into that, is the fact that these- Creatures, these plants, actually have to work harder.

• 44:41Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 44:42Steven Gundry?

  And they have to produce more polyphenols to protect themselves against insect predation. And so that's actually the reason you want to eat organic. So when you're going to the farmer's market and the poor little organic vegetables have got pockets of insects.

• 44:57Lewis Howes?

  It's like they're dying.

• 44:58Steven Gundry?

  And they don't look very good. You go, I want that guy.

• 45:01Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 45:02Steven Gundry?

  That guy is struggling. He is gonna just be so loaded with polyphenol.

• 45:06Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 45:06Steven Gundry?

  And correlation with that is the more bitter, the better. Because polyphenols in general are very bitter. For instance, when we were developing, you know, my signature product Vital Reds, it's pure polyphenols primarily, and they're bitter. So we did lots of taste testing to figure out how the heck we're gonna mask these really bitter compounds. So more bitter, more better. In fact, as I talk about in the book, I had the pleasure of knowing Jack LaLanne.

• 45:40Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 45:41Steven Gundry?

  Who you would know is really the godfather of

• 45:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Steven Gundry?

  of fitness and nutrition in the United States. And I knew him in his later years. And Jack used to have a saying is that if it tastes good, spit it out.

• 45:54Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 45:55Steven Gundry?

  Now, what he really meant by that is bitter things, nasty tasting things, is actually what is gonna give the bugs that are actually gonna keep you alive what they want to eat. And don't, you know, more bitter, more better.

• 46:14Lewis Howes?

  Mmm.

• 46:14Steven Gundry?

  So, you know, the more polyphenols, the more bitter greens I can get into you, the better.

• 46:20Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. But you can get that through capsules and other things, too.

• 46:22Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, you can. Uh, and in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm a nut about taking a bunch of supplements because If you look at even really good organic eaters, most human beings only eat maybe 20 different plant species.

• 46:41Lewis Howes?

  I probably, I probably like three.

• 46:43Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, yeah, most people do.

• 46:45Lewis Howes?

  Like five, maybe.

• 46:46Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, you know, and you know, ketchup is not a vegetable. It's a tomato and we can't, we can't do that. So our ancestors and even looking at modern hunter gatherers like the Hanzo tribe, they go through, they eat 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. And you think about it, all those plants are grown organically. They're in six feet of loam soil. They got their cool microbiome. So they're just replete with all these nutrients and polyphenols. And so, you know, if people think that they can actually do a great job eating healthy without supplementation, I got oceanfront property in Palm Springs. I'm happy to sell them.

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 47:27Steven Gundry?

  There is no.

• 47:28Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly. Okay, so I want to get one more thing. I've heard that in order to extend your life, you need to, I can't remember the name, extend something at the end of your.

• 47:38Steven Gundry?

  Telomeres.

• 47:39Lewis Howes?

  Telomeres.

• 47:40Steven Gundry?

  Or telomeres.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  So how do we, is that true? Do you have to extend this?

• 47:44Steven Gundry?

  Okay, so that is one theory of longevity. And it is a, it's a good theory. I like the theory. It's controversial. Vitamin D. Turns out that people with the highest levels of vitamin D have the longest telomeres.

• 48:00Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 48:00Steven Gundry?

  So why wouldn't you do that?

• 48:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 48:04Steven Gundry?

  If you like that theory?

• 48:06Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 48:06Steven Gundry?

  So that's vitamin D is, it's, if anybody is, if anybody takes away, it's vitamin D.

• 48:13Lewis Howes?

  So you've given four things so far. Let's give me one final thing that can extend our life and the, the quality of our life as well.

• 48:21Steven Gundry?

  Great. So the last thing we want to do is we want to turn off as much as we can the sensor called mTOR, originally called the mammalian target of rapamycin. It's subsequently been discovered in all organisms besides mammals. So now it's called the mechanistic target of rapamycin. And so mTOR is an energy sensor and it's in all of our cells. And basically, we come from a circadian rhythm system of plentiful food at one time of the year and very little food at another time of year.

• 49:00Lewis Howes?

  Right, fruit sometimes, not.

• 49:02Steven Gundry?

  Exactly. And we use fruit to gain weight for the winter, and that's a whole nother subject. So mTOR senses energy availability. And it senses sugar molecules, and it also senses amino acids, protein. Now, it turns out that it's very sensitive to particular amino acids rather than all amino acids. The ones it's most sensitive to are amino acids contained in animal protein. And animals include fish, animal protein includes eggs, includes cheeses, and besides, you know, meat. So beautiful work that's been done, a lot of it done by now my friend Walter Longo

• 49:47Steven Gundry?

  from USC from the Longevity Center.

• 49:49Lewis Howes?

  Is that the mimicking?

• 49:51Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. The fasting mimicking diet.

• 49:53Lewis Howes?

  I've taken that a couple of times.

• 49:54Steven Gundry?

  And he got a patent for prolong.

• 49:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, prolong.

• 49:59Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, got a patent for it. Prolong is a vegan, low amino acid diet that you do for five days.

• 50:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's tough the first time.

• 50:10Steven Gundry?

  It is.

• 50:11Lewis Howes?

  For me it was.

• 50:12Steven Gundry?

  Now, in the book, I wrote about it in The Plant Paradox, actually before he made Prolong, but I write about it again, and he and I, and he's even given me a nice shout out on the back. The idea is you want to reduce mTOR as much as you can. And the longer, the more you suppress it, the longer you live. And here's the reason. If times are rough and you sense that times are rough, your body, your immune system actually goes around and looks at all the cells in your body and says, who's pulling their weight? Who is really, you know, contributing to this effort? And who's a slacker? Who looks a little weird? Who's not, you know, not doing? And it actually instructs cells to commit suicide. And it's called autophagy.

• 50:57Steven Gundry?

  And it tells cells, sorry, you know, you're not, you're out of here. You die. And so it gets the fittest of the fittest to survive. Makes you stronger. And you have to have these periods of time. You have to call the herd, as we say. So unless you do that, you have all of these cells that just kind of build up the debris. They're called senescent cells. Some people call them zombie cells. And it's the amount of these zombie cells that is actually going to make you deteriorate long before you should. And get sick. Exactly. So you gotta call the herd. So how you do that? Five days in a row, once a month. Once a month you do this?

• 51:41Steven Gundry?

  Once a month, five days in a row, five days in a row. You follow a vegan diet of about 900 calories. And I've got some great recipes. It's easy to do. And you do it five days in a row. Yep. It's as if you did calorie restriction every day. And what this does is not only call the herd, but it activates stem cells. Now, everybody says, oh, stem cells, you know, it's the future. You've got oodles of stem cells in you already. Where do you think we get the stem cells? We, you know, take a liposuction and suck out your fat and then we spin it around. We get your stem cells and inject you right back in.

• 52:24Steven Gundry?

  They're already there. You just have to call them into action.

• 52:28Lewis Howes?

  So when someone does that, when they pull it out of you, they're essentially just killing off the dead cells and then putting the good ones back?

• 52:34Steven Gundry?

  No, they're actually, you know, they're centrifuging out the stem cells. Stem cells are in fat. They're everywhere, actually. So you, but you gotta activate the great crazy thing. So you activate them by this modified fast. Or you do intermittent fasting or time restricted fasting. For instance, for the last 12 years, during the winter, from January through June, Monday through Friday, I don't eat breakfast, I don't eat lunch. And I eat all my calories in a two hour window from six to eight o'clock at night. So 22 hour, 24 hours I'm fasting.

• 53:10Lewis Howes?

  For how long?

• 53:11Steven Gundry?

  For six months.

• 53:11Lewis Howes?

  Six months you do that?

• 53:13Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 53:14Steven Gundry?

  Now, why do that? Because way back when.

• 53:16Lewis Howes?

  You're just drinking olive oil and vitamin D all day?

• 53:18Steven Gundry?

  No, during the night.

• 53:20Lewis Howes?

  And those two hours, yeah, just drinking it? Okay, wow.

• 53:23Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 53:24Lewis Howes?

  But that's why you look so young.

• 53:25Steven Gundry?

  I don't know.

• 53:26Lewis Howes?

  That's why you look.

• 53:26Steven Gundry?

  Actually, if you look at pictures of me from 1995, which was about 25 years ago now, I look much older than than I do do now.

• 53:37Lewis Howes?

  You used to be much, much bigger.

• 53:40Steven Gundry?

  Oh, yeah. I was doing exercising.

• 53:42Lewis Howes?

  But you were doing heart surgery.

• 53:43Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, doing heart surgery.

• 53:44Lewis Howes?

  Eating a lot. And if you guys want to learn more about that story, you can watch the last interview we did. And I wanna, I wanna be mindful of time here. But in the last interview, we talked about all that. And I'll also go into the history of that in the intro here. But those five keys, if we can do those five things. I like them. Is fasting mimicking or mimicking fasting diet?

• 54:03Steven Gundry?

  Fasting mimicking diet.

• 54:05Lewis Howes?

  That thing, when I did that, I've done that twice. And both times, first time was very challenging. Second time was a lot easier. I think you get used to it.

• 54:12Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, you do.

• 54:12Lewis Howes?

  I looked younger. I looked healthier, younger after like three days, I can notice the difference. And so for me, it was very challenging because I usually eat thousands of calories a day. But to have, you know, 800, 900 a day was, and the specific calories, you know, the specific things that it gives you. And you talk about it in here, how to do that.

• 54:31Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, and here's how to do it, and you know. God bless him, you know, all of his profits go back into research. That's great. Which is great. It's a good product. I show people how to do it just in their own home without that. Perfect. And, and he, you know, bless him, he, he backs my way of doing it. Right. So we're, but again, these are the, these are the tricks.

• 54:55Steven Gundry?

  Most of us, the reason it's called longevity paradox is most of us look at what's happening. And old age doesn't look very good. Hmm. It really doesn't. People now, you know, assume that they're going to get their hips and their knees replaced, and they're going to have a bypass or a stand or a valve replacement. And they're going to end up anyhow in the old folks home, you know, drooling in their oatmeal. And none of us, you know, we've seen that, you know, happen to our parents or grandparents. We go, we don't want that. We don't want that. It doesn't have to be that way. What, what shocked me is I've had a number of people, and I talk about some of them in the book, who have been scheduled for knee or hip replacement and have come to me for cardiac clearance, get a stress test, make sure they can come through the test.

• 55:38Steven Gundry?

  And we would put them on my program in, you know, anticipation of getting them in better shape for their hip or knee replacement. And one of them that I talk about in the book, he was scheduled for a knee replacement. He was a diabetic, he had heart disease. We put him on the program for six months pending his knee replacement. And when I saw him right before the knee replacement to, you know, do the final test, I said, okay, you know, you're ready to go. You know, I have diabetes anymore. You don't, you know, you're, you passed your stress test. I said, you know, you can have your knee replacement. And then the guy says, what knee replacement? I canceled it. You know, my knee doesn't hurt anymore. And he starts skipping around the exam room. And people can regrow cartilage. Wow.

• 56:21Steven Gundry?

  And I talk about why you lose cartilage with, because of the things you eat, including lectins. Lectins are one of the major reasons why people have arthritis.

• 56:33Steven Gundry?

  Darn.

• 56:33Lewis Howes?

  More in the Plan Paradox. This book is called The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age. It's out right now. You guys can get it. I highly recommend it. There's forty plus pages of notes backing all of the data and the research and the science. In the back, you've got all the research, you've got the diet programs, what to eat, what to take, everything you need.

• 56:57Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Lewis Howes?

  Get this for yourself, get it for your parents, get it for friends. This is gonna be a game changer. Make sure you guys check this out. You brought me a bunch of goodies for my birthday, so.

• 57:05Steven Gundry?

  Happy birthday.

• 57:06Lewis Howes?

  I'm gonna be trying all these supplements and putting fish oils in my brain and vitamin D3 in my gut and all that. Mushrooms galore. Good thing I like mushrooms.

• 57:17Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Lewis Howes?

  I love mushrooms. So you've got a mushroom supplement too? You've got all these things?

• 57:20Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Lewis Howes?

  The fungus.

• 57:21Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Lewis Howes?

  Everything you need, you guys have this stuff. Where's the website to get the book and to learn more about the supplements that people can get?

• 57:28Steven Gundry?

  So you could go to DrGundry.com, you can go to GundryMD.com. I've got a YouTube channel. We now have a podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts, Dr. Gundry Podcasts.

• 57:40Lewis Howes?

  Sweet.

• 57:40Steven Gundry?

  Go to Amazon, go to Barnes and Noble, go to your local bookstore.

• 57:44Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 57:45Steven Gundry?

  Barnes and Noble, by the way, will have a separate table with all my books now in the front.

• 57:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 57:51Steven Gundry?

  And The Longevity Paradox at Barnes and Noble has ten additional recipes that you cannot get anywhere.

• 57:59Lewis Howes?

  Else. Can't get it on Amazon, huh?

• 58:01Steven Gundry?

  Can't. So Barnes and Noble, if you want the ten extra recipes.

• 58:05Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. Okay, so DrGundry.com. Check out the book, Longevity Paradox. Get The Plan Paradox as well. That one's been a game changer. Thirty-four weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. I'm sure this will be on there for a long time as well. To save time, everyone can go listen to the last interview, which has a million views on YouTube, the Plan Paradox interview we did. Incredible insights, transformed a lot of people's lives who have, who've applied the lessons that you teach and the philosophy you teach, so thank you for that. They can learn more about everything there as well. I want to acknowledge you for this. You continue to show up and do the research to help people live healthier, longer lives. And I think it's really cool to know that you're this heart surgeon who worked on, I think, ten thousand heart surgeries.

• 58:49Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 58:49Lewis Howes?

  And. You started to look within and ask yourself the question like this isn't working. When people are going through heart surgery, then they come back three years later.

• 58:59Steven Gundry?

  Here we go again.

• 59:00Lewis Howes?

  It's a Band-Aid, but it's not fixing the root cause. And we need more roots, I guess, in our gut is what you're saying. So I acknowledge you for essentially evolving something that you were taught early on, that you spent a lot of time and money going to school for and evolving out of that to help people live longer, healthier, happier lives. So I acknowledge you for everything you do, Dr. Gundry, you're an inspiration. And my final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 59:30Steven Gundry?

  Let's see, I've forgotten what I said last night.

• 59:35Lewis Howes?

  We'll compare both of them, yeah.

• 59:36Steven Gundry?

  If I can teach somebody how to fish, I don't have to give them a fish. And so, teaching somebody is my definition of greatness. And again, I used to give people fish by operating on them. And now I teach them how to fish and they don't have to have operations anymore. And again, the greatness that I see is, and I've talked about this in dedications, I owe everything to my patients. Because they either asked me a question I couldn't answer, or they were willing every three months to do some silly dietary things, or go to Costco and Trader Joe's and buy a supplement, and I'd look to see what happens.

• 1:00:21Steven Gundry?

  Without them, I couldn't do this. And I was at a meeting a few months ago, walking with another very famous nutritionist. And he said, "You don't still see patients, do you?" And I said, "Oh, gosh, yeah, I see them every day, actually on Saturdays and Sundays. I have full practice tomorrow in Santa Barbara." And he says, "What do you do that for?" And I said, "Well, because I learn every day from my patients. I learned a couple of things yesterday from my patients." So I can't imagine doing what I do without having my patients help me. So I'm never going to retire. Oh, and that's the fifth thing, never retire, ever.

• 1:01:02Steven Gundry?

  Particularly men, we are social creatures and you have to be in a social network. And men in general find that in the workplace, women more and more. And I see so many men, and now women, who retire and it starts the downward spiral. And it's because their social network is gone.

• 1:01:21Lewis Howes?

  There you go. I love it. I'm gonna get this book for a bunch of friends, so thank you for everything you do and...

• 1:01:28Steven Gundry?

  Thank you for having me. It's always one, like I said, I think it was my favorite podcast the last time around.

• 1:01:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, we'll do it again for the next book.

• 1:01:35Steven Gundry?

  All right.

• 1:01:36Lewis Howes?

  Appreciate it. Thank you.

• 1:01:37Steven Gundry?

  Good to see you.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, if you enjoyed learning about the fountain of youth, how to live longer, then make sure to share this with your friends. LewisHowes.com/772. Again, super powerful insights. Check out the full show notes over there. Check out the new book. Watch the video over on YouTube as well. Again, your health is an important thing and that's why we have these episodes on health. If you're looking to achieve greatness, you must achieve greatness within yourself first, with your body, your mind, your soul, your heart. And if you want to live longer, if you want to have the opportunity to make a bigger impact in the world, you've got to live longer to reach those people that you're looking to create with.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  So, as the Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise, we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear." Make sure you're taking care of yourself today. Make sure you remind yourself how much you matter. And send a hug and some love to someone else around you today. Spread love. It's easy to make an impact. All you need to do is smile towards someone else and brighten their day. I love you so very much and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.