The Foods You MUST Eliminate From Your Diet & Common Keto Diet Myths w/Dr. Steven Gundry EP 1237

Today’s guest is Dr. Steven Gundry, one of the world’s top cardiothoracic surgeons and pioneers in nutrition, and currently serves as the medical director at The International Heart and Lung Institute Center for Restorative Medicine. He has spent the last two decades studying the microbiome and now helps patients use diet and nutrition as a key form of treatment. He is author of several New York Times bestselling books with his latest being, Unlocking the Keto Code. In this episode we discuss:The worst foods that you need to eliminate from your diet. The health issues linked to stress. The best foods to add to your diet. The science behind why the keto diet can be life changing to your health. The biggest misunderstandings around the keto diet. And so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1237Get Dr. Gundry's new book: Unlocking The Keto CodeThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod 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.

• 0:01Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1237 with 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.

• 0:29Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, my friend. Today's guest is Dr. Steven Gundry, who was one of the top heart surgeons in the world and pioneers in nutrition and currently serves as the medical director at the International Heart and Lung Institute Center for Restorative Medicine. He has spent the last two decades studying the microbiome and now helps patients use diet and nutrition as a key form of treatment. He is an author of several New York Times bestselling books, with his latest being Unlocking the Keto Code. And in this episode, we discuss the worst foods that you need to eliminate from your diet today. The health issues that are linked to stress in your mind and in your body.

• 1:12Lewis Howes?

  The best foods to add to your diet right now. The science behind why the keto diet can be life-changing to your health if you do it the proper way. The biggest misunderstandings around the keto diet and so much more. And if you're enjoying this, make sure to spread the message with your friends, post it on social media. Text a few people and let them know that you listened to this episode on the School of Greatness. And I want to give a shout out to the fan of the week today, who is from Axel, who said, "The School of Greatness podcast has been life-changing for me. I love all of them. I've made them a part of my daily morning routine because they add so much value to me in many areas of my life. It's an investment in myself, something to push me further along my journey to be the best version of myself on a daily basis."

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  So, big thank you for leaving the review over on Apple Podcasts and you are the fan of the week. And if you guys want to be shouted out on the fan of the week and have that chance, just go ahead and leave us a review right now over on Apple Podcasts as we love looking through those, seeing how we can continue to elevate this show and show you at a higher level. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Steven Gundry.

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• 3:54Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are some of the worst foods that people often eat, like on a daily basis, that we should start eliminating or avoiding?

• 4:03Steven Gundry?

  Well, don't get me started because, you know, you gotta get rid of major lectin-containing foods in your life.

• 4:11Lewis Howes?

  Okay, give it to me.

• 4:12Steven Gundry?

  And so gluten happens to be a lectin. And lectins are plant defense proteins that plants produce to convince their predator like us that we shouldn't eat them or their babies. And lectins, the science is getting better and better every year. Lectins, thanks to a professor at Harvard, Lassio Fazano, proved that in fact lectins like gluten can

• 4:44Steven Gundry?

  Attached to the wall of our gut and kind of flip a switch and produce leaky gut. And so it's not science fiction, it's not pseudoscience. We can now measure leaky gut, we can quantify leaky gut. And you wouldn't believe that the number of people who have leaky gut have antibodies, like they've been vaccinated against the various forms of wheat. And gluten is just one of the lectins in wheat, there's plenty more.

• 5:20Lewis Howes?

  So is gluten harmful for everyone? Or is it some bodies can handle a certain amount and it's okay? Or is it like if you have gluten, it's going to affect you in a negative way, no matter who you are?

• 5:31Steven Gundry?

  Excellent question. So I've actually published data that we can take people with gluten sensitivity and with leaky gut and with antibodies to gluten. And over a year period of time, take away the foods that they're sensitive to and heal their leaky gut, seal it up. And with the passage of time, those antibodies to the various forms of wheat disappear. Disappear. They go away. It's like, it's like you keep needing a booster shot for, you know, for COVID.

• 6:14Steven Gundry?

  You literally lose the antibodies, you lose the memory that you were interested in gluten.

• 6:20Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 6:20Steven Gundry?

  And that's really exciting.

• 6:22Lewis Howes?

  What does that do to your body when you lose the antibodies to gluten?

• 6:25Steven Gundry?

  So I think that you can now reintroduce gluten and get away with it.

• 6:33Lewis Howes?

  Got it, okay.

• 6:34Steven Gundry?

  In fact, I've written about this on my personal self. Years ago, we started doing autoimmune tests on everybody, including ourselves.

• 6:45Steven Gundry?

  There's markers for autoimmune disease like lupus, like Hashimoto's. And so my assistant comes running in, she says, "Doc, you got lupus." And I go, "I don't have lupus." And she says, "Yeah, you have anti-nuclear antibody positive." And I said, "Huh, that's interesting." Because my father's side of the family had massive psoriasis, which is an autoimmune disease. And he was on methotrexate for 50 years. Long story short. So I said, "Yeah, okay, I've got a very strong family history for an autoimmune disease, and I'm always experimenting with food." I said, "That's really cool. I'm gonna try to turn it off."

• 7:26Steven Gundry?

  And so I went two weeks perfectly following the Plant Paradox program. Measured it, two weeks later, gone.

• 7:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 7:35Steven Gundry?

  I said, "Okay, that's good information."

• 7:37Lewis Howes?

  If you stayed on that track, it would stay probably gone.

• 7:40Steven Gundry?

  Oh, it was gone for years.

• 7:41Lewis Howes?

  But if you went back on the...

• 7:43Steven Gundry?

  So I decided to test it. You know, you gotta experiment on yourself. So I was, we were editing The Longevity Paradox in New York City, and we needed to do some more editing. Finished on a Friday, and I had to stay over for Monday to keep editing. So I said, "You know, I got a whole weekend here. I'm gonna test the system." So I had pizza, I had bread, I had pasta, I had tomatoes. Yeah, I had ice cream. And so I come back to Palm Springs, and I test my anti-nuclear antibody, and sure enough, it's positive. I go, "Oh, wow, this is great." And so I said, "I wonder how fast I can turn it off." So I went one week. Retested, negative. So what does that tell me?

• 8:28Steven Gundry?

  Tells me that I can produce leaky gut in myself, but I can fix it really fast. What I've learned from my patients over 22 years is, when you've got really leaky gut, it's not gonna fix in a week or two. It can take three, six, nine months, a year. I have one patient, and we just celebrated, it's been a year and a half, we're finally done with it. And the really cool thing, once you...

• 9:00Steven Gundry?

  Once you heal a leaky gut, you no longer have particles coming across your gut wall. And 80% of your immune system is sitting lining your gut. All of your white blood cells are just there waiting because troublemakers can come through. And so if troublemakers are constantly coming through, the immune system is on hyper alert. And you know, people hear about cytokine storm in COVID. Well, with the immune system hyper alert, they're ready to fire at any little thing. Example I like to use, believe it or not,

• 9:40Steven Gundry?

  95% of us are born with an antibody to the peanut lectin. Born with it.

• 9:46Lewis Howes?

  What's it mean when you have an antibody to that?

• 9:49Steven Gundry?

  So you literally have been vaccinated.

• 9:52Lewis Howes?

  So it means you can eat the food and it won't affect you?

• 9:55Steven Gundry?

  It will.

• 9:56Lewis Howes?

  It will affect you. So 95% of us have it.

• 9:59Steven Gundry?

  Have an antibody.

• 10:00Lewis Howes?

  Where it will affect us in some way.

• 10:02Steven Gundry?

  But when I was growing up, every little kid had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at school. There were peanuts on airplanes.

• 10:10Lewis Howes?

  Baseball games.

• 10:11Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, baseball games, you're having peanuts. And nobody had a peanut allergy. Nobody had EpiPens. Now, of course, if some, you know, poor little kid brings a snack of peanuts, three EpiPens are coming out and kids are having these tremendous allergic reactions. And you go, wait a minute, why is that? Why, you know, my generation didn't have that? Never had that. That's because back in the good old days, almost nobody had leaky gut. And so our immune system.

• 10:42Lewis Howes?

  Could defend against it.

• 10:43Steven Gundry?

  No, the immune system goes, yeah, I know that. I'm not very interested in that. You know, that's not a big deal. But now our immune system is walking around with Uzis, you know, and anything that looks even remotely worrisome, you're going boom. Okay. And that's why all of us, I mean, autoimmune diseases are off the wall. 60 million women have Hashimoto's thyroiditis in America.

• 11:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 11:12Steven Gundry?

  It's like, huh? And, you know, when I was in medical school back in the dark ages, I mean, these were incredibly rare diseases. They were so rare that these series of tests looking for autoimmune diseases, we called funny tests because we almost never ordered them.

• 11:29Lewis Howes?

  You never used them.

• 11:30Steven Gundry?

  Hey, let's get those funny tests.

• 11:31Lewis Howes?

  But now people use them every week.

• 11:33Steven Gundry?

  Oh, yeah, I get autoimmune tests on every patient. And it's shocking how many people have it.

• 11:38Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so we, alright, so gluten and lectin, so what are the main foods that have the most gluten or the most?

• 11:46Steven Gundry?

  Well, so wheat, rye, and barley have gluten. Oats have a protein that cross reacts with gluten. And I can't tell you in the number of people who are eating oats that they're one of the culprit.

• 12:01Lewis Howes?

  What if it's when it, when they say gluten-free oats?

• 12:05Steven Gundry?

  Run.

• 12:06Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean when it's gluten-free oats?

• 12:09Steven Gundry?

  Basically means nothing because there's a protein in oats that isn't gluten, but it looks a lot like gluten and our immune system can't tell the difference. Similarly, 70% of people who are sensitive to gluten react to corn as if it was gluten. And that's why so many patients, and I've written a paper about this, who are gluten-free, eating gluten-free foods still have leaky gut and autoimmune diseases. And when we take away their healthy gluten-free foods like corn, like oats, like quinoa, then

• 12:51Steven Gundry?

  their leaky gut goes away and their autoimmune disease goes away.

• 12:55Lewis Howes?

  What about when you process the almonds or the oats into almond milk or oat milk?

• 13:01Steven Gundry?

  Part of the problem with oats is that almost all of our oats in the United States have been sprayed with Roundup. And a ton of our organic oats have Roundup on them. And Roundup glyphosate.

• 13:16Steven Gundry?

  Is a major leaky gut disruptor in and of itself. So.

• 13:22Lewis Howes?

  So even if it says organic oats, gluten free, organic oat milk.

• 13:27Steven Gundry?

  You, you, no human being ate a grain until 10,000 years ago. No human being ate a grain of rice until 8,000 years ago. These didn't exist. Human beings used to be as tall as you 10,000 years ago.

• 13:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 13:42Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. Then we shrunk down to my size after we started eating.

• 13:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 13:48Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, we shrunk about a foot after agriculture.

• 13:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 13:53Steven Gundry?

  Literally shrunk. Our brain sizes decreased 15% after the dawn of agriculture.

• 14:01Lewis Howes?

  Because of the foods we're eating?

• 14:02Steven Gundry?

  Because of the foods we're eating, yeah.

• 14:04Lewis Howes?

  That's fascinating.

• 14:05Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so.

• 14:06Steven Gundry?

  Darn it.

• 14:07Lewis Howes?

  So when you process it into a milk, you know, what does that mean? Is it better? Is it worse? Is it the same?

• 14:14Steven Gundry?

  So.

• 14:15Lewis Howes?

  How does the gut?

• 14:16Steven Gundry?

  Take it in? It, it really doesn't make any difference.

• 14:19Lewis Howes?

  Oh, come on.

• 14:20Steven Gundry?

  Doesn't make any difference. Well, for instance, I'll give you a great example. Originally, the Plant Paradox program was called The Matrix after the movie. And my editors at Harper Collins thought it was kind of too macho, manly. No, not touchy feely enough. True story.

• 14:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 14:40Steven Gundry?

  And so we called it The Plant Paradox and the rest is history. But originally almonds were not allowed on the program. Because I had a ton of people with autoimmune diseases that almonds, they would react to, even almond flour. But the Plant Paradox, you know, take away a lot of stuff. And my editor said, hey, come on, you're a mean guy, you know, give us something, you know, give us something. I said, well, almonds, the peel of the almond has the majority of the lectins. So I'll tell you what, let's have, you know, blanched, you know, peeled almonds like Marcona almonds. That's why those people do that.

• 15:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Steven Gundry?

  And let's give them blanched almond flour. Okay? And everybody's happy.

• 15:24Steven Gundry?

  So it works for 90% of people who just pick up the Plant Paradox with an autoimmune disease, they resolve their issues without even visiting me. But about 10% of people, even visiting me, playing by the rules, still, they're better. We can measure that they're better on their leaky gut, but they're not all the way. And so we do these tests called food sensitivity tests. Now, that's totally different than food allergy tests. Food sensitivity, believe it or not, basically says that if you've got spaces in the wall

• 16:02Steven Gundry?

  of your gut that undigested food particles, like, let's just use almonds, which would normally be digested into simple sugars, simple fats, simple amino acids, and absorbed through the wall, now pieces of food can potentially go across the wall, undigested, and your immune system says, "What the heck? I've never seen a piece of broccoli before. What's that doing in here? That's foreign to me, and I'm going to attack it. And I'm gonna make a memory of what that broccoli looks like, and anytime I see anything that looks like broccoli, I'm gonna attack it."

• 16:42Steven Gundry?

  So we see these people who are, you know, having almond flower cookies and, you know, almond bread. Almond milk. And almond milk. And then we test them for food sensitivity, and up comes almonds. And, yeah, I've just got some wonderful story. I had this woman with psoriasis, horrible psoriasis, on two drugs. And anyhow, we got rid of all of her psoriasis, got her off of all of her drugs, and she had this two-inch patch of psoriasis in the middle of her back, and that's all she had. Still left. Yeah. And she says, "Look, you know, I'm really happy, it's nowhere else." No one sees it. Who cares? But isn't that, and she goes, "Isn't that interesting?" That, there it is. And I said, "Yeah."

• 17:27Steven Gundry?

  I said, "Would you mind if we did a food sensitivity and just kinda see if there's a couple of things that we ought to get rid of?" And sure enough, almonds, you know, pops up. And so she got her results a couple of weeks before I saw her. And so she comes in, and she said, "I've got my results." And guess what? She said, "I've given up almonds." Two weeks ago.

• 17:51Lewis Howes?

  And now look.

• 17:51Steven Gundry?

  It's down to an inch. It's shrunk.

• 17:54Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 17:54Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, fifty percent in two weeks, just by getting rid of all of them.

• 17:58Lewis Howes?

  And she did that for another two or three weeks.

• 18:00Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, now it's gone. No, now it's gone.

• 18:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Isn't that interesting?

• 18:03Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Lewis Howes?

  I think there were food sensitivity or food allergy tests, one of the two. Because I had a little patch of psoriasis right here, like a little different skin. You know, it was like kind of a raised, little impact. It wasn't like spreading, but it was a little patch here and it kind of come and go. And on all these tests I took, they were like, you have no sensitivities, no like sensitivities to allergies. I'm not sure which one it was.

• 18:26Steven Gundry?

  They were probably allergy tests. We used to do those. I never thought they were any good, even though I get them.

• 18:31Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 18:32Steven Gundry?

  I never thought I got useful.

• 18:33Lewis Howes?

  The sensitivity is better.

• 18:35Steven Gundry?

  Food sensitivity.

• 18:36Lewis Howes?

  Anyway, they said that I didn't have any allergies or sensitivities. I'm not sure which one it was. But a lot of it, what I realized was based on stress, was based on a lack of sleep and a lot of stress that I was facing. Internal, internal emotions that I wasn't able to process and essentially abandoning myself in certain occasions, which made me kind of feel like I had a heightened immune system, I guess, which I think was the cause of this.

• 19:01Steven Gundry?

  And stress in itself can actually produce leaky gut.

• 19:05Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 19:05Steven Gundry?

  Oh, yeah. I have particularly a number of women who can point literally to the day and hour that their autoimmune started, their leaky gut started.

• 19:18Lewis Howes?

  So were they?

• 19:19Steven Gundry?

  A sudden death of a mother, for instance.

• 19:22Lewis Howes?

  Divorce.

• 19:23Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, divorce is right up there, yeah.

• 19:26Lewis Howes?

  So were they still eating like perfectly to, you know, the diet they were supposed to eat? But they were like, why do I have this, you know?

• 19:34Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, I mean, they were eating quote a normal diet and they'd been fine up until that.

• 19:38Lewis Howes?

  And then stress heightened the leaky gut.

• 19:40Steven Gundry?

  Then kind of once you produce that leak.

• 19:45Steven Gundry?

  Then your immune.

• 19:47Lewis Howes?

  Blood gates are open.

• 19:48Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, they're open. And interestingly enough, your immune system actually comes up to the border of the wall of your gut. And, you know, there's a war going on there. And as the war goes on, you actually have friendly fire. So your own immune system worsens the problem. And so it just perpetuates.

• 20:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Steven Gundry?

  The other thing we've learned is that viruses are actually really good at making leaky gut. And my humble opinion is a lot of the long COVID we're seeing is actually because of leaky gut from COVID. COVID is a loves to attack the mucous membranes of us. Gluteal gut. A lot of people present with COVID with diarrhea, for instance.

• 20:32Lewis Howes?

  Mmm. So we've got gluten, lectins, wheat, rye, barley, oats.

• 20:37Steven Gundry?

  The nightshades.

• 20:38Lewis Howes?

  The nightshades.

• 20:39Steven Gundry?

  Tomatoes, peppers, goji berries.

• 20:44Lewis Howes?

  Wait a minute, goji berries are supposed to be healthy for you, right?

• 20:46Steven Gundry?

  Goji berries are actually nightshades. Darn it. They're actually American plants. They're called the wolfberry in America. And they were taken over to China in trade, in Colombian trade, and they grew extremely well. But yeah, goji berries are nightshades.

• 21:02Lewis Howes?

  So all these.

• 21:02Steven Gundry?

  And potatoes.

• 21:03Lewis Howes?

  And potatoes.

• 21:04Steven Gundry?

  And potatoes. Not sweet potatoes, not yams and sweet potatoes.

• 21:08Lewis Howes?

  Sweet potatoes are fine, but potatoes are.

• 21:11Steven Gundry?

  And beans, but beans you can detoxify really easily with prolonged soaking, prolonged cooking, but most importantly, a pressure cooker.

• 21:23Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 21:24Steven Gundry?

  And there's two brands of beans now, I have no relationship, Eden and Jovial, that soak and pressure cook their beans.

• 21:32Lewis Howes?

  Before they ship, they send it to you.

• 21:34Steven Gundry?

  And, you know, people say, well, you know, you hate beans. I have beans several times a week.

• 21:38Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 21:39Steven Gundry?

  As long as they're pressure cooked.

• 21:40Lewis Howes?

  So what about potatoes? Is there a way to eat potatoes?

• 21:42Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so, yeah. So most of the lectins are in the peel.

• 21:48Lewis Howes?

  The skin.

• 21:49Steven Gundry?

  The skin. Same with tomatoes and same with peppers.

• 21:51Lewis Howes?

  So if you take the skin off the tomatoes.

• 21:53Steven Gundry?

  And deep seed the tomatoes and peppers.

• 21:56Lewis Howes?

  Then you can eat them in sauce or.

• 21:58Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, exactly. In fact, in Italy, you cannot make tomato sauce without peeling and de-seeding tomatoes.

• 22:04Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 22:04Steven Gundry?

  You'll never open a jar of Italian red peppers and see peels and seeds because they're gone. You'll never open a can of chili peppers in the United States and see peels and seeds because they're gone because the traditional cultures have always known to do this. And how'd they know? Because their mother told them and blah, blah, blah. And, yeah, I mean, the Italians wouldn't eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back, their native son, because they knew how bad they were for them.

• 22:33Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 22:34Steven Gundry?

  In fact, Americans didn't start eating tomatoes until the late 1800s because they were believed to be deadly.

• 22:43Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 22:44Steven Gundry?

  And they were part of the deadly nightshade family. And then this, I've forgotten his last name, and I think it's Colonel Mitchell, he wasn't a Colonel at all. He stood on this, he put an announcement in the paper in a suburb of Philadelphia that he was going to commit suicide by eating a bushel of tomatoes on the courthouse steps. And he proceeded to eat a lot of tomatoes and he doesn't die. Seriously. And I actually talked about it in Plant Paradox. That actually opened the floodgates to Americans eating tomatoes.

• 23:18Lewis Howes?

  They said, okay, he's fine, so we can start.

• 23:20Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, yeah, look, he didn't die. Yay. It's a myth.

• 23:24Lewis Howes?

  But people thought if you eat this, it's going to kill you.

• 23:26Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, it's going to make you really sick.

• 23:28Lewis Howes?

  Make you sick.

• 23:29Steven Gundry?

  And we still have a lot of people who do react with pain to the nightshade family.

• 23:36Lewis Howes?

  So potatoes are fine if they're peeled?

• 23:39Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Lewis Howes?

  Is that what you're saying? Just don't eat the skin?

• 23:41Steven Gundry?

  Or pressure cook them.

• 23:42Lewis Howes?

  Or pressure cook. Then they're fine. Okay. Are there any others that you have in mind? Is that the main ones?

• 23:48Steven Gundry?

  Well, peanuts and cashews. Cashews are actually poison ivy. They're the same plant as poison ivy. And why anybody would, you know, want to munch on poison ivy is beyond me.

• 24:03Lewis Howes?

  But they taste so good.

• 24:04Steven Gundry?

  Well, I agree. I used to love them.

• 24:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 24:07Steven Gundry?

  I haven't had a cashew in, I don't know how long.

• 24:10Lewis Howes?

  So what do you see when people are eating cashews, when they take the food sensitivity tests, who have, who stop eating cashews? But there's probably a number of foods they're eating that affect them, then they remove them all.

• 24:22Steven Gundry?

  Correct. Yeah, we remove them all. And some of them make, you know, people cry. You know, I have a, I have an executive high up in one of the social media companies who developed just devastating painful autoimmune disease and.

• 24:37Steven Gundry?

  The meds were making him even sicker and long story short, got referred to me. And we did these tests and among other things, he was sensitive to both egg whites and egg yolks. And so, you know, out it goes. Now, the problem was this guy lived on omelets. He had an omelet every day of his life. So good. He loves omelets. And, you know, he was, you know, I can't do this. I thought, look, you know, come on, help me out here. I said, we'll get him back, I promise, just. But you gotta fix the leak. Fix the leak. So, and sure enough, you know, his pain went away. We got him off his meds. So about nine months in, we could measure his leaky guts getting better and better and better. And he's a happy guy, but he still wants his omelet. So nine months in, we retest him.

• 25:21Steven Gundry?

  And now he can tolerate egg whites, but he's still not good with egg yolks. But now he's a happy guy. He can have an egg white omelet. Here's the best part of this story. So, we go over this data. Two days later, I get a phone call from him. And he says, oh, I'm in such pain. I said, what'd you do? I have an omelet. He said, well, um, I had an omelet for breakfast, an omelet for lunch, an omelet for dinner. And then I just had another omelet. And I'm in such pain. He said, what'd you do that for? I, I said, you know, you got, you haven't seen this in nine months. You gotta put it in. Slowly, yeah.

• 26:01Steven Gundry?

  I got it. Yeah. Dumb, sorry. You know, the light bulbs went off this morning. Yeah, that was dumb. But now he's eaten, you know, egg yolks. And so the really cool thing, really cool thing is, you can retrain the immune system. And you can seal leaky gut so that you can have these foods back as long as you, you know, Moderation, yeah. Take some precautions, yeah.

• 26:33Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so what would be some of the alternative foods? That we could eat and consume if we got rid of all these? Because it sounds to me, I'm just eating broccoli and cauliflower all day.

• 26:43Steven Gundry?

  No.

• 26:44Lewis Howes?

  So what are some of the alternatives that are also?

• 26:46Steven Gundry?

  I mean, there are great pastas out there made out of cassava flour. I make one at Gundry M.D. made out of sorghum flour. Again, have no relationship. Jovial makes phenomenal pastas out of cassava flour.

• 27:03Lewis Howes?

  Cassava flour?

• 27:04Steven Gundry?

  Cassava, yeah, it's a taro root.

• 27:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 27:07Steven Gundry?

  And I tell you, I actually, one of the restaurants, Italian restaurants in Moseto, keeps cassava pasta for me and I just had a big bowl of penne pasta a couple nights ago.

• 27:22Lewis Howes?

  And it doesn't affect your, you don't feel like this?

• 27:24Steven Gundry?

  No.

• 27:24Lewis Howes?

  This gluten hangover and?

• 27:27Steven Gundry?

  And it's got this mouth feel. It's really good now. It's al dente. So the idea that you have to, you know, suffer these things is old school. And I think one of the, one of the big benefits of the plant paradox being so popular is that consumers wanted alternatives and companies rise to the occasion.

• 27:54Lewis Howes?

  Started making these.

• 27:55Steven Gundry?

  And they're making lots of stuff. There's lots of now pasta sauces peeled and de-seeded tomatoes. You know, again, there's lots of pressure cooked beans. So it's actually, it's been exciting to watch these things come about.

• 28:13Lewis Howes?

  Right. What about, so what other foods? We've got the cassava flour pasta. What about, I mean?

• 28:19Steven Gundry?

  So there's actually increasingly now a lot of fairly safe ice creams out there that can use alternative, like coconut milk as an example. There's actually some ice creams that use a sweetener called allulose, which I'm very high on.

• 28:42Lewis Howes?

  Allulose.

• 28:42Steven Gundry?

  Allulose. Allulose is a rare, actual sugar. It was first discovered in figs, but it has no caloric value. And they actually, it's primarily produced from corn, but before everybody has a fit.

• 29:01Steven Gundry?

  By GMO allulose, most corn in the United States is genetically modified and that's a whole nother story in itself. Most corn in the United States is sprayed with Roundup, as is all our wheat, as is all of our everything.

• 29:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Steven Gundry?

  So, but allulose is actually a prebiotic. So, a prebiotic is fiber that feeds good gut bacteria.

• 29:30Lewis Howes?

  So, get non-GMO allulose?

• 29:32Steven Gundry?

  Allulose, and it's easy to find. It's on the internet. A lot of stores are getting it. But it's starting to appear in, it's starting to appear in bars. It's starting to appear in ice creams and so.

• 29:43Lewis Howes?

  Protein bars and stuff.

• 29:44Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Any other, what about for like the nuts? What's a replacement for nuts?

• 29:50Steven Gundry?

  So, number one nut, and we'll talk about this in a little bit, is pistachios.

• 29:56Lewis Howes?

  I love pistachios.

• 29:57Steven Gundry?

  Pistachios have so many crazy health benefits, and their number one health benefit, spoiler alert, is they are the highest source of melatonin of any food.

• 30:12Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 30:13Steven Gundry?

  Really. And everybody says, well, wait a minute. I don't want to go to sleep after I eat pistachios. It turns out that melatonin is only one of two actual antioxidants that are used in mitochondria to protect mitochondria. The other one is glutathione. All the other antioxidants that people talk about, you know, vitamin C, vitamin E, blah, blah, blah, have absolutely no effect on oxidative stress in mitochondria. There's only two, melatonin and glutathione.

• 30:53Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 30:54Steven Gundry?

  So, melatonin is not a sleep hormone. Melatonin has a much higher purpose, and that is to actually repair mitochondria, to uncouple mitochondria.

• 31:09Lewis Howes?

  Got you. We'll go into that for sure, yeah. So pistachios is

• 31:14Steven Gundry?

  Pistachios is number one.

• 31:15Lewis Howes?

  Can you have too many nuts? Uh. Of pistachio macadamia?

• 31:20Steven Gundry?

  You can't. So if you want to gain weight, macadamia nuts are the way to do it. And I've actually had some weight gaining challenges for some of my really skinny people. And if you want to gain weight, macadamia nuts are the way to do it.

• 31:33Lewis Howes?

  Mac, what about pistachios?

• 31:34Steven Gundry?

  Pistachios is pretty hard.

• 31:36Lewis Howes?

  Macadamia nuts are so good.

• 31:37Steven Gundry?

  Oh, I know. That's part of the problem.

• 31:39Lewis Howes?

  That's why. That's why you gain weight.

• 31:40Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, you really do gain weight with macadamia nuts.

• 31:43Lewis Howes?

  So you can have more pistachios?

• 31:44Steven Gundry?

  Walnuts are great. Hazelnuts are great. Uh, pine nuts are great.

• 31:48Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 31:49Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. So, uh, pecans do have lectin. I wrote about in the Plant Paradox Cookbook that we often see on food sensitivity test.

• 31:59Lewis Howes?

  Pecans?

• 31:59Steven Gundry?

  Pecans. But, you know, I, I just tell, tell people, go easy because, you know, I went to medical school in Georgia and it's the state, you know, nut.

• 32:07Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 32:09Steven Gundry?

  Help the economy.

• 32:11Lewis Howes?

  What do you think is the best diet or food eating plan to go on to help you reverse age?

• 32:19Steven Gundry?

  Uh, believe it or not, my keto, my new keto program.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 32:23Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Lewis Howes?

  To help you reverse?

• 32:25Steven Gundry?

  Reverse, reverse age.

• 32:27Lewis Howes?

  Why do you think that? What's the difference between that and the, the Plant Paradox diet?

• 32:31Steven Gundry?

  So this is the Plant Paradox taken to its kind of ultimate conclusion. You know, I, I, the Plant Paradox had a ketogenic program.

• 32:42Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:42Steven Gundry?

  Uh, but people were shocked with the amount of carbohydrates that were available to them in my ketogenic program. And nobody could quite figure out why, but it was really effective, particularly at losing weight. And I didn't even realize why until, uh, I was writing the Energy Paradox. And then it was like, oh my gosh, why this works has been sitting here in plain sight. And I didn't see it. And no keto expert has ever seen it because we've all been kind of led down the garden path that

• 33:23Steven Gundry?

  Ketones and being in ketosis is, you know, it's a miracle fuel.

• 33:29Lewis Howes?

  Burns fat.

• 33:30Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, burns fat and makes you an efficient fat burner. And let's look at it this way. If you become an efficient fat burner, which is what every keto says that you will be. Efficiency means you get more out of something, you get more efficiency. In other words, if you wanna save gas, you buy a Toyota Prius, which is very efficient at getting the most miles out of a gallon of gas. On the other hand, if you want to be fuel inefficient, then you buy a Ferrari, which is really good at wasting gas.

• 34:14Steven Gundry?

  Now, there might be other reasons to have a Ferrari rather than a Prius, but we won't go there. So, fat has nine grams, nine calories per gram. Amino acids and carbohydrates have four calories per gram. So, fat has more than twice the calories by weight of carbohydrates or proteins. So, if you become an efficient fat burner and you're eating fat, then you ought to gain weight.

• 34:47Lewis Howes?

  Why don't people gain weight?

• 34:49Steven Gundry?

  Believe it or not, a ton of people gain weight on ketogenic diets.

• 34:53Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 34:54Steven Gundry?

  Because they're actually eating the wrong kinds of fats. And the book shows why eating the wrong kind of fats do this. Most people eating a high saturated fat diet, you know, cream cheese and bacon, actually become insulin resistant and insulin, and they actually develop high blood sugar. And that insulin.

• 35:21Steven Gundry?

  Goes up and insulin is actually the fat storage hormone. So when you're eating a lot of fat, you actually can get fatter and fatter. And I profile a patient of mine who I call Miranda in the book, who had been doing a true supervised ketogenic diet for two years. And she had gained 30 pounds in two years.

• 35:43Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 35:43Steven Gundry?

  And was really pissed.

• 35:45Lewis Howes?

  And She's like, all the experts say that you're supposed to follow this.

• 35:48Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, and I mean, she was doing it. She showed me her food diaries. And yet, when we measured her, she was insulin resistant. She had high insulin levels. She was prediabetic. And she was apoplectic. And she's literally, she's like, what are you talking about? You know, I'm a saint on this diet. I said, yeah, this is, you know, what we see. That's why 60% of people who try a ketogenic diet give it up quickly. Because they don't see the results that are promised. And it's clear, after I wrote Unlocking the Keto Code, why people aren't getting the results that were promised. Because

• 36:29Lewis Howes?

  What are people doing wrong on the old way of doing the keto diet? And how should they approach it now with the new information?

• 36:37Steven Gundry?

  So one of the big problems is that, and this is shocking information. You look at normal weight individuals in the United States. 50% of normal weight individuals are metabolically inflexible. And I've used those terms before, but let's, let's define it again.

• 37:00Lewis Howes?

  Okay, what is that?

• 37:00Steven Gundry?

  Normally, you and I can burn glucose to make ATP in our mitochondria. But we can also, if glucose runs out, burn free fatty acids, fat, as a fuel. And normally, the second glucose runs out, we should be able to switch over to burning fat as a fuel. Just very much like a hybrid car.

• 37:32Steven Gundry?

  When you're running on gasoline, the battery, which we'll call fat, is being charged. When the gasoline runs out, the battery can discharge and power the vehicle. Fifty percent of normal weight people are metabolically inflexible. They can't do that.

• 37:49Lewis Howes?

  They can't switch on the burning fat.

• 37:50Steven Gundry?

  They can't switch to burning fat. Now, you look at overweight people. Eighty-eight percent of overweight people are metabolically inflexible. They cannot switch over to burning fat.

• 38:04Lewis Howes?

  So, how do you switch over, then?

• 38:05Steven Gundry?

  And get this. Ninety-eight point five percent of obese people are metabolically inflexible. They cannot make the switch.

• 38:15Lewis Howes?

  Is that meaning they can't make the switch on a day-to-day basis?

• 38:20Steven Gundry?

  On a 24-hour basis.

• 38:21Lewis Howes?

  They can't switch and burn?

• 38:22Steven Gundry?

  They can't.

• 38:23Lewis Howes?

  But if you intermittent fast for a couple of days?

• 38:27Steven Gundry?

  I'm glad you asked that. Have you been reading up? Yeah, so it turns out that when we have, and metabolically inflexible people have normally high insulin levels. Simplistically, insulin is a fat storage hormone. That's why, back in the old days, when we gave people insulin who were diabetics, they got fatter and fatter because we were injecting them with the hormone that stores fat. So, when we eat, insulin comes up. Insulin knocks on your muscle cells and says, "Hey, Louis just had a great meal. Here, I want to sell you this stuff. Open the door." And your muscles say, "Oh, yeah, good. I'm hungry. Give it to me."

• 39:11Steven Gundry?

  So, you're insulin-sensitive. Now, unfortunately, most people, insulin levels are high almost all the time because your muscles are full. They don't want anything to eat. They go, "Go away. Don't come back." But insulin keeps trying, so it keeps pushing. When insulin is high, it has a second effect. It blocks the release of fat from fat cells. Now, think about it. If you and I just killed a bison and we were gorging on bison, we would want to store most of what we ate as fat. Because probably we weren't going to kill the bison for a while.

• 39:54Steven Gundry?

  So insulin, when it's high, is storing fat. But insulin, you wouldn't wanna burn fat while you're doing that. So insulin says, no, no, no, it's staying here in the storage tanks. So there was a very good purpose for that. But normally, if you and I stopped eating, after about eight hours, your blood sugar levels would pretty much be used up. Insulin would fall. And then fat would come rolling out of your fat cells, out of your hybrid battery. And you'd start burning fat as a fuel. And everything's fine. But if you go on a ketogenic diet,

• 40:36Steven Gundry?

  when you're metabolically inflexible and all you're eating is fat. What happens then? You don't, you can't get to that fat. And you crash and burn. And that gives you the keto flu, the Atkins blues. Your athletic performance plummets. Your energy goes down. Your energy goes down. You get that headachy feeling. And you say, give me some carbs. Yeah. Give me some carbs. Yeah, and your brains go, what the heck? You know, I got nothing here. I got nothing. And that's what's really cool. So normally, all of your cells, all of my cells, are delighted to burn free fatty acids. It's a great fuel.

• 41:19Steven Gundry?

  The problem is, free fatty acids are actually big molecules. And they can't get through the blood-brain barrier. They're too big. So that's a problem. Everybody else and you can do fine. But if your, your brain can't burn free fatty acids, because they can't get there. It could do it if they could get there. So we have this clever system that when free fatty acids are outflowing, some of them go to the liver. And the liver converts them into water soluble, short-chain fatty acids called ketones, or ketone bodies. The liver can't use ketone bodies.

• 42:03Steven Gundry?

  So it throws them out into the bloodstream. And ketone bodies can get past the blood-brain barrier. So they can serve as a backup fuel for the brain during the time you're sleeping.

• 42:21Steven Gundry?

  During the time you're starving, or during the time you're eating a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet. But everybody got the idea, thanks to some research out of Harvard and the NIH years ago by Cahill and Veitch, that because ketones could provide an alternative fuel, that it must be a super fuel. And that we should always try to be starving, in fact.

• 42:53Lewis Howes?

  Get into ketosis, right?

• 42:55Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, get into ketosis, get into ketosis. Well, one of the proteges of Dr. Cahill, Dr. Owens, in 2004, you know, fairly recently, showed that even at a full ketogenic output, a full ketogenic diet, only 30% of our power could come from ketones. 70% still had to come from free fatty acids and glucose. And even at full ketosis, your brain still has to have 30 to 40% of its energy met by glucose. Not ketones.

• 43:38Steven Gundry?

  And so as I was researching this for the energy paradox, I went, well, wait a minute. Something's not right here. Something isn't making sense. These aren't a perfect fuel at all. But we clearly make them. And one of the reasons we make them is to keep our brain kind of going while times are tough. Makes sense. But they must be doing something else. And that's when I discovered what ketones actually do.

• 44:16Lewis Howes?

  What do they do?

• 44:17Steven Gundry?

  They are signaling molecules. They are messengers to, believe it or not, tell mitochondria.

• 44:28Steven Gundry?

  Mitochondria are the little energy producing organelles in almost all of our cells. To protect themselves at all costs, number one. To make more of themselves to carry the workload, which is called mitogenesis. And here's the best part, to protect themselves, they should waste fuel. Burn fuel. They should burn it, but don't make it into energy. They should become a Ferrari. Why is that? Well, that was the $64,000 question.

• 45:11Steven Gundry?

  Because, think about it, if you're starving to death, you would think that you would want your mitochondria to become the most efficient, get every last ounce of ATP out of every last calorie in you. And the last thing you would want them to do is waste. So, a researcher by the name of Martin Brand in 2000 wrote a little tiny paper that said, the paper's name, look it up, it's great, Uncoupling to Survive. Uncoupling to Survive. Sounds like a relationship. Yeah, well, we now, yeah, we think of. Conscious uncoupling. Yes, yes. So.

• 45:56Steven Gundry?

  And I think we may have to get out the chalkboard, but. So what he said was, so if, if you're starving to death, if your mitochondria die, then you're, you're not gonna be here. If your mitochondria die. Yeah, if they don't make it, you're over. And who cares about your muscles? Who cares about anything else? You gotta keep your mitochondria alive. And it turns out, making energy is really, really hard work. Okay. It is incredibly damaging work for mitochondria. And they injure themselves in the process of making energy.

• 46:40Steven Gundry?

  They make energy by coupling protons with oxygen, if you will, marrying a proton to an oxygen molecule. And they make ATP. Great. So it turns out that normally, you and me, sitting here right now, 30% of all the calories entering into our mitochondria never couple up with oxygen to make ATP. They are uncoupled from making ATP. So in mitochondria, there's an electron transport chain.

• 47:24Steven Gundry?

  The Nobel Prize was awarded to Peter Mitchell for this discovery. So the mitochondria have these membranes. And in the book, I call it the mito club. And the mito club is the hippest place to be for all the millennials. And the mito club, the patrons enter one direction. And so we've got protons, and we've got electrons, and we've got oxygen. And it is the hottest place to be. And everybody wants to be in the club. And there's actually bouncers in the club.

• 48:09Steven Gundry?

  And those bouncers happen to be melatonin and glutathione. And they kind of keep things okay. So there's only one exit out the back. And so the object of the game is, you know, for a proton and oxygen to couple in on the way they go. And as they leave, they actually make the energy molecule ATP.

• 48:35Steven Gundry?

  And that's how we make energy. Okay. This is the electron transport chain. I mean, it is hot and steamy and lots of damage. Sometimes oxygen couples up with an electron. Those are free radicals. Those are reactive oxygen species. Those are bad. You don't want that to happen. And the protons get really mad because, you know, they're... Why are they coupling up with who they want to go with? Okay. So, everything's kind of really bad. Now, it just so happens that there are emergency exits. Okay. And along this row. And they're supposed to be closed, except for emergencies. But, these can be opened by what are called uncoupling proteins.

• 49:20Steven Gundry?

  And there happen to be five of them. Okay. So, if things are really steamy, if things... If chairs are thrown, punches are being thrown. Protons can escape out the emergency exits and not participate in making ATP. What happens when that happens? Things quiet down. Okay. Things return back to a nicer level. Okay. And more people can actually join into the club. So, the point of all this is, you can actually process more calories through the mitochondria, but you actually do a caloric bypass by wasting these calories.

• 50:05Steven Gundry?

  Before it makes ATP? Exactly. And that is beneficial, why? Why? Lots of things. Number one, it generates heat. Okay. And it turns out, you probably know that there is brown fat and beige fat and white fat. So, brown fat is brown because it is loaded with mitochondria. And brown fat makes heat. And it turns out that people who have more brown fat actually are much healthier than people... You're burning more fat, too, right? You're burning more fat. So, how this whole discovery came about is actually one of the funniest things in medicine. Back in World War I,

• 50:50Steven Gundry?

  it was noted that factory workers...

• 50:54Steven Gundry?

  In Germany and France, who were making gunpowder, munitions, were really skinny, despite eating huge amounts of food. Okay. And they were running temperatures. And nobody could figure out what they were doing. And then a couple of doctors at Stanford in 1930 said, I think we figured it out. These guys were using a chemical called 2-4-dinitrophenol. Okay. DNP. You can find it on the dark web. Anyhow, so, and they thought that this DNP was making them waste huge amounts of calories.

• 51:37Steven Gundry?

  They didn't know why, but they thought they were generating it in heat. It increased their metabolic rate. And they go, oh, my gosh, this is the greatest weight loss drug ever known. So they actually started prescribing DNP to human beings. And a hundred thousand prescriptions of DNP were written, the United States alone, in the 1930s. And DNP was miraculous. One, a small dose, you could lose a pound a week. At a higher dose, you could lose five pounds a week. I mean, think about that. Who wouldn't want that? Right. Only one problem.

• 52:21Steven Gundry?

  So these guys got really hot, they ran fevers. It actually affected their thyroid. It caused cataracts, and this was before cataract surgery. And then there were a bunch of deaths. Because they got so uncoupled that they couldn't produce enough ATP to stay alive. Interesting. And they died. Okay. So one of the first official acts of the FDA, when they were formed, was to ban the sale of DNP. Now, and every now and then, you'll, you'll read on the internet about a bodybuilder, who was using it and who died.

• 53:02Steven Gundry?

  So it turns out that D N P was the first known oral mitochondrial uncoupler. And the reason it was so effective is that it made you literally throw tons of calories out the back door, out the side door. Too many, though. Yeah, too many. And it turns out, there's a lot of research in controlled low-dose D N P. Lot of money looking into, okay, how can, how can we find that sweet spot? And I talk about it in the book. So what we want to do is there's a Goldilocks rule, rule with mitochondrial uncoupling.

• 53:47Steven Gundry?

  We want just the right amount of mitochondrial. Yeah, it's the right amount. So now we go back to ketones. And we go, okay, so what the heck? If ketones aren't this great fuel, what exactly are they there for? And it turns out that ketones are a signaling molecule to tell mitochondria to uncouple. And to uncouple to survive, like Brand said. And to protect themselves at all costs. Now, we, most of us have accepted the mitochondrial theory of aging, that mitochondria eventually

• 54:28Steven Gundry?

  gets so damaged and they're the powerhouses and kind of things fiddle out. And it's a pretty good theory. So the idea is, let's keep the mitochondria repairing themselves, not harming themselves by trying too hard to make fuel, and to actually tell themselves to make more of themselves simultaneously, in a way, try to make brown fat in all of our tissues. And it turns out, interestingly enough, if you look at super old people, they have the most uncoupled mitochondria. Really? Yeah, really. Why is that?

• 55:13Steven Gundry?

  Because of the foods they eat. And it turns out, I mentioned 2-4-dinitrophenol for a reason.

• 55:24Steven Gundry?

  It has a phenol group. And where have you heard the word phenol when I have talked to you? Poly. Polyphenols. Lots of phenols. Yes. All right, here's where it gets really good. All right. So plants have to produce energy. And they have their own version of mitochondria, which are called chloroplasts. And they take photons from the sun and mix it with carbon dioxide and produce glucose, ATP, and oxygen. So it's actually the reverse electron transport chain.

• 56:07Steven Gundry?

  Photons, sunlight, just like oxygen's really damaging to mitochondria, sunlight is really damaging to plant chloroplasts, their mitochondria. So plants produce polyphenols Yes. to uncouple their mitochondria to protect their mitochondria from sun damage and also other stressors. And so the more a plant is under stress, or even the higher a plant is in altitude, the more polyphenols it makes. And, surprise, plants produce melatonin

• 56:51Steven Gundry?

  as a major protector of their chloroplast and as an uncoupler. It turns out that melatonin in itself is an uncoupler. So what happens when we eat brightly colored plants, eat the rainbow, what we're actually doing is we're eating uncouplers. Interesting. And the more uncouplers you eat, the more you will protect your mitochondria. So now we go back and look at something like the Mediterranean diet. Well, it turns out that olive oil is full of polyphenols. Red wine is fully full of polyphenols.

• 57:33Steven Gundry?

  These bright colored vegetables are full of polyphenols. And each one of them is documented to produce mitochondrial uncoupling. Another interesting aspect of the Mediterranean diet is that there are two, two blue zones. Yes. In the Mediterranean. Sardinia? Yeah, Sardinia and Greece. Yeah. But there's another blue zone in Costa Rica on the Nagoya Peninsula. And I got really interested in why those guys were so unique. In Costa Rica? In Costa Rica, in Nagoya Peninsula.

• 58:12Steven Gundry?

  And the only people in Sardinia that constitute the blue zones are the Sardinians who live up in the mountain. The Sardinians who live up in the mountains have incredible longevity. The Sardinians who live down by the sea don't. Why is that? I'm glad you asked. It turns out the Sardinians in the mountains are sheep and goat herders. And, fun fact, thirty percent of all the fat in goat and sheep milk are medium chain triglycerides. MCT oil, thirty percent. MCT oil? Yeah, in goat and sheep milk, who knew? It's not present in cow milk.

• 58:54Steven Gundry?

  And it turns out that the Nagoya Peninsula also eat lots of goat and sheep cheeses. And so you can actually look at what happens when these people are eating goat and sheep cheeses. And it turns out that, to come full circle, MCTs are fats that don't behave like any other fat. They go right through our digestive wall. They go directly to our liver. And they are immediately made into ketones.

• 59:33Steven Gundry?

  Do not pass goat and not collect $200. So, for instance, you could have, you could bite into an apple and have some MCT oil, or better yet, have a delicious piece of goat or sheep cheese. And despite the fact that you bit into an apple and had all that fructose running around your system.

• 59:56Lewis Howes?

  Spiking of that, yeah.

• 59:57Steven Gundry?

  You'd be in ketosis.

• 59:59Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 59:59Steven Gundry?

  Yes.

• 1:00:00Lewis Howes?

  How is that possible? Because you're coupling the two foods?

• 1:00:02Steven Gundry?

  No, because the MCTs are going to your liver and your liver is making ketones despite what else you eat.

• 1:00:09Lewis Howes?

  Despite the fructose that you eat.

• 1:00:10Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:00:11Steven Gundry?

  So that's unlocking the keto code. The cool thing is, you don't have to go on a miserable high-fat diet to activate what you're trying to get from ketones, and that is to unlock mitochondria. So the cool thing is, you can have some MCT oil, you can mix it in your salad dressings. You can have it with olive oil, which has uncoupling power. You can have some pistachios, which are full of melatonin, which will uncouple. You can have a glass of red wine, which will uncouple your mitochondria. And red wine has lots of melatonin.

• 1:00:54Steven Gundry?

  And so you can literally have your cake and eat it too, as long as you know the tricks of foods to uncouple your mitochondria. Final thought. So why does intermittent fasting work so well? In The Energy Paradox, I wrote about these fascinating studies with Dr. DeCabo from the NIH, who was convinced that calorie restriction didn't provide the benefits because of calorie restriction. He thought that there was another mechanism. And in animals, what we do when we calorie restrict animals is

• 1:01:38Steven Gundry?

  we give them their 30% less food portion once a day. We put it out. Here you go. That's it. When you're getting thirty percent less food, you eat what you got very quickly.

• 1:01:51Lewis Howes?

  Right now.

• 1:01:51Steven Gundry?

  Right now. It's gone. And he thought that what was happening was that the calorie-restricted animals were actually eating much quicker, and they were fasting for a longer period of time during every twenty-four hours. So.

• 1:02:08Lewis Howes?

  They weren't nibbling throughout the day.

• 1:02:10Steven Gundry?

  Exactly. And so he set up an experiment where he would give animals calorie-restricted food, or he would give animals regular food to eat all day, but the third group, he would put out their food only once a day at three o'clock in the afternoon. It would be a full day's portion. But it turns out that these mice who could only start eating at three o'clock in the afternoon only ate for about ten hours before it was gone. The other guys nibbled all day long. They got to eat all day long. When they looked at all the results, it turns out that the time-restricted mice lived eleven percent longer than the guys who munched all day.

• 1:02:56Steven Gundry?

  The calorie-restricted, time-restricted mice lived about thirty percent longer. But if you do the math, if we timed restricted, like a mouse, we would get an extra ten years of good life.

• 1:03:09Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:03:09Steven Gundry?

  Ten years. Okay, so what's happening?

• 1:03:13Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean, time restricted? Only eat in a certain amount?

• 1:03:15Steven Gundry?

  Only eat in a certain amount of time. So here's the deal. Normally,

• 1:03:20Steven Gundry?

  after about eight hours of not eating, we start producing ketones, normally. And those ketones, remember, are not a fuel. They are a signaling molecule to make your mitochondria protect themselves.

• 1:03:37Steven Gundry?

  We reach maximal ketosis after about twelve hours.

• 1:03:41Steven Gundry?

  And so if you go a 12-hour window, you're getting a nice effect of ketones. But let's suppose we push that out an additional four hours to a 16-hour fasting.

• 1:03:56Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:03:57Steven Gundry?

  Now, we've got a good, actually, 10 hours of ketone production telling our mitochondria to uncouple and protect themselves. So it worked out from Dr. Matheson, who worked from the NIH, that probably for us, a six-hour eating window may be perfect. So an 18-hour fasting window. Now, why shouldn't we, if that's so good for us, why shouldn't we be in ketosis 24/7? The problem is, is the sweet spot, the Goldilocks rule.

• 1:04:36Steven Gundry?

  Continuous ketosis starts to impact muscle production. Because if you're always in ketosis, your mitochondria are being told that this is, you know, we're starving to death. Protect yourself, forget about those muscles, they don't, you know, who cares about them? Protect yourself and don't make muscle protein. Make protein for yourself. And make sure the muscles don't get anything by producing insulin resistance. So the, whatever is around can't get into the muscles.

• 1:05:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05:17Steven Gundry?

  So that's why continuous ketosis is so dumb and dangerous, and why intermittent ketosis is so important on a 24-hour basis.

• 1:05:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Well, it just seems really hard to be always in ketosis. It's like, how does your brain function after a certain amount of time?

• 1:05:37Steven Gundry?

  That's a really good question, because we now know that even at full ketosis, your brain still wants 30 to 40% of its fuel is sugar. And where's the sugar come from? It has to come from your muscles.

• 1:05:50Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, so you're losing the muscles then?

• 1:05:52Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, and you know, I've, I've, I have a colleague who went all in on this 24/7 keto thing for a very long time. And despite the fact that he exercises like a fiend, uh, he got sarcopenia, he got muscle wasting.

• 1:06:09Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:06:09Steven Gundry?

  And it finally dawned on me, I said, what the heck am I doing? So the cool thing is ketones are really cool, but not why people think they're really cool. And you don't need to do a high-fat diet to get the benefits of what ketones do.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  So what would be the main ingredients or food of the new style of keto diet that you're recommending? What would be the, the 10 main foods we should be eating then within that diet?

• 1:06:37Steven Gundry?

  So here's another really cool thing.

• 1:06:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Steven Gundry?

  The principal ketone that we use once we're in ketosis is a fat called beta-hydroxybutyrate. A lot of people have seen it as BHB.

• 1:06:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:06:52Steven Gundry?

  Right? That is made from butyrate, which is made from prebiotic fiber being digested by our gut bacteria into postbiotics. And these short-chain fatty acids like butyrate are a product of prebiotic fiber digestion. So one really easy way to make the substrates of ketones is to eat a high-fiber diet, soluble fiber.

• 1:07:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Steven Gundry?

  So, you know, asparagus, uh, the root vegetables, leeks, onions, garlic, um, the chicory family vegetables, uh, radicchio, chicory, frise, Belgian endive. I just had a big radicchio salad last night. So those actually make the precursors for what we're looking for.

• 1:07:44Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:07:44Steven Gundry?

  But here, uh, ever heard of apple cider vinegar?

• 1:07:48Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 1:07:48Steven Gundry?

  Of course.

• 1:07:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Uh, I don't like it, but...

• 1:07:50Steven Gundry?

  Ever wanna know how apple cider vinegar works?

• 1:07:54Lewis Howes?

  Tell me.

• 1:07:55Steven Gundry?

  It turns out it is...

• 1:07:56Lewis Howes?

  People swear by apple cider vinegar.

• 1:07:58Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so it is a short-chain fatty acid

• 1:08:01Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:08:02Steven Gundry?

  called acetic acid or acetate. And it just so happens to be a backbone for making a ketone, aceto acetate. But more importantly, both butyrate and acetic acid are mitochondrial uncouplers in their own right. So have yourself some apple cider vinegar. Doesn't taste good. Put it in sparkling water like San Pellegrino. Drink it. Have some balsamic vinegar, put it in, you know, some water and drink it. Okay. Put it on your salads. Now have some other fermented foods. It turns out that fermented foods are not doing anything for probiotics.

• 1:08:46Steven Gundry?

  It turns out that they have these postbiotics already in there. And fermented foods like wine have postbiotics. And fermented foods like cheeses have postbiotics. And these are a class of, class of postbiotics called polyamines. And one of the most famous ones is spermidine. Okay, spermidine. Spermidine, and you can guess where that comes from. There's another one called putrescine, putrid, rotting. And these things are potent mitochondrial uncouplers.

• 1:09:26Steven Gundry?

  That's why men in Italy who eat a lot of Parmesan cheese, which is aged Parmesan cheese, have lived longer and have much better vascular health than men who don't. That's why those Sardinians and those Costa Ricans who are eating lots of goat and sheep cheese have such great health. So have yourself some goat yogurt, stir in some polyphenols, get yourself a polyphenol of your choice. I like to do what's called reverse juicing. Take fruit, put it in your Jackaline juicer, I know you got one in the cupboard.

• 1:10:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Steven Gundry?

  Throw the juice away. You know how much I hate fruit juice.

• 1:10:10Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:11Steven Gundry?

  We lit up the internet with that one.

• 1:10:13Lewis Howes?

  A lot of sugar.

• 1:10:14Steven Gundry?

  A lot of sugar, a lot of fructose.

• 1:10:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Steven Gundry?

  But take the pulp, which is pure polyphenols, and freeze it, or just take it and put it in your goat yogurt, your sheep yogurt. You can get goat yogurt at Trader Joe's. And you will just have this uncoupling burst. You'll have breakfast, but you'll generate ketones.

• 1:10:36Lewis Howes?

  Mmm.

• 1:10:36Steven Gundry?

  You can even have some pistachios and you'll generate uncoupling.

• 1:10:42Lewis Howes?

  What does goat yogurt taste like?

• 1:10:44Steven Gundry?

  Eh, it really doesn't taste very goaty. Fun fact, MCT is a component of five different fats. And four of them are named after the Latin word for goat, capress. So there's capric acid, caprylic acid, caprolic acid. So it's named for goat. And so it came from the fact that goat milk has all this MCT.

• 1:11:14Lewis Howes?

  So these-

• 1:11:14Steven Gundry?

  And sheep milk is fantastic.

• 1:11:16Lewis Howes?

  Similar, right?

• 1:11:17Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Lewis Howes?

  Same thing.

• 1:11:17Steven Gundry?

  So Munchingo cheese from Spain and Portugal, that sheep cheese.

• 1:11:23Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:11:23Steven Gundry?

  So, you know, have yourself a slice of cheese for breakfast.

• 1:11:27Lewis Howes?

  Now, the Costa Ricans and the Sardinians that are in the blue zones, how much goat milk, sheep cheese are they eating on a consistent basis?

• 1:11:36Steven Gundry?

  They have it almost every day.

• 1:11:37Lewis Howes?

  A little bit every day, or just-

• 1:11:39Steven Gundry?

  Just a piece.

• 1:11:41Steven Gundry?

  A little dabble, do you, as I talk about in the book.

• 1:11:44Lewis Howes?

  Do they have cow's milk? Do they eat other cheeses? Do they have-

• 1:11:48Steven Gundry?

  So, cow's milk cheeses don't have MCT. But if you ferment any cheese, you're going to produce postbiotics like all these cool polyamines, which will uncouple your mitochondria.

• 1:12:06Lewis Howes?

  Is that a, is that a blue cheese then?

• 1:12:07Steven Gundry?

  So, blue cheese is great, but, yeah, blue cheeses are great.

• 1:12:11Lewis Howes?

  So that's good for you?

• 1:12:12Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Lewis Howes?

  Even if it's cow blue cheese, it's okay?

• 1:12:15Steven Gundry?

  It turns out, years ago, there was a wonderful book. And I'm blanking on his name, but it was called The Man Who Ate Everything. And he was the food editor for Vogue. And he wrote a fun book about his life. And he had a whole chapter about cheese. And he said, you know, the chapter was entitled, Why Aren't the French Dead? Because the French actually eat three times the amount of cheese that Americans eat. About eight times the amount of butter. They have

• 1:12:49Lewis Howes?

  They're skinnier.

• 1:12:50Steven Gundry?

  They have a, yeah, they're skinnier. Why are they skinnier?

• 1:12:54Lewis Howes?

  Some people say because they smoke cigarettes.

• 1:12:56Steven Gundry?

  I'm glad you brought that up. Do you know one of the best mitochondrial encouplers there is? Nicotine.

• 1:13:01Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. It's not good for your health, but it'll make you

• 1:13:04Steven Gundry?

  That's why, yeah, that makes you burn calories. And I write about this in Unlocking the Keto Code. So that's why a lot, most smokers are very skinny. Because they're wasting fuel. But the other thing that's interesting is the French, despite, you know, all this cheese, they, you know, have much less heart disease than Americans, much less. And he made a point of that. He said, why aren't they all dead if this theory of saturated fat is so right? And then I had a British doctor, by the name of Tim Spector, on my podcast, who makes the argument that if you look at cheese-eating Britons,

• 1:13:48Steven Gundry?

  that they actually have better health than non-cheese-eating Britons. And he said, we shouldn't, you know, put down cheese. So I then said, okay, I'm going to find out why this is so important. And it turns out it's the fermentation process of cheese. It's the MCTs in sheep and goat. But one other factor. It turns out that there is a miracle essential fatty acid in cheese called carbon 15.

• 1:14:23Lewis Howes?

  In all cheeses?

• 1:14:23Steven Gundry?

  In all cheeses. And work from the dolphin study of naval dolphins found that C15 is an essential fatty acid. And the Framingham Heart Study, the longest heart study of all time, started in the 1940s, show that two components in dairy are only one of four fats that improve heart health and longevity. And it turns out that two of them are in dairy. So the idea that we should be avoiding dairy is a bad idea.

• 1:15:05Steven Gundry?

  But, having said that, there's a protein in American cow milk that happens to be lectin-like. So, get your cheeses from France, from Italy, from Switzerland. Get goat and sheep, they don't have any of that. So, and then you'll be safe. You'll actually get health benefits from eating cheese. What a take-home message.

• 1:15:27Lewis Howes?

  So, is it, you know, I'm a fan for the stinkier the better.

• 1:15:32Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:15:32Lewis Howes?

  For me, it tastes better.

• 1:15:34Steven Gundry?

  Putrescins is one of these polyamines. So, the stinkiness, whether you knew it or not, was uncoupling your mitochondria.

• 1:15:43Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:43Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, my wife and I usually, every afternoon, you know, have a glass of red wine and several pieces of stinky cheese.

• 1:15:52Lewis Howes?

  What do you, okay, so I'm hearing the high fiber is the key, apple cider vinegar.

• 1:15:57Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, any vinegar.

• 1:15:58Lewis Howes?

  Any vinegar.

• 1:15:59Steven Gundry?

  You name the vinegar.

• 1:16:01Lewis Howes?

  The, obviously, the famous olive oil.

• 1:16:06Steven Gundry?

  Olive oil is a great source of it.

• 1:16:08Lewis Howes?

  Because you told me in a previous interview we did that you want your poop to look a certain way. I don't know if you remember this.

• 1:16:18Lewis Howes?

  You want it to look like a snake?

• 1:16:20Steven Gundry?

  A snake, yes.

• 1:16:21Lewis Howes?

  Snake looking at you.

• 1:16:22Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, exactly right.

• 1:16:23Lewis Howes?

  Would you look down at it?

• 1:16:24Steven Gundry?

  Looking in the bowl, you want to see a coiled snake looking up at you.

• 1:16:27Lewis Howes?

  And that comes from high fiber.

• 1:16:29Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, that's from fiber. It turns out, it's not... What's looking back at you is not plant fiber. It's actually mounds and mounds and mounds of bacteria.

• 1:16:42Lewis Howes?

  Good bacteria or bad bacteria?

• 1:16:44Steven Gundry?

  Good bacteria.

• 1:16:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay, you want good bacteria?

• 1:16:46Steven Gundry?

  Bad bacteria don't like that stuff. Bad bacteria want sugar and saturated fats. Gimme, gimme, gimme. And they, as we've talked before, they control your brain to go find it. The good bacteria want soluble fiber. And they want it because they make more babies. And that's that big poop you're seeing. But the benefit is, when they ferment that fiber, they produce postbiotics, which are fermentation products that uncouple your mitochondria. So it's a win-win. We should be eating for them, and they'll take care of us.

• 1:17:31Lewis Howes?

  To gut bacteria.

• 1:17:32Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. I mean, there was a cool study that I talked about in the Energy Paradox. They took some Chinese volunteers, men, and they put them on a 14-day water fast. Tough.

• 1:17:43Lewis Howes?

  That's tough.

• 1:17:45Steven Gundry?

  Half of the group were given 100 calories a day of prebiotic fiber powder, mixed in water. 100 calories. They couldn't digest those. We can't digest prebiotics. Only bacteria can digest them. The guys who got the prebiotic fiber had no hunger, despite a 14-day water fast.

• 1:18:11Steven Gundry?

  And it actually prompted, they're proponents of what's called the gut centric theory of hunger. And the theory, which I really like, is if we give our gut bacteria, the good guys, what they want to eat, they send signals to our brain, say, hey, you know, great, we've got everything, you don't need to go look for anything, we're happy, we're satisfied. And we know this actually to be true, because as we've talked on your program before, we can take, we can take skinny people and give them a fecal enema with bad back from obese people, and they'll become fat. Wow.

• 1:18:51Steven Gundry?

  Because they're, these bacteria literally, you know, take over our brain and what we want, or what they want. So I think it's really cool, like, hey, you know, have a hundred calories of prebiotic fiber, grind up some flax seeds, put them in your yogurt, grind up some psyllium husks, put them in your yogurt, grind up, you know, juice your fruit, put the pulp in the yogurt, sheep and goat, and man, you're uncoupling, I can just, you're just, you're just gonna be an uncoupling machine. Speaking of which, so there's the, there's the, there's a theory of aging called the

• 1:19:33Steven Gundry?

  rate of living, and it's been popular almost for a hundred years, and that is, small animals have a very high metabolic rate, and they don't live very long. And that's because their metabolic rate is just really high. Large animals, on the other hand, have a slower metabolic rate, and they live a long time, you know, elephants, blue whales can live 200 years. But there's one problem with that theory, and that's birds. Birds are really small, and yet they live an incredibly long time. A hummingbird in captivity can live 10 years. This, you know, little dinky bird. And a parrot, you know, can live 80 to 100 years.

• 1:20:18Steven Gundry?

  Isn't that crazy? And so people said, well, what the deal? They have a really high metabolic rate, this doesn't make sense. Guess who has the most uncoupled mitochondria of any animal? Birds. Birds. So they have all of their uncoupling proteins activated. And it turns out, in the case of the hummingbird that I write about, the hummingbird uses the polyphenols in the nectar of the flowers as the uncoupler.

• 1:20:46Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:20:48Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so if you want to live a long time, uncouple to survive and thrive.

• 1:20:55Lewis Howes?

  I like that. What do you think? I mean, a lot of research has changed since you wrote The Plant Paradox. I mean, new research comes out in the world.

• 1:21:05Steven Gundry?

  Sure.

• 1:21:05Lewis Howes?

  As more people are studying these things around health. What do you think is going to evolve in the next five to 10 years? Like, that hasn't come out yet that is going to be the next new science in five to 10 years? That maybe you're testing, or you're seeing other people testing, or you just have a hunch about?

• 1:21:25Steven Gundry?

  Well, I think one of the things that is interesting is this whole food sensitivity idea. That we could be eating what would normally be, what would seem to be very healthy food, like broccoli.

• 1:21:44Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:21:45Steven Gundry?

  And yet, if we have a leaky gut, that broccoli in itself could be our enemy initially.

• 1:21:53Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:21:53Steven Gundry?

  And I think it actually, it's fascinating when I do, and I do it more and more now, with people who have really followed the rules pretty well, but it's gotten better, but they're not all the way. When we do, you know, the leaky gut tests and the food sensitivity tests, it flashes and people go, "Oh, my gosh, you know, I can tell you, when I have ginger, you know, I don't like ginger. It bothers me." And yet ginger is really healing. We have tons of people react to ginger. Or they'll say, "Oh, yeah, you know, I knew that I didn't like this. I didn't know why, but, you know, there it is."

• 1:22:31Steven Gundry?

  So I think we can really, you know, kind of customize people for...

• 1:22:39Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:22:40Steven Gundry?

  And I think, you know, this is not new, but I think the more we come to realize this, you know, Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut. And the guy was right. And I think what we are beginning to realize is...

• 1:22:58Steven Gundry?

  You name the disease, it's from something going on in the gut, leaky gut. I now think heart disease is from leaky gut. It's just a manifestation. So, you know, and I paraphrase Hippocrates. All disease begins in the gut, but all disease can end in the gut.

• 1:23:18Lewis Howes?

  That's true.

• 1:23:19Steven Gundry?

  When we fix it.

• 1:23:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Steven Gundry?

  Which I think, to me, is really empowering.

• 1:23:23Lewis Howes?

  Food is medicine.

• 1:23:24Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Lewis Howes?

  Can kill you or can heal you.

• 1:23:26Steven Gundry?

  Very true.

• 1:23:27Lewis Howes?

  Now, here's something we haven't talked about yet, which all the keto people are gonna wanna hear and learn more about. Because on the keto diet, what I'm used to knowing is that you eat as much meat and cheese and milk as you want, right? It's like you can eat all the meat in the world.

• 1:23:42Steven Gundry?

  Yeah. Well, that's a high protein keto diet.

• 1:23:44Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:23:44Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, there's so many crazy versions. There's the high protein, there's the dirty, there's the clean keto.

• 1:23:53Lewis Howes?

  So what is, I mean...

• 1:23:54Steven Gundry?

  So, yeah, but you're right.

• 1:23:56Lewis Howes?

  All the longevity experts, including yourself, have talked about something around the Mediterranean diet, like having more vegetables.

• 1:24:03Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Lewis Howes?

  A lot less meat. You know, if you're gonna have meat, have fish.

• 1:24:06Steven Gundry?

  Have fish, yeah.

• 1:24:08Lewis Howes?

  And where does meat come in with this now?

• 1:24:12Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so that's, those are good questions. There's, there's several problems with beef, lamb, and pork. And I wrote about this in The Plant Paradox. And with each passing year, it gets a stronger and stronger evidence. There is a sugar molecule in beef, lamb, and pork called N5GC. And I talk about, who knew? And it, N5GC is on their blood vessels. We have a different sugar molecule called N5AC. We share that sugar molecule with fish and chicken.

• 1:24:54Steven Gundry?

  Fun announcement you saw about the pig heart going into. I saw that, yeah. Done by a good friend of mine, Bartley Griffith. So tell, tell people what happened? So they engineered, I, I used to hold the longest record for a pig to baboon heart transplant, ungenetically modified, 30 days. Where the, the baboons stayed alive? Yeah, yeah, working, you know. You made the transplant? Yeah, I did the transplant, have the record, unmodified. Now, what they did, what we knew back then. This is crazy. Is the pig had this dumb sugar molecule on it that we react to. It had Nu5GC. And so what they've done with that pig is they've genetically bred that pig to have our sugar molecule, Nu5AC.

• 1:25:39Steven Gundry?

  So when our guys go past the wall of the pig's blood vessels, we see, you know, our sugar molecule. So why is that important? Well, we know that we can develop an antibody to Nu5GC in beef, lamb, and pork. And it looks so similar to the antibody that lines our blood vessels, that we attack our blood vessels by mistake when we see our own. And that may explain why meat eating is much more associated with coronary artery disease.

• 1:26:24Steven Gundry?

  Number one. We also know that cancer cells use Nu5GC to hide from the immune system. They literally cloak themselves. We don't manufacture Nu5GC. We have Nu5AC. So they have to acquire Nu5GC from our diet.

• 1:26:52Steven Gundry?

  And that may explain why meat eating associates higher with cancer development because of this molecule. And so that's one reason. Second reason that the Cleveland Clinic would propose and vegans would propose is that a lot of our gut bacteria will take components in meat, even chicken, even fish, and turn it into a compound that can really damage blood vessels called TMAO. And I've written about it in all my books.

• 1:27:36Steven Gundry?

  Most of us have got bacteria that when we eat meat will make TMAO. Fun fact, if you eat a lot of polyphenol-containing foods or take polyphenol supplements like resveratrol, like grape seed extract, those polyphenols paralyze our gut bacteria so that they can't make TMAO. It doesn't kill them. It paralyzes the enzyme system. And that may explain why Italians can eat sausages and, you know, whatever and not

• 1:28:20Steven Gundry?

  have much heart disease. It's because of the rich polyphenol diet that's suppressing that production. So those are, yeah, those are some of the arguments.

• 1:28:32Lewis Howes?

  So if someone's going to be on this specific diet, how much meat should or can they have? And what types of meat?

• 1:28:40Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so what I try to do is limit people to about two to four ounces of animal protein a day.

• 1:28:49Lewis Howes?

  And the less the better is what I'm hearing.

• 1:28:51Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, really, the less the better. Use it, you know, use it as a

• 1:28:54Lewis Howes?

  A couple of times a week.

• 1:28:55Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, use it as a garnishment.

• 1:28:57Lewis Howes?

  Not the main thing.

• 1:28:59Steven Gundry?

  Not the main thing.

• 1:29:00Lewis Howes?

  A little.

• 1:29:01Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, you know, I mean, if you want a big giant, you know, Caesar salad with no croutons and, you know, you want three grilled shrimp on, you know, great. You know, that's a, that's a wonderful meal. But we really, our protein needs are so overestimated and we could get into our discussion on that. But we really only need two and a half eggs. Gives you all the protein you need in 24 hours.

• 1:29:24Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm. You don't need a lot more meat.

• 1:29:28Steven Gundry?

  You don't need a lot more meat.

• 1:29:29Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 1:29:29Steven Gundry?

  Don't get me wrong, I grew up in Omaha. You know, I mean.

• 1:29:32Lewis Howes?

  You eat steak all day.

• 1:29:32Steven Gundry?

  Oh, yeah, you know, steak and bacon for breakfast, you know, steak and eggs for lunch. Side of pork for dinner, I mean, that's living.

• 1:29:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:29:43Steven Gundry?

  Not living very long.

• 1:29:44Lewis Howes?

  Not living, not dying quick. So, um, high fiber.

• 1:29:50Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, high fiber.

• 1:29:52Lewis Howes?

  Less meat, less meat. Uh, and really less lamb, beef and pork is what I'm hearing.

• 1:29:58Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, less lamb beef and pork.

• 1:29:59Lewis Howes?

  Like, if you're gonna have a steak, do it once a month.

• 1:30:02Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, you know, actually, you know, my wife and I will have a grass-fed, grass-finished, uh, six-ounce filet, um, once three, every three months. And it's really good, and we enjoy it. And, but, you know, it's really good.

• 1:30:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, but even that every day doesn't, from your research and your experience for what, decades doing heart?

• 1:30:23Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, well, I've been, well, and I've been doing, you know, nutritional research now with patients for, you know, this is my 22nd year.

• 1:30:31Lewis Howes?

  But you were a heart surgeon for how long?

• 1:30:32Steven Gundry?

  Oh, uh, for too long. No, I was a heart surgeon for 50 years.

• 1:30:36Lewis Howes?

  50 years?

• 1:30:37Steven Gundry?

  50 years.

• 1:30:37Lewis Howes?

  So, working with the heart for that long and seeing what people were eating to get to that place.

• 1:30:43Steven Gundry?

  Right, and the exciting thing, you know, subsequently, is watching people reverse heart disease.

• 1:30:48Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:30:49Steven Gundry?

  By changing what they eat.

• 1:30:50Lewis Howes?

  By limiting some of these things. Now, to go back to the, the pig heart, what, what has happened now? So, there was a pig heart transplant.

• 1:30:58Steven Gundry?

  Correct.

• 1:30:59Lewis Howes?

  From a pig that was modified.

• 1:31:01Steven Gundry?

  Genetically modified.

• 1:31:01Lewis Howes?

  To have a sugar molecule that we.

• 1:31:04Steven Gundry?

  That we have, instead of his sugar molecule.

• 1:31:06Lewis Howes?

  And so.

• 1:31:07Steven Gundry?

  Lining his blood vessel.

• 1:31:08Lewis Howes?

  And so, this happened, what, a week or two ago?

• 1:31:10Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, last week.

• 1:31:11Lewis Howes?

  So, your colleague did a heart transplant of the pig into a human being.

• 1:31:18Steven Gundry?

  Correct.

• 1:31:19Lewis Howes?

  And the human's alive.

• 1:31:20Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Lewis Howes?

  And

• 1:31:22Steven Gundry?

  Now, just remember, Baby Faye, my colleague Leonard Bailey, she lived for 14 days with a baboon heart in her. So, there's this kind of grace period where this intense rejection against

• 1:31:41Lewis Howes?

  All right.

• 1:31:42Steven Gundry?

  A foreign substance takes place. Now

• 1:31:46Lewis Howes?

  So, it's not gonna feel good for

• 1:31:48Steven Gundry?

  With pigs, the rejection was so immediate that before my research, the longest a pig, you know, baboon could go was about four hours, because the intense rejection was after that sugar molecule on the pig blood vessel. So, it's gonna, I mean, they've done some

• 1:32:06Lewis Howes?

  Even a heart-to-heart transplant from human to human

• 1:32:09Steven Gundry?

  Sure, will attack.

• 1:32:10Lewis Howes?

  Is traumatic.

• 1:32:11Steven Gundry?

  Exactly, will attack. But, yeah, but they've done, they've done their homework. This has been going on now for well over 20 years. A lot of the research that I started at Loma Linda, and it's, it's gone to fruition, and, you know, the FDA has allowed a compassionate use for this guy. And, but they've done, they've done very good homework on looking at what the protein molecules that our immune system is looking for that's different in a pig, and then genetically modifying them.

• 1:32:46Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 1:32:47Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Lewis Howes?

  So, we'll see how, what happens.

• 1:32:49Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Lewis Howes?

  So, but yeah. Is this guy awake?

• 1:32:51Steven Gundry?

  Oh, yeah, he's awake.

• 1:32:52Lewis Howes?

  He's talking, is he able to talk right now?

• 1:32:53Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:32:54Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:55Lewis Howes?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:32:56Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so, I mean, this was not one of these last ditch spur of the moment. This

• 1:33:02Lewis Howes?

  This has been studied and tried.

• 1:33:03Steven Gundry?

  This research has been going on for a very long time.

• 1:33:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:33:06Steven Gundry?

  I started, I started this research at Loma Linda in our xenotransplant lab in 1989. So, it's been going on now.

• 1:33:15Lewis Howes?

  How many heart transplants did you do?

• 1:33:17Steven Gundry?

  Oh, jeez. We usually did baby heart transplants. We did over, over one a week for multiple years. We've We don't do them as much anymore because we've refined the way of repairing babies' hearts, where they can actually survive the operation.

• 1:33:37Lewis Howes?

  That's good.

• 1:33:37Steven Gundry?

  And so, we don't need it as much anymore.

• 1:33:40Lewis Howes?

  But in adult transplants?

• 1:33:41Steven Gundry?

  We need so many adults, we don't have any donors. So, I mean, there's a tremendous need for this. And artificial hearts, you know, I was one of the first 20 surgeons selected to put in the artificial heart. Even artificial hearts are not great. I mean, they're a nice stopgap, but... So, if this can happen, it would just be phenomenal, so.

• 1:34:09Lewis Howes?

  Lots of good information here. You've got the book that I want people to get, which is called Unlocking the Keto Code: The Revolutionary New Science of Keto That Offers More Benefits Without Deprivation, which I think that's the key there. People don't want to deprive themselves.

• 1:34:26Steven Gundry?

  Correct.

• 1:34:26Lewis Howes?

  No one wants to starve themselves, deprive themselves of foods that they enjoy. But you're gonna have to supplement things, you're gonna have to replace certain things for other healthier options.

• 1:34:38Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Lewis Howes?

  And you're gonna see extreme benefits in this process. So, you've got this book.

• 1:34:42Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, and really, you know, if you want to get really most of the benefits of keto without doing keto.

• 1:34:49Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 1:34:50Steven Gundry?

  Uh, time-restricted eating, time-controlled eating is key.

• 1:34:54Lewis Howes?

  And I've seen that from so many of the Dr. Longo, from...

• 1:34:57Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Lewis Howes?

  From Sinclair.

• 1:35:00Steven Gundry?

  USC.

• 1:35:00Lewis Howes?

  Sinclair.

• 1:35:01Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01Lewis Howes?

  All these longevity experts talking about time-restricted, how that it just seems to be universally tested now to help you in longevity, with weight loss, all these things.

• 1:35:11Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, and the amazing thing is, it works by uncoupling mitochondria.

• 1:35:15Lewis Howes?

  That's what it helps with.

• 1:35:16Steven Gundry?

  That's how it does it.

• 1:35:17Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:35:18Steven Gundry?

  That's the underlying mechanism. None of us really... Knew the underlying mechanism. Like I say, it was their

• 1:35:26Lewis Howes?

  You just knew, you just see results.

• 1:35:28Steven Gundry?

  We know why it worked.

• 1:35:30Lewis Howes?

  And now we know.

• 1:35:31Steven Gundry?

  Now we know how it works.

• 1:35:31Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting.

• 1:35:33Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, so you know, you and I want to become a parrot.

• 1:35:36Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. Live for a long time.

• 1:35:38Steven Gundry?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Lewis Howes?

  DrGundry.com has all of your information, Dr. Gundry on social media as well. They can get the book at your site. Are you offering any other bonuses?

• 1:35:50Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, we are offering a bonus for, I think, the first 2,000, they'll get the Energy Paradox as well, which, and it really, writing the Energy Paradox was the impetus to write the Keto Code. Because as I was trying to explain all these wonderful benefits of ketones, I ran smack into a brick wall and said, what the heck? They don't work the way all of us have been saying they work.

• 1:36:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:21Steven Gundry?

  And then I said, well, okay, they work. How are they working? And it's by literally wasting fuel, doing a caloric bypass.

• 1:36:31Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:32Steven Gundry?

  And there's a lot better ways to lose weight than taking D N B.

• 1:36:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, worse than killing you.

• 1:36:39Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, which will kill you.

• 1:36:40Lewis Howes?

  You've got many books that people can get. You've also got the Gundry Podcast, which you do weekly, I believe.

• 1:36:48Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, weekly.

• 1:36:48Lewis Howes?

  Where you share a lot of this research and information.

• 1:36:50Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, we're coming up on the 200th podcast, so.

• 1:36:53Lewis Howes?

  I like it. I like it. Coming along.

• 1:36:56Steven Gundry?

  Yeah, it's, you know, very popular. We're on Podcast One now, so.

• 1:37:00Lewis Howes?

  That's great. It's exciting.

• 1:37:01Steven Gundry?

  Enjoy it.

• 1:37:02Lewis Howes?

  How else can we support you besides getting the book, following you on social, listening to the show? What else can we do?

• 1:37:09Steven Gundry?

  Oh, my gosh. Go to GundryMD.com and check out the supplements, including my incredibly high polyphenol olive oil.

• 1:37:17Lewis Howes?

  This thing is powerful.

• 1:37:18Steven Gundry?

  Which is powerful.

• 1:37:19Lewis Howes?

  I've got a bunch of this stuff in here.

• 1:37:21Steven Gundry?

  Thirty times more polyphenols than regular olive oil.

• 1:37:24Lewis Howes?

  I take the vitamin B that you have there. I love that stuff. So, it's always good stuff. You've got great stuff over there. What else? Anything else we can do?

• 1:37:31Steven Gundry?

  Ah, that'll do it.

• 1:37:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:37:33Steven Gundry?

  Get, get, get the book. It'll, it'll, it'll rock your world. It'll, you'll go, what the heck?

• 1:37:41Lewis Howes?

  I didn't know that. There you go. Well, Dr. Gundry, I always appreciate you coming on. I acknowledge you for constantly furthering the research and sharing new things with people to help them unlock really their health in a different way. So I really acknowledge you for constantly pushing the envelope, finding these new things, sharing it in an interesting way so we can understand it and excited about the new book. So thanks so much. Thanks for having me again. Appreciate you.

• 1:38:08Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links and also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.