Is Your Gut Controlling Your Mood? Dr. Steven Gundry on the Microbiome-Brain Connection

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

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

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I am bringing you back Dr. Steven Gundry. So Dr. Gundry, he is the most well-known for his original book that just took over the world and stunned everyone, which is called The Plant Paradox. And in that book, he really brought forward some controversial thoughts that still hold true today, which is that plants have toxins on them. And some people's gut microbiome actually will respond negatively to those toxins.

• 0:42Mindy Pelz?

  And he specifically called them oxalates and lectins, which many people know now, they're unable to handle these plant toxins, especially when they have a severe gut situation. What he's bringing us now is so good. I am so excited to bring this to you all. He just put out a book called The Gut-Brain Paradox. And it's about how our gut microbiome controls our brain. If you have never heard this concept before, please listen, take notes, listen again, send it to a friend.

• 1:23Mindy Pelz?

  Because what Dr. Gundry is bringing forward is going to change so many people's opinion on depression and anxiety and neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson's and aging conditions like Alzheimer's. When we break down all of these mental health challenges or brain challenges, we start to see that there is a gut bacteria issue that needs to be repaired.

• 1:57Mindy Pelz?

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

• 2:38Mindy Pelz?

  So Dr. Steven Gundry, The Gut-Brain Paradox. And as always, I hope you enjoy this incredible conversation and it moves the needle on your health and your life. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

• 3:15Mindy Pelz?

  So Dr. Gundry, let me welcome you back to the Resetter Podcast. I'm excited to have this chat with you.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And it's great to see you again, Mindy. So thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

• 3:27Mindy Pelz?

  So it was interesting, you and I chatted about this book back in October, when I was on your podcast.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32Mindy Pelz?

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

• 4:11Speaker 01

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

• 4:52Mindy Pelz?

  Right. So, okay, so when we look at the gut microbiome, just to bring everybody into the conversation, we've got good guys, we've got bad guys. Do we have microbes that are neutral? Like, just give us an idea of what that ecosystem looks like before we dive into how it affects the brain.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Sure. You know, I started the book with one of the, one of the great scientific Titan warfare in the 1800s between two French chemists, Louis Pasteur and Antoine Beauchamp. And they were both fighting, to put it mildly, over microbes and whether germs, bacteria in specific, were, were bad guys like Pasteur got. And Beauchamp said, no, no, no, they're, all these organisms exist in what he called a terrain, an ecosystem.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  And I use tropical rainforests as an example. And there are all these interdependent species. And they're neither good guys nor bad guys. Obviously, some things eat other things, et cetera, or need a product of one plant or animal to survive. But as long as things are in balance, this ecosystem, the terrain, keeps everything on a level playing field. But when imbalance happens, when one or more species becomes dominant, that's when you see a disease process, an infection.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And Pasteur was a great public speaker, as I understand, and I've read actually every book written about both of them. He figured out that French wine went bad by bacterial contamination and the French king thought that was pretty important information. And so Pasteur won and Beauchamp lost, but in several accounts, there's no proof, but in several accounts on Pasteur's deathbed, he called Beauchamp's aide Bernard to his bedside and he said, you know, he was right, it is the terrain, some.

• 7:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yep. I I've heard that story as well. You know, I researched that story during the pandemic. I was, I was like, when's the last time we've had a pandemic? And when I went back and looked at the 1918 Spanish flu, that was the time those two men were arguing. And now we have more reference point to it because we've been through our own pandemic, because what out of that, pretty within a couple of years came penicillin.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:39Mindy Pelz?

  And then once penicillin came into the world, it was like a miracle. And you can understand why. Think about how fearful we've all been. But, you know, to your point in the book, where do we sit now with bacteria now that we've created all of these antibiotics? Like if anything is proven, is it the terrain or is it the microbes? I think it's the overuse of antibiotics. Would you agree?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And not, not only that, but as I've talked about before, and also in this book, people need to know that glyphosate, the active ingredient roundup, was patented by Monsanto as an antibiotic, not as a weed killer. And we're now luckily through animal studies, particularly, we now know that glyphosate decimates our microbiome and in fact, decimates the tryptophan serotonin producing microbiome. And is it, is it any wonder that we've got this incredible epidemic of depression and anxiety? I mean, you know, I mean,

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Twenty to thirty percent of females in this country are on antidepressants. I mean, it's, it's like, holy cow. Yeah.

• 8:59Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Is it affecting women more? The, is, is a woman's gut more susceptible to things like glyphosate than a man's? Leading us to depression?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think you guys have always had a gut sense.

• 9:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, we do. Yeah. No joke.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  No, no joke. You know, I have a wife and two daughters and some female dogs. So I get it. You know, I've been educated all my life.

• 9:25Mindy Pelz?

  Well done.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  But, and, and you know, autoimmune disorders affect women far more than men, although men are catching up, because everybody's got an autoimmune disorder now. And that's another, that's another story. But yeah, women are more susceptible. And I, my theory is that you guys, your immune system has to learn tolerance to the largest parasite ever created, and that's your fetus. And your immune system has to do kind of a 180 in trying to accept a clearly foreign body for nine months or so,

• 10:07Speaker 01

  without trying to kill it off and then go back to normal functioning. And I think that's this glitch that makes women in particular more susceptible to autoimmune diseases. And, and I happen to think, like Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, that all disease begins in the gut. And certainly in my practice, which is 80, 80% autoimmune patients, every autoimmune patient has gut dysbiosis and abnormal terrain. Every autoimmune patient has leaky gut, intestinal permeability. Everyone, 100%.

• 10:46Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. Wow. Where are we in understanding the impact of microbes on our human cells? I also dove into this and saw that when you look at the Human Genome Project, it came out like late 70s, early 80s, but then they followed it up with the Human Microbe Project. And then that really was ongoing for a long time. It may still be. And it really showed that it influenced how human cells behaved. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Human Microbiome Project finished in 2017. Actually, the date, I published The Plant Paradox. And what that's done is, you're right, it's really opened our eyes into the fact, our genome isn't very interesting. It's actually not a really unique, big genome. I mean, corn has more genes than humans do.

• 11:45Mindy Pelz?

  That's crazy.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  A sand flea on beach has more genes than humans do. But what's really interesting is, so we've got 100 trillion bacteria just in our gut alone. And these guys are constantly dividing, and they're constantly sharing genetic information with each other. They're constantly getting genetic information from viruses, phages that attach to them. And so they're constantly in this recombination of genes. And I and others have proposed that, just like you and I are talking on our computers here, this computer doesn't have a lot of functioning power, doesn't have a lot of memory,

• 12:31Speaker 01

  but we have uploaded most of the processing power up to the cloud, which is supposedly infinite processing power.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Because this microbiome is so genetically active, is such a good interacting substance with our environment, everything we swallow goes through our gut, that we've uploaded the processing power of decision-making to the bacterial cloud in our guts. And I think, and so those who are watching on video, so my phone is a really good receiver for information from the cloud. In fact, there's four pieces of information that just came. And I propose that our brain is merely a really good receiver for the information that's coming from our bacterial cloud.

• 13:24Mindy Pelz?

  Okay.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And if we accept that, then things start to make sense. Like, why does somebody just have this sugar craving that they can't give up? Why is the recidivism rate of any addiction treatment program about 90%? There's only about a 10% long-term success rate. You choose the addiction, it's usually a 90% long-term failure. Why is that? Because we're trying to manipulate this when the book, and I suggest we should be manipulating the gut microbiome.

• 14:02Mindy Pelz?

  Is there a way for us to know based off of behavior or symptoms if our gut microbiome is well-balanced and serving us well? Like, I could be depressed because of a life situation. How do I know if that depression is being amplified by an imbalance in my microbes or actually is just a life situation?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Well, that's true. We now know that depressed individuals have a specific identifiable microbiome. Anxious individuals. One of the shocking things that I discovered is people who have an outgoing personality, kind of from day one, actually have a unique microbiome that makes them an outgoing personality.

• 14:52Mindy Pelz?

  That's cool.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of cool.

• 14:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's really cool.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  So it actually, I hope my daughters aren't looking.

• 15:00Mindy Pelz?

  As somebody with an outgoing personality, I'm like, oh, I like that.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so yeah, embrace your microbiome outgoing personality, right? So, yeah, so, and these, these experiments have been conducted in rodents. You can take a germ-free mouse, have them eat poop from a depressed human individual, and they'll get depressed. Now you go, well, wait, how you know if a rat's depressed? Well, there are actually mazes and tests to measure depression in rats. It's actually pretty easy. And so, and there was a, there was an experiment done in the 1930s. Back in those days, severely depressed individuals were institutionalized. And so they, they took these very depressed individuals and they gave them enemas and

• 15:49Speaker 01

  cleaned out their guts. And then they gave them fecal enemas from happy people.

• 15:55Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And they actually got happy. And it's like, what? Are you, are you sure? Well, yeah, now we're sure because now we know how that happened.

• 16:04Mindy Pelz?

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

• 16:47Mindy Pelz?

  Is it a, is there a way for us to tell?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's getting better and better.

• 16:53Mindy Pelz?

  Okay.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Again, women have always had this gut feeling. And that's actually pretty intuitive. If you think something's off in your intestines, it is. We now know, for instance, Parkinson's is a disease that comes to the brain from the gut, as does Alzheimer's. And one of the striking things when we start looking at the history of Parkinson's patients and even Alzheimer's patients, they all collectively have gut issues that they can cite. Or they have history of, you know, chronic antibiotic use, et cetera, et cetera. But they, it's, they all will, will tell you this.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  But now with, with the modern microbiome testing that we have on stools, because of the Human Microbiome Project, we can identify the genetic code of all of these species. And now we can actually number them. We can, we know the ratio that they're supposed to have. I talk about in the book, there's, when you're looking at tropical rainforest, there are ecological terms looking at the diversity. And one's called Shannon's Index and the other is Simpson's Index. And we can now apply those indexes to the microbiome.

• 18:15Mindy Pelz?

  That's cool.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  And you can, you know, you can give a patient a map of, okay, you know, here, these are the guys that are the bad guys and they, they've kind of taken over. And your good guys, man, they're, they're hiding in the corner and we gotta coax them out. We gotta starve the bad guys. And that's actually a big part of the book is now don't despair about all this. There is something that can be done. And I, I wouldn't see patients six days a week if I just wanted to give them bad news.

• 18:45Mindy Pelz?

  Right, of course, of course. Explain the mechanism behind this. I had a really wonderful conversation about a year ago with Dr. William Lee. And he, we, we actually specifically honed in on the Stroblome and the set of bacteria that break down estrogen. And we started geeking out on how these bacteria go up the vagus nerve and then go up into the brain and start to stimulate different parts of the brain. And before you know it, we were also geeking out on fermented sour dough and how it can impact the bacteria that make oxytocin. So bring this into some kind of complete understanding for the layperson.

• 19:28Mindy Pelz?

  Is it these microbes are just hanging out in the gut? And is it the vagus nerve they travel up? How do they get to the brain? And then how do they decide what part of the brain they're going to stimulate?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Well, the vagus nerve is just one tiny piece of this puzzle. In fact, I mean, we used to thought when I was in medical school that the vagus nerve is how the brain talk to the gut. And lo and behold, now we know that for every one nerve fiber heading from the brain to the gut, there's nine from the gut heading up to the brain. So we had it backwards. But the vagus nerve is just really an old fashioned telephone line. But the sophistication of how these guys control us is now, thanks to the Human Microbiome Project. For instance, I recently was lecturing at, get ready for this, the Society of Extracellular Vessicle.

• 20:27Mindy Pelz?

  That sounds interesting.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  So what the heck is that? So these are exosomes or extracellular vesicles. These are little packets of information. I look at them as kind of a link on an email that I click, well, to come on your show. I clicked the link and it instantly brought me here. So we now know that bacteria and plants and fungi can pop out little pockets of information that have genetic instructions, can have microRNA, mRNA, and even living

• 21:07Speaker 01

  mitochondria. And pop them out. And the way these are designed, they can go through the wall of the gut, they can go through blood vessels, they can go through the blood brain barrier, unobstructed.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Merge onto a target cell and release that information and change the epigenetic expression of that cell.

• 21:32Mindy Pelz?

  Insane.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's like, holy cow, I thought it was pretty cool that bacteria could send messages up in the

• 21:39Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  But now, are you kidding? They're sending, you know, text messages and with a link to open it up and it's going to change, you know, my behavior. And talk about sophistication.

• 21:51Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And it's like, wow, is this complex? How could we have imagined that these little one cell organisms have this incredible complex control over us? And once you, once you see all that, you go, whoa.

• 22:09Mindy Pelz?

  What kind of behaviors do they control? Just so we could, so people, is it everything in our brain?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  You know, we certainly know, I get this question a lot, you know, GLP-1 agonists are in. We now know it's the microbiome that actually produces GLP-1. And it's the microbiome production of GLP-1 that if you're feeding the good guys what they need to eat, they basically send GLP-1 up to the brain and said, hey, great news, you ate everything we need. You don't have to go looking for anything else. We're great. You don't have to be hungry. Now, unfortunately, those guys have mostly been killed off or starved to death.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  And most of the processed foods and ultra-processed foods that we eat are very simple sugars and saturated fats that a whole different set of bugs can utilize. And in the old days, our grandparents ate whole food and they ate them whole. And so we, in the digestive process, would get, you know, glucose and amino acids and fats, but then there'd be a whole lot left over in terms of polysaccharides, resistant starches that would filter down to the colon where most of these guys live. And there'd be plenty left over. And then these guys say, yep, we got it.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  No problem. And one of the things that I Tell my patients who have this food noise in their head is, well, we could eat.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  A podcast host admitted right before the podcast yesterday that she had consumed eight.

• 24:02Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. You will. That would. That would never happen with me, but that's that's quite an admission. I'm. Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  I say, so let me tell you what just happened. I said, you ate those Oreo cookies and they're simple sugar and fat. And these microbes who love this stuff gobbled it all up. And there was nothing left that was coming downstream. And the guys downstream go, wait a minute. I heard her chewing up there. I she swallowed something. I know it's coming. And then nothing arrives and they go, what the heck? I just heard you eating. You got cheated. We didn't get anything. Go find some more food. So they send out ghrelin, another hormone to make you hungry. And no wonder these things just set up the cycle of

• 24:54Speaker 01

  food noise and that food noise is actually your microbiome. The good guy is going, you're starving me to death. What? What the heck? What are you doing?

• 25:05Mindy Pelz?

  So you're eating, but you're not feeding these microbes that will send your brain the right signals to turn off hunger.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 25:15Mindy Pelz?

  And so now we've come up with a drug to be able to replicate that. Is that correct?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 25:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So what food should we be avoiding so that we don't destroy these microbes?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Well, it's a it's a two, two, two step process. You, you can't give these bad guys the food that they can take advantage of these simple sugars and these fats. You gotta starve them. They can't utilize long changed starches. They don't have the fermentation mechanism to break them down. On the other hand, the good guys do have that mechanism, but it's not as simple as it sounds. I wish it was. For instance, there's a husband and wife microbiology team at Stanford, the Sonnenbergs, who are real doomsayers of the human microbiome.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  They really think, and they're right, that we basically have a desert wasteland of a microbiome, rather than a tropical rainforest. And they don't really think we'll ever be able to reestablish our rainforest. I disagree with them, but they did a beautiful experiment that I talk about in the book and in a previous book. They took volunteers, and everybody knows that the good guys want prebiotic fiber. They want soluble fiber. And they used a soluble fiber, inulin, which is present in the chicory family of vegetables, radicchio and Belgian endive. Radicchio. It's my favorite.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And the great thing is you can find it in almost every grocery store now. It's not in the weird health food section anymore. And asparagus has inulin, artichoke hearts have inulin. So they gave volunteers lots of inulin. And they looked at their gut microbiome diversity, and they looked at markers of inflammation. And they gave them all this stuff, and nothing changed. The gut microbiome didn't change. Their inflammation markers didn't change. Yeah, and go, hmm, well, wait a minute. That's what those guys want to eat. They said, you know, we're missing something here. There's got to be some precursors that I've written about

• 27:31Speaker 01

  for many books now called postbiotics. These are essentially the products of bacterial fermentation, of eating things. And we should give these people, in addition to the inulin, we should give them some fermented foods. They chose yogurt and kefir. You could have chosen sauerkraut or kimchi. You could have chosen vinegar. And...

• 27:59Speaker 01

  We'll do the same experiment, give them the inulin, but give them this. Now, with the addition of these postbiotic foods, these fermented foods, the gut diversity increased and the inflammation markers decreased. So it, to talk about Hillary Clinton, it takes a village. And that's really what has to happen.

• 28:23Mindy Pelz?

  So you, so bringing more fermented foods in is really key to the diversity of, yeah. Yeah, I can, I can really, you know, after, you, you know this as a podcast host, when you interview a lot of people, you start to see conflicting theories all over the place. But the, one of the unifying theories I see amongst everybody who has a slant in nutrition is everybody's pretty pro fermented food. Is there any person who should not be eating fermented foods?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Well, some people actually have to kind of take it slowly. Just like some of my patients, introducing really any plant material into them when they've got a really destroyed wall of their gut can be mischievous. We've certainly seen people, I'll give you an example. There's a, a keystone species in our gut called Akkermansia mucinophilum. And it's, it's a really important species and it lives in the mucus layer of our gut, which really protects our gut from mischief. And it eats mucus. Now you think, well, wait a minute, mucus is good and it's eating mucus? That, that sounds like a bad thing. But the more mucus it eats, the more mucus is produced by the wall of our gut.

• 29:40Speaker 01

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

• 30:17Speaker 01

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

• 30:48Mindy Pelz?

  So is, are probiotics a risky adventure to dip into? Would you be better off trying to search for these bacteria in food?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think, yeah, back in the good old days, these bacteria, and more importantly, these bacterial products were in the foods we ate.

• 31:07Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  And you look at these ancient cultures, fermentation was really, number one, the only way to preserve food. We didn't have refrigerators and it was the only way to preserve food by actually eating the sugar molecule. So wine is preserved grape juice and it has the products of fermentation. So, so my patients say, dog, Gonda, I'm having fermented foods every night. And God bless you, Dr. Gundry, and great, great suggestion. And they're just, not to change the subject, but there is a cool human trial of looking at the gut microbiome diversity, comparing red wine,

• 31:48Speaker 01

  the equivalent calories in grape juice and the equivalent calories in gin. And lo and behold, it was actually the red wine that promoted gut diversity and improved gut wall health. The grape juice had no effect and the gin actually had a very negative effect.

• 32:07Mindy Pelz?

  Wow, you just, you just put a huge smile on my face. I'm like you, a very, I have a soft spot for a good bottle of wine. So, does it matter then? Is it need to be biodynamic, natural? I mean, of course, it goes down that path.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, most of our California wines have glyphosate in them.

• 32:28Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I was, a few years ago, I was talking to Michael Mondavi, who is Robert Mondavi's son, who runs Mondavi. And he said, it took us 10 years to get glyphosate out of our soil in our vineyards, 10 years. Yeah.

• 32:45Mindy Pelz?

  It's crazy.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. This stuff is just everywhere.

• 32:49Mindy Pelz?

  Is, would you say glyphosate is one of the worst pesticides for the microbiome?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, antibiotics are even better. But again, glyphosate is an antibiotic. We should realize it's.

• 33:03Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  It is an herbicide, but it was, again, patented as an antibiotic. And there's some really good animal studies using human diet equivalent amounts of glyphosate that show that the, the animal's microbiome is just totally changed for the worse. All the good guys are wiped out. The bad guys are pretty resistant to it. And so you wonder, and why we have so much anxiety and depression? I'll give you another example, which was really educational for me. Again, most of my patients, we treat their autoimmune disease and we have a really good success rate.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  94% of my published data are in remission off of all their meds in a year.

• 33:55Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  And so.

• 33:56Mindy Pelz?

  Awesome.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  You know, their psoriasis goes away, their rheumatoid arthritis goes away, their Crohn's goes away, you name it. And they go over to Europe on vacation and they can't resist. They have croissants and they have baguettes and they have pizza and they probably have some tomatoes and they do not react. They go, and they, they go, wow, you know, Dr. Gundry's cured me. I can have all this. And they come back and they start having our bread and our pizzas and you know what else? And within weeks, they're on the phone going, what the heck? You know, this patch of psoriasis is bad here. What the heck? You know, this finger just swelled up. What the heck? I thought you cured me.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  I said, no, you weren't eating glyphosate over there.

• 34:44Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  And you could tolerate that just fine, but you came back. And I see it all the time. It's just, it's so sad.

• 34:54Mindy Pelz?

  We did, in my clinic, we did a lot of heavy metal detoxing and glyphosate just drives those heavy metals even deeper into the brain. Is, what, what's your best strategy for, other than avoiding glyphosate, but that's near impossible? Is there any other way we can heal our gut from the abuse of glyphosate?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Well, there is some evidence that humic acid does protect against glyphosate. I, for one, have my patients take about three grams of glycine every, every day, particularly at night, helps sleep. And it's useful because glyphosate will compete for glycine in DNA. And you kind of flood the zone, we're hearing that in politics now, but you can kind of flood the zone with glycine to stop glyphosate from binding where glycine would go in. And I, you know, time will tell, but it certainly won't hurt and, but might help.

• 36:01Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Is this why the carnivore? You have, one thing I love that you put in there in your book is about a modified carnivore diet. And I can tell you as a community, our community has been experimenting with something I call carnivore fasting, where we do 17 hours of a fast and then the rest of the day you're just eating meat. And of all the different types of fasting and food combinations, I've seen that one cause people to drop the most amount of weight compared to any other combination. Is it partly because of this glycine component to animal meat? And can you talk a little bit about your modified carnivore diet?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's actually more that you're, you're really eliminating glyphosate primarily from your diet. And you're eliminating most lectin-containing foods in a carnivore diet. And it's interesting, if you look back at, you know, some of the famous diets like the Atkins diet, or the South Beach diet, or diets before that, these all

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Had in common that they eliminated most carbohydrates. And the weight loss was usually quite spectacular. And then people would get bored of it, or they'd get tired of it.

• 37:19Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's boring.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  It is boring.

• 37:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And they'd reintroduce these healthy foods, carbohydrates, healthy carbohydrates, and their weight would come right back up. And I was very impressed with that. I got to know Dr. Atkins' nurse and got to know his ghostwriter very well. And Atkins never realized that what was happening with his diet was that he was eliminating all these mischievous compounds. And it was the elimination, the elimination diet, that was most effective. But when they added these compounds back, then, you know, people gained weight again.

• 38:02Mindy Pelz?

  Right, right. So, okay, so explain what your modified carnivore diet is.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Well, there's a very interesting sugar molecule. And the word sugar shouldn't sound like sugar sweet.

• 38:17Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  We have a sugar molecule in us, poultry and fish and seafood, that's called N5Gc, N5AC, sorry. And so we share N5AC with all of these animals. Unfortunately, beef, lamb, pork, and milk have a very similar sugar molecule called N5GC. They differ by one molecule of oxygen, otherwise they're identical. When humans swallow N5GC-containing foods, we make aggressive antibodies to it. We hate it.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  We view it as one of the most dangerous compounds we've ever encountered, even though it looks virtually identical to our sugar molecule, N5AC. So what? Well, we now know that N5AC, which lines our gut wall, lines our blood vessels, lines our joint service, lines our blood-brain barrier.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  It can be displaced by new five G C in the diet. And the more new five G C eating foods, containing foods, the more new five A C is displaced. So what? Our immune system attacks that new five G C is foreign. And it causes leaky brain. It causes joint inflammation. It causes heart disease. And it causes impressive neuroinflammation. How, how I really started to see this is some people have accused me of being the father of the carnivore diet because if you take my anti-plant stance to the extreme,

• 40:10Speaker 01

  then you should never eat a plant. That's not what I said. Right. You gotta know your friends and you gotta know your enemies and you gotta detoxify your enemies. But so a number of my patients have tried the carnivore diet, you know, mainly beef. And they all feel great. They lose weight. They never felt better. And yet, when I look at their inflammatory markers like T N F alva or L six, they're going up and up and up. And I'm going, what the heck? So I said, you know, I'm glad this is working for you.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Would you mind trading, you know, pastured poultry and wild fish and wild shellfish for this? Or if you'll eat fermented meats, fermented sausages, true fermented sausages. Prosciutto is a fermented meat. And it turns out the fermentation process eats the new five G C. It's gone. Okay. I said, let's try that. Would you humor me? Cause you know, I draw blood on every three months. And sure enough, their inflammation markers went away. And that to me has certainly convinced me in my practice

• 41:30Speaker 01

  that this molecule is mischievous unless you detoxify it by fermentation. And that explains, so milk has new five G C. That's, that explains, there's a very strong association with milk drinking and heart disease and dementia and arthritis, but there's a reverse in fermented milk products. The more yogurts you eat, the more fermented cheeses you eat, particularly goat and sheep cheeses and yogurts, the better your markers get. And because the fermentation process

• 42:10Speaker 01

  has eaten all those sugar molecules. So there's no new 5GC in fermented dairy.

• 42:16Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. So, okay, so your modified is fermented dairy and then poultry and fish, but shellfish stain away from pork and beef?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  You can have pork and beef if it's in a sausage form that's been fermented. Now, how do you know?

• 42:36Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  So traditional cultures ferment their sausages, you know, they eat nose to tail, so they have to preserve everything. And so they introduce bacterial cultures into their product. And there, there are still, you can read a label, and if you see lactic acid cultures on the sausage label, that's a fermented sausage.

• 43:02Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Companies have gotten very clever. They know that consumers are now looking for the word lactic acid and not so much the word cultures. So a lot of them just inject lactic acid and don't inject the bacteria. So I've had some patients come in, oh, look, I found this sausage. Look, it's got lactic acid. I said, do you see the word culture? No. And I said, they fooled you. Oh, man, that's not fair.

• 43:34Mindy Pelz?

  That's so true. You have to have like a PhD in chemistry to be able to read a nutrition label these days. It's really embarrassing what they've done to our brains around nutrition is so sad. So.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. For instance, pea protein or soy protein are just so low in lactams, but. Pea protein or soy protein isolates the lectins have been removed. So I, well, actually, if my patients have to, and I take care of a lot of vegan patients, I said, as long as you see, you know, protein isolate on the pea or the soy, that'll be okay. But pea protein is so cheap.

• 44:16Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  That it's in everything.

• 44:18Mindy Pelz?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, and they, and they just, they refine everything, right? They just, they take the goodness, they steal it down, and we think it's healthy. It's really quite manipulative. So, well, of course, I have to ask you what you think of fasting on the microbiome, and especially in relation to the new book and how our microbiome affects our brain. What's the research you found there?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  You gotta have a reparative time in the wall of your gut. Just like our brain needs reparative time, it needs downtime, it needs to go through a washing cycle.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And digestion is hard work, requires huge amounts of energy. And the cells in our gut are really being damaged by this process. And, you know, the average American now eats 16 hours a day from the sun up.

• 45:15Mindy Pelz?

  Crazy.

• 45:15Speaker 01

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

• 46:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And do you think what you break your fast with matters?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  No, I think if you're looking at a, you know, a 24 hour cycle of, you know, with a six to seven hour eating window, there's nothing that you have to break the fast with that I've seen.

• 46:18Mindy Pelz?

  To like refeed the microbes after they've had a little break.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:24Mindy Pelz?

  And, and talk a little bit about the circadian rhythm of microbes. You even in this new book, talk about the moon cycle, which is of interest to me because the way we look at hormones and how hormones come in and how they're connected to the moon cycle, if you really dive into the nuance. So I found it fascinating that you're talking about the moon cycle of bacteria. Explain that.

• 46:50Speaker 01

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

• 47:33Speaker 01

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

• 48:07Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. So in your research, so then what does that look like? Certain microbes come in at when the moon is waxing and some is when it's waning?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, they get more active and you know, it shifts, you know, on a, on a, on a lunar clock basis.

• 48:24Mindy Pelz?

  Affecting our behaviors.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, and we know that, for instance, you know, anxiety changes with lunar cycles, schizophrenia really changes with lunar cycles. And as I like to try to say in the book, well, it's actually because those microbes are changing with the lunar cycle. We, there's a very good identification of schizophrenic microbes, just as an example, there you can identify them.

• 48:53Mindy Pelz?

  And can somebody do an average like stool test and then see what like when there's so many stool tests out right now? And if you do one, do you get a really good snapshot? Or are these microbes kind of waxing and waning all the time? And so we don't really have a clear way to test them?

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yes and no. You're right. It is a snapshot, but the stool tests are getting better. I poo-pooed them for many years. I didn't use them in my patients because it was, it was just a snapshot.

• 49:22Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  But now, we can actually identify who they are, how much of the products that we now know are produced by gut microbes, the postbiotics, we can measure all the short chain fatty acids, the percentage, and we can begin to see, oh, jeez, okay, we're missing this group, or this group is overgrown. And now we're beginning to realize, okay, well, what are these guys need to eat? And what, what are we going to do to starve these guys? And so it's, it's a, it's kind of a fun balancing act.

• 49:58Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And yet we're not sophisticated enough yet in our knowledge on, I mean, if there's trillions of bacteria. So in your book, do you address some of that? Like if you're deficient in this microbe, or you have too much of this one, how you can use food to balance that?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that Was discovered just a few years ago about polyphenols, these very dark and bright colors in fruits and vegetables. Polyphenols are produced by plants to actually protect their mitochondria from sun damage, from environmental damage, by uncoupling their mitochondria. That's how they work. And we thought for years that polyphenols were antioxidants. They're not. And we knew, we've known for years that polyphenols aren't absorbed very well. And we're going, well, gosh, people who eat lots of polyphenols seem to do better.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out, polyphenols are one of the best prebiotics for the gut microbiome. They love this stuff. And they're the ones who then change these polyphenols into absorbable compounds that then can uncouple our mitochondria.

• 51:12Mindy Pelz?

  And is olive oil the best polyphenol around?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Well, there are some great polyphenols in olive oil, but spices are a great source of polyphenols. Interesting little tidbit of crazy information. Olives have their own microbiome, the leaves have their own microbiome. And there's a bacteria on olives called L. pentosus, and don't take note. So L. pentosus is actually one of the most important bacteria to foster the growth of acromantia, by the way. And wouldn't you know that olive oil has L. pentosus in it?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, olive oil's a great polyphenol, but son of a gun, you're drinking a bacteria that makes acromantia, you know, really happy. And Wow, polyphenols, antibacteria that makes, you know, no wonder, I mean, the Greeks per capita use a half a liter of olive oil per week, per capita.

• 52:23Mindy Pelz?

  Wow, wow. So are they the happiest people on the planet then?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  I, I believe so. If you've ever seen them dance, it's true.

• 52:32Mindy Pelz?

  I do have to give your olive oil a shout out because you gave me, when I was on your podcast, you gave me a couple of those products. Wow, so tasty. That was what I was, I was just taking it spoonfuls every morning. Really? Yeah. It's really, really, really good.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has, it has 30 times more polyphenols than any other olive oil that's been described.

• 52:53Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it was, I could, you, and you can smell it in olive oil. So, yeah, it's almost like wine. Like it just has this really different smell than what I get in a restaurant for, for, for example. Yeah. So what are you hoping to accomplish with this book? And, and you know, you've written a lot of books and you probably have an extremely curious brain, but why this book? And what are you trying to bring forward to the culture right now?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Well, number one, I think what I want to do is take away the shame that we all go through of, oh, it's my fault that I'm a sugar addict, or it's my fault that I'm a alcoholic, or it's my fault that I like drugs, or it's my fault that I'm depressed and, you know, my mother beat me when I was two years old and I don't remember it. But the point of all this is that these, these are not your fault. These are control mechanisms that our gut microbiome uses. And the good news is it is changeable. And I think it's time to stop the shaming of

• 54:08Speaker 01

  I hate the more the mental illness or the shaming of depression, the shaming of food noise and food cravings. And let's get, let's get people a way of taking control over this that doesn't involve, don't get me wrong, therapy is wonderful, but it doesn't involve therapy. We, we want to do therapy for our gut microbiome.

• 54:32Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Oh, well said. Well said. How long does it take to change the microbiome?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  So when I started this 25 years ago, I was pretty naive and I thought we could seal a leaky gut in two weeks, or literally thought that. It usually takes nine months, two year for most people to seal their leaky gut. Can be faster. I've seen it faster. But the longest it's ever taken me is four years and a young gentleman who had such leaky gut that he could not get out of bed. He could not walk outside except to go into anaphylactic shock. And was literally bedridden, cared for by his girlfriend. She's a saint. They're now married. He's a normal human being. He has a job. He does everything he wants to

• 55:22Speaker 01

  do. But it literally took us four years to get his microbiome in shape and to seal his leaky gut. But now he's a functional human being. So that's an exception. But the good news is most people, it doesn't take that long.

• 55:39Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. It can, I've, I've seen studies where even like you, one of the more interesting ones was a natural, National Geographic article where a journalist went and lived in an African outback. Yeah. And then came for three days, ate porcupine, did a few other, you know, lived off the dirt, came back and his whole microbiome was different in three days.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 56:02Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that's possible.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  The problem is he came back and his microbiome completely reverted back to normal in the next three days. That's the sad part. So you gotta, and they're. There've been researchers from Scripps who have gone and had fecal transplants from these hunter gatherers to get, you know, whatever. And that lived for a few days and then they all left because you didn't feed them what these guys were feeding. So

• 56:32Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  I guess they were on vacation for a couple of days.

• 56:35Mindy Pelz?

  That's right. That's right. It was like a, it was like a spa for the microbiome. Living with the Hadza tribe.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 56:44Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Well, Dr. Gundry, you continue to be a leading edge in bringing great conversations to the health world and probably of all the ones I've seen you bring, I really hope this one sticks and people grab it and start to get to know these bacteria because like you said, the shaming, the depression, the anxiety, we're just all over the place in trying to understand that. And you have really brought it into a focal point. So I just want to say thank you for that. It's really time. So appreciate that.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Let's shame the bad bacteria.

• 57:19Mindy Pelz?

  That's right.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Come on, get out of here.

• 57:21Mindy Pelz?

  That's right. Yeah, that's right. They don't, they don't, they don't care. Let's go ahead and shame them.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  That's right. Have you no shame?

• 57:28Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Exactly. Okay. When, how do people get your book and tell us what, what we can do to send your message into the world?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Well, you know, they can watch the Dr. Gundry podcast where I've had the pleasure of having you on, I think two times.

• 57:43Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  You, my YouTube channels, my Instagram, drgundry.com, gundrymd.com is my food and supplement company. Hopefully I pop up while you're scrolling or your feeds and I say, hi, you know, hopefully.

• 58:00Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing. And the book is anywhere books are sold.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, anywhere.

• 58:04Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Support your, support your local bookseller. They had a horrible time during COVID and they're just coming out of it. So.

• 58:14Mindy Pelz?

  That's what I always say is go to the Indies if you can, because they need us. So agreed. Well, you have done it once again. So I don't know how you keep popping these books out. Is it once every two years?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, about once every year and a half.

• 58:29Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  About my schedule.

• 58:30Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  This is book nine in the series.

• 58:33Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing, amazing. Well, we appreciate you, your commitment, your brain, and keep dreaming up new things for us to noodle on. We really appreciate it.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Oh, don't thank my brain. Thank my microbiome.

• 58:45Mindy Pelz?

  Well done.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  I owe everything to them and my wife.

• 58:55Mindy Pelz?

  Well done. Well done. That was so good. Appreciate you.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks. Many greats.

• 59:01Mindy Pelz?

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