Pod Insights The School of Greatness 772 How to Live a Long Life with Dr. Steven Gundry About this episode DIE YOUNG AT AN OLD AGE. How many fad diets have you tried? There’s a reason that they don’t work. Health and diet are not one-size-fits-all. We all have a special set of genes that tell us what foods we need. But it’s more than your genes. Doctor’s will ask you if you have a history of a disease in your family. That’s because you not only share the same genetic make-up, you probably eat the same way. It’s a combination of the two that will determine your health. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about the secret to longevity with one of the world’s top health experts: Dr. Steven Grundy. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Transcript 10,321 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is episode number 772 with New York Times bestselling author Dr. Steven Gundry. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.
0:32 Speaker 00 The Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our minds strong and clear." Welcome to this episode. We've got Dr. Steven Gundry back on the podcast. He came on about a year and a half ago, and his interview took over the internet. Over a million views on the video on YouTube, and the audio just continues to thrive. It's been crazy, the amount of comments and engagement that this has taken on. So we decided to bring him back. His last book, The Plant Paradox, I think was on the New York Times Bestseller list for over 30 weeks. It's taken over the world and it's transformed so many people's lives.
1:14 Speaker 00 We have a new book on, which is all about how to live a longer life. And if you want to live longer, if you want to learn the secrets, the keys, he really breaks down five main principles. If you could do five key things to help you live longer and healthier, he breaks them all down. And a few of these things, I really had no clue that this is even part of the human makeup to help us extend life. But when he talked about it, it made a lot of sense. So make sure to dive into this. And for those who don't know who Dr. Steven Gundry is, he's a doctor and bestselling author. He's a former cardiac surgeon who did close to 10,000 heart surgeries. And he currently owns his own clinic.
1:54 Speaker 00 He is constantly looking to improve the health and lives of others. We talk about his story a little bit in here, but he's been transforming the lives of so many people for many years. And in this interview, we talk about how eating the same food as your parents can result in the same health Issues and disease, not necessarily your DNA. Also, the importance of oral health to prevent most of the diseases we get. Most people aren't aware of this. The importance of olive oil, vitamin D3, and fish oil to live a longer life and what you really need for your body. And how organic vegetables are better for you, even though they may not look as polished as other vegetables. That and so much more. We dive into a lot of things in this interview.
2:36 Speaker 00 Make sure to share this with your friends, all about how to live a longer, healthier life. If you want the fountain of youth, this is it. And make sure to share with your friends, lewishouse.com/77. Big thank you to our sponsors. And without further ado, let's dive into this episode with the one, the only, Dr. Gundry.
3:00 Speaker 00 Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got the legendary Dr. Stephen Gundry in the house, my man. Good to see you.
3:06 Steven Gundry? Pleasure to see you again.
3:08 Speaker 00 Glad you're back on. The last interview we did blew up on the internet.
3:12 Steven Gundry? I'm sorry.
3:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I know, in a good way.
3:14 Steven Gundry? Oh, shoot.
3:14 Speaker 00 In a good way. Plant Paradox has been a massive New York Times bestselling book. How many times on the list? Was it how many weeks?
3:21 Steven Gundry? I think it was 34 weeks.
3:23 Speaker 00 34?
3:23 Steven Gundry? Yeah, 34 weeks. And then the subsequent books, Cookbook was on 14 weeks, something like that. And the other one joined the list as well, so.
3:33 Speaker 00 It's incredible.
3:33 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
3:34 Speaker 00 34 weeks in a row, or it kind of like go off?
3:36 Steven Gundry? It actually went off for two weeks and then hopped right back on.
3:39 Speaker 00 Oh, alright.
3:39 Steven Gundry? Just kind of funny. And then it ran forever. And then Kelly Clarkson, God bless her, you know, cured her Hashimoto's by following my book.
3:47 Speaker 00 Wow. Really? She did?
3:49 Steven Gundry? Had a big fit, yeah.
3:50 Speaker 00 And she talked about it publicly?
3:51 Steven Gundry? Yeah, she talked about it publicly. She, everybody noticed that she had lost like 40 pounds and said, hey, what's the deal? And she said, oh, you know, I'm reading this crazy Plant Paradox thing. And I used to have Hashimoto's and I was on thyroid and now I'm not on it, it's gone.
4:06 Speaker 00 Wow.
4:06 Steven Gundry? It's, it's, it's.
4:07 Speaker 00 It's pretty cool.
4:08 Steven Gundry? Pretty cool.
4:08 Speaker 00 So the book's been out for a year and a half.
4:10 Steven Gundry? Yeah, almost two years.
4:12 Speaker 00 Almost two years.
4:13 Steven Gundry? Almost two years.
4:13 Speaker 00 And it's just been blowing up.
4:15 Steven Gundry? And yeah, it's still just, it's been translated into 34 languages now.
4:21 Speaker 00 Amazing.
4:22 Steven Gundry? Just signed the deal for Slovakian.
4:25 Speaker 00 There you go.
4:26 Steven Gundry? You know?
4:27 Speaker 00 Taking over the world now.
4:28 Steven Gundry? Big fans in Slovakia.
4:29 Speaker 00 There you go. I love it.
4:31 Steven Gundry? Hello Slovakians, I love you.
4:34 Lewis Howes? And you, what are some of the things you learned through the process of the last couple of years that people were, people were finding out about themselves and discovering about other things? You've got this new book about living longer, longevity paradox. So what were some of the things that you've learned over the last couple of years about health in general with people?
4:52 Steven Gundry? So I think one of the things was probably one of the most controversial statements in the plant paradox was that your bad health is not your fault.
5:03 Lewis Howes? It's your DNA, right? It's your genes?
5:05 Steven Gundry? Yeah, it's your genes and DNA. And I go into a lot of this in the longevity paradox, that in fact, your genes have very little to do with what's going to happen to you, both in the immediate period and in long term. And there's a big, huge study looking at millions of people around the world and their outcome, looking at their genetics, their DNA. And their DNA has only probably about a 6% influence on you, your health, what's going to happen to you. So that means-
5:45 Lewis Howes? Including like diseases?
5:46 Steven Gundry? Yeah, diseases.
5:47 Lewis Howes? So why do we always, when we go to the doctor, they say, well, did your father have a stroke or a heart attack? Did your mother have dementia?
5:55 Steven Gundry? So when I ask that question, and I do, what that tells me is that if your mother had diabetes, or your father had coronary artery disease, that tells me that if you eat like your parents did, then you will most likely have those diseases, not because you inherited that from your parents, but you learned to eat from your parents. And it actually goes beyond that. Not only did you learn to eat from your parents, but you shared the microbiome, the bugs in your gut that your parents had.
6:37 Steven Gundry? In fact, as we talk about in the book, you can take identical twins and raise them apart.
6:45 Steven Gundry? And they will actually have microbiomes more in common with the family that they were raised with than their identical twin. And the outcome, health outcomes of those identical twins will not parallel genetics. They will parallel the microbiome that they acquired.
7:07 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
7:08 Steven Gundry? Living with that other family.
7:09 Lewis Howes? So you could be separate from your twin for, what, fifteen, twenty years, living different, live with different, I guess, health benefits and, and one more than the other, see each other and almost look different.
7:22 Steven Gundry? Yeah, that's exactly right. And you can actually, you know, there, there've been some studies of twins who have been raised apart and clearly they're identical, but depending on how they ate and their microbiome that they acquired, they can look quite different.
7:38 Lewis Howes? Wow. This may be a dumb question, but if you're an identical twin, do you have the exact same genes?
7:44 Steven Gundry? Exactly.
7:45 Lewis Howes? Really?
7:46 Steven Gundry? Yeah, identical.
7:47 Lewis Howes? Wow.
7:48 Steven Gundry? You are literally the same.
7:50 Lewis Howes? The same.
7:51 Steven Gundry? Genetic person.
7:52 Lewis Howes? Okay, interesting. Wow, okay, so you talk about this microbiome, the gut, that's really like the brain, right?
7:58 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
7:59 Lewis Howes? That's the brain.
8:00 Steven Gundry? It is the brain.
8:01 Lewis Howes? So, and there's always, there's bugs inside of us right now.
8:04 Steven Gundry? Yep, trillions.
8:05 Lewis Howes? Trillions of like little bugs, insects.
8:08 Steven Gundry? Well, not insects.
8:09 Lewis Howes? Not insects.
8:10 Steven Gundry? No, they're bacteria.
8:11 Lewis Howes? Bacteria.
8:12 Steven Gundry? So, not only bacteria, but they're also viruses, there's also fungi, there's all sorts of molds and mushrooms and things like that growing in you.
8:19 Lewis Howes? Mushrooms in my gut.
8:20 Steven Gundry? Yeah. Well, in fact, fun fact, recent study shows that women's breast milk has bacteria and funguses in the breast milk that feed the microbiome, that seed the microbiome of the baby. We've known for quite some time that, you know, the microbiome, and the microbiome again is, is all these other inhabitants of us and.
8:50 Lewis Howes? Like, for example?
8:52 Steven Gundry? Okay, so, getting back to genetics.
8:56 Steven Gundry? Ninety percent of the cells that make up you, me, are non-human. They are bacteria, viruses, fungus, parasites, worms. Wow. So ninety percent of you and me is not me, is not you. It's all these other guys. Wow. So you're basically a condominium for what I call bugs. And if we look at the genetic material that constitutes us, the genes, the genetic material, all the DNA of all these other guys, is ninety-nine percent of all the genetic material that's in you and me.
9:36 Steven Gundry? So the book is, let's take care, forget about the one percenters, our genes. Let's understand that ninety-nine percent of the genetic material in us is non-us, but that's the important guys. Why is it so important? Because they control our fate. And the point of the longevity paradox is that knowing what these guys want, and I call them bugs, good bugs and bad bugs, knowing what these guys want to eat, and knowing how these guys relate to the wall inside of our gut,
10:18 Steven Gundry? the inner lining of our gut, and that crosstalk across that wall will determine what's going to happen to you. Long term? Long term. Wow. And even short term. Just this past week, just as another great teaser, we now know that the oral microbiome, the bugs that live in our mouth, can predict who's going to develop or who has pancreatic cancer. Really? Really. At what age, any age? Choose your age. There is a distinctive set of bugs
10:56 Steven Gundry? that has now been found in pancreatic cancer in humans that predicts. And so there's an exciting new thing that you could take a swab of your tongue and sequence which bugs are in there, and you can go, oh crap, you know.
11:17 Steven Gundry? You've got a pancreatic cancer microbiome. Now, the good news about that is, is that you can alter that microbiome. But a paper just this morning, they literally stuck needles into the pancreas of people that were, you know, looking for pancreatic cancer. And they were looking for pancreatic cancer cells, but they're looking under the microscope and they go, wait a minute, there's a bunch of bacteria sitting here inside this, you know, pancreas, what the heck are those doing in there? So then in 105 people, they sequence those bacteria and they were all exactly the same sorts of bacteria and they actually all came from the mouth.
12:00 Lewis Howes? Wow. Doesn't most, I heard this from an oral, I guess hygienist or dentist or doctor, who said a lot of the disease we capture is through the mouth.
12:11 Steven Gundry? Yeah, correct. Dale Bredesen, who wrote The End of Alzheimer's, who's become a good friend of mine. He and I are fascinated with the effect of the oral microbiome on dementia. For instance, in the, in the Plant Paradox, I wrote about, there's kind of a fun study in rats where you can take LPSs, lipopolysaccharides, which are the outside wall of bacteria. They're not living bacteria, they're just the dead bacteria. And in my book, you know, I don't swear, but I call them little pieces of shit, because that's what they are, LPSs, they literally are dead bacteria. And so these, you can take rats and you can swab one of their noses with LPSs, they're
12:56 Steven Gundry? not living bacteria, they're pieces of dead bacteria. And the other side of the nostril, you can just put a cotton swab with nothing on it, right? And you do that every day. The rats who get the swab up one side of the nose, their other side of their body gets Parkinson's disease.
13:14 Lewis Howes? No way.
13:15 Steven Gundry? Yeah, gets Parkinson's disease. The other side, you know, the opposite side, doesn't. And you go, what the heck is going on? Well, if you think about it, your nose and your mouth are gateways to your brain. I mean, literally the back of your mouth and the top of your nose is your brain, your brain's just sitting there. And so this is a direct shot into your brain. And as I talk about, I talked about it in The Plant Paradox, but I really go into this in The Longevity Paradox, that To prevent Alzheimer's and to prevent Parkinson's and dementia, one of the things you gotta do is the care and feeding of your microbiome. And that includes your oral microbiome.
13:58 Steven Gundry? Because this is a direct shot and you gotta, you gotta take care of it.
14:03 Lewis Howes? So how do you take care of that?
14:04 Steven Gundry? So there are, believe it or not, certain bacteria. One's called the P gingivitis that is now been isolated from the brain Alzheimer's patients. And how did it get there? Well, it got there through your mouth, through bad dental hygiene, through gingivitis. That's how the name.
14:23 Lewis Howes? So you can get Alzheimer's through?
14:26 Steven Gundry? Through your mouth.
14:26 Lewis Howes? Not taking care of your teeth?
14:28 Steven Gundry? Exactly.
14:28 Lewis Howes? Really?
14:29 Steven Gundry? Yeah. And in fact, years, years ago, you know, I'm such an incredible nerd. There's a very famous marker of inflammation called the C-reactive protein, CRP. Almost everybody listening is probably had a CRP. There's a more specific one called highly sensitive CRP. Years ago, I noticed that a lot of my patients with heart disease had elevated CRPs. And I said, you know, my wife flosses twice a day, literally. I mean, she's a nut.
15:01 Lewis Howes? It's good, right?
15:02 Steven Gundry? Yeah, it's great. I hate to floss. I hate it. So I designed an experiment with like 500 people and I asked them to floss every other day. Okay? And we'd measure their CRPs and then we measured their CRPs every three months for a year. And the people who I could get to floss every other day, and that included myself, their CRPs came down to normal and they were elevated. And the people who flossed more than every other day, they had even lower. And so I wrote this paper for the American Heart Association that says that since CRP is very highly associated with developing coronary artery disease,
15:42 Steven Gundry? that coronary artery disease, in fact, partially comes from the mouth. And if you want to prevent coronary artery disease, you ought to floss. I got honored by the American Institute of Oral Biology for my research. You know, everybody gave me a big hand. But these dentists are right. There's a barrier between the bugs that live in your mouth and you. And it's at your gum-tooth interface and you've got to preserve that barrier.
16:13 Steven Gundry? The same thing happens in the barrier in the wall of our intestines. So here's the deal, your your intestines are your skin turned inside out. That's all it is. That surface area of the intestines is the same surface area as a tennis court.
16:36 Steven Gundry? That's big. Yeah, that's big. Everybody's kind of looking down like there's no tennis court. How's it fit in there? Yeah, how'd they do that? Well, and we can do this because it's kind of fun. I'm fascinated with plants, as you know, the plant paradox. And, you know, plants are actually very intelligent human beings. They actually see. A new book has proven that plants see. Anyway, so plants have a root system in the soil that they get their nourishment. And those roots are surrounded by a microbiome of the soil. And there's fungi and bacteria. And it's actually that microbiome that gets the food into the plant, gets all the nutrients into the plant.
17:20 Steven Gundry? So we actually have roots. And this surface area, those of you who remember high school biology, we have all these little projections called microville. And think of it kind of as a shag carpet. And so we have roots that go into our intestines. And everything we eat is actually the soil. So intestines are like the roots. Yeah, our intestines, out of our intestines are these roots. Got it. And the soil is what we eat. But the main component of the soil is the microbiome. So you've got four to five pounds of bugs. In my gut. In your gut. And they're there.
18:04 Steven Gundry? We used to think they were just a bunch of crap. But we actually need it. And we not only need it, they control everything that's going to happen to you. Do I want 10 pounds of bugs or do I just want four or five? Well, actually, the more the more diverse set of bugs you have, the more kind of mixing pot, United Nations of bugs, the better off you're going to be. In fact. Why is that? Turns out, if you take, you look at what's called microbial diversity. In other words, you know, how many? We now know that there are at least 10,000 different species of bacteria that live in
18:46 Steven Gundry? your gut. In fact, a few weeks ago, another thousand was was found that nobody realized. So your gut is basically a tropical rainforest and you've got all these creatures and things happening and one creature depends on another and you know, you tip the balance off, it's like introducing wolves back into Yellowstone Park, right? Oops, we needed wolves, who knew?
19:13 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
19:14 Steven Gundry? Right? So there's this intense kind of communication dependence and the more diverse your microbiome is, the longer you live and the longer you live well. So.
19:31 Lewis Howes? Why is that?
19:32 Steven Gundry? Turns out that this root system is dependent on the nourishment it gets from all of these bugs.
19:46 Lewis Howes? Got it. So like if you're trying to grow a plant or a tree in a desert, it'd be challenging because there's not enough soil.
19:53 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
19:54 Lewis Howes? And it would only thrive for as long as it can or?
19:56 Steven Gundry? Yeah, in fact, you know.
19:58 Lewis Howes? You put an oak tree in a desert, I guess, or whatever, it needs more nourishment than it's receiving there.
20:02 Steven Gundry? Right. And you can actually, there's really cool experiments where you can have two identical plants planted right next to each other and depending on the microbiome in that soil, one plant will thrive and the other won't.
20:17 Lewis Howes? Right.
20:18 Steven Gundry? But we can go down a rabbit hole. It turns out in a forest, if trees sense that one of their neighbors is not, you know, doing too well, they will actually send roots and supports over to that tree.
20:31 Lewis Howes? That's pretty interesting. So all this has, so what I'm hearing you say is that the gut, the microbiome and these bugs have a lot to do with how you can live well now and also for extending life. Is that what I'm hearing?
20:42 Steven Gundry? Yeah. So you take 105 year old people around the world. And you look at their, and these, these are thriving people.
20:51 Lewis Howes? Not like about to die.
20:52 Steven Gundry? No.
20:53 Lewis Howes? They can move around, they can.
20:54 Steven Gundry? Yeah, it's like Edith, it's like Edith Murray who starts the book. That lady was a hundred and five and a half when this picture was taken.
21:02 Lewis Howes? Wow.
21:03 Steven Gundry? And so she was in two inch wedgies. She walks her little Pomeranian and she's smart as a whip and she was one of the women who really changed my life. Her name's Edith Murray, she's Michelle in all my books. So anyhow. So you take these people and you look at their gut microbiome. They have the gut microbiome, the diversity of a thirty year old individual.
21:30 Lewis Howes? Wow.
21:30 Steven Gundry? And if you look normally at people as they age, their gut microbiome becomes less and less diverse. You ultimately have only a few species. So it's this, number one, it's this huge diversity that makes a big difference. And number two, we now know that there are certain bugs that really make the difference. And the longevity paradox is actually teaching people how to nurture the bugs that are very interested in keeping you alive.
22:04 Steven Gundry? Another way of looking at this, you're, you're basically a condominium for these bugs, for bacteria.
22:11 Lewis Howes? So how do we attract all these diverse, good bugs?
22:14 Steven Gundry? I'm so glad you asked.
22:17 Steven Gundry? So we know that good bugs like to eat certain foods.
22:22 Lewis Howes? Okay.
22:22 Steven Gundry? And a lot of this was actually based on, there's this fascinating creature called the naked mole rat. And naked mole rats, make sure everybody who's listening or watching, Google's naked mole rats. And here will be my first controversial statement of the day. Naked mole rats have sometimes been described as a penis with buck teeth. Okay. Okay, so Google it. There you go. You'll see it. So these are probably one of the ugliest creatures in the world. Naked mole rats live in the Sahara Desert and they live in colonies, very much like termites or bees. And they live in subterranean tunnels.
23:03 Steven Gundry? And naked mole rats appear to have no end mortality. In other words, naked mole rats live at least 10 to 20 times longer than any other rat. Rats live about two years. Naked mole rats have lived 20, 30 years. Wow. In fact, no one has actually known that you could actually have an end life of a naked mole rat. So they've been the darling of longevity researchers for a very long time. And in fact, hilariously, when I was professor at Loma Linda, which is a blue zone, I had behind my desk this giant, iridescent naked mole rat picture. Really? From the San Diego Zoo.
23:48 Steven Gundry? And everybody goes, what's the deal, you're a famous heart surgeon? And what the deal, you've got this naked mole rat behind your desk? I mean, it's bright pink and purple. And I've been fascinated with naked mole rats because they're the longest living creatures. So naked mole rats have the same diverse microbiome as 105-year-old people. Really? Really. And what the heck is going on? Well, it turns out naked mole rats, unlike any other rat, eats roots, eats tubers, and eats fungi that are growing in the subterranean area.
24:29 Steven Gundry? So if you think I would like you to eat some roots and tubers and mushrooms, you're absolutely right. Because the evidence is rather striking that the bugs that like these things are what keeps the naked mole rat living so long, unlike any of its other rat cousins who eat grains. And we can be sure to be talking about that soon. So this is the only rat that eats tubers and mushrooms and roots. And... They have the microbiome of 105 year old people who are thriving. In fact, a study published last week out of Singapore showed that humans who eat two cups
25:12 Steven Gundry? of mushrooms per week do not get Alzheimer's disease.
25:17 Lewis Howes? And it's because- Two cups of any type of mushroom?
25:19 Steven Gundry? Any type you want.
25:20 Lewis Howes? Go to the grocery store, get some mushrooms.
25:22 Steven Gundry? Turns out button mushrooms are second best of all mushrooms in terms of a compound that we now know is the secret of mushrooms. Porcini mushrooms, which of course is the prized mushroom of Italians, is number one for these compounds. Now, these compounds are polyphenols. They're actually cousins of polyphenols that are in green tea. And what happens with these compounds is that they're actually eaten by bacteria. Bacteria love to eat polyphenols. And the bacteria then, for lack of a better word, poop out these compounds that have been changed a little bit.
26:04 Steven Gundry? And it's those compounds that enter our circulation. And a particular compound in mushrooms that's been manipulated by bacteria protects the brain from damage.
26:17 Lewis Howes? From Alzheimer's or dementia or anything like that?
26:19 Steven Gundry? Wow.
26:20 Lewis Howes? So mushrooms.
26:20 Steven Gundry? Mushrooms. Eat your mushrooms.
26:22 Lewis Howes? Every week?
26:23 Steven Gundry? Every week.
26:24 Lewis Howes? What if there's a diverse of mushrooms or if you eat the same mushroom all the time, does it matter?
26:28 Steven Gundry? It really doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. And again, the plain old humble button mushroom will do it for you.
26:34 Lewis Howes? Just have a couple of cups a week.
26:36 Steven Gundry? What I do is, you know, I take a bunch of different mushroom blends and-
26:41 Lewis Howes? Mix it up.
26:41 Steven Gundry? Yeah, mix it up.
26:42 Lewis Howes? United Nations of mushrooms.
26:44 Steven Gundry? Yeah, and I take mushroom capsules. And I take, I have a product that's actually lots of different mushrooms you just squeeze in your coffee or whatever.
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28:25 Speaker 00 Okay, I have a question now. So, for people that want to live longer and be healthy while they live longer, not having to get surgeries all the time.
28:32 Steven Gundry? Right.
28:33 Speaker 00 If you had three to five minutes, max, to talk to someone who said, "I just want to live longer. I want to know the secrets to living longer. I got to figure out the keys," and you've got three minutes with them, what would you say in three minutes are the things they must do every day, or as often as they can for the rest of their life, to extend their life?
28:55 Steven Gundry? The first thing they must do is realize that the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. The only purpose of food, and preferably it'll be mushrooms that you pour the olive oil on. That's number one. The evidence that the polyphenols in olive oil... If you really, you know, wanted to live well for a very long time, olive oil is the key. Two of the blue zones, actually three, if you count the Echeveroles, use a liter of olive oil per week. Now, that's a lot of olive oil. So like 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. So, there's a beautiful study out of Spain that I talk about,
29:39 Steven Gundry? where you took 65-year-old people. And we'll dumb it down real quick. Two groups. One group had to use a liter of olive oil per week for five years. Then they changed their olive oil once a week at the clinic. The other group had to eat a low-fat Mediterranean diet. Both Mediterranean diets of Spain. At the end of five years, the olive oil group had better memory, had improved memory than when they started. The low-fat group lost memory. The women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the low-fat group. People in both groups who had coronary artery disease,
30:20 Steven Gundry? the group that got the olive oil had a 30% less incidence of new events versus the group that had the low-fat diet. And so if, you know, three blue zones, and this study doesn't convince you that you better get olive oil into you, olive oil grows brain cells. And it's not the oil per se. It's actually the polyphenols in olive oil. Olive oil, the polyphenols literally make your blood vessels slippery. And I've actually published data on this, that your blood vessels, you cannot stick cholesterol to blood vessels if you have olive oil in your system. Yeah. So, you know, drink the dumb stuff.
30:59 Lewis Howes? Do you drink it?
31:00 Steven Gundry? Yeah, I do.
31:01 Lewis Howes? Wow.
31:01 Steven Gundry? I take a shot of it.
31:02 Lewis Howes? Craig's always talking about how he can drink as much as possible.
31:05 Steven Gundry? But what I would urge people to do is, you can cook in olive oil. This myth that olive oil oxidizes when you cook it is one of the worst internet myths there is.
31:15 Lewis Howes? Really?
31:16 Steven Gundry? It turns out that olive oil is the least oxidizable oil. It's even better than avocado oil or coconut oil. It does not oxidize.
31:25 Lewis Howes? Oxidize, meaning like evaporate?
31:27 Steven Gundry? No, oxidize means gets damaged.
31:29 Lewis Howes? Damaged.
31:30 Steven Gundry? Damage, okay. It turns out, everybody sees olive oil smoking and they figure that's damage.
31:35 Lewis Howes? It's not. So you can burn it as much as you want.
31:38 Steven Gundry? You know, cultures have been using olive oil to cook with for 5,000 years. And you know, there's not a lot of dead Italians from cooking in olive oil. Okay, so you gotta get olive oil.
31:49 Lewis Howes? So that's number one.
31:49 Steven Gundry? Number one. Number two, you gotta take vitamin D3. You've got to.
31:53 Lewis Howes? Vitamin D3, not D.
31:55 Steven Gundry? Yeah, well, there's, there's D2, there's D1.
31:58 Lewis Howes? What's vitamin D3 and why is it important?
31:59 Steven Gundry? So D3 is the active form of vitamin D that we use. You will be shocked that people who have the highest levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream live the longest and live well compared to people with the lowest levels of vitamin D3. It turns out that you have to have vitamin D3 to activate stem cells activation.
32:30 Lewis Howes? And we can, vitamin D is also through the sun, is that correct?
32:33 Steven Gundry? Correct, but it's nearly impossible to get enough vitamin D through the sun.
32:37 Lewis Howes? Really?
32:37 Steven Gundry? Nearly impossible. 80% of Southern Californians are vitamin D deficient because we're slathering sunscreen on us and we're wearing long sleeve shirts.
32:46 Lewis Howes? We're inside a lot still.
32:47 Steven Gundry? We're inside a lot, you know. I live in Palm Springs, it's pretty hot in the summer. I tend not to go out a lot in the summer. So we don't have enough vitamin D. And so you have to swallow vitamin D. The University of California San Diego published a study that the average human being to have an adequate level of vitamin D3 should be taking 9,600 international units a day. So basically 10,000 international units.
33:13 Lewis Howes? Wow.
33:14 Steven Gundry? They found no one who had vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day.
33:21 Lewis Howes? You can't overdose on vitamin D.
33:23 Steven Gundry? I have yet to see vitamin D toxicity. And I've been measuring vitamin D levels for 20 years in patients every three months. I personally run my vitamin D level greater than 120 nanograms per milliliter for the last 12 years to prove I'm not dead. And so far, so good.
33:41 Lewis Howes? Right.
33:42 Steven Gundry? Right? And here's, you know, just
33:45 Lewis Howes? Wow.
33:46 Steven Gundry? To tell you how crazy this is, if I feel I'm getting something, if I'm coming down with a scratchy throat or something, I'll take 150,000 international units of vitamin D3.
33:57 Lewis Howes? How many capsules is that?
33:58 Steven Gundry? Three days, well, so you can get 5,000, right? So that's 10 capsules, three times a day for three days. So I'm basically taking a half a million international units of vitamin D to ward off a virus.
34:13 Lewis Howes? Everyone always says you should take vitamin C when you start to feel like a scratchy throat.
34:17 Steven Gundry? Yeah, it really doesn't work. Vitamin D is probably one of the best antivirals that's ever been discovered.
34:22 Lewis Howes? So vitamin C really doesn't help that much, or?
34:24 Steven Gundry? Really doesn't help that much. I'll add, we can get into vitamin C and I think everybody should take a timed release vitamin C twice a day and it's actually for a different purpose.
34:34 Lewis Howes? What's the purpose?
34:35 Steven Gundry? All right.
34:35 Lewis Howes? A quick version.
34:36 Steven Gundry? All right, quick version. So you and I are one of the few animals that don't manufacture our own vitamin C. Us, monkeys and guinea pigs. And we have actually all the genes to manufacture vitamin C. There's actually five of them. The last gene is turned off. It's called a ghost gene. Why do we do that? Well, we manufacture vitamin C from sugar, from glucose. And it's actually very expensive to manufacture vitamin C. So the theory is, and I like the theory, is we grew up in Africa with lots of vitamin C containing plants in our diet. And so it was unnecessary for us to manufacture vitamin C.
35:20 Steven Gundry? And the theory goes, we'd have some extra glucose left over that we could store as fat to make it through the winter when times are rough. And we're the only fat storing ape. So the problem is vitamin C is essential to repair collagen and arachid collagen. Okay? The reason smokers get wrinkles is collagen is broken because you actually repair cracks and collagen with vitamin C. And smokers use up all their vitamin C with what's called oxidative stress. So they don't have any vitamin C. In fact, Here's another controversial statement. If I've got a smoker with heart disease,
36:05 Steven Gundry? I'm willing to trade him his smoking with him taking large amounts of vitamin C while I get the rest of his diet squared away, rather than tell him to stop smoking.
36:18 Lewis Howes? Wow.
36:19 Steven Gundry? Now, the reason I say that is, and I talk about this in the book, there's this fascinating island people called the Katavans in New Guinea, who smoke like fiends. They eat 60% of their diet is taro root. The other part of their diet is coconut oil. And they live into their mid 90s with no medical care, but they've been studied extensively. There has never been a case of a heart attack, heart disease, or a stroke in these smokers. What they do do is they eat a lot of vitamin C-containing fruits and vegetables as part of their diet.
36:56 Lewis Howes? Olive oil as well?
36:58 Steven Gundry? They don't have any olive oil. They have coconut oil. That's their coconut. They don't have any olives down there.
37:03 Lewis Howes? So you can do without olive oil and still live a long life?
37:06 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
37:07 Lewis Howes? But you think olive oil will...
37:08 Steven Gundry? Yeah, since olive oil is so readily available.
37:11 Lewis Howes? Might as well.
37:11 Steven Gundry? Might as well. Might as well. Okay, so anyhow, back to vitamin C.
37:15 Lewis Howes? Yep.
37:17 Steven Gundry? You have to have vitamin C to repair the cracks in blood vessels. People remember scurvy, where people would die, they bleed to death on long ocean voyages. Actually, 50% mortality on those old ocean voyages, just dying from scurvy. And the British Navy, the reason they're called Limies, is because the surgeon in the British Navy realized that if he gave them limes to take on the voyage, that they wouldn't die of scurvy. That's why the British Navy is still called Limies. So vitamin C repairs the cracks in collagen, and our blood vessels are flexing all the time. And so these cracks have to be repaired. And if they're not repaired, you basically bleed to death.
37:59 Steven Gundry? We have a system repairing those cracks and it's called cholesterol. And cholesterol will patch those cracks. So if you have plenty of vitamin C throughout the day, you won't, you'll be able to repair those cracks. And there's a wild study, I mean, head down a rabbit hole. You can genetically engineer rats to lack that final gene to make vitamin C. And they will live half as long as a normal rat. If you then put vitamin C in their water, they will live as long as a normal rat who can manufacture their vitamin C. But they're drinking the water throughout the day.
38:39 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
38:40 Steven Gundry? So vitamin C, unfortunately.
38:42 Lewis Howes? We have to manufacture.
38:43 Steven Gundry? We have to manufacture it and we've got some interesting tricks to do that coming up.
38:49 Lewis Howes? Okay.
38:49 Steven Gundry? But in the meantime, the average person should take like a thousand milligrams of timed release vitamin C twice a day.
38:57 Lewis Howes? Okay.
38:57 Steven Gundry? To cover their ass.
38:58 Lewis Howes? Wow, okay. So the first thing I heard you say, this three minutes is turning into 20.
39:02 Steven Gundry? It's okay.
39:03 Lewis Howes? No worries. The first thing I heard is olive oil.
39:06 Steven Gundry? Oh, and olive oil is actually one of the tricks to activate the ghost gene, a polyphenol in olive oil.
39:11 Lewis Howes? Okay.
39:11 Steven Gundry? You will actually make vitamin C.
39:12 Lewis Howes? Okay, there you go. So there you go.
39:14 Steven Gundry? Another good read.
39:15 Lewis Howes? So have olive oil, vitamin D, have lots of vitamin D, three, D3.
39:19 Steven Gundry? D3.
39:20 Lewis Howes? And then what's next to live a long life?
39:22 Steven Gundry? Next is you gotta get some form of long chain omega-3 fat, better known as fish oil.
39:28 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
39:29 Steven Gundry? And vegans have no excuse anymore. There is algae-based DHA and EPA. But here's the deal. Your brain is about 70% fat. So if you wanna call me a fat head, you know, I will pat you.
39:46 Lewis Howes? Yeah, yeah.
39:46 Steven Gundry? And I can just see how the internet lighting up, country is a fat head. So half of the fat in your brain is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA.
40:01 Steven Gundry? So half, basically half of your brain is fish oil.
40:05 Lewis Howes? Wow.
40:06 Steven Gundry? And as I talk about in the longevity paradox, you look at people, what are called the omega-3 index, which basically looks at how much DHA you have in you over the past two months. People with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains and the largest areas of memory, the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest memory areas, hippocampus. So mom was right when she said fish is brain food. You know, she was absolutely, she didn't know why it was, but we now know it's, DHA is really what makes your brain.
40:49 Lewis Howes? So sushi is good.
40:50 Steven Gundry? Sushi is actually not a good idea.
40:53 Lewis Howes? Oh, wow.
40:53 Steven Gundry? Most of the people I see with high mercury levels are sushi eaters or dentists. Uh, so, and particularly shishimi grade tuna.
41:04 Lewis Howes? God, it's so good though.
41:06 Steven Gundry? You just wanna, you just kinda wanna stay away from it.
41:09 Lewis Howes? Ah, sugar fish is amazing, though.
41:12 Steven Gundry? Tono.
41:13 Lewis Howes? And it's got the grains, too.
41:14 Steven Gundry? Yeah, it's got the grains, you know, so.
41:16 Lewis Howes? So no sushi?
41:17 Steven Gundry? Yeah, so.
41:18 Lewis Howes? Once in a while?
41:18 Steven Gundry? Yeah, once in a while.
41:19 Lewis Howes? Okay.
41:19 Steven Gundry? Absolutely. But, yeah, so fish oil is incredibly important.
41:24 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
41:25 Steven Gundry? And what I try to get people to do, and again, I measure this every three months in all my patients, and we're talking, you know, thousands and thousands of patients over the last 20 years. You wanna get about a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Now, how do you do that? Well, you get fish oil, I mean, you can go to Costco, I don't care. And you look on the back and you find serving size and make sure it says one serving size. They love to fool you. Uh, they may say two or three, and then you look down below and you see DHA. And you look to see how much DHA is in a capsule. And you add it up and say, oh, okay, there's 250 milligrams of DHA in this capsule, so I need to take four.
42:08 Lewis Howes? Wow, four a day.
42:09 Steven Gundry? Yeah, well, I mean.
42:10 Lewis Howes? Thousand a day, yeah.
42:11 Steven Gundry? Thousand a day.
42:12 Lewis Howes? Okay.
42:12 Steven Gundry? DHA.
42:13 Lewis Howes? We got olive oil, we've got vitamin D3, we have fish oils.
42:19 Lewis Howes? What else do we need to live longer?
42:21 Steven Gundry? So you gotta have polyphenols in your diet. So what the heck is a polyphenol? How do you remember polyphenol? Think about polywannaphenol.
42:30 Lewis Howes? Okay.
42:31 Steven Gundry? Phenols are plant compounds. Polyphenols are plant compounds that plants use primarily to protect themselves against stress and sunlight.
42:41 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
42:42 Steven Gundry? Just interesting fact. We know that red wine is beneficial for you because of actually two polyphenols. The most famous is resveratrol. The other one is curcetin or curcetin. The higher the grapes are grown, the higher in altitude the grapes are grown, the more polyphenols they make.
43:03 Lewis Howes? Cause they need more to protect themselves.
43:05 Steven Gundry? Yeah, exactly. It's basically suntan. Uh, you know, they, they've actually protected themselves against sunburn.
43:11 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
43:12 Steven Gundry? Also, the more the plant is stressed, the more polyphenols it makes to protect itself.
43:18 Lewis Howes? Right.
43:19 Steven Gundry? Okay. So, polyphenols are traditionally in dark colored berries. So for instance, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. Interesting fun fact, the leaves of these trees or vines have more polyphenols than the actual fruit does. So for instance, black raspberry leaves have far more polyphenols than black raspberries.
43:48 Lewis Howes? Wow.
43:49 Steven Gundry? And I take black raspberry capsules though, by the way, and it's in the book.
43:53 Lewis Howes? There you go.
43:53 Steven Gundry? So olives, for instance, are loaded with polyphenols. And olives that are stressed produce-
44:01 Lewis Howes? Even better.
44:02 Steven Gundry? Are even better.
44:03 Lewis Howes? Wow.
44:04 Steven Gundry? Olive leaves have more polyphenols than olives. So olive leaf extract is an easy way of getting the huge amount of benefits without drinking a liter of olive oil.
44:15 Lewis Howes? So what about like, uh, you know, leafy greens? Do you want stressed out looking leafy greens? Or do you want healthy, thriving looking?
44:23 Steven Gundry? Excellent question. It turns out that the reason organic vegetables in general are better for you, besides the fact that they haven't been sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and probably Roundup, and we can get into that, is the fact that these- Creatures, these plants, actually have to work harder.
44:41 Lewis Howes? Huh.
44:42 Steven Gundry? And they have to produce more polyphenols to protect themselves against insect predation. And so that's actually the reason you want to eat organic. So when you're going to the farmer's market and the poor little organic vegetables have got pockets of insects.
44:57 Lewis Howes? It's like they're dying.
44:58 Steven Gundry? And they don't look very good. You go, I want that guy.
45:01 Lewis Howes? Really?
45:02 Steven Gundry? That guy is struggling. He is gonna just be so loaded with polyphenol.
45:06 Lewis Howes? Really?
45:06 Steven Gundry? And correlation with that is the more bitter, the better. Because polyphenols in general are very bitter. For instance, when we were developing, you know, my signature product Vital Reds, it's pure polyphenols primarily, and they're bitter. So we did lots of taste testing to figure out how the heck we're gonna mask these really bitter compounds. So more bitter, more better. In fact, as I talk about in the book, I had the pleasure of knowing Jack LaLanne.
45:40 Lewis Howes? Uh huh.
45:41 Steven Gundry? Who you would know is really the godfather of
45:44 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
45:45 Steven Gundry? of fitness and nutrition in the United States. And I knew him in his later years. And Jack used to have a saying is that if it tastes good, spit it out.
45:54 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
45:55 Steven Gundry? Now, what he really meant by that is bitter things, nasty tasting things, is actually what is gonna give the bugs that are actually gonna keep you alive what they want to eat. And don't, you know, more bitter, more better.
46:14 Lewis Howes? Mmm.
46:14 Steven Gundry? So, you know, the more polyphenols, the more bitter greens I can get into you, the better.
46:20 Lewis Howes? Interesting. But you can get that through capsules and other things, too.
46:22 Steven Gundry? Yeah, you can. Uh, and in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm a nut about taking a bunch of supplements because If you look at even really good organic eaters, most human beings only eat maybe 20 different plant species.
46:41 Lewis Howes? I probably, I probably like three.
46:43 Steven Gundry? Yeah, yeah, most people do.
46:45 Lewis Howes? Like five, maybe.
46:46 Steven Gundry? Yeah, you know, and you know, ketchup is not a vegetable. It's a tomato and we can't, we can't do that. So our ancestors and even looking at modern hunter gatherers like the Hanzo tribe, they go through, they eat 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. And you think about it, all those plants are grown organically. They're in six feet of loam soil. They got their cool microbiome. So they're just replete with all these nutrients and polyphenols. And so, you know, if people think that they can actually do a great job eating healthy without supplementation, I got oceanfront property in Palm Springs. I'm happy to sell them.
47:26 Lewis Howes? Right, right.
47:27 Steven Gundry? There is no.
47:28 Lewis Howes? Right, exactly. Okay, so I want to get one more thing. I've heard that in order to extend your life, you need to, I can't remember the name, extend something at the end of your.
47:38 Steven Gundry? Telomeres.
47:39 Lewis Howes? Telomeres.
47:40 Steven Gundry? Or telomeres.
47:42 Lewis Howes? So how do we, is that true? Do you have to extend this?
47:44 Steven Gundry? Okay, so that is one theory of longevity. And it is a, it's a good theory. I like the theory. It's controversial. Vitamin D. Turns out that people with the highest levels of vitamin D have the longest telomeres.
48:00 Lewis Howes? There you go.
48:00 Steven Gundry? So why wouldn't you do that?
48:03 Lewis Howes? Right.
48:04 Steven Gundry? If you like that theory?
48:06 Lewis Howes? There you go.
48:06 Steven Gundry? So that's vitamin D is, it's, if anybody is, if anybody takes away, it's vitamin D.
48:13 Lewis Howes? So you've given four things so far. Let's give me one final thing that can extend our life and the, the quality of our life as well.
48:21 Steven Gundry? Great. So the last thing we want to do is we want to turn off as much as we can the sensor called mTOR, originally called the mammalian target of rapamycin. It's subsequently been discovered in all organisms besides mammals. So now it's called the mechanistic target of rapamycin. And so mTOR is an energy sensor and it's in all of our cells. And basically, we come from a circadian rhythm system of plentiful food at one time of the year and very little food at another time of year.
49:00 Lewis Howes? Right, fruit sometimes, not.
49:02 Steven Gundry? Exactly. And we use fruit to gain weight for the winter, and that's a whole nother subject. So mTOR senses energy availability. And it senses sugar molecules, and it also senses amino acids, protein. Now, it turns out that it's very sensitive to particular amino acids rather than all amino acids. The ones it's most sensitive to are amino acids contained in animal protein. And animals include fish, animal protein includes eggs, includes cheeses, and besides, you know, meat. So beautiful work that's been done, a lot of it done by now my friend Walter Longo
49:47 Steven Gundry? from USC from the Longevity Center.
49:49 Lewis Howes? Is that the mimicking?
49:51 Steven Gundry? Yeah. The fasting mimicking diet.
49:53 Lewis Howes? I've taken that a couple of times.
49:54 Steven Gundry? And he got a patent for prolong.
49:58 Lewis Howes? Yeah, prolong.
49:59 Steven Gundry? Yeah, got a patent for it. Prolong is a vegan, low amino acid diet that you do for five days.
50:09 Lewis Howes? Yeah, it's tough the first time.
50:10 Steven Gundry? It is.
50:11 Lewis Howes? For me it was.
50:12 Steven Gundry? Now, in the book, I wrote about it in The Plant Paradox, actually before he made Prolong, but I write about it again, and he and I, and he's even given me a nice shout out on the back. The idea is you want to reduce mTOR as much as you can. And the longer, the more you suppress it, the longer you live. And here's the reason. If times are rough and you sense that times are rough, your body, your immune system actually goes around and looks at all the cells in your body and says, who's pulling their weight? Who is really, you know, contributing to this effort? And who's a slacker? Who looks a little weird? Who's not, you know, not doing? And it actually instructs cells to commit suicide. And it's called autophagy.
50:57 Steven Gundry? And it tells cells, sorry, you know, you're not, you're out of here. You die. And so it gets the fittest of the fittest to survive. Makes you stronger. And you have to have these periods of time. You have to call the herd, as we say. So unless you do that, you have all of these cells that just kind of build up the debris. They're called senescent cells. Some people call them zombie cells. And it's the amount of these zombie cells that is actually going to make you deteriorate long before you should. And get sick. Exactly. So you gotta call the herd. So how you do that? Five days in a row, once a month. Once a month you do this?
51:41 Steven Gundry? Once a month, five days in a row, five days in a row. You follow a vegan diet of about 900 calories. And I've got some great recipes. It's easy to do. And you do it five days in a row. Yep. It's as if you did calorie restriction every day. And what this does is not only call the herd, but it activates stem cells. Now, everybody says, oh, stem cells, you know, it's the future. You've got oodles of stem cells in you already. Where do you think we get the stem cells? We, you know, take a liposuction and suck out your fat and then we spin it around. We get your stem cells and inject you right back in.
52:24 Steven Gundry? They're already there. You just have to call them into action.
52:28 Lewis Howes? So when someone does that, when they pull it out of you, they're essentially just killing off the dead cells and then putting the good ones back?
52:34 Steven Gundry? No, they're actually, you know, they're centrifuging out the stem cells. Stem cells are in fat. They're everywhere, actually. So you, but you gotta activate the great crazy thing. So you activate them by this modified fast. Or you do intermittent fasting or time restricted fasting. For instance, for the last 12 years, during the winter, from January through June, Monday through Friday, I don't eat breakfast, I don't eat lunch. And I eat all my calories in a two hour window from six to eight o'clock at night. So 22 hour, 24 hours I'm fasting.
53:10 Lewis Howes? For how long?
53:11 Steven Gundry? For six months.
53:11 Lewis Howes? Six months you do that?
53:13 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
53:13 Lewis Howes? Oh, my gosh.
53:14 Steven Gundry? Now, why do that? Because way back when.
53:16 Lewis Howes? You're just drinking olive oil and vitamin D all day?
53:18 Steven Gundry? No, during the night.
53:20 Lewis Howes? And those two hours, yeah, just drinking it? Okay, wow.
53:23 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
53:24 Lewis Howes? But that's why you look so young.
53:25 Steven Gundry? I don't know.
53:26 Lewis Howes? That's why you look.
53:26 Steven Gundry? Actually, if you look at pictures of me from 1995, which was about 25 years ago now, I look much older than than I do do now.
53:37 Lewis Howes? You used to be much, much bigger.
53:40 Steven Gundry? Oh, yeah. I was doing exercising.
53:42 Lewis Howes? But you were doing heart surgery.
53:43 Steven Gundry? Yeah, doing heart surgery.
53:44 Lewis Howes? Eating a lot. And if you guys want to learn more about that story, you can watch the last interview we did. And I wanna, I wanna be mindful of time here. But in the last interview, we talked about all that. And I'll also go into the history of that in the intro here. But those five keys, if we can do those five things. I like them. Is fasting mimicking or mimicking fasting diet?
54:03 Steven Gundry? Fasting mimicking diet.
54:05 Lewis Howes? That thing, when I did that, I've done that twice. And both times, first time was very challenging. Second time was a lot easier. I think you get used to it.
54:12 Steven Gundry? Yeah, you do.
54:12 Lewis Howes? I looked younger. I looked healthier, younger after like three days, I can notice the difference. And so for me, it was very challenging because I usually eat thousands of calories a day. But to have, you know, 800, 900 a day was, and the specific calories, you know, the specific things that it gives you. And you talk about it in here, how to do that.
54:31 Steven Gundry? Yeah, and here's how to do it, and you know. God bless him, you know, all of his profits go back into research. That's great. Which is great. It's a good product. I show people how to do it just in their own home without that. Perfect. And, and he, you know, bless him, he, he backs my way of doing it. Right. So we're, but again, these are the, these are the tricks.
54:55 Steven Gundry? Most of us, the reason it's called longevity paradox is most of us look at what's happening. And old age doesn't look very good. Hmm. It really doesn't. People now, you know, assume that they're going to get their hips and their knees replaced, and they're going to have a bypass or a stand or a valve replacement. And they're going to end up anyhow in the old folks home, you know, drooling in their oatmeal. And none of us, you know, we've seen that, you know, happen to our parents or grandparents. We go, we don't want that. We don't want that. It doesn't have to be that way. What, what shocked me is I've had a number of people, and I talk about some of them in the book, who have been scheduled for knee or hip replacement and have come to me for cardiac clearance, get a stress test, make sure they can come through the test.
55:38 Steven Gundry? And we would put them on my program in, you know, anticipation of getting them in better shape for their hip or knee replacement. And one of them that I talk about in the book, he was scheduled for a knee replacement. He was a diabetic, he had heart disease. We put him on the program for six months pending his knee replacement. And when I saw him right before the knee replacement to, you know, do the final test, I said, okay, you know, you're ready to go. You know, I have diabetes anymore. You don't, you know, you're, you passed your stress test. I said, you know, you can have your knee replacement. And then the guy says, what knee replacement? I canceled it. You know, my knee doesn't hurt anymore. And he starts skipping around the exam room. And people can regrow cartilage. Wow.
56:21 Steven Gundry? And I talk about why you lose cartilage with, because of the things you eat, including lectins. Lectins are one of the major reasons why people have arthritis.
56:33 Steven Gundry? Darn.
56:33 Lewis Howes? More in the Plan Paradox. This book is called The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age. It's out right now. You guys can get it. I highly recommend it. There's forty plus pages of notes backing all of the data and the research and the science. In the back, you've got all the research, you've got the diet programs, what to eat, what to take, everything you need.
56:57 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
56:57 Lewis Howes? Get this for yourself, get it for your parents, get it for friends. This is gonna be a game changer. Make sure you guys check this out. You brought me a bunch of goodies for my birthday, so.
57:05 Steven Gundry? Happy birthday.
57:06 Lewis Howes? I'm gonna be trying all these supplements and putting fish oils in my brain and vitamin D3 in my gut and all that. Mushrooms galore. Good thing I like mushrooms.
57:17 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
57:18 Lewis Howes? I love mushrooms. So you've got a mushroom supplement too? You've got all these things?
57:20 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
57:21 Lewis Howes? The fungus.
57:21 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
57:22 Lewis Howes? Everything you need, you guys have this stuff. Where's the website to get the book and to learn more about the supplements that people can get?
57:28 Steven Gundry? So you could go to DrGundry.com, you can go to GundryMD.com. I've got a YouTube channel. We now have a podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts, Dr. Gundry Podcasts.
57:40 Lewis Howes? Sweet.
57:40 Steven Gundry? Go to Amazon, go to Barnes and Noble, go to your local bookstore.
57:44 Lewis Howes? Amazing.
57:45 Steven Gundry? Barnes and Noble, by the way, will have a separate table with all my books now in the front.
57:50 Lewis Howes? Wow.
57:51 Steven Gundry? And The Longevity Paradox at Barnes and Noble has ten additional recipes that you cannot get anywhere.
57:59 Lewis Howes? Else. Can't get it on Amazon, huh?
58:01 Steven Gundry? Can't. So Barnes and Noble, if you want the ten extra recipes.
58:05 Lewis Howes? Amazing. Okay, so DrGundry.com. Check out the book, Longevity Paradox. Get The Plan Paradox as well. That one's been a game changer. Thirty-four weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. I'm sure this will be on there for a long time as well. To save time, everyone can go listen to the last interview, which has a million views on YouTube, the Plan Paradox interview we did. Incredible insights, transformed a lot of people's lives who have, who've applied the lessons that you teach and the philosophy you teach, so thank you for that. They can learn more about everything there as well. I want to acknowledge you for this. You continue to show up and do the research to help people live healthier, longer lives. And I think it's really cool to know that you're this heart surgeon who worked on, I think, ten thousand heart surgeries.
58:49 Steven Gundry? Yeah.
58:49 Lewis Howes? And. You started to look within and ask yourself the question like this isn't working. When people are going through heart surgery, then they come back three years later.
58:59 Steven Gundry? Here we go again.
59:00 Lewis Howes? It's a Band-Aid, but it's not fixing the root cause. And we need more roots, I guess, in our gut is what you're saying. So I acknowledge you for essentially evolving something that you were taught early on, that you spent a lot of time and money going to school for and evolving out of that to help people live longer, healthier, happier lives. So I acknowledge you for everything you do, Dr. Gundry, you're an inspiration. And my final question is, what's your definition of greatness?
59:30 Steven Gundry? Let's see, I've forgotten what I said last night.
59:35 Lewis Howes? We'll compare both of them, yeah.
59:36 Steven Gundry? If I can teach somebody how to fish, I don't have to give them a fish. And so, teaching somebody is my definition of greatness. And again, I used to give people fish by operating on them. And now I teach them how to fish and they don't have to have operations anymore. And again, the greatness that I see is, and I've talked about this in dedications, I owe everything to my patients. Because they either asked me a question I couldn't answer, or they were willing every three months to do some silly dietary things, or go to Costco and Trader Joe's and buy a supplement, and I'd look to see what happens.
1:00:21 Steven Gundry? Without them, I couldn't do this. And I was at a meeting a few months ago, walking with another very famous nutritionist. And he said, "You don't still see patients, do you?" And I said, "Oh, gosh, yeah, I see them every day, actually on Saturdays and Sundays. I have full practice tomorrow in Santa Barbara." And he says, "What do you do that for?" And I said, "Well, because I learn every day from my patients. I learned a couple of things yesterday from my patients." So I can't imagine doing what I do without having my patients help me. So I'm never going to retire. Oh, and that's the fifth thing, never retire, ever.
1:01:02 Steven Gundry? Particularly men, we are social creatures and you have to be in a social network. And men in general find that in the workplace, women more and more. And I see so many men, and now women, who retire and it starts the downward spiral. And it's because their social network is gone.
1:01:21 Lewis Howes? There you go. I love it. I'm gonna get this book for a bunch of friends, so thank you for everything you do and...
1:01:28 Steven Gundry? Thank you for having me. It's always one, like I said, I think it was my favorite podcast the last time around.
1:01:33 Lewis Howes? Yeah, we'll do it again for the next book.
1:01:35 Steven Gundry? All right.
1:01:36 Lewis Howes? Appreciate it. Thank you.
1:01:37 Steven Gundry? Good to see you.
1:01:40 Speaker 00 There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, if you enjoyed learning about the fountain of youth, how to live longer, then make sure to share this with your friends. LewisHowes.com/772. Again, super powerful insights. Check out the full show notes over there. Check out the new book. Watch the video over on YouTube as well. Again, your health is an important thing and that's why we have these episodes on health. If you're looking to achieve greatness, you must achieve greatness within yourself first, with your body, your mind, your soul, your heart. And if you want to live longer, if you want to have the opportunity to make a bigger impact in the world, you've got to live longer to reach those people that you're looking to create with.
1:02:22 Speaker 00 So, as the Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise, we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear." Make sure you're taking care of yourself today. Make sure you remind yourself how much you matter. And send a hug and some love to someone else around you today. Spread love. It's easy to make an impact. All you need to do is smile towards someone else and brighten their day. I love you so very much and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.
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