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These foods are designed to be addictive.
Search this video
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There was an old there's statement that's any white substance is addictive.
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White flour is addictive, white sugar is addictive, cocaine is addictive, heroin is addictive.
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You choose the white, it's addictive.
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Unfortunately, sickness is good for business.
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And I'm sad to say you know, I I turned against that over 20 years ago.
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You know, I could still be patching people's coronary arteries up now and doing bypasses.
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But I found I could actually keep people away from me by teaching them how to Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you who come back every week to listen, learn, and grow.
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Now, you know that I like to find people that can share with you really great insights about your mind, about your body, about your diet, about your food.
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And today I'm sitting down with none other than Dr. Steven Gundry. Dr.
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Gundry, it's such a pleasure to have you here.
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Thank you so much for joining me.
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I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
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We were sharing earlier that we share a mutual friend in Lewis Howes, and I've seen you on his show many times, and I'm really glad that we get to sit down together.
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Well, I appreciate you having me on because, you know, I have the Dr.
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Gundry podcast, and maybe by appearing here I can become the number one health podcast. So, thank you.
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Yeah, well, we we we go all across health, so we do mental health, physical health, spiritual health.
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Uh but today I'm really really excited to talk to you about food, our gut, diet, uh what we take in.
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Now, we've all heard the famous phrase that you are what you eat.
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We've heard it for years and years and years and years and years.
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And as someone who's been doing this for years and years and years, how true is that statement?
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And what is it What comes to mind when you hear that statement?
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Well, I always add the second part of that sentence, which is probably far more important than what you just said.
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You are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate.
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And that's actually one of the big surprises in the last 20 years of my career, that so many times it's Yeah, we got to choose what we're going to eat, but we have to choose what that animal ate or what that plant had been fed or fertilized or sprayed with to really make a good outcome.
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And it it always shocks me.
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And how do we get aware of that?
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I feel like one of the biggest challenges in this whole field is, you know, we have all these labels of organic or not organic or whatever it may be.
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I find like as a uneducated consumer, I'm speaking about myself, it's so difficult to know what it's been sprayed with, what it hasn't been sprayed with, what it's been exposed to. Uh where do you start?
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So, I guess organic is is a good place to start, but as I've, you know, learned from my patients through the years, so many of us uh are sensitive to, for instance, wheat, uh the lectins in wheat, that organic wheat is just as deadly to you as wheat that's been sprayed with glyphosate, um Roundup.
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Uh on the other hand, most people I think still are unaware that glyphosate, Roundup, is one of the best ways to destroy your gut that anyone has ever developed.
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And now people associate glyphosate with GMO, genetically modified organisms, but in fact, glyphosate is now routinely sprayed on conventional crops, conventional wheat, conventional oats, conventional flaxseed, conventional uh soybeans, conventional um uh canola oil, canola.
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And so, and it doesn't have to be declared on any label.
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So, not only, speaking of you are what you eat, these crop foods are fed to our animals.
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And those animals, literally, not only pass on glyphosate into us when we eat them, but as I talk about, most animals are still given antibiotics to make them grow faster and grow fatter.
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And those antibiotics are passed into us, as well.
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And one of the things that we didn't know when broad-spectrum antibiotics were introduced, uh, about 50 years ago, is that we didn't know about the gut microbiome.
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Nobody knew about it until about 10 years ago.
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And we had no idea that these broad-spectrum antibiotics was literally throwing napalm on our tropical rainforest in our gut.
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And so, most of us, inadvertently, are swallowing antibiotics every day, and are swallowing glyphosate every day, um, without our knowing.
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And, sadly, looking at, for instance, organic oats, a huge number of organic oat products have glyphosate in them. You know, I had, uh, Dr.
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Mark Hyman, who's a friend of mine, on my Dr.
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Yeah, we've had him on the show, too.
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Yeah, on my podcast, and Mark's a pretty careful eater, um, and he still has significant amounts of glyphosate in himself.
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And he's going, you know, "What the heck?
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You know, how what am I going to do?"
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And so, if if he and I are really kind of sensitive, picky eaters, imagine what the average consumer is is getting in their food.
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And is there a way of someone measuring how much glyphosate's in their body, like you were saying with Dr.
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Yeah, we can actually measure glyphosate.
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You can measure glyphosate in blood.
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You can measure glyphosate in hair.
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We when we're looking for mischief in some of our patients who who aren't doing better with doing by following the rules, many times we're shocked that glyphosate is right up there on their culprits.
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And when you say deadly, let's talk about that because I think for a lot of people we don't really understand.
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Like you were saying that from a gut perspective, we only started understanding about microbiome probably around 10 years ago at least in Western medicine. Correct.
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In Eastern medicine, the gut is at the heart of your health.
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And and that's kind of what I was especially exposed to through my wife as I was mentioning.
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But when you say that we only found out 10 years ago, I think there's still a whole group of people who are just not aware of how central their gut is to their health.
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But also when you say deadly and you say things like wheat, it's like well, wheat's in everything.
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Where how do you help people understand what you mean by deadly and what's actually happening happening inside of us when we consume these products?
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Yeah, so I mean Hippocrates, father of Western medicine, 2,500 years ago said all disease begins in the gut.
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And one of my colleagues from Harvard, Dr.
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Fasano, has paraphrased that.
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He I think stole it from me, but that's okay.
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All disease begins in a leaky gut.
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And certainly I've been preaching and publishing that almost all diseases, whether it's heart disease, whether it's cancer, whether it's dementia, whether it's arthritis, certainly whether it's autoimmune diseases, begin in a leaky gut.
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Now, people are beginning to hear and maybe understand leaky gut.
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If you'd ask me 15 years ago if I thought what I thought about leaky gut, I would have told you it was pseudoscience. Now, we can measure it. We can see it happen.
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Uh anyone with an autoimmune disease, I can assure your listeners has a leaky gut.
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And the good news is, when we seal a leaky gut, and it's actually quite possible to do, the autoimmune disease goes away. Wow. Um goes away. Wow.
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Yeah, it stays in remission.
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So, getting back to we have a wonderful set of bacteria, viruses, fungi in our gut, over a hundred trillion different organisms.
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And all these little one-celled creatures are really probably the most important organ in our body that we really are were totally unaware of.
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And there's this incredible symbiotic relationship between our gut microbiome, our skin microbiome, our oral microbiome, and everything that happens to us.
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We now know that they control our immune system. They control our mood.
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Uh they control, quite frankly, whether you or I are going to develop heart disease.
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They control whether you or I are going to get dementia.
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And uh a lot of people, particularly I think in the West, uh say, "Oh, come on now.
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You know, we're the most advanced, highest organism that's ever happened.
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And our brains are the most exquisite things.
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And you're trying to tell me that a one-celled organism is actually con- controlling our fate?" And yes, they are.
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What what are some of the basic things?
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Let's let's make this really simple for everyone listening now.
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What are some of the basic do's and don'ts of strengthening our guts, strengthening our digestion, making sure we're not giving in to some of these basic challenges that we may come across. You said you and Dr.
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Mark Hyman maybe on the very safe end of I'd love to hear what you guys do eat on a daily basis and you of course because you're here, but but I would love to hear what the basics are and then what you do at the very extent because I feel like you're someone who's obviously so well researched, read, you've seen it affect people's lives.
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You must be on one end of the spectrum.
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How do people start on that journey?
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Well, so one of the things I talk about in my current book, The Energy Paradox, which I think is very illustrative.
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Some Duke researchers who I've had on my podcast were fascinated with this hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania called the Hadzas.
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The Hadzas are incredibly healthy. They have no diseases.
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They walk The men walk eight to 10 miles a day hunting.
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The women walk oh four to five miles gathering. And they're very thin. They're very fit.
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And they said, "You know, we should look at their energy expenditure, compare them to desk workers in the United States."
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And our supposition, our hypothesis is that these guys are lean and fit and everything cuz they're walking, they're always moving, and their energy expenditure is going to be a whole lot higher than the desk workers.
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And of course, that's why the desk workers are all so fat and miserable.
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Turns out when they did the measurements, they found out that these Hadzas are actually expending the exact same amount of energy Wow. as the desk workers. Wow.
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Now, when we make a hypothesis in research um and we can't prove our hypothesis, then that really bothers us, and we sometimes fudge and say, "Well, of course, this is what we expected to find, uh, because everybody has the same amount of energy expenditure, whether you're doing a whole lot or just sitting at a desk."
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And to me, when I read that article, and that's why I wanted them on the program, that didn't pass the sniff test. Um, didn't make sense.
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And I said, "So, sure, okay, they're both expending the same amount of energy, but clearly those desk workers aren't walking 8 to 10 miles every day.
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Where is their energy expenditure going?"
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And it turns out, from my research and many other people's research, it's going to inflammation.
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And the inflammation is actually driven by leaky gut.
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Now, the best way to compare this, we have the lining of our intestines is the same surface area as a tennis court.
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So, when we're watching Wimbledon right now, that huge surface area is actually inside our gut.
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And everybody kind of looks down there, "Wait a minute, there's no tennis court in here." Well, in fact, there is.
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And we have, for lack of a better word, a design flaw.
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That that tennis court, the lining is only one cell thick. Right.
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And those cells are all held together by what are called tight junctions.
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When I was a kid, we played Red Rover, Red Rover, where two lines of kids locked arms, and you tried to run across, and most cultures actually have that game.
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And so, they're all locked together because there's only one cell standing between everything you ate, and all of these bacteria and you.
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And on the other side of this one cell wall is 80% of our immune system.
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80% of all of our white cells are literally waiting on the other side because, quite frankly, that's where mischief can come through.
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And so, normally, um that wall has some pretty interesting def- fences itself against being broken through.
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But one of the things that Dr.
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Fasano, uh who I mentioned before, found was that gluten, which is a plant protein, which is called a lectin, which I guess I became famous for, is able to actually attach, if it can get to the wall of the gut, and attach to a receptor, and actually break the tight junction.
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And now you've got a gap.
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And through this gap, you can get proteins, bacteria, bacterial particles, and leaky gut, and our immune system goes, "Oh my gosh, we're under attack.
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We got to rally the troops. The troops need food.
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The troops need supplies.
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And give us all the energy you've got."
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And so, most people don't realize is that the vast majority of us on in the West, particularly, uh all of our energy is being devoted to this war that's going on inside of us. That's incredible.
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I Yeah, that's it's just It's insane.
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That example with the Hunzas, you said?
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That Yeah, that's That's that's fascinating that all of our energy expenditure's all here. Yeah.
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And so, that's why we feel more drained.
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It's why we feel more stressed.
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It's why we feel more overworked and exhausted and fatigued and I think what's really fascinating about this is I think that so many of us today feel that our a lot of our pain is mental, but it's actually starting here.
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Would you say that's true?
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Does that make sense that Yeah, uh you know, we've talked about for for a number of years we've talked about, you know, the gut-brain connection. Mhm.
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And the the the gut is the second brain.
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Well, we now have kind of added to that the microbiome gut-brain connection.
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And what's fascinating and I I talk about it in the energy paradox is that these bacteria, primarily, make compounds that actually communicate to our brain.
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Uh they are actually a language.
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They're the they're literally called a trans-kingdom language where bacteria talk to our neurons, to our mitochondria, the little energy-producing cells, to our immune system, and they literally send them text messages.
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Um a few years ago, uh usually every year, uh pre-COVID, I I pre- presented a talk at the World Congress of Microbiota in Paris, and the organizer, uh Dr.
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Edis, uh took me aside, and it must have been 6 years ago, and he said, "I'm going to tell you something.
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The microbiome, you know, talks to the mitochondria, talks to the brain."
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I said, "Okay, I believe you, but why haven't we discovered the language?"
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And he says, "Oh, don't worry. It will be discovered.
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I guarantee you it happens."
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And sure enough, the language was discovered, and it's it's literally, I think it's as important as breaking the Enigma code, which was the German code in World War II. Um Yes. Yes. Yes. Remember that? Yep. Yep. And so Yeah.
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And so, breaking this code, it actually won the Nobel Prize for medicine.
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Uh so, there is truly a language that bacteria use to tell us kind of what's going on. Um they're in a way Mhm.
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the real guardians of what is coming into us. Mhm.
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And the cool thing about bacteria, everybody thinks our genes are so important.
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Well, we actually have fewer genes than corn. Wow.
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We actually do not have the most genes of any animal.
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That a sand flea has more genes than we do.
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And the neat thing about bacteria is they have their own genome, but bacteria divide so rapidly.
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They can actually change their genome very, very quickly.
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And so, many of us think that we've actually uploaded most of our computing power Mhm.
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to the bacterial and viral genome inside of us. Mhm.
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Uh cuz it's it's a much bigger cloud than our genes. That's incredible. Wow.
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That's Yeah, so we I guess we're just getting so much I mean, it feels like for years we've just got so much wrong. We've Yeah.
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we've had the wrong information, we made the wrong decisions.
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Bringing it back to the basics, if someone listening right now and saying, "Dr.
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Gundry, I can actually relate to what you're saying.
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Like I experience what you're saying."
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If someone's listening to us right now and they're just like, "I feel like I have a leaky gut or I'm on the way there or I already know and I'm I'm struggling even further."
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What are some of the things that we need to cut out and what are the things we need to adopt in a very simple way because I feel like for most of us, we don't have the time to read and research and journal and and and I'm hoping that after this podcast many people are going to go and order your books, The Energy Paradox and The Plant Paradox.
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I think that'll be fantastic insight and use for all of our listeners today. But simplify it for me.
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What would you encourage us uh stop eating this, start eating this and why?
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Well, yeah, it's interesting you mentioned some people have a gut feeling and it's interesting women in general have a much better gut feeling than men.
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And interestingly enough, women by far have far more autoimmune diseases than men.
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And fun fact or sad fact, women actually develop far more Alzheimer's disease than men. Wow.
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And even though they're clearly the stronger sex.
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So women actually are really in tune with their gut far more than men and we have this epidemic of autoimmune diseases, Hashimoto's thyroiditis for example, IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
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And these are real things. These are not imagined.
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Um I just saw a young woman actually from LA who's been to every specialist in the world with uh oh um depression, anxiety, stomach issues and they can't find anything wrong with her.
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We finally did a leaky gut panel and food sensitivity panel and it turns out that you know to me it was obvious that she had a profoundly leaky gut and that so many of the foods that she was being told to eat were actually causing her leaky gut.
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And you know, she she really she's only 12 years old and she just started crying. Wow.
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And she said, "You mean I'm not crazy?
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You mean this is this isn't in my head? Mhm.
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Uh cuz they wanted to put her on antidepressants. Of course. And I said, "No.
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I said, this is you know, look, it's real. We can measure this."
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So, getting back to your question.
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The Hanzos, for instance, have a incredibly diverse microbiome.
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They've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of species of bacteria in their gut.
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And a lot of those bacteria actually like to eat the things that are troublesome to us.
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For instance, there are bacteria that like to eat gluten, believe it or not.
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And they go, "Oh, you know, gluten, yummy."
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The problem for most of us is all of us have been given antibiotics for dumb things.
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And all of us inadvertently have been eating the antibiotics that our animals have been fed.
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And so, and glyphosate, believe it or not, was patented as an antibiotic.
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It was not patented as a weed killer. And Monsanto knew this.
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And yet so, every time we eat these things, we actually kind of kill off the first line of defense that has been established for eons of time in dealing with plant compounds that don't like us. Yeah.
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That was the premise of the plant paradox that plants, believe it or not, do not want to be eaten. They have a life.
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They you know, we're here first, actually.
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And they don't want their kids eaten, their babies, their seeds.
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So, they protect themselves with compounds that are designed to make an animal sick.
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And some of those compounds are these proteins called lectins that can cause leaky gut.
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So, where are these things?
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Well, these things are in almost all grains.
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They're in pseudo grains like quinoa or buckwheat.
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They're not in millet and sorghum.
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So, folks, if you're interested in eating grains, and I have nothing against eating grains per se, millet and sorghum are perfectly safe foods.
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They don't have any lectins. Wow.
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Do quinoa and buckwheat have less or no They actually have some of the worst lectins there are. Sadly.
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In fact, when I first worked on this, I I really wanted buckwheat not to have lectins. I love buckwheat. What about farro? Farro, same problem. Okay.
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Uh any of these fancy names for ancient wheat are are just it's still wheat. Sorry about that. Got it.
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And ancient wheat is just as mischievous as modern wheat. Yes.
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Um beans and legumes uh have some of the highest lectin contents of any food.
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Now, the good news is that pressure cooking or fermentation of, for instance, quinoa or buckwheat or any of the beans are perfectly safe.
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For instance, all Everybody says, "Oh, you're anti-bean." I'm not anti-bean.
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I I just want to get rid of their offending compounds because, quite frankly, they're anti-me. Right.
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Um And I mean, there's there's amazing research looking at the most famous one was was the healthy eating day at a the school in Boston.
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And 23 students and teachers went to the hospital with bloody diarrhea traced to undercooked beans that they were fed on their healthy eating day. Wow.
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Um but, get a pressure cooker.
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Um I've got a whole book, the Plant Paradox Family Cookbook, on how to pressure cook these things. Mhm.
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Luckily, there's a couple of companies now that pressure cook their beans, Eden brand, e d e n, and now Jovial brand, which is an Italian company.
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Easy to remember, Jovial, Jovial happy person.
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Oh, yeah, I want some happy beans. Yeah.
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And I have those several times a week.
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There's beans have some great benefits as long as you defuse them. Got that.
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The same way with the nightshade family and you and I off camera we're talking about nightshades and those are eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes.
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And believe it or not goji berries are part of the nightshade family. that's a strange one. I know. Yeah.
25:23
Uh goji berries were actually from North America and they were they were called the wolf berry and they were taken to China in trade during early trading days and they thrived in China and so yeah, they're they're in nightshade from America. Wow.
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And the peels and the seeds of nightshades are the troublesome things. So Right.
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many cultures, for instance, the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back because they knew how deadly they were.
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And really to this day the Italians always peel and deseed their tomatoes before they eat them.
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Um the Southwest American Indians who love chili peppers always peel and deseed their chilies before they either eat them or grind them into chili powder.
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In fact, anybody who wants to do this experiment, just go to the store, buy a can of green chilies, chopped green chilies, open it up and you'll notice they're peeled and deseeded.
26:26
Uh because cultures have figured out how to do this.
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Like for instance, the Incas um you know, loved quinoa.
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But they soaked quinoa, they fermented it, they let it rot and then they cooked it and it's not on the package directions. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah, let it rot. Yeah, let it rot.
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That's Yeah, it's that I didn't I had no idea about that about quinoa and buckwheat.
26:53
So, that's that's massive news to me.
26:55
And when But I'm sure, you know, and and I'm trying to think for everyone who's listening to us, and you've heard this a million times because you're sharing things that are quite uh they shouldn't be, but they are because And and it's I find it really funny when someone says, "Well, Dr.
27:10
Gundry, you're against beans."
27:10
Because I'm just like I mean, I don't think you have a vendetta against beans or people who own bean production companies or whatever it is.
27:19
So, I always find that fascinating whenever I hear that because all I'm hearing is just being healthy requires a completely rewiring of our diet, and that is hard to hear. It's difficult to hear.
27:31
Is living the healthy way expensive or no?
27:37
Are some of these changes expensive changes, or are they are they affordable changes? That's a great question.
27:41
I actually still see Medicaid and Medi-Cal patients, uh you know, even though my you know, accountants say, "Wait, would you stop doing that?"
27:51
Well, I believe everybody has a right to good health. Mhm.
27:53
But we found that so many disadvantaged people, poor people, they actually end up saving money when they do this because profit margin is huge in processed foods.
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And about 70% of the food we eat is processed or ultra-processed.
28:17
And And when you say processed, you mean from packages? Yeah, from packages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From packages.
28:21
And people say, "Well, I always read the label." Yeah.
28:23
And one of my advice is, "Look, if you're reading a label, uh put it down.
28:30
There's no label on a head of lettuce."
28:34
Uh and labeling laws uh have been changed to actually fool you. Oh gosh, yeah. It's crazy.
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We had the former head of the FDA on my podcast uh recently, and he is actually the person who was put put the labeling on the back.
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And, he was actually called into the Oval Office, and I won't tell you who the president was cuz that's really not important.
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And, big agriculture uh, was and the head of the Department of Agriculture was in there, and they said, "You can't put this system on a package."
29:09
And, he said, "Well, wait a minute.
29:09
You know, that's what's in there."
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And, they said, "You can't do that.
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You cannot tell people how much sugar is in our products."
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And, he said, "But, you know, there it is."
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They said, "You're going to have to change the label.
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You're going to have to hide the sugar."
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And, this is coming from the head of the FDA.
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And, he said, "For instance, let me give you an example." It's a great example.
29:30
He said, "You look at a label of a bagel." Mhm.
29:35
And, he said, "Bagel says 300 calories."
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And, you look down, and it says 1 g of sugar. And, you go, "Oh, great. No sugar in a bagel."
29:42
And, it doesn't taste sweet. Yeah. He says, "No."
29:44
He says, "There's actually 12 teaspoons of sugar in that bagel."
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And, I go, "I know that, and you know that.
29:52
Why don't Why doesn't the consumer know it?" He says, "We hid it.
29:57
It's under total carbohydrates."
30:00
And, you take total carbohydrates on a label.
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And, this is all in all my books.
30:05
Take away the dietary fiber, which is actually what we feed good bacteria with.
30:11
And, that will tell you the amount of sugar in that serving.
30:17
Then, just for fun, there's 4 g of sugar. Uh, there's Sorry.
30:21
There's 4 g of carbohydrate in a teaspoon of sugar.
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So, divide that total carbohydrate by four, and it'll actually tell you the teaspoons of sugar you're eating.
30:34
And, when I And, I have a bunch of these packages in my office.
30:36
And, when I show a patient a healthy product, and they go, "Wait a minute.
30:42
You know, there's 5 tsp of sugar in those, you know, 10 little cassava chips I'm eating?" I said, "Yep." And they go, "Whoa." Yeah. Yeah.
30:53
How How is How is the FDA getting away with that? Like, how is that okay?
30:57
Because that That sounds Sickness is good for business.
31:02
Yeah, but that's but it's it's so it's so hard to believe that people are doing that to their own family, their own kids, their own you know, parents, grandparents.
31:10
Like, it's everyone's consuming it, right?
31:14
It's just scary to believe that It would be different if they were really healthy and their family was really healthy and then they were just But remember, we're in we are, you know, a profit-driven society and these companies are beholden to shareholders. Mhm.
31:29
And whether they like it or not, the bottom line is they have to produce a profit. Mhm.
31:34
And as as you know, and Mark Hyman and I know, these foods are designed to be addictive.
31:41
You know, there was an old there's a statement that's any white substance is addictive.
31:47
And we, you know, white flour is addictive, white sugar is addictive, cocaine is addictive, heroin is addictive.
31:55
You choose the white, it's addictive.
31:57
And they've made a science out of addiction. Mhm.
32:01
And again, unfortunately, sickness is good for business.
32:07
And I'm sad to say, you know, I I turned against that over 20 years ago.
32:13
You know, I could still be patching people's coronary arteries up and doing bypasses, but I found I could actually keep people away from me Mhm.
32:22
dumb by teaching them how to eat. Yeah.
32:25
Yeah, and I want to talk to you about that.
32:27
It feels like there's two tra- and you can actually guide us better on this, but it feels like there's two transitions.
32:33
There's And I know this from changing my own diet, having met my wife, and her having a big impact on me, but when you look at diet, there's the change of habit, and then there's like a change of palate and taste, and like addiction, as you're saying.
32:47
Like we we are addicted, we're craving these things that are terrible for us, whether it's fries, or whether it's gluten.
32:53
Like I know that I've My wife's always telling me to avoid any of the mock meat, or you know, because we're both plant-based.
33:02
So, my wife and I are both plant-based in our diets, but she's always telling me to avoid anything with gluten in it that's processed vegan meat, or whatever it may be, because she's dead against gluten.
33:10
And so, when when you when you do this, it's almost like what is the process you've seen people go through in trying to change their habit, trying to change their palate?
33:20
How difficult it has been?
33:22
What has helped people the most?
33:22
How have people actually broken through that 1 month of being excited?
33:26
And I know you created a 30-day challenge.
33:28
How How have people gone from 30 days to make that the next three decades of their life, rather than 30 days and back to where they were?
33:36
Well, that's a good segue into this stuff we were talking about earlier.
33:41
There's essentially, simplistically, two two types of gut bacteria.
33:47
And I call the good guys your gut buddies.
33:50
And then I call the bad guys the gang members.
33:55
And they they coexist, and the gang members, again, these guys send signals to our brain.
34:03
The gang members love simple sugars and saturated fats.
34:09
And they actually tell your brain to go get these things.
34:15
And one of the things that they're unique about is they're really good at making you fat when you eat these things.
34:23
They actually extract more calories and pass it on to you.
34:25
On the other hand, the gut buddies hate simple sugars, hate saturated fats, they like complex carbohydrates, fibers, and they actually take most of that and keep it for themselves, make more little bacteria, and they tell you, "Hey, this is the stuff that we want to eat."
34:49
And so, I can take a a meat and potatoes guy and who said, "Ugh, salads, you know, vegetables, ugh, you know, I hate that stuff."
35:01
And kind of make him eat this stuff for a couple of weeks, and he'll come back and he'll go, "This is bizarre.
35:08
I've been taken over by a foreign life form."
35:11
He says, "I I kill now to get a salad.
35:14
If I don't get a salad, you know, I'm I'm ready to push somebody out of the way to get it."
35:20
He says, "This isn't me."
35:20
And I said, "Well, actually, it is the new you.
35:23
You have been, you know, taken over by the gut buddies, and they're now directing your taste."
35:31
Let me give you one more exciting example.
35:33
Um There was a recent Chinese study looking at fasting.
35:39
And there's a a new theory called the gut-centric theory of hunger that I talk about in the energy paradox.
35:47
That theory is that these bacteria actually guide our food choices and our hunger, whether we want to eat or not.
35:55
Not our brain, not our willpower.
36:00
So, they took a bunch of volunteers, and they put them on either a 7- or 14-day water fast.
36:08
Part of the group were given 100 calories of prebiotic fiber.
36:14
That means we can't digest it, but the gut bacteria can eat it. And just 100 calories.
36:19
The guys who got the 100 calories of prebiotic fiber, even going on a 14-day water fast had absolutely no hunger.
36:32
The folks who didn't get it were hungry.
36:35
And you go, "Well, what's the deal?"
36:38
Well, it turns out the guys that got the prebiotic fiber, their gut buddies said, "Thanks a lot.
36:44
We're fed, got what we need.
36:47
You don't have to go looking for food."
36:51
And in a way, that's a really incredibly exciting and actually empowering.
36:56
Because if we if we give them what they want, uh they'll take care of us. Mhm.
37:02
Uh I I I got to know Jack LaLanne uh in his later years.
37:06
Jack LaLanne was the godfather of fitness as far as I'm concerned.
37:12
And Jack LaLanne had an expression.
37:16
He says, "If it tastes good, spit it out."
37:17
Now, all of my staff say, "Will you stop saying that because now you're going to make people think you want them to eat non-tasty things."
37:25
Well, he wasn't really saying that.
37:27
What he was saying, he didn't know back then, is if you eat for them, Yeah.
37:32
then you'll you'll take care of they'll take care of you.
37:38
And I think he was absolutely right. Yeah.
37:40
And it and it is that transition and it it is it is crazy though that most of the stuff that's good for us is just our palate's just not trained to like it. Correct. Right?
37:51
Like that's just the way it is.
37:53
And I've found that as I've had my wife in my ear over the years, it's and she's like almost coached me and guided me through this from a physical health point of view, I've seen my palate start to change.
38:02
And and it's changed around stuff that I was addicted to.
38:07
Like I was addicted to chocolate or or sugar because that's what I grew up having.
38:11
And so for me now, when I'm generally not eating any um you know, raw sugars or whatever, I'm eating natural sugars and uh trying to remove it completely, but I can notice that my palate slowly started to change.
38:25
It's taken a lot of time and effort.
38:27
Uh what are some of the Tell us about some of these products and supplements that you've created to help this transition?
38:32
And I'm asking because you know, I'm I'm already like straight after this, I'm going to be coming to your clinic to to to get checked out and then get your help because I'm already, you know, fully uh what's the right word?
38:46
I'm fully immersed in what you're saying today.
38:48
Like I'm thinking through everything you're saying, and I'm just so happy that you're doing this.
38:50
Uh it it brings me so much joy that someone's actually speaking about these things in a scientific, clear, and researched way because I think it's so needed today.
39:02
Uh what Tell me what you eat first of all on a daily basis.
39:04
I think it'd be good for people to hear. Uh what Dr.
39:08
Mark Hyman eats if you feel like sharing that with us.
39:09
And what was your journey to get there personally?
39:14
Yeah, um Because you didn't know this when you were born.
39:16
You haven't been living like this for No, but you you make a good point.
39:18
You know, I I use this as example for my patients.
39:21
Uh you know, a little child in Japan um doesn't come out of the womb wanting to eat seaweed. Totally.
39:31
and yet, uh you know, almost from day one, they are exposed to seaweed and think it's the best thing, you know, they they ever had. Yeah.
39:39
And so, almost all of our preferences are are culturally driven.
39:42
And there's nothing wrong with culture.
39:45
There you know, there's let's embrace culture, but uh for instance, breakfast.
39:51
Breakfast is actually a very modern invention.
39:53
If you follow hunter-gatherers, there is no such thing as breakfast because there's no storage system, you know, nobody's got a refrigerator.
40:03
There's not even a cupboard.
40:05
And so, they have to find breakfast.
40:09
And breakfast means break fast. Mhm.
40:12
And most of them don't eat until 11:00 in in the morning.
40:17
Interesting, I just got back from France.
40:20
Um the French actually have no word for breakfast.
40:23
Déjeuner was the first meal. Wow.
40:26
When all the tourists arrived, they made up a word petit déjeuner, you know, little first meal.
40:33
Uh and that's breakfast, but breakfast was an industrial revolution product. Mhm.
40:38
Um men would have to go to factories very early in the morning.
40:45
There were no breaks, there were no lunch breaks, and they'd get home late at night.
40:49
And so, their wives would make them a breakfast before they went to work because they were going to fast. Mhm.
40:56
They were basically not going to do Ramadan every day of their lives.
40:58
You know, a pre-dawn meal and then a post uh uh sunset meal, which I write about in in the book.
41:08
Ramadan fasting is really useful, but that's beside the point.
41:12
So, the Kellogg's Corn Flakes company, which was founded in 1906, uh actually 1906 Wow.
41:21
Yeah, made breakfast cereal the most important meal.
41:24
And interestingly enough, uh they and the United Fruit Company, who were the Chiquita Banana, paid physicians in the early 1900s to tell people that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Wow. Yeah.
41:41
And so, you know, it's again um I lived in England training in children's heart surgery, and the Brits were never exposed to cereal until 1942 when when the allies when the Americans came over. Wow.
41:56
And I have a lot of patients from, for instance, the Middle East.
42:01
They were never exposed to cereal until 1960. Mhm.
42:04
And you can just watch our cultural spread uh take over.
42:11
And yeah, just great marketing.
42:14
It's addictive food, too.
42:16
It's It's really simple carbohydrates.
42:19
All right, so No, no, this is good. This is great.
42:20
I I love here I love how you're able to your research and obviously your your depth of knowledge of interweaving like history with food, with culture, with, you know, what's happening economically.
42:34
I I I just think that that's what I'm finding so fascinating about this.
42:36
I don't think I've ever sat down with someone who's broken it down in this way for me.
42:40
And And actually when you start seeing that, it's easy for anyone listening to connect the dots and go, "Oh yeah, that is right.
42:45
I only like that because of I was born in this area or this is what we did or this what my family did."
42:51
And now I realize that that doesn't mean it's healthy or good for me. Yeah.
42:56
But yes, tell us about your diet and then I'm going to get you to analyze mine.
42:59
So I want to share with you what I eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then I'll get you to break down what I need to change and I'd love that.
43:05
You can be honest with me.
43:06
the last 21 years now, from January through June, Mhm.
43:10
uh I don't eat breakfast.
43:13
I don't eat lunch uh during the week. And I eat all at all.
43:18
And I eat all my calories in a 2-hour window from 5:00 to 7:00 at night.
43:20
Uh so 22 out of 24 hours I'm fasting. You don't eat at all? at all.
43:28
Not even like uh a snack or a bar or Nothing. Wow.
43:31
I have about And you have a busy life, just to clarify.
43:36
You don't sit around on a beach all day.
43:37
So you're like today you were like, "I've got another meeting to go to."
43:39
Like Well, I So I I see patients six days a week.
43:42
I see patients Monday through Thursday.
43:46
Friday I'm at Gundry MD here in LA.
43:48
Saturday and Sunday I have patients in Santa Barbara at my other office.
43:54
So tomorrow, Saturday, I will have a full patient schedule.
44:00
Sunday I will have a full patient schedule.
44:02
So six days a week I'm seeing patients, one day a week I'm at Gundry MD.
44:06
So, and I don't eat during those times.
44:10
How how how long have you been doing that? 21 years. Wow. 21 years.
44:15
And so then in the I was actually, as far as I know, the first person to write about intermittent fasting in my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. Yeah.
44:23
It's actually a hilarious story, but Tell us.
44:25
So, I had an entire chapter on time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting, whatever you want to call it.
44:33
Compressing the eating window from when you start eating in the morning till when you finish at night.
44:42
And there's more and more and more and more evidence that if we can reduce that eating window to 6 to 8 hours a day.
44:48
Yeah, mine's eight right now.
44:52
Yeah, 6 to 8 hours a day, it's going to have profound short-term and long-term effects on our health.
44:59
And we can actually measure that with some cool test called insulin-like growth factor, and do that experiment on a person and watch their insulin-like growth factor plummet.
45:11
So, anyhow, uh So, I wrote an entire chapter in my first book, and my editor, Heather Jackson, said, "Look, this book is so crazy anyhow, this is nuts."
45:25
And she said, "I'm going to cut this chapter."
45:26
I said, "No, no, no, you can't do that.
45:29
This is really important.
45:29
You know, I've been doing this for 5 years already, and you know, here's the data, here's the research, it's you know, it's proven in animals, blah blah blah.
45:39
The Ramadan diet is a is a version of that, you know, we know human studies. You can't do it."
45:45
And she said, "I'll give you two pages to make your case." Wow. And okay.
45:52
So, she came up to me, I was lecturing at the Mindbodygreen Symposium 2 years ago, pre-COVID, and she was in the audience, and she came up to me.
46:03
She says, "First of all, you know, congratulations on everything."
46:06
She said, "Secondly, I have to apologize.
46:08
She says, you were right about intermittent fasting.
46:11
You were so far ahead of your time. I apologize.
46:15
Will you ever forgive me?" Um I said, "It's okay."
46:21
No, I'll never forgive you. That's good.
46:24
Yeah, so it's very powerful and literally the second half of the energy paradox is to how to get people to implement this.
46:32
The problem with intermittent fasting, 80% of Americans, Westerners, are pre-diabetic, insulin resistant, whether they know it or not.
46:42
And their doctors don't know how to diagnose it, quite frankly.
46:46
And when people embark on trying to extend the period of time where they're not eating, they literally fall flat on their face. Yeah.
46:56
They they get headaches, they get weak, they they get Energy lasts. is gone.
47:02
And that's because we can't convert from burning glucose, sugar as a fuel, to burning fatty acids as a fuel.
47:11
And that's what's called metabolic flexibility.
47:12
And if you want to live a long time, if you want to have a brain that works late into life, you have to have metabolic flexibility.
47:21
You have to be able to change, almost like a hybrid car, change from a gasoline engine to a battery.
47:29
And that's basically the analogy.
47:29
And most of us are stuck using sugar as a fuel. And can we build that? Exactly.
47:37
So, but you got to you can't just jump off the cliff. Yes, of course.
47:41
Yeah, no one needs to do that overnight. Yeah.
47:43
And so, what I do in the book is say, "Okay, let's suppose you eat breakfast, break fast, at 7:00 in the morning.
47:52
Tomorrow, I want you to eat break fast at 8:00 in the morning.
47:55
Come on, give me an hour.
47:59
And we're going to do that for a week.
48:01
Okay, next week we're going to do it at 9:00 in the morning.
48:04
And we're going to practice that for a week.
48:06
It's like going to the gym.
48:10
You know, you're not going to pick up 50-lb dumbbell and do bicep curls. Uh Definitely. Can you? Oh, yes. But we got to train you.
48:19
So, we have to train your mitochondria, your squash that eating time. Yeah.
48:25
And so, over a 6-week period, we can get most people to having their breakfast at noon. Mhm.
48:30
And then if I can get people to quit eating at around 7:00 at night, Mhm.
48:39
there's tremendous evidence that if we got a 3-hour window before we go to bed, we'll actually have a period when we go to sleep called brainwashing, which I write about and Dale Bredesen writes about.
48:54
We literally clean the toxins out of our brain, like a washing machine. Mhm.
48:59
But if we eat too close to bedtime, Yes.
49:01
all the blood flow that would normally do that is down in our gut digesting. Mhm.
49:07
So, but that's what we that's what we do.
49:10
If we do this in a stepwise progression, Yes.
49:12
it's also the same as weaning off sweet taste. Yes, yes.
49:16
You know, there are actually a number of good natural no-calorie sweeteners out there. monk fruit.
49:24
Monk fruit is really quite good.
49:25
That's what I My new favorite is allulose because allulose is actually a prebiotic.
49:29
And it's a natural sugar.
49:34
And what do they put it in for you to eat it?
49:35
It's a it's a white powder.
49:38
Unfortunately, but yeah, it's readily available now in a lot of stores.
49:41
If not, you can find it online. Right.
49:43
And it's a it's a really unique sweetener. Right.
49:49
But one of the things you want to do is retreat from sweet.
49:54
And so, if you're used to putting oh a teaspoon of monk fruit in your coffee or whatever and your yogurt, then put it down to a half a teaspoon. Yeah.
50:05
It won't be as sweet as you like, but in a week or so you'll say, "You know, this is really quite sweet." Yeah.
50:09
Well, then put a quarter of a teaspoon in.
50:11
Um that's and it's an easy way. Don't jump off cliffs. Totally, yeah.
50:17
Cuz most people just fall flat on their face, they fail, and they say, "Ah, this isn't for me. This doesn't work." Yes. Yes, exactly.
50:24
And then it's just a power of it's a battle of willpower and Yeah, this should never be a battle of willpower.
50:32
And what I try to do is try to get folks to enlist the power of their gut bacteria. Mhm.
50:39
And if you, you know, if you start giving your gut bacteria what they want to eat, uh I mean, it's just amazing what happens to people. It's It's just amazing. Yeah. It's really exciting.
50:53
And that's why I see patients 6 days a week.
50:54
Uh you know, I'm like a kid in a candy store. Amazing.
51:00
me just tell you a real quick story. Please.
51:01
We've got this uh young um um we've got this young family in Texas.
51:10
Uh mother with two chi- two children.
51:10
Uh the boy Actually, I take care of both boys.
51:17
I saw this young man when he was 8 years old.
51:19
He had such severe psoriasis on his hands and feet that his hands and feet were bloody. Mhm.
51:25
And he had been to specialists, he'd been on drugs, and it was just the saddest thing.
51:32
His mother sent me pictures of this.
51:33
She said, "I carry my 8-year-old son around cuz he can't walk. He can't go to school.
51:38
Uh we've been everywhere, you know, can you help?" And I I said, "Yeah."
51:46
So, you know, we looked and he had massive leaky gut and multiple autoimmune diseases like psoriasis, like lupus.
51:56
And we put him through, okay, what are you sensitive to?
51:59
And put him on that program.
52:03
And he completely cleared up over the course of a year.
52:08
And then he went to school.
52:08
He started going to school and they were there was a birthday party at school.
52:14
And he ate a birthday cupcake. Mhm.
52:16
And literally within days, he started having these lesions on his hands and feet. Yeah.
52:25
And we checked he had completely sealed his leaky gut on his blood work. Wow.
52:30
So, we checked his blood work and boom, everything was kind of back to square one. That's amazing.
52:36
So, I just That's incredible.
52:37
I just talked to them on the phone this week. And he's now 12.
52:43
He's never He's like young patient.
52:44
Oh, I see lots of young kids.
52:48
Um And now he's in school. He's he's thriving. He's a smart kid.
52:51
You know, and mother, you know, sends me pictures. His hands are normal. His his feet are normal.
52:59
And, you know, it's like no wonder I get up every day.
53:02
You know, you get you get this kid who mother was carrying him around cuz he couldn't walk because his feet were bleeding and he couldn't hold a pencil cuz his hands were bleeding. And That's beautiful.
53:15
It's all because he had a leaky gut. Yeah, that's incredible. Dr.
53:18
Gundry, you're going to have to come back for a part two because I could talk to you for another hour, but we're running out of time.
53:25
So, I'm going to have to ask you our final five.
53:29
We end every episode with a final five fast five round where you have to answer each question in one word or one sentence maximum. It's really tight.
53:35
So, a seven words sentence.
53:40
So, these are your final five, Dr. Gundry.
53:42
The first question is, what is the best food diet advice you've ever received?
53:47
Uh, it's what I tell people not to eat that's important.
53:50
Uh, the more I tell people what not to eat, the better their health. Great.
53:54
Uh, second, what's the worst food diet advice you've ever received?
53:58
Eat multiple small meals throughout the day to keep your energy up. Okay, good one.
54:05
Uh, question number three.
54:08
Uh, what would you say is Wait, I don't want to take Oh, what is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Uh, pet my dogs. Oh, nice.
54:18
Uh, question number four, what's the biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 months?
54:24
Oh, in the last 12 months, the power of food to prevent COVID. Oh, wow. Okay.
54:35
And the fifth and final question, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
54:41
Uh, listen to your mother. That's brilliant. Dr.
54:44
Gundry, thank you so much for joining us on On Purpose today.
54:47
I want to recommend to everyone who's been listening and watching go and grab a copy of The Energy Paradox, which is Dr.
54:53
Gundry's new book, and go and grab a copy of The Plant Paradox.
54:55
I promise you you won't regret it.
54:57
I know that I'm going to be seeing Dr.
54:59
Gundry a lot more after this.
55:00
I'm hoping he'll make some time for me. Uh, but Dr.
55:03
Gundry, we'd love to invite you back on for a part two.
55:05
I think, uh, we have so much more to talk about and we've just scratched the surface.
55:08
So, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for sharing your insights with us. Great. Happy to come back. Yeah.
55:15
If you want even more videos just like this one, make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here.
55:19
I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book Think Like a Monk from thinklikeamonkbook. com.
55:29
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