DO THIS Every Day To Reduce Inflammation & STAY HEALTHY Until You're 105+ | Dr. Steven Gundry

The lining of the gut is only one cell thick and they're all kind of held together with what are called tight junctions locked arm and arm like a game we played red rover red rover that kids don't play anymore. So the bacteria are foreign if you will and there is an interaction with the bacteria in the gut. And what this model shows is that as those bacteria begin to break holes in the gut, break down the gut, then you can show that that is when aging starts. And the more the wall breaks down, the faster you age. So what happens is if we damage this lining and boy do we damage this lining. Swallow an ibuprofen. It's like swallowing a hand grenade. Take some food with Roundup in it. Roundup will destroy the lining of your gut. It's really good stuff. Roundup in itself will destroy your bacterial population. Hey everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's episode is round two with the extraordinary Dr. Steven Gundry. He's a New York Times bestselling author of The Plant Paradox and most recently, The Longevity Paradox. He's also an award-winning, renowned heart surgeon and researcher as well as the former president of the American Heart Association. But the crazy part of his story is that he left the profession he built his entire career around at the height of his success when he realized he was just dealing with symptoms and not addressing the underlying causes of those symptoms. And that's where I want to start today. Your book kicks right off with the myths of aging. Now, I want to believe that we can sort of age in reverse, that we can get stronger, better looking, more robust as we age, but that is not conventional wisdom. But you debunk it right off the bat. Yeah. hit us with it. We want to be Benjamin Buttons, you know, we want to actually deage. And I really think it's possible. In fact, when people look at my pictures uh really at the height of my surgical career in the mid 90s and then compare those pictures to me now, uh there's actually no doubt that I'm actually a younger man than I was almost 30 years ago. Better skin. Like what are we judging that by? Better skin, better Yeah. better texture. My skin. One of the things I talk about in the book extensively is your your skin is actually a mirror of the lining of your gut. Your the lining of your gut, which is the surface of a tennis court, is actually your skin turned inside out. What is it that makes you think that the gut is so influential in aging specifically? Because people think of like, I'm going to get arthritis. It's wear and tear. It just is what it is. I've used my joints so much that, you know, they're they're going to be tapped out. Like, it it actually does make intuitive sense. And so, what you talk about in the book is really sort of kicks people into a new way of thinking about it. So, why is the gut so tied to what we think of as actual aging? So, uh here's the deal. Uh there's a there's a wonderful animal model for aging that involves a little worm called sea elegance. Uh it only lives about 3 weeks. So you can do an intervention in it and kind of instantly know what's going to happen. And so in this model, the influence of the bacteria, the microbiome, and the wall of this little creature's gut. The the lining of the gut is only one cell thick, and they're all kind of held together with what are called tight junctions, locked arm- arm, like a game we played, Red Rover, Red Rover, that kids don't play anymore. So the bacteria are foreign, if you will, and there is an interaction with the bacteria in the gut. And what this model shows is that as those bacteria begin to break holes in the gut, break down the gut, then you can show that that is when aging starts. And the more the wall breaks down, the faster you age. So let's uh break down what is aging exactly like what are we so I think most people would sort of go to um mobility um aesthetics and maybe accumulation of disease like how would you define aging specifically? So aging to me is the either quick or slow breakdown of the gut wall. How do we know that? Well, we can take a look at 105year-old people around the world. You can look at their microbiome, the collection of bugs in their gut. They will have a very diverse set of bugs. They'll have, you know, it it takes a village, this really incredible tropical rainforest. And those microbiome, that collection will be identical to a healthy 30-year-old. So what that says is that these healthy 105 year olds are healthy because they have the microbiome of a 30-year-old. And it's this microbiome that is not attacking the wall of their gut that's actually existing with the wall of the gut. We I talk a lot about this crazy bug that may be the key to longevity and it's got a great name. Eurmancia mucinophilia. Say that three times. Say that once. Yeah. So this bug lives in a mucous layer that uh lines our gut. And if we're lucky and the way we're designed, we're supposed to have a layer of mucus lining our gut before we get to the cells. And that mucus is there to number one trap my favorite subject, lectins, which are plant proteins that are looking for sugar molecules. And number two, it's to protect the wall of the gut from bacteria that might do us harm. So, acromancia lives in the mucous layer and it actually eats the mucus. Now, here's the best part. The more mucus it eats, the more our gut cells produce mucus and it actually increases the mucus layer. And the book is actually lots of tricks on how to make this guy happy because the thicker our mucus, the younger we are. In fact, fun fact, metformin we now know works by increasing the amount of acurmancia in our gut, not by some magical mystical thing happening in our body. In fact, interestingly, about 25% of people when they start metformin get diarrhea. And uh it's actually because the gut microbiome changes dramatically on on metformin. And one of the reasons is that ecmansia becomes predominant. Interesting. So at a cellular level, what's happening with metformin? Something that simply triggers the body to produce mucus in general. Is it is it changing the microbiome? You called it a rainforest earlier. Is it changing the makeup of that rainforest or is it just actually compelling the body to create more mucus? No, I think it's actually changing it's selecting out for acrimonia. Now, how does it do that? Because there's actually kind of a shag carpeting on the lining of our gut. So, plants have roots going into the ground. Yep. We know the roots actually absorb nutrients because of the soil microbiome. All the bacteria, all the fungi actually deliver the nutrients into the roots of the plant. Well, we have a root system and that root system is this shag carpet that makes the the lining of our gut a tennis court. Okay. So the reason it's so big in surface area is it loops around itself with little one cell thick protrusions called microvilli. Okay. Okay. These are our roots. They literally are our roots. At the bottom of these microvilli or what are called crypts. At the bottom of the crypts, there is a pocket of bacteria that are essential and they're down there in storage. In fact, fun fact, we now know the appendix is not useless. It's one of these storage systems to repopulate our gut. If you lose your appendix, you're screwed for that part of your storage system. But down at the bottom of these crypts are these little collection of bacteria. And at the bottom of these crypts are our stem cells that actually repopulate these microvilli. So what happens is if we damage this lining and boy do we damage this lining. Swallow an ibuprofen. It's like swallowing a hand grenade. Take some food with Roundup in it. Roundup will destroy the lining of your gut. It's really good stuff. Roundup in itself will destroy your bacterial population. All right, really fast because I I think this is important and for some reason um even though I've had you on the show before, I read the book like the way that you've started talking about some of the places that you're going to find also known as glyphosate in the system that basically they're part of why they're doing it was originally created as a um or patented as a antibiotic. Correct. Which that was already shocking. And then you said they use it as a way to be able to dry the crops out so they can harvest them on a specific day. Very good. But then you said they don't no one wipes them off and so it ends up in Cheerios and other things and I was like what? Like I thought if I was washing my vegetables I was going to be fine. So this was a little bit startling to me. Yeah. you know, you know, a little off subject, but they've looked at recently a study of 35 oat products in the United States, and all of them had glyphosate in them. Some of them at very high levels. some of our breakfast cereals, most of our granas, most of our granola bars, most California wines, including a couple of organic wines, have glyphosate in them because the the fields are sprayed, the weeds are sprayed with glyphosate between the vines to kill the weeds. research at MIT has shown that not only does glyphosate kill bacteria because bacteria use the same reproductive pathway that plants use, it's the shikcomamate pathway. Humans don't use the shikamate pathway. And so Monsanto when they invented it said, "Hey, uh, this kills plants, but don't worry, it doesn't kill humans because we don't use the same pathway for life." And everybody said, "Oh, that's great. You know, this is a miracle." Uh, what they didn't tell anybody is the bacteria use the same shikamate pathway. And again, they patent this as an antibiotic. They didn't patent it as an herbicide. What else are people doing that is um breaking the bonds or killing the bacteria, the antibiotics in their food or that they're taking themselves. In fact, study just out this morning shows that women who take antibiotics just, you know, because a urinary tract infection, sore throat, uh, have a much higher incidence of heart disease than women who don't. That's scary. Now, this gets into something in your book that was super freaky. Uh, I've never heard somebody say, and I'm not saying that nobody's ever said it. I had never heard anybody say until reading this that um heart disease is an autoimmune disease. Yeah. So because it ties into this point, how is heart disease autoimmune disease? How does that start in the gut? What is that whole chain reaction? Okay. So, um, Michael Debbi, one of the premier originators of heart surgery from Houston, Texas, would always say that cholesterol has nothing to do with causing heart disease. Interesting. That it's an innocent bystander that literally gets sucked into uh inflammation at the wall of the blood vessel. And I use the example of, let's say, you know, I'm an alien and I'm, you know, circling above LA and I report back that I'm pretty sure that ambulances cause car accidents because every time I see a car accident, there's an ambulance there and the ambulance must have caused it. Well, you know, causation, association is not causation. So the fact that we see cholesterol in deposits and I see it, you know, every day in the operating room, there's cholesterol in these plaques, doesn't mean that the cholesterol caused the plaque. So I learned this as an infant heart transplant surgeon. What we found was we thought naively that if we got these hearts in as a newborn that the immune system of the newborn would not be mature enough and would say, "Oh, yeah, that, you know, that's my heart. Uh, I don't know any better." And it wouldn't attack it. Well, we were partially right. But as the years went and we studied these kids, they started to get coronary artery disease. their blood vessels got thicker and thicker. That is super interesting. And we're going, "Oh, what the heck?" So, did they look just like somebody who we would have associated with too much cholesterol in their diet? It looks just like diabetic coronary artery disease. Just like it. And so when you actually look at the blood vessels, the kids, the lining of the blood vessel is from the donor, from a foreigner. M the blood going through is from the kid and the blood says wait a minute these are foreign cells and they're I'm going to attack them just think of a splinter under your finger you you know gets all red so that's inflammation and what was happening was then cholesterol was basically coming as a patch an ambulance and it was getting caught up in this inflammation. So then we look at these adults who obviously don't have heart transplants and you go, well that's funny. This looks just like a kid who has, you know, somebody else's heart and there's a attack on the blood vessels that looks identical as if that was a foreign object. So that got me going, you know, this is an immunologic reaction. And in just few weeks, and I can't tell you the paper because it's embargoed, I'm giving a paper at the American Heart Association vascular biology meeting that makes a pretty good case that lectins, which are a foreign protein that can stick to sugar molecules on the surface of blood vessels, uh, are the cause of aththerosclerosis in humans. and that removing lectins reduces the markers for that. All right, really fast. And we talked about this in our first issue or first episode, but I I think it bears repeating like what's the real quick uh breakdown of lectins and the the rhetoric you started using around kidney beans I found really interesting. Yeah. So, lectins are the plant defense system. One of the plant defense system, a pretty dogone good one. Plants do not want to be eaten. They don't want their babies eaten. and they have evolutionary pressures to keep being eaten and have their babies not being eaten. And lectins are one of the ways to do this. They are sticky proteins that look for specific sugar molecules to stick to and that incites an inflammatory response wherever they stick. We talked about joints wearing out. Joints do not come with a sell by date or use by date. There is no evidence that the wear and tear theory has anything to do with a human body. We can constantly rebuild cartilage, but like I talk about in the book, cartilage is broken down by certain cells and rebuilt by other cells. And we can if you had arthritis, we could stick a scope in you, suck out some of the fluid. We could actually find bacterial particles in your joint fluid. Wow. Okay. So, really fast because I know where you're going with that. But now, now connect those dots. How did those parts get into the joint? Lectins broke down the wall of your gut. And on the other side of your gut is 65% of all your white blood cells, 65% of your immune system is lining your gut. What are they doing there? Because the gut is where the outside world gets through and they're there to sound the high alert and attack them when they get through. One of the reasons we store fat in our gut, one of the reasons we have a beer belly or a wheat belly is we are actually putting fat down where the action is. It's to supply the troops. That's why we put it there. In fact, when I operate on people with advanced coronary disease, there is a layer of fat that is on the surface of the blood vessels. And there is a perfect correlation to the amount of inflammation and disease in the blood vessel with the amount of fat surrounding the blood vessel. Whoa. This is in humans published studies. So we don't this is not conjecture and I reference this in all my books. Wow. Okay. So here's my understanding of fat 45 seconds ago which may now be changing. Um one that fat is essentially an organ but I think of it as an energy storage unit that we can certainly access and and break down and turn it into energy. Uh that the body is very efficient at burning ketones. Certainly the brain. Um, so what exactly is it doing at these areas of inflammation? So maybe 15 years ago, we thought the fat was actually causing the inflammation because wherever we found fat, there were lots of white blood cells. What I think recent information has proven is that the fat is not the evil guy that we thought it was. that the fat is there because of the inflammation and the inflammation is there because you have a leak in your gut. You have a leaky gut. Interesting. Your white blood cells require huge amounts of energy to do their job. Okay? And so you it just it's just like any army. You got to have a supply line. You have to have food for the troops. All right. Now, let me ask a really difficult question. I have no idea if this even makes sense, but it makes sense to my layman's mind. So many people have gotten to a metabolic point of dysfunction so extreme that they really never access their fat stores. True. So if they're existing in that state and they have metabolic syndrome and the body's like, "Yo, here's the fat. Take it. I we have inflammation. Get ready, white blood cells. You're going to have all the energy that you could ever use, but the body doesn't know how to click over into that mechanism because insulin levels are elevated. Is the fat getting there and the white blood cells are unable to use it or that's a whole different thing and they're still able to use it? That's part of the problem. That's part of the problem. Yeah. Let me use an example I used to use with my patients. Um the the flu virus. So the virus has a has a barcode on it that our immune cells scan literally and say, "Oh, you know, that's a nasty virus. That's the flu virus. We know this guy. We need to get ready to attack this and we need to get all of our immune system up and running and we need to make sure the immune system has enough power to do this. So what do we do? We actually make you me hurt to move because if we move the muscles are going to take all the energy. If you lay down, then all the energy is available for this battle to go after this virus. Our immune system literally reads barcodes to tell whether somebody is a friend or a foe. And lectins have fascinating barcodes that mimic other uh proteins in our body. And when this immune system is ramped up, the immune system goes around the body and looks for proteins that are lectins and let's say they come to a thyroid and they go, "Oh my gosh, you know, this poor woman's thyroid is full of what appear to be lectins. They're not quite the same, but it's close enough and we should, you know, shoot to kill and we'll ask questions later." Mhm. Okay. So, I'm going to I'm going to walk through the process that we've just discussed because wow, for me anyway, and for anybody listening that's like me, once I can picture it, once I can understand it, then it's like I can begin to manipulate it and predict what I should do and not do. Okay? So, you eat something. It could be lectins, uh, which you'll find in the skin and seeds of nightshade vegetables is one example, or peanuts. Or peanuts. Uh so you eat these things, they like glyphosate, like um ibuprofen. Apparently they will go in and they'll disrupt um my microbiome. They break down the single the bonds between the single cell lining of my gut that allows either entire um elements of proteins in the case of lectins or um pieces of bacteria. Yep. I'm assuming dying pieces, dead pieces, broken arms. The cell wall of bacteria, it turns out when bacteria divide, and they do all the time. I mean, there's trillions and trillions and trillions of them, you make about anywhere from a half a pound to a pound of dead cell wall bacteras every day. Wow. And so those pieces are normally excreted with your poop. Um, most of your poop is actually bacteria. That's so weird. Yeah, that's what it is. So, anyhow, our immune system is so afraid of bacteria. They're supposed to stay on their side of the wall. Yep. That if they see the, you know, signature of that bacterial cell wall, it doesn't know that it's not a whole bacteria. It doesn't know that it's dead. So we can take in human volunteers, LPS's uh dead bacteria, inject them into your bloodstream, and you will go into septic shock. Whoa. As if we put living bacteria in you. Whoa. Because what's actually happening is my immune system is going crazy. Exactly. The immune system doesn't know any better. said, "Holy cow, you know, there's there's thousands and millions of bacteria all of a sudden in us and you know, we got to do something." And they just start attacking. Ah, like crazy monkeys going nuts. Yeah. Exactly. And so those particles, whether they're the lectins, which by the way on lectins really fast, the whole notion of thinking about plants not as these inert things, which until starting to read you, I always did. I just thought of plants as is completely inert. When you talk about them as being sort of the world's most sophisticated chemical warfarest, that's where it's like, whoa. Then you begin to realize maybe what's really going on. Okay, so these lectins or particles of bacteria get into the bloodstream, immune system scans it, maybe they've ended up in the thyroid, maybe elsewhere, and it just [ __ ] goes nuts, starts attacking. you get inflammation which has a whole host of knock-on effects from could be um cholesterol trying to patch, could be the fat wrapping around the blood vessels or the arteries or whatever the case may be. And you know, we're we're now most of us are now convinced that Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and dementia is neuroinflammation. Okay? and what's and what people are picking up on because they're all going to talk about the beta amalloid plaques and you've talked about how some of the companies targeting that may actually be accelerating your onset of dementia which is really terrifying, really bad. Um is that this is again the alien blaming the ambulance for car accidents. Yeah. So most amaloid is actually produced by bacteria in the gut. And Dale Bredesen keeps saying, he says it's not the amaloid in the brain that we should be looking at. And no wonder $40 billion of investment in anti-amaloid drugs has been a total and useless failure. $40 billion. He says because amaloid is produced in the gut by bacteria. And we know certain bacteria that make it and certain that don't. And why would we give the amaloid producing bacteria what they want to eat, which is simple sugars and saturated fats, the western diet? Plus, the amaloid can't get out of the gut unless your gut is leaky. It's too big a protein to be absorbed. So Dale and I for years have been saying, "Hey guys, you're looking at the wrong spot to go after Alzheimer's." So really fast, let me ask, are you saying that beta amaloid plaques are not actually created in the brain and that they would never make their way to the brain? You won't make them unless they get to the brain and then stimulate more production. That's so weird. Why would the brain have the ability to produce something in the brain that would never be turned on unless it started from a problem in the gut? That seems way counterintuitive. It's basically so we now we now know we have we have a leaky brain and there's increasing meaning things are crossing the bloodb brain barrier that should not that would have never done it. And there's actually a beautiful new paper that probably explains why cholesterol and amaloid and dementia actually um coexist in people with the ApoE4 gene um the quote Alzheimer's gene. Um, I got interested in Appoe E4, which 30% of people carry uh as a heart surgeon because it causes heart disease. And Dale Bredesen got interested in it because it causes dementia, Alzheimer's. And lo and behold, we now know there's an intimate connection between carrying the APOE4 gene and how cholesterol can be mischievous to you in your brain and not necessarily somebody who doesn't carry that gene. What is the APOE gene? What is it doing? Great question. So, it's a it's a carrier molecule of among other things cholesterol. And if you carry a four mutation uh or a double four mutation, you do statistically have an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's. You also have an increased risk of developing heart disease because it's doing because it changes the way cholesterol is transported. Interesting. It's more efficient. It's so it's getting more ambulances to the scene. It's actually worse. Let's suppose the Appleoe E4 is a subway. Mhm. and it's carrying cholesterol and it stops at a subway s stop and cholesterol gets off and it goes into the cell does its thing and the cell says okay I've got plenty thanks a lot you can take the rest of the cholesterol back and take it someplace else so it gets back on the subway and the subway moves on with the ApoE4 gene what happens is it carries the cholesterol to the cell on the subway way. But when the extra cholesterol tries to get back in, the subway doors are closed. Super clear. All right. And that's the problem. You know, this is a transport problem. It's dropping the stuff off just fine, but normally it'd be picking up the stuff that, you know, isn't needed, but so it builds up. Yeah. So, it's kind of a double whammy. Th This is so interesting to me. It's crazy. Uh, we have a lot of ground to cover here. So one I want to talk about fecal uh microbial transplants which are really interesting. So I think we have sort of a really basic understanding. Um your book goes into a lot of detail. So people should definitely check it out because it's so interesting the more that I understand this stuff. Um but we have a basic understanding so far in the time that we've had together today. Now how can feal microbial transplant help with that? Why does that work? And why didn't it get widespread adoption? So back in the 70s when broadspectctrum antibiotics came out they they were truly miracle drugs because before that we had to uh actually culture a bacteria find out what antibiotic it was sensitive to and then give that antibiotic you know and that would take oh gosh 48 72 hours to do. When broadspectctrum antibiotics were invented it was you know it was a shotgun approach. No worry, we don't even know. We don't have to know what you have. Uh here, take this. We're going to wipe out everything. Which was great in a lot of ways. But what we didn't know was that we also wiped out every last living bacteria for the most part in our gut. And we were so naive back then that we didn't realize that that microbiome was incredibly important. And so we developed a lot of people all of a sudden with what was then called pseudommembranous enercitis. It's now called ced difficil clustrdium difficil. And so these guys got horrible infections in the lining of their gut and nobody had any treatment for it. These people were dying in hospitals after getting broadspectctrum antibiotics and we're going what the heck? So, uh, my one of my mentors who was the chairman of the department of surgery at the medical college of Georgia in Augusta, um, said, you know, this has got to be we've wiped out most of the bacteria in the gut and this is an ecosystem where there are checks and balances. So all of a sudden now we've wiped out most of the checks and balances and there's probably a rogue bacteria that's taken over. It's party time, you know, so clever party time. So he says, "We got to get, you know, good stuff back." And he said, "Where are we going to get that?" And he starts looking around at the medical students. True story. And he said, "You know, medical students, they're pretty healthy." So once a week, this is the mid 1970s, they would pass around this plastic bucket. It was called the honeypot. And we'd take it into the john and take a crap. You actually had to hold it, you know, get get to school and, you know, take a crap. And he'd take it to his lab. And I'll never forget we had wearing blenders, you know, and homogenize all this medical student poop and put it in enema bags and give these people feal enemas. This is in the 70s. And he would have before and after pictures and he'd go to meetings and show, you know, this horrible inflammation, this horrible infection in the colons. And then a week later, it's pristine, it's beautiful. you know, people are singing kumbaya inside the colon and and everybody goes, "Oh, he's making this stuff up. That can't happen." And so people did not believe it because we had no idea. No one had had sequenced the human microbiome. That was really only five years ago. Well, now since the sequencing of the human microbiome, it's, you know, you go, well, of course, you know, there were 10,000 different species of bacteria in in you and me. In fact, a month ago, they found another thousand. And normally, there are beautiful checks and balances. But it's when these checks and balances get disturbed by taking a round of antibiotics or as simply as eating meat where the chicken or the pork or the beef was given antibiotics. You know when we eat that they have residual antibiotics in them and we eat the antibiotics. Talk to me about the hol holbiome. Hol biome. Yeah. Yeah. I so there are a number of researchers that think we should use holobiome rather than microbiome. Microbiome pretty much attempts to define the bugs that are living in our gut, right? We have an oral microbiome and we actually have a cloud of bacteria that live in the air around us. And there is this theory which I really do like that our personal space is actually determined when your holobi, your cloud bumps up against mine. Dude, that would be so weird. Well, if that's true. Well, I mean, cuz you feel something like Yeah. Yeah. You feel that. Yeah. and and there's certain people that you're you're allowing in closer, right? And it gets so Twilight zone that I you know, I always play that music in my head. We know that kissing, for instance, is a universal uh human great ape and often animal characteristic. And there's some pretty cool wacky suggestion that I really like that kissing you are exchanging your oral microbiome and your bacteria are actually deciding if your person next to you is compatible with them. You've heard of that whole study where they have women just smell these t-shirts and rank them in order of desiraability and the women are like, "I have no idea why you're making me do this." But they put them in order of most genetic diversity or difference from their own to uh most similar to their own. Yeah. That's surreal. Yeah. And women, you know, and I I say this as as often as anyone will say, women have a gut feeling far better than men. And that is because women actually are far better capable of listening to their microbiome. And I get kind of deep into the fact that uh our microbiome is inherited from our mother. We get it from our mother. And all of the mitochondria, the little energy producing organels in us are actually engulfed bacteria that are inherited from our mother. And they have their own separate DNA and their maternal DNA. And there is now actually very good evidence that the bacteria in our microbiome communicate via text messages that now have been measured to mitochondria. They're sisters and about how things are going in the the body in the outside world. It's so crazy. So and so women trust your gut. Yeah. Uh, going back to the microbiome, coming from your mother, um, I've become probably a little like oversteppy. Like I normally like, hey, whatever you want to do until I hear somebody um, saying that, oh, I I have a plan C-section. So, look, if you need one, obviously get one. Jesus. Absolutely. But if you don't need one, I'm like, make sure that you smear the baby in the vaginal fluid at a minimum. And people are always like, whoa. But just trying to pass that microbiome on. And you said there was a recent study that came out about autism and fecal microbial transplants and how the link between a a successful maybe the wrong word microbiome and an unsuccessful one can manifest as autism. Talk to me about that study. Yeah, there's um we've known for actually a long time since the microbiome was identified and sequenced that we know that number one, kids with autism have a lot more irritable bowel. They have a lot more GI issues and they actually have a very different microbiome than quote normal. And there has been a suggestion for years that maybe it is that microbiome that is contributing not want to say cause autism. There's even more exciting work in gynecology and obstetrics that the m there is a microbiome in the vagina that we know about, but there is a microbiome of the placenta itself. And there's some actually exciting work that perhaps the microbiome of the placenta is the most important in terms of educating the neonate the fetus's immune system. Do you only encounter that as um you're actually born and you go through it during the whole time you're washing it? Then why would a C-section be so problematic? Well, so one of the theories of autism is that this is an inuterero problem that happened to the kid before he was born or she was born. Reasons I say he is that boys have it far more than girls. And that now there is interesting evidence that we should be working on the maternal microbiome during before pregnancy and certainly during pregnancy. We need to start early in making sure the microbiome is right. So, getting back to autism, there was a recent study just published and don't quote me on the exact details, but it comes out of Australia. And because of this connection with autistic kids having funny bowels and a funny microbiome, they with an institutional review board permission did oral fecal transplants in a large number of autistic kids and they did this for about six weeks. Almost immediately 50% of the autism symptoms subsided. 50%. And the paper has now followed these kids for two years and the 50% reduction in symptoms has continued. Wow. And if that doesn't make the case that, you know, the gut and the microbiome has such an incredible effect on the brain, I don't know what does. No kidding. Now that we know that and your your book goes into great detail including recipes and all kinds of stuff, what's a quick overlay of lifestyle and dietary choices that people should make if they want to um die young at a ripe old age as the uh sub headline of the book goes. So we know that there are ways to give these good guys like ecmansia what they like to eat. And they love resistant starches. They love tubers like yams, like hikima, like tarotroot, like yuka or yaka. They love uh mushrooms. And there's a beautiful recent study out of uh South Asia of people basically having a 90% reduction in Alzheimer's if you eat two cups of mushrooms a week. What? So, there is this incredible compound in mushrooms. Uh, I'll probably fracture it. Erggotheonine theionine that actually crosses the bloodb brain barrier better than turmeric curcumin and actually protects against neuroinflammation. And it turns out that mushrooms absolutely positively feed these friendly bacteria. And mushrooms contain this compound called spermadine. It's a polyamine that study after study shows promotes longevity. Okay. So those are some of the things. Also inulin containing compounds. So inulin is present in chory. You can buy inulin made out of yikon root and any store as a sweetener. So, inulin feeds acromancia and so it's present in chory, it's present in radikio, Belgian endive, uh, Jerusalem artichokes, sun chokes, they're just pure inulin. So, the more of this stuff you eat, uh, the more of this bug you're going to grow. So, that's number one. So, eat for them. Number two, exercise. Beautiful study in women. Women have more Alzheimer's disease than men. And so you look at an exercise program in women, women who exercise regularly, routinely kind of from midlife on have a 90% reduction in Alzheimer's. Whoa. And compared to women who don't exercise routinely and in the women who are going to get Alzheimer's, it's 11 years later than if they didn't exercise. So, I mean, think about that. If we had a drug that had a 90% reduction in Alzheimer's. Yeah. You know, how much would we pay for that? You know, you and I would be popping that every day. Uh we wouldn't have $40 billion wasted on amaloid drugs. But it's available by housework, by gardening, by getting a dog and walking it twice a day. Okay, that's interesting. So when you say housework, why do you say that? I think people would be confused by that. It turns out that give you an example. My my mother actually scrubbed her floors until the day she died at 90. Uh even though there were swifters and things like that. And she did it as an exercise program. Exercise changes the gut microbiome. That's interesting. To a friendly microbiome. Meditation, yoga changes the gut microbiome. Seems impossible. It's so interesting that they're in a two-way communication. Yeah. Yeah. It literally and there's there's even some really cool stuff that yoga postures uh actually move this microbiome around in your gut and they actually get signals probably electrical signals. So all these chakras that you know in eastern medicine it's probably all this part of this really amazing communication system that western medicine is just going oh come on that's all voodoo. Because we couldn't measure it before. Yeah. So exercise really important. Lastly I really want people to have a brainwash day at least once a week. So, in the last couple of years, we've learned that there is a lymph system in the brain called the glimpmphatic system. And it no one actually believed it existed, but now it exists. And the brain actually in deep sleep, which happens very early in the sleep cycle, goes through a literal wash cycle. It shrinks by about 20%. And all of these toxins like amaloid, like towel, like bad pieces of protein are actually squeezed out of the brain like ringing out a sponge and it happens in deep sleep and it happens early in the sleep cycle. So we have to have a lot of blood flow to our brain to do that. The brain uses huge amounts of blood flow, but we have to have even more. So the evidence is that you need about a 3 or 4hour window before the last meal of your day before you go to sleep. Why? Because digestion is actually really energy expensive. So we put huge amounts of blood flow down into our gut. If you eat near the time you go to bed, that blood flow is down in your intestines and it doesn't go up to your brain. So there's actually a recent study of men who had unstable anga or heart attack and they followed those men who ate late at night had a much higher incidence of a new anga or new heart heart attack. And so they're all really actually interconnected. So one day a week I ask people finish your last meal at 6:00. If you go to bed at say 10, right? If it's 11, finish it at 7:00. Do not snack before bedtime. And allow yourself to have a brainwash. Better yet, skip a meal. And that gets in probably to the fourth point. You've got to have periods of extended lengths of time between eating. We were supposed to go prolonged periods of time before our next meal and break fast. We've talked about this before. It ruins your, you know, your morning stuff was you break your fast. And there's no definition of when you know it's supposed to be breakfast. That was from the Dural Kellogg's Cornflake Company telling people they had to eat breakfast. Yeah. Yeah. that the whole um lifestyle that you just painted like makes all the sense in the world like when you start looking at the research even just like so one I can certainly speak to the anti-inflammatory properties of a lot of things that you're talking about um which that has been revolutionary in my life intermittent fasting has had a whole host of benefits for me anecdotally and then certainly I think there's a lot of data backing things up you've talked a lot about how eating is just an excuse to get olive oil in your mouth Man, I hope you're right about that one because I have really um taken that to heart. There does seem to be some pretty tremendous benefits to that. Um it's it's really pretty extraordinary. Yeah, I mean it really is. Um you know, and I I show a lot of studies. I think the probably the best one is the Predimed study out of Spain where just simplistically they took 65 year old people, divided them into three groups. One, they all ate a Mediterranean diet. Spain. Uh, one group had to use a liter of olive oil per week. The second group had to eat the equivalent calories in walnuts primarily. The third group had a low-fat Mediterranean diet followed for five years. The initial study was look at memory. The olive oil group and the walnut group had improved memory after five years. The low-fat group lost memory. The people in all groups with known coronary artery disease or stroke, the olive oil group had a 30% reduction in new events. The uh low-fat group had an increase continued events. So this stuff is miraculous. Um it actually grows neurons, the polyphenols in olive oil. And here's another crazy fun fact. Now, there's a a chemical that I talk about called TMAO discovered by the Cleveland Clinic. TMAO is made by our gut bacteria primarily from animal proteins, particularly choline and carnitine. Cholines and egg yolks. We need choline for our brain, but our gut bacteria love it. They make it out of these. And TMAO damages blood vessels. to the Cleveland clinics credit. They said, "Well, wait a minute. The Mediterranean diet seems to be very good for preventing heart disease, and yet these guys eat fish. They, you know, they eat cheeses. They eat salamis. What gives?" So they actually discovered that there are polyphenols in certain olive oils, balsamic vinegar, and red wine that paralyze these enzyme systems in the bacteria. It doesn't kill the bacteria, paralyzes the enzymes. So you could eat all the choline and carnitine you want, but you will not make TMAO. So olive oil, balsamic vinegar, make a spritzer of balsamic vinegar and sparkling water. Yeah, you got me on that. Yeah. And have a glass of red wine. And so you will pro you you can still have your, you know, your meat and eat it too. I like that. Not much. I like that. All right. Tell people where they can find your book. Uh anywhere. Amazon.com, Barnes & Audible. I actually did the audible of this book. Uh so if you want to hear my voice longer and longer, I I read the book. It's my name. Uh, you can find it at GundryMD. You can find me at drgundry.com. Come to my YouTube channel. I've got a podcast, the Dr. Gundry podcast. I'm on Instagram, Facebook. Um, what's the one change that people could make that would have the biggest impact on their longevity? The one change, and I, you know, I get on my soap box, is you got to get your vitamin D level up. take at least 5,000 IUs of vitamin D a day. A day. The University of California, San Diego has shown that the average American to have an adequate vitamin D level should have 9,600 international units a day. The average American Whoa. If you look at cancer patients, they almost always have a low vitamin D. Every one of my patients with autoimmune disease walks through the door with a low vitamin D. If you look at if you like the telomeir theory of aging where the little caps on the end of chromosomes and it's a good theory of aging. The higher your vitamin D level, the longer your telomeirs are. Interesting. And vitamin D. Getting back to those little crips down in the down in our shag carpet, those stem cells actually have to be stimulated to move by vitamin D. And if you don't have vitamin D, they will sit there and you will have a leaky gut. There it is. So that's number one. Number two, take timed release vitamin C twice a day or chew a 500 milligram vitamin C four times a day. All right, we're one of the few animals that don't produce vitamin C. And you got to have it for so many functions, particularly women. They have to know that collagen will not repair all their wrinkles without vitamin C. Awesome. Beauty, thank you so much. That was really fantastic, guys. Please. Everything that this man talks about is extraordinary. I find it wildly educating. I said this in the last episode. I'll say it again. There's something about the way that he explains it that I find uniquely capable of allowing me to understand things in their totality to follow the bouncing ball all the way through so that I can understand what to do in my own life uh on a predictive model. And he also, especially in the book, goes into great detail about things that you can do, recipes, all kinds of amazing stuff. So, be sure to check it out. All right. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.