Doctor Reveals TOP FOODS You Need To STOP EATING Today! | Dr. Steven Gundry

In today's episode of Health Theory with Dr. Steven Gundry, we talk about why eating too much meat may actually shorten your life, how these things called lectins that you're probably stuffing your face with cause leaky gut, the single healthiest food on the planet, and the seemingly healthy foods that are actually probably killing you. Hey everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dr. Steven Gundry. He's a heart surgeon, medical researcher, former president of the American Heart Association, and New York Times best-selling author of the deeply fascinating book Plant Paradox. He's performed 10,000 surgeries and holds the record for longest survival of a pig to baboon heart transplant. And what I want to know is how do you, somebody who eats a primarily plant-based diet, how did you come to the conclusion that there are some plants that are okay and some that are actually outright bad for us? Well, actually it all started with a major a Yale University as an undergrad back in the dark ages, uh where we could actually design our own major. And we could actually develop a theory that we wanted to defend, and my theory was that you could take a great ape, manipulate its food supply, and its environment, and prove you would arrive at a human being. Over generations? Over a long period of time. Okay. And so I actually defended my thesis and got an honors. And gave my thesis to my parents and went off to become very famous heart surgeon cardiologist. And uh one of the things I discovered way back then was that we evolve in concert with the plants that we're eating or the animals that we're eating, but back then we were eating leaves. And there's actually now evidence that the thing that makes us human as opposed to a chimpanzee is there's a a change in the gut microbiome between when chimps and gorillas evolved off and we evolved out. And you can actually tell a human being by their distinctive gut microbiome instead of a chimpanzee, for instance. We share 98% of all of our genetic material with chimps and gorillas, and yet we're profoundly different. And what makes us profoundly different from them is not our genes, it's actually the genes of our microbiome. Unfortunately, uh my wife has had some very real experience with just how important the microbiome is. You're the only person I've ever heard talk about that. I'd love to hear more about that. So, um if we were going to prove your thesis out, and what would we be doing to the diet to create that effect in the microbiome that would express so such a radically different species? Lectins are plant proteins that are one of the major defense systems of a plant against being eaten. One of the things that's hard for us to conceptualize is that plants do not want to be eaten. They actually have a life, and they were actually here first. Um when insects arrived, plants had a problem because they couldn't run, they couldn't fight, they couldn't hide. But they have a huge advantage, and that's their chemists. Um they can turn sunlight into matter, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. So, what they do is they make proteins that are sometimes called sticky proteins or lectins that stick to certain sugar molecules in us, particularly in our gut lining. Just by the way, if anybody has sinusitis or runny noses when they eat certain foods, you are actually producing sugar molecules in your mucus to trap lectins. And I have so many people who had chronic sinusitis, including myself, when we finally got lectins out of our diet, they completely went away. So, lectins bind to sugar molecules. Lectins cause the wall of our gut to actually separate. And people have heard the term leaky gut. I used to If you'd asked me 15 years ago if I thought leaky gut was a was a problem, I would have said it was pseudoscience. Now, with the advances in understanding how the microbiome works and in understanding how lectins work, I think everyone who has a disease has a leaky gut. Now, I'm pretty dumb. Hippocrates said this 2,500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut. So, one of the things we know about research is research is research. Look again. Cuz somebody already knew this. And Hippocrates knew it 2,500 years ago. It's really interesting and I'm I I've heard that quote so many times and it's one that I just accept and go, "Oh, wow, what a great insight." What do you think led him to that at at even now? People have a hard time conceptualizing the microbiome cuz it's invisible. So, how did he come to that conclusion? He had this interesting theory. He believed that we all, any creature, has what he called, the translation is green life force energy. That actually wants perfect health for that creature. And that it's a driving force. Unfortunately, he believed, as I do, that there were external forces that were preventing that expression of green life force energy. So, he thought the purpose of a physician was to identify those external forces that were keeping the green life force energy from expressing itself and remove them or teach the patient to remove them and then the patient would heal him or herself because the green life force energy would take over. Now that sounds kind of new age and touchy-feely but he was absolutely right and one of the things that I guess I and and other people have discovered is that one of those external contributing factors are lectins and if you remove certain lectins things you'll start to heal yourself. Let me give you another example. If we're out on the ocean in a boat and the boat springs a leak in the bottom of the boat and water is rushing in we have two options. The one option is we grab a bucket and we start bailing. The bigger the hole is like the old commercial we're going to need a bigger bucket. And I think that most systems for healing the gut are just giving people buckets to bail whatever. It's a lot easier to plug the dumb hole and then you don't need buckets. And so if lectins are one of the major ways that we get leaky gut then if we get lectins out of our diet that's how we plug the holes. Unfortunately for us the lining of the gut is only one cell thick. And so imagine one cell thickness keeping everything you eat or everything living in you like bacteria separated from you. And they're all held together locked arm in arm with tight junctions. So what Dr. Fasano showed with gluten which is a lectin is that gluten makes its trouble by causing leaky gut. So once those spaces are open not only do lectins get through, which are foreign proteins, they're splinters, but also pieces of bacteria called or living bacteria also get through the wall. Now, on the other side of the wall is your border patrol, your immune system. And 65% of all the white cells in our body are up against this wall. Why are they there? Because that's where the problem is going to happen if it's going to happen. So, when these foreign proteins get across the wall, the immune system basically sounds the alarm, sounds the air raid sirens, we go to threat level five, we scramble the fighter jets, and we actually go to war status. And as I talk about in the book, that war status is manifested in multiple ways, whether it's brain fog, whether it's arthritis, whether it's depression or anxiety, whether it's coronary artery disease, which is how I got interested in it in the first place. And all of these things come right back to what Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago. That if you want to cure the disease, head to the gut. And And I see this For instance, I had so many allergies as a young adult and in college that I had to get all allergy shots. And you know, "Oh, you're allergic to things." Well, my allergies were just because my immune system was just on hyper overload. I don't have any allergies anymore. I didn't outgrow my allergies. Through the last 17 years, I've told my immune system to chill out. There's nothing to be interested in here cuz there's nothing coming across the border. That's super interesting. Uh probably about 3 months ago, I started getting really itchy. And then just like in like my chest would itch like crazy, my back would itch like crazy. I'm like, "What is going on?" Because I'm really religious on my diet. I don't cheat on my diet, but a couple times a year like I'm really hardcore about it. And then it it started with like a little spot on my neck. And then it was like I had to wear like long sleeve everything. I was just one big rash. It was It was insane. And I've never had anything like that in my life. And so I was like, "This I know this is something I'm eating. Just like in my gut I can feel that that's true, but I haven't changed my diet." So I was like, "What could this be?" And before I give you the punchline of what I think it is, what when you hear stuff like that, where do you go? Well, you're the best way to think about your skin is your the lining of your gut is actually your skin turned inside out. That's fascinating. And so you have from your mouth all the way down to your anus a tube that's got the surface area of a tennis court. And everything that you swallow is actually outside of you as it's moving through. The inside skin has to do the same functions as the outside skin and that is kind of keep things away from us, but it's got a fatal flaw. It not only has to keep things out, but it has to let things in like the proteins and the fats and the sugars that we eat. So that's where the mischief can happen. But when I see someone with an external skin problem, it's always a reflection of what's actually happening in the gut. What is that process? What does it look like? How can people that are watching this now if they're struggling from something, how do they begin that process of repair? So you know, I think the first thing you do is get major lectin containing foods out of your diet. You won't like me for a couple of weeks, uh but most people, even within a couple of weeks, begin to notice a difference. Now, what are those? They're foods that we actually, evolutionary, were not designed to eat. Beans are so lethal raw that there's very good published studies in humans that they can cause massive bloody diarrhea. And there's some pretty good studies in monkeys, rhesus monkeys and red velvet monkeys, that they can actually cause heart disease and even kidney damage from the lectin content. What's fascinating from a human evolution standpoint is that humans, up until the dawn of agriculture, were actually very tall creatures. Most humans were about 6 ft tall. And our brain size was about 15% bigger than it is today. And when If you look chronologically by 8,000 years, 2,000 years into grain and bean eating, we actually shrunk about a foot. And our brain size has never recovered from 10,000 years ago. So, these are anti-nutrients, grains and beans. That's number one. Number two, 2,000 years ago, northern European cows suffered a genetic mutation, a spontaneous mutation where they stopped making the normal protein in milk, casein A2, and began making casein A1. Now, casein A1 has a lectin-like protein that is converted into a compound called beta-casomorphin, which can cause a direct immunologic attack on the beta cell of the pancreas, the insulin-producing cell of the pancreas. And there's some pretty good evidence, and it's accumulating every every year, that one of the causes of type 1 diabetes or juvenile diabetes is casein A1 milk. And it actually correlates very well in countries that have casein A1 cows, they have much higher incidence of type 1 diabetes than countries that have casein A2 cows. Cheeses for instance are safe from France, Italy, and Switzerland. Sheep, goats, and water buffalo are all casein A2. And what is it about that that's so problematic? It actually makes a It's a lectin-like compound that stimulates an immune response. So just as I would get from the beans or whatever I'm getting Exactly. You'll get the same thing. Okay. So it's a it's a very new addition to our diet. Now, the newest addition to our diet is some of our most precious foods are American North American or South American foods. For instance, in the nightshade family, uh potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, and goji berries. So the the nightshades, the peel and the and the seeds have the lectins. And Native American Indians in the Southwest always peel and deseed their peppers. They char their peppers, they deseed them, and then they either grind it into chili or eat them that way, but they always do that. The Italians always peel and deseed their tomatoes before they make sauce. And is this like a cultural intuition kind of thing where they What I What I like to do is I go around the world studying cultures and figuring out why did they do this? How did they detoxify lectins? For instance, rice was invented 8,000 years ago. 4 billion people use rice as their staple. Yet 4 billion people take the hull off of rice and eat it white. And surely there can't be 4 billion dumb people who don't know any better that white rice is bad for them and brown rice is good for them. In fact, they've been taking the hull off of rice for 8,000 years. Same way, believe it or not, up until William William and Harvey Kellogg in the early 1900s, did the idea that whole grains were good for us. And if you look back 50 years, when the whole grain goodness really caught on, you'll notice that a lot of our current health issues, including this epidemic of autoimmune disease, didn't occur. This epidemic of dementia didn't occur. And so, whole grains are one of those wonderful myths that got perpetrated by a few individuals. The other individual that perpetrated this, English surgeon by the name of Dr. Burkitt. And Dr. Burkitt, uh, did some missionary work in Africa in the middle of the of the last century. And he is a colon surgeon, a guy who would operate on colon cancers. And he went down there to do some work, and nobody had colon cancer. He actually went around and watched and looked at the bowel movements of these Africans who were eating huge amounts of tubers, things like yams for instance, or celeriac root, or jicama. And their bowel movements were huge. And he goes, "Wow, you know, look at all They're eating all this fibrous stuff. And it must be that the fiber in their diet is keeping them from having colon cancer." So, he came back to England, and he espoused the the fiber theory of preventing cancer. Now, the problem is in England, they didn't have a lot of these sorts of tuberous foods, but they had tons of what's called insoluble fiber in the form of wheat and rye and barley and even oats. So, he didn't know the difference between insoluble fiber and soluble fiber. And so, he said, "We should all be eating fiber." And so, that's actually where that whole idea that the whole was actually good for you. Now, the ironic thing is he actually died of colon cancer. That is very ironic. Very ironic. Uh there's a saying among surgeons that we always die from the disease we treat, so. Well, then, so that uh there's so many interesting points in there. Talk to me about how animal meats end up cuz you don't eat hardly any. Um how how does lectin find its way into animal meat? We raise animals with antibiotics, and this was discovered by by accident years ago when they were thinking that antibiotics might be needed for crowded conditions of uh you know, stockyard animals. But, the researcher found out that by giving antibiotics to these animals, they grew faster and got fatter much quicker than the animals who didn't get the antibiotics. So, it was approved by the Department of Agriculture and the FDA to give antibiotics to animals for the purpose of growth. Those What we didn't know is that those residual antibiotics are incorporated into the meat, um the beef, the chicken, the pork, you name it. And so, we actually, every time we ingest factory-raised meats or even farm-raised fish, ingest microdoses of antibiotics. Microdoses of antibiotics are incredibly effective at killing off your microbiome. So, in the last 40 years, we've had this, you know, incredible, you know, the the worst storm that could possibly happen for our microbiome and for our leaky gut. So then, are lectins there are lectin-like substances in the meat, but is there actually lectin itself? Great question. There was just paper published from Ohio State a few weeks ago that shows that lectins in soybeans can be found in the meat of animals that you feed them to. Now, I used to think that this was kind of fanciful in the alternative medicine world, you know, you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate. And as I started seeing more and more autoimmune patients, uh we had case reports of particularly there's a woman psychologist in LA that I talk about in the book who had horrible lupus, was on two drugs, and we got her off of all her drugs by following this program, and her her lupus cleared, she had rashes, and um she she came back to see me, and she said, "You know, everything's great, but I've got this eczema, this little rash on my upper eyelids." And so, we're going through the list. I said, "Well, something's getting into you." And we get to pasture-raised chicken. And I said, "Now, you're you're eating pasture-raised chicken." She said, "Oh, yeah, I eat organic free-range chicken all the time. It's my go-to food." Free-range chicken? And she said, "Yeah, yeah, you know, organic free-range." I said, "Well, the federal government in 2007 passed a law that says you can keep 100,000 chickens in a warehouse, feed them organic corn and soybeans, and not let them out of the warehouse except open a door for 5 minutes every 24 hours and the chicken has the potential to go outside. And that is the current government definition of organic free-range chicken. Wow. So, she was eating the lectins of soy beans and corn in the chicken that she was eating. I trained in London, England for children's heart surgery and my kids were 4 and 6 years old and they missed Kentucky Fried Chicken terribly. And a Kentucky Fried Chicken opened in London. Now, in those days there was so much fish available in England that the chickens were fed ground-up fish meal. Wow. And the the chicken breasts were actually translucent like fish. And so, you know, we go to Kentucky Fried Chicken, they both grab a drumstick and they bite into the drumstick and my 4-year-old goes, "Ew! Ew! You tricked us. This is fish. Ew, this isn't chicken." Wow. And I'm going, "Well, no, no, no, no. Look, you know, drumstick, you know, Colonel Sanders, that's chicken." "No, it's fish." Well, she was right. It wasn't a chicken. It was a chicken with feathers that was actually a fish. So, we have to realize that our chickens are no longer chickens. They're an ear of corn with feathers. Americans are 70% carbon atoms from corn. Wow. A substance that we were never exposed to until 500 years ago. Europeans are 5% corn. In fact, France in 1900 banned corn as unfit for human consumption. Wow. So, what I want people to do is is eat and party like it's 9,999 years ago before we started all this mess. Mhm. And when we do that with people and teach them how to do it, it's amazing what happens to them. Well, let's talk about that because if I had um only heard some headlines about you, I would have thought, "Oh, red meat, I'll get after it." Because I eat a ton of red meat and think I'm doing healthy things. So, you don't need a lot of meat, why not? So, we found that there was a molecule, sugar molecule, on the wall of pig blood vessels that's totally different from the sugar molecule that's in ours. But, it differs by only one, actually, atom. And it's new It's called new5GC, uh in pigs, cows, and lambs. And we carry what's called new5AC. And I have nothing against red meat. But, if you look statistically, the red meat eaters do have significantly more coronary artery disease and significantly more cancer. Now, why cancer? Well, it turns out that cancer tumors in humans use new5GC to shield themselves from detection by the immune system. The problem is we don't manufacture new5GC, nor can a cancer cell. Which means they acquired it from external sources, namely beef, lamb, and pork. Now, fish doesn't carry it. They have the same molecule that we do, and chicken have the same molecule that we do. So, I urge people, uh if they're going to eat animal protein, and I I do, uh to use wild shellfish or wild fish as their main source of animal protein. Do I eat meat? Yeah, I mean do I eat beef? I do. But I get grass-fed and grass-finished beef and I use it as as a treat, not as a mainstay of my diet. And then what's your take on eggs? The yolk of the egg may be the most beneficial food that has ever been invented and as long as the chickens are fed what they're designed to eat. Well, I actually ask people to mainly throw the whites away. So, we'll do a a four egg omelet, but four of them are yolks and just use one white. And what is it in the whites or about the whites that make them problematic? Okay, it's animal protein and let's look at another reason not to eat animal protein, sadly. So, animal protein there we there's a sensor in all of our cells called mTOR and it senses energy availability and it senses sugar availability, but it senses certain amino acid availability. So, if you avoid or lessen your amount of animal protein, your mTOR will fall. Now, we have no way of measuring clinically mTOR, but we can use a surrogate for that which is insulin-like growth factor, IGF-1. And in my super old people and I study a lot of super olds, 95 and above um they all have extremely low insulin-like growth factors. And why why is that a number you want to get down? Because super old people always run low insulin-like growth factors. They always do. And in my upcoming book, The Longevity Paradox if you look at societies of the blue zones, the longest-living people on Earth. The common factor that they all have in their diet, they have very diverse diets. There's no universal diet that these people follow. And I was a professor at one of the Blue Zones, Loma Linda, for most of my life. The thing that separates or or unites all of those various diets is they eat very little animal protein. And one of the things we notice about super old people is they run low body temperatures. They're running 96°, whereas you and I are running 98.6. And they become incredibly efficient creatures. My mentor Dr. Morrow always said that you only have so many heartbeats. And when you use those up, that's the end. And he's actually right in a lot of ways, but the corollary to that is let's suppose your design is that you only get so many calories in your lifetime. And you can use them quickly or you can spread them out. And that's why that's why fasting is so useful and intermittent fasting is so useful because it's actually an easy way just to reduce your calorie intake. And it's, you know, and once you learn how to do it, it's it's an easy way to make the system work. How do you pull it off? So, I'm a huge proponent of intermittent fasting and fasting in general. Um, how do you do it? How do you make it an easy process? So, I started uh 11 years ago uh at January 1st to June 1st. Uh during the week, I would eat all my calories in a 2-hour window from 6:00 to 8:00 at night. So, the 22 out of the 24 hours every day, 5 days a week. I was fasting 22 hours. Now, why 6:00 to 8:00 at night? Cuz that's when my wife and I were at home. And um Now, this is, as you know, for a professional driver on a closed course. Right. What most people who try to do this don't realize about 80% of us in America are insulin resistant. We have much too much insulin production. And I won't bore you or the listeners, but most people can't do prolonged fasting for even more than a few hours because they can't access the fat that they've stored. Right. And they crash. And it's often called the Atkins flu or the low-carb flu where they have to be able to transition over to using ketones as a fuel. Mhm. Now, you can get there fairly quickly, and we have tips in the book on how to do that. You actually have to use exogenous ketones for a while, things like MCT oil, things like coconut oil, even red palm oil. There's a little bit of exogenous ketones in butter. It's called butyric acid. Yeah, it's um intermittent fasting is really, really powerful for alleviating brain fog, for changing your relationship to hunger is how I always think of it. It's just fundamentally different. And then getting your machinery used to actually accessing your body fat and all that. We're designed to use up fat. We just have to, you know, use the tricks to get to that fat. For most people who are overweight or obese what's so frustrating for them is they try things like, you know, intermittent fasting, and they're pretty miserable. They get headaches, and they're they're very hungry. Their brain is going, "Hey, you know, what what's the deal? You've cut me off." Mhm. It's water, water everywhere, and not a drop to to drink. And we see so many overweight and obese people. And I was 70 lbs overweight. I was obese. Running 30 miles a week and going to the gym 1 hour a day. And going, "How come I'm such a fat guy?" I couldn't get to my fat stores cuz I had an elevated insulin level. When I first, you know, got my insulin level Wow. What's that? Now I have a very low insulin level. Now, that stuff is fascinating in terms of the complexities of really breaking through and figuring out for you what do you have to do to lose fat, keep it off, and yeah, it's a a very complex thing. And to that end, not necessarily, my question is not really about fat loss, but given what we've been talking about lectins and autoimmune and all of those joints, aches, pains, all of the things that come along with it, psoriasis, all of that, what should people be eating? So, we we've got a rough sense of what we should be avoiding, but what should we be actively pursuing? Okay. So, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. There are three long-lived societies in the blue zones that use a liter of olive oil per week. That's about 12 to 14 tablespoons a day. Can I use it to sauté? You can use it to sauté. Believe it or not, there's a wonderful paper from the NIH showing that olive oil does not break down into our harmful compounds. That's amazing. But, bring olive oil to table. So, if you're going to have a steak, please pour it on your meat as they do in Italy. They always bring a bottle of olive oil so you can have steak Florentina and just drench it with olive oil. The steak is there to get olive oil into your mouth. Broccoli is there to get olive oil into your mouth. A salad is there to get olive oil into your mouth. So, there are wonderful cruciferous vegetables. You can have all the bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower. Have cauliflower pizzas. There's a great recipe in my cookbook for cauliflower pizza. Uh Can I have Japanese sweet potatoes? Yes, please. Oh, they're so good. Yeah, but the purpose of the sweet potato is to get olive oil in your mouth. Yes, which works for me just fine if I can sauté or use an air fryer. Yeah. Have you done the air fryer? Oh my god, they're like french fries. They sure are. So, yeah, they're are great for you. Things like yuca or yucca, uh make phenomenal french fries, but parboil them first and then put them in the air fryer. Also, any tuber, so like celeriac root is fantastic. Jicama. So, get some guacamole, believe it or not, true guacamole does not have tomatoes in it. That's an American whatever. And get yourself some jicama sticks. Trader Joe's has them. Lots of plain old grocery stores have them. Use that as your dipping chip. Other thing I like people to get is uh vegetables in the chicory family. Uh the more chicory you can get in your life, radicchio, the kind of Italian red lettuce, is pure inulin and your gut bugs will love love it for you. Love it. All right, before I ask my last question, where can these guys find you online? So, go to gundrymd.com. You can sign up for my daily newsletter. There's also a Gundry MD YouTube channel where every day I'm giving crazy hints and recipes um to live this lifestyle. It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle. Mm, for sure. All right, I think I know the answer to this, but what's the one big change that people can make in their life that would have the biggest impact on their health? The biggest change that people can make is just get these foods that you were not designed to eat out of your life for a while and watch what happens. The grains and the beans and the nightshades and stop eating peanuts and cashews. They're beans, they're not nuts. And I can't tell you the number of people who have gut issues or even heart disease issues that peanuts and cashews were one of the big mischief makers. That's interesting. Awesome. Dr. Gundry, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It was really incredible. All right, guys. If you want to join me in this one, I am going to be trying out this diet. I am so interested. I've never ever considered really even for a second going low meat, low animal proteins. So, but reading his book and going into the research, I'm intrigued. There's something about the breakdown that he gives about lectin and the way that it impacts your body and the way that it impacts the lining of the gut. It just there was it all made so much sense to me. And then looking at it from an evolutionary standpoint again, it just made a lot of sense. So, I'm going to be trying this and experimenting. So, join me if you will. I think that he is one of the most interesting voices in the space talking about it in a way that doesn't just become psychotic dogma. It's really just looking at what actually happened. And we didn't get to talk about his time as a surgeon, which I am sorry for. It's really interesting. Remember, 10,000 operations that he did and he has seen a lot of hearts opened up, looked inside of arteries. So, that level of understanding of what it's actually doing to your body is so important and I certainly consider that when I think about taking somebody's advice or not. But I believe see it for yourself, see if it works for you or not. Because I have been itchy, this will be a great experiment and I will see whether it works or not. So, I'm really excited. I hope you guys will join me. And he has another thing. He has so many tips. Go check out his website. I'm telling you right now, it's fantastic. And one of the things he says to try, as you guys know, I drink diet coke. And so, I'm actually going to try cutting that out by drinking soda water. So, just a nice sparkling mineral water. San Pellegrino is his uh recommendation because of its high in sulfur content. Uh so, give that a shot and you pour 1 to 2 Tbsp of balsamic vinegar. And I tried it today. It's actually pretty good. I was shocked. It's no diet Coke, I'm not going to lie, but if it means that I live forever, then I'm all for it. So, hopefully you guys will give this stuff a try and hopefully you will dive much deeper into his world. There's something about uh his voice and the way that he's coming at this that I I I was really intrigued by. So, I look forward to learning more. All right. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Awesome. Thank you again so much. 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.