These "HEALTHY" Foods Are KILLING Your Energy | Dr. Steven Gundry on Healthy Theory

It's the gut wall integrity and the bacteria relationship that determines your fate. [music] Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Health Theory. I am here with the legend Dr. Steven Gundry. He is a best-selling author multiple times over, a world-renowned heart surgeon who has done over 10,000 procedures including heart transplants, I might add. This man knows the human body and today we're going to be talking about his new book, The Energy Paradox. And Dr. Gundry, as I was saying before we started rolling, I really love this book and unfortunately I have experience uh with this, but if you would give people just like a quick encapsulation of what the energy paradox is and why you wrote it. So, it's uh it's dedicated to people when what to do when your get-up-and-go has got up and gone. And actually my my impetus for writing it uh started pre-COVID. Uh I was on my way to Orange County to a PBS uh fundraiser. Um and I get a call on the phone on the way down to Orange County that the person uh a young millennial who was going to do the fundraiser with me uh called in and said she didn't have it in her to come in today to uh to do the fundraiser. And I got oh gosh, you know, anything wrong? I said, "No, she's just, you know, she's exhausted and she's tired and she just doesn't have it in her. But we don't worry, we we got another person, we'll be fine." But that phrase stuck with me for for days afterwards that, you know, a millennial would be calling in and saying, "I don't have it in me." And I realized that uh when I first started my restorative medicine practice over 20 years ago, at least half the people I saw uh, would we would use a medical code, a diagnostic code called fatigue and malaise. And uh, it never really then it always went away. So, it never really occurred to me that I was, you know, treating an energy problem. But, when she said that, I said, "Oh my gosh, you know, I'm an energy doctor all along and I need to tell people what's going on." So, that was the impetus for the book. All right. So, one of the things you go into in the book um, is around cellular energy and so and and mitochondria specifically. And I've been asked a lot about how I maintain my energy levels, you know, whether it's running a company or speaking or whatever. I once stood and answered questions for 11 and 1/2 hours. Um, and one of the questions was, you know, how how do you generate the energy? And my answer was, "Well, the only real truthful answer to that is it's at a cellular level." So, it has to do with diet, it has to do with exercise. And you do get some benefit from psychological energy. Um, but I had always been, you know, since my sort of mid to early 20s, I've been working out. I've been very conscious about my diet. And so, it just sort of felt second nature until during COVID, probably I don't know, this is maybe 6 months ago now, I started to get psychotically fatigued. Brain fog, just like so tired. I was like, "Am I losing my will to fight, to live?" It was really unnerving. And I thought, "Okay, what would you tell somebody if they were asking you this question?" And I said, "Well, my answer would be I don't know what's going on with you, but I promise it's your diet." And so, I was like, "Okay, well, if that's true, what's going on in your diet?" And uh, for me, I started thinking about the only thing that I was eating a lot of was this like pecan pudding. And it was delicious. And I loved it the most. I can't even begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this thing. And because it was like raw pecans and everything, I thought, you know, it can't be that, but it's the only thing I ate a lot so let me cut it out. And it changed in like 48 hours. It was surreal. So, I know the punchline because I've read the book, but walk people through how it's possible that something I'm eating simply by removing it could restore my energy. Yeah, the I about 80% of the patients I see now are autoimmune disease patients who have kind of been all over the country, all over the world, and have not gotten a resolution in their autoimmune disease, or they're on immunosuppressant drugs they don't want to be. And what we find 100% of the time, and I can assure you it's 100% of the time, that all these people suffer from leaky gut. And or you know, intestinal permeability, if you want the exact term. And 2,500 years ago just for people that don't know it is is literally the lining of our intestines is the same surface area as a tennis court. And it's only one cell thick, right? It's only one cell thick. And the cells are stuck together with what are called tight junctions. So, everything we eat, including all the bacteria that live in us, are only one cell away from us, from and 80% of our immune system, white blood cells, are sitting right behind this wall, waiting for troublemakers to come through. And your example is actually really good. Hidden in one of my books, the Plant Paradox Cookbook, the original one, there's a little line that says pecans have a very interesting lectin. And I can't tell you the number of people who are sensitive to the lectin in pecans, particularly if you eat them raw. So, you quite frankly, undoubtedly, are one of those people who are sensitive to pecans, and these little pro- proteins, lectins, actually made your gut porous. So, so what? Well, the whole book is literally about that. Your immune system requires huge amounts of energy to do battle with whatever is coming across your border. And it Really fast on that. That was one thing from the book that um I was wondering is is there data coming out? Cuz in the book you talk a lot about the Hadza tribe, the studies that are coming out, how people compared. You've got the Hadza moving around all the time, hunting and gathering, and then you've got somebody sitting at their desk. And when you measure the energy output of those two people, you would think the sedentary person was way lower in energy output, but they're actually the same. Now, is it just your hunch that that isn't true, or is there actual data around the um the sort of energy requirements of the um inflammation, basically? I'll use a a great pre-COVID example that I use in the book. You catch the flu. The everybody gets really achy, you feel awful, you don't want to move, you don't want to read, you don't want to think, you just want to, you know, binge-watch Netflix laying in your bed. And everybody says, "Well, yeah, of course, that's the flu virus. The flu virus is causing that to happen." And in fact, it isn't. There's nothing in a flu virus to do that, but our immune system recognizes the flu virus as a troublemaker, and mobilizes the troops. And the troops, if you will, require huge amounts of fuel. So, we ration fuel to energy-hungry muscles, and we ration fuel to that energy-hungry brain. How do we ration fuel to the muscles? We make muscles hurt so that it doesn't feel good to move. How do we ration fuel to the brain? We make the brain not work. And so, your immune system takes all this fuel for the fight. And it's fascinating to see that, you know, what we thought was the flu virus causing the problem, in fact, is our own immune system saying, "You lay back, sit down for the count. I need all this energy." And in fact, that's I think, and other data shows that that's what happened to these sedentary workers. Their energy expense was just the same as if they were walking 10 mi a day, but they were burning fuel of inflammation, the fire of inflammation, as I call it. Yeah, one thing that, um, you know, sort of bringing these pieces together in my own life, my wife went through a really brutal, um, gut problem many years ago, which frequent listeners of this podcast will have heard many, many times. Uh, and I remember she used to say, "It It just feels like my gut is inflamed. It feels like my gut is inflamed." And I had heard people talk about that the immune system is right there, and I was like, "Why would the immune system be in the gut? That seems so bizarre." And then when you think, okay, well, if that junction breaks, something gets in, now the body has to go crazy, you really are inflaming that whole area. Now, the question becomes, is that what's causing the fatigue, or like the just the energy reallocation or is this something that has to do with leaky brain and foreign substances are getting into the brain that cause like that brain fog? Like how does this all um begin to manifest the symptoms? Yeah, that's you're exactly right. Number one, it's enough in and of itself to steal enough energy to have to be tired. But I think more importantly, we're now realizing for the most part, if you have leaky gut, you will have leaky brain in in one of two potential ways and I outline them in the book. One, which is probably the most frightening, is that we have a blood-brain barrier, which is a single set of cells that keeps really anything in your bloodstream away from your brain, which is kind of a sacred space. It's it's so sacred that let's suppose you get a brain tumor uh or you get an infection in your brain, we can't give you chemotherapy through your veins and it won't won't get in your brain. We can't give you antibiotics through your veins and it won't get into your brain. It's that protected. Yet, what we're now able to do with uh blood tests is actually find disruption of the blood-brain barrier. And number two, we actually see inflammation in the brain itself, particularly with these um secret service protecting agents of the brain, the microglia. They are actually the immune system of the brain. And they're they're handlers for the neurons, which are the real important cells of the brain. And the microglia are you know, the bodyguards, the handlers. And if the microglia sense that there's problems in the gut that already there's lack of a better word, an army that's penetrated our borders and that the army will soon be up to the brain the microglia actually cause neuroinflammation and it literally begin to kill Preemptively? preemptively. Here's as I talked about in the book neurons send out these dendrites to talk to other neurons. Very much like an airport has a central terminal and then satellites where you go out to catch the planes. Think of the neuron as the central terminal and the satellites are where you're going to catch plane or talk to another neuron. If the microglia think that an attack is imminent, they go, "Oh my gosh, we got to call the guys back from the satellites." So, since the dendrites are actually how we talk to another nerve, how we think, how we create memory imagine if microglia are actively popping these guys, you know, away, no wonder we have brain fog. And you know, it was something so you're 80 years old and you don't think as clear as you did when you were 30 and we go, "Eh, you're 80 years old, that's okay." But now we have 30-year-old women, particularly who have brain fog. And so many times their physician go, "Oh, you're a young mother, you have two kids, you know, you're not getting enough sleep, of course you have brain fog." But when we see these people because they're not getting any better and we actually do these tests they light up, you know, their blood-brain barrier with all these inflammatory markers and we see this neuroinflammation that we can now measure. This morning I saw a 48-year-old woman who um has Parkinson's disease. 48 years old. Uh yeah, healthy as a horse, you know, kind of out of the blue after started after a funny viral illness a couple years ago. But, long story short, we've been working with her for about 6 months, and I saw her back for a visit. And when we first checked her, she had not only leaky gut, she had markers for an autoimmune disease, lupus, uh antinuclear antibody, and she had leaky brain, and she actually had an attack on the movement center of her brain, uh anticerebellum antibodies. And we're going, "Well, no wonder, you know, you got this. You know, let's get after this." And we've now been 6 months. Each time we check her, her leaky gut is better and better. It's about uh halfway to where we want her. Her autoimmune markers are gone. Her leaky brain is about half of what it was when we started, and her anticerebellar marker is pretty much gone, still mildly positive. And so, you can kind of track what's happened to her by looking at how leaky your gut is. And we've gone through what she's sensitive to, and some really healthy foods she's sensitive to, like you were sensitive to a really healthy food. And once you get a leaky gut, even what would normally be a healthy food, if it can get past this leak, your immune system says, "Hey, wait a minute. This isn't supposed to be in here in this form. It's supposed to be digested, and what are you doing there?" And literally makes an antibody, just like if you got a shot for COVID, you made an antibody to the spike protein in in COVID. So, we make an antibody to pecans. And it's like, what what the heck? So, every time you eat pecans, your immune system goes, "Wow, you know, we got to we've got to summon the troops. This is awful. We got to take all the energy to help poor Tom." So, now let's walk people through step-by-step cuz we haven't even gotten to mitochondria in detail yet, which we'll get there in a minute. It's such an important part of this story, but so first I want to um begin to help people to understand what it is that breaks the junction in their gut because that's such a huge part of this. Uh what is it that triggers the breakdown? Let's start with that. Well, so there's you know, there's three kind of major components. So, first of all, and we don't need to talk about this extensively, but lectins are plant Paradox. We go all into that. They're plant proteins that were designed by plants to protect themselves and their seeds, their babies, from being eaten by making their predator ill to pay attention. Number two, particularly if we're eating a typical American diet with lots of saturated fats, lots of fats in general, and lots of sugars, we in our gut have classes of bacteria, and we have 10,000 different bacteria. And I divide them into gut buddies, good bacteria, and gang members. Gang members love saturated fats and simple sugars. And the problem with these gang members is that they divide and die and pieces of these bacteria called LPS's, lipopolysaccharides, in In all my books I call them little pieces of because that's literally what they are. These guys actually hop on fat molecules and ride through our gut, even without a leaky gut. And when they get to the other side, the immune system cannot tell the difference between a living bacteria and a bacterial cell wall. It's so impressive that, for instance, we could take you or me and inject these LPS's into our bloodstream and both of us would go into septic shock as if living bacteria had been put into us. So, believe it or not, in the American diet, 24 hours a day, we're causing leaky gut, we're assaulting our immune system with these LPS's. And it's no wonder that just from fat, we all, you know, are just a giant ball of inflammation. Okay, so, um, for my own sake, it'll be interesting to tease out some of the ideas around fat, but first I want to, um, stand this point just for a second of how people end up getting in a state where they're prone to having that junction break. So, I'm going to make some assertations, you tell me, or assertions, you tell me if these are correct assertions or not. Um, so, one, that part of the problem is a breakdown in the actual microbiome, so the integrity of a well-balanced microbiome. So, you've probably done something to assault that microbiome for a long time. It could be a very non-diverse diet, so some of the bugs are just dying out, and so, because they're starved to death, and And you get, you know, some dysbiosis there. You've got people just shoveling sugar in their face that comes in a gazillion different forms that causes all kinds of havoc, not only in the microbiome, but elsewhere and you know, we'll get into some of the other ramifications, I'm sure, later. Um antibiotics, which are causing that. Glyphosate, which is causing that. So it's like there are so many things that are assaulting our guts. And the reason I'm I'm prefacing all of this is because one thing that I've had tremendous success with in my life is high fat, low carb. So I'm curious to see like it in my N of 1 experience fat of certain kinds, anyway, do not seem to be problematic. N of 1, I'm well aware of that. So you know, everybody freaking out that that is not empirical data, I understand. Um but you know, there's also obviously a pretty interesting carnivore movement. Um so is it certain types of fat? Is it only fat when you have compromised your microbiome or is it No, no, no. Fat is in and of itself an assault upon even a healthy microbiome. So I'm I'm the guy who's famous for saying the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. So I'm absolutely not anti-fat. And in all my books, I have a ketogenic plant paradox chapter of exactly that. But having said that, interestingly enough um most fats, even including olive oil, are transported across the wall of our gut using these carriers called chylomicrons. And it's the chylomicrons that these LPSs hop onto. So interesting a metabolite of some kind? No, chylomicrons are the uh moving van that literally carries fat across your gut wall. Fat transverses your gut wall in a totally different way than sugars or proteins. The exception to that is medium-chain triglycerides. Now, medium-chain triglycerides, MCT oil, are a saturated fat, but they are a unique saturated fat in that they're water soluble. So, they transverse the gut wall without chylomicrons, number one. And they don't enter our lymphatic system where chylomicrons go. They go directly from our gut through our portal vein into our liver. And in the liver, MCTs actually tell the liver to make ketone bodies. So, whenever you eat MCT oil or eat MCTs in other forms, you will automatically do not stop, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You will automatically make ketones in your liver. And they'll be released. I understand the difference then. So, if if not all fats are bad, what are the fats that are bad that are causing this problem? I didn't I didn't get that. So, sadly, a lot of the saturated animal fats are some of the biggest mischief-makers. But, the other fats Specifically because they're feeding the wrong bacteria. They're feeding the wrong bacteria. And if you don't have these gram-negative bacteria in your gut in huge amounts, you will not produce LPSs, lipopolysaccharides. So, you could have a very high-fat diet as long as you don't have these gang members in your in your life. And those gang members got there, quite frankly, by eating a lot of sugar. So, help me then understand. So, um there you said there is a time for a carnivore diet. I'm guessing there's a pretty narrow band where you would recommend that, but what would that narrow band be? So, we we will use it for an elimination diet where we've got someone who is really intolerant to plant lectins in general, and we do see these people. Uh they're totally intolerant to raw plants. Most of the time um the lectins in plants can be cooked away. There are exceptions. Beans, you cannot cook the lectins away. Uh wheat, you cannot cook lectins away. You can't pressure cook wheat to get rid of the lectins. Oats have a molecule that mimics gluten. Corn has virtually identical molecules to a gluten. In fact, 70% of people who are sensitive to gluten react to corn as if it was wheat. And so many patient Yeah, so many patients that I see on a gluten-free diet for celiac disease, for extremely leaky gut, they're eating corn because it's gluten-free. And when we take corn away from them, so many of them resolve the problem. And you know, it's like "Oh my gosh, you know, I've been eating corn chips and corn muffins and cornbread, and I thought that was, you know, gluten-free." Well, it is, but it cross-reacts. So, if you if you combine a carnivore diet with what I recommend in the book, which is time-restricted eating, or compressing your eating window, you can I want to say get away with a carnivore diet a period of time. Um there's a very famous young lady who follows a carnivore diet who really wants to get off the carnivore diet, uh but she can't. Um and I think we've seen this And if we were going to really simplify why she can't, I'm guessing [snorts] it's it is simply a question of the microbiome, right? Like if we could uh repopulate her microbiome whether through fecal microbial transplant or magic, whatever, but if we could repopulate her gut, then theoretically she would be able to get off it. The only reason that people get trapped in something like that is because of the changes in their microbiome. Yes. Um one of the things that I um I think is critically important for our health in so many ways that I talk about in the energy paradox is we now know that the the microbiome, number one, has to be diverse. We know that the Western diet produces the worst kind of non-diverse microbiome that you could possibly, you know, wish for and you don't wish for that. That's number one. Number two, if you don't give the microbiome plant fibers, which are prebiotic fibers. These are soluble fibers that we can't digest, but the microbiome needs. The microbiome can't produce what are called postbiotics, and I spend a lot of time in the book talking about this exciting discovery of postbiotics. Yeah, it helped me understand what the difference between a postbiotic and a metabolite is. Okay, so literally when bacteria ferment fibers, then they the fermentation process produces both short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, like acetate, like propionate. And they produce a series of gases, hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide gas, the rotten egg smell, methane, carbon dioxide, nitric oxide. We used to think that these were just farts that everybody made and they didn't do anything. But about 10 years ago, I usually present a talk at the uh uh World Congress of Microbiota, which is which happens in Paris before COVID. And the organizer is professor from Paris, Dr. Marvin Edis. He pulled pulled me aside about 8 years ago and he says, "You know, the microbiome talks to mitochondria." And I'm going, "Well, that's interesting. How do you know that?" He says, "Well, it has to because mitochondria, the little energy-producing organelles in all of our cells, are actually engulfed bacteria. And the bacteria of the microbiome talk to their sisters. And they control what happens to the mitochondria. They either tell them to produce energy or things are bad in the engine room, cut back on energy production. I'm going, "Well, this is fascinating, but why hasn't anybody discovered this?" He says, "You watch. Uh we will." And sure enough, he was right. So, we now know that these, they're now called postbiotics. The gases are called gaso-messengers or gaso-transmitters. And the short-chain fatty acids, we now know nourish the gut wall, number one, and also nourish brain cells, number two. So, the discovery of this language, and it's literally called a trans kingdom language, where Sutter bacteria talk to us, in particular our mitochondria. And it won the Nobel Prize for medicine a few years ago with the discovery of specifically the gas, or is it the gas and the postbiotic? So, the gas is a postbiotic. Okay, are the short the short-chain fatty acids considered postbiotic? Correct. Okay. Yeah, they're they're all classified as do they do? Is it is uh hey, nitric oxide has arrived, therefore do this, and the flip side, nitric oxide has not arrived, and therefore do that? Correct. So, for instance, we know that hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg smell, if you produce the right amount of hydrogen sulfide, you will not produce atherosclerotic disease plaque in coronary arteries, despite a monstrously high level of cholesterol in the diet. But if you don't produce the right amount of hydrogen sulfide, it's as if, you know, let the hell loose from L LDL. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. That sounds like a life-changing uh revelation. I've never heard that before. So, I can have freakishly high uh cholesterol, but if I get the right signal from the my microbiome in the form of gas, then my body's like, we're good. We're not going to form the the the atherosclerotic plaque. That's like the hardest word in the English language. I know it, yeah. That's crazy. Why are people not talking about that? Because there's no money in it, you know? As statin drugs are make a lot of money. Um You know, and this is you know, when I look back at the man who changed my life 25 years ago, Big Ed, and watched him clean out the, you know, inoperable plaque in his coronary arteries, Did you see him under the knife or was he uh not surgical? So, it Yeah, interesting enough, he had so much plaque in all his blood vessels you couldn't put stents in them. You couldn't do bypasses cuz there weren't many place to land. And like so many people, he would go around the country looking for idiots like me to operate on him, to take him on. That's kind of what I did. And he spent 6 months going to major centers, and I've named them before. Um And everybody turned him down. Said, "Nope, go away. Nothing we can do for you." Well, during the 6 months, he went on a diet, and he started taking a bunch of supplements from a health food store. And he lost 45 lbs in 6 months. Now, he was still big guy. I called him Big Ed cuz he was 265 when I met him. So, he arrives in my office carrying his angiogram, the cardiac catheterization, from 6 months previous. And I look at it, and I go, "You know, Yeah, everybody's right. Nothing we can do for you. You know, sorry." And he says, "Wait a minute, you know, look, I've been on a diet. I'm taking all these supplements. Maybe I did something." And I said, "Well, you know, good for you for losing weight, but that's not going to do anything in here." He says, "Look, but what do we got to lose? Let's do another angiogram." And I said, "Okay." So, in 6 months' putting a camera in his veins. Yeah, it's do- putting dye in his veins and taking a 3D picture of where the blockages are. And in 6 months' time, 50% of the blockages are now gone. Now, he's still got blockages, but now there's open spaces where I could land a bypass. So, if I knew what I knew now, I'd say, "Great job. See you in 6 months. They'll probably be all cleaned out." But, I didn't know that. So, I said, "Great. You know, we're going to do an operation on you." And we did a five-vessel bypass, and I'm pretty smart. And then I said, "Um tell me about this diet, and let me look at those supplements." And son of a gun, this guy had actually put himself on a diet with that was my thesis as an undergraduate at Yale on what turned a great ape into a human being. And I was so shocked that, you know, this guy did this, that I put myself on my thesis, and I lost 70 lb. I was a big fat art surgeon. Even though I was running 30 mi a week and going to the gym 1 hour a day. So, that's a long way of saying that he actually was the guy who opened my eyes that we've got this all wrong. Yeah, it's it's bananas, man. Every time I talk to you, I mean, you forget your book, which is already just chock-full of enlightening things, but that that's really crazy. You So, you say in the book, you make a prediction that in the future we're going to realize a couple things. One, you say that you refer to the gut as the first brain and not the second brain. But, the other thing is this gut-gas brain axis. And I've never heard anybody talk about it before, and just to to re-anchor everybody, we're we're talking about energy and your body's ability to generate energy. And you've got your gut, which is far more complicated than anybody could possibly realize. It's [snorts] communicating to the organs inside your cell or the organelles inside your cells that generate the actual energy that are are bacteria, that have their own DNA, which is fascinating unto itself. And all of this then is also having an effect, I won't just say communicating cuz I think it's more than that, having an effect on the brain, which is then having massive effects, whether it's fatigue, whether it's the the fogginess, which was the worst part of what I went through. So, you just blew my mind with the whole gas communication thing and how it can even play out with plaque. Now, mitochondria, we have to talk about the the idea of um the the traffic jam that ends up happening. And it's really important for people. You've already mentioned time restricted, but now talk to me in in the context of that traffic jam. Because this to me was a big player in why you feel lethargic if you feel like you're lacking energy. Yeah, so mitochondria produce energy from either glucose, which comes from the carbohydrates we eat, or amino acids, proteins that we eat, or from free fatty acids, fats that we eat or that we have stored that we produce. And normally, mitochondria use one of those substances at a time. And quite frankly, if we actually ate whole foods like I talk in the book, like our great-grandparents did, normally carbohydrates, sugar molecules, would arrive first for processing. And mitochondria are really good using one thing at a time. Then, after the carbohydrates are gone, protein takes a long time to digest into amino acids, and they arrive second. Fat literally takes a circuitous route. It's not even absorbed into our bloodstream. It's absorbed into our lymph system, and then comes around later. But what's happened with our processed foods and our ultra-processed foods is that we have had made perfect pre-digested sugar, amino acids, and small fat molecules that literally instantaneously enter our bloodstream and wham into our mitochondria simultaneously. And it's literally, uh, since both of us live in the LA area, it is like rush hour traffic in LA. With all of these streets leading into our freeways and nothing moves. And what we're doing now, the average American work by Satchin Panda at the Salk Institute in San Diego, has shown that the average American is eating for 16 hours a day. And 60% of the food we eat is processed. So, we're just constant in rush hour. It's like the 405 24 hours a day as you and I know. And nothing moves. So, if we look at energy production as literally cars moving down through a freeway it's no wonder that even though we're eating huge amounts of calories we have no energy because we literally log jam the mitochondria. And just as a fun fun side note, the first pre-digested food that was actually advertised as a benefit was Kellogg's Corn Flakes. It was actually advertised as the first pre-digested food. And why anybody would want to have their food pre-digested like most of our food is now you can thank Kellogg's for doing that over 100 years ago. Yeah. Okay. Now, in the last, um, few minutes that we have, walk people through what do they do? Like, how do you you right now you have it. You're me pre-realizing that I'm eating something I shouldn't be eating. How do they rebuild back better and stronger than ever? You talk about, you know, these 80-year-olds that, you know, are charging up hills and um you know, aren't aren't thinking of fatigue. They're just they're ready to rock. How do we get anybody there at any age? So, uh I had the pleasure of knowing Jack LaLanne uh in his later years and um Jack LaLanne was the godfather of fitness in in my humble opinion. You might think that, too. But, Jack LaLanne said he used to say, "If it tastes good, spit it out." Now, he wasn't saying that because don't eat, you know, tasty food. What he was saying is, "Look, you've got to eat for your gut microbiome first. And you have to choose foods that they want to eat. And if you do that, they will take care of you." And I spent the Longevity Paradox book explaining why if you want to be a 90-year-old charging up a hill in Sardinia, you got to take care of your gut microbiome because you're actually their home. And again, in a very weird way, we have to get over the fact that this complex organism may in the end be totally dependent on single one-cell creatures that live in our gut. And, you know, it it really knocks you down a notch to think that maybe I'm here for them. But, all the available evidence is that we die, we get diseases by breaks in the wall of our gut that start this process just like Hippocrates said 2500 years ago and he doesn't have the sophisticated test that we have to prove it. But the guy was right and you can do this in animal models, you can do this in worms and it's the gut wall integrity and the bacteria relationship that determines your fate. So, eat for them, that's number one. Number two, you got to eat for your mitochondria. You cannot overload them 24 hours a day. They actually have to have down time. And the more down time they have, the more repair work they do and they will actually make more energy and it's a paradox. If you begin to gradually restrict the time you eat down to about 6 to 8 hours a day, you will develop much better functioning mitochondria, you actually have a better gut wall because you're not working on digestion 24 hours a day and you're going to protect your brain. Dr. Dale Bredesen and I who he wrote The End of Alzheimer's have become friends through the years. And Dr. Bredesen says, "Look, if you want to protect your brain, restrict your eating hours down to about 6 to 8 hours a day and it's the number one thing you can do to protect your brain by restricting your eating." It's like, "Really?" Wow, okay. So, this is extraordinary. When you take your um the three paradox books that you've written together, you really get a a pretty holistic picture of what is going on. I'm super excited. So, obviously people can find your book on Amazon wherever books are sold. Uh how else can they stay in contact with you? So, come to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Um you can get it wherever you find your podcast. We're a part of Podcast One now, so we're readily available. Uh please visit me at drgundry.com or gundrymd.com, my uh supplement and food company. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. I have two YouTube channels. I would do recipes. I cook. Uh just did another recipe this week, so um and hopefully I appear on your email visiting you every day, so. [laughter] Nice. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me. This was really wonderful. And guys, I'm telling you this stuff is so important. There are few things that have had a bigger impact on my life than diet. For the most part, it's been uh the amplitude of effect was bad because of what Lisa went through. Um but it is such a key component once you get it down how good you feel, and um Dr. Gundry talks about that in the book that there's nothing that tastes as good as feeling alert and energetic feels. Um so keep that in mind. It really is a game changer. 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