Today I am chatting with Dr. Gundry about how we can unlock the Keto code.

Dr. Steven Gundry, MD

Dr. Steven Gundry is the Founder of Gundry MD and one of the world’s top cardiothoracic surgeons and pioneers in nutrition.  He has spent the last two decades studying the microbiome and now helps patients use diet and nutrition as a key form of treatment. He is the author of many New York Times bestselling books including The Plant Paradox, The Plant Paradox Cookbook, The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age, and The Energy Paradox: What to Do When Your Get-Up-and-Go  Has Got Up and Gone. This year, Dr. Gundry released his latest national bestseller, Unlocking the Keto Code, which offers a revolutionary new take on the keto diet that debunks common myths and shows readers how to reap the rewards of keto with less restriction. He is also the host of the top-ranking health show, The Dr. Gundry Podcast.

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TRANSCRIPT

KAYLA BARNES (00:00)

Okay, great. Dr. Gundry, it's such a pleasure to have you here with me today.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (00:04)

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Let's go biohacking or something.

 

KAYLA BARNES (00:10)

Absolutely. We should be biohacking right now instead and just chatting have some really important information to give to the listeners. Today we're going to be talking about something that I have experimented with a lot with the keto diet at different points in my life. I've pretty much done every diet because I just want to see how I respond, how I feel, what my blood biomarkers look like. So keto was definitely something I did for a while. But you've uncovered some interesting new science on keto and what might be the best and the mechanisms. Right? In your new book.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (00:43)

Yeah, absolutely. I've had a ketogenic version of my diet in all of my books, and I was one of these advocates that said, wow, the benefit of being in ketosis is that it makes you a really efficient fat burner, and that's why you lose weight, potentially. And I was wrong. I think everybody else was wrong, because think about it. Now, with gas prices so high, we probably want a very efficient fuel burning car that we can get the most miles per gallon. So we'd get a Toyota Prius or something. And we certainly wouldn't want to fuel a wasting machine like a Ferrari. Well, you might want a Ferrari for another reason, but certainly not. So what was actually discovered, actually both at Harvard and the NIH, where I used to be an associate, is that ketones are not this phenomenal fuel that everybody thought they were. In fact, studies from Harvard show that even at full ketosis, the body only gets 30% of its energy supply from burning ketones. Most of it comes from burning free fatty acids. And the brain, which is supposedly the biggest beneficiary of ketones, even at full ketosis, still needs 30% to 40% of its fuel glucose.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (02:25)

And these are human studies. So they certainly aren't the greatest fuel of all kind of all time. But what they are is they're phenomenal signaling molecules that work by telling mitochondria to the fancy scientific name is uncouple and mitochondrial. Uncoupling is actually uncoupling oxygenation and respiration from producing ATP. And we discovered a number of years ago that mitochondria have basically emergency exits in the side of the inner membrane of mitochondria that protons can escape from. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, as I talk about in the book, making ATP in mitochondria is incredibly hard work, and it's incredibly damaging to mitochondria. And if you like the theory of aging, then damaged mitochondria is one of the last things you really want. So mitochondria have innate protective mechanisms to prevent that damage. And one of them, which I've become fascinated with, is uncoupling of mitochondria wasting energy. Now, it sounds most people know originally ketones were discovered in starvation, and they were also discovered in people who were eating an extremely high fat diet. But if you were starving and ketones, tell mitochondria to waste fuel, that seems really stupid because you would want every last calorie.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (04:30)

But in 2000, a PhD by the Mayor, Martin Brand wrote a fascinating little paper called Uncoupling to Survive. And he argued and subsequently has proven that in extremists that mitochondria have to save themselves because if mitochondria don't make it, then the organism doesn't make it. And so mitochondria should do everything in their power to not get damaged. And one of the ways they do that is to literally uncouple to waste fuel. And you go, well, hold on, something else has to happen. Well, what happens is that mitochondria, in the process of protecting themselves, actually make more mitochondria. Mitigenesis. Your listeners probably know that mitochondria have their own DNA, and they can grow and divide separate from the cell that they're living in, growing and dividing. So I like the analogy of if I have a dog sled and I have one dog tied to my sled, yes, the dog can pull the sled and you're not going to go very fast and you're not going to go very far before the dog will get tired out. But if we took five additional dogs and hooked it to the dog sled, now we have six dogs.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (05:57)

Each dog has to do a six of the work of that one dog. They're going to slide a go a lot further, go a lot faster. The only downside is you now have to feed six dogs instead of one dog. And I think that's a very good example of what happens. You recruit more mitochondria, each one of them does less work, so it doesn't get as damaged. But in the consequence, you've got to feed six mitochondria instead of one. And so you're actually going to waste calories. So it actually has a calorie wasting effect rather than a fuel efficiency effect.

 

KAYLA BARNES (06:38)

That's super interesting. And I think that many people that have been on the keto diet or currently on the keto diet will be pretty surprised to hear this. So for anyone that's not familiar, let's break down. What are the mitochondria? What are they used for? What do they do in the body? Obviously, we can't live without them, but can you break it down a little bit?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (06:59)

Sure. I mean, it's kind of a fun story. We think about 2 billion years ago, a bacteria was eaten by another single cell organism that would normally have been eaten and digested. And the story goes, the bacteria said, hey, let's make a deal. If you don't eat me, I'll make energy for you, I'll make density triphosphate ATP, and I just want a nice place to live. And how about it? So it was a very symbiotic relationship. We think that those mitochondria now are ancient engulfed bacteria which have their own DNA. And so almost all life forms on Earth, advanced life forms use mitochondria to generate ATP. Generating ATP is amazing. The average human makes £140 of ATP every day. And you go, Wait a minute, I don't even weigh £140. Where's that £140? Well, we actually spend it to stay alive. It's our energy currency. So mitochondria are without them. We're done for the ketogenic diet or ways of uncoupling mitochondria that are different than the ketogenic diet is probably a really good idea. Let me give you an example. Dr Brand, to kind of prove his point, looked at mitochondrial uncoupling in extremely old humans who are doing well.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (08:57)

And these extremely old humans have the most uncoupled mitochondria of anybody. One of the most fascinating stories that I talk about in the book is there's a theory of aging, basically called the Cost of living hypothesis, and that says that in general, smaller organisms, smaller animals have a very high metabolic rate and they really burn through calories and they don't live very long, whereas bigger animals generally have a slower metabolic rate. And if the theory is right, they live a long time. So far, it's good. The problem is birds, birds in general are small, and yet birds have incredibly long lifespan. Parrot in captivity can live 80 to 100 years. A Hummingbird in captivity, which has the highest metabolic rate measured of an animal, its heartbeat is 1100 beats per minute. And yet Hummingbird and captivity can live ten years. That's a long time for that little guy. And what was been discovered is that birds have incredibly uncoupled mitochondria. And what fascinated me was that birds have uncoupled mitochondria because of the various foods and nectars that they eat that contain compounds that I've talked about for a very long time called polyphenols. And hopefully we can talk about why polyphenols might be a really good idea for uncoupling mitochondria.

 

KAYLA BARNES (10:48)

Absolutely. And thank you for that. That's a great description. Yeah. Mitochondria, most people, I think, know are like the powerhouses of the cells. That was an incredible description. Let's talk about polyphenols and let's talk about things that boost. We talked about ketones being a mitochondria on coupler, but there have to be other things. I would guess we can go through that list, too. And by the way, Doctor, how do you know if you have really uncoupled mitochondria? Is there a test?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (11:16)

Well, yeah, we can't do a test for them, get a blood sample for you. But what's fascinating, in the lab, you can show the effect of various modalities, such as, let's use one example, time restricted eating or intermittent fasting. As I talk about in the book, there's two very provocative studies, one by Dr. Rafael de Cabo at the NIH, where most people have heard that calorie restriction, that is, cutting calories 25% to 30% less than a person or an animal would normally eat, is really the only proven way to extend not only health span, but lifespan. And this was confirmed in one set of rhesus monkeys but not in another set. And there was slightly different dietary treatments of these groups of animals. And Dr. Cabo said, you know, I think we've got calorie restriction wrong. He said, when we're doing calorie restriction in animals, we're controlling what time these animals eat because we put the food in their cake. And if you're really hungry and you're only eating 70% of your calories, instead of when somebody puts the food in the cage, you're going to eat it very quickly, naturally. And I think it's not so much reducing the amount of food that these animals are eating, but it's reducing the amount of time that they're actually spending eating and increasing the amount of time that they're fasting not eating.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (13:13)

So he designed a series of mice experiments. It was quite elegant. And I'll go to the punchline. The mice that ate all day long lived a certain amount of time. Then he took mice and gave him a full day's portion, but he put the food out at 03:00 in the afternoon. And mice in general are nighttime eaters. So they ate up, actually most of their food in about 12 hours, and the rest of the time they were fasting until the next day. And then he had a third group of mice that he calorie restricted gave them 30% less food, but also put it out at 03:00 in the afternoon. And what surprised him, I guess it didn't surprise him, is only the mice that were time restricted, and that was the calorie restricted. But the time restricted had metabolic flexibility, had the ability of their mitochondria to either burn glucose for fuel or burn fat for fuel free fatty acid. The mice that ate all day had no metabolic flexibility. They couldn't make a switch between fuels. The mice that were calorie restricted and time constricted lived about 30% longer than the mice that ate regular.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (14:37)

But what was wonderful was that the mice who ate a full day's ration, but their ration was compressed to about 12 hours, still lived 11% longer than the mice that ate all day. That's equivalent to a ten year increased lifespan in humans. It's not bad. The other fascinating thing is the time restricted mice didn't have any beta amyloid or Tau formation in their tissues, which is actually very common to occur in mice. So there's these sorts of evidence that uncoupled mitochondria are really a good idea. There's also a fascinating Italian athlete study that I talk about in the book where they took Italian cyclists and they put them on a training table where they all had to eat the exact same food for three months. They only varied the time that these athletes could eat their meals. So one group ate breakfast at 08:00 in the morning. They had lunch at 01:00 in the afternoon. They had to finish dinner by 08:00 at night. So that's a twelve hour eating window and a twelve hour fasting window. The second group that breakfast. Breakfast at 01:00 in the afternoon. They had lunch at 04:00 in the afternoon, and then they had finished dinner at eight.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (16:04)

So they had a seven hour eating window and a much longer fasting window. They had identical performance, identical muscle mass at the end of three months. But the compressed eating window guys lost weight. The other guys didn't, even though they ate the exact same amount of calories. And one of the markers that I use in my clinic to look at aging, or lack thereof, is insulin like growth factor one. Igf one the athletes in the shortened window group dramatically dropped their IGF one, the other group didn't change at all. What a nice piece of information. You really don't have to change the foods you eat. You just have to change the timing that you eat. Compressing the timing, and you'll get a lot of the benefits that I talk about in the book.

 

KAYLA BARNES (17:05)

Wonderful. I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting. To me, it seems like it's kind of common sense, right? We really shouldn't be eating all the time. We should be doing other things. But that's just my opinion. That's a great way. I've heard you say maybe coffee. Is that a mitochondrial encompler?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (17:24)

It is indeed. In fact, it's a double mitochondrial coupler. Let me return to polyphenols for a second. Polyphenols are those in general dark, bright colors that most people have seen polyphenols every fall in leaves and didn't realize that that's what they were seeing. Polyphenols, Interestingly enough, are used by plants to protect their version of mitochondria, which are called chloroplasts, from the damage of sunlight. Plants obviously have to have sunlight to produce energy, but sunlight is damaging to their mitochondria, just like oxygen is damaging to ours. So plants produce these polyphenol compounds which, believe it or not, uncouple their mitochondria to prevent the damage from sunlight. And so when the green goes away in the fall, all those beautiful colors of yellows and oranges and Reds and purples, those are the polyphenols. Now, when we eat polyphenol containing foods, we don't actually absorb much of the polyphenols, but we now know that the bacteria microbiome in our gut loves to eat polyphenols. It's actually prebiotics to them, and they, in turn, convert these polyphenols into absorbable compounds. And it's those polyphenols that in turn uncouple our mitochondria. So coffee happens to be loaded with polyphenols, and coffee is also loaded with caffeine.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (19:17)

And it just so happens that caffeine uncouples mitochondria as well. So you get a double hit. Now, interesting. Unfortunately, milk binds polyphenols in both coffee and tea. And that actually explains the paradox between the British Isles and Japan and China, where all of these people are tea drinkers. And yet the British put milk or cream in their tea, and Japan and China drank it black. And so they're getting the benefit of polyphenols and the British aren't. Darn it.

 

KAYLA BARNES (20:05)

Yeah, that's interesting. I've never been a big fan of any milk in my coffee. Actually, the only milk that I really drink. I don't even know if I should say it because it's illegal, I think. But raw milk I know.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (20:18)

I really it depends on the state, quite frankly. There are plenty of places that raw milk is sellable, let's put it that way. How's that? And I'm actually having a glass of polyphenols right now. It's one of my products. It's called Power Blues, and it's just a bunch of polyphenols. And I have actually about five cups of green tea every day just to get the polyphenols.

 

KAYLA BARNES (20:47)

That's amazing. Do you have any other favorite sources of polyphenols that you enjoy on a daily basis?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (20:53)

Well, interesting, a cousin of polyphenols that plants use to protect their mitochondria is melatonin, the supposed sleep hormone. And it turns out that melatonin is actually one of only two actual antioxidants that work in mitochondria. The other is glutathione. There is no other antioxidant that is actually used by mitochondria. So melatonin is used by plants, and plants don't need to go to sleep. So plants produce melatonin. And the highest concentration of melatonin is in pistachios. And pistachios are loaded with them. Just so happens that coffee has melatonin, mushrooms are loaded with melatonin, red wine has melatonin, and dark chocolate has melatonin. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is let's not think about melatonin as sleep hormone. Let's think of melatonin as a mitochondrial repair hormone. And the more melatonin we can get in us, the better our mitochondria will function.

 

KAYLA BARNES (22:16)

Wonderful. I love that. So there was another potential mitochondrial uncoupler that I've heard you talk about before. Not in the form of cigarettes, of course. But nicotine has some mitochondrial uncoupling benefits, right?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (22:34)

It does indeed. And our mutual friend Dave Asprey would be the first to applaud. And I talk about this. So nicotine is a mitochondrial and there are, rightly or wrongly, multiple studies showing that cigarette smokers have far less dementia and Parkinson's disease than non cigarette smokers. Interestingly. Cigarette smokers are, in general, significantly thinner than non cigarette smokers. And it would appear that it's because of the uncoupling effect of nicotine. Now, having said all that, I do not advocate nicotine, even nicotine patches, even nicotine drops, because one of the things that I would hope they would admit is that, yes, nicotine is great for uncoupling mitochondria, but it's also great as an addictive substance, and it's a very slippery slope. And since there's so many other ways doing a couple of mitochondria, you get better choices.

 

KAYLA BARNES (23:50)

Absolutely. It's been kind of popular in the biohacking world, of course. Not smoking. No one's taking up smoking in the biohacking world to benefit?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (23:57)

I hope not.

 

KAYLA BARNES (23:58)

No, not that I'm aware of, at least. But there's like some little gum and these little lozenges from a brand that I've heard quite a bit about. So I know that's what David is talking about so that's super interesting. Can we talk a little bit about free fatty acids? What are the best sources? So you're saying that free fatty acids are better or the same as ketones, or it prefers free fatty acids. Right. Our bodies, yeah.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (24:27)

So normally mitochondria can use glucose to produce ATP, or they can use free fatty acids to produce ATP. What's sad in my research and others is that the vast majority of Americans have no metabolic flexibility. In fact, even normal weight individuals, only 50% of people have metabolic flexibility, the ability to change basically on a dime from burning glucose to burning free fatty acids. And a lot of that is because the vast majority of Americans, whether they know it or not, are insulin resistant. They have elevated insulin levels and simplistically. Insulin is a fat storage hormone. And insulin is really good at taking any of our excess calories and inducing fat cells to take them and store them as fat. What's unfortunate is insulin is not only a fat storage hormone, but elevated insulin levels prevent the release of free fatty acids from fat cells when you stop eating. Now that was actually pretty smart because way back when if you found this great fruit tree, you'd want to eat as much as you can and store a lot of fat. And if you're trying to store fat, it would be crazy that some other hormone was letting fat out of your fat cells.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (26:06)

So insulin blocks what's called hormone sensitive lipase from releasing free fatty acids. And what's so disappointing for so many people who try intermittent, fasting or even a high fat ketogenic diet is they have elevated insulin levels. And try as they might if they actually can't release free fatty acids from their fat cells, often for several weeks until insulin falls. So what's so important about free fatty acids, if you like ketones and I do, is ketones are made from free fatty acids arriving in the liver. And free fatty acids can't get past the blood brain barrier, your muscle level, they think it's great stuff. But free fatty acids are too big to get through the blood brain barrier. So this is where ketones come in. Ketones are short chain, water soluble fatty acids, and they can get through the blood brain barrier. So that's where the idea that ketones are so critical for the brain. Now there's a way around this that I talk about in the book, and it's something I've been using in my clinics now for 25 years. Medium chain triglycerides, which people now know as MCT oil, are unlike any other fat in that they are absorbed directly through the wall of our gut without carrier molecules, and they go directly to our liver, and there they are, directly converted into ketones.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (27:50)

So I joke, you could eat a big fruit salad and have a tablespoon of MCT oil, and you actually, a half hour later, will be producing ketones. You will be in ketosis even though you had this big giant carbohydrate load. And the beauty of that is most people really can't release free fatty acids from their fat cells because their insulin levels are too high. So as a crutch to get going, you can start getting MCT oil several times a day and get ketones to keep you going in your brain. The other really cool source is it turns out that the names for the various medium chain triglycerides are all derived from the Latin word for goat Capra. And so there's capric acid, Caprylic acid, and so forth. Why in the world would it be named after a goat? Well, it turns out that goat and sheep milk, about 30% of the fats in goat and sheep milk are medium chain triglycerides. So the beauty is that you could have goat yogurt, goat Kiefer, sheep yogurt, sheep cheese, goat cheese and have a delicious piece of cheese and actually be eating MCTS that can produce ketones.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (29:19)

So. Wow, that's fun.

 

KAYLA BARNES (29:22)

That's super fun. I'm doing pretty good so far in my mitochondrial uncoupling checklist. I do a smoothie with raw goat's milk kefir in it. So we have a bunch of different things I'm doing. I feel pretty good about this.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (29:36)

Well, yeah. And it's interesting we cut this out of the book because I ramble too much. But if you look at a lot of the longest living communities in the world, they are goat and sheep herders, and they eat a lot of goat and sheep products. And in fact, when you compare these villages with villages nearby that otherwise eat a similar diet, live in a similar environment, but aren't goat and sheep burgers, they don't have the longevity that these goat and sheep burgers have. And we now at least think it's because these guys are actively uncoupling their mitochondria because of the ketones that's generated from the MCT and these products. So you are spot on.

 

KAYLA BARNES (30:36)

I love it. If you have access to ketones like ketone esters, would you recommend taking some of those every now and then? Will that even boost mitochondrial uncoupling more?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (30:51)

Yeah. So ketone esters and ketone salt, first of all, ketone esters are one of the most nasty tasting things I think I've ever tried. Yeah. And they're very expensive. You certainly can get ketones out of ketone salts. They're a lot less expensive. They're certainly a lot tastier. But for most people, it's just a temporary thing that you need to do. And since MCT is literally instantaneously produced into ketones, then to me, these additional costs aren't necessary. And they're in my book. But for most people, it's just so much easier to buy a bottle of MCT oil. The other thing that people forget is you can mix MCT oil with olive oil and use it in salad dressings. You can pour it on vegetables, you can put it in a smoothie and it's flavorless. Try to get the C eight variety or the mixture of C eight and C ten. C twelve really doesn't have any ketogenic potential. So buyer beware?

 

KAYLA BARNES (32:06)

Absolutely. Or we could do what our friend does with the coffee. So you could have the organic lab tested coffee with some MCT, right. And maybe a little bit of butter to start your day. And that would be a pretty powerful, mitochondrial, uncoupling beverage, right?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (32:23)

Yes. But as I point out in the book, butter really has not a whole lot of MCTS. It has a little bit of butyrate. That's where the name butter came from. Or butyrate came from. But you're much better off using a dollop of goat or sheep cheese or goat sheep yogurt in place of that. And I call it my crop Chino in my book, Top Frachino instead of Dave's.

 

KAYLA BARNES (32:55)

Well, I love that I'm going to try it, and I would imagine it tastes pretty good, too.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (33:00)

It tastes great.

 

KAYLA BARNES (33:01)

Maybe put like, a little bit of cacao or something in there. Would that interfere or be okay?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (33:06)

That would be okay. Although just remember that just like in other polyphenols, the polyphenols in cacao are bound by the milk molecules. That's why milk chocolate really has no health benefit. And also, as I talked about in the book, you really want to stay away from Dutch or Alkali cocoa powder, because the Dutch invented a way of using Alkali to neutralize the bitterness in cacao, and it's the bitterness that are actually the polyphenols. One of my early sayings was more bitter, more better, because that's actually you are tasting the polyphenols in that food.

 

KAYLA BARNES (33:55)

That's great. And it's an acquired taste, but I love the bitter taste. Now I way more preferred than the milk chocolate. So what does a perfect, mitochondrial, uncoupling day look like for Dr. Gundry? What is your morning looks like the breakfast. What do you eat throughout the day?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (34:13)

Well, I just completed my 23rd year of not eating breakfast or lunch from January through June 1 and eating all my calories between five and 700 at night, the so called OmAd diet, one meal a day. So as far as I know, police anybody? Correct me. I was the first person to write about this a very long time ago and practice it. So why am I doing that? Well, what I want to do is I want to spend a considerable period of time in a non eating state so that I am producing ketones that are signaling my mitochondria to a couple. But I don't want to do it continuously because the literature is actually pretty clear that continuous ketosis number one would have never happened evolutionary. I mean, can you imagine if our Hunter gatherers were knowingly wanting to be in ketosis, and then we killed a Buffalo and we go, oh, Gee, I think I'm only going to have about three bites of that Buffalo because I want to maintain my ketosis. Of course not. We would cycle in and out of ketosis on a probably daily basis. Most Hunter gatherers don't eat until ten or 11:00 in the morning when they find something.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (35:56)

Nobody had a storage system. So why do I do it in the winter? Because in general, winter is a time of less food. Even in the jungle, fruit only ripens once a year in the summer and fall. So I patterned this behavior on what I think was an evolutionary good idea. So that's what I do now. What do I have for dinner? For instance, my wife and I always have a handful of raw pistachios, and we, quite frankly, always have a piece of goat or sheep cheese as kind of the start of dinner. And then for the most part, we eat very large salads. Interestingly enough, olive oil on couples mitochondria. And fun fact, vinegar, a short chain fatty acid, is like acetic acid, is very good at uncoupling mitochondria. So getting vinegar in your life is a really good idea. And it probably explains the magic of why Apple cider vinegar is so useful in so many things and may help people lose weight. And I write about this in the book. Both of us are what I call vegaquarians. We tend to eat vegetables during the week and then on the weekends, we usually have Wildfish or wild shellfish.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (37:28)

Do I ever eat meat? Yeah, about once every three months. We have a grass fed, grass finished piece of beef, but very rarely. And I go into why very rarely in the book? I take care of a lot of vegans in my practice because of my association with Loma Linda University School of Medicine, where I was a professor for much of my career. And sadly, most of the vegans I've seen in the United States are some of the sickest, unhealthy individuals that come to my practice. And this is not the time to talk about it. But they are, in general, pasta and bean and grain Italians here in the United States. And for reasons that I go into the books, that's probably not a great long term healthy lifestyle.

 

KAYLA BARNES (38:28)

Yes, I agree with that. So what do you see vegans elsewhere kind of doing? Just more whole foods, plant based?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (38:36)

Yeah, far more whole foods. Whole plants, lots of green leafy vegetables. The Okinawans are actually, I think, a very good example. The only actually survey of the traditional Okinawan diet was done by the US military in 1947, after we occupied Japan, after the war. And that diet, 85% of the calories, was a purple sweet potato. The blue sweet potato 85%. Wow. Yeah. Only 8% of their calories was from white rice. They did not eat soy. They ate miso and NATO, which fermented soy. And so the idea that these guys were healthy, pretty much vegans, that all they were eating was soy and rice is actually not true. They were in sweet potato, but specifically a purple sweet potato and that of course, was loaded with polyphenols, and that's where their longevity came from. Vegans and I go around the world looking at these cultures, they eat very differently than our vegans do.

 

KAYLA BARNES (40:11)

Yeah. And also, I would assume there's not as many we keep coming out with these imitation products. Right. So it's like a burger, but it's not a burger, but it's filled with all these fake chemicals and ingredients.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (40:25)

Yeah. I mean, it's still a processed food, and we're going to have to get over this. That just because it's plant based, if it's processed to unrecognizability, then it's probably not all that great for you. The other problem that we have in this country, which I do talk about in the other books, is glyphosate Roundup. Roundup is one of the better ways to produce leaky gut in and of itself. It actually kills off our microbiome. People don't know that Monsanto patented Roundup as an antibiotic. Seriously, not a weak killer, an antibiotic. And because bacteria use what's called the chickamate pathway to reproduce as new plants and humans don't have a shikamaid pathway. But, yeah, Monsanto Roundup Glyphosate blocks the chicamate pathway. And Monsanto used that to convince the FDA that Roundup was perfectly safe for humans to eat because we don't have a chickenmate pathway. But they didn't bother to tell anybody that bacteria in our microbiome utilize the sugar meat pathway.

 

KAYLA BARNES (41:48)

Oops, wow. Yeah. No, I've been very against, of course, like eating all these foods sprayed with glyphosate for a long time, and it's wild. I surely know that you know this as well as anyone, but we have a lot of work to do on our food system for it to be fair, for it to be health promoting. But thank you for the work that you do and the message that you're spreading, because all of these small details that we can change, like mitochondrial uncoupling, and just knowing the fact that you told us about Monsanto, this is really going to change people's lives because health is power, right?

 

DR. GUNDRY  (42:28)

Yeah, absolutely. I spend time in villages over in Europe, and it's interesting, the European government is under increasing pressure from Bayer, which now owns Monsanto, to open Europe up to Round up. And some of the individual countries now, luckily, pass laws or laws are on the books to ban the use of Roundup and the food, the safety of food over there compared to our food. I think it's one of the reasons that a lot of people from America, when they go over to Europe, even with, say, autoimmune diseases that are very troubling, do very well when they're over in Europe and their autoimmune disease or their leaky gut gets better, their IBS gets better, and then they come back saying, oh, I'm cured, I'm fine now. And then they start eating our food and it flares right back up. It's not good.

 

KAYLA BARNES (43:35)

I agree. I think it's outrageous that we have to pay so much more to not have poison on our food. Yeah, and that sounds extreme, but I also feel it to be true. So thank you so much for your time. This has been absolutely incredible and I definitely loved your book. I'll include a link in the show notes so other people can pick it up too. But I really appreciate your time, doctor Gundry.

 

DR. GUNDRY  (44:00)

Well, thanks for having me on and let's go hack some more again in the future.

 

KAYLA BARNES (44:06)

Absolutely. That sounds great.