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This Man Thinks He Knows What Causes All Disease | Dr. Steven Gundry on Health Theory

Feb 27, 2020
On today's episode of Health Theory with Dr. Stephen Gundry, we talk about why eating too much meat can actually shorten your life, how these things called lectins that you're probably stuffing your face with cause leaky gut, the most common food.

health

y food on the planet and the seemingly

health

y foods that are actually probably killing you Hello everyone Welcome to Health Theory Today's guest is Dr. Stephen Gundry, he is a cardiac surgeon, medical researcher, former president of the American Heart Association and New York Times bestselling author of the deeply fascinating Plant Paradox. ten thousand surgeries and has the record for longest survival from a pig to a baboon heart transplant and

what

I want to know is how to use someone who eats a primarily plant-based diet.
this man thinks he knows what causes all disease dr steven gundry on health theory
How did you come to the conclusion that there are some plants that are good, and some that are actually completely bad for us, well, actually it all started with a major at Yale University as a student in the Middle Ages, where we could design our own specialization and develop a

theory

that we wanted to defend and My

theory

was that you could get an A grade, manipulate your food supply and your environment and show that it would reach a human being over generations over a long period of time . In fact, I defended my thesis, got honors, and submitted my thesis. with my parents and I became a very famous heart surgeon and cardiologist and one of the things that I discovered back then was that we co-evolved with the plants that we eat or the animals that we eat, but back then we were eating leaves and now there are evidence that

what

makes us human as opposed to a chimpanzee is that there is a distinctive change in the gut microbiome between the time when chimpanzees and gorillas evolved and we evolved, and in fact you can tell a human by their distinctive gut microbiome rather than a chimpanzee, for example, we share 98% of all our genetic material with chimpanzees and gorillas and yet we are profoundly different and what makes us profoundly different from them is not our genes, it is actually the genes from our microbiome, unfortunately my wife. she has had a very real experience about how important the microbiome is.
this man thinks he knows what causes all disease dr steven gundry on health theory

More Interesting Facts About,

this man thinks he knows what causes all disease dr steven gundry on health theory...

You're the only person I've ever heard of that, I'd love to or more about it, so if we were going to test your thesis, what would we do? be doing with the diet to create that effect on the microbiome that would be expressed so radically in such different species. Lectins are plant proteins that are one of the main defense systems of a plant against being consumed. One of the things that we find difficult to conceptualize is that plants don't want to be eaten, they actually have a life and they were actually here first when the insects arrived.
this man thinks he knows what causes all disease dr steven gundry on health theory
The plants had a problem because they couldn't run, they couldn't fight, they couldn't hide, but they have a big advantage and that's it. their chemicals can convert 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 attach to certain sugar molecules in the US, particularly in our intestinal lining. By the way, if someone has sinusitis or a runny nose when they eat certain foods, they are actually producing sugar molecules in their mucus to trap lectins and I have many people who had chronic sinusitis, including myself, when we finally eliminated lectins from our diet, disappeared, so lectins bind to sugar molecules, lectins cause the wall of our intestine to separate, and people have heard the term leaky gut.
this man thinks he knows what causes all disease dr steven gundry on health theory
I used to if you had asked me 15 years ago if I thought leaky gut was a problem I would have had. He said it was pseudoscience now with advances in understanding how the microbiome works and understanding how lectins work. I think everyone who has an illness has a leaky gut. Now I'm pretty stupid. Hippocrates said

this

2500 years ago that all

disease

s begin in the intestine. so one of the things we know about research is research, look again because someone already knew

this

and Hippocrates knew this 2500 years ago. It's really interesting and I've heard that quote many times and it's one that I just accept and say oh wow.
What a great idea, what do you think led to that? Even now people have a hard time conceptualizing the microbiome because it is invisible. So how did you come to that conclusion? He had this interesting theory. He believed that all creatures have what he called. the translation is Green Life Force energy that actually wants perfect health for that creature and that is a driving force, unfortunately he believed, as I did, that there were external forces that were preventing that expression of Green Life Force energy , so he thought it was the purpose of a doctor. was to identify those external forces that were preventing the Green Life Force energy from expressing and eliminate them or teach the patient to eliminate them and then the patient would heal himself because the Green Life Force energy would take control now, that sounds like a bit new age and sentimental, but he was absolutely right and one of the things that I guess I and other people have discovered is that one of those external contributing factors is lectins and if you remove, move certain lectins, you will start to heal yourself same.
Let me give you another example, if we are in the ocean on a boat and the boat has a leak in the bottom of the boat and water rushes in, we have two options, the only option is to grab a bucket and start bailing. the bigger the hole, like in the old commercial, we're going to need a bigger bucket and I think most gut healing systems just give people buckets to salvage whatever, it's a lot easier to plug up. the silly hole and then We don't need cubes and so if lectins are one of the main ways we have leaky gut, then if we eliminate lectins from our diet, that's how we plug the holes, unfortunately for us, the The lining of the intestine is only one cell thick, so Imagine that one cell thickness keeps everything you eat or everything that lives on you as bacteria separate from you and they are all held together arm after arm with tight junctions, like this that what Dr.
Fasano showed with gluten, which is a lectin, is that gluten

causes

its problems by causing leaky gut, so once those spaces are open not only do lectins, which are foreign proteins, pass through, they are splinters, but also pieces of bacteria called live bacteria pass through the wall. Now, on the other side of the wall is his border patrol. The immune system and 65 percent of all the white blood cells in our body are against this wall, why are they there? Because that's where the problem is going to happen, if it's going to happen, when these foreign proteins cross the wall, the immune system basically goes off. the alarm sounds, the Airaid sirens, we get to threat level five, we turn on the fighter jets and, in fact, we go to the state of war and, as I talk about in the book, the state of war has manifested itself in multiple ways, already be it mental confusion, arthritis or depression. or anxiety, whether it's coronary artery

disease

, which is what interested me in the first place and all of these things go back to what Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago: if you want to cure disease, go to the intestine and I see this. for example, I had so many allergies when I was a young adult and in college that I had to get all the allergy shots and you know, oh, you're allergic to things, well, my allergies were just because my immune system was hyper overloaded.
I no longer have allergies. I haven't gotten over my allergies in the last 17 years. I told my immune system to calm down. There's nothing to be interested in here because there's nothing that crosses the border that's super interesting. I started probably about three months ago. It itches a lot and then my chest itches like crazy. My back would be crazy. I wonder what's going on because I'm very religious about my diet. I don't cheat on my diet except a couple of times. a year like I was really hard on it and then it started with a little spot on my neck and then it was like I had to wear everything like long sleeve it was just a big rash it was crazy and I've never had anything like that in my life and then it was like this.
I know this is something I'm eating just like in my gut. I can feel it's true, but I haven't changed my diet. I thought: what could this be? Before I give you the punchline of what I think it is, when you hear things like that, where are you going?, you're the best way to think about your skin, it's the lining of your gut, actually, your skin inside out, that is. It's fascinating, from the mouth to the anus, a tube that has the surface area of ​​a tennis court and everything you swallow is actually outside of you as it moves through the inside, the skin has to do the same functions as the outer skin and that's keeping things out of us, but it has a fatal flaw: it not only has to keep things out but it has to let in things like the proteins, fats and sugars that we eat, so that's where Mischief can happen, but when I see someone with an external skin problem it is always a reflection of what is really happening in the gut.
What is that process? How does it look? How can people watching this now if they are struggling with something? How can they get started? that repair process, so you know, I think the first thing you should do is eliminate major lectin-containing foods from your diet that you won't like for a couple of weeks, but most people, even after a couple weeks, they begin to notice a difference. Those are foods that we weren't really evolutionarily designed to eat. Beans are so lethal raw that there are very good studies published in humans that it can cause massive bloody diarrhea and there are some pretty good studies in monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and red velvet monkeys that it can actually cause heart disease and even kidney damage due to to the lectin content.
What is fascinating from the point of view of human evolution is that humans until the dawn of agriculture were actually very tall creatures, most humans were around six feet tall and our brain size was about 15 percent larger. than it is today and if you look chronologically back 8,000 years 2,000 years in eating grains and beans, we actually shrank about a foot and our brain size has never recovered from 10,000 years ago, so These are anti-nutrient grains and beans, that's the number. One, two, two thousand years ago, cows in northern Europe suffered a genetic mutation, a spontaneous mutation in which they stopped producing the normal milk protein and A2 casein and started producing A1 casein.
Now A1 casein has an olectin-like protein that is converted to a compound called beta caseiomorphin. which can cause a direct immune attack on the beta cell of the pancreas, the insulin-producing cell in the pancreas and there is pretty good evidence and it's accumulating every year that one of the

causes

of type 1 diabetes or juvenile diabetes is milk with A1 casein and it actually correlates very well in countries that have A1 casein cows, they have a much higher incidence of type 1 diabetes than in countries that have A2 casein cows. Cheeses, for example, are safe from France, Italy and Switzerland.
Sheep, goats and water buffalo also contain caseinate and, It's about that's so problematic that it actually produces a lectin-like compound that stimulates an immune response, so just like you would get it from beans or Whatever you're mixing, you're going to get the same thing, okay? It's a very new addition to our diet now. The newest addition to our diet is that some of our most treasured foods are American foods from North or South America, so For example, in the nightshade family, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, and goji berries, so nightshades have the peel and the seeds have lectins and the Native American Indians in the Southwest always peel and they remove the seeds from their peppers, they char the peppers, they remove the seeds and then they grind them into chili or eat them that way, but they always do what the Italians always peel. and remove the seeds from their tomatoes before making sauce and it's like a kind of cultural intuition where what they do is go around the world studying cultures and discovering why they did this, how they detoxified.
Lectins, for example, in rice were invented 8,000 years ago. Four billion people use rice as a staple food, but four billion people take away the rice and eat it white, and surely there can't be four billion foolish people who don't know any better. that white rice is bad for them and brown rice is good for them, in fact, they have been detracting from therice for 8,000 years, the same way, believe it or not, until William William and Harvey Kellogg, in the early 20th century, came up with the idea. that whole grains were good for us and if you look back 50 years and when the goodness of whole grains really became popular, you'll notice that many of our current health problems, including this autoimmune disease epidemic, didn't happen, this epidemic Dementia yes.
It doesn't happen, which is why whole grains are one of those wonderful myths that were perpetrated by a few individuals. The other individual who perpetrated this English surgeon named Dr. Burkett and Dr. Burkett did some missionary work in Africa in the mid-19th century. last century and he is a colon surgeon, a guy who operated on colon cancers and he went there to do a job and no one had colon cancer. In fact, he would go and observe the stools of these Africans who ate enormous amounts. quantities of root vegetables, things like yams, for example, celerac root or jicama, and his bowel movements were enormous and he said, "wow, you know, look at everything, they're eating all this fibrous stuff and it must be that the fiber in their diet prevents them from having colon cancer, so he returned to England and embraced the theory of fiber to prevent cancer.
Now the problem is. In England they didn't have many of these types of tuberous foods, but they did have tons of what is called insoluble fiber. in the form of wheat, rye, barley and even oats, so he didn't know the difference between insoluble fiber and soluble fiber. and then he said that we should all eat fiber and from that came the idea that the salon was really good for you. The ironic thing is that he actually died of colon cancer. It's very ironic, very ironic. There's a saying among surgeons that We always die from the disease we treat so well, so there are so many interesting points there.
Talk to me about how animal meats end up because you eat almost nothing. How does lectin get into animal meat? We raise animals. with antibiotics and this was discovered by accident years ago when they thought that antibiotics might be necessary for the overcrowded conditions of free-range animals, but the researcher discovered that by giving antibiotics to these animals they grew faster and put on weight much faster than the animals that did not receive the antibiotics, so the Department of Agriculture and FDA approved giving antibiotics to the animals for growth purposes. What we didn't know is that those residual antibiotics are incorporated into meat, beef and meat. chicken, pork, you name it, so every time we ingest factory-raised meats or even farm-raised fish, we ingest microdoses of antibiotics, microdoses of antibiotics are incredibly effective at killing the microbiome, so in the last 40 years we've had This is incredible, you know, the worst storm that could happen for our microbiome and for our leaky gut, so our lectins are chosen and similar substances in meat, but does the lectin itself really exist?
Great question, an article was just published from Ohio State. A few weeks ago that shows that lectins and soy can be found in the meat of the animals you feed them. Now I used to think this was a bit fanciful in the world of alternative medicine. You know you are what you eat, but you are what you are eating you ate it and as I started seeing more and more autoimmune patients we had case reports, particularly there is a psychologist in Los Angeles that I talk about in the book who had a horrible lupus she was on two medications and we took her off all her medications following this program and her lupus went away she had rashes and she came back to me and said you know everything is great but I have this eczema this little rash on my upper eyelids , so let's go.
Through the list I said well something is bothering you and we got to the pasture raised chicken and I said now you're eating beyond your pasture raised chicken cheese oh yeah I eat organic free range chicken all the time it's my go to. I said free-range chicken to the food and she said yes, yes, you know, free-range organic, they said, well, the federal government passed a law in 2007 that says you can have 100,000 chickens in a warehouse, feed them corn and organic soybeans and not allowing them outside the warehouse except opening a door for five minutes every 24 hours and the chicken has the potential to come out and that is the current government definition of free-range organic chicken.
Wow, so she was eating the soy and corn lectins in the chicken. What she was eating I trained in London, England for children's heart surgery and my children were four and six years old and they missed Kentucky Fried Chicken terribly and a Kentucky Fried Chicken opened in London. In those days there was so much fish available in England that the chickens were fed ground fish meal and the chicken breasts were actually translucent like fish and, you know, we go to Kentucky Fried Chicken, they both grab a thigh and bite it under the thigh and my four year old says oh. oh, you fooled us, this is fish ooh, this is not chicken and I'm going to oh no, no, no, look, you know thigh, you know, Colonel Sanders, that's chicken, no, it's fish, well, she was right, no It was chicken, it was chicken. with feathers that was actually a fish, so we have to realize that our chickens are no longer chickens, they are an ear of corn with feathers.
Americans are 70 percent carbon atoms from corn, a substance we were never exposed to until 500 years ago. Europeans are five percent corn, in fact France in 1900 banned corn as unfit for human consumption, so what I want people to do is eat and have fun like 9,999 years ago before we started it all this mess 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 it because if I had only heard some headlines about you I would have thought oh red meat I'm going to chase it because I eat a ton of red meat and I think I'm doing healthy things so You don't need a lot of meat, why not?
Then we discovered that there was a molecule, a sugar molecule in the wall of the pigs' blood vessels, that is totally different from the sugar molecule that is in ours, but it differs only in one. actually atom and it is new it is called nu5 GC in pigs, cows and lambs and we carry what is called new 5ac and I have nothing against red meat, but if you look statistically, red meat consumers have significantly more diseases coronary arteries and much more cancer now, why? Well, it turns out that cancerous tumors in humans use the new 5 GC to protect themselves from detection by the immune system.
The problem is that we do not manufacture new 5 GC nor a cancer cell, which means that they acquired it from external sources, i.e. pork laminated beef. Now fish does not have it, it has the same molecule as us and chicken has the same molecule as us, so I urge people that if they are going to eat animal protein, they use seafood or wild fish as the main food. source of animal protein. Do I eat meat? Yeah, I mean, I eat beef. I do, but I get grass-fed, grass-finished beef and use it as a treat, not as a mainstay of my diet, and then what's your opinion on eggs?
Egg yolk may be the most beneficial food ever invented, and as long as chickens are fed well on what they are designed to eat, in fact I ask people to throw out mostly the whites, so we'll do a four egg omelet. but four of them are yolks and you only use one white and what is it about egg whites or egg whites that makes them problematic? Well, it's animal protein and let's look at another reason not to eat animal protein, unfortunately, so animal protein, there we have a sensor. In all of our cells it is called mtor and it detects energy availability in its senses of sugar availability, but it detects some availability of amino acids, so if you avoid or reduce the amount of animal protein, your mtor will decrease.
Now we have no way to clinically measure mtor, but I can use a surrogate for what is insulin-like growth factor igf-1 and in my super elderly people and I study many super elderly people 95 years or older, they all have extremely low insulin-like growth factors and why is that insulin-like growth factor igf-1? number you want to reduce because super old people always have low insulin-like growth factors, as they always do, and in my next book, the longevity paradox, if you look at blue zone societies, people who live longer on earth, the common factor that everyone has in their diet is very diverse diets, there is no universal diet that these people follow and I was a teacher in one of the blue zones of Loma Linda for most of my life , what separates or unites all these diets is what they eat. very little animal protein and one of the things we notice in super old people is that they have low body temperatures, they are 96 degrees while you and I are 98.6 and they become incredibly efficient creatures.
My mentor, Dr. Morrow, always said that you only get so many heartbeats and when you use them up, that's the end of them and he's actually right in a lot of ways, but the corollary of that is let's say your design is that you only get a certain amount of calories in your life and you can use them quickly or we can spread them out and that's why fasting is so useful and intermittent fasting is so useful because it's actually an easy way to reduce your calorie intake and you know that once that you learn to do it, it's an easy way to do it.
This system works, how is it achieved? So, I'm a big proponent of intermittent fasting and fasting in general. How is it done? How do you make the process easy? So I started 11 years ago, from January 1 to June 1, but during the week I ate all my calories in a two-hour period, from six to eight at night, so 22 out of 24 hours of all days, five days a week, I was fasting 22 hours now, why six to eight a week? night because it was when my wife and I were home and this is like you know for a professional driver on a closed course, what most people who try to do this don't realize is that about 80 percent of us In the United States we are insulin resistant.
They have too much insulin production, and I won't bore you or your listeners, but most people can't do a prolonged fast for even more than a few hours because they can't access the fat they've stored and they crash and It's often called Atkins flu or low carb flu, where you have to be able to transition to using ketones as fuel, now you can get there pretty quickly and we have advice in the book on how to do it, 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 actually very powerful at relieving brain fog and changing your relationship with hunger is how I always think it's fundamentally different and then getting your machinery used to accessing your body fat and everything we're designed to use fat, we just have to use the tricks to get to that fat for most people. people who are overweight or obese, what's so frustrating for them is they try things like intermittent fasting and they feel pretty miserable, their head hurts and they're really hungry, their brain works hey, you know what the deal is? have you cut me?
Is water. water everywhere and not a drop to drink and we see so many overweight and obese people and I was 70 pounds overweight, I was obese, I ran 30 miles a week and I went to the gym an hour a day and I was wondering why, how It's just that I'm so fekka. I couldn't access my fat stores because I had high insulin when I first got my insulin. I was wow, what is that? Now I have a very low insulin level. Those things are fascinating in terms of the complexities of reality. move forward and figure out for yourself what you need to do to lose fat, not gain it back and yes, it's a very complex thing and to that end not necessarily my question isn't really about fat loss, but given what we've been talking about. lectins and autoimmune diseases and all those joint pains, pains, everything that goes with it, psoriasis, all that, what people should be eating, so we have a rough idea of ​​what we should avoid, but what we should actively pursue.
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 one liter of olive oil per week, that is, between 12 and 14 tablespoons per day. Can I use it to skip you? You can use it to sauté, believe it or not, there is a wonderful article from the NIH that shows that olive oil does not break down into harmful compounds. That's surprising, but it brings olive oil to the table, so if you're having a steak, pour it on top. your meat, as they do in Italy, they always bring a bottle of olive oil so thatYou can eat a Florentina steak and just dip it in olive oil.
The steak is there to bring the olive oil to your mouth. The broccoli is there to bring the olive oil to your mouth. The salad is there to put olive oil in your mouth, so there are wonderful cruciferous vegetables. You can eat all the bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower, eat cauliflower pizzas. There is a great recipe in my cookbook for cauliflower pizza. Can I eat Japanese sweet potatoes? Yes please, oh, them. They are very good, yes, but the purpose of the sweet potato is to get olive oil into your mouth, yes, which works well for me if I can sauté or use a deep fryer, yes, have you done that?
Yeah, everything, oh my god, they're like potato chips. They sure are, so they're great for you. Things like Yucca or Yucca make phenomenal fries, but parboil them first and then put them in the air fryer. Also any tuber, like celerac root, makes a fantastic jicama, so get some guacamole, believe it or not. the guacamole has no tomatoes, it's American, whatever, and it gets some hika mistakes. Trader Joe's has them in many plain old grocery stores that use them as a dipping chip. Another thing I like people to buy is vegetables in the Chicory family, huh. You can get more chicory in your life Radicchio, the type of red Italian lettuce, which is pure inulin and your intestines will love some.
I love it before I ask my last question. Where can these guys find you online? So go to

gundry

md. .com, you can subscribe to my daily newsletter. There is also a Gundry MD YouTube channel where every day I give crazy tips and recipes for living this lifestyle. It's not a diet, it's a safe lifestyle. Okay, I think I know the answer. This, but what is the big change that people can make in their lives that would have the biggest impact on their health? The biggest change people can make is to simply eliminate these foods that are not designed to be eaten from your life for a while and Watch what happens to grains, beans and nightshades and stop eating peanuts and cashews, they are beans, They are not nuts and I can't tell you how many people have intestinal problems or even heart disease than peanuts and cashews.
They were one of the great creators of mischief, that's interesting, amazing, Dr. Gundry, thank you so much, thank you for inviting me to the amazing. Guys, if you want to join me on this, I'm going to try this diet. I am so interested that I have never for a second considered cutting out meat and animal proteins, so I read your book and get into the research. I am intrigued, there is something about the deterioration that he produces on lectin and the way it impacts your body and the way it impacts the lining of the gut, it just was there, it all made a lot of sense to me and then I looked from an evolutionary point of view again, it just made a lot of sense, so I'm going to try this and experiment, so join me to me if you want.
I think he's one of the most interesting voices in the space that talks about it in a way that doesn't just become psychotic dogma, it's really just looking at what really happened, we don't talk about his time as a surgeon. , which I'm sorry, it's really interesting, remember the Ten Thousand Operations that he did and that you've seen. A lot of hearts have opened up and looked into the arteries, so that level of understanding of what it really does to your body I think is very important and I certainly consider it when I think about whether to follow someone's advice or not, but I think that you can see it for yourself.
See if it works for you or not because he has made me itch. This will be a big experiment and I'll see if it works or not, so I'm really excited. I hope you will join me. Andy has something else. He has a lot of advice. Go visit his website. I'm telling you right now it's fantastic and one of the things it says to try is you know I drink Diet Coke so I'm going to try to eliminate that by drinking sparkling water so just a good San Pellegrino sparkling mineral water. is their recommendation, it is the best with high sulfur content, so try it and pour one or two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar and I tried it today, it is actually quite good.
I was surprised that there is no Diet Coke. I'm not going to lie, but if it means I live forever, then I'm all for it, so I hope you give this a try and hopefully dive much deeper into their world. There's something about his voice and the way he comes. I was really intrigued by this so I hope to learn more, if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary, take care, great, thank you so much again, thank you all so much for watching. and by being part of this community, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe, you will receive weekly videos on how to develop a growth mindset, cultivate grit, and unlock your full potential.

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