 One of the things that really got me interested were these proteins that are called lectins, and they're sometimes called sticky proteins. And just to capture the audience, gluten happens to be elected. And it's just one of multiple lectins. Gluten is actually not as evil as a lot of people think. Okay. Inflammation and everybody's, you know, inflammation is the cause of everything. Well, inflammation is caused by a leaky gut. Today, I'm excited. First off, this is my earliest interview that I've ever done. Seven a.m. in the morning. Oh, wow. But I'm here with Dr. Stephen Gundry, who is a cardiologist, heart surgeon, medical researcher who's done over 10,000 heart surgeries and former president of the American Heart Association, but also now in New York Times bestselling author of the Plant Paradox, the Longevity Paradox and the newest book, the Energy Paradox. Dr. Stephen Gundry, thank you for being here. Hey, thanks for having me, Rob. I'm excited to dive in and talk about all the research I've been doing on you. But but but it's good, though, because I think that a lot of people I was talking yesterday with somebody about people don't research their food enough. And my my nephews say that I ruin food for them because every time I come over the house, I'm like, oh, do you know this? Do you know this? I ruined ketchup for them because I talked about how much sugar was in it. Oh, yeah. So I'm I'm excited to sit down with you and actually hear it directly from you. But if you could kind of talk about why you are writing these books now, why are you putting this out there, coming from a heart surgeon and what you noticed and what made you decide to leave that task to become an author? Well, real real briefly, I was a professor and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery and pediatrics at Loma Linda University, not far down the road from here and very famous for operating on people who were too dangerous to operate on children's heart transplants and over 20 years ago now, I met a guy who changed my life, who I call Big Ed in all my books. And he was a big overweight guy from Miami who was 48 years old and he had inoperable coronary arteries disease. That means he had so many blockages in his coronary arteries. You couldn't put stents in them to open them up. You couldn't do a bypass because there wasn't any place to land a bypass. And people like this would go around the country looking for idiots like me to operate on them. And were you kind of like the last resort? Yeah, exactly. There are a handful of surgeons who'll just say, oh, what the heck? You know, if you want to try, I'm willing to try. And he had spent six months going around the country, carrying his angiogram, his catheterization, you know, the movie of his coronary arteries around and everybody turned him down all the centers. And I was kind of six months into this, the last resort. And I'm looking at his movie and I go, you know, I really don't like to turn people down, but I agree with everybody else. There's nothing I could do for you. He says, well, you know, wait a minute, you know, this film was taken six months ago. I've been on a diet. I lost 45 pounds. This guy's 265 pounds when I'm talking to him. Big Ed. And he says, and I went to a health food store and I bought all these supplements and I've been taking these supplements religiously. Maybe I did something in here. And, you know, I'm scratching my professor beard and going, well, you know, good for you for losing weight, but that's not going to do anything in here. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine, which I firmly believe. And he says, well, look, I've come all this way. Why don't we just get another angiogram and another cardiac catheterization? And I go, all right. So we did. And in six months time, this guy had cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coronary arteries. Gone. And that's not supposed to happen. That's impossible. At least that's what I was taught. So I'm going, wait a minute, you know, how did you do that? And he starts describing this diet he was on. And with, I mean, it's, the serendipity is amazing because I had this crazy special major as an undergrad at Yale University back in the Dark Ages, where you could actually design your own major. In human evolutionary biology, basically I had thesis that you could take a great ape, manipulate its food supply, manipulate its environment and prove you'd wind up with a human being. And I actually defended my thesis and got it in honors and gave it to my parents and went off to become a famous art surgeon. So he starts describing this diet and I go, holy cow, you know, that's my research project. It's the same diet. Yeah, it's the same diet. And why this was so poignant was that at that time I was 70 pounds overweight. Despite running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour a day, eating what I thought was incredibly healthy, pretty much vegetarian diet because Loma Linda is an Adventist institution. So, and you know, I had high blood pressure, I had pre-diabetes, I had arthritis, I had migraine headaches, doing baby heart transplants, don't recommend it. And I was told it was genetic because my father had much of the same stuff. So I'm going, wow. So I called my parents actually who lived in San Diego. I said, do you still have my thesis? And they said, yeah, you know, it's here in the shrine by the eternal flame. And I said, send it up to me. So I actually started my thesis on myself. But the other thing that happened is, let me look at those supplements. And I said, how'd you choose these supplements? He said, well, you know, I just, that one looked interesting and this one looked interesting and the health food store person said, yeah, I'll try that one. And when I started looking at these supplements, I was famous for keeping hearts alive for 48 hours in a bucket of ice water for heart transplant. And I used a bunch of these particular compounds to protect them, to preserve them. And I was putting them through the arteries and veins of the hearts and never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things. So I started swallowing a bunch of supplements and I lost 50 pounds my first year and I lost another 20 and kept it off over 20 years now. But the important thing is, I started patients that I operated on on my program. And lo and behold, their high blood pressure went away, their diabetes went away, their arthritis went away. And after about a year of doing this, I was actually going into work one Friday, looked in the mirror and I said, you know, I've got this all wrong. I shouldn't operate on people. And then teach them how to eat. I should teach them how to eat. And I probably won't never have to operate on them. Right. And that's a really dumb career. Making yourself obsolete. It's like, yeah, all my colleagues said, well, you're trying to put yourself out of business, which I did, unfortunately. And, you know, it's a really dumb career move, but that's what I did. So I resigned my position at literally the height of my career and set up a clinic in Palm Springs, where I just started a research project saying, look, if you'll start eating certain foods and avoiding certain foods and go to Costco or Trader Joe's and buy some of these supplements, I want to draw your blood every three months and, you know, insurance will pay for it, Medicare will pay for it. And let's just see what happens. And lo and behold, you could document how it worked, that it did work. Who'd have thought? Just switch the food that you're eating. Yeah, just switch the dumb food around. So this is what I want to dive into, is what foods are the ones, first off, that we shouldn't eat. Because there's some big surprises that I've found. And then obviously in the book, it tells the ones that we should eat. But what are some of the surprises that you came across with foods that we definitely shouldn't eat as humans? Yeah, and that actually harks back to my research on human evolution. Human beings are basically great apes. And we never encountered, never ate a bean or a grain until about 10,000 years ago. And 10,000 years ago is a blink in human evolution. And it's interesting when you actually look at skeletons from humans back then, humans were actually very tall creatures. The average human was about six feet tall. And our brain size was 15% bigger than it actually is right now. And then you can actually watch human shrink about a foot when beans and grains were introduced. And our brain size shrunk. And you can actually first document arthritis occurring in bones and so on and so forth. Then you go, gosh, that's not very good. So I was intrigued as well, why are these things so mischievous? And that opened up this Pandora's box of learning about plant defense systems against being eaten. And believe it or not, plants do not want to be eaten. They were not put here on earth for us to eat them. They were here first. And their defense system is biologic, biochemical warfare against their predators. And one of the things that really got me interested were these proteins that are called lectins. And they're sometimes called sticky proteins. And just to capture the audience, gluten happens to be a lectin. And it's just one of multiple lectins. In fact, if I was going to choose an evil foe as a lectin, gluten is actually not as evil as a lot of people think. But it's... I'm gluten-free, so I want to hear about that. When we dive into it too. Okay. So, you know, in all my books, it's really what I tell you not to eat that really makes the difference. It's not what I tell you to eat. So, almost all grains have lectins. They're primarily in the outer hall. And so, one of the things that's fascinating is we have gotten sicker and sicker the more we've introduced whole grain goodness. For instance, four billion people use rice as their staple. Rice was introduced, cultivated 8,000 years ago. Four billion people go to the trouble of taking the hall off of brown rice to make it white before they eat it. And four billion people can't be that stupid. Because everybody knows how much better brown rice is for you than white rice. But it's not. They've taken the hall off of rice. For years and years and years, bread was judged by the whiteness. And only the poor people got the brown bread and the upper class got the white bread because the hall was being removed. And the Italians, I mean, the idea of really a whole wheat pasta or whole wheat pizza would just kill an Italian. It's like really a whole wheat croissant in France. Why would I do that? Why would I ruin something? So people have all been, part of my job is to study cultures and figure out, well, why did they do this? What prompted them? I'll give you another example. The nightshade family. Nightshades are primarily American plants. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes are all from North or South or Central America. And they were only introduced to the rest of the world, both Asia and Europe by Columbus and what's called Colombian trade 500 years ago. So all of these foods are modern to almost all human beings. And even the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back because they knew how deadly they were. And most Italian cuisine, tomatoes and peppers are peeled and deseeded before they're used and made into sauces. Because we don't do here at all. Which we don't hear it. Yeah, my mother, my grandmother on my mother's side was French and she taught my mother you always have to peel and deseed tomatoes. So growing up, I actually had sliced tomatoes when those seeds are peeled on them. And when I went away to Yale, I actually had a sliced tomato with a peel and deseed. And I thought, this is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. Why would you eat these things? 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Yeah, they were kidney beans, I think you said. Yeah, kidney beans. Kidney beans are by far the worst. They have the highest lectin content. But even the humble lentil, 7% of all the proteins in a lentil are lectins. So they're armed and dangerous. But when you look at traditional cultures that use beans, for instance, much of India and much of Brazil, which both use a lot of legumes, pressure cooking is standard in how you prepare these things. What's the reason why pressure cooking works and none of the other ones do? So you have to have high pressure and high heat to break lectins. The only lectin that's resistant to that is actually gluten. And gluten is such a tough protein that even high pressure and high heat can't do it. I learned subsequently that the Adventists live on a mystery meat that's made out of texturized vegetable protein, TVP. Everything's made out of TVP. And it turns out TVP is made from de-fatted ground up soybean that is extruded under high pressure and high heat. So the clever Adventists had figured out a way to detoxify soy. It's like how did they knew all of this stuff and we just lost this knowledge. We lost the knowledge of the beans. We lost the knowledge of the tomatoes. Is it just because we got lazy or we just wanted to get it done quicker? Yeah, I think all of the above. I mean, the Incas clearly ate quinoa, you know, that healthy pseudo grain. But the Incas wouldn't eat quinoa raw. They wouldn't cook it. They actually fermented it first and they let it rot and then they cooked it and ate it. And fermentation is actually a very good way of eating lectins. In fact, many bean eating cultures soak their beans for multiple hours, multiple days. They change the water. And it turns out that you can actually ferment the surface of beans by doing that and break down the lectins. So it's really fun watching how cultures have figured this out. Yeah, and how we just lost it. One thing I'm really curious about is the gluten because I'll tell you the journey my girlfriend I've been on. So my girlfriend was having eczema for real bad eczema. And I definitely want to hear you talk about skin. And that's super interesting to me. She's having real bad eczema though. And she did a whole bunch of research. Didn't want to take any pills, any of that type of stuff. So then she started researching the no-fod diet. She went on that for a while and started going away. I was like, I'll go gluten-free with you because I've noticed some soreness in my back, that type of stuff. And I was like, maybe it'll help with inflammation. Her eczema went away. She hasn't had it in probably three years, I would say. Her eczema went away. And so we've just been gluten-free since. And the more that we do research on it and the way that it breaks through the lining of your gut and goes into your blood. So for people that are out there that think gluten-free is crazy because people are always like, oh, but it takes so much better if you can have just bread. What is the reason why gluten does that? And then why is the skin so important to notice when there's problems inside of your gut? So we'll almost start backwards. So the lining of your gut is literally your skin turned inside out from your mouth down to your rear end. And the surface of the lining of your gut is actually the same surface as a tennis court inside of you. And everybody looks down and goes, wait a minute, come on, there's no tennis court in there. And it's only one cell thick. If you will, a design flaw. I mean, I can tell you why it's one cell thick, but it's one cell thick. And those cells are all held together. You're probably old enough to remember red rover, red rover. Yeah, it's not allowed in schools anymore. It's too dangerous. Of course. Yeah, of course. So we all locked arms and two rows of kids. So all the... One straight at them. Yeah, you run right at them. There was always the big guy with his knee up and the girls would scream and it was great fun. So these cells are all locked, literally arm and arm. And they're called tight junctions. And Hippocrates, 2,500 years ago, the father of medicine said, all disease begins in the gut. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And he knew. He didn't have any of our tests. You know, the guy just knew. And he's actually right. So thanks to work by professors now at Harvard, Dr. Fasano. Dr. Fasano tried to figure out how gluten was his interest. Cause celiac disease, extreme form of gluten intolerance and cause leaky gut. And he discovered that gluten, being a lectin, if it could get to the surface of our intestines, could attach and make a compound that would... It's called zonulin and it would attach to another receptor and it would actually break the tight junction. It would make the arms go apart. And there would be a gap between these cells. And if there was a gap, then foreign proteins like lectins could leak through this gap. Pieces of bacteria or living bacteria could get through this gap. And on the other side of our intestines, 80% of all of our white blood cells, all of our immune system line the lining of our gut because that's where a potential attack could come across the wall of our border, if you will. And so these guys attacking these foreign proteins created inflammation. And everybody's, you know, inflammation is the cause of everything. Well, inflammation is caused by a leaky gut. And so one of the things in my research is that what happens is that these foreign proteins, plants are so clever, it's mind-boggling. Plants, we identify foreign proteins by literally reading a barcode of that protein. And all of our immune cells literally have barcode scanners that read a protein and say, do I know this protein? Is it a good guy or is it on the no fly zone? And plants make these proteins, lectins, resemble human proteins. And so our immune system gets all wrapped up and they're sent out almost like with wanted posters at the post office. If you see this protein, kill it and shoot it down. And plants have figured out that it's close enough to a human protein that because our immune system is so wildly turned on that it will shoot to kill a protein that almost looks like what it's looking at. And so your girlfriend's eczema was your immune system shooting at proteins in her skin that looked like lectins, in her case, gluten. And let me use the best example. Oh, when 95% of us are born with an antibody to the peanut lectin, peanuts or beans, they're not nuts at all. So 95% of us carry an antibody and everybody now knows antibodies because of COVID. So that's how our immune system recognizes a foreign protein. And yet when I was growing up, nobody had a peanut allergy. Kids were bringing peanuts to school, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and nobody was carrying EpiPens to school. Right. Now, of course, we have a massive amounts of peanut allergy. Yes. My nephew has peanut allergy. Yeah. And you go, well, wait a minute, 50 years ago, nobody had a peanut allergy. What happened? Well, back in the good old days, our gut microbiome, the bugs in our gut literally taught our immune system, hey, yeah, I know you guys are looking for this guy, but just cool it. Nobody had leaky gut for the most part, so our immune system wasn't hyper activated. But now, thanks to tons of antibiotics, thanks to whole grain goodness, we all have leaky gut. And so our immune system is hyper on alert. And now they see this kind of innocent peanut lectin and they go, oh my gosh, I've got an antibody to that. I'm going to shoot it down. Wow. Yeah. And so is glyphosate a part of that as well? Oh, yeah. That's the other thing. I was on a podcast with a millennial recently, and millennials are often described as the first lazy generation. And it's interesting that millennials are actually the first generation that has been totally exposed from day one to glyphosate in our food, and never been without it. And glyphosate's in round up. And the interesting thing about glyphosate is it's really good at destroying our gut microbiome. It was patented by Monsanto, not as a wheat killer, but as an antibiotic. Yeah. You want to hear something crazy around that? My grandfather worked for Monsanto in, it would have been, I guess, the 60s and developed a, not to go too deep into it, but developed stomach cancer from working at Monsanto. Long story short, it was in so much pain. He came in alcoholic, ended up killing himself. But interestingly enough, in killing yourself, you're not supposed to get any insurance money. Monsanto paid the insurance money to keep him quiet. Interesting. Yeah. So that tells you a little bit about what was going on, being in the 60s and those, inside the, but yeah, it's interesting. You know, there's numerous books written about what they knew and when they knew it. Right. And it's, they knew that it killed bacteria because bacteria use what's called the chikamate pathway. I love that word, chikamate. It sounds like a great swear word, but the chikamate pathway is how plants live, produce energy, if you will. And bacteria use the chikamate pathway as well. Humans don't use the chikamate pathway. And so Monsanto said, don't worry, you know, you can, you know, eat glyphosate by the bucket full and it won't kill you because, you know, use the chikamate pathway. What they didn't say is, oh, by the way, it's going to kill all your bacteria and you've got microbiome. And now there's recent evidence that glyphosate in and of itself causes leaky gut without having any effect on the gut microbiome. Hey, you're the hiring expert for your company. And what you really need is help making your short list of quality candidates. You need a hiring partner who's going to help make your life easier and you need Indeed. Get your quality short list of candidates whose resumes on Indeed match your job description fast and only pay for the candidates that meet your must have qualifications in schedule and complete video interviews on the Indeed dashboard. With tools like Indeed Instant Match giving you your quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately and Indeed skill tests that on average reduces hiring time by up to 27%. And according to Talent Nest, Indeed delivers four times more hires than all the other job sites combined. So if you're hiring, you need Indeed. So get started right now with a free $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your posts at Indeed.com slash Rob. That's $75 credit at Indeed.com slash Rob. Indeed.com slash Rob. Offer is valid until June 30th. Terms and Editions do apply. And so we're talking about a lot about the gut and you always say that all disease starts in the gut. And before we started doing research with my girlfriend, I never heard anything about the gut. Except for like go with your gut feeling. That was it, right? But you have some extremely interesting stuff about why it's so important and how it actually changes the way that you feel, the way that you think and everything about you. So tell us about the gut and all of the goodness that you have for that. Well, so we used to women understand gut feeling much better than men or trust your gut. And now we've known for a number of years that there are nerves that go between the gut and the brain. And likewise, recent research shows that for every fiber, nerve fiber coming down from the brain to the gut, there are actually nine nerve fibers going from the gut up to the brain. So far more information is actually going up rather than down. Then there were a bunch of neuro hormones that were discovered that seemed to be coming from the gut. And we presume that there were tissues, neurons that were making this in the gut. And then the most recent advance is no, no, no. All these compounds like serotonin, for instance, that makes you feel good, we're actually being manufactured by the gut microbiome themselves. Isn't the majority of your serotonin actually manufactured in the gut? Yeah, it's all coming from the gut and it's all mostly coming from your gut microbiome. And then as I talk about in the energy paradox, the new exciting research is that there's a whole class of compounds that are called postbiotics. Which is a literal language between the gut microbiome and our energy producing organelles, the mitochondria and our brain that literally tells you, if you will, how to feel, how much energy to make. Giving an example, just yesterday, I saw a woman who had some pretty awful autoimmune disease called Crohn's disease which is leaky gut at its finest. And she had been to multiple physicians, had been placed on multiple medications, was miserable and she was profoundly depressed. And we got her off of all of her medications and she came to see me, she's 15 now. And we were talking yesterday, literally. And she says, you know, the biggest thing that has happened to me that just blows my mind and blows my psychiatrist mind is I am no longer depressed. She says, I am so happy. And she said, I fired my psychiatrist. I, you know, I don't need him. I don't need the pills. And it was all because of, you know, you and teaching me how to get my gut working again. So she doesn't have Crohn's and she's not depressed. And it's like, wow, you know, you don't need any of these medications or you just have to avoid a few foods. Yeah. So tell me about, because the thing that's really interesting about it, and people don't realize how important it is, is I've heard you talk about the fecal transplants to go from one person to another that might be, I've heard you talk about rats doing or you take it to depress fecal matter and put it into a normal rat. I've heard you talk about someone who's extremely healthy and getting fecal transplant from someone who's not healthy. So yeah. And how it actually changes their body physically by having a fecal transplant. Yeah, the most, the most famous human story was a female marathon runner in England who because of some antibiotic overdose, if you will, developed a really a life-threatening infection called C. difficile. And a lot of people have heard about it. And C. difficile primarily, we now treat it, if it's severe, with a fecal transplant from a healthy donor. And as I talked about in other books, we share a lot of our microbiome with family members. The closer you are to a family member or the living in a house, you share a lot of your microbiome. Yeah. And friends share microbiomes. We've talked about that in other books. So anyhow, they found a niece of this one who was a good match. And except she was 30 pounds overweight. And so got the fecal transplant from the overweight niece and went back, she was cured, went back to life, went back to running. But over the course of the next year, she gained 30 pounds. Crazy. She didn't change the way she ate. She didn't change her activity. It was just that she had been given a new set of bacteria that changed how, excuse me, she harvested food and actually made her actually eat more for that bunch of bacteria. Wow. There's a new paper out this morning. On the same sort of subject, you can breed mice to develop high blood pressure. And you can feed mice with a high blood pressure inducing diet that makes bacteria that make you have high blood pressure. But they found that intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, which is actually a big part of this new book, The Energy Paradox, if they put high blood pressure mice on time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting, then they would become normal intensive. Their blood pressure would go back to normal. And they go, gee, I mean just, they didn't change the amount of food, just the timing of food. And they went, wow, how come that's happening? Lo and behold, changing the timing of the food in these mice changed their microbiome from a microbiome that induced high blood pressure to a microbiome that cured high blood pressure. Well, yeah. It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. So, and I see this again, I started seeing this years ago. It's like, wait a minute, these people had high blood pressure and they don't have high blood pressure anymore. What happened? It was really funny. Early on, people would call and say, you know, I'm pretty dizzy. You know, what supplement are you giving me that's making me dizzy? And my nurse and I would look at each other and this isn't, there's nothing in there, so I'm making you dizzy. And we'd have them come into the clinic and sure enough, their blood pressure was pretty low. So we'd cut their blood pressure pill in half and say, okay, you know, that'll take care of it. And then they call a few weeks later and say, well, I'm really dizzy again. You know, well, come on in here and they're blood pressure low. Well, shoot, let's just, you know, throw these blood pressure pills away. And that's kind of like how all this starts like, wow, food has that much power. Yeah, for sure. And so what does it have to do with, with, because I'm super interested how you can take fecal matter from somebody and put it into someone else and change, but you've also, there's also been studies on rats that were considered, I guess, depressed rats and the way that they act and the way that they were and taking their fecal matter and putting it into a normal rat and it changes the normal rat that had normal energy and everything as well. Yeah, the rat becomes anxious, won't you know, go looking for food. We now know that these, as much as we hate to admit it, these little single cell organisms have profound effect on really our entire functioning. They're in charge more than this. They are literally in charge. I always like to say this and my staff hates me to say it, Jack LaLaine, who I think is really the godfather of fitness, who lived in 96. Jack LaLaine, most people know him from the Jack LaLaine juicer, but Jack LaLaine always had an expression that if it tastes good, spit it out. And my staff say, no, don't say that, you know, you have good tasting food, but he wasn't really saying that. What he was saying is you really should be eating for your microbiome and he didn't even know about the microbiome back then, but you should be eating for them and if you eat for them, they'll take care of you and that's my research in longevity shows that other people, research in longevity shows that the more we take care of our microbiome, the more we give what I call the gut buddies, what they need to eat, what they want to eat, they make these compounds called postbiotics that control everything that's going to happen to us, even control our lifespan, which is, I mean, really fun and exciting. What's interesting about it, are you familiar with, have you ever heard of trying to remember his name? Anyways, I can't remember what it is, he wrote the Biology of Belief, but I want to say Greg Brayden, but Greg Brayden's his friend. But anyways, Bruce Lipton. Yeah, Bruce Lipton. Bruce Lipton says, when you look at yourself in the mirror, you're not like when I see myself in the mirror, I'm not seeing Rob, I'm seeing a collection of 70 trillion cells. And I've heard you talk about that literally majority of us in our genes are not actually human genes at all. Correct. Or human cells. Or yeah, about 90% of all the cells that make us up are non-human. But the fascinating thing is that 99% of all the genomic material in us genes are non-human genes. So what genes are they? Yeah, we're nothing. We have 1% say in all of this. And that's in a way scary, but the really exciting thing is with every year we learn what these guys want, why we want to give them what they want, and if we do that, then all these things that we assume are part of getting older go away. There was a nature study that I published or I cited in the longevity paradox in 2018. So a fairly recent study that looked at the influence of genes and our microbiome on our fate. And it turns out that human genes have only a 8% maximum influence on what's going to happen to us. And so 92% of what's going to happen to us is actually non-genetic. And you can literally pretty much wipe out any of that genetic determinant by choosing what to eat and choosing how to behave. It's the environment that's created. Another thing that Bruce Lipton talks about is that he was seen as crazy in the 70s because he was saying it's not the genes that matter. When everyone's saying the genes matter, he's saying it's the environment because you can take a human cell and make an ear or you can take a human cell and make a nose or something completely different. And what he says is it's the environment that actually matters more than the genes that matter. Right. Yeah. Yeah, epigenetics is really what happens. I mean, for instance, I mean we have fewer genes than a corn plant. Really? Yeah, fewer genes. And we hopefully are a little more complex than a corn plant. We have actually, and so everybody says, well, then we have the most genes of any animal. And it turns out that's not even true. The sand flea has more genes than we do. So next time you're walking on the beach and I'm one of those little guys, yeah, so far more genes than we have. Well, so we like to think we're like the most advanced and the biggest, but we're not even close. Yeah, not even close. Yeah. So talk to me about meat because one thing I really, actually when I was researching yesterday, I was watching you talk about organic free-range chicken. And I text my girlfriend, literally took a video of it, sent a video to my girlfriend, texted it to her because she's got a soy allergy. And we don't need a whole lot of meat. We eat a little bit of meat, but when we get it, we try to get what we thought was the healthiest. And people listening to podcasts can't see my fingers do the quotations, right? But when you talk about organic free-range chicken, you're talking about their given soybeans. That was the first impot to my oh my gosh, she's ingesting organic free-range chicken that are having soybeans. She has pretty bad allergies. Eczema's gone, but the allergies are still there. I was like, it actually might be from that. But talk to me about that, the meat industry, but also the organic free-range chicken because for me, that was super eye-opening and I got to go back to Austin Research who has the better meat in the area. Well, you got to look at my podcast on the Dr. Gunnu podcast where we had farmer Dan from Texas who is now excuse me, raising lectin-free chickens. Wow. And he set about to feed his pastured chickens lectin-free food. And it's fabulous, I can tell you. So you live right around the corner from farmer Dan. Do you know where in Texas he is? I've forgotten the name, but It's a big state. Yeah, it's a big state. But yeah, but now his whole business is lectin-free chickens. Well. Anyhow, so you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate. And what really surprised me and maybe shouldn't have is years ago, well, in 2007, the Congress passed a law determining what an organic free-range chicken is. And you can label a chicken organic free-range as you can keep it in a warehouse for its entire life with 100,000 other chickens. As long as you open a door to the outside that has a three-yard by three-yard patch of grass, one door. Three-yard by three-yard. Yeah, one door. Nine feet by nine feet. Correct. And it literally is 100,000 chickens. 100,000 chickens. Wow. You can have 100,000 chickens. Wow. And as long as you open that door for five minutes every 24 hours and the chickens have the potential to go outside. They don't have to leave. Wow. Then you can legally label them organic free-range. Crazy. Now it gets even better. If the, and most of these chickens are fed organic corn and organic soybeans. That's primarily what's in chicken feed. If the price of organic exceeds conventional corn and soybeans by double in price, you can legally feed them conventional corn and soybeans and still label it organic because you meant well. Because you meant well. Correct. Oh, that's nice. Yes. And it's technically illegal to give antibiotics to chickens anymore. But there's a loophole. Courser is. If the veterinarian who is employed by the Major Food Corporation on site believes that there is a sick chicken in that 100,000 flock of chickens. Then you can dose the entire flock rather than wading through the 100,000 chickens to find the sick chicken. And it's perfectly legal to give them antibiotics. And so, so getting back to your question. So you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate. I had a woman here from LA who's actually a psychiatrist who had horrible lupus, skin rashes, the whole bit. And on double drug therapy, she was miserable, long story short. We got her off of all of her drugs. Her skin rashes cleared up. And she was in the office one day and she said, you know, I'm really happy I'm off on all my drugs, the rashes are gone, but I've got this little bit of eczema on the top of my eyelids, right where my eyelashes are. She said, that's all I've got. And she said, what do you think that's from? So we're going through, you know, what she's eating and she got to organic free range chicken. And I said, so not pastured chicken. And she said, no, organic free range. And I said, well, they're being fed corn and soybeans. I said, tell you what. And she said, I eat a lot of it. And I said, tell you what, let's just eliminate that. Just stop eating that. Call me back. Change nothing else but that. Nothing else but that. Let's just look at one thing. Monthly or she calls, she said, yeah, that was it. Eczema's gone. It was the organic free range chicken. Wow. And I went, wow. And I said, well, of course, it makes so much sense because these proteins, which are foreign proteins, are incorporated into the flesh of these animals. And if you have a sensitivity to soy or corn, and I can tell you huge, I can tell you that in my practice, 70% of people who are sensitive to gluten react to corn in the exact same way. 70%. Really? And that's one of the reasons why gluten-free diets, as they're construed now, in general, don't work for celiac disease. 70% of people celiac, which is the extreme form of gluten intolerance, still have celiac by biopsy a year and a half later of being on a gluten-free diet because most of the foods that are gluten-free are full of lectins, foreign instance corn, or quinoa, or buckwheat. And that's what they're eating. Wow. So just to go back because I want to, I want to talk about, I just want to, for anyone who happened to miss it, and if you were to put all that together, an organic free range chicken can be inside of a warehouse with 100,000 other ones, they have a opportunity to leave for five minutes. They don't even actually ever have to leave. They're given corn, which we can talk about as well. I've heard you say it was outlawed in France at one point in time. Soybeans, which many people are there to soy as well, they're not supposed to have, oh, and if the price of organic soybeans and corn happens to be twice the price of conventional, which I hate the word convention. I think they should call it GMO. And then they should switch the name of it, so it should be corn. Plus all that conventional corn and soybeans has been sprayed with Roundup. Oh, perfect, which is glyphosate, and they have all that. So if the price is double, they can give them non-organic, which they call conventional, because they meant well. And if they think that there happens to be one sick chicken and 100,000, they can give all of them antibiotics, which we all know antibiotics make them fat and huge and grow faster. Correct. Oh, my God. And that was actually passed in the law in 2007. It was introduced by congressman from Georgia from a chicken farming. Of course. Of course. What a surprise. Wow. So I'm trying to process all of that, the fact that that's possible. So when you say pasture raise, and you mentioned that with the lady, so is pasture raise okay? So you've got to know your farmer. Or is there other loopholes in there? You've got to know your farmer. And I'll tell you an interesting story about that. We have a big fan of our program who really changed her life around, got rid of some really awful arthritis issues. She was a young woman. And then she unbeknownst to any of us, she's not a patient but she's a big fan and I talked to her. Unbeknownst to us, she went on a well, I'll just say it, a carnivore diet. And the more carnivore diet she did, the more sick she got. Her arthritis came back her migraines came back and she was getting grass-fed beef and pasture poultry from this farmer. And so she says, you know, I'm doing everything right. It's grass-fed. It's pasture poultry. And we did, she finally, she was posting that, you know, my diet had failed her, blah, blah, blah. And so we reached out to her and learned that she actually wasn't following my program and said, well, this is interesting. So let us, you know, let us do a lot of, you know, blood tests on you. Look at leaky gut. Look at what you're sensitive to and come to find out. She's got a wide open leaky gut again and she's sensitive to corn. And so I said, you need to talk to your farmer. And I said, farmers, even if they're pastured, will supplement their food with, you know, a feed. And you need to find out what's in this feed. And so she did and she actually called me back. She says, oh my gosh, my farmer was killing me. He was feeding his chickens, corn and soybeans and other grains. He was feeding his cows, corn and soybeans, even though they were on pasture. And I said, okay, well, you know, that's good news. Stop eating this stuff. Call me back. And she called me back in three days. She said, you're not going to believe this, but my pain is 70% less than it was three days ago. Wow. Just, she said, my farmer was killing me. And I trusted him. Yeah. That's crazy. So how do, how do, do allergies have a big part of this as well? What, how people's allergies react to that? So, so allergies, so we used to do food allergy testing in our office. And I was never impressed because allergies work on an immunoglobulin system called IgE. And when we finally switched over to looking at food sensitivities by using IgG and IgA and then we won't go into the technicalities and started believing those results. It made all the difference in the world. And I recently had a standard professor on the Dr. Henry podcast talking about her book, The End of Allergies. And she and I both agree that allergies and food sensitivities can be completely eliminated by knowing what you're sensitive to, finding out how leaky your gut is and then stopping that leaky gut. And your immune system literally relearns. A year ago, I gave a paper pre- right as COVID hit at the American Heart Association Lifestyle and Epidemiology Meeting where we took 10 people with severe leaky gut. They actually all had celiac disease, put them on our program for a year and looked at all their food sensitivities, including to gluten. And at the end of the year, nine out of 10 of them, all of them sealed their leaky gut. Nine out of 10 of them had actually lost all memory, all immunoglobulin memory that they didn't like gluten. And completely gone. Now, does that mean we can reintroduce gluten? I don't know. I don't want to make that leap of faith, but when we look at food sensitivities and once the leaky gut is sealed, then we can reintroduce things. Have a gentleman here in LA who developed a severe autoimmune disease, severe pain from his leaky gut. We pretty much got his leaky gut sealed now. Got him off of all of his mischievous compounds. And initially he was sensitive to both egg white and egg yolk. And we took those away. We retested him about nine months into it because he loves omelets. And he was still sensitive to egg yolk, but he was no longer sensitive to egg white. So we introduced egg white omelets, which made him a happy guy. And I just talked to him on the phone a couple of weeks ago and he says, I got to be honest with you, I've reintroduced duck eggs, including the yolk, and I'm not reacting. So he says, I'm a happy guy. That's awesome. Yeah. So I used to have horrible allergies as a kid and in college. And I got allergy shots. And I had hay fever and the whole bit. I don't have any allergies anymore. It's incredible. Yeah. So I've retrained. I've told my immune system to stand down. I've told my gut microbiome has educated my immune system and said, hey, we got your back. Go have a donut and a cigarette and just relax. I'm sure that's what you're doing on your days off. Donuts and cigarettes. Tell me about your new book. I know we're short on time, but tell me about your new book, The Energy Paradox, because that just came out last month. Yeah, yeah, last month. So I really had no intention of writing The Energy Paradox, but I was driving into LA. Actually, I was counting to do a PBS fundraising segment. And I got a call on the phone saying that the person who was going to do the segment with me wasn't going to come in today because she just didn't have it in her. And this was a millennial. And I'm going, well, what are we going to do? They say, well, that's all right. You know, somebody else will take her place and blah, blah, blah. And we got through it, but that kept resonating with me for several days. It was like, how can a millennial not have it in them to come into the studio? And so I realized that when I first started my new practice in restorative medicine, that well over 50% of the diagnoses, codes that we use, the ICD dying code, was fatigue and malaise. And looking back, I realized, oh my gosh, all these people presented with being tired, with being exhausted, and part and parcel, that all went away. So I said, geez, I've been an energy doctor for the last 20 years, and I should find out why this program has been so effective in restoring people's energy. So the book holds people by the hand, shows them some nerdy stuff about how energy is made, but then shows people how to get their energy back. The other thing that's striking is brain fog in this country is just rampant. For sure. And it's one thing to say, well, you're 80 years old and you don't remember things you used to, but again, when a millennial can't remember, can't leave their keys someplace, you go, what the, that can't be good. And it can't be good. And we're seeing this huge amount of what I call neuro-inflammation, which if you have a leaky gut, I can pretty much guarantee you, you have a leaky brain. And we can actually measure that and we can measure neuro-inflammation. And it's no wonder that our brains don't work well. There's a war going on inside of our brain as well. And we have an entire set of immune cells in our brain that basically are our neurons' bodyguards, if you will. And these guys actually, if they suspect that mischief is a foot down in the gut, they literally form circles around neurons and cut off their communication to each other to literally protect them. And so we can actually measure this now and we go, whoa, no wonder your brain doesn't work right. And the really exciting thing is you can measure that coming back. You can watch the neuro-inflammation going away. Wow, that's incredible. Man, I feel like we could go for another few hours. I have so many, so many questions I get asked. I'll have to have you back at some point. So before I ask the last question, how can people find you books and also on the internet as well and podcast world? Yeah, so the Dr. Gundry podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, the drgundry.com, you can find me, gundrymd.com is my supplemented food company and got two YouTube channels, Instagram, if you can't find me, I'm doing something wrong. The books, everywhere books are sold. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, please, please, please go to your local bookseller. It's a best-selling book. They'll have it. The booksellers, your local stores have been devastated by COVID and we need to give them all the help we can get. For sure. So last question I have for you, a little bit of a shift, but you went from heart surgeon, working in the actual surgeries themselves to now educating people, making yourself obsolete, but obviously building a career doing it. You know, they say that there's two times when you die. The first one is when you stop breathing. The second time is the last time someone says your name. So in between that time, what do you think people, what do you hope that people will think and say about you, between the first death and the last death? Well, I guess, I think the most important thing I can tell people is, and I tell them this in their own health, it is never too late. It's never too late to make a difference. It's never too late to make a change in a mission or career choice. I mean, never. And the other thing I would tell anyone is never retire. Retirement is, unless you use your retirement for a new interest and pour yourself into that. In my patient population, retirement is a death spiral. It literally starts a death spiral. And never, ever retire. I'm now in my 70s. I work seven days a week. And literally six days a week seeing patients one day a week at Gundry MD and never, ever retire. But you seem like you love it. And I got more energy than I ever am. Dr. Stephen Gundry, I appreciate you for being here. Hey, thanks for having me, Ron. Appreciate it. Thanks. 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