 with literally wasting fuel, ketones instruct mitochondria to make more of themselves. Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Okay, first things first. I was wrong. And I'm not the only one. Turns out health professionals around the world were wrong about how the keto diet works. But you know what? I embrace finding out that I'm wrong. In fact, it actually motivates me. It's why I do what I do to empower you with the latest and greatest science discoveries so that you can live a long, healthy, fulfilled life. You see, I'm actually committed to researching. That means continuing to look again. That's the definition of research. At our current mainstream health beliefs in search of the truth. So today, I'm excited to share this groundbreaking research with you today. Plus, I'll give you a sneak peek of what's inside my new book out today, Unlocking the Keto Code. So we'll be right back. You're not going to miss this one, where I tell you how all of us were wrong about keto and its effects. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Now, don't be fooled by the title Unlocking the Keto Code. Even if you're not interested in keto, this book with my latest findings for optimizing health is really Longevity Paradox 2.0. Or, as I like to call it, the real key to the fountain of youth. And it's not what you think. And it really comes down to just one thing. Like the line in city slickers. First, let's discuss what exactly is the keto diet. Well, there are so many versions of the keto diet that the mind really can't get itself around the whole concept. There's traditional keto, there's dirty keto, there's cheating keto, there's high fiber keto, there's high protein keto, there's muscle sparing keto, there's protein sparing keto. How does anybody know what keto is anymore? Well, the traditional keto diet was actually developed as a treatment for epileptic children before any of the anti-seizure drugs were available. And that diet started in the 1930s. And it utilized an 80% fat diet, a 10% carbohydrate diet, and a 10% protein. And remarkably, it was at least 50% effective in reducing and stopping seizures in children. It fell out of favor when drugs like dilatin and phenobarb were invented. But it actually had a resurgence a few years ago with the finding that you could give kids MCT oil, medium chain triglycerides, at a much lower amount of fat dose, say a 50% fat diet, and give them more carbohydrates and more proteins. Now, why do that? Quite frankly, for all of you keto dieters who have failed out there, eating an 80% fat diet is number one incredibly boring. And the carb drive that I talk about in the new book is built in to actually all animals seeking carbohydrates, including us. And so that makes really good sense why 60% of people who start a ketogenic diet for health reasons stop because they just cannot stand the restrictions. The other thing that's important to realize is that children who were on this actually had growth retardation and didn't develop muscles well. And in the book, you're going to find out exactly why that happens in an extremely high fat ketogenic diet. Okay, as most of you know, I've been recommending a ketogenic version of the plant paradox program for over 20 years now. And in the plant paradox, it's chapter 10, the keto intensive care program. But any of my alert readers, and certainly my patients who follow that program, notice that there's a whole lot of carbohydrates in the ketogenic program. And a lot of people don't question that. But a lot of people who think that you have to eat an 80% fat diet to achieve ketosis wonder why my ketogenic program is so easy to follow and so effective. And in fact, I profile one of my patients, Janet, at the start of the book to show how following the principles of that program, she not only effortlessly lost weight, reduced her prediabetes, reduced her cholesterol numbers. But she was so successful that she actually wanted to start to gain weight. And we go through why she actually found it difficult to gain weight. And that's actually one of the things we're going to unlock in the keto code. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be one of those people, and we all know these people who seem to be anything they want, they can have a piece of cake, they can have a croissant, they can have a fruit smoothie, and they don't exercise. And you and I go to the gym, we run, we do spin classes, we do Pilates, and we just look at a carbohydrate or food, and it seems like we gain weight. Well, we've often been told that that's our genes, that that person was lucky. Well, it turns out we now know, as I talk about in the keto code, from twin studies, twins have identical genes. And in twin studies, it's been found that where one twin is overweight or obese, and the other twin is normal or skinny, they have the identical genes. The mitochondria in the overweight twin are lazy. Now that doesn't mean the twin is lazy. It means the mitochondria is unable to process calories properly to take those calories and turn them into energy. Instead, the mitochondria takes those calories and stores them as fat. And what we've learned about the skinny twin and the skinny folks that you hate is that their mitochondria have actually adopted a way of wasting a lot of the calories that these people eat. And the whole principle of unlocking the keto code is telling you how those mitochondria have been trained to waste energy. And that's the excitement. That's the scientific breakthrough that's going to make a ketogenic diet not so miserable and easy to do. Now, as I mentioned, most people who try a ketogenic diet fail. It's actually not your fault. It's not their fault. I profile another one of my patients, Miranda, who came to me after two years, two years on a ketogenic diet. And despite being two years on a ketogenic diet, she kept gaining weight. And she actually, when I saw her, was a pre-diabetic slash diabetic with insulin resistance. And how could that possibly happen in a ketogenic diet? Well, as you'll learn in unlocking the keto code, what happens is, when most of us, most of us Americans, are metabolically inflexible. Now, it's a fancy word of saying that normally, mitochondria, the energy producing organelles and almost all of our cells, can use sugar, glucose to produce ATP. Or they can use free fatty acids to produce ATP. Or they can use ketones. And normally, when you stop eating, within eight hours of stopping eating, you should shift over to burning free fatty acids as a fuel. There's only one catch. When you eat, your pancreas produces insulin. Insulin takes the food you eat and knocks on all your muscle cells and your other cells as a salesperson. And says, hey, this person just ate some great stuff. I want to sell you this sugar. I want to sell you this protein. Your cells normally say, hey, great, you know, we're hungry, open the door, bring it in. When you stop eating, normally insulin should fall because now there's nothing to sell. When insulin falls, insulin not only ushers food into cells, but think about it. If you're trying to store food after you ate, you wouldn't want to bring it back out of the cells and the fat cells. You'd want to keep it in storage. So when insulin is elevated after you eat, you won't bring that stuff right back out. That's silly. But when insulin falls, then you actually activate an enzyme that brings fat out of fat cells so that you can use it as a fuel. Now here's the problem. 50% of normal weight individuals in the United States have no metabolic flexibility. They have no ability to go get that fat out of fat sores and use it as fuel because they have elevated insulin levels. 50% of normal weight people. Now here's the really bad news. If you are overweight, 88% of you have no metabolic flexibility. You cannot get that fat as a fuel out of your fat cells because an elevated insulin level is stopping you from doing this. The worst news, if you're obese, 99.5% of individuals have no metabolic flexibility. You may have all that fat and you can go on a ketogenic diet where you're not eating carbohydrates, where you're not eating much protein, but you have an elevated insulin level and that elevated insulin level may stay elevated for a very long time and you have all that fat stored already and you cannot get to it. The other bad news is, fat has nine calories per gram of food. On the other hand, carbohydrates and protein have four calories per gram. So when you're eating a super high fat diet, you're actually getting twice the amount of calories by weight of carbohydrates and proteins. So it's no wonder when most of us are insulin resistant and metabolically inflexible and we start eating more fat, it's no wonder some of us are like Miranda, we just keep gaining weight and keep our insulin resistance. And the benefit of unlocking the keto code is there's a way we can trick the system, we can hack our insulin resistance without resorting to a high fat ketogenic diet to try and do it. Okay now I mentioned mitochondria. Mitochondria take the sugars and proteins and fats that you eat and through a rather complicated process called the electron transport chain, convert sugar, protein and fat into the energy currency that we all spend called ATP, adenosine triphosphate. And in fact I talk about in the book this process is actually very much like a hip new club where everybody comes to mingle and hopefully hook up for the night or longer and that hook up is called coupling. And mitochondria are in the business of coupling the food we eat with oxygen to produce ATP. Now that process is actually not as efficient as you might think. In mitochondria coupling oxygen with the food we eat is actually very damaging to the mitochondria. Most of us have heard of free radicals, reactive oxygen species. These are coupling processes that go wrong inside the mitochondria and they damage the mitochondria itself. And the mitochondria has a lot of repair mechanisms that we go into the book but we'll worry about that later. What we now know is about 30% of all the calories that enter the mitochondria for processing actually escape via back doors, via emergency exits and never participate in this coupling process. And that process of escape is called mitochondrial uncoupling. In other words you don't couple oxygen with these components to make energy. Now it seems like that's a pretty dumb idea. Why would we waste 30% of the food we eat? Well it's actually not as dumb as you think. It turns out that when we uncouple our mitochondria we produce heat. And it's that heat we're a warm-blooded animal that actually keeps us warm-blooded. But it's also that heat that wastes the calories we eat. And lo and behold in unlocking the Keto code you'll find out that ketones are not some super fuel. In fact they're not. This is well known from human research dating back to the 1970s and confirmed as early as the early 2000s in humans that ketones are a horrible fuel for our mitochondria and in fact are a horrible fuel for our brain. Just one fun fact human beings at full ketosis only 30% of the energy needs of ourselves can be met with ketones. Only 30% at full ketosis. Even the brain can only use 60% ketones as a fuel. The brain still wants 30 to 40% of its fuel at full ketosis from glucose. So if you take nothing away from today's podcast ketones are not the super fuel they're made out to be. Yet ketones have some amazing properties. So if they're not a super fuel what are they doing? In fact what ketones are doing is they're uncoupling mitochondria even further. And that's the unlocking the Keto code. You don't want to make ketones as a super fuel. You want to make ketones as a mitochondrial uncoupler. But the best part is there are other substances in the food you eat that can act exactly like ketones and uncouple your mitochondria even if you're not eating a ketogenic diet. And what that means is it means that you can get all the benefits of a high fat boring miserable ketogenic diet without eating a high fat boring ketogenic diet. Imagine the possibilities. So how did I discover how ketones really work? Well one of the most important papers I think I've ever read in this search was a paper by Martin Brand in the year 2000 and it's a very simple title paper called Uncoupling to Survive. And let me take you through that real quick because it is totally counter-intuitive. It is completely paradoxical and you know I love a good paradox. So Dr. Brand discovered that if you are starving to death and there is no fuel coming in you would think that mitochondria would become super efficient in extracting every last little molecule of ATP from what you've got left to keep the organism alive. But what he found out was exactly the opposite. Mitochondria in the presence of ketones actually waste fuel. Waste fuel they become profoundly inefficient. Let me use the example from the book. If you wanted to be an efficient gasoline burner and let's call fat gasoline you would buy a Toyota Prius or a hybrid vehicle and you get 50 miles per gallon of gas. That's efficient burning of gasoline. On the other hand if you wanted to waste gasoline you'd buy a Ferrari which will get eight miles per gallon. Now as I talked about in the book there might be another reason you'd want a Ferrari over a Toyota Prius but stay with the analogy. So if you are trying to be efficient at calorie burning you'd be a Toyota Prius. But what Dr. Brand showed and every other study shows that instead of becoming a Toyota Prius when there's no fuel coming in the mitochondria by ketones are instructed to become Ferraris. Why do they do that? Because the process of making energy is really harmful to mitochondria and mitochondria are what produce energy. So when ketones are around they tell mitochondria to protect yourselves you mitochondria at all costs because if we lose you guys the mitochondria there's nothing left and so sacrifice everything else to save yourself. It's you know as you know I live in Palm Springs and we have a wonderful 10,000 foot mountain out my back door. Let's suppose I'm in a hot air balloon and the wind now starts pushing me towards the mountain. What am I going to do? I'm going to take all the ballast and start throwing that overboard so I can get more height. At some point if I'm about to hit the mountain I start looking at the other passengers and we all start eyeing each other going all right which one of you guys is going to jump out. Why? Because at the end the mitochondria has to save itself. So it will do everything its power to protect itself and to do that it actually wastes fuel. Now there's a good part of the story simultaneously with literally wasting fuel ketones instruct mitochondria to make more of themselves and mitochondria are remarkable if you've read any of my books. They actually carry their own DNA so they can divide within a cell as many times as they want to without the cell dividing. So what ketones and other ketone like substances do is when they tell mitochondria on a couple and waste fuel they actually tell mitochondria to make more of you guys so that now there's more mitochondria not working individually as hard but producing the equal amount of energy that one mitochondria would have struggled to do in the first place. It's kind of like if you're on a dog sled and you got one dog and you add five more dogs and now have a six dog sled you now have six dogs doing the work of one dog and actually making better progress and this is exactly what unlocking the keto code means. Each mitochondria has to work less but more mitochondria is made. Third thing that happens is that mitochondria are instructed not only to waste fuel and make more mitochondria but to repair any defects any damage that's been done to the mitochondria up to that point and if you've been following me you know that mitochondria working properly is the key to energy and also the key to longevity and one more fun fact when Dr. Brand looked at the mitochondria of the oldest living human beings who are living well these are 105 year old plus those individuals had the most uncoupled mitochondria so uncoupling is the key to survive and the book as strange as that name is uncoupling teaches you how to uncouple your mitochondria without the need of a ketogenic diet and that's what I'm so excited about. Now I can't wait for you to get the book but if you wanted to one make one change starting today to start this process to optimize your mitochondria it turns out it's something I've been telling folks for over 20 years now the more I can restrict the time of day that you actually eat food and get that period of time that you eat food down to about six to eight hours a day the better your mitochondria are going to work the better flexibility you're going to get to mitochondria and fun news just by compressing your eating window if you want to call it time controlled eating if you want to call it intermittent fasting but compressing your eating window from the time you start in the late morning to the time you finish in the early evening down to about six to eight hours a day the better your mitochondria are going to work and from human athlete studies the more weight you're going to lose even though you're eating of full days calories so wow you can have all the food you want to eat if we just compress the time of day you do and in the book I'm going to walk you through an easy way where one hour a week we're going to push back the time we eat breakfast and we're going to do that for five weeks good news you're going to take the weekends off so and you're going to find that it's really easy to transition from eating three meals a day to eating two meals a day but getting all the calories that you would have gotten from the three meals a day and you're still going to improve mitochondrial function and you're going to automatically lose weight because you've actually training your mitochondria to do a caloric bypass on the food you eat it's so exciting you know I can't wait for you to get unlocking the keto code so that's a teaser for the new book start today if you eat breakfast at seven o'clock tomorrow for the rest of the week start at eight o'clock take the weekend off next week instead of eight o'clock let's go to nine o'clock do that all week by then the keto code will arrive and you'll have the complete set of information on how to do it all right unlocking the keto code book launch happens today please get a copy wherever you get your books amazon barns and noble you can go to your local book seller as you know i'm multiple new york times bestselling books they should have it and they should have my other books as well but get unlocking the keto code it's secretly longevity paradox two as you're going to learn there is just one thing that binds all the great diets together and that turns out to be mitochondrial uncoupling and the stuff you're going to find that uncouple your mitochondria and the food you eat is going to blow your mind it's it's actually really exciting i can't wait for you to get it okay it's time for our audience question from bulletproof coconut on instagram what are your thoughts on hard ketones well it turns out most of you probably have never even heard of hard ketones there happens to be a beverage company that makes a seltzer which is an alcoholic drink but the alcohol is a half ketone which in some circles is called a hard ketone believe it or not it is still an alcohol but it's an alcohol that when our body uses it it appears as a ketone and it makes beta hydroxybutyrate i personally have absolutely no experience with the product it is advertised on the internet it's quite expensive they're pretty much out of stock i looked into it but uh the reviews are quite frankly mixed i find it's a whole lot easier if you want to make ketones believe it or not all you gotta do is take a tablespoon of mct oil you can swallow it you can put it in your coffee you can mix it in olive oil put it on your salad or fun fact from the book goat milk and sheep milk and goat yogurt and sheep yogurt and goat cheeses and sheep cheeses 30 percent of the fat in those animals milk is medium chain triglycerides mcts and you're going to find out how easy it is to generate ketones just by having mct or having goat and sheep cheese without having to pay an arm and a leg for some special beverage but that's a great question bullet proof coconut thanks for asking now it's time for the review of the week uh bean two all fifty from youtube commented on the yes no food list lecture after a year of going lectin free my cardiologist asked me what i did to improve my health i told him a little about you dr gundry but he really didn't want to hear it he said whatever you're doing keep doing it i'm 70 and feel better than i have for decades thanks dr gundry well thank you been to all 50 uh this is a very very common response from so many of my patients who have adapted my program and when their cardiologist sees their new numbers most of the time the cardiologist assumes that they've taken the statin drug that was prescribed and in fact they hadn't been taking the statin drug and when they tell them they hadn't uh they basically say uh i don't know just keep doing what you're doing and it's really too bad because as you know i've i've spent my career uh trying to teach anyone who will listen including family practice doctors internists and cardiologists that there might be more to heart disease and health than the cholesterol theory of heart disease and i'll give you a quick example uh today uh from this week uh i saw a patient who actually uh runs an orthopedic medical practice and this gentleman has been plagued with high cholesterol his entire life multiple physicians have urged him to take statin drugs he has resisted he has been following my program for two years uh he runs ldl cholesterol of 350 he has a total cholesterol of over 500 and finally after the urging of several of the practitioners in his practice he agreed to get a ct coronary angiogram a ct coronary angiogram basically gives you a 3d picture of how much plaque is in your coronary arteries and anybody want to guess how much plaque was in the coronary arteries of this gentleman following my program if you guessed zero you are correct now the person who did the study was apoplectic that a person could be walking around with death-defying cholesterol numbers but when i show this gentleman one of the tests we do looking at whether that cholesterol is activated to stick to blood vessels since beginning my program he's never had any activated cholesterol despite the fact that his cholesterol numbers are high now sadly most cardiologists don't even know about this test but it is available it's called ox ox capital p capital l dash apo b apo capital b ox pl dash apo b and it literally tells you whether your cholesterol is mischievous or not it's state of the art it's available and this guy is a living walking example that the cholesterol theory the cholesterol hypothesis of coronary artery disease is full of holes so thanks keep doing what you're doing please please please try to educate your cardiologist that there's something here i've been doing this now with patients for over 25 years and remember my life was changed by watching big ed clean out his inoperable coronary artery disease with a diet and supplements just like i subscribe to so thanks a lot thanks for writing this is why i do this your letters mean so much to me because i'm dr gundry and i'm always looking out for you we'll see you next week i hope you enjoyed this episode of the dr gundry podcast make sure to check out the next one here