 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Now here's a staggering statistic. Every year around 655,000 Americans lose their lives to heart disease. In fact, it's the leading cause of death in the United States and it's been that way for the last 80 years. Now granted, COVID has gotten our attention but it's still heart disease the number one cause of death. And according to today's guests, the scariest part is this. Most of the common fixes out there like maintaining low cholesterol levels and taking preventative medicines like statins may not be helping. In fact, he believes these recommendations are probably doing more harm than good. You're gonna want to hear about this. And if you've read my work, you know my guests and I are on the same page. I'm joined by Johnny Bowden, a.k.a. the nutrition myth buster and he's a board certified nutritionist and expert on diet weight loss. He recently relaunched his best selling book, The Great Cholesterol Myth Revised and Expanded. Why lowering your cholesterol won't prevent heart disease and the statin-free plan that will. Whoa, we got to stay tuned for this. On today's episode, Johnny and I will reveal the truth about cholesterol. Expose the real villain when it comes to heart disease and share what you can do today to optimize your health and protect your heart. Johnny, I'm excited to have you all join me on the podcast today. Thank you so much. I'm such a fan of your work as well. And I'm thrilled to be here and discuss this very important stuff with you. So I want to dive right in. What's the biggest issue with the way the health industry has been tackling heart disease all these years? Well, that is that's a big question we could probably talk for an hour about. But I think to start off the discussion about cholesterol and our fear of it and our belief that it predicts heart disease and that if we could only lower it, we would be protected. We need to start right with the way we measure cholesterol. Because people often misunderstand us when we say cholesterol is not important or you don't need to be looking at your high versus low cholesterol. We don't think that there's nothing that cholesterol has to tell us. We think we're measuring it by a technology that's 70 years old and that's incorrect. And what we say is that don't even talk to us about high cholesterol until we know how you're measuring it because if you're using an outdated and inaccurate way of measuring it, then we have nothing to talk about yet. Your high cholesterol might be masking a perfectly healthy heart profile and your low cholesterol might be masking a risky one. And that was the case with me, which I'll tell you in just a minute. So the way I try to explain this to people, I live in California, we have very, very strict smog regulations and we all always have to have our cars tested for emissions. So there are these smog testing places and you have to take your car to one and then they give you a bill of health or they give you a non-bill of health and they say, Mr. Jones, you got to fix this. It's going to call $1,700. Take it over there. That's what you got to do. And everybody does it because we want to comply with the emissions and because there's no way to get a license if you don't. Well, what have you found out? What have you found out that the device that the garage is using hasn't been calibrated since 1963, that the algorithm doesn't even include the toxins that have been invented in the last 10 years because they weren't invented at the time the machine was first set up. And then it's giving wildly inaccurate readings. So some people might come away with their car saying, God, I got to put $1,800 into fixing this. And it turns out that nothing bad's coming out of the exhaust. Whereas other people are driving around thinking, I'm just doing fine. And there are toxic waste dump because the machine's not catching it. So before we go any further talking about cluster, we have to talk about the fact that the machine that's measuring it is broken. And I can tell you how that happened. You know, you're you're probably too young to remember this. And most people that I tell this to don't remember it. But in the 60s, we had health fairs. And you would go to a health fair to kind of be educated about what was important about health. And there'd be somebody at the booth with a white lab coat, and they do a little fingerprint and a little finger print. And they say, Mrs. Jones, let's check your cholesterol. Oh, it's 240. Very good. Because that time actually 240 was the amount that was okay, they keep dumbing it down so they get more patients. But they give you one number. And that was your number. Your cholesterol is 220. It's 190. This is good. This is bad. And around 1963 ish, the technology became more common where they could actually look a little more closely and say, you know, our cholesterol actually travels in containers. It doesn't travel in the bloodstream. It's hydrophobic. It won't last one second in the bloodstream. It's got to travel in containers. And it looks like they travel on two different kind of containers. One of them is an HDL, a high density lipoprotein. The other one is an LDL, a low density lipoprotein. But the L in both of those HDL and LDL stands for lipoprotein. That was the bulk that carried the cargo of cholesterol. And now we had an improved way of measuring it because HDL and LDL, generally speaking, kind of did different things in the body. And scientists picked a way of describing them, unfortunately, very simplistic way that said HDL, we'll call that the good one. And we'll call LDL the bad one. But basically, there are two kinds of boats. And they're transporting the cargo of cholesterol. Well, that was great for 1963. And what I always say to audiences is, the flip phone was great for 1989. You still want to use it when you have an iphone 12? I mean, come on. So we now know, Dr. Gundry, that there are 13, 13 different subcategories of cholesterol, not two. Not only that, we know they come in different sizes. And those sizes actually matter. Sometimes the size of a lipoprotein is like a big fluffy tennis ball, doesn't really do much damage. Other times it's a nasty little lapogenic BB gun particle sized one. Those sizes matter, the pattern of distribution matters. And what matters the most is the number of lipoproteins. Because think about this, just as a logical management task, if you're going to manage a crowd of millions of people, there's more likelihood of accidents, there's more likelihood of somebody has a gun. If you're managing a marine, and you want to make sure the boats are all safe, the more boats in the water, more likelihood somebody accidentally bumps up against another. If you're a bouncer in a bartender, the more crowded the bar, the more likelihood somebody spills a drink, somebody starts a fight. It's the same thing with the bloodstream. We need to be looking at how many lipoproteins are in the water. And this is the punchline. We have the tests to do all of that. We've got the iPhone 12s and the Galaxy 9s. But doctors are still using this test from 1963 and worse, they're prescribing drugs based upon this test, which is defective. So our first mission is to retire the HDL LDL test forever and put it on the dustbin of out-of-date ideas where it has long belonged. Well, so how what's the replacement? Are you obviously have one? And I obviously have one, but I'm interviewing you. It's the same replacement. You know, we now have this technology. It's called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in MR, and there's an mRNA cholesterol test, and it looks under the hood. And I show people and readers when I'm doing this, you know, the PowerPoint, I show them mine. And it's just a multi, there's different tests available to every major lab in the country lab core and quest. These are the ones your doctor uses. They all offer a version of this. Some of them call it the LIPOL panel, the advanced lipid profile, the NMR particle test. Doesn't matter. They all look at the same data, which is all the subtypes of cholesterol, the number of boats in the water, which predicts heart disease way better than the amount of cargo in the boat. And finally the pattern of distribution of whether they're big particles or little particles. This is valuable information. This matters. The HDL LDL test does not. So I'll give you an example. I do those in my office. That's what we order. And we use several labs to do it. But interestingly, I had a woman yesterday in my office who we go through all this and she has very few small dense LDL particles. She doesn't oxidize her small dense particles. She doesn't oxidize her apoB and we're just kind of talking shop. But we get all done. And I say, you know, you are at so low risk. And she said, how can you say that? Because my cardiologist showed me that my total cholesterol is 242. And I'm a walking time bomb. And I have to be on a statin drug. And this is true. This was yesterday. I believe you. I can I'll match your horror story for horror. How about this? I have a very close friend 69 years old. She doesn't have an ounce of body fat. As a human being, her risk factors for heart disease are probably around zero. Exercises every day. Joyous life. Great cook. Wonderful family. Low inflammatory measures. Everything is low blood sugar. It's all perfect, right? She's got a 300 something cholesterol. Doctors, you're on a statin or I'm firing you as a patient. And we've gone through this for years. And I said, get the real test and then we'll talk. Wouldn't do it. Nope, we don't need it. So finally, finally, when it was like she was either going to change doctors or he was going to fire her, he says, I'll tell you what, we'll do a compromise. We'll do a calcium coronary scan. And for anybody, I'm sure your audience knows what that is. It's a picture. We're not going to guess because of the cholesterol. We're going to look inside the arteries and see if there's any plaque and the scores go from zero to like a thousand and there's a whole algorithm. And so she's 69. She goes in. She says this and they say this will be the final arbiter. Fear or not, they take the picture. Her calcium coronary scan is zero. Zero. I would die to have that number. She goes back to the doctor. You know what he says? I want to put you on a statin just in case anyway. That's how entrenched this way of thinking is. Yeah, no, you're, you're absolutely right. And you know, I have patients with total cholesterol of three, four hundred. I have a couple total cholesterol 500 that I manage without statins. Now, you and I think statins may be both over prescribed and potentially under prescribed. And I think before we go any further to my audience, I'm not telling you to go off statins called Turkey. You need to talk to a doctor about this plan. I do prescribe statins. I use them to drop inflammation until I can teach you how to eat. And then it's very rare that I will use a statin once. I teach you how to eat because quite frankly, you probably won't need it. And if I can interject one other thing, many of you need to know about a particle called lipoprotein little a sometimes called LP little a. It is the worst of all the bad actors and you inherited an ability to make it or not make it. And here's a scary thing. LP little a is probably the number one cholesterol particle that causes familial heart disease in early coronary artery disease. Staten drugs actually raise LP little a and look it up. It's in the literature and I can't tell you the number of times that I have patients who LP little a is clearly their issue. They've had bypass. They have multiple stents. They're taking monster amounts of statin drugs and as we wean their statin drugs off and get them on niacin or niacinamide for their LP little a, lo and behold their LP little a plummets. And just by getting them off the statin drug, that doesn't mean tomorrow stop your statin drug. But Johnny, what do you say are statins? I couldn't agree more. I never if I'm not a medical doctor and even if I was, I'm not treating my audience over the internet and I would never anybody ever ever ever to just drop a drug without supervision. So I totally agree with you about that as far as statins other beneficial effects that you mentioned the inflammation one. I say this and Dr. Sinatra says it all the time. Staten is doing a number of things. In my opinion, the least important is lowering cholesterol. They also lower inflammation somewhat and they thin the blood a little bit. So they make as Sinatra likes to say they turn it from the consistency of ketchup to fine red wine. Okay, those are good things. I happen to personally believe you can do both of those things with zero side effects using fish oil, ginkgo, vitamin A, you name it. So these things are not hard to do without a statin but for those who don't take anything and they're literally just following their conventional doctor's advice to give them a statin. There may be some mild anti-inflammatory and blood thinning effects that are good. I would prefer to see those gotten through the through supplements that don't have a side effect profile like statins but I I agree with you Dr. Sinatra agrees with you there are cases in which they might be beneficial. I'd love to mention that under prescribed thing because I am a perfect example of that and everyone used to think when we first came out with the book oh they just they just think everybody's over prescribing statins. Well we do think everybody's over prescribing but we also know that the reverse comes along and and so I'm a perfect example of that for years and years I had perfect cholesterol measured by the old way. My LDL was under 100, my HDL was you know it wasn't much above 40 but it was still okay the ratio was good every doctor oh you're fine nothing wrong whatsoever and then I discovered the particle test or the NMR test or the lipopanel or any of the ones that we're talking to Dr. Gundry and I are talking about and that test showed a very different story very very high particle number 2200 high risk nasty pattern of little b ones and not so many little big fluffy a ones um it was it was a it was a wake-up call and luckily I the cardiologist I chose well I had a few that I bounced this off and they came up with different things but certainly one of them was hey let us put you on five milligrams of cholesterol and knock those particles down like that and I said I'd like to hold off let's see if there's another way and I went to the cardiologist who is the head of the lipid clinic at Scripps Institute here in San Diego and he's extraordinary and I know that he has quite a repertoire of things not just limited to statins and I went to him and I said here's my here's my numbers what do you think and he said well the first thing is I hope you're eating a high fat diet which made me love him even more um but he designed a supplement routine which up which which added to the things I was doing already we put it on a trial did it religiously for six months particles dropped from 2200 to 16 they're still not great but they went from high risk to like yellow light like you should watch this and the particle size just barely shifted into the good uh pattern a where it's mostly fluffy guys are ways to go it's not overwhelmingly fluffy but it moved the needle from like pattern b to pattern a so these things are changeable with supplements and that would be my preferred way to go it's not to say that statins can't help one of as I said one of my reference doctors said I think five five milligrams will do it I know you're not a fan of statins but that will do it and it probably would but what I am not a fan of is people prescribing statins or not prescribing statins based on a test that no longer works well said okay so let's address a question that everybody wants to know if it's not cholesterol what is the best indicator for determining your heart health well that is a great question and I'm so glad you asked because that is my mission in life to answer that question to as many audiences as I can so when we wrote the first edition of the great cholesterol myth 10 years ago we knew that the search for heart disease in the HDL LDL test was not the way to go and we knew the particle test was a huge improvement but we couldn't say for certain like what we should really be looking at we knew it wasn't that we knew there was a hell of a lot more to it than that but we weren't quite sure and when we did this deep dive this time around looking to connect the dots because remember I first wanted to say I'm not an original researcher I'm not the smart guy that runs the college sophomores and the and the vats wearing a lab coat and doing the statistical analysis and getting four stages of clinical studies done but I can translate that stuff really well to the audience that that I speak to and I think you speak to and I'm able to make that clear and what I went on was a mission to see what research had been done here and what was it and what could we uncover so we uncovered a very direct line of research and it has been hiding in plain sight since the 1970s and it is mind boggling mind boggling the doctors do not know this so in the 70s it was a doctor named craft who discovered the insulin assay now insulin I'm sure everyone who listens to you knows what insulin is the very very important form on one of its main things that it does in the body is it clears the bloodstream of excess sugar it's kind of a sugar surfer goes in there pancreas releases it comes out sees the sugar takes it out takes it into the muscle cells drops it off the muscle cells great we need it for energy everybody's happy but in most people that is not how it works and the numbers about in how many the percentage of how many people that doesn't work in is staggering 88% in america is the most recent figure 52 worldwide and we think that's an underestimate so it doesn't work right what happens is instead of the cells accepting insulin they reject it there's just too much sugar too much noise too much insulin and they go nomos we gave it the office they close their doors and now your bloodstream you've got this high sugar and high insulin the definition of pre-diabetes all right so this insulin resistance the ability of the cells to just resist the effect of insulin was something very important and craft figured out a way to measure it was a very complicated assay required his patients to sit in the office for several hours they would be hooked up to two different infusions one would infuse sugar the other would infuse insulin you'd watch how quickly or how effectively insulin was able to clear that sugar you could really get perfect lab measures of it and he developed this great test and he tested it on like 14 000 patients over the course of his years and he followed them up he just wanted to see what happened to people he put them in categories 20 categories of very insulin sensitive which means your blood sugar goes up when you eat insulin comes right up bum bum bum it clears it right up and you're back to normal and everything works in a good that's about 20% of the population and it went downhill from there to the next 20% not a little bit insulin resistance all the way up to major insulin resistance and these people with abdominal belly weight and all of the risk factors that go with that and then he watched to see what happened to these people so the first 20% the really insulin sensitive ones nobody died in 10 years which is unheard of in a population that size no major heart attacks or nothing then the second group you start to see disease and death and it goes up and it's just like that until you get to the highest level of insulin resistance and he said you know we knew it was kind of the basic condition for diabetes but it looks like it's connected to a lot of other stuff okay this kind of got buried and nobody paid much attention to it in the 1980s a guy from stanford comes along named Gerald Reeden and he invents or labels something called syndrome x and syndrome x was quickly replaced by metabolic syndrome which is somewhat later replaced by three diabetes it's all the same thing and guess what he was talking about insulin resistance and he said you know when you have insulin resistance and you have heart blood pressure, abdominal fat that's a condition of a group of conditions we call that metabolic syndrome it always is pre-diabetes well we looked at all of this literature and we made the hypothesis which is not a big leap of faith that pre-diabetes is diabetes it just hasn't gotten the diagnosis yet and guess what diabetes is pre-heart disease 80% of diabetics die of heart disease so when we looked at the literature that Reven had done which was basically the same thing he spent his career identifying this insulin resistance as a causal central cause for diabetes and the entire cardio metabolic stuff towards the end of his life and his end of his research he said I wonder what else his insulin resistance is related to and he basically did what crafted he took everybody and he put them in categories and once again cancer lung disease kidney disease there was not a disease that it wasn't linked to and and Dr. Gundry we put our book out to great cholesterol myth late last year and we basically say insulin resistance is the cause of heart disease now let me put the caveat in the asterisk there obviously it doesn't it doesn't explain every case of heart disease in the world there are three year olds who were born with heart disease it but it tracks with heart disease as well as cigarettes tracked with lung cancer I mean a lot of cigarettes don't account for every lung cancer case in the world there are people who get lung cancer who don't smoke and there are people who smoke a lot and don't get lung cancer but it sure is a good tracker it counts for like 800 percent increased likelihood and it's the same thing with insulin resistance so we wrote our book we said insulin resistance we think it's the cause of heart disease with that caveat a couple months later a great doctor that I have great admiration for Dr. Jason Fung he's the father of intermittent fasting he comes out with a book called the cancer code and it says guess what insulin resistance is the cause of cancer and two months later a PhD I had never heard of who's brilliant named Dr. Benjamin Brithman writes a book called why we get sick and guess what he thinks insulin resistance is the cause of everything else so we've got these three independent I don't even know work man I met Fung once we've got these people who are kind of coming to the same conclusion which is insulin resistance is at the core of everything we know it's at the core of obesity and diabetes and heart disease and then the take home for this is that if you look at COVID which is we're right in the middle right now in January in California we're in major lockdown I don't know what it's like over there but we're definitely not out of the woods and we've been in the woods for the better part of a year no matter where you stand politically on it this is serious thing look at every co-morbidity for COVID every pre-existing condition that you guys that we have all been told oh man if you've got that thing that's a bad case you're immunocompromised what what are they high blood pressure pre-diabetes diabetes obesity heart disease shall I go on they're all the same related conditions and when I realized that and I said holy holy if we could do something about insulin resistance we'd be wiping out the basis of half of these pre-existing conditions but I was puzzled I thought I don't really know if there's a what about lung disease kidney disease and liver disease because those are big pre-existing ones conditions also and I spent them no more than a morning on PubMed on the National Institute of Health Medicine thing trying to find a relationship between insulin resistance and lung can't a lung disease and kidney disease it's right there there's a literature this long it's underlies all of them so we really feel this is such an important thing I I have actually talked to others in the low-carb clinicians network about a political action committee to literally lobby the medical authorities to pay attention to insulin resistance and to teach people that you can turn around insulin resistance you can prevent it you can treat it you can you can reverse it with diet alone so this is so important for us I'm not saying I'd never say anything so simplistic as to say if you wipe out insulin resistance you won't have deaths from COVID but I'll bet you the death rate would be a lot different because people are metabolically broken and any challenge whether it be viral or any other is going to be much more opportunistic when you've got a weakened population that you're inflicting that on right yeah oh yeah when when COVID first came out I wrote an editorial on Thrive Global on exactly this that we should actually arm ourselves and the federal government should actually mandate people believe it or not rationing sugar and flour just like we did in world war two and that we should give people the money to have victory gardens in their yard or their porch because in world war two 40 percent of the food that we ate was grown in home victory gardens and I said if we and we know how to do that we should do it again because quite frankly we are at war and we've now exceeded the deaths from world war two just from COVID so yeah I wrote an editorial about that you're right we need to empower people we you know we wouldn't so send soldiers to combat unarmed and yet we're everybody's unarmed unless we take care of this all right so most of my listeners know about insulin resistance they're hopefully aware of how to reverse insulin resistance but can you give me your thoughts a brief overview on how to reverse insulin resistance well I always start with it because I do find that it's a somewhat difficult concept to explain to the general public so I'm always thinking about how would I explain insulin resistance to a fourth grader because once you explain it this way you see what the solution is very easily so the way I came up with and I love your feedback whether you think this will land for fourth graders or anybody else who knows nothing about biochemistry so here's how insulin resistance works you are a child and when you were born you're assigned a bucket a little pale and the pale is different for different children sorry that's just the way it is it's the luck of the door some people get blue eyes some people get brown eyes but you get a pale and for the rest of your life and that pale may change a little bit but not much it's basically the pale that you get um you may eat as many carbohydrates as you can fit in that pale every day many as you want if you eat more if you try to stuff more into the pale than that pale will hold there are going to be metabolic problems and what they are is called insulin resistance you don't even need to know what it is it's the inability of your body to process more than fit more carbohydrates and fit into your pale and they may be different amounts for different people so if you say well you're all those vice in china sorry that ain't your pale this is your pale and when you take in more blood sugar goes up the pancreas can't keep up with the load eventually you become insulin resistance and that is what we've been talking about for the last 45 minutes so it's basically your body's inability to deal with more sugar and starch than you genetically hormonally metabolically whatever it is then your pale will allow you to deal with and that's what it is so how do we reverse it the answer is very obvious we stopped trying to shove more carbohydrates into the pale and for many people it may take zero carbohydrates their pale may have been so damaged at this point that they can't get anything in there and you might have to go to zero those people are not i don't think in the majority but they do exist and there are people who've done it very successfully carnivore diets keto diets no carbohydrates i think for most people a little adjustment on what we try to shove into that pale will do the trick if we just ate less of that stuff less processed carbohydrates if we if we stuck that pale with the bones that filled with fiber like fibers vegetables and apples and berries and cantaloupes and grapefruits and and things like that we'd probably do better than if we stuff it with pasta and rice and cereal and breads and crackers and all the other stuff so the way to reverse insulin resistance is exactly what the cardiologist said to me online at the scripts institute when i said here's my numbers what should i do and he said well i hope you're eating a high fat diet because think about it the macronutrient that drives blood sugar and therefore insulin up the most is carbohydrates the one that drives it up the middle ground is protein it raises blood sugar a little bit uh and it raises this a little bit but nothing like carbohydrates but the one that doesn't even move the needle on it is fat so what is this sense of recommending low fat high carb diets to diabetics or to people who are obese or people who cannot manage the stuff that's in their bucket right now you're going to get more of it it's just it just makes no sense to me at all you can reverse insulin resistance with a higher fat lower carb diet period it works every time no you're right um we uh we are over um we are over fed in this country and it's uh the processed foods have been processed so well that it's almost instantaneous blood sugar um it's far more than anyone could have possibly imagined it was possible um but yeah one of the things that has struck me over the last 20 years of doing this with my patients is that half the patients i originally saw would come in with with fatigue issues now they had lots of other issues uh but they figured they were just getting old and it turns out that one of the things about pre-diabetes and i agree that telling someone they're pre-diabetic is like telling a woman she's a little bit pregnant yeah and i i use this in all my patients there there's no such thing if if you're a pre-diabetic you're you should consider yourself a diabetic sorry hundred percent uh but yeah this these things can overcome all right so other than dye and other than insulin resistance and i agree an insulin in and of itself is an amazing growth hormone and it's a smooth muscle growth hormone that actually makes our blood vessels thicker and uh believe it or not we want nice smooth skinny blood vessels not thick ones uh so insulin is a big big driver of heart disease just from that alone uh so other than diet what other factors can can affect our risk of cardiovascular disease well i'm so glad you asked that because as a nutritionist and i'm sure for you as well as a as a medical doctor we tend to focus on that narrow area that we were trained in and you know i always looked at at the beginning of my career it's it's exercise and diet it's it's diet and supplements it's all nutrition related what i've noticed in my colleagues over 30 years of doing this that all the best people no matter how they started out and i started out as a weight loss coach at equinox fitness clubs however they started out none of them are looking at food diaries anymore none of them are looking at exercise lots because every one of them has figured out that the things that really impact health go way beyond what you eat what you do with your body and that seems almost like heresy to say that because it's so food and nutrition food exercise movement are so important but we really do forget the impact that our mental attitude our spirituality if you will our calmness of mind our ability to form relationships with other people are the amount of love in our life the relationship we have with our animals with our outdoors with how much sun we get because we're walking in the actual sunlight and the greenery as opposed to just taking a pill we forget the power of those things and i thought there's a very very famous story called the rosetto phenomenon which we actually talk about in the book the great cholesterol myth it's a very famous thing you can please everybody google the rosetto phenomenon but in the 20s there was this hard scrapple town in pennsylvania called rosetto and the weirdest thing happened is is that the doctors there were not seeing any heart disease and these doctors would meet in these kind of towns in between in these bars that were sort of centrally located in the old exchange notes and talk shop and and the ones in rosetto were constantly saying you guys see all this hard we don't see any what do you think's going on and this led eventually to some real research attention being paid to this area and then the researchers started coming in and by god there's like no heart disease here now this would not have been so amazing except if you looked at how the people in rosetto lived this was a hard scrapple pennsylvania town this made scranton pennsylvania look like Beverly Hills this was like they worked in the mines they they breathed the worst stuff you can imagine they ate an american diet that was as bad as you could imagine american diets being they smoked they should be they should have been dying like twice the rate of everybody else and the best the researchers could come up with after a couple of years of investigation and this is what you'll read in in wikipedia is that these people had such strong social bonds that it somehow overcame a lot of risk factors no become all of them some did die but these people came they were all from the same area of europe they shared certain genetics they did everything together they had you know sunday dinners square dancing gardening whatever it was it was such a community nobody lived alone and they believed that those things really made that much of a powerful difference and that's been kind of supported over the years the blue zones that wonderful research where they went across the globe to find at first four and then a fifth place was discovered as well five places around the globe where people live to over a hundred and and they're all fine i mean there's just a very high percentage of centenarians like the highest percentage of healthy people over a hundred and these are not people in assisted living homes they're they're marching goats up the hills of sardinia they're they're doing stuff and what the researchers found national geographic team of researchers was that they didn't all eat the same diet they weren't all vegetarians they weren't i mean they were they were just kind of lots of various big differences that they couldn't find like what's one thing do they all eat meat they all not eat meat the only thing that they all had in common was this absolutely unbreakable social fabric they were all part of the community they didn't know what it was like to be isolated the old people didn't go to old age homes they looked at the family everybody was important everyone felt like they contributed and this was the continual thing that was true for all five of the areas around the globe where people lived the longest so in our book the the last third of the book almost is about all the stuff besides what we talked about in the first two thirds we talk about how important nutrition is obviously you and i just talked about a higher fat lower carb diet reversing insulin resistance which we think is the cause of all disease we talk about exercise but then in that third section we talk about meditation we talk about stress reduction we talk about tech foods like heart math where you can actually monitor your your own physiology in a very creative way it's almost like a video game because 99 bucks and it's fun and actually changes your blood pressure in your brainwaves we talk about the eco therapy the the actual proven demonstrated benefits of being in greenery they even show that there's research showing that if you're in a hospital and you view of the garden you do better than if you don't so i mean there are all these things that actually do change our physiology we talk about the science of psychoneuro immunology which is basically the notion of what you think about affects your immune system something i've been preaching about since the beginning of the pandemic i'm sure you have too so we talk about all these things and we want people to understand that it's so easy to feel overwhelmed because you're not doing all the right things and you're not eating and they keep changing the stuff about nutrition which supplements are good and which ones aren't and what exercise is most effective and people can easily be overwhelmed and what i never want people to lose sight of is all the other stuff that they are in charge of that actually are making contributions to their health bank every time you have a you cook a meal together with your friend or family you made a contribution to your health bank every time you take vitamin d you make a contribution these are little contributions and you make them every day or you can make them every day and i don't want people to get so overwhelmed by either a lab test it's a bad lab test because sometimes you have bad lab tests and you don't have that many risk factors because on balance you're doing all these good things so i want people to be aware that it is more than just eating right and exercising right and yes those things are vitally important but so are the relationships that you have in your everyday life how you sleep how you digest the time you spend with your dog all of those things they matter profoundly to our health and we cannot just omit them because they don't fit under the you know the medical establishment of pharmacology and all the the interventions we do these things are really really important yeah i i couldn't agree with you more in fact for years i used to give a powerpoint lecture about disease is the absence of ease and i wanted people to be at ease and ease is eating attitude spirituality and exercise and there you go and you just told someone how to be at ease and if you have ease it's impossible to have dis ease and yeah so please folks get the book uh and you know ignore the first two thirds because we just told you that but if you but if you if you do nothing else follow Johnny's absolutely right that you know it's it's the it's connectivity with people it's connectivity with the outdoors it's your attitude that really is fundamentally going to change things yeah good for you good for you thank you so much this is such a great i can't wait to read your new book and interview you for my podcast because i all right i'll come so all right all right so where where can listeners find your book and learn more about your work how do we how do we find you well my books on amazon and and any booksellers that still exist but amazon is usually the most reliable all my books are on amazon um you can follow me on twitter and facebook and all that at at johnny botan and my website is johnny botan dot com no h and johnny yeah that's important it's j o n n y there's no h so don't type it in wrong please all right well it's been a real pleasure and good for you and thanks for updating your book i like i said i i've been following you ever since the first one i love what used to be heresy but now luckily it's becoming more and more mainstream all right take care all right now it's time for our audience question this question comes from david ivers on youtube who said dr gundry do you recommend toasted or untoasted perilla oil where can i purchase the best quality well i actually use just untoasted perilla oil and a couple reasons i use it uh and i've written about this perilla oil has some of the highest levels of alpha linoleic acid there is to be found even more than flaxseed oil and it's got incredible levels of rosemaryic acid which may be one of the real secrets in long-lived communities that we've just been talking about so that's the same thing that's in rosemary so rosemaryic acid is a great find in perilla oil i like to use perilla oil in my salads mix it with olive oil i actually mix it with mct oil but that's a whole another subject uh what are the sources occasionally you can find perilla oil in grocery stores you can find it in asian stores certainly korean chinese stores will usually carry perilla oil worse comes to worse go to amazon i have no connection with this company but it's easy to remember i get my perilla oil from doctor adorable so if you think of me you'll think of doctor adorable and i have absolutely no connection so great great question all right time for the review of the week uh mcp shows watched my interview on youtube with dan walter the first farmer to raise chickens on the plant paradox yes foods i've been buying and eating dans pasture raised chickens for almost two years they taste better than conventional chicken but what's even better is that they are not inflammatory it has been almost three years that my husband and i have been on the plant paradox lifestyle my husband a diabetic has been able to drop all his diabetes drugs as well as blood pressure drugs we have both lost significant amounts of weight and feel fantastic we are both looking forward to dying young at a ripe old age well mcp shows thank you very much and thanks for enjoying that show and this was a perfect question to include with what we just talked about with with johnny bowton um you can reverse these diseases you can get rid of these diseases just by making some simple changes in your life and by the way uh dan walter if you're listening i know my next chicken is on the way i just got an email so can't wait to get it so thanks very much this is a great review to include with what johnny bowton and i have just been talking about you can reverse these problems you can reverse diabetes you can reverse high blood pressure with simple changes in your diet and that's why i do all this because i'm dr gundry and i'm always looking out for you before you go i just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes google play stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because i'm dr gundry and i'm always looking out for you