 Hey everybody welcome to a special edition of the Dr. Gundry podcast. I'm gonna tell you all about my new book the longevity paradox how to die young at a ripe old age and it's available at Barnes & Noble Amazon and your local bookstore and this is going to be like the plant paradox I guarantee you a big game changer. I wanted to give you a little tease to get your appetite wetted for living a longer but living better longer and that's really the longevity paradox. Most of us kind of look at what's happening to our parents or our grandparents or our great grandparents and kind of don't like what we see. People are getting knee replacements, hip replacements and that doesn't sound very good and it doesn't sound very good because it isn't very good but what's exciting about the research that I've done with my patients and the research that I've done in the literature is that doesn't have to be that way. So today just a few teasers of longevity secrets and myths. First of all there's a myth that animal protein is really important for you as you get older and in fact that's not only a myth but it's absolutely wrong. Now as a young man from Omaha, Nebraska and Milwaukee, Wisconsin I can tell you that you know I come from cattle country and unfortunately animal protein is one of the biggest causes of getting old faster there is sadly and I talk a lot about this in the plant paradox but I bring even more information to the longevity paradox. It turns out that animal protein and it doesn't matter if the animals are fish it doesn't matter if the animals an egg if it doesn't matter if it's cheese animal proteins absolutely cause you to age quicker and absolutely in the case of beef, lamb and pork increase your risk of developing cancers and cancers quite frankly are almost completely preventable as long as you follow a few of the important steps in the longevity paradox and I take you through all that as we go on. One of the interesting things about the blue zones and I'm actually the only nutritionist who has actually spent most of their career living in a blue zone and that's Loma Linda California and I can tell you that the unifying principles of the blue zones in other words what their diets all share is not the common things that you're told about all the blue zones do not eat whole grains all the blue zones do not eat beans that's a myth in fact that is not a unifying feature of the blue zones and as I talk about in the longevity paradox the whole grains that some of the blue zones eat and the beans that some of the blue zones eat are actually a negative part of their diet that's overcome by other very positive parts of their diet including generous use of olive oil in three of the blue zones but the unifying feature of the blue zones which was common to Loma Linda it's common to Sardinia it's common to Crete it's common to Etchioroli it's common to Kittavins is very very little animal protein that's actually the uniting factor and as I talk about in the longevity paradox one of my colleagues Gary Frazier from Loma Linda has shown that the vegan Adventists are actually the longest lived of all of the long lived Adventists and again the unifying feature of all the blue zones is not the grains and beans it's actually limited animal protein does that mean you have to give it up no in fact I'm going to give you a bunch of tricks in the book on how to have your cake and eat it too in this case how to have your meat and eat it too so great tricks are coming up unfortunately I used to love animal protein I still consider myself a veg aquarium that means I eat mostly vegetables tend to eat fish on the weekends particularly wild fish or wild shellfish but it's very little part of a normal diet and one of the biggest questions I always get asked is Dr. Gundry you know what am I going to do for protein remember a gorilla eats 16 pounds of leaves every day and he's got more muscle mass than you'll ever have a horse eats grass and weeds he has more muscle mass you ever have they do not eat animal protein in fact all the largest animals on earth get all their protein from eating grass and leaves and believe it or not you can too as I show in the book there's some very good studies of trying to supplement seniors with extra animal protein and we actually found out that it did not benefit them in muscle mass in energy these are all myths that are perpetrated by people who are interested in selling you animal protein okay number two you got to have a high metabolic rate to stay healthy in fact one of the things that I have found in my research of my patients the super old that I see in Palm Springs they don't call Palm Springs God's waiting room for nothing I've had the player privilege of dealing with large numbers of 90 and a hundred year old people who are thriving and one of the things we find consistently both in my research and in other researchers is the contrary to expectations they run a low metabolic rate they actually run a low temperature a low basal temperature now why is that well it turns out that energy efficiency predicts a long lifespan and I like to use the example of what's happened in for instance hybrid cars a Toyota Prius or a car with a four-cylinder engine with turbocharging and a supercharger can develop the power of an 8-cylinder 12 cylinder engine but use very very very little gas and as I talk about in the longevity paradox what I want to do is teach you how to you become a turbo charged supercharged four-cylinder engine that will actually have the power of a v8 or a v12 now you can if you want to burn through a lot of fuel with a 12-cylinder engine but in the long run it's efficiency of burning fuel that actually determines who's going to live a long time and teaching you how to be an efficient fuel burner is really one of the second big tricks of the book the other thing that's fascinating is we can actually measure your literal fuel efficiency by looking at actually something you probably had done in your doctor's office and that is hemoglobin a1c almost every night you see commercials for I got to get my a1c to go or I've got to get my a1c in range well a1c actually measures what are called advanced glycation end products and they're nicknamed ages for sure age ages occur from heat binding protein and sugar molecules together in what's one of the strongest chemical bonds that's ever been described it's called the mallard reaction so you have heat in your body you eat protein you eat sugar and we can actually look at these charred bits in you if any of you have ever grilled a steak you know that the crusty bit on the outside the good stuff that's actually advanced glycation end products those of you who have liver spots or age spots on the back of your hand or elsewhere those are advanced glycation end products and they're actually you aging and as I've described to myself a number of my other patients and I bring a new funny one in on the longevity paradox you can actually de-age and you can actually watch these age spots disappear by changing your diet and using these tricks number three there's a myth that saturated fat is good for you most of the folks in the paleo and keto communities think that the more saturated fat that you eat the better in fact this was first posited as the cause of heart disease back in the 1950s by a very famous nutrition researcher from University of Minnesota by the name of Ansel Keys he's incredibly demonized in the paleo and keto communities because he did a study to find out why Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s had a heart attack Ansel Keys developed the K ration in World War two that kept our troops alive and so he was brought in to find out why president Eisenhower had a heart attack he published a very famous study called the seven countries study that purported that animal fat the more saturated fat that people ate the higher their risk of heart disease now he presented his findings to the World Health Organization and the World Health Organization believed what he said and so the low fat movement came about now I've looked at Ansel Keys all of his studies I looked at them over and over again and interestingly enough Ansel Keys is tied for the longest living nutritionist in on record he and an Italian from the 1500s by the name of Luigi Carneros who you'll get to know in the book they both died at about 102 years of age but Ansel Keys retired and lived in a village south of Naples right next to a very famous blue zone called Achiaroli and Ansel Keys I've had the pleasure of interviewing his housekeeper ate huge amounts of olive oil now olive oil is not a saturated fat but what happened with Ansel Keys was people took his data and he thought they thought he was demonizing fat he wasn't at all he was demonizing animal saturated fat in fact he was one of the original critics of the cholesterol theory of heart disease and we'll talk about that in a minute so what I've looked at Ansel Keys data and my own data in that animal fats are associated with animal protein and it was actually the animal protein that was the big mischief maker in the animal fat the saturated fat hypothesis now so having said that the more olive oil that I can get into you the better your longevity and the better your brain health and I've got a lot of tricks in the longevity paradox to tell you how to use olive oil or the polyphenols and olive oil to maximize your brain health and your lifespan and there's some really exciting things in there so the idea that you should be cramming down the bacon or the sausages or the really marble meat you know paleo or a ketogenic diet is quite frankly detrimental long-term and those of you on the carnivore diet pay attention the carnivore diet is really good for losing weight and it's just like if you want to burn through a lot of gasoline quickly in your 12-cylinder engine it's a great way to burn through fuel but that 12-cylinder car isn't going to get you far down the road and this is for longevity so carnivore folks you want to lose weight fast go ahead but it's not a long-term successful diet if you want to live well for a very long time okay so the other thing that I want to talk about before we go is how important it is to get vitamin D into your diet vitamin D is a miracle vitamin in fact it's not a vitamin at all it's actually a hormone and if I could do anything to get you to activate your stem cells to get you to activate these little tips of your chromosomes called telomeres or telomeres it's vitamin D as I show in the book a University of California San Diego study shows that the average person to have a sufficient vitamin D level in this country should be taking about 10,000 international units of vitamin D3 a day and I'll bet you almost every one of you who are listening are not doing that in fact that same study showed that 40,000 international units a day of vitamin D3 will not produce vitamin D toxicity lastly there is a very very very strong association with low vitamin D levels and cancer whether it's prostate cancer colon cancer breast cancer ovarian cancer low vitamin D levels are characteristic of people who develop cancer whereas high vitamin D levels are characteristic of people who do not develop cancer so one of the things one of the last messages from the longevity paradox is take your vitamin D3 and don't be afraid of it it's one of the greatest hormones ever discovered so the book is out now head to Barnes and Noble.com Amazon.com wherever your bookseller is please support your local bookstores get it now it's a game changer and it's going to keep you dying young at a ripe old age because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you and your longevity