 Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill. Today, I have a special guest who I have long admired, and this is our first official meeting, but you're going to hear all about gut health and why the gut is connected to every single organ in the body, and if you're suffering from chronic disease that seems totally far removed from the gut, heart disease, cancer, auto-immunity, inflammation of any type, you're going to want to hear this podcast today because we're going to dive in as to how the gut is connected to all these things. So Dr. Gundry, welcome, and thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks a lot, Joe. Great to be here and love to talk about the gut. Yes, me too. So let me introduce Dr. Stephen Gundry. He's a founder and director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs, California, and the Center for Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara after a distinguished surgical career as a professor and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery at Loma Linda, one of the blue zones, right? Loma Linda University. Dr. Gundry changes focus to curing modern disease by dietary changes. He's the author of New York Times bestselling book, The Plant Paradox, The Plant Paradox Cookbook, The Plant Paradox Quick and Easy, and The Longevity Paradox, along with national bestsellers, The Plant Paradox Family Cookbook, The Energy Paradox, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution and Unlocking the Keto Code, and more than 300 articles published in peer-reviewed journals on using diet and supplements to eliminate heart disease, diabetes, autoimmunity, and many, many other things. And we're going to dive into that today. He's the host of the weekly Dr. Gundry podcast and founder of Wellness brand, Gundry MD. He lives with his wife Penny and their dogs, Ann Palm Springs and Monticello, California. The Ceto California. Thank you. Thank you. That's a tough one. So welcome. Welcome. And what an amazing career with all those books and then the previous career cardiothoracic surgery. So I always love to ask my guests, what was your journey to medicine and how did you really transform into this integrative holistic doc where we look at root cause? Tell us your journey. Well, real briefly, I decided to become a doctor after reading a book in fourth grade in my public school library called All About You and I decided to become a doctor that day. So I had, I went undergraduate at Yale back in the Dark Ages and in those days, we were actually able to design our own major and it was basically you did a master's thesis and I chose to, my hypothesis was you could take a grade A, manipulate its food supply and manipulate its environment and prove you'd arrive at a human being. I actually defended my thesis and got an honors and I give it to my parents and went off to become a famous heart surgeon. So I eventually wound up at Loma Linda, California and Loma Linda University Medical School and I was a famous heart surgeon who among other things, I was famous for xenotransplantation, pediatric transplantation and operating on people that nobody else wanted to and there are a few idiots like me and so back in the late 90s, I was referred to gentlemen who I call Big Ed in all my books. Big Ed was 48 years old. He had inoperable coronary artery disease. He was from Miami, Florida and he, all of his blood vessels were clogged up. You couldn't put stents in them. You couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't many places to put a new vessel and he went around the country looking for idiots like me to operate on him and everybody turned him down and I'm kind of on one of those stops and he spent six months looking for somebody and he finally wound up in my office after about six months and I looked at his angiogram, the cardiac catheterization of his heart from six months earlier in Miami and I said, well look, you know, I don't want to break your heart but I agree with everybody else. There's nothing I can do for you. They're right and he said, well look, what you don't know is I've been on a diet for six months time and I've lost 45 pounds. The reason he's nicknamed Big Ed is he was 265 pounds when I met him but he had lost 45 pounds and he says that I've gone to a health food store and I'm taking a bunch of supplements and he literally had brought in a big bag and he says, you know, 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 really going to help this and I know what you've done with all those supplements. You've made expensive urine which is what I used to believe and he says, well, you know, come on, I've come all this way, blah, blah, blah. Why don't we get a new angiogram? Why don't we get a new cardiac catheterization? Don't get your hopes up. Okay. So the next day we get an angiogram and in six months time, this guy has reversed 50% of the blockages in his heart. They're gone and I'm looking at this and you know, I'm looking at the two and I'm going, you know, this is impossible. I've never seen anything like this and so the next thing I go is that, wait a minute, you know, tell me about this diet of 50 and so he starts rattling off what he's doing and I'm going, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. That's my thesis from Yale University of what, you know, an ancient man ate and I said, what the heck? And so I said, well, wait a minute, let me look at those supplements. Now, I was famous for protecting the heart in a bucket of ice water for 48 hours for heart transplant and I was famous because I had this concoction of stuff that I would put down the veins and arteries of the heart to protect it. And I started looking through his supplements and a bunch of the stuff I'm putting down the veins and arteries of the heart, he's swallowing. And it never occurred to me to swallow the dumb thing. So why, so pointed is I was 70 pounds overweight even though I was running a 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour a day. I operated with migraine headaches. I had pre-diabetes. I had hypertension. I had such bad arthritis in my knees. I wore braces to run. And so I called my parents and said, hey, do you still have my thesis? And they said, yeah, you know, it's in the shrine. And I said, well, send it up to me and I put myself on that program and started swallowing a bunch of supplements that I used to put down the veins and arteries. And I lost 50 pounds my first year and so on and so forth. So I started putting my patients who I operated on on this program so that they would never have to get another operation because quite frankly, the vast majority of people five to seven years later, you're getting new stents or new bypasses. And I said, this gotta be a better way. So after about a year of doing this at Loma Linda and seeing the exact same results that I was seeing on myself, I said, gosh, you know, I've got this all wrong. Instead of operating on my patients and then teaching them how to eat to avoid me in the future, I need to teach them how to eat. And I'll never have to operate on them in the first place, which is really stupid for you're out of a job. Yeah. So I literally at the height of my career resigned my position at Loma Linda. And I set up a clinic here in Palm Springs, where I just ask patients, look, every three months, first of all, I want to tell you, I want to take some foods away from you. I want to give you some foods. I want to send you to Costco or Trader Joe's or wasn't an Amazon back then, buy some supplements. I want to do blood work on you every three months that insurance will pay for. And let's see what happens. And of course, I guess the rest is history. But for a career decision at the top of your career, it was a really stupid move. But I kept persisting and my wife said, you know, this is really stupid. But if we're going to do this, let's do it. So there you go. That's how it all started. Wow. I love that story in so many ways. First of all, I always say curiosity is the hallmark of genius. And you clearly from way back, you never lost that you still haven't. And that I think one of the things that makes great, not only physicians, but great scientists, because as we say, well, what if, or we ask these questions, right? And if we stop learning and stop asking the questions, then we get stagnant and we just do surgery or do whatever we've been told to do forever. So first of all, I love that. And that shows what a brilliant person you always have been and continue to be. But second, I always, I find interesting, my experience with medicine has also been that we're taught in medical school, oh, patients won't change their diet. So why even try, right? So we're kind of like jaded to come out to like, don't even go there because our patients won't be willing. And that's kind of sad because there's so much there. And there are patients that are willing. And then if we are passionate and we can show the data, obviously it's so powerful. And I feel like there's probably better education now 20 years after I graduated. But it's still, to me, it's always been sad that our medical education didn't talk more about patient and diet. Because again, we weren't, at least for me, it was more like total perintual nutrition. That was it, right? Well, interesting. I was just recently on Mark Hyman's podcast. And his daughter is a third year medical student. And so he mentioned to me, he says, so I, you know, honey, what do you learn in about the microbiome? And she said, what do you mean? And he says, what are they teaching you? She said, absolutely nothing. We have not been taught anything about the microbiome. And he went, holy cow, you know, what? Because there are hundreds, thousands of articles now, which is a transition. Let's talk about, because you and I know diversity is king. And that's such a core, core concept in the gut. Let's talk about that. Tell us a little about why is diversity so critical in our microbiome? And why does it have to do with the rest of the body? So, Abocrates, you know, 2,500 years ago said all disease begins in the gut. And I've now been spending 25 years trying to figure out how he was riding and he was riding. In fact, I don't know if you can see it, but behind me, I love it. I saw the beginning, I didn't see the last word, which is the road to health is paved with good intentions, intestines. And it's so true. The, you know, we've, we've only really recently discovered that there's this tropical rainforest living inside of us with, you know, 100 trillion organisms that, thanks to the human microbiome project, we actually know we're there. We used to think that the human intestine was a hollow tube and we swallowed some stuff and digestive enzymes and juices and acid extracted some stuff and whatever was left over. We pooped out along with a few bacteria and boy, how wrong we were. And really the part of gut check, to me, that's so exciting is that now that we know about these guys and we can individual what, what happens with this incredible community, it's like any ecosystem, the more diverse that ecosystem is, the more one species depends on another species and one species can take over for another species if there is a perturbation in the ecosystem. We now know that the whole same thing happens in our gut. And what's startling, I think to most people and apparently should be to medical students is that most of what we thought and we're trained in medical school is going to happen to us from any disease standpoint is under the control of one way or another of our microbiome and on our gut. And to me, at least the most empowering thing is you choose the disease process and you can change it by changing the gut. It's, I mean, it's really exciting. And no one could have even imagined this except apocrates, apparently. Right. Hey, everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, Unexpected Finding Resilience Through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life-threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein bar and mold and biotoxin related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you want to get your own copy, stop by readunexpected.com. There you can also collect your free bonuses. So grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through functional medicine in finding resilience. Right. Way back if we were to listen. So true. I mean, autoimmune is a classic one because everything on the immune, 80% of our gut or immune system is lining the gut. And so something happens there. I say it's like vagus, right? What happens there except it doesn't stay there. It affects the whole body. You obviously from your cardiovascular surgical point of view have had a big interest in the heart. Tell us about heart-gut connection. Is there any specifics there that? Well, again, it was kind of a big ad that really made me rethink this. Interestingly, one of the great fathers of heart surgery, Michael DeBakey, who I had the pleasure of knowing while he was alive, he always said that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. That cholesterol was an innocent bystander and that how right I think he was. I've used the example in another book. Let's suppose I'm an alien sent down to observe what's happening on earth and to report back to high command. And as I'm looking around earth, we'll choose Los Angeles for an example. I noticed that every time there's a car accident, there's an ambulance. So that I could certainly report back to high command. I'm pretty sure that ambulances are the cause of car accidents because every time there's a car accident, there's an ambulance. So association does not mean causation. And I think DeBakey was saying that cholesterol was the ambulance. And cholesterol is basically, I tell patients, a spackling compound. And it's there to spackle potholes that are caused by inflammation. And that inflammation is actually the cause of the problem. And what's interesting, I think, where did the inflammation come from? Well, the inflammation actually came from leaky gut. And again, it all gets back to apocrates. So I would have thought that this was saw, was put to death, the cholesterol theory or hypothesis at the American Heart Association this year, where low dose culturacine, which a lot of people have heard of as a gout medication, low dose culturacine is an anti inflammatory substance. And low dose culturacine in maximally statin medically treated patients produced a 30% reduction in addition to what they had achieved before, just because it blocked inflammation. And the other thing that well meaning physicians don't know is that statin drugs don't work by lowering your LDL or APO B statin drugs work by blocking toll like receptors, TLRs, which call inflammation into play cytokine. And we didn't know this initially, but I just had a debate with a very well meaning cardiologist who just stood by said, no, no, no, it's, you know, it's lowering apple B. That is the cause of all this goodness. That's a side effect. Come on. So I love that you're sharing that because it really is a lot of these drugs and interesting to a lot of the drugs that we've used, actually have their action on the microbiome when we didn't even know it, right? And then we're seeing that downstream effect. And what you're describing is this endothelial dysfunction, right? The lining of the vessels, leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky blood vessels and all of this stuff then gets that cholesterol spackling that you described as really just sticky inflamed endothelium that draws the cholesterol to try to heal the process. And then of course, the stuff you saw with the cardiovascular disease, but it didn't really start with just an elevated cholesterol. So I love that you're really describing that clearly. So fascinating. And often I think auto immune, whatever we call that, obviously that's the immune system gone or riot attacking itself. But even on the endothelial level, a lot of it is really immune inflammation, auto immune related, and we can actually track that back to the cytokinesine. It's so fascinating. So one thing you mentioned earlier that I wanted to come back to is you were famous for keeping those heart to live for transplants. And you put that solution in there and those nutrients, and then you find out this guy, Tom, was Ed or Tom? Big Ed. Yeah, big Ed was taking these. What are some of the most core nutrients for the heart? I would love to know your list of the top four or five things that you think are critical for the heart. Well, not so much for the heart. But if I was going to have anybody take a few supplements and I've talked about this, vitamin D is number one. One of the fascinating things about vitamin D is that vitamin D is essential for preventing leaky gut. And I go into it and gut check in more detail than I have in the past. But vitamin D, we have at the base of our crips in the microvilli and we can get into anatomy if we want, but let's not bore everybody. We have a bunch of stem cells at the base of all these crips and the crips are at the base of microvilla. And the reason the wall of our gut is a tennis court in surface area is because we basically have a shag carpet in our intestines of these microvilli. And at the base of these are a collection of bacteria and stem cells. And those stem cells repopulate the one layer lining of our gut. But the stem cells are critically sensitive to vitamin D. And if you don't have enough vitamin D, the stem cells basically sit there and twiddle their thumbs and say, I didn't know there was a problem when you want me to do, but vitamin D actually kind of shoves them into action and differentiate. And early on, 80% of my practice is now autoimmune patients who really have not done well with traditional medicine or even, you know, with traditional treatments of autoimmune disease, biologics, which are transplant drugs, folks. And, you know, I'll tell my patients, I say, I didn't do a hard transplant on you when the ding dong are you doing on a transplant drug? And that tends to get their attention. So the interesting thing is all of these people have low vitamin Ds. And we've done a horrible disservice in teaching people what a normal vitamin D level should be. We've, I was taught, oh my gosh, once you get above 80 nanograms per milliliter of vitamin D, it's toxic and horrible. And in fact, that's not the case. The University of San Diego, University of California, San Diego, which has a huge vitamin D research unit, thinks the average American should be on 9600 international units of vitamin D, international units of vitamin D3 a day, 10,000 international units. And the recommendation is 600. And I make all of my patients have a vitamin D level above 100. Quest and Cleveland Heart Lab now say 150 is absolutely normal. And I completely agree with that. So vitamin D, the other thing that, again, I guess gets back to heart health. We're one of the few animals that don't manufacture our own vitamin C. And normally vitamin C, a fun fact, is manufactured with five enzymes from glucose, turn glucose into vitamin C. And there are five genes that code for these enzymes. We have all five genes. But the fifth gene is what's called a ghost gene. It's turned off. Us, new world monkeys and guinea pigs, the fifth gene is turned off. So what? Well, we think we turned it off because we were exposed to large amounts of vitamins C containing foods in the jungle. And so glucose is really good as a fuel for among other things storing fat. So it would be silly if you had plenty of vitamin C to waste glucose in making vitamin C. So we think that's why it happened. Well, vitamin C is essential to repair breaks in collagen and putting on my heart surgeon hat. When blood vessels flex, collagen is the rebar in our blood vessels, and that collagen gets exposed. And if you have vitamin C, you will re-nit that collagen back. My friend, Bill Sardy, who's now passed from COVID a few years ago, showed that you could breed rats with the same genetic defect as humans where they do not manufacture vitamin C, and they will live half as long as a normal rat. If you put vitamin C in their water so that they're drinking their vitamin C, they will live a normal rat's life as long as vitamin C is in their water. And he did some fun calculations that would predict that if we had a continuous source of vitamin C, we would live about 252 years on average. Wow. Wow. So time-release vitamin C, I think, is another really neglected, essential nutrient. And luckily, time-release vitamin C is cheap. It's easy to afford. And I have all my patients take 1,000 milligrams of time-release vitamin C once or twice a day. If that's really inconvenient, get yourself some chewable vitamin C tablets and just chew it four times a day. So that's two things that are really essential. Well, I love it because these are not expensive, and they're so accessible for every American, every human being. It's not a difficult thing. And it reminds me back my history. I had breast cancer at 25 Crohn's and celiac at 26. And guess what? I had a very severe genetic impairment of EDR, which is the vitamin D receptor. And I look back as I hear you talk. I know multiple things that contributed to that, but I am sure one of them was my severe deficiency of vitamin D going into that. And then, of course, chemotherapy caused the leaky gut, which caused my predisposition towards Crohn's to become activated. Now I'm free 20 years from Crohn's. I don't have it anymore. But I'm really, as you talk, I'm very much aware of the fact of how much vitamin D had an effect on my own health because I was probably severely deficient, not knowing I had that VDR gene. Yeah. I mean, in my practice, in Southern California, 80% of people who walk through the door are vitamin D deficient. And it's like everybody goes, that's impossible. It's funny all the time. And the problem is, of course, we've been convinced that we got to cover up with sunscreen and we got to protect ourselves with long clothing. And the exact opposite is true. But quite frankly, you really can't get enough vitamin C just by being out in the sun unless you're like Joseph Mercola walking in a speedo for- Right. In the coldest sun. So good. And like I said, I love the practicality of this DNC, so simple for people to get. You talk in your book, which we're going to talk at the end, where people can get your new book gut check, but about cultures and other cultures that sometimes they do a better job of Americans at getting the micro nutrients and diversity. What are some of the things that you've seen in other cultures or continents that are really key to maintaining how healthy gut that maybe we don't do well or that we're just starting to do? Well, one of the things that is fascinating to me, first of all, it sounds trite, but most of these cultures eat food whole. And everybody says you're supposed to eat a whole food diet, but we forget that the word should be actually we should eat foods whole. And these people eat a lot of tubers, quite frankly. The other thing that's striking is that almost all of these cultures eat fermented foods. And things as simple as yogurts, things as simple as cheeses. We forget that cheeses are fermented foods. And I spent a whole chapter debunking the blue zones. They I think should be called white zones. And I'm the only nutritionist who spent most of my career living in the only blue zone in the United States. So you can know a little bit about what I talked about. I have a funny story in the book when I was recruited to Loma Linda, and I'm not an adventist, but I was recruited and I met with the dietitians. And the diet was 50% fat, was mostly cheeses and yogurts and eggs. And I'm going, what the heck, you're killing my patients. You know, I'm a heart surgeon and you're killing them. And they said, look, Sonny, you know, we're some of the, yes, Sonny, we're some of the longest living people in the world. Why don't you just shut up and pay attention? And the other thing that struck me years later is everybody says, wow, you know, they all this plant protein and they eat a lot of nuts. We have nut everything at Loma Linda. But their main plant protein is texturized vegetable protein, TVP. What's fascinating is it's defatted soy that is extruded under high temperature and high pressure. So that the really nasty compounds in soy, lectins, are destroyed. And nobody wants to point out that, boy, the adventists look a lot smarter than you guys think. They're not sitting around eating tofu. They're actually decontaminating their lectin-rich food by pressure cooking. I didn't know that. That makes so much sense. Speaking of food, what is the optimal dietary or diet for the gut? What are some of the principles that you would recommend? Wow. Well, one of the things that I think made a real impression on me is the Sonnenberg team, the husband and wife team from Stanford. Everybody knows that prebiotic fiber is really important for our gut microbiome. It's what the gut microbiome eats. And that prebiotic fiber should be actually soluble fiber, not insoluble fiber, number one. Insoluble fiber. Things like, for instance, one of the best sources is Jerusalem artichokes, sometimes sun chokes, artichoke hearts, the cruciferous vegetables, which are great in themselves, but the vegetables like chicory-based. One of the easiest things to find on almost all grocery stores now is radicchio, that what people call Italian red lettuce. I'm shocked when I'm, excuse me, in Italy or France that every salad I think I have ever been given has chicory in it, whether it's radicchio, whether it's Belgian endive, whether it's frisee, whether it's chicory, every salad. And you start going, what the heck? Why are these guys eating this stuff? Well, it's a great source of prebiotic fiber. But getting back to the Sonnebergs, they took volunteers and they gave them a ton of prebiotic fiber, primarily in the form of inulin, which is in chicory. And they looked at their gut microbiome diversity and they looked at their inflammatory markers and they didn't see any change. You go, well, that's weird. So they took an additional group of volunteers, gave them the same prebiotic fiber, but this time they gave them fermented foods, primarily in the form of key fears, vinegars, yogurts. And it was only with the addition of these fermented foods that they then saw with the prebiotic fiber, the gut diversity improve and the inflammatory markers go down. And so I almost hate the expression, but it really does take a village to get what we need. So most people think of fermented foods as a great source of probiotics, friendly bacteria. They're not. They are a great source of post biotics, which are the products of bacterial fermentation. And there also, as I talk about in the chapter, dead men tell no tales, but dead bacteria do. And it turns out that dead bacteria are this amazing communication system to our living bacteria about what's there and what they should do. And it's just shocking to see what happens. So yeah, eat fermented foods. All of these cultures eat fermented foods. It's easy to do. I have my wife and I have probably 10 different vinegars that we alternate. Get yourself some goat yogurt or sheep yogurt, not the flavored or coconut yogurt. And have yourself some traditional fermented cheeses, believe it or not. Parmesan cheese, pecorino is great for you. Exactly. This is so great. And I love that you mentioned a couple of things as post biotics. And my work on a little bit of cardiovascular was that short chain fatty acids, butyrate production, those post biotics that are so core to anti-inflammatory. And now we can actually measure those in patient's stool or in some of the testing. But I see frequently that butyrate acid is very, very low. And that's one of the most powerful anti-inflammatories. And it comes from butter and cheese and also post biotics. The other thing you mentioned I thought was so profound and important for patients and people to hear today is that dead bacteria can talk to us. Because we thought for years, in fact, as I've been teaching you about diversity and acromancia, which is one of the keystone strains, of course, that tells if we have diversity or not. So if you lack acromancia totally, you're going to have less mucosal barrier, less diversity in general. And for years, you couldn't culture this in a row because it's very hard to culture and give. Now there is a company out there that has acromancia. It's dead. It is completely pasteurized. It's a dead probiotic, but their evidence is showing that that dead probiotic, as you mentioned, has a powerful anti-inflammatory effect on the body even though it's dead. So all this controversy years ago of do we take our probiotics with food without food, does the H2O kill them? Maybe it doesn't matter, right? Because the dead probiotic is still going to have that signal to the immune system. Yeah. I use the example. We have some rescue dogs, and a few of them are male dogs. And of course, they like to mark things, but more importantly, they like to sniff what other people's dog's pee has. And you go, what the heck? Why are you spending, you know, stop sniffing? What's so interesting? Well, that urine contains lots of information that they get that we have no idea what they're smelling. And what we now realize is that our living bacteria can read the code on these dead bacterial cell wall, and they literally get information from it. And just because we can't read that doesn't mean that somebody, the bacteria, can't. Wow. Amazing. Now you mentioned about 80% of your practice now is autoimmune, which is just becoming an epidemic. Women four times the amount of men. What would you say for autoimmune disease? Is there a few pearls that you would could give us here that you give to your patients with autoimmunity related to the gut? Well, the good news is that, and I've published this data, within a year, 90 plus percent of people with autoimmune disease are in remission. They're off of their meds, which is pretty doggone good. The first thing to realize is that everyone with autoimmune disease has leaky gut. Period. Get over it. 100% of my patients with autoimmune disease, whether or not they're eating wheat or gluten, have antibodies to the various components of wheat. Wheat, germa, gluten, and all the different forms of gluten, non-gluten proteins, 100%. So, and I have people who've been gluten-free for 10 years who have massive antibodies still, IgG antibodies to gluten. The good news is, excuse me, this goes away. It completely resolves. And does that mean you can have it again? Maybe if you go to Europe where they don't have glyphosate? Hearing the United States, I could tell you stories that we don't have time for, but glyphosate is just a disaster for us. It's one of the big mischief makers in autoimmune disease, and it's everywhere in our food supply. But so we get people to give up grains. The only safe grains in my practice are sorghum and millet. They don't have a haul. They don't have lectins. We ask them to pressure cook their beans and their lentils. We get to, we have them throw away their peanuts and cashews. Sorry. And we ask them to peel and de-seed tomatoes and peppers because they contain lectins. And we've had a great run, and that's how people end up in my clinic. But it's all in the book to, if you've got an autoimmune disease, it is a fixable problem. I promise. And does it take some work? Sure. But the good news is we'll get you back a lot of the foods that you want. The other thing I think is striking, great number of my autoimmune patients react to all forms of dairy and both egg yolk and egg whites. The other thing that surprises a lot of people is that almonds, even almond flour, even blanched almonds are problematic for a number of my patients without autoimmune disease. Gosh, I agree on all fronts. And it's stuff that is so important, but not many people are talking about it to the level that you are. So thank you. Dr. Gundry, the last question for you is, personally, you've done a lot of stuff in transformation, and you talked about your journey after your patient. You saw this transformation. What do you feel like is your most important key to longevity and health for you personally? Oh, gosh, I think you hit on it early on is one of the things that's interesting in traveling around the world, looking at these long-lived populations is these super old people have a mission. They firmly believe that they are there to help their community, to help people understand what got them there. And I guess it's this discovery. We joke. I've written a lot of books, and my editor always wants an outline before I start writing, and I refuse to give her an outline. And so we can't write a book without an outline. And I said, well, if I give you an outline, but guess what? Everything's going to change by the end of the book. Just write something down and humor me, because I'm not going to prove you doing this without an outline. And of course, every time I write a book, I go down rabbit holes of discovery, and I don't write a new book unless I've got something important to tell people. And I still see patients six days a week in my mid-70s. And so the reason I do this is you get to see, I get to see miracles nearly every day. And so that's I love that so much. I'm just in the midst of reading a book by Gladys McCary, which was, I think she lived to be 106. She was a medical doctor. She talks about the life well lived. And the first part of her book is the juice. It's the thing you're talking about. And I'm talking about what gets us up in the morning, what gives us passion and purpose and meaning in life, and how do we use that juice to transform people's lives and inspire. And clearly you've got the juice. So I love that. I loved how she said it, because at 106, she's like, you got to have the juice. Yeah, that's very true. That's very true. Well, thank you for your amazing work in the world. Gut Check is coming out January 6th. So whether you hear this right before or right after that, you can get your own. January 9th. Tuesday. January 9th. Yeah, always Tuesdays. Harper, it's one of the Harper subsidiaries. And January 9th, you can get it. Where can people find you? Where can they get the book? Well, they can get the book wherever books are sold. Please go to your local bookseller. They really suffer during COVID, as we all know, and they need our help. But Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, the usual spots. DrGundry.com. GundryMD.com is my supplement of food company. The Dr. Gundry podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, and my YouTube channels. And if I don't pop up on whatever you're viewing every morning on your cell phone, I've done something wrong, I guess. Oh, I love it. I love it. We'll go follow Dr. Gundry, find his resources, check out his website, and please get the book. This is going to be a game changer for all of you that are suffering from auto immunity, or really any chronic medical condition. Dr. Gundry, thank you for taking your juice and making such a difference in the world.