How Gut Bacteria Cause Brain Fog, Anxiety & Early Alzheimer’s
with Dr. Steven Gundry
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metals, chemicals, and health issues caused by different toxins. We talk about anti-aging and bioenergetics, one of my favorite topics and more advanced topics on health that you will not hear on other podcasts. And today on the show, we have Dr. Steven Gundry. I’m a big fan of this. He’s gonna be talking to us about the gut-brain paradox, how to heal the gut, things that damage the gut, and a lot of really interesting new information you probably haven’t heard before. I’m well-versed in this topic, and Dr. Gundry talked about a lot of things I’d never heard about before. Some of the key takeaways on this show are: we’re gonna be talking about how the gut microbiome is intricately linked to brain health and leaky brain, mood and neurological disorders, and different forms of dementia like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
We’ll talk about how an imbalanced microbiome and leaky gut are at the heart of brain-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, anxiety and depression, addiction, and eating disorders. When you have an imbalanced microbiome, you have bad bacteria that literally hijack messages like neurotransmitters being sent to the brain. We talk about bacteria in the brain, how Alzheimer’s patients have five to 10 times more bacteria in their brains than healthy individuals. We discuss how patients with eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia, tend to have altered dopamine activities stemming from the gut and that patients suffering from anorexia are rewarded by microbiomes for not eating, while those with binge-eating disorders and bulimia are rewarded for binging. Their bacteria are driving that behavior.
We also talk about Dr. Gundry’s protocol that he recommends in the gut-brain paradox for healing in the gut that focuses on vitamin D, fermented foods, prebiotic fiber, and eliminating harmful lectins that are found in many plant foods. He talks about high-dose vitamin D, even 10 to 40,000 IU daily, to seal the gut, calm the immune system, and improve microbiome diversity. He talks about fermented foods like vinegars and kimchi sauerkraut to introduce beneficial bacteria. You also want to eliminate lectin-containing foods or properly prepare them to reduce lectins.
He talks about time-restricted eating and doing intermittent fasting in a six-to-eight-hour window for gut rest and repair. He talks about olive oil and how it has beneficial bacteria. We discuss factors that harm your gut, like glyphosate, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, NSAIDs like a lot of pain medicines, opioids, and overeating without periods of gut rest. So, it’s a really interesting show today.
Steven Gundry MD is the director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs, California, and the founder and director of the Center of Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs in Santa Barbara. After a distinguished surgical career as a professor and chairman of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Loma Linda University, Dr. Gundry changed his focus to curing modern diseases via dietary changes. Dr. Gundry is a four-time New York Times bestselling author. His bestselling books include The Plant Paradox, Gut Check, Unlocking the Keto Code, The Energy Paradox, The Longevity Paradox, and The Plant Paradox Cookbook Series. Dr. Gundry has written more than 300 articles published in peer-reviewed journals on using diet and supplements to eliminate heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and multiple other diseases.
He’s the host of the top-ranked nutrition podcast, The Dr. Gundry Podcast, and founder of Gundry MD, a wellness brand. They have supplements and olive oils and things like that. Dr. Gundry lives with his wife, Penny, and their dogs in Palm Springs and Montecito, California. You can learn more about his work and his supplement line at drgundry.com. Dr. Gundry, thank you so much for joining the show.
Dr. Steven Gundry
Hey, thanks for having me, Wendy.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Oh my gosh! Where do we begin? Well, I was chairman and professor of cardiothoracic surgery and pediatrics at Loma Linda University for a number of years and became a very famous heart surgeon, blah, blah, blah. My life was upended in about 1995 when I met a guy I call Big Ed, who was referred to me with inoperable coronary artery disease. He had so many plaques in his heart that you couldn’t do bypasses, you couldn’t put stents, and he had been going around the country looking for idiots like me to operate on him. He spent about six months doing this. He was 48 years old, and everybody turned him down. I am one of those people that people go to.
I looked at his angiogram from six months previous and said, “I agree with everybody else. I’m not gonna be able to help you.” And he said, “Well, guess what? I’ve been on a diet for the last six months, and I’ve lost 45 pounds.” He was 265 when I met him. Hence the name Big Ed. I’ve gone to a health food store, and I’ve been taking a lot of supplements. He literally brought in a big shopping bag full of supplements. I said, “Well, good for you for losing weight. It’s not gonna do anything here. I know what you did with your supplements. You made expensive urine,” which I believed then, and he said, “Well, why don’t we get another angiogram, cardiac catheterization.” So, I said, “Well, don’t get your hopes up.”
In six months’ time, this guy cleaned out 50% of the blockages off his heart. Gone! So, long story short, I was an undergraduate at Yale back in the dark ages, and we were able to design our own majors back then. It was like doing a master’s thesis. My thesis was that you could take a grade ape, manipulate its food supply, manipulate its environment, and prove you’d arrived at a human being. I defended my thesis and got an honors degree and gave it to my parents and went away. When he started describing his diet, I go, son of a gun. That’s my thesis. And then, let me look at your supplements. I was famous for protecting the heart for heart surgery and heart transplant by putting a bunch of chemicals into the heart veins and arteries.
Lo and behold, a lot of those quote “chemicals” he was swallowing, and it never occurred to me to swallow them. So, I started experimenting on myself. And then when I got the results I wanted on myself, I started experimenting on the patients I operated on to have them not come back and see me again because most of the time you operate on someone, five to seven years later, they’ll be back for a new bypass or it needs stents or something.
After about a year of doing this at Loma Linda operating on people and then changing their life with food and supplements and seeing results, I literally, in a stupid decision resigned my position at the height of my career and moved down the road to Palm Springs, California and set up a clinic, where I basically said, hey, I wanna tell you what to eat and not to eat. I wanna have you go to the health food store and buy some supplements and every three months I want to do blood work and let’s see how we do you wanna play and people want to play. So that is how The Plant Paradox, my monster bestseller of 2017, came about. My current book, the Gut-Brain Paradox, is the ninth in the series of what I learned. I still see patients six days a week, even on the weekends, Saturdays and Sundays. About 80% of my practice is now autoimmune disease and leaky gut. The gut microbiome manipulation is what I do.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You have the Plant Paradox and it’s a runaway bestseller. You sold more than 2.2 million copies. So, talk about your new book, the Gut-Brain Paradox. What were you trying to achieve with this book, and what’s in it?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Well, each of my books hopefully builds on something that I learned from the previous book and wanted to expand on. The Plant Paradox came back, came out in 2017, which was actually when the Human Microbiome Project finally concluded. Since that time, we’ve been able to not only figure out who’s living in our gut, the hundred trillion different organisms, but probably more importantly, we’ve learned the complex language system that exists between our gut microbiome and us and our brain. With each literally passing month, another piece of how much interaction there is between our mood, thinking processes, and addictions with the microbiome. We’ve only been able to decipher this language in the last few years. The level of complexity with how the gut microbiome interacts with our behavior, thought process, and mood is nothing short of stupefyingly complex. This book tries to make people realize that the microbiome is both a major help to you, and depending on who’s living down there, a major hindrance to you, and here’s how to sort it out.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You talk about the relationship between a lot of mood disorders, anxiety and depression and neurodegenerative disease and how they affect the brain and our neurotransmitter production. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Steven Gundry
I think one of the better examples, well first of all, we can do models of depression and anxiety in the animal models. And for years, we’ve known that we could take poop from a depressed individual and feed it to a rat. Believe it or not, mice and rats loved to eat poop. It’s the thing they do. The rat will become depressed, and we can actually measure that because we’ve transferred depression-causing bacteria. Similarly, we can take a depressed rat and feed it poop from a happy person, and the rat will become happy and we can measure that. So you go, whoa, if that happens in a rat, I wonder what happens in a person? Well, we have a huge epidemic just in depression and anxiety. And there’s of course, many reasons. Covid was good. Cell phones are another and social media. But, many people are on antidepressants that I see, and most of these are what are called SSRI, serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Serotonin is, quote, “the feelgood hormone.” And we thought that these drugs work by allowing serotonin to stay in the brain longer than normal. But if that was how they actually worked, then if I swallowed a Prozac by tomorrow, I’d be a happy person. And in fact, that isn’t how they work. It takes a month or even more to have an effect.
A few years ago, it was determined that these drugs actually change the microbiome and it changes the microbiome to a more non-depressed microbiome, and that takes a while. It doesn’t happen overnight. It can take a month or two. And so, son of a gun, the action of the drug, which had nothing to do with serotonin in the brain, the action of the drug was getting more of the serotonin producing bacteria in the gut. That’s just one example. The other example, which is unfortunate that I talked about in the book, is the Weed Killer. Glyphosate Roundup was actually patented by Monsanto as an antibiotic. It wasn’t patented as a weed killer. We now know that glyphosate kills bacteria in our gut and it particularly kills the tryptophan, serotonin, and pathway-making bacteria. All the good guys have been killed off by glyphosate. Unfortunately, Roundup is in almost every food we eat. That’s just an example of, oh my gosh, unwittingly, we’ve killed off a lot of the guys that we’re really dependent on for our mood.
Ads 14:24
For anyone listening who really wants to detox their body, go to heavymetalsquiz.com. I created a quiz for you. It only takes a couple of seconds and it’s based on some lifestyle questions. You can get your toxicity score and get a free video series that answers all of your frequently asked questions about how to detox your body. Check it out at heavymetalsquiz.com.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I talk about glyphosate a lot on the show as we talk about detoxification and toxins that cause various health issues. It’s in all the food. It’s in 7-8% of the organic food as well. It’s infiltrated Europe and Europe’s not the wheat. It is not safe anymore either. There are so many things working against our gut. There’s chlorine in the water. It’s just amazing that our gut microbiomes are surviving as well as they are. And so, let’s talk about leaky gut. We know gut dysbiosis can then lead to leaky gut and there’s many factors contributing to leaky gut. But, how is that contributing to our mood issues as well?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Well, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said 2,500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut. I’ve been spending 30 years trying to figure out how he knew that because he was right. One of the things we can measure, leaky gut, intestinal permeability, it’s not pseudoscience despite some well-meaning physicians still not believing in it. But this was worked out very well by a pediatric gastroenterologist who’s now at Harvard Alessio Fon. He showed how, in his research, gluten, which is a lectin, is capable of producing perforation of the gut wall. The gut wall is about the surface area of a tennis court, and it’s only one cell thick. We have a little bit of a design flaw. Lectins like gluten are capable of pulling these cells apart. Now, why that’s important is that 80% of all of our white blood cells, our immune system, are literally sitting on the other side of the gut because that’s where trouble can come in. And if that’s an isolated event, then the war takes care of itself.
A little local inflammation takes place. We repair the wall of the gut and wash our hands. Unfortunately, this is now a daily event for almost everybody. Our immune system literally wants to alert the rest of our body that there’s a war going on and that we should prepare for the worst. It literally alerts the immune system in our brain, the microglia and the astrocytes to prepare for war and to guard the neurons and be on war status. And so now, we’ve got a brain that’s wary of anything, and that contributes to brain fog. It contributes to anxiety and depression, literally all because of this war that’s happening in the gut.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Today, there are so many people with different food sensitivities related to leaky gut, related to gut dysbiosis and they’re thinking, oh, I just gotta eliminate all these different foods. It’s not that simple. Before we get into some solutions for your gut, I wanna talk about dementia, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s because many people are very concerned about their loved ones or ending up that way. Alzheimer’s has been growing every year, and there are tens of millions of people around the world with these devastating states of dementia. Can you talk about gut dysbiosis and leaky gut and how that can lead to different forms of dementia?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Luckily, through the work of Dr. Dale Breon, Dr. David Perminter, and me, we’re convincing most people that these diseases actually originate in the gut, not in the brain. One of the things I would like to use as an example, everybody’s aware of amyloid plaque and tau proteins and that this is the cause of Alzheimer’s or Lewy bodies in Parkinson’s. This is the cause and $20 billion in drug research on anti-amyloid compounds has ended up wasted. None of these compounds work. A lot of them make things worse. That theory that these guys are the troublemakers, actually it’s very flawed. All of us remember after 9/11, we began putting up concrete barriers in front of federal buildings, airports, anything that terrorists could potentially drive a car through. Those barriers were erected to slow down or frustrate a terrorist attack.
I like people to envision that if a terrorist attack has been occurring down in the gut and that attack continues, our immune system in our brain is alerted and they begin constructing barriers to prevent the terrorists from getting at these valuable nerve cells and the neurons. I like people when they’re told they have amyloid plaque or tau proteins, that those are just barriers that we’ve constructed by our immune system because we know the bad guys are on the way and we’re gonna try to slow them down. The other thing that’s really scary is when these bodyguards of our neurons, the microglia are activated, they begin pruning actually the Dr. Dendritic processes where one nerve talks to the other, they prune them back to and basically pull everybody back to the fort because the attack is imminent. The more we can visualize this happening, the more Hippocrates was right that this started in the gut.
The other exciting thing about Parkinson’s, and I actually start the book with them, is a woman physician who I saw a couple weeks ago, again with horrible Parkinson’s in her early sixties and runner was basically chair bound for a year. She had completely reversed her Parkinson’s off all meds, running again, and no tremor. How did she do that? Well, there are really cool studies. I was a general surgeon before I could become a heart surgeon. And in the dark ages we treated ulcer disease with a vagotomy. There’s this giant nerve that runs from the brain down to the organs, and we always thought, and were taught that that was how the brain talked to the organs. Imagine our surprise that for every one fiber from the brain down to our organs, there’s nine fibers coming from the gut up to the brain in the vagus nerve.
So, it was actually the other way around. It was the gut talking to the brain, not the other way. We would cut the vagus nerve to treat ulcer disease, and as we got better at it, we would just cut the nerve fibers that went to the stomach and leave the rest of the vagus nerve intact. Well, this was done long ago, but there’s a lot of survivors who’ve had vagotomy, vagus nerve cutting or selective vagotomy. People who’ve had their vagus nerve cut have a 50% less chance of developing Parkinson’s than people who have vagus nerve intact. And so you go son of a gun, these things were coming up the vagus nerve from the gut that were causing Parkinson’s. And interestingly, the people who had just the vagus nerve cut to the stomach, they had no difference in outcome. So you had to cut that cable
Dr. Wendy Myers
You mentioned in your book that people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia can have five to 10 times the level of bacteria in their brains versus relatively healthier people. Can you discuss that?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Yeah, we’ve always thought that the brain was a privileged organ, and in a lot of ways it absolutely is. A blood-brain barrier was designed to really keep mischief away from the brain. But lo and behold, we can now, thanks to the human microbiome project, measure bacterial presence in the brain. And lo and behold, people with Alzheimer’s have bacteria in their brain and they’re not supposed to be there. In fact, my friend Dale Bredesen makes a very strong point that oral and nasal microbiomes have a big effect on Alzheimer’s. If you think about it, it’s a straight shot to the brain, particularly from our upper teeth. It’s that close. If you’ve got anything going on in your mouth, they’ll just head right in.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, let’s talk about the specific bacteria that contribute to depression and anxiety because so many people are suffering these days from depression and anxiety. I wanna give the listeners some idea about what they can do, what they need to be look for, maybe with repopulate their gut with bacteria
Dr. Steven Gundry
There was a major battle in the late 1800s between two very famous chemists in France about bacteria and viruses and yeasts and fermentation. One of them was Louis Pasteur and the other one was Antoine Bechamp. Pasteur believed that bacteria were mischievous and that bacteria were the cause of disease. Bechamp said, no, no, no, no, there are good bacteria. There are bad bacteria. And as long as there is a balance between all of these in this ecosystem, which he called the terrain or terroir in France, that everything was fine and that it was only when one guy got out of balance that the system fell apart. Pasteur apparently was a much better public speaker. Pasteur proved that bacterial contamination of the fermentation process and wine, which was done by yeast, was the cause of wine going bad. The King of France, who was quite interested in wine production figured that was a really good thing to know.
So, Pasteur won the debate. And so, the bacterial, the germ theory of disease, which continues to this day, is thanks to Pasteur winning that argument. I’ve read every book written about both of these great men. It is said on numerous occasions that on Pasteur’s deathbed, he called out that Becamp was correct. It was the terrain. I think he came to that realization. So, getting back to your question, we can actually now look at the microbiome of experimental animals and humans, and we can see that it is actually an imbalance between the good guys and the bad guys. That gets out of balance. It’s this dysbiosis, this unbalancing of the terrain that really is responsible for a lot of this. And the good news is, and that’s why I wrote the book, we can get that balance back now. It doesn’t happen overnight. Back 25 years ago, I was pretty naive and I thought we could seal leaky gut, for instance, in a couple weeks.
It takes nine months to a year for most people to seal their leaky gut. But we see this imbalance. We can do a stool microbiome test, and we can see this imbalance of the good guys and the bad guys. It absolutely takes a while, but the book shows, okay, here’s how we do it. We see great results. I see patients six days a week, even Saturdays and Sundays, and I certainly don’t have to, but I get to see what I would’ve considered miracles 30 years ago, and hopefully I see them on a daily basis, and that’s why I keep seeing patients.
Ads 28:31
If you’re taking protein powder, you need to stop and listen to this. The Clean Label Project recently tested 160 of the top selling protein powders in the US. They tested 83% of the market, which is 70 different brands and 40% of the products tested exceeded Prop 65 safety thresholds for lead. 21% had more than two times the Prop 65 safety thresholds for other heavy metals and toxins. 65% of chocolate protein powders tested over the Prop 65 safety thresholds, and 77% of plant-based protein powders tested above these thresholds as well. That’s definitely not what you want from products that are supposed to support your health particularly. It’s something that you’re consuming daily.
What the study found was that Puori PW1 protein powder was awarded the number one cleanest protein powder out of 130 different brands. The choice is clear. That’s why I love Puori’s PW1 Wave protein powder. Every batch is third-party tested against 200 plus contaminants. They don’t sell any product unless it passes these tests, and they make all of their third-party tests available via a QR code. You can scan this QR code and see exactly what is in this product and what this batch tested for. No other brand is doing that because they won’t pass the test. Each serving gives you 21 grams of minimally-processed, clean, high quality whey protein powder from pasture-raised cows milk. So, no hormones, no GMOs, no pesticides, nothing to worry about. I personally love the bourbon vanilla flavor. You get real vanilla seeds from bourbon, vanilla from Madagascar, which is known as the best vanilla in the world. It’s high quality. It tastes amazing. Even my daughter mentioned how she loves the vanilla flavor in it.
I worked with Puori on an amazing deal for you. You can get 20% off, or if you choose the already discounted subscription, you get almost a third off the price. But you’re only gonna get this deal if you visit my exclusive link at puori.com/wendy and use coupon code Wendy. That’s P-u-o-r-i.com/w-e-n-d-y, and just use my code, Wendy, to get 20% off this amazing deal of the highest quality whey protein powder that’s been tested for 200 plus contaminants. You can bet this for quality. This is my number one recommendation for protein powder because the results are in. Puori is the number one cleanest testing protein powder on the market.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s amazing. There are some people on the weekends also, but it seems like anyone with chronic health issues or anyone that’s looking to improve their health or take things to the next level, you’ve gotta start with your gut. I think sleep also helps with troubleshooting that, which is a whole podcast series, but working on your gut is so important and foundational. What are some tips that you would give people to improve their gut health?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Well, the first recommendation is to get your vitamin D levels much higher than everybody tells you to do. About 80% of my practice is autoimmune patients, and every one of them has a leaky gut. I’ve never met an autoimmune patient who doesn’t have a leaky gut. I’ve never met a depressed individual who doesn’t have a leaky gut. Vitamin D is essential to activate stem cells in the wall of our gut to seal leaks. 80% of my patients with autoimmune diseases have vitamin D deficiencies. The University of California San Diego, big research unit for vitamin D thinks the average American should be taking 10,000 international units of vitamin D three a day. That’s for an average American. I have some patients with really leaky gut that I’ll use 40,000 international units of vitamin D three a day with vitamin K2 initially until we begin sealing their gut.
The University of California San Diego has never seen vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day. Neither have I. So, that’s number one. We also know that vitamin D improves gut microbiome diversity and that the higher your vitamin D level, the more diverse your microbiome is. The third thing that’s interesting about vitamin D, again, our white blood cells get activated. They get bothered. They get war status when we have a leaky gut. Vitamin D, particularly at high levels, tells your immune system, hey, calm down. Don’t get your finger off the trigger. Don’t have the Kevlar vest, don’t have the AK 47 with your finger on the trigger. Relax, calm down. And we see this all the time.
For instance, there’s very good research in rheumatoid arthritis that the white blood cells of people with rheumatoid arthritis don’t respond well to the normal inputs of Vitamin D. A lot of my folks, you literally have to hit them over the head with a sledgehammer of vitamin D. So, number one, vitamin D. Number two, the work from the husband and wife team at Stanford, the microbiologists, Sonenberg, I think has been very useful. They’re a bit of doomsayers of the microbiome. They think most of us have a desert wasteland instead of a tropical rainforest in our gut. And they’re right. They’re doomsayers because they don’t think we’ll ever get back our tropical rainforest. I would beg to differ, but they’re right. It’s very challenging
They took some individuals and so we know that probiotics are friendly bacteria. Probiotics need prebiotic fiber to eat to make postbiotics, which is part of the communication system between the gut nose. So, they gave individuals a wonderful prebiotic called inulin. Inulin is in the chicory family of vegetables. It’s in asparagus. It’s in artichoke arts. It’s in Jerusalem artichokes. They gave them a lot of inulin. They looked at the gut microbiome diversity, and they looked at markers of inflammation. Despite all that inulin, their gut diversity didn’t change and their inflammation markers didn’t change. And they go, well, son of a gun, we’re giving them what they want. Maybe we’re missing another factor. So, the second time around, they gave people fermented foods. In this case it was yogurts, kefirs and the inlet.
This time around with these fermented foods, which are actually postbiotics, their gut microbiome diversity increased and their inflammation markers went down. I’ve been writing about this for the last few books. You gotta understand that it’s one thing to give bacteria what they need, but we now know there’s an assembly line of bacteria that bacteria one needs to eat something and poop out something that bacteria two needs. And bacteria two needs to poop out something that bacteria three needs. So, there’s this assembly line, and if you’re missing one guy or if you’re missing one of the ingredients, you’re not gonna get anywhere. And so fermented foods, which most traditional cultures have used fermentation to either break down plant compounds like lectins and make them less harmful or to preserve foods
These products are really critical to prebiotic fiber as well. And as all of us know, none of us in the standard American diet now gets any prebiotic fiber. All of our processed foods and ultra processed foods, they’ve all been stripped away. So, that’s number two. Number three is parallel to that. I conceal your leaky gut, but if you keep swallowing razor blades and razor blades or these plant compounds like lectins, oxalates, phytates, you’ll just tear it right back open. So, part of this is either getting these foods outta your diet, like most of the grains, like beans that have not been pressure cooked or properly fermented, the nightshade family, tomatoes, white potatoes, eggplant, and peppers that haven’t been properly treated by peeling or deeding or pressure cooking. That’s part three. It’s a three-pronged attack and we show people how to do it and not hate me forever.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I worry about people that are vegan, that are only eating plant foods and they’re not eating enough proteins are gonna heal their gut and fats and things like that. It just seems like it’s a recipe for disaster.
Dr. Steven Gundry
Well, I have a sizable vegan and vegetarian population because of my experience at Loma Linda. Loma Linda is an Adventist institution, and it’s a vegan cafeteria. Some of the sickest people I see initially are vegans and some of the leakiest gut. I see. But you can be a successful vegan. You have to get long chain Omega-3 fats into your diet, and we can do that now with algae-based fish oil products. We have to detoxify all these plant compounds. It can be done, but it is challenging.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, it’s interesting that you have that stance, but you have to have a lot of knowledge of nutrition and how to properly prepare foods and things like that. I think a lot of vegans probably are not doing that. That’s where your books come in and help educate people about that. As far as fermented foods, what kind of fermented foods do you like and recommend?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Well, one of the easiest things for people to add, we come from a culture where we really don’t like sour and bitter foods. It’s not part of our culture. We’re not introduced to it as infants. Most of the cultures that do very well were introduced to fermented foods from day one. So, if you’ll notice, most of our yogurts and most of our kombucha have so much added sugar or fake sweeteners that it’s a joke, but it’s to cover up this tartness that Americans just hate. There are low sugar kombuchas. There are water kefirs that are easy to drink that are low in sugar, but the easiest one for most people to introduce is vinegars. Vinegars are fermented foods, and there’s a ton of different vinegars. Some people know that I’m actually the father of the happy cola, the fake Coke, which is balsamic vinegar dissolved in sparkling water.
I did that so many years ago, and we call it a happy cola or a fake Coke. That’s an easy way to get vinegar into you. You want to use apple cider vinegar? Yes. Apple cider vinegar works because it is a short chain fatty acid called acetic acid. So vinegars, put them on your salads, put them in your water.
It’s an easy way to do it. Take kimchi sauerkrauts. The exciting news that I’ve written about before is you don’t have to have these things raw. Pasteurized sauerkraut or canned sauerkraut works every bit as well as raw or cooked. And you can cook these foods and you won’t destroy the benefit. So, all sorts of ways to get fermentation into your life. And believe it or not, wine is a fermented food.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, that’s good news. You talk a lot about olive oil as well. Can you discuss the benefits of that?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Yeah, it’s actually exciting. Recently, it’s discovered that olives, like all leaves, all plants have their own microbiome and olives have a very distinctive microbiome. They have a bacteria called L ptosis and there won’t be a test. When you ferment all those, they actually keep that bug. But what’s interesting is that olive oil has that bug as well. Now, here’s what’s really exciting. L ptosis actually fosters the growth of one of the keystone species in her gut called akkermansia. And so the more el ptosis you have, the more akkermansia you have, and the more akkermansia you have, the more short chain fatty acids you have, the more mucus that you have lining your gut barrier. And so it’s a win-win.
We’ve also learned that polyphenols are an amazing prebiotic for bacteria. Olive oil’s kind of a one-two punch. You got a really friendly bacteria, you got a lot of polyphenols, which they want to eat, and they’ll help grow akkermansia. I think it explains why in many of the Mediterranean cultures, olive oil in large amounts is part of their culture.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, absolutely. We see that people in Sardinia and Sicily are living well over a hundred years old and just bathing themselves in olive oil every day. You have your own olive oil line as well, correct?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Gundry MD, we make our high polyphenol olive oil. It actually has 30 times more polyphenols that have been measured compared to any other olive oil. It comes from a unique small farm in Morocco, in the desert where the young man who decided this was, it’s a great story. He’s a wine nut and his family owns 1, 200,000 olive trees, fourth generation olive oil makers. And so he decided that great wine comes from a very hard terroir terrain where it’s in rocks, it’s underwater, it’s in bad conditions, and plants make polyphenols under these conditions to protect their grapes. He said, gee, I wonder if the same thing would happen with olives. So, he got his dad to let him use a really rocky place, planted the olive trees like vines very close together under watered them and the heat of the Moroccan desert. And lo and behold, it produced huge amounts of polyphenols in the olives, and that’s how it was discovered.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s so interesting. I hadn’t thought of olive oil in Morocco. Let’s talk about Al. So, Akkermansia is very, very popular. There are lots of products out there you can supplement with. Do you recommend supplementing with Akkermansia or other probiotics versus the fermented foods? It’s definitely a more expensive option than just eating fermented foods.
Dr. Steven Gundry
I’m a big fan of pendulum life. I’ve had them on my podcast several times. If you just swallow Akkermansia, we’ve seen many, many patients that if they don’t give Akkermansia the precursors of what it needs to eat, you can swallow all the Akkermansia and it won’t colonize your gut.
On the other hand, there are other people who if they do it right and the book shows how to do it, Akkermansia can be very useful as a part of the program. Interestingly enough, as we do more and more stool gut testing, we find that a great number of people are limited with a number of other species that are critical to all this. I make a product, a shameless plug, 24-strain probiotic. This product was designed based on who I saw was missing in these gut tests. Now, I just tell my patients here, just take one of these a day and we’re covered for what we need.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. Can you go over the protocol a little bit more that you lay out in the books? You talked about fermented foods. You talked about a couple other things. Is there anything else in the book that you recommend?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Well, the other thing that we’ve found is that our ancestors, number one, didn’t crawl out of our cave and say, what’s for breakfast? There was no storage system for food. Even hunter gatherers usually don’t eat until 10, 11 o’clock in the morning when they find something to eat. That’s been lost in our culture. The average American eats about 16 hours a day, literally from the second we wake up till right before we go to bed. And some people are snacking in the middle of the night so that our gut, just like our brain, has to have a period of rest. You have to have a period of repair, and our eating habits don’t allow for that repair to happen. So, part of my program, which we’ve been using for over 25 years, is time-restricted eating, gradually decreasing the amount of time we spend eating. The magic number is probably six to eight hours of an eating window. But most people who try to jump into that head first fail miserably. So in the book, we step you down one hour at a time.
For instance, if you’re used to eating breakfast at eight o’clock, we ask you on week one to wait till nine o’clock to eat breakfast and then take the weekend off. The next week we ask you to wait till 10 o’clock to eat breakfast and take the weekend off. And so, we gradually work our way to a shorter and shorter eating window. If people have a problem, we’ll just hold there for a week or try a half hour later and we hold hands with everybody and show tricks to get through the feeling of deprivation and it goes away. So, getting gut rest is just as important as getting brain rest.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think so many people are just mindlessly programmed. They have to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I find it amazing how little food I can get by on,
Dr. Steven Gundry
We’re extremely well designed. We can go an extra long time without food.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I like to keep my metabolism flexible and keep my body guessing. I have one day I don’t eat at all and the next day is 8,000 calories, and just keep it guessing,
Dr. Steven Gundry
Right?
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, let’s talk about some things that you should not do that’s harming your gut. There’s a very long list of things that people do on a daily basis. They don’t think about it or they don’t realize that their habits are harming their gut. Can you talk about some of those?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Well, one of the problems I think we’ve addressed is there’s unfortunately glyphosate in so much of the food we eat, even our organic products. It’s one of the things that probably wasn’t noticed. For instance, with the Atkins diet or the South Beach Diet where carbohydrates were removed and a high fat or a high protein diet was instituted, people lost weight and they felt better. And then with all these diets, when carbohydrates were reintroduced, usually people started to gain weight and everything fell apart and carbohydrates became the demon. But what we didn’t realize was that these carbohydrates, number one, were mostly lectin-containing foods. What also we really didn’t realize is that most of these carbohydrates contain glyphosate. So, it was a one two punch of really hurting your gut health and your microbiome. Eliminating these guys, at least temporarily, by detoxifying them with tricks like fermentation or pressure cooking makes a big difference for a lot of people.
The other thing, we’re lush with endocrine disruptors. It’s in our sunscreen. It’s in most of our cookware. They’re in our cosmetics. They’re in our plastic wraps on our boneless skinless chicken breast. But as we’ve written before, they’re actually really scary studies that show that women who eat a lot of chicken during their pregnancy give birth to boys who have smaller penises than normal. It’s because of the phthalates in the plastic wrap and the chicken, sorry about that. That’s what happens. So, getting rid of those is essential. The other thing that people should realize is that our painkillers to themselves, like the NSAIDs, like Aleve, ibuprofen, and Advil cause a leaky gut and they cause intestinal dysbiosis. The more of these we take, the more pain we have and the more pain we have, the more of these we take. It just becomes an unending vicious cycle. A lot of the book goes into a lot of our requirement for pain relievers. Even narcotic pain relievers are driven by a leaky gut and driven by a narcotic seeking microbiome, which is really scary but interesting.
Ads 53:15
I wanna take a minute to give a shout out to one of our sponsors, True Energy Skincare. They have an amazing serum that I am cuckoo about. I’ve been using their facial serum here for well over a year for a reason. This is just bar none my favorite product. It’s very, very light. It’s just a serum you’ll put on under your moisturizer. And the reason I use it is because it’s a frequency-based skincare. They have frequencies imprinted on this serum that improve collagen, improve elastin. Collagen is that support matrix in your skin that makes it look firm and juicy and we lose that as we age. That accelerates rapidly after we hit menopause. You lose 30% of your collagen within two years after menopause. I’m using everything I can get to improve collagen. This has over 2000 frequencies imprinted on it for skin nutrition, to help the appearance of your skin, the fine lines, the age spots, and it will smooth out the texture of your skin as well.
This has been my secret weapon that I’ve been using to improve my skin, look and feel healthy, like I said, for well over a year. And so, I’m not promoting this because they’re a podcast sponsor. I’m promoting this because this is one of my secret weapons. I love this product and I use it every single night under my moisturizer. This has no toxic ingredients in it whatsoever. It has lots of nutritive ingredients as well. It’s got fruit, enzyme extracts. It’s got oat kernel extract. It’s got oat beta glucans. It’s got beach bud extract and it’s got algae and chlorella in it as well. It has lots of great nutrition in this as well as the frequency enhancing aspects of it. Any old product can moisturize your skin. That doesn’t impress me, but the results you get from this are bar none, and that is why I highly recommend it. They have a very good offer for my listeners. Go to trytrueenergy.com/wendy. That’s T-R-Y-T-R-U-E-N-E-R-G-Y.com/wendy and get a very special deal for my listeners.
Dr. Wendy Myers
As we know, there’s a large part of our society or a big portion of our society that deals with addiction. You even talked in your book about how our gut microbiome can even drive addiction. I found that so fascinating. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Steven Gundry
This has been well worked out, not only in animal models, but human experiments, if you will. We know that there’s an alcohol seeking microbiome, and we know that people who enter alcohol rehab programs, first of all, rehab programs, the recidivism rate of addiction is about 90%. Only about 10% achieve long term addiction free survival. But in alcohol, there’s some really good data that people who have the most dysbiotic alcohol-seeking microbiome are the ones who fail the most and the people who have less of that alcohol seeking microbiome are the ones who succeed more often. If we knew that from the start, we could put our emphasis, not that 12 step programs aren’t useful, but we could put our emphasis in a completely different area, changing the gut rather than mental thinking.
It’s the same way with opioids. We now know there is an opioid seeking microbiome that literally likes narcotics. They grow with narcotics and they eat the narcotics. They produce leaky gut to cause pain, and the pain makes their person seek out more narcotics to dull the pain. And the more pain they get, the more they seek out more, and the more of that substance these bugs eat. And what’s fascinating is that you can take an animal model of that and give them antibiotics to wipe out their entire microbiome, including these bugs, and then give them little tiny bits of narcotics and it has the full effect. It’s like son of, again, there’s nobody taking that anymore. But then you reintroduce that microbiome into these animals and it takes a bucket of heroin to have the same effect. It’s because they’re consuming all this stuff. Imagine if we did rehab programs where we’ve spent our time fixing the microbiome and rebalancing this terrain so we get the good guys who will always handle the bad guys. If you’ve got enough of these guys, it’s when the bad guys take over that all the problems start. I think it’s really an exciting time.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s fascinating. I hadn’t heard that before, but it makes perfect sense.
Dr. Steven Gundry
It’s brand new, hot off the press.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I found this really interesting. You touched on your book, how even eating disorders can be the result of dysbiosis in the gut, like anorexia and bulimia. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Steven Gundry
It’s absolutely true and we know there is an eating disorder microbiome. These bugs actually, I believe, and others believe, take over your brain and cause you to eat this way. I profile a young lady in my practice who was institutionalized on a feeding tube and we convinced them to let us put probiotics and prebiotics into her feeding tube, which is not done. Literally within weeks, her behavior changed completely and we were able to remove the feeding tube. She’s back home with her family. Most of these people are incredibly intelligent and they are told, your mother beat you or your father hated you. No, she had a leaky gut and we could see her microbiome that there were the wrong guys and we were able to rebalance it and they left her alone.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, it is really fascinating. Why don’t you tell the listeners where they can get your book, The Gut Brain Paradox, and what your website is as well?
Dr. Steven Gundry
Wherever you get your books, it’s on pre-order now. It’s going to be released on April 15th. It’s released on tax day. So, get your refund and buy the book at Barnes and Noble. Please frequent your local bookseller. COVID really did them in, as we all know, and they still need your help. I’ve had numerous bestsellers, so they’re usually easy to pre-order at local booksellers. My food and supplement company is gundrymd.com. My other website is drgundry.com. There’s the Dr. Gundry Podcast, my YouTube channels, my Instagram, and Facebook. Hopefully, I pop up as you’re surfing the web every day, waving.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Dr. Gundry, thank you so much for coming on the show. I was really looking forward to you coming on. I loved your book, The Plant Paradox. It is so eye-opening. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the plant foods that they’re eating, better choices to make, lectins, and all those things related to what we talked about today and healing your gut. So, thanks for coming on the show.
Dr. Steven Gundry
Thanks, Wendy. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thank you so much for tuning into the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m just so privileged and just so honored every week that you tune into the show. I love having experts like Dr. Gundry and so many other experts every week. My goal with this is just like when I was on my own health journey, really desperately searching for answers, trying to figure out this puzzle that is our health. I really wanna give you like those little tips, those little tricks, those little distinctions that you can make to dramatically improve your own health. I know that with every show you listen to, you’re learning one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to put those pieces of the puzzle together to improve your health. So, I’m really honored you took the time to tune in to this show, and I will see you guys next week.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
