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Dr. Steven Gundry - Renowned Heart Surgeon | How Hidden Gut Triggers Are Sabotaging Your Health · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I was obese. I weighed 228 pounds. I had high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, and I was told
• 0:06
  that was normal because my father had the same things. I put myself on my thesis. I started
• 0:12
  taking a bunch of supplements, every thing in my conditions reverse. I said, that's really cool.
• 0:18
  So that was my motivation. Dr. Stephen Gundry is a former world-renowned heart surgeon
• 0:22
  turned nutrition pioneer. After performing countless heart surgeries and inventing breakthrough
• 0:27
  surgical devices, he shifted his focus to the role of nutrition in reversing disease.
• 0:31
  I looked in the mirror one Friday and said, I should teach them how to eat and never
• 0:36
  have to operate on them in the first place. Open up a little clinic. That was a really bad
• 0:41
  career decision at the time. It was ruined my life but saved my life. Founder of the Center for
• 0:47
  Restorative Medicine, an author of bestsellers like the Plant Paradox, Dr. Gundry now leads a movement
• 0:52
  challenging conventional health wisdom. His podcast and research continue to redefine wellness
• 0:57
  and longevity. This episode explores innovation, resilience, and transforming expertise into global
• 1:03
  impact. All inflammation comes from the gut. Better way of saying is death begins in the gut.
• 1:08
  The good news is thankfully all disease can be reversed from the gut. The life's too short.
• 1:13
  Do what you love as long as you're doing what you love. There's nothing better to do.
• 1:19
  Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the
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• 5:12
  Dr. Gundry, so you were a very distinguished heart surgeon. You led groundbreaking cardiac
• 5:18
  research for decades. What made you completely pivot to studying the gut-brain connection?
• 5:23
  So, yeah, I rose to become professor and chairman of Cardi Thrasic surgery at Loma Linden
• 5:30
  University here in Southern California and pioneered with my partner, Leonard Bailey,
• 5:36
  who's now deceased in pediatric heart transplantation, pioneered so artificial heart,
• 5:44
  minimally invasive heart surgery, blah, blah, blah. And was among other things very famous
• 5:49
  for operating on people who nobody else wanted to. And 30 years ago, yeah.
• 5:59
  A gentleman, 48-year-old gentleman from Miami, Florida, who I called Big Ed in all my books,
• 6:06
  was sent to me with an operable coronary artery disease. So what that means is all of his blood
• 6:12
  vessels were so clogged up, you couldn't put stents in them, you couldn't do a bypass,
• 6:17
  because there wasn't any place to land. And this guy would, like many other people with this,
• 6:25
  would go around the country to various centers where there were idiots like me who would take
• 6:31
  on these difficult cases. And you know, he went to Columbia, New York City, went to the Mayo clinic,
• 6:38
  he went to Stanford, he went to Texas Heart Institute, and everybody turned him down.
• 6:45
  And he spent about six months doing this and then wound up in my office, which was kind of part
• 6:51
  of the circuit. And I looked at his Instagram, the movie of his art from Miami of six months earlier,
• 6:59
  and said, you know, I got to agree with everybody else. I can't help you. There's nothing here to work
• 7:07
  with. And he says, yeah, that's what everybody says. But let me tell you what I've been doing.
• 7:11
  He says, I've been on a diet for this six months and I've lost 45 pounds. Now this was a guy who
• 7:17
  was 265 pounds when I met hence the name Big Ed. So he had actually been over 300 pounds.
• 7:26
  And he said, I went to a health food store and I've been taking a lot of supplements. And he
• 7:30
  literally brought in this giant shopping bag full of supplements. And he says, you know, maybe I
• 7:37
  did something in here. And I've stroked my professor beard and going, you know, good for you,
• 7:44
  for, you know, losing weight, but that's not going to do anything. And I know what you did with all
• 7:49
  those supplements, you made expensive urine, which I firmly believe back then. And he says, look,
• 7:55
  I've come all this way. Well, what would it hurt to get another cardiac catheterization,
• 8:01
  another angiogram of my heart? Don't get your hopes up. But yeah, okay. So we do an angiogram
• 8:08
  on him the next day. And this guy in six months time is cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his heart.
• 8:17
  God. Now, never seen anything like that in my life. Now, if I knew what I knew now, I would have
• 8:26
  said, Hey, that's great. Let's keep going. Good for you, goodbye. But I said, Hey, now there's
• 8:32
  actually places to land bypasses. So good news. We're going to do a five vessel bypass on you. Yeah.
• 8:40
  And I did. So, but the researcher in me, after we were done, says, Hey, tell me about this diet.
• 8:52
  And let me look at those supplements. So I went to Yale as an undergraduate and back in the
• 9:00
  dark ages, we could design our own major. And I had a major. It was basically a master's thesis.
• 9:08
  She had to do a thesis and defend it. My major was basically you could take a great
• 9:15
  ape, manipulate its food supply, manipulate its environment, prove you to arrive at a human being.
• 9:21
  And that was my thesis. And I defended it and got an honors. And I gave it to my parents and
• 9:28
  went off to become a famous heart searcher. So as big as talking about what he's eating, I'm going
• 9:34
  to, holy cow, you know, that's, that's my thesis from Yale. You're eating exactly what ancient men
• 9:42
  did. And so I said, let me look at those supplements. And like I said, I was actually very famous for
• 9:52
  protecting the heart during heart transplant and during heart surgery. And I'd put a bunch of
• 9:59
  funny chemicals down the veins and arteries of the heart to protect cells from dying.
• 10:07
  And he was swallowing a number of the things I was using down the veins and arteries.
• 10:15
  If the heart ever occurred to be to swallow the dumb things. So I, the reason is so
• 10:21
  point it was, even though I was a famous heart surgeon, I was obese. I weighed 228 pounds. I was
• 10:29
  running 30 miles a week going the gym one hour a day. I had high blood pressure, pre-diabetes,
• 10:35
  arthritis so bad in my knees. I wore burses to run. I had migraine headaches. I don't recommend
• 10:42
  doing baby heart transplant with migraine. And I was at high cholesterol and I was told that
• 10:49
  was normal because my father had the same things. And so any of my, I called my folks. I'd still
• 10:57
  got my thesis and they said, yep. And I said, send it up. I put myself on my thesis and lost 50
• 11:05
  pounds my first year. I started taking a bunch of supplements, everything in my conditions reversed.
• 11:12
  I said, that's really cool. So then I, every one of my patients that I operated on, I gave them a
• 11:19
  list of, okay, here's foods. I want you to eat, here's food. I don't want you to go to Costco or
• 11:24
  Trader Joe's or a health food store. And I want you to buy these supplements. There wasn't an
• 11:29
  Amazon back then. And I want you to stay away from me. I don't want to operate on you again.
• 11:36
  Because quite frankly, most of the time we'd redo an operation in five to seven years because you
• 11:42
  just clogged things back up. So that was my motivation. And after about a year of this at Loma Linda,
• 11:50
  seeing the changes that happened to people, their diabetes went away, their high blood pressure
• 11:55
  went away, their arthritis went away, their headaches went away. I looked in the mirror one
• 12:02
  Friday, black Friday, and said, I've got this all wrong. Instead of operating on people and then
• 12:10
  teaching them how to eat, I should teach them how to eat and never have to operate on them in the first
• 12:16
  place. So I went in and I resigned my position at the height of my career and moved down the street
• 12:24
  to Palm Springs, California and opened up a little clinic and said, hey, I want my researcher. I
• 12:33
  want to tell you what to eat, not to eat. I want you to go buy some supplements. I want to draw
• 12:38
  your blood every three months and insurance will pay for it. And let's see what happens. Okay.
• 12:45
  The rest is history. Like that was a really bad career decision at the time for a heart
• 12:52
  for a heart surgeon, but you're right. Things finally worked out, but it was
• 12:59
  ruined my life, but saved my life simultaneously. When did through this journey,
• 13:06
  we're going to fast forward because I know you've told this story many times, but we're going to
• 13:09
  fast forward is sort of what you're working on right now. But through this journey,
• 13:14
  what was the inflection point of the impetus to start studying the microbiome, the gut brain
• 13:21
  connection, because there's a lot that happened in between one of the things that when I first
• 13:26
  you know started on this part of the journey was well, I'd be better figure out a lot smarter
• 13:32
  people than me have been before me in this area. And maybe I should find out what they know.
• 13:39
  And I actually started reading a lot of the old texts from Hippocrates and the people who
• 13:46
  studied Hippocrates. And there was a nun in the middle of ages of Helen Abinden who had a
• 13:56
  an honorary infirmary that people would come to for the cure. And she was a devotee of Hippocrates.
• 14:06
  And I'll get really California's speak for a minute. Hippocrates said that all of us had a green
• 14:15
  life force energy that wanted us to have perfect health. And that external factors would suppress
• 14:27
  this green life force energy. And it was the purpose of a physician to identify those external
• 14:37
  factors that was suppressing the green life force energy. And teach the patient to remove those.
• 14:46
  And if that happened, then the green life force energy would produce perfect health in the
• 14:54
  patient. And it sounds really hokey. But what was very clear, Hippocrates believed, and he was
• 15:03
  right that all disease begins in the gut. And how he knew this is then my quest for the last
• 15:11
  30 years now. And so early, like in the year 2000, I was writing that this is all got related.
• 15:22
  This was, this is a poverty knew this, we should probably call it the brown life force energy.
• 15:29
  It would be a better description. But the more what happened during the early 2000s is the
• 15:38
  human microbiome project came about. And it was a 10 year project to identify these denizens of
• 15:49
  our gut. And you know, lo and behold, there's a hundred trillion bacteria that live in our gut.
• 15:58
  And our gut goes from our mouth all the way down to our room. And with every passing year,
• 16:05
  we not only have figured out who they are and what they do. And the intricacy of the involvement
• 16:18
  of this organism, we're a symbiotic organism. And we exist in many ways as the home
• 16:30
  for our bacteria. And a few books ago, I made the claim that bacteria have far more genes,
• 16:42
  this collector bacteria has far more genes than we have. And these bacteria divide constantly.
• 16:51
  And they obtain actually more genetic information from viruses that are called vages than
• 16:59
  infect them and change them. And bacteria can exchange genes between each other and become
• 17:05
  different. And so I made the claim that what we've done is we've uploaded most of our information
• 17:14
  processing, most of our decision making to our bacterial cloud, much like much of what you and I
• 17:23
  are doing right now won't exist. It's up in the cloud. And because that was the only way to make
• 17:31
  this high powered computer work and that brain just happens to be receiving much of its information
• 17:42
  from the bacterial cloud. And believe it or not, with each passing year, that's becoming more
• 17:51
  and more evident. So this book is, okay, what how is this bacterial cloud influencing what we
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• 18:11
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  referenced people that understood a nuance of this like thousands of years ago. But this research
• 21:01
  is relatively new. So there's a gap there. So why for the longest time did we not try and explore
• 21:07
  this more? I think one of the huge pieces of this was, for instance, I had the former head of
• 21:18
  the FDA and my podcast a few years ago and we were in the same age and we were chuckling that
• 21:27
  back when we were in medical school, we thought the gut was this hollow tube and we swallowed things
• 21:34
  and magic happened. And we absorbed things and then whatever we didn't need was
• 21:42
  pooped out the rare end and that was about all we knew. And then we discovered that there were
• 21:49
  actually more nerves, neurons in the gut, surrounding the gut, then there were in the spinal cord.
• 21:58
  So the word second brain came about. And then we began to realize that, oh my gosh,
• 22:09
  there we couldn't, we didn't know these bugs existed because the only way we could identify
• 22:15
  these bacteria was either look at them under the microscope and they all look kind of similar
• 22:21
  or we try to grow them. And most of these bacteria wouldn't grow. We didn't have the techniques.
• 22:28
  So with the human microbiome project, once the genetic code was cracked,
• 22:36
  you could use computers to look at the genetic code of microbes and the genetic code of microbes
• 22:45
  is different from every microbe and then look at stool and rather than trying to culture bacteria,
• 22:52
  trying to look for bacteria, all you need to do is look for their genetic signature.
• 22:59
  And when they did that, lo and behold, there's 10,000 different genetic signatures that we thought,
• 23:09
  oh, maybe there's a hundred or so. And there's a trillion, a hundred trillion of these guys
• 23:17
  living in us. And then it gets even better. Each of these different species have, you know,
• 23:26
  different subclasses and geniuses. And like just last week, there's a really cool bug that I write
• 23:36
  about that's a very important bacteria called acrimoncium, eucinophila, mucous loving acrimoncium.
• 23:44
  And it's really important and we get into that if you want to, but it took researchers 10 years
• 23:50
  to actually grow this bug. And you couldn't grow it. And now it's done. But now we know that there's
• 23:59
  a cousin of acrimoncium, not mucinophila, another guy who's probably even more important. And we didn't
• 24:07
  even know he existed because we didn't know that little signature difference. So now everybody's
• 24:12
  excited. Oh my gosh. And we got to grow this guy. So the other thing is, if you would ask me
• 24:21
  30 years ago, what I thought about leaky gut, I would have told you it was pseudoscience. It was
• 24:28
  and thanks to people like Dr. Alessio Fuzano who's a pediatric gastroenterologist now at Harvard
• 24:37
  who literally broke the code to find out, you know, could you, does leaky gut exist? I guarantee
• 24:46
  that exists. He proved it. We can prove it. We can measure it. So all of this kind of pseudo stuff.
• 24:57
  There, how apocrates knew this? I don't know. And that's what I'm trying to figure out. But
• 25:04
  the longer I do this and the more science we apply to this, the more it's like son of the gun,
• 25:11
  you know, there is this brown life force energy that it was, it was these guys.
• 25:20
  Incredible. That's incredible. So then, so what does this disparate because obviously
• 25:26
  second brain means that it's controlling and influencing almost every part of our body to a
• 25:30
  degree. But what are the major things that it's disproving that we thought and held true before
• 25:35
  we had this research? Okay, that's an excellent question. I for one, there was a heart surge
• 25:44
  in cardiologists who thought the cholesterol theory of heart disease was a pretty good theory.
• 25:51
  It turns out it's a horrible theory. Michael Tabaki, one of the fathers of heart surgery,
• 25:57
  said cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. It's an innocent bystander. And you go,
• 26:05
  so inflammation in the lining of the blood vessel is actually the cause of heart disease.
• 26:12
  And cholesterol just happens to be a sparkling compound that tries to cover up what's going on
• 26:17
  on the blood vessel. We could get back to Big Ed. But for the purpose of how he did it, because
• 26:24
  I've written about how he did it, inflammation, all inflammation comes from the gut. People go,
• 26:33
  well, if I eat anti-inflammatory foods, I'll stop inflammation. And since there are wildfires in
• 26:41
  California nearby me right now, I can assure you that fighting inflammation with anti-inflammatory
• 26:48
  foods is like putting out a forest fire with a garden hose. And we learn repeatedly, you can't do
• 26:55
  that. So you have to find the source of the inflammation. And all disease begins in the gut.
• 27:04
  And the inflammation is coming from the fat. That the lining of our gut is, it's got a design
• 27:13
  flaw. Now that design flaw is, the lining of our gut is about one to two tennis courts in
• 27:20
  surface area, insiders. And it only has one cell thing. Everything you swallow is separated
• 27:31
  from the rest of you by only one cell. Now those cells, this is one cell. Those cells are held
• 27:40
  together by a glue that's called a tight junction. Are you old enough to have played Red Rover,
• 27:49
  Red Rover? Yeah. Yes. The reason I have to ask now is it's illegal? Actually, play Red,
• 27:56
  yeah, schools ban it. Why? You cannot play. It's too dangerous, of course. So these cells are
• 28:03
  bound together. They're locked arm and are, you know, like Red Rover. And so everything you swallow
• 28:11
  is here. All the bacteria are here. And there's only one cell between standing between everything
• 28:20
  you swallow, all the bacteria and us. Now on the other side of this wall, 80% of all your white blood
• 28:29
  cells are there. Why? Why are they there? Because this is where trouble could come across.
• 28:38
  Now trouble can come across that there's no question that trouble comes across, but it's usually
• 28:45
  a small incursion. And then the guys put out the incursion and that's the end of it. But what
• 28:53
  has been shown over and over and over again now is that this incursion goes on every day, every night
• 29:02
  and that there is a chronic incursion across the wall of the gut. And the immune system not only
• 29:10
  is doing battle at the wall of the gut, but the immune system literally sends out warnings in the
• 29:19
  form of hormones called cytokines that among other things go up to your other organs, go up to
• 29:27
  your brain and says, oh my gosh, we're under a massive attack, take cover or prepare the defenses
• 29:38
  or we have a set of immune cells in our brain that are called microglia that are kind of the
• 29:44
  bodyguards of the neurons are that important. And when these bodyguards get alerted that mischief
• 29:51
  is on the way up, they actually take action to try and protect the neurons and they do it in a
• 29:59
  bad way. They actually make the neurons stop talking to other neurons to protect themselves.
• 30:06
  That's where brain fog comes from. We now know that Parkinson's comes from the gut, dementia comes
• 30:13
  from the gut, Alzheimer's comes from the gut and getting back to the original question,
• 30:17
  heart disease comes from the gut. And better way of saying is death begins in the gut.
• 30:28
  But the good news is all disease comes from the gut and thankfully all disease can be
• 30:35
  reversed from the gut. So that would be that would be the question that everybody wants answer.
• 30:40
  So what do you start to do to make sure that your gut, your microbiome is working properly so that
• 30:48
  you don't have all these all these diseases? Well, nobody used to have these. One of the things
• 30:55
  that's been fun looking at ancient cultures or the cultures that don't have these diseases that
• 31:03
  believe it or not, there are cultures that have no heart disease, just as an example.
• 31:10
  There's a group of islanders in Papua New Guinea called the Catavans that
• 31:17
  a Danish researcher Stefan Lindbergh spent his life studying these were the group of islanders
• 31:26
  who smoked like fiends and they had no coronary arteries, no stroke, and no cancer.
• 31:38
  And he spent his life trying to figure, well, how can that be? And it turns out that they,
• 31:48
  because of what they ate, had a perfect microbiome had a perfectly intact wall of their gut. And
• 32:00
  yeah, smoking's bad for you and people accuse me of telling people that smoking's good for you.
• 32:05
  Well, it turns out that four of the five blue zones are heavy smokers. So maybe we ought to be
• 32:09
  interested in why it wasn't killing them and might have been helping them, but that's another subject.
• 32:14
  But these people were able to defend against the bad parts of smoking by having an antioxidant rich
• 32:27
  diet among other things. So, and you look at these cultures that don't have what we have,
• 32:36
  one of the things that's remarkable is that they have this really incredible tropical
• 32:42
  rainforest of gut microbiome. And Hillary Clinton would say it takes a village. But
• 32:52
  we used to have this incredible tropical rainforest. And it could handle anything that came down
• 33:02
  the pike and this tropical rainforest was capable of making sure that nothing bad got to the wall
• 33:13
  of the gut. And if the wall of the gut was damaged, that they made compounds that actually rapidly
• 33:21
  repaired the wall of the gut. Now, as any of us know, our tropical rainforest is a desert wasteland.
• 33:31
  We have destroyed it in lots of fascinating ways. Number one, antibiotics, broad
• 33:41
  spectrum antibiotics. I was actually in medical school when broad spectrum antibiotics were
• 33:47
  introduced. And we just thought it was the greatest advance in the history of mankind.
• 33:53
  Because before then, we had to try and figure out what bacteria was causing
• 33:59
  an infection. We had to try and grow it. We had to test antibiotics against it. And it was a
• 34:04
  time-consuming process and an illusion. We were wrong. Then all of a sudden, you know, we had an
• 34:10
  AK-47 and you know, sat on automatic and we could mow down every living bacteria known and unknown.
• 34:22
  But we had no idea that we were also killing off these guys that lived in our gut because we didn't
• 34:28
  realize they were there. And then we found out that you could make animals grow faster and
• 34:34
  fatter if you gave them antibiotics. So almost all of our animals were given antibiotics.
• 34:40
  And so, presto change, oh, that's one thing that happened. Then glyphosate came along round up.
• 34:49
  And most people don't realize that Monsanto patented glyphosate as an antibiotic, not as a weed killer.
• 34:58
  Oops, that should make us worry. And speaking of the brain, it turns out that glyphosate
• 35:05
  targets the bacteria that live in our gut that make the feel good hormones. The anti-exaggerated
• 35:12
  hormones, things like serotonin and things like GABA. And we have to have the bacteria
• 35:19
  actually make those hormones for us. We didn't know that. We thought neurons did that.
• 35:25
  And now we've killed those guys off. So is it any wonder that we have this epidemic of anxiety
• 35:32
  and depression that, you know, it's just unbelievable. Yes, we have things to be depressed about and
• 35:38
  anxious about. But the epidemic is staggering. And it's just we've just killed off this incredible
• 35:48
  part of us unwittingly, hopefully unwittingly. And building it back is part of this book.
• 35:58
  It can be built back. The tricks are in the book to help you build it back. But,
• 36:06
  and that's part of the start. I was going to say, I was even curious if the foods of like we live in
• 36:13
  the US. And everybody always comments on the food in the US versus the rest of the world.
• 36:18
  Is it, the question was, is it even possible with the kind of food that we can go buy at the
• 36:24
  supermarket in the US to actually build this back? It's really difficult. It's really difficult.
• 36:32
  One of the things that becomes at least to me more and more clear is the glyphosate is
• 36:39
  everywhere in our environment. All of our grains are sprayed with glyphosate.
• 36:46
  Even our organic grains are contaminated with glyphosate. Most of our wines in America have
• 36:52
  glyphosate in them. Our school yards are covered with glyphosate. Our yards have glyphosate. We spray
• 37:01
  our weeds. And so this is ubiquitous in our water supply. One of the things that's been fascinating
• 37:09
  to me, much of my practice is autoimmune diseases. And we're really good at reversing autoimmune disease.
• 37:20
  And you choose the autoimmune disease. We're pretty good at reversing it. It takes a while.
• 37:26
  But these people who have psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis or eczema, they'll go over to Europe
• 37:34
  and they can't help themselves. They have a croissant or a baguette or a pizza, which would normally
• 37:43
  flare their rheumatoid arthritis just as an example. And they don't react. And they go,
• 37:50
  oh, this is great. Dr. country has cured me. I can have these foods again. And they come back
• 37:57
  to America and they start eating our food. And within weeks, they're on the phone going,
• 38:06
  what the heck? My finger just blew up. What the heck? I thought you cured me. I said, no, you
• 38:11
  weren't having any glyphosate over there. And it's just remarkable. I have a new patient whose
• 38:20
  French were taking care of his son who had some really awful autoimmune disease. And he's
• 38:25
  getting better. And the parent has become a patient. And the parent, his son lives in the
• 38:32
  United States. And he's moved to America going to be with his son, no family. And this guy is
• 38:39
  a young entrepreneur and very health conscious, very physical. This guy's put on 20 pounds in a year
• 38:50
  moving the United States. And he has not changed a thing. And he said, what the heck are you?
• 38:58
  You know, what are you doing to me here? And it's, yeah, it's true. A quick shout out to the
• 39:04
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• 39:08
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• 39:13
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• 39:18
  on create like the greats Ross dissect the genius behind history's most remarkable creators
• 39:24
  and their legendary work. So you're going to get this blend of history and business and creativity.
• 39:29
  He has a great voice, always good for a podcast. And he has a decade of practical experience. He's
• 39:34
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• 39:39
  brands and stories in a way that anyone can apply. So whether or not you're fascinated by history,
• 39:44
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• 39:51
  without sacrificing productivity, this podcast is your perfect listen. Go listen to create like
• 39:56
  the greats wherever you get your podcasts. A huge shout out to Lingoda for supporting today's
• 40:00
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• 40:05
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  Plus, you save on any course with my link, try.lingoda.com slash success story and code Scott 25. Don't
• 41:13
  miss this chance to transform your life through language learning. You know, you speak a lot about
• 41:17
  cognitive implications, neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, dementia. And correct me if I'm
• 41:27
  wrong, but I was reading that studies have found that some Alzheimer's patients have five to ten
• 41:31
  times more bacteria in their brains from gut translocation. That was one of the points in the book.
• 41:38
  So we're talking about two different ideas. On one side, we don't have enough bacteria and we've
• 41:43
  killed it. On the other side, it's moving to other parts of the body. So can you explain what's
• 41:48
  happening? Yeah, there, you know, you got to have these guys in their place. And I almost like
• 41:56
  to think about it as a nuclear reactor. A nuclear reactor is a great source of energy. As long as
• 42:05
  that nuclear reaction is kept in a containment vessel. And if we keep our bacteria where they
• 42:16
  belong in their containment vessel, then everything's fine. But if that containment vessel
• 42:24
  gets damaged, then radiation on the loose is not a good thing. And so, um, leaky gut
• 42:38
  was, it happens. It just so happens that bacteria can leak through the wall. We don't have
• 42:45
  the rainforest anymore. We don't have the, it's always just, it gets out. Okay. I got it. It gets
• 42:51
  out. And the sad thing is that even our defenses, these guys can travel up the Vegas nerve. They
• 43:00
  can go through our bloodstream. We now know that, you know, healthy volunteers have bacteria in their
• 43:08
  bloodstream. And the concentrate and who these bacteria are also make a difference. One of the
• 43:15
  shocking findings of Parkinson's years ago, we, we're convinced that Parkinson's, you know,
• 43:21
  happened in a spot in the brain called the substantial nigron. That's true.
• 43:27
  And there are findings that correlate with Parkinson's dementia called Louis bodies, which is
• 43:36
  basically a dead neuron surrounded by these microglia. And one of the things about Parkinson's
• 43:43
  patients is they have a very strong history of constipation. And so researchers said,
• 43:51
  I wonder if these problems are down in the gut too. And they started doing biopsies and
• 43:57
  lo and behold, they'd find these Louis bodies surrounding the gut. And then researchers of
• 44:04
  animal models found that if you caused leaky gut as the first thing. And then you would produce
• 44:13
  Louis bodies in the neurons in the abdomen. And then you would see that the Parkinson's came
• 44:22
  from the gut up rather than the brain down. And it's just up into all of our concepts about,
• 44:32
  what came first that chicken or the egg. And apoverities was right.
• 44:38
  So you mentioned when you write a book, it's because there was a big question that needed answering.
• 44:43
  And obviously this was the big question. This is something that can completely upend and turn
• 44:49
  traditional medical science on its head, really, complete 180 from what we know.
• 44:55
  When you go on this rabbit hole and you start to research all these topics,
• 44:59
  what do you think would be the most controversial or most difficult to swallow idea that you've
• 45:04
  discovered? And that's a good thing. It's most difficult to swallow. Some of our quote,
• 45:11
  healthiest foods in my view or some of our most unhealthiest foods. Number one,
• 45:23
  the number two, one of one of my friends, Mark Hyman, as a daughter who was a third
• 45:32
  year medical student in a very prestigious university. And she has not had a course on the
• 45:41
  microbiome in her third year. You know, now three years into medical school has not had a
• 45:49
  course on the microbiome. And it's were, you know, and I've been on podcasts where I've been mocked
• 45:58
  and, you know, that what would opocrates know back in those days, you did bloodletting.
• 46:06
  And what turns out, bloodletting was actually a really good idea, but I used to give a lecture
• 46:13
  because I was a surgeon. And surgeons were barber surgeons. Bloodletting was used because bacteria
• 46:20
  actually have to have iron to grow and reproduce. And back during the plagues and things like that,
• 46:28
  people who were anemic, the bacteria couldn't reproduce as quickly as possible.
• 46:32
  So as strange as it seems, many of these really, you know, bizarre ideas had a basis in truth.
• 46:43
  Same way with snake oil, I'm often described as a snake oil salesman. Snake oil turns out that
• 46:51
  Chinese laborers who built the railroads used water snake oil because it was really good for
• 46:58
  their rheumatism and arthritis. And it turns out the water snake oil is one of the richest
• 47:05
  source of omega-3 fatty acids, fish oil. And it's much more than fish oil. And so snake oil
• 47:15
  was actually, and incredibly, I have a couple books about snake oil. And when it was adulterated,
• 47:23
  then that of course is where the snake oil salesman came from. But snake oil was really good for you,
• 47:30
  from the Japanese laborers. Why does medicine as an industry? Why did it have such a hard time
• 47:39
  adopting new ideas? Like why, for example, would somebody mock you? Why would they not say
• 47:44
  that's an interesting idea? Let me research it. Let me understand where you got your information
• 47:49
  from because that seems like the normal human response to when you're challenged. You shouldn't have
• 47:54
  this autoimmune reaction to a new idea. You should explore it, learn it, you know, get better.
• 48:01
  I'll give you a personal example. Number of years ago, I saw two patients in their late 70s in
• 48:09
  my office, new patients. And we always measure vitamin D levels. And traditionally, we're taught
• 48:19
  that vitamin D should not be no higher than 80 nanograms per milliliter. And you know,
• 48:26
  I remember that because it's wrong. And we're told that anything above that, you'll get vitamin
• 48:32
  D toxicity. And you will get a very elevated calcium level. You will make kidney stones. You could
• 48:39
  get numbness in your fingers and toes. And it's a really bad for you. So I'm seeing these two
• 48:44
  patients for the first time. And they have vitamin D levels of 276. Both of them. One of those 276,
• 48:54
  one of those 278. And I'm looking at them. And I said, you take a lot of vitamin D, don't you?
• 49:02
  And they said, oh yeah. And it's a longevity drop. And I'm, you know, what? And I said,
• 49:13
  do you have, and I'm looking at their labs and their kidneys are fine and their calcium is normal.
• 49:19
  And I said, you got any numbness in your fingers and toes? No. Why? I said, well,
• 49:26
  as far as I can tell, you should be dead. And that's what I was taught. And they looked at me and they
• 49:31
  said, you don't know very much about vitamin D. Do you? Is sunny? And I said, just what I've
• 49:39
  been taught. They said, well, maybe you ought to read about it. So I did. And these guys were right.
• 49:45
  And for instance, the University of California San Diego is a huge vitamin D research unit.
• 49:51
  And they think the average American should be taking 10,000 international units of vitamin D
• 49:56
  three a day, 10,000. They've never seen vitamin D toxicity up to 40,000 international units a day,
• 50:05
  nor have I. And yet I have patient after patient just one yesterday who we had them. I like
• 50:13
  patients to be somewhere between 100 and 150. And if you want to go higher, it's fine with me.
• 50:20
  I had a patient who we were running at about 115 for an autoimmune issue. And they came back in.
• 50:27
  It was 67 this time. So what the heck happened? Did you forget? Oh no. My physician read me the
• 50:35
  riot act that if you know, if I didn't get my vitamin D down, he was going to be stopped being
• 50:41
  my physician. And I'm going. And I hear this all the time. I hear from cancer doctors.
• 50:47
  So all I can tell you is that we're in a way taught that we're we're unquestioned authorities
• 50:59
  on subjects and how dare you not take my advice. That's one thing. The other thing that was
• 51:08
  very useful for me in my career as a heart surgeon is I had the opportunity to join a group out of
• 51:15
  Boston. The call the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. And it was formed by a pediatrician who
• 51:22
  noticed that practicing physicians were 20 years behind current research knowledge in their field.
• 51:32
  And so they got a bunch of us and sure enough in the fields of cardiology and heart surgery,
• 51:38
  the practicing physician in general was 20 years behind current knowledge. In fact,
• 51:46
  on one podcast I was told that gastroenterologists believe that the microbiome is a fantasy and it's like
• 51:57
  what yeah on ongoing education should be mandatory if you're responsible for somebody's well being
• 52:08
  but the ongoing medical education in this country is driven by drug companies. That's the only
• 52:15
  source of ongoing medical education. Interesting. Look at the incentives and then
• 52:20
  last thing I want oh go ahead sorry yeah. Sickness is good for business. I hate to say that but
• 52:29
  well that's how that's how you found yourself out of a job. That's exactly right.
• 52:34
  One last idea that I want to go into I think it's going to be relevant for this audience.
• 52:41
  Cognitive performance, mental fog. That's the bane of any high performing individual. Yes,
• 52:47
  of course all these things are important. But how do you always have that energy, that focus
• 52:55
  being able to recall the words you want to recall whenever you need to recall them? What is the
• 53:00
  what is the the playbook for for peak performance? Well I think again and I think Dale
• 53:09
  Bredison who wrote the end of Alzheimer's who I think is probably the smartest neurologist in the
• 53:14
  country. The promoter is also a friend. One of the things that amazes us when we get together and
• 53:23
  I just talked to Dale on Friday is who would have believed that our heart surgeon cardiologist
• 53:31
  and two neurologists when we get together all we talk about is the gut and it's like we go
• 53:38
  who would have guessed this that and Dale and David would be the first to tell you that
• 53:46
  get your if you get your gut intact if you get that biodiversity if you get the tropical rainforest
• 53:55
  if you seal the wall of your gut then everything starts to repair it so and I can go into other things
• 54:02
  that I am very passionate about with this sugar molecule that's in beef lamb pork and melt called
• 54:10
  new five GC that profoundly affects brain performance and I am very controversial about that because
• 54:21
  and new five GC is not in us yet we have a similar sugar molecule called new five AC and they
• 54:29
  differ by one molecule of oxygen otherwise they're identical new five GC breaks down the blood
• 54:39
  brain barrier animals try desperately to keep even animals who have new five GC won't let it
• 54:46
  in their brain and yet new five GC we make antibodies to new five GC every time we eat a new five
• 54:55
  GC containing food and that includes grass fed grass finish beef sorry about that
• 55:02
  but the happy news is that it's not present in fish it's not present in chicken or poultry
• 55:10
  it's not present in fermented food products so for instance it's loaded in milk it's loaded in
• 55:19
  goat milk it's loaded in cheap milk but if you ferment it into a yogurt or a cheese the bacteria
• 55:26
  eat that compound fun news if you ferment meat if you traditionally make sausages and sausages are
• 55:35
  traditionally fermented with bacteria the bacteria eat the new five GC for instance prosciutto
• 55:43
  doesn't have new five GC even though it came from a pig because the bacteria ate it in a
• 55:49
  traditionally prepared sausage has no new five GC so that's the good news to take hold with you
• 55:56
  no I just think that there's it's listen what you eat what you put into your body it's this
• 56:02
  mind field and it's very hard to navigate and there's so many there's so many bits of information
• 56:08
  about eat this eat that this diet that diet and a lot of it seems to conflict so I think that
• 56:14
  this is why just some generalized guidelines as to what to put into your body is so important so
• 56:20
  that you again you're you're operating your best right now but you're going to live a long life
• 56:25
  and you're going to feel good well into your future and that's really what people need they just
• 56:28
  need this very simple operating guideline how to live life and they're already there are listen
• 56:34
  they're already running uphill by living in the US and only being able to shop at a US grocery store
• 56:38
  so they are I know they I know they are everyone knows it everyone feels it but nobody really
• 56:45
  can put a finger on why and this is kind of this is what you're doing okay if people if you want
• 56:52
  to people to take away one thing from this book and obviously you can get it anywhere you get books
• 56:56
  I think it's coming out in April of 25 okay so April of this year you get on Amazon and I'll
• 57:03
  put all the show I'll put all links in the show notes as well but if you want people to take one
• 57:07
  thing away from this book what would that idea be that most of what appears to be
• 57:16
  lack of control on your part anxiety depression in your part brain fog lack of higher executive
• 57:26
  functioning is not your brain's fault it's actually coming from your gut and it is a fixable problem
• 57:36
  and the the simple steps are in the book it's it's doable as I wrote in the plant paradox
• 57:47
  you'll hate me for about six weeks and then you'll start then you'll start to like me and
• 57:52
  the fact one of my newer patients said you're right I hated you for six weeks and now I love
• 57:58
  you and that's why I'm here but yeah it's doable it's going to take some work but you're right folks
• 58:06
  particularly who are listening to your podcast they know that their executive functioning is
• 58:15
  paramount they and a lot of people I mean I see people now in their 20s and 30s who
• 58:24
  their brains aren't working right you know they know it yeah it's like what the heck it's very
• 58:31
  scary it's very very scary especially when you're self aware enough to understand that you don't
• 58:37
  think as clear as you did a year ago you're like oh my goodness where am I going to be in 10 years
• 58:42
  from now that's exactly right so and we can actually believe it out we can measure leaky brain
• 58:50
  if you have leaky gut you got leaky brain and we can actually measure neural inflammation
• 58:56
  and the nice thing is and the reason I do this is if we can measure it going wet and so we can
• 59:03
  correlate that to people going oh wow you know I started you know I I'm thinking we're clear
• 59:11
  yeah because look these neurons are not inflamed anymore and so we can actually see it so it's
• 59:18
  it's not I mean we the nice thing is we can quantify this now that's why I keep doing this
• 59:24
  people are going to get the book that's sort of the entry point into your world they don't know
• 59:29
  you if they if they know you already obviously they know where to find you but if they want to
• 59:33
  connect with you other places if they want to go check out your podcast or newsletter youtube
• 59:38
  channel drop the links where they can go but also tell the listeners if they want to work with you
• 59:44
  in some capacity or what you just mentioned how they can measure improvement where would they go
• 59:49
  for that would they be working through you through someone else someone wants to sort of take their
• 59:53
  health to the next level yeah so you know I I still take on patients I usually see my physician
• 1:00:00
  assistant first but then I see them I work six days a week I see patients on Saturday and Sunday
• 1:00:08
  why because quite honestly I still like to see what I would have called miracles happen and
• 1:00:16
  I mean it's just exciting watching and I I describe a lot of these people in in the book it's
• 1:00:20
  just exciting to watch somebody take a potentially you know irreversible disease like Parkinson's
• 1:00:28
  and a year later they don't have Parkinson's it's like wow why wouldn't I want to
• 1:00:37
  help this person so that's that's why I do it yeah so they can find me at their Dr. Gendry
• 1:00:45
  podcast I've got a couple youtube channels drgendry.com my supplement and food company gendrymd.com
• 1:00:55
  and if I don't wave to people on the internet every day is they're surfing I'm doing something
• 1:01:00
  wrong I guess okay perfect um last question so obviously you have tons of advice that you can
• 1:01:08
  teach over to people tons of wisdom from your career and I usually ask this question from the
• 1:01:13
  context of life advice you had passed on to your kids but I can give you I can give you both
• 1:01:17
  options I can even give life advice you had passed on to your children or it could be health advice
• 1:01:21
  it would be one last like bit of wisdom that you want to leave the audience with that you think
• 1:01:25
  your kids would want to know well first of all never retire um it is the worst possible thing
• 1:01:35
  than I think anybody could do uh number two it sounds really silly but life's too short do what you
• 1:01:44
  love and if you literally do what you love and make a career out of doing what you love then good
• 1:01:52
  things will come your way it may take a lot longer time than you thought as my wife likes to remind
• 1:01:59
  me but as long as you're doing what you love um there's nothing better to do