Lessons - How Your Gut Health Determines Your Life Span | Dr. Steven Gundry - Renowned Heart Surgeon

In this lessons episode, discover how your gut influences nearly every system in your body. Learn why the microbiome is considered a second brain, learn how chronic inflammation in the gut can lead to heart disease, dementia, and brain fog, and learn what ancient cultures teach us about rebuilding a healthy gut to prevent modern disease. Why for the longest time did we not try and explore this more? I think one of the huge pieces of this was, for instance, I had the former head of the FDM, my podcast a few years ago and we were in the same age and we were chuckling that back when we were in medical school, we thought the gut was this hollow tube and we swallowed things and magic happened and we absorbed things and then whatever we didn't need was pooped out the rear end and that was about all we knew. And then we discovered that there were actually more nerves, neurons in the gut that were surrounding the gut than there were in the spinal cord. So the word second brain came about and then we began to realize that, oh my gosh, we didn't know these bugs existed because the only way we could identify these bacteria was either look at them under the microscope and they all look kind of similar or we try to grow them and most of these bacteria wouldn't grow, we didn't have the techniques. So with the human microbiome project, once the genetic code was cracked, you could use computers to look at the genetic code of microbes and the genetic code of microbes is different from every microbe and then look at stool and rather than trying to culture bacteria, trying to look for bacteria, all you need to do is look for their genetic signature. And when they did that, lo and behold, there's 10,000 different genetic signatures that we thought, oh, maybe there's 100 or so. And there's a trillion, a hundred trillion of these guys living in us and then it gets even better. Each of these different species have, you know, different subclasses and geniuses and like just last week, there's a really cool bug that I write about. That's a very important bacteria called acrimoncium, eucinophila, mucous loving acrimoncium and it's really important and we'd get into that if you want to, but it took researchers 10 years to actually grow this bug. You couldn't grow it and now it's done, but now we know that there is a cousin of acrimoncium, not mucinophila, another guy, who's probably even more important. And we didn't even know he existed because we didn't know that little signature difference. So now everybody's excited, oh my gosh, and we got to grow this guy. So the other thing is if you would ask me 30 years ago what I thought about leaky gut, I would indulge it with pseudoscience, it was woo, and thanks to people like Dr. Lesio Fizzano is a pediatric gastroenterologist now at Harvard who literally broke the code to find out, you know, could you, does leaky gut exist? I guarantee you that exists. He proved it, we can prove it, we can measure it. So all of this kind of pseudo stuff, how apocrates knew this? I don't know, and that's what I'm trying to figure out, but the longer I do this and the more science we apply to this, the more it's like son of a gun, you know, there is this brown life force energy that was, it was these guys. Incredible. That's incredible. So then, so what does this dis, because obviously second brain means that it's controlling and influencing almost every part of our body to a degree, but what are the major things that it's disproving that we thought and held true before we had this research? Okay, that's, that's an excellent question. I, for one, it was a heart surge in their cardiologists who have thought the cholesterol theory of heart disease was a pretty good theory. It turns out it's a horrible theory. Michael DeBakey, one of the fathers of heart surgery, said cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. It's an innocent bystander. And you go, so inflammation in the lining of the blood vessel is actually the cause of heart disease and cholesterol just happens to be a spackling compound that tries to cover up what's going on on the blood vessel. We could get back to Big Ed, but for the purpose of how he did it, because I've written about how he did it, inflammation, all inflammation comes from the gut. People go, well, if I eat anti-inflammatory foods, I'll stop inflammation. And since there are wildfires in California nearby me right now, I can assure you that fighting inflammation with anti-inflammatory foods is like putting out a forest fire with a garden hose. And we, we learn repeatedly, you can't do that. So you have to find the source of the inflammation. And all disease begins in the gut and the inflammation is coming from the fat. That the lining of our gut is, it's got a design flaw. Now that design flaw is, the lining of our gut is about one to two tennis courts in surface area, insiders. And it, it only has one cell thick. Everything you swallow is separated from the rest of you by only one cell. Now those cells, this is one cell. Those cells are held together by a glue that's called a tight junction. Are you old enough to have played Red Rover, Red Rover? Yeah. The reason I have to ask now is it's illegal? Actually, play Red, yeah, schools ban it. Why? You cannot play. It's too dangerous, of course. So these cells are bound together. They're locked arm and are, you know, like Red Rover. And so everything you swallow is here. All the bacteria are here. And there's only one cell between standing between everything you swallow all the bacteria and us. Now on the other side of this wall, 80% of all your white blood cells are there. Why? Why are they there? Because this is where trouble could come across. Now trouble can come across. There's no question that trouble comes across. But it's usually a small incursion and then the guys put out the incursion and that's the end of it. But what has been shown over and over and over again now is that this incursion goes on every day, every night and that there is a chronic incursion across the wall of the gut. And the immune system not only is doing battle at the wall of the gut, but the immune system literally sends out warnings in the form of hormones called cytokines that among other things go up to your other organs, go up to your brain. It says, oh my gosh, we're under a massive attack. Take cover or prepare the defenses. Or we have a set of immune cells in our brain that are called microglia that are kind of the bodyguards of the neurons are that important. And when these bodyguards get alerted that mischief is on the way up, they actually take action to try and protect the neurons and they do it in a bad way. They actually make a neuron stop talking to other neurons to protect themselves. That's where brain fog comes from. We now know that Parkinson's comes from the gut, dementia comes from the gut, Alzheimer's comes from the gut and getting back to the original question, heart disease comes from the gut. And better way of saying is death begins in the gut. But the good news is all disease comes from the gut and thankfully all disease can be reversed from the gut. So that would be that would be the question that everybody wants answered. So what do you start to do to make sure that your gut, your microbiome is working properly so that you don't have all these all these diseases? Well, nobody used to have these. One of the things that's been fun looking at ancient cultures or the cultures that don't have these diseases that believe it or not, there are cultures that have no heart disease just as an example. There's a group of islanders in Papua New Guinea called the Catavans that a Danish researcher Stefan Lindbergh spent his life studying these were the group of islanders who smoked like fiends and they had no coronary arteries, no stroke, and no cancer. And he spent his life trying to figure, well, how can that be? And it turns out that they because of what they ate had a perfect microbiome had a perfectly intact wall of their gut. And yeah, smoking is bad for you and people accuse me of telling people that smoking's good for you. Well, it turns out that four of the five blue zones are heavy smokers. So maybe we ought to be interested in why it wasn't killing them and might have been helping them, but that's another subject. But these people were able to defend against the bad parts of smoking by having an antioxidant rich diet among other things. So and you look at these cultures that don't have what we have, one of the things that's remarkable is that they have this really incredible tropical rainforest of gut microbiome. And Hillary Clinton would say it takes a village, but we used to have this incredible tropical rainforest. And it could handle anything that came down the pike and this tropical rainforest was capable of making sure that nothing bad got to the wall of the gut. And if the wall of the gut was damaged, that they made compounds that actually rapidly repaired the wall of the gut. Now, as any of us know, our tropical rainforest is a desert wasteland. We have destroyed it in lots of fascinating ways. Number one, antibiotics, broad spectrum antibiotics. I was actually in medical school when broad spectrum antibiotics were introduced. And we just thought it was the greatest advance in the history of mankind. Because before then, we had to try and figure out what bacteria was causing. And we had to try and grow it. We had to test antibiotics against it. And it was a time-consuming process. And you should be wrong. Then all of a sudden, we had an AK-47 and sat on automatic and we could mow down every living bacteria, known and unknown. But we had no idea that we were also killing off these guys that lived in our gut because we didn't even realize they were there. And then we found out that you could make animals grow faster and fatter if you gave them antibiotics. So almost all of our animals were given antibiotics. And so, presto change, oh, that's one thing that happened. Then glyphosate came along round up. And most people don't realize that Monsanto patented glyphosate as an anti-biotic, not as a weed killer. Oops, that should make us worry. And speaking of the brain, it turns out that glyphosate targets the bacteria that live in our gut that make the feel good hormones. The anti-exaggerated hormones, things like serotonin and things like GABA. And we have to have the bacteria actually make those hormones for us. We didn't know that. We thought neurons did that. And now we've killed those guys off. So is it any wonder that we have this epidemic of anxiety and depression that, you know, it's just unbelievable. Yes, we have things to be depressed about and anxious about. But the epidemic is staggering. And it's just we've just killed off this incredible part of us unwittingly, hopefully unwittingly. And building it back is part of this book. It can be built back. The tricks are in the book to help you build it back. But uh, and that's part of the start. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.