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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to the youe Are Not Broken podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kelly Casperson, a board certified urologist, thought leader and conversation starter on midlife living, hormones and sexuality. Enjoy the show.
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B
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the youe're Not Broken podcast. I'm going to have on today an awesome dude named Dr. Steven Gundry, and he's coming out with a brand new book called the Gut Brain Paradox. And today we're going to talk about why our microbiomes made us do it. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Gundry.
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C
It's true. Our microbiome. Yes.
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B
I saw somebody. Have you seen that T shirt? I've seen somebody with the T shirt of my microbiome made me do it and I'm like, okay, that's a cool person.
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C
No, I don't have that T shirt. I do have the T shirt. Do or do not. There is no try.
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B
Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Good job, Yoda. I have a French bulldog pug puppy who just completely looks like Yoda. So it's fabulous. I get to look at Yoda every day. Now talk to us about your career transition before we jump into what's currently happening with our gut and microbiome. You are a cardiothoracic surgeon. Are a cardiothoracic surgeon. What made you pivot?
- [01:14]
C
Over 30 years ago, while I was chairman of cardiothoracic surgery and professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, I was a really famous heart surgeon who would take on really difficult cases that nobody else wanted. There's always about five or 10 of us that are idiots that will tackle these things. So I was presented with a 48 year old gentleman who I call Big Ed in my books from Miami, who had inoperable coronary artery disease. He had so much crud in all his coronary arteries, you couldn't put stents in, you couldn't do bypasses because there wasn't any place to land. And Big Ed had been going around the country to these various centers and carrying his angiogram from Miami. And everybody turned him down for good reason. And he spent about six months doing this and he ended up at Loma Linda in my office. And I'm looking at his angiogram and I'm going, you know, everybody's right. There's nothing I can do for you. They're right. And he says, well, hold on. I've been on a diet for the last six months and I've lost 45 pounds. And this guy was 265 pounds when I met him, hence the name Big Ed. And I've gone to a health food store and I've been taking all these supplements. And he literally had brought in this giant shopping bag full of supplements. He said, you know, maybe I did something in here. And I'm going, yeah, right, you know, scratching my professor beard. Don't get your hopes up. Good for you for losing weight. And I know what you did with all those supplements. You made expensive urine, which I firmly believed back then. And he said, well, come all this way. What would it hurt to do another cardiac catheterization, get another angiogram? I'm rolling my eyes. Okay, so we get a new catheterization arm, and in six months time, this guy has cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coronary arteries. 50%? No, that's impossible.
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B
It can't be done is what they
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C
say, can't be done. And there I'm looking at, I'm looking at the two angiograms, and as the saying goes, if all you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So now there were places to do bypasses on them. So I took them to the operating room and did a five vessel bypass on them. And the researcher in me says, you know, how the heck did he do this? And so I said, tell me about this diet of yours afterwards. And she starts spouting off and I go, wait a minute, wait a minute. Back in the dark ages, I went to Yale as an undergraduate and we could design our own major. It was a master's thesis program. And you had the hypothesis and you had to defend it. My hypothesis was you could take a grade 8, manipulate its food supply, manipulate its environment, and prove you'd arrive at a human being. And I defended my thesis and got an honors and gave it to my parents and kind of forgot all about it. So as he's describing what he's eating, I'm going, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's, you know, that's what made a human human. I said, let me look at those supplements. And I was really famous for protecting the heart for heart surgery and transplants by putting a bunch of glop down the coronary arteries and veins. And I start digging through his supplements and he's swallowing a bunch of the glop. I was putting down the blood vessels to protect the heart. Never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things. So I called my parents who lived in San Diego, and I said, do you still have my thesis? And they said, oh yeah, it's here in the Shrine. So what's poignant was even though I was famous heart Surgeon, I was 70 pounds overweight despite running 30 miles a week. I was what's called a Clydesdale runner. I was going to the gym one hour every day. I was eating a healthy low fat diet because that's what you do. I was a heart surgeon and I had such bad arthritis in my knees. I wore braces to run. I had migraine headaches. I don't recommend doing baby heart transplants with a migraine, but I did high cholesterol, pre diabetes hypertension. I was told it was genetic because my father had the same issues and just suck it up. So I put myself on my thesis and I started taking a bunch of supplements and I lost 50 pounds my first year. My arthritis went away, my migraines went away, blah, blah, blah. And I lost another substance, £20. And I've kept it off for 30 years. So when I operated on people at Loma Linda, I said, hey, I don't want to ever see you again. Because normally we would reoperate on someone in five to seven years and do it all over again. Because this is. You can't stop the problem, right? And I said, I'm going to want you to eat certain foods and go to the health food store and buy a few supplements. There wasn't Amazon back then. And let's see how you do. Well, almost from the word go, these people would start calling and say, hey, what are you giving me that's making my blood pressure so low? And I'm going, I'm not giving you anything. Because these people were on two or three anti hypertensives, come in here to the clinic, let's look, and their blood pressure's low. I said, well, let's stop one of those blood pressure meds. And the diabetics would say, what are you giving me that is making my blood sugar so low and not giving you anything? And so this would go on and on and we'd throw away all these medications and it was, I mean, you predict it. So after a year of doing this at Loma Linda, I had a really bad morning. I looked in the mirror literally Friday morning and said, you know, I've got this all wrong. I shouldn't operate on people and then teach them how to eat to avoid me later. I should teach them how to eat and I'll never have to operate on them. What an idiot. So I literally resigned my position at the height of my career and headed down the road to Palm Springs to set up a Clinic where every three months I'd say, hey, I want to draw some blood on you. Insurance will pay for it. I want you to eat certain foods. Don't eat these certain foods. And go to the health food store and buy some supplements and let's track it. Okay? And everybody said okay. And that's actually how it all started.
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B
Did everybody think you were crazy?
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C
My colleagues certainly thought I was crazy.
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B
Right. The patients didn't think you were crazy. They're like, of course I wanna try something before surgery. That makes perfect sense.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it really was all because of Big Ed showing me that son of a gun. Maybe the hypothesis that we had that this is maybe we could slow down coronary disease, but we certainly couldn't stop it or much less reverse it. Maybe that was all wrong.
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B
Good job, Big Ed. My story is I had a patient change my life too. And it's like people don't understand the power of their stories to affect their physicians lives. Every once in a while you'll get a life changing one. Especially I think when the student's ready.
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C
That's right. If your eyes are open, you can't see.
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B
Yeah, you can't see it. I picked up on in your story, one of them was the role. I think we've been fed this story of like genetics is your destiny and you have breast cancer because your mom has breast cancer and it's the only reason why you have breast cancer. And it was inevitable that you were going to get breast cancer. Same with colon cancer, same with heart disease, same with being overweight, same with diabetes. And the medical paradigm of trying to like digest things down to the gene is backfired horribly because now we have, we feel like we have no control over it.
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C
Right. You know, there was a really cool paper in Nature a few years ago that I mentioned in one of my books, looking at the effect of genetics in particular, watching twin pairs who are raised separately. Genetics really only has about an 8% effect on what's going to happen to us. Environment and our behavior is actually 92% of what's going to happen to us. And Hippocrates knew this. The guy said 2,500 years ago, all disease begins in the gut. And you know, I've been spending 25 years now learning how we knew this. And he was right.
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A
Right.
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B
Proving, proving what the ancients already knew.
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C
How do you know this? And I'm going to find out. And you know, that's what I spend my career now.
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B
I mean it's, it's fascinating because it's something everybody does. And it's very like, it's cultural and it's religious. Celebrations are what you put in your gut, and it's like, it's really everywhere, and at the same time, nobody's paying attention to it.
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C
Yeah, I like to study old people around the world and figure out why they're old and thriving. And it's just amazing. You look at these diverse cultures, and they all have so many similarities. One of the things that I talk to people is, look, our great, great grandparents ate whole food, but more importantly, they ate it whole. There wasn't any protein powders. There were no processed foods at all. And really, the only processing of food was fermentation preservation techniques. And it's fascinating to learn that these guys in the process of, for instance, detoxify. Detoxifying plant compounds like lectins with fermentation or soaking or cooking, these guys were getting all the products of fermentation that we now postbiotics that are so important for health. And they knew how to do this.
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B
I love it. Well, let's jump in because your book now is so much about leaky gut. And I think in the traditional, the current medical paradigm, leaky gut's not a thing. Or like, people don't know what it is. Or they're like, yeah, that's something you learned on the Internet. Can you define what it is and how do you talk about testing for it? How did you come to that?
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C
Well, I mean, I guess if you had asked me 25 years ago when I first started this, what I thought about leaky gut, I would have told you it was pseudoscience. But thanks to a pediatric gastroenterologist who was at the University of Maryland when he made these discoveries. Alessio Fazano, who's now at Harvard, he wanted to figure out why gluten, which happens to be a lectin, caused celiac disease in people. And he started studying how cholera caused watery diarrhea. And he discovered that cholera made a compound called. Made our cells in our gut wall make a compound called zonulin. And zonulin, in turn, would break the glue that held our one cell thick ball in our gut together, which are called tight junctions. He discovered how it broke that tight junction. And lo and behold, he discovered that gluten mimicked cholera in doing the exact same thing. And you could measure it. And we could measure anti Zonulin IgG, and we could measure anti actin IgG, which was part of the tight junction. And so now it isn't Pseudoscience. It is measurable. We can do it on a blood test. We can do it on a finger prick, we can do it on stool samples in another way. But we can measure this and we can watch the gut repair. And the other thing I learned, I was naive 20, 25 years ago, I thought we could see a leaky gut in a couple weeks. It takes usually nine months to a year for most people to see a leaky gut. Now can it be done? Yes. My practice now, 80% of my practice, is autoimmune patients who have kind of been all over. And if you don't think autoimmune disease is an epidemic, just watch commercials every night. Almost every commercial is for an autoimmune disease drug.
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B
Yep. So is the theory that what you put in your mouth affects the gut? The gut gets leaky cause it's stressed and not healthy. And then that leaky kind of like inflammatory stuff goes and gives autoimmune to the rest of the body?
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C
Yeah, simplistically. This was actually first proposed by Loren Cordain, the father of the Paleo diet, who's at Colorado State, years ago. And he said things like lectins, which are proteins that plants make as a defense mechanism against being eaten. Lectins have a molecular barcode that our immune system reads as either a friend or a foe recognizes that it's something it recognizes or it's a troublemaker. And that these molecular barcodes are very similar to the molecular barcodes on our tissues. Like, for instance, let's suppose we have leaky gut. And these molecular barcodes come through the wall of the gut. 80% of our white blood cells, our immune system, line the gut. Why? Because that's where mischief comes through. And these guys in turn, are kind of the early warning system. They're going, oh, my gosh, we're being overrun by terrorists. Here's what they look like. Here's the most wanted poster. Let's scramble the fighter jets. Let's go to threat level five. And we know these guys are loose. They've gotten past us. Go in the body and look for these guys. And so let's suppose. Let's take Hashimoto's, which is an incredible epidemic, particularly in women. Now these fighter jets have a picture of who they're looking for. And they come on the thyroid and they go, oh, my gosh, there are proteins in this poor woman's thyroid that look a lot like the protein I'm supposed to shoot. Not quite the same, but it looks really similar. And we're at war and I'm going to shoot to kill and I'll probably get an award and we'll ask questions later. And so that molecular mimicry theory has now really stood the test of time. For instance, we know that type 1 diabetes is a molecular mimicry problem with certain bacteria in the gut that produce an insulin like molecule that is recognized as foreign, only certain bacteria. And our immune system says that's, that's a foreign molecule. And then it starts attacking the pancreas, saying, oh, insulin, that's what I'm after. So like I say, I have 100% of my autoimmune patients have leaky gut, they have intestinal dysbiosis. And the good news is, in published data, 94% of them in a year are in remission off of all drugs. Not bad.
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B
That's insane. Are you saying similar, would you say with rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis? And then let's talk about the big elephant in the room, dementia.
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C
Yeah. So that's another part of why I wanted to write this book. Through the years I've become good friends with Dr. Dale Bredesen, who wrote the End of Alzheimer's, who I really think is maybe the most accomplished neurologist in dementia. And Dale and I and David Perlmutter all now think that dementia comes from the gut, not from the brain. And one of the most, I think, ways of talking about this. So let's suppose we have leaky gut and our immune system is just hyper activated and it's sending out all these cytokines to warn the rest of the immune system. We have immune cells in our brain, glial cells, microglial cells, who are really the bodyguards of neurons. And neurons are really important apparently. So it's like I use the example for my patients. Just like 9 11, after 911 you notice we had all these concrete barriers that went out in front of every building, you know, every airport, so that a terrorist in a truck or bomb couldn't get in to do the damage. And so when I see a patient with early dementia who brings in their amyloid plaque pictures or their tau protein, I go, these are just barriers that are being thrown up by your immune system because they've been told the terrorists are on the way and protect the neurons at all costs. And those barriers, Barriers, yeah, they're doing a really good job. But now the neurons can't talk to one another because the barriers are in the way.
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B
And drugs to treat the barriers, that's why it doesn't fix Dementia reticence said,
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C
hey, we spent $20 billion with the amyloid tau protein theory and guess what, you can get rid of it. It doesn't change a thing. In fact, probably makes it worse, right?
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B
Yeah, it's totally crazy. So how do you get leaky gut in the first place?
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C
A couple things, and I wrote about this in my monster bestseller, the Plant Paradox. Normally we would have a really robust, rich, dense tropical rainforest of microbiome that, I'll use another analogy, is like the front four, the offensive front line of a quality football team. And you've got all these linebackers trying to get through the front four to sack the quarterback and the front four, you know, the steel wall or whatever, they rebuff all those attackers. We used to have an incredibly rich microbiome that could eat gluten, for instance. There are gluten eating bacteria. There are absolutely oxalate eating bacteria, Oxalobacter. These guys have all been wiped out by our use of antibiotics. The antibiotics that's been fed to animals, Glyphosate, the active ingredient, Roundup, was patented as an antibiotic and it is really good. It's in all of our food, it's in all of our animals, it's in our wine, and it's really good at wiping out this front floor. So now what's happened, the normal protection is gone and our poor wall of our gut is, is only one cell thick and it's the surface area of one or two tennis courts. And we used to have this incredible protection and now that's completely gone. So now the linebackers, I mean they're coming through the water boys and the poor quarterback, you know, is scrambling around and he's getting sacked. And so the immune system, which way back when, you know. Yeah, some mischief would come through and the immune system goes, eh, troublemaker, I'll put some handcuffs on them and take them to jail and that'll be the end of it. Now these guys, they're coming through the walls really unabated. And our immune system, which used to be pretty calm, now we've all got Kevlar Bess on, we've all got an AK47 and the finger is on the trigger.
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B
Yeah. And they're just chronically stressed.
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C
The other thing that's frustrating is people go, well, inflammation is the cause of all these problems. Yeah, you're right. Where's the inflammation from? Well, I'm going to eat anti inflammatory foods. That's the way we'll fix it. Living in California, I can tell you that eating Anti inflammatory foods to stop inflammation is like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose. And we unfortunately learn every year that that doesn't work. And it's the same thing. The inflammation is coming from leaky gut, just like Hippocrates said. And so to stop the inflammation, you've got to seal the leaky gut.
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B
And an anti inflammatory diet won't help seal the leaky gut. Or you're saying it's nice, but it's not enough.
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C
It's nice like a garden hose is nice, but. And I can seal somebody's leaky gut. In fact, I make my number one and number two selling products at Gundry MD are Bio Complete 3 and Total Restore, which are designed to seal leaky gut. Which, they work really good. But as I tell my patients, look, I can seal your leaky gut, but if you guys keep swallowing razor blades, you'll just tear it right back open. And I've demonstrated that on myself. I've had my patients demonstrate it to me.
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B
What do you see people eat that makes you cringe?
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C
Oh, gosh, let me give you an example. So 100% of my autoimmune patients have leaky gut. 100% of them have antibodies to their various components of wheat, rye, barley, oats and corn. 100%. Within a year, the gut is sealed, 94% of them, and they lose all the antibodies to these various compounds. They completely forget how much they hated gluten, for instance, how many antibodies. They're gone and their psoriasis resolves, their rheumatoid arthritis markers resolve and they go over to France and they can't help themselves. And they have croissants, they have baguettes, they have a pizza, they might have some tomatoes, and they do not react. And they go, oh, Dr. Gundry's cured me, I can have all this again. And they come back here to the United States and they start having our bread, our pizzas, just an example. And within a few weeks they're on the phone going, what the heck, my finger's all swollen. Or what the heck, that patch of psoriasis is bad. I thought you cured me. I said, no, you were over there, there isn't any glyphosate over there. And you were okay over there. And then you made the mistake of eating our stuff. So our bread is not their bread. And we see it all the time.
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B
It's good to think about because I think people are like, why can't we eat this? Why can't we? Blah, blah, blah. Humans evolved, we've dominated planet because our gut is so capable of eating all the foods, right? And you're like, but there's something unique about the processing and the chemicals in the American food that makes you uniquely intolerant to it. So do you ever think, like, the problems help us out? Because I'm like, the problem's too big, Dr. Gundry. Like, you can only see so many people. We've got the food systems against you. Only to continue your war metaphors, but the food system's against you. We've got the healthcare system that doesn't have the time to. I mean, that's why books are so good. And your book's so good is like, because if you actually want to know the science, you got to read the book. You're not going to get that in a 10 minute visit. But it's like, do you ever think the problem's too big?
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C
I do have hope. But let's be frank. The medical school curriculum is dominated by the pharmaceutical industry. And most continuing medical education is provided by pharmaceutical industry. And if you look. And most of the research in medical schools now is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. It's not by the NIH anymore, It's not by the National Science Foundation. So there's this, how do we stop this? And people go, well, now that RFK Jr. Is in, he'll stop all this. We forget that Congress is supplemented by big agriculture, big chemistry, big pharma and big medicine. And that's where they get their contributions from. One of my favorite stories about how insidious this is that I wrote about in the Plant Paradox. It used to be legal for giving chickens arsenic to make their flesh pink. And when it was realized that that was probably a really bad thing to do, the state of Maryland a few years ago outlawed arsenic and chicken feed right before the vote. A generous grant from the Monsanto Corporation, which happens to make arsenic for chicken food. And Roundup was yes, and Roundup was given to the state legislatures. And so amazingly, all arsenic was banned from chicken feed except the arsenic made by Monsanto.
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B
Wow, that's sad. Do you think that, like our shampoo, our mouthwash? I'm like literally preparing for this podcast. TMI in the shower yesterday with my bar of soap being like, what's this doing to my microbiome right now? What's our personal care products doing to our gut? And what should we be thinking about?
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C
Well, yeah, this latest revelation about red dye number three in our food, that the FDA, the FDA knew how bad red dye number three was. That they banned it from cosmetics 35 years ago. You couldn't put red dye on your face, but you could swallow it, even though they knew how bad it was. And the hilarious thing is, oh, well, we won't let this law take effect until 2027. So manufacturers use up what you bought, and you can keep poisoning people for another two years. With the Human microbiome project, which was finished in 2027, we now have this amazing tool to figure out who's there. I mean, there's 700 different bacterial species in our mouth alone. There are thousand bacterial species on our skin. And give you a really interesting example, Sophia Loren. One of the great beauties of all time, prized for her complexion and her skin, always attributed to her looks, was olive oil. She not only drank the stuff, but that's what she used, and she used olive oil soap. Recently, it was discovered that olives have their own microbiome on the outside of the olive. One of those organisms is called L pentosis, and there won't be a test. L pentosis is actually really important for getting Acheromansia mucinophila, one of the keystone species in our gut that makes mucus to grow. And lo and behold, you go, whoa, wait a minute now. And so it's in olive oil. It's living in olive oil. So then you go, son of a gun. Here's another piece of the puzzle. There happens to be a bacteria that's really important for supporting another bacteria that happens to be an olive oil. So it's not just oleic acid, which isn't very interesting at all. It's not just the polyphenols, which are really important in olive oil. But now there's a bug in there that's really important. And so that bug is supporting her skin. So do I use olive oil soap? Yes, I do.
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B
Mouthwash is falling out of favor because it kills so many things.
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C
Yeah, yeah. It's just so scary.
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B
It's like napalm for your mouth microphone.
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C
Yeah. You know, you got mini fresh breath. But there's really good human studies showing having people use mouthwash raises their systolic blood pressure by seven to 10 points after a couple weeks. So I got mini fresh breath, but, gosh, now I need a blood pressure medication.
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B
No way.
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C
Yeah, that's because we didn't realize that the nitric oxide cycle depends on us kind of exhaling nitrogen. And the gut oral microbiome converts nitric oxide into nitric oxide, which dilates our blood vessels. Without those guys in the system, no wonder everybody's Blood pressure went up.
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B
That's wild. Let's talk about the other epidemic that I see a lot, anxiety and depression. So we've got a quarter of midlife women in America on antidepressants right now. If one of these people was to come to your clinic and they're like, hey, help me fix my anxiety and my depression via my gut, where would you start?
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C
Well, first of all, I do see a lot of these people. I started learning about this because way back when most of my practice was women would bring their 65 year old husbands into me, usually with coronary heart disease or diabetes or both, and they'd go fix him.
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B
They're like, I like him and I'd like him to be around longer.
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C
So I always felt that this is a team sport. So I would ask the wife, who was usually skinny back then, to also be a patient. And we'll do blood work and everything, and then we start looking at their lists. And to a person, these people were on one or two antidepressants and they were usually on some bone building drug. And we won't go into that. Maybe we will. And I go, why are you on these antidepressants? And she said, if you were married to my husband, you'd be on them too. I'd say, you know, have you ever tried to get off them? Oh, yeah, I can't. I wean myself down. So through the years, to a person, these people, after six months or nine months say, you know, I know you didn't tell me to do it, but guess what? I'm not on my antidepressants anymore. And I profile one of them in the book and they all, to a person say, oh my gosh, you know, my brain works so much better. How did you get me off of them? And I couldn't get off. Well, let's go back to Roundup for a minute. So glyphosate was patented as an antibiotic. And we know now that glyphosate in particular targets the tryptophan serotonin pathway bacteria in our gut that manufactures these hormones. And they are wiped out by glyphosate. And isn't it interesting that this epidemic of depression and anxiety, really, you could trace back beginning in the mid-1970s when glyphosate was introduced. And glyphosate is used on all of our conventional crops now. It has nothing to do with GMOs. So what was really interesting to me, the research that came out on SSRIs, antidepressants, which are serotonin reuptake inhibiting drugs if you actually thought the mechanism was that, in other words, the serotonin of the brain is broken down very quickly and you could prevent the serotonin from being broken down. If that was the mechanism of action, then you and I could swallow a Prozac right now, and tomorrow you and I would be giddy on the phone, laughing together about how happy we were. That isn't how they work. It takes a month, maybe more, to even observe an effect. Maybe it's a placebo effect, but it's usually a month or more. Lo and behold, it turns out that these drugs change the microbiome to have more of these serotonin tryptophan producing bugs. And that takes time. And so I'm going, well, that's why they can't get off of these drugs, because if they stop it, those bugs aren't supported anymore. And how did they stop it with me? Well, we rebuilt, built that microbiome into a stable community, and now we don't need those drugs anymore. And that's, I guess, the whole point. People say, oh, you're anti pharmaceutical drugs. I'll use pharmaceutical drugs. If I break my leg, I really want somebody to put a cast on it. I'll wear the cast until it heals, but I'm not gonna wear a cast the rest of my life. And it's the same thing. A lot of times we need a little bit of support until we fix the underlying problem.
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B
And I know that podcasts aren't for individual medical advice, but top three or five takeaways for somebody who's like, I would just like my microbiome to help my mental health a little bit better. How do you rebuild a good mental health microbiome?
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C
So the first thing which should shock everybody, particularly if you have anxiety or depression, almost everyone has a very, very low vitamin D level.
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B
Low. Yes. Oh, we needed to talk about that, dude. The guidelines came out last year that nobody should test it. Insurance doesn't cover it.
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C
It's an $8 test.
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B
Yeah. The more things that come out that vitamin D is important for, like, it's embarrassing at this point that insurance doesn't cover it and they say don't check it.
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C
Yeah. We're beginning to realize how important vitamin D is in, in so many ways. First of all, it's a hormone.
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B
It's a steroid hormone for everybody who thinks steroid's a bad word.
- [35:48]
C
That's right. So the lining of our gut is only one cell thick, and it's under attack. We have stem cells in the wall of our gut that are more than capable of activating and plugging these gaps. These stem cells, unfortunately, are very sensitive to vitamin D. And one of the things that shocked me very early on in my practice was all my patients with autoimmune disease or depression or anxiety had really low vitamin D. And what now turns out, these stem cells, they just sit there and twiddle their thumbs. If there isn't enough vitamin D to go wake up, there's a problem. Go, go plug that gap. And before we had leaky gut testing, one of the things that I would do is I would push vitamin D on my patients to get their vitamin D levels up to at least 100 to 150 nanograms per milliliter. Now we're taught that 80 is toxic. Speaking of learning from our patients. So about 20 years ago, I had two new patients in their late 70s, husband and wife, and I have their blood work and their vitamin D levels were both 270. Toxic is 80. And I'm looking at them and you know, they look pretty healthy. And I'm going, you guys must take a lot of vitamin D. And they go, oh, yeah, you know, it's a longevity hormone. I'm going, yeah, right, okay, sure. And you know, I'm looking at their calcium levels and their calciums are normal. And supposedly vitamin D makes toxic calcium levels. And I'm looking at their kidney function. It's completely normal. Supposedly toxic vitamin D levels kill your kidneys. And I'm going, any kidney stones? No. Maybe vitamin D toxicity could give you numb fingers and numb toes. And I'm going, any numb fingers and numb toes? And they go, no. Why are you asking all these questions? I said, well, as far as I can tell, you should be dead. And he said, why? I said, because you have toxic levels of vitamin D. And he says, you don't know much about vitamin D, do you, Sonny? And I go, what I'm taught in medical school, you know, what I taught in residency. He says, well, you know, maybe you ought to read about vitamin D. So I did. And sure enough, you look at super old people, they have incredibly high levels of vitamin D3D in their. In their body. You look at the higher your vitamin D is, the more diffuse your microbiome is, the better that tropical rainforest, it actually influences the bacteria that live in your gut. So the University of California, San Diego, big vitamin D research unit, says the average American should be taking 10,000 international units of D3 a day. Average American, they have never seen vitamin d toxicity at 40,000 units a day. I haven't either. Some of my troublemakers, we first start out, I have to give them 45,000 international units of D3 to get their levels up.
- [39:10]
B
I love that. Okay, so depression, anxiety, people just get their vitamin D up. Is it a blanket statement to be like, just eat everything organic. Try to get as much Roundup out of your body as you can?
- [39:22]
C
Yeah, I think that's a really good idea. Or move to Europe until
- [39:27]
A
some people
- [39:27]
B
are doing that right now, probably not because of their gut, but their gut will probably get better.
- [39:31]
C
That's right. For other reasons that we won't go into. But the other thing is, again, I can seal your leaky gut, but if you keep swallowing razor blades, it'll just slice it back open. And you have to be aware that there are certain plant compounds that are mischievous to eat. Now, there are lots of ways to get rid of them. One of the best examples, 3 billion people use rice as their staple. And if brown rice was so good for you, then why do 3 billion people go to the trouble of taking the hull off of a rice and make it white before they eat it? Because the hull has the lectins in them. Why? For ever since agriculture, almost all cultures try to get the hull off of wheat and have white bread. And only the peasants got the brown bread because the lectins were mischievous. But why did almost all cultures ferment their grain products before they ate them? Even the Incas fermented quinoa. They soaked it, they let it rot, and then they cooked it. And it's not on the package directions. So these are actually easy to do things. Why do most cultures that use beans soak their beans for a very long time? In Tuscany, beans are soaked for 48 hours. And having soaked beans, most people who've ever done it, there's scum that rises to the top. Beans have their own microbiome, and the microbiome ferments the lectins on the surface of the beans. And that foam you see is the fermentation. And so you go, wow, look at these cultures. Here's. Look at what they do to detoxify these plant compounds.
- [41:20]
B
Fascinating. So if you. This is an asking for a friend question. Of course. If you have a gut that loves sugar, how do you change your. Because you're like, well, I. My. The microbiome is making me want my Haagen Dazs mint chip ice cream.
- [41:34]
C
That's exactly true.
- [41:36]
B
Right? So like, okay, now That I have that knowledge. What do I do about it?
- [41:40]
C
So you got it. You got to do two things. I'll use an example. Here in Santa Barbara, 20 years ago, we had whale watching tours and we had the California gray whale. And they're pretty boring, but that's all we had. And now with climate change, we have pods, blue whales, we have humpback whales in Santa Barbara channel from Hawaii, and we now have killer whales from up in your neck of the woods.
- [42:11]
B
Yeah, you probably took ours.
- [42:13]
C
And what are they doing down here? Well, they're following the food supply. And that food supply has changed because of climate change of where they are. So here's an example I use in the book. We have bacteria, the bad guys that love simple sugars and they love fats. And they can utilize them extremely well. And they, believe it or not, send text messages to your brain to go find those foods. They've actually moved up from our colon into our small bowel where this stuff they can get to, they can feed there. The problem, the good guys can't use those. They can't ferment these simple sugars. They need these complex starches, these polysaccharides to ferment, to break down. Back when our ancestors were eating whole foods and eating them whole, we would extract the sugars and proteins and fats, and there'd be a whole lot left over of these undigestible soluble fiber, and they would drift down into our colon where these guys are going, oh, dinner arrived, thank you so much. And when they got these things, they would send text messages up to the brain, like GLP1 that said, our needs are met. You don't have to be hungry anymore. Thank you very much, see you tomorrow sort of thing. Now none of that stuff is in our diet. And nothing gets floated down. And those guys go, what the heck? I hear you chewing up there. I heard you swallow. Where is it? You got cheated. Go find some more and keep looking for it. And that's why you look at the Pictures on the 40s and 50s and even 60s, we were eating the same amount of calories, actually probably more. And everybody was skinny. I mean, skinny.
- [44:18]
B
The older pictures are crazy. Or like that's how it's been the whole eons of all of the times we're eating calories that just don't have any nutrients left.
- [44:27]
C
Yeah, it's the perfect calories to feed the bad guys what they're looking for. And it's just perfect.
- [44:36]
B
Perfect. Let's talk about, for our wrap up question, should Everybody be on a probiotic, prebiotic. What's the difference? And what do you think about that?
- [44:47]
C
In my practice in Palm Springs, I use the example that I'll sell my patients grass seed. And they come back three months later and said, you sold me bad grass seed. It didn't grow. And I go, well, what'd you do with it? Well, I took it out to the sand and I spread it out, and they said, well, did you water it? No, you didn't tell me to. Well, did you fertilize it? No, you didn't tell me to. Well, what did you expect? And this was actually confirmed by the Sonnenbergs that the problem is you can swallow all the probiotics, the grass seed. But if you don't give these guys, number one, what they need to eat, fertilizer, and if you don't actually have things that other bacteria that support them make products for them, postbiotics, nothing will ever grow. And I see this all the time when I do these gut bacterial profiles of my patients. They're eating, for instance, lots of prebiotic fiber, but they're not growing any of the good guys. And this was proven by the Sonnenbergs. But if you then add, for instance, postbiotics like vinegar or fermented foods with the prebiotic fiber and with certain bacteria that can get into the gut alive, then you get chance. But the great news is we're getting better and better and better at identifying what each of these different bugs likes to eat, who it needs around them to be support system and personalized medicine. Pretty soon, we'll have it to where a gut test, a stool test, will pretty much enable us to dial in what everybody needs. It's actually pretty exciting.
- [46:41]
B
That's super exciting. So you're saying that the apple cider vinegar craze on the Internet has a little bit of truth behind it?
- [46:48]
C
Oh, yeah. But it's not for why they think it is. It actually has a short chain fatty acid called acetate, and there's an assembly line to get to the ultimate gold standard, butyrate. You've got to have an assembly line of all these different other short chain fatty acids and medium chain fatty acids to build the final building block. And if you don't have those and we can measure these in gut tests, and it's amazing. Most people are just profoundly deficient in these short chain fatty acid material, and even the bugs that make it amazing.
- [47:25]
B
Are you able to give me, like, some common labs that you think are legitimate? Because I know there's other nurse practitioners listening, physicians listening. If they're like, I want to but understand how to actually test and measure stuff, do you think you could provide that to me? Because I know people will be interested?
- [47:41]
C
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [47:42]
B
Okay, awesome. We'll get that. We'll get that offline for people because I think they're going to be like, okay, all right. It's not woo, but where do I start of like, besides vitamin D, there's got to be some other things that we can check for people. Thank you for coming on the Gut Brain Paradox. When does it come out?
- [47:57]
C
April 15th. Tax Day. Tax day when you get your refund. Buy the book.
- [48:02]
B
Buy the book and your podcast is the Gundry Podcast and multiple other books. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us today. It's been super educational.
- [48:12]
C
Well, pleasure to meet you and thanks for having me.
- [48:15]
A
Thank you for listening to this week's episode of youf Are Not Broken. If you want to dig deeper with me, sign up for my Adult Sex Education Masterclass where you learn adult things like communication skills, anatomy lessons and desire types, and how to talk to your doctor about sexual health concerns. If you want the Adult Sex Education Masterclass for free, join my monthly membership for more in depth exclusive content, more time with yours truly. A private podcast, coaching and educational empowerment and you can watch my interviews live and get them immediately without advertising. Head over to www.kellycaspersonmd.com for the membership and Adult Sex Ed Masterclass members. Get the masterclass for free. This podcast is presented solely for educational, entertainment and informational purposes only. I am a doctor, but not your doctor in this format and all of my platforms and guests including on this podcast are not giving individual medical advice or practicing medicine. See in Consult with your own care team for your individual needs and concerns. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the care and advice of a physician, therapist or other qualified professional. This podcast does not constitute the practice of medicine, in case you were curious about that and no doctor patient relationship is formed. But I still love you. Using the information on this podcast or any of my platforms is at your own risk. Until next time, remember, you are not broken.