Is Your Gut Controlling Your Mood? Dr. Steven Gundry on the Microbiome-Brain Connection

Dr. Mindy

On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I am bringing you back Dr. Steven Gundry. So Dr. Gundry, he is the most well-known for his original book that just took over the world and stunned everyone, which is called The Plant Paradox. And in that book, he really brought forward some controversial thoughts that still hold true today, which is that plants have toxins on them. And some people’s gut microbiome actually will respond negatively to those toxins. And he specifically called them oxalates and lectins, which many people know now, they’re unable to handle these plant toxins. especially when they have a severe gut situation. What he’s bringing us now is so good. I am so excited to bring this to you all. He just put out a book called The Gut-Brain Paradox, and it’s about how our gut microbiome controls our brain. If you have never heard this concept before, please listen, take notes, listen again, Send it to a friend because what Dr. Gundry is bringing forward is going to change so many people’s opinion on depression and anxiety and neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and aging conditions like Alzheimer’s. When we break down all of these mental health challenges or brain challenges, we start to see that there is a gut bacteria issue that needs to be repaired. And it can be repaired by things like fasting. And you’re going to hear some really cool information on different types of diets, like the carnivore diet. And we’re going to look at, is depression actually your life circumstance or is it an imbalance in your microbiome? I really hope it gives you a new lens on not only how your brain works, how your moods work, but also gives you an idea if you have any loved ones with any kind of neurodegenerative issues or anybody who’s dealing with Alzheimer’s or dementia, let’s bring it back to these microbes. They’re really, really powerful. So Dr. Steven Gundry, the gut-brain paradox. And as always, I hope you enjoy this incredible conversation and it moves the needle on your health and your life. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. So, Dr. Gundry, let me welcome you back to the Resetter podcast. I’m excited to have this chat with you.

Dr. Gundry

And it’s great to see you again, Mindy. So thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Dr. Mindy

So it was interesting. You and I chatted about this book back in October when I was on your podcast.

Dr. Gundry

Yeah.

Dr. Mindy

And, you know, my first thought was, why aren’t we talking about the gut-brain access enough? And why it seems when I have read the research, looked at what these microbes do to our thoughts, I have questioned why we are even approaching mental health from a mindset standpoint. So can we start with this question? When we’re looking at our thoughts, our behaviors, the way that our brain functions, what is controlling our brain more? Is it the microbes or is it actually neurons in our brain?

Dr. Gundry

Well, I submit and have some pretty good evidence in the book that it’s the microbes. It’s the passengers on the bus that are actually driving the bus. And we really ought to get over this. You know, bacteria have been around for 3 billion years. We’ve been around 100,000 thereabouts. And, you know, they probably have worked out some pretty good survival skills during 3 billion years. and probably want to direct our behavior to get them what they want. Unfortunately, bad guys can also direct our behavior to get them what they want, right?

Dr. Mindy

Right. So, okay, so when we look at the gut microbiome, just to bring everybody into the conversation, we’ve got good guys, we’ve got bad guys. Do we have microbes that are neutral? Just give us an idea of what that ecosystem looks like before we dive into how it affects the brain.

Dr. Gundry

Sure. You know, I started the book with one of the great scientific titan warfare in the 1800s between two French chemists, Louis Pasteur and Antoine Beauchamp. And they were both fighting, to put it mildly, over microbes and whether germs, bacteria in specific, were bad guys like Pasteur got. And Beauchamp said, no, no, no. All these organisms exist in what he called a terrain, an ecosystem. And I use a tropical rainforest as an example. And there are all these interdependent species. And they’re neither good guys nor bad guys. Obviously, some things eat other things, et cetera, or need a product of one plant or animal to survive. But as long as things are in balance, this ecosystem, the terrain, keeps everything on a level playing field. But when imbalance happens, when one or more species becomes dominant, that’s when you see a disease process, an infection. And Pasteur was a great public speaker, as I understand. And I’ve read actually every book written about both of them. He figured out that French wine went bad by bacterial contamination. And the French king thought that was pretty important information. information. So Pasteur won and Beauchamp lost. But in several accounts, there’s no proof, but in several accounts on Pasteur’s deathbed, he called Beauchamp’s aide Bernard to his bedside. And he said, you know, he was right. It is the terrain, some.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. I’ve heard that story as well. You know, I researched that story during the pandemic. I was I was like, when’s the last time we’ve had a pandemic? And when I went back and looked at the 1918 Spanish flu, that was the time those two men were arguing. And now we have more reference point to it because we’ve been through our own pandemic. Because what out of that, pretty within a couple of years came penicillin. And then once penicillin came into the world, it was like a miracle. And you can understand why. Think about how fearful we’ve all been. But, you know, to your point in the book, where do we sit now with bacteria now that we’ve created all of these antibiotics? Like, if anything is proven, is it the terrain or is it the microbes? I think it’s the overuse of antibiotics. Would you agree?

Dr. Gundry

Yeah, and not only that, but as I’ve talked about before and also in this book, people need to know that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, was patented by Monsanto as an antibiotic, not as a weed killer. And we’re now, luckily through animal studies particularly, we now know that glyphosate decimates our microbiome and in fact decimates the tryptophan serotonin producing microbiome. And is it any wonder that we’ve got this incredible epidemic of depression and anxiety? I mean, you know, I mean, 20 to 30 percent of females in this country are on antidepressants. I mean, it’s like, holy cow.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. Yeah. Is it affecting women more? Is a woman’s gut more susceptible to things like glyphosate than a man’s leading us to depression?

Dr. Gundry

Well, I think you guys have always had a gut sense.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah, we do. Yeah. No joke.

Dr. Gundry

No joke. You know, I have a wife and two daughters and some female dogs, so I get it. You know, I’ve been educated all my life. Well done. But, and you know, autoimmune disorders affect women far more than men, although men are catching up. Because everybody’s got an autoimmune disorder now, and that’s another story. But yeah, women are more susceptible. And my theory is that you guys, your immune system has to learn tolerance to the largest parasite ever created, and that’s your fetus. And your immune system has to do kind of a 180 in trying to accept a clearly foreign body for nine months or so without trying to kill it off. and then go back to normal functioning. And I think that’s this glitch that makes women in particular more susceptible to autoimmune diseases. And I happen to think, like Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, that all disease begins in the gut. And certainly in my practice, which is 80% autoimmune patients. Every autoimmune patient has gut dysbiosis and abnormal terrain. Every autoimmune patient has leaky gut intestinal permeability. Every one, 100%.

Dr. Mindy

Wow. Wow. Where are we in understanding the impact of microbes on our human cells? I also dove into this and saw that when you look at the Human Genome Project, it came out like late 70s, early 80s, but then they followed it up with the Human Microbe Project. And then that really was ongoing for a long time. It may still be. And it really showed that it influenced how human cells behaved. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Gundry

Yeah, the Human Microbiome Project finished in 2017, actually the date I published The Plant Paradox. And what that’s done is, you’re right, it’s really opened our eyes into the fact our genome isn’t very interesting. It’s actually not a really unique, big genome. I mean, corn has more genes than humans do. A sand flea on beach has more genes than humans do. But what’s really interesting is, so we’ve got a hundred trillion bacteria just in our gut alone. And these guys are constantly dividing and they’re constantly sharing genetic information with each other. They’re constantly getting genetic information from viruses, phages that attach to them. And so they’re constantly in this recombination of genes. And I and others have proposed that just like you and I are talking on our computers here, this computer doesn’t have a lot of functioning power, doesn’t have a lot of memory, but we have uploaded most of the processing power up to the cloud, which is supposedly infinite processing power. Because this microbiome is so genetically active, is such a good interacting substance with our environment, everything we swallow goes through our gut, that we’ve uploaded the processing power of decision making to the bacterial cloud in our guts. And so those who are watching on video, so my phone is a really good receiver for information from the cloud. In fact, there’s four pieces of information that just came. And I propose that our brain is merely a really good receiver for the information that’s coming from our bacterial cloud. And if we accept that, then things start to make sense. Like, why does somebody just have this sugar craving that they can’t give up? Why is the recidivism rate of any addiction treatment program about 90%? There’s only about a 10% long-term success rate. You choose the addiction, it’s usually a 90% long-term failure. Why is that? Because we’re trying to manipulate this when the book, and I suggest, we should be manipulating the gut microbiome.

Dr. Mindy

Is there a way for us to know based off of behavior or symptoms if our gut microbiome is well-balanced and serving us well? Like, I could be depressed because of a life situation. How do I know if that depression is being amplified by an imbalance in my microbes or actually is just a life situation?

Dr. Gundry

Well, that’s true. We now know that depressed individuals have a specific identifiable microbiome, anxious individuals. One of the shocking things that I discovered is people who have an outgoing personality kind of from day one actually have a unique microbiome that makes them an outgoing personality. That’s cool. I mean, it’s kind of cool.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah, it’s

Dr. Gundry

really cool. So, and actually, I hope my

Dr. Mindy

daughters aren’t looking. As somebody with an outgoing personality, I’m like, oh, I like that.

Dr. Gundry

Yeah. So, yeah, embrace your microbiome outgoing personality, right? Yeah. So, and these experiments have been conducted in rodents. You can take a germ-free mouse, have them eat poop from a depressed human individual, and they’ll get depressed. Now you go, well, wait a minute, how do you know if a rat’s depressed? Well, they’re actually mazes and tests to measure depression in rats. It’s actually pretty easy. And so, and there was an experiment done in the 1930s. Back in those days, severely depressed individuals were institutionalized. And so they took these very depressed individuals and they gave them enemas and cleaned out their guts. And then they gave them fecal enemas from happy people. And they actually got happy. And it’s like, what? Are you sure? Well, yeah, now we’re sure because now we know how that happened.

Dr. Mindy

I have been a part of a beautiful mixture of health care practitioners for years. And one of them in there said to me one time, hey, Mindy, I’d take your poop if it’s going to make me drop weight and put a smile on my face. I was like, I think that’s a compliment. But it is interesting when we start to see that these bacteria are not just controlling our minds, but controlling our metabolism, controlling our immune system. Again, I just, where my brain goes is how does the individual human understand if they have the right mixture of bacteria or not? Is there a way for us to tell?

Dr. Gundry

Well, it’s getting better and better.

Dr. Mindy

Again,

Dr. Gundry

women have always had this gut feeling, and that’s actually pretty intuitive. If you think something’s off in your intestines, it is. We now know, for instance, Parkinson’s is a disease that comes to the brain from the gut, as does Alzheimer’s. And one of the striking things when we start looking at the history of Parkinson’s patients and even Alzheimer’s patients, they all collectively have gut issues that they can cite. Or they have history of chronic antibiotic use, et cetera, et cetera. But they all will tell you this. But now with the modern microbiome testing that we have on stools, because of the human microbiome project, we can identify the genetic code of all of these species. And now we can actually number them. We know the ratio that they’re supposed to have. I talk about in the book, when you’re looking at a tropical rainforest, there are ecological terms looking at the diversity. And one’s called Shannon’s Index and the other is Simpson’s Index. And we can now apply those indexes to the

Dr. Mindy

microbiome.

Dr. Gundry

That’s cool. And you can give a patient a map of, okay, these are the guys that are the bad guys and they’ve kind of taken over. And your good guys, man, they’re hiding in the corner and we got to coax them out. We got to starve the bad guys. And that’s actually a big part of the book is now don’t despair about all this. There is something that can be done. And I wouldn’t see patients six days a week if I just wanted to give them bad news.

Dr. Mindy

Right. Of course. Of course. Explain the mechanism behind this. I had a really wonderful conversation about a year ago with Dr. William Lee. And we actually specifically honed in on the strobilome and the set of bacteria that break down estrogen. And we started geeking out on how these bacteria go up the vagus nerve and then go up into the brain and start to stimulate different parts of the brain. And before you know it, we were also geeking out on fermented sourdough and how it can impact the bacteria that make oxytocin. So bring this into some kind of complete understanding for the layperson. Is it these microbes are just hanging out in the gut? And is it the vagus nerve they travel up? How do they get to the brain? And then how do they decide what part of the brain they’re going to stimulate?

Dr. Gundry

Well, the vagus nerve is just one tiny piece of this puzzle. In fact, I mean, we used to thought when I was in medical school that the vagus nerve was how the brain talked to the gut. And lo and behold, now we know that for every one nerve fiber heading from the brain to the gut, there’s nine from the gut heading up to the brain. So we had it backwards. But the vagus nerve is just really an old-fashioned telephone line. But the sophistication of how these guys control us is now thanks to the Human Microbiome Project. For instance, I recently was lecturing at, get ready for this, the Society of Extracellular Vesicles.

Dr. Mindy

That sounds interesting. So what the

Dr. Gundry

heck is that? So these are exosomes or extracellular vesicles. These are little packets of information. I look at them as kind of a link on an email that I click, well, to come on your show. I clicked the link and it instantly brought me here. So we now know that bacteria and plants and fungi can pop out little pockets of information that have genetic instructions, can have microRNA, mRNA, and even living mitochondria. And pop them out. And the way these are designed, they can go through the wall of the gut. They can go through blood vessels. They can go through the blood-brain barrier unobstructed, merge onto a target cell, and release that information, and change the epigenetic expression of that cell. Insane. Yeah. And it’s like, holy cow, I thought it was pretty cool that bacteria could send messages up with the vaginal nerve. But now, are you kidding? They’re sending, you know, text messages with a link to open it up and it’s going to change, you know, my behavior. And talk about sophistication. Wow. And it’s like, wow, is this complex. How could we have imagined that these little one cell organisms have this

Dr. Mindy

incredible complex

Dr. Gundry

control over us? And once

Dr. Mindy

you see

Dr. Gundry

all that, you go, whoa.

Dr. Mindy

What kind of behaviors do they control? Just so people, is it everything in our brain?

Dr. Gundry

You know, we certainly know, I get this question a lot, you know, GLP-1 agonists are in. We now know it’s the microbiome that actually produces GLP-1. And it’s the microbiome production of GLP-1 that if you’re feeding the good guys what they need to eat, They basically sent GLP went up to the brain and said, hey, great news. You ate everything we need. You don’t have to go looking for anything else. We’re great. You don’t have to be hungry. Now, unfortunately, those guys have mostly been killed off or starved to death. And most of the processed foods and ultra processed foods that we eat are very simple sugars and saturated fats. that a whole different set of bugs can utilize. And in the old days, our grandparents ate whole food, and they ate them whole. And so we, in the digestive process, would get glucose and amino acids and fats, but then there’d be a whole lot left over in terms of polysaccharides, resistant starches, that would filter down to the colon, where most of these guys live, and there’d be plenty left over. And then these guys say, yep, we got it, no problem. And one of the things that I tell my patients who have this food noise in their head is, well, we could eat. A podcast host admitted right before the podcast yesterday that she had consumed eight.

Dr. Mindy

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. That would never happen with me. That’s quite an admission. Yeah.

Dr. Gundry

I say, so let me tell you what just happened. I said, you ate those Oreo cookies. And they’re simple sugar and fat. And these microbes who love this stuff gobbled it all up. And there was nothing left that was coming downstream. And the guys downstream go, wait a minute. I heard her chewing up there. She swallowed something. I know it’s coming. and then nothing arrives and they go, well, what the heck? I just heard you eating. You got cheated. We didn’t get anything. Go find some more food. So they send out ghrelin, another hormone, to make you hungry. And no wonder these things just set up the cycle of food noise. And that food noise is actually your microbiome. The good guy’s going, you’re starving me to death. What the heck? What are you doing?

Dr. Mindy

So you’re eating, but you’re not feeding these microbes that will send your brain the right signals to turn off hunger.

Dr. Gundry

That’s exactly right.

Dr. Mindy

And so now we’ve come up with a drug to be able to replicate that. Is that correct?

Dr. Gundry

That’s correct.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. So what foods should we be avoiding so that we don’t destroy these microbes?

Dr. Gundry

Well, it’s a two-step process. You can’t give these bad guys the food that they can take advantage of, these simple sugars and these fats. You got to starve them. They can’t utilize long-chain starches. They don’t have the fermentation mechanism to break them down. On the other hand, the good guys do have that mechanism. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. I wish it was. For instance, there’s a husband and wife microbiology team at Stanford, the Sonnenbergs, who are real doomsayers of the human microbiome. They really think, and they’re right, that we basically have a desert wasteland of a microbiome rather than a tropical rainforest. And they don’t really think we’ll ever be able to reestablish our rainforest. I disagree with them. But they did a beautiful experiment that I talk about in the book and in a previous book. They took volunteers. And everybody knows that the good guys want prebiotic fiber. They want soluble fiber. And they use a soluble fiber, inulin, which is present in the chicory family of vegetables, radicchio and Belgian endive.

Dr. Mindy

Radicchio. Yeah. It’s my favorite.

Dr. Gundry

And the great thing is you can find it in almost every grocery store now. It’s not in the weird health food section anymore. And asparagus has inulin. Artichoke hearts have inulin. So they gave volunteers lots of inulin. And they looked at their gut microbiome diversity. And they looked at markers of inflammation. And they gave them all this stuff. And nothing changed. The gut microbiome didn’t change. Their inflammation markers didn’t change. Yeah, and go, hmm, well, wait a minute. That’s what those guys want to eat. They said, you know, we’re missing something here. There’s got to be some precursors that I’ve written about for many books now called postbiotics. These are essentially the products of bacterial fermentation, of eating things. And we should give these people, in addition to the inulin, we should give them some fermented foods. They chose yogurt and kefirs. You could have chosen sauerkraut or kimchi. You could have chosen vinegar. And we’ll do the same experiment. Give them the inulin, but give them this. Now, with the addition of these postbiotic foods, these fermented foods, the gut diversity increased and the inflammation markers decreased. So to talk about Hillary Clinton, it takes a village. And that’s really what has to happen.

Dr. Mindy

So bringing more fermented foods in is really key to the diversity of, yeah. Yeah, I can really, you know, after, you know this as a podcast host, when you interview a lot of people, you start to see conflicting theories all over the place. But one of the unifying theories I see amongst everybody who has a slant in nutrition is everybody’s pretty pro-fermented food. Is there any person who should not be eating fermented foods?

Dr. Gundry

Well,

Dr. Mindy

some people

Dr. Gundry

actually have to kind of take it slowly, just like some of my patients, introducing really any plant material into them when they’ve got a really destroyed wall of their gut can be mischievous. We’ve certainly seen people, I’ll give you an example. Oh, there’s a keystone species in our gut called Acromancea mucinophila. And it’s a really important species. And it lives in the mucus layer of our gut, which really protects our gut from mischief. And it eats mucus. Now you think, well, wait a minute. Mucus is good and it’s eating mucus. That sounds like a bad thing. But the more mucus it eats, the more mucus is produced by the wall of our gut. So it’s actually a plus win. And we can measure acromancea in our patients. And most people with leaky gut or with an autoimmune disease or dysbiosis really don’t have any acromancea. And so you could give some of these people acromancea. And there’s several companies that make it, both in living form and in dead form. And that’s another subject. And some of these people get really severe abdominal pain when they introduce acromansia. And I think in those people, their mucus layer is so devoid that acromansia begins to really start chomping on the cells themselves, trying to get some nourishment. And William Davis makes a case for this. And I’ve seen it in my practice. Some young children who their mothers gave them acrimony had a bad reaction. So it’s more complex than meets the eye.

Dr. Mindy

So are probiotics a risky adventure to dip into? Would you be better off trying to search for these bacteria in food?

Dr. Gundry

Well, I think, yeah, back in the good old days, these bacteria, And more importantly, these bacterial products were in the foods we ate. And you look at these ancient cultures, fermentation was really, number one, the only way to preserve food. We didn’t have refrigerators. And it was the only way to preserve food by actually eating the sugar molecule. So wine is preserved grape juice. And it has the products of fermentation. So some of my patients say, doggone it, I’m having fermented foods every night. God bless you, Dr. Gundry. Great suggestion. And not to change the subject, but there is a cool human trial of looking at the gut microbiome diversity, comparing red wine, the equivalent calories in grape juice, and the equivalent calories in gin. And lo and behold, it was actually the red wine that promoted gut diversity and improved gut wild health. The grape juice had no effect and the gin actually had a very negative effect.

Dr. Mindy

Wow. You just put a huge smile on my face. Like you, I have a soft spot for a good bottle of wine. So does it matter then? Does it need to be biodynamic, natural? I mean, of course, it goes down that path.

Dr. Gundry

Well, yeah. I mean, most of our California wines have glyphosate in them.

Dr. Mindy

I

Dr. Gundry

was a few years ago, I was talking to Michael Mondavi, who is Robert Mondavi’s son who runs Mondavi. And he said it took us 10 years to get glyphosate out of our soil in our vineyards. 10 years. Wow. Wow. It’s

Dr. Mindy

crazy. This stuff

Dr. Gundry

is just everywhere.

Dr. Mindy

Would you say glyphosate is one of the worst pesticides for the microbiome?

Dr. Gundry

Well, I mean, antibiotics are even better. But again, glyphosate is an antibiotic. We should realize it

Dr. Mindy

is

Dr. Gundry

an herbicide, but it was, again, patented as an antibiotic. And there’s some really good animal studies using human diet equivalent amounts of glyphosate that show that the animal’s microbiome is just totally changed for the worse. All the good guys are wiped out.

Dr. Mindy

The bad

Dr. Gundry

guys are pretty resistant to it. And so you wonder why we have so much anxiety and depression. I’ll give you another example, which was really educational for me. Again, most of my patients, we treat their autoimmune disease, and we have a really good success rate. 94% of my published data are in remission off of all their meds in a year. Awesome. You know, their psoriasis goes away, their rheumatoid arthritis goes away, their Crohn’s goes away, you name it. And they go over to Europe on vacation, and they can’t resist. They have croissants, and they have baguettes, and they have pizza, and they probably have some tomatoes. And they do not react. They go, wow, you know, Dr. Gundry’s cured me. I can have all this. And they come back and they start having our bread and our pizzas and you know what else. And within weeks, they’re on the phone going, what the heck? You know, this patch of psoriasis is bad. What the heck? You know, this finger just swelled up. What the heck? I thought you cured me. I said, no, you weren’t eating glyphosate over there. And you could tolerate that just fine. But you came back and I see it all the time. It’s

Dr. Mindy

just,

Dr. Gundry

it’s so sad.

Dr. Mindy

We did in my clinic, we did a lot of heavy metal detoxing and glyphosate just drives those heavy metals even deeper into the brain. What’s your best strategy for other than avoiding glyphosate, but that’s near impossible. Is there any other way we can heal our gut from the abuse of glyphosate?

Dr. Gundry

Well, there is some evidence that humic acid does protect against glyphosate. I, for one, have my patients take about three grams of glycine every day, particularly at night, helps sleep. And it’s useful because glyphosate will compete for glycine in DNA. And you kind of flood the zone. We’re hearing that in politics now. But you can kind of flood the zone with glycine to stop glyphosate from binding where glycine would go in. And, you know, time will tell, but it certainly won’t hurt, but it might help.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. Is this why the carnivore? You have one thing I love that you put in there in your book is about a modified carnivore diet. And I can tell you as a community, our community has been experimenting with something I call carnivore fasting, where we do 17 hours of a fast and then the rest of the day you’re just eating meat. And of all the different types of fasting and food combinations, I’ve seen that one cause people to drop the most amount of weight compared to any other combination. Is it partly because of this glycine component to animal meat? And can you talk a little bit about your modified carnivore diet?

Dr. Gundry

Well, I think it’s actually more that you’re really eliminating glyphosate primarily from your diet and you’re eliminating most lectin-containing foods in a carnivore diet. And it’s interesting, if you look back at, you know, some of the famous diets like the Atkins diet or the South Beach diet or diets before that, these all had in common that they eliminated most carbohydrates. And the weight loss was usually quite spectacular. And then people would get bored of it or they’d Yeah, it’s

Dr. Mindy

boring. It

Dr. Gundry

is boring.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. And

Dr. Gundry

they’d reintroduce these healthy foods, carbohydrates, healthy carbohydrates, and their weight would come right back up. And I was very impressed with that. I got to know Dr. Atkins’ nurse and got to know his ghostwriter very well. And Atkins never realized that what was happening with his diet was that he was eliminating all these mischievous compounds. And it was the elimination, the elimination diet that was most effective. But when they added these compounds back, then people gained weight again.

Dr. Mindy

Right, right. So, okay, so explain what your modified carnivore diet is.

Dr. Gundry

Well, there’s a very interesting sugar molecule. And the word sugar shouldn’t sound like sugar sweet. Right. We have a sugar molecule in us poultry and fish and seafood that’s called NU5GC. NU5GC. NU5AC, sorry. And so we share NU5AC with all of these animals. Unfortunately, beef, lamb, pork, and milk have a very similar sugar molecule called NU5GC. They differ by one molecule of oxygen. Otherwise, they’re identical. When humans swallow NU5GC-containing foods, we make aggressive antibodies to it. We hate it. We view it as one of the most dangerous compounds we’ve ever encountered, even though it looks virtually identical to our sugar molecule, NU5AC. So what? Well, we now know that NU5AC, which lines our gut wall, lines our blood vessels, lines our joint service, lines our blood-brain barrier, it can be displaced by NU5GC in the diet. And the more NU5G-seeding foods, containing foods, the more NU5AC is displaced. So what? Our immune system attacks that NU5GC as foreign. And it causes leaky brain. It causes joint inflammation. It causes heart disease. And it causes impressive neuroinflammation. How I really started to see this is some people have accused me of being the father of the carnivore diet because if you take my anti-plant stance to the extreme, then you should never eat a plant. That’s not what I said. Right. You got to know your friends and you got to know your enemies and you got to detoxify your enemies. But so a number of my patients have tried the carnivore diet, you know, mainly beef. And they all feel great. They lose weight. They never felt better. And yet when I look at their inflammatory markers like TNF-alva or IL-6, they’re going up and up and up. And I’m going, what the heck? So I said, you know, I’m glad this is working for you. Would you mind trading, you know, pastured poultry and wild fish and wild shellfish for this? Or if you’ll eat fermented meats, fermented sausages, true fermented sausages, prosciutto is a fermented meat.

Dr. Mindy

And it turns

Dr. Gundry

out the fermentation process eats the new 5GC. It’s gone.

Dr. Mindy

Okay.

Dr. Gundry

I said, let’s try that. Would you humor me? Because, you know, I draw blood on every three months. And sure enough, their inflammation markers went away. And that, to me, has certainly convinced me in my practice that this molecule is mischievous unless you detoxify it by fermentation. And that explains, so milk has new 5GC. And that explains there’s a very strong association with milk drinking and heart disease and dementia and arthritis. But there’s a reverse in fermented milk products. The more yogurts you eat, the more fermented cheeses you eat, particularly goat and sheep cheeses and yogurts, the better your markers get. And because the fermentation process has eaten all those sugar molecules. So there’s no new 5GC in

Dr. Mindy

fermented dairy. Wow. So, okay, so your modified is fermented dairy and then poultry and fish,

Dr. Gundry

but staying away,

Dr. Mindy

shellfish staying away from pork and beef.

Dr. Gundry

You can have pork and beef if it’s in a sausage form that’s

Dr. Mindy

been fermented.

Dr. Gundry

Now, how do you know?

Dr. Mindy

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Dr. Gundry

So traditional cultures ferment their sausages. You know, they eat nose to tail, so they have to preserve everything. And so they introduce bacterial cultures into their product. And there are still, you can read a label, and if you see lactic acid cultures on the sausage label, that’s a fermented sausage. Amazing. And companies have gotten very clever. they know that consumers are now looking for the word lactic acid and not so much the word cultures. So a lot of them just inject lactic acid and don’t inject the bacteria. So I’ve had some patients come in, oh, look, I found this sausage. Look, it’s got lactic acid. I said, do you see the word culture? No. And I said, they

Dr. Mindy

fooled you. Oh, man, it’s not fair. That’s so true. Like, you have to have, like, a PhD in chemistry to be able to read a nutrition label these days. It’s really embarrassing what they’ve done to our brains around nutrition is so sad.

Dr. Gundry

Oh, yeah. For instance, pea protein and soy protein are just so low to lectins. But pea protein or soy protein isolates the lectins have been removed. So I, well, actually, if my patients have to, and I take care of a lot of vegan patients, I said, as long as you see, you know, protein isolate on the pea or the soy, that’ll be okay. But pea protein is so cheap

Dr. Mindy

that

Dr. Gundry

it’s in everything.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah, and they refine everything, right? They take the goodness, they still it down, and we think it’s healthy. It’s really quite manipulative. So, well, of course, I have to ask you what you think of fasting on the microbiome, and especially in relation to the new book and how our microbiome affects our brain. What’s the research you found there?

Dr. Gundry

You got to have a reparative time

Dr. Mindy

in the

Dr. Gundry

wall of your gut. Just like our brain needs reparative time, it needs downtime, it needs to go through a washing cycle. And digestion is hard work. It requires huge amounts of energy. And the cells in our gut are really being damaged by this process. And, you know, the average American now eats 16 hours a day. That’s crazy. Yeah. And there’s absolutely no rest time. So one of the great things about fasting that you and I know is kind of the longer you can continue a fast after not eating before you break your fast, which was breakfast, break fast, then the more reparative time there is. And the ketone production is actually uncoupling mitochondria. And it’s this uncoupling of mitochondria that allows them to have more mitogenesis, to have mitophagy. And it’s a win-win. So that’s a part of my programs for the last 25 years now.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. And do you think what you break your fast with matters?

Dr. Gundry

No. I think if you’re looking at a 24-hour cycle

Dr. Mindy

with

Dr. Gundry

a six to seven-hour eating window, there’s nothing that you have to break the fast with that I’ve seen.

Dr. Mindy

To like refeed the microbes after they’ve had a little break.

Dr. Gundry

Yeah.

Dr. Mindy

And talk a little bit about the circadian rhythm of microbes. You even in this new book talk about the moon cycle, which is of interest to me because the way we look at hormones and how hormones come in and how they’re connected to the moon cycle if you really dive into the nuance. So I found it fascinating that you’re talking about the moon cycle of bacteria. Explain that. Yeah,

Dr. Gundry

there’s been conjecture through the years that jet lag is actually caused by a change in the circadian rhythm of our microbes, not by jet lag per se. And again, think about it. Bacteria have been here for three billion years. And they’ve been exposed to the tidal pull of the moon, the gravitational pull, for three billion years. And the idea that they can’t see the moon when they’re inside of us really is meaningless. They can certainly feel lunar cycles. And so it makes sense that they, after three billion years, would cycle their activity with the gravitational pull of the moon. And any of it, I moonlighted as an emergency room doctor for many years in residency. And it is absolutely true. We added extra staff on full moons. Oh, yeah. We always had. There were more car accidents. There were more craziness. There were more stabbings. And you could say, oh, that’s an old wise. You don’t spend money for extra staff

Dr. Mindy

unless you

Dr. Gundry

know you’re going to use them. Oh,

Dr. Mindy

yeah.

Dr. Gundry

We had it marked on the calendars, the lunar cycles.

Dr. Mindy

Wow. So in your research, so then what does that look like? Certain microbes come in when the moon is waxing and some is when it’s waning?

Dr. Gundry

Yeah, they get more active and, you know,

Dr. Mindy

it

Dr. Gundry

shifts, you know, on a lunar clock basis.

Dr. Mindy

Affecting our behaviors. Yeah,

Dr. Gundry

yeah. So, you know, and we know that, for instance, you know, anxiety changes with lunar cycles. Schizophrenia really changes with lunar cycles. And as I like to try to say in the book, well, it’s actually because those microbes are changing with the lunar cycle. There’s a very good identification of schizophrenic microbes, just as an example. You can identify them.

Dr. Mindy

And can somebody do an average, like, stool test and then see what, like, when there’s so many stool tests out right now. And if you do one, do you get a really good snapshot or are these microbes kind of waxing and waning all the time? And so we don’t really have a clear way to test them.

Dr. Gundry

Yes and no. You’re right. It is a snapshot. But the stool tests are getting better. I poo-pooed them for many years. I didn’t use them in my patients because it was. It was just a snapshot. But now we can actually identify who they are, how much of the products that we now know are produced by gut microbes, the postbiotics. We can measure all the short chain fatty acids, the percentage. And we can begin to see, oh, geez, OK, we’re missing this group or this group is overgrown. And now we’re beginning to realize, OK, well, what are these guys need to eat? And what are we going to do to starve these guys? And so it’s kind of a fun balancing act.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah, and yet we’re not sophisticated enough yet in our knowledge on, I mean, if there’s trillions of bacteria. So in your book, do you address some of that? Like if you’re deficient in this microbe or you have too much of this one, how you can use food to balance that? Yeah,

Dr. Gundry

absolutely. The other thing that was discovered just a few years ago about polyphenols, these very dark and bright colors in fruits and vegetables, polyphenols are produced by plants to actually protect their mitochondria from sun damage, from environmental damage, by uncoupling their mitochondria. That’s how they work. And we thought for years that polyphenols were antioxidants. They’re not. And we’ve known for years that polyphenols aren’t absorbed very well. And we’re going, well, gosh, people who eat lots of polyphenols seem to do better. Well, it turns out polyphenols are one of the best prebiotics for the gut microbiome. And they love this stuff. And they’re the ones who then change these polyphenols into absorbable compounds that then can uncouple our mitochondria.

Dr. Mindy

And is olive oil the best polyphenol around?

Dr. Gundry

Well, there are some great polyphenols in olive oil, but spices are a great source of polyphenols. Interesting little tidbit of crazy information. Olives have their own microbiome. Leaves have their own microbiome. And there’s a bacteria on olives called L. pentosis. And don’t take notes. L-pentosis is actually one of the most important bacteria to foster the growth of acromontia,

Dr. Mindy

by

Dr. Gundry

the way. And wouldn’t you know that olive oil has L-pentosis in it. And so, yeah, olive oil is great polyphenols, but son of a gun, you’re drinking a bacteria that makes acromontia, you know, really happy. And, wow, polyphenols and a bacteria that makes, you know, no wonder. I mean, the Greeks per capita use a half a liter of olive oil per week, per capita.

Dr. Mindy

Wow. Wow. So are they the happiest people on the planet then?

Dr. Gundry

I believe so. If you’ve ever seen them dance, it’s true.

Dr. Mindy

I do have to give your olive oil a shout out because you gave me, when I was on your podcast, you gave me a couple of those products. Wow. So tasty. That was what I was, I was just taking it spoonfuls

Dr. Gundry

every morning. Really. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy

It’s really, really, really good.

Dr. Gundry

Yeah. It has, it has 30 times more polyphenols than any other olive oil that’s been described.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. It was, I could, you, and you can smell it in

Dr. Gundry

all the world.

Dr. Mindy

So yeah, it’s almost like wine. Like it just has this really different smell than what I get in a restaurant, for

Dr. Gundry

example.

Dr. Mindy

So what are you hoping to accomplish with this book? And you’ve written a lot of books and you probably have an extremely curious brain, but why this book? And what are you trying to bring forward to the culture right now?

Dr. Gundry

Well, number one, I think what I want to do is take away the shame that we all go through of, oh, it’s my fault that I’m a sugar addict, or it’s my fault that I’m an alcoholic, or it’s my fault that I like drugs, or it’s my fault that I’m depressed. And, you know, my mother beat me when I was two years old and I don’t remember it. But the point of all this is that these are not your fault. These are control mechanisms that our gut microbiome uses. And the good news is it is changeable. And I think it’s time to stop the shaming of, I hate the word, the mental illness or the shaming of depression or the shaming of food noise and food cravings. And let’s get people a way of taking control over this that doesn’t involve, don’t get me wrong, therapy is wonderful, but it doesn’t involve therapy. We want to do therapy for our gut microbiome.

Dr. Mindy

Oh, well said, well said. How long does it take to change the microbiome?

Dr. Gundry

So when I started this 25 years ago, I was pretty naive and I thought we could seal a leaky gut in two weeks. I literally thought that. It usually takes nine months to a year for most people to seal their leaky gut. Can be faster. I’ve seen it faster. But the longest it’s ever taken me is four years and a young gentleman who had such leaky gut that he could not get out of bed. He could not walk outside except to go into anaphylactic shock and was literally bedridden, cared for by his girlfriend. She’s a saint. They’re now married. He’s a normal human being. He has a job. He does everything he wants to do. But it literally took us four years to get his microbiome in shape and to seal his leaky gut. But

Dr. Mindy

now he’s

Dr. Gundry

a functional human being. So

Dr. Mindy

that’s an exception.

Dr. Gundry

But the good news is most people, it doesn’t take that long.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. I’ve seen studies where even like you, one of the more interesting ones was a National Geographic article where a journalist went and lived in an African.

Dr. Gundry

Hunza.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. And then came for three days, ate porcupine, did a few other, lived off the dirt, came back and his whole microbiome was different in three days.

Dr. Gundry

Absolutely.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah, that’s possible.

Dr. Gundry

The problem is he came back and his

Dr. Mindy

microbiome completely

Dr. Gundry

reverted back to normal in the next three days. That’s the sad part. So, yeah, you got to. And there have been researchers from Scripps who have gone and had fecal transplants from these hunter-gatherers to get, you know, whatever. And lived for a few days and then they all left because you didn’t feed them what these guys were feeding. So

Dr. Mindy

I guess they were on vacation

Dr. Gundry

for a couple of days.

Dr. Mindy

That’s right. That’s right. It was like a spa for the microbiome, living with the Hadzen tribe.

Dr. Gundry

There you go.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. Well, Dr. Gundry, you continue to be a leading edge in bringing great conversations to the health world. And probably of all the ones I’ve seen you bring, I really hope this one sticks and people grab it and start to get to know these bacteria because, like you said, the shaming, the depression, the anxiety, we’re just all over the place in trying to understand that. And you have really brought it into a focal point. So I just want to say thank you for that. It’s really time. So I appreciate that.

Dr. Gundry

My pleasure. Let’s shame the bad bacteria. Come on. Get

Dr. Mindy

out of it. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. They don’t care. Let’s go ahead and

Dr. Gundry

shame them. That’s right. Have you no shame?

Dr. Mindy

Right. Exactly. Okay. How do people get your book and tell us what we can do to send your message into the world?

Dr. Gundry

Well, you know, they can watch the Dr. Gundry podcast where I’ve had the pleasure of having you on. I think two times. Yeah. Thank you. My YouTube channels, my Instagram, drgundry.com. GundryMD.com is my food and supplement company. Hopefully I pop up while you’re scrolling your feeds and I say, hi. Hopefully.

Dr. Mindy

Amazing. And the book is anywhere books are sold. Yeah, anywhere. Please support your

Dr. Gundry

local bookseller.

Dr. Mindy

They

Dr. Gundry

had a horrible time during COVID and they’re just coming out of it. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy

That’s what I always say is go to the indies if you can because they need us. So, agreed. Well, you have done it once again. So, I don’t know how you keep popping these books out. Is it once every two years? Yeah,

Dr. Gundry

about once every year and a half. Wow. About

Dr. Mindy

my schedule. Wow. This is

Dr. Gundry

book nine in the series.

Dr. Mindy

Amazing. Amazing. Well, we appreciate you, your commitment, your brain, and keep dreaming up new things for us to noodle on. We really appreciate it.

Dr. Gundry

Oh, don’t thank my brain.

Speaker 4

Thank my microbiome.

Dr. Mindy

I owe everything

Dr. Gundry

to them and my wife.

Dr. Mindy

Well done. Well done. That was so good. Appreciate you.

Dr. Gundry

All right. Thanks. Great.

Dr. Mindy

Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.