About this show:
The Gut-Brain Paradox is Dr Steven Gundry’s latest book, now available for pre-order.
People know Dr Gundry as ‘the guy who told us plants were evil foods’ but have they read his books, I wonder?
The key to enjoying the wide variety of foods we must enjoy to have a healthy, diverse microbiome that promotes overall health, is to have a robust and diverse terrain – it’s a positive feedback loop we must create, and when we don’t? A whole host of issues can occur that eventually lead to a whole host of diseases and diagnoses.
We cover a LOT of ground on the show this week:
Why the doctor he dedicated his book to, was beaten to death in an asylum
How our terrain matters and why it took so long to understand it better.
How you can trace different addictions to different microbiome populations/overgrowth
How “plants don’t kill you” much as many social media accounts might try to tell you – BUT… you have to have what it takes to enjoy and process them.
The difference between protein sources
The label that Dr Gundry’s been given and is puzzled by “the father of carnivore diets”.
The miracles Dr Gundry sees every day in medical practice, as he helps heal people’s terrain – heal the terrain, heal many, many different illnesses, in so many cases.
And, believe it or not, we cover even more than that list! Hour of power if ever there was one!
Enjoy the show,
Alexx Stuart
Founder of Low Tox Life and the Low Tox movement
Join me on Insta @lowtoxlife
Steven Gundry, MD, is the director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs, California, and the founder and director of the Center for Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. After a distinguished surgical career as a professor and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery at Loma Linda University, Dr. Gundry changed his focus to curing modern diseases via dietary changes. He’s written several bestselling books and more than three hundred articles published in peer-reviewed journals on using diet and supplements to eliminate a variety of serious diseases.
You can grab the Gut-Brain Paradox on Pre-order, HERE.
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Thank you to this month’s show sponsors for helping you make your low tox swaps easier:
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About Dr Steven Gundry
Steven R. Gundry, MD, is the director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs, California, and the founder and director of the Center for Restorative Medicine in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. After a distinguished surgical career as a professor and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery at Loma Linda University, Dr. Gundry changed his focus to curing modern diseases via dietary changes. His bestselling books include Gut Check, Unlocking the Keto Code, The Energy Paradox, The Plant Paradox Family Cookbook, The Longevity Paradox, The Plant Paradox Quick and Easy, The Plant Paradox Cookbook, and The Plant Paradox, and has written more than three hundred articles published in peer-reviewed journals on using diet and supplements to eliminate heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and multiple other diseases. He is the host of the top ranked nutrition podcast The Dr[LN1] . Gundry Podcast and founder of Gundry MD, a wellness brand. Dr. Gundry lives with his wife, Penny, and their dogs in Palm Springs and Montecito, California.
https://drgundry.com/
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https://www.facebook.com/DrStevenGundry/
https://x.com/drgundry
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCtxo0nTZjzlKJq5-vJq6s6g
Booktopia: https://bit.ly/4giYRxA
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Title show track, by LIOR.
Love the podcast music? You will hear excerpts from Lior’s track “Caught Up” – go check it out on iTunes or Spotify if you want to hear the whole song or album, Scattered Reflections. Co-written with Cameron Deyell, it’s a great song and I love the reflective energy of it – perfect for the show, right? Enjoy. Lior is always touring, so do check out his website. It is wonderful to hear him sing live, trust me.
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If you would love reading like me or you just simply want to go through the full transcript, you can check below.
[Alexx Stuart] (0:00 – 9:58)How bacteria rule your health for better or worse, that is today’s show. Hello and welcome to the Lotox Life Podcast. I’m Alexx Stuart, your host, founder of the Lotox Movement and today I have show 419, welcoming Dr. Stephen Gundry to the show for the first time. Now I have read a couple of his books over the past decade and for those of you who don’t know him, you might think of him as the guy who alerted people to the fact that just saying eat the rainbow might actually not be a great idea for lots of people but there is a reason why and it’s not forever, which we talk about on today’s show. And it kind of leads quite logically to his upcoming book which is now available for pre-order, The Gut Brain Paradox, because here he explains in such incredible detail. It’s, I mean, I rarely read health books these days completely cover to cover, but this one definitely had me riveted from cover to cover and I read it in two days and I really found that the explicit and specific links made between various gut bugs and various addictions to the point where you have different presentations depending on the type of addiction or craving and also the greater clarity we now have connecting the microbiome and its health to things like neurodegenerative disease and today and in the book we discuss really detailed ways this comes to be. It is a great book, sure, but today’s show is packed. You guys know me, it’s never always about, yeah, but read it in the book, yeah, but read it in the book.
We want answers and we dive deep in the show as well and I quite like the show to bring almost like an extension, a deeper, a deep dive into people’s books so that we understand the why even more and that it’s just, yeah, I’m going to jump into it in a little second. If you don’t know Dr Stephen Gundry’s work, he’s actually a celebrated immunologist by trade, director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs, California. He’s a very busy clinician, so he writes his books so that he can just get the information out there, but really he spends a lot of time still in a time where he should be kicking back and enjoying retirement, helping people reverse disease and very, very serious diseases.
He’s written over 300 articles published in peer-reviewed journals as well, has a supplement company that sort of supports people at different stages based on the research he’s done and the things that he knows works with his patients, so an incredible person to have on the show. I’m really stoked to have cleared up some of the nonsense that then people take some of the ideas of doctor’s books and then go on socials and claim things in very black and white ways like lectins are bad. Well, yes, sometimes to some people and depends.
It always depends and I think you’ll get a load of clarity around that from the plant world today. I also grilled him at the end of the show on his food list because there were some things there that really shocked me that I wanted clearing up and we got to the end of my hour with him and I still had loads of questions, so I’m teeing up with his assistant at the moment, a LOTOX club master class where we are going to be able to ask Dr Gundry more questions, clear anything up that we’re not sure of and we want answers on, and so that is obviously for our LOTOX club members. Imagine if you had a place on the internet that was free from all the kind of freaky stuff that happens in free health groups. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I see those comment threads and I think, whoa, okay, um, so you have a beautiful supportive Facebook group, you have a master class every single month, you can, you do and don’t have to go to those by the way, you don’t have to do it like it’s a course and you’ll fall behind if you don’t come.
I just like doing lots of stuff for our members and making it a no-brainer. You also have a bunch of shopping codes, incredible five years worth of archives from when we first started the club, both ebooks and master classes, I think we’re up to about 35, 40 now, when you join. And it’s for the price of a coffee a month, a takeaway coffee a month, that’s it.
So that’s $49 Australian, which means it’s even cheaper for the Euros and the Americans and the Canadians, it’s about $32 or 30 Euro. So jump on LOTOXlife.com, hit the Explore tab, LOTOX Club’s the very first option if you want to join us there and I would love to, love to, love to see you there. All Aussies that join as well get a free copy of my book LOTOX Life Food, which is all about regenerative agriculture and how we can cook from scratch more without the overwhelm, eat good food without the cost freakouts, it really is a very helpful book.
So I’ll hook into that chat in just a little minute. I really, really, really love this podcast. I can’t wait to hear what you guys think, but I want to introduce you to our podcast partner for this next two weeks.
We have the wonderful Ojiji, Karen founded Ojiji off the back of moving from her lustrous architecture career through to starting to develop all sorts of sensitivities and being diagnosed with chemical sensitivity, then studying building biology and then moving into thinking, hang on, there’s so much wrong with the planet. What could I do here? And coming up with a plastic free tooth powder idea that just took off and these tooth powders are brilliant.
They’re gentle, they’re not harsh and abrasive, but you do get a sort of gentle whitening effect as well as a tooth strengthening effect with the inclusion of hydroxyapatite, which has a ton of research behind it, both the nano and non-nano forms. Karen’s tooth powders, Ojiji has the non-nano form and that is a choice of hers based on wanting to see how nanotechnology and research pans out first given regular hydroxyapatite also has incredible gains for tooth care and tooth strength. And the tooth powders come in three different flavors.
You have brilliant exclusions here, right? So we want to get rid of all those mainstream fluoride, triclosan, which is an endocrine disruptor, parabens and BPA endocrine disruptors, a whole bunch of nasties like sucralose or sugar or artificial sweeteners of other kinds. There is so much crap in mainstream toothpaste still, not to mention things like sodium lauryl sulfate, which is extremely abrasive to the entire oral microbiome.
So Ojiji tooth powders are awesome. And with the code LOTOXLIFE with any order over $50, which is just grabbing a couple of things off the website. You also get a free tongue cleaner.
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I genuinely implore you to get started and it’s free with your Ojiji order over $50 for the next couple of weeks. So jump in, code LOTOXLIFE. And of course, we have our major partner, Ozclimate.
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There’s a bunch of stuff in there for you to get an extra 10% off, whether they’re on sale or not. That’s always there for you in 2025. Now let’s talk gut bugs and what we can do to improve our terrain with Dr. Stephen Gundry. Enjoy, guys. Stephen, hello. How are you?
[Dr Steven Gundry] (9:58 – 10:00)Alex, nice to see you. [Alexx Stuart] (10:00 – 10:22)
Now, at the very start, you dedicate your book to Hippocrates. One might think, yeah, I get that. But also perhaps to a lesser known gentleman by the name of Ignaz Philipp Sammelweis.
Hopefully I’m pronouncing that right. Could you share his story? Because I think a lot of people won’t know that.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (10:22 – 13:40)Now, so Dr. Sammelweis trained at Vienna General Hospital in Vienna, Austria in the 1800s. And he noticed that the leading cause of death in women in childbirth was an overwhelming sepsis that followed delivery of their child. And he noticed that when this was being done in Vienna General Hospital, there was a lot of women died from childbirth from this infection.
And yet, there were women who were delivered by midwives, not at that hospital. And they didn’t seem to have this problem. And he noticed that at that time, professors would do autopsies, then immediately go from the autopsy table, and then deliver a baby.
And one of his professors actually nicked his finger doing an autopsy. And he actually died following nicking his finger of a bacterial infection. Now, bacteria we’re not known about.
He just died from being nicked. And he said, now, wait a minute, you know, my professors are going back and forth from the autopsy. And most people had died from infections back then.
And the women who were delivered by midwives who weren’t doing those sorts of things, didn’t get this horrible infection. And he said, I have a feeling it’s because they’re not washing their hands before the delivery. And I don’t know what’s causing it.
But I swear it’s the handwashing. So he started washing his hands before deliveries. And he instructed anyone who was working with him to wash his hands.
And lo and behold, his results, unlike any of his other colleagues, match the midwives results. His patients didn’t get these overwhelming infection. His colleagues didn’t like that, because that went against their practice.
And he was actually labeled not only a quack, but a dangerous quack. And he was actually exiled to Budapest. And he was put in an insane asylum.
And he was actually beaten to death in the insane asylum as a young man. Turns out, 15 years later, the bacteria were discovered. And his antisepsis was recognized.
He literally became, you know, he was the father of, you know, antisepsis. And as I say, may he rest in peace.
[Alexx Stuart] (13:42 – 14:07)Imagine being so sensitive, that you would be offended that someone would suggest that you had to wash your hands before a procedure. I mean, I can’t even imagine the fragility of the ego that would then exile that person to be beaten to death in an asylum. That just it’s quite mind blowing, isn’t it?
And yet, we still see it in various degrees and forms today in medicine.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (14:08 – 14:48)Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think he should be an example for us all.
And, and then you’ll notice, I also talk about Carl Sagan, who said that, you know, science only advances by questioning conventional wisdom. And because conventional wisdom eventually is usually proven wrong and most everything and it’s, it takes courage, as he says, to question conventional wisdom. But until you do that, science doesn’t move forward.
[Alexx Stuart] (14:48 – 15:31)No. And I would say also, it takes courage to admit you’re wrong. Because a lot of people straight away go to, oh, there’s too much money at stake, there’s too many profits.
And that’s why we have this problem. But that example, far less money at stake back in those days, it’s actually also an ego and a vulnerability problem, like people not being able to say, hey, you know what, you might have a point, let’s debate it, let’s take a look. And I think our culture, like this patriarchal ego culture is so fragile, that that that is actually one of the key reasons we don’t move forward in science.
I mean, look at the cholesterol debacle.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (15:33 – 15:36)Right? Probably don’t get us started on that. [Alexx Stuart] (15:36 – 16:08)
No, no, that’s not what we’re here for today. I know, I know. And so we then move on to this battle between bacteria being the bad guy in the Pasteur camp, and then the Bichon camp, the terrain being the thing we need to cultivate, so that bacteria is less of a problem in terms of overgrowths and infections.
And again, we pick the wrong guy to get behind.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (16:09 – 16:14)And he was a great, you know, he was a good. And that story, I’ve read all the books on both. [Alexx Stuart] (16:14 – 16:15)
Yeah, yeah, I bet. [Dr Steven Gundry] (16:16 – 18:14)
That story is just fascinating. They, you know, they were arch rivals. And Pasteur was a better public speaker.
And Bichon wasn’t. And Pasteur got the undying gratitude of the King of France by correctly finding out that bacterial contamination was the reason wine went bad. And let’s just say, if you’re in France, the guy who looked after the wine at all costs.
And so, you know, Pasteur rose to prominence and pasteurization and sterilization and Bichon fell by the wayside and was basically labeled a quack. And, you know, it’s really interesting. Bichon believed that there were all these particles in blood that you could see with specialized microscopes, with light microscopes.
He said, look, there’s little living creatures in blood. And everybody said, yeah, right. Yeah, right.
Whatever. Yeah, whatever. And lo and behold, like I talk about in the book, guess what?
We now find bacteria in healthy people’s bloodstreams and find bacteria in the brain. And it’s like, Bichon would talk about ahead of his time. And why don’t these guys bother, quote, normal people?
And Bichon, I believe, was correct. It’s because the terrain, the terroir, kept bad guys under control. And it was only when the terrain was altered that a bad guy came out and was mischievous.
[Alexx Stuart] (18:15 – 18:51)And so, like, I mean, I know we are jumping way, way forward here, but the work you did to uncover lectins being problematic, could we then say lectins might not be problematic for a huge range of very healthy terrain people, but because of the degree to which guts are leaky these days and how many people have poor terrain, that’s when these things become a problem. And they might not be problematic forever if you do the work on your terrain. Correct?
Have I got that?
[Dr Steven Gundry] (18:52 – 20:10)That’s exactly correct. And that’s something I think a lot of people, so I first talked about this in my bestseller, The Plant Paradox, and plants have a defense system against being eaten, but it’s a balance of power. And we had an amazing defense system against these plant compounds, and it happened to be our microbiome.
People don’t realize there are bacteria that enjoy eating gluten. They love it. There are, as I talk about in the book, there are bacteria that love eating oxalates.
Unfortunately, if you look at someone who believes or is sensitive to oxalates and then look at their microbiome, they don’t have oxalobacteria and other lactobacilli that will eat oxalates. And so their defense against those compounds is nil. And so these guys then have kind of a direct shot at where they want to get to make us feel lousy.
And the cool thing is when you restore this terrain, they’re no longer a problem. That’s exciting.
[Alexx Stuart] (20:11 – 20:43)Yeah, it is exciting. Because I’d imagine when you write a book like that, and then, of course, influencers get a hold of it. And then they start to productize and protocolize and say, like, it is absolutely bad.
If you read your work, it’s actually it can be very temporarily damaging because of the state of what’s happening now. But it’s not an intrinsically bad thing. Like you don’t then label oxalates are bad and gluten is bad.
It actually depends on the terrain.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (20:44 – 21:20)Correct. You know, I wrote about the seven deadly disruptors in the paradise. Antibiotics, glyphosate, etc.
And that part kind of because lectins were so controversial, people didn’t hear or didn’t read that. Guess what? It’s because of this disruption of our terrain that these guys, which we held in check for eons, now showing themselves for the first time.
[Alexx Stuart] (21:21 – 21:21)Yeah. [Dr Steven Gundry] (21:23 – 21:37)
And the good news is, you know, yes, it’s hard to get your terrain back to where it should be. But the good news is you do that and then lots of wonderful things are possible. [Alexx Stuart] (21:39 – 22:46)
Something’s just come into my mind and I feel like I have to ask it right now. A lot of people say when they travel to different continents, they’re then able to eat different foods. I know this for myself as someone who seems to be very gluten sensitive here in Sydney, Australia.
I have French heritage, French on my mum’s side. When we travel to France in the countryside, I do not have the same problems. How fast does terrain change and coupled, I guess, with stress and neurotransmitters then changing?
Because as I was reading your book and starting to see all the links, I was like, yes, interesting. There’s a lot of moving parts to our terrain working well and they’re all talking to each other on these superhighways. Could part of it be it’s not just glyphosate or, you know, all the things that people say, but it’s actually that our terrains are more receptive in different parts of the world.
That is such a tangent, but I just had to ask.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (22:46 – 24:08)Well, no, and I actually bring this up in the gut brain paradox. Most of my patients have leaky gut when I see them and 80% of them have autoimmune diseases that they’re not having success with. And 94% of them in a year are in remission from their autoimmune disease and their leaky gut is sealed.
And a lot of these people will go over, particularly to Europe, to France or Italy, and they can’t help themselves. And they, you know, they have a croissant and a baguette or pizza and they do not react just like you. And you go, oh, you know, this is great.
Dr. Gundry has cured me and I can have all this stuff again, you know, hallelujah. And they come back to the United States and they eat our bread or our pizza. And within weeks, their gut is all messed up or their psoriasis is flaring and the joint is hurting and they go and they call me.
What the heck? I thought you cured me. And I’m going, oh, there was no glyphosate over in Europe.
And you came back and started eating our stuff. And unfortunately, Australia has a glyphosate.
[Alexx Stuart] (24:08 – 24:12)We’re the same. Yeah. So you really believe that it is more about farming practices. [Dr Steven Gundry] (24:13 – 24:14)
Yeah, unfortunately. [Alexx Stuart] (24:15 – 24:19)
I figured it was, but I thought, well, let’s just see if there’s a bit of gray area there. [Dr Steven Gundry] (24:20 – 24:35)
Yeah, it’s worse than I thought. And I go into why it’s so mischievous. Among other things, glyphosate in and of itself can cause leaky gut. [Alexx Stuart] (24:36 – 24:40)
Well, because it is, it has an antibiotic function. [Dr Steven Gundry] (24:40 – 24:48)
Oh, yeah. People don’t realize Monsanto patented glyphosate as an antibiotic. [Alexx Stuart] (24:49 – 25:13)
I know you say that and people are like, oh, OK, because then they understand antibiotic resistance. So they might be skeptical of like, oh, organics, you know, it’s all the hippies just saying we have to. That’s expensive.
Can’t do that. But if you explain it through something that people have a bridge to understanding a little bit more well-known in the mainstream, I find that to be a bit more of a successful sell.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (25:14 – 25:27)Yeah. And glyphosate, the reason it got approved initially is glyphosate targets what’s called the shikimate pathway, which is kind of fun to say. [Alexx Stuart] (25:27 – 25:28)
I like it, too. [Dr Steven Gundry] (25:30 – 27:05)
And plants use the shikimate pathway to grow. And if you block the shikimate pathway, plants die. OK, humans don’t use the shikimate pathway.
And so the FDA was convinced that you can have all the glyphosate you want. No problem. But they didn’t bother to tell them is the bacteria use the shikimate pathway, just like plants.
And so again, that’s why was patented as an antibiotic. And what’s really scary is glyphosate doesn’t kill all bacteria in the gut. But among other things, it’s really good at killing the tryptophan producing bacteria.
And it leaves resistant bacteria kind of alone. And so isn’t it interesting that, yeah, glyphosate was introduced in the mid 1970s. And if you watch anxiety and depression and even addictive behavior, yeah, we can blame social media and we can blame all sorts of fun things like COVID.
But you can track anxiety and depression just right from the start of glyphosate and knocking out all of these bacterial pathways. And we used to think it was the neurons in the gut that were producing all these neurotransmitters. It’s the bacteria that we missed that because we didn’t know they did that.
[Alexx Stuart] (27:05 – 27:57)Exactly. And something I found fascinating in your book was when you were talking about addiction, you literally break down the addictive substance and the bacteria that especially link to that exact addiction. And it made so much sense because I’ve only ever been addicted to cigarettes.
And next month, that is 20 years as a non-smoker. And I couldn’t figure out why. But then, and I’ll get you to unpack this, the dopamine connection and then the loop you end up in, I was like, mind blown.
It makes so much sense now why it took a full year to let that psychologically go because my terrain kept telling me I needed it.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (27:59 – 27:59)Yeah. [Alexx Stuart] (27:59 – 28:24)
And I thought it was a brain thing, completely separate from back. I never got told, hey, let’s work on your gut and that’ll help you quit smoking. That was never a part.
It was about calming the brain, doing meditation, doing hypnosis. So can you explain a couple of your favorite discoveries around addiction and specific bugs?
[Dr Steven Gundry] (28:26 – 31:08)Yeah. I mean, what was fascinating to me once I went down this rabbit hole and I started down this rabbit hole because I deal with a number of addictive individuals. And the great thing about addictive individuals is they’re usually incredibly smart, incredibly intelligent, and ought to know better sort of thing.
You can then look at which bugs are driving this and how they’re actually commanding us to get the substances that they want. And they may use like dopamine to get it. Most of them actually use pain to get it.
For instance, and I break it down, there’s the alcohol addictive microbiome. There’s the nicotine addicted microbiome. There’s the opioid addicted microbiome.
There’s even the NSAID addicted microbiome, which is really scary. NSAIDs for those who don’t know are the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, like naproxen. And that story is fascinating in and of itself.
These drugs were introduced in the mid 1970s as well. It’s kind of funny how, for instance, broad spectrum antibiotics were introduced in the mid 1970s. Are we seeing a pattern here?
So NSAIDs were considered so dangerous because they were really good at causing leaky gut to go on. And they were really good at changing the terrain, the microbiome, making it very dysbiotic. And they were so dangerous, even though they were very useful for relieving pain, that at least in the United States, they were only available as prescription and they were only allowed to be used for two weeks before they could not be renewed because of this potential.
And I mean, I have all the pharmaceutical companies papers showing that this was going to happen and the FDA knew it. And that’s why it was only by prescription and only for two weeks there were warnings. Now, of course, they’re the most widely used painkiller there is.
They’re available over the counter. I mean, we have children’s ibuprofen.
[Alexx Stuart] (31:08 – 32:22)Yeah, we have lovey-dovey commercials saying, is your little one feeling, you know, whingy and upset with those teething worries? Go get yourself some. And then you’re like, and it’s just all so lovely and innocent.
And I genuinely, I don’t know, probably because I had migraines in my twenties before I discovered holistic health. And I remember I was working in cosmetics as a young 20 something. And I used to pop a bunch of NSAIDs and then take a nap in one of the facial kind of beauty rooms.
If the managers were on a break, just to kind of let them kick in and get back to work. Of course, all the artificial fragrances and crap we were pumping around in the air and spraying on ourselves and lathering on our customers. I mean, hello.
You can only operate from what you know at the time. I don’t feel guilt or anger about that, but I did take a shed ton of them and I do have detoxification issues now as a 40 something. And I don’t question for a second that there’s a link there of having taken that many painkillers.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (32:22 – 35:43)Yeah. So it produces leaky gut and I talk mechanism that actually there’s so potent mitochondrial uncouplers that locally on the wall of your gut that kills off cells and produces these little lesions. And that alerts your immune system, your immune system creates inflammatory cytokines, causes pain.
And then that pain signal, your brain says, oh my gosh, I’m getting all these signals about pain. We need to turn that pain off. And so you take more NSAIDs, gut microbiome, the dysplastic ones, just what we wanted to eat.
And then you get more pain and the cycle just persists and persists. And the drug companies know this. And so it’s like a no brainer.
The more I get you to take of these things, yes, you’ll relieve the pain, but then it not only will come back, it’ll come back more. And drug seeking microbiome then says, oh, I can get more if I give her more pain. And it just continues the cycle.
It’s the same way with opioids, which is really startling what happens. And you can do this in mouse studies. You can do it in human studies, but the mice studies are really kind of cool that I’ve talked about in the book.
So you can get a mouse addicted to opioids pretty easy and show that it’s microbiome not only changes, but the microbiome then causes leaky gut, which causes you pain. The pain makes you seek more, but the best part is the microbiome then steals more of those opioids for itself, making the opioids less effective. So you need more to get the same pain relief, which gets them more of what they want.
Now you go, oh, come on, they don’t really do that. Well, you can give mice who are needing more and more of the same to get the relief, give them antibiotics and wipe out this gut microbiome. And all of a sudden they become incredibly sensitive to low dose opioid.
In other words, a little bit will be all they need. And you go, well, what the heck? What if we put that opioid microbiome back into that mouse with basically a fecal transplant?
All of a sudden they revert right back. They need massive amounts of opioids again. Why?
Yeah. Why? Because the microbiome is back in there and it’s like, wow, that’s amazing.
And the hopeful word is, the problem is, as any addictive individual knows, is the recidivism rate is horrible. I mean, most people go right back to it. Yeah.
They can clean up their act. They can go cold turkey.
[Alexx Stuart] (35:44 – 35:52)Or they do surgeries and have injections and like all sorts of other interventions that become more and more extreme even. [Dr Steven Gundry] (35:53 – 36:37)
Yeah. And it’s the same way with alcoholism. We know that people who have an alcoholic microbiome have a much more difficult time getting off of alcohol than individuals who drink a lot of alcohol that don’t have that microbiome.
And I go through that in depth and it’s like, son of a gun, no, you know, no wonder. Oh, so these guys were better people because they, you know, got off of alcohol or cigarettes. No, it’s they had a different microbiome that they were fighting against and it was the microbiome driving their behavior.
[Alexx Stuart] (36:38 – 37:35)Yeah. Wow. And so can I ask, because a lot of people, and you do unpack this in so much detail in the book, but to just give a little bridge towards anyone hearing any of that and going, oh my gosh, I’m addicted to NSAIDs or I have alcohol problems and find it really hard to just do a week without booze.
What are the best ways to actually test and how can we find readily accessible practitioners? I mean, not everyone can fly across to California and visit you. And so, you know, I think what are some of the audition questions to see, are they going to do the right testing for you, get the level of detail you deserve and need to get to the bottom of what’s going on in your gut and what kind of questions could we be asking to make sure we’re going to be working with practitioners that can help us?
[Dr Steven Gundry] (37:37 – 38:32)Well, the reason I write these books is to try and bring this sophisticated knowledge from looking at thousands of people with leaky gut, watching what we needed to do to show the leaky gut, working with lots of addicted individuals, working with lots of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, is hopefully I’ve done most of the guesswork taken away from me, taken out of it. And for most people, the book is, look, here’s the guidelines, here’s the yes list of foods, here’s the no list of foods, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to take a lot of vitamin D regardless of what your practitioner says. [Alexx Stuart] (38:33 – 38:35)
When you say a lot, what does that even mean? [Dr Steven Gundry] (38:35 – 39:20)
Well, so for instance, there’s a big research group at the University of California, San Diego here in Southern California. They think the average person, male or female, should be taking 10,000 international units of D3 a day. That’s in European, I don’t know the Australian, but 250 micrograms of D3 a day.
And that’s way over what people say. I’ve never seen vitamin D toxicity. The University of California has never seen vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day.
That’s a lot of vitamin D.
[Alexx Stuart] (39:20 – 39:26)It’s a lot. And what do we think of vitamin K being paired into a lot of those supplements? [Dr Steven Gundry] (39:26 – 39:50)
Yeah, I like vitamin K2, particularly with higher dose vitamin D. I do like vitamin K2, but you don’t need much vitamin K2. You only need about 100 micrograms of MK4 and MK7.
I like the combination of the two. You don’t need much, but yeah, it’s a good idea, but that’s number one.
[Alexx Stuart] (39:50 – 39:52)It’s the D that’s the number one, yeah. [Dr Steven Gundry] (39:52 – 42:15)
Yeah, the D is number one for three reasons. Number one, the higher your level of vitamin D, the more diverse your microbiome is, period, regardless. Period.
Number two, we have stem cells in the lining of our gut. And our gut has one of the fastest turnover rates of any cells in our body. That’s why people who are on chemotherapy, one of the biggest side effects of chemotherapy, which kills rapidly dividing cells is gut distress because that’s really the fastest reproducing line of cells in us.
Vitamin D, there are stem cells in the lining of our gut that are always ready to replace damaged cells. It turns out that they’re exquisitely sensitive to vitamin D. And if you don’t have enough vitamin D, they just kind of sit there and twiddle their thumbs and go, what?
You want me to do something? You want me to grow? What?
They’re like teenagers. Yeah, wake up. There’s work to do.
So one of the things that struck me early on in autoimmune disease patients is number one, they had usually very low vitamin D. And number two was how much vitamin D I needed to get into them to kind of activate these stem cells, plugging the gap. Number three, vitamin D, normally our immune cells are white blood cells.
80% of them are down lining the wall of their gut. Why? Because this is where mischief comes through.
And 80% of your army is right there at the border. It turns out that vitamin D is designed to tell these cops, don’t be so trigger happy. Get your finger off the trigger.
You don’t need an AK47 set on automatic all the time. Relax, as we joke in the United States, go have a donut and a cigarette. Sorry.
[Alexx Stuart] (42:15 – 42:18)That’s not a medical recommendation, folks. [Dr Steven Gundry] (42:18 – 42:18)
Yeah. [Alexx Stuart] (42:18 – 42:19)
Yeah. [Dr Steven Gundry] (42:20 – 44:55)
And one of the things that we learned working in autoimmune disease, and I got into this as a transplant immunologist. I wanted to know, you know, okay, what’s the immune system looking for? How do I tell it to not look at this heart from a pig I’m putting in or something like that?
And so my lab was a transplant immunology lab working at manipulating the immune system. So when people started showing up in my office with autoimmune disease, they’d go, hey, what do you know about autoimmune disease? I don’t know anything about autoimmune disease, but I know a whole lot about how the immune system works.
So if you want to play, let’s play. So getting back to vitamin D, we know that the immune system in leaky gut patients is really, really activated. And normally it should listen to vitamin D, but with autoimmune disease, it’s so activated that you have to hit it over the head with a sledgehammer of vitamin D, like a teenager.
Hey, pay attention, calm down. And that’s what we found. Now, the good news is once you kind of get everything under control, you can kind of back off on these things, but getting your vitamin D levels up is so important.
So that’s the three-prong vitamin D. Now, the other thing that I keep making the case for that we mentioned earlier, we used to have a great defense system against the things we swallowed, including all these plant compounds. And that defense system, sadly, for the reasons we’ve talked about, is decimated in most people.
Okay, let’s repair the wall of your gut. And I’m happy at Gundry MD to sell you products to do that. But initially, if you keep swallowing razor blades, you’re going to slice it right back open.
And that’s why until we get that terrain back, until we get those defense guys up and running, you really need to get some of these mischievous plant compounds out of your diet. And yeah, most people, we can get them back into you. But like I tell people, you’re going to hate me for six weeks, and then you’ll really start to love me.
[Alexx Stuart] (44:56 – 45:53)And then you think, I was wrong about him. Okay. So as I read through the lists of the yeses and the noes, I just, I have to use me as a guinea pig here.
So we’re pretending that I’m in your office and say, but Dr. Gundry, I can’t do that. And I’m going to make my case. So you list all the cruciferous veggies as a yes.
I have an absolutely shocking intolerance to cruciferous veggies. I don’t know whether it’s a midlife thing. I don’t know whether it’s spurred on by virus that I’ve had, because you talk about the viral bacterial and immune relationships in the book, which I’ve found really interesting.
But then on the no list, I see my beloved squash family that I seem to be able to eat so happily with absolutely no gut disruption, no bloating, no issues. What would you do with me?
[Dr Steven Gundry] (45:54 – 46:12)Well, you’re actually the person who I put on the chicken and the sea protocol. People who have really sensitive gut wall lining, notoriously, you guys cannot tolerate cruciferous vegetables. [Alexx Stuart] (46:12 – 46:15)
I find a little bit with eggs as well. [Dr Steven Gundry] (46:15 – 46:37)
So I’m almost wondering if it’s a rather hilarious story. So we have an expression, more bitter, more better. And it is true that long lived people, cultures are notorious for consuming bitter food. [Alexx Stuart] (46:38 – 46:48)
Well, arugula is literally one of my favorite things in the world, but it’s not my friend at the moment. This midlife transition has really done me a nasty. [Dr Steven Gundry] (46:49 – 49:32)
These guys, the bitterness is the plant’s way of warning you, you really shouldn’t eat me because I am going to cause real havoc in you. And it’s that bitterness that was the plant’s evolved to warn you that there are really nasty compounds that are going to make you wish you never put a piece of arugula in your mouth. So those are the warning systems.
So I’ll tell you, funny, true story. I’m a plant predator. I like cruciferous vegetables because of the sulfur-containing compounds.
But a number of years ago, you remember when the Magic Bullet and the NutriBullet came out, these little small blenders, right? So I could eat a kale salad with absolutely no issues. My wife decided one day when these things came out, that she was going to make me a kale smoothie to take to work.
And she basically blended raw kale in a NutriBullet with not much else. And I’m drinking it on the way to work. And a half an hour later, I had the most explosive wipeout at work and in the bathroom.
And I’m going, you know, what happened? So if I ate whole kale, the individual cells were not opened and my digestive enzymes slowly broke them up. And these nasty compounds, and I would have a really good gut microbiome that can handle them.
But what she did, probably on purpose, was she broke the kale apart and released all of these horrible anti-gundry compounds. And I swallowed them. And so my gut said, what the heck did you just do?
We’ve never seen this many compounds at once, and we’re going to protect you. Out they go. And so there’s a perfect example that I could tolerate whole kale, how we always ate kale, but there’s no way I could tolerate that onslaught.
A lot of my troublemaking patients, the kale, the cruciferous vegetable family either has to be cooked for days and days.
[Alexx Stuart] (49:33 – 49:42)Yeah. Oh, well, you think of like the recipes that involve them around the world, they’re often fermented or pickled or there’s a lot done to them before you eat them. [Dr Steven Gundry] (49:42 – 49:46)
That’s exactly right. You have to have the bacteria do the work for you. [Alexx Stuart] (49:47 – 49:50)
Yeah. Right. Detoxify. [Dr Steven Gundry] (49:50 – 49:56)
Bacteria are really good at detoxifying plant compounds. That’s what they were designed to do. [Alexx Stuart] (49:57 – 50:02)
And so then what’s with squash? Why are we saying goodbye to that for a while? [Dr Steven Gundry] (50:02 – 50:03)
Well, I’m glad you asked. [Alexx Stuart] (50:04 – 50:07)
I’m really genuinely like what? [Dr Steven Gundry] (50:08 – 50:46)
Squash are a new world plant. But the main reason I eliminated them early on is that squash are a fruit. And fruit in general, fructose is one of the best, worst enemies of your gut and your mitochondria that I can conceive of.
And so a lot of my patients have insulin resistant metabolic syndrome. And for that reason, squash for most people is a no-no. They’re a fruit.
If it has seeds in it, it’s a fruit.
[Alexx Stuart] (50:47 – 51:06)I’m so sad. I get it, but I’m sad. And so when I rebuild my terrain, let’s say, would I, through the protocol in the book, then be able to reincorporate cooked cruciferous veggies bit by bit? [Dr Steven Gundry] (51:06 – 51:07)
Yeah, absolutely. [Alexx Stuart] (51:07 – 51:09)
And squash? Please tell me. [Dr Steven Gundry] (51:09 – 51:23)
And squash. You know, really, even in the plant paradox, they said, hey, once we fix your gut, you can have baby squash, and you can have zucchini, and maybe yellow squash. Get them growing mature.
They haven’t matured there, and they don’t have as high sugar content.
[Alexx Stuart] (51:24 – 52:00)I was slightly terrified, less so now. So thank you for unpacking that. Let’s talk about the red meat versus chicken, poultry, and fish, because that’s quite different quantity recommendations.
And I mean, we live in the age of carnivore diets everywhere. And I often think about microbiomes and long-term changes that those sorts of extreme diets would then create. But what is the reasoning behind that four-ounce-per-week minimum of red meat?
[Dr Steven Gundry] (52:01 – 52:30)Well, so I am sometimes, by the carnivore community, labeled as the father of the carnivore diet. And I do not claim to be that. But the argument was, if you take my arguments to extreme, all plant compounds do not wish us well. [Alexx Stuart] (52:31 – 52:35)
Yeah. And haven’t we heard that time and again on social media? [Dr Steven Gundry] (52:36 – 57:34)
Correct. And so when the plant paradox came out, you know, oh, plants hate us, and we should avoid them at all costs. That’s not true for reasons that maybe shouldn’t concern us right now.
But it turns out that polyphenols in plants are actually some of our gut buddies’ favorite foods. And this was really a recent discovery that bacteria love polyphenols, and they make polyphenols available to us, and they actually detoxify some of the harmful effects of polyphenols. So why not just go on an all-beef diet, which is what most carnivores do?
The problem is, and I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and that doesn’t mean anything to anybody, but Nebraska is called the beef state for a reason. Nebraska used to have the largest stockyards in America, in Omaha, where we fatten cows with corn and soybeans, but that’s another story too. And so, you know, beef made Omaha what it was.
And so, you know, I should be a huge fan of beef. The problem is that beef, lamb, pork, and milk from cows, sheep, and goats have this odd sugar molecule called NU5GC. So what?
It turns out we, humans, poultry, fish, and shellfish have a different sugar molecule called NU5AC. See, these two sugar molecules are virtually identical except for one oxygen molecule. So what?
When humans swallow NU5GC, and fun experiments have been done, humans make an aggressive antibody to NU5GC. We hate it. We just think it is awful.
And the minute it comes in contact with us, we make antibodies to it. So what? Well, when I wrote The Plant Paradox almost 10 years ago now, we knew that NU5GC and NU5AC are very similar, and that if we made antibodies to NU5GC, we might attack our own NU5AC with what’s called molecular mimicry.
And that’s where I left it. Well, now it turns out because these molecules are so similar, we have NU5AC lining the wall of our gut. We have NU5AC lining our blood vessels in what’s called the glycocalyx.
We have NU5AC lining our blood-brain barrier. And we have NU5AC in our joint surfaces. What we now know is the more NU5GC we eat, the more it displaces NU5AC lining of our gut, in our blood vessels, in our blood-brain barrier, in our joints.
And our brain abhors NU5GC. And we attack NU5GC in all these places, and we create leaky gut, leaky brain, neural inflammation, and joint inflammation. If that’s not bad enough, we know that cancer cells, which can’t manufacture NU5GC, use NU5GC from our diet to actually cause local inflammation and grow and prosper, which explains why there’s a strong association between red meat eating, milk drinking, and heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and dementia.
Now, here’s the good news. Two pieces of good news. The more NU5AC foods we eat, the more we displace NU5GC from the wall of our gut, from our blood vessels, from our blood-brain barrier, and from our joints.
That’s the first really good news. The second really good news, which I wrote a lot about in Gut Check, here’s the great news. If you ferment NU5GC-containing foods…
[Alexx Stuart] (57:35 – 57:37)And so that’s red meat. [Dr Steven Gundry] (57:37 – 57:38)
That’s red meat. [Alexx Stuart] (57:38 – 57:39)
And milk. [Dr Steven Gundry] (57:39 – 58:11)
Milk. The bacteria eat the NU5GC, so there isn’t any left. Yeah.
That’s the conundrum that if you look at cultures that eat fermented milk products, that eat fermented animal products, they have exceptional good health. Because, for instance, prosciutto has no NU5GC. What?
[Alexx Stuart] (58:13 – 58:14)Newsflash. [Dr Steven Gundry] (58:14 – 58:56)
And traditionally fermented sausages are fermented with lactobacillus. They don’t have any NU5GC. So the exciting news is we now know, well, wait a minute, how do these guys who are eating all these sausages and prosciutto have such incredible good health and longevity?
Because they’ve fermented away the NU5GC. And the same way with yogurts are fermented. There’s no NU5GC in them.
And traditional cheeses, which are fermented like parmesan red jam, have NU5GC.
[Alexx Stuart] (58:56 – 59:04)Or gruyere or anything that’s really beautifully made. Not your kind of cheap, tasty at the supermarket kind of stuff. [Dr Steven Gundry] (59:05 – 59:22)
The joke in Switzerland is we’ll sell all the cheeses with holes to eat to the idiots. We’ll keep all of our gruyere and compte for ourselves because there are no holes in it. [Alexx Stuart] (59:24 – 59:35)
So does that mean raw milk dairies that have their bacteria still in them tend to be less problematic for people if it’s properly, safely processed? [Dr Steven Gundry] (59:35 – 1:00:15)
Or are we not counting that? But remember, most of the cows, for instance, in Australia and the United States are Holsteins, black and white cow. And Holsteins make not only NU5GC, but they also have a really nasty casein called casein A1.
And a wonderful researcher from New Zealand first rang the bell on this, the devil in the milk, about the association of casein A1 with type 1 diabetes, etc. So that’s another subject.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:00:15 – 1:00:25)It is. But so does A2 protein therefore have less of the GC? [Dr Steven Gundry] (1:00:25 – 1:01:09)
Yeah, it doesn’t have the casein molecule that’s troublemaker. But if you ferment milk, the casein molecule is broken down into much less antigenic compound. And you look at these long-lived cultures, one of the things that’s fascinating about the blue zones is they all are eating fermented milk products, goat and sheep products.
They’re eating goat and sheep yogurts. They’re eating goat and sheep cheeses. And they’re eating fermented animal products because this is all they can live on.
And, you know, I talk about all these cool polyamines in fermented animal products.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:01:10 – 1:02:50)It really does. I mean, honestly, I could talk to you for another whole hour, Stephen. Fascinating.
And I had all these questions on some of the bacteria buddies and not so nice guys, but we will have to leave it for another time. Yeah, definitely. I was going to suggest we do a book club session on this so people can ask questions as well, because it is there’s just so much to unpack.
And I know a lot of people often get information not from the horse’s mouth, but from the influencers who then interpret that to be very black and white situations where plants end up evil or meat ends up God or vice versa. And and I really think nitpicking through the gray area reminds us that there’s an incredible amount of gray area. And it’s very situational as to what is going to work for you and what isn’t.
So could I get you to just leave us with because one of my favorite parts of your book is the breadth of severe conditions that people come to you with that you work in one way, the way you talk about in the book, of course, to then radically transform their lives. And we’re talking very different things, you know, from a kid who can’t get up and walk to an elderly woman with Parkinson’s and like every possible type of illness in between. Can you share an incredible story of hope to finish our chat today?
[Dr Steven Gundry] (1:02:52 – 1:05:31)Yeah, you know, it’s funny, the young lady, I shouldn’t actually identify where she’s from, but one really wonderful story that I talk about in the book is I do see a lot of people with food addictions, with bulimia and anorexia nervosa. And a couple actually I’ve never met the young lady. I’ve only zoomed call with her and her parents.
She bounced around from treatment center to treatment center, horrible anorexia, you know, a little stick of a way for a woman, a young girl, teenager. And all these kids are really smart. I mean, they’re accused of being overachievers and blah, blah, blah.
And that’s why they got it. So we looked at all of her blood work and, you know, it’s unbelievable leaky gut, incredible dysbiosis, very low vitamin D level, very low omega-3 fatty acid levels. So, I mean, she was on a feeding tube and she was institutionalized.
And so we introduced some, you know, soluble fiber through her feeding tube, introduced some probiotics, got her vitamin D levels up, got some fish oil in her. And literally within a couple of weeks, she was off of her feeding tube. She was accepting the food that they were giving her.
And we could see actually in a month, a radical change in her gut microbiome and the wall of her gut and her vitamin D levels. She’s now home. And she’s actually, she actually looks forward to the food we’re giving her because, you know, she was under control by a set of microbes.
And as much as we like to think that, you know, we’re under control and this was her problem, her brain problem, it was under control by a set of microbes. And we just changed the information, the messages. And so, I mean, that’s so hopeful that, my God, you know, we’ll take back, we’ll get those guys out of control and we’ll put the good guys in and we’ll be okay.
Does it take work? Yes, it does. But she’s a wonderful example.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:05:31 – 1:06:05)That’s such a great example. And there are so many more. And I think changing the information was one of my favorite kind of distillations from reading it because once you realize it’s not your fault and you’re not the bad person, you haven’t done a bad thing, it’s just that you’re hosting some really unfavorable party guests that need to be kept in check and you need to invite a better crowd.
And it’s literally that. And I love that because everyone can draw hope from that. So thank you for writing it.
[Dr Steven Gundry] (1:06:06 – 1:06:08)Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me on. [Alexx Stuart] (1:06:09 – 1:09:04)
I hope you loved today’s show as much as I loved bringing it to you. I want to remind you that if you are someone who craves a low-tox community that is judgment-free, full of empowerment, has health professionals and building health professionals that can support you, as well as me in there answering questions multiple times a week, I want to invite you to join the Low Tox Club. For the price of less than a cup of coffee a month, you have an annual membership for $49 Australian.
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