Is there really a fountain of youth? Well, not exactly… but renowned cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Steven Gundry has come pretty close to cracking the code to living longer and healthier. In this interview, he’s pulling back the curtain on the secrets of those who look and feel young at any age, and what everyone can do starting right now. He's the author of the book "The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age." Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You know, it's trite, but you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate.
And if I can get people to change certain foods that they've accepted as healthy all of their lives, all sorts of things happen.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
podcast.
Is there really a fountain of youth?
Well, perhaps not exactly a fountain of youth, but renowned cardiothoracic surgeon, good friend, Dr. Stephen Gundry, has come pretty close to cracking the code.
Today, he's here.
He's going to pull back the curtain on the secrets of those who look and feel young at any age, and he's going to reveal how everyone listening right now can do exactly that.
Dr. Gundry, thanks for being here.
Before we get into this issue of aging, let's talk about someone who aged very beautifully.
A man who, actually, you made national, international news with Dr. Leonard Bailey.
Yeah.
Baby Faye.
And this whole idea of taking xenografts, taking animal hearts and putting them into babies who we couldn't get hearts for.
You were a young surgeon at that time.
Yeah.
All of us watching from the outside, it was almost impossible to envision it had been being conceived, much less executed.
And he just passed away.
Yes.
So I'd like to celebrate him for a second since you guys work so closely together.
Give us some of that background.
Yeah, you know, he was affectionately known as the gentle giant.
And he's a very tall individual, but he hugged everybody.
And most surgeons are not huggers, as you're probably aware.
You know, we're fighter pilots.
Get in, drop our bomb, and get out.
But Leonard Bailey, I mean, he really was a gentle giant.
And he had such a strength of convictions and love of people.
And he actually, I think, taught me more humanity than any of my mentors.
And he was my partner for most of my career.
And I learned so much from that man.
So we're both heart surgeons.
Yep.
Leonard's specialty as well.
Within the field, the idea of transplanting an animal heart into a human was extraordinarily controversial.
Correct.
It's one of the reasons it made international news when you tried it.
Give me some of the inside story of how that came about, why you finally did it, and in retrospect, what are your thoughts about it?
Well, you know, what happened on that day is that, you know, Dr. Bailey had been experimenting on animals, on primarily baboon to goat or goat to baboon, and had actually developed this to a fine science.
And he had some really great immunologists who were working with him, Nelson Canarella.
And he pretty much had convinced at least himself and the entire team that this was feasible.
Now, remember, this was back in the day when there really was no good treatment for hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
And quite honestly— Your baby's born with no real heart.
Yeah.
There's no left heart in there.
You're just barely alive because you were in your mother's belly, but you're not going to live outside.
Yeah, and except for, you know, Bill Norwood in Philadelphia, babies were sent home to die.
And the mother was given the option, you know, we can keep the baby here and let it die, or you can take it home and let it die.
And that was the option.
And one day, he talked to a mother and said, you know, this is what's going to happen, but, you know, I'm convinced that I've got this figured out enough that That it's certainly worth a while to try this.
And even if we fail, and you actually told the mother this, I think that this will be the start of something that can help children in the future.
And she said, you know, let's do it.
My baby is going to die.
And he, I remember his press conferences, he took a lot of heat.
People would call him.
They would show up at his house and say, we're going to kill your two boys so that you know what the mother baboon felt like by you taking this baby baboon's heart.
And, I mean, it was that radical.
And he just kept – he actually just said, look, my goodness, you know, we eat animals and we think nothing of taking those animals from their mothers and eating them.
And, you know, we take – We take pigs and take their hearts and we take their valves and we think nothing of this.
So, is it a slippery slope?
Maybe so.
Well, you know, much of my career working with Dr. Bailey was looking at xenotransplants using pigs as a model.
It was actually a lot of the work in using pigs as a xenotransplant that actually made me discover this autoimmune attack on the inside of blood vessels.
That was the final stop in doing xenotransplants with pigs.
We now know that we can genetically engineer pigs to get rid of that sugar molecule that you and I know, NU5GC.
But, you know, I think if he hadn't done that, I think the whole field of infant heart transplantation probably wouldn't have happened because that moment, he knew that you could do this and do it successfully.
I mean, baby Faye lived for 20-odd days.
And baby Faye actually died, we think, from an ABO miscompatibility, a blood type miscompatibility rather than anything else.
So, would I have done it?
No.
I think he was actually the right person at the right time.
I mean, this guy was the calmest person under fire I think I've ever seen.
The amazing thing to me is you were there.
This is equivalent, everyone, of putting a man in the moon.
You know, putting an animal heart into a human and then jump-starting a process with lots of other derivative benefits.
And you've taken your career from there to where most people know you now as a gentleman who's figured out more about aging than most of us.
Dr. Lectin.
Radically re-engineered some of the thought processes around foods that are quote-unquote good for you or bad for you.
Breaking down some of those barriers and making us realize there's subtle things in there that plants use to protect themselves.
And we should have all along...
At least expected that.
I mean, why wouldn't wheat protect itself from us the way we protect ourselves from other predators, right?
Yeah.
So I think let's dive into that a little bit.
But I wanted to establish the hard science background that there's an opportunity to reinvent yourselves no matter where you are in your career, and you've done that.
So I applaud you on that.
Aging, which is what the longevity paradox is about.
Why do you think we've gotten aging at least somewhat wrong?
What are the big breakthrough ideas that you've garnered over a career of challenging orthodoxy?
Well, I think the main point of the book is the aging process we've been taught is something that's inevitable that obviously we are going to die.
And in my epilogue, I talk about it.
We're all going to die.
Get over it.
That's right.
Whether you're Dave Asprey and you're going to die at 180 or you're going to be me and die at 150, we're all going to die, even Dave.
So the point is we've come to think of aging as not a very pleasant thing to look forward to.
And that's actually why it's called the longevity paradox.
We all want to live a long time, but when we look at what that involves, hip and knee replacement, heart surgery, stents, cancer, dementia, you know, sitting in an old folks' home.
There's a new movie out that I guess I've forgotten who the protagonist is.
She checks into the nursing home.
She said, what are you here for?
She said, I've come here to die.
And I think that's a very interesting way of looking at it.
And I practice in Palm Springs, which is nicknamed God's waiting room for a very good reason.
So I've had the benefit.
I'm actually the only now nutritionist who's actually spent most of their career in a blue zone, Loma Linda, California.
And some of my critics say, you know, you You're all wrong.
You know, what do you know about blue zones?
Well, I'm the only one who's actually lived there and studied these people.
And so, getting back to aging, the amazing thing is, not only my research, but a lot of other very smart people's research has shown that we actually age by the lining of our gut slowly breaking down or quickly breaking down.
And one of the things I like people to imagine is our gut, which is the lining of our gut is the size of a tennis court.
And it's only one cell thick.
And that gut, that lining is actually our skin turned inside out.
And we know that when people get older, people look at your skin and it gets thin and, you know, you touch it and it peels away and there's bruising all over the place.
Well, that's actually a reflection of how strong the inner wall of your gut is.
And there's beautiful experiments that have been done in this cute little worm called C. elegans, an Every experiment that's ever been done in C. elegans has been duplicated in higher animals, including rhesus monkeys, and it's predicted what happens to us.
And even this little tiny worm, the bacteria that live in its gut, its microbiome, As those bacteria break down this little single cell wall of its gut, it ages.
And the faster it breaks down, this wall, the faster this little critter ages.
And I've become convinced that Hippocrates was absolutely right, that all disease begins in the gut.
And he knew this 2,500 years ago.
And we didn't know any of this until five years ago, the Human Microbiome Project was finished.
And this guy, 2,500 years ago, said, hey, guess what?
All disease begins in the gut.
So, you know, I see arthritis get reversed by changing diets and getting lectins out of your diet.
I see the thing that started me off on this was watching a gentleman who I call Big Ed reverse his coronary artery disease by changing his diet.
And I see it all the time in people who I've actually had ready to go on the operating table And they got scared and say, is there another way?
And I say, well, yeah, but, you know, you're going to have to listen to me.
And these people now, these are diabetics, multi-vessel coronary heart disease, had a heart attack.
Some of these people now were celebrating their 15th year after telling me I don't want to go through this operation.
They have normal stress tests, normal angiograms.
There's lots more when we come back.
So what was the paradox What was the surprising part, the epiphany in your own health, but also in those of your patients that got you to realize, you know, we missed some of the story here.
And what are the big changes people have to make to avoid being on your OR table, but more importantly, to live gracefully and with longevity?
You know, it's trite, but you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you're eating ate.
And if I can get people to change certain foods that they've accepted as healthy all of their lives, all sorts of things happen.
Let me give you an example.
The whole idea that we should be eating healthy whole grains as a staple of our diet...
Actually began in the late 1800s and early 1900s from those famous Seventh-day Adventists, the Kellogg's Brothers.
And the Kellogg's Brothers in Battle Creek, Michigan, actually had a sanitarium that they wanted people to eat whole grains for good bowel movements.
And what most people don't know is they actually firmly believed that That if you ate whole grains, it would tamp down your sexual desires and it would prevent masturbation.
I kid you not, look it up.
Yeah, because you were all stuffed and you were feeling bloated so you didn't feel like having sex.
I'm cutting out all whole grains for my wife.
So, and they actually, their food was so horrible with their whole grains that people were making teeth on them and they were so against sugar.
And then Will said, they actually, one of their patients was WC Post, Post Toasties and Grape Nuts.
And he stole their idea.
And Will got so mad at his brother, he said, this is ridiculous.
You know, this guy is now making a fortune on our idea.
And we're going to do this.
And we're going to put sugar in it.
And we're going to grind it up so fine.
And people will actually eat this stuff.
And it was called Pre-Digested Food.
And they started an advertising campaign to convince people that, number one, this should be your breakfast, and number two, you know, a bowl of Kellogg's Corn Flakes was pre-digested and was the perfect way to treat, you know— Irritable bowel, which actually caused irritable bowel, but that's another story.
But we've been eating greens for a long time before the Kellogg brothers.
That's true.
Mehmet and I were in southern Turkey in this place called Gobekli Tepe, which is a civilization, or at least the remnants of one that was from 12,000?
Yeah, 12,000.
No, 12,000 years ago, so 9,600 BC. And they were still hunter-gatherers.
They hadn't had the agricultural revolution, but they...
They had jars of grain there that they've uncovered.
So we've been eating grains for at least 12,000 years.
So it wasn't the Kellogg's that gave that to us.
No, but that's been the modern iteration of grains.
But, you know, that was my research at Yale as an undergraduate.
And you could look at early man up until the agricultural revolution.
And we were about six feet tall at that point.
And our brain size was 15% bigger than it is today.
And after the agricultural revolution, we shrunk about a foot.
And our brain size shrunk 15%.
We've never recovered.
Now, I propose that that's because of the ill effects of these things.
In fact, the famous frozen man in the Alps of northern Italy, about 5,000 years old, I'll
take it one step further.
Yes, there are blue zones that eat whole grains.
And there are blue zones that eat beans.
But we have to remember that Okinawa, which is a blue zone, believe it or not, they do not eat whole grains.
Most of their diet is the purple sweet potato.
They do not eat soy.
They eat miso and natto.
They don't eat soybeans or tofu.
And they eat white rice.
Only about 6% of their diet is white rice, not white.
Not brown rice.
And, you know, four billion people in this world who use rice as their staple eat white rice instead of brown rice.
So maybe these people are a lot smarter than we think.
I thought it was just because they could store it for a longer time.
So you could go through periods of famine and...
No, actually, whole grain stores just fine.
It's when you grind up whole grain that you expose the germ and the fats to oxidation.
And that's why...
In this country, when we have a whole grain product, we have to put so many preservatives to prevent oxidation, most of which are endocrine disruptors.
So this whole idea that whole grains are healthy for us...
I've got to disagree.
And even the Adventists.
The Adventists use a lot of soy products, but their soy product is texturized vegetable protein, TVP. That's soy that has been extruded under high heat and high pressure to make that product.
And I think these Adventists were incredibly clever.
That's their mystery meat.
And so pressure cooking, high heat, high pressure, will destroy most lectins.
And if you look at traditional cultures, even back 10,000 years ago, the storage systems were horrible.
And so most of these grains naturally fermented.
And most of these cultures had fermentation processes to denature lectins.
Fermentation is a really good way to kill off lectins.
It really is to this day.
The same way with beans.
When you study cultures that do use beans, and I've studied a lot of them, they soak their beans for 24, 48 hours, and they change the water every four to six hours because lectins will leach out in water.
And so then you cook your beans for a very long time.
In Italy, in Tuscany, where they do eat a lot of beans, they will cook their beans for days in a glass pot after they've soaked it for 48 hours.
The Aciroles in southern Italy, south of Naples, the town with the largest amount of people over 100 years of age in any town, over 30% of the population is over 100 years of age.
And they have a phenomenal diet.
They do not eat bread.
They do not eat pasta.
They eat lentils.
They eat anchovies.
They have a huge amount of olive oil, and they eat little anchovies as their only animal protein.
And what produce do they eat?
So, yeah, so they'll eat vegetables.
They eat a lot of lettuces.
They love lettuces.
A lot of cruciferous vegetables.
Just as an interesting aside, one of the most popular salads in Italy is tricolori.
And tricolori is radicchio, Belgian endive, and arugula.
Two of those, radicchio and Belgian endive, are chicory.
And chicory plants have the highest amount of inulin of any really plants, the chicory family.
And it just so happens in the book, The Longevity Paradox, that this cute little microbe called Ackermansia mucinophilia loves inulin.
And I think those Italians are so clever because, look, their favorite salad is two inulin-containing plants and arugula, which is a cruciferous vegetable, a cousin of broccoli.
And they pour olive oil over it, and they pour balsamic vinegar over it.
And this bacteria you mentioned, Acromancea, I'm told, I've read, that it's found in higher percentages in skinny people.
Yes.
Which is, again, paradoxical.
And I don't know if giving acromontia to you, so don't go out there and start to eat acromontia.
Yeah, you can't.
Yeah, you can't.
Nobody's figured out a way to get it into us yet.
But it's actually there.
And interestingly enough, we now know that metformin, the most famous diabetic drug, works...
Not by any mystical, magical thing of changing our glucose metabolism.
It actually increases the proportion of Akramansia mucinophilia.
So I interrupted you.
We're moving on from the oldest-lived population south of Naples to...
Yeah, so...
To anchovies.
That's the segue.
To ants.
And the anchovies are...
So one of the uniting feature of the Blue Zones is not that they eat grains and beans.
It's not that they eat a low-fat diet.
I mean, three of the Blue Zones actually use a liter of olive oil per week.
That's a lot of olive oil.
I try to do that.
David Perlmutter does that.
The unifying feature is that all of these communities do not eat a lot of animal protein.
Animal protein is a minimal part of their diet.
And it makes me very sad.
You know, I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.
The beef state, you know, beef for breakfast, beef for dinner, and then a side of pork, you know, whatever.
But the exposure to Loma Linda and getting to know Dr. Gary Frazier, who's been in charge of the Adventist Health Study, I mean, here you have a community where you can, under a microscope, follow these people.
And Adventists will cheat.
They're supposed to be vegetarians or vegans, but occasionally fish will sneak in and chicken will sneak in.
But he's tracked these people, these long, long, long-lived people, and the longest living Adventists are vegans.
Followed by the lacto-ovo vegetarians, followed by the pescatarians.
And he just recently published a paper that says, sorry guys, any addition of animal protein will increase your risk of heart disease and early death compared to none at all.
Now, I think you can mitigate against that.
And a lot of the book is, okay, you know, I want my cake and eat it too.
Don't we all?
And one of the ways to mitigate against this is, number one, Walter Longo from USC Gerontology Center has shown that That if you eat a low-calorie vegan diet for five days a week,
a fasting mimicking diet of about 800-900 calories, five days in a row, you will act as if you were on a 30% calorie-restricted diet for the entire month.
You will activate stem cells as if you were on a water fast.
You will renew your immune system as if you were on a water fast.
And yet you can still eat.
So in my book, and Walter Longo has given me a nice shout out on the book, I say, hey, five days a week, you know, Eat five days a month.
Sorry, five days a month, yeah.
Four or five days in a row.
Just eat a vegan diet, which is not too hard to do, believe it or not, and I give recipes on it.
And you're going to get, you can cheat.
You can, you know, have your cake and eat it too.
But please don't make your cake out of, you know, wheat.
More questions after the break.
The foods that surprise us that have lots of legends If you don't mind, just for everyone, define a lectin so they know what it is.
And then I'd love you to walk us through examples of some of the mistakes we make that maybe we can have hacks out of.
You already mentioned pressure cooking and soaking beans, but there are other examples you've shared with me in the past as well.
Sure.
So lectins are the defense system, one of the defense systems of a plant against being eaten.
It's a sticky protein that binds to sugar molecules.
Are they all bad?
No, there are actually some good lectins out there.
There are some pretty interesting lectins in garlic that are actually very beneficial.
Believe it or not, lectins are a very important communication system between cells.
And you and I know about lectins because we were taught about blood types.
And lectins were first discovered in typing blood.
We introduce a lectin into a tube of blood, and if that lectin binds to one red blood cell, it will bind to another.
And they will agglutinate.
And that will tell us what your blood type is, depending on the lectin that sticks to a sugar molecule.
For instance, I've got a paper where I make, I think, my second really good case.
That lectins are a cause of an autoimmune attack on the surface of our blood vessels, and that removing lectins from humans' diet actually reduces dramatically that inflammation on the surface of blood vessels.
So I propose, and other people propose this, that That inflammation and autoimmune attack on the blood vessels is actually the major cause of heart disease.
And, you know, one of the greatest heart surgeons of all time, Michael DeBakey, who you and I both had the pleasure of knowing when he was alive, Always said, back in the 50s, that cholesterol had nothing to do with plaque in the arteries.
It was an innocent bystander that basically was an ambulance that got caught up in this war that was going on on the surface of the blood vessels.
And I think he was right.
So let me push a couple of diets that are popular now.
Paleo diet.
Thoughts?
Yeah, so interestingly enough, The Plant Paradox, my original big blockbuster.
It was a blockbuster.
And it actually still is.
It's still, simultaneously, the number one paleo diet on Amazon and the number one vegetarian diet on Amazon, simultaneously.
It's the pegan diet.
It's the pegan.
The paleo married vegan.
Yes, I mean, it's crazy to have an iconic book only two, three years after his publication.
Yeah, two years.
Yeah, exactly two years.
So, the interesting thing about the paleo and with the keto diet, I look at ketosis on every one of my patients.
Most people who think they're doing a ketogenic diet or a paleo diet are not in ketosis.
That's because, in general, both the paleo and the keto diet emphasizes a large amount of animal meats and proteins and fats.
And I think that, I talk about this in the book, that Ansel Keys, who is the original, what everybody says was the anti-fat fanatic, he was actually very afraid of animal-saturated fats.
He actually did not Fear plant-based fats like olive oil, like avocados, for instance.
In fact, hilariously, Dr. Keyes retired to a village right next to Acciaroli, south of Naples.
And he died just shy of his 102nd birthday.
So he's actually the longest-lived nutritionist.
And I've had the pleasure of interviewing his housekeeper, Dr. And his housekeeper said that the guy just drank olive oil day and night.
And so here's the original anti-fat guy who's, you know, held up by his fingernails by the paleo community.
And yet he never said that fat was bad.
What he wanted to have people avoid was animal fat.
And I've read all of his work many, many times.
And I think what the connection he didn't get with animal fat...
Is that animal fat is almost always associated with animal protein.
And it was the protein that was the troublemaker.
Now, having said that, as you know, 30% of people carry the ApoE4 gene, which is nicknamed the Alzheimer's gene.
And I and others have shown that animal fats, saturated fats, including coconut oil, is really mischievous to people who carry the ApoE4 gene.
They do not transport fats properly.
And Dale Bredesen, the end of Alzheimer's, Uses my program in his program, the Recode program.
So I think saturated fats in a keto diet or paleo diet are mischievous for most people.
Having said that, fat is actually good for most people as long as it's plant-based fats like avocado oil, like Like olive oil, still the best.
MCT oil is probably safe for most people, which is a derivation of coconut oil.
And avocados.
Avocados are phenomenal for you.
You say coconuts are okay.
Coconuts are great.
Coconut milk is okay.
But for the ApoE4s, please stay away from coconut oil.
Because it's saturated.
Yeah.
And when I study, I study lots of ApoE4 folks because they come to me.
And these people really, they will kick up their small dense LDLs.
They will kick up their oxidized LDLs.
Whenever we expose them to these sorts of saturated fats.
So what would you tell someone with that gene profile to eat?
No fat?
No.
Just olive oil?
Yeah, just lots and lots of olive oil.
Avocados, okay?
Yeah, avocados are great.
But it's saturated too.
No, there's no saturated fat.
It's all monounsaturated fat.
It's just, okay.
Monounsaturated fats are fine.
But the other interesting thing is there's a beautiful paper out that shows that people with the apoE4 gene highly benefit from taking fish oil.
And there's some beautiful studies out recently that shows that with fish oil in the apoE4 gene...
Sorry to get technical, but you actually have to take a phospholipid that's present in krill oil to deliver fish oil into your brain properly.
So you take a krill and a fish supplement?
Rapid questions.
Which vitamin do you think we get the least of that we should bonus up on?
I tell you, vitamin D3. We are profoundly deficient in this country in vitamin D3. Every one of my autoimmune patients that I see, and I now, my practice is 70% autoimmune disease, walks in with a low vitamin D. Vitamin D is critical for sealing the wall of your gut.
It's critical to turn on stem cells.
There's a beautiful paper that I cite that shows, if you believe in the telomere theory of aging, those little caps on chromosomes, that people who have the highest level of vitamin D have the longest telomeres, and people who have the lowest levels of vitamin D have the shortest levels.
And I have yet to see vitamin D toxicity.
The University of California, San Diego says the average human being should take 9,600 international units of vitamin D a day.
Do you take a multivitamin?
Every now and then.
I really, you know, I have several of my own products that pretty much cover the bases.
But yeah, multivitamin is not going to hurt you.
But trace minerals are probably far more important than just a multivitamin.
The other thing that's important for most people to know is that 50% or more of people will carry a mutation of the MTHFR gene, better known in my clinic as the mother effort gene.
Yes, that's right.
What do you do with that one?
So you've got to take methyl B12 and you've got to take methylfolate.
And you've got to put the methyl B12 under your tongue.
It will not work if you swallow it or chew it or suck on it.
You can get a shot.
Or you can get a shot, but why bother?
You can get a methyl B12 from Costco, and it's cheap.
Are you vegan?
No, I'm not.
He eats anchovies.
He already told us.
Yeah, I'm what I call a pescatarian.
Not a pescatarian, sorry.
A veg-aquarian.
A veg-aquarian.
So my wife and I, in general, will eat vegan during the week.
And then on the weekends, we usually have wild shellfish or wild fish.
I have one more question before you wrap up.
You mentioned the microbiome at the beginning of this, and I feel like your book has a lot on the microbiome.
It's all about the microbiome.
So just really briefly summed up, people think they take a generic probiotic and they fix their microbiome.
Please give us, like, the very, the headline of how we actually do fix our microbiome.
So the vast majority of probiotics that we swallow never make it into our gut, number one, because the stomach acid destroys them.
Number two, these probiotics are not normal flora in our gut.
They basically, if they make it in, go on vacation in our gut for a couple weeks, and then they leave.
You know, they kind of hang out at the beach down in Florida.
And then they leave.
What's fascinating is that we actually have a little collection of important microbes at the bottom of what are called crypts in our microvilli, and they're protected down there.
And even if we wipe out our microbiome with antibiotics, if you give these guys what they want to eat, they will come out of hiding and repopulate.
So the key is not the probiotics.
The key is prebiotics, the things that these guys like to eat.
And prebiotics are things like...
Inulin.
Inulin.
I mean, it's probably the best prebiotic.
Detroit color salad.
Yeah, tubers are great.
You know, get yourself some yams.
Potatoes?
Tuber, that's a nightshade.
So, a sweet potato or a yam, rutabagas, turnips, the things, you know, our grandparents used to eat in large amounts.
Hicama.
You know, grab yourself some hicama.
Get yourself some guacamole.
And, you know, spoiler alert, guacamole is not made with tomatoes.
And use the hicama to dip your guacamole.
It's the perfect food for your gut bugs.
I've been hearing a lot about colostrum.
Is maybe something that might help people who are trying to either take probiotics or take prebiotics and help their intestinal regrowth.
Thoughts on that?
Yeah.
So colostrum is kind of the first milk of any animal, including humans.
And it's loaded with immunoglobulins.
And I don't have any professional connection with these guys, but there's a product that you can find in your drugstore called Dia Rescue.
And I take it on all my international trips, particularly if I'm doing it.
I did a mission in Ethiopia a couple months ago.
And it cures diarrhea.
And it's primarily colostrum with a couple of really cool added ingredients.
And luckily, I had some on the trip.
I didn't need it, but basically cured our group that we were traveling with.
They're actually integration partners on the show, which is why I knew about them.
But I'm asking not about them, but about the actual colostrum itself.
Because I know that more and more folks are telling me that they might help our intestines address issues with our microbiome.
You've got to seal the wall of your gut.
And you've really got to take control of what I call the gang members in our gut.
There's two fighting, you know, opposing forces in your gut.
There's good guys, what I call gut buddies, and then the gang members.
And the gang members do not like us.
They throw rocks through our windows.
As opposed to all of our gut buddies, we are actually a condominium for our microbiome.
90% of us is not us.
It's...
Bugs and worms and viruses.
And we are their home.
And the principle of this book is, if we eat to take care of the 90 percenters, then they will take care of their home.
And the really cool thing is you look at 105-year-old people who are thriving around the world, and you look at their microbiome.
Number one, it's very diverse.
There's lots of these.
But they have the microbiome.
Of a 30-year-old healthy individual at 105. The same microbiome.
And they have the same microbiome of my favorite animal, the naked mole rat.
And there's a lot about the naked mole rat.
And please have your listeners Google naked mole rat.
The ugliest animal.
Just to titleize this, what do you love so much about the naked mole rat?
So, the naked mole rat, rats live about two years.
The naked mole rat has been clocked at 20 or 30 years of age.
There is no known death of a naked mole rat.
And what they do is they have the same genes as all the other rats, but they live in underground tunnels.
They eat tubers and fungi and mushrooms, and the book is all about how eating tubers and fungi and mushrooms will make you a naked mole rat.
And guess what?
All the other rats eat grains, and they don't make it very long.
On that note, the longevity paradox, how to die young at a ripe old age by Stephen Gundry.
You can either look like a naked mole rat or hopefully even better.
And hopefully you will not look like a naked mole rat.
Another spectacular contribution to the literature by Dr. Gundry.
