Speaker 1 0:00
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long happy life.
Dr Gundry 0:23
You probably heard me say vitamin D is important. And while this is true, you still need to protect your skin from getting too much sun. First off beta carotene. Beta carotene is a nutrient that can aid in the maintenance of your skin health. Fun fact it’s also one of the grot noids that give fruits and vegetables like mango carrots and sweet potatoes, their natural colors. Now, beta carotene produces vitamin A activity in your body. It’s also acting as a plant derived photo protector. In other words, it acts as a natural sunscreen for your skin. Now what should you eat to get beta carotene? I’ll tell you right now, raw carrots are a great source. Sweet potatoes are a great source and leafy greens like kale and spinach now number two omega three fatty acids are the healthy fats that are essential for your skin protection. They maintain healthy cell membranes helping to fight DNA changes due to skin exposure. Now some great sources omega three fatty acids you probably well know by now. wild caught salmon, flax seeds, walnuts, hemp seeds, organic canola oil and perilla oil are all great sources. Another fun fact, it turns out that farm raised trout, not farm raised salmon actually convert their Omega six feeds into omega threes. So if you see farm raised trout on a menu, or sometimes you’ll see it at Costco, don’t be afraid to buy it. But if you see Atlantic salmon or farm raised salmon run the other direction. Okay, as to xantham. So as to Xanten has been shown to have wonderful photo protective effects you can get as to Xanthan in your diet by eating algae, so spirulina, chlorella, great sources of acid Xanthine. wild caught salmon that color in wild caught salmon is esta Xanten. And there are now a number of supplements that are readily available to get esta xantham. How about Fernbach Fernbach is actually polypodium leucotomos. It’s a plant protective property there’s very photoprotective Fernbach is an all natural antioxidant extract. It’s used both topically on the skin and can be taken orally. It helps protect our skin cells from UV damage and supports an increase in skin collagen, hyaluronic acid production and the last a major part of his photo protective properties rely on its antioxidant properties due to its high phenolic content. And in fact, it has tons of poly phenols which will change your gut bacteria for the better time to release Vitamin C is the next one. Now interestingly enough vitamin C repairs damage to collagen. Vitamin C unfortunately is not readily available shortly after you take it. Oral vitamin C only lasts a couple of hours in our blood. That’s why I really recommend people take time to release vitamin C, about 1000 milligrams twice a day. Interestingly, the reason smokers have such sun damage and wrinkles is because their vitamin C is all used up by the oxidative stress that smoking gives to them. And the reason the smokers have so much wrinkles and sun damage is they don’t have the vitamin C that’s necessary for repair. Now next up is foods that have high levels of a gallic acid. A gallic acid has wonderful photo protective effects when it comes to college and break down redness and swelling in irritated human skin cells. So to get the benefit of a gallic acid, you should be eating pomegranate in season, not just pomegranate juice folks much too much sugar, strawberries in season raspberries and season and blackberries in season. Next up dark mushrooms. Turns out that dark mushrooms contain a lot of melanin. Now most of you know what melanin is. Melanin is what goes the dark pigmentation to our skin. And melanin exists to absorb UV light. So the more melanin you eat, believe it or not, the more that’s transmitted get into more melatonin to protect you from UV exposure. So don’t hesitate to get more of the darker mushrooms into your diet. Leave the white button mushrooms alone, get the brown mushrooms, the crimini mushroom portabello mushrooms are a great dark mushroom that are now available in almost all grocery store. I’ve got a great portobello mushroom pizza recipe on YouTube. Now one more thing all that when your skin is exposed to the sun, it produces vitamin D. And you actually want that to happen. Vitamin D promotes calcium absorption from your gut. It enables mineralization of the bone. And it’s also very essential to prevent low calcium in your bloodstream and vitamin D production is necessary to actually grow bone. So the last thing you want to do is block vitamin D production from sunlight. Once again another really important reason. And one of the most famous dermatologist perhaps infamous Dermatologist, Dr. Holick from Boston University was one of the first dermatologist to actually tell people to get their vitamin D levels from sun exposure. And long story short, he got into a lot of trouble but luckily got reinstated. And now we know that sunlight is not as bad for you as you once thought. If you can’t get enough sunlight to get your Vitamin D is up and most people can’t. I recommend most adults take 5000 international units a day. The University of California San Diego recommends that the average American take 10,000 international units a day for protection are these seven habits, ageing you all right number one, six small meals a day. By eating all day you’re giving your mitochondria those many power plants and all your cells, no time to rest up. This is why time restricted eating is so important. Allowing your body and your gut to rest and adjust between meals not only helps you live longer, but it’ll make you feel younger too. And bedtime snacking also ages us faster for the same reason. Please try to stop eating about three to four hours before bedtime. It literally gives your brain a chance to do a deep cleaning while you sleep. And if you eat too close to bedtime, that deep cleaning that brainwash, unfortunately, never happens. Number two sitting all day. So if you want to feel young and youthful, you’ve got to move your body. You got to walk every day, take a walk in the morning, take a walk after dinner, I’ve said it over and over again, get yourself a dog, a dog is going to get you out whether or not it’s called whether or not it’s hot, at least twice a day. And here’s a fun fact, studies of people who walk before dinner versus people who walk after dinner. The people who walk after dinner actually lose weight on the same caloric intake as people who walk before dinner and they don’t lose weight. And there’s a good rationale why that is. But Walking is one of the best things you can do. The other thing that’s exciting is you do not have to exercise all at once. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to exercise long bouts to reap the benefit of movement. In fact, there’s a new study that was published just this week showing that if you got up and moved for five minutes, every two hours while you’re at work, you will break the deadly effect of sitting five minutes every two hours. Why? Well I call it exercise snacking. And now multiple papers like this one shows that small breaks, like for instance, 310 minute breaks throughout the day gives you more benefit than 30 minutes of continuous exercise. They’re easy to do. One of the easiest ones that I can’t imagine all of us don’t do is while you’re brushing your teeth twice a day, do deep knee bends. You’re sitting there anyhow for a minute or two. Just do deep knee bends and you got two minutes of deep knee bends. Same thing when you’re on your couch slipped down and do BACKWARD push ups or Front Push ups on your couch. too lazy for that do a plank on your couch. It’s really easy to get up and just do something. One of my favorite hacks is if you work in a bill They take the elevator up. But then walk the stairs down. Studies out of Austria showed that people who did that actually got the same benefit as the people who walked up the stairs and rode the elevator down. So walk down, it’s easy to get in these small exercises, most importantly, get a dog. Number three, eating whole grains and corn based products. All right, here’s the problem, folks, these products are loaded with lectins. And eventually all of these products get turned into sugar. Even if a product says organic, low sugar. Trust me, folks, you don’t want to put it that into your body, you’re damaging your gut, and therefore damaging the rest of your body. By getting rid of this habit, you’re going to feel younger than ever. Number four, sleeping late or getting irregular sleep. Deep Sleep is of vital importance because of your brain wash cycle opportunity. And you’ve got to have wash cycles in your brain to clear out all these inflammatory proteins, like beta amyloid, for example, it builds up every day, and your brain actually has a wash cycle to clean it out literally like a dishwasher. So you’ve got to have consistent sleep patterns. The other thing we’ve learned, sadly, is you can’t make up for days and days of sleepless nights by sleeping in on the weekend. One thing we’re learning is that this is literally like jet travel, changing time zones. And if you think about it and makes a whole lot of sense. We now know that your gut microbiome has its own circadian rhythm that does not like to be disturbed. So if you get up at six o’clock in the morning during the work week, but you then say I’m sleeping in until eight or nine o’clock on Saturday and Sunday. You’ve literally changed two to three timezones in terms of your gut microbiome. And the more we’re learning about circadian rhythms, the more we’re finding out that that simple habit of oh, I’m sleeping out on the weekends to get more rest is doing you more harm than good. Another reason to get a dog your dogs work on their natural circadian rhythm. And I can assure you that our four dogs do not understand the concept of sleeping in, get yourself a dog number five, eating too much animal protein. Now sadly, eating over consuming animal protein can lead to insulin resistance, metabolic and flexibility and even weight gain. Now, a little is fine. And come on. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, but a lot is not I’m sorry, try to cut back to about four ounces of animal protein a day. And like I always say not only are you what you eat, but you are what the thing you’re eating. So whatever that cow was fed, you’re now eating it too. So when you do eat animal protein, make sure to get grass fed grass finished meat and wild caught seafood by cutting back and helping your gut you’re helping to revive the rest of your body too. And you’ll feel brand new again, if number six putting cream or milk in your coffee or tea sorry, half and half cream milk nixes the benefits of coffee or tea by binding to the poly phenols making them useless as nutrients for your body. Now, if you gotta have a creamer in your coffee, opt for a non dairy option, like coconut or walnut milk or macadamia nut milk. Now sprouts carries hazelnut and walnut milk you can also find it on Thrive Market. So there are alternatives readily available. Number seven having a smoothie or energy bar before your workout. Now shockingly, this actually impairs your performance and ages you but we’ve all been taught that this healthy smoothie before a workout is going to make you better and better. In fact, it does the exact opposite. Let me give you the perfect example. When I was growing up if we had lunch my mother would not allow my sister and I to go swimming for a hour after lunch because we would get cramps and die. Now there was actually some truth to that old wives tale after you eat anything. Whether it’s a smoothie, whether it’s an energy bar, a huge amount of blood flow is diverted to your stomach and intestines for the purpose of digesting food. If that blood flow is going there, guess what? It can’t go to your muscles. And study after study has proven this in humans, that exercising on an empty stomach actually gives you improved performance because you have more of your cardiac output available to go to your muscles. The second thing is that you actually benefit by producing ketones and remaining in ketosis After an overnight fast by exercising and you’ll actually get some benefit in increased mitochondrial uncoupling. If you exercise on an empty stomach, it makes muscles increasingly sensitive to the action of insulin muscles need to be hungry, to accept the food you eat, and if they’re hungry, and if you depleted the amount of sugar storage and your muscles called glycogen, then when you eat, and I really recommend waiting about 20 minutes after your exercise, and then take your smoothie or your energy bar, then your muscles will be ready. And studies show that you will actually build more muscles and have lower insulin levels. Because you exercise on an empty stomach. If you eat before your muscles are hungry, your blood flow will go down to your gut, your muscles won’t be receptive to insulin, and you’ll negate the whole thing. So please exercise on an empty stomach. And then you can go over to the smoothie bar and get what you want. And just remember, a fruit smoothie is one of the most lethal things you can put in your stomach.
Modern food innovations that could be destroying your health. All right, number one plastic in our food. microplastics are pieces of plastic smaller than five millimeters. Some of them are used in cosmetics or toothpaste, but most result from the floating waste that is constantly exposed to UV radiation and crumbles into smaller and smaller pieces in the ocean or in our lakes and rivers. 50 trillion such particles float in the ocean where our marine life swallow them. And as you know, you are what the animal you’re eating ate. And it turns out that fish, either fresh or saltwater have actual pieces of microplastics contained in their flesh. But that’s not the only way plastics have made it into our food. plastic water bottles and foods wrapped in plastic packaging are also wrecking our health. Here’s how every time we put something in plastic wrap it leeches endocrine disruptors into us. Now I’ve written and spoken a lot about endocrine disruptors, but let’s give it another go around. Endocrine disruptors are endocrine like substances, estrogen or testosterone to name two that are not the actual hormones but act as if they were these hormones. Unlike hormone like estrogen or testosterone. Normally hormone binds to a receptor in our cells, gives a message and then leaves after it gives the message endocrine disrupters rather, they’ll still attach to these receptors. But rather than leaving they remain attach. Now why that’s important is you can have infantile decimally, small amounts of endocrine disrupters that will build up because they never leave the receptor. And what we’ve learned was that the Environmental Protection Agency was never worried about these compounds because they were in such microscopic amounts, until people look at how these actually work as if they’re much more potent. So Falaise exposure, as I’ve written before, phthalates are in plastic wraps. They’re in plastic water bottles. They leach into the water we drink. They leach into the food we there are very good studies showing that pregnant women who eat a lot of chicken give birth to boys with smaller penises. Just saying we know that these affect the newborn forming brain. There’s a crib The whole time when sexual identity happens forms in the brain as a fetus. We now know that these endocrine disruptors are part of the changes that we’re seeing in kids brains. We don’t want them in us, and we don’t want plastic near us. So what’s exciting news, or even more disappointing news. As I’m talking about in the upcoming book, we now know that microplastics disrupt the gut microbiome, and make the gut microbiome more dysbiotic. It allows more bad bacteria and less good bacteria. So bad news all around. It’s the same way with sunscreen. It turns out that we absorb everything we put on our skin. sunscreens, sadly, are loaded with endocrine disruptors. So what can you do to avoid microplastics and other endocrine disruptors? Well, they’re nearly impossible to avoid entirely, but there are a few things you can do to greatly reduce your exposure. First things first, ditch plastic water bottles, either use a glass or stainless steel water bottle, even ones that say BPA free don’t believe it. The replacements for BPA like BPS are now known to have these chemical endocrine disruptors once something scary, believe it or not, 93% of adults have detectable BPA in their urine. That’s right, you and me. 93% of us have BPA in our urine. So get yourself a good water filtration system. Even if you think your city water is the best in the world. Do yourself a favor, there are affordable reverse osmosis countertop water filtration systems that can sit on your counter, they don’t need plumbing hookups, they don’t need to go into your sink, you use them very much like you would use a coffeemaker and you will get rid of these harmful pollutants. And it’s not just the water bottles, please please please don’t buy foods that come in plastic packaging, or any packaging for that matter. Instead look for compostable reusable material. Like this straw in my vital reds never use plastic and the microwave. Plastic when it’s heated will give off more of these compounds. Now I like to joke that I like to eat my sunscreen. I actually am worn sunscreen I think in 20 years now. How do I protect myself? Well, I use vitamin C, I use poly phenols and melatonin containing foods to absorb the UV lights of sunlight. Now, also know which foods contain glyphosate and other pesticides and avoid them. Most of our modern grains have been spread with glyphosate, whether it’s wheat, rye, corn, oats, soy beans, they’ve all been spread with glyphosate. So just because it says non GMO doesn’t mean that it’s been sprayed with glyphosate. And glyphosate is another disaster. All right, number two, food invention that’s destroying your health, convenience foods. Yes, these are typically wrapped in plastic and other harmful packaging. But there’s another problem. Almost all pre packed or convenience foods are devoid of any fiber. In fact, they’re actually pre digested. Now Fun fact, cornflakes came out over 100 years ago. And interestingly enough, the Kellogg’s cornflakes Corporation advertise that cornflakes were the first pre digested food. Now, what’s the big deal about that sounds like well, if something’s pre adjusted for me, I don’t have to do all that work of digesting my food. That’s the problem. Normally, when we eat foods, whole whole foods, the sugars, the proteins, and the fats in those foods are contained in a very slowly digestible form. And it takes a considerable period of time to break those starches, proteins and fats into correspondingly absorbable sugar molecules, amino acids and fatty acids. And that whole process takes time and energy. What’s happened now is that our convenience foods and ultra processed foods are all pre digested So that means if you’re having a scoop of protein powder, that’s totally different than having a piece of fish, yes, you might have 20 grams of protein in that fish. And you might have 20 grams of protein in that protein powder. But that protein powder will instantly be absorbed and whack into your mitochondria and cause rush hour. Whereas that 20 grams of protein in the fish may trickle into your system over the next 234 hours. Totally different. The same thing with simple carbohydrates, you can take a whole grain, and it has a lot of carbohydrates. But it will be digested slowly and don’t think I’m telling you to eat whole grains. But what we’ve done is we’ve ground up those whole grains into a fine powder, which are instantly absorbed into our body as sugar. And once again, it’s rush hour in the mitochondria. Finally, and probably the worst thing, when we use the whole foods, there was a ton of stuff that we couldn’t digest the fiber. And that fiber was there because it drifted down into our colon, where it was available to our microbiome. Now with our ultra processed foods, we have absolutely no fiber for the end users or microbiome to eat. And they literally are starving to death. Now, why is that important? Well, there’s a fantastic theory they like lot called the gut centric theory of heart disease. And that is it’s actually our microbiomes hunger for the things they need to eat. That drives our hunger. And there’s beautiful experiments that show if we give human volunteers prebiotic fiber, and nothing else to eat, they can go on a 14 day water fast without any hunger as long as they get some prebiotic fiber. So think about that. Next up fruit juice. Speaking of sugar, it doesn’t get much worse than fruit juice. Take everyone’s favorite orange juice, for example, an eight ounce serving of juice and a coke. Both contain about 30 grams of sugar on average, that’s almost eight teaspoons. To put that into perspective, that’s more than a Snickers candy bar. And I could probably guess which you’d rather have. Okay, but what about the no added sugar juices? They still contain loads of fructose, when you see no added sugar. What that means to you is there was so much sugar in here already. We didn’t have to add any more. That’s what that sticker means. Well, what if I make my own juice at home? Well, juicing is really one of the worst trends out there. I’ll take you on a trip to the LA Zoo to the San Diego Zoo. We’ll look in all the cages ever seen a juicer? Of course not. Why would any animal be stupid enough to throw away the most important part of fruit? And that’s the fiber. Why is the fiber there to feed the gut microbiome. So if you’re going to get a juicer, yeah, take organic berries, juice it, throw the juice away, take the pulp, then mix it in with some coconut yogurt. Now you’re juicing properly.
Speaker 1 28:49
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