– What happens if you water fast for 72 hours? The 72-hour fast, where the heck did this come from? And why 72 hours? Now, I’m not a huge fan of going without food for this long for a couple of reasons. Instead, as you probably know, I recommend time-restricted eating, which is where you ideally reduce your eating window to about a six to eight-hour period, but we’ll talk about that in just a little bit. Now, here’s the major problem With a 72-hour water fast, most people will crash and burn. Why? Studies have shown that even if you are of normal weight, in other words, you’re thin, 50% of you are metabolically inflexible. Now, what does that mean? Normally, your mitochondria that make ATP like to burn glucose, sugar, for fuel, but if glucose runs out and isn’t available, they can make a switch to burning free fatty acids that are liberated from fat cells to make energy. Now, your brain, unfortunately, can’t get free fatty acids because quite frankly, they’re too big to get through the blood-brain barrier. Instead, your brain will use ketones, which your liver will make if free fatty acids are available. Now it’s a big if, here’s the problem, 50% of us, plain old normal-weight people, can’t make that switch, 92% of overweight people can’t make that switch, and 98% of obese people can’t make that switch. So what happens if you decide to just drink water for 72 hours? You will exhaust your glucose supplies in about 8 to 12 hours, you’ll exhaust your glycogen supplies, which is stored glucose, primarily in our muscles and in our liver, in about 24 hours, and then, unfortunately, you will not be able to liberate free fatty acids from your fat cells because, as I’ve talked about before, the vast majority of us who are metabolically inflexible have elevated insulin levels, and insulin will not let you release fat from your fat cells even if you are starving. And it takes multiple days for insulin levels to drop enough that you can start accessing your fat. So what happens? You get hangry, you get headachey, your brain is going on fumes, and you’ll notice that you don’t function well. I’ve noticed this in people who go on these fasts, and they’re very healthy, and I’ll see them in the Pilates class and all of a sudden, they can’t even do an hour of Pilates, power Pilates, and I’m going, “Hey, you know, you feeling all right?” “Oh, no, I’m doing the 72-hour water fast ’cause it’s healthy for me.” And I’m going, “Well, what, healthy? You can’t even do an hour of Pilates, and, you know, you do it every day with me.” And they go, “Oh, yeah, you know, that’s an interesting point. Yeah, I got no energy today.” And these are healthy people. So please, please don’t fall into this trap. Okay, so you’re metabolically flexible, what happens in that case? Well, you have to get energy from the fat in your fat cells. So what? Unfortunately, fat is where we store our heavy metals that are mischievous. A tuna or swordfish, most of us know, is full of mercury, even though it’s swimming around and is a powerful, you know, thousand-pound fish. Why aren’t they dying of mercury toxicity? Because their mercury is safe in those fat cells. The problem when you start fasting and you are metabolically flexible is, you start releasing fat from your fat cells. And guess what? Out comes the heavy metals. Now, this was proven years ago at the Biosphere 2 experiment in the Arizona desert, and these people, unfortunately, couldn’t grow enough food to live on in the experiment. And Roy Walford, who was the head pathologist from UCLA, documented that these people released huge amounts of heavy metals into their bloodstream. And so, you are doing a 72-hour water fast for detoxing, in fact, you are actually toxifying, that doesn’t sound like a really good idea. Plus your is responsible for detoxifying, and your liver is starving because it doesn’t have the fuel to accomplish the purpose. Finally, your liver cannot detoxify heavy metals, and instead, it pushes it out through the bile. And your bile has the heavy metals. And guess what? You reabsorb the heavy metals again. So your whole purpose of detoxifying actually fails. So that’s a really bad idea. So what do you do instead? Actually, before I get into that, one other thing that you should realize, if you can’t get to free fatty acids and you’re metabolically inflexible, you can make sugar from your muscles, and it’s called gluconeogenesis. So guess what happens? In the worst-case scenario, you will actually lose muscle mass during that fast. And if you’ve noticed the recent weight loss craze using injectables, the downside is that you lose huge amounts of muscle mass. And again, that’s the last thing you wanna do for health. Is there a better way? Well, I mentioned at the start of this, yes, there is a better way, time-restricted eating, that means compressing your eating window to, preferably, six to eight hours a day. Now, during that time, during that compression of your eating window, part of that time, you’re sleeping, so you don’t have to worry. But increasing the time, pushing the first meal that you eat, your breakfast, closer towards noon, the more you produce ketones. And ketones have dramatic effects on uncoupling mitochondria. If you uncouple mitochondria, you promote thermogenesis. Thermogenesis promotes weight loss. You actually do a caloric bypass on your mitochondria. So they literally waste fuel, waste fat. Good idea. And studies in Italian athletes have shown that this way of eating has composed to a 12-hour eating window. These were Italian cyclists, Italian cyclists who ate in a seven-hour window maintain their muscle mass compared to the group that ate in a 12-hour window. The Italian cyclists who ate in the seven-hour window lost weight, even though they maintained muscle mass. Pay attention, you folks, who are injecting your stomach every week, and they actually lowered their insulin-like growth factor, which promotes health span and longevity. How do you do that? Well, “Gut Check,” my new bestseller tells you how to do it. And I’m gonna hold your hand. I don’t want you to just start with a seven-hour eating window, it’s too hard. But what I do want you to do is, next week, just push your breakfast off one hour. If you normally eat at seven o’clock, eat at eight o’clock. Do that for a week, take the weekend off. Next week, eat your breakfast at nine o’clock, do that for a week, take the weekend off, and so on. In five weeks, we’ll get you up to 11 or 12 for breakfast. It’s easy, it’s doable, and I’ll be here for you every step of the way. Do yourself and your body a favor, stay away from a 72-hour water fast. Colostrum supplements. Have you heard the buzz, all about the dazzling benefits of colostrum supplements? Well, it’s everywhere on TikTok, it’s everywhere on the internet, it’s everywhere on commercials. But before you pluck down your good, hard-earned money on one of these, be it a powder, a pill, or whatever, what the heck are you buying? Colostrum is sometimes called liquid gold, it’s the first milk that mammals produce right after you give birth and before your regular breast milk comes in, it happens in both animals and humans. Now, for years, we were convinced that the reason it existed is that the poor baby was totally defenseless against the various bacteria and viruses and whatever that it was going to be exposed to after coming out of this perfectly sterile environment without an immune system, and it is true that colostrum does contain quite a few antibodies, IgG antibodies, IgM antibodies from the mother against various infective agents. So far so good. It also has a few interesting compounds, like beta-glucans, which feed friendly bacteria, and lactoferrin, which also supports the immune system. So far so good. But it also has a really mischievous sugar molecule called Neu5Gc. Now, you’ve heard me talk about Neu5Gc a lot. We, moms, make Neu5Ac in our breast milk, cows, sheep, goats make Neu5Gc in their breast milk. Neu5Gc is a foreign compound to us. In fact, experiments in humans show that if I give healthy volunteers Neu5Gc to eat or drink in the form of milk, that they will instantaneously make antibodies to Neu5Gc, it’s that foreign and nasty a substance. So what? Well, it turns out that Neu5Gc can be incorporated into the wall of your gut, into the wall of your blood vessels, into your blood-brain barrier, into your joints, and you will attack it as a foreign compound. Doesn’t sound like a very good idea, does it? Okay, so why then think that colostrum is really great for you? The exciting news that you probably read about in my new book, “Gut Check,” is, guess what? Your baby has a wonderful active immune system that’s fully ready and fully primed by the time the baby pops out. We now know that the placenta has its own microbiome. We now know that the amniotic fluid has its own microbiome, and that the immune system of the baby is fully revved up and ready, having been trained by the placental microbiome and the amniotic fluid microbiome about what’s good and what’s bad. So we don’t have to worry about poor mom giving us a helping hand with more immunoglobulins, that, quite frankly, is bunk. Number two, let me assure you, you are not a baby cow or a baby goat or a baby sheep, you are not a calf or a lamb. The microbiome of a cow or a sheep or a goat is completely and totally different than your microbiome. And the idea that you should have a liquid from a cow or a sheep or a goat to educate your microbiome or to protect you against what a baby cow or a baby sheep or a baby goat might need protection from is also absolutely bunk. Finally, I was a consultant to one of the major companies in this country that controls the market for colostrum, and they developed a very exciting formula based on colostrum and also with inoculated eggs for the purpose of controlling infectious diarrhea in third-world countries. Whether you know it or not, one of the leading causes of death in third-world countries is diarrhea from infectious agents that are in the water supply. In fact, I and Gundry MD are contributors to an organization called charity: water, which brings clean water to millions of people around the world. But diarrhea kills kids, kills adults. This company developed a great product called DiaResQ. Now, I have no affiliation with them whatsoever. When I am working in the field with charity: water, I carry DiaResQ to Africa, to India because, quite frankly, diarrhea is a real problem, infectious issues are a real problem. And DiaResQ works. How does it work? It binds the bad bacteria in the gut, and basically, knocks them out. You’re not absorbing immunoglobulins from this compound to help you fight these infectious agents, it’s binding them, and you basically stop them from misbehaving. So please, I know a whole lot about colostrum, and the idea that you are going to get any benefit from colostrum is not true. And number two, knowing what I and others know about the downsides of swallowing Neu5Gc, which is in the colostrum of cows, sheep, and goats, is really a dumb idea if you wanna improve your health. That’s it, colostrum, put it down. If you wanna stop diarrhea when you’re traveling in Africa or Mexico, take some DiaResQ. You should know that most detoxing diets are actually causing or releasing toxicity into the body. Say what? How could a detox diet toxify you? Well, in many ways, let’s start with number one, with traditional detoxing diets, you’re either on a low-calorie or a fruit juice diet or a vegetable juice diet. And one of the purposes is, is to lose weight. Now, what most people don’t know is that we store our heavy metals and what are called organopesticides, all these herbicides, pesticides, biocides, in our fat cells, an example of that is heavy metals. A swordfish or a big tuna is full of mercury, clearly, not exactly a healthy component of the tuna, but that big tuna or swordfish is a thousand pounds of muscle, and that mercury or whatever is not bothering that animal, that’s because that animal stores it in its fat, where it’s harmless. But what happens when we go on a fast, a water fast or a detox diet? We start using the fat from our fat cells. And as that fat is used, heavy metals and pesticides are released into your bloodstream. They go to the liver. The liver has two sets of detoxifying enzymes, phase I and phase II detoxifying enzymes. And fortunately, most of us don’t have those enzymes very activated. If we’re on a traditional American diet, then those enzymes have been working overload and are pretty much spent. And so, we can’t handle any additional load, on top of that, the liver has no system for detoxifying heavy metals. So the liver says, “Well, I don’t want these, I can’t treat them. I’m gonna dump them into the bile. The bile will leave the liver, and I’ll wash my hands of it.” And that’s exactly what happens, only one problem, the bile then goes into our intestines, and those heavy metals get reabsorbed right back into our bloodstream, where they obviously don’t belong. And the longer you do this detoxification diet, the more toxic heavy metals accumulate in your bloodstream, and your kidneys can’t filter them out fast enough. So I see a number of patients who have tried a detoxing diet, where we’ve actually measured their heavy metals before and after the detoxification diet, and their heavy metals are much higher than when they started. The second thing about detoxing diet is that people say, “Well, I’m going to only eat anti-inflammatory foods, and that will stop my inflammation.” As you’ve seen from my books, particularly in “Gut Check,” inflammation is our body’s response to leaky gut. Inflammation does not occur because you’re eating inflammatory foods, it occurs because they’re causing leaky gut. So treating inflammation by eating anti-inflammatory foods is like, here in California, fighting a forest fire with a guard nose, it’s completely insufficient. What you gotta do is eliminate the foods that are causing leaky gut. And of course, that’s where the Yes and No Lists come from from my website. The more you take leaky gut making foods, like grains, like beans, like the nightshade family, like cashews, like peanuts, out of your diet, then you are truly repairing your leaky gut, and then quelching inflammation, it’s not the other way around. I see people who are eating turmeric smoothies every day of their lives, who had massive amounts of inflammation. And it’s not these anti-inflammatory foods that are doing anything for them, ’cause they’re still eating healthy things like whole wheat bread or brown rice. Just yesterday, I saw one of my patients, who we’re treating for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and leaky gut. And while we’re making a little progress, it’s certainly not as fast as I was anticipating ’cause she’s very motivated. And with someone like that, I certainly always go through, “Okay, what’s a typical day’s eating for you?” And the first thing out of her mouth, she said, “Well, I start every morning with my detox shake, and I buy it on the internet, it’s really famous, and I won’t tell you the name.” And I said, “You’re kidding me?” And she said, “No, no, it’s really healthy.” And I said, “Have you ever actually looked at the ingredients?” And she said, “Well, no, it’s really healthy, full of, you know, adaptogens and all this really good organic stuff.” So I pulled up on the internet, the package, I said, “Well, if you think that pea protein and brown rice…” And I went down the list, and it’s this giant lectin bomb with actually very few good things in it. And she said, “Well, but this is a health detox drink.” And I said, “No, it’s a toxification drink, and your blood work shows it.” So it’s that example, that we often think we’re doing the right thing, but we’re actually causing more leaky gut than tamping down inflammation. Okay, well, why don’t we just do a juice cleanse? The problem with juices, I’ll say it over and over again, fruit juice is mostly fructose. Fructose was really good way back when when we ate fruit whole, and it was really good for weight gain. Great apes only gained weight during fruit season, and fruit season only occurs once a year, even in the jungle. We convert fructose, which is a mitochondrial toxin, I’ll say it again, fructose is a mitochondrial toxin. We detoxify fructose in the liver into triglycerides, which is a fat, and into uric acid. I’ll say that again, we detoxify fructose in our liver, that doesn’t sound like a detox diet if what we’re drinking is a toxin. So what happens? Triglycerides raise our cholesterol, raise our fat content. These things are created or turned into another fat called a ceramide. For those of you who are interested, there’s a wonderful paper to read on the internet, published in PubMed, “Death by Ceramides.” And if you wanna know how to poison your mitochondria, to poison your heart, please read “Death by Ceramides.” Put it on your browser, you’ll be shocked. That’s what fructose does to us. Finally, I can’t tell you the number of patients who came to see me after a fruit juice cleanse, who developed acute gout. Why? Because they rapidly raise their uric acid. And uric acid is what causes gout. So here they are detoxing and actually causing a toxic gout crystal formation in their big toe, all because they are eating anti-inflammatory foods. And I can tell you, if you wanna experience inflammation, I have a case of gout. Well, so are there any effective detox solutions? Well, first of all, eating a plant-based diet that’s low-calorie, that’s lectin-free is one of the better ways to do this. But the object of the game is not to lose weight quickly. Number one, as I’ve always said, weight off fast will never last, weight off slow, you’re good to go. Dr. Valter Longo, my colleague at USC, has shown that five days of eating a low-protein vegan diet dramatically improves our immune system’s function for the entire month, even if you only eat it five days a month. He’s also shown that it actually improves insulin resistance, improves markers of pre-diabetes, but you only do it for a limited time period, you don’t do it for all month. You can enhance your liver’s phase I and phase II detoxification enzymes, and there’s many compounds that do this, the most famous is probably milk thistle, artichoke extract, which is a cousin, artichokes or cousins of milk thistle, they’re a thistle plant, is another really good detoxification trick. I like D-limonene, which is sometimes advertised as orange peel extract, and this is a compound that, in my way of thinking, takes milk thistle and artichoke extract to the next level, and I even make a product with those in mind. Sometimes milk thistle is really great, sometimes it’s not enough, and you have to add D-limonene for extra boost. Now, what about all those heavy metals that are gonna come out of the fat when you are doing a detoxification diet? Well, again, the problem is that heavy metals are reabsorbed once they’re put out into biome. So what you gotta do is capture the heavy metals in your gut. And there’s several compounds that have been shown to be very effective, the first is cracked Chlorella. Chlorella binds heavy metals and won’t allow them to be reabsorbed, the same is true with activated charcoal, it will bind heavy metals and will prevent it from being reabsorbed. Now, Chlorella, you can take fairly constantly. Activated charcoal, on the other hand, you don’t wanna continuously take it day in and day, night because it will actually bind other minerals that you need. But when you combine that with a proper diet, that’s a way to get heavy metals out of your system. And we’ve had really good success using Chlorella and heavy metals to get mercury and lead out of our patients, even quite high levels, without chelation. More amazing episodes just like this one, watch now. That a glass of orange juice would suppress white blood cells from eating bacteria or eating viruses for up to six hours.
About
Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned heart surgeon and New York Times bestselling author of “The Plant Paradox” and “The Plant Paradox Cookbook.”