Dr. Steven Gundry:
I want to talk about a lot of free things or nearly free things that you can do every day to improve your health. Number one, well, it’s not exactly free, but it doesn’t cost very much. I want you to start using vinegar. And no, that’s not to clean your coffee maker, although it does work for that. I’m talking about the benefits of acetic acid. If you’ve read gut check, you know that acetic acid is one of the short-chain fatty acids that are really, really, really important for making the ultimate short-chain fatty acid called butyrate. And butyrate is really the holy grail of short-chain fatty acids.
Butyrate just happens to be the essential fuel for the cells that line your colon, your large intestine. They get 80% of all their nourishment, not from your bloodstream, but from the butyrate produced by your gut bacteria. Now here’s the deal. You could eat all the fiber you want, and the odds are you are not going to produce butyrate. How come? It turns out we need an assembly line of various bacteria and the compounds that they produce to end up with butyrate, and it just so happens that acetic acid is one of those components that’s necessary to get the final product butyrate. Now, of course you have to have the right gut producing butyrate bacteria, but you got to have the precursors. So acetic acid is one of those great ways. The secondary effect is that these compounds, short-chain fatty acids, are actually really cool mitochondrial uncoupling compounds, and they also are really cool anti-cancer compounds.
Now, why is this so important? Have you noticed that there’s article after article after article talking about young people developing cancer, particularly colon cancer, and do you ever wonder why that is? Now, the answer is not, well, let’s start screening for colon cancer earlier. Let’s instead of 50, let’s screen at 45, or let’s screen at 40. No, the answer is why is that colon cancer developing in younger and younger people? And the answer is we no longer are producing butyrate to feed the wall of our gut and to prevent cancer. So I want you to think about vinegar as one of the fundamental parts of a healthy diet for you. You may remember that I invented the fake Coke, where you take San Pellegrino sparkling water or another sparkling water, pour some aged balsamic vinegar in it, and it looks like a Coke, it tastes like a Coke, but you’re getting a shot of vinegar, apple cider vinegar. You know that mother that’s in there, do you know what that is? That’s actually dead bacteria and yeast cells.
And if you’ve read gut check, you know that those dead bacteria and those dead yeast cells are actually postbiotics as well, and they educate your microbiome and they actually promote a more diverse microbiome. So whenever you’re buying apple cider vinegar, make sure you get it with the mother. Now, there’s a lot of apple cider vinegar drinks out there, because quite frankly, a lot of us come from a culture where we do not appreciate sour foods. And so companies know this, and so they’ll add sugar to an otherwise healthy product, like apple cider vinegar, and make it in a shot or a drink. So please, just because it says apple cider vinegar or another vinegar doesn’t mean it’s healthy for you if it’s been loaded with sugar. What my wife and I do, we probably at any one time, we have anywhere from five to 10 different vinegars in our cabinet. And they’re endlessly variable now, I happen to like a fig vinegar right now, but there’s apple cider vinegar, there’s champagne vinegar, there’s sherry vinegar, there’s rice vinegar. It goes on and on and on.
Each of these have different polyphenols, and so adding vinegars into your daily routine as a salad dressing is a great way to improve your health for little or no expense. And just start experimenting with it, you’ll have a great time. And have a fake Coke on me. Okay, secondly, in the energy paradox, I introduced the concept of exercise snacking. What the heck is exercise snacking? Short bouts of exercise done several times a day actually is the equivalent in human studies to doing 30 minutes of continuous workout in a gym. So stop killing yourself in a gym. You don’t need a gym membership. You can get all the benefits of hours at the gym with exercise snacking. For example, put a song on your iTunes or wherever you get your songs, on Spotify, and dance for three minutes. Make an idiot out of yourself. Dance with your dog. My dogs love to dance. They think it’s just crazy. It keeps your metabolism flexible.
Now, I call these snacks because that’s what they are, they’re a snack. So when you’re sitting on the couch watching TV and a commercial comes on, and they go, “We’ll be back in 90 seconds.” That doesn’t mean get up and walk to the refrigerator for a snack, that means do a snack in the room. Do jumping jacks, do push-ups, do a plank for 90 seconds. Any way you can do this is a great snack. Now, house chores actually count. If you look at the blue zones, one of the things that’s unique about blue zones is they actively garden. They actively walk, they walk up and down hills. I happen to live in hilly communities. I walk my dogs every day twice a day, up and down hills. If you don’t have a hill, do deep knee bends while you’re brushing your teeth twice a day. That’s right, I do deep knee bends while brushing my teeth. You’re not doing anything else. That’s an exercise snack.
Speaking of dogs, did you know that dog owners live longer than non-dog owners? Yes, it’s true. A study showed that a 10 minute stroll after dinner dramatically lowers blood sugar. And spending a lot of time in Europe like my wife and I do, we’re fascinated by the fact that most individuals are walking after dinner, strolling in their communities. They’re not running, they’re not working out, they’re walking after dinner. And try that at home, it really makes all the difference in the world. Finally, eat breakfast later. It’s free, and it saves you money in time. Just remember, our ancestors did not crawl out of our caves and say, “What’s for breakfast?” There was no breakfast. There was no storage system for food, there wasn’t a refrigerator, there wasn’t a pantry. There wasn’t a 7-Eleven next door. There wasn’t a Starbucks. Our ancestors had to find food to eat it, and the modern hunter-gatherers usually don’t eat until 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning.
So why is this so good for you? We’ve seen that the longer that you can fast following your final meal of the day before you eat again dramatically improves your metabolic flexibility, dramatically improves your mitochondrial function, dramatically improves your lifespan and health span. Now, the good news is your sleep time counts as part of the time you’re not eating. So that if I can get you instead of eating breakfast, break fast, at seven o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock in the morning, if I can even get you to nine o’clock in the morning, that’ll make a big difference. If I can get you to 10, even better. If I can get you to 11, even better.
Now, I’ve worked out this protocol for you in unlocking the keto code in gut check and also my upcoming book, the gut-brain paradox. And the more I can get you to push that window out before you eat your first meal of the day, the better off you’re going to be, the better off your mitochondrial work. And the good news is it’s free, and all this wonderful free stuff is how to really improve your health dramatically.
Finally, get your vitamin D levels up. Vitamin D is a hormone. It’s not a vitamin, even though we call it a vitamin. It’s really important to have vitamin D in your system. More and more research is showing that to a great extent, the higher your level of vitamin D, the more diverse your microbiome is. And quite frankly, the more diverse your microbiome is, the healthier you are and the longer you live well. The higher your vitamin D level, the tighter the wall of your gut is. And the tighter the wall of your gut is, the less permeable it is, the better your health, the longer you live, and the longer your health span. Your vitamin D is essential to make your immune system work properly.
And we know that sunlight is a great way to get vitamin D, but for most people it is not enough. Most people need at least five to 10,000 international units of vitamin D3 a day, that’s 125 to 250 micrograms of vitamin D. I personally have never seen vitamin D toxicity. The University of California, San Diego, has not seen vitamin D toxicity up to 40,000 international units a day. So vitamin D is remarkably safe and remarkably effective, and it’s really cheap. And if you can’t afford it, just get out in the sun. Don’t be afraid of the sunlight. As I’ve talked about before, I don’t wear sunscreen, I eat my sunscreen. And we can maybe talk about that in a different lecture, but that’s the deal.
Personally, in my patients, I run their vitamin D levels at 100 to 150 nanograms per milliliter. Most of your doctors will be afraid of that. I’ve been following vitamin D levels for 25 years now, and believe me, the higher your vitamin D, the better. Quest and Cleveland Heart Lab now say that 150 nanograms per milliliter is normal and not to be afraid of that sort of level.
Hey everybody, it’s time for question and answer time. Look, I love hearing from you, I love your questions. Oftentimes, they’re the exact same questions I get from my patients, so let’s dive in. If you’re ready, I’m ready. Number one, from @meats, salt, and water. I bet you’re a carnivore guy. I dislocated my shoulder really bad, what should I eat to make it recover stronger? Are there any supplements I should be taking for healing? Well, I’m sorry to hear that you did that. The deal is all the collagen supplements in the world are probably not going to help you heal your shoulder. And if I’m reading your site, meat, salt, and water right, you’re probably getting a lot of collagen in your diet already.
But what most people unfortunately don’t know is that vitamin C is critical for knitting collagen together, and vitamin C, we don’t manufacture, so you have to swallow it. The problem with vitamin C, it’s a water-soluble vitamin. And when you swallow a vitamin C, it’s gone in about three or four hours. So my recommendation to you, and I actually do this with the patients that I operate on or did operate on, I have them take 1,000 milligrams of timed release vitamin C twice a day. That’ll give you a continuous supply of vitamin C to re-knit all that collagen that you need to repair your shoulder. And you’ve heard me say again, vitamin D is another critical part of that. Make sure you’re taking anywhere from five to 10,000 international units of vitamin D3 a day. I like to supplement it with vitamin K2, at least 100 micrograms a day. And feel better.
This is from at @Carm.de, thoughts about eating pasta imported from Italy made with Italian flour. Well, here’s the deal. Sadly, after the war in Ukraine, a great deal of the wheat available in Europe was no longer available. And I have it with good sources that Italy now imports a great deal of its flour from the United States. And since almost all of our wheat is sprayed with glyphosate, just importing Italian pasta is probably not the safest thing to do. Particularly now there are great pastas made out of sorghum flour, I make one here at Gundry MD, and there’s millet pasta. There are great alternative pastas, so you really don’t need to import your pasta from Italy. Great question though.
This one’s from @luda.sha, how to get rid of toenail fungus. So you wouldn’t believe how many people have toenail fungus, almost everyone I operated on back when I was a heart surgeon had toenail fungus. Sadly, it’s really, really, really difficult to get rid of toenail fungus. First of all, please, please, please do not take an oral antifungal agent. I personally have seen several people develop liver failure from this. When I was a transplant surgeon, we did liver transplants for people who had taken antifungals to treat their toenail fungus, so please don’t do that. Laser treatment will work, but interestingly, the number of patients I’ve had who’ve had their toenails treated with laser, eventually the toenail fungus came back. So in general, it’s almost a losing cause.
From @stef.any. If your gut is completely healed, can you still have food sensitivities? Absolutely. I have a number of patients whose guts are completely healed, they have absolutely no markers of leaky gut. And yet when we measure their food sensitivities, certain foods remain as a sensitive food. Now, a lot of them, a lot of their food sensitivities completely resolve, but a number of people, and most of these people knew that they had this food sensitivity even when we started. So just because your leaky gut is healed doesn’t mean that there’s certain foods that you should still avoid. The good news is, like I say, most of my patients know what foods those are and they just naturally avoid them, or they, for instance, pressure cook them.
So the good news is for most of my patients who might have a two-page list, a moderate and severe food sensitivities, they might be down to two or three in the end. In fact, we just had a patient this week who’s now literally down to one food sensitivity. Happens to be almonds, it started off with almonds, but most of the time they’ll resolve. But just because your gut is healed doesn’t mean you’ll completely avoid food sensitivities.
From @EZARLENG. What is the deal with Apeel coating on avocados? Should I stay away from buying these? Well, again, this is a treatment that’s being applied to apples, to avocados, to keep the moisture in. Now, the deal is with an avocado, luckily, you’re going to throw the peel away and you’re going to scoop out the insides. So no, in an avocado, that’s not a big deal. But with apples or other fruits, to me that is a big deal. And apples are quite frankly, one of the highest fructose-containing fruits there is, so just be cautious when you see that treated with a vegetable coating or treated with a coating, or treated with a peel. There’s far better fruits to buy, like blackberries or raspberries or kiwi. Great question.
From @StudioL by Liz. Can you clear up the confusion with kale? Is it good for you or bad for you? What about oxalate content? Well, good question. I’m actually going to produce a YouTube all about this subject because it is very controversial. I’ll give you a quick answer. A kale, like other brassica vegetables, likes to concentrate a heavy metal called cadmium in its leaves. And if you’re Dave Asprey, you hate kale anyhow, and cadmium may not be very good for you. But I do heavy metal testing in a lot of my patients, and cadmium actually rarely shows up as a major issue for most of my patients. However, kale does have a lot of oxalates.
Sadly, a great number of us no longer have oxalate-eating bacteria. And so if you are one of those people who are sensitive to oxalates, that’s because you don’t have that class of bacteria. Now, the good news is that we’re now learning that there are a class of bacteria in the biofilm of olives and also in pickle juice, which will actually help reconstitute those oxalate-eating bacteria. And that’s maybe another reason why olives are so good for you. Who knew that there was a biofilm in olives that might help you handle oxalates? Interestingly enough, all of my oxalate-sensitive patients, once we get their leaky gut fit and their microbiome more diverse, they’re no longer sensitive to oxalates. I hope that answers your question.
From @Ira.enchiva. How do you fast yet not lose weight for people who are already too thin? That is actually a really good question, and that is true with my patients as well. There are absolutely some of my patients who are very thin to start with, who embark on intermittent fasting, and absolutely cannot keep weight on. It’s in general because you are uncoupling your mitochondria even more than what you’ve already done. Most thin people actually have very uncoupled mitochondria. What I like to do with my individuals like this is I look at their fasting insulin levels. I look at their HOMA-IR, and I look at their insulin-like growth factors. If those are all in great shape, then you don’t need intermittent fasting to add to your regimen. It’s not going to benefit you any further.
But just remember that 50% of normal weight individuals in the United States are metabolically inflexible, 88% of overweight individuals are metabolically inflexible, and 98% of obese individuals are metabolically inflexible. So for the vast majority of everyone, intermittent fasting is very, very useful. Finally, if you are thinking about getting pregnant, intermittent fasting is not for you. Because it literally sends signals to you that times are rough, that you might not be be getting adequate food, and probably not a good time to have a baby, [inaudible 00:24:08].
Okay, this is @Forever Health Journey. Even though I take magnesium, I sometimes still get cramps, especially in my feet. Not sure what that means I’m lacking. Well, so it sounds from your handle that forever health journey, you may be working on intermittent fasting. And one of the things we know about intermittent fasting or even fasting for a day or so is that you actually increase your uric acid and you deplete not only magnesium from your muscles, but also potassium. So one of the tricks, number one, is make sure you are consuming an electrolyte solution. I make one called vital recharge. I happen to love element. My wife takes element every day, so there are multiple electrolyte options. Number two, most of my patients, we have to give them potassium magnesium aspartate, not just magnesium. That usually solves the problem. Finally, I do have a few patients even on that regimen that still get cramps. I’ve found that you can use magnesium oil spray.
Now, magnesium oil is not an oil, but it feels greasy. It’s just liquid magnesium, it’s like Epsom salts. And you just spray it on your legs or your feet, and that’s actually been very, very effective. Finally, some people have noticed that apple cider vinegar is actually very useful for cramps, and if you haven’t tried it, please try it.
Okay, from @I love Lucy Lover, she’s pretty funny. Been drinking three to four cans of sparkling water, Spindrift and LaCroix for two months, now I have sky-high albuminuria and elevated A1c. Can this be related? No, that would not be related to this, but let me tell you, sky-high albuminuria and elevated A1c is directly related to sugar and or uric acid damaging your kidneys. And come and see me, we’ll fix it.
Speaker 1:
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