Speaker 1:
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. Steven Gundry:
The vast majority of people in this country have such high insulin levels, have such insulin resistant levels, are so metabolically inflexible that they absolutely do not do well with intermittent fasting. Shocking, but true. You’ve seen in my last book and heard me talk that 50% of normal weight individuals in the United States are metabolically inflexible. Now, just to review very quickly, normally our mitochondria should be able to take sugar, glucose, and turn it into ATP, our energy currency. They should also, when the need arrives, instantaneously switch from burning sugar as a fuel to burning free fatty acids and ketones as a fuel that come from our fat cells and from our liver. And that switch should happen instantaneously, very much like a hybrid car can switch from gasoline, powering the engine to the battery powering the motors, and that switch can happen instantaneously. But 50% of normal weight individuals can’t make that switch.
That means when they stop eating, they can’t switch over to immediately drawing on battery power or releasing fat from their fat cells. And I’ll talk about why that is in a second. If you look at overweight people, and the vast majority of Americans are overweight, 88% of overweight people can’t switch between burning sugar and burning fat. And 99.5% of obese individuals, and that’s a ton of us in the United States, cannot make that switch. Okay, so why is that so important? Well, when you have high insulin levels, insulin is a fat storage hormone, and insulin’s job is to take any extra food that you eat and store it for harder times. That makes sense. But insulin is going up and up and up in our bloodstream as we eat more and more processed foods, we exercise less. So the vast majority of Americans have elevated insulin levels.
So not only is insulin a fat storage hormone, but when insulin is elevated, it prevents fat from leaving the fat cell. It’s literally blocking the exit and until insulin levels fall, all that fat that’s in all of our fat cells is literally locked in there. And you could stop eating, but you will not release the fat until your insulin levels begin to fall. And here’s the bad news, it may take two to three to four weeks of dramatically reducing your food intake or your carbohydrate intake for insulin levels to fall enough to start releasing fat from fat cells. Number two, ketones are made in the liver from free fatty acids that are released from fat cells. Ketones are designed to aid your brain and your muscles in times of starvation by keeping the brain and muscles functioning. But if you can’t release fat from fat cells, then there’s no free fatty acids going to the liver to make ketones.
So what happens? You don’t have any sugar in your blood. You don’t have any free fatty acids in your blood. You don’t have any ketones going to your brain. And what happens? You crash. You get headache-y, you get weak, you get hangry. You just do not feel well, and that’s your body saying, “Hey, I can’t make this switch.” So when people start trying to cut out a meal because they heard, “Oh, I need to have my first meal of the day at noon.” And you’re used to eating a breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning, that’s five hours of going without fuel, coupled with what you went through in the night where you don’t have any chance to keep your brain happy, much less your body happy. And that’s why this is so difficult to do. I can’t tell you the number of people, and I’ve written about this, who fail a ketogenic diet or an intermittent fasting diet because they just have too high an insulin level to access what they really need to do.
And 60% of people who try a ketogenic diet, a low carb, high fat diet, quit after a month. And it’s obvious why they quit, because they quite frankly feel miserable. Now, this will happen if you are insulin resistant. I guarantee it. I like to use the example, I could have King James LeBron teach me how to dunk a basketball. And as much as he would show me over and over and over again, I am height impaired compared to King James. And as much as I would like to replicate exactly what he was doing, I can’t do that. So when you see influencers, particularly young influencers who tell you how easy it is to do an intermittent fasting program, these are people who start with metabolic flexibility and they’re right. It’s really easy. Once you have metabolic flexibility, this is easy, but most people are starting from a place where they, with all the instruction in the world with all the, here’s what you should do, can’t get off the dime because they can’t break their metabolic flexibility.
All right, so how do we do it? As I’ve talked about in my last two books, there’s actually a fairly easy way to get metabolic flexibility. And rather jumping in the deep end of the pool and trying to push out your fasting period, what I ask you to do is one hour a week, extend when you’re going to have breakfast. So if you have breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning, this week we’re going to have it at eight o’clock in the morning and then take the weekend off, relax. The following week, we’re going to extend another hour. We’re going to go to nine o’clock in the morning and so on each week rather than going, oh, you’re not going to eat until noon and you’ll fall on your face. Any of us can make it for one hour. And even that one hour change going slowly week after week, we’ll start to lower our insulin resistance. And I see this all the time.
Now, there’s places where people run into a brick wall. Let’s suppose you made it to nine o’clock and you’re pretty good at that, but then pushing to 10 o’clock, then you go, “Oh, I’m hungry.” Or, “I’m feeling weak.” That’s actually telling you that you still have insulin resistance, and this is where you’re running into trouble. And as I talk about in the books, we got lots of tricks. One, get yourself a handful of nuts. It won’t break your fast. Have a teaspoon or a tablespoon of MCT oil. Have a bar that contains MCT oil. These are really easy tricks, and just hold it at nine o’clock for another week and then try for nine 30. Lots of different ways. The other thing that I think is important that I’ve talked about, but is when you break your fast the first meal of the day, make it what’s called a mono meal.
Make it either mostly carbohydrates or mostly protein or mostly fat. That actually makes it much easier for your mitochondria to power up and make energy. Now, how do you know when you’re metabolically flexible? Well, quite frankly, the longer you can go without these feelings, the more you’re becoming metabolically flexible. So long story short, for most of us, please, please, please do not jump off the deep end and try time-restricted eating of six to eight hours a day. It’s going to not work. Instead, try time-restricted eating on a variable schedule of just extending your eating period one hour a week and watch what happens.
If you’re doing 8/16 fasting, here’s how it works. One, you eat all your calories during an eight hour window, say 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. The rest of the time you simply don’t eat or drink any calories, though water, unsweetened tea, and black coffee, you’re fine. It’s that simple. And it’s amazing for your health. Why? Well, because intermittent fasting is how your ancestors evolved to eat. No, not on a precise clock like this plan, but based on when they found food. It’s not like the hunter-gatherers of the past always found two eggs for breakfast, after all. No, sometimes they’d have a wild board of feast on, other times they’d go days without meals. That’s how your body evolved.
Now, I would never tell you to go days without eating without supervision, but keeping your body guessing a little is a great way to optimize your health. In fact, a recent study looked at intermittent fasting in people with type two diabetes, the results of the study showed about a 15 pound weight loss in about a three-month time period. Why? Well, if you are restricting the time you’re going to eat food, you are going to restrict calories you eat too, because it’s virtually impossible to cram a lot of calories into a small amount of time.
Plus, even if your stomach growls a little bit at first, it takes some getting used to after all, your body knows how to handle a little hunger and you’ll be okay. In fact, I tell my patients, embrace the hunger. So with all the fasting methods out there, why 8/16? Well, it’s not that it’s better than any of the other methods, but for a lot of people it’s easier, because if you can still eat lunch with your coworkers and dinner with your family, you’re less likely to feel deprived. And when you don’t feel deprived, you’re more likely to stick with the plan. That’s why I’m a big fan of 8/16 fasting for a lot of my patients, it’s sustainable no matter what your lifestyle is, and ultimately your health is my number one concern. So I suggest picking a couple of weeks that work for you and committing to 8/16 fasting. Just schedule it so that you can enjoy the meal that’s most important to you and your family. That way you can live your life and enjoy lasting health too.
Now, what’s the optimal meal to eat if you’re only going to have one meal a day? Now, to begin this conversation, I need to set the record straight. It’s actually not what you eat that matters the most to a healthy metabolism, but how you eat and for how long you eat. That’s the most dramatic finding of the NIH experiments done by Dr. Rafael de Cabo in mice looking at not so much the foods the mice were given to eat, but the timing of when the mice got to eat their food. And what he showed was that it really didn’t matter whether the mice were given a high fat diet, a high protein diet, a high carbohydrate diet, the outcome was driven by how short a time period that the mice ate the food that they were given during a 24-hour period.
The mice that ate all day didn’t live very long. The mice that compressed whatever they were eating, whether it was high protein, high fat, high carbohydrate, compressed that eating window lower and lower, lived the longest regardless of what they were eating, and had far less amyloid production and beta amyloid than the animals that ate all day long. So that’s actually really exciting news. And as you know, one of my sayings from that book is eat short to live long. So that experiment and the Italian athlete experiment has convinced me that compressing my eating window is one of the strongest ways I can impact my long-term health. So is there any bad news to that study? Well, all the mice eventually died, but the mice in the high sugar group, most of the mice died from liver cancer, and that’s actually a very common cancer in mice. So long story short, would I make my one meal a day mostly sugar?
No, I wouldn’t. But the takeaway is the beauty of constricting the time that you eat all of your calories during the day gives you lots more options into not being a fanatic, “Oh, I can’t have this. I can’t have that. I can’t have that, because that’s high carb hydrate or that’s high fat or that’s high protein.” Just compressing your eating window gives you tremendous power over your health. So what would I suggest you have? Well, first of all, I can’t say this enough. The more I have you eat green things, the better off you are. As I mentioned in Unlocking the Keto Code, the more you can eat the rainbow, which really means eat polyphenols, the better you’re going to be. I’ve said this before, multiple times a week I will have pressure cooked beans as part of my meal, and that just drives some of my critics crazy.
But pressure cooking beans makes them actually an important part of your diet. I learned this from my years at Loma Linda. The other thing I think everyone should add to their diet is nuts, particularly pistachios, particularly walnuts. And we’ll go into that on another lecture. But every day I change what I eat. Do I have my favorite? Sure. But the great thing is I don’t think in five years I’ve gotten through all the yes list of all the yes foods. So there’s so much you can do.
Can limiting how much meat and dairy you eat help you live longer. Well, according to a growing amount of research, it actually can. In fact, the less animal protein you eat, probably the better off you are. But if you want to live the longest, healthiest life possible and don’t like the idea of adopting a completely vegan diet, don’t worry. Because today I’m going to share some alternative ways to limit your animal protein intake without having to give it up. So let’s start first with why limiting animal protein helps your health. Well, I’ve written about this in The Plant Paradox and The Longevity Paradox. And let me start with the Adventist community of Loma Linda, California where I was a professor for a great part of my career.
As you know, the Loma Lindans are one of the blue zones of the world, and Loma Linda is the only blue zone in North America. And I think that’s important to know because the Adventists as a religion in general are promoting vegan or vegetarian belief and eating. And in fact, in our hospital, there was only a vegetarian selection of food. There was no animal products except for cheese and eggs. But what’s interesting, in the long-term studies of some of the longest living people in the world, the Adventist of Loma Linda, it’s actually the vegans that have the longest lifespan and best health span, followed by the lacto-ovo vegetarians, followed by the pescatarians, followed by the chicken eaters, followed by those who cheat and have other forms of animal protein.
And this has been now studied for well over 20 years on an ongoing basis. And my colleagues at Loma Linda have published on this and I’ve documented in my books, and sadly for every amount of animal protein that’s added to the Adventist diet, we see increases in heart disease, decreases in longevity, and increases in cancer. And I’ve postulated on this in all of my books on why that might be. Now, there’s been some excellent studies out of St. Louis University looking at Calorie Restriction Society members who as you may or may not know in general, reduce their caloric intake by about 20, 25% over normal because of the very strong experimental evidence that calorie restriction extends health span, number one. And in all animals studied except for rhesus monkeys, extend lifespan. And as I wrote about in The Longevity Paradox, there are two competing rhesus monkey studies, both showed improved health span.
These animals lived better lives for as long as they lived. One study showed that they lived longer lives than comparable rhesus monkeys. The other did not show a benefit in lifespan. These studies are different, believe it or not, in the amount of protein that was in these two diets. And lo and behold, the protein in the rhesus monkeys that lived longer was less than the protein in the group that did not live as long. And this is actually confirmed in the St. Louis studies of the Calorie Restriction Society. They looked at a hormone that I measure in all my patients called insulin-like growth factor. It’s abbreviated IGF-1 if you’re looking for it and you can ask your doctor to measure it. And insulin-like growth factor is probably our best way of looking at how a receptor called mTOR, and I’ve talked about this before, is turned on.
Now quite frankly, we have fairly high levels of insulin-like growth factor while we’re young because quite frankly, we’re growing. But as we age and kind of cross 40 years of age, we actually see that insulin-like growth factor one levels, IGF-1 should start falling. Why? Because if you look at people who have extreme longevity and are doing great in their late 90s, early 100s, they have very low IGF ones. If you look at instead, cancer patients who develop cancer, they remarkably have high insulin-like growth factors, unfortunately and I’ll give you example later on of a recent patient. So at St. Louis University, they took calorie restricted members. And quite frankly, the Calorie Restriction Society does not bar eating animal products. In fact, they do. They asked some of the Calorie Restriction Society members to keep calorie restricted but changed to a vegan diet rather than having animal protein in their diet.
And lo and behold, their IGF-1 levels plummeted when they took down animal protein. Now why is that? Well, simplistically, mTOR the mammalian target of rapamycin. We now know that TOR exists in all creatures, including yeast is an energy sensor and it senses simplistically, amino acids from protein and sugars, and that’s what it is interested in. It turns out that there are certain amino acids in animal protein that are far more abundant than there are in corresponding plant proteins. And experiments have shown that if you lessen those specific amino acids in animal protein, then you correspondingly decrease the activation of mTOR. And believe me, we in the longevity community do every trick possible to trick mTOR from being turned on. And if one of the easiest ways to do that is dropping off animal protein so much, the better. Now, so many of you, including me, having been raised in Omaha, Nebraska, think that animal protein, eating meat, animal protein of any kind, whether that’s chicken or fish or eggs or cheeses, is essential for health.
I got news for you, there’s absolutely no evidence that any of these are essential to health or to build muscle for that matter. I again, like to remind my patients that a gorilla does not eat animal protein and he has more muscle than you will ever have in your life. A horse only eats grass and I got news for you, more muscle than you have. In fact, the largest animals on earth are actually plant eaters. So the idea that we can’t grow and develop normally just eating plants is one of the great myths. And that myth, of course has been perpetrated by our industries of in agriculture, of meat consumption and dairy consumption. And myths are really easy to do as long as you’ve got advertising dollars. Okay, now, I wrote in The Plant Paradox and The Longevity Paradox that beef, lamb, and pork in their tissue, in their muscles, if you will have a sugar molecule called Neu5Gc that we actually make a antibody to.
We have a different sugar molecule that we share with fish and chicken called Neu5Ac. And while that distinction is only one molecule difference, when we see Neu5Gc and we make an antibody to it by mistake, we often attack this sugar molecule on our blood vessels. And there’s several papers that suggests that one of the reasons meat eating is associated with more coronary artery disease is an autoimmune attack on our blood vessels, and I think we should be aware of that. The other thing is that cancer cells use Neu5Gc to shield themselves from detection by our immune system. And so that may account for the very strong epidemiology linked correspondence between, for instance, colon cancer development or even breast cancer development and meat eating. Now, those associations are actually fairly strong, but it could just be that the sugar molecule and beef, lamb, and pork may be part of the consequence, not just the fact that you’re eating animal muscle.
Now, I understand that going vegan or nearly vegan isn’t something everybody wants to do. In fact, I don’t do that. As most of you know, I am a self-described veg-aquarian in that most of the food I eat are plants or vegetables. And I supplement my diet usually on the weekends with shellfish and occasional wild fish. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t eat meat. And in fact, believe it or not, probably every three months I will have a grass fed, grass finished piece of steak. And you can visit me at Lucky’s in Montecito where I eat that grass-fed, grass finished steak every now and then. Do I do it every day? No. Do I do it once a week? No. It is a rare occasion. Hey, I’m from Omaha, okay, I got to do it occasionally. So if you’re in the group that says, there’s no way I’m going to go vegan, there’s no way I’m even going to go vegetarian. I like my meat, I like my chicken, I like my fish. That’s okay. Here’s the exciting part.
So I’ve become, I think, good friends with Dr. Valter Longo, who’s the head of longevity research at USC Medical Center. And I think Dr. Longo is rightfully one of the greatest researchers in longevity and how to achieve the benefits of calorie restriction or the benefits of fasting without actually doing either one. Fasting, a water fast, a prolonged water fast, unless you are properly prepared and taking protection with certain supplements like activated charcoal, like chlorella, like liver enzyme detoxification supplements, then you probably don’t want to do a prolonged water fast because unfortunately, heavy metals and pollutants are stored in our fat. And when you and me go on a prolonged water fast and I’m talking three days or more, you start using up the fat in your fat cells.
Well, duh. But as you use up that fat, out come those heavy metals and the pollutants, now the problem is the liver does a horrible job of detoxifying these guys and even getting rid of them. And I’ve talked about this before. You actually excrete your heavy metals in bile back into your intestines, and then your body reabsorbs them. And I see so many people who have been doing fast and they have incredibly high levels of mercury and lead and cadmium in their blood while they’re doing this without realizing they’ve actually released this from their fat cells. That tuna, that swordfish, that has toxic levels of mercury in their flesh are big, strong animals because the fat is in the, sorry, the pollutants are in the fat where they can’t do any harm. So in our modern society, fasting, prolonged water fasting should be done with caution, should be done under medical supervision, and you got to use the right supplements to help you with that fast.
Okay, so what can you do instead? Well, thanks to Dr. Longo’s work, which I cite in all of my books, what he did was say, well, wait a minute. We know that eliminating animal protein for a period of time changes how mTOR is turned on. And he actually designed experiments first in mice and now replicated in humans that show that a five-day period consecutively of a modified vegan fast where you’re only eating about 600 to 800 calories of basically vegetables. You can certainly have fats from plants, but you eliminate all animal protein, you eliminate dairy, you eliminate eggs. And so you have dramatically dropped the amount of animal-based amino acids in your diet. And what he found was all you need is five days in a row of doing this consecutively and you will act in terms of activating stem cells, activating your immune system, activating anti-cancer genes, as if you had been on a fast, a calorie restricting diet for the entire month.
How about a prolonged water fast? Now, of course, this is the most well-known, historically speaking approach to fasting. Even Jesus has said to have done it for 40 days and 40 nights, and almost all great religions have some form of prolonged water fasting. There’s clearly benefits in ancient times to water fasting, but not so fast, excuse the pun. Most of us store our heavy metals and organ pesticides in our fat cells. So when we stop eating anything for a continued period of time, we release not only fat from our fat cells, but those heavy metals and organo pesticides. We have a horrible detoxification system in our liver to eliminate these problems. In fact, Roy Walford, the famous UCLA professor who was the doctor on the biosphere, two experiments in the Arizona desert, documented in that group of people who literally starved for six months, their levels of heavy metals and organ pesticides went up dramatically and remained dramatically high for a year following re-eating. That’s because they put them into their bloodstream and they couldn’t get rid of them.
So right now for Americans, water fasting is dangerous because of that fact. Now, if you want to do that, understanding the risks, you want to absorb those heavy metals and organo pesticides by taking chlorella tablets and activated charcoal. That will bind those heavy metals and prevent them from being reabsorbed into your system. But you don’t need a prolonged water fast. Instead, time controlled intermittent fasting will have just as good an effect. Or as my friend and colleague, Dr. Valter Longo has shown, a fasting mimicking diet, which uses a five day low calorie vegan fast once a month has been shown to duplicate the ability of a water fast in terms of health benefits without the danger of the heavy metal and organo pesticide release.
Speaker 1:
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