Now, have you ever wondered what this trend is about so much colon cancer in young people? Now, you’ll see on TV that this is true, and it is, and you see the answer to this on TV, is we we’re now recommending that younger and younger people get colon cancer screening. That’s the wrong message, folks. The message is, holy cow, why are so many young people developing colon cancer? Not that we ought to screen people in their 20s for colon cancer. We need to let people know why they’re getting it. And that’s why today we’re gonna talk about butyrate, an incredible inhibitor of colon cancer cell growth. Now, if you’ve read my books, you know I love butyrate. I’ve talked about it in the energy paradox in unlocking the keto code in my new bestseller “Gut Check.” So butyrate is a short chain fatty acid that’s made primarily in our colon by butyrate producing bacteria. Now, what most people are unaware of, we assume that all the cells in our body need to have oxygen delivered to them to live, and they need to have glucose and fat and proteins to live except for the lining of the colon. These cells are called colonocytes. But interestingly enough, 90% of everything they require to eat is butyrate. They don’t need oxygen, they don’t need sugar, they don’t need protein, they need butyrate to live. Now, the problem with butyrate and the colon is through the years we have pretty much number one killed off most of the butyrate producing bacteria that live in our colon through our overuse of antibiotics, either personally or in the animal food that we eat that have been given antibiotics or in the use of roundup glyphosate, which is now sprayed on just about everything. We do not have those butyrate producing bacteria anymore, and it’s hard to get them back. So, if the colon cells need butyrate for proper health and we’re not making it, is it any wonder that these cells are dying or becoming odd looking? And here’s the number two factor about butyrate. Butyrate is well known as one of the most strong suppressor of cancer cell growth that anyone has ever discovered. It’s A-H-D-A-C inhibitor, and I won’t go into that, but it literally prevents cancer cells from growing and dividing. So it’s a two-pronged reason why we’re getting an increased amount of colon cancer in young people because we’re not feeding colon cells what they need, and they’re becoming weird looking, and we don’t have the butyrate that would stop those pre-cancerous cells from becoming cancerous. So it’s a one-two punch. And so is it any wonder that we’re seeing increased colon cancer in young people? I’m reminded of a very famous British colon surgeon by the name of Dennis Burket, famous for Burkets lymphoma, if you wanna look him up. He wanted to do mission work in Africa and utilize his talents to treat Africans. Good for him. But he got down to Africa and unfortunately, he couldn’t find any colon cancer to treat. Matter of fact, he couldn’t find any colon diseases to treat. He couldn’t find diverticulosis, he couldn’t find hemorrhoids, and he was pretty much out of a job. And he said, “What the heck? You know, this is so prevalent in England. How come these guys don’t have this?” And he started to watch what these people ate, and they ate huge amounts of tubers, yams, and he used to actually go out into the fields and look at their bowel movements and they would have termite mound bowel movements. Huge. And he said, “Son of a gun, it’s the fiber that these guys are eating that’s preventing colon cancer.” And so he came back to England. And quite frankly, England didn’t have a whole lot of these sorts of foods, not a lot of sweet potatoes, not a lot of other tubers in England. But England had a lot of insoluble fiber in wheat, in oats, and he didn’t know that insoluble fiber is totally different than soluble fiber that’s in tubers. And he didn’t know that the butyrate producing bacteria that were responsible for all these wonderful things that were happening to the Africans can’t use insoluble fiber. But cereal companies thought this was great news. And if you’ve ever noticed cereal companies jumped on the fiber bandwagon. And since cereal companies use grains as their main fiber, it’s no wonder that we see this emphasis on whole grain bread, on whole grain muffins, on high fiber muffins, on rice brand muffins, on wheat brand muffins, on oat brand muffins. There’s no soluble fiber. It’s all the wrong kind of fiber. And even if there was the right kind of fiber, is anyone who’s read any of my books or watched this, know that these grains contain lectins, which literally are like razor blades. So, you’ve got a one two punch, your colon cells are starving to death, and then you eat razor blades and slice them. And it’s no wonder that we have this incidence of rapid increase of colon cancer. Okay, so the answer is, well, let’s just swallow the butyrate and that’ll fix things. I had the president and founder of Pendulum Life, maker of butyrate producing bacterial probiotic products on this podcast, and she used a very great analogy that I’ll share with you again today. So, let’s suppose I am carrying a suitcase with a million dollars in $1 bills in the back of the pickup of a pickup truck going down the freeway, and we hit a bump and the suitcase flies out of the pickup truck, lands on the freeway springs open, and the million a hundred dollar bills go flying around the freeway. And of course, everybody stops their car and starts picking up $1 bills and everybody gets a few dollars, but nobody gets rich. Now, that’s exactly what happens when you take a butyrate supplement. Butyrate needs to be in the colon to feed the colon cells. When you swallow butyrate, I’m sorry, the suitcase springs open and everybody gets a little bit of butyrate, but the guys who need it are way down the line and they don’t get anything. So it’s completely dependent on delivering the butyrate where it needs to go. Now, you can make butyrate with all the things I’ve talked about before. You not only have to have butyrate producing bacteria, but you have to give them not only soluble fiber, but you have to give them precursors for butyrate, other short chain fatty acids. And those are in the presence of fermented foods, particularly vinegars. And I’ve had a full Instagram post on the benefits of vinegars in improving colon health and your health. So, the effects of this are so far reaching that I can’t even begin to start. So where do you start? Well, I’m a big fan of taking butyrate producing bacterial capsules. No question about it, but I’m also a big fan of getting the precursors for making butyrate into you. Those are fermented foods, those are vinegars, and you have to have soluble fiber, not insoluble fiber, and that’s available in lots of great foods. You can get inulin in all the chicory family vegetables like radicchio, like Belgian endive, like chicory. You can get inulin in asparagus. You can get inulin in artichokes and artichoke hearts. You can get great amounts of soluble fiber in okra. You can get great amount of soluble fiber in root vegetables, particularly like yams or sweet potatoes. So the options are endless, but you gotta get ’em into your system. Now, is there a way to get butyrate delivered where it needs to be? Yeah, but you’ve got to nano encapsulate butyrate. So you’ve gotta get butyrate where the action is. You can make it yourself through the ways I told you to do. Or if you’re going to get butyrate, make sure it’s a nano encapsulated form that’s literally delivering that million dollar suitcase to where it’s needed, and that’s the actual colon cells. Without that, you’re wasting your money. Now, how long does it take to fix all this? That’s the thing. There is no quick fix. This takes time to repair the cell lining of your colon. I used to think that we could fix damage leaky gut in a couple weeks. I was very naive. Now, I’ve been at this for 25 years, and we now have ways of measuring how the lining of your gut is doing, how leaky it is, how healthy it is, and it can take minimum of three months, six months, nine months, a year. I’ve even seen people take two years. Recently, we had a young man with severe fibromyalgia that has taken four years of concentrated effort to repair his gut and restore his intestinal health. Why is that? Because quite honestly, we should have a tropical rainforest of over 10,000 different species of bacteria in our gut. And quite frankly, some of are devoid of all, but a few strains of bacteria. In fact, some people who take an antibiotic for a urinary tract infection, it may take two years of taking probiotics to reestablish even a meager bacterial flora. The point is, it’s a process. The other point is don’t give up. It is fixable, it is repairable. And this is why I come to you every week to give you the tricks so that you’re not one of those persons who gets the bad news at 35 that you have stage four colon cancer. More amazing episodes just like this one, watch now. So one of the things that’s been implicated in our epidemic of anxiety and depression is the fact that glyphosate, which has now been around four 50 years, is destroying the very bacteria that make feel good hormones.
What the heck are amino acids? Well, amino acids are the building blocks of proteins in both plants and animals. Now, amino acids, there are 22 different amino acids, and these combine in different ways, in different patterns throughout your body to form the proteins that create the tissue that make you you. They make your muscles, they make your cartilage, they make your bone, they make your muscles, they make everything. So saying that amino acids are important is in a way an oxymoron, you have to have amino acids. But where they come from is where all the controversy and the hype comes from. Now, there are essentially two types of amino acids in humans. There are what are called non-essential amino acids. They’re important for your health, but they’re called non-essential because you can produce them on your own from other amino acids or even from sugar molecules. So you have the enzyme system to make one amino acid from a different amino acid. So those are non-essential. On the other hand, there are essential amino acids. We don’t manufacture them ourselves, so we have to obtain them from our diet, and that’s where it gets entertaining. Now, many people are told, “You have to acquire amino acids for bulking.” And many bodybuilders and many people who advise athletes say that you’ve got to get these amino acids primarily from animal protein. Now, what a bunch of bums. First of all, the head of nutrition, Professor Christopher Gardner at Stanford, has some fabulous online videos showing that in fact, there is no human need to get muscle building amino acids from animal protein, and he’s got no skin in this game. The point is, as I’ve reiterated many times, that if we actually needed animal protein to bulk up our muscles, then horses and gorillas would be skinny. In fact, a gorilla has far more muscle mass than you and I will ever achieve, and yet the gorilla is not eating bone broth or amino acid supplements to bulk up, neither is a horse, they’re eating plants. Now, the point of all this is, as Christopher Gardner points out, that we’ve been told that plant proteins are deficient in certain amino acids, amino acids that are essential for making protein. Now, believe it or not, both plant and animal proteins have a complete array of essential and non-essential amino acids, both plants and animals. It’s true that plants may be less of certain amino acids, but the point Professor Gardner makes is there’s still plenty there, even if there’s not much of these, particularly if you’re eating a lot of plant-based material, which explains why a gorilla or a horse does just fine in making huge amounts of muscles just eating plants. And every time you get into the hype that you’ve got to have animal protein to do this, please just go down to the zoo and watch a gorilla, or go out to the farm and watch a horse. Plenty of muscle there folks, and they’re not pumping amino acids. Now, the majority of protein that we eat, about 87% of it in some studies, is not converted into muscle, it’s converted into sugar. Sorry about that. We have very little need for protein in our diet for repairing protein, for building muscle. In fact, only about 13% of labeled protein is incorporated into bone and muscle in the foods you eat. Now, here’s the bad news. Back in the good old days, our great-great grandparents ate whole food and they ate it whole. Now, there was no such thing as a protein powder, there was no such thing as an amino acid supplement, and they were pretty lean and mean, why? Because they got plenty of protein slowly delivered into their bloodstream. So you were more likely to be able to use that protein for muscle building than converting it immediately into sugar. And one of my arguments and other’s arguments is the more you break that protein down into rapidly absorbing protein like protein powders, like amino acid supplements, the more likely you are to convert that into sugar rather than muscle mass. And remember, we have no storage system for protein. We do have a storage system for sugar. It’s called fat, and we do not waste energy. So if we consume more protein than we need for wear and repair and muscle synthesis, we will convert that into sugar and convert it into fat. So that’s where all this goes, sorry about that. Now, what about branched-chain amino acids, BCAAs? These are truly involved in muscle synthesis, I have no question about that, and there is no question about that. But the problem with branched-chain amino acids is that they stimulate mTOR, the mechanistic target of rapamycin and in turn, stimulate insulin-like growth factor 1. Now, if you’re 30 years old and building muscle, I have no problem with branched-chain amino acids. I do have a problem if you’re older because insulin-like growth factor is one of the biggest mischief makers in aging properly. And as I tell my patients who are 50 or older, there is nothing in you that you want to grow anymore. And sadly, in my practice and others’, people who have elevated insulin-like growth factors as they age, have a much higher incidence of cancer than people who have low insulin-like growth factors. So always consider what you are trying to accomplish by taking branched-chain amino acids. Now, sadly, there are no human studies that show that branched-chain amino acids will increase muscle synthesis or even prevent muscle loss. In fact, two studies actually showed it would decrease muscle synthesis. And just remind you, gorillas and horses do not take branched-chain amino acid supplements, and they seem to do fine. We recycle a lot of our protein. Remember, the lining of our gut is the same surface area as a tennis court, and that lining is constantly slough. And we actually re-eat the protein in those cells that we slough. And some studies show that we actually get 20 grams of protein just by re-eating the wall of our gut every single day. Now, what about the vegetarian and vegan community? Now, there’s a huge myth that vegans and vegetarians don’t get enough amino acids. That’s not true, they get it from the food they eat, and there are multiple controlled studies with athletes giving them a vegetarian or vegan diet or an animal protein diet showing absolutely no difference in muscle mass or incorporation of muscle mass. Now, “Where do you get amino acids from plants?”, you may ask. Well, they’re in everything you eat. They’re particularly present in some root vegetables like beets and leeks. If you are a vegetarian, Parmesan cheese, other aged cheeses, nuts, leaves, nuts like baruka nuts. Baruka nuts have all the essential amino acids. But just remember, because one or two products of plants may not have enough of a particular amino acid, that’s going to be counteracted by the other thing you are eating. The other idea that we have to combine foods, if we’re vegans or vegetarians, to get the right amino acids. There’s nobody on the other side of your gut looking at what’s coming in and saying, “Oh my gosh, we are deficient in this particular amino acid.” We can’t make such and such a thing. The next bite, that amino acid will show up and you’ll have enough. Again, just look at all the largest animals on Earth and they just happen to be vegans, sorry about that. Eggs are another great source of protein. Now, it’s true that vegans do have low levels of creatine and amino acid derivative, and interestingly enough, there’s several studies that show that vegans are deficient in creatine in their brains. Also, there are several studies that vegans who rely on short-chain omega-3 fats like flaxseed oil for their omega-3s, have smaller brains than people who get their long-chain omega-3 fats from fish oil. But the good news is there are algae-based long-chain omega-3 fats readily available. So now, really vegans have no excuse. I do recommend to my vegan patients that they supplement with creatine to make sure their brains have plenty of creatine to go around. Now, if you’re eating the plant paradox way, you’re getting plenty of amino acids. In some cases, supplementing with individual amino acids may be useful. Now, I personally take lysine, proline, and glycine in supplemental form. They’re easy to find and they’re cheap, why? Because collagen is made primarily from those three amino acids, and it’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper to actually take the amino acids that make collagen rather than a collagen supplement. Just remember, you do not absorb collagen. And study after study after study has not shown that collagen that you swallow will be made back into collagen once you absorb it. There’s no instructions that said, “Oh, you just ate collagen, you better make collagen on the other side of your intestine,” that’s not how it works. So collagen has to be broken down into individual amino acids to be absorbed. That doesn’t mean you’re going to take those amino acids and make collagen again. You might, but you might use them for other processes. So you can have all the bone broth in the world, and that’s not going to make more collagen on the other side of your gut. Cows don’t eat collagen. Cows make collagen from the plant amino acids that they eat. And so the idea that you have to have animal collagen to make collagen makes absolutely no sense, because the animals that you’re eating got their collagen by eating plant amino acids, sorry about that. So just take a lysine, a glycine, and proline supplement, add some vitamin C, which is essential for knitting collagen together, and you’ll be all set. I hope you enjoyed this episode of “The Dr. Gundry Podcast.” Make sure to check out the next one here. If we ate the recommended daily allotment of protein, 98% of us would be eating too much protein.
