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:
You’ve heard me talk about leaky gut, but have you ever heard of leaky brain? That’s right. What’s happening in your gut might be sneaking into your brain causing brain fog, memory issues, and even more serious neurological problems. In today’s episode, we’re diving into the gut-brain connection and how healing your gut could be the key to a sharper mind. Plus, I’ll share how simple spices can support brain health and even help protect against cognitive decline. And I’m giving you an exclusive sneak peek into my latest book, the Gut Gut-Brain Paradox, where I reveal groundbreaking insights on how to repair your gut brain for optimal health. So stay with me. This episode is packed with everything you need to know to protect and improve your brain.
If you’ve got leaky gut, there is a very good chance that you have leaky brain. Now, what do I mean by that? The brain normally has a communication system with your rest of your body. And one of those main systems is a very large nerve that runs from your brain to all of your organs, your heart, your lungs, your gut, called the vagus nerve. Now, when I was in medical school long ago, I was taught that the vagus nerve is the way for the brain to talk to the gut and to kind of tell the gut what to do. Come to find out that for every one fiber, and think of this literally as a cable network or a telephone cable, for every fiber from the brain down to the gut, there are nine fibers coming from the gut up to the brain. And when this was discovered, we realized that there was a gut brain connection. It got even more interesting when it was discovered that there were as many neurons, nerve cells in the gut as there were in the entire spinal cord. That’s a lot of nerve cells.
Fast-forward, we now know that most of the information that comes from the gut to the brain is not from the nerve cells, but actually from the gut microbiome, the bacteria in the gut. So one of the things that I’ve written about in the past is we now know that lectins can actually climb the vagus nerve and go right into your brain. And really cool animal experiments show that among other things, lectins in the gut from leaky gut can cause Parkinson’s Disease by destroying the substantia nigra in the brain.
I wrote about in Gut Check, which hopefully got your attention when I was a general surgeon and you had to be a general surgeon before you became a heart surgeon, ulcer disease, people with gastric ulcers or duodenal ulcers, one of our treatments was to cut the vagus nerve, and there’s a lot of people walking around with their vagus nerve cut. So what? As time went on, people who had had their vagus nerve cut had a 30% to 50% less chance of developing Parkinson’s. Huh? Why? Because the cable was cut and these guys couldn’t get up to the brain. Quite remarkable.
So this is one way that the gut clearly can get things that you don’t want into your brain up via that cable system, but perhaps more important, the brain has always been known to be a very privileged organ and it’s a privileged organ from what’s called the blood-brain barrier. Now, we’ve known about this since the dawn of chemotherapy for cancer, and we’ve known that chemotherapeutic drugs can’t get through this wall. If you have a brain tumor, we could give you all the chemotherapeutic drugs in your veins and they can’t get through the blood-brain barrier. It’s that impenetrable. We can’t even get antibiotics into the brain very well. We can’t get most anything. The brain is so protected by this blood-brain barrier.
Now, here’s the bad news. When you have leaky gut, one of the things that I’ve talked about before is your immune system, your white blood cells tell all of your other cells in your body that there are issues and lectins and other particles like LPSs, lipopolysaccharides, can actually begin to make holes in the blood-brain barrier. The other problem is that certain foods that we eat, particularly beef, lamb, pork and milk products, break the blood-brain barrier. And so now we have just like leaky gut, we have leaky brain. So what? Your brain has its own set of white blood cells, they’re called glial cells or microglial cells. Glial cells are the body guards to the neurons. Their job is to protect the neurons at all costs.
Here’s the bad news. When the body, the immune cells in the brain get the message that the bad guys are loose in the gut and they’re coming this way, they do what any great bodyguard would do. They simplistically, here’s a neuron, he’s the king in a castle, and the bodyguards are the soldiers, the glial cells. And what the bodyguards do, the neuron talks to other neurons with extensions called dendrites, and it talks to another neuron sends it a message. The first thing the glial cells do, and we’ve actually seen these on photography of actual leaky brain. They start just like Pac-Man biting off these dendritic processes, and then to make things worse, let’s suppose this is the castle and there used to be a drawbridge up to the castle, the glial cells pull up the drawbridge. So now the neuron is cut off from talking to other neurons. In worst case scenario, the neuron starves to death because the glial cells are trying to protect it.
So is it any wonder that most of us are now walking around with brain fog? Is it any wonder that Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia is now an epidemic? And it’s not because of the brain’s fault. It actually all began just like Hippocrates said, 2,500 years ago. All disease begins in the gut, and with each passing year with research, we’re realizing the mechanisms of how this happens. So it’s not conjecture, it’s not fanciful thinking. We can actually measure antibodies to the blood-brain barrier. We can actually measure antibodies to particular neuron cells. And the exciting thing is in my practice, we can actually watch these antibodies against the blood-brain barrier go away. We can actually measure the blood-brain barrier resealing, and we can watch this attack not only stop, but actually reverse. We can watch these connections regrow, and that’s why leaky brain is from leaky gut. And when you treat leaky gut, leaky brain can be fixed.
Number one, here’s one you probably never heard of, fermented long pepper. What the heck is that? Well, studies have shown that long pepper, look it up, a traditional Chinese spice herb has remarkably good effects on blood pressure. In fact, if you ferment long pepper, it is one of the more effective ways of lowering blood pressure traditional Chinese medicine has found. Most peppers contain a compound called piperine, and you’ll see also lots of supplements. For instance, turmeric will have bioperine or piperine added to improve the absorption of bioactive compounds like turmeric. And so just the piperine or bioperine in long peppers has a benefit.
Also, there’s some interesting studies on fermented long pepper. Anytime you ferment polyphenols, as you’ve heard me say before, you make them more bioavailable than if you took them in their regular form. Now the good news is your gut bacteria will ferment these compounds, but if you ferment them before they get to your gut bacteria, you’re one step ahead and will probably even improve the absorption even better.
Okay, number two, rosemary. I can’t say enough about the benefits of rosemary. This was really brought to the forefront a few years ago by the study of the people of Acciaroli, Italy, a small town south of Naples on the coast of Italy that I’ve visited. There are more people over a hundred years of age in this town than anywhere in the world as a percentage of population. One of the unique things about the Acciorolians is that they eat large amounts of rosemary. They chew rosemary, they use it in their cooking. Scientists, cardiologists, particularly from the University of California San Diego, have found fascinating compounds in rosemary that may account for some of the benefit. One, of course is rosmarinic acid. Rosmarinic acid is one of the most potent antihistamines ever discovered. Rosmarinic acid and quercetin I give my patients with allergies and we’ve had remarkable success with both of those compounds.
There’s also a compound in rosemary called carnosic acid, and this actually dilates blood vessels. Studies in animals show it protects from myocardial ischemia, basically a heart attack. Rosmarinic acid has lowered cholesterol levels and rosemary extract in one study has had a mild diuretic effect. And as most people know, one of our first treatments of high blood pressure is giving you a diuretic to lower your blood pressure. So those smart Acciorolians are doing a lot of great things for their heart just by adding rosemary to their diet. Now you can go and chew rosemary. It certainly has a pungent flavor. I like it. I cook with rosemary a lot. You can even add dried rosemary when you are cooking just about anything or even think about getting it fresh and sprinkling it on your food. Worse comes to worst, get yourself some rosemary extract capsules and you’ll be fine.
Basil. Basil is part of the mint family, and basil in ancient Rome was called salvia, and salvia was so named because it saves your life. Basil also has some very unique properties in lowering cholesterol, in lowering blood pressure. Basil is a great source of vitamin K, both vitamin K1 and vitamin K2. It’s also a really good source for potassium. Potassium is one of the two main compounds along with magnesium that helps regulate blood pressure, that helps regulate heart rhythm. Whenever I have people with skipped heartbeats extra beats, the first thing I do is put them on a potassium magnesium supplement. Basil is a great way to get potassium into your diet.
Now, it’s also great for your gut health. Basil is loaded with fiber and your gut bacteria, as you’ve heard me say over and over again, need to eat prebiotic fiber to produce compounds that affect your heart health. Things like nitric acid, things like hydrogen gas, things like, believe it or not, hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg smell is actually really important for blood vessel protection. So get some more basil in your diet. Another easy way of getting basil in your diet is using basil seeds instead of chia seeds. And you may have seen my episode on zen basil where basil seeds are just a great way of getting prebiotic fiber and the benefits of basil into your diet every day.
Number four, garlic. I can’t tell you how important garlic is for your health. High blood pressure is one of the key factors in heart health. And as many of you know, high blood pressure is out of control in this country. I can’t tell you how many people I see on a daily basis who are on one, two, or three high blood pressure medications when I first see them in my office. This is a very real factor. Now, interestingly enough, in 2019, a study published in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine showed that garlic supplements helped lower blood pressure. Researchers in this study showed that the blood pressure lowering ability of garlic supplements would actually reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by 16% to 40%. Not bad.
Now, also really exciting is studies of aged garlic extract have shown that the soft plaque inside arteries, and quite frankly, it’s the soft plaque that causes heart attacks. But one study in patients, 55 patients aged 40 to 75 were tracked taking an aged garlic supplement for a year. The researchers found that those who took the supplement had an 80% reduction in soft plaque. And quite frankly, I take an aged garlic extract every day for exactly this purpose.
I recently had a patient who does not exactly have a healthy lifestyle, let me put it that way. Very overweight, very insulin resistant In his early seventies, despite my best efforts, continued his unhealthy lifestyle. One day he developed very severe chest pain, was taken to the hospital, taken directly to the cath lab, and lo and behold, he had absolutely no plaque in his coronary arteries. And the cardiologist was shocked. He came back and brought his film with him to show me. I was shocked until he opened his mouth and said, “One thing I never told you, I chew two raw garlic cloves a day and I have for the last 40 years. And what do you think? Maybe I did something.” Well, an anecdote is an anecdote, but again, giving people aged garlic extract pills dramatically resulted in reduction of salt plaque. And my one patient, I can assure you, is going to continue to chew his garlic cloves every day.
Before you put that big slice of turmeric into your smoothie, listen up. We all know I’m a great fan of spices. They offer many unique health benefits, and they’re absolutely delicious. Now, you’ve probably heard of the one I’m going to focus on today, but I guarantee you you’ll be surprised by how much this spice has to offer, but the ways you’ve got to use this spice to get the benefits from it. Now, after you listen to this, you might want to go grab a big bowl of curry rather than throwing the root into your smoothie. What am I talking about? I’m talking about turmeric.
Now number one, turmeric is full of polyphenols. And if you’ve read my books, if you’ve listened to me long enough, you know that polyphenols are those compounds from plants that were designed by plants to protect their mitochondria from damage from particularly sunlight and the elements. We in turn, when we eat the polyphenols in plants, we actually don’t absorb them very well. And that’s the point of all this talk. You could eat the polyphenols in turmeric, particularly curcumin, and you will very likely not get any benefit from it because it is very poorly absorbed and it’s very poorly broken down by our gut bacteria into absorbable compounds.
Now, what’s interesting about that is it needs a helper to get absorbed. And remember I told you, let’s have a bowl of curry. Well, curry contains both turmeric but also black pepper. As I’ve written about in my books, there’s a fascinating study in Singapore looking at people with improved memory as they get older versus mild cognitive impairment. And people who ate one bowl of curry per week had dramatic better memories than people who did not eat that bowl of curry per week. And the reason for is the two essential ingredients to make turmeric work is black pepper and curcumin.
So when you are putting your turmeric in your smoothie, please believe it or not, shake in some black pepper. When you’re adding turmeric for a seasoning shake in some black pepper, you’ll activate it. And when you are buying curcumin or turmeric as a supplement, either look for the presence of black pepper, the active ingredient is bioperine, and look for that word. Or look for turmeric that has been activated and has been shown in a clinical study, a human clinical study to be absorbed. And there are several active ways to make curcumin absorbable besides black pepper. But most of the time you’re going to see the word bioperine. And if you see that that’s your key, that you’ve got the agent to absorb it.
Why get curcumin in your body? Number one, it’s one of the few polyphenols that has been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier. Most drugs, most compounds cannot get through this barrier called the blood-brain barrier. And turmeric is one of those rare ones, and that may explain why it has been associated with improved memory. Now, turmeric, curcumin, also is a strong mitochondrial uncoupler. That means it actually tells mitochondria to repair themselves and to make more mitochondria called mitogenesis, and it has the additional benefit in having mitochondria waste fuel. And there are a number of studies suggesting that curcumin actually helps maintain a healthy weight or helps with weight loss through thermogenesis.
Speaking of thermogenesis, there are numerous studies that show turmeric changes white fat into beige fat. Now, there are three types of fat. There’s brown fat, beige fat, and white fat. The fat that we store fat in is basically white, it’s fat. Brown fat is named brown fat because it’s so loaded with mitochondria that it literally looks brown under the microscope. Brown fat is used to generate heat. In fact, when we’re babies, we have a lot of brown fat in our body and we use that brown fat to generate heat through mitochondrial uncoupling. Beige fat is white fat that’s becoming more and more and more filled with mitochondria. So guess what? Turmeric curcumin actually makes that transition happen. And the more beige fat you have, the more brown fat you have, the healthier you are. And you’ve seen in my last books like Longevity Paradox, energy Paradox, Unlocking the Keto Code, how important activating brown fat in beige fat is in your long-term health and longevity.
Moreover, there’s some good evidence that turmeric improves your mood and who doesn’t need a mood boost in this day and age? There are physical benefits with turmeric. It provides joint support. And there are several studies, human studies that show that turmeric can actually improve mobility. So it’s a win-win-win. Again, don’t just throw a piece of turmeric into your smoothie. It’s really not going to do much for you. On the other hand, throw in the black pepper, sprinkle it on your salad when you put it in. Use turmeric on just about everything you cook. Personally, I love it on chicken. Many Indian recipes use turmeric as that flavor ingredient for their chicken dishes. Make some curry. We’ve got lots of recipes for curry in all of our books. The benefit is you get the black pepper and the turmeric simultaneously.
Here’s a fun thing to do. Sprinkle it on your goat or sheep yogurt or oitu yogurt. Try it on coconut ice cream. It’ll give you a fascinating kick. If you’re worried about getting it enough in your diet, take a turmeric supplement like I do every day and just make sure it’s an absorbable form or that you’ve got bioperine on the label.
My new book, the Gut-Brain Paradox is almost here. And today I’m giving you an exclusive sneak peek at some of the most groundbreaking discoveries inside. All right, sneak peek number one, your body needs dirt to stay healthy. For centuries, humans ate food straight from the ground, exposing their immune systems to tiny amounts of bacteria, nature’s allergy shots. But today we sanitize everything like our life depends on it, and we’re sicker than ever. Autoimmune diseases, food allergies, and even brain disorders are skyrocketing. Turns out our obsession with cleanliness might be the very thing wrecking our health.
The hygiene hypothesis or why being too clean is making us sick is one of the reasons behind this. Now, our ancestors ate unwashed root veggies, microbes, and all. This train their immune system to tolerate bacteria instead of overreacting. In fact, there’s a shocking study, kids raised on farms where they’re exposed to more bacteria have far fewer allergies and autoimmune diseases than their ultra-sanitized city counterparts. Now, there’s even more. The brain-bacteria connection. Believe it or not, the lack of bacterial exposure actually weakens brain defenses. In fact, in a study on germ-free mice, germ-free mice had leakier blood-brain barriers making their brains more vulnerable to toxins and inflammation. But low-dose bacterial exposure actually resulted in less neuroinflammation. A really cool study showed that exposure to tiny amounts of bacterial compounds called lipopolysaccharides, LPSs, and if you’ve read my books, you know what LPS stands for, little pieces of yes, you’re right. LPSs train the immune system to stop overreacting and it reduces brain inflammation and even protects against dementia.
Now here’s a scary one. Antibiotics obviously kill bacteria. And as most of you know, antibiotics kill our gut microbiome. But do they have any effect on memory loss? Well, a study in middle-aged women who took antibiotics frequently showed faster cognitive decline just seven years later compared to women who didn’t take antibiotics. The good news from all this, you don’t need to start licking the floor to fix this problem. Just a few easy tweaks can help reintroduce beneficial microbes into your life. But you have to read the book to find out what these tweaks are.
All right, sneak peek number two. Your gut controls addictions. Your cravings are not actually coming from you or your brain or your bad behavior. They’re actually coming from bad gut bacteria. Shockingly, certain microbes thrive on alcohol, nicotine, and even opioids. Hijacking your brain’s reward system to keep you hooked. Let me give you some examples. Alcohol in the gut. People who develop alcohol addiction have distinct gut bacteria years before their first drink. A thirty-year study found that future alcoholics had unique microbiomes long before starting drinking.
Now, here’s a fascinating fact. Healing the gut during detox actually reduces cravings and relapse rate. In fact, in studies of people in rehab for alcohol, people who had the worst set of alcohol-craving bacteria were the most likely to do poorly during rehab and relapse. Whereas alcoholics who had the least mischievous alcohol-seeking bacteria we’re more likely to complete rehab and stay off drinking. So it’s not you, it’s not your weakness, it’s them.
How about smoking? Well, it turns out smokers have fewer gut bacteria that regulate dopamine production, making quitting much harder. In fact, kids with low levels of key gut bacteria were more likely to start smoking than people, kids, who had a better balance of gut bacteria. Now, the microbiome actually shifts after quitting to trigger food cravings to replace nicotine’s dopamine boosts. That explains why most smokers, once they quit, gain a lot of weight because they’ve shifted their microbiome to get their dopamine kick, not from nicotine and cigarettes, but from foods.
Finally, opioids. Opioids, number one, cause gut damage. They cause leaky gut and chronic inflammation, worsening pain sensitivity and fueling addiction. Now here’s a fascinating study. In mice, you can addict mice to opioids, and as they become addicted, they get a completely different gut bacteria that actually craves those opioids and starts benefiting and eating those opioids. How do they get more? They actually create more pain, more leaky gut, which requires more of the opioid. Fascinating study. You take those mice, you treat them with antibiotics to kill off their gut microbiome, and lo and behold, their cravings go away and only little bits of opioids are needed to give them a high.
Here’s the bad news. If you repopulate that gut with those addictive microbiome, they once again have to have huge amounts of the same drug. Now, exciting news in rehab for opioids, probiotics, friendly bacteria, actually reduced opioid withdrawal symptoms and craving.
So the good news is you don’t have to fight addiction with willpower alone. In the book I reveal how gut health is the key to overcoming cravings, including food cravings, improving mental health and breaking the addiction cycle. So if you know someone struggling with addiction, depression, or uncontrollable cravings, please share this book with them. It could save their life.
All right, sneak peek number three, the brain boosting diet you’ve never heard of. Now, we all know diet affects brain health, but what if the type of protein you eat plays a major role in your mood, addiction, recovery, and cognitive function? I reveal in the Gut Brain Paradox, the chicken and the sea diet, my version of a safe carnivore diet. The good news, you don’t have to go full carnivore or keto to support your brain. In the Gut Brain Paradox, I’ll show you a few simple food swaps that can supercharge your gut to start healing quickly with the ultimate gut repair eating protocol. But you have to read the book to find out what they are. So if you found these sneak peeks fascinating, just wait until you read the whole book. The Gut Brain Paradox is available right now wherever books are sold. So go grab your copy now.
Now it’s time for the question of the week. The question of the week comes from @KirionWalters3120 on my YouTube video on coffee. They ask, “Does adding cacao powder negate the benefits of coffee? Thanks a million Dr. Gundry.” Well, it actually improves the benefit of coffee because it adds another very powerful polyphenol. In fact, I’ve been putting a teaspoon of raw cacao powder in my coffee for years, and sure looks like a good idea to me. Thanks for the question.
Now it’s time for the review of the week. The review of the week comes from @MichaelDuBois9466 on my YouTube video on leaky brain. They said, “Thanks again, Dr. G for teaching the importance of eliminating lectins from our diet,” with a big heart emoji. Well, thank you very much, DuBois9466. Not a day goes by that I get a new patient who just has life-changing experiences by following the yes and no list and getting the more troublesome lectins out of their diet. So thanks for writing in.
Speaker 1:
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