Dr. Steven Gundry:
This week we’re diving into three of the most talked about health trends, red light therapy plus sauna, spermidine, and glucose monitoring to see if they really work. From boosting your mitochondria and activating longevity pathways to tracking your blood sugar in real-time, these tools could play a major role in how you feel and how you age. In this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, I’ll share how I personally use each of these strategies, what the science says, and the simple ways you can start incorporating them into your routine. Plus, I’ll break down common myths, what to look for in a quality product and the real reason these may be worth the hype. Whether you’re curious about heat therapy, longevity supplements, or dialing in your diet with a glucose monitoring, these next episodes are packed with actionable insights. Stay tuned.
Feeling older than your age. Tired, bloated, foggy like your body’s slowly wearing out. Now here’s the truth. It might not be aging, it might be chronic inflammation, and today I’ll show you how to fight it. One of my favorite tools, red light therapy in my sunlight and sauna. Now a quick disclaimer, this episode is sponsored by Sunlighten, but I want you to know I only share products I personally use and that are backed by solid science. Infrared, and red light therapy isn’t a fad, it’s a foundational tool for aging well. So stick around. I’ll explain why it works, what to watch for, and how to get started. And if you like what you heard today, make sure you subscribe, like it and tell your friends and family.
Let’s talk about inflammation. It’s your body’s natural defense system, but when it stays turned on, it causes real damage. Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, gut problems, aging faster than you should. Now technically we call this infla-aging. Chronic low-level inflammation that silently breaks you down. And yes, if you’ve read any of my books, it starts in your gut and then spreads elsewhere. Okay, so how do you know if you have it? Any kind of discomfort in the body is usually a telltale sign there’s inflammation. How do you decrease inflammation? What can you do? So here are my go-to strategies. First of all, cut out inflammatory foods. And as you know, I’ve written now for 10 years about what to eliminate. So say goodbye to wheat, grains, most American cow dairy and the nightshade family like tomatoes and peppers. Number two, eat in a time-controlled window. That is try to eat all of your calories between six to eight hours during the day.
What does that usually look like? Well, if you start breakfast, break fast at 10 o’clock in the morning, you really want to try to finish by six o’clock at night, your last meal. Similarly, if you want to go to noon for breakfast, then you could go to six to eight o’clock at night to finish your last meal and so on. Third, use red light therapy and sauna therapy. Yes, my personal sauna uses red, near and far infrared light from sunlight, which helps calm inflammation, boost energy, and the best news support gut health. So why does red light therapy actually work? So red and near infrared light do actually something remarkable. They activate your mitochondria, your cells power plants, and so you make more energy and at the same time make less information. They increase HO-1, a gene that reduces inflammation in your blood vessels. And here’s the best part, they even balance your gut microbiome.
Yes, red light and near infrared light affects your gut bacteria. And I’m not just talking theory, so I use the mPulse Smart Sauna from Sunlighten. Now it combines red, near and far infrared light. So I get full body cellular support including red light therapy built right in. And what’s really exciting is that these various forms of light literally penetrate not only through your skin into your brain, but perhaps more importantly, they actually get into your gut through your gut wall. And studies have shown that they actually improve the microbiome. And if you’ve been following me for long enough, you know that a happy microbiome, happy gut buddies is really one of the keys to health and longevity. Now let me break down what this therapy really helps with. Here’s the studies in your brain, red and near-infrared light therapy improves blood flow, reduces neuroinflammation, that’s inflammation in the brain and boosts BDNF. BDNF is a fancy an acronym for brain-derived neurotropic factor. It actually grows brain cells. That’s great for memory.
In your heart. A sauna mimics cardiovascular exercise. It raises your heart rate and dilates your blood vessels. There’s an expression in longevity that your only as young as your blood vessels are flexible, and I can measure blood vessel flexibility in my office and my lab, and it really does improve blood vessel flexibility. In your gut, not only does it make more gut buddies, but it also reduces leaky gut. We can measure that effect. Now, most of you maybe could care less about that, and then you want to see results on the outside. Well, as the good news is red light really helps with collagen production and re-knitting of damaged collagen, and that’s why you see so many advertisements now for red light therapy masks, et cetera.
But perhaps the most important thing is in your individual cells, these devices fight oxidative stress, help repair aging cells, and even stem cell rejuvenation. So it’s like multi-system therapy and it’s effortless. I just step into my sauna, relax, and let the light work. Okay, so how do you build an at-home longevity practice? First of all, why don’t you get a few baseline labs? You can ask your healthcare provider, your physician, your physician assistant, your nurse practitioner, to please order three simple tests, HS CRP, C-reactive protein, a fasting insulin level. They’ll look at you funny, just say, “I want a fasting insulin level and a vitamin D level.” These three easy, cheap tests are a great way to start to see where you are in the longevity cycle. Then use your sauna three to five times a week, 20 to 40 minutes at a time. Now stack it with stretching, post-walk routines or meditation, try energy snacking. That’s short bursts of exercise throughout your day for maximum benefits.
I wrote an entire book called The Energy Paradox on how to do this. Now you combine that with gut-friendly foods and polyphenols. These are these dark-colored products of fruits and vegetables that actually feed friendly bacteria. Now there’s a lot of saunas out there, not sure which one to try. Well, Sunlighten offers the Solo System, a lay-down option. The RED light therapy panel, and my favorite, the fully customizable mPulse Smart Sauna. Your choice. They’re different prices. And let’s face it, pricing is important. So start with what you can afford. Now here’s the good news. I want to try it for yourself. Click the link in the description and save up to $1,400 on your Sunlighten purchase. Fill out the get pricing form and speak to a consultant to find the best sauna for your space and goals. Just remember, you don’t have to accept aging as a decline. With the right tools like red light therapy and smart lifestyle habits, you can age powerfully and quite frankly, in reverse.
There’s a really interesting compound that occurs in nature that occurs in several foods and maybe one of the kind of hidden secrets to longevity that you need to know about. And I’m talking about spermidine. You may recall a term called autophagy. Autophagy actually means self eat. In aging, there are essentially two ways a old cell is destroyed, one is called apoptosis. It literally explodes and spews everything all over the place. That’s actually a bad way. On the other hand, the opposite is called autophagy. And autophagy basically means, okay, everything in here is worn and old. Let’s recycle these components, buff them up and reuse them again. And it turns out the more you can induce autophagy and the less you induce apoptosis, the longer you live and the longer you live well. What does that have to do with spermidine? Spermidine promotes autophagy, not apoptosis.
So I want to talk about spermidine. Stay with me for a few minutes because we’re going to get a little nerdy and it’s going to be kind of sciency, but I promise you it’ll be worth it because you really want to know about spermidine. Okay, spermidine is a naturally occurring compound. We actually make it. It’s part of a class of compounds called polyamines. In mice, oral administration of polyamines has been shown to repair their intestinal mucosa and reduce inflammation. In fact, if you’ve read Gut Check, polyamines increase intestinal alkaline phosphatase, that’s a really good thing to have. Here’s the fun part. Spermidine was discovered in human semen, yes, that’s where it got its name, in 1678 by Anton Van Leeuwenhoek. Now it’s known to be present in all body cells. It can be created in tissue, but here’s the good news, it can be created by bacteria in our gut.
Now, as I mentioned, spermidine’s cool thing is it induces autophagy. That’s the natural way we recycle cellular components. Now, fasting, if you’ve read my books, is a phenomenal way of creating autophagy. But spermidine will do this without fasting. How? Well spermidine inhibits acetyltransferase. Now this reduces acetylation and it also inhibits mTOR or the mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1. This activates the AMPK pathway and actually starts up autophagy. So spermidine activates autophagy by inhibiting mTOR and activating AMPK. That’s how it works. There are a lot of other compounds that activate AMPK. One of them that you may have heard of is berberine. Another one that you may have heard of is metformin, the diabetic drug, but spermidine does it too. Now, how was this identified? Well, a study was done in yeast and they found that if they gave yeast spermidine, it was correlated to the upregulation of autophagy genes in these yeast. It also increased the lifespan of these yeast. And if the yeast lacked autophagy genes, then it didn’t work.
So they figured out the mechanism of how spermidine did what it did. So what does that have to do with the aging process? Here’s the good news. Spermidine has great anti-aging properties. So autophagy’s role in inflammation and lifespan is really important. It reduces apoptosis, cell death. It actually changes lipid metabolism. It’s crucial for regulating lifespan. It’s affected by spermidine. There’s a University of Graz study that showed improved mitochondrial function in the brain due to spermidine-induced autophagy. Spermidine actually produces mitophagy, which is the turnover and recycling of mitochondria. And if you’ve been following any of us, you know that brain aging is directly related to mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain. So the better your mitochondria are, the better your brain. It increases ATP production by the mitochondria and it has the potential to actually reverse cognitive decline.
Here’s the good news, spermidine crosses the blood-brain barrier. Unlike many other compounds, spermidine can get to the brain to do its cool thing. What about lifespan? Well, these have been primarily done in mice, but hold the fort, there’s a human study coming up. Aged mice were given spermidine for six months. It had notable anti-aging effects. It reduced liver and kidney damage. It preserved cardiac tissue, which usually gets older and older in mice, and it actually robustly restored their hair growth. They got furrier and more radiant. Now, human studies, there was a 2018 study. There was a link between dietary spermidine and reduced mortality rates in humans. Yes, believe it or not, some humans eat a lot of spermidine and some humans don’t eat a lot of spermidine containing foods. And so these groups were compared. There was an independent predicting value. The association held true even after adjusting for factors like age, BMI, alcohol, aspirin use, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, physical activity, sex, socioeconomic status, and diet quality.
And the study showed that there was lower cardiovascular and cancer related deaths, and the mortality rates were dramatically statistically lower in the study group that had more spermidine in their diet. So that sounds good. How about another cool study, this time in mice? They wanted to know what would happen to mice if they were supplemented with spermidine in their water. So they took aged mice and gave them spermidine for six months into their water versus normal water for the other group of mice. The mice age-related bald spots improved. Their heart health improved, their telomere shortening stopped. And the treated mice telomeres looked like younger mice telomeres. And telomere length is another sign of aging. So lots of cool stuff. But the take-home point is people who had a lot of spermidine in their diet did better than age-matched controls who didn’t have a lot of spermidine in their diet.
That’s pretty cool. Now everybody has heard about rapamycin and there’s a lot of folks trying out rapamycin for anti-aging effects. And just to be clear, rapamycin works on the same mTOR pathway that spermidine works on. Could you take them both? Since I was around doing heart transplant when rapamycin was developed, I can tell you that there is a risk-benefit ratio with rapamycin and quite frankly, I’m not willing to take that risk-benefit ratio. And quite frankly, the dose of rapamycin for humans that safe has yet to be determined. And since I don’t have a heart, lung, kidney or liver transplant, I don’t need to take rapamycin to keep rejecting my heart. Fasting has the same effect. Now, the combination of fasting and spermidine, now that’s what I am interested in. So what are the practical applications behind all this?
First of all, the bad news, as we age, spermidine production gets lower and lower. So as we age, it’s more important to acquire spermidine from external sources. Now there’s actually some rich sources of spermidine. Mushrooms are probably number one, cauliflower and broccoli are right up there. My favorite is actually aged cheeses, like for instance, aged Parmesan or aged pecorino cheeses. For example, in one gram of mushrooms, that’s not much, there’s 160 micrograms of spermidine. In comparison, one gram of meat, and quite frankly, that’s not very much, gives you just 20 micrograms of spermidine. So gram for gram, pound for pound, you’ll get about eight times more spermidine from mushrooms than you will from beef. Interestingly enough, there’s lots of spermidine in chicken skin. So my advice, find yourself a good pasture-raised chicken like Farmer Dan’s lectinlightchicken.com, and order the whole chicken and eat the chicken skin. In fact, I have a patient who daily dines on large amounts of baked chicken skin that he buys from his butcher because they sell boneless skinless chicken breasts and they basically throw the skin away. And that’s where the spermidine is. Fun idea.
You do absorb spermidine from the gut and the absorption rate is anywhere from 40 to 80%. So eating spermidine goes a long way. Here’s an interesting clinical trial. There was a randomized placebo-controlled trial carried out for three months. During that trial, 1.2 milligrams of spermidine were administered to one group while the other group was administered a placebo. At the end of the trial, it was found the spermidine was completely safe to take. The additional benefit is the spermidine group actually had increased hair growth. Listen out guys, it grows hair. All right, so spermidine is now generally recognized as safe, which means the FDA has basically said, “Because of this clinical trial, will let people have it. We’ll let people take it in supplemental form.” And what you got to do is make sure you get quality ingredients, know who your supplier is, and think about adding spermidine to your diet either through food, a great way, or supplementation.
Today we’re going to look at one of the most trendy pieces of wearable biometric technology. And I’m not talking about sleep rings, we’re talking about the continuous glucose monitor or CGMs. Okay, so the emergence of CGMs or continuous glucose monitors has really been life-changing for many people with diabetes. With these CGMs, people with diabetes can constantly monitor their blood sugar levels and don’t have to prick their fingers multiple times a day. Now this means the pain of poking is gone, but it means that most of my diabetic patients had to check their blood sugars multiple times a day. Most of them didn’t and really relied on really how they felt or whether they were crashing to really know where their blood sugars were. A lot of the times they recognize their crashes, but they didn’t recognize when their blood sugar levels were extremely high. And that was really part of the problem with managing these folks.
Now with a CGM, most people now recognize them, they’ve seen them. You might be wearing one even now. This inserts a small needle under the skin that comes with a patch and you wear this and it literally measures the amount of glucose in the interstitial space between your cells and it then sends this information to either a smartphone or sometimes it’s a device that you carry with you that updates the trends. Okay, now there are a lot of possible and real benefits for this. First of all, metabolic health. There was a recent study published in Cell Metabolism, found that even people without diabetes can experience significant glucose spikes after meals, which can contribute to metabolic disorders over time. What benefit CGM does to these people is you can find the foods that cause these spikes and then make dietary adjustments over time to minimize those spikes.
Okay, that sounds pretty good. Weight management. A study in the Journal of Nutrition show that stable blood sugar levels can help with weight management by reducing cravings and preventing overeating. By tracking glucose responses to different foods, people then could create a personalized diet plan that promotes weight loss or for that matter, maintenance, energy levels and moods. Now, as anyone with young children knows fluctuations in blood sugar levels can affect energy and mood. The sugar tantrums of children are well-known. The hyperness of sugar in children is well known. Similarly, the fall in blood sugars causing changes in mood or even affect are extremely well known to diabetics, but also to most laypeople who notice these changes. So correlating a CGM with mood sounds like a good idea.
Now, one of the problems with CGMs has been that you needed a prescription to get a CGM and doctors were supposed to only prescribe them for people with a code of diabetes. Now that’s a problem you have probably noticed, there are a great number of companies that have sprung up with telemedicine, Teledocs, who will be more than happy to prescribe off-label a glucose monitor if you subscribe to their program. Now, all that changed a couple of months ago when in March of this year the FDA approved the first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor without a prescription. Now we’re waiting for the rollout. I suppose I could tell you who it is. It’s the Dexcom Stelo. I have no relationship. There is another competing device from a different company that’s not yet approved, but probably will be. So what? Well, interestingly enough, insurance plans usually cover about all but 30 or $40 a month for these continuous glucose monitors. This continuous glucose monitor when it comes on the market, and we anticipate it actually any day now, will cost about $90 a month over-the-counter.
What does that mean? That’s $3 a day and that’s quite frankly less than a cup of coffee for this information. So that’s really going to change the entire field. So the question is, okay, there’s all these benefits, is it really going to change habits or is it worth knowing what happens for instance, after a meal? I’ve had Professor Tim Spector from the UK on my program, Tim is intimately involved with a company called ZOE, a really good company, a weight management company. I have no interest in that company, but Tim makes a very good point and I’ll second that point. He uses a test meal that is administered to his patients as a telemedicine service that basically looks at not only glucose spikes, but insulin spikes to a test meal. And he loves to tell this story, and I think I tell it right, that his wife is incredibly tolerant of carbohydrates.
So she can eat this test meal, which quite frankly has a lot of carbohydrates and basically nothing happens. Her blood sugar doesn’t spike, her insulin doesn’t spike, he does the exact same meal. His blood sugar spikes, his insulin spikes, and that’s not fair. But this just one example of eating a test meal now informs him that carbohydrates, at least in the form of his test meal, are pretty mischievous to him, but not to his wife. So they can actually eat very differently. Now the point I’m making is, once he learned what his response to this test meal, he doesn’t need any more continuous glucose monitoring, he knows what’s going to happen to him. Same way with his wife. She knows what’s going to happen to her. So once that initial test is done, so why is that important? Well, if low carbohydrates or keeping your blood sugar low following a meal, which sounds like a really good idea, is important for long-term health, then we might want to design a study that looked at people who compress their carbohydrate load to a particular part of the day.
For instance, a study was done of eating your carbohydrates quite early in the morning versus eating your carbohydrates quite late in the day at dinner versus eating a Mediterranean-style diet. And looking at the long-term outcome in blood sugars, in weight management, in insulin resistance, in metabolic syndrome, in pre-diabetes and diabetes and in humans. And guess what they found? It turns out it made absolutely no difference when you had your high carbohydrate load, whether it was in the morning, whether it was at dinner. But the important thing was when you didn’t worry about that and just ate a Mediterranean diet, the results were exactly the same. Now, Michael Greger of NutritionFacts.org, has said the same thing, and it’s one of a number of things and interestingly enough, he and I agree about he’s one of my fiercest critics, but we actually have a lot of points of agreement.
I think this is one of them. Just because you know what’s going to spike your blood sugar doesn’t mean you have to keep wearing this to kind of fixate on this. I’ve made a joke that I wear two sleep monitors, an Oura Ring and a WHOOP band, which is hiding under here. And I wear them for entertainment value because they totally disagree with each other. And so if let’s say I really want a lot of deep sleep and the WHOOP band says I got a lot of deep sleep and the Oura band said, I didn’t guess who I’m going to believe. On the other hand, if I want to know my REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, and the Oura band said I got more REM and the WHOOP band said, I didn’t guess who I’m going to believe the Oura band.
My point is these things are useful up to a point. But like any of these other devices for bio-hacking, you can get carried away with focusing instantaneously on, “Oh my gosh, my blood sugar went up 20 points and I’m going to die.” That’s not what’s going to happen. So this is a brand new world we’re entering and it’s maybe well worth your time to buy it once, track for a month, test which foods are your friends, test which foods are not your friends. But quite frankly, all you got to do is follow the Plant Paradox program like this study showed. And don’t worry about it. It will take care of itself.
Now it’s time for the question of the week. A question from Mahdi Amani 1995, from the Dark chocolate episode asks, “How can I find dark chocolate brands that don’t have heavy metals?” Well, here’s the bad news and good news. Chocolate has lead in it and all chocolate has lead in it. But I can tell you, looking at heavy metal levels in my patients who eat chocolate, I have never seen an elevated lead level in any of them. In fact, there’s really not that much lead to be worried about unless you’re eating bars and bars and bars of chocolate, which you shouldn’t be anyhow. But that’s a great question.
Now it’s time for the review of the week. A review of the recommended foods from Gundry comes from @JaneRoach on YouTube. They say, “I’ve incorporated the Gundry Diet and have been able to maintain my weight, eat well, and not be hungry between meals like gut functions that have improved. Sleep is regular, and anxiety and depressive symptoms are normal and not requiring treatment. Thanks Dr. Gundry.” Well thank you for that nice review. As I noted in my new book, Gut-Brain Paradox, it’s amazing how depressive and anxiety symptoms are actually driven by the gut microbiome and the folks in your gut that might not have your best interest in mind. And what I’ve found in 25 years of treating patients with anxiety and depression with food, is that food really can make the difference. So thanks for writing in about that.
Speaker 1:
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