Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
This is how I start my day. I drop one of these in a glass of water and just like that, I’ve got one of the most powerful health tools we know of molecular hydrogen. Why do I do this? Well, most people can’t make hydrogen anymore, and the fact is we need 20 liters of hydrogen a day. Turns out microplastics deplete hydrogen producing bacteria in our gut. Number two, even if we have those bacteria, they have to have fiber to make hydrogen. Now, historically, humans ate a hundred to 150 grams of fiber daily. Today, most Americans eat less than 15 grams and many eat just two to three grams a day. That lack of fiber starve your hydrogen producing gut bacteria. A lifetime of killing off these bacteria means a significant percentage of the population is now incapable of making hydrogen gas. Even if you eat more fiber now, those bacteria may already be gone and won’t come back easily.
(01:35):
Antibiotics, processed foods and even meat from animals raised with antibiotics also damage your microbiome. What is hydrogen and why do we want it in our water? Molecular hydrogen is H two. It’s the smallest molecule in the universe. It dissolves in water, and when you drink it, it passes right through the gut wall into your bloodstream. From there, it travels to your cells where it starts to work. Now, this is not the same as alkaline water. Don’t confuse the two. Alcon. Water may have a high pH, but if it came in plastic or even had a plastic cap, the hydrogen gas is long gone. Hydrogen gas escapes easily, which is why fresh is always the best. Why is hydrogen so important for your health? Over 15,000 studies on the benefits of molecular hydrogen now exists. It supports energy production, mitochondrial function, and cellular repair. It activates the Nerf two pathway.
(02:38):
Your body’s built-in antioxidant defense system. It helps regulate nitric oxide and hydrogen sulfide, which support blood vessels and brain health. Animal studies show hydrogen gas improves exercise performance and speeds up recovery. Now, hydrogen isn’t a stimulant. It helps restore balance when your body is under stress. Can hydrogen water help restore gut health? Yes. Studies show hydrogen water can improve microbiome composition in 15 to 20. Human and animal studies increase butyrate prop two key short chain fatty acids, lower calprotectin, a marker of gut inflammation and leaky gut. Normalize GH growlin the hunger hormone, especially in overweight individuals. And if you’ve read my books, you know butyrate is one of the holy grails of gut health, brain health and mitochondrial function. Now, is all hydrogen the same? Well, not even close. Many hydrogen products don’t deliver a high enough dose to have any effect. In fact, some so-called hydrogen water in pouches or bottles test 0.3 parts per million or less far below the effective threshold.
(03:57):
Okay, so what about the machines out there, the bottles and other methods? Well, pre bottled hydrogen water, it’s often stored too long and sealed in plastic caps that leak hydrogen. So by the time you drink it, there may be no hydrogen left. There are expensive hydrogen machines. Unfortunately, many don’t produce enough hydrogen to be effective. They often cost thousands and aren’t always tested for real output tablets. On the other hand, they deliver freshly generated hydrogen gas in high amounts. Also, these include absorbable magnesium, which most of my patients are deficient in. They’re easy to travel with, they’re affordable and they’re reliable. But not all tablets are the same. So here’s a buying guide. Search the brand’s website to check on the concentration of hydrogen. Look for at least one to 1.5 parts per million. So how do I take it? Like I always recommend to folks asking about when to take supplements whenever it works into your schedule. Do that so that you’re consistent. You can also use it before, after a tough workout, during travel to minimize jet lag or after poor sleep. Now, a crucial tip, do not sip it, chug it right after the tablet fully dissolves to retain the gas, and don’t let it sit around. Consume it within five minutes. And please don’t take the tablet as is. Please dissolve it. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Avoid continuous sipping all day. Hydrogen works best as a short pulse of stress like exercise. Think of hydrogen like a workout for your cells.
(05:45):
Should you drink lemon water every day? All right, you’ve heard all about it and you’ve seen it everywhere. The lemon water. And if you’ve hopped on board, I’m here to tell you you’re wasting your time and your lemons. That’s right. Lemon water is not all it’s cracked up to be. So where does this idea come from? Well, the idea started out that lemon water is actually really good for you because of a one of the oddest and quite frankly, most unfounded diets there is out there, the alkaline diet. Now interestingly enough, lemons are acidic. They contain citric acid, but they are associated with alkaline effects. What the heck does that mean? Well, the body operates at a very, very, very tightly controlled pH level, a fine balance between acids in the body and alkaline effects in the body. And while it is absolutely true that most vegetables have an alkaline effect, they trend towards the alkaline side of the pH scale, and many animal products tend towards the acidic effect.
(07:19):
There really is no evidence that eating a slightly alkaline diet or drinking a slightly alkaline water has any effect on your body’s pH balance. This became very trendy and still trendy because you see all the alkaline waters for sale now. And normally a normal pH is 7.0. We, our bodies operate on a pH between 7.35 and 7.45. So a very, very narrow band. Interestingly enough, Italian waters, Italian sparkling waters by law required to have a balanced pH of 7.0 or or higher. So you would think that if you’re kind of trying to get rid of acids in your body or you’re eating a lot of acid containing foods, that you ought to balance that with alkaline water with alkaline foods. The problem is there is so little available bicarbonate in alkaline water or in these foods that you would actually have to eat tons of these foods to have any effect on your pH, even your stomach pH.
(08:48):
And you would have to drink untold thousands of gallons of lemon water a day to have any effect on your alkaline status. In fact, uh, on our podcast a few years ago, we had an expert in alkaline water, one of the founders of studying Alcon water. And he had a good chuckle about the idea that we could actually affect our alkalinity by using alkaline water. So that’s not why they have lemons. Well, what are people saying about the benefits of lemon water? Well, according to an article by how Harvard Health, there are quite a few benefits and here’s their benefits. Well, the first being that it prevents oxidation. Now you’ve heard me talk about oxidation and in fact, one of the reasons I am not a big fan of the cholesterol theory of heart disease is that if you like that theory, then cholesterol has to be oxidized.
(09:54):
It has to be rusty or rancid, kind of fish that smell bad. That’s the Omega-3 fats in the fish that are oxidizing. And that’s that fishy smell that the amount of antioxidants in lemon water are so infinitesimal that again, that’s not where to get your antioxidants from. How about phytonutrients? Yeah, lemons are an excellent source of phytonutrients, but all you are doing by drinking that lemon water is getting a very dilute amount of phytonutrients. You’d be much better off taking that lemon that you were gonna squeeze in the water and eat some of the peel, eat the pi, and have a bite of the lemon. In fact, my father used to, uh, actually eat a lemon with salt almost every day of his life. That’s the way to get a lemon into you. Harvard says it’s a great source of vitamin C. Here’s the problem with vitamin C.
(10:59):
Vitamin C is a water soluble vitamin. Once you take vitamin C within two to four hours, it’s left your system. And so the amount of vitamin C in lemon water is very small, and once you drink it, it’s gone. So as I’ve told you before, it’s really important to have a continuous supply of vitamin C in our body because we’re one of the few animals that do not manufacture vitamin C. So my advice, get yourself time to release vitamin C capsules. They come in 500 milligrams, they come in a thousand milligrams, take one twice a day. If that’s a pain in the neck, get yourself some chewable vitamin Cs about 500 milligrams and chew for a day every morning, noon dinner and before you go to bed. That way you’re guaranteed to have a continuous supply of vitamin C. Just to remember, rats have been bred to not produce vitamin C.
(12:09):
Those rats live half as long as a normal rat. When you give those rats who can’t produce vitamin C, vitamin C continuously in their drinking water, they reestablish their normal lifespan. That’s how important continuous exposure to vitamin C is. How about a potassium boost? Actually, lemons are not a great source of potassium. And just getting that little bit of potassium is not gonna be enough to help your muscle cramps. As you know, I recommend potassium magnesium aspartate for muscle cramps, and there’s actually good data out of athletic performance that potassium magnesium improves muscle performance in athletes. Finally, lemon water prevents kidney stones. Well, it’s true that uh, having a lot of citric acid is one of the treatments for one type of kidney stones. But here the same thing happens. You have to take citric acid multiple times during the day at much higher concentrations than you’ll ever get in lemon water.
(13:23):
So throw the lemons in your food, but don’t put it in your water. So what are you gonna do instead? Get yourself your your balsamic vinegar. Get yourself other v vinegars. Vinegars are going to give you huge benefits. You’re gonna get all the polyphenols that you get from vinegars. You’re gonna get all the postbiotics, short chain fatty acids from vinegars, and you’re gonna get all the post biotic benefits that have now been shown to occur. When we drink or eat fermented foods, there are lots of other good options. Uh, water-based kefi kombucha, which is low sugar. Now a word of warning. There are so many high sugar kombuchas out there that it’s scary and I spend some time looking at them in the grocery stores every week. Kombuchas have been sugar eyes because quite frankly, kombucha is an interesting taste. And to cover it up, companies have added more and more and more sugar to their products, so you’ll drink them.
(14:38):
Now back to balsamic vinegar. A lot of people really don’t like the really kind of bitter vinegar taste of balsamic vinegar. Here’s a trick. I have no relationship with this company. I use their product. It’s called Napa Valley Naturals, and they make a 25 year age balsamic vinegar, which is thick. It’s almost sweet tasting, it’s syrupy and a little goes a long way and it’s incredibly reasonably priced. You can find it in a lot of stores. You can find it on Amazon. Again, I have no relationship, but it’s a great way to get a high quality balsamic vinegar into your sparkling water that makes it taste like a Coke. And for those of you who are not aware, I actually invented the idea of the new Coke made out of balsamic vinegar and sparkling water, uh, well over five years ago. And you can actually watch my YouTube on how to do it.
(15:42):
Finally, you’re gonna see in my upcoming book that dead bacteria that are left over from fermentation actually carry important messages to the bacteria that live in our gut. So anytime you can have a fermented food, even though it has no living probiotics, you’re way ahead of having something like lemon water, which has none of these benefits. Now, if a little lemon water mil motivates you to hydrate throughout the day, that’s great. Be my guest. Mix it up. Use limes for a while, use lemons. Use tangerines for a while, that’s fine. If that’s what you want, go ahead and do it. Just know if you are drinking lemon water for the health benefits, there are so many better options out there for you, and that’s what I’m here to do, give you the best options for your immediate and long-term health.
(16:46):
Now, juice cleansers have been called the ultimate reset for your body, but a groundbreaking news study suggests they might actually wreck your microbiome in just three days. So today I’m gonna break down what this study found. What really happens to your body when you drink juice and how modern fruit, especially in juice form, is putting you into fat storage mode all the time. So let’s get in that new study. It’s really eye-opening. Researchers put healthy adults into three groups. One group drank only juice, another had juice plus whole foods, the third eight only whole plant-based foods. Now, the researchers studied these people’s gut and oral bacteria before, during, and after the diets. The results, the juice only group had a surge in inflammation linked bacteria both in their mouth and in their gut. Now, what’s so interesting about these bacteria, and I’ve written about this extensively, these bacteria are linked to leaky gut and spoiler alert, cognitive decline.
(18:13):
Now the whole food group who didn’t drink any juice at all had healthier, more protective microbes. And the juice plus the food group landed somewhere in the middle. Now, Dr. Melinda ring the lead researcher put it bluntly, and I couldn’t agree more with her conclusion. Most people think of juicing as a healthy cleanse, but this study offers a reality check, something that I’ve been saying for the last 25 years. So what does juice do to your body? I wanna talk you through this, what’s happening step by step. Now, the moment juice hits your tongue, your tongue does not have any sugar receptors. It has sweet receptors. Those sweet receptors occupy two thirds of the surface area of your tongue. The only thing that we would’ve ever encountered long ago that was sweet was quite frankly, either fruit or honey. Now when those sweet receptors taste sweet, they fire signals to your brain that energy is incoming.
(19:35):
The next thing that happens is your brain calls down to your pancreas that in fact sugar must be sugar ’cause that was all there was back then is on the way, and that we should make insulin in our pancreas to facilitate that sugar, which your brain knows you’re eating, getting into your cells. The problem is, up until recently, that sugar in fruit arrived with fiber. In fact, it was encased with fiber. So some degree of digestion had to happen before that sugar was liberated from the contents of the fruit. But without the fiber that’s now gone from juices, your body absorbs that sugar almost instantly. Now let’s back up for a second. Remember that fruit juice is a combination of fructose, fruit, sugar and glucose, and that table sucrose is half glucose and half fructose. But high fructose corn syrup, for example, has more fructose than glucose, hence high fructose corn syrup.
(21:02):
So when we eat a piece of fruit and we have a slow digestion of that fruit back in the good old days, and we would liberate glucose and fructose. Now here’s the bad news. Fructose is a mitochondrial toxin. Just look it up. It is normally glucose is absorbed directly into our bloodstream from the intestines. Do not pass. Go. Do not collect $200 fructose because it’s so dangerous. Very little gets absorbed directly into our bloodstream. Instead, it is bypassed into the liver via the portal vein. And there in the liver it’s detoxified into triglycerides. A fat that you have measured on your cholesterol test every time you have it done and uric acid. Now, some people have heard about uric acid. Uric acid is the causative agent of gout. But what a lot of people don’t know and has been really eloquently written about by my friend, uh, David Perme in his book Drop Acid combination of uric acid actually affects your kidney function in a negative way.
(22:29):
But uric acid also produces insulin resistance, which we don’t want. How come this happened? Let’s take a second and let me tell you the thing that made us successful humans, but is often our biggest kryptonite. Great apes had a genetic mutation that they no longer made an enzyme called uricase that broke down uric acid into a harmless compound. So what it allowed them during climate change, when forests began receding about 10 million years ago, to take fruit which only occurred seasonally, fruit only ripens once a year, even in the jungle and store that fructose in fruit as fat as triglycerides, and allowed uric acid to produce insulin resistance to make sure that that sugar was not used as fuel but was guaranteed to be stored as fat. And the reason we call them great apes is that this was great mutation during climate change because they could outcompete other monkeys who didn’t have this ability and store fat for the lean times.
(23:57):
Fast forward humans inherited that mutation. We cannot break uric acid down into a harmless compound. We used to think that this was called the thrifty gene. And the theory was that we went through rough times where we couldn’t find anything to eat and that somehow we magically mystically evolved a genetic mutation to allow us to store fat for the lean times. No, we just inherited the great apes mutation. So that allowed us to also take advantage of fructose on a seasonal basis to store fat for the winter. Fun fact, bears get fat for the winter by becoming insulin resistant. That’s why they can eat all those berries and eat all that salmon and turn it into fat because they’re insulin resistant. So what is it about fructose that is our Achilles heel or our kryptonite? Remember, fructose is a mitochondrial toxin. We have to diffuse it and we do that in our liver with turning it into triglycerides.
(25:21):
As I tell many of my patients who have fatty liver. And if you’ve been paying attention to the news fatty liver disease or non-alcoholic steato, hepatitis, that’s a word, is now rampant in America. And animal studies and human studies show that fructose is the culprit. As I tell my patients who like ua, which is goose liver or duck liver that is so fat, it basically turns into butter that when I tell them they have fatty liver, they basically have Wawa for their liver. Now that’s kind of a nice visual, but we can produce fatty liver in ducks and geese by force feeding them either fruit or in most cases whole grains. And they produce so much triglycerides in their liver that it can’t get out of the liver fast enough. And so it builds up. We see the same thing in animal and human studies by giving people more and more fructose, which is now so prevalent in our diet.
(26:34):
Now some people say, but juice is natural. Well, it’s not. The fruit we eat today isn’t natural at all. It’s been bred to be bigger, sweeter, and packed with fructose. And once you juice it, it’s not much different from drinking soda. In fact, your body, a glass of orange juice and a can of coke both look like glucose plus fructose with zero fiber buffer. Now, I talked about this extensively with the glucose goddess right here on this podcast. We flipped the script, so something that made us take over the world because we were capable of storing fat for the hard times. We’ve made fruit sweeter. It’s now available 365 days a year, and we’ve started juicing it. As I’m telling my patients, if you think juice is safe and healthy, let’s all take a trip to the San Diego Zoo or the LA Zoo or your favorite zoo and let’s look in all the cages and see where the juicers are.
(27:46):
They’re not juicing in the ape cages. Yeah, we’ll throw them an orange and they’ll eat the whole orange. This is the most unnatural thing you can do. So now we’re stuck in permanent fat storage mode, never giving our bodies the seasonal break that they evolve to expect. So what’s the problem with that? When we overload and damage our mitochondria, when we overload our liver with fat, the result is fatigue, weight gain, blood sugar swings, and mitochondrial stress. So what’s the lesson here? Juice is not the health food we were told. It is whole fruit in season and in moderation. Fine, that was our design. But please even then avoid the sugar bomb fruits like ripe bananas, ripe mangoes and grapes, but juice, any kind of juice, it’s a sugar bomb. If you really want to use up all that fresh produce, please consider reverse juicing.
(28:59):
I’ve written about this extensively. Get your juicer, put the fruit in organic, preferably throw the juice away, and then take the pulp, freeze it in a silicone ice cube tray, and then use it to flavor your plain goat or sheep or coconut yogurt. You were designed to get the benefits of polyphenols in fruit the way nature intended. So that’s it. Modern human studies show juice is lethal. The real reasons you should drink filtered water. Okay, it’s the scary truth that the tap water provided to millions of Americans actually fails to meet federal health standards and violates limits for dangerous contaminants. Take fluoride for example. Beginning in the early 20th century, scientists linked high levels of naturally occurring fluoride in certain community water supplies to low levels of tooth decay. Well, unfortunately, those studies were deeply flawed and are incredibly outdated. However, now roughly 73% of the US population with public water access is receiving water fortified with fluoride.
(30:30):
Now, fluoride unfortunately is known to negatively impact many parts of the body, including the cardiovascular and immune systems. It’s also been linked to serious illness and disease, and unfortunately, in my opinion, fluoride is doing way more harm than good and it’s in most of our water supplies. Not to mention heavy metals are in most of our water supplies. Lead, cadium, mercury, and arsenic are all on the World Health Organization list of chemicals of major public health concern. Yet they can almost all be found in tap water. Now the resulting health issues are almost too numerous dimension, but they include cardiovascular disorders, neuronal damage, kidney issues, and the risk of serious illness. But of course, water is essential to life. So what is the best filtration system for clean, safe drinking water? Well, that depends on where you live. Before you spend money on a good filtration system, it’s best to find out what you’re working with.
(31:50):
So here, this is really easy. I recommend going online and actually checking out what’s in your water. Simply Google water quality report for blank your city, and it’ll come right up. You may have to check a couple sites, but your city will post what’s in their water. Now, once you find that you may have a great drinking water that’s pretty much devoid of what I’ve talked about so far, the chances are you’re gonna be shocked with what that report shows. So what should you do? Well, one of the things to consider is drinking water from an underground spring that’s been bottled. For instance, I’ve sung the praises of San Pellegrino water from Italy in a glass bottle. Now, there’s multiple reasons for that and I am not a spokesperson for the company. I’m a big fan. It has the highest sulfur content of any water that’s been measured.
(33:08):
It’s been rated as the purest water that you can drink. It has no additives, know anything in it, and it’s in glass. Now, why is glass important? Most people are aware of the scandal that involved BPA, that’s in almost all plastic bottles, plastic containers, and there was a huge move to ban BPA and that move has pretty much been effective. The problem is the replacements for BPA, like BPS looked to be just as dangerous as endocrine disrupting chemicals as what they replace. So plastic is plastic is plastic. So you may have the best source of water, you may have the best fil trade water, but if you buy it in a plastic container, you’re probably doing yourself no favors and probably harm. So there are other great waters out there, but please buy them in a glass container. Don’t fall for the plastic trap. Now, there are many good reverse osmosis water systems that you can purchase either a countertop unit or a whole house unit.
(34:43):
Both of our houses in Palm Springs in Santa Barbara use reverse osmosis water filtration systems. Uh, the point is, get a system that you can afford that’s easy to use, that doesn’t disrupt your life, and use it not only for drinking, but use it for cooking. And that’s an important distinction. Use it for making your coffee, use it for whatever you’re going to use water for. It’s not just to have a glass of water. Now there are several, you know, good filtration pitchers that are quite reasonable. But when I’ve looked at the long-term cost of the filter replacements, oftentimes your initial investment, particularly in a countertop filtration system, um, will pay for itself over a fairly short period of time. But if that’s not in your budget, do consider one of the pitcher filtration systems. And there’s some pretty good ones out there. Now the second thing to consider is the hardness of your water.
(36:06):
Now the simple definition of water hardness is the amount of dissolved calcium and magnesium in the water. Now many people get water softeners installed in their homes because soft water can make your water heater last longer. Make soap lather easier and can keep your dishware or sparkly clean. It can also keep your sinks from clogging up the spouts your shower head clogging up. However, it’s been shown that people who live in hard water areas actually have better heart health than people who have soft water. Now why might this be? Well, it turns out that hard water in general has multiple beneficial minerals like sulfur, for instance, that may actually improve our heart health. The other problem with previous water softeners is that most water softeners used sodium chloride as the water softener. Now however, we can get potassium chloride as a water softener system. So if you’re going to use a water softener, please use a potassium chloride water system for two reasons.
(37:31):
Number one, you’re gonna eliminate the sodium factor. But number two, potassium is very deficient in our diets and in our water. And potassium is one of those minerals that actually improves heart health and improves heart function and actually lowers blood pressure. So if you’re gonna invest in a soft water system, please get the potassium chloride based systems. And now potassium chloride. Big bags are really easy to find in most hardware stores right next to the sodium chloride bags. Alright, should you buy spring water or purified water whenever you’re book looking at buying these products in the grocery store or at the big box stores? First of all, please keep in mind glass is vastly superior to any plastic that you’re gonna buy. Number two, you can take too much of a good thing out of water. And if you’re going to buy reverse osmosis, filtered waters or purified waters, look for waters that have had the minerals re-added back in.
(39:01):
And some, some companies make a big point of assuring you that they have re-added the minerals that they’ve removed in the process of filtering the water. Alright, so number one, find out your water quality in your town. You may be shocked with what you thought was healthy. Number two, if you are shocked, get yourself a water filtration system. We’ve gone through the whole list of what’s a good idea if you can afford it by bottled water in glass containers. Again, my favorite is Sand Pellegrino, which is sparkling. Their other company is called Pana, P-A-N-N-A, which is Nons sparkling. Also in a glass bottle. There’s several great American companies like Poland Spring, for example, that gives you everything that you’re looking for. Buyer beware in plastic bottles is the final takeaway.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.
