Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Now, most people think more cardio is better for you. You know, run more, burn more, live longer. Well, my guest today says that’s backwards, and he’s got a new book in his own former aching joints to prove it. He’s Mark Sisson, my good friend, a New York Times bestselling author, co-founder of the Barefoot Shoe Company Peluva, and founder of the recently republished marksdailyapple.com blog. He was on the show back in episode 82, talking keto and metabolic flexibility. But he’s back today with his latest book called Born to Walk: The Broken Promises of the Running Boom and How to Slow Down and Get Healthy One Step at a Time. In just a bit, we’ll talk about what exercise beats running for long-term health. The surprising way running can actually work against your weight. Mark calls it the Ben and Jerry’s effect, and I can attest to that.

(01:12)
And a brand new study on marathon training and colon health you’ll wanna hear before you head out on your next run. We’ll be right back.

Have you ever heard that story that Napoleon used the Egyptian sphinx for target practice and shot its nose off? Or maybe you’ve heard that a French astrologer named Nostradamus correctly predicted nearly 500 years of human history? Or maybe someone told you that the legendary blues guitarist, Robert Johnson, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. These stories are what I like to call historical myths, great little tales that may or may not have any basis in historical fact. On Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what’s fact, what’s fiction, and what is such a good story. It simply must be told. If you dig stories about death-obsessed emperors, lost civilizations, desperate sieges, voodoo black magic, and famous historical figures you thought you knew, then our fake history might just be your new favorite podcast. If you dig it, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark, welcome back to the show. So great to see you, Steve. It’s good to see you. You know, the last time I had you on the show was back in 2020. I

Can’t believe that. I

Know. Isn’t it amazing?

It’s crazy.

Well, we see each other all the time – Yes. In the south of France. But anyhow, we talked about keto and metabolic flexibility, but you were even then sounding the alarm on chronic cardio.

Yeah.

Now you’ve written an entire book declaring the running boom is over. <laugh> What pushed you that way?

Well, you know, personal experience. Um, I was a pretty competent runner and I was, uh –

You were a great runner.

Really interested in, in, uh, human performance at all levels. So I spent my early years trying to do the right thing. I tried to understand the training methods. So in those days, it was the more you ran, the faster you were, theoretically, the better it was for you. Not just in the context of, of athletic performance, but in terms of longevity. Ken Cooper had just written his book on aerobics, which seemed to indicate that more aerobic activity was better for your heart and would con- confer upon you longevity. Immortality. <laugh> Immortality. We will talk about that soon. I looked into the dietary components of performance, and it appeared at the time that a high carbohydrate diet was what was necessary to fuel all those miles. Over the years, um, I got, uh, to be pretty good, but I also got injured. And I got. I was, I was sort of the picture of fitness.

(04:28)
I was on the cover of Runner’s World Magazine three times, a number of other, you know, uh, sort of athletic and performance magazines. But inside, I was falling apart. I had GERD, I had irritable bowel syndrome, I had skin problems, I had sinus issues. And over, uh, at a very young age, I started to develop arthritis in my joints. So I thought to myself, something about what I’m doing in pursuit of performance and health just isn’t working. I ultimately had to quit running because of these injuries that I’d incurred, not just from overtraining and not just from the highly inflammatory diet that I was, that I was engaging in, which was promoting the inflammation and promoting the arthritis, but also because of the footwear, because the shoes that I was wearing, again, in service of putting in more miles so that I could be a better athlete, so that I could live longer, right?

(05:21)
So all of these things that I though I was doing properly were working against me. As I shifted my, my focus in my life to finding ways in which I could write about my experience and educate other people, I started to look back on the research. I started to look back on, um, you know, the, the data that was being compiled about, about, uh, how people were using exercise to lose weight and it wasn’t working, uh, how people were using running as a weight loss program and it wasn’t working. They were engaging in running as an, as a longevity, uh, protocol. Yeah.

(05:54)
And I’m telling you, it won’t work. I mean, it’s, it’s a little early to even be opining on that, but it’s, it’s not a great strategy for, for living a longer, healthier life. And then probably the most compelling evidence I got, I started to see, uh, within my, within my generation and within my cohort of athletes, people dropping dead of heart attacks, people starting to get, um, heart issues. Uh, AFib is endemic in my gener – epidemic in my generation of runners. Probably, I don’t know, two to three million cases of, of AFib. So lots of my peers getting ablations, lots of my pe – several of my peers dropping dead of heart attacks. So when I looked at, at, at the amount of, of data and evidence and the fact that people were not losing weight engaging in a running program, uh, they were still getting injured at rates that were equivalent to.

(06:42)
It’s like that sort of high-tech shoe industry has never caused a reduction in injury among all of the participants. I started to just think like, what is going on with, with our perception of what we think is right for us? And why are we suffering and struggling and sweating and groaning and, and going, putting ourselves through all this misery in pursuit of health and longevity and performance and looking better naked and all the things that we say we want? This is ridiculous. That then prompted me to look at the running boom of the last 50 years, and I realized I had this sort of aha moment. Um, the only people who should be running are runners. Now that’s a glib statement, but the, but the, but the reality is the only people who should be running are pe – ectomorphs with long legs, large lung capacity, and a high pain tolerance.

(07:34)
And those people probably sh – I would say should be running. It’s okay for them to run because they have sort of the genetic, uh, predisposition to being able to recover from workouts and to not, uh, e- exert themselves too much. The rest of the population should not be running. They should be walking. Everybody should be walking. It’s the quintessential human movement. I’m gonna stop there because I’m rambling already, Steve. <laugh> But I wanted to set, set the stage for your next question.

You know, you are really one of the sadder but wiser guys. And I, I wanna tell everybody when I, you know, was transitioning from, uh, being a heart surgeon to being a nutritionist, uh, practicing restorative medicine, Mark’s Daily Apple was one of the first things I started to read. And I really thank you. Uh, if you don’t know about it, it was just a real education for me coming out of nowhere trying to learn about this. And I, I thank you to this day for doing Mark’s Daily Apple. And now you’re back. Yeah,

It’s my pleasure. And, and again, that was me wanting to share with the world these revelations that I’d gotten from having gone down a path of performance, longevity, health, um, you know, human wisdom and knowledge and discovering that much of what we though we knew to be true was not. And much of the dogma, no offense to the medical profession, but much of the dogma that was coming out of medicine wasn’t preventative. It wasn’t holistic. It was based on fixing something that had already broken. Right. Right. And not really, uh, uh, getting to the root cause of whatever the issues were. And the more I uncovered a lot of these, these little aha moments, m- my, my life’s work has been to uncover these hidden genetic switches that we all have that we can turn on or off based on behaviors, based on food choices, based on sun exposure, based on sleep, based on movement choices, based on stress reduction.

(09:36)
And we can literally turn on genes that build muscle, that burn fat, that make us happy. We can turn off genes that store fat, that cause our immune system to be suppressed, that, uh, cause muscle to waste away. And that amount of power that we all have was really exciting to me. And I wanted to kind of, you know, share that, not the, uh, I call it wisdom, but share the insights I’d gotten from all the research I’ve been doing.

My number one prescription that I actually write to patients is get a dog. Yeah. Because it actually makes people go out and walk, usually twice a day. And I talk about the blue zones constantly, and they’re not running marathons – No. But they are walking all day, uphills, downhills. Great number of these people are herders, sheep herders, goat herders. And you make, I think, a very strong argument that we were actually born to walk. Yes.

Yeah. And

What’s. All right. So what does walking do for you? Why shouldn’t you be doing something as intense as

Running? I know. It’s crazy. Well, first of all, just regarding Blue Zones, Dan Buetner, who wrote Blue Zones, promotes it, is my downstairs neighbor. I know.

Yeah. I know.

So Dan and I become very good friends. And, um, you know, we agree on just about everything with regard to the Blue Zones lifestyle, except the source of protein. Ah,

Yeah.

He’s beans. I’m beef. And even there, we only disagree by two letters. The AN and bean and the EF and the N of B. Anyway. So

You basically say F you, Dan,

Or – <laugh> No, no, no. We, we have a, we go out to dinner and I order a big steak and he orders, he orders beans and that’s, and that’s good. Yeah. Humans, we’re bipedal. We’re one of very few bipedal animals. What does that mean? Well, it means we have to be moving around a lot so we don’t fall over, right? So if we’re not, if we’re not sitting in an ancestral position, because before there were chairs and sofas and, and couches and, and whatever, La-Z-Boys, uh, you know, we either sat cross-legged on the ground, if we rested, we squatted. It was still, it was still moving the body through different planes and ranges of motion. And I did a paper with somebody on, on these ancestral, these archetypal rest poses that people have. Cro- cross-legged sideways, uh, cross-legged front ways, uh, side saddle, uh, s – you know, butterfly rest, whatever.

(11:58)
Mm-hmm. Even when we’re resting, we’re moving. So the human body’s designed to move. It’s expected that we move. Our genes expect us to move. Whether it’s increasing heart rate a little bit to make sure the blood flows, circulatory system works, the lymphatic system requires movement. There is no pump for lymph and, and that’s a, a great detoxifier of the body. So we have this genetic predisposition to be moving as often as we possibly can. When I first wrote the book, The Primal Blueprint, almost 20 years ago now, I s – one of the first rules of the Primal Blueprint is move around a lot at a low level of activity. That meant walking mostly, but you, you know, now you can ride a bike, you can swim, whatever. Your prescription of getting a dog and, and, and the point that you make about twice a day, one of the things we know about walking is that.

(12:45)
And by the way, it’s not about burning calories. Forget calories, forget steps. It’s just about the movement. <laugh> It’s just about putting your body through different ranges of motion, different planes of activity, because all of the joints want to articulate. They all wanna move in different, in ways to s – to stay mobile and resilient and lubricated. And the more you do this on a regular basis, the more mobile you’ll stay throughout your life. When we talk about longevity, we, you know, we talk about the quality of life and what defines the quality of life as we get older. Like I don’t wanna just live to be 180 for the sake of waking up in the morning going, “Oh, what do I do today?” You’ll

Be talking to Dave Asprey.

No, it’s just be he and I. <laugh> We’ll be the only ones left. But, um, I define it in two, with two different contexts. One is, is cognition. I wanna be able to understand people and converse with people and, and, and experience the beauty of the world and smell the s- smells and look at the sites and process the information. Cognition is, is critical. And, you know, we’re, we’re heading a real bad direction with that with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

(13:45)
The other is mobility. And mobility is what is, they, they’re linked because the mobility part of this is you wanna be able to walk down the hall to visit your neighbor or down the street to go shopping or board a plane to go to Italy and do a walking tour or south of France and do the cap – Yeah. Every day. Every day. Where I saw you randomly one year, that was the first time we sort of hooked up in south of France. Mobility is, is such an important aspect of longevity, and it’s sort of a use it or lose it thing. If you, if you don’t get out and walk a lot and walk every day, um, then you will, you will start to slow down over a period of time. Now, when you’re 30 or 40, uh, whatever you sort of overlooked at, but as you get older, this mobility thing becomes huge.

(14:30)
Mobility is your, is also your ability to walk to the gym and do deadlifts or do Bulgarian squats or to do leg days or to, or to get, jump up to be able to do a, a, a pull-up. Mm-hmm. Your mobility depends on your foot strength, your foot health, and your connection with the ground. So this protecting of the connection of the ground through walking as the primary human, quintessential human activity is kind of tantamount and puts everything together. Now, when we get back to the conversation about dementia, one of these aspects of dementia is this loss of blood sugar mismanagement over a lifetime, and it’s circulatory. It’s circulation. And so the more that you can pump the heart a little bit and get the blood flowing a little bit more and get oxygen to those areas, the healthier you will be and the less likely you will be to, to succumb to these, um, lifestyle diseases that take so many people down.

(15:26)
So walking becomes the quintessential human movement. Um, and wa – and, and again, back to walking your dog. Sometimes usually twice a day, get a dog. Studies have shown that it might even be better to. I’m, I’m a big fan of walking, so I’ll say, you know, 50-minute walk, which I do every day, um, as part of my regular decompression routine at the end of the day. But a 50-minute walk, that’s great, but maybe five, 10-minute walks spread throughout the day is even better – True. Because you are moving the body throughout the day. You know, we get, we get so tethered to our schedules and our routines, especially the, um, the protocols that are set out for us by our apps on our phones and things like that. “Oh yeah, I worked eight hours. Oh, I got up and I, you know, I did my journaling and then I did this.

(16:13)
I’ll check that off and then I went to work and I worked eight hours and then I went home and I did a 50-minute check that off. “Well, that’s fine, but then you sat for eight hours in a chair doing the other part of your day,

(16:26)
Better to maybe get, take small breaks and walk, um, 10 minutes, 15, what, whatever you could do. I tell people walk just as, as much as you can, as far as you can, as often as you can.

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(17:40)
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(17:46)
In my book, The Energy Paradox, I introduced the term exercise snacking – Yeah. Which eventually became viral. Yeah, taking these five-minute breaks. Yeah. And, and like, you know, you oughta walk up a couple flights of stairs. Well, I can’t do that. Okay. Take the elevator up two flights, walk down two flights. Exactly. In fact, there was a really cool study, uh, in Austria where they took volunteers and they had a, uh, tram that kinda headed up the mountain. And half the people rode the tram up and walked down. Yeah. And the other half hiked up and rode the tram back down. And they’re figuring, well, the guys who were walking up are gonna be in much better shape – Yeah. Build more muscle. Turned out it didn’t make any difference. Yeah. Whether you went up against gravity or went down against gravity, you were using major muscle groups.

(18:36)
Yeah. And we forget going down. Those eccentric,

Those eccentric muscle contractions, there’s a whole body of work that suggests that’s what really builds muscle too, is the eccentric part of a, of an exercise movement. Right. You know, so it’s an interesting concept to think that, uh, so, you know, that walking would be more beneficial than say running. Now let’s, let’s analyze that a little. Let’s unpack that a little bit and say, you know, so why is walking better than running? It’s, it’s not better than running. We tell people how to run appropriately. Much of it. Yeah, in the book. In

The book.

Yeah. If

You’re gonna, if you’re gonna be that dumb – Yeah.

He

Tells you how to do it. Yeah.

<laugh> Exactly. In fact, Brad and I wrote a book, uh, 10, 12 years ago called Primal Endurance. And it’s how to. I, I, I tell people, don’t run a marathon. It’s, it’s stupid. It’s, you know. But if you do, if you have to, we’re gonna show you how to do it the most painful – The least harmful way. The least harmful way. Exactly. Right, right. People who engage in a running program and think that by going out and struggling and suffering and sweating and getting home and, and sitting on the couch and going, “God, that was amazing and I’m so tired and I’m so hungry, you know, why am I hungry? I though I was melting the fat away.” Most people are training at a heart rate that’s too high for them to be able to optimize fat burning. So they’re not burning fat when they’re doing this.

(19:57)
They’ve, um, exceeded their fat burning zone and now they’re into glycogen burning. So they’re burning the glycogen in their muscles. Right.

(20:04)
Which is fine, except that when you burn glycogen that much on a regular basis, the brain goes, “Hey, we gotta eat carbs to. We gotta replenish this, especially if you’re gonna do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day, which is what runners do. They tend to get into the cycle of running, you know, five, six, seven days a week. So what we’ve identified is that the body will burn largely fat up until a certain heart rate. And once you exceed that heart rate, that level of output, and typically we call it zone two. Mm-hmm.

A lot

Of people have zo – heard of zone one, zone two, up to zone five. Zone two and below, you’re deriving most of your energy from your stored body fat. And that’s what you wanna do when you’re engaging in this activity designed to achieve a, a better body composition. You’re trying to burn off stored body fat. Nobody wants to store fat. You wanna burn the fat. Well, it’s ironic that you, if you run too hard for too long, you not only, uh, jar the joints because your running form is probably bad, you create stress hormones because your body says, “What are we doing? Are we running away from a beast?” Yeah.

“Are we

Trying to survive?” So the cortisol levels go up. So your stress levels go up. Cortisol is a pro-inflammatory over long-term, uh, uh, hormone. And cortisol also tends to promote weight gain instead of weight loss. And that’s all because you’re doing stuff too hard for too long. And again, it’s just ironic that you would say, “Wait a minute. So, so my willingness to go out and beat myself up is actually doing me harm when I could be going longer and slower and burning more fat and not damaging my joints and being in an anabolic muscle building state instead of a catabolic state, uh, simply by walking.” And that’s what a lot of the book is about. And, you know, I, I, I really do pick apart the running boom of the last 50 years as, as having been inappropriate for most people. Most people would be better served by walking, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.

(22:06)
Base of walking, go to the gym twice a week and lift weighs. Yep. Build

Muscle.

Absolutely build muscle. And then once a week sprint. And I, I, you know, I, I make a distinction between metronomic running at, at a, at a, what we call a no man’s land or a black hole of training where you’re, you’re running too fast to be burning fat. So you’re b- burning up glycogen and creating cortisol, but too slow to be actually, uh, creating power and strength and speed. So now you, you’re just training yourself to hurt every single day. And you don’t get better. That’s the, the irony of this is you don’t improve. You know, so people who, who are running 40, 50, 60 miles a week and they’re running 10 minute miles and then they run a marathon three times a year and they run four hour marathons, they’re not doing themselves any favors at all. Over years, you see that most people who enter a marathon.

(22:56)
I mean, I, sorry, sorry people, I’m ragging on people who enter marathons. Look, it’s a great life, you know, belt buckle kind of thing. <laugh> Uh, you know, put a notch in your belt and, uh, uh, you know, ch- check it off your bucket list. But as a, an advocation over years and years and years, what we see is people have the same 15 or 25 pounds to lose who’ve been running for years and years and years. And their frustration at, at doing the work and trying to, you know, maybe I’m not running fast enough when I’m doing my miles, right? Yeah.

Um,

Maybe I’m not eating enough carbohydrates to ref – you know. And all of this is setting up, uh, a disastrous, uh, downstream situation, which our buddy Tim Noakes encountered when Tim, Tim was a, you know, he was the number one researcher in the world of glucose management, glycogen management, carbohydrate management, carbohydrate intake, carbo loading for, for athletes. His book, The Lure of Running, was the greatest book ever written in the, in, you know, a 700-page tome. Yeah.

Every,

Every coach read it. And, and his, his whole thing was, yeah, you gotta manage carbohydrates because when you run out of glycogen or carbs in a run, you hit the wall, it’s over. To his credit, he, you know, he was a runner himself and he did, you know, he did the, the Comrades Marathon and he’d done a lot of participation, but he found himself over years not losing weight, gaining weight from all the miles he was doing, and becoming diabetic. And when he realized that all of this trying to do the right thing was working against him, and he refocused and reframed what he was doing, he read, “Oh my God, I’ve been, I’ve, I’ve been looking down the wrong corridor here. I should t- teach myself how to become metabolically flexible, how to burn off my own stored body fat when I’m running, how to decrease the dependence on carbs that I have.” Yeah.

(24:44)
Not just day-to-day, but meal to meal. When he did that, his, his, uh, diabetes, his type two diabetes went away, because you can cure type two diabetes. Oh, absolutely.

You

Know, it’s a, it’s a simp – it’s simple. You have to do the work, but it’s a simple set of rules, right? Um, and, and he’s, and he realized that, that, um, this whole carbohydrate focus, uh, was pro-inflammatory and it was not helping anyone with their, with, with their weight loss efforts. And with that and with the rest of the sort of community starting to realize that fat metabolism is really where it’s at with weight loss and with, even with exercise as a strategy, as a tool, we come back to running. I mean, running as a, as a, as a weight loss strategy does not work. So now we have the same people lining up at the start of the LA Marathon and the New York Marathon. More than 60% of the entrants are overweight. Yeah. They’re not marathoners, they’re just overweight people who run. So how do you, how do you combat that?

(25:43)
How do you, how do you. Look, you walk. You just walk and lift weighs, and you have to dial your diet in. There’s no question that 80% of your body composition, the results come from organizing a diet in which you burn off your stored body fat when you’re not exercising, even when you’re exercising. But don’t even count on that. Don’t even use that as the main metric. Right.

When

You’re not exercising, if you use intermittent fasting, uh, a- a – to any extent, or even if you just cut back on the amount of calories that you take in on a daily basis, realize that if you’re metabolically flexible, any requirements for energy will come from your body willingly, lovingly taking fat out of stored body fat, burning it, combusting it as fuel, taking some of the extra fat, sending it to the brain to be converted into ketones, and run your brain on ketones. It’s an amazing system built largely on developing metabolic flexibility, but then also recognizing that if I have metabolic flexibility, I don’t have to go grunt and groan and, and, and, and, you know, count 8,000 calories burned like the old, um, biggest loser – Yeah. Contestants. Yeah. Which was, that was inhumane. People should go to jail for that stuff, Jillian. She’s, she’s a friend of mine.

(26:59)
Anyway, again, um, that’s sort of the, the, the take on that, but it’s. Walking is the quintessential human movement. Everybody should be doing it. And everybody should be doing it in the right context and the right footwear. And that’s. We can talk about that shortly.

Back when the running move started, um, they asked the, the Kalahari Bushman, the great long distance walkers of Africa what they thought about running a marathon. Yeah. And they basically said, “Well, w- why would anybody run 26.2 miles?” If they

Didn’t have to.

Because if you were chasing an animal, uh, it wouldn’t be worth your effort to go that long. And if the animal was chasing you, he would’ve caught you long before then. Exactly.

And they were right. No, they’re right. Part of what happened over the past couple years is, um,

(27:49)
A friend of mine, Christopher McDougall wrote a book called Born to Run. Yeah. Born to Run. And he, you know, and he posited that we were, that we’re, you know, genetically gifted as runners. Yeah. We should be running. We should be running barefoot. And he used the Kalahari Bushman, he used the, the, the, the, um, Hadza and a number of other, um, remaining tribes around the world, uh, as examples of persistence hunting. And they said, “Well, these guys are out on a hunt for two hours.” But dude, they’re not running seven-minute miles. They’re, they’re hiding behind a tree, tracking an animal, um, sprinting to the next tree, waiting, walking three miles to catch up to the animal, um, jogging over here. That they hit with a poison

Dart. With a

Poison, that they can hit with a poison dart. But number one, they’re not running metronomically. The whole time they’re doing this, they’re conserving energy. Uh, number two, they don’t do it every day because once they, once they kill an animal, it lasts for a couple of days. Yeah. So they’re not like. And, and by the way, on days off when they’re not doing a hunt, they’re not sitting around going, “Yeah, maybe we should go out for a 10K, you know, easy job.” They’re not doing anything. They’re doing as little as possible. Yeah. And they’re re – they’re recovering from the work they did during the hunt. So th- this concept of a persistent hunt equating itself to, um, you know, humans being designed to run. Yes, we were born to be able to run, and that’s a good thing. And then he also reflects on the, uh, Tara Hamara Indians – Yeah.

(29:17)
Copper Canyons of Mexico who, you know, they’re not as healthy as he makes them out to be. Um, they use, they used running to survive, to run away from conquistadoris originally, and then eventually they turn it into a game, but they have injuries, they have heart problems. So, so there’s no, there’s no real good data on running being a good, uh, protocol for achieving longevity and health at the same time. Second

Thing I wanna bring up, uh, my new book comes out February 23rd called Feed Your Brain. Love it. And believe it or not, there are only two animals that stand bolt upright. We happen to be One of them. Yeah. The other one might surprise you. It’s penguins.

Yeah. No, it doesn’t surprise me. And

Guess what?

Yeah.

Those two animals are great long distance walkers.

Yeah. The migration of penguins is, is legendary.

And by the way, spoiler alert, those two animals are both great swimmers.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. No, I, I ask people. I tell, tell me another bipedal animal –

Yeah.

Uh, that, you know, that doesn’t have a tail that balances it out or – Right.

Yeah. We’re

The only ones that. Doesn’t knuckle walk at the same time.

Yeah. All right. Now in the book, you say that half of all runners get injured every year. And I can certainly attest to that. After running a half marathon that I really didn’t prepare well for, I had a piriformis injury – Oh, God. That persisted for at least a year, probably two years. Yes. Um, I’ve had plantar fasciitis. I have had, you know, shin splints. I can attest, uh, that yeah, and you think, and all the books say, “Oh yeah, you’re gonna get injured.” Yeah. “And here’s how to recover from the injury.”

Yeah. Uh,

What did we get wrong?

We got everything wrong. The, the history of the running movement goes back to, um, in the early days, uh, people didn’t run that much and running was like a, what was like a, a challenge. There would be these hounds and hairs pub races in England or for beer, you know? Yeah. The hash out,

Hash house harriers.

That’s exactly right. Um, they wore thin, you know, leather sh – soled shoes. So they were minimalist shoes. Up into the early, uh, the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s when, um, you know, the Olympics started to become a thing. And the, the Boston Marathon was one of a few road races that were available. But as people started running more and more, um, US athletes became better on the world scene. And around the late ’60s, early ’70s, it was recognized that it was the thin shoes that were the, that was the stumbling block. That was, it was your feet that told you it was, that was enough miles for the week. Your feet were what said, “Dude, it hurts. You know, we’re running on stones because also you weren’t running on, on, uh, you know, tartan tracks and, you know, you were running on dirt roads and cobbles and whatever.” So at some point in the late ’60s, early ’70s, Bill Bowerman, a coach of, uh, the Nike, uh, Track Club and, uh, the Men of Oregon and Phil Knight, who was one of his runners said, “You know, uh, we should make a shoe that is thicker and cushioned so that our great runners, the ones who run with great form, can run more than 50 or 60 miles a week.

(32:39)
If they could run 90 or 100 miles a week, they could keep up on the world tour, on the scene with the European runners. They were adamant in creating this shoe that would be easier on the feet. The asterisk is for people who knew how to run well, who were great runners, who had good running form. So they, they developed this thick running shoe. Um, it wa – it’s not as thick as today, but it was thick enough to offset a lot of that, uh, that, uh, damage that the cobbles and the roads and the stones were. I was one of their first runners. I, I was a Nike runner, uh, in the mid – 70s. And as the shoes got thicker and thicker and people put in more miles, I went from running 40 or 50 miles a week to running 100 miles a week. My high mileage week was 130 miles one week, and I got injured.

(33:21)
Now I didn’t get injured from bone bruises on my, the bottom of my feet. Now I got injured because, um, I couldn’t feel the ground and my, the first thing to go was my knees. Uh, so I, because my knees, I was a pronator, uh, and that’s a term that, you know, everybody uses, you overpronate. <laugh> You’re supposed to pronate. But the podiatrist that I worked with said you have chondromalacia, you have a knee problem, your knee cap’s not tracking well. Here’s a set of orthotics we’re gonna put in your shoes. So I went from missing a season of running because of, of these knees that, this chondromalacia, to coming back and being captain of my cross country team. It was great. But I had these orthotics and every step I took, now I’d fixed the knee problem, but it went further up the kinetic chain because I wasn’t feeling the ground underneath and I wasn’t building an arch.

(34:08)
I was supporting an arch. And so ultimately my hip tendonitis was what forced me to quit running. But the, the shoe industry progressed along and more and more people now as Jim Fix writes a book on running and, uh, George Sheehan starts, starts promoting it. And Frank Shorter wins the gold medal in 72. Now running becomes a thing and the running boom starts. And more and more people start running because they think they’ll lose weight running and because these new shoes, these thick cushion padded shoes allow them to put in miles and not hurt themselves. Well, they think they’re not hurting themselves because they can’t feel the ground when they heel strike with crappy form. And most runners have bad form. Most of the people you see out on the roads running, they have bad form. They’re not. They’re, they’re using the shoes as a short-term shock absorber, but ultimately it’s just bypassing the shock and sending it up the kinetic chain up to the hips.

(35:00)
So now we have people who are. And if it’s not the hips, it’s the knees. And because they’re constricted in these shoes, and because the feet aren’t able to do what the feet are supposed to do, which is splay outwardly, the toes are supposed to splay out, the big toe is supposed to be the last point of contact when you run or jump or sprint or dance or whatever, because you’re scrunching it against the other toes in a shoe and now you’re raising the heel up an inch above the forefoot. So now with a scrunched over toe that’s not contacting the ground with an arch support in it that is taking all of the. It’s unburdening the arch of having to do any work. So the muscles of the feet now start to atrophy. Um, now the calf is shorter because you’ve raised the heel and now the calf is, has shortened.

(35:46)
Just that’s what just, what happens when you, when you point your toe that way and you, and you force it pointed all the time. Who’s not gonna get injured? I mean, there’s all these things that can go wrong. You can get bunions from the toe cramping over. You can get Morton’s neuroma, you can get all

Kinds of

Neuropathies and things with scr- scrunching that metatarsal head, which is the mid, sort of the front part of the midfoot. Um, people get plantar fasciitis because there’s a lack of circulation to the plantar fascia tendon area. And that’s because you, because that big toe needs to splay outward for that circulation to open up. When you squeeze it over, you cut off the circulation to the plantar fascia area. In fact, um, there’s a body of work now, evidence that says most cases of plantar fasciitis isn’t an itis, it’s an osis. It’s plantar fasciosis and that’s the lack of blood flow to that area. So all of these high tech shoes that are supposed to add spring and reduce forces, impact forces are actually in many cases doing the opposite. And if you’re, if you’re a runner who doesn’t have good form, which most people don’t, if you don’t pay attention to the width of your shoe, if you haven’t done foot exercises your whole life to maintain strength in your arch and the intrinsic, the, the, those 22 intrinsic muscles of the foot, there’s 29 muscles in the foot.

(37:06)
Um, you know, most, most shoes, we have all these muscles in the feet and most shoes allow us to use maybe three of those muscles. And the rest of we’re binding them up and then we’re asking the ankles and the knees and the hips to do all the work from there on. And that’s where these injuries come from.

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(38:19)
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(38:39)
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(39:36)
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(39:52)
So you took it upon yourself to make this – Yeah. The Paluva shoe. Yeah. Why should I go through the trouble? And we talk about this – Yeah. Of trying to get my toes that have been cramped in shoes all of my life – Yes. To get them – To fit into those. To fit into those little chambers – Yeah. And splay them out. Yeah. And, you know, full disclosure, um, I find them a bit hard to get into, challenging, and full disclosure when I get into them, uh, I like them a lot. But talk to me about these shoes. Yeah. Uh, you and your son –

Yes.

Um, formed this company.

Yes.

Aluva.

Yeah.

Okay. What. You’ve, you’ve led up to why these should

Exist. Yeah. So I, I did not like. My whole life I’ve wanted to go barefoot, and I didn’t like shoes that were available on the market at any point in time, um, including the running shoes that I, that I wore up until the end of my running career, which ended partially as a result of the shoes that I was wearing. And there was no other alternative. Um, so I’ve been. In the back of my mind, I’ve had this issue about footwear my whole life. Um, I was an early adopter of the five-toed shoe that came out in 2005, six, and seven, the Vibram five fingers.

Yeah. I was

One of their earlier influencers. I love the concept. It was an amazing concept. I totally got it from the, from the get-go. However, I though that the shoes that were available to me, and that’s all I wore, by the way, uh, the shoes were too thin, too thin. They didn’t accommodate for manmade surfaces, which is pretty much what we navigate on a daily basis, pavement, concrete, hardwood floors, tile, marble, glass, needles, dog, whatever. All the things that we encounter in our daily life, those shoes did not accommodate that. Um, I though they were not. The operas weren’t substantial enough. I didn’t think they looked great, and I wanted. So I wanted to make a shoe that was comfortable, that was functional, that looked great. When my son and I set about to design, uh, the optimal shoe, starting from the ground up, it had to be wide, thin, flat, and flexible.

(41:58)
It had to mimic being barefoot. So it had to have a thin sole, so what we call ground feel. So you could feel the ground underneath. And I know when you walk in these, uh, every time you step on an uneven surface, it feels good. Your brain senses, this is how I’m supposed to feel this rock or this dimple on this manhole cover or this stick that I’m stepping on or this divot that I’m stepping into or this whatever, this rock large boulder that my foot wants to like grab almost.

Yeah.

So you want, you want it to be thin, ground feel. Uh, you want it to be wide, wide enough to accommodate toe splay. Um, you want it to be flat. Now flat as, as opposed to thin, you. No heel lift at all. The heel wants to be at the same elevation off the ground as the midfoot is and flexible. You wanna be able to, again, you wanna be able to articulate that foot through. The foot has lots of ranges of motion and, and, and planes of activity. The ankle is a gimbal. It’s a 360. It, it’s, it’s not straight ahead. The knee is pretty much straight ahead. And, and the reason you wanna protect the knee is to use, you wanna use the ankle to offset any of the forces that might tweak the knee on a hike or on a run or on a jump or stepping on a gopher hole on a Frisbee pitch.

(43:11)
So you want the shoe to be wide, thin, flat, flexible. Those are the starting points. But ultimately, you want every toe to be able to articulate individually. You want the toes to accommodate the surface you’re walking on. So even if you have a wide single toe box shoe, um, and there are some great companies that make wide single toe box shoes, your foot, your dysfunctional foot, the disformed, malformed foot that you created by choosing the footwear that you did, no offense, Steve. I resemble that remark. I, I love you like a brother, man. So I mean it with a great deal of love and respect, but the way you mess your feet up, they’re not gonna automatically find some lovely open splay just because you’re going barefoot or just because you went to an open toe box shoe. So, and that’s the reason like 10 million pairs of toe spacers have been sold over the past couple of years.

(44:00)
Women in particular get that they’re messing their feet up and they have to do something to create this, this splay. But then toe spacers are almost too much of a splay – Yeah.

(44:11)
For people who aren’t used to it. And then they only wear them while they’re watching TV. They wear them for an hour and take them off and you, you shrink back down. So we wanna have our feet go into a sort of a neutral splay position to start with. So early on decided the only appropriate, uh, configuration for a true barefoot minimal shoe is a five-toed shoe, is a glove for your feet that guides your toes. So you, you. When, once you guide the toes into those individual toe slots, and then you walk or you climb stairs, or you go to the gym and do leg day or whatever it is, you’re putting your, your, your toes are articulating, bending individually according to whatever surface you’re walking on. They splay outwardly if you’re doing a sprint or if you’re, again, walking upstairs or if you’re doing, um, deadlifts, they’ll, they’ll find a, a, a slightly wider splay.

(45:05)
But the idea is to relax, realign, and strengthen. Now we tell people don’t run in these shoes. They’re the best running shoe you’ll ever find, but you have to know how to run. So don’t run in these shoes, but walk, walk, walk. And we say every step is a rep in Palouvas. Every step you take in Paluvas, you are building strength. Now, don’t run because again, if you know how to run, great, but forget that for now. Every step is now not impactful. There’s not a lot of G-forces when you walk. Because it’s thin, Steve, every, every time you, you weigh the forward foot, because it’s thin, the sensory input, there’s, there’s tens of thousands of nerve endings in the bottoms of the feet that are designed to inform the brain of exactly what the next move is. By the time you weigh that forward foot, depending on the tilt and the texture and the temperature of the ground that you’re walking on, the brain immediately in milliseconds has all the information it needs on how to orchestrate your kinetic chain, how much to scrunch the arch around that rock, how much to articulate the toe up and down over that twig on the left side or the right side or that divot you’re stepping in.

(46:17)
Um, how much to roll the ankle to offset the roll or the tilt of that so that the knee doesn’t tweak automatically, because you’re gonna use the ankle as that first point of contact to accommodate the surface you’re walking on. Then how, how deeply to bend the knee because you just stepped off an 18 inch platform. And if you did that in a stiff hiking boot, you’re like, “Oh God, I hope I didn’t tweak my knee.” But if you’re in b – if you’re barefoot or in minimal shoes that have toes, by the time you land, the brain already, “Oh yeah, bend a little bit deeply. Not, not a problem at all.” All of these things, all of this sensory input is, is critical to you reorganizing this perfect kinetic chain. Now when I say perfect kinetic chain, everyone is born with this. And the kinetic chain is the, is the complexity, the, the integration of, uh, of muscles, nerves, tendons, ligaments, bones, uh, cartilage, all the way up from the bottom of the feet through the ankles, through the, through the shins through the knees, through the hips, through the lower back, all the way up to the neck.

(47:19)
That’s the posterior kinetic chain. Everybody is born with a perfect kinetic chain for your physiology. It doesn’t mean you have to mimic somebody else’s and, and, and go see some physical therapist to acquire this, but people say, “Well, but I don’t. Mark, I have flat feet. I don’t have a good kinetic chain. Uh, my knees bend in, my hips are out.” No, you were born with a perfect kinetic chain provided you are able to give the information to your brain on how to organize your perfect kinetic chain. Now we screw it up over a lifetime of wearing thick, padded shoes, tight, restrictive, thick, padded shoes that completely negate all of that sensory input that, that offset, uh, you know, the shock of walking or running because we have this, this thick sole that, again, shorten the, the calf, which then puts pressure on the achilles because we’ve raised the heel up.

(48:13)
And all of these things absolutely negatively impact your perfect kinetic chain. So now the time you’re 20 or 30 or 40 or 50, now you’re like, now you do have knee problems and you do have hip problems and you do roll an ankle just, you know, wearing high heels if you’re a woman, or you could be a man wearing high heels, no judgment, or wearing, uh, you know, soccer cleats, which are like – Yeah. You know, they’re raised off the ground and they’re on these, they’re on these, you know, pointy pieces and they’re, they’ve so restricted your, your foot that your big toe is basically gonna cut off all circulates, again, in, in sort of in service of creating a bat out of your foot in soccer cleats. Right. You know, you turn your foot into a bat.

So, uh, you know, I, I’ll bring up one, uh, very important point. I ha – I take care of a lot of people with Parkinson’s. And the first thing they, they always come in in their big padded

Shoes. Yes.

And they’re so happy. And the first thing I do, I say, “You’re gonna throw those in the trash and you’re gonna get a barefoot shoe because you are totally disconnected from…”

The big toe is directly connected to the brain. Yeah. In Chinese medicine, if you ever have reflexology, which I have once a week, it’s incredible, the big toe with the brain connection is, it’s a known thing. And if you scrunch that big toe over you, if you, if you disengage it, if you wear a thick padded shoe, I wanna do a study on dementia and barefoot walking, and we should talk about that after the show.

Yeah, we should. Uh, literally, that’s the first thing I do. Yeah. And they look at me like I’m, you know, nuts. Yeah. Yeah. They do anyhow. But the other thing I’ll bring up, uh, speaking of feeling things, uh, you and I, um, w- we hike a lot in the south of France and we run into each other. And so you may know this, uh, little beach restaurant, Ajuna in S. Of course. Of course. And, you know, you have to walk over kind of – Yeah, hard, hard rocks. Hard rocks to get there. Yeah. So we were there a few months ago, and I had your shoes on, and Penny, my wife, had big cushion shoes on. It’s okay. And the first thing that grabbed me as I was going over these rocks is, oh my gosh, uh, this feels great. Yes. I am grabbing – Yes. These rocks.

(50:27)
And I turn around to Penny and say, “This is really cool. I’m not trying to balance on these rocks.” Yeah. “I’m, I’m grabbing them, and it feels great.” So

We call it foot candy, by the way.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. That’s what we call, we call it cobblestones and Rocky Trails foot candy.

All right. So final takeaway. If someone does nothing else after listening to us today, what’s the one thing they should change about how they move this week?

Oh, uh, buy a pair of and start walking. Now if –

Boy, if that

Isn’t a pitch. No, no, no. I mean, dude, here’s the thing. Start walking, for sure. I mean, walking, like I say, if you didn’t get from this conversation that walking is a quintessential human movement, it’s probably the best thing you can do for yourself in terms of longevity and health and everything else. And you don’t walk, you don’t even need to walk fast and hard and briskly, just walk a lot. Um, but walk in the right footwear. So it’s not my shoes, then put, then, then it’s minimalist footwear of some kind. And there are some brands if you just Google minimalist footwear. Yeah. Um, that’s it.

Your 2025 book, Born to Walk, uh, goes deep into everything we talked about today. And it’s a really important book, and you really ought to get it. You can pick up a copy wherever your local bookstore is. It’s on Amazon. Go to your local library. If your library doesn’t have it, they can get it. Yeah. But, Mark, I think you’re gonna offer a free copy of Born to Walk included in any Palouva sho – order today – Yeah. If you use the code Gundry. Love it. Is that right?

Absolutely. Are you kidding

Me? Yeah. And I think you’re gonna get 10% off – Yeah. Your purchase as well. Free book, 10% off. Code Gundry. All right. Before we go, got an audience question for you. Here’s what showed up from one of my podcasts at drgundry.com. This isn’t from Anonymous. I’m in my 60s. What do you think is the best exercise? What about the Stairmark. What about the StairMaster? What about these non-impact. Uh, well, what about a treadmill? What about. Yeah, so they’re,

They’re all good. So anything that you can do and keep your heart rate below, um, this zone two, so zone one and zone two for any length of time is fine. I have no problem with doing a StairMaster. I’m just saying, uh, or a treadmill, but it. Get out in nature, you know, get out on an uneven surface and walk and, and put your feet through, um, different ranges of motion. We, you know, if you’re just walking on a treadmill or just doing the, the StairMaster, it gets a little boring. Now you can listen to a podcast. I mean, there’s a lot of things you can – Yeah. You can, you can get by with.

But you’re right. Get out in

Nature. Get out in nature.

Forest bathe. Yeah. The, the amount of information now about these really cool plant chemicals that hit your olfactory system and turn on, for instance, a half hour walking in a woods turns on your natural killer cell production for 30 days – Yeah. After 30 minutes of walking in the woods.

It’s, it’s profound.

Yeah. It’s, it’s fantastic. All right, buddy. It’s always great to see you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Uh, thanks for inventing these shoes. Uh, you know, from the side, they look pretty doggone. Cool. Uh, from the front, my wife says, “Eh, I can do without ’em.”

Uh, look, I got a lot of hot girls wearing these in the gym thinking they’re the cutest things they ever put on. So – Ooh. Uh, it’s a,

It’s a – Is that, is, is it great? It’s gonna be a thing. Is it great for a pickup in a gym? Is that what you’re saying? Understand. Yeah, exactly. All right. So visit paluva.com and use the code Gundry to get 10% off and a free copy of Mark’s book, Born to Walk.

Yeah.

Thanks for coming. Thank you. Now it’s time for the question of the week. Question of the week comes from @LynettaBalo5110 on my YouTube video about toxic vegetables. They said, “So are you saying you should not eat canyon pepper? I sprinkle it on all my food. I’ve been told that it helps with inflammation.” Well, if you’ve, uh, read any of my books, uh, you’ll know that can pepper is actually made from peeled and deseeded pepper, can peppers. And it’s the peels and the seeds that are the problem. Uh, the Southwest American Indians who started eating peppers always peeled and deseeded their peppers, or they fermented them like in Tabasco sauce. That makes it safe, but great question. Now it’s time for the review of the week. The review of the week comes from @realtorsaydaguire on my YouTube video about how to get the best deals on Gundry MD supplements.

(55:18)
They said, “I love Dr. Gundry MD’s supplements. They are awesome. I use tons of them. Love, love, love, love, love, love, heart, heart, heart, heart, and love his customer service. Amazing. Well, thanks very much. You know, we try to please. My supplements are designed after years and years and years of seeing what works with my patients, seeing what doesn’t work, and I pass that on to you. And I’m very proud of my customer service, and I’m glad they’re doing good for you.

Hello, and welcome to Plutofo. If you knew the name of the movie you’d like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto TV, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman, the legend of Ron Burgundy. Fantastic. The Matrix Trilogy.

Welcome to the real world.

Mean girls.

Shut up.

Titanic. And so much more. For Showtimes, press nothing. They’re free twenty four seven. That

Is so a fast.

On Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.

That’s a wrap on today’s episode. And before you go, I wanna leave you with one task. If anything you heard today made you think, made you wanna dig deeper, or gave you something you’re going to pass along to someone you care about, please take 15 seconds and leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I know that sounds small, but those reviews are how Apple and Spotify decide which shows to surface to new listeners. And this show only grows when people who’ve never heard of it suddenly find it. That person finding this podcast today could hear something that genuinely improves their life or the life of someone they love, maybe even saves one. Everything I share here comes from my research when writing my next book and my clinics, where I’ve been seeing patients six days a week for over 25 years, working with nutrition and supplements as the primary treatment.

(57:30)
This is real world medicine. Help me get it to more people. And thank you. Truly thank you. I’m Dr. G, and I’m always looking out for you.