[00:00:00] Luke Storey: I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. Steven Gundry, welcome to the Life Stylist podcast, my friend. 

[00:01:53] Dr. Steven Gundry: Thank you very much. Hey, great shirt. 

[00:01:55] Luke Storey: Hey, thanks dude. Thanks. I try to keep a fashionable, like you obviously do as well. There are so many things I want to talk to you about, you're someone who is not only incredibly knowledgeable, but also quite prolific in the amount of content you put out, blog posts, books, your podcast, guest appearances. So, when I started doing some research on what I wanted to talk to you about, it was like, it was very hard to narrow it down to be honest. 

[00:02:22] But you guys sent me a copy of your new book, The Energy Paradox, and I'm sure like all authors that do a round of podcast, they want to make sure to talk about that book, and it was really easy for me, because there were so many things that I'm familiar with and found validation in you supporting. And then, there were many things you covered that I had no idea about. So, what I thought was really interesting about your approach was that it wasn't solely based on food. And I find that a lot of the health experts, biohackers, doctors, et cetera, tend to get in these, I don't want to say food wars, but it's like, you could listen to-

[00:03:06] Dr. Steven Gundry: Food fights. 

[00:03:06] Luke Storey: Yeah, food fights.There you go. You could listen to a hundred experts and they're all going to have different opinions with scientific validation about what you should eat and not eat.  And I think it's been a few years now since I kind of just stopped paying attention to the noise, and just tuned into my body, and did what feels best. But you cover a lot of other issues in the book and remedies in the book, which I found really fascinating. 

[00:03:27] But for those that are kind of just catching up to who you are, I think you're most known at this point for The Plant Paradox book and that that one was a big eye-opener in terms of exposing people to the existence of lectins in their diet and the inflammatory process that so ensues due to leaky gut and all the things that you've talked so much about. In this new book, you're focusing on energy, and I'm going to just jump right into some of the things that really caught my attention, which are going to be totally out of order in terms of your protocols. 

[00:04:00] But what I think was really interesting is you talked about the—I don't like to use the word, dangers, and be a propagandist about it, but you talked about how deleterious junk light and blue light, like the one I've got shining in my face now can be, and the importance of sunlight. And I think a lot of us have been conditioned to believe that the sun is out to kill you, when in my own health journey, sun exposure has been one of the top things that's really helped me to remain vital. So, if you could break down that part, as it relates to our energy to start, I think it'd be a fun way to kick it off.

[00:04:34] Dr. Steven Gundry: Just as a preamble to that, there is a professor at Boston University, Dr. Holick, who is a dermatologist. And a number of years ago when Dr. Holick wrote a book all about the importance of sunlight exposure and producing vitamin D, and that he radically said that you really should force yourself to be out in the sun for at least 30 minutes a day. And his colleagues were so aghast that a dermatologist could actually recommend that someone expose themselves to the sun, that despite the fact that he was a tenured professor, meaning that you would not lose your job in an academic setting, they got him fired, because of his heresy, and it's spent him a lot of money and a lot of time in court, and he eventually got reinstated with his full professorship. 

[00:05:32] But he was absolutely right, one of the reasons he got his professorship right back is because he was right, that we are a creature of the sun. Anyone who lives in Seattle, or Portland, or Vancouver and visits me in Palm Springs in the winter knows that you're coming for the sunlight and that you miss the sun. So, one of the really interesting things about the book is we actually generate ATP, our energy currency from direct sunlight exposure in our skin. 

[00:06:09] We actually make energy. And it's no wonder that so many people actually say, I feel energized by being out in the sun. And now, we know that the melanin, the pigment in our skin actually convert sunlight into energy. And like the book says, you can even eat melanin-containing foods. For instance, darker colored mushroom are some of the  best melanin-containing foods there are. And so, the more melanin you eat, the more energy you get from the sun. 

[00:06:40] But back to your question, where long ago in my first book, I wrote about when we're exposed to intense blue sunlight, which would be normally in the middle of the day, we're actually designed to be hungry and to stay awake. And the reason for that is during summer months, that's when most of the food availability was, that's when most of the animals were getting fat, and that's when the daylight was longer. 

[00:07:10] And so, we actually have an inborn mechanism through a receptor in the back of our retina that connects to our eyes, connects to my brain that says, if you see blue light, be hungry, stay awake, and eat. And now, unfortunately, as you noted, we are surrounded by blue light almost 24  hours a day, from the second we get up to the minute we go to bed. And even in bed, we're on our devices, which are blue light devices, or we're staring at a TV screen, which is a blue light device, and it's no wonder that we can't sleep and we're hungry all the time, because of this blue light exposure. 

[00:07:55] Luke Storey: That's interesting. I never thought of the hunger. I've read quite a bit about the relationship between blue light exposure and weight gain, but I didn't think about it in that way, right? Because it's signaling to your body, it's time to be awake and have energy. And if you need energy, the body goes, give me calories, so it makes a lot of sense. 

[00:08:17] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. And in my first book years ago, there's really great studies of great apes. The great apes only gain weight during the summer, during fruit season. And an orangutan can eat 5,000 calories of fruit every day, put on about eight pounds, and a female orangutan won't even go into heat until she eats that eight pounds of fruit, and then she reproduces. So, light has a big effect on our appetite. 

[00:08:50] Yeah. This 

[00:08:50] Luke Storey: is something I'm a huge champion of, because I've just witnessed in my life over the past few years of really being quite disciplined about stopping the blue light at night, whether it's putting incandescent bulbs in the house and creating an amber light, which is actually much easier fix than people think. And then, if I'm in a situation like I am here, I'm renting an apartment while I'm doing some work on my house, and they have those can LED lights in the ceiling that you can't do anything about, they literally don't unscrew, so you can't change them. So, I'm finding that I'm wearing my Ra Optics, or BLUblox,  or whatever around the house. 

[00:09:28] Both great companies, by the 

[00:09:29] Dr. Steven Gundry: way.

[00:09:30] Luke Storey: Yeah. And I know you've had Matt Maruca on your podcast. He's a good buddy of mine. And I'm actually launching a private label of blue-blocking eyewear brand with him soon, so I'm excited about that. But what I noticed is when I started really paying attention to the blue light exposure and switching out my light bulbs at home and then wearing my glasses after dark, you really start to become aware of how many devices actually emit a crazy amount of blue light. 

[00:09:58] In fact, across from me, there's one of these little nest thermostats, which I would never have in my house, because they're Wi-Fi, which is a whole other thing we can perhaps go into briefly. But when you walk by, it has a sensor and it basically shines a blue flashlight in your eyes. You walk through the room at night to get a glass of water or something, it's like, somebody just turned on a police spotlight on you. It's really bizarre that all of these tech companies are still really hung up on such bright blue light everywhere, and you really start to notice it when you eliminate it from your life. 

[00:10:28] Dr. Steven Gundry: Right. And there's so many alarm clocks that still use blue light, and it's like, don't do that, because literally, not much exposure to blue light will just activate your awake system. It's scary how powerful it is. 

[00:10:46] Luke Storey: Back to the sun exposure, I love that you put a passage in your book called, eat your sunscreen, where you talk about lycopene, Omega-3s, I can't pronounce this one, well, that's sulforaphane, that one, you're going to have to pronounce for me, and vitamin C. And you mentioned melanin-containing foods like mushrooms, I'm a huge fan of—I just make everything I do with chaga tea, because of the melanin content, but could you explain how some of those nutrients can help people get acclimated and build a solar callus, so they can safely get sun exposure? 

[00:11:24] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah, I haven't used sunscreen now in over 21 years and I live in two sunny locations, Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. And the key is you can protect your skin by, for instance, time-release vitamin  C, lycopene. The cruciferous vegetables have large amounts of sulfur-containing compounds that really protect your skin. And one of the things people should realize is ultraviolet sunlight definitely breaks up collagen damages, it breaks collagen, but what most people don't know is you could drink all the collagen-containing drinks in the world, but you have to have vitamin C to actually knit collagen molecules together. 

[00:12:18] And one of the reasons smokers have so many wrinkles is that smoking actually depletes you of vitamin C. You use up all your vitamin C as an antioxidant in dealing with cigarette smoke, so that's why they got so many wrinkles. So, I have used time-release vitamin C,1,000 milligrams twice a day. And you're right. You want to build up, like Matt has talked about, a solar callus. You really want to build up a layer of protection and then you don't have to worry about it. 

[00:12:52] And people  look at me, I'm on my 70s, they say, oh, my gosh, let me see your skin. What the heck? You got the skin of a young man, and you don't use sunscreen? The other reason not to use sunscreen is we know that a large number of the compounds in commercial sunscreens, not all of them, are actively absorbed through our skin and they're endocrine disruptors, and they actually make us store fat, among other things. So, please, please, please, if you're going to use sunscreens based on zinc or titanium, not the usual commercial stuff. 

[00:13:30] Luke Storey: I think the other thing that is really bizarre about the sunscreen, I mean, to me, I consider it kind of a scam, because these sunscreen companies, it came out and filled our heads with this idea that, as I said, the sun is there to kill you. But if I'm not mistaken, based on my research, when you wear most commercial sunscreens, I know there are some natural that use zinc, and minerals, and things like that, but you're actually kind of creating a window on your skin that blocks out half of the sun's spectrum, the UVB, and much like you wouldn't want to sit behind a glass window in bright sunlight, it's really damaging to your skin. 

[00:14:08] And there are, in fact, to my understanding, some studies to support the fact that you're much more likely to get skin cancer when you filter the UV light in such a way. So, it's like the sunscreen thing to me is very backwards and makes very little sense scientifically, but it seems to be a profitable product, because people don't like to get sunburned nor do they  want to get skin cancer. 

[00:14:32] And people 

[00:14:33] Dr. Steven Gundry: don't want to do the work of building up a solar callus. And long before sunscreens, all of us were taught by our parents to do the work, to gradually increase your sun exposure. And I write a lot about in the book, most of us do not enjoy doing the work of something that's hard to do. We really don't want to be uncomfortable. And part of the challenge in the book is we are actually designed to be challenged. We're designed to be challenged with heat. We're designed to be challenged with cold. We're designed to be challenged with hunger. We're designed to be challenged with movement. And unfortunately, part of the reason, none of us have any energy anymore is we  don't like challenges. 

[00:15:24] Luke Storey: How does it relate to energy production, ATP, mitochondrial function when it comes to exposing ourselves to hot and cold? That was another thing that I was really excited to see in your book, because I've been doing infrared saunas and ice baths for long, long time. I started out maybe 24 years ago doing contrast showers where I'd turned it all the way hot and all the way cold, and do that a bunch of times, kind of a quasi-hydrotherapy routine. And then, that really made me much more tolerant to both hot and cold to where I'm hard-pressed to get in a sauna that is hot enough for me at this point, maybe at a Russian spa, they'll get it up to 220 or whatever it is. 

[00:16:05] And I'm like, okay, my ears, like actually had the skin come off my ears at one point in a New York City Russian spa. It was that hot. And that was too hot for me. But apart from my skin melting off, I love it. And I now sit in an ice bath for five or 10 minutes, and I'm just totally relaxed. I mean, there's an initial shock, but I really have, I think, conditioned my body to be used to those dramatic changes in temperature. And I just do it because I just feel energized and just feel amazing, but how does it work on a biochemical level to be in those variable temperatures to that extreme? 

[00:16:40] Dr. Steven Gundry: So, both of these opposite techniques were up in the actual same principle. And these stressors, Nietzsche had a famous line that, that which doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. And these stressors produce what's called a hormetic effect. And the hormetic effect says, there's something really bad happening here. For instance, it's really much too hot for you to tolerate, or conversely, it's much too cold for you to tolerate, and you better take some action to protect yourself. 

[00:17:18] What happens in the mitochondria, and I get kind of in the weeds in this in the book, but what happens in the mitochondria, it literally tells your mitochondria, which are the energy-producing organelles in most of our cells, to kind of rev up production of protective compounds, do a lot of repair work, and quite frankly, prepare for the worst. And it's this hormetic effect that supercharges your mitochondria. 

[00:17:48] And this is proven in, for instance, fasting, as we talked about, and time-restricted eating, they all actually work by the same underlying mechanism. Now, the point you bring up is actually good. So, none of an exposure to a hormetic agent is not very good for you. Some exposure is really good for you and a lot of exposure is really bad for you. And I call it the Goldilocks rule in The Energy Paradox. You want it just right. So, the Russian spa, sorry, that was not in the Goldilocks sweet spot. 

[00:18:26] Luke Storey: Too hardcore? Yeah. It gets pretty extreme, especially at the point when your skin's going, we're leaving, it's too hot in here. But yeah, again, I think I always approach things from, how did we get here from an evolutionary standpoint? And we did not arrive here as a species by living in 68 degrees with fake lights on 24/7. So, it just always makes sense to me, too, even though I know there's no going back in time, even if you wanted to go live in a really remote area, there are still satellites firing down, radiation, all kinds of crazy things on Earth that we can't turn back the clock on. 

[00:19:05] But it seems to me, as close as we can mimic our ancient life ways, both with lifestyle, movement, the ways that we interface with our environment, and of course, getting back to the foods as close as we can, but I find there's this gap in the sort of ancestral movement and the paleo movement where people just want to eat the food, but they don't want to do the other things, as you said, because they're much more difficult, right? Eating a cheeseburger is like pretty—yeah, or avoiding grains or whatever it is, but getting in an ice bath for three minutes, maybe not so fun for many people.

[00:19:40] But I think the approach that you gave in this book, where you incorporate all of these different lifestyle choices, is really important. And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about one thing, and I don't think that you talked about it in a book, but when we're dealing with mitochondrial function and the production of ATP, something I've picked up along the way of having this podcast was the presence of too much deuterium in our bodies. Is that something you've researched at all in terms of the ATP production?

[00:20:11] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. My personal feeling, it's a bit of a distraction over things if we have much more actionable things that we can do. Certainly, there is an effect  on it, but I think we got better things to spend our time with. 

[00:20:31] Luke Storey: Okay. So, it's not the low-hanging fruit when it comes to mitochondrial function. Okay. Cool. I'm glad to get your take on that. And then, in terms of sun exposure, one of the supplements that you recommend is the Omega-3s. And there's a school of thought from people like Ray Peat and different people that are quite anti-Omega-3s that combining a high Omega-3 diet or supplementation with things like fish oil and sun leads to lipofuscin and this whole issue. Is that something that you've looked into at all or have any opinion on?

[00:21:05] Dr. Steven Gundry: Well, I have the  pleasure o fbeing, I think, a good friend of Jonathan Carp who  owns Miracle Noodle, who is a dermatologist. And Jonathan can tell you from a dermatologic perspective that one of the things that he and I both talk about is you've actually got to balance long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids, like DHA, and DPA, and EPA with long-chain fatty acids in the Omega-6 category, particularly those that are found in, for instance, borage oil, and also, strange, but true, arachidonic acid, the evil Omega-6 fat. And he thinks for skin health, and I agree with him, that we see a number of people who over-consume Omega-3 fats and have skin issues, rashes, skin damage. And when we replace or give them borage oil, that's my favorite, frankly, then those rashes go away. So, there actually has to be a ratio between the two. 

[00:22:14] Luke Storey: Yeah. Do you think supplementing with a bit extra vitamin E would help counteract the negative effects of that?

[00:22:22] Dr. Steven Gundry: The problem is most commercial vitamin E preparations are actually the wrong forms of vitamin E. Most of us don't get the tocotrienols that we're supposed to get. Most of us consume tocopherols, and it's actually the tocotrienols that are the most effective as anti-oxidant compounds, but they're harder to find. And fun fact, if you take tocotrienols and take tocopherols at the same time, they'll cancel their effects.  

[00:22:53] Luke Storey: That's funny. Interesting. Okay. 

[00:22:56] Dr. Steven Gundry: So, yeah. So, taking mixed vitamin E is actually one of the dumber things I think people could think. 

[00:23:01] Luke Storey: That's hilarious. Okay. And you also focus a lot on sleep, which I think is really important, especially as I get older, I'm 50 now. And of course, I'm sure like many people back in the 20s and even the 30s, I could get away with very little sleep and feel great. And now, I mean, this is something I harp on a lot on my podcast, I think the number one thing for me in vitality and energy is sleep. I don't care what supplements I take, I can inject NAD, I can do the red light therapy, do all the biohacks, nothing, nothing replaces a good night's sleep.

[00:23:36] Last night, I had eight-and-a-half hours, which I don't always get that much based on my sleep tracking, the Oura Ring. I think I had a couple hours of deep, yeah, a couple hours of REM sleep. I feel amazing. If I would have slept five hours last night, for whatever reason, I don't care how much stuff I pumped into me this morning, there's just no way I would feel as good as I feel right now, even taking no supplements, just eating regular food. So, I think that was really important that you covered that. What are some of your tactics for improving sleep quality and just sleep hygiene in general? 

[00:24:09] Dr. Steven Gundry: First of all, we have to realize that there is no animal yet found that doesn't sleep and no animal, no lab rat does not keel over if you deprive them of sleep. And there's been beautiful studies in surgeons, for instance, about lack of sleep and there's now rules in medical schools about how long you can keep somebody up. My personal  record as a resdent was three-and-a-half days without sleep. Three-and-a-half days. And I do not recommend, but getting back to your point, so we have to have sleep. 

[00:24:51] We have to have sleep, because we have to undergo repair of our mitochondria and actually of our brain during sleep. And sleep is when you're not eating, among other things. And if you're not eating, your mitochondria, which have to produce energy, get to kind of cut back on their energy production. And they're not bombarded with food stuffs to convert it into. And they have to have this repaired time. There was a large part of the book devoted to getting your mitochondria the downtime they need. 

[00:25:27] And the more repair work they do, then the more energy they'll produce when you are up and out. It's like I'm in LA and drive the freeways, and I go back and forth between Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, my two offices, and I do it kind of in the really, early morning or the very late at night, because there's not much traffic on the road. And that's exactly what we need in our mitochondria. Secondly, for brain health, both Dr. Dale Bredesen, who wrote The End of Alzheimer's Program, and I really believe in the power of brain washing. 

[00:26:06] And brain washing usually happens in deep sleep and most deep sleep happens fairly early in the sleep cycle. And our brain literally goes through a wash cycle and our brain shrinks about 25%. And all those toxins, amyloid plaques, cal plaques are literally washed out, but you have to have about a three-hour window before you go to sleep to accomplish this. Now, the reason, you might be old enough to remember that your mother, after you ate lunch, said, you're not going swimming for an hour, because you'll get cramps and die. 

[00:26:49] And this was a wonderful old wives tale that had some truth. When we eat, digestion takes huge amounts of blood flow. And if we eat close to bedtime, all of our blood flow is down in our belly doing digestion, and it's not available to have this big woosh of blood flow to clean our brain out. So, one of the biggest ways to protect your brain and to clean your brain is to stop eating about three hours before you go to bed, anything.

[00:27:25] Luke Storey: That's so true. And I didn't really know why, I just know based on tracking my sleep for a few years. If I get the munchies at 10:00 or 11:00, and I eat a bag of whatever, and I look at my sleep score, it's always 100% guaranteed to be much worse, especially if it's like some protein. Like I typically wouldn't eat meat that late, but say I go out to dinner at a restaurant and eat a big steak, my sleep's going to be horrific, probably for a number of reasons.

[00:27:53] Dr. Steven Gundry: Well, I'm glad you brought that up. Actually, protein takes the most energy, and power, and blood flow to digest. So, your observation is absolutely correct. It's actually one of the reasons that protein, as a rule, may promote weight loss, because it actually uses huge amounts of energy to digest and process. But you're right. The advantage of Oura Rings and I've got a WHOOP band as well, they're really great to do experiments with. Say, hey, I'm going to have a bag of whatever or I'm going to have a hamburger right before I go to bed, and you're  going to watch, it's like, whoops, that's what happens. And that's why I'm trying to get people to understand, we have devices that can teach us that are available to us. 

[00:28:47] Luke Storey: Yeah. I think also, really, the quantification leads to gamification too, right? So, I'm always kind of competing with myself with the sleep score and it incentivizes me to avoid doing things that are going to interfere with great sleep and helps me to have more discipline, because I want to get a really good score. One thing I do though, just as a tip, and this kind of is a placebo or nocebo avoidance technique, and that is, I typically don't check my Oura Ring the day after a night's sleep. 

[00:29:20] I'll check it every few days and kind of track, because I've had experiences where I wake up and I feel pretty good. And then, I checked my Oura Ring and I got a really bad score. And then, I'm like, oh, I'm supposed to be tired. I feel like I'm telling my subconscious mind, oh, you should be really in bad shape today when actually, for whatever reason, feel pretty good. So, I've kind of gotten a little bit more disciplined about that, but it is really good to get that information. 

[00:29:45] And also, if you have friends that do it, sometimes, my buddies in mind, we'll text each other our sleep results and kind of have an informal competition. And if I see a friend of mine got a 96 or something like that, okay, I got to really go to bed early tonight. It's fun. It's fun. I mean, it's very nerdy and probably not something you're going to get many teenagers to do, but as you start to age, man, it really, really matters, as I said. You talk about some of the energy disruptors, like antibiotics, glyphosate, sugar, what are some of the heavy hitters in terms of things that are going to really tank our energy? 

[00:30:21] Dr. Steven Gundry: Well, I think way up at the top is antibiotic use that either we take personally, or probably, equally as important, the vast majority of antibiotics in this country are still given to animals and feedlots. They're still given to most of our beef, most of our pork, and quite frankly, most of our chickens, even though it says antibiotic-free. 

[00:30:46] Really? 

[00:30:47] Yes, because there is a loophole. There is always a loophole, and the FDA, who banned antibiotic use i chickens, said, okay, if the veterinarian thinks that there is a chicken in a flock of 100,000 chickens, and believe it or not, there's a 100,000 chickens crammed in the warehouse, and they're only allowed outside for five minutes a day, and that qualifies with the free range chicken. They're crammed in, because they hold themselves up because their legs break, and that's another subject. 

[00:31:21] So, if you think one chicken is sick, you have the right to give antibiotics to the entire flock, and because how ridiculous it would be to find that one chicken and feed it separately. And there have been look at antibiotic residues in natural and organic chickens, and it's as high in some plants, 60%. And the reason for that is, quite frankly, there are good doctors and there are bad doctors, and there are good vets and there are bad vets. And not saying everybody, but if you're employed by a big food agriculture system that's in the poultry-grazing business, and you're a vet, your employment is unfortunately dependent on you delivering the final product, which is a healthy chicken. 

[00:32:13] Luke Storey: So, if we're eating factory farm chickens and other animals as food that's not organic and legitimately free of that antibiotics, that is really putting an antibiotic, and thus energy load on our bodies, there's actually enough in the meat to be discernible? 

[00:32:32] Dr. Steven Gundry: Oh, yeah.  So, antibiotics kill bacteria. That's what they do. And what we didn't know, even with broad-spectrum antibiotics, is we didn't know that when we swallow an antibiotic or ate an antibiotic-containing meat, those antibiotics would kill off our gut microbiome. And as I talked about, they exist, really, for two reasons. Number one, to eat a lot of the stuff that shouldn't get past them, like my favorite subject, lectins, but more importantly, they make what are called postbiotics, which are short-chain fatty acids, like butyrate, and gases, like hydrogen gas, like hydrogen sulfide, that we now know constitute a language that the microbiome talks to our mitochondria to tell them to manufacture energy, to ramp up their energy production. 

[00:33:34] And postbiotics are so new and exciting that the discovery of postbiotics won the Nobel Prize for medicine a few years ago. So, there's an actual length—so if you don't want to have a microbiome that you've destroyed by taking antibiotics or eating antibiotic-laden meat, then you don't have these postbiotics that talked to mitochondria. Additionally, you mentioned glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup, which is sprayed now, not only on GMO crops, but most people don't realize that over 80% of all conventional crops are harvested after being killed by Roundup spraying. 

[00:34:18] All of our wheat, all of our corn, all of our oats, all of our soy beans, most of our canola is sprayed prior to harvesting with glyphosate to desiccate them, a lot easier, cheaper to harvest crops? Roundup isn't washed off. These crops are fed to our animals. The glyphosate ends up in their meat. They're fed to us. They're in our Cheerios. They're in our oat energy bars. Glyphosate alone kills off the microbiome. It was actually patented as an antibiotic, not as weed killer. And glyphosate alone can cause perforations in the wall of our gut leading to leaky gut. So, glyphosate is number two on the hit list of deadly energy disruptor.

[00:35:07] Luke Storey:  Yeah. To me, that one, it's a crime against humanity. I mean, not just humanity, it's a crime against biology. It's such nasty stuff. And as you said, it's so prevalent. I mean, even two days ago, I was in Home Depot, because I'm there a lot these days, and right when you walk into any Home Depot, there's a huge rack of Roundup. And I'm obviously assuming most people are spraying it on their yard, but it's like, I walk in there and I imagine how many people would walk in here and spray that on their doughnut or their sandwich. 

[00:35:40] Probably, very few. They'd be like, oh, my God, that's poison, I'm not going to put that on my food, yet right after a trip to Home Depot, they're running down the street and getting a meal made with flour, whatever, that is full of this Roundup. It's crazy. And I've talked to Zach Bush about it quite a bit, and when I say it's a war kind of against all biology, it's also just so destructive to the whole biome of the world's soil.

[00:36:06] Dr. Steven Gundry: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It literally is an antibiotic against the world. 

[00:36:11] Luke Storey: It's just crazy, man. It's crazy. And it's one of the things that I find to be the best deterrent against me resisting starchy, carby foods, breads, gluten, all that kind of stuff. It's not just the gluten, it's that most of those foods are going to also be really loaded with glyphosate. And I don't always succeed at resisting, but a lot of the time, I do, because I picture that bottle of Roundup at Home Depot ,and go, Luke, you don't eat that stuff, don't eat it. 

[00:36:40] Luke, listen to  the forest, Luke.  

[00:36:43] Exactly. What about, I guess for those listening that don't really understand mitochondria and the production of ATP, could you give us a simplistic breakdown of that? And then, I'd like to cover some of the other interesting compounds that you present in the book that helps support more production of ATP. 

[00:37:03] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. Mitochondria are actually engulfed bacteria that 2 billion years ago, a cell decided to eat a bacteria, and rather than digesting the bacteria, lack of a better word, they made a deal in exchange for food and a nice place to live. The bacteria would produce ATP and the bacteria that are now mitochondria in ourselves have their own DNA. They can divide and grow without the cell dividing, so you could make more mitochondria. 

[00:37:35] We talk about how to do that in the book, but mitochondria make energy via what's called the electron transport chain. And the electron transport chain was proposed by Peter Mitchell in 1960 and nobody believed him, then he finally got the Nobel prize in 1978. Long story short, you take protons and electrons, and everybody remembers protons and electrons from school, hopefully, and the protons and electrons come from the food you eat. 

[00:38:05] And they run down this gauntlet, which is called the electron transport chain, and everybody gets energized, and charged up, and excited. And then, if everything works out, there's some merging of these protons going through a revolving door and you make ATP in the process of going through this revolving door. And it's an exciting process. We talk about it in the book, comparing them to Lucy and Ethel wrapping candies in the famous  I Love Lucy episode. And they're supposed to handle everything that comes in. 

[00:38:43] And mitochondria are supposed to handle all the sugars we eat, all the proteins we eat, and all the fats we eat. And unfortunately, they're supposed to handle them one at a time. They can do one thing at a time, but if you ask them to do all three things simultaneously, you literally get rush hour traffic in a long jam of materials, trying to get into this raceway, if you will, into this freeway. One of the things that I talk about the book is the way we eat foods we eat, we have literally rush hour traffic constantly in our mitochondria. And no wonder we have energy gridlock. And so, part of the book is teaching you how to not overload your mitochondria with too much work. 

[00:39:31] Luke Storey: And then, what about some of the supplements that you recommend? And I know we're in a sentence and we'll hopefully have time to get to it, we're skipping past some of the things that really would make you need these supplements, because you're interrupting your mitochondrial function in the way you just described and many other ways. But there were a few things that you talked about that I take on a regular basis and find to be very effective for energy. First one being CoQ10. 

[00:39:58] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. So, CoQ10 is a coenzyme in this electron transport chain. And it's almost like a shortstop in a double play—or the second baseman in a double play. The shortstop throws the baseball to the second baseman, who pivots and throws the ball through the first baseman. Well, the  second basemna is Coenzyme Q10. And Coenzyme Q10 grabs an electron that's coming down this chain, pivots and fires it down the chain further. If you don't have the second baseman ready to get the ball, you can't get into the first base for a double play. 

[00:40:38] And so, Coenzyme Q10 is essential to actually produce energy. And one of the energy disruptors that we talked about, statin drugs, things like the Lipitor or Crestor, stop the production of Coenzyme Q10 in our liver. And in about six months, we're all totally depleted of Coenzyme Q10 if we're on statin. In Canada, by law, you have to prescribe a statin drug if you're going to prescribe Coenzyme Q10, if you  prescribed statin drug. But most cardiologists in this country don't even know the connection. So, yes, Coenzyme Q10, particularly if you're on statin. 

[00:41:19] Luke Storey: Interesting. I didn't know that piece about the statins. Very interesting. And then, what about PQQ? 

[00:41:25] Dr. Steven Gundry: So, PQQ is kind of super Coenzyme Q10. It's even better. It's designer Coenzyme Q10. It does the same function, only better. 

[00:41:38] Luke Storey: Got it. Okay. And then, berberine and quercetin.

[00:41:41] Dr. Steven Gundry: So, both of these compounds, there's a lot of more and more information that particularly berberine, also quercetin, act very much the way Metformin acts. And actually, in my next book, I'm doing a deep dive into how these agents actually allow you to make more energy. But essentially, both of these compounds tell mitochondria to not work so hard. Don't overwork yourselves to the point of exhaustion. And the way they tell mitochondria to do this is just absolutely  fascinating and it may be why Metformin actually works. 

[00:42:24] Luke Storey: Cool. I can't believe the way you crank out books. I've been working on one book for months, and it's like, wow, this is a real process. So, I appreciate your ability to crank them out. 

[00:42:36] Dr. Steven Gundry: I go down these crazy rabbit holes, and then I go, oh, my gosh, I got to tell people about this. So 

[00:42:41] Luke Storey: Very cool. There was another one, and that is shilajit and this is something that I discovered way back in the day, kind of in the raw food community, and it was a relatively obscure Ayurvedic sort of material that people use. But you're the first kind of mainstream person that I've heard talk about it. And it's something I use every day. I put a little chunk of it in my coffee and I just love it. 

[00:43:05] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. And Zach Bush actually talks about the ability of humic acid, which is part of this compound, which was discovered on rocks in the  Himalayas. And looks like  humic acid, number one, can stop the tight junctions from being destroyed by glyphosate. So, if, for no other reason, because glyphosates in almost everything we eat, including some of our plant-based meats that are now so popular, warning, some of the burgers that are beyond whatever, we won't go any farther than that, have glyphosate in them. And yeah, so humic acid also is real mitochondria-revving agent. And again, our mitochondria are so damaged, and as I written in The Longevity Paradox, now, The Energy Paradox, our survival, our health is dependent on well-functioning mitochondria. Most of the bad things that happen to us are from mitochondrial dysfunction.

[00:44:12] Luke Storey: Got it. And in the last few minutes here, I feel that it would be really wise of me to talk about one of your great areas of expertise, and that is lectins. And so, if you could just give us a brief breakdown of what they are, why we would want to avoid them in our diet, especially as they pertain to energy, because you do talk, again, quite a bit about them in the book, and then some of the main offenders in terms of food. BEcause when I was reading the book, I've not really looked into the lectins thing, but I was like, well, what foods have it? 

[00:44:45] And then, I thought, well, what reaction do I have? And, oh, my God, tomatoes for one, if I eat something with tomato sauce, it just wrecks me. And it's almost to the point, I thought, am I allergic to tomatoes, because they just do not agree. And there's a number of foods on your list that have a similar reaction. And I think after people hear from you, they might reflect on some of the things they eat, and go, you know what, yeah, when I eat that, I don't feel so great. So, what are they? Why arethey bad guys? And what are kind of the main offenders in terms of the foods that contain them?

[00:45:16] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. So, lectins are part of the plant defense system against being eaten. Plants don't  want to be eaten. They have a life and they particularly don't want their babies eating their seeds. They can't run, they can't hide, they can't fight, but they're chemists of great ability. And so, they make proteins that are what are called sticky proteins. And these proteins look for specific sugar molecules that line the lining of our gut. They line the lining of our blood vessels. 

[00:45:46] They line our joints. So, they even line the gap between  one nerve talking to the other nerve. And lectins are the best way to pry open the lining of your gut causing leaky gut. Dr. Fasano from Harvard was the first to show that gluten, which is a lectin, is a cause of leaky gut via process of binding to these molecules in the gut. I've written several papers about how lectins are one of the major cause of heart disease. And also, lectins are one of the major causes of most autoimmune diseases  by causing leaky gut. 

[00:46:29] So, where are they? They're in almost all brains. They're in wheat, brine, barley, which are foods. They're in brown rice. They're in buckwheat. They're in quinoa, folks. Sorry about that. They're in two nuts that aren't nuts at all. They're in peanuts and cashews, and I can't tell you the number of people who eat cashews. Once we get rid of them, it's so much better with IBS, with auto-immune diseases. They're in the Nightshade family, like tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, chili peppers, and even Goji berries. They're in chia seeds, folks. 

[00:47:11] And please, please, please throw your chia seeds away and buy basil seeds. Basil seeds are so much better for you and they feed your microbiome to make those biotics. A huge fan of basil seeds. Lastly, the bean family, legumes have some of the worst, lectin is black. Most of these foods, you can pressure cook and destroy lectins. And I have pressure cook beans several times a week, but I wouldn't think about eating them without pressure cooking. And fun fact, there is a warning label on all your slow cookers that say never cook beans in the slow cook. And it's because you cannot detoxify the lectins and beans with low heat. Yeah, there's a warning. Go look on the package. There's a big warning. Don't cook beans in this. 

[00:48:03] Luke Storey: Does the lectin content of legumes have anything to do with why they tend to give people so much gas? 

[00:48:11] Dr. Steven Gundry: No, that's actually a different process. Gas from legumes is actually really good for you. So, you just have to detoxify the lectins by pressure cooking. And there are several companies now that have lectin, pressure-cooked beans. Jovial is the latest. They soak their beans, and then pressure cook them. And Eden brand beans are the other one. And I have no relationship with either company. So, now, you can just get pressure-cooked beans off the shelf, and it's not that difficult.

[00:48:41] Luke Storey: Oh, that's cool. The funny thing on that list to me was the goji berries. Probably around the time, and going back a couple of decades when I discovered shilajit, goji berries were all the rage, man. They were the superfood and all of that. And I used to eat tons of these, Ron Teeguarden's company. They were these moist Dragon Herbs, these really moist, more fresh, not the dry, kind of hard goji berries. And I used to just eat the hell out of those things, but those would be also high in lectins, too, huh? 

[00:49:10] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah, sadly, they're actually part of the Nightshade family and they're actually from America. They were the wolf berry in America and they were taken to China in Colombian trade when Colombian trade started after Columbus. And they thrived in China. And so, they're actually an American Nightshade. 

[00:49:31] Luke Storey: That's wild. I didn't know that. 

[00:49:33] Dr. Steven Gundry: And fun fact, the Italians refused to eat tomatoes for 200 years after their native son, Columbus, brought them back, because they knew how deadly they were. So, they  finally figured out. They had to peel and deseeed tomatoes to make them safe. But  now, there's some pressure-cooked tomato sauces out there that come from peeled and seeded tomato. 

[00:49:57] Luke Storey: That's interesting because I'm thinking about grandma making that spaghetti sauce and she would peel, I don't know about the seeds, but peel the tomatoes, and then cook them in that way. And there were no peelings in there. I wonder if that was something that developed, because people realize that just eating the whole tomatoes didn't agree with them. 

[00:50:15] Dr. Steven Gundry: Oh, yeah. Most cultures, most traditional cultures have figured out a way to deal with lectins. So, for instance, 4 billion people use rice as their staple. Yeah, 4 billion people eat white rice rather than  brown rice? How stupid could that be? Because everybody knows brown rice is better for you. Well, we're out the hall of the rice as the lectin. The Incas, yeah, they ate a lot of quinoa, but the Incas actually fermented their quinoa. They let it rot, and then they cooked it. And fermentation is another great way to detoxify lectin. 

[00:50:54] Luke Storey: Oh, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually thinking about one of the lost arts that thankfully is getting some traction now, but fermented foods seem to go back in a lot of indigenous cultures from all over the world and ones that were not related or in contact with one another either, which leads you to think, perhaps, some higher intuition was given to these peoples around the world as they prepared food, and realized, wow, we've got these calories here, but they make us feel bad, so how can we prepare them in a way that we're just getting the benefit of the energy and not any of the deleterious effects. 

[00:51:32] Dr. Steven Gundry: There's very good evidence that very early on, most humans, wherever Oak trees grew, ate acorns, but there are such nasty tannins and lectins in acorns that if you and I tried to eat them, we get really sick. My dogs like them as a matter of fact, squirrels do very well, but the Chumash Indians in the Santa Barbara region actually lived on acorn. And they developed a way of pounding the acorns, and then washing them, and completely filtering them, and got rid of all the tannins. And then, they made it into a guaca. It's actually a great food source if you detoxify it. And it's fascinating to learn how these cultures figured it out to make them safe to eat. 

[00:52:22] Luke Storey: It is indeed. Yeah. I have a friend named Daniel Vitalis who's a wild food, a hunter-gatherer enthusiast. He's got a great TV show, I'll give him a plug, called, Wild Fed, and a podcast by the same name. But I follow him on social media because he lives in Maine and I live in Texas, so we don't see each other often anymore, but he is an avid acorn collector and processor. And let me tell you, man, processing acorns is no joke, right? 

[00:52:48] So, I mean, it's a lot of work. I mean, just collecting them is a lot of work, gathering them, but then what you have to do with them to turn them into a flower as you described. And it leads me to observe how, if ancient peoples went through that much extra work and caloric expenditure to actually prepare the food that they've burned so many calories to go out and find that they must've had a good reason to do so.

[00:53:14] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:53:14] Makes a lot of sense. 

[00:53:16] Dr. Steven Gundry: And the more we learn from traditional cultures, and again, the more respect I have that traditional cultures felt this stuff happening to them. And we were so disconnected from our bodies now. And like you've talked about sleep patterns or eat patterns, the more we can reconnect, and say, wow, every time I eat that food, that didn't agree with me. Then, you look back, and say, there's a pattern here, I'm just not smart enough to recognize that pattern. 

[00:53:51] Luke Storey: Yeah, or sometimes, we like to ignore the pattern, because that food tastes so good, right? I mean, I love a good marinara sauce, so it's like, well, and I'll even think, oh man, this is going to hurt, and I go, no, in this time, it'll be different. This time, it'll be different. Classic move. And sometimes, it is worth the hit, right? You don't want to be too neurotic. You've got to live your life. I mean, I'm a huge health advocate, but if people saw some of the things I eat, sometimes, they wouldn't believe it. I'm prone to stop in a gas station and grab some M&M'S, and I just kind of blessed those M&M'S and all of the God knows what's in them, and I enjoy it, and move on with my day. 

[00:54:29] Dr. Steven Gundry: I'm glad you brought that up, because in the book, I talk about that if you'd follow my steps of time-restricted eating, compressing the window of time that you eat your food, you can actually get away with eating foods that would otherwise likely be bad for you. But the power of compressing your eating is amazing studies in humans, in mice that you can probably have that bag of M&M'S, and I actually talk about it in the book, and get away with it, and make it so it won't hurt you. 

[00:55:10] Luke Storey: I'm a pretty good intermittent faster. I don't tend to eat during the day. And I discovered these electrolytes recently that Robb Wolf made this company called LMNT. They're actually one of my sponsors. And I found them before they became a sponsor and they make fasting so much easier. Basically just make an electrolyte salt drink, and any time I'm outside of that eating window and I want to curb my appetite, I drank a glass of that, and it's literally like I'm just ,10 minutes later, forgot that I even had the idea to go snack, because I found that the intermittent fasting and kind of reducing those eating windows was a bit difficult if you didn't eat enough big meals to kind of keep you satiated with enough good fats and things like that.

[00:55:53] Dr. Steven Gundry: Well, the other great trick in the book is there's beautiful work out of China on what's called the gut-centric theory of hunger. And our microbiome actually drives our hunger, nothing else. And great research in China looking at 14-day water fast in human volunteers. If you give these people 100 calories of prebiotic fiber, something as simple as ground black seeds, or ground psyllium seeds, or I make a prebiotic fiber called PrebioThrive. 

[00:56:28] If you give them a hundred calories during this water fast, they have absolutely no hunger, because you've actually fed the gut microbiome what they want to eat. You don't absorb those calories. And so, they tell you, hey, we got what we need, thanks a lot, you don't have to go looking for anything. And it's a great trick that I use in the book to get people to extend that eating window without being hungry. So, electrolytes are great, but hey, try some PrebioThrive. Maybe we'll get you some, okay? 

[00:56:58] Luke Storey: I'd love that. Yeah. Oh, speaking of which, and I know we're out of time, so I got my final question, but the olive oil that you got, it's great having a podcast, people send you free stuff. Thank you for that. But the olive oil, you sent me these two little kind of sample bottles of olive oil, it is incredible and it's so strong. Like I like really strong, yeah, I love really strong olive oil. And I was like, this stuff tastes like medicine the most. I mean, this isn't even food grade. It really is a medicinal. So, I don't know what you did to get that happening, but that stuff was amazing. You put it in your mouth, and you're just like, I know this is good for me, just the polyphenol content must be-

[00:57:38] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. It has 30 times more polyphenols. 

[00:57:40] Thirty times? Wow.

[00:57:42] Dr. Steven Gundry: That's why it takes time. And it was developed by a young man in Morocco who's a fourth generation olive grower and he got the idea, not to belabor it, that great wines came from stress wines that didn't have much water, that were grown in rocks and had horrible soil. So, he got his father to let him plant olive trees in rows right up against each other, and rock, and stress them with under-watering them, and it took five years to get the first crop. 

[00:58:17] And when he pressed it, his dad said, oh, this is an extra virgin olive oil. This is horrible. And he said, no, no, no. So, he took it down to the local tester, and the guy said, no, this is extra virgin, makes all the criteria, but boy, this is different. Can we send it to the Paris lab and see what's in it? And the Paris lab calls him back, holy cow, what have you been doing? This is 30 times more polyphenols than we've ever seen. 

[00:58:44] No wonder it tastes like this. So, luck of the draw, he knew I'm a polyphenol nut, and kind of cold-called me, and described what he did, and sent a bottle. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I got on a plane, because I thought, what's he  doing? And he's legit, the way he processes it. And it's just one tablespoon of that is the equivalent of having a liter of olive oil per week in terms of—so it's so exciting and it's been a good for him. 

[00:59:23] Luke Storey: Yeah. That's cool. That's amazing. Yeah. I'm glad he found you. I'm glad he found you, and had the courage and wherewithal to cold-call you, because you have obviously the reach to put it to market in a meaningful way. Yeah, it was really good stuff. I'm glad we got to cover that real quick. Last question for you, my friend, is who are three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and your work that you might share with us?

[00:59:47] Dr. Steven Gundry: One of my great teachers was my boss at the National Institutes of Health, Glen Morrell. And Glen Morrell, when we came to research under him, first thing he did was say, there's nothing new to learn. And I guess all of our mouth dropped open, new fellows, and we were, wait a minute, we're here to research, you know research? And he says, yeah, you're here to research, you're here to look again. And he says, it's all there, you just have to look again and relearn something that's been forgotten. 

[01:00:23] And it's one of the smartest things he ever told me. And lastly, I think my father never met a human being that he didn't want to listen to and actually listen. And he said, just when somebody talks to you, no matter what, be so happy and thankful that they were willing to tell you their story. And he said, gratitude, this is the secret to his success and I think it's certainly the secret to my success. So, that's a couple of those. 

[01:01:06] Luke Storey: Awesome. Thank you so much. 

[01:01:07] Dr. Steven Gundry: Oh, let me throw in one more. 

[01:01:08] Luke Storey: Alright. I was going to let you off with two, but bring it on. 

[01:01:11] Dr. Steven Gundry: My dear departed partner from Loma Linda, Leonard Bailey, the  gentle giant. He was really the father of infant heart transplant. He and I pioneered infant heart transplant. Patient. He passed on this past year in his mid-70s, unfortunately, but just one of the greatest human beings I've ever met in his compassionate love and that's what we got to be taught.

[01:01:42] Luke Storey: Awesome. Thank you for that. And lastly, where can we find your websites, your delicious olive oil, social media? Anything you want to plug before we go? 

[01:01:50] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah, so you can find me at drgundry.com. My supplement food company is gundrymd.com. I'm all over YouTube, got a couple of channels, Instagram, come to Clubhouse, I'm there now. We just had a Clubhouse meeting late last night. And hopefully, sign up for my emails. We have a magazine for your health that comes out quarterly, all Gundry MD and sign up. We're happy to get you on. And the new book, The Energy Paradox, wherever you get your books.

[01:02:24] Luke Storey: For those watching the video, it's right here. And it really is a very  comprehensive and easy-to-read book, man. It's definitely a service to humanity. So, thanks for putting this great book out and thanks for coming on the show. It's been really fun to finally meet you. 

[01:02:36] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah. Nice to meet you too and let's do this again.

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