Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Expert Shepard. I'm joined by Expert Padman. Hi.
Hi. Today we're going to talk to Dr. Stephen Gundry. He's a cardiologist, a heart surgeon, a medical researcher, and author.
Dr. Gundry has performed over 10,000 surgeries, Monica. Wow, that is a lot. That is about 1,000 more than you or I have done, which is very impressive.
And he's moved his focus onto diet. He's written three books, The Longevity Paradox, The Plant Paradox, and Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. Now, listen, when I read up on him, he's got his critics.
Yeah. But rest assured, I did take those points, and I confronted him with him, and we had a nice dialogue about it. Great. So if you're up for that, please enjoy Dr.
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Some trips really do feel better when you have the right space. I'm going to do some repulsive things while we talk, one of them being chew tobacco. So I just want to warn you, I don't know where your sensitivity to that may lie on the spectrum. Ticotine is very good for you.
It's the delivery device. I know. I cannot. Let me tell you what's going on.
I smoke forever. I haven't smoked for 14 years. Of those 14 years, I've been on the nicotine lozenges, okay, for the bulk of that time. The lozenges, by my estimation, started making my skin red, and when I would cut them out, the redness would go away.
So now I'm on old-fashioned chewing tobacco, all because of the vanity of my skin. And I now must quit this on August 12th before I go back to work, and I'm not sure which delivery system I can use, because I do like nicotine in my life. What are your thoughts on that? What about drops or sprays?
Do they make a nicotine spray? Oh, they do. It's just like a little breath-mouth mint, basically. Really?
Nicotine spray. Oh, I should look at that. Dave Asper uses that. Oh, he does.
Oh, we're having him on here. Well, yeah, so you've got to pick Dave's brain about that. Okay, great. Because, yeah, in fact, during our podcast that Dave and I did together, live, you know, sprayed a little nicotine.
Oh. His shtick is the only great thoughts, the only great everything ever happened over coffee and cigarettes. Yeah. He said it's the two, you know, caffeine and nicotine produce the best brain hit that anyone can have.
Yeah. And nicotine, it's interesting. Smokers have a very low incidence of Parkinson's and dementia. Right.
I've read two different studies that it may delay the onset of Parkinson's and also Alzheimer's. Yes, exactly. And then the downside, right, of nicotine is it raises your blood pressure. That's one of, if you have some, you know, hypertension or something, it's not good for you.
I happen to have inordinately low blood pressure, so I'm not worried about mine spiking a little bit. Cool. Now, Dr. Gundry, you are from where?
Originally? Of course. Oh, yeah, we go back. Your origin story.
Well, I mean, we're all from Africa, so let's go over it. Yeah. That's right. That's true.
Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha, Nebraska. Okay. And what did mom and dad do in Omaha, Nebraska?
So, I'll start with my mother first. She was valedictorian of Central High School, which was a class of about 1,000. And then she went off to a two-year college and then, you know, made the mistake 10, said, look, there's no future in selling free repair parts and you need a real job. And so, my mother had grown up down the street, actually, from Warren Buffett.
Oh, sure. But she knew the owner, the president of Mutual of Omaha Insurance. She made a call. My dad got into the executive training program and with only two years of college, I rose to executive vice president of Mutual of Omaha in charge of the chairman's office.
No kidding. And at that time, that was the single big building in downtown Omaha, right? That's exactly right. Yeah.
One big megalith. So, it's fair to say that you grew up in a pretty nice lifestyle in Omaha? We were lower middle class in a middle class neighborhood, but my mother, she was raised actually upper middle class, even upper class. And she always acted as if that's what we were.
One of the kids down the block was the son of a dentist. And the dentist had this wonderful Cadillac Eldorado convertible in 1958. It was gorgeous. And my father drove a company, Chevrolet station wagon, 1956.
And I convinced all of my friends that the 56 Chevy was a vastly superior car to the Cadillac Eldorado. So, I learned very early age to be a good salesman. Well, my dad sold cars for a living and he sat me down at some point and said, I don't care what you're going into, you're going into sales. There's no job that you're not going into sales.
You have a great new idea, you're eventually going to have to go into your boss and sell that idea if you, anything, name it. And that was his take on life. Now, you ended up at Yale. Was this an extension of mom wanting to aspire to greatness?
No. Interesting. In the area where we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, there was a separate school district that was separate from all the Omaha regular school districts. And we went to, it was called Westside High School.
It was nicknamed Hollywood High. The vast majority of the valedictorians, valedictorians, top of the class usually ended up in Ivy League schools. So, there was this, you know, this is what you're going to do. And it was all.
It was more the trajectory of the high school. Well, actually, in kindergarten, we were given IQ tests. My teacher, Ms. Kozak, called my parents in.
She said, you know, he tests right now at an 11-year-old level. And I was five. And she said, here's the deal. He will be great at whatever he's interested in.
But if he's not interested in it, then don't even try. And actually, she was absolutely right. But my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, when I was like five, gave me this whole set of books, little paperback books, called the Zim Nature Series. One book was insects.
One book was amphibians. One book was mammals. And I would just devour these things. So, in school, in the early years, my mother and I would sit on the couch every night.
My mother would have flashcards for math, for vocabulary. And just, you know, every night, grill me. You know, that was normal. You didn't watch TV.
You did flashcards. Right. So, I think my mother said, look, I guess I'm going to live through my son because that's my track, you know, in the 50s. Yeah.
And my father actually always wanted to be a doctor. But then I wasn't in the cards. He came from a very, actually, poor family. Right.
Anyway, so you end up at Yale. And do you immediately know you're going into medicine? I knew, actually, when I was 10 that I was going into medicine. Because I found a book in my elementary school library called All About You.
And it was kind of a book called All About You. Uh-huh. And I said, yeah, that's what I'm going to do. So, just a genuine interest in it.
Yeah. And then you end up at Yale. And what did you do as an undergrad there? Well, I started as a philosophy major.
Okay, good. Then they had a program. This was in the late 60s. You could design your own major.
So, I decided to write a thesis called Human, Biologic, and Social Evolution. What does that mean? The thesis was you could take a grade A, manipulate its food supply and its environment and prove you would arrive at a human. Uh-huh.
And so, I combined the departments of biology, anthropology, and psychology as my mentors. Now, what was your food argument to that? As an anthro major, I'd like to hear your food argument. So, what happened was, and there's actually a book in my future, so I can't tell you everything.
But long story short, you have to compete in an area of food supply that you can compete successfully in. And that's what will happen to you. If you can compete for food in an environment, then you'll win. If you can't compete for food in that environment, you won't survive.
Right. So, four or five million years ago, there was climate change. And where Great Apes, which was in Africa, primarily in the Rift Valley, although we can argue it was also South Africa, we had a lot of climate change, and forests, dense forests, began to recede. We came from a line of Great Apes.
We were arboreal apes. We actually lived in trees, fun factories, and we have a shoulder joint that works the way it does. We actually should have named the playground equipment Ape Bars, not Monkey Bars, because actually Great Apes have a universal shoulder joint that allows us, breakiation and breakiation, to walk on the underside of branches, whereas monkeys have to climb on the top of branches. And that allowed Great Apes to actually get farther out on a branch to get to fruit, and that's actually how they feed out monkeys on fruit.
Eventually, that began to dwindle, and it turns out that we actually found a new place to compete, and that's in streams and water and ocean. We actually spent a great deal of time as an aquatic ape, and that's actually why you and I are hairless, by the way. Who are you citing for this? Where did you get this chapter?
So, my mentor in anthropology, actually in paleontology, was David Pilbein, who was at Yale at that time, and then he went on to Harvard and became the chairman there. But there's actually some fascinating evidence that most of our characteristics that we take for granted are because we were able to occupy space that no other animal occupied, and that was streams and lakes and probably the Indian Ocean. It doesn't mean we were swimming and living in the ocean, but we could go where nobody else could go. There's no competition.
To explain to me, the loss of hair is a result of, as we became upright, our contact patch with the sun diminished, and we no longer were processing as much vitamin D, and we had to lose hair to absorb more vitamin D. Does that jive with? No. No.
The only hairless animals actually are aquatic animals. Dolphins, whales, elephants, hippopotamuses. Believe it or not, elephants were aquatic. Their trunk was a snorkel.
It wasn't for getting leaves off the trees. They were an aquatic animal. So, the only evidence of hairlessness is in aquatic animals also. Well, really, let's just be clear.
Dolphins aren't hairless. Humans aren't hairless. None of these are hairless. Yeah, we all have little hairls.
Yeah, we have more hairs per square than a chimpanzee. It's just very fine. It's just very fine. And hair is a drag in water.
If you actually look at the hair patterns on your back or even on your chest, you'll notice that the hair patterns follow the flow of water. And we also have, I'm a hairy guy, probably has some Neanderthal in me. Should you be so lucky? Yeah.
I was disappointed I didn't have much. Funny, my daughter, who is born and born a Christian, she had addiction problems that she overcame, happy to say. She got her 23andMe and found out she's 3% Neanderthal. And so I know she got it from me.
But the funny thing is we have some interesting discussions on what that means to have a 3% Neanderthal and believe strongly in the Bible as a text. Is there ever a peaceful end to that conversation? Yeah, actually, I think it's actually made her more willing to interpret the Bible as, well, maybe, you know, the time periods, maybe those are not accurate. And maybe, you know, she's come...
So maybe an inch away from the literal, more into the metaphorical? Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, that's big of her. But back to hair paths.
Yes, please. Underneath our clavicles, collarbones, there's a swirl of hair. It doesn't go one way or another. When you do this in water tanks, looking at flow, this is a swirl pattern right here.
It doesn't follow a path of water. Kind of fun. Interesting. So when you left Yale, you successfully defended your dissertation, and you graduated beyond that, and then you went to the Medical School of Georgia.
Well, and Monica is from Georgia. I am. Book Park. I'm from Duluth, Georgia.
Yeah, yeah, MCG was a big school. Oh, it was? What city is that in? Augusta.
Oh, okay. Home of the Masters? Oh, wonderful. Medical students used to work the first aid tents at the Masters.
Oh. It was really cool. I think you made a lot more money in caddying, though. No, no.
I'm just saying, if you're going to take a medical tent or caddy, you probably would have made a lot more money in caddying. And so there you became a cardiologist and a surgeon. Well, I was a medical student and had two actually wonderful mentors. William Strong was a pediatric cardiologist.
And MCG was fairly unique in that they wanted to actually train doctors who were going to be doctors. And so from year one, you would actually start rotations following a doctor around or going to a doctor's office and seeing what they did. So I had already figured out that I was going to be a heart surgeon at that point. Actually, my family, my father was transferred to Atlanta, Georgia.
So while we lived in Georgia, I was at Yale, and I needed a summer job. And I come back from Yale for the first summer, and I had gotten this job as a radiology tech in one of the hospitals. So I show up the first day, and they said, who are you? And I got this job.
And they said, well, the guy who hired you is gone, and we don't need you, so have a nice day. And I'm going, geez, I need a job. And I want to be in the medical field. And they said, well, there's a big inner city hospital called Brady.
Why don't you go down there? They always need people. And I said, okay. So I go down to the big inner city hospital, and I go to the employment office.
They said, well, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm a pre-med student at Yale. And they said, well, you don't want to be here. You want to go up to the professional employment office.
And I said, okay. So I go into the professional employment office, and they said, well, what do you do? It's pre-med at Yale. And I said, you know, this may be your lucky day, because we have this program here at Grady where we take medical students during their summer, and we train them as scrub nurses.
We always take medical students. But on Friday, we selected people. And this morning, this was on Monday. One of the people we selected came, oh, this is unique.
You're not a medical student. But if you could tell us that you'll do this for the next four years in the summer, we'll take a chance on you. And I said, would I? Yeah.
So all of a sudden, you know, in the summer, I'm trained as a scrub tech in the inner city hospital of Atlanta, Georgia. Little did I know, and once I became a scrub tech, that the training system at Grady for Surgeons was you were 36 hours on call in the hospital, and then 12 hours off. And that was your life. Can I ask really quick, because this is kind of well-known, students in the residency have these hours.
What on earth is the theory behind why we would want someone sleep-deprived doing this? The theory was your mentor did it, and that's how we... No one's raised their hand and said why. Right, and that's how we weed the chaff from the weed.
That's how we, you know, find the best in the best, and how you can land an airplane totally sleep-deprived, blah, blah, blah. At that time, what was the thoughts on amphetamines for people on those shifts? Never saw anybody use it. You didn't?
Ever in my career. Oh, okay. Coffee, yes. I mean, some of the orthopedic surgeons would have beer available.
Oh, great. Perfect. And anesthesiologists. Now, anesthesiologists don't want to generalize, but we usually knew the kids in medical school who were going to go into anesthesiology because they had a real keen interest in mind-altering drugs.
Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, they were administering acid and other things probably in their pre-time. Yeah. Well, there is some statistics on the high rate of addiction among anesthesiologists.
That's a big toolkit, too. Trust somebody. Yeah, no, it's very true. Yeah.
And, again, it makes sense if you're interested in drugs. You're probably interested in drugs. So you find yourself there. And then at what point in medical school do you say, I want to take the surgeon path?
Well, so, you know, almost by accident, I'm now a trained surgeon because what happens, talking about the poor residents, the residents would actually train us to do the operations. It's true. And they would sleep on a gurney. And so the scrub nurses and scrub techs would actually do the operations.
This was a knife and gun club. You know, stab wounds, shotgun wounds, gunshot wounds, a lot of belly surgery. And so... Tons of bleeding.
Lots of bleeding. Never forget one time, we were hauling a gentleman down the hall to the operating room and who's bleeding profusely in his abdomen. And all of a sudden, from underneath his gown, he pulls out a gun and starts waving it. And, you know, we're all, oh, jeez.
And the head surgeon says, don't worry, he's bleeding so fast, he'll be out in a second. And sure enough, you know, he's waving like this. And then we jumped on him and saved his life. Now, as a young man from Omaha, Nebraska, did you feel like you were on episode of MASH or something?
How were you computing what you were witnessing? Yeah, it really was, you know, MASH every night. And did that give you some adrenaline and a thrill? Was it exciting?
No, yeah, it was very exciting. Particularly, like I say, when you're a young person and all of a sudden you, you know, you've got this, for lack of a better word, authority or, you know, you need to save somebody's life. Yeah. And the poor resident's knocked out, you know, on the gurney.
You go, you know, I've got to get this guy through this. Well, yeah, it gives you a purpose and a real... Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, I was meant to do this.
So, you start doing surgery. You start doing surgery on the heart, correct? Correct. Yeah, in residency.
So, you have to, once you graduate from medical school, you have to go do a residency. And in those days, actually still, you have to do a general surgery residency first and then, you know, prove competence in that. And then you do a cardiothoracic surgery residency. And it's usually two or three years.
So, it's about eight years of training to become a cardiologist. Is any of that overlapping with your medical school? No. It's not.
So, you're talking 16 years out of your BA or BS. So, 16 years later, you're now employed officially as a surgeon. Well, and then I did a fellowship in pediatric cardiac surgery over in London, England. Okay.
We're now another year beyond. Oh, my God. Are you dragging a gal with you throughout all this? Yes, indeed.
And is she your wife, aren't we? No, not my wife, aren't we? Okay. This gal that was with you, was she at any point like, okay, enough with the fellowships and residency.
Let's get you up with a practice. Well, I mean, residents do not, did not make much money. They were basically indentured servants. And is that part maddening at all?
Like, I know I will have enough money for a house, but I can't get it now. Well, I actually had a house. If you were an idiot, you would moonlight and work in emergency rooms at night. I wanted my kids, we had two young kids, and I wanted my kids to have a house and not live in an apartment.
So, through most of my residency, one night a week, I would, even though we're on call, 36 on and 12 off, those 12 hours, one night a week, I would work in an emergency room to make enough money to have a house. Right. And you're still going to keep this position about no amphetamines? Yeah.
Surgeons often kind of pre-select themselves because they can work without much sleep. My brother-in-law is a cardiologist, and he wanted to be a art surgeon, but he said, there's no way, you know, I can work with that little sleep. And so, I'm going to be a cardiologist because I get more sleep. This is a very weird system.
I just have to, once again, and say it out loud, I think it's a very bizarre system that we would want. There's all these great studies on sleep. They've tracked some of the biggest tragedies and environmental tragedies being from, you know, the Valdez guys have been up for 31 hours, the people in the Titanic have. There's just all this proof that people just aren't operating optimally.
Well, the good news is, you know, the systems have radically changed. There are now time periods. Oh, that's good. Okay, so that has changed.
Yeah, it really has changed. Okay. Do you specialize in pediatric surgeries, or are you just doing them all? So, I'm doing them all.
I was one of the last of a generation that tended to do all things. So, I, you know, did lung surgery, esophageal surgery, adult heart surgery, and pediatric heart surgery. And there's a few of us, you know, dinosaurs that did that. Yeah.
And my argument was, I actually learned things by operating on a kid that I could apply to adults, and vice versa. I was one of the originators of infant and pediatric heart transplant, along with my partner, Leonard Bailey, who just passed away a few months ago. Really? And so, what age was this first?
So, this was in the 80s. So, anyhow, I finished my pediatric cardiac surgery fellowship in 1986. I was six, and was recruited at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Fairly shortly after that, we started our pediatric heart transplant program at Maryland.
And I went out to Loma Linda University here in Southern California to learn from Leonard Bailey, who had done Baby Faye, the famous baboon to human transplant, because he was the expert. And we took our team out there and learned everything. And I went back to Maryland, and he called me, actually, a few weeks later. And he says, hey, you know, how are you doing?
And I said, oh, great, thanks. And he says, well, it sounds like you're really happy. And I said, yeah, I'm really happy. And he says, well, that's too bad, because I'd kind of like you to come out and be my partner.
And I'll split everything, you know, 50-50 with you. So I walked into my boss, Joe McLaughlin, in Maryland, and I said, don't Leonard Bailey. He wants me to come out and be his partner. And what do you think?
And he says, oh, shoot, man. And he says, geez, if Leonard Bailey calls you and I'll split everything with you, I can't stop you. He said, go out there. Yeah.
So that's actually how I ended up here in Southern California. And did you take to it like a little dolphin in water? No. Well, it was a culture shock.
Yeah. It was much different. Because I was from East Coast, South, Midwest. And quite frankly, the area around Loma Linda, San Bernardino, is not the garden spot of America.
No offense to my friend. Right, right. It's not the jewel of California. That's true.
You have kind of a compartment in your head that allows you to treat this body like an engine with a bad head gasket. You can't possibly be evaluating this person's emotions and stuff while you get in there and do the physical, mechanical activity of fixing someone's body. True. Now, with that said, knowing that we don't want you emotional when you're doing that.
We want you very pragmatic. Is it extra rewarding when a little baby's heart starts beating and you know that that little baby is going to make it versus an adult? Yeah, I think one of the attractions of congenital heart surgery is if you don't fix this, this baby has no future, has no life. Right.
There's this old saying that surgeons carry around a graveyard in their head where we go to visit every now and then to realize that, there will be bodies in what we do and we have to come to grips with that and move on. So, yeah, to this day, I have kids who are now adults come in who I did their operation when they were one hour old and completely redid their heart and graduate from college and come in and we do a photo. And, you know, it's pretty cool. The mental gymnastics I feel like I would have to do is I would have to enter each operating room going, this child's going to die.
So there are no stakes. All that can happen is I can now make it live or prolong its life. I feel like that's the mental trick I'd have to do for myself. Yeah.
And I became very famous for operating on people who nobody else wanted to operate on. Fifth time redos, three valve replacements, five bypasses, cut out half your heart. We called it the blue plate special. So, and so, and yeah, and what I had to do, the reason I think I became good at it is you have to have the attitude.
You talk to the patient and say, you know, are you somebody who wants to roll the dice? Because this is dangerous stuff we're talking about. Right. And, you know, if you tell me, you know, I think I'm going to make it, let's do this.
But if you say, you know, I've got some bad feelings about this, I was like, let's not do this. Right. In the parts, this is just kind of a morbid question, I guess. The parts, these valves, it's generally from human cadavers.
Are there animal parts, pig valves? All of the above. Is one animal better for longevity than another? Because a primate, it would feel like a primate would be a more natural.
Well, unfortunately, we can't do that. But no one is finicky about using animal parts that we eat. So we use cow valves, we use pig valves. We have a series of using Gore-Tex, the stuff you make, waterproof stuff out of valves, and published several papers on using Gore-Tex valves in children.
And did those prove to be? They work temporarily, not long-term. But sometimes we have to do a kind of patch to get through. Sometimes with children's surgery, we know there are four operations to get this kid to kind of a fully functioning adult.
And, you know, God bless parents for saying, okay, you know, I can see it. Okay, in six months we're going to do this, and in a year we're going to do this, and it's okay because, you know, I got my kid, and let's do it. Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I guess knowing that there's going to be five is preferred to, let's have one, hey, six months later, hey, we've got to go again. Yeah, a year later, guess what?
I guess when you know what course you're charting, it gets a little more easier to deal with. Yeah, digestible. Stay tuned for more Armchair Hours, if you dare. Okay, so what caused you to change your focus?
In the late 90s, I met a guy who I call Big Ed in all my books. He was from Miami, Florida, 48 years old. He had inoperable coronary artery disease. Now, what that means is everything was so clogged up that you couldn't put stents in because there was another clog right down the road, and you couldn't do bypasses because there really wasn't any place to jump past in line.
There's no good piece of wire that wasn't corroded. Yeah, exactly. There's just no place to do it. So he went around the country going to these centers, Columbia University in New York, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Texas Heart Institute, Stanford.
Those were the usual spots. If nobody else would take somebody, they'd wind up in Loma Linda with me. So he had spent six months going around, and everybody tells him, no, can't do anything for you. Have a nice day.
And so he arrived. Literally, have a nice day. So he arrives in my office with his angiogram, you know, the movie, his heart video, his heart from Miami six months earlier. And I'm looking at it, and I said, you know, I don't like to turn down people, but I agree with everybody else.
There's nothing I'm going to do for you. And he says, yeah, I know that's what everybody says, but I've been on a diet for six months, and I've lost 45 pounds. And I'm still a big guy. He was 265 when I met him.
And he says, I went to a health food store, and I bought all these supplements. And he literally brings in this shopping bag full of supplements. And he says, you know, maybe I did something in here, in my heart. And, you know, I'm scratching my professor's beard and going, yeah, yeah, yeah, good for you for losing weight, but that's not going to do anything in here.
And I know what you did with all the supplements. You made expensive urine, which I firmly believe. And he says, well, look, you know, it's been six months. I came all this way.
Why don't we get a new angiogram? Why don't we get a new catheterization and see? So we did. In six months' time, this guy has cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his heart.
They're gone. Now, he's still got blockages. But now the surgeon in me says, great news. You know, there's places to land bypasses.
So I actually do a five-vessel bypass on them. It's done good for me, good for you. But the researcher in me, and probably, you know, this thesis from Yale, comes back afterwards. I say, tell me about this diet of yours.
He gets maybe, you know, a paragraph in, and I go time out. I said, this is actually my thesis that I wrote in Yale about what made a human a human. Literally got on the phone to my parents who lived in San Diego. And, you know, I said, do you still have my thesis?
And they said, of course, you know, it's in the shrine. So then I started looking through his bag of goodies. And I was also famous for heart preservation during heart surgery, keeping hearts alive. I have a catheter that's named after me, blah, blah, blah.
And we were using ingredients in the protective solution that we put in hearts. And a lot of the ingredients that we were putting into the solution, he was swallowing. And it actually never occurred to me to swallow the dumb things. Yeah, what were the ingredients in that solution?
Alpha-lipoic acid is one of the ingredients. We had a cousin, I guess you could say, of rapeseed extract. We had magnesium. He just willy-nilly kind of gone to a health food store and just kind of, I guess, he kind of grabbed stuff.
I was. Top of my game is art surgeon. But I was 70 pounds overweight. I was pre-diabetic.
I had such bad arthritis on my knees. I had braces on my knees to run. But I was running 30 miles a week. And I was going to the gym one hour a day.
And I was eating what I thought was going to happen. How on earth were you running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour a day, and doing surgery? Well, you get up at 4 o'clock in the morning. That's how you do it.
My wife would kick me out the building. I know Marvel actors that are working out less than that. Yeah, that's what I would do. Wow.
And again, I didn't need much sleep. So that's what you do. But I was a big fat guy. Migrant headaches.
I do always love this. I remember going into the emergency room with an asthma episode. I was like 16 or something. And when we pulled up a small town emergency room, the doctor on call was outside smoking a cigarette.
And then I went in there, and he starts listening to my lungs. Do you smoke? Yes, I do. You cannot smoke.
You've got to stop smoking. I'm like, weren't you smoking up front? And he's like, yeah, just you've got to stop smoking. There's something, I don't know why.
There's something satisfying when doctors are in a state of ill health. I don't know why. Do you get that, Monica? No.
No. The opposite. Oh, you do? Okay.
Yeah. I kind of like it. I go, oh, they're just as human as everyone. Knowledge isn't going to safeguard you from making bad decisions.
That's true. That's true. Anywho, so you had to take kind of stop to your own health at that moment. Yeah, well, I was told that this was normal.
You know, I had horrible cholesterol. And they said, you know, you're 40-ish, and this is normal. And, you know, your father is exactly the same way. And that's genetics.
And, you know, get over it. Yeah. So I actually got out my thesis. And I put myself on my thesis and started taking a bunch of supplements and started sending my blood work up to the University of California, Berkeley, which had the best at that time system for looking at cholesterol.
Lo and behold, you know, in the first year, I lost 50 pounds. So I just lost 20 pounds, and I've kept it off. What did you change diet-wise? I like to use the expression, I became a gorilla who lives in Italy.
I started eating a whole lot of leaves. You know, gorillas eat 16 pounds of leaves a day. Started using a whole lot of olive oil. And I think that...
Like spoonfuls? You drink it all in your mouth. The only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth, in my humble opinion. Oh, okay.
Three of the Blue Zones, the longest living people on earth, use a liter of olive oil per week. That's about 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. So that's what I do. But those Blue Zones also have a lot of other things in common.
The thing that they have in common, they only have one thing in common. The only thing they share, you know, all the Blue Zones, is a very limited animal protein in their diet. Yeah, it's a primarily plant-based diet. Correct.
Yeah, so that's significant. Yeah, other than just olive oil. That's a very big part of it, right? Yeah, olive oil is pretty good stuff.
I do love it. There's several Blue Zones that don't use olive oil, so we can't, you know, say that that commonality is not true of all Blue Zones. Right. The only commonality of all Blue Zones is very limited animal protein.
Yeah, which is a real bummer for my diet. Well, again, I grew up in Omaha, so genius. So you started, have you seen the documentary Forks Over Nives? Sure.
Yeah. Did you like it? No. You didn't like it?
I mean, if you like propaganda, it's a great propaganda movie. Oh. But in that, you have a cardiologist as well, right? No.
He's not a cardiologist? No, he's a general surgeon. Nestle Stone is a... Okay, general surgeon.
Okay, but you have a surgeon taking this group of patients, putting them on a whole food, plant-based diet, and you're... No bet. And you're getting all these miraculous results from coronary distress. No.
Well, you're saying you don't believe... In the movie, he's touting results. Correct. So you're saying you don't believe the results.
Well, the results are that he had a 50% dropout in his group, so they never actually completed the program. It's just like Dean Ornish's results. It's interesting, and I totally respect all these gentlemen, but Dean Ornish, after his initial small study where he also had a 50% dropout, despite now 25 years on, Dean Ornish has never published a study of his results, and if his results are reproducible, one would think that the father of the plant-based no-fat diet would certainly update us at some point in his career over the results of his study, but he never has. Well, just really quick to defend, which I have no horse in any of these races, but a 50% dropout on a lifestyle food diet study, to me, does not seem high at all.
That seems... I'm shocked 50% of people even stuck around and did the diet. You know, I don't think that in itself is indicative of any kind of... But you're then left with very few people.
Well, half. The group is only about 30 people, and they drop down to 15. So really, it's very hard... You know, he's not been able to actually, because his numbers are small, make statistical significance out of this.
Yes. I guess what I'm pointing out is that I don't think there's a topic in science. Maybe psychology sometimes rivals it. There is no topic in science that is more frustrating for the consumer than nutrition.
Correct. There is no consensus. There's every single variety of explanation. Humans are almost impossible to study.
We do so many things. There's so many variables. The notion of isolating this or that variable is almost preposterous. Even when I would look at those early smoking statistics.
Now, I definitely think smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. Don't get me wrong. But they're also ignoring that smoking is a suite of behaviors, generally. Smokers drink more.
Smokers do a lot of things more. But you're going to isolate this one aspect of their lifestyle and hang everything on it. Speaking of smoking and lung cancer, the Catavans, one of the blue zones in the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea, the Catavans smoke like fiends. They wean children off of breastfeeding cigarettes.
Yeah. And there's never been a case of lung cancer in Catavan. And they live into their 90s with no medical care. And there's actually never been a case of coronary artery disease or stroke in Catavan.
Yeah. And one of the anthropologists that studied them did chest x-rays. And they're like, how could this be? Oh, their tobacco, obviously, is far less.
So, again, nicotine is good for you except for the delivery device. And what smoking does is produce huge amounts of oxidative stress. And we use vitamin C as one of our ways of soaking up oxidative stress. And so smokers, interestingly enough, have incredibly low levels of vitamin C.
Vitamin C is actually essential to repair collagen in blood vessels. Blood vessels are always flexing. And the collagen in them, which is basically the rebar, it breaks. And the collagen breaks then get exposed.
And we actually put little patches on them. And that's actually where the start of these flax come from is collagen breaks. Smokers, because they don't have any vitamin C, don't repair their collagen breaks. And smokers, we used to love to operate on smokers.
Because smokers would have their blockages very, what's called, proximal in their coronary arteries. Close to the heart. Close to the start of these blood vessels. And the rest of their blood vessels were gorgeous.
A lot of smokers were skinny. And, you know, it's just, man, this is great. Thank you very much. Thank you for smoking.
Thank you for smoking. And now we're so happy. So the Catawans have an incredibly vitamin C-rich diet in the kind of fruits and vegetables that we eat on this island. And I've proposed that the reason that they've actually figured out, and they didn't know it, but their diet is full of vitamin C.
And so they compensated for this oxidative stress from smoking. I'll take smokers. And if people stop smoking, in general, they gain weight. And I don't want that.
So I'll make, you know, a deal with the devil to say, okay, look, you smoke, but you're going to chew 500 milligrams of vitamin C every four to six hours. You're going to take time to release vitamin C twice a day. And we're going to, you know, we're going to negate this negative. Try to neutralize.
Yeah. And then let's work on all the other stuff. And, you know, then once we've got all that controlled. So, yeah, again, nicotine is good for you except for the delivery.
Yeah, I know, I know, I know. Maybe I should start doing it intravenously. Just shoot out several. Spray to spray.
Yeah, spray sounds exciting. Dave asked me on here. Yeah. It'll probably bring us.
Yeah, we'll shoot me up. Yeah, first spray is free. So you just gave me a clue about your kind of priorities, which is for you in that moment with the smoker, putting on weight. Explain to me why that for you is the worst option possible.
I've told anyone who will listen that if there was one blood test that I'd want you to get, if there's one blood test, you should have a fasting insulin level. A fasting insulin level will pretty much predict what's going to happen to you. If it's low, you're most likely never going to develop cancer. You're never going to get dementia.
You're never going to get coronary artery disease. If it's high, you're going to get cancer. You're going to get dementia. You're going to get coronary artery disease.
You're going to get fat. You're going to get high blood pressure. An elevated insulin level is generally saying you're consuming a lot of sugar or carbohydrates, and your body's creating a bunch of insulin. Break that down.
Yeah, or even protein. This was actually one of the mistakes that Atkins made. Atkins didn't know. We don't waste energy, and we have actually very little need for protein.
So when we eat too much protein, we don't waste it, but we convert it into sugar. It's called gluconeogenesis. Why? Because we have a sugar storage system called fat.
And so even high protein will actually produce high insulin levels and make you fat. Is that assuming, and again, here's another great place where there is no consensus and lots of debate, but are you saying that in a caloric model, once the protein exceeds, let's say you're burning 2200 calories a day, and you exceed the amount of protein that would equal 2200 calories, because the rest of it is then converted to sugar. Okay, because there's a couple different models, right? There's a guy we heard on Sam Harris that's really interesting.
He said that is horseshit. It's not calories in calories out. That's correct. It is not calories in calories out.
That's absolutely correct. He's like, it's way more chemistry. You could eat the wrong 2000 calories, and you could eat the right 2000 calories. Well, even beyond that, none of these models actually use the fact that you have a microbiome of hundreds of trillions of bacteria that eat the food you eat.
If you have bacteria that will actually eat most of the food you eat and keep it for themselves to make baby bacteria, then you could eat, which is what I propose people do, eat to feed them, and you can eat huge amounts of food and huge amounts of calories, but they will eat it, and you won't. On the other hand, we know that there are obesogenic bacteria who will actually pass what you eat directly onto you, into you, and so you could have two people who literally eat the same thing, have completely different outcomes. There's a great study that was published in Lancet a few years ago of a woman marathoner in England who developed a C. difficile, a horrible infection in your colon, and the treatment is to pay fecal transplants.