Your Gut Controls Your Mood, Cravings, and Even Personality w/ Dr. Gundry

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2:13this is the admiral show welcome back to the show everybody so today is going to be a really interesting journey We're going to talk about, ironically, we're going to talk about your mental health. We're going to talk about cognition, but we're actually going to connect it through your microbiome, through the gut. And I've got a very special man I want to have on the show for a long time. He says a lot of interesting things that has gotten my attention over time. And he's a world-renowned cardiothoracic surgeon who sort of shifted into a little bit more of this work right now. He's sold a couple million books, New York Times bestselling author.

2:50and today we're going to talk about the gut brain paradox which is the title of his new book and this is going to be interesting today because i got some tough questions for him so dr stephen gundry welcome to the show thanks a lot ed appreciate you having me on and looking forward to it so am i very much i wanted to talk with you for a long time even to some of your other books but it's interesting when i thought well we're going to have him on to talk about the gut i didn't know we were really going to spend a lot of our time on mental health frankly cognition and the brain and that connection so everybody stay in here today because i think you're going to hear some things that you've never heard before at least i had not heard before so let's start out let's go a little bit bigger picture um a big topic on our show has been depression and mental health and we've we've covered it from all different types of angles never from the gut so how is the gut connected to depression or mental health overall uh well where shall we start actually one way i get people's attention is that many many people take an antidepressant an ssri serotonin reuptake inhibitor and there they notice that it takes about a month to kick in, right?

4:08I mean, that's typical. What if these things worked by actually increasing serotonin up in the brain, then they ought to kick in within 24 hours, but they don't. So how in the heck are they working? Well, it turns out, and it's in the book, it's been published, that these antidepressants actually change the gut microbiome. And it's the change in the gut microbiome that, quite frankly, takes at least a month that actually causes the effect that they're looking for. It has nothing to do with the fact that they're SSRI. And we now know that there is a specific dysbiotic gut microbiome that associates with depression.

5:02There's a specific dysbiotic gut microbiome that associates with anxiety, with ADHD. Each of them have a specific imbalance. And you can even now spot the troublemakers and you can actually manipulate the gut microbiome to get a better balance. And that's actually what these drugs do. What does dysbiosis mean, just for everybody's edification? Because I don't think about 90 % of the people don't understand the term. I didn't before I started reading your work. So one of my favorite examples that I think resonates. So in any ecology, like a tropical rainforest. There are, you know, thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of different species that all cooperate to make that tropical rainforest balanced.

6:05And one of my favorite examples is Yellowstone Park. A number of years ago, it was decided that wolves are bad actors and wolves are evil and we really ought to get them out of Yellowstone Park. Now, it was mostly because the ranchers didn't like them, but anyhow, wolves were eradicated from Yellowstone Park. Imagine what happened was that wolves, of course, are an apex predator and the wolves controlled the elk population. Without bulls to eat elks, elks overgrew. And the elks ate a lot of the saplings. The saplings were actually used by beavers to build beaver dams. The beaver dams weren't there because there weren't any beavers.

6:56The fish population changed and the entire ecosystem collapsed. when they realized that because of the balance of one bad actor a wolf when they reintroduced wolves back into yellowstone it took a few years but lo and behold the balance the ecology of yellowstone park return so dysbiosis means normally as unbelievable as it sounds we have at least a hundred trillion bacteria in our gut. We have many more viruses in our gut. We have lots of fungi in our gut, lots of molds in our gut, and I could go on and on, but at least a hundred trillion bacteria. And there's probably, the number goes up every year, about 10 ,000 different species.

8:00And these different species literally all communicate with each other. They're dependent on each other. They recognize bad guys. Some of the good guys, which I call keystone species, will actually make compounds to try and suppress the bad guy's growth. but most of us in the united states at least have what's called a dysbiotic microbiome this tropical rainforest this balance this interdependent of species has been completely screwed up in fact you and i off camera we're talking about palm springs and the desert where I am right now and you used to be. It's basically our tropical rainforest in our gut is now a desert wasteland.

8:55And so that's dysbiosis. I want to go back to the anti-anxiety or anti-depression medication just for a second, because I don't want everybody that's taking it to get off of it right away and go, I'm just going to start cleaning my gut and I'm going to be great. If that's accurate, what you said, then why is it that you need it for, why is it that when people decide they're no longer going to stay on these medications, that their counsel to stage off of them over time, if it's just gut connected, or are you saying the gut is contributory in addition to maybe a serotonin issue or those two are correlated?

9:37So I want to understand that just a little bit more. Yeah. There's lots of pieces to this puzzle. Right. One of them is there's a herbicide called Roundup that its active ingredient is glyphosate. And it turns out that we were taught that Roundup glyphosate is harmless to humans because it goes after a plant growing pathway called the shikimate pathway. I love that word, the shikimate pathway. It's easy to remember. Yeah, easy to remember. And we were sure humans don't use the shikimate pathway. So we could drink Roundup supposedly and be fine. Now, unfortunately, nobody bothered to mention that bacteria use the shikimate pathway to reproduce.

10:37And fun fact, Roundup was actually patented as an antibiotic. Fun fact, not as an herbicide. So Roundup glyphosate actually specifically targets the tryptophan bacteria pathway. And tryptophan is the precursor for the feel-good hormones like serotonin. And so unwittingly, let's be nice, we have killed off much of our serotonin pathway bacteria just by eating foods that contain glyphosate. And sadly, almost all of our grain products are sprayed with glyphosate prior to harvesting. They're not glyphosate isn't used just on GMO crops. and those foods we eat and they're fed to our animals. So glyphosate is just one of the best ways to knock off your feel-good bacteria known to mankind.

11:49And isn't it interesting? Yes, social media contributes to all this, but isn't it interesting that the huge epidemic started when Roundup began being increasingly used? What do you do about it then? We're going to talk about antibiotics in a minute. You brought that up. We're setting up the stage here a little bit. I always like to cut to the end of the movie and then come back to the middle in a minute. I know everyone's listening to this going, you know what? I believe that probably my gut has contributed to my mental health well-being over the next 10 years. Whether what you said or not about re-entuctant inhibitors or not, that's going to be interesting to see.

12:30But having said that, someone says right now, hey, listen, I do struggle with my mental health. I have tried other things. It's not worked. Is there a test I should do to test certain bacteria in my gut? Is there a certain diet recommendation that you have? And obviously, this is in the book, so they should get the book. But also, since you're on the show, I'm supposed to ask you this. So what would your answer be to that? Well, interestingly enough, and I show a lot of examples in this book and in the previous books, most of these people with anxiety and depression have what we call leaky gut or intestinal permeability.

13:12Now, if you had asked me 25 years ago when I first started in this area what I thought about leaky gut, I would have told you it was pseudoscience. And it's not. This has been well worked out in humans. A lot of it was spearheaded by a professor who's now at Harvard, a pediatric gastroenterologist by the name of Alessio Fasano, originally from Italy. Funny guy. Been on a couple panels with him. Anyhow, he actually showed the mechanism where gluten, and most people have heard of gluten, it's part of wheat, rye, barley. Gluten is a lectin, my favorite subject. How gluten causes intestinal permeability, causes literal holes in the wall of the gut.

14:12and he and others showed how you could measure the presence of intestinal permeability, how you could actually grade it. And I've published numerous papers that over the period of about a year, nine months to a year, most people by following my program will seal their leaky gut. And I show in the book, among other things, that one of the consequences of doing this is that people are usually able to wean off their antidepressant medicines because they find they no longer need them. And you're right. No, this, everybody listening, no, don't stop your antidepressant medicines and swallow a probiotic.

15:05That's not going to work. I can assure Right. Right. So, hey guys, I want to jump in here for a second and talk about change and growth. And, you know, by the way, it's no secret how people get ahead in life or how they grow. And also taking a look at the future. If you want to change your future, you got to change the things you're doing. If you continue to do the same things, you're probably going to produce the same results. But if you get into a new environment where you're learning new things and you're around other people that are growth oriented, you're much more likely to do that yourself.

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17:05So, want to drive? CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. You know, when I was a little boy, I was very ill until I was about eight years old. I mean, on antibiotics constantly. And so, I assume that's why even now I don't have a great immune system. So, I speak and I travel and I shake hands, you know, 100 nights a year at least. I get sick a lot. And so I've been prescribed antibiotics more than about anybody that I know. I mean, I'm sure there are people far more sick than me, but I've had antibiotics most of my life. And we have had other people on that have talked about the gut and how antibiotics can be very detrimental to your gut.

17:46So now I'm wondering, and I'd like your opinion about this for people that have children that are getting antibiotics prescribed or even themselves, your overall viewpoint of antibiotics, how it impacts the gut and how that might impact our mental health, our cognition and other things. Because we're very quick to prescribe them, aren't we? I mean, it's just, it's the thing. And I'm wondering if you, you know, think there's a whole bunch of adverse consequences to doing that on a regular basis. Oh, absolutely. I'm old enough to have been in medical school when broad spectrum antibiotics were introduced in the mid 1970s.

18:22And we really thought they were miraculous because beforehand, if we were lucky, We would culture a bacteria that was the troublemaker. And then we'd find out what antibiotic, we'd test antibiotics against it over a couple more days to find out which antibiotic worked. Well, now when broad spectrum antibiotics came out, it was instead of taking a.22 caliber rifle at the bacteria, now we had a shotgun or an AK-47 on automatic. and we could mow down everything. We didn't have to do a culture. We just said, bam, and they were miraculous. I mean, they really were. I can remember it well. What we didn't know, we didn't know that these guys down in our gut even existed.

19:18It wasn't until the Human Microbiome Project in the early 2000s to the mid-2017 is when it was completed. We didn't even know those guys were there or how many of them were and what they did. So we have wiped out most of our flora. And it's literally, since I'm now in California and we love to have forest fires out here and fires, imagine we have a forest fire. And let's just think of our gut microbiome as a forest. And we burn it to the ground. Now, we could plant all these little seedlings, but it would take 20 to 30 years to get that forest back to this incredible ecosystem. And there are papers, and some of them are referenced in my books, that you could take a round of antibiotics and it could take up to two years to begin to even reestablish something that almost resembles a working ecosystem.

20:33Two years after a single round of antibiotics. the thing that we're also learning is number one these bacteria and i talk a lot about it in the book these guys actually have are intelligent sentient beings no they don't have a brain no they don't think like we do but they for instance see they don't see with their eyes, but they can count numbers of bacteria around them. They know who the bacteria are around them. They share information with each other. They educate our immune system, and they do a great job of letting the immune system know who's the good guys and who's the bad guys. And in the good old days, they would tell the immune system, hey, we got your back.

21:34We're going to handle most everything that comes down the pike, whether it's a virus, whether it's a bacteria, we'll fight to the death against these guys. Immune system, you go handle anything that kind of gets past us. Not much is going to get past us. If you see something get pass, be ready. So I use the example. Um, I, I trained in London, England and children's heart surgery. And back in those dark ages, the police, the Bobbies only carried a billy club. They had no weapons now. And now our immune system should basically have a billy club. Now, of course, we're getting no information from our gut bacteria about uh that'll take care of business so now our immune system is got a kevlar best you know two ak-47s and their fingers on the trigger and that's where our problem lies and we've we're basically a very poorly trained militia now instead of well-organized.

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23:39No spin, no judgments, just the facts straight from the experts for more than 140 beverage ingredients. Visit goodtoknowfacts.org. Well, one of the, I'll use your analogy, one of the bulletproof vests we can use is to have the right nutrients in our gut, right? Yep. And you say in the book that we've identified certain nutrients that must exist, and if they don't exist, the bad guys start to take over and blow us up. Can you share with us what some of those nutrients are, how we could get them as well? Yeah, here's one of the other, I think, surprising things. that I've written about in the last three books.

24:20Most people know probiotics, friendly bacteria.

24:28Probiotics have to eat something, and the things they like to eat in general are long-chain sugar molecules, starches, sometimes called resistant starches, sometimes called soluble fiber. What we didn't know is that when they eat these things, they make a communication system called postbiotics. And postbiotics are, believe it or not, gases that communicate. They're short chain fatty acids like butyrate. And there's a whole host of new postbiotic compounds called exosomes and extracellular vesicles, which are literally packets of information that bacteria pinch off, go through the wall of our gut, pass through any membrane, even to our brain, and then deposit that information by latching on to, say, a neuron and telling the neuron literally what it wants the neuron to do.

25:41And it's really Star Wars. And I have the pleasure of attending these meetings and lecturing at these meetings. And the level of complexity that our microbiome exerts on just about any level you care to think about is just, and I've talked about this before, we have very few human genes. Believe it or not, a sand flea has more genes than a human. uh bacteria have like tenfold more genes in in our microbiome than we have and they're constantly reproducing and they're constantly changing genes exchanging genes so i and others believe that um we have decided to make decision making uploaded to our bacterial cloud much like There's not much happening in my computer right here.

26:48You and I are being uploaded to a cloud. And that because we are a symbiotic organism, we've left these sorts of decision making to this microbiome, to these bacteria. And we need to get over the fact that it might just be that the bus driver is not driving the bus. It's the passengers. He pointed to his head, guys, at the brain, is what he's saying. He's saying that. And it's probably the passengers who are directing most of the things that happen to us. So I'm going to push you on this again. So if I'm listening to this, I want to take an actionable step on this. I want to get the passengers cooperating with the driver or helping the driver with a sense of direction.

27:37I love our analogies today. Are there two or three nutrients I want to ingest or supplement? And are there two or three? I don't want. These are contributing to the passengers, the inmates running the asylum, so to speak. Yeah. So one of them probably most, I think, at least for me and my understanding, important paper was written a few years ago. there's a husband and wife microbiology team at Stanford by the name of the Sonnenbergs. And they took a bunch of healthy volunteers and they gave them a lot of prebiotic fiber. It's called inulin. It's a nice fiber. And they looked at their gut microbiome diversity and a more diverse tropical rainforest, the better.

28:29And they looked at inflammation markers. And they gave them all this prebiotic fiber because everybody knows that that's what the probiotics want to eat. Nothing happened. There wasn't extra diversity. There was still inflammation markers. And they went, hmm, let's try this. Let's give them the prebiotic fiber, but let's also give them fermented foods in this study, which believe it or not, everybody thinks fermented foods, probiotics. No, fermented foods are postbiotics. And so let's give them fermented foods. And in this case, it was mostly yogurts and kefirs, but it could be vinegars, it could be kimchi, it could be sauerkraut, and also give them the inulin and then see what happens.

29:26And lo and behold, with the addition of these postbiotic fermented foods, then the gut diversity began to get more diverse. And then the inflammation markers went down. So to phrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a village. And what we're learning is that these really important bacteria that are going to make really important things for us, for our brain, like serotonin, like butyrate, there's got to be four or five other bacteria kind of on an assembly line and bacteria one has to eat something to kind of poop out produce what bacteria two needs to eat bacteria two needs to poop out what bacteria three needs to eat and so on to and if you've got one guy missing or if you've got the component that's missing, then you're not going to finish up with a car on the end of the assembly line.

30:39And that's, again, discovering the incredible complexity of this ecosystem is mind boggling. But now that we are beginning to understand and we are beginning to understand what each of these guys need, then we can build, rebuild that assembly line and we can get this stuff back. So that's a long, go ahead. No, that's a great answer. I have to tell you, I've always kind of looked for like, is there any overlapping? And so just for the audience, this idea of fermented foods, guys, and fermentation, I can tell you has come up multiple times now with people that I've talked to about the gut and the brain and overall health as well.

31:23And it's just something, you know, we all talk about, Hey, make sure you get your creatine or make sure you're getting your macros, all these fitness people. But this idea of fermentation and eating fermented foods is something that seems pretty consistent. And I have to tell everybody also this, I just share this with you as well. You know, the good thing about having 800 episodes, I've had anti-aging people on brain health, mental health experts, you know, muscle building, physical strength, cardio, all the, and one of the things that keeps coming up, If you ask almost everybody, what's the next frontier of health, of wellness, of strength, of mental outlook, of energy, of all of it, of anti-aging, is the gut microbiome.

31:59This is the next frontier. And I have a feeling that over five, six, seven years, this is going to be one of these light speed evolutionary things that we learn more and more about. We're going to talk about personalities in just a second. But before we go there, we talk about eating fermented stuff is probably good for us. is there something that the bad stuff feeds off of? Is it like sugar? Is there something don't put in your body? This is the thing. Don't put in it. If you put it in, you're screwing your gut up. What would that be? Well, you're right. Sugar is right up there. Easily digested carbohydrates.