The modern human diet is doing a great job of “assaulting, starving and killing” precious microbes in the gut, according to American physician Steven Gundry.
“100 trillion microbes sit in our gut. They're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it any longer,” he tells Jesse Mulligan.
Photo: Ave Calvar
Dr Stephen Gundry is the director of the International Heart and Lung Institute in California. He has written multiple best-sellers connecting diet with health. His new book is Gut Check: Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health.
Antibiotics, ultra-processed food and a lack of fibre are all laying waste to our microbiome, according to Dr Gundry.
He says this has made consuming plant foods, which intuitively should be good for us, problematic.
“Plants, believe it or not, don't want to be eaten. They don't want us to eat them or their babies, their seeds. And their way of fighting back against us is basically chemical and biological warfare.
“We used to have a pretty good system, a defence against these, it was a balance of power. But we've, unfortunately, lost all of our defences by killing off our microbiome.”
One such piece of plant weaponry, he says, is the carbohydrate-binding proteins known as lectins.
“Lectins are really good at opening the wall of our gut and allowing things to pass through our gut barrier into us. And our immune system recognises these particles as foreign and produces inflammation.”
A leaky gut, now proven scientifically to exist, is what lies behind many autoimmune diseases, Dr Gundry says.
“You can eat all the anti-inflammatory foods in the world. But if you don't stop leaky gut, if you don't stop eating, as I say, razor blades - and basically, that's what these plant compounds are - you'll just keep having leaky gut despite eating all those anti-inflammatory foods.”
We have much to learn from the diets of our ancestors, he says.
“Our ancestors detoxified the plants that they wanted to eat. It's been done for millennia and yet we've forgotten for the most part how to do it.”
Photo: Wikimedia commons
The lining of our intestines has the same surface area as a tennis court, Dr Gundry says, but with a major design flaw.
“That surface area is only one cell thick. Only one cell thickness is protecting you from anything that you swallow that might want to get through that one-cell thick area."
Plants have a really clever way of penetrating this surface, he says.
"They use lectins to actually pry open the spaces between these cells. And they produce leaky gut.”
Twenty years ago, Dr Gundry regarded the idea that a gut could leak as pseudoscience.
“But thanks to ground-breaking research over the last 15 years [we now know] leaky gut is real. We can measure it with blood tests. We can quantify how leaky it is.
"As I say in the book, if you've got an autoimmune disease, I guarantee you have leaky gut. If you have type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes, I guarantee you have leaky gut. If you have coronary artery disease, I guarantee you, you have leaky gut. And if you have one of the conditions like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, I guarantee you have leaky gut.”
The good news? It’s fixable.
“I've given papers showing 90 percent of my patients with an autoimmune disease - like psoriasis, like Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, like Crohn's, like rheumatoid arthritis - go in remission, on no medications, after a year of following my programme.”
A lack of vitamin D is a big part of the problem, he says.
“One of the things that's amazing to both myself and many other people is that here in Southern California, 90 percent of my patients when they walk through the door - and I still see patients six days a week - are Vitamin D-deficient.
“You go 'that's impossible'. Well, it's because we protect ourselves from the sun.
“One of the things every human being should do is take a bare minimum of 5,000 international units of Vitamin D3 a day, that's 125 micrograms.
“The University of California San Diego, which has a very large Vitamin D research team, says the average person should take 10,000 international units of Vitamin D3 a day. And I completely agree with that.”
Stem cells in the walls of our gut are “incredibly sensitive” to Vitamin D, Dr Gundry says.
“Without enough Vitamin D, these little stem cells don't get the message to start growing and patch the holes. It's just been fascinating in my practice, watching these holes get repaired as I give my patients more Vitamin D.”
Repair to the gut won’t last if we keep "swallowing razor blades” as food, he says.
“The razor blades that are, to me, the most mischievous are most of the grains, the foods we love most. With these razor blades, most of the lectins are in the hull of the grains.
“One of the hilarious things is that wholewheat bread is far worse for you than white sourdough bread that was traditionally fermented. Brown rice is much worse for you than white rice.
“Isn't it amazing that 6 billion people in the world use rice as their staple? And almost all those people go to the trouble of removing the hull from rice to make it white. They must have learned something through the centuries.”
Dr Steven Gundry. Photo: Dr Steven Gundry.
The human immune system has not had time to adapt to many of the foods we now regularly eat, he says.
“All of us, wherever we live, are originally from Europe, Africa or Asia. And none of us, up until 500 years ago, were exposed to plants from the Americas."
As it introduced new foods, the Columbian trade boom exposed our bodies to “a whole new set of plant toxins”, he says.
“The nightshade family - white potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers - are all brand new to us. Quinoa is brand new to us, chia seeds are brand new to us. And our immune system has not had enough time to adapt to these things.”
The Incas took care to ferment their quinoa, Dr Grundry says.
“They let it rot before they cooked it - it's not on the package directions.
“Smart Italians always peel and de-seed their tomatoes and peppers before they eat them. Because the troublemakers are in the peels and seeds.”
He is a “huge fan” of fermented foods.
“Fermentation was the primary way we detoxified certain plant compounds by having the bacteria eat them for us before they got into us.”
Fermented foods are also a good source of postbiotics, he says
“Probiotics are friendly bacteria. Prebiotics are the foods, the soluble fibres, that friendly bacteria need to eat. But when they eat prebiotics, they, if you will, poop out postbiotics.
"It turns out postbiotics are literally signalling compounds that tell us what to do, that tell us how to behave, to seal the wall of our gut.
“What's really cool is the dead bacteria in fermented foods tell the living bacteria in us that they are around and what to do.
“So it's true 'dead men tell no tales' but dead bacteria do.”
