Creating a Healthy Intestinal Microbiome With Dr. William Davis

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Our guest today is Dr. William Davis, a guest we've had on many times before.
And this time we invited Dr. Davis back to share how he feels health coaches
are the perfect healthcare practitioners to help unwell humans get to the root
cause of their health issues by focusing on relatively simple diet and lifestyle
changes that affect the incredibly diverse and important human intestinal microbiome.

(00:26):
There's a literal ton to learn from this conversation, and we really just scratched the surface.
Health coaches, do yourself a favor and get you a copy of Dr.
Davis's book, Supergut, and be sure to check out primalhealthcoach.com to enroll
in our new specialty certification course, The Human Intestinal Microbiome in
Health and Disease, which Dr.

(00:47):
Davis wrote exclusively for us to help arm health coaches with the knowledge
they need to help millions and millions of people. Please enjoy this conversation.
Hi, I'm Erin Power. And I'm Laura Rupsis. We're certified health coaches,
and this is Health Coach Radio.
This podcast is about the art, science, and business of health coaching.

(01:09):
We share our insider tips to help you become a better coach and entrepreneur.
And we interview expert guests to discover how they've made it in this growing field.
It's time for health coaches to make an impact. It's time for Health Coach Radio.
All right, Dr. Davis, we're so excited to have you back. How are you?

(01:31):
Terrific. Survived the move to Chicago, so I'm better. I recovered.
Oh, my gosh. I don't care how far a move is. When you're moving your entire
life, I don't care how close or far it is. It is a huge undertaking.
So I'm glad you survived, and we're happy to see your face.
Thank you. Yeah, so, I mean, I don't honestly think you need an introduction
to our audience, but just in case, we do.

(01:55):
Just go ahead and give us the five, three to five minute backstory on how you
landed doing what you're doing now in medicine, which is a bit controversial.
Sure. So I started out very conventionally practicing what's called interventional
cardiology, which is opening people's coronary arteries with stents and balloons
and drilling devices, all that kind of stuff.

(02:16):
But it was the death of my mom after her successful two-vessel vascular coronary
angioplasty, sudden cardiac death, that really kind of drove home to me that
what I did, what I trained for 17 years to do,
10 years of college, seven years of medical training was kind of silly,
that it was really not the best way to manage this very dangerous disease.

(02:38):
So I set out to find a way to identify people like my mom who are at risk of
dying of heart disease or having heart attack and similar things years before it happened.
And so that took me down a whole new path, this idea that let's identify people
at risk for heart disease and death years before it happens.
When you start to ask different questions, as opposed to, do you need a stent

(03:00):
or do you need a bypass operation?
You start to get answers to things.
And so I learned many lessons along the way, good lessons, bad lessons,
mistakes, blunders, all kinds of things.
But it led to a set of strategies that really worked.
We've got to reject this ridiculous notion that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.

(03:22):
The tragedy of cholesterol and related things like saturated fat is that it
took everyone's attention away from the real causes of heart disease.
There are real causes that are easy to manage, but they're not managed by drugs.
They're managed by nutrition and related things.
And so one of the lessons I learned was that if you want to stop coronary disease,

(03:43):
the progression of coronary disease, once you have coronary disease,
even in its early form, it gallops ahead dramatically and very quickly.
So if you can stop it, well, I can tell you the statin cholesterol drug,
we helped publish these data.
The statin cholesterol drugs do not stop it. They have virtually zero impact.
Yet my colleagues have the gall to call that optimal medical therapy.

(04:08):
High-dose statin drugs, baby aspirin, low-fat diet, exercise does not work.
They do not work. They absolutely do not work.
So what do you do, though? People freak it out because they have heart disease and scalping forward.
Well, one of the things you do is you can do lipoprotein testing,
not cholesterol testing.
And you'll see right away that the dominant abnormality is an excess of small

(04:29):
LDL particles, not LDL, cholesterol.
That's the indirect crude way of assessing it. but actual measurement of the
particles in the bloodstream that cause heart disease, small LDL particles,
and also VLDL particles, very low density lipoproteins.
And it's very simple. What caused that abnormality and causes coronary disease?
Wheat grains and sugars, period. You take wheat grains and sugars out of the

(04:53):
diet, and you see if you're doing lipoprotein testing, not silly cholesterol
testing, but lipoprotein testing,
you'll see small LDL, for instance, dropped from 2,400 nanomoles per liter,
particle count per volume, to zero.
It's miraculous. It's wonderful. You have incredible control,
but you've got to do the opposite of what conventional guidelines tell you.

(05:17):
That's the incredible thing. So that set me down a number of paths to really
understand how to gain health. Healthcare has nothing to do with health.
It has to do with that $80 million new wing they added for cardiovascular disease
because it makes the most money for the hospital system and my colleagues.
So we have to almost plug our ears when it comes to what we're told by health

(05:38):
care systems and doctors and start to ask, is that really true?
Is cholesterol really the cause for heart disease?
Is a low-fat diet rich in health?
Is that really the path to health? So you have to reject, start from ground
zero, and relearn all that you thought you knew in health.

(05:59):
Yes. Okay. You know, like you definitely have allies in our live audience and in Laura and myself.
I just have to say, this conversation is so hard to have with clients.
I mean, as a health coach, you know, our scope of practice precludes us from
diving into anything pertaining to medical diagnoses.
And you know i'm a really staunch advocate for staying in

(06:21):
scope so when my clients say things like isn't all
this cholesterol bad for my heart and and i want to explain well actually you
know what we know about cholesterol what we know about heart disease and inflammation
and i cannot but feel like i sound like i'm making it up it's just so far off
from the conventional the conventional wisdom.

(06:41):
It's so far from the generational understanding of heart disease.
I guess my question is, as a health coach, I want to say, you know what,
client, I'd love for you to go and get your particle size test or your particle testing done.
What kind of doctor is doing this? Because obviously the conventional doctors aren't doing it.

(07:05):
Where do we direct our clients to get, to try to find this, to try to find a
doctor that will help with this.
Sadly, Erin, it takes a generation, at least for my colleagues to catch up.
We like to think of the doctors as talking to the scientists,
keeping up to date with all the new information.
They're not. Their information source, I know this for a fact,

(07:27):
I practiced for almost 30 years.
They get their information from the sexy sales representative in a miniskirt,
who's got nice, beautiful pamphlets
and an offer to come to dinner or an all-expense-paid week in Orlando.
That's how they're educated. That's sad. It sounds very cynical, but it's true.
And so the idea that doctors are at the forefront of science is complete nonsense.

(07:49):
And so we have to accept that mainstream doctors will not have these answers
for the most part. So we have to turn to the people...
Who, like us, have rejected conventional thinking, like functional medicine doctors,
naturopaths, chiropractors. I'm grateful for these people because they recognize
that the current paradigm for health, that is for every symptom there's a drug,

(08:12):
is absurd. It's ridiculous.
And it makes a ton of money. That's the key here.
What we're doing is, it's not free, but it's damn close to free.
That is talking about nutrition and nutritional supplements,
the microbiome. These are simple things you can do in your own kitchen.

(08:32):
And doesn't make tens of thousands of dollars or now even millions of dollars, right?
There are drugs now that cost millions of dollars per year. No joke.
That's what pharma is all about. That's what healthcare is all about.
It's about money. So we're going against the tidal wave of money.
But I hope that That as we, you know, when you start to tell somebody,

(08:55):
for instance, that cholesterol is not the answer to heart disease,
that there are better ways, you can't accomplish that in one sitting.
It's a process of educating somebody and saying, listen, you know,
I'm not setting you up for your angioplasty, which I charge you thousands of dollars.
I'm trying to give you the real insight to how heart disease or other conditions
are caused and that you actually have astounding control over your future.

(09:21):
Whether you have a heart attack, whether you have sudden cardiac death,
whether you have colon cancer, whether you're going to be a type 2 diabetic,
whether you're going to be obese, you actually have astounding,
magnificent control over these things.
But the last person to talk to about this is the conventional doctor. Right. Right.
Yeah. You know, I, I've been doing a lot of kind of corporate wellness coaching for primal.

(09:45):
And inevitably when I've got a group of a hundred people, there's a handful
that are like, I can't eat that way because I have high cholesterol or because,
you know, and so they're asking me kind of what to do.
I'm not a doctor. I'm certainly, you know, so I will often just send them some
food for thought, some articles from doctors like you or other sort of thought leaders.

(10:08):
There's quite a few cardiologists now that are out there saying that doesn't work. Right.
And I'll send them articles. I can't really send them research studies.
They don't understand it. But the other thing I will do as a resource is send them.
And there's a handful of these. And I'd love your opinion on some of these are
organizations and companies that will do direct to consumer lab work that have

(10:28):
figured this stuff out. But also, here's the important part.
They provide an explanation of what the lab work means. needs, right?
Because it does you no good to kind of get this new lab work,
which often might say what your conventional doctor says sometimes,
but it's not in context. They don't know what that means.
So there's an organization that I trust that I've referred people to.

(10:49):
Do you, I know in like your undoctored circle, I think it's got a different
name now, but you've provided some resources for that.
And spoiler alert, the course you helped write for us, there's some sort of.
Recommendations in terms of types of testing that consumers have access to.
But so if a if a client or a patient doesn't have a conventional doctor they

(11:09):
trust, there's no functional medicine practitioner near them.
Although most, some of those are going more telehealth.
So doing some digging kind of on Dr. Google a little bit, looking for some functional
medicine sort of telehealth situations that might be more helpful.
But in terms of like the average consumer health consumer, I mean,
what do you, what do you think in terms of the efficacy and and the support

(11:32):
that those kinds of options provide.
So you guys know that we are up against, this is going to take a lot of work and a long time.
So we're not going to convince John Q. Public by next Tuesday that the current
way of approaching health, including heart disease, is plain wrong.

(11:53):
You know, 80 million Americans alone in the U.S. take statin cholesterol drugs, 80 million.
And it's had virtually zero impact on the incidence of heart disease,
heart attacks, et cetera. In other words, if these drugs are as effective as
they claim, that is 36% to 55% reduction in heart attack, which is not true,
that's marketing, that is not the science.

(12:15):
If that were true, we should have seen a huge drop in the need for angioplasty,
stents, bypass surgery, heart attacks, emergency room visits, but we haven't.
We have seen virtually no impact at all because the drugs barely do anything at all.
But they do make a lot imagine you invented something
uh and it made billions of

(12:36):
dollars billions of dollars every year are you going to
expose yourself and say you know what it really doesn't work because
you're making billions of dollars but once again the real tragedy of the statin
cholesterol drug uh nonsense and cut your fat cut your cholesterol is that it
took everybody's attention away from the real causes of heart disease which

(12:56):
are so easy to identify and manage And so,
you know, your local hospital continues to do a huge bang up business in aborting heart attacks.
Dealing with heart failure, cardiac rehab, all this stuff that goes with heart disease.
They're doing a great business because they failed to prevent the disease because

(13:16):
they counted on this absurd house of cards called cholesterol.
But it's going to take a long time, a lot of work for all of us to undo the
damage that's been done with 50 years of misinformation. information. So frustrating.
Yeah. So is the answer then for a patient like that or a client that like that
whose eyes really haven't been opened, right?
They're still pretty like tentative or just scared to kind of go down the road

(13:40):
we're talking about, which is this nutrient dense whole food diet of adequate
protein, whole food, healthy fats, vegetables, right?
They're afraid that those animal foods, that protein and that fat is going to cause issues.
Is the answer more kind of meeting them where they're at and just staying with
this whole food paradigm.

(14:02):
But, you know, working with them to construct a diet they do feel comfortable with.
If the idea of kind of going a different test and learning to try to trust another authority is,
I don't know. Yeah. You know, not everybody's going to be our friends, right?
There are people who say, oh, you're full of crap. There's no way.
My doctor says, you know, all that nonsense.

(14:24):
Right. So it's education. It's not taking things personally.
You're trying to undo essentially the brainwashing of 50 years,
half a century from conventional sources who maybe were not evil.
So there's actually some good people delivering the wrong message.
It's not all bad people like, you know, the executive of pharma.
And just delivering information unemotionally, scientifically and saying,

(14:49):
you know what, I fear that your focus on cholesterol has kind of led you down the wrong path.
There are better ways. I don't know if you know that, right?
And we can identify the causes of heart disease.
And it's relatively easy, but it means a different kind of look at how heart disease is caused.
And a lot of these causes, remarkably, are worsened by conventional information

(15:12):
are improved by doing the unconventional.
So if you're open to this, let's talk about it. And some people say,
nope, I'm not going to listen.
My doctor says I have to cut that fat and saturated fat, eat boneless,
skinless chicken breast and all that nonsense.
So you know what? We just can't convince everybody because it's too hard.
It's 50 years of misinformation.

(15:32):
Gosh, darn it. It's frustrating. It's very, very maddening. It's just,
it's hard not to get frustrated, especially like, you know, you have aging parents.
My dad is on every heart medication there is.
And you know, I, that generation, I just think especially really trust their doctor.
So I think maybe the path forward is, is hopeful, hopeful, hope,

(15:53):
hopes and prayers that future generations will start to come around.
So Dr. Davis, we get the sense that cardiology is,
you know, it's not, it's not, it's not working generally conventional cardiology is not working.
Now you, to me, I, when I think of Dr. Davis, I don't think of cardiology.
I think of the human microbiome.

(16:14):
I feel like you're an encyclopedia of, I mean, knowledge around the microbiome.
How, how did you make the shift from cardiology into becoming a global leading
expert and thought leader on the microbiome?
You know, Ari, it happened, but in stages. So So the wheat belly insights where
I took wheat and grains out of the diet because of coronary disease,

(16:35):
because people, I saw coronary disease galloping forward because of the small
LDL, VLDL problem that's caused by the amylopectin A of wheat.
That's the carbohydrate unique to wheat and grains.
You take wheat and grains out of the diet. And I was shocked at what happened.
This goes back now about 15 years.
You take wheat and grains out of the diet and people say, I lost 43 pounds.

(16:57):
I didn't even try. my waist shrunk by
six inches i don't know why i'm no longer
a type 2 diabetic my skin rashes joint pain
migraine headaches depression all are all gone i
thought what the and it became clear also that modern life is uh uh complicated
by new numerous nutrient deficiencies not because of the diet but because of

(17:22):
modern habits for instance something as simple as drinking water We can't drink
water from a river or stream,
you know, flowing over rocks and minerals, rich in minerals.
We can't do that. It's got sewage. It's got farm runoff, pesticides, herbicides.
So we have to, the city or we filter our water.
Well, water filtration removes all magnesium.
And so we're very magnesium deplete. And that has implications for heart disease,

(17:45):
blood pressure, bone density, numerous factors.
So we address the nutrient deficiencies common to modern life,
specifically magnesium, iodine, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamin D.
But even doing that, people will say things like, yeah, I lost 73 pounds,
but I have 30 more to go, and I hit a plateau.

(18:08):
Or I was a type 2 diabetic. I did your program.
My hemoglobin A1C was terrible. I was on my way to kidney failure and heart
disease at hemoglobin A1C of 11.7, which is terrible.
It dropped to 6.1%, but short of ideal, which is 5.0, where all the excess risk
of being a diabetic goes away.

(18:28):
And they go further and address the microbiome. It drops to 4.7.
In other words, it was that missing piece in the program.
And the deeper you dig into the gastrointestinal, specifically microbiome,
The more you recognize how, like diet, we
have massively disrupted this thing in our gastrointestinal tracts of three

(18:50):
or so pounds of microbes living in our gastrointestinal tracts that have dramatic
and powerful effects on your health, not just gastrointestinal health,
but metabolic health like blood sugar, weight control,
what goes on in your brain, the internal dialogues we have, your mood,

(19:11):
your dream content, the quality of sleep.
Libido, hormone levels, on and on and on.
You know, I cringe to think how little we knew when we did not address or recognize
what a huge role the microbiome plays in human health. Right.
You know, the more I learn about it, the more I realize how much I don't know.

(19:34):
Oh, it's literally an unexplored universe, I feel like.
We've been looking through a keyhole into the room and we catch a glimpse of this or that.
Now we open the door and shine a light. And you're right, Laura,
we're seeing extraordinary things.
And so many unanswered questions are being answered now.

(19:57):
Yeah. So when we, you know, look, I, as a health coach and as the admissions
director at our school talking to other people that want to be health coaches,
as well as existing health coaches that want to learn a lot about what we teach,
I hear a lot of people saying they want to be a gut health coach.
They want to help people address their microbiome and they're going to market

(20:21):
as a gut health specialist, which is awesome. Be there to support people.
But this is kind of what prompted us as a school to say, there's so much we still don't know.
So go into this understanding that, but we wanted to bring to market something
that was better than what we were seeing out there in terms of depth and helping
the student, the person that takes that course, realize the complexity of this

(20:43):
and have a little humility here.
Some of the people that I respect most, including you, are the ones that are
the first to say, so here's what we know, but here's what we don't know.
So, you know, and so when we really were thinking about providing some sort
of support for health coaches and then thus the end health consumer around what
they can do that will address some of this stuff after our last conversation,

(21:09):
which, you know, our last podcast, and that was years ago, Aaron and I were
blown away at how much we didn't know about what was out there in terms of support
and resources for this, that when we thought about writing a course, you were...
Number one, let's see if Dr. Davis would be willing to help us out.
So can you speak to a little bit about, first of all, kind of setting the stage

(21:30):
for the complexity of all this and why just adding probiotics and some collagen
is not necessary? Wow, that's helpful.
Could be helpful. That's not the full picture.
Yeah. So isn't it funny that we thought the gastrointestinal microbiome,
and by the way, virtually every organ has its own microbiome.
And that's another whole nother conversation.

(21:51):
That's so important in a woman giving birth, for instance,
the microbiome, the uterine, the uterine microbiome, the vaginal microbiome,
the urinary microbiome, the skin microbiome, the oral microbiome,
there are microbiomes in virtually every part of the body. That's another conversation.
But it's become clear that this thing we thought, the gastrointestinal microbiome,

(22:13):
was just a nuisance because you took an antibiotic, had diarrhea for two weeks,
and that was the end of it, right?
It's this goofy thing. You disrupt the microbiome. No, no.
Gastrointestinal microbiome is extremely powerful. Some of the things I've been seeing.
So one of the reasons why I think this is a conversation so relevant now is
because we've survived a century of antibiotics and overuse of antibiotics.

(22:38):
So most of us by age 40 have taken 30 courses of antibiotics.
And for every thousand children, over 1,300 prescriptions for antibiotics are written every year.
Now, even the CDC, the conservative people at the CDC, Centers for Disease Control,
will tell you that about a third of all antibiotic prescriptions written are

(22:59):
unnecessary or inappropriate, given, for instance, for an upper respiratory viral infection.
So the massive overexposure to antibiotics,
that always comes by way of our food supply by the way as well as other factors
preservatives and food like potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate these are antimicrobial
so you don't have mold and fungus growing in your food but it also has antimicrobial

(23:24):
effects on you other food additives like emulsifying agents.
Which disrupt the mucus barrier. Mucus in the gastrointestinal tract is very important.
It protects you from all the contents of your gastrointestinal tract, food, and microbes.
And if you dissolve the mucus barrier, say with the polysorbate 80 in ice cream,

(23:45):
microbes contact your intestinal wall and cause inflammation.
And it opens the door for microbial a breakdown of products and enter the bloodstream,
a very important process.
And so you cannot, you know, the pharmaceutical model of health is if there's
a sequence of factors that lead to, say, rheumatoid arthritis,

(24:07):
we're going to intervene in that one step.
I think what we're saying is, no, no, no, we're going to go at the root cause.
We're going to identify the factors that allowed that disease,
whether it was labeled rheumatoid arthritis or coronary disease or fatty fatty
liver or hypertriglyceridemia or carotid disease or ulcerative colitis or Crohn's
disease, we're going to get the root cause.

(24:27):
You know what? The root cause are common to hundreds of conditions.
So someone might do our programs and say, oh, I lost a whole bunch of weight. I'm no longer diabetic.
Oddly, my migraine, headaches, depression, and psoriasis also went away,
even though we weren't even targeting that.
So when we get the root cause, you enjoy enormous performance side benefits?

(24:51):
Yeah. First of all, I just want to say, as I was building the course,
so, you know, as, as Laura touched on, we had Dr. Davis write this incredible course.
I'm obsessed with it and I'm building it as we speak. And the emulsifier thing is,
blew my mind. That's actually so logical. When we have these emulsifiers,
these ingredients that are designed to emulsify fats and break things down and

(25:14):
help things blend together, they have sort of a disintegrative property to them.
And how that would go down and
do its job in the mucous lining of the intestine. It's just like, dang.
Because I think the idea of processed foods, we know processed foods are bad.
That's one thing that even health consumers know. Processed foods.
I should eat less processed foods. Processed foods are bad, but it's like processed

(25:36):
foods are bad because this ingredient is going into your gut and dissolving the mucus lining.
And now you have no barrier between your gut and the outside world.
It's just, many things in this course blew my mind.
We have one chapter in the course, chapter six, it's the disrupted microbiome
and its role in human disease.
And it's like irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease,

(25:59):
celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, diabetes, overweight,
obesity, autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease,
like list and list and list and list.
And there is one line in this curriculum that to me, it was just encapsulates
everything, which is health coaches.
The root cause of most of what your clients are dealing with probably is down

(26:20):
in the microbiome somewhere in the microbiome somewhere.
And I say down, it's not even just the gut.
It's the entire GI tract. impact it's every
possible microbiome is disrupted skin vaginal urinary
breast is a breast microbiome didn't know that that learned that
in the course as well so it's a lot it's i guess
what i'm getting at is this is very vast um and we have a lot of questions from

(26:44):
coaches who are getting who want to get granular into what about this scenario
what about that scenario are you open to some scenario type cues from our audience
i'll just make a quick point erin that is it can seem overwhelming at first,
all these new crazy names like Saccharomyces and Clostridia.
But you know what? If you get...

(27:05):
Just acquainted with what's going on in the microbiome, you are light years
ahead of the conventional practicing physician who knows nothing.
And you know, you guys know this, my colleagues are champions at covering up
their ignorance with authority and saying things like, Erin,
did you consult Dr. Google again?

(27:26):
Or there's nothing wrong with you. Don't waste my time. There's no such thing.
And so it's going to take a generation or two for them to catch up to where
your health coaches can be.
So they need to be aware that just doing this course, getting acquainted with
microbiome issues, a work in progress, will make them far more effective and

(27:48):
far more knowledgeable.
So you shouldn't be intimidated by the doctor who says, Aaron,
that's ridiculous, because you know better. You know a lot more.
They're covering up their ignorance.
We need to educate them also, but it's hard to educate docs because they think they know it already.
It'll happen, but it's going to happen in a generation, 20 to 30 years. Yeah.

(28:08):
Okay. So if we get into sort of health coaching situations and these very granular
questions that have come in from many of our viewers and folks registered for this webinar,
I think the first place a health coach would typically start,
and especially, honestly, a primal health coach, I do have to say our particular
audience of health coaches, and I'll just toot our horn.
We are on the ball with this generally.

(28:28):
The primal approach is similar to your approach, which is let's take these inflammatory,
gut-irritating foods out that haven't contributed anything positively to our
health culturally ever.
So let's get rid of those. They're not nutritionally necessary.
So I'm thinking about clients that I have for whom I say, let's tap the brakes
on wheat, sugar, grains.

(28:50):
Let's just take that out for a period of time and and see if that helps you
feel better, insert symptomology here.
So we start with this dietary approach and generally people do feel better.
If we just stuck with that, let's say we just said, great, you feel better,
keep those foods out of your diet, the client can see the immediate sort of

(29:13):
downstream effects, like I took them out, I feel better, anyone can put that together.
If we just stuck with a healthy diet, a gut supporting diet,
In your estimation, how far would we get? How far would that take us to having
a healthy microbiome versus what additional steps in terms of repopulation and
further support is there?

(29:34):
How big of a picture does diet play, generally speaking?
It's huge. It's not sufficient for full recovery for many people, but it's a huge factor.
So, you know, because some of the things we're doing with microbiome strategy
is so fun, exciting, and powerful.
People tend to say oh you know the diet doesn't matter and official
vitamin d but those those

(29:55):
basic things do matter by the way the nutrients that we
focus on restoring because they're lacking modern life
like magnesium omega-3 fatty acids vitamin d iodine this was not intentional
they're all very important for microbiome health for instance omega-3 fatty
acids are an activator of an
enzyme that lines your intestines called intestinal alkaline phosphatase.

(30:21):
Which deactivates some of the toxins that come from bacteria,
specifically the LPS endotoxin.
That's a very potent toxin that comes from bacteria when they die.
You have trillions of microbes in your gastrointestinal tract.
Well, they live and die in hours. They don't live for decades.
They live for hours. When they die, they shed something called LPS endotoxin,
and it's very toxic and omega-3

(30:44):
fatty acids activate the enzyme that partially not
entirely but partially deactivate that that vitamin d
is extremely important for the intestinal immune response iodine is really important
because if you have marginal iodine status and thereby mild hypothyroidism it
slows the transit of food through your gastrointestinal tract and that allows

(31:07):
over-proliferation of certain species.
So even though I didn't create that list of nutrients, basic nutrients for the
microbiome, it turns out they're all important for microbiome health.
So those basic things still do count for a lot.
Yes, there's so much. There's just so many moving parts, honestly.
I'm also just always impressed by just your ability to just rattle this stuff off. stuff.

(31:32):
Okay. So we have some questions. I'm going to throw this, I'm going to throw this out here.
Okay. So how does food sensitivity testing, if at all, I think that's sometimes
where health coaches go.
My client isn't feeling well when they eat onions and garlic.
I have a client right now who's not feeling well when she eats onion and garlic,
which to me is like, oh, that's got to be SIBO. I don't know.
But to her, she's like, I think I have a food sensitivity. Should I take a test?

(31:56):
You know, what, where do you think this relationship, how does this land?
So whether it's to nightshades like eggplant and tomatoes or histamine containing
foods like cheese or wine or FODMAPs, fibers and sugars in food or nuts,
you name it, this is all, virtually all SIBO, that is small intestinal bacterial

(32:19):
overgrowth, like you mentioned, Erin.
So the loss of hundreds of beneficial species, so antibiotics.
Preservatives, emulsifying it, have changed the gastrointestinal microbiome.
We've lost literally hundreds, if not more, important species.
Well, among the things those species did for us is suppress unhealthy species,

(32:39):
specifically microbes that sound familiar, like E.
Coli, salmonella, campylobacter, because they're also causes of food poisoning.
So we lose healthy microbes.
We lose their suppressive properties on those unhealthy fecal microbes.
Those unhealthy fecal microbes proliferate and then remarkably ascend up into

(33:01):
the small intestine, the 24 feet of small. You know what?
I was guilty of thinking this was a rare thing until a PhD engineer from Dublin,
Ireland invented the air device that you blow into,
talks to your smartphone, and registers how much hydrogen gas is in your breath
because bacteria produce hydrogen gas and you do not.

(33:24):
So you can use it. It's a mapping device.
You can use it when used properly to tell you where microbes are living.
And to my great surprise, when this thing came out in 2018, and we had thousands
of people testing it, it was shocking that it was uncommon to test negative.
Now, you might say, well, maybe the device, maybe the whole concept is flawed,

(33:44):
except that I saw people testing positive, zero to 10 scale.
Starting with a real high level, say 10 or 9.8, whatever.
And then they take steps to eradicate the microbes in the small bowel,
SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
And we'd see some residual health problem finally go away.
I lost 73 pounds, but I was stuck. I have 30 more pounds. I finally lost that

(34:08):
weight. My hemoglobin A1C finally dropped into the four range.
My depression finally lifted. affected my
skin rashes that kept on coming back despite all the
steroid creams for the last 10 years finally went away
we saw residual health problems dissolve
in the face of eradicating sebo and by the way uh people get scared by sebo

(34:30):
because they hear this idea that you must take the conventional antibiotic rifaximin
or xifaxin uh which by the way is very expensive it's got side effects it's
about 50 to 60 percent effective so not very good and of course you go to the a gastroenterologist,
he says, take this prescription.
If he even knows what SIBO is, most do not.

(34:50):
Take this prescription. You're back a few months later because it comes back.
Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. There's no insight in helping you find
out why you got it, how you can increase the efficacy, what you can do to stop it.
So one of the things I did is ask this question.
What if I have SIBO, which is incredibly common?

(35:12):
I think it's at least 50%, at least 50% of the North American population. It's huge.
It's as big as the obesity and overweight epidemics. What if I take a conventional,
off-the-shelf commercial probiotic?
Will the SIBO go away? 30 feet of microbes.
No. You might have a reduction in bloating or diarrhea temporarily,

(35:36):
but your SIBO, the 30 feet of microbes won't go away.
So I asked some different questions. I asked, what if we chose microbes that
colonize the upper GI tract, that's where SIBO occurs, and produce what are called bacteriocins.
These are natural antibiotics effective against the species of SIBO, the fecal microbes.
So I created this yogurt. It's not yogurt. It looks and smells like yogurt,

(36:00):
but it's a fermentation vehicle.
And we let it ferment for a long time. So we get hundreds of billions of microbes.
We did something called flow cytometry on the yogurt.
You get about 300 billion microbes per half cup serving.
So I chose three microbes. microbes that be in our 17 strain of gasseri the
6475 strain of roteri and bacillus coagulans.

(36:22):
We have to when we play with microbes you have to pay attention to strain,
as an illustration you all your listeners have
e coli we have e coli in our guts what if they
let us contaminated by cow manure and e coli we can die
of that e coli same species different strains so we have to pay attention to
strength it's tedious cumbersome i know but you pay pay attention to strain

(36:43):
and you have more greater chances of having effective results so we make this
three microbe yogurt so far anecdotal we have not performed the clinical trial yet we will,
40 people who've done this 90 have converted to hydrogen gas negative using
the air device it's yogurt you know if i if i said you know hey laura if you

(37:05):
want to get rid of your sebo you have to take your colon out,
You better be damn confident of what you're doing. But what if the solution
could be something akin to yogurt?
We don't have to be quite so confident. And what I stumbled on by doing this
is not just a solution to SIBO.
And by the way, to recurrences of SIBO, we're also replacing microbes that you've

(37:30):
lost, that you were supposed to have all along.
Very important species. So if we looked at primitive people,
hunter-gatherers in New Guinea, or the Brazilian rainforest,
or the Tanzanian savanna, they all have rhodorite, for instance.
If we sequence the microbiome of a gopher, or raccoon, or a deer,

(37:51):
or a moose, they all have rhodorite and gasorite.
And so what we're really doing is replacing microbes we've lost.
And I think it's the loss of those microbes, that's probably a big part of the
reason why SIBO is now epidemic.
Yeah. That's the keystone species.
It's not just that we have an overgrowth of other things. We've also lost our

(38:11):
keystone species, that bigger picture.
So, and what I'm hearing tagging back to Aaron's question is the food sensitivity
test might be telling you what you're reacting to, but you're reacting to them for a reason.
It's not just, oh, because it's not really an allergy, right?
It's like, why am I sensitive to it?
And it's lies in the gut and kind of what that, what, what is it?
What's inherent about that kind of food?

(38:32):
Is it the type of sugar? Is it the type of starch? Is it, you know,
what is it that's in that food that the gut is responding to and causing that
inflammatory response?
You know, if we told our grandmas that we have all these food sensitive and
people say, I only can eat four different foods.
Every other food causes adverse reaction like diarrhea or headaches or throw vomiting.

(38:53):
Your grandma said, you're nuts. right? This doesn't, this does not happen.
So it's a modern phenomenon.
There's nothing wrong with the food. There's something wrong with you.
And that is you have SIBO, you have increased intestinal permeability,
and you've generated an immune response.
So you could do food testing, IgG food testing, and identify those foods.
You could eliminate the FODMAPs or the nightshades of histamine-containing foods,

(39:16):
but you've not addressed the underlying cause.
And that is loss of healthy microbial species, proliferation of unhealthy fecal
microbes that cause the food sensitivity.
Because I've seen this now countless times, you address the SIBO.
You can eat all the FODMAPs, nightshades, just to maintain the food you want.

(39:37):
Yeah. So if you're getting these foods that keep popping up on a food sensitivity
test, can you find the common denominator amongst those foods?
And perhaps a low FODMAP diet from a symptomatology standpoint helps the client
feel better while you treat the underlying cause of SIBO.
That's reasonable. Yeah. You can eliminate the foods temporarily that seem to

(40:00):
provoke symptoms. symptoms, and then fold them back in, maybe in small quantities
at first, to see whether you've, it can be a nice little test for you.
If you spend a month, say, eating the, what I call SIBO yogurt,
that's the three microbes, proliferate the high counts, you do that,
and now you can, you eat a little bit of, let's say, cheese,
or eggplant, or tomatoes, whatever, and oh, I don't respond.

(40:23):
That's good evidence to you that you've eradicated the SIBO.
Yeah. What phenomenal, empowering conversation to have with clients saying,
look, you don't have to live on this super strict diet forever.
Right now we're doing this to remove the symptoms so you can live your life,
but we're going to be working on rebuilding the integrity of your gut microbiome

(40:45):
so that we can then add more variety down the road rather than having clients faced with like,
I'm never going to be able to eat a tomato again, tomatoes,
you know, or whatever it is.
But from a coaching perspective, this like, I, as a client, if I was that client,
and if it meant that I was taking those out for six months, while we tried to help fix my gut,

(41:05):
if that meant that I might be able to actually have salsa again,
or tomato or tomato sauce again, I would absolutely do it.
You know, and of course, you know, kids, kids, kids are having a real problem, right?
With these food intolerances. Yeah, this is not natural. It's something that
modern life has created.
Yeah. I think that it's exciting to springboard off what Laura was saying,

(41:28):
because this is in the realm of the health coach.
We're running an experiment. We're going to run this experiment for a period
of time, and then we're going to run a different experiment where we try to
bring this food back in and just see what happens.
So there's the self-efficacy, the empowerment of the health consumer who finally
feels like they have some semblance of control of what's happening in their body.
But also this is within the realm of the health coach branching out doing food experiments.

(41:52):
Okay. So, so the big questions we're getting everywhere, everywhere.
There's two big ones. Okay. The first one is, so what you're saying is,
probiotics are pointless. Probiotics implementations are pretty much pointless
because I do feel like this is a good question just to kind of quickly close
the loop on, because I think it's one of those supplements that health coaches
really lean on because it's, yeah, it's generally not harmful,

(42:15):
might as well, but it's sort of like, is there any utility to commercially available probiotics?
Or should we honestly, and just like your honest gut opinion,
should we just kind of maybe pump the brakes on even recommending it at this point?
Cause it's kind of like not helping that much that's
the first one of these two common questions what do you think what's
the official stance on like conventional probiotics so i call the current crop

(42:37):
of probiotics probiotics 1.0 it's the first uh generation of probiotics which
are essentially haphazard collections of microbes oh bifidobacterium longum seems good throw it in.
Lactobacillus gastrocyte throw it in they're haphazard collections and they do have some benefit.
They do increase mucus production in the intestinal tract. They do help suppress

(43:02):
temporarily some of the unhealthy microbes.
They do provide some collaborative effects for other microbes,
but they're only modestly helpful.
And the mistake made by many people is that they think the probiotic is the solution. It's not.
It's the last thing on the list that rebuilds a healthy microbiome.
Now that's going to change as some of the manufacturers start to incorporate

(43:23):
some of the the newer findings, such as collaborative effects.
You know, microbes are just like people. You know, we don't live in isolation.
We have a partner, families, neighbors, friends, co-workers, communities.
Microbes are the same. They have collaborative consortia, or guilds are called.
Where they collaborate to generate specific effects.

(43:44):
Well, I know of one product, one product on the market, and I have no relationship
with the company, except the people who developed it, with my friends called Sugar Shift.
It's a collaborative guild of microbes that lower blood sugar because they consume sugar.
So that's the start of this concept of collaborative guilds in a probiotic.

(44:04):
Now, the dark side of all this is because the probiotic markets become so competitive.
There's also a lot of gimmickry going on now, too, such as things like,
oh, you must take soil-based spore-forming microbes. That's nonsense.
That's fiction. Somebody made that up. not to
say there aren't soil-based spore-forming microbes that are beneficial like

(44:25):
our friend bacillus coagulans very beneficial bacillus
subtilis very beneficial but but to say that
all the other microbes are that's that's nonsense or double encapsulation so
that the probiotic doesn't release until it gets to the cold that's that's not
a good idea because if over 50 of the u.s uh the north american population has

(44:45):
has a small intestine back to overgrowth you want release in the small bowel.
So there's a lot of gimmickry going on. It's going to improve in coming years,
but right now we don't want to over-rely on a probiotic because they're only modestly helpful.
Cool. Great. There we go.
Now, the second most common question we're getting, and I've been chatting in

(45:07):
the chat with people about this, that this is a loaded question.
There's as many things are.
What tests are available to the consumer that health coaches just can encourage
their clients to go and get.
So people don't need to buy the air device to confidently deal with SIBO.
You can look at, you can just deal with what I call telltale signs.

(45:32):
There are signs that tell you you have SIBO. For instance, fat malabsorption.
If you see fat droplets in the toilet or standing of the porcelain where the
water meets the porcelain, those are very common, confident signs of SIBO. Food intolerances.
If you have, you can't eat this, this, this, this, this, that is almost guaranteed to be a SIBO.
If you have conditions virtually synonymous with SIBO, fibromyalgia,

(45:57):
virtually 100% of people who have fibromyalgia have SIBO and have it really bad.
Irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease,
obesity, fatty liver, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases.
These are so highly associated with SIBO that I would just, it's safe to say,

(46:18):
okay, you know what? I didn't do the air testing, but I think I've got SIBO
because I've got fibromyalgia or something like that. Restless leg syndrome, another one.
Especially if you subscribe to this idea that we can use what I call SIBO yogurt,
it's so benign and it's fun.
And it might cost you a few dollars to buy the microbes. That's the hassle of

(46:39):
that. By the way, you have to source the microbes from different sources.
Once you do it, you make future batches from a little bit of the prior batch.
So this is also a cost-saving maneuver.
And by the way, also true of probiotics. You buy a commercial probiotic,
you can make a yogurt or other, it doesn't have to be dairy, it could be other foods.
You ferment it, you've got the microbes at higher counts.

(47:00):
It's better than the probiotic. And you make subsequent batches from a little of the prior batch.
And so it's a great cost-saving maneuver also.
And then in terms of stool samples, there's many available. available any particular
brand that you recommend?
Well, it depends on what your goals are because different, one of the things

(47:22):
to accept with stool testing is you're essentially doing a rectal stool sample, right?
It's not an ascending colon. It's not the small bowel ileum.
So if we, if you and I were to sample a stool every inch, no one's going to do this, right?
But if we did this every inch along the four to five feet of colon,

(47:43):
we'd get different results from every inch.
So my friend, Dr. Raul Cano, 40-year academic microbiologist,
he did something wacky. It's impractical, right, to sample every inch along the colon.
So he did something else. He did full bowel movements and homogenized them and
then analyzed the complete bowel movement.

(48:04):
And it's completely different than what you get from a rectal sample.
That is One of the participants submitted four from the same bowel movement
to four different testing companies, got four different results.
There was some overlap, but therefore, so we have to accept that stool testing is imperfect.

(48:28):
Ideally, what we'd have is location specific. And you can't,
of course, identify SIBO by stool testing because that's a small bowel process.
And what you're doing is a rectal test. So, we just have to accept that there's
major deficiencies in stool testing.
Not to say you still can't identify some useful information,
like the percentage, for instance, of acromantia or fecal bacteria.

(48:50):
So, there is still useful information.
Some of the basic tests like GI map, GI effects, those are still helpful,
even though they're limited, and how a lot of those tests only go to genus, not species.
So they can say things like, oh, you have lactobacillus. Well,
which ones? But sometimes you don't have to know that.

(49:12):
If you do want to know that, let's say you're doing lactobacillus gasseri yogurt
or some other fermented food. You want to know, has it taken up residence?
Do I have a substantial amount? Then you need something that goes down to species
and even strain, like gut zoomer or thrive.
That goes down to species and strain. So it depends.

(49:34):
These are all listed in the course, of course. Use this test for this.
Use this test for this. uh but the
basic tests that are widely available like gfx ga map and some
others still usually also offer what are
called physiologic markers that is they
tell you whether you have fat malabsorption protein malabsorption whether you
have pancreatic insufficiency uh undigested food measures like calprotectin

(49:59):
which is a reflection of inflammatory response in the gi tract so they can be
very helpful but you just have to accept from the start that they're very,
very limited in reliability.
Yeah. I mean, it sounds to me like all of these various testing options kind
of give us a piece of the pie.
They don't give us the whole thing. And I guess if you have the financial resources

(50:19):
to put all the pieces together, awesome.
But otherwise, what I hear you saying is there's a lot that you can surmise
just from your own experience, things you know you've already been diagnosed
with, certain symptoms.
But we're getting a lot of questions in here, questions about what about fermented
sauerkraut? what about fermented quinoa?
So is our food fermented food, like foods that are fermented that carry probiotics?

(50:41):
Do they, do you have any ideas whether they're more effective or is it?
So first of all, yes or no. And if it's yes, is it because that food-based medium.
Like the yogurt allows you to get a higher concentration of the probiotic, not the species.
So yogurt is more useful for targeting specific species.
So if you say, and by the way, you can treat this like going to a restaurant.

(51:06):
You know, if you go to a restaurant and the waitress hands you a menu,
you don't freak out and say, I can't possibly order all these appetizers and main dishes, right?
You pick and choose the dishes you want.
Same thing here. If you want smoother skin with loss of wrinkles or restoration
of youthful muscle and strength or increased libido or deeper sleep,

(51:26):
let's ferment lactobacillus reuteri.
If you want to shrink your waist, taste, put aside diet and exercise.
Let's ferment lactobacillus gasseri. If you have a new baby,
you want that baby to have improved neurological development,
sleep through the night, fewer bowel movements, fewer diaper changes,
less likely to have asthma, type 2 diabetes and obesity.

(51:47):
Let's ferment bifidobacterium infantis for that child. You can choose the microbes.
That's the usefulness of these yogurt fermentations.
Laurie, you raise a very important question. One of the most important things
anybody can do is use fermented foods.
The curious thing about fermented foods, whether it's kombucha, kimchi,
kaffirs, yogurts, fermented veggies on your kitchen counter,

(52:09):
is that the microbes that ferment,
if you rely on the microbes resident on a vegetable surface,
like a cucumber or a tomato, those are species like Pediococcus pentasaceus
or Pediococcus acetylactoside.
Or Luganostoc mesenterite. I know these names are crazy. I know.
And of course, the microbiologists have changed the names to even more confusingly,

(52:32):
but Lactobacillus plantarum.
These are microbes for the most part that don't take up residence in the GI tract.
So they're foreign, but they have this peculiar ability to cultivate the proliferation
of other healthy microbes that you need. No one knows how that happens.
Are those healthy microbes quiescent in small numbers and the passage of,

(52:57):
let's say, leuconostoc and pedicoccus somehow allows them to bloom, nobody knows.
But it's become clear that fermented foods are this wonderful,
underappreciated thing in your diet.
And it's virtually no cost. If you want to ferment, say, cucumbers or tomatoes
on your kitchen counter, it's the cost of the vegetables, filtered water and some non-iodized salt.

(53:21):
And you do it yourself on your kitchen counter. it's very
easy people are frightened of it they think it's rotten it's not rotten so
it was the introduction of home refrigeration that
essentially did away with fermented foods even though
your great-grandmother fermented foods all the time so it's in a lot of ways
what a lot of what we're doing here is is uh going back to old practices that

(53:44):
worked and that people were accustomed to but as modern people we don't do anymore
i love that okay so so this is really really,
really, there's so much powerful information here, but just to circle back to
the question of testing,
it does sound like the symptomology is the way to go.
And the question always is, and we had this question pre-submitted,
which is like, how long does it take?
So if we say to a client, I want you to eliminate nightshade vegetables for

(54:08):
a period of time, what period of time?
Because I mean, like an autoimmune paleo protocol is something like a six month,
you know, somewhere up to six months of elimination.
And then this methodical reintroduction and now you're looking at years of life.
What do you think? I know that's a hard question to answer, but can we get that done?
Can we kind of clear the decks in a couple of weeks and then branch back into

(54:30):
reintroduction? What's your hunch?
It really depends, Erin, on the path you choose. So if you choose rifaximin,
you can reacquire tolerance typically within a couple of weeks if it works,
the 50% or 60% of people in which it works, for whom it works.
There's only two herbal antibiotic regimens that have been at least somewhat

(54:51):
validated in clinical trials.
That's the Candabactin AR, BR, or the F-C-Cidal plus this Bioside.
Those two have been looked at.
They do work. I've used many times prior to SIBO yogurt.
They do work. I think they're superior to rifaximin, and that was the results
of that clinical trial from Johns Hopkins.
That is, rifaximin was put up against those two herbal antibiotic regimens,

(55:15):
and the herbal antibiotic regimens outperformed the rifaximin.
So that's a couple of weeks, typically.
With the SIBO, we're doing it for four weeks, but some people have it so bad.
So the person who says something like this, oh, I've taken antibiotics for years
because I had acne or had some other reason to take and I have multiple food

(55:39):
intolerances, chronic diarrhea, abdominal pain.
They do an endoscopy, colonoscopy, say there's nothing wrong with you.
Do you want an antidepressant? right those people
uh can take months of whatever
you choose like the SIBO yogurt so it can vary uh I don't know how to identify
those people ahead of time aside from their history uh but you know we're talking

(56:00):
about a yogurt you know it's it's not in other words what as I said what are
the side effects of the SIBO yogurt,
your waist shrinks, your skin is smoother, your sleep is deeper,
your libido goes up, you get restoration of youthful muscle and strength,
your bone density is preserved.

(56:21):
In other words, it's not like a drug where you have liver failure and opportunistic infections.
No, you get all these, by the way, youth preserving or age reversing benefits.
And so I call it, I regret calling it SIBO yogurt.
It makes it sound like it's a drug or a treatment, It's really a restoration
of microbes you lost that you should have had all along that remarkably,

(56:44):
to this day, guys, I'm astounded at, for instance, what lactobacillus reuteri can do for you.
So lactobacillus reuteri, you may recall, yes, takes up resin,
small bowel, produce bactericids, so useful for SIBO, but also sends a signal,
retrograde to the vagus nerve to your brain to release the hormone oxytocin.

(57:07):
The hormone of love and empathy so people say you
know what i love my partner more i love my children more
i love my core i get along better with the co-workers i'm more generous my favorite
i'm more accepting of other people's opinions oxytocin but oxytocin is becoming
clear now it's not just a matter of social and emotional effects it's also physiological

(57:28):
effects like guys Guys experience a surge in testosterone,
deeper sleep, more vivid dreams, restoration of muscle and strength.
You know, older ladies typically in their late 60s and 70s develop vaginal atrophy,
dryness, irritation, loss of libido and repeated urinary infections and urgent

(57:51):
condoms. You laugh and you wet yourself, you pee.
This is a big problem. And the conventional solutions are terrible.
A woman has to make a decision, for instance.
Will you risk thromboembolic disease and endometrial cancer by taking estrogens to reverse this?
So it's an awful choice. Well, guess what? Roteri.
Address the entire constellation of all those phenomena.

(58:13):
Vaginal atrophy, loss of libido. There's some other things ladies can do,
by the way, for the urinary component of this, like lactobacillus crispatus.
That's a microbe that the vaginal, I'm getting off track here,
I'm sorry, but the vaginal microbiome is very specific.
It's very different from the gastrointestinal microbiome. It's very discreet, very definable.
And vaginal microbiome normally should have dominance of Lactobacillus crispatus

(58:37):
and should not have dominance of unhealthy microbes like Gardnerella,
Adipobium, and fecal microbes.
One third, one third of the world's population of females has the opposite.
Lack of Lactobacilli and dominance of those unhealthy species.
Well, if a woman can restore that, that restores a lot of vaginal health.

(59:00):
So extremely powerful. And here's another thing to learn from all that.
If a woman takes a probiotic, let's say lactobacillus crispatus,
or the RC-14 strain of lactobacillus rhodori, woman takes it orally.
It will populate the vaginal canal. How? There's no connection.
There's no connection between the gastrointestinal and the vagina.

(59:22):
We got to believe it's contiguity, nearness in the perineum, that area.
And the lactobacillus crispatus, even more remarkably, will colonize the bladder.
And good evidence from Loyola in Chicago, 50% reduction in repeated urinary
tract infections. So not complete cure, but 50% reduction from one microbe taken orally.

(59:49):
And by the way, that raises another very interesting issue. That is this emerging
issue of what's called translocation.
That is microbes are able to leave where they originate and gain access to other parts of the body.
This is a big deal, by the way, in Alzheimer's dementia, where oral microbes
are becoming clearer and clearer. Oral microbes are a major player in dementia.

(01:00:10):
Oral microbes. microbes oral microbes like fusobacterium nucleotide which proliferates
when you have bleeding gums or gingivitis or periodontitis so it blooms when
you have those situations and then it gains access to the bloodstream when you floss or brush,
and it populates it colonize the colon where it causes colon cancer,

(01:00:33):
so a great example
of translocation a microbe here in the mouth
can colonize the colon you would
think it does so by swallowing it's not it's it's been
looked at it gains access to the bloodstream and so this is causing us to redefine
re-examine so many can think about that colon cancer starts in the mouth so

(01:00:57):
yeah yeah goes that colonoscopy every so often right to detect early cancer.
But why not address the oral microbiome and the gastrointestinal microbiome that could be sourced?
And by the way, the PrEP used, the polyethylene glycol.
For prep for a colonoscopy is the worst disruptor of the mucus barrier known to man.

(01:01:18):
So the prep for prevention of detection of early cancer likely causes cancer.
Oh my God. I can so see the future of, you know, the gastrointestinal portion of just healthcare.
If we do this right, or people that are literally experts in understanding which
microbes target which issues and figuring out how to kind of repopulate that

(01:01:42):
without needing medications.
I'm sure the pharma industry can figure out a way to freaking like benefit from
financially benefit from actually just using microbiota.
I think you guys have a sense just how powerful addressing the microbiome can be.
And we're talking about, you know, people just think, oh, I had diarrhea and
it helps that. But no, no, no.
We can talk about skin health, vaginal health, not having miscarriages,

(01:02:07):
not having premature labor.
These are all microbiome issues. It's becoming extremely powerful.
The sad thing, of course, is that John Q Primary Care has no knowledge of this whatsoever.
That's why this is so wonderful. The health coaches are going to be far more
powerful, far more knowledgeable than conventional physicians.

(01:02:28):
Because I don't think we're here to make billions of dollars as they are in
conventional healthcare. We're here to help people become healthy.
So your health coaches are doing what they should do. That is addressing health,
not the business of healthcare.
And sadly, that's what healthcare has become, just a big business.
So the reason why pharma is not that involved in the microbiome is patents.

(01:02:51):
It's too hard to patent microbes and related technologies.
Because if your goal is to make billions of dollars off some product and you
can't protect it. And that's why.
Billions of women were given Premarin, horse estrogens, even though human estrogen

(01:03:12):
was available all along, except for the first couple of years or so.
But women were given horse estrogens despite horrible side effects,
including cancers, cardiovascular death, and thrombobolic disease.
I mean, seriously, we're not talking about skin rashes or stomach aches.
We're talking about death and cancer from this drug because it was patent protectable.

(01:03:35):
So that is the defining theme for big pharma. We don't have to play that game.
We don't care if a microbe is patentable or not. We like this microbe because
it provides specific benefits.
And by the way, it doesn't have to be yogurt. It could be salsa.
It could be hummus. It could be veggie.
You can ferment all kinds of things. And it's a lot of fun.

(01:03:55):
One thing I can't tell you is whether you can achieve the hundreds of billions.
You can with coconut milk, by the way. And anybody who wants to ferment coconut
milk, take a look at the recipes.
In the course, as well as my super gut book, because coconut milk is fussy. It likes to separate.
So you have to do some extra steps, but you can make a very delicious yogurt
with coconut milk, non-dairy.
Every time we talk about this yogurt, I think I'm going to make it.

(01:04:16):
Okay. So last few questions. Okay. These are so fast.
I'm going to cue them up for you. So these are the questions that came in.
We have a lot of questions about parasites and how that factors in because parasites
are kind of trendy right now.
I feel like I see a lot of health coaches just doing parasite cleanses with their clients.
So that's one question. And the second question that was really commonly submitted
was the mental health of kids and teens is like probably at an all time problematic

(01:04:42):
level for many, many reasons.
But inside the course, there was, you mentioned this, there's like a heritable
piece to the biome, right?
So can we hit those two topics like boom, boom real quick? So parasites first, what's your thought?
The conventional stool tests are useful for that purpose. If I identify Entamoeba

(01:05:03):
histolytica, for instance, that is useful to know.
Now, one of the things you have to be careful about is we get away from this
pharma notion. If you have this microbe, we have this drug.
That's the trap that pharma takes you down.
I would instead view it this way. It depends on the microbe,
of course. It depends on the parasite.
But for many parasites, the solution is not this antibiotic or antifungal or

(01:05:26):
antiparasitic for that organism.
Organism it's to address the general microbiome because unhealthy
species emerge when you lost your healthy species so it's not so we gotta get
away from that pharma notion um but it depends on the on the parasite identified
but i would urge people to use stool testing and identify those parasites not
assume it's a parasite because uh parasites are still uncommon they're not,

(01:05:51):
SIBO is much more common you're going to get a lot better results as focusing
on SIBO and colonic dysbiosis.
You know, with kids, you know, a lot of kids have been, you've heard these stories.
My daughter won't eat anything but macaroni and cheese.
Yeah. Well, that child has a very bad future ahead because they have massive
disruption of their microbiome.

(01:06:13):
They likely have SIBO and they're likely going to have behavioral,
psychological, and neurological side effects down down the road.
So everything we talk about with adults applies at least as well to children.
Bariatric surgery for teenage, for children now, according to the Academy of
Pediatrics. Really? No, no.

(01:06:35):
You can do so much for kids. And so all the things we talk about with adults
apply equally well with children.
Now, when we get down to infants, that's a little bit different conversation
like that bifidobacteria infantis.
That's the dominant microbe in an infant, particularly during the first year.
It can occupy as much as 70, 80, 90% of all microbes.

(01:06:56):
It becomes the dominant microbe because that's the microbe that
helps a child digest the human
milk oligosaccharides in breast milk if that child does not have infantis and
mom is breastfeeding that child will still not have full development proper
development neurologically and emotionally because that child needs both it

(01:07:16):
needs the human milk oligosaccharides in breast milk by the way virtually absent in synthetic formula.
And it needs to be fed back to your infantis to metabolize a human milk oligosaccharides.
Now that goes away as the child becomes a toddler, but teenagers,
if mom tested the teenager for SIBO with the air device, they're going to be shocked.

(01:07:40):
Because they do goofy things, right? They only eat pizza. They drink soda.
They have slurpees. They eat too much candy.
In other words, you know, it only takes about three days of over-consuming sugars
to generate severe dysbiosis and SIBO. Three days. Wow.

(01:08:01):
Oh my God. I just think back to college when my college roommate lived on,
she had everything bagels with cream cheese and Doritos stuffed inside.
Like that was lunch for her.
I know. So, I mean, there's just so much we can dig into.
And what I'm hoping, you know, our audience is taking away is how complicated

(01:08:22):
this is and how important it is to come to this with some humility,
understanding we're learning new things all the time, but that this course is
aimed to address some of these complexities as best we can through the mindset
and the sort of scope of a health coach.
But I have yet to see a course on the market. I haven't seen all of it,

(01:08:43):
but Erin, I've kind of peeked at like a couple of chapters here and there that are in there.
I've maybe spent an hour trying to peek through and see what's in there.
And I've already learned so much.
There's so much in here, you guys. And what I have found from client to client
is the more focused they are on behaviors and choices that make them well, illnesses fall away.

(01:09:08):
They quiet.
That's the kind of thing. So as health coaches, it's using these tools as a
way to have conversations about wellness and health rather than keeping them
stuck in their disease, mentally, psychologically, and all of that stuff.
Stuck, that victimness.
It's, I'm going to be a wellness warrior and I'm going to fight every day to be well.

(01:09:29):
And by the way, the percentage of the time that helps either improve illness
is 100%. It's literally 100%. Laura, that is a brilliant insight.
Couldn't agree more. We need to get away from this idea of for every symptom, there's a drug.
We're going to treat high blood sugar.

(01:09:50):
We're going to treat high blood pressure. Don't treat anything.
As you say, let's address the factors that allow those conditions to emerge
in the first place, regardless of the label.
What was hypertension, coronary disease, ulcerative colitis, type 2 diabetes, lupus.
We don't care about the label because the root causes are virtually all the the same.

(01:10:14):
So let's address the root causes while you may do it to lose weight because
you're 280 pounds, but then you're no longer hypertensive. You're no longer a type two diabetic.
Your rheumatoid arthritis goes away. You're also colitis gets,
in other words, we're going to address the root causes. So that's a very important insight.
Love it. You know, we just love picking your brain, Dr. Davis.

(01:10:34):
And we, we absolutely, this course to Laura's point is that you've written for
us, the human intestinal microbiome in health and disease.
So we're not just talking about gut health. Like we it's more than that.
It's, it's vast, it's deep, but it's also super gettable, super actionable for
health coaches, written for health coaches.
So it helps us put this knowledge into action on behalf of our our clients. It's wonderful.

(01:10:59):
It's just a masterpiece. So thank you for writing it for us.
Thank you for always sharing all this wisdom.
We'll wrap up here. Any, I don't know, partying pep talks for health coaches
that you can share before we let you go?
Don't let it overwhelm you. Recognize that you have a set of tools that are
astoundingly powerful.

(01:11:20):
It may not make sense to John Q primary care down the street,
but you have astounding,
that's a work in progress so one of the things we have to accept is
that the need for continual education so your education
doesn't stop at this course this course gives you solid grounding
and understand what this thing is in the microbiome but it's we're not that
far away from this world where you say you know what i i have i want to lose

(01:11:44):
140 pounds we start with the microbiome i don't want to be a type 2 diabetic
anymore we're going to start the microbiome i don't want want to have this autoimmune
disease or this food and talk,
we're going to start with the microbiome, but that's how powerful this world is becoming.
Amazing. Oh my gosh. I love it. Dr. Davis, thank you so much.
Um, people will be able to learn all about this in our course.

(01:12:06):
It's going live in a couple of weeks.
Um, so jump in there's, there's going to be some sort of early bird kind of pre-order special.
Um, so, you know, give us a call, shoot us an email, take a look at the website,
primalhealthcoach.com, but they can also just find you. Where can people find you?
So my umbrella website is drdavisinfinitehealth.com.

(01:12:28):
I've got several thousand blog posts. We have a discussion forum where we talk
and share lab results, for instance.
I have a typically once a week, a couple hours, a live Zoom like this.
And we talk, last night I did it. We talk over all kinds of stuff like the yogurts
and other aspects of the programs.
And of course, the Super Gut book, most recent book.

(01:12:49):
So my intention is to help people regain health because sadly it's not coming
from the healthcare system.
Yeah. I bought the super gut book, got through the first couple chapters and
spoke to a friend of mine who needed it more than I did.
And I gave it to her. So I haven't finished it. I have to get myself another
copy and I will, but I'm also going to go through this course and just thank

(01:13:12):
you so much for your contribution and for believing in health coaches.
Being a a practitioner, a licensed doctor that believes in the power of health
coaches. For that, we can't thank you enough.
Thank you, guys. My view is health coaches are the future.
We agree. All right. Thank you.
This podcast was brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute.

(01:13:35):
To learn more about how to become a successful health coach,
get in touch with us by visiting primalhealthcoach.com forward slash call.
Or if you're already a successful health coach, practitioner,
influencer, or thought leader with a thriving business and an interesting story,
we'd love to hear from you.
Connect with us at hello at primalhealthcoach.com and let us know why we need

(01:13:55):
to interview you for Health Coach Radio. Thanks for listening.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Creating a Healthy Intestinal Microbiome With Dr. William Davis

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

All Episodes

Creating a Healthy Intestinal Microbiome With Dr. William Davis

Stuff You Should Know