Is Your Pursuit of Comfort Wrecking Your Gut Health? with Josh Dech (Part 1)

Introduction and episode overview 0:00

All right. Welcome back to another episode of Take Back My Brain. I'm your host, Laura Hammer, and I have a repeat guest today, which I'm very excited about. His name is Josh Dek, so I want you to go back and listen to this past episode that we had previous, because we have a lot of foundational things. And today we're going to dive into more all things. Gupte and Josh is an expert in gut health and I deeply respect him. So pay attention, take notes, you know, share, like, subscribe, do all those beautiful things and just enjoy this episode because life and death really begins in the gut.

You know, I'm all about the brain. Like, balance your brain first and then the gut gets easier to heal. But, you know, they both go back and forth. And so brain affects your gut. Gut affects your brain. And so I'm really excited to dive deeper. So Josh thanks for being here today Laura. Thanks so much for having me back again. I'm so glad the first was so beneficial to your listeners. We're happy to expand on this and bring more information to it. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Yeah. Me too.

So I'm kind of been in this mode lately. Like, how do I simplify things for people, right? And I keep thinking that we're in this, bounce back culture. We're in this, you know, quick, quick, quick. You know, microwave culture. We're in the soccer moms. You know, we've got all these things going on. And so we don't take very good care of our gut and all. If we have one little symptom, we're like, oh, I got to fix it. I bet it's an infection. I got to go to the doctor or, you know, maybe have some reflex issues going on.

Oh my gosh, I better go get some Toms or some Prilosec or, you know, whatever it might be. And I feel like because we have this such fast paced culture, we're looking for such a fast paced reaction fix, and we're really damaging our most valuable asset and our bodies. So I really want to dive into that today so that we can teach people like one. We really need to slow down for one. And then what's that? What are those signs and symptoms? They don't. Signs and symptoms aren't bad. They're a signal.

And you know what happens if we do use those antacids and those antibiotics. What's what are we shifting and damaging. And then how do we fix it kind of thing. Sound good. Well that sounds amazing. So where do we want to start? That's everything all at once I know. Right. So I would love to dive into the I feel like there's like this whole antacid like epidemic going on. Everybody's got reflux. You know, everybody's like, oh, I'm nauseous all the time. My throat hurts. So many people are getting diagnosed with Barrett's disease.

You know, all those kind of things like, well, let's talk about like, why do we why do you feel or you know, that those issues are increasing for one. And then what are the ramifications of using medication to, you know, relieve those symptoms? That is a great question. So the first thing we have to understand is that your body is always speaking to you. It uses a language that we call signs and symptoms. Now, you and I, Laurie, we're speaking the English language. We have thousands of words at our disposal to use more fluent in this language so we can have a very productive,

Why reflux symptoms keep getting suppressed 3:04

meaningful, life altering, in many cases, conversation between you and I. The problem is, our body also speaks its own language called symptomatology. And we're looking to the gut. It only says maybe a dozen, maybe 15 words. Depends on what you argue. But it says words like gas bloat, constipation, diarrhea, acid reflux, increase, decrease appetite, peeing, cramping blood, mucus. Sometimes these are the words it can communicate to you, which we have to learn to interpret. Those words carry a meaning and we understand that meaning.

We can go back to our root causes and figure out what's happening. The problem is, but we have these symptoms popping up in the gut. We look at the gut and go, it must be only the gut, but ignoring the rest of the symptoms, your body speaking the rest of the words in its vocabulary. There's probably 13,000 different words. Your gut or your body can speak to you through bloodwork and other signs and other symptoms, or something like 30 quadrillion combinations of things you can kind of put together.

So it really is a very vast language. Now when we look at these symptoms, our job is to try to reduce them because symptoms suck. We don't want to have a sign is what you see. A symptom is what you feel. So if I'm bloated the sign is the physical distension. The symptom is maybe pain or heaviness. So one condition can kind of have both. That's an idea. Now if I look at something like acid reflux, that is both a sign and a symptom. You can see physically the burning, the esophageal issues, Barrett's esophagus like you mentioned.

And then you can feel the symptom, which is the burning and that coming up of food, if you have a full Gerd condition. Now we do we pursue comfort. So we say, I'm going to suppress this sign or this symptom to make it go away. So I feel better. Right. But what we're doing, it's like if you take a hostage, Lori, in your living room, don't take hostages isn't a call to say, take hostages if you take what if you have a group and they're screaming and crying and yelling for help and you put table for their mouth, they're still not happy to be there.

Just hear them. And so we have acid reflux and we just simply taken add acid. We're trying to suppress the acid assuming the problem is excessive acid in the body. I have never in ten years of working in that space, all these years of gut specific. I've never you've never. I'm sure I've seen someone with too much acid. No, it is always to what, bill. Yeah, right. It's. So you have this this feedback mechanism between these sphincters, these open and closed doors above and below your stomach where they enter an exit.

And those are pressure sensitive. Well, if you don't have enough pressure from a fluid volume. So the actual level of acid, you don't have a low enough pH. So more acidity, they just kind of flop open. So of course things pop up. How many people do you know who repeatedly take and acids and they actually don't help or they get worse. Yeah. Lay on the back it. But there's one worse. Well of course who are low acid was the problem. Now you're suppressing it further. You're feeding the problem. Right.

And this is the start. Laurie, I don't have to tell you how much of a start this is to almost every condition you can imagine. You start taking eight acids, you're almost guaranteed to have worse and digestive issues in weeks, months or many years down the road, which will take a long time and often be very expensive to fix. Oh yeah. I mean, you think about, you know, Crohn's colitis, which is like, you know, at the end of the GI tract or even Sibo, right? And, you know, we spend so much time killing stuff and killing stuff when really we got to go back to do you even make enough hydrochloric acid?

Yeah. And, you know, kind of go back to that. And then we have to say, well, why is your hydrochloric acid low? And then hopefully, you know, address those issues. So what do you think are some causes of low hydrochloric acid first and foremost stress. Now so many of us this is the obvious low hanging fruit. Answer. So many of us say, well I'm not stressed. I'm very Zen. We are, and we often just don't know it. You know, I can I can be a modern 2024 hippie. That was awesome. Thank you very much.

Another T-shirt I'll have to make right. So we go in, we're stuck in traffic. We're irritated. We're arguing with our spouse. There's money issues is political issues. There's the news all the time. The radio bombarding us because their job is to keep your attention. Humans respond to fear. Most of us will know this. If you go and look at reviews or you hear someone talk about something, they're more likely to complain than they are to praise it. Our bodies are biologically wired to respond to fear as a survival mechanism.

From thousands of years ago, we walked around naked in the forest and had to fight bears, and so our job is to respond to stress. And so we're constantly bombarded by it. Because the attention economy of 2024, you keep attention by eliciting a stress response. Be a good or bad, there is you stress which is good, and there's distress which is bad stress, but we're constantly bombarded by it. Well, that that starts to elicit this fight and flight mechanism, which is the opposite of Rest digest. If you're in Rest, digest your resting and digesting, which means you have good motility.

You're producing things to digest stomach acid, digestive enzymes. But if we're constantly turning up the dial on this fight or flight, rather than turning it down to rest and digest, we're turning up to anxiousness, to poor motility, to less stomach acid production. And it's these low grade stressors. Now, some of those will I be more stress living in a mud hut, naked in the woods, running from bears? 100% agree. But that would happen once every couple of weeks. You'd run, you'd fight, you flee. You're fine.

Stress, low stomach acid, and nutrient depletion 8:35

But we are bombarded by constant low grade stressors every day. That hammer and hammer and hammer and chip away at us until we have these disease processes that slowly, insidiously creep up. That would be the first one. Okay. Yeah. Second way. Let's you want to jump on that one. I'll move on. Oh I that was perfect. Yeah okay. Beautiful. Well let's talk about the second one. That the first one is going to be stress. The second one I would argue is dietary nutrient deficiencies. We consume so many things that suppress our ability or our body's ability to do its job.

We mangle up our own bacteria, which we have through our intestines, which again feedback, stress responses, etc. we're not eating nutrient rich food. We need nutrients and vitamins and minerals. We need them to even produce things like stomach acid or digestion to detoxify the body, leaving us in this healthy state to rest and digest. And so we're constantly bombarding or giving our body a lack of what it needs, bombarding it with more illness, which again feeds back to the fight and flight and stress responses to what we call the cell danger response, which is like a microbial cellular level response.

Not a big I'm freaking out having a panic attack response, but even your cells on a microscopic level understand that you're stressed and they respond accordingly. And so we get these feedback mechanisms from small to big that continue feeding in or the zinc deficient in zinc to create stomach acid in the first place. We're mostly deficient in that because we're stressed and inflamed and sick and we're burning through these. Or we got toxins coming in from every which way left, right and center bombarding our system.

We're utilizing these nutrients at an increased rate to try to heal the body. It's like we have fires all over the place. You live on an acreage, you have one well, you live on well water. You have enough to shower, to drink, to cook with. But the minute you need more light, the house is on fire. That well drains, empties. You have no more left, so you can't even do your basic functions anymore. And this is how nutrients sort of function and perform in the body. We have what we need from food, but the excess of toxins and stress and all these things coming into us all the time through our day to day, is also beginning to deplete these nutrients.

We need to even perform our basic functions like stomach acid production. Yeah. Would you say also, you know, those stressors or, you know, being nutrient deficient if we're not eating foods that actually stimulate hydrochloric acid production, chronic you if you don't use it, you lose it. So there's this movement toward being, you know, like vegan vegetarian where you're not eating meat. So you don't really need a ton of hydrochloric acid if you're not eating animal products. Do you, do you agree with that?

Like if you don't use if you got spot on? Yeah. I mean, I can speak to both sides of that years back for New Better. I tried vegan, I was I heard the train heard or the train to jump on the train. Right. I watched all the videos and I was like, well, maybe there's merit to it. So I and I was, you know, I'm heavy into bodybuilding and nutrition. I understand this. And so I micromanage every microgram, all my nutrients, make sure I got enough of what I needed. All the macros were balanced. I had never felt worse in my entire life.

Right? I was bloated, I was weak, my strength went down. I actually my body started to change shapes in the worst ways. I felt like an old bag of milk and so I went back to eating it. I felt better, and then I swung in the other direction to try a full carnivore diet. And lo and behold, I felt amazing. But on both ends of the spectrum, North Americans, statistically speaking, do not have enough of the microbes. We need to break down fibers and turn them into short chain fatty acids like butyrate and propionate.

These things that we need for our body, for health in all kinds of ways. So we don't have these bacteria. Whereas like someone living in rural Nigeria on a farm, they have way more of them, right? So they can eat these things that we can't. So our body will produce extra bacteria, which can produce its own short chain fatty acids without having to break down fibers. So we compensate. But I went to the vegan diet. All this extra fiber, I felt bloated and gassy. The argument is maybe I needed more time than the eight weeks I gave it before I gave up and said, screw this.

In order for me to feel better so I couldn't break down these fibers. On the other hand, many years later, this is just probably about a year ago or so. Two years ago, I went full carnivore state line diet meat and water and salt, and I had diarrhea for about a week. And so the argument then is like my gut bacteria has to compensate and change for this dramatic. I was eating probably 50, 50 plants and fruits and vegetables with meat, but I had to learn to produce more stomach acid to stimulate that growth.

Right? Because I wasn't before, my body had to alter its bacterial profiling, and it can in just a couple of days to be able to compensate for the new fuel I'm putting in for. It's constantly balancing what you're doing, and it's dietary habits. And there's there's all kinds of other reasons why, based on your composition, what sicknesses or overgrowth you might have, why these diets may not work, or why you may feel good on things like carnivore. There's merit to all of it, but it's situational, but long and short 100%.

If you don't use it, you lose it because your body adapts to what it is doing at the time. Altering the landscape of your gut, changing your ability to break down, digesting, absorb. Right? So it's in when when people are changing your diet like you were talking about your example, it's not a bad thing to get those symptoms of the loose stools. You know, those types thing. If you're going into ketosis, a carnivore, because your body is just adjusting like those are not bad symptoms. They're just letting us know, hey, things are trying to shift.

It's kind of hard right now. But you know, I feel like that's a good thing, too. It's like a hermetic stress. Like in any way. Yeah. It's good. We need those types of good stressors. Yeah. I mean, provide enough for my girl. I agree in this, provided those symptoms are persisting

Diet, fiber tolerance, and carnivore vs vegan 14:10

in such a way where you're actually having a lot of negative effects or that's getting worse. You're chronic diarrhea. Like I went for a week and I knew what was happening. If you're getting a lot of it, maybe ease into it. Start going 5050 in your meals, 60, 40, 70, 30 and slowly alter. I just went cold turkey. I went from 5050 right to 100% right. I expected diarrhea, I knew it was going to happen. So I braced myself quite literally, like waiting for it to happen. And so but if you're somebody who comes in and you go, I'm actually getting more pains. It aches.

You're having other symptoms besides, like loose stool whoopee. That's not that big of a deal. If you know, it's like you said, a hermetic stress, a biological stressor, changing the landscape of your body. However, when it comes associated with brain fog, joint pain, fatigue, skin issues, more pain, cramping, bloating, blood or mucus in the stool, skin issues, cognitive issues, hormonal issues. You're creating something that's actually more problematic, and it's a loss to your body cat team. And so you might actually have other things going on.

But this leads into the conversation is why is vegan good for one? Why is carnivore good for another? Why is mix good for somebody else? It's a whole can of worms. Yes, big can of worms. So let's open it up. Let's do it. That's very aggressive. All right, let's open it. Well, let's get into it. So it comes down to there's a great study. I often was in Cell Reports and I believe 2018, 2019 where they actually took GI maps. So that's a stool sample where they measure your gut bacteria, the microbes there.

They actually measured urbanized societies of Western culture versus rural and urban societies and cultures of Nigerian colonies, who still have very much a hunter gatherer type of lifestyle. And they found these hunter gatherers in the rural, living on the farm, walking around barefoot, no pesticide, interacting with the animals, drinking the water, eating the foods right off the tree. They had a much greater abundance of bacteria and variety, as well as microbes that can actually break down fiber.

Because your body, you don't actually create enzymes on your own accord. You make your five. You break down your fats, proteins, carbs. You can't break down fiber. Your gut bacteria has to do that and ferment them into things it can utilize. So you eat, you poop. So your bacteria, they effectively will eat this and poop out good things. And we lack those microbes in the West. We tend to not have the ones that can break down fiber as much. So in these instances, I believe personally, this is why things like the lion diet from Michela Peterson, why these carnivore diets are so efficient and profound in their results, because we're not feeding the microbes that are creating or pooping out these bad things parasites huge.

But you can see these people coming in all the time curing supposedly their eczema. It's a huge sign of parasites. Is eczema and psoriasis. Well, if it goes away, what do parasites love to eat? Fibers much more than meat, right? So they're not in there pooping out bad things. Your body then turns over, reacts to creating these symptoms of eczema. And this is why I believe it works. Now, I do believe we know your body uses fiber. We also know there's a greater abundance of microbes that digest fiber in these hunter gatherer tribes.

We've seen the stool samples. You get guys like Tim Spector who go over and live with these cultures of these tribes, and they live in these villages in a couple of days. Their gut microbes are already changing because of what they're in. That. That's amazing. Oh, it's amazing what it does in a few days. And so we know that they could do this, but they don't have any of the diseases that we have. So the argument that humans should never eat plants, I think is also silly. I think it's what we do to our plants in North America.

Oh spot on. Yeah. 18 to 20,000 different pesticides approved for use in North America. Of course you're going to jack up your gut and gut bacteria. Of course you're going to destroy them using these chemicals that they don't have in nature. Look at their teeth, break the teeth of a lot of these, these African countries, they don't. They have white, sparkling, beautiful teeth. Ours are rotting in yellow over here because our oral microbiome is eating our teeth. It's producing lactic acid, acetic acid byproducts, chewing up our mouth and destroying our teeth.

But over there, they don't have it because they're actually feeding natural things and apples like a natural tooth brush. Well, it grows on a tree and it's not sprayed with any pesticides, right. So it's very different. And I think it all needs to be contextually understood that maybe carnivore isn't the best for everyone, even long term. I think it's circumstantially beneficial to just not contribute to the problem until you can properly remove it. Yeah, 100%. So when we're talking about, you know, over in Nigeria and the rural Nigeria, and they're able to eat all these things and, you know, here because of all the chemicals and stuff, we spray, you know, how important is it to eat organic, you know, biodynamic.

Oh, and like, can somebody heal if they're say 50, 50, 60, 40, still eating conventionally sprayed things versus organic? Like, I really want to dispel that because, that's that's a tough one. I live in rural Iowa. Right. And so my sorry, one second. So any things going on outside? I live in rural Iowa. And so my organic section in my grocery store is like this back, right? We have zucchini, we have apples. We may get cucumbers and maybe throw in a broccoli and a cauliflower every now and then. And then we've got, you know, all the rest of this.

And then we live in glyphosate country. We live in atrazine country. Things are sprayed in the air. So if somebody's saying, well, how do I get, you know, organic foods, how do I get grass fed if I live in the middle of somewhere like I do? I mean, I find all the resources because I work really hard at it, and it's very rare that we have something that's not grass fed, organic, pastured, you know, all those kind of things. But what would you say to somebody who's like, well, can't I eat 5050? And that's, you know, 50% better than what I was doing before?

And will I heal? I can say unquestionably, absolutely, yes. Because you think about it, if my body is a glass of water, the emptier it is, the better I'm going to be. Because as that water starts to fill up, things overflow. Pesticides, stress, toxins, chemicals, junk food, inflammatory foods, they start to fill up my glass when that glass overflows. Now I have disease processes and symptoms. We need to have proper drainage to drain things out the bottom of that glass. That's how your body stays healthy.

It fills up. It drains out, it fills up, it cleans, it drains out. But we had this blockage of this drainage with too many chemicals coming in. Your body has a very well adapted, broken dustpan. It cleans up what it's designed to clean up. But we're living in an age where, on a daily basis, for dumping a landfills worth of junk into our body in a broom and dustpan no longer is efficient to clean it up. And so the less we contribute to that glass 100% the better. Now I'm going to throw some stats, but don't quote me on the exact numbers.

Organic food, pesticides, and healing exposure 21:08

They actually came from doctor Tom O'Brien. I had him on episode 49 on my podcast. We talked about reversing disease to what he calls the inflammation equation. There's a great big documentary they just put out about it. So we had him on the episode for a promo, but some of the numbers were something like they had pregnant women, for example, coming in. They tracked them over the course of 7 or 8 years after delivery, and they found that the chemicals, like phthalates, through perfumes and nail polish and little things.

By removing those, there was an average of seven points higher IQ in the children by just removing those chemicals. And that's amazing. And mean seven points of the difference between what's considered special or, you know, challenged, or maybe working their ass off and getting kids to just kind of cruising along with A's and really getting concepts. That's the difference. And they also found that women who change, assuming they were eating 21 meals a week, that's three meals a day for seven days.

They changed three. I believe it was just three meals that they changed to purely organic. So that's three of 21 meals they changed and their increase in, I believe it was probability of delivering a healthy baby full to term. It decreased their stillbirth rates by like 20 something percent, increase the likelihood of having healthy pregnancy and healthy children by just changing three a 21. So going 50% I think is huge, huge. And this is where I go right back for very basics. Let's keep it easy.

Go to the environmental working group, the world famous list. They have the clean 15 and the dirty dozen clean 15. You can eat whatever you want on that list. It's very little. And pesticide the dirty dozen. I will not eat an organic fruit ever. I would rather go without fruit 100%. And so you get things every year. Blueberries. Strawberries. I believe it's nectarines or peaches. Apples, spinach. These are the things that are on the list every year. Grapes. Because they're so full of pesticides.

I believe the average strawberry, it's something like 8 to 12 different chemicals in the US that you actually purchase. And there's 18 to 20,000 different pesticides approved for use in the USA, which is shocking in itself, over 1 billion pounds a year that are sprayed on our food. And so by just simply reducing some of these chemicals, we can reduce our exposure, reducing the amount that's going into your glass and your body's natural cleaning, draining processes can remove it. So we're dumping less of the landfill into your body.

It can do a remarkable job of cleaning up. I love it, I love it so because it gets overwhelming to people right? You know, like I can only change, you know, these three things. Well that's fantastic. There are things that you didn't change before. And so, you know, that puts you on, you know, that healing path. So I love that. What about antibiotic use? I mean, we're talking about grass fed, you know, meats, but, you know, so that's in our, in our food system as well. But what about just antibiotic use, you know, for colds and flus and infections, you know, or whatever it might be.

I mean, I was a kid that was inundated with antibiotics, that chronic tonsillitis and ear infections. And so my my microbiome was horrific and I suffered with constipation. Since you know, I was super little, and it took a long time to reverse that. You know, once I understood what was going on. Yeah, I think this is a great topic to bring up because first of all, it drives me nuts when doctors just throw antibiotics, people for colds and flu. They're identified as being a viral issue. So an antibiotic for a bacterium is not really going to do anything with it.

Let's just try it just in case. And the idea is your microbiome. I argue it's as important as our DNA. I've talked to people about this before. They go, no, our DNA is important. I don't want to talk about it. Well, you're shutting yourself off from a basic concept. If you think about it, the entire human genome has been mapped. There's something like 23, maybe 25,000 different genes that make up the human genome. So all of your genetics and DNA, on the other hand, inside of your gut, there's 3 million different types of genes.

So we have a 130 times more genetic material inside of your gut by the different strains and species and all these different varieties that we have. There's 50 to 100 trillion microbes that make up your body. They outnumber you. The idea was maybe 10 to 1. Some studies are showing it's more like 1 to 1 point 3 to 5, but point being, there's more microbes, bacteria and fungi and viruses and parasites and archaea and all these little things. There's more of them than there are your actual human cells.

We take antibiotics, antibiotics, do different things. They work in different ways. If you were to go hunting, for example, like you and me, Laurie would going out hunting and you'd want to hunt a specific animal. I don't know how to kill certain animals, but let's say for the example, God forbid you're hunting dogs. Well, we know it's just for the example, because I know it's bad for dogs. I love dogs. Oh, my dogs are in the background going like this. I know I got Bruce down here laying on his back with his balls in the air.

So what's bad for dogs, right? Grapes, raisins, chocolate? Certain types of fruits that they can't have. They're very toxic to them. So if you wanted to harm a dog, God forbid you're going to hell. But if you wanted to harm a dog, you would know specifically what things to give them that would make them sick. But it wouldn't make a tiger or lions or bears or mine wouldn't make them sick, just the dog, because their biology doesn't react to it well. Antibiotics, what they do is they will kill, say, all mammals, because it might eat away their it'll block out their mucous membranes causing the breakdown in degree, or it will destroy some of the protein structures or prevent them from creating vital food sources that keep them alive.

Antibiotics cast a broad net in generally speaking, that destroy all these types of bacteria. So instead of just one type of animal, it kills the entire mammal species or all the marine life, not one type of fish. And so antibiotics kill in such a broad spectrum, they kill the good and the bad. If you have an invasive species, sure, go hunting even for food, whatever.

Antibiotics and microbiome disruption 26:58

That's how it's done. But if you were to spring something over the woods to kill every mammal, suddenly all your biodiversity is gone. The ecosystem falls apart. Same thing happens inside of your gut. Okay, I still feel guilty about the dog example. I know there is like, you know, mean this there. So we have to understand that antibiotics go after an entire subspecies like mammals or marine life, not just one individual species. And so we go and take something for a cold or flu. Maybe it's an infection. It's a staph infection. Cool.

Take an antibiotic, but you're killing off all the good with all the bad that respond to that particular type of poison. And this is where the problem comes in. Because now what we've done, your ecosystem is in perfect harmony. If provided best case scenario, you're born vaginally. You're not born C-section. You are bottle fed, strictly or breastfed, strictly not bottle fed. You grow up, say on a best case scenario, you're on a farm, glyphosate, pesticide free. You interact with the animals, eat the food, you play in the dirt.

You're exposed outside. You see people and have a community. You travel. You're cautiously inundating your body with new microbes. That's the best case scenario. Worst case your C-section birth. Strictly bottle fed, grow up in a hyper sanitized home with no pets. High rise building in New York say middle of the pandemic when everyone's mass is sanitized, there's no exposure. This is the worst case for development. And so what we do as we take in these certain antibiotics, we typically push ourselves to, worst case scenario, we kill off this biodiversity, which leaves us now with what's called opportunistic microbes.

Overgrowing. There are our conventional microbes that we have that run around the body doing these things. We need them. They're part of us are called commensal. And then you have your opportunistic. So you're staph, your fungi and these other klebsiella and different bacterium's. We don't want overgrowing now. They're all part of the ecosystem. They're part of it naturally. But when they overgrow, it's like having gang members and drug dealers and gunrunners instead of police officers, baristas and schoolteachers.

When you have too much of one, the ecosystem no longer works. The society is dangerous. That happens in your body. These opportunistic overgrow. Often we've killed the good. They tend to be more antibiotic resistant as well. We kill the good, they overgrow, they wreak havoc. They produce toxins and byproducts which cause disease, leading to more issues, gut issues, etc., which permeate around the body. And now we have multiple sicknesses. But I will put a caveat. Yes, antibiotics destroy a bunch of the good and the bad.

There are some interesting studies been shown that some antibiotics can target mostly just about 90 to 99%. We'll say ballpark in the broader mass they can destroy way more bad and preserve the good. There is the bad with a kill, all the things. But then we also have what we call, quote, alternatives to either the ugly options of antibiotics, antimicrobials which are naturally from the Earth, which target the bad, and even support or buffer the good to make them better. We have those options as well.

So there's always a pros and cons life and death kit with the antibiotics. Now I'll figure it later. They act faster. That ties and fasciitis. Flesh eating bacteria. Load me up. I want to keep my limbs. I'll figure out the gut bacteria after the fact. Right. But if it's like, oh, I got this low grade infection or it's a little tonsillitis, like, try something else. There's 1001 alternatives. Yeah. Wasn't there a kid that did like a study or something like it for a science project? Oregano myself.

Well, yeah. Yeah. And he was like, yeah, it works better than, you know, the antibiotics he was comparing things to. So yeah, like like 100 times to one, I think it was either penicillin or a box of something. He compared to a shrinking oil in a petri dish. It was like like like a seventh grader or something. Yeah. And every test he did, it was always better. Even he'd increase or decrease the doses. Oregano oil is better every time. It's amazing. I know, it's just there's so many other options out there.

So save the antibiotics for the big, you know, the really big stuff like the flesh eating bacteria or, you know, whatever. It might just a little kill you. That's a little killing. Like you lose your leg and you got a really bad infection. Maybe use it, that kind of thing. But what you're saying is you can repopulate your gut. So I think that's a fear that people have, like, take an antibiotic, you know, then have I ruined my life forever? And I'm just going to be in hospice care, you know, until I die.

Years from now, you know, the answer is. Of course not. I mean, the idea is your gut, the more robust it is. Going back to best case scenario, on a farm, vaginal birth, breastfed all these things. It's like seeding a meadow. You have a very robust ecosystem. Think about a meadow that once started before it became the Amazon rainforest. You can light a fire and burn half of it down. In a few years, it'll bounce right back. However, if it was just a lightly seeded meadow, it was brand new, not very diverse, not a lot of forest green animals.

And there you burn it down. It may never grow back. And so the better off your starting point, the more likely you are to recover. And it's been shown, you know, just start adjusting in a couple of days or weeks. But over a belt depends on who you ask. 3 to 6. You know, 12 months. It can typically bounce back. However, if something has crept up in the meantime. Big one insidious Candida fungus or Clostridium bacteria, which can be really gnarly as well. We see these at the root of a lot of bowel diseases.

So as we start to churn these things out, we have to understand it's not only rebuilding your own microbiome, but also repairing the residual damage created for the opportunistic overgrowth that overgrowth. In the meantime, before you're able to repopulate and rebalance. And that's where you have to go for the next one. Yeah, absolutely. So, you mentioned, you know, vaginal birth, breastfeeding. I would love to kind of segue into that. I have a lot of moms that listen to this. So why is that so important?

Why why is vaginal. Why why is that important? Well, I'll preface first because I've come under fire before. I very much like straight to the point. Fix it. Logical. My wife loves that. About me. I'm a great listener. So what I have to say is there are some situations where vaginal birth and breastfeeding is medically not an option. That's okay. We can get as close to there's something called vaginal sealing, where if it's a C-section birth, you can actually a couple hours before birth. So good gauze to stick it in the vagina, let it sit there, soak up microbes in all kinds and rub the the baby's body down.

That's been shown to possibly be beneficial. Donor milk if you can't get that, there are milk banks. And of course, there are better options for formula out there than just like your Johnson and Johnson. Other stuff full of seed oils and inflammatory junk. So there's always a spectrum of better to worse get as good as you can. But the importance of vaginal birth number one, coming through the birth, we used to think, let's back it up even further. We used to think that the placenta was sterile with a baby's actually growing inside it.

Right. It's we know no longer it's not we know it's not sterile. It's teeming with microbes. And you actually share. What's really interesting is mom actually develops leaky gut during pregnancy. Now, we think leaky gut is bad, but it has its medicinal uses. Leaky gut in a traditional sense. The defense mechanism. When your body opens the floodgates to draw water into flushing. So if you've ever eaten something in ten minutes later, you've got diarrhea in the bathroom. That's leaky gut to flush things out, like putting your thumb over the house to wash a driveway.

Now, what happens with mom during pregnancy? She actually increases her Proteobacteria, Bifidobacterium, lactobacilli. These are the ones that actually see the baby's gut first, and we see this actually changing and modifying during first, second, third trimester, mom's microbiome actually changes. Her gut becomes permeable, allowing microbes to travel around the body. And so this trans placement of microbes can actually reach the baby as well. And they share a blood supply through what's called microclimate ism.

Now, what's interesting about that is about 33% of all the metabolites, these are the byproducts floating around in blood are actually like post biotic, bacterial or byproducts. So they're made by bacteria. And so what's happening to this process?

Birth, breastfeeding, and early microbiome seeding 34:48

It can help explain some of the chronic inflammatory markers that maybe elevate in pregnant women, that doctors maybe treat it like it's a disease that, oh, you're inflamed. You have these problems. Oh no, no, no. The body's doing that deliberately to allow more things to transfer to the baby. It actually can create. That's this is the difference between insulin resistance a little bit, which is normal in pregnancy versus diabetes, but it actually shunts blood or food away from mom cells into the baby, because the baby will absorb that if mom's not.

And so it's actually a very beautifully designed process that's a very natural and normal to feeding raw baby. So all these microbes start from mom. They see the transfer on the get into the baby right away. And even studying fetal look at meconium which is like baby stool in womb like bacteria. So that's number one. And if mom has healthy microbes, she gives them healthy to baby. We have seen some instances where babies are born within a couple of months. They have bloody stools. And colitis that typically comes from mom is not to blame that she doesn't know, but we see a lot of pregnant women. That's the huge caution.

If you have got issues and you're trying to get pregnant, please work on yourself first because all these things will transfer to baby, moms who have candida issues who don't know it. I met with a woman recently, a lot of acne. She's overweight, a lot of cravings, joint pains, leader, signs of candida nail fungus that works. A lot of history of mastitis while she was breastfeeding. It was fungus. And her baby's got gut issues because they absorbed all that extra fungus overgrowth. All right, so there's a lot there we have to be mindful of.

So there's a lot of prep in pregnancy. But that's number one is pre-birth. Number two, the microbes that they get coming through the birth canal actually coats the whole face, the mouth, the whole body had to toe this to the first seeding of these really beneficial lactobacillus. We have goiter reason ram gnosis and all these good ones which are vaginally native which cover the baby. That's the first inoculation of microbes. Well, I should say second to, in utero. And so as they come through, if they skip that and they go through the first seeding, whatever seeds first will take, if your C-section, what's on the doctor's glove?

What's what are you getting out of the hospital? That seed instead of what's natural through the birth canal. And so we have to consider that number three right away. The first thing that happens when baby starts a breastfeeding one, it's a huge oxytocin release which actually builds, you know, a maternal bonding and all kinds of stuff. But that first three days of breastfeeding lays down colostrum, these thick like turf, like layers of nutrients and microbes and all these things which seed like seeding a brand new metal covering this turf in the baby's gut, preparing it to grow to an Amazon rainforest that comes into importance of breastfeeding.

And there are dozens and dozens of probiotics and prebiotics and nutrients like breast milk is the one food on planet Earth that humans could live on for the rest of their lives until death. The one food. There's actually an interesting painting I forget who did it hundreds of years old. It's actually a painting of a man in a jail cell sticking his head to the rails. Breastfeeding. Awesome. Yeah, I know, if you ever seen that. I have not seen that. Don't look at that. The whole story is that again, it's hearsay, but it's an interesting story.

Is that this man, his daughter was actually just had a baby, and she would come to visit him in the prison every single day. The guards were going to starve him as part of his torture and whatever they were punishing him for. And he actually took from her milk. He actually breastfed off his own daughter and survived. Was like a year or two years. This man had never actually eaten, but he had consumed breast milk. And the guards, apparently, the story goes that they're so moved by this bond between the, you know, father and daughter and their willingness to sacrifice themselves.

They ended up letting them go. But there's a painting you can see of this. And so it is the most nutritious food on earth. And the baby gets that right away on the other hand, there's formula. Now, the FDA recently made it mandatory, believe it or not, to have seed oils like canola oil or something else in these foods which we know are directly linked to diseases. So you get babies now, babies, brand new babies who are instead being inoculated with toxins rather than nutrients that are not there with inflammatory things.

Rather than healing things, our immune systems are being compromised rather than built right out of the gate, which is it's evil as far as I'm concerned. And so some women have no choice. You have to formula feed, and that's okay. But there are baby probiotics you can get. There are better quality formulas. There are donor banks and all kinds of systems being set up now where you can get some of that. Sometimes it can be very expensive. So there are limitations. But the idea is do the best you can, knowing with the knowledge that you have now.

And that's the best we can do if we go in and refuse to take the knowledge, then it's a choice. Even if we have the knowledge and don't have the means, at least we can look to getting outside. You know, getting them inoculated. The ways that we know how and you can do what you have, go barefoot and yeah, hundred percent let it get covered in gross stuff. Let them get outside. Let them play in the doorway, let the dog leave your face. You got pets? Pets are a great way to inoculate 100%, and that's the best we can do.

So. So we got our first three stages, which is one in utero, two is through the birth canal, three is through breastfeeding. Four is exactly that. It's through life getting exposed, making friends, playing in the dirt, getting outside. These are the ways we can see these microbiomes. That that meadow grows into a rainforest and it becomes resilient even after antibiotics it over grows. It makes you healthy. 70 to 90% of your immune cells are grown and matured and actually living inside of your gut.

And these gut like your malt or your gut, we call this gut a mucus mucus layer associated lymphoid tissues, your lymphatic system. And it all starts in the gut. And so it's very, very important to start early. The earlier we have the better development we have, the more resistant or resilient we are. And the question might be what if I was one of these people who was bottle fed and C-section, etc.? And that's that's another topic we definitely get into. Yeah. So what do we do? I mean, do you just start using probiotics with, you know, go roll around the grass? You know what?

What do you tell people to do? Well, all the above provided the grass is it's spring fly for say right. Exactly. So many things that are poisoned out there. What we look at is this we know the information we have now. We know that your body will or will start to grow and inoculate. The more we see today. But think of it like the thumbprint. Best case scenario is early on. The thumbprint, so to speak, will set between about three and five years old. Right? Your body will decide. This is what our is going to be.

That will be the homeostasis it tries to come back to. It can always be changed. Most probiotics do die the upper GI. A lot of them are actually living probiotics. If you look at pre pro and post biotics, the prebiotic is like think of it like fish in a fish bowl. The prebiotic is fish food. The probiotic is the living organism, the fish or the bacteria? The post biotic is fish poop where your bacteria eat food. It's a living organism. I think you living organism poops out good things or bad things.

And so a lot of the probiotics, we take the already dead. So it's just the bacterial poop we're now eating, which have good benefits, immune modulating signaling benefits in the body. So what we can do is yes, we can take probiotics. We can eat clean food, use the clean 15 list, the dirty dozen list, eat that organic stuff where you can, like Tom O'Brian was saying through these stats, we can look at getting outside, touching people, hugging people. The worst thing we did during Covid was mask up, sanitizer, stay indoors.

That was the worst thing for our immune systems. Sunlight is very important, but it's the seed, oils and inflammation under the surface that leads to skin cancers. You can get skin cancer in areas that have never seen the sun. So tell me, it's just the sun that causes it, you know? So you go for a skin cancer check up. They check invasively every crevice they do, even ones that don't see the sun. So you can't tell me it's just the sun that causes it, right? So we have to look at that as well. It's probiotics.

You can even get what's called Spore biotics or Spore probiotics, which are like seeds which make it down to the lower GI, where 90 plus percent of your bacteria live. Right. But the large and small intestine connect and they can actually plant and grow in these areas. So there's all kinds of ways to get in and start to continue to regrow and inoculate. But it's really the core of our gut and gut health and wellness, which starts with those bacteria and making sure we're doing our best with the situation we have, rather than saying, screw it, throwing our hands up, eating, you know, junk food, drinking beer and sugars and contributing to the problem.

Yeah, right. I want to back up just a little bit. So I'm not sure all my listeners know the difference between pre pro and post biotics. Could you break that down for people because that gets confusing. Oh let's go back to the fishbowl analogy right. You have a fish in a fishbowl. You have to feed it. That fish puts in a healthy ecosystem a fish tank. There are many species of plants and critters are actually bottom feeders. They will eat the poop and upcycle it in your body. It works the same. Prebiotics are the food that we eat.

We eat and poop. So do your probiotics, your fish, the living organisms. So things you eat these fibers, for example, we can feed and they get fermented and turn into beneficial things and upcycled in your fish tank, your ecosystem of your gut. That's really what it is. Prebiotics are all kinds of things are fibers. They're I mean, mostly fibers, right? These things that your body eats and consumes and then ferments or converts probiotics. We have 1 or 2000 different species, arguably 7 to 9000 different strains, which makes multi-millions 15 to 20 million different types of bacteria.

Are we up to 30 million different genetic species of strains, and they multiply out to about 50 to 100 trillion bacteria outnumbering us again, depends who you ask. 10 to 1 or 2 to 1 or whatever it is. It's a lot. And so these are the probiotics, the living organisms in this ecosystem. Now what we poop. So do your fish. So your bacteria and they poop. It all kinds of beneficial things. Your bacteria help you detoxify. They help you clean the system. They help balance hormones. They help regulate your system. They help your immune system.

They have anti-inflammatory properties. They produce vitamins like vitamin K and B. Vitamins are actually synthesized by your gut bacteria made for your body to use. So we're constantly using upcycling in this fish tank. Our ecosystem in our gut. And that's the pre pro and post biotic pre is food pro is organism post is byproduct. Be it good or bad. Now you do have a fish tank full of piranhas. You're trying to put a goldfish in there. It's gone right. It's going to get eaten for food. Yeah. This is why feeding prebiotics into a dis biotic gut, which is an imbalance gut bacteria ecosystem.

People all take prebiotics and feed my gut. Well, you could be feeding the piranhas. You could be feeding the bad guys. The dominant fish will eat first, which is why we have to look at balancing your gut. If you want to reverse some of these diseases and then feed them accordingly. If you just throw food, you could be feeding the wrong guys, I love that. I love that because yeah, it's confusing for people like, why would I take a probiotic when I should just take a prebiotic? That'll feed all the good stuff, but you don't want to feed the piranhas.

It's a really good analogy. I appreciate that a lot. Another t shirt?

How to rebuild gut health and where to find Josh 45:48

Yeah. Don't feed the piranhas. So good. I would like to just, like, swing back to. Well, maybe only ask it this way. If somebody wants to start working on their gut, what would be the first three things that you would tell them to do? Josh? You know, this answer has changed over the years. As you know, I specialize in Crohn's colitis. We see a lot of the worst of the worst gut disease. We see a lot of irritable bowel or irritable syndromes. Without a doubt, you don't need a diagnosis. I want to state that for for the record, a diagnosis means nothing.

It's just one fancy medical word that we use to cast an umbrella upon all of our illnesses. We can name it in the Western world. They treat disease as if it's innate to the biology. It's part of your DNA. They're inevitable, and all you can do is take medications which are expensive and patented to mask your symptoms. We have to understand that everything in the body is cause and effect. Me bending my arm is a cause and effect of muscles contracting or relaxing, right? That first part of it. And then we have to understand that on a micro level it's sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium moving in and out of the cells to allow that electrical contraction to occur.

If I get pinkeye, right, it's bacteria enter. That's the cause. The effect is inflammation symptoms. In your gut, there is a cause causing dysfunction which presents as inflammation or irritation or dysfunction of some kind, which we lump into a category. Give a diagnosis in a name to. So like a cookbook, we can go symptoms check you meet this many. Therefore you have check this diagnosis. Therefore check you get this drug in this order. If they don't work well we can cut your organs out. I don't care if it's your gallbladder, your appendix, your bowels.

They're looking to do a hysterectomy because their hormones are jacked up. There's a reason why it's happening. Your body has dozens. If not hundreds of mechanisms to keep this. Checks and balance and everything can be fixed. We just need the right approach. And medicine only masks the symptoms, telling it to shut up. It doesn't fix the problem. The hostage is still in the living room. You just put tape over its mouth. You can't hear it, but it's still trying to wiggle free and it's cutting its wrist on the rope, trying to get out.

We get more diseases. So that's the first okay. Yeah. No, you definitely have to understand that. So that's that's number one. Understand that your symptoms are not permanent. Your doctor, if they say they are, they are wrong. If they don't know it, they're lying either intentionally or unintentionally. That's number one. Number two, if we want to do anything, move anything around the body, we have to open drainage pathways. And this is something we need to talk about so much more. I know you know this. I know you talked about it.

Drainage is how anything exits the body or even moves around the body. If you have a factory or construction site, you're trying to rebuild your house, repair the damage done. There's a hurricane came through, antibiotics destroyed everything. Your house is all disheveled. You want to repair it, you can do that. You can replace parts and move things around. But that construction crew is going to have waste products. They have to go somewhere. You have to empty out the trash or just piles up. Makes it hard to walk around and move around in your own house.

The same thing happens with your immune system. The more waste products you have, they have to exit the body. So drainage is how things get out. That's going to be your kidneys, your liver. It's going to be your sinuses, your lungs, your skin. These are exit pathways. You have movement or filtration systems, your kidneys, your liver, your old static system. You have your bile ducts. These tubes or bile moves through. These are how things get through or out the body and filter and drain to exit. So many people try detoxes and they just get sicker.

They get headaches, they get bloated, they get nauseous because what you've done is you've dislodged toxins, or you've taken all these bathtubs full of dirty water and dumped them down one drain that's full of hair. It's going to overflow. It's going to flood the house, and now your floors are ruined. The same thing happens when you drain you empty of your liver and lymphatics and your skin and clear all the stuff out. It dumps down the drain and it overflows because your drainage is blocked. So we have to open drain.

Just number two. Number one recognize this can be done. Symptoms are temporary. They're not permanent. No diagnosis under the sun is a permanent condition ideal in ulcerative colitis Crohn's and IBS to go. It's just genetic bullshit. It is. It is it way. You are genetically prone to expressing inflammation through this way, but you put ten people in a room, Lowry. Expose them all to mold. One gets Parkinson's, one gets asthma, one gets arthritis, one gets Crohn's, one gets colitis, one gets IBS, one gets nothing.

It depends on the individual. That's genetics. It's a propensity. So understand that can be fixed. Two work on drainage. Three we have to go through the five hours, which I know you've talked about. I think we talk about the last one as well. You have to remove the problem and you can't convict the tenants unless the doors are unlocked. Which is why we need drainage. And so you have to remove the problem and go through that five hours process of remove, rebuild the microbiome, replenish the nutrients.

So you have to, rebuild a repair the tissues and the gut lining and rejuvenate the immune system. There's a lot of takes on the five hours, but that's how we use it in colitis and gut disease. But that's the idea. Understand? It can be fixed. Open drainage. Proceed with the five hours. And that's there. I know it's this is years worth of work. And that's a paragraph. So you just this much. Yeah. And we have the class hours on this Josh. Completely. Yeah, 100%. Man, I appreciate you being here so much.

This is a great second conversation that we have. And so where can people find you. And all this will be in the show notes to for everybody listening. But I want them to know hey you know Josh is here, but I love that. Thank you. Well, the best place to go. Every information if you're willing to look I mean some people click a link and go, oh, I couldn't find it right away. You didn't try. Everything is available on the website. If you go to gut Solution. Okay. That's a gut solution. All singular dossier for Canada.

Gut solution okay. We have two podcasts. We have reversible which is all about the gut and how it interacts with our world and vice versa. We do talk about, you know, bowel diseases. But I did sort of second one just about Crohn's and colitis. So we have our Facebook group community about bowel disease. We have our podcasts about it. We have the Gut Health podcast. We have programs and courses and DIY stuff. All of it can be found by sending me very complex solution. So we have our goal is to make our free stuff better than most people's paid stuff.

So we have a lot of great stuff out there. It is phenomenal. It is phenomenal. I'm I'm trying to mimic some of your stuff, like not like copy your stuff, but like copy away a ton of free stuff available for people. So we're working on that throw on my website too. So I love that idea because it's all about generosity and that fix that helps your microbiome to generosity, joy, you know, emotion. Huge thinking. I get so many people coming through just taking the free stuff and they go, I've never felt better.

I learned more in this 20 minutes I did for my doctor in ten years. And that's that's what we want. What people getting better so everything can be found. A gut solution okay. Awesome. Josh, thank you so much. God bless you and hopefully I'll have you back again in the future. I will look forward to it. Thanks, Laurie. Thanks everyone for listening. Make sure you like, subscribe and share and I will see you in the next episode.