Reversing Crohn’s & Colitis Naturally: Why Everything You’ve Been Told Is Wrong – With Josh Dech

Introduction and guest background 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the Thyroid Pharmacists Healing Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Isabella Wen. Today, I am really excited to have Josh Deck here with me. He is a holistic nutritionist and physician's consultant specializing in Crohn's colitis and severe IBS. we're going to be talking about reversing Crohn's and colitis naturally. As you might know, this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart as my husband was diagnosed with ulcerative colitus when our son was just two weeks old.

Fortunately, we've been able to get him completely into remission. And I just really am excited because Josh helps share that this is possible and teaches people how to do this. I have my husband as living proof and Josh has helped reverse over 300 cases of Crohn's and colitis. These were previously thought to be impossible to fix. And I really, really want to get this information out there. Josh has launched a top 2% globally ranked podcast. He's spoken on international TV and has been recruited to the Priority Health Academy as a medical lecturer.

he now helps educate doctors and the public on the holistic approach to gut health and chronic digestive disease. I am so, so excited to have him here to share his wisdom with us. and to talk about how to heal something that not many people know is possible to help. So Josh, such an honor to have you here with me. Thank you so much for joining. Isabella, it's an absolute pleasure. And I love what you're doing with this platform to get the word out about what's supposed to be impossible just to shift the paradigm.

It's really exciting. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's, and at the time, there was nobody talking about getting Hashimoto's into remission. And I like, well, maybe this can be done, but there is no information that I had personally learned about lifestyle changes. So I just really went out to try to do that. Since that time I have learned so many other health conditions that can reversed. and put into remission. And I really, really want people to know about this. Of course, this one is like super close to my heart, just because this was something that we lived with.

Fortunately, for less than a year, that was a part of our life with my husband. I will tell you he he went from somebody that used to run marathons for fun. He would wake up at 5am and just have tons and tons of energy. And just was like unstoppable on this like superhero to all of a sudden he was sleeping until 11 o'clock. 11 a.m, barely able to get through his day, was very frustrated, irritable, had insomnia, pain all over his body, and of course all of the digestive issues. So ulcerative colitis can take so much from you, Crohn's can so take much you.

I know for us this was a very, very special time period in our lives just having become new parents And at first, we didn't know what was going on with him, and it prevented him from bonding with our newborn son. And we don't if he had some kind of an illness. Before he was diagnosed, it was like, does he have some sort of illness? Can this be spread? And so we got the diagnosis, Then it was like, okay, we reached out to people in functional medicine that we knew. I had taken some IFM courses and we were like let's figure out how to do this.

Unfortunately, We were able to get him into remission within a few months. He's been in remissions ever since. But I know that not everybody is as lucky and they don't have access and resources, access to the resources of that this is possible, that you can absolutely heal from this. One question I'd love to ask you is, many of us come into functional medicine with our own healing journeys and healing stories. Maybe it's a family member of ours or our personal story or somebody that perhaps we loved.

Do you have a personal connection with inflammatory bowel disease? Interestingly enough, I do and I don't, you know, all kind of blitz it through this one as quick as I can to get the point across. I've had gut issues my entire life. My mom's had them, my dad's have them. There was only ever an official diagnosis of IBS. Now when I was probably somewhere between 11 and 13 years old, and mom got really sick.

IBS, IBD, and the gut-health spectrum 5:00

We used to play baseball. They played, that was terrible. But we would go for a baseball game. Then we'd come back, we go to McDonald's, grab some ice cream and some fries and we would go home. My mom had gut issues my entire life, as long as I can remember, since she was a young girl. She'd go upstairs, lay on her left side and eventually things would kind of just pass and she'd be fine. But one time we went back after baseball and when she went upstairs to lay down she just wasn't getting better.

The gas wasn' t passing, she started getting nauseous, getting pale and cold and sweaty. My stepdad says, we're going to the hospital. As much as she hated the idea, took her, went in, and that night she was thrown into emergency surgery. Turns out she actually perforated her bowel. So a little hole formed and she's leaking contents of stool and bacteria and all kinds of stuff into her abdominal cavity. And she is going septic. The doctor said, another couple of hours and you may have died. They ended up removing 12 inches of her colon that day.

put in a mash, all kinds of surgeries she had done. She had her gallbladder removed through this whole process. Ultimately, she ended up with two bowel surgeries, two feet of intestines removed, down a gall bladder, and permanent life-changing digestive issues ever since because the structures of her bowel has been changed. I had severe gut issues as well, all through high school, what I call like a nervous belly, IBS. And it started to progress beyond that, where somewhere between my teens and my 20s, i had not an inch on my back, not covered in acne, up my neck, down my arms to my forearms.

I was a competitive athlete, a wrestler, into kickboxing and jiu-jitsu. The pain, my skin was always in. ADHD from an early age compounded tenfold over to a point where in my mid-20s my gut was so severe, my brain was a mess, ADHD was mess. They put me on Vyvanse. I was up to 10-15 bowel movements a day, 10 minute transit times. I could see whole undigested food, like I chew it and spit it out in the toilet. I had blood in my stool, but I never got formally, I'd never went to the doctors. They're not gonna help me, so I figured it all out and got some help with that.

And that's effectively what led me to this career I am today. Moved from paramedics to personal training to nutrition. It's just been a wild ride, it's been family and myself dealing with gut issues. Until one day someone came to me with ulcerative colitis and said, can you help? I said I don't know, we figured that out. The rest is history. Incredible. Thank you so much for doing the work that you're doing and offering so many hope. I know personally, I have also been diagnosed with IBS and this was way before I had been diagnosis with Hashimoto's and oftentimes I would love to get your opinion about this because I've been researching for a book about Irritable Bowel Syndrome and it can be a bit of like a slippery slope where some people might be quote unquote, in remission from like inflammatory bowel disease, and they'll still have irritable bowel syndrome.

And some people will say that there are two separate conditions. Others will see that it's more of a spectrum. Do you have any thoughts on that? I do. And I think there's merit to both things. But I'll tell you, Isabella, the reason I got to where I am, and the success we're having with IBD, I attribute it to how we saw it from a different lens. I had no formal experience. If I was taught originally it's an autoimmune genetic idiopathic, so unknown cause condition, there was nothing we can do, here's what the roots are, we wouldn't have unwound this puzzle on our own.

We would have already been seeded with this idea of wrong information. And so I looked at it and said, what if it is a spectrum, if IBS is, a precursor to IBD, like rungs on a ladder, the first rung, you have a healthy gut. You're fine. It's like Olympian of gut health. you're perfect. But then the next rung, you have IBS. The next, You have some kind of Crohn's or colitis, but I'll even argue colitus predates Crohns, which is the Next Rung and then The Next Run after that is an autoimmune condition.

And so what I'm looking at is a sliding scale progression from a healthy gut to an irritable gut, to inflamed gut. to, or I should say, an inflamed colon to an inflammation entire GI tract, to then a possibly but not guaranteed autoimmune condition. That's how I see it. Now, some people skip rungs. Some people jump up the ladder. some People go from healthy to blood and Crohn's overnight. I've seen all the above. But generally speaking, that's the trend. We can break these down into three simple camps of acute inflammation, two chronic inflammation to chronic auto immune.

And that is really the transition that we see. That's, that's really fascinating. Um, looking at all the research that I've looked at for my book, they got delayed another year because instead of writing like 80,000 words, I wrote like 200,00 words. I love it. That was the book was, and you know, it was like all citations. Cause I really wanted to do a deep dive in the literature. And I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense. and a of the factors that can contribute to irritable bowel syndrome.

also contribute to inflammatory bowel disease. And I feel like this is like a huge, huge overlap. The other interesting part of that is in my experience, I had IBS about 10 years or so before my Hashimoto's diagnosis. If you guys are watching on camera, he just picked up the cutest little dog ever. Yeah, she was chewing on the cords that are charging my laptop right now. So for the sake of her not dying, What? What's her name? This is Callie. So she's a little miniature dashhound. She's 12 weeks old and about three pounds.

Oh my gosh, she is so cute. I love her. Can I, can I have one? You can, here you go. You could take this one. she has a menace. My goodness, you are so sweet. you're, You are just healing me from afar you beautiful little thing. Well, I didn't hear that. Yes, such a good girl. oh my goodness. So I was diagnosed with IBS about 10 years before my Hashimoto's diagnosis. And when I went to functional medicine training, this was a pattern that was commonly reported that you might have that intestinal permeability which can be asymptomatic, but it's oftentimes symptomatic as irritable bowel syndrome five to 10 years before an autoimmune diagnosis and that this intestinal permeability can progress into auto immune disease because every case of autoimmunity, including Hashimoto's hypothyroidism has some degree of intestinal permeability.

So so I'm kind of with you. I know that the that's a controversial topic in like conventional medicine. But I feel like what you're saying makes a lot more sense rather than these two entirely separate conditions. What I could do for Isabella, why don't we dive right into the deep end if you want to go into it? I sort of developed this theory that I've been working on. And I ran it past some very prominent doctors, David Perlmutter, Jeffrey Bland, and they're like, this is really good stuff. In small brag, they are now going to write the foreword to my book upcoming.

So there's definitely some merit to what we're talking about here. Do you want to jump right into just disproving Crohn's colitis as a condition altogether? That sounds really, really fascinating. I would love to ask you all the other questions too. so many. We'll go wherever you want to go. So here's what I'll say about Crohn's colitis, because these are conditions that were conventionally told they're non-issue, right? It's just, it's autoimmune, its genetic, and it is idiopathic, so there's no known cause.

I will break it down for you really fast, just to really put a stamp into this one. Number one, How can a condition be just genetic when 24 to 28% of all cases have any family history, number one? Number two, your genetics are never to blame. They don't work inside of a vacuum. Right? They're influenced by nutrients. There's a study called Neutrogenomics that we know of. they're influenced by stress by your environment by toxins by all kinds of things so that's number one genes can't work in a vacuum and we have a gene detection the top 10 genes across Crohn's colitis on average up to 25 percent of the time five to twenty five percent is genetic susceptibility so we can say it's genetic at all number three We say, or sorry, number two, we say it's autoimmune.

Well, did you know that only 50% to 70% of all Crohn's colitis cases have any antibodies at all? Period. But of those antibodies, very few are designated as solely autoantibodies, which means they're not attacking your own cells. They're attacking something else that shouldn't be there. So they are antibodies like you would have for a virus. It's no different. We can't call it auto immune. Then we say it's idiopathic, meaning no known cause. We've seen cases increase by 3000% since the 1950s, doubling since 90s.

Something must be causing it. And by just simply looking at the data from the CDC and these different organizations, we can look at that information and say, wait a minute, this is wrong. What we're saying doesn't make sense. Therefore, if we are treating everyone like it is autoimmune genetic, then we give everyone immunosuppressive drugs. But if you're in that 30-50% who have none of the above, you're being treated like you are. And that's bad medicine. That's cookbook medicine, it doesn't take patient individuality into account.

So we're treating this disease very, very backwards, I believe. It's really quite fascinating. I think there's so much more research that needs to be done. And unfortunately, conventional medicine is very far behind like functional medicine in this. I they're always looking at like, what's the latest drug that we can make instead of figuring out like what is actually driving this, What is causing this? I was looking a map of the incidence rates of inflammatory bowel disease. all over the world. And holy cow, there is one part of the word where the rates are much, much higher and is like the epicenter of that.

Why Crohn's and colitis are not purely genetic 15:00

If you're listening, if you can take a guess of which part the of world it is, spoiler alert, it's North America, where Josh and I both live. Can you share with us how and why is this the case? That's the thing, when you actually look at the heat maps, again, to say it's genetic with no known cause is asinine. When you've got North America, we'll say Canada, the US, I mean, our hot spots are industrial countries, Canada the U.S., UK, New Zealand, Australia, but when we're looking at this, We know that less than 5% of the globe being the United States has more than 50% of the world's cases of IBD, something must be causing it.

We've got a problem. And that's what we're not looking at. That's we are ignoring in Western medicine, and that is a big, big issue. Something has to be And so if we have to look, what's the difference between our lives and their lives? Well, there's two things. Number one, is a theory actually brought by Erica and Justin Sonnenberg from Stanford University. We call this generational dysbiosis. And we look at this, and what they're talking about is, say great grandmother had a thousand microbes for argument's sake.

And then we introduce, it's pre-1800s, right? Early mid 1800s and the Industrial Revolution hits, and then grandma's born. And grandma gets 800 microbes because the toxins coming in, her bacteria starts to die off, we're getting more big ag farming. Then here we are, early mid 1900s after penicillin's been introduced, antibiotics, other chemicals. Well, now mom gets born who's given 600 microbes, because that's all that left. then you're born with 400 and now your kids get 200 because we're consistently killing off or extincting our microbiomes and this is what we call generational dysbiosis.

So that's factor number one. When it happens more in industrial countries you can see the heat maps. The second thing that we tend to see You're familiar with the hygiene hypothesis that we might be too clean and this is keeping us ill. We can blame toxins and I actually have, I've sort of described the only three reasons humans get sick. we can get to that as well. But let's talk about the big one being toxins. In a world full of toxins, toxic food, Toxic chemicals, toxic preserves, we have up to 18 to 20,000 pesticides that were used in North America.

There's all kinds of junk in our systems. So the question we want to then be asking, Is it really toxins that are killing us as much as our microbiomes not being where they should be? So look at two countries that have the most industrial toxic rating countries on planet Earth, China and India, right? The Ganges River is full of bodies and corpses and metal, and you would die breathing that water. But people in India living near these rivers don't have nearly the same percentage, a fraction of a percent of the per capita illness that we have.

So even though they're exposed to more toxins and chemicals than we are, they have a fraction of these diseases that we do. So is it just the toxins? Is it a combination of factors? It is our stress that live with on a nonstop basis in our lives that leads us to developing these disease? There's a lot of layers. But ultimately, to say it's idiopathic, meaning unknown, in my opinion, we're just not looking hard enough or willfully turning a blind eye. And that's as big of a problem as anything. I still agree with you with that.

I know that a lot of times countries that are further away from like the equator, they have higher rates of autoimmune disease. And there's so many different theories out there. Um, I knew for my husband, one of the triggers was erythreal. which is an additive that is commonly found in like keto products. It's a sugar alternative. And these are, you know, very much like the American diet is like so full of processed foods. I'm a big believer in eating much, much a much cleaner diet. But there's I feel like there are a lot more factors than just, just some of those things, right?

Absolutely, and I think again we're not looking in the right places or frankly the quote scientists are being paid not to look to turn a blind eye. We've seen over the last years more than anything how backwards science is. That science can't necessarily be trusted because the top scientists follow whoever's got the biggest wallet. And that's been proven over and over. How many times in our lifetime have these three-letter organizations, .gov, anything, said this is safe? Thalidomide, Teflon, BPAs, all these different chemicals that say are safe.

And it's actually at your expense, my expense that they've decided, hey, OK, it is a problem because the people spoke up against being quite literally poisoned. That's when we decided it was a problems. So the, people telling you what's safe, what effective, What's healthy. What could it be? What not as far as I'm concerned, have no vested interest in your wellness. In fact, just to put a stamp on that, for those of you who might say, no, I don't believe it. Remember we said North America is less than 5% of the globe.

We have up to 50% Of the world's cases of Crohn's colitis. On top of that we make up almost 70%of the global pharmaceutical profits. That's a problem. So what we're looking at here, one more stamp on this one, it's about $4.7, $ 4.8 trillion per year in the USA spent on sick care. That's 18% of the entire country's GDP made up by sickness and disease, more than any other country on earth. And regardless of spending more money per capita than in any country, on planet earth, we are the sickest. Our life expectancy is going down for the first time in like 150 years.

We have more disease than anybody ever. It's something like 15%, 50% percent of children by age 18 will develop a chronic disease. 60% adults have a Chronic illness of some kind diagnosed. Again, don't quote me on the exact stats, but I believe it's 50 to 60% of adults over age 50 are on two or more pharmaceutical medication prescriptions. It's unbelievable what we're doing. And so instead of looking at disease symptoms as, wait a minute, this is a word, my body's communicating and saying, hey, help me.

We just put tape over its mouth and tell it to shut up in the form of medication. And so, you know what I mean? Like you could hold a hostage in a living room, Isabella. God forbid you do. But if you put a tape on the mouth, and they stop screaming, are they happy to be there? No. So what are we doing with medication? It's kind of the same issue. You know, when we were chatting a little bit beforehand, I was mentioning to you I have a six and a half year old son and he likes to watch YouTube sometimes on my computer or my husband's computer.

And the United States is one of the only countries that allows direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertisements. The other one is New Zealand. And I had been working in Google Docs on my book and I have been writing something about ulcerative colitis or inflammatory bowel disease. I was writing about depression and my son started seeing ads for antidepressants and for medications like biologics. watching like little kid YouTube shows. And he started asking me what these like, what is this? What is that?

He's like calling out drug names and asking what it is. It's just it's Just madness to me. So many people like I feel like the approach Maybe, I don't know, if they've been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis or irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's, nothing's going to help me because I've already tried the doctor route, or they're looking for the next pharmaceutical biologic that suppresses their immune response and kind of shuts that signal down. I feel like we're really doing people a disservice because we are not really educating them about what is going on and why their body is raising these alarms and red flags.

I know you had wanted me to ask you about why the Western medicine approach to inflammatory disease is so broken. There's so many directions we can go. Do you have thoughts on this? This is such a great question. I know it's loaded. It's like, what are the things you guys want to talk about? But this is why this, is the epicenter of what you and I do. it is a functional approach. Here's what I can say. No disease comes up out of the blue. Imagine Isabella, you go into the hospital. You step on a nail and nail goes through your foot.

Your doctor looks at you. He's, like Isabela, I, know that nail really hurts. Sorry. But there's nothing we can do. It's just part of your body now. But here's what I can for you. I'm gonna give you some numbing cream. You're gonna put it on your foot every day for the rest of you life. And if it doesn't help, the pain gets out of hand, we'll cut off your feet. How insane would this conversation be with your doctor? Would it make any sense? Yet you get somebody who's 30, 40, 50 years old. live their entire life perfectly healthy, no gut issues.

They go to their doctor, he goes, you have ulcerative colitis, You have Crohn's. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do. It's just genetic, it's part of your body. But here's what we could do, I'll give you some medication, It'll manage your symptoms for the rest of you life. If it doesn't work, we'll cut out your bowels. Why is that conversation not just as insane as a nail in your foot with numbing cream? Yet we look at it because we've been so conditioned that diseases just are. this infinite continuum of things that we just can't help, and your headache is an aspirin deficiency, take a pill, it'll help you get better, there's nothing we can do about it.

But it's insane to me that we look at disease and go, yep, it just happens. Here's the rub, your body is not designed to be sick. Your body does not make mistakes. You're genetics aren't against you. Something is causing your genes to express like a volume knob. They can turn all the way up and express poorly or turn back down and be nice and quiet and still. They simply have regulation over your immune responses on a mucosal level, so inside your gut lining.

Environmental drivers: toxins, dysbiosis, and stress 25:00

They can help regulate and manage bacterial levels inside of your guts, management with nutrients, etc. So if those are expressing poorly, their volumes turned up, we need to be asking what turned the volume up? Not, why is my jeans just on and off like a light switch? It doesn't happen that way. There's a lot more layers to it. And so Western medicine does it wrong because they treat you as if it's innate. They treat like it is a nail in the foot with numbing cream. Rather than asking why and how do we get here, they just go, let's cover it up and we have surgery.

This is big financial incentive for you to be on Renvo or Remicade for $20,000 a month. It's about $35 billion a year alone just in bowel disease, let alone other gut-related things up to about 800 billion. So on top of that, if we can connect, 93% of the leading causes of death in North America, which we, can as per the CDC, they come back to the gut. Your gut's the epicenter of all things. If we just ignore the symptoms, you're putting tape over its mouth, and maybe you can't hear it, but it's still crying out for help.

And that's why Western medicine does this so, so wrong. Yeah, for me, I mean, just I've seen it with my own eyes. So I have two good friends who used to have Crohn's disease. They have zero evidence of Crohne's Disease. I had my husband who use to had ulcerative colitis and basically he was told I drove him to the appointment and back and they were like, this is something you're gonna have forever. It can get better, it can worse. Here's the medications. We were given four different medications And I know I mean, I see it with my own eyes.

It's not like a forever thing. Most doctors, conventionally trained doctors will say it's a Forever Disease. I have my evidence that it is not. Why do you say, it can be fixed? What's your evidence, right? Well, like I can say Isabella, as I refuse to ignore the evidence in my eyes and ears. Right, hundreds of cases. Great example, I had a fellow who was in 17, 18 years with severe ulcerative colitis. They planned his funeral three times, thought he was gonna die. Here he is now, it's been almost four years, five years since I've seen him, and he's perfectly fine.

Not a sign of gut issues, nothing. You'd never know he had bowel disease of any sort. So that's number one, after being on medications for, you know, again, almost two decades. I saw a five-year-old boy's mom came to see me, really severe inflammation, severe colitis. And you've got kids, imagine your little boy walking around limping around the house because his joints hurt, his hair falling out, he's pale and gray, and his appetite's bad, sleeping 18 plus hours a day. That's not normal, right?

Boys should be able to be boys, go out and play, get your hands dirty, bump your head off of something and come in crying, but he didn't have the energy to go bump his head of stuff. But it turns out his doctor said, yup, it's genetic. It's a bad luck of the draw. it was not, It was actually a mold infection. He had 16 toxic strains of mold. Turns out their whole house had to be torn down to the studs and remodeled. So there's always a root cause. Your body never gets sick just because. There has to a wrench in the system.

You have 200 plus checks and balances of your body trying to heal you. At the very core of it, inflammation is actually good for you! Inflammation is a good thing. It's an acute inflammatory response where your body bucks up and says, you shouldn't be here. They dilate the blood vessels and bring in all the superheroes and white blood cells. they stimulate, they sensitize the nerves to say, maybe back off of this piece and let us take care of it for a little while. But instead we take anti-inflammatories and suppress it.

The problem is, when you move from this acute state, this sort of phase one inflammatory process, if your body is stuck, and it can't get rid of things, it comes back to the three reasons we get sick, but if you can get it rid off things it then becomes chronic. And if it's chronic for long enough, its like you trying to carry a boulder on your shoulders, a big, big rock and eventually you start getting more and more tired and you have to drop it. That is your phase three, where now it's this chronic autoimmune where your body's like, I don't know what else to do.

And it keeps pulling out all the extra straws. Something had to set this cascade in motion and it started with an acute inflammatory response that your bodies couldn't shake. It's not your genetics, something was there. We just had figure out why is it that you're sick and there's only three reasons that can be. So I know I was personally very intimidated when my husband was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis because I'm like, you know, I specialize in like this part of the body in women. And, you know, there are some functional medicine things, like I'm very well versed in functional Medicine approach for thyroid health.

I remember talking to our functional medical doctor, and he was like, a lot of same things we would do for Crohn's and colitis, are a of things that you're already doing for Thyroid health, and there's like a whole functional medicine approach to inflammatory bowel disease and gut disease. Can you share what that might be versus, you know, like I'm trained in conventional medicine, so like, I am still unlearning about like you, know I kind of see things in a vacuum like this is a thyroid issue, this a gut issue and I have to constantly unlearn.

And I think a lot of us really need that help with understanding the difference between conventional and functional approach Here's the thing about Western medicine. They look at the body in a reductionist point of view, right? Your thyroid's your thyroid. Your nerves are your nerves. You got a hormone issue, go see an endocrinologist. Got a gut issue? See a GI specialist. you got joint issues? Go see that doctor. Eye issues, eye doctor, there's always this reductionists point-of-view, but the reality is in functional medicine, we understand that nothing in your body stands alone.

everything is connected to everything in some way, shape or form, right? Your hair and your fingernails are connected your gut. They're connected too your freaking lungs in Some way. I mean, ultimately, you wouldn't be able to have hair or nails or skin if you didn't have lungs taking an oxygen, so it's all connected. We have to recognize this. So when Western medicine says, yes, it is a gut issue, what do they do? They suppress inflammatory responses in your guts. If we look at your body like a cup of water, What ends up happening?

Well, that cup begins to fill up. You're developing symptoms. Once that Cup finally overflows, now you have enough boxes checked on the symptomatology that you go to your doctor, they see up, you just have this condition. It's all it is. We checked enough Boxes. And now we know what drugs to give you in which order. This is cookbook medicine. Functional medicine takes the time. We're not based in insurance We don't need to move you through like cattle at six seven minutes to get our kickback on You know time in 20 bucks from the insurance.

Give me the the kick back on the drugs I gave you it's not about that We take the hours to sit down understand your history my intake forms. I do one interview I send you 200 plus questions I look at your bloods any labs any tests we do a second interview We meet with you every single week because we have to because this is the way people get better and the reason you're Not is because you are not doing this And so you have to understand it's all connected. We can't reduce the body to individual parts and pieces because it operates as a unified whole.

Yeah, I really appreciate you saying that because I feel like if you've had any training in conventional medicine, it's like a big unlearning process of, yes, there are things, maybe it seems like it localized to this part of the body, but there's also these other things we might need to address and it is all connected. You mentioned three things. What are those three thing that you had talked about that could be potential triggers for inflammatory bowel disease? What have you found in working with your clients?

Well, there are three main triggers that we see at the root of it. But let's bring up a little higher view. There are 3 reasons we get sick ever for every disease, especially we'll apply to bowel diseases, which is how I sort of unlock this. And challenge me if I'm wrong here, Isabella, because this is sort what I've been reducing over the last decade. Number one, it's toxins. That has to be some kind of toxin from somewhere. High blood sugar, that's a toxine. If we have any kind of issue from heavy metals to VOCs to pesticides, mycotoxins, all these things are toxins, chemicals, microplastics.

It's all toxins. We're surrounded by it constantly.We have pharmaceuticals in our water, these forever chemicals we can't get rid of. They're there. So those toxins are things that get into your body that should not be there. Your body therefore has to react against or take resources away from your immune system, your nutrients to be able to take care of and try to clear these toxins. So that's the first thing that makes us sick. Any combination of the above. The second thing is going to deficiencies.

Now, those deficiencies, they can be your basic nutrients. These are your building blocks. Whether it's a toxin that's in there or you're aging, you cut yourself, and your body has to heal, these are constant building block. Your body's constantly turning over cells. But it needs resources, like construction workers taking bricks to build a home. these Are your vitamins, minerals, your amino acids, of course your proteins, fats as they get broken down. This is water and electrolytes, all the basics you need to survive.

When you're deficient in these, your body starts to break down, right? Just like any house that wears down with age, you need to continually keep it up and maintain it. That's what nutrients do. So if we're efficient, we break it down. We get sick. The third thing we see is microbial imbalances. You either have too little of certain species in your buddy, too high of a certain specie, even if they're good guys, they are too hi, it's a problem. If they too low, bad guys come in and overgrow. They take up residence because there's vacancy.

Whether you have parasites, bacteria, viruses, fungus, whatever it is, these imbalances, high or low, are what contribute to our issues. So if you toxins, deficiencies, and microbes, any combination above, you're going to be sick.

Why Western medicine falls short 35:00

And that's really how we develop any kind of disease. And I think that makes so much sense. I feel like people listening might be like, well, how does it call connect? And, I just want to expand like toxins, stress could be a toxin too. Like there is such a thing as toxic stress, right? and that can create a lot of deficiencies. When we're under a lotta stress we might deficient in B vitamins. Um, i'm gonna share my husband's story. We were living in Boulder, Colorado at the time. And we had Boulder, Colorado is at elevation.

It's in the mountains. Beautiful, beautiful mountain town, gorgeous hikes. Also, many people can develop iron overload because of the hypoxia. And so my husband had high levels of iron in his system, which is toxic, Which feeds pathogenic bacteria, right? And this was sort of a perfect storm that when he was exposed to some I want to say it was sugar-toxic E. coli that basically we all ate this like salad that was you know perhaps not not fresh or whatnot and in his body because he had all of that all of that extra iron, this became superfood for the pathogenic bacteria.

And another thing is, he was working out a lot at the time and he under a lotta stress. He was kind of becoming a new dad and not sleeping and a wanna worried. That was really depleting a lots of his nutrients. It's interesting, I know I've personally observed I don't know if you have thoughts on this, but some of the gentlemen that I've seen with, like, UC, they tend to be like bodybuilders. And I know I have observed in in just, you know, athletes that a lot of times they might be glutamine deficient.

And I wonder if that's kind of the underlying cause of, or, they're just not fixing their gut enough. They don't have their, when you're doing extreme sports, that can cause like micro injuries to your gut, right? Well, I think that's an interesting point to consider. Are there deficiencies? But if you're getting your proteins and doing what you do, maybe you have enough. So I don't want to agree or disagree because it's something to considered. On the other hand, you know, when I was actually doing strength sports, i was competitive and strong man, and I doing powerlifting.

I always on anabolic steroids. i'm only five foot nine.I was 216 pounds. Like I, was a big boy. And I got sick,I dropped to about 165. And what ended up happening though is because my gut was already an underlying issue. I had a Candida infection that had been there the entire time, as well as some parasites that weren't quite out of hand at this stage yet. And then the steroids, because now you have all this extra testosterone, it's really hard on the liver, I was actually recirculating beta-glucuronidase.

So I had toxic bile recirculating, binding onto estrogens. I got a little bit of gynecomastia, so I knew I have elevated estogens. And estrogen, progesterone, they actually have a role to play in your immune responses. So not only can you be modifying and modulating your responses, but if you're sludging up your liver with anything, be it high stress, excess foods, supplements you are taking, I was eating Cocoa Puffs as a snack because I need calories, right? When I as teenager, it was McDonald's.

Because I'm in gymnastics now. It was crazy. And then my liver then became toxic. So I filled up my cup even further until it eventually overflowed and everything got wet. Now I had breakdown and compromise in my system, my immune system my gut lining, My skin, drainage pathways, how things exit my body were all plugged up. I was getting acne and joint pain. My lymphatics were stuffy. It was prone to getting sick. But it's these combination of things in any of the above that lead us to disease. Are we deficient in one thing?

Sure, you could be. That's a cascade effect that leads to deficiencies in others or blocking up of toxins and things and another system, which is a collective whole, fill your glass. And that's really what we want to be watching for. I think from a conventional medicine standpoint, a lot of times they try to look for causes and they're sort of like, well, if this one nutrient isn't the full answer, that can be the cause. But from the functional medicine point, it's looking at a few different things.

So maybe it started off with a mycotoxin exposure. And that led to some dysbiosis because of your microbes got out of balance. And so a lot of times, and that plugged up your detox pathways, then you became nutrient deficient. A lot times you have to fix a few different things. You can't just be like, oh yeah, we just did one thing. At least that's been my experience in thyroid health is a lotta times we're fixing various parts of the system. It's like if you're not If your gut is inflamed, then your liver is going to get congested with the toxins, and you're recirculating a lot of toxins.

So I feel like this is a really important conversation for anybody listening, is that, yes, it's absolutely reversible. But the next question I was going ask is, Why isn't this functional medicine approach to healing more popular? Yeah, we kind of covered it, right? I mean, the insurance-based model worth $4.5 trillion a year, you get in, your seven minutes in. You get to your doctor, they check a box for your symptoms, give you a drug, get you out, and get the kickbacks. Everyone's done. It's not their fault.

That's what they're taught to do. They're a quarter million dollars or more in debt for school. they have to pay back their loans. Like they are stuck in the model. It takes them 25 years to be able to get out of that, should they want to, to move on anyways. There's financial incentive to stay. Functional medicine, insurance doesn't cover it, so a lot of people got to pay out-of-pocket for that. On top of, that it's much more time-consuming. It take a more critical thought. You can't systemize health care, but you can systemized sick care.

And that's the issue. That's why it is not more popular. What are some, I guess, suggestions you might have for somebody that maybe they're listening to this and they've been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, and IBS, they are like, well, what do I do? I'm listening this at home and don't want to have this condition. Do you have suggestions for them on things that they can do to perhaps help to heal themselves or what their next few steps could be? Yeah, and without making assumptions, let's start with the basics.

If you're new to this, or whether you've been at this a long time, you can have a different point of view. Those who have been out this have tried every diet, everything and that's fine. But let us start at the basic first and we'll get more in depth. Number one, remember your body's like a cup of water. As that cup starts to fill up, it overflows and now you get sick. So the first thing I want to do is look at what is filling your glass. So you can't empty it if you keep pouring water into it. Are you high stressed?

Are in a stressful environment, an environment that's making you sick? 70% of US homes have an active mold issue. are you prone to mold? What is contributing to your illness? are eating food that is making sick or causing dysbiosis or toxicity in your system? what is filling your glass number one? Number two, you want to figure out why your body can't empty. Why can you drain that stuff out of your, body what's holding on to it? We need to support that drainage. And the third is part of the cleanup.

Once we know what has gotten wet, what other systems have been compromised, your limbs, liver, immune system, et cetera, we can then go in and patch those holes. So the first basic is let's stop filling the cup. Manage sleep and sleep hygiene. Get off your phones, unplug your Wi-Fi routers or cell phones. Don't let them charge next to your bed. Those EMFs disrupt you on a cellular level. EMFs, as well as there's mold, by the way, EMS from Wi-Fi and cell phones increase mold growth by 500%. It's astonishing what can happen.

That's in your gut. You're colonizing. So we have to that's number one. And I'm just going to pivot here for a second, Isabella. We'll break it down to the five Rs. I think that the best way to explain this before I get too deep in the deep end here. So emptying that cup, that's removing. You want to drain, get your drainage or exit pathways open. There's some great supplements out there like basics like NAC and TUDCA that can be part of this process. But if we drain but don't bind, Then you're moving toxins and possibly mobilizing, they land somewhere else and you get sick.

This is where universal binders, your zeolites, bentonite clays, charcoals, humic fulvic acid, okra, powder, all these different things can come in handy. Modified citrus pectin, and all of these can be really great. But again, work with a practitioner to make yourself sick, So this is what we're removing. We're moving the problems, opening the system, stop adding to the cup. The second we want to do, because we realize why we get sick, one of our reasons is going to be deficiencies. So we've removed our toxin, number one.

Number two, we are deficient. Let's replenish. This is the second R. Make sure your body is getting nutrients that are high quality, nice and dense to refill those debt jars, so to speak. Then we wanna rebuild. We have to rebuild your microbiome. Your ecosystem has been changed and compromised. So we have go back to patching that, adding in what's missing, removing the bad guys again, fixing that. That's that third reason we get sick, which is your microbial imbalances. Then the fourth R is repair.

We want to repair your tissues or repair you gut lining. One of the biggest reasons those with IBD stay with I B D is they have holes in their gut, which precipitates and drives autoimmune disease. one of three legs of auto immune disease is leaky gut. So if we can repair that, patch the lining, you could take down the load on your immune system. And ultimately as well, You wouldn't want to live in a house that's been burned down with holes in the walls and smashed windows,

The five Rs of healing the gut 45:00

neither do your microbes. So, if you can patch your gut and give them a nice healthy home that is durable and stable and safe, they can colonize. The bad guys like a bad environment, the good guys need a good one. We have to repair. so far we've removed those toxins or any issue making you sick. we have replenished the nutrients because you've been deficient. We've rebuilt the microbiome because the microbial imbalances were why you're sick. Now we're repairing those tissues to make sure they can have a place to live.

Then we rejuvenate the immune system. Very different than boosting. In IBD, there are three main immune pathways that are implicated. The first one we call TH1. This is really your innate immunity. This one actually regulates the next two pathways we're going to talk about, helps keep them in check, it's anti-inflammatory, keeps bad guys and pathogens out of your system. But when that one is compromised or deficient or depleted at the far stage of disease, we then have an imbalance or a high a drive, a hyperactivity of what's called TH2 and TH17.

These immune pathways, number two, this drives things like histamines, allergy reactions, leaky gut, food sensitivities, that's in that pathway. The second one we have is number 17. Now this arm of your immune system, This is what is going to drive your neutrophils. If you've got IBD, your body, if your doctor goes to check, what are they looking for? To mark inflammation, they're checking calprotectin. This TH17 pathway drives a neutrophil activity. And just like cars idling in a parking lot, the more neutrofils you have, more exhaust they produce in the form of calprotectin.

So when those are hyperactive in an area you had these high inflammatory markers, well no wonder you'll have this problem. because TH17 is hyperactive. When it's hyper active, this is where you get ulcers and fistulas and strictures and all these things breaking down. So if you go to boost your immune system without knowing what you're doing, you might boost this hyper-active pathway number two and number 17, leading to more issues. We have to rejuvenate and bring back back. which is extremely important to do, and it does take a fair bit of doing.

There are pharmaceutical options, there are natural options. there's all kinds of things and lots of hope on the horizon, but this is really the five bases. Remove, replenish, rebuild, repair, rejuvenate. I love that. I'm curious if you have any kind of maybe go-to protocols if somebody is in a lot of pain, or they might have residual pain. Let's say they've resolved a lots of their inflammatory bowel disease symptoms, but maybe they still struggle with depression, they struggle pain or fatigue.

Are there additional things that you might work on them with? That's a great question. That part of repairing and rebuilding as well, if you're still dealing with residual issues. And I'll put some context to this. I've had a lot of people come through the program and feel amazing. 15 years of issues, three, four, five weeks like I'm having normal bowel movements for the first time in over a decade. Like my drugs aren't working. What's happened? Well, you removed a layer. But sometimes as we open layer and layer, and later after layer your body can re-react.

You can feel like you relapsing, but you actually getting deeper to the root. Prime example had a woman in, she had mold infection and parasites. Those are her big two drivers. We started binding and clearing the mold, opened up her drainage pathway so her exit doors of the body, liver, gallbladder, bioducts, those things, and she was better within about six, seven weeks. I'm talking after 15 plus years. But then we said she was starting to get some hives, itchiness, rashes. Like, I think that's a parasite issue.

We dug in, she had parasites, we started moving them. And guess what? Full relapse. She thought she were worse or back to where she is, but she wasn't. Her immune system had the resources to redirect its energy to this new thing it just identified that came out of the woodwork, came of out the biofilms that your body couldn't detect or react to before. But now it can. And so we're talking about what to do. I would look first to the five Rs again, because maybe you missed a layer. Maybe you miss the problem.

Because that's a downstream issue. Your microbiome doesn't screw itself up. Maybe it was the mold that did it like you mentioned. So let's deal with the mould first. See what's remaining residual. If I test one now, then fix the molds. It's changed anyway. We have to go back and continually take a new look at the five Rs. I mean, 90% of your neurotransmitters for your brain are made in your gut. 70% every immune cells are may grown and matured and nurtured inside of our gut, so there's a problem at the source.

The downstream effect is all these symptoms you're still feeling. So the first thing I do is let's go back to the five hours and see what we missed before I try to take any supplementary or medical intervention. I think that's such sage advice. I know just going back to my husband's story again, we were able to get him into remission with solid nutrition, low dose naltrexone, and we had done a lot of gut testing at the time, but nothing came out. And he was like, pretty much in remission with all things, but he would have every now and then he had more pain and insomnia and it happened to be around the full moon.

Very suspicious and we ended up doing a different type of like a parasite test. And sure enough, he had like a giardia infection. And that was like, we treated that and we had been trying like PEMF on his pain. We were like going all of these different, you know, kind of rabbit holes of like why does he have this pain? Where did this paint come from? And so on and so forth. That was probably the biggest thing, like little bit of limping. Then holy cow, We treat the parasite and it's like oh, That was it, but it never showed up on the earlier tests.

And some professionals, and I'm not sure if you fall in that category, will say you actually want to fix the initial layers and just do more soothing things, the things that you're talking about, like the five Rs, versus some of the more aggressive things for gut health. I know I know some anti-parasitic protocols might utilize things like berberine, and in his case, that was causing a little bit more inflammation. So I'm not sure if you have any thoughts on that. I knew this was our experience when we were like, you know, I am always very interested in the infectious component, but we sort of told, okay, why don't we just try to cool the inflammation first before we start to, kind of take out any kind big guns.

What's your experience with your clientele? Does it vary or do you kind follow this approach too? I think it depends on how your body responds. I mean, I had a young girl I was working with, think she was 14, 15, and curcumin took her inflammation and pain down to 90 plus percent of what it was, or sorry, took it down by 90%. So she can respond really well. But here's the thing, as an integrative practitioner, we're not afraid of medication. It's long-term issues or the long term side effects that become an issue for you.

So in these cases, do we want to take the inflammation down? I'm sure. Here's what I look at supplementing. If I'm taking supplements to manage my inflammation, it's just plant-based medication. That's all it is. Medications, manage your symptoms. If you're using plants to manager symptoms, there's no difference. At least the drugs are covered by insurance. And there is a much higher efficacy rating for the most part. So don't be afraid of those. What I'm interested in is can your body tolerate maybe a parasite removal protocol?

If your drainage is still plugged up, if you're highly inflamed, you can't even get pills down because your bodies shoots them out. Yes, we need to manage it first. But it's always going to be on a per basis as an individual. What do you tolerate? What does your buddy want or need right now? And ultimately, as far as that's concerned, there's a couple of basics, manage your stress, make sure you are sleeping, etc. Low histamine diet as well. That's a big part of this. Whole foods, tolerable foods low histamine.

Because you guys remember we just talked about the low TH1 pathway, high TH2 and 17. Number two releases histamines. So if you're consuming bone broth, which is supposed to be good for you, it might be bad for your gut. If you are consuming fermented foods for probiotics, It might bad your your guts. We have to look at histamin foods. Cured meats, canned foods all that stuff. But that's really where we go. Do we manage inflammation first as needed? But my interest is what can you tolerate right now to get your body to the next stage?

And how can we do that comfortably? That's all that really matters to me. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with over 300 people that you've helped to get into remission. It's always, you know, a good reminder that everybody is going to be a little bit different. And sometimes the protocols, I know the protocol that I learned through IFM, some of them were very spot on. in my husband's case, but then there were others that were just making him worse. And that's why it's really, really helpful to work with a knowledgeable practitioner with this kind of condition.

If I could jump in with you here really quick Isabella, I'd like to say this is a very controversial statement, mind you. So take this for what it's worth and sort of distill it down on your own. I question the term remission because there are some people who are beyond the point of no return where their immune system is now deficient and it cannot come back. We've seen that. certain genes, etc. But in my experience, most people are not just in remission. Here's the question we need to ask, how long do you have to be pain free, symptom free medication free completely self sustaining on your own, but completely healed basically before they call it a cure?

What does it actually take? That's where I want to pose the question. You're in remission for 25 years, you're not on medication, your body's doing its own, and you can eat pizza once or twice a week and feel like you are

Mold, methylation, and drainage pathways 55:00

not dying. Great, no symptoms. Are you cured or in your remmission? And then on top of that, if you get sick again, see I told you I was in my remition, did you just miss a layer? Did something else come up that you didn't know was there before? So there are people, I believe, that will just be in remission. We can see that we already know with immunodeficiency, but there's more to the picture, more of the puzzle. I think we've been told, and I just need to question the status quo a little bit more and just creak that door open a bit.

And every time we do, we get a lot more information, a more insight, experimentation. Sometimes, Gate keeps the stuff. Yeah, I feel like I really wanted to have you on to get it out into the open and just really give people that hope and some ideas of things to look into. There's a fantastic account on Instagram, and I believe it's like is mold toxicity, and are you're involved with that? Would you say in your experience of the almost 400 people now that you've worked with, is this a common factor or is it a sometimes factor?

I would love to get your thoughts on that. We hadn't considered that as something for my husband when we got him into remission, but that's been brought up to me. It was like, oh, was mold an issue? And I'd love know more about that, Yeah, I mean, absolutely. What is IBD? It's long-standing inflammation and hyperactivity of those same immune pathways 2 and 17. That's really all it is at its core. And so mold creates this process you mentioned called pleomorphic. So it changes the landscape if you've got bacteria, increase the bad guys, lose the good guys etc.

that's the first thing we tend to see. The second thing is that mold activates and drives these immune pathways. And if it's still there, it is going to continue to drive it further and further. It creates more changes in your gut, which drive that immune system further, and now we compound our issues. So I see mold. Again, as that cup filling up, I see it in probably 60 to 80% of people's cups. The question is, is it filling your entire cup? Is it just a small part of your cup. Did that mold distract your immune system enough to have overgrowth of bad things and toxins and bring parasites in, which are now 90% percent of you cup, it's definitely something to be considered.

It's a huge factor, especially that we know 44% people, at least if not up to eighty, have some kind of issue with methylation. You may be familiar with these. This MTHFR you guys may have seen on social media gets pretty popular. So those people are prone to holding on to mold and heavy metals. Half the population is prone. When 70% of homes in the US have a mold problem, we got to consider it. On top of that, up to 40% asthma cases, for example, are attributed to molds. There's a lot of layers to what mold does to your body, and we have to be aware.

And then consider all other diseases as an interesting sidebar. Your body gets leaky, you have leky gut. You leak out these endotoxins. We call them LPS or endo toxins. They get around your body. What does your do? Well, it produces extra cholesterol to bind on to these toxins or try to neutralize them. What is heart disease? Inflammation of the arteries like atherosclerosis which causes hardening. You lack that ability to expand and contract so your blood pressure goes up. Then you have all these toxins inflaming the wall so you're body binds cholesterol which hardens and turns into plaque and now 40 years later you've got heart diseases or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, or something else because of these toxins.

So there's a connection everywhere. The question is can we draw it back and pinpoint the origin and then reverse engineer the process to unravel your disease. Great. Thank you so much for that. So definitely, I mean, 60 to 80%, if you're somebody that has inflammatory bowel disease, definitely make sure that you are being tested for mold and you look at that as a possibility in your home. I think that's pretty huge. It's not like 5% or 10% that your seeing. The methylation, so this is another very, very common thing that you're seeing.

44 to 80 percent of the people that your working with have methylated issues. You also mentioned two questions, maybe part one and part two question. Methylation, what are your favorite ways to support methylation? And then you also mentioned a concept that I feel like maybe a lot of people have heard about, but maybe they're not quite sure what it means. And it's like supporting those pathways. What are people talking about? You support these pathways, right? I know that gets thrown around a lots in functional medicine, I think for the average person listening, maybe break that down just a bit more and explain what we mean when we say that like the drainage pathways and the detox pathways, because people are like, what?

It's like drinking from a fire hose, isn't it? Here's what I can say. So detoxing is collecting your trash. Drainage is bringing it out to the curb. The simple is that detoxing is pulling in all the things in your detox organs. Drainage is how you move it around and expel it from your body. We have seven main drainage pathways. The first is going to be your liver. Then you have your gallbladder and bile ducts. These are the two that I see need the most love in IBD. You got your kidneys and your bowels, of course.

you got you lymphatics, your sinuses and you skin. these are all drainage or exit pathways for your And your lymphatics is a seventh. So when these are all clogged up or there's a traffic jam, you can't move things around or move them out. What we have to do is open these up. But again, we talked about drainage being paired with binders and that first R remove. We have to open the drainage pathway. Tudka, really great for the liver, moving bile. Your body recirculates 95% of your bile, it's very expensive to make as a resource standpoint.

So you rec circulate it. But if your liver is toxic, your body's toxic. You can't get rid of these things. you're actually rec circulating and re absorbing more toxins, filling your cup once again. So we want to bind on to some of these as well and help get rid of it. So when we're talking about drainage, basic things, sweating, red light therapy, you can do acupuncture, or you could do the phatic massage, You can also supplement certain things to help support your liver. So as part of that methylation, which is really the extraction, like I think Gary Brekka describes it as taking crude oil from the ground and making it a usable form in your car.

All kinds of stuff like folate, not folic acid, by the way, garbage, but folates like an L5 methylfolate a methyl version, B12 we call TMG or trimethylglycine, NAC which N acetylcysteine intrinsic factor.

Resources and closing thoughts 1:02:00

all these things can be really beneficial to helping your body actually remove these toxins. That's your drainage. And then detoxing, it kind of just does on its own, which we can support. But the detox and fails when the drainage fails. It's like filling your garbage bin up, you can only fill up so much till it overflows into your kitchen. Now you've got a bigger mess to deal with. Same system. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think that's going to help clarify a lot because I know when I was starting on my healing journey, I would hear these terms thrown out quite a bit and I had no idea what they meant.

It took me so time and effort just to track down what all of that meant I am so grateful that you came on my show and that one, you're helping people recover from significant gut issues that most people think are impossible to heal. So really, really grateful for the work that and for taking time out of your busy day to help educate us about what to do. I know I learned a ton while speaking with you, I was taking notes and just really, really fascinated by everything that you found to be helpful.

And it just makes so much sense to me coming from functional medicine training and seeing things with my own eyes, right? I would love to ask you, you have been very generous and kind to provide a free resource for people listening. Can you share what that is? Absolutely. This resource is like a treasure chest, it's full of other resources. So, I want to make sure you have the right one. It's our IBD Resource Library. Everything can be found in there. Now, this is specific to IBDE. You can always find the reversible podcast.

That's Reverse Able, ABLE, the ultimate health podcast, where you'll see Dr. Wins on there soon. And that's always one for broad spectrum gut. But for Crohn's colitis, I have my IBD resource library. I've got a podcast called Reversing Crohns and Colitis Naturally. Got a YouTube channel dedicated. It's all these lives I do inside of my Facebook groups, my Instagram. They're all up there for you to take and absorb and learn from. This is stuff. The number one thing I hear is I learned more in a 15-minute episode than from my doctor in 15 years.

it is astonishing what you learn in these episodes. And all the tools to reverse are in there to find. So that resource library, there's downloadables and guides and food recommendations where you follow the food rules to not trigger your immune system. It's all free. You can find all of that there. And I imagine you'll just link that in the show notes. Definitely. Thank you so much for providing these resources for us and that the work that you do really, really appreciate it. I know we're running out of time here.

But I did want to ask you before I let you go, are there any wellness hacks that just refuse to participate in? Hmm. There is a trend that I refuse to participate in unless I was alone in the forest, which is sunbathing my taint. That's really got very popular on the internet. Outside of that, here's the thing. Everything is trending. And I think if it's a Trend, there's probably some semblance of disinformation in there. So check with a source that you trust. Fantastic advice. Thank you so much for joining us and everybody joining.

I hope this has been incredibly healing on your healing journey.