What's a fecal transplant? You take a healthy person's poop and you transfer it into the person who's sick. For example, a patient of mine took an antibiotic which wipes out your gut, which became life-threatening. There are choices where to remove the colon or to give her a fecal transplant. And so I delivered the fecal transplant to her. By the next day, the entire infectious issue got shut down. So this is a great example to show how important our gut microbiome is, because 60% of the weight of your stool is your microbiome. Really? Yes, but it's not getting enough attention. And we need to talk about that.
World-renowned gastroenterologist Dr. Will Bolswitch is back. This time he's sharing brand new information regarding the gut microbiome and how poo might actually be the key to your health. 60% of people that listen are currently struggling with some kind of gut problem. And it manifests in these subtle ways, like bloating, increased fatigue, difficulty concentrating. You don't sleep well at night, skin issues. So it flies under the radar, but ultimately leads to other health-related problems afterwards.
So I've got so many questions. Totally. What's the cause of plating? So constipation is the number one cause. But people who are bloated, please don't sip through straws, drink carbonated drinks, chew on gum, because you just make it worse. Next, are there decisions that you make as a parent that will have a lasting impact on a dead-scuff function? Yeah, by three years of age, you are basically fully adult-sized in terms of your microbiome. But antibiotics, bottle feeding, and birth bicessarian section are associated with an impact on the microbiome, such as an increased risk of allergic autoimmune and metabolic diseases. And I'll explain why.
And then can I repat the gut? Yeah, 100%. And every three to five days, you build a new gut barrier. And so I've identified four things missing in our diet, as well as a daily routine that can optimize our microbiome. And when you do these, you will thrive, and you will live longer, and you will have less disease. And I'm going to take you through all of these steps right now. I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated.
It's the simple, it's the free thing to anybody that watches the show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in the show in the trajectory it's on. So please do double check if you subscribed. And thank you so much, because there's a strange way you are, you're part of our history, and you're on this journey with us. And I appreciate you for that. So yeah, thank you. Dr. Will, before we started recording, I asked you about this new book that you've written, and the way that you spoke about it was incredibly passionate. Why?
I sincerely believe that if people take the advice that's in this book and they actually follow it, which is the hardest part, I'm completely convinced that we'll transform your life. And that's because we all are struggling with the same problem. We manifest it in different ways. But there's this common issue, which is inflammation. And it's the health story of our time. It's not getting enough attention. And this book is not only about shining the light on that. It's about providing people with the evidence-based tools that they need in order to be successful, and to live an anti-inflammatory life. And when you do that, you will thrive, and you will live longer, and you will have less disease.
Can you explain information to me a lot? I'm a 10-year-old. Steve, you have an immune system that protects your body. And inflammation is when we turn that immune system on, and we make it active. And sometimes that's a good thing, right? If you had a tummy bug, you want to clear that infection, right? If you hurt yourself, you want to heal that wound. That's when your immune system is really good. It's working for you. But the problem that we have these days is that we're turning on the immune system when we don't need to. And it's staying on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that ultimately creates problems because it leads to new issues, new health conditions.
The way inflammation sounds like something has inflated or become swollen. Yeah. Well, that is a part of the process. For example, if you hurt your knee, right, there will be inflammation in your knee, and it will get red, it will get swollen, it will become tender, and like those are the typical characteristics of inflammation when it arrives. But what we're talking about is chronic low-grade inflammation. And this is a tricky thing because it can fly below the radar. It can fly below the radar where you don't realize that it's there. Your doctor may not realize that it's there. And it manifests in these subtle ways where it's like you have increased fatigue. You have difficulty concentrating. You don't sleep well at night. You wake up with aches and pains, or you have joints that hurt a little bit, or you've had skin issues, right? And it's like, well, we all have those problems. But that's inflammation. Inflammation is driving many of those issues.
And so it's important for people to be aware that, you know, you may, like, there's so many patients that go to their doctor, complaining of these symptoms. And the doctor is kind of not really sure what to do about that. And I think it's time for us to like, open our mind and bring awareness to the possibility that there is this issue, inflammation that's driving that problem, the symptoms, the health conditions of which there are many. And ultimately, we need a plan to address that. And it can be like skinny and in shape and still have inflammation. A hundred percent. So it's not just a weight thing. No, it's not just a weight thing because if you think about, you know, people who are competitive bodybuilders, they look amazing on the outside. And they're falling apart on the inside. And these people often suffer with digestive health problems. I know because they reach out to me, including many people that are well known who look incredible.
And they're suffering with gut issues. And then ultimately, they're at risk for other health-related problems afterwards. So on this point of inflammation is when your immune system kind of stays on. Why does it stay on? And I mean, how do I turn it off? Well, we have to start with acknowledging that the reason why this causes problems is that let's sort of use an analogy of the immune system is your small army. And they're there to defend you. And when we activate the army and they're actually going to war, you have to expect that there's going to be damage to the surrounding areas. Like if there's a war occurring, of course, there's decimation and damage that occurs, and it's brutal.
And the problem is that if we're activating the immune system, the areas that are surrounding it, that's your body. And the decimation and destruction that's occurring is within your own tissues, within your organs. As I was researching this book, I actually took three years to understand this topic. And what I discovered is a connection between your immune system and your gut that is undeniable. And that connection becomes the powerful factor that allows you to understand why it happens and how we can fix it. We have our gut microbiome. And there are 38 trillion microbes that live inside of our large intestine. And they include bacteria and yeast and archaea, which are these things that have been on the planet for four billion years, and possibly parasites.
And so in this entire community of microorganisms, they're there with the purpose. And that is to support you and your physiology. One of their key jobs is actually to basically feed the gut barrier that lines your entire intestines. It's gonna show me using this. Sure. This is the right part of the body. Now the large intestine is the home to your microbiome. So these 38 trillion microbes, this is their residence. This is their domain where they live. Now this entire system, which is on the order of 20 or 25 feet, so something on the range of 6 to 8 meters, it's coated with a single layer of cells, which we call the epithelial layer. And that is your gut barrier. And it's a quite fascinating part of your body because this is like the castle wall and keeps the bad stuff out.
But simultaneously needs to allow the good stuff in. And these cells, they turn over every three to five days. So it's a beautiful thing actually because every three to five days, you have an opportunity to create a brand new gut barrier. So within the system, the microbes that live inside your colon, their job is to basically repair and restore the gut barrier. And when the gut barrier is intact, it's gonna do its job of protecting the immune system. And when the gut barrier starts to break down, then things can sneak across, which we would refer to as increase in intestinal permeability, but the common language is we could gut. The immune system will see and recognize things that aren't supposed to be there. And so the immune system then steps up and wants to take it out. And that basically means it needs to get activated and attack. And that is inflammation.
So the breakdown of these three systems that start with the microbes, microbes are actually your first layer of defense. And then weeding to the breakdown of the gut barrier is what ultimately activates the immune system when we have things that are sneaking across that are not supposed to be there. The reverse can also be true. And that, to me, is where the exciting opportunity exists, is that if you can heal the gut microbes, then the gut microbes can get back to work and do their job of repairing and restoring the gut barrier. And when you create a strong gut barrier, then basically you're protecting the immune system. And then what you see actually is the immune system cools off and it becomes more tactical and capable of doing its job.
Okay. And when we're eating lots of bad stuff and many of the things we're going to talk about today, a causing a breakdown in those microbes, which is causing the gut barrier to worsen, which is causing the immune system to kick in, which is causing the inflammation. And the inflammation is therefore causing ourselves to be damaged. What's the immune system over functioning causing? You're talking about the army analogy where there's an army in their war and some of them are damaging the surroundings. How is it damaging my surroundings, my immune system being on all the time? Well, so what ends up happening is it sets off this sort of chain reaction, which can have an effect throughout your entire body where the immune cells is not just a couple of immune cells. They start to basically send out signals. And these signals, we call them cytokines.
So you can measure those cytokines and those are basically communication tools that the immune cells are using with each other to basically call for help. So and as they get revved up, these cytokines start to go out and then this leads to a cascade of even more immune cells releasing even more cytokines. And so and then kick off this wave. And this is what ultimately you can feel throughout your entire body. And it has these consequences of basically causing damage to these individual tissues. So it depends on which tissue we're referring to. Information in the liver, we would call hepatitis, right?
But at the same time, we have overwhelming evidence at this point that inflammation in the brain, which we call neuroinflammation, has been associated with mood disorders. So like major depression, inflammation in the brain has been associated with cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease. So and it's not to claim, it's not to claim that all disease literally is related or caused by the gut microbiome. That's not the call. It's more so to say that we need to understand that our immune system is so powerfully connected to our microbiome that you cannot separate the two. And there's evidence to suggest that we can we can manipulate.
So whether it be antibiotics, which decimate the gut or the alternative, the opposite would be a fecal transplant, which rapidly reinvigorates the gut and restores that gut architecture and ecosystem. What's a fecal transplant? So fecal transplant is where you take a healthy person's poop and you transfer it into the person who's sick. And where are they administering it? The way that I've always done the fecal transplant because I've done many throughout my career is during a colonoscopy. So if in theory, I wouldn't say colonoscopy.
Yeah. So colonoscopy is a medical procedure where typically you would be asleep. And while you're asleep, I take a long flexible tube that is about the size of my index finger. And I can pass that with control all the way through the entirety of your large intestine, which is about five or six feet long. And I can actually dip into the last part of the small intestine, which we call the terminal ileum, which is down here in the right, the right lower part of the abdomen. You're missing the fecal transplant because they have this vicious infection called C-DeF. And again, those infections, this infection can be life threatening. And you're administering the fecal transplant because the antibiotics are not working. So you need an alternative where the idea and goal is to restore balance within the gut ecosystem.
Yeah, you're putting good bacteria and not taking bad bacteria. Yeah, not taking old bacteria out, I guess. So you put and you put the good bacteria in. And when this happens, you're actually all at once reinstalling potentially hundreds of species in balance in the right amounts. So it's like an entire ecosystem transplant. It would be like us being like, okay, here's this forest that's not doing well. We're going to take the Amazon and we're going to transplant it into the space. And now that we have all these animals that do well in the space, the forest is washed and it's vibrant again.
So going back to our point about the immune system, the reason why the immune system is staying on is because I have damaged my gut. And it's essentially trying to repair my gut. And so if I live in a permanent state of a damaged gut because of what I'm consuming, then I'm going to live in a permanent state, theoretically of inflammation. The thesis from my perspective is that the modern world and the way in which we live is damaging our gut, damaging our microbiome. And then we're suffering the consequence of that, which is disruption of our gut barrier. And ultimately the activation of our immune system in this forever war, which is chronically a great inflammation.
How is cancer associated with this? We talked about 130 different diseases. And in your book, I think it's around page 22, you mentioned, I think it's chemotherapy, while you're making an analogy between how chemotherapy kind of wipes everything out and how poorly kept gut is associated with an increase in cancer likelihoods. Let's start with this. Your body produces 3.8 million cells every second. Your immune system has the responsibility of identifying where there's a problem and taking it out. You can't possibly create 3.8 million new cells and not have some genetic abnormality that could turn into cancer. So the responsibility of the immune system is to basically be perfect every day of your life and remove those problematic cells before they turn into something bigger and better.
It's an impossible task. There's an entire story that's unfolding now in this conversation about how the gut microbiome is connected to our immune system and the way in which we treat cancer. And it started really in melanoma. We have been using sort of immune manipulations for a very long time to treat melanoma. But what changed is they were using these things called immunotherapy to be more specific immune checkpoint inhibitors. So it turns out that your immune cells have like basically a kill switch. If there was a problem, you could flip it off immediately. And that specific receptor is called PD1. And the tumors, they're so nasty because they produce this protein that basically activates the kill switch.
It turns off your immune system and it turns off your immune system. So the immune checkpoint inhibitor, the idea, is to basically flip that switch back on. And by flipping it on, activate your immune system, which will then wake up, see this cancer, be like, okay, that needs to be taken out and go after it. If someone received antibiotics before the immune checkpoint inhibitor, they didn't do well. So then it raised the question, maybe this is a microbiome thing. So they said, okay, well, if antibiotics do this, what happens if we move in the opposite direction and basically like restore the microbiome with a fecal transplant?
And what they discovered was incredible results. There's now multiple studies in melanoma where they take people and they give them a fecal transplant from someone who was a responder and give it to the person who's about to go get treated. And that's what they did. And with incredible results, like literally twice as many people were beating cancer relative to the expectation. The fascinating thing about that is that it's not just the cancer story. There's research now in Parkinson's disease. So Parkinson's disease is a neurocognitive disorder. So that means basically it's a brain condition. Well, it turns out that Parkinson's probably starts in the gut. And this is actually a disorder of the gut-brain connection. Because both parts are involved. It's not just the brain condition. The brain condition is actually the more severe part.
So for the people who are listening at home, we have a model out and I have just lifted their skull like a headable lector and exposed their brain tissue. And what we want to talk about is the brain gut connection connections between the brain and their intestines. And so we have classically thought of Parkinson's disease as being a brain health problem. But I'm here to tell you that this problem begins down here in the gut and involves the connections between the two. Because every single person that I've ever seen with Parkinson's disease, they're constipated. All of them. And what's interesting is that they've now shown that the constipation comes before the Parkinson's disease. So now this doesn't mean for people who are constipated. There's a lot of you out there. This doesn't mean that if you're constipated, you're going to develop Parkinson's disease. There's a very small percentage of people.
But it's important to understand that the manifestations of this health condition actually start in the digestive system before they actually transfer up to the brain. And so now in this study, Steve, what they did is they took these people who have Parkinson's disease. They gave them a fecal transplant. They gave them a poo transplant. They gave them a poo transplant. And what they found was a year later, they had a durable, continued benefit in terms of their movement issues. There are now other studies with Parkinson's disease that are showing benefit both for the brain and the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but also for the gut in terms of that constipation that I was talking about. I mean, it begs the question, these poo transplants sound great. Can the average person go and get one? I think we need to talk about that.
Yeah, we need to talk about that. Because there was a Netflix special where they made it sound like you should just do it at home. Do not do that. Please do not do that. So number one, we need to study and adequately understand what the risks are. The fecal transplant makes it sound like this is like the quick, easy thing that you do and you fix your entire life. But that's not the same as rebuilding your microbiome, using the lifestyle and diet tools that actually are going to give you the meaningful health impact that you're searching for over the long term over the monitor. A huge percentage of the population struggle with gut problems.
We asked the direverseo audience and roughly, it was over 60% of people that listen said that they're currently struggling with some kind of gut problem, whether it's bloating or some kind of discomfort or just digestion issues generally. Now that 61% of people responding to those three words, bloating discomfort, a regular digestion. Then about 15% of people said that they have IBS, 14, 15% of people said, self-diagnosed that they think they have irritable bowel syndrome. Am I right in thinking the causes of what they're saying they have are wildly different potentially? Or is it like one or two things? Because I'm trying to figure out how I help those 61% of people that.
Like me have eaten something sometimes and then feel shit and then not really sure what it is, feel a little bit bloated, might feel a bit gassy, might have strange digestion but not necessarily sure what's causing it and when. Yeah, I mean, this is the same issue that I struggle with. So I write a book with the goal of trying to help as many people as possible knowing that there's no one's has fits all. So ultimately it's about empowering people with the right information and helping them to identify. I wrote about this in my author's note right in the front of the book which is basically to say you're all going to read the same book but the way in which this book touches you is going to be unique to you. There's going to be something in there that you're going to find that you're like that's my moment, that's my aha moment right and for many people like just looking statistically looking at the average American diet there's a huge opportunity when it comes to diet and that is where I put a lot of energy and attention because I just I know what the stats say.
So I know America needs this but at the same time there's a conversation that gets into other topics that look the way that we live is different than the way that our grandparents grew up when they were kids. To me it's more about like helping people to see like what is that one thing for them. There's some people who are going to be listening to this that it's not their diet it's not sleep it's not circadian rhythm it's trauma and I think that these are things that need like we need to shine a light on that. We'll do all of that. On this point about bloating discomfort regular digestion if I have one of those things does that theoretically mean that something is not right. Everyone gets bored of once in a while so I think I think it would be unfair to make it sound like you should never have any adverse symptoms at all. But if it's prolonged but if it's prolonged if it's a chronic health issue if you're the type of person who you wake up in the morning and you say I hope today is going to be a good day I hope I don't have to deal with that specific issue.
You have a problem like we already know and then we have to work on that to address that issue and how we go about that I think needs to be on some level personalized but the tools that are at our disposal remain the same so it's just a matter of like let's put it on the table. Here are your choices. You pick which ones are most applicable to you where are the opportunities for you and I can't tell you that without knowing more about you. What about this issue of people getting gassy like farting a lot. Yeah. Is that typically associated with one particular gut issue or is that again could that be a plethora of issues? So it could be a plethora of issues. This is a common problem. If I have to like start with what is my number one thing it's constipation. For sure 100%. There are so many people who are listening right now that are constipated and they don't even know it because they poop every day and they think that how often they poop is the definition and that's not true.
So constipation is what happens when you're not adequately emptying your bottles and that could be a frequency problem but it could also be that it's a partial poop. Oh okay because I thought constipation was if you just haven't been you can't go you don't get to the toilet and nothing comes out. Look don't get me wrong if you if you don't poop for a week I know you're constipated. I don't need to ask any more questions. If you go a week but if it's there are people who they poop every other day that's their normal they feel fine they don't have any gut symptoms they don't have a constipation problem. We're okay right. So frequency is not that fuel and end all. It's part of the it's part of the equation right but there's also people who they poop and I want to sort of paint the picture and forgive me like I feel very comfortable talking about poop. This is what I've done for a living but they they go to the bathroom in the morning they struggle it's not satisfying they had to work really hard to get a little nugget to come out and then they feel like they still have to go and maybe 45 minutes later they poop again.
Okay that's not a new poop. You're doing partial poops you're probably doing a 20 or 25% poop so you could poop three four times during the day you might not still be fully emptying your bottles right and so that's an example of a person who can actually be struggling with bloating and constipation and not think because they're like Doc I'm pooping three times a day. Where is the gas coming from and that's why why do people you eat something and then you thought what's going on. So gas so gas travels with poop you may I don't mean you specifically Steve people listening may notice this that you wake up in the morning and you're farting like crazy and that farting continues until you actually have your morning bowel movement.
And then once you have your good healthy morning bowel movement you feel solid and you're not farting anymore right the gas travels with the poop so and the reason why this happens is because first of all your poop is not just the leftover remains of your food. Actually your poop is predominantly your microbiome. 60% of the weight of your stool is microbial really? Yes. When you say microbial you mean like the bacteria. The bacteria 60% of it. Let me give you an example. If I took your drink and I added some soluble fiber which is pre-botic into your drink.
Yeah. There's no grit, there's no roughage you don't even know it's there and you're going to have a bigger healthier bowel movement tomorrow as a result of what I just did. Why? Because I fed your microbes and they grow stronger and then they multiply and because they multiply you have a bigger bowel movement. Right that's the way that that works. Now don't get me wrong you eat you know a salad you're going to end up with a bigger bowel movement as well but a big part of that is the fiber within that salad that's feeding these microbes they multiply the grow and you have a big bowel movement. So if that was my, if that was my stool my poop I'm holding a chocolate bar here. 60% of that would be the microbes. 60% of that would be the microbes.
Yes. So for that person when the poop is in gridlock and it's not moving through then those microbes are basically sitting there with unlimited time to ferment and produce gas. Okay. So anything they come in the contact with they're just going to start working out. So it's not just like a fiber thing anything they come in the contact with it could be protein they will ferment it they will produce gas. So this is a big part of the reason why constipation is so strongly associated with gas and bloating. When people eat dairy and things like that and I think some people that have gluten they often tend to get a little bit gassy.
Yeah. Is that constipation? Gas and bloating is not just a constipation issue. I would argue that constipation is the number one cause of that particular issue but there's many potential causes. Number one could be motility that's constipation. What's motility? Motility is the way in which your intestines move. So if the intestines move too fast and out of rhythm you get diarrhea. If the intestines slow down too much, sluggish you get constipation. We want the intestines in a rhythm because when they're in a rhythm just like your heart that's when they perform their best.
So an erhythm basically means predictable consistent daily bowel movements. That's ultimately where we would love to be right and that in a way taps into like an entire circadian conversation that we can have later. This is a part of your circadian rhythm is a fantastic morning bowel movement. Motility is just one of the causes of gas and bloating. The second is the microbombs. If you have a microbombs that's damaged and struggling it's not going to be able to do its job the way it's supposed to.
And part of its job is processing and breaking down fiber because the fiber in our diet we don't have the enzymes to digest it. So it works its way through the intestines comes in the contact with the microbes and the microbes they have literally 60,000 enzymes that we don't have as humans. They go to work as teams fiber stops being fiber produces short chain fatty acids. This is the way that it's supposed to work. When your gut is not happy they're weak the microbes are weak and you're asking them to do work and they can't handle that and you end up with sloppy digestion and that's gas and bloating.
The third thing can be your diet so you just mentioned dairy which contains lactose. Lactose can be easily fermented to produce gas. You mentioned gluten. Gluten itself is a protein so can gluten technically be fermented? Yes it can be technically fermented but that's not really the that's not really what's going on. What's happening is that gluten containing foods which are wheat barley and rye also contain these carbohydrates called fructans and fructans are actually really good for our microbes they're pre-botic but if you consume a very large amount of them and you're not used to eating these foods it can cause gas and bloating.
These days when I was younger if I had if I had pasta as fine if I have pasta these days I'm going to feel it for the next like two two days. Really? Yeah I don't know I didn't even know what's going on but then other people can eat pasta as much as they want it seems. At a curiosity can you go to Italy and eat pasta and be okay or no? Same thing. I haven't really not really tried. And it totally I think when I remove when I have like non gluten bread or non gluten pasta I think I feel much better but I'm well aware from speaking to people like yourself that such a small percentage of the population is actually gluten intolerant but we all kind of think we are to some degree.
I think it's was the numbers is it like 20% of people think they are or something? So like here in Los Angeles it's like probably 80% of people think that well like almost everyone's gluten free. Yeah right. Which they don't need to be and actually you can cause problems. It can it can cause problems to be gluten free unless you know what adaptations to make.
So what do you when you ask that question about Italy what you getting at? There's a processing issue in the United States involving wheat which is that they allow the wheat to be sprayed with glyphosate which is roundup it's a weed killer and they do that to basically dry it out as quickly as possible. So imagine for a moment that you're a farmer and you have this field of wheat you harvest okay here are your choices Steve you can wait a couple weeks and let it dry out naturally in the air and store it somewhere or you can spray it with this chemical and it will be dry by tomorrow and then you can ship it up.
Yeah right and the problem is that glyphosate is not on the label you would never know whether it's sprayed or not sprayed unless you're buying organic if you buy organic then by definition they're not allowed to spray it. You would never know if it's there the the the thing about glyphosate is that it's been approved to exist in our food system under the assumption of safety because what it does is it shuts down this thing called the Shikamat pathway and that kills weeds or it kills plants and we have a workaround and it has to do with basically amino acids we have a workaround where we can basically create those amino acids as humans but the plants can't so the plants die we live but there's a problem which is that the microbes that live inside of our large intestine they don't have the workaround so that microscopic amount of glyphosate you would say well us big humans that's so small you know what do you think happens when it comes in the contact with them.
We know that glyphosate disrupts the microbiome that it depletes the beneficial bacteria and the ones that tolerate it the best are the inflammatory ones the bad bacteria the bad bacteria so you're shifting the balance and this is this is a small thing but I hear from people Steve that go to Italy they say I can't eat wheat in the United States and then they go to Italy and they're fine and you think it's that glyphosate yeah they don't do that there.
So if I tried I'll try organic pasta tonight and maybe that'll be better yes and then like the alternative choice is how do you do a bread are you okay not all bread my generally I stay away from bread okay do you ever eat sourdough yeah do you do okay with sourdough yeah there we go so here's the here's the second part of this equation put the glyphosate put this aside for a moment let's talk about the fruit hands that we're talking about a moment ago when you ferment your wheat when you ferment your dough you actually reduce the fruit tan content.
What's fruit tan so these are the the long chain carbohydrates that exist in wheat barley and rice so if it contains gluten it also contains these fruit hands like gluten is not the only thing in wheat right and these fruit hands again they're good for you they're good for your microbiome but people who have a slightly damaged gut they struggle to process and digest them so this would explain why some people they eat they eat you know wheat containing gluten containing foods and they struggle but they do okay with sourdough because if you ferment the the bread it takes it reduces the fruit tan content and actually then you can tolerate it oh okay so you think it might be the fruit tan in the bread that. I have an issue with and sourdough doesn't have fruit tan in it yeah there was there was a study that was in gastronomy of a few years gastronomy is the top journal in my field where basically they they sent people home with a bunch of breakfast bars all right not chocolate but nonetheless they sent people home with a bunch of breakfast bars three of them one of them was a placebo bar so they didn't add anything special one of them contains a very large concentration of gluten and then the third one contained the fruit hands and the placebo is our standard we're going to compare to that when people ate the gluten containing bar and these were by the way people that they did not have celiac disease they did have gluten problems according to them right so like this is like the 20% of people that you mentioned the moment ago who think they might have a gluten problem when they ate the gluten containing bar they actually had less symptoms than the placebo so in other words the gluten is not the problem but when they ate the fruit tan containing bar they were triggered so basically what the said is that we have been taking this concept of gluten intolerance and we've we've misnamed it it's not a gluten intolerance it's a fruit tan intolerance these are people who are attending the struggle with these particular parts of that food.
What foods contain fructane so we barley and rye okay and different there's there's many different types of fruit tans by the way so you may not react to all of them you may react to just some of them but like garlic and onions are also classic so you hear people who are like I can't eat garlic I feel terrible right that's a that can be a fruit tan issue tough amaranth sorghum keenwa these are these are whole grains that don't contain gluten and they also don't contain fructans.
How long does it take to repair the gut when you have done damage to it that's a very broad question intentionally but generally for the average person who's done his sort of irritated that gut how long does it take to restore and for those microbes to go back it really depends you have to start with okay what's your starting point right like how deep is the damage how bad is it because for the people who have ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease those are forms of inflammatory bowel disease those people have the deepest this dysbiosis dysbiosis is the word that we use for a damaged gut is it possible to reverse that it's possible to put them into remission so deeply that they don't have a flare is that what the flare it looks like on this little model that I have in front of me yes so so going back for the people who are listening and not on YouTube you can flip over to YouTube if you're interested but what I'm showing here is the model of the large intestine and the model includes a little area that it looks raw ulcerated it's bleeding if you if you were to bump up against it it's going to start to you'll start to see blood coming out so it's like a it's a very vulnerable sensitive area.
Now these inflammatory bowel diseases Steve I have an interesting study on this topic they are to me the classic gut inflammatory health condition and what's happening is the immune system is attacking the microbiome so technically it's not actually autoimmune because autoimmune would be you're attacking your own body the immune system is not attacking your intestines the immune system is attacking your microbiome and rejecting it and because that's happening your intestines are stuck in the middle so this here is the immune system attacking the microbiome it's attacking the microbiome which is in the tube of the large intestine and the immune system is trying to get at it and kill it why and because it's decided that it's the enemy.
So the immune system is confused because when we're born we don't have much of a microbiome at birth it's the closest that we will get to not really having anything and then during the first three years of life you build your microbiome through your life experience and by three years of age you are basically fully adult sized in terms of your microbiome during this time your immune system is learning from and with those microbes so there's this interplay between the two that is undeniable where when the microbiome is healthy during childhood during those first three years it results in a healthier immune system.
So what's going on here the immune system is supposed to acknowledge your microbiome as being friendly and it does not it decides that your microbiome is the enemy and so it's taking it out so what do you think is for someone that has like irritable bowel syndrome all crone's disease and they all they you know they have one of these big sort of ulcers in their small or large intestine is it because of their lifestyle typically so lifestyle change or or is it lots of things what's the number one perpetrator okay there's clearly a genetic component okay so we have to we have to be upfront about that but like these are these are things that are not necessary within a person's control entirely because I mean there's no evolutionary reason why this would happen like there's no evolutionary reason why you have severe gut digestion problems no it's not too there's no advantage to it you know.
And and these things that uh that occur they were quite rare years ago in fact in third world countries today there's not much inflammatory bowel disease there's not a lot of crone's disease and all sort of clitus in third world countries if you go to Africa there's very little and what then what you see though is as countries industrialize there's a takeoff and they start ramping up so within the United States over the course of 40 years from 1970 to 2010 all sort of clitus and crone's disease cases were increasing by up to 55% and you can get that any age you get that at any age yeah even if I'm healthy right now I could do a set of things that would give me this.
Yes in fact if you take so back to our conversation about antibiotics if you take antibiotics your risk of developing an inflammatory bowel disease in the next year just doubled oh gosh if you disrupt the gut with antibiotics which the antibiotics do there's nothing that will basically like decimate the gut faster reducing gut diversity disrupting the gut barrier by 50% during a course of antibiotics and activate in the immune system it really speaks to that like if you take antibiotics these risks of inflammatory health conditions really start to go up we see this in both adults and kids.
You had a patient at view who was called Michelle who took antibiotics and had a life-threatening swelling of her colon this is this is the colon right uh she's with the colonist so the colon is the origin testant okay fun you yeah and so she took an antibiotic and had a life-threatening swelling if they have had a launching testing so she took it in antibiotics she took clindamycin which is a classic skin antibiotic okay and the problem is that clindamycin wipes out your gut like hard and when that happens there's a risk that this pathogenic like bad bacteria called c-diff if it's in there it can multiply and then you get this infection the c-diff infection that causes inflammation of the entire colon.
So this patient Michelle what happened I was on call and I get this text and they say you got to come to this room right now this patient is sick and she had just been transferred in from an outside hospital so I was in the middle of typing up a consultation drop that run through the hospital walk into the room she's clutching her belly and she's moaning and groaning and she has no clue where she is she's sweaty she's pale her vital signs are completely out of whack her heart is racing she's breathing really fast and um and I did a little test which is that I gently bumped her bed just like that and if a person has severe inflammation of their intestines they will jump if you do that because they have paratinitis right or you can call it an. acute abdomen so just by bumping the bed like that was enough for her to and she's screaming right and clutching her belly and she has no clue where she is or what is going on she's completely delirious she's maxed out on antibiotics.
Our choices were to rush her to surgery remove the colon or alternatively to give her a fecal transplant and give her a shot at keeping her colon so I take her down to the operating room and I actually um used a I mean I won't bore you with the details but I used a special technique that's atypical for what I would normally do because the inflammation was so severe to pass a scope so this scope that I used was a smaller scope to be more gentle a scope being achieved a scope is a tube and I mentioned that if you get a colonoscopy it's the size of my index finger so that's like probably about a centimeter across but I I instead went with a smaller scope that's more like five millimeters six millimeters across it's more gentle and it just makes it harder to do but I basically passed the scope through her rectum and all the way through her intestines to get it over here on the right side.
So that's basically like I have now passed all the way through her large intestine and in that location I delivered the fecal transplant to her and so the amazing thing is that number one that procedure went really well by the next day she was a normal human being she was laying in bed she was able to have a conversation and after two days she was so normal that we were able to send her home so the entire severe infectious issue that she was facing got shut down and corrected by restoring her microbiome and then when you restore the microbiome the c-diff basically gets suppressed and the immune system falls back into balance the information washed away.
So do you have like a fridge full of these fecal matters that you can just tap into and when you need it no but there is a company in Massachusetts that does and so and that's what most hospitals use is they'll basically have this sent in but it's actually kind of interesting because there's there's new development in this space where for the first time drug companies are actually identifying how to manipulate the microbiome using things that are not actually a fecal transplant but sort of derived from the idea now what they're developing is a way to rebuild the gut and protect it during this period of vulnerability so that's the new thing that's coming.
You must hear about so many different types of diets and juice cleanses and whatever else that influences and podgusters promote that you absolutely hate because you have a deeper understanding of the consequences on the gut what are some of the biggest diets or I don't know these sort of trends that you are absolutely despised because they are misinforming people about how to create healthy gut well I think the thing from my perspective is that trends fluctuate hard yeah right in 2020 it was like the vegan diet wasn't in 2023 it was the carnivore diet you couldn't have more diametrically opposed diets right and and so the problem is that to the person who's at home and they're trying to get this figured out is very easy to get sucked into whatever the trend is because that's what you're hearing about when you open up your social media right whereas as I sit here the science has not changed that dramatically in the last five years we are working on this but these are small fluctuations in terms of our understanding of things it's not a radical we don't whiplash like that right.
So nor has your biology you have the same biology five years ago so this entire concept of like whipping people over the places total bullshit from my perspective I want to start by saying that any person who has the audacity to change their diet in the interest of their health like I actually I actually think that's incredible and it doesn't matter what your choice is because you're just trying to figure it out and ultimately I just want people to be better but the problem is that there's a lot of dietary advice that's insane and it comes on both sides Steve so absolutely I don't believe that a 100% meat or organ only diet is in balance or the optimal solution for longevity but on the flip side like a fruit only diet I would never support or recommend either that's completely insane what are we doing so I think they like these highly the more restrictive that you get the more that I think you're drifting away from what is quite simple which is whole food in balance.
What about these like juice diets and stuff like that people do people do like a seven day juice diet or more to diet whatever so you will you will often feel better if you have gut issues and you take away the stuff that's irritating your gut and so simplifying your diet and doing something like that you can make yourself feel better on a temporary basis and think that you did something generally speaking that's not really doing much of anything at all how long does it take to both kill and then create new gut microbes well so the beauty of it is that your gut is very forgiving so the choices that you make today will be reflected in your microbiome by tomorrow the beauty of it is that these microbes like their superpower is that they are able to procreate so fast procreate meaning making babies so they can make they can create new generations like estimates are potentially as quick as 20 minutes and so we can use that to our advantage because if we actually support them with what they need change can come real quick and you know I get back to every three to five days you build a new gut barrier so there's an amazing opportunity that we have to actually see some quick health effects.
Are there any big sort of health myths or diet myths that you're concerned about that people are currently following or believe in particular is there anything you look out into I don't think oh god that's going to be awful for the gut oh gosh it's not something that I pay a ton of attention to because I'm not on TikTok to be honest with you so it's I find the interesting that actually like TikTok some of the trends that have come more recently are actually on point so which feels great because I love it when like people are getting excited about stuff that's good like the fiber maxing trend I'm not ahead about one so fiber maxing it feels like after not really talking about fiber for a really long time people are starting to come around to the benefits that come from fiber and this was really exemplified on TikTok with this fiber maxing trend where people are basically trying to increase their fiber profoundly.
So the issue though is that you have to ease your body into it so I think the idea is the right idea of where people are trying to go but the execution I just want people to do it in a way where they feel okay because if they don't feel well they're gonna bail and then they're gonna think well fiber's not for me and what was this trend it was people trying to just get above that up and above that daily recommended dose of fiber yes I'm eating high fiber foods yes and acknowledging that 95% of people in the United States and 90% of people in the UK are deficient in fiber as we sit here right now and what complications or implications does that have for the ones that got my carbine massive because fiber is feeding the good bacteria fiber is the principal food for the good bacteria and it is the precursor to short-chain fatty acids.
So the short-chain fatty acids are what we create when fiber comes in the contact with microbes short-chain fatty acids are the thing we create when fiber comes in contact with the gut microbiome yes bacteria okay and the short-chain fatty acids are really good they're so good in fact of all the things that I've studied and learned about these are the most anti-inflammatory thing that I've ever come across so there's three of them three main ones acetate propionate and butyrate they all have their own distinct effects within the body they have effects right there in the gut on the microbes on the gut barrier on the immune system and these have produced these three things you just named a produced when fiber comes in contact with the gut microbiome.
Yeah so like if you were sterile if you didn't have if you were born without a microbiome like you ever hear about bubble boy oh yeah there's a film what TV show is no yeah it was like a documentary in the 70s of this kid who was he was born with this rare genetic immune disorder and so his family in order to try to protect them they isolated him thinking if no bad stuff can get in then he would be fine right so like he lived in a sterile bubble so in theory if you were sterile you would never get the benefits of these short chain fatty acids because you never have bacteria because you don't have bacteria okay so but we have the opposite of that problem which is that we have bacteria but we don't feed them.
We don't give them fiber you can't create something from nothing so you have to give them the fiber in order to allow them to create the short chain fatty acids from it and these short chain fatty acids so I've got my gut microbiome in my gut here I put fiber in there in the form of what foods are the best foods for fiber okay so what we have here is an entire array of choices and the beauty of it is that there's only one thing that I can spot on these two plates that does not contain fiber do you want to guess I guess that it is okay you want me to give it to you it's not too married isn't no but the turmeric product probably doesn't have very much.
Okay no it's the oil because the issue is that this is a hundred percent fat so you by definition cannot have any fiber inside of an oil okay all right it's like sunflower oil so yeah whatever whatever type now you could have polyphenols like extra virgin olive oil has polyphenols that are really good for the microbiome extra virgin olive oils actually incredibly good for the microbiome but it doesn't have fiber everything else has fiber so we have all these different plant-based foods and the beauty of it is that it doesn't have to become complicated fruits vegetables whole grains seeds nuts in my gummies they all have fiber meat anything that's not a plant does not have fiber okay so if it goes on the ground as fiber so if it comes if it comes from a plant it has fiber.
And then it cools by the way the mushrooms so the mushrooms are technically fungi but they share a lot of the same characteristics that the plant-based foods do so there's fiber there's polyphenols all of these things we want to include in the healthful diet so if I eat these high fiber foods they go into my gut the microbiomes produce this thing called short-chain fatty acids in the short-chain fatty acids they produce more good bacteria but also they help my immune system calm down yes so if you think about let's go back to the model that we led off with which is that there's these three parts to your immune system or actually your I should call it your defense system because your gut microbes are the first layer of defense right that was what was broken down by the antibiotics in Michelle.
The second layer of defense is your gut barrier which is the lining of your gut that protects the immune system and then the third part is the actual immune system itself we don't even want to have to activate that we'd rather the first two parts take care of it for us right so the beauty of this is that you eat you consume these high fiber foods they come in the contact with your microbes right here in the large intestine specifically the right colon is the classic spot and they unpack them and they release the acetate, propionate and butyrate and those three things impact your microbes impact your gut barrier impact your immune system.
Now over the three my favorite is butyrate because it's the butyrate that has the biggest effect on the microbes on the gut barrier like you literally need butyrate in order to produce the proteins that hold your gut lining together and the butyrate has a direct effect on our immune cells so these are again the most anti-inflammatory thing that I've come across and part of why we're suffering with these going back to the original conversation about these chronic inflammatory health conditions and you asked me where do they come from we live in an industrial world where 95% of us at a minimum 90% of us are not getting even close to the amount of fiber that we need and when we compare this to other places so there was an interesting study that came out recently where they looked at the microbiome of people in Italy, Singapore and then they had native tribal people in the Bolivian Amazon and native tribal people in Malaysia.
So two indigenous tribes living a you know hunter-gatherer lifestyle against Italy and Singapore and what they discovered is that there is this radical difference in terms of the diversity of the microbiome there's a difference in terms of their ability to produce short-chain fatty acids and there's this question that comes up about aging because as we age inflammation increases is that inevitable are we stuck in a position where like based upon our age we should just expect that we're going to have more inflammatory issues? What they found in the tribal populations is that actually that's not true at all so they were protected against inflammation regardless of their age because of their lifestyle but they were leaving and it's not just what they eat it's they wake up when the sun comes up they sleep when the sun goes down they're connected to their tribe they're not looking at Instagram.
Like there's so much to that story the point being though that in the industrial world like we're not consuming a sufficient amount of these types of foods I guess they're not also drinking alcohol and vaping no which we you know do a lot more in the Western world here we do what impact does that have on the gut microbiome because I don't typically hear people talking about alcohol in the gut microbiome what we know is that it definitely affects the gut barrier I guess it's just where it's where it's where it's where it's where it's where it's where it's where it's some degree if I'm pouring the same as it would be the same as using an alcohol-based mouthwash which which now we don't recommend anymore.
And so yeah so alcohol there was a study actually that changed my mind when it comes to alcohol so I actually don't drink hardly at all anymore like very rarely I'll have a glass or two with my wife if we're on a special dinner and in this study they basically gave people a significant amount of alcohol and then they tracked every 30 minutes the measure of their blood alcohol level and simultaneously the measure of what's called the lipopolysaccharide so it's it comes from the inflammatory bacteria that live inside of our microbiome it's not supposed to be in your bloodstream if it's in your bloodstream that generally indicates that your gut barrier is insufficient in a week because it's able to get across and the problem is that the immune system has been trained to identify that lipopolysaccharide as the enemy and so it gets activated.
So and this is where inflammation comes from so in this study that he had people have a number of drinks and they start tracking every 30 minutes and what you saw was that as the blood alcohol level goes up in parallel the lipopolysaccharide goes up when the alcohol peaks so did the lipopolysaccharide there was this weird thing that happened I don't I can't explain why but the alcohol level peaked it started to come down and then actually it bumped back up and when that happened the lipopolysaccharide followed the exact same pattern and the lipopolysaccharide did not return to normal until the alcohol level was zero so when I saw this from my perspective to be clear it wasn't a study of one drink although we do know that one drink is sufficient to disrupt your sleep and cause other health issues but when I saw this I saw enough to say I don't think there's any amount alcohol that's safe to summarize what's going on there the alcohol's coming into the body it is impacting the gut in some way which is making the gut go into dysfunction and that dysfunction lasts for a little while.
Because I'm trying to understand why you you looked at that and thought do you know what absolutely not I'm not going to drink yeah yeah so basically alcohol was causing leaky gut oh leaky gut yeah so alcohol was causing leaky gut that's what that's what we saw in that study and the fact that the amount of leaky gut was proportional to the amount of alcohol in the blood and that the leaky gut did not return to normal until the alcohol level was zero says to me that any amount of alcohol that's detectable in the bloodstream can create this problem which is going to cause inflammation which is going to cause inflammation.
We know with total clarity that people who are heavy drinkers their gut is totally destroyed and that that's actually a requisite step on the pathway towards developing cirrhosis and alcoholic liver disease so there are some people who seem to get away with it where they can be a heavy drinker and they never actually get cirrhosis and it cirrhosis is the so the liver sits in your right upper abdomen and its job is to detoxify your bloodstream and all of the blood that goes to your gut the first place that it goes after your gut as it returns to the heart is your liver and it's actually a smart setup anatomically because we don't want toxic blood to get access to the heart and then circulate and ultimately get back to the brain so we allow the liver to protect and defend it.
But the cirrhosis what's happening is that basically the liver which is soft and spongy like imagine a sponge that you can put it under a faucet the water goes in one end we listen to it through comes out the other end okay instead of that it's just the piece of plastic right it's hard it's not letting anything through that's what that's what happens when a person develops cirrhosis so and there's many causes of cirrhosis cirrhosis comes from inflammation so all soror all cirrhosis health conditions ultimately are inflammatory health conditions they're all part of the 130 health conditions associated with inflammation but in this particular setting what we're talking about is alcohol and what I'm saying is that to create that inflammation in the liver based on the available data it seems that you have to disrupt the gut microbiome in order to get there.
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There's a orangey looking chemical on the plate over the turmeric people talk about turmeric a lot when they're speaking about inflammation yeah I'm not really sure what the truth is on turmeric and inflammation yeah you have to be a little bit careful because you could easily overdo it really so well so we just have to be smart with the way that we approach because the turmeric that we're really talking about is if you were to take it on a consistent daily basis which actually from my perspective makes a ton of sense for people that have chronic inflammatory health issues.
So turmeric is helping inflammation go down somehow it turmeric is helping inflammation to go down because it blocks another one of the cytokines so in the same way we were talking about those walkie talkies and basically pull in the batteries out turmeric helps to accomplish that so there's a specific cytokine that turmeric has that effect and so it's the you mentioned curcumin so curcumin is the phytochemical found in turmeric turmeric is the root okay curcumin is the chemical okay that actually does the thing and it turns out that curcumin is what we call a polyphenol.
So polyphenols as we sit here and we look at this beautiful array of all these colors every single one of these foods contains polyphenols that define the color and that impact the gut like the onion here would have cursatin and many people have heard of cursatin as being beneficial for longevity same would be true for the garlic so there's different polyphenols for different colored foods and 95% of them require our gut microbes in order to be activated so with turmeric you just need to be careful with supplements because if you overdo it if you take too much that could create an issue though here in front of me I have a I guess I guess this is a perfect gut day have you seen this.
Yeah well I wanted you to explain to me step by step how to have a perfect gut day this all right so I'm going to I'm going to define for people the way that I would approach the perfect 24 hour rhythm we have an innate circadian rhythm circadian rhythm basically means that our body functions on a 24 hour clock why because we evolved with the sun the sun goes up and it comes down and that is one of the most powerful things that defines everything that exists both for us as humans and in our entire environment right so everything around us also evolved with the sun and is connected to it around 50% of our genes are turned off or on at specific times of day based upon our circadian rhythm more than 50% of our microbes rise and fall during the course of our day to meet the moment our body thrives on consistency.
So what I want to talk about is how do we create a consistent daily routine that can optimize our microbiome and I'm going to take you through all the different all the different steps let's imagine that the sun comes up and it's seven in the morning all right and you naturally wake up and you are consistent about it you're off to a great start consistency with the time that you wake up is a fantastic way to start your day and what I want you to do in the first five minutes of your day is I want you to initially just focus on waking up and thinking about your day and how you're going to approach it because starting at seven oh five you're going to wake up your microbes you're going to wake up your body with hydration.
So we're going to opt for water and in a perfect world I would love to add a pre-botic fiber supplement to that water so like our company is called 38 Terra you can add that there or you can add alternative this is the hydration the water turns on your gut turns on your brain turns on your kidneys so no coffee straight away no so pause the coffee start with hydration and we're waking up your gut with the water and also with the pre-botic fiber that's going to feed those microbes in your gut okay so that's at seven oh five and let's pretend that takes you 10 minutes and so now it's seven fifteen and we're going to basically flip the switch to tell your body it's time to go that we're starting a new day and this is actually the most powerful moment.
So if there's only one thing that everyone takes away I want it to be this because I'm giving you the two most powerful levers in terms of activating your circadian rhythm number one sunlight or at a minimum bright light exposure so what happens is that light passes through our our eye and hits the retina in the back of the eye enters into the body detects this and it enters into the optic nerve and right at the very first spot where you could collect information from both your left eye and your right eye sits this part of your brain called the supra chiasmatic nucleus the SCN and the SCN is the orchestrator that is the master clock of your circadian rhythm.
So like I would think about it like school so when we were kids and we went to school we might have all been wearing a watch and that watch gives us a general idea of where we are in our day all your organs all your tissues more than half your microbes they have their watch they have a feel for where they are in the day but it's the alarm that goes off between classes that ultimately is what matters the most that's the central clock that's your SCN your SCN is basically managing all that and there's an entire cascade of things that follows from when you tell the SCN today started.
So that light exposure is what basically activates the SCN to release cortisol through a series of events that releases cortisol all right cortisol is the morning hormone it is it allows us to get activated it makes protein and energy available to ourselves it makes us focused it actually suppresses our immune system in that moment you want more cortisol and by getting morning light exposure you can bump it by 50% so we're off to a good start.
The second lever that we can pull with our outdoor time is exercise you don't need to do like a full scale workout I'm not talking about the most vigorous exercise your day I'm talking about light exercise but if you just move your body right which during the summertime what you would do is like you might go outside and you might have a rock fest and you take a walk right when the weather is good and when it's January and the weather isn't so hot you might actually have a light box the light box allows you to stay inside you just got to make sure it's 10,000 lux is what you're looking for so the light box is the substitute for the sun and then you could do any form of exercise you could do squats you could do lunges pushups whatever it may be you could do jumping jacks you do yoga right.
So during this period of time if you get light exposure and you exercise the exercise can add another 25 to 50% this is a compounding effect that's going to give you the ultimate morning cortisol peak and then this is essential to propel your day because by getting this you will be more focused you will be able to do more from a cognitive perspective like your endurance will be enhanced you also will sleep better tonight and you will you will notice this on day one I promise you so all right so and you're going to do that for about 20 minutes so from 715 until 735 you're going to be doing your light and exercise okay ideally outdoor light whenever possible if you wear glasses by the way take off your glasses you don't have to look directly at the sun.
At 735 we're going to basically come back in and this is a time for us to now have our coffee and also quite time so like to me we don't have enough time in our day the day is so fast-paced right we need to be intentional about creating opportunities to like activate our parasympathetic nervous system which is so there's two sides to our autonomic nervous system autonomic is just like you have like you you can't totally control it it's just going one side is sympathetic sympathetic is the part that gets you going fast like this is your accelerator all right and the other side is your parasympathetic which is your break it's your rest and recovery.
So now that you've done your outdoor time and your exercise you come in and we want to give you 10 minutes of just like quiet low-key sympathetic time so that could be meditation breath work could be reading your Bible could be journaling right whatever it is that works for you so you do that with your coffee for 10 minutes and that brings us to 745 and that you have breakfast all right so and breakfast is the perfect opportunity to take your supplements okay so what breakfast what supplements okay so your breakfast and what is my breakfast strategy am I going for a lot of food do I need to have breakfast why do I need to have breakfast you should have breakfast you should definitely have breakfast yeah.
So your metabolism changes during the course of the day your strongest metabolism is first thing in the morning and so what that means is that you could literally eat the exact same food at 745 or at 3 in the afternoon and when you eat it at 745 you will get better blood sugar control you will get better blood fat control so those are those are manifestations of our metabolism and when they're under control that's actually really good for our body so whenever possible we want to shift our food towards earlier in the day and what kind of foods I would argue that we go high fiber and moderate protein no sugar no sugar no sugar no sugar no sugar right no sugar refined carbohydrates should get left out as much as possible what's a refined carbohydrate can be sour or sugar okay so no no baked goods no ex-benedict so the exception from my perspective would be if you're going if you want to have avocado toast then a sour though colossal prefer not they are delicious but no I prefer not because ultimately what we want is we want we want high fiber and moderate protein.
By doing that combination it's maximum satiation so you're going to feel full you're giving your body what it needs from a protein perspective and your simultaneously giving your gut what it needs from a fiber perspective out so I mean you could do oats do for the reasons that we were discussing glyphosate earlier the oats should be organic and if you were to do them do them as minimally processed so like I don't really love instant oats what about for kids if I'm you know giving my kids a breakfast should I be thinking about anything in particular because you know a lot a lot of parents I've talked about this quite a few times before but when I was young I'd get a lot of orange juice and I didn't realize the orange juice was just like sugar water yeah is there anything that parents should be thinking about when they're giving kids their breakfast of course and I think that the most important thing is that you need to model for your kids what a healthy breakfast looks like by having it yourself because if you don't do that then there you can't expect them to.
So healthy breakfasts my kids I four kids so my kids love avocado toast they love avocado toast you could absolutely do yogurt with berries right you can do berries and nuts there's a lot of different choices in that regard so overnight oats chia pudding these are different choices that you could do for sure on this point of kids before we carry on with our perfect morning and day routine are there decisions that you make as a parent to give your kids certain things that will have a lasting impact on their immune and gut function a hundred percent yes and the I think it opens up a discussion about where the connection between our gut and immune system starts it starts before birth the first three years are critical.
So let me unpack that just a little bit Steve they have studies where they look at mom's microbiome during pregnancy all right so like mom poops they analyze her poop and they're able to basically identify patterns that are associated with the kid developing allergic diseases later on okay they also have studies where moms who increase their fiber intake during pregnancy reduce the likelihood of their kids developing allergic diseases later on as well what about kids taking antibiotics does that have a when you're forming you get microbiome is at a young age does that have a consequential impact a hundred percent antibiotics bottle feeding and birth by cesarean section and by the way all of my kids were born by C section it's not what we wanted but what happened but those three things are associated with an impact on the microbiome and the immune system and if you look downstream over the course of the first five years increased risk of allergic diseases increased risk of autoimmune diseases increased risk of metabolic diseases.
Because in the C section the baby didn't pass through the birth canal the birth canal and the birth canal would have given the baby some of the mother's microbiome yes so and then breastfeeding does the same it gives the baby microbiome breastfeeding gives them access to mom's skin microbiome but also breast milk contains these things called HMOs human milk illegal sac rides it's quite fascinating to consider this we evolved where mom's breast milk contains these things human muclegosecrites there's over 200 varieties they have no nutritional value to the child directly so why do we why do we have them because they're pre-botic so these human muclegosecrites in breast milk were basically designed to feed the developing baby microbiome.
So and this is part of why we get into some challenges where when you replace it with with the bottle the formula you might put fiber in there but it's like a monofiber it's not the same as the 200 plus varieties of human muclegosecrites so there was a study that was done out of Finland where they looked at roughly 1100 kids. and they tracked them for five years and during this time five years they got a microbiome specimen poop specimen from the kid at three months and 12 months of age and they looked at okay so some of these kids develop allergic diseases so eczema food allergies asthma rhinitis allergic rhinitis all right those are the classic allergic diseases and what they found is okay there were certain factors that predicted who was going to develop allergic diseases by the age of five number one exposure to antibiotics in the first year of life number two being bottled.
All right then they looked at the microbiome at 12 months so and just to be clear these kids they they had not developed the allergic disease yet that comes later but they looked at the microbiome at 12 months and they could tell who was going to develop the allergic diseases later on because there was a specific pattern what was missing were the bacteria that produced short-chain fatty acids and the short-chain fatty acids of that chemical we talked about aliron that that you get from five which produces those three things yes but you to rate but rate acetate and appropriate eight and and in fact when they checked the poop for butyrate levels the butyrate levels were low.
So in essence what they discovered in this study that was quite fascinating is that you can look at the microbiome and predict who will later on go on to develop these confused immune system with these allergic diseases so going back to a daily routine yep where I'll be too yes we're at 745 and so you want your high fiber moderate protein as a little shark sugar as possible breakfast and this is the perfect time to take your morning supplements because the morning supplements the ones that I recommend that are evidence-based are vitamin D omega-3s and turmeric that's for inflammation so these are for inflammation okay yeah.
So now I also believe that we should test whenever possible there's a test for vitamin D there's a test for omega-3s if you have enough you don't need to take the supplement but if you're deficient that's where supplements play an important role so I believe that that supplements should be taken consistently in a circadian fashion so that means that we take our morning supplements at the same time every day why because basically everything about our microbes and our body and the way that it works thrives on consistency so supplements would be the same.
And when we do this so it's been 745 we've had our breakfast we've taken our morning supplements stack and now it's been an hour since we woke up and it's time for a fantastic bowel movement and that is the manifestation of all of the work that you've done because when you get your morning light exposure that helps to contribute to that bowel movement when you exercise that contributes to that bowel movement when you drink your coffee that contributes to that bowel movement all these different things ultimately lead to this place where you're having that good healthy bowel movement and that's indicative of a gut that's in rhythm and doing well.
So that's your morning now you're going to go to work and I want to circle back to roughly the lunchtime hour so it gets to be lunchtime and it's 12 noon and basically I would advocate for people to have lunch with another person like the way that you and I are sitting here at this table right now so because we don't do that enough like way too much we're on our phone like this and eating at the same time that we're flipping and scrolling how's that good for my gut and inflammation there so feeling socially bonded to another person 50 percent this is by the way statistics that come from before the pandemic right.
So the pandemic made this worse 50 percent of people in America were lonely before the pandemic even started loneliness is the equipment loneliness will destroy your longevity faster than just about anything loneliness is has been shown to be on par with smoking cigarettes on a routine basis in terms of the impact that it has on your health in your longevity and you're quite clear that you define loneliness as the feeling of disconnection versus being alone right yes.
So but being alone there you have to think about where we came from so we um are tribal by our nature like you have to understand that for millions of years humans lived the specific lifestyle of being hunter's gatherers in our tribe there was no money the currency of wealth was your bond to other people that's what allowed you to survive and thrive your family was like basically the measure of wealth the bigger the family the more wealthy you were because you would work together to support one another and take care of each other but then the broader tribe which is not 300 people at alone hundreds of thousands on social media the broader tribe which was this like family of families we were in it together if you and I were in the same tribe if someone attacked us I know that you would step up to defend me and I would do the same for you so this is causing some kind of cortisol issue stress issue that's then impacting the gut microbiome and causing inflammation.
If we want to torture a person like literally the easiest way to do it is to put them in solitary isolation that's literally torture we're so social that we need that and it's the cortisol response that that's going to cause that that's that then causes inflammation that is correct so ultimately that is a manifestation of the brain gut connection okay we have it we have an innate need of human bonding and when that innate need is not met then it's actually quite stressful for us because we feel vulnerable and unsafe we sleep worse as well I was reading about some stuff around when people feel lonely they go into self-preservation which is kind of like I guess the analogy would be if you drifted off from your tribe yeah you'd have to be a bit more alert you'd have to be honest you'd have to be wait you know you couldn't sleep for eight hours in peace because you're you're in danger now yeah you don't have that sort of insulating factor of a group of people.
It's so interesting to think about like there's a condition called Stockholm syndrome and Stockholm syndrome is what happens if you take a person hostage and in that scenario you're the person who's taken hostage you have a choice you can reject the person who's taken you or you can actually find the good in them and bond with them and it's actually a survival mechanism that within that context of being taken hostage people have a tendency to bond with their captor and have sympathy for them and that's and we think that's a defense mechanism because we're so social we need that as opposed to like being alone and being held captive okay so we socialize at lunch we have to know with other people yes so I want people to socialize and launch to address this epidemic of loneliness that I think is highly problematic and not and not to be underrated because again it's like smoking a pack of cigarettes.
So let's imagine that we have a nice lunch time that we're not talking about 10 minutes we're talking about 45 minutes that includes conversation right and we get to the end and now what I would encourage people to do before you go back to work is to get outside and take a walk so there's two advantages to this we talked earlier about the benefits of sunlight in the morning and also the benefits of exercise in the morning we're circling back to that but things are a little bit different this time by getting outside you're getting different rays of sun so the actually the types of rays that we get from the sun are slightly different and they're more likely to boost our serotonin later in the day and that serotonin is what lifts our mood gives us focus helps us to get to get things done so this reinforces our circadian rhythm when we take a walk and we get outside a second time.
Also the exercise a 10 minute walk just 10 minutes of simple walking is enough to get 30 to 40 percent improvement in your blood sugar control because when you activate the big muscles in your leg it helps to draw the blood sugar out of your bloodstream so like it's the messaging there is if you just eat too much and you don't feel well force yourself to take a walk as opposed to laying on the couch all right so and the outdoor walk also activates our gut and helps our gut to get into rhythm and that reduces bloating after a meal okay so and then you do that for 15 minutes it's one o'clock you're back to work I encourage people to have a matcha green tea I'm a big matcha believer this is of all the teas that exist it has the highest polyphenol content and it's phenomenal for the microbiome so and it gives you a nice boost to your afternoon.
Okay let's accelerate to four o'clock I saw you um I think it was in your book that I read this yeah in your book it talks about how the gap between sort of three and six is the optimal time to exercise that's right yeah so three and six p.m the reason for that has to do with our core body temperature so our temperature cools off at night our body temperature of lowers at night and then during the day it starts to rise in the morning exercise by the way in the morning helps to accelerate that but our peak is three to six p.m I fought a tact on page 159 of your book where you said my one request is that you do not have a heavy exercise late in the evening as this activates the parrots sorry the sympathetic never system and can negatively affect your ability to quickly fall asleep yeah well I always were going to last night it was like bloody god I love until midnight oh no that's like quite typical though because I don't know I just just when I get my time how's your sleep last night okay but I mean there's like a series of issues took place two hours so okay fair enough to do like a series of like my other issues the time I ate was bad and the time I went to the gym was bad and so it was was it was was was was a mess yeah well ideally two hours before bedtime okay at least two hours before bedtime so and like especially when it's vigorous exercise if it's light exercise it's not a big deal but vigorous exercises a different story okay so yeah so three three to six this is more from like an exercise performance perspective like that's the best time if you want to lift heavy weight okay three to six p.m.
So let's imagine that we go and we get we smash a workout at four o'clock right and so I'm going to give us an hour to smash that wonderful workout and then now it's five and it's the perfect time for dinner I want to point something out real quick I we had breakfasts around eight and we had lunch around noon and we had dinner around five we've spaced things out by about four hours and that's actually the perfect time from from the perspective of your digestive rhythm so there's this thing this this concept within the the gut that many people haven't heard of called the migrating motor complex where between meals your gut has this entire thing that it does and it basically is like sweeping through and reorganizing itself but it gets disrupted if you eat okay so it's ideal to give a four hour space between these meals and that if you do that you will actually notice a difference in terms of how you feel with your digestion so because you feel about your gut to fall into a rhythm.
All right so we have our dinner it's five o'clock we're moving into the evening and now it's going to be seven o'clock at night and let's imagine I know this time of year the sun is going down much earlier than this in most places but imagine that it's seven o'clock look when the sun goes down you want to start to dim the lights in your house you want to start to reduce your personal light exposure because light exposure just casual lights within your home can cut your melatonin down by 30 percent melatonin is the sleepy time hormone so in the morning it's cortisol and in the evening it's melatonin and it's interesting because what we did in the morning with both exercise and with light exposure it was designed not only to enhance that that cortisol peak but it also increases our serotonin serotonin the happy hormone that keeps us focused will serotonin is actually the precursor to melatonin so when you make the investment of morning light morning exercise you're setting yourself up for excellent sleep in 14 hours.
So and we want to protect that melatonin is going to start to rise when it gets dark outside and so we want to dim the lights within our home and we want to really be cautious as we move towards eight o'clock if our bedtime is going to be 10 forgive me if that's too early for some people but I think it's like nice to have a consistent bedtime if our bedtime is 10 then by eight o'clock like we want to be sort of dialing back on our devices or wearing blue light blocking glasses the blue light blocking glasses can help to protect us and then roughly 830 take your evening supplements so we had our morning supplements which were vitamin D omega-3s and turmeric now we want to take our evening supplements which are zinc and magnesium and if you take melatonin that would be the time to do it or if you take a different sleepy time supplement that would be the time to do it roughly 830 to 9 somewhere in that range.
So because it's going to take about 60 to 90 minutes to really kick in around 9 o'clock we want to activate our evening ritual and so in the morning we had our quiet time we should have a quiet time in the evening to intentionally activate our parasympathetic nervous system and get like relaxed before bedtime so that at 930 we basically are preparing for bedtime and that might mean a hot shower like actually like he at night hot shower sauna is perfect because actually it cools off your inner core temperature believe it or not so and that's exactly what we want we want a cool room we want a dark room and that will help us to sleep better because then at 10 o'clock we want to go to bed and 10 o'clock like it could be whatever time but I would argue that we should be consistent it could be 1030 it could be 11 whatever time you choose adapt to it but the point from my perspective it's not so much 10 is the magic number it's more so that 10 is the magic number if you always do 10 1030 is the magic number if you always do 1030 consistency is key.
And you would recommend three meals a day I think that you could do three meals I think the way that we structured this is that if you were done eating at 6 o'clock at night and then you're having breakfast around 8 you have a 14 hour fast do you think that fasting window matters that specific number 14 or in general just like generally generally having sort of a big intermittent fasting window where you have an eaten for 16 hours whatever it might be I think that there's so I think that there's two parts to the value that we get from time restricted eating so the first is we give our gut a time to rest so when you when you particularly eating late at night I got honestly the timing of it all could be debated the one spot where it's a total non-negotiable from my perspective is late night eating so I mean no if that's like sometimes we're busy right but when you eat late at night it hits you different metabolically and then it carries and it lingers into the next day and it will affect your sleep.
Yeah so we really as much as possible want to opt for early dinner time and then shut it down for the evening as much as possible people will be saying yes but I'm hungry and I think part of the reason that the hungry from what you've explained is probably because they didn't have breakfast yeah they like started eating later that's what typically what I find is if I have breakfast I'm typically not hungry later might yeah yeah I think that I think the breakfast helps to sort of set the tone for the rest of the day and then a specific way so the two the two advantages of time restricted eating are that you get that you get that gut rest which anything over 12 hours is good for the gut and then the second part is I think it just the underrated thing that no one talks about is it helps us to get more consistent with our meal times so this entire conversation about circadian rhythm can be summarized in one word consistency.
If you ate at the same time every single day you would feel the difference in terms of your digestion I promise you and so the advantage of time restricted eating is it brings attention to what time am I eating dinner what time am I eating breakfast and then you end up being a lot more consistent about it as opposed to just flying by the CD or pants do you fast ever do you try and like long fast long fast or just sort of most time restricted eating sounds I do I do time restricted eating all the time in fact I most days like I first of all I'm imperfect and so what that means is I don't perfectly follow all the advice I give so like I don't eat breakfast most days yeah because I'm going hard so like I wake up I do my morning routine I get I get to the coffee stage and then I jump into work same so but on the we're getting today today I did yeah today I had my breakfast because I wanted to be on my game but on the weekend I have my breakfast I noticed the difference actually like I'm I'm less hungry during the day when I have that breakfast that sort of just keeps it balanced.
So yeah I sometimes I do one meal a day last month I told you about a challenge that I'd sat our internal flight tech team flight tech team is our innovation team internally here I toss them we're seeing how much time they could unlock for the company by creating something that will help us fill to new AI tools to see which ones were worth pursuing and I thought that our sponsor five of pro might have the talent on their platform to help us build this quickly so I talked to my director of innovation Isaac and for the last month my team flight X and a vetted AI specialist from five of pro have been working together on this project and with the help of my team we've been able to create a brand new tool which automatically scans scores and prioritises different emerging AI tools for us its impact has been huge and within a couple of weeks this tool has already been saving us hours trialing and testing new AI systems instead of shifting through lots of noise my team flight X has been able to focus from developing even more AI tools once that really moved the needle in our business thanks to the talent on five of pro.
所以,是的,我有时候会在一天内只吃一顿饭。上个月,我告诉过你们一个我给内部飞行技术团队设定的挑战。飞行技术团队是我们公司内部的创新团队。我向他们提出挑战,看看他们能通过创建一些有助于我们筛选新AI工具的东西来为公司节省多少时间,以确定哪些工具值得追求。我认为我们的赞助商Five of Pro平台上可能有能够快速帮助我们构建这个项目的人才。所以,我与我们的创新总监Isaac进行了交流。在过去的一个月里,我的团队Flight X和来自Five of Pro的经过筛选的AI专家一起合作进行这个项目。在我团队的帮助下,我们成功创建了一种全新的工具,该工具可以自动扫描、评分和优先排序不同的新兴AI工具。它的影响力非常大,仅仅几周的时间,这个工具已经为我们节省了大量用于试验新AI系统的时间,让我们不必再在大量噪音中筛选。我的团队Flight X能够专注于开发更多真正能对我们的业务产生重大影响的AI工具,这都是得益于Five of Pro的人才。
So if you've got a complex problem and you need help solving it make sure you check out five of pro at fivea dot com slash diary if there's anything we need it is connection especially in the world we're living in today and that is exactly why we created these conversation cards because on this show when I sit here with my guest and have those deep intimate conversations this remarkable thing happens time and time again we feel deeply connected to each other at the end of every episode the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest and we've turned them into these conversation cards and we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting and there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards this is the brand new addition and for the first time ever I've added to the pack this gold card which is an exclusive question from me but I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards so get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone head to the link in the description below.
One of the things you we touched on briefly at the beginning was this concept that trauma is linked to gut function powerful in what way we're talking a moment ago about the autonomic nervous system which is sympathetic versus parasympathetic we live our lives on sympathetic overdrive which basically is the equivalent of constantly feeling threatened right heart rate heart rate pumping blood pressure up more focused but then you suffer the consequences within your gut the gut gets sacrificed when we are activating our sympathetic nervous system we don't do enough to do the opposite which is the parasympathetic nervous system which is what happens with when we slow down conversations holding hands hugs prayer journaling meditation sauna that's parasympathetic okay so to the trauma question it's been shown that and this is something that I had to learn not only myself but I had to see that I always thought the kids if they were young enough they wouldn't remember.
And what I've realized is actually this idea of like the body keeps the score is so well said it's so true the body does keep the score you can have trauma that occurs before the age of two there's no way you remember that and yet it will manifest later on in adults and this has been shown actually in kids that are adopted and like have an unstable first two years of life they are more likely to suffer with health-related issues later on this this issue of trauma what happens is that it restructures the brain and how your brain functions and it keeps you sort of trapped in that fight with flight state keeps you trapped yeah so there's a part of our brain called the amygdala and the amygdala is what gets activated if you like go to a haunted house you know like if you get scared of something right or like it's the middle of the night and you hear something creepy in the bushes and you're not sure what's going on okay so that's the activation of your amygdala well the the issue for people that suffer from trauma is that they live with the amygdala perpetually turned on.
So if something's happened to me in my life that's caused some form of trauma there's an increased probability that I'm going to be in a more sympathetic state in terms of my nervous system which is going to activate a hormone which is then going to disrupt my gut motility and all the other things we talked about um like the gut barrier and other dysfunction across the gut what is the link there is it is it the hormone that's produced when I'm in a stress state that is impacting my immune system which is then having the impact on my gut yes this is all a manifestation of the brain of the brain gut connection so the what's happening is that your brain has the ability to release a hormone corticotropin releasing hormone and C.R.H and C.R.H is this that's effectively your sympathetic nervous system getting activated turned on in a person who's had trauma.
And to be clear like not everything that's bad is trauma right it's possible to have things that are bad that are not actual trauma trauma is the thing that sticks with you it's it's when you have something occur that overwhelms your ability to cope with it and so and then it has this lasting effect I was thinking as just speaking about some of my friends that I've had some bad diagnoses recently got a friend that got diagnosed with something very very serious and what I then noticed after that diagnosis they had lots of other health related issues that seemed to be unconnected but the doctors associated with stress yeah and maybe the traumatic news of that one thing has caused this cascade of other issues downstream.
Yeah 100% and that's all a manifestation of the brain gut access so the brain gut access is how we think about the brain being connected to our gut and how they're in communication with one another and within that context the brain releases this hormone. The C.R.H. corticotropin releasing hormone that hasn't affected throughout the entire body it puts them on edge and the consequence is that that C.R.H. that's like so this is a bit nuanced but let me clarify something about cortisol cortisol is the morning hormone when you get that spike in the morning it's perfect it's exactly what your body needs what you don't need is you don't need cortisol to still be elevated at 10 o'clock 11 o'clock midnight one in the morning cortisol is the get up and go hormone right now it's disrupting your sleep now it's actually the adversary of your of your circadian rhythm and that's what's happening in these people is that through that the brain gut access they're activating the cortisol and the cortisol then disrupts their gut barrier and leads the inflammation.
Where does healing from that trauma start in your view if a patient were to come to you yeah and they were they had loads of complications with their gut yeah but you were able to identify that trauma was playing a row yeah where would you start with with their healing journey the most important thing is the is to and I think this is the the moment that will be most impactful for some of the listeners not all but some the most important thing is to understand that the trauma is the root of the issue because most people the way that we react to trauma it's the part that we don't want to talk about right so we push it into the corner and we pretend that it's not there we're not like we know it's there but we're not going to even look at it and so the solution is to accept and acknowledge that the trauma is the root of the problem because then you need to actually turn towards it and that's under professional that's with professional help so there's different things that you can do different approaches including cognitive behavioral therapy they're all administered by trained health professionals that's not what I do but step one is the acknowledgement and understand if that's the problem.
You remember last time we made lots of different shapes of poop I think we were using was the Bristol stool there we go yeah we have this Bristol stool thing which is the different types of poop that people produce and on this table I think we have a variety of different styles just to remind me once again if I was guessing I would assume that maybe this one is healthy or this one yeah which one is healthy and Jacobar is your so this sweet Jacobar right here is your glorious Bristol 4 Bristol 4 so the Bristol stool scale is seven unique types of poop and you can tell by looking in the toilet bowl we have been told don't look there's nothing to see there but what I'm saying is we discussed this that 60% of the weight of your stool is your microbiome that's the microbiome story right there in the toilet bowl and so the Bristol 4 is the normal bowel movement and it should be it shouldn't be a rectangle but it's soft but formed like a sausage and the word Bristol is coming from this thing called the Bristol stool chart.
Yeah so the Bristol stool chart actually comes from Bristol in the UK right the city of Bristol where they did a study in the early 90s and what came of that study was the discovery of these seven unique stool types so and four is normal and three many people would consider normal three is just sort of lumpy bumpy like this but and many people would consider that to be normal by type one and two are constipation and types six and six and seven are diarrhea now what's interesting is that the Bristol study was one location in the UK 2000 people actually at Zoe we did a nationwide survey in the UK and we had 140,000 people tell us about their poop so we actually have we're working on publishing the papers that came from this but we have the largest survey on bowel habits that's ever been done in the world and how many people's people's people's healthy well based upon this actually it was interesting because the results were about what you expect there's a disproportionate number of people that are struggling with bowel related issues so it's probably about 40% of people that are struggling with bowel related issues.
Of all the different types of people one could have is there any that I should be most concerned about if you have these like little pellets rabbit pellets that's severe constipation and is that a lack of something a lack of fiber or a lack of fiber for sure okay but sometimes this is stool softening issue too so like for people that have severe constipation fiber is more nuanced than people are willing to discuss on social media everyone makes this sound like the simple solution is just increase your fiber it's not necessarily that simple so sometimes you have to add magnesium magnesium supplements are great with fiber what do they do so they help to draw water into the intestine and that water softens up the stool so if you have the fiber for the form and you have the magnesium to make it soft this is how you get a soft formed bowel movement.
We talked a moment ago about taking a nighttime magnesium supplement okay if your goal is to sleep or to relax magnesium glycinate is a phenomenal choice but if you're constipated that's not going to do anything so don't do that for constipation magnesium oxide is the one that I would typically go with but there's also magnesium sulfate and magnesium citrate those are the choices okay yeah and if you get to a Bristol 7 which is just like diarrhea that's just yeah it's just a liquid you're not in a good place and so obviously that needs to be addressed as well and be aware of what we talked about earlier which is that there are some people who suffer from chronic constipation and then they start having diarrhea and actually that's overflow.
Doctor what's the most important thing we haven't talked about as it relates to all that is in your new book that you think we should have talked about I mean we've probably covered tiny tiny tiny fraction of all the things in that but it gives people a flavor is there one other thing that you think is the most important thing that we haven't talked about here's what I really feel compelled to say to be totally honest with you you're holding the book the book is called plant powered plus I don't want people to be intimidated by the title of my book let me explain this I believe that there are many pads to healing there are many different dietary patterns the one that's going to work the best for you is the one that you're actually willing to do right so this book is not about a one size fits all approach nor is it a hundred percent plants that's not what the book is about so instead the conversation and what we haven't discussed is what's missing in our diet that we really need and we've kind of started to touch on this.
I've identified four things and these four things you find in all of the healthy dietary patterns so whether it's Mediterranean pescatarian flexitarian if you do it right you're going to have these four things number one fiber number two polyphenols number three healthy fat so healthy fat is the extra virgin olive oil healthy fat is this avocado right here healthy fat are these seeds and nuts right here okay they all have healthy fat and in whole form you should consume these whole form foods without restriction if you are obese and you're trying to lose weight the problem with any oil not just not just seed oils also including extra virgin olive oil is that this is the highest calorie thing that exists on the entire planet you cannot create something with a higher calorie content than oil.
So it's not to your advantage to really focus on oil if anything you should be limiting your oil intake but these healthy fats the monounsaturated fats that you get from nuts from avocado if we had fish like a salmon or shellfish the omega-3s that you get from those things there's tremendous benefit to those healthy fats that was the third one and on the fourth is fermented food okay which is so which we don't actually see we kind of see here we got the pickles all right we got some pickles here um but the thing about fermented food is most of us are not eating fermented food so the average intake of fermented food in the United States is zero and if any maybe once in a while yogurt that's it we have tons of choices that are available to us.
And the key that people need to know is a Stanford study done by some of my friends Christopher Gardner and Justin and Erica Sonnenberg and what they showed is that in just eight weeks by adding fermented food to their diet people could increase the diversity of their gut microbiome that means a healthier gut and they lowered inflammation so as the gut gets healthier inflammation goes down and they did that just by adding fermented food so Steve these four things fiber 95% of Americans are deficient polyphenols almost no one is getting the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables healthy fats we're not opting for the types of fats that we're talking about right now I want people to get more omega-3s and more monounsaturated fat and finally fermented food no one's really consuming if you think about your diet this shouldn't be an exercise in more of the thing that you already have this should be an exercise of what is the thing that's missing that we could add that could transform our health because that's the real opportunity so that's what the nutrition program is about.
When I look at these this photo of you before and after I think this one's probably sort of during medical school was it or just after medical school so I was actually that's in my early 30s on the left yeah and then this photo here which I'll put up on the screen is you at one age yeah about 40 okay well 10 years has passed and you look 10 years younger yeah and you look pretty ripped yeah what changed in your life between these two photos what was different in one's mind knowledge mentality psychology what was different so the the easy answer is I change my diet I change my lifestyle I grew up eating junk food I grew up eating fast food we celebrated that sort of diet and I shifted towards eating the way that I'm describing to you today right I obviously started going to the gym and working out I think everyone should be going to the gym and working out I don't think that's to be underestimated that's an important part of the program that I'm proposing for people right so there's those things but the part that you don't get on the surface that I don't really talk about that much is I also need to heal on the inside.
So I was in a dark place and I wasn't in a dark place just because of my diet there were issues that existed within our family I had issues with my dad and I needed to resolve those and what happens a few things one literally an angel came into my life that's my wife right she came into my life in 20 and 2012 and she never pushed anything on me but just seeing her and having her as a presence in my life was what I really needed to change myself in terms of my diet in terms of my lifestyle but also to pick up the phone and call my dad who I didn't talk to in 10 years you'd full an out totally phone oh and there's an entire story that goes into that and I have to own my own mistakes because I'm as guilty as anyone for the issues that existed between us but I picked up the phone and I called him and the other thing that happened in my life that really changed everything was the birth of my daughter.
So my oldest I four kids my oldest is now 11 and when you hold that child in your hands you're a different person instantly and I can't describe this to a person to someone who's never experienced this but you have a purpose that you didn't have prior to that day you've experienced love that you never understood and the love that I had for my daughter helped me to understand the love that my own dad had for me but I could never accept that and so the complexity of it all is yes I changed my diet my lifestyle yes I started working out but I also needed to forgive my dad for the things that happened when I was a kid and reconnecting with my dad was actually one of the most important and powerful things that happened for me.
He was vacant he was absent or was this no my when I so this is something that chapter eight of my new book to me it's my masterpiece of all the chapters this my third book of all the Chaps over it and it's the one that I'm most proud of by far and if you if people get the audio book they're going to hear it in my voice so there were some things that I needed to talk about and you'll find them in that chapter and basically this story is that our family we went through a really hard time and my parents got divorced and I was seven and I was the oldest of three boys it was not a nice divorce and when it happens you feel like you have to choose it side and from my perspective again you know I was a kid but there was a part of me that said dad you're a man why did you allow this to happen why did you allow this to happen to our family why didn't you fix this and eventually I stopped talking to him and that was around the time that I graduated from college.
So for 10 years I was like I went to medical school at Georgetown I went to Northwestern I was the chief medical resident there I won the highest award in my residency. class I was fully accomplished I was accomplishing everything I was very very sad inside and what was missing was my dad and I needed him there and so having my daughter and feeling the love that I felt instantly for my daughter helped me to understand the love that my dad had for me and ultimately what I realized Steve is that because I think you have to know that's hard to explain in short order is that we had two brothers my dad used to take us camping three boys no one else just him he took us camping all the time he took us to the vacation all the time if there was a sporting event he was always there right but I wasn't able to see that all of that was really an active love and now having kids myself and understanding how hard it is to be a parent and raise these kids the idea of taking three boys camping by yourself is insane to me.
I now understand how hard my dad was trying and in your book published in um 2020 I believed 2020 you wrote this fan could you read that in your own voice because I was gonna read it but it's very personal you wrote this in the front of the book yeah I lost my dad during the preparation of this book it was sudden and completely unexpected I couldn't wait to share this book with him would have been easy to just send an electric cop electronic copy but I really wanted his first read to be a physical book with the hard cover all the pages and his son's name on the front over the past few months my dad repeatedly told me how proud he was of me he told me that my grandparents John and Helen Bolsoitz would have been so proud of the work I was doing in the name of our family I can't tell you how much it means to me that he said all that it breaks my heart that he's not here anymore I am who I am because of him but I will forever be grateful for the special times that we shared love you dad will always be thinking of you this book is for you.
You know we're all susceptible for letting a relationship sour and then losing a lot of time and I think that's why your story is so inspiring because it reminds us that I guess what might as most in the end and sometimes we can lose I don't know decades years because of grudges or because of misunderstandings that I've never been addressed so I mean it's a huge compliment to your wife that she had the way with all to to try and get you guys to reconnect so that you could reform that relationship before he did pass away and I'm a no doubt that he was would be incredibly proud if it's if he was watching it over us now and I had seen what's happened in the in the last five years in your life because it's been incredible actually incredible healing comes in many forms and sometimes it's the changes that we make to our diet and sometimes it's the changes we make in our relationships with other people.
There's different opportunities you and I talked about like what is the thing for every person that's something different and it's funny how they're both extricably linked because when one gets right with themselves and others they often find it much easier to get control of their diet and their lifestyle and then it all clicks. I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book it's it's going to be published in the US here on the 13th of January and in the UK and the 15th that's right yeah Tuesday and the US Thursday and the UK. So I'm going to link it below and we just touched on a fraction of it we haven't gone into much of the details but if you ask someone that is struggling with your gut you know one of the 61% or 70% of people that told me ahead of this conversation that you were I highly recommend this book because it's incredibly accessible in the way that it's written but also it's incredibly comprehensive and up to date.
As you said the science on the gut and all of the related gut related sort of issues and symptoms that we have is always evolving so I love having these conversations is almost refreshes and updates to me because every single time I learn something new and I get more of the sort of jigsaw puzzle of my gut health and as it relates to like my brain and my immune system filled in. It's having it's really remarkable how much of a real-world impact these conversations have had on me they don't think people know this enough but they often ask me like which conversations had an impact on you the way that I view it it's almost it is like a jigsaw puzzle and each conversation is adding a piece and I can see since we had that last conversation about poop and the gut and the microbiminal those things there's been radical changes I've made to my life that I've had a radical impact.
It's like the lights have been turned on and that's a really good example of what this book does when you read it it turns on the lights so highly recommend people go check it out. You are launching a YouTube channel you said yeah I'm launching a I'm launching a YouTube channel it's the gut health MD and that's also my social hashtag or my social handle so you can find me all those locations but my home base is my website the guthealthmd.com and if you come there I highly encourage people to register for my email newsletter because it's a completely free resource basically a sub-stack for free that's designed this is where I love to like really have these conversations with people about hey there's this new study let's talk about it hey there's this thing that I'm seeing let's talk about it right hey this is what I'm doing right now right so it's an opportunity for sharing that goes beyond like the limitations of social.
就像灯被点亮了一样,这本书就有这样的效果。读它的时候,就像灯光被打开了,因此我非常推荐大家去看看这本书。你提到你正在启动一个 YouTube 频道,是的吗?是的,我正在启动一个 YouTube 频道,叫做 "The Gut Health MD",这也是我的社交媒体标签或用户名,你可以在所有这些地方找到我,但我的主要基地是我的网站 theguthealthmd.com。我非常鼓励大家来这里注册我的电子邮件通讯,这是一个完全免费的资源,基本上就是一个免费的 sub-stack,这里是我喜欢和大家讨论的地方,比如有新的研究时我们可以讨论,还有我现在在做的事情,这样的分享机会超越了社交媒体的限制。
I'll link all of that below everything we've mentioned in the last 30 seconds everyone can check you out. We do have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next and the question that has been left for you is what is one thing you could do today to help rectify your life's biggest regret is it that fighty um well I think that the good news this is to me if anything a story of hope and optimism because on many levels I did um so reconnecting with my dad was key but I think that the other piece is when you when you lose a person the way that we lost my dad he's gone right and it happened real fast and I didn't get to say goodbye.
I will say it's my faith that allows me to know like not to pretend to know to actually know that these things that I need to say to him that I never actually got a chance to say that I wish I did I'll have a chance to do that and I look forward to the day when I see him again. What would you say I would tell him that uh I hate the fact that it took me so long to figure out that he was a great dad and you know adults may have conflict that's what the divorce was but he was a phenomenal dad and I didn't see that or get that until I had my own kids doctor will thank you yeah.