How to have a super gut with Dr. William Davis

Let's Say Hello

[00:01:16.030] – Allan

Hey, Ras, how are things going?

[00:01:18.110] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:01:20.140] – Allan

I'm doing okay. It's been kind of a weird couple of weeks. I don't want to go into it in too much detail because there's still some things I'm working on that I can't really reveal out loud right now because if I don't get what I've got to get done, done, then I don't need anybody knowing about it. So, yeah, a lot's going on, good and bad and just kind of working through some things, but otherwise healthy, doing well. The gym is doing okay. Lula's is doing okay.

[00:01:51.320] – Rachel

Good.

[00:01:52.140] – Allan

We're just plotting along.

[00:01:54.430] – Rachel

Nice. That's awesome. Good to hear.

[00:01:56.120] – Allan

how are things for you?

[00:01:57.470] – Rachel

Good. Burying myself out of the snow, but I am excited because I'll be taking a vacation down in Florida very soon. So I just ran a half marathon over the weekend in the snow, and next weekend I get to run a little over a half marathon on the beach. So I'm pretty excited.

[00:02:15.910] – Allan

Just watch out for that lip and the sidewalk, okay.

[00:02:18.930] – Rachel

Right. I know.

[00:02:20.710] – Rachel

I'm telling you, I'm already nervous about it, but, yes, I will definitely be paying attention this time.

[00:02:27.550] – Allan

All right. Well, you're ready to have a conversation with Dr. Davis?

[00:02:31.050] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:03:17.890] – Allan

Dr. Davis, welcome back to 40+ Fitness.

[00:03:22.030] – Dr. Davis

Thank you, Allan. Glad to be here again.

[00:03:24.730] – Allan

I didn't realize it's been over three and a half years since we talked about your book, Undoctored. That was episode 251. If anyone's interested after listening to this, that they want to go catch another episode with you. It's episode 251, so you can go back and find that there. But we talked about Undoctored, and I really liked the book. I liked the concept of it, and I've used that in talking to people about how they manage their healthcare and help manage themselves. But today we're going to talk about Super Gut: A Four Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. And when I heard Super Gut, I was thinking about a superhero with a beer gut. But that's not what we're talking about.

[00:04:11.110] – Dr. Davis

Right. It's kind of a goofy name, I know, but I'm kind of the King of goofy book titles. But it's a serious book. I think it's got a lot of fun stuff in it, too. But it's a very serious book that I think really packs. I'm very mindful, Allan, that it's not just descriptive telling you how the microbiome has gone wrong and all the nasty things, but I want to make sure that people are given solutions also. So people who read this book, it's very prescriptive also.

[00:04:42.440] – Allan

It is. And that's what I wanted to get into as we got into this is it's a full week program in the book, and each week kind of has its own purposes, but the whole concept of SIBO and CIFO and all the other stuff that's going on with your microbiome, this is not a simple if then this puzzle that we are trying to solve, this is a 16 sided Rubik's Cube, if you will, of symptoms and things going on. And that's why it's been so difficult for doctors to diagnose this. And most of the times it just gets kind of lumped in with, oh, you've got IBS, and it just becomes this nebulous thing of, well, let's try that, or let's try this. And then you have the FODMAPs and you got that, you got this. And it is just for a lot of people, trial and error, and you kind of line it all up and say, okay, here's some things, here's some tools, here's some approaches to how we can solve this problem. But you also do a really good job on the front end, in my opinion, of helping us understand why we're experiencing the things we're experiencing.

[00:05:50.950] – Allan

Because a lot of us thought the gut is the gut and the brain is the brain and the liver is the liver. And they, I guess sort of need things because the liver is going to get food from the gut and the brain is going to get food from the gut. So we know there's some relationship there, but I think we've always kind of simplified it. And you brought up some things in the book that just were fascinating because I've talked about SIBO before, but I always just thought, okay, yeah, it's food particles and getting into your blood, but it's actually much more toxic than that. Basically, the bad fungi or bad bacteria we have, they actually get into our bloodstream and cause a whole mirror of things. It's called metabolic endotoxemia, and it's caused by these lipopolysaccharides LPS. Can you kind of talk about that whole process? Because I think as soon as we start to understand that having the bad bacteria is a huge problem, if it's getting up into our small intestine and then the fact that it's not just little food particles or other things going in, it's bacteria we're eating.

[00:07:08.240] – Allan

It's bacteria that we have coming up through the bottom, the whole thing. Can you just kind of just summarize that for us?

[00:07:15.950] – Dr. Davis

A lot of us have suspected this thing called leaky gut for many years. But I finally got validated with good science in 2007 by a French and now Belgian group, Dr. Patrice Canyon and his team. They showed that the microbes in the GI tract, there are trillions of them, of course, Alan right. And they live and die in the space of a few hours. They don't live very long. So there's rapid turnover of trillions of microbes. And when they die, a lot of the debris of their little cell bodies enters the bloodstream. And as you point out, that's called endotoxemia, because the walls of these microbes have something called endotoxin. Endotoxin is extremely toxic to humans. If you inject nanogram quantity, you can kill somebody. So it doesn't take much. But there's been an across the board increase in endotoxemia in modern people because of what we've done to the microbiome. We've dramatically disrupted the composition. We've lost microbes that did important things for us, and we've allowed proliferation of unhealthy microbes to take their place. But also, as you point out, then, ascend many people in my estimation, one in three people, Allan, over 100 million people.

[00:08:31.640] – Dr. Davis

This is bigger than the pre diabetes type two diabetes epidemic. It is a silent but very widespread epidemic where microbes have proliferated and descended up into the Ilium to a denomin stomach. So you can imagine 30ft trillions of microbes living and dying rapidly and their debris entering the bloodstream. So it's both a cause for numerous health conditions as well as a fact that makes many conditions worse. And as you point out, it's something that's not being addressed by the great majority of mainstream physicians.

[00:09:10.610] – Allan

As I thought about this, we've talked about antibiotics before. I'm on the show quite a bit. It used to be you'd go to the doctor, you'd have the sniffles, and the doctor would say, well, here, even though I know it's probably a virus, you're not going to be happy unless I give you something. So here's a prescription for an antibiotic. And that sort of became the norm for a while. But that is sort of like dropping a nuclear bomb on the village, isn't it?

[00:09:37.490] – Dr. Davis

Absolutely. Most of us by age 40 have taken 30 courses of antibiotics. And yeah, you don't really recover from antibiotics. Many people do not recover a normal microbiome you're left with because if you kill something, it doesn't just reappear. People used to think that rats came from a pile of rats, right? That's not true. You have to have rats to make rats. And so if you lose important microbial species, you've lost them probably for life or at least for a long time. 

[00:10:09.720] – Allan

And I guess we know we still have some individuals out there, tribes and whatnot people that still live basic lifestyles very similar to what we did when we were Hunter gatherers, because they're Hunter gatherers and they're not taking the antibiotics and they're not eating and drinking the diet sodas and the eating of that. How different is their microbiome to ours?

[00:10:37.670] – Dr. Davis

It's fascinating. Several research groups have done this work, and I give them a lot of credit because this is not an easy thing to do to get the stool specimens from people living hunter gatherer lives. And you can imagine what an odd request that must seem to them. But the stools have been analyzed from the anomaly in the Brazilian rainforest, the Matzo in the Highlands of Peru, the hazard in the Savannah of Tanzania, the Masai in Kenya, the Malone and East Coast of Africa. So primitive groups, as you point out, are Hunter gatherers, don't eat modern food, don't take antibiotics, and don't have exposure to such things as emulsifying agents and ice cream. So they have very different microbiome. They have microbes we don't have we have microbes they don't have there's very little overlap compared to modern people. But the interesting thing is if you compare the microbiome composition of all those primitive or Indigenous populations, even though many of them are on different continents, have never met each other, they have very similar microbiomes, which has been interpreted by these groups to mean that they must have the microbiome handed down through the generations, so called Stone Age microbiome.

[00:11:53.040] – Dr. Davis

And it is very different. What's not clear is how much do we mimic? Should we try to mimic? Do we need more Prevotella like they have? They have a species called Prevotella. They have something called spirochetes. They're loaded with spirochetes. The only spirochetes that modern people have is the one that causes syphilis. And we have to remind ourselves also these people who have a different microbiome also have no constipation, no hemorrhoids, no colon cancer, no ulcerative colitis, no Crohn's disease, no Erobile syndrome, virtually unknown to have autoimmune conditions, no coronary disease. In other words, they have other problems, right. They've got infections and injury and worm infestations because of their lifestyle, but they don't have the so called I always find this amazing, the anthropologists actually label the diseases we suffer from, like type two diabetes, hypertension, coronary disease, Alzheimer's, dementia, etc. They call this diseases of civilization? Well, there's got to be some important lessons. If these Indigenous people have virtually none of our diseases, they have different diseases. Those diseases that they suffer from, like malaria, dengue fever, we're pretty good at dealing with that. The modern healthcare system is pretty good at dealing with that.

[00:13:14.080] – Dr. Davis

But modern health care stinks for taking care because for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons is they're very profitable because they're chronic treatments. If you have pneumonia and you need antibiotics for a couple of weeks, that's a two week profit opportunity. If you have high blood pressure, that's a lifelong profit opportunity. That's why there's so much focus on the diseases of civilization.

[00:13:38.150] – Allan

Well, and they just get bigger and bigger every year. I see the reports. The percentage of people that are obese or overweight, it goes up every year. It doesn't go down despite people knowing that eating whole food and not over indulging in ice cream and those kinds of things is going to be better for you. It's just really a struggle living in a modern environment and not having some of those problems. And you talk a lot in the book, and I want to just mention it, is that we start building our microbiota through being born, coming through the cervix and being born, and then later with breast milk and all of those types of things. And a lot of that has stopped happening. And because we're over 40, it's not like we can go back and redecide how we were going to be born and bred. We are who we are now. You have a four week super gut program, and it's very broad. I mean, it goes through a lot of different things that you have to think about with regards to managing what you eat, how you live, what you do. It's not the shortcut we think.

[00:14:51.440] – Allan

Why can't we just get a fecal transplant? Because that's the thing. Can you kind of go through the steps of your four week super gut program and why each one of those steps is important?

[00:15:06.030] – Dr. Davis

So people don't get overwhelmed with this. I think of cultivating your microbiome is just like having a garden in springtime in your backyard. So if you have a garden, let's say you lay out 10×10 plot. You've got to prepare the soil. You pick out the rocks and stones and debris, and then you plant seeds, and then through the growing season, you water and fertilize it. The intestinal microbiome is very, very similar. So we clear the soil, prepare the soil by not getting exposed to things that disrupt your microbiome. There's a list, as you know, such things as minimizing antibiotics. There's a time and place for antibiotics, but as you point out, not just in case kind of usage, other drugs, statin, cholesterol drugs, those horrible class of drugs that make a lot of money for big Pharma, does almost nothing for the public health. Nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs like Ibuprofen, Naproxen, diclofenac, massive disruption of the microbiome. The most fine agents in common foods, like salad dressing and ice cream, synthetic sweeteners in diet sodas like aspartame. So we kind of clean up our garden by avoiding those kinds of things. There's a long list in the book.

[00:16:21.440] – Dr. Davis

Of course, it's not unmanageable. One of the things we all do is we go back to real food. We don't buy the crap that's got 35 ingredients that are unpronounced. We buy avocados and eggs, a pork chop, and then we plant seeds. The seeds come in several forms. The best seeds are fermented foods like Kimchi, fermented sauerkraut, fermented veggies. And you can do this on your kitchen counter. It's virtually no cost. It's delicious. But people have forgotten that fermented foods are so healthy for you. In fact, they view fermented foods with suspicion or disgust because it may be like a cloudy soupy mix with your veggies. But once you learn how to do this, it's virtually no cost. It's delicious. And it's one of the most powerful ways to seed your GI tract. By the way, the seeding process, based on some very interesting research out of Stanford by a husband wife team, Erica and Justin Sonnenberg, showed that frequent consumption of fermented foods has dramatic changes in your microbiome. But oddly, it's not the microbes in the fermented food. No one knows why. If you eat a lot of fermented foods, the microbes that take over in your GI tract are not the microbes in the fermented food.

[00:17:42.010] – Dr. Davis

For the most part, it's other microbes. Where did they come from? Were they latent in small numbers? Did you acquire them from your environment? Nobody knows. But there's a dramatic shift and increase in healthy microbes with consumption of fermented foods. Probiotics also. But unfortunately, commercial probiotics are really kind of primitive right now. They're getting better, and there's a lot of problems with them. There's an emerging short list of probiotics that I would recommend only because not that I have any relationship with them, but they have specific features, like the strain is specified, you can't take a probiotic unless the strain is specified. To illustrate, you have E. Coli. Your listeners have E. Coli. I've got E. Coli. But what if you ate lettuce contaminated with E. Coli from cow manure? You could die of kidney failure and sepsis. So same species, e. Coli. Different strain. So strange differences can make a life death difference. So you must know the strain. And another problem with commercial probiotics is they often don't include what are called Keystone species. That is, species so much like plankton in the ocean. If plankton disappeared, whales and jellyfish, so many animals filter feeders would just die off because plankton are Keystone species.

[00:19:02.290] – Dr. Davis

That little those little creatures support tons of other creatures. Well, you have the same biological phenomenon in your GI tract. And so when you take a probiotic, you want to make sure there's at least a handful of these so called Keystone species. But probiotics can be helpful. And lastly, that's the seeding of your GI tract. And, of course, that's where we also throw in some of our fermentation projects, where we make some really cool yogurts. Particularly, it doesn't have to be yogurt. It could be other fermented foods. But my favorite microbe in the world, Lactobacillus rotori that I think introduces an age reversing effect, including ladies go berserk for this. They lose their skin wrinkles starting within four to eight weeks. And then we water and fertilize our garden. That's the things that microbes like to eat. These are mostly so called prebiotic fibers, polysaccharides, polyphenols, a lot of healthy things in mushrooms and onions and garlic, as well as some commercial preparations. And that causes healthy species to Bloom. And so it sounds like a lot, but I try to break it down week by week so that this week we're going to talk about diet and cleaning up your garden.

[00:20:12.470] – Dr. Davis

This week we're going to talk about seeding your garden. This week we're going to talk about water and fruit to try to break it down so it's manageable.

[00:20:19.410] – Allan

And I think it's really important to think of these in that order because it's fine if you start throwing the food and water in there. But if you don't have the seeds, it might not do you what you want to do. If you haven't cleaned your garden first, then you might be growing the species you don't want to grow or the strange you don't want to grow. And you're not really solving some of the bigger problems. Like, why is this in my little intestine anyway? Because it doesn't belong there. And so kind of dealing with some of those things early on. I do want to dive a little bit deeper into your week one to prepare the garden or prepare the soil, because I think for a lot of us, this is really where we're going to see a big shift in how we look and feel. Because if we're doing these things, it's like this is a list of try these things and watch how well you feel. Watch what happens to your weight. Watch all the little things that you want to use to measure health. These are going to move the needle. Every single one of these will move the needle for you in one way or another.

[00:21:27.810] – Allan

I sent you over a list of the ones you talked about in the book. Could you kind of just go through each one? And why is it important for us to either limit that or eat that way?

[00:21:38.190] – Dr. Davis

Let me pull up your list.

[00:21:39.820] – Allan

Okay. 

[00:21:40.740] – Dr. Davis

Okay. Here we go. So sugar, sugar is something we absolutely avoid. That is added sugars because sugars cause a Bloom in all kinds of nasty species. People don't know that three days, let's say you go on an all expense paid vacation in Mexico, all inclusive, and you can't resist all the margaritas that you can drink, right? Well, it takes three days of that kind of sugar exposure. You've already got irritable bowel syndrome, because what the sugar does is it feeds the microbes. It also feeds fungi. So fungi like the various Candida species, candida tropicalis, candida global Alpaca malassesia. There's about 200 different fungi that live in the human GI. They love sugar and oddly, fungal overgrowth. Somehow these microbes, these fungal microbes release some kind of factor that affects your brain and causes you to crave sweets. So it's an odd, vicious cycle. Fungi produced in metabolite that causes a sweet tooth. You eat sweets, you feed the fungi. So you've served your purpose to the fungal world that's sugar, the synthetic sweeteners like aspartame, saccharine and sucralose. Very good evidence that they massively disrupt your microbiome, even if you're a slender, active, non diabetic person.

[00:23:05.870] – Dr. Davis

By using those synthetic sweeteners, it gives you the microbiome of an obese type two diabetic. And that microbiome thereby pushes you towards weight gain, obesity and being a type two diabetic, major disruption.

[00:23:18.720] – Allan

Now, you recommended other things like stevia and Monk fruit and things like that. So if you want to move to a lower calorie, you want to look at some of the more natural choices, right?

[00:23:30.630] – Dr. Davis

Absolutely. So we just have to be a bit more discerning in our choice of sweeteners. So as you point out, stevia and Various forms mung fruit. Alulos erythritol is pretty safe. And we still can make all kinds of great stuff like cupcakes or cheesecake. We're going to use non grain flowers, by the way. Also, because of the massive disruption of the GI tract, that's the whole course the theme of my Wheat Belly books as well as the Undoctored books. I didn't want to dwell on that too much because it's covered in other books. But as you know, growing wheat and grain free is a huge advantage in health, despite the fact that they are the centerpiece of all official government guidelines and diet. The worst possible advice you can possibly conceive of is cut your fat, eat more healthy, whole grains. It would be as bad as people saying, Allan, you know, smoking a pack or two of cigarettes is not go ahead, it's good for you. No, it's not. Right.

[00:24:28.290] – Allan

They did because for a long time they did. And I think it's probably the same mechanism for why grains are such a prominent thing in our government's guidelines for food. It's a great way to get a lot of calories then, but not necessarily going to help your microbiome.

[00:24:51.790] – Dr. Davis

Now, we try to eat organic whenever opportunity and budget permit. We don't really know how effective that is. We are all filled with herbicides and pesticides. Unfortunately, if we tested all your listeners, for instance, for glyphosate, the Herbicide and Roundup will all test positive blood, urine, hair, skin, everything. So it's kind of hard we can't avoid. Unfortunately, we can only minimize. And so choosing an organic whenever possible, it makes a contribution. We filter our drinking water because most cities chlorinate or chloraminate. I'm in Milwaukee, where they use chloramine, they're very proud of that because it lingers much longer, so much so that you can't even boil it off. You have to boil it for three to four days before it starts to be reduced. So it's very persistent. But these are antimicrobials. They kill stuff, and they also disrupt the mucus barrier and thereby caused shifts in the composition of the microbiome species composition. Of course, avoiding wheat and grains, that alone is a huge advantage in health. That was the whole base of the week belly books. Of course, people lose weight because you no longer exposed the insulin raising effects of the envelopectin a. You rid yourself of the glycoprotein'derived opioid peptides that are potent appetite stimulants.

[00:26:16.520] – Dr. Davis

You get rid of the potent bowel toxic effects of wheat germaglutin, which is completely indigestible. But as it courses from mouth to toilet, it is extremely destructive, inflammatory to the human GI tract. Short list of things wrong with wheat and grain. And of course, it's gotten worse because farmers and agribusiness scientists have selected strains for their purposes. So not because they are evil, but because they wanted strains that were resistant, for instance, to pests like molds and insects. So they selected strains of wheat that were enriched in wheat germaglutin, bowel toxin and phytates, which are great pest resistant compounds. But they're also binders of magnesium, calcium, zinc and iron. And you poop out those minerals in the toilet. That's why, for instance, iron deficiency anemia is very common among people who eat grains. And then we limit alcohol because alcohol likes to entice fungi to proliferate. It doesn't mean you can't have glass. Mine just means don't overdo it. And then nonstrough anti-inflammatory drugs. These are dispensed like candy, of course, even over the counter. So a woman might take, for instance, Motorin for menstrual cramps. Or somebody might take the proxy from knee pain.

[00:27:36.070] – Dr. Davis

For one thing, Allan, I can't tell you how many times I put patients on dialysis for kidney failure from those drugs, how many times I've had red blood thrown up in my face because they had a bleeding ulcer. How many times people passed black, partially digested blood in their stool from bleeding, intestinal, ulcers. These are nasty drugs, even though they can be over the counter. But they also disrupt the microbiome. There are other ways to deal with pain that don't disrupt the microbiome. That's a whole other conversation, of course, but you can do without them very easily. And, of course, antibiotics. If you're sick and you can't breathe and you have pneumococcal pneumonia, you need an antibiotic. But as you point out, you just got a cough and a viral tracheop bronchitis, you don't need an antibiotic. So you want to really question any physician who tries to prescribe an antibiotic when it's not really clear whether you have a bacteria infection or not.

[00:28:31.840] – Allan

Yeah. And I think you do a great job in the book of simplifying this each day be thinking about something that you're going to incorporate and use. But really in the simplest sense, and you say it in the book is eat real food, single ingredients, and avoid things that you know are not going to be serving you, like alcohol, the medications, the antibiotics, those types of things, because you need that microbiome to be healthy so you can be healthy. And if you start getting to the point where, as we call it, leaky gut is happening, it's because the mucous membranes not intact. It's because other things are going on. And now you're introducing toxins into your body that are going to recap it across your whole health, not just your gut. So you might feel fine and not have any kind of bowel symptoms, but still, it's your gut that's the cause.

[00:29:31.870] – Dr. Davis

Absolutely. It's funny. If anyone ever has a few free minutes, take a look at all the studies. For instance, in irritable bowel syndrome, and you'll see they ask questions like this. What proportion of people with this very common condition shared by 60 to 70 million Americans called Irritable bowel syndrome, where you have usually diarrhea and cramps and Bloating? Well, if you look at those studies, you'll see that people with IBS or irritable bowel syndrome, typically 40% to 84%, it varies with each study, how they chose their participants have SIBO. But then look at the healthy control group. You'll be shocked at how many of the healthy control group it's not uncommon to have 24% of a healthy, controlled people also test positive for siblings, for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So it's everywhere. And I show people how I came to that figure. I wrapped that figure of over 100 million people in the US with SIBO. Of course, similar situations outside the US, too.

[00:30:34.990] – Allan

Well, if you're eating sugar or the non caloric, artificial sweeteners and emulsifying agents, like you said in your ice cream and drinking your local water, yeah, you probably have done some damage down there. And it's worth doing some things to make that environment a lot more hospitable to the good bugs we want in our gut.

[00:30:58.750] – Allan

Dr. Davis, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:31:06.580] – Dr. Davis

Well, you know, I saved the best for last in the book because as you point out, if you do things out of order, bad things can happen. So if you say, I'm going to start with the prebiotic fibers because it's too much, the probiotics are too expensive, or I don't want to deal with the SIBO, you can actually make yourself ill if you do it out of order. So I presented a very specific order for your safety and for greater effectiveness. But I saved the very best for the last. That is pinpointing microbes that most of us have lost. And my favorite, as I mentioned, is Lactobacillus rhetoric. 96% of people have lost it due to all those factors we talked about when you re implanted. And we do it with yogurt fermented in a very specific way. Please don't let your leaders get confused. This has nothing to do with store bought yogurt. Store bought yogurt is garbage. It has almost nothing in it. Because when you ferment yogurt or any other food, bacteria don't have sexual reproduction of course. They have what's called asexual reproduction. They don't have Mommy and Daddy microbes. They just double.

[00:32:15.010] – Dr. Davis

One becomes two, two becomes four. Like that. Well, if, let's say, Rotary doubles every 3 hours in commercial yogurt fermentation, they ferment for 4 hours. Nothing happens. That's why you see ingredients like gel and gum, xanthan gum, guar gum added to thicken it up because there ain't nothing in it. So we're going to ferment for 36 hours. We allow the bacteria to double twelve times. It's just like that kid's Riddle. Which would you rather have? A million dollars or a Penny that doubles every day for 30 days? Kids always say, I want the million dollars, not knowing that the Penny will become over five and a half million dollars by day 30. But if you look at the curve, the money doesn't really start to increase $0.01, two cent, $0.04, right? Go nowhere. But it's our I'm sorry. It's day 26 27 where you start to get those really big millions of same thing happens in bacterial reproduction. If a microbe doubles every 3 hours, it's not about our 33. We start to get really big numbers. So 36, we performed a test called flow cytometry on our yogurt. We're getting around 260,000,000,000 counts of microbes per half cup serving.

[00:33:31.220] – Dr. Davis

So people eat this half cup or so of the reuteri yogurt. It's rich and very tasty, and skin starts to lose its wrinkles. There's a thickening of dermis, dermal collagen. There's an acceleration of healing. There's a restoration of youthful muscle and strength. There's a preservation of bone density. It's one of the most important things ladies can do to preserve bone health and prevent osteoporotic fractures. It deepens sleep. I'm a chronic Insomniac Allen. I used to sleep three, 4 hours a night. I have to force myself. I now sleep 9 hours a night straight through deep, vivid drains. It suppresses appetite, puts you in absolute control over appetite and impulse. And because it works, this microbrotride, by stimulating oxytocin release from the brain, it stimulates empathy, a desire to understand other people's points of view, desire for human connection, and a reduction in social anxiety, of course, occurring even pre-pandemic at a time of record social isolation, divorce and suicide. That's one microbe. So that one microbe makes a delicious yogurt. And so we do this with other microbes. So we purposefully reimplant specific microbes like Lactobacillus reuteri like bifida bacterium like Bacillus.

[00:34:58.300] – Dr. Davis

This sounds like a lot. It's actually a heck of a lot of fun. And you can get it's amazing what microbes, how they influence our behavior, our internal dialogues, our skin, not just whether you have gas or bloating, whether you're going to have Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis or whether you can't lose weight and we're going to become obese. Microbes are the answer.

[00:35:24.860] – Dr. Davis

So the answer to your question. Three things. So one would be aware that you can reimplant lost microbes. We don't know all the microbes, but that list is growing virtually every day, by the way, Allan. Two, though it's not directly influential on the microbiome that dietary change of banishing all wheat and grains, particularly modern wheat and grains that have all kinds of problems. In Richmond, wheat germaglutin and phytates, they're glyphosate laced. So getting rid of grains and vitamin D. I advocate that people take certain nutrients because they're lacking in modern life. So, like, for instance, magnesium, we take magnesium because we all drink filtered water. We have to if we drink from a river or stream, it's got sewage, it's got farm runoff. So we have to filter our water.

[00:36:18.700] – Dr. Davis

But water filtration is very effective at removing all magnesium. And when you become magnesium deficient, as all modern people are, unless they are supplementing, it leads to higher blood pressure, muscle cramps, higher blood sugar, heart rhythm disorders, osteoporosis, et cetera. So we have to replace magnesium. And so it's not because I want you to take a whole bunch of stuff. It's because modern life has caused it. But I didn't realize that whole list of nutrients we advocate, vitamin D, magnesium, Omega three fatty acids and iodine all also have very important microbiome implications. For instance, Omega three fatty acids, fish oil activates a very important enzyme that lines your intestinal wall called intestinal alkaline phosphatase. And that enzyme helps deactivate that endotoxin we talked about that comes from unhealthy microbes. I'm not sure I answer your question.

[00:37:17.110] – Allan

No, you did. This sounds like a lot. It is. But he really outlines us really well in the book. He has the recipes for the yogurt and the Kiefers and all the things he's been talking about. So he makes it very easy for you to start this protocol to go through and understand and know what's happening and why maybe you feel a certain way at a certain part of the program. So it's really well put together there.

[00:37:41.020] – Allan

Dr. David, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book Super Gut or Undoctored or any of the Wheat Belly books, because there's a few of them in the series. Where would you like for me to send them?

[00:37:52.750] – Dr. Davis

I made the mistake, Allan. Every time a book came out, I'd have a wheat belly Facebook page. We have Wheat Belly blog. I finally consolidated everything. It's going to launch in the next couple of weeks, I should say it's going to launch in December so that people listening to your podcast can see it when you do. That new site is called drdavisinfinitehealth.com that will kind of incorporate everything, including a new blog. We'll bring all that content. There's 2000 articles on the blog. So a lot of stuff in there. I also have a membership website where we actually do this, like you and me talking via Zoom. I do that every Wednesday night, usually with about 70 to 100 people. And we talk about these microbiome issues, other health issues, two way interaction. People get a lot of hand holding, so that's all going to be drdavisinfinitehealth.

[00:38:49.050] – Allan

Okay, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/524, and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Davis, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:38:59.950] – Dr. Davis

Thank you, Allan. My pleasure.

Post Show/Recap

[00:39:09.350] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:39:11.210] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. It was nice to hear from Dr. Davis again. I know he was on your podcast before, so it was good to have him speak again on another topic about the super guts. But there's a lot to talk about here. But for starters, I think a lot of us know that antibiotics can destroy our gut, and they're still very heavily prescribed. And sometimes you have to take a course of antibiotics to heal from a cold or illness of some sort. But I guess I didn't realize that there are other things that can destroy our gut, meaning alcohol and other drugs, like statins he had mentioned and other things. So it was a really eye opening discussion on that.

[00:39:52.980] – Allan

Yeah. There's really only one thing to feed your gut, and that's whole food, pretty much anything else that you put into your mouth isn't food. And as a result, there has to be a downstream effect. It's sort of like you have a river and you're like, okay, I can throw live fish in the river, and that's cool. I can Overstock it. But generally I can stock a river just by adding new fish. And not just species that will eat each other, but just fish. And you can kind of stock something like stock upon or stock a river. But then you start saying, well, no, now I'm going to go in there and I'm going to throw Coke cans and bottles, and I'm going to throw this other stuff in there. And now you're polluting the water, and we have to think about our internals and the gut all the way from the mouth to the butt as our river. It's our health river. It's our second immune system or our main immune system, if you will. It's a second brain. And so every time you throw crap in there, you're harming yourself, and there's no other way around it.

[00:41:01.850] – Allan

People say, garbage in, garbage out. And I'm like, no, it doesn't come out. It just stays in there. You're poisoning yourself. And sometimes, like, you said with an antibiotic, it makes sense. You've got a bug that you have to kill. There are some bad ones out there that can kill you if you don't do the right things and take the right things, get through the whole course, and hopefully that course does what it's supposed to do. As soon as you finish that, though, it's time to start restocking the river. It's time to go in there and say what are the things I need to do to clean up the water? I need to make sure there's food for the fish that I'm going to put in there and I put the good fish in. And so it's kind of his process of walking you through the planting of the garden, sowing and feeding and nurturing and then planting and doing those things in a way that builds a good flora. And he does sell kits, all the process for how you can make your own yogurts and kind of really get geeky on. Okay, exactly what do I want to put in here?

[00:42:09.410] – Allan

Maybe not completely necessary, but when you're thinking about if you're really struggling, if you've got IBS and you're struggling and you take an antibiotic course and things just go south with all that stuff. Now, granted, whatever you took the antibiotics for is okay, the infection is gone now, but now you've got to do something and you might have to go through and really be meticulous about how you're repopulating. And most of the things I've read up until this book were really just eat some yogurt, some kefir, and go on with your life. And what he's saying is you might want to be a little bit more diligent and a little bit more direct and a little bit more specific for how you do these things. Because one of the things that we have to think about is now we're well into 2nd 3rd generation of antibiotics. Penicillin was invented in 1928. And so we're fairly long and how now we've been using antibiotics to kill off species in our gut and then so there's probably species in our gut that no longer exist.

[00:43:20.990] – Rachel

Yeah, it's sad to think that.

[00:43:23.450] – Allan

And so the best you can do is the best you can do. It's like an overused knee. If you were really bad on your knees when you were younger and now your knees are hurting you, there might be some limits to how much you can repair the damage that was done. But there are things you can do. And I think that's what this book is really about with regards to the gut is to really take a methodical approach. He has a very good approach there. When you're talking about bacteria, the names get long and I don't even try to say them out loud, but he walks you through to say these are the strains of what you want to start with. This is how you want to make sure they have the food they need. But again, whole food, most of it is going to be build the good gut with whole food. And then you start worrying about adding the plants, Adding the flora.

[00:44:22.170] – Rachel

Sure. He mentioned kombucha and other sauerkraut and some other fermented foods and then paying close attention to the type of probiotics that you might find at the store to make sure that they had some sort of account or type of the bacteria that are in those prebiotics. And just to pay attention, you mentioned taking onions, garlic and mushrooms or other good fibers that the gut bacteria likes to eat. So just like you said, whole normal foods.

[00:44:58.520] – Allan

Now, one of the big things we'll say is with yogurt and things like that, the vast majority of them are not going to have enough. All they have to do is say there's some in it and then they get to sell it as what it is. He's talking about taking that same yogurt you buy in the store and adding this bacteria and letting it sit for longer than they would. They're going for a few hours. You would go particularly maybe for a day or so, two days, three days maybe, and let the bacteria multiply, multiply, multiply. Then you're really adding an opportunity. And the other side of it is, I have to believe that your stomach acid is probably going to kill a lot of these things going through you. So just recognize when you're talking in terms of billions, just like baby turtles, only a small percentage of them are probably going to make it through. But that's an approach. And it's not that you have to go do a fecal transplant or anything crazy like that, but just recognizing that what you feed grows. And if you're feeding the bad bacteria with sugar and processed foods and bad attitudes, Then they're going to be the ones that live, and then they're going to be the ones that propagate and they're going to be the ones that move up into your small intestine and cause SIBO and irritable bowel syndrome and all of those problems.

[00:46:21.690] – Allan

Those are, whether we want to admit it or not, Predominantly self inflicted Based on our lifestyle and what we're eating. And maybe, yeah, we got sick and we took some antibiotics and set ourselves up for that. But in a general sense, we can beat that back down if we're methodical about what we're doing.

[00:46:39.540] – Rachel

Yeah, this sounds like a really helpful book to have handy in case these types of things are happening to you right now.

[00:46:45.950] – Allan

Absolutely.

[00:46:47.130] – Rachel

Cool.

[00:46:48.160] – Allan

Alright. Well, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:46:51.010] – Rachel

Sounds great. Take care.

[00:46:52.510] – Allan

You, too.

[00:46:53.320] – Rachel

Thanks.

Patreons

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