Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #354 Understanding The Gut Before We Heal It w/ Dr Michael Ruscio

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Dr Michael Ruscio is back after a long grind making his own way in the health and wellness world! Some of y’all may have tuned in WAYYY back in the day when Dr Ruscio was on talking what he knows better than anyone I’ve had on in a minute, maybe since he was on last! This one gets into the science of gut microbiome, lactobacillus, probiotic loads and we even get to catch up a little on his life these days. This was a feel good ep from start to finish, so enjoy the vibes and spread the love yall! Connect with Dr Ruscio: Website: DrRuscio.com  Instagram: @drrusciodc  YouTube: Dr Michael Ruscio Podcast: Dr Ruscio DC Radio Apple - Spotify   Book: "Healthy Gut, Healthy You" -Dr Michael Ruscio  Sponsors: Lumen If you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to Lumen.me  and use KKP to get $100 off your Lumen.  Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  Happy Hippo Kratom is in my opinion the cleanest Kratom product I’ve used. Head over to HappyHippo.com/KKP code “KKP” for 15% off entire store Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome to today's podcast. We have the return of Dr. Michael Ruscio. Michael Ruscio came on this podcast years ago. I think it was back either when he and I were both in California or right after I had moved. No, it was right after I came to Onnit in 2017. I remember that. Or shortly after, rather, because I was trying to get as many awesome people to come either guest write and do different things. And I remember there was a strong push to learn from Dr. Michael Ruscio and I was trying to get him in and he decided that he wanted to self-publish and do as much as he could to build his own brand. And he did. And no hard feelings at all. We've remained friends the whole way. I totally understood it. But it's interesting to think that was fucking eons ago.

Oh man, two to three years before 2020. My word has changed tremendously since then. But what hasn't changed or what has only improved is Dr. Michael Ruscio's wealth of knowledge. He has helped thousands and thousands of people with gut issues, autoimmune issues, you name it. He is in large part considered one of the world's leading experts. We actually met at Paleo FX. He was speaking on different panels that I was fascinated with, and I think he popped in for one or two of mine. And we've been buddies for a while. We also had a blast. Those Paleo FX days were incredible.

Getting to hang and know each other and hang out after the event. And I just love this dude. He moved here what seems like yesterday, but it's actually been a couple of years since he's been here. And I had him out. He was the first or the second interview,

but the first only live interview that I did, first one being Tim Kennedy. He popped that cherry at the new crib. But Michael Ruscio is here at the crib and just love this dude. He has such a wealth of knowledge. I love it because he's both highly intelligent and yet he doesn't need to flex with large words.

He can actually break things down fairly easily for the common man like myself and many others. And I think that that's a really important skill to have. I think it was Einstein that said, if you can't explain it to a kid, you don't fully know it. And Ruscio has that scientific mind where he could fucking go deep and deeper and deeper and deeper. And I just love the fact that he lays it out so smoothly. So lots of cool, interesting things on this podcast that will help a ton of people. If you've been interested in gut health and been

wondering why haven't we had a gut health issue episode in a long time, in part when I solve a riddle, and I have solved that riddle of my own personal gut health many times, I like to move on. I like to discover new shit. So that's one reason. The other reason is we've had Dr. Michael Ruscio on the podcast before, but I realized there's a lot of new listeners and not a lot of people want to backtrack four or five years ago. Also, times change, hosts change, and I'm sure I wasn't the same person four or five years ago asking questions. So it is good to run these things back. And it's awesome to have Dr. Michael Ruscio back on the podcast. We for sure will not wait five or six years to do it again, especially with him in

town. Just love this dude. He's got great energy. He's also, as I mentioned before, somebody who walks the walk, meaning he is highly physically fit. He's strong. He has a great fucking physique, takes care of himself. And that's an important thing. If you're going to talk about this stuff, I need to be a living example of that, in my opinion. And Ruscio is. So awesome to have him on. There's a number of ways you can support this podcast. Share it with friends, far and wide. Post it on your fucking social. Do all the things you want. Leave us a five-star rating. Any of that stuff's fine. And if you don't, totally cool too. Also support the show by supporting our sponsors. They make the show fiscally possible.

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the most convenient thing in the world until now, thanks to Organifi's Shilajit gummies. And without further ado, my brother, Dr. Michael Ruscio returns. Rocking and rolling. Dude, I have to say I'm impressed. This setup is amazing. Actually, so one of the things that's top of mind for me is kind of the next phase of life, which is meeting a partner, building a family, building sort of a life together. This has just expanded

my template. What's that old saying by Earl Nightingale? Once the mind of man is expanded by a new idea, it can never again return to its original dimensions. You just leveled up my vision of what the future could look like, dude. This is awesome. I love it. Fuck yeah. Thank you, brother. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that. That's not a quote that comes to mind for me often when you're saying it is something that I've experienced at different points in time where I was just like,

you know, going to Paul Cech's house at the Heaven House and then watching him get the Rainbow House. And it was just like, damn, kids running around, fucking food in the ground, animals, you know, glorious home, glorious other buildings. You know, he's got the, his, his, uh, there's a guest house that he converted. That's 3000 square feet where it's his office and a guest room for friends that come in and town to podcasts and things like that. And then the garage

is his giant fucking library. And that's what we were just talking about the libraries before this. And I've got a lot of, a lot of work filling this bad boy in. But I feel your pain, right? I have books. The other day, I hit this tipping point where I said, dude, my living room looks kind of sloppy because there's just books piled up randomly, and now I have to find a couple little mini bookshelves to kind of put in the living room

because they spilled over from my office bookcase from my podcast studio, and it's a good problem to have, I guess. Well, that was the thing when in the, in the kids' room, the music and art room and education room, they were only supposed to put in like a very tiny amount of shelves and they ended up doing a whole wall. And I was like, you know, we're not mad about that. And then of course my wife fills it in fucking,

right when we move in, it's full. So it's pretty, it's nice having extra shelves for sure. Right. Right. We were talking methylene blue beforehand. I haven't had Dr. John on the podcast yet, but he's good buddies with Luke Story and some other mutual friends. And I was telling you about the Midazine company. They're not a sponsor or anything like that.

I've asked for some reviews from the fans, from people listening. Yeah, I'm gonna try them. And one of the things that we got back as a criticism was don't have podcast or don't have supplement company owners on the podcast. But I geek out on shit like that, haven't been in the supplement industry, but he knows so much more as an ND. Anyways, what we're talking about is that one of the things he figured out was that it's fat soluble, methylene blue is. And so he mixes that with lutein and phycocyanin,

things that also help with photobiomodulation and then organic palm oil. And so you don't have to suck on it and get blue teeth. And he has suppositories, which are nice, but I like it during the daytime. What's the form I've been using right now is liquid. And I'm just a little bit careful. I take like a shot glass.

I put in, It's about 10 milligrams per dropper. So I'm doing 50 megs twice per day. So I'll just put the liquid into a shot glass and shoot it back because if you're not careful, everything gets stained. Well, when I had my teeth done from a biological dentist I've had on the podcast,

a great guy, Hills Dental Spa here in Austin, the glue that binds it stains permanently. So the sublingual was gone permanently. Right when that happened, I was like, oh man, all right, we got to figure this out. But he found you can swallow it with a fat and it's even more bioavailable if you do that. Who we got here? Guapo, you coming in? Come on, buddy. He's got a little dog bed in here. He's a podcast champion, Guapo. Go ahead, buddy. Sit down. Don't you step on that stop button. He's an old timer. He's 10 years old. Anywho, that to me is the best product. And you

can go up to 180 milligrams. They're scored so you can quarter them at 45 a piece. So I had my wife, Tosh, you just met, 45 in the morning, 45 in the afternoon. What I found, because the dose range is 0.5 mg to 4 mg per kilogram. So as a 100 kilo guy, I can take up to 400 a day. They do recommend to split it. So I take 180 twice a day, one full one. Not to cut you off, but do you find if you take it too late, it interferes with your sleep? Not at all. And that's why the suppository, because the suppository is meant to be taken at night. And I didn't understand that. That's why the suppository because the suppository is meant to be taken at night. And I didn't understand that.

And basically, you know, you know this, of course, we recycle everything at night and it does help to boost the mitochondria right before bed in terms of recycling neurochemistry and help aiding in the body's ability to help itself while it sleeps. And it doesn't keep me awake, but it is, I want that benefit during the day.

Because the increased energy is the fucking real thing, especially when we're talking like, of all the ways we get energy from caffeine to nootropics to different things, when it affects the mitochondria that well, there's a holy shit moment because it's working on a different thing, a different system in the body.

And all those other things I just mentioned are still stackable. Caffeine's still stackable. Nootropics are still stackable. Right. So it's pretty amazing. I've been running that with the Juve. I was geeking out on Dr. Jack Cruz who just came on. So Juve light every morning. One of the things we, I didn't show you this, but we built a star deck just so I could see the sunrise on the horizon and the whole Western wall, all that eight foot glasses. So we can, we won't sit in front of the glass obviously, but back patio, we can watch we're up high enough to have the horizon sunset. Love it. And so as anytime it's not, it's just tough because it's spring with lots of clouds,

but once it gets real hot, none of those clouds will be in the morning. And that's been a daily habit with the meth lane, the ice bath. And I haven't had energy like this, you know, probably since I retired fighting at 32. Nice. You know, so it's really, really fucking cool. But a reason I bring that up is when I was running some of the lighter stuff, um, we're again, great companies out there, but, uh, running some of the lighter stuff, I think the maximum dose was like 30 migs. I thought it was good, but I didn't understand all the fuss. You know, I'm reading, you know, scientific literature on this. I'm like, wow, it does X, Y, and Z to the mitochondria. And it does this for pain management.

It does this. It stacks well with these other things. When I went to 100, it was like, whoa, especially the first week. It was pretty remarkable. Yeah. Yeah. So I think finding that upper end of the dose, especially for dudes that are like, you've got muscle on you.

You train. That's something I've always admired about you. Thanks. You don't just know the shit, you walk the walk, right? Yeah, not just a nerd. Exactly. But you're a great nerd at that, right? I said this the first time you came on, like Rob Wolf,

who is infinite more popularity than both of us combined, and is New York Times bestseller multiple times. He considers you his gut guy, his autoimmune guy. If someone's in trouble that he can't figure it out and source it with everything he knows, he sips them off to you as a concierge. And that stands out to me. That's a big fucking deal.

Yeah, I'm forever indebted to Rob Wolf because way back when I was just starting my career, we met at one of his seminars. I was attending, asking questions. And at the end of the seminar, we were chatting. He's like, you have some pretty insightful questions. What do you do? We kind of got to talking.

And sort of just stayed in touch a little bit. And maybe a year later, I saw something on this podcast about, oh, maybe parasites are having an impact. So I shot him a text and I said, hey, this is something I've dealt with personally. We do a lot with this in the clinic, blah, blah, blah. I said, why don't you come on the podcast and talk about what you're doing?

After that podcast, we had something like, I think it was 284 people either called or emailed the office in that month. And our practice just blew up because I'm not a marketer, right? I know some people who are just brilliant marketers and they can build a practice, but I was just a science nerd.

So for me, that really helped because early in my career, I wasn't good at marketing. I was good at science, but admittedly, the first couple of years, kind of struggling to get the practice off the ground, right? Because we weren't in the insurance model where you just kind of have people funnel into your door. So Rob, a big credit to you, man.

That was a real important boost to kind of get my practice off the ground. Yeah, that's a cool, I love that background story. And you're speaking to a point that actually is an unfortunate truth of the world in that those who have the sauce in whatever their respective field is likely aren't great marketers or salesmen. And those who are great marketers and salesmen likely don't have the sauce. That's just been the unfortunate thing that I've seen time and again. And name the field. If they look awesome on paper, they're spending all that time figuring that part of the game out, not the actual substance of what it is that they're trying to sell and do.

And it is a science in and of itself, right? Now that I've been in Austin for a while, I've met a few people who are e-com wizards and things like that. And so we have an e-com store as part of what we do. But, you know, again, it was pretty crappy, if I'm being honest, until I met a guy who's scaled an e-commerce coffee company from zero to nine figures. He's like, hey man, if you change this and this and this on your store, your store would be much better for the customer experience and whatever else. And he was totally right. And I realized,

holy crap, like there's just like, there's a lot to being good at gut health. There's a lot to being good at sales and marketing or e-commerce, or even if you have an online store, making that experience flow easily. I'm sure you've been, I call it the poop test.

If I'm taking a poop on my phone and I'm, you know, I see something come up like a pair of shoes, I might buy it while I'm passing my bowel movement. But if I can't check out in that period, then I'm probably not going to buy the shoes. And a lot of things go into that. Are you connected to shop, pay on the back end

where all your information auto-populates? And I didn't know about any of that. I only know about it because I've met a few people who are really astute in those areas and they've been nice enough to sort of plug in and help us out with that part of our offering. But to your point, it's a whole discipline in science in and of itself. And you can only use your mind to be good at so many things, right? So like if you're going to be good at that and you're a clinician, you're probably going to sacrifice some of your clinical side. Yeah. Yeah. It cracks me up as you mentioned that because I shit so quick, you know, like everything's been so smooth

over the years as I've improved digestion. There's not much I can buy in that time period, but the shop thing is crazy to me because I'll find something where I'm, you know, I was telling one of my clients about LifeStraw and, you know, we're doing some basic prepping shit. And I'm like, it's a good idea to have some of these and to-go bags in your cars, that kind of stuff. And at your house, get the LifeStraw community. These guys aren't a sponsor by the way, but it's a great, great product. So you get the LifeStraw community. It doesn't need to be flush. That's why I think it's better than a Berkey. And it'll last like two years for 60 people, you know, with pond water, pool water, whatever.

It's a next level shit. So I'm telling him about that. And then I find some of these one liter ones that I don't have. And I was like, I need to get these too. And I was going to buy the fucking thing anyways, but then shop pops up, has all my stuff. And I was like, God, that's so convenient.

It just made the checkout in a heartbeat. I was like, take my money. And it's funny, as you mentioned that, I'm thinking like how many times if they're connected to shop, it's a done as you mentioned that, I'm thinking like how many times, if they're connected to shop, it's a done deal. Yeah, totally. Absolutely done deal.

Well, let's talk, I mean, I don't know if you've been on since you've come to Austin. We've, it's been a long minute. Yeah, we were supposed to do it back in the day and didn't work out. And obviously this is perfect timing because we're in the house now. They've worked out really well, actually. Again, I'm so glad I could see this.

Hell yeah. Yeah, it's perfect timing. Talk a bit about your transition from California because we were NorCal guys, Bay Area guys. Yeah. Obviously 2020 hits, the world changes quite a bit. Quite a few people fled to Texas as fast as they could. Myself included, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's been an interesting experience. I had the clinic in Northern California and we were kind of a hybrid in-person plus telehealth. Then COVID hit and we had to go all telehealth, which was actually kind of a blessing in disguise because it really opened us up to being able to help anyone anywhere. And with what we do,

there's no need for a physical assessment. You could argue if you were doing PT or something, there's no need for a physical assessment. You could argue if you were doing PT or something, you'd need to probably be in person. And we expanded. It's now myself and two other doctors and a small research team, whereas before it was just myself and like two admins. And Austin's been awesome. The summers are kind of tough. As someone who likes being outside, that has been a tough adjustment. But otherwise, Austin has been great. Clinic's been growing nicely.

We published two papers last year, which I'm really happy to say. And we have a, not that you asked about the science, but my mind just pulls there, right? We currently have a paper under peer review in the treatment of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Okay, let's dive into that. Yeah, so does your audience know SIBO? Let's talk about that because it's something that people become aware of at the last minute when they fucking realize nothing's working and I have this, right? It's not something that you find out about in general.

The last time I had a gut expert on was the last time you came on, probably two, three years ago, right? So this would be great conversation for sure. Right. Well, to kind of frame the importance of the digestive tract, all of your calories and nutrients are absorbed there, obviously, right? I mean, it's so obvious,

but it's worth stating because you could be eating a healthy diet, yet you're not properly assimilating that diet, right? The other thing about the intestinal tract that I don't think is appreciated enough is you have this selectively permeable or absorptive barrier. And if the function of that barrier is not correct, you have leaky gut, let's say, right? The immune system is what mediates when particles leak through that shouldn't. And the largest density of immune

cells in your entire body is in the lining of your intestinal tract. So if that barrier is not functioning correctly, there's chronic inflammation as stuff is sort of sneaking across that border and the immune system is reacting with inflammation. And so this is how we can see what's going on in the gut tied to your limbic system, your mood, your emotions, your sleep, your skin, your joints, because of that chronic inflammation. Now within the GI, right, you have the mouth, the stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine, the rectum. The small intestine is probably the most important. It's 22 feet in length, whereas the large intestine is five feet. 95% of calories

and nutrients are absorbed in the small intestine. The large intestine or the colon, it's more so for regulation of salt and fluid, but not so much so nutrients. So this is where small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or SIBO occurs in the small intestine. And what's, I think, paradoxical about SIBO is someone could be eating an otherwise stereotypically healthy diet. They're eating broccoli, asparagus, avocado, all these rich cruciferous vegetables, and also things like eggs and meat. But it's the vegetables and their rich prebiotic content that if you have bacterial overgrowth, you actually feed that overgrowth. And this is the person who may say, gosh, I'm eating a healthy diet,

yet I'm bloated, I'm distended, I have pain, I have maybe constipation, maybe diarrhea. And this, I think above all else is really important to underscore is that for some people periodically reducing some of those otherwise, quote unquote, healthy foods can help starve that overgrowth, balance out their system.

And then almost like rehabbing an injured back, right? You can't do JITs for, let's say six weeks, but then you can go back to rolling. Same thing with FODMAPs, these high prebiotic foods, and we can define FODMAPs in a second. But reducing those short term, sort of like a rehab plan,

allows better tolerance in the longer term. I love that. And I think it's such a, there's a, this is important to break down because, you know, I've had people from both sides of the camp on homeways with the carnivore dog, Paul Saladino, and, you know, and he'll give you a thousand reasons why fiber doesn't matter, doesn't need to be part of the diet. Then you'll hear other people, more traditional background, talk about the importance of that and short chain fatty acids and feeding the good microbiome and the different things of that nature, which lowers inflammation and contributes to neurochemistry that are made down there and things of that nature. So I kind of see it from both sides. And also having followed Dr. Stephen Gundry's work, the plant paradox, how food is prepared

really matters. But I haven't really heard a lot of people talk about FODMAPs and how what is considered a healthy food can still be something that's highly problematic for you if you're dealing with this. Well, I mean, it reconciles the nuance, I think. There's a couple nuances that reconcile why clearly some people do well on a carnivore diet. And while on the other end of the spectrum, some people do really well on a more plant-based diet. And I think the truth serum to some extent, and this is my biased perspective, is being a clinician,

if you listen to your patients, you're gonna get hit in the face with that reality, which is some people, no matter what you do, they're reacting to plant materials and then they go carnivore and they do well. But other people go carnivore and they fall apart. And to me, I'm dietarily agnostic, but I look at it as sort of a spectrum of,

well, what sort of gut type are you? Are you someone who's gonna do better on a plant-based diet perhaps? And your microbiome metabolizes very effectively things like FODMAPs and lectins, oxalates, whatever. Or maybe not. Maybe you're the IBS type and you're that person who might do better on more of a sort of omnivorous diet. I don't think carnivore long-term is advisable. And I haven't fact-checked this, but I don't believe any hunter-gatherer societies purposefully ate carnivore. There was

usually some form of omnivory. Right, yeah, you find like Weston A. Price's work, compare the ends of the spectrum. You have the Inuit that are 80% to 90% blubber, still eating plants and berries as they were seasonally available for a couple months a year because

it became available. You've got the pyg tribe in africa that's right on the equator that's 90 percent yams and then all of a sudden you know they they start eating grubs and different things that can get them a little bit more protein you know so they still have 10 insect population you know world economic forum diet but yeah they enjoy the bugs yeah but yeah that makes perfect sense and and i think to your point you know i've said this before like carnivore can work for you will enjoy the bugs. But yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I think to your point, and I've said this before, carnivore can work for people,

but it shouldn't be the end all be all. It is a form of fasting. Veganism is a form of fasting. There's times in my life where I'll go plant-based only in preparation for ayahuasca or iboga. And it's not necessary, but I feel cleaned out and I feel ready and prepared for that.

There's been other times where I've jumped into ceremony and I've had red meat the night before and the ceremony was just as powerful, just as transformative. So, but all that said, every one of these things that is a form of fasting can work well intermittently,

but even Saladino now is on raw dairy and a bunch of other goodies and all the fruits and honey and things like that. And he's doing just as good doing that. Well, it reminds me of something bringing back in Paul Check last time we podcasted together. We kind of had this back and forth and we agreed that any value system carried to an extreme becomes a vice. And I would say a dietary value system, if you will, follows that same path. If you're a hardcore vegan, hardcore carnivore, I just don't see that being healthy for multiple reasons because we're probably meant to be omnivorous. Now there's

a scale within that omnivory, right? And we should honor that and we should sort of try to learn what works for someone's system. But totally, a healthy gut should be able to eat on an omnivorous spectrum. But this is where we try to really help people. And myself was included in this. When there is an active imbalance in the gut or there's a back injury, someone might be like, shit, why can't I run without having back pain? It's like, well, running isn't necessarily the problem. Avoiding running for a term can be helpful, but it's not that running is bad. In my view, it's not that all plants are toxic, right? But we need to figure out how to rehab your back so that you can now

handle otherwise healthy activity. Let's break down FODMAPs for people. It's something you can, and we talked about this round one, but it is, again, it's worth rehashing. There are a thousand different ways you can look at a low FODMAP diet, but what does FODMAP actually stand for? You mentioned some of the healthy foods that are the silent killers, asparagus, things like that. So FODMAP stands for fermentable, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. It's just the structure of the carbohydrate, whether it's plant or vegetable or fruit, that requires bacterial assistance to digest. So it depends on what's going on in your gut, but that can be good, right? Feeding the gut bacteria can be good unless you have an overgrowth, and that's where it can become problematic. And a lot of the foods that we associate to be healthy

are high FODMAP. Asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, apples are just a short list. And there is some disagreement across food lists, but there's also 90% agreement. So I tell people, don't wig yourself out with the exceptions. Some people say they can have a cup of coffee?

Other people say, there's no coffee at all. If you just reduce your FODMAP load, that's going to reduce the bacterial feeding. And within a week, you should be able to read like, yes, this is helping or no, it's not helping. And there's an app. We have diet handouts that people want to look up my name and low FODMAP. We made one that's paleo, one that's standard, and one that's vegetarian for the different populations out there. But the source is really the University of Monash, and they have an app.

So if you really want to have a personal Google for any food, you can download the Monash app and just look up your given foods. That's super cool. What would some of the side effects be, or the symptoms rather, if somebody had a FODMAP issue or SIBO you know like how would yeah what's a good way to start to even question that and that's usually for me you know like I'm not a clinician but having a lot I'm the health guy and fit for service and if somebody pulls me aside and said like hey you know I've had loose stool for three weeks or you know there's a number of other things of the pain and things like that yeah I start to

think in that in those terms if if all the other things have failed, there might be some bacteria in the wrong place in the body. Sure. You're going to have the typical sort of digestive symptoms. So there might be bloating, pain, discomfort. There could be diarrhea.

There could be constipation. There could be both. And then this might be occurring with other things like skin involvement. There was a really nice paper by Leonard Weinstock that found treatment of SIBO reduced rosacea, so like the flushing of the cheeks. He published another paper that treatment of SIBO reduced restless leg,

so now it's more neurological. So you can have these distal involvements of the brain, the skin, maybe the joints. So I would look for a clustering of a few gut symptoms and then maybe some distal symptoms. And that at least puts you in the ballpark that there's something that's imbalanced in the GI. I know there's more than many paths lead up the mountain. Obviously, you've been doing this for so long, you've got a fairly dialed in approach to how you like to do this. For somebody who's fairly healthy, once a year, we do the fasting mimicking diet, sometimes twice a year. For a while, I was just running water fast for five days. And in fact,

that was a little hardcore for me to do, especially with trying to stay in the game with muscle and things of that nature. I felt better and I sleep a lot better doing modified fasting mimicking, not the prolon therapy, but I'll do a thousand calorie shake that's 80% fat for five days. Every day at 4 p.m. we hit that and that gives me enough food in my body to sleep through the night, but I'm still eating in that very narrow window and it is nutritionally ketogenic 80, 10, and 10. And I feel really optimized from that. And they say like the benefits

of that should last six to 12 months running CGMs and things like that has been awesome because I could see just a remarkable difference from having not fasted from two to three years and seeing, you know, like any amount of Thai food would make me look pre-diabetic. I'm like in the 160s, I'm like, damn dude, this is not good. I should never pop up to 160. And then post fast all the way through the rest of the year, I tested it out with Tasha's famous sourdough French toast. I had seven slices covered in maple syrup and was a 118. That's the whole concept of metabolic flexibility. Atta boy. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. But my question I guess is um rather than just bragging here online is no no for is you know is that a long enough starving point if it done if it done often enough now somebody's really bad with the SIBO and really i doubt fasting for five days is going to kill off that but is it something from a um you know prophylactic way of helping to balance the body. I think fasting is a good, as you said, either prophylactic or direct treatment. There are things to factor in with this, which is if someone's had an issue in their GI for a while,

it might be sort of reducing their vitality. And so it's harder to buffer a fast and people may have a hard time sleeping. That might be even more exacerbated if someone's already kind of burnt out a little bit from the chronic condition, whatever it may be, if it's SIBO or candida or what have you. So I do like fasting, but it is a slippery slope. So we have liked giving people some sort of modified fast, whether it's a bone broth fast to get in some calories. We've used the master's cleanse, which is sort of this homemade lemonade. There's also an elemental diet, which is a sort of medical food that's pre-digested. You'll have a fasting-like effect in the gut, but you won't have a metabolic fast,

so people can sleep still. And it's definitely a approach to integrate for sure. Now, usually that's done with a couple other things to kind of build a more comprehensive rehab plan, right? Someone might do the McKenzie extension for a back injury and that could help, but that in and of itself might not be enough to completely rehab them. So that's how I'd look at fasting. Definitely helpful. And it's part of this larger mosaic of things you can use to help rehab somebody. So a tool in the toolbox, but nothing in OBL. I like that. And you know, it's not good for social media, right?

You want to have the one thing. That's the name of John Lawrence's book, Magic Bullet. Magic Bullet, give me the Magic Bullet. That is cool though. You know, the term Magic Bullet, I'm sure you heard this already, but methylene blue was given that name from a German scientist when he discovered.

No, I didn't know that. Yeah, so it's in German. Originally magic bullet translates from the German to English, but that's the first. And so I thought that was pretty fucking cool here. And that's the OG one from a hundred years ago. Very cool. I like too that that's some antimicrobial properties

in that as well. What are some of the products that you find that are beneficial for clearing out bad bacteria and parasites, candida? Obviously there's some big names. Most people usually hear about one like, oh, oil of oregano or apple cider vinegar, or they don't really understand that rather than hammering with one, it's probably better to have a small amount of a few different things. Are there products out there that you like? Are you guys creating some on your own? It's a great question because sometimes people will,

when they have been feeling well for a while, understandably so, they can start to forge this sort of adversarial perspective with their health, with their gut. I just want to zap the bugs. I just want to throw a bomb down there. I want to go nuclear, things like that. And I get it.

I get when you're not feeling well. When you wake up and you're like, yeah, I slept adequately. I did all the things, yet I'm still foggy and tired in the morning. What the hell? I want my life back. I understand how you can get into that territory. Totally. It doesn't mean that the best way to modulate the ecosystem is just to pound away with antimicrobials, which is why over the past five plus years, I've really started to favor more gentle therapies early phase. Now, gentle doesn't mean ineffective and probiotics, I think are the best case study in a therapeutic that's not harsh, but can be really effective. Have you talked about meta-analyses or randomized control trials? Nope. Okay. So this is really important because one of the things, and I think we share this

frustration is with sort of the influencer healthcare, it's not about the person who has the most accurate argument. It's a person who has the most compelling argument, right? Like the person who speaks the most eloquently will capture your attention, but they might be making an argument that's scientific garbage, but they just- Like Obama on misinformation. Yeah, they just- He's a great speaker.

Yeah, a good speaker can have a really poor quality argument. And so this is where science can be quite helpful. Now, also, I think in COVID, the term science, that kind of bastardized. In fact, we had this conversation with a couple of people on our research staff because we were writing an article and they were using this term, follow the science. I said, guys, unfortunately, that term has been dragged through the mud. That's a bad one. That's a real bad one. And we are going to look at the science, but sometimes people will say,

follow the science, and they're not actually following the science. But to take a big step back in areas where we have adequate research, we'll have randomized control trials. So 30 people have the intervention, 30 people have a sugar pill, and we compare pre and post the results. And if the result is similar with those having the intervention and those who had the intervention, 30 people have a sugar pill, and we compare pre and post the results.

And if the result is similar with those having the intervention and those who had the placebo, then the treatment's not really effective, right? Because it's no better than placebo. And that's why the randomized control trial is so important because, and I'm sure you've been here, I've been there many times, I try a new thing, and for the first week I'm like, man, this thing is awesome.

And then I get two, three, four weeks in and I'm like, you know what? That wasn't really awesome. It was a fluke. I was excited. It was a good week, whatever. And so this is why the randomized control trials are really helpful and really important. Now, if we have, let's say, 30 randomized control trials in existence, a team of scientists will go and say, let's summarize all of these trials to get the meta or the big picture finding, and that's a meta-analysis. So when referencing a meta-analysis, I call that a truth serum, right? Because you can always find one study that spins whatever you want to say, right? Eggs are going to kill you because of the cholesterol. Well, you've got to look at the entire body of literature. You can't just cherry

pick one study. And so that's what a meta-analysis does. It summarizes all the available clinical trials. So meta-analyses are truth serum. How that maps onto probiotics, probiotics have about a 50% resolution rate of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which is about as effective as the antibiotic rifaximin. So even an antibiotic, which is a good antibiotic, I think, rifaximin, that's FDA approved, not that I'm a massive fan of the FDA, but nevertheless, you don't get FDA approval unless you have decent evidence, right? So rifaximin- Most of the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, there's sure. There's exceptions to any of these things. But there's at least adequate randomized control trials showing that rifaximin, the antibiotic, can improve IBS, all these GI symptoms. So if probiotics are as effective as rifaximin for clearing SIBO, that tells us they're pretty effective. And I'm comparing a meta-analysis of probiotics to a meta-analysis of rifaximin for clearing SIBO, that tells us they're pretty effective. And I'm comparing a meta-analysis of probiotics to a meta-analysis of rifaximin. So I think that's really insightful in the sense that let's say someone is frustrated by, I eat and I get bloated and my bowels are always either loose or I'm always constipated. And they may say, well, screw it. I'm not really a fan of antibiotics, but I just want to nuke this bacteria,

get it all out of my gut. Well, a good probiotic protocol is probably about as effective as an antibiotic when looking at comparative meta-analyses. So I like starting with probiotics because they're antibacterial, they're pro-motility, they're anti-leaky guts, they attune immune receptors in your gut. And this is something that I think you get with probiotics

that you don't get with many other things, which is most probiotics, not all, but they don't colonize you. They're almost like tourists, right? They transiently come through and stimulate the economy. And probiotics have a transient beneficial effect on sort of attuning immune receptors. And you know this, right? This is why you walk around with no shoes on, you're in touch with animals, right? You need that bacterial exposure. All these things are sort of probiotics in a way, in that there are ways of getting healthy bacteria to pass through your system.

And they attune these immune receptors when they do that. And that helps lower inflammation, right? So I think probiotics are one of the best places to start if you're having GI symptoms and you're not really sure what to do next. That's awesome. Do you guys make your own? I mean, the field of probiotics is comical

in how wide-stretching it is. And an argument against them is that they are transient, right? I mean, the field of probiotics is comical in how wide-stretching it is. And an argument against them is that they are transient, right? So do spore-based probiotics actually colonize? What are your thoughts on the differences between those? And then tell us, you know, what success have you had with the various strains of probiotics? Yeah. Some probiotics do, but the majority do not.

I don't know offhand. And I don't believe that partitions based upon soil-based or your traditional lactobacillus or your saccharomyces. And again, I think it's because the game, the objective of probiotics isn't like a one pop colonize and you're good, but just like exercise. They're almost like hormetic for the gut, right?

We need this constant stimulation. And by the way, you can get adequate probiotics from food. I think that's really important to mention, which was news to me until we did a piece on this about a year ago, where we just laid out sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, kefir, what's the dose they're in. It's going to vary a little bit from food to food, but compare that to a probiotic and the dosage is about the same. So you get a similar dose from food. If it's real, right? So I want to caveat that. I know a lot of people buy pickles

in the middle aisle where it's not refrigerated versus something that you're like- You're looking for live cultures. Minimally processed. There's refrigerated ones that are almost cloudy when you shake it. That's the shit that I want. That's the pickle juice I'm going to drink that the kids love. You know, like it's loaded and it should have a bite to it where there's a little tang, you know, like a kefir. I remember my first time my son had kefir, he started smacking his tongue. He's like, you know, he's like, oh, it's almost, it's like, it's spicy almost. I was like, that's how you know it's working, buddy. There's lots of goodies in there. Yep. Yep. And we do make our own probiotics. I also

want to say this, you know, it's probably not good marketing, but there's nothing necessarily special about our probiotics. There are not really any special probiotics. I think that's a misnomer. As long as you're following GMP, so good manufacturing practices, you're testing them to ensure that what's in the bottle is actually what you're claiming that it is, then most probiotics that have halfway decent manufacturing are going to be efficacious. The thing that we've done to help the consumer is we've organized them into your traditional lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. We talked about this last time. Separately, a Saccharomyces, which is actually a healthy fungus,

and then separately to that, a soil-based probiotic. And there was a meta-analysis published just this year by Alex Ford, who's at University of Leeds. And his conclusion essentially reflected this category system loosely in that they found efficacy for some bacillus, so some soil-based, saccharomyces, and a few strains of lactobacillus and a few, or I should say species of lactobacillus and a few species of bifidobacterium. And so when you look at the randomized control trials, they're usually given as one of these three formula types. So if you find a quality probiotic that fits these, then just try one. And the dosing parameters for the lactobifidyl blend, 1 to 50 billion CFU per day. So anywhere from 1 to 50, anywhere in that range works. For Saccharomyces, there's two different types. There's Saccharomyces cerevisiae,

there's Saccharomyces boulardii. They're bull fungus. And the dose range per day is anywhere from 4 billion to 15 billion per day for that type. That's floristor. You may have seen that before, that probiotic. And then the lactobifido, VSL3, VisBiome, these are examples of that sort of traditional type. And then the soil-based are kind of the newer kid on the block. That's your Megaspora, your Biospora.

Prescripticist. Prescripticist is another version. Back in the Paleo FX days, the big one going around. And actually their formula was different in that it had many, many, many, many different species. But there's only about four that have been studied. Bacillus lichenformis, Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus clossii, and I'm blanking on the fourth, but there's about four Bacillus species and they had a whole bunch, but they haven't really been studied. So they might be helpful, but it's a little bit more speculative. But the dose with

that categorical type is four to 6 billion CFU per day. Find one, start on it, and you want to give yourself about a month to initially appraise. Some of the studies have found that for constipation and for cognition, you may not see a benefit until the second or third month. So I'd look for, is this helping within the first 30 days? And if it is, keep going. You may not see a pinnacle of improvement until the second or the third month in. I like that. I want to talk with you a little bit. One of the questions that I have is, you know, SIBO is bacteria overgrowth in the wrong place to begin with. We're not supposed to have that in the small intestine. Well, you have some, it's just you don't have too much. Some, but not much, right? And the bulk would be in the large intestine culinary, right? So

with that knowing, when I've had to deal with fungal issues, candida, parasites, one of the things that you get constantly talked at you is if you hammer them, they'll create biofilm and they'll go into this little shell and they'll hibernate and wait for the environment to come back, right?

And so you could defeat candida multiple times all the while when you go to have the cheat week and you see it come right back, right? A lot of people, that was myself for a while. Is Saccharomyces something that's really well known for breaking down biofilm and preventing that from going down? Or do you have something else that's good for that? Well, it's a hard question to answer because to actually study this in an accurate way, it's extremely hard. Because you'd need to be able to look at the bio, to image the biofilm pre and post.

So it's important to disclose that because sometimes what gurus will do who are jazzed about biofilms is they'll tell you all about the biofilm and how there's a certain product that's so good for it. But it's not that easy to actually have an accurate and factual answer on this. And that's the paper that we currently have

under peer review, where we took one cohort with SIBO and half of them were given herbal antimicrobials. The other half were given the herbal antimicrobials plus an antibiofilm agent. Because I wanted to know, right? I had heard all this discussion and I said, all right, well, I'm a little bit uneasy about this because it kind of feels like parroting, right? You go to a seminar,

there's that charismatic speaker up there at the podium, biofilms. And I was like, it seems a little bit dogmatic. So maybe, right? I'm open-minded in anything I can do to help someone I want to do. But part of being able to help someone is functioning as an adequate filter for the stuff that's not going to be effective as a clinician. So we were not able to demonstrate that the co-administration of the antibiofilm agents led to better resolution of SIBO. Both groups resolved SIBO more than zero, right? So there was no placebo group that we controlled again. So it was just one treatment versus the other. Both of them had similar clearance rates of SIBO. So I don't know for SIBO

if the co-administration of antibioflammagens is effective. Now with candida, maybe that's a different story because they can form what's known as hyphae. These little sort of, this is the body of candida. They can form this little sort of tentacle that kind of anchors them. Okay. So it may not be a biofilm per se. Like a Velcro hook.

It's the hook. Yeah. It's the hyphae hook. Maybe, right? This is why I think rather than the biofilm agents, you need a holistic approach. My thinking is if this is hooking down into tissue, well, what's hanging out in that tissue? Your immune system in most of these cases. So this is where sleeping, exercising, stress management, yes, antimicrobials, and yes, the right type of diet are probably going to be more effective than maybe not sleeping enough, eating the incorrect diet for candida, and then thinking that the antimicrobial plus the magical magic bullet of the biofilm buster is going to get you over the line. I love that.

Yeah, I remember it just refreshed my mind of our last podcast talking about the environment and trying to grow food in the desert. Right, right. Yeah, the environment is the totality, the holistic piece of everything that factors into your health and wellness that actually shifts that. Yep. You mentioned like the antimicrobials. Talk a bit about some of those that are, because there's so many that are out there.

You know, some people swear by raw garlic, some people swear by olive oregano, and then you've got ozonated agents and things like that. What are some of the ones that you found to be most effective? Oregano, definitely. I'm a big fan of oregano and it kind of depends on what the organism you're trying to treat is. I don't think it's super complicated, but there are some herbs for if we're going to like take a lateral jump over to what hangs out in the blood and some of the blood bacteria like Lyme and co-infections, that's where there's some different agents that can be, I think, more favorable. But oregano, berberine, garlic, or alicillin, caprylic acid, black walnut, uva ursi, and you'll see different blends. And I think the best evidence for this was, or one of the best evidence points,

Jerry Mullins, he's at Hopkins. He's a conventional GI. He treated half a group with herbals and it was a blend, two blends actually, Candibactin, AR, and BR. Now Candibactin was formulated for Candida, right? But he used it to treat SIBO and he found that the herbs were as effective as rifaximin for SIBO hence making my point that it's not super prescriptive there might be a little bit of nuance let's say if you're trying to treat Lyme and those co-infections there's some different agents like artemisinin is oftentimes used

that is antiparasitic I've never heard of artemisinin or wormwood I've used the Scramemisinin. Or wormwood. It's a- Okay, yeah, yeah. I've heard of wormwood. Yeah, that's an- I've used the Scram product from Health Force Naturals. It's got black walnut, wormwood, and a few other things in it.

So that comes to mind. Artemisinin. Yep. So that might skew a little more in the direction of a blood-borne bacteria. But I don't really think it's the agent. It's really, you're looking for a therapeutic signal. So if you're using an a therapeutic signal. So if

you're using an antimicrobial and the person is improving, that tells you that you're on the right track. If you're using antimicrobial and you're not seeing any response, my perspective is you don't have to antimicrobial harder. You have to change your approach. Like maybe it's actually not the microbe. Maybe it's the immune system. And this ties back into fermented foods, right? Because fermented foods are clearly health-promoting, but they're also rich in histamine. Histamine is a signaling molecule of the immune system, right? I have allergies, antihistamines, but they're also a natural byproduct of bacterial fermentation. So if someone is sort of what I would call this kind of immune type, they're really reactive, maybe they have a runny nose when they eat, they have

flushing sometimes, they might have insomnia, tachycardia on occasion, then this sort of person may not do well eating a lot of dietary histamine. In fact, one study fed people a high histamine diet and found that they had those symptoms that are just outlined, fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, palpitations, environmental reactivity were exacerbated. So this is also a presentation type you'll see when you're looking at someone's case

is that they'll say something like, man, yeah, like kombucha, fermented foods, I just don't feel great on them. So for them, it might be best to do a low histamine diet and you may not need to kind of hammer in with antimicrobials. That's great. Yeah. Yeah.

I've heard too that kombucha in particular, because the sugar content can feed candida and isn't always the best. I remember Rhonda Patrick saying the amount of probiotics that are in kombucha is basically like doing one drop of water into a swimming pool, by comparison to like one bite of really good kimchi

or a half a cup of kefir. Kimchi is the highest in probiotic, but it's also the highest in histamine. Now kefir is the lowest in histamine. So if someone was histamine sensitive, I think kefir is probably what they should focus on. Cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

That's the only dairy that my son does really well with is kefir and then a little bit of raw milk from that A2A2 farm we got down the street from us. Nice, nice. If you're into it, they've got a strict farm is like 90 minutes Southeast of here, rolling green hills

the happiest jersey cows you've ever seen they'll come right up to you and start nuzzling up to your ass like they're fucking awesome and it's just a sweet old couple out there uh but they make the best milk in the state of texas it's hands down just awesome raw stuff and then raw cheeses we got a buddy who's a third generation venezuelan cheesemaker who sources all of his milk from those guys. All the connections, my man. This is great. Right? That's shit you want to know.

You know, like you get into Rome Ranch, you know, tailoring the guys out there, force of nature, right? Second you get here, you want to know these guys, you know? So we've been very fortunate to be connected with everybody. But yeah, Dos Lunas is his cheese. If you see that in supermarkets, central marketplaces like that, it's incredible cheese. Absolutely incredible.

And it's all coming from the raw family. That cool so kefir kefir is a good one there um what you guys have you guys are running science and things like that on the different studies and things that you want to know what what is something that's in you know in your zeitgeist of things that you want to look at because you've got a hypothesis but haven't been able to fund yet? Well, we're about to do, or almost about to do a study on the elemental diet. That's the pre-digested meal replacement that has a fasting-like impact on the gut

but isn't metabolically stressful because you have some carbs and proteins and some fats. Predigested. Explain that too. Is this going to be like dipeptide, things like that? Well, it's typically a maltodextrin in either a whey or an amino acid plus something like an MCT. Okay.

Meaning that it's going to absorb within the first two to three feet of the small intestine, leaving the other 20-ish feet totally untouched. So it's kind of like a form of gut rest, really, said simply. And there's one sort of hallmark study from Mark Pimentel and colleagues that gave this to people who had IBS, so pain, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, and had SIBO.

They did it for two weeks, nothing but that for two weeks, which is a really hard intervention. Awesome results, right? They cleared SIBO. They lowered symptoms significantly. We've been using it in a different application. If you look at the literature on inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, they're often doing it in a just consume about half your calories per day from these shakes. So you wake up in the morning, you have a shake, you have maybe another shake in the afternoon,

then you have a snack that's regular food and a dinner that's regular food. Very, very doable, right? It's like the old ultra slim fast. Yeah, it's way easier than two weeks, nothing but liquid. There's a lot of data on that use for inflammatory bowel disease, also for colitis and Crohn's. There's no data on a use case like that for IBS, right? The bloating, the distension, the pain, the constipation, diarrhea.

So what we want to do is known as a waitlist control versus intervention. So some people, they'll have some care that can sort of factor out partially the placebo, and then they'll be compared against people who are actually doing this hybrid application. And we had to put it on hold for a little while just due to some funding restrictions. It's not going to be a ton of money, but as a self-funded research organization, it's hard to, right? Like I make one mistake with hiring and it's like, there went our budget for that study,

which I did, right? We had to downsize one component of our team that just didn't work out. Good people, but as I'm sure you can imagine, as you're trying to grow a business, you make mistakes and those mistakes cost money. And if we have to fund maybe $30,000 for this study, it's not a huge amount of money,

but if the organization just made a financial mistake, then we had to kick it down the road for about a year. So we were really fortunate to get connected with Christy Adamo, who's at UMaryland Medical. Great guy, and thank you, Chris, for kind of being a mentor in terms of helping us design the study parameters. All that's ready to go into what's known as IRB,

which is Institutional Review Board. They make sure that you're not going to do a study that will harm people. So before you do a study, you've got to clear it with the board because you can't say, well, we want to give people acid, which is something that's really questionable, right? We want to have people smoke versus take our antioxidant and see what the difference.

Well, you can't, in ethics, just have people cigarette smoke for six months to compare against your antioxidant green tea product or whatever. The board would say, I'm sorry, that's going to harm people, and you can't do that. So we'll have to go through IRB, which shouldn't be a problem, but just to speak to that's kind of where we are in the research flow, locked and loaded, get the IRB approval, and then we'll do that study. And why I care so much about that study is it opens up an easier use of the elemental diet, which a lot of people are doing right now in clinics who treat SIBO, who treat IBS. But you have another realm of people who are kind of your more conventional

doctor types. And I think understandably so, they're more wary until there's at least one study showing a different use case. And so I want to publish that study so people will see this broader application, which is way better for patients. Because clearly, in my view, clearly it's working. We just want to document, okay, you're going to do an IBS symptom inventory pre maybe a SIBO breath test and then intervention and repeat those assessments post. This is awesome that you're doing that.

How effective are the SIBO breath tests? I'm so glad you asked so there was a meta-analysis published 2022 that it looked at the two types of SIBO breath tests they used a sugar solution have you ever done one?

no I think my wife was going to do it and she's like I don't want to drink 75 grams of dextrose yeah so you drink a sugar it's usually either glucose or lactulose. It might be probably glucose then, yeah. And then you do serial repeat breath samples for every 20 minutes for about three hours. And then what you're looking at is the output of gases.

And at some point, the gases are going to start peaking or increasing. If they increase too early, that tells you you have the bacteria making the gas in the small intestine. But there is debate over what type of test is the best. Some say lactulose is the best. Some say glucose is the best.

That's why this meta-analysis that was published, coming back to meta-analyses, is so important because it summarizes all these different clinical trials. And when looking at both types of tests together, the glucose and the lactulose, people who had the symptoms of IBS had a 36% positivity rate. Healthy controls had a 28% positivity rate.

So that tells you it's not a very accurate test, right? It's almost the same level of positivity in people who are perfectly healthy as compared to those with the symptoms of IBS. Now, if you use just a glucose test, that inaccuracy drops off almost completely, meaning the lactulose test leads to what's known as a false positive, meaning you're Kyle, you're healthy, and Samantha's sitting next to you. We're going to test both you guys. If you're positive and Samantha's positive, is that a helpful test? No, right? If a healthy person is positive and Samantha, sorry if I didn't say this, but Samantha has food

reactivity, brain fog, and diarrhea, right? So she's unfortunately not healthy. You are healthy. If we're seeing a similar positive rate on the test between you two, it tells us that that's not an accurate test. That's what seems to be the case with the lactulose. So the glucose test is more accurate. And off the top of my head, I'm blanking. I think it was something like 22%

with the glucose test of people tested positive. So maybe a third of people with symptoms will test positive for SIBO. Sorry if I'm getting too nerdy. No, no, I love this shit. And again, we haven't, I mean, it's been a long time since I've had a gut expert on. So it's just great picking your brain and teaching in Fit for Service now. There's a lot of shit that's outside of my wheelhouse where I lean on guys like you. I just sent a client to you not long ago and you fucking got him straight as an arrow very quickly and let him know he was cool and not to worry about stuff. And so super appreciative of that. And I appreciate you sending people and I want to just pick up on what you just said. Part of what you said, which is not

to worry about stuff because it's been well demonstrated that when people have gut symptoms, they start to worry. There's a higher level of anxiety in people with gut symptoms and they start to overly restrict food. And so it's super important as a clinician, I don't pour fuel on that fire, right? And this is why some of the gurus you mentioned earlier who are really staunch about their dietary message, I, on the one hand, appreciate what they're trying to do. On the other hand, it's like twisting a knife in my side because we see these people who come in, Doc, I'm low histamine, I'm low oxalate, I'm low lectin, I'm low carb, I'm grain-free.

And half of their problem is just the fact that they're under eating and they have almost no life, right? They never go out, they never eat out, they grill the waiter everywhere they go about, you know, is this- What do you cook with? What kind of salt do you have? Again, I get it. I consider myself a food first provider, super important, but there is a law of diminishing returns at which you start actually making yourself worse if you're just too fanatical about your food. So I appreciate the fact that that came through for the person that you referred over. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, and I'm constantly thinking, I mean, I've been very fortunate, you know, through since the Paleo FX days, through Onnit. Way back. Way back, you know, that to be connected to amazing people like yourself. Same, same.

I couldn't wrap my head around everything, you know, and becoming homies with Paul Cech has such been a massive influence as well. But that middle path, the less of the extremes has been really helpful in terms of just getting people to settle down because the world has become more polarized in the last four years, for sure. And that unfortunately translates into everything. You know, it translates into food. It translates into workouts. It translates into all the things. So it's helpful, you know, to have people I can send, you know, send to that are, that are high level and experts. And I'm going to start picking your brain back on some fitness stuff. You were kind of blowing my mind with what you were saying about your, your deadlift routine

and a few of the things that you're doing. So expect me to blow up your text probably later today. Absolutely. So what's your daily like while you're in town? What are you doing? Have you made your way out to stand a paddleboard on the lake? You do anything fun? What do you do while you're here? Or are you just grinding nonstop? Well, I've been grinding up until about this year. And admittedly, I'm coming out of a period of burnout. It was just, I think my desire to do good in the field outpaces my physical capacity. And I think many people, I know Chuck talked about this at one point, go through that cycle of,

you're just, you're like Sisyphus. You're trying to roll that boulder up the hill in perpetuity. And at some point you got to take a break and the boulder kind of rolls over you and up the hill in perpetuity. And at some point you got to take a break and the boulder kind of rolls over you and it's a little bit ugly. So I am relearning how to prioritize, but I also think we just needed to get to that point, right?

Things now, thankfully, there's enough of a team built where there's a fair degree of self-perpetuation and we're continuing to grow and publish and help people without me having to work incessantly. So it's been worth it. One of the things I'm doing is the five-minute journal every morning, which has been just a nice chance to just chill out. I used to have this bad habit of waking up

and first thing is like my WhatsApp messages, like anyone on my team, what do they need? And I'm like, all right, i'm going to five minute journal i've also been doing a mantra and uh some some crystal bowl um you know that's beautiful what kind of uh frequency you got i mean is it noted to like the a note it's c 12 inch so it's root chakra and And I'm doing Om Namah Shivaya, which is a mantra. It has different interpretations, I suppose, but it resonated with me, which is sort of coming into your full being, which I feel like as I'm coming out of the burnout,

I get to come back into my full being, which is now vocationally secure, but also with the time and resources to pursue other things in my life. So it's been a nice sort of practice of I journal, I mantra, I meditate, and then I do a few other things, but that's a good start. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, so many of the people that we're working with in FFS, it's like, have you read the book Essentialism by Greg McCown? Start there, you know, otherwise we won't have any time to do anything i'm telling you yep you know that's a big one and and to your point don't underestimate

the power of the dark knight you know because there's so many lessons and and things that you could only get from going through the shit and going through the funk to come out on the other side better well you know it's funny because on the drive over here i was thinking about a uh a thought i had this was maybe a month ago when, as you're coming out of burnout, you still have those moments when you're kind of feeling really shitty and it's dark and it's kind of like a winter of your life.

And it got me thinking about back in college when I, we didn't even touch on this yet, but I had a parasite in college when I was about 20, right? And that's what diverted my entire career path. And it got me thinking, was one year of suffering worth 20 years of purpose? And it's like, yeah, it totally was, right? And I think I'm just coming out of another year of suffering for another 20 years of purpose. And the suffering was different each time and they led to different realizations. But as a clinician and a healthcare provider, all those realizations get sort of infused into the way we try to help people. And it really sort of ups my purpose, right? I wanted to be an orthopedic

surgeon and now I'm a gut nerd, but man, am I happy that I'm doing this. And then, you know, I had some burnout and probably some fungal overgrowth and a few other things. And by going through that, I learned how to be better as a clinician with those things and how to live a more balanced life. And so now those get put into the next 20 years of purpose. So yeah, I think you have to have the winters, so to speak, to then appreciate the springs and the summers. Okay.

Well, dude, this has been great. I want to show you the land. Where can people work with you? How can they get ahold of you? How can they learn from you? Yeah. I mean, if you just Google my name, Michael Ruscio, the last name is R-U-S-C-I-O.

We have a YouTube podcast, a blog. I wrote a book. We've made some supplements. We'll link to Healthy Gut, Healthy You, correct? We'll link to that in the show notes. It's a phenomenal book. If you want a breakdown on low FODMAP and a lot of the different protocols that you've laid out for there, I've turned a lot of people onto that book. It's a phenomenal book. If you want a breakdown on low FODMAP and a lot of the different protocols

that you've laid out for there, I've turned a lot of people on to that book. It's excellently written. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, and I mean, that should get people plugged in. There's also a science page where you can see what we've published and we update that every time we do publish a paper.

And yeah, man, thanks for having me back. It's been great chatting. I'm looking forward to taking all this in with you. So good, brother. Thank you. So good, brother. Thank you. Bye.