Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Super Gut: The Bacteria-Microbiome Connection You Need To Know About - With Dr. William Davis

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

For full show notes, resources mentioned, and transcripts, go to: www.drmindypelz.com/ep145/. To enroll in Dr. Mindy's Fasting membership, go to: resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. This episode uncovers a widespread intestinal problem that stems from common lifestyle practices. Dr. William Davis shares the science behind the problem and reveals the best remedies. Dr. William Davis is a cardiologist and New York Times #1 bestselling author of the Wheat Belly book series. He is the Medical Director and founder of the Undoctored program, including the Undoctored Inner Circle. He is Chief Medical Officer and co-founder of Realize Therapeutics Corp. which is developing innovative solutions for the disrupted human microbiome, and author of the book Super Gut. Please see our medical disclaimer.

We're not humans. We are humans accompanied by trillions of microbes in every orifice. And the crazy thing is, as you know, is all the organs we thought were sterile are not. They're teeming with microbes. Resetters, Dr. Mindy here. And I am on a mission to teach you just how powerful your body was built to be. This podcast is about giving you the power back and helping you believe in yourself again. Let's jump in.

On this episode of The Resetter Podcast, I bring you another amazing, profound thinker, Dr. William Davis. Now, I want to tell you that one of the things that I love about podcasting is getting to speak with authors that I have admired for years, and Dr. Davis is one of them. His original work and what he was known as was his book, Wheat Belly, and prior to it, You'll hear it in this conversation. Prior to wheat belly coming out, I was living a gluten-free, wheat-free life. It really helped me from a chronic fatigue diagnosis that I was given is to pull wheat out.

And when his book came out, everybody started to understand the impact that this new style of wheat was causing on not just our gut health, but our energy levels and our brain health. He then went on, and the second book I loved was called Undoctored. And it was all about giving the power back to the patient and how we often know more on our condition than the doctors we're interacting with. And I just love that book. Well, he now has a book called Super Gut and he is changing the way we look at the microbiome. As you all hopefully know, I'm very passionate about giving you solutions that are easy to implement, that are free, that anybody can do. And what you're going to hear in this conversation is he has

identified the strains of bacteria to help conditions like SIBO. Now, if you're not familiar with SIBO, Sebo is a bacterial imbalance in the small intestine. It stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And what's so interesting about SIBO is it doesn't just cause gut problems. It causes mental health problems, energy problems, weight loss resistance, diabetes. You'll hear everything that he lays out that SIBO is causing. And to date, we have not had a good solution for SIBO. You can put a thousand doctors in a room of all backgrounds, and they will tell you it's very

difficult to solve SIBO. But Dr. Davis figured it out and it's in a yogurt that he's using. And what's really exciting about this yogurt is that we can all make it at home. Now, it would be easy to listen to that and think it's too simple. But what I want you to do is make sure you listen all the way through this podcast because he talks about not only how to make it, he talks about other things we can do with different bacteria, even going into things like salsa, how we can ferment salsa, different drinks we can make. and I'm really excited to use his concepts as a way we can all enter into our eating windows post-fast.

So you're going to hear me talk to him about can we break a fast with this yogurt, why this yogurt is more powerful than a probiotic, and what the implications of this yogurt is on our mental and physical health. Unbelievable conversation. I've never brought you a conversation like this. So I am so excited. Dr. William Davis, as always, if you love it, go buy his book, share a review, and share this out into the world. Microbial health is where the new paradigm of health care is going to.

And after this discussion, I hope you grasp that. And as always, I hope it helps you on your health journey. Enjoy. We're going to jump right in. And for starters, let me just welcome you to the podcast. I really have been such a fan of your work. you have put out books that have changed the way people think, which as an author I feel like is so important. So not only am I welcoming you, but I just a huge thank you for the work you're doing.

So happy to have this conversation with you. Thanks for saying so. You know, yeah, and I know, when you're putting a lot of content out there and you're on a mission, sometimes you lose sight of the impact you're making. Maybe not, maybe that's not happening to you. But when you put wheat belly out into the world, I was already gluten-free, and I had used a gluten-free diet to really heal myself from Epstein-Barr virus. And when you, I was recommending gluten-free diets to people and everybody thought I was crazy until your book came out. So I want to start by saying, thank you.

I hope you know that that book transformed the way people looked at gluten. Do you look at it that way? I think so. You know, we still have lots of work you and me to do to educate people what that means and why? Because, as you know, prevailing opinions are completely opposite. You know, you must eat healthy whole grains. Every meal, every snack.

So we've made a dent in it. But there's still tons of people who are skeptical, think it's nuts, don't believe it, or have some other reason for not doing it. And yet, as you and I know, it is the key. It's the first step. a big first step in regaining health. Yeah, yeah. And thank you for saying that because we are going to go into your new book, SuperGut,

and talk about fermented foods. But would you say before we launch into that, the most important thing for gut health is to pull these offensive foods out like gluten? Yeah, no question. Because you could eat all the, you could eat all the L. Rudurai yogurt you want, but if you're still toxifying yourself with gluten, and you're not going to make much progress. Is that a good way to look at it?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. The second thing I have to tell you is that one of my favorite books of all, health books of all times is und doctored. Oh.

I love that book. I, you know, and let me tell you why, because I use it to empower patients and people to really stand up to their doctors because what I gathered from that book is you really made it clear that somebody who might have a thyroid problem. They may know, and they've researched and Googled the heck out of it, they may know more about that thyroid problem walking into their doctor's office than their doctor may actually know. Do you feel like that still is true and exists? I think it's becoming more and more true every day as, I don't know why, but people are

educating and still being informed, collaborating, conversing about these things, while my colleagues continue to bury their heads in the sand. And then what kills me is how they can often deliver misinformation with absolute authority. And then belittle you. Yeah. Did you consult Dr. Google again? You know? So I don't think it's going to change in the foreseeable future, probably generations from now as the current crop of docs pass away replaced by, I hope, or open-minded people who embrace information. But yeah, it's not gotten a whole lot better. And in fact, the gum, big pharma is out of control.

You know, that a doctored was the book that earned me a blacklisting from all media, major media. Oh, really? Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. I thought it was me at first, but it's not. It's all of us now.

It's you, me, anybody with any kind of an agenda or a book about health or nutrition. So, you know, you and I used to be able to watch like, you know, CBS this morning or one of these other shows. And you'd see a book author on health, you know, once a week or so some regularity or an in-depth expose of some issue in health care. Zero now. Nobody's talked about health and nutrition. In fact, I had a publisher say to me, you know, we can't make money publishing books on health, maybe we won't publish books on health. Isn't that something?

That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah, which I've thought about this a lot because, you know, in my younger years, I was very focused on how can we overturn big food? How can we overturn big pharma? And I agree with you that we've now entered a time where those industries are so profit-driven. They're so integrated into the political system. there's no way we're going to unturn that.

So the only thing we can do is empower the individual. Yep. Don't you think? I couldn't agree more. Absolutely. We got to get into the back door. Yeah. And so those of you that are listening as we go through gut health,

as what I love that Dr. Davis is putting out there right now is some really good food-based ideas on what we can do to change our microbiome. You know, we have to take our own power back. because it's not going to happen the days where we would walk into our doctor's office and expect to get all the proper answers is no longer amongst something we're living in. Would you agree? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

So let's dive into Super Gut. Why did you write this book? Let's start with that. I always am curious from an author perspective. What motivated you to write the book? Well, I saw the wonderful results of people engaged in what I call the weak belly. lifestyle, that is elimination all wheat, grains, and sugars, and addressing common nutrient deficiencies, not because of the diet, but because of the modern habits. So magnesium,

for instance, because by necessity, we have to filter our water of sewage and other things. And so water filtration removes all magnesium. So we all start with severe magnesium depletion. Iodine, particularly in the Midwest, what used to be called the Goiter Belt, for lack of iodine. So we get iodine because people are cutting back on salt. They're not getting their iodine from iodized salt anymore. Omega-3 fatty acids because nobody wants to eat brain anymore. That's the primary source in addition

to fish that has mercury, shellfish that has cadmium. So we're stuck with this ultra-refined product called fish oil capsules. And then vitamin D because we live indoors. So that collection of things, the diet, those four nutrients that, by the way, when put together, synergized to reverse

or minimize insulin resistance and inflammatory phenomena. So it really worked. But I saw people do things like this. Oh, my, I've lost 73 pounds. My waist is eight inches smaller. I don't have hypertension anymore. My type two diabetes is gone.

But I'm still intolerant to nightshades. Or to histamine-caut, containing foods. Or Fodbabs or fructose or some intolerance. Or they had some residual problem. Like my rheumato arthritis is 70% better. I'm off the biologic. It's saving me several thousand dollars a month in co-pays. I'm off the prednisone,

but I'm still having to take Naproxin now and then for occasional flares. Why is that? And so I saw some residual problems. And I went, why? And by the way, this was in spite of the basic program having a multi-species hypotency probiotic and prebiotic fibers. So even though people made those minimal efforts for their microbiome, so I want to know if the microbiome,

if I dug further, will we find answers. And lo and behold, yeah, there's a ton of answers and there's a ton of new insights coming out in the microbiome now. I cringe to think what we didn't know just a few years ago. Now, as we uncover all the incredible things going on in the microbiome. Yeah. You know, I get questions a lot about like, you know, what's the best foods for the microbiome? How do you help SIBO? These are the things, kind of things that we're going to talk about. but one of the things that I've thought about deeply is the food allergies. You speak of those.

Like how many food allergies we have now? If we stop and think about it, like I didn't, there was, I don't know any kids at my elementary school that had a peanut allergy. We didn't talk about gluten allergies. We didn't talk about all the bazillion allergies we have now. Do you feel like that's because of what you just said where our foods are not giving us the same nutrients and that we've got so many toxins in our water, so many antibiotics that people are taking. What is causing all those allergies?

So it's from a disruption of the composition of the gastrointestinal microbiome. You know, all the things you and I and your audience have been exposed to like common antibiotics, moxacosilin, azithromycin, et cetera, wipe out literally hundreds of different species in the gastrointestinal tract in the colon. Well, once you wipe out the good guys, some of the fecal organisms start to proliferate, E. coli, cypherbacter, klepsiella, they proliferate. The odd thing is they also, and this surprised me.

I was really taken by surprise when I started to think about SIBOs, as you know, small intestinal back to your loaf growth. So fecal organisms proliferate in the colon, then ascend, up to 24 feet of small bowel. And fecal microbes in the small bowel are extremely inflammatory. And when they die, some of their breakdown products, enter the bloodstream, as you know, process called endotoxemia.

Right. And that's part of the whole process that leads to food intolerances. So the vast, not all, but the vast majority of food intolerances are due to this process. It's multi-step process. Cbo, fecal organisms, endotoxemia. And the small bowel is especially susceptible to this because it only has a single layer mucus barrier. It's not suited to have fecal organisms while the colon has a thick two-layer mucus barrier

because that's where all these fecal microbes are supposed to be. So one other name for SIBO is fecalization. It's the proliferation of the fecal miccos in the small bowel. And what convinced me just how widespread SIBO was was the availability of this device, the air device. So. Yes. Yeah. So as you know, you blow into it.

It's a real-time sensor for hydrogen. You know, unlike the stuff that some people do in their clinics or labs where you have to capture breath or hydrogen. in a two, a very imperfect process. Hydrogen gas is the smallest molecule there is. You've got to cap it really fast. And even then, the gas escapes. So conventional testing for CBO is flawed. And it tends to underestimate some very. So I think, I think this air device is an improvement over, because it's a real time sense, you blow directly, you put your mouth on, you blow directly into it. And what surprised me, though, was when I started talking about this in thousands of people started testing themselves was that it was the exceptions who tested negative.

Now, we could question the validity of the test, except that what I saw happened was people would test positive. By the way, the instructions that come with the device are not right. I did call the inventor, Dr. Angus, he's a scientist, he's an engineer in Dublin, Ireland. And I said, Angus, I know you invented this for people with IBS, your bowel syndrome, on a low FODMAPS diet. I said, but that's not really what this is. I'm telling the inventor what he invented. I said, Yeah, that's funny.

It's really a mapping device. You can use it to map where microbes are. You use time, and you can tell where they are. So, now he knows. They're trying to change the labeling and instructions, but he has some regulatory hurdles to get over. But that is how you use it.

You consume some that bacteria metabolize. We use inulin. because it's broadly metabolized by multiple species of SIBO. And then you time how fast you turn positive. Zero to 10. Let's say you started at 1.2. If it jumps to 9, that's positive. A jump of 4 would be positive.

So when I started having people do this, I was shocked. Now, even better, people would take some steps to eradicate their SIBO, and they would test negative. And they would say things like, I finally broke my weight loss plateau or my rheumatoid arthritis is now gone or my hemoglobin A1C that dropped from 12.7% terrible to 6.1% much better but still terrible is now 4.8% I saw all those residual problems go away. So is this a test that that is accessible to everybody? Is it an easy test to do? It is easy. It's easy to use.

So the instructions on the actual use of the device are okay with the instruction that come with it. But the interpretation of how to use the timing factor is in my super gut book. And perhaps in future, when Angus Short catches up, we'll put it in the device itself. Right now, I have the full instructions. So the key here is you consume something that bacteria metabolize. So in the lab, they use laculose usually, a non-degestible sugar. we use inulin. Inuline has, in other words, what if you choose a sugar or a carbohydrate that only some microbes consume, but not the ones you have, they'll test negative.

So I picked the prebiotic fiber or carbohydrate that has the widest species can metabolize this thing. So he chose anulin. So typically two tons of inuline, like a cup of your coffee, a cup of coffee or something. So test baseline, consume your inland, then test every 30 to 45 minutes. If you test positive, a rise of four units within the first 90 minutes, you've got SIBO. After 90 minutes up to 180 minutes, three hours, it's not quite clear because that could be distal ilium SIBO or it could be just normal colonic fermentation. So that's where some judgment is required. So if somebody says, you know, I tested, I went positive at 110.

minutes or whatever. Is that positive? Well, typically it's not regarded as positive, but what is the person says, but you know, I have, I've had diarrhea unexplained for years, and I have panic attacks, or I have rosacea, or restless leg syndrome, or polymyalgia, I'm sorry, or fibromyalgia. In other words, conditions are extremely highly associated with SIBO, even with negative tests, I would say you've got SIBO. So there's some judgment also involved. Is there a way symptom-wise for our audience that might not know what CBO is, but might be suffering from the symptoms of CBO? How would we even start that conversation for somebody to understand if they had it? So there are what I call telltale signs like fat malabsorption.

If you see fat droplets in the toilet or fat staining where the water meets the porcelain. Or you have food intolerances or conditions versus. synonymous with CBO, so irritable bowel syndrome is almost synonymous with CBO, as is fibromyalgia, rest of leg syndrome, all neurodegenerative and autoimmune conditions, highly associated with CBO, fatty liver, very highly associated, obesity, type 2 diabetes, at least 50% of all people have CBO. The curious thing, though, is if we look back at all the studies that have been done, For instance, if we take several hundred people with Iirtle bowel and ask how many test positive for SIBO, those studies vary anywhere from 12 to 84%. But typically about 40% will test positive.

But if you look at those studies and look at how many people among the healthy controls also test positive, it's anywhere from a few percent to 44%. In other words, normal ain't normal anymore. So even healthy controls? positive. Oh my gosh. I would say in my clinical work, I feel like everybody's got some version of CBO. And I would even throw into that anxiety. A lot of mood disorders are associated with CBO. Are you seeing that as well? Yeah, good point. Anxiety, depression, panic attacks. Yeah, very high proportion. There's an interesting series of studies, some done in Germany. asking this question, how come some people don't respond to antidepressants? Antipresors are stupid.

But what the question is asked? Yes, they are. Why do some people don't respond at all? Well, it's been determined that people who don't respond to antidepressants have higher measures of inflammation, higher C-reactive protein, higher I-L-6, I-O-1-Beta, etc. And, of course, big pharma steps in and says, let's give them expensive biologics for $10,000 a month to address the inflammation. Of course, that's ridiculous. So this German group asked this question. They said, what happens if we inject that endotoxin from the CBO organisms? Let's take a little bit of that lipopolysaccharide endotoxin, minuscule amounts, and inject them into non-depressed people,

which is really daring, because if you miscalculate a little bit, you kill the person. So I don't have they got this through their review board, but they did. So they injected this endotoxic. into the bloodstream of these non-depressed people, and they became clinically depressed within three hours, and they performed MRIs that showed all the hallmarks of depression. In other words, LPS endotoxin from SIBO now has been conclusively shown to be a major contributor or cause for depression. Now, what proportion of depression?

No one knows. No one's done that study, but it's probably a lot. And, of course, that won't respond to some stupid drug to increase serotonin. Right. Right. Well, did you see the meta-analysis that came out in molecular psychiatry this summer? It basically looked at several different studies on SSRIs and said that depression is no longer a singular thing. They do not believe that it's a serotonin reduction because they have plenty of people who have low serotonin are happy. Other people that go on antidepressants to raise their serotonin and they're unhappy.

So I think that whole world of antidepressants hopefully is being blown apart, hopefully. And I know a lot of people believe they help, but a lot of times they help temporarily. Don't you see that? If at all. Yes, exactly. They are a miserable class of drugs famous for their ineffectiveness. No question at all. Yeah.

You know, I find a great illustration of the power in a negative way, the power of the microbiome addressing emotions is when you. try to eradicate the microbes, you get this die-off reaction, which as you know, it can be profound depression, nightmares, panic attacks, anxiety, irrational behavior. So, I mean, it's, but it's a vivid illustration of the effect that microbes can have, their breakdown products can have on brain, on the brain and emotions. Yeah. So what do we do if we, if we think we have CBO? What's our first step? Let's just say we're listening to this. We resonate with all those symptoms or we do your air device test, which I can't wait to go research.

And we get this clear idea that we have SIBO. What's our first step to fixing that? What I've been doing is, so I asked a bunch of questions. What if I just took a commercial off-the-shelf probiotic? That is a haphazard collection of microbes. No rhyme or reason. There's not a reason why they combine specific microbes. will my CBO go away?

No, right? It can reduce the symptoms sometimes, like less diarrhea, perhaps, less cramps and bloating, but it doesn't really eradicate the CBO in most cases. So I ask these questions. What if we chose species that colonize the upper G.I.

tract, that's where CBO occurs. And what if we chose species that produce bacteriacens? These are natural antibiotics, effective against the species of Cibotin. So I picked three. I picked lactobacillus gasseri, the BNR 17 strain, upper GI colonization, up to seven bacterisms. So it's a bacteriousin powerhouse.

I chose lactobacillus rhodoride, the DSM 179338. And I'm sorry about these, you know, these strain designations are nuts. And the APC, PTA 6475 strain. And also upper GI colonizer produces up to four. bacteriasin, so powerful, by the way, my microbiologist friends say, you know, we use rotoride to clean our fermentation vats. I didn't believe them at first, but they do. That's how effective and antimicocular it is.

And then I threw in bacillus coagulants, the GBI 36086 strain. Now, these are all commercially available, despite the wacky strain designations. We ferment them, but we don't, it looks and smells like yogurt, it's not yogurt. So when we buy yogurt at the store, it's been fermented for, about four to six hours. We ferment for 36 hours. The reason for that is like Rotoride, for instance, doubles every three hours. Of course, microbes don't have sex. There's no mommy and daddy microbes. They just double. So Rotterite doubles every three hours at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Well, in four to six hours, you've got nothing. So we do 12 doublings. The perform flow cytometry on these yogurts.

We're getting something like 250 to 300 billion counts per half cup serving. And so far, now this is anecdotal, but 40 people have done this for four weeks, a little longer than antibiotics, and then tested negative after testing positive at baseline. So so far, now we'll do a formal clinical trial, probably in collaboration with Dr. Angus Short in Dublin, but we'll do a formal clinical trial in future to prove. But you know, if the solution I'm proposing is a total collectomy. or explore telelethorotomy. Well, we better be damn certain, right? What we're doing? But what if the solution is kind of like a yogurt?

It's a yogurt. I was just going to say it's so unsexy, but it's amazing because you can do it at home, right? Yeah. And, you know, I kind of regret calling it CBO yogurt because it makes it seem like it's just for CBO. It's actually those, certainly the gasteri and the rhodori are keystone species. That is, they're very important species that, by the way, we have almost all lost. So they're extremely good antimicrobials, those two species. But they're also very susceptible to common antibiotics.

So, you know, if we were to test the squirrels and the rabbits and the other creatures out, they all have rotterite. If we were to test indigenous populations like the people live in the jungles of New Guinea or jungles of South America like the Yanomami. or all those indigenous hunter-gathered poplar, they all have rotari and gas rye. We almost none of us have it anymore. So replacing them is extremely helpful. So I'm now drifting over time to the idea that, yes, use the sebo yogurt at first to normalize your sebo

and then continue to do it with some, maybe every third day or something like that. Because I think those two microbes, the loss of them is probably a big part of the reason why there's so much sebo in this world. I think easily one and two people have sebo. I think because of the loss of these microbes. Yeah.

Yeah. And I would agree in what we're seeing. It's just the microbiome is so decimated by big food and big pharma. I mean, it's just totally. And so all these strange things are repairing. And what I love about this yogurt is that it's anybody can do it. and we got to make health simple. So explain to me the difference.

You have an L. Routreye yogurt and then you have a Sibo yogurt. Is the Sibo yogurt just an extension of L. Routreye? Because I saw a lot of great art. You had a great, like, great community talking about your L. Routreai yogurt about three years ago, two years ago. It was all over your website. So how would you choose one or over the other? So the Rortarai, so the Sipal yogurt is just good.

for cleaning up your bowels because of those properties. Upper Giac colonization, bacteria's production. The roidori, specifically, you can do it as part of the sebo yogurt, or you can do it separately. When you monoculture something by itself, you get bigger numbers. So in the sebo yogurt, you probably get about 80 billion per species. But if you want a real wallop, you can just cultivate the roiteri. And that's where you see things like, so in addition to up,

Geli colonization and bacterias in production. It also sends a signal via the vagus nerve to release the hormone oxytocin. And so people experience things like greater intensity of affection for other people. They become more generous. The part I love is they're more accepting of other people's opinions. So you get along better with your coworkers. But there's a bunch of physical effects that also occur that have only recently been recognized. Ladies love it. Because there's an explosion dermal collagen and the wrinkles throughout your body start to be reduced. Ladies say they stop using moisturizing creams because you're so moist from the sebum production. They don't need to use moisturizers anymore.

Guys love it because there's a restoration of youthful muscle and strength, a dramatic effect, by the way. I love it because I'm a chronic insomniac. And now I sleep straight through full eight, nine hours every night, vivid dreams. dreams. There's an increase in libido. Crazy. Guys experience an increase in testosterone. So if you're an older guy like me, you can have a youth level of testosterone restored. Ladies love it because it also increases libido and also reverses vaginal atrophy.

That, as you know, afflicts men. Which is huge for menopausal women. That's huge. This preservation of bone density, acceleration. of healing. In other words, so what I thought my start thing was, wait, wait, acceleration of healing, deeper sleep, smoother skin, greater muscle, increased libido, we're turning a clock back, 10, 20 years. And that's what we're seeing in people who do this. So the roteri is, that was the first microbe I played with. I just happened to stumble on this incredibly powerful microbe.

Yes. And so just so I followed the El Routeri craze of on your, on your website. and people talking about it for a couple of years. Just so we kind of fill the audience in, what does this look like to make this yogurt? Because, again, if we go back to where we were in the beginning of this conversation, we've really overcomplicated health. And what you're doing is giving a very simple answer.

But not everybody knows how to make yogurt. So can you walk us through like what this would look like to make this and how often we would want to eat it and when we want to eat it? So I'll use roteri as the example, because that's kind of the prototype. Because, you know, in addition to rotorite, you can ferment other microbes. You can ferment, let's say, bacillus coagulants that also reduces arthritis pain and accelerates recovery from heavy exercise or biphidobacteria infantis, that if you give this to a newborn, it sleeps through the night, has 50% fewer bowel movements that are formed, 50% fewer diaper changes from mom and dad.

as an older child, less prone to asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and has a higher IQ. So you can ferment different microbes for specific effects. But we're right now is kind of the prototype example. So we need to source the microbe. We're currently sourcing it as a commercial product called a biogaiagastris, G-A-G-R-U-S. Now, here's something to know. This is tedious. So I apologize to your audience.

This is kind of tedious. But when you play with my... knows. You have to pay attention to strain. Easy illustration. Yes. So I have E. coli. Everyone in your audience has E. coli. But what if you ate lettuce contaminated by cow manure with E. Cola? Well, you can die of that E. coli. So same species, different strains. So we have to pay attention to strain to some degree when we play with microbes. Now, the strains we're using are the two strains that come in that gastrous tablet. Now, we're doing a mouse trial right now, comparing different strains, I want to know if there are strains that are better at it. So we have several successive

studies ongoing with animals to see if there's differences among the strains. So don't know yet, don't have the results yet. Probably in about, I think about a month will have the results. So for now, we go with the strains. We know work, and that's the biogagastra strains. Problem, they sell it to you as tablets made for babies. So the dose is tinsie-weensy. It's 100 million of each, which sounds like a lot, but in microbes is nothing. That was my motivation for making yogurt. We're going to increase the number of microbes a thousandfold. So when you first start out, what we do is just take the tablet, put them in a baggie,

crush them with a mortar or with a rolling pen or heavy jar, anything. So they're all crumbled. Put that in a bowl. We add a prebiotic fiber to feed them. It's like putting calmenor on your garden. You're going to have bigger tomatoes. Yeah. So put about a tablespoon of a prebiotic fiber like in a meal.

or raw potato starch, inexpensive. I reject the idea that we should limit fat. I think that's stupid. So we use organic fat, 18% fat. So make a story first, so everything's suspended, then top it off with the rest. And then you need some device, cover it, saran wrap, whatever, and then keep it in some device at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Could be a suede, a sticker base in suvade, could be a dehydrator, could be a dehydrator, could

be a yogurt maker, could be an instant pot. Some means just keeping it at 100 degrees, give or take, for 36 hours. First batch, by the way, tends to separate and the curds in a way. It's subsequent batches that are more uniform. Don't know why. Don't know why. And, you know, another interesting thing about these yogurates is they all taste different. So lactobacillusill's roterai yogurt tastes very different than lactobacill's brevis yogurt. Taste very different than lactobusus gaseousy yogurt. It tastes very different than the Cibol's yogurt. It tastes very different than the Cibol yogurt. It tastes very different than biofidicure in Fandis yogurt. So it's really an interesting little experiment. But that's what we're doing. And by the way, it doesn't have to be yogurt or

dairy. It could be coconut milk. It could be salsa. It could be purees, fruit puree. The process of fermentation reduced the sugar content. So it's still perfectly compatible with a low carb type lifestyle. There may be some additional steps, though. Like with coconut milk, you don't want to buy cans that have some kind of thickening agent in it like guar gum. I'm sorry, like Xanthamthum or Jellin gum or Karegeneon. That screws it up. So you want just coconut milk. And then there's a couple extra steps you have to throw in use of a blender.

You've got to add some guargum because it tends to separate. So it's very easy. But I put all those recipes in the Super Gut book because I had many failed batches before I learned how to do it the right way. And what about if you add in raw milk? it's already got a lot of probiotics and prebiotics in it. You're heating it up so that's going to die off anyways? Would that affect the, did you test that to see if it affected the strains? Yeah, you have to heat it because in case there's even a minuscule quantity of Listeria,

monocytogenes or Staphylococcus aureus from the cow's utter, even if there's a little bit, when you ferment, you amplify counts a thousandfold. And you can actually die of that yogurt. So it's unlike. So no raw milk. So no, don't do raw milk because we have a lot of raw milk fans in this audience. So you're saying don't do this yogurt with raw milk. So as your listeners know, there's a little bit of tintsy risk by consuming raw milk.

But you amplify the risk hugely when you ferment it. That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad I asked the question. And, you know, we have a local gal at the farmer's market that has fermented salsa. It is the best salsa in the world.

So I love that you said we could take these and ferment it in salsa. Do you tell us, just so people understand, in your book, are they capsules that you open up and put into the salsa and then heat it up for 36 hours? Like, how do we make sure we're getting the right strain to your point? And especially in the SIBO yogurt, because we've got multiple different bacteria we're putting in, correct? Yeah. So with salsa, you're going to have to add some starter. So let's say I want to make bacillus coagulance salsa. I'll take a capsule of bacillus quaglance and empty it in there. Stir it, of course, cap it. You want to keep air away from it. So you need some means of topping it off with something or a little contraption, like a little plate. I use a glass. I have like an old olive jar. I have a drinking glass. It fits perfectly in the top of it. And it pushes everything down because you don't want air to contact your fermenting foods because that invites mold fungi. And so you also want to use, of course, non-aidic salt and filtered water that has no chlorine or fluoride. But it's an illustration of just how many antimicrobials were exposed to in this world.

And, of course, if you ferment it. One of my favorite things to do, this is really easy for your listeners, is to make sparkling, sacramides, juices. It's real easy. So in case your listeners don't remember, Saccharomyces and bulardi is a fungus, and it's probably the most important thing someone can do to preserve the integrity of their microbiome during antibiotics. So let's say you have to take it out because you've got some infection.

Sometimes we need to. Well, if you drink this juice, it's the best thing you can do to preserve, to minimize the loss of bacterial species. So what we do is just buy any juice, any volume, so long as it doesn't have a preservative like potassium, sorbate, or sodium, benzodia, but the pulpier, the better. So apple, cider, mango, passion fruit, grape, whatever.

So some of juice, empty a capsule of the commercial probiotic flora store. That's Saccharomycese-Balty, just one capsule. Stir lightly, cap. This one can be exposed to airbite. You want to cap it, though, but cap it lightly. because within 24 hours you're going to see it bubbling. That's how much fermentation is going on. You'll see CO2 carbon dioxide bubbles.

And if you cap it too tightly, you'll actually have an explosion on your hands. Ferment for 48 hours on your kitchen counter. It's going to taste like sparkling juice. If you used apple cider, it's going to taste like apple soda. If you did grape juice, it's going to be grape soda. We only consume a half, I'm sorry, quarter a half cup per serving, maybe twice a day or so. Because there is still some sugar. the fermentation process reduces the sugar by 50%

but distill some sugar so you want to be overexposed the sugar but it's a delicious and fun way it's virtually foolproof to just do this on your kitchen counter interesting and this is your way amazing and are all those

go ahead this is a way of taking the low counts in the probiotic they sell you and increasing the counts for a greater effect it is so genius I just want to tell you like I just I love what you've done with this to put it in food and give us the power to be able to make it on our own.

It's just incredible. Are all those recipes in your book? Is that everything you're talking about? So if people want to read more up on it? They all are except for the Sacramice-Balardi juice, sparkling juices, because I thought of that only like eight months ago. Of course, yeah. The problem when you write a book, you have to have it ready to go, you know, a year or so before it actually comes out to the world. I get that. I get that. What do you, how do you feel about fasting? So that's my passion. I have a book

coming out in December called Fast Like a Girl. And, you know, the research I've seen on fasting is that it's a beautiful way to get some die off of some of these bad bacteria. And I'm wondering if we break a fast with your yogurts. We break a fast with the sparkling. And so you're killing the bacteria while you're fasting, but then you're adding the good bacteria in. Have you, have you tried that? And what are your thoughts on fasting? We haven't looked at it formally, but I'm going to bet you're right that this is a way to accelerate the process. The downside of fasting is you kill off bad microbes and good microbes. So there's, it's not, in other words, fasting isn't selective for one or the other. And so doing what you're

suggesting as re-implanting the good guys is a really good idea, especially the ones that take up resin small bowel and produce bacteriacin. So that's a really good idea. Yeah. Yeah, I came up with it when I was treating so many SIBO patients. I was like, okay, let's just starve these suckers out. But what I struggled with is to find the right thing to reintroduce. So you just gave me, like, I can't wait to dive into the book and try the different recipes and then just experiment with that. So those of you that have been following me for a while, let's all do. that and then give us, give us feedback. Because I look at fasting as just let's wipe the slate clean and now let's repopulate. Kind of like tilling you're getting rid of the old dirt in your garden

and then putting new dirt in that can actually your garden can grow from. That's the way I look at it. So how have you found that and people need a probiotic at all after they do this, this yogurt in your, in your community? You know, as time goes on, I think some people view probiotics as the solution and they're not. Unfortunately, the current most commercial probiotics are really nothing more than haphazard collections of microbes. So in other words, there are a number of things not incorporated. There's no awareness of what are called guilds or consortia of bacteria.

So the only person I have, the only product I know that does that is a product called sugar shift, formulated by my friend, Dr. Raulchano, who is a 40-year academic microbiologist. And Raul asked this question, can we get a collaborative group of organisms that in this case consume fructose, sucrose, and glucose in the GI tract? And we gave this to 20 people, and it reduced fasting glucose by 9.8 milligrams in non-diabetics, which is on a par with metformin, with no side effects. Crazy. And so that's an example of a guild or consortium.

But I know of no other product that does that, where they actually put together a collaborative guild. Or the counts are too low. So if it's $2 billion or $5 billion, one of the things we don't have a lot of in the microbial world is dose response evidence. So for instance, there's a study in which ritori, the 6475 strain, was given to ladies versus placebo.

And the ladies on rhodorai had 50% less, bone loss over a year than placebo ladies that was 10 billion per day well if 10 billion does that what does a hundred billion do nobody knows so we lack a lot of dose response though i think the evidence little by little is inching towards the idea that high counts are what we want like 50 billion a hundred billion maybe even a trillion i've done that i've taken a trillion by the way of rotterine in several occasions with no ill effect um yeah there's some other there's a a failure to include keystone species. If you don't have gastroide, you made a mistake. If you don't have rotorite, you've made a mistake.

And so all you're taking, say, is lactobacill's brevis and biophobic bacteria longum. That's an incomplete probiotic. So there's a lot of problems with current crop products. And then there's always gimmicks with the probiotics, spore-based. There is no evidence, zero, to tell us that spore-based is superior. That's nonsense. The marketing says things like, well, these survivors, spores survive stomach acid and bile. Well, so do the promontics, too. There may be some declining counts, but they survive. Their rotorite, for instance, is perfectly comfortable at a pH of 1.5.

Extreme acidity and sufficient to burn your finger off. You put it in it in. So there's a lot of gimmickery. There's one product getting a lot of press that has, it's double encapsulated. well why would it's double encapsulated so that it releases its microbes into the colon what about the 160 million people with sebo you want release in the small so there's a lot of this gimmickery going on this recent product came out uh it's claimed of famous that it contains 115 species and i can't tell where it comes from because they're saying it comes from food then they say it comes from a human don't know but 115 different species most of which aren't even labeled properly.

And half of them are what are called proteobacteria, fecal microbes. I wonder if the FDA is going to clamp down on that one, because, and I took it, I got sick. So I won't say the name, but it's one that has 115 strength, half of which are fecal microbes, proteobacteria. And so there's a lot of gimmickory in the probiotic.

It's going to improve. as people like you and talk about these kinds of things, maybe even formulate some ourselves. But right now, the last thing on the list that helps restore a microbiome is a probiotic. It shouldn't be that way, but it is that way today. Yeah. Well, and we've commercialized them now. So everybody thinks that's going to be the solution, right, to their gut problems. So what do you think? One thing I've thought a lot about is we've spent so much time in medicine focused on human cells.

and we're just starting to appreciate the microbiome. Do you feel like in the new health, the way that you and I want to see the health care sort of emerge, do we need to sort of look at microbes as having an influence over the human cells and stop trying to manipulate the human cells but actually work on changing the microbiome to enhance whatever is going on inside our cells? Yeah, you're hitting on a very popular new concept in the world. of the microbiome is the concept of the so-called holobiome. That is that we're not humans.

We are humans accompanied by trillions of microbes in every orifice. Exactly. The crazy thing is, as you know, is all the organs we thought were sterile or not. They're teeming with microbes, the brain, the urinary bladder. You know, I've treated thousands of malaria tract infections over the years. And you always think, oh, you want your urine to be sterile? No, you don't. You want your urine to be filled with microbes, but the right microbes.

There's a really cool conversation going on in the gynecologic world. And that is the urinary microbiome is determined by the vaginal microbiome. Because we can't really directly change the urinary microbiome. There's nothing you can do to change directly. But you can change the vaginal microbiome. So some of the new science and the vaginal microbiome shows that a healthy vaginalibium is dominated by lactobacillus crispotus and other lactobacillus species. It is lacking in bacteria like garterola vaginalis and adipobium and fecal microbes. Now here's the twist.

One third of all women in the world have the opposite. they have very little lactobacillus crispottis and other lactobacillic and they have proliferation of gardeneralla and adipobium and fecal microbes as well with candida and fungal organisms a third and the big risk beyond just irritation discharge etc the big risk is premature delivery of a child in a third of the women in the world and so that sign and that is the presumptive cause of repeated urinary attract infections, or at least a lot of them. Interesting.

The bodice in the urine is protective. You know what's interesting that you bring up the vaginal microbiome. I recently have been looking at what the connection between the health of the vaginal area, including the cervix and how it plays out in the other parts of our body. So, for example, in utero, I don't know if you knew this, I just recently learned this, that our vocal cords and our cervix originally were of the same tissue. and then they separate out and they become your vocal cords, they become your your cervix.

And if you look at the tissue themselves, like if you actually go and look at them, Google them, you'll see they look very, very similar. So could you use, you know, the yogurts like this? I don't know if you're doing it like as a douche or if you have to just, you just eat it, but could we start to look at the vaginal area, the microbiome is the vaginal area,

to start to affect all other areas, in a woman's body. Do we know anything about that? Yeah, that's an emerging concept, this idea of cross-talk between species and also translocation. So I find remarkable a woman can take, let's just say lactobacillus chryspotis. By the way, when you and I talk about these things, your listeners have to know that. Sometimes we're talking about the science that has not yet been commercialized. So it's really tough to find lactobacillus crispotus, but you can. Like Jero has a a product called Geraldophilus women. And that does have the crispotis in it.

So there's going to be more and more products to do this because there's some hurdles to go through regulatory and commercial, going from the laboratory to a commercial product. And so there's a delay of typically a couple of years between science and then commercialization. But I find it remarkable. A woman can take, let's say, lactobacillus crispitis, orally, and it will populate her vagina.

and her bladder. Well, how did it get there? There's no connection that anybody knows of. Well, it's presumptively by contiguity because they're near each other in the perineum. You know, they're real close, so they somehow share. So that's also true.

It's kind of creepy. It's also true of the fecal microbes. So that whole area is a big party area. It's got all kinds of stuff being shared. So, but there's also, a reverse example would be, fusobacterium nucleotum. This is a microbe that we all have in our mouths.

By the way, the mouth is the second most densely populated microbiome after the colon. So think about that when you kiss your honey. Well, one microbe that incorporates is called bacterium nucleotum. And if you have gingivitis or even worse, periodontitis, the populations of fusobacterium go way up. and then it implants itself in your colon, where it's associated with colon cancer. If I take that microbe, put it in a mouse with a normal colon, it gets colon cancer. If you look at colon cancer from a human that's been taken out,

it's filled with fusibacterium. Now, here's the kicker. How did it get from here to colon? Well, swallowing, right? No. It gets filled by the bloodstream. Yeah. So cross-talk.

It's becoming clear now. Another one, if a woman takes Bithyrtebacteria infantis, like the Avivo strain, EVC-Zer1 strain, that has the best science from UC Davis. If a woman takes that microbe, it populates her mammary glands so that when she breastfeeds her baby, the baby gets you. Well, how did he get from the gas from testal tract to the mammary gland? But it's become clear. There's cross talk of all. sorts going on. Good and bad. You know what worries me is there's some very elegant work from Ruth Alonzo's lab in Spain where they did something crazy. They took brains of people who died,

young people who died in traumatic accidents like car accidents and then stained the brain for fungi, no fungi. They took the brains of people who were old but didn't die of dementia, moderate fungal infestation. They took the brains of people who died of Alzheimer's, filled like a Wyoming sky at night, filled with fungus. They took it further. They looked for fungal proteins in the bloodstream and the cerebral spinal fluid in people filled with fungal proteins in DNA. And then the real kicker, a Harvard group about two years ago showed that, you know, the stuff that accumulates in people with dementia is beta amyloid plaque. And there are drugs. effectively reduce beta amyloid plaque.

There's several of them. And they all make your dementia worse. So the, wow. The theory is undergoing change. Maybe beta amyloid plaque is not the cause. Maybe it's a consequence. So this Harvard group looked at the microbial effects of beta amyloid plaque. It's not a very good antibacterial.

It's an excellent potent antifungal. Isn't that interesting? Well, what the hell? That's crazy. Does that mean there's an important subset of people with dementia that's due to fungal infestation? And if so, where did it come from? Well, some people like Dale Bredesen say the sinuses. I say it's the colon.

I say it's the GI tract. Because as you know, as common as SIBO is, CFO, small intestinal, fungal, or at least colonic overgrowth of fungi, is also very, very common. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I listen to you talk, I'm like, we have. got health all wrong. And I just so grateful, you know, again, the books you've put out into the world have transformed the paradigm. You know, you're shaking the paradigm up. So I love that because the paradigm

of health is not working. If it was working, we wouldn't have all the chronic diseases that we have. So I just so grateful for you. What's the next book, by the way? Do we have another book in the, in your brain there? Well, I do. And I don't want to say the title. It's work. title because I think it's a good title. The question I'm asking. Yeah, I get it. One thing we have to be mindful of, as you know, that you and I talk before I started recording is that people like you and me

and other book authors on health are no longer welcome in big media because of the influence of drug advertising and the flow of revenue. So, and as I mentioned you, I had a publisher even say to me, if we can't make money publishing books on health, maybe we won't publish books on health. Well, how do we continue to get this message out? It's hard. Through books. Well, what if we kind of give it a non-health spin?

So one of the things I've been thinking about is, you know, so almost all of us have lost rotter eye and thereby oxytocin. Does that mean the intensity of love and affection today is much less than it was 50 years ago or 100 or 1,000 years ago? And could this be at least part of the explanation behind? the exploding divorce rate, suicide, depression, isolation. I think I'm not so silly as I suggest that's a sole solution, but I think it's a big part of the solution. Because I see it all reversing now. People are telling me, ladies will come and say, you know,

my husband is normally not very demonstrative. He's been eating the yogurt and he says to me out of the blue, hey, honey, you know, I've always liked you. I like you more now. come here sit next to me please or I choose myself to strangers in line for coffee at Starbucks something I never

did before or I accept the differences of opinions they have a right to their opinion and I respect it I mean a complete change but is it also true for the intensity of love and affection I think it is tough as hell to prove oh but you can do it I

I love where you're going with this so one of the things that I did was I got the oxytocin blood and salivate levels on three indigenous populations. So I called Paul Zach. He's a faculty member at Claremont in California. And he did something crazy. He went into the deep jungles of New Guinea. And he says the first thing at Strikes You is the stink of filthy humans. But he said there were warm, wonderful people. But he said they were so unbathed that it took four alcohol swabs just to find a vein. So he draws their blood and runs the oxytocin level.

So these are people living in the jungle. There's no antibiotics. There's no glyphosate. There's no herbicides and pesticides. There's no stomach acid blocking drugs, not that stuff. So presumptively untouched by Western life. Well, the problem is the methods to measure oxytocin are so wildly variable, it's hard to make sense of. So I was hoping to prove that primitive people have much higher levels of oxytocin than we do.

But I'm not sure I can prove that. What if these kinds of superficial interactions that are popular with modern people, like Tinder, you know, back and forth and online data, is this a symptom of the distance we've drawn between each other from the loss of oxytocin? I think it is. And I wouldn't have said that, except that now I see all the people restoring oxytocin and what's happening to them. Amazing.

Oh, my gosh. And if you can restore oxytocin in humans, which restore. restores love and connection and compassion, you will be even more of a hero than I already think you are. So this has been amazing. Again, I really appreciate the way your brain thinks. I really appreciate your work. So keep writing them. Keep more books is better for the world.

So one last question we've been doing this year on my podcast. I've been asking everybody if they have all my guests, if they have a gratitude practice. Do you have a daily gratitude practice that you do? I should. I do not, though I remind myself that as a really powerful practice, because it seems to bring good things to you. So thank you for the reminder. But I will thank you for what you're doing. Because as we talked about, we live in a world where the pharmaceutical industry is so dominant that they have essentially shut us down. That is, we can't get on morning news. We can't get on talk shows anymore. Whereas I was on numerous shows and it all stopped. Yeah. For me, it stopped with the publication of the Undoctored book, but for most of us, any topic now on health and nutrition is no longer welcome. So what you're doing, the podcast world, blogs, websites, summits, all the things that you and others are doing are 10 times more important today than it used to be. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I love that. And, you know, I'm on a mission to change the way that we approach women's health in our health care world. But we're not going to do it through the doctors. We're going to do it through the women. the individually. And what you just talked about today is key. I can't wait to integrate this into my fasting protocols for women. So thank you. Again, this was, this was, this is the highlight of my week. So where do people find you? For sure, they got to go buy your book. But where else can they find you?

Right. So the super gut book available everywhere. And my kind of central site is DR Davis, Infinite Health.com. There's a blog with 2,000 articles on it. There's a very busy forum, discussion form with several hundred thousand posts. There's also, I have an inner circle, which is a membership site. But every once a week, we have about a 90 minute to two hour long conversation, Zoom, two-way Zoom. Typically, 75, 80 people show up at any one time. And we talk about rotari yogurt, the air device, diet, thyroid,

all the stuff that's relevant to what you and I do. I love it. I love it. Well, keep writing books. Keep educating us all. Again, thank you so much. This is so helpful. And I can't wait to get it out into the world.

So appreciate you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.