Dr Peter Dingle on Gut Secrets: A Blueprint to your Microbiome

Hey guys. Cribbin Govender from the Gut Health Gurus podcast. I'm Cribbn, I'm a food scientist. My colleague next to me, James Shadrach, is a psychology major, background in psychology. And we have a very special guest with us today, Dr. Peter Dingle. Welcome, Peter.

Fantastic. Thank you. Thanks guys for inviting me on.

Our pleasure. It's been a. I think we kind of operate in a very similar space in that Gut health realm and we literally just met each other I think a couple of weeks ago and I just had that short conversation, I was like, I have to get Peter onto the podcast. And I had a quick look at your group. You've got a very vibrant group in a community, lots of support, so. So I'm really fascinated to have a conversation with you today. Now to set the scene for our audience. Who is Peter Dingle?

Just an ex academic who's passionate about health and I'm passionate about changing people's perspective. I'm sick of seeing people sick and people nowadays become their disease. How I tell you about my arthritis, Let me tell you about this. And I've been in this area for over 30 years and I'm convinced absolutely 95% of all the chronic illness and the pain and all that suffering out there, we don't have to. We really don't have to. And I started out as a, literally as a science teacher over in Victoria. I did a couple of years, traveled the world, realized how big the world was and back then, that was 35 years ago or something, how big it was back then, and went back into study, did a degree in environmental science, got excited another degree, got excited about toxins and so I did my honours all about toxic substances and then that led on to Health. I did my PhD all about toxic substances in the home and health things like everything from glues and varnishes, molds, all those things, and developed a little research group out of the university where I worked for, I think about 21 years and ran a degree there called Health and the Environment. Because my passion was looking at that big picture. All too often our picture of health is looking at one little illness or a condition. I don't even call them illnesses, they're more symptoms and we focus on that. Whereas I have the big picture. I developed a concept and many people have done this, but mine was the Dingle Deal. Why the dingle deal? Because hey, a good rhyme. But the deal stands for diet, environment, attitude and lifestyle. You can't look at one aspect and think you're going to solve it. And that's where medicine goes so, so wrong. Medicine says, well, everyone's the same, so everyone's an average, which they're not. On top of that, they say, well, we're going to give you this amount and that amount and we're going to treat that part of this illness and deal with that. Where they don't look at what we've known for thousands of years, that your food, your lifestyle, your attitude are all key players. So if you're going to state a depression, it may be some psychological, emotional, physical, nutritional, stress, or all of them combined. And what's their answer? A drug. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. So I've been researching and teaching this for literally 20 years. Look at the big picture and look at all the key players in there. And that led me in about two, I think it was 2003 to start looking at the gut. And we had a research project looking at pregnancies, how the birthing process and allergies and so on, which obviously leads to the gut microbiome. I published a little paper in 2006 on allergies and the gut. And ever since then, I've just been interested in it to the point of it seems to be almost the crux of our health. Everything goes through it. So when I talk about toxins, I now talk about, well, the first place that these toxins have an effect is frequently on the gut. So everyone knows Roundup, right? Roundup gets huge amount of media at the moment. I was campaigning against that back in 87. Now, what you don't realize is Roundup was identified as an antibiotic back in the 90s, but it was classified as an antibiotic in 2003. 01, something like that. It's my action. Its main toxic effect on us, I believe, is through the gut and then the gut ramifications. But to consider Roundup without considering the gut or all these other things, it just doesn't fit together in a health puzzle where complex organisms. But health is simple if we just approach it that way. And, you know, I've been researching the gut and last year, last year we wrote about one book called Gut Secrets that I did, and that's got a thousand references, by the way. My wife says I'm ocr, Obsessive compulsive researcher. I just love it if I can spend three hours on the computer before my wife demands her first cup of tea in the morning.

I feel blessed now, Peter, with your wife, Correct me if I'm Wrong. But did your wife have some form of gut dysfunction?

No, no, no, no. She's a naturopath.

Right. Okay.

No, no, no. She's pretty. I'm. Put it this way, everyone's got dysfunction. I'm convinced, okay. Everybody whether right now, but. And unless you're listening to this podcast and doing something about it, then you do have a gut problem. And on it. But Martine, my wife, is a naturopath here in Fremantle. He doesn't practice as much as she would like to because we're traveling. We do a traveling roadshow every year. You know, literally traveling around the country, giving running lectures. We do about 100 talks a year.

Right.

She wrote the book called Ready, Set, Gut. And I wrote another book the year earlier called Overcoming Illness, which is all about inflammation, oxidation and acidosis, which is the cornerstone and which, by the way, and the main place in our body that that is all dealt with is through the gut. So for the last five years, we've been pretty well concentrating on the gut. So I'm just excited because everyone now knows gut. They've heard the word gut. I tried to run a seminar on it five years ago and no one came except people with fat bellies.

They must have read the keyword on the.

There you go. That's it.

Of the talk and thought it's something to do with losing weight. It must have been. It's either a different Peter Dingle, but I was reading something about. Was it someone that had cancer or something in your family?

Oh, no, no, no. Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. That was my late wife.

Oh, okay.

About 12 years ago, passed away and somehow she had rectal cancer. But somehow I got blamed for. Was really interesting because at that stage I had my own radio program. I was on TV twice a week and I was really hammering the food companies, the drug companies. I wrote a book called the Great Cholesterol Deception. I actually. One comment I made led to the public servant in Western Australia resigning. So I had that very big dingle, Peter Dingle hate group going, oh, my God. And so there was a very, very big campaign against me that was personally devastating. But and almost. And almost made us give up our journey. And we said, no, we can't, because we just see too much of this. So my, you know, eight years, eight years later or what, 12 years since that time and five years, eight years since the event that caused us almost to give up where we're passionate and nothing is going to stop us by someone shooting me. And I often joke about that, but shouldn't.

Yeah, It's a scary time, isn't it?

When you look, we're competing with this information. We're competing with drug companies that make trillions of dollars. You know, on another event, another talk, I'll talk about medications if you want, and why they don't work and why they never will work. But I will tell you that most of the medications that they use out there are derived from herbs, from plants. So the metformin for diabetes, cholesterol medication, statins from red rice, yeast, you know, all of them. All of them. So when people, I love it when the medical professions say, well, you know, these herbs and nutrients don't work. And then what do they do? Ah, they're using just extracts of herbs. Funny world, isn't it?

It's. Yeah. I was recently at a conference and there was a lot of, I guess the pharmaceutical based companies, but there is a lot of interest in, I guess, probiotics. It's almost a gold rush. And what these companies do is they typically look at sourcing a probiotic from whether it's a fermented food or whether it's from the gut of a person. And they look to patent these probiotics so they own it.

And they medicalize everything. Like the fecal transplants, the poo transplants that people are doing now and are being promoted and are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And at the end of the day it's a problem, it's a medicalization. And I say don't wait till you get to that stage, fix it now. Every single day, a little bit of the day, every time is what you want to do. Because even if you do a fecal transplant, you're still gonna have to feed it, you're still gonna have to feed it from above so that you know, it can, it can all be regrow. And then by the way, you just gotta hope that the shit of that person is good too, the stuff you're getting.

That's an excellent point because.

And we don't know, and we really don't know because there are viruses that we still don't know how to measure, monitor and do things. And when you've got a cocktail of however many thousands or hundreds of microorganisms in our gut, they still can't identify them all. There's a lot of guesswork going in. And you're putting that in your body. Yeah, Reminds me of the old AIDS days and the when blood transfusions and everyone thought was okay. And then we've got these other things happening coming in.

That's an excellent point. I mean, fecal transplants, I think, are one of the ways. And we talk about this. There's a guy doctor in China that's supposedly created the first genetically modified baby publicly known anyway. But I think, well, you know, a fecal transplant in itself is a way to manipulate genes because, as you know, Peter, most of the genes in the body are not. That begs a question, you know, the safety as well, because there's so much to learn, there's so little we know about the virome, the metabolome, the microbiome. All these are really frontier areas of science. So I think while there's a lot of promise in fecal transplants, there also comes with risks, as you've pointed out. So what else is piquing your interest at the moment in the gut health world?

Well, look, starting in the gut health, I think we're going to have five hours to talk, which is great. I can do that nonstop. The point that I try to get across to people in my talks is that the gut health is the single biggest health issue confronting Australians and any Western nation around the world. Now, people don't realize, they go, what? What about. I've written a book on weight loss and obesity. I'll tell you, big cost. But part of the obesity problem is because of the gut. So there's always a part of it in every illness. And then people say, but what about smoking? You know, smoking here in Australia, the rates are going down. But I can tell you right now the cost of sick gut in Australia outweighs that of tobacco smoke injury and damage and weight gain damage, simply because it links with every single condition. And as you highlighted, kibbon that we've got roughly, give or take something, the estimates are maybe 500, maybe 1,000 microbiome and 100 trillion, maybe 40 million, you know, 40 trillion. The guess where a lot of scientific guesswork going on. And those they have, you know, maybe up to 100 times the amount of genetic material that we do. So they can. And as we now know, through a process called epigenetics, they can talk with our genes and they can talk with different things. So what that means is that, you know, we've just discovered that that microbiome in our gut is a part of our evolutionary process, that rather than developing a second head and second br to be able to cope with things, we've developed a gut microbiome that takes on a lot of the roles and responsibilities to do with our health. And as a result of that what we find is that anything goes wrong with our gut microbiome. It influences every single health condition. I can't find a health condition that isn't linked. At one of my talks, someone said, oh, what about bipolar? And I said, ah, yeah, I've seen the results. But the next morning, in fact, that night, I got home after the talk, got online, found 30, 30 articles linked with the gut and bipolar, and sent them straight to him. On another talk, I was mentioning, you know, diabetes type, diabetes and the gut. And someone said, ah, you know, you mean diabetes type 2? And I said, no, type 1. Type 1. And since about 2010, there have been many studies, not as many as we need yet, but many studies showing the direct link between diabetes type 1 and the gut, or I should say the gut and diabetes type 1. So the causative factor. And there was a really interesting mouse experiment because, you know, they do. They do experiments on mice and rats and rabbits and then eventually humans with the fecal transplants. That was sarcasm there. So. But what they did was they were able to reduce the risk of diabetes type 1 in these mice that are prone to develop diabetes by 90% simply by altering the gut microbiome.

That's amazing.

Yeah. So you say, you know, what does that translate in humans? Well, maybe it's 90%, maybe it's 50%, maybe it's 30%, 10%, doesn't matter. But it's a big number. And so, you know, I'm trying to get this message out there, mums, mums, dads, family members, grandparents, you know, get out there and fix your gut, fix your gut, fix your kid's gut. And I walk around the supermarket and I cringe, I cringe, you know, it scares me to see what people are eating. And then I go back and read more research and I go, they're even worse than I thought. And the scariest thing of all this is everyone's just going blindly thinking, it's all right, it was all right for me, it's all right. And I'm now seeing. I'm seeing kids 5 years old, 10 years old, teenagers with chronic diseases we never saw until they were in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s, breast cancer in girls and their teenagers and things like that. And it's scary. And people think it's normal. It's not normal to be sick. Your body wants to get back to a state of health, a homeostatic health imbalance, and the best place to work with is the gut. So when we go back and look at the health conditions. Alzheimer's. We know at least 50% of Parkinson's disease is linked directly to the gut. 50%. Now, that means if we go out and tell everyone, hey, fix your gut, we're going to cut down the Alzheimer's rate by 50% diabetes type 2, maybe 10 or 20% diabetes type 1, let's say 30%. Then we go through all these health conditions right through to depression, bipolar. Is it going to make depression disappear? No, but what it will do is help rebalance the body so that the person can actually help cope with the various stresses that are going on in their life. And there are now studies coming out showing how people have been given literally some probiotics and a new gut healthy diet, which is what I prefer, a gut healthy program. And the depression rates have dropped. You know, the depression rates have dropped. And they've done it in controlled studies as best we can with humans and so on. They've done it in mice, they've done it everywhere. So we know that it's linked with all these conditions and we know it has a huge impact. So then the next question is, well, what is a healthy gut? And we don't know because we're all different. We're all different. You know, what, what's a good looking guy? Well, you look at you and think, wow, our gut is so unique to us. Nothing like it in the world. And it's totally different from, you know, my brothers, my wife's, my grandkids, my, you know, whatever it is, you know, it's totally different because of everything that happens in it. Now, there are certain things that can do that, but the best way we measure gut health is by there's two ways. Biodiversity. How many microorganisms in the gut? Now, this includes the goodies and the baddies. And the baddies we'll call opportunistic because they're not really bad. Until there are too many of them.

Yes.

Too many. In the wrong spot, you can actually get good ones, really good ones. Everyone knows Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacteria bifidum infantalis and so on. These are great bacteria, but if they get and grow in the wrong spot, for example, your mouth or in your small intestine, then they're toxic.

Yes.

So it's the right organism. So the thing is, in your large intestine, which is when we're talking about your microbiome, where they all are, or 90% or whatever, where they are, it's about having the biggest biodiversity. It's like a rainforest. A rainforest has so much resilience, a fire comes through, it'll burn in a bit, die off, A pest comes in, it'll eat around the edges, it'll die off. But if you've got a garden or a crop with two or three things growing in it, wheat and rice, a bug comes through, everything gets wiped out the same. So you want a biodiversity of let's say 500 different species growing in varieties growing in your large intestine. So if some get knocked out, others can there and they support each other and they actually have a food web. Remember when we all did a bit of biology back in high school, there was this food web. You know, the fish are eaten by the bigger fish and the bigger fish eat. Now the sharks eat them, then we eat them and there's some cross eat. Exactly the same happens in our microbiome. So we've got a food web in there. And so what we're after is growing a rainforest with a diverse food web in there. And here is the key. The only way you're going to get to know what to do is come to my talks. No joking. It's about eating the biggest biodiversity of foods. So you know people talk about having two and five. No, I talk about 25 a day. 25 different plant based foods a day, yes. And oh no, I'll never be able to eat that. Well, you don't have to eat, you know, 25 serves of potatoes. What I'm talking about little bits. And you know, I'll give people the handy sin. I go out and nibble on my rosemary bushes, my oregano, all of my herbs. Now apart from the fact that all of these herbs are antibiotic to the worst type of bacteria and help, for example, they control helicobacter, which is the one that causes ulcers and cancers and so on. And it also controls Candida. So just by nibbling on it, it's not going to wipe them out, but it's going to help keep the pressure on them so that their numbers stay low. But on top of that I get all the rosemary fiber and the rosemary big chemical molecules called polyphenols. The stuff we get in green tea polyphenols and the red wine resveratrol polyphenols and chocolate polyphenol you get in every food and they're all a little bit different. The fiber is a bit different, the polyphenols are a bit different. The biggest diversity of the littlest amounts of food that's the way I put it. So nibble on that. Nibble on a bit of lavender and you go, oh, that tastes terrible. Well, you get over it, will you? When I tell this to people, oh, that sounds inconvenient. You know what's inconvenient? Having your leg cut off because of diabetes type 2 when you're 40. Absolutely, that's inconvenient. And they say, oh, it doesn't taste nice. You know what doesn't taste nice? Hospital food. I try to get across to people, sure, you know, you don't have to be this superhero person, but you've got to get off these ultra processed foods. And if it's in a pack and it doesn't look like something that came out of a seed, out of the ground or off a tree, then you've got to cut it down. You've got. There is no option. There is no option for help. No matter what rubbish we're promoted by the health departments and health organizations. There is no option. We have to de ultra process our food. That's a terrible sentence, but you get the idea. Get that out and we've got a nibble. We've got to nibble on the greens, we've got a nibble on the reds, the blues, the purples, and get as many of these as possible. And here is a fabulous hint. You've got to do some of it raw. You've got to do some of it raw. Because raw isn't just good because it's got more polyphenols and more fiber in it, but it's also got probiotics on it, it's prefermented, it's still got probiotics. So every little bit of raw. And it's got the enzymes to digest the food, by the way, I do a lot of work with people who have gastric problems. Reflux, another condition called sibo and I just have the same system. And we have hundreds of people who walk away, you know, and go, wow, I didn't realize it was going to be so cheap and so simple.

And so, Peter, let's dig into this a little bit. So sick person comes into your office, they're exhibiting some forms of digestive, by.

The way, I'm not a medical doctor, so they don't come into my office. I see him at my talks.

Your talks? Okay.

Yeah. And my dogs.

Thank you for clarifying. Say, there's an audience member puts their hands up. I'm suffering with xyz. How do you approach it? What's the protocol for addressing These concerns.

Well, you know what I say is I go back to the science every time, and I say, okay, remember what I said about the acid stomach? The stomach has to be acid, but I've got too much ass. So I said, who told you that? My gpa? Did he measure it? No, hold on. Your stomach acid is. Actually has a pH of one, hydrochloric acid. You can't get any more acid than that. So how can it be 2 acid? You're meant to actually have a pH of 1. And then when the food. The food's broken down, it goes to 2, 3, 4, 5, and then it goes back and it breaks down. And if your stomach doesn't have a PH of two, again, extremely about the same level as vinegar, ph of 2. If it doesn't have a ph of 2, then it can't break down many of the big proteins. So that's all. So people. People are. Most Australians now are running around protein deficient. All the big bodybuilders, protein deficient. Sure, they might have muscles, but they don't have the neurotransmitters and the hormones and the proteins and amino acids that do everything else around the body. You know, tryptophan, serotonin, melatonin, you know, all of these ones that people have heard of all come from amino acids. And if you don't have the strong stomach acid, you don't get the minerals either. Things like. Things like iron, zinc, all rely on us. All rely on us having a strong stomach acid. And then if you don't have a strong stomach acid, it doesn't kill the bacteria. So Helicobacter loves it. The bacteria goes, oh, I'm gonna have a party. I'm gonna rapidly reproduce. So I teach people, and in chemistry, the ph, the acid level is one of the basic concepts. And so you've got to have an acid stomach. And by the way, it has another dozen functions. So when people say, oh, I've got an acid stomach, I say, no, you don't. There's a 95% chance. I think it's 99, but I'll be conservative. There's a 95% chance it's not acid enough. And what's happening is because it's not digesting, it can't go anywhere. Your body won't let it through into your small intestine unless it's ready to be processed to the next level. And for that to happen, it has to have a strong pH. You see, one of the ways that your body measures different things to do Things is from ph. So your PH of your small intestine determines how fast the things move through or if they don't move through. Your PH of your stomach determines what opens and closes to let things through into the small intestine. So it's critical to get that ph balance right throughout the whole body, throughout the whole digestive system. And here is my great conundrum that people love. A more acid stomach leads to less acidosis in the body. Acidosis is a health condition where there's too much acidity and an acid stomach reduces that acidity in the body. Ah, how and why? Well, that's another talk. But, you know, it just goes back. So you fix the ph. So this person comes up and they say, you know, I've got gastric reflux. Well, what are the 10 things I listed up on my talk? Okay, you can do apple cider vinegar. I don't like the taste of it, whatever it is. Okay, here's another one. Here's another thing. Here's another thing you can do. Eat smaller meals. Da, da, da, da. And I go through a list and we've had people contact us the next day to say, I've had this condition for 27 years. Thank you. We've also had people come up and say, I've been on These drugs called PPIs, proton pump inhibitors that stop the production of your hydrochloric acid in your stomach. And they're only supposed to go on it for weeks or a month or something. That's what the regulations, that's what the guidelines say. And they're on it for decades. And they come back and they've got all these diseases. Literally their body is shutting down. And they've said, thank you. It's the first time I've heard a proper explanation. I'm not the first to think of it. I'm just the one who's put together a better picture so people can understand it. We've known this for hundreds of years. That's why people have talked about apple cider vinegar for thousands of years. In Hippocrates days, he talked about vinegar and honey for digestion. So we just now know the science of it. So we go through. And the same. And the thing about, let's say, a gut condition like a reflux, that means you're going to have gut conditions all the way through the system because the ph isn't right in the stomach, then the ph isn't going to be right in the small intestine, the large intestine, and at the rectum so you're going to have gut problems all the way down. So you'll find that people who have reflux also have another condition called cited sibo, or have an inflammatory bowel condition like colocolitis or another autoimmune condition because the whole system isn't working. It's like a production line, you know, of a car. If. If they're not putting the chassis on properly, you're never going to end up with a car that looks like a car and works like a car. And so digestion cannot occur until you get it right. And by the way, it begins first in the mouth. Actually, it begins first in the brain. Let's physically talk about the mouth. It has to be chewed, it has to be raw, it has to be smaller amounts, it has to be unprocessed food. Then you start talking about regaining your health. What's really interesting is about some stuff I'm talking about and the science is there, okay? There's heaps and heaps of science, heaps and heaps of science supporting it directly and indirectly. And the health authorities will say, oh, no, just stick to the two and five. Oh, no, do this, you know, oh, no. And then the sad sex go, oh, but we've got diabetes. Oh, we've got increase in this. Kidney cancers are skyrocketing. Chronic kidney illnesses are skyrocketing. Breast cancer in teenager. And everyone says, oh, I don't know why we're doing this. We better get some more research done. Let's pay some more research before I come up with the drug. And I go, no, we know what to do. We do know what to do. You know, it's just crazy, it's just absurd. And we just keep putting it off and, oh, no. But my GP, who was trained 40 years ago, doesn't understand it or 10 years ago even. You know, this is stuff that I read every day and then I put out and, you know, a study today linking periodontal disease, so your tooth decay and gum disease with rheumatoid arthritis. Wow. Yeah. Now, the first of that study was probably done in 2003 that I remember, but this one was a confirmation and they did it, you know, they did differently to support what we already know. Now, periodontal disease, tooth decay, gum disease is linked with heart attacks and strokes. We know that it's linked with diabetes type 2 and all these. And the probable link with all of that is through the gut. That's through the gut. And I mean, if you've got Tutuka, you've got bad bacteria constantly feeding into your gut microbiome, the wrong type. And then you're doing things that aren't right up here. So it's not right down there. As I said, it's a system. You got to treat. You got to deal with the whole system. Now here's a classic on the topic of rheumatoid arthritis. I told you, I need five hours at least. On the topic of rheumatoid arthritis, I just put up a Facebook description of it. It's really simple. I'm not saying you can cure it, but they've actually come up for the last 20 years the way they've actually created the animals to test for drugs on rheumatoid arthritis. So they've got the mice and they go, oh, wait, we want these mice to get rheumatoid arthritis. So then we can test if a drug works. What they do is that they poison the gut microbiome. So they poison the gut microbiome, which kills off and creates a state of dysbiosis in the gut. And then the mice develop rheumatoid arthritis. Hold on. Then we develop a drug to see if we can reverse that. Now, you see the conundrum here, or the paradox, the stupidity of it all, all I've done reverse engineered it and said, hold on, let's not poison the gut microbiome.

Yes.

And the research out there is overwhelmed. And what happens is when you poison the gut microbiome, the microbiome protect the first layer. They're your first layer of protection, your gut microbiome. Then you've got a mucus layer called mucin. Then you've got your cell and your gut wall is only one cell thick, preventing literally all the shit in your intestines. Literally all that fermenting, yucky, should be green, green stuff, okay? Preventing that from getting into the blood is one cell. And so on top of that, you've got the mucus layer. And then on top of this, the bacteria and the good bacteria protected. Now, if the good bacteria are wiped out, the bad bacteria eat away the mucin layer, the mucus layer, and they've got direct access to the gut wall and then the gut wall under stress because it's not getting fed by the good ones, it's not being looked after, cared for. The good bacteria are like the shepherds of our gut cells. They feed it and they look after it and they nurture it, massage it, do all those good things. And by the way, not really. Not really massage, okay? But you get the idea. It looks after them, it nurtures them. And if they're not there, the bad ones go down there and poison it. And they chew all the mucus layer that the body produces to protect you. And as they die off, they send all these toxins into the blood and some of them will be intercepted and you'll end up developing an allergic disease to it. You know, there might be a big molecule coming through because of the breakdown in layer. It might be a peanut, a peanut molecule, peanut protein, or a dust mite allergen called Derpy1. It gets through there and your immune system identifies and says, okay, there's too many of these. We're going to make a reaction to it to shut it down. That might be one or the other one it sends. And this is where we get under rheumatoid arthritis. It sends the chemicals through one particular called LPS lipopolysaccharide. And these lipopolysaccharides get through the gut wall because it's got a leaky gut now, it's got virtual holes in it. And it goes to wherever your body has a little bit of. A little bit of damage and inflammation and it multiplies it by a hundred. So if you've got old basketball and knees or ankles or, you know, karate chop hands or whatever they are, then you get the arthritis in those joints in those positions. But what causes that multiplier factor, and it's my guesstimate to say really, no, we don't know, is the fact that this chemical gets through. And the studies that have been done, and a lot of these are inadvertent studies, like, you know, the let's reverse the mind, how we poison the mice gut and things like that. But people who take collagen, they think, oh, collagen. They take it so that they look, you know, get beautiful skin. But what they found is if they take collagen, a lot of these people, their arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, disappears or becomes significantly less in a week or two weeks or three weeks. And they go, wow, it must be going through to my knee joints. And I'm going, no, not possible. The blood flow to your knee is really. The turnover of cells is in months and years. It's just not going to happen. So what's it doing? It's repairing the gut wall. Yes, it's only a superficial repair. It's a band aid, but it's a superficial repair of the gut wall because collagen is a major connective tissue, not for just our skin and our bones and everything else, but for our gut wall. And the turnover of our gut wall cells is in minutes, hours. So the repair occurs really, really, really quickly. So the cells get their collagen, they can repair. And then as a result, as a result, the reverse arthritis, the LPS doesn't get through anymore. And reverse arthritis, wow. Rheumatoid arthritis starts to disappear. Now, the collagen, by the way, isn't a solution, it's a band aid. There are so many, many other things that we talk about and you talk about, about healing the gut repair, but it shows you how the whole system works. And the unfortunate thing is I'm on some really big Facebook pages on this and whenever I post something up, it doesn't get there because people are really happy. It seems people are really happy just to complain about their rheumatoid arthritis and not fix the gut. The good thing about this, okay, I'm not saying it's going to solve all of the ra, rheumatoid arthritis, but you know, the side effect, even if it doesn't fix your rheumatoid arthritis, it's going to fix other aspects of your health. And here is a classic rheumatoid arthritis. People I only found out in the US can't get health insurance. If you've got ra, you've got all these other health conditions. For example, you're more likely to develop fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, diabetes, type 2 diabetes, type 1, heart attacks, strokes, extra cancers and so on, which, by the way, is all linked through the gut, which is what I said in the beginning. So if you start to fix the gut, you start to fix everything. And these people and on these Facebook pages I go onto, with tens of thousands of people, the best I can put up is, have you considered looking at the gut? Yeah, we're just going to get that message out there. You know, rheumatoid arthritis, all of these conditions, whether 5% or 95%, come back to the gut. So if we can fix the gut using a strategic approach, which is what I talk about, and again, look, I'm a firm believer in probiotics, but the problem with probiotics is that it's a one off. And most of the research shows that if you take the probiotics, you have a benefit. And then over a period of anywhere from days to weeks, maybe months, it goes down. And so how do you sustain that benefit without having to take probiotics every single day for the rest of your Life. Well, my take on that is you feed them. You feed them. So you take the probiotics, but at the same time, you feed it. And my standard line is, you know, it's no good having probiotics on white bread and a spoonful of sugar doesn't help the medicine go down. It poisons your gut microbiome. So taking these things, there's no option out there. There is no option. You know, I've seen these people line up for organic donuts. I'm sorry. Yeah, look, I'm a big believer in organic, but not organic donuts. It's still crappy over processed sugary substances that literally poison the gut microbiome. So we have to, we have to. Someone has to stand up and say it gets back to basics. It gets back to basics. And it doesn't. You don't have to be a vegetarian. You don't have to be a radical raw food eater. You don't have to. But you've got to do more of it. And the answer is simple. The more of it you do, the better the return. It's an investment in your health. Invest a little bit, you'll get a little return. Invest a lot. You know the outcome. Best years in the world.

I'll press pause for a sec there. We're pretty much. We're coming up to time, Peter, if you wouldn't mind staying on for a couple more minutes, we'll just dig into your latest work because you mentioned about feeding the microbiome, and I'm really excited about your work that you're conducting at the moment around fiber. And maybe you can go into. You're in the process of writing a new book. Just some quick takeaways or highlights of some of the research that you're looking at at the moment.

Yep. Okay, look, I'm glad you said takeaways, because I believe in the future, McDonald's will have their fiber bun. This is where it's going to go. Because, you know, after, after our books on gut health, you know, Gut Secrets and Ready Said gut Health, we said, okay, what's next? And although probably 95, maybe 99% of the research on the gut has gone into the probiotics and the guard and fecal transplants and all those things, what seemed this huge gap was the stuff on fiber. So I just started looking at it over the last 12 months. And the more I look into it, the more I believe that it's the biggest part of the solution. Now, when we talk about fiber, it's confusing. You've Got your soluble and insoluble, you got your resistant starch, you've got your prebiotics. I won't try and define them for people here, but just saying the more fiber, the better, the more fiber from more sources. See, every bit of fiber has its own reactions. We used to think it was just prebiotics that fed the Lactobacillus and the Bifido and the other good bacteria in our gut and the saccharomyces, the good molds and things in our gut. But what we've now learned is that it's almost the whole cocktail and we don't know yet. And I actually think we're going to get to a point and this will probably be the title of my next book called Fiber Medicine, where we can actually treat an illness based on the type of fiber that person's not eating. So you might, at the simplest level, give them some psyllium husk. That's always a good one to start with. But then give them some apple pectin, which by the way is different from the per pectin, which is different from the guava pectin because all of the molecules, all of those fiber molecules are really, really long, complex carbohydrate chains and they've just got a couple of extra molecules thrown on the end or thrown in the middle and they're all a bit different and they all feed the same, but just a few extra different ones as well. Which is why I got into the rant in the beginning. Eat 25 different forms of foods and in those 25 different forms of foods, you probably have, I don't know, a hundred different types of fiber, 100 different types of fiber that are going to feed the rainforest in your gut. Now, fiber isn't the only one. Polyphenols. These are the thing I mentioned earlier, the things you get and they both feed it. But it's probably, I'd make an academic guess and say it's a two to one ratio, fiber first and polyphenols separately. And what they find is even with the fiber, it's still got polyphenols locked into the fiber. So I'm a big one. Not for juices, but for smoothies and smoothies because we get the whole plant and that's the best way. I'll do a smoothie virtually every day. We're actually going away on a three day camp farm, stay with our grandkids and we're taking the smoothie maker. That's the only bit of cooking equipment we're Taking with us because the grandkids know they love their smoothies. And in the smoothies we'll throw in anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen different types of plant based foods. Linseed, almonds, sunflower, whatever we can get. You know, we'll throw in to get the greatest diversity of fibers. And you remember the study, you remember the study I mentioned about the diabetes type 1 and the mice? That was done with fiber. No probiotics, it was done with fiber. Now I think we're kind of 10 or 20 years away from understanding how it is. But you know, for diabetes type 1, you can take these or diabetes 2, or if you've got blocked artery, you can take that. Oh, by the way, I read a great pomegranate. You know, pomegranate. A pomegranate a day unblocks your arteries over three years. So the total blockage disappears. Just with pomegranate. Yeah, I'm getting off the track. But again, why does it work? Because of the polyphenols and the fiber. Yes, that's why it works. It's the first port of call of all food in the gut. So I say, you know, if you don't feed, you feed the gut and the gut feeds you. Feed the gut, the gut will feed you. And you look after the gut, it'll look after you. And the best one is fiber from the biggest and most diverse sources. You can actually imagine anything, anything with fiber, everything from a plant that's got fiber in. And the unfortunate thing about Australians is we probably have about 10 grams of fiber and we should be consuming, you know, the authorities say 35, but if you look at the hunter gatherer, they did probably 100, 200, even 300 grams. They also probably went to the toilet a lot more than we did.

I think you've raised some magnificent points there. I think circling back to the fecal transplant, you know, the analogy of, you know, having that someone else's pruning you in there, but then eating the same crappy food is not going to do you any benefit. It's the same thing about, you know, having probiotics, you know, and again, not feeding the organisms in the gut. It's, it's, it's really, I guess the next step, I think is where we're headed because, you know, whether it's fiber, whether it's prebiotics, whether it's just good diet, including lots and lots of variety of different colored plant foods, polyphenols from herbs and spices, and this is highly critical to actually Nurturing this rainforest or this garden so that it's producing all these beneficial compounds like short chain fatty acids, vitamins, neurotransmitters. And this is really, it's simple, right, Peter? It's not hard. It's just taking the crap out and eating really clean food. Now, just a couple of rapid fire questions. Just hold on a second.

Just to prove this is real life.

Yes.

Here's my granddaughter. She's just coming on to be a part of this seminar.

What a kiddie. So just to wrap things up really quickly, couple of rapid fire questions. The first question is, who is inspiring you in the sort of gut health world at the moment? Is there anybody that pops to mind in terms of inspiring you?

No, no, I just get excited by the research. You know, the stuff that, wow, even though I've been reading on this for 20 years, I still find something new every day. Every day.

Is there a particular university or study or.

No, I don't even know where it is. I honestly don't. I just read the research. I see some recurring names, but I don't know any of them. And I just read the research and I go, wow, you know, that's really interesting. Australia's got some great research on, you know, coming up on different aspects of it. And you know what I. What I'd. What I would love to see. And this is a problem with science. Science is reductionist. So we tend to do one little nutrient looked on one condition over a period of here and control it. And then we complain that, well, we're not getting results because one nutrient isn't enough and it needs to work through a gut microbiome. So I'd actually, and some people do this. I'd love to see where you get a group of people and you totally work on their gut. All you need is 10 people who are sick work on their gut for two months, three months and see the reversing. Now Pete Evans has done this in his movie. I love Pete, he's great. I love what he does out there. He's just a better looking, younger version of me and he cooks a lot better. But I'm the scientist behind it and we know it works, we know it works. And I'd love to see, you know, 10 people out there and maybe we need to crowdfund some money just to do an ad hoc experiment with 10 people with diabetes type 2. And we just work on their gut. They do that, you know, the dingle gut protocol, which, you know, I tell everyone is there's no secrets about it all the stuff I read, I write on and share with. And we get those people and we follow them through. That is the ideal scenario, them reversing their condition in a short period of time. They've done big studies, they've done smaller studies, but it's usually looking at one little thing, you know, one probiotic or one fibre or not even the fiber or one or two supplements and things like that. And that's not enough to reverse 50 years of abuse of your body. It's like saying, I'll give my car a service for the first time in 20 years and think that that's going to fix it. Come on.

Yes, it's regular.

How absurd. We don't. We think more about the car service than we do our own. And that's what we need to change that mentality. And the biggest roadblock in this are the authorities. The authorities, the vested interests. It's incredible. It's incredible the level of corruption and vested interests in all of this and the unwillingness. I'd be happy to do a public debate on any of these topics. I'd love to. On cholesterol medication, on the use of antibiotics, on all of these things, on gut health and say, okay, but nobody wants to. Everyone's just following the two and five. Hold on. We only do two and two, which is two potatoes. We do potato chips and potato fries and we do two bananas a day. That's it. That is leading to the destruction of the human population over three or four or five generations.

Yes.

Because now we're actually losing the microbiome diversity. And if we don't pass it on, then, you know, there's an intergenerational loss of this diversity. And it's diversity that keeps us healthy. So let's go out and do the real experiment, which is everyone actually taking, taking part in what they're doing and then letting us know how easy it was.

Yeah, absolutely. And just the last rapid fire question. If there is one thing, Peter, that someone could do to improve their gut health, first thing that pops in your mind, what would it be?

Fiber.

Fiber. Eat lots of fiber.

Yeah, lots of fibre. Lots of fiber. But a diversity, a diversity of fiber. By the way, you can go, but you can go into supermarkets now and they've got $5 for a bag of three or four different fibers combined. You know, I love it, I love it. Some of it's organic. I love it. And I'd like them to sell. By the way, I don't have shares in any of the supermarkets that I know. Of. But I'd love all the fiber to sell out and head down and get it. Because that is the single best thing you can do to get it started. Because literally without the movement, nothing else will work.

100%.

Sorry. Water. Throwing a lot of water.

100%. Two very important things. So Peter, it was such a fun, jovial discussion with you. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm so grateful for you coming on and sharing some of your knowledge. So appreciative. If there is, you know, people out there that want to connect with you, they're interested in your books, they're interested in your work. How can they find you?

Well, we've got a website which is www.drdingle.com doctordingle.com We've got an events page up there which shows you all the events we're doing around Victoria and South Australia. Then we're heading. We haven't booked in the New South Wales and Queensland and Northern Territory ones, but we'll do at least 80 talks around the country this here, including WA where I'm from. And we've got our books up there on the shop. And again, a great selection. I'm passionate about writing and reading the research. So we've got seven. I've got, I've got a mix of 17 books now and I'll be doing at least one a year from now on. So by the time I die at 120, I should have another. I have another 60 books on the topic.

Awesome. I really appreciate your time. It was such a fun discussion. Thank, thank you for you so much.

Absolute pleasure, guys. Take care. Thank you.