Dr Vincent Pedre on Happy Gut: Lose Weight, Gain Energy and Eliminate Pain

Hey, guys, welcome to the Gut Health Gurus podcast. I'm Cribbin. I'm a food scientist. My colleague here, James Shadrach, all things psychology with a psychology background. And today we have a very special guest coming all the way from New York City, Dr. Vincent Pedre. Vincent, thank you so much for coming onto this podcast.

Hey, guys, it's a pleasure being on with you.

I thought, Vincent, the first question that I have for you just to, I guess, introduce our audience is, who is Vincent Pedre and what do you do?

I'm a traditionally trained medical doctor, but I've had a kind of a circuitous path in medicine because prior to becoming a doctor, I actually almost didn't go to medical school. And I told my parents that I did not want to become a doctor. And the reason behind that was because I had an incredible fear of needles. And I thought, you know, up to this point, I was very good at science, very good at math, and I love science. And I loved the idea of, you know, the whole, you know, altruistic idea of becoming a doctor. But when the reality was getting close and I realized, well, I can't really be in a room with a needle, like, I don't do well. I get all sweaty and cold and pass out. And so I told my parents that I wasn't going to become a doctor. I wanted to go to Wall street and go into finance. So completely polar opposite. Well, they weren't happy. And they said, you know, after it was like an hour long conversation at which. At the end of which I pretty much said, okay, I'm gonna continue and apply to medical school and become a doctor. So I continued on the path and got into medical school and knew that it was coming, but that elephant in the room was still kind of hovering over me, that fear of needles. And I just thought, if I don't conquer this, then I'm going to be like a false doctor. Like, how can I actually become a doctor who is afraid of needles? So I started learning about the autonomic and the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, which coincidentally tie so integrally to gut health. So the balance between the relaxation response, the parasympathetic nervous system, and the fight or flight, which is the sympathetic nervous system. And I decided that I was going to conquer this fear of needles that I had. And the philosophy in my family was never of such to take drugs for things, for mental health issues. It was really more like, if it's a mental issue, then it's something you can figure out. And alter. And I was about maybe 21 years old, and I just started going to the library and picking up books and picked up a book actually called the Relaxation Response and taught myself how to breathe, relearned breathing and diaphragmatic breathing, and started learning how to gain control over that autonomic part of the nervous system through the breath. And the breath then led to meditation. I started reading Deepak Chopra and Dr. Andrew Weil, and then that led me to start studying yoga and going to yoga at the same time. My sister was going through divorce and she was really kind of relying on me as a source of support. So I was kind of getting her into meditation and all this. And this is, by the way, 1995. So this is over 20 years ago. In 95, meditation was not the sexy thing that it is now. It was more like, I'm doing this, but I'm not gonna tell anyone what I'm doing because they're gonna think I'm crazy. This is woo woo stuff. But I silently thought, you know, I'm going to hack this seemingly uncontrollable response within my body that would lead to me passing out. And I tell this story because it shaped the type of doctor that I became. Because before I went to medical school, I was already had a regular meditation and breathing practice and had learned to use my breath to help me relax in all sorts of situations, like taking exams in or even going into the first cadaver lab where actually one of my classmates did pass out and it dropped to the floor. And I managed to be okay through a lot of other things. Now, coincidentally, I think what really saved me is that I was able to conquer the fear of needles. I learned when I was in medical school that I had no problem seeing blood. I had no problem seeing someone opened up in surgery. Like all that fascinated me. So there was this kind of unexplainable fear of needles. And yet I could watch a person come in with 10 bullet wounds to the abdomen, go to surgery with them as a medical student, and I was fine. But it shaped the type of doctor that I knew I wanted to become. And yoga became a part of my practice during medical school and meditation. And I was known as the Zen guy. So anytime my classmates were stressed out, they would come to me. And interestingly, this has become like one of the centerpiece or pillars of my practice. And especially taking care of patients with gut health issues. Usually people who present with gut health issues, you cannot. You cannot extract or separate the mind from that. And I think also mind Body, spirit. Because I really do feel like I treat people at all levels. And I think that there is a hierarchy. Most people need to start in the body, the concrete. And as you kind of tackle that and kind of the very, very salient. Do I eat? What do I not eat? What supplements should I take? That to me is very concrete. Then we move on to the mental, emotional, like what is affecting your gut? Like what happens when you're nervous, what happens when you're stressed? Do you tighten up your stomach? Do you feel a knot in your stomach? And then I think the spiritual, like the fulfillment. Like I talk to people about, I can't separate any piece of life as not being relevant to a person's health. So we may be talking about how they feel at work and what happens when their boss yells at them and how that makes them feel in their gut and whether that is really what they want to be doing in their lives. You know, I don't tell people, go quit your job. But I do shine a light at like, this is one element of what is making you sick. And if that is so, then either you leave that job, which may not be an easy thing to do, or you need to change the way that stress enters your body. You've got to change your own perspective or you've got to move yourself out of the perspective. So a lot of that, you know, when talking about who I am, like all these experiences in life have influenced me and most particularly growing up with gut health issues myself and what I thought was my normal for many, many years, because I had what would have been called just a very sensitive stomach as a child, the butterflies in the stomach when I was going to take a test or I used to perform the piano. So anytime I was about to go on stage, I had a whole routine. If I was going to perform, I had to have Eden at least more than two hours before the performance because I knew after that I could not have anything in my stomach. But I needed to have energy for the performance. So I had a whole methodology with that. But I grew up with a nervous stomach and I think that that became leaky gut syndrome due to the fact that I was on multiple, multiple rounds of antibiotics starting probably in around age 10. And all throughout my teenage years, I was on at least two or three rounds of antibiotics every single year. The pediatricians would tell my parents that my immune and was shot, that I would pick up any cold, anything that anybody had at school, at home. And I really walked around a bit of a hypochondriac and wish that I could be in a bubble because I was always afraid of people when they were sick. What we didn't realize, they were telling my parents, oh, he needs to take a multivitamin, he needs to eat more, he's too thin. I'd gone through my growth spurt and I was extremely thin and I could not put on weight. Little did they know that the problem was all the antibiotics had destroyed my gut microbiome, caused leaky gut syndrome or increased gut permeability. And as a result, I developed sensitivities to foods. And the two biggest ones for me, which were the two biggest food groups in the life of a teenager, and I'm sure you can guess, were wheat. So gluten and dairy.

Yes.

So my day started with cereal with milk, a wheat cereal with milk, and also loaded with sugar as well. And at lunchtime, maybe I was having a pastry or an empanada or a sandwich or bread with something. And then I got home and there was probably more bread. And my grandmother was constantly baking me cakes that I love to eat. But all along my stomach was a nervous mess and no one could figure it out. And it became so that I just grew to understand that, well, it's just gonna act this way. And I know I just have a very sensitive stomach. I did not realize that my normal was not normal until much later, until about two decades later when I had finished my medical training and I was actually doing my functional medicine training. So I trained in as a regular Western md Went to a three year internal medicine training, and at the end of it, I told you my story and how I started. And I was doing yoga and I was meditating and, and I was knowing that the trajectory that I wanted to live was holistic, was integrative medicine, or what was called alternative medicine at the time. And I finished my residency in internal medicine and I was disillusioned. I had lost my way. I mean, yoga still kept me sane throughout all those years, working 100 hour weeks and feeling completely dehumanized by the training, my hypothalamic pituitary access. So the control between the brain and the adrenals was completely shot by the stress and the lack of sleep and whatnot and not living a balanced life and, you know, going out with friends and drinking and whatnot during all that time. But I was, I was just completely disillusioned because I felt that I was just a glorified drug pusher for the pharmaceutical industry. And I felt I had lost my way and I told my parents I don't know what I want to do because I've spent all this time with this education getting here and I don't like what I see. We are a disease management industry, Western medicine, we don't resolve issues for people. So I went and I took a year, a sabbatical year, and about the time I lived through 911 here in New York, so. And I felt very affected by it. Even though I didn't know anyone, I didn't lose anyone from it, but you could just feel and absorb the energy and the sadness and the pain that people were going through. So I felt that I could not be complete if I didn't do something to give back to that. And the opportunity came to be part of a research project, a clinical research project with the Department of Environmental Medicine at Mount Sinai, looking at the people who have worked on the World Trade center site, the recovery workers afterwards who were exposed to all that smoke and the constant smoldering pile and the asbestos and, and whatnot. So I did that for a year and during that year I went on a retreat with a friend of mine where we did yoga and meditated every single day. And I had kind of lost my way at that point. And that seven day retreat reminded me of the power of that path. So as soon as I came back to New York, I decided I'm going to train in yoga. So I took a yoga teacher training. I looked up, I found one was actually starting, starting the next month after I got back and I just said, perfect, I'm on a sabbatical year, I'm doing research. I went from working 100 hour weeks to working 40 hour weeks. So you can imagine like when you were working that many hours and now 40 hours you feel like you're not working. You feel like I've got all this time on my hands. And the beautiful thing about it was that the yoga training brought me back to where I had started. And I started looking at the body as a whole entity again, not just the lungs or the heart or the liver as we used to call patients. Sometimes we'd say, oh, that's the liver, that's the heart. And that was the reason they were in the hospital, that people are whole, but we were seeing them as their segmented pieces as doctors. The yoga training brought me back to the beginning and after that I decided to do an acupuncture training. The acupuncture is really what led me to functional medicine. When I studied functional medicine is when I started learning about the connection between the gut and the gut microbiome and how everybody system is connected to that. I went back and revisited my diet was much better by then. Eating organic vegetables at home and cooking healthy at home. But wheat and gluten wasn't completely out of my diet. And I still didn't have a perfect digestive system. So it brought me back to the place of, okay, maybe this normal that I've lived with my entire life, maybe it's because I am gluten sensitive and it's not normal and this is not the way that my stomach has to behave. And so I went on a whole revamp, took gluten out of the diet, I took dairy out of the diet and started incorporating probiotics, prebiotic foods, fermented foods, and repopulating my gut. And I was able to heal my gut through that. Now granted, I think back to it and that your gut is your intuitive tuning fork. It's your intuitive receptacle. And still to this day, my gut is sensitive. It is not sensitive in the way it was before because now I know how to manage the eating. But I realized that there is a gift in that you can see beyond the bad side, the sensitivity of the gut and thinking I'm overly sensitive. But the gift is having that gift of intuition and being able to connect and really feel things. So I look back at that and I think I wouldn't be on this road had it not been for that. And now I'm helping other people heal their guts. And that's what happened is I started thinking, well, this is really cool, like hey, you can work on people's guts and everybody's been on antibiotics. So pretty much everyone needs to have their gut rebalanced and they need to have their diets improved. And it was the first place in medicine that I felt like the passion come back because I'm like, I'm telling people to eat healthy, to take probiotics, to re establish their gut microbiome. This is so different than just the medication for pain in their abdomen. We're fixing this from the root cause, from the ground up. That was what I went to medicine for. And for helping people get through, helping them traverse transformative journeys. You know, where they go from being sick to being, you know, beyond that. And through these years went through many challenges. And all of those really helped shape the type of practitioner. When I finally opened my own practice 14 years ago in 2004, I was sued by my ex employer.

Wow.

Now imagine I had just launched my practice in July. My son Was due to be born in September. And a month before he's born, I'm slammed with a lawsuit and an extremely expensive lawsuit that's threatening my ability to practice medicine in Manhattan. And I knew that this is where my heart was. I didn't want to leave, and I really wanted to practice medicine here. And the long story short, no one won the lawsuit. I got the lawsuit dropped. But the gift of that was that it allowed me to develop an inner strength. But from that, I came across one of the most influential persons in my life, who I keep in touch with to this day, and that's my life coach. She's been so influential because me first as a client, teaching me how to think through and positive thinking and affirmations when I felt like life was falling apart from a business standpoint. And all of that I use now with my patients, teaching them positive thinking and affirmations. And I even think back to, like, my first, you know, my first, I guess, exposure to positive thinking was with my fifth grade elementary school teacher. And she started teaching us the power of the mind and the power of thinking. And just think like, you know, fifth grade. I'm probably, I think, like, 10 years old at the time. This person, you know, influenced. I think back, like, the people have influenced me in my life. Like this fifth grade teacher who I can't even find. I don't remember her name, but if I could go back and tell her, you know, you were one of the single most influential people in my life, that I use what I learned every day because I need to be a positive influence to my patients and a shining light of hope and positivity when, you know, people are sick, they are full of negativity. And it's very hard to transform that when all you see is black and darkness and dark cloud over your head. But that is part of my. I know about my Gut care program and the first C, which is cleanse.

I'll just pause you there for a second.

Yeah, yeah.

So what did your teacher actually say to you?

So my. My teacher to our class is an aggregate because it was a very unique school. It only had 10 students in the class, and that was the entire fifth grade of that school. And my parents actually moved me there. So it was my first time in that school. I was in a public school until fourth grade, and I was complaining to my parents that the students didn't let me pay attention. And it was starting to become apparent that I really wanted to learn. I mean, I had been a sponge since I was in Kindergarten. I actually took a test that would have allowed me to place into first grade in the first month of kindergarten. And the teacher came to my parents and had a conversation and actually convinced them to keep me in, in kindergarten so that I could be more age matched to my peers. And she said, you know, he could always feel kind of awkward because of the age difference or you can let him stay where he's at and he's always going to be the top of his class. Which is exactly what happened. I was always the top of my class. But this teacher, she spoke with us as an aggregate, teaching us the power of positive thinking, working with each other and positive affirmations. So it wasn't that particularly she said one thing to me is that she taught us as a group how to use the power of our minds to accomplish things together. So for example, like we always had positive affirmations around our sports and we used to play the game, it was our class against the fourth grade class. So one year younger. But we always went into that with the idea that we were going to win and the positivity around that. And I felt it fostered a lot of cooperation and co working in a class that when I arrived there, there was discord among the students and there was cajoling and you know, things mean, you know how kids are, they say mean things. And there was one girl in the class that everyone picked on and I have two older sisters. So I me as a new kid in the class defended her because I just didn't. I was raised to think that, you know, and I think that, you know, during women's liberation and all that, you know, my sisters always showed me and taught me that we're equal, you know, men and women are equal. So I could not sit there and let these other boys talk down to and make this girl feel horrible about how she looked. So that was the beginning of that class. But then she turned the teacher, turned it around and got us all having a positive mindset. I can't, you know, I wish I could remember one thing she said, but that what I my takeaway was the power of positive thinking, which has been something that I've revisited over and over. And also, you know, our words are.

So powerful, so powerful. I 100% agree. I think it's so amazing that you learned that life lesson at such an early phase in your life. The majority of us don't get that opportunity, so that's definitely a blessing that your teacher has given you. Something else. You mentioned that I wanted to dig into a little bit further because I'm also a yogi or probably not as advanced as you, but it's something I've been doing for the last seven years pretty regularly as well. Vincent, what's your favorite yoga pose, and what is your recommendation for yoga pose that can help with the gut with digestion?

Yeah, I will say that my favorite is probably split between two. I really love the opening feeling of triangle pose and the opening of the hip, because for so many people, our hips are tight, including me from, you know, we sit for too many hours and the hip joint gets very tight. So I love that is actually kind of connected to that is pigeon pose. Hmm. And I love pigeon pose for multiple reasons. One, because it is such a powerful hip opener and releases so much. I mean, when I used to do that when I was in my 20s in medical school, I could leave a yoga class and then start crying for no reason with my friend. And I'm like, I have no idea why I have tears, but I feel like I'm releasing stuff from. To have a yoga teacher that did a yengar. That was the method we learned. And she loved hip openers, so we could spend entire classes just on hip opening exercises. But pigeon pose also, because it connects you to the earth, to the ground, because you can, you know, you really get grounded. And I think that that is so important in our modern society is to feel the earth to be grounded because we are in such an era of ungroundedness with all the social media and just that the pace of life is just so fast.

I 100% agree. I mean, it's certainly a chaotic time with social media and just stress in general. I think people these days are a lot more stressed and things like yoga meditation. I also do meditation on a daily basis, and I could not live my life without those two practices. It's absolutely fundamental for my whole wellbeing.

The way I see it is that if you're committed to health, then part of that commitment has to be a commitment to yourself.

Sure, absolutely.

And. And to see that that commitment is not just how you eat, it's how you live and you breathe your life. And I think as. As simple as that is to say so many people out there are walking, speaking, and voicing that what they want, but they're not fully committed, you know, and they don't. They don't commit themselves to the level that they take action. One thing I talk about with my patients is, what do you put as your priority? What is your highest priority? For me, feeling well, and my health is one of my highest priorities and I know I have to make it. So one is an example because I believe in walking your talk, but. And two, because I need to be as clear and present for the people that I help, you know, so I can't. I don't have time to be navigating, not feeling well because I ate the wrong thing, because I was under stress. So I decided to go for the muffin that I knew wasn't going to make me feel good in the end. But, you know, I tell people, you know, when you're reaching for that muffin or that pastry, in that moment of stress, what are you putting as your highest priority? Because if you're always at every moment of your life making a decision from the point of view that I'm putting my health and my wellness as one of my highest priorities, then it makes it much easier to look at the muffin and say, you know what? That is not in alignment with my priority. So I don't need it because I don't want to feel the way I'm going to feel after I have it.

Absolutely.

And one thing I heard recently somebody said is that they eat for their microbiome. And I thought that was funny because we are, in a sense, determines your microbiome. But for me, it's more. A lot of the way I eat is determined by how do I want to feel afterwards. Do I want to be mentally clear? Do I want to be in a coma? And trust me, there are times when I'm like, well, it's in the evening, I'll have some carbs and they'll make me tired and it's okay. I don't have to. I don't have to be sharp. But a lot of times, especially during the workday, the way I eat is dependent on how I want to function and how clear I want to be. So I'm not going to eat anything that's heavy. That's going to take a lot of work to digest because I'm busy for 12 hours a day.

I hear you. That's such a great concept. I love that. Eating for how you want to feel. And that's a huge take home message and I hope that resonates with the audience. So, Vincent, what inspired you to write the book, the Happy Gut? Because it's in line with what we're talking about, how you feel and what you eat and the practices that you have in your life and your mindset. So what inspired you to write the book?

There's multiple Answers to that question. There's several answers. The first one was that there was a book in me. And I knew this years before I wrote the. The proposal, the rudimentary proposal for my book, or the skeleton or the structure for the book. I just felt that I had a voice and I had something to say, and I didn't know how that was going to come out, but I knew that there was just almost like a soul contract, and if I never did it, I would feel incomplete. That is one answer. Second answer relates to when I wrote the first treatise of my book, the table of contents and the idea and the structure and what it would contain. That happened about a month and a half after my mom passed away. And that was six years ago. That was in 2012. And the reason for that is when you lose a parent, it makes you look at your life, and it makes you kind of analyze everything. I was 39 years old, so going into 40, and I thought about, you know, what's the next decade gonna be like? And life goes really fast. What am I gonna leave behind? What can I do? You know, for me, it's all about doing good in the world. It's about helping. And so it. Let's just say it added that extra fire behind me because I wanted to leave a legacy.

Yes.

You know, and there's nothing that kind of really makes that poignant and brings it to light. Then when you lose your parents and you start thinking about your own mortality and just how quickly life goes in a blip when it seems like it goes forever, and then in that one moment, it's gone. And it was after she passed away that the idea came into my mind that I wanted to write a book about the gut. And then I just realized that it was under my nose the entire time. I basically had a practice that was based on good portion of it, on gut issues and helping people resolve their gut issues. So I had been doing it for a number of years, but I hadn't thought of it as, this would be a great idea of what I want to do as my book. And after my mom passed away, the idea hit my head, and it was the first idea of many. Many. I had so many book ideas and so many abandoned book projects, but when I heard it, I thought, this is it. This is the one. It feels authentic to me because it's my story and it's the way I'm helping people in my practice. So this is the book I'm supposed to write. It's the one that I was waiting for. The whole time. And the third reason was that I realized, you know, there's only one of me. And I mean, there's so many doctors out there, you know, that are doing great work. But I thought my. My ability and my. My ability to reach people would be so much greater and to help more people through a book. And it really is. It's what. It's because the book has opened so many opportunities for me to reach a greater number of people that I would have never reached before. So if you say, you know, what was the. What was the. The intention behind the book, behind writing the book? It was not just to leave a legacy, you know, because that's more of like an ego thing. It was really to be able to help as many people as possible that I would never reach because we would have never crossed paths otherwise.

Absolutely. 100% agree. And I think we're much in line with our thinking. And this is why we, James and I, do what we do as well. It's just to help as many people as we can. I struggled in the past with anxiety and depression, and that crippled my life. So, again, just like your gut dysfunction, it all stemmed from that, from the problem that we had as people and willing to teach people or educate people on how to get out of these struggles, whether it be gut dysfunction or mental health. Because it's all linked, isn't it?

It's all very closely linked. And I can't. I mean, I know through my own journey that I had to. I was already a very calm person, but growing up, I had learned to put emotion in my gut, in my digestive system. And so if I was upset, I felt it in my gut. So not only being the intuitive reservoir, but also very sensitive receiver. And this is true for so many people. So many people out there, they're upset, they feel a knot in their stomach, they're angry, they feel it in their stomach, they're nervous, they feel it there. I mean, we have more serotonin receptors in the gut than we do in the brain. And we know that the gut microbiome produces all sorts of neurotransmitters, including gaba, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that shushes your nervous system and tells everybody to kind of relax and be still. And if you lose those bacteria that can actually increase anxiety, or if you have bacteria or yeast producing unfriendly metabolites that get to your brain, that can actually cause depression and anxiety. So we know that there is a very close and direct link between the health of the gut and the health of the gut microbiome, which we are, it's just been in the last decade that we are starting to appreciate all of this. I'll tell you a funny story. When we were coming up with a name for my book and the initial name that I, when in the first treatise, I almost feel embarrassed to say was the ultimate guide to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, that was going to be the initial name. And then we decided, you know, why don't we do a play on words? And the name that it was kind of being developed under with a publisher was Happy Gut, Happy Life. And when I told my, the person who runs my PR, Jade I've been with for over 10 years, and she said what you're going to call it like, you know, like people think of like beer belly and this is 2012. And I just looked at and I said, no, we're going to change the whole meaning behind gut and it's going to become a common word and that's how we're going to refer to the digestive system. And like, trust me. So I started just calling my book Happy Gut and I dropped the Happy Life. One day my publisher calls me and she seems kind of nervous about it and telling me, you know, we're thinking about changing the name or just shortening the name because it's such a long thing to say. And. And I'm like, oh yeah, great, because I just call it Happy Gut. So let's just do that. So that became the name of the book. And if you think about it like in the last six years the word gut has become household word and microbiome, which no one really knew that word has become a common word in the last three years and everybody now knows about the gut and the microbiome. So it's gone from obscurity to being part of the gestalt understanding. I think now what you guys are doing and what I'm trying to do is really continue to educate people on the powerful connection between the gut and the microbiome and their health, their body health and how key and important that is that to me, you know, the gut was, I think in one of my. I wrote the preface to a book for. Or the pro. The foreword for Lee Holmes, which is a well known author there in Australia. And I said that the, if the, if your body was a royal court, the gut would be the, the monarch sitting at the throne.

Wow.

And I think, because I think the gut is the most underappreciated organ system. And yet if your gut is not functioning properly and you're not absorbing the right nutrients and the gut microbiome is disordered, as I experienced in my life, your body does not function well, your brain doesn't function well.

So let's stick in. We've pretty much come up to time, but I think if you're happy to, we'll continue talking for a bit longer.

Yeah, let's, let's say like 10, 15 minutes.

Yeah, absolutely. I really want to dig into your gut care program because I think it's fascinating because with all this research that comes out, as scientists we get it, but for the layperson it can be quite challenging. Let's go through your gut care program and have that intention of someone picking up this information. They've got some form of digestive discomfort and they're going to use this protocol that you've developed to heal their gut. So let's go through it.

Yeah, so when I was coming through this four step protocol, I wanted to come up with an acronym for it and the word care came to be, I think so poignant because most people who I see with gut issues, they're not caring for themselves. A lot of them might be caretakers for others, but they put themselves last. So first and foremost I wanted to kind of bring back and shine a light on that self care, gut care, through that word and then each piece of it is a part of the program. The C is for cleanse, which is the biggest part. We want to take away all the inflammatory foods, the foods that are bad for the gut, the pesticide ridden foods, the genetically modified foods, which by the way, when farmers here in the US grow genetically modified corn and soy, they spray six times the amount of pesticide they would have otherwise used on the crop, because the crop is genetically modified to resist the effects of the pesticide. But the pesticide is a chelating agent that starves the plant of minerals and nutrients. So you have this plant that is thriving, but it is mineral deficient and then that becomes the food. So just a little side note there on why genetically modified is not great, especially if it's modified to be able to withstand the effects of pesticides or produce its own pesticide, like the BT toxin, like the BT potatoes and there's BT corn. And I know that we're exporting this throughout the world. So I joke with people that the US is the innovator in health in a lot of ways, but we are also the exporter of disease. So really taking out the toxic foods, the Gluten, soy, corn. For a lot of people with gut issues, dairy is not good, at least during the healing part. And then eventually you can experiment and bring back fermented sources of dairy, depending on the person, or maybe goat milk or sheep milk. As for kefir. So cleanse is also about cleansing out all the bad guys, the bad bugs that have taken over the gut, maybe yeast overgrowth. So there may be diet protocols, but also supplements that can be used to kill off the bad. And cleansing is also, you know, when I think of cleanse, I think of what are we drinking, the water that we are drinking, and how important that is to make sure you're drinking clean water, perhaps filtered water, water that is devoid of heavy metals, of contaminants, of drug residues, all these things. So cleansing that aspect brings all of that and finally the mind.

One step back before we move on to mind. So what's the supplements that you recommend for gut cleansing?

Food supplements like berberine, which has been studied quite a lot in its ability to kill off bad bacteria, but at the same time promote the growth of good. Yes, maybe supplements or things like oregano oil, clove oil to kill off yeast, yeast overgrowth, and sometimes things like wormwood and black walnut to kill off parasites in the gut. So these are the things that help rebalance the health of the gut. And then in terms of cleansing the body, I always talk about cleansing the mind of negativity a while ago, because you cannot heal if you're doing everything, great, but you're just being negative about everything. But you're following this protocol, but you're upset at life and you're upset that you have this. So I'm really big believer in cleansing the mind of negativity. And for me, one of the best ways to do that, aside from meditation, but meditation could be hard for beginners, is gratitude.

Yes, absolutely.

Can I tell people that in a moment of gratitude, when you are expressing gratitude, there is no space for negativity?

Yes.

It is the one place where negativity cannot exist. And if you can get into a practice of writing down a gratitude, there is a power of seeing it in concretely written on a piece of paper, you know, not just saying it in your head, but writing what you are grateful for. And it could be the smallest thing, I think that there is at any moment in life, regardless of what just happened, regardless of how horrible things may feel for you, there is something that you can find that you can be grateful for. There's always something. And I think shifting that perspective is very important when embarking any sort of healing journey because you have to heal the mind also to help heal the body.

100% agree.

So then the next step I'm going to move on to the A is activate. Activate is about reactivating the digestive system with necessary nutrients and things that help reduce inflammation or promote digestion. So a lot of people had dysbiosis, which is the imbalance between good and bad bacteria. They've had leaky gut syndrome. Their body is not producing enough digestive enzymes so they cannot break down the foods that they're eating properly. So digestive enzymes are key, key part of healing the digestive system. And the way I describe it is that if say you hurt your knee and you need to walk with a cane while your knee is healing, Digestive enzyme is like a cane to your digestive system. It's helping kind of give a break to your digestive system while you allow it to heal. You're changing your diet, you're removing all the inflammatory foods, the refined foods and the sugars and taking digestive enzymes, maybe taking essential fatty acids, so like Omega 3 fish oils which are anti inflammatory and help the gut lining. Or you may even also add other nutrients like ginger and turmeric, which are great functional foods to add spices to add to your foods and can be very gut healing well. So activate. I think of as, you know, we're kind of like reactivating the digestive system and then the restore step, which is the R in care is all about restoring the gut microbiome. And that's through using probiotics, prebiotics, bringing in fermented foods. I think a lot of people don't realize how important eating a wide range of vegetable fibers is to their gut. It is extremely, extremely important. And we are in modern western society, we are extremely devoid of fiber in our diet. I had an old patient, she was like in her, she was close to 90, I think she was like 89. And she would come and see me and she would tell me, you know, you have no idea. Like I've seen food change. When I was a girl, bread was what we call whole grain. Today it was brown. You could see the graininess in it. We didn't have white bread. White bread came later. All these refined foods that are devoid of fiber which do not help your microbiome. The majority of people are getting probably 20 grams or more, 20 grams less fiber than they need on a daily basis. And the interesting thing is there was a study I looked at with the Hadza people of Tanzania who still follow a traditional hunter gatherer lifestyle. Not all of them, but let's say about 10% of them do, maybe 10 to 20%. So they eat a lot of tubers. Tubers are extremely rich in fiber.

Yes.

And sometimes they'll actually chew on the fiber. Even if you can't swallow it, they'll just keep it in their mouth and chew it and eventually once they chewed as much as they could, they'll spit it out. But they looked at the microbiome of the Hadza people and compared it to age match control of Italian people, healthy Italians. You could see the Hadzas microbiome was way more diverse than that of the Italian cohort.

Is that the De Filippo study?

What's that?

I think it's the De Filippo study, isn't it?

I think it might be, yeah.

I'll link to the show notes for our audience.

Really fascinating. I mean, because I love the color picture where you can just see, you don't even have to know science. You can just see this is the hotel and you see a much wider range of colors to their microbiome. And this is the Italian people. And there's this much smaller diversity. And what I tell people is you want a diverse microbiome, that is what creates health. And the way to create a diverse microbiome is to eat a diversity of vegetables and that is the rainbow of colors, not a monochromatic diet. So you don't want to, you know, we talk about the importance of a plant based or a plant focused diet. I think across the board, whether you are meat eating or you are vegetarian vegan. A plant based diet is across the board what helps create health and a healthy microbiome. And you can be a carb vegan and you can be eating a carb monochromatic vegan diet of pasta and bread and carbs, which would not be healthy for your microbiome. Yes. So again I really emphasize the importance of giving the microbiome the foods that they need in order to flourish. Because as a result of the fibers in the food, what we see are the byproducts of their metabolism. This is where the beauty of symbiosis occurs. Because the bacteria produced in our gut produce short chain fatty acids such as butyrate which serve multiple, multiple functions in the body. From keeping the cells of the colon healthy and preventing colon canc to helping keep insulin sensitivity normal and our blood glucose levels. All this from a short chain fatty acid that also crosses the blood brain barrier and increases the expression of brain derived neurotrophic factor so that you can learn and create memory. All this is tied to your gut microbiome which is tied to how you eat. So it comes back to we are what we eat and we also are what we eat has eaten. Yes, that is an important thing to kind of go back and mention under cleanse. I didn't talk about meats, but if you do eat meat, really knowing where your meat is sourced from, how it was raised, is it factory raised or was it raised on hormones and antibiotics or has been free range and grass fed, or if it's fish, was it wild caught, was it farm raised? All these things affect the quality of what you're putting into your body and that will affect your health and the health of your gut. I covered car cleanse, activate, restore and enhance is really about reintroducing or using nutrients that we know help heal and promote a healthy mucosa and that is the lining of the gut. So we want to help the gut lining heal. We know certain nutrients very scientifically studied over multiple research studies like L glutamine, which is an amino acid, it helps reverse leaky gut syndrome. It's very small intestine. DGL D glycerizinated licorice, very important anti inflammatory healing for the gut mucosa. Aloe, which sometimes I have patients drinking aloe juice also really great. And I think an underappreciated one, Quercetin, which is a bioflavonoid, which I learned when I was researching a particular sexy strain of bacteria called Akkermansia mucilla that they like to feed on bioflavonoids. And so quercetin is one of those. So quercin help stabilize mast cells but can also help improve the permeability of the gut barrier and reduce histamine overproduction in the body. So it has multiple, multiple different ways it can help the body. And turns out that one of my favorite flavor enhancers when I cook certain meals also happens to be the food that is highest in quercetin. I don't know if you know that. Do you know which one I'm talking about?

I have no idea.

I don't know. I imagine you have them in Australia, they're called capers.

Ah, okay. Wow. I did not know that. That's amazing.

Quine in quercetin. So when you're eating capers, you can think you're actually feeding your gut microbiome and you're reducing histamine in your body and balancing out mast cells and so you're doing a lot of good for your body when you're eating a dish with capers.

We're going to get some capers. That's just golden information. I'm so appreciative for sharing that your care program. I do have a question. So with the different steps in that care program is this approximate length of time that people should be following each of those different steps in the protocol.

So the way, the way the protocol is set up is that I start every piece of it at once. Okay, so it's a 28 day protocol. And now when people are working with me individually, I might have to be getting rid of bad bugs in the gut. And that part of the protocol may go on for two months. Individually, I may work a little bit different with people, but as a general rule, I made the protocol so that you do all of this at once. And in 20 days your gut is in a different place and even your relationship with food is transformed. What I see, and actually two years ago almost now, I did cleanse as part of the New Year's thing. And as I am, I always walk my talks. So if I'm telling people how to do the cleanse, I do the cleanse with them because I need to know what it feels like to be on the cleanse. And I was, funny thing was drinking a lot of coffee leading up to that, I had gotten into doing the grass fed butter with the MCT oil or the coconut oil and the coffee. And I decided my cleanse cuts coffee out. I just decided I was becoming too caffeine dependent. And I really don't like being dependent on anything to function. So I realized, okay, I had to tip the scales in that direction. So I cut out coffee for my cleanse and I never went back. So that's almost two years ago. And I realized when I did it that it was actually better for my gut to. Not for some people, not everyone. Some people are listening to this and like, oh my God, I'm not going to give up my coffee. But for some people, the gut coffee is very acidic and it is a gut irritant. It might be good for women who are constipated. Sometimes it kind of helps make you regular. But turns out that for me, cutting out coffee actually boosted my energy and equalized my energy throughout the day. In its place, I was drinking green tea, which is allowed in the 28 day cleanse because for many reasons. One, so that people don't go into shock from not having caffeine. But two, because green tea is a Powerful activator of phase one, phase two, liver detox. So it helps your body cleanse and detox. And we know that the catechins in green tea are anti cancer antioxidants, really great for the body, and that reduces the risk of breast cancer. So there's many reasons to maybe not give up coffee completely, but maybe incorporate some green tea sometimes as a substance. So I've been coffee free for almost two years now since then, except for, you know, like, when I was in Cuba and I could not refuse an espresso from my host because it would have been so insulting to not have it. Like, I couldn't say, like, no, I'm not drinking coffee right now. That's it.

Well, one final question just to wrap up our podcast, Vincent. So if there was one thing that a listener could do to improve their gut health, what would it be?

You know, I think that the most powerful thing that transforms gut health is learning how to relax. To me, the one powerful thing that can do that, breathing. Even learning how to do deep diaphragmatic breathing with breath holding at either end. So an inhale, with a hold, exhale twice as long as the inhale. So if you inhale for 5 seconds, you're going to exhale for 10 seconds, hold again at the end of the exhale for as long as it's comfortable, and then breathe in again. Stay in this cycle. So what that does, it activates the stretch receptors in the lung that create parasympathetic balance, and it relaxes the body.

And how many repetitions would you recommend?

I tell patients to not worry about the number, to just set a timer on their phone and do this without thinking of when it's going to end for five minutes. And if they get to the point where those five minutes finish like that, then go to 10 minutes and see if you can get to 10 minutes. Because, you know, anybody who's starting meditation or starting breathing exercises, the first minute is up and you're like, oh, my God, how much longer do I need to do this? And then after a while, you start really relaxing into it, and five minutes passes. You're like, no, no, no. Like, that was just one minute. How was that five minutes? And for me, like, I can't do anything less than 10 minutes, because five minutes, to me feels like a minute. It just goes by so fast. But the reason I say that that is one of the most powerful things that anyone can do for the gut is because anytime I've had a patient go on vacation who has gut issues they even cheat on the diet and it doesn't affect their gut. And I feel the one variable is the amount of stress that in our lives. So if we can start there, because we know that stress is an attack on the gut and the catecholamines that are released. So the physical mediators, the chemical signals, actually affect the microbiome, but also affect the permeability of the gut. Increase the gut permeability. Gut permeability. So the more relaxed you can be, the fast happen. The body needs to be in a relaxed state in order to heal. So I think that breathing to me is key, key part of the first place that someone can start, and then the next thing is get into the diet and start taking out the inflammatory foods. Everything that I do in my program is kind of all at once, but when I work individually with people, I meet them where they're at and I compromise with them. And I say, okay, what is the one thing that you can leave today and do? What is that one thing? Can you take gluten out of your diet? Can you take dairy out of your diet? Okay, so for two weeks, that's all you're going to do. And you're going to become a master at avoiding dairy. When you eat out, like, you're going to know to ask about cream and soup or in sauces, and you're going to master that. And then you're going to add in the next thing. So you don't have to conquer Rome all in one day. It's all about being successful in the process.

Absolutely. Vincent, I just want to say a huge thank you for your time today. I know you're a busy guy. You're doing some amazing things, so congratulations. And I highly recommend that people grab a copy of the Happy Gut book and check it out because this protocol sounds amazing. I will link to the book in the show notes. So huge gratitude. So, Vincent, how can people find you if they want to reach out to you?

I am on all social media channels, on Twitter, Facebook, as Dr. Vincent Pedre, Instagram, Dr. Pedre. And they can find me through my website as well at Happy Gut Life.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Vincent. Take care.

Thank you, guys. Thanks for having me.