The 3 Foods I Eat Everyday To LOSE WEIGHT & Lower Blood Sugar! | Dr. Mark Hyman

We have massively messed up our guts. We have to really understand that gut is central to our health. How do you hit the reset button on your gut?

Why do we need to pay attention to the gut and why is it so crucial for all aspects of health, especially longevity, which you're focused on a lot right now?

Yeah, I mean, listen, this is the century of the gut, honestly. The microbiome has taken off as a field of research in the last 20 years and we've learned so much about the relationship between our gut health and the rest of our health. And it turns out that if your gut isn't healthy, then you're not healthy. If your gut is messed up inside, we call it dysbiosis. It's a huge risk factor for heart attacks, strokes, cancer, obesity, weight gain, diabetes, Alzheimer's, autism, autoimmune disease, allergies, asthma, and of course all the digestive disorders of irritable bowel and reflux, inflammatory bowel and bloating. I mean, you name it, the microbiome plays a role. Even longevity, in my longevity research, it's astounding to see the changes that happen in our microbiome as we age and the healthiest people as they get older have healthy microbiomes. The centenarians, poop is much healthier than some young guys poop who's 60 or 70 who's got all kinds of health conditions. So, it's really central. And, the question is, why is our gut so messed up? and how do we fix it? And the reason our guts mess up is our processed diet, is a lack of fiber. I mean, we used to eat 150 grams of fiber per person a day. Now, as hunter-gatherers, now we eat about eight to 15. And that's why so much constipation exists. And in my book, I talk about Dennis Burkitt, who was a British physician who has lived in Africa as a medical missionary, and he's noticed this huge difference in the health between the urban and city dwellers in Africa and the rural hunters and gatherers who were basically genetically the same. And he noticed that the stool weight of the hunter-gatherers was two pounds a day, and that of the urban city dwellers was four ounces, like a little teeny turd. He didn't know why, he didn't quite understand, but he saw this huge correlation between the size of your poop, correlated with the size of the amount of fiber you're consuming, and long-term health risks. I mean, elephants have, I think, 50 pounds of poop a day or 50 kilos or something crazy like that, 'cause they're eating so much stuff. So we have to learn how to rebuild and reset our guts. And the reason they're messed up is our processed diet, C-sections, lack of breastfeeding, overuse of certain drugs like antibiotics, acid blockers, anti-inflammatories, the glyphosate in our food supply, which on 70% of all crops is a microbiome killer. So there's so many reasons toxins, pesticides, We are just a culture that is gut-busting, a society that is gut-busting. And so we needed to be proactive about maintaining and optimizing our gut health, which is really why we created this product, Gut Food, as a multivitamin for the gut. Nobody's really talked about that. How do we keep our gut healthy? I mean, yes, there's programs and products and treatments for people with severe gut issues, but how does the average person just keep their gut healthy? with a low friction opportunity to actually add in the things we know are necessary on a daily basis to keep your gut healthy. Probiotics, polyphenols and prebiotics, which we're gonna talk about today.

Yeah, we're gonna dive all into prebiotics. And the thing is much bigger than any kind of product that you're affiliated with or any companies that we work with or anything like that. This is really about education and education on these topics for low hanging things, diet first.

Yeah, of course.

Always say it. Diet first, that's the first thing that we need to focus on. On that note, there's a prebiotic food that you're a huge fan of and it's been shown to help out with weight loss, improved metabolism and blood sugar and that's called resistant starch. What is resistant starch and what are.

Some of the common examples that are available to people out there? Yeah, I mean, so resistant starch, it means that rather than being absorbed by the body, it's not absorbed, right? So it's resistant to absorption. So if it can't get absorbed and you can't use it as calories or fuel, what happens to it? well, it's eaten by the bugs in your gut. Now, if it's the right kind of starch, called resistant starch, it actually starts to fertilize the good bugs, 'cause they start to eat this starch and they grow and the good guys grow. And this seems to have broad implications for improving metabolism, for lowering obesity, lowering insulin resistance, curing diabetes. It's really impressive. And it's in certain types of foods, for example, plantains, green bananas, lentils, drew some artichokes. There's a whole bunch of these resistant starch that can be taken and eaten on a regular basis that will help to actually create a better gut environment. So it's really beautiful way to eat and actually not get the calories, get the taste and have your gut be really healthy and happy at the end of it.

So Mark, you just listed a bunch of them. What are a couple of your favorites and how are you incorporating them into your diet on a regular basis?

Well, plantains are great. I love those. You can stir fry them, cook them. You can put them in smoothies. Lentils are great. You can make lentil soup.

Those are really great resistance starches. And just to interject really quickly on the plantain side, plantains definitely have like less total sugars compared to like bananas and stuff. But being the blood sugar guy, people are always asking, right? You're like, okay, you're saying this thing.

Is good for, you know, being a resistant starch. And how do I be mindful about incorporating my diet if I'm— yeah, but resistant starches also tend to help with insulin resistance and gluten sensitive and insulin sensitivity so that they're not as having these big spikes and they're actually being consumed not by you but by the bacteria. and they produce something called short-chain fatty acids, which are incredibly important as fuel for the gut cells, as regulators of signals of cancer risk and are so important for your overall health. And that's what's so beautiful about prebiotics is that they help grow the right bacteria which are producing in these short-chain fatty acids, including butyrate that are so protective against a whole host of diseases.

Yeah, and also, is it, I understand that green bananas are also in that category and green bananas.

Green bananas.

I mean, it means that they are like Unripe bananas. Unripe and there's less sugar content that's there.

Yeah, but they don't taste that good.

They don't taste that good. But you could kind of figure out.

How to make them. You could cook them. And, there's like powders that are out there as well. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, there's powders and there's, you know, also you can take potatoes, you can have little tiny potatoes that are like the Peruvian potatoes that are already lower in starch and sugar. You can cook them and cool them and then you can eat them that way in like a potato salad and those are more resistant starches.

So, there's a lot of ways to sort of make resistant starch.

But I think the naturally occurring ones are the best, like lentils and plantains and green bananas.

Sure. And following a bunch of tips like the Glucose Goddess who was recently on your podcast was talking about putting clothes on your carbs, adding a little bit of fat, having them with a bunch of fiber. Fiber, yeah, fiber and fiber. Those are things that are going to.

Be helping and making sure you get the benefits without the blood sugar impact. Oh, so funny. I just did a talk at a university called Queens University. Charlotte, South Carolina and this woman was interviewing me who was like a top chef and she was really great. She was a chef and she has to do a tasting contest of desserts. So, she's freaking out that she's going to gain weight because she has to eat all these desserts for the next month. And, I said, well, all I have to do is take something called PGX which is polyglycoplex basically made from cognac root which is a very highly viscous fiber that absorbs 50 times its weight in water.

So, I said, just take that about 15 minutes before you eat dessert.

It won't spike your blood sugar. You'll be fine.

Yeah, PGX is a great product. Shout out to the company, Natural Factors, I think.

That's right, Natural Factors, really great product. It's kind of a hack.

You take that before you eat and you do much better.

Yes.

Although it's tough to drink a big glass of water with it. You gotta make sure you drink at least two glasses of water with it if you're gonna take it. Okay, so can you talk a little bit about the compounds that are produced when our gut bugs eat prebiotics?

Why are these so critical for our overall health? well, these compounds I mentioned are short chain fatty acids, and that's a big mouthful. But these are the, the products that are produced by bacteria when they're digesting the right fibers and including Prebiotic fibers. And, you know, yes, you know, we talked about resistance starch, but there are also lots of other foods that just have Prebiotic fibers in them. And the, and the gut bacteria love these, like, legumes, beans, dandelion greens, garlic, artichokes, asparagus, onions, cognac root, which is what I was talking about, the PGX, cocoa actually, flax seeds, jicama, seaweed, and polyphenol-rich foods. These are all prebiotic foods. So we need to include these in our diet. So when I go to the grocery, I'm gonna get asparagus, artichokes, and onions because I know these are prebiotic foods are gonna help my microbiome. I think about it or I'm gonna buy hickam and put it in my salad because it's a prebiotic food and I wanna actually increase the food for my good bugs. So I'm shopping, thinking about this all the time. And the reason they're important is they produce these compounds, short chain fatty acids. Butyrate is one of the most important ones. And we know that butyrate is such a, not just for providing fuel for the clonic cells to keep them intact and everything working, but it's actually also a, a cancer regulator, an inflammation regulator. It regulates the risk of heart disease and cancer and diabetes. So there's so many benefits. It's one of the most important molecules in the body, butyrate, and we don't have enough of this. And I test my patients stool all the time, and I see so many people are just so low in butyrate. And it really is necessary because it's necessary to keep your metabolism up, to reduce inflammation, to prevent cancer, and to help heal a leaky gut and prevent a leaky gut. So when you, for example, have low butyrate levels, you can't maintain the integrity of your gut lining that causes a leaky gut. You get food allergies, food sensitivities, you get leakage of bacteria, you get systemic inflammation. That leads to more weight gain, more inflammation, more heart disease, more cancer, more dementia, more depression. I mean, it's just going on and on. So basically, when you have prebiotic foods, it helps the gut bugs flourish and then they can replicate to produce their vitamins like vitamin K and biotin. They regulate your hormones and they basically remove toxins. But when you don't have these good.

Bugs, you're kind of screwed. Well, one of the prebiotics that's in your formula that you put together gut food is acacia fiber. Talk to us a little bit about that and why it was one of the things that you were using when your gut was messed up and you.

Were dealing with a lot of leaky gut, which had a whole host of challenges. Yeah, for sure. So acacia fiber is a really wonderful prebiotic fiber. it's well tolerated often more than other fibers because they can be hard on the system. It makes you feel full. It helps control blood sugar and cholesterol. It's an antioxidant and it helps really help correct a leaky gut. And what's really quite amazing about acacia fibers is it's actually been studied to lower a whole set of cytokines basically through lowering something called NF-kappa B. NF-kappa B is what we call a transcription factor. It's a compound that the body makes to tell your genes that there's a problem and to make more inflammatory molecules called cytokines. And then you get all these cytokines produced like TNF-alpha and interleukin-6 and interleukin-8, which are very inflammatory, and you get all these problems when you have inflammation. So when you actually have a case of fibromyalgia, it lowers the NF-kappa B, it lowers IL-6, it lowers the TNF-alpha, these dangerous cytokines, and it actually increases the anti-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin 10. So, you've got a break and you've got an accelerator on your immune system, right? So, you don't want the accelerator going all the time. You don't want the break going all the time. So, we have just so much in our culture, in our life, in our environment, our diet, our toxic load that drives inflammation. And so, if you're not getting compounds that help to lower that, you're actually accelerating aging and obesity in all the chronic illnesses. So, it's super important to make sure your cytokines are balanced. and that's really key. And that means making sure you have enough of the prebiotic foods that produce the short-chain fats and take care of it. And that's the acacia fiber is another one of the essential fibers. It's so key.

I love it. There's another prebiotic that's also included in the formula that I'd love to have you talk about. Galacto-oligosaccharides.

It's a mouthful. GoS.

GoS. It's often referred to. what are the benefits and some of the research show about GOS?

Well, it's quite amazing. I've taken this product quite a while and it's a powerful product because it's so good at feeding the good guys and in 14 days and bloating is a huge problem for people, like the food baby thing, it's a real thing. I promise you people, I mean, my patients send me pictures of it all the time, look at my food baby. but 71 reduction in bloating at 14 days, a 92 reduction in pain, a 71 reduction in flatulence or gas. That's a big deal. And these are really debilitating symptoms for people. And what's also interesting is that it doesn't just affect the bloating, gas and digestive symptoms, but it has indirectly effects on the immune system. So you see a almost a 60, 60 increase in phagocytosis, which means your macrophages, which are little Pac-Man that go around and clean up all and viruses infections are increased in function and natural killer cells, which are really critical for fighting infections and viruses and cancer, there was 106% increase in natural killer cell function in 10 weeks. That's impressive. And so that's what helps you fight viruses and cancer. And there was also a higher level of interleukin 10, which is one of the anti-inflammatory cytokines, is all from taking a prebiotic. This is how powerful they are.

Okay, Mark, switching to the next part of this discussion. So typically when people think of the gut, they think probiotics. But what we're seeing is that prebiotics are just as important, especially for creating these beneficial compounds that improve digestion and help prevent even chronic diseases that are out there, top ones that we all know about. Ideally, this means eating a high fiber diet. So let's break down a typical plate of food for you. How much fiber and prebiotics are in that plate of food and how much fermented food and how much protein and how much fat. Just describe your typical meal.

Yeah, sure.

I think it's important to understand that probiotics are like the seeds you put in the garden. Prebiotics are like the compost you put on the ground to make the seeds grow. So, it's really important to think of them together. And the polyphenols are like super fuel on all that stuff. and it's just a trifecta of a powerful set of compounds that really have never been put together in a product before. And that's really why we've created gut food. And when you look at particularly my particular day, I tend to eat a lot of fiber rich foods and I love those foods because I just like them, but it includes a lot of veggies, so tons of raw veggies and salads, cooked veggies and I am.

Cooked onions. We learned last time. You can't have raw onions.

Cooked onions. And I do, I eat, like, for example, the other night we had, I had, as a, as a meal, I had a duck breast. I had shiitake mushrooms, which are also very high in certain compounds like poly, polysaccharides that are helpful for immune function. We had a spare, I spare, I had arthritic chokes. I had steamed artichokes, which have, again, prebiotic fibers and also folate and detoxification compounds. I had a, I think, a Japanese sweet potato, which, again, is full of fiber and also phytochemicals and polyphenols. And also I had asparagus. I had stir-fried asparagus with ginger. So I'm providing all the spices and the asparagus, which also is a prebiotic food, into my diet as just a natural part of cooking and what I like to eat. so I've sort of learned to include some core foods in my diet on a regular basis that I know are both probiotic foods and prebiotic foods and also fermented foods. So I have, I have miso, I have kimchi, I have sauerkraut, I like pickles, being a good Jew. So basically, you know, I eat a lot of these foods, and then, and then I'll have, I'll make sure I eat, those are probiotic foods, and I'll eat the prebiotic foods, like I mentioned, and the polyphenols. So I tend to eat a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables. And then as fats go, I tend to stay away from refined oils, avocados, are great, nuts and seeds are great, extra virgin olive oil is great. So I tend to stick to those fats and protein is just your palm size serving of protein. So if you're three years old or you're, you know, 50 years old, whatever your size your palm is, that's about the protein needs you have per meal. And that can be plant proteins or animal proteins. But the plant proteins, you typically need to eat a lot more to get.

The same grams of protein. If there was one prebiotic food, the people that are listening today, somebody's like, you know what, I'm not eating any of the prebiotic foods. There's one that could be a great starting place, maybe a little easier on the palate but still beneficial to them. What's that one prebiotic food that if.

They'Re not including today, they should think about incorporating? Well, it's kind of a fun one and it sounds counterintuitive, but it's noodles. And not just any noodles, but a special kind of noodles called shirataki noodles. and these noodles are Japanese noodles that are made from cognac root. This, this fiber I talked about that was in PGX. It's a Prebiotic food, but also has tremendous power to slow the absorption of glucose and fatty acids and, and other things that actually drive weight gain and obesity. And you can enjoy them because they have no calories and they have no carbohydrates. It's just fiber, so you can make pasta with them, you can put them in soup. They're delicious. And, and you can buy them now, pretty much everywhere. You can buy them online. They're called Miracle Noodles. Miracle Noodles. Yeah. The Shirataki noodles. They have weird ones that are made from soy, but get the ones that are made from cognac root. That's K-O-N-J-C, not cognac like the drink.

And, and that's, that's kind of a fun one. We make stir fries at our place all the time. By the way, we have no affiliation with this company. It's just something nice that people like to do. Exactly. It's a good way to get you.

Off a lot of the refined carbohydrates.

If you're eating pasta on a regular basis, nothing wrong. enjoying some pasta here and there. We had some pasta last night as a special treat.

We went to a friend's restaurant.

Heirloom grains and, you know, yeah, heirloom grains. And they're bringing in from Europe and other stuff, but that's not how we eat on a typical basis. So Miracle Noodles are a nice way to, like, mix it up and get some of that texture that people enjoy.

From noodles and pasta, but not have it be so detrimental to your metabolic Health. Absolutely. And then I think if you really.

Want to, you know, get into it, you can have more artichokes and plantains.

And how easy is it to cook artichokes?

They can look intimidating for people.

Oh my God, artichokes are the easiest thing in the world. You just take it, you can basically steam it for an hour and you have to make sure enough water's in the pan or boil it and then.

Take it out and I just dip.

It in olive oil and vinegar. That's it. You don't do the oven.

You do steam it.

I just steam it. And then it just waits. It's usually about an hour depending on the size of the artichoke. Like a little pot and a bamboo steamer do you use? No, I have like a pasta pot which I don't really use for pasta anymore, but I I fill the bottom up with water and it's got a metal strainer in it. I put them in there. You can also boil them too. You can just boil them. That's fine. I like to steam them. But yeah, and then when they're soft and the leaves pull off easily, you take it out after about an hour and then you just dip the leaves in artichoke.

It takes a while to eat. You have to dip the leaves in the olive and vinegar and you scrape.

Off the yummy parts with your teeth. They taste great. And if you're not used to eating them on a regular basis, maybe start.

Off small initially and then you can slowly work your way up. You still want to eat the hairy parts in the middle.

Yeah.

You have to get to the heart of the artichoke and you have to take off the hairy bits in the.

In the middle, but it's fun.

It's an adventure. It's an adventure for sure. So Mark, as part of this mini-series, we haven't gotten to many community questions, but we'll toss in some community questions here. And these are from your audience, your Dr. Hyman Plus audience, your Instagram audience, your podcast audience.

So let's jump right in. So first question, can you take pre and probiotics at the same time? Absolutely. You want to because you want to fertilize the bacteria. So you want to fertilize the bacteria in your gut that are already there, but also you want to help grow a little bit more of the actual ones you're giving. So it's certainly fine to take them at the same time. The one caveat is if you're taking prebiotics and probiotics and you have bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth in your gut, it can create a war and you.

Can often feel a lot worse.

And, what's an example of that happening or taking place? Well, I mean, if you start taking probiotics and all of a sudden you feel like you had somebody come with a tire pump and pump up your intestines and you're bloated and distended and it's painful, that's a clue that maybe there's something rotten in Denmark and you need to go figure out what's going on in your gut that needs weeding. Is it a bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth, it is a parasite? Then you can kind of make a more coherent stand on what actually is working or not.

And often one way, you know, different companies will do this is you're taking a prebiotic, it's something new to you or you're taking a probiotic, you start small and you build your dose up so your body can get used to it. And I think that's even in your recommendations around gut food is you start tight.

For sure. Start slow and build up.

Slow, yeah, exactly. And, I think there's instructions on how to do that. What are your thoughts about jicama and is it one of the best probiotics that are out there?

Definitely. Jicama is a great prebiotic. So, if you know what jicama is, it's like a, I think a Mexican kind of... South American. South American-y kind of vegetable that is like a big white root or something. And, you basically peel it and you cut it into thin little matchstick slices and you can throw it in your salad. I love it. I love putting my salad. mushroom, it's kind of got a nice taste to it and it's a great prebiotic. So, it's a go-to for sparking up your salad with a prebiotic fiber.

And, it's been really interesting to see a lot of companies start to incorporate jicama in their products. Your friend, Mona, my friend Mona, they have their product, Jicama spelled with an X, we linked in the show notes. It's a nice beverage mixer that people can use for just by itself or solo and then our buddy, Junaid. and we invest in his company's farmer's juice. One of the ways green juices spike people's blood sugar so much because they have so much fruit juice inside of them. And, he used jicama to improve the taste but not spike people's blood sugar. And, I'm so excited about all those companies. Those are two of them and there's plenty of others that are out there that are using jicama juice in their products. So, if your diet is in check and pretty pristine, do you still need to supplement with prebiotics and probiotics?

I mean, not necessarily. I mean, if you're eating 100 grams of fiber a day and good luck, let me see that. And, you're eating the right prebiotic foods and you're really doing the right things by your gut in terms of your overall diet. I think it's not necessary to take prebiotics. But, for most of us out there, our guts are pretty messed up and we need a daily dose of something to help. Now, if we're not going to be eating it three times, I'm traveling right now. So, I can't always control what I'm getting. I try my best. I mean, we had seaweed salad for lunch because I know that's got prebiotic fibers in it. that helps me. But I do like to have the insurance of having something on a daily basis knowing that there's so many things that disrupt our gut and it's just a good insurance policy to get a multivitamin for my gut every day.

Mark, I'd love to get your thoughts on this. That study around the 150 grams, 100 grams of fiber, there's a gentleman named Justin Sonnenberg, I believe he's from Stanford University, and he was one of the ones that was looking at one of the tribes in Africa and looking at their diet, the hunter-gatherer tribes that are out there.

The Hadza.

Hadza, exactly. And in that paper, a little bit of the controversy that's been there online is that some people in more of what you, I guess, would call the carnivore community, they talk about how a lot of these hunter-gatherer tribes, fiber was more of a fallback food. Now, Justin recently, in an interview that he did with Andrew Huberman, who's also been on your podcast, and we'll link to in the show notes, he was saying that Yes, it's a fallback food. They would prefer honey all day. They would prefer to eat honey all day, but they just can't get a honey all day. They would prefer meat all day, but hunting is a little bit tough and not always are animals there. So whether it was done by design or by default, he's saying they're still having this amount of fiber in their diet. So, yeah, of course. They have the same food addictions that we have. So if you could give them processed food all day, they would choose processed food all day. It's not like they have some enlightened idea.

Around food.

And just any thoughts on that big picture, like any extrapolation you want to add in? Because some people would say, well, when they can get access to meat and honey, they would choose and they would prefer that. So since we have meat and honey all around us, you know, why do we need to be having things like fiber as a regular part of our diet? It's just one of the arguments that's out there. I mean, listen, if you're a carnivore.

Your, your gut microbiome changes very fast. If you're an omnivore, it's different. If you're a vegan, it's different. so what is the right microbiome? That's really the question is how do you get a healthier microbiome? And I think, you know, we still haven't figured that out. You know, we know we can measure diversity, which is important, the complexity of the ecosystem. We can measure markers like short chain fatty acids, inflammatory markers. We can look at what bugs are there, what are not there, what's growing, if there's parasites, all that is helpful. You know, what I find challenging about some of these microbiome tests is they only look at the microbes. They don't look at the function of the gut. And as a functional medicine doctor, that's what I care about is what are these bacteria doing? What are they, for example, some kids I'll see who have autism, very, very low short-chain fatty acids of, for example, butyrate, which is anti-inflammatory and very high levels of something called propionic acid. which is very inflammatory. And propionic acid has been shown in animal studies to increase autism and autism behavior. And if you look at breastfed kids versus bottle-fed kids, they have different short-chain fatty acids. The breastfed kids have high butyrate because their bacteria are being fed by the breast milk with the oligosaccharides that are in the breast milk. Basically, the oligosaccharides are prebiotic. right? This is a prebiotic made by the body for the bacteria for babies in breast milk. That's what it is. And if you take formula, there's no prebiotic oligosaccharides. And so instead of eating butyrate, these kids get high propionic acid. And that's why we see, you know, breastfeeding is so important and correlated with better health outcomes. And where maybe bottle feeding is leading to increases in propionic acid, which can have adverse consequences for cognitive function, for autism and learning difficulties, ADD and lots more. So I think it's important to realize that our diet really matters and that the, you know, prebiotics that are in our food really are key. And so historically, you know, if we were hunter gathers, you know, we didn't have a choice. We had to eat whatever we could. We got root, a berry, you know, some tree bark or whatever, like, and, and that's just what we had to do, and. and that was more of a natural environment for them. It was yes, I mean, if all we had was sugar, that's all we'd want to eat, we'd be really happy, but we'd get very sick. But they had a wide variety of foods, a far more complex diet than we do. The whole variety of roots and berries and plant foods and lots of different kinds of animals, and also they'll eat the bone marrow, they'll eat all sorts of stuff. So really, really important to think about how do we get the right balance of things for us. in a way that isn't going to be too onerous, but that it's going to be designed to fertilize the right bugs and not grow the wrong bugs.

So another question we have from the community, is a prebiotic good for people who have IBS? What are some of the considerations that people who have IBS have to think about?

Yeah, so generally when I think about someone with a gut issue is the weeding, seeding, and feeding program. And I think the IBS group can be constipation, can be diarrhea, but typically there's a component of bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth. So I really am very careful about when I'm working with these patients, not overdo stuff too fast with the pre and probiotics. I usually give them a week or two of weeding, clearing out the bad bugs with herbs, some of these medications, antifungals, and then we see the body can be able to tolerate these things. There's not a war going on.

All right, next question from the community. What's the difference in digestive enzymes and how are digestive enzymes different than pro and prebiotics?

Well, Drew, in order to have a healthy functioning gut, you need a lot of things going on. You need to be able to digest your food, you need the right stomach acid, you need digestive enzymes from your pancreas, you need salivary enzymes from your mouth, you need the right fibers and prebiotics to actually help grow the right bacteria, you need probiotics, you need postbiotics, you need all the things you need to actually keep a gut healthy. And so, when we're thinking about repairing and fixing the gut, we need to think about all those things. And I see people with low pancreatic function, low hydrochloric acid. And so sometimes giving them supplements with pancreatic enzymes or more plant-based digestive enzymes along with hydrochloric acid can actually be very helpful. So it's really depending on the person, but if people have a lot of SIBO and bacterial overgrowth and digestive upset and undigested food in their stool or on their lab test we see low pancreatic elastase, we can actually help to treat them in an effective way by providing those enzymes for people. So it's not either or, it's a select group that might need them, but when you need them, it can be really helpful. And then when you get your gut healthy, you don't need them so much anymore.

Now, sometimes when people are going out to restaurants or they're eating foods like gluten and dairy, which people partake in every so often, you know, it's a part of metabolic flexibility. Some of my friends might take digestive.

Enzymes with them to, like, the restaurant or whatever. Do you ever do that? And yeah, there's actually gluten digest enzymes. There's, there's lactase enzymes. There's things that help with that dairy and so forth. So you can use them to sort of mitigate. problems that you might have if you go out and cheat a little bit, but depends on who you are. If you're a celiac, you don't want to cheat at all, right? If you're having severe dairy reactions, you don't want to cheat at all. But for some of us, you know, who are just may have a little upset his tummy or whatever, I mean, I think it's fine. I think the goal is ultimately to eat in a way that actually is going to rebuild your gut so you're more resilient. That's the whole game here in functional medicine. It's not restriction, but freedom. And metabolic degrees are freedom by optimizing your body's systems. And once you do that, like I said before, I couldn't eat anything for years without being sick, without causing rashes all over my body, my eyes getting red, my tongue getting sores, my stomach bloating, my having severe brain fog, fatigue. I mean, it was. It was so immediate. And I. I knew exactly, like, what was going on at the time. This was, like, almost 30 years ago. I didn't know all that I know now with a microbiome wasn't even a word. We knew how to work with the gut, but. but it was really tough and it was hard to reset the system. And for me, it was challenging because I had mercury poisoning and if you have something like that, you can do everything you want. You can take all the prebiotics, polyphenols, everything you want. Unless you get rid of that, you're.

Not going to get better. So Mark, I think this is a perfect opportunity to do a little bit of a recap. We've been doing this multi-part series and we've just covered polyphenols to start and we covered probiotics and then we covered prebiotics all under this greater umbrella of We live in a world that has never been more destructive to our gut. So, we want to be more mindful to take care of our gut because health and disease starts in the gut. So, give us a little bit of recap of some of the top points that we learned through this multi-part series. And, we'll have more to come soon, but at least so far, where are we at?

Yeah, man, the first high level is we have to understand as a culture, we have massively messed up our guts by our industrial process diet, our lack of fiber, our lack of phytochemicals and polyphenols, by the increasing C-sections, rates, lack of breastfeeding, the use of antibiotics and gut-busting drugs like Advil and Aspirin. So it creates a perfect storm for a disaster of a gut environment that promotes all sorts of downstream problems from not just digestive issues, which are the number one reason people visit the doctor, but all sorts of chronic diseases, from heart disease to obesity, to cancer, to diabetes, to dementia, to autoimmune diseases, to allergies, to asthma, to autism, to ADD. I mean, that could go on and on. so we have to really understand that gut is central to our health, to every aspect of our health. And so we really have come up with a framework for helping people to reboot their gut. How do you hit the reset button on your gut? Well, it involves diet, so upgrading your diet and the quality of the food you're eating, increasing the fiber content, polyphenol content, phytochemicals, super important. Second, we need to supplement with the right things like a multivitamin for our gut with the right prebiotics, the right probiotics. and the right polyphenols to help. So, for example, in our product gut food, we have lacto-spor probiotic, which is a spore-based probiotic, very well researched. We have galacto-oligosaccharides, which are incredible prebiotic food. Acacia fibers are prebiotic. We have something called mucosa, which is prickly pear and also olive leaf extract, along with quercetin, which are incredible polyphenols for helping boost the good bacteria in the gut for, for example, Akkermansia muciniphila is highly responsive to these. It's exactly what it sounds like. Muciniphila means it's mucin loving, so it creates a mucus layer in the gut to prevent a leaky gut. So we have all these ingredients that are designed scientifically to optimize the gut environment to be like a multivitamin for the gut and to help people really create a baseline that they can rely on. It's like, why do you need a multivitamin? Well, because we're not eating 800 different food crops anymore and a lot of our food's depleted and we've had all these problems. So in a perfect world, we should not need all these things, right? And I always say, oh, you don't need a vitamin, but only under certain conditions, right? You only hunt and gather your own wild food. You only drink pure, clean water, breathe pure, clean air, have no environmental exposures, have no chronic stress, sleep eight to nine hours a night, and exercise all the time. Now, if that's you, no, you don't need a multivitamin. But everybody else, yes. So, the same thing with a gut multivitamin, in a perfect world, we wouldn't need this. Maybe if you're a Hadza living in the jungle and you're eating in, you know, in Africa all the wild stuff and you're doing your thing, no, they probably don't need all this stuff.

But for the rest of us in modern society, absolutely. People don't understand how so many of our issues come from the gut and how easy it is to diagnose it and treat it. and we use tests that traditional doctors just don't do. Like we have a different set of lenses, a different set of filters that we can sort through information and data and ask questions that traditional doctors can't. Like how do you measure leaky gut? How do you look at the microbiome in the gut? How do you look at the digestive function in the gut? How do you actually start to treat it in a different way? And I think your first case is just so rich with with a story that is so common that I just love you to share this because I think everybody's gonna resonate with this story. And by the way, I have never seen this patient as your patient, but I've literally seen the same story a hundred times or maybe 500 times or.

A thousand times in my practice.

It's the same freaking story, right? So tell us about this story.

So it was a 24-year-old gentleman who came in to see me and was really struggling over the last year with digestive system. He was having a lot of bloating and gas, pain in his stomach every time he ate. He was having diarrhea and sometimes he was getting constipated. And he went to his traditional GI doctor and they told him, you have irritable bowel, but he wasn't getting any better, right? And he was just really, because he was having so much stomach pain, he had lost some weight. so he wasn't, you know, he was on the thin side to begin with, but because he was having stomach pain when he ate, he wasn't able to eat as much and he was even losing more weight. He was feeling really weak and tired and sad, depressed, right? And so for him, well, for everyone, the timeline is so important, right? That's what we learn in functional medicine, is gathering that information and learning about that individual patient's story, seeing the whole picture.

So we start with a history with the mother and her pregnancy and the birth and whether they breastfed and when they took antibiotics, whether they were sick as a kid, what happened, when they were introduced to food, when they got gluten, when they got dairy. We ask all these questions so when someone comes in with irritable bowel, the.

Average GI guy is not asking all these questions. So why do we ask all those questions? So because for this gentleman, for example, he really didn't have stomach pain before a year ago, but what we found out is that when he was a kid, he had ear infections. So it was probably scary. Probably, right? So it's such a common connection.

I remember being in the ER, Liz, and I, this patient came in and this little boy keeps coming back and, like, the toddler was coming back over and over to the ER with ear infections and. Yeah, just so inflamed. And I said, how was he, like, in, like, did you breastfeed?

Yeah.

So when did he start getting the ear infections? Well, we started formula and dairy and milk. And I'm like, oh, okay. And this is even before I knew about functional medicine.

I know.

And I was like, well, maybe you shouldn't eat dairy. Yeah. The kid was fine, you know?

Right.

It's, that's such a, such a common connection. I mean, even my son with, when he started dairy, he got asthma and eczema. It was, it's, it's unfortunately such a common connection. So for this child, he had a lot of ear infections and and eczema. And so he was on antibiotics about once or twice a year in his childhood. And he really didn't think that was very much. He's like, that's not, you know, that wasn't too much. But, you know, it makes a huge impact on the microbiome as we're learning. And then he started to have acne as a teenager, maybe because of dairy more, right? Or some of the imbalances in the microbiome, right?

Yeah, when you When you screw up the gut with antibiotics or a C-section or lack of breastfeeding, then you get often more acne. Yes. We treat acne from the top in as opposed to the inside out, which is actually where it works much better.

And this gentleman was given low-dose antibiotics for two years. So then he took even more antibiotics. And so this history of antibiotics sort of set him up, and about a year ago he had some sort of stomach bug. So some probably viral stomach infection. And then since that time, he started to have all these digestive issues and was losing weight. Which is a common story.

People are so common.

You have like this sort of smoldering.

A bunch of insults over the course of their life. Maybe they were a C-section, they had antibiotics as a kid, they took acne antibiotics, they were eating a crappy diet, whatever. And all of a sudden something happens and then boom, the body can't take it anymore and it creates some kind of disease. But if you look at the story, you can often map out exactly how this happened.

That connection with his acne, with his asthma, with his digestive issues, with those antibiotics, that's that story we often see. And we're not making this up.

There's so much science that shows that your gut microbiome plays a role in acne and eczema and asthma. I mean, we're actually doing this at Cleveland Clinic now. We're studying asthma looking at how the microbiome plays a role and how it affects inflammation, all these various factors that most doctors just don't pay attention to.

Right. So with him, as we do with most of our patients, we do food first, right? So we said, okay, we've got to really focus on this person's diet and help him start feeling better right away so he can start to eat more and regain some of his strength. So we pulled away inflammatory foods. We took them off of gluten and dairy while we were waiting for to come back. Sometimes we will do some tests that look at, of course, we'll test for celiac disease or-- which is a big.

Cause of leaky gut.

Yep, that's for sure. Probably the number one. And he didn't have that.

By the way, you don't have to have celiac disease to actually have a problem, right? You can have they call non-celiac gluten sensitivity. I would estimate it probably affects 20% of the population. And I think if you look at the antibody levels, you can get a clue, which most doctors don't look at. I read a study that autistic kids and schizophrenic patients often have 20% of them have antibodies to gluten. And it may not be full-blown celiac.

Absolutely. And even, you know, regardless of, even if people are negative totally for celiac, if they have increased intestinal permeability, they start reacting to a lot of different foods. So then you start to see with that leaky gut as we talked about before, the coffee filter and things are coming through, then the body's reacting to lots of foods that it maybe never reacted to before.

So they're not true allergies, they're more like sensitivities.

Sensitivities. And because of, and the real thing is it's because of this increased intestinal permeability. So our job is we have to heal that increased intestinal permeability so that they don't have to be so restrictive with their foods. I mean, we still always want them to be on a healthy diet. but we want to relax those restrictions over time. Most of the time we can.

Yeah, and so it's part of the approach of functional medicine, we start them on the elimination diet. So eliminating all the inflammatory foods, gluten, dairy, processed foods, all that stuff.

Remove, right? That's the remove in the five Rs.

Right, the five Rs. Remove, replace, reinoculate, repair, rebalance. Yep. And we'll go into each of those because they're really important. But the next step is also there's other things we may need to remove, there's tests we need to do. So what kind of test would you look at as a functional medicine doctor that you wouldn't see at a traditional doctor's office that give us a roadmap of how to treat these patients?

Right, so we did a stool test that looked at his microbiome and what we noticed is that there was an overgrowth of unhealthy bacteria and unhealthy yeast. So he had this, you know, so probably because of years of antibiotics, he developed this dysbiosis, this imbalance in the bacteria and yeast, and so there was an overgrowth of the unhealthy things.

It's like weeds, having a lot of weeds in your garden. Yeah, right.

Right, it's not always like one of those, you think of a stomach infection and you're getting really, really sick, you're throwing up or having diarrhea. This is this, it's an imbalance and it's called dysbiosis. but that imbalance causes a lot of symptoms in people. When you have the wrong bacteria and the wrong yeast levels, you can get a lot of bloating after you eat, you can get a lot of fatigue after you eat, you can get those symptoms of constipation and diarrhea, and that causes this inflammation in the digestive system so all of your digestive enzymes don't work well. So you're not breaking down your food well, you're not absorbing your nutrients, as well. And it becomes this vicious cycle that people are dealing with and we see all the time.

Yeah, it's so powerful. So, you know, when I see this patient, I'm like, okay, you don't have to do all the tests. But sometimes when you get stuck, you look at various tests that look at antibodies against things that are in the gut that determine a leaky gut. We call it Cyrex 2 testing, which is a test you can get.

You can test to see if there's leaky gut. I love that test too because it's a great way for us to follow up and see how much we're seeing improvement. Are we doing enough? Are we seeing improvement in their leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability?

Then we look at poop testing. We do thousands and thousands of these tests and it's so helpful and it doesn't just look at the microbiome, it actually looks at the function of the gut.

Yes.

Whether there's malabsorption, whether you had no digestive enzymes, whether there's inflammation, whether there's overactive antibodies in there, whether you have imbalances and what we call the short-chain fats, which are the food for the colon that are produced by bacteria eating the right kinds of fiber. And if they're low, it means there's an imbalance. Then we look at the microbiome, we look at what grows, we look at parasites, and then we target and micro-target the things that are out of balance for that person, and it's different for everybody. and we might look at food sensitivity testing. We might look at, and even things like heavy metals or other things which.

Can also cause it.

I had a patient with ulcerative colitis once and I did everything right. I did the whole 5R. It wasn't working. But I forgot the first part of the R, which is remove, and I thought, well, maybe, you know, heavy metals can cause autoimmunity. Maybe it's a problem. And so I tested him and he was, like, wasted away and he was like, it was terrible. He actually had high levels of mercury. We treated mercury and his colitis went away. So it's phenomenal.

Yeah.

So I think it's so powerful. This case is so important because it really describes how a patient, you know, goes traditional doctor, is diagnosed with a disease, irritable bowel syndrome. By the way, anytime you hear syndrome, it means doctors know what the heck is going on. It's just a collection of symptoms that we agree we're gonna put in this bucket. And if you have those symptoms, you have this disease. But it's not really a disease.

Right.

And, and so that's what functional medicine is. It sort of looks Upstream to figure out what the root causes are. and personalize the treatment for everybody. And there's common things that we do like the 5-R, but it may be different R's for each patient, right?

Right, right. So for him, we removed the inflammatory foods and we removed the bacteria and yeast. I actually treated him with an antibiotic, a non-absorbed antibiotic, and an antifungal. So I treated him with a prescription medication. Weed killer. so that was the remove, right? And then the replace because he was underweight and because of that inflammation in his digestive system, I gave him some digestive enzymes for a short period of time just to help him, to help it so the food wasn't as inflammatory for him and to help him absorb more nutrients. And then we worked on reinoculating, right? So after we gave him some good.

Probiotics, put in the healthy bacteria, put.

In the healthy some good prebiotics. Right, so we know that. What are prebiotics? Prebiotics are the things that help feed the good bacteria. So they're the food for the probiotics. Which is usually what? Like fibers. Fibers are amazing prebiotics. We know a lot of phytonutrients are prebiotics. So this I think is really exciting research when we're looking at our phytonutrients. You know, we know that.

Phytonutrients.

Right, so I know it's amazing, right? So our food has minerals in it, it has vitamins, but it also has these things called phytonutrients, which are these components in our plant foods that have this amazing health benefits for us. So that can include things like ellagic acid that we see in pomegranate that can feed some of the good bacteria, that Akkermansia that we know can lower inflammation. We know that Dr. Justin: Just to.

Back up on that akkermansia thing. So when we look at the poop, we can tell if there's good levels of different bugs. One of them we look at is akkermansia. And it turns out that that is so important for protecting your gut. It helps you keep your biofilm or that little coating over the gut so you don't have a leaky gut. And it's involved in so many autoimmune diseases, in response to cancer therapy, and metabolic issues and weight. And it's such an overlooked thing. You can't take a probiotic of it.

At least not yet. Right.

But you can feed it, the good guys.

Right, we can feed it. We can feed it with all these amazing phytonutrients like what's in pomegranate, the ellagic acid, and also we know that sulforaphane from our cruciferous vegetables feeds the good bacteria.

So broccoli, collards, kale, but not juicing it.

Right, Brussels sprouts, all those good ones. We know that green tea, that has has good phytonutrients in it that's good for the digestive system. So we always say to people, get something from every color of the rainbow every day. Get some plant foods from every color of the rainbow every day. Get some good red foods like the pomegranate or cranberry. Get something orange and yellow and green, blue, purple, white, tan. All those good healthy plant foods like our vegetables, our fruits, our spices. our teas, our coffees really actually are impacting our microbiome, which is fascinating. It's so great.

And, you know, just a great anecdote from a colleague of mine, Dr. Lee, who was on our podcast talking about E. coli disease. His mother had stage four uterine cancer. And being the smart doc he is, he understood from the research that if you have low akkermansia, patients don't respond to the immunotherapy, what they call the checkpoint inhibitors, which is this new form of cancer therapy that helps activate your immune system. So if your gut isn't healthy, you can't actually get the cancer cells to die with immunotherapy.

Right.

So basically you die unless you have good bacteria in your gut. So his mother was, had stage four uterine cancer and was gonna die and wasn't responding. And he gave her pomegranate, cranberry, green tea, all these phytochemicals, got her acrymancy levels. up and she was cured of her stage four cancer within a month.

That's a phenomenal story.

It's an incredible story and I think that just shows the power of these plant foods. Of the plant foods and of getting focused on the gut.

Yes, yes.

We call it the 5R, I call it the weeding, seeding and feeding program. So you weed out the bad things, you seed it with the good things and you feed it with good nutrients.

And all this stuff.

So it's really, it's so powerful. I can't tell you, you know, as a functional medicine doctor for the last 30 years and you've been doing this almost as long, the results you get from focusing on the gut with so many conditions, whether it's autoimmune or that it's allergic, whether it's digestive, whether it's your skin issues like acne and eczema, whether it's your mood, whether it's weight metabolism, whether it's migraines, whether it's Alzheimer's, I mean, Autism, ADD, it's just amazing when you start to focus in on this. So let's break down the 5R program for everybody. So we got the remove. So what are we looking at?

We're removing... Removing unhealthy foods or inflammatory foods for that person.

So they can be food sensitivities, things.

Like gluten, food allergies. Food allergies, big ones. And then we're removing... Processed food and junk food. Oh yeah, that's for sure. And sugars and, you know, excess sugar, which is feeding the wrong bacteria. And then we're removing the unhealthy bugs or yeasts or viruses or fungi.

Cure overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, a parasite. I was on the Red Table Talk and Jada and her son both had parasites and they both had gut issues for a long, long time. And they thought it was just how they were. But with short little course of treatment, they were both, I've never felt better. And all these other symptoms gone.

Because now you're actually absorbing the nutrients you're eating. which just helps the body heal.

Yeah. So then you remove... Then we replace... But you might also remove things like heavy metals or stress or toxic people in your life or whatever's giving you a stomach problem.

Replace means just replace some of those digestive enzymes if needed, re-inoculate.

So the replace also could be like prebiotics, right? So putting in the fiber to feed the gut and to actually maybe use hydrochloric acid sometimes for people who aren't digesting their food as they get older. Yeah, and to help get them off.

Of the acid blockers, which we know are creating a lot of problems because we need that acid in our stomach to digest our food. Okay, let's take a little detour.

So, you just mentioned acid blockers. Okay, these are among the most prevalent drugs prescribed today in America, other than statins, I think. When I was in medical school in the 80s, we just had those drugs come on the market. The drug reps used to come to us and say, these are very powerful drugs. Never use them for more than six weeks because they block stomach acid and they'll cause significant problems if you do that long term. You can cure an ulcer with it. You can fix a acute problem but never use this. Now people are on this for decades.

Yes.

And the side effects which is listed in the manuals that we get as doctors, is that it causes irritable bowel syndrome. So you end up fixing the heartburn, but you get irritable bowel and bloating and bacterial overgrowth and all these problems.

Right, because you need the acid in your stomach. And when you block that acid, then there can be an overgrowth of bacteria where there's not supposed to be, and that can cause all those slough problems.

You change the pH, you get more yeast issues and all this stuff.

And then you're not absorbing absorbing your minerals so you can get osteoporosis and you're not absorbing your B12 so you can get fatigue and dementia, right?

It just goes on and on and on. It absorbs zinc and magnesium, minerals, calcium.

You cause osteoporosis, pneumonia, it causes, you know, ear, nose, throat. On and on, right? And it takes some work sometimes. When people have been on an acid blocker for a long time, it takes some work for us to help wean them off because their body has gotten pretty used to it. they start to get their bodies, their body wants to make acid, so it's working against the medicine. So when you wean them down, sometimes they get more acid production.

It's called rebound. So you actually, and it's sort of a trick, like you get off it, but it makes you worse, so you.

Feel like you have to get back on it.

But it's actually not true. You can actually get off it. Absolutely.

We do that all the time. We do it all the time. So reinoculate, giving all the good prebiotics and probiotics, the good bacteria and all the things that feed the good bacteria. And then the fourth R is repair.

How do you know what probiotics to take? Oh, that's a great question. I wanna know, what are you prescribing?

Oh my goodness, that's such a, that goes on and on.

We could talk about that for the next hour. Yes, it's true. There's more and more probiotics on the market every day and they all have different roles and different functions. Yeah. And we're just sort of, honestly, I think we've been doing this forever, but it feels to me like we're at.

The infancy of this understanding of how to use these in medicine. Yep. I mean, there's some great brands that I trust and I use all the time, But when somebody is, you know, doesn't maybe know what to do, I'll say, you know, go to a reputable place, a reputable pharmacy or a good wellness store pharmacy and get a probiotic. You know, try it. If it makes you feel worse, then stop it, you know, because there's some good bacteria that make people feel worse.

Well, they have bacterial overgrowth.

Exactly.

If you have bad bugs growing in there and you put the good bugs in there, they have a fight and.

They cause all sorts of things. And so that means we just have to do more work before we can start it. So they got to reinoculate and then repair. And that's the fourth R. So that's things like giving good protein, good amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. Sometimes repair. Yeah, to help repair that barrier. that coffee filter, right? We have to repair it with good protein. And sometimes we'll use amino acids like glutamine that help repair it. We'll give more zinc, whether it's from food sources or as a supplement. Maybe we'll give some vitamin A, which also helps with healing that barrier. It helps with healing the endothelium in the gut. So those are things we will do to repair. And then rebalance. that's the fifth R, which is really focused on managing our stress and how we're reacting to the world. Because we know that when our parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, when that calming nervous system is engaged through meditation and yoga and breath work, that our body has the ability to heal. And it heals better when our body is at rest.

I mean, yeah, you just touched on something very powerful, which is that our our gut and our brain are connected. There's a whole hard wiring of nervous system in our gut even has this independent nervous system that actually is like a second brain. And so, you know, we often say people are irritable bowel are emotional or anxious or have, you know, just maladaptive emotional coping mechanisms. But it turns out that the irritable bowel actually can cause an irritable brain and lead to anxiety and all emotional issues. So it's a bi-directional and I think that's a great lever for helping people reset their gut.

Absolutely.

You know, I just want to share a story because I've been doing this for a long time and of course my, I don't know what it is, curse or blessing depending how you look at it, is actually getting really sick and having to figure out what to do to fix myself. And I've had a lot of gut issues over the years. which is why I really focused on this. The first was when I had mercury poisoning. And I tried everything. I did every functional medicine trick in the book back then and it wasn't working. And until I got the mercury out, which disrupts all your enzymes, it disrupts your gut, it causes leaky gut, it causes yeast overgrowth, it screws up the bacteria in your gut.

Until I got rid of the mercury.

From my system, I couldn't get my gut straight. Yeah. It's impacting your immune system too, right?

Right.

And then I, many years later, I you know, kind of got an issue which was triggered by an antibiotic for a root canal that I had to take called Clindamycin, which is known to cause C. Diff, which is a terrible bacterial infection that kills like 30,000 people a year. And I got that. And I was so sick. And, you know, Liz would come over to my house and I was like, it was pretty bad. I'm like, we were all struggling to figure it out. And I had mold in my house, all these other things, but I ended up having colitis and I had tremendous leaky gut and I did my own stool test and my friend Patrick Hanaway who worked for the stool test company for many years, my colleague at Cleveland Clinic, he and I looked at my stool test and we probably between the two of us seen like 20,000 stool tests. We're like, this is the worst one we've ever seen and everything was screwed up and I had no good bacteria, I had low butyrate, I was not digesting. I had tons of inflammation. It was terrible. And I couldn't really fix it using a lot of the traditional things. And then I started to sort of work on a gut shake, which included a lot of the sort of 5R concepts, right? So, I clean up my diet, obviously. I got rid of the bad bugs. But I used a combination of these polyphenols from the plants, a pomegranate, cranberry, green tea, also added glutamine, I added prebiotics, probiotics, I even added colostrum, which is to help regulate the immune system. And it was like a miracle. I went from full-blown colitis to normal in three weeks. And I've been great ever since. And it's just like, wow, this is something that people can actually do. It's not that hard. It's not drugs. And the alternatives are really bad drugs, right? So, we I want to go into the next case, which was sort of not about people with a gut centric issue, because people have think, oh, well, if I have a leaky gut or if I have gut related problems, I'm going to know it. My stomach's not going to be right. I'm going to feel symptoms, but that's true. It's not always the case. So the first case was a guy who did have a typical history of, you know, antibiotics and acne and some infection and then, you know, diet and all this stuff. and that was pretty clear. But there are many cases where people come in and they have zero gut symptoms, but their guts a mess and it's causing all these issues. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.

And many, many, many ancient healing systems understand the power of the gut in keeping us healthy. So having, having a healthy gut is, is critical to our well-being our long-term health, our may, even our mental health. We're now learning that, you know, antibiotics can destroy the.