SCDLifestyle-BenGreenfield.mp3

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And as you may know, if you're a regular podcast listener, we inevitably end up sometimes talking about topics such as your digestive health and your stomach and diets that help out your gut and diets that don't help out your gut and even the function of your poop at some points. And today what we're going to do is really delve into what kind of happens when you consume the wrong type of foods, what it does to your digestive health, and some options that you may have for fixing that. Now, earlier in a show, if you listened a few weeks ago, I mentioned something called the specific carbohydrate diet. And that's really what we're going to talk a lot about today. I have a gentleman on the call who is an expert on this, who runs a website and I'll be sure to link to you in the show notes to his SCD Lifestyle website. But Steven Wright is on the call and today Steven and I are going to talk about basically what the specific carbohydrate diet is, how it saved him, as well as the guy who he runs SCD Lifestyle with, Jordan Reasoner, when it comes to fixing their respective guts, and also how you might be able to kind of convert your diet into more of a specific carbohydrate diet if you struggle with issues like diarrhea and poor gut health. We will be giving away an ebook to any of the listeners of this podcast as well, and you'll be able to find that over in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so my guest today is Steven Wright of STD Lifestyle. Steven, how you doing?

Great, Ben, thanks for having me.

Now, do you prefer I call you Steven or Steve?

Well, if you're already mad at me, then call me Steven, but otherwise we'll just run with Steve.

Alright, I'll try not to be your mom.

I appreciate that. That'd be weird.

So tell me a little bit about kind of what you do and then how you got into this whole specific carbohydrate diet. And if you could, I know that Jordan can't be with us on the call today, but feel free to kind of fill us in too on him because I know you kind of each had your unique set of digestive problems that led you to this diet.

Yeah, I'll try to give you the Cliff Notes version so this doesn't go all night. But, but it started with Jordan, actually. He was diagnosed with Celiac disease and he received the prescription that every celiac receives, which is the gluten free diet. And we became friends in college, and he got this diagnosis probably right a year after college, and things didn't get better. They kind of got a little better, and then they got way worse. And he went to more doctors and they kept saying, oh, you're not doing the gluten free diet. Right? So he kind of got really fanatic about, you know, making sure that there's absolutely no gluten anywhere. I mean, the dude threw out everything in his kitchen, bought all new stuff, he got new counters, knew everything. I mean, he was the most militant gluten free person I've ever known in my life. And he was still having diarrhea, like, you know, 10 to 15 times a day. And it got really bad. He bounced around doctor after doctor and nothing was working. And he finally saw a holistic guy who said, there's this book out there called breaking the vicious cycle. I want you to buy it and I want you to do this diet and don't come back and see me until you do it. And, you know, when you hear Jordan tell the story, you know, I wasn't there for that, but I would have been pretty devastated because he had waited a long time to see this guy, and then to get that kind of news, I'm sure, was a little disheartening. So, yeah, so he kind of like, he bought the book and he did some research on it, and it seemed like there was a lot of some goodwill out there. And this was four and a half years ago, I think now when this is happening. So the Internet was still. It wasn't new per se, but there wasn't a ton of blogs yet. And so he was on some Yahoo groups. And he finally got around to starting it, I think six or seven weeks later. And in seven days, like I said, he was going to the bathroom 10 to 15 times a day for two to three years. And in seven days, he got that down to two or three times a day.

Wow. Holy cow.

Yeah. Yeah. So major improvement. I mean, massively. The kid was writing a will at 24 to his son and his and his wife because he didn't think he was gonna make it past 26. So when we say that this diet definitely saves lives, it saved his life. I mean, no joke. So hehe was doing it and, you know, we were still friends and we kind of like you talk about on this podcast, you always have that buddy who probably also has a few stomach issues. And it's okay if you talk about poop and, you know, diarrhea and how that all goes. So I was that guy for him and, and I had called him a few times when I was in Chicago at this time and said, you know, man, dude, I am just, you know, feeling worse and worse. And he's like, man, you know, what you're telling me is not. I've been doing a lot of research. This isn't right. You need to try this diet. And I was like, yeah, okay, man. You know, at that time, I, I was working for a big four accounting firm. I was a traveling consultant. I was like, I can't cook all my food. I'm in Chicago, the happy hour culture, man. Not gonna happen. I don't see how this is gonna work for me. So I was trying to get healthier. I was doing a lot of the fitness things that you talk about on your site, and I was looking better and better on the outside, but I was getting sicker, sicker on the inside. I think a lot of the stress and the travel was really adding up for me. And I had been diagnosed with ibs, kind of like the alternating kind, constipation, diarrhea by four or five different doctors. And every time I had gone in there and this was over probably four or five years, I had gone to see these different doctors. They always said, you need more fiber. A couple of them had tried to give me some prescription drugs, but I didn't fill those scripts. And I had tried the fiber for a while. It seems to kind of mask the problems. But over that year when I was consulting, it got really bad to where I was doubled over in pain after every meal because the gas and the bloating was so bad. And so, yeah, I actually had an accident. And I'm okay to admit this, that I definitely pooped my pants in downtown Chicago in a full on suit on the way to work one day. Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, it was not cool. I had a huge meeting, so I got my suit on, poop myself. Not cool. Had to clean my pants and everything up in the bathroom. And that day, like later that day, I was like, I called Jordan. I'd tell him about it. And then he was once again, he was like, man, you're not right. You need to do something different. And so I talked to him a little bit longer and, you know, over the next week or so, he convinced me to get started on this diet. And telling you, man, again, I had all the objections. There's no way I can cook all my own food. There's no way. I made pizzas out of a box. I knew how to make chicken breasts and frozen veggies. That was it. After starting this diet four days in, I had no gas and my nickname was gas man by my family. So for a guy that has had gas since I've been a little kid, I had no gas in four days. It was remarkable. Just completely remarkable.

Wow. So in terms of what this actually is, I'm sure people are kind of starting to won people out there who are kind of struggling with some of the similar things that you, or maybe even that Jordan struggled with. You know how this thing actually manifests in terms of how you would implement a diet like this. So let's get into what the specific carbohydrate diet or if we abbreviate it, SCD during this call. That's what it is. Just so people know, what exactly is scd? How would you describe it?

Okay, well, I would describe it as saying it's going to be a grain free process free and starch free diet. So you're eliminating all grains and all pseudo grains. That includes your quinoa and anything basically that's a grain, no starch. So that's going to be your tubers that a lot of Paleo folks like to eat. And it's also going to be no rice and then it's processed food free. Because there's a lot of chemicals, whether it be youryour fake sugars, your sugar alcohols or your MSG or you know, we know that there's a lot of weird additives, just the man made stuff you can't even pronounce on the back of a package that when you're in a state of gut disrepair that those chemicals might be seeping through and causing some problems. So we eliminate all those as well. So it's kind of strict, if you want to call it strict, but it's only strict because you've never eaten this way. Like if you were to look at the foods you eliminated, if you, if you put all the foods in the world together, if you think about it from a supermarket perspective, people always say, well, there's nothing left to eat. Well, no, we just eliminated basically grains. And it turns out that 85% of the supermarket is filled with grains. You're used to eating a lot of the foods that you can't eat on this diet, but it's actually not that restrictive. It's like a reawakening of your palate is how we like to encourage people to go about it. Because we like to have people create their own custom version of it where they test vegetables and fruits and nuts and even all the fermented stuff that's allowed and kind of rebuild your diet. So you kind of eliminate everything out. You start with this core group, it's called the intro diet. And you make this chicken soup. It's pretty delicious. It's got all the anti inflammatory chemicals that are going to be found in chicken bones. And when you cook that for a long time and you start from that square one and you slowly just build your diet back up.

So you're getting a lot of the benefits of something like a bone broth basically.

Exactly. But the key is the big difference between the GAPS intro diet and the specific carbohydrate intro diet is that the GAPS intro diet is basically all bone broth and a little meat and bone broth actually contains a lot of polysaccharides which on the specific carbohydrate diet, the part of the carb part is that you're eliminating all polysaccharides and disaccharides. And so it's more of like a meat broth when you make the chicken soup. And so it's not as concentrated with the polysaccharides. And we also know, if you follow the paleo primal communities, that people who jump into a really high fat diet after being on like a Moderate carbohydrate, say 50% or more carbohydrate diet, you're just not making enough enzymes to be able to break down that fat and it can lead to a lot of loose stools and other gut problems. So we're not anti bone broth or you know, anti high fat. It's just that when you start with something that's more of like a meat broth that has some of those properties, but it's not full on, and then you slowly add more fat in and you add the bone broth in later, you can really minimize any potential problems that you'd have right away.

So why does it work? Like, you know, if you look at, if you look at like somebody who, you know, like you had a bunch of gas, like, why is it that when you, when you cut those kind of things out, you tend to see the fix and you know, in a guy like Jordan, who had obviously even more serious issues, you know, what happens kind of on a physiological or a biological level in the gut that makes this thing work?

Yeah, great question. And you know, just the record, Jordan had complete villous atrophy that's you know, complete 100% atrophy. He's got the diagnosis for that.

Like, all the villi in his small intestine were just pretty much nuked.

Yeah, yeah, they were flat. There was nothing there. It was like a black top.

And for the listeners, the villi are where a lot of your gut enzyme production takes place, as well as much of the absorption and a other very key intestinal functions. So that's serious.

Yeah, you really need those to be thriving and healthy. To be healthy. And so specific carbohydrate diet and diets like these work on several fronts. The fastest front is they stopyou stop eating foods that you're not able to currently absorb, which would be the polysaccharides and the disaccharides. So if your brush border your villi or your microvilli, which again, are the little like, think about it like shag carpet on the inside of your intestine, if those are harmed in any way, they have enzymes that aren't going to be released. And you need those enzymes to split the carbohydrate molecules down into monosaccharides to be able to absorb them. And so if you have any deficiency in your ability to produce those enzymes and, or actually transport any carbohydrates across the membranes and into your, into your gut, you're gonna have malabsorption of these carbohydrates. So they're gonna hang out longer in your intestine than what they normally would for somebody else. And so what happens when they hang out longer is then they become food for something. Right? So they're either gonna slide down the track and then they're gonna get near the colon and you're gonna have problems there. But usually what happens, because our gut is really like an ecosystem, if there's a source of food, something will rise up to eat it. I mean, it's just like anything in the wild in nature. So if we are constantly eating a source of food and it's being malabsorbed, whether it's fat or carbohydrates, something will rise up to help digest that, because it's an ecosystem down there. So if you're constantly malabsorbing carbohydrates, bacteria, yeast, maybe in a parasite, will rise up in, multiply in numbers and eat this. Now, normally it's bacteria, and the byproduct of this fermentation of these bacteria is gas. So. And what I'm talking about specifically right now is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And so that's when the bacteria, you know, there's not supposed to be a whole lot of them in the small intestine and they sort of migrate up from the colon to into the small intestine because there's food there. It could be the intestinal injury. And there's a lot of other things that can go wrong with like the PH of the whole tract. Like your stomach ph is messed up. So I would say that's the, that's the number one thing is that you're reducing the available food supply for opportunistic flora and you're getting a whole host of other benefits when you cut out the other things. So when you cut out grains, you're cutting out things like prolamins and lectins, which are toxins in our food. They're natural to a plant because they're the plant's natural defense. But plants don't have jaws and teeth. They can't fight back. So what they have is they have toxins inside of them to prevent every animal on the planet from eating them all the time. Well, that includes us. And so in someone with a compromised gut, these toxins become twice as bad. And so not only if you're completely healthy, you might be able to break them down. Science isn't totally clear on that yet, but let's say you could. In someone who has a gut that's compromised, they definitely can't. And so you have increased toxic load which is going to make your gut leaky. And that just contributes to this whole process of inflammation in the gut. And if you have the yeast overgrowth of the parasite or the small intestinal bacterial overgrowth they produce, not only do they produce a byproduct of gas, which gives you the bloating and stuff, but they also produce endotoxins. And these endotoxins leak through the gut and they cause all kinds of problems everywhere throughout your body. It could be acne, could be headaches, could be rashes. Basically the literature is just pouring out every month. There's more stuff on endotoxins and lipopolysaccharides and just how bad this is for someone when this is happening in the gut.

So in terms of who this is for, I don't get the impression that this is something that everybody necessarily would have to do. But in people who have, say, damaged guts, this would be a really good idea. Or is this something that anybody could use just kind of as a day to day eating plan? Who's this exactly for?

Would you say that's A great question. Normally we say it's for people who definitely have a damaged gut. So you know that you have a gut problem, you're having constipation, diarrhea, things are just not working right. You're having a lot of gas and bloating. If you're someone who your symptoms aren't quite as severe, I'd say go Paleo first, because SCD is really just like a little kid brother of Paleo. Our goal is to start you on the specific carbohydrate diet. That the way that we do it. Build your diet up and then, like, let you go as a little butterfly into the paleo world and let you keep, you know, making your diet more and more diverse. And then if after that, you want to go to the Winston A. Price diet and try some, you know, grains or whatever, that' sthat's great too. We definitely think that everyone has their own custom diet, but when it comes to somebody with ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, definitely a diagnosed person with ibs, because that means it was. So your digestion was so bad that you went to see a doctor about it. That's really who we can make significant progress with right away. If other people want to try it, of course you're going to reorder your gut flora in a matter of weeks. If you have any of these issues that we've just been talking about, I guarantee they'll go away as well. So it will definitely help them people. But it is a pretty big lifestyle change. So if your pain isn't that high, a lot of times people don't just, like, jump into something like this unless they have a true pain, you know?

Gotcha. So let's go ahead and jump into, like, a sample day of eating. You know, like, you could go over what you ate yesterday or what a typical day would kind of look like when you wake up to the time you go to bed.

Yeah, for sure. So I'll tell you about two different days a day, like, for me is. And granted, I've been on this diet for going on almost three years now. So what did I shoot? I had yesterday for breakfast, I actually had shrimp and sauerkraut. And for lunch, I had some leftover steak, and I had sauteed up some vegetables. So I had, like, zucchini, cucumber, and onion. I just sauteed in some coconut oil. For dinner, I had, like, a flank steak and just a quick salad with some olive oil and an avocado. So remember, I'm a bachelor. I'm cooking for only myself. I cook in bulk because I'm not a huge fan of being in the kitchen every single night. So the way that Jordan does it is much different than the way I do it. He actually uses a lot of the paleo recipes, uses recipes from our site, and makes it for his two kids and his wife. And the two kids love it. And everybody eats. And I think, obviously other days I'll have eggs for breakfast, different things like that. I'm just trying to get more seafood in my diet. But in the beginning of the diet, what we encourage people is definitely cook your vegetables, cook your fruits, and that's really going to help you to digest things. And sometimes we even tell people to puree their food, because if you're someone with ulcerative colitis or Crohn's, you're having a major flare right now. The first step in digestion is chewing, right? So a way to make sure that you don't make any mistakes with chewing is to puree your food. So that's. That's a. Like, someone is really, like, worried about this, and they want quick results. Definitely cook. So you break down the cellulose wall, bring out. Break down the outside wall for the plants and vegetables. Excuse me, the vegetables and fruits, and then puree it. But that' swe only encourage that for people that have really bad problems, and only do that for, like, the first 15 days. But after that, you really justjust add in something. You know, what do you want to eat? Pineapple. Okay, eat pineapple. You know, pick something from the legalist and just try it.

Gotcha. Interesting. So you talked about all the real foods that you would eat, but what about supplements? A lot of times you'll hear, and I've talked about on the show before, using things like digestive enzymes, probiotics, even in some cases, things like colostrum or fermented foods. Where do what you would consider to be perhaps dietary or nutritional supplements come into play here, or do you use those at all?

I think they're huge. I think you're right on talking about them. I think most people most probably need them. If they're not tending their garden, you know, their gut flora on a regular basis, then you should probably definitely be using supplements. I think if you do the research and you talk in the circles that I do with people like Dr. Joe Brasco, he's a really famous gastroenterologist with a lot of books and a lot of the other sort of naturopath or Functional medicine practitioners, you'll find that with someone with a compromised digestive system, you're going to want to have some pancreatic enzymes. Number one, you could have a problem with your pancreas. The signaling could be wrong. You might not be making enough of them because you've been eating a higher carb diet and your hormones just aren't adapted yet to a higher fat, higher protein diet. We talked about the brush border being if that's broken down at all, you're not going to have the right carbohydrate enzymes. So enzymes are for us, almost a 100% must. If your digestion is so bad that you want to try one of these digestion specific diets, then it's likely that you'll see benefit from digestive enzymes. And we always say, you know, there's definitely people out there who don't need them. But it's a 20 to $30 test. That's a really, really cheap test. There's no downside. Try it. And for most people, they make significant benefit or they see significant benefit. We are also huge fans of probiotics. When it comes to someone who is celiac, Crohn's or uc, we usually encourage them to start very conservatively. Just like when you look at our site, we really encourage a very conservative approach because we don't want anybody to switch to a diet like this and see worse symptoms. We don't want you to get any worse than what you already are. So we'd like to take the safe route. And the safe route for these types of people is to really start with Lactobacillus acidophilus, probiotics only, and start those.

From Dr. Like, if you look at the back of the bottle, the actual strain that's in the probiotic, that's the one you would want to choose, correct?

Yup. Because unfortunately people have. When your gut is so messed up and it's so leaky, you can have these various strains, you can have reactions to them. And so what we found, over 11,000 people getting started on this diet now, is that people really do very well with Lactobacillus acidophilus. And as you get to healing, you can incorporate more strains of probiotics if you'd like to keep taking the pill form. But we immediately at like the 30 day mark, we hope that you're trying sauerkraut or even there's a specific type of fermented yogurt that the specific carbohydrate diet encourages. And that's just 24 hour fermented yogurt. And the reason why it's 24 hours is because over that time period, the bacteria will eat up all the lactose, so it becomes lactose free yogurt. Great, because it has tons of probiotics and it's lactose free. Not great, because you can't buy it in the store.

Right.

So you gotta make your own. But, you know, people can react to casein, the protein in dairy. So we really encourage people, start with lactobacillus acidophilus probiotics, then after a few weeks, start trying some sauerkraut and, you know, try any fermented dairies, you know, later on if you want to try some kefir, any of these other fermented foods. We're all about those. We think those are very important to repopulate your gut. And, you know, some of the science ISIS is saying that maybe they don't necessarily populate your gut per se with what's in them, but what is for sure is that they help modulate the immune system, so they help tone down the inflammation. And that's super, super key for any digestive problem.

Gotcha. Very cool. I'm taking a lot of notes here. I'll be sure and give you guys lots of notes in the show, notes about the stuff that Steve is talking about. Okay. Barriers to this lifestyle, things that you find people complain about that make them most likely to fall off the bandwagon or have a hard time. Because I know that some people listening in, based on the questions I get sent in for the podcast, are definitely going to want to try this, but what can they anticipate as being hard? And what are your tips as far as overcoming those barriers?

Hmm. Okay. So I would say that the first thing is that this is a lifestyle change. Don't look at it as a diet. If you're going to try this diet, and I hate to discourage you, but I want to be real with people, if you're going to try this diet, you're committing to taking responsibility for your health and doing something new. This isn't losing 30 pounds in 30 days or 30 pounds in 90 days. This is remaking your health, lowering your inflammation and just rebuilding your gut. So if you take that mentality, it makes things easier because you're not telling your family, oh, I'm just going to try this for 30 days. And if you do that, it can be very hard because what you're going to have to do on this diet is you're going to have to cook your own food or you're going to have to find someone to cook it for you. You can't go out and buy anything, not right away anyways in the stores. And so that is a barrier for a lot of people. And you don't have to have any cooking skills. We have an ebook that Jordan and I wrote and we wrote it for people who might not have any cooking skills because we surely didn't when we started this diet. And so you're going to have to cook, but that sounds laborious and a lot of people like to make that into a big thing.

But like chicken soup, like I looked at your guys recipe for chicken soup because I got your ebook and it's easy.

Yeah, yeah, you can make things in the crock pot. Like I said, I'm a bachelor man. So I cook like eight chicken press at a time or I cook like three pounds of of flank steak at a time. So I'm eating three days worth of. And then you can make different side dishes and jazz things up so you do not have to spend a long time in the kitchen. And you can do this as a consultant, whether you travel five days a week or if you're a stay at home mom. Anybody can do this if you're just willing to think about things and be a little creative.

Gotcha. So you've got this ebook that you and Jordan worked on. What are some of the things people can find in that? Because I'm going to put it on the show notes of this podcast for people to be able to get for free.

Yeah. So in our free guide, we have a free starter guide. And what it is is it's a sample chapter plus some more information from our ebook. And in it is literally step by step, hour by hour. Here's how you start this diet, here's how to make the food, here's what's coming up. And then the rest of our ebook we have a whole chapter on just some of the lifestyle mentality. Things like because you know, even if you're someone who's trying to lose weight and trying to cut calories, sometimes we need to trick ourselves and motivate ourselves and have mentality shifts. And so we have a whole chapter about how we do that with our clients and how we do it. Then later on in the book we also have information on the enzymes, the probiotics, and then we go through basically we have like phasing charts. And so for people who have like really severe digestive problems or who just want to be really militant about how they rebuild their diet. We have classified food based on how easy it is for you to break it down. And then they're kind of like encouraged phases that you sort of work through. And so we show you how to prepare and cook like the first three phases worth of food. And then phase four and five is basically just like raw stuff anyways, so you don't really need that because you're not cooking it. But so we go through all the cooking and we have some like two week menus and that kind of stuff in there. Go through a lot of shopping, how to make the special SCD yogurt, that kind of thing. But also a big thing is, I guess we didn't talk about this is I want to touch on die off.

Die off?

Yeah, Die off.

That doesn't sound pleasant.

No, no. And I think if any of your users, excuse me, if any of your listeners, have googled any of these diets before, they'll find stuff on die off. And what die off is is it's what they call a Herxheimer reaction. And what it is is when your liver and youryour detox pathways get overloaded when you make a big change. It could be like you took an antibiotic or it could be when you switch your diet. And so there's a percentage of people, I really can't tell you what it is, but it's like 50% or so somewhere in there who will see some symptoms when they switch this diet. They'll get a little brain fog, they'll get some headaches. They might feel kind of flu y for the first two to three days. And what this is, is literally your body dumping toxins from all of those bacteria, those yeasts, those parasites sort of dying off or rearranging where they are in your intestines. And so the first five days in this diet, you can expect to potentially have a little bit of a problem there. What's cool is that the free book that we give away has a bunch of cool tips in there on how to ward this off. Take some Epsom salt baths, just take a day off, sleep a lot, drink a lot of water, those types of things.

Interesting. That's probably really good to know because die off sounds like something that would be nice to be warned about.

Yeah, cool. It's a good thing, though.

I am sure that anybody out there who has gut issues probably has their head kind of full of information right now about how to move forward. And of course, as usual, you can leave your questions, your comments, or your feedback over on the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Jordan and Steve have an excellent website at SCD Lifestyle, and I'll put a link to their website, to their ebook, and also to the ability to download this free guide in the Show Notes if you want to try out the specific carbohydrate diet. So Steve, thank you so much for your time today and for coming on the call.

I really appreciate your time, Ben. I had a lot of fun and I hope that your listeners got a lot from this. And I'll be pretty active in the comments section, so if you want to interact, I'll be there.

Awesome. Thanks, Steve.