Midlife Gut Solutions from Bloat to Colitis and Crohn’s

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Good night.

Seeking gut solutions? You're not alone. And apparently the USA is gut disease capital of the world. You heard that right. On this episode, we define serious conditions like colitis and Crohn's, but we start with— and they may start with bloat. Have I got your attention? Today we talk about all things gut and understanding what could be a gut issue you may be passing off as simply menopausal symptoms like skin, asthma, arthritis, brain fog, hormonal issues. The links between the gut and other diseases are the topic of conversation today. And you'll also hear how my guest got interested in gut solutions in the first place and really got started seeing what's possible with a client, a female personal training client in her late 50s who he helped later not just heal her gut but break world records. My guest, Josh Deck, is an ex-paramedic and holistic nutritionist. Specializing in gut health. And it was the successes his clients have had with complex digestive issues like Crohn's and colitis, previously thought to be impossible, that got him connected to some of the world's most renowned doctors. Since then, he's been recruited to the Priority Health Academy as a medical lecturer, helping educate doctors on the holistic approach to gut health and complex digestive issues. You're gonna love this episode, if not for yourself, for somebody you love. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. Josh Deck, thanks so much for being here.

Debra, it's a pleasure to be here so soon.

I know, right? I missed you so much.

Oh, it's been like 16 hours, right?

So that's a little behind the scenes, everybody. Basically a swap unintentionally, and neither one of us really realized that's how it played out in our calendars. And such is life. Nobody's surprised by that. But we're talking about a very important topic, I think, to our audience, and I Ironically, it still though isn't something that comes up. So any listener out there, if you can resonate with this, you know, you come and you dive into the exercise at Flipping 50, you're maybe also asking about meals and food, and yet a lot of you are dealing with gut issues. I mean, literally you are aware of the, maybe the bloating, the, constipation, the diarrhea, but either are putting up with that or you're isolating that. You're like departmentalizing that and putting that over here thinking this is not related, although it's so related to your progress and what can happen. So Josh, you work with gut so much. We're going to really dive in and unpack it. But before we do, I always find it super interesting to figure out what's the backstory. Story. Why guts? I mean, right, like career day in elementary, dissecting intestines, or what were you doing?

I mean, it's— there's been some instances. I am a boy growing up with 4 brothers, so I mean, there was some weird stuff we got up to in our early years with, you know, dead animals. It definitely was always curious. I've always been interested in biology, even right from elementary school, you know, animals. I was like, oh, I want to be a veterinarian or something else. I've always been invested in biology in some way, and I just Got it. You know, there are some people who really want to learn a skill and they, they really pour their heart and soul, but it's very difficult for them to pick up. But for me, biology, it was second nature. Like, I just knew it. It was almost intuitive. It was super bizarre. So I've always loved biology, but what it was for me, it was an interesting process of what I call falling forward. So my first career, my late teens, early 20s, was actually a paramedic.. And so I loved it. I loved working with, with patients. I loved running in the ambulance. I loved trauma calls and medical because there's, there's two kinds of calls you get as a paramedic. There's medical and there's trauma. So medical is heart disease and strokes and diabetes and all those things. Trauma is car accidents and, you know, physical trauma. And I really enjoyed working in the medical cuz it was a puzzle. I tried to figure out how the body worked, but it was never, it wasn't what I dreamed of doing. It was sick care, you know, not healthcare. We pick people up time and time again for the same issues and we drop them off at the hospital where I'd watch the doctor give them the same medication or a new medication for the same problem, masking the symptoms. I pick them up week after week for the same issues until they stop calling because they were dead. And so it just wasn't what I wanted to be doing. And so by a chain of happy circumstances, again, falling forward, I ended up becoming a personal trainer in my early 20s. And I'd done that. I've been in the fitness space since I was probably 14. I started working out. I had these bodybuilding books from the '70s and '80s, and I've been really into it.. I thought, why don't I just— who did you follow? Everybody. I had these old ones. I had Sergio. I had, of course, everything from Arnold, Tom Platz. I had all the guys, like the '70s, '80s Mr. Olympias. I had all their stuff. And so Frank Zane was one of my favorites. I had a similar physique to him. I mean, not nearly as godlike, but you get the idea. And so when I went through these processes, I, I really enjoyed the personal training aspect, but what really struck me wasn't just people getting stronger, but a client came to see me. In my early 20s, one of my first clients named Lynn. And I can use this, it's public information. We did a little 5, 6-minute mini documentary on her. And so she did remarkable things. She came in when she started with me, she was on 17 pills and a shot of insulin for breakfast. She had 9 pills and insulin for bedtime. Of course, her gut was in rough shape. She had a CPAP machine, high blood pressure. Looking back now, I can identify as borderline congestive heart failure. She was on the disability list when I— at work. And so. It was just a really unfortunate circumstance. Like her whole health and everything was just declining. Medications to mask symptoms, which caused more symptoms, which they gave more medication. And it was just this, they were circling the drain at that point. It's just a matter of how fast you go down. And so this woman, we started working on basics. We worked on health and nutrition and lifestyle and just really basic fundamental stuff. And I watched her body heal itself at age 57 when we started together. She came to see me by age 59. She was off all except 2 medications, her glasses. She actually got her prescription reduced because her eyesight improved cuz her diabetes was gone. And now here she is, 59. I put her into her first weightlifting competition as a powerlifter in the RAW Federation here in Canada. And Debra, she broke a world record at age 59.

Oh my God.

Wow. It was remarkable. And she kept breaking them until she was probably 62, 63 when she retired. And so it was really amazing to see what the body was capable of.

I want to ask you, because you started working with her, and I think a lot of times someone in that situation can be so tunnel vision on weight loss. Little things around it, getting off of medications, surviving, just establishing a habit and, you know, just right here in front of their face. But it sounds to me like you got her on something bigger, like seeing yourself out here doing this. You're somebody who trains for competition. Like, this is an end goal.

Tell me about that. Well, it wasn't her goal. It was actually blind trust by that time. You know, when you're that invested with someone working for 2 years, 3 days a week consistently, she came in to see me. And so I pulled a fast one over on her. I said, Lynn, how much do you trust me? She goes, implicitly. I'm like, great, sign here. And so she signed up. I said, awesome, I got to get you a belt. I got to get you a singlet. We're going to get you some shoes and I'll see you in 3 months. We're competing. Excuse me? So it wasn't really her end goal by any means. She was actually a bit resistant to it after I broke the news to her, but she trusted me. I said, you can do this. And I actually showed her the numbers. I looked up the current stats. I said, what you're doing right now in training is comparable to some of the world's elite, what she was in, the progress she was able to make. I said, you can do this. And so she leaned in, she trusted me ultimately, which worked out great for both of us. And she did it and she competed in most of the records she broke over the next, you know, 3, 4 years were hers. So it was just really cool to see. And the highlight of her day, of probably her entire training career, was when they made her pee in a cup to test for drugs. It was just great. She was so good, they made her pee in a cup.

That is so good. Two takeaways for anybody listening. One, don't sign anything without looking. But number two, her mindset just about herself shifted so much. It had to have. And I think that's the difference between when you get started and you're thinking, I want weight loss, even if it's subliminal. And I find that, you know, at the end of 12 weeks for a lot of women, when they'll go through a 12-week program with us, And they'll list off 4 things that I'm stronger, I'm sleeping better, I'm this and I'm that, but I'm so frustrated because I haven't lost any weight. And I'm like, wait a minute, you discounted all the breadcrumbs telling us we're going in the right direction. And, you know, when you can let go of that, I mean, truly, you know, realize I'm diving into my subconscious and does the weight really matter? Because ultimately, I don't think it matters as much as am I living? Or am I obsessed? So come back to your own story and finish where I interrupted you with that client, please.

So we, we left off around Lynn breaking some world records. Yeah. Uh, that was for me really a window into the capabilities of the human body when it's given the right conditions, circumstances, tools, and resources. Mm-hmm. If we give it what it needs, it will excel. Just so many of us, we always look to go, okay, what can I put in? What supplements can I take? Rarely, what can I take out? Mm-hmm. And so we sort of miss a lot of the marks around that. We do a lot of the same things, following people who are not in the same situation as us, following influencers who just give terrible advice. We start to look in the wrong places and we start to miss. The reality is we don't know what we don't know. And if nobody's told you, maybe it's your gut that's preventing weight loss, nobody's gonna be looking. If nobody's told you, maybe your gut is the root for A, B, and C conditions you're dealing with, you're never gonna think to look because it's so disconnected. How can my weight on the outside possibly have something to do with my gut on the inside? How can my skin on the outside have to do with my gut on the inside?. And so I started diving into this and answering more of these questions and the clients coming to see me dealing with anxiety or depression or asthma gone. Once we started addressing their health, nutrition, and their gut, their bloat went away. That was the common factor. I, I tracked everything I possibly could. The common denominator, the one thread connecting everything was their gut. And so I was at a trade show actually for another gig, ironically enough, and I was watching, there was somebody doing a presentation on gut health and the microbiome. Which is really our community of gut bacteria living inside of our body, which is 2 to 3% of our entire body weight. And so I said to my boss at the time I was working with, I said, I have to go see this. I said, I need to listen to this speech. She says, go, go, go, whatever you want to do. She was lovely. She says, take off. That speech changed the course of my entire life. I went over and watched this woman talk and she was talking about the gut microbiome, its role, its connection, how vast it is, its connection to everything, Debra, you can possibly imagine. Your gut bacteria, the way they work from birth to life to death, of things that help them and destroy them. My jaw was on the floor for a 30-minute presentation. I looked, I said, that is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. It was love at first sight. It took all of my love of biology from grade school and high school and college and medicine and healthcare and personal training, and it dropped it and brought it into one concise book and said, this is what it is. You need to learn about the gut. I saved up, went back to school, became a nutritionist, and I've been all in the gut ever since. And the people have been coming to see me. It was mild gut stuff. It was diabetes. It was all kinds of random things. But the deeper I got into my career, the deeper I saw there was a bigger and bigger need. I'm always here to help the worst of the worst. And now I specialize in Crohn's and colitis, which is the most severe of the gut diseases you can get next to cancer, arguably very comparative. They often screen for cancers in these conditions because they present the same. So they are the worst of the worst. And the people on the low end of the spectrum can benefit all the same, whether you're bloated or you have ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease. It's all kind of the same thing, contrary to what Western medicine tends to say. And so I just, I fell in love with the results we're getting people, people coming in with 50 bowel movements a day with blood and mucus and pain being compared to childbirth. You know, they come in. I had a woman turn around in 3 weeks, 5 to 8 bowel movements in just a couple of weeks after 16 years of being on drugs and getting nowhere. A little boy, 5 years old, running around limping because he's got so much pain in his joint with blood in his stool and he can't be a little boy and play. And we get him in and after 4 weeks he's got color back in his face. He's feeling great and his bowel movements are reduced. And whereas his doctors for all these people just wanted to put them on drugs. Drugs and leave them forever and just say, this is your life now. The minute we disagreed with that, we realized we can change the world.

And it's been remarkable ever since. Wow. Love that. And I think you've got everybody's attention here with bloat. That's a common denominator. I think as soon as hormones begin changing, it's definitely, you know, one that for women in midlife, and I think often when we look back, We also, before we noticed, you know, a slight weight gain that is sometimes common when hormones begin to change, you know, it's just compounded. I think many of us can say that bloat was actually there earlier and I just kind of let it go and tolerated it and thought this is just in reaction to that food that I don't— doesn't agree with me. Let's define So Crohn's and colitis, I'm sure everyone listening has heard of them, and unless a woman maybe is suffering or has or knows somebody directly, she wouldn't maybe be able to communicate or define each of those.

So would you do that? Absolutely, I'd love to. So let's look at gut first of all as kind of our, our grassroots here. It's a spectrum. So if you have somebody dealing with inflammation in their gut, like just bloat, it is a wear and tear process. And so I picture this like you're wearing a new pair of shoes, you're going to the gym, you're going for a run, and you forgot your socks. What happens to your heel on that shoe, right? It rubs, it rubs until it gets red and blisters, and it will bleed. It's— that's similar. We have somebody dealing with just bloat or just irritable bowel syndrome, just constipation. We see that quite a lot. Or loose bowels, you're having 3, 5, 8 or more bowel movements a day, your transit time is very quick. That's sort of the beginning where that heel is starting to rub and it gets raw, and maybe it's pre-blister. But blistering and bleeding is Further down the wear and tear severity spectrum where now you've got ulcers in your colon and Crohn's disease. And so ulcerative colitis is really what it sounds like. It's ulceration of the colon or the large intestine. And so we see in there, we get people coming in with symptoms like mucus in their stool, blood, painful bowel movements. Urgency is a big one, like inability to hold. Uh, there's a lot of food sensitivities and other issues going on with that. Biologically, it's inflammation in these chunks. So maybe 15 straight centimeters of like the lower rectum, for example, might be inflamed. And you might have some mild to moderate ulceration or none. It just depends on the severity. And they come in these big chunks, and it's really surface level, right? Like skinning your knee. It's, it's a very surface level wound or injury. But then we have Crohn's disease, which is beyond just the large intestine. It's the entire mouth to anus GI tract. It's all kind of the same tissue, like the tissue inside your cheeks, that soft squishy stuff. That's kind of what your intestines are like. It's very similar type of tissues. They share a lot of the same cells. And so your mouth to anus is all the same assembly line. And so Crohn's disease, you can get inflammation anywhere. You can get ulcers in the mouth, you can have it in the small intestine, and they come in patches we call Peyer's patches, which is where you'll have a chunk here, 3 inches later, another patch here, 8 inches later, another one here. And they go really almost random and they're deeper. It's beyond a scraping of the knee. Like you're, you're down sometimes to the bone. It's very deep into the tissues. Um, and so I look at Western medicine says Crohn's and colitis are different. They say IBS or irritable bowel is different. I look at them as a severity spectrum. Bloat is the very beginning. IBS is the next stage. Colitis or ulcerative colitis is next, and Crohn's disease is worse. Now, some people can jump from one to the other almost overnight. Some people, it takes months or years to get there, but every bit of it is a wear and tear spectrum. Western medicine spends a lot of time differentiating these diseases. If you even look at their own stuff from The Lancet or the Mayo Clinic and their own reports, they have these Venn diagrams. To look at IBS or IBD, so irritable bowel syndrome versus inflammatory bowel disease, which is your Crohn's colitis. They're overlap, they're almost identical. It's just a little bit different in terms of severity. And so they really are the same thing. We started looking at them as the same condition as a wear and tear. It allowed us to look into a different root cause, which allowed us to ultimately reverse these diseases up to 95% of the time. Whereas Western medicine does it 0%. Their goal is to simply mask the symptoms.

I'm going to come back to causal, causative reasons, but can it be cured? Can both of them be cured? And what are you seeing? Or is it better and symptomatic, but I still have this?

The reason I use the term reverse is legally in my practice for what we do, I cannot use the words cure, treat, or heal. Yeah. I'll get charged with practicing medicine without a license. I'm not a medical doctor. So what I have to say is reverse or, you know, undo or unwind or some other, you know, pussyfoot type of dance around the bush type of, type of word. And so what we have to look at— the word cure, I'll let you guys define by yourself. Here's what I look at: if you are no longer inflamed, you no longer need medication, you can go back to living a normal life, and you complete— you're so healthy you completely forgot that you've ever had any kind of inflammatory process or disease whatsoever, what is it? Is it cured? You make up your mind, right? Western medicine says you can only get it to remission, it's bound to come back. I say it's only going to come back if you do not pull out enough of the root causes. It's a multifactorial thing. If we have many layers, you have 5 or 6 different layers, you manage to get 5 of them, you're still prone to things coming back. It's not cured per se, but if you remove all of the contributing factors and causes, your body will heal itself and your disease will be completely removed entirely. You call it what you want, but I say reversed to whatever degree I'm legally allowed.

Sweet. Yeah, very well said. What then are those contributing factors? I mean, is there a common denominator and these are same for all, or is there a wide variety depending on who you are?

Well, I'm so glad you asked, Debra. I have basically condensed the last 10 years of my life into this tiny little Venn diagram that I have now here in front of me. It's become a notes page, so I scribbled all over it. But this little Venn diagram describes the 3 root causes of what creates inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's colitis, and the 3 things that make it autoimmune, if it is autoimmune. Now, so far, anybody dealing with this, their doctors told them, yes, it's autoimmune. No, there's nothing we can do. Your only options are medication and surgery. I disagree with all of those things vehemently, you know, fight to the death over it. I know I have the privilege now of the absolute blessing of actually lecturing doctors at a functional medicine academy about this. And this Venn diagram is the roots of all of my lectures and everything I do to try to change the way we see this. So The first thing we have to look at is toxins. Now we hear about toxins and detoxes and, you know, whatever else we get into, but the reality is toxins are from everywhere. It can be mold toxins, it can be food toxins, it can be pesticide toxins, rodenticides, insecticides, any kind of -cide. These are all toxins we take in, right down to our perfume. Everything we have, it's putting, you know, drops of water in a cup. Eventually you might fill that cup up. It's when it overflows you have symptoms.. You might be full of toxins and not know it because your cup has not overflowed. The second it overflows, we develop symptoms, and then we start running to see what's causing the problem. So even though a small toxin like the perfume you're wearing, it might be a drop in the bucket, it's still one of 1,000 drops, which makes up for a big chunk. And so we have to look at toxins overall. The second contributor to bowel disease is microbial imbalances. And so this is where we go back to the microbiome. It's 100 trillion bacteria outnumbering us 10 to 1. And I'll tell you, Debra, When we're born, we are born 99% human cells, 1% bacterium. So that's what we get from mom in utero coming through the birth canal. It's what inoculates the baby. It's 1% of us is bacteria. By the time we die, we're 10% human and 90% microbes. It's a staggering statistic, like it's shocking. So we have to look at microbial imbalances. Is there fungal or candida overgrowth, parasitic issues, bacteria? You go to your doctor with gut issues or gut disease, they'll check you for salmonella, varicella, E. coli, really basic pathogens we call them, like really dangerous stuff, but they don't look for anything else. They don't check your microbiome and measure through what we call a GI map. If you're good and bad are out of balance to either end of that spectrum, too much good, too much bad, not enough of either, you can have symptoms. And so we have to look at microbes. The third thing is diet and nutrient deficiencies. So our food is void of nutrients. Many of us are eating— hopefully most of your listeners are eating pretty good. But we have to keep in mind anything processed, junk, refined, it's void of nutrients. Our, our monocropping, our farming practices today, there are arguments. A study back from '04 determined we need 8 oranges in 2004 to get the same nutrients as your great-great-grandmother would've in 100, 200 years ago. And so fast forward that to today, 2020 or 2024, now the estimates are upwards of 20 oranges. So we can argue we have 20 times less nutrients in our body. But those are the— that's the construction crew. Those are our materials that we need to repair ourselves, heal the immune system, repair our tissues, and we're not getting them. And so our 3 causes that we have are toxins of some kind, of any kind, microbial imbalances of any kind, and nutrient deficiencies or poor diet. These are what contribute to it. But there's one more layer. People go, well, what if mine is autoimmune? Or it's in— it's genetic. We hear that one a lot. It's just genetic. I'll give you a great example, Debra, and I'm on a tangent now, but I had a client that came to see me, 22-year-old male, right? Came in and his doctor told him, I kid you not, he had ulcerative colitis. He started a new job. 2 months in, he was having gut issues, went to his doctor, diagnosed with IBS. 6 months after that, saw his doctor. He's now 8 months on the job. He was having blood in his stool, diagnosed him with IBD, ulcerative colitis proctitis. So the lower 10 or 15 centimeters of his rectum was inflamed with ulceration and blood. And he said, well, it's genetic. And I kid you not, he said it's more common in Jewish people. You're Jewish, your family's Jewish. It's probably— that's why. So it's genetic. There's nothing we can do. Take some drugs and that will help. And that was his explanation. I kid you not. It just blew me away. I talked to him about this. We laughed out loud what an asinine explanation this was. And so I said, okay, it was— we worked a timeline, took us 15 minutes. When did this start? Because your doctor goes, okay, here's, here's the symptoms. Therefore, the next stage is give it a diagnosis. Let's put it in a box and name, name this pet of ours inside of a box. Once we have that, we feed it drugs 1, 2, 3. It's this drug, that drug, or that drug. And if none of them work, we kill the pet. We just cut the organ right out of your body. We'll remove, remove your colon, which makes no sense. And so if your pet's screaming at you and it's barking, feed it something different. Don't just kill the animal. You know, it doesn't make any sense. And so we had to go back. I said, what job? We started working in HVAC. So he's in new homes and old homes and renos and the works. I said, okay, so you're working in ventilation. Did you wear your PPE? His question, he says, what's PPE? I said, that tells me everything I have to know. So you're not wearing your personal protective equipment. I said, you probably have a mold infection. We sent him for a urine test to check for mold and he came back positive for Ochratoxin A. It's a nasty mold known to cause ulcerative colitis, kidney disease, liver disease, asthma, and the works. 10 weeks later, got it out of his system. Bing, bang, boom, off his drugs, no disease, no symptoms, no nothing. And he's still Jewish. So the idea is you can say it's genetics, right? Genetics load the gun. Other things, toxins, microbes, nutrients, these pull the trigger. These things influence your genetic expression. And so your genetics are one of the things that might make it autoimmune. Leaky gut can contribute to autoimmunity. If you have gut issues, you have leaky gut or a trigger of some kind, a stressful event or going to medical school or divorce or a death of a loved one. These things can make it autoimmune. But that, that's sort of our spectrum. Outside of that, there's, there's no reason for inflammation. Can't be random. It can't just happen to you.

We have to figure out why it's happening. Mm-hmm. Okay. So I want to back up just to one thing that you just said, and let's clarify this for everybody. So you said, you know, a stressor may make it autoimmune.

Say more about that, because I think you just made all of us a little nervous. Yes. So stressors are one of those contributing factors. Right? So we have to look at cause and effect. Again, drops in a bucket. Some people, they respond really badly to stress. If you're someone who's sitting in traffic and you're having a bloody panic attack because you're going to be late for work, it's not the traffic. You've got other things going on inside your body contributing to these factors. Maybe there's PTSD. Maybe it's a death of a loved one or, you know, whatever it is, a long, a bad marriage or an unhealthy relationship that you finally got out of. Um, these are all stressors. They contribute to these issues. They contribute to blood sugar imbalances. They contribute to immune dysregulation. Right? Autoimmunity really is just a dysregulated immune system where your body now attacks itself, truly. And so if you have a contributing factor, right, I can hold 9 buckets of water and walk just fine. I can carry these things without them overflowing or spilling. But you put me on a tightrope, I'm bound to spill something or fall off. And so the stress might be that tightrope. It might be a glass of water. It just depends on how it is for you in the grand scheme of your general response. For me, I get stuck in traffic, I'll be 30 minutes late. For like the most important meeting of my life, and I'm like, well, shit happens, no big deal. My wife, she hates being late. We're 5 minutes late, she's pissed. And so certain people respond to certain stressors differently, right? So everyone's going to respond. But stress, it disrupts your gut, your gut bacteria. It increases stress hormones. It actually inhibits motility or the movement of food through. It withholds or inhibits digestive enzyme production, stomach acid production. If you have acid reflux, you probably should get off the antacids. You probably have too little acid, not too much. So all these little things— your stomach has an entry door and an exit door. These sphincters, they open and close. They are pH and pressure sensitive. So if you lack stomach acid, you don't have the fluid volume, therefore no pressure, and you don't have the acidity, therefore no acid, or the pH is too high instead of low where acid should be. And so you end up with these doors flapping open all willy-nilly. So if you have acid reflux, it's cuz your door's not closed. It's pressure and pH. If my wife gets acid reflux, what do I do? I give her either some stomach acid replacement pills like the HCL, or I give her some apple cider vinegar with water. Boom, goes away. Because your body gets that signal back. Everything in the body is positive and negative feedback loops. They all come in these signals. Turn on, turn off, turn up, turn down. We just have to give it the right tools to signal correctly.

Love it.

Perfect.

All right, I want to ask you something here. You say something like the USA is the gut disease capital of the world, and I know you're not just picking on us because you're Canadian, but say more about this and why, why is this the case and why, where you're saying it?

Well, you know, they say misery loves company. You might like this one then because I'm up here in Canada. We recently joined you guys as one of the leaders for gut disease as well, so We do blame you. Yeah. As per the CDC, there was roughly 1.5 to 3 million cases of IBD being treated worldwide by a doctor. 1.5 to 3 million. It's not that much. 1990, considering at the time it was what, 6 billion people or something. Today it's north of 7 to 8 million. Oh my God. And so we've gone up arguably 4 to 6 times the amount of IBD cases. Why? Why are we seeing so much Crohn's and colitis? Studies can show up to 72% of Americans complain of gut issues at least once a week. Gas, bloat, diarrhea, constipation, cramping, pain, nausea, something, acid reflux, some kind of dysfunction. The challenge here is the Western world, we look at diseases and we just wait for a diagnosis. Okay, I got my diagnosis. At least I know what's wrong now. At least there's hope. A diagnosis means nothing. And I, I'm trying not to swear. I get really fighty on these things. A diagnosis, it means Nothing. It is useless. All it is is a word to describe your symptoms, but we cling to a diagnosis like it's some kind of hope, right?

It's very dangerous. Or, or I don't know, or a sentence. I think it— yes. Yeah, it is dangerous because I think we sometimes then own it, right? It's— we're not— it's not something we have, but it's something that we are.

It's dangerous. Yeah. And we sort of look at it and go, I finally have answers now, but all we're looking for is Okay, if you've got a hostage in your house, they don't want to be there. You put tape over their mouth, they might be quiet, but you still don't want to be there. So if you have your body creating symptoms, making noise, it's screaming and yelling, help me, help me. These are your symptoms. Medication is tape on its mouth. We go, oh, it's quiet now. I fixed the problem. No, you didn't. You just can't hear it. And so we have to get in there. Like if I went to the doctor with a thorn or a nail in my hand, it's all swollen and infected and it's bleeding and I can't move my hand. You go to the doctor and they say, oh yeah, You're clearly inflamed. Let me give you some ointment for the pain. You look at him like he's crazy. Like, reverse the disease. Like, pull the thorn out. Pull the nail out. We have to look for the thorn and the nail inside. When we have internal chronic inflammation, we have gut disease or gut issues or something else going on, we simply look for the numbing cream. We're putting tape over its mouth. We're not looking for the thorn. We're not looking for the nail in your gut. Inflammation is a pain response. Your body's trying to heal you. It's your body dilating blood vessels. It's putting pressure and sensitizing nerves. That's what pain is. And so we have to figure out what is causing the inflammation. It's never random. It's not just genetic. It's not just— they call it idiopathic, which means unknown. If you've gone up 5 to 6 times the cases in the United States or in the world, it can't possibly be unknown. If it is, you better figure it out. But here's why I say the USA— I kind of went on a tangent— is the gut disease capital of the world. Debra, there are about 8 million cases worldwide of IBD or Crohn's and colitis right now. The United States of America is less than 5% of the global population. North America, Canada, US included, less than 5% of the global population, but they have 50% of those disease cases. Wow. 10 to 1. It's astonishing. And so we have to figure out what's causing it. It can't possibly— if it's genetic, that's a statistical impossibility for cases to go up. 5, 6 times in 30 years, and for 50% to be located in 5% of the world, that's impossible. It can't be genetic. It can't change that much that fast. If it's idiopathic, you better figure it out. We got a pretty good idea. We just talked about the microbial imbalances, toxins, nutrients, etc. And then they'll also say there's nothing that can be done. Well, you're giving numbing cream for the pain. You're putting tape on the hostage's mouth. Let's figure out why it's screaming in the first place. But doctors are unfortunately trained to go, here are your symptoms. Therefore, here's the drug. We never go backward. Even in medical school, they don't learn this stuff. They learn, what, 4 to 6 hours of nutrition, and then the nutritional deficiencies aren't taught to be fixed with nutrition. They're taught to be fixed with drugs to mask the symptoms of the medic— or the nutrient deficiencies. They just give medication. And so it's a completely backwards system. And the critical thought, it frankly said— these come from colleagues of mine, like medical doctors who left their practice to pursue functional medicine or other things— they say it is cooked book, book, medicine. It does not make sense.

It's ridiculous, and people are not getting well, and that's why they leave their practices. I hate that this is the reason, but I think this is leading to better and better physicians, you know, in, in the end, although it's taking a while. And hopefully it will not be maybe this for our generation, for all my listeners, but for the next one, because of the level of frustration and the unwillingness of you listeners not to settle. And to, to have this wake-up call that there is a different way and that this is the system. So thanks for pointing all that out. I want to tap into one more thing before I let you go. The gut is basically tied to everything and every other possible thing, so it's not just those immediate things of bloating and constipation, diarrhea, solving those, but the big thing is your absorption, you know, of the nutrients that you do take in and/or do supplement. You know, if you're not breaking down your food, you're not absorbing the protein that you're eating. You're not able to hold on to that lean muscle tissue or the bone and maybe in fact leaching it, making it worse. But you say something very interesting, and it's that the gut health is very connected to brain health, which I think more, more of us know, but you also mentioned intuition and relationships as well. Talk a little bit about the intuition part because I find that so intriguing.

Yeah, it's kind of a bizarre concept to try to put together, but here's the deal. You got up to 90% of your neurotransmitters are made in your gut, and those are the things that your nerves use to communicate and send signals. They're The, the carrier pigeons that take a signal or a message from one place to another, and they're made inside of your gut. So your brain, your nervous system to communicate these things, they have to carry these messages and they're made inside your gut. So if you have an imbalanced gut, you're gonna have an imbalanced production of these neurotransmitters. Number one. Number two, look at, we talked quickly about relationships. Well, even your gut microbes, your bacteria can determine how social you feel like being on a given day. They have so much influence on everything. When I say everything, Debra, I mean everything. You can name one thing, one aspect about your life, and I will connect it back to your gut. They're like Alexa. They are. They're better than Alexa. It's— let's talk about intuition. I mean, you have billions of neurons inside your brain, right? You have about 400 or 500 million inside of your gut. Now, we know the conscious and subconscious, right? The subconscious fires much faster than the conscious mind. And so if you think about the conscious mind, we process about 2,000 bits of information per second. If you were to measure it to a computer, put that in speed, you're driving 100 miles an hour, right? Pretty good, pretty good pace to be driving. That's how quickly your brain can really take in information, disseminate it down, and come up with a conclusion. Your subconscious mind travels about 100,000 miles an hour. So we've literally got a turtle with 3 legs versus a Millennium Falcon jumping to hyperspace. Right? And so your subconscious mind is like lightning fast. Well, we all know what a gut instinct is. We all know that feeling, a gut feeling, a gut something. We know what that is. It's an intuition response. Well, think about this. Your subconscious, you often get a gut feeling or you catch a vibe or something happens before your brain can take that information apart and like rationalize what's going on, right? Your brain won't figure it out for several seconds or several minutes. After your gut already goes, ooh, something's up. Well, picture you're trying to walk around, trying to run. You have a sprained ankle and lower back pain. Your joints are inflamed. They don't function very well. They're limping. They're a little bit slower. So your gut, when it's inflamed, it's not producing neurotransmitters, which are the signal messengers, the carrier pigeons you need. It's not communicating at the speed it could or should be. In fact, your gut and your brain, they're made from the same tissue in utero, in the womb. As you're being— like a fetus is developing, they're the same tissue that separate and become two different organs. So they communicate together. Well, no wonder your subconscious communicates through your gut first. And if your instincts and intuition are inhibited, or you feel like you're kind of cloudy, you're just not as sharp as you used to be, it could be your gut because that's— it's limping along, it's slowed down, it's inflamed and not producing the same things or passing messenger signals as quickly or efficiently as it may be used to. And that's where we connect the intuition to gut health, response. It's something I've sort of theorized but have yet to actually prove, but we break it down, it makes sense.

Yeah, it totally does. And I think simplicity-wise, bringing it back to, you know, that gut feeling, of course, you know, it's easy to recall and remember, but I have never— and we've talked about the gut health a lot here— I've never had somebody literally say, you know, intuition and So I find that so interesting. So everybody, I think, you know, when you feel like you've lost that ability to trust yourself or trust your judgment, you know, there may be something else to look at beyond, you know, brain fog.

Where did that come from? Even think about how you disseminate— sorry, really quick— how you disseminate signals. If you have a migraine and people are talking to you, you're not paying attention, you're not listening, you're not hearing, you can't study, you can't remember, right? Because your nervous system is inhibited. Well, think about having an inflamed gut. How can you differentiate a signal between gut pain and intuition as well? Right? There's so many layers about it. So I know we're wrapping up here, so I don't want to drag this on for your listeners, but I hope that gives us some information about how it all works.

Well, and there was no dragging. This was all so very insightful. So I know you're going to have some fans and followers, and where would they go if they wanted to do that and connect with you further?

Oh boy. Easiest place to get a hold of me is on the website. You can access our podcast. We talk all about the gut and gut disease, meeting with some of the world's most famous doctors and experts that you could ever think of. Um, it's been a real blessing to work with them. So we do interviews there and quick tip episodes. We've got programs and courses for those going through Crohn's and colitis. And most recently just opened up an online community, um, where we have, uh, all kinds of Q&As and courses and all kinds of stuff. So everything there can be found at gutsolution.ca.

Thank you so much, Jess. This has been fantastic. So everyone, I'm going to encourage you to go over there and listen. And I know firsthand he's got a great podcast, he's a great interviewer, and I know he most likely pulls out all of the good stuff from any of his guests. So thank you again for being here. If you're looking for show notes on this one, everyone, flipping50.com/gutsolution. And what are you waiting for? Let's start Flipping 50 together. Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what what you want to listen to as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about, like how much protein do you need, weight loss, and other 3 ultra important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman. So go and listen. Right now. Do you have a question for a podcast? A question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell? Did you know we have a special group just for podcast question roundups and the answers? My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group. But it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, open call for podcast questions, or tell your story, would you like to be a guest? So if you're looking for a community of women who are also interested in optimizing their health, strengthening their mindset, and looking forward to every new year, join the Flipping 50 Insider group that's flipping 5-0, Insiders on Facebook.