Dr. Daryl Gioffre: How to Heal Leaky Gut and Alkalize Your Body Naturally | TUH #053

It's incredible how deficient we become in mineral. And one of the biggest reasons why is what's happening to our soil. They've done a study on spinach showing that you have to consume 65 servings of spinach to get the same mineral content, especially iron, that you got back in 1948 with one serving. Dr. Daryl Draw for joining us live. This book called get off your sugar. The gut is critical. With over two decades of experience, Dr. Daryl Joffrey is a highly sought after gut health and inflammation specialist. I think we've become more deficient than we ever been in human history. We have what we call a sick care system. We make a percent of the world's population, we spend over 50% of the world's money on medical care, yet we rank 72nd in world health. The gut is critical. All these downstream issues that people have, whether that's brain fog, anxiety, depression, we got to go back to the gut and make sure the gut's okay. And most people, it's not okay. My dad's doctor got it wrong. It wasn't about too much acid. It was about.

Hey, guys, welcome back to the ultimate human podcast. I'm your host, ultimate human, human biologist Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything, anti aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. I've just introduced this guest to you, but I just wanted to say how excited I am to have him on the podcast. He is actually a resident of Naples and I, I started my clinic, ironically in Naples and we had this serendipitous crossing of paths I've been using, which is called alkamind for quite a while, to get the acidity out of my coffee and get some MCT oils and other things into my coffee in the morning. And then one day I heard about his personal journey. And as you know, I think the greatest inventions and impacts on humanity come from people that have solved a problem in their life and usually their pain has led to their purpose. And he is no different. He went through an incredible health journey, both himself and his father. And as he solved this complex puzzle of what was wrong, and we're going to talk about it today on the podcast, you know, he gave birth to an incredible brand that is focused on getting the acid level out of your life and controlling acid and eating an alkaline diet and becoming more alkaline to put yourself in a healthy state. As you know, I think the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease and so does he. So welcome to podcast Dr. Daryl Geoffrey.

Thank you so much.

It is such a pleasure to have you on, man.

Yeah, what a blessing. Great to see you.

And, you know, like I said, I feel like some of the greatest impacts on humanity from a health and wellness, longevity, anti aging standpoint, biohacking standpoint, whatever you want to say, you call it, you know, the impacts on big nutritional revolutions, they come from people that have solved a problem in their life. Um, and I've had some of the most inspiring guests on, and they identify with my audience because they've been in a place in their life where it was hopeless. Modern medicine couldn't solve the problem for them. Some of them were physicians, some were PhDs, some were MDs, and some were soccer moms. And. And they just realized that I had to become my own citizen scientist. I had to take matters into my own hands and solve the problem. And that ripple effect now is impacting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions of lives. And I think that your story is very similar. So welcome to the podcast. And, you know, I. I'd love for you to talk about your journey and, you know, what you're focused on right now in your practice and with your patients. I know you're known as the celebrity nutritionist, but, you know, I'd love to hear about your journey and what gave rise to alkamind and. And your focus on an alkaline diet.

Sure. My practice was in New York City for 25 years.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Exactly. I escaped from New York. I love it. I love family up in Connecticut, but, yeah, I was the shoemaker with no shoes. You know, when you're in your early 20s, you can get away with a hardcore sugar addiction, which I had. You know, I've coached a lot of people through sugar, and it's. It's amazing because the amount of sugar that I was intaking was just insane. And you get away with this when you're in your 20s. But as I started getting, you know, later into my 20s, what happened was my waistline started growing. Yeah, I actually was.

I think sugar addiction is way worse than people think it is.

Oh, it's. It's. Sugar is a substance. It's not a food. I mean, it's a drug. It's become America's drug of choice. I mean, the average American is consuming 130 pounds of this white stuff every single year. Wow. That equates to 38 teaspoons a day. The problem with that is after six teaspoons, the liver can't metabolize it literally. Stores as fat and becomes just this massive toxin that dries up inflammation. And we know where that goes to. So I started gaining weight. I was 50 pounds heavier than I am, you know, today. And I was leading down to adjust one of my patients, and literally, my pants split right down the backside because. True story. No, true story. I refuse. I refuse to buy bigger clothes. You know, I was. I was one of those people.

The old fashioned plumber's crack.

Exactly. Exactly. So that was kind of one of those moments where I said, all right, you know, you got to. You got to change something. And I literally drew a line in the sand, you know, burn the boats that day. And I decided I had to make a drastic change in my lifestyle. It was interesting because a week later, I heard about this thing called the alkaline diet. And you ever hear something, and all of a sudden it's like the magnets flip, and you're like, whoa, this. There's something about this. I got to learn more.

Yeah.

And, you know, sugar is the most or one of the most acidic substances you can put into the body. And as I started to learn more, I basically said, all right, I'm going to stop with the deprivation approach. Before that, you know, for years, I would stop sugar for two weeks, two months, you know, six months. And again, it's such a powerful drug. You come back to it. Now, for many people, they can quit sugar by that deprivation approach. But it didn't work for me, as most of my clients. It doesn't work. Yeah.

Yeah. Most of my clients doesn't work either.

Yeah. So I just started to add things into my life that were going to strengthen my body, alkalize my body, and I started with a green juice, and that was it. You know, I started with a green juice every single morning. And. And when I first had my first green juice, it literally tasted like swamp water. It was disgusting. And I realized about two weeks later that it wasn't the green juice that tasted nasty. It was my taste buds that were so used to sugar that was causing that desensitization. So as I started drinking more and more green juice, within about two weeks, my cravings were less. And within 21 days, the cravings were gone. So I started adding on to that. I started eating more salads. I started bouncing on a rebounder. I started lymphatic drainage, doing more things to oxygenate my cells. And literally, chlorophyll is one of powerful ways to cleanse and purify your blood.

It's very close to hemoglobin as well.

It's identical. It's identical except for the center atom. So I do live blood cell analysis as well. And it's amazing because you can look at your, your red blood cells on that high powered microscope and you like a dark field. Dark field, exactly. Yep. And phase contrast. So I would be testing my blood as well and seeing what the chlorophyll did. And it was amazing because when I was really like jacked up on sugar, all my cells were like stuck together. What I call blood sludge.

And guys, time. Can I get, can I get a round of applause, please?

Yes.

There you go.

And the problem with that is that you can't get the oxygen to your tissues, you know, and now it creates this downstream issue. But as I started putting in this green juice and the chlorophyll, right, because it's identical to your hemoglobin molecule except for the center atom, where chlorophyll obviously is your magnesium, your hemoglobin is your iron. So again, people out there that want to help build iron just drink more greens. And as I started drinking more and more greens, the red blood cells started to separate. My body started to actually feel better. And byproduct of that, I literally lost about 42 pounds in three and a half months. It was incredible. And that was really kind of like the introduction to the whole alkaline world. And what I learned was, is that it's not about like trying to increase the alkalinity of the body. Like so many people get it wrong out there, right? The whole purpose of alkalizing your body is to take the stress off your own body's buffering system so it doesn't have to do the work on its own. It's kind of like your, your temperature. If I'm in New York City and it's freezing cold out, I'm wearing a T shirt, I go outside. What happens is your has to rob Peter to pay Paul. Your body has to basically use its resources to keep you alive. So it's going to take all of your blood from your fingers, from your toes, bring it to your organs. Why? So you don't die. It's got to keep that temperature at 98.6. It works like a thermostat, right? Well, the PH of your blood is exactly the same. It's tightly regulated between 7.35 and 7.45, but ideally a 7.4. So again, the reason why we put things into our body that alkalizes like leafy greens and things like that is to take stress off your body's buffering system, like your kidneys, like your adrenal glands, like your blood proteins and the minerals in your bones, your muscles, in your mouth, so that your body doesn't have to do the regulating on its own.

You know, it's interesting. I talk a lot about the fallacy behind drinking alkaline water can make the blood alkaline. We know that that was a great marketing myth and it worked to sell a lot of alkaline water. So talk to me about if, if alkaline water doesn't change the ph of the body, then how do certain diets provably and measurably actually change the ph of the blood? Because I also am a firm believer that being slightly into the call it, the alkaline range for human beings is, is entering a disease free state. When we were in the mortality space and we looked at blood ph, you know, acidic blood phs would accelerate nearly every form of disease and pathology and alkaline states would actually do the opposite. And so I'm a little fuzzy on the research and the mechanisms for, you know, diet specifically relating to shifts in ph in the blood. So talk a little bit about that.

It's all about minerals. I mean, minerals are the critical, most important thing for the body right now. And it's incredible how deficient we become in minerals, you know, and one of the biggest reasons why is what's happening to our soil. I mean, they've done a study on spinach, and this one study was back in 2015, showing that you have to consume 65 servings of spinach to get the same mineral content, especially iron, that you got back in 1948 with one serving. Now in our present time, that's going up to 75. So even when we try to be healthy, even try to get those minerals, it becomes really, really hard. So that's why supplementation of minerals, especially magnesium, becomes critical. And the whole purpose of putting minerals into the body is because they neutralize acidity. So when there is acid, when there's toxins, when there's inflammation being created by those acids, we need mineral to go in there and basically mop up the scene. But the problem is, if we're not getting them from our diet, the body's got to get them somehow.

Yeah, right.

Because again, the ph of the blood is always constant. So what happens is the body, as I said before, it robs Peter of the paypal. The body will take calcium from your bones, bring that into the blood. Why? To neutralize the Acid takes magnesium from the bones, the muscles, takes bicarbonate from the mouth. Your body is so innately intelligent, it'll let your body and bones fall apart to keep your PH tightly regulated and stable. Because if that PH dips down by more than one point, we die.

Right?

And your body says, no way, we're not gonna let that happen. So the most important thing we can do is adopt what I call a strength eating diet, where you're eating lots of leafy greens, healthy plant based keto fats, moderate amounts of proteins, fiber, rich slow burning carbs. So you're getting all those four macros into your body and when you do that, your body's gonna have the necessary nutrients it needs to deal with whatever it is. I always say your body's alkaline by design, but it' acidic by function. So we breathe in oxygen, the waste product is carbon dioxide gas. Right. We go for an exercise, the body makes lactic acid. So the body has these like buffers that it could deal with just the regular acidity that we create from normal day life. But the problem is, is that the average American is dumping in so much acid into their body. From the standard American diet, which we call the SAD diet, or what I call the crap diet, right? We're full of crap. Completely refined and processed. All right?

Oh, I love that. I'm going to adopt that now. There you go, you're going to see that start appearing on podcast. The crap diet. Completely refined and processed.

I mean we're, we're, we have a crap diet. We're full of crap. The Average American has 5 to 15 pounds of impacted fecal matter in their gut and is creating all this auto and toxicity. We're literally choking on our own fumes. So we have to get more minerals, especially the magnesium, because what it's going to do over a thousand different things, as we all know. But in terms of what it does for our gut function, for people dealing with acid reflux, for our blood ph, it is critical. So again, leafy greens, but I like to go above that one step further. We want to drink our greens. Green juice, green smoothies, green soups. That's the core of what I call a strength eating diet.

And so what's so talk about a, a good morning routine for, I mean there are lots of great brands out there, athletic greens, you know, some of these superfood blends. So are you suggesting that people add this? You know, one of the things I, I tell people to add every day to their morning routine is a half a Teaspoon of something called Baja Gold sea salt, which, or even Celtic sea salt. I, I was reading some research on, on pink Himalayan sea salt and I, and I about the, you know, the amount of heavy metals. And then I actually did a test and I actually crushed some of this pink Himalayan sea salt and was able to pass a magnet over the, the cutting board and even see some of the flaking of, of the metals coming out the, of the pink Himalayan sea salt. So I really push people to, you know, Celtic salts and, and mineral salts like Baja Gold and, and to just remineralize the body first thing in the morning. You know, I, I like you believe that the majority of us are becoming diseased and pathological because of deficiencies in certain nutrients in the human body. And, and many of them are the ones that you don't hear about. The, the unfun co factors like molybdenum and selenium and manganese and B.O. of these, you know, minerals that nobody's even heard of. Everybody knows about B vitamins and you know, B12 and folate, but it's those minerals. So talk about a, you know, for the listeners. Like what in your opinion is the, you know, best morning routine? And when you say greens, what greens are you talking about? What's the best way to get them?

Sure. And I love what you said about, you know, deficiency. I mean, I think we've become more deficient than we ever been in human history. You know, if you look at the cause of all dis ease, which is, excuse me, lack of balance, lack of harmony in the body, it's deficiency and toxicity. I always like to use the analogy. If you see a plant start to wilt, what's the first thing that comes to your mind?

Water.

Right. Why not drugs or surgery? Right. That's, that's, that's, that's where most of these.

Maybe I'll do that. Maybe I will start dissecting the stem.

And see if we.

But that, that's where all these popsicle stick on there.

Yeah, right. But that's where all these allopathic doctors are going to. And listen, there's, there is a time and place for crisis care. We have the best crisis care system in the world, but we do not have a health care system. We have what we call a sick care system. I mean, we make up 5% of the world's population. We spend over 50% of the world's money on medical care, again, which we call sick care. Yet we rank 72nd in world health. I can't even name 71 countries ahead of us. Right?

Wow.

So if we go back to the plant, we need to give that plant the things that it needs to be strong, to live, to be vital. Give it water, give it nutrients, give it sunlight. But there's a problem. That plant is still wilting. It's still dying. Why? What's going on? We're giving everything that it needs to be strong. Well, perhaps we missed that gas station next door leaking gasoline into the root system of that plant that's making that plant toxic. Now, maybe we prolong the plant's life because we gave it the things it needed that it was deficient in. But again, it was still toxic. So the problem with this day and age is that we are more toxic than we've ever been in human history. And I truly believe that addressing the toxicity in the body is more important than the nutrients. But we need. We need both. So if you give the plant all the things that it needs, and then you take out the things that's not serving that plant's higher purpose, then if it's not too far gone, that plant will heal itself. Because we're all designed to heal ourselves. I mean, God heals us, right? That's the innate intelligence of the body. Power made the body is the power of the heals the body. But we still need to give those the body the things that it needs to strengthen it from the inside out. So when I wake up, the very first thing I do is I hydrate with water. But water is neutral. Right. Now you can throw in some, you know, some of the things that you mentioned. Yeah, Bajo gold and whatever salt you choose to use. But I like to make my water what I call acid kicking. So we have an amazing green powder with alkaline. It's got 21 of your most alkalizing greens. And I'll take a scoop of that. I'll put that in, mix it up. Less than 30 seconds, you're getting five servings of organic greens. But why is that so powerful? Because it's literally bypassing the gut. It's getting right into that blood where it's going to alkalize, it's going to energize, it's going to detoxify you. And it's not like the sugar where you kind of get that like Joel. And all of a sudden you come down deep with a crash, right? No, this is going to sustain you because chlorophyll is the core of what's in that green juice. And it'. Minerals. Right. The Magnesium, the potassium and all the other minerals that you're getting in those trace minerals that is actually going to give the body the juice, no pun intended. Right. The strength that it needs. So I wake up, that's the first thing I want to do. You gotta hydrate because the body is most acidic in the middle of the night. I mean the body's most acidic between 1 and 3am in the morning, it peaks about 5am so when you wake up like you have to alkalize your body, you gotta hydrate. And I always say the solution to pollution is dilution. You've got to get that water in, but kick its acid with something that's going to be a little bit more powerful. That could be a little sea salt, a mineral powder or a greens powder. And that's how I, that's how I start my day.

That's great. You know, there's, there's, you know, some threads of, of wisdom out there that say that vegetables are killing us. I, I actually don't subscribe to that. I know that we have, you know, oxalates and we have oxalobacteria in, in the gut. I also think that the body is extremely good at minor amounts of, you know, hormetic stress. And so just about everything creates minor amounts of hormetic stress. Exercise creates small amounts of hormet. Every time we eat there is some hormetic stress on the body. And so talk a little bit about why you feel that green vegetable sources are some of the best ways to make the body alkaline. And what about the toxic chemicals in vegetables like oxalates and things like that that are commonly attacked as being stressors or pro inflammatory in the body are blocking the absorption of other nutrients? Again, I don't particularly subscribe to that theory myself, but I know a lot of my listeners have been down the road of different kind of dietary gurus. And I hear vegetables getting trashed a.

Lot.

In the public domain because of these stressors.

It's a great point and we hear it all the time. Anything in life you could find something good to support your cause or something against your cause. Right. But I wrote a whole page in the book about the whole thing on oxalates. You know, don't eat spinach, it's bad for you. It's got the oxalates. You know, Popeye, it's all bs. But no, it's like it's really about your gut. Like your gut is home to trillions of bacteria that's designed to assimilate these nutrients. I always say you're not what you.

Eat, you're what you digest, absorb low bacteria. I mean, so why would oxalate. Why would you have bacteria to process oxalates?

Right? So the problem is people's guts are a wreck. I mean, people's guts are so acidic is that they're not able to assimilate those nutrients. And I think one of the biggest problems with the oxalates is that you don't have that specific type of bacteria that's able to deal with what you're eating in the food. So it's not about avoiding spinach, because spinach is a strength food. I mean, spinach is incredible. Things like broccoli, all the vegetables are so powerful for the body. They are really good at detoxification and cleansing and purifying the body, especially the blood. But it's really about the gut. Gut is healthy. When your gut microbiome is balanced and you don't have that dysbiosis where you're having more of these bad bacteria that basically eat away at the gut lining versus the good bacteria that reproduce and can go after those bad guys, it's like your, your gut is always in a war, right? It's like good guys versus the bad guys or your guts. Like a garden, you want lots of flowers. You don't want lots of weeds. The people that have trouble with digesting vegetables have more weeds in the garden. You know, it's like people that have low stomach acid, which I believe, believe is one of the biggest causes of all disease in human.

I could not agree with you more.

On that big time.

I mean, when you say low stomach acid. Just, just, just so. Because sometimes we get these, these terms confused. You know, acidity in, in, in. In the stomach. You know, the lower the number, the more acidic, and the higher the number, the more basic.

Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And when we say get off your acid, I'm not talking about stomach acid. Right. Stomach acid is critical. I think we really got to talk about this because it's such a, a huge misconception out there. I'm talking about the acidity in the body, the acid in the tissues, or issues with the tissues and stealth pathogens and the inflammation that that causes. Right. So that's the things that we got to get rid of. But in terms of acid in the stomach, it's critical. I mean, I call this GI North. And one of the biggest things, when Hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut, I believe we're talking about leaky gut. But one Step further. Because one of the draw. The driving causes of leaky gut is hypochlorigia, which is low stomach acid. It creates three major problems. Right. Here's the thing, is that as we get older, we don't get stronger, we get a little weaker. Unless you're Gary, Brad, guy. We don't get faster, we get a little slower. We don't produce more stomach acid, we produce less stomach acid.

That's right.

I mean, when you're 20 years old, each decade you're going to lose 10% of that stomach acid. That's what the research shows. I'm telling you, that is way more accelerated because of the standard American crap diet. Diet, right. People have such low levels of stomach acid that the problem is when they eat their food, they can't absorb those nutrients. So you could be eating the best organic, clean food in the world. It's not getting into your cells. All right? So the first problem is you're getting malnutrition. Again, I'll say this, it's so important, we got to say it again. You're not what you eat, you're what you digest, absorb and stimulate. So as that food comes down and it gets into the stomach, if we're not digesting and assimilating that those nutrients aren't getting into the cells. One of the major causes of hypothyroidism is not something that's going on with the thyroid. You have all these doctors looking at the thyroid and yes, we have to check those markers. It's critical. But why is the thyroid going hypo. We gotta look at the stomach.

Yeah, right.

Because we're not.

80 of the T3. Is, is, is. Is made in the, you know, outside of the thyroid and the liver, the gut, the periphery, it's de. Iodinized in the liver. You know, there's nutrients that are needed for that deionization process. And then, and then you have the, the, you know, the role of the gut and the periphery and actually raising the level, taking T4 and turning it into T3 outside of the thyroid. And it's astounding to me that when T3 levels are low, that a lot of physicians are saying, well, this is hypothyroid. And they're medicating the thyroid, in my opinion, for a crime that's not committing. That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. So we have to look at that low stomach acid and start to optimize digestion. Because maybe they're not getting iodine or selenium or vitamin C or magnesium or vitamin D because of the digestive process. So it never reached the thyroid gland and now the thyroid gland is getting hit by that. Plus the thyroid gland is the first organ that gets hit by leaky gut. And that's another major issue. So malnutrition is the first thing that happens from low stomach acid. Number two is we develop food sensitivities. So again, as that food doesn't get digested. So let's say I'm eating an avocado. Right. When I did my food sensitivity test. I love the MRT test because it's not release test. Yeah, exactly. It's not looking at are you allergic to this food food. It's looking at when you consume this food, are you not digesting that food? And therefore it's creating inflammation in your gut. So that avocado comes down and it's not a small particle that your body can take in for nutrients. So instead the immune system that lives in your gut, and by the way, 80% of our immune system does, does live in our gut. Right. 80% of the nerve system lives in the gut. 95% of the serotonin is not made in the brain, made in the gut. Gotta pay attention to this area. So what happens is, is that because that food's not being digested, it gets attacked. And now we're developing these food sensitivities, driving up inflammation. It's causing more self pathogens to gain momentum, again causing leaky gut. But I think the third and most important thing that happens from low stomach acid is the free passageway of stealth pathogens into the gut. Right. It's from the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, it's from the food that we eat. Again, there's toxins everywhere. And when those come through, it's like my wife went to Michigan. I said, you want to have that Michigan defensive line in your stomach that's going to kill it all before it gets in. But no, it goes right past the stomach, right into the gut, what sets up shop. And here we go. Right, Right. So stealth pathogens, I believe is one of the biggest causes of low grade chronic inflammation in the body. Because we don't know that they're there. And just like a stealth fighter, you don't know that it's there. It's going to kill you and take you out at some point. That's what these stealth pathogens do.

What's interesting is that is the stomach is actually designed to prevent this from happening. I mean, one of the reasons why we have A stomach is to kill bacteria.

That's right.

And. And yet when we take proton pump inhibitors, you know, Nexium, Prilosec, one of those was just recently pulled from the market, too. Might have been Nexium. But in any case, we take these proton pump inhibitors, you know, Tums, Rolaids, Antacids, and then we're killing the PH of the stomach. We're making it too alkaline, so the first stage of the digestive process is inhibited. Now we're dumping alkaline contents into the gut, where we should be dumping acidic contents into the gut. And you're sort of reversing the natural physiologic role of the gut. And one of the most incredible things for me as a human biologist was discovering years ago that acid reflux was actually the byproduct of having too little acid.

Oh, boy. Right. Oh, boy.

This seems so oxymoronic to me. But then, then when you understand the physiology of how these different sphincter muscles, you know, in the stomach work, this cardiac sphincter at the top of the stomach, that's actually very sensitive to not only the amount of acid, but the PH of the acid. And the more acidic the stomach is, the tighter this muscle closes.

That's right.

And the more alkaline it is is the more it relaxes. And so what you're doing is you're asking that muscle to relax. That protects the stomach acid from leaving and entering the esophagus. And then you're wondering why you have acid reflux. And so you keep taking more antacids and more proton pump inhibitors, further driving the alkalinity up.

Yeah.

And further exacerbating the acid reflux and then buying yourself a downstream problem in the gut.

And you would agree it's the problem with PPIs is that you're taking now a low acid stomach, which we now know is bad, and every time you pop one of those pills, you've now reduced 95% of the acid in the stomach. So the goal of this kind of method is to get rid of the symptoms. But here's the problem. There's a research article that was published a year ago showing that 54% of people that take PPIs actually have increased symptoms in terms of their acid reflux. So it doesn't even work work in the majority of people. Right. Not to mention you're actually taking the root cause of why we have acid reflux. You're making it worse. So the goal is to, like, snip the wire to the alarm in the house. And, you know, now we don't know that there's something going on, but guess what? The fire's still there. We just now aren't being paid attention to it. The fire is going to take you out. And by the way, this is exactly what happened with my father.

With your dad.

Really? You. Acid reflux is a serious, serious problem.

I know. It leads to Brett's esophagitis. And when in the pre. You know, the dysplasia is a predisposition to cancer and can even lead to cancer in the distal part of the esophagus. Right. Is this what we're talking about?

It was October 2014, and it was a beautiful fall day, one week before the New York City Marathon. And I've been wanting to run the marathon for 20 years. And I'm in my final training run in Central park, and I'm picturing myself walking past or running past that finish line. Yeah.

Yeah.

And my wife would be there. My son Braden, who's now nine, was six months at the time. He was just born. And my parents were coming down Vermont from Vermont to watch the race as well. And all of a sudden, my phone starts to vibrate. I take the phone out, and there's a missed call from my brother Brandon. So me being a goofy brother, take a selfie, snap it back to him, and I keep going. Few seconds later, phone buzzes again. Take the phone out. This time it was a text call. Emergency. Wow. Immediately, Gary, I knew something happened to my parents again. They were driving down from Vermont. So they were driving down at 91 south, like, right before Hartford, a very, very busy highway. They were in the hov land. My dad was always the driver. My mom was always the passenger. In fact, she was knitting a sweater for my son Braden that she was gonna give to him when they saw us. And all of a sudden, she feels the car start veering off like this. Well, there's one huge problem. A concrete divider going 70 miles per hour. So she looks over at my father, and there he is, passed out against the window like this.

No way.

Serious. Car goes up the concrete divider. She leans over, grabs his leg off the accelerator, pulls it off. Car comes back down. Car goes back up. She grabs the keys, pulls them out of the ignition. As the car crashes, it's a miracle they didn't flip onto uncommon traffic the other way and kill not just them, but other people as well. So all of a sudden, I'm in a zip car heading from New York City up to the Hartford Hospital. And all along the way, I'm trying to figure out as a doctor, like, why did my dad pass out? Was it a heart attack? Was it a stroke?

Perforated?

Was it an aneurysm? Right. So when I get to the hospital, I meet with a doctor. He says, your dad has esophageal cancer. I'm like, what?

How did that cause him to lose cancer? Did he bleed?

So he was bleeding out from the inside from years of silent acid reflux. He was a stubborn Italian father, never mentioned anything. This is before. I was really like a gut specialist, right? But he always had this chronic cough. And I was always saying to myself, what is that chronic cough all about? So three days later, we're with the top specialist in esophageal cancer at Sloan Kettering. And he says, good news, guys. Your dad's cancer hasn't metastasized or spread. And these things are usually caused by too much acid. We'll come back to that point. We'll come back to that point in just a second. Wow. And it's so funny because I'm wearing my shirt that says, get off your acid. Right? Because that night, I'm giving a keynote address at one of the big wellness conventions in New York City. And I'm talking about how the. Or the connections between acidity and, as you were mentioning before, chronic inflammatory diseases like cancer, heart disease, and things like that, right? And so, like, right after that, I doubled down. I became a health investigator. And like any investigator does, you start following the evidence. I started calling every expert, you know, reading every research article, as many studies as possible. How did this happen? How did my dad get to this point? And most important, what can we do to hopefully reverse this thing? Right? Right. So three years later, I'm driving up to my brother's house in Connecticut. It was my birthday. We're gonna go up there to see my family and spend the day with my dad. And when we got there, you can tell that, you know, he lost a lot of weight. He wasn't looking good. He was losing the fight.

Did he have a gastroesophageal resection? What, did they go in and resect it?

So what they did when. When he was diagnosed with it, he had an 11 hour robotic surgery because the damage was so bad, right? Because he. Because we say, yes, it's from low acid. But we have to understand is that acid still causes the damage. Right? Low acid is the reason a big thing is magnesium deficiency. That's what causes that esophageal. Sphincter to not open and close properly. So there's a whole host of things we do for, obviously when someone has acid reflux. But for years this acid, even though it was low level, was creeping up into the esophagus. Basically, think about what acid does from a common sense standpoint. Acid is corrosive, right? It could burn a hole through chicken bones and metal. Think about what that does inside your gut, inside your digestive system. And when he was driving, that's what made him pass out. He was bleeding out. He had to have two transfusions at the hospital and they did basically an 11 hour robotic surgery where they took two thirds of his esophagus, removed that half of his stomach. They brought the two together. So now his stomach was up in his chest, which is just a whole crazy thing. That was a pretty traumatic surgery that he went through. But nonetheless, we're with him on that day when we went to visit him. And again, we could tell that he was losing the fight. But we had a nice, beautiful day. My daughter now was three months old, so got to spend some time with my daughter. We head back to the city. Gary, not even two hours later, I get a call from my. From my brother. Dad's in the hospital on life support, in a coma.

Oh my God.

So I'm back off there this time. I took a train. There's no way I was in the state to drive. We all gather around my father. I'm holding his hands and he's got a tube down his throat. And I said, dad, I'm so sorry for not being able to save your life. And I made a vow to him in that moment. I said, dad, I'm going to do everything in my power to prevent as many people from not suffering and not going down this route that you had to go. And Gary, after that, they pulled the tube out and he died right there. So this has become. No, thank you. But you talk about when we started turning pain to purpose. This was such a painful moment. It still is a painful moment, but I've turned that into my purpose. You know, my story was originally about me and sugar addiction and weight, but it's taken on a whole new role, which is the gut is critical. It's like all these downstream issues that people have, whether that's brain fog, anxiety, depression, issues with the reproductive system, liver stress, whatever it is, right? We gotta go back to the gut and make sure the gut's okay. And most people, it's not okay. So that's become my now mission in life is to help, as many people become aware of how to protect your gut, what to do to protect the gut. And again, my dad's doctor got it wrong. It wasn't about too much acid, it was about too little acid. Yeah. And what can we do? So you mentioned, like, the things that we could put into the body as far as the acidity. One of the best things you could do is apple cider vinegar. You know, it's like you take a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar 20 to 30 minutes before your biggest meal of the day, put that in about a third cup of warm water, because the warm water is going to stimulate the gastrin, and this is.

This is how to get the acid going again. By the way, I don't know if I've ever shared this publicly, but my father had the same surgery. He had gastroesophageal resection from esophageal cancer. And by the grace of God, he's still with us today. But a large part of this was because we got him off of. Post surgery off of PPIs, but he did have that gastroesophageal resection. And I got a very similar call to what you did. And I think that this is a much more prevalent problem. I mean, here we are, two guys on a podcast. Both of our fathers suffered from esophageal cancer. And I think it's a lot more prevalent than people are aware. And, and that, you know, we don't take action until you get that phone call. I didn't take action until I got the very same phone call. And my father started with a persistent golf, too. And so Captain John Bruckus still around. Love you, dad. And, but, but I, but. But I want to get back to this. So as I, I didn't mean to cut you off some of the way that. Yeah, you're. You're welcome. I know that's a hard story to share, but I want to talk about some of the ways that people listening, practical things they can do to maybe restore this acid balance. So you were saying 30 minutes before a meal. Tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. Love that. With baking soda.

You said you can add a little baking soda, but I would prefer not to. If you're taking baking soda, it could deplete your other minerals.

Right.

So what I would do is just do the straight up apple cider vinegar. Or you can also, in addition to that, add a little bit of lemon juice. Juice. Now, lemon, we all know, is an acidic fruit. It's acid out of the body, but it has an alkaline forming effect when you digest it. So does apple cider vinegar because it's high minerals, low in sugar. Right. Same thing with lime. Same thing with grapefruit. Not so with oranges, because oranges have more sugar. So you can just put a little lemon slice in there. Now, if someone does have acid reflux, I recommend don't start with a tablespoon, start with half of a teaspoon, see how you feel if you get that kick up of acid reflux. And what you do is take a tablespoon or a couple teaspoons of baking soda, a little bit of water, drink that, that'll calm it down right away. Or you could take some of our acid kicking minerals, same thing. And that'll come right away. But that's important because what that's going to start to do is start to gently increase the stomach acid, which is the goal. Right. Because we want to digest our food, we want to get those nutrients into our cells. One of the biggest symptoms we see with people from hypochlorigia, or low stomach acid is chronic fatigue.

Yes.

You have no energy, they'll sleep 12, 14 hours. They wake up, they're still exhausted. It why? Because the body's not getting those nutrients into the energy factories of the body, the cell. Right, right. Mitochondria. So it's really important that we do that before a meal. We have to take a digestive enzyme. I'm huge into digestive enzymes. And we test for this. I mean, my mantra is test, don't guess.

Right.

I know that's one of your mantras as well.

Totally agree with that.

It's so important, and especially when it comes to gut. Another one of my goals is to or missions is to have gut testing as regular as all the other testing. You know, it's like we test our cholesterol, we test our blood sugar, we test our hormones. Like we got to test our gut as well.

Yeah.

All right. Because we can actually look at all these numbers. There's a specific marker called the last taste, one that will show up in a GI map or a stool sample test, which is a direct marker if you're making sufficient amounts of enzymes specifically to break down proteins. Right.

And what kind of test is this? A saliva stool.

This is a stool sample.

Stool sample.

Yep, stool sample. And uses PCR technology. So we're looking at the DNA not of our body, but of the pathogens in that stool. Right. And it's very, very accurate. And it gives us a really incredible look at the entire microbiome. We're looking at GI north, we're looking at the, the stomach digestion, we're looking at your gallbladder. You know, are we digesting and simulating the fats? Now? You can tell if you're not stimulating fast because the stool will float, right? We gotta look at our, our stool, right? We gotta look at our crab, as they say.

Nobody wants to hear that.

But, but it looks at something called stay adequate, which is basically looking at are we diagnosed digesting our fats? And of course, are we making enough digestive enzymes? So that's what we call GI North. And just by adding a digestive enzyme before your first bite or after your first bite does wonders for your body because again, it's going to support your pancreas and it's going to help you assimilate all those nutrients that your body really, really needs.

So for somebody that's taking PPIs right now or just constantly, you know, sucking down the tums. At one point in my life, years ago, it was when I was triathlon training, I used to buy the Costco sized, like they were like quart jugs of, of tums and I nibbled on those things like cotton candy. I, I've been off of that for, for, for years now. But so for somebody that's constantly tums, roll aids, antacids or on a PPI Nexium Prilosec and wants to get off, number one, is there hope for them to do so? And number two, what does that pathway look like?

Yeah, absolutely. 100. This is all reversible.