The Hidden Causes Of Your Gut Issues (It’s Not What You Think)

I'm always doing new things to keep my gut fitness up in a world that frankly is no longer compatible with our biology. I got really sick because my gut had just been teetering for well over a decade.

Uh, you got started as a paramedic.

And I figured if I can heal something else, I can heal the gut. My brain was exploding with the possibilities of the human body.

Josh Deck, my podcast guest today, is a certified nutritionist. He is a consultant for Crohn's and colitis, a former paramedic, personal trainer, strength athlete, and he has helped hundreds and hundreds of people find the root cause of and reverse their bowel disease. He has a podcast called Reversible and it literally helps people reverse Crohn's and colitis naturally. I and he are not physicians, so do not misconstrue what you are about to hear as medical advice. But, it is a fascinating discussion. And, if you have gut issues or as we discuss in the podcast, a so-called princess gut, you should definitely listen in. BenGreenfieldLife.com/GutSolution is where the shownotes reside. Let's go talk with Josh. You got started as a paramedic from what I understand in my little bit of stalking that I did of you before the show.

Yes.

But now, you're kind of like a gut health I don't know if you like this term, but like a gut health expert. People go to you to fix gut issues. So, what's the story in terms of going from paramedic to the gut guy?

It was an accident, all of it, 100%. I actually thought about going into medicine, be a doctor, and I was like, I don't want to go to school that long. So, I went into paramedics, loved it. But honestly, I was born and raised in Ontario, kind of central eastern Canada, moved all the way out east, worked in Newfoundland, Crap job. I mean, great people, but the job and everything sucks. So I decided to jump across Canada, look for a better job, better pay. Couldn't get the license to transfer for the life of me, and I picked up personal training. So it's like, I've been weightlifting. It's actually one of my starts. I used to follow those old '80s bodybuilding books. And Ben, when you were actually doing a lot of bodybuilding and fitness and strength stuff on your blogs, that was back in high school and college. I was reading all your stuff then.

Oh geez, now you, now you make me feel old.

Yeah, yeah.

Of course, in my defense, I was probably also pretty close to 19 or 20 years old when I started putting that stuff out anyways. So we might've been a similar age.

Still a spring chicken. Well, long and short, I got into personal training space. I fell in love with it. One of my first clients, she was 57 years old. She was on 17 pills and a shot of insulin for breakfast. She had 9 pills and insulin for bedtime. Slept with a CPAP machine, had high blood pressure. She was on disability, like just circling the drain, right? We started working together, basic lifestyle and nutrition and strength training 3 days a week. And by age 59, just 2 years later, here she is. She entered a Canadian Raw Powerlifting Federation and broke a world record. She was off all but 2 medications, completely healed. She had only 2 medications because she had a stomach surgery done as a gastric bypass. But that was my first window that the body can really heal itself, right? And I started diving deeper. So I went all in and I called up physio clinics and chiropractic clinics and Chinese medicine and naturopaths. And I said, can I just come and sit and watch and listen and learn? I started picking stuff up. So I had people coming in who were dealing with sciatica, 7, 8 years of chronic sciatica, had surgeries done, and in 7, 8 weeks they're fixed. And I started doing this over and over with carpal tunnel syndrome and chronic pains and The body just started healing. And I was like, this is kind of amazing.

Yeah. You mean not with a magic wand that you were waving, but you were learning specific rehab therapy, physical training techniques that were helping these people?

I was picking out the functional, I should say dysfunctional issues in the function of a body that allowed me to just, like an engineer, sort of reverse and unwind why their body fell into this place of dysfunction. And we just helped restore it with basic movements and patterning. And I started learning, like, the body is meant to be a certain way, obviously, barefoot in the grass, regular movement, certain chain of function from toes to hamstrings to glutes to upper back. Once we started breaking these things apart, learning about the spine, everything fell into place. And this was sort of my first window. And so right around the same time as my brain was exploding with the possibilities of the human body, I got really sick. 'Cause my gut had just been teetering for well over a decade. So here I am in my early 20s, I was up to 15 bowel movements a day, blood, mucus. Oh, it was awful. It was, I lost 30 pounds. Holy cow.

And then this was at the same time you were, I guess, like in a, were you in a gym during the day helping people out? And then in the in-between times you were just like ducking into the bathroom?

Yeah, and it was actually at the peak of my strength career. I mean, I'm only 5'9. I was running gear at the time, so I was running steroids. 500 milligrams a week of testosterone, and I was running some other compounds as well, like primobolan and these other things just for strength and fitness. I was into strongman. I was the only guy under 200 pounds in my strongman gym who could pick up the 370-pound Atlas stones. Like, I was, I was, I was strong for my size, right? And I clear those things no problem to chest height. Like, that, that's what I was doing. But all of that finally caught up to me, and I lost all that weight. Hardly could— I struggled to pick up 30 pounds. It was nasty. The anxiety, the depression, like where I planned my own suicide couple of times. It was just this really nasty spiral that my brain, my body was going through. And I figured if I can heal something else, I can heal the gut. So I started looking for help, went outside of that conventional, take your Imodium and it's genetic and hope for the best type of conversation with my doctor. And I started getting better. I started talking about it online. I was on Facebook. And one day a woman comes to me and I shit you not, Ben, she says, I've got colitis. Can you help? And I was like, I don't know. So I went to Google. I went, what is ulcerative colitis? I had no idea. I came back to her and I said, look, I did some digging over the weekend and they say it's an autoimmune condition that is genetically caused. There's nothing we can do about it. I said, I looked into the research and something just doesn't add up. I think there's a hole in this thing. Why don't we explore it together? And she's like, great. I said, I can't guarantee, I have no idea what I'm doing, just so we're clear. But we just dove into it. And in 90 days she made about 80% improvement. And then her functional doctor, Dr. Salibi, who had been seeing her for about 3 years, got on the call with me, got on Zoom. He's like, tell me everything because I want to know what you did. What did you find? What did you do differently? And we just hit it off from there. We started co-sharing patients and we've done consultations together and now I've done lectures. We just published research together. It's this whole thing. The research paper you actually read for this, for this podcast episode, we published that together and we've become good friends since. And ever since then, we're now 700-plus cases in and with a 92% reversal success rate. And we've shown these diseases are not genetic, they are not autoimmune at all, and they are not idiopathic or unknown in origin. I mean, it's just been— I wouldn't even call myself an expert. I'm just a guy who got curious and figured it out and worked back the math.

I have so many questions. Okay. So before we dive into if this stuff isn't, say, genetic and not idiopathic, For you personally, it sounds like you were pushing pretty hard physically, but did you have other predisposing factors that led to what I'm assuming you would describe as colitis?

I would describe it as colitis. I never got formally diagnosed. By that stage in my career, I knew they're going to give me a label. My entire life they said, well, your mom had gut issues. My mom had 2 bowel resections, a perforation, colostomy bag, gallbladder removed. My dad had IBS. Genetic, genetic. They just said that. So I didn't bother going in. But looking back, I had all the markers. My calprotectin, it's a byproduct of neutrophils showing inflammation in the colon, was about 200. Blood, mucus, urgency, weight loss, joint pain, skin issues like acne. Man, I had acne. Not an inch on my back wasn't covered. It was on my wrists like it was everywhere. So I'm convinced it was colitis in hindsight. Yeah.

And you said that this woman came to you with Ulcerative colitis. Just for people who don't know what that is, how do you describe ulcerative colitis?

So we look at colitis as col is colon and -itis is inflammation. Ulcerative colitis is just inflammation in the colon that leads to open wounds. Kind of like if you're walking, going on a hike and you've got a brand new pair of shoes and you're not wearing socks, the colitis is that red kind of raw irritated heel you get. The ulcerative colitis is like the blistered version of that. It's just a progressed and worsened form.

Okay. And this is kind of gross, but I'm going to ask the gross question anyways. You said there was blood You mentioned blood in the stool when you were going to the bathroom 15 times a day. How does somebody differentiate between that being something like hemorrhoids from straining because your gut is upset or whatever and actual colitis?

Medically speaking, it's either a finger up the butt or it's a scope, right? One of the two things have to investigate where's the blood coming from. Because you can get bright red blood from a hemorrhoid or you can get bright red blood from colitis if there's blood in the bowel, especially the lower the GI tract, the brighter it is when it comes out. That's why your biggest risk of you having dark, like black tarry stool, it's blood somewhere up that needs to be investigated immediately, right? Because it coagulates and hardens as it comes down. Yeah, you'd have to go through scopes or something. But in my opinion, Ben, honestly, I don't care what the diagnosis is. You could tell me it's IBS, you could tell me it's hemorrhoids, Crohn's, or colitis. Instead of looking at these in these isolated incidences of one condition or one disease or another, I actually look at them as a spectrum of severity. And that view, which is totally hypothetical, which I still can't prove, has completely transformed the way I see bowel disease and bowel health as a progressive disease that hits a certain critical max in genetically predisposed individuals.

Wait, I thought you said it's not genetic.

So it's not genetically caused. So genetically caused and genetically determined are different than genetically susceptible. If you think about it, if you put somebody in a room Under high stress for long enough, under toxic conditions with junk food and antibiotics in the works, one of them might get joint pain or MS or lupus or whatever else. The other might get colitis or Crohn's. So I think of it more like a chain that's being pulled, and your genetics are that weak link. If that's the first weak link to go, that part of the body or that type of expression is how you'll express that disease or dysfunction. So it's definitely not determined or caused by genetics, and there's tons of research we can go through back to the 1980s with Swedish twin studies to go through that. But it's also not autoimmune. And when you look at it and say, well, the Western medical system says yes, it's autoimmune, it's genetically determined, and it's idiopathic, all 3 of those pillars, when we actually look at the data, completely falls apart. It's a total fallacy.

Interesting. And for people who don't know, when we use the term idiopathic, that means of unknown origin, right?

You got it. We don't know what's causing it, where it comes from, or why it happens, but maybe God plays favorites or it's bad luck.

Right. It does not mean you're an idiot. So the Swedish twin study, people might think of Swedish Fish or the Swedish bikini team, but we're talking about the Swedish twin study.

We all think the same things, united by thoughts.

What is the Swedish twin study?

So back in 1988, a researcher by the name of Tysk, he was doing some digging onto these Swedish twins with Crohn's disease. And this was the one that was really being studied was Crohn's, not colitis, but they fall under the same umbrella. And he started looking at twins. And he said the concordance rate, which just means twins who both carry and develop the same diseases, were between 50 and 58%, that these twins both got Crohn's disease. So this narrative of, well, it must be genetic, there's got to be a heritable or heritability factor in here. So it sort of hit the mainstream, it hit the research, and they said it's got to be genetic. And that snowball just went. And then here we are pushing through time. It was somewhere around the early 2000s, give or take, 2001, 2002, where they actually started— they found this gene called NOD2. Now, this was the first Crohn's gene. They said, we found the thing. It codes microbial sensors in the gut lining. So everybody thought we found this big smoking gun. They figured if we map enough of the genes in the human body, we can explain that this disease, where it came from, we could sort of build these targeted therapies. Well, if we fast forward from 1988 when they said, yep, we found heritability in twins, it must be genetic. To 2001, they found the smoking gun, the NOD2 Crohn's gene. Jump ahead to 2005, 2012. This is the era of what we call GWAS. These are the genome-wide association studies. And ultimately they found roughly 240 different what we call risk loci. It's plural for locus, but basically it's a specific location on the genome where DNA variation is Statistically more common in people with a disease than people without it. So you go, well, look at all the people with Crohn's. They have this disease, this gene marker X amount more times than people who don't have Crohn's. So those are the risk factors they found. What they actually proved is that all 240 or more risk factors in the genes, when they combined them, they only explained a little over 13% of Crohn's variants and about 7% of colitis. The rest is what's called missing heritability. And so the genes we can point to account for roughly 10% of the risk, and that's just risk, still not causation. So all this research over time has been misinterpreted, misquoted, and the narrative stuck and it never got dropped. And that's, that's just the aspect of one gene. And I can take that a little bit further if you want to follow that snowball down the hill.

Yeah, yeah, I'm interested in this because so far it sounds like what you're saying is that There is a genetic component, that the genetic component in this case for this NOD2 gene in Crohn's may not be as high as we might have been led to believe that it is, and that there are other findings as well when it comes to genetic risk, if you want to call it genetic risk, for some of these bowel issues that people have.

Yeah. Let's look at the nail in the coffin on this one. We'll stick to the NOD2. So this is that microbial sensing gene, right? It says, okay, we got some bad guys. How much of a reaction? If you get food poisoning, do you react just enough to kill it? Do you overreact like the lady at the grocery store who, you know, is waiting in line too long and she freaks out? Same thing. And so this gene, it only shows up— it's what we call penetrance. So the amount of people with the disease who have these gene markers, it's only 20 to maybe 40% of Crohn's patients who actually have this smoking gun. Which means anywhere from 60 to 80% of those with Crohn's don't have this gene at all. And we look at some of these other genes, we have these dual copies of the same gene. More than 98% of people who are the highest risk with 2 copies of this gene never get Crohn's at all. So to say it is caused by genetics is not only factually incorrect. If it was like Huntington's or something else where it is like cystic fibrosis, those are genetic nearly 100% of the time. With that gene, you will get that disease. But in these cases, it's maximum 40%, and more of the other genes like CARD9, which is a fungal reactivity gene, that's what, 5%, 8%? So when they say the genes are the smoking gun or it's caused by genes, that is factually incorrect, and it's a narrative that never got dropped from 1988.

Okay, so I could get Crohn's whether or not I'm genetically predisposed to it. I guess like, like the, the question that comes to my mind from there is why would I get Crohn's?

And we'd have to say theoretically because there's a lot of risk factors, right? I honestly couldn't tell you if you took somebody who had 100% clearance, they had no Crohn susceptibility genes, could they still get Crohn's? I would say theoretically, but I think it would be a lot harder for them to get it under the same circumstances as somebody who's more genetically prone Yeah.

And by the way, we defined ulcerative colitis, but we didn't technically define Crohn's. How would you define that?

Let's split the difference. So ulcerative colitis, we talked about ulcers, and that's in the colon, it's inflammation. It's a very surface-level type of inflammation. Think falling down and scraping your knee on the pavement. It's a topical, takes a couple layers, and that's it. And it typically goes in these strips where it's one chunk, like just proctitis. So maybe it's just 18 centimeters of just the lower rectum, or maybe it's the entire colon we call pancolitis, the whole colon, but it's one continuous lesion basically, or one patch of inflammation. We look at Crohn's disease, it's not isolated just to the colon, it's anywhere from mouth to anus. You can experience excess amounts of canker sores. You can get perianal abscesses and sores on your glutes. You can get them in the esophagus. You can get sores in your small or large intestine, anywhere in your digestive tract, mouth to anus. Because your mouth's kind of the top of your butt, right? It's all connected. And so Crohn's disease, instead of being surface level where colitis is like a scuff on the pavement, Crohn's physically burrows and actually gets deeper into the layers of tissue. You're more prone to fissures or fistulas. So holes forming or fistula, it's like a pimple instead of coming to the surface that you can pop, it actually goes backward and it can burrow and connect. Oh, gross.

Oh, yeah.

I've had patients with like rectovaginal fistulas. where their intestines is a hole that actually connects the vaginal canal. A horrible, horrible condition, extremely painful. So they can connect organs, these fistulas, they're tunnels. And that's really the big difference is presentation. And they do have different immune pathways that are active or engaged in these disease processes, but it's the same digestive tract. And the root causes, I would say the primary drivers are the same across the board.

Yeah.

This is where that genetic factors or environmental factors and others come into play to determine, do you just get IBS? Do you get Crohn's or colitis? That's where— the way I see it.

Okay. IBS is irritable bowel syndrome?

Yes, you got it. So there's no inflammation with IBS. It's more just symptomatic, whereas IBD, that's your inflammatory bowel disease, which covers your Crohn's and colitis.

Irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease. That's IBS versus IBD. Okay, okay, got it. So, IBS, IBD, Crohn's, colitis or ulcerative colitis, and I'm sure there are other issues that people have that they might come to you for. Is this something that you see increasing in frequency? And, of course, paired with that question is always the consideration of whether or not we're just better at diagnosing these things or Is there an actual big surge in the presence of gut issues in people?

Yeah. I think both of those are very insightful questions because we look at things like ADHD or autism. There's an argument that maybe we're just better at diagnosing. You just thought the kids were weird, right? Or back in the '50s, you just called them retarded. We didn't know what it actually meant to physically have a retardation or a disability or some kind of handicap. We didn't have the vocabulary, the understanding as a public.

Right.

But if somebody's shitting blood, it's pretty hard to not diagnose. You know what I mean? We don't have— they had different diagnostic criteria in different things like colonoscopies and endoscopies and capsule endoscopies where you swallow a camera. There's different ways to diagnose, but people with extreme diarrhea, weight loss, blood in the stool, mucus, that's something you can't really miss. Even cancer, they were looking at what appears to be cancer back from Egyptian times. If you've ever read Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, fantastic book, but he goes back and says it looks like cancer. So by no means would I say that we just didn't have the diagnostic capabilities. I think really it is increasing. And we look back to some data from Olmsted County, I believe it's Missouri or Minnesota, one of the M states. I'm Canadian, I don't know. But anyway, we look at this data, And we can see that roughly depends on the datasets you look at, 1 to 4 per 100,000 people were living with Crohn's or colitis, right? Or getting this disease. Today, there was actually a research paper published just last year in 2025, took data out of Scotland, and they're predicting in the next, by 2030, it'll be 1 in 100. So what we've seen, let's say it's 1 to 2 per 100,000, that is a 25,000 to 50,000% increase in IBD. If we're getting into a place now where, where as a nation up to 1 in 100 people, so 1%, are going to be living with it actively. In Canada, that number is something like 781 per 100,000. Other places are over 800 per 100,000, which again is creeping in on that 1% number, which is a staggering statistic when you consider what that means.

Yeah, that's too big of a statistic for it to just be due to increased diagnostic capabilities.

100%. And again, if somebody's got bloody diarrhea, you put it down on paper and put it in a textbook, right? But this was basically unheard of until the early 1900s. Research picked up in the 1950s to where we are today, where there's foundations and ribbons and all kinds of stuff for these things.

Okay. So we've got glyphosate exposure, we have increased amounts of potentially chronic stress, especially at the times When people are eating, we have ultra-processed food, increased use of antibiotics, both oral as well as topical, like a host of factors. Are you one of those guys who fits into the bucket of this being a multifactorial issue?

Absolutely, without a doubt. And you actually named some of the biggest factors that I found in a paper I'm currently writing but have not published yet. The way I came to this conclusion to look at these, I mean, yeah, we can say obviously antibiotics kill the bacteria. That's a no-brainer. We can say obviously glyphosate messes with the shikimate pathways. And we can tell all these things from the data, but what's not been proven on paper is what the risks are conclusively. We have connective studies. So back in 2019, researcher Piovani, I don't know his first name, but he published over 71 different major risk factors for IBD, including bottle feeding, breastfeeding, birth control, smoking, alcohol consumption, antibiotics, like all these factors that were shown looking back at history, basically saying, look, you've got Crohn's colitis. Did you do these things and what are the odds? And he calculated and did the math.

Right. And then by the way, just quick interruption. When you said breastfeeding, I'm assuming you mean the absence of breastfeeding.

Yeah, yeah. The absence of breastfeeding versus the active. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, we don't want to freak out a bunch of moms.

No, no. Breastfeed. It's the best thing you can do, hands down. Do what nature and do what God intended, right?

Okay, got it.

And so the paper I'm writing right now, it's the first one. And if somebody beats me to the punch and publishes it, great. I've been delayed on it because I'm busy. But if you can beat me to it, just get the data out there. I don't care. I'm comparing westernized or industrialized versus industrialized nations, which is really the first one ever to look at industrialized nations like parts of Asia, Southeast Asia. We look at certain parts like, what was I looking at there? I think it was Taiwan, rural China, Korea, a bunch of these Southeast Asian areas. I even took in Japan, who's not Southeast Asia, but you get the idea. And so I looked at these industrialized Asian cultures and countries, and I looked at industrialized Western. I said, what is the difference? Because we look at the data, these Asian countries that I measured made up about 35% of the global population. They had roughly 3% of the global cases of bowel disease. So it's sort of matching though, 35% of the population, 3% of the disease. That makes sense, right? For 35% to have 3, math and math maths. But I looked at the Western countries. So we're talking Canada, US, UK, Australia, New Zealand. They are 6% of the global population. Wild guess, Ben, what percentage of the bowel disease globally do you think they made up?

Just based on typical Western lifestyle, I'm going to say— I'm going to say somewhere between 50% and 60%.

Bang on. They are 60%. So the Asian countries are 35% of the globe with just 3% of the disease. These Western countries are 6% of the globe with 60% of the bowel disease.

It's basically 10 times the 6% that you would assume just based on comparison.

Totally, right? 35 to 3, you'd think it'd be 60 to 6. It's not. It's the opposite. It's shocking what we're doing to ourselves. And so I said, what's the difference then that they are doing that we are not, or vice versa, that's causing us to have so much more disease per capita, like up to 25 times more? And what it turns out was, yes, much more glyphosate easily. Ultra-processed foods are one of the biggest killers. On average, these countries looking at rural China, they're less than 5% of their diet is ultra-processed, whereas somewhere like Japan might be more like 20%, but they're much lower. For the average American, it's 60%. Some arguments are up to 80% of the diet is ultra-processed. That's the biggest standout difference. On top of that, it is access to medicine, antibiotics. Even the CDC acknowledges that up to 30%, it's like 29 or 30% of all antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary. They're given prophylactically or just in case or for like a flu, something that's not even needed, or they give an antibiotic and go, oops, we never cultured the bacteria, gave you the wrong antibiotic. Here's another one. And we just hammer our guts with this stuff. So there are a lot of factors involved, but those are the big smoking guns so far.

Okay. So, so this might be the dumbest question I've asked of the month on the podcast, but I'm going to ask it anyways. So, I'm actually generally curious about this. You'd think ultra-processed foods are very heavily processed, therefore the gut has to do less work upon consumption, right? And maybe they just pass through the body and yeah, maybe they're not as nutrient-dense or whatever, but how the heck could something that's so palatable and so easily digestible and just falls apart in the mouth cause a bunch of damage to the gut?

See, I don't think that's a dumb question at all. I think that's a question that more doctors should be asking because it's such a simple question With this huge slew of things attached. So the ultra-processed foods— I'm not worried about ground beef that's been put through and minced a couple of times and put into a patty, then frozen, then shipped, then seasoned and given at McDonald's. I don't care about that. What we're looking at is the ingredients, the emulsifiers, the food dyes and colorings, the sugars, the sweeteners, the thickeners, the gums. These are proven in literature to be problematic for the microbiome. We know, we see the data, it's crystal clear. And so even though foods are breaking down in your mouth, even though we are taking these carbs, these sugars, these starches, half of that's going to absorb— well, not half, but you get the idea. It's going to absorb right through the mucous membranes, the buccal folds in your mouth before it even touches your intestines. It's everything that's attached to them, the preservatives. Like, look at Wonder Bread, right? There's what, 18 or 20 different ingredients in a loaf of Wonder Bread? But when you make it at home, if you're to make bread, flour, Yeast, water, and salt.

Okay. So, if we're talking about, say, my backyard, which I'm looking out my window right now, it's kind of dug up, it's dirt. What you're saying is ultra-processed foods would be less of the equivalent of me taking a sledgehammer to my backyard with a bunch of stuff that's just super hard to digest and instead would be more like me spraying my backyard with a bunch of chemicals that just kills off all the worms and bugs and insects and everything.

Yeah, all the life gets killed in the process. It's like if you're trying to grow a garden at home on top of a compost bed of real food, it'll break down. There's good things. If you try to build a garden on top of a bed from a dump, like a landfill, nothing's going to grow because all these artificial factors have killed all the life inside.

We could probably talk about the problem until we're blue in the face, or I guess in this case, red in the anus or whatever analogy you want to use. But, what I'm curious about is you come on good recommendation. Again, I've stalked you a little bit and seen that you're getting results with people. So, I'm a little bit more curious here about solutions. From what I understand, you even have this protocol that you put people through. I'm sure it varies from person to person based on the diagnosis, but big question, I realize, we have time. What's your general approach?

It is complicated in getting to the nitty-gritty, like building a car, or give it wheels, give it a chassis, and put an engine in it, you're good. That's the high level. When it gets to the nitty-gritty, there's a lot of detail. But I simplify it this way. If you've got a headache, Ben, and you're like, how do I stop my headache? Well, if I'm sitting there hitting you in the head with a hammer, let's stop getting you hit in the head with a hammer. That'll stop the cause of the headache. There are so many things in our environment that are actively causing problems. Again, we see mold and mycotoxins. We see ultra-processed foods. We see antibiotics. All the problems we just talked about are contributing to the problem. So we got to stop doing that, number one. Find out what are the active things in your environment, which is largely environmental for these diseases these days, if not food-based, but our environments. So find the things that are making it worse or causing or contributing to. Number one, stop that. That's easy. Number 2, we now have to go in and clean up the damage those things have caused. So there is regulatory issues with liver and bile. There are drainage issues. Have you talked or have you discussed the concept of drainage on your show here before?

I haven't taken a deep dive into the lymphatic system per se on the podcast. I actually recently lectured on it at an event in Boise, but I haven't done a deep dive on drainage pathways per se. I'd be happy for you to give the overview. Sure.

So high level, if you think about detoxing, it's kind of like gathering up your garbage and putting it into a bag and just leaving it at your back door. That's what detoxing really is. Your liver and your kidneys, they gather these things up, they bundle them, they package them with different methyl groups and other things to kind of neutralize and make them safe. And then the drainage is physically taking that trash out to the curb for pickup, right? Or getting out of your house. So there are 7 main exit doors we look at, these drainage pathways in the body. So you got your liver is a big one we see congested in bowel disease. Then you've got your bile ducts and gallbladder. There's a lot— bile does a lot more than emulsify fats, right? It regulates inflammation, detoxifies, and a lot of toxins like mold get stuck in bile, so you recirculate them. It's part of your immune system. It does so much. So if your liver and bile are compromised, you're contributing. That's the hammer, right? You're contributing to the problem over and over again if you're not having these exit doors open. Then we've got your lymphatic system, your skin, your sinuses, your bowels, and your kidneys, bladder, right? So you pee, you poop, you sweat, you snot. Like, these are the way things leave your body when they are congested. So many people go through and they do these detoxes, right? They take herbs and supplements and they take— they go and do their sauna sessions and buy their greens powders. But if your exit doors are blocked, all you're really doing is bundling and moving toxins around your body and they settle elsewhere. This is where you get joint pain and headaches and mood swings or anxiety or bowel upset when you detox because nothing's actually leaving. And so we look at drainage after finding here's your root cause, stop doing that. We typically look at drainage. those exit doors as the next step.

Okay.

And drainage, I would imagine, is again multimodal in terms of there being options for everything from sauna to maybe prokinetic agents that might move the bile to lymph massage or lymph circulation, et cetera.

Any of those things. There is a caution here for somebody listening going, oh, I'm going to open my drainage. Be careful because you can open too much drainage too fast. You can pull toxins and mobilize. You can make yourself extremely sick, put yourself in a nasty flare of hospitalization. There's a fair portion, I would even venture to say 5, 10% of the client base I see also deals with MCAS or CIRS, which is mast cell activation syndrome or chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And these are largely immune dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction, things like that. But if they go to sweat, they try to detox, they take vitamins, you know, these methylation things you're seeing, that's popular over social media, they will flare up, they'll react and be much worse. So, you have to be aware of the state of your immune system before you go too wild on it.

Right. You don't necessarily, unfortunately, as inconvenient as this might be to hear, listen to this podcast and kind of piece together your own protocol. I'll pause here for a second and say, for those of you listening, I will link to Josh's website because he helps people out with stuff like this. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/Gut, That's where the shownotes are in case you're already like, whoa, this is overwhelming. Where do I start? Josh, let's say from a diagnostic standpoint, if someone comes to you and they're just like, dude, I gas, I got bloating, for sure my bowel movements are off, something's up down there, in there. Do you have tests that you favor that pretty much your 80/20s, the ones that you're running quite a bit of the time when it comes to helping with diagnosis? Yeah.

There is. I think an important caveat in there, because we can talk about stool samples and urine tests and blood and all those things. The number one thing I do before running any test is a history. And it might surprise some people because you want empirical data, but you can spend— I've had people come to me, Ben, multiple 6 figures. I had a lady recently who's 7 figures in for her son, just testing and guessing and trying to figure stuff out.

Oh my gosh.

But we're throwing good money after bad. Because we look at these tests, oh, a GI map. You come to me with a GI map and say, look, my gut's all screwed up because my bacteria screwed up. I go, whoa, pump the brakes. Your gut microbiome is a self-regulating ecosystem. So let's first figure out what caused this to dysregulate in the first place. If, oh, I'm sweaty. Yeah, but your body self-regulates temperature. What's heating you up, causing you to need to cool off? Same thing. So, so many practitioners and clinicians and even clients themselves or patients of doctors, they're coming in already trying to work downstream, right? We're dumping buckets of water out of the boat without finding the leak, so to speak. And this is why a history matters to me more than testing. And I'll give you a great example of that. There was a lady came to see me, it was just November actually, almost a year ago now. She was in, she said, I got COVID and then I got colitis. I was like, nah, it doesn't add up, right? I get it, it can cause issues and then, you know, the shots can cause issues, all this stuff. But what we're dealing with here is Billions of people got this infection but did not get colitis. So why did you get colitis? Same thing. Oh, I was stressed and I had a really bad day. My dog died. My dad died. My house burned down. I got colitis. I'm like, yeah, but people die every day. Not to minimize what you're going through, but why did you, under these sadly common circumstances, end up getting this disease? So we went back in time. We actually found out she was born and raised in the mid-1980s in Colombia. If you've ever seen Narcos on Netflix, where Pablo Escobar, the Cali cartel feuding in the streets, bombs going off, drive-by shootings, she lived in that. So she has huge trauma. Her words, if mom wasn't home by 6:00 PM, we figured she died in an explosion somewhere. That was her reality, right? Trauma, which is huge stressors, which is cortisol, which is gut dysregulation and immune overactivation and gut dysbiosis, all these things from stress. She also grew up in an extraordinary amount of mold. She remembers seeing it. She had very poor family, a big longhouse, multigenerational family, and there was mold on her bed. It was on her, up her walls. She remembers chronically like boils on her skin, ear infections, tonsil infections. Before she turned 20, she was over 3 dozen doses of antibiotics. So you've got stress, we've got trauma, we've got poverty, which leads to, you know, obviously not optimal food choices and all these different things that compounded over the years. By the time she finally got COVID, That was the straw that broke the camel's back. So you'd have all these clinicians going through and spending tens of thousands of dollars on tests to find no answers because you didn't get the history to know. It's like a needle in a haystack. Let's get the metal detector. At least I know where to start looking first.

This is, this is a sensitive question, but I've also come across the idea that sexual trauma can lead to pelvis, pelvic floor dysfunction that affects things like gut motility because you're just kind of like Tight and holding it in. Does that make sense?

You know, trauma does a lot of different things. And Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score, has been debated largely, largely debunked, largely favored. It's— there's a lot of things. But we do know that look at people with trauma, they go in for massage therapy and they have relapses, or acupuncture, they have flashbacks. And, you know, they have these collapses or these panic attacks because the body is storing it somewhere. So whether or not you can prove it in these studies or not, we know it's in there. And a lot of people hold it in their gut. When my gut was really sensitive, even to this day, if I'm stressed or going through something extreme, my gut's in knots. I lose my appetite, I get bloaty or gassy, I might even be prone to diarrhea under the wrong circumstance because it goes to my gut. So who's to say that years of actual trauma, sexual trauma, physical trauma, all these different things, psychological traumas, that you're not going to be holding these long-term in your body on a subconscious level, it's going to be that same type of response. I have no doubt about it, and I've seen trauma histories in many clients.

The drainage piece makes sense. Of course, removing the affecting agents, cleaning up your lifestyle, diet, environment, etc., makes sense. A lot of times, because I've interviewed a lot of people about the gut, you come across the idea of the need to like rebuild. Some people describe it as like repairing the lining of a leaky gut or permeable gut lining. And, you come across all sorts of different strategies that are proposed for that: bone broth, glutamine, colostrum, et cetera. But increasingly, I have seen people talking about peptides for this. Often, I think not the GLO stack, they call it the CLO stack: KPV, BPC-157. What else is in there? I think lorazotide is another one that's recommended as part of a peptide protocol for leaky gut. Have you gotten around to playing in the peptide realm at all?

I'm very careful with peptides. A lot of these things, I call it plant-based medication, because again, if I'm hitting the head with a hammer and your solution is to put a helmet on and not stop the hammer, you're managing the symptoms as best you can and trying to slow down the damage at best. So it's kind of like trying to rebuild a house while it's on fire. If you don't actually put it out, your only hope is slam the glutamine, the slippery elm, the aloes, the peptides, and hope your body can use those things to build you back faster than it breaks down. So I am a fan of looking at them, but I think time and place matters more than anything else. You know, there are a lot of peptides you mentioned— the larazotide, BPC, the KPV, copper peptides, TB-500, LL-37, SS-31. They all have their purposes. I would say those to me are a 4, 6, or 8-month thing down the road unless there are special circumstances that may call for it. Outside of that, they're not my first go-to, which might surprise people. I'm not looking to build your house while it's on fire. It's just a bit of a different take, I think. But I think it's one of the reasons we're so successful. Like, we have a 92%+ success rate for those who actually do the work and do what we ask and follow through and finish the job. But a lot of people, they get 4 months and they go, I'm good enough, and they just stop because it's not that big of an issue for them anymore. But for those who finish the job, oftentimes they don't need peptides at all. The ones I'm extremely cautious of, thymosin alpha-1, TB4-Frag, a lot of these other ones I'm not too familiar with because I don't really play in that pond, but these immune-modulating peptides.

Yeah.

I knew a practitioner and was way too willy-nilly, and I think he nearly killed some people. with these peptides because they actually took their immune system and threw them way over the deep end and things got much, much, much worse and they weren't able to recover after that. So I don't play with immune modulators. I will play with reparative things, but I'm, I'm always on the side of caution. These people are going through enough things, you know, I just, it's not worth it to me.

Yeah. A minute ago you said somebody who would, might get 4 months in and say, I'm good and potentially regress. Talk to me about timeline. Like, If somebody does come to you and they have a cluster of gut symptoms, what can they expect as far as healing time?

When you look at my website, you'll see some testimonials on there. And anybody from a marketing standpoint wants to see the best of the best. I will have the highlights in those testimonials. If you watch through them all, you'll see a fair bit of them like, I'm doing okay, but I got a ways to go. Because I don't ever want to pull back the reality of things that I've had some people in the gold standard, who've come in with 50 bowel movements a day, 5-0, immense, like a faucet. Oh yeah, diapers and buckets in the car, they can't go anywhere. And I've had them down to 5 and 8 within 3 weeks' time. I've had other people having 1 bowel movement every 2 to 3 weeks, extreme constipation, medically induced bowel movements by whole bottles of mag citrate or laxatives every 2 to 3 weeks. Within, again, a couple of weeks, they're pooping every day. On the other hand, I've had people who are slower, where their symptoms are nothing but sunshine and rainbows, but they get 1% better a week, and it's taken 10 months to get better to where they need to be. So everyone's different. On average, I'd say between 1 and 3 months, you can expect 20 to 50% better on average. And then at the end of 8 to 12, 90% or more, most people. Because again, they're not even autoimmune, so it's not that big of a deal to deal with, right?

Yeah, I think it's still longer than what some people would like. Some people are like, well, what if I just don't eat bad food for 4 weeks?

And, it's just—

Yeah.

Then, you go back to the bad food once you feel better.

Yeah, especially if we're talking about the rebuild piece.

You got it.

Okay. So, this is controversial and I know several doctors who make some claims about parasites. Some will say literally everybody has parasites. I should be even more specific, everybody has actual opportunistic parasites. problematic parasites and therefore need a parasite cleanse. Are you on the everybody has parasites bandwagon, or where do you fall on that spectrum?

Yeah, I think everybody does. We used to have a saying, if you're breathing, you got parasites. In fact, if you're dead, you probably got more. And everybody's got Candida. Is Candida bad? No, but it gets demonized because in our Western world, we're carb-heavy diets, we're sugar-heavy, we're stress- We have all these different layers of things where we're burdened by everything. These opportunistic aspects of Candida overgrow, take over, and become problematic. So we hear Candida and go, Candida's bad. It's got over a dozen, maybe 16 different beneficial things it does for you and your ecosystem, but it's when things get out of whack. And so on the parasites, yes, we all have them, but it's when they get out of balance. So you have too many of the bad guys or even too many good guys, like a SIBO condition. Are you familiar, Ben, with what happened with Yellowstone National Park in the early, mid-1900s?

Embarrassingly, no.

Oh, you're grand. I'm Canadian. I'm going to take your citizenship. You're grand.

Okay.

So basically what happened is they went in and said, look, there's a lot of wolves and we think they're a problem with these ecosystems. They pulled the wolves out of Yellowstone. What ended up happening is the elk and the caribou, these ruminant animals, had no natural predators. They weren't forced to migrate and they weren't forced to move around and feed on different parts. So they started overeating all the fauna and the grass and things in the area. So they crept closer and closer to the streams. They ate a lot of the greenery there, and the streams got dirtier and dried up, and the fish died, and the beavers left, and everything fell apart. So what they did, it was late, probably the '70s, '80s, somewhere in there, maybe even the '50s, but they brought all the wolves back in, and then everything started regrowing. And it was beautiful once again, because the balance was finally struck of the bad guys and the good guys were all doing their own part in this balanced ecosystem. So there have been studies where they've given a whipworm like Trichuris soeus, and I mean, they were relatively inconclusive and found that it was probably more placebo-based from the studies I've read, but they've used parasites to try to induce therapeutic benefits.

I have a friend who is— well, everybody would know his name if I said his name, and he takes parasites every day to stimulate his immune system. He talked me into doing it for 6 months. Tapeworms and whipworms from a specific source and I didn't notice anything. But yes, I know on good authority people are downing these things every day.

Yeah, it feels like— have you ever watched The Office with Creed Bratton? He's like, that wasn't a tapeworm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they have their benefits and there are some I'm fine with. I mean, do I want Blastocystis hominis and all the Giardia? No, I've never seen a positive Giardia infection, But I have seen a detectable level of Blastocystis hominis that is not pathogenic in nature. It's not symptomatic like C. diff, right? Nasty microbe to get overgrown, but I've seen it show up on a PCR test from Vibrant Wellness, one of these other GI map companies. But when they go to their doctor to test it, it's not there. So there are detectable and symptomatic levels of these microbes. So I don't worry about parasites as much. But generally speaking, I do protocols for my clients with them, and I've seen some wild stuff come out of people. Whether they're parasites or not, frankly, Ben, I don't care. They came out and you felt better with what we believe to be a parasite treatment. I'm going to keep running with it and figure out what it is later.

I did a podcast where I talked about Mimosa pudica and how it basically increases mucus production in the colon. And when people take it, because it's a common ingredient in parasite cleanses, that Essentially, they're blowing the nose of their butt and seeing long mucus threads, not parasites. Do you use any of these parasite cleansing products or know if there's anything good out there for something like that?

Yeah. I mean, we have to be careful again, but I do like Mimosa pudica. It's generally considered one of the better ones. They describe it as a sticky sponge. If you get those things from the dollar store, the Goops to clean out your computer keyboard, same type of concept. It gets into the folds and it pulls it out. But if you mix it in a glass of water, it looks like it does in your stool. So is it parasites? Is it just congealment? I don't really know.

It does make you poop, and maybe that just pushes out parasites. I don't know. But I think a lot of what people are taking pictures of is mucus.

I believe so. And you'll get mucus plugs, you'll get— what do they call them now? Mucoid plaques is one of the terms that's being used. There's a lot of that. But again, if I give you a parasite protocol with your wormwoods and black walnut and clove and oregano and thyme and all these different herbs, and that stuff comes out of you and you feel better, cool. I'll worry about what it is later. We want it out for now, obviously. And I've seen a lot of that as well, which might sound irresponsible from a clinical standpoint, but when you understand that these inflamed ecosystems of chronic inflammation, Crohn's, colitis, et cetera, they are terrain. Right. So it's— I kind of describe it like you get people do fecal transplants. They say it's like this next big medicine. A lot of them actually fail. A huge number fail because if you take a healthy tree and transplant it into toxic soil, the healthy tree will die unless you fix the soil that killed the first tree. Same thing. And so we get these terrains that are so toxic, they're conducive to, quote, bad guys, fungal overgrowth, parasitic infections, broad levels of dysbiosis, opportunistic bacteria that take advantage of that situation and overgrow. They become a big problem. And so when I look at them, these, these antiparasitics, they're also antibacterial, they're also antifungal. A lot of them have biofilm-busting properties. So there are a lot of layers it can take down. So truthfully, I don't think we know what we are taking out. I think it could be parasites, it could be fungus, it could be overgrowth of bacteria, it could be a lot of stuff. That's what I would concern myself with first before I try to name exactly the thing it is and spend money on testing.

Yeah. I do a lot of self-experimentation, so I'm not recommending this for everyone, but I did an oral fecal microbiota transplant treatment over 3 months using capsules from Novel Biome. And, I have a whole podcast about it. I'll link to it in the shownotes. I did do, as recommended by the physician who prescribed it to me, a 2-week course of Rifaximin antibiotic first to basically clean the slates. I did a pre and post, essentially the equivalent of a food allergy panel, pre-3-month, post-3-month. And, my food allergy panel did go from being lit up like a Christmas tree to being pretty even keel with just a few things left after doing the antibiotic. Plus the FMT. And then, the reason I bring that up is when you were talking about putting healthy bacteria into an unhealthy terrain, I think what some doctors are doing, at least based on my personal experience, is just nuking the entire gut with an antibiotic and then following that up with something like an oral capsule.

Yeah. I mean, there's 3 ways to give an FMT. There's one, the capsules like you use. I think Dr. Steven Gundry calls them crap Yeah.

I love that.

We have those, then we have your enema, retention enema, where it's exactly what it sounds like, a syringe, stick it up your butt, face down, ass up, leave it there, pass it when ready. The next is actually a colonoscopy where you are under anesthesia. There's gastroenterologists that go in, clean, and physically transplant— oops, they physically transplant way up in the bowel. So there are ways to give that FMT. I think what we have to look at though, the studies that came out were pretty cool. Back in about 2013, somewhere around there, there was a woman named Catherine Duff. She had these recurring C. diff infections. Nasty bacteria, can be deadly. And it kept coming back. She was on, I don't know how many, 14 different rounds of antibiotics over 7 years, couldn't get rid of it. So she actually did her own home FMT. Her husband, who was a retired submarine commander, she took his bacteria from his gut, put it in a blender, basically stuck it up her butt. Within 4 hours, her C. diff was gone. After 7 years of battling this thing. And yeah, she wrote a book on it in the works, and that's actually what just a couple years later became FMT approved for C. diff. And the studies on the C. diff, because it's basically competitive exclusion, you take all these bacteria and then you put them into the microbiome and they fight each other for space and the bad guys get shoved out.

Yeah.

And what they found, I think it was a couple of weeks into the study, they were getting medium, like 30% success rates with the antibiotics from previous, It was so successful using FMT, they stopped the trial early for ethical concerns. They said that the FMT is so effective, it's actually morally wrong to keep giving antibiotics for this problem.

Or to not give the people that had C. difficile the FMT.

Exactly. Yeah, we know this is so much better. So it's like starving kids versus feeding them. We know feeding them is better. It was that big of a deal. And it's been studied since. I mean, they've used it for Parkinson's and cancers and autism and all kinds of diseases, and the research is booming. But so many of them fail because that terrain, they're living in mold, their diet's garbage, they're chronic, they're highly inflamed and haven't gotten inflammation under control because your bacteria— you wouldn't want to live in a house that's on fire with no roof, no windows, and there's raccoons in the corner. I mean, I like the Instagram raccoons, they're cute.

I mean, not unless you're like David Goggins, but yeah.

David Goggins will live anywhere, anywhere. He's like the Chuck Norris of our generation.

Yeah, exactly.

But these bacteria need that nice clean environment. That's the terrain, which is why they fail. And I've seen people spend $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 on FMTs and it doesn't work because the terrain was never fixed and they stayed sick. And so they put the bacteria into the toxic soil and it all died. They went, oh, I guess I'm incurable. It must be genetic. But again, it's not. They've never found autoantibodies. That was also a lie or a misconception. It's just so misunderstood. And I think if people just understood this disease better, the world would be able to fix the problem.

Yeah. Coming back full circle to you, Josh, I mean, the way I understand gut issues is, yeah, you can fix a great deal of the underlying problems, but in many cases, if you do have, for lack of a better scientific term, a princess gut, you, you have to be careful for life, like, like in certain areas of life, or they're, you know, you do certain supportive practices. For you personally, having gone from whatever you said, 15 bowel movements a day and bloody stool and ulcerative colitis, at least what sounds like may have been ulcerative colitis, to now, do you have certain things that you do now just to make sure that your gut stays stable whether foods you avoid or a certain diet you follow or a must-have supplement that you do every day or anything like that?

I'll give you a basic rundown of what it looks like currently. I do have to be careful. I do have a princess gut. It's quite delicate and fragile. Earlier this year, I got a nasty ear infection. It was actually from earplugs, which I no longer wear because of that. But I tried the drop antibiotics and the works. Nothing would work. My eardrum was going to explode. So I'm like, I'll just take the orals. It actually caused a SIBO condition, so small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Mine is methane-based, so it caused constipation. And so since then, daily, I take digestive bitters 3 times a day before food. I've experimented with different probiotics. I'll put those on rotation. I do consume ferments, whether it's kefir or fermented pickles or whatever it happens to be. So I do a lot of the basics of my diet, 98%, 99% clean. I eat a lot of meat and I eat a lot of berries. I don't eat a whole lot of veg just because everything's sprayed with chemicals. But that's really mostly what I do. I have things on rotation. If I'm going to try— I work in the gut space, so I get a lot of sponsorships. I've recently worked with some companies who send probiotics and different plant fibers or prebiotics, and I'll try them all, and I like to see how they work. But that's really me. It's like I'm into fitness, so I'm going to try different types of exercise. You're doing fitness still, and you're just seeing what you like and don't like. And maybe you pick up an exercise from CrossFit, and maybe you keep some things from the strongman training. You decide what you do or don't like. Maybe you move to track and field for a bit and come back. The same thing with my gut. I'm always doing new things to keep my gut fitness up in a world that frankly is no longer compatible with our biology. So I think we have that responsibility to ourselves and our future generations because I can screen share and show you some of the data of the microbial loss. It's actually quite shocking.

Wow. You know, I, I have had gut issues in the past and I'll, I'll throw in 2 things that have been super helpful for me. One is pretty basic, but you'll get a kick out of this, Josh. My parents used to tell me all the time that I was sick because I would go to bed with a stomachache at least one night a week. And, I used to drink a gallon to a gallon and a half of 2% milk from Albertsons in the plastic jug per day. And, it wasn't until later that I found out that I'm pretty sensitive to dairy, like ice cream, dairy, you name it. I've ridden my bike through Italy and stopped for gelato 3 times a day and wondered why I'd be on the toilet for an hour and a half before dinner at the end of the day. Eventually, after trying everything like heal my gut, what's wrong with— I just cut whey, cut dairy, cut cheese, and almost overnight my gut just— Just felt night and day better. And then, the other thing that I find really helps me, and we haven't really talked much about this besides maybe briefly touching on it on the drainage pathway piece, is really understanding the biomechanics of bowel movements. And, my master's degree is in biomechanics, so perhaps a little bit biased, but the whole idea of squatty potty, This great book called Toilet Yoga. I interviewed the author of that book about defecation positions and basically understanding that just sitting on a toilet, especially a toilet that's too high with your feet on the floor and your pelvic at the wrong angle, can actually really limit those drainage pathways. And, basically, I have 5 different positions I poop in now and it's just like—

I love that.

Stuff just falls out of you. I know this is gross to think about and you just fill the toilet bowl. That also has been a game changer for me, just understanding how to poop.

Well, it feels so good to actually have a fully evacuated bowel. It's like a good yawn in the morning when you hit it just right. It feels good and relieving. I actually— so I don't have a bunch of positions, but I actually perch on my toilet like a gargoyle. I had little things for my feet to sit on, but Because I'm an athlete, I can get to a deep squat. I literally put my feet on the toilet seat and I sit into a full squat, like 8 inches above the bowl, like a gargoyle. But I find for me, it's the best and easiest position. But that actually does, it straightens the colon to allow stool to fall out with gravity and less force, less pressure. And it's a much better bowel movement every time.

Yes. Don't get hurt, folks. I did that one because I have a similar practice. I did it at an Airbnb once and the toilet seat was not screwed on properly. It went flying off one direction, I went flying off the other direction. I literally landed fully sprawled out on the bathroom floor. So, make sure that toilet seat is secure, folks, before you perch. There's so much we could talk about, Josh, but I think we've probably whet people's appetite enough to where hopefully they check out your website because I think you've really cracked the code on some stuff, especially based on the success stories and testimonials I've seen, and you obviously know your stuff, know your shit as they say. BenGreenfieldLife.com/GutSolution, for those of you listening, is where the shownotes will be. That's where I'll link to Josh's stuff. But Josh, thank you so much for doing this. Such a fun, occasionally gross but fun discussion. Yeah.

If we don't go a single day without talking about poop, it is a weird day. So, I appreciate it, Ben. It's been a pleasure. I think the questions you ask, that's why I love this show. It's very insightful and it comes from a place of conversation and curiosity, not a scripted list of notes, which really makes the conversation so educational to anybody listening. So it's always a great time and it's a pleasure to finally get a chance to connect here doing this.

Yeah. And I'll throw this in that that is— it's a little bit of a struggle for me sometimes because a lot of the people who I interview are authors. So, I'll get 3 to 5 books a week and they all come with a little 8.5 by 11 tucked in the inside flap that give you the pre-scripted list of questions to ask. And, I can't not read the entire book before I interview somebody. So, what I've developed over the past year is I literally had a bathtub, a hydrogen bathtub built in my garage and 3 to 4 times a week, I literally, like, lay in an Epsom salts hydrogen bathtub for 30 to 60 minutes and just read books cover to cover. It's a tough job, man, but somebody's got to do it.

I'm glad you do. You know, people don't do their due diligence. Let AI give them summaries. I'll have a book coming out. I was supposed to have it 2 years ago, but we've gone back and revamped and reworked and we had a book deal that isn't coming through. So I am going to be working on it. I'm like, screw it. I'm going to self-publish just to get it out. I'll be sure to send you a copy of it. And, uh, we'll make sure we send you some candles for your bath as well with it.

Definitely send it to me. I'll read it in the bathtub. Yeah, include some candles and a nice bath towel. All right, folks, bengreenfieldlife.com/gutsolution. Thanks so much and have an incredible week.

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