From Engineer to Gut Health Expert: Steven Wright’s Journey, Solutions & Holiday Survival Tips

Welcome to the Wellness Sherpa Podcast, where we engage with passionate leaders, holistic thinkers and disruptors who courageously share their personal journey, mission and wisdom with you. Together we create a safe space to empower you to live your best, most vital life. Thanks for being here. Well, I am so delighted to be here with Steven Wright, a friend of mine. I met you, gosh, probably three years ago maybe in Arizona at mindshare, at least three, four years ago. And Steven has a great story. I'll let him tell it. But he calls himself the health engineer and there's a very specific reason for that. He is really honed in on gut health because of his own experience. And he has an amazing product line called Healthy Gut that we're going to talk about and get into the details on in a minute. So, Stephen, such an honor to have you here. Thank you for joining me today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Jen. This is, this is great. I always love these chats.

Yeah. So why don't you start. And I remember profoundly when actually we were in Atlanta together, you were talking about, I said, how did you get into this? I'm just curious. And you shared your story, so share a little bit about how the heck. Because you weren't, you were an engineer, right? You were in business?

Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I trained in electrical engineering. That's my college degree. And I did a stint at General Motors and I also worked as a engineering tax consultant at kpmg. And so I was in sort of corporate area doing some interesting things. And I mean, my problem started before this, but I think the, the wake up call was at kpmg, I worked in a, in a big building In Chicago, a 16 story or I was 16 floors up on like a 40 story building. And if you ever worked in those buildings, oftentimes they don't really have room for more than one bathroom per floor. And if that bathroom happens to be occupied, like, you know it's occupied, you gotta wait or go to another floor.

Another floor.

Yeah. And so that's fine normally, uh, except for if you were like me back in 2008, where any meal I consumed. And at the time I, I had graduated college, I was a few years out of college and I was overweight. I had exercise induced asthma, so I had an inhaler with me at all times. I had adult acne. I was probably £230. I was. So I was overweight. I was having panic attacks and depressive episodes at the time. And I'm supposed to be, you know, client facing person who, with every single meal, whether it was chicken salad and chicken, which I was eating a lot of because I was trying to lose weight at the time, or burgers and a beer with a client, I would have extreme bloating that would happen. Like I would literally just balloon up. And I had a type of IBS and a type of bloating called visceral hypersensitivity, which not everybody has, but the people who have it, you know, you have it because it feels like needles, knives. It's very painful experience. And if you've never really had it, you know, it's not, I'm not saying you can't relate, but it's hard to relate to the amount of pain that can be caused by it. And so you, you kind of. Everybody else like bloats up just like everybody. But those of us with vs, we tend to get a bunch of pain. And so I would sit there and I'd literally like load up a spreadsheet and I would kind of softly cry and fart because it was, there's like nothing I could do. Like, I couldn't, I couldn't always be in the bathroom and I was in so much pain I couldn't leave work. And so at some point my co workers ident me as the guy that was gassing out the office and crop dusting everybody and talked to my boss and my boss called me down and he was like, hey, you know, in the best way you, you could have this type of conversation. He was like, you got to get this figured out. You're, you're the stinky guy in the office.

And so that was a great reputation to have, right?

Yeah, that's how you, that's how you advance your career right there. So that, yeah, that drove me into modern medicine offices in Chicago. At the time, I saw several different western doctors and the general feedback was, kid, you're not that sick. Suck it up. You can have any antibiotic you want and you should eat whole grains and take Metamucil every day. And I had already not like given, I'd already not done antibiotics because I ended up in the hospital because I used Bactrim ds, which is a pretty decent strength antibiotic for my acne back in college. And I, I passed out at work because I had basically killed all my microbiome and I had an overgrowth of bifidobacteria and I passed out at work. And so I was already anti antibiotic because of that and I had already tried Metamucil. And that didn't work. And so I was kind of just like, oh, wow, I can't believe I'm such a wussy. And I tried to keep pressing on. I had a bunch of accidents on commuter buses. I missed dates. Like, it was really affecting my life and like some really tragic, you know, types of ways. And finally, a buddy of mine from college, I feel like if you have a gut issue, you always have a friend, you know, that you confide in about just how really bad it is, but you don't tell everybody else, but, like, you already have like one person. And so I was telling him and he was like, you gotta try this version of an elimination diet called the specific carbohydrate diet. It's what, it's what turned me around when gluten free didn't work. And I was like, very resistant because you had to make all the food at home. This was 2000, 2008, 2009. There was no. The Internet was nothing like it is now. We had like a book and a Yahoo Listserv, like a paperback book and a Yahoo Listserv. That's all we had to work with. And so anyways, enough embarrassing moments continued to happen. Finally, I was like, I guess I. I guess I gotta do this. And within I would say, seven days of starting the specific carbohydrate diet, probably 50% of my pain was gone and everything was improving. And it just. It just flipped a light switch on inside of me that has never gone out. That just kind of channeled the shame and rage and anger towards. I can do this. I can figure this out. I can reverse engineer what's happening in my body. Because this whole meat suit thing is complex. But what I studied in college was really complex. There was a bunch of infinite variables and we couldn't figure it all out. But you still worked with it and you made it work. In a. In an engineering perspective, why is the body any different? And so I just started going down that path, trying to find mentors, anybody. It could be like, you know, western docs to Eastern docs to just a patient who wrote a post on a listserv. And I was like, if they have something to teach me, I'm going to try it. And so it was just like this guinea pig reverse engineering model that led me into functional medicine and, you know, doing a functional medicine certification with Dan Kalish and having a clinic for a little while. And it's just been this insatiable drive for the last 16 years of I'm not somebody who wants to build a life of limitations. So I don't. I'm not somebody who's always trying to like be perfect, like no pesticides and no, no alcohol and no sugar, no gluten. I'm somebody who loves pleasure and loves things, trying things in life. And so my thing has always been like, but why does dairy cause me my whole face to swell up and I can't breathe and I have the runs. But why? I'm looking around and a lot of other people can do dairy. How come I can't?

Right. What's going on in your body?

Yeah. And so it's been this insatiable desire to try to figure that out and try to live as resiliently and pleasure filled life that I can.

Yeah. And I love that you say that because oftentimes when we're diagnosed with an illness, you know, that becomes our platform to, to change. Right. To change something in our lives, to seek answers, to kind of start doing the research, finding the mentors, like you said. But it's really like the pleasure piece when we get sick. You know, it's amazing that you were able to keep perspective of that because often people go into rigidity saying okay because they go into fear. Right. So when you're in fear of like, okay, I know when I went through cancer it was like, okay, I can't have any sugar. Right. That means no alcohol, no fruit. Right. And all of a sudden my world starts going like this. And then it's like, what's the point? You're missing out on the pleasure. Like, food is really about pleasure. I mean, yes, nutrition too, but food is a pleasurable activity. So I love that you called that out and that you live by that because I think it's part of being healthy.

Yeah, look, I tried it the other way too. That's how I got here. I didn't have. I, I for many years was very strict on the specific carbohydrate diet. And I would constantly be falling off the wagon and I would be. And then I would get into the shame spiral about how I cheated and I had had something I wasn't supposed to have. And then I would have this binge episode with like say, sugar or something and it would just be this like binge shame thing that would happen. And so I would say maybe like three to five years into this sort of like restricted bubble of eating and trying to work with food, yes, I was feeling better, which gave me more possibilities. But I also was just sick of like literally guzzling honey because that was the only source of sugar I could get. Or like eating a bunch of raisins because that was the only simple carbohydrate sweet thing. And then, and then reading addiction book after addiction book and be like, I clearly am an addict. Like, I have these issues. But then reading the addiction books and being like, well, I don't really meet that criteria. And like, what is happening here? And so it took a lot of years later of doing some, you know, actual therapy work and whatnot, but also brain related work to realize, oh, wow, I struggle with low dopamine. I have adhd. I have a history of like all these concussions and these other things that happen to me. And this pattern existed as a child through reward. Like, if you finish your food, you get a cookie. Even if you finish your plate, you can't leave the table till you finish your plate. And if you finish your plate, you get a cookie. And my mom made homemade, amazing cookies. She's like a legend in our community for her cookie making. And so it wasn't just a regular cookie, it was a super cookie. And so I have like all these patterns, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns with food and sugar. I have a brain drive that's always kind of trying to get okay and be okay. And like, it's kind of culminated in this, like, wow, abstinence of a lot of different foods for me just absolutely sucks and doesn't work. And I've watched it happen now in, in my community and with the people that I was working with and realized for the majority of these people, it also doesn't work. And so, yeah, there is that. That group of people who can like sort of clamp down into fear, into the box of their diagnosis and their thing, and they can kind of thrive for a little while, but over time, most of those people.

At point you break. Yeah, yeah. At some point you break. Because we're not meant to live or eat out of like this big of a space. Right. And it's not good for our bodies. Like, even it might give our body an ability to reset in that moment, but at some point, the body wants more. Our souls, our. Our personalities, everything wants more than just that. So share. Like, what do you eat today? What is your life like today? And then I want you to talk about how you went from being this engineer at KPMG to being an, you know, an amazing entrepreneur with a big community. So how did that shift and tell us what you're doing today, food wise?

Yeah, food wise, I would say I am 90 to 95% like whole food, you know, where, you know, I'll make like eggs, like four eggs, and just have a bunch of sauerkraut with it. Sometimes for lunches these days, I don't. I just go through. I. It'd be like my version of intuitive eating. Like, I'm not like an intuitive eater, but, like, I have learned to respect if I have like a desire or craving to follow that until that naturally ends. And so the seasons have changed here in Colorado and there's less, you know, fruit, there's less vegetables available, and lo and behold, like more protein and more like heavy starches is kind of appealing to me. So I've been eating like some Thai food with white rice recently, the eggs and sauerkraut. Last night I went out with a friend and caught up and we had just brisket and, you know, I didn't really eat anything else except for I tried some of the beans that they had and some of the. The coleslaw. And I didn't, you know, make sure that everything was absolutely gluten free, even though I think it mostly was. So I would say that I try to follow seasonality, but I will still eat blueberries. You're. There's some data on blueberries making your brain like double the size over time. And so, like, for whatever reason, I read that research a long time ago. And so, like, I'm just like, pretty much hanging out. Yeah. There's two things I eat every week, and that's blueberries and carrots. And those are just like my mainstays year round, even though they're not in season. And everything else kind of hopefully follows seasonality a little bit. But also I just kind of listen to my body. Like in the summertime, you'll find me eating a lot more sugar, a lot more carbohydrates, and I'm not gonna make that wrong. And then I'll go through phases where I'm extraordinarily protein heavy. And again, I'm not gonna make that wrong. I'm just assuming, you know, based on there's some really cool data on. I think it was 2 year olds where they set out 50 different types of food and we're talking like sardines to Skittles to like just little samples of all these foods. And then they let the kids just pick and then they whatever the weirdest combinations, they would eat like, you know, anchovies and chocolate and weird know. And what they found is that the kids intuitively, by the end of six months, they ended up with like, crazy High levels of all the nutrients that they could measure, like, like multiple X's of the RDA of all the nutrients, even though their daily and weekly patterns were sometimes a little kooky to, to us as adults. And so I, I try to remember that, I try to remember that, like just following maybe a little naturally what my body might want, I might end up doing something that I'm not even aware of when it comes to nutrients or anti nutrients.

Well, I think it's pretty cool because most of us are never taught to follow our body or to listen to our body. You know, like you said, you get rewarded for food. You know, in my family we got punished if we didn't eat things. You know, we would sit there until 9 o' clock at night until we ate everything. Right. So food is used as a, as a weapon in many, in many households.

Yeah.

And we, we don't necessarily get a diversity of foods. And I think that's part of the gut problems that we're facing today is we kind of, I know people eat the same three things every day. Right. And so you're not helping your diversity in your microbiome by doing that. So how, how amazing that you started listening to your gut and literally and then eating according accordingly.

Well, yeah, as you said, food, I, you know, one thing I'm a huge proponent of because again, I went through all these like, like I am the guy who's thrown cookies in the trash, taking the cookies out and eating them. I'm the guy who's eaten six cupcakes in a row. Like I have binge eating, emotional eating issues. Like I've done, I got a whole 1 pound bag of M M's. Like I've done that. I, I can join that club. I did day. So my trying to understand like what is wrong with me, like why am I behaving like this has led me to a lot of reading into the other side of food. Not just nutrients and anti nutrients and toxins and regenerative farming. And that gets a lot of talk. But there's also this whole, like you've been talking about this whole side of food that is emotions, it's connection, it's love, it's community, it's spiritualness. It, there's like a whole other side of food that is totally sort of cut off. I think when it comes to functional medicine and integrative medicine, it's kind of not everywhere, but in a lot of topics or a lot of circles is kind of cut off. But I think I don't Know, maybe you've never had this experience, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna wing it here and see if you've ever had this experience. Have you ever drank some alcohol, like, with. With a community of people, and you've maybe had, like, more than you normally would consume. Like, maybe one glass is enough for you. This. This night you had, like, three glasses, and then you woke up the next day, and you're like, I should probably feel pretty bad right now, but I'm feeling okay.

Hello, Italy.

Yeah. Okay. And then have you.

Yeah.

And then have you drank a glass not with community, and then woke up the next day and just been, like, hungover and been like, God, what happened last night? Yeah.

Feel terrible. Yeah, totally.

And so. So to me, that's like, a prime example of the state in which we consume something.

Yep.

Matters so much. And so the state at which we consume our food matters, I think, just as much as the food, you know, and because we're talking about alcohol here, which is, you know, it's fun, but it's also a toxin. It's a toxin.

Yeah. Yeah. You know it. And it's so interesting, Stephen, because, you know, if you look at the blue zones, you know, the people that live the longest on the planet. So first of all, I would add rosemary to your blueberries.

Okay.

Dr. Canillo went through and looked at all the studies, and the number one thing that every blue zone area does is they have rosemaric acid, which rosemary. All three meals.

All three meals. Wow.

All three meals. But I think you're right, you know, the people that are living the longest are doing things in community, and they're not stress eating. Hello. Most of us. You know, I know when I was in corporate, I was either not eating or I'd be grabbing something and eating at my desk while I was multitasking. So you're not really present. And to your point, Community, like, we can actually calm down. We feel like our. We're out of fight or flight, we're relaxed, and you can actually absorb and digest what you're eating versus in a state of stress, which happens a lot.

Totally. So I think this is a great conversation because the holidays are upon us. And I have had some really poor holidays. Like, back when I was really trying to stick myself in a box and I was trying to be absolutely strict on scd, I had some really, really challenging holidays where, like, I didn't feel included. My mom took it personal that I wouldn't eat her cookies like, that I didn't love her anymore. Like there was a lot of things that were again, not about the gluten, not about the sugar, not about the dairy, about other things that have to do with the holidays and family systems and, and the other part of food. And so one of the big proponents I'm in or one of the things I'm a huge proponent of these days is just like telling people around the holiday season like, look, we, we have tools and techniques that can help you digest the food if you know you're going into environments where things aren't going to be as controlled as normal, or if you're like me and you're going to be entering households and parties and family systems that are stressed. Because I don't, I don't know anybody who's not some form of stressed around the holidays. And that just, it's going to make your digestion worse than what it was a few months ago. It just is.

Yeah. Yeah. So you know, what are some of those tools that you use during the holidays?

So for me, the biggest weapon I would say that's in my sort of like everyday bag is our Holozyme product, which is a digestive enzyme. It's like a full spectrum digestive enzyme that can work with FODMAPs and dairy and like all, all the different weird parts of foods that can be hard for some of us to digest if we have a compromised gu. And I still have a compromised gut. Look, I have issues that came from birth and that's kind of how I got to that moment at the office. And I was in such bad shape. So like my history is such that like, if I, if I want to run a company and do and make a difference in the world, which I do, and I'm choosing that, my level of stress is going to be high enough that I'm probably always going to need support. Like, my gut is just really fragile and the only times in which it's like really crushing is if like I have a 10 hour work week and that's just, that's it doesn't happen. That's vacation.

Yeah. So, so I love Holozyme. It's one that I use. I use it a lot in my clinic here. So can you share a little bit? How does a digestive enzyme work? What is it actually doing in the body and why do people need it? Because I think just about everybody needs support with digestion.

Yeah. So inside of our body we have these things called digestive enzymes. And I like to imagine Pac man because they're kind of like a Pac man, where they're just looking for certain types of food. There's like an enzyme for different types of bonds in our foods and it kind of comes through and just eats it up. Or you can think of it like little scissors. There's all these little scissors inside your stomach, inside your small intestine that are like scissoring up parts of your food. And so if you think about like a blueberry, it's like a beautiful looking, cool 3D model, but like, you gotta like zoom in a bunch of layers to get to like microscopic carbohydrate chains and polyphenols. And if you go look this stuff up, go look up like, give me like acid chat GPT or something. Give me a 3D molecule for a polyphenol and blueberries or a, the skin of a blueberry, give me the molecule. And you'll see these crazy, crazy, like it's just like a kidney. Gardener with a crayon. It's nuts. And so the body actually can't absorb that. The body needs these very linear simple carbohydrates or simple amino acids or simple fats in order to actually get the nutrition out of the food you eat. And so that process of going from this beautiful looking blueberry down to little, little bits of nutrition that we can actually pass across our gut lining into our body, that process is pretty complex and it includes a ton of enzymes. And those enzymes are there for all the different molecules, fat molecules, carbohydrates and proteins and fiber molecules and salicylates and all these different things, FODMAP molecules, all these different specialty molecules. And as we age, our gut is aging, we're all aging. And so sometimes our enzyme capacity can go down either due to stress, aging, infection, different things like this. And so using something like a high quality digestive enzyme is I think, not only insurance policy, but it's a diet multiplier. Like you're going to basically ensure that you get, say the magnesium or the calcium or the B vitamins out of the food you're eating. You're also going to maximize your chance that you get the carbohydrates. You don't accidentally feed bugs deeper inside of your gut like Sibo or Candida that can, that can overeat just because there's food there, because you didn't take the food in personally inside your body, right?

So you would take those with every meal to help you, you know, absorb the nutrients, you know, as optimally as you can and break down what your body doesn't need right help break it down into the right size. So how did we all get gut issues? Because there aren't many, right? You had an extreme case that was your pain to purpose. Right. But I don't know many people that don't have gut issues. So how did we all get these gut issues? What's your perspective?

My perspective is it's multifactorial and it. And our environment matters more than any one of us can even really calculate. So if you look at behavioral research for addictions or behavior issues, or you look at microbiome research, our environment is basically something we're not actively choosing or in control of like you think you are. So in other words, like you might meal plan and you might lay out your supplements and you might set some reminders to exercise or meditate and you think you're in control. But there's these other variables that, that aggregate to significantly more like health data points that you're not thinking about, which is the air you breathe, the location that you live in, like the, the literal latitude, longitudinal the. And what happens in that location? Is there a lot of farming? Is there not? Are you in the city? Are you in the country? Do you have pets? Do you not? That's a food you choose, the supermarket you. You shop at. How local are they? How, like, how long does the produce take to get there? What is it covered in? What is it not covered in? So there's all these different things and then there's the, the environment we've built to live in, which is both beautiful. It's how you're listening to this podcast right now, and it's absolutely toxic to our biology. The, the extra artificial light, the fact that we have all these devices that can trigger us into fear immediately, you know, 100 times per day. You know, I have a phone problem myself where I, you know, I go to it for dopamine. I go. And it drives me into sympathetic. And I kind of like that, but it kind of hurts me. And so I think we've, we've built this environment that's really mismatched to our biology, but we can't have it the other way there. You can't. There's no like going back to hunter gatherer ways. There's no hippie community that exists out there where you're part of this society and you're fully like healthy and aging like that. Unless you go to maybe some of those blue zones. And even then you're probably an outsider. You don't have the community. It's going to Take you a while. And so I think, why do we have so many gut issues? It's a product of the environment that we're in. It's also a product of the food we're eating and everything that we're choosing to do to our nervous systems. And, you know, all the antibiotics, all these different things kind of come together. And so, you know, is it possible to live a life without gut issues? I think there's definitely some Olympic level gut people out there. They, you know, these are the athletes. Right. They don't need supplements.

I want to see that commercial. Hi. You know, I have an Olympic belly right here.

I think Those people are 100 out there, you know, but I bet they're probably only 20% of the population. I would say the rest of us are struggling with the current biologic mismatch that we have with our environment, which includes all those things I said. Air, water, food, light, everything and input to our nervous systems. And so I think what I'm really focused on as we move forward is I'm not gonna go try to live in the mountains or go try to live in the jungle and just separate myself from my family and my friends and my society. And I'm trying to run a business, which includes being on the social medias and all these things that I know aren't maybe the best for me. And so I'm trying to develop practices as well as supplements that can help our biology kind of speed up its timeline to being with this new environment.

Right. I love that. I think it's so great. So let's talk just for a minute about the elimination diet, which you mentioned when you first came on. Where are you with that now? So you did that back in the beginning. What's your stance on elimination diets? Because I see it a lot with my clients where they will go off one thing or they only eat one thing. So talk about that a little bit. Does that serve us or not?

It's a tool. And so in general, the world is fixed. The. The world in our brains. Our brain loves to fixate on good and bad, right and wrong, no gray zone. And the world of food is 100% gray. Well, except for, like, Crisco. Crisco's. Crisco's bad. But, like, most of it's gray. There's some real plastic stuff out there that. That's not food. That is considered food.

But whiz.

Yeah, there's two. So elimination diets are a tool. And in general, these tools should only be applied for like, four to eight weeks. There is research, for instance, on the fodmap diet, which is the, I would say, the current preeminent diet for IBS and gut issues. That suggests starting around week eight, you start to lose butyrate production and butyrate species, microbiome species. And butyrate is a very, very important molecule. It's kind of the keeper of the gut. According to one research article I read, anything you want to have good in your. In your gut is related to butyrate, butyrate production. And we can only get this through our microbiome. It's a molecule that our microbiome takes from the fibers and the polyphenols that we eat. And so it's this symbiotic hippie relationship that we have going on in our gut that is absolutely critical to all health. It's. If you have low butyrate, it's. You can just Google low butyrate. Any disease out there, it's connected. And so we need this molecule and we need this gut community to be producing it. And so what we see is around week eight of any sort of elimination diet, whether it's low fodmap, carnivore, you know, scd, autoimmune, paleo, whatever it might be, you're going to start to basically cause your own dysbiosis. You're going to be like, essentially creating elimination diet dysbiosis.

Wow, that was a thing.

I'm. I'm calling that a thing.

Okay, I believe you.

So what I've seen clinically over the last 10 years, because I started to really notice it about six to seven years ago and is that people will get help when they cut certain food groups out. And that's because they're missing the enzymes, they're missing the stomach acid, they're missing the digestive processes to break these foods down. So limiting those foods helps them feel better immediately. And I agree with that, and I experience that. However, if you do not immediately reengage to, how do I keep these? As long as they're real foods, as long as they're like whole real foods, how do I keep these in my diet? Like, what is missing about me? Not. Not this is wrong for my body. What is wrong about my biology that isn't letting me eat these foods? Not, these are wrong because of my blood type or something crazy. When you start to ask that question, you normally come up with answers like, oh, I have low digestive enzymes, or I have an immune dysregulation that I need to work on. Or my nervous system is too stressed to be able to properly digest these foods. Things like that. If you immediately start to reintroduce them, you don't get stuck with. Where a lot of people end up is two years in, they're reducing food. Reducing food because, because they get better for six months, but then they start to get worse because of the dysbiosis and because of the fear and everything. And so then they go from paleo to autoimmune paleo and then they go from paleo autoimmune to low histamine. And then they're like, maybe it's the fodmap. So by the time a lot of these people, and this is, this is millions of, of men and women out there who are just going elimination by elimination and many of them get down to like five to 15 foods. And that is really bad for your microbiome. It's also really bad for your nutrient status. You will end up like low in certain random nutrients. You'll also end up high in certain toxins if you're just eating like one specific type of food over and over again.

Yeah. And I think it affects your mineral stat, right? Your minerals, everything.

Yeah.

So what are the steps? So if somebody comes to you and they have gut issues, they don't know where to go. What, what's the process? Can you walk us through the process?

Well, I would say, look, if you're eating gluten and Crisco and, and going out to McDonald's and things like that, step one would be getting you to a more condensed real food diet and even gluten free and maybe even dairy free if you're having a lot of reactions. But immediately like that's happening week one and week two, you are starting like a high quality supplement routine based around checking for digestive organ function. So I'd be checking to see do you have low stomach acid? People could Google a BTNHCL challenge. This is out there. You basically can do an at home test for less than 50 bucks to find out do you have enough stomach acid? And many of us do not. I would introduce a high quality digestive enzyme because we want to give your body a break. Maybe you have enough enzymes, but at least then we'll give you a break. Most of us do not. And that'll immediately help with whatever food you eat. And then most of us, if we're having pain or any sort of gut upset, already have low butyrate. By the time that happens, you're kind of already your microbiome is probably already dysbiotic. It's probably already messed up. So I don't want to stabilize that with, with a tributer next. That's the product we make for, for butyrate. So that's kind of like the core, but beyond that immediately I also want to know, do you, do you check any boxes for histamine? Because a lot of people out there will overlook histamine intolerance and they'll kind of keep chasing their tail on different digestive protocols. And really what's happening is they're concurrently having a histamine problem, an overload of histamine, as well as the other digestive issues. And so if that's happening, I want to get them on a dao, a diamond oxidase product immediately to just help them, you know, deal with the symptoms. They may need to go on an anti histamine for a little while or take like a quercetin or something just to help calm that down. And if we can get that sort of stacked together normally we can stabilize them on a pretty diverse diet that's not super cut down and that. So that's like my goal for the first four weeks is like, I'm just gonna ask timing.

So that's the first four weeks. Okay. Yeah.

And then if things are not going well, we'd start to look at maybe like, what's the, what's happening there? Like, what is the symptoms? Are they cyclical or are they like daily? Cuz if they're daily, then it's probably not diet. It's. Unless you're eating that same thing over and over again, it might be something else. Is it cyclical with like, let's say you're still cycling as a woman. Is it, is it cyclical during the month? Um, is it cyclical due to something you have at work? It might be a nervous system related issue, but that's the other thing that immediately I'm gonna start advocating for. Somewhere around like weeks three to six is like nervous system work. Because most of us, if you have a gut issue, you also probably have a nervous system issue. And a lot of us are not. And I'm one of the worst people. It took me so long to get this, just to just relax and be like, I'm okay right now, I am safe, I'm okay. I know that there might be possible nuclear war at any moment in time. I know that there might be some sort of meltdown with my family at any moment time, but right now, technically I am safe. And there's some really Basic stuff around doing that kind of thing or grounding or just going out and looking at the sun without your phone for a little while. That can be really helpful for the nervous system. And I find that that combination gets 80%, 80, 85% of people very stable, and then we can start working from there. The other 15 are probably going to need to graduate into some functional medicine testing because they're probably the folks that have the parasites, the. Some sort of infection or something that we have to figure out what's going on there.

Right. When you say infection, like H. Pylori could be giardia, things like that. Right.

Yeah.

Which I see a lot of in the clinic here. Okay, so. And you, you know, we use all your products in our clinic here at Divine Health Alliance. Do you have any new products on the horizon? Like, where are you going next?

Well, I mean, I, Yeah, I have so many formulas on the horizons, but as you know, every formula costs time and money to, to do so. I mean, right now the lineup I think is really solid as far as there's immune components, there's digestion components in nervous system. What we're really weak on, and I think we're really weak on as a species is fiber and very targeted prebiotics. And so what I'm personally and I have been playing with this for about two years is playing with different types of resistant starches and specialty fibers and, you know, kiwi and grape and pomegranate and cranberry, all these different extracts. Because the, I think the, what's clear about the research is the more diverse your, your microbiome is, which means the more amount of species you have and the, the thicker or the more amount of like babies or, or population that they have, that is probably like, along with like, say, VO2 Max and a few other things, like your, your muscle are like some of the best markers that you're going to be okay. Like, if it doesn't matter what your genetics are, it doesn't matter what's going on in your life, if you have a really diverse and thick microbiome, you're going to be able to handle a lot. That's.

Yeah, yeah. I think it was Dr. Zach Bush who said, you know, if you introduce one new food a week to your microbiome, you will allow that process to happen. Right. You'll allow getting the diversity in your gut. And unfortunately, we're creatures of habits, so we don't typically do that. We go to the same restaurants to get the same foods because we like it there Right. We cook the same foods. But I think it's pretty profound to be able to create that diversity to heal the gut.

Yeah. So that's, that's currently what I'm really deep in the research and playing around with is what kind of different, like supplements or chews or fiber products or powders can we create that? Knowing what you just said, knowing that we're habit, we're creatures of habit. We like simplicity. It's hard for us in the Western world to get a lot of fiber and a lot of diversity in our diets unless we really make it a very specific exercise every single week. What could we do from a supplemental standpoint that could restore microbiome diversity and keep it healthy in the long run?

Right. I love that. Any last words?

No, no, I just love being on here. I mean, I think if people are really struggling with their gut health, obviously they should reach out to your clinic if they have, you know, if you're too backed up or they need some, some advice. They like what I've said here. You can always hit us up at Support Healthy Gut. My entire team of, like customer care representatives are actually health coaches, nutritionists, PhDs. Everybody is us based. And we're here to help. And we'll hop on the ph you and try to help you figure out whether or not Healthy Gut products are right from you, whether or not we should pass you on to a functional medicine doctor. All those things. Because I feel like it's hard enough to be sick and it's hard enough to want to be better, but parsing through the amount of influencer data and the amount of just junk out there on the Internet is, Is incredibly difficult. And so what I think of us as like, guides. We're like guides trying to help you through the alternative medical space and giving you options, whether it's Healthy Gut options or nature provides options or whatever. Options. Yeah.

And we, you know, I'll reiterate again, we use, you know, your, your Tributin X. We use the Holozyme. We use the calm your lotion. We love that. And the HCl hydrochloric acid. So we use all of them. And we're really picky about what products we use, so we're grateful that you have developed this beautiful line and people can find you@healthygut.com that's correct. And then support at Healthy Gut if you have questions.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, so, so great to have you. I feel like we could talk for another three hours about all the gut things. So many gut things going on. But I appreciate your wisdom and your. Your authenticity. So thank you for, for being here.

Thanks, Jen.

And we will put all your information in the show notes for everybody, so thank you.