FMT and Carnivore Diet for Interstitial Cystitis, IBS, Fibromyalgia, Tendonitis, Joint Pain and Hair Loss

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons. Today I'm going to be talking with Einar Jordan, who has associate's degree in chemistry and microbiology, a Bachelor of Science, and a master's in project management. He's a quality and process engineer currently working as a project manager in research and development in the biotech industry. He's worked for over 25 years with tissue medical devices, pharmaceutical, and biologic companies in different capacities. He's done repeated fecal transplants on himself using his son's stool to address various conditions, including interstitial cystitis and chronic bladder pain, fibromyalgia, IBS, histamine intolerance, chronic tendinitis, joint pain, and hair loss. But before our conversation, if you're a regular listener and you want to find a way to support the podcast, there are a few ways, and links to them are all in the show notes, which are on my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com. So first, if you're in the US and you get supplements regularly and want vetted, high-quality ones, you can find them on my Fullscript or Wellivate dispensaries. Or if you're on a budget and just want low-cost supplements, I'm an affiliate of eVitamins and BulkSupplements too. And then if you live in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and of course the US, anything you buy through Amazon using links on my website will support the show. Or finally, you could become a supporter of the show on Patreon. And if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com. And sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. If you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now on to the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Einar.

Thank you for having me, Lindsey Parsons.

Yeah, well, thank you for raising your hand to, to come on. So as I understand it, before resorting to a fecal transplant or FMT, you had already done a lot of things to address your health issues. So can you just give me a brief synopsis of when your health went downhill and why, and then what you did to address it up to the point of doing FMTs with your son's stool?

Okay. Well, my health probably started going down around age 10, but it was not really noticeable until about 2006, where it really hit me like a, like a ton of bricks, and I developed interstitial cystitis of the bladder. They still call it today prostatitis in males, but it does not seem to have a significant link to the prostate. Eventually, with time, I started developing IBS, fibromyalgia. So it was every couple of years I was developing something new. The tendonitis was probably before even the IC of the bladder, and my sight started— my eyesight started deteriorating. I needed to have new glasses every year, every ears, then my blood pressure went— started skyrocketing, triglycerides, I was pre-diabetic, it just— I lost most of my hair. The list is hard to even remember, the list of things that I was developing. I did not think I was going to live this long.

TMJ, I think, was another one on there.

Yes, TMJ was probably one of the last ones. I thought I had an ear infection. So to treat these conditions, I had to take clonazepam for 5 years, which is an awful medication. I mean, it saved my life for that period of time. It allowed me to sleep, but eventually your mental health starts deteriorating and I had chronic anxiety and depression as a consequence. I had it before, but it got much worse around 4 or 5 years of it.

A lot of people may not know all these abbreviations, so just— or even what these conditions are about, but just briefly, interstitial cystitis is like urgency and just sort of a constant feeling, almost like having a bladder infection, except that you don't.

Yes, you, you have to go to the bathroom about 50 to 60 times a day, so every 15 minutes or so. You, you feel like your bladder is full of blades and battery acid, and you lose your ability to sleep. You start losing your mind very slowly. It is a horrible condition. I have a PhD on pain.

Okay, and then TMJ stands for— what is it?

Transmandibular joint, I think. It is sort of an arthritis condition of the jaw where you feel like an ear infection at the same time as a very bad discomfort on the jaw. Every time you try to chew things, your jaw really starts getting inflamed. So it's kind of an arthritis of the jaw.

Okay. And fibromyalgia, talk a little bit about what the symptoms of that are like.

Fibromyalgia, they sometimes call it separately, so brain fog, but it's pretty much part of the same thing. You feel like you're burning and you lose your capacity to process thoughts. You think very, very slowly. You're exhausted all the time. You have very, very little energy. It's probably— I can probably— I never had chemotherapy, but that exhaustion that you get from chemotherapy and that weakness, it is something sort of like that, to give you an image.

Okay. And so when you say burning, you're talking your skin feels like it's burning.

Yeah, your skin and your muscles. For me, it was the upper, the shoulders and arms. Anytime I lifted a 10-pound weight, and I'll be exhausted for days and burning.

Okay. Okay. So go on with your story about what you did about all that.

So, I mean, I try— because I come from a scientific background, I'm able to read a lot of research articles, and I started doing experiments on myself based on whatever came out. If there was some medication that came out, I will immediately try to convince my doctor and I show him the research of how this is helping. But everything was, at least on me, it was not helpful whatsoever. I did even some things that, that for me, because I had a pneumothorax, which means that my left lung collapsed at a very early age, so they have to be stapled shut. So I try hyperbaric chamber therapy and that made you feel a little better for a little while, but it was short-lived. Eventually, some people figured out that dairy was the biggest cause of fibromyalgia, and it seems to be dairy a big issue for at least most people. I think the theory is that the lactose buildup puts pressure on the vagus nerve or something like that. So I cut off lactose, I started feeling better. My doctor kept on telling me to eat less meat and less fat, and that just got me even worse. So I did the opposite. I actually ran into Mikhaila Peterson and Jordan Peterson's story of how they healed themselves from multiple diseases with a carnivore diet. And so I did a keto diet that was very helpful, then a carnivore diet was even better, but still I was unable to process foods. So I was— because most of these conditions are very high histamine intolerance, and my theory is that the histamine intolerance is due to the fact that you— the food is not being processed through your body, so it's rotting. So I mean, if you try to eat any aged food, they're higher in— the more you age the food, the higher in histamine. So I, I run into an IBS study because the IBS was now driving me— this is a new thing that was driving me crazy— that they, they were successful for 6 months to 2 years doing an FMT, and I decided to, to give it a shot. I, I I couldn't figure out where I would find the healthy donor, but then it dawned on me that, you know, I subconsciously was raising my children to have a better than average autoimmune system or a microbiome by feeding them very low-carb diets, making sure they're breastfed, so they are much longer. They were also vaginal birth. There is all these conditions that— all these things that improve the person's microbiome and keeping them away from antibiotics. And I decided to test my son and it was very, very stressful. I tried to tell everybody that even if I am used to doing experiments, I normally, even if I do them on myself, I normally never experience this level of anxiety. Within 2 hours of conducting the FMT and I use capsules to the fecal transplant, I use enteric capsules. So yes, I have people call me and this is not a simple thing. So a lot of people get desperate and they make a lot of mistakes. It is incredible the number of mistakes people make. But within 2 hours, constant bladder pain just stopped. The IBS kind of progressed later on. It got better about a day or 2 later because on the day I did the FMT, you had a little diarrhea. And I started testing on day 1 on 2 different things. So alcohol was something I could not touch. Very few types of alcohol, very little amounts. So I tested red wines, stout beers, pistachios, dark chocolate, coffee within moderation. I have very small amounts which I could not tolerate before in any way or form, and I was able to tolerate them as soon as I did the FMT. So I did the FMT 10 days in a row.

Okay.

So each day I consume Yeah, I consume via capsules a solution of 50 grams of fecal matter, which I separate from the solids.

Okay, and that, that was how many capsules?

The average, I'll say, is about 100 capsules a day.

Wow.

0.8 milliliters per capsule. That you feel very bloated.

And did you do those all at once or like throughout the day?

So my, the protocol I recommend, and I want to specify that I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nutritionist, to make sure that the capsules release in the intestine, I fast for 16 hours because food can interfere with the process and it could delay it and they can accidentally release in the small intestine or in the stomach and they can make you sick. And I accidentally made this mistake 3 months later. I had a full stomach. I like, well, let me take a couple of capsules and I gave myself SIBO.

Oh no.

Which you do not want to give yourself SIBO. It is a horrible condition. And I was able to reverse it. It took me about a week to reverse it, but it— I want to emphasize this, this is complicated. It's not that simple. For every day, and I took a break of 1 day or 2 within this 10-day period, it was a 12-day period. And again, my son produces fecal matter usually every day, but not every day. So, there were 2 days he didn't produce, so I didn't do this.

But, but how, how throughout the day, you said 100 capsules, are you taking these all at once? Are you taking these like in 3 batches? Or how did you, how did you do it?

No, I, I sit in my bed, in my, well, back then it was my, my bathroom. I have a very large bathroom. So I fill each capsule and I consume each capsule immediately. So I consume it within less than an hour. I process and consume within less than an hour. I think 2 hours is still okay. But you want to take the microbiome as fresh as possible if you have the ability to do so.

Yeah, but most people don't have a donor who's right there in their house.

Yeah.

Ready to give each day. So, you're not freeze-drying or anything. You're taking a solution. Yes. Presumably have some sort of sterile way of getting the solution into the capsules without spilling and—

Well, so the challenge that the biotech industry has with this procedure is that We are used to being in a sterile environment, and this is the most— the dirtiest thing you can possibly imagine within the biotech industry is poop. There is 500 bacteria species, right? And like 90% of our DNA is basically bacteria species. And this could explain probably why, why we have more DNA from the mother than the father, because we inherit all of these species when we're born. One of my many crazy theories. So, I fill each capsule because the enzymes of this, the FMT, will start dissolving the capsules from the inside. At the same time, the acid in your stomach could probably put some pressure on the capsules and then, once it hits the colon, then it releases. And this is why fresh, I normally— and if you're healthy, if you can process food fast or normal. Fresh capsules are not a problem, but if you have a slow digestion, I normally tell— when people call me and ask me for my advice, I say, "Well, I would personally do enema if I am constipated, but if I am digesting very fast, I do capsules and I will fast 16 hours before and not eat anything for 2.5 hours." Part of the biotech industry testing for any product is we take that— that you are consuming. This is called the acid simulation or the stomach simulation test. So you take a strong acid. I got a swimming pool, so I got the acids from a swimming pool, and I put the capsules in it. And the capsules will last in stomach acid for a long period of time, but that does not simulate the pressure your stomach will put on all the other colon areas that are gonna put on the enzymes that are there. So that's why I try to— when I do a fresh, I do it within very, very quickly, or any type of capsule. And the frozen, they normally have to use a double capsule to prevent them from falling apart. If you actually put it in, you will see within 2 or 3 minutes the capsule starts— once you put the fecal matter in the capsule, the capsule starts dissolving from the inside. They start getting soft. So I just filled them, take it, and I— when people call me and ask me for details, I said, you don't sit and do 10. You do one. If you're really dexterous, you do two or three. And if you can swallow those three at the same time, sure. If you can't, do one at a time.

Okay. And but do you have some sort of a capsule filling system to make sure there's no fecal matter on the outside of the capsules? What I was getting at.

Oh, yes, yes. So, so I use a syringe with a needle, a blunt needle, to make sure that all the drops go in. Sometimes I use a pipette. Yeah. And in that way, and I'm— so after 25 years working on many, I have the dexterity of a god. I was born in a veterinarian hospital, so as a child, we were mouth pipetting from 5 years of age. So I'm actually very good at dispensing things.

Okay.

But again, the normal person might not have— it sounds like, oh, I'm exaggerating. No, no, it is actually an art to dispense and pipette. People have to go through extensive training to do this for years.

Excuse this brief interruption, but I wanted to remind you that if you've been struggling with IBS, IBD, reflux, gastritis, SIBO, dysbiosis, candida, diarrhea, constipation, and all that gut health stuff, that's my specialty. So I work with clients not just here in Tucson, Arizona, where I live, but also virtually on video chat. And I offer single appointments as well as a 5-session gut health program for people with tougher gut health issues. Or mental health or autoimmune challenges that go along with that, who likely require testing and longer-term follow-up, as well as 12-week programs for weight loss. If you think that a 5-session or longer course of health coaching might help you meet your health goals, you can set up a free 30-minute breakthrough session with me to talk about what you've been going through, and I'll listen and hear if it sounds like I have something in my toolkit that you haven't already tried and let you know if I think that health coaching would be appropriate for you. You can find a link for that in the show notes, and I hope to hear from you. Okay.

Now, let me stop you for a second and say, you— so you said you went on the carnivore diet. What changes did you see from that versus the ones you saw after with— from the FMT?

They were very similar. They were a little slower. For the carnivore diet, it took close to a week to start feeling the— the pain stopped on the bladder. The fibromyalgia also went away. The IBS did not.

And, and was your IBS like an IBS-D or an IBS-C?

I don't know the difference.

Diarrhea or constipation?

Oh, sorry, diarrhea. Okay. D. I mean, it started with a C probably earlier on, but it usually on most people and then that progressing, yeah, to a D. But it is possible that it might have not been as much IBS that it— because a high-fat diet makes you very regular. Some people take 9 months 6 months to a year and a half for them to— the tool to solidify. I did it for 6 months and then I added some carbs on and off, but most conditions— tendinitis improved significantly, my hair started growing, and my eyesight started getting better. I don't remember when my graduation was, but it improved by 50%. So where I needed to see you before with glasses, I don't need them now for long distance. I only need them for reading.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's impressive.

I'm still shocked. And there are sort of things that I didn't list that were unexpected. So some people ask me, "Oh, well, maybe it was in your head. It was a placebo effect." And I'm like, I used to bite my nails since age 10. I was constantly biting my nails. I don't bite them anymore. When I came out of clonazepam,— I had fetish. I could not leave my house or be anywhere without a hat, including inside my house. I have 30 hat collection right now. And all of a sudden, within 2 hours, it took me a week to realize that, "Hey, I've been a week without wearing a hat." It was a very odd thing. So, I have some theories about the nail biting is that your body is so— is starving so much for this bacteria that is looking any dirt under your nails. To pick it up in your stomach.

Interesting. Okay, and then some other things that you had put on the list for me— high cholesterol and triglycerides.

Oh, that disappeared with a carnivore diet.

Okay.

And I was shocked. The high blood pressure, was it also my blood pressure? Last time I measured it— well, sorry, my blood pressure did not change a lot, but I'm not sure if it's because I was not eating enough salt and I was having the occasional drink.

Okay.

So about a few months ago, I did quit cold turkey alcohol, or at least I cut down to a significant level. This is the problem with FMT. Everybody wants to go partying the moment they FMT.

It works.

I haven't drunk.

They can live again.

I know. You feel you want to be normal. We all want to be normal. So I went to the doctor and my blood pressure was 90 over 50. About 2 years ago. And so I went to the doctor about a month ago and it was 70, low 70s over 120, 119, I wanna— I think it was, which I was like, I haven't had that blood pressure since I was on my late teens.

You mean 120 over 70?

Yeah, 120 over—

right, okay. Oh, so you were saying it was 190 before?

Yeah, 150 over 90.

Okay, because I thought you said 90, which I've had blood pressures taken that were 90 over 50, and the people were a little bit nervous. They're like, is it usually that low?

Yeah, but yeah, you're, yeah, I mean, you're, you're very thin. I, I work with a lot of pathologists, and I'm not a pathologist or a doctor, but I do remember that there is a significant difference between women and men on blood pressure, and it may be also diet related. I'm not sure.

Yeah, no, I just, I've had doctors tell me eat more salt.

Yeah, I, you know, I— so we've been told that salt was horrible for us, and I went from eating— and my doctors— I nearly cut off all salt to lower, and my blood pressure did not drop. I'm eating fistful of salt and my blood pressure is beautiful.

Yeah, I tend to think of high blood pressure along with the entire spectrum of metabolic syndrome, prediabetes, and I think because high cholesterol go along with that. So, yeah. So your prediabetes, did that also resolve under the carnivore diet?

Yes, yes, it improved significant— I mean, significantly, no, it went away. I don't get those blah after you have a meal. I can run all day. One of the— let me go back a second. So, I mean, I did a whole video on the night after. I was feeling a bit of anxiety and I thought it was a lot of anxiety what I was feeling when I did the FMT. But because I had that surgery on my lung, I can tell changes in my breathing pattern better than most people. So, I felt my lung started stretching and I'm free breathing abnormally compared to how— I mean, I was breathing normal, not abnormal, but I always been breathing abnormal so I couldn't tell the difference. And what I realized is that, you know, children breathe through the diaphragm. So, all of a sudden, I'm using my full lung capacity, I'm standing straight that I always had like a hump. And scoliosis, all of a sudden I'm standing super straight. And same happened with a carnivore diet, you start standing a lot more straight than before. Your muscle mass and tone gets improved significantly. And so I'm breathing and I'm only needing to sleep 4 hours and I'm all wired up like a 2-year-old running around the house with so much energy. And so I wrote like a 30,000-page book in a week. I had come down since, but those 10 days of FMT were just—

I was like Superman.

Yeah. And with the carnivore diet, your sleep pattern gets reduced because you get better quality of sleep. So, you don't need to sleep 12. I used to sleep 12 hours a day and I was exhausted. Now, 4, 6 hours, I can I mean, I'm trying not to run a marathon and because I'm just done with that, but, uh, God.

Feeling so good. Okay. And so, so just to differentiate between the carnivore diet. So it sounds like you did the carnivore diet and most of your things cleared up, but then you started eating some more carbs and then, then maybe some of those things were sort of, sort of coming back or what was coming back or what was still an issue at the time you did FMT?

One of the problems with the carnivore diet for me is that I didn't have the right bacteria to even process some types of meat. So, I couldn't do dry meats, aged meats, and a lot of different meats that are higher in histamine. So, I have to basically eat raw beef almost. So, I sear it 30 seconds per side and that was it. She was a pretty— I mean, it's not the worst life, but it's not the greatest either.

Yeah.

So, when I did the FMT, it allowed me to process all these other meats I couldn't eat before and occasionally cheat and have a normal life. I can go out and I can have sushi and I don't have to just eat the sashimi. You know, I can have some rice to it and I don't have to pay for it heavily. I'm trying not to do it every day because, I mean, from my research indicates that, you know, human beings are not supposed to eat as much carbs as we're eating now. And that's usually— that seems to be the root cause of all these illnesses, or at least what's been starts the illnesses from progressing. That and antibiotics seems to be the issue. But yeah, the carnivore diet was very interesting in that, that it helped me improve, but the quality of life was not the greatest when you came to a social life. Yeah, and you know, eventually you get bored and blah of eating fat and lard. It's just, you need at least a day off once in a while.

Yeah, no, that sounds pretty miserable. So how did you assess your son's fitness as a donor for FMT?

Mm. Well, I developed a very long questionnaire, and probably won't bore you with every detail because I don't have it open and it's hard to remember every single step of it, but I developed this based on what I know. So I developed this for a couple of tissue banks in my career where you have to assess a donor. It's not just blood work. That does not tell you what the microbiome is like. The microbiome is associated with pretty much everything. So, if you're losing hair or your hair is thinning, that's a microbiome issue. If you don't have good muscle tone, microbiome issue. Eyesight, your skin. I looked at my son and the first thing is, okay, how was he born? Vaginal birth. Ding, ding. That's a good one. Breastfed till he was 1 year and 8 months. I expose him to dirt, and that's, that's a huge thing for children right now. They're trucking in— I can't remember what European country— are trucking dirt to kindergarten so kids can play with dirt. So I, I had run a previous study from Mongolia where they took— where they found out that Mongolian people consume more dairy than anybody per capita, I think, and they don't have a genetic abnormality to process that much dairy. And the reason is because they don't sterilize their dairy products. They're still heavily contaminated with the organisms that live in that natural environment. So I let my son play with the dog. I didn't sterilize the house. I just clean very, very normal. We go out in the dirt. I get cow manure, throw it everywhere in the garden. He plays, he gets dirty. He fights the dog, sticks his hand in it. Sometimes I cringe when I see this, but he sticks the dog bone in his mouth. So I let him do these normal things that I guess the Paleolithic men were doing, and that's why they were healthy and strong. And people from— and I was born in a third world country, the healthiest people are the countryside people that work directly with the farm and the animals. So I did that, and then because children are a harder target to get, you also examine the mother because their microbiome comes from the mother. So the mother doesn't have any health issues that at least I'm aware of. And you also want to see the demeanor of the person that you're transplanting it from, and that the demeanor is also a big indicator. Is the person has depression, anxiety, sad and thought, erratic behaviors, right? Yeah.

So, but it— but in terms of pathogens, you did a GI map on your son, right?

Eventually I did. At first I didn't do it because I didn't suspect him to have any pathogens. It is a, you know, most pathogens they show in different patterns. But, you know, at the time I was, I had nothing to lose.

Yes, it does kind of sound like it.

Yeah.

And I did, I saw the GI map from your son and I noticed that he does have H. pylori in his gut. So I'm just curious about, about your thoughts on taking in stool that has H. pylori.

Yes, H. pylori is natural. There is H. pylori, and then there is H. pylori, and then there is an amount of H. pylori. So if you read, there is a target and then there is a number, and the number is below the target. So I think the target is 10 to the 3 or the 4, and then the amount he has is about 1 standard, 1, 1 log below that. So that is normal. And then I think below you have all the pathogenic type of pylori. Because I mean, you can consume, for example, raw food that has E. coli and nothing happens because it has not switched. Or you could drink dairy that has Candida and you're not going to get sick from Candidiasis.

Right. Yeah, because it doesn't have the virulence factors.

Yes. Yes.

So, but I do— I mean, I do see a lot of clients who have H. pylori with no virulence factors, but they are very symptomatic.— and even clients whose H. pylori shows up on the GI Map below the reference range but still again are symptomatic and very much improved after it's gone. So, I'd be hesitant, to be honest. I would be hesitant to take an H. pylori, but as you said, you didn't have much to lose.

Yeah, but you're not going to find or it's very rare to impossible to find a person without any type, any amount of H. pylori. Yeah, so, and that's why you, you, you do the examination. Okay, you have H. pylori. Is it making you sick? No. So then you have normal healthy amount of H. pylori, right?

It's— there's enough of other good bacteria to keep it in check.

Yes. And for example, my ex-wife and one of my cousins, they developed the bad type of H. pylori, and but they are symptomatic. If you're asymptomatic, it's very likely that, that H. pylori is not really pathogenic.

Okay. And so you did— over 10 days you were taking a bunch of capsules a day. Did you do any kind of ongoing FMT protocol then after that?

No, I just did this— the fasting before and after, 16 hours before and after. And I tried to eat a low-carb diet except for the foods I was introducing on my experiment. So, my reasoning is that— so, every person has, what is it, yeasts, aerobes, and anaerobes. So, you want to— so, they have a— let's call it an army. Let's call it the 300 because you have about 5 to 25 pounds of poop in your gut. And what you're introducing is, let's just say, most companies that sell this, they sell about 10 grams per dose. So, it's a very, very small amount. So, the 300 is fighting the Persian army of a million. To give it a fighting chance, you have to cut down on the, the bad bacteria you have in your gut. So it's— you give them a fighting chance. Yeah, but a lot of people just go crazy eating carbs, and, and this is why it doesn't work long term, or if it doesn't work at all for most people, especially unless you got the dose that I introduced to myself. I also put my son under the same diet, so I increase the chances of his microbiome to be strong. So my son has always been on a, I will call it a paleo diet with dairy and high fat. And I myself on a, on a high fat diet. And that probably helped with, with that.

Okay. And so just to go back, interstitial cystitis. So after the fecal transplant, did that completely resolve or is there still some trace of that?

No, there is some traces. The frequency improved significantly around the first— around day 10 of the experiment, but eventually the frequencies, when I started introducing more carbs, started getting worse. So right now I'm going back to eating a more carnivore diet again.

And when you say carbs, are you talking about vegetables? Are we talking about rice? What do you—

Oh, any type of carbs. They unfortunately— yeah, they— so I spoke with a Candida expert and she explained to me. So I did another experiment later on, but let's just leave that one aside. She explained to me that the reason why her and a lot of other scientists suspect that a lot of these conditions are caused by candidiasis, and the reason you can't really eliminate it entirely is because it feeds through the bloodstream directly, not through the stomach only. Even if you cut off all carbohydrates and sugar, you just basically put them dormant or slow them down, but they're still going to be there, right?

Right. Your body converts protein to glucose.

Yeah, yeah, glucose. Sorry. Yeah, so I guess until we figure something out, I'm stuck with this.

Yeah. And have you, have you tried reducing oxalates? Well, I guess you're— if you're only eating meat, you're not having any oxalates, but but any kind of oxalates.

I think it's path— I, I forgot the names of them, but yeah, I have reduced all of that and it makes a difference on other things. On the IC of the bladder, not as much. I think it's just— I'm gonna guess it's just glucose, the issue with that.

Okay, yeah, because I see a lot of people who have urgency and maybe not an official IC diagnosis, but then when they go on calcium citrate to help absorb oxalate crystals and then also reduce their oxalates in their diet, that improves a lot.

I mean, you, you also gonna get some oxalates from animals that consume these vegetables and then you're processing because they are not already eating the natural diet that they're supposed to be eating. We're eating them high corn diet. But yeah, I can't afford to go— I mean, a carnivore diet is already expensive enough to, to do a, an all grass-fed diet.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah.

Okay, I know you have posted several videos to YouTube. Can you tell me about what those videos are about? And I'll link to those in the show notes.

Well, I, I wanted to teach people how to process as aseptic as possible, and because I've seen a lot of videos that they don't explain a lot of things about a process in the FMT, I, I did an entire video on how to assess a donor. Based on, on the characteristics of the donor. And let me see, I did another one explaining why the histamine— so a lot of people with SIBO call me. SIBO is a tough one to help people with, but I did a video explaining why the histamine reaction happens because of the slowing down on the body of the food processing, that it starts rotting. You don't have the right bacteria to clear it out of the way. It just sits there, rots, creates all this histamine, and you start getting worse. And I got requests to do it also in Spanish. I'm bilingual. I mean, I'm multilingual, but I do best in two. Then let me see what other ones. Oh, I did a video called Tricks and Tips on How to Process FMT because the gagging reflex, we have been programmed to think of poop as a bad thing. And all of a sudden you're trying, no matter how you encapsulate it, you have to sit there and process it and smell it, and it smells awful. And I have worked with cadaveric tissue, I have worked with, with a lot of things that, that were disgusting, but this one was the worst. So I, I explained how to put Vicks under your nose to help you a little. It's not a perfect thing. How to maybe run an extractor if you're in a bathroom or near a bathroom, how to stay away from from water sources, because those can be contaminants, although poop is already heavily contaminated. But keeping pets away so you're not dealing with the dog hair that can just get in it, or cat hair. And how to clean the area, what materials and equipment to use, what's the right type of capsules and the type of syringe that's probably going to be more beneficial versus— because a lot of people want, oh, I want to use a pipette. Sounds cool, but it's not. It gets plugged very easily. So a 10cc syringe is probably the best with a, with a blunt tip. Even if you cannot get the blunt tip, just assist— the 10cc syringe will be good enough. Like, I originally bought a 60cc syringe. It was just very big and bulky to maneuver, so I settled after all the equipment that I bought on a 10cc syringe.

Okay, and just to make sure people don't go off and just grab their kids' stool and start doing FMTs. I do want to say, you know, it is a good idea to test for all types of pathogens. So there's— I can— it is a good idea to, um, a list of all of the different things one should be testing for. I think it's a European consensus or something on— yes, stool testing for FMT. So I can link to that. Yes.

There is a— there is the European consensus. The FDA has some guidance. There is also— I mean, the GI-MAP is a good test to conduct, and you have to go through a doctor. The doctor is— you can call him and ask him or talk to a microbiologist or somebody. I have read and reviewed a lot of— and I'm not— I don't work as a microbiologist, but I work with a lot of laboratories that were under my supervision that I have— I understood enough, and I have to release tissue product as part of quality engineering. So I can read them well enough, but I wouldn't call me to release for other people.

Yeah, right. Okay.

Yeah, better an expert.

Okay. Are there any supplements that you took in addition to doing FMT that were useful for your situation?

When I did it, I didn't, because on itself the FMT is going to be much better than anything you can take. Later on, I discovered there is some supplements and other bacteria you can take that can help different conditions. So I run into a study that used L-glutamine to rebuild the gut because most of our conditions are— they seem to be linked to leaky gut or they're causing the gut to leak for some reason. And the L-glutamine, I think the study suggested 15 to 20 grams a day and it helped about 70-something percent of people with IBS. Then I run into a few other studies that use— one used boulardii.

Saccharomyces boulardii.

Saccharomyces boulardii.

It's a yeast.

Yeah, sorry, a yeast. That uses the boulardii to treat SIBO. So if you cannot get your hands on FMT, I would try that. And then Lactobacillus casei. And it's been a couple of years since I, I deal with microbiology, so my apologies. Lactobacillus casei seems to help people with prostatitis or chronic bladder pain, which— so I see of the bladder sometimes is called BPS, which means bladder pain. BPS, PBS, it has many different acronyms and names, so the consensus is still out there. I personally think that all of them are the same condition. So this is my theory. Your microbiome is about 70% of your immune system, and then your genetics are the other issue that you have. So your microbiome can protect your genetic deficiencies if they're still not being stressed out enough. So it protects them. Once the microbiome starts dying, then all your genetic conditions start causing problems. My theory seems to make sense is, for example, people with schizophrenia when you do an X-ray of their brain, you can tell that the person has schizophrenia, but not everybody that has that brain condition is schizophrenic. And my theory is that is the microbiome what basically protects that person. There is people with that genetic trait of celiac, you don't see them with celiac disease. So it is complicated, and I think that using these other ways can probably improve your odds if you are doing— I didn't know then what I know now, but right now I'm taking Velarde, I'm taking Cassay, and I'm doing the L-glutamine.

Okay, yeah, it's a pretty common supplement for leaky gut sealing up and post-gut or concurrent with gut healing protocols.

But I gotta tell you, it's very hard to think straight when you have all these conditions on top of you and you're coming out of clonazepam. So the things that are clear and simple and make sense now, I don't even know how I held the job for the last 15 years. I, I'm still wondering about that.

And read all the studies and then did all that stuff. So yeah, it's great that you've been able to—

I rebuilt houses with fibromyalgia. I was passing out every now and then, raised children. I don't know how I did it.

Pure willpower, I think, right? Yeah, no, I think having a positive attitude has a lot to do with it because even if you're feeling miserable, if you have a good attitude and you're still hopeful and you just keep pushing through, then somehow versus hopelessness, I see people who are truly hopeless and it's a heck of a lot harder to push through.

I want to do a video on this, but I don't really know how to do it. I don't really like videos that much, but I get people calling me and they're like, I've been suffering for a couple of years and I'm like, try 40.

And just to back up, like, what do you think destroyed your microbiome? Did you take a lot of antibiotics or?

Yes. When I was around 10, I was very thin and the doctor thought that there was a bacteria in my gut that he needed to kill. So I was given abnormal overdose of tetracycline. I do remember that. So I developed a lot of skin cancer since it was like every year that that's also seemed to have stabilized.

Skin cancers?

Oh God, yes, like 15. From age 12, 12, yeah.

Like basal cell carcinomas, not like melanomas?

Oh, all of them.

Really? Even melanomas?

Yeah.

Wow.

I have several melanomas, one of them on late stages. It almost entered my bloodstream. It was about, I'll say, about an inch, inch and a half in diameter. Yeah, no, I, I'm a human wreck. I got more stitches than a baseball.

I'm glad that one didn't go metastatic.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, thank you so much for sharing about your experience with us. It's very interesting.

It's been an absolute pleasure. And anytime you need to reach out and talk to me about anything, I'll do my very best. I'm not an expert on all of this because it's not my full-time job, but I do what I can to help people because I know one should suffer what I've gone through. This is not Good.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I appreciate you coming on.

Sam Lindsey Parsons.

Okay.

Take care.

Sorry about the not great audio quality there, but I've done my best to edit it and to try and clean that up. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest, and links for those are in the show notes. Thank you all for joining me today, and here's wishing you all The Perfect Stool.