Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally: Root Cause Healing with Josh Dech

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'll be speaking with Josh Deck, a holistic nutritionist and physician's consultant specializing in Crohn's colitis and severe IBS. After reversing over 500 cases of Crohn's and colitis, previously thought to be impossible to fix. He's worked with some of the world's most renowned doctors. He's got a popular podcast called Reversible that I'll be appearing on this year and has spoken on international TV and has been recruited to the Priority Health Academy as a medical lecturer. He now helps educate doctors and the public on the holistic approach to gut health and chronic digestive diseases. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. If you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, hidezaharthealthcoaching.com and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my recently updated free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool or functional medicine 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, Josh.

Pleasure to be here, Lindsey Parsons. What a delight.

Yeah, I'm happy to have you. So would you like to start with your gut health story and what got you interested in this topic?

Oh boy, that— sure, let's just get deep real fast. Well, I've had gut issues my entire life, and it's really— it's been my entire life since probably grade school. So if I haven't gone a single day, or if I don't go a single day without talking about poop, it feels a little bit weird. So I'm glad we're doing this. So, you know, I always had this nervous belly. It was something that came up if I had to go to a competition. I was always in sports. I'd have to use the bathroom beforehand. It was just in my household. My mom had gut issues, my dad had gut issues, and I went to the Talk to me, said, yep, it's IBS. It's genetic. I just kind of dealt with it. Nobody told me anything otherwise. And it really hit a critical mass sort of building up over the years. I was in my teens. I had acne all over my body, my back, my neck, my chest, down my arms, on my wrists. It was a big mess. I had geez, joint pain and all kinds of stuff. You name it, brain fog, severe ADHD. And then right around my mid-twenties, early mid-twenties, things hit a critical mass. And I was 15 bowel movements a day, 10-minute transit times. I was dealing with blood and mucus, and I was actually a strength athlete at the time, and I was using anabolic steroids. So I was artificially larger than I should be, but I was 216 pounds. When I got sick, I dropped under 170 and I just felt atrocious. I couldn't lift a th— I mean, 30 pounds was heavy for me getting out of bed. There was anxiety and panic attacks and extreme depression, you name it. So after watching my mom do 2 bowel surgeries and mesh and gallbladder removal and the works, and having gone through it, I figured that was just my fate. But long and short, I got some help and I started studying the gut and I realized this is a fixable thing. That's really the summary of it all. And I ended up healing my gut to the place where I used to have a teaspoon of ice cream in the bathroom. I could eat a liter. I'm not even going to fart. Like my gut's great. It's, it's bulletproof. So it's been really amazing to see what is possible. And from there, it just opened this whole door, window of possibility that nobody had told me before. And I just felt like I needed to tell the world about it. And here we are.

So who did you find that was able to help you? Was it like a functional medicine person, a naturopath?

Yeah, I found some functional practitioners. The naturopaths I've seen unfortunately weren't able to help much and to no detriment of their own. It just wasn't their specialty. But I actually found some colleagues of mine who just understood gut health. So I started knocking on that door and getting some help from them, dealing with basic stuff through liver and bile. Diet was rarely talked about. I was eating Captain Crunch cereal because it fit my macros, but I— everyone told me about calories, no one told me about chemicals. And so it was just a whole different transition to pulling out all the infections. There was mold and parasites and massive amounts of Candida, and my liver was congested, and all these things that led to me being sick that just regular people at the gym, colleagues of mine, personal trainers, like, oh yeah, I can help with that. And they did.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, I'm glad you found help.

Oh, geez. You and me both.

Yeah. So you and I had a pre-interview call soon after I had gotten the results of an expanded IBD panel that had the AMCA antibodies elevated, which was sort of the, maybe the second hint that there might be something more than just post-infectious IBS going on with me. And I haven't had any other further confirmation of that because my last colonoscopy was 2 years ago and I'm not doing one again. Sure. Unfortunately, I have no pain, no diarrhea, no blood or mucus in my stool, no other symptoms other than occasional bloating. So thankfully anyway, but I did wanna get into this expanded IBD panel and what it means cuz that was something we had discussed. Sure. And the other antibodies on the test are the G-ASCA and ACCA, A-C-C-A, and A-L-C-A. So can you tell us more about what those different antibodies mean?

Yeah. So antibodies, all they come up as is your body's trying to protect you from something. So the most common one you're going to see in there is going to be 60 to 80%, I'd say upwards of 80% is that p-ANCA antibody you're talking about. Crohn's disease, it might be 20, 25%. It's not as common, but it stands for perinuclear antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody, which sounds like a big complicated thing, but it actually works against components inside the neutrophil, right? So you got 5 types of white blood cells. The most common in bowel disease is going to be the neutrophil, and that's where you get your calprotectin number from. The more neutrophils in the area, the higher the level of calprotectin protein being produced. Like a car in a parking lot running its engine or revving or idling even, it's producing exhaust and you measure the air and go, look how much cars there are. You do the same, you measure the protein, that's how much neutrophil. So it's a pretty simple measurement, but this P. Anca, what it's doing is attacking what's inside the neutrophil. Well, why would it do that? Well, NutriQuil operates kind of like Pac-Man. It's called phagocytosis, right? They walka, walka, walka, and they eat. And when they eat, they try to digest. But if your body can't digest, it needs help, it sends in the antibody. And so this is where we see these antibodies coming up and we go, look, you have antibodies.

You're—

it's this autoimmune condition. Well, P. Anca is not an autoantibody. It's not attacking your own tissue. And if we can say, well, it looks like it's attacking these white blood cells, but it's actually attacking what's in the white blood cell. Is it really attacking you or are you simply, or your cells, your white blood cells simply standing in the way of what your body's trying to handle?

All right.

So they're not actual autoantibodies in the sense that they don't attack yourself. And this is a big misconception in the world of bowel disease. We say it's this autoimmune condition. Show me the autoantibodies. They're not attacking me. So it's all a big, a big scam, if you will. And what were the other antibodies you said you found there?

Oh, well, the ones that were elevated on my panel were the AMCA, which I guess that they're all part of the Pianca, those 4, maybe is the way it works.

That one is, so it's a little bit different. So the, the AMCA, this is an anti-mannobiocide, if I'm pronouncing that one right, carbohydrate antibody. So that's under like the ASCA, not the ANCA, but the ALCA, ACCA, and the AMCA are under these. Similar panels as they're going after these glycans and these carbohydrates specifically. And so the AMCA is targeting what's called manobiocide. It's just a carbohydrate structure. You find them in yeast, in fungus, and other things. And that's where you're getting these other, again, the ASCA is anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibody. So it's under that same umbrella of attacking yeast. Now that one's more common in Crohn's, less common in ulcerative colitis. But again, I would argue if it's attacking a yeast, What's wrong with the yeast? Is it been mutated? Is there something in your body that's causing your body to maybe confuse it? We call this molecular mimicry, where picture— I'm just gonna back it up. So it's getting a little scientific. I've got this big window right next to me. Picture I look outside that window and every time, every day I see a man in a purple jacket and his dog poops on my, on my lawn. I'm like, damn you, man in the purple jacket. I'm gonna get you next time. I see him come by and I see him come by every time in the purple jacket and his dog poops on my lawn. I'm like, I'm gonna get him. One day storm comes through and it's raining and it's It's muddy and I can't see out my window, but I see what looks like a guy in a purple jacket. I know that dude. He's gonna poop. He's gonna let his dog poop on my lawn. He might poop on my lawn. I don't know. Anyway, so I look out the window and throw a rock at him. Well, that time it just so happened to be a different man in a purple jacket. It wasn't the same one. So because my window was muddy, I couldn't see clearly. I mistook an innocent bystander for the guy Who always lets his dog poop on my lawn. And in the same way, your body can do the similar thing called molecular mimicry. It's got this looking glass as it's trying to send these signals to and from to perceive what's happening inside my body right now. Oh, there's that bad guy. Well, that yeast might be looking like the actual bad guy, that Saccharomyces, that fungus or whatever it is. And now your body is attacking it thinking it's something else. We call this molecular mimicry. It's just a similarity. Oops, I'm attacking it., but in your case, what we're seeing now are these ANCA antibodies. So your white blood cells are trying to clear up something, but then you've got these yeast antibodies. So why is it attacking yeast? Now we have to dive a little bit deeper and figure out what's causing it. It's typically barrier activation, your Th1 and Th17 immune pathways. Again, we're getting very technical, so stop me where you want to. These are going to be innate pathways. So Th1, this is like if you get the flu, your body's gonna fight off that flu. Viruses, intracellular pathogens like parasites, your body uses that pathway to get rid of them. Well, Th17 is a very, call it a hyperactive extreme immune response where you end up seeing too much neutrophil. You end up seeing these skews of architectural changes, ulcers, strictures, fistulas. So your immune system just gone off the deep end. And what we have to look at here, that's progressing what's likely your situation, which is attacking yeast and different type of glycans, is there's 4 stages of bowel disease. Now, if you guys are listening and it's feeling a bit sciencey, I'm gonna try to dial it back for you here. Think about 4 stages of bowel disease. The first is acute. This is where, picture you having one stressful day. Eh, you can deal with it. You shake it off, right? You get the flu, you get food poisoning, boom, it's gone. You're good. The second stage is chronic. After enough stressors, after a certain amount of time, medically speaking, it's defined as a year or more with minimal changes, even in spite of medical intervention. It's this ongoing inflammatory thing you can't get rid of. So your body had a stressful day, it's fine, but it can't get rid of it. It goes on and on and on and on. Now you're stage 2, you're chronic. Stage 3, you're stressed out for so long, one day you snap and like punch the mailman in the mouth. Your immune system overreacted. This is where we're seeing a lot of this skewing of that Th17. Your body was trying so hard to work to help you, your immune system actually became toxic, where it begins to degrade and erode your own tissues. And this is where we're getting these ulcers, strictures, fistulas, bleeding, excess of neutrophils, that, that Th17 is overreacting. Okay. Well, the fourth stage now, is where things tip off the deep end. And it's actually pretty rare what I see in Crohn's colitis or any bowel disease, really. That fourth stage we're going to call immune dysfunction. So from acute, one-off. Second, more chronic. Third, now we're dealing with this overreactive response. Like stressful day, you're freaking out, your immune system can't calm down. The fourth stage is this dysfunction. We'll see a collapse where your immune system no longer has the ability to respond. We'll see CIRS, that's chronic inflammatory response syndrome, or MCAS, which is mast cell Activation syndromes, you have these chronic histamine-based responses. Your body can't calm down, or even true autoimmunity can happen in this fourth stage. The vast majority of bowel disease are in the 1, 2, 3. It's either acute and it just hit you really hard and fast, or it's been around long enough, it's defined as chronic, or your immune system is progressively getting more and more and more and more and more reactive. Now it's this hyperreactive, we're calling it immune mediated. And if we look at the literature, Crohn's Colitis Foundation, the CDC, the Mayo Clinic, they've downgraded Crohn's colitis from autoimmune to immune-mediated. So they're now recognizing there's not autoantibodies, it's just a hyperactive immune system. They suppress it without addressing the reason why it's hyperactive.

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Okay. So when we were talking on the, on the pre-interview call, you mentioned that one of these antibodies had something to do with E. coli, which is that?

Mm-hmm. So that would be your OMPC, another antibody, relatively common, but OMPC stands for outer membrane porin C. And this is what's attacking a protein on the outside of an E. coli bacterium. And E. coli is wonderful. There are bad E. coli and really good E. coli. In fact, there was a probiotic— you read studies, it's E. coli Nissle 1917, and it's been used to fight back all kinds of nasty infections, chronic E. coli, heavy-duty benefits for the immune system. There's even biologic drugs utilizing E. coli to help train your immune system. So it's not a bad guy, but that OMPC antibody will attack these proteins on the outside of E. coli, disrupting some of that signaling or the benefits from the good and/or the bad guys, which can cause some issues in itself.

Okay. But that's not part of that IBD panel that I could see.

If you don't have it on your IBD panel, I wouldn't fuss about it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was just wondering because I know E. coli's been my bacteria, like for when I get SIBO, it's E. coli. It's not Klebsiella or, you know, it's not the methanogens. So.

Well, consider that if you're prone to SIBO and you're prone to E. coli, E. coli is a fecal microbe, right? Typically residing in the large, large intestine. But if you're getting SIBO, so small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, that means there is typically what SIBO is, it's fecal microbes flowing from the large into the small intestine. Well, if that's happening, it's not just overgrowing on its own. Something must be disrupting that ileocecal valve. So the valve that opens and closes between the small and large intestine, If it's disrupted, now you get backflow, which leads us to the next clue. What's disrupting that valve? Well, there's signals, there's all kinds of stuff we can get from inflammation. You can get strictures, you can get parasitic infections will actively disrupt that valve. If you have toxic bile, your, your liver's congested, your bile, cuz right at the end of the small intestine is called the terminal ileum. 95% of your bile gets reabsorbed. Well, if it's toxic bile, it's sludgy, it's dirty bile, then it's not gonna be cleaning properly. It can lead to inflammation. We call this now ileal colitis, your doctor goes, oh yeah, it's Crohn's.

Yeah. But okay.

It's just an inflamed bowel. Any diagnoses, Crohn's colitis, diverticulitis, colonoscopies, endoscopies, all these things are telling you where you're inflamed, how severely you're inflamed, and what is inflamed. It's not telling me why, but the clues we can start to follow that if there's an ileocecal issue, let's start with the things that disrupt that.

Interesting. I had not heard, um, other than ileal breaking, which, uh, another guest talked about. Interesting. I had not heard much about that in particular. So relating to antibodies for E. coli, I was curious because I know there are bacteriophages that reduce certain strains of pathogenic E. coli, and I'm wondering if that's something that's, that you use or that's useful. I'm thinking like of the trademarked Pre4Pro bacteriophage mix.

Yeah, Pre4Pro is cool. Yeah. I mean, there are phages which will go and sort of gobble up and eat some of these things, and a lot of them are considered prebiotics, but in the same sense, if I've got an E. coli overgrowth, my first instinct isn't to go in and try to kill it off with an antimicrobial or antibiotics. My first instinct is to go through with probiotics to try to balance out the ecosystem. So if I can get— I mean, you have to think about your microbiome this way. It is a self-regulating ecosystem, which means it's going to self-soothe, self-balance. You get an infection, it contradicts it, or it kicks it out through exclusion. We say there's too much room, no vacancy, get out out of here and it pushes them out of the bowel. That's all helpful stuff. But the question we have to ask now is if your body's not self-regulating, what is lacking in that ecosystem in order to make that lack of self-regulation? Well, if that ecosystem is self-regulating, something might be lacking, but a lack is again, a dysregulation. So what caused this self-regulating system to dysregulate? If I have this overgrowth, this dysbiosis doesn't happen on its own. If you're already dealing with diet and lifestyle and all these basics, we have to look to the 3 things that make your body sick and can also disrupt your microbiome. That's going to be toxins, microbes, deficiencies, nothing else. Getting hit by a bus doesn't count. That's trauma, right? So we're talking about the things that make you sick. Toxins, environmental pesticides, mold, chronically high stress or chronically high blood sugar. All these things can be toxic to your body. Then you have your deficiencies, sunlight, fresh air, good relationships, quality sleep and rest and downtime, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, anything that gives your body tools to recover and heal and build itself. Those, if you're deficient, things become disrupted or dysfunctional. So you have your toxins, you have your deficiencies. Now you have your microbes. Well, microbes are going to be your viruses, parasites, bacteria, and fungi. So we have to then establish what happened throughout your life or your lifetime in what order to set the stage for some of these three things. In whatever combination of toxins, microbes, deficiencies to end up putting your body in a state where it is in fact inflamed, dysfunctional, unable to, to, to develop this equilibrium or this homeostasis. It wants to keep coming back to understanding that dysfunction is what leads us to an actual solution.

So what tools do you use to try and unwind what's happened to somebody who's got a diagnosis of Crohn's or colitis?

We have to start with a history, right? So you talked about, say, going in and trying some of these things to manage E. coli. That's sort of a downstream issue, right? Again, all these things are plant-based medication where we have herbs, we have supplements, even pharmaceuticals, and we apply them to this chronic inflammatory response, right? It's this ongoing chronic thing, but we take acute treatments and then apply them chronically. This is why I don't intervene with all these things right away. We get to the sources. So when I'm going to find somebody's original root cause, because that's the footing for the story. Once we have the story, like Hansel and Gretel, we can follow these breadcrumbs on the way back. What was the first instance you were sick? I had a great conversation with a woman just a few months ago. She's actually just finishing up our program. Night and day difference. Symptoms are almost gone entirely. And I said, how did you get colitis? She said, I got COVID. I was like, nah, billions of people got COVID and did not get colitis. So why did you get colitis? Long and short, took us about 15, 18 minutes and we wound back her story. Turns out she was born and raised in Colombia, 1984. And she remembers she lived in a very poor family in a big long home that they all just kind of lived together in. And it was at her grandparents' house. Her room was at the back and at the back of this house there was mold up and down the walls. It was on, she remembers it on her bed and her bed sheets. Chronic tonsil infections, chronic sinus infections, ear infections, boils on her skin. By the time she was 20 years old, she had been on nearly 40 doses of antibiotics. Which is massive for anybody. She was bottle-fed strictly, so she never got that proper inoculation. On top of that, she was born in Colombia in 1984. If you know much about Pablo Escobar and the rise of the world's biggest cocaine empire, her words, if mom didn't come home by 6:00 PM, we assumed she was just— she died in a bombing somewhere because there were bombs going off and guns in the streets. So this poor girl, it wasn't COVID, it was bottle-feeding, mold, dozens of doses of antibiotics, chronic stress, trauma, all of these things piled up to when she hit her 30s, she finally got COVID. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. So when I'm looking for somebody's root cause and identify, we have to see what were the, what was the first layer of weakness and how do we stack the story up to get you to where you are? Once we can do that, now we follow the breadcrumbs backward and we're able to start with what's damaged right now and needs to move first. And we can create an outline and a protocol from there.

And are you using stool testing sometimes?

So I'll look at stool testing. In her instance, it may be worth looking at stool testing early because she has so much known dysbiosis and that disruption to her microbiome likely led to where she's at now. But for most people coming in, they don't have 40 doses of antibiotics. So the question isn't how bad is your microbiome now? It's what caused your microbiome to disrupt. If I test it right now and take all the interventions, the reason why Right? Could it be upstream? Your microbiome is a downstream symptom effectively. So if I measure it now and then get rid of all the whys, the root causes, and address those over the next 2, 3, 4, 5 months and measure your gut microbiome again, it's gonna be completely different. So I've wasted $400, $500 for a test upfront knowing I was gonna take interventions that would change that microbiome anyway in a few months' time. So I rarely do them upfront unless there's a known need or a cause, or you know, it's an antibiotic. Issue or a breastfeeding issue or something like that, because there's other fish to fry in order of priority. Anytime you tell a story, there's always a structure to it. And if we start jumping ahead, nothing makes sense and you spend a lot of money on nothing.

Hey, this is Lindsey here. Just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, that's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages, we'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners, but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show.

So what percentage of the time, just roughly, do you feel like mycotoxins are at the root of these conditions?

80%.

Really?

It's shocking.

Okay.

Oh yeah. I'm telling you.

Oh, you know, that's really interesting.

80% plus.

Because I literally just wrote a blog post and I said, I didn't use to test mycotoxins, but then Vibrant started offering this great 3 for $700 and it's now 3 for $800 deal. And I was like, well, let's just throw in a third test. Let's do the mycotoxins. Cuz you maybe had a moldy house once. And 80% of the people had mycotoxins.

I could see that it adds up, right? I mean, mold is present in 70+ percent of US homes, and we know that the CDC even attributes 40%— depends on the stats— 20 to 40% of asthma cases to mold. But we haven't looked at bowel diseases. But let's go back to what you're showing with the different antibodies. You may have a skew. We talked about Th1, that's viruses, innate pathogens, things like that. And then Th17. That's that neutrophils, hyperreactivity, excessive mucosal inflammation. Th17 deals with mucus layers. So sinuses, oral, vaginal, rectal, like all those squishy surfaces. So if we have mold, we know mold can push that Th17 in the wrong direction, making it overreactive. And if we look at the data, we can see mold elevates Th17. We can look at the data saying Crohn's colitis largely have a skew of too much Th17 immune pathway, but there's no studies or very minimal saying, oh, mold causes colitis. We have to make the jump and say, well, this creates that immune pathway. Bowel disease is a result of that immune pathway. 1 1 must equal 2. We start testing, it's 80%. But then we have to consider two streams of mold since we're down this rabbit hole. The first column A is inoculation. Column B is going to be residual damage. So if I look at somebody in column A, they're actively being inoculated by mold in their home, their work environment, something they're auto-inoculating, which isn't— I would say it's relatively rare, but mold will grow and colonize in your sinuses, your lungs, or your gut. So you're actually growing mold inside of your own system, or they've now left that exposure, but toxins are still circulating and most will degrade in about 6 months' time. So the inoculation means circulating toxins. Self-inoculation or an active environmental exposure. That's column A, or inoculating mold from somewhere. Column B is residual damage. The bomb's gone off, the fire's out. Now it's just what's damaged your immune system, damage to your gut microbiome, damage to your gut lining, all these different things, cellular mitochondrial health, bile congestion. Bile becomes very thick under mold, which toxifies your liver. This is all the residual damage mold has done.. So we look at column A, we can rule out there's no more mold in your active environments. There's no known issues. Column B, let's go after the residual damage. Now, your bile, your lymphs, liver toxicity, cellular mitochondrial health, all the things your body needs as a foundation to move anything. That's where we get to start instead. So that's why testing can be very, very helpful for sure. But a lot of clinicians will go through and they'll go, look at all these mycotoxins, let's go bind them. Can be dangerous, but jump into it.

Sure.

If you feel they're ready for it, but they'll go and bind and clean the toxins without assessing where they came from. And that's one of the biggest mistakes people are making.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Obviously you've got to stop them coming in before you start trying to kill them off. Yeah.

It shouldn't have to be said, Lindsey, but it does, unfortunately.

So you've mentioned some bile-related things a couple of times and like bile for me, it just remains this I mean, I see markers about bile on the tests that I do, and I see markers of fat digestion, but at the end of the day, how do you distinguish between congested sticky bile versus not enough bile? Or is it the same thing essentially? Because if it's congested, you're not getting enough of it.

That's a great question. I would argue it's similar. It's, it's not, again, not uncommon, but if we look at stool, If someone is dealing with yellow, oily, greasy, really foul-smelling stool, any of those things in the checkbox, that's malabsorbed fat. So you're clearly not producing or getting enough bile where it needs to be. On the other hand, if you have gray stools, pale and gray or clay color, bile is part of what— it's that green color that gets your stool and makes it more brown. So if it's gray or pale in color, then we likely don't have enough bile flow where it's congested somewhere. So based on whether or not you're absorbing fats, the color of your stool, that's really helpful. But I would say again, 80 to 90% of those with bowel disease need to support bile because bile, we look at it and go, well, it's a green slippery sort of thickish substance that will emulsify fats. I need to break down fat kind of like turning oil to water so I can absorb it. That is the case, but bile is not just fat digestion, it's also an immune signaling molecule. And it's a huge part of We'll call it regulating your microbial ecology. So it keeps that ecosystem balanced. So bile helps your immune system in a few ways. So number one, yes, we know it emulsifies fats. It regulates your microbiome and helps keep that composition. It's part of intestinal permeability. We actually reabsorb 95% or so of it at the end of your small intestine. We recycle and detox hormones. All kinds of things go through bile. They suppress inflammatory cytokines. They, they signal through immune receptors. There's all kinds of things that get involved when we're having bile flow or adequate bile flow. The problem is when your bile is not there, we have decreased immune regulation. Common things we see elevated in bowel disease: interleukin-6, interleukin-1 beta, NF-kappa-B, TNF-alpha. These are different signaling pathways that trigger inflammation. And when bile's disrupted, it disrupts these things and can increase or decrease these immune pathways, leading someone to having a hyperreactive response. So bile does so much more than just break down fats. It regulates T-cells, or what we call T-reg. You have different types of T-cells and immune cells and B-cells and all kinds of stuff in your body. T-reg cells are your managers. So they will go in and say, oh, you're overreactive, let's calm you down, or let's get you balanced out. But without proper bile, you don't even have regulation of your immune system. Loss of proper bile, you end up with Th17 dominance, like your experience. And we talked about that neutrophil activity is excessive. So there's too much neutrophil activation leads to high levels of cow protein. Protected, which ends up also leading to your gut barrier being broken down. When your gut barrier is broken down, you have more immune dysregulation. And again, dysbiosis, because bile's not there. So there's a lot of issues where if your bile's not properly regulated, filtered, flowing, if it's not supported, your immune system goes off the deep end. It leads to dysbiosis, leaky gut gets worse. All these different things compound because of one little thing that's meant to digest fats. It's a crazy process. And I would say bile is needed. Again, 80, 90% of those with bowel disease need to promote healthier bile flow and support what we call drainage.

And what do you do to support healthier bile flow?

A couple of things. So you wanna make sure your liver's taken care of. If you don't have any grass allergies or ragweed allergies, milk thistle is a very standard herb used for the liver. NAC. Glycine. You can use glutathione. Some go right to glutathione, is fine. I'm a big fan of things like taurine, herbs, bitters, gentian, dandelion, things like that. TUDCA is really, really beneficial as well. TUDCA is a hugely important supplement for moving bile and even phosphatidylcholine. BodyBio makes their BodyBio PC. It's this really thick, almost molasses-like syrup, which again is really beneficial in moving liver, emulsifying, and moving bile. But on top of that, if we're going to move bile, we often want to pair or with some kind of binder. And again, moving slowly, because some people do this, they'll hear this, if I'm gonna move bile, I'm gonna get healthy. You can throw yourself into a flare and go off the deep end. You have to be very careful. So regulating bile, yes. But if you are going to mobilize toxins, it's also important to bind them. This is where gentler binders like humic and fulvic acid, chlorella, these things come into play, particularly like a broken cell wall chlorella. You can look at Sunny's Number 7 is a bentonite clay liquid you can utilize. There's lots of things to utilize, but we have to be very careful in moving bile, but those are some of my, my key things that I'll utilize to do so.

When do you distinguish between somebody who say needs taurine versus someone who needs phosphatidylcholine versus bitters versus— there's so many different ways to promote bile flow. Yes. How do you pick which one is good for a given person?

I'd love to say that there is a checklist you can go through. There's not always. So I find PC for some people can be a lot gentler for moving bile. But it can also aid in cellular detoxing. So if you're a heavy mold case and you're highly stressed, it might be in a cell danger response. Cell danger is kind of like your body panics and it like locks all the doors. Each cell will hold onto things. If you force those doors open, you can flare. So for some people, PC or phosphatidylcholine might be bad if they're in that cell danger response or they're highly toxic, whereas TUDCA might be better. TUDCA in, in mouse models has shown to put some colitis into complete remission. So there's lots of benefits to that as well. If I'm gonna go through glycine, it's typically more of a bonus. But if I find somebody's like glutathione depleted, either through lab testing, I can find that through an organic acid test. We can get an idea if they may be depleted. Or simple one, if you lift up your tongue, look at the veins on the bottom of your tongue and they're deep, deep purpley blue and yours look really quite pale. So a deep, deep purpley blue vein might show glutathione deficiency. So that's when I might go to like NAC, glutathione or glycine. But if somebody I suspect has really thick biofilms, it's been around a while, it's been 20 years of issues, I might not give them NAC because N-acetylcysteine is a biofilm disruptor as well as a precursor to glutathione. So you have to look at all these different markers in somebody and really there's no perfect system. It's really a probability score or a risk ratio. Do I find that this is really risky to give everybody all the time? The combination?

Yes.

But there's little nuances to look at to reduce your risk profile.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah. So it's a very nitty-gritty process.

Yeah.

So, um, I often see calprotectin and fecal lactoferrin or other inflammatory markers elevated on stool tests, but not necessarily all of them elevated together. So I'm just wondering, is there a definitive marker on a stool test that points to IBD, or are there always other possibilities that, of what that could be? Do you always need confirmation from a colonoscopy?

Well, I think I would actually posit a question to your question. Meeting a diagnosis in my mind is bullshit. I don't really care. I get people who come in like, oh, I think I have Crohn's. I want to get help. I want to join a program or whatever it is, but like, I got to find out first. I'm like, why? I want to know if it's Crohn's or colitis. Like, who cares? Here's my argument. Whether or not you're trying to get the differential diagnosis, you try, was it Crohn's? Is it colitis? Is it lymphocytic colitis? Is it microscopic colitis? Is it pancolitis? Is it proctitis?

Who cares?

What we're doing is we're taking inflammation and we're giving it a label. It's all on a spectrum. And this is where my argument for IBD and bowel issues came from way back when I first started, was that IBS is the kind of like early stage. We talked about 4 stages of immune response: acute, chronic, immune-mediated, meaning hyperactive, and then immune dysfunction. Let's look at the same levels or same progressive chart for IBS to IBD. Low-grade is like food sensitivities, sensitive gut, et cetera. Number 2 is going to be your IBS-type symptoms. So you're more sensitive, diarrhea, constipation, you get cramping, pain, the typical stuff. As it progresses down the line and gets worse and worse and worse, now you've got colitis. It's actual inflammation, possible ulceration of the colon, the large bowel, which could progressively get worse. And now it's Crohn's where it's anywhere mouth to anus, including external, like perianal abscesses, fissures, et cetera. So we have a sliding scale of severity from a little delicate to a diagnosable condition like IBS till we have known inflammation or severe immune activation. When we can do this, we can look at diagnosis to say, why does it matter? If you look at all my symptoms and you check, check, check the boxes, you go to your doctor, they go, yep, we get your colonoscopy. We did your calprotectin. We did the fecal lactoferrin. You got the symptoms. We did the antibodies. Yep. You check, check. You have colitis. Well, now what? They told you what's happening, where it's happening, and how severe. They checked enough boxes to give you a label so they can just give you the drug to manage those symptoms. They told you what's happening, where, and how bad, and how they're going to control the symptoms. They've not told you why it's happening to be able to understand how we can reverse this process to stop the symptoms from having to be controlled ever at all anyways. So for me, when I'm looking at diagnostic criteria, it's all crap. Step because it means nothing unless you're pursuing a medication. The root causes, no matter where you are on the sliding scale spectrum, are going to be the same, and we're going to find them the exact same way based on you, your history, how it got here, the development. Was it rapid onset, slow onset? Where are your weak links? Were you bottle-fed strictly? Were you exposed to mold? Did you have 20 doses of antibiotics? Did you grow up in a traumatic environment? What set the stage? Because no matter what label you've given it, my way back is the exact same. And so diagnostic criteria, I don't, don't really care.

That makes a lot of sense. The reason that I guess I care is because number one, I want people to take stuff seriously. Like sometimes they're just like half committed to whatever it is you're telling them to do. And like, you have this serious condition, then they're gonna take it more seriously. But I guess the other piece too is that I've had clients who've had elevated inflammatory markers and one of 'em ended up having colon cancer. And thank goodness I encouraged her to do a colonoscopy.

Yeah.

Because she literally said I saved her life. And I mean, I don't normally do that, but if I see the potential of IBD, I usually do say you should get a colonoscopy because I wanna make sure, you know, I, I think that's a very fair way to put it.

And that's one of the nuances. If you're, if you're trying to clear cancers, yeah, go get it done. There are advanced blood markers you can do instead, so it's less invasive., but a colonoscopy is still gonna be the gold standard for identifying colon cancer. So if that is a risk, it's something you're concerned about. I'm certainly not telling you not to get the, the test done. In fact, all my clients come in like, should I get a colonoscopy? I'm like, if your doctor's telling you, then yes. I can never and will never tell you anything about your medication, what to take, what not to take, whether or not to do your colonoscopies. But what I can say, I have no concerns for cancer. I've done my blood markers, I've done my other scans, I've done my advanced blood chemistry. I have no need to screen for cancer. I won't bother because it's gonna tell me what, where, and how, but not why. And so in that instance, I agree. I'm so glad she got that colonoscopy. And that's, that's one of the few who I believe should get one cuz now they know and they can take swift intervention.

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Cool.

Now back to the show.

Yeah. So you, we were talking about neutrophils and I'm curious what you can see on just a CBC that might tell you about what's going on in the gut.

Yeah. So let's look at monocytes, for example. If I, and again, a CBC or complete blood count, it's helpful, but it's not everything. There are other panels we can get, but monocytes are one that we'll see in biotoxins or endotoxins. So like your bacteria or dysbiosis, they might be elevated trying to fight off some kind of chronic exposure. If I see elevated neutrophil activity. You can get more neutrophil activity in the bowel than you would in the blood, but again, it can indicate some sort of ongoing infection. Eosinophils, you'll see them elevated in 25 to 30% of the time with those with parasitic infections, for example. That might be a leading indicator. So there's different markers we can look at in blood to give us an indicator. But what I've actually found really helpful, there's a, a really cool panel from Cyrex Labs. And it's called the lymphocyte map. Now, this one is extremely in-depth and it measures your NKT cells. You'll get CD16 and CD56 markers and all these different things, and they show you patterns. And it's something I'm still learning on my own, but I got on the call with one of the doctors and one of my guys who I've been working with them now for probably 8, 9 months. It was severe, severe, huge histamine reactions and mold infections, and his bile was congested because the sphincter of Oddi, where the, the bile travels down this tube and injects into your small intestine, that was, that was spasm. So we had a lot of stuff we had to get through and he's got this little bit of linger. I was like, why don't we get this immune panel done? See if your immune system's dysregulated. So he went in and measured all of his, his T cells and B cells and NKT cells and got these CD again, 16 and 56 different markers. So it's advanced. It's really advanced immunology. And I brought it to one of the doctors who did the consult at the lab. I said, what am I missing here? And he says, well, did he have a mold infection? I said, he had mold. We got rid of it. He's okay. I could see that on the map. That's good. Ask him about herpes.

We're not—

there's no herpes viral check on this thing. It's just an immune profile pattern. This doctor's an immunologist. So I went back to my guy, said, did you ever get herpes? He goes, holy shit. He says, I forgot about that. He says, I kissed the wrong girl. I got a cold sore. Within 2 weeks, it was in my bowel. I got Crohn's disease. He says herpes, the herpes virus set off my Crohn's. I was like, ta-da, there it is. That was the thing we were missing, which we saw in this immune app based on the ratios of different cells presented in his body. So there is some really cool stuff we can get beyond just a CBC. But again, it's helpful, but I don't rely on it. But if I see somebody, for example, with high ferritin— ferritin's like your storage— but I see them with low serum iron and high ferritin, or even a super high ferritin, your body might be hoarding iron because something might be eating That. Well, if I see that with typical symptoms and presentation on top of elevated eosinophils, I'm like, mm, might be parasites, right? Because parasites will eat the iron. So eosinophils elevated, check, probably parasites. Iron depleted, check, could be parasites. Other symptoms, eczema, psoriasis, early signs of hair loss, poor fat absorption, anxiety-based symptoms, grinding your teeth or drooling in your sleep. These are other symptoms you can look for and go, that's probably parasites. Let's deal with that. So there's layers that we can go through in this way.

Do you have a number in your head about how high the eosinophils have to be to think parasites?

Off the top of my head, I have to go back to my conversions because I'm in Canada and our numbers are different. And so I've got two different sets of numbers and I couldn't even tell you, but if you're curious, you as a clinician or anybody listening could go through, there's a system like, like Function Health. They'll give you reference ranges on what's optimal versus normal or optimal diagnostics.

Right.

Yeah. I'm curious because a previous guest looked at my blood test and she says, she said, I think you have parasites. And I've done like 5 stool tests that show no parasites. So I'm like, is this realistically something I should be concerned about?

Or, you know, well, I think that's interesting. Because parasites don't always show up in the bowel, right? They might be in a pancreas, the liver, they might be hiding in bile. They can burrow. If you've got lower back pain that like chiropractor and physio never helps you get rid of, they can burrow and actually attack the muscles leading to this chronic stiffness. Parasites don't always come out in the stool. So, I mean, yes, if you have the pattern of them, they may still be worth going after, but then the question has to be asked, how do they get there? Because your body should be able to balance or keep them at bay. So what about your, your system inside allowed parasites to overgrow in the first place? Now we're getting another why and another why we get to go deeper and deeper.

Are gut diseases more prevalent in North America than other places?

And so why?

Oh boy. Oh, here's a stat for you, Lindsey Parsons. So I'll say North America, excluding Mexico, because those are my numbers. So Canada, US, we're about 4.7% of the global population. Depending on the stats you look at, we have up to 50% of the global bowel disease cases. Though 8 million Crohn's colitis diagnoses worldwide, could be many more non-diagnosed, nearly 50%. Again, depends on the data, 30 to 50% are just in Canada, USA. And we're seeing it becoming more and more prevalent in industrialized countries. So those with more chemicals, manufacturing, machining, EMFs, like just standard indoor modern living is leading to more and more bowel disease. So it's absolutely an issue of modernity. The question we have to be asking is how can we modify our environments in such a way? Because, because our environments are no longer compatible with our human biology. So how can we modify our current modern environments to become compatible once again, to give our bodies the best chance at healing? Because it is remarkable we're not all dead, quite frankly.

It is remarkable how resilient the human body is. Yeah.

Yeah. We get diseases instead of collapsing, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. I mean, it beats, beats dying, I suppose.

Yeah. Depends on the disease, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, we've touched on this a little bit related to Western medicine, but in the context of working with somebody with IBD, do you bring in or encourage people to continue working with their Western medicine providers around IBD, say if they come in already on a biologic or something else, or do you keep your hands clean of all that and just work on the root cause?

Yeah, it's a really delicate legal dance. So I don't intervene. I've actually encouraged people who came in, they're so severe, like, I want to go natural, I'm anti-drug. I said, look, I'm, I'm with you. To use these acute treatments chronically is the problem. But if you are so severe, you had, you're losing weight, you're bleeding, you can't get out of bed. Like you just can't do anything. Get the drugs. I do what you have to do. It's the lesser of the evils to dying. Get yourself under control., and then it'll make your intervention much less miserable. And so I had a, a little boy who came in, he was about 4 and a half years old when we started together. It was mold. They were a family in Northern California and it was a brand new build. So if you're listening to this, oh, it can't be mold. Their home was built in 2021. By 2023, this boy was severely ill because the wood that was used to build the home was moldy and those toxins pushed through the paint and the drywall. And you could, there's no mold on the walls, but it was behind it and the toxins came through and he was severely, severely ill. 16, 17 different strains of mold toxins. And so we went in and had to go deal with this. And he was on, what was it? It was in, I think it was Entyvio. So another biologic or immune suppressor, suppressing drug. And his mom said, what do we do? Leave him on Entyvio? I said, yes. One, I'm not gonna touch that with a 30-foot pole. And then they ended up changing him over to Stelara injections every 8 weeks or something. So long and short, they stayed on the drugs, but he was still really symptomatic, very severe, 10+ bowel movements a day.. And so as we were working together, after a year or two on these drugs, he finally started to get better. The doctor went, oh, the drugs are starting to work. Duh, sure. But anyway, so we went through, we found the mold, we remediated, got it out of his system. He started to get better. He's on the drugs and it got to a point where he was completely symptom-free. So mom went, well, instead of giving these injections every 6 weeks, let's go to 8. He did great. By week 9, he flared again. She said, okay, gave him the injection. No problem. I think it was Humira at that point. And so they went out a little bit longer, a little bit longer. By the time she was done, he was 9 months. She's like, I haven't given him a single Humira injection now in how long? And he was fine. So it wasn't Skyrizi infusions, it was Humira injections. And so a lot of the time you can simply make your way through a protocol, particularly if you're symptomatic, and then make the decision on your own or have the conversation with your doctor to lengthen the time between doses or decrease the amount of each dose to be able to decrease your serum levels in some way to see if your body's able to balance itself. That's how I approach those conversations. Not, you should come off. It's, do you feel ready to have the conversation without me?

So I didn't get the specifics on the testing. Do you, what if you do use stool testing, whose tests do you like?

I'm a big fan of Vibrant Wellness. Vibrant has, oh, they're great. Their sample sizes, those years.

Yeah.

Their sample sizes are really large, which means you get a better sample for accuracy. You get a better median. And so they're very, I say very high caliber testing. In fact, Dr. Tom O'Brien's a big fan of them as well. He, he told me, he's like, they're something like 92 or 98% accuracy. It's really super high. And their Gut Zoomer report is almost 2,000 pages long, right? It goes through all of your specific microbes. It goes through inflammatory pathways, antibodies. It'll show you MMP-9s and lactoferrins and different types of fecal fats and short-chain fatty acids. And it'll measure 100 plus 200 different microbes. It'll screen through parasites and viruses, which again, aren't perfect. It's an incredible test. Of all the lab tests out there, I'd say that Vibrant is one of my top. Second to that, I've really come to like Tiny Health. Years back, actually. Yeah, yeah, same page, twinsies. Because they use shotgun sequencing, so it's a lot more accurate. And, and years back, I was on a podcast with Christine Hassler, and I was like, well, Tiny Health, I find it more qualitative, not quantitative. So it tells me what's happening but not how much. I didn't really care for the test. Well, Cheryl Suh Hoy, who founded Tiny Health, shows up on my podcast. She's like, "We should talk. She's like, my tests aren't as bad as you think." And I was like, "Maybe I misunderstood." So, I went back and I ran a few and I quite like them because, again, shotgun sequencing has been— it's the next evolution beyond PCR. The shotgun gives us a much more accurate profile. And they do babies as well. They do adults and they even do vaginal. So, there's a lot of different microbiomes they can then test to get a picture of your health, which is quite incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, those are, those are the two pretty much that I'm using almost all the time now.

High five.

The only thing I have, yes, high five. The only thing that I object to on the Gut Zoomer is their reference ranges.

Correct.

Like they're all kind of 0 to 10, 10 to 20, 20 or more. And I'm like, could I just find out what percentage of the microbiome this composes? Because this may be overrepresentative, but if it's overrepresentative, that 0.01% of the microbiome, I'm not as concerned as if If it's 13%, which is the Tiny Health will tell you.

Sure.

Yeah. I've talked about changing the reference ranges and just giving us absolute ranges based on percentage of the microbiome.

And, and that's the issue with any range, right? I mean, you and I, for example, we've never met before. The odds of us actually being related by blood are very, very, very, very small, but you and I will still share 99+% of our DNA. But if we measure our microbiomes, it's something like up to 30% of your microbiome is shared in the same way DNA would be as far as you overlap it and go, yeah, these are all the same. So there's so much variance in a microbiome, and that is one of the fallibilities of these tests, is we're using stats from thousands of people who have next to no relation to each other. We find the mean averages and go, well, this is typically a little bit higher and is associated with these symptoms or better health or whatever. And then we try to put people into these boxes accordingly. So it isn't perfect by any means, but again, it is a window, and that's why I look at them as, as being useful in some regards.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, yeah, it's just you're trying to figure out what is the signal here.

Yeah, exactly.

What's the noise and what's the signal? Yeah. You kind of mentioned this about the, the model of IBS versus IBD and how they're progressing. But I've had post-infectious IBS SIBO symptoms for like 30 years now. Yeah. And, and I actually managed to, I'm bring my ambiculin antibodies down to normal through couple prolonged fasting mimicking diet rounds. Pounds, but it doesn't seem to have made a lick of difference in terms of if I let up on my constant regime of prokinetics and, well, I take MSM as an antimicrobial, sort of a maintenance one. You know, the bloating will begin to get out of control again. So anyway, my CDTB was elevated though, so, so there was that too. So I've been dealing with that. So I'm just curious if you have any experience with, with that type of thing.

The post-infectious IBS.

Post-infectious IBS and how that might progress towards Crohn's, if that's what I indeed have. Who knows? Yeah.

I mean, it's hard to say again, whether or not you have Crohn's is really a matter of immune activity based on the symptoms given. Right. But we look at post-infectious IBS. That is one of the more common causes and it's nasty, which leads to autoimmune SIBO. Number one thing we'll see in autoimmune SIBO, and this is Kiran Krishnan, Allison Siebecker, they talk about this quite a lot where Or if there's food poisoning, then it's back to that molecular mimicry. Say that infection, that microbe had a protein that looks like something your own intestines are producing. Then the thought is that you'll forever be attacking your own intestines for producing what your body thinks is toxic. So that post-infectious is a very different animal. This is where I would, A, because I don't have enough information on you to make a judgment at this stage, just say, here's what I believe is probably driving it. But let's say I had all the information in front of me, all the labs, all the tests, and I still went, hmm, something is missing, I look at an outside consult because I've had a number of dozens over the years of 600+ people we've seen now. I think we've said, we read on the intro, it was 500. I think we're about 600+ now cases reversed. But even at that, I'd say probably up to 3 dozen I've had to go through outside consults and bring other experts where like, my team and I are not sure what to do now. And there's nothing wrong with that. I actually, I started doing it because I admired so much, because clinicians came to me. I had doctors saying, hey, can you help me with this? I'm like, one, I'm not a doctor, but I'll try. And that worked out great because I just know things, right? Because I've been here. And so that was early in my career. I had to put my ego aside. I'm like, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more things than I do. And I really learned to respect physicians for doing outside consults and started doing them in my own practice once I basically graduated from being a boy to being a man. And then I'm able to say there's a lot more this picture and I don't know.

That's interesting. And so how do you, how do you arrange that? Do you just say, can I do a little consult about this client?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'll shoot 'em an email or a text. Depends on the physician or the clinician.

Will they, will they charge you a fee for that presumably, or?

Sometimes. Some of them, it's just a trade, you know, we just work together and we have that relationship. Some they'll say, yep, it's a couple hundred bucks or X amount, and here's my fee for doing this. But it depends on the relationship I have with that clinician and how much work I do for them. But either way, we're compensated either financially or they're compensated with my Interesting.

So do you believe in limiting fiber when people with IBD are flaring?

That one is largely dependent on the individual. So I had a woman in, you can find her on my website, name's Karen, and she was having 50 bowel movements a day. Like absolutely, I'd say definitely the high. I've seen a couple of people with 50 plus, but she was, she described it like a faucet. It was just nonstop. And we put her on seeds and nuts and all kinds of stuff. Hers is largely stress. So we started to manage her stress and stress symptoms. And then 3 weeks, she was from 50 bowel movements a day down to about 5 and 8. But she was eating bags and bags of seeds and nuts when her doctors told her no fiber. So I don't go low fiber necessarily, though there is great efficacy around the SCD, the AIP, Atkins, carnivore. There's different diets, but in the same sense, there are people who thrive on vegetarian or even vegan. There are some people who thrive on carnivore. The question we have to ask is, Is your body, your level of inflammation and/or your gut microbiome able to handle a load of fiber? If I give it to you, if it is, have at it, I'm not picky. My rules are 3 things when it comes down to diet and everything else is just per individual. Number 1, tolerable foods. So it can't bother you when you eat it. Obviously. Number 2 is whole foods. So it came out of the ground, a bush, a tree. It flies, walks, swims, God forbid it crawls, but those are like foods that have been around since the beginning of time. You can eat them.

That.

So it's whole foods, tolerable foods. Third rule is low histamine, because again, mold, parasites, chronic stress, these are major drivers of IBD, but also major drivers of histamine issues. And so if you're consuming high histamine foods, you're aggravating an aggravated immune system and you're going to get these types of reactions, bloating, et cetera. Outside of that, how much fiber you consume, you tell me, and then we go from there.

That's interesting. Cause I don't think most of the IBD-related diets have any histamine component to them, do they?

Some might. That's a really great question. I have to go back to my charts again. I deal with diet so little in my practice, like unless you're eating, you know, Chick-fil-A and McDonald's and drinking and all kinds of junk, I rarely make meal plans. I just, they're a helpful part, but it's, it's an, I'm not going to change your food if I don't know what foods do and don't work for you while I'm doing all these other things. It's unnecessary complicating factors. So food, I don't touch much. So I couldn't answer that question specifically, but maybe they don't address histamine. Mm-hmm.

So you were talking about whole foods only. Does that mean you're not using any added prebiotic fibers or just that you're saying when you're eating, don't eat processed food?

Yeah. Well, yeah, don't eat processed food, just whole foods. So your fruits and vegetables and meats, and that's about it. Try to keep it as clean as you can. Spices, herbs, I'm fine with most of those unless again, you know, they aggravate you. I'm not gonna fuss about it when it comes down to specifics. Most people who come in to see me, it's kind of a last straw. It's like, I've tried every diet. I've tried every pill. I've seen this specialist, that specialist. I can't get it fixed. What do I do? You know what you can and can't eat. I'm not going to tell you, right? You tell me and I work within those guidelines.

Okay. Is there anything I haven't asked about that you wanted to talk about or like to talk about?

You know, normally towards the end of a podcast, it's a pretty common question. Is that, can we miss anything? I will circle back because you actually had the foresight to bring this conversation up. We talked about the diagnoses. What I always end the podcast with is never accept a diagnosis. They're stupid. They make no sense. A diagnosis is given under the pretext or under the understanding that your body is just fallible by design and your diseases are what they are because you're bad luck or God plays favorites or whatever it is. You're inflamed. Let's just manage it. That doesn't make any sense. It flies in the face of everything we know to be science. We know inflammation is simply a response from your immune system trying to protect you or trying to heal you. The question is what from? And in medicine, we don't ask what from, we just give you drugs to mask it. Like if you got a hostage in your living room, Lindsey Parsons, and they're screaming for help, they're like, help me, help me, rescue me. And you put tape over their mouth. Is the hostage happy to be there? No, you can't hear them, but they still want to leave. The same thing with your immune system. You can suppress it. It and you can silence it, but it doesn't mean it's okay. So by accepting a diagnosis, you're accepting this idea that your body is just fallible, and that flies in the face of everything we know to be science. Inflammation's there for a reason. Don't accept it. Dig in, ask why. And if you ask why enough times, you'll get to the deepest layer to understand your true root cause.

I completely agree. In fact, on my Facebook page, it says, defy your diagnosis.

I love that. Yeah, I respect that.

So tell people where they can find you.

Oh boy. Head over to gutsolution.ca. That's all singular, .ca for Canada, gutsolution.ca. You can find my Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever, joshdeck.health. You can get my podcasts. And for Crohn's colitis specifically, I do have a podcast called Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally. It's strictly about bowel disease and it's from these lectures I do every week in my Facebook group. And I take those lectures, I do live and I put them on the podcast or on my YouTube channel. You can find all that information out there as well as the Reversible podcast where you'll be, we'll be seeing you, I believe, later this year. But all that can be found in one simple place, just gutsolution.ca.

Okay. Awesome. We'll have those links in the show notes and people can follow up with that.

Looking forward to it.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks, Lindsey Parsons.

I love a good science-heavy episode and Josh delivered that in a really approachable way. You can support the podcast by buying supplements at a discount from my FullScript dispensary, ordering tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Lab store, or using my affiliate links to iHerb, which is available worldwide, or Amazon. And just a note that you can use my Amazon link to buy anything, so I'd appreciate it if you'd bookmark my link and use it not just for supplements but for gifts and everyday items to support the podcast. 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. .com, as well as follow me on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Mastodon, and X. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today, and here's wishing you all the perfect stool.