A Game-Changing Discovery in Gut Healing (It's Not What You Think) with Steve Wright

Foreign. Welcome to the Full Circle Healing Podcast where we merge modern cutting edge science with traditional healing wisdom and everything in between to help you come full circle back to your original natural state of health and well being. I'm your host Michael, and over the past 15 years I've helped hundreds of thousands of people find the information, practices, tools, resources and experts they needed to find their way back to optimal health. Our guest in this episode is my friend and leading gut health expert, Steve Wright. Due to his own lifelong struggles with debilitating and often embarrassing gut dysfunction, Steve has dedicated his life to helping others who find themselves dealing with complex and challenging GI related symptoms. After spending over a decade as a leading educator and practitioner in the arena of gut healing, Steve founded the Healthy Gut Company which produces some of the most effective research backed digestive support supplements on the market today. In this episode you'll learn how Steve earned the nickname of the gas man growing up and how his troubles with gas almost cost him his first big job out of college, why gut related health challenges and digestive symptoms tend to be very tricky to clear up long term and they come and they go. Why a lot of diets and products people use to try to solve their gut issues don't work and how a certain fatty acid acid produced by our microbiome has completely transformed Steve's understanding when it comes to long term reversal of gut dysfunction and digestive problems and how you can use this knowledge to finally find relief. It's one of the most mind blowing conversations about gut health that I've had in a while and I really look forward to you learning as much as I did. And if you find this topic interesting, head over to RebelHealth Co Leakygut to gain immediate access to an in depth training on endotoxemia and leaky gut featuring microbiologist Kiran Krishnan, where you will learn what leaky gut really is, how it contributes to almost every chronic disease, and what you can do to heal your gut and reduce your risk. And now let's get things underway. Hey Steve, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks Michael. Thanks for having me.

Yeah man, this is going to be fun. I always really enjoy our conversations and our webinars and whenever we get to connect. And lately on the webinars everybody's been saying we should co host a podcast together. So I think this is about the closest we're going to get to that, at least in the meantime. So let's just jump right in. We're going to talk about a little bit about your story and how you got to be doing what you're doing, which is really interesting and kind of a lot of parallels to my own, I think. And then why people find themselves in, in constant loops with GI problems and digestion problems and some, some misunderstandings that we can run into in that world and, and kind of outdated information and then what kind of solutions that you've, you've created that, that are helping a lot of people, both practitioners and consumers, kind of deal with really tricky GI problems. So let's start out with a little bit about your story. We've covered this before in some other interviews. We don't got to go super, super deep into this. But how did you, you didn't, you didn't go to school and start out and, you know, be like, I'm going to be a health coach or a health practitioner. I'm going to make really good health supplements or teach people how to heal their guts? Like that wasn't the plan, right?

Yeah, no, no. That was not on the radar. It was not on the bingo card for life.

So how did that come about happening?

Yeah, I mean, I think the universe or this life kind of chose it for me. I just squirmed around and tried a lot of different things before I, you know, just was settled down into. This is, this is my path and I'm kind of a conduit for these types of issues and this type of problem. And there's, I have plenty of embarrassing stories. You know, one of the most embarrassing that I say often is that one day I walked in, it was a Friday. I was working in Chicago in a high rise, had a sue. It was a big four accounting firm. We worked on big accounts like bank of America and other big Fortune 100 companies. And I thought that this was my life path. I thought I was going to be this cool consultant in Chicago. And my boss called me in to see him, like my boss's boss, actually. So, like, you know, you kind of get like at 3 o' clock on a Friday, if your boss's boss says they want to see you in corporate, like, you kind of know that's not good. And so I'm like headed down the hall to go in there and he's sitting super awkwardly on his desk and he's like, hey, so your co workers are complaining. And they say you're the smelly guy in the office and you're going to need to handle this if you want to keep working here. And I was just like kind of in shock. I didn't even sit down. I didn't even get a chance to sit down. And he kind of just laid it out directly like that. And I of course knew I was the smelly guy. I of course knew that every day I would load up a spreadsheet and softly cry and fart because I had visceral hypersensitivity, like a subclass of ibs. And no matter what I was eating at the time, whether it was chicken and salad, because I was actually trying to lose weight at the time from, from college, I was trying to peel down from like 2:45, you know, back down to like, you know, 180 or something healthier and. But it didn't matter if it was that or like chicken and beer or burgers or whatever. I would have this intense bloating and then there's only one way to get it out and it's the fart. And so it was so painful. But I. But I was 16 floors up. I didn't have a lot of options. And so that was, I think, the one of my biggest wake up moments just to like, go choose something differently in this life. There's plenty of other embarrassing ones. And I knew I had a problem for years. I knew I was abnormal. My. My family nicknamed me the gas man in high school. So even amongst my family, which has a history of ibs, I was the smelliest. And so, yeah, that led to, you know, different sorts of diets which helped, different supplements and kind of coming through the Internet in 2008, 2009, which was kind of a scary place and nothing like what it is today. And then many doctors, you know, integrative naturopaths, western functional, and everybody kind of had a piece of the puzzle for me. Like I had a lot of root causes and real causes I call them sometimes nowadays. I'm getting a little sick of this everybody has a root cause thing. But I then went and studied with Dan Kalish and learned the Kalish method of functional medicine. We had a telehealth clinic where we consulted with people. We weren't medical team, but we consulted with their medical team for these stuck hard to treat cases for a couple years. And then later on, yeah, I kind of had written off this whole thing. And when my life got hard again, I needed the supplements, I needed the protocols that I had learned and helped so many other peoples with. But when I pulled them out and tried to use them, I was flooded with the frustrations and the annoyances of the products in the market and their reliability in people. And that's what had us pivot to healthy gut and start to try to just basically develop better fucking products.

That makes a lot of sense. And I know we're laughing about some of that now, but I also want to acknowledge for people out there that are dealing with those kind of situations and with their health and I'm. Nobody likes to be called the gas man. Nobody likes to be the smelly guy in the office. Like, I know that, that, I'm sure that really sucked. And I'm sure that, you know, that compounds these things too, because as we know now, like stress and nervous system dysregulation, which would come from like, oh man, I don't want to go into work because I'm the smelly guy and everybody, you know, whatever, like that makes your digestion worse. So it creates this self perpetuating loop. And so I just want to acknowledge that, like, yeah, we're joking, we're both smiling as you're telling these stories. But like, that's a really, that's a really hard thing to go through. And if somebody out there is listening to that, hopefully they can learn something here that's going to help them. And that's how I found you. And your work with Jordan was SCD Lifestyle, which is a specific kind of diet that helps people with ibs. And you guys built a huge platform around that and helped tons of people doing that. And I want to give a little shout to Dr. Kalish. He's one of the OGs in the integrative medicine, functional medicine world. I've interviewed him once and I learned that he now meditates like three hours a day. And he's a very interesting guy. For anybody out there, find Dan Kalish. Watch some interviews, learn some stuff. But he's been doing it since before I even knew what any of this was. So you decided to make some products because you got frustrated that the products on the market didn't work very well in regards to digestive supports. Is that one of the reasons why? Because it seems like our audience with Rebel Health for the last 10 years is really heavily. A heavy percentage of them are probably people with some form of digestive issue or they've had a digestive issue or something. And we've heard so many stories of people that I had this digestive problem. So I tried this diet and this one supplement for a while and I was feeling better and then it went off the rails and then I felt like crap again and then the bloating came back or I had this stressful period of my life and my digestion like it's this up and down and up and down and backwards and sideways and it's maddening for people. Like they get discouraged, then they get encouraged, then they get jaded, like, oh, nothing's going to work or I'm just going to deal with this forever. So why is that that especially with gut related health problems, that the diets or these. A lot of different types of approaches, people that go on this like yo, yo type of, I don't want to call it recovery, but recovery, I guess, like better. Worse. Better, Worse?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really important question. I did it for many years. I did it for five or six years myself. And I think it's pretty common. Like, I don't think anybody, except for like really mild cases, do they just like, you know, do one supplement, one dietary change and then like, boom, the rest of their life is gravy. And I mean the no duh answer is because your gut is literally the center of you. It's the center of, in a way, it's the center of your nervous system. It's the center of the assimilation of every nutrient you need to have a healthy body. Whether you're, you know, maybe you're not gut first person, you're like, oh, my hormones are my problem or my skin is my problem, or you know, like you're, your problem is not necessarily the gut first, but the gut is the second part of that equation like every single time. And the research, you know, there was these old time practitioners and stuff that used to say like, you know, all disease begins the gut. Like that was Hippocrates, like I don't know, like 2,000 years ago. Yeah, so many, so many years ago. And then, you know, you'd have all these naturopaths and all these people that would try to tell that back in like 0809, even 2010, 2012, but it wasn't until like 2015, 2016 and beyond that, the research now is just pouring out like buckets of digestive health studies every single month, cross linked to whatever type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, whatever.

You saw one on ALS?

ALS, yeah, yeah, whatever. It is like you, it is. I mean, I don't, I don't think it's been proven. You can't say anything is 100% in health because there's always one outlier. There's always one person who breaks the mold. But 99, I believe accurate statement now is that dysbiosis and intestinal permeability are linked to Every chronic disease that they've been studied in. And so those are just two things that go wrong in the gut. And there's many other things that do go wrong. And so it's happening because it's an everyday thing and it's connected to everything. And then the yo yoing is because we are as humans, we're programmed to fixate on one thing and sort of focus in and forget the bigger picture. And we forget that there's like a lot going on in the gut. There's. And where there's smoke, there's fire. Where there's one problem, there's typically multiple problems happening. But we're very, very bad at dealing with that cognitively. And so doctors and well meaning health professionals are not good at holding this systems theory, this idea that there's multiple things going wrong at the same time and then therefore creating protocols and educating consumers. They don't want to hear that like, look, there's a few things you need to focus on. They want to know the one thing or the two things. And the answer is it's more than that. And if you don't kind of like go down the checklist, you can actually make improvement in one or two areas and like you said, feel good for 30, 60, 90 days, six months only to have life happen. Or that other part that you didn't address starts to flare and then you're back feeling as bad or worse and it's like you're chasing your tail wondering, am I the problem? Is that diet problem? Is that Steven guy, the idiot, is he the problem? You're left wondering what the issue is and the answer is usually it's true, but partial. You just didn't see the whole picture. You didn't address all that needed to be addressed at the same time.

Yeah, I, thanks. I like that version of an explanation when I just, I just actually attended a training of Steve's where he went through a really elaborate presentation on layers and different levels to leaky gut. And I really enjoyed that. You talked about the nervous system and you talked about people being dysregulated and you talked about hormones and that. And you wouldn't expect that in a gut presentation. You didn't have to put that in there. And it was like, if this stuff isn't working for you, here's some reasons why. And I think that often gets left out for a few reasons. One, it goes outside of the person's scope who's teaching them the thing. And two, marketing. Like now that I've unfortunately or fortunately Learned marketing, they always want to narrow it down to the thing. What's the thing, what's the one thing? And you have a supplement company. I'm sure there's been marketers who are like, what is the one problem that this supplement solves and how does it solve it and what is the glowing result they're going to get and what's the promise you can make and how do you narrow it down to one problem and this one pill solves this one. And so that's how anybody who's now an entrepreneur in this field, I think they're kind of being pushed to that too. Come up with your one, your patented solution to this problem. And that's the solution because that's the thing we can market. Yes. And, and it's really complex and there's a million moving pieces and there's a thousand things that could be wrong. Is, is a little more challenging to like put on a Facebook ad. So I saw you laugh when I was talking about the marketing with the supplements. Have you been exposed to such an approach?

Yeah, I mean that's part of why I started the company too. It's, it's part of why I'm starting to do the courses again because I don't feel like there's a place for me to rec. Like there's a lot. I have a lot of friends in this industry. I've read a lot of good books, I've had a lot of mentors. But I don't find anybody that's keeping up on the last five years of research like I have. And the research has moved the goalposts we now understand significantly more than what we had five years ago. But everybody's using these outdated models around root causes or the gut. And I think we're not only are we promising the one thing too much, but, but even doctors and well meaning practitioners and experts out there are just not, they're just regurgitating stuff that if it was working, if it was working, we wouldn't need to have this conversation. You can look at the trend line like chronic disease is just going up and to the right. Ibs, digestive complaints, constipation, it's just going up. The use of, of certain supplements such as probiotics has never been higher in the population of humans on this planet. If probiotics were the only answer or the one thing we would know that we wouldn't even need to be talking right now. But we, I think, but people are like, it's really hard to admit when you're wrong. It's really hard to say, like, shoot, I might have wasted a few years of my life there, or I might have told a few thousand people the wrong thing to do. And so I think we really need to move this conversation forward if you want to exist in the current society we have, like, if you can, you can opt out if you want. Like, if you want to go opt out and like, go live on a hippie farm and not use the Internet and like, be like, in this amazing nervous system place where you can do, you know, an hour of yoga, an hour of meditation and prayer, and like, just be in that, like you're opting out of society. And I. That's all amazing. Good for you. I'm not that type of person, so I'm not wired for that. And my gifts are to kind of give to the people who are going to stay in the system. And the system includes a ton of light mismatches. It includes a bunch of nervous system mismatches. With the amount of information flow that we're seeing and is now available, we've never seen these things. This much light pattern change, this much information and nervous system change. We have all these new chemicals in our houses. We have all the new chemicals that are in the water table, and then we have the soil depletion due to monocraph. Like, you can just go through this list, you know, pesticides, all these things. It's like, you think you can combat that thing with just a diet and one supplement and not get sick? Like, I don't know. The math doesn't math for me on that equation. And so I want to move the conversation if we're going to live a resilient health, because I do think we can adapt. I do think we can figure out protocols and methods for these, you know, meat sacks to adapt to this new reality we've created. But we do. We probably are going to have to, like, maybe say some things, like, maybe just diet alone. Maybe food isn't medicine. Maybe just food is food. And maybe we can move the conversation forward around the products we use and the way we use them for the gut, such that you can actually have the choices to be resilient, to not have pain, to have the ability to deal with, you know, like, I'm not saying, like, I walk through life without bloating. If my stress level gets too high, if I choose alcohol a few times in a row, if something else goes sideways in my environment, like, I could be bloated that day. It's not like I'M free of bloating. But when I do have that happen, I can reach into like my care kit, pull out my supplements and be like, all right, I'll double this dose and I'll add a little bit more of this in, and no big deal, I'm good to go the next day. And so I want, I want people to have that kind of like adult level awareness and control of their, their bodies and their gut.

I, I think half of the naturopathic medicine world might have just died when you said maybe food is just food and it's not medicine. No, I totally hear what you're saying. And like, the level of bombardment versus what maybe would have been enough before is, is way off kilter. Like, I just saw a meme the other day that had a forest completely. It was like a cartoon. And it has this forest completely cut down. And on the stump of one of, on one of the stumps, there's a koala bear, like grasping to it and it's like shaking and its eyeballs are popping out or whatever. And there's two people, like, analyzing it. And the one guy says, like, this koala has a acute anxiety disorder and no shit, home is gone. So, like, that's the state. I mean, that's a drastic version or a hyperbole a little bit, but, like, that's kind of where we're at. And I've heard a few people speak about this intelligently. Like, what would have worked when we didn't learn everything bad that was happening in the world all at the same time within 30 seconds? And when we weren't exposed to 66,000 chemicals by the time we were 2. And when this, and this wasn't happening. Yeah, just eating a bunch of food. That's real food because other food didn't exist at that time also probably wouldn't have had as many problems. So, yeah, it's really good to have these tools. And I think you covered some misunderstandings or myths there. I see that too. And I'm not going to name any names, but there's people that, in this world of natural health that I saw speak when I first got into this stuff, like when Sean Croxton was doing his OG summits. Remember those? I forget what they were called, but they had a tagline for them. But there was the gut one, the thyroid one, the whatever. There are people who I saw talk on those things, and that was probably 20, 10, 11 maybe, who, if you see their face on the things now, the name of the talk they're giving is the same and the thing that they're teaching is the same. And there's no way that the information didn't change because it changes so fast, especially now, the way technology is now and the way everything's changing exponentially faster. So that's a red flag. And I like that you brought that up. So let's talk a little bit about that. Like what, what are a couple, I guess just examples of something that you've learned in the last five years regarding gut health that say when you guys started SCD lifestyle, you didn't know or you wouldn't have taught somebody that wasn't on the radar.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, the number one thing that I've learned a crazy amount about and it's absolutely transformed my viewpoint on gut healing, on long term gut health, on the aging of the gut. Everything has literally been transformed by this is butyric acid. It is by far one of the most exciting and complex and sometimes confusing topics for the gut, but also I think the one that holds the most promise. Like if there's one thing that I would go all in on for the next five to 10 years of research, it would be butyric acid. Butyrate. Anything related to that, that'll be, in my opinion, the next five to ten years of research. That'll be where we find even more breakthroughs. And that's because we knew about it five to 10 years ago. Like, everyone was like, yeah, you should have some of that. That's a good thing. You want that?

Can we pause for one second and just share what that is before we go into the research? You found out about it. I think a lot of people in the health consumer space know what butyrate is, or they've heard of it, but maybe not like what it actually is or where it comes from or how it's made or any of that type of stuff. Could you just give us like a quick primer and then jump into what you've learned?

Yeah. So I think it's really important to understand that your microbiome is, is in a symbiotic relationship with you. Like. Like it is. You both rely on each other for health. And among the gifts of the microbiome, I think the number one gift that it gives us is, is butyric acid. We do not make it without the right microbiome species. And so what does it come from? It comes from eating foods that are fermented by a series of bacteria. And it's a series. It's not just one group or another group. It's multiple people breaking down certain parts of foods and then passing it off metabolites to another group. And then at the end of the hippie community, that is your microbiome, if it's healthy and everything's working well, it will give you gifts. And, and some of the, the number one gifts it gives you every day is butyric acid and it's a short chain fatty acid. Now it does the, the, the microbiome community does give you other short chain fatty acids as well. Acetate and propaninate are the other two most abundant ones and the most studied ones. But butcheric acid is in every way basically better and differential to those. And what happens is approximately 70 to 80%. We don't know at this time, but that's the best guesses that we have. It's really hard to measure this stuff. It's in the top of your large intestine and the bottom of your small intestine. It's like 80% in the top of the large intestine, 20% in the bottom of the small intestine. This is where the microbiome is and this is where this whole thing is happening. And getting something in that part of your body without disrupting the environment to measure is like still impossible, basically. And so this is all based on some research, some theory, but approximately 70, 80% of that is sucked up by those gut cells for their metabolism. And when they do that, they the metabolism that happens, it needs oxygen molecules and it needs butyric acid. And so it sucks the oxygen out of your gut and sucks the butyric acid out and it does its metabolism. And that's really healthy for cells and it's really healthy for your gut because your gut should be in a low oxygen environment. We want the blood and the heart and the brain to be high oxygen. We want the gut to be really low oxygen.

And the fungus, it's, the more that it's metabolizing means it's consuming more oxygen and removing the oxygen. But if you're short on the butyric acid, that could be a limiting factor of the metabolism of the cells. And so then it's not pulling the oxygen, right?

And then it flips the glucose metabolism and it doesn't pull the oxygen out. And now you're stuck in this window where your oxygen gradient is too high, there's too much oxygen. And that sounds like, why would that be bad? And it's a really simple answer. It's because the dominant grouping of bugs that are considered probiotics or healthy bacteria in your microbiome are called anaerobic bacteria. That means they thrive and they can only live without oxygen environments. Now there are species that can live in gradients of oxygen, like they're, they're called facultative anaerobes and they can handle more oxygen, but if they are allowed to bloom too much, they're allowed to grow too much because the oxygen is higher than it should be. You lose those no oxygen only bugs, those anaerobes, and you grow these, these sort of like they're not bad guys, but in too high a numbers they cause problems. And so you get in this situation where the gut cells are not doing the metabolism that they prefer, therefore they're not symbiotically helping the community down there by sucking the oxygen out. And then in response to that, life just wants to live, nature just wants to live. And so what will grow will is what can grow in that sort of environment, which are these bugs that are not bad for you, but in too high or too bad of a mixture of, of oxygen and fuel, they do create bad dysbiotic scenarios. And then you're stuck in this really weird situation. You're probably experiencing a lot of gut problems. You probably want to reduce the fuel that you're feeding these bugs, which, which would mean like fermentable matter. So these are where the diets, like fodmap diet and other diets that cut heavily down the amount of vegetable and fruit matter that you take in, or starch matter, they make you feel better. But that equation of how do you make butyrate is not only do you have the right microbiome in the right atmosphere, but do you have enough fuel to create it. So it's a two to three part equation. So if it's, if it's not happening and then you cut your fuel down even more so you don't feel bad.

Which is the foods that temporarily make you feel bad when you eat them, right?

But they're also the most butyogenic, they're the ones that make the most butyrate possible. So now you actually cause even less butyrate to be made and the oxygen gets worse. And so now you're in this cycle where if you add foods back in, you're in pain. If you try to use prebiotics, which are often one of the best ways to stimulate butyrate production, those can typically work, but you need to drop the oxygen gradient. And for some people, all they need to do is add in Prebiotics and do like, and I'm not saying any prebiotic normally these have to be designer prebiotics and you have to use like a solid dose, not just like whatever one scoop on the bottle is like you're going to want to do it two or three times a day. You're going to want to take this kind of serious because you have to get the fuel portion up and you have to hope the community responds. And then the oxygen drops, but a lot of times it doesn't happen. The prebiotics kind of help, the probiotics kind of help, but the oxygen never drops. And so you're still stuck in this sort of thing where if you stop the diet intervention because you want to eat a more normal, wide ranging diet, or if you stop the prebiotics or probiotics, like everything just flares like crazy. And the reason why is the oxygen's wrong. We've got to drop the oxygen and increase the butyrate production of the health of the hippie community. And then the prebiotics and the probiotics and everything else work even better.

That makes sense. There's a lot of self perpetuating loops in there. If things go sideways and then you're not eating the foods that fuel the bugs that make the butyrate, which you were low in in the first place, which is why you have too much oxygen, which brought in the wrong bugs, which make you not feel good when you eat the foods. And so the symptom management can cause a lot of problems. And I know when we've a couple others that we've interviewed on gut related things now is that these really restrictive diets long term are causing more problems than they're going to fix. And that goes in either extreme like not eating any carbs or not eating any, you know, or carnivore or this or that, like there's just going to not be the right fuel for the microbiome there. And oftentimes the problem is that it didn't have fuel in the first place. So then you're removing all the fuel. So regarding the butyrate specifically, and I remember the first, the first webinar we ever did on that, it was a few years ago and you mentioned just now that 70 or 80% of the butyric acid or the butyrate is consumed by these gut cells as part of their metabolism. What does the other 20%? Ish. What happens there? Because when you I knew about the gut related benefits of butyrate or the functions and why it was so important and why it was good at great that the bugs make it and whatever. But when you first talked about other health processes in the body that butyrate is linked to, I was quite surprised to learn.

Yeah, I mean, I was, too. So, you know, we started this with, what is. What have you learned in the last five years that have, like, totally scrambled your. I mean, the way that I understood it was, like, what have you learned that's, like, totally scrambled your old protocols and the old ways of doing gut health? And when I started digging into butyrate, I was like, are you kidding me? What about this? So I was like, okay, well, what about butyrate and bones? There's no way butyrate affects your bones. I had to do a. I was doing a menopause show, and so I was just like, let's take an hour or two and look at this. And I found study after study of how Butyrate, the extra 20% ish, goes systemic and it hits all these different cells. We have receptors on all these cells, and we have a bunch of receptors in our osteoclasts, which are the bone cells. And butyrate not only slows the degradation of the bone, but in mice studies. We haven't done any human studies, but in several mice studies, extra butyrate supplementation caused them to make new bone. So not only did it stop the breakdown of bone, but it also caused these mice to regenerate bone. And that was just like. I was like, are you kidding me? So then I was like, what about the lungs? And, like, sure enough, there's a bunch of research on the lung function and asthma and butyrate. And then I was like, what about the brain? Yep. Neurodegeneration studies on mice. They're now doing the first clinicals on humans where you take extra butyrate and you see better brain function, you see less loss of cognition. I just saw this one last week. I actually haven't talked about this yet at all. And I don't quite understand it just yet. But there's a butyrate, a muscle connection, like a muscle access connection, where, like, if you have more butyrate, somehow the muscle makes more of this. Certain cells that make muscle. I don't understand muscle like that. But so basically, everywhere I've looked, whether it's the lungs, the eyes, the brain, the muscles, the bones, there's heart stuff, butyrate is connected. It's almost. I've begun to think about it in the same classification of a molecule as vitamin D3 and magnesium, like if we all know, and I think it's all now accepted even from western medical professionals, that low vitamin D status will tank your health in every conceivable way. And if there's a threshold you have to be at to even maintain, like okay energy and okay health, let alone optimal, if it's drops below that threshold, you're going to be in a really bad place. We all, I think, are aware that that's true for magnesium as well. There's a threshold. If you get too low magnesium, everything goes sideways. I now believe that there's a threshold of, of systemic butyrate production. Well, it'd be local in the gut, but also systemic, just a total butyrate production. If you're lower than that threshold, like you could be chasing skin problems forever, you could be chasing brain problems forever. And it could have been that you didn't have this nutrient butyrate, which stems.

From the dysbiosis, which is the bugs not making it in the wrong environment in the gut. Yeah, that's really wild. I think only about half of those you shared on the webinar. I recently had that last year that happened to me when I was researching something called Tadka, which is a bile acid. And I just googled and I was like, what? How? Why doesn't anybody talk about this more? I need to find a good product of this because this is another thing that I think has like, I try to find stuff for our shop that we do with Rebel Health, stuff that's like wide ranging benefits for a lot of people because we're not one on one with everybody. Like there's, there's hyper specialized products that exist in supplements that are like for this one person, in this one situation, you take a gajillion milligrams of this for two. We're not doing that. But yeah, that happened to me when I looked up Tutka and I just kept went down this rabbit hole and it was like, it helps this, it helps. And I never knew any about that about butyrate. Even when I was taking gut health training programs like six, seven years ago, it got mentioned as like one of the many beneficial compounds that the microbiome makes. The end.

Right?

That was the end. Okay, onto the next thing. It also makes this. It also makes this. So that's really fascinating and it's interesting because like, and I'm really sensitive to these things, so I'm just going to name it. This podcast now took a turn where it feels like some sort of infomercial for butyrate, which we had no intention. I will post my bulleted notes of what this conversation was going to be about. And butyrate is not even there. Doesn't say it one time on there. There's nothing about butyrate. We totally went off track. But it's a really, really interesting topic. And it is the one thing that you learned in the last five years that most blew your mind or changed your perspective. And I think that's why it's so important for, for people who are either practitioners working with patients or clients or formulators of supplements and products to be up to speed on the most current research. And it's a good demonstration of that. I always joke that you read more studies than anybody that I know, and it's probably true. And that's how we wound up in this conversation. So, no, this was not intended to be a podcast about butyrate. We were actually, before we started recording, we were planning to do a webinar on butyrate. But here we go. So I guess I'm gonna cut us off here and we're gonna, we're gonna kind of just get to the, the. I know nothing's like easy or simpler. 1, 2, 3. But this, this pattern of dysbiosis, high oxygen, not enough butyrate, cell walls, using glucose, not consuming the oxygen makes it worse. You're avoiding the foods which have the fuel for the bugs that make the butyrate. So it creates this like perpetual loop cycle. What's the elevator pitch level of how to correct that?

Well, it's, it's not detox, it's not heavy metals, it's not mold. Anything you could do for your hormones and your nervous system will help with that. Because part of, part of the cycle is first you have to be able to eat the foods without pain that are going to feed the butyrate species. And so that is one of the most important steps. And so, number one, you can't be on elimination diet forever. You can't be low, fodmap forever, you can't be low, whatever, forever. You have to force the reintroduction of foods, otherwise you'll never have the fuel to make the outcome we want, which is butyrate. And so then we have to ask the question, what do you need, like your specific body, what do you need in order to process these foods without pain? And that's when we actually go back to old school techniques that have worked for a long time, which is stomach acid function, which is digestive enzyme function. Those things are what, like, are the drivers of the breakdown of food without pain such that we can actually get it deep enough to the microbiome communities.

And the food gets to them more intact than it should be and not broken down like it should be. All kinds of things go sideways. Yeah, totally. Yep. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

So.

So if you're not. No matter what diet you choose to eat, whether it's vegan or carnivore or regular or standard American, you have certain windows in your digestive tract in which you can absorb certain molecules, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins. If you don't break your food down fast enough, like, you don't actually, like, like, literally break it down, like, at a microscopic level, you can't absorb it fast enough. And then it just hangs around too long in your gut. And again, nature will thrive with whatever you give it, but just sometimes it's not what you.

Someone else want.

Yeah, someone's gonna eat it. It's like if you throw. If you keep. If, if you. Or your kid keeps dropping food or. Or sugar on your kitchen floor, and then you're like, why are all the ants in the kitchen, like, the answer in the kitchen? Because there's food available. The bad bugs are growing in your gut partially because the food's available. And so if we can get rid of that availability and actually absorb the nutrients ourselves, like we should, that will naturally create less bad bugs and create more of a habitat that could potentially rebound with the butyric acid. And if it doesn't, that's where we have to go. You know, we have to go in with butyric acid and actually drop the level of oxygen. Like, just do an intervention there and restart everything.

Yeah. And then so the stomach acid, the digestive enzymes, and the butyric acid. And this is where it's going to sound like an infomercial, but I swear, we did not intend for any of this. Steve formulated Tributerin X, which butyric acid, supplementally, was generally over, historically, was done with sodium butyrate or some other form where it's attached to some kind of salt. Right. Or a mineral. And that's how it was usually done in supplementation. But then you can't go really high with the dosing because then you have too much sodium or too much of whatever the other thing is. And so Tributerin. I'm going to butcher this, but in my understanding of it, it's the purest way to deliver butyrate. And you can do it at higher doses because it doesn't have something with it that's going to cause unwanted effects. Is that why you decided to make that and when you found that molecule like that was possible, that's why you thought this would be a good addition to the line?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, partially true.

So. Correct. How bad did I do?

No, you did. You just missing a few really important things.

So.

Yes, it is the most pure form of butyric acid because it's, it's, it's, it has a fat molecule, a glycerol molecule that it's bounded to rather than a calcium, a magnesium or a sodium. And so that does a number, a number of things. One is that the, it actually just lasts longer in your gut because it takes a little while for a lipase enzyme to, to nibble it apart. And so pharmakinetically, it is more pure, meaning that it has less side effect risk. And this has been studied in humans. In humans, they took people up to 42,000 milligrams a day in a cancer trial and several people dropped out due to nausea. But that's almost an entire bottle a day of our product.

Yeah. I was going to ask how many bottles would I have to take to equal 42,000 milligrams.

Yeah. About 90% of product. You'd have to take 90% of our bottle every day. Oh, man, that's like.

I take three of those.

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's not three bottles.

I take three. Tiny. They're tiny. Like tiny little, tiny little capsules.

Right. And nobody would be doing the dosing that high. But in humans, they've never gone past 4.5 grams or 4,500 milligrams of sodium butyrate because you start to get a sodium toxicity.

One tenth the dose.

Yeah. Yep. And so, and then there's other cell culture and animal studies that suggest that sodium butyrate and the other butyrates act in a U curve, meaning like the, the stronger the dose, the better the outcome. The better the outcome. And then suddenly too strong of a dose equals bad outcome, bad outcome, bad outcome. But Tributerin, it, it goes in a linear stepwise function. So the more you take, the better the outcome. And there's. They're in this. These are cell culture line studies and animal studies. So they're not completely applicable to a.

Human because it's pumping your gut lining with the fuel it needs to regenerate itself and change the environment. And it would drop down the oxygen really fast. Theoretically.

Yeah, yeah. It's doing a lot of things, but I'm just saying, from a safety perspective, it's superior to the other butyrates. And yes, it does increase mucus layers and increases tight junction function. It calms mast cell activation. It does so many things. It encourages microbiome diversity. It actually encourages those lost butyrate communities to start to bloom again. So it does essentially everything you're trying to do in the gut, for the most part, at a really nice level. And when I say this, this is not Steven's theory. That stuff I can back up with paper after paper after paper on each one of those functions. So taking it is super potent. And yes, Tributerin. And I didn't necessarily dream this up. This was a scientist in Spain that I met who was touting it, that he had figured out an enteric capsule and he had figured out a way to make Tributerine more pure than ever. I was trying to find a Tributerine product. I was trying to make one, but this guy was ahead of me. He's been doing Butyrate for 30 years, and he had already figured out a way to proprietarily make the purest one on the planet. 99.9% purity. And then he had found a capsule in a fill technique that's still proprietary, that no one else is doing, that protects it even further. Because our goal, again, is to get it. Remember the I this.

Get it intact to where it needs to go.

Yeah, this blew my mind too. But, like, I didn't really. I love conceptualizing things with pictures. I didn't really realize that, like, the. The bottom of the small intestine in the top of the large intestine, that is the microbiome organization. That's where the hippies are hanging out. And I was like, oh, so we want to get things as close to that community.

We need graphics for this that are like little bugs with headbands and like VW buses just for our editing team. If you can swing that, that'd be great. Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. And so that's the innovation of TributeNext. That is the genesis of it. And it pairs with essentially everything you're doing. Because let's think about the ways in which people try to treat the root causes of gut issues. In a lot of those scenarios, they'll try to do a killing protocol. And I'm not saying that killing protocols are bad. In fact, they're often needed. But I think they're now so prevalent that people think, oh, I'll just kill it. And then everything fixes itself. And that does not happen. That absolutely does. Not happen. Because those people then have a bloom because you kill more bugs. Guess what? You have less butyrate, you have more oxygen. You can perpetuate the cycle. And so you get better for 60 to 120 days. And then boom, the bloom happens of the other bugs again. Then you got bloating, then you got pain, then you got stool inconsistencies, and you're like, oh, I didn't kill the. I didn't kill the candida.

That's just one example. Like, that's just one example of something that gets disrupted when you do the carpet bombing approach with antimicrobials. It would be the environment of the oxygen and those specific bugs. But there's a lot. There's a lot that happens and a lot of things that get killed and then who's the first one to come back into the room kind of wins then, right? It's like, oh, this room's empty. I'm going to set up shop here. And it's like, well, we don't want those.

The one who can survive in a higher oxygen environment.

Yeah. With the wrong kinds of fuel and the. Everything else. So.

Right.

And so I think, who's gonna love eating your food?

Totally. And so I think where gut healing is going is that, like, you don't do that type of program unless you've taken care of the conditions that we know are going to happen on the backside, which is make sure that the butyrate and the. And the processing of food is still going to happen during that killing phase. And after that killing phase, otherwise you've made yourself, like, wide open for colonization. Like, you're not hard to colonize. You shouldn't be surprised if your issues come back in six to 12 months because you left the door wide open for nature. To nature.

Yeah. And it's not like, yeah, it's just doing what it does. This is no good bad, otherwise there's no villains here. It's just doing what it does. Like you mentioned, if you don't want ants, don't throw sugar on the floor. So, all right, we're going to have to put this to a stop. And we went completely sideways. And it was a really interesting conversation. What I take out of it, other than the. Other than the incredible information around butyrate and oxygen levels in the gut and all of that, is that it's really important for clinicians and supplement formulators and companies that are making products that practitioners are using to help people to pay attention to new research and to be looking at new studies. And to always kind of trying to be up their game a little bit because this stuff is advancing. Like you didn't know any of this when you ran SCD Lifestyle, which was a platform that, I don't know what was the peak of that, how many people you guys were servicing, but a lot. And helping people. And like you mentioned, like, you can still be missing some of the puzzle and do some stuff and you feel better and like things still move in the positive direction. But you didn't know any of this. And if you'd have still been like the people I see on summits that are giving the same speech they gave 12 years ago, if we are still sitting here talking about exactly the same stuff you knew then when we first met, when you were doing SCD Lifestyle, this conversation would be really incomplete and lacking.

Yeah, 100% this stuff. You know, we were, you know, we, we helped millions of people. We almost helped a million, you know, a million visitors a month back then. You know, we saw 30, 40, 50,000, 50,000 customers back then. Even when I was doing the Kalish methods, plus our understanding of nutrition and stuff. And we had that consulting clinic. I didn't know this stuff. And we did get good results. You're right. It's not like these other people are being bad per se. It's just incomplete. And so for the folks who are fighting for better health and they're looping like you said, they're on this yo yo loop of like, I thought it was this and then now I'm pretty sure it's mold and now I'm pretty sure it's histamine. Now it's definitely EMFs like that kind of looping suggest we missed some steps. We did not fortify the gut in a way that allows those other interventions. It's not that I'm saying that like EMF shouldn't be looked at or, or that like, or whatever.

It's just a more complete picture.

Yeah, you're building on a shaky, a shaky ass foundation that's gonna fall apart when too much of that stuff stacks up. And so, yeah, I hope that people do start to question their protocols and question their thinking on the gut and if they've handled it. Because there's some really exciting new research that I think actually starts to fill in the gaps of why the yo yoing happens, why you can never find that stability where you can actually just. I'm not even talking about tolerating gluten, but like, I don't think dairy's inherently bad. I don't think corn, I don't know what corn did to everybody, but I don't think corn is bad. Like, you know, oats are fine, but like people are have attacked these foods like there's some sort of villain. And like we all have the wiring. We at least normally we come with the wiring and the capacity for that type of food, let alone just vegetables and fruit and meat. And so if we want to tolerate that stuff and if you don't want to loop back and be like, oh no, not broccoli again or whatever. I think looking deeper into butyrate, looking deeper into these missing steps of gut healing could be the answer and do think it is the answer for most.

I agree and I'm grateful that you're out there and other people are out there spending the time and doing the research and looking up these things and really starting to get a different picture of what's actually going on. And like I said, it's not that people are bad or that other approaches are bad. It's just we're trying to give as complete a picture as we can and we're trying to understand things as well as we can and take the steps that get people out of pain and discomfort and embarrassment and all of those things as fast and permanently as possible or as consistently as possible. Like more good days than bad days. And I like that you put it that way too. So thanks a lot Steve for this sideways conversation that went awesome and for being here. And by the time we air this, I think we will have done a webinar on butyrate. So I will link that which will be in more detail and a little bit more focused and a little bit more of that. I'm gonna link that somewhere around here, around this that you're seeing. So you'll wanna check that out and where do like Healthy Gut is the name of your company you guys make. I know your product line, it's HCL Guard is the HCL support. You've got the Holozyme, which is the best digestive enzyme I've come across in 12 years of taking and using and recommending digestive enzymes. Holoimmune, which is a really cool paraprobiotic, which is a whole nother, really interesting rabbit hole that we could have gone sideways down today, easily. The Tributerin X, you've got the magnesium glycinate and the B serine for our stressed out folks out there. And I'm sure that there's a couple things in the pipe because there always is over there.

Well, we got the new histoharmony. The dao.

Yeah, Histaharmony, too. The DAO enzyme for people that have histamine reactions. But I like that you're not just trying to fill a product line to fill a product line. You're seeing where there's a gap and where something doesn't work that people are trying to use and finding out if there's a better way to make it or a better way to deliver it or higher quality or ways to get something that theoretically should work, to actually work when people are using it. And we're grateful to be partnered with you and to have you come by so much to do so much education. So thanks a lot, man, and keep up the good work. All right.

Thanks, Michael. Always a pleasure.