The Role of Herbal Medicine in the Microbiome

BioGaia LACTOBACILLUS REUTERI for fermenting: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AH3RT9Y/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_66EPKQ3B46MSWZEQMB85&subject

Best Yogurt Maker for this type of fermentation: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PQ2KWHS/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_ZN6Y7CKZ757KHCDGGS0J&subject

BOOK: Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B096RTDMXV&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_2Q1YVTR4GATHAW0G5MMS&tag=mighty91com-20

 

Antidepressant Probiotic Homemade Yougurt Lactobacillus Reuteri, Dr. William Davis

https://www.learntruehealth.com/antidepressant-probiotic-homemade-yougurt-lactobacillus-reuteri-dr-william-davis

 

Highlights

• Benefits of TRPV1 in our gut
• Benefits of lactobacillus reuteri
• Losing weight by focusing on gut health support
• Importance of fermented food for the gut

 

After the success of Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis is back with a new book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. Super Gut explains how we can eliminate bad bacteria and breed good bacteria in the gut. In this episode, Dr. Davis shares specific bacteria that we can ferment that can target specific areas such as deeper sleep, increased libido, and muscle injury reduction.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Okay, I’ve got a few really exciting things to share with you before we dive into today’s interview, so you don’t want to skip this part. I interviewed Dr. William Davis, this is today’s interview, back in February. My life’s been crazy. I have been wanting to sit down and publish this since I did the interview. It was late February.

We were in the middle of moving, packing, moving, and it was total chaos. I’m so happy, I finally have a moment to sit down today and publish this. I’ve got 10 more interviews. I’m just backlogged with interviews that I want to get out there and publish. Just watch out. They’re going to start coming out more frequently now. I’m so excited to finally get back onto a regular schedule now that we’ve landed in our new location.

This interview was so life-changing for me because in January and February, I was having breakdowns, emotional breakdowns. My mind was okay, I was like, hey, I can taskmaster. Give me five things and I’m going to just bang them out. My mind was totally clear, but all of a sudden, I just noticed that my physical body was incredibly stressed out.

I am definitely handling a lot of things in the last year and then I had a lot on my plate. Mentally I felt fine, This is the whole thing, I don’t feel stressed. Stress is not an emotion. I started noticing that the littlest thing would have me in tears. It wasn’t just one part of the month, it was two months straight. I was in tears at the littlest thing. I felt so bad for my husband and my son who is so good-hearted. I’m sure it was scary all of a sudden like seeing my mom smiling one second then mom’s crying another, what’s going on. I tried to explain as best I could. I did notice that my body was definitely emotionally in overwhelm. This was just such perfect timing to get this interview.

At the beginning of the interview, I had no idea that this was going to be the answer to what I needed. With what Dr. William Davis shared, I took his information and I made one of the things he shares about today is a specific kind of—it’s hard to call it yogurt but it’s a fermented thing that you can make to eat. I made it out of soy milk and then I made it out of coconut milk just to try different plant-based options because I’m allergic to dairy but if you’re not allergic to dairy you can follow his recipe. What was just so cool and I’m so excited to share with you is that I had a result the same day I took it.

The last time I had such a profound effect was when I got on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells back 11 years ago. I think it was about 11 years ago. I was so sick. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, type 2 diabetes, and chronic adrenal fatigue so bad that I couldn’t process human language in the morning. I was in really rough shape.

Getting on those supplements and going gluten-free, so cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and then getting on the supplements, the trace minerals they sell, especially the liquid vitamin which is really bioavailable and absorbable, and the trace minerals, within 24 hours of being on those, I noticed my blood sugar began to balance. That constant gnawing hunger went away within five days of being on the supplements. My energy levels were the highest they had been in 20 years. For somebody who has chronic adrenal fatigue, it’s amazing. It wasn’t like energy that was jittery, it was just like real energy like my body started coming back online because it was so deficient in those minerals.

Often, when we have a mineral deficiency, we have symptoms across the board that doesn’t make sense to doctors because the doctors are not taught what trace mineral deficiency looks like, that’s just not in their wheelhouse. By getting on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells, I was able to—they’re very specific to each person and their needs—turn around within five days. I thought this was amazing. In terms of getting better from feeling horrible to feeling great, it was one to five days, boom, that was amazing.

Since then, I have had great experiences with many products. Using what Dr. William Davis shares today had me go from crying and just—I’m pretty sure I was still struggling with depression and all the changes that have happened with our family. Then I took the stuff that he told me to ferment, a very, very specific strain of probiotic, and 4I noticed a shift. That day was the last day I broke down crying for (I don’t want to say) no reason, but it’s kind of like crying over spilled milk like a way to overreact. Something small would happen, and my body would just completely meltdown.

Since I started introducing this specific probiotic, it’s a specific strain that affects the brain chemistry. How cool is that? It helps balance the brain chemistry so you feel happier. It also helps with insomnia so you get better sleep. I don’t have bad sleep, but I started getting better sleep. I started waking up wow, that was a really deep sleep. It helps with sleep. It helps with joy and a feeling of contentment, a feeling of connection, connectivity to the people you care about. It has a few other really cool positive results that Dr. William Davis is going to go in today. I wanted to let you know that since this interview, I tried it and I’ve been eating it, and I’ve been getting fantastic results. There’s my testimonial.

Please share this interview with everyone you know who has insomnia and also who wants to have more joy and feel even keel in terms of their emotional state, definitely share it with them. Another cool benefit to this specific strain of probiotic that you need to ferment yourself to get enough of it so you can eat it to get it in you is it increases the body’s ability to produce collagen so that wrinkles go away. Even for vanity’s sake, it’s worth thinking about because it’ll make you have better hair, skin, and nails. People are noticing all kinds of positive results.

I love this concept. The whole interview today is about this concept that there’s a pharmacy that we could tap into in our gut that we could prescribe ourselves specific strains of probiotics. These are healthy bacteria that live in our gut. Prescribe ourselves specific ones that have specific outcomes. It’s already well established. I’ve had dozens of interviews about this. You can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find all my interviews about gut health. The doctors I’ve had on who talk about gut-brain access, that there’s a direct correlation with what goes on in your gut.

There are about four to six pounds. Think about you have a little chihuahua-sized animal that lives in your gut and it’s made up of thousands of different strains of probiotics. You want to have the good kind and you want to make sure you mitigate the bad kind. They actually digest our food for us. They make nutrients for us by digesting the food that we absorb. They make chemicals for us that affect our brain, affect our chemistry, and affect our hormones. It’s amazing. This is just scratching the surface. It’s so cool. We’re on the cutting edge.

Dr. William Davis shares that information today. That was the one thing that I wanted to share with you. The next thing I wanted to share with you is I’ve done some recent interviews which I’ll be publishing soon about some pretty amazing stuff like how to increase nitric oxide in the body which has just a host of amazing health benefits. I’ve been pouring through all these studies and what I’m seeing is thermal therapy, using the Sunlighten Sauna, the reason why I say Sunlighten Sauna specifically is the Sunlighten Sauna has near, mid, and far-infrared. It goes into the different depths of your tissue and it binds to receptors.

Now I had a cardiologist on, Dr. Joel Kahn, and he talks about this that in our cells, we have receptors for hormones, we have receptors for nutrients like let’s say calcium, and glucose, right? Insulin being like hormones, we have receptors for those things. We also have receptors for light. That these infrared lights, the spectrum affects our cells. There’s one specific protein that is triggered by heat and this protein is called TRPV1.

This protein when triggered by heat—I believe it’s over 41 degrees Celsius is what I read—then helps the body to turn pre-muscular cells into muscle cells. They’re seeing that for the elderly, it helps to lower the chances of wasting away. It increases muscle, continuing to have more muscles so the muscles don’t waste away. It plays a huge role in helping with cardiovascular health to the point where this one study I read showed that they’re now doing therapy with people who are in cardiac failure. They’re really far gone in terms of their cardiac disease and heart disease, and that using heat therapy actually helps to increase nitric oxide in the body which supports the endothelial function of the cardiovascular system.

It reduces the oxidative stress of the cardiovascular system that supports the autonomic nervous system. They’re seeing that there are so many things. It also helps balance blood pressure. They’re seeing so many benefits to using heat therapy for cardiovascular health. Well, I was looking into this specific protein, the TRPV1, because there’s also a role that plays in breaking down and helping the body break down fat and in burning fat as fuel. Everyone who wants to be healthy wants to make sure we have healthy levels of fat. Brown fat is linked to better health and better health outcomes and burns off excess fat.

What we’re seeing is, when you’re in a sauna, yes it increases the body’s heat, your core temperature, and thus you’re burning off calories. They say about an average of 500 calories. Obviously, it depends on the person and how long they stay there and how hot it is. They also see now the reason why being in a sauna helps people lose fat is that it is creating these specific proteins, it is binding to these receptors. When it was explained to me, it was like, imagine a fat cell has these triglycerides that are built inside the cell and then they’re too big to get out. You have to tell the triglyceride inside the cell to break down. Kind of like a sectional couch, you can’t take your sectional sofa out the front door until you break it down into its parts.

Using the Sunlighten Sauna therapy is one of those ways to trigger to create that cascade effect to the body that triggers the fat cell to break it down so that it can leave the fat cell so that the triglyceride can break down to leave the fat cell, which I found fascinating. There are all these health benefits that I keep reading as I’m pouring through this information, but just the fact that sauna therapy increases nitric oxide in the body, in my next episode you will be learning more about nitric oxide and how the amazing benefits of it.

Everyone says inflammation is the root of all. At the very core of all diseases, there’s inflammation. Then people say, actually lactic acid is the root. No, lactic acid and inflammation are the result of the root cause and the root. We go deeper than that when the body cannot make enough of the nitric oxide that causes inflammation, that causes lactic acid, that causes all these cascades of negative outcomes that we see. When we’re looking at the common factor between everyone with disease and we’re going well, everyone with disease has more lactic acid and has more inflammation. Therefore, those are bad things we need to manage. Those are results of not enough nitric oxide in the body. My next interview is going to be about that.

How cool was it that the Sunlighten Sauna increases nitric oxide production which is linked to longevity by the way and not having enough of it is linked to early death. Also, so many health benefits of looking better and feeling better. What I want to say about Sunlighten is I’ve had mine for a few years. I absolutely love it. I’ve gotten so many health benefits from it. I am always in touch with the owner of the company there. They offer a great discount for listeners. Please give them a call. If you have any questions, they’re fantastic. They can help you out, give you the literature, give you the science. Also make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James because they will give you a fantastic discount, including free shipping. If you ever have any questions about it or anything at all, you can also contact me at ashley@learntruehealth.com and I would love to help.

I’m so excited for you to hear today’s interview because what Dr. William Davis shares today has changed my life. It’s now April and when I did that experiment with the probiotic that he recommended, that was near the end of February. All of March, even in the midst of the chaos of my move, we moved in March, I did not have any of those emotional overwhelm that I had before. I was able to navigate just by introducing this probiotic. You know what I said to my friend, I said that I’m on an antidepressant. She of course looked at me with big eyes. I said no, you don’t understand, not a pharmaceutical. This stuff that Dr. William Davis shares today, I said to her, this feels like I’m on an antidepressant. I feel amazing. I’m going through a very chaotic move and yet it’s not affecting me, it’s like the stress is gone.

That’s why I’m so excited for you today because imagine if the whole world was able to get their body to the point where they’re just feeling so calm and happy, and how much we could accomplish instead of feeling overwhelming stress. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Continue to please share, this episode is going to change lives I just know it. Come into the Learn True Health Facebook group because I’d love to hear your experience as you also experiment and play around with the things that Dr. William Davis shares today.

 

[00:17:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 476. I am so excited for today’s guest, we have back on the show with Dr. William Davis. Dr. Davis, you were on the Learn True Health podcast back in episode 167 which was eons ago but I have to tell you that you had a profound impact on my life and my husband’s life back in, this was like back in 2011, 2012, somewhere around there.

 

[00:17:48] Dr. William Davis: It was like the 19th century, wasn’t it?

 

[00:17:55] Ashley James: Yes, the dinosaurs roaming the earth. We went gluten-free. Actually, we cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Oats contain gliadin, which is a protein similar to gluten. Some people react to it, some people don’t. We were just like, let’s just throw them all out anyway and we noticed a profound difference. I love sharing the information that you shared in your book, Wheat Belly, was so eye-opening for us. It really helped us solidify our decision to eliminate barley, wheat, rye, and oats.

Then what happened was amazing, my husband and I lost so much water weight. In one month actually, I lost 25 pounds of water weight and both of us had our wedding rings flying off our hands. I’d like to go to point, oh, the remote is over there, I’d point my hand in that direction and my rings would go flying across the living room. We had our rings custom fitted. We waited about six months because I thought this might be temporary because women are more in tune with the water weight of their body than men possibly. I was like, well, this might be the time of the month and by the next time of the month, it won’t be like this.

Six months go by and we’re still not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. The 25 pounds of water weight is still off of me and I can’t believe it. I couldn’t push a finger into my skin and then have an indent, it wasn’t like that. It was just overall inflammation. Then six months later we went and got our rings resized. That’s what we found out, I went down one and a half ring sizes. My husband went down two whole ring sizes.

Then I was able to overcome a lot of other health issues. I mean, the diet was a major factor and also nutrition. I brought in specific very high-quality supplements and I tweaked my diet, but I was able to reverse type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue. I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome. Every doctor I talked to was like, you can’t reverse that. Watch me and look at my labs, they’re like, oh my gosh, I love showing to doctors my labs. They don’t believe it. It’s like, these are two different people.

I reversed infertility, all these great big things, but really the big thing was eliminating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. I have had so many friends say, oh, I tried that. I was gluten-free for two weeks, and I didn’t notice a difference. I’m not allergic to gluten. I definitely want to get into that.

You have a new book out, which I’m really excited about, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. I love that you have a deep dive into supporting this microbiome. It’s like six pounds of bacteria in our gut that we can actually use to heal our whole body. We talked about this that your book has very actionable steps that people can take to restore their health. I’m really looking forward to you teaching us that today. Welcome back to the show.

 

[00:21:10] Dr. William Davis: Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for the invitation. Glad to be back.

 

[00:21:13] Ashley James: Absolutely. Fill us in. What happened in the last four or five years since you were on the show with us?

 

[00:21:20] Dr. William Davis: Well, as you experienced, the Whole Wheat Belly lifestyle really can change people’s lives if they get it right. As you see, a lot of people say things like, I went gluten-free. Meaning they may have cut back on wheat and unrelated grains, but then turn to gluten-free garbage, which is awful. They make that mistake. Those gluten-free processed foods are just horrible for your health. It shocks me that that industry continues to grow and they fill store shelves with something that’s far worse than sugar.

If people get it right, they do experience as you have. By the way, reversing polycystic ovary syndrome is a huge advantage in health. As you see, the 15% of ladies who have it shouldn’t have it. Doctors say there’s really nothing we can do except give you diabetes medications, give you insulin, give you anti-hypertensive drugs, and then go through procedures for fertility, which is ridiculous. As you experience, it is readily reversed back to normal, including the hormonal distortions just by shifting your diet and maybe addressing a handful of nutrients that are lacking in modern life.

People are doing this and experience as you have dramatic life-changing improvements in health, weight, et cetera. But I also saw this, people say things like, I lost 73 pounds, but I have another 40 to go and I’m stuck. Or my joint pain from my rheumatoid arthritis is better, but I’m not off all the drugs yet. In other words, people were having successes but not 100% all the way back to perfect health, so I asked what is missing.

Now in the basic program, even back then, I was advocating adding a high potency multispecies, probiotic, fermented foods, and prebiotic fibers. But even those efforts to address the microbiome were insufficient for many people. I continued to dig and look for answers in the microbiome. I was shocked at the kind of things you can uncover in the microbiome. It led to an explosion and actionable solutions. Things you can do to take back control over their health.

 

[00:23:34] Ashley James: As you’re looking at the microbiome, what was the biggest, the first aha moment that really shocked you that made you go, oh my gosh, I have to dive into this deeper?

 

[00:23:44] Dr. William Davis: It was a series of things that I stumbled on was a series of very elegant research studies from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted between 2013 and 2017. This cancer group was looking at a microbe lactobacillus reuteri named after the German microbiologist who discovered this microbe in breast milk in 1962. They were looking at this microbe because they were looking into how it prevented colon cancer. It has very potent anti-cancer effects.

They gave it to mice and they noticed something unusual. They noticed that within a few days of getting lactobacillus reuteri, these mice developed what they described as rich luxuriant fur. They decided to explore it and they found all sorts of unexpected phenomena. They found, for instance, that healing was remarkably accelerated. If you inflicted a wound, it healed in half the time. Hair grew faster and thicker. They found that skin thickness increased dramatically because there’s an explosion of collagen in the dermis, the dermal layer of skin.

There was one study, they did a very elegant series of studies. They compared two groups of mice both fed a really crappy diet, a fast food diet, essentially. White flour, sugar, hydrogenated oils, fried foods, et cetera. One group just got the diet, they got fat, old, lost their hair, stopped playing with each other, stopped mating. They got old, fat, and died. The other group was fed the crappy diet also but given reuteri. These mice stayed slender, had thick and luxurious fur, played with each other, mated, and stayed young until they died. When that would get really interesting. They even made some other interesting observations.

There’s a restoration of youthful immune response in old mice. There’s a dramatic restoration of youthful testosterone in male mice. There’s an increase in growth hormone. But the pivotal finding, the real central finding in all these studies, was that all those effects came because reuteri that colonizes the entire length of the GI tract, by the way, not just the colon, sends a signal to the brain to release oxytocin. This group worked out all the details. If you cut the vagus nerve, the whole effect is turned off. It’s so-called gut-brain access via the vagus nerve. The reuteri sends a signal to the brain, the hypothalamus, to release oxytocin and there’s a 300% increase in oxytocin.

I found that really interesting even though the group said, isn’t that interesting? Do with it what you may. I got a hold of the same microbe that they used in these studies. It was available as a commercial product from Sweden. The company is called BioGaia and the product is called Gastrous. The problem is, these tablets are made for infants, and they were targeted for reducing infantile colic, regurgitation and diarrhea after antibiotics. The tablets had very low counts of microbes, I would challenge that they’re even enough for a baby. They had such low numbers, I made yogurt out of that, but not yogurt in the conventional sense. I made yogurt in a very different way. I fermented for a long, long time, 36 hours, not the usual four hours or 12 hours that some people use at home. I want as many microbes as possible.

We performed flow cytometry on the yogurt and we’re getting around 250-260 billion bacteria per half cup serving. We increased the number of reuteri by a thousandfold over what was contained in the tablets. Then I want to see if we could mimic these effects in humans. Me and thousands of other people, including my entire neighborhood, are eating this yogurt. We all start to see all the same stuff.

People got that boost in oxytocin and said things like, I like my family better. They don’t annoy me as much. I like my spouse better. I like my coworkers better. I understand other people’s points of view more readily. My skin is smoother, I’m losing my wrinkles. I heal faster. My sleep is deeper with vivid dreams. I’m no longer hungry, my appetite has been turned off completely. I’ve regained youthful muscle and strength. I have an increase in libido. I’m having erotic dreams like I used to have as a teenager or in my 20s.

Increased muscle, increased libido, thicker hair, smoother skin. Ashley, this one microbe turns the clock back 10 or 20 years. That’s just one microbe but it became clear. It was an illustration, Ashley, just how potent it could be to restore this one microbe, which by the way, almost all of us have lost. When Gerhard Reuter was exploring reuteri in mother’s breast milk and stool, he found it in almost everybody. In the indigenous populations on this planet who have been studied for this, they all have reuteri. If you look at chipmunks, squirrels, dogs, and raccoons, they all have reuteri. Modern people have lost it. Very few of us have it anymore because it’s very susceptible to many things like the antibiotic ampicillin. If you took ampicillin for your urinary tract infection or upper respiratory infection, you’ve likely lost your reuteri. We restore this ubiquitous microbe and spectacular things happen.

 

[00:29:40] Ashley James: I’m just imagining how many women are breastfeeding diligently thinking that they’re supplying their baby with this and they’re not, because at some point they had a UTI infection and they lost it forever. It’s not something that’s in our food supply that we can get back once it’s gone.

 

[00:30:10] Dr. William Davis: No, it’s not in the food. Not to say there aren’t wonderful microbes in fermented foods. You eat, say some kimchi, which is my favorite fermented food of all. By the way, people in South Korea have among the lowest incidences of cardiovascular disease in the world, far less than we do. There are probably a lot of factors but I think a major factor is their enthusiastic consumption of fermented foods like kimchi. Kimchi’s got wonderful microbes. It’s got something called leuconostoc mesenteroides and pediococcus pentosaceus. These are really beneficial microbes, but we can get species like lactobacillus reuteri, we actually have to get it specifically.

Now, one of the things that I think we’re in the process of figuring out is we have to pay attention. When you play with microbes, you have to pay attention to strain. Not just species but strain. To illustrate, you have E. coli, I have got E. coli, your listeners had E. coli in their colons. What if you ate romaine lettuce tainted by cow manure from the Central Valley of California? Well, you could die of that E. coli. Same species, E. coli, different strain. The strains that we use from the gastric tablets are two strains. It’s 17938 and 6475. I have seven other strains now of reuteri, they are in my refrigerator. I’ve made yogurt with all of them. I’ve experienced the same effect or greater with these other strains.

Now, we have a mouse study lined up. We’re going to compare five strains and see if any of them are better at provoking oxytocin than the others. That’s going to get underway in just a few weeks. We’ll be smarter. What I want to do at some point is say, Ashley, this is the strain you want to use. It’s the best at generating this effect. But right now, we can’t say that, so just to be sure, we stick to the Gastrous stains.

Let me tell you an embarrassing story. We get a boost in oxytocin from reuteri. Ashley, I think it’s safe to say, the restoration of reuteri makes us better human beings. Now, I did something crazy. I got another strain of reuteri from a microbiologist friend. He’s a master at generating super-duper high counts of unique strains. He was actually about half an hour from my house at a place called BioSource, his name is Suresh. He gave me some of his reuteri strains. It was super-duper high potency. I made yogurt out of it. Tastes the same, nothing different.

I had it that night and then I went to sleep. During sleep, I had this incredibly vivid dream. Really embarrassing, Ashley, but I will tell you anyway. I dreamt this imaginary woman came to me and I could see her in vivid detail. I could see her hair color, her eye color, and her facial features. She introduced me first and last names, which I have never had happened in a dream before. I felt overwhelming love and affection for this imaginary woman. When I woke up, the odd thing was that overwhelming love and affection continued for this imaginary person for many hours into the day. It was intoxicating. I hadn’t had that feeling for a real person in years.

I’ve not been able to recreate that feeling, but I think if we can recreate it, we can almost turn this on and off. It also makes me wonder, Ashley, if modern humans have lost reuteri and thereby the capacity to enjoy very high levels of oxytocin. Is the intensity of love and affection today less than it was 60, 100, or 10,000 years ago? Tough but I believe it might have been.

 

[00:34:11] Ashley James: Just think of maybe are there other groups of people that had higher levels of it naturally because their lifestyle didn’t degrade it? For example, in the history of the First Nations people in North America, what they taught in schools is so manipulated from the truth. When you actually dive into it, you find that most of the tribes were at peace with each other. They traded with each other. There were tribes up in the northern regions of the United States that had conch shells because they traded all the way down from the Mexico area. They trade routes. There was a lot of peace. There’s a lot of prosperity. There is vibrance, right? Then when they teach us that they were all savages, they’re all killing each other. That’s what they taught me in school.

Then I go and actually find out that it’s highly manipulated, the history that they teach. They had so much beauty in their cultures, of course, some war with each other but there’s more peace than war. There’s more togetherness, trading, and helping each other. I just wonder if cultures were more in touch with herbal medicine and nature if they had higher levels of these strains versus cultures that maybe were drinking alcohol and messing around with substances that would disrupt the microbiome.

 

[00:36:12] Dr. William Davis: I think we can only speculate. It will be tough to prove. I got the oxytocin levels, the blood levels of three primitive indigenous populations. I got unpublished data from a researcher in California who went to New Guinea and very bravely got the blood of some very—these are people who just two generations ago were cannibals who were eating other humans. He got the blood from these people and measured oxytocin.

I have also the data from the Somali, another indigenous population, and from the Bodango people in the Republic of the Congo. These are all people who have not been exposed to antibiotics and are not exposed to glyphosate, the herbicide. Do not get herbicide and pesticide residues in their food. Don’t take statin drugs or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They have essentially a stone age microbiome and thereby presumptively higher oxytocin dose.

Unfortunately, the methods to measure oxytocin are so wildly different that it’s almost impossible to compare their levels to modern levels. Different methods, different tests, and platforms. I have the data, but I can’t say that they had higher oxytocin. I wanted to prove that primitive people with reuteri have higher levels of oxytocin. Unfortunately, this kind of a mess of data surrounding oxytocin prevents us from doing that. We’ll likely never know unless we have a time machine and go back in time, draw blood, and run those tests using modern methods.

 

[00:37:50] Ashley James: There are thousands and thousands of different bacterial strains, healthy helpful bacterial strains that we can have in our gut. You’ve isolated one and played around with one and found that your healing room time, your collagen, and people are getting younger. People are getting more feeling wonderful in their bodies and connecting with other people. That alone, yes, I think that you’ve sold everyone. Everyone’s like, okay, sign me up. That’s just one. Now, you talk about making yogurt. Can I take the same stuff and go make some fermented food with it? Just add it to the brine, add it to the saltwater and ferment some cabbage and get the same result, or do you find that we have to make yogurt and can it be a plant-based yogurt?

 

[00:38:40] Dr. William Davis: It doesn’t have to be dairy and it doesn’t have to be yogurt. It could be coconut milk. It could be veggies. What I don’t know Ashley is the number of microbes you obtain from that. If you were to ferment let’s say some eggplant and cabbage, the reuteri will compete with the microbes that are on the surface of the vegetable like say Leoconostoc. I can’t say that you get the same kind of numbers. That’s a work in progress. We’ll probably quantify that. That requires DNA analysis. Flow cytometry is a quick and dirty way to count microbes. When you have different microbes, several of them to tell them apart, you have to do DNA analysis to tell them apart and count them. We have not done that, but you can indeed do that.

You know what, you can gauge this by the effect. Personally, for instance, I go from terrible insomnia, terrible for years, decades taking horse doses of melatonin just to get a good night’s sleep. Now whereas I used to watch TV or read books at two or three o’clock in the morning. Now I sleep straight through nine hours of sleep.

By the way, those of us who wear actigraphy graphic devices like an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, or an aura ring, see that REM sleep, the deep restorative phase of sleep that helps you maintain good mental health is extended by about 20%. That’s another thing that needs to be formally documented with AEG, not just an active graphic device. I know I get a very deep sleep with vivid, colorful dreams. I know if I take a microbe that’s not working or I’m not getting enough microbes, I’ll revert back to being an insomniac. I have my own little built-in gauge. If your listeners do this, you try to ferment something else, and you lose the effect, then you know that the microbe count might not be enough.

One thing you’ll find in the world of the microbiome that’s not well explored is what’s called dose-response. The drug people, as much as I despise that industry, those people are very good at dose-response dies. They have a new drug, they’re going to test all variations in dose 0.25 milligrams, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 5.0, 10, 15, 25, 50. They have deep pockets.

In the microbiome world, we don’t have deep pockets like that. We do have a human study where we are going to take a stab at dose-response, 10 billion and 50 billion with a strain of reuteri. My gut’s sense, forgive the pun, it takes probably 50 billion more microbes to generate an effect. What I don’t know is, let’s say you fermented sauerkraut with reuteri, will you get sufficient numbers of reuteri when it competes with other species? That I don’t know. But you know what, this is fun, it’s benign, it’s very low cost. In fact, you save money.

One of the things I advocate is you can spend a ton of money on these fancy commercial probiotics, which by the way have some real problems. Nonetheless, you can buy a probiotic. Pay a lot of money for it. You can ferment foods with it. It cuts back on your need to buy it again. If you make the yogurt, for instance, you don’t make future batches from tablets of reuteri, you make it from a little bit as a prior batch. That’s how I have my entire neighborhood making reuteri yogurt. I give them a little bit of the yogurt and they make their yogurt from that prior batch.

 

[00:42:18] Ashley James: Yes, right. Maybe you could clarify, I think a lot of people thought if you take a probiotic, it’s like planting a seed in a garden. Then you don’t have to keep planting seeds every day. Right? Whatever you planted is going to grow and then reproduce its own seeds and then keep growing. The idea is, if you take a probiotic, wouldn’t that one course of probiotics populate the gut and now the reuteri is living in your gut and that’s it. It’s over with. You do not have to eat anymore. Or do you have to constantly eat it because it doesn’t reproduce in the gut?

 

[00:42:57] Dr. William Davis: You raise a fundamental question, Ashley. That is how come if mom gave you a microbe, you’d likely have it for decades, if not an entire lifetime. If you take it as a probiotic or yogurt, you’ll have it for a few days, maybe weeks, and then it dies. Why? Well, it points toward all the inadequacies of the current understanding of commercial probiotics. The commercial probiotic is when nothing more than a slapdash, half-hazard collection of microbes just put together with no rhyme or reason. That’s the current crop.

The probiotic of the future will have other factors built-in. For one, they must specify strain for the reasons we talked about. If you don’t specify strain, you have no idea what you have. For instance, there’s a strain of lactobacillus rhamnosus, that GG strain that has very good evidence for abbreviating post-antibiotic diarrhea. If you take lactobacillus rhamnosus non-GG strain, it doesn’t have that effect. You need to know the strain. That’s one issue.

Another issue is microbes are just like people. We don’t live in isolation all by ourselves. We have partners, families, neighborhoods, and communities. Bacteria are the same way. They have guilds or consortia and they work together. Almost no probiotic preparation factors in that phenomenon. The only product I know of that does that is one out of Colorado called BiotiQuest’s Sugar Shift. I have no relation to the people who developed it.

My friends Martha Carlin and Dr. Raul Cano, a microbiologist with 40 years of academic experience. They formulated this because this group of microbes work together and generate bigger effects. They call it Sugar Shift because it reduces blood sugar quite substantially, by the way. Most other probiotics do not incorporate that phenomenon. Another deficiency of modern probiotics is they fail to include keystone species. These are foundational species that support other species like plankton in the ocean. Without plankton, you don’t have whales or jellyfish. It’s foundational or keystone.

We need to have restored keystone species. Reuteri is a keystone species. There are others like lactobacillus gasseri, faecalibacterium prausnitzii is another, don’t memorize these of course. When you buy a commercial probiotic, many of them lack. In their defense, a lot of this is a work in evolution. But the bottom line here is a probiotic is probably one of the least important things you can do to restore the microbiome. Among the most important is to include fermented foods. Bring back fermented foods, just like your great-grandmother did.

Kimchi, kombucha, kefirs, yogurts, fermented veggies, fermented meats, all those things, you get these wonderful microbes. The curious thing is the microbes you get from fermented foods like leuconostoc mesenteroides do not actually take up residence for very long. By some odd twist, just having those guys restored allows healthy microbes to re-emerge. It’s not quite clear how that works but this is very interesting data out of Stanford.

The Sonnenburgs, Eric and Justin, husband and wife microbiology team published a very important study that showed that fermented foods hands down are the most important thing that you can reincorporate into the modern diet. That is something that most people forgot about. In fact, most modern people think that fermented foods are rotten. They’ll often throw away something that ferments. We need to add those things back and that’s a really big advantage for the restoration of rebuilding a microbiome.

 

[00:47:06] Ashley James: I love it. What about prebiotic foods? Fibers that are non-wheat, there are some indigestible fibers that we don’t necessarily eat because we’re going to digest it but it feeds the microbiome. It just enriches it. How important is making sure that we eat prebiotic food?

 

[00:47:33] Dr. William Davis: Very important, Ashley. As you suggested, including sources of prebiotic fibers. If you and I were primitive, indigenous populations, you wouldn’t go to a grocery store, of course. You would dig in the dirt and look for roots and tubers. That’s where you get the majority of your prebiotic fibers. You would also kill animals, and as disgusting as modern people find it, in addition to eating the brain, heart, tongue, and pancreas, we would also eat the intestines and stomach, and sometimes do that raw.

That is the real version of prebiotic fibers and probiotics. Modern people cannot stomach those kinds of things so we have to compensate for it. I say all of that because sometimes things we turn to get our prebiotic fibers seem a little odd. Like a raw white potato is filled with prebiotic fibers. It seems a little odd because we’re not used to that. We’re trying to recreate what indigenous populations did by digging in the dirt. Raw white potatoes, inulin powder is an easy convenient way to get it.

Legumes, white beans, black beans, kidney beans, peas, chickpeas, hummus, root vegetables, dandelion greens. There’s a long list of these things and they’re very, very important. The problem that people encounter though is modern people have so massively disrupted their microbiome in the form of either dysbiosis that is unhealthy microbes in the colon or worse, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, where all 30 feet of the GI tract are filled with unhealthy mostly stool microbes that they say things like, I can’t eat beans because when I do, I have explosive diarrhea, panic attacks, bloating, and other effects.

There’s nothing wrong with the beans or other foods you’re intolerant to and that could be, by the way nightshades, FODMAPs containing foods, histamine foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food. There’s something wrong with your microbiome. These are modern phenomena. People say things like, I had the testing, I can’t eat these 42 foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food, it’s your microbiome. People have to get beyond this idea that there’s something wrong with the food. It is something wrong with you, the microbiome.

 

[00:49:55] Ashley James: Right. It’s fascinating that our microbiome actually helps us digest our food and turns it into chemicals that we absorb. Without the microbiome, we would not survive. It’s so important, but like you pointed out, it also plays a major role in our mood. Often we sort of live life letting our mood guide us. They woke up on the wrong side of the bed. People make decisions most of the time, not logically, but most of the time from their emotions. They’re letting their gut run them, right?

 

[00:50:29] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, I’m always impressed just how much our internal dialogues—the things we tell ourselves, conversations we have in our heads—are colored by our microbes. A really good illustration of this is when you try to undo all these bad things. Let’s say you have all these stool microbes like E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, and Proteus, and all these are filling your 30 feet of GI tract. Well, you do something to kill them. It could be an antibiotic, it could be an herbal antibiotic. It could be something I called SIBO yogurt. We make yogurt that I think is proven to be effective in eradicating SIBO.

You kill these microbes and when they die, they shed their breakdown products, some of which get into your bloodstream and people call it die off but the real name is called endotoxemia. People will say things like this as they are in the process of killing microbes. They say, I’m having terrible panic attacks. I’m having dark thoughts and nightmares. People are chasing me, I’m falling off a cliff. My heart is racing. I’m having a low-grade fever. I ache all over.

That’s a vivid illustration of the kinds of things that happen when unhealthy microbes die off. Outside of that situation of die off, just having microbes living in your GI tract—these microbes don’t live for hours, they do not live for decades. If you had trillions of microbes occupying 30 feet of your GI tract, and they live and die in rapid succession, they shed their breakdown products, some of it gets in your bloodstream, that’s endotoxemia. Even when you’re not trying to kill them, some of it gets into your bloodstream.

That’s the thing that colors your internal dialogue and your mood. There’s a very interesting but disturbing set of studies from Germany where they took people who are non-depressed, normal people, they took that endotoxin to break down prompts and bacteria and injected it into these normal people. Which is really scary because if you miscalculate the dose, you can kill somebody quite easily. They somehow got into the review board. An injected bacterial endotoxin into these people, within three hours were profoundly depressed and had all the hallmarks of depression by MRI. It’s just one illustration of the potent effect that microbes have on your internal dialogue and mood.

 

[00:53:10] Ashley James: That is scary. What about someone who puts on an antibiotic? Does that have a similar effect? Does endotoxemia occur when we go on antibiotics?

 

[00:53:23] Dr. William Davis: It can. It depends on the antibiotic, where it was targeted towards. But yes, people do get quite sick taking antibiotics. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the die off effect from the disease you’re treating. If you’re treating pneumonia, you’re already sick, feeling awful, and having a fever. The die off effect just makes you feel a little worse. This is a well-established phenomenon. That’s known for about a century. It’s not just unique to these efforts in the microbiome. It is known to occur with virtually any infection where you’re killing off microbes.

It is an illustration of the power of microbes and their breakdown products that color human mood and our internal dialogues. It makes you wonder, hate has always been part of the world. Humans are a violent species. As you pointed out, has it gotten worse? Did indigenous populations actually enjoy a lot more peace than we give them credit for? Part of that at least do the microbiome, such as loss of reuteri and thereby oxytocin, the hormone of love, affection, and understanding of other people’s points of view. We can only speculate, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is somehow we prove it to be true.

 

[00:54:41] Ashley James: You are a cardiologist. I wonder from that filter, from that viewpoint, have you seen that restoring the microbiome positively affects heart health?

 

[00:55:01] Dr. William Davis: I think so. That’s an area where the microbiome science has simply not been explored sufficiently. It’s my prediction that the microbiome plays a very important role in coronary disease. That is heart attacks and those diseases of the heart’s arteries. I think it plays a big role in cardiomyopathies, heart muscle diseases, congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and other heart rhythm disorders. I predict that managing the microbiome will become a major—the problem with this of course, Ashley, is that practicing physicians, including my immediate colleagues and cardiologists, are typically 20 years behind in the science.

I still have colleagues say to me, there’s no such thing as SIBO, which is ridiculous, of course. There are thousands of published research studies on SIBO. They say things like, we know that probiotics don’t do anything. Well, we’ve got some criticisms of probiotics, but to say that they don’t do anything is completely nonsense. That’s the nature of things that the science has marched way ahead and the practicing physician is way behind. That’s why I think it’s so important for what you’re doing, what I’m trying to do, and that is broadcast these messages so that your listeners can take the reins. Yes, and their doctor will say, Ashley, did you consult doctor Google again? Right?

 

[00:56:23] Ashley James: I would fire that doctor and hire a more informed one. That’s what I will do.

 

[00:56:28] Dr. William Davis: That’s what you have to do. Take the reins yourself. That’s one of the great things about the microbiome. If you can tolerate a little bit of digging and understanding, it’s not that difficult. People have astounding control over their health if given a little bit of direction. The reuteri yogurt and other yogurts. I should tell you about the SIBO yogurt. This problem of SIBO, that is 30 feet of microbes, largely stool microbes that have ascended up into the small bowel.

I used to think this was uncommon or rare until something came out called the AIRE device made by a company in Dublin, Ireland. Invented by a Ph.D. engineer named Dr. Angus Short. He made this device because he saw his girlfriend, now wife, struggle with her irritable bowel syndrome when she was told to go on a low FODMAPs diet. He saw a low fiber low sugar diet. He saw how difficult that was for her and when she did get exposed, how she’d have bloating, diarrhea, and other effects. He invents this device for her that measures hydrogen gas in the breath because bacteria produce hydrogen gas but humans do not. You can use it to map out where microbes are. He commercialized this device a few years ago thinking it was just a device for people with IBS and FODMAPs intolerance.

I got a hold of it and I called him up and I said, Angus, this is far bigger than you think. This is a device that maps out where microbes are in the GI tract and helps people navigate all food intolerances. FODMAPs, nightshade, histamine-containing foods, sorbitol, fructose, fruit, legumes, nuts, all that stuff. He now knows that this is a far more important device than ever thought. I had thousands of people testing their breath now for hydrogen gas. Ashley, what shocked me was it’s everywhere. People are testing positive left and right.

It’s the uncommon person who tests negative. My crude estimation is that at least a very conservatively estimated, at least 100 million Americans have SIBO. I think that’s a dramatic underestimation. It’s gotten a whole bunch worse just the last few years. People say things like, this is too complicated. It’s too much to worry about. It is scaring me. It’s very unwise to ignore this because if you have SIBO, which is true for a lot of people—at least one in three—over time it leads to autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, colon cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders. In other words, it leads to a whole host of diseases. Of course the doctor is more than happy to dispense all kinds of fancy drugs including biologics for many thousands of dollars per month.

 

[00:59:40] Ashley James: Just thinking about what led us here? I mean, antibiotic use is on the rise, right? Glyphosates in our foods, just one of the thousands of chemicals in our food. Glyphosate, although was first designed as a chelator, is now known back, I think, 2010 or 2012, they published that it’s also an antibiotic. Glyphosates, which is in the Roundup. Which is in so much of our food. Even if you buy organic at home, if you go out to a restaurant to eat something, you’re eating glyphosate.

That is basically antibiotics in your food. There are chemicals in our food that are harming our microbiome, then there’s the diet itself. I heard somewhere that eating high fat and when I say high fat, I mean a highly processed oil, standard American diet like eating french fries, like eating canola oils, right? This very high unhealthy fat diet, just go out and eat at restaurants basically. That oil itself suffocates the good microbiome. It makes it like an anaerobic environment. I’m just exploring, just in my mind, I’m exploring all the factors that we have in this modern era that are killing the good bacteria.

 

[01:01:26] Dr. William Davis: You know, Ashley, I could devote an entire episode of your podcast just talking about that because you’re making an essential point. We’re drowning in the factors that disrupt the microbiome. You’re right, antibiotics. Most of us by age 40 have already taken 30 courses of antibiotics. For every thousand children, over 1,300 prescriptions for antibiotics are written every year. That’s just antibiotics. You making an essential point with the glyphosate. Yes, an herbicide but also a potent antibiotic. Other herbicides, pesticides, a linoleic acid-rich diet that is a diet that includes lots of vegetable oils, corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil does disrupt the microbiome.

We have to be careful here. I love talking to a microbiologist. I’m not of course a microbiologist but I talk to a lot of microbiologists. I love talking to them because they have such great insights into microbes. The problem with microbiologists is they are microbiologists. They don’t understand nutrition. I mentioned that because you’ll see in a lot of the studies, they say, we gave our mice a high-fat diet just like unhealthy Americans.

They’ve subscribed to this ridiculous and outdated notion that we should all be low fat, which of course is absurd. The low-fat mantra has damaged so many billions of people’s health and lives and it’s a big driver of obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics we now have, so we have got to be careful. You’re right that the linoleic acid omega 6-rich oils do contribute to the disruption of the microbiome.

On the other hand, it’s omega 3, the EPA DHA, not so much the linoleic acid that has microbiome protective effects. One of the things that the omega 3 fatty acids do is activate an enzyme that lines the intestinal wall called intestinal outland phosphatase. One of the effects of that enzyme is to deactivate that endotoxin that microbes release and tries to get into your bloodstream. Even good old fish oil has beneficial effects on the microbiome.

 

[01:03:44] Ashley James: I love it. I love all these tidbits. Let’s talk more about your book because I’m sure I want to go make the SIBO yogurt. We’re going to make it out of coconut milk or something. I really want to make that. My husband has had mild SIBO. We did that test, eating a certain diet, then you blow into the little tubes and you send it off to the lab.

I also wonder about small intestinal fungal overgrowth, which the doctor who coined that and the first person who ever published studies on it, I had him on the show. He says it’s a man-made illness because without antibiotics and all the things we’ve done to disrupt—basically take healthy food and turn it into junk food, turn it into processed food, and all the chemicals we now eat. Mostly it’s the overuse of antibiotics. He sees that fungal overgrowth is now taking effect in the small intestines. He had a wealth of data to support this and he was criticized heavily by his peers.

It’s just funny that we can have a mountain of evidence. It’s like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We can have a mountain of evidence, but when we challenge people’s belief systems, especially someone who has had more education around their profession, challenging that education sometimes leads to a lot of resistance. We have to remember to keep our minds open enough that our brains could fall out. Just think critically. Don’t take everything at face value. Question everything, but keep your mind so open.

What if you could cure your insomnia and depression because you changed what you ate? So many doctors out there will say that’s impossible, take this prescription. Yet here we have this book, Super Gut by Dr. William Davis. He’s showing us that we can do simple, small, actionable steps each day, and we could cure lifelong insomnia. We can look younger. We can have more love in our life. We can start to reverse major health issues and get off medications like diabetes.

For SIBO, it causes so much discomfort. Like you said, it can lead to colon cancer, it can lead to all these other issues, that it causes distension. I have a friend who has such a bad SIBO that she only eats meat. She’s so careful. She can’t even use spices. She can’t put onion on something. Any form of fiber and she is so sick. She gets a migraine. She gets bloated and she’s so sick that the only thing she can do is use a small amount of meat each day. She is becoming skinnier and skinnier in a very unhealthy way. She’s always in pain.

I can’t wait to give her your book. I am going to cry. I’m so excited for her because I know her case is extreme. It was years and years leading up to it. For those who notice that they have gut issues, they have digestion issues, and eliminating one food after another and after another. It is going to get to the point where it’s like, what can you eat? Whereas when we heal the gut and that we have a strong healthy microbiome, the microbiome is working with us, the healthy microbes are working with us to help digest our food, and assimilate our food, then we won’t have those issues anymore. The SIBO yogurt is that in your book?

 

[01:07:41] Dr. William Davis: It is. I came to it by just sheer logic, just reasoning this out. Because when you think about it, if you have SIBO that is 30 feet of trillions of microbes, if you take a commercial probiotic off the shelf, can it get rid of your SIBO? No, it might reduce bloating and diarrhea a little bit, but it really wants to get rid of these misplaced bacteria in the upper GI tract. That’s why people use things like Rifaximin, the prescription antibiotics, and some of the herbal antibiotic regimens that have some proven efficacy like the good the bad, and the FC biocides regimen that I discussed in the book. That we use for a couple of years successfully.

But I asked some different questions. I asked, what if we chose bacterial species that colonize the upper GI tract? Because that’s where SIBO occurs. What if we chose species that produced what are called bacteriocins? These are natural antibiotics effective against this species of SIBO.

I chose a strain of Lactobacillus gasseri. Gasseri colonizes the upper GI tract and produces up to seven bacteriocins. It was a bacteriocin powerhouse. I chose those strains of reuteri that also colonize the upper GI tract and produce up to four bacteriocins and a strain of bacillus coagulans. We co-ferment them as yogurt. It doesn’t have yogurt, but in this case, I use yogurt. Extended fermentation to achieve very high bacterial counts and we consume half a cup per day. Ashley, so far, this is only about 30 people but 90% have converted to hydrogen gas negative by the AIRE device.

So far, it’s holding up. We have several clinical trials in the works. We’ll probably do that one down the road, not as yogurt but we’ll have to encapsulate microbes to control the dose. We’ll probably look at that formally and see if this holds true, but so far I think it’s working. The downside is you have to eat it for about four weeks. It’s a little slower than antibiotics. There is a die off phenomenon upfront. You do get the little bloating, anxiety, and those light effects, but Ashley, it’s just yogurt. It’s such a nice way to approach it.

 

[01:10:11] Ashley James: Instead of having to go through the FODMAPs diet, that is infinitely easier than getting rid of SIBO traditionally.

 

[01:10:20] Dr. William Davis: Right. Now, one thing we’ve not done is test how well this works in non-dairy fermentation that I just don’t know. I believe you can do quite well though. We’ve had a number of people do this well with coconut milk, canned coconut milk. The only difference is when you ferment canned coconut milk, there are a few additional steps you have to add because coconut milk likes to separate into fat. You don’t want to get this big layer of fat. You have to add some guar gum. We preheat. We don’t preheat dairy, that’s an unnecessary step. They do that in conventional yogurt making because they start with skim milk or low-fat milk. I start with organic half and half, 18% fat. For all the problems that dairy may have, the least problem or no problem is the dairy fat or fat is fine.

This notion of low-fat nonfat dairy is ridiculous. I start with organic half and half 18% fat. You can also start with organic coconut milk. You’ll just have to add a few additional steps like adding a little bit of guar gum and then we also blend it with a blender until it thickens up. All of these additional steps discourage separation in the final product.

 

[01:11:37] Ashley James: This is so interesting. I’ve made plant-based yogurt before and I used whatever I thought was a healthy probiotic. It turned out well. I’m excited to play with your system and what’s in your book. Your book is Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan, so let’s talk about this. It is a four-week plan just to reprogram your microbiome to restore health and lose weight. Give us a glimpse into what it looks like for the next four weeks. We’re all going to get your book and then we’re going to do it for four weeks. How much time does this take? What kind of fun experiments are we going to be cooking up in the kitchen? Give us a layout of what it looks like for the next four weeks.

 

[01:12:26] Dr. William Davis: If we spend the first week, I liken this, Ashley, to a backyard vegetable garden. Let’s pretend it’s May or June and you’re going to layout a 10×10 plot. How do you do that? Well, you lay out your plot, then you pick out the stones and the twigs, and then you plant seeds. Then you want to fertilize it for the growing season. After a couple of months, you’ve got a whole bunch of eggplant, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, and zucchini. The same kind of thing happens in your microbiome. We have to prepare the soil. It’s done the first week of preparing the soil means undoing all the things that screw up your microbiome such as getting filtered water, and choosing organic foods over conventional foods wherever possible to minimize your exposure to herbicides and pesticides.

Working to get off medications like statin drugs and anti-inflammatory drugs. This might take longer than a week but at least you have a whole week to try to reorganize your life and clean up your microbiome. We also approach diet. I’m guilty of reintroducing some of the Wheat Belly-type concepts just because as you saw, even though the concepts in Wheat Belly did not take the microbiome 100% of the way back, it was a great start because one of the things that happen with brain consumption is huge intestinal inflammation. You experienced it, you lost all that water weight.

 

[01:13:56] Ashley James: Yeah, the inflammation weight.

 

[01:13:59] Dr. William Davis: When you lose water weight, that is very important because it means you were retaining water because you were inflamed. Getting rid of all that inflammation, water is a huge step. We reintroduce the diet like we’re already doing the diet simpler for them. I also introduce nutrients that are largely lacking in modern life. Not because of the diet but because of the way we conduct our lives. We can’t drink from the river because it’s got sewage, pesticides, and herbicides. We have to filter our water. All water filtration removes all magnesium. We all begin with profound magnesium depletion. We’ve replaced that and that helps the microbiome as well as other aspects of your physiology.

We’ve replaced vitamin D because we don’t eat liver and most of us live indoors and wear clothes when we’re out in public, we replace the vitamin D. Iodine and omega 3 fatty acids, similar reasons, which we’re because we’re just not getting enough from our diets. One departure we have to talk about is people get all excited when they hear about the reuteri yogurt and how you turn the clock back 10 or 20 years, the infantis yogurt that we use in babies that has dramatic effects on their future development and IQ, or bacillus coagulants, how it helps athletes recover faster.

But the problem with that is those are really powerful strategies but they work much better if you don’t have SIBO or SIFO. Many people have to stop the program and then deal with their SIBO or SIFO. It’s not that difficult, but it means there’s a delay. You might not do it in four weeks because if you’re going to do the SIBO yogurt, that alone is about four weeks. If you do the candibactin regimen of herbal antibiotics, that takes a couple of weeks. If you don’t have SIBO or SIFO, that’s a lot simpler. Then you start talking about these fermented foods, including yogurt to get these outsized effects.

 

[01:16:07] Ashley James: That’s really exciting. It’s exciting that people will be in touch with their bodies. They’ll notice these changes. They’ll go, okay, I’ve got to stop and go and do the SIBO regimen and then come back. It empowers people. It gives them confidence. I’ve experienced this as well. So many of us, because we’re raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then go to the doctor and the doctor is on their pedestal that will heal us. Then they write a prescription and which most drugs don’t heal, they suppress. They manipulate the body, suppress, and they don’t actually help the body overcome and get healthy again. Because the body was out of balance because it was missing nutrients, mostly it’s our diet.

We got to bring and we got to correct the diet. We’ve got to make sure our diet includes the prebiotics and the probiotics, the fermented foods. Like you said, first correct the overgrowth if there’s an overgrowth in the small intestines. We’ve been raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then see the doctor. It’s so backward. This is sort of the mainstream idea of health is that we are helpless and the all-seeing, all-knowing doctor is going to help us.

That’s the perfect business model. It’s perfect PR perfect marketing for big pharma. It’s perfect, a lifelong customer, for doctors and big pharma. Then there are doctors like you who are like let’s get so healthy we don’t need to get sick all the time, go to the doctor, and get a prescription. Let’s get so healthy that we prevent getting sick.

 

[01:18:06] Dr. William Davis: You make such a crucial point that I agree completely. That is, we need to get away from this idea of treating diseases like type 2 diabetes. What are they doing for type 2 diabetes? One, the American Diabetes Association diet is absurd. It raises blood sugar and sustains diabetes, so they’re no help.

The doctor introduces drugs whether it’s insulin, Metformin, Byetta injections, or other drugs to reduce blood sugar. They don’t address the cause. What you’re advocating is we identify the root causes of these conditions. In the case of type 2 diabetes, let’s remove the foods that raise blood sugar and cause insulin resistance. Let’s address the nutrients that are largely lacking that also contribute to insulin resistance. Let’s address the microbiome that via endotoxemia contributes largely to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes goes away in the vast majority of people.

I was a diabetic 30 years ago. I’m no longer a diabetic on nothing except my nutrients and food. I have perfect blood sugar and perfect hemoglobin A1C. I’ve done this with many, many people, and there’s actually published evidence to this effect, but unfortunately, it doesn’t drive revenues. While you and I know this, your listeners know this, my colleagues don’t give a crap because there’s no pot of gold involved.

 

[01:19:40] Ashley James: This is a really scary part of the medical system. You as the patient need to be incredibly informed and we have to pull our heads out of the sand. We cannot blindly take our bodies to a doctor that is just going to put us on the conveyor belt of allopathic medicine. We need to take charge. That can seem daunting and overwhelming, especially if we have a large family. I know as a mom, I’m responsible for feeding everyone every day, every meal, and it gets a little overwhelming and gets a little old.

If we can sort of step back and just take these baby steps, and I love that your program, let’s just make this yogurt and eat it for the next two weeks, that’s doable. What else are some doable steps that we can take? Nothing overwhelming, but something that really gives us some bang for our buck.

 

[01:20:45] Dr. William Davis: I have a really cool one. It’s not in the book, but it’s consistent with the program. It is on my website. I had my Wheat Belly blog for years. It had 30 million visits and I converted it over to drdavisinfinitehealth.com. I had so many websites and social media. I combined a lot of it into one website, this drdavisinfinitehealth.com. One of the things I’ve been advocating is that there’s a fungus, not a bacteria but a fungus called saccharomyces boulardii. It’s a cousin of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae that’s used to ferment wine and beer.

Saccharomyces boulardii is better adapted to the human body. It doesn’t take up long-term residence. It acts as a kind of a traffic cop in your microbiome that when you get exposed to this microbe, it does all kinds of cool stuff. It encourages growth, a proliferation of healthy bacterial species. It discourages unhealthy species including fungi like candida albicans, candida glabrata and malassezia. If you take it during a course of antibiotics, it minimizes the disruption of your microbiome because it’s not susceptible to antibiotics. It’s a fungus. We take this microbe and you could buy it in the US at Walgreens, Walmart, or Target as a product called florastor. Florastor has different names in other countries but in the US it is called florastor.

As often happens, they sell it in low numbers. What we do is take a capsule of the Florastor and empty it into some juice. Apple cider is a really good one. I recently made mango passion fruit juice. You have just had to make sure there are no preservatives in it. Look for potassium sorbate or those kinds of things. Don’t buy those, you want one with no preservatives because preservatives inhibit the microbe. Get a natural juice, it’s going to have a lot of sugar, but fermentation by saccharomyces boulardii reduces the sugar because it eats the sugar.

Take a capsule, empty it into any volume—a quarter, a gallon, whatever you want. Cap it lightly, not tightly, because you’re going to see within 24 hours as it sits on your kitchen counter it will be bubbling with carbon dioxide. Let it go for 48, not more than 72 hours refrigerated. You’re going to have sparkling juice. It’s effervescent, it’s delicious. You’re getting a wallop of saccharomyces boulardii that helps bring your bacterial and fungal microbiome back in order.

This is a great adjunct to the other things you’re doing like SIBO yogurt, the candibactin regimen, or whatever else you’re doing to reorder your microbiome. It’s a big advantage. Just be sure not to cap it tight because you’ll have an explosion because of so much carbon dioxide. It tastes like apple soda or whatever kind of juice you ferment. It’s effervescent like soda.

 

[01:23:59] Ashley James: It sounds like making water kefir where the bacteria eats the sugar and poops out the bubbles.

 

[01:24:02] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, yes.

 

[01:24:05] Ashley James: I love it. I have a dear friend who has lifelong constipation. Her parents had her on courses of antibiotics as a baby. I just think this is such a common problem. She has tried everything. Everything that I’ve given her because I have lots of health information. I’m like, all right, try this healing gut soup. Now, try this herb and try just everything and she says it’ll work for a bit. Then the second she gets off it, it’s a high-fiber vegetable soup. It’s really nice when she takes it but the moment she stops taking it, she’ll go back to incredible constipation. Nothing seems to last. Nothing seems to stick. Every supplement she’s tried, every diet change she’s tried, and it doesn’t have any lasting effect. She’s tried on over-the-counter probiotics. She has to be on high doses of oral magnesium just to keep her moving.

What would you say to someone who has lifelong constipation that has never been able to get it under control? I really feel like it’s a microbiome issue because she knows she was on antibiotics her entire childhood and it totally destroyed her gut. All the conventional ways of restoring the microbiome haven’t worked for her. What would you say for those who have very chronic constipation?

 

[01:25:32] Dr. William Davis: First, Ashley, I’m very impressed she knows you and she knows about magnesium because magnesium is a really big advantage. It abbreviates the so-called transit time. The amount of time it takes for food to pass through your GI tract. She’s already done that. That’s a great thing to do.

Another thing is called obstipation. It’s the most severe form of constipation that seems to respond to nothing. Getting rid of wheat and grains is important because of the gliadin-derived opioids. Of course, opioids are very constipating. Anybody who’s taking oxycontin or other opioids knows he gets terrible constipation from opioids. The gliadin protein in wheat and the related proteins and other grains become opioids and they are likewise extremely constipating for many people.

I had a woman way back when Wheat Belly first came out and she said, you’re not going to believe what happened to me. I moved my bowels once every three weeks. My abdomen is so distended. I’ve had numerous endoscopies and colonoscopies and all they tell me is to take laxatives, enemas, and stool softeners and nothing works. I went wheat and grain-free and I lost 30 pounds in a week.

For the first time in her lifetime, she’s moving her bowels every day. Then her family left the house for a day and she’s hungry for lunch. She says, what the heck, I’m going to make a sandwich. She had a sandwich with bread and it all came back. It took her about another week to get off of it and have her bowel movements returned. I’ve seen things like that. That’s called obstipation. The gliadin-derived opioids can be very potent.

The other thing here is likely she has, of course, methanogen overgrowth. That is an overgrowth of not bacteria and not fungi but these peculiar creatures called archaea. These are really fascinating creatures because they’re also called extremophiles. They live in the boiling water geysers in Yellowstone National Park. They live at the bottom of the ocean with extreme weight upon them. They survive in all kinds of extreme environments, the Dead Sea with extreme salinity and the human GI tract. No one knows how they got there or why they’re there, we are filled with methanogens. When they overgrow and possibly ascend into the upper GI tract, the telltale sign is unremitting constipation.

The newest AIRE device that came out literally two weeks ago, the old AIRE device only measured hydrogen gas. The newest device measures hydrogen gas and methane. She can do that and prove to herself whether she has methanogen overgrowth or she can do a stool analysis and see if she has an excess of so-called methanogens.

These are microbes like methanobrevibacters smithii and some others. One of the problems we have with methanogen overgrowth, it’s not quite clear how we best manage it. There’s some evidence that the Rifaximin antibiotic has an effect. There is some data and we’ve seen some successes with the Candibactin Herbal antibiotic regimen. There may be some other things, but they’re very poorly documented.

We’re not quite clear on exactly what to do with methanogen overgrowth, though I personally would consider the newest aire device and consider the Candibactin regimen. If you have methanogen growth, you’d likely have other disruptions in the microbiome. All the other things we do like saccharomyces boulardii sparkling cider, maybe the SIBO yogurt, all those kinds of things probably have value as well.

 

[01:29:26] Ashley James: The candibactin regimen is that in your book?

 

[01:29:30] Dr. William Davis: It is. It’s from metagenics. It’s Candibactin-AR and Candibactin-BR. I was very skeptical about these herbal antibiotics because when you combine things, when you say things like this, let’s throw in a little oil of oregano because it’s effective against E. Coli. Let’s throw a little this herb because it’s effective against this other microbe. You really can’t concoct antibiotics that way. There has to be formal evidence and these were concocted very sloppily. I was very skeptical.

Then there was a study from Johns Hopkins that compared incredibly Rifaximin to conventional antibiotics with two herbal antibiotic regimens. The ones I’ve mentioned, the Candibactin regimen and the dysbiocide regimen from Biotics Research. Lo and behold, the herbal antibiotic regimens outperformed the Rifaximin and the Rifaximin failures, of which there are many, responded to the herbal antibiotics. Lo and behold, some evidence that there are herbal antibiotics. Now, there are lots of other herbal antibiotics but they have no evidence for efficacy.

I have no reason to take them on faith. Those two regimens have worked for us. But lately, I’ve been inching towards this idea that you know what, if you have SIBO, not methanogen overgrowth, try the SIBO yogurt. There is one small study, I believe it was done in Italy looking at reuteri that suppress methanogens. But I’m skeptical, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s really going to play out in the real world. I wouldn’t advocate the reuteri alone for methanogen overgrowth and constipation.

 

[01:31:13] Ashley James: It sounds like a pretty stubborn microbe to get rid of like it lives in the Dead Sea and lives in geysers. It sounds like it’s going to take a bit more to move it out of the body.

 

[01:31:30] Dr. William Davis: Here’s an oddity. If we look at the microbiomes of indigenous populations like the ones that have been studied in Africa, South America, and elsewhere. They have methanogens more than we do. In other words, if we use them as a comparator to see what a healthy microbiome should look like, this is kind of puzzling, they have more methanogens than we do. I think what’s happening here—by the way, beyond constipation, methanogen overgrowth has not yet been blamed for any human disease. It’s not quite clear what these things are doing. I think what that means when you look at the Hodza, for instance like Maasai, Yanomami, or the people in the jungles of New Guinea, they have all these methanogens.

What the real story here is with the presence of methanogens per se may not be harmful. It’s the company it keeps in the rest of the microbiome. In other words, maybe those indigenous populations define with methanogens because they have more spirochaetes that we don’t have any of. They have more Prevotella and they don’t have any by sort of bacteria. They have a very different microbiome. Maybe it’s the setting that occurs. In other words, it’s not quite clear what we do about methanogen overgrowth but for the sake of your poor friend’s constipation, it’s still worth considering, like the candibactin regimen. I think in the future, we’re going to have to rethink this whole situation within the methanogens.

 

[01:33:09] Ashley James: Fascinating. I love it. I’m really excited to apply these to my life and get my friends and the whole neighborhood. I’m very excited to play with it. I’m very excited for my listeners to get your book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight.

Lastly, let’s talk about this idea of losing weight simply by focusing on supporting gut health. We touched on how by removing grains, you can lose the water weight. How even just with the Lactobacillus reuteri improves the oxytocin and you feel so good and you’re not hungry so it curbs the appetite. Beyond those things, how does your book help us lose weight by creating a healthy microbiome?

 

[01:34:09] Dr. William Davis: Back to your reuteri and oxytocin, you may recall one of the effects of the boost in oxytocin is the so-called anorexigenic effect. It really turns off your appetite. If you go wheat and grain-free, you’ve eliminated gliadin-derived opioid peptides. They’re not only constipating, but they’re also very potent appetite stimulants. That’s why you see people, for instance, have a big bowl of pasta, they’re filled to bursting, yet they’re still hungry. That’s the gliadin-derived opioid peptide appetite-stimulating effect.

Wheat and grain-free, you’re given tremendous control over your appetite. Cultivate reuteri, get a boost in oxytocin and you become profoundly in control. Food is great of course, but you are no longer tempted. Hunger feels completely different. It’s no longer that gnawing desperate feeling. I personally feel hunger as slight restlessness after I haven’t eaten for maybe six to eight hours. It’s a very different experience. The oxytocin effect is a big, big advantage.

Then there are microbes like Lactobacillus gasseri that have been shown in two studies to reduce waist circumference quite significantly. If you did an MRI or CAT scan of your abdomen and measure the cross-sectional area of visceral inflammatory fat, you would see dramatic reductions in visceral fat. It’s not quite clear why that is, but I think it’s because gasseri is so good at reducing endotoxemia. We call that endotoxemia. The breakdown products of microbes that enter the bloodstream is a big contributor to insulin resistance.

If we took somebody who is slender and active and measured their fasting insulin, it’s likely something two micro units per liter. If we took somebody who was pre-diabetic, had a big waist, a lot of visceral fat, and we measured their fasting insulin, it’s probably 30, 70, 100 microunits per liter. In other words, it’s not 20% worse, it’s manyfold worse. When you have high insulin, it causes weight gain and prevents weight loss. One of the big drivers of that high insulin is endotoxemia. If we get microbe gasseri that reduces endotoxemia, your body is allowed to reduce insulin and thereby release weight. Those are the two biggest strategies that I’m aware of.

 

[01:36:41] Ashley James: I love it. I just had another thought for cardiovascular health. Is there a microbiome fix for high blood pressure?

 

[01:36:53] Dr. William Davis: What we do with high blood pressure is we start with the diet, which alone has huge effects because we lose visceral fat. Insulin drops, we don’t have insulin resistance, and that releases fluid as you experience. That alone is huge. We add the nutrients largely lacking in modern light, vitamin D, magnesium, omega 3, fatty acids, and iodine. Those four things all together have a huge impact on further reducing insulin resistance and reducing blood pressure.

Just the magnesium alone reduces blood pressure. Then taking the steps to restore a healthy microbiome, thereby reducing inflammation and endotoxemia also reduces blood pressure. Getting fermented foods reduces blood pressure. Those microbes, let’s say kimchi or fermented sauerkraut, like Leuconostoc Mesenteroides and Pediococcus they reduce blood pressure. We’re not actually treating blood pressure, we’re addressing the factors that allow blood pressure to emerge in the first place, and almost people walk away with a blood pressure of like 106.

 

[01:38:07] Ashley James: That’s awesome. When we go to make our yogurts, like you’ve mentioned, the Lactobacillus gasseri, the reuteri, and all these other really great ones, can we take all of them and throw them in and make a concoction, or do they compete and we really should make individual batches with each one?

 

[01:38:26] Dr. William Davis: That’s a good question, Ashley. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You can do that, you can combine them, but it’s like your backyard garden. If all you have growing your gardener tomatoes, you’re going to have a ton of tomatoes. What if you grow tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and squash, you have fewer tomatoes. The same kind of things and it depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

If you’re a competitive athlete, you want to reduce the amount of muscle injury you have with extreme exertion. You should take Bacillus Coagulans, probably fermented by itself from natural effects. You want to get smoother skin, deeper sleep, and restore youthful muscle strength, that’s a reuteri effect, you probably want to ferment reuteri by itself. What if maybe you have somebody in their 20s who doesn’t really need to reverse age yet and would also like some better recovery, and maybe wants to have lower blood pressure and a smaller waist? Maybe we could co-ferment reuteri, gasseri, and bacillus coagulans. You can do that.

We make future batches of yogurt from a little bit of the prior batch. As you get further and further in subsequent batches, there can be shifts in relative numbers of different microbes. One of the things that happen with the SIBO yogurt is you’ll lose the reuteri probably by your 10th batch. That’s an instance where you want to re-inoculate or start from scratch again.

A lot of this is a work in progress, we have not done DNA analyses and all the different combinations. You can do this, you can combine microbes. This is very useful for younger people. All humans are supposed to have reuteri. What if you have a 10-year-old or an 18-year-old? They probably don’t want to superduper the high numbers were getting. They can co-ferment several microbes and still get reuteri replenished and get those other benefits as well.

 

[01:40:29] Ashley James: I love it. Does your book have a list of all these different ones that talk about each one of them like an encyclopedia, all the different microbes that we could be fermenting to repopulate to get specific outcomes?

 

[01:40:49] Dr. William Davis: Approach it like a menu at a restaurant. If you and I walk into a restaurant and the waitress hands us a menu, you don’t freak out and say, oh my God, I can’t order all these appetizers, main dishes, and desserts. We pick and choose the dishes we want. We do the same thing with the microbiome. Pick the microbes for the effect you want. If you want deeper sleep, greater libido, and smoother skin, let’s ferment the reuteri.

If you want a reduction in knee pain from arthritis, let’s ferment the bacillus coagulans. If you have a baby and you want that baby to sleep through the night, take longer naps, and have half as many bowels movements, thereby half as many diaper changes, have less asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, type 1 diabetes, autoimmune disease, have a higher IQ for a lifetime, and are less likely to become obese as adults. Let’s ferment Bifidobacterium infantis. You can pick and choose the microbe you want for the effect you want just like a restaurant.

 

[01:41:51] Ashley James: This is amazing, everything you listed. I’m really just imagining the listeners are just getting so excited to get your book, try it out, and start making this yogurt. You don’t have to eat bowls and bowls of it. You’re just having a few spoonfuls of this yogurt. Then the question that arises is, because there’s an acid on my stomach, doesn’t it kill all the bacteria anyway?

 

[01:42:16] Dr. William Davis: There’s a drop in numbers, but the microbes that were using largely survived stomach acid and bile. These microbes are fairly tolerant to the stomach. There are microbes that do indeed die, but the ones that we’re using are the ones that have been shown to be tolerant to those kinds of things. If you eat, for instance, 250 billion, maybe only 100 billion survived, but it’s sufficient to give you a big wallop of an effect.

By the way, the saccharomyces boulardii that we make those sparkling juices with, by the way, you don’t want to overdo those juices. They do still have some sugar. It cuts the fermentation process and cuts sugar by 50% or more. If anybody’s ever interested, you can get a hydrometer from your brewing. If you have a beer-making store they have these things called hydrometers. With just a few dollars, you can measure the sugar content of your juice so you can calculate how much sugar you’re getting. I suggest people drink no more than a quarter cup a couple of times three times a day so you’re not getting a bunch of sugar all at once.

 

[01:43:27] Ashley James: As we’re drinking it, is it making it into the intestines, is it making it to the colon?

 

[01:43:35] Dr. William Davis: The saccharomyces, in particular, are very tolerant. That’s a really big advantage. By the way, it’s also tolerant to alcohol. You can make an appletini and other martinis with it.

 

[01:43:50] Ashley James: Some of these are supposed to populate in the colon not in the small intestine, is that correct?

 

[01:43:55] Dr. William Davis: That is true. Unfortunately, some of the probiotic manufacturers have ignored this whole issue of SIBO which is a big miscalculation. They do things like double encapsulate their capsule so that it does not dissolve in the small bowel. I think that’s a real mistake because even if you don’t have SIBO, there are so many factors that are trying to make you have SIBO that it’s worth always having microbes in the small bowel to discourage E. Colis and Klebsiellas of the colon from ascending.

You’re just taking Ranitidine or Prozac for a few weeks is not to give you SIBO. Just having an all-you-can-eat vacation in Mexico where you drink too many margaritas over three days, that’s enough to give you SIBO. There are so many things conspiring to make those microbes rise in your small bowel that I think is worth having those release in the small bowel and not trying to keep them in the colon alone.

 

[01:44:55] Ashley James: Which makes the yogurt make so much sense.

 

[01:45:00] Dr. William Davis: Yes.

 

[01:45:01] Ashley James: I can talk to you all day. This is so fascinating. I’m really excited about your book. Of course the link to the book, Super Gut, is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast down the description, learntruehealth.com, and in whatever podcast directory you’re listening from right now. Dr. Davis, is there anything you’d like to share to wrap up today’s interview? Any homework? Any suggestions? Of course, we’re going to have the link to your website and everything you do. Also in the show notes that people can follow you and read your blog and continue to learn from you. Please, impart us with final words of wisdom.

 

[01:45:40] Dr. William Davis: As you know, Ashley, the lesson to pass on is that if you desire, if you want to, you have astounding power over your health. The last person you want to consult and how to become healthy is the doctor. The doctor has no idea. If you said, hey, doc, I’m interested in boosting my oxytocin by getting reuteri. I’m trying to make the sparkling apple cider so I get a big wallop of saccharomyces boulardii, what do you think about that?

You’re going to get glazed eyes, they’ll make fun of you, or say something like, hey, did you consult Dr. Google again? Sadly, people in healthcare have abdicated their responsibility because of making more money for their healthcare system. So important to emphasize that people have huge power.

Also, it’s important to know that what you’re doing is so crucial. People like you and me are no longer welcome on major media. We can’t get on TV. We don’t get interviewed by major magazines or newspapers because there’s too much money at stake from big pharma. Big pharma now funds so much of the media via direct consumer drug advertising and other means that people like you and me have missed on his health, nutrition can’t get in anymore. It means that podcasts, blogs, and social media are the ways we have to get these types of messages. It’s not coming from the doctors, it’s not coming from the media, we’ve got to get these messages out because they’re so powerful and they empower people.

 

[01:47:20] Ashley James: I am so thankful that you came on the show. Again, thank you so much for sharing this information. We really do need to empower ourselves. We really do need to educate ourselves and keep our minds so open that our brains would fall out. We just have to be willing to challenge the belief system we grew up in. We have to be willing to be the salmon.

I like to say this often on the show, if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. One in three people has a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. I think it’s one in three women and one in two men. It’s ridiculous. There’s a 50% chance that you’re going to get cancer if you just do what everyone else is doing. My listeners on the show don’t. They love to be the salmon, swim upstream, be the black sheep, and choose to take charge of their health.

Sometimes that’s overwhelming. Just taking one step at a time, just one little thing that you can do today to improve your health and continue doing that. If you want to have diabetes, one to two people are diabetic or pre-diabetic, obesity, it’s so common now. Heart disease and cancer are the top killers, and of course, diabetes is a trifecta because diabetes causes heart disease. Then there’s dementia. There’s just a deterioration, a quick-aging, quick deterioration, dying younger and younger.

If you want that in your life maybe not now but in the future, then do what everyone else is doing. Go eat what everyone else is eating. Just go to your doctor and get put on older drugs he wants to put you on. Going with the flow leads to being a statistic. We have to look at the statistics of health in our country and realize that doing what everyone else is doing is going to give you that life. You have to go against the grain. You have to throw the grains out and listen to Dr. William Davis. What I love is Dr. Davis brings science-based, holistic, you in charge of your health healing medicine that is backed by studies, that is backed by science. We don’t need to wait to get sick. We can take actionable steps today.

Definitely get Dr. Davis’s book, I’m so excited about this, and start to take these actionable steps and then do it with your friends and family. It’s so easy to hand a spoonful of yogurt to your husband, wife, sister, or whatever. Just hey, try eating every day. Just a few spoonfuls a few times a day, and here, drink this little sparkling beverage in here. Eat some fun fermented food I made. It doesn’t take cups and cups or bowls and bowls of it. Just a spoonful at a time, little tweaks at a time we can completely take back our health.

I know everyone is really excited about introducing the reuteri and having a better sex life, feeling amazing on oxytocin, and having better collagen and twice as fast healing. That alone I think has sold all of us on buying your book, Super Gut. Of course, following you on your blog and continue to learn from you.

Thank you for everything you do. I’d love to have you back on the show when you have more information. I know you’re just constantly digging into the bleeding cutting edge of all the science coming out. Please, come back to the show when you have more to share.

 

[01:51:10] Dr. William Davis: I will Ashley, happily, anytime.

 

[01:51:11] Ashley James: Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

 

[01:51:15] Dr. William Davis: Thank you, Ashley. Keep up your great work.

 

[01:51:17] Ashley James: I hope you enjoy today’s interview with Dr. William Davis. Wasn’t that amazing? I bet you’re so excited to jump on probiotics, go experiment, and make some yourself. I am going to put the links to what he recommends in the show notes of today’s podcast. Wherever you’re listening from, just go to the notes below of this recording, the description. You can go to learntruehealth.com or from wherever you’re listening, just click on the podcast and you’ll see the notes in the description. I’ll make sure I put the links there for the probiotics that he recommends to culture. Also yogurt maker and other stuff like that. Make sure that’s there so you could immediately go and give it a try.

Come join the learn true Facebook group and let us know how it goes. Of course, I’ve already shared my testimonial at the beginning of the interview. I look forward to hearing yours as well, I’m very, very excited. Please, join Learn True Facebook group, come share your experience, give it a shot.

I’m all about experimenting and the kitchen is such a fun place to do some great fermenting, culture some great probiotics, do some health experiments, and just try it for yourself. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and I’m just really excited for the journey that you’re on. If you’re new to this podcast, welcome. Please join the Learn True Health Facebook groups so that you can ask questions and jump into the community.

I also recommend going to takeyoursupplements.com as they are amazing health coaches that help you through a naturopathic doctor-created program. Get on exactly what your body is craving, what your needs, and what your body’s missing, as well as helping you understand the nutrients that certain foods are hurting you, certain foods are helping you. They help you in that way to guide you. So if you’re looking for a bit more hand-holding, definitely want to check out takeyoursupplements.com as well.

Dive into the group, into the community because we’d love to see you there. You can even use the search function in the Facebook group to dive in and learn from so many amazing people from past conversations and start your own new conversation. Just throw some questions out there and it’s a very supportive group. I’m there every day helping people and I look forward to meeting you and seeing you there as well.

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