The 3 Foods I Eat Everyday To LOSE WEIGHT & Lower Blood Sugar! | Dr. Mark Hyman

we have massively messed up our guts we have to really understand that gut is central to our health how do you hit the reset button on your gut why do we need to pay attention to the gut and why is it so crucial for all aspects of health especially longevity which you're focused on a lot right yeah i mean listen this is the century of the gut honestly the microbiome has taken off as a field of research in the last 20 years and we've learned so much about the relationship between our gut health and the rest of our health and it turns out that if your gut isn't healthy then you're not healthy if your gut is messed up inside we call it dysbiosis it's a huge risk factor for heart attacks strokes cancer obesity weight gain diabetes alzheimer's autism autoimmune disease allergies asthma and of course all the digestive disorders of irritable bowel and reflux inflammatory bowel and bloating i mean you name it the microbiome plays a role even longevity in my longevity research it's astounding to see the changes that happen in our microbiome as we age and the healthiest people as as they get older have healthy microbiomes the centenarians poop is much healthier than some young guys poop who's 60 or 70 who's got all kinds of health conditions so it's really central and the question is why is our gut so messed up and how do we fix it and the reason our guts mess up is our processed diet is a lack of fiber i mean we used to eat 150 grams of fiber per person a a day now as hunter gathers now we eat about eight to 15 and that's why so much constipation exists and you know in my book i talk about dennis burkett who is a a british physician who has lived in africa as a medical missionary and he's noticed this huge difference in the health between the urban and city dwellers in africa and the rural hunters and gatherers who were basically genetically the same and he noticed that the stool weight of the hunter gathers was two pounds a day and that of the urban city dwellers was four ounces like a little teeny turd you know so uh that he didn't know why he didn't quite understand but he saw this huge correlation between the size of your poop correlate with the size of the amount of fiber you're consuming and long-term health risks i mean elephants have i think 50 pounds of poop a day or 50 kilos or something crazy like that because they're eating so much stuff so we we have to learn how to rebuild and reset our guts and the reason they're messed up is our processed diet c-sections lack of breastfeeding you know overuse of certain drugs like antibiotics acid blockers anti-inflammatories the glyphosate in our food supply which is on 70 of all crops the microbiome killer so there's so many reasons toxins pesticides herbicides we are just a culture that is gut busting a society that is gut busting and so we need to be proactive about maintaining and optimizing our gut health which is really why we created this product gut food as a multivitamin for the gut nobody's really talked about that how do we keep our gut healthy i mean yes there's programs and products and treatments for people with severe gut issues but how does the average person just keep their gut healthy with a low friction opportunity to actually add in the things we know are necessary on a daily basis to keep your gut healthy probiotics polyphenols and prebiotics which you're going to talk about today yeah we're going to dive all into prebiotics and the thing is much bigger than any kind of product that you're affiliated with or any companies that we work with or anything like that this is really about education and education on these topics for low-hanging things diet first always say it diet first that's the first thing that we need to focus on so on that note there's a prebiotic food that you're a huge fan of and it's been shown to help out with weight loss improved metabolism and blood sugar and that's called resistant starch what is resistant starch and what are some of the common examples that are available to people out there yeah i mean so resistant starch it means that rather than being absorbed by the body it's not absorbed right so it's resistant to absorption so if it can't get absorbed and you can't use it as calories or fuel what happens to it well it's eaten by the bugs in your gut now if it's the right kind of starch called resistant starch it actually starts to fertilize the good bugs because they start to eat this starch and they grow and the good guys grow and this seems to have brought implications for improving metabolism for lowering obesity lowering insulin resistance curing diabetes it's really impressive and it's in certain types of foods for example plantains green bananas lentils i drew some artichokes there's a whole bunch of these have resistant starch that can be taken and eaten on a regular basis that will help to actually create a better gut environment so it's really beautiful way to eat and actually not get the calories get the taste and have your gut be really healthy and happy at the end of it so mark you just listed a bunch of them what are a couple of your favorites and how are you incorporating them into your diet on a regular basis well plantains are great i love those you can stir fry them cook them uh you can put them in smoothies lentils are great you can make you know lentil soup those are really great resistant starch just to interject really quickly on the plantain side plantains definitely have like less total sugars compared to like bananas and stuff but being the blood sugar guy people are always asking right you're like okay you're saying this thing is good for you know being a resistance charge and how well do i be mindful about incorporating my diet um yeah my resistance instructors also tend to help with insulin resistance and gluten sensitive and insulin sensitivity so they're not as having these big spikes and they're actually being consumed not by you but by the bacteria and they produce something called short chain fatty acids which are incredibly important as fuel for the gut cells as regulators of signals of cancer risk and are so important for your overall health and and that's what's so beautiful about prebiotics is that they help grow the right bacteria which are producing in these short chain fatty acids including butyrate that are so protective against a whole host of diseases yeah and also is it i understand that green bananas are also in that category and they bring green green bananas that means that they are like unripe bananas unripe and there's less sugar content that's there yeah but they don't taste that good but you're going to taste that good but you could kind of figure out how to make them you could cook there's like powders that are out there as well do you are your favorite there's powders and there's there's also you can take potatoes for them like little tiny potatoes that are um that are like the peruvian potatoes that are already lower in starch and sugar you can cook them and cool them in there and then you can eat them that way in like a potato salad and those are more resistant starches so there's a lot of ways to sort of make resistant starch but but i think the naturally occurring ones are the best like lentils and plantains and green bananas sure and following a bunch of tips like the glucose goddess who was recently on your podcast was talking about you know putting clothes on your carbs adding a little bit of fat right having them with uh you know a bunch of fiber fiber fiber those are things that are going to be uh helping and making sure you get the benefits without the blood sugar impact oh so funny i just i just did a talk at a university called queen's university in charlotte south carolina and this woman was interviewing me who was like a top chef and she was really great she's a chef and she has to do a tasting contest of desserts so she's freaking out that she's going to gain weight because she has to test eat all these desserts for the next month and i said well i have to do is take something called pgx which is polyglycoplex basically made from cognac root which is a very highly viscous fiber that absorbs 50 times its weight in water so i say just take that about 15 minutes before you dessert it won't spike your blood sugar you'll be guys yeah pgx is a great product uh shout out to the company natural factors i think is that's right natural factors really great products it's kind of a hack you take that before you eat and you do much better yes although it's tough to drink a big glass of water with it you got to make sure you drink like at least two glasses of water yeah yeah with it if you're gonna take it okay so can you talk a little bit about the compounds that are produced when our gut bugs eat prebiotics why are these so critical for overall health well these compounds i mentioned are short chain fatty acids and that's a big mouthful um but these are the the the products that are produced by bacteria when they're digesting the right fibers and including prebiotic fibers and you know yes you know we talked about resistance charge but there are also lots of other foods that just have prebiotic fibers in them and the gut bacteria love these like uh like legumes beans dandelion greens garlic artichokes asparagus onions cognac root which is what i was talking about the pgx cocoa actually flax seeds jicama seaweed and polyphenol-rich foods these are all prebiotic foods so we need to include these in our diet so when i go to the grocery shop i'm going to get aspara asparagus and artichokes and onions because i know these are prebiotic foods they're going to help my microbiome i think about it or i'm going to buy jicama and put in my salad because it's a prebiotic food and i want to actually increase the food for my good bugs so i'm shopping thinking about this all the time and the reason they're important is they produce these compounds short-term fatty acids butyrate is one of the most important ones and we know that butyrate is such as not just for providing fuel for the clonic cells to keep them intact and everything working but it's actually also a cancer regulator an inflammation regulator it regulates risk of heart disease and cancer and diabetes so there's so many benefits it's one of the most important molecules in the body butyrate and we don't have enough of this and i test my patients stool all the time and i see so many people are just so low in butyrate and it really is necessary because it's necessary to keep your metabolism up to reduce inflammation to prevent cancer and and to help heal a leaky gut and prevent a leaky gut so when you for example have low butyrate levels you can't maintain the integrity of your gut lining that causes a leaky gut you get food allergies food sensitivities you get leakage of bacteria you get systemic inflammation that leads to more weight gain more inflammation more heart disease more cancer more dementia more depression i'm actually going on so basically when you have prebiotic foods it helps the gum bugs flourish and then they can replicate they produce their vitamins like vitamin k and biotin they regulate your hormones and they basically remove toxins but when you don't have these good bugs you're kind of screwed well one of the prebiotics that's in your formula that you put together gut food is acacia fiber talk to us a little bit about that and why it was one of the things that you were using when your gut was messed up and you were dealing with a lot of leaky gut which had a whole host of challenges yeah for sure so acacia fiber is a really wonderful prebiotic fiber it's well tolerated often more than other fibers because they can be part of the system it makes you feel full it helps control blood sugar and in cholesterol it's an antioxidant and it helps really help correct a leaky gut and what's really quite amazing about acacia fibers is it's actually been studied to lower a whole set of cytokines uh basically through lowering something called nf kappa b and if kappa b is what we call a transcription factor it's a it's a compound that the body makes to tell your genes that there's a problem and to make more inflammatory molecules called cytokines and then you get all these cytokines produced like tnf alpha in interleukin-6 and interleukin-8 which are very inflammatory and you get kind of you know all these problems when you have inflammation so when you when you actually have acacia fiber it lowers the nf kappa b it lowers il-6 it lowers the tnf alpha these dangerous cytokines and it actually increases the anti-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin-10 so you've got to break and you've got to accelerate it on your on your immune system right so you don't want the accelerator going all the time you want the brake going all the time so you know we have just so much in our culture in our life in our environment our diet our toxic load that drives inflammation and so if you're if you're not getting compounds that help to lower that you're actually accelerating aging and obesity in all the chronic illnesses so it's super important to make sure your cytokines are balanced and and that's really key and that means making sure you have enough of the prebiotic foods it produces short chain fats and and take care of it and that's the acacia fiber is another one of the essential fibers it's so key i love it there's another prebiotic that's also included in the formula that i'd love to have you talk about galactooligosaccharides it's a mouthful g-o-s g-o-s this is often referred to um what are the benefits and some of the research show about gos well you know it's quite it's quite amazing i've taken this product uh quite a while and and it's it's powerful product because it it is so good at feeding the good guys and in seven in in 14 days and bloating is a huge problem for people like the food baby thing it was a real thing i promise you people i mean my patients send me pictures of it all this i look at my food baby i'm like but 71 reduction in bloating at 14 days a 92 reduction in pain a 71 reduction in flatulence or gas that's a big deal and these are really debilitating symptoms for people and what's also interesting is that it doesn't just affect the bloating gas and digestive symptoms but it has indirectly effects on the immune system so you see a almost a 60 60 increase in phagocytosis which means your macrophages which are little pac-man that go around and clean up all the problems and viruses infections are increased in function and natural killer cells which are really critical for fighting infections and viruses and cancer there was a 106 increase in natural killer cell function in 10 weeks that's impressive and so that's what helps you fight viruses and cancer and there's also a higher level of interleukin 10 which is one of the anti-inflammatory cytokines is often taking a prebiotic this is how powerful they are okay mark switching to the next part of this discussion so typically when people think of the gut they think probiotics but what we're seeing is that prebiotics are just as important especially for creating these beneficial compounds that improve digestion and help prevent even chronic diseases that are out there top ones that we all know about ideally this means eating a high fiber diet so let's break down a typical plate of food for you how much fiber and prebiotics are in that plate of food and how much fermented food and how much protein and how much fat just describe your typical meal sure i mean i think i think it's important understand that that you know probiotics are like the seeds you put in the garden prebiotics are like the compost you put on the ground to make the seeds grow so it's really important to think of them together and the polyphenols are like super fuel on all that stuff and it's just a it's a trifecta of a powerful set of compounds that really have never been put together in a product before and that's really why we created gut food and and when you when you look at particularly my particular day i tend to eat a lot of fiber rich foods and i love those foods because i just like them but it includes a lot of veggies so tons of raw veggies and salads cooked veggies um and i cooked onions we learned last time you can't have raw onions cooked onions and i do i eat like for example uh the other night we had i had as a meal i had a duck breast i had shiitake mushrooms which are also very high in certain uh compounds like poly um polysaccharides that are helpful for immune function uh we had a spare i had artichokes i had steamed artichokes which have again prebiotic fibers and also folate and detoxification compounds i had a i think a japanese sweet potato which again is full of fiber and also phytochemicals and polyphenols and also uh i had asparagus i had stir-fried asparagus with ginger so i'm providing all the spices and the asparagus which also the prebiotic food into my diet as just a natural part of cooking and what i like to eat so i've sort of learned to include some core foods in my diet on a regular basis that i know are both probiotic foods and probiotic foods and also fermented foods so i have i have miso i have kimchi i have sauerkraut i like pickles being a good jew so basically and i eat a lot of these foods and then and then i'll have uh i i i'll make sure i eat uh those are probiotic foods and i'll eat the prebiotic foods like i mentioned and the polyphenols so i tend to eat a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables and as fats go i tend to stay away from refined oils avocados are great nuts and seeds are great all extra virgin olive oil is great so i tend to stick to those fats and and protein is just your palm size serving of protein so whatever if you're three years old or you're you know 50 years old whatever your size your palm is that's about the protein needs you have per meal and that can be plant proteins or animal proteins but the plant proteins you typically need to eat a lot more to get the same grams of protein if there's one prebiotic food the people that are listening today somebody's like you know i'm not eating any of the periodic foods there's one that could be a great starting place maybe a little easier on the palette but still beneficial to them what's that one prebiotic food that if they're not including today they should think about incorporating well it's kind of a fun one and and it sounds counterintuitive but it's noodles and not just any noodles but a special kind of noodles called shirataki noodles and these noodles are japanese noodles that are made from cognac root this this fiber i talked about that was in pgx it's a prebiotic food but also has tremendous power to slow the absorptive glucose and fatty acids and other things that actually drive weight gain and obesity and you can enjoy them because they have no calories and they have no carbohydrates it's just fiber so you can make pasta with them you can put them in soup uh they're delicious and and you can buy them now pretty much everywhere you can buy them online they're called miracle noodles miracle noodles yeah the shirataki those they have weird ones that are made from soy but get the ones that are made from kanyaku that's k-o-n-j-c not cognac like the drink uh and and that's that's kind of a fun one um we make sure fries at our place all the time by the way we have no affiliation with this company it's just something nice that people like to do exactly it's a good way to get you off a lot of the refined carbohydrates if you're eating pasta on a regular basis nothing wrong with enjoying some pasta here and there we had some pasta last night as a special treat we went to a friend's restaurant heirloom grains and you know heirloom grains and they're bringing in from europe and other stuff but that's not how we eat on a typical basis so miracle noodles are a nice way to like mix it up and get some of that texture that people enjoy from noodles and pasta but not have it be so detrimental to your metabolic health absolutely and then i think if you really want to you know get into it you can have more artichokes and plantains and how easy is it to cook artichokes they can look intimidating oh my god artichoke is the easiest thing in the world you just stick it you can you basically steam it for an hour you have to make sure enough water in the pan or boil it and then take it out and i just dip it in olive oil and vinegar and i just that's it you don't do the oven you do steam it i just steam it can i just wait it's usually about an hour depending on the size yard like a little pot and a bamboo steamer do you use i'll use i have like a pasta pot which i don't really use for pasta anymore but i i fill the bottom up with water and it's got a metal strainer and i put them in there yeah you can also boil them too you can just boil them that's fine uh i like to seam them but yeah and then when they're soft and the leaves pull off easily you take it out after about an hour and then you just dip the leaves in order it takes a while to eat dip the leaves in the olive oil and vinegar and you scrape off the yummy parts of your teeth they taste great and if you're not used to eating them on a regular basis maybe start off small initially and then you can slowly work your way up you just don't want to eat the hairy parts in the middle yeah you have to get to the heart of the artichoke when you have to take off the hairy bits in the middle but it's fun it's an adventure it's an adventure for sure so mark as part of this mini-series we haven't gotten to many community questions but we'll toss in some community questions here and uh these are from your audience your doctor having plus audience your instagram audience your podcast audience so let's jump right in so first question can you take pre and probiotics at the same time absolutely you want to because you want to fertilize the bacteria so you want to fertilize the bacteria in your gut that already there but also if you want to help you know grow a little bit more of the actual ones you're giving so it's certainly fine to take them at the same time the one caveat if you're taking prebiotics and probiotics and you have bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth in your gut it can create a war and you can often feel a lot worse so and what's an example of that happening happening or taking place well i mean if you start taking probiotics and all of a sudden you feel like you know you had somebody come with a tire pump and pump up your intestines and you're bloated and distended and it's painful that's a clue that maybe there's something rotten in denmark and you need to go figure out what's going on in your gut that needs weeding is it a bacterial overgrowth fungal overgrowth it is a parasite then you can kind of make a more coherent stand on what actually is working or not and often one way you know uh different companies will do this is you're taking a prebiotic it's something new to you or you're taking a probiotic you start small and you build your dose up so your body can get used to it and i think that's even in your recommendations around gut food as you start typing for sure start slow and build up slow yeah exactly and i think there's instructions on how to do that um what are your thoughts about jicama and is it one of the best uh probiotics that are out there different addicts sorry jacob is a great prebiotic so if you know what jicama is it's like a i think a mexican kind of south american south american any kind of vegetable that is like a big white root or something and you you basically peel it and you cut into thin little matchstick slices and you can throw it in your salad i love it i love putting my salad it's crunchy it's kind of got a nice taste to it and it's a great prebiotic so it's a go-to for sparking up your salad with a prebiotic fiber and it's been really interesting to see a lot of companies start to incorporate jicama in their products your friend mona my friend mona they have their product jicama spelled with an x we link to the show notes it's nice uh beverage mixer that people can use for just by itself for solo and then our buddy junaid and we invest in his company's farmer's juice one of the ways you know green juices like spark spike people's blood sugar like so much because they have so much fruit juice inside of that and he used jicama to improve the taste but not spike people's blood sugar and i'm so excited about all those companies those are two of them and there's plenty of others that are out there that are using jicama juice in their products so if your diet is in check and pretty pristine do you still need to supplement with prebiotics and probiotics i mean not necessarily i mean if you're if you're eating 100 grams of fiber a day and good luck let me see that and you're eating the right prebiotic foods and you you're really doing the right things by your gut in terms of your overall diet i i think it's not necessarily necessary to take prebiotics but for most of us out there our guts are pretty messed up and we need a daily dose of something to help now if we're not going to be eating at 3am i'm traveling right now so it's i can't always control what i'm getting i try my best i mean we had seaweed salad for lunch because i know that's got prebiotic fibers in it that that helps me but i i do like to have the insurance of having something on a daily basis knowing that every there's so many things that disrupt our gut and it's just a good insurance policy to get a multivitamin for my gut every day mark i'd love to get your thoughts on this you know that study around the 150 grams 100 grams of fiber there's a gentleman named justin sonnenberg i believe he's uh from stamford university and he was one of the ones that was looking at one of the tribes in in africa and looking at their diet the hunter-gatherer tribes that are out there exactly and in that paper a little bit of the controversy that's been there online is that some people in more of like what you i guess we call like the carnivore community they talk about how a lot of these hunter-gatherer tribes like fiber was more of a fallback food now justin recently an interview that he did with andrew huberman who's also been on your podcast and we'll link to in the show notes he was saying that yes it's a fallback food if they would prefer honey all day they would prefer to eat honey all day but they just can't get honey all day they would prefer meat all day but hunting is a little bit tough and not always are animals there so whether it was done by design or by default he's saying they're still having this amount of fiber in their in their diet so of course they have the same food addictions that we have so if you could give them processed food all day they would choose processed food all day it's not like they have some enlightened idea around food and just any thoughts on that big picture like any extrapolation you want to add in because some people would say well when they can get access to meat and honey they would choose and they would prefer that so since we have meat and honey all around us you know why do we need to be having things like fiber as a regular part of our diet um it's just one of the arguments that's out there i mean listen if you're a carnivore um your your gut microbiome changes very fast if you're an omnivore it's different if you're a vegan is different so what is the right microbiome that's really the question is how do you get a healthier microbiome and i think you know we still haven't figured that out you know we know we can measure diversity which is important the complexity of the ecosystem we can measure markers like searching fatty acids inflammatory markers we can look at what bugs are there what are not there what's growing if there's parasites all all that is helpful you know what i find challenging about some of these microbiome tests is they only look at the microbes they don't look at the function of the gut and as a functional medicine doctor that's what i care about is what are these bacteria doing what are they for example uh some kids i'll see who have autism very very low short chain fatty acids of for example butyrate which is anti-inflammatory and very high levels of something called propionic acid which is very inflammatory and propionic acid has been shown animal studies to increase autism and autism behavior and if you look at breast-fed kids versus bottle-fed kids they have different short-chain fatty acids the breastfed kids have high butyrate because their bacteria are being fed by the breast milk with the oligosaccharides that are in the breast milk basically the oligosaccharides are a prebiotic right this is a prebiotic made by the body for the bacteria for babies in breast milk that's what it is and if you take formula there's no prebiotic oligosaccharides and so instead of getting butyrate these kids get high propionic acid and that's why we see you know breastfeeding is so important correlated with better health outcomes and where maybe bottle feeding is leading to increases in propionic acid which can have adverse consequences for cognitive function for autism and learning difficulties add and lots more so i think it's important to realize that our diet really matters and that the you know prebiotics that are in our food really are key and so historically if you know if we were hunter gatherers you know we didn't have a choice for you to eat whatever we could we got root a berry you know some tree bark or whatever like and and that's what we had to do and and that was more of a natural environment for them it was yes i mean if all all we had was sugar that's all we'd want to eat we'd be really happy but we'd get very sick but they had a wide variety of foods a far more complex diet than we do the whole variety of roots and berries and plant foods and lots of different kinds of animals and also they'll eat the bone marrow they'll eat all sorts of stuff so really really important to think about how do we get the right balance of things for us in a way that that isn't going to be too onerous but that it's going to be designed to fertilize the right bugs and not grow the wrong books so another question we have from the community is a prebiotic good for people who have ibs what are some of the considerations that people who have ibs have to think about yeah so you know generally when i think about someone with a gut issue is is the weeding seating and feeding program and i think the the ibs group can be constipation can be diarrhea but typically there's a component of bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth so i really am very careful about when i'm working with these patients not overdo stuff too fast with the pre and probiotics i usually give them a week or two of weeding clearing out the bad bugs with herbs sometimes medications antifungals and then we see the body can be able to tolerate these things there's not a war going on all right next question from the community what's the difference in digestive enzymes and how are digestive enzymes different than pro and prebiotics well drew you know in order to have a healthy functioning gut you need a lot of things going on you need to be able to adjust your food you need the right stomach acid you need digestive enzymes from your pancreas you need salivary enzymes from your mouth you need the right fibers and prebiotics to actually help you know grow the right bacteria you need probiotics you need postbiotics you know like you need all the things you need to actually keep a gut healthy and so when we're thinking about repairing and fixing the gut we think about all those things and i see people with low pancreatic function low hydrochloric acid and so sometimes giving them supplements with pancreatic enzymes or more plant-based digestive enzymes along with hydrochloric acid can actually be very helpful so it's really depending on the person but if people have a lot of sibo and bacterial overgrowth and digestive upset and undigested food in their stool or on their lab tests we see low pancreatic elastase we can actually help to to treat them an effective way by providing those enzymes for people so it's not either or it's it's a select group that might need them but when you need them it can be really helpful then when you get your gut healthy you don't need them so much anymore now sometimes when people are going out to restaurants or they're eating foods like gluten and dairy which people partake in every so often you know it's a part of metabolic flexibility uh some of my friends might take digestive enzymes with them to like the restaurant or whatever do you ever do that and yeah there's actually gluten digest enzymes there's there's lactase enzymes there's things that help with dietary and so forth so you can use them to sort of mitigate problems that you might have if you go out and cheat a little bit but depends on who you are if you're a celiac you don't want to cheat at all right if you having severe dairy reactions you want to cheat at all but for some of us you know who just may have a little upset his tummy or whatever i mean i think it's fine i think the goal is the ultimate way to eat in a way that actually is going to rebuild your gut so you're more resilient that's the whole game here in functional medicine it's not restriction but freedom and metabolic degrees of freedom by optimizing your body's systems and once you do that like i said before i couldn't anything for years without being sick without causing rashes all over my body my eyes getting red my tongue getting sores my stomach bloating my having severe brain fog fatigue i mean it was it was so immediate and i i knew exactly like what was going on at the time this was like almost 30 years ago i didn't know all that i know now the microbiome wasn't even a word we knew how to work with the gut but you know it was really tough and and it was hard to reset the system and and for me it was challenging because i had mercury poisoning and if you have something like that you can do everything you want you can take all the prebiotics polyphenols everything you want unless you get rid of that you're not going to get better so mark i think it's a perfect opportunity to do a little bit of a recap you know we've been doing this multi-part series and we've just covered polyphenols to start then we covered probiotics and then we covered prebiotics all under this greater umbrella of we live in a world that has never been more destructive to our gut so we want to be more mindful to take care of our gut because health and disease starts in the gut so give us a little bit of recap of some of the top points that we learned through this multi-part series and we'll have more to come soon but at least so far where are we at yeah i mean the first high level is we have to understand as a culture we have massively messed up our guts by our industrial process diet our lack of fiber our lack of phytochemicals and polyphenols by the increasing c-section rates lack of breastfeeding the use of antibiotics and gut-busting drugs like advil and aspirin so it creates a perfect storm for a disaster of a gut environment that promotes all sorts of downstream problems from not just digestive issues which are the number one reason people visit the doctor but all sorts of chronic diseases from heart disease to obesity to cancer to diabetes to dementia to autoimmune diseases to allergies to asthma to autism to add i mean i could go on and on so we have to really understand that gut is central to our health to every aspect of our health and so we really have come up with a framework for helping people to reboot their gut how do you hit the reset button on your gut well it involves involves diet so upgrading your diet and the quality of the food you're eating increasing the fiber content polyphenol content phytochemicals super important second we need to supplement with the right things like a multivitamin for a gut with the right prebiotics the right probiotics and the right polyphenols to help so for example in our product gut food we have lactospore probiotic which is a spore based probiotic very well researched we have uh galacto uh lacto-oligosaccharides which are incredible prebiotic food acacia fibers are prebiotic we have something called mucosae which is prickly pear and also olive leaf extract along with quercetin which are incredible polyphenols for helping boost the good bacteria in the gut for for example acromancy mesenophilia is highly responsive to these it's exactly what it sounds like mucinophilia means it's mucin loving so it creates a mucous layer in the gut to prevent a leaky gut so we have all these ingredients that are designed scientifically to optimize the gut environment to be like a multivitamin for the gut and to help people really create a baseline that they can rely on it's like why do you need a multivitamin well because we're not eating 800 different food crops anymore and a lot of our food's depleted and we've had all these problems so in a perfect world we should not need all these things right and i always say oh you don't need a vitamin but only under certain conditions right you only hunt and gather your own wild food you only drink pure clean water breathe purely in the air have no environmental exposures have no chronic stress sleep eight to nine hours a night and exercise all the time now if that's you no you don't need a multivitamin but everybody else yes so the same thing with a gut multivitamin in a perfect world you wouldn't need this maybe if you're hadza living in the jungle and you're eating in you know in africa all the wild stuff and you're doing your thing no they probably don't need all this stuff but for the rest of us in modern society absolutely people don't understand how so many of our issues come from the gut and how easy it is to diagnose it and treat it and we use tests that traditional doctors just don't do like we have a different set of uh lenses a different set of of filters that we can sort through information and data and ask questions that traditional doctors can't like how do you measure a leaky gut yeah how do you look at the microbiome in the gut how do you look at the digestive function of the gut how do you actually start to treat it in a different way and i think your your first case is just so rich with uh a story that is so common that i i just love you to share this because i think i think uh everybody's gonna resonate with this story and by the way i've never seen this patient as your patient but i have i've literally seen the same story a hundred times or maybe five hundred times or a thousand times in my practice so the same freaking story right so tell us about this so it was a 24 year old gentleman who came in to see me and was really struggling over the last year with his digestive system he was having a lot of bloating and gas pain in his stomach every time he ate he was having diarrhea and sometimes he was getting constipated and um he he went to his traditional uh gi doctor and they told him you have irritable bowel and um but he he wasn't getting any better right and he was just really he was because he was having so much stomach pain he had lost some weight so he wasn't you know he was on the thin side to begin with but because he was having stomach pain when he ate he wasn't able to eat as much and he was even losing more weight he was feeling really weak and tired and sad depressed right and so for him the time well for everyone the timeline is so important right that's what we are we learn we learn in functional medicine is that gathering that information learning about that individual patient's story seeing so we start we start we start with a history with the mother and her pregnancy right and the birth and where they breast fat and when they took antibiotics whether they were sick as a kid what happened when they were introduced to food when they got gluten when they got dairy we ask all these questions so when someone comes in with irritable bowel the average gi guy is not asking all these questions right so why do we ask all those questions so you know because because for this gentleman for example you know he really didn't have stomach pain before a year ago but what we found out is that when he was a kid he had ear infections so probably because he was eating scary probably right so it's such a common connection i remember being in the er liz and i this patient came in and this little boy kept coming back and like the toddler was coming back over and over to the er with ear infections and yeah just so inflamed and i said how was he like like did you breastfeed yeah so when did he start getting ear infections when we started formula and dairy and milk and i'm like oh okay this is even before i knew about functional medicine i know and i was like well maybe you shouldn't eat dairy yeah yeah the kid was fine you know right that's such a such a common connection i mean even my son with when he started dairy he got asthma and um eczema it was it's it's unfortunately such a common connection so for this child he had a lot of ear infections and um and and and eczema and so he was on antibiotics about once or twice a year in his childhood and he really didn't think that was very much yeah he's like that's not you know that wasn't too much but you know it makes a huge impact on the microbiome as we're learning and then he started to have acne as a teenager maybe because of dairy more right um or or some of the in the imbalances in the microbiome right when you screw up the gut with antibiotics or a c-section or lack of breastfeeding then you get often more acne yes you know we treat acne on the from the from the top in as opposed to the inside out which is actually where it works much better and this this gentleman was given uh low-dose antibiotics for two years so then he took even more antibiotics and so this history of antibiotics sort of set him up and about a year ago he had some sort of stomach bug so some probably viral stomach infection and then since that time he started to have all these digestive issues and was losing weight and so this is a common story people are so sad they're sort of smoldering a bunch of insults over the course of their life you know maybe they're a c-section antibiotics as a kid they took acne antibiotics they got you know they're eating a crappy diet whatever and all of a sudden something happens and then boom the body right can't take it anymore and it creates some kind of disease yeah but if you look at the story you can often map out exactly how this happens that connection with his acne with his asthma with his digestive issues with those antibiotics that's that story we we often see and we're not making this up there's so much science that shows that your gut microbiome plays a role in acne and eczema and asthma that it plays i mean we're we're actually doing this at cleveland clinic now we're studying asthma and looking at how the microbiome plays a role and how it affects inflammation all these various factors that most doctors just don't pay attention to right so with him as we do with most of our patients we do food first right so we said okay we've got to really focus on this person's diet and help him start feeling better right away so he can start to eat more and regain some of his strength so we pulled away inflammatory foods we took them off of gluten and dairy while we were waiting for tests to come back um you know sometimes we will do some tests that look at of course we'll test for celiac disease um or which is a big cause of leaky gut yep that's for sure probably the number one and he didn't have that but but by the way you don't have to have celiac disease to actually have a problem right you can have they call it non-celiac gluten sensitivity yeah i would estimate it probably affects 20 percent of the population and i think if you look at the antibody levels you can get a clue which most doctors don't look at and i read a study that autistic kids and schizophrenic patients often have 20 of them have antibodies to gluten yeah and it may not be full blown celiac absolutely and and even you know irregardless of even if it people are negative totally for celiac um if they have increased intestinal permeability they start reacting to a lot of different foods yeah so then you start to see with that with that leaky gut as we talked about before right the coffee filter and things are coming through then the body's reacting to lots of foods that it maybe never reacted to before so they're not true allergies they're more like sensitive sensitivities and because of and the real thing is it's because of this increased intestinal permeability so our job is we have to heal that increased intestinal permeability so that they don't have to be so restrictive with their foods and we still always want them to be on a healthy diet but but we want to we want to relax those restrictions over time we most of the time we can yeah and so so it's part of the approach of functional medicine we start them on the elimination diet so eliminating all the inflammatory foods gluten dairy processed foods all that stuff and then you remove right that's the remove right the five r is we can remove right replace re-inoculate repair pair rebalance balance yep and and we'll go into each of those because they're really important but the the the next step is also there's other things we may need to remove there's a test we need to do so what kind of tests would you look at as a functional medicine doctor that you wouldn't see at a traditional doctor's office that give us a roadmap of how to treat these patients right so we did a stool test that looked at his microbiome and what we noticed is that there was an overgrowth of unhealthy bacteria and unhealthy yeast so he had this you know probably because of years of antibiotics he developed this dysbiosis this imbalance in the bacteria and yeast and so there was an overgrowth of the unhealthy things it's like weeds having a lot of weeds in your garden yeah right right it's not it's it's not always like one of those you think of a stomach infection and you're getting really really sick you're throwing up or having diarrhea this is this it's a it's an imbalance and it's called dysbiosis but that imbalance causes a lot of symptoms in people when you have the wrong bacteria and the wrong yeast levels you can get a lot of bloating after you eat you can get a lot of fatigue after you eat you can get those symptoms of constipation and diarrhea and and that causes this inflammation in the digestive system so all of your digestive enzymes don't work well so you're not breaking down your food well you're not absorbing your nutrients well and it becomes this vicious cycle that people are dealing with and we see all the time yeah it's so it's so powerful so so you know you know when i see this patient i'm like okay you don't do all the tests but sometimes you get stuck you look at you know various tests look at antibodies against things that that are in the gut that determine a leaky gut right we call it cyrex ii testing which is a test you can get through function right is there you can test to see if there's leaky gut i love that test too because it's a great way for us to follow up and see how much we're seeing seeing improvement are we doing enough right um are we seeing improvement in in in their leaky gut or increased intestinal pressure then we look at poop testing like you know where we do thousands and thousands of these tests and it's so helpful and it doesn't just look at the microbiome it actually looks at the function of the gut yes like whether there's malabsorption whether you have no digestive enzymes whether there's inflammation whether there's overactive antibodies in there whether you have uh imbalances and what we call the short chain fats which are the the food for the colon that are produced by bacteria eating the right kinds of fiber and if they're low it means there's an imbalance then we look at the microbiome we look at what grows we look at parasites and then we we target and micro target the things that are out of balance for that person and it's different for everybody then we might look at food sensitivity testing we might look at um and even things like heavy metals or other things which can also cause it i had a patient with ulcerative colitis once and i did everything right i did the whole 5r it wasn't working but i forgot the first part of the r which was removed and i thought well maybe you know heavy metals can cause autoimmunity maybe it's a problem and so i tested him and he was like wasted away and he was like it was terrible he actually had high levels of mercury we treated mercury and his colliders went away so it's phenomenal yeah so i think it's it's so powerful this case is so important because it really describes how a patient you know goes traditional doctor is diagnosed with a disease irritable bowel syndrome by the way anytime you hear syndrome it means doctors know what that's going on it's just a collection of symptoms that we agree we're gonna put in this bucket and if you have those symptoms you have this disease but it's not really a disease right and and so that's what functional medicine sort of looks upstream to figure out what the root causes are and and and personalize the treatment for everybody and there's common things that we do like the 5r but it may be different ours for each patient right right right so for him we removed you know the inflammatory foods and we removed the bacteria and yeast i actually treated him with an antibiotic a non-absorbed antibiotic and an antifungal um so i treated him with a prescription medication a weed killer um so that was the remove right and then the replace because he was underweight and because of that inflammation in his digestive system i gave him some digestive enzymes for a short period of time just to help him to help it so the food wasn't as inflammatory for him and to help him absorb more nutrients um and then we then we worked on re-inoculating right so after we we gave them some good probiotics put in the healthy bacteria put in the healthy bacteria some good prebiotics right so we know that what are probiotics prebiotics are the are the things that help feed the good bacteria so they're the food for the probiotics which is usually what like like fibers fibers are amazing prebiotics we know a lot of phytonutrients are prebiotics so this i think is really exciting research when we're looking at our phytonutrients you know we know that phytonutrients right so i know it's amazing right so so our food has has minerals in it it has vitamins but it also has these things called phytonutrients which are these components in our plant foods that um have this amazing health benefits for us so that can include things like elagic acid that we see in pomegranate that can feed some of the good bacteria that acromancia that we know can lower inflammation we know that um just just to back up on that necromancer thing so when we look at the poop we can tell if there's like good levels of different bugs one of them we look at is acromancia and it turns out that that is so important for protecting your gut it helps you keep your biofilm or that little coating over the gut so you don't have a leaky gut and it's involved in so many autoimmune diseases in response to cancer therapy and metabolic issues and weight and it's such an overlooked thing you can't take a probiotic of it at least not yet right but you can feed it the good guys we can feed it we can feed it with all these amazing phytonutrients like the what's in pomegranate the ellagic acid and also we know that sulfurophane from our cruciferous vegetables feeds the good bacteria you know so broccoli collards kale but not juicing right brussels sprouts all those good ones um we know that green tea you know that has good phytonutrients in it that's good for the digestive system so we always say to people you know get something from every color of the rainbow every day you know you'll get some plant foods from every color of the rainbow every day get some good red foods like the pomegranate or cranberry get something orange and yellow and green blue purple white tan you know those all those good healthy plant foods um that we you know like our vegetables our fruits our spices our teas our coffees really actually are impacting our microbiome which is is fascinating so great and you know just a great uh anecdote from a colleague of mine dr lee who's on our podcast talking about eat to be disease his mother had stage four uterine cancer and being the smart doc he is he understood from the research that if you have low achermansia patients don't respond to the immunotherapy what they call the checkpoint inhibitors which is this new form of cancer therapy that helps activate your immune system so if your gut isn't healthy you can't actually get the cancer cells to die with immunotherapy right so basically you die unless you have good bacteria in your gut and so his mother was had stage four uterine cancer and was going to die and wasn't responding and he gave her pomegranate cranberry green tea all these phytochemicals got her acromancial levels up and she was cured of her stage four cancer within a month that's a phenomenal story it's an incredible story and i think that just shows the power of these plant foods of the plant foods and of getting focused on the gut yes yes you know we call it the 5r i call it the weeding seeding and feeding program so like you weed out the bad things you see it with the good things and you feed it with good nutrients and all that stuff so yeah it's really it's so it's so powerful i i can't tell you you know as a functional medicine doctor for the last 30 years and you've you know been doing this almost as long the the results you get from focusing on the gut with so many conditions whether it's autoimmune or whether it's allergic whether it's digestive whether it's your skin issues like acne eczema whether it's your mood whether it's weight metabolism whether it's migraines whether it's alzheimer's i mean autism add it's just amazing when you start to focus on this so let's break down the the five-hour program for everybody so we got to remove so what are we looking at removing removing unhealthy foods or or inflammatory foods for that person so they can be food sensitivities things like that allergies sensitivities and then we're removing processed food and junk food oh yeah that's for sure and sugars and you know um excess sugar which is feeding the wrong bacteria and then we're removing the unhealthy bugs on or or yeasts or viruses growth yeast overgrowth a parasite you know i was uh on the uh red table talk and uh jada and her son both had parasites and they both had gut issues for a long long time right and they thought it was just how they were but with you know short little course of treatment they were both i've never felt better right and all the other symptoms because now you're actually absorbing the nutrients you're eating which just helps the body heal yeah so so then so you remove then we replace but you might also remove things like heavy metals right stress or right toxic people in your life or whatever's giving you a stomach problem right right replace means just to replace some of those digestive enzymes if needed um re-inoculate so the replace also could be like prebiotics right so putting in the fibers to feed the gut and to to actually maybe um use hydrochloric acid sometimes for people who aren't digesting their food as they get older yeah and to help get them off of the acid blockers which you know we know are creating a a lot of problems because we need that acid in our stomach to digest our food let's take a little detour so you just mentioned acid blockers uh-huh okay these are among the most prevalent drugs prescribed today in america and statins i think um when i was in medical school in the 80s and we we just had those drugs come on the market the drug reps used to come to us and say these are very powerful drugs never use them for more than six weeks because they block stomach acid and they'll cause significant problems if you do that long term right you can cure an ulcer with it you can fix an acute problem but never use this now people are on this for decades yes and it and and the the side effect which is listed in the you know manuals that we get as doctors is that it causes irritable bowel syndrome right so you end up fixing the heartburn but you get irritable bowel and bloating and bacterial overgrowth and all these problems right because you need the acid in your stomach and when you block that acid then there can be an overgrowth of bacteria where there's not supposed to be and that can cause all those slower problems you change the ph you get more yeast issues and all this stuff and then you don't you're not absorbing your minerals so you can get osteoporosis and you're not absorbing your b12 so you can get fatigue and dementia right it just goes on and on and on it'll absorb zinc and magnesium minerals calcium cause osteoporosis pneumonia it causes you know um on and on right it's it's so it's and it's it takes some work sometimes when people have been on an acid blocker for a long time it takes some work for us to help wean them off because their body has gotten pretty used to it they they start to get their bodies their body wants to make acid so it's it's working against the medicine so when you wean them down sometimes they get more acid production rebound so you actually yeah it's like and it's sort of a trick like you get off it but it makes you worse so you feel like you have to get back back on it but it's actually not true you can actually get off it absolutely we do that all the time we do it all the time so re-inoculate giving all the good prebiotics and probiotics the good bacteria and all the things that feed the good bacteria and then the fourth r is repair i don't know what probiotics it takes oh that's a great question i wanna know what are you prescribing my goodness that's such a that's that goes on and on we could talk about that for the next year it's true right there's a lot there's more and more probiotics in the market every day and all of different roles and different functions yeah honestly i think you know we've been doing this forever but it feels to me like we're at the infancy of this understanding of how to use these in medicine yep so i mean there's some great brands that i trust and i use all the time but when when somebody is you know doesn't maybe know what to do um i'll say you know get one get go to a reputable place a reputable pharmacy or or a good wellness store pharmacy and and get a probiotic you know try it if it makes you feel worse then stop it you know um because there's some there's some good bacteria that make people they have feel overgrowth exactly they're bad bugs growing in there and you put the good bugs in there they have a fight yeah and they cause them and so that means we just have to do more work before we can start it yeah so um so they got to re-inoculate and then you got the and then repair yeah and that's the fourth r so that's things like that's like giving good protein good amino acids um which are the building blocks of protein sometimes yeah to help repair that barrier that that that coffee filter right we have to repair it with good protein and sometimes we use amino acids like glutamine that help repair it um we'll we'll give more zinc whether it's from food sources or as a supplement maybe we'll give some vitamin a which also helps with healing that barrier it's it helps with healing the endothelium and the gut um so those are things we will do to repair and then and then rebalance right that's the fifth r which is really focused on managing our stress and how we're reacting to the world because we know that when our parasympathetic nervous system is engaged when that calming nervous system is engaged through meditation and yoga and breath work that our body has has the ability to heal and it heals better when our body is is is at rest i mean yeah you know you just touched on something very powerful which is that our our gut and our brain are connected there's a whole hard wiring of nervous system in our gut even has this independent nervous system that actually is like a second brain yeah and and so you know it's you know we often say people are irritable bowel are emotional or anxious or have you know just maladaptive emotional coping mechanisms but it turns out that that the irritable bowel actually can cause an irritable brain and lead to anxiety and all these emotional issues so it's a bi-directional and i think that's a great lever for helping people reset their gut absolutely you know i i just want to share a story because i you know i i've been doing this for a long time and and of course my my uh um i don't know what it is curse or blessing depending how you look at it is is actually getting really sick and having to figure out what to do to fix myself yeah and and i've had a lot of gut issues over the years which is why i really focused on this the first is when i had mercury poisoning and i tried everything i did every functional medicine trick in the book back then and it wasn't working right until i got the mercury out which disrupts all your enzymes it disrupts your gut it causes leaky gut it causes yeast overgrowth it screws up the bacteria in your gut until i get rid of the mercury from my system i couldn't get my gut straight yeah because it's impacting your immune system too right right and then and then i fear many years later i you know kind of got an issue which was triggered by an antibiotic for a root canal that i had to take called clindamycin which is known to cause c diff which is a terrible bacterial infection that kills like 30 000 people a year yeah and i got that yeah and i was so sick and i and you know liz would come over to my house and i was like it was pretty bad i'm like we're all struggling to figure it out and i yeah and i had mold in my house all these other things but i ended up having colitis and i had tremendous leaky gut and i did my own stool test and my friend patrick hanaway who he worked for the stool test company for many years my colleague at cleveland clinic he and i looked at my stool test and we probably between the two of the seen like 20 000 stool tests we're like this is the worst one we've ever seen and everything was screwed up and i had no good bacteria i had a lot low butyrate i was not digesting i had tons of inflammation it was terrible and and i couldn't really fix it using a lot of the traditional things and then i started to sort of work on a gut shake which included a lot of the sort of 5r concepts right so i cleaned up my diet obviously i got rid of the bad bugs but um i used a combination of these polyphenols from the plants a pomegranate cranberry green tea also added you know glutamine i added prebiotics probiotics i even added colostrum you know which is to help regulate the immune system and it was like a miracle i had went from full-blown colitis to like normal in three weeks and i've been great ever since and you know it's just like wow this is something that people can actually do it's not that hard it's not drugs and the alternatives are like really bad drugs right so um you know we we we um i want to go into the next case which was sort of not about people with a gut centric issue because people think oh well if i have a leaky gut or if i have gut related problems i'm going to know it my stomach's not going to be right i'm going to feel symptoms but that's true that's not always the case so the first case was a guy who did have a typical history of you know antibiotics and acne and some infection and then you know diet and all this stuff and that was pretty clear but there are many cases where people come in and they have zero gut symptoms but their gut's a mess and it's causing all these issues if you loved that last video you're gonna love the next one check it out here and and many many many ancient healing systems understand the power of the gut in keeping us healthy so having having a healthy gut is is critical to our well-being our long-term health our may even our mental health we're now learning that you know antibiotics can destroy the micro