Hello, everybody.
Hello everybody and welcome to the show the Big Show. The show was weak key wiper blades going on in the background. So if you hear a strange story every once in a while, that's because it's on interval wipers. We're in the midst. It's missing.
You may have guessed we're in our vehicle. Play misty for me.
We should maybe get a jazzy opening for our show. What do you think?
Never sad. Last time I said I know.
It's one of the few things I can actually use music that I write for.
But do it.
Anyway, maybe an outro.
That's it. No intro, and outro
Okay, probably not this episode.
My gut tells me it's a good idea to not have it on this episode.
your gut tells you what
my gut tells me. It's not a good idea to have it on this episode, because we're talking about the gut.
Well, I'll take some guts. Yeah. Okay,
no fortitude.
Let me explain how this works. There was once a role playing game called deadlands. I think there's still a role playing game. But they had areas that a person could get wounded. They had the upper guts, among the other arms, legs, the upper guts, you had the lower guts. And you had the gizzard and you never, ever wanted to get shot in the gizzard. That was a bad thing.
The zombie cowboys didn't know much about internal anatomy. So they didn't realize that humans didn't have gizzards. A lot of humans don't know a whole lot about their guts either.
Or their gizzards. They don't have one. So well, the game said.
Yeah, the game said there were zombie cowboys too.
Well, there we go. Arthur,
I hope not.
Okay.
The reason that we're doing this episode is it's the first of a new series of our prepper med line. Because I teach things about how the human body works for a living. And it's some of the stuff is things that it would be useful for preppers to know. And it doesn't seem to be talked about a whole lot in prepping world. So since this is an angle I have that maybe is not too terribly well covered. Salty, had the brilliant idea that we should
have a series on it. And I thought that was actually a good idea. So here we are.
It was just a gut feeling I had,
yeah. And then we had to start with the guts. Because if the guts ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. That much is true.
For those of us who have had intestinal distress, man, it's not good.
No. And it's the last thing you want to have to be dealing with. Okay, not the very last. But one of the things you definitely do not want to be dealing with if you're trying to deal with another kind of emergency situation. But it's also one that is extremely prone to pop up when people are trying to deal with emergency situations. So it's very prep irrelevant. So here's what you got big long tube, running mouth
to anus. You stick the big fat food molecules in the top, you chop them up into much smaller chunks, with the help of some lovely, horrible green looking digestive fluids produced by your liver and pancreas and dumped into the gut. Once you got them chopped up, you drag the parts you want across the gut wall and dump them into the blood. and stuff on a little further, you've got a vibrant population of neighbors and tenants. Who are the microbes that live in your large
intestine? And for the most part, that's good. Most of them do you no harm. A significant subset of them have various useful functions to you. And only occasionally do you get a bad actor down there. So you got the microbes and they live off the parts you didn't want mostly. And then anything that's left over gets ejected out the other end. So that's the digestive tract mission. In a nutshell, that's the guts. As far as pieces, I wrote an article to accompany this and
it's got a little diagram. So if you're not familiar with where the pieces are and where they go, it'll help you out there. Nothing much exciting happens in the mouth other than physical breakdown, get stuff mashed down small enough, you can swallow it, mix it up with some nice slimy saliva. Also, mostly to make it easier to swallow. runs through the esophagus that runs behind the heart and the lungs just trying to get you through the chest to the abdomen where the real action is going to
happen. And then you finally get to the stomach, the most overrated of your digestive organs. Because mostly it's a storage tank, it stores, it churns, it does a couple of other minor things, but not a whole lot. If you want to know what stuff looks like at this point, well, the last time you vomited, that's what you're tossing up on the floor is probably came out of your stomach. Then the warm up band is done. And you pass the stuff on to the place where the action really happens, which is the
small intestine. The liver sends you some bile, the pancreas send you some pancreatic juice, enzymes in there, digest all your food. Lots of interesting little transport proteins, I'm not going to tell you about along the edges, full of those nutrients out and dump them in your bloodstream. So you can have them. Then you get the large intestine, which is much shorter than the small intestine, it's a diameter thing. That's where all the
microbes hang out. They live off the fiber, which is carbohydrates, you cannot digest. They add some vitamins in they live their own, potentially happy little microblogs. And then you get rid of what's left. There it is.
Well, poop
kind of stinks, doesn't it?
Ah,
you can thank the microbes for that part, too.
Yeah. So how does this relate
to major ways? disturbances due to your diet and stress levels, and infections, both of which are way more common. I swear I can hear my gut microbes screaming in dismay when I read the ingredient list of most of the common emergency food supply items.
Yeah, we need to do a series on those because some of them are thunderbolts and lightning very, very frightening me. They are horrid. They are horrid. They are.
Yeah,
this is such a poor food we eat.
When you're reading on the net, about prepper food, there's a lot of people on the line of Oh, it's calories, you'll eat whatever you can get, and you will. But frankly, most Americans are not terribly short of calories. And in the fairly short term, like weeks to months, sufficient calories isn't going to be the life threatening problem. No, it's actually going to cause you a lot more distress in the short term. If you don't have the well fiber in that food, not to put
too fine a point on it. It may sound totally pointless, because it's the stuff we can't digest.
But that's the whole point.
Yeah, it keeps stuff is gonna go along the tract, it's
gotta go.
Gotta have some bulk to keep stuff moving along.
This is where I'm going to stop and and reaffirm what she is saying. I have to really push the fiber in my diet. Yeah, I actually actually eat foods extra from my normal diet to push the fiber in my diet because I tend to need extra fiber.
And we this foodie actually eats has some fiber in it too.
Oh, yeah. It's not like I'm not getting any fiber. It's just I need extra.
Frankly, most Americans don't get enough fiber to keep them in best digestive health at any point. But when you start looking at what's in the emergency food supplies, there's very little in there. Because what is cheap and has a really long shelf life and is easy to prepare using nothing more than boiling water, pasta, rice, and dehydrated dairy products,
none of which good fiber levels
and none of which have a lick of fiber in them. That's what they'll throw in light.
Which is the worst thing is they could fix this. Yes, they could fix this by simply using whole grain pasta,
which works just as well folks,
but I actually liked it. I liked the taste a bit better to both the fiber. There's just a lot more fiber in it.
Yeah. And the rice, make it go to brown rice. You can make fast cook brown rice that shelf stable. We've got a bunch of it. So I know we can do it. But they don't. And so you got very little after even a couple of days of trying to go on that stuff or maybe your classic 72 hours, two hours. Emergency pack. You're going to be stopped up like a cork in a bottle.
Now tell you true story from the Civil War. As general Sherman's men were starting from the Nashville area to their march to the sea, actually, the first part was the march to Atlanta. He sent his troops out, call them bummers, he sent out his bombers. And these bombers just clean out a huge swath of the country. They got ham, they got butter, they got cheese's, they got meat, fresh meat, pro cattle back that they could slaughter grow hogs back, they read me cheese, and you know all
the rest of this stuff. But they didn't have a supply train behind them. Which means their normal diet of things like
car, crack and pilot
pilot bread or a heart attack, or heart attack, which at the time was made out of whole wheat, not white flour, white flour, excuse me. After a week or so, have eaten literally high on the hog. They were begging for heart attack, because they couldn't go they were clogged up. Because they didn't eat all this non fibrous food. You know, they're used to their, their hard tack their pee use. You know, this is what they were used to. And they made a
change. And a week later, even though they were getting the best food the country had to offer literally, they were dying, literally because
you know they're getting impacted. impaction is the most serious outcome. It's rare, but it can happen.
But when you've gotten it's a little more iffy. If he held campaigning for years, and you get, you know, 40 50,000 of them, it may be rare, but that's a lot of people,
they were often water limited to and that makes it worse. And that would make it worse in a prepper situation as well.
Right now, people on a keto diet have got to push the fluids.
One of the reasons,
but is a big reason.
Also, they at least we're getting exercise. And if somebody is bugging in and eating in those emergency operations, they're not even moving and moving also helps move things along the gut. So that is absolutely the most common kind of problem people gonna run into. And even if you don't impact which, of course is rare, it tends to tear things up on the way out. And that's not cool.
Not a comfortable thing.
The flip side of that is digestive distress, and especially if you irritate those microbes that live down there. by feeding them an unusual diet, you start to get the usual guys dying off and new guys who are not such nice neighbors moving in, you start to get diarrhea in some cases and diarrhea is a lot more threatening in the short term. And constipation is
diarrhea has all kinds of different names. I mean, but you read back throughout history people talk about dysentery that's what you know, it's a form of this.
It's bloody diarrhea.
How many people have died of dysentery over the years? Is it massive amounts? biggest killer in the Civil War? Wasn't the bullets it wasn't the bombs. It was dysentery from having poor camp hygiene. Yeah, not filtering or boiling their water drinking all kinds of water full of all kinds of who knows what kind of bug was getting got infestations that not kinda neighborhood. And a lot of people died that way. Yeah,
dysentery is a big deal. If you ever played the game, Oregon Trail, there's a good chance you have died. dysentery many many times. Because people on the Oregon Trail died of dysentery Oh, a lot.
It was a trail and they'd leave their waist and the next people would come by and drink from the same water source without purifying it. Which is by the way exactly where I was planning to go next, that the biggest reason for diarrhea is absolutely bad water.
And you absolutely positively in the survival situation can take no shortcuts. When it comes to your water. There is no drinking out of a puddle. Even if it's perfectly clear. You have to filter or toilet.
I don't care if it's a rushing mountain stream. You drink that through a filter too, because it's got its own set of microbes
factor we have we have a doctor in our area who's lived with Giardia. complications from Giardia since his 20s. And he's now in his 60s because he took a drink out of a clear mountain stream in the Rockies and got a bad case of Giardia.
Yep, I've drunk from those streams through my filtering water bottle.
I one thing, a lot of the really worst bugs like for example, Giardia, which is one of the really worst ones because they're everywhere. And all mammals carry it. You just don't. You just don't go any water source in North America that isn't straight from 100 to 500 feet down and even then has Georgiana. But those water bottles, even the worst cheapest ones of them will stop Giardia and almost everything else.
He means the filtering
filter on water bottles. Yeah, the filtering ones like the the life straws already are big, Sawyer, cheap filters catching any of those will but only if you use them, but only of using us right? If you don't use them, you're not gonna catch a whole bloody thing. Yeah, you're gonna catch the boy.
The other place is from digestive problems is food poisoning. And even right now one out of six Americans per year. Or what a six, one of eight. I forget I read it this morning. One of less than 10 Americans per year gets food poisoning right now, of course, they're usually mild cases that you feel some indigestion and you're over in a day or so. But some cases were way more serious than that. Of course,
they don't send you to the house. Oh, my gosh, I've had, I've had a couple of cases over the years that just were brutal. When you're sitting on the toilet, with your head in a bucket, and it's coming out to every way it can come out except for maybe your ears or maybe your boat is connected? Yeah.
That's right up there with the gizzard? Yep. So the food problem is, can be from toxins in the food. And let's be honest here. If you've lived in a place and your power has gone out and the refrigerator hasn't run for a while, have you not had that internal conversation with yourself of well, it's probably still good. And if you have had that conversation, don't you think the answer to it relies in part on how hungry you are and how much food is in the
house. The hungrier you get, the more likely it is in your estimation to be okay. And there's hygiene, hygiene with the water that used pair of the food the fact that when you have to work really hard to get water and work really hard to heat water and not just turn the tap hygiene tends to go south quickly. If you don't
exert willpower over keep an after it. And so you get contamination of food from that source as well. Which is another reason why every prepper who plans to buggin really, really, really, really, really needs to nail down laundry. And that's going to be a big deal. Because then you have to be just as careful because you're at the mercy of how careful your neighbors are. If you live around some other people.
Yeah, less. So if you're careful about your water, but still. Yeah. So those are all reasons why they are prepper problems. And in there, you can see a lot of the potential solutions. When you're pulling in your GNC food supplies. Keep an eye on keeping it in composition somewhat similar to your normal diet so you don't make your tenants unhappy. Make sure it's got some fiber in it. So you don't stop entirely up. Have good ways to get water clean easily. moldable so you'll use them.
Yeah, easy ways.
A lot of people actually don't drink a whole lot of water and they don't tend to drink enough if they don't have nice flavorings in their water. So watch that too.
You will you will be drinking more water because you won't be drinking a lot of the stuff. A lot of people drink now you're not going to Starbucks in the morning. You know? Well, another thing to to keep in mind is on the we're not going to get very much on the medical end of things but one of the first things I'm sure having my we do have are plenty of anti diarrheal oils. Yeah, because diarrhea gives you dehydration and dehydration will SAP the energy right out of you. Make
you feel terrible. You'll be listless and you'll be much less likely to get Take care of yourself in your in your peeps the right way.
Also, it Causes iron imbalances. And those can actually kill you. I actually, in the written form of this one, I linked back to an old article I did on diarrhea, to give people some more concrete, research ideas on what to do about it. But you maintain your hygiene, you keep in mind that the calories you might get from if he food may not be worth the
risk. If it's gone bad on you, I mean, I'm not one of those people who throws food out as soon as it hits its expiration date, I think a little more carefully about what's likely to actually be a risk and what's not. But then I don't need it if I think there's actually a risk. But yeah,
part of that, though, is when we, we stock our foods, we're very careful to stock foods that, you know, even if they are a little over their x date, or not the kind of things that will go bad. And if they do, you can tell for example, you will have canned foods and you could tell the can of food has gone bad on you. It's not any promise to swell, it'll rust. You know,
whose fluids from the can that's right out. If it has a strange color when you open it,
if it doesn't do any of the first part. So you're generally going to be okay, unless it's a high acid food. Just don't really go too far.
When it looks strange when you open it,
or smells strange.
That's usually the older high acid foods though.
Yeah, I'll do that.
So those are things to keep in mind
and rotate.
You might think about some preps that are fermented foods, because if they're fermented, and they've still got the live cultures in them, they're a good way to repopulate your gut with human friendly neighbors after they've been depleted. By a bout of diarrhea by a course of antibiotics, something like that. It can be a quick way to get yourself back on track.
This is not a this is not a really a prepping thing. But for non prepping purposes I use if I have had some intestinal distress, I'll generally eat some yogurt,
live culture, yogurt,
like culture, yogurt, and even even the frozen ice cream type live culture yogurt works as long as it's five culture. That's the key to the to the whole deal.
And what a great excuse to eat some frozen yogurt with chocolate in it. Yeah, that room my way. There's a car coming now.
I also have clear so I'm not going to take any funny moves.
This being one of the most dangerous intersections in the state, we're gonna be
the most dangerous intersection single, single most dangerous intersection in the state of Missouri we just passed. You have to really watch that it's the most. The thing is it's only 10 years old, and it is the single most poorly engineered intersection. I think it's just impossible to imagine what they could have been thinking when they designed that thing.
They probably had a case of the trots. And they were dehydrated, and they weren't thinking clearly. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Don't let that be you. After all, we need all the good intersections we can get.
There you go.
Thank you for listening. If you're enjoying the podcast, hey, share it with your friends, share it with your neighbors, share with your friend, okay? Don't share with your mother in law because you know, it's your mother in law. But anyway, hey, hey, hey,
rate it right rated,
rated good. Like it. Give us give us a review on Stitcher or iTunes or whichever rater you're using Google or whatever. Give it just give us five stars and we'll call it good. Okay? But share it. Thumbs up if you have a thumbs up easy. Give us a thumbs up. We really appreciate it and we'll talk to you the next time.