Well, hello ladies and gents. Robert Sykes, Keto, savage.com. And today I've got special guest Josh Deck on the line. He is a gut health expert and holistic nutritionist, and we dive deep into the wonderful world of proper gut microbiome health. We talk a lot about the environmental factors, We talk about the dietary factors.
We talk about the things that oftentimes go unsaid when it comes to optimizing one's gut health, such as where the food comes from, not just the types of foods, the macronutrient breakdown, but the actual sourcing, procurement and environment that that food was raised or grown and how that
impacts gut health as well. We we honestly went pretty deep on proper gut health and improving one's health from a holistic standpoint as it pertains to the gut being the foundational pillar in which everything stems from. So I truly enjoy the conversation. We are speaking the same language. He's got an interest in homesteading in light of what he's learned about proper gut health, so we'll talk a little bit about that as well. I've got no doubt that you will
take something from this. You'll likely want to grab a pen and paper because it's going to be pretty involved at some point. So take some notes. But thirdly, enjoy the conversation. Like I said, I've got no depth that you will take some actionable steps from this. So that for the delay. Sit back, relax, enjoy the conversation with Josh Deck, we are live, Josh. How are you brother? It's a good day to be in Calgary, man. We get these chinooks. The sun is shining, there's snow
on the ground. I can wear AT shirt and short shorts outside if it doesn't get any better than that. So you get snow on the ground right now, huh? We do do not. We do not, no. I'm in Arkansas, so there's no snow here. Not yet. We don't get snow. Almost ever. You get snow. What, A month out of the year? Yeah, pretty much, man. We get like one or two weeks where it gets us really hard and we're all buttoned up for the winter, but it's not normally a
common occurrence by any means. Well, I'm in Calgary. We snow 13 months out of the year. Man, you don't get tired of that. Oh, I get very tired of that. We're looking to to move, do something, change something up, buy a homestead, you know, a little farm, do something. We can actually enjoy it differently than being inside and dealing with traffic and, you know, vehicles. That's about it. Oh, you've piqued my interest on Homestead now.
So you want to get some land? Raise your own animals. Yeah, ideally. I mean, especially doing what I do in the health space, you know, we understand so clearly everything from the water to the food. Like it's just, it's garbage, right? Everything's about if it's poison, it's all fake food. And I do, I want to have my own food, my own my own animals, my own everything. So I can really just have sort of that. We'll call it a freedom approach
to my own health and my Wellness. 100% man, Like we bought some land a few years back and we've been trying to get into the homesteading scene. How? We got our own chickens. We're going to be getting some lambs, some pigs, some cows. I found a really good local source for pasture raised poultry. I actually just ordered. I was talking to somebody early this morning. I'm having them butcher several lamb for me. I'm going to get that. So we're speaking the same language.
As soon as you start diving deep into nutrition and health and where your food comes from, what you tend to do when you're following ketogenic low carb carnivore diet. It's like the whole homesteading conversation just happens by default because it goes hand in hand. It really is an organic transition. You know, it's like anything you get car guys over long enough period of time, they end up working on fixing on cars and
they got a garage full of them. Same with any kind of nutritionist or anybody in that space. It is an organic transition to go from curiosity to expertise to just overhauling every aspect of your life to fit your new desires, wants and needs a. 100% Man, There's so different. There's so many different entries to this lifestyle, like I came to it from, you know, the bodybuilding training standpoint. You are a gut expert. What was the catalyst for you getting into it in the 1st
place? Well. With an interesting chain of happy accidents. So I used to be a paramedic. That was my first career, way back in my late teens, early 20s, and I really learned very quickly it was actually sick care. I wasn't working in healthcare, I became a glorified ambulance or taxi for the elderly and the ill, and it's just not what I wanted to do. I really wanted to help people
get better. And there's something to be said for, you know, pulling somebody out of a car with the jaws of life and, you know, all the trauma. But it wasn't what I wanted to do in healthcare. And so I learned very quickly I need to do something else. And through a chain of happy accidents, I got into the personal training world. I had been into fitness and weightlifting and basic exercise and sport since I was a kid.
I remember, you know, being 8 years old, six years old, somewhere in there and pulling out, you know, remember those Jane Fonda thigh squeeze machines that like mom would have? I had one of those couple of 10 LB dumbbells and made my own little gym. So it's something that's always been in my blood. And so I pursued that for a few years and it was really interesting. This woman came to see me back in my early 20s, one of my first clients, when I was working for
a big box gym. Her name was Lynn and we started together. I mean, her breakfast was 17 pills and a shot of insulin. Her dinner was 9 pills and a shot of insulin. She was had high blood pressure. She was on the disability list at work. She slept with a CPAP machine. Like all of her body's functions were just on a steady decline. That was age 57 when we started
together. By the time she was 59, she ended up breaking her first world record in the raw powerlifting division and she just kept breaking them right up until she was about 62, give or take when she retired. And so it really just highlighted the bodies ability to heal itself. We do things properly and look at things properly and it just pushed me further and further in
the holistic world. I saw people I was working with working on food and nutrition and exercise whose skin issues, anxiety, depression, arthritis, whatever it was. They would just start to alleviate when the body worked as it was originally intended. And it pushed me further and further to that world until I ended up at a conference where someone was talking about the gut Biome.
I was hooked. I saved up for a couple of years, went back to school, became a nutritionist, and here I am specializing in gut disease like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. The gut is like one of the guts, kind of like the brain, man. That's why I call it like the second brain. Like there's so many, there's so
many ways you can take things. There's so much we still don't know about it. When you were to like, if you were to look at it from a high level view, what degree of understanding do you think we have on the gut? Are we still light years away or are we getting closer? Oh man, we're 50 years away easily. So just to give you an idea here, understanding, we understand gut health sort of in a general sense.
We talk about how important it is and most of us just assume, well, I'd like to not be bloated. I'd like to digest food or kind of eat more of whatever I want without any repercussions. And we call that gut health. But what it actually means at its core, I argue our gut bacteria are more important than our very own DNA. And I'll tell you why. You know, we look at the entire human genome, right? There are 23,000 genes in the human genome that make you you. We have 3,000,000 genes inside
of a gut bacteria. And so we have 130 times more genetic material inside of our gut microbiomes. And those bacteria that we do, the rest of our body, they influence everything, genetic expression, DNA. You can connect the the gut to every disease you could possibly
imagine. In fact, 14 out of 15 of the leading causes of death in the USA are things like heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory issues, diabetes, Alzheimer's, kidney issues, liver issues, Parkinson's, all these things, 14 out of 15 are directly connected to the gut. The 15th cause is suicide and homicide, which means that 93% of the main things we're telling people are natural causes of
death are not in fact natural. There are chronic inflammatory conditions that your gut has a major role or can be entirely responsible for by itself. And so when we talk about gut health, I look at it, we often say you are what you eat, but really you are what you breakdown, digest, absorb. And if you have any kind of inhibition in your gut, an inability to absorb, you're not going to be healthy. You're not going to turn over new cells. You're going to start breaking down.
Disease processes happen. Things get from the gut and circulate directly into your lymphatic system and bloodstream, which are the Super highway of the entire body. It can get in, causing all kinds of issues anywhere in the body, just about any disease you can name. We can draw a connection. I feel like when you're going through elementary school and you're learning the anatomy of the human body, the way they structure that does as a disservice because they separate everything out.
You got the skeletal system, the musculature system, you've got the digestive system and the way they portray that it just kind of segments everything, whereas in reality everything is so incredibly intertwined and affects the whole. So on that note, if someone is wanting to just understand the digestive system and the gut, particularly from a a deeper level like, how would you define that? How would I define the gut? Wow.
Like that's a question. I can't say I've ever been asked before, but here, here's my first instinct. Answer your brain and your gut. They're actually made from the same tissue in utero. Your gut is connected to everything. It's one cell thick between your small intestine and getting directly to your blood and lymphatics. It's two cells from your large intestine, and they're smaller than the width of hair. And so we look at what goes in and what comes out.
Here's the basics of how it works. You eat, you chew, you break things down. They get into your stomach. You have receptors between your stomach and small intestine, like guards think like the Queen's guard. They stand there and open up or they close down. If things close down, we got a problem. If they open up, it's usually a good thing. Sometimes can be a problem. So if they get through the small intestine, things start breaking
down. You have your bile and all your pancreatic enzymes and all these things start to mix in and start breaking down foods so you can readily absorb it. Where it gets to the large intestine where you absorb what we used to think was most of just your water absorption, which is part of it. But as we start to excrete, things exit the back door through the rectum. But 90 ish percent of all of your gut bacteria actually reside in your large intestine at the portion that connects to
the small intestine. So it's going to be connecting on your your right side. And so that tube that comes up and down, that's where most of your gut bacteria lives. Now that gut bacteria is responsible for everything like we talked about, it's responsible for balancing hormones. Up to 40% of your inactive thyroid converts to active between your gut and your liver, right. We have balancing of estrogens. We can actually recirculate estrogens and toxins if our guts
out of whack. All kinds of toxins and junk can float through there. And so we talk about defining the gut. It is everything. It is the center of our being, the center of our Wellness, the center of our cognition. ADHD, depression, anxiety all comes back to the gut. They're even now looking at even autism as being an inflammatory autoimmune condition of the brain and nervous system rather than just a structural disorder
of the brain. It all comes back to the gut and the gut Biome. Now one thing I will say on that, we talked about all the genes in the bacteria, right 3,000,000 different genes compared to 23,000 inside the the human genome. We start to look at how expansive this gut bacteria is. We have about 100 trillion of them. Now we have about 10 trillion cells in the rest of your body, which means your gut bacteria also outnumber your body's own cells. 12:50 And so we look at
the gut. Not only are we talking mouth to anus or talking everything in between this remarkable microscopic world where everything is everything and it's connected to the rest of you, more so than arguably your brain and your nerves are. So when we are going through life as a species is meant to, we're going through, we're eating of the foods that we're supposed to.
If you were to just take all the the human noise out of the equation and we were just eating as we're designed to eat and everything was functioning as it should, That's a far cry from what we now are seeing in our society with the obesity epidemics, the chronic sickness, the illness, all the medications, all the processed food that people are pouring
into their guts. What is the single biggest issue or concern that you see as where we're stepping wrong and just being LED astray as a species as it pertains to improving proper gut health? When I look at proper gut health, of course look at overall health and my comparison will be this. If we look at a lot of indigenous tribes, Brian Sanders is working on a documentary right now called Food Lies. That's you'll see him on
Instagram as Food lies. And he visits different tribes, indigenous tribes through Cambodia and different areas. And they don't have diseases like we do. They don't have rotting teeth like we do. That's your microbiome in your mouth, right? They don't have infertility the same way we do. They don't have arthritis, they don't have Alzheimer's. We have elderly, they have elders. And it's a very different way of looking at aging and disease
processes. And so if I could say the number one thing that's leading us astray is that we're no longer eating food. Everything that we eat is basically a food like substance. It mimics food, it goes down and tastes like food. It's what we've conditioned to be food. But we're not eating real food anymore, and most of what we eat comes out of a factory or a package somewhere, somehow. And so even if you reduce it to its smallest parts, there's microplastics and damn near
everything. We spray 17,000 different types of pesticides on crops in the USA, totaling over a billion pounds a year, and pesticides destroy and kill living organisms to make sure the crops can grow without interference. So if we have these living organisms like bugs and beetles and all kinds of wildlife that is dying, what do you think it's doing to individual organisms inside your gut, which are again, more important than your DNA?
And so the biggest way we're being LED astray is being told by lobbying agencies, food corporations and people who make money, One off of processed foods but two off of illness, right. We're being told constantly we'll go try a Beyond Beef burger because it's better for
you. None of that food, not a single ingredient in there, is of a natural substance or source from it, from its its edible form, maybe from its raw form, Maybe soy at one point was you know, grown, but that's also GMO and so none of it's actual food and your body can't run on that. And This is why these other tribes have no idea what these diseases are, because they don't face them like we do.
Yeah, no, I totally agree, man. Like I think when you look at what we're consuming on average, I mean people like it's just it boggles my mind. People the things that people are willing to stick down their throat and consume spend money on. It's not even food like the the rate at which people go to fast food chains. I mean none of it's real anymore. So when, when that's happening, when they're consuming that food, from a mechanistic standpoint, what is?
What is the cascade of events that take place? Like, they consume that food, they chew it, it goes to their digestive tract. It literally just wreaks havoc and kills the microbiome. And then that leads to the disarray we find ourselves in. I mean, basically that's probably the best way to summarize it. Like if I was teaching, you know, a grade five class, that's exactly what I would tell them. It goes through and instead of nourishing, it kills. Think about your bacteria in
your gut like a fishbowl, right? We talk about prebiotics and probiotics and there's something we now know is post biotics as well. And so your probiotics are the living Organism. That is your actual live bacteria. Those are the fish in the fish bowl. Now the prebiotics are the fish food, right? Because you, you eat, you poop, so do your bacteria. So we put some fish food in the tank, and your fish eat that, and then they poop. That's your post biotic. Now is that post biotic a good
thing or a bad thing? Is it pooping out short chain fatty acids? Is it pooping out vitamins? Is it pooping out really beneficial things for your immune system and culturing? I mean, up to 90%, seventy to 90% of your immune cells are made and matured inside of your gut and you need a really good environment to do that
successfully. And so if we look at what's muddying the waters and that's all these things coming in, we're putting too much things that your bacteria, your fish in the tank cannot eat and so the water doesn't stay clear and that's where disease starts. That's sort of the the
simplified version. A lot of people have a very high, you know, surface level understanding of this and they will be marketed towards things like detoxes and things of that nature or specific products that are marketed as probiotics, prebiotics. Is there much benefit to any of that if they're still consuming the diet that they're consuming?
Well, I mean, it's really interesting because the argument would be, if your house is burning down while you're trying to build it, can you build it faster than it burns down? If you can, then at least it's a structure, livable or not, as irrelevant. It's a structure by the basic
marketing argument. And so if we're putting in all these vitamins and minerals and nutrients into our body while we're also burning the place down, I mean, are we really keeping up or just preventing the inevitable? And that's the question we have to ask ourselves when we're consuming these things. Now, every health practitioner, every single one, has a bias leaning of some kind.
Whether you're carnivore, whether you're vegan, whether you're a mix, whether you know you advocate for supplements or Whole Foods only, it doesn't matter. We all have a bias somewhere, though a lot of us can try to be, you know, non partisan in any way we possibly can. There's going to be some mixture in there based on education preferences and personal experience.
And so the general population, it's very easy for them to get confused, for them to get LED astray, frankly, by marketing companies who make a really good point or make a viral video. And they buy this product that does next to nothing for them because the environment which is receiving that product is not ready to make the most use of it. You can bring lumber to a town that's on fire, but they're not going to be able to use it adequately.
And that's the same thing with what's going on inside of our bodies. We're bringing building materials, we're bringing supplies, but our body is not in a state to be able to use it appropriately. And this is what's causing us to still be spending. The USA spends 4 1/2 trillion dollars every single year, but they have the highest sickness and disease rates. It's the sickest country in the world.
You know, 60 plus percent of people over 50-60 years old are on a minimum of two or more prescription medications on a regular basis. And so we're throwing, no matter what we have, we're throwing the most money, the most research and money and supplements and pharmaceuticals at our health. Yet we are the sickest nation on earth. And I say we I'm in Canada, but I call it all of North America are pretty much the same. And that is a big, big problem.
Yeah, I totally agree. I tend to do the exact opposite of what the bureaucratic entities tell me to do when it comes to. Yes, they say go left, go as far right as possible. Yeah, 100%. Out of curiosity is there with with so many different types of societies, cultural backgrounds, ways of eating When you look at it from a a gut microbiome standpoint and the bacteria that
are therein. When you look at somebody with a healthy gut microbiome in North America for instance, and compare that to somebody in Southeast Asia eating totally different types of food, but both seemingly very healthy, is that gut microbiome? I mean I would assume if you're eating the right food, your gut microbiome would reflect that, but how could they be so totally different forms of dialect?
Does that shift based off of lineage and and heritage or is there much play in that realm at all? Well, this is where your original question kind of comes back around full circles. How much do we really know? I say we're 50 years away at least, because you and I rob as total strangers. We've never met before, right? We're not related. We don't even live in the same country, right? You and I share about 99 to 99.9% of our DNA, right? We're almost identical.
We only share 20 to 30% of the DNA of a microbiome, and so we're looking at the grand scheme of things. This is why it's so fascinating. We know there are staples, right? We know the basics of Acidophilus and bifidobacterium or different Lactobacillus strains. If we see these all over the place on probiotics, the most researched ones out there, Acromancia is coming out making a big splash right now, all kinds of specific strains. And so we know what they do.
But the ranges and ratios, the specific genus of each strain is very, very different, and so I'm very curious to see myself as a practitioner in this space. I'm very interested to see over the years what happens with the development of research and I'll tell you why. There are even on a basic GI map for example, we might measure Lactobacillus, that's going to be all your Lactobacillus, reyteries and acidophilus and
different strains. Often times if you're not measuring an individual gene of that species it comes out as SPP, your non species specific measurements kind of the umbrella of all Lactobacilli. And so we can see all of that but we don't know exactly the ratios of who's got what right now. We haven't measured it enough. It's only technology that's been around for maybe a decade of really like accessible to the public.
And so if we look at somebody, for example, who receives a heart transplant, great story of a woman that was a news article that came out 1015 years ago now. But she'd received a heart transplant. Stay at home, mom, three kids, very quiet, kept to herself, you know, goes to church, the basics. And she got a heart transplant from a donor who had actually died in a motorcycle accident. Very evil Knievel type, right? Love to drink, love to smoke, love to ride fast.
Well after a number of years she started to develop habits that were more high risk living that she never had before. And so the argument then that I would make is it's these microbes influencing our personality. We already know your micro, your microbes in your gut directly influence how social you feel like being certain behavioral traits and qualities we can see how they influence certain
neurotransmitters and hormones. I mean 90 plus percent of your neurotransmitters come from your gut anyways. And so these different things that we see and how they interact, it's going to be a really cool science to discover how much of our microbes alter our personality, right? We even know right now, for example, people who cut calories and can't lose weight, right. We call it in the industry
weight loss resistant. Those people have a lot of toxins in the body, but also are likely to have a lot of altered gut bacteria. There was a recent mouse study where they actually took all this bacteria from the mice and flushed it out as much as they could with laxatives and antibiotics in the works. And they cleared out their colons. They took a control group with healthy bacteria and then this modified group and they put them
on a caloric deficit. And they found that the mice who had good bacteria, of course, got benefits to their gut bacteria and their hormones and all these things. And they lost weight on a caloric deficit. But the mice who had altered or disrupted or even eliminated gut bacteria didn't get any of those benefits. And if they did get any, they were very, very minimal. And so they even couldn't lose weight, which is what I believe is in part responsible, not only the food and junk but for
obesity crisis is a change. The gut bacteria that we're not yet measuring or that is not yet popularized. And so the influence really everything and even our personalities, even our ability to gain and lose weight and I think something of the future will be very similar to CRISPR technology. We're changing baby's eye colors in utero and all kinds of stuff right now.
Whether or not, you know, you have certain specific beliefs or you think we're playing God, that's irrelevant to this particular statement is that we have the technology to alter genetics in utero, in a tube to determine what hair color, what eye color. And there are now studies, these same mouse studies showing that mice who get a fecal transplant of gut bacteria from an active, thriving healthy mouse, they get a lot of those benefits of the exercise from the healthy mouse.
So maybe in 20 to 50 years really wealthy people can purchase stool from poor people and give them money for having healthy bacteria and not actually really have to exercise but still get the benefits. And so that leaves the question, in the future, could we maybe change personalities and change other traits and disease and risk ratios and genetic expression all through altering somebody's gut bacteria with a
pill? And that that fecal transplant, I mean that's starting to be rolled out in human studies, right, like there have been some studies indicate success with it. Yeah, it's already approved by the FDA and the USA that's typically it's used for recurrent C diff infections. That's that's what it's approved
for. Right now it's not yet approved in Canada, but they are doing clinical trials, but they've used it cases of ulcerative colitis and what's Crohn's disease previously considered autoimmune. Nothing you can do take the drugs will cut out your colon one day are now being reversed. We've seen Parkinson's reversed. I had Doctor William Lee who was on my show talking about the causes of disease and he was saying how he actually scrubbed in on a colonoscopy FMT. So there's two roots of FMT.
One's going to be an oral capsule, which sounds really gross, but that's what it is. They take the stool and the feces and spit it out and extract the microbes and put them in these resistant capsules to get it in culture in your
gut. The other one which now looking at his colonoscopy to actually go in and flush and clean out as much stool and bacteria from the colon as possible and implant stool from another healthy donor or your super donors and they have actually fully reversed Parkinson's and even a case of cancer was completely reversed and cured through this FMT. And so again cancer is an inflammatory condition.
So if it starts in the gut, it makes sense that altering the Biome will help reverse these diseases. And that's what we're working on right now in my specialty here with inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's colitis is what changes do we need to make on a cellular and microbiological level to get people to reverse these diseases and stay in permanent remission. There's there's so much to it, man.
Like people need to take a very measured approach to any manipulations they're making with their gut health, I'm assuming. So like a lot of people will do these these cleanses or they'll do like they'll they'll take enemas, coffee enemas, all water enemas. That's become popular and a lot of a lot of subgroups that could probably do a lot more harm than good if they're riding themselves of all the good bacteria they do have.
Like how? How does one go about measuring and determining what steps to take here? That's a great question. Before I do that, I want to put one caveat in place. Please do not aim to modify your own bacteria, especially if you detect problems on your own. It can be very detrimental. We've seen cases of death from it. We've seen all kinds of disease introduction. There was a fella in Toronto.
It's actually on a documentary fun one called Designer Shit and it's this woman who goes through and she actually alters her own. She has ulcerative colitis and takes her husband's stool and does her homemade FMT and she did what she could to do some measurement to make sure things were healthy. But it is highly risky without a professional and you can cause a
lot of problems. This one gentleman actually used stool from his mom also got lucky, says he cured his ulcerative colitis but he actually picked up her menopause symptoms with hot flashes and you know and ADHD and lack of focus. So measuring. Very very cool tool, but please take heed when doing it yourself. It can be very dangerous. Don't eat so in an unsupervised environment. That's exactly it. If you're gonna eat, poop, do it. Do it with a professional.
And so her FMT She'd actually done retention. Enemas is what it was, but oral administration seems to be the preferred route as of late. But here's my thoughts on that. So we can measure. So we talked briefly about a GI map right measurement. That's what we do, is a stool sample goes to the lab. There's different types of maps. Ones I tend to like to use are Q, PCR, DNA stool analysis. There are some labs like Doctor's Data that will do them,
but they are qualitative. So we give you a +1234. So yeah, Streptococcus species or Clostridium species plus 3 + 4. So it gives you an idea. I like to use quantitative data, so that's going to be things like Vibrant Wellness or diagnostic solutions where they'll actually tell you your culture count. They use APCR to actually replicate and count out the the strains of these things and show you how many grams or how many bacteria per gram of stool etcetera.
So it's a very cool measurement. But the problem here again, we have 1 to 2000 species, 7 to 9000 strains, which means upwards of about 18,000,000 different types of bacteria. And This is why a lot of physicians tend not to use them. It's just not solid enough, right. We can maybe see 50 to 100 strains out of these upwards of 18 ish million bacteria and and count them in data. Now, the good news is that what we can see on these stool samples we sent to the lab is it's very actionable.
But again, it's stuff we know a lot about your Lactobacillus, your Bifidobacterium, your fecal presidencies. And so there's all kinds of stuff we have a lot of research on. A lot is very actionable. We can know where it resides, a lot of the bacteria, where it comes from. But it goes beyond that. If somebody is showing a lot of imbalance in the bacteria, I see it a lot in IBD cases. That's why most of them are inflamed, is we see a lot of imbalances in bacteria.
But the question is, how did you get there? I got one lady I'm working with right now. Over the last 3-4 years, her doctors gave her over 30 doses of antibiotics. Like, no wonder her guts a mess. On the other hand, I've got a little boy I've been seeing for a little while now. He's five years old, turning 6 soon, and he went in to see his doctor. Severe ulcerative colitis. OK, it's ulcerative colitis. It's autoimmune. There's nothing we can do.
It is what it is. I'm sorry you got a bad luck in the draw, but here are some immunosuppressives and all kinds of stuff we can give him to, you know, make his life more comfortable. Well, we did a stool analysis. His gut bacteria was one of the worst I've ever seen at five years old. It doesn't make sense. There's has to be something else going on. So we did a urine test and found 20 plus different strains of mold. Turns out the whole home, they're doing a complete remediation.
They've moved out. They've been out of their home now for nine months, and that's at the time of us recording. And they're working on getting the mold out because the system was full of it. And that's what altered has got bacteria. And so when doctors say there's really nothing we can do, I say bullshit. We're just not looking in the right places. Either we don't want to, or we don't have the education or they don't have the time to educate themselves as another problem.
But that's sort of what we do in measurement. We have to measure #1. But two, if it's out of place, we have to go through an extremely thorough history. We can use organic acid testing. We can use different types of lab work to figure out the most probable explanation as to what's a causing the inflammation and or B causing changes in your gut bacteria leading to further inflammation.
I know there's been multiple companies that have come out of the woodwork lately to analyze DNA, kind of take the the raw 23andMe genetic data and then you know, summarize what that could potentially mean for you, how to turn on and turn off those various snips. And I know there's been some companies crop up that do something similar from a a gut
microbiome standpoint. Are there any particular ones that you would recommend that vouch for, present good data in an actual format, or is that still the wild frontier? Now, are you talking about biomes or DNA testing? Biomes similar to what they've done with the DNA testing. Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of, you know, looking at things like Mosaic, Vibrant Wellness diagnostic solutions. Those are sort of my go TOS right now.
There's a lot of them out there. Precision Point has some really great stuff, but all of them have different tests. So for example, one of the tests from Vibrant Wellness, we do an Oats test, that's your organic acid test. That may not be as accurate in some regards as maybe one from Mosaic. And so really getting to know your labs does make a difference as a practitioner because they they present different points of data and different levels of
accuracy. And so there are a lot of tests that will recommend the challenges for your general population. You have to have a practitioner like myself or a functional medicine Doctor Who works in your area or all over the world that can actually get these tests and help you find a solution because they are behind locked doors. Because I consult for a lot of doctors, I do have access to a lot of these labs like Precision Point. You have to be a physician.
I was able to get an account, but without access like that you you can't get a lot of these proper tests done. Yeah, totally makes sense. Are there any? Like, given all that we don't know about proper gut health, are there any hard yeses and hard Nos that you can confidently say? For instance, obviously alcohol is probably not going to be the best thing for gut microbiome health. What about things like fermented foods? Is that going to yield a net positive for everybody? Like what?
What are some hard yeses and hard noses that we can confidently speak on? 100% alcohol. You know, we used to say that little bit is good for you or it's, you know, the red wine is good for the antioxidants resveratrol. That's all been fully debunked, that the risks and problems are not worth the reward by any means. You can get those anthocyanins and resveratrol from other places and even a straight supplement now, so we don't need the alcohol.
There are zero benefits from alcohol human body if anything is detrimental and directly linked to other problems. So that's one other challenge we have is manufacturers, producers, food companies will pay for studies to be done and that's where the financial bias comes in. The information trickles to the public. We just hear the 1 cherry on top. Oh alcohol, I love alcohol and I can get antioxidants. Hell yeah, give me the wine and it's extraordinarily
detrimental. That study was paid for by, say, a wine producer. And so we're cherry picking data without considering or purposely leaving stuff out. So alcohol's number 1, #2 sugar. Now, there are different types of sugar, right? Of course, you refine sugars, your table sugars, even, you know, we look at us like cane sugar. It's all highly acidic sugar. It's all concentrated forms. So I prefer things like stevia
or natural sugars in fruit. Of course, as you would know with fibers, that can slow the absorption in imbalanced blood sugars. But if you have bacterial issues, if you have fungal issues, Candida or dysbiosis, like an overgrowth of a lot of opportunistic bacteria, any sugar at all is going to contribute to your problem. And that's very problematic for a lot of people not knowing what's actually going on. So even fruit sugar, I might remove fruits entirely for 6 to 12 weeks.
It depends. And other things you want to look at, of course, are going to be gluten. Gluten is a hard no for everyone, always, Doctor Tom O'Brien he told me. He says the people who get gut issues from gluten are the lucky ones because they can decipher that this is a problem. They understand they can feel it by eating a bite of gluten that they balloon. But the people who are unlucky are the ones who can't tell. Maybe 3-4 days later you have a problem.
And that's primarily because gluten, for example, your body identifies gluten protein as a pathogenic bacteria, as a as a toxic bug. And so when we talked about the digestive system, we talked about those Queens guard sitting between the stomach and small intestine right there. It's called TLR 4. It's a Toll like receptor #4. I believe there's nine or eleven, I think there's nine in the body. But toll like receptor #4 sits between the stomach and the small intestine.
And if you eat gluten, what they do is actually look at that and go, OK, you're a problem. Better down than up. It might be a little bit easier. So let's try that. They open the floodgates and they actually create leaky gut as a defense mechanism. They open the floodgates. They spread the cells inside the gut lining. It actually allows water to come in. That's why if you eat something you shouldn't, you get the runs
within like 10 minutes. That is your body's toll like receptors opening the floodgates to try to wash like putting your thumb over the top of the hose right to create pressure and power washer driveway. Same thing happens in the gut is trying to flush it out and that's what what gluten does to the body. It creates leaky gut. Now we heard the term leaky gut. In this context it's a good thing. It is beneficial. Your body's saying I want to get rid of you.
The problem is chronic inflammation leads to sustained leaky gut, which leads to sustained issues in a bi directional flow. Not just water coming in, but toxins leaking out. And that's the problem. So alcohol, sugar, gluten. Hard. No. Second to that would be as an overarching rule. If your great, great, great grandmother would not recognize it as an edible piece of food, we probably shouldn't eat it. It's as simple as that.
I know nobody likes it. It's not a sexy answer, but it's meat, fruit, vegetables, whatever it is you're eating, that's where you want to go to. And those are sort of my four points of contact, I'll say, around food and edibles. What about hard yeses? Are there any for sure? Hey, your your body's going to benefit if you consume this on a regular basis. Fat and meat every single time.
It is the most bioavailable. All the studies that are coming out, there's so much information out there but the benefits of red meat. And even Harvard published a really embarrassing study recently, earlier this year that was showing the how harmful red meat was and diabetes and waste circumference and all these things. But their classification for raw meat or sorry red meat was lasagna and sandwiches as opposed to eating a salad with like olive oil. So even the data they're
collecting is is pretty biased. And so I'm a big fan of doctors like Anthony Chafee who do talk about the carnivore diet. I'm not strict carnivore. I'll consume fruit, I eat very little vegetables, but mostly red meat. And I did AGI map earlier this year when I was dealing with some gut issues myself. Came up high stress period, lots going on. Had surgery earlier in the year which required a lot of antibiotic use. They put in a big sinus infection and issues there.
But my gut Biome was a bit of a mess. I've been carnivore, almost strictly carnivore. I think I went 12 weeks strict carnivore. Then after that I introduced some fruit. But about eight months on an animal based a carnivore diet and my Biome has never looked better. I just submitted A stool sample, got it back about 3-4 weeks ago and it's never looked better. And so it's interesting to say that we need fiber, we need plants, we need these things. Now fibers become an essential nutrient.
Literally putting sawdust inside our food like wood isn't food, right? It's a building material. It's it's it's cellulose for for rabbits maybe, and other craters, but humans can't digest it. And so now that we're adding all this fiber to things, just because it's cellulose, we're getting a lot more junk in our food. And so my yeses are animal products, eggs, meat, fat, butter or ghee. Olive oil is a pretty remarkable substance, has all kinds of antimicrobial and healing properties.
So that's sort of my go to yeses. Now we're definitely speaking the same language there. I think all the benefits of fiber far more so, not because fiber Internet itself is grand for our body, but it helps mitigate the adverse response that comes from eating all the other crap and just pushes that through at a better rate. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting argument to say eat fiber because you can't break it down.
You need it. So it kind of scrapes the insides and you know, it's good for you. On the other hand, they'll also in the same breast, say don't eat meat because you can't break it down. So do we eat fiber because we can't break it down or not eat meat because we can't break it down? Like you can't have both in in my argument. I'm not necessarily saying everyone should be carnivore always. I'm actually very much in the
middle. I've had people with very poor guts like in severe gut disease who I've tried on carnivore and they've done well based on their their Biome profiles. Other I've given them more of a plant based diet and they've done really well. Everybody responds differently. I don't think it's so much per SE the foods, I think one, GMO is a big problem. Two, we're eating a lot of foods that never existed in the human diet.
And three, I don't think it's the foods as much being the problem as it is. Excuse me, as it is the food production. Food production is a mess again, pesticides, GMOs, mono cropping storage processes, the mold risk, and things like peanut butter and chickpeas and coffee. Like it's immense. And so it's this mega manufacturing and mono cropping that is the problem. It's how we're growing our food, I believe to be more of a problem than the food itself. We're now growing food inside of
dirt, right? We used to grow it inside of soil. And by that I mean carbon cycling, biogeochemical cycling. If you have a bioregenerative farm, right? You'll look at Rob, you have an apple tree. Apple falls off the tree, It decomposes in the grass. The grass grows from that dirt. And then the cow eats the grass and you eat the cow. So you've now gotten all those nutrients combined into you, but now it's just dirt. We till the soil, the the top layer is dead. There's no microbes in it.
There's no life in it. There's no nutrients. It's artificially grown with fertilizers and sprayed full of chemicals to make it grow and produce a crop and the nutrient value is destroyed. And I think those are more of a problem to our health than the actual plants themselves. That's my my first instinct thought on it. But again, some doctors will disagree about defense mechanisms of plants and all that, so.
This is where intuitive Eating comes in, and that's a sort of a whole nother topic, but definitely an interesting point of discussion. No, I'm, I'm definitely picking up what you're putting down. I'm in agreement for sure. Have you had anybody that's seen a significant decline in microbiome health with a carnivore approach? No, no, I've not at all. And that's another interesting point is why and how right do they sort of sustain themselves?
Can they use all the nutrients and meat to to sustain themselves? We've been told we need prebiotics, we need fermentable carbohydrates, we need things they can turn into short chain fatty acids, you know, resistant starches and all these things. But some of the healthiest people I've seen are an animal based or carnivore diet.
And so that begs to differ or begs the question rather how do we differ these diets from a plant based diet where we study the microbiome to doctors saying will it actually be knowing what we know now? They will argue it is inhumane and borderline should be illegal to do a carnivore diet and test people because of how hard red meat and other things is on the diet. But I mean since the 1800s they've used a red meat diet in water to cure Crohn's disease.
So what is it we're missing and what sort of data are we neglecting to gather by not testing biomes and stools on a mass scale using an animal based or carnivore diet? There's much less money to be made, man. That's why there's not incentive there. Unfortunately, that's exactly it. Artificial food is where it's at. Yeah, regular farming, there's there's very little money in it and that's why these lab grown meats, the profit margins are so
high. But again, it's just dead tissue inside of of that often made from, you know what would arguably be cancerous or precancerous cells to get them to grow so rapidly. But we're not getting real food anymore. Like humans were never meant to eat like this man. Totally. If someone is going to be consuming a lot more vegetation, are they better off going the route of fermented foods like the sauerkrauts and kimchi, things of that nature?
That's going to be easier to absorb than, say, a raw vegetarian approach. You know, I used to say raw. I was actually conventionally trained. As a nutritionist. I was trained go raw, right? Eat as many raw, real organic foods as you can and I'm seeing whether or not a healthy gut could do it to be determined. You know, that's something else that's really interesting. People argue they feel great on a raw diet. I think it's because what they've done is eliminated a lot
of the junk really. But I've known a lot of people who went raw vegan and got horribly, I'll I mean, famous person right away is David Dave Asprey, right? He went raw vegan and he never felt worse in his life. I tried it and I felt horrific. It's when I went animal based, I felt better And so it's really interesting to say should we eat raw or not. I think humans, if you're going to eat vegetables, should be cooked. I think fruit is definitely a lot easier to eat raw.
Some will argue eat it cooked, it just depends on the current state of your gut. But I will never ever advocate for a raw vegan diet. Knowing what I know about health and science and gut disease specializing in it, I'll never recommend a raw vegan diet. Yeah, What about raw meat? That's been kind of like a popular trend as well. Like, some argue that when you cook the meat, you're able to have better absorption of the nutrients.
Some say that the exact opposite is true, and if you're eating raw meat, you're going to be able to simulate those nutrients better than what what What's the gut microbiome say? That's a good question and that's something that is just not enough data on unfortunately right now and a lot of these studies that we look for and what we're really conditioned in the society as well where we want to prove really causation, not just correlation. It's just not enough for us
anymore. It has to be measured. And so I would argue to say that a raw meat diet, provided it's, you know, a clean and and sustainable source, is probably great. But I don't, I don't know if in our world anymore raw meat is going to be OK. I sure as shit would not eat raw meat from like, Safeway, right? I wouldn't do that at all. If I was growing my own cattle and I was to eat it, I'd be more inclined.
On the other hand, I've also known people who went out hunting, you know, grabbed a wild buck and the meat was raw and they got very, very, very sick because that animal was carrying a pathogen or a parasite or something else that caused the problem. So I would say just from a health and safety standpoint, microbiome aside that consuming raw meat is but much better, sorry, cooked meat is a much better option than raw just for safety.
But whether or not it benefits the Biome differently, that's some some research I'd be very interested in seeing. It would just be very difficult to get a a big enough scale of people to actually study pre and post and keep track of raw meat to give them grocery store meat versus farm grown meat versus you know, wild game and haunted. And it can be very, very difficult study to do. Yeah, it is interesting though. I've been kind of gravitating more towards not necessarily raw
but minimally cooked meats. But at at the same time, I've definitely known the source of those meats. I've either haunted it and killed it myself. I've known the farmer, the rancher. That's definitely not something that I would do or advocate for a big box conventional grocery store. I agree entirely. I know where my food comes from. I know the farmers. I go to the farm myself to pick it up. I go to the ranch. And so, you know, I know where all of it's coming from.
And that makes a big difference. Excuse me? It makes a very big difference. What about seed oil? So that's another point of contention right now in the space. What is that doing to the gut microbiome specifically? It's like 1 SEC. It's got a scratching the throat. Hey, no worries, no worries. Especially as it depends like cooking in certain oils and fats and like whether or not you cook above that smoke point. Does it turn it into a trans fat? What's that doing to the gut
microbiome like that? That's a big point of contention right now, so I'd be keen to get your take on it. Yeah, I'm a vehement. They get seed oils. It doesn't make any sense, the manufacturing process. And here's the thing, there's a lot of people right now will say again, it's correlation, causation. We have the study that shows seed oils are just fine, but they are extraordinarily high in Omega 6. Now can the average body handle high Omega six?
No, because 92 to 97% of us are not metabolically healthy anymore. And so again, but not just metabolism in the weight gain, weight loss scenario, it's our entire cellular Wellness. Every, every chemical or biological process used to maintain life, that is metabolism. And so our metabolisms are so full of junk that we can't handle these things. I mean, and back in 2000 and four 2005, the Red Cross did a study where they took a bunch of freshly cut umbilical cords.
They grabbed 10 of them and they found an average of 256 toxic chemicals inside a freshly cut umbilical cord, which is staggering. I mean 180 were known to cause cancer, 217 were toxic to the brain and nervous system, 208 caused birth defects or abnormal development. And these are in like brand new babies. And so could we handle higher Omega sixes if we were maybe in a better metabolic state? Perhaps.
But are all of us highly inflamed and full of so much junk that adding more of these negative Omega sixes in higher amounts like seed oils, which I believe would be a better oil in your car than in your body, Then you know it's nonsense. And so looking at these fried oils, looking at the amount of trans fats, looking at hydrogenated oils, that's a big one. I mean, we look at any hydrogenation will produce trans fats every single time.
It's a chemical process with a basically just blow hydrogen through something and it attaches to all your carbon chains and so instead of this squiggly non stacking oil that will actually make like an oil like you get from olive oil, it turns into a thick margarine where all these lines, these these chemical structures are more straight and so they stack like paper. That's how you get your
margarine. They always create trans fats, even if they say trans fat free, they've modified it even further in some way or change the serving size to show no trans fats per that serving size and that's very problematic as well as more deception by the food industry. So long about answer are seed oils safe? There are a lot of people who would argue yes, but the correlation is just so strong. We've only been eating them for
50 to 70 years. We cannot say for sure they are safe and the risk profile just doesn't make sense knowing what we know about processed foods. Yeah, I'm in complete agreement. What are some good proxies people can use for kind of analyzing their own health and being objective? Like like regularity for instance? As simple as that may sound, is there like a general rule of thumb as to what a healthy frequency for regularity would be, or is that going to be incredibly dependent upon the
individual? I don't think this is dependent, as doctors say, even GI specialists, and this is what shocks me. Gastroenterologists will tell you one bowel boon every couple of days is fine. If you are not having at least minimum of one fully formed easy bowel movement every single day. Or you wipe, it's one or two wipes and you're clean, then you are having a problem of some
kind, some sort of dysfunction. If it's really sticky, if it's, you know you're having, like I said, less than one, some people up to three. That's pretty normal, right? Dogs, babies, they eat, they poop. So one to three could be argued to be normal. I do have less obviously on a carnivore diet, you know, maybe two a day instead of three or four like I used to with a plant based diet. And that's just strictly do the bulk and the fiber and how things are moving through or not
digesting. But if you're having anything outside of that, you have a problem. If you are dealing with a bit of looseness, if you're dealing with sensitivity, if you're dealing with any kind of bloat, any irritability, any acid reflux, I mean, 72, upwards of 72% of Americans complain of gut issues once a week. That's your Constipation, diarrhoea, gas bloat, pain, cramping something. And if we look at the severity spectrum and here's where it gets wild, Rob.
When I look at my speciality of Crohn's and colitis, we have in 1990, there was roughly 1 1/2 to 3,000,000 cases of IBD worldwide according to the CDC. Today it's 7,000,000 / 50% of those cases are in the USA alone. In the USA is 5% of the globe. So with 72% of Americans dealing with gut issues and now when 5% of the world has 50% of the disease, we can see the slippery slope of gut problems happening. And so we talked about what kind of gut issue should be aware of.
Anything outside of the normal can put you on a slippery slope to developing severe gut disease down the road, be it months or years. It's all relative and it's not really dependent on the individual. We're all so similarly built. Mechanically speaking, you should be one to three a day with I'll pain very easy, no blow eating food, high energy, good focus, mental clarity, no skin issues. These types of things should be
very very easy and normal. It is crazy how accepting people are of just, you know, bloat, pain, discomfort, acid reflux, that they just all assume that's just normal. They'll run to Walgreens, grab some Pepto Bismol and call it good and. Which is the worst? I hate antacids. Yeah, but I mean, I can't. I like since I adopted the ketogenic down, like I don't have any gas, I don't have any cramping, I don't have any bloat. Like all that's just gone.
Like people just realized how much better they felt when that was not even part of the equation. That alone would be a reason to stick with it. Yeah, well, one of the issues is 1. The education is precipitated by the medical professional. Like I had one lady, she came in. I'll tell you Rob, she had one bowel movement every four weeks, once a month. Can you imagine the backup, the solidity she had chronic migraines. She had all should have colitis. She had all these issues.
Her doctor wasn't that concerned. It's like, well, you have, you see these things are going to happen. Like this lady's on the brink of death. You need to be cleaning out those toxins and purging stuff. 3 weeks later she's having three to five bowel movements a day. Like we loosened her right up. No problem, no medication. It can be done. But the problem with this is because up to 9090 to 97% of people are not metabolically healthy, 72% complaining of
regular gut issues. We've now taken common and accepted it as a normal, and that's a very big problem. We do it all the time even in blood work when we see patient blood labs. You know I had a client of mine who went back and she got a thyroid checked and her TSH that thyroid stimulating hormone normal used to be between one and 4.5 or was it goes one and four and she got hers back.
It was like 6.1. The doctor said, oh you're fine it's within normal range well over that year for when she got hers done in July of 2022 to when it came back in January of 2023. They've changed the reference range from 1:00 to 4:00 to 1 to 6.5 S They added 67% extra leeway because they took the normal population of sick people, the common population, and said, well, here's our new reference range. So we're constantly measuring our Wellness based on sick people.
We're going to continue to get sick results and we're going to continue to make people sicker and sicker. And This is why we'll say, yeah, 123, you know, one bowel movement every couple of days is normal. And say, yeah, common is normal because everyone is sick, because our sliding scale of what's acceptable keeps getting worse. And as a major problem, we're going to drive ourselves into freaking extinction, man.
Yeah, no, I totally agree, man. The there's just so many moving targets out there right now and people have forgotten how to just be intuitive and be objective and listen to their own body. Like they don't even know how to do that and they'll turn to a doctor or medical professionals get a skewed or biased approach. And it's just it is a slippery slope. It's very, very unfortunate. And very, very dangerous. It's This is why diseases are on
the rise, man. This is why, you know, we celebrate things and saying, well, look at us here. Now, in 2023-2024, we do such an amazing job with cancer. People are surviving. The survival rate is so much more. Well, there's one stat. The other stat is we have more cancer than ever before and people are getting sicker, right. So we're cherry picking our data once again and celebrating wins that should not be wins. 100% out of curiosity man, know what
you know. How do you structure your day of eating and frequency for instance? Like I know you kind of say you certainly advocate for animal based diets and predominantly don't use much besides some veg, same fruits from time to time, but what does that look like on a day-to-day basis? Are you eating a lot of fish? Are you predominantly red meat? You have much chicken, poultry, things of that nature. Predominantly red meat, about
95% red meat. I'm not opposed to eating other things I'm a big fan of like Benazzotti Keto Flex, where it's like flexing in and out of keto, for example. So I primarily do ride in Aikido life. I had this morning, for example, I had about a half pound to a pound of steak with butter and salt, and I'll eat that three times a day. Sometimes I put yogurt on it. Sometimes, you know, maybe for a little snack we'll have half a cup or a cup of frozen raspberries as a treat, things
like that. But I get everything I need from red meat and that's my personal diet. And again, it's all grass fed, grass finished, organic, GMO free, soy free, corn free, grain free. And really, it's not that much more expensive than the grocery store because I drive to the farm and go direct from farm to table and that's a much better option.
And so that's my personal diet. I might make a soup, you know, if my wife is sick, I might make chicken soup with rice and carrots and celery and that's fine. I'm not going to say no to vegetables. If I go to my in laws, they're just not a regular part of my diet and I've never been healthier. I love it. Can you speak a little bit on the the formation and creation of just butyrate butyric acid in a Diane that is predominantly red bean?
Yeah, well I mean your gut bacteria produce these post biotics, right. They they create that. So what they take in is they consume and they ferment like we talked about inside of the gut bacteria like the fishbowl. So whatever you give them, they will then consume and if they are healthy and you have these relatively normal levels, they will produce them. And what we used to believe was, OK, well your your bacteria need food to poop, right?
They have to be fed these fibers, these starches, these fermentable carbohydrates in order to ferment into short chain fatty acids. But those are what keep the body healthy. Now on the other hand, if you don't need these things coming in, how do you make them? If your if your bacteria can sustain themselves, it becomes
its own ecosystem. If you are doing fasting, maybe your bacteria are eating other things, maybe your cells they're consuming through autophagy and so things turn themselves over. It's a very self regulating machine. And so we talk about post biotics and things like butyrate. We know there are specific strains of bacteria that produce these post biotics, right. They create them by themselves. A really great example of a post
or pre, sorry probiotic. We know that we're studying a lot now with Acromancia. We know it balances things like estrogen, We know it balances out your blood sugar metabolism. We know it produces benefits to the immune system. And so it's in there, it's balancing itself.
It's very self regulating. And so it's really interesting to see the research and I'd actually love to read more about exactly what these bacteria need if any for food because they are so self-sufficient and self-sustaining that ecosystem. Think about a pond, right, we don't need to put food into a fish pond. If you have algae, if you have bugs, if you have a normal ecosystem, it's very self-sustaining. That's what terrariums are.
They're a self-sustaining ecosystem and I believe our guts can do that regardless of what we put in there, if they start off the right way, from birth to breastfeeding to life. Yeah, totally, totally agree, man. So no carbohydrates necessary, basically. Basically, I mean, I don't think we need them at all. Look how many people are in a full ketogenic lifestyle for years now? We do know if you're always in
keto, always in forever. There are correlations to cancer risk, but that's the point of keto flexing in and out. You know, you're not going to get a tribe that goes through running through the jungle and looks at fruit and goes, no, we are keto, don't eat right though. We're going to grab that and eat it. And so our bodies flex in and out of these states. So is the question. No carbohydrates always in forever? I'd say no. These fruits and these things are made to be eaten.
But on the other hand, do we actually need them on a day-to-day basis? Hell no. You could go your entire life without a single carbohydrate. You'd have a much better chance of survival and preventing disease than you would without a, you know, go even a couple of weeks ago. Any fatter, any protein, you get very, very sick. And so do we need carbohydrates? I'd say arguably in small amounts here and there. Do we need them every single day, forever and always?
No. Women, of course, are going to be different biologically and hormonally, but for the most part we can be in a keto lifestyle. Yeah. And I don't think any of those studies that indicate long term ketosis being, you know, cooler to cancer are well designed studies in the 1st place. So that's kind of a mute point to begin with. Well, that's a lot of grey air and I totally agree. And so that the data we pulls from the data we're given.
But like you said, if it's already kind of bastardized and bias and, you know, skewed, then like what good is it? Is it a point of reference and consideration? Sure. Is it something for us to maybe look at and keep an eye on? Sure. But can we use it as definitive data? Absolutely not. Yeah, 100%. Well, I'm, I'm curious man, what, what's in the pipeline for you? What are you excited about? What research studies get your interest right now? What? What are you diving into as we
go into the next year? Well, it's interesting. So I've been pushed recently to write a book. A lot of people have been asking for it. I met with Mark Devine. What I think was last week, I don't know if you know him, he's the Navy SEAL wrote unbeatable mind and design SEAL fit. But interesting fella. He says, tell you what man says when you write a book, we're going to come back and have another conversation. I said OK. And so I think a book coming up
is going to be interesting. I think I'd like to call it antiquated medicine. Talking about how horrible our system is and how we rely on all this old stuff. Got some neat stuff coming up going on a show with Doug Kaufman, who created the Kaufman Diet on Know the Cause. Going to got some really great speaking events, doing some traveling, going to seminars. So we got a lot of stuff. We're just trying to get the word out.
My my whole mission is that diseases, especially autoimmune, digestive diseases like Crohn's and colitis don't fall to the sky and drop on our head and come from nowhere. There's always A cause. The problem is, medicine doesn't look for it. They just go, here's your current symptoms, therefore here's your diagnosis. And we give drugs 1-2 or three for that diagnosis. It's cookbook, it's line cook. It is not critical thinking.
We want to go back to the roots and teach people to do that for themselves, to understand it differently and really become advocates. And so whether that's through books or speaking or TV shows or or podcasts, there's lots of cool stuff coming up and we just want to get the word out. Yeah, I love it, man. I feel like this is a topic that is so misunderstood. So the more light that you can bring to it, the more hopefully you open people's eyes and
minds. Because like we said in the very beginning, you can't really tease out gut health from everything else. Like, it's all intertwined. And if people start viewing it holistically as such, they're likely going to start moving in the right direction. So where? Where they're sourcing their food, the types of foods they're consuming, the toxins, their environment. I mean, everything is all interconnected and we have to live life accordingly.
Undoubtedly. I don't think I could have wrapped it up better myself is that's exactly what it is. When you are so convicted by knowledge, belief and understanding, you move in accordance with that It becomes your new law, your new rule for life. When you realize that these pesticides are killing us, when you realize that our circadian rhythms are a mess because we're all in the city, we're watching TV at night, we're eating late at night, we're throwing off these rhythms.
We're not getting sleep or prone to diseases. It's really interesting. A lot of the health community has more interest in actually moving out of the city day by day, not just because homesteading is trendy, but because it aligns with our beliefs and our values around health and Wellness and getting back to nature.
And as society begins to move further and further away from that original design, we health professionals tend to move closer and closer to it. So it does create more of a gap and more of a dichotomy, you know, between two different types of communities. But I think it's really interesting to see where it goes and how much one can influence the other. Yeah, I mean, it just feels right to like when you're doing something that you know to be
true and pure and right. You just, you just know it. And like when you're sitting around a campfire sharing a meal with people that you know you aspire to, to learn from and be like, and you're eating a quality meal and you're looking up at the stars because you're miles away from the city. Like that just feels like it's primal, It's carnage. It's like how we are supposed to be as a species. We've just removed ourselves from that environment.
But the more we can do to get closer to it, the better. Yeah. And I got a philosophy, you know, it's that we as human beings, the closer we get to nature, the further we get from disease. And I'll tell you why. You know, over sanitizing everything 20/20 was a prime example of people getting sick just from not getting outside, not getting sunlight, over sanitizing everything. And that whole that whole forest was just people making themselves sick or really.
And so looking back, one of the things that that people can do the most for themselves is to get outside, get into nature. The people with the worst microbiomes and with that the worst immune systems are those who are #1 born C-section, so not vaginally. So again, a not a natural thing. Two who are bottle fed, not breast fed and they're going to have horrific gut biomes and they're actually more inclined to get, you know, to die of SIDS.
Babies who are who are bottle fed are twice as likely to die from SIDS than babies who are breast fed. And so that already starts right out there. Now, if you live in a city, if you work in an office building, if you sit inside all day, you have one of the worst microbiomes. But if you were born vaginally, you came to the birth canal, you were breast fed.
If you grew up on a farm, interacting with animals and getting your hands in the dirt, your microbiome diversity is far more superior than to somebody on the other end of that spectrum. And that's strictly because of how we were designed to live in nature and engaging, interacting with nature, being outside, being in the dirt, you know, working with animals, being on a farm or consuming animal products. That's how we introduce things
into our bodies. But these hyper sterilized lifestyles, they just completely work against us. We're not introducing new life into our Meadow, into our forest of of bacteria so to speak. And so we're lacking a lot really in in the world of health and diversity based on our modern lifestyles. And that's another driver for so much sickness and disease, a. 100% and that's kind of what we're touch touching on the very beginning and our aspiration is to kind of get into the home setting.
What what's the timeline like that for you? Are you you going to be getting land anytime soon? Yeah, we're actually seriously looking at getting some land within the next year to year and a half and having a home and everything built up. It's just going to be a really great question of what do we do with it.
You know, my dream would be to buy some land that's farmable and that you know, we have some flexible zoning on that people will come out and want to do retreats, come out to do weddings, have some glamping, have some cabins and Airbnb's. And you know whether it's a live work type scenario and you have people coming out, live on the land and working and it just becomes a community. That's my dream and hopefully in the next couple of years we'll have that.
But it's something we are working and saving rigorously toward because we believe that is where we're supposed to be and that's where humans were designed for, is this very natural lifestyle. In meeting with homesteaders and farmers like Joel Salatin and Jill Winger, they are phenomenal and they're super brilliant and they just talk about how getting back to nature and farming and working in outside is just some
of the most fulfilling. It gave them meaning, it gave them purpose and it changed their health as well. And so much comes from getting back to nature and then that's a dream that I want. The closer I get to that side of things, the deeper my understanding gets, the more I am in this industry, the more that begins to align with my values. And that's now we're actively working towards. I love it, man. Well, our dreams and our values are most definitely aligned.
So when you get that property, you let me know. If there's anything I can do to help, by all means let me know. And you are more than welcome to come check out our operation here because I think one of the main benefits that I've noticed just simply in going the homesteading route is that the people that are doing something similar and the sense of camaraderie and community that comes with that is pretty much unparalleled. So just keep diving deeper, man.
It's it's pretty fulfilling. Well, I'll absolutely take you up on that. You know, we're doing a lot of traveling coming up this year and maybe that's one of the things we'll stop and do because I want to learn more about it. You know, unfortunately I wasn't raised on a farm. I wasn't raised to work with my hands. Like I've been trained to work hard but not with my hands. I'm handy ish. I can hang photos and pictures, but I couldn't build a house, you know.
And so I want to learn these things because those are skills that you are self-sufficient, self-sustaining. And when you have a village full of people who do that, the the quality of life that you get is so much more meaningful and so much deeper than constantly being back-to-back and competing with somebody on social media, media and and you know, living in this sort of world that's all artificial and made-up. It's just not what we want to be doing.
And and the better a community we can build, the more places we can visit, the more we can learn and everybody comes up together. And that's that's the dream. Amen to that, man. It certainly takes a village. Well, where do people go to find out more about you and just watch the journey unfold, man? But they want to learn more. Best place to go to wouldbereversiblepod.com That's reverse able pod.com. And that's my podcast, Reversible, the ultimate Gut
Health podcast. And what we do there is just talk about the gut. Now that can be a bit of redundant topic. So it's not just like here's some bacteria, Here's some fun facts. We actually meet with some of the best in the world talking about different ailments and conditions. We talk about how the gut effects our world, how our world effects it. And we meet with doctors like William Lee, Stephen Gunger, We even had Lisa Bill you on talking about business and gut and Wellness.
And it's just a really fascinating podcast. I've had the opportunity to meet with some really amazing guests and specialists from all over the world, some very famous famous people and to get their take on it and it's been really cool journey. So on there as well on reversiblepod.com. I also have access. I've created some free gut health programs.
If people are dealing with acid reflux, fatty liver, irritable bowel, inflammatory bowel, whatever it is, there are free programs and of course our our custom programs for severe inflammatory bowel disease. We can always help with that and you can reach everyone through that website reversiblepod.com. Awesome. Well, I will certainly link it to that and make it easy for people to find you. Josh, really appreciate the time, man.
I've learned a ton. I value what you're putting out in the space, and I've got no doubt that you're making impact in ways you don't even yet realize. So keep doing exactly what you're doing. Hey man, likewise, I I love what you're doing. The message is spreading and I appreciate you having me on. And just give me the opportunity to share this information with people who are really interested in hearing it. So thank you. My pleasure, man.
Well, until next time, brother. Take care and happy holidays to you. Cheers.