SUPER GUT WITH DR WILLIAM DAVIS
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Episode 228:
Show Notes
Episode 228:
Transcript
Dr Mary Barson (0:04) Hello, my lovely friends. I am Dr Mary Barson Barson.
Dr Lucy Burns (0:09) And I'm Dr Lucy Burns. We are doctors and weight management and metabolic health experts.
Both (0:16) And this is the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast!
Dr Lucy Burns (0:23) Good morning, my lovely friend. I am with a legend in the field this morning. And no, it's not Dr Mary, who is of course a legend, but I have another friend with me this morning. You are in for a treat. I am having a chat this morning with William Davis. Dr William Davis, a renowned cardiologist, who wrote the book Wheat Belly 13 years ago. He's now doing a deep dive into the gut microbiome. And that's what we're going to be chatting about today because it is fascinating. William, welcome to the podcast.
Dr William Davis (00:51) Oh, thanks for the invitation.
Dr Lucy Burns (00:52) Ah, you are welcome. I was so excited to see that you're when you reached out and asked if you could be on because I thought absolutely. And we were chatting off air before, and I mentioned how when your book first came out, a friend had sort of mentioned it to me, and this was when I was back doing very traditional medicine, where I was still writing scripts for everything, where lifestyle I sort of rolled my eyes about. And they'll mention this wheat belly book, and I'm thinking, ah, what a load of bunkum. And now I look back and I think, If only I'd had a slightly more open mind back then, I could have been enlightened so much earlier.
Dr William Davis (01:31) Yeah. Isn't it amazing that dietary guidelines, the world of dieticians, most of our colleagues, industry, and of course, most of the healthcare got it so colossally wrong. You know, when I first wrote the book and I first started thinking about these things, I did it to help prevent heart disease. You and I know, so I was in a cardiology practice, of course, anybody in cardiology will tell you. Heart attacks, sudden, you know this, sudden cardiac death, going through stent implantation bypass. It's an everyday phenomenon. It happens all the time. It's a revolving door of repeated procedures. Well, that's very unsatisfying. And my mom died of sudden cardiac death after a two-vessel coronary angioplasty. So I'm thinking there's gotta be a better way. Now this makes a lot of money. For cardiologists and for the health care system, especially if it's worse than the U.S., where it's a ridiculous, huge enterprise. Well, when you start to ask better questions and you do better testing, rather than cholesterol testing, cholesterol testing should have been discarded decades ago. In favour of what's called lipoprotein testing, just looking at quantifying and characterising the particles in the blood potentially lead to heart disease. You quickly recognise when you stop testing cholesterol and test the real particles in the blood. You start to realise that this has nothing to do with saturated fat has nothing to do with cholesterol. Has nothing to do with total fat. It's all about particles that cause heart disease. Triggered by the consumption of wheat grains and sugars period, not saturated fat, not bacon, not pork. So, but that set me on a new course.
Dr Lucy Burns (03:11) Yeah. look, honestly, I look back now and I just think I cannot believe I was so indoctrinated into that standard. Like the imagery that we had in Australia was an ad. There was an ad that would be dissected out an artery and they were literally squeezing out the fat within this artery. And so you have this image of like fat clogging your drain and that it happens immediately. That's the other thing. And so people are so worried that they'll have one meal and have a heart attack. I'm sure you encounter this all the time, but doctors often still say to people, you're a heart attack, you know, with your cholesterol, you're a heart attack waiting to happen. It's like, Oh, you don't get it.
Dr William Davis (04:03) Absolutely. The tragedy is that when you focus on these false causes it takes everyone's attention off the real causes. That's why heart disease, especially in us is a huge business. Many hospitals have added on 60, 80 million wings to manage, you know, there's over 80 million Americans who take statin cholesterol drugs now, and there's been no meaningful reduction in heart attacks or other cardiovascular events, yet they still focus on this thing. The wonderful thing is once you stop being blinded by this conversation about saturated fat and cholesterol, and instead focus on the real causes, it becomes clear, You, I, and your listeners have magnificent control over heart disease and it has nothing to do with cholesterol, has nothing to do with saturated fat. It has to do with a variety of things, diet, yes, but not the diet advocated by the American Heart Association, the US Department of Health and Human Services or Australian policymakers. It's a different diet and we have to address this thing. called insulin resistance and inflammation. And now it's the extraordinary power of managing the gastrointestinal microbiome. I had no idea just how powerful a phenomenon it is to manage the intestinal microbiome.
Dr Lucy Burns (05:23) Yeah, absolutely. I think that, and I'm really looking forward to our chat because I think one of the things is, and particularly in women's health, people don't realise that heart disease is still the leading cause of death in women, you know. Breast cancer gets a lot of attention, as it should. It's extremely common. But it then, you know, it's like heart disease needs a marketing campaign because no one's really that interested in it. It's sort of boring. And it's like a few last, in fact, it was Valentine's Day this year. I did a social media post, which was basically saying, don't die of a broken heart this Valentine's and I gave all the things of the symptoms of heart disease or heart attacks in women and how it's different to men. And honestly, all the comments. I've just been to the hairdresser. All the comments were about –Oh, love your hair. Oh, new glasses. Oh, and I'm thinking people, we need to talk about this heart.
Dr William Davis (06:21) That's what, so I, one of the things I've been doing, let me tell you about one of the things, this crazy project, one of my projects. Well, I stumbled on a conversation about the hormone oxytocin. You know, people don't talk much about oxytocin. It's this infusion you get, right? At the time of delivery to provoke uterine contraction, cervical dilatation to deliver a child. End of story. Some people do know that it's love, it's the hormone of love and empathy, so they say things like, hug your dog or your partner and you get a surge in oxytocin. Yeah, yeah, for a few seconds, but doesn't have any kind of durable effect. So I was thinking about ways to provoke oxytocin. Well, there's some remarkable research out of MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in mice, where they stumbled on, they were playing with a microbe, lactobacillus reuteri, R U T E R I, Named after the German microbiologist who discovered it in 1962 in a German woman's breast milk, breastfeeding. And it was ubiquitous, he found it everywhere. Stool, breast milk, vagina, everywhere. Well, in his 40-year academic career, he had increasing difficulty finding it. Now, since then, others have corroborated, that it's gone. It has essentially disappeared from the human microbiome because it's very susceptible. Other microbes are too, very susceptible to common antibiotics. Like a course of amoxicillin you took 10 years ago for an upper respiratory infection or whatever. So almost everybody's lost it. Well, this group showed that restoration of reuteri, provokes the release of oxytocin from the hypothalamus, from the brain. And that in turn yields a whole spectrum of positive changes. So ladies love it. So I got ahold of the microbe, but it was made for infants, for babies. So the dose was so small. So I simply reasoned, well, how can we increase the number? Cause the, we don't want to take 500 tablets a day. So we cultivate it as something that looks and smells like yogurt. It's not yogurt, but it looks and smells like yogurt. But using my method of extended prolonged fermentation, we allow this thing to double. reuteri doubles every three hours or so at human body temperature. So we allowed it to double 12 times, 36 hours. I performed flow cytometry, a laser-assisted counting method for bacteria, and we counted around 300 billion microbes per half-cup serving. People consume it and lo and behold, this doesn't often happen, but all the observations made in mice prove true in humans, both in clinical trials as well as anecdotally. But the thing that makes ladies crazy is they start to lose their wrinkles, crow's feet, and smile lines over a longer time period. Nasolabial fold and forehead wrinkles. There's an increase in moisture. So I did a small clinical trial, 25 ladies. And I asked them, please don't change your diet. Please don't change your exercise. Just get it, it was, it lacked bacillus rhodori and to amp up the likelihood of positive skin effects, I added marine source collagen peptides, hyaluronic acid. Those are two things absent from the modern diet because we've been told to cut our fat and cholesterol. So people stop eating things like brain and heart and tongue and stomach. So I add back those missing nutrients that are important for skin health and the carotenoid acids. And as you know, there are hundreds of carotenoids, but astaxanthin is a good kind of prototype for carotenoids that has skin effects. So we did this 90-day trial because it was a skin trial, I wanted to make the ladies happy to show them what this did. And we use methods like high-resolution skin ultrasound, and we showed that there was a 15% increase in dermal thickness, which doesn't sound like a lot, but almost every other method produces about a 6 to 7% at best increase in dermal thickness. Of course, as you know, it's not the epidermis that's the seat of skin health. It's the dermis just below where we record a 15% increase in dermal thickness. But what took me by surprise was when I got the data on Christmas Eve in fact, they lost a huge amount of abdominal fat. Oh, now you're talking. I did not expect it, we just happened to measure waist circumference cause it's free and they did not lose weight. How can you lose a huge amount of abdominal fat? And not lose weight. Well, consistent with the animal evidence consistent with what I'm seeing in thousands of people and myself increased muscle. So you may recall that the Achilles heel of virtually all weight loss programs, whether we call it to move more, eat less, cut calories, Weight Watchers, a GLP one agonist like we go via or ozempic or a bariatric procedure. They're all variations of the same thing, reducing calories. And we know with good science, that when you reduce calories, regardless of the method, you will lose a huge amount of muscle. Established fact, typically 25% of the weight lost. So I think about a woman who pays in the US 12, 000 for a year's worth of Wegovy, and she loses 40 pounds. Of which 10 pounds is muscle. 30 pounds is fat. She stops the drug. She can't afford it forever. Few people can. She regains 32 to 34 pounds of fat. She's more at risk for type two diabetes, heart disease, senile dementia, cognitive impairment, breast cancer, and other conditions. Then she wasn't the start. She's poorer and less healthy. That's what people are paying for. Well, I stumble on a way, I believe to reshape what I'm calling shape and body composition to specifically target loss of abdominal fat and preserve or even increase lean muscle mass. Personally, in my 60s, in my 60s, Dr Lucy, when I did this about five years ago, over three weeks time, I gained 13 pounds of muscle and my strength increased by 50%, which is, and I go to the gym 15 minutes once a week. Cause I hate going to the gym. I can't stand it. So despite that I gain, and that's what I'm seeing loss of abdominal fat, increased muscle. As compared to loss of muscle, loss of fat, regain of extravagant quantities of fat and less metabolically healthy at the end.
Dr Lucy Burns (12:46) Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. Do you know what the mechanism is for this? Like, how does it work?
Dr William Davis (12:53) It's probably multiple mechanisms. One mechanism is oxytocin's effect alone. So we know that if a mouse, an elderly mouse with muscle loss, atrophy and sarcopenia is given oxytocin or lactobacillus roteri, little shrunken atrophied muscle cells plump up back and become indistinguishable from a young mouse. So that's been shown repeatedly. So a part of it's oxytocin. Roteri via oxytocin also has been shown to reduce cortisol levels by about 50%. So cortisol, of course, the hormone of appetite hormone of abdominal fat accumulation and loss of muscle and myosteatosis, the accumulation of fat in muscle. So the reduction in cortisol has a big effect. So reuteri, is very powerful in these oxytocin effects, but it has another aspect of its behaviour that's so interesting. It's unusual among microbes in that it takes up residents in the small intestine and colon. Most microbes are happy in the colon. The most further down, of course, is four to five feet of colon. But reuteri takes up residence also in the 24 feet of the small intestine where it takes up residence and produces what are called bacteriocins. These are natural antibiotics effective in killing fecal microbes, proteobacteria like E. coli and Salmonella and Pseudomonas. Well, why is that important? Well, I know in the U S half the population, Dr Lucy, half the population has SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth where fecal microbes have been allowed to proliferate. and then colonise the small intestine. So the small intestine is not equipped to deal with this. It has a thin mucus barrier. It's very permeable for absorption of nutrients. So when fecal microbes, these are all gram-negative proteobacteria, die, which they do, they only live for a few hours, trillions of them, and they release some of their toxic components, in this case, endotoxin. And that endotoxin is able to enter the bloodstream through the very permeable small intestinal wall. It's called endotoxemia. When you have endotoxemia, it causes weight gain, and abdominal fat expansion, adds to the risk for dementia, multiple forms of cancer, coronary disease, atrial fibrillation, rosacea, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and sleep apnea. In other words, it's caused us to reconsider everything we used to think that we knew about disease. Yep. A reuteri! Because it takes up residence in the small intestine produces bacteria is at least the start of an effort to push back those fecal microbes and that's what we're seeing. We're seeing fecal microbes receding. You can map fecal microbes. Do you guys ever talk about the air device? No. So this is the original. You blow into it, it talks to your smartphone, zero to ten, and this one registers hydrogen gas. This one registers a newer one, hydrogen gas and methane gas. These are gases, of course, produced by microbes.
Dr Lucy Burns (16:04) Ah, okay. Yeah, we, we, I don't think we have those in Australia. We, if I want to test someone for SIBO, I have to send them off to a lab to have it all done. So I'm imagining our TGA, which is quite strict. It hasn't approved those yet, but they look amazing.
Dr William Davis (16:20) Invented by an Irish PhD engineer who thought it was just a device for people with irritable bowel syndrome who had FODMAPs intolerance. So I called him, I said, his name is Angus Short. I said, Angus, this is not quite that. Yeah, I'm telling the inventor. He said you invented a mapping device. It helps you map out where microbes are living. And so, thousands of us started doing this. What shocked me was, I thought SIBO was this rare thing. No, it's everywhere. It's the unusual person who tests negative. Now you might say, well, maybe the method, maybe the device, maybe the whole concept is flawed. Except here's what I saw. People would score very high, zero to 10, maybe like a 10. They take steps to eradicate the SIBO, like incorporating reuteri into their program. And it would take a month of reuteri, sometimes longer. It would test negative now, maybe 1. 2 or something like that. And they say, you know what? The first time my weight loss plateau broke. And I've lost 32 pounds or my hemoglobin A1c, I know you guys use different units, but, here's someone with type two diabetes who might have a level of 11, which means they're on their way to kidney failure and blindness. Well, they, they said, I did your program diet and other things, and it dropped to 6. 1% so big, but I'm still in the pre-diabetic range. I'm stuck. They correct their SIBO. Judging by their, hydrogen breath and drops a 4. 8 where it's supposed to be. Yeah,
Dr Lucy Burns (17:53) yeah, yeah. They're the same units we use it. Yeah. So, wow. That's amazing. Yeah.
Dr William Davis (17:59) Okay. So I saw a normalisation of hydrogen gas accompanied by dramatic changes in residual problems in health. Now, it doesn't mean you have to have this device to do this because of what we're doing now is using microbes to correct the SIBO and we do it in something that looks and smells like yogurt. It's not yogurt, of course. Now, if the solution, you know, if the solution was say, if I said, Dr Lucy, we're going to tell your patients to have their small intestines surgically removed, you would say, well, you better be damn confident that's true. But what if I said, the solution is something that looks and smells like yogurt that you make in your kitchen? Well, you don't have to be so confident and if you get rid of SIBO and you take them, get, restore these very important microbes, ladies get smoother skin, you get a return of youthful muscle contours, you lose abdominal fat, men experience a 50% rise in testosterone, older females experience a return of vaginal moisture and epithelial smoothness and libido. There is a preservation of bone density. There are all the effects of oxytocin an increase in the intensity of love and affection, increased generosity and acceptance of other people's opinions, and amplification of the immune response. In other words, if you do this, You only get benefits. And I believe it's the loss of reuteri and probably lactobacillus gasseri also, another small intestine colonising species that produces bacteria. That's probably underlying this explosion of SIBO. Wow.
Dr Lucy Burns (19:35) Wow. That seems amazing. So it sounds like the key then, or one of the keys is to increase your reuteri. I kind of like that word, reuteri. And From what I'm understanding, you're saying that you can just do this in your kitchen. Have I got the right end of the stick here?
Dr William Davis (19:56) Yeah, you may have to hunt. It may be a little different for your part of the world than it is here, but you can get these commercial sources, sometimes as a probiotic, sometimes as a food. One of my favourite microbes is Bacillus subtilis, which is a spore-forming microbe. You can buy it as a probiotic. We have a grocery chain here, it's a German grocery chain called Aldi's. Oh yeah, we have that. And they have a very inexpensive, I call it kombucha, but it's not kombucha, but it looks and smells like kombucha, and it's made with Bacillus subtilis. Well, you can buy that, for us it's $2.19. And we take a quarter cup, I pour it into another juice, any volume, as long as it has no preservatives, no potassium sorbate, no sodium benzoate. Cap it lightly, because within 24 hours you're going to see it bubbling, reducing carbon dioxide. Let it go for about 72 hours, ideally at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. What's that? About 35 degrees Celsius. Something like that. Yeah. And you're going to have a juice that has almost no sugar remaining because the microbes ate the sugar. Yes. And it's very effervescent. So if you did this with say grape or plum juice, you've got grape or plum soda. It's delicious. And it's a very powerful microbe that adds to these effects. It germinates, it's a spore. It germinates in the small intestine and then releases a broad spectrum of bactericidins with effects against both gram negatives and gram positives. That is fecal microbes and species like staphylococcus, streptococcus and enterococcus. So very broad spectrum, very powerful microbe. And it's juice. It tastes like soda.
Dr Lucy Burns (21:41) Yeah. Amazing. I know. Yeah. So a question we get asked a lot, and I'm not sure if you have the answer, but we have people that have histamine intolerances and they find when they eat, you know, fermented foods or drink fermented drinks that they, you know, that don't tolerate them. Have you got any thoughts on that subset of people?
Dr William Davis (22:04) So it's terrible here. There are oodles of people with histamine intolerance, FODMAPs, those Monash people, FODMAPs, intolerance, essentially fibres and sugars. Nightshade intolerance, eggplants, tomatoes, et cetera, nut intolerance, egg intolerance. And people say things like, I have a list of seven foods I can eat. I can't eat anything else. Well, this is very unnatural and it's almost all due to SIBO. So the problem is not the food. Now, because some of these fermented foods can trigger the phenomena of histamine intolerance. Those people, we do better with a course of antibiotics, not conventional like rifaximin, but there are two known regimens of herbal antibiotics. I was very skeptical that herbal antibiotics had any merit because they're concocted haphazardly. There's now a retrospective analysis from Hopkins that showed that two regimens of herbal antibiotics, the candibactin AR and candibactin BR, or the FC cidal with dysbioside from biotics research. Those two were compared to zyfaxan or rifaximin, the conventional antibiotic, and lo and behold, they proved superior. And all the rifaximin failures, because it's only about 55% effective, all the rifaximin failures proved superior. Responded to the herbal antibiotics. So lo and behold, to my great surprise, there's at least some evidence that those herbals and that can be a better way for someone with histamine intolerance because the fermented foods and reuteri yogurt, all that stuff will provoke histamine reactions. But once you get through that antibiotic course, they can almost as a rule, consume histamine-containing foods, FODMAPs-containing foods, nightshades, all that stuff.
Dr Lucy Burns (23:50) Oh, amazing. Cause yes, I do know, you know, in general, we always say to people, you know, the number one thing you can do for your gut is to reduce processed food, you know, ultra-processed food, you know, reduce, reduce your sugars and starches. And for a lot of people, that's all they need to do. And they, they get better and, you know, they don't have to bother about their FODMAP. you know, no cauliflower ever again, or no garlic ever again diet. But then there's this then sort of the next subset of people who do that. And it is not enough. And so, as you said, there's those little then lectin people and salicylate people and histamine people who don't tolerate those. So it's going to be a gut microbiome problem.
Dr William Davis (24:34) You know what worries me? Is someone who says you got to go on a low FODMAPS diet for your IBS, or you have to go on a low histamine diet for your histamine intolerance, or whatever food avoidance strategy you follow. Well, those are almost all SIBO unrecognised SIBO. So here's an important question for your listeners. What happens if all you do is avoid the foods that cause some symptoms, but don't address the SIBO, the infestation of your small intestine with fecal microbial species? Well, now you're at risk for autoimmune diseases, depression, suicide, panic attacks, skin rashes, rosacea, psoriasis, weight gain, abdominal fat, insulin resistance, coronary disease, atrial fibrillation, and dementia. In other words, you're leaving yourself open to a huge swath of modern health conditions that of course, our colleagues have a drug or procedure for all those kinds of things, but all along the source was this disruption of microbes in the small intestine.
Dr Lucy Burns (25:35) Yeah. So listeners, SIBO, S I B O, small intestine bacterial overgrowth is what it stands for. I remember for the first time when I heard SIBO, I thought it was sort of spelled with a C and I was thinking, what is this SIBO, but yeah, so small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So interesting and I reckon that this microbiome. information that we're learning about the research that's being done. It's really like right back to the germ theory when that first was proposed and the doctor that proposed it was sort of, you know, laughed at and poo-pooed and as if hand washing is going to be any help. And now, of course, it's not only routine, but mandatory and we all have to go and do hand washing classes. And it's really, really, the benefits are so enormous for such a small thing. So I think we're going to find that the gut microbiome, similar things will happen. So when people are sort of thinking, Oh, can't possibly cause all of that. Like how can one little thing cause rosacea and belly fat? Like, how does that all work? And I think we'll find that eventually, it becomes standard practice.
Dr William Davis (26:49) My prediction, is it's going to take two generations, sadly. Right, because our colleagues, you know, my training occurred in the 80s and 90s, and there was no mention of microbiome outside of treating, you know, streptococcal pneumonia and things like that, and E.coli urinary tract infections. And so it's a whole new world. And so now we know. So depression and anxiety are largely diseases of the microbiome. There's a very interesting set of German studies. They recognise that people who are depressed, who don't respond to conventional therapy like SSRIs are different in that their measures of inflammation like 1 beta, C reactive protein, etc, are higher than people who do respond. So they hypothesize that could that level of inflammation be due to SIBO and endotoxemia. So they did something extraordinary. They took normal non-depressed people and injected that endotoxin into them, which is very scary because you're talking about nanogram quantity or less than a millionth of a gram. And if you miscalculate or mismeasure, you can kill somebody. They did it. They gave it to non-depressed volunteers and within three hours, they were clinically depressed and by MRI showed all the hallmarks of depression. And they did the study again and corroborated it. So it doesn't show that all depression is caused by endotoxin, but it suggests at least a portion is likely caused or worsened by endotoxemia. And so, so many new conditions we thought were medical conditions were really conditions driven by the microbiome, gout and hyperuricemia. is a disease of the microbe. We now have five microbes that are superior to the pharmaceuticals in reducing uric acid Oxalate is a disease of the microbiome. Autoimmune diseases are a disease of the microbiome coupled with, by the way, the gliadin protein of wheat, one of the few things that actually causes an increase in intestinal permeability. So on and on and on. So if, in other words, we go to a conventional doctor who says, take this biologic for your psoriatic arthritis and prednisone and naproxen, health-destroying factors, as you know, but never addressed the SIBO and endotoxemia. Well, now you're at risk for diverticular disease and depression and fibromyalgia and all those conditions because the microbiome source was not addressed.
Dr Lucy Burns (29:25) So the question that's just been permeating through my mind then is what is the cause of this disruption in our microbiome? What's the, what's the cause? You know, if we used to have a microbiome that was healthy, we didn't have as, you know, all these chronic diseases. We've now got a microbiome that's not as healthy. We've got bacteria placed in bits where it's not meant to be. We've got other bits that don't have bacteria that should have bacteria. What causes all that?
Dr William Davis (29:52) Well, we know that multiple courses of antibiotics, which is very bad in the US. So most Americans by age 40 have taken 30 courses of antibiotics for every 1000 children. Over 1300 prescriptions for antibiotics are written every year. So that's a big factor. That's established fact. Now, all the other causes are that may contribute are more speculative, but they're likely, but there's not a lot of motivation to research this because there's no money in it, but probably glyphosate, the ingredient in Roundup is probably a big factor because it has a potent antibiotic properties and it's ubiquitous in food now because it's vast overuse. Food preservatives are antimicrobial in food and in you. Emulsifying agents like polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose and carrageenan emulsify the intestinal mucus barrier which leads to changes in microbial composition. Drugs, stomach acid-blocking drugs, particularly PPIs, non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs, birth control pills, chlorinated drinking water, and on and on and on. We swim in a sea of factors that destroy. It could be something as innocent looking as a bowl of ice cream that contains carrageenan xanthan gum. Gel and gum and in other words things that keep that ice cream when it thaws and refreezes it separates into solids and ice. Well, they add all those mixing agents, emulsifying agents to keep that from happening but they emulsify you. One of the things that bothers me is the prep for a colonoscopy. The, I'm blanking on the brand name. PicoPrep is one of the ones that we use a lot. Okay. It's ethylene glycol of course. It's really good. which is a very potent, very potent emulsifying agent. That is, it disperses the intestinal mucus barrier that protects us from unhealthy microbes. And it's an effect that lasts days. So the purported prep to prevent colon cancer likely causes colon cancer and other diseases.
Dr Lucy Burns (32:03) Yeah. So, you know, going back to basics, we've got, the way I kind of feel like we're talking about the microbiome here, there's sort of like two areas. So there's the, we want to prevent issues with the microbiome in the first place, but then once they've happened, we need to treat them and then continue on the path to preventing them from coming back. Is that, have I got the right end of the stick there?
Dr William Davis (32:34) Yeah, I break it down kind of like this. So cleaning up your life of all those things, getting rid of processed foods that contain preservatives, emulsifying agents, et cetera. Herbicides, pesticides, choosing organic foods, filter your drinking water, get off those drugs, and minimise the need or exposure to antibiotics. Then we have to replant seeds. The most important seeds, if we believe what's coming out of Stanford, From the husband-wife team, Justin and Erika Sonnenberg, they published a very important study about two years ago that showed that the most important modifying factor in restoring the diversity of your microbiome, gastrointestinal microbiome, are fermented foods, like sauerkraut, fermented veggies, kimchi, kefirs, yogurts, not the stuff in the store though, stuff you make yourself. And what the curious thing about that is, so the microbes that ferment, let's say sauerkraut, are species like Leuconostoc mesenteroides, or Pediococcus pentasaceus, or Pediococcus elicitolactysi, or Wiesella species. Well, these are species that don't take up residence. The human GI tract, you ingest them, let's say a sauerkraut, you poop them out. Now, so what effect can they have? Well, it became clear that by some uncertain mechanism, those fermenting species cause a bloom in beneficial species like acromantia and fecalibacterium all those wonderful, no one knows how. Cause you know, Remember the old myth that rats come from an old pile of rags? Well, they don't. You can't, you can't make a life out of it. So how do fermenting microbes lead to the proliferation and expansion of health? Nobody knows. Are they simply there, but they're quiescent or dormant? Or are they, does it make you more susceptible to acquiring them from your dog? Or other people? Or doorknobs? No one knows. But fermented foods, just like your great grandma did, that is very important. And then we also restore those, what I would call keystone species, lactobacillus roteri, lactobacillus gaseri, perhaps bacillus subtilis, maybe bacillus coagulans, microbes that are so important, especially in combating or pushing back, invading microbes in the small intestine. That really helps also. And then fibres to feed them.
Dr Lucy Burns (35:05) Yes, I love it. I love it. It's um, it doesn't have to be hard, but it has, I think it, we have to be intentional about it because obviously fermented foods aren't if we're not used to consuming them or we're not used to making them, you know, I make a bag bowl, we call it spaghetti bolognese sauce once a week. It's the same recipe. It's got a whole heap of veggies and all sorts of stuff in it. And it's easy because I've done it tons of times. I've also got some kombucha that I make, but I'm new to making it and I keep forgetting about it. It sits there and I go, Oh, I forgot about that. Oh my God. It's been sitting there for weeks now. And so I think just bringing them into being our everyday types of food prep makes it then become easy.
Dr William Davis (35:54) It scares a lot of people, even though our great grandparents did it all the time, but it's so once you get the hang of it, it's really very, very simple. Like that bacillus subtilis juice. It's essentially effortless. If you have some means of keeping it at around 35 degrees Celsius in your kitchen, but you don't want to actually remind your listeners, make sure the cap is loose.
Dr Lucy Burns (36:20) Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to explode. Bacillus cillus. I love the names of the microbes that remind me of Dr Seuss characters.
Dr William Davis (36:27) One easy way to help your listeners understand microbes is, that this is not entirely true, but it's largely true. Think of microbes as room temperature fermenting microbes, like those ones in sauerkraut, and human body temperature fermenting microbes, like the lactobacillus roteri, lactobacillus gasseri, because room temperature, do it on your kitchen counter. For human body temperature, you need some artificial means, a yogurt maker, a sous vide device, and it's a pot if you have those. Some means of keeping it around human body temperature, so around 37 degrees C, or about 100 degrees, 9800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dr Lucy Burns (37:08) Yeah, excellent. Well, I do know that lots of people in Australia have instant pots or pressure cookers that have settings for fermented foods. And we have a contraption here called a Thermomix, which is a kind of a, you know, 20 things in one cooking extravaganza. And it also has a yogurt-making setting. So yeah, exactly. That sounds great. Right. Well, if people want to buy your book, what's it called? Where do they find it? Um, if they want to read a bit more about this amazing gut stuff, what's the best way to connect?
Dr William Davis (37:45) Well, the most recent book about the microbiome is Super Gut. I was sure I included all the recipes for making lactobacillus roteri yogurt. There's something called SIBO yogurt. That's a little bit more effective than rotary alone. It's lactobacillus rotary, lactobacillus gasseri, and bacillus coagulans. And that makes a delicious yogurt. How to ferment other things. It doesn't have to be dairy. It can be salsa. It could be pico de gallo. It could be I ferment all kinds of things on my kitchen counter right now. I have mixed veggies with eggplant tomatoes and garlic. I've got several different kinds of juices being fermented by bacillus coagulants, SAIC bilar that, by the way, SMI Bilar, which is a fungus. It's a cousin of smis Visier. That's the, of course, the fungus that makes beer and wine. Bilardii is a cousin but adapted to the human body, and it's the most potent thing you can do to protect yourself if you must take a course of antibiotics to minimise damage. So we make a sparkling juice with the saccharomyces bilardii. We also make sparkling juice with the bacillus subtilis. It's delicious. I have friends who, they liked it so much, they guzzled the whole thing. Don't do that. I mean, there was a little bit of s left.
Dr Lucy Burns (39:07) So Supergut, they can just buy that from bookstores or online. And if they want to go and check out your website, what's the name of it?
Dr William Davis (39:17) So a number of ways to get there. I have an umbrella website now. I reduced all the crazy things I was doing to WilliamDavisMD.com or DrDavisMD. com. Infinitehealth. com. There are thousands of blog posts. There are several hundred thousand discussion forum posts. I have an inner circle also where we have a two-way zoom like this. So I'm going to do that tonight with probably about 90 people. And we talk about new ideas, dude. And one of the great things, Dr Lucy, is when you interact with your audience, as you know, Hmm. You learn things from them. We're learning new lessons at breakneck speed. One of the lessons we learned from our audience, for instance, is that when you test positive on the air device using a time pattern, it means you have SIBO, but lactobacillus reuteri causes a false positive. And we didn't know that. Until one of our members figured it out and we tried it and yes, we corroborate. Yes. So people have stopped the reuteri If you're going to test with the air device, but in other words, we're learning things that nobody knew yet.
Dr Lucy Burns (40:25) No, I know. I think my philosophy and yours is too, obviously is that you, you need to have an open mind that we don't know everything. There's clearly a lot in medicine that we don't know. As you've mentioned, people with depression don't get better on antidepressants. We have people on anti-obesity medicines who don't lose any weight. We've got all sorts of things that we give to people that don't work and are default is often to blame the patient. And now we know there are actually lots of pieces of our puzzle that we still don't know yet. And so I thank you for your research and for bringing bits of the puzzle to life in a way that is accessible to people. So thank you.
Dr William Davis (41:18) Thank you! What you're doing is so important.
Dr Lucy Burns (41:21) Excellent. All right lovely listeners, that's it from us this week. You can go and buy Super Gut. It's like, it's going to be a great read. I think the fact that it's got practical recipes in it makes it easy. There's no need to be scared. So if anybody can make fermented food and it works, if I can do it, you can do it too. So, yes, check out Super Gut and I will catch you next week. Thanks for listening.
Dr Lucy Burns (41:53) The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, including show notes and links, provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns.
