Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But if you want to take that smoothie and turn it into a meal and make it more satiating, then yes, we would absolutely love to include some protein and some healthy fat.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So let's break that down. So every single plant has fiber. But also fiber is not just generically fiber. Not all fiber is the same. That would be like saying that the protein in a fish is the same as the protein in a bean. They're not the same. So unique plants have unique forms of fiber.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah. I mean, you're going to need a liquid. So, and I think that all of those choices that you just described are perfectly fine from my perspective. Where I started back in the day was with water. We will use a plant-based milk now these days in our house. But like whatever you prefer, wherever you feel most comfortable.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And there are advantages to kefir in the sense that that's a fermented food. And we can talk more about like the advantages of fermented food more globally. I sort of see that as a separate conversation, but also very important. We led with plant diversity. Cool. We're tackling that. There's also this conversation about fermented food. I would love to get into that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
You need something that's going to give it the creamy factor. All right. So if you had no FODMAP concerns, that could be an avocado. When you do have FODMAP concerns, then many times a banana would be the way to go. You still need to be conscious and aware of the banana. Is it brown or is it closer to green?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
When it's closer to green, it's higher in resistant starch, which is actually really good for our gut bugs. And it's lower in FODMAPs. So that, to me, is a win when you get close to that. And again, you're going to be throwing this into a blender. So you're not going to be trying to bite some hard, unripe banana, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And it's still going to blend well, assuming that you have a nice blender, like, you know, whether that be a Vitamix or a Beast or something like this. Okay. So you want something that's going to give it the creamy. I usually go with banana. If you wanted to make this a smoothie bowl, here's a little hack. As opposed to a smoothie that you're going to drink, freeze your banana.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So take the banana out of the peel and put it into your freezer. And then when you're ready to make your smoothie, throw that in there. You will now have a smoothie bowl or an ice cream. We could also call it that instead of the smoothie. All right, now after this, like to me, greens should absolutely be a part of these smoothies. Why?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Because of the incredible amount of nutrient density, the unique properties that they have, the nitrates that are good for our blood pressure, and the fact that they're almost no calories. So it's like sprinkling nature's multivitamin into your smoothie without adding any additional calories to it. So I want the greens in there. You have many choices of what you prefer there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And then we need some variety of berries. So like in our house, we will classically go with blueberries. If you're being mofadmap, you have to be a little bit careful because there's a certain number of blueberries that you can do. The alternative could be a different fruit. So we want something to give some sweetness. So like you could roll with pineapple or you could look at raspberries.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Like these are alternative choices that are available. Whatever is going to taste good for you. Um, so like, I don't believe in smoothies that are purely berry based or purely berry plus banana.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Also, every single plant is like slightly different in terms of the chemicals that they contain, which could include things like phytochemicals or could include special polyphenols. There's over 8,000 polyphenols. which are plant-based antioxidant compounds. And the simplest way to look at that is the colors of a plant. So red has certain polyphenols, orange, purple, these are different.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I kind of feel like that's a lost opportunity because if you're going to add all of that sweetness, but not include some vegetables in there, then you're sort of missing out on the chance to like make this more healthy and add more variety to it. And then other stuff that I like to put in there. So we always put broccoli sprouts into our smoothies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And the beauty of broccoli sprouts is that like broccoli contains glucosinolates that are really thought to protect us from cancer. And that's what we get from cruciferous vegetables in general. The main one that we're talking about is one called sulforaphane. It's an isothiocyanate. Sorry for the nerdy language here.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But sulforaphane, which Johns Hopkins is studying this particular phytochemical, looking at it on many different levels for many different issues.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Dr. Jed, exactly. Yeah, Jed Fahey. So I like to get broccoli sprouts because they contain 50 to 100 times more sulforaphane than you're going to get from adult mature broccoli. So rather than throwing adult mature broccoli in there, give me a handful of sprouts, throw them in there. I will warn you, they're going to give a peppery flavor to your beverage.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
If you throw too much, like you might notice that. Embrace it because that's the good stuff. Like you're tasting the good stuff. So it's kind of like olive oil. How do you shop for olive oil? Well, I could give you 10 different ways or I could just tell you this. If it tastes peppery, if it kind of burns the back of your throat, you got good olive oil. It's basically like the summary.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Exactly. Let's not miss the opportunity before we move on from this to also include the wonderful seeds that include both fiber and healthy fats, chia, flax, hemp, and basil seeds. So the cool thing about those is that you could have those sitting either in your freezer or in your pantry, but basically like that's a, you know, pseudo non-perishable. It's not going to go bad, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And you keep that around the house. And then every single time you fire up the blender, you just get all four and you get four extra points there. I love the mint addition, by the way. That was cool.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But every single one is unique. These are the things that feed and fuel the gut microbiome. The fiber, the polyphenols, the phytochemicals, resistant starches when they're present, these are the prebiotics. And specific families of microbes, they rise and they fall based upon the choices that we make. So if you were to literally just eat kale all day long, you would not be healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yes, and I 100% agree. And the beauty of this is that we have to keep it real. Like, we're busy. We're all busy, right? So trying to plan out what you're going to be doing at 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, who knows? But planning out your morning. Like that's on the table, right? You just need to decide what time you need to wake up and then you have your routine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
We've all seen on the internet the guy who wakes up at 4 in the morning and has this elaborate routine. But you just got to figure out what time you want to wake up and then you can include something like this. And where you choose to insert it, that's a personal choice. But to me, where I see the opportunity is like get up early enough.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
If you want to, spend some time reading, perhaps like reading, like doing spiritual work, reading in the Bible or writing, journaling, doing something that's good for you to sort of set your mind right. And then when the sun comes up, get outside.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Get 30 minutes outside, ideally with another person, having a chit-chat, being social, enjoying the outdoors, getting that natural sunlight beaming off the back of your retina, which activates the serotonin, which is good for our brain. It's good for our focus. It's good for our energy levels. It's going to actually transform it to melatonin later tonight so you can sleep better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And by the way, 90% to 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut, Because this is the drumbeat that basically keeps our gut in rhythm. So when we get that morning sunlight, we actually are helping to produce that serotonin, which is going to help to give us a good, not to be too graphic, but a good, healthy bowel movement.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So, and to me, like you go and you do that, maybe you have a ruck vest on and then you get home and it's smoothie time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Because whatever microbes enjoy kale, they would grow. You can only go so far with that. And all the other microbes would be starving.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I am concerned.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Well, there's always stuff that we don't know. So the issue is that, Drew, dietary emulsifiers are just one category. of food-based additives that have been introduced into our food system, into our food supply, without adequate research to give us confidence, whether they are safe, unsafe, or somewhere in the middle.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And this is the problem that we have with the system that's been in place that really has, I think, come more into the public consciousness. And I think this is a really good thing through the service of RFK and the Maha movement. Like basically, they're bringing attention to this concept of generally recognized as safe, which is GRAS. Anyone who's read my books, you've heard me talk about this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
This is something that was in my first book, Fiber Fueled. I was very critical of the way in which our regulatory bodies are managing our food system because it's like completely designed for the food industry to add whatever they want. to get permission to do so, and to make it next to impossible for us to withdraw it after the fact.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It's really hard to prove that something is really causing harm. Now, these emulsifiers, let's dig into this. They have come to the surface because it starts with animal model studies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And you would definitely end up with a kidney stone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Did I miss something? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it's certainly more than the plant-based milks. This is all over the place. So you have to really start to pay attention.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That's another story. No, but it's true. I mean, that's not a healthy diet, right? So when we overemphasize one specific thing, we're sort of making a mistake. Because actually what we should do is zoom out and look at this bigger picture where there's this abundance of variety that exists in nature.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Exactly, yes. And there's got to be workarounds that we'll figure out. We'll talk about that. I think the simple of the emulsifiers is we all know what happens when you add oil to water, right? They separate out. What if you wanted to blend those together and keep them blended together so they wouldn't separate out? That's what the emulsifiers are doing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So could we make these plant-based milks without emulsifiers? Yes. And that would require a simple thing. You would have to shake up your milk before you pour it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, and that is a beautiful thing. And as a consumer, it's actually not that complicated to figure this out because if you flip it over and look at the ingredient list, if you recognize everything on that ingredient list, you're in a good spot. If you're like, what is that? Which I am myself, and I have a background in chemistry.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Many times I look at these ingredient lists, I don't even know what these things are. So you have to figure that out. So this is where I think like keeping it simple becomes very important. All right, so the issue with the emulsifiers is that with these different products that contain them, and like a lot of times it's the creamy type things.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So like a plant-based milk, plant-based yogurt, like these are places where you're going to find these. And ice cream in general, in general, regardless dairy, non-dairy, whatever. The issue is that they are disruptive to the microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And this signal emerged initially in animal model studies where we would see basically rats developing colitis, like ulcerative colitis because of exposure to these compounds. And it evolved to where they started to ask the question, like among humans, what happens? And actually there was a study done in France where they put people on a low emulsifier diet compared to a high emulsifier diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And it's much like diversifying your portfolio where when you have variety in your diet, you are feeding and fueling. You are getting all the different types of fiber and polyphenols and phytochemicals and different types of vitamins and minerals. So you're sort of balancing it all out. And that's what ultimately leads to a more healthy, more diverse, more abundant microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And they saw very rapidly significant disruption of the gut microbiome in the course of just days in people who were consuming the high emulsifier diet. And to contextualize this, I just want to be totally clear. This is not an argument that the way to fix our food system is to remove emulsifiers. That is not the only solution.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
This is a broad issue where there are 10,000 additives in our food system. emulsifiers we have started to identify as potentially problematic, let me know when they pull these things out of the food supply because they have not. Let me know when that happens. I don't see it happening anytime soon, but maybe with RFK, maybe it will.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But this is not like you can take the emulsifiers out of the ultra processed food. It's still an ultra processed food. We still have other issues.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Polysorbate 80, carboxymethycellulose.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah. Well, and also when you compound that with other things in your diet, right? So like this is not happening in isolation. This is not in a vacuum. This is concurrent with other things that are going to exist. The more that we lean into ultra processed foods, the more that we expose ourself to these risks.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Because if you made the plant-based milk at home, which by the way, many of the plant-based milks that you just mentioned, it is 100% possible and not even that complicated. Oat milk, incredibly easy. Almond milk, not that complicated. Soy milk, not that complicated. You could take edamame and throw that into the blender.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Like frozen edamame, throw that into the blender with your smoothie with water. Basically, you just added clean soy milk, right? And that's going to also give you protein. So like I don't know how you feel about edamame, but from my perspective, organic edamame, organic, minimally processed soy-based foods like miso or tempeh, to me, these are health foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So, and you and I were talking before we started about Zoe. This is something that Zoe actually, our scientific founder at Zoe, Tim Spector.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
A company based in the UK that's available in the US. Tim Spector is a professor at King's College London. one of the most accomplished, most published scientists in the world. And he actually was like driving this study because basically he introduced a whole bunch of people from his data set in the UK so that it could be balanced, include both US and British people. And we found this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Well, so GLP-1 doesn't come out of nowhere. It's produced by our own body. This is one of a group of gut hormones that we call incretin hormones. And actually what drives GLP-1 production in the body, there's a couple of things, but one of them is fiber. Fiber in the diet helps us to basically activate the release of GLP-1 because when fiber gets fermented and transformed into
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
by our gut bacteria, they produce short-chain fatty acids, and those short-chain fatty acids activate receptors that lead to the release of GLP-1. So this is the reason why when you line up different concepts of how do we get people to feel full after a meal, what consistently rises to the surface as being the most powerful way to accomplish this is through dietary fiber.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Now, it's not just a fiber thing. So I don't want to make the claim that just hack your fiber, this fixes all of your issues because there's also protein. Protein in combination with fiber can be a great pairing, right? And this is how we get ourselves to feel full and not overeat.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
When it comes to the GLP-1s, you know, with the people that you described, like, there are people who exist who have tried everything. And I'm so glad that these drugs exist for those people. But I do take issue with the idea that we destroy people's health. We make 88% of America metabolically unhealthy. through diet, like largely driven by diet, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And then the solution that is created by the people that we work with, like whether it be the pharmaceutical industry or our government or whatever it may be, the solution that's being proposed to us, even honestly the medical system, what's being proposed to us is take this shot, take it for the rest of your life. It will cost you a lot of money. And we have no clue.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
What will happen to you and your body three years, five years, 10 years, 20 years from now? We have no clue.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So to me, it's a reasonable short duration that we have with other GLP-type drugs like bieta that was being used a little over 10 years ago. for diabetes semaglutide we have more experience with diabetes than we do with weight loss it's not exactly the same dosing so semaglutide is much more recent on the market my point
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So we have data for, let's call it like a little over five years for semaglutide, a little over 10 years for any GLP-1. All right. So yes, there's data of that variety. We're asking people who are in their 20s and 30s to commit to taking this for 50 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And this led us to now where Zoe is sort of taking this and running with it. We have other studies that have backed up the concept that dietary diversity is essential. And we have a randomized control trial where we apply these concepts to people
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Right. We don't, because the problem is that if you discontinue the use- We don't yet have any evidence to suggest that there's a protocol that allows you to use it, change your diet and lifestyle, and then withdraw the drug and maintain that weight loss. We have no evidence of that. What we see with total clarity is that a year after people stop using the drug, the weight is 100% back.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So all of the benefits that you receive from the drug, they are gone. I think that there's benefits to these drugs for the people who really need them. I think that the problem that I have is that like we have completely bypassed the nutrition conversation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And the exercise conversation, like why, why would we bypass that to jump straight to these drugs that again, I'm concerned about not only the cost, but what, what happens when people take these for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And so, and what I see is I see an opportunity to start with foundational principles that like, I really wish our, our healthcare system was more supportive of and would actually like introduce this as the baseline. Like this is the first step. We're going to work with you to improve the quality of your diet. There's many ways you can prove it. It's not just a fiber thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But one of the aspects of a high-quality diet with total clarity is addressing your fiber deficiency. And when we accomplish this, it's going to elevate the health within your body. Will it lead to profound sudden weight loss in the same way that a GLP-1 does? No, this is not a drug. Will it lead to better health throughout your entire body that can lead you to thriving for the rest of your life?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
100% yes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And we find that in this randomized control trial, when you apply these concepts, you lower your weight, you reduce your waist circumference, you lower your triglyceride levels, you're happier, you sleep better, you have more energy, you're less hungry, which is actually kind of interesting. You're less hungry, yet you're losing weight. That's pretty cool. So all of these benefits start to unfold.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, and there's no particular effort to change their diet, to improve the quality of their diet, to get them exercising. It's just like a single, like, take this drug, and there you go. That's it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Right? So, no, what you just described, I have tremendous empathy for that. A person who is obese... is struggling, is trying, like working their tail off to exercise, to eat better, not achieving the results that they're looking for, that's exactly what these drugs are good for. This is exactly the situation. And I would love for it to be less than full dose and be successful.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I think that's a personalized approach because ultimately, if you're able to accomplish your goals with that dose, that's what matters, right? Like I'm a goal-oriented person. What's going on with the patient? How do I get them to where I want them to be? And if I were to get them to that place and then be able to withdraw the drug,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
and maintain them on that diet and that lifestyle change that they've made, it's a massive win. I would 100% stand behind that. I think my concern that I have is these are a bit polar in opposite, but the use of the drug as being a first-line option for obesity in the absence of dietary and lifestyle modification, I have a problem with that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I also have a problem with people, because this is what's happening out there, and I know that it's happening in Los Angeles, and it's happening in Charleston too, is the idea of taking people that are slightly overweight.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So here's what I would come to say that like to me, I have moved past. In fact, I kind of don't like dietary and nutrition labels at this point. Like I really don't like them. Because we're oversimplifying people. We're oversimplifying diets. So I'm here to say, forget that. Like, forget what we call it. Focus on the quality of your diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, and they want to look good in a swimsuit, right? And making promises to those people, not only will you lose the weight, but this reduces your risk of cancer. This reduces your risk of heart disease. That's bullshit. That's not true. You don't have data to back that up. Don't make a promise like that when you don't have.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That is way too big to be making a promise like that when you don't have data to back that up. These studies that were done, yes, they do protect against heart disease and against cancer in people who are morbidly obese and lose a tremendous amount of weight because obesity is a risk factor for heart disease and cancer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
To your rank, though, so I have to put it in order.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Oh, Drew, you're putting me on the spot, brother.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Thank you. Putting these in order is a little bit tricky. Let me say this. I don't think that exercise would be number one, but it would definitely be in there. The problem with exercise is that if you don't actually get into a calorie deficit— then your body will just adapt the number of calories that you consume.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So my argument, I would probably start with the elimination of hyperpalatable ultra processed foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That's number one.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
know hyper processed uh you know starbucks other things like that so i think they're they're hip to that but yes we have to make sure that that's part of the equation even the health washed ones right because the problem is like cheetos and doritos are obvious right but you're in to your intelligent listeners who are out there they're going to walk into a supermarket and they're going to be marketed to with tempting packaging that's going to tell them that they're healthier
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Or it's high fiber.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Or it's prebiotic. I mean, Olipop.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
One of the ways that you can really enrich the quality of your diet is by adding more variety of different plant-based foods. And if 30 sounds intimidating, don't panic. Because truly, like 10 years ago, I was probably at 5. What you want to do is just start slow and steady adding more. All fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, legumes, and spices. They all count.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So now, do I think that Olipop is the worst thing that exists in the world? No. But do you want me to dig into this?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It's okay? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. All right. Yeah, you're sharing your honest thoughts. Let's put a couple of things on the table. Because ultimately, to me, nutrition is about choices. What are you consuming relative to what? And of course, from a beverage perspective, good old-fashioned water should be the backbone, right? But that's not the reality of what's happening out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So here are the choices. There's sugar-sweetened beverages like Coke. There's artificially sweetened beverages like Diet Coke. There's...
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
lollipop and there's kombucha all right or and we could throw juice in there too if you want so like to me juice the vast majority of juices are sugar sweetened beverages so i would put them like conceptually close but not as bad as coke and as coke itself or like a sugar sweetened soda
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, just not to even make it even more complicated, it's not just a sugar thing. I'm sure that people have noticed that there's an acidity to Coke. It has citric acid in it. What happens when you take acid and you put it in plastic? You shed plastic into the beverage.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
In the same way that if you go to your favorite coffee shop, and you get a takeaway coffee, and it sits on your counter because you forgot to finish it for three days, if that paper cup has not melted and seeped through, it's got a plastic liner. And these plastic liners are important because we're exposing ourselves to microplastics.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I'm
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But I am here to bring awareness to where there may be risk. There was a New England Journal of Medicine paper that came out recently. They took a look at people who were undergoing a carotid endarterectomy. So they were removing the plaque because these are people who are at risk for a stroke. They're surgically removing the plaque in their carotid artery, which is up in their neck.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So they peel this plaque off and then they sent it out and they looked under a microscope. Not everyone had a high concentration of carotid. microplastics, or like really truly the proper language is nanoplastics. These are plastics that the particle size is so small, you will only see it under a microscope. Not everyone had a high concentration, but many of them did.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And among these people that had a high concentration of nanoplastics stuck in the wall of the plaque that is in their neck artery. What they found, okay, look, that has been removed. But then they tracked these people and they saw that they were at a significantly higher risk of having a heart attack, having a stroke, dying from cardiovascular disease in the years that followed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Cans. So let's go through it. So we have the sugar sweetened soda beverage.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
We'll throw juice right after that. All right. Now we're going to go to the artificially sweetened soda beverage. Still has the microplastic issue. Still concerned about that because there's acidity in there. And in terms of artificial sweeteners, I know people get big feelings about these things. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But artificial sweeteners with total clarity, total clarity, come into contact with the gut microbiome because the vast majority of them are not absorbed. So they come into contact with the gut microbiome. They change the gut microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And then the result of this is now the way that your gut microbiome interacts with you and your food is slightly different as a result of that artificial sweetener. There are concerns that exist. Is that worse than sugar? I would say no.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah. And do I occasionally have Diet Coke? Yes. Do I drink it on a daily basis? Absolutely not. But I used to back in the day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That's a tricky one. The problem with the microplastics is that I would characterize us as like there's a signal. We don't like what we're seeing here. We haven't actually done the research yet to have clarity of like what those risks really are. So I think there's enough there to say let's proceed with caution. Let's like be conscious of this and try to avoid this where we can.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But we can't yet say with total clarity that this is in fact as bad as this or as that. Part of the issue, Drew, is that these are microscopic. So again, like you can only see them with a microscope. We don't yet have a test measure that is consistently applied to characterize what quantifies. How do we quantify it? How do we find them?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Exactly. Here's my thought with Olipop. If I were to take a soda, like a carbonated water, basically, all right, and want to help you to improve your gut microbiome, I would prefer to opt for a high quality supplement as opposed to, because basically this is what we have here. Like to me, this is carbonated drink plus supplement. We mix them together.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
We call it a functional beverage, which sounds very sexy, right? But it's the same thing as having drinking a carbonated drink and taking a supplement.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I welcome that concept, right? I welcome the concept of a healthier soda. But I think that the issue, though, is that there's this added fiber that's in there. The added fiber that was put in is inulin. Inulin is pure FODMAP. We were talking about low FODMAP. This is the opposite of low FODMAP. This is pure FODMAP. It's actually purified FODMAP. That's what it is. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It does feed and fuel the gut microbiome. It also is the most gas producing form of fiber that I've ever come across.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Carbonated gas also enters into the body. It must be expelled. It either comes out the top. So you're either belching or you're farting. Like those are the two options when it comes to the carbonated gas. And then you add in the fiber and that's going to ferment it. And yes, it does have an effect on the microbiome, but it's producing a lot of gas and you're farting like crazy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
All right. So, but the problem with this is that like knowing what I know, this is the cheapest fiber that exists. You can add this amount of fiber for pennies, right? So we add this cheap fiber into this and then we call it prebiotic. We sell it as a health drink. We jack the price up dramatically. If you're going to supplement, don't give me the cheapest fiber that exists.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
If you're going to supplement, give me something high quality. Like give me something that actually is really good for my body. So that's the way that I feel about it. It's like, to me, this is basically a carbonate drink. In my mind, give me a Spindrift plus a good supplement.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
No, not necessarily calories. It's more so that these are part of an ultra processed food diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I would rather have kombucha if I had my choice.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yes. It comes in a glass bottle. No microplastic concerns. It's fermented. And what you do is you take that, like, for example, you buy a 16 ounce bottle, you cut that into thirds. And you mix that with water and ice. It's still plenty flavorful, right? And then you extend the life of that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Bring down the ultra processed foods. I would say number two, we need to address our fiber issue. So, and the reason why this becomes a massive target for me is because of the mass scale deficiency that exists. So the average woman in the United States is getting 15 grams of fiber per day. She should be getting 25 at a minimum, not optimal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
At a minimum, the average man is getting 18 grams of fiber per day. He should be getting 38 at a minimum. You and I can have a conversation about nutrition and see the common grounds that exist between us, even if we're not exactly the same.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And to explain my general approach to nutrition is to say that I'm trying to get after the things where I see great opportunities for the average American out there. Now, if you're already consuming a ton of fiber, that would not be my target, right? But acknowledging that 95% of Americans are deficient in fiber, let's get after that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, I think so. I think that there can be value to those things. And the technology has gotten better. I should mention real quick that at Zoe, we are traditionally known for having a big kit that allows people to do personalized nutrition with our big kit.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But actually, we have a new app that we're going to be releasing within the next few weeks that's totally free, helps people to identify the quality of ultra processed foods because we created a risk score for ultra processed foods. We break them down into because they're not all the same and they're not all bad. Right. So let's understand which ones are worse, which ones are better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So we help people to do that, and it also provides nutritional guidance for people for free.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I'm going to go protein. I'm going to go protein because, again, it comes back to I sort of see these as complementary pieces. Like let's not isolate fiber. It's not just fiber and isolation. It's fiber plus protein leads to greater satiation. And I want to combine those two. And I think people, you feel this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
When you eat a meal that combines an adequate amount of both fiber and protein, you feel that difference. So I would say protein is number three.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Based upon the data that I've reviewed, I do think that the 0.8 grams per kilogram RDA is too low. Like that is like to avoid...
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
sarcopenia right um when we're talking about optimization we need to go higher i'm of the belief i'm not as high as some other people are where they say basically the equivalent of 2.2 grams per kilo um of body weight i'm more in the range of 1.2 to 1.6 and i think that the amount that you need is in some ways determined by your physical activity so i'm going to put exercise on our list
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It may not be number four, but let's call it number five. All right, so let's make exercise number five. I'm going to put that on our list. And to me, protein needs to be sufficient to support growth of muscle mass and also recovery. So, and that to me, the 1.2 to 1.6 is the range that gets that done from my perspective.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yep. That's three. Exercise. Yep. I have exercise at five and I'm going to slide in number four and I'm going to go with time-restricted eating. So the thing about time-restricted eating is that people, you know, I see these debates. Is there something special about time-restricted eating compared to like calorie control over a certain period of time? Okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
The thing about this is I think this is universally applicable and something that every single listener, unless you're on a 100% animal-based diet... Every single one of these listeners can apply this to their life. Increase the diversity of plants in your diet. Where this came from, Drew, is a study called the American Gut Project. That's where it originally started.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
The truth from my perspective is that time-restricted eating gives you a framework to control the timing of your diet with consistency, which taps into your circadian rhythm. and simultaneously to maintain control over the unhealthy eating that happens on the bookends. So if you are going to create this sort of period of time where let's pretend that it's 10 hours of an eating window, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
14 hours of fasting, which I think this is like a nice level of time-restricted eating. You have a 10-hour eating window. What this helps you to do is to avoid that late-night snack. And that's key. That late night snack is where we disrupt our metabolism. So, and the data are clear that if you take real world people, which is what matters because that's who's listening to us right now, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
If you take real world people and you apply time restricted eating, it does help them to maintain a calorie deficit, which can lead to weight loss.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, it is.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It's cutting that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Oh, it's 100% healthy for the microbiome. And the other thing I want to add real quick is that the premise of our conversation was targeting specifically weight loss, right? So that's why I have exercise down at number five. Right. But if we're going to shift this argument to, I want to look good for summer in a swimsuit, exercise moves way up.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Well, we talked about time restricted, time restricted eating.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It's a manageable way to achieve a calorie deficit and have control and maintain a circadian form of eating so that you're not eating at 10 o'clock at night. Um, which is when we're creating the most metabolically unhealthy pattern. So like the timing of when we eat does make a difference.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And the last thing I want to add before we move out is alcohol. We have to throw alcohol in there, right? Which is that is unnecessary calories and also disruptive to our gut microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, I think the strongest argument is for red wine. So it's interesting. I actually recently have been pushing back against myself a little bit. Because I used to say, in fact, my first book said this, that why drink red wine when you can get resveratrol, which is the polyphenol that comes from red wine. You can get that by eating grapes or even, believe it or not, eating peanuts.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Like there's a lot of other plant-based foods that contain resveratrol. Okay, here's where my pushback comes in. Fermentation. Fermentation leads to transformation of food. The resveratrol that has been fermented is not the same as the resveratrol that has not been fermented. The resveratrol that was fermented is now more bioactive.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Your body is going to be able to receive this resveratrol in greater proportions. So now that doesn't mean that red wine needs to contain alcohol. So if you were to drink red wine for the purposes of your health, you would de-alcoholize it because it's not the alcohol that provides the benefit. If anything, that's the part that provides the harm.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But if you're just like looking to have a drink once in a while, like what you described, I have zero issue with. I have zero issue with occasional.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Truly occasional drinks. Where I think that the issues exist is like clearly there's an issue with drinking to the point of a hangover. You're damaging your microbiome when you do that. That is not just dehydration. You can't just give yourself an IV and feel better. You have damaged your gut microbiome and it takes you a day to feel better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I think that there's an argument. Let me be totally clear. I don't have perfect data for what I'm about to say. I'm using what I have and interpreting it. But I think there's an argument that the concept of one to two drinks being good for us is actually being challenged right now. So part of this is that alcohol consumption on any level has been associated with carcinogenesis, cancer risk.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Part of this is that alcohol consumption on any level when consumed in the evening is disruptive to your sleep, even one drink. And then the study that changed my mind is they took a look at something called lipopolysaccharide, which comes from the gut. And when the gut barrier is damaged and broken, meaning like people call it leaky gut, that's fine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I also would call it increased intestinal permeability. When the gut barrier is damaged and broken, this lipopolysaccharide gets into the bloodstream. So if you draw blood on a person and you're seeing, oh man, their LPS is spiking, you know the gut barrier has been harmed. All right. And in the study, they basically gave people a significant amount of alcohol.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It was not one drink, a significant amount of alcohol. But here's what happened. Their blood alcohol level went up in parallel. Their lipopolysaccharide level went up. The lipopolysaccharide did not normalize until the alcohol normalized.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So the fact that these things happened in parallel, the fact that you couldn't get LPS to get out of the bloodstream until the alcohol was also gone, to me provides the suggestion that we're better off without alcohol in our lives.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah. I'll still have a drink once in a while if I'm being social. But like as a dad with four kids, I'm not out doing that very much.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But the one thing I would say with caution, though, is that as alcohol use has gone down, marijuana use has come up. And people want to believe that there's no risk associated with that. That is certainly not true. So a few things. First of all, cognitively, it definitely affects people's brains. We call them potheads back in the 90s, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
There's actually studies now where they look at the size of the brain on imaging and have shown that the brain shrinks with chronic marijuana use. I don't like the sound of that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Okay. And then in the gastroenterology world, 10 or 12 years ago, If you ever made the diagnosis that I'm about to share, your peers would look at you like you are a genius. But there has been the emergence in recent years of something called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. People may have also heard of this being referred to as cyclic vomiting syndrome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But this is cyclic vomiting syndrome that is driven by chronic marijuana use. We're seeing it a lot in kids. And if like, let's pretend in theory that we're in a clinic and some young person comes in, they're 19 years old. And they say to me, I'm having, I'm, I'm throwing up every single day. Cause that's literally what they will describe it as.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I will ask them one question that will help me to know immediately what's going on. Do you like taking hot showers? And they'll go, oh my gosh. Yeah. How did you know? I'll like, you know, I'll take a shower for an hour straight. I feel so much better. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
What's happening here is that when a person develops cannabinoid, it's probably related to the cannabinoid receptors that we have in the body. But when a person develops the cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, the problem that exists is that they feel better when they smoke. And the nausea gets worse when they stop smoking. And then they can hop in the shower and feel better for whatever reason.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It's like the heat allows them to activate those receptors and feel better. Wow. So it's a word of caution.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, those associations are clearly there. There's also on a lighter level, there's also paranoia that many people experience through the use of chronic marijuana. So I think that the big thing from my perspective is that if you want to smoke weed once in a while, that I don't have a huge issue with.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But when you're turning this into chronic use as a replacement for having a drink or when you're basically self-medicating because a lot of people are, that's where the issues come up.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I've always felt very strongly about keeping my politics separate from my professional life. Because to me, I'm a medical doctor. We're talking about people's health. That should come from a place of sincerity, honesty, and there shouldn't be really any sort of political influence.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, 100%. That means nothing. And also, I would never align my views to try to fit. Like to me, the association of what you eat with political ideology is completely absurd. But it definitely has happened. It definitely has happened.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So now with this, though, we're talking about the intersection of politics with the world that I exist in professionally because this is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And I have been calling – for change. I have been begging for change. All right. So here's where I'm at. The status quo is killing us. We're clearly getting worse. We're clearly getting worse. So we do need to change.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Anytime you make a change, like there's going to be discomfort that people have with any change. That's human nature. People are like, Ooh, that doesn't feel comfortable. Like you'd rather stay in what you know right now to be true, even when it's killing you. That's the way that people typically operate. So to make any change is going to make people feel a bit uneasy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
When you make a change, you're going to take a risk. There's a chance. There's a chance that it's the wrong choice. I would really love... love for this to be a smashing success. And I am cheering for him to do that because in the same way that across party lines, I would never cheer against the president of the United States. This is our country. This is the country that my children live in.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
This is the country that my grandchildren will live in, right? I want us to be successful. That's to be like cheering against your own country. So with that, I want Bobby Kennedy to be a massive success. Only time will tell. I can't project what's going to happen. I can tell you this. I can tell you this. This is me assessing the lay of the land as we sit here today and discuss this topic.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I would like to believe... that there are much bigger issues for us to get after than seed oils. Now, you can take the seed oils out, and I am perfectly happy with that. When you take them out and you replace with beef tallow, from my perspective, we are rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Like, that is not moving America in a meaningful direction towards better health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And if he's going to use... the energy that he has at the start of a new administration, the energy is high right now. Dude, get after it. Let's get after the big stuff, right? Let's make a difference. Let's make healthy food more affordable for people. Let's get it into their lives and figure out how to do that. Let's get the bad stuff out of the food system.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So that's where I'm at is I want to see those types of changes. And what I don't want, what I'm fearful of, to be honest with you, Drew, I'm fearful that we're going to do something like, okay, we got rid of red number three. Do you know how easy it is for the food industry to replace red number three?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Let's not plant a flag and declare victory. We have done nothing, right? And I'm not saying that's what Bobby Kennedy and his team have done. What I'm saying is that's what I fear is that we do something that's convenient and easy for them because their lobbyists get to us. And then the flag gets planted. Hey, we were a success. We made a difference. Look at what we did.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I want bigger change than that. I want much bigger change than that. But I also think that like we have to target the stuff that's really meaningfully going to make a difference in people's lives.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And if he really is going to do that, then honestly, I'm kind of a little bit like I hope that he's OK because he's putting it on the line to do that because these are powerful forces that he's going to have to push through.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I'll take it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
You know, first of all, I completely agree, right? My hope is that that's step one on the path to much bigger things. And again, with the seed oils, my thing is just, look, you can take the seed oils out of the ultra-processed food. It's still an ultra-processed food.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Still may have those emulsifiers in there. Right. So like to me, there's other issues that exist. Absolutely. Replace the seed oils with extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil and limit our frying as much as we possibly can. Like, I'm pretty sure you would agree with me on that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So now the thing, the thing I want to remind the listeners though, is that at the end of the day,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
We can't expect our government to do everything for us. This is the reason why this podcast and my platform and all of these other things exist so that we can empower people with knowledge so that they can basically become the stewards of their own health. And I think that health is like, to me, health and family are true wealth.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And ask anyone who has lost their health, they would pay anything to have it back. So I think that we all have to start there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
A hundred percent.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I think it starts with having the fermented foods in your refrigerator. Like to actually have them in your physical space so that when you open up that refrigerator door, boom, there they are. They're tempting you, right? And bear in mind that this is not intended to form the core of your diet. I am very happy for you to have this as a side item.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So it's like this little accoutrement that you have with your core meal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That's your side piece, right? And there's many different forms of fermented foods. Not everyone loves the same flavors and textures. They're all sort of unique and different. So you have to find what works for you. But like things like sauerkraut and kimchi and like those to me, they both come from cabbage. They're not the same thing. They complement different types of meals, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Sometimes I want that heat from the kimchi and sometimes I want that crunch. And that acidity that cuts, cuts through the other food with the sauerkraut. I think fermented vegetables, which include pickles, but like if you, if a person who's listening to this tries fermentation at home, it is so easy to do. And I love, love fermented green beans, fermented radishes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
You may not like radishes, but if you ferment them, you will feel differently. They're amazing. So these are on the table. And then, of course, there's the fermented foods like tempeh and miso. Those are going to be like not as common to consume, but it's really good to try them out. Expose yourself to them and see what you think. Don't eat raw tempeh. It's a little funky.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It's better to cook it, add some spice to it or like a little bit of soy sauce to sort of add some flavor to it. And then there's the fermented dairy products. So like for people who are consuming dairy, to me, the healthiest form of dairy that exists without question is fermented dairy. And that includes kefir and yogurt and things like that, Greek yogurt.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So in Greek yogurt, we talked about protein. Take a look at the label of Greek yogurt. The amount of protein is quite impressive.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
The argument, if I were to like push back against dairy products in general.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
The issues that exist are like there's issues around non-organic dairy, which where they could be pumped up with hormones. They may even be pumped up with antibiotics. Yeah. That's the issue with non-organic. And when you get into organic, they're not going to be administering the hormones or the antibiotics, but the cow still produces hormones.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So that still is being transferred as a part of that product. That's the pushback that exists. But among animal products, I would put fermented dairy products up towards the top. To me, fish, shellfish, eggs, and fermented dairy are up at the top from my perspective. And
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So, and if you were to take that, that Greek yogurt that you just mentioned, like to me, that can become the vehicle for plant-based diversity, which makes me very happy for people who are trying to accomplish that, where you could put a whole bunch of different berries.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Hemp seeds, right? You could put, um, whatever nuts you like. Like I really dig walnuts. Uh. But whatever nuts, you throw some hemp seeds, you throw some cinnamon on there, that's an extra plant. You get a mix of berries. So yes, blueberries, but raspberries and strawberries and blackberries. Okay, that's four. Like that to me becomes the vehicle to accomplish this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That thing that started off as just yogurt could end up with seven or eight different plants easily.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
We don't have clear data on intermediate amounts of fermented food intake. So what that means is that like, let's start by acknowledging that the vast majority of Americans, their fermented food consumption as we sit here right now is zero. Or if it's any, it's probably yogurt. And that's it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
What we do have is a study out of Stanford University, and the Sonnenbergs had people really crank up their fermented food intake.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It was a lot. But it was to prove the point, like what happens with this intervention over the course of eight weeks? And what they found is increase in the diversity of the gut microbiome, reductions of inflammatory measures, right? So this is what's potentially on the table. What does an intermediate amount accomplish? We don't have total clarity on that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But I also think that there's enough to sit here and say, I think it's worth it, even if it's an intermediate amount. I don't think that it should be, hey, you only should feel good about yourself if you get up to six servings of fermented food a day. That's really hard to get to, to be honest with you. Absolutely.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So let's opt to try to prioritize these foods and take it as far as we can possibly take it. What happens with fermented foods? What are the benefits in terms of the gut microbiome? Okay, zoom out for a quick moment and contemplate this. It's very interesting. Our gut is an ecosystem in the same way that the Great Barrier Reef or the Amazon rainforest is an ecosystem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And a ferment is also an ecosystem. So it achieves a balance. And it's made up of all of these living microorganisms that include bacteria and yeasts. And through that balance, they are actively consuming and transforming components of that food that you have exposed them to. What they are depends. Like, are we talking about sauerkraut? Are we talking about kombucha? Are we talking about yogurt?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
There's different things that are being consumed in each of those cases. But basically what they're doing is they're consuming things within that food and they're changing it. They're transforming it. So the end result is not just about the microbes. That is a part of the story. That you have living microbes. But it's also the transformation that took place within the food.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
An example of this is sourdough bread. You kill the microbes. And yet, despite this, I would argue that a high quality sourdough bread from nice flour is the healthiest bread that exists. It's lower in gluten content. It actually reduces the glyphosate content and enhances the absorption of fiber, of protein. So it increases the vitamins that are there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So we get all of these benefits that come from the transformation that the food undergoes as a result of these microbes. In essence, what they're doing within that jar or whatever it may be within that ecosystem is they are slowly digesting the food in the same way that our body would digest the food, but we're giving them more time to really do it and transform it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And the American Gut Project actually was an international study and included like 52 territories and countries across the globe, especially the United States and the U.K., And it was the first time that they had microbiome samples for over 10,000 people and simultaneously all kinds of information about their diet, their lifestyle. What were they eating? How were they eating?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I think there's been a generational decay that's taking place in the quality of our microbiome. So I think it's been happening over time. And so forgive me because I'm going to cheat a little bit because my number one would be the absence of dietary fiber.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I think we're referring to the same thing. I would use the word smoothie. Like basically we're talking about throwing a whole bunch of plant-based stuff into a blender, pressing the button and letting it buzz, right? And I think it's a great way to start your day. So a few things about this. Number one, it's more easily digestible.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
element that could help even maybe withstand some a lot of these insults that are coming from our environment and other things that are there that's exactly right and there was research done so i just moment ago mentioned a moment ago the fermented food study out of stanford with the sonnenbergs the sonnenbergs also did a study which was a generational mouse study because you can't do this study in humans it just would you know i mean it would take like 70 years to do
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So they did a generational mouse study where they deprived the mice of dietary fiber. And what they found was that there was a generational decay that took place in the diversity of species within their gut. Now, when they added fiber back, say, three or four generations in, when they added fiber back in, there was some saving that was accomplished.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Like basically they were able to get back some of what they had lost, but they didn't get all the way back to the baseline of where grandma started. So I do think that this is like part of the issue is that it's worse for our kids than it was for us, and it's worse for us than it was for our parents.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yes. And these things, so the choices that you make push out and exclude something else. So, and this is the issue where I would put number two, ultra processed foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And it's a bit I'm cheating a little bit, to be totally honest with you, because within this umbrella of ultra processed foods, the reason why I'm going for this for number two is that I get to like sit down and say, look at all of these different food additives that we do know. are causing harm to our gut microbiome. We touched on dietary emulsifiers. We've talked about artificial colorings.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
We haven't talked about artificial flavors, but we could throw those in there. We touched on glyphosate. We touched on artificial sweeteners that I have concerns about, perhaps not as big as the emulsifiers, but they're there. My concerns are there. This is just part of the package. And here we are, adults, 60% of calories, ultra-processed. Our children, 70% of calories.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Because if you put it in the pantry, if it's in the house, that's what they're going to eat. That's what it was designed for, designed to bring them back. So number two is ultra-processed foods. Number three, I'm going to cheat again a little bit. We're going with sugar, all right? Because, like, to me, this is a part of the ultra-processed problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
This is something I would recommend to nearly all of the listeners. Number two, they can be delicious. They should be delicious. There's no reason for it to not be delicious. Number three, you can really crank up your fiber by doing this. It's a great way to start your day because then you're already ahead of the curve. in terms of your fiber goals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Um, but it's also a specific part of the ultra processed problem and it needs to be dealt with the added sugar. And I, you know, I would go so far as to say, cause there are people who say, damn those carbs. And I used to push back against that, Drew. Because I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's more complicated than damn those carbs. Fiber is a carb. But you know what?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I'm willing to stay here today with you. Damn those carbs. Because really what we're talking about is refined carbs. And that includes sugar. And that also includes refined flours.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Which act like sugar in the body. And the more that you grind them up and bleach them and remove the whole grain element to turn it into white flour, the more that you do this, the more that you're basically turning this into sugar and the more that you're also extracting where the value, including the vitamins, the minerals, and the fiber exists.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Now, it doesn't mean that it's impossible to enjoy a slice of bread. Bread's quite delicious. But I argue in favor of sourdough bread, which has a lower glycemic index and has other qualities that I've described that are more healthy. But I also am not arguing that sourdough bread is something that you consume at every meal. It's just part of a diet. You have it a couple times a week maybe.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, and there's some interesting things. Like, for example, at Zoe, we did some research where we, as a part of the Zoe kit, people wear a continuous glucometer for two weeks. And we see what they're eating and how their blood sugar responds and what their blood sugar does, like, over the course of many hours.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Most people, when they think about the glucometer, they're thinking about, okay, what is my spike? What is my area under the curve? What's happening immediately? And I get that. But actually, if you bring attention to a couple of hours later, there's something interesting that happens in people who consume refined carbohydrates, which is that your blood sugar drops.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And it drops below the baseline. Now, it's not a plummet. And it's not enough to make you like overtly hypoglycemic. Hypoglycemic is the word that we use for low blood sugar. And that's where people are like shaky because they took too much insulin. All right. It might not make you that. But it is enough to make you feel fatigued. And it's enough to make you hungry.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And it's enough to make you hungry for more refined carbohydrates. Because glucose is the fuel for your brain. And in that moment when the blood sugar is too low, the interpretation of your brain is, oh, gosh, like, am I on short supply here? I'm below my normal amount. I need more sugar to replace that to get this back to normal amounts.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And number four, same is true for plant diversity. Like you can easily get to eight, 10, 12 different plants. It's a Monday morning. It's a new week that started. You want to get to 30 by the end of the week. You throw some stuff into a blender. It takes you three minutes and you're already at 12. That's not a bad start.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So then you go seeking it out and you end up consuming hundreds of calories extra during that particular day. So it ends up becoming a vicious cycle.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah, so you and I have, I feel like, I feel pretty good about the conversation that we had about microplastics and nanoplastics. And I think that that needs to be included along with pesticides because that's like an environmental toxic exposure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I, you know, if I'm not going to include that with ultra processed foods, then I would put this right where we are right now, which is probably number four. And you could debate, is that four or is that really three? Should I bump that above sugar? That's a debatable thing. I'm pretty close on those two from my perspective. But I do worry about these things.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And let me just summarize my thoughts on glyphosate. People get big feelings on this topic. And the thing about glyphosate is this is a water-soluble herbicide. So that means it's intended to destroy all plants. And because it's water soluble, that means that when it gets into our soil, it doesn't wash out very easily. So it will stick around for a period of time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
In fact, I was telling you before we started, I just saw a commercial on TV that the Roundup people were bragging that you can go outside, spray your lawn once, and for four months, you won't have to worry about spraying it again. So basically what they've told you is that when you spray your yard with glyphosate, those chemicals are still hanging around four months later. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
As your children and as your dog is running around in that yard. My wife and I have the worst yard in the neighborhood. We're never going to win the yard of the month award in Charleston because we have opted to go clean. So but, you know, that's being sprayed on our food. And that includes oats. So when you mentioned oats earlier. Actually, I'm not a fan of oat milk.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
A lot of contamination also. It's basically like you're creating a refined carbohydrate because when you take that oat and you roll it, you are processing it. And then when you chop it up in a blender, you're processing it even more. So you're breaking it down into constituent pieces. So yes, I'm not a huge oat milk fan, but oats.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And this also, by the way, includes the wheat, barley, and rye that contain gluten. You hear these stories, Drew, about people. I know people also have big feelings about gluten and that's its own conversation. But you hear these stories about people who are like, I can't eat bread in the United States. But if I go to Italy, I'm fine. Okay. That is not gluten.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
There's definitely gluten still in that Italian bread. And I get the argument, oh, well, the concentration of gluten is higher in the United States. No, I don't think that's what it is. I think the argument there is pesticides. That fundamentally the wheat is not being treated the same way prior to making bread compared to the wheat in the United States that is being sprayed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And by the way, it's not even genetically modified per se. In the U.S., it's that an herbicide kills plants. When you harvest wheat, you are able to accelerate your process and get that wheat into the supermarket much faster if you dry it out, which is what this does. I have serious concerns about glyphosate.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And really what it boils down to is that, you know, you could say, oh, well, humans are not hurt by glyphosate. The consumption of glyphosate, okay, but are your microbes hurt? Because it doesn't take much. And the data would strongly suggest that the microbiome is hurt by the presence of glyphosate. The microbes are in fact killed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
For that person, I like to use an expression, low and slow. So what that means is conceptually similar. I want people to think about the gut like it's a muscle. Apply the same logic that you would use in the gym.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I'm a medical doctor. I care about that person, right? Like what I really care about. And I said this earlier in the show and I'll bring it back on the table is I care about results. I want a person better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I fully respect and acknowledge that if you try something for yourself and it causes you to get worse and you have not been provided by your medical doctor or through the health care system an explanation for that, I would totally understand why you would then ultimately say this makes no sense anymore. I'm hurting myself. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And I think where I come from is that I don't know the details of this person. And truly, it's not about this person anyway, right? This is more like a conceptual, right? But I feel given the opportunity to sit down with someone like this and really unpack in the way that I would in a clinic.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
to your gut so let's pretend this is day one this is conceptually the same as you going to the gym on january 1st and if i were to give you guidance on that day before you go to the gym i would say drew please don't hurt yourself please don't go crazy please don't lift weights that like are way more than you're ready to lift start low allow your body to adjust and adapt to it and you will get stronger and when you go back in two days you'll be a little bit stronger you can do just a little bit more and if you keep that pattern going that's how you build muscle mass
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Everything about this person, including their medical history, but going, I'm of the belief, Drew, and you've alluded to this, but I want to bring it into the light here. It's more than just your health and your list of medications and even your diet and whether you exercise. It's more than these things.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
There's elements of who we are as humans that aren't easily definable and yet have a massive impact on our health. And so to me, that is the non-conscious mind, the things that exist outside of our conscious mind, and the presence potentially of trauma. And I've seen this firsthand many times.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And the reason why I want to point this out is that I actually had a patient who I can tell you with clarity that I was trying to do all of my tricks. She had ulcerative colitis. I was trying to do all my tricks. I was trying to do the plant-based thing. She was not getting better. And ultimately what changed everything was when we got to a point where we discovered together that like her job was,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
was horrible. And she would go to work and her boss would demean her, not just to her face, but in front of her peers. And like getting in the car in the morning was enough to get her heart rate to jump up. And so it takes a lot of audacity to to leave a job and she did she did it and when she did the healing was instant and because it was never a matter of the plants being the problem
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
it was a matter of a misdiagnosis and the problem being something that the conventional healthcare system doesn't really acknowledge, which is the reality that we are human and that we have a soul and that soul can be injured through trauma. And that sometimes the best healing that we can do is actually to heal that part of ourselves that is not physical, but is, you know, who we truly are though.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I think that sometimes that's what we really need.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I started a company called 38 Terra and 38 T-R-A, this means 38 trillion. That's in reference to the 38 trillion bacteria that we have living inside of our gut. And basically the backstory, Drew, is that as a gastroenterologist, It is completely part of our process and has been for a very long time to use supplements with our patients. So that could be prebiotic fiber supplements.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It could be probiotics. It's in our guidelines. This is mainstream gastroenterology. And I was doing this with incredible success in my clinic for many different years. Um, so like if you came in to see me in the clinic on the very first visit, there was legitimately a 90 or 95% chance that I was going to send you home using a fiber supplement.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Well, I had, I had a few different ones and it kind of depended on the context just a little bit. But in the United States, like there's, you know, you can very easily get access to Metamucil. You can very easily get access to Benefiber. And if you are a little bit willing to go and seek it out, you can find the Keisha fiber in the United States. And these are all great options.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Psyllium husk is with Metabucil. So that's Metabucil. And then there's also partially hydroized guar gum. So PHGG is another one. It's not super easy to find, but it's out there. So I had been doing this for a very long time. I do this with people who are on a low-fiber diet. I do this with people who are on a high-fiber diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I had a ton of people who are vegan who would come to see me with digestive health issues. It still works. So this became like a centerpiece of what I did. And when I wrote my book, Fiber Fueled, Chapter 7 was called Prebiotics, Probiotics, and Postbiotics. It was all about this concept. So after reading this chapter, so many people came out of the woodwork.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
They're like, Dr. B, what do you recommend? And the problem is that it's one thing for me to be in a clinic one-on-one with people. And it's another thing to now have a platform which potentially impacts hundreds of thousands of people and simultaneously opens up the opportunity for me to do something that really makes a difference.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That's how you grow stronger. That's how you add functionality to your body that you don't currently have, but you could have if you were to follow this pattern of growth, right? The gut is the exact same way. So with the smoothie concept, let's start low. Let's go slow. So how do we start low? Okay, part of this is like, please don't drink 40 ounces of smoothie on the first day, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And so it was in that moment that I made the decision that I wanted to – take what I saw as an inadequate number of options to address gut health issues in terms of supplements and take it up to a whole new level and like really create ultra premium supplements for gut health. So I started this process in 2021, February of 2021. I launched the company in January of 2024.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So about a year ago, um, the, like sold so many products in the first 24 hours that I had to close the store.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah. And I started doing drops like every month and like, you know, how many am I going to sell this month? Boom. We're sold out in 45 minutes. All right, so, but our first product is a prebiotic. And the beauty of this product, there's a few things about it that like I spent literally years honing in and crafting. It is seven unique prebiotic ingredients. So we talk about diversity of plants.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So does a monofiber really make sense within the context of diversity of plants? No, I would rather give you seven different unique prebiotic ingredients. We talked about how fiber, resistant starch, and polyphenols are unique types of prebiotics. This product, as far as I know, is the only one that's on the market that gives you all three of those, fiber, resistant starch, and polyphenols.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Several of the ingredients are ones that are given in a very precise dose because they have human clinical trials to prove that they improve your gut microbiome, improve your bowel movements, and reduce gut symptoms. So we also made it low FODMAP. This was an important thing from my perspective. We talked about FODMAPs very early in the episode. They're more gentle for the gut.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And then the really big thing is like, for example, Benefiber. This is wheat dextrin. So this is a wheat-derived product.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
mean do we know if it's been sprayed with glyphosate we really have no clue probably so my thought was you know what we're we're making the supplement that we always wished would exist let's go to an extreme in terms of our testing so every single batch we spend thousands of dollars testing over 120 different things that ultimately are fed into a report that when you enter the lot number on our website you can download that report and you will get batch specific information
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
in terms of the allergens, the heavy metals, in terms of food intolerances. Like I have to push the labs to do very weird tests that most people are not doing. Pesticides, glyphosate, we are certified glyphosate free. And last but not least, we are on the verge of becoming NSF certified, which for people who don't know what that is, I'm sure you know what that is, Drew.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But for most people, they may not know that NSF certified basically means that we are testing it extremely rigorously. Where if you were a professional athlete and you want to know that you have a clean product, NSF Certified is how you accomplish that. So anyway, so this is our first product, Daily Microbiome Nutrition. This to me is like...
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
I'm building products that are intended to serve a purpose for people's gut health. This product is to improve the health of your gut microbiome. But we have other things in the product line that are going to be coming later this year. So I think it's just something, if you like what you're hearing, come to the website 38terra.com, check out what we have, read the reviews. They're completely real.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Like it's a volume thing. So don't make a massive smoothie and then feel obligated to finish the whole thing. Like if anything, make it smaller and share it. All right, number two, what do we throw into the smoothie? I would recommend that you start off with a low FODMAP smoothie. because it's going to be more gentle on the gut.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And sign up for our newsletter so that you can hear about new products when they come out.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
This is a powder.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
You can add it to your smoothie. You could drink it with just water. It's quite easy. Like literally, you drop it in some water, you swish it and drink it. Boom, done.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
This concept of intuition and trusting your gut, it's very interesting how things that we provide a label to, like we use terminology, many years ago, and ultimately here we are and we circle back and we're like, huh, that seems to be actually true. Our gut actually has 500 million nerves that are constantly feeling and sensing and connected to our brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And those gut microbes are communicating to our brain through those 500 million nerves. So our brain, our conscious mind, in combination with our gut, and then the third party is our non-conscious mind that we don't have the capability of really understanding what's happening in that space.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But it does ultimately feed into those instincts of what you feel in that moment where you want to trust your intuition. To me, these are the three things. It's like a triangle. The conscious mind, the non-conscious mind, and your gut are combining in that moment to give you an instinct. And the research has suggested that those instincts are on point.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
More so than, like in many cases, you can overthink a thing. So how do we trust our gut better? I think that part of it, from my perspective, Drew, is also through the gut-brain connection. I want people to be in a place where they feel well, where they love the person that they see in the mirror, where they have great self-esteem and great confidence, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So what is this concept of FODMAPs for your listeners who perhaps haven't really heard much, or maybe they've heard it, but they're like, what is that? FODMAP stands for, and this is super nerdy, forgive me, fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. What this is referring to is the fermentable carbohydrates in our diet. So that includes lactose and dairy products.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It's the same thing that I want for my children as I want for everyone else who's out there. I want it for myself. I was in a place where I didn't have those things. So how do you ultimately accomplish this? You elevate your health throughout your entire body, right? And that includes, or that really starts from my perspective, through the gut. And we've talked about a lot of things.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
You've pushed me to create lists where I had to prioritize. And I think that if we were going to summarize these things, because truly, if you go back, and I'm sure you'll timestamp those things, you can go back and you can take those lists and write them down on a piece of paper and put them on your refrigerator and be aware of these things that exist, because these are opportunities for you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
These are the levers that you can pull. But if I were to really break this down, let's keep it super simple. I want people to increase the variety of varieties of plants in their diet. You don't have to count the grams of fiber. If you increase the varieties of plants in your diet, you will be giving me what I want. I want you to add fermented foods to your diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Like those to me are the two big dietary interventions. And as we increase those things, I want you crowding out the ultra processed foods. So as that UPFs go out, in come these new things that are flooding your body with gut healing, anti-inflammatory chemicals that are good for you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And then I like to think about like the physical body and the non-physical body and how we can be the best versions of ourselves. The physical body, there are the obvious things that we can do without lifting a fork. Exercise, sleep, spending time outdoors, getting that morning light exposure. Even you can make the argument things like breathing exercises to activate the vagus nerve.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
But in terms of the non-physical body, I just want to bring attention to this in the very last minute. Please. With absolute total clarity, we have a crisis of loneliness in the United States. People feel more disconnected than they've ever felt before.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And it's funny because social media, you would think having a network of thousands of people that you're talking to on there, that would somehow make you feel more connected. It doesn't. We come from a position of being tribal. And within a tribe, you didn't have 3,000 people that you're hanging out with. You had a family of families.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
It started with your own family that you made sure that you were really connected to. And then these other people, you grew to trust one another. True connection means that in that moment when I am at my lowest, you are there to pick me up. And that's not easy for you, but you do that for me because you are bonded to me. That's a true connection.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Social media, they will let you go as quickly as they can swipe a different direction. That's the way it is. So we need to get back, put down the phones, have real conversations with real people, take a walk, talk to someone, go have dinner, sit down, have a meal, actually talk to them. Turn off your phone. The average adult is spending six hours a day on their phone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
The average child is spending seven on devices. So we need to be aware of this. And the last thing that I want to say is that we as humans, this is something I've been thinking about a lot. We as humans have a hole in our heart that can only be filled by our higher power. And that we will try to fill that hole with a lot of different things.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
know the worship of material goods and money or um you know there's there's so many things that we get ourselves into like we want to be famous we want to be on the internet we want to um uh serve a certain ideology right a certain group of people okay the problem is that those things are like sugar for the soul
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
That includes things in beans, things in whole grains, fructose and fruit, and sweeteners like sugar alcohols, which also include artificial sweeteners. Okay. All of these things, when we say fermentable, fermentation produces gas. So for people who have a sort of weak gut... where they may struggle to process and digest their food.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
They make you feel good for a minute, and then you feel worse a couple hours later, and you're hungry for more. The thing that truly satiates the soul is actually to open up. And to me, this is not about that one specific ideology, that one specific religion, although I have my own beliefs. This is about the fact that across the globe, if you look at all groups of humanity that have ever existed,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
dominantly, we have all yearned for a relationship with our higher power. And I think it just starts with taking a quiet moment and opening up your heart to that possibility because I think when you find that connection, it's something that can really fuel better health and it may surprise you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
The pleasure is all mine. You're doing amazing things. And it's an honor to be here with you and with your audience. So I thank you for that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Going low FODMAP can be a more gentle approach that's easier and produces less gas. You'll feel better. So start with a low FODMAP smoothie.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
What was their dietary pattern? All these different things. And when they did their analysis, this was like purely statistical. This was not some sort of a priori thing they were trying to find. When they did their analysis, this thing jumped out. It jumped out off the charts where they go, whoa, that's the thing. And the answer was eating at least 30 unique plants per week.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Beans, legumes, almost all of them. Lentils are, especially canned lentils, are the exception potentially. Whole grains, the ones that are gluten containing, which is an interesting thing. Again, we may circle back to this. So wheat, barley, and rye are high FODMAP foods. Garlic and onions, high FODMAP. And then like there's like some other ones that are out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
There's certain berries that can be high FODMAP.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
You have to be kind of careful with the amount.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So it's with avocado. It's like, if you have a certain amount, that's a modest amount. Cause I mean, like when I opened an avocado, I'm definitely not throwing it in the trash. I want to eat that whole thing. And, but like the amount is rather small if you have gut issues.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Low and slow.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Yeah. And if you're looking to do that, like you can certainly find these things on the internet. You absolutely don't need to buy my books, but you could also borrow my books from the library. And my first book, Fiber Fueled, has a four week plan in the back. The first two weeks are completely low FODMAP. So any recipe that's in the first two weeks, you already know it's low FODMAP.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
And then Fiber Fueled Cookbook is my second book. And that was an interesting book because it was really about food – sensitivity and trying to help people with that. So I have two protocols and one of the protocols is low FODMAP. So there's about 25 recipes, including some smoothies. So again, for people who want to try this out, go and try those types of things and see how you feel.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
If you are getting bloated from that, if it's too much, then reduce the amount that you're drinking. Just cut it down.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
So use a powder.
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Why You Need to Eat 30 Different Plants a Week to Fight Inflammation and How to Build Your Healthiest Gut Microbiome Yet with Gut Expert Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
You absolutely could. If you want to turn this, if you want to make it more satiating, if you want to feel full, because what we're talking about right now is the basic conversation is around getting more plants, more fiber, more diversity, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Because I know that once the bloating is gone, I know that I have them in a rhythm where they're moving their bowels the way that they're supposed to. So magnesium is one of the ways that we can accomplish that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Well, first of all, that is 100% true. When you cook your food, when you modify your food, these are forms of processing and there's nothing wrong with processing, meaning like cooking your food or chopping your food or something like that. That's a different thing from my perspective than say an ultra processed food where we're like,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
throwing together chemicals that, frankly, we don't even know what they are or what they do. So when we process our food, when we chop it, when we cook it, heat it up, boil it, steam it, whatever it may be, the food structure actually changes. And it's kind of interesting, Drew. There was a study that was done at the University of California, San Francisco by a gentleman.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
His name is Professor Peter Turnenbaugh. He's one of the leaders in microbiome research out there. And essentially what he did is he took the exact same food, it was a plant food, the exact same plant food, and he served it both raw and in cooked form. And what he discovered is that you actually get different effects on the microbiome when you cook the food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So there is no doubt that processing our food, specifically cooking our food, or cooking breaking it down, such as you would do with a smoothie, for example, that these are ways that we can make it easier for us to digest because in a way we're sort of pre-digesting that food through that process that we're doing. So I do think that there's benefits.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
For the person who has gas and bloating, we're focusing on food right now. We could open this conversation up into bigger things too. when it comes to gas and bloating. But for the person who has gas and bloating, I do think that it's really important that you ease into your fiber intake. I always say start low, go slow.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And what that means is that we're going to try to get you in a place where the amount of fiber that's on your plate, you're actually capable of processing and digesting it. We wanna be at a level that actually is matched to what your gut microbiome is capable of doing. And then go slow basically means that we're going to start to escalate over time.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And as we start to escalate and challenge your gut, your gut will have the ability to keep up with what you're doing as long as you're going slow enough. And this is how you build. It's the exact same concept of what we do in the gym. When we go to the gym, we start off low in terms of weights that we can handle, and then we go slow in terms of ramping it up.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So for the person who has gas and bloating, yes, processing your food. This could be done through cooking your food, making like I'm a big fan of soups, stews, things like that. Also making smoothies and pre-digesting it. Additional things to think about. You could sprout your food. You could ferment your food. In some cases that actually improves it and makes it more easily tolerable.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And the other thing is to look at low FODMAP foods. So FODMAPs are the parts of our food that are fermentable, that cause gas and bloating. And for the person who has a damaged gut, for example, if you have chronic gas and bloating, you have your old bowel syndrome, then it can be a good place to start with the low FODMAP foods and then ramp up over the course of time.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So an example are raspberries. Raspberries are low in FODMAPs, but they're actually very high in fiber, like extremely high in fiber. And so it can be a great food to start with because it's less likely to cause gas and bloating and make your symptoms worse. But at the same time, like you're giving your body exactly what it wants in terms of building up your microbiome and making it stronger.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
your life of like what kind of diet were you eating at that time and then we'll go to other other factors in your life i mean i was a textbook example of the things you should not do and this is despite the fact that i had graduated medical school from georgetown and was a chief medical resident northwestern and you know all these things like i was an accomplished medical doctor and yet my lifestyle was not aligned with what i would recommend at this point in my life being in my 40s
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Um, and I think that, you know, kind of what happens is that the demands of what I was going through professionally from medical school, residency, fellowship, like those three things for me, they were four years each. So this is 12 years of my life from 22 years old to 34 years old, where I'm spending six days a week in the hospital.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
I'm working like a minimum of 12 hours a day, but most days, 15 or 18 hours, sometimes 30 hours straight. I'm giving everything that I got to getting through this process. And when you're in that sort of place where it's like, look, your sleep is disrupted. You don't have time for exercise. You don't have time for yourself. You're constantly stressed.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
When you're in that place, you just, you desperately want some sort of control over your environment. You want something that you actually have control over and it needs to be something that makes you feel good. And for me, that thing was food. And so it's not like I sat there and thought that I was eating a healthy diet when I was getting $15 worth of Taco Bell.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
But at the same time, I also really wasn't that worried about it because I thought I'm young. My body can handle this. I'm going to be like, I'm, you know, I'm strong enough. I'm tough enough. And frankly, I need this. Like I deserve this. I've earned this because I've worked so hard. This is all I got is this. And, you know, you make those sacrifices.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And over the long run, it's just like, I mean, I know this didn't happen overnight, but I felt like I woke up one day and I felt like you look in the mirror and you think of like my self-image of myself was an athlete. I played three sports every year when I was in high school. And you look in the mirror and you're just like, dude, who are you? And my gut was sagging over my belt.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
I had high blood pressure, I had high cholesterol, tons of anxiety, and I was just in a bad place. And I knew I needed a way out. And the irony is despite, like nothing against these institutions, I'm very proud of my education, but despite being educated at Georgetown and Northwestern and the University of North Carolina, like I really didn't have a great solution to my own problems.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
I didn't want what I was actually offering to my own patients, which was pills. I didn't want that. But I wasn't really sure how to fix this despite all that education. So there was a period of time where I was trying stuff. And the first thing that I tried was exercise. I thought I can exercise my way out of this.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And I was doing about 45 minutes of strength training plus 30 minutes of cardio of some variety. Um, six days a week and I could grow stronger and faster and those kinds of things, but the gut didn't go away. The anxiety didn't go away. The low self-esteem didn't get better. And so it was ultimately, frankly, stumbling into a dietary change that allowed me to get myself to a better place.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And when it, when it changed my life. I, as a medical doctor, felt like I have no choice now. Like this has to be a part of what I do for my patients. Because if you find something that powerful, that it doesn't matter whether you learned it in medical school or you learned it on your own.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
When you find something that's that powerful and that healing, then you have to deliver that to your patients because they deserve that too. And so that's really sort of the... the takeoff point for everything that has happened since is just like, I felt like I needed to do this and do it for my patients. And now here we are.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
I think the most obvious sign that you're not getting enough fiber is if you're not eating enough real plant food. If you're not really sure where the plants are in your diet, then you're clearly not getting enough fiber because fiber is found in plants. The average American, only about 10% of our calories are actually coming from plants. Unfortunately, the number one plant is potato.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Yeah, it's an interesting story because I think we've all known and I think we were all raised hearing from our grandmother that fiber is good for us and we're supposed to be eating more of it. My grandmother used to nag me about that when I was a kid. And I was just like, whatever. So it turns out that she was right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And I think that the science that really has changed, that is exciting because there's a new story. There's a new understanding of fiber. And this new story is like enough with us pretending that fiber is boring. It is not. It is so exciting. It is so interesting what we have learned in the last 15 years, which is that when you consume fiber, which by the way,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
just kind of taking it from the top fiber is a carbohydrate it's a complex carbohydrate so essentially if you take a bunch of sugar molecules and you fuse them all together and make a super long chain that's fiber and fiber is intensely complicated so i was a chemistry major in college and when i look at fiber molecules and i see their chemical structure i have zero clue
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
because French fries are sort of the number one thing that we're consuming that's vegetable based. So that's, you know, there's a lot of opportunity for improvement there. But to get into like symptoms, to get into sort of what you're looking for, Drew, I would talk about bowel movements. You know, if I were a cardiologist, I would be here to talk about heart rate and blood pressure.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
how to properly describe them. And it gives me like a brain cramp to even consider it. So because it's so complicated, we have done some things to try to simplify our understanding of fiber and we've broken it into two main categories, soluble and insoluble fiber.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So soluble fiber is the part that you and I were discussing earlier, Drew, when we were talking about coffee, because basically if you take soluble fiber and you put it into a beverage and you stir it, it will disappear. you won't even know that it's there. And there are certain properties to soluble fiber, but the main one that people need to know about is that it's food for our gut microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
I'm gonna come back to that in a moment, but just to take on insoluble fiber real quick. Insoluble fiber, insoluble meaning this does not dissolve. No matter what you do, you could heat it up. You could stir it all you want. It doesn't matter. It's still gonna be there. And this is the grit. This is the roughage.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
This is the more traditional understanding of fiber that we've always kind of learned, which is that you chew it up, you swallow it, it sweeps through your intestines, and then it launches out the other end like a bowel movement. So it has a bowel movement.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
uh insoluble fiber is not the part generally speaking that really is important to the microbiome it's the soluble fiber and this insoluble fiber what's unique and interesting about it is that as interesting and complicated as we are as humans our digestive system is actually rather simple We only have 17 digestive enzymes that are designed to process complex carbohydrates.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And this number 17 is inadequate to allow us to break down fiber. We don't have the ability as humans to actually digest it. So if we didn't have microbes, if we didn't have a microbiome, we would never be able to get the benefits from fiber.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
But because we have a microbiome and they're mostly concentrated in our colon, this is the main place, the colon is the large intestine where you will find these microbes. There's about 38 trillion of them there. Because they're there, the fiber will work its way through our small intestine, which is about 15 or 20 feet long.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And it will arrive in the colon in your right lower quadrant of your abdomen. And that's where it comes into contact with your gut microbiome. And this is their food. This is their food because it is one of the only things that we can guarantee that it will not be changed. It will not be altered by digestion. It will be exactly the same that you found it in your stomach.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And so those microbes, they have tons of these enzymes. So again, like we are big and complicated, but our digestive system is simple. We only have 17 enzymes, a single cellular bacteria that we can only see with a microscope. could have hundreds of enzymes alone. And collectively, the entire microbiome we've estimated could have 60,000 unique enzymes.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
If I were a pulmonologist, we would talk about pulse oximetry, respiratory rate. I'm a gastroenterologist. This is my vital sign, bowel movements. And I personally think that we're facing an epidemic of disturbed, out of balance, out of rhythm bowel movements.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And they use these enzymes, they go to work, they break down the fiber. The fiber stops being fiber. It's now been digested by your microbiome. And they release, Drew, the sort of key part here, they release the most healing, the most anti-inflammatory molecules that I've ever come across, which are the short chain fatty acids, butyrate, acetate, propionate.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
These three molecules, many people have heard of butyrate. They have healing effects in your colon. They have healing effects for the lining of your gut. They have healing effects on your gut microbiome. but they also have healing effects throughout your entire body.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
They will enter into your bloodstream and they will travel down to the tip of your toes and all the way up to your brain and make a difference everywhere they go. So the reason why fiber is so special, the reason why fiber has overwhelming evidence to support its health benefits is because When we consume fiber, it comes into contact with our gut microbes.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
They release short chain fatty acids and those short chain fatty acids are what activate the healing benefits that we get from fiber.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
To be honest with you, Drew, we don't even know how many varieties of fiber exist. And the reason why is because the biochemical complexity of fiber makes it very hard for scientists to even wrap their minds around this. But what we do know is that different plants, different plant types have different types of fiber. And those different types of fiber will feed different families of microbes.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
This is where diversity within the microbiome, this is where diversity with our diet become very important. because ultimately what we want is we want to eat a wide variety of plant foods that allow us to feed a wide variety of different microbes. So all of these different types of fiber, they're all unique.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Now, Drew, to answer your question a little bit more directly, some types of fiber are better at producing butyrate, some are better at producing the other short chain fatty acids. There's another thing that I should toss in here while we're talking about fiber and we're talking about butyrate, and those are the resistant starches. resistant starches are technically not fiber. They're starch.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
There's something to be said for having a good, complete, and dare I say, satisfying evacuation on a routine basis, like probably once a day. It doesn't have to necessarily be that, but probably once a day. And when you're consuming more fiber, many people are going two or three times a day and having really good bowel movements.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
You will find them in green bananas. You will find them in mashed potatoes when they cool off. You have to cool off the mashed potatoes to form the resistant starch. But this starch is not processed by our digestive system. And as a result, the resistant starch actually behaves exactly like fiber.
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The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And what's interesting, Drew, is that the resistant starch tends to support and produce a significant amount of butyrate, which is part of the reason why there's an emerging science that is increasingly showing us that there are benefits to us, including these resistant starch type foods in our diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So again, potatoes, when they're cooled off, green bananas, you'll also find resistant starches in legumes and beans, things of that variety, whole grains.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
it's a struggle if you feel like you can't completely empty um if you have this sense of like gosh i did all that work and when that little thing came out like those to me are signs that we have an issue and if you're not adequately evacuating your bowels then the number one symptom that we're going to see drew is bloating gas and bloating And this is widely prevalent.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
There are a bazillion people I'm quite sure listening to the podcast right now, who this is something that they've experienced. It's like the routine presence of gas and bloating. And I'm here to tell you, I'm here to tell you that this is very closely tied to your bowel movements. That if you are backing up, that is the cause of your gas and bloating.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And if we can get things moving through, then we can relieve that issue and you'll feel better. And fiber is one of the ways potentially that we could get that working.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
All right, Drew, how about we do this? You bob them my way and I'll try to crush them. Because I don't remember the exact four tips that I did.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
let's talk about coffee first yeah so i i coffee clearly helps people poop the vast majority of people when they consume coffee on a routine basis they're going to notice that they um often will have a bowel movement that comes shortly after that and it can be a part of that really healthy daily routine that you build in the morning
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
um that really gets your day started i mean i honestly believe that having a good uh complete evacuation in the morning is part of stepping into a great day so what is it about coffee there's a couple of things coffee is very rich in polyphenols polyphenols are antioxidant compounds an example would be chlorogenic acid that the research suggests may help us to move our bowels
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Coffee, believe it or not, even without adding fiber to it, actually contains some dietary fiber. And so this is soluble fiber. The soluble fiber is not grit. You would never know that it's there, but it is fiber and it is feeding your gut microbiome. And so that's one of the other things that potentially helps. Now, I will say there are some people that coffee just is not a great fit.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And so there's about 10% of the population that will drink a cup of coffee and it will actually trigger urgent bowel movements. With those people, I would consider adding a fiber supplement to your daily coffee, which by the way, I kind of recommend this for everyone. I do this myself. I did it this morning.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Adding a soluble fiber supplement to your coffee on a daily basis is a great way to amp up the microbiome support. So examples of fiber, acacia powder, partially hydrolyzed guar gum, wheat dextrin. These are examples of ones that will dissolve. You won't even know that they're in there. And I would try that if you're having some urgency after you drink a cup of coffee.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Some people it will trigger anxiety. Coffee may not be a good choice for them. It's, I think, the caffeine in that particular setting. And then you have to be careful about this causing insomnia. So for some people, they're very caffeine sensitive. So you want to be careful about coffee in the afternoon.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
For me, I could drink it at nine o'clock at night and go to bed at 10 o'clock and I'll be perfectly fine. That's just the way it is for me, but for others, it will be potentially different. So I think from my perspective, coffee is good for the microbiome. We actually have research that indicates that there are specific microbes that thrive when we regularly consume coffee.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And it's a rich source of prebiotics, both polyphenols and fiber. And I think it's a good part of the morning.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
No, I don't think so. I don't really have concerns if you feel that you're having better bowel movements because you drink a cup of coffee. I actually experienced that myself. So from my perspective, I don't see that as a red flag.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
There's this expression that exists called the runner's trots. Basically, these are distance runners, people who are training for marathons and things of that variety, where when they run, they have to poop. When they're on their legit marathon run, they find interesting ways to do that. What we know is that movement actually stimulates motility within the intestines.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
When you move, your bowels will move. And our bodies really were designed to move. So this sort of lifestyle, coming back to the lifestyle thing, Drew, this lifestyle where we're sitting at a desk and working from nine to five or something like that, and then going home and popping down on the couch, this is not the way that we were designed as humans. So it doesn't have to be a run.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
It could be a walk, a good brisk walk. You will notice the difference. This can help you to have a good regular bowel movement.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Well, I think there is some nuance to this particular topic. I'm not here to say that the solution for every person who is constipated is to crank up their fiber. I think that there's a little bit more to the story than that. But what I will say is this, that when your bowels are moving, as your bowels are moving through, fiber is your friend.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So for people who are constipated, as a gastroenterologist, my goal, the way I always tackled this issue is I want to get your bowels moving first. And there's a number of ways that I would do that. And then once I have them moving, then I want to bring the fiber on board because the fiber is going to help us to keep them moving.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So I sort of see, I think the key learning here for the audience at home is that it's not so much that I wean into fiber to treat constipation. It's more so that I get your bowels moving and then I bring the fiber on board to keep the bowels moving.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Yeah. And this is actually something worthy of us unpacking beyond what I did in the actual post. Because when I did this post, I was talking about a bottle of magnesium citrate. And many people tried to correct me. And I think part of it is sort of trying to educate on complex topics through social media. So let's just kind of unpack this together.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Magnesium citrate, you can buy at your local drugstore. It's typically about the size of a can of soda and carbonated, lemon-lime flavor. It really does not taste good. But when you do an entire bottle of magnesium citrate like that, The intent of this is to jumpstart your bowels.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
So if you are a person who is constipated, you would not do this on a daily basis because that would basically leave you perpetually in diarrhea. But instead, if you were constipated, you would do this first. You would drink a bottle of magnesium citrate. This gets things going. You have one or two really good solid bowel movements.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And then after that, you want to get into something that's more of a routine that you're going to do on a consistent basis. which could include fiber, but also would potentially include magnesium supplements. So magnesium supplements are more like the routine daily intervention that you will do to support good, healthy bowel movements.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And when it comes to magnesium supplements, there's a number of different ones that are good for constipation, magnesium citrate, magnesium sulfate, magnesium oxide. These three particular ones I've had great success. The way that I typically approach it will be depending on which type, starting at four or 500 milligrams per day. I usually tell people take it before bedtime.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
It can help in terms of sleep. There's a number of other benefits to magnesium. Magnesium is kind of a cool thing to take. And by the way, I've found that the vast majority of people are actually deficient in magnesium. But if you're concerned about that, you can always get your blood drawn with your doctor before you start doing this. Just get your blood drawn. Make sure you know where it is.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
Then you start doing this and you take four or 500 milligrams before bedtime once a day. Give it a week. See how you feel. If you're not where you need to be in terms of having those good regular bowel movements, then you can start to increase the dose by about 250 milligrams at a time. And until you get yourself to a place where it's like, okay, cool, I'm in a rhythm. This is where I need to be.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Nutrient Most of Us are Under-Eating That Boosts Brain Health and Fights Inflammation and Visceral Fat
And you know you're in a rhythm, by the way, Drew, with this particular thing. If you are constipated, you almost surely are going to have gas and bloating. And from my perspective as a GI doctor, when I treat people with this issue, what I'm looking for is that their gas and bloating has improved substantially, if not completely gone.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I grew up hearing about how genetics ruin everything. I'm here to say that there's an opportunity to change that. So here's the thing. The microbiome is basically a community of microorganisms. This impacts our digestion, our metabolism, our mood, our cognition. I don't think that there's an element of the human experience that isn't in some way connected back to our gut microbiome.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
There's over 30 neurotransmitters produced in the gut. We think about serotonin when it comes to our mood. 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut. We think about dopamine in terms of motivation. 50% of dopamine is produced in the gut. So it's this powerful organ in terms of communicating to the brain, and then there's ways in which the brain is communicating back.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It absolutely is. It literally is. Yeah. So here's the thing. A tree can't grow without roots, right? The larger the tree, the more there needs to be roots down below the surface, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And so this enteric nervous system, we call it the second brain, but it actually was our first brain because there was no way for you to actually power the development of human intelligence without first developing this, the gut.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I think that nature is way smarter than we are as humans. And you can think about this however you choose to. You could look at this as purely evolutionary in nature. And that is like this entire globe and every second of every day the evolution selecting the choice that is the superior choice and bringing us to where we are today.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And yet I look out and I see butterflies and flowers and I ask questions, how did they get here? Why are they here? And there's a part of me that looks at this entire picture and acknowledging that I am a scientist, right? And that I want to use those tools that I've been trained in to apply that and understand.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But I take a look at this and actually to me, this is better proof of a higher power than anything that I can see out there, right? The beauty of it, the intelligence of it. There's so many aspects, you know, and then like this might be hard to relate to and kind of weird, but like there's been moments where I'm performing colonoscopy
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
and seeing a microscopic world up close because my camera is able to basically zoom in and show things that otherwise you would never see. And that zooming in that's happening in real time as I'm performing this procedure, you step back and you go, number one, there's an entire world that's happening in this little small spot right there. That's crazy. And number two, gosh, it's beautiful.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It's amazing, right? And so, and I think that there's, there needs to be respect for that. And you mentioned a moment ago, ancient traditions. And now I, this is not exactly the same thing, but I think that it's worthy of, of acknowledging this, that, you know, to me, we have like 21st century science, right? Which are like statistical tools, big data, computers, things like this. That's cool.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
The promise is that we're gonna be unpacking the newest frontier of science that is changing the way that we think about the human body. And I don't think that there's an element of human health, but also the human experience that isn't in some way connected back to this, our gut microbiome.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But I also think that there's something to be said for 5,000 years of human observation, right? And collecting that 5,000 years. And I think that there's a reason why when we look at these ancient traditions, we are consistently discovering the accuracy. And the intelligence and intuition that existed within those places. Because they were onto something.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And they were pulling together that human experience over 5,000 years or so. There's something to be said for that. I think we need to respect that.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
The reality is that we're only aware of what we think of within the conscious mind. And yet, we all will acknowledge the existence of the non-conscious mind. That's powerful. and has influence over so many aspects of us. And it can be to our benefit, and in some cases, it can actually inflict harm upon us.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So I think that the way in which we think about these things, we need to expand that, you know? Because I think we tend to be, at least in my world of allopathic medicine, We think about things as just being like very cut and dry, right? And what is the science? What does the science say? And that's failing to see this world that exists that clearly is affecting people.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I've seen this firsthand. And I believe actually that this is something that has affected me in my own life. Where, you know, I'll give you a quick example that when I was at the University of North Carolina, I was doing my gastroenterology training. So I was already a board certified internal medicine doctor.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the University of North Carolina within my specialty is why do we consider one of the top three programs? So like basically us, Michigan and University of Pennsylvania, I would say are the top three. And so I was working with this doctor, his name is Doug Drosman, and he's both a professor of psychiatry and medicine.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And he's brought together these two realms into one place, which is really important because when we talk about health conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, clearly there's more to it than just your digestion. And so in this clinic, we would see like, Andre, a normal gastroenterologist might see 20 or 25 patients in a half day. We would see two. We would spend hours with one person.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And so the value that a person gets is that by nurturing health within this part of our body, this part that's not even human, you can become superior, not only in terms of your health, not only in terms of how you feel, but also I think it makes you feel more aligned with your nature. This is who you are.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And these are people that would fly in and they had had every single test that exists and is known to man five times over. And what the amazing thing was is that we needed time to nurture and develop a bond, a relationship, because you can't dig into trauma and complex issues on a surface level. You have to feel connected to a person to do that. You have to trust them to open up on that level.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But over the course of several hours, we would get there. And it's amazing to see and witness people who have tried everything within the conventional healthcare system failed and to discover that there is something that's been affecting them. And if you address that, healing happens so naturally because they're usually doing everything else right.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So, and they just have this one thing that's holding them back. It's chaining them down. And if you could release those chains, It opens it up. So from my perspective, you know, I think that there's this conversation that exists where we have to go beyond just the conscious mind into the non-conscious mind and acknowledge that we're far bigger than this.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I think the non-conscious mind is trying to guide us.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
You are a reflection of your environment. Yeah. And that's the totality of that environment. And if the environment is diseased, then it translates into disease within your own body. The term that we would use for this is superorganism. You are a superorganism. You are more than Andre. You are Andre plus 38 trillion friends that are there.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And most of those friends are working and fighting on a daily basis to support you because they want you to succeed. Because if you do well, then they do well. So that's a beautiful thing. You know, I think a lot of these things, you mentioned a few things there. You mentioned cravings and intuitions. These are things that there's emerging evidence to suggest that the gut is the origin.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So, you know, it's not easy to prove, but we have data, for example, on people that crave specific foods where the gut is producing certain chemicals that motivate the consumption of that particular food. Why? Because if you want that food and that's what you need to survive, you're going to try to do something to to get that person to do it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah. Sometimes actually going to the point of consuming soil Because the soil has minerals that their body actually needs for healthy pregnancy. And there's a natural element to that. It's quite fascinating. But also, a woman's microbiome is radically and dynamically changing throughout the pregnancy.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
in a way that is designed by nature to support the baby, which is quite fascinating because what advantage do the microbes get by supporting this particular baby? I'm not really sure. We could debate that because I suppose if you were gonna say, what do the microbes get? Well, potentially a new home.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Because when the baby passes through the birth canal, many of those microbes will carry on with the baby and then become the new microbiome for the new person.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Basically. The womb is not totally sterile. There is some evidence to suggest that there are some microbes in play, both in the placenta and the babies being exposed, but really the baby has not been exposed to the outside world until the water breaks. When the water breaks, microbes enter. And then this process really begins.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But it's interesting to think about that during pregnancy, a woman's body obviously changes dramatically. And I have four kids, so we've been through this many times as a family. And the microbiome is shifting in a way that explains the bodily changes that are happening in a woman who's pregnant.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the redistribution of weight that occurs is actually explained by the changes that are occurring within the microbiome at the particular time in the pregnancy, like the second trimester. And then during the third trimester, the vaginal microbiome changes in a way where it now starts to resemble the gut microbiome. So it's less like the vaginal microbiome, more like the gut microbiome.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, so this world that we live in, it started with single cellular organisms that are so small that we can't see them with the naked eye. And we eventually evolved to being more complex, which is you and I. But these microbes, this entire time, have been everywhere, covering everything. And so from the very beginning of us as humans, we've always had our partners, which are these microbes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And this is basically the vaginal microbiome preparing for birth. So it's just interesting because there's also the story of human breast milk and how that facilitates a relationship with our microbes, which is to say that human breast milk contains The estimate is around 200 unique types of these carbohydrates called human milk oligosaccharides.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And what's interesting is these 200 types of human milk oligosaccharides, they would just pass through the baby. The baby gets no nutritional value from them at all. But actually, this is the breast milk version of a prebiotic. that turns into food for the developing microbiome and will feed the development of that microbiome within the child.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So just, you know, if you step back for a moment and just acknowledge that we evolved, women evolved to have breast milk strategically designed to nurture a relationship between the baby and the baby's microbiome, that's a fascinating thing just to consider by itself.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
If you had an identical twin, which I'm not aware that you do, but okay. If you did, the research would suggest that you would only share about 30 or 35% of the same microbes. Even though you are genetically identical, you share the same mother. You, in most cases, grew up in the same home, eating similar types of food and things like this.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And yet you would only share 30 to 35% and you would be 65 to 70% different. So, and then among the rest of us, like even with your siblings, radically different. The interesting thing though, is that there's been this new research about cohabitation. the people that we live with, we start to share microbes with them.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And one of the powerful things that has been discovered with this is the importance of connection with one another.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Basically, what we have found is that number one, you share the microbes with the people that you cohabitate with. Number two, if you are in a healthy relationship where you feel bonded to one another, you actually get a benefit in terms of your gut microbiome. So people that are in a loving, partnered relationship have increased diversity of their gut microbiome.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
The problem is if the root of an issue is not addressed, they will get worse. It's amazing to see people who have tried everything within the conventional healthcare system failed and discover that there is something that's been affecting them. And if you address that, healing happens so naturally. So we've been kind of alluding to this, but let's just get very direct with it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Whereas when people are struggling in their relationship, not the case. And now you could say, well, is this because of sexual intimacy? Are you sharing microbes during sexual intimacy? Well, I think that's at least part of it because when we kiss, we share millions of microbes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Not realizing there's so many microbes being exchanged. I think that there's a selection that happens before you get to that point, right? So you mentioned earlier intuition.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So it's been a while, but because I've been married for some time now, but like I think back to when I was single and dating, sometimes you're on a date and they're a perfectly lovely person and there's just something about it. You're just like, not feeling it. And it's nothing against them. And is that pheromones?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Because if it is, pheromones are, because you may not actually be able to smell a difference. It's more so that you, but you're detecting it. Pheromones are produced by the gut microbes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
The microbiome is basically a community of microorganisms, mostly bacteria, but it also includes things like yeasts, these things called archaea that we could talk about if you want to, potentially parasites, and then viruses. And you take the entirety of that and acknowledge that they're covering us from the top of our head to the tip of our toes, then our nose and our mouth.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I clearly, there is no one size fits all. So anyone who claims that this is the one dietary pattern and everyone needs to follow it, We have to agree that this just not, it'll work for some people for sure. I do believe that there's basic principles of nutrition that exist that are universally true. So, you know, for what it's worth, like I'm a huge believer in the power of dietary fiber.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And it's not just fiber. It's the effect that fiber has on our microbiome. And I can't, I'm never going to be able to shake this. So you'll never be able to convince me that a person is better with zero fiber than they are with a high fiber diet, right? I just believe that that's universally true for us as humans because our microbes need the fiber to be powered up.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
That being said, there's clear evidence that if you do a randomized control trial, I'm just going to use an example. This is totally made up. where you're comparing counterpoints. So one might be a high-carb, low-fat plant-based diet against a high-fat, low-carb, mostly animal-based ketogenic diet, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
When you enter people into studies like this, depending on what you're looking at, you might find that one is better than the other for some specific health outcome. But the issue is that within the study, there will be some people that do really well with one diet and not so well with the other one. And it may be against what the results of the study say, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So that study helps us to understand on a population level But it doesn't answer the question, what's the best diet for Andre? What's the best diet for the listener at home? So this is actually something that I have been involved with trying to sort out and disentangle. I work with a company called Zoe. And we are super powered up in the UK.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Everyone, like all the listeners in the UK, they know what I'm talking about right now. They've heard of Zoe. In the US, we're really just getting started and we're excited about the opportunity to come to the US and do some stuff. But basically the idea, it looks like this, that if you want to understand the personal nature of diet, you need massive data.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
you need massive data, and then you take those data points, everything that's in there, and you use what we have today that we didn't have 20 years ago, which is super-powered computers and artificial intelligence. Within that data set, what we could do is I could create basically your doppelganger, an avatar of you in the data that has the same qualities and characteristics as you.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
They're most concentrated inside of our large intestine, which is our colon. And they have basically inserted themselves into human physiology, where in order for our body to function appropriately the way that it's supposed to, we need them. And we need them to do their job. And they equally need us.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Then using the data and using artificial intelligence, ask the question, if I want to make this person as healthy as possible, what would I feed them? And the data allows you to do that. But in order to get there, you need massive data first.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So with this company, Zoe, the way that we approach this is we send people a kit that will allow us to get their microbiome data, which by itself is tons of information. their microbiome data. They wear a continuous glucose monitor for two weeks. And importantly, during those two weeks, they enter into an app what they're eating so that we can synchronize. This is what they ate.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
This is what their blood sugar did, right? And it's very, that's very personalized. And then we collect some additional information about their blood fat. And we have people enter information to his survey tools. So again, all of this, take all that, That's one person. And now acknowledge that we have over 200,000 people so far that have done this.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And as we grow, the more people that we get, the better that we can get in refining this and understanding more. But I think that the point though is that the microbiome is a driving factor for understanding which particular foods are going to work best with our body because it's right in the center of our digestive process.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, that's an interesting thing because we have been kind of discussing how the gut microbes could potentially motivate you to make certain choices. And then once you make those choices, it sort of reinforces something within the microbiome. So there's sort of a feedback loop that exists there.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But I think that the important point is that if you take a step back, when people think about gut health, And part of this is my fault, to be totally honest with you, where I come on a podcast and I want to talk about nutrition, right? So it gives the listener the impression that the only thing that influences your microbiome is the food that you eat.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I think that's probably the most powerful lever that we have. But I want the listeners to understand that the totality of the environment that you live in, exist in, on all levels, is ultimately reflected on some level within this ecosystem, within your microbiome.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And it's easier to sort of categorize that as sleep and exercise and stress levels and how much you clean your home and whether or not you have pets and how much time you spend outdoors and sunlight exposure and these different things that when you get into the health and wellness world, you tend to hear like we all come at it from our own angle, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I might come at it from a gut health angle, but we're kind of all talking about the same general stuff, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So this symbiotic relationship impacts our digestion, our metabolism, our immune system, our mood, our cognition, and even the way in which we express our genetic code. So if you take a step back and you think about what I just said, digestion, access to nutrients, that's life. and metabolism, immune system. I should add hormones, mood, and cognition.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Right, so there's this tension that exists in the body through our nervous system where we have sort of two main ways that our nervous system can be activated. And we don't have total control over that. Like it's not necessarily a choice that you can make. And that is the sympathetic versus the parasympathetic nervous system.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So sympathetic, and your listeners may already know some of this, but the sympathetic nervous system is basically adrenaline, right? This is your like, hey, something's happening and I need to step my game up physically to deal with this thing. Survive. Right, to survive. So like... In the day, it was an attack by an animal, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And today, it's something different, which could be a fight with a partner, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
To answer your question, I feel compelled to say that the world that we live in is making us sympathetic dominant. So there's a lot of triggers.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, so we're in perpetual survival mode and constantly activating it. And there's so many things. I mean, anything that's getting your heart rate up and your blood pressure up, it could be something so silly and inconsequential as what's happening on Twitter. But you have a fight with a partner. this is going to activate your sympathetic nervous system.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And so what I'm about to describe applies to anything where it's activating your sympathetic nervous system, whether it's a fight with a partner or something else. Your brain releases a hormone called CRH or corticotropin-releasing hormone. And this CRH will spread through the body. And in the process of doing this is basically activating this adrenaline response.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And that includes literally in the adrenal glands and the release of epinephrine, norepinephrine. So, but there's consequences. to the release of CRH. And particularly the place where we pay the price is within our gut because it basically will break down the gut barrier, lead to the release of a toxin called lipopolysaccharide into the bloodstream and inflict harm on the gut microbes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And this is the reason why I think that Everyone can sort of relate to this in their own way. You know, imagine a stressful event. Where do you manifest that physically? Some people, it's a migraine headache, which by the way is also connected to the gut. But for many people, it's in the gut. It's here. And it could be a small little thing, like you feel it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It could turn into nausea or it can grow into waves of cramping pain that fold you over. And what is happening there is the physiologic consequence of sympathetic overdrive and this CRH release. So when I was in medical school, I remember like on big test days, we were in such a pressure cooker.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I remember on big test days, like literally there was a line out the bathroom door because everyone's gut was upset. Everyone had diarrhea.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, there's consequences to all choices that exist in nature, right? So This is us activating the part of our body that is needed for survival in that moment. So what we get is we get, you know, enhanced ability to focus and we get release of blood sugar into our bloodstream, which powers our muscles, allows us to run faster and, you know, things of that, like more of a physical nature.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But the problem is like, That's not what we need in the current 21st century to deal with a lot of the issues that we run into. So it's sort of a misplaced physiologic benefit And again, there's always going to be some sort of price that you have to pay.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
This is pretty much everything that matters in terms of human physiology.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So the price that we're paying in order to get this like ramp up of blood sugar and, you know, uh, increased, um, strength of our, of our muscles and, and the heart pump and blood pressure up and all these things is actually what the gut, what's basically being, um, sacrificed. Hmm.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
This is huge. Yeah, so I think that it's important to start by saying that not everything that's bad is trauma. Yeah, not all stress is bad. Not all stress is bad. Stress is good. Stress makes us stronger. Exercise is stress, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Trauma is when we overwhelm the body's coping mechanism.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And so that to me is like a different level of dealing with something hard where you have completely overwhelmed the body and the effects are lingering and they're still there. And typically in the non-conscious mind,
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Well, so basically what you get is we were talking about this concept of like the corticotropin releasing hormone, the CRH, when we are in sympathetic, in our sympathetic drive. And what you get is you basically get a swing towards this and a persistence of that. So it's essentially like being in fight or flight mode, but never turning it off.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And it may not be as intense as that moment where like, oh my gosh, I almost got into a car accident and almost died, right? Like it may not be as intense as that moment, but the fact that there's sort of a persistent ongoing activation of the body in that way, there's consequences to this because basically what I'm saying is that when you're in sympathetic drive,
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
the release of corticotropin-releasing hormone, the consequence is damage to the gut, right? The term that we use for this is dysbiosis. That refers to a damaged gut. Some people call that leaky gut. I'm talking about the same thing. I'm fine with calling it leaky gut if you want to. But it's dysbiosis. And so we are inducing dysbiosis. And the problem is that
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
If you are persistently damaging the gut, if you are just constantly inflicting harm upon it, how can it heal no matter what you do from a nutrition perspective and all these different things? So these people, they do their best, many of them, to try to remedy their issue by pulling those levers, sleep and exercise.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
sleep and nutrition and exercise and they may have some sort of stress reduction mechanism that they follow. But if you're not directly addressing the issue, that open wound that exists that needs to be healed, then it's going to be hard for you to achieve true healing. And so I think ultimately the attention has to go there.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I completely agree with that. And, you know, it's interesting because you talked about a release of tension. And there are all of these things that we can do that are health and wellness sort of hacks. like breathing, for example. There's many different forms of breathing that we could do.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And in essence, they all work the same way, which is to flip us from the sympathetic back to the parasympathetic. We're activating the parasympathetic nervous system. But there's also these other things that I find to be really kind of cool when you consider this within the framework of the human existence, which is like holding hands, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Or kissing or cuddling or things like dancing or listening to music, right? Why are we so into those things? I love to dance. I'm great to invite to weddings. I'm usually the first guy on the dance floor, but like, why do I love that so much? Why does that just work with my body so well? And it turns out that a lot of these things, there's just this natural release that occurs.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But that being said, I don't want to make it sound like it's a bunch of hacks is what you need to fix your issues. I think that for people that have serious trauma from the past, My experience is that we all, myself included, push these things into the corner because they hurt. And so you'd rather push it away and just kind of block it out, pretend it's not there.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But actually the right choice is to acknowledge it and heal it. And that may require working with someone who this is their expertise. But by doing that, when you heal that issue, you are unlocking health within your body.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
90 to 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, so getting back to the intelligence of the body, why would this be? Why wouldn't it be mostly in the brain, right? Serotonin is our happy hormone. It affects our mood in a powerful way. It also affects our energy levels and our focus. But it turns out that it also sets the beat of the drum for your gut. So your body thrives with rhythm. Think about the heart.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I could take any person, the greatest athlete in the world, if I knock their heart out of rhythm, they will collapse. They can't do anything, right? And the gut requires rhythm in the same way that the heart does. So we know that any change in gut rhythm will affect the microbiome. Deviation towards constipation, deviation towards diarrhea.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
In both cases, when the gut is out of rhythm, the consequences damage to the gut microbes. Serotonin sets that rhythm. So this is the reason why it's produced there. But there's an interesting story because our gut does affect our mood. It's very clear. There is a study called the SMILES trial, which is a cute name for a study about eating a certain diet to try to improve depression.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So they took people who have major depression, diagnosed, and they put them on a plant-predominant, it's not vegan, a plant-predominant anti-inflammatory Mediterranean diet.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And what they found was that the effect on their mood was as powerful as what you would expect to occur if they were to be prescribed medication, but without the side effects and with all of the added benefits that you get throughout the entire body beyond just improving your mood.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So it turns out that this serotonin that's produced in the gut, it's not driving mood in your body, but it is a factor.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Ecosystem is absolutely the right way to describe this. Like it literally is an ecosystem. And the same rules that apply to the Amazon rainforest or the Great Barrier Reef apply to what's happening inside of your body right now and throughout the day. So the vastness of it, the numbers are staggering. And it's very hard for the human mind to sort of pull this together and comprehend it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Melatonin is our sleepy time hormone. Melatonin sets the nighttime rhythm for our circadian rhythm. So we're talking about rhythm. And one of the most powerful things that I've found, I don't know how you feel about this or if you enjoy doing this, I'd be curious to hear from you, but I like waking up and taking a walk in the morning outside.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
This is the reason why people get seasonal affective disorder. but also morning sunlight. And by the way, it will energize you and it will also give you better focus that day. Like literally the first day that you do this, you will feel the difference.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But the quite fascinating thing is it may also improve your rhythm in terms of your gut, reducing gut symptoms, allowing you to have that good, healthy morning bowel movement propelled by serotonin. And when I say propelled, I mean in a good way, like a normal, healthy bowel movement, not diarrhea.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So when we have this serotonin release in the morning through morning light exposure, we are preparing ourselves for sleep that night. And you get the melatonin, which helps you to get into a circadian alignment. And what you will find is that roughly 14 hours after you take your morning walk, that night you will find that you're getting sleepy and you'll get a better night's rest.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Melatonin is interesting because melatonin, I've always thought of it as just sleep. Actually, it turns out we have 400 times more melatonin in our gut than we do in our brain. So we said 95% of serotonin is in the gut, 400 times more melatonin in the gut. Why so much melatonin in the gut?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Well, it turns out that melatonin is active in terms of repairing and restoring the gut barrier and healing the microbiome. So a good night's rest aligned with our circadian rhythm is clearly good for our gut health. Everyone would agree with that. But what I'm saying is that part of the reason why it's good for our health is not just that you slept.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It's also that when we get ourselves into rhythm, we can get the benefits of this melatonin that's actually being produced in the gut. And, you know, we've alluded to the changes that have occurred in our modern society and how that's pulled us away from our nature. This is a perfect example. If you go camping, you know when the sun comes up.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It's impossible to miss it because it's going to wake you up. Whereas when you are like in the crypts of your home, you don't see the sun and you may not like the average person spends less than 8% of their day outside. So that's inadequate in terms of being able to activate these mechanisms that we're discussing.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But let's, so let's break it down this way that there are in your colon, 38 trillion microorganisms, again, mostly bacteria, right? 38 trillion, you only have 30 trillion human cells. So at a minimum, you are less than 50% human. If we take away your red blood cells, right, and we take away your platelets.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Well, so the gut, I don't want to make it sound like the entirety of our mood is affected by our gut. That's not the case. But there's definitely a connection between our gut and our mood. And we know this because you can transfer a mood disorder from a human into an animal through fecal transplant.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
That rat would get depressed. Or if you take a person who has generalized anxiety disorder and you transfer their poop from a human into a sterile rat or mouse, that mouse or rat will now develop anxiety-type behavior. And they just transport it into the colon of that creature?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I think they usually do what's called a lavage, which basically means that like they'll put a little tube down into the stomach, transfer through that tube into the intestines. So it circulates through. So it's not just the colon, but yeah, basically. It's a gnarly image.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
From human to human? That's an interesting idea. No, I'm curious. I think that it's possible. We don't know. We don't know. So this is the way that I would unpack this. So fecal transplants in humans. I'm sure you saw the Netflix show where there was someone who was taking her boyfriend's poop. And you didn't see this? Oh, okay. What was the name of it?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I don't remember the name of the show, but I'm sure we could dig it up. There was a Netflix show recently where basically one of the main people that was being followed, she was taking her boyfriend's poop and putting it and like taking it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I think he knew. And she was like encapsulating it. Okay. All right. So from my perspective, I don't love the idea. Let me explain why. So the concern that I have is that we just don't know what the risks are. And we should not trivialize that because in the 1970s, we developed the ability to give blood transfusions. So this was a great thing.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
People were dying because they couldn't get blood prior to this, right? But the issue is we didn't know for many years that actually we were transferring hepatitis C because we hadn't actually detected the existence of hepatitis C at all. And then we went through a period of time in the early 80s where we called this non-A, non-B because we knew what hepatitis A and hepatitis B were.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
We didn't know what this was, but we knew that there was something there. We were giving people hepatitis C through blood transfusions. So tons of people who got blood in the 70s and early 80s ultimately had this. And we just didn't know that we were doing this. So I tend to take a cautious approach when it comes to fecal transplant to say that we need to study it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Where we are right now is I have actually seen quite miraculous things, honestly, with fecal transplant within the realm of infections. So there's a specific infection called C. diff, and it tends to happen to people after they receive antibiotics. And we are approved, like a gastroenterologist such as myself is approved to provide this treatment for people that have had C. diff.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
especially if it's severe or if it's a recurrent C. diff, like you've had it more than once. And I'll just tell you that I've seen some quite miraculous things where a person is like literally at the point where antibiotics are failing them and they might need to have their colon removed surgically.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
These are things like, these are not the classic cells that nerds like me think about or learn about in biology. Like to me, a classic cell has a nucleus and Golgi complex and all these things, right? So if you take away the red blood cells in the platelets, you're about 10% human and about 90% microbial. And then when we get into your genetic code, it's actually even more profound.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And so what's happening there is that antibiotics are the fastest way to medically induce dysbiosis within the body. So like for example, Cipro, a common antibiotic that we get for urinary tract infections or for diverticulitis, it destroys 65% of the microbes and it's not just bad ones. So you are like totally decimating the architecture of the ecosystem
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And then what that creates is sort of a vacuum where this pathogen, C. diff, can rise up and dominate. And then it causes colitis, which is an inflamed colon that bleeds. And I don't want to get too graphic, but the point is like there's a gnarly colon and it's extremely uncomfortable and they have diarrhea around the clock plus blood. All right. The problem is the damage to the gut ecosystem.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It's not the fact that you have C. diff. C. diff was already there and it was not causing an issue. The issue is that you damaged the ecosystem. So when you actually give the fecal transplant, in essence, what you're doing is you're restoring the gut ecosystem. And when you do that within two days, they're better.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, we definitely are. I mean, I would simultaneously argue that the greatest medical discovery of the last 100 years was penicillin and added years to our lives. And at the same time, acknowledging the power, we became seduced by it. And frankly, it was penicillin, which by the way, was discovered and really brought to market during World War II and was a game changer in World War II.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
That power is what created the healthcare system that we are wrestling with today, right? Where we built the entire healthcare system around the concept that you could develop through a pharmaceutical company, a pill that can change and influence our physiology in such a powerful way that that's the way that we would address health is with pills.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So I do think that we, in fact, the data are actually very clear that about 70% of the antibiotic prescriptions that are provided are inappropriate. And there are consequences when we take something that is medically inducing dysbiosis. So we clearly need to pump the brakes on that.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
could be healed in a more holistic way that for example like antibiotics have all these adverse side effects that we might not we could be able to avoid by healthier you know solutions provided by nature what are your thoughts on that yeah i mean i completely agree i think that the issue from my perspective is that i don't i don't want to make it sound like i outwardly reject the healthcare system and the existence of medications and i've like seen the beneficial effects of many different medicines for many different people
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So you started to allude to this, which is that the word microbiome is actually referring to this genetic code that's actually functional and active as a part of our body. And when we look at the entire landscape, if there were 200 pieces of DNA, 199 of them would come from your microbiome, and only one of them would come from your human DNA. So it's like so wildly outnumbering.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
What I reject is a system that completely ignores diet and lifestyle and a holistic view to a person that is where the root of our issues exist. And I see a problem where if the root of an issue is not addressed, they will get worse.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the amount of medication that's necessary to just sort of, you know, plug up the hole that exists in the sinking ship starts to escalate and increase and you become subjected to like the consequences of that. So it's, you know, to me, the way I see it is actually quite simple.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I think that the optimal approach is to embrace a dietary approach, lifestyle, a holistic view of the person that includes their emotional health and their spiritual health. I think that there's a place where supplements exist and they're beneficial, not as a replacement for any of this, but in addition to.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah. So, you know, if you think about it this way, we're talking about medications where milligrams can change bodily physiology, right? Very small amounts. And then into that, like into your mouth, the same portal of entry. you are going to put in thousands and thousands and thousands of grams of food. And so like on a daily basis, we consume about three pounds of food per day.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
To me, if there's only one thing that I would want people to take away from this show, this is it right here. I think that nature is way smarter than we are as humans. The beauty of it, the intelligence of it, to me, this is better proof of a higher power than anything that I can see out there.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So if we were to convert that into milligrams, it's millions. And we're putting that into our body on a daily basis and we ignore it as if it's of no consequence. Yet at the same time, we acknowledge that a couple milligrams of a medication is intensely powerful.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And this is where I think that some of the arguments that exist around ultra-processed foods, many people who are in defense of ultra-processed foods will argue, well, the amounts are very small. It's just a couple milligrams. Exactly. only a couple milligrams is all that we need to have potentially a quite profound effect.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So if we think about the entirety of our diet, you know, grams and grams of food on a daily basis, three pounds of food per day, the makeup of that diet is all coming into contact with our gut microbes and it influences change within them. The microbes rise and fall, families rise and fall based upon the choices that we make.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Well, I think we reinforce those choices. So ultimately, we are not... zombies to our bacterial overlords. It could sound like that sometimes. It could start to sound like that, but ultimately you are a human of free will with the right to choose what ultimately you do put into your mouth. We may have preferences, we may have addiction, but ultimately you still have the choice.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And those choices, when you make a dietary shift, a significant shift, you are now selecting for different microbes that love these choices that you just made. And the microbes that, for example, love sugar or unhealthy fat, they're not getting what they wanted. And so they grow weaker and their representation is less.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And as a result of that, now you start to crave the food that you've been eating.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And to me, I actually, what I hear in this is actually a story of hope and opportunity because I feel like I grew up hearing about how genetics ruin everything, right? That like we're born a certain way, the code that you receive from your parents, there's nothing you can do about it. And in some way that's going to predict or determine the entirety of your life.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It depends on, so on some level, it depends on the intensity of the change that you're making, how hard you're going all at once. There was an interesting study that was published in 2014 in the journal Nature, where basically they took a group of people and they did five days of a completely plant-based diet. And then they did five days of a completely animal-based diet.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And they would assess their microbiome on a daily basis. So this study helps us to answer this question because basically what they found is that number one, within 24 hours of making that change, you could already start to see it reflected in the microbiome. When people flipped to a plant-based diet, they started to create these microbes that are known to help us to break down and process fiber.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So, and those are anti-inflammatory bacteria. And many of the ones that were detected in these five days of doing a plant-based diet are the same ones that people pay to consume as a probiotic. So these are beneficial anti-inflammatory microbes. And before I dig into the animal-based diet, let me be the first to say that there are many dietary patterns.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the argument that I'm making here is not for a 100% whole food plant-based diet. Although I think that for many people, that can be a great dietary choice. But it's more so to say that finding the right balance for each of us. So on this 100% animal-based diet though, during the course of five days, there were some changes that were concerning.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So there were specific bacteria that started to rise up. And these are bacteria that thrive within an environment with high saturated fat, with more bile, because bile is released in response to that fat in the diet, and also the absence of fiber.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And one of them is called bilophila wadsworthia, and bilophila wadsworthia keeps showing up in association with ulcerative colitis and colorectal cancer. So within these, another was allostypes putridensis. Again, that's an inflammatory microbe. You find that in abscesses, and it's associated with colorectal cancer.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And then the last was a family called bacterioides that also- Those are great names.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, exactly. Those are microbes. So those are the microbes. And it's not to say that these people developed ulcerative colitis in five days. They did not. It's more so to say that you're creating an ecosystem, though, that puts you at risk. And if you have a certain genetic predisposition, that could absolutely happen further down the road.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So the other thing that was interesting real quick on the animal-based diet that happened that I think needs to be discussed is that they developed antibiotic resistance. And it did not exist. It didn't happen on a plant-based diet. Why would that be? It's not inherent to animal-based foods. It's our agricultural system.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So antibiotics, 80% of antibiotics in the United States that are manufactured go to cattle. Yeah. Or I should say not cattle, but animals. Yeah. Factory farming. Yeah. It's part of factory farming. And, you know, the issue is that there's loopholes that allow them to do this where they could say, oh, well, the animal needed it. Right.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But really what's happening is that, and this is an interesting thing to consider for a moment. If you give a pig antibiotics and you destroy its microbiome,
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So you feed them the exact same number of calories and they gain 15% more weight because you destroyed their microbiome with antibiotics. And you look out at America right now and 70% of America is overweight or obese. And we're suffering with an epidemic of gut-related issues. And I think this is just another piece of the puzzle that's kind of saying to us, hey, we need to make some changes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So anyway, with the animal-based foods, the issue was the antibiotics that were given to the livestock.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the beauty of what I'm describing to the listeners right now is that actually that's not the dominant part of your body. Yes, that is a part, but that is not the dominant part of your body. And this other part, the microbiome, is constantly changing, constantly adapting to the choices that we make. So we actually have this profound control over our ability to change it, to shape it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Okay, so I would like to start with where we are as a country, and then I would like to take it into an acknowledgement of the carnivore diet and the trend. So where we are as a country is, first of all, probably the worst diet in the history of humanity. Yeah. Like on average. Where 60% of the American diet comes from ultra-processed food.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
30% of our diet is animal-based foods, so meat, dairy, and eggs. And again, I think that you can be healthy and eat animal-based foods, but we're not balanced. And then 10% comes from plants, but that 10%, the number one plant is potatoes because we're eating a lot of fries. So this is a horribly unhealthy pattern and the result is that we are wildly fiber deficient.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
The recommended amount for a woman in the United States is 25 grams and she's getting 15. That is the minimum. That's not an A plus in fiber, that's a D minus if you could get 25.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
For men, we're even worse. The recommended amount is 38 grams per day and the average man is getting 18. So while women are 10 grams below where they should be, men are 20 grams below where they should be.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So we have a huge fiber deficiency issue and this ultimately reflects in the health of our gut microbiome because our ability to support that microbiome, be anti-inflammatory and allow it to be adaptable and resilient, they need to be fed. And if they're not being fed, they can't be strong.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So if we take a look at the carnivore diet, or you propose to me a person who gets into ketosis and is truly in ketosis, because the issue is I think a lot of people who do a ketogenic diet, they're not actually in ketosis.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Now, this is an interesting thing because I am a huge believer in the power of fiber because fiber produces butyrate, acetate, and propionate. So note the similarities of the names, beta-hydroxybutyrate versus butyrate from fiber. Acetoacetate, the ketone body versus acetate from fiber. They're biochemically similar.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
They activate the same receptors as butyrate and acetate because the body created a defense and survival mechanism because this is so important. Where during times of starvation, we still get our short chain fatty acids through the ketones. The problem with this approach is that it's not the same. This is not a one-to-one conversion.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So basically, if you're saying, okay, they activate the same receptors, they do, but in a very weak fashion compared to the original, which is the acetate and the butyrate that we get from fiber. So if we look out at this landscape, there are definitely people who say, I do a carnivore diet and improved my autoimmune disease or whatever type health condition. And I believe them.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I think the reason why is because they went from a standard American diet, which has no fiber and just a lot of junk. And they at least moved into a place where their body is producing these ketone bodies. And that's definitely a step in the right direction.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
and to turn it into what we want it to be. So if you're not satisfied with where you're at in terms of your health, I'm here to say that there's an opportunity to change that.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But I think that they would be even better off if they were to reintroduce healthy whole foods that then empower and fuel their gut microbiome and other microbiome to produce acetate and butyrate and propionate.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yes, so that's true with, so this is interesting. Melanoma research is fascinating. The stuff that's happening in melanoma right now. So melanoma is a skin cancer that is the number one cause of death related to skin cancer, right? So of all the skin cancers, melanoma is the one that's most dangerous.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
All right, the way that we're treating melanoma now is with something called immunotherapy, where rather than traditional chemotherapy that attacks the cell, Immunotherapy empowers your own immune system to destroy the cancer for you, which is interesting. That's a testament to the function of our own body, right? We're weaponizing our own body to protect ourselves.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So there's a series of studies that have come out of MD Anderson in Texas, one of the top cancer centers in America. And it starts with this, that number one, they noticed if you give antibiotics to a person with melanoma before you give them this immunotherapy, they don't do well. They're like, what's the deal with that? If I give antibiotics, why are they not doing well?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
You're destroying the microbiome. So they tested the opposite. And they took a group of people who had received immunotherapy and failed. So their melanoma is still threatening their life. And they gave them a fecal transplant before immunotherapy. And a very large percentage of these people who had previously failed had success. and were able to eliminate their melanoma through this approach.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So this led the researchers into the question of like, well, what about if the microbiome is good and a healthy microbiome translates into a better immune system that has more power to fight cancer, what happens with fiber? And that's where the statistic that you just shared, they discovered in their study that for every five grams of fiber that a person was consuming,
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
If you increased by five grams, you had a 30% better likelihood of responding to immunotherapy for your melanoma. And there's similar data for colorectal cancer, and there's similar data for breast cancer. So fiber has profound benefits in terms of preventing cancers and simultaneously after people have been treated for cancer or during treatment.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So we've been kind of alluding to this, but let's just get very direct with it. You know, I grew up with the idea that fiber passes through us and it just results in a bigger bowel movement, right? It's like just this thing that sweeps through you. And that's like a half truth. But there's the other half. That's the part that's really exciting that we're learning about right now with new research.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
which is that there's some forms of fiber that are what we call prebiotic. Prebiotic basically means food for the microbiome. And this fiber, we as humans don't have the enzymes to break down and process the fiber. So when we consume fiber, and by the way, I should say fiber is actually quite easy to find. All plant-based foods have fiber.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So any fruit or vegetable or whole grain or seed or nut or legume has fiber.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It can be a structural component. Basically fiber is long chain carbohydrates. So it's made, it's going to, this is going to scare some people, but let me unpack this. It's made up of sugars, but which is just simply what carbohydrates are. All carbohydrates are made up of sugars, but if you chain enough sugars together and you make it long and complex, you've created fiber, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
In the same way that protein is made up of amino acids and you have to chain those amino acids together to create protein. So fiber is multiple long chain carbohydrates. And in order to break that chain, you have to use enzymes that we as humans don't actually have. But our microbes do. We evolved to like basically third party, the digestion of fiber to the microbiome.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the reason why is because if you step into nature and you think about all the things that you could potentially eat out there that are a part of our environment, all the plant-based foods, there's so many of them. So there's estimates that there's 300,000 unique plants in the planet.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Right, so as humans radiated out from Africa, as we went across the globe, the issue is we were running into so much variety that the human body is not capable from an evolutionary perspective of keeping up with that variety. So we needed something else that could help us. So we internalized this organ
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
the microbiome that actually has that capacity to basically like adapt and adjust and bring forward the enzymes that we need when we need them. And again, it's the intelligence of nature. So fiber, we don't have the enzymes to break down, but our gut microbes could literally have, there's estimates that they have 60,000 unique enzymes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Milky Way galaxies full of stars, take all of the stars, pull them, put them into a ball and do it 380 times into the colon. That's the number of microbes that you have living inside of you right now. So and everything that you put into your mouth is going to come into contact with with this ecosystem.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So when fiber goes through our intestine, passes through, and it enters into the colon unchanged because it hasn't yet come into contact with microbes. And in the colon, these microbes get to work as a team, unpacking, breaking down the fiber, and it stops being fiber, and it gets transformed into a fat. And these are the short-chain fatty acids, butyrate, acetate, and propionate.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So when I was just alluding to these a moment ago, these three things, we call these butyrate, acetate, and propionate, we call these postbiotics. They're produced by the microbiome. And in the very beginning of the show, I mentioned that things, chemicals produced by your microbiome can heal your blood-brain barrier. This is what we're talking about, this right here.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
in the same way that these things can heal your gut barrier, in the same way that these things will elevate the healthy microbes and suppress the inflammatory bad ones, and in the same way that these chemicals are what can, through at least five, maybe six different mechanisms, I forget the exact number, can disrupt cancer cells in the colon.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
They have all these healing effects right there within the intestines, but then they also enter into the bloodstream. They have healing effects on our metabolism in terms of blood sugar control, blood pressure, our cholesterol, in terms of satiety.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So like GLP-1, which is commercialized as Ozempic, is produced when short-chain fatty acids come into contact with these cells that line our body and make us feel full. That's why fiber is so satiating. they affect our immune system. They're the most anti-inflammatory thing I've ever come across.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
They affect hormone levels, both for men and for women, both male sex hormones and female sex hormones, allowing us to achieve healthy hormonal balance. That's right for our body. They affect our mood. They affect the blood-brain barriers, like brain fog. To me, you know, you go to your doctor, you say, I feel like I have brain fog. And they kind of roll their eyes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yet, like, there's a bazillion people that are dealing with this. What is that? I think it's leaky brain. I think it's that the blood-brain barrier has been damaged and is now letting things across that aren't supposed to be there. And it's affecting your ability to have sharp cognition.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the choices that you make today will start to shape the microbes that are dominating within your ecosystem by tomorrow. And that's not to make it sound like, hey, you can change your diet today and by tomorrow you've fixed all of your issues. It's more so to say, though, that the changes that you're looking to make, they will start to happen immediately.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah. So to me, if there's only one thing that I would want people to take away from this show, this is it right here. I want you to add variety into your diet. And that doesn't necessarily mean trying new things. It means looking for opportunities to increase the number of different types of plants that you have in your meal.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So research has shown that the number one predictor of a healthy gut microbiome was not your dietary pattern. The most important thing was how many different types of plants you had in your diet. And to be very specific, the number that they found that was sort of magical was 30 per week. 30 different types of plants per week. 30 different types of plants per week. Now that is not just vegetables.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So it's like four to five different types per day-ish. Yeah, roughly. But if you think about it this way, there are these foods that are an opportunity that like basically serve as a vehicle for variety. So like a smoothie. To me, a smoothie should, at a minimum, have five or six different plants.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So a smoothie, in the same way that juicing fruit, I don't really believe in that because that, to me, is a sugar beverage. Like you don't like blending fruit. So I guess what I'm saying is I wouldn't make a fruit-only smoothie. Like you go to Tropical Smoothie Cafe, that's what they serve you. Sugar to glucose spike drink. Yeah, that's a glucose spike drink.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And that's actually bad for your microbiome. But on the flip side, if we're talking about the benefits that come from phytochemicals, which are plant-based chemicals, polyphenols, which give the colors to our food, Fiber, even if it's been partially digested by a blender, right? To me, these things are powerful and good for us in that form. So it's just a matter of like having a balanced smoothie.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
There's nothing wrong with having blueberries in a smoothie. I'm not saying no fruit. I'm just saying don't make it like a banana and banana and orange smoothie and that's it.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I think juicing vegetables is completely fair game. The only issue that I have with juicing is that I see juicing. So in a world where 95% of Americans are deficient in fiber, It's hard for me to sit there and watch us remove the fiber and throw it in the trash can, right? That's my issue with juicing. Do I think that there's value to that compared to drinking Diet Coke? Of course.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, of course. But I really want to make sure that people are taking care to not discard that part. There's still some fiber in there, and there's also other phytochemicals in there. But I just want to make sure that people are not taking that— you know, tremendous value that exists from the whole food and then discarding it in the process.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So to me, if you can find the proper balance in your diet, I think of juicing as conceptually very similar to supplements, which is like optimize your diet, take it as far as you can take it. And then here's this thing that you can do to optimize it a little bit further, right? Which can be supplements or adding some juicing.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And it's just a matter of reinforcing those changes over time.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So basically it's the S's. Smoothies, soups, salads, sauces. All right, all of these different things basically can become a vehicle for variety. But the issue though, to be honest with you, Andre, is that this has to be self-motivated.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Because when you step into your supermarket, statistically, 75% of the plant-based calories in your supermarket come from three plants. So that's wheat, corn, and soy. And it's not to completely vilify those things. I think edamame is an incredibly healthy thing for a person to snack on. It's more so like soy nuggets. What is that?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So if you want variety, the food system will not provide this for you. You have to take it upon yourself. And I see this as when you're in the supermarket thinking about what can I do to get more variety? Part of this is like expanding and grabbing new stuff, something that you've never tried before. Grab the dragon fruit, see what happens, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But it's also about like making sure that when you go and you're checking out the beans, get multiple different types. Like you should maximize that. So same is true for like whole grains or other things that you're consuming. And then when you're at home in the kitchen, if you're making a sauce, a soup, a stew, a smoothie, a salad, any of these things, start thinking about this.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
What can you add to this to make it better?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, fermented foods. That's number two. It's a unique category. We traditionally consumed routinely, sometimes by necessity and sometimes without even thinking about it. So if you think about the entirety of human history, fermentation naturally occurs in nature. A fruit falls from a tree, lands on the ground, and it naturally starts to ferment.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And if I were a caveman, I would still pick up that fruit and eat it. As long as it's not completely destroyed. And over the course of human history, as we developed into civilizations and we developed agricultural practices, it was fermentation that allowed us to preserve the harvest through the winter. which made it so that we didn't have to be nomadic.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I've been thinking a lot about where do we come from and what are we as humans and what do we need to be satisfied and to be the best versions of ourselves? And I think that there's questions that exist in that that aren't answered by chemistry, right? It's more complicated than that. And so with this, I do think about that we've always had a partnership and a relationship with these microbes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
We could actually settle into a place and have a food supply that would propel us and allow us to stay. And then, you know, forward on to the 19th century and we start to develop new techniques for preservation of our food, including pasteurization and canning. And the way that these things work is by destroying the microbes. That's the way the pasteurization works.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
You heat it up to the point that all the microbes are dead, right? And that's how you preserve the food. And what we lost was this connection to our food and the fact that a fermented food is a living ecosystem and it's pre-digested and it contains enzymes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So good too. Sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles. And when I say pickles, it's not just cucumbers. I think that making green beans, I've made amazing green beans, amazing radishes. And in the summertime, I will pickle my watermelon rinds. So anything that has like a good fibrous outer is actually really good for this kind of technique.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So, and then like, you know, kombucha, there's emerging research that's now starting to come out showing us the benefits. Does that mean that I think the kombucha should be the only thing you drink all day long? Definitely not. But routine consumption of kombucha can definitely be good for us.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And then within the animal-based space, clearly, without question, the healthiest form of dairy that exists is fermented. And that includes kefir and things like this, kefir, yogurt. Those are clearly the healthiest forms of dairy that exist. So if you're someone that consumes dairy, you should be incorporating this into your diet. Rad. Okay.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
There was a study, an interesting study that was done at Stanford. And they took a group of people. It was a randomized control trial. And they took a group of people and they had them radically increase their fermented food intake. But the thing that was cool was that over a period of about eight weeks, they added diversity to their microbiome.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So in other words, their gut ecosystem was getting healthier, more resilient. And simultaneously, and this always plays out this way, when you add diversity to the microbiome, you get less inflammation. So all the markers of inflammation start to drop off.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So this is where, to me, it's like this combination of plant-based foods in diversity, 30 different plants per week, and bringing back fermented food. Of all the bread that exists, to me, you're gluten-free, it sounds like. But if I were someone who was eating bread, sourdough is number one by far.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, yeah. I had no issue. And where were you in Italy? Yeah, I've heard this many times. I think it's let me tell you how I interpret this. Please. I think that there are so we discover that something is wrong with wheat.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And specifically what I'm concerned about with this, because gluten, like there's definitely gluten and it's not different gluten in the wheat in Italy.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
unless it's organic, which the vast majority of bread, unless you're shopping at Whole Foods, is not organic.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, for sure. To me, the healthiest bread is the bread that you make yourself at home. Glyphosate sprayed onto the wheat, it's an herbicide, so it kills the plant. And the problem is, like, I take issue with this, that we have a food system that doesn't require that to be on the label. It should be required that you sprayed Roundup onto my food so that I know that.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I can make a choice whether or not I'm okay with that. And so we talked about how milligrams, or in some cases, micrograms of medication can have these profound effects on our body, on our gut. I believe that the same is true with glyphosate, that even microscopic amounts that are being sprayed onto the wheat to dry it out are enough to create serious health issues.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
We just didn't know it. And that the way in which we lived and existed for 99.999% of human history was aligned with the needs of those microbes. Basically, we lived in nature. We were adapted to the rise of the sun in the morning, the fall of the sun in the evening. We ate a whole food diet because that's all that existed. We moved our bodies, which now we call exercise, because we had to.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And that, to me, is what separates Italy from the United States.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Oats. Many people who have issues with bread cross-react with oats. And you can make an argument that it's protein in the oats, but you could also make the argument that all oats are being sprayed with glyphosate, unless they're organic. And then you also see this in dried out whole grains and legumes. So some people react to these things and we end up with books that blame lectins.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I'm not of the belief that that is the truth, the true story. Like, I don't think that's the case. But I do believe that there are like clearly people that are reacting to these foods. And in some cases, I think those reactions are related to this.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
All right, so we allow glyphosate into our food supply because we say that it does not harm humans through the shikimate pathway. But the issue is that it does destroy microbes.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the barrier, like the... Well, when you destroy the microbiome, you destroy the barrier. So the barrier is constantly revising itself. So our intestine is like multiple football fields of surface area. It's kind of interesting to think about. Inside of us could be that much space.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Multiple football fields of surface area. And then get more microscopic with it. Every single blade of grass has microbes that are taking up residence there and part of that system. And this is the inside of us. And so the issue from my perspective is that when you have like this much surface area, it revises itself every three days. You have a brand new gut barrier every three days.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So it's in a state of perpetual maintenance. It's not just like, you don't just build the wall and leave it. You're constantly maintaining the wall. And when we disrupt our ability to do that, then we suffer consequences.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Sometimes I feel like the hype is outpacing the science as I see it. That being said, there's an intuitive element to this. which is that our body is designed to sort of be in two main modes and that dominates our daily circadian rhythm. And our gut clearly has its own circadian rhythm. So the concept of fasting is simply allowing the gut to rest.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I've seen people with serious inflammatory bowel disease, like Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. And one of the techniques that we will use in the hospital is actually to rest their bowels. And it helps to get their immune system cooled off and back into alignment. So I do think that there's value to, and by the way, the research would support that there is value to resting the gut.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
it doesn't need to be like an aggressive multi-day thing. To me, it's more so, like this is the pattern that I see, is aligning how we eat with a natural 24-hour cycle.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the important part of this is that there's a lot of people, and I've been there for most of my life, where you get into the evening and you're like, look, I'm going to unwind, I'm going to watch some TV, and I'm going to have a couple of drinks.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So the way that I would recommend people approach this is trying to have dinner for some minimized alcohol. We can talk about that as a separate issue if you want to. Have dinner and then like basically I cut it off and go clean for a few hours of no food, no alcohol before you go to bed.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And that basically sets you up where if you take that and you combine it with seven or eight hours of sleep, you end up in a place where you've done at least 12 hours of fasting. And this is a pretty good start. If you get that to 14 hours, we did a study with Zoe.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
There were no cars. All of these things, this is where we came from. And this is what we evolved with as humans. But I feel like we tend to think about evolution, human evolution, as being in isolation. It's not.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So we did these interesting studies where we would basically put an app out and let people who want to participate in a giant research study just come in and volunteer. And so we had over 100,000 people doing a 14-hour fast. 10-hour eating window, 14-hour fast. You get to choose how you divide that up during the day, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
It's like a mild fast. And among the people who did this, we saw substantial improvements in terms of their mood, their energy levels. They actually had less bloating, which suggests, because this is not a population without IBS, this is a general healthy population, and yet their bloating is improving. Again, that would support that your gut microbiome is in a healthier place.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So I do think there's value to fasting. The other thing that I will say in terms of fasting is it allows us to have the structure that we need in order to control how much food we're consuming on a daily basis.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
With a diet that's made up of ultra-processed foods, if you don't have any sort of barriers in terms of how you approach your day, what we know about ultra-processed foods is that they lead us to overeating.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So the benefit of fasting is by sort of compacting it into a window, there is the potential for many people who are suffering with metabolic issues, overweight and obesity, that this approach by itself can help them to get into at least relative caloric restriction and then they lose weight. And that's been pretty firmly established that fasting can do that.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So bottom line, to me, we all should strive for consistency of our mealtimes, just like consistency of sleep. And with that consistency, one of the approaches that can help us to achieve that is a fasting approach.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Like not literally see the parasite, but I need a test to show me that it's there. I don't think it's fair game. And I don't recommend that people operate under assumptions and then do things that could potentially really disturb their microbiome. Whether we call something an antibiotic or an herbal antimicrobial, we're talking about the same thing, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Which is something that's going to have an effect on these microbes in terms of destroying certain ones. So the issue with cleanses or the concept of like a parasite cleanse, I just worry that unless you know that there's a parasite there, unless this is confirmed by a test, I have concerns about proceeding forward with this approach and
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
which generally involves some sort of antimicrobial protocol. In a world where we are suffering with dysbiosis and a damaged gut, this is a way to get yourself into a deeper hole, unfortunately, from my perspective.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Well, if I scrape my knee or if my son scrapes his knee and I want to clean up that wound, what do I pull out?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Exactly. Because it's inherently antimicrobial, right? And so what do we think happens when we ingest? And why do we get hangovers? Is the hangover just dehydration? Because I can drink a lot of Gatorade the morning after I've gone too far and I'm still going to feel that hangover for about 24 hours.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I think that a hangover is that we've actually induced dysbiosis through excessive alcohol consumption. And there was a study that changed my mind about alcohol. I used to think that one or two drinks was okay. Like as long as you don't have a hangover, you're okay. And I've changed my mind on that. I actually think... Let me start by saying this. I'm not a teetotaler.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So like there will be someone who hears this and then you might see me out socially with friends and I'm having a drink, right? That's okay. Like we're not trying to be perfect here. But the point from my perspective is that the evidence is indicating to me that the best place for us to be is to not have regular alcohol. This was the study.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
They took a group of people and they had them consume a significant amount of alcohol relative to their body weight. And then they measured every 30 minutes their blood alcohol level and the presence of lipopolysaccharide in their blood, in their bloodstream. All right. I mentioned this lipopolysaccharide a while back in the episode. So let me explain what that is.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
In our gut is a mix of different types of microbes. And many of them are really good for us. Most of them are good for us. But some of them are bad. E. coli is definitely in our gut. Every single one of us has that in there. And these inflammatory pathogenic bacteria, they have this coat of armor that surrounds the cell and protects them called lipopolysaccharide. And it's specific to pathogens.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So our immune system was trained to be activated in response to this. It's supposed to stay in our gut. That's why we have a gut barrier. But if the gut barrier gets broken down for whatever reason, then that E. coli or that lipopolysaccharide that's in our gut can sneak across the gut barrier and get into the bloodstream and come into contact with the immune system, which results in inflammation.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
know health uh effects it's insane so i think there's some part of this is like a um there's cultural elements yeah in the western world it's not just america but like i think that we kind of take it to an extreme in the united states where you know basically like where we come from is we're tribal right and that explains our need for social connection And we have an appetite for that.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So this is like, to me, lipopolysaccharide is synonymous with inflammation. So they were checking lipopolysaccharide levels in the blood. Again, we should not be seeing much lipopolysaccharide there when our gut barrier is working.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
these two things, blood alcohol level and lipopolysaccharide, is like literally you could take the graph of what was happening every 30 minutes and you could superimpose them on one another because it was literally a complete and total overlap.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
In fact, there was this one really interesting part for reasons that I can't totally explain, but there's probably a metabolic basis for this, where the alcohol level actually went back up. So like the alcohol level peaked and it was coming down. The lipopolysaccharide level peaked, and it was coming down in parallel.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And then for whatever reason, the alcohol level went back up, and so did the lipopolysaccharide level. It was a one-to-one connection. The lipopolysaccharide did not get back to normal until the alcohol was zero.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
So from my perspective, if you're drinking enough to have alcohol that's detectable in your blood, you're drinking enough to allow lipopolysaccharide to leak into your blood, which means a damaged gut barrier.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
That's the way that I feel about this. And I have an expression that I like, which is progress over perfection. Because I don't want people to feel like they need to drill down on these things. Like even with the 30 plants, if you're the average American, then you're probably consuming like seven or eight per week. And so to go up to 30 is a bit much.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
But if you were to go from eight up to 15, I'm thrilled. It's about the steps along the way, right? And for me, this has been a journey in my own life. And I'm constantly looking for ways to make little tweaks and improvements.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think that also tapping into how you feel, right? When you feel that difference, then you know.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
We do know, like with clarity, that the sterility of our environment does have consequences. People that are raised in a home where there's no pets are more likely to end up with allergic diseases later in life.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, the bubble boy. That was a complex thing because he was born with a genetically inherited immune deficiency. And so it was complex because they tried to raise him within a bubble and it didn't go very well.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
so but the challenge of an environment that includes all kinds of different things is actually good for us right to be sick on occasion is actually good for us it's it's allowing your immune system to grow and become stronger as a result of that if you think about
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
We're starving for that. And the problem is like we're suffering right now through an epidemic of loneliness because we have lost those natural connections that exist. And I think that a big part of the reason why is because we've, from a cultural perspective, promoted concepts of individualism. where you think about yourself, you don't think about your tribe, you think about yourself.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
when people were colonizing the Americas, many of the natives, what they died from was actually exposure to illnesses that they had never been exposed to before, right? Whereas the Europeans had no issue with this because their immune system had been already challenged and created the antibodies that it needed to protect itself. So yeah, so the sterility of our environment is problematic.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And when we think about our skin, the skin has its own microbiome, but it's also in contact with our gut microbes. So once again, our gut microbes are producing chemicals that can ultimately have effects on the health and balance of our skin microbiome. You know, I grew up where, like, as a teenager, everyone deals with acne on some level, right?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Hormonal fluctuations are what are sort of driving that. But some people get cystic acne, and that's actually an inflammatory condition. And acne is driven by the skin microbiome. This is the reason why many of the treatments that a dermatologist provides are antibiotics. And some of those antibiotics are antibiotics that are taken by mouth.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
if you think about the effect that that then has on the skin. On the flip side of this, when we clean up our diet, you can have profoundly better skin. And some of the strategies that I see being helpful, of course, increasing the plant-based foods in our diet, which have the fiber, but also many people who have acne issues, when they reduce or eliminate dairy, they see improvements.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah. So acne, but also psoriasis and eczema are all skin health conditions that the gut microbiome has been damaged. You know, quick story that's interesting. So I have four kids. My son, I have three girls and then I have one son. My son is eight. When he was really young, he had horrible eczema. Like I'm talking about, you know, three to six months old. He had horrible eczema.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And we tried, you know, I'm a medical doctor, and I was trying all the stuff. And he was also breastfed, so it wasn't that. And we tried everything we could. We couldn't get it better. And then we put him on a probiotic. And, like, literally within two days, the eczema cleared up. And then my wife, I forget what, I think she, you know, went away for a weekend.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
She had something else that she had to do. So, you know, I was holding down the fort with Lee and my son, and I dropped the ball and didn't give him his probiotic. Eczema came back. My wife gets home. She says, oh, you didn't give him the probiotic. She starts giving it to him, and two days later, it's gone again.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I think that I'm really glad that we got to talk about the impact of trauma. And what I want to say though, real quick, is that all these things that we talked about, they're all important. Food, sleep, exercise, dealing with trauma. But let me put this out there too. Not everyone has trauma that needs to be healed. But what we do all need is we need human connection.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And we've also promoted the value of materialism.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And we're suffering through a crisis of loneliness right now. And the reason why is because there is zero connection value from your devices, even when you are talking to another human. You get nothing from it. You need to actually sit down and connect with a person. And keep in mind, we talked in the beginning about like that we are tribal origins.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Consider the fact that connection was not this superficial thing. I mean, I realized that like we both have social media accounts with a large number of followers, right? And I appreciate these people, but that doesn't empower me. That doesn't charge me up in the way that a connection with one person really is capable of doing.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the reason why is because coming from those tribal origins, it started with our family. And then the tribe was a family of families. And we knew that if there was a threat to the tribe, someone's stepping up, right? My partners are stepping up. I will protect my family, but then like I get so connected to you and your family that I'm going to make sure that you're okay too.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And you're going to take care of me and we survive together, right? And that's where we came from. And this is the reason why if you take a person and you hold them hostage, they will actually develop, you know, we call it Stockholm syndrome. They will actually become sympathetic to their captor And you'd say, that's counterintuitive. That makes no sense.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Why would they, this person is holding them hostage. Why would they become sympathetic to them? Because we need connections so desperately that we will take it even that way. And that's a survival mechanism. And so I want to share that. I think that we all would benefit regardless of
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
history, we all would benefit from putting a greater emphasis in our lives on making times to connect with real people and not through devices. And the last thing I just want to say real quick is I also think that spiritual health is greatly needed in America and in the Western world right now. And to me, that is not defined by one specific belief.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
There are many different belief systems, but I think that there's a place that exists within our heart that can only be filled through a spiritual connection with a higher power and understanding our purpose of why we're here. And the purpose is not to make money. What does that do for us? I'm not saying it's bad, but that's not going to fulfill you.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And if it comes at the expense of your emotional connection to others, or if it comes at the expense of not being able to take a moment to step back and sort of connect to your higher purpose, you're missing out.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And if I'm really successful, that house is so big that every person that lives in that house could isolate themselves in a different corner and not have to come into contact with one another. And that is actually the complete antithesis from where we came from. Where, you know, as tribal creatures, it was never about money or goods and the accumulation of wealth. It was about your tribe.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Full circle.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Yeah, I mean, this has been this has been really cool. And I'm glad we got to like touch on all these things because many of these notes are sort of things that like I think about or I talk to my wife about, but it doesn't necessarily get relayed on the usual podcast. So it's fun that we got to talk about all these things. I would love for people to come and hang out and join my community.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I spend a lot of time trying to create an environment for learning and empowerment. The easiest way to do that is to go to my website, theguthealthmd.com and sign up for my email list. It's completely free. It's a free resource. So you can definitely follow me on social media at theguthealthmd. And we didn't have much of a chance to touch on this, but I just also want to bring forward that
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
I'm of the belief that diet comes first, that we should do lifestyle. And then there's this place for optimization with supplements. And I launched my own supplement company in January of 2024 called 38TERRA, 3-8-T-E-R-A. And my motivation in doing that is that I was never satisfied with the quality of gut health supplements that were out there as a gastroenterologist. It was just
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
The formulas were not up to date. There was no transparency. Where's the third party testing? So I felt like, you know what? There's an opportunity to try to do this better. And so this is something also for people who are interested in this topic. Definitely go and check out what we're doing there.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
You were only as good as your tribe in those connections. And that's what allowed you to survive, to thrive. And I think that's a big part of what we lost is like when we made the choice to stop focusing on each other and like our connections and service to one another. When we made the decision to stop focusing on those things, when we turned inward to what do I need? How can I serve myself?
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
We made a mistake.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
Interconnected in such a powerful way that I want the listeners to stop thinking about the distance that separates these two organs, because I think that comes into conflict with the way that your body is functioning. We compartmentalize things that aren't really separate in the body, right? Everything is intertwined and interconnected.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And the gut is so connected to the brain that they might as well be right next to each other, talking to one another. There's several ways. I mean, we could literally unpack for an hour the many ways in which the gut is talking to the brain. I'll summarize it real quick, that your microbes are producing chemicals. There's many of them.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And your microbes are producing chemicals that will ultimately enter the bloodstream. And when they get into the bloodstream, within a matter of seconds, your heart will circulate that blood up to the brain. And those chemicals have influence. on the blood brain barrier. So the brain is encapsulated by this protective wall.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And that protective wall actually is made up with the exact same cellular architecture as your gut barrier. So things that can heal your gut barrier can also heal your blood brain barrier. And things that harm your gut barrier will also harm your brain barrier.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And this is a perfect example of how these things are interconnected because when something is harming your gut, it will also harm your brain. But also those chemicals, many of them, many of them will cross the blood brain barrier and have influence there. Your gut is the second most dominant location in terms of nerves in your body. So you have 500 million nerves within your gut.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
That is, by the way, five times what you will find in your spinal cord. And that's why we refer to this as the enteric nervous system or the second brain. And all those 500 million nerves are feeling and sensing as we sit here and speak to one another constantly, not in the same way that my fingertip does, it's a little bit different, but they're feeling and they serve a purpose.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And that information gets basically brought together into the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve, which is a pair of nerves that basically connect our brain down to our heart, our lungs, and dominantly our gut, The vagus nerve is the information superhighway. It's carrying that, all those 500 million nerves worth of info back up to the brain, which is influencing brain function.
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E137 - Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “Your Gut is Wiser Than Your Mind!” - Science of Intuition, Mood & Microbiome
And I think when we talk about things like, I would imagine you want to talk about gut feelings. This is where we need to start the conversation right there is the vagus nerve, which is feeling and sensing 500 million nerves. So there's this and this is, by the way, just the way in which the gut is communicating to the brain, you know, neurotransmitters.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Okay. When I'm in the hospital, I will be walking through and I can literally tell when a consult is coming because I can smell this diagnosis.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah. So anyway, the stool will turn black. It will smell terrible and it will be like tar. That's what makes it different than if you were to, for example, take Pepto-Bismol.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So there was a study that was done in the 90s, a long time ago, and it was less than 2,000 people exclusively in the city of Bristol. And it led to the creation of a chart called the Bristol Stuhl Scale. Right here, I'll put it on the screen. Yeah, and we're gonna run through this. But before we do, I wanna mention a few things real quick.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
As the US Medical Director of Zoe, I'm proud of my contribution as a gastroenterologist, as a physician, to the work that we're doing there. And we not only did the blue poo study, which we've talked about already, which is that you can eat your muffins and figure out your gut transit time. But we also did a couple of other things. One is called the Blue Poo Challenge.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Where we had over 20,000 people across the planet who were basically eating blue muffins and then reporting back to us on what was going on with them. And then more recently, so again, the Bristol study was 2,000 people exclusively in the city of Bristol. We recently did the largest study across the entire UK on poop deaths. and what people were doing in terms of their bowel movements.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So it was called the Big Poo Review, and we had 142,000 people from across the UK basically fill out a 17-question survey. And part of what we were looking at was their Bristol stool form. We were also looking at how often they poop. By the way, the average person poops 1.7 times per day. And we were also looking at how it associates with different conditions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So as an example, one in five people in the UK are constipated. One in six people in the UK have diarrhea. So it's interesting to take a look at all these things. So now getting into the Bristol stool chart, the... The dream. That is real poop. It's lovely. This is the dream. This is where we all want to be. And this is a Bristol Four.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
The Bristol Four is the classic where I come walking out of the bathroom in slow motion and rock music is jamming and doves are flying in slow motion. And I just am such a stud. So, and that's after a Bristol four. My wife knows what happens when I come out looking like that. It's soft and formed, okay? And it's like a sausage or a torpedo. So pretty smooth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Now, when we move from a four to a three, a three is not that big of a deal, but it is getting some cracks and crevices in it, all right? So, and we're moving towards constipation. Now, a three, you know, a little more fiber, a little more hydration, some exercise, right? These are simple things that can help to get you back to a four if you're having one of these, a three.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And those vital signs would allow me to have an idea of how you're doing in terms of like just on a basic level, your cardiovascular health. All right. I'm a gastroenterologist. If I want to know the basics of what's going on with you and your body, I need to know how you're pooping.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But that moves us to a Bristol two where we are truly getting into constipation territory here. And basically, this is like if you took a whole bunch of marbles of poop and jammed them together. So it still forms into something, but it looks like a pack of marbles of poop that are stuck together. So that's a Bristol two stool. That's constipation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And then finally, a Bristol one is when you're having the rabbit pellets and they're hard. They're not easy to get out. And sometimes they're a lot bigger than this. These are small. So you would form this up into what would be like a golf ball. And that golf ball would be like a Bristol one.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
All right. You form it up into a hard ball like this, but perhaps even bigger. And it's actually hard for a person to pass this. It's so big. It's so hard that your bottom has a problem relaxing to let it out. Okay. So Bristol 1 and 2 are forms of constipation. Let's go back to the middle. We're going to start from 5. The stool is soft. It's not hard. It's not lumpy bumpy. It's soft.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But it's starting to break into blobs, different pieces of poop. Okay. So, and we're moving towards, we're moving towards diarrhea where like just like fragments of solid stool are Bristol six. And then when it's just like, or the other thing of Bristol six could be like a cow pie. Where there's no form. It's just someone plopped down this formless patty.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And a Bristol 7 finally is straight liquid. Straight liquid.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
There's been now multiple studies, including our work at Zoe on the blue poop study that was published in the journal Gut. There's now been multiple studies where basically what they found is that if you can look at which of these Bristol types you have, it does give us some insights into your gut microbiome and what's happening there. So now, where do we want to be?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
In a perfect world, we want to be somewhere on the spectrum of three, four, or five. We ideally want to be a four. You're not unhealthy if you have a three or a five.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah, interesting question. One of the things that we found in the Big Poo Review, which is our nationwide survey of 142,000 people, we actually looked at what they were eating. And we were able to find associations between fiber intake and specifically plant-based food intake and having a number four.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So in other words, we found associations between fiber intake and basically plant-based food intake and having a number four. So basically what that means is the people that were having a number four bowel movement were consuming more legumes, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
The people who were having whether it be a type 1 or a type 7, they actually were quite similar in terms of their diet, which is that they actually were consuming lower amounts of fiber.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Now, the other thing to look at too is actually some studies have found that people who have more on the spectrum of constipation tend to have a higher fat diet, tend to typically consume more animal products, which of course are higher in fat. And people that are more on the loose or diarrhea side of things tend to be consuming more plant-based foods.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So now you could have a very healthy diet and be having a Bristol 5, and that actually is not problematic. And the reason that you're having the Bristol 5 is because you're consuming so much fiber that actually you're producing a lot of short-chain fatty acids. And those short-chain fatty acids, they're like lubricants for your poop.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
That's right. So a slow gut transit time, which is a gut transit time more than 58 hours. So again, and this is all with the blue muffins. You eat the blue muffin, it comes out 58 hours later. You are more likely to be having a Bristol 1 or Bristol 2, which is the classic constipation form. There's no way. no way that you would have slow gut transit time and have a Bristol 7. That's not possible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah, a diarrhea.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And the reason why this is happening, you know, so when water moves through the intestines, because a ton of water moves through the intestines, and one of the jobs that our colon has, the large intestine, is to pull the water out. So the more time that something spends inside the colon, the more it's actually going to do that, pull the water out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
This is the reason why when we have fast transit, it's high in water. And this is also the reason why when it's slow transit, it's extremely dry.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
All right, let's break this down. So first of all, why is our poop brown? The answer to that question has to do with bile. Bile is produced by our liver. it's actually involved heavily in digestion of fat. So when we, for example, eat a fatty meal, our gallbladder will squeeze. People that have gallbladder issues know what I'm talking about. You eat a fatty meal, your gallbladder squeezes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Bile then mixes in your intestines with the food and the bile helps to absorb the fat. That bile is what makes our poop brown. Now that becomes particularly relevant if we're talking about a white poop, People poop white? Some people poop white. No way. Yes. And the reason why a person would have a white poop is if there's a blockage that stops the bile from mixing with their intestines.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
On the flip side, if you are struggling to process your fat, you could have a yellow poop. And this could be a person who has a pancreas issue, for example, chronic pancreatitis. And so if they're not able to digest their fat... they have a fatty poop, it may come out yellow. And one of the things that they'll notice is that there may be an oil slick at the top of the toilet bowl.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
That's fat, oil is fat. So, all right, you've never had a, have you ever had a green bowel movement?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Answer the damn question. No, I haven't. Okay. I have. Oh, really? Yeah. There's a couple of reasons. Some are healthy, some are not. So you could have diarrhea like from an infectious cause. An example could be something called Giardia, which is a parasite. And that'll give you green poop. But you could also go too hard on the smoothies.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
I was drinking like 40 ounces of green smoothies a day and my poop would come out green. It was interesting. Okay. We're about to get into some that are really important. Before I do that, let me just mention real quick, the blue.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So the blue poo, you could get a blue poo from eating blueberries, particularly if you eat a lot of them, or alternatively, of course, this is the blue muffin, the blue poo challenge. So, and perhaps what we could do in the show notes is give people the recipe for how they can go about doing that if they're interested. All right, red and black.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So we have to talk about, let's start with red, because of course, red, we think about blood. And I have a rule, which is that if you see blood in your stool, that's not normal. And to me, that's grounds to talk to a doctor. And then there's different levels of intensity of how seriously we check it out. But Stephen, colon cancer, which can present with red stool,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
um colon cancer is the number two cause of cancer death in our countries in the united states 150 000 people are diagnosed per year it's highly preventable and it's shifting towards younger people there has been a change in the last few years in terms of colon cancer where you know as an example A person of your generation, you and I are pretty close, I think, but I'm a little bit older.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
A person of your generation is four times more likely to be diagnosed with rectal cancer during their lifetime than my parents were. And twice times more likely to be diagnosed with colon cancer compared to my parents' generation. So there's been this shift and it's also affecting younger people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So my point is this, I've had patients who come to me, they go, I saw a little bit of blood in my stool, do a colonoscopy and discover that they have a massive polyp, which is a precursor to cancer. And by removing the polyp, we just basically stopped them from developing cancer. So I take it seriously when you see a poop that is coated in red, All right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Now that red may be just on parts of it like it is here where that's typically bright red coming from the bottom. So that would be either something in your rectum, could be hemorrhoids, could be an anal fissure, could also be a polyp in the rectum.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But I think what I come back to is I would encourage people to get checked out because just seeing the bright red blood doesn't mean it's hemorrhoids. Don't assume that. Particularly with cancer shifting towards younger people. I think it's important to get checked out. On that point about cancer shifting towards younger people, is that because our diets are changing? I think so.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
I think it's the shift generationally that's taken place in terms of our diets. I also think that there's a microbiome element. The connections between the gut microbiome and colon cancer are as powerful as any type of cancer. And at the same time, what protects us? And I think you know what I'm gonna say, it's the fiber and the short chain fatty acids.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah, and I think that this is an important conversation to have because we have stigmatized poop. We're not allowed to look in the bowl. We should be looking in the bowl. And the reason why is because if I were a cardiologist, I would come over and I would check your pulse. I would listen to your heart.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And in that study that I was mentioning earlier from Andrew Reynolds, the professor from New Zealand, actually there was a powerful association between fiber consumption and protecting ourselves from colorectal cancer, so powerful, that for every five grams of fiber that we increase in our diet, we are getting a significant reduction in our risk.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So it's not just do you eat fiber or not, it's actually how much fiber do you eat and the more the better. You know what I should mention real quick, red stool can also come from eating beets. It will almost always happen like literally 24 to 48 hours after you eat the beets. So don't be surprised when that's the case, you may see a little bit of red stool.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Well, because it goes back to what you mentioned earlier, which is that 60% of the weight of our stool is actually microbial in origin. So if you want a window into your microbiome, look at your poop. You don't necessarily need to go and do an expensive test. Quite simply, looking at your poop is one of the ways that you can tell what's going on.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Um, black stool can come from benign places. So an example is bismuth. So like Pepto-Bismol. So you have a, you have a stomach ache and then you take some Pepto-Bismol. And, um, so, but the issue with this is it'll actually give you black stool. So if you're having a bad stomach for a couple of days in a row, it could turn black.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But the other thing that turns your stool black that people need to know about is a slow GI bleed. bleeding into your stomach specifically, because that bleeding is happening higher up in your intestines and then it has to pass all the way through like intestinal transit time, right? Because there's such a delay, by the time it gets down to your rectum, it's now black, it's not red anymore.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So black stool can be indicative of bleeding. The way that we can differentiate this is when it's blood, it smells terrible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah. Well, you don't have to stick your nose into it. It's so clear. Like it will be so clear.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Yeah. Do you switch up your exercise every once in a while to see if you can get better gains?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
It's amazing to be in your 40s and thriving. Yes. And I'm actually lifting my heaviest weight in my 40s as well. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah, dude, I'm pumped. Let's go get the cameras and let's go lift right now.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, this is the point, and I don't know that you were intentionally trying to set me up there because we haven't talked about this before, but actually diversity of exercise is actually a relevant idea. Really? Yes. So much we could be talking about different types of foods have a different effect on our microbiome. Different exercises have a different effect on our microbiome.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You go into the supermarket, they've distilled it down to 75% of the calories in our supermarket is three foods. What are those three foods? Wheat, corn, and soy. Wow. Yes. That is 75% of the calories in the supermarket. Now, granted, most of those are ultra-processed. I'm here to advocate for real food. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes, that's at least five.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They did this study where they looked at marathon runners. And they identified that there was this one bacteria called Villanella that was disproportionately represented within these marathon runners. So the scientists, this was, by the way, done, I believe, at Harvard in Boston. The scientists asked the question, what's the deal with this Villanella?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Why would the runners have more of this specific thing? And the answer was quite interesting. The Villanella was breaking down lactic acid. When we run, endurance exercise, lactic acid accumulates in our muscles. That creates muscle fatigue. If you want to be a better runner and have greater endurance, you would break down lactic acid. The microbes are helping. That's interesting.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They have another study done by rugby players in Ireland. All right. And they looked at their microbiome, these rugby players, and they discovered that there is a shift within their microbiome towards actually more anti-inflammatory bacteria that interact with fiber to produce what are called short chain fatty acids, which are the most anti-inflammatory molecules out there.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And these short chain fatty acids, which people may have heard of them, butyrate, acetate, propionate. These short chain fatty acids have healing effects right there in your gut. They help to shape the microbiome. They affect the immune system. They affect our metabolism. And they enter the bloodstream and they travel all the way to the brain.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And they affect the brain, including the blood-brain barrier.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, it's interesting because you think about all the great athletes, for example, in the NFL. And you see these guys do, like Adrian Peterson comes to mind. where some of the recoveries that he had during his career were crazy. And they defy the rules of recovery. And it makes you wonder if there's something- Is that genetics? Is that microbiome? Is that, yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Are there other factors in play here? But what's interesting is because you have this shift in the microbiome towards these anti-inflammatory molecules. Okay, well, I just mentioned that depression has an inflammatory component to it, right? So here we are and we discover that exercise is actually good for helping our mood.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And what I'm saying is what's happening under the hood, if you lift up the hood and take a look, is there's this shift in the microbiome. And now you don't even have to change your diet. I mean, I do want you to eat more plants. Right, right. Right? But exercise alone helps you improve your anxiety or stress or depression. Yes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And that shift that's happening in the microbiome is actually helping you to get more from your fiber. Right. So you don't change your diet. You eat the same fiber. Now you get more from it. But what if you also changed your diet at the same time that you were implementing this exercise? If you did one and two, food and exercise. This is why they synergize so well.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I think that the answer is yes. And the reason why I say that is they have these bizarre studies that they've done where they take people and they inject into them something called lipopolysaccharide. What is that? All right. Lipopolysaccharide is produced by bacteria that live inside of us, like E. coli. So we've all heard of E. coli, okay? So this is like- They inject a disease inside of us.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So they're injecting this thing that you find in E. coli into a person's bloodstream. Wow. Okay. And then they track them over the next couple of hours. We're talking about humans. We're not talking about mice right now. And they see what happens. And here's what they find. Number one, because this bacteria has entered into the bloodstream, they get increased levels of inflammation in the body.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We could add mushrooms. Those are broad categories. We can get more specific if we want to, but to me, it's about getting that variety. This is not just an idea or a concept. This is actually scientifically proven. In a study called the American Gut Project, which, by the way, was international, but it was run out of UC San Diego, what they found is that
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Number two, their mood and their motivation to work dips. Wow. All right. Number three, they socially withdraw. All right. So what's going on here? Basically, what I've just told you is that when they inject this E. coli type stuff, which I, by the way, want to unpack that in a quick moment.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
When they inject this E. coli based stuff called lipopolysaccharide, it basically activates inflammation and which affects their mood, and it also makes them socially withdrawn. And they think that what's happening is that the body is starting to shut down to preserve energy because it needs to fight the infection. So that's number one.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And then they socially withdraw. Why would they socially withdraw? We're social creatures. We come from living in tribes of people, right? And you want to protect one another. If you're sick, you don't want to pass that on to someone else. So, when you feel sick, there's this natural inclination to socially withdraw. To get away.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
To protect the others.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Okay. So, we have these studies where there's correlation. You have a group of people with major depression and you study their microbiome and you discover that their microbiome is damaged. Yes. Okay. They have what we call dysbiosis or a leaky gut, right? Now, what's causing what? That's the question, right?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Because there's a correlation, but you can't prove that the microbiome caused the depression or similarly, you can't prove that depression caused the microbiome change. Yes. Right. So then it raises the question, how do we then prove this? And there's a couple of ways that you prove this through interventions.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And when you take this lipopolysaccharide, basically what you're recreating is what happens when a person has a damaged gut. Interesting. Because when you have a damaged gut, Those microbes, they live inside the tube of the intestine. And as we discussed at the very beginning of the show, that tube is outside of our body.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We have a single layer of cells called the gut epithelium that basically protect us. Because on the other side of the epithelial layer is 60 to 70% of our immune cells. Wow. Okay. So the immune system is there to protect us on the other side. And the single layer of cells, it's like the wall of our castle.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And when our gut breaks down, when our microbes are damaged, when we don't have enough anti-inflammatory short chain fatty acids, you start to see this gut barrier breakdown. We get what people may call leaky gut. And what leaks is the lipopolysaccharide. This lipopolysaccharide that they were injecting in this study, basically what they were recreating, they were not recreating an infection.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They were recreating chronic inflammation.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
That comes from a damaged gut.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
At the end of the day, when they did their analysis, above everything else, there was this one rule. The diversity of plants in your diet was the number one factor in predicting who had the healthiest gut. And the number is 30. 30 per week. 30 different plants per week. Now, all fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes. Include those 30. They count. Okay. All of them, right?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You start to take a smoothie. It could be Monday morning. Take a smoothie, bananas, blueberries. Greens of your choice, whatever ones you like. Chia seeds, hemp seeds. Chia seeds, hemp seeds, flax seeds. We're already up to six. Okay. Right? You want to add in some raspberries or some other kinds of berries. We could easily get this up to 10. Gotcha. Gotcha. You're making pasta sauce. Oh.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Why would you just do pasta sauce? Why not throw some plants in there? Oh, there you go. Right? Onions, garlic, basil, oregano. Those count too.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Adding more and more of the diversity as possible as opposed to just broccoli and spinach by itself. The average person in the United States, 10% of their calories comes from actual plants. The number one plant is the potato, right? We're not talking about optimal nutrition here.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
There's a reason why people in the United States are suffering through the health-related issues that they currently have. We need to make changes. If we simply added more fiber to our diet, we would radically transform the health of this country. Really? Yes. And that person who's not necessarily eating a lot of variety but is eating a lot of plants, number one, I give them a standing ovation.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Their diet's great starting point. They're way better off than the average American is right now, right? We all, though, should be looking to optimize. We all have opportunities to do better. So if you take that diet and you add more variety to it, they will reap the rewards of that.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And the reason why is because every single one of these plants has unique properties that are, number one, going to affect our microbiome, right? So these microbes, they're kind of like us in many ways, Lewis. They have personalities, right? Some of them are not nice. They have cliques. They have certain ones that they tend to hang out with and they work together. They also have taste buds.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They have different food preferences. Not every microbe, believe it or not, likes kale.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You can trade it to like kale but there's going to be a lot of microbes that are going to be hungry if the only thing that you eat was kale. Interesting. Right? So, every single plant is feeding certain families of microbes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Yeah. So, satiation, like feeling full, is an important concept these days, right? We have all seen the rollout of Ozempic and these other GLP-1 type agonists. What is this GLP-1 that we're talking about here? This is a hormone. It's a gut hormone already produced by your body, right? And makes you feel full.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Now I'm not sitting here and going to try to pretend that like what you eat is going to have the same effect on your body that a drug does. That's not what I'm trying to do here. But I want people to understand that here we exist where 95% of Americans, 95% are deficient in fiber. This is our most prevalent nutritional deficiency. And fiber is what actually leads to the release of GLP-1.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
GLP-1 is what exactly? GLP-1 is glucon-like peptide 1, which is a gut hormone, which is what Ozempic is. Ozempic is GLP-1. Okay. And it has these different effects on our body, including helping us to control our blood sugar and making us feel full.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Which is the reason why Ozempic is used for diabetes and for weight loss.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So... First of all, we have to fully acknowledge that these drugs are highly effective. There is no doubt that they work. They're getting results. They're getting results. But what are the long-term effects of these? We have no clue. Right. We have no clue. We don't have the data yet to say what the long-term results of these are.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
What we do know with complete clarity is that if you stop using the drug, by the way, they're very expensive. They're very expensive. Thousands of dollars per month. Wow. Right? And are we ready to commit to doing this for the rest of our lives? Because when you come off of the drug, you go right back to where you were. Really? Yes. You rebound immediately.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So flip side though, I think it's important at the same time as we're having this conversation about Ozempic and these types of weight loss drugs. Again, like I'm not here to vilify them. Okay. But when we're doing that, instead of changing the way that we eat. The behaviors. Right. The problem that exists with this is like, yes, we can measure weight loss.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And when people lose weight, there are different things that can certainly improve and they become more healthy. But is the only thing that matters for human health our weight? That is not the case. There is so much more to us as humans and our determinants of our health beyond just whether or not we're obese, skinny, or what our body habit is. And so we need to look at that bigger picture.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
The bigger picture is that when we optimize our diet, we have opportunities to improve ourselves metabolically, which includes improving our weight, which includes improving our blood sugar control. But we also have opportunities to prevent other diseases far beyond what Ozempic is capable of preventing.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So, the data are clear. That when we consume an ultra-processed diet, which in the United States today, 60% of calories are ultra-processed foods. So more than half. These are foods, by the way, that did not exist 100 years ago. Crazy. Right? So what we're describing was not possible for our great-grandparents.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
There's no way they could have ate the diet that we currently eat because these foods did not exist. And our kids, 70% of calories in our kids come from ultra-processed foods. Wow. And there's no doubt that they cause a shift in the microbiome. It's a shift towards what we call dysbiosis. So it's the opposite of what we see when we eat a diverse diet.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, I'll give you three things and they all connect back to the microbiome. I would start with food. The food is our most powerful lever that we can pull in terms of shaping and changing the microbiome. And there are simple choices that anyone can make. And this doesn't have to fall under a dietary pattern or a label. It's just changing the way you eat.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Diverse diet leads to a diverse microbiome, and that is a healthy microbiome. When we shift towards ultra-processed foods, we're actually contracting the microbiome. We're empowering the ones that love sugar. We're empowering the ones that create inflammation.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They're telling your brain you need this. There are interesting studies to suggest that our taste buds and our cravings are driven Biomicrobial. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I think that they play a role in that whole, yes, I think that they play a role in that whole impulse. And yes, that certainly exists. But also the beautiful and exciting thing is our taste buds can change, right? Those impulses can change and you can get yourself to a place where what you crave is actually something that's good for your body and nourishes your body.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I think it really, you really start to see the benefits of four weeks. Four weeks. Yeah. Of doing it consistently. Of doing it consistently. Yeah. But by the way, don't, I don't recommend that people try to flip a switch. Now there are some people that works for, but like to me, we want what, what I want is sustainable, right? Something that you can actually stick with. Not extremes. Not extreme.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We don't want yo-yo. We don't want to be swinging all over the place, right? So we want consistency, sustainability, and we want it to taste good. So start with the stuff that you enjoy, introduce simple, sustainable choices and build from there. And as we start to build, we start to build momentum and our microbiome is given a chance to change with us.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So I say four weeks is what it takes to really make this huge change. But really, I would rather that you do it over the course of six months, a year. Because then by consistently doing this, you are actually going to completely reshape your microbiome. Wow. So, getting back to the question about ultra processed foods and brain health.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
What you're going to create with these ultra-processed foods is an inflammatory microbiome. And inflammation is an essential feature that exists in many different cognitive disorders and mood disorders, including depression, including anxiety.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Oh, gosh. It's hard to put an exact number on that. But I think what we see, if we were to zoom out, Even in America then, maybe. Yeah, in America. If we just focus on what's happening here in the States, if you zoom out for a moment, think of all of the digestive disorders that exist. Obesity, digestive disorders.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Metabolic issues, immune issues, meaning autoimmune type issues that are hugely on the rise. hormonal issues, right? And you go down the line and you think of these things and I haven't even gotten to the brain yet. Heart issues. And basically what I'm saying is the gut microbiome is a player in all of these different conditions. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So if the gut microbiome is a player in these conditions and you have these conditions present, you've already proven. You've already proven what the state of the microbiome is. And then the question is, how is it affecting your brain, right? And could you have better energy, better focus, better ability to do tedious, hard things during the day? And the answer would be yes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And the way that that starts is by changing your diet. Wow. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And it was as effective as medication for the treatment of major depression.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Okay, I can give you a top five, but can I start with this essential rule? Yes. Which is diversity of plants. All right, so eating as much variety of different plants in our diet. We have to be intentional about this if this is what we want. Because the problem is the food system is not going to do that for us.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Abundance is the right word for what we're talking about here. 30 different plants or more. I'm asking you to add more variety, not take away, not restrict. Yeah. So it's the opposite of what we've been told by traditional fad diets. Yes. So, all right. Number two. Yes. So we want to improve our mood. Okay. Exercise.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So exercise clearly improves our mood, can be used as something to help in the treatment of major depression. And the question is, how is it doing that? And one of the answers to that question is actually through the way that exercise shapes our microbiome. How do they shape our microbiome? It depends on what exercise you're doing. So what kind of exercise do you like? I'm curious.