Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Alpha Dreams, Alpha-Delta Sleep and Other Microbiome Effects on Sleep
Long regarded as a passive phenomenon, you have likely heard that sleep is an active process complete with various phases, roles in maintaining metabolic and mental health, but often shortchanged in modern life yielding widespread sleep deprivation. But a phenomenon not widely appreciated or explored is the role of the gastrointestinal microbiome on sleep. So, in this episode of the Defiant Health podcast, let’s get thinking about the role of the gastrointestinal microbiome on sleep quality, sleep phases, sleep duration, and content, i.e., dreams, including how you can put the microbiome to work to improve on the architecture of your sleep patterns.
How to make L reuteri yogurt: A step-by-step guide
SIBO Yogurt
BioGaia Gastrus tablets for L. reuteri
Yakult store locator
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*Dr. Davis and his organization are financially compensated for supporting Paleovalley and their products.
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*Dr. Davis and his organization are financially compensated for supporting these products.
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
Long regarded as a passive phenomenon. You have likely heard that sleep is an active process, complete with various phases, roles in maintaining metabolic and mental health, but often short changed in modern life, yielding widespread sleep deprivation. But a phenomenon not widely appreciated or explored is the role of the gastrointestinal microbiome on sleep. So in this episode of the Defiant Health podcast let's get thinking about the role of the gastrointestinal microbiome on sleep quality, sleep phases, sleep duration and content, that is, dreams. Later in the podcast let's talk about Defiant Health's sponsors that include Paleo Valley, who provides fermented grass-fed beef sticks, bone broth, protein rich in collagen, organic supergreens and low-carb superfood bars and now 100% grass-fed and finished pastured meats. And our newest sponsor, BiotiQuest, who provides unique probiotics such as Sugar Shift to support healthy blood sugars and Simple Slumber to assist in obtaining healthy sleep, probiotics crafted with the unique property of combining synergistic microbes. If you've been following along in my conversations here in the Defiant Health podcast or in my blog, drdavisinfinethealth. com, or through my Super Gut book, you know that many of us are cultivating Lactobacillus reuteri, a strain of Lactobacillus reuteri, and we do so by using prolonged fermentation, my method of prolonged fermentation, to generate very high bacterial counts. By flow cytometry, we get something like 300 billion counts of microbes per half cup serving. That's probably a big part of the reason why we're experiencing some over-the-top effects. One of the effects many people not everybody. It's not quite clear why everybody doesn't enjoy this effect, but most people who consume the lactobacillus reuteri yogurt enjoy deep sleep. Personally, i was a chronic insomniac for many, many years, often having to resort to such things as high dose melatonin or tryptophan or other methods to fall asleep, but still always struggling, even with those crutches for sleep. I added the Lactobacillus reuteri. That is a microbe that nearly all of us have lost because of its susceptibility to common antibiotics. We add back this microbe and I and many other people enjoy deep sleep. So personally, i sleep about nine hours now straight through, almost never have middle of the night awakenings and have vivid dreams.
William Davis, MD:Many people use these actigraphic devices. These are devices that you wear, like Apple Watch, Fitbit or Oura Ring, that extrapolate sleep phases. I say they extrapolate sleep phase because there's no EEG. To really get a read on your brain waves during sleep, you'd have to be undergoing EEG. Well, these devices, of course, are on your hand or wrist and not on your brain, not on your head. So they're extrapolated from such measures as body temperature, heart rate, heart rate variation and movement and they're pretty accurate. They're about 80-plus percent accurate in calling the various phases of sleep.
William Davis, MD:Well, people who do wear these devices are reporting that their REM sleep is being extended by something like 18 to 20 percent or so, which is very interesting if that's true, because REM sleep is the restorative, consolidative period of sleep where you take memories, particularly painful memories, and you soften them, you revisit them and when you awake you may find that painful memories are less painful. So it's a restorative phase of sleep that's critical for your mental and emotional health. So people who have been experimentally deprived of REM sleep develop severe emotional issues. So you really need REM sleep for mental and emotional health. So does an extended period of REM because of the effect of lactobacillus rhodorite, does that help you better adjust to painful memories, have better daytime mental health? I think it does, but that has yet to be formally proven in a clinical study. Nonetheless, recall that rhodorite is known to provoke release of the hormone oxytocin from your brain, from the hypothalamus, and it's probably oxytocin that mediates some of these effects on sleep. Lactobacillus reuteri and its effects on the brain, exerted via the vagus nerve is a wonderful illustration of the so-called gut brain axis. The gut has an effect on the brain and the brain has an effect on the gut. In this case it's the gut signaling the brain to release oxytocin that we presume to be at least part of the reason why people enjoy deep sleep.
William Davis, MD:But all this came back to my mind recently because of an experience I've been having. I've asked a number of people if they've had this, and some do, some don't, but it's called alpha dreams And all that means when you first begin to fall asleep, you know that kind of twilight where you're in between, you're kind of a little bit awake, you're still aware of some of the sounds and activities around you, but you're also kind of asleep. So that's called the alpha phase of sleep. It's a very light, superficial form of sleep. But I've noticed personally that during entry into alpha sleep I'm having a flood of dreams, very vivid, clear dreams, and a number of other people have reported the same thing. So I take this to mean it's yet another aspect of the change in sleep behavior that occurs with lactobacillus reuteri and oxytocin. Let me know if you're experiencing that all, but we'd like to hear about it because it's a new observation that's never been reported before. But I believe we could argue that the increase or the vividness and recall for alpha dreams may be part of the changed architecture of sleep due to L reuteri and oxytocin.
William Davis, MD:There's another very interesting phenomenon that occurs in people who have depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and that is something called alpha- delta sleep. What that means is that the deep phase of sleep that is, phase three, just before REM sleep, phase three is also called delta sleep because the pattern on an EEG has a very specific pattern and labeled delta waves. Alpha- delta sleep means that during that very deep phase three or delta phase of sleep there's an intrusion of the alpha type waves that occur during the initial part of sleep, that so-called alpha period, the period where I've been having these vivid alpha dreams. But in these situations there's intrusion of the alpha type waves much more rapid waves in the generally slow phase three or delta sleep, and this has been linked to effects such as increased sleepiness, chronic fatigue and other psychiatric and emotional issues.
William Davis, MD:Now here's something to ponder. A condition like fibromyalgia is almost virtually synonymous with SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. For instance, Dr Mark Pimentel, one of the world's authorities on irritable bowel syndrome in SIBO at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles published his study some years back where he took about 100 people or so with fibromyalgia and about another 100 people with irritable bowel syndrome and 100 healthy controls. I may be a little bit off in the numbers, but generally that's around the right numbers. The people who tested for hydrogen gas to diagnose SIBO in the people who had irritable bowel syndrome, about 84% of the people tested positive. Of the people with fibromyalgia, 100% tested positive for SIBO hydrogen gas, sibo and tested to a severe degree. So if we accept Dr Pimentel's findings at face value, it appears that SIBO is universal in people with fibromyalgia and the SIBO is severe.
William Davis, MD:Now the next step, the next logical step in the sequence to prove that association has not yet been done, and that is to take people with fibromyalgia and somehow address their SIBO to see if their symptoms improve. And I've done that informally with people using, by the way, mostly my SIBO yogurt as well as some herbal antibiotic regimens, and you can find out about these in my Super Gut book or all those other places I mentioned, like my drdavsinfinehealth. com website as well, as I've talked about here on this Defiant Health podcast, when you eradicate SIBO, in my experience, fibromyalgia also recedes. Think about that for a moment. If you have SIBO, that is, you have the 24 feet of small intestine, the stomach, duodenum, dejunium and ilium infested by fecal microbes. These are microbes that should have remained in the colon, but because of loss of healthy species that suppress fecal microbes, these fecal microbes have been allowed to proliferate and then they ascend. They ascend into the 24 feet of small intestine. So we have a huge burden, trillions of microbes where they don't belong. The small intestine, recall, is not well equipped to deal with fecal microbes because the small intestine is very permeable, because it's more permeable for nutrients, unlike the colon, which is relatively impermeable. So when fecal microbes have proliferated and ascended into the small intestine, they die and they release their components, particularly of their cell walls, and one particular component called endotoxin is released upon their death. Trillions of microbes, 24 feet of small intestine, they die and that endotoxin penetrates the small intestine and enters the bloodstream. It first enters endotoxin, enters the bloodstream in the portal venous system, that's the venous system that drains the entire gastrointestinal tract, and then it gets through the liver into the systemic circulation. When this happens, there's about a 200 to 400% increase in the level of endotoxin in the bloodstream. We call that endotoxemia.
William Davis, MD:You know people who are septic. They have sepsis. Let's say you had a bladder infection and let's say the microbes ascended from the bladder into the ureters and kidneys and that becomes pyelonephritis or kidney infection. And then those microbes can enter the bloodstream. That's sepsis. That's when microbes enter the bloodstream and they provoke a marked inflammatory reaction that you might have heard labeled cytokine storm and that can make you very sick. In sepsis it can lead to kidney failure, adult respiratory distress syndrome where your lungs fill with fluid and you have to be put on a ventilator. It can lead to damage to your heart, and delirium. So sepsis with endotoxemia and this so-called cytokine storm can make you very sick. Well, we're not talking about that level of endotoxemia. We're talking about only a doubling or quadrupling of the level of LPS endotoxin, not the 100 fold increase that occurs in sepsis.
William Davis, MD:So when you have SIBO you also have endotoxemia. Now that can be experienced as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome or depression or anxiety, or even as other conditions like weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive impairment, Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease or autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's thyroiditis or lupus. In other words, SIBO and endotoxemia causes us to reconsider so much about what we thought we knew about health, and I'm going to propose that SIBO and endotoxemia are at play in sleep disruption, especially in those conditions like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. So the solution is not an anti-inflammatory drug that just blocks a single step at a pathway that causes pain and inflammation. Let's get at the root cause of sleep disruption and other conditions by addressing the SIBO. Another thing to know about disrupted sleep is that if we looked at people who struggle to sleep, they're having frequent awakenings, they're having a hard time falling asleep, having a hard time staying asleep or they never feel like they get truly restful sleep. If we look at the blood of those people, they have higher measures of inflammation, like C-reactive protein, interleukin 1, beta, interleukin 6 and others. But where's that inflammation coming from? These people don't have sore knees or sore hips or open wounds, right? So where's that hidden inflammation coming from? My bet is coming from SIBO and endotoxemia, and those conditions are known to drive a lot of inflammation. That's so-called cytokine storm in sepsis.
William Davis, MD:Well, if this is true, yet another way that lactobacillus reuteri might have a positive effect on sleep is because we know that reuteri can colonize the small intestine. It's kind of unique that way. Most microbes that come as probiotics or as yogurt do not colonize the small intestine. They instead pass through and colonize the colon, if they colonize anything at all. But reuteri will colonize the 24 feet of small intestine where it takes up residence and produces what are called bacteriocins. These are natural antibiotics. So reuterii produces up to four bacteriocins with labels such as reuterin and reuterocyclin. These are potent antibacterial compounds that are effective in killing or at least suppressing the fecal microbes of SIBO. So you ingest the 300 billion or so reuteri counts in our yogurt generated via extended fermentation, and it takes up residence in the small intestine and kills off a lot of those fecal microbes. Now, if you do have SIBO, i would urge you to take steps beyond just reuteri but Lactobacillus reuteri consumption or replacement, or restoration is a big first step And I think that may be another reason why there's a deepening of sleep, because we're reducing endotoxemia.
William Davis, MD:Now, before we go any further, let me take a pause for a moment to talk about the sponsors of the Defiant Health podcast. The Defiant Health podcast is sponsored by Paleo Valley, makers of delicious grass-fed beef sticks, healthy snack bars and other products. We are very picky around here and insist that any product we consider has no junk ingredients like maltodextrin, carrageenan, carboxymethylcellulose, superlose and, of course, no-edged sugars. And all Paleo Valley products contain no gluten nor grains. In fact, i find Paleo Valley products among the cleanest of any in their category and they're truly delicious.
William Davis, MD:One of the habits I urge everyone to get into is to include a fermented food product at least once, if not several times, per day in their lifestyles. Unlike nearly all other beef sticks available, the Paleo Valley grass-fed beef sticks are all naturally fermented, meaning they contain probiotic bacterial species. And now Paleo Valley is expanding their Wild Pastures program that provides 100% grass-fed, grass-finished, pastured beef and pastured chicken and pork raised without herbicides or pesticides and raised in the USA. And they've just added wild-caught seafood caught from the waters of Bristol Bay, alaska. They're now offering a 20% lifetime discount in every order for a limited time. I'll post the web address in the Defiant Health show notes. Shipping for Paleo Valley products is free for orders of $75 or more. To order, just go to paleovalleycom/DefiantHealth, no coupon code required. The 15% discount will be automatically applied.
William Davis, MD:And be sure to take a look at their other products, such as their organic super greens rich with phytonutrients, and their super food bars that come in dark chocolate chip, apple, cinnamon and lemon meringue. They're low carb, of course, with 8 grams net carbs per bar. The folks at Paleo Valley have lately been busy recently adding some interesting new products, including pasture raised, fermented pork sticks, chocolate flavored grass-fed bone broth protein, grass-fed organ complex in capsule form, pumpkin spice super food bars with grass-fed bone broth protein and new essential electrolytes in powder form to add to the potassium and magnesium intake of your lifestyle, available in orange, lemon and melon flavors. Go to paleovalley/ Defiant Health to receive your 15% discount. No discount code is required.
William Davis, MD:And I'd also like to welcome Defiant Health's newest sponsor, BiotiQuest. I've had numerous conversations with BiotiQuest founders Martha Carlin, and academic microbiologist, Dr Raul Cano. They have formulated unique synergistic probiotic products that incorporate what are called collaborative or guild effects, that is, groups of microbes that collaborate with each other via specific metabolites, potentially providing synergistic benefits. They have designed their Sugar Shift probiotic to support healthy blood sugars. Simple Slumber to support sleep. Ideal Immunity to support a healthy immune response. Heart Centered that supports several aspects of heart health and Antibiotic Antidote designed to support recovery of your gastrointestinal microbiome after a course of antibiotics. BiotiQuest probiotics are, I believe, among the most effective among all probiotic choices for specific health effects. Enter the discount code UNDOC15 for a 15% discount for Defiant Health listeners. Now let's get back to our discussion.
William Davis, MD:Lactobacillus reuteri is not the only species affects sleep. There are other species. Now if you're getting great sleep from reuteri, that's great. Just continue doing that. And if you're like me, you enjoy full nights of sleep that are uninterrupted and deep and very restorative. That is, you wake up feeling great. But if you're not getting that effect, consider adding a yogurt made with Lactobacillus casei Shirota. I'll add that to the case notes.
William Davis, MD:How to get it. You get it, by the way, from a commercial product not a very good product called Yakult Y-A-K-U-L-T. You can find it in the dairy aisle of some grocery stores, like Meiers has, i believe, Target has it and some of the big box grocery stores have it. Now, it's not a very good product because it's made in skim milk with added sugar. But that's okay, because all you want is the microbe. But it only comes with a relatively modest quantity of microbes of 6 billion. So you buy this very inexpensive drink. It's only about $4 or so for, i think, six bottles.
William Davis, MD:You just need one bottle and do the same thing that you did with lactobacillus rot, or I'm making yogurt that is at a tablespoon or so of a pre-bottic fiber like inulin. Maintain at around 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 36 hours, because the evidence shows that lactobacillus KCI shurot is has outsized benefits at a dose of about 100 billion counts, for instance, improves immunity. But we add that to our rotari and you can get very profound sleep. I actually did this. I had to stop the KCI shurot yogurt because I was sleeping 12 hours a night and wanting to sleep even more, so I stopped it. But some people combine the rotari and the KCI shurot and get very good sleep out of it.
William Davis, MD:Now try co-fermenting them. You know, the only reason to have a monoculture that has a single species being fermented at a time is if you somehow sense that you need those really high counts of, say, 300 billion to obtain some effect, whether that effect is deeper sleep or increased muscle mass or increased libido or whatever effect you're looking for. Say you co-co ferment them. You ferment the L reuteri with the L casei Shirota. You're going to get fewer right, it's just like having a garden in your backyard. If all you do in your 10 by 10 plot is plant tomatoes, at the end of the growing season you're going to have a ton of tomatoes, right. But what if you plant tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini and squash and watermelon? How many tomatoes will you have? Far fewer tomatoes. So when you co-ferment, when you grow microbes together, different species, you'll have fewer. You'll still have a lot, maybe 150 billion, something like that. So gauge the effect, see if you get the effect you want, including sleep, including increased libido, including increased muscle mass, better emotions, liking people better, liking your spouse or your partner better. We've also had some good experiences By adding another microbe or using it alone a microbe that is a close relation to Lactobacillus reuteri and that is Lactobacillus fermentum, the ME3 strain, and some people have reported having deep sleep, a successful deep sleep, with that, by fermenting that microbe, the same way, same temperature, same amount of time.
William Davis, MD:Now, if you're struggling with sleep, whether or not you're doing any of these fermented foods, consider SIBO and endotoxemia, as I've discussed in past. It is not rare. By my estimation, half the country has SIBO about 160 million people And it's easy to come to that conclusion Once you look at all the several dozen studies that ask a question like this. In condition X fill in the blank how many people have SIBO. So let's ask how many people with irritable bowel syndrome have SIBO? As we talked about in Dr Pimentel's study, 84% have SIBO, and that's 84% of 60 to 70 million people. So right there, you could have about 50 million people. Now what if we use a more conservative value of only 40%, because some studies don't show 84% but show lower proportion of people with IBS having SIBO. Let's say 40%. Well, that's 40% of 60 to 70 million. We're still talking about something like 20- some million, just from people with irritable bowel syndrome.
William Davis, MD:How about people who have fatty liver? That's about 30 to 50% of the country. So that's over 100 million right there that have SIBO. How about obese people? 50% of people who are obese prove positive for SIBO. Add on type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative disorders, fibromyalgia and numerous other conditions. Of course there's some overlap among these conditions, right, an obese type 2 diabetic with fatty liver. But despite that, you can see that we can get to very large numbers of people well over 100 million who have SIBO and thereby endotoxemia, with consequences that include disruption of sleep, as well as other health conditions, both gastrointestinal and non-gastrointestinal, such as dementia, neurodegenerative disorders, diabetes, obesity, etc. Now I urge you if you think it supplies to you, i urge you to take a look at all the other discussions I've provided on SIBO and endotoxemia.
William Davis, MD:It's not that difficult to deal with, especially since we now have what I call my SIBO yogurt. That is a combination of microbes that I believe so far anecdotal experience, but in about 40 people, the majority, about 90%, have gotten rid of their SIBO And it's simply making a yogurt once again, because we get these really high counts of microbes and you can co-ferment these three or you can ferment them separately. But it's a combination of Lactobacillus reuteri, the same strain we use for L reuteri yogurt, adding Lactobacillus gasseri, the BNR17 strain, and a strain of Bacillus coagulans, the GBI30,6086. I'll put this in show notes and it makes a delicious yogurt. By the way, the Bacillus coagulans makes the most tasty yogurt you've ever had. It almost tastes like whipped cream. So you can co-ferment these three or you can ferment them separately. I'm not really quite sure how necessary the Bacillus coagulans is. I'm having people who are just doing the gasseri and the reuteri who appear also to be getting rid of SIBO by doing this.
William Davis, MD:We consume the yogurt for four weeks and that seems to generate a big response. Don't be surprised when you first start that SIBO yogurt if you get some unpleasant feelings during the first few days, feelings such as bloating, diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, emotional effects like nightmares, and anxiety and panic attacks. This is from die-off. That is, when you send gasseri, reuteri and maybe Bacillus coagulans into the small intestine where trillions of fecal microbes are dwelling. You're killing them. Remember. Those bacteriocins get to work and kill those fecal microbes and you get a surge in endotoxemia. Not as bad as sepsis, but there's a spike in endotoxin levels in your bloodstream and they make you feel like you're sick.
William Davis, MD:You can always back down. Rather than taking a half cup of the yogurt, maybe take a quarter cup or a couple of tablespoons and build yourself up to the half cup serving over time and try and aim for at least a minimum of four weeks of doing that. Or you can always take something that binds endotoxin. A very easy and inexpensive one is activated charcoal. You can get this in capsule form like a thousand milligrams. That works very quickly. You don't want to do the charcoal chronically because it also binds nutrients, but just used when you have some unpleasant feelings. Take a capsule of activated charcoal and you'll have relief in about 15 minutes. Now one word of warning If you're using the air device, the A-I-R-E device for measuring breath hydrogen gas, one of the peculiarities of Lactobacillus reuteri is that it will take prebiotic fibers and convert to hydrogen gas.
William Davis, MD:If you're consuming the L reuteri or the SIBO yogurt that includes reuteri, you're going to test positive for hydrogen gas. It looks like you have persistent SIBO and you do not necessarily have persistent SIBO. What you have to do is because the lactobacillus reuteri is converting prebiotic fibers or sugars to hydrogen gas. You have to stop the reuteri for about two weeks, then test your breath hydrogen by the AIRE device and you can tell if you're negative or positive. If you want to learn how to use the AIRE device, i have full instructions laid out in detail in the Super Gut book, because the instructions as they come with the device as are not quite correct. If you want to use it for this application, that is, to map out where in your gastrointestinal tract microbes are living, there's a full discussion on how to interpret the values, how to change your diet in the hours preceding the test, when to get your baseline, how to consume the prebiotic fiber and then when to test and when to recognize a positive test, when to recognize a negative test All detailed in the Super Gut book.
William Davis, MD:But know that the SIBO yogurt is so benign.
William Davis, MD:What you're really doing with the SIBO yogurt is, yes, you're getting microbes at very high counts to colonize the upper GI tract, a small intestine, and produce bacteria, but you're also replacing lost keystone microbes, microbes you should have had all along. So, while you can use it, this SIBO yogurt, to get rid of SIBO, i would urge you to continue it, maybe every three days, something like that, twice a week. Three times a week, because, as you likely know, sibo loves to recur And it's looking to me like people who use the SIBO yogurt or the yogurts separately, each species separately, and do so even after a eradicated SIBO. They seem to keep recurrences from coming back, at least most of the time. So consider using this, making this part of your lifestyle forever. Essentially, now, if you learned something from this episode of the Defiant Health Podcast, i urge you to subscribe via your favorite podcast directory. Post a review, post a comment and help us build this community of like-minded people who are trying to get healthy outside of the healthcare system. Thanks for listening.
