19: Your Body Isn't Attacking Itself: The Truth About Antibodies in Crohn's and Colitis

What would it mean for you in your IBD was not actually autoimmune? Could it mean you can finally get relief? ... Or could it mean you can actually reverse the disease?

In this episode, we're talking about what I call "The IBD antiboy fallacy" - showing you why your IBD is not autoimmne, and that your body is NOT actually attacking itself.

Which means it can be reversed.


TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Antibody overview - what they are and what we see
• Primary causes of IBD and the antibodies they create
• Common causes of inflammation
• How IBD develops and progresses

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Transcript

Josh Dech:

This episode is going to change the way you see your IBD forever. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m coming in swinging hot with some truth bombs.

Your IBD may not be autoimmune.
 And just think about what that could possibly mean for you. Could it mean relief? Could it mean total reversal?

Here’s what we want to look at: there are about a dozen antibodies typically associated with Crohn’s and colitis. I’m going through nine in this episode. But here’s the thing about them—they’re associated with IBD, but it does not mean they’re going to give you IBD. In fact, these antibodies are more closely associated with things that can cause IBD, which means your body’s not attacking itself—but it’s attacking something inside your body that’s causing a problem. And your tissues are caught in the crossfire.

And I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I’m spoiling it for you. But please do tune into this episode, because we’re going to break what I call the antibody fallacy.

Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn’s and colitis are reversible.
Now, I’ve helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, and I’m here to help you do it too. Because inflammation always has a root cause—we just have to find it.

This is the Reversing Crohn’s and Colitis Naturally podcast. Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below.

I am dropping a truth bomb on you today: your Crohn’s and colitis probably is not autoimmune.
Now I’m going to show you why your doctor is totally wrong about this and of course what is really going on.

And this big fancy board you see behind me—there’s a reason for it. We’ll get there. But by the time you finish this episode, you’re finally going to know why your IBD is not autoimmune—probably.

You’re going to know why it feels like your body is attacking itself and what’s really going on, and of course what you can do about it—begin reversing this process, which is again probably not autoimmune.

Now, if you don’t know me—my name is Josh Dech. I’m an IBD specialist, medical lecturer, and physicians consultant for Crohn’s and colitis and severe IBS. And my team and I—we’ve now helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, because as it turns out, your doctor—and frankly the entire system—is wrong.

Let’s dive right into it.

I want you to consider for a moment what this would mean to you, and what it would mean to your IBD—your Crohn’s and colitis, or even severe IBS, or the condition you’re going through.

What would it mean if it was not autoimmune?

All of a sudden, it would open up these doors of hope.
You wouldn’t be in this “can’t do anything about it” situation. It wouldn’t be, “no matter what you do, you’re going to be in pain.”
It wouldn’t be this endless thing that you’re dealing with till the end of time, that you can just simply manage with drugs and hope for the best.

It would actually open up the door and say, “Wait a minute... maybe this can actually be fixed.” Just like any other common illness has a root cause, it can be fixed.

So let’s consider what would happen.

Here’s what I want to do. I want to go through this big chart in the back here that I promised you—it’s not as complicated as it looks, I promise you that.
 If you’re listening on the podcast, I’ll walk you through it—don’t worry about it.

But here’s the thing. We’re going to go through these antibodies really quick, and I’m going to talk about some of the most common causes for these antibodies.

Now, what you see on the left here—these are just the eight or nine most common antibodies that are associated with IBD. And over here, for Crohn’s, these are percentages that you’ll see oftentimes with Crohn’s—what percentage of Crohn’s patients have them. And this is for colitis.

So you can see here in Crohn’s, there’s a lot higher prevalence of antibodies—55%, 60%, 70%—some 20s and 40s.
There’s a lot more antibody activity in Crohn’s disease—which I look at as just being worsened colitis, because instead of just being your colon, it’s mouth to anus—it’s everything.

Now on the other hand, in colitis, we’re seeing one major antibody 60% to 70% of the time.
 And the rest? They’re very seldom, if ever.
 So if you have colitis, there’s a far lesser chance you have any autoimmunity at all—and that’s any antibodies whatsoever.

And if you have Crohn’s disease, there’s a medium chance—about 50% chance—there’s some antibodies.
 But just because you have antibodies does not mean it is autoimmune.

Antibodies are typically thought to say, “Well, your body’s attacking itself. This is why those antibodies exist.”
 There’s nothing you can do.

But take a look at this for a moment. On the far side here, what I’ve done is I’ve put up some of the major players that contribute to inflammatory bowel disease. Now, I’m not talking about “the cause” — if you have H. pylori, you get bowel disease. That’s not what I’m saying.

There are a lot of root causes, but think about it like your body filling up like a cup.
When that cup overflows, we have disease.

So imagine you have dysbiosis — we all do.
This is why the Western world, let’s say North America — being less than 5% of the global population — has 50% or more of the world’s cases of bowel disease.

When 5% has 50%... there’s a problem.

And so we have to look at it here — what are some of the common things that we see in our society and in IBD clients or patients who are dealing with this disease?

Number one: high stress lifestyle.
Go-go-go. News media, social media, work, finances, elections. There’s so much that goes on that causes stress.
Going to the grocery store trying to find non-toxic food to buy — these are all micro-stressors. But they don’t stop.
Even your work schedule — getting up at the crack of dawn with your alarm before the sun — is a biological stress.
There’s actually an article that classified it as biological torture.

So there is much to it.

Looking at microbes — H. pylori, parasites, candida, even E. coli, salmonella, Epstein-Barr — I should have put CMV or cytomegalovirus — we see these as big drivers of bowel disease that contribute to your cup filling up and then overflowing, leading to these problems.

We also see long-term NSAID use — we’ve seen this with Dr. Andrew Weil — he’s one of the top leading, most famous functional medicine physicians, one of the OGs — and he actually gave himself bloody bowels from using way too much ibuprofen. Prime example — because they destroy your gut and gut bacteria.

Antibiotic usage or C. diff, which many of you have had, can lead to bleeding of the bowels — which can get to a diagnosis of colitis or Crohn’s disease, right?
Certain medication use can cause these antibodies.

So everything I just listed — not only can cause IBD, but they can cause the antibodies.

Now you might be going, “Josh, but if I have the antibodies and the IBD causes, isn’t that my body attacking itself?”
 No.

If you have high stress, it can produce antibodies — just because your body’s doing something, doesn’t mean it’s attacking you.

If you have microbes — like candida, H. pylori, parasites, E. coli, salmonella, EBV, or CMV (that’s Epstein-Barr or cytomegalovirus), or many others — that you have in the way of infectious microbes, your body will be attacking them to get them out of your body, and your own tissues are simply caught in the crossfire.

Which means your body isn’t attacking itself —
Therefore, it is not “auto” — meaning “self.”
It is not autoimmune.
It is just immune.
It is just your immune response is firing.

Which means the vast majority of these— I showed you this chart last week — this one here talks about all these yellow boxes. These are the common antibodies.
Here you see — these are the same ones up top and their percentages. And then in these yellow boxes — these are some of the main root causes.

What else can cause these same antibodies?

So is your body attacking itself or not?
 We’ve already established — probably not.

But look at this —
 Mesalamine can cause anti-pancreas antibody.
Huh. Weird.
So your body is not actually attacking itself — it’s reacting to the mesalamine — which is used to treat IBD.

Antibiotics — right? We can see that causing some of these as well.
E. coli — we talked about that.
Methotrexate, Imuran — both drugs that we see used to treat IBD —
55% of Crohn’s patients have that.
What’s a common one they use in Crohn’s? Methotrexate or Imuran.

Looking at these — we can see that there’s so much more that causes it.

Let’s look at ASCA, another very common one in Crohn’s disease.
Well, guess what?
Your biologics — Infliximab, Humira — can cause this antibody.

So if you’re going in for treatment — how do you know your body is actually attacking itself?

We’re going to talk about some of the most common causes of inflammation, because we know if your body is not attacking itself, it’s attacking your microbes.

And what I’m going to do now is go through with you — in the 300+ cases my team and I have helped reverse — I’m going to show the most common causes that we see.

And these common causes I’m going to write are the same ones that can drive IBD and the same ones that can create these antibodies.
So I’m now showing you the exact crossovers of what we actually see in our clients that we’re fixing and reversing — because they’re not autoimmune — and the bowel disease condition you’re dealing with.

So the first one we’re going to talk about — bacteria.
There are some really common bacteria that we’ll see driving these problems. Now, I actually got a little list of them here that we wrote.

I’m just going to put:
 Bacteria
Yeast
I’m going to put fungi as well.
And even parasites.

I’m going to put these all on the same list. The reason I’m doing that is because they’re all microbes — and when microbes get into the body in a place they should not be, we’re having an issue.

Now last week — if you haven’t seen the episode, make sure you go back in the playlist and check for that — we talked about inherited dysbiosis.

So assuming great-great-grandma had a thousand microbes — right before pesticides and environmental toxins and chemicals were introduced into our world — up to 100,000 give or take in the last 100 years — most to our food supply.

So if great-grandma had the microbes before that, and a little bit got introduced, well guess what?
 Grandma gets 800.
 And guess what — we have more chemicals introduced — we’re into the early-mid 1900s now.
 And grandma gives your mom, say, 400 now — let’s say in the 70s.
 And then here we are — if you’re around my age, 80s–90s baby — you’re given 200 microbes.

Because there’s more chemicals and toxins killing them off.
You have inherited dysbiosis simply due to the environment, which means your defenses are low, which means the microbes — the infectious guys we don’t want in the body — get in the body, and now they start causing issues.

So some of the really common ones that we end up seeing here:

We’re going to see big overgrowths of candida.
We also see a fair bit of E. coli.
And I’m going to put salmonella.

Now these can be food poisonings you might get as a short-term, one-time thing that offsets your entire system and never recovered.
Or you took antibiotics for it, and it never recovered.
It’s a combination of a lot of things, okay?

We can also see a couple really nasty ones:
 We see some bacteria called Klebsiella.
Your doctor might even test Pseudomonas or something called Citrobacter.

I’m just putting these on the board here so you guys can really dive into these and look at them on your own. I’m not going to go into huge detail.

But common things — like even H. pylori — these are just really common microbes, either yeast or bacterium, that we see causing some of these problems leading toward IBD.

On the other hand, we also see a very common set of parasites.
So there’s some called D. fragilis — that’s Dientamoeba fragilis.
We see E. histo — or Entamoeba histolytica.

We’ll see a lot of these guys kind of coming in causing problems.
 A common one we see in adults — even babies — is Giardia.

Great example — I was talking to a woman in Trinidad — now it’s not just Third World stuff that may have these issues, we see them all over the place.

I was talking to a woman — she had two daughters who went to daycare.
 One went to daycare, within a couple of days came back, got diarrhea from another baby who had diarrhea.
 So that daughter came home — and in a couple of days, her youngest daughter then had diarrhea.
 And within a couple of months, she started with blood in the stool.
Now she’s one or two years old.

Well guess what? Giardia is a prime place to travel — causing diarrhea in babies, which gets in the air, in the bathrooms, on hands — even if you wash — it can pass from baby to baby.

We also see them in adults.

Other common ones we see — something called Blastocystis hominis.

These are some really common and really nasty microbes or parasites that’ll get into the system and your body will be reacting and fighting them off.

Now, I had a client of mine who came in — who was actually working with Curtis, one of our team leads here — and she was working with him.
She had eight parasite tests for aAnd that’s just a quick overview.

Now, some other common things we see that cause IBD — that also cause your antibodies — to further prove it’s not autoimmune.

Look at pesticides — direct or indirectly, they can cause shutdown in the liver or the pancreas, which can lead to things like anti-pancreas antibody — one of the top 9 and 10 antibodies we see with IBD.

Heavy metals — mercury, aluminum — very pervasive. Even still in the dental industry.
The dental world — we see a lot of mercury fillings, or amalgam silver fillings rather, being used — but they’re mercury-based.

When you talk on your cell phone, that actually heats up and creates mercury vapor.
Every time you brush your teeth, drink something hot, go to the dentist and drill it — that gets into the system.

And it’s a prime area to cause dysbiosis, which creates bacteria in your gut that overgrow in a bad way.
It lets parasites in.

Same with mold.

70% — there’s a big nasty number —
70% of all U.S. homes have a mold problem, and at least 44% of the population is prone to mold infections.

So if we got 70% of U.S. homes having a mold issue,
60% of all North Americans complain of having some kind of gut issue,
and 60% have a chronic disease of some kind — adults —

And they’re less than 5% of the globe, but they have 50% of the world’s population of bowel disease…

Do you think maybe that 70% number correlates nicely in there to say:
 Maybe mold is a major driver for bowel disease?
It’s something we have to look at.

We talked about bacteria — E. coli, Pseudomonas, etc. — they can cause these same antibodies.

Viral infections — enteroviruses, EBV or CMV — can drive that.

And many IBD-specific antibodies that we’re talking about here — these are the top 9 and 10 that we see that your doctor may even measure —

They specifically target microbial components — like yeast and bacteria and their byproducts.
They’re well known to do that.

So why are we saying — most of you have never even been tested for antibodies. Ever.
We’re just assuming you have this disease — therefore it’s autoimmune.

But we just showed you — it’s probably not.

So is your body actually attacking itself?
 Well… no.

Think about what happens if I step on a nail, and it goes through my foot.

What happens if I leave it in there?
It’s going to get infected.

Do I have autoimmune hand-itis?

No.
My body is attacking the nail and the microbes and things that were brought into that hand or that foot.

Therefore, I don’t have an autoimmune disease in my hand or my foot.
 I have an immune response.

If you have parasites or yeast or fungi or microbes inside of your gut and your body is attacking them —
Do you automatically have an autoimmune condition?

Or do you have inflammation in the area, and your body is attacking something else, and your tissues are simply caught in the crossfire?

If you can understand that and maintain that position — that “wait a minute... it’s probably not actually autoimmune,”
Then suddenly you realize that there’s much more to this picture — that much more can be done.

ll these guys — all the different parasites.
 In fact, there’s about 1,400 different types of parasites that can affect humans.

She had eight parasite tests done over about five years — all negative.

And guess what? When she was through the program —
 She’s pooping out three and four-foot worms — like anacondas of the colon.

So they’re in there, even though you may not test.
They’re a very common cause, and they can cause these antibodies that we were just talking about.

So just because your doctor says they’re not there — says they don’t exist — doesn’t mean they aren’t.

And that’s just a quick overview.

Now, some other common things we see that cause IBD — that also cause your antibodies — to further prove it’s not autoimmune.

Look at pesticides — direct or indirectly, they can cause shutdown in the liver or the pancreas, which can lead to things like anti-pancreas antibody — one of the top 9 and 10 antibodies we see with IBD.

Heavy metals — mercury, aluminum — very pervasive. Even still in the dental industry.
The dental world — we see a lot of mercury fillings, or amalgam silver fillings rather, being used — but they’re mercury-based.

When you talk on your cell phone, that actually heats up and creates mercury vapor.
Every time you brush your teeth, drink something hot, go to the dentist and drill it — that gets into the system.

And it’s a prime area to cause dysbiosis, which creates bacteria in your gut that overgrow in a bad way.
It lets parasites in.

Same with mold.

70% — there’s a big nasty number —
70% of all U.S. homes have a mold problem, and at least 44% of the population is prone to mold infections.

So if we got 70% of U.S. homes having a mold issue,
60% of all North Americans complain of having some kind of gut issue,
and 60% have a chronic disease of some kind — adults —

And they’re less than 5% of the globe, but they have 50% of the world’s population of bowel disease…

Do you think maybe that 70% number correlates nicely in there to say:
 Maybe mold is a major driver for bowel disease?
It’s something we have to look at.

We talked about bacteria — E. coli, Pseudomonas, etc. — they can cause these same antibodies.

Viral infections — enteroviruses, EBV or CMV — can drive that.

And many IBD-specific antibodies that we’re talking about here — these are the top 9 and 10 that we see that your doctor may even measure —

They specifically target microbial components — like yeast and bacteria and their byproducts.
They’re well known to do that.

So why are we saying — most of you have never even been tested for antibodies. Ever.
We’re just assuming you have this disease — therefore it’s autoimmune.

But we just showed you — it’s probably not.

So is your body actually attacking itself?
 Well… no.

Think about what happens if I step on a nail, and it goes through my foot.

What happens if I leave it in there?
It’s going to get infected.

Do I have autoimmune hand-itis?

No.
My body is attacking the nail and the microbes and things that were brought into that hand or that foot.

Therefore, I don’t have an autoimmune disease in my hand or my foot.
 I have an immune response.

If you have parasites or yeast or fungi or microbes inside of your gut and your body is attacking them —
Do you automatically have an autoimmune condition?

Or do you have inflammation in the area, and your body is attacking something else, and your tissues are simply caught in the crossfire?

If you can understand that and maintain that position — that “wait a minute... it’s probably not actually autoimmune,”
Then suddenly you realize that there’s much more to this picture — that much more can be done.

So let’s talk about how this creates this disease process really quick.

Now if you’re here listening on the live and you’re going, “Oh Josh… this makes sense. Nobody’s ever told me this before.”
 The most common thing we see is like — it’s been 15 minutes — most common thing I hear is that,
 “You’ve told me more in 15 minutes than my doctor told me in 15 years.”

If you’re in that situation, check the links below.
 If you want to get a hand on how to do this and how to go through the gut health solution with us — we can get you some help.
There’s links below — you can simply schedule in a call with me and my team.

So let’s talk about this.
 I want to talk about how this drives disease.
 All the things that we’ve talked about so far — all of the toxins, the microbes, the parasites, bacteria, the yeast and fungus — let’s talk about this.

They create leaky gut.
We’ve talked about leaky gut before.

If you’re new here, I’m going to go over it with you.

Picture your cells sort of held together like a quilt — like a stitched-together quilt, right?
All your little cells are held together with these stitches called tight junctions. They hold it together.

What happens when the stitches in a quilt start to tear?
 Well, they spread apart and your quilt starts to come apart.

Well, if these are cells in your intestines, and normally you eat things that go from the inside of your intestines, and they want to get to your bloodstream, right?
What they’re going to do is they’re going to go from the gut — they’re going to pass through and they go,
Check or balance. Yes or no? You’re coming through, you’re not.
And they pass it into your blood or your lymphatic system, and then it circulates around the body.

But what happens when you have leaks in the gut?
Well, they don’t go through the checks and balances — pass or not.
They actually just sneak through and go — whether your body wants them to or not — which gets into your blood, and now you have all these bad guys floating around the body, and it triggers an immune response.

And it fills your cup.
Your body becomes more inflamed.
Your immune system becomes overstressed and overreactive, which can lead to more antibody production.

There’s also oxidative stress.
If you’re familiar with antioxidants, they help with that.
Oxidative stress — it’s on a cellular level, it has to do with electrons and kind of punching holes through stuff.

Nutrient deficiencies — really the only two ways we get sick — the only, only reasons — is either:

Deficiencies
...or
Toxicities

Oops, that’s not even — no, I’m just — it’s going to say “deficiencies”, I’m a bad speller.

So it’s either going to be deficiencies, or it’s going to be toxicities.

So we are either low on nutrients, or we are toxic because something’s causing a problem.

Those toxins might be microbes passing through and creating problems.
It might be pesticides, it might be heavy metals, it might be mold,
It might be medications getting into the system and causing problems,
Or your body is deficient in vital nutrients that it needs to rebuild itself.

It’s either deficiencies or toxicities.
And these are the only two reasons we get sick.

And so if your body is under a lot of stress, it can create what’s called mitochondrial dysfunction.
As well — on a cellular level — your body can’t help itself.
It can’t create the energy, it can’t detoxify and clean out the cells that are all now getting leaks in them and causing damage.

And it’s going to fill up your detox and drainage systems, so your body’s going to be junked up.

So you can’t actually get rid of the garbage.

Detoxing is collecting the trash.
Drainage is bringing it out to the curb.

If you are not draining, you’re not actually getting anything anywhere.
It’s just storing inside your tissues, leading to more toxicity.

So here’s what happens:
 You get this leaky gut — let’s use your body, right? It’s a cup.
And so you get leaky gut — that adds toxins into the body — and you start to fill up.

You get pesticide exposure.
 Mold exposure.
You get parasites, microbes, medication,
And your cup starts to fill.

Add stress, etc.
Guess what? Now you’ve overflowed.

And now we have disease.
And this is how your body and your immune system begin to overreact —
And this leads to antibody production.

But just because you’re toxic doesn’t mean your body’s attacking itself.
 It could just be creating antibodies or immune reactions all over the body at the same time,
That lead to antibody production —
Perhaps from other reasons —
Not your body attacking itself.

In fact, we established right off the get-go that there is a 50% chance, give or take, with Crohn’s disease, that you have any antibodies at all.
60–70% chance you have them if you have Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis — there’s only one of them in that same antibody.

I even got it here — medication, stress, bacteria, inflammation, other diseases — can cause those same antibodies.

So it’s more likely you are not autoimmune.
Above all else.

Far beyond it being a regular inflammatory condition — which means:

More can be done.
And you’re not stuck with this.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

And so here’s sort of how this happens.

Let’s assume you’re healthy.
So the last one I want to get you — I want you to really understand this.

Let’s go through my Autoimmune — or my IBD — Ladder, we’re going to call it, okay?

You got four rungs of the ladder — we’re going to do some zigzag here.
You start here, and you have a healthy gut. No problems.

What happens?
 A little microbe gets in.
Some people jump rungs, some people skip ahead or go faster, but this is how things progress.

You’re healthy. Got a healthy gut, healthy body.
 Something comes in — one of the toxins: E. coli, parasites, C. diff, heavy metals, pesticides, etc. — they get into the body.

And now you’ve got IBS.
Suddenly you’ve got this syndrome — your gut’s a little bit wonky. Could last a couple of days, weeks, months, or even years — till it progresses to the next ladder.

What happens then?
 Well now you jump up.
 You go from IBS, and your body progresses till you get IBD.

Now you’re in the IBD category.
 Well it looks like one of two things — it’s either colitis or ulcerative colitis, or it’s Crohn’s.

Now, colitis is just the “C.”
 And Crohn’s is everything — mouth to anus.

So I say one is worse than the other, but you can have these long before antibodies actually show up.

But then let’s assume antibodies do show up.
Now you have autoimmune-low, or call it autoimmune-minor —
And autoimmune-major.

You can have really heavy antibodies and really heavy autoimmune reactions and multiple autoimmune reactions,
Or very small, just starting out in the autoimmune space.

And even then — that can be reversed all the way back down the ladder.

We’ve even seen conditions where full, heavy autoimmune diseases — like several people get three, four, five, seven, ten autoimmune diseases out of the hundred or so we can get as humans —
And they can reverse all the way back down. It’s happened before.

An autoimmune condition is not a death sentence.

And so — what am I saying in all of this?

Number one:
 Your IBD is probably not actually autoimmune.

There is a far better chance that it is not autoimmune than it actually is.

Second to that — if it is truly autoimmune,
There’s still a chance for reversal.

It’s not this lifelong, “nothing you can do about it” condition.
It’s not desolate.
So much more can be done — and it’s very, very easy oftentimes to do.

And the way we do that is we have to get to your root cause — figure out:

• What are the things?
• What are the infectious microbes?
• The toxicities?
• What is filling your glass?

If we can do that, and remove them in the right way —
 We can promote heavy drainage and start on the Five Rs of Reversal:

The first being: Remove.
Remove the problem.
Remove the microbes.
Remove the toxins.
Remove whatever is causing your body to react.

There’s a very simple way to do that.

Me and my team — we’re going to reach out.
 We’ll have a conversation.
 I’ll pop on a call with you this week, next week — whenever we have time. I know we got a bit of a waitlist now.

But we’ll have a conversation and talk about the Gut Health Solution —
What is it?
What does it look like?
How does it work?
What are your root causes?
How can this actually be reversed?

Because the truth is — it can be.
You don’t have to be stuck with it.
And your doctor is wrong there.

The reason?
 We’re now teaching them this stuff.

We’re teaching doctors all over the country, all over North America now — some in Europe —
That there’s a different way to see IBD.
And so much more can be done.

The only reason you’re inflamed is because your body is trying to heal you.
We just have to ask: Heal you from what?

So let me go through my questions here — glad you guys are here.

So Amar asks: In simple terms, what is an antibody?

An antibody is something your body creates to attack something deliberately.
So you may see this in the way of your body creating antibodies to things like Humira or Entyvio — because they’re biological substances —
Your body creates a defense to it.
Says, “You are unique. I’m going to create this very unique response to this one thing.”

We can see it in, say, your own body.
 You might have like anti-pancreas antibodies — one of the top antibodies we see in Crohn’s, colitis.

Well maybe your body then has created an antibody to attack your own pancreas — or something within your pancreas that it’s trying to get to.
It’s just something specifically made to attack something very specific.

Teddy actually answered this one really elegantly:
Antibodies — a protein produced by the body’s immune system when it detects harmful substances called antigens.
That’s exactly it.

It’s kind of like solutes and solvents — there’s always a light or a dark, a plus and a minus.
 Your body goes, “We’re going to make something very specific to that specific problem.”
And that’s called an antigen.

Thank you, Teddy.

Teddy asks: What do you think about Biomel?

Uh, elaborate on that one for me, Teddy. I’m not super— let me see. Biomel, let me look it up... the health drink?

Hard to say.
 So when we’re talking about very specific products, a lot of them — there’s so much research that goes into a product before they can be considered food.

But the FDA has a lot of laxity around what they do.
There’s very little regulation for a Food and Drug Administration that’s supposed to regulate.

So here’s the thing —
 You could be adding antibodies or probiotics into your system — it may or may not be helping.

Think for example — if you’ve got—
 Let’s talk about probiotics like lactobacillus — there’s a lot of lactobacillus strains.
Couple hundred lactobacillus and bifido strains or genus that we’ll actually use in the case of probiotic supplementation.

But consider someone with parasites, for example.
The immune pathways that are histamine-related immune pathways —
You know those from swelling of the throat, rashes, hives — those pathways are going to be lit up.

Now there are certain probiotics that are histamine dominant —
They’re very high in histamines, which can elevate those responses — being a problem for you.

If you’ve got a lot of microbes — say a SIBO condition (that’s small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) —
There’s a lot of bacteria overgrowing, causing a problem.

Sometimes, adding more bacteria to that same area can cause more of a problem.

If you have an overgrowth of something, and you’re adding in — you’re not actually helping.

So probiotics are something I will use sparingly, and not as commonly as I think a lot of people think they are in the gut space.

Probiotics are not a magic cure by any means.
They can elicit some responses — a lot of them come in, come out, they die off —
They’re not this cure-all magic thing.

But your gut microbes are extraordinarily important.

The question is:
 Why are they dying?
What else has come in when your defenses were down,
When you went from a thousand microbes from great-great-grandmother to 200 now where you are —
What else has filled that space of the 800?

What other toxins have come in to fill that space your microbes usually would have crowded out?

And so — probiotics, like I said — I’m really hit or miss.
 I can’t say they’re good or bad — but everyone’s going to be different.

That’s all we got for you guys for tonight.
 Thanks so much for coming.
 We’re going to see you next time.

The most common thing I hear from listeners like you is that they learned more in this 20-minute episode than they did from their doctors in 20 years.
Now that this information is starting to click, and it’s really making sense to you —
Feel free to check the show notes below this episode.

There’s tons of information.
 You can catch the video version of these episodes on YouTube.
You can catch us live in our Facebook group and join that — totally free.

And of course, you can always reach out to me and my team,
And talk about how it is that we can help you reverse your IBD.

That information is available inside the show notes below.
 Looking forward to seeing you on the next episode.