20: What You Should Eat for IBD (Crohn's + Colitis)

What should you eat for your IBD, and why does your doctor think food doesn't matter?

This episode will show you what foods are best for IBD (in general) and how to find foods that are best for YOUR Crohn's and colitis.



TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Why your doctor thinks food doesn't matter
• why this is TOTALLY crazy
• How poor nutrition education in medical school actually is
• Which oods are best for IBD (general)
• Why junk foods often feel safe 
• Which foods are goof for YOUR IBD
• Why some foods are good for some people but bad for you
• Why does the carnivore diet work so well?

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Transcript

Josh Dech:
Hey I know you are stressed about figuring out food. There are certain foods you eat that hurt your gut. There are certain foods you eat that feel good that shouldn't. Maybe it's junk food, maybe it's fast food or fried foods or something from a bag that you know isn't good for you, but for some reason it feels good on your gut.

And so it sort of creates this big major ball—like a ball of yarn—just of confusion around what's good for you, what's bad for you, what should you be eating, what shouldn't you, what's going to help or harm your IBD.

And if whole foods are hurting you, why should you be eating them? And this is what we're talking about today. We're going to be going through all the things you need to know about food. The things that you need to know about what you should be eating for your IBD.

Because here’s the thing—you shouldn’t be eating junk, but if whole foods are hurting you, we want to know why. We're going to be talking about that too here on this episode of Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally.

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.

The craziest thing I’ve ever heard is that most GI doctors will tell you to eat whatever you want. Food doesn’t impact your gut health. What we put in our gut doesn’t affect our gut. This is—this is crazy.

And this is what they say to patients. This is what they probably told you. And by the time you're watching this video, you’re going to know what foods are good or bad for IBD, which ones are good or bad for your IBD, why what your doctor said is crazy wrong, and how much food really impacts your gut.

And of course—how you can go back to eating normally again.

Now if you don’t know me, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, medical lecturer and physician’s consultant for Crohn's, colitis and IBS. And my team and I have helped reverse almost 300+ cases now of IBD.

Because the truth is, it’s not this unfixable condition. And we've proven that hundreds of times already. And I’m here to give you the information today that you need to start reversing yours.

And today’s conversation is about the role and relevance of food. What’s good and bad for you. What’s good and bad for IBD. Why your doctor is crazy wrong. And of course, how to eat normally again.

Now the first thing I want to talk about is why your doctor says food doesn’t matter.

Here’s the thing. Number one, they say about food that it cannot create disease. Food can't create IBD. Well, first of all, that’s wrong—but that’s their ideology.

Food can't create IBD, it can’t create bowel disease, which means they go, “Food doesn’t matter.” And if you honestly believe food can't create disease, therefore food doesn’t matter, we say food can’t fix it. Therefore, eat whatever you want.

They go a bit too far with that, in my opinion.

We say okay, food doesn’t create disease—that’s wrong. I have seen it create IBD. Absolutely it can create bowel disease.

But number two, they say if it can't create it, therefore it can't fix it. Therefore, food doesn’t matter. And they take it way too far saying therefore eat whatever you want.

This is nuts.

The problem is—it’s like saying the gasoline or the fuel type you put in your car doesn’t affect your car. What goes into your gut directly affects your gut for a number of different reasons.

Not only the lack of nutrients, the carbs, the sugars, what they’re feeding, what they’re also killing—the microbes that are coming in, the microbes that are being fed, the ones that are dying, the ones that are overgrowing because of your diet—it all matters and it all makes a difference.

And so we can get into this on a deeper level later. We’re going to touch on some of these foods, what they’re feeding, what they’re not.

But I want to start with a really great quote. This one is from Dr. Mark Hyman. He says:

“The food industry doesn’t really pay attention to health. And the health industry doesn’t really pay attention to food.”

And this is the reality of what we’re in.

When the food industry kind of just makes things manufactured—to be addictive, to be delicious, to be more edible, to make you want to crave more, to make more money—they’re looking at the dollars, not the quality of the food or its nutritional value going into your body or what’s available to you in your body.

And then the health industry tells you eat whatever you want, food doesn’t matter. And so now we have this conflicting bit of information where you’re getting sick and no one’s talking about what’s making you sick.

And we have to consider these as options.

 And so I want to tell you quickly before we get into what foods are going to be good or bad for you in your IBD, I want to talk about a little bit of information around med school. Give me 30 seconds here.

There’s about four years of medical school training, right? Takes about 7,000 hours, give or take—six to 7,000 hours of medical school. So this is what we’re going to say. Four years equals about 7,000 hours of medical school training. This is just med school.

And then there’s another three to seven years of residency to go through before you can specialize and begin practicing. So you get your doctor in four, begin practicing, get into residency just to basically be a licensed physician to work with patients. It takes another three to seven years. So we’re talking another 9,000 to 28,000 hours of time, give or take.

So we’re about 16 to 35,000 hours total that it takes to become a doctor. Do you know how much they actually study food and nutrition?

20 hours.

20 hours is all they get. This is anywhere from 0.6 to—what was it? I believe that’s what I wrote down—0.13. I almost had it. So anywhere from 0.6 to 0.13% of their time is spent on food. 20 hours out of up to 35,000 hours.

That’s all they get on food and nutrition—whole foods, bad foods, whatever—as long as you’re getting your nutrients. It’s crazy. And this is why people are so sick.

And so here’s the thing we have to know. If this is the information that we’re getting, other medical schools in other countries talk about food and nutrition and exercise and the very fundamental basics that make human beings healthy and allow them to thrive. That’s standard practice. But we’re getting over here 6 to 0.13%—20 out of up to 35,000 hours—are dedicated to nutrition.

Here’s what we need to know is wrong with this. And let’s just go with this as a quick basis.

66% of all US adults—66%—take at least one or more prescription medication.

66% take one or more medications. Over 50% take two or more.

So we’re two-thirds taking one or more, half or more taking two or more prescription medications. 25% of all US adults take four or more regular medications.

And this equates to a total of 60% having some kind of chronic disease, at least one or more.

40% of US adults have two or more chronic diseases.

And get this—15 to 20% have some kind of autoimmune disease or prognosis coming up.

This is the state of it when doctors only get 20 hours of nutrition education in three to seven years—well, I should say seven to fifteen years, really—depending on what it is they’re doing.

20 hours. And this is why we’re so bloody sick.

In fact, 93% of the leading causes of death—14 out of 15, per the CDC—these are all diseases like heart disease, kidney, liver, strokes, cancers, etc.—are all connected to gut health and nutrition.

The 15th cause is accidents or homicide or self-harm.

So everything that’s killing us can be managed.

And these are the disease stats. It’s—it’s astonishing to look at. When we put it in this perspective, we go, wait a minute. Food matters.

This brings us back to our question—which foods are good for IBD?

Which foods are going to be good for IBD?

Now I feel like I’ve teed this one up pretty good. Let me know in the comments what you think the best foods are for IBD. I just want to hear it from you. What do you feel are the best, based on what you eat, based on what you tried, based on what makes you feel good or bad? What foods are the best for IBD?

Let me know below. I’m going to put it up here. I’m going to cover everything while I do this. There. Covered like a gargoyle.

As expected—whole foods.

Now some of you are calling me crazy right now. Some of you are saying, “No, no, no. Whole foods make me hurt.” We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about why.
I want to talk about what foods are good, what foods are bad.

The good foods are whole foods.

These disease stats I just gave you—where 66% take one or more medications, 50% take two, 25% take four or more prescription meds, 60% of adults have one or more chronic disease, 40% have two, and 15 to 20% suffer from unspecified or specified autoimmune conditions—because most of what they're eating, about 80%—60 to 80%, depends who you ask—are not whole foods.

So if 97% of the diseases we have today didn’t exist 100 years ago, guess what didn’t exist 100 years ago? Well, 97% of the foods we consume today.

And so I'm going to tell you—whole foods unquestionably are the best foods for IBD.

I’m going to dive into this because there’s some of you going, “No, whole foods hurt my body. Whole foods cause me pain or bleeding or cramping or something.” We’re going to dive into why that is.

And so here’s the thing.

Bad foods? Everything else. Anything that comes in a package, a box, a machine, a microwave, a drive-thru, from a freezer, a bag—any of those things.

Even though they sit well with you, they are not helping you. And I’ll tell you why.

We’re so focused on managing symptoms. We’re so focused on going, “As long as I’m not in pain, I’m good.” And to a degree that’s true, because pain is a sign of disease process.

On the other hand, we start looking at what foods are actually driving the disease—it’s those ones.

So why don’t they hurt?

Why don’t some of these other foods hurt?

Let’s talk about something called—let’s just erase half those letters—the white diet.

This is a very common diet that dietitians from the hospital or even doctors will recommend. The white diet.

Why does this work? It’s white bread, white pasta, white rice, white foods, white cereals, Corn Flakes—it’s garbage food.

So why does it work so well for IBD?

Well think about it. If you have a sprained ankle, and I tell you to carry a backpack and walk up a flight of stairs, it’s going to hurt.

The more weight I put in that backpack, the more your ankle’s going to hurt. You are asking inflamed tissue to perform some kind of mechanical action or function, using or putting weight or strain on that inflamed tissue—it’s going to hurt.

So the more strain you put on it with more whole foods talk—let’s talk like beef jerky, raw broccoli—you’re going to have some pain. Because you have inflamed tissue that is asked to do mechanical work to break down these things, which is going to lead to problems.

On top of that, some of these fibers will feed nasty organisms, which produce bad byproducts contributing to inflammation.

And so the white diet works so well because, guess what? We do not ask your inflamed tissue to do any work. It’s an empty backpack.

Most of that food—white bread, starches, sugars, white potatoes, white rice—it breaks down. Most of it’s going to break down in your mouth before it even gets to your stomach, let alone the rest of your intestines. So there’s no mechanical work to be done.

The amylase, this digestive enzyme in your mouth, breaks down those starches and sugars first. So by the time they get there, it’s—

You can try this. You can chew white rice or a white cracker or white bread—chew it about 60 seconds in, you're going to taste—it turns sweet. Because it's breaking down those carbohydrates into smaller forms, which are sugars.

And so we don’t taste them—or we don’t need to break them down, we just do it all in our mouth. And that's that taste you're tasting.

This is why these garbage diets work so well—because you're not putting strain on inflamed tissue. You're not putting weight in the backpack to walk up the stairs.

But—you have to get up the stairs. That’s just what your body’s going to do.

And so what can we do about this?

The question is really—it's how much tolerance can we take with our nasty foods?

But the question is—what do we do if these nasty foods, these processed and fake foods that really can’t be broken down in your body, don’t hurt you?

How do we get to good quality foods?
We have to look at what we’re consuming. Number one—this is where it’s going to go into what foods are good or bad for IBD.

But here’s what we need to know about food.

So we can go soft, mushy, cooked, skinned, very simple, even elemental supplementary support—good stuff, it’s expensive.

I avoid brands like Nestlé like the plague—that’s filled with a lot of garbage—but here’s the thing.

We talk about severity—so based on the severity, that’s your tolerance. Based on the injury to the ankle is how much weight you can carry without it getting worse or causing a lot of pain.

We look at the same with severity. The longer it’s been going on, the more inflamed, the more flares you get, the longer the flares last, the more symptoms you have—the more severe it is.

So go as gentle as you need to. What you feed a baby—feed you.

But let’s talk about what’s good for your IBD specifically.

We have to know the root cause.

So look at this, for example. I’ll talk from client examples—even myself.

There was a sale on apples a little while—couple years now anyway—there was a sale on apples at the farmer’s market down the road. Organic apples. I was like, “I’m up for some apples!”

Five bucks for a bag of organic apples. They were tasty. I was eating easily—probably 12 apples a day.

Well, here’s what I found out.

After about one week, I started to feel a little bit of bloat, a little bit of heaviness in my belly.

By about two weeks, I was constipated. I was needing supplemental support to get my bowels moving—they weren’t able to empty on their own. And I was having to strain to have bowel movements.

So I went, sat on the toilet—about two weeks in—probably 150 apples at this point. Two weeks in, I’m straining and I’m pushing, and guess what happens?

I got blood in my stool.

Why?

Fiber. Especially apple pectin—it’s a water-soluble, like a spongy watery fiber—really beneficial for us most of the time, right?

Slippery elm, apples, bananas, fruits, peaches—these types of things can be really good for your gut.

On the other hand, they were bad for my gut.

Why?

Well guess what I happen to have?
 I had parasites.

One of the primary drivers we see driving bowel disease today is parasites.

I had these 12-inch worms coming out.

Well, parasites happen to feed—the ones that I had—happen to love apple pectin, the fiber in apples.

So I gave them a super dose of food, they produced a super dose of parasite poop, which caused a super dose of inflammation, which led to bleeding in the bowel and constipation.

That make sense?

On the other hand, there are some people who might eat fiber and get constipated like I did in this case.

There are other types of fiber that would have run through me.

Caffeine ran through me at the time. There was a time my gut was so bad, I was having 15 bowel movements a day. I’ve had blood in the stool, I’ve had the mucus, I’ve had 10-minute transit times—you eat, and it’s gone.

I’ve been there.

And at different times, different foods were good or bad for me.

Another one that was really bad for me was sugar and heavy doses of carbs or breads.

And I say “most people think breads” when we say carbs. If you’re thinking breads—I mean even potatoes and vegetable carbs—any kind of carb.

Because not only did I have parasites, I also had candida, which thrived, right?

You as an organism—you eat and you poop.

Guess what else does?

Every organism inside your body.
Mine were parasites and candida.
They ate—and they pooped.

They ate my food that I fed them and pooped out toxins instead of good benefits, leading to inflammation, which led to high transit times, and/or constipation, or blood and mucus.

The good foods are whole foods, unquestionably.
But now we have to ask, which foods are good for you? Which foods are good for your IBD?

There’s two ways we’re going to do this.

The first one is going to be strictly based on tolerance. You know when you eat it—how it feels. If it hurts you, it’s bad for you right now. It’s not bad for you always. It’s not bad for you inherently. It’s just bad right now.

Carrying weight in a backpack and walking upstairs is great exercise—unless your ankle’s broken. Then it’s a really bad and really dumb thing to do, frankly. You’re going to make it worse.

And so if you’re eating foods to tolerance—ones that you can tolerate—but tolerance is:

One, can you eat it?
 Two, is it a whole food?

Is it something that grew on the ground, in a tree, in a bush, in the land, in the sea—one of those things? I often say God forbid it crawls—if that’s what you like to eat—but these are the things we have to look at.

Can you tolerate it? Is it whole? Those are the first two steps to look at.

But here’s what else we can do.

We can take these whole foods, and we can break them down through a very simple process of cooking or, as many of you know, peeling.

Sometimes—some of you can eat apples or berries, but you can’t eat the skins.

Some of you can eat vegetables, but they have to be cooked—because you’re taking the load down on the body.

It’s a lot harder for you to break down a raw potato than it is a cooked potato, than it is a chewed potato that’s been chewed for 60+ seconds in your mouth.

The more breakdown we put before it hits the body, the easier it’s going to be to digest, the less pain you’re going to have.

So—two checks:

One, can you tolerate it?
Two, is it whole?
And three—what form can you put those whole foods in to make them digestible to you?

Now someone will say—well, many of you will probably hear this and say garlic or onions are really bad, they hurt my gut. Other people—they feel great.

Some people will avoid fiber like the plague. They do really well on carnivore or a keto diet or something of the sort. Others can eat as much fiber as they want—they feel amazing.

I’ve had clients on both ends of the spectrum.

So here’s what we need to know: what foods are good or bad for you are based on what is causing your IBD in part, and of course, how much damage is done.

So we’re going to say:

Number one, I’m just going to put severity of the condition.
Number two is going to be the cause, or primarily the root cause.

If we can understand these two things, this will give us what is good for you and your IBD.

So think about this as you’re watching or listening—if you’re on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, podcast, wherever you are—think about this right now.

Let me know in the chat if you haven’t yet—what foods are good or bad for you? I want to hear from you. Drop it in the comments.

But here’s the thing. If you have a very severe condition, you are probably going to benefit extremely well from things that are soft, things that are mushy, things that are cooked, things that are skinned, and things that are simple.

So we’re going to say few ingredients.

The fewer you have, the easier it’s going to be to break down, the less work is required from your body—but you can still eat whole foods.

Maybe—it’s—some of you might be grossed out—but I’ve made meat purée. Soups are actually delicious.

You can cook the meat, purée it up into like a blender with water till it’s nothing but goo. It almost makes like a cream soup. That way, you don’t have to hardly break anything down.

You can even take a digestive enzyme with it and you can still absorb the nutrients.

We’ve had really, really severe cases where people have had to go on the elemental diet, which is just already the broken-down food components—you simply have to absorb them.
 
And so if you’re experiencing this—I’ve had clients.

Karen is a great one. She talks about this all the time.

She’s eating bags and bags of nuts and seeds. It feels amazing.

But—you may not be able to eat nuts or seeds. They might cause blood, bloating, or exorbitant amounts of pain. I’ve seen that too.

So why?

Based on what is driving your disease will change what you can eat.

This is even part of what we utilize to help us find the root cause of your disease and what’s driving your IBD. It’s what foods are causing you problems, which ones are good, which ones are bad, which ones are tolerated, which ones are not.

This is part of a bigger puzzle and a bigger picture.

And so, for example—I did really well on carnivore. Still do.

But why is carnivore so good?

If you’ve got parasites or candida, which will eat your fibers and carbs—I almost said farbs or farts—if they will eat your fibers and your carbs and sugars and alcohols and grains, well, if you go carnivore, you starve them out.

This is why we can feel better or be fixed—because the symptoms go away, because you starve the microbes into remission or into this state of dormancy.

So they’re no longer pooping out bad things, you’re no longer inflaming, and not reacting.

Whoopee—you solved the problem temporarily.

Because a lot of these will go dormant.

So we still have to get the microbes out of the body.

And this is how we go back to eating normally.

If you’re feeding bad microbes that are producing bad byproducts based on the foods you’re eating—whole foods or junk foods—junk foods will contribute more in the long run, so it makes a worse prognosis for your disease recovery.

But on the other hand, if you’re eating foods that are feeding microbes, they produce bad things, leading to inflammation, leading to worsened symptoms—this is why reducing or eliminating foods can help, on top of the physical mechanical tolerance level based on things like a broken ankle.

And so going carnivore, for example, can be really good for some people because they’re starving their microbes, and those bad guys aren’t producing more junk—therefore, they feel better for now.

But—we still have to get rid of the microbes.

But this is the process of: what is good for you, and how do we actually get back to eating normally again?

Based on what we find is the root cause—whether it’s mold, or fungus, or E. coli, or a virus, or some kind of inflammatory process, or a parasite.

Based on what’s causing it, we have to remove it.

If we can remove it, we stop feeding it, we can go back to eating normally.

So we have to go through a root cause approach.

If this is making sense for the first time—your doctor has told you food doesn’t matter, eat whatever you want, makes no difference to your health, there’s no way to fix this, there’s no root cause of this disease—

Well, look at the diseases we have in North America.
Look at the foods we’re eating in North America.
Look at gut disease.

North America is less than 5% of the global population, but they have 50% of the world’s cases of IBD—Crohn’s and colitis.

That’s not genetic.
We’ve seen cases go from about 15 in 100,000 in 1950 to about—or in the 70s it was about 45 per 100,000, to the 90s where it’s upwards of 200 or so, to today where it’s 463.

There has been a 3,000% increase in bowel disease in the last 75 years.

Guess what’s changed in the last 75 years?

Our food—which lets in nasty microbes, which cause more problems.

So if we want to get back to the root, we want to get back to normal, there’s a simple way to do that.

We have all this information available through YouTube, Facebook, podcast, the works.

But if you want help—you want hands-on help to work with me and my team directly—there’s a very simple way to do that.

If you’re listening on the podcast or you’re watching on YouTube, there’s a very simple way to get help.

All you’ve got to do is check the link below that says “Work With My Team.”

And you just click the link, fill out a quick questionnaire, and book a call.

We’re going to talk to you about the Gut Health Solution—the program that we use to reverse the 300+ cases.

It can be done.

Your doctor just hasn’t been given the tools.

They’ve been given 0.6 to 0.13% of the tools—20 hours out of 35,000 hours they’ve been given. It’s crazy.

So—there’s more out there. I promise you that.

So I’m going to take a turn right now to the questions and see what we got available for us here.

This is a great time to put your questions in, because there is so much that we can answer.

We do these lives for you so that we can help you with the information you want to hear.

We pick the topics that you’re asking us about.

So this is a great time to answer these questions—not just talking at you what I think you should know.

Let me see, just scrolling… a lot of great—lot of comments in here about what is and isn’t working—oatmeal, fibers, chicken, veg—all kinds of good stuff in here.

Let’s see what we got for questions.

Jared asks:
“What was your diagnosis? Crohn’s or colitis?”

Jared, I never got a diagnosis.

I was officially diagnosed at age probably 13 with IBS.

And here’s what’s interesting—17% of all IBD diagnoses end up having Crohn’s or colitis.

But 70% of all Americans complain of some kind of gut issue not yet diagnosed.

And so I never got a formal diagnosis of Crohn’s or colitis.

Had I gotten a scope when I was really inflamed and bleeding, I probably would have had colitis.

But I never got my formal diagnosis.

But here’s the good news—you don’t really need one.

Because what happens—wherever you are on the spectrum, it doesn’t matter if you have a little gut issue or a big gut issue, it doesn’t matter.

Because here’s what happens:
 We go from a healthy gut to something like IBS—it’s kind of a spectrum.

It’s wear and tear—like wearing a pair of shoes without socks.

So you go from a good healthy gut to something that develops like IBS, which ends up going to something like colitis, which can get worse and go to Crohn’s.

And then after all this, it can become autoimmune.

Now some people might jump around—I’ve done a video recently proving that it’s not actually autoimmune, it’s not unknown, and it’s not just genetic—we’ve gone through that and torn through that.

I have a video for that—send me a DM and ask for it.

It’s called the Crohn-Colitis Truth Bomb—you can check that out on YouTube.

But here’s the thing—I was diagnosed with IBS, but I progressed to symptoms of colitis.

I just never went in for a scope.

Because a diagnosis like a colonoscopy will tell you where you’re inflamed, how much you’re inflamed—but never why you’re inflamed.

And I’ll never tell you not to see a doctor. I’ll never tell you don’t get a diagnosis.

But they look for a diagnosis to put you in a box—to know which boxes to check.

“Yep, you have this disease. Therefore, there’s nothing we can do. All we’re going to do is just mask your symptoms.”

So here’s the drugs we give you—in this order.

If it doesn’t work—snip snip—we’ll cut the organs out.

It’s like me going to the hospital—I step on a nail and it goes through my foot—and I go to the doctor. He goes:

“Josh, that nail is really bad. Just part of your body now. Nothing we can do. But here’s some numbing cream for the pain. Take it for the rest of your life. And if it doesn’t help, we’ll just cut your foot off.”

Same ideology.

So a diagnosis to me is kind of useless. We have to look at symptoms.

And so that’s why I don’t bother going in for a diagnosis—because it tells me what’s happening, where it’s happening, even how bad—but it does not tell me why.

Therefore, it does not get me to the ultimate solution I want, which is healing, reversal, and recovery.

Hope that answers the question.

Next question coming up. Let me see…

Jared, I see you here—“solution.” Jared, we’ll make sure we reach out. I’ll definitely be in touch. If you send me a DM right now, I’ll be able to get back a little bit quicker.

Mariah asks:
“Can you still test if you have started a doctor’s medication?”

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Here’s the thing—we have clients coming in all the time who are actively on and taking medication, trying to get off, avoiding medication, who are on and afraid to get off.

Let’s go back to the nail in the foot analogy.

If I’ve got a nail stuck through my foot, I’m using numbing cream for the pain.

If you’ve got IBD, you’re using steroids or immune-suppressing drugs or biologics of some kind to manage the symptoms—just like numbing cream would manage this nail inside of my foot.

So if I need to get off my medication, I want to get better, I have to understand—there’s a root cause.

If I pull the nail out of my foot and it heals, do I still need the numbing cream?

That’s the question you want to ask.

And I apply that the same to medication. You’re using it to suppress an inflammatory response—your body’s reacting or inflaming to something.

If you remove the something, give your body what it needs—the tools and resources to begin healing, to reverse the disease—do you need medication anymore?

If there’s nothing left to fight against?

Keep that one in mind.

I say this loosely, because the words cure, treat, or heal are illegal for me to actually say.

Let me see…

Jared: “What are your thoughts on German New Medicine?”

Jared, I’ve heard about it—but truth be told, I don’t have enough experience with it specifically.

But it does sound like a form of functional medicine, which is root-cause focused, which I like.

We do have a question here on Instagram—I’ll put Facebook down, I’ll come back to you guys—go ahead with that one.

“Do you recommend parasite testing before treating?”

It’s from Debbie.

Debbie asks if we recommend parasite testing before treating.

80+% of the clients we see have parasites at the root, or as a big major contributing factor to their bowel disease—or it’s somewhere in the mix.

But up to 100% will have some kind of parasite.

Do I recommend testing?

Not really.

On average, Debbie, about 40% accuracy across the board when you test for parasites.

We had a lady who actually recently came in who was testing for parasites—and she did eight different tests over about five years’ time, all negative.

And she’s passing four-foot worms like anacondas. It’s shocking what comes out.

But here’s why.

Parasites—number one—it’s typically a stool test. One, minimum three, and if not, five-day stool test.

And so you’re looking for eggs, ova, worms. You’re looking for amoeba, protozoa—some kind of sign of life of parasites.

The problem is—about 30 minutes after excreting a parasite, they start assimilating their own DNA. They’ll start breaking themselves down.

On top of that—parasites? They’re very hard to test for. At 40% accuracy, if you get one, you’re either really lucky, or they’re so abundant you can’t help but get them because they’re falling out of you.

Or—you’re not going to get them because they hide in the bile duct, the liver, the gallbladder, the appendix.

They love the ileocecal valve.

Some of them will actually slice the gut lining, get through the intestines and hide in muscles—you know, lower back pain, hip pain, joint pain.

We see this commonly with certain types like Blastocystis hominis—it’s a very common and nasty parasite.

And so—they’re very hard to detect.

We don’t typically test in my practice for parasites. In fact, I don’t think we ever have.

It has to be based on symptoms.

There’s probably 60 different symptoms, maybe 70 different symptoms you can have with parasites directly.

We’ll look for common things like:

• Psoriasis
• Eczema
• SIBO conditions
• Headaches
• Sensitivities to foods
• Crohn’s
• Colitis
• Autoimmunity
• Allergies
• Sinus issues

These are just some of the basic ones.

• Low libido
• Early signs of hair loss, especially in men

These are some really basic symptoms.

High cholesterol, high liver enzymes might show up.

A big one is eosinophils on blood work.

If you have EOE, or eosinophilic esophagitis… if you have elevated eosinophil activation protein in your stool tests—that can be a big sign of parasites.

We see those correlated all the time.

So we look at symptoms, not testing.

I hope that helps.

Karen says, “Our doctors should know about this.”

They should, Karen. Doctors really should know about this. They’re not taught this in med school.

Eastern Europe is really coming along with what they’re teaching in terms of holistic and natural, but they’re just not taught this stuff here, unfortunately.

But thankfully we have—you know, my team and many others like me that I’ve recently connected with who are advocating for this to help educate doctors.

So it’s a huge, huge blessing to be able to work with them.

Rasham asks,
“What might be the reasons that medical doctors accept the reality of IBD?”

Dare I say the word inundation?

Dare I say indoctrination?

Doctors are told IBD is autoimmune, it’s genetic, it’s unknown cause—this is what we do.

In fact, I had a really great episode—I think it’s episode 19 on Reversible, with Dr. Tabatha Barber. She’s a gynecologist.

When she was in medical school, she tells a story about a doctor that she was working under for residency. And she asked, “Why are we giving this? What’s the point? Why do we bother with this? What’s the protocol, the rationale?”

Her doctor, who was overseeing this, said:
 “Don’t ask questions. We follow the protocol.”

So we have cookbook medicine being ingrained into Western medicine.

In fact, on average, it’s 17 to 20 years for something to go from natural, holistic, or homeopathic medicine—the ideology of this training—to get into conventional medicine, to even break the ice.

17 to 20 years.

Back in the 90s, our homeopath that we were seeing—Dr. Farguson was his name out in Ontario, Cambridge, Ontario—and he was talking to my mom about aluminum in deodorant being a problem, and fluoride in the water being a problem.

Well, aluminum has recently—in the last decade or so, so we’re talking 20+ years later now—been recognized as linked to Alzheimer’s, heavy metal toxicity, etc.

And fluoride—just this week—was recognized on a federal level by the FDA in the USA as being toxic, with the health risks outweighing the benefits.

And so they’re now removing it from the water.

They were talking about that in the 80s and 90s—and it’s just becoming available now.

This is why doctors don’t know. It’s quite shocking and kind of sickening.

Let me see…

Mariah, I see your comment—“solution.”

If you guys are looking for help, you want to get to the root cause, comment the word solution.

We will reach out and get you some information about the Gut Health Solution.

And send me a DM right now—we’ll make sure we get to you, absolutely.

If you send me a DM directly, truth is, I get to you a bit faster.

Let me see…

Chris Jeff asks—are there any more questions over there?

This will be the last question we take, guys.

Chris Jeff asks:
 “Why are the doctors not testing for these things? Do you think stress plays a role in disease, particularly ulcerative colitis?”

Doctors don’t test for these things because they are not regulated. They’re not standardized yet.

The thing about Western medicine—it has to be what’s called standardized.

If we can standardize medicine or healthcare, we can say, “Look, here’s the things we look for.”

A standardized protocol to IBD is: check the symptoms, put them in a box, you’re 5 to 7 minutes.

When was the last time you went to your doctor and they spent an hour with you, diving into symptoms, history, asking about your life, quality of life, stress, etc.?

When did that happen?

Arguably, probably never.

And so we have to look at—

Here, I got Bruce knocking the—uh—everything around.

Here’s what we have to look at.

Doctors look to standardize things because they are based on an insurance model—he’s sniffing the microphone—they’re based on an insurance model.

Which means you’re 5 to 7 minutes—get in, get out.

You reimburse, say, 20 or 30 dollars for that patient coming to see you.

If you spend an hour, you make 30 bucks for that hour.

As a doctor with a clinic and nurses and cost and overhead and stock and supply—you go broke.

So you have to get out in 5 to 7 minutes using the standard of care, which is pushed and recommended by the pharmaceutical companies and medical colleges—who are all paid for and funded by Big Pharma.

47% of their funding—and the FDA and all this—comes from Big Pharma.

So they’re on this insurance-based model, and this is why they don’t really do this stuff and don’t really get into this information.

This is why they don’t test—because it’s not standardizable.

And frankly—it can be expensive, and even parasite tests aren’t accurate.

And so if you believe that there’s no root, you believe there’s no cause, you simply look to mask the symptoms.

It’s a lot more profitable.

Gut disease and gut health is about an $800 billion-a-year industry.

In fact, the three biggest industries in North America, in the USA—all say, based on data we have:

1. Health insurance
2. Hospital stays
3. Pharmaceuticals

In no particular order.

So you have health insurance, hospital medical care, and pharmaceuticals making up 18% of the entire US GDP.

That’s $4.7 trillion a year in revenue from sick people.

So this is where it all comes from.

Let me see…

Mariah: “I literally keep asking my doctor, but why?”

His response:
 “That’s the million-dollar question.”

I also asked about a nutritionist, and he said,
“I’m not going to tell you not to see one, but clearly changing your diet isn’t working.”

And—they’re not wrong.

But again—your doctor—they’re taught there’s no root.
We see it all the time because we look for things that they don’t.

But your doctor’s not wrong—food is a part.

Think of it this way:

If you have your body—I use this analogy, you might be familiar with this—your body is a glass of water. It fills up.

If you guys hear little tippy-taps, that’s just Bruce running around.

So your body fills up. You have heavy metals, you have mold, you have toxins, you have stress, you have food, you have whatever.

Well, picture you have all these things filling your glass.

When this overflows, you have disease and diagnosis.
This is just the development of symptoms.

But when it overflows, we now have a diagnosable disease.

Well—for a lot of you, you already overflowed.
 But your cup—it empties just a little bit.

And food is that last bubble, that last drop, that causes it to finally overflow.

And so this is why they say food can’t create the disease.
They take it too far and go, “Therefore it doesn’t matter. Therefore, eat whatever you want.”

Food contributes to the disease. Absolutely.

I have seen food cause it, but it’s less common.

But food absolutely contributes.

Again—our food has changed the most in the last 75 years.
About everything else.

We live in a world no longer compatible with our own biology.

Of course we’re sick.

And so—if they say food doesn’t matter because it’s such a small part of the cup, therefore eat whatever you want—we’re now creating more room for the disease to develop.

That 3,000% increase we’ve seen in 75 years?
It’s food-related, for the most part.

Now—I’m not saying it’s all food that caused your disease.

But the food contributed to the defenses of the body being low, which contributes to inflammation, which contributes to an immune response, which contributes to autoimmunity.

And all this combined?

Of course, we have to look at the microbes in your gut that are lost—that are destroyed over the years—which allows these bad guys to come in, which allows toxins, which allows bad microbes and parasites and fungus and E. coli and C. diff and all these other things—these nasty bad guys—and viruses like cytomegalovirus or Epstein-Barr—to come in and wreak havoc and overdraw the immune system.

This is where we see it.

And so, if this is making sense to you…

All you gotta do is comment the word “solution”, or send me a DM directly, and we’ll get you some help.

If you’re listening right now and you go, “This makes sense,”—you’re on the podcast, you’re listening—you go:

“I wish somebody told me about this sooner. I don’t want to wait another 20 years for mainstream medicine to pick it up…”

Just click the link below in the show notes and we’ll make sure we get you the help that you need, because that’s what we do.

That’s all we got for you tonight.

Thank you so much for coming.
We’re going to see you next time.

Josh (Outro):
If listening to this is finally striking a chord, and you’re hearing this going:

“Well, for the first time in my life, everything my doctor told me has never really added up… but finally, it makes sense.”

Then I want to invite you to find the links below in the show notes to reach out to me and my team.

If you just want to be a lurker on the outside for now, that’s totally okay. We’ve got the podcast here—of course, stay subscribed.

You can always as well subscribe to the Reversible Podcast—that’s Reverse-ABLE, the ultimate gut health podcast—and our YouTube channel, as well as our Facebook and all kinds of other content.

But if you’re finally ready to grab Crohn’s and colitis and give it a shake—and get this thing reversed—you can always reach out to me and my team by simply checking and clicking the links below here in the show notes.