44: Rebuilding Your Gut Microbiome When You Have IBD (Crohn's and Colitis)

Your gut microbiome may be more important than your DNA, and when it's out of balance, so is everything else from you moods, sleep, immune system and disease processes, all the way to your metabolism and brain function.

I'm showing you how to rebuild your microbiome when you have Crohn's and Colitis.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Why your gut microbiome matters so much
• Why your microbiome is a mess with IBD
• Why you've been unable to fix it
• 5 Steps to Healing and Repairing your gut microbiome
• How to maintain it once it's fixed
• The 4 stages of how IBD develops 

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Transcript

Josh Dech:
Your gut microbiome is all of the microbes living inside of your gut. They control your health. They control your immune system. And when they're out of whack, so is your IBD—your Crohn's, colitis.

Now I'm going to be showing you how to start rebuilding this gut microbiome so you can heal your gut and heal your body. But there are some caveats to it. First, we're going to talk about what you're going to need to get your microbiome rebuilt—like why the efforts that you put into it so far are not working. I'm going to show you why your microbiome is currently a mess. And of course, the steps that you need to take to rebuild your microbiome successfully.

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 links 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.

Now if you don't know me, my name is Josh Deck. I'm an IBD specialist. I'm a medical lecturer and physicians consultant for Crohn's and colitis as well as a scientific strategist and education director for the Root Cause for Crohn's Colitis organization.

And today we are talking about rebuilding your gut microbiome with Crohn's and colitis. First thing we need to know is why does it matter that your microbiome is rebuilt? Ultimately, it's the epicenter of your health. And I actually make the argument that it may be as if not more important than your DNA. And it's really interesting when we dive into what it does.

We know 90% of the neurotransmitters your brain uses—they're made inside of your gut. That's how it communicates with everything else. Seventy percent of your immune cells are grown and matured inside of your gut. Long and short, it helps regulate inflammation, hormones, toxicity, genetics—all kinds of stuff are regulated through your gut microbiome, this ecosystem.

And if it's out of whack, so are you. You're going to be a mess. Your immune, your signaling, inflammation. All these things come back to your gut.

Let's talk about why. Why is your gut microbiome currently a mess and what can we do about it? First thing you got to know is there's three things or three umbrellas of things that actually make us sick and that infect your microbiome.

If this is a refresher for you, we're hitting it from another lens here today. So stay tuned.

Okay. First one: toxins. Toxins can be anything from chronically high blood pressure to chronically high blood sugar to chronic stress. A toxin can be mold. It can be pesticides. Even EMFs and Wi-Fi. It can be chemical exposure, alcohol. Anything that is toxic to our body goes under the toxin umbrella. That's number one.

Number two, what we're going to be looking at is deficiencies. Now a deficiency of what? Well of course basic things we need to thrive and survive: fresh air, water, sunlight, movement, exercise but also vitamins, minerals, amino acids—basic nutrients that we need to live. If you're deficient your body's going to be breaking down with no tools to build it back up and it has nothing to fight against the toxins.

The third reason that we get sick is going to be microbes. Now this is what really impacts your microbiome. Toxins can get in creating an inflammatory state which inflames your gut microbiome which leads all kinds of issues you're experiencing. If you have microbial infections—parasites, viruses, fungus, bacteria—they overgrow and they create an imbalance in this ecosystem. We call this dysbiosis.

This is an inflamed state or an imbalanced state that creates inflammation. The crap part about this—no pun intended—is that all these microbes when they're overgrown and you have infections they produce more toxins and then your body also burns their nutrients. So you have more deficiencies.

It's a very incestuous pool. Deficiencies can lead to microbial imbalances because you have nothing to fight them off. Microbes can actually cause deficiencies because your body's trying to fight them off using more resources. When you're toxic it's a prime environment for microbes. Microbes also can produce toxins. Then of course toxins lead to deficiencies because your body has to clean them out. And when you're deficient to begin with and then you become toxic you don't have the tools to clean them out.

So it's sort of this very incestuous triangle between toxins, deficiencies, and microbes. And all of these contribute to dysbiosis—your gut microbiome being a mess.

And this is why it's happening to you. You have some kind of combination of toxin, some kind of deficiency, and some kind of microbial imbalance. This makes your microbiome a mess.

The challenge you run into is that most of us live in an environment that makes our microbiomes worse. So we're chronically inflamed again. We're consuming toxins. Maybe we're chronically stressed. We're eating foods that are far from optimal for our health. Uh we're taking medications, pharmaceuticals, ibuprofen that mess up our gut even further. This damages that microbiome making things even less conducive to life in existence.

So this is what we got to look for. So the question has to be asked then if you're currently dealing with this and you're actively working saying "Hey I know my microbiome is a mess I'm trying to improve it. Why isn't my microbiome improving? Why am I not getting healthier? Why am I still inflamed?"

One simple word—if my marker worked even better there'd be more emphasis on this dramatic moment—we call terrain. What is the terrain? If your ecosystem sucks, your ecosystem isn't conducive to you growing healthy microbes or the terrain, like the soil that it should be growing in, you're going to have crap microbes. It's as simple as that.

Now here's the thing about it. Terrain is going to involve a chronically inflamed state that inflames the terrain, the turf so to speak that these seeds, these microbes are trying to grow in. If you're chronically inflamed or chronically stressed your digestive system, the motility is going to be a mess. If you're actively living in an inflamed or inflaming environment like a moldy home—70% of homes in the US have mold—so you're going to be chronically exposed to something that is inflaming your gut and causing your gut microbes to go all over the place and be messy.

So again, the terrain is not there. And if it's kind of like you're taking all these things—these probiotics, these supplements, these medications, whatever it is you're taking—because you're going "Oh I really want to rebuild my gut." Perfect. It's kind of like trying to rebuild a house while it's on fire in the middle of a war zone. It's going to keep getting broken down as you continue to try to build it back up and it becomes a fruitless effort.

So it's really important to understand there are three things currently impacting you: your toxins that you're being exposed to, your deficiencies, and the microbes that are imbalanced. These are what mess up your gut. And then the terrain you're living in—the environment, the ecosystem you're providing it—are going to determine whether or not these microbes can actually seed and grow and become healthy.

So there's some very simple steps we're going to get to here. I'm going to show you what you can do to actually rebuild your gut microbiome.

We go through six basic steps. The first thing we want to talk about of course is your roots. What is the root cause? Now this might be like a stupid question like, "Of course if I'm sick I want to figure out why." If you're having gut issues is it a parasite? Is it a fungal overgrowth? Is it mold in your environment? Is it chronic stress? Is it lifetime of poor diet? Did you have your gallbladder removed and now no matter what you do it's not getting better? What is the reason?

Once we can find that root, of course, we're going to have to remove that. That's just how it works. It's like you find a nail in your foot—that's why your foot hurts. You got to pull the nail out. So let's pull the nail out. That's step number one. Whatever we identify as the driver of your disease process has to go. And sometimes there's many, many drivers.

The second step—and these aren't always going to be linear like this but this is part of it—your immune system. What does it look like? Oftentimes we have to calm it down. Remember when you're a chronically inflamed environment you're chronically inflamed in your gut due to stress, hyperactive immune responses, poor diet, moldy environment, whatever is causing your gut to be inflamed, those seeds and the microbes you're trying to plant are never going to grow. It'll never be successful.

And so we have to calm down the immune system and calm down the inflammation in the area for these seeds to take so to speak. And sometimes, yeah, that looks like taking them a salamine. Sometimes it looks like the biologics. They don't have to be a forever thing but they can be a right now thing. So your body is calm enough and susceptible to having a chance to plant some good microbes which will in the long term correct your biome.

But maybe right now you need something heavy and pharmaceutical. Maybe you respond really well to like ching dai and curcumin or that heavy nature protocol curcuy. Maybe you respond really well to like aloe vera and a different type of diet—carnivore. Even some people go to like raw veg. For some reason it works. I don't, can't explain it. But whatever it works for you that's going to calm your immune system.

Once that immune system is calm we've taken the fire down, right? Our house is no longer burning down. Now we can get into it and we can actually work on your gut lining.

Think of it this way. You could not and would not want to live in a home happily and safely that has no windows, a collapsed in roof, and is actively on fire. Your gut microbes don't want to do that either. So we have to look at for you—we have to calm the immune system. That's the fire. The gut lining—that's the roof, the wall, the walls, the window. If we have these and the house is calm and safe, perfect. We can now go back to replant and your gut microbes can grow.

So you have to have that gut lining. It's also part of your immune system calming. A leaky gut leads to an overactive immune system. In fact, leaky gut is one of the three pillars of autoimmune disease. So we have to take care of that healing and sealing or soothing and cooling we call it.

The third thing we're going to want to do—fourth thing—I lied. Let's talk about seeding.

Now this can look like, for some people—but few with active Crohn's colitis—fermented foods. The reason I say few, ferments are high in something called histamines. When they get into your body it causes this release of histamine which leads to histamine-type reactions and your body has a big immune response.

So if you're consuming bone broth because it's good for your gut and you feel worse, it's bad for your gut because of the histamines. If you're consuming ferments, vinegar, cured meats—even some probiotics are high in histamine—that's a problem.

So we can look at seeding what's going to be through low histamine probiotics. Sometimes that low histamine seeding is going to look like spore-based probiotics or bacillus-based probiotics, even some bifidobacterium. The ones that tend to be higher in histamine are our lactobacillus and those can be really nasty. So we want to watch for that.

But seeding can come in a lot of different ways: food environment, getting out in nature, maybe you touch a tree, going for a hike and you bite your fingernails without washing your hands. We're getting soil microbes, whatever it is—it's getting a new inoculation of microbes into your ecosystem because diversity is correlated to lung health.

And we can also look at this through a fifth one. Let's talk about probiotics. They're not for everyone. In fact, I rarely use them unless we're kind of toward the end. But again, this comes back to ferments, tons of probiotics in fermented foods, fermented whatever. The problem is we need probiotics that are good to calm your immune system—very specific strains and genus—for example, like Lactobacillus LP299V. This is a very particular genus, a strain that is known for calming the immune system and relaxing the gut lining.

So we have to be very selective in the probiotics we use. Some people get lucky and just pop one off the shelf and feel good but a lot of people it's a waste of money.

Okay, so these are the first five steps. But once we're corrected, we've gotten rid of the root cause—we know what the infecting thing was or the insult was—we've removed that. The next thing we've looked at is said, "Okay, your immune system is way overactive and your gut lining is highly inflamed. Let's calm these both down because they work together."

This is going to provide a better terrain for you to begin seeding your gut with probiotics to rebuild that biome. But you can't seed when your house is on fire. Once that's done we can deliberately go in with some selective probiotics.

In this stage as well, if your gut lining is healed, your immune system's calm, ferments may not be that big of an issue because you may not be experiencing such high histamine responses or high levels of this reaction, which means it's going to be a little bit safer for you to try probiotics a bit more willy-nilly and see what works for you.

The last thing, of course, is going to be maintenance. What is that? Well, of course it's going to be food or diet and lifestyle. These are extremely important.

So many people come into my program and they're like, "6 months or whatever it takes them like my IBD is gone, I've never felt better, it's been 20 years and look, I'm healed." And they go back to doing the crap that caused the disease in the first place. McDonald's three nights a week happens all the time. I had a client who did really, really well, came back fully reversed. Colonoscopies were perfect. Three, four years later comes back, gained 100 pounds, was eating McDonald's all the time, eating junk food and actively harming her digestive system and then of course she relapsed.

And your doctor goes, "I told you it was just in remission." No, you healed it but you broke it again. It'd be like saying, "You jumped off a third story roof and you broke your leg but it's going to be the best you can do is get it to remission, heal the bone, give the body what it needs. If you jump off the third story roof again and break it does it mean you were just in remission?" No. It means you did the dumb thing to reinjure yourself.

So we have to work on maintenance. This is very important—food, lifestyle. Fix those three things that make you sick. Look for where your toxins are—whether that's from laundry detergent to pots and pans to chemicals you're consuming to microplastics to pesticides to whatever you're consuming—cut them out.

Find your deficiencies: vitamins, minerals, amino acids, exercise, fresh air, sunlight, whatever you're not giving your body that it needs to thrive. We have to go back there.

And then of course the microbes. At this stage, we can totally get a GI map done, get a gut bacteria map done to see what's lacking, what do we need, what do we want to improve on, and that'll give you a bit more resilience down the road.

And this is where we enter into maintenance. Do the things that make you feel good.

Here's the rub though. This isn't quick. This process minimum four months. My program runs for four months and month to month beyond that. I've had people go 6, 8, even 12 months. It took them to get better but they're better.

But the longer you've had this going on—if it's been 20 years with you dealing with Crohn's or colitis—we're not going to get you better in four months. It's extraordinarily rare. We have seen some amazing results. You can check the pinned posts I have on my Instagram. The top three are amazing results of reversing colitis very, very quickly. Crohn's tends to be more complicated. I've had people take eight months until one day they hit a critical mass and got better.

But your body is unique. It's going to do what it's going to do. And we have to give it the resources it needs. And that all starts with setting the foundation and intervening sooner than later.

The longer this has been going on, the more complex your immune responses are.

And I want to bring this back and I'm going to get to some questions here in just a second. But there are really four stages that I identify Crohn's and colitis to have.

The first stage is acute. This is like the equivalent of getting the flu, right? It comes in, you kick it, you feel better. Bing bang boom, you're done. Problem solved. Your body gets rid of it.

The problem is if you get an infection you can't kick and can't get rid of. Well guess what? That goes on for a year or more and that now turns chronic. So it's ongoing. You're like, "I'm constantly inflamed. I have a chronic condition."

Okay. Think of this like you being stressed out. You have one stressful day—not a big deal, right? You shake it off, you move on. But if you have stressful days after stressful days, you start to get a little bit worn thin until one day you just punch the mailman in the mouth or who knows what.

This chronic inflammation eventually leads to the next step of you snapping.

And this is going to be what we call immune-mediated, immune-mediated responses. And interestingly enough, immune-mediated means hyperreactive. Right? You have a bad day, you shake it off, that's acute, not a big deal. You have a lot of bad days in a row over a year, it's like, "My life is chronically stressful," until one day you snap and punch the mailman. That is an immune-mediated response. It's an overreaction.

The Crohn's Colitis Foundation, Mayo Clinic, they've recently downgraded IBD from being autoimmune to being immune-mediated. They say they're recognizing the antibodies and autoantibodies just aren't there like they used to think. So it's just your immune overreacting, which is really interesting.

Now on a sidebar, they did put it under the autoimmune umbrella still, which I believe is probably where the 40 billion dollars of immunosuppressive drugs come in. They can still now give them because they're quote autoimmune but it's an immune-mediated reaction.

Now think about this. Go back to acute bad day, chronic ongoing, finally you snap.

And if you have to snap enough, eventually you just collapse in your corner. You start rocking yourself to sleep because like you've lost your mind.

Well this is stage four. This is going to be either immunodeficiency or autoimmunity and where your body maybe truly is attacking itself even if you have autoantibodies. Most of the time it's not but immunodeficiency where your immune system just craps out and now there are certain pathways just unable to do their job.

This we're going to call it for all intents and purposes—we're going to call it the point of no return. That doesn't mean you're screwed forever. Very few people I've ever talked to are here now. I want to put a preface here—this doesn't necessarily correlate with symptoms. You could be fully immunodeficient and have like no symptoms because you're in control of it. I often describe this stance. People go, "Oh, I feel like I'm probably stage four because it's really severe." Doesn't work that way. This is under the hood, what your immune system is doing. The symptoms you present with have very little to do with it because that can change on a day-to-day.

So just to make that clear. But very few people have I seen who are truly autoimmune or truly immunodeficient. But the longer you have this condition, the worse your symptoms are, the less your treatment, the more toxins, deficiencies, and microbes you have going on, the more likely it is you'll get here which means you may be at a ceiling where you can only get 80% better and you're playing defense the rest of your life.

Or most people I see are between here and here. They're two to three where it's like, "Well I'm chronic or it's immune-mediated. My immune system is out of whack. I need help."

And this is where the help comes in right now.

Drop your questions below if you have them. I want to hear them. We're going to get to you in a minute.

Right before I do that, the last piece I'm going to go to here for you is how to get that help.

I have a podcast called Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally. All these lives go up there. We've got over 40 episodes published now. You can follow me on YouTube. If you're here on the Facebook group, wherever you are, the information is there for you to follow along.

If you're like, "Dude, I've seen a few episodes for the first time in my life, it's actually making sense and I need help with this," jump the line. Here's how you can do it.

If you are watching on YouTube or you're listening on the podcast, you can get help from me and my team. You can schedule a call with me directly or reach out by clicking the links in the notes below the video or below the podcast wherever your platform is right now.

And that's how you can get help with this. Skip the line. Don't wait until you're stage four playing and fighting for your life and playing defense. Be proactive.

These conditions are not autoimmune. They are not irreversible. They're certainly not permanent. They're not genetic. And we know a lot of the root cause is what drives it. Your doctor is wrong. It can be fixed. You just have to make sure to reach out accordingly. We'll get you that help.

Guys, that's all we got for you tonight. I got two dogs scaffling who are going to knock over the tripods. We're going to go have dinner.

Thanks for being here. We're going to see you guys next time.

One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of, "I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years."

And if this for the first time is really starting to click and it's starting to make sense and you're going, "Wait a minute, this might be reversible. I think there's more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and suddenly I wasn't. And you're telling me there's no cause."

If you're understanding finally that there is a cause—that something is driving this—I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below. Send me an email. Ask a question. See if a program is the right fit for you.

Because I promise you this doesn't have to be a lifelong sentence. You're not doomed to this. And IBD can be reversed.