71: The Biggest Reason Your Bowel Disease Isn't Healing

One of the biggest contributors to long term bowel disease, and your inability to heal, is nutrient deficiencies.  This is dangerous because your body needs raw materials – nutrient deficiencies disrupt cellular signalling, weaken your ability to repair, and they force your immune system to operate in a constant state of chaos and breakdown, which is one of the reasons IBD appears to be autoimmune, even though it isn’t.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• The role of nutrients in healing and immunity
• The top nutrients you're deficient on and what each of them do for you
• The symptoms of specific nutrient deficiencies
• How to get them into your body safely, and effetively

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Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) One of the biggest contributors to long-term bowel disease and your inability to heal is actually nutrient deficiencies. It's a big, big problem and it's dangerous because your body needs these raw materials. Nutrient deficiencies disrupt cellular signaling, they weaken your ability to repair, and they put your immune system in this constant state of chaos and breakdown, so it feels like constant fight or flight, which is one of the reasons why IBD can even appear to be autoimmune, even though the research clearly shows that it's not. Your tissues continue to break down under these deficient circumstances. And so, if we haven't met yet, my name is Josh Dech, I'm an IBD specialist, physician's consultant, did I say specialist? Specialist, and a physician's consultant, and of course a researcher in IBD, and I'm going to be showing you the five biggest nutrients right now that you need because you're more than likely deficient, as 98% of you will be. I'm going to talk about what they do and of course why they're depleted and the easiest ways to get them. 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 first one we're starting with today is going to be, of course, I'm a little rusty today. It's actually been three weeks since we've done one after the Christmas break and the both of us here are just trying to kind of scramble to remember how we're supposed to do this today. But here's what we're getting at. First one is going to be iron. This is kind of a no-brainer. If you're with IBD, there is probably a 95% chance you are anemic or have been anemic at some time. Now, here's what iron does. I'm going to show you why each one is necessary, why it happens to be low for you, and then how you can actually get it in. And iron pills are not the way. I promise you that. So, we know that iron is really important because it carries oxygen. Why is oxygen important, Josh? Well, without it, you'll die. That's a great place to start. We know low oxygen leads to chronic fatigue. We know it leads to immune dysfunction because we know the presence of oxygen is also connected to an absence of disease. When you don't have enough oxygen, you're more prone to have inflammation disease processes and even dysbiosis, which means imbalanced microbes, as well as opportunistic microbes taking over. For example, today's a day. We're doing so good. But for example, things like cancer thrive in these low oxygen, really acidic types of environments. And so, number one reason why we see iron being low, of course, if you're somebody with bowel disease who happens to bleed a lot, that's a no-brainer, right? Your iron is in your blood. It carries oxygen. But if you're not bleeding, which is actually extremely common, so many of low on iron and you're not bleeding. This is because chronic inflammation drives down iron levels for a couple of reasons. Number one, there's something called hepcidin, which is released from the liver. It's a response to chronic inflammation over time. And it releases this hepcidin, which sort of locks iron to the cells. It prevents it from getting out where it needs to go. The next one we see, because you have inflammation, you're getting poor absorption, when your intestines are inflamed, you're not absorbing all the things that you could be or should be. That's a problem. The other thing we want to look at for you is when you have IBD, a common deficiency is stomach acid. Well, stomach acid aids greatly in the absorption of iron. So, if you don't have stomach acid or are low on stomach acid, even if you have reflux, you're low on stomach acid. That's the number one cause of reflux is low acid. Then again, you're going to be low on iron. On top of that, inflammatory environments, low stomach acid, these things contribute to this state we just talked about called dysbiosis. Imbalanced bacteria compete with the host all the time. You are the host. Your microbiome is the bacteria. So, if you are low on iron, you may have overgrowth of bacteria or infections like parasites, which chronically get in there and they actually eat the iron before you get to absorb it. And so, it's a big, big issue with iron. Even though you're not bleeding, you can be extremely anemic. And so, the best ways to get it in, and I'll tell you now, we've seen at the time of this recording 550-ish people in our practice with IBD. And we had a 92% success rate in reversing within four to six months, getting people off medication and having them in full clinical histological remission. And one of the things that we utilize for iron is not in effusions. It's not iron pills. It's not the stuff your doctor gives you, this ferrous iron. It's hard on the gut, basically like iron shavings. There's a really absorbable version of iron. It's got different spellings, believe it or not, but heme. That can be spelled with an A in there as well if you feel so inclined. But heme iron, this actually comes, they take it from cow's blood, they take this polypeptide, and they take that iron and put it into a capsule. And there's a specific brand we use a lot called Three Arrows. Three Arrows Heme Iron. That one is so, so powerful for getting people who are anemic to be able to absorb iron, number one, but two, tolerate it. That's a very important part. If iron pills are jacking up your gut, this Three Arrows Heme Iron is a good way to go. The next one is actually a Koji fermented iron. Now, Koji fermentation is just a Japanese style of fermentation. It's very, very ancient, but there's actually a brand even called Koji Iron, and it is this fermented process, which is very, very accessible. And again, very well tolerated for those who don't tolerate iron. Lastly, if you can't do any of these, my preferred route is always going to be oral absorption. But if you can't, of course you can always go through an iron infusion. There's no fuss with that. So that's iron. Now, if at any point during this process you have questions, drop them down in the chat. We will get to them right after this. If you're here on the live, we're going to answer all your questions. If you missed the live, shoot me a DM. Next one. You may see this one coming, maybe not. Vitamins B12 and B9. I'm not talking these cheap vitamins from the grocery store, and I do not mean folic acid. No sirree, I do not. Here's what we got to look at. Vitamin B12, it's one of those things that your body needs. Again, it's a building block. When you're deficient in nutrients, your body lacks its ability to do basic functions. It puts you in a constant state of immune dysregulation, tissue breakdown, et cetera. So in the case of B12, we need this for your nerves. It helps calm and soothe the nerves. Lack of B12 leads to neuropathy, physical pain or tingling in your nerves. We know that B12, not only for the nerves and for your brain, is a big one. Those who lack B12 tend to have anxiety, tend to have cognitive disruption, elevated levels of stress and stress responses. These are things that low B12 can do. It can also lead to mood swings and brain fog. So it's for your nerves and for your brain. That's going to be B12. Very, very important vitamin. Now if you go to the grocery store and you buy it, it's going to be a cheap version. Low B12 increases stress responses because of increased anxiety. But think about this for a minute. If you have an increase in stress or stress responses, what does that mean? Increased cortisol. What does that do? Not only can it rob eventually from other hormones, but elevated stress and elevated cortisol, which again leads to more stressors, inflames your body in such a way where you have trouble recovering. Okay. Stress is the number one trigger for bowel disease, not the root cause. A lot of people get stressed and don't have bowel disease or don't get bowel disease. You get stressed when you have bowel disease and your bowel disease gets worse because stress drives those same inflammatory immune pathways that are already elevated. That's what bowel disease is. It's an excessive amount of immune responses. When you're stressed, those same immune responses get even higher, which means low B12 leads to higher stress responses, leads to more inflammation, more pain, and a higher probability of having a flare. So we need B12. The next one is B9. B9 is very important for a little process getting very popular across social media in the last several years called methylation. Methylation is very well described by Gary Breka, credit where it's due, as taking the raw materials and extracting them for your body to use. That's part of it. But this methylation process and the B9, not folic acid, you also need this to make brand new cells. It's part of detoxification, it's part of utilizing good resources from raw materials, and you actually need it to be building new cells. But why would you need to build new cells? Think about this. If you break a bone, you need new cells to heal that bone. When you are inflamed, the tissue breaks down, you need new cells to repair and rebuild that tissue. And so we need methylation and we need vitamin B9, not folic acid, for tissue repair, healing, and inflammatory control. So why does B9 and B12 get so low? Number one thing. Guess what? We're back at it. Inflammation. Inflammation and chronic inflammation increases the need for B12 and B9. When you have some kind of disease process going on, not because your body's attacking you, but because there's something your body is trying to attack or defend you from, this increased inflammatory response and immune responses increase the need of raw materials. B12 and B9 are some of those raw materials, along with many others, but B12 and B9. So you're depleted by inflammation. When you're inflamed chronically, you're not going to be able to absorb your nutrients properly either. And get this, when your doctors are giving you corticosteroids and infusions and all these things, prescription drugs actually decrease vitamin B12 and B9, along with some other nutrients we're talking about today. So your prescription drugs, though they manage symptoms, also work against the very foundations that your body needs to heal and maintain itself. Kind of like, imagine we know that moving and exercise is good for you. It's good for blood pressure, good for health, good for blood sugar. It's good for your immune system to exercise. Well, imagine you have leg pain. And so you take a paralytics, you can't move. You get rid of the leg pain, yes, but it actually defeats the very things that your body needs to maintain health, being movement. If you can't move, you get sick. And so the drugs that we're using to manage symptoms actually contribute to the disease and inflammatory processes and the immune imbalances. And that's the rub with this stuff. I'm not saying drugs are bad. I'm saying they can be very useful for short-term inflammation and symptom control. The problem we have is that when we're dealing with chronic inflammation, we take these acute treatments and apply them chronically rather than getting to the root cause and fixing the problem, which I'm not okay with. Next up, number three of five. Now, again, I'm not saying there's only five things you're deficient in. It's just one of the most common, vitamin D. Low levels of vitamin D. Think of vitamin D as like a thermostat for your immune system. It helps regulate things, helps keep that climate control, temperature control. The problem is we have, oh, that's my vest. I should like do a twirl, like have it swing everything everywhere. I was just knocking stuff off. For those of you on the podcast, my vest is swinging around, knocking things off my shelf. Anyway, vitamin D, think of it kind of like a temperature control, not literal body temperature, but like a thermostat for your immune system. It helps control and regulate things. The problem is when you have low vitamin D, we need vitamin D for your immune system to control it, so if you don't have it, guess what happens? Your immune system gets out of control. When your immune system is out of control, which it already is in IBD, what happens? You increase all of your immune-based symptoms, which is inflammation, diarrhea, chronic fatigue, blood, mucus, pain, etc. Low vitamin D is directly correlated to elevated symptoms and immune responses. But beyond that, it's also connected to poor barrier integrity inside of your gut. Why does integrity in the gut matter? Because a leaky gut or an inflamed gut leads to what? More elevated immune responses. So vitamin D not only, or a lack of it not only increases your immune responses, but it also creates tissue damage, which by themselves lead to higher immune responses. So now we double down. Vitamin D is very, very necessary. Now, you can get this from going in the sun. Best place to get it is outside. It's free. I'm pretty pale. I mean, I can go outside. You can almost see my white pasty skin. I can go outside and get vitamin D, probably 30,000 IUs inside of like 30 minutes. Now, infrared morning and night sun, the best sun you can get. It's really, really powerful. That infrared is going to have the highest levels for you. Again, getting outside in safe sunshine is great. If you go, well, I burn really easy. Cool. Sit in the shade in a green area and all the infrared light actually bounces off the greens and gets into your skin, which is cool. But if you're not getting it from the sun, you can actually get it. I don't like tablets. Tablets are crap. Liquids, liquid vitamin D drops are great. A liquid vitamin D drop can come in. My preference is like Trace. They make a supplement. It's a vitamin D3 with a K2, which isn't necessary for your immune system, but it comes in a suspended olive oil. It's an extra virgin olive oil. Best way to get it in. Otherwise, it's safflower, God forbid, canola. I'm not a big fan of canola oil, obviously. But the levels you're getting in are so low. For what you may need, it's probably not an issue. But I do like the Genestra brand. They have D-Mulsion as a supplement. It's really high quality as well. And Trace is another one that I quite like. Fun fact, if you take mushrooms, regular everyday edible mushrooms, tip them upside down in the sun so the bottom gets exposed. It increases the vitamin D levels exponentially. So, lots of availability there. So, vitamin D. I lost my... Oh, there it is. Lost my wipe. What is this called? Eraser, thank you. My wipe. It's toilet paper or something. It is an eraser. That's right. You know, if English was a second language, this would be impressive. But it's my first and only language, which makes me kind of a dumb-dumb. Anyway, the next one that we often are extremely deficient in is going to be omega-3s. Omega-3s are extremely necessary because they are related to your anti-inflammatory signaling. When you have an infection, when you have an immune response, all those symptoms you experience, think of inside of your gut being like scraping your knee on the sidewalk. It still inflames. It still has to heal. It's just inside of you rather than outside that you can see. And so, when you have these signals that your body says, actively inflame it, it dilates the blood vessels, brings in all the healing responses, all the things are good. That's cool. But if your immune system doesn't have the anti-inflammatory signal, the inflammatory signals just go more and more and more. They keep driving up until your tissue breaks down. The inflammatory cytokines can actually become toxic to your system. They become cytotoxic, breaking things down further. So, omega-3s are part of that anti-inflammatory signaling. We want to bring that inflammation down. Lack of them means too much inflammation keeps driving up and up and up. We also need it for cellular membrane stability. Think about your cells. You want a healthy cell, kind of like you. Have you ever seen really, really old people with really fragile skin? They're prone to infections and stuff. It's kind of what your cells need, your immune system. Now, a healthy cell membrane, like this guy here, the outer layer, we need these omega-3s and other fats to create that, like cholesterol and stuff like that. When you have poor integrity, cells get infected, they're weak, they can die. There's all kinds of issues that can go wrong. So, what we've got now by low omega-3s, we have this immune system of inflammation that can't turn off and we have weak cells that can't defend you. They can't defend against the bad guys because your walls of defenses are actually weak. So, the number one reason we see these getting low is due to something we see a lot. I'm trying to talk and write and I'm out of practice. Now, I'm smelling like malabsorption, but malabsorption. The number one thing that I see congested in someone with IBD is their liver and bioflow across the board. It's a drainage pathway. The problem we see here, when your drainage pathways are congested, your bile doesn't flow. We need bile to emulsify fats. If you can't emulsify fats, you don't absorb them. You don't absorb them, you become deficient. So, in the case of omega-3, oftentimes there's a low intake because they're not eating a ton of foods that are high in omega-3. But on top of that, we are chronically inflamed. That excess inflammation, we know because you need that inflammatory signaling because you're chronically inflamed, there's an increased demand. So, not only are we often not eating enough omega-3s, but your body's burning through them at an excessive rate, which means the demand is higher than the supply. Therefore, you become low. On top of that, your body's ability to absorb them from foods also is decreased because those same pathways needed to do so are congested, damaged, or deficient. So, now we're tripling down on the reason we're low on omega-3s, which means inflammation has more trouble shutting off. So, if you are using omega-3, like a fish oil supplement or something else, if you're having issues with absorption, cleaning out your liver, bile flow, supplements like Tudcut can be very helpful. But even an ox bile supplement can be very helpful for getting that to absorb properly. Now, you can find omega-3s. If you're a salmon eater, great. But wild Atlantic is typically better. It's that farm stuff that gets really, really gnarly. It's highly toxic farm salmon. It's actually quite disgusting when you look into it. But sardines, anchovies, these things are good, like super high sources of omega-3s. Lower sources would be like walnuts. But your best ones are your fish, cod or cod liver. Or again, cod liver oil is a great option for that. But something you want to look for when you're looking for omega-3 supplementation, because I'd rather get it than eat cans and cans of sardines, you want to look at something called the TOTOX, T-O-T-O-X. This is a total oxidative stress measurement. And they measure this in units. I forget what they're called. But this TOTOX or TOTOX or TOTOX. Anyways, this measurement, you want it best case, you're actually under 10. Under 10 is going to be best. This means it's the lowest level of oxidative stress. When you buy the cheap fish oil supplements from like whatever grocery store, the Jamison versions, they're oxidated, they're rancid, and they can actually be inflammatory and really crap for you. So high quality, under 10 is ideal. What we're looking for otherwise, under 10 to 20 is going to be acceptable. Anything that's over 20 is a problem. It's just going to be highly inflammatory. If they don't have a TOTOX or TOTOX measurement, check for third party testing, look for consumer reports and things like that, that will give you a better read on what those actually look like. I'm just going to scroll my notes here. It's not your fault. I had a pop up on my screen. Oh, no, you're good. It's been doing that. I don't know how to fix it. Anyway, so what we're looking at is low omega-3s equals a poor ability to turn off inflammation, weak cell membranes, and we're not absorbing it because we're inflamed and the liver's congested. Bing, bang, boom. That's number four to five. The fifth one that we are most often deficient in, and I'll give you kind of a quick list actor of what else you can look at. I just didn't want to dive in to make this a three-hour lecture. A very important one is going to be magnesium. Magnesium is highly important. It's needed for over 300 different enzymatic reactions. It helps balance out your nervous system, and we know that magnesium helps relax muscles, helps relax your body and your brain and all kinds of stuff. So, therefore, low levels mean nervous system becomes imbalanced, which leads to higher stress responses, which leads to more inflammation and immune dysfunction, leading to, again, more symptoms. Muscular contraction can lead to bowel spasms. If you're prone to constipation, urgency, diarrhea, any of these things, then spasming is a bigger problem for you as well. So, low levels of magnesium are a big, big issue. We need it for sleep. We need it for energy. Again, 300-plus enzyme reactions in your body. It's one of the most needed minerals you could ever consume. And low magnesium equals increased, I'm just going to put rest for responses, in everything. So, you can see the pattern we're getting at here. When you're deficient in things, your immune system can't balance. Your body can't heal, and it actually continues to precipitate the problem. And your doctors give you drugs to manage the symptoms, but taking those drugs creates further deficiencies, putting your body deeper, deeper into, we'll call it debt, or nutrient deficient hole, where you're unable to start healing yourself. And then your remission rates get even lower and lower because you don't even have the basic tools you need to balance your immune system into a state of remission. And so, magnesium is one of those big things. Why is it low? Number one, we have, of course, just like all the other ones, poor absorption. Because when you're inflamed, you're not absorbing properly. And a lack of absorption leads to deficiency. That's how you get nutrients from the sun, from the earth, from your food. If you're not getting any of those things, and most of it aren't properly, then you're not getting your nutrients. But the next one, again, is, believe it or not, prescription medications, particularly things like corticosteroids. These drugs, the steroids and the biologics, decrease magnesium stores. And again, when you're inflamed, because you need magnesium for all these reactions, there is an increased demand, therefore a deficiency. When there's an increased demand and a decrease of intake, you end up in debt. It's like spending more money than you make. You're going to be in debt. Same thing with your nutrients. When we have low magnesium, another big reason is actually chronic diarrhea. Now, those who are constipated can still be there, but water loss and chronic diarrhea, rapid transit times, end up leading to a lot of these deficiencies as well. And then, of course, this also leads to increased stress hormones, like we talked about, more immune responses. You can see the cycle, how it goes on and on. Everything we talked about from omegas to iron, et cetera, B9, B12. When you're deficient, your body becomes inflamed. It's unable to regulate. When it can't regulate, your immune system spirals off the deep end, and then you're more likely to need drugs in the first place. But at no point during your time has your doctor said, hey, you should take magnesium and omega, vitamin D3, a B9, B12, a fermentable iron supplement of some kind, because your body needs these to regulate. Nope. They just say, here are some drugs that will control your symptoms. No regard for your body. They're just paralyzed. It's nonsense. So how do you get magnesium? Well, leafy greens are typically a good source if you tolerate them. But a lot of those with IBD can't tolerate greens. So one of the things I recommend is get a supplement. There are absorbable forms, like magnesium glycinate. And that's spelled like it sounds. That's G-L-Y-C-I-N-A-T-E. You may also see it listed as bisglycinate. I use the brand Canprev is one of my go-tos. It's very affordable and highly absorbable. It's great, but not everybody tolerates that. So there are other forms, like malate or threonate. These are really good ones, whereas magnesium citrate will typically lead to either sleepiness or diarrhea for a lot of people. You can get magnesium in pumpkin seeds and other foods. But again, the dosing that you can get in a supplement for $30 is much, much higher. So I'd always rather go to a supplement if I can do that instead. I'm in Canada. I think we pay $35 for a bottle of 240 capsules at 200 milligrams each. And if you're deficient, anywhere from 600 to 1200 milligrams a day for a short stint is great. So a bottle will last you a month or more, which is typically enough for some people. And that's what we have to look at. But remember, this whole process we just talked about, of all the things you're deficient in, none of these things at all are a fix to IBD. They are managing symptoms and they help your body regulate itself when it cannot regulate because you're so inflamed. IBD conclusively, and I'm working on publishing a study on this to prove it to the world, it is not autoimmune, genetic, or random. There are root causes for all of it. Your immune system is not attacking you at all, and we know there are many root causes. All of these things, however, lead to imbalanced immune responses and inflammation, which end up ultimately leading to nutrient deficiencies. When you're deficient, your body spirals deeper, and now we have more problems and we just get medication. So these aren't a fix, but they definitely give you a better fighting chance to help yourself unless you actually want help from me and my team, and we can do that. If you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on the podcast, there's a link down below in the notes. Simply click that. You can send me an email. You can schedule a call with me and my team. We'll just walk you through the process. And right now at the time of recording, I'm doing those calls myself. So you can talk to me personally, and I'll walk you through your root cause so we can identify it and get this figured out to start reversing your disease. 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, 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.