81: Everything You've Been Told About Crohn's and Colitis Is Wrong

In this episode, Josh Dech challenges some of the most widely accepted beliefs surrounding inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), arguing that chronic gut inflammation should be viewed through the lens of root-cause medicine rather than lifelong disease management.

Josh explores why he believes the autoimmune label does not fully explain Crohn's and colitis, discusses research involving immune-mediated responses, and examines evidence around antibodies, genetics, and environmental triggers. He explains why genetics may represent susceptibility rather than destiny and why factors such as toxins, antibiotics, processed foods, mold exposure, microbiome disruption, nutrient deficiencies, and lifestyle stressors deserve greater attention.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Why Crohn's and Colitis Are Described as Non-Autoimmune
• Root Cause vs Symptom Suppression Philosophy
• Genetics vs Environmental Factors
• Immune-Mediated Responses and Antibody Discussion
• The Five R Healing Framework

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Transcript

0:00

Everything you've been told about Crohn's and Colitis is wrong. I'm here to tell you right now it is not autoimmune, it is not caused by genetics, and it is not a random condition. Full stop. But I'm going to prove it to you. Now, in this video, you're going to learn everything your doctor never told you about your bowel disease, and you're finally going to understand that just like any other condition, like an infection, like a burn, or even a broken toe, that is to say that there's a reason why it's happening. There is a root cause, if you will. And once you find that root cause, you can actually reverse it. And I promise you, you don't have to live with bowel disease forever. 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. Now, if we haven't met yet, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, a physician's consultant for Crohn's and Colitis, and a researcher with over 10 years of experience. And I've helped over 600 people reverse their bowel disease. And this is what you absolutely need to know about Crohn's and Colitis. Now, first things first is, I think we should answer the question, why does this video matter? Because the second that you accept your IBD is caused by genetics, that your body's attacking itself, that it's this random condition, then you stop looking for a reason, you stop looking for answers, and you just take the drugs and accept it, and spend $10,000 to $50,000 a month on medication. Once you realize it's not autoimmune, genetic, or random, suddenly you start looking for a root cause. So I want to take this apart, pillar by pillar, piece by piece, the autoimmune genetic random conversation, and we're just going to strip it down to its bare parts. First things first, this isn't a long conversation, but it's the most important one you'll ever hear for Crohn's and Colitis. Pillar number one, we say, or they will say, it is autoimmune. The definition of autoimmunity matters here, because there are actually rules to determine if it's truly autoimmune or not. Kind of like a checklist that requires you to prove the immune system is actually attacking your own tissues. Now the gold standard is actually what's called the Witebsky-Rose Standard. Now this means that you can actually take an antibody, and you'll take, that means a self-attacking antibody, so it's going against your tissues, you can actually take it from a sick person, you inject it into a healthy person, and that person gets the same disease. That's the criteria, that's how they know Graves' disease, for example, a thyroid disease, is autoimmune. They take these thyroid antibodies from a sick person, they inject them into a healthy person, and that antibody attacks that healthy person's thyroid. That's how you know. It has never, ever been done in inflammatory bowel disease, ever. There are no self-attacking antibodies. In fact, when they did some research, they started diving in, they found that back in, I think it was probably the 60s, 50s, 60s, when they first started coining autoimmunity, your body must be attacking itself, they found some antibodies around the 60s and 70s and said, well, they must be attacking yourself, because we've already assumed bowel disease is autoimmune. Not the case. In fact, now research has shown they found some antibodies, 80s, 90s, and even mid-2000s, and they found things like ASCA. That is an antibody. Stands for anti-saccharomyces cerevisiae antibody. What does that mean? That is an antibody towards saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is a yeast. It's not self-tissue. It's actually in your microbiome. And so it targets what's called mannin, which is on the yeast cell wall. But it's not attacking you. That's one of the most common antibodies in IBD. They found other things, like one called anti-OMPC. What is that antibody? Well, that's an antibody, but it's not an auto-antibody. Targets a bacterial protein on E. coli, which there are 700-plus strains of that. Not all E. coli is bad. Some is very good. But they haven't found any self-attacking antibodies. They found dozens of different antibodies, but they found one that was called anti-CBER. And this one here, what they found, I believe it's actually anti-CBER-1, if I'm not mistaken. But long and short, it targets bacterial flagellin. That's the protein that make up the little tails on the end of certain bacteria. It targets those proteins, not your own tissue, right? ALCA, ACCA, AMCA, all these target carbohydrate structures in yeast cell walls. And your gut lining, because there's so much inflammation around them, and your body is attacking these tissues, it's kind of like friendly fire. So your own tissues get broken down by collateral damage. Or there's an infection that's actually been in there for so long. These things like NK cells, these are called natural killer cells. They're part of your immune system. Vital part. They're like seeking to store like assassins. They're very cool. But these natural killer cells, after a long period of time, what ends up happening is these cells can actually turn cytotoxic. They call them CD. They use CD markers. Anyway, you can get what's called bright and dim. And these can become basically from young to old cells. The longer they're there, the more dangerous they get. It's like developing teeth and claws. If one's a baby lion, one's not. They can become toxic to your cells as they start to self-destruct. But that's collateral damage. So it's not autoimmune, right? If IBD were autoimmune, one, you would have self-attacking antibodies. Two, you would actually be able to transfer an antibody from a sick person into a healthy person. And those antibodies would then attack their tissue. What we actually have is an immune system reacting to environmental threats or toxins or something else. That means it's doing its job. It just happens to be reacting in a way that damages the host as collateral damage. This is not autoimmune disease. It is called immune-mediated responses. And this means your body has antibodies to things, which means there's a root cause. It's not arbitrarily attacking your own tissue. This changes the game entirely because now we go away from I'm no longer looking for answers. It's autoimmune. I'm attacking myself. There's no explanation. Oh, well, let's just take the drugs to $10,000 to $50,000 a month and hope for the best. There's a root cause. No different than having a nail in your foot. Those drugs are like putting numbing cream on the nail for the rest of your life and never actually removing the nail. And every time the numbing cream wears off, what do you do? You get a new cream. Suddenly that cream stops working. So what do you do? You put a new cream on top of it. Hope that one works. That's what drugs are doing in your IBD. It is not autoimmune. So let's just call that pillar smashed, right? Not autoimmune. Very conclusive. That one's easy. No self-attacking antibodies. Cannot be transferred from host to host. The Rosewood-Tempsey protocol or that requirement is sound, okay? Not autoimmune. But they also say, well, it's a genetic condition. They got it because of my genes. Let's talk about this. Pillar number two. They say it's a genetic condition. That's what your doctor told you. We don't know why. It's probably genetics. Genetics account for about 25% of the risk factor. That's it. And you can look up the research on this. 25% of your risk is genetically sound. You guys okay? Knocking the tripod around? She good? Okay. I got a puppy who's just running around a little bit crazy. Anyways, 25% of your risk factors are genetics. That doesn't mean the gene is causing the disease. It means that there are certain genes which are likely under the right conditions to express in a way that turns to bowel disease. What does that mean? There are certain genes that regulate how much you respond to a bacterial infection. There's certain genes that help keep the lining of your gut sealed up. But these genes are like computer software. If you put a virus in that software, suddenly it doesn't work so well. That's simply a weak link. The chain didn't break itself. There was something that got in that ended up breaking that chain when it got pulled on with enough pressure. That's the genetic risk of 25%. That's it. We also know it's not genetic because there are studies that show immigrant families. When you get a family of people who move from a country that's non-Western, non-industrialized, what ends up happening when they move, so let's say a low IBD country, right? Like somewhere in the middle of the African jungle, right? So they move over to someone that has a lot of IBD, like Canada, like the US, like the UK, Australia, westernized countries. What we know is that within a single generation, these people are getting IBD just as much as the people in these other countries. Which means it cannot be genetically determined. Because when you move countries, your genes don't change. Your environment changes. And that's a very important distinction. And so the next generation, within a single generation, is getting IBD just as much as everybody else. And also if it were truly just genetic, identical twins would actually almost always have bowel disease exactly the same because it's the identical DNA. But we know that's not the case. In fact, with Crohn's disease, if you have two identical twins, Crohn's disease is only seen in both identical twins 20 to 50% of the time. And in ulcerative colitis, it's actually about 19% of the time where they both end up having it. But likely because they both have that same 25% risk factor and there's an environmental change that's pulling on that weak chain. And so the genes express poorly and it comes out as bowel disease. That's all there is to it. So it's not autoimmune and it's not caused by your genetics. Already this whole disease is like, holy shit, everything's changed. Because what you've been told is false information. It's old information. It's actually rhetoric. And it's not true to what we actually have for up-to-date literature and science and data. So it's not autoimmune. It's not genetic. The third pillar they tell you is that this is idiopathic. This means unknown cause. We don't know what's driving it. It just kind of happens. However, we know there are many very measurable risk factors. Tons of risk factors. Big ones, for example, we know. Antibiotics. That's a risk factor for bowel disease. In fact, in adults, taking antibiotics throughout your lifetime, as little as one single course, but it can get worse as you get more, can increase your risk of developing bowel disease by 74%. In children, 180% more likely to develop a bowel disease after antibiotics. That's pretty substantial. We also look at smoking. That's a big one. Lots of people smoking, vaping. It's all kind of the same issue. What we're looking at here is actually a 76% increase in chances to get bowel disease. These are regular factors. Even oral birth control. Birth control pills can actually increase your risk by 46% of developing bowel disease. Statistically speaking. On top of that, there's air pollution, which is one of the biggest drivers. Ultra processed foods, mold exposure. We have found through the history of the 650 people we've seen now so far for bowel disease, with Crohn's colitis specifically, that up to 87% have identifiable mold or highly likely mold exposure at some point in their life. 87% of those who come to see me have been exposed to mold or got sick and then they found mold and mold is part of their relevant history. That's a huge statistic. So all these factors, environments, and air and water and food, all these things that we see in our modern environments, right? Canada, US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, industrialized countries. This is where we're getting disease. The USA is less than 5% of the global population. In fact, Canada, US is less than 5% of the global population collectively. They make up, depending on the data set you look up, up to 50% of the world's cases of Crohn's and colitis. In Canada, in the USA alone. That's a staggering stat. It can't possibly be genetic and there has to be root causes. What do we have over here? The worst food in the world, the worst air in the world, some of the most toxic water in the world next to drinking parasites out of the Amazon rainforest. We use the most pesticides per capita. The USA, again, 4.7% of the global population, uses roughly 50% of the world's glyphosate spray. So we're covered in this stuff. We're full of chemicals and toxins. You wonder why we're getting sick. It's industrialized countries, which breaks down the three reasons we get sick. Remember, it is not autoimmune. Genetics are a risk factor and it is not an unknown cause. And there's only three reasons we get sick. These are the causes of your bowel disease. First, I'll put a little Venn diagram here for you. The first is going to be toxins. That's your pesticides, your air, your water. That's going to be artificial chemicals. It's going to be polyplastic-based clothing like Lululemon. It's all garbage stuff. It's going to be mold, alcohol, chronically high stress, chronically high blood sugar, ultra-processed foods. Like there's a limitless amount of toxins in our world, right? So these toxins are pulling on your genes and they're also creating deficiencies. Deficiencies of vitamins, minerals, amino acids. You can be deficient in fresh air, sunlight, sleep, rest, relaxation. Deficient in exercise. You can be deficient in so many things your body needs to thrive. When you're deficient, you start to get sick. The last thing that makes us sick is actually microbes. Parasites, viruses, bacteria, and fungus. So yeast, which a lot of those antibodies in IBD are actually yeast. And when these get out of balance, overgrown, we have too little good guys and too many bad guys. We get parasitic infections and mold makes your body prone to parasites. Mold and toxins damage your gut microbiome. All these things reduce resources from your body. You become deficient in vitamins, minerals, amino acids, et cetera. And then you start to develop bowel disease. And there are three things that you need to truly develop bowel disease that we put in our risk factors, right? You have some kind of trigger. A stressful event, a toxic exposure, a surgery, antibiotics. Something has to push you over the edge, right? Or a long, stressful eight, 10 years of your life. The other thing you need to truly develop autoimmune disease is actually gut. That's part of the actual autoimmune for those who truly have self-attacking tissues. But leaky gut is a big driver in an immune overreaction like we see in Crohn's colitis. The next one we do see, of course, like we talked about, is genes. There's genes that often get exploited by toxins or deficiencies. There's even a study called Neutrogenomics that follows nutrients and the lack thereof and their impact on your genetic expression. Because genes are like a volume knob, right? They can either turn way up and overreact or they can turn way down and get calm and work as they should. And then between all these, that's where we get IBD. It is not an autoimmune genetic random condition. It is simply caused by toxins, microbes, and deficiencies in a body that's gone through layers of triggers. There's leaky gut causing your immune system to overreact. It's one of the big factors and genetic predispositions or susceptibilities. These are the factors that actually create disease. But it is not autoimmune. Your body is not attacking itself. It is not random. There are very identifiable, traceable, testable root causes and it is not something that just happens out of the blue. It's not genetic, not random, not autoimmune. We know that. The data is very, very, very, very clear. So the question we have to ask is how do we undo it? Well, this is a whole other conversation. I'm not going to talk about it today. I have it all over my YouTube channel, podcast, social media. It's all over. But I will give you a quick rundown. There are five R's to abide by. The first is remove. Remove what? Remove the problem. What is that trigger? What is the root cause? What is the toxin, microbe, or deficiency that's driving it? All right, so toxins and microbes need to be removed from your environment or from your body. You can't get healthy in the environment making you sick. The next is going to be replenish. And this is where that nutrient depletion conversation comes in. If you do have any kind of deficiency of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, sunlight, fresh air, exercise, you can start getting those into your body. Then we can actually start the next phase, which is actually going to be repair and rebuild. Repair and rebuild what? Well, your gut lining, your gut microbiome, right? Leaky gut is one of the big aspects that drives bowel disease and immune overreactions. So repairing your leaky gut and rebalancing your microbiome and getting those rebuilt to a healthy state. Again, microbes, that's a driver, right? So now we've removed the toxins. We've got the microbes here and we got your deficiencies here. Now we're fixing the bowel disease. The only stage we have left is your immune system has overreacted. This is where we can actually work to rejuvenate the immune system. Not boost it. You can boost the wrong things. Remember, your immune system's already overreactive. We don't want to boost that and make it worse. We want to actually rejuvenate and rebalance your immune system. There's a lot of nuances to this. It's not a right now video conversation, but the point is, everything you've been told about your bowel disease from your doctor is wrong. The research is very clear and if they don't agree, they just haven't caught up or they haven't read it. I've actually got a paper right now. It's in for peer review for the first publishing in history to definitively conclude that the three pillars are wrong and everybody needs to start changing the language in what they're doing and what they're looking for in bowel disease. I hope that will be published in the next couple of months, but we'll see. Anyway, very exciting time, very exciting stuff. All this information, it's on the website, YouTube channel, social media, etc. And of course, you can always reach out to me if you have any questions. It's very easy to do. Simply email us, clients at gutsolution.ca all singular .ca for Canada. Because I'm going to do for you. On that note, thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure. We'll see you 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, 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.