Super Gut, Super You with Dr. William Davis

ur guest this week is Dr. William Davis author of the new book Super Gut. We talk about the elements of the Standard American Diet that are contributing to a myriad of metabolic diseases, and how to rebuild your gut biome to help with everything from dementia to aging.

Follow up with Dr. Davis at his website. 

Get the Adult version of the probiotic we discussed, BioGaia Gastrus, here.

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Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

Unknown: 0:08

Gib, hello and welcome to another episode of intelligence for your life. The podcast. I'm Gib Gerard. Our guest this week is Dr William Davis. He is author, most famously of the international best seller, Wheat Belly, but we're gonna be talking about not only what what we learned from Wheat Belly, but also about his newest book, super gut, which is all about the bacteria that we have growing in our gut and and the implications that that has on our whole body, from our brain to our skin, every everything and everything in between. You know, your mood, all of that, and how to rebuild that gut bacteria. So here, without further ado, is my interview with Dr William Davis. Dr William Davis, author of, well, author of, like, the International, world renowned bestseller, Wheat Belly, and, of course, the new book, most importantly, super gut, a four week plan to reprogram your microbiome, restore health and lose weight. Thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate it. Oh, thrilled to be here. All right. Well, let's, let's dive into this. So your first book, Wheat Belly, was sort of ahead of the paleo and keto world. Like that, that movement of cutting out grains out of our diet, and kind of change Turn, turn some, some traditional like, literally turn the food pyramid on its head. Let's just start with, like, a quick primer on on kind of what brought that, what brought that up to prominence, and why Wheat Belly was such a, was such a, why it was such a big success in such a phenomenon? Well, I think because it worked. People, when they heard the actual rationale behind it and they tried it, they saw phenomenal things happen. I And there's several reasons for that Gib. One of the reasons is that there's a protein in modern wheat. And I say modern wheat because what we're being sold today is nothing like traditional strains of wheat. Sure, it doesn't look the same. It's genetically different. It's biochemically unique. And so one of the effects is this protein that they altered in numerous experiments, called Gliadin, and humans just don't have the enzymes, the digestive enzymes that break down the proteins in seeds of grasses. That's what wheat and grains are. And so while we can break down the protein, say, in an egg, into its constituent amino acids, you can't do that with the proteins and grains, so we break them down to fragments or peptides. And some of these peptides from that protein, the glide in protein, have opioid properties on the human brain. They don't make you high. They stimulate appetite. It makes a lot of people become incessantly hungry. These are the people, for instance, who have a big bowl of pasta. They're filled to bursting and they're still hungry. That is a very unnatural response describing me at every family dinner. But yeah, so when you get rid of that collection of opioid peptides that stimulate appetite. You are miraculously freed of appetite. You may have breakfast, say at 7am maybe three eggs and some sausage, and you probably won't want to eat till no sooner than three, maybe five, 6pm in other words, that hold every two hour you're hungry is nonsense. It's all due to the appetite stimulating effects of the glide in protein. There's other components that that have been changed. For instance, the wheat germ agglutinin protein sounds like gluten, but it's unrelated. Wheat germ agglutinin is a very toxic compound to the human gastrointestinal tract, but it has been markedly enriched in strains of wheat because it provides pest resistance to the farmer. It keeps insects and molds away from the wheat plant, so they enriched wheat Gerard gluten by selecting strains that had higher content, not recognizing they were concentrating this very potent bowel toxin. And there's some other factors in modern wheat and grains that when people banish these things from their lives, they are freed, not just of appetite, but also weight, high blood sugars, many times, autoimmune conditions, depression, anxiety, and that's when I started to see the absolute shift, the change in Latin landscape of health, when people banish this thing that is recommended by all government agencies, doctors recommended to be the majority of your diet. I mean, you look at you look at the food pyramid. And that the biggest, the biggest staple is, is that wheat, that wheat and grains staple and and we, we repurpose it in a variety of ways. So there's, obviously, there's bread, but, you know, cereal is just versions of that, with certain exceptions being oat based, like Cheerios, for example. But, it's insane. It's insane how much we're supposed to be eating that. And then in the kind of metabolic stuff that you're talking about, the metabolic disease that follows, you know, if they got it right, Gib and they said, and they said something like this, instead of saying, have healthy whole grains at every meal, every snack. And what if they instead said, we're not sure. This stuff changed by Agra. Business and genetics research is appropriate and safe for human consumption, then you and I wouldn't have anything to talk about, but they got it so colossally wrong by urging us to pack our diet filled with these things. But then the great news here is when people recognize this blunder they made and take it out of the human diet, spectacular things happen. So I mean, should we be finding heirloom grains, or is the big thesis of Wheat Belly that we just need to cut out grain in general for the foreseeable future? So they took something that was somewhat harmful to humans and made it much worse. If we look back at what the anthropologists tell us and ask, What happened to the first humans who consumed ancestral forms of wheat, such as einkorn wheat that's pre biblical times, or Emmer wheat of the Bible. There was an explosion in knee arthritis. There were multiple deficiencies, especially of iron, and there was other diseases that emerged, including rotting teeth, you know, before, before people consumed grains, there was almost no such thing as tooth decay. Interesting time, of course, this was time with no toothbrushes, right? No dental frost, no floor, no dentists, no doubney years. That's, you know, no Novocaine. But when grains were added to the diet, and this was about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, about 8000 4000 years ago in the Central America, about 8000 years ago in Sub Saharan Africa, with millet. When those grains were added, the very uncommon tooth decay, one to 3% of all teeth recovered. Exploded to 16 to 49% of all teeth showing rot and misalignment, by the way, and so that's why we've been plagued with bad teeth. You know, it's not uncommon for half the country to have lost their teeth by age 75 Yeah, so it's a big problem that we have to address with hygiene. And is it just, is it just the, is it just the the bacteria that gets fed by the by these proteins and wheat? Is that? Is that the is that the key? So it's actually the amylopectin, a carbohydrate of wheat that is highly digestible, more digestible than sucrose, table sugar. Interesting. So if you put a piece of bread, for instance, in your mouth and chew it, and if you were to check a finger stick blood glucose, you would see that even before you swallow, your blood sugar has gone up. But that release of sugar from the amylopectin a also feeds the unhealthy microbes in your mouth, and that's why you get a lot of the plaque in between your teeth, and you get tooth decay, and all the problems that come with tooth decay. So you've seen this from, you know, from the studies that you've done, and also from from, from your practice. But almost every, every societal change you know, every, every, like big empire level society has had with it on its rise, a staple crop that that rises with it, right, like that's, that's the way that these, these large civilizations have risen, and wheat in Egypt was, was one of them. Could it possibly be that, like, there's just this is a nature of civilized life, and that the grain itself is not the problem or or is that it? Can we really identify that it is these, these elements are great. You make an excellent point. That is, the growth of empires, expansion of human population is dependent largely on cheap, available staples, yeah, such that the government can control the flow of food. But it was a mistake. You know? It's a mistake that we're seeing now only in light of having had government advice that got it even further, even more wrong, right, right, telling us to load our dice with this stuff, and now we realize, holy crap, we made a big mistake. Sure, stuff never belonged in the human diet in the first place. Yet we have 7 billion lives on this planet now, largely dependent on this thing that should not have been food in the first place. Yeah, but I mean, but would I guess we wouldn't have civilization without it. That's it would look very different. Yeah, right. So we would, maybe we would have these sort of hunter gatherer tribes still that may have, may or may not have grown larger than they currently, than they used to be, or something like that. So, you're right, the advent of agriculture, many 1000s of years ago, allowed such things as specialization and occupation, yep, or else you and I'd be farmers, right? I mean, yeah, you're even in, you, even in, like, recent history, over the last 100 years in Western society, you see 80% 70% of of the workforce being agrarian, moving into now, you know it's, I think it's, it's less than 10% that that transition is because of the kind of modifications that you're talking about, but that ultimately hurt our health. You know, from where I said Gib, where I see people's lives, their weight, their health transformed by managing this stuff from their lives, but it does. Has opened the question, well, how do we feed the planet? So, right? This is my point, that this is kind of how I'm circumventing that question directly. But yes, yeah, you can't, you can't have the number of people we have. I mean, you're talking about a mass starvation event in order to transition away from them, right? So we're not talking you. And I can't propose that we legislate the diet, right? But I think those of us who are aware and understand that all the modern diseases of modern humans, that is tooth decay, type two diabetes, obesity, anxiety, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, etc, are largely caused by consumption of wheat and grains. Interesting, once, those of us who can afford to do so can banish wheat and grains, and by the way, you can still have pizza and you can still have muffins and cookies, but we're going to recreate them without wheat and grains. We'll pick and choose healthier replacement products. Don't mess with your blood sugar, don't cause opioid activation of the of the appetite, and don't have all those other adverse effects. And you can enjoy all kinds of wonderful things, even in social events. I want to transition to the new book in a second here, but, but you talk about replacing those traditional confections, right? Very popular, specifically, like in, you know, in certain cities, the gluten free revolution, right? And you're talking about different proteins in wheat from gluten. The gluten itself is not the enemy, but it's these other, these other proteins and sugars that our body treats. People go for these gluten free baked goods. They go for these gluten free, you know, confections, processed food. It seems to me that they're trading wheat gluten. And sometimes it's wheat without the gluten, but it's still, it's you're still getting the wheat. And sometimes they just replace it with a lot of sugar to make it more palatable, or some other kind of starch to hold it all together, but sugar to make it taste better. That can't be the right solution. Can it? No, absolutely not. It's sad Gib that a gluten free industry has emerged and is growing like crazy, and they're choosing awful replacement ingredients, typically cornstarch, rice flour, tapioca starch and potato flour. These are awful because they raise blood sugar sky high, more so than even wheat. Very few things, very few foods, raise blood sugar higher than wheat, the amylopectin, a wheat among the very few corn starch, rice flour. It's like a cruel joke, right, right? So I see these people who pretend that they're being healthy by eating gluten free, but they're just really eating a high sugar, weird, like new starch diet. Exactly. That's why it causes heart disease, dementia, cancer, high blood pressure, many of the same diseases that wheat causes. And so that's a what we do, and what I advocate is avoiding all those processed gluten free foods. You know, an avocado is gluten free, naturally gluten free, that's okay. Yeah, grapefruit is naturally a piece of lamb or pork that's naturally gluten free. That's okay. That's where the confusion comes. So what do you replace this stuff with? So let's say you want to make a pizza crust, or maybe want to make a muffin. We use such things is almond flour, ground golden flax seed, coconut flour. Cheeses in various forms make good replacement ingredients, believe it or not. And for sweeteners, we use the natural, mostly non caloric sweeteners, like various forms of stevia, yeah, monk fruit, allulose and erythritol. Do you think that the rise in childhood allergies to things, I mean, I, you know, do things like gluten and peanuts have anything to do with this genetically modified food that we're getting. I think it's more due to the disruption of the microbiome, and that leads us down. The reason I wrote the super gut purpose, I saw smooth transition. There's real smooth. So I saw spectacular transformations in health, just with the wheat grain elimination and, by the way, also addressing the handful of common deficiencies, not because of the diet, but because the habits of modern life, right? Like living indoors, not getting vitamin D, right, drinking filtered water because you don't want sewage in your water, and that takes out all magnesium. So addressing those handful of nutrients also. But then I saw people, this is that give and take with like civilization, right? You got to feed a lot more people. You got to have, you have to have treat, you have to treat your water, because we don't have these amazing fresh water sources everywhere we go anymore. But at the same time that you're missing some stuff. You don't want skin cancer, but you still need your vitamin D, right, exactly. But then I saw some issues that were persistent for some for many people. For instance, food intolerances, like the ones you're talking about, could be the peanuts, or it could be night shades. Could be tomatoes, tomatoes and eggplants, yeah. Could be histamine containing foods. It could be FODMAPs, fibers and sugars. And so they persisted. Despite doing all this and other some other issues persisted. People say something like this, I did the Wheat Belly lifestyle. My rheumatoid arthritis is 70% better. I'm off the biologic it was cost me 1000s of dollars a month in co pays. I'm off the prednisone, but I still have to take naproxen now and then for flare ups. Why? So I looked for better answers, and I found them in the microbiome. But the great thing about the micro. I'm one. The bad thing is that virtually all of us have massively disrupted microbiome, our GI microbiome, because of exposure to antibiotics, glyphosate and Roundup herbicide, which is ubiquitous. It's a herbicide, yes, but it's also an antibiotic. I mean, other herbicide, and the fact that, the fact that they carved them out specifically in the laws about what you're allowed to put in your food, that they are an exception, even though the chemical class that they're in are not allowed is insane to me. Yeah, it's everywhere, though. Gib it's chlorinated drinking water, on and on and on. All the things, non sternal, anti inflammatory drugs, stomach acid blocking drugs, statin cholesterol, drink. All these things disrupt the human microbiome, and as a result, we've lost literally hundreds of species, including very important species. And when you lose those species that were competing with the unhealthy, mostly fecal microbes, right? Those fecal microbes win, proliferate. Yes, they won. And the curious thing is this surprised me, is that many people, by my estimation, 50% of Americans have these fecal microbes, E coli, Klebsiella, citrabacter, et cetera, climb up into the 24 feet of small bowel, so called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And what's remarkable about that is, once you had this 30 feet, so 24 feet of small bowel, four to five feet of colon filled with fecal microbes, some of the breakdown products. These these creatures live only for hours, not for years. Mm, hmm. When they die, they release some of their breakdown products into the bloodstream. And that is a process finally validated by a French, now Belgian group in 2007 that process called endotoxemia, but it explains how microbes in the GI tract can be experienced in the brain. Yeah, I've heard more about this, yeah, yeah, that some cultures recognize it a little bit better and say that the gut is the second brain, right? That that these that neurotransmitters are created in the gut. Yes, absolutely, you get dementia, or you can experience this process as joint pains or muscle pains like fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis, or as metabolic diseases like high blood pressure or type two diabetes or obesity. In other words, virtually all modern diseases have to be re examined in light of this process, because the gastrointestinal microbiome, via endotoxemia, participates in so if all the doctor does, for instance, is give you an anti inflammatory drug for your fibromyalgia, your rheumatoid arthritis, he has done nothing to address the cause. Now know with confidence that many of these diseases are either caused or at least worsened by this process of you treat the symptom, but you're actually making the underlying cause worse in doing so, or at least just failing to address right process, right? Because these drugs, like these biologics, that cost up to$12,000 a month, Gib, yeah, a month, yeah, all they do is interfere with one step in inflammatory pathway. They do nothing for the actual root cause. Yeah. Okay, so this is some real doom and gloom stuff. So I mean, my assumption is based on extrapolating, is we want to cut out a lot of these processed foods, particularly the foods that are treated with the pesticides and herbicides that you're talking about. That's gonna be organic. Whole Foods is gonna be the first step, right? And then how do we begin to rebuild that healthy gut bacteria? I mean, I take, I do psyllium Hus powder every morning, and I have to say, I felt a huge difference in my mood and all kinds of other things. And that's, oh, great. That's supposed to it's supposed to be the building block from which my good bacteria comes. Is it beyond that? Is there more we should be doing? Yeah, two big things people can do. One is reintroduce fermented foods and Oh, good. Okay, so these are things that many people kind of recognize, like kefir and yogurt, kombucha, kimchi is at the top of the list for very helpful fermented foods. It's inexpensive. It's very easy to do once you do it, once you see how it's done, do it on your kitchen counter. Takes a few days to ferment something, and it's delicious and it makes food taste better. But with the availability of home refrigeration in the late 1920s Americans forgot fermented foods. Yeah, the other thing I do, beer is fermented. Does that count? Beer is fermented, but really not that rich in the right microbes you want. Fine, fine, fine. I was getting happy there for a second, but that's fine. The other thing we do is we identify lost what are called Keystone microbes, very important microbes that like plankton in the ocean, that whales and jellyfish depend on you lose plankton, you lose whales. Same thing here in the GI microbiome, and one of my favorite microbe of all is Lactobacillus reuteri that almost all of us are E, U, T, E, R, I, by the way, named after the German microbiologist Dr Gerard Reuter Well, we lost that microbe even though squirrels have. Possums have it. Dogs have it. Indigenous hunter gatherer humans all have it, but we've lost it because we get it back, or do we have to? How do we get can we get it back so we can get it back? And what happens when you restore this microbe? What does two things. One, it sends a signal to your brain so it takes up residence in the GI tract sends a signal to the brain to release the hormone oxytocin, great, the hormone of love and empathy. Yeah, people will say things like, I like my partner better. I like my co workers better, hmm, I'm more generous. Sure. I accept the opinions of other people more readily. My favorite, yeah, but the ladies love it because it smooths their skin. They start to lose skin wrinkles from an explosion dermal collagen. Guys love it because it restores youthful muscle and strength. It also deepens sleep, extends the period of REM sleep, accelerates healing. So a whole huge by the way. Gib, so if we're talking about acceleration of healing, greater muscle and strengths found in youth, is what you're describing. Yes, that's what's happening. We're seeing people not, not back to age 15. No, no. But you're talking about the the like the stress related, you know, we acknowledge that there's a certain stress of modern life and stress related aging that goes with it. But what you're talking about is is basically a an effective blocker on some of those stress related breakdowns that we go through. Yeah, and you can see it on people's faces when they share their selfies at two months, for instance, ladies will see a reduction skin wrinkles, smoothing of the skin more. So how do we I I'm Salt, salt. I'm in. How do we get it back? What do we do to begin to build that back up? So now we're conducting, there's two strains of Rotary. So this is kind of dull stuff. Gib, I apologize, but when you play with microbes, you got to pay attention to strain. To illustrate, you and I and your listeners all have E Coli in our guts. Sure? What if you ate lettuce contaminated by cow manure with E coli? Well, you can die of that E coli. Right? Right? Species, different strengths. So we must be mindful of strain. So we know with confidence there are two strains that do this, and those are in the Super gut book. It's there. There these strain designations are a pain. DSM, 17938, and ATCC, PTA, 6475, of course. Yeah, everybody knows that. All in the book. We got that in elementary school. I don't know what you were learning in kindergarten, but yeah, of course. So we get it from a commercial product called gastros bio Gaia gastros, J, S, T, i, o, s. Now I'll tell you though, we're currently conducting some clinical trials, and we're testing other strains to see if there are strains that are better at it than those two strains that we know have those effects. But until I have those data in my hands from our mouse trials and our human trials, human trials. What I would do is get those strains from bio guy, gastrous, and we do something crazy with them. You can take those tablets, but you'll see those tablets are made for infants, so the doses are very low. So what I did is I took those tablets and I made a yogurt out of it, not like store bought yogurt. I used prolonged fermentation, so we get really big numbers. So we use 36 hours of fermentation, Rotary doubles, Buck back two. Don't have Mommy and Daddy, no sexual, right? Yeah. So they just double. One becomes two, two becomes four. Well, Rotary doubles every three hours at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So I allowed it to double for 36 hours, 12 doublings. I performed something called Flow cytometry on the yogurt to count the microbes. We're getting between 250 and 300 billion microbes per half cup serving. Okay, consume the yogurt and we get these spectacular effects. And not, not Gib, that's one micro, okay, but that's, that's one microbe, and that's you a scientist who is able to do this stuff. I mean, I don't trust myself or my kids not to touch for something that's at 100 degrees for 36 hours. I have a, I have a I have a an instant pot, and I know you can ferment yogurt in that instant pot, and I know I can do all that stuff with it, but I wouldn't trust myself to do this experiment on my own, or this, this development on my own. So what? What are, what are the those of us without access to labs supposed to do? Well, it's actually very easy. You can do it with your instant pot. You can do it with yogurt makers. I do it with a sous vide device, a stick sous vide base and sous vide device. So you do need some means of keeping it 100 degrees Fahrenheit, because these might because these might most lactobacillus species like 100 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly human body temperature. So it's it's much easier than you think. The I laid out the recipes, and I also, by the way, laid out recipes for other microbes. Let's say you want to reduce knee arthritis pain. Well, let's ferment bacillus coagulants, very easy. Let's say you want to shrink your waist and reduce inflammation. Let's ferment lactobacillus gas, right? What if you want a healthier baby that's more likely to sleep through the night have 50% fewer everybody wants that. Everybody wants that. Go, go, go. And what do we do for that? Then you ferment Bifidobacterium fantas and your child. Is less likely to become obese a type two diabetic and has a higher IQ. So it's like going to a restaurant. Gib. You know, when you go to a restaurant and the waitress hand you a men, you don't freak out and say, I can't order all these appetizers and dish you pick and choose the ones you want. That's what we're doing. We're picking and choosing the microbes we want for the effect we want, and when you cultivate them to high numbers as you're doing this. And by the way, it doesn't have to be dairy. It could be coconut milk, it could be salsa, could be hummus. You can ferment all kinds of things and get these high microbial counts. And you obtain these over the top benefits. The book is super gut, a four week plan to reprogram your microbiome, restore health and lose weight. Link to where you can buy that in the show notes, as well as to bio Gaia gastrous supplement, for which is the main bacteria that we've been talking about in the second half of today's show you can check those out in the show notes. Guys, two last questions, Dr Davis, because I know your time is valuable, and we got to go first and foremost, aside from buying the book again, link in the show notes. How come? You'll follow up with you. So we're on social media. My main website, I just last year, have shifted everything over to Dr Davis, infinite health.com, there's a very busy discussion forum. There's my blog. It has over 2000 articles. There's also something called my inner circle, where we have two way zoom conferences once a week for a few hours, and we talk at length about these kinds of things you're talking about. Unbelievable. Okay, so folks, link to Dr Davis, infinite health.com in the show notes as well. One last question, Dr Davis and I ask it to everybody, what is one thing we can all start doing today that will make our lives a whole lot better? Add back fermented foods. It is far bigger than you think. That's amazing. And again, you know, you talked about kombucha, and you talk about, you know, fermenting this yourself. Can you, can we make it easier for people? Can you just buy the kombucha at the store, which has a lot of sugar in it, and a lot of the stuff, you know, has sugar in it? But does that work or or do you really need to be doing this yourself? No, you're right. Gib that you can buy now, commercially produced fermented foods, like kombucha, kefirs, yogurt. Of course, the problem is commercial production. They try to go as fast as possible to make as much product sure as short a time as possible. So let's say I buy some fermented sauerkraut, not sauerkraut and brine and vinegar, but fermented sauerkraut, or let's say kimchi I leave on my counter for a minimum of 48 hours to let it proceed further and fermentation increase. Open it and leave it on your counter because, because you gotta, if they're sealed, you know, you gotta let it, you gotta open it, right? Otherwise, the process isn't gonna, isn't gonna happen. So you loosen the top, but leave it on, okay, yeah. That allows the gasses to escape. You want to get the pump. You want to get the pop, but then, but yeah, top on, yeah, that's right. Some fermenting micros produce so much gas, like carbon dioxide, that you could actually have an explosion if you don't do that, right, yeah? All right, well, all right, so I hear what you're saying. There's a couple things that I'm going to start incorporating into my life, including these additional fermented foods. More often it's and again, it's hard to find the real stuff. Like a lot of times you have sauerkraut in brine that masquerades as the real sauerkraut we're talking about, and you got to find the fermented version exactly it should say something like, contains live cultures or fermented or some wording to that effect. Dr Davis, we really appreciate your time that you've given me personally, a lot to chew on, pun intended, and hopefully we can have you back at some point. But thank you so much anytime. Be glad to that's it for the show today. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate, comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. Helps us out a lot. Follow up with John at facebook.com/john Tesh. He's also on Instagram at John Tesh, underscore, ifyl, I'm Gib Gerard. You find me facebook.com/gib, Gerard, or at Gib Gerard on Instagram and Twitter, I try to respond to every DM, every mention of the show, because ultimately, I do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.