Dr. Will: What's a fecal transplant? You take a healthy person's poop and you transfer it into the person who's sick. For example, a patient of mine took an antibiotic which wipes out your gut, which became life-threatening. Our choices were to remove the colon or to give her a fecal transplant. And so, I delivered the fecal transplant to her. By the next day, the entire infectious issue got shut down. So, this is a great example to show how important our gut microbiome is because 60% of the weight of your stool is your microbiome.

Steve: Really?

Dr. Will: Yes. but it's not getting enough attention and we need to talk about that.

Steve: World-renowned gastroenterologist Dr. Will Bulsiewicz is back. This time he's sharing brand new information regarding the gut microbiome and how poo might actually be the key to your health. 60% of people that listen are currently struggling with some kind of gut problem and it manifests in these subtle ways like bloating, increased fatigue, difficulty concentrating, you don't sleep well at night, skin issues. So it flies under the radar but ultimately leads to other health related problems afterwards.

Steve: So I've got so many questions.

Dr. Will: Totally.

Steve: What's the cause of bloating?

Dr. Will: So constipation is the number one cause. But people who are bloated, please don't sip through straws, drink carbonated drinks, chew on gum, because you just make it worse.

Steve: Next. Are there decisions that you make as a parent that will have a lasting impact on a kid's gut function?

Dr. Will: Yeah. By 3 years of age, you are basically fully adult-sized in terms of your microbiome. But antibiotics, bottle feeding, and birth by cesarean section are associated with an impact on the microbiome, such as an increased risk of allergic, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases. And I'll explain why.

Steve: And then, can I repair the gut?

Dr. Will: Yeah, 100%. And every 3 to 5 days, you build a new gut barrier. And so, I've identified four things missing in our diet, as well as a daily routine that can optimize our microbiome. And when you do these, you will thrive and you will live longer and you will have less disease. And I'm going to take you through all of these steps right now.

Steve: I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So please do double check if you've subscribed and thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So yeah thank you

Steve: Dr. Will. Before we started the recording I asked you about this new book that you've written and the way that you spoke about it was incredibly passionate. Why?

Dr. Will: I sincerely believe that if people take the advice that's in this book and they actually follow it, which is the hardest part. I'm completely convinced it will transform your life. And that's because we all are struggling with the same problem. We manifest it in different ways, but there's this common issue which is inflammation. And it's the health story of our time. It's not getting enough attention. And this book is not only about shining the light on that. It's about providing people with the evidence-based tools that they need in order to be successful and to live an anti-inflammatory life. And when you do that, you will thrive and you will live longer and you will have less disease.

Steve: Can you explain inflammation to me like I'm a 10-year-old?

Dr. Will: Steve, you have an immune system that protects your body. And inflammation is when we turn that immune system on and we make it active. And sometimes that's a good thing, right? If you had a tummy bug, you want to clear that infection, right? If you hurt yourself, you want to heal that wound. That's when your immune system is really good. It's working for you. But the problem that we have these days is that we're turning on the immune system when we don't need to. And it's staying on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that ultimately creates problems because it leads to new issues, new health conditions.

Steve: The word inflammation sounds like something has inflated or become swollen.

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Dr. Will: Well, that is a part of the process. For example, if you hurt your knee, right, there will be inflammation in your knee and it will get red, it will get swollen, it will become tender and like those are the typical characteristics of inflammation when it arrives. But what we're talking about is chronic low-grade inflammation. And this is a tricky thing because it can fly below the radar. It can fly below the radar where you don't realize that it's there. Your doctor may not realize that it's there. And it manifests in these subtle ways where it's like you have increased fatigue. You have difficulty concentrating. You don't sleep well at night. You wake up with aches and pains or you have joints that hurt a little bit or you've had skin issues, right? And it's like, well, we all have those problems, but that's inflammation. Inflammation is driving many of those issues. And so, it's important for people to be aware that, you know, you may like these. There's so many patients that go to their doctor complaining of these symptoms. And the doctor's kind of not really sure what to do about that. And I think it's time for us to like open our mind and bring awareness to the possibility that there is this issue inflammation that's driving that problem, the symptoms, the health conditions of which there are many. And ultimately, we need a plan to address that.

Steve: And is can you be like skinny and in shape and still have inflammation?

Dr. Will: 100%.

Steve: So it's not just a a weight thing.

Dr. Will: No, it's not just a weight thing because if you if you think about, you know, people who are competitive bodybuilders, they look amazing on the outside and they're falling apart on the inside. And these people often suffer with digestive health problems. I know because they reach out to me, including many people that are well-known who look incredible and they're suffering with gut issues and then ultimately they're at risk for other health related problems afterwards. So on this point of inflammation is when your immune system kind of stays on. Why does it stay on and I mean how do I turn it off?

Dr. Will: Well, we have to start with acknowledging that the reason why this causes problems is that it let's like sort of use an analogy of the immune system is your small army and they're there to defend you. And when we activate the army and they're actually going to war, you have to expect that there's going to be damage to the surrounding areas, right? Like if people if if there's a war occurring, of course there's decimation and damage that occurs and it's brutal. And the problem is that if we're activating the immune system, the the areas that are surrounding it, that's your body, right? And the decimation and destruction that's occurring is within your own tissues, within your organs. As I was researching this book, I actually took three years to understand this topic. And what I discovered is a connection between your immune system and your gut that is undeniable. And that connection becomes the powerful factor that allows you to understand why it happens and how we can fix it. We have our gut microbiome and there are 38 trillion microbes that live inside of our large intestine and they include bacteria and yeasts and and archaea which are these things that have been on the planet for 4 billion years and possibly parasites. And so in this entire community of microorganisms, they're there with a purpose and that is to support you and your physiology. One of their key jobs is actually to basically feed the gut barrier that lines your entire intestines.

Steve: Do you want to show me on using this?

Dr. Will: Sure.

Steve: Is this a the right part of the body?

Dr. Will: So now the large intestine is the home to your microbiome. So these 38 trillion microbes this is their this is their residence. This is their domain where they live. Now this entire system which is like on the order of 20 or 25 feet so like something on the range of 6 to 8 mters it's coated with a single layer of cells which we call the epithelial layer and that is your gut barrier and it's a quite fascinating part of your body because this is like the castle wall and keeps the bad stuff out but simultaneously needs to allow the good stuff in and These cells they turn over every 3 to 5 days. So it's a beautiful thing actually because every 3 to 5 days you have an opportunity to create a brand new gut barrier. So within the system the microbes that live inside your colon their job is to basically repair and restore the gut barrier. And when the gut barrier is intact it's going to do its job of protecting the immune system. And when the gut barrier starts to break down, then things can sneak across which we would refer to as increased intestinal permeability, but the common language is leaky gut. The immune system will see and recognize things that aren't supposed to be there. And so the immune system then steps up and wants to take it out. And that basically means it needs to get activated and attack. And that is inflammation.

Dr. Will: So the breakdown of these three systems that start with the microbes, microbes are actually your first layer of defense and then leading to the breakdown of the gut barrier is what ultimately activates the immune system when we have things that are sneaking across that are not supposed to be there. the reverse can also be true. And that to me is where the exciting opportunity exists is that if you can heal the gut microbes, then the gut microbes can get back to work and do their job of repairing and restoring the gut barrier. And when you create a strong gut barrier, then basically you're protecting the immune system. And then what you see actually is the immune system cools off and it becomes more tactical and capable of doing its job.

Steve: Okay? And when we're eating lots of bad stuff and you know many of the things we're going to talk about today are causing a breakdown in those microbes which is causing the gut barrier to worsen which is causing the immune system to kick in which is causing the inflammation and the inflammation is therefore causing our cells to be damaged. What's the immune system overfunctioning causing? Like you you're talking about the army analogy where there's an army and they're at war and some of them are damaging the surroundings.

Steve: How is it damaging my surroundings? My immune system being on all the time.

Dr. Will: Well, so what ends up happening is it sets off this sort of chain reaction which can have an effect throughout your entire body where the immune cells, it's not just a couple of immune cells, they start to basically send out signals and these signals we call them cytokines. So you can measure those cytokines and those are basically communication tools that the immune cells are using with each other to basically call for help. So and as they get revved up these cytokines start to go out and then this leads to a cascade of even more immune cells releasing even more cytokines. And so and then kick off this wave and this is what ultimately you can feel throughout your entire body. And it has these consequences of basically causing damage to these individual tissues. So it depends on which tissue we're referring to. Inflammation in the liver we would call hepatitis, right? But at the same time we have overwhelming evidence at this point that inflammation in the brain which we call neuroinflammation has been associated with mood disorders. So like major depression inflammation in the brain has been associated with cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease. So, and it's not to claim it's not to claim that all disease literally is related or caused by the gut microbiome. That's not the call. It's more so to say that we need to understand that our immune system is so powerfully connected to our microbiome that you cannot separate the two. And there's evidence to suggest that we can we can manipulate. So whether it be antibiotics which decimate the gut or the alternative the the opposite would be a fecal transplant which rapidly reinvigorates the gut and restores that gut architecture and ecosystem.

Steve: What's a fecal transplant?

Dr. Will: So fecal transplant is where you take a healthy person's poop and you transfer it into the person who's sick.

Steve: And where are they administering it?

Dr. Will: The way that I've always done the fecal transplant because I've done many throughout my career is during a colonoscopy.

Steve: So if in theory colonoscopy what's a colonoscopy?

Dr. Will: Yeah. So colonoscopy is a medical procedure where typically you would be asleep and while you're asleep I take a long flexible tube that is about the size of my index finger and I can pass that with control all the way through the entirety of your large intestine which is about five or six feet long. And I can actually dip into the last part of the small intestine which we call the terminal ileum which is down here in the right the right lower part of the abdomen. You're administering the fecal transplant because they they have this vicious infection called C. diff and again those infections this infection can be life-threatening. And you're administering the fecal transplant because the antibiotics are not working. So you need an alternative where the idea and goal is to restore balance within the gut ecosystem.

Steve: Yeah. You're putting good bacteria in, not taking bad bacteria. Yeah.

Steve: Not taking all bacteria out, I guess.

Dr. Will: So you put and you put the good bacteria in and when this happens, you're actually all at once reinstalling potentially hundreds of species in balance in the right amounts. So, it's like an entire ecosystem transplant. It would be like us being like, "Okay, here's this forest that's not doing well. We're going to take the Amazon and we're going to transplant it into the space." And now that we have all these animals that like do well in the space, the forest is washing. It's vibrant again. So, going back to our point about the immune system, the reason why the immune system is staying on is because I have damaged my gut and it's essentially trying to repair my gut. And so if I live in a permanent state of a damaged gut because of what I'm consuming, then I'm going to live in a permanent state theoretically of inflammation. The thesis from my perspective is that the modern world and the way in which we live is damaging our gut, damaging our microbiome, and then we're suffering the consequence of that which is disruption of our gut barrier and ultimately the activation of our immune system in this forever war, which is chronic low-grade inflammation.

Steve: How was cancer associated with this? We you talked about 130 different diseases and in your book I think it's around page 22 you mentioned I think it's chemotherapy where you're making an analogy between how chemotherapy kind of wipes everything out and how a poorly kept gut is associated with an increase in cancer likelihoods.

Dr. Will: Let's start with this. Your body produces 3.8 million cells every second. Your immune system has the responsibility of identifying where there's a problem and taking it out. You can't possibly create 3.8 million new cells and not have some genetic abnormality that could turn into cancer. Right? So, the responsibility of the immune system is to basically be perfect every day of your life and remove those problematic cells before they turn into something bigger and better. It's an impossible task. There's an entire story that's unfolding now in this conversation about how the gut microbiome is connected to our immune system and the way in which we treat cancer and it's it started really in melanoma. We have been using sort of immune manipulations for a very long time to treat melanoma. But what changed is they were using these things called immunotherapy. To be more specific, immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Dr. Will: So it turns out that your immune cells have like basically a kill switch. If there was a problem, you could like flip it off immediately. And that specific receptor is called PD-1. And the tumors, they're so nasty because they produce this protein that basically activates the kill switch,

Steve: turns off your immune system,

Dr. Will: and it turns off your immune system. So the immune checkpoint inhibitor, the idea is to basically flip that switch back on. And by flipping it on, activate your immune system, which will then wake up, see this cancer, be like, okay, that needs to be taken out, and go after it. If someone received antibiotics before the immune checkpoint inhibitor, they didn't do well. So then it raised the question, maybe this is a microbiome thing. So they said, okay, well, if antibiotics do this, what happens if we move in the opposite direction and basically act like restore the microbiome with a fecal transplant? And what they discovered was incredible results. There's now multiple studies in melanoma where they take people and they give them a fecal transplant from someone who was a responder and give it to the person who's about to go get treated. And that's what they did. And and with incredible results, like literally twice as many people were beating cancer relative to the expectation.

Dr. Will: The fascinating thing about that is that it's not just a cancer story. There's research now in Parkinson's disease. So Parkinson's disease is a neurocognitive disorder. So that means basically it's a it's a brain condition.

Steve: Mhm.

Dr. Will: Well, it turns out that Parkinson's probably starts in the gut and this is actually a disorder of the gut-brain connection because both parts are involved. It's not just the brain condition. The brain condition is actually the more severe part. So for the people who are listening at home, we have a model out and I have just lifted their skull like Hannibal Lecter and exposed their brain tissue. And what we want to talk about is the brain-gut connection, the connections between the brain and their intestines. And so we have classically thought of Parkinson's disease as being a brain a brain health problem. But I'm here to tell you that this problem begins down here in the gut and involves the connections between the two because every single person that I've ever seen with Parkinson's disease, they're constipated. All of them. And what's interesting is that they've now shown that the constipation comes before the Parkinson's disease. So now this doesn't mean for people who are constipated, there's a lot of you out there. This doesn't mean that if you're constipated, you're going to develop Parkinson's disease. There's a very small percentage of people, but it's important to understand that the the manifestations of this health condition actually start in the digestive system before they actually transfer up to the brain. And so now in this study, Steve, what they did is they took these people who have Parkinson's disease. They gave them a fecal transplant.

Steve: They gave them a poo transplant.

Dr. Will: They gave them a poo transplant. And what they found was a year later they had a durable continued benefit in terms of their movement issues. There are now other studies with Parkinson's disease that are showing benefit both for the brain and the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but also for the gut in terms of that constipation that I was talking about. I mean, it begs the question, these poo transplants sound great.

Steve: Can the average person go and get one?

Dr. Will: I think we need to talk about that.

Steve: Yeah, we need to talk about that because there was a Netflix special where they made it sound like you should just do it at home. Do not do that. Please do not do that. So, number one, we need to study and adequately understand what the risks are. The fecal transplant makes it sound like this is like the quick easy thing that you do and you fix your entire life, but that's not the same as rebuilding your microbiome using the lifestyle and diet tools that actually are going to give you the meaningful health impact that you're searching for over the long term.

Steve: Over the long term, a huge percentage of the population struggle with gut problems. We asked the Diary of a CEO audience and roughly it was over 60% of people that listen said that they're currently struggling with some kind of gut problem whether it's bloating or some kind of discomfort or just digestion issues generally. Now that's 61% of people responding to those three words bloating, discomfort, irregular digestion. Then about 15% of people said that they have IBS. Like 14 15% of people said self diagnose that they think they have irritable bowel syndrome. Am I right in thinking the causes of what they're saying they have are wildly different potentially? Or is it like one or two things? Cause I'm trying to figure out how I help those 61% of people that like me have eat something sometimes and then feel and then not really sure what it is, feel a little bit bloated, might feel a bit gassy, might have strange digestion, but not necessarily sure what's causing it and when.

Dr. Will: Yeah, I mean this is the same issue that I struggle with, right? So I write a book with the goal of trying to help as many people as possible knowing that you can't there's no one-size-fits-all, right? So ultimately it's about empowering people with the right information and helping them to identify. I literally wrote about this in my author's note right in the front of the book, which is basically to say you're all going to read the same book, but the way in which this book touches you is going to be unique to you. There's going to be something in there that you're going to find that you're like, that's my moment. That's my aha moment, right? And for many people, like just looking statistically, looking at the average American diet, there's a huge opportunity when it comes to diet. And that is where I put a lot of energy and attention because I just I know what the stats say. So, I know America needs this. But at the same time, there's a conversation that gets into other topics that look, the way that we live is different than the way that our grandparents grew up when they were kids.

Steve: Mhm. To me, it's more about like helping people to see like what is that one thing for them. There's some people who are going to be listening to this that it's not their diet, it's not sleep, it's not circadian rhythm, it's trauma. And I think that these are things that need to like we need to shine a light on that. We'll do all of that. On this point about bloating, discomfort, irregular digestion, if I have one of those things, does that theoretically mean that something is not right?

Dr. Will: Everyone gets bloated once in a while. So, I think I think it would be unfair to make it sound like you should never have any adverse symptoms at all.

Steve: Right.

Dr. Will: But if it's prolonged,

Dr. Will: but if it's prolonged, if it's a chronic health issue, if you're the type of person who you wake up in the morning and you say, "I hope today is going to be a good day. I hope I don't have to deal with that specific issue." You you have a problem like we already know. And then we have to work on that to address that issue. And how we go about that, I think needs to be on some level personalized. But the tools that are at our disposal remain the same. So it's just a matter of like let's put it on the table. Here are your choices. You pick which ones are most applicable to you. Where are the opportunities for you? And I I can't tell you that without knowing more about you.

Steve: What about this issue of people getting gassy like farting a lot?

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Steve: Is that typically associated with one particular gut issue or is that again could that be a plethora of issues?

Dr. Will: So it could be it could be a plethora of issues. This is this is a common problem. If I have to like start with what is my number one thing, it's constipation for sure. 100%. There are so many people who are listening right now that are constipated and they don't even know it because they poop every day and they think that how often they poop is the definition. And that's not true. So constipation is what happens when you're not adequately emptying your bowels. And that could be a frequency problem, but it could also be that it's a partial poop.

Steve: Oh, okay. Cuz I thought constipation was if you just haven't been you can't go you go to the toilet and nothing comes out.

Dr. Will: Look, don't get me wrong. If you if you don't poop for a week, I know you're constipated. I don't need to ask any more questions. If you go a week, but if it's there are people who they poop every other day. That's their normal. They feel fine. They don't have any gut symptoms. They don't have a constipation problem. We're okay.

Steve: Right? Right. So frequency is not the be all and end all.

Dr. Will: It's part of the it's part of the equation, right? But there's also people who they poop and I I want to sort of paint the picture and forgive me like I feel very comfortable talking about poop. This is what I've done for a living. But they they go to the bathroom in the morning. They struggle. It's not satisfying. They had to work really hard to get a little nugget to come out. And then they feel like they still have to go. and maybe 45 minutes later they poop again. Okay, that's not a new poop. You're doing partial poops. You're probably doing a 20 or 25% poop. So, you could poop three, four times during the day. You might not still be fully emptying your bowels, right? And so that so that's an example of a person who can actually be struggling with bloating and constipation and not think because they're like, "Doc, I'm pooping three times a day."

Steve: Where is the gas coming from in that? Why why do people you eat something and then you fart a lot? What's going on?

Dr. Will: So gas so gas travels with poop. You may I don't mean you specifically, Steve, people listening may notice this that you wake up in the morning and you're farting like crazy. And that farting continues until you actually have your morning bowel movement. And then once you have your good, healthy morning bowel movement, you feel solid and you're not farting anymore, right? the gas travels with the poop. So, and the reason why this happens is because first of all, your poop is not just the leftover remains of your food. Actually, your poop is predominantly your microbiome. 60% of the weight of your stool is microbial.

Steve: Really?

Dr. Will: Yes.

Steve: When you say microbial, you mean like the bacteria?

Dr. Will: The bacteria.

Steve: 60% of it.

Dr. Will: Let me give you an example. If I took your drink and I added some soluble fiber, which is prebiotic, into your drink.

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: There's no grit, there's no roughage, you don't even know it's there. And you're going to have a bigger, healthier bowel movement tomorrow as a result of what I just did. Why? Because I fed your microbes and they grow stronger and then they multiply. And because they multiplied, you have a bigger bowel movement, right? That's the way that that works. Now, don't get me wrong. You eat, you know, a salad, you're going to end up with a bigger bowel movement as well, but a big part of that is the fiber within that salad that's feeding these microbes. They multiply, they grow, and you have a big bowel movement.

Steve: So, if that was my if that was my my store, my poop, I'm holding a chocolate bar here. 60% of that would be the microbes.

Dr. Will: 60% of that would be the microbes. Yes. So for that person when the poop is in gridlock and it's not moving through then those microbes are basically sitting there with unlimited time to ferment and produce gas.

Steve: Okay?

Dr. Will: So anything they come into contact with, they're just going to start working on it. So and it's not just like a fiber thing. Anything they come into contact with, it could be protein, they will ferment it. They will produce gas. So, this is a big part of the reason why constipation is so strongly associated with gas and bloating.

Steve: When people eat dairy and things like that, and I think some people that have gluten, they they often tend to get a little bit gassy.

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Steve: Is that constipation?

Dr. Will: Gas and bloating is not just a constipation issue. I would argue that constipation is the number one cause of that particular issue, but there's many potential causes. Number one could be motility. That's constipation.

Steve: What's motility?

Dr. Will: Motility is the way in which your intestines move. So if the intestines move too fast and out of rhythm, you get diarrhea. If the intestines slow down too much, sluggish, you get constipation. We want the intestines in a rhythm because when they're in a rhythm, just like your heart, that's when they perform their best. So in a rhythm basically means predictable, consistent daily bowel movements. That's ultimately where we would love to be, right? And that in a way taps into like an entire circadian conversation that we can have later. This is a part of your circadian rhythm is a fantastic morning bowel movement. Motility is just one of the causes of gas and bloating. The second is the microbiome. If you have a microbiome that's damaged and struggling, it's not going to be able to do its job the way it's supposed to. And part of its job is processing and breaking down fiber. Because the fiber in our diet, we don't have the enzymes to digest it. So, it works its way through the intestines, comes into contact with the microbes, and the microbes, they have literally 60,000 enzymes that we don't have as humans. They go to work as teams. Fiber stops being fiber, produces short-chain fatty acids. This is the way that it's supposed to work. When your gut is not happy, they're weak. the microbes are weak and you're asking them to do work and they can't handle that and you end up with sloppy digestion and that's gas and bloating. The third thing can be your diet. So you just mentioned dairy which contains lactose. Lactose can be easily fermented to produce gas. You mentioned gluten. Gluten itself is a protein. So can gluten technically be fermented? Yes, it could be technically fermented, but that's not really the that's not really what's going on. What's happening is that gluten containing foods, which are wheat, barley, and rye, also contain these carbohydrates called fructans. And fructans are actually really good for our microbes. They're prebiotic. But if you consume a very large amount of them and you're not used to eating these foods, it can cause gas and bloating. these days. When I was younger, if I had pasta, I was fine. If I have pasta these days, I'm going to feel it for the next like two two days.

Steve: Really?

Dr. Will: Yeah. I don't know. And I don't even know what's going on. But then other people can eat pasta as much as they want, it seems.

Steve: Out of curiosity, can you go to Italy and eat pasta and be okay or no? Same thing.

Dr. Will: I haven't really not really tried. Um,

Steve: anecdotally, I think when I remove when I have like non-gluten bread or non-gluten pasta, I I think I'm I feel much better. But I but I'm well aware from speaking to people like yourself that such a small percentage of the population is actually gluten intolerant, but we all kind of think we are to some degree. I think it's was what's the the numbers? Is it like 20% of people think they are or something?

Dr. Will: So, like here in Los Angeles, it's um like probably 80% of people

Steve: think that

Dr. Will: well like almost everyone's gluten-free. Yeah. Right.

Steve: Which

Dr. Will: they don't need to be. And and actually it can cause problems. It can it can cause problems to be gluten-free unless you know what adaptations to make.

Steve: So, what are you when you ask that question about Italy, what are you getting at?

Dr. Will: There's a processing issue in the United States involving wheat, which is that they allow the wheat to be sprayed with glyphosate, which is Roundup. It's a weed killer. And you they do that to basically dry it out as quickly as possible. So, imagine for a moment that you're a farmer, and you have this this field of wheat. You harvest it. Okay, here are your choices, Steve. You can wait a couple weeks and let it dry out naturally in the air and and store it somewhere or you can spray it with this chemical and it will be dry by tomorrow and then you can chip it up.

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: Right. And the problem is that glyphosate is not on the label. You would never know whether it's sprayed or not sprayed unless you're buying organic. If you buy organic, then by definition they're not allowed to spray it. You would never know if it's there. The the the thing about glyphosate is that it's been approved to exist in our food system under the assumption of safety because what it does is it shuts down this thing called the Schikim pathway and that kills weeds or it kills plants and we have a workaround and it has to do with basically amino acids. We have a workaround where we can basically create those amino acids as humans, but the plants can't. So the plants die, we live. But there's a problem, which is that the microbes that live inside of our large intestine, they don't have the workaround. So that microscopic amount of glyphosate, you would say, well, us big humans, that's so small. Yeah. But what do you think happens when it comes into contact with them? We know that glyphosate disrupts the microbiome, that it depletes the beneficial bacteria, and the ones that tolerate it the best are the inflammatory ones,

Steve: the bad bacteria.

Dr. Will: The bad bacteria. So, you're shifting the balance. And this is this is a small thing, but I hear from people, Steve, that go to Italy, they say, "I can't eat wheat in the United States." And then they go to Italy and they're fine.

Steve: And you think it's that glyphosate.

Dr. Will: Yeah. They don't do that there.

Steve: So if I tried I'll try organic pasta tonight and maybe that'll be better.

Dr. Will: Yes. And then like the alternative choice is how do you do with bread? Are you okay?

Steve: Uh not all bread. My my generally I stay away from bread.

Dr. Will: Okay. Do you ever eat sourdough?

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: Do you do okay with sourdough?

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: There we go. So here's here's the second part of this equation. Put the glyphosate. Put that to the side for a moment. Let's talk about the fructans that we were talking about a moment ago. When you ferment your wheat, when you ferment your dough, you actually reduce the fructan content.

Steve: What's fru?

Dr. Will: So these are the the long-chain carbohydrates that exist in wheat, barley, and rice. So if it contains gluten, it also contains these fructans. Like gluten is not the only thing in wheat, right? And these fructans, again, they're good for you. They're good for your microbiome. But people who have a slightly damaged gut, they struggle to process and digest them. So this would explain why some people they eat they eat, you know, wheat containing, gluten containing foods and they struggle, but they do okay with sourdough because if you ferment the the bread, it takes it reduces the fructan content and actually then you can tolerate it.

Steve: Oh, okay. So you think it might be the fructan in the bread that I have an issue with and sourdough doesn't have fructan in it.

Dr. Will: Yeah, there was there was a study that was in gastroenterology a few years ago. Gastroenterology is the top journal in my field where basically they they sent people home with a bunch of breakfast bars. All right, not chocolate, but nonetheless, they sent people home with a bunch of breakfast bars, three of them. One of them was a placebo bar, so they didn't add anything special. One of them contained a very large concentration of gluten and then the third one contained the fructans. And the placebo is our standard. We're going to compare to that. When people ate the gluten containing bar, and these were, by the way, people that they did not have celiac disease, they did have gluten problems according to them, right? So like this is like the 20% of people that you mentioned a moment ago who think they might have a gluten problem. When they ate the gluten containing bar, they actually had less symptoms than the placebo. So in other words, the gluten is not the problem. But when they ate the fructan containing bar, they were triggered. So basically what this said is that we have been taking this concept of gluten intolerance and we've we've misnamed it. It's not a gluten intolerance, it's a fructan intolerance. These are people who are tending to struggle with these particular parts of that food. What foods contain fructan? So, wheat, barley, and rye,

Steve: okay?

Dr. Will: And different there's there's many different types of fructans, by the way. So, you may not react to all of them. You may react to just some of them, but like garlic and onions are also classic. So, you hear people who are like, I can't eat garlic. I feel it's horrible. Right? That's a that can be a fructan issue. Teff, amaranth, sorghum, quinoa. These are these are whole grains that don't contain gluten and they also don't contain fructans.

Steve: How long does it take to repair the gut when you have done damage to it? That's a very broad question intentionally, but generally for the average person who's done who sort of irritated their gut, how long does it take to restore and for those microbes to go back?

Dr. Will: It really depends. You have to start with, okay, what's your starting point, right? Like how deep is the damage? How bad is it? Because for the people who have ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, those are forms of inflammatory bowel disease. Those people have the deepest dysbiosis. Dysbiosis is the word that we use for a damaged gut. Is it possible to reverse that?

Dr. Will: Um, it's possible to put them into remission so deeply that they don't have a flare.

Steve: Is that what the flare looks like on this little model that I have in front of me?

Dr. Will: Yes. So, so going back for the people who are listening and not on YouTube, you can flip over to YouTube if you're interested. But what I'm showing here is the model of the large intestine. And the model includes a little area that it looks raw, ulcerated, it's bleeding. It if you if you were to bump up against it, it's going to start to you'll start to see blood coming out. So, it's like a it's a very vulnerable sensitive area. Now, these inflammatory bowel diseases, Steve, I have an interesting study on this topic. They are to me the classic gut inflammatory health condition. And what's happening is the immune system is attacking the microbiome. So technically, it's not actually autoimmune because autoimmune would be you're attacking your own body. The immune system is not attacking your intestines. The immune system is attacking your microbiome and rejecting it. And because that's happening, your intestines are stuck in the middle.

Steve: So this here is the immune system attacking the microbiome. It's attacking the microbiome which is in the tube of the large intestine and the immune system is trying to get at it and kill it.

Steve: Why?

Dr. Will: And because it's decided that it's the enemy. So the immune system is confused because when we're born, we don't have much of a microbiome at birth. It's the closest that we will get to not really having anything. And then during the first three years of life, you build your microbiome through your life experience. And by three years of age, you are basically fully adult-sized in terms of your microbiome. During this time, your immune system is learning from and with those microbes. So, there's this interplay between the two that is undeniable where when the microbiome is healthy during childhood, during those first three years, it results in a healthier immune system.

Steve: So, what's going on here? The immune system is supposed to acknowledge your microbiome as being friendly and it does not. It decides that your microbiome is the enemy and so it's taking it out. So what what what do you think is for someone that has like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's disease and they or they you know they have one of these big sort of ulcers in their small or large intestine. Is it because of their lifestyle typically a lifestyle change or or is it lots of things? What's the number one perpetrator?

Dr. Will: Okay. There's clearly a genetic component.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: Okay. So, we have to we have to be upfront about that. Like these are these are things that are not necessarily within a person's control entirely

Steve: because I mean there's no evolutionary reason why this would happen.

Steve: Like there's no evolutionary reason why you'd have severe gut digestion problems.

Dr. Will: No, it's not to there's no advantage to it at all. And and these things that occur, they were quite rare years ago. In fact, in third world countries today, there's not much inflammatory bowel disease. There's not a lot of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis in third world countries. If you go to Africa, there's very little. And what then what you see though is as countries industrialize, there's a takeoff and they start ramping up. So within the United States over the course of 40 years from 1970 to 2010, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease cases were increasing by up to 55%.

Steve: And you can get that at any age.

Dr. Will: You can get that at any age. Yeah.

Steve: So even if I'm healthy right now, I could do a set of things that would give me this.

Dr. Will: Yes. In fact, if you take So back to our conversation about antibiotics, if you take antibiotics, your risk of developing an inflammatory bowel disease in the next year just doubled.

Steve: Oh gosh.

Dr. Will: If you disrupt the gut with antibiotics, which the antibiotics do, there's nothing that will basically like decimate the gut faster. Reducing gut diversity. disrupting the gut barrier by 50% during a course of antibiotics and activating the immune system. It really speaks to that like if you take antibiotics, these risks of inflammatory health conditions really start to go up. We see this in both adults and kids.

Steve: You had a patient of yours called Michelle who took antibiotics and had a life-threatening swelling of her colon. This is this is the colon, right?

Dr. Will: Uh

Steve: show me where the colon is.

Dr. Will: So the colon is the large intestine.

Steve: Okay, fine. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Will: And so she took an antibiotic and had a life-threatening swelling of the of her large intestine.

Dr. Will: So she took an antibiotic. She took clindamycin which is a classic skin antibiotic.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: And the problem is that clindamycin wipes out your gut like hard. And when that happens, there's a risk that this pathogenic like bad bacteria called C. diff, if it's in there, it can multiply and then you get this infection, the C. diff infection that causes inflammation of the entire colon. So this patient, Michelle, what happens, I was on call and I get this text and they say, "You got to come to this room right now. This patient is sick." And she had just been transferred in from an outside hospital. So, I was in the middle of typing up a consultation. Drop that, run through the hospital, walk into the room. She's clutch clutching her belly and she's moaning and groaning and she has no clue where she is. She's sweaty. She's pale. Her vital signs are completely out of whack. Her heart is racing. She's breathing really fast. And I did a little test which is that I gently bumped her bed just like that. And if a person has severe inflammation of their intestines, they will jump if you do that because they have peritonitis, right? Or you could call it an acute abdomen. So just by bumping the bed like that was ENOUGH FOR HER TO AND SHE'S SCREAMING, RIGHT? And clutching her belly and she has no clue where she is or what is going on. She's completely delirious. She was maxed out on antibiotics. Our choices were to rush her to surgery, remove the colon, or alternatively to give her a fecal transplant and give her a shot at keeping her colon.

Dr. Will: So, I take her down to the operating room and I actually used a I mean, I won't bore you with the details, but I used a special technique that's atypical for what I would normally do because the inflammation was so severe to pass a scope. So, this scope that I used was a smaller scope to be more gentle.

Steve: A scope being a tube.

Dr. Will: A scope is a tube. And I mentioned that if you get a colonoscopy, it's the size of my index finger. So that's like probably about a centimeter across. But I I instead went with a smaller scope that's more like 5 millime 6 millimeters across. It's more gentle and it just makes it harder to do. But I I basically passed the scope through her rectum and all the way through her intestines to get it over here on the right side. So that's basically like I have now passed all the way through her large intestine. And in that location, I delivered the fecal transplant to her. And so the amazing thing is that number one, that procedure went really well. By the next day, she was a normal human being. She was laying in bed. She was able to have a conversation. And after 2 days, she was so normal that we were able to send her home. So the entire severe infectious issue that she was facing got shut down and corrected by restoring her microbiome. And then when you restore the microbiome, the C. diff basically gets suppressed and the immune system falls back into balance. The inflammation washed away.

Steve: So do you have like a like a fridge full of these fecal matters that you can just tap into when when you need it?

Dr. Will: No, but there is a company in in Massachusetts that does.

Dr. Will: Um, and so and that's what most hospitals use is they'll basically have this sent in. But it's actually kind of interesting because there's there's new development in this space where for the first time drug companies are actually identifying how to manipulate the microbiome using things that are not actually a fecal transplant but sort of derived from the idea. Now what they're developing is a way to rebuild the gut and protect it during this period of vulnerability. So that's the new thing that's coming.

Steve: You must hear about so many different types of diets and juice cleanses and whatever else that influencers and podcasters promote that you absolutely hate because you have a deeper understanding of the consequences on the gut. What are some of the biggest diets or I don't know these sort of trends that you absolutely despise because they are misinforming people about how to create a healthy gut?

Dr. Will: Well, I think the thing from my perspective is that trends fluctuate hard.

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: Right. In 2020, it was like the vegan diet was in. In 2023, it was the carnivore diet. You couldn't have more diametrically opposed diets.

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: Right. And and so the problem is that to the person who's at home and they're trying to get this figured out, it's very easy to get sucked into whatever the trend is because that's what you're hearing about when you open up your social media, right? Whereas as I sit here, the science has not changed that dramatically in the last 5 years. We are working on this, but these are small fluctuations in terms of our understanding of things. It's not a radical. We don't whiplash like that, right? So nor has your biology. you have the same biology five years ago. So this entire concept of like whipping people over the place is total from my perspective. I want to start by saying that any person who has the audacity to change their diet in the interest of their health, like I actually I actually think that's incredible and it doesn't matter what your choice is because you're just trying to figure it out. And ultimately I just want people to be better. But the problem is that there's a lot of dietary advice that's insane and it comes on both sides, Steve. So, absolutely, I don't believe that a 100% meat or organ diet is imbalance or the optimal solution for longevity. But on the flip side, like a fruit only diet, I would never support or recommend either. That's completely insane. What are we doing? So I think that like these highly the more restrictive that you get the more that I think you're drifting away from what is quite simple which is whole food in balance.

Steve: What about these like juice diets and stuff like that? People do people do like a 7-day juice diet or water diet or whatever.

Dr. Will: So you will you will often feel better if you have gut issues and you take away the stuff that's irritating your gut. And so simplifying your diet and doing something like that, you can make yourself feel better on a temporary basis and think that you did something, generally speaking, that's not really doing much of anything at all.

Steve: How long does it take to both kill and then create new new gut microbes?

Dr. Will: Well, so the beauty of it is that your gut is very forgiving. So the choices that you make today will be reflected in your microbiome by tomorrow. The beauty of it is that these microbes like their superpower is that they are able to procreate so fast.

Steve: Procreate meaning making babies. So they can make they can create new generations like estimates are potentially as quick as 20 minutes. And so we can use that to our advantage because if we actually support them with what they need, change can come real quick. And you know, I get back to every 3 to 5 days. You build a new gut barrier. So, there's an amazing opportunity that we have to actually see some quick health effects. Are there any big sort of health myths or diet myths that you're concerned about that people are currently following or believe in particular? Is there anything you look out into the world and think, "Oh god, that's going to be awful for the gut."

Dr. Will: Oh gosh. It's not something that I pay a ton of attention to because I'm not on TikTok to be honest with you.

Dr. Will: So, um it's I find it interesting that actually like Tik Tok some of the trends that have come more recently are actually on point.

Steve: So, which feels great because I love it when like people are getting excited about stuff that's good. The like the fiber maxing trend.

Steve: I'm not hiding about them. So fiber maxing, it feels like

Dr. Will: after not really talking about fiber for a really long time, people are starting to come around to the benefits that come from fiber. And this was really exemplified on Tik Tok with this fiber maxing trend where people are basically trying to increase their fiber profoundly. So the issue though is that you have to ease your body into it. So, I think the idea is the right idea of where people are trying to go, but the execution, I just want people to do it in a way where they feel okay. Cause if they don't feel well, they're going to bail and then they're going to think, well, fiber is not for me.

Steve: And what was this trend? It was people trying to just get above their up and above their daily recommended dose of fiber by eating high fiber foods.

Dr. Will: Yes. And acknowledging that 95% of people in the United States and 90% of people in the UK are deficient in fiber as we sit here right now. And what complications or implications does that have for one's gut microbiome?

Dr. Will: Massive.

Steve: Because fiber is feeding the good bacteria.

Dr. Will: Fiber is the principal food for the good bacteria. And it is the precursor to short-chain fatty acids. So the short-chain fatty acids are what we create when fiber comes into contact with microbes. Short-chain fatty acids are the thing we create when fiber comes in contact with the gut microbiome.

Steve: Yes.

Steve: Bacteria. Okay. And the short-chain fatty acids are really good.

Dr. Will: They're so good. In fact, of all of the things that I've studied and learned about, these are the most anti-inflammatory thing that I've ever come across. So, there's three of them, three main ones. Acetate, propionate, and butyrate. They all have their own distinct effects within the body. They have effects right there in the gut, on the microbes, on the gut barrier, on the immune system.

Steve: And these are produced, these three things you just named are produced when fiber comes in contact with the gut microbiome.

Dr. Will: Yeah. So, like if you were sterile, if you didn't have, if you were born without a microbiome

Steve: um like you ever hear about Bubble Boy?

Dr. Will: Oh, yeah. There was a film or TV show, wasn't there?

Dr. Will: Yeah. It was like a documentary in the 70s of this kid who was he was born with this rare genetic immune disorder. And so his family in order to try to protect him, they isolated him thinking if if no bad stuff can get in, then he would be fine, right? So like he lived in a sterile bubble. So in theory, if you were sterile, you would never get the benefits of these short-chain fatty acids

Steve: because you'd never have bacteria.

Dr. Will: Because you don't have bacteria.

Steve: Okay?

Dr. Will: So we have the the opposite of that problem, which is that we have bacteria, but we don't feed them. We don't give them fiber. You can't create something from nothing. So you have to give them the fiber in order to allow them to create the short-chain fatty acids from it.

Steve: And these short-chain fatty acids microbiome in my gut here. I put fiber in there in the form of what foods are the best foods for fiber.

Dr. Will: Okay. So what we have here is an entire array of choices.

Dr. Will: And the beauty of it is that there's only one thing that I can spot on these two plates that does not contain fiber. Do you want to guess? I guess that it is.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: You want me to give it to you?

Steve: It does. Is it the It's not the turmeric, is it?

Dr. Will: No, but the turmeric probably doesn't have very much.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: No, it's the oil because the issue is that this is 100% fat. So, you by definition cannot have any fiber inside of an oil.

Steve: Okay. Sorry.

Dr. Will: It's like sunflower oil, olive oil.

Dr. Will: So, yeah, whatever whatever type. Now, it could have polyphenols, like extravirgin olive oil has polyphenols that are really good for the microbiome.

Dr. Will: Extravirgin olive oil is actually incredibly good for the microbiome, but it doesn't have fiber. Everything else has fiber. So, we have all these different plant-based foods. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't have to be complicated. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes, they all have fiber.

Steve: Meat, anything that's not a plant does not have fiber.

Dr. Will: Oh, okay. So, if it grows in the ground, it has fiber. So if it comes if it comes from a plant, it has fiber and that includes, by the way, the mushrooms. So the mushrooms are technically fungi. Um, but they share a lot of the same characteristics that the plant-based foods do. So there's fiber, there's polyphenols, all of these things we want to include in a healthful diet. So if I eat these high-fiber foods, they go into my gut, the microbiomes produce this thing called short-chain fatty acids. And the short-chain fatty acids, they produce more good bacteria, but also they help my immune system calm down.

Dr. Will: Yes. So, if you think about, let's go back to the model that we led off with, which is that there's these three parts to your immune system or actually your I should call it your defense system because your gut microbes are the first layer of defense, right? That was what was broken down by the antibiotics and Michelle.

Steve: Mhm. The second layer of defense is your gut barrier, which is the lining of your gut that protects the immune system.

Dr. Will: And then the third part is the actual immune system itself. We don't even want to have to activate that. We'd rather the first two parts take care of it for us. Right? So the beauty of this is that you eat, you consume these high-fiber foods. They come into contact with your microbes right here in the large intestine. Specifically, the right colon is the classic spot. and they they unpack them and they release the acetate, propionate and butyrate. And those three things impact your microbes, impact your gut barrier, impact your immune system. Now, of the three, my favorite is butyrate because it's the butyrate that has the biggest effect on the microbes, on the gut barrier. like you literally need butyrate in order to produce the proteins that hold your gut lining together. Um and the butyrate has a direct effect on our immune cells. So these are again the most anti-inflammatory thing that I've come across and part of why we're suffering with these going back to the original conversation about these chronic inflammatory health conditions and you asked me where do they come from? We live in an industrial world where 95% of us at a minimum 90% of us are not getting even close to the amount of fiber that we need. And when we compare this to other places, so there was an interesting study that came out recently where they looked at the microbiome of people in Italy, Singapore, and then they had native tribal people in the Bolivian Amazon and native tribal people in Malaysia. So two indigenous tribes living a you know hunter gatherer lifestyle. against Italy and Singapore. And what they discovered is that there's this radical difference in terms of the diversity of the microbiome. There's a difference in terms of their their ability to produce short-chain fatty acids.

Dr. Will: And there's this question that comes up about aging because as we age, inflammation increases. Is that inevitable? Are we stuck in a position where like based upon our age we should just expect that we're going to have more inflammatory issues? What they found in the tribal populations is that actually that's not true at all. So they were protected against inflammation regardless of their age because of their lifestyle. But they were living and it's not just what they eat. It's they they wake up when the sun comes up. They sleep when the sun goes down. They're connected to their tribe. They're not looking at Instagram. Like there's so much to that story. The point being though that in the industrial world like we're not consuming a sufficient amount of these types of foods.

Steve: I guess they're not also drinking alcohol and vaping.

Dr. Will: No.

Steve: Which we, you know, do a lot more in the Western world.

Dr. Will: Yeah, we do.

Steve: What impact does that have on the gut microbiome? Because I don't typically hear people talking about alcohol in the gut microbiome.

Dr. Will: What we know is that it definitely affects the gut barrier.

Steve: I guess total clarity wiping up my my oral microbiome as well to some degree if I'm pouring vodka.

Dr. Will: And it would be the same as it would be the same as using an alcohol-based mouthwash, right? Which which now we don't recommend anymore. And so yeah, so alcohol, there was a study actually that changed my mind when it comes to alcohol. So I actually don't drink hardly at all anymore. like very rarely I'll have a glass or two with my wife if we're on a special dinner. And in this study they they basically gave people a significant amount of alcohol and then they tracked every 30 minutes the measure of their blood alcohol level and simultaneously the measure of what's called lipopolysaccharide. So it's it comes from the inflammatory bacteria that live inside of our microbiome. It's not supposed to be in your bloodstream. If it's in your bloodstream, that generally indicates that your gut barrier is insufficient and weak because it's able to get across. And the problem is that the immune system has been trained to identify that lipopolysaccharide as the enemy and so it gets activated. So, and this is where inflammation comes from. So, in this study, they had people have a number of drinks and they start tracking every 30 minutes. And what you saw was that as the blood alcohol level goes up in parallel, the lipopolysaccharide goes up. When the alcohol peaks, so did the lipopolysaccharide. There was this weird thing that happened. I don't I can't explain why, but the alcohol level peaked. It started to come down and then actually bumped back up. And when that happened, the lipopolysaccharide followed the exact same pattern. And the lipopolysaccharide did not return to normal until the alcohol level was zero.

Dr. Will: So when I saw this from my perspective, to be clear, it wasn't a study of one drink, although we do know that one drink is sufficient to disrupt your sleep and cause other health issues. But when I saw this, I saw enough to say I don't think there's any amount of alcohol that's safe.

Steve: To summarize what's going on there, the alcohol is coming into the body. It is impacting the gut in some way which is making the gut go into dysfunction and that dysfunction lasts for a little while cuz I'm trying to understand why you you looked at that and thought do you know what absolutely not I'm not going to drink as much as I was.

Dr. Will: Yeah. So basically alcohol was causing leaky gut.

Steve: Oh leaky gut. Okay.

Dr. Will: Yeah. So alcohol was causing leaky gut. That's what that's what we saw in that study. And the fact that the amount of leaky gut was proportional to the amount of alcohol in the blood and that the leaky gut did not return to normal until the alcohol level was zero says to me that any amount of alcohol that's detectable in the bloodstream can create this problem which is going to cause inflammation which is going to cause inflammation. We know with total clarity that people who are heavy drinkers, their gut is totally destroyed and that that's actually a requisite step on the pathway towards developing cirrhosis and alcoholic liver disease. So there are some people who seem to get away with it where they can be a heavy drinker and they never actually get cirrhosis.

Steve: And it cirrhosis is

Dr. Will: Cirrhosis is the so the liver sits in your right upper abdomen and its job is to detoxify your bloodstream. And all of the blood that goes to your gut, the first place that it goes after your gut as it returns to the heart is your liver. And it's actually a smart setup anatomically because we don't want toxic blood to get access to the heart and then circulate and ultimately get back to the brain. So we allow the liver to protect and defend it. But the cirrhosis what's happening is that basically the liver which is soft and spongy like imagine a sponge that you can put it under a faucet. The water goes in one end, wiggles its way through, comes out the other end. Okay? Instead of that, it's just a piece of plastic, right? It's hard. It's not letting anything through. That's what that's what happens when a person develops cirrhosis.

Dr. Will: So, and there's many causes of cirrhosis. Cirrhosis comes from inflammation. So all cirrhosis health conditions ultimately are inflammatory health conditions. They're all part of the 130 health conditions associated with inflammation. But in this particular setting what we're talking about is alcohol. And what I'm saying is that to create that inflammation in the liver based upon the available data it seems that you have to disrupt the gut microbiome in order to get there.

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Steve: There's a orangey looking chemical on the plate over there. Turmeric. People talk about turmeric a lot when they're speaking about inflammation.

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Steve: I'm not really sure what the truth is on turmeric and inflammation.

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Dr. Will: You have to be a little bit careful because you could easily overdo it.

Steve: Oh, really? So, well, so we just have to be smart with the way that we approach because the turmeric that we're really talking about is if you were to take it on a consistent daily basis, which actually from my perspective makes a ton of sense for people that have chronic inflammatory health issues.

Steve: So, turmeric is helping inflammation go down somehow.

Dr. Will: It turmeric is helping inflammation to go down because it blocks another one of the cytokines. So, in the same way we're talking about those walkie-talkies and basically pulling the batteries out, turmeric helps to accomplish that.

Steve: So, there's a specific cytokine that that turmeric has that effect. And so, it's the you mentioned curcumin. So, curcumin is the phytochemical found in turmeric. Turmeric is the root.

Dr. Will: Okay.

Steve: Curcumin is the chemical,

Dr. Will: okay,

Dr. Will: that actually does the thing. And it turns out that curcumin is what we call a polyphenol. So polyphenols, as we sit here and we look at this beautiful array of all these colors, every single one of these foods contains polyphenols that define the color and that impact the gut. Like the onion here would have quercetin and many people have heard of quercetin as being beneficial for longevity. Same would be true for the garlic. So there's different polyphenols for different colored foods and 95% of them require our gut microbes in order to be activated. So with turmeric, you just need to be careful with supplements because if you overdo it, if you take too much, that could create an issue, though.

Steve: Here in front of me, I have a I guess I guess this is a perfect gut day. Have you seen this?

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Steve: I wanted you to explain to me step by step how to have a perfect gut day.

Dr. Will: Nice. All right. So, I'm going to I'm going to define for people the way that I would approach the perfect 24-hour rhythm. We have an innate circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm basically means that our body functions on a 24-hour clock. Why? Because we evolved with the sun. The sun goes up and it comes down. And that is one of the most powerful things that defines everything that exists both for us as humans and in our entire environment. Right? So everything around us also evolved with the sun and is connected to it. Around 50% of our genes are turned off or on at specific times of day based upon our circadian rhythm. More than 50% of our microbes rise and fall during the course of our day to meet the moment. Our body thrives on consistency. So, what I want to talk about is how do we create a consistent daily routine that can optimize our microbiome. And I'm going to take you through all the different all the different steps. Let's imagine that the sun comes up and it's 7 in the morning.

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: All right. and you naturally wake up and you are consistent about it, you're off to a great start. Consistency with the time that you wake up is a fantastic way to start your day. And what I want you to do in the first 5 minutes of your day is I want you to initially just focus on waking up and thinking about your day and how you're going to approach it. Because starting at 7:05, you're going to wake up your microbes. You're going to wake up your body with hydration. So, we're going to opt for water. And in a perfect world, I would love to add a prebiotic fiber supplement to that water. So, like our company is called 38 Terra. You could add that there or you can add an alternative. This is the hydration. The water turns on your gut, turns on your brain, turns on your kidneys.

Steve: So, not coffee straight away.

Dr. Will: No. So, pause the coffee. Start with hydration. And we're waking up your gut with the water and also with the prebiotic fiber that's going to feed those microbes in your gut. Okay. So, that's at 7:05. And let's pretend that takes you 10 minutes. And so now it's 7:15 and we're going to basically flip the switch to tell your body it's time to go that we're starting a new day. And this is actually the most powerful moment. So if there's only one thing that everyone takes away, I want it to be this because I'm giving you the two most powerful levers in terms of activating your circadian rhythm. Number one, sunlight or at a minimum bright light exposure. So what happens is that light passes through our our eye and hits the retina in the back of the eye, enters into the body detects this and it enters into the optic nerve. And right at the very first spot where you could collect information from both your left eye and your right eye sits this part of your brain called the supra kaismatic nucleus, the SCN. And the SCN is the orchestrator. That is the master clock of your circadian rhythm. So like I would think about it like school. So when we were kids and we went to school, we might have all been wearing a watch. And that watch gives us a general idea of where we are in our day. All your organs, all your tissues, more than half your microbes, they have their watch. They have a feel for where they are in the day. But it's the alarm that goes off between classes that ultimately is what matters the most. That's the central clock.

Steve: That's your SCN. Your SCN is basically managing all of that. And there's an entire cascade of things that follows from when you tell the SCN today started.

Dr. Will: So that light exposure is what basically activates the SCN to release cortisol through a through a series of events. It releases cortisol. All right. Cortisol is the morning hormone. It is it it allows us to get activated. It makes protein and and energy available to our cells. It makes us focused. It actually suppresses our immune system. In that moment, you want more cortisol. And by getting morning light exposure, you can bump it by 50%.

Steve: So, we're off to a good start. The second lever that we can pull with our outdoor time is exercise. You don't need to do like a full scale workout. I'm not talking about the most vigorous exercise of your day. I'm talking about light exercise. But if you just move your body, right, which during the summertime, what you would do is like you might go outside and you might have a ruck fest and you take a walk, right? When the weather is good. And when it's January and the weather isn't so hot, you might actually have a light box. The light box allows you to stay inside. You just got to make sure it's 10,000 lux is what you're looking for. So the light box is the substitute for the sun. And then you could do any form of exercise. You could do squats, you could do lunges, push-ups, whatever it may be. You could do jumping jacks,

Steve: do yoga.

Dr. Will: Right? So during this period of time, if you get light exposure and you exercise, the exercise can add another 25 to 50%. This is a compounding effect that's going to give you the ultimate morning cortisol peak. And this is essential to propel your day because by getting this, you will be more focused. You will be able to do more from a cognitive perspective like your endurance will be enhanced. Um, you also will sleep better tonight and you will you will notice this on day one. I promise you. So, all right. So, and you're going to do that for about 20 minutes. So, from 7:15 until 7:35, you're going to be doing your light and exercise. Okay? Ideally, outdoor light whenever possible. If you wear glasses, by the way, take off your glasses. You don't have to look directly at the sun. At 7:35, we're going to basically come back in and this is a time for us to now have our coffee and also quiet time.

Dr. Will: So, like to me, we don't have enough time in our day. The day is so fast-paced, right? We need to be intentional about creating opportunities to like activate our parasympathetic nervous system

Steve: which is

Dr. Will: so there's two sides to our autonomic nervous system. Autonomic is just like you have like you you can't totally control it. It's just going one side is sympathetic. Sympathetic is the part that gets you going fast. Like this is your accelerator. All right? And the other side is your parasympathetic which is your break. It's your rest and recovery. So, now that you've done your outdoor time and your exercise, you come in and we want to give you 10 minutes of just like quiet, low-key, sympathetic time. So, that could be meditation, breath work, could be reading your Bible, could be journaling, right? Whatever it is that works for you. So, you do that with your coffee for 10 minutes and that brings us to 7:45. And now you have breakfast. All right. So, and breakfast is the perfect opportunity to take your supplements.

Steve: Okay. So, what breakfast? What supplements?

Dr. Will: Okay. So, your breakfast and

Steve: what is my breakfast strategy? Am I going for a lot of food? Do I need to have breakfast? Why do I need to have breakfast?

Dr. Will: You should have breakfast. You should definitely have breakfast. Yeah. So, um your metabolism changes during the course of the day. your strongest metabolism is first thing in the morning. And so what that means is that you could literally eat the exact same food at 7:45 or at 3:00 in the afternoon. And when you eat it at 7:45, you will get better blood sugar control. You will get better blood fat control. So those are those are manifestations of our metabolism. And when they're under control, that's actually really good for our body. So whenever possible, we want to shift our food towards earlier in the day.

Steve: And what kind of foods?

Dr. Will: I would argue that we go high fiber and moderate protein.

Steve: Low sugar.

Dr. Will: No sugar. Yeah. Low low sugar, right?

Steve: Low or no sugar.

Dr. Will: Refined carbohydrates should get left out as much as possible.

Steve: What's a refined carbohydrate? Give me

Dr. Will: flour or sugar.

Steve: Okay. So no

Dr. Will: no baked goods,

Dr. Will: no eggs benedict. Uh, so the exception from my perspective would be if you're going if you want to have avocado toast than a sourdough.

Steve: Awesome.

Dr. Will: Prefer not. They're delicious.

Dr. Will: But no, I prefer not because ultimately what we want is we want we want high fiber and moderate protein. And by doing that combination, it's maximum satiation. So you're going to feel full. You're giving your body what it needs from a protein perspective. and you're simultaneously giving your gut what it needs from a fiber perspective.

Steve: Oats.

Dr. Will: So, I mean, you could do oats do for the reasons that we were discussing glyphosate earlier, the oats should be organic. And if you were to do them, do them as minimally processed. So, like I don't really love instant oats. What about for kids? If I'm, you know, giving my kids a breakfast, should I be thinking about anything in particular? cuz you know a lot of a lot of parents um I've talked about this quite a few times before but when I was younger I'd get a lot of orange juice and I didn't realize that orange juice was just like sugar water.

Steve: Yeah.

Steve: Is there anything that parents should be thinking about when they're giving kids their breakfasts?

Dr. Will: Of course. Um and I think that the most important thing is that you need to model for your kids what a healthy breakfast looks like

Steve: by having it yourself.

Dr. Will: By eating it yourself

Steve: because if you don't do that then they're you can't expect them to.

Dr. Will: So, um, healthy breakfast. My kids, I have four kids, so my kids love avocado toast. They love avocado toast. Um, you could absolutely do yogurt with berries, right? You could do berries and nuts. There's a lot of different choices in that regard. So, overnight oats, chia pudding, these are different choices that you could do for sure. On this point of kids, before we carry on with our perfect morning and day routine, are there decisions that you make as a parent to give your kids certain things that will have a lasting impact on their immune and gut function?

Dr. Will: 100%. Yes. And the I think it opens up a discussion about where the connection between our gut and immune system starts. It starts before birth. The first three years are critical. So, let me unpack that just a little bit, Steve. They have studies where they look at mom's microbiome during pregnancy. All right? So, like mom poops, they analyze her poop and they're able to basically identify patterns that are associated with the kid developing allergic diseases later on.

Steve: Oh, okay. They also have studies where moms who increase their fiber intake during pregnancy reduce the likelihood of their kids developing allergic diseases later on as well.

Steve: What about kids taking antibiotics? Does that have a when you're forming your gut microbiome at a young age? Does that have a consequential impact?

Dr. Will: 100%. Antibiotics, bottle feeding and birth by cesarean section. And by the way, all of my kids were born by C-section. It's not what we wanted, but it's what happened. But those three things are associated with an impact on the microbiome and the immune system. And if you look downstream over the course of the first 5 years, increased risk of allergic diseases, increased risk of autoimmune diseases, increased risk of metabolic diseases.

Steve: because in a C-section, it the baby didn't pass through the birth canal.

Dr. Will: The birth canal.

Steve: The birth canal would have given the baby some of the mother's microbiome.

Dr. Will: Yes. So,

Steve: and then breastfeeding does the same. It gives the baby microbiome.

Dr. Will: Breastfeeding gives them access to mom's skin microbiome.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: But also breast milk contains these things called HMOs, human milk oligosaccharides. It's quite fascinating to consider this. We evolved where mom's breast milk contains these things, human milk oligosaccharides. There's over 200 varieties. They have no nutritional value to the child directly. So why do we why do we have them? Because they're prebiotic. So these human milk oligosaccharides in breast milk were basically designed to feed the developing baby microbiome.

Dr. Will: So and this is part of why we get into some challenges where when you replace it with with the bottle the formula you might put fiber in there but it's like a mono fiber. It's not the same as the 200 plus varieties of human milk oligosaccharides.

Dr. Will: So there was a study that was done out of Finland where they looked at roughly,00 kids and they tracked them for 5 years and during this time 5 years they got a microbiome specimen poop specimen from the kid at 3 months and 12 months of age and they looked at okay so some of these kids develop allergic diseases so eczema, food allergies, asthma, rhinitis, allergic rhinitis. All right, those are the classic allergic diseases. And what they found is, okay, there were certain factors that predicted who was going to develop allergic diseases by the age of five. Number one, exposure to antibiotics in the first year of life. Number two, being bottlefed. All right. Then they looked at the microbiome at 12 months. So, and just to be clear, these kids, they they had not developed the allergic disease yet. That comes later, but they looked at the microbiome at 12 months and they could tell who was going to develop the allergic diseases later on because there was a specific pattern. What was missing were the bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids.

Steve: And the short-chain fatty acids are that chemical we talked about earlier on that

Steve: that you get from fiber

Steve: which produces those three things. Yes.

Dr. Will: But butyrate

Steve: butyrate, acetate and propionate.

Dr. Will: And and in in fact when they checked the poop for butyrate levels, the butyrate levels were low. So in essence what they discovered in this study that was quite fascinating is that you can look at the microbiome and predict who will later on go on to develop these confu the confused immune system with these allergic diseases.

Steve: So going back to our daily routine.

Dr. Will: Yep.

Steve: Where are we to?

Dr. Will: Yes. Yes, we're at 7:45 and you So, you want your high fiber, moderate protein, as little sugar as possible, breakfast, and this is the perfect time to take your morning supplements because the morning supplements, the ones that I recommend that are evidence-based are vitamin D, omega-3s, and turmeric.

Steve: That's for inflammation.

Dr. Will: So, these are for inflammation.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: Yeah. So, now I also believe that we should test whenever possible. There's a test for vitamin D. There's a test for omega-3s. If you have enough, you don't need to take the supplement. But if you're deficient, that's where supplements play an important role. So, I believe that that supplements should be taken consistently in a circadian fashion. So, that means that we take our morning supplements at the same time every day.

Steve: Why?

Dr. Will: Because basically everything about our microbes and our body and the way that it works thrives on consistency. So supplements would be the same.

Steve: And when we do this, so it's been 7:45. We've had our breakfast. We've taken our morning supplement stack and now it's been an hour since we woke up and it's time for a fantastic bowel movement. And that is the manifestation of all the work that you've done. Because when you get your morning light exposure, that helps to contribute to that bowel movement. When you exercise, that contributes to that bowel movement. When you drink your coffee, that contributes to that bowel movement. All these different things ultimately lead to this to this place where you're having that good healthy bowel movement. And that's indicative of a gut that's in rhythm and doing well. So that's your morning. Now you're going to go to work. And I want to circle back to roughly the lunchtime hour. So you it gets to be lunchtime and it's 12:00 noon and basically I would advocate for people to have lunch with another person like the way that you and I are sitting here at this table right now. So because we don't do that enough like way too much we're on our phone like this and eating at the same time that we're flipping and scrolling.

Steve: How is that good for my gut and inflammation though? So feeling socially bonded to another person

Dr. Will: 50% this is by the way statistics that come from before the pandemic right so the pandemic made this worse 50% of people in America were lonely before the pandemic even started loneliness is the equ loneliness will destroy your longevity faster than just about anything loneliness is has been shown to be on par with smoking cigarettes on a routine basis in terms of the impact that it has on your health and your longevity.

Steve: And you're quite clear there that you define loneliness as the feeling of disconnection versus being alone,

Dr. Will: right? Yes.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: So, but being alone there, you have to think about where we came from. So, we um are tribal by our nature. Like you have to understand that for millions of years, humans lived the specific lifestyle of being hunter's gatherers in our tribe. There was no money. The currency of wealth was your bonds to other people. That's what allowed you to survive and thrive. Your family was like basically the the measure of wealth. The bigger the family, the more wealthy you were because you would work together to support one another and take care of each other. But then the broader tribe, which is not 300 people, let alone hundreds of thousands on social media. The broader tribe, which was this like family of families, we were in it together. If you and I were in the same tribe, if someone attacked us, I know that you would step up to defend me and I would do the same for you.

Steve: So this is causing some kind of cortisol issue, stress issue that's then impacting the gut microbiome and causing inflammation.

Dr. Will: If we want to torture a person, like literally the easiest way to do it is to put them in solitary isolation. That's literally torture. We're so social that we need that. And it's the cortisol response that that's going to cause that. That's that then causes inflammation.

Steve: That is correct. So ultimately that is a manifestation of the brain-gut connection.

Steve: Okay. We have a we have an innate need of human bonding and when that innate need is not met then it's actually quite stressful for us because we feel vulnerable and unsafe.

Steve: Mhm. We sleep worse as well. I was reading about some stuff around um when people feel lonely they go into self-preservation which is kind of like I guess the the analogy would be if you drifted off from your tribe.

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Steve: You would have to be a bit more alert. You'd have to be on edge. You'd have to be wait you know you couldn't sleep for 8 hours in peace because you you're in danger now. Yeah,

Dr. Will: you don't have that sort of insulating factor of a group of people.

Dr. Will: It's it's so interesting to think about like there's a condition called Stockholm syndrome and Stockholm syndrome is what happens if you take a person hostage and in that scenario you're the person who's taken hostage. You have a choice. You can reject the person who's taken you or you can actually find the good in them and bond with them.

Steve: Mhm.

Dr. Will: And it's actually a survival mechanism that within that context of being taken hostage, people have a tendency to bond with their captor and have sympathy for them.

Steve: And that's and we think that's a defense mechanism because we're so social. We need that as opposed to like being alone and being held captive.

Steve: Okay. So, so we socialize at lunch. We have dinner with other people.

Dr. Will: Yes. So, I want people to socialize at lunch to address this epidemic of loneliness that I think is highly problematic and not and not to be underrated because again, that's like smoking a pack of cigarettes. So, let's imagine that we have a nice lunch time. We're not talking about 10 minutes. We're talking about 45 minutes that includes conversation, right? And we get to the end. And now, what I would encourage people to do before you go back to work is to get outside and take a walk. So, there's two advantages to this. We talked earlier about the benefits of sunlight in the morning and also the benefits of exercise in the morning. We're circling back to that. But things are a little bit different this time. By getting outside, you're getting different rays of sun. So the actually the types of rays that we get from the sun are slightly different and they're more likely to boost our serotonin later in the day. And that serotonin is what lifts our mood, gives us focus, helps us to get to to get things done. So this reinforces our circadian rhythm when we take a walk and we get outside a second time.

Dr. Will: Also, the exercise, a 10-minute walk, just 10 minutes of simple walking is enough to get 30 to 40% improvement in your blood sugar control. Because when you activate the big muscles in your leg, it helps to draw the blood sugar out of your bloodstream. So like it's the messaging there is if you just ate too much and you don't feel well, force yourself to take a walk.

Steve: Mhm.

Dr. Will: As opposed to laying on the couch.

Steve: Mhm.

Dr. Will: All right. So um and the outdoor walk also activates our gut and helps our gut to get into rhythm and that reduces bloating after a meal. Okay. So, and then you do that for 15 minutes. It's one o'clock. You're back to work. I encourage people to have a matcha green tea. Um, I'm a big matcha believer. This is the of all the teas that exist. It has the highest polyphenol content and it's phenomenal for the microbiome. So, and it gives you a nice boost to your afternoon. Okay, let's accelerate to 4:00. I saw you um I think was it in your book that I read this? Yeah. In your book it talks about how the gap between sort of 3 and 6 is the optimal time to exercise. That's right. Yeah. So 3 and 6 p.m. The reason for that has to do with our core body temperature. So our temperature cools off at night. Our body temperature lowers at night and then during the day it starts to rise in the morning. Exercise by the way in the morning helps to accelerate that. But our peak is 3 to 6 pm.

Steve: I felt attacked on page 159 of your book where you said, "My one request is that you do not have heavy exercise late in the evening as this activates the par sorry, the sympathetic nervous system and can negatively affect your ability to quickly fall asleep."

Dr. Will: Yeah. What What time are you working out?

Steve: I mean, last night it was like bloody god 11 till midnight.

Dr. Will: Oh no.

Steve: That's like quite typical though because I don't know. I just It's when I get my time.

Dr. Will: How's your sleep last night?

Steve: feel great. But I mean like a series of issues took place.

Dr. Will: Two hours. So, okay, fair enough.

Steve: Yeah, like a series of like my other issues.

Steve: The time I ate was bad and

Steve: the time I went to the gym was bad and so was was a mess.

Dr. Will: Yeah. Well, ideally 2 hours before bedtime.

Steve: Okay.

Dr. Will: At least two hours before bedtime. So, and like especially when it's vigorous exercise. If it's light exercise, it's not a big deal.

Steve: But vigorous exercise is a different story.

Dr. Will: Okay.

Dr. Will: So, yeah. So, three three to six. This is more from like an exercise performance perspective. Like that's the best time if you want to lift heavy weight,

Steve: okay?

Dr. Will: 3 to 6 p.m. So, let's imagine that we go and we get we smash a workout at 4:00, right? And so, I'm going to give us an hour to smash that wonderful workout and then now is 5:00 and it's the perfect time for dinner. I want to point something out real quick. I we had breakfast around 8 and we had lunch around noon and we had dinner around 5. We've spaced things out by about four hours. And that's actually the perfect time from from the perspective of your digestive rhythm.

Dr. Will: So there's this thing this this concept within the the gut that many people haven't heard of called the migrating motor complex where between meals your gut has this entire thing that it does and it basically is like sweeping through and reorganizing itself. But it gets disrupted if you eat.

Steve: Okay?

Dr. Will: So it's ideal to give a 4-hour space between these meals and that if you do that you will actually notice a difference in terms of how you feel with your digestion. So because you've allowed your gut to fall into a rhythm. All right. So we have our dinner. It's 5:00. We're moving into the evening and now it's going to be 7:00 at night. And let's imagine, I know this time of year the sun is going down much earlier than this in most places. Um, but imagine that it's 7 o'clock. Look, when the sun goes down, you want to start to dim the lights in your house. You want to start to reduce your personal light exposure because light exposure, just casual lights within your home can cut your melatonin down by 30%. Melatonin is the sleepy time hormone. So in the morning it's cortisol and in the evening it's melatonin. And it's interesting

Dr. Will: because what we did in the morning with both exercise and with light exposure, it was designed not only to enhance that that cortisol peak, but it also increases our serotonin. Serotonin, the happy hormone that keeps us focused. Well, serotonin is actually the precursor to melatonin. So, when you make the investment of morning light, morning exercise, you're setting yourself up for excellent sleep in 14 hours. So, and we want to protect that. Melatonin is going to start to rise when it gets dark outside. And so, we want to dim the lights within our home. And we want to really be cautious as we move towards 8:00. If our bedtime is going to be 10:00, forgive me if that's too early for some people, but I think it's like nice to have a consistent bedtime. If our bedtime is 10, then by 8:00, like we want to be sort of dialing back on our devices or wearing blue light blocking glasses. The blue light blocking glasses can help to protect us. And then roughly 8:30, take your evening supplements. So, we had our morning supplements, which were vitamin D, omega-3s, and turmeric. Now, we want to take our evening supplements, which are zinc, and magnesium. And if you take melatonin, that would be the time to do it. Or if you take a different sleepy time supplement, that would be the time to do it. Roughly 8:30 to 9, somewhere in that range. So, because it's going to take about 60 to 90 minutes to really kick in around nine o'clock, we want to activate our evening ritual. And so, in the morning, we had our quiet time. We should have a quiet time in the evening too to intentionally activate our parasympathetic nervous system and get like relaxed before bedtime so that at 9:30 we basically are preparing for bedtime and that might mean a hot shower like actually like heat at night hot shower sauna is perfect because actually it cools off your inner core temperature believe it or not. So, and that's exactly what we want. We want a cool room. We want a dark room and that will help us to sleep better because then at 10:00 we want to go to bed and 10:00 like it could be whatever time. But I would argue that we should be consistent. It could be 10:30, it could be 11. Whatever time you choose, adapt to it. But the point from my perspective is not so much 10 is the magic number. It's more so that 10 is the magic number if you always do 10. 10:30 is the magic number if you always do 10:30. Consistency is key.

Steve: And you would recommend three three meals a day.

Dr. Will: I think that you could do three meals. I think that like the the way that we structured this is that if you were done eating at 6:00 at night and then you're having breakfast around 8, you have a 14-hour fast.

Steve: Do you think that fasting window matters?

Steve: That specific number 14 or

Steve: Yeah, just like generally generally having sort of a big intermittent fasting window where you you haven't eaten for 16 hours, whatever it might be.

Dr. Will: I think that there's so I think that there there's two parts to the value that we get from time-restricted eating. So the first is we give our gut a time to rest.

Dr. Will: So when you when you particularly eating late at night, like I honestly the timing of it all could be debated. The one spot where it's a total non-negotiable from my perspective is late night eating. So I mean no offense, like sometimes we're busy, right? But when you eat late at night, it hits you different metabolically and then it carries and it lingers into the next day and it will affect your sleep. Yeah.

Steve: So, we really as much as possible want to opt for early dinner time and then shut it down for the evening as much as possible.

Steve: People will be saying, "Yes, but I'm hungry."

Dr. Will: And I think part of the reason that they're hungry from what you've explained is probably because they didn't have breakfast.

Steve: Yeah.

Steve: They like started eating later. That's what typically what I find is if I have breakfast, I I'm typically not hungry late at night.

Dr. Will: Yeah. Yeah. I think that I think that breakfast helps to sort of set the tone for the rest of the day in a in a specific way. So the two the two advantages of time-restricted eating are that you get that you get that gut rest which anything over 12 hours is good for the gut and then the second part is I think it just the underrated thing that no one talks about is it helps us to get more consistent with our meal times. So this entire conversation about circadian rhythm can be summarized in one word consistency. If you ate at the same time every single day, you would feel the difference in terms of your digestion. I promise you. And so the advantage of time-restricted eating is it brings attention to what time am I eating dinner? What time am I eating breakfast? And then you end up being a lot more consistent about it as opposed to just flying by the seat of your pants.

Steve: Do you fast ever? Do you try and

Steve: like long fast?

Steve: Long fast or just sort of more time-restricted eating self?

Dr. Will: I do. I do time-restricted eating all the time. In fact, I most days like I uh first of all um I'm imperfect.

Dr. Will: And so what that means is I don't perfectly follow all the advice I give. So like I don't eat breakfast most days.

Steve: Yeah.

Dr. Will: Cuz I'm going hard. So like I wake up, I do my morning routine, I get I get to the coffee stage and then I jump into work.

Steve: Same.

Dr. Will: So but on today

Steve: today I did. Yeah. Yeah. Today I had my breakfast because I wanted to be okay on my game.

Dr. Will: But on the weekend I I have my breakfast. I noticed the difference actually. like I'm I'm less hungry during the day when I have that breakfast that sort of just keeps it balanced. Um so yeah, I sometimes I do one meal a day.

Steve: Last month I told you about a challenge that I'd set our internal Flightex team. Flightex team is our innovation team internally here. I tked them with seeing how much time they could unlock for the company by creating something that would help us filter new AI tools to see which ones were worth pursuing. And I thought that our sponsor Fiverr Pro might have the talent on their platform to help us build this quickly. So I talked to my director of innovation Isaac and for the last month my team Flight X and a vetted AI specialist from Fiverr Pro have been working together on this project. And with the help of my team, we've been able to create a brand new tool which automatically scans, scores, and prioritizes different emerging AI tools for us. Its impact has been huge. And within a couple of weeks, this tool has already been saving us hours triing and testing new AI systems. Instead of shifting through lots of noise, my team Flight X has been able to focus on developing even more AI tools, ones that really move the needle in our business, thanks to the talent on Fiverr Pro. So, if you've got a complex problem and you need help solving it, make sure you check out Fiverr Pro at fiverr.com/diary.

Steve: If there's anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we're living in today. And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards. Because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest. And we've turned them into these conversation cards. And we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand new edition. And for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card, which is an exclusive question from me. But I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards. So get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone. Head to the link in the description below.

Steve: One of the things you we touched on briefly at the beginning was this concept that trauma is linked to gut function.

Dr. Will: Powerfully.

Steve: In what way? We we were talking a moment ago about the autonomic nervous system which is sympathetic versus parasympathetic. We live our lives on sympathetic overdrive which basically is the equivalent of constantly feeling threatened, right? Heart rate heart rate pumping, blood pressure up, more focused, but then you suffer the consequences within your gut. The gut gets sacrificed when we are activating our sympathetic nervous system.

Dr. Will: We don't do enough to do the opposite which is the parasympathetic nervous system which is what happens with when we slow down conversations holding hands hugs prayer journaling meditation sauna that's parasympathetic.

Dr. Will: Okay. So to the trauma question, it's been shown that and this is something that I had to learn not only myself but I had to see that I always thought that kids if they were young enough they wouldn't remember. And what I've realized is actually this idea of like the body keeps the score is so well said. It's so true.

Steve: The body does keep the score. You can have trauma that occurs before the age of two. There's no way you remember that. And yet it will manifest later on in adults. And this has been shown actually in kids that are adopted and like have an unstable first two years of life. They are more likely to suffer with health related issues later on.

Dr. Will: this this issue of trauma what happens is that it restructures the brain and how your brain functions

Steve: and it keeps you sort of trapped in that fight or flight state

Dr. Will: keeps you trapped. Yeah. So, there's a part of our brain called the amygdala.

Steve: And the amygdala is what gets activated if you like go to a haunted house, you know, like if you get scared of something,

Dr. Will: right? Or like uh it's the middle of the night and you hear something creepy in the bushes and you're not sure what's going on. Okay, so that's the activation of your amygdala. Well, the the issue for people that suffer from trauma is that they live with the amygdala perpetually turned on. So, if something's happened to me in my life that's caused some form of trauma, there's an increased probability that I'm going to be in a more sympathetic state in terms of my nervous system, which is going to activate a hormone, which is then going to disrupt my gut motility and all the other things we talked about, um, like the gut barrier and other dysfunction across the gut.

Steve: What is the link there? Is it is it the hormone that's produced when I'm in that stress state that is impacting my immune system which is then having the impact on my gut?

Dr. Will: Yes. So this is all a manifestation of the brain of the brain-gut connection. So the what's happening is that your brain has the ability to release a hormone corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH).

Steve: CRH and CRH is this that's effectively your sympathetic nervous system getting activated turned on.

Dr. Will: Mhm.

Dr. Will: In a person who's had trauma and to be clear like not everything that's bad is trauma, right? It's possible to have things that are bad that are not actual trauma. Trauma is the thing that sticks with you. It's it's when you have something occur that overwhelms your ability to cope with it.

Steve: And so and then it has this lasting effect. I was thinking as you're speaking about some of my friends that have had some bad diagnosis recently. Got a friend that got diagnosed with something very very serious. And what I then noticed is after that diagnosis, they had lots of other health related issues that seem to be unconnected.

Steve: Mhm. But the doctors associated with stress.

Dr. Will: Yeah.

Steve: And maybe the traumatic news of that one thing has caused this cascade of other issues downstream.

Dr. Will: Yeah. 100%. And and that's all a manifestation of the of the brain-gut axis. So the brain-gut axis is how we think about the brain being connected to our gut and how they're in communication with one another. And within that context, the brain releases this hormone, the CRH, corticotropin-releasing hormone that has an effect throughout the entire body. It puts them on edge.

Steve: Mhm.

Dr. Will: And the consequence is that that CRH that's like um so this is a bit nuanced but let me clarify something about cortisol. Cortisol is the morning hormone. When you get that spike in the