Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that the blood work your doctor orders at your yearly exam isn’t giving you the full picture of your health. The good news is comprehensive blood tests do exist, so you just have to ask for them. So, today I want to talk to you about which tests you should be asking for and why. Now I’ve seen great success in reversing health issues with my patients, and a huge reason is because I focus on a comprehensive panel of health span markers tested regularly every three to six months in my clinics. Well, I can’t see each of you personally. The good news is that these important tests are incredibly inexpensive and often covered by insurance. So, I encourage you to request these tests at your next doctor’s visit. Okay, let’s go get them.
Number one, fasting insulin. If there’s only one test you should get, it’s this one. This test is the easiest way to measure metabolic flexibility. It measures how easily your mitochondria are able from switching from burning sugar to burning fat. Now, insulin is actually a fat storage hormone, but as most of you know, insulin is also essential for unlocking the door to your cells that ushers in sugars and proteins into your cells. Now, sadly, the higher your insulin level is, the easier it is for you to convert the food you eat, particularly carbohydrates and protein, into fat. Because of this, people with a high fasting insulin level often feel like they don’t eat much, but they still gain weight. And this explains why diabetics who are put on insulin injections actually tend to gain weight, not lose weight. They’re literally injecting themselves with the hormone that turns food into fat.
Now, what are the ideal levels? Well, most health professionals agree that a fasting insulin level of 10 or less is desirable. I personally, along with others, think six or less is the way to go. My fasting insulin levels tend to run two to three. My wife’s run one to less than one. As you know, I can’t catch her. I hate her for this. But a low fasting insulin level is one of the best ways to assure yourself of metabolic flexibility. Now, why a fasting insulin level? Why not a blood sugar level, blood glucose? Why not a hemoglobin A1C? Because these will miss many people who are controlling their blood sugar, even controlling the amount of sugar and protein that appear in their blood work for two months before the test with a very elevated insulin level. You and your doctor will miss the fact that you have metabolic inflexibility, which is about the worst thing that can happen to you in terms of a long health span.
Now, how do you resolve these abnormal results? If your results are 10 or over, you have insulin resistance, your mitochondria are inflexible. You are either over consuming carbohydrates and or protein. Now, interestingly, eating fat has no effect on your insulin levels, so you simply need to change your diet. Please follow the yes and no list in all my books. It’s available online at drgundry.com. It’s free. Follow the yes and no list and watch your fasting insulin fall. Now number two, it’s a cousin of a fasting insulin test. What you want is an insulin resistance score, sometimes called a HOMA-IR. That’s spelled H-O-M-A-I-R. And as you can guess, IR stands for insulin resistance. So, insulin resistance is actually how resistant your cells, particularly your muscle cells, are to the action of insulin. As I tell my patients, insulin is essentially a sales person that wants to sell your cells, particularly your muscle cells, sugar and protein, and it literally knocks on the door of your cell and says, “Hey, this guy, you just ate some great sugar and protein. I want to sell it to you.”
And your muscle cells, if they’ve been active, if there’s a lot of them, they go, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I’m interested in that. Yeah, I like what you’re selling. Come on in.” On the other hand, if your muscle cells have been inactive, if they’re full, then they go, “Pff, really? There’s no room in here for any more sugar or protein. I’m not interested in what you’re selling. I am resistant to your sales pitch and go away.” Now, the problem with this is that insulin’s job is to get rid of sugar and proteins from your bloodstream, and insulin first tries to shove it into your muscle cells by recruiting more insulin molecules, hence elevated insulin levels, but the muscles are resistant–insulin resistance. So insulin finally says, “Well, what the heck? I got to get rid of this stuff.
I know I’ll convert this sugar and protein into fat. Someday you’ll thank me because one of these days, a famine is going to occur. It always has occurred in the past, and you are going to be fat enough to make it through the famine and all those skinny people won’t. So you are going to thank me someday. So, the muscles don’t want it. I’ll put it in the fat cells. There’s always room in there.” So you really want to know your fasting insulin level, but you also want to know how resistant your muscles are to the sales pitch. Now, most labs think that 2.0 on a HOMA-IR is normal, but there’s considerable evidence that a HOMA-IR really should be one or lower indicating literally no insulin resistance. Now, how do you resolve this problem? First of all, the good news is that hungry muscles, lots of hungry muscles want to buy the sugar and protein that you’re eating that insulin is selling.
So, strength training is so incredibly useful for this problem. And remember that strength training, really you want to spend your time on your lower leg. Your legs and butt contain 60 to 70% of all your muscles. So, don’t spend your time at the gym trying to get guns. Try to work on your butt and your thighs on the leg machines or do like Jacqueline used to teach. There’s two perfect exercises for human beings, deep knee bends or squats and planks or pushups. That will really get your muscles working. The other thing that I’ve written extensively about is walking and particularly hiking. Hiking in hills. One of the unique things about all the Blue Zones is they all live in hilly communities and hiking, walking hills is a great way to make your muscles not resistant to the sales pitch of insulin.
Number three, test your vitamin D levels. Did you know that 80% of people in sunny Southern California are vitamin D deficient? That’s why everyone should get this test. And quite frankly, robust vitamin D levels support a healthy immune system, support a healthy wall of your gut and control so many important hormone functions in your body that I can’t begin to tell you how important it is to get your vitamin D levels up. Now, my lab, I want my patients to have vitamin D levels of a hundred to 150 nanograms per milliliters. Most tests will measure 25 hydroxy vitamin D3. That’s the one you’re looking for. If you get Quest, if you get Cleveland HeartLab, they will say that up to 150 nanograms per milliliter is normal, as in normal. And yet so many well-meaning healthcare professionals, when they see your vitamin D approaching 60 or 80, they tell you that you are Vitamin D toxic.
The University of California San Diego, a big vitamin D research unit has never seen vitamin D toxicity up to 40,000 international units a day. They believe that the average American should be getting 9,600 international units of D3 a day, and that’s what I recommend to my patients. So how do you resolve this? First of all, please guarantee that you take 5,000 international units a day. That’s 125 micrograms of vitamin D3. Now, any basic one will do. Really, they all work just fine and I can assure you I look at vitamin D levels wherever my patients buy their vitamin D3 and it’s fine. Now, most people should probably take 10,000 and take at least a hundred micrograms of vitamin K2 as well. It really helps vitamin D take calcium out of your blood vessels and put it in your bones. In fact, one human trial is shown supplementation with vitamin K2, not vitamin K1, vitamin K2 reduces coronary calcium scores.
That’s pretty cool if you worry about coronary calcium scores. But take the combination of vitamin D3 and vitamin K2. All right, I got a bonus test for you. Number four, homocysteine. Now, everybody should get this test. Homocysteine is an amino acid that is usually converted by certain B vitamins into another amino acid called methionine. Now, numerous studies suggest that higher levels of homocysteine can damage your blood vessels and your brain. Yet 50% of us carry a mutation of the MTHFR gene, which I affectionately nicknamed the Mother-FR gene because if you say that gene out loud, we will bleep you from network television. Now with this mutation, unfortunately most people do not make enough of the enzymes that attach a methyl group to vitamin B12 and folic acid to turn them into their active compounds, which are methyl B12 and methyl folate. So, if your homocysteine is above 10, there’s a very good chance that you carry this MTHFR mutation, and if you do, then the easiest trick is to take sublingual vitamin B12 and methylfolate.
Now, they come in a tablet that you can chew and stuck under tongue. Methylfolate can be swallowed, but I see so many patients that swallowing methyl B12 does not solve the problem because some people lack a receptor in their intestines called intrinsic factor that allows you to absorb B12 properly. If you put it under your tongue, you eliminate that issue. So, methyl B12, methylfolate sublingual under the tongue is the way to go. Now, there is a chance that your provider will be reluctant to order these tests. Just be persistent. Now, I can tell you it’s not their fault that they don’t know what blood tests to look for. Medical students and residents, myself included, back in the dark ages are trained to only test a few markers and most of the tests we’ve been trained to look for don’t shed much light on the real root of the problem.
In fact, I have third year family practice residents rotate through my clinic in Palm Springs and to a person. So these people are about ready to go into practice. None of these people have ever heard of getting a fasting insulin level, a HOMA-IR, or a vitamin D level in their patients. That’s how prevalent this problem is, and I’ve seen over and over again a resistance by practicing physicians to not order a test you want because they don’t want to appear ignorant because they don’t know how to interpret the results. So, be your own healthcare advocate. I’ve already given you the range that you should look for and just ask your healthcare provider to humor you. As I always say, it is never too late to take control of your health. It’s your health and these tests will help you do that.
In this episode, we’re going to dive head first into the world of internet trends, separating fact from fiction and debunking some of the most popular fads you probably stumbled upon online. But it’s not all skepticism and debunking. We’re also here to reveal which of these trends are not just hype but genuinely worth trying out. Let’s start with the first one: micro-workouts. So micro-workouts are a popular fitness trend focusing on short, convenient exercise sessions integrated into daily routines. I’m actually a fan of this trend because micro workouts closely resemble my exercise snacking concept, which I introduce in my book, The Energy Paradox, where I recommend small amounts of activity throughout the day in short bursts, in short exercise, snacking.
Now, this is all about using what you’ve got from utilizing your environment and available resources such as taking the stairs or using a chair for squats or lunges. These are short adoptable exercises that are a practical way to enhance strength, mobility and overall fitness within a busy daily schedule. And I’m all for that. In fact, I’m happy to see that many people have recognized that my concept of exercise snacking has some real merit. So thanks very much TikTok. It makes it easier for people to prioritize their health and wellbeing, so I’m all for it. So, have an exercise snack. If you want to call it a micro workout, so be it. That’s a good TikTok trend.
How about number two? Mouth taping? Now, for those of you who don’t know, mouth taping is a practice where individuals use specialized tape to seal their lips during sleep to encourage breathing through the nose. Now, there’s a lot of good things about nasal breathing. It turns out that nasal breathing is really the best way to humidify the air you breathe before it gets into lungs, whereas mouth breathing does nothing to that. It all has to do with circulating in through your nasal passages to pick up water vapor. The second thing that nasal breathing does that has been shown is it limits the actual stress response.
Animals, humans who breathe through their nose actually have a much lower stress response than people who breathe through their mouth. And if you think about it, breathing through your mouth is kind of the last thing you do when you are exhausted running, and that’s just basically saying, “Oh my gosh, I’m about to die and I’m on my last breath.” There’s some actually very good controlled studies in human athletes forcing them to breathe through their nose to improve VO2 max. So there is actually something to this. Now, it will reduce snoring, particularly if you’re a mouth breather. And so there’s a lot of potential benefits to mouth taping. It can also improve oral health because if you are a mouth breather, you are going to dry out your oral cavity and have risks of dental issues such as cavities, but more particularly gum diseases. Plus, there’s nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night with a dry mouth, which is definitely a sign that you’re probably mouth breathing at least for part of the night.
Now, the big problem with mouth taping is true sleep apnea. Now, sleep apnea is a very real thing. Now, if you have the type of sleep apnea where your tongue falls backwards into your throat, which is a very common type, it’s quite possible to worsen the flow of air if you tape your mouth shut. So, if you’re going to do this, or if your partner tells you that you snore and you snore loudly, please get yourself a sleep apnea evaluation before you try out this trendy TikTok trend of mouth taping. Buyer beware in this case. It’s like we watch these commercials for cars that are driven wild, and at the bottom it says, “Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt this at home.” This is one of these TikTok trends where there should be a warning, “Warning! Professional sleeper in a closed bedroom situation. Don’t try this at home without proper evaluation.”
All right, number three, the cabbage soup detox. Now, the cabbage soup detox is a short-term low calorie diet plan that primarily revolves around consuming homemade cabbage soup. It’s often used for rapid weight loss because the soup is quite low in calories and high in fiber, which can help create a calorie deficit and it can shed excess pounds. So far so good. Now, people claim it can help eliminate toxins from the body due to the high fiber content and the diuretic effect promoting urination. Well, spoiler alert, when you’re on a calorie restricted diet, you should understand that most of the toxins that we consume are stored away in our fat cells where they are pretty much harmless. That big giant tuna or swordfish has toxic levels of mercury, and yet he’s big and giant and certainly swims very hard because that mercury is safe in the fat cells.
When you go on a rapid weight loss program, you release those heavy metals and toxins from your fat cells and your liver has lousy phase one and phase two detoxification enzymes, number one. And number two, your liver cannot detox heavy metals. Instead, it passes them into your bile. You excrete them into the intestine where you re-absorb them. So, the idea that a cabbage soup diet is a detox diet is exactly the opposite. It is a re-tox diet and should be kept that way. Now, I’ve actually posted for the first of the year a four-day cabbage soup diet as a reset, but let’s reset the facts. This is not a detoxification diet, quite the opposite. Okay, number four, oh, this is fun, lemon and protein in your coffee. Now, if you’re looking to add something to your diet following a workout, a heavy strength training workout, then you probably know that your muscles are quite receptive to accepting protein from your diet for refueling and rebuilding muscles.
So, there’s nothing really wrong with putting a scoop of protein powder in your coffee providing that you wait about 20 minutes after your workout and get those muscle cells ready and then have your protein powder. But buyers beware of protein powder. Remember, our ancestors did not have protein powder. They had whole foods like meat, like fish, like chicken, like eggs, and even plant protein-rich plants as the sources of their protein. What that meant for our ancestors is that the protein in these foods was broken down very slowly in the process of digestion and absorbed as individual amino acids. The problem with protein powders among other things is they’ve done all the work for you. This is pre-digested food, and our body is not designed to handle pre-digested food. The second thing that you should realize is that the vast majority of protein powders that we eat do not turn into muscle protein or bone protein.
Instead, they are converted into sugar. Why? Because we have no storage system for protein, but we got a great storage system for sugar. It’s called fat. And all the research shows that the vast majority of the protein powders that you ingest do not go towards muscle maintenance or muscle repair or muscle building. They go into making sugar. So, buyer beware. Now, lemon water and lemon coffee are popular trends believed to alkalinize the water countering coffee’s acidity. The amount of hydrochloric acid in your stomach normally is so massively higher than the amount of acid in coffee or the amount of alkalinity that you get from drinking lemon water. Research has shown it’s absolutely ludicrous to think that you are going to change anything. And you should realize that our body blood pH is kept at a very narrow window and you could consume all the alkaline foods in the world and you will not impact your body’s pH. Sorry about that.
Good news is the Italians take a peel of lemon and squeeze it into their coffee and drop the lemon peel in. Why in the world do they do that? Well, the polyphenols in lemons peel are extremely good for you. And lemon peel has a fantastic detoxing compound called D-limonene, and I use that in one of my liver support products and recommend it to my patients for improving phase one and phase two liver detoxification enzyme systems. So, that’s why they squeeze the lemon in their coffee and besides gives them nice flavor to the coffee. So, lemon peel, yes; lemon water, please. How about number five? Adrenal cocktail. Now what is it? Well, the adrenal cocktail on TikTok Trend is all about creating a beverage that supposedly offers various health benefits. It typically includes ingredients like lemon juice, orange juice, coconut water, and sea salt.
Now the claims are, it balances electrolytes, it boosts energy and supports adrenal function. First of all, I measure fasting cortisol levels every three months in all of my patients. And I think out of the 10,000 or so patients that I’ve measured this on, I’ve maybe seen six people with adrenal fatigue, with low cortisol levels. It’s quite frankly an incredibly rare phenomenon. As I’ve talked about in The Energy Paradox. What most people who are suffering from adrenal fatigue, they actually have adrenal hormone resistance, which will not be fixed by a miracle adrenal cocktail. It has to do with time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting, which I’ve gone into for the last three books. Please don’t waste your time or your money with adrenal cocktails. They’re not needed. They don’t work. Fix your deep adrenal resistance and you’ll be amazed how much energy you have.
Number six, the Sleepy Girl Mocktail. All right, what is that? Well, the recipe is ice, tart cherry juice, magnesium, sparkling water, and or poppy soda. Well, people are saying that it helps them fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Well, believe it or not, magnesium is really good at that. Believe it or not, tart cherry juice is really good at that and I’ve done YouTube videos about why that works. But spoiler alert, tart cherry juice is loaded with sugar. Tart cherry juice has 31 grams of carbohydrates per eight ounces. Now if you do the math, there’s four grams of carbohydrates in a teaspoon of sugar. So that’s about seven teaspoons of sugar that you’re having before you go to bed. Not exactly what you want to help your brain out through the night. On the other hand, you must use tart cherry extract where the sugar has been removed and there are some good clinical trials looking at tart cherry extract for promoting sleep.
Now, sparkling soda is great. As you know, I’m a big fan of Sanpellegrino and other sparkling sodas. Among other reasons is the CO2 contained in sparkling beverages, carbonated beverages may actually promote sleep, but please stay away from the tart cherry juice. Number seven, oatzempic. Wow, is this a trending topic? Well, what you do is you put oats and water and add some lime juice and put it in a blender, and the claims are just absolutely hilariously ridiculous. It can help you lose up to 40 pounds in two months. A spoiler alert, you do not want to lose 40 pounds in two months. The vast majority of the weight you lose if you lose it that fast will be muscle mass and you don’t want to lose muscle. The other thing that will happen to you based on the trials in human beings in the Arizona Desert in the Biosphere 2 experiment is you will be awash in heavy metal and other environmental toxins if you lose weight that fast.
Number two, I’ve written and now new studies have shown that almost all of our oats in the United States are contaminated with not only a glyphosate, Roundup, but also a herbicide which is banned by the EPA to be used on oats. But this herbicide is known to cause cancer and birth defects, and now all oats tested in the United States have presence of this herbicide. So if you want to toxify yourself, expose yourself to Roundup and herbicides, then oatzempic is the way to go. There are far better ways to actually support healthy weight management. Have a slug of apple cider vinegar in the morning or before meals. Make my balsamic healthy soda, my fake Coke, where you put balsamic vinegar in Sanpellegrino water. Soak some basil seeds in water and have a basil seed cocktail or a basil seed pudding. There’s recipes for basil seed pudding in my books. Better yet, practice time-restricted eating. Shorten your eating window eventually to around six to eight hours per day. Those are the healthy ways to lose weight.
What the heck is all this to do about small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO? Everywhere you go, it’s trending. I have SIBO. I’ve seen my functional medicine and I have SIBO, and that’s what’s wrong with me, and I’m getting treated for SIBO. Just this past week, I had a patient come in with telling me that they were diagnosed with SIBO because they walked into their GI doctor’s office and the GI doctor said, “Here, blow in this tube.” And within a couple of seconds, the doctor proclaimed that I have SIBO because he measured hydrogen and methane on my breath, therefore, I have SIBO. Not. Now, why do I say that? Let me give you a little history of the human microbiome. Remember that we really did not know anything about the human microbiome and how important it was, how diverse it was, how many species there were until the Human Microbiome Project, which started in 2006 and finished in 2016.
For years, we did not believe that there were any bacteria that lived in the stomach, for example, because stomach acid would kill any bacteria that you happen to swallow, and so it would be impossible for bacteria to exist in that acidic environment. Well, lo and behold, when H. Pylori was discovered as a bacteria that not only thrived in the stomach but could be a cause of gastric ulcers, that we began to say, “Oops, I guess we were wrong that bacteria don’t exist in the stomach.” Now, similarly, the colon, we knew bacteria lived in the colon. Why? Because we could culture a few bacteria and we knew that there were bacteria that could live with oxygen, which are called aerobic bacteria, and we knew that there were bacteria who couldn’t live around oxygen, and those were anaerobic bacteria. Until we learned that, we didn’t know the existence that anaerobic bacteria existed because we kept putting them out in plates that were surrounded by oxygen and they wouldn’t grow, so we wouldn’t know they were there.
I’m old enough to remember the huge advent in taking blood cultures and culturing bacteria from blood and people we thought were in septic shock. And the advent of both aerobic and anaerobic blood cultures opened up a whole new world to us that we didn’t even know existed because we couldn’t grow those bacteria. So, now we know there’s bacteria in the stomach. Now we know there’s tens of thousand different bacterial species that live in the colon, but what about the small bowel? That’s the largest surface area you have in your gut. And for years we assumed that most of the small bowel like the stomach was sterile. Why? Because before I was a heart surgeon, I was a general surgeon, and quite frankly, we operated on the small bowel all the time and we didn’t have to be very careful about contamination from the small bowel.
On the other hand, if we were operating on the colon, we had to be really careful about getting an infection from colon contents. So we pretty much felt pretty good that there wasn’t a whole lot growing in the small bowel. Now, there’s such a thing called the acid gradient in the small bowel. The acid gradient says that bacteria, particularly colonic bacteria, don’t particularly like acidic environments and they don’t grow very well. So that the acid from the stomach as it makes its way down past the duodenum and mixes with bio and pancreatic juices, which are alkaline in nature, the acid from the stomach gets neutralized. And by the time it gets down to the colon, it’s pretty much all the acid is neutralized. The colon bacteria we thought wouldn’t come up into the small bowel because it wasn’t a really great place for them to live, and the acid gradient kept them down there.
Now, some of that is true. We know that people who take acid-reducing drugs, chew a lot of Tums, bind up that acid, neutralize the acid, and so there is a possibility that colonic bacteria could migrate up into the small bowel. Now, when we started looking at post-biotic gas production, gasotransmitters, and I’ve written an entire book about that–The Energy Paradox–none of us really knew that normal gut bacteria should be producing a variety of gases that are a language system that our gut bacteria talk to us, talk to our mitochondria, talk to our brain. Those gases include hydrogen gas, methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitric oxide, and I could go on and on. We now know that these gasotransmitters are essential for a healthy life, are essential for brain health. And little did we know that we did not know that bacteria that are capable of producing these gases live in our small bowel and are normal flora for our small bowel.
Now, why didn’t we know that? Well, quite frankly, it’s almost impossible to measure the bacterial contents in our small bowel. We could use a colonoscope and get into the bottom part of our small bowel, the ileum, but those samples are often contaminated by the fact that we went through the bowel to get there. A scope coming from what we swallow can only get into the duodenum and we just can’t get into the small bowel. We can do capsules that people swallow and hope to take a sample, but quite frankly, we just didn’t know those guys were there. Now, the original tests looking for SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, relied on having you swallow a sugar like Mannose or even simple sugars and looking at when you would start to produce hydrogen gas or methane gas, those are the two most popular. And if you produce them fairly quickly after you swallowed these sugar molecules, then it had to have been coming from your small bowel and everybody knows the small bowel is pretty much sterile.
So, if you making hydrogen gas or methane gas, or if you walk into the room and breathe into a tube and these can now be bought on the internet, you must have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth as a cause of that. Nope, that’s not correct. This is a normal part of what you and your gut bacteria should produce. Why is it so important? Well, there are now 1200 separate studies looking at the importance of hydrogen gas that your intestinal bacteria produce in among other things, protecting your brain from Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. People who don’t have bacteria that produce hydrogen in their intestines actually have an increased rate of memory impairment and Parkinson’s. And amazingly, if you give these people hydrogen water, that is, water had hydrogen gas dissolved in it, their memory and their Parkinson’s improved.
My point, if you are diagnosed with SIBO, you are prescribed antibiotics to kill off these bacteria, which quite frankly are essential for your well-being. I’ll say that again. These bacteria and the gases they produce are essential for your well-being, but you might say, “But I’m very uncomfortable. I have gas and bloating, so that must be coming from these bacteria in my small bowel.” Yeah, they probably are. So what’s your option? Well, you could go on the FODMAP diet. The FODMAP diet takes away all fermentable sugars from your diet and it’s very popular, and quite frankly, it’s remarkably effective for most people in reducing gas and bloating. Why? Because you aren’t giving these normal flora of your gut the foods they need to ferment to keep them alive. But the downside is you will not get the benefit of all these gasotransmitters that we now know are essential for both your short-term and your long-term health and your long-term brain health. So yeah, you might feel better, but in fact, it’s a bad choice of things to do.
One of my biggest critics is a physician by the name of Michael Greger, NutritionFacts.org. And quite frankly, he and I absolutely agree on this subject and he thinks that SIBO doesn’t exist. Do I think it exists? Yes, but certainly not the epidemic that everyone thinks it is. These breath tests have been shown to be very inaccurate time and time again, and quite frankly, the last thing you want to do is take antibiotics that kill off gas-producing bacteria in your gut. That’s the last thing you want to do. There are really good studies looking at people who have been told they have SIBO put on a sham placebo treatment. And believe it or not, the placebo group did just as well as the treatment group, which goes to show that the gas and bloating probably had nothing to do with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
So, I see this all the time in my clinics and I have never given anyone an antibiotic to treat this. We put them on my program, which involves removing gluten and grains, removing beans and legumes or pressure-cooking them, and in some cases removing all American dairy and eggs. And we see remarkable turnarounds and we didn’t have to kill any bacteria to accomplish it. If you really are worried about SIBO gas and bloating, you’ve been told you make hydrogen or methane gas and take it as good news, you’re going to be protecting your brain. But the complaints of irritable bowel of Celiac, we can eliminate that by just following the Plant Paradox Program. In the new book, Gut Check, you’ll learn all the new ways that I’ve learned since the Plant Paradox to really improve your gut health.
Speaker 1:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.
