Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #157: Could the Microbes in Your Gut Actually Replace Your supplements?

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Episode #157: Could the Microbes in Your Gut Actually Replace Your supplements? · Beyond Labels Premium

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Is the fact that these tiny microbes are also miniature vitamin factories.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and we've known this since at least 1997.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: We've known that there's certain types of these microbes in your gastrointestinal tract that can produce, for instance, vitamin K.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: They can also produce B vitamins like riboflavin and folate.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, we actually know now that they can produce all of the B vitamins.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm your farmer Joel Salatin with our favorite researcher, Dr.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Cena McCullough, with another episode of Beyond Labels.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: Today, we're having an interesting um kind of a roundabout query, if you will.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: Um Cena's uncovered some news indications that your microbiome uh can actually create its own vitamins.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: And so we we're kind of gonna examine the question: can your own microbiome replace the supplements?
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of us are on supplements.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: We take various supplements, you know, vitamin D, uh, cal um vitamin C, all sorts of things.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: Vitamin C is probably the most one of the most common.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: And um, and so uh we're gonna we're gonna look we're look into a uh a replacement idea using our microbiome, and can it actually make those supplements um unnecessary?
1:32
SPEAKER_00: Cena.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Joel.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love pondering these questions.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: So this one popped in my mind, and I said, who better to discuss this with than Joel?
1:42
SPEAKER_01: So here we are.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: So, Joel, I was thinking about it one day, and I was imagining, you know, your gastrointestinal tract and how it's this like bustling metropolis of microscopic life, right?
1:54
SPEAKER_01: The bacteria, the archie, the fungi, they're all going about doing their business.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: And you know, we've known for a long time that these tiny little tenets they help with digestion, absorption of nutrients, they help support our immune system.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: They even make neurotransmitters like serotonin, right?
2:12
SPEAKER_01: But then I started thinking they do other things that most of us don't really think about on a day-to-day basis, and we don't usually make dietary and supplement choices based on this.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: It's the fact that these tiny microbes are also miniature vitamin factories.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and we've known this since at least 1997.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: We've known that there's certain types of these microbes in your gastrointestinal tract that can produce, for instance, vitamin K.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: They can also produce B vitamins like riboflavin and folate.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, we actually know now that they can produce all of the B vitamins.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: So these tiny little microbes in your gastrointestinal tract can produce all of the B vitamins.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: So it is your internal vitamin factory.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: And all of these vitamins that I've mentioned, these are critical.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: It's not like, oh, they just produce a few vitamins.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: How big of a deal is that gonna make?
3:14
SPEAKER_01: These are required for producing energy in your body, right?
3:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, how many of us are suffering from fatigue?
3:21
SPEAKER_01: Right?
3:22
SPEAKER_01: So they are responsible for energy production, synthesizing DNA, your bone health, blood clotting, your mood, how well you sleep, if you're gonna heal from either a cut or a chronic disease that you might have.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: Those vitamins go ahead.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: So Cena, um, you gotta realize here that asking that kind of question, I mean, think about all the nutrient analysis.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: Every food has been broken down to this one has more, you know, uh riboflavin, this one has more B12, this one has more B6.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can look at charts and tables from and so all of our, I'm just trying to make sure I understand your query here, because you're you're you're pretty you're pretty far above me.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh so so uh here so your query, you're actually, I mean, we we have we have looked at nutrients from from a I've got from an outside source.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: I've got to get this and this and this and this and bring it in.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: And you're suggesting that instead of an outside in look, what if we take an inside out look?
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's very revolutionary, yes, and I just got goosebumps, and that's why I was like, see, I knew I had to discuss it with you because and let's so let's go through this layer by layer so I can, you know, I tend to jump to the end because I already got to the conclusion.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: Let me try to bring you along in my thinking on this because it is revolutionary, it is an entire change in the perception of how we not only see the body, but how we view food and how we view healing and our needs and also in outsourcing our power.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: This is another example of how we we we are now in this modern culture, again, looking outside of ourselves for the answer, right?
5:15
SPEAKER_01: We're looking to the foods, we're looking to the supplements in order to fill in these gaps that we have in our micronutrient profiles.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: But I think really we need to look within because so here's going to be my bottom line, and then I'll I'll back you through it is that God gave us everything that we need.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: Right?
5:32
SPEAKER_01: God gave us every single thing that we need to flourish and thrive in any environment.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: And we just need to know how to harness that gift that he's given us.
5:45
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: So let me that's my bottom line.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Let me walk you through it.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, well, but before you do, let me let me just point out that that you are you are touching on a on on the at a human scale, one of the things that that I have always touched on the farming scale, in that everybody's out here trying to what do I put on?
6:10
SPEAKER_00: What what do I need to get?
6:11
SPEAKER_00: I need to get phosphate from Morocco, I need to get you know uh urea from Putin in Russia, I need, you know, all it's for soil fertility.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Basically, since the beginning of I mean, you you can read um Thomas Jefferson's uh book, you can read uh all all the early farming colonial from from pre pre-revolution, it's all about the fertile somehow the fertility has to come from outside.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: And I've always said I I've always had a problem with that thinking, you think God really made it that the only way for me to have soil fertility is to import something from Morocco in order to give me soil fertility?
6:53
SPEAKER_00: And so you start looking at the alimentary canal of the of the worm and what it can do from a mineral.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: I just learned seen it this week.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: This I learned something this week from a from a guy.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: He's a he's a French, uh, French soils expert.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: He said that there's not a single plant or a single animal that can synthesize organic matter and minerals except one, the earthworm.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: The earthworm's alimentary canal is the only living thing in the world that can mate, marry organic matter and mineral and take and make mineral, I'm getting chill bumps, get and and make mineral out of organic matter, which means if we can if we put on compost, the soil will balance itself out.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: In you know, internally, you know, we don't have to bring stuff in anyway.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: It's a tangent.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm taking up your time.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: But but but I've seen the same thing, I've seen seen the same thing agriculturally, and now you're gonna you're gonna take this to a a new a new terrain here, um humanly.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's beautiful too.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad that you interjected with that comparison because that's even more support for this theory that I'm putting forth because we look you got to look to nature.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: If you're trying to figure out how the human body works and what our requirements are, we look to nature, right?
8:22
SPEAKER_01: It's more untouched than than our modern medicine and modern science.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: So, so this this is what I started to think.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: We know that they these microbes in our gastrointestinal tract can synthesize vitamin K.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: We know that now that they can synthesize all the B vitamins.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: What other vitamins might they be capable of producing that maybe we just haven't discovered yet?
8:45
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so it's it's an arrogance to read the nutrition literature and have them say the gastrointestinal microbes can only produce vitamin K and the B vitamins, right?
9:00
SPEAKER_01: That that's an arrogance in a closed-minded perception.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: We don't know what else they can produce at this time, but you know, just 20 or like 30 years ago, we didn't even know that they could do all the B vitamins, and now we know they can.
9:14
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so what else can they actually produce?
9:17
SPEAKER_01: So some people might be thinking, well, it doesn't actually really matter because we get the vitamins from foods and we can get them from supplements.
9:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, but here's the thing.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: Even though we have a seemingly abundant food supply, the stats show that Americans in general are not meeting their nutrient intake requirements from food.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: Okay, 80% of people consume a diet that's deficient in vitamins and minerals.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: 80% of them.
9:45
SPEAKER_01: And that's like you said, that's like looking at the nutrients within the foods.
9:49
SPEAKER_01: Okay, if you just look at the nutrients within the foods, the National Research Council has said that a staggering 80% of people consume a diet deficient in vitamins.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay, if you break that down, about 84% of people fall short in vitamin E, 45 fall short in vitamin A, 46 fall short in vitamin C.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: And in clinical practice, Joel, I'm telling you, in clinical practice, we're seeing all the time people show up with nutrient deficiencies.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not talking about using the Western tests.
10:24
SPEAKER_01: We've talked about the Western medicine test for micronutrient deficiencies.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: Those take a snapshot of your blood, like a snapshot in time.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: Those are not accurate tests.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about when you use the right test, the functional test for nutrient deficiencies.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: You see people show up five, six, seven, eight nutrient deficiencies, micronutrient deficiency diseases.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: And these are people that are eating, you know, these whole food diets and presumably doing everything right, right?
10:51
SPEAKER_01: But but they're showing up with these diseases.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: And so uh new, sorry, they're showing up with these night um micronutrient deficiencies and they're presenting with symptoms.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so so my thought was okay, clearly we know that these micronutrient inadequacies lead to things like fatigue, weakened immune system, and they increase your risk for chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes, and gone unchecked over time, they can develop into those chronic and autoimmune diseases.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I then I thought, what if what if these deficiencies and subsequent diseases partly arise because we're losing the internal vitamin factories, right?
11:36
SPEAKER_01: So we know that the microbiome in our gastrointestinal tracts have been decreasing in both the number of microbes and the type or diversity of microbes, right?
11:51
SPEAKER_01: We know that this has been documented in numerous scientific journals and medical journals.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: And this is attributed to many things, like we've discussed, our modern lifestyle with the processed foods, overuse of antibiotics, chronic stress, you name it.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: All these things contribute to decreasing your diversity of your microbes.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: So could that decrease resiliency in your microbiome?
12:15
SPEAKER_01: Could that be why we're seeing more nutrient deficiencies and subsequently more chronic and autoimmune diseases?
12:23
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm not saying it accounts for all of them.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm saying this could be part of the equation.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: So now let's get into what you're talking about.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: That we're hearing about these declining nutrient levels in our food, right, due to soil, soil depletion.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: So we hear stats of people reporting, like, you know, there's less vitamin C and oranges today, uh, you know, compared to like 20 years ago.
12:49
SPEAKER_01: And it the list it goes down the list, right?
12:52
SPEAKER_01: Broccoli is lower, apples are lower.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: But what if what if we're thinking about it all wrong, or at least partly wrong?
13:01
SPEAKER_01: So what if we're too dependent on outside sources like these foods to provide us with the with these vitamins?
13:09
SPEAKER_01: What if instead the microbes could provide us with vitamins, but they need they just need an energy source, which modern science would call calories.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: So they need the microbes would need an energy source or calories, and they would need the raw materials in order to build the vitamins like carbon.
13:32
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so what if that's really what the microbes need?
13:35
SPEAKER_01: They need the source of energy and they need the raw material, the building blocks to make these vitamins.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: If that's true, Joel, it totally flips our understanding of nutrition on its head.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: Because in instead of just primarily focusing on consuming nutrient-rich foods, we could shift our attention to really focusing on providing the right environment and building blocks for those microbes in our gastrointestinal tract so that they can thrive and produce all of these nutrients that we need.
14:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: Now, did you want to jump in?
14:15
SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to uh point out that this kind of thinking um could account for why, for example, very healthy populations are found in in all sorts of diets and places on the globe.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: I I mean, if you think about it, the the the Eskimos, the Eskimos who are very healthy and long, I mean Weston A.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Price Foundation stuff, okay.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh, ancestral diets type stuff.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: All right.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, Eskimos never ate blackberries.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: They never they never had a smoothie.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: They didn't even eat Swiss chard, okay.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: Um meanwhile, the you know, the the net the Nepalese, you know, the Tibetans, uh, or the the Outer Mongolia, you know, they just live on Kurds and camel milk, you know, or or or um it's just fascinating that the that when Weston A.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: Price did his uh work, how different the diets were, yeah, and yet in each of these people groups, there was there was tremendous health.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: And that's that's where I want to go right now, because what this suggests is that if if we so we need to rebuild our microbiomes, right?
15:45
SPEAKER_01: That's the bottom line.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: If we are we are robbing them of their ability to make these new these micronutrients that are required for our health, and we're robbing them by um by consuming foods, living a stressful life, you know, being exposed to all these toxins that is actually decreasing their number and their diversity.
16:13
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: If if you can give them what they need, it suggests that we can prevent nutrient deficiencies naturally.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: We wouldn't have to rely on supplements.
16:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just think of all the money someone would save from consuming these supplements, often synthetic supplements, right?
16:29
SPEAKER_01: We could reduce our risk of chronic diseases.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, and like you said, this theory helps explain why some people thrive on certain diets that to a nutritionist on paper, those diets seem nutritionally incomplete.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: So, like let's take the carnivore diet or the lion diet.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: Lots of pushback for people doing the lion diet, carnivore diet.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: So those, so the diets consist of um animal products, right?
16:58
SPEAKER_01: No plant matter.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: So there's no fruits, no vegetables, no legumes, no grains, no nuts, no seeds.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: And on the lion diet, you're consuming only only ruminant meat.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: So you're not even eating eggs or dairy, right?
17:10
SPEAKER_01: Modern nutritional wisdom suggests that these diets are lacking in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients, because those are usually found in the fruits and vegetables, right?
17:20
SPEAKER_01: But you see people thriving on those diets.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: Some people, not all people, but you do see people thriving on them.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: When you look at um the literature in just the lion diet alone, you'll see you can go and look up almost every single condition, right?
17:36
SPEAKER_01: Labeled health condition, and you will see that people have healed or in the process of healing from those quote-unquote diseases by following the lion diet, right?
17:47
SPEAKER_01: So what I'm saying is I think that if our gut microbes could do indeed manufacture these vitamins and they just need the basic building blocks, then that can explain why some of these people are feeling healthier and they're healing from all sorts of diseases on the seemingly restricted diet.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: Like I said though, so so it's their gut bacteria that could be stepping in, actually, as they are rebuilding their microbiome, those bacteria could be stepping up and filling in those potential nutrient gaps by producing the vitamins they need.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: And check this out.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: So I got to that point in my theory, and I was like, well, what would they need?
18:33
SPEAKER_01: Like if you're on a carnivore diet, you're on a lion diet, and you're pretty much just eating meat.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's let's take the lion diet.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: You're pretty much just eating meat.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: Would that give your microbes the building blocks that they need to make the vitamins?
18:49
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: So this is what I found out.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: About 96% of the human body's mass is made up of just four elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: Carbohydrates, fats, and protein, they all contain the oxygen, the carbon, and the hydrogen.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: So there's three.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: There's three of the four predominant elements in the human body: oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins contain all three of those.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: And now we get into the comparison to what you brought up with the worm.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: The proteins are actually special because scientists are actually believing, we'll see if this pans out to be true, okay?
19:33
SPEAKER_01: But the current belief is that the proteins are the only macronutrient that also contains nitrogen as part of their core structure.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and nitrogen was our fourth element.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: It was oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, which which carbohydrates, fats, and proteins all contain, and then it was nitrogen.
19:52
SPEAKER_01: Only the protein contains the nitrogen in its core structure, right?
19:57
SPEAKER_01: And these are used in to build amino acids, for instance.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: So when you think about those diets like the lion diet, the that diet is actually a rich source of those elements, and it's a critical source of the nitrogen.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: So that could explain that the microbes are actually getting those building blocks that they need, even in these restrictive diets.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: So if they're getting all the raw material and they're getting the calories, you know, that you're taking in, they can potentially produce all those vitamins and whatever other micronutrients that we aren't even aware of, you know.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: So, and I'm not saying we should all rush out and adopt these extreme diets.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: That's not what I'm saying.
20:46
SPEAKER_01: What I'm saying is this highlights the incredible adaptability potentially of the gut microbiome.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: And it opens up a whole new way of thinking about nutrition and food and overall health.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: That I do think that it is possible that if we could rebuild the microbiome, because uh most of us are lacking in our microbes now, right?
21:17
SPEAKER_01: Hence, we're perpetuating it's a self-perpetuating cycle of deficiency that we've created for ourselves.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: It's a downward spiral.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: Um would eat more than 1,000 different kinds of foods uh in a in a given year.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh they they would go along the beach and and eat you know sea stuff, and then they would get you know crickets and gra, you know, differ different things.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: And and They and and berries and and in season as they migrated around and um and they ate huge, huge varieties of foods.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: And if you know, I've I think I've mentioned this on on here before.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: If you get, for example, Martha Washington or uh Dolly Madison's cookbooks, you know, from back uh in colonial days, half of the stuff in there we don't even we don't even know what they are, you know.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: Uh currant berries and and why because they didn't have a Walmart, and so they had to produce, you know, they they had to produce their their fruits and vegetables, you know, through the season on their own places.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Um uh in grass farming, uh you know, the the original prairies, the original prairies that fed the bison and elk and deer and all that stuff, had uh up to 100 100 different species of forage per acre.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: Everything from flowers to legumes to grasses to you know forbs and uh forbes with you know weeds.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: Um and so so the bison's intake was incredibly diverse.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: And and um in fact the BioNutrient Association um is is working on this you know big uh beef nutrient analysis now going on ongoing.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: And the one thing they found with their whatever 450 to 500 um um samples of beef they've they've tested is the single most important aspect of nutrition in the beef is how many different kinds of plants did the cow eat.
23:46
SPEAKER_01: Yes, and this makes so much sense.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, part of that is when you're this is what I think now, when you're getting that much diversity, yes, you are getting a variety of different nutrients.
23:58
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not saying I don't want people to walk away thinking that I'm saying you don't get any of these nutrients from your foods.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: That's not what I'm saying.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: We obviously get nutrients from our foods, at least we think we do.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: So when they're eating that diversity, they're getting, and I had thrown that little caveat because who knows, right?
24:13
SPEAKER_01: We're not down there.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: It's like Dr.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: Cowan, we're not down there watching what's happening, right?
24:18
SPEAKER_01: So we're presuming we're absorbing this.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: So, so we have this diversity that they're they're consuming, and we're getting presumably nutrients from that.
24:27
SPEAKER_01: But what is it also doing?
24:29
SPEAKER_01: It's building a diverse microbiome, right?
24:33
SPEAKER_01: It keeps it diverse because you have you have different fuels coming in, feeding the different microbes, and presumably they're not like it's not sprayed with glyphosate, right?
24:43
SPEAKER_01: We don't have all these other toxins that are on it.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: Then glyphosate is a patented antibiotic.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: So assuming presuming we're not doing any of that, we are building a robust microbiome.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's that is I know people talk about the microbiome a lot, but I think that is much more important than we even realize.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: And I didn't really realize it either until I just started theorizing about this over the last week.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, so so one thing is that to me, this means it partly explains why there's no perfect diet, right?
25:23
SPEAKER_01: There's no one size fits all diet because it what matters is what your microbiome is doing.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: So you can eat like something that's a plate of food that you and I would consider as quote unquote healthy.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: Someone can eat that, but if they don't have the right types of microbes in their gastrointestinal tract, they might not actually be digesting that properly and absorbing the nutrients that they need, right?
25:47
SPEAKER_01: So that's pretty much an agreed upon thing at this point, is that our bodies can look at the same food and respond differently to it.
25:58
SPEAKER_01: And part of that is the microbe composition, but in your gastrointestinal tract, and part of that is perception, right?
26:06
SPEAKER_01: And the emotional attachment that goes into food and if you think that food's gonna be healthy or not.
26:10
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, but but what I'm suggesting is that it's it's very everything is very individualized here, and that I don't think we need to be so rigid.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: Like we're a lot of us, and I got clients like this all the time, and I used to be like this too, like, oh gosh, I want to be healthy or I want to reverse this disease, for instance.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: I need so I there's like there must be some magic way for me to eat, right?
26:38
SPEAKER_01: There must be something.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: Give me a diet, tell me what's in your fridge, in your pantry.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: But what I'm saying is there is no one size fits all diet, and the body's very forgiving.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: And I think that if if you have a diverse microbiome, then you can handle many more foods and situations than we give the body credit for.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: So, for instance, we just had Sally Norton on talking about oxalates.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: I know Sally's hard line with oxalates are toxins, and everybody is shouldn't be consuming oxalates.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: Like they're bad for everybody, right?
27:16
SPEAKER_01: So I don't take that hard line.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: That's fine that she does, and she has her reasons for doing that.
27:21
SPEAKER_01: But there are microbes that can break down oxalates that can live in the gastrointestinal tract.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, part of my theory is that would mean if you have lost some of those microbes, you may have a harder time digesting foods that contain oxalates, right?
27:40
SPEAKER_01: Those oxalates may affect you more than somebody else who has those oxalate-degrading microbes.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: And just for kicks, uh Joel, I I called up our friend Dr.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: Sabine Hazan, who's one of the world's leading experts.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking of her as you started down this path.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, see, you have learned a lot.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: You're right up there with me now.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, like now I need to get up there with you on the ag part.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: Um so I called her up and I said, Hey, this is my theory.
28:13
SPEAKER_01: You know, what do you think?
28:15
SPEAKER_01: And she said, 100%, absolutely, I think you're on to something.
28:19
SPEAKER_01: And 100%, absolutely, there are, we believe there's some kind of microbes that can break down these oxalates.
28:28
SPEAKER_01: And it would make sense that if you don't have those microbes, you become more sensitive to oxalates, right?
28:34
SPEAKER_01: So what I'm so I guess my big thing is that I feel like a lot of us are running around trying to start, we're searching for some answer of how to eat.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing wrong with that.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: But what I'm saying is it brings stress.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: That search alone brings stress because it comes from a perspective of inadequacy, that once again you're not enough, right?
29:03
SPEAKER_01: Something's missing in your diet.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: You need to run around and ask these external experts for help in filling these perceived gaps.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: But I think that, you know, and by the way, that could also explain why we all know that person who's lived to be in their 90s, who you know, eats junk, uh, drinks a glass of wine or a beer every day, but they're happy and and they're in their 90s.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: So how do you they might even smoke?
29:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, some of them smoke, you know.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: I I mean, one of my relatives did that, and I was like, what?
29:40
SPEAKER_01: Like, how do you explain that?
29:42
SPEAKER_01: So, um, what I'm saying is this fits into a theme that you and I have talked about as well.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: The perception matters, right?
29:49
SPEAKER_01: Your perception of life, of of food, this all matters because if you are going around trying to find this perfect diet, you're kind of setting yourself up for failure because only your body knows what is quote unquote perfect in that moment for you.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: There is no perfect diet.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: The body can actually, in my opinion, I think the body can make these nutrients for us.
30:15
SPEAKER_01: But if we're constantly stressed about what should I eat now, or is this food good, or is that food good, or now I got to get the kids over here to soccer, now I got to do this, now I got to do that.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: That decreases the microbes in your gastrointestinal tract, right?
30:31
SPEAKER_01: That alone will cause a dysbiosis.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: We know that stress has an immediate response on the microbiome.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm saying that that response to just stress alone could actually shift the microbiome to a state where it's not as productive in making the vitamins.
30:56
SPEAKER_01: So if you if you think of this on let's let's expand this out to a level that people are more familiar with, and I'll try to be brief, is you know, fight or flight.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: We're all familiar with fight, flight, or freeze, right?
31:09
SPEAKER_01: Well, that is a stress response to fear.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: So when there's a threat, a perceived threat, the body will go into fight, flight, or freeze, right?
31:20
SPEAKER_01: Natural physiological process.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: That affects your microbiome.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: Anytime you go into that response, it affects your microbiome.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: We know that probably around 70% of most of our day is spent in fight, flight, or freeze because we spend it in a state of fear.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: That's we just know that now.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: So that affects your microbiome because here's the thing: when you're in fight or flight, you activate your sympathetic nervous system, it's worried about survival.
31:46
unknown: Right?
31:47
SPEAKER_01: The nervous system's worried about survival.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: It's not worried about how am I gonna digest my food?
31:53
SPEAKER_01: You know, or it's not worried about, in my opinion, I'm extrapolating here, it's not sending this message to the microbes.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: It's time to make vitamins, right?
32:03
SPEAKER_01: Because I need to build, I need to repair, I need to heal.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: It's not sending that message, right?
32:08
SPEAKER_00: It's yeah, you know, uh Dr.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: Temple Grandin, the you know, the the grand grand dame animal behaviorist from uh University of Colorado, the the autistic uh animal behaviorist, she says that that that uh animals, um, and she's anything about animals, only have energy for three things reproduction, immune function, and and physiological growth, you know, to grow grow a calf, grow a chicken, whatever.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: And she says, and she says if you and she's talking about like genetics.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: So if you select animals for, for example, growthiness, you're automatically going to reduce the energy that had the capacity for immunological function and reproduction function.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: That's what we're seeing in the dairy industry.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: These dairy cows, you know, they don't they don't reproduce, they've they've selected them all for milk production, and so they don't they only have two calves and they're and they're worn out and their body falls apart and they turn into McDonald's hamburgers.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: Uh because you can't, because you can only go those those three.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: And so the trick is to maintain a balance in all those um you know three elements, and maybe you know, and maybe in the uh maybe although she hasn't said it, maybe we could even add in there um that that the stress element acts as a a catalyst or a hurdle or an impediment to those three energy flows: reproduction, immunology, and physiological maintenance and growth.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: Those three things.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Um, she she says it, of course, more beautifully than I can say it, but but I've I've always thought of that, those three elements, and so she's always about balance, balance, balance, balance.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: You can't you can't select for one and and and neglect the others.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm I'm I'm struck by by the fact that um as we as we examine this, you've got kind of two sides.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: You've got one thing that says one obvious question is, well, how do you how do you um develop or diversify the microbiome uh in a positive way?
34:30
SPEAKER_00: But then you also have, well, how do you how do you hurt it?
34:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh how do you you know uh uh destroy it?
34:37
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, we had we had my uh my great dentist uh Dr.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: Jesse Myers on on one of our episodes.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, when I go to him, he he takes a little infrared uh light and shines it on my tongue, and he can tell uh on a you know on a level of one to ten how healthy your microbiome is based on the color, the color code that it's reading from your tongue.
35:07
SPEAKER_01: And what was yours?
35:08
SPEAKER_01: How was yours?
35:09
SPEAKER_01: Super healthy, yeah, yeah.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: He says mine was extremely, extremely good.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: But you know, I drink out of the cow tank, you know.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: I you know, I uh you live in soil, and you have you you have a balance too in your life, you know.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: Like I was just thinking of this, so you know, we talked about centenarians, for example, and we were finding commonalities amongst different centenarians across the across the world, and this relates to the stress component because they all had different diets, right?
35:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh, like some one of them, I think was that of town San Diego, I think, in that area, the maybe Low Melinda, where they were vegetarians.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: Was it Low Melinda?
35:48
SPEAKER_00: Melinda, yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: Primarily Seventh-day Adventist vegetarians, yeah.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: So they're vegetarians.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: The other groups, though, they they ate meat.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: Some of them ate high fat, even though they wanted us to believe that they were eating high carb.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: That's not true.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: So they but what I'm saying is there wasn't like one way that they were eating, but they all lived to, you know, like close to 100 and beyond.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: But remember the one thing, one thing that they all did was they all had downtime.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: They all had downtime every day.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't like, oh, once a quarter, I'm gonna get together with my friends and do a girls' night out or something, right?
36:28
SPEAKER_01: Even though that that is very helpful, right?
36:30
SPEAKER_01: But they had it every day.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: Like they would do like a siesta, they came together in community.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: One of those groups would um, they'd have food and music and wine, and they'd party into the night, right?
36:42
SPEAKER_01: So this goes into goes, it contributes to what we're saying that this, I think the stress component is really the key here.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: Clearly, something that they're doing is creating a more robust microbiome that's allowing them to have this longevity.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't seem to be something that's common across the board in every every compartment of the diet.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: I think there's this huge underrated stress component of it.
37:14
SPEAKER_01: So, so my takeaway for today is going to be, you know, let's keep thinking and theorizing, because I think this is for me, this has um implications on all levels of nutrition and science, uh, food science in the medical industry.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: If we start to shift our perception away from more of a it is more of a victim mentality when you're waiting for something outside of you to help make you whole, right?
37:43
SPEAKER_01: Versus nurturing the gift that God's given us inside.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: So instead, kind of take that more ownership role, that hopeful perception.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: And um also I would like to post maybe maybe um the listeners can do something to lighten their load of stress, even if it's just for the one day.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: Do something, even if you just take five minutes to go sit, like what I'll have to do, because I've got kids running all around the house, my husband and the five dogs.
38:16
SPEAKER_01: I'll actually just go into the bathroom and sit on the floor of the bathroom.
38:21
SPEAKER_01: I will, and I'll play a little meditation for like it's like positive, encouraging words, you know, like you are a good person, like you like to my my girlfriend um hosts a podcast.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: So I listened to her little five-minute affirmations is what they're called.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: So even if you just do like five minutes, or if you don't have five minutes, do two minutes, go someplace, go into your closet and just do some deep breathing exercises, because even that in real time shifts the microbiome.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, and and not only that, just the stress factor, but but purpose.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: You know, what are you what are you living for?
38:57
SPEAKER_00: What do you what's um uh it's it's not morbid to to contemplate what do you want said?
39:05
SPEAKER_00: What what what do you wish the the elegy the elegy is at your funeral?
39:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, what do you want on your tombstone?
39:13
SPEAKER_00: That's not morbid, that's that's that's getting down to the most basic uh you know bulleted uh purpose of of what we do.
39:25
SPEAKER_00: And and and um and you know, there's a lot of a lot of despair and hopelessness in our culture, and um, and so you know, purpose is a is a big deal too.
39:34
SPEAKER_00: I think I think per purpose purpose can overcome some some stress just because you know you're you're going for a goal, you know, you're going for an objective.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe that's our community question.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: So you can go into your closet, take a couple deep breaths first, and then then go answer the community question of even like what do you want people to say about you after you're gonna?
39:56
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's your legacy?
39:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a good question.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great question.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: All right, well, a lot of a lot of food for thought here, Cena, and uh I enjoyed, appreciated the uh the search through.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: We don't we don't have all the answers here, but it certainly it certainly does fill in some of the you know some of the blank spaces in in in what we're discovering about the the health gut um the and and the the emotional the the emotional mental uh spiritual gut um relationship.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Cena, and thank you all for enjoying another episode of Beyond Labels, and we'll look forward to visiting with you again next week.