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From Pain to Purpose: A Gut Health Journey with Josh Dech - Episode 281 · Gladden Longevity Podcast

0:28
Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden longevity podcast.
0:32
I'm your host Dr.
0:32
Jeffrey Gladden.
0:33
And as always, we're here answering big questions like how good can you be?
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How do we make a hundred and new 30?
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How do we live well beyond 120?
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How do we live young for a lifetime?
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And how do we basically cultivate a 300 year old mind?
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And today I have the pleasure of welcoming to the podcast, um, a guy named Josh deck who
0:57
has a really interesting story.
0:58
has a large podcast following.
1:01
He's a internationally recognized health coach around particularly Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.
1:09
But you're going to hear a very interesting conversation about gut health, autoimmunity, detox.
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We really kind of unravel this knot in a deep way.
1:19
And I think you're going to find it a really interesting and informative conversation.
1:23
There's some real
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Good tidbits, some information there that's very actionable.
1:28
Some companies we talk about for testing and things like that.
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give this a listen and I think you'll find it very useful.
1:37
Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Ongevity Podcast.
1:39
I'm your host, Dr.
1:40
Jeffrey Gladden.
1:42
And as always, we're here having interesting conversations.
1:45
And today I'm speaking with Josh Deck, D-E-C-H.
1:51
And Josh has an interesting background that has to do with really the gut and autoimmunity and a number of other topics that we'll probably cruise into.
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So Josh, welcome.
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to the Welcome to the Podcast.
2:09
Jeff, thanks so much for having me.
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I really appreciate it.
2:11
Looking forward to our conversation.
2:12
good.
2:13
So, you know, maybe tell the audience a little bit about your story.
2:18
How did you get interested in the gut?
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Not everybody ends up there, but you did, obviously.
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And why don't you walk us through how you arrived there?
2:30
It's one of those pain to purpose stories that I'm sure we're all sick of hearing by now and it's what makes us good at what we do.
2:37
You know, I've had gut issues my entire life, as long as I can remember.
2:39
I've had issues in my joints.
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I remember back to third grade running in the playground and my knees hurting.
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And I wasn't really aware of what was causing it until I was about 11 years old.
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My mom's always had gut issues and she'd go upstairs, she'd have gas, bloat, pain, she'd lay on her left-hand side and eventually the gas would pass, it would go away.
2:58
When I was 11 years old,
3:00
I remember there was a night after baseball practice, went over to McDonald's, because that was our thing.
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And we got whatever it is we got.
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She went upstairs to lay on her left-hand side.
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But for some reason, the pain just wasn't going away.
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It was actually getting worse.
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And I watched my stepdad go upstairs.
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I was sitting outside the bedroom door looking in.
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And it was dark, dimly lit, smelled like farts.
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And he sits on the edge of the bed with her.
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says, we need to go to the hospital.
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And she refused.
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He came back half hour later.
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She was breaking out into cold sweats.
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He says, we are going.
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He picks her up.
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puts her in the car and took her in and the surgeon said, have we not done emergency surgery tonight?
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Two to three hours later, she probably would have died at home.
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What ended up happening was her bowel wore out over many, many years, decades of dealing with this consistent bloating, constipation, pain she was having and kind of like your
3:48
heel wearing out when you're wearing shoes without socks and it starts to rub to look at red and blister and bleed that happened to her gut and it perforated.
3:57
Okay.
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a little hole.
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She was leaking bowel contents, stool toxins into her abdominal cavity and she went septic.
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So you had emergency bowel resection done that day that took out 12 inches of colon put in a bag.
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And over the year she had her gallbladder removed.
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She had a total of two feet of bowel mesh put in the works.
4:13
My dad had gut issues.
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I've had them to the point where when I was in my early twenties, my back was covered in acne, talked about not an inch without acne on it down my shoulders, down my arms to my
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wrists, up my neck, on my chest.
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I was having severe joint pain.
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I lost about 30 pounds, give or take.
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I had 15 bowel movements a day, blood, mucus in my stool, panic attacks, anxiety, drove me to suicidal thoughts where I almost went through with it.
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My brain was so messed up because of my gut.
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And I was able to correct and reverse that to where I am today.
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And I just, love my life.
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I feel amazing.
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And I was never depressed.
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My gut inflamed my brain and it made me feel like I was.
4:54
Yeah.
4:55
Well, that's a, that's a remarkable turnaround.
4:58
so, I mean, it sounds like you have a genetic predisposition for Crohn's ulcerative colitis, you know, some, some kind of something going on there and probably some
5:08
autoimmune things related to that with, with the joint pain and the other stuff.
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So you want to tell us kind of how you unraveled that knot and what, what you found as you unraveled it.
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Well, at the time I didn't know any better.
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So I had to bring somebody who was much smarter than myself to unravel it for me.
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But what we had learned through this process, we know your gut is the center of everything.
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There is nothing in your body from a hair on your head to your fingernails, to your sleep patterns and your personality that are not connected back to your gut.
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it ended up happening, we did some testing that really dove into it.
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I had massive candida fungal overgrowth where it was growing.
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up through my esophagus into my mouth and down from my small intestine where they usually live all the way to the large intestine I was fully infected.
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It was coming out and pushing through my skin so it was fungus causing acne and I also had parasites.
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They were plugging up my liver on top of that at the time when I got sick and lost that 30 plus pounds.
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I was also on anabolic steroids.
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I was a strength athlete competing so my liver was extra bogged down by the injections and the pills and it was just the perfect circle.
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yeah, so just so the audience understands, so yeast overgrowth in the gut is a thing.
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We tend to see it pretty frequently.
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A lot of times it'll be in a small bowel, but it can be throughout the entire bowel, if you will.
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In fact, the entire GI tract into the mouth, into the esophagus, et cetera.
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You know, even people that have like fungus in their toenails or fingernails or things like that, they really have a reservoir of this, right?
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It's not just enough to treat the nails.
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They have a reservoir of this in their gut.
6:49
It's really kind of a systemic reservoir that they have.
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And the yeast, you know, we see that people that drink more alcohol tend to have higher amounts of candida or yeast overgrowth.
7:03
Certainly people that eat a lot of sugar are more prone to it as well, diabetics or insulin resistant people that are on that path to diabetes.
7:11
What was it in your case do you think?
7:13
Was it something other than that or was it related to that in some way or?
7:18
For me, I think it came from early years.
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So looking back, there was probably a fair bit of stress in my life.
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Once I've sort of unpacked things with a therapist, you know, after my parents divorced, we went from financial stability to straight poverty, where my mom would send me to
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friends' houses to eat because there's no food at home.
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And, you know, that's sort of where we grew up.
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And around 12, 13 years old, when was 13, I got into high school, got in with the wrong crowd.
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was dealing drugs by age 13.
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I started a business with 100 % profit margins.
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Okay.
7:47
and then sold it out of my locker in school.
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So there was just a lot of that, you know, involvement with the police and just a lot of the wrong crowds.
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So between that, I was also a high, high level athlete.
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was wrestling.
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I was doing gymnastics and martial arts nonstop.
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So I was eating McDonald's.
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Yeah.
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it's remarkable that you could be a high performance athlete with all that going on, right?
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mean, I get this.
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on at the time.
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This is what caused it.
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I was performing high level and I was like, well, I got to keep up my calories.
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counted calories, not chemicals.
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So was eating McDonald's four days a week because it was 3000 calories.
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I was downing 18 plus eggs a day, a liter of milk and cottage cheese.
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I didn't know I had sensitivities to the dairy and that just eroded my gut.
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And that's what I believe laid the foundation for all this to come in.
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Okay.
8:37
So, this is interesting, right?
8:38
So I think, I think one of the things that this highlights is one of the things about diet itself.
8:45
And if you, if you listen to anybody about diet advice, I can, it's almost guaranteed that people will be talking about the health of this food or the goodness of that food or the
8:58
badness of this food or this other food, right?
9:01
In actual fact,
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there isn't a good or bad food.
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There's just a food that's good or bad for you.
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And you really have to start to understand that from the standpoint of your own immune system, your own food sensitivities, your own digestive patterns and that sort of thing.
9:16
And so it's really so important to actually, before you decide that a food is good or bad, is to actually deconstruct your own system, you know, whether you're of insulin
9:25
resistance, whether you have yeast overgrowth, whether you have food sensitivities, whether you have Crohn's disease, you know, all these different things.
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If you figure that out first, then all of a sudden it becomes pretty clear.
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well, eggs are not particularly good for me.
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Dairy is not particularly good for me.
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So gluten's probably not good for anybody, but there are some people that tolerate it better than others, let's say.
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But it's an interesting thing.
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If you're struggling with your gut, the first thing to do is not to jump on a diet.
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The first thing to do is actually deconstruct the problem.
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What is actually going on?
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Do the stool test, do the food sensitivity test.
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Maybe you're not digesting your food properly.
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We see this all the time, Healthy people come in here and they're not absorbing fat, they're not absorbing protein.
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It's really wild what you find when you actually look.
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so I think it's really important to deconstruct this.
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Now you didn't have the benefit of any of that initially, but apparently you started working with somebody that started to unravel that for you.
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So walk us through that a little bit further.
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So what happened?
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Well, I had to find some help.
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So I started reaching out to people who worked at the gym who I knew were in quote health coaching or studying nutrition.
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And they were able to identify the candida and the issues.
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And they started running me on basic protocols.
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But as it developed, it actually took me years because I didn't realize at the time they were missing critical steps that I now know today that I use for my clients.
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There was no drainage support.
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And if we think of detoxing is collecting your trash, drainage is bringing it out to the curb.
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You have seven main drainage pathways.
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So your liver, gallbladder and bile ducts are the biggest ones we see clogged up when we're dealing with bowel issues.
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Mine were sluggish from the steroids, from the junk food, from the stress, from everything, from the candida.
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Then of course we have your sinuses, your lymphatic system.
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I've had sinus issues for years.
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My lymphatic system, I was having trouble even sweating.
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So whether I was exercising or moving, my body wasn't getting rid of stuff, right?
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Bowels, kidneys and bladder, this is how things get out.
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there's so many ways to move things out of your system.
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And what they did was say, well, let's kill everything that's overgrown to get rid of it.
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But my trash has to go somewhere.
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I had no my yeah, I was evicting tenants from the building, but my doors were all locked.
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So they just moved around, got really upset and peed on the rug.
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It's so now I've got infections in other places.
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I started getting headaches and my bowels worsened until they improved.
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But I should never have had to have gone through that extra slump.
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had there been proper foundations laid for drainage, immune support, cellular wellness.
12:00
Yeah.
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This is, this is part of the deconstruction process also is to look at detox pathways, drainage pathways, all of this, because if you're not doing that, then you can, you can
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compound the problem, right?
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We're doing the right thing.
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You can actually compound the problem, which is kind of what you were, what you were doing.
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Right.
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So walk us.
12:20
Yeah, totally.
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So walk us through the drainage, you know, sort of protocols that you
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that you utilize to help people with liver, gallbladder, kidneys, sinuses, lymphatic drainage, et cetera.
12:33
I'd love to.
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And just to preface, when we're getting into drainage, we use this.
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I specialize in Crohn's colitis, which by the way are very reversible conditions, contrary to what your doctor says, and even severe IBS.
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And drainage, liver and gallbladder drainage, these are pertinent for everyone.
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If you have a bowel issue, a symptom or diagnosis, you need these.
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So what it often looks like, number one, we can start by binding because there's a lot of residual floaters.
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So whether it be mycotoxins, so mold, or biotoxins, which are being produced by your bacteria and inflammatory products, we often want to capture some of those.
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And we can start with a very low basic dose, get you drinking more water and just moving your body more.
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That's going to start catching the residual, but then you have to get the stuff that's buried.
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So I think of it this way.
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If you have a cup filled with water and there's something at the bottom and you reach your hand in through that cup to grab the thing at the bottom, it overflows.
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You have to empty out some of that cup first before you can reach to the bottom of it.
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And that's we have to do by binding and draining before you can remove all this junk.
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So that drainage protocol, it might look like red light.
13:41
I wouldn't jump into most people lymphatic massage right away, but basic movement, walking, stretching routines, getting your body to move your lymphatic system around.
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But priority, you want to support the liver, gallbladder, and bile ducts.
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And this is going to be supplements like TUDCA, T-U-D-C-A.
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or NAC, that's N-Acetylcysteine, milk thistle, even glutathione, but NAC is sort of, it's a precursor to glutathione, but it depends on where you wanna go.
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And we support your liver to get it moving.
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You can use things like phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylserine to help with your brain cell membranes, which again helps with exiting the body.
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And so once we can support this adequately, we get you sweating more often and sweating more readily, then we've emptied the glass enough.
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to really reach our hand into the bottom and pull that infection out.
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Because if you think about it, there's only three reasons, Jeff, that I've distilled it down to in my career, is why people get sick.
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Toxins of some kind.
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High blood sugar, high stress, mold, heavy metals, alcohol, preservatives, chemicals, pesticides, they're all toxins.
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The second reason is deficiencies.
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Deficiencies of sunlight, fresh air, exercise, basic nutrients, vitamins, minerals.
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The third is microbial imbalances or infections.
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Overgrowth of candida.
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or undergrowth of bacteria, keystone microbes, infections like parasites, viruses, whatever.
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There's no other reason we get sick.
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And so we have to remove those infections or those insults to the body.
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And that's how we can continue after drainage to proceed through the healing process.
15:14
Yeah, I think that's, that's really wise.
15:19
Yeah, I like the approach.
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And then do you move into areas like lymphatic massage and things like that to, to help people as well, or tell us about that.
15:29
We can and I think it's all about tolerance.
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You know, let's go back to the cup analogy.
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It's cup filled with water.
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You want to drain it out slowly and controlled.
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If you dump too much too quickly, the paper towel can absorb, you make a mess all over the floor.
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So what I want to do drainage, you're slowly shaking that cup to get a little bit of water out at a time.
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But if you shake too much too fast, you spill everywhere.
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And so when it comes down to lymphatic, sometimes lymphatic massage will make people sicker because that's the most congested system, depending on why and how they're sick.
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If you're somebody, talked to a client yesterday, she puts on like a baseball cap and she has an indent in her forehead for hours.
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Her socks leaving in, she's not an overweight woman, she's quite lean, but socks leave an imprint around her ankles.
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Her lymphatic system is not draining fluid.
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So for her at that stage, right at the beginning to go through and do lymphatic massage, when she's not getting things out, she's just going to move them around.
16:21
She'll probably get migraines and even the flu, muscle aches, joint pain as those toxins immobilize, then settle elsewhere.
16:28
So for me, sweating first to really push things out and gentle movement before I manually press things out like a massage.
16:36
Yeah.
16:37
Yeah.
16:38
That makes perfect sense.
16:39
So are you a fan of using saunas in this context or how do you feel about that?
16:44
Totally.
16:45
I think saunas are fine if you can tolerate them.
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Start with 10 minutes.
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Get it heated up to a point where you finally break a sweat, but for five or 10, brush off, go shower.
16:53
Increase it as you need.
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One of the challenges we see is a lot of people go in and jump into red light saunas right away, and they can do too much too quickly.
17:01
Red light penetrates a lot deeper into the cells, stimulates mitochondrial function, helps drainage and detoxing and all this.
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But again, like lymphatic, if you're not ready for that powerful of a system, I recommend you're better off.
17:14
going to sweat outside in the shade surrounded by green things.
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That green actually reflects infrared light like a hundredfold or something ridiculous.
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So being shaded in a green area is going to get you all the nice infrared light and allow you to sweat without really being focused in a sauna that can make you sick.
17:32
Nice.
17:32
I like that a lot.
17:35
So that would mean not doing it at the beach if you're going to be reflecting green, right?
17:40
So the park next to the beach.
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Yeah.
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And if you're as pale as I am, you're reflecting too much sunlight anyways.
17:47
There you go.
17:48
Yeah, there are ways to fix that, quite honestly.
17:54
yeah, very interesting.
17:56
So tell us a little bit more about advanced detox things that you do.
18:04
Are there things that are even more advanced once you kind of people are able to tolerate it or what does that look like?
18:11
advancing detox, then again, detoxing and drainage are two stages.
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So once you've opened up those exit pathways, so liver, gallbladder, bile ducts, lymphatic skin, sinuses, bowels and bladder, or kidneys, once those are opened and things are moving
18:25
freely, then you can really begin detoxing more because while you're collecting trash, will naturally make its way out of your body.
18:32
And so increasing that really looks like two things.
18:35
You increase the dosage of whatever supports you're using.
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whether that's broad spectrum binders like bentonite clay, zeolite, humic fulvic acid, chlorella, modified citrus pectin.
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Whatever it is you're dosing, you can increase the doses.
18:48
Number two, you increase the interventions.
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You sweat more often, you sweat more regularly, you exercise and move more.
18:55
Whether it's acupuncture, lymphatic massage, you're increasing your interventions.
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Where a lot of people get tripped up, they continue these interventions.
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And they go, I'm feeling better, so this must be my solution.
19:06
But once they stop, they feel terrible again.
19:09
And what it is, it's kind of like there's a fire burning and you constantly pour water on top of the fire, but you never turn off the gas leak.
19:16
So we go through drainage, we go through detoxing, but at no point do we really fully actually turn off or get rid of the problem.
19:23
You don't correct the fungal overgrowth.
19:25
Maybe there's mold in your home, which affects 70 % of US homes.
19:28
and you're constantly re-inoculating your body with these toxins.
19:31
So you keep going back and needing more drainage, more binding.
19:35
And now you're basically on plant-based medication, right?
19:38
Managing your symptoms with supplements.
19:40
Yeah.
19:41
So with the infections, do you have testing that you do to look for the parasites and look for the mold and things like that?
19:48
I know that we do testing here, but I don't know which, you do in your world.
19:53
Or do you just assume that they're there or how do you go about that?
19:57
a little bit of both.
19:59
So in the Crohn's colitis space, mold is present 70 to 80 percent of the time and so are parasites.
20:04
And parasites and mold go hand in hand.
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We know that one opens a door for the other.
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So we can assume that they're there.
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But for the sake of doing our due diligence and being good practitioners, we always want to know.
20:16
So we operate through what's called functional blood chemistry.
20:19
We can look at blood in certain markers to know what else is going on.
20:23
We can look at bun and creatinine in different
20:26
measurements within blood.
20:27
Now it's not my specialty, I've got a guy who does that, but we can look at the blood which tells a broader spectrum.
20:32
Not just are you in normal ranges, because what your doctor does to identify normal is they take all the blood from your entire city or your state and they look at this and go
20:41
here's where the average population sits.
20:43
If you're within there you're normal, but 92 % of the population is not metabolically healthy.
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Therefore if you're normal, by definition you're actually already sick.
20:52
So we want to look for optimal ranges.
20:54
And then from there, we look at symptoms.
20:56
Is the truth is Jeff, mean, parasite testing at best is probably 40 % accurate.
21:01
Your doctor's is like 99 % inaccurate.
21:04
So we have to look at symptoms and there's a huge array of symptoms we can find.
21:08
We can look at blood work, which can help identify parasites.
21:11
We can look at stool samples.
21:13
You may not catch parasites, but certain markers can show us parasites in your stool, certain depletions of bacteria like acromansia, fecalobacterium presnitzi.
21:23
can often indicate certain species of parasites.
21:25
Sometimes eosinophils.
21:27
So you can find it in stool as eosinophil activation protein or eosinophils in blood.
21:32
Those are elevated about 20, 30 % of the time.
21:35
We look for psoriasis, eczema, skin issues, trouble sleeping, drooling in your sleep, grinding your teeth, allergies, food sensitivities.
21:44
There's 50, 60 supplements we can tie back to parasites.
21:48
And it's kind of like having a language, you know,
21:50
I can give you a dictionary and it means nothing until you put those words in context to create sentences with meaning, then we can understand each other.
21:59
And that's sort of how we have to look at symptoms because parasites overlap with mold, they overlap with candida or claustridia and other dysbiosis.
22:05
And we have to be very contextual in the way we look at your symptoms, but symptoms are priority for us.
22:12
So what's the actual regimen that you use to actually heal yourself here or use in conjunction with other practitioners that were helping you?
22:20
What did you end up doing?
22:22
So way back in the day, we're going back 10 years or more now, it was drainage support, liver, gallbladder, and then sweating, a lot of just active passive sweating.
22:31
exactly what you did, liver and gallbladder.
22:33
What did you actually do?
22:35
We're pulling back the curtain here.
22:37
Let me see if can remember here, Jeff.
22:39
So, Tudka for sure.
22:40
Milk thistle, general liver support.
22:42
So, genation, dandelion.
22:46
boy, we're really peeling back here.
22:49
I would say that any sort of over-the-counter liver supplement is probably a good place to go, but I'm a huge fan again of Tudka.
22:56
Really mobilizes bile.
22:58
It helps restore the liver cells, anti-inflammatory, it's immunomodulating.
23:02
That's huge.
23:03
Once we got...
23:04
interesting molecule.
23:05
It's actually a metabolite of a bile salt, actually.
23:10
And it has anti-inflammatory antioxidant properties.
23:13
It also has an impact on longevity as well as gut health.
23:19
So we like Tudka.
23:21
It's a very cool molecule.
23:24
If you're not familiar with it, if you're listening to this, it's T-U-D-C-A, Tudka.
23:30
In fact, if you had to pick, you know,
23:33
I guess if you had to pick one thing just randomly off the shelf, that might be the one that you picked, but it's pretty interesting, right?
23:40
So it's a good thing.
23:42
Okay, and then so with that, your symptoms got 20 % better, 40 % better, 60 % better, what actually happened?
23:50
What I started finding was my energy was improving first, because my body was so sluggish, everything was toxified.
23:56
So between that, you know, methylated B vitamins, zinc, magnesium, molybdenum, these co-factors to detox enzymes and getting your body cleaned out, I was able to sort of empty
24:07
my glass so it wasn't constantly overflowing.
24:09
I noticed my moods began to stabilize a bit.
24:12
I wasn't so anxious all the time or all the time.
24:14
My joints are a little better, my energy improved.
24:17
Once I was there,
24:18
I was unable to move on to the next phase, which was going to be killing off a lot of these microbes that were overgrown, rebalancing my gut.
24:25
The challenge is in the, yeah, please.
24:29
second to get to the killing off because just so the audience understands also, we use a genetic test called Intellex DNA.
24:38
I think we've done a podcast with them.
24:40
I know I did a doctor's talk with them.
24:42
I'll probably do a podcast again on a couple of things.
24:45
But Intellex DNA is a company out of Boston that looks at detox pathways.
24:53
And if you're
24:54
If you're curious to know where you need support, if you look at some of these genetic SNPs, you can actually get some insight into, I see.
25:01
I don't do a very good job with making glutathione, for example, or I don't do a very good job with heavy metals.
25:09
I do a pretty good job with organic things to get out, and that sort of stuff.
25:14
if you're looking to refine your thoughts on this, just doing their sort of executive panel will give you a...
25:21
their detox snips, if you will, along with a lot of other things that are useful.
25:25
So I'll just throw that in there.
25:27
But we find that to be useful to kind of customize where we think people are going to need the most help.
25:32
So, yeah.
25:33
I think that's brilliant.
25:34
And it depends on who you ask.
25:35
I know even some practitioners that I've worked with or that I even have on my team will say, well, DNA is not so important.
25:41
Others swear by it.
25:43
And I guess my opinion on it is that it's so vital to know where your body might be lacking so you can lean into those weaknesses.
25:52
But at the end of the day, if you're not cellularly stressed, toxically loaded, if you're not having dysbiosis issues and all that, then your DNA is not going to be faulty.
26:02
but especially in the beginning and long-term stages when you get sick, you know where to lean on to give your body a bit of that.
26:08
It's kind of like wearing orthotics.
26:10
Like, well, I have a bit of a limp here.
26:12
I got one leg that's a bit shorter.
26:14
So this will kind of be preventative.
26:16
It will help me get corrected faster.
26:18
I'm all about that.
26:19
And that's where you want to go.
26:21
maybe an analogy is you've got a house, right?
26:24
And it's built on a foundation and the foundation of the genetics.
26:28
And if you know where the inherent weaknesses are relative to, let's say heavy rains or high winds or something like that, you can sort of reinforce those genes are actually what
26:40
happens is with the right support, you can actually modify the way those genes are expressed to make them more supportive.
26:46
Right.
26:46
And that's really what we're going for.
26:48
But if you don't know, if you don't know,
26:50
what's in your foundation, then it's difficult to know.
26:53
You you can throw the kitchen sink at it.
26:54
That's one approach.
26:55
Or you can try to be a little more a little more precise about it.
26:59
So, yeah.
27:01
Yeah.
27:03
Exactly, exactly.
27:05
So then so then you got to a point where you were feeling better, better energy.
27:10
And then were there other things that you did to actually settle down the actual acne and the and the gut and the diarrhea and all the other things that you were kind of
27:20
talking about earlier on is were there additional things that you did or was that enough to sort of take care of it?
27:24
Or where did you, did you then diagnose the parasites and the yeast overgrowth and the bacterial overgrowth and start to kill that off?
27:32
Is that the sequence or what happened?
27:34
Well, so after drainage and after basic support, getting things out of my system, the next stage I took, I had to change my diet.
27:40
Because again, I was focused on calories.
27:42
I was eating boxes of cereal and all kinds of junk.
27:45
So they got a new flavor of tricks or cinnamon toast crunch, this and that.
27:49
And so I pick it up and that'd be a snack for me.
27:51
But we're talking grains, processed sugars, glyphosate, all kinds of garbage that I didn't realize how big the...
27:58
I was a personal trainer, count macros, right?
28:00
I got my macro balance, I'm And it made me very sick.
28:02
So did have to change the insults.
28:04
It's like to empty the bathtub, you got to turn off the tap.
28:07
And so that's what I had to do first.
28:10
So once I changed the diet over and I was no longer compounding and making my own issues, then I was able to go into biofilms.
28:18
there's a lot of biofilms are produced as a protective layer, they also help them transport, move around.
28:24
It's kind of like a sludgy, slimy mucus.
28:28
like a film.
28:30
You're talking biofilm, but it's almost like a mucus film, as you can almost imagine it, right?
28:36
If you're listening to this, it's almost like snot that kind of lines a skin, an internal skin, a mucosal membrane, right?
28:45
So yeah.
28:46
it.
28:46
And biofilms not bad, I mean we need it.
28:49
But when you have overgrowth of bad guys creating too much biofilms, you can't really go in to kill them all off.
28:55
It's like dropping a bomb on top of a bomb shelter.
28:57
You gotta open the hatch and clean things out first and get everything moving.
29:01
But as you go to open up these biofilms, because they are a layer, they hold onto toxins.
29:05
Whether it's endotoxins produced by your microbes, if it's mycotoxins from colonizing mold, know, byproducts like urine and feces even from certain worms that might be in your
29:14
gut.
29:15
Once you open those biofilms, you release them.
29:18
So you also have to bind and capture.
29:20
it's kind of a put on the gas, pull off a little bit, throttle on, throttle off.
29:24
you see what your tolerances are.
29:26
And already I'd had less junk in my system.
29:29
It didn't have to push through my skin.
29:31
My acne started calming down right away.
29:33
My joints got better right away because there wasn't so much circulating.
29:37
And then I went in with all these microbial killers, whether it was probiotics or antimicrobial plant-based.
29:44
There's a supplement I used through Neutrodyne, for example, called, was it Nutricidin?
29:49
And what we focused on there, it's clove, oregano, thyme, black walnut, all these anti-fungals, anti-microbials that come in and kill things off.
29:57
But again, when you kill a microbe, it's like popping a balloon full of confetti.
30:02
Now you got a mess to clean up.
30:03
So if you kill too much too fast, again, you over-flood your system.
30:06
So it really is a titrated, go slow type of process.
30:09
That's right.
30:10
Yeah.
30:10
You can end up with diarrhea if you go too fast is what we found basically, which is why you sure.
30:16
Well, sure.
30:17
Yeah, that's right.
30:18
If you're that sensitive to it for sure.
30:20
So using the binders, taking it at a measured pace, you know, taking some of these things like every third day, not every day or every something like that, right.
30:29
Just to kind of allow your body to kind of digest the process almost.
30:33
Do you have particular biofilm busters that you found to be particularly useful or helpful that you like?
30:39
There's a lot of them out there.
30:41
One that I've leaned on the most over the years is Clair Labs Interphase Plus.
30:45
I found it to be really nice.
30:46
It's got a great blend of these what we call proteolytic enzymes and they have an interphase and their interphase plus I believe is the one that also contains EDTA which
30:55
can work as a chelator to capture other toxins, heavy metals, etc.
30:59
So it depends on what you need.
31:01
Some people can get away with just seropeptase or natokinase, something like that but
31:08
We always want to go slow.
31:09
It's really easy to throw away too many enzymes in to break these biofilms down way too quickly.
31:15
So I think we get in such a rush because we're desperate.
31:18
I was sick.
31:19
I was depressed and suicidal.
31:21
My joints hurt.
31:22
I was having panic attacks.
31:23
And I mean, God bless my wife.
31:25
We're not divorced, but at the time it's surprising we weren't because I was so off the rails.
31:30
And had I gone too much too quickly, I would have gotten very sick.
31:33
And so in these desperate situations,
31:36
It's important to understand that slow and steady will get you there.
31:39
If you go too quickly out of desperation, you're likely to set yourself back and make it worse.
31:43
Yeah.
31:45
I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you're saying.
31:47
So, you know, we started, the podcast, you were talking a bit about joint pain and things like that.
31:53
And we know that people that suffer from toxins, from food sensitivities, from the associated inflamed gut, the leaky gut, leaky gut and leaky blood brain barrier with brain
32:05
fog.
32:05
then, you know, also you end up with,
32:09
autoimmune issues, right?
32:11
So you can end up with Hashimoto's and you can end up with other autoimmune sort of scenarios.
32:16
Hashimoto's is where antibodies are basically attacking your thyroid gland.
32:22
And pretty much 100 % of the time, we find that's associated with, you know, issues going on in the gut, if you will.
32:30
So you had what sounded like some autoimmune issues going on.
32:34
And I know you've got some theories about autoimmunity.
32:37
Do you want to talk a little bit?
32:38
further about autoimmunity, both for yourself and then some of your generalized notions about it.
32:44
Yeah, know autoimmunity is an interesting conversation and we hear the word antibodies sort of say, it's autoimmune.
32:50
There's two kinds of antibodies.
32:52
There's auto antibodies which attack you and there's antibodies which attack other.
32:57
If you think about it, let's go back to medieval times.
32:59
You have a castle or a watchtower and there's foot soldiers coming up.
33:02
What do you do?
33:02
You design an archer to be able to snipe them.
33:05
It's a very specific defense against a specific type of soldier.
33:08
And this is what your body does to defend itself.
33:11
When it becomes autoimmune,
33:12
That archer turns around and shoots the king.
33:15
And so now we're attacking ourselves.
33:17
And what we look at when it comes down to autoimmunity, we have to say your body's attacking yourself.
33:23
I had no proof that it truly was.
33:25
What it seemed like was just systemic toxicity, but it could be easily classified as autoimmune because of the severity of the conditions.
33:32
you probably had ulcerative colitis.
33:33
I probably did, but I never got it diagnosed.
33:36
And so, yes.
33:39
if you're listening to this and you're curious, do I have autoimmunity?
33:42
There are tests that can be done to look for autoimmune signatures in your immune system that can be easily tested, quite honestly.
33:51
So yeah, we use Vibrant America for that, yeah.
33:53
Vibrant, but you'd be shocked, Jeff.
33:55
So my specialty in Crohn's colitis, you might be shocked or maybe not at all with the expectation we have of the Western medical system.
34:01
How many people come in to see me who have never had any antibodies tested, but their doctor's telling them their condition is autoimmune because of how it's characterized or
34:10
classified.
34:11
And most of these cases aren't.
34:14
So to break down autoimmunity, let's lean to Crohn's colitis for a moment here, just because that's my niche is, but let's specialize and say,
34:22
anything, whether it's ALS, MS, lupus, whatever it is.
34:25
The three reasons we get sick, toxins, microbial imbalances, and nutrient deficiencies or basic deficiencies like sunlight exercise.
34:34
That's the reasons we get sick.
34:35
For something to turn autoimmune, there are three legs to this table.
34:39
We have some kind of antecedent, so like a trigger, a stressful event, many years of stress, surgery, medication, whatever it is.
34:48
We have a genetic predisposition, and then we have leaky gut.
34:51
Those three things are connected to nearly every autoimmune condition on the planet.
34:55
And I would challenge you to maybe find one that's not.
34:58
So your body is a well-oiled, well-designed machine.
35:02
And when you lack the resources, because you're toxic, you're deficient, or you're overwhelmed with infections, and then you have genetic predispositions, you have some kind
35:11
of stressful event or something that causes your body to go off of a leaky gut, which gets these toxins systemic, now you have these hyperactive immune responses.
35:19
And I sort of break them down.
35:21
autoimmune disease into four main stages.
35:24
The first is acute.
35:26
This is where you get an infection like the flu.
35:28
Like your body kicks it in a couple of days or a week and you're fine.
35:31
It should do that.
35:32
But when it doesn't, it then becomes chronic.
35:35
So after a year or more with minimal sort of relief in your symptoms, even with medical intervention, you're still having issues, it's then classified as a chronic condition.
35:45
And what happens just like you carrying a heavy load, you get tired and tired and more tired.
35:50
And so your system, after a chronic condition develops, then it pushes into, we could classify as immune mediated.
35:58
So Crohn's and colitis, these quote unquote autoimmune bowel diseases have been declassified by the CDC, the Mayo Clinic, et cetera, as being immune mediated.
36:07
We know they're hyperactive responses.
36:10
So just like you having a stressful day, you're stuck in traffic, somebody swiped the side of your car, your boss yelled at you, you get home and your kids are running and
36:18
screaming, you blow your top.
36:20
Your immune system does the same.
36:21
It becomes overreactive.
36:22
That's our third stage.
36:24
But then the fourth stage is where we have autoimmunity or immunodeficiency, where we see certain pathways of the immune system collapsing and being unable to do their job, or your
36:34
body really does begin attacking itself.
36:37
And that autoimmune theory, if you want to get there, I'm actually working to challenge that because I'm on a mission to prove, I mean, it's a bold statement.
36:45
Someone's going to attack me for this, but I'll say with a grain of salt.
36:49
I don't believe autoimmune disease exists the way we believe it does.
36:54
Okay, well that's an interesting statement.
36:56
want to talk about that just a little bit further?
36:59
I know you kind of did on the preamble there, but you want to explain that?
37:04
Yeah.
37:04
And I'll preface, if you're listening or you, Jeff, have anybody who's got access to a lab who wants to collaborate with me on this, I'd love to run some tests.
37:13
So I'll go back again to my niche, Crohn's colitis.
37:16
70 % of cases of ulcerative colitis have an antibody we call P-ANCA.
37:21
That's little P, capital ANCA.
37:23
This stands for perinuclear antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody.
37:29
So what does that mean?
37:30
It means it's a
37:31
antibody that is attacking your white blood cells, the cytoplasm, like the belly, the jelly in the middle, it's saying, hey, we got to get rid of you.
37:38
So conventional thought is, well, your body's attacking your own white blood cells.
37:42
There's too many of them.
37:43
They're over attacking your body.
37:45
Your healing responses are out of whack.
37:47
So these antibodies must be attacking your white blood cell, these neutrophils.
37:52
My thought is, well, what if there's some kind of toxin, some kind of protein, something
37:58
that your body is not able to digest.
38:00
Neutrophils eat like Pac-Man.
38:03
We call this phagocytosis.
38:04
They eat, it gets into the belly, they digest it.
38:07
But if your neutrophils, these white blood cells, can't digest this thing, perhaps your body is creating an antibody against what's in its belly, and the neutrophil is caught in
38:16
the crossfire.
38:18
That right there would prove that there's more to autoimmunity, that your body's not attacking your own cells, it's just a bystander effect.
38:25
And if we can actually separate this, say, in a Petri dish,
38:28
and take these P.
38:28
anka antibodies from someone with colitis and attach them with the split the neutrophil, see what it goes after the cell or what's in the belly.
38:37
If we could do that, you could right away prove that this antibody is not an auto antibody.
38:42
And following this chain of events could dismantle a lot of what we currently see and autoimmunity to be.
38:48
Yeah, I think I think there's there's truth in that in the sense that when we think about autoimmunity, we sort of don't think that that's the intention.
38:59
We think it's kind of the consequence.
39:02
If that makes sense, right.
39:03
The immune system doesn't have the intent intention of attacking itself, but it becomes a consequence of the immune system being activated in a particular way.
39:12
And then either it's a white blood cell or it's a similar appearing.
39:17
you know, antigen on another cell or whatever that gets caught in the crossfire, right?
39:21
And so to your point, if you can unravel the knot and not simply look at the symptom or what's actually being attacked, but look at what's actually under the attack occurring in
39:33
the first place, if you will, right now, you're actually starting to get to the root cause of the root cause here a little bit on this to then now you're starting to look at, okay.
39:42
So maybe it is mold, maybe it is heavy metals, or maybe it's something else and there's things that have to be done to kind of detox this in a way that's safe and effective.
39:51
I think that's what you're saying.
39:53
So yeah.
39:54
exactly it, right?
39:54
The symptom is your body attacking something that is itself or is related to itself, but the root cause is still deeper.
40:02
And this whole idea sort of came from the fact that human body isn't meant to have disease.
40:08
It is remarkable how much innate intelligence our bodies have.
40:12
There are hundreds of checks and balances and mechanisms to make sure your body does not attack itself.
40:17
You have cells designed to attack cells that attack you.
40:20
So why suddenly would it turn around and start firing on its own home team?
40:24
Something else must be going on.
40:27
And rather than accepting the common narrative that it just is what it is or it's genetic or bad luck, we pulled back the curtain and said, what if?
40:34
And I still, again, I need access to a lab and a team, but if somebody wants to help me with this, I'll bet you would be nominated for Nobel Prize pretty fast.
40:41
So feel free to reach out to me anytime.
40:44
Yeah, yeah, no, it's really interesting.
40:47
So yeah, so pretty fascinating stuff.
40:50
So why don't you share with the audience kind of where you're located?
40:55
I think you're doing health coaching, if I'm not mistaken, around these issues.
41:00
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
41:03
Yeah, and I just want to preface if it's an autoimmune condition you're coming with with lupus, MS, etc.
41:10
I will definitely refer you or help you find somebody.
41:12
My specialty is right now it's in the gut, Crohn's, colitis, severe IBS.
41:17
And I wouldn't want to say well autoimmune disease, these are great theories, but I don't have practice in these niches.
41:24
It's just the Crohn's, colitis and IBS.
41:27
So yeah, we work all over the world, Jeff.
41:29
I mean, I'm located in Canada.
41:31
We got clients in the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, parts of Europe.
41:35
There's no country on earth we can't help.
41:37
We do have challenges with India in the Middle East just because of accessibility, but ultimately there's a thousand and one ways to get help.
41:46
We have a free podcast.
41:48
We have a YouTube channel.
41:49
We explain all of these things straight down to what it looks like, how it works, why are doctors wrong, quite frankly, and what you can do instead.
41:56
And it's all available all over the internet.
41:59
Nice.
41:59
So what's the name of your podcast?
42:02
So I actually run two, which I realize gets confusing.
42:05
The one we're actually to be seeing you on here soon, Jeff, I believe at the time of recording, I'll see you this week.
42:10
It's called reversible.
42:11
That's reverse able, A-B-L-E.
42:14
Looks great on paper, play on words, terrible to have to say, but reversible.
42:18
And this is where we have two episodes a week, one with an expert, somebody who's much smarter than I am talking about something that I don't understand.
42:26
And then the second episode is a short, where I'll talk about...
42:29
how to reverse certain conditions, how to fix yourself, how to heal everything from bloat, acid reflux, rebuild your gut, whatever it is, we're a gut focused podcast.
42:37
And the second one that I have available is called Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally.
42:42
And I started this because I was doing live teachings in my Facebook group, we got about 14,000 people there, and I was doing these every single week.
42:50
And I thought, well, why don't we get them out side of the Facebook group and put them on the internet.
42:54
So I just took those recordings, they're all available for free on this podcast, Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally.
42:59
Nice.
42:59
Beautiful.
43:00
I love it.
43:02
Well, to your point, you know, when you started the podcast, it's your own story of pain that's kind of led to your passion and your purpose here.
43:10
Right.
43:10
So it's a it's a common theme.
43:13
Right.
43:13
We see it over and over again.
43:14
But but I think in many ways it's a concept of being faced with a challenge.
43:24
deconstructing it, understanding it, solving it, healing it, and then in some level, quite honestly, becoming grateful for it, you transcend it and become grateful because now you
43:32
can actually help other people and share your wisdom.
43:35
So I congratulate you on that course, right?
43:39
I think a lot of people don't go through all the stages it takes to get to this place where you're actually helping other people, but that's really inspiring trajectory that
43:49
you're on.
43:50
So it's great.
43:51
Thank you.
43:52
I'd love to revel in that, you know, I'm awesome.
43:54
But the truth is, think every practitioner who's really worth their salt does go beyond theory.
44:01
I've again, I'm 100 and at time of recording 160 some odd episodes into my podcast, I would tell you probably 70 80 % or more of the specialists we brought in have had the very
44:11
same pain to purpose story.
44:13
And that's what drives us because we've been there.
44:15
we know better and we can help save you the pain we went through in the decade or more of just figuring it out.
44:20
We can help you get to a solution.
44:23
Yeah, yeah.
44:24
But it's yeah, it's.
44:29
I'm not just trying to blow smoke, I think.
44:34
Yeah, and it's really not about external validation either to say something nice about your your course there.
44:40
guess what I'm doing is I'm relaying it to the audience as it's inspiring.
44:44
And maybe as you're listening to this, think about your own pain.
44:47
Think about the direction you can take right in terms of
44:52
deconstructing it, understanding it, healing it, and then transcending it and making it a gift that you can give to other people.
44:58
That would be the thought there.
45:01
Absolutely and I'd love to tack on to the end of that one, Jeff.
45:04
I will tell you, whatever diagnosis you're dealing with, it doesn't matter whether it's my niche Crohn's colitis or something else.
45:11
It doesn't matter.
45:12
It doesn't actually exist.
45:13
It's like the matrix.
45:14
You know, there is no spoon.
45:16
Your diagnosis, what your doctor does is they are trained to measure what's called diagnostic criteria.
45:22
It's often referred to as cookbook medicine.
45:24
We say, here are your symptoms.
45:27
Once you check enough boxes,
45:29
We move you into the next one where you say, is the condition you have and your treatment therefore is this drug or that one in this order.
45:35
And if that doesn't work, here's your surgery.
45:37
The problem is, is this gray area where if you don't meet enough of the boxes to get stuck into a diagnosis box, they don't know what to do.
45:45
Well, we don't know what it is.
45:46
It could be anything.
45:47
Let's come back if it gets worse.
45:49
Well, it's going to get worse.
45:51
You're wearing a pair of shoes without socks that heel's gonna rub raw till it blisters and bleeds gets down to the bone.
45:57
Imagine.
45:58
If you dislocated your shoulder and your doctor went, well, not much we can do, but come back when your arm falls off.
46:03
That would be downright insane.
46:05
But we do this with disease conditions and illnesses and expect diagnostic clinicians like doctors to be able to get root cause approaches when they're just, it's not in the
46:15
toolkit.
46:16
So a diagnosis means nothing.
46:18
They were never, yeah.
46:19
way.
46:20
Yeah, no, that's right.
46:21
It's so important to, as you're listening to this, to be asking the question, what's below this, right?
46:27
What's beneath my symptoms and then what's beneath that, if you will, right?
46:32
And you have to dig like this.
46:33
You have to go into it with that mindset.
46:35
And there are enough people out there.
46:38
You know, like Josh, like what we do here in our clinic as well, where we're really focused on getting to the root cause of the root cause.
46:44
And in some cases, the root cause of the root cause of the root cause, right.
46:47
Which is aging itself.
46:48
And so, when you start to go and deconstruct it that way, you start to get really.
46:54
Super fun, phenomenal results for people.
46:57
And that's, you know, that's, that's the joy that we, that we go on a right.
47:00
Seeing our clients do well.
47:01
That's the greatest joy both of us have, I'm sure.
47:04
So it's good stuff.
47:06
Yeah.
47:07
Yeah.
47:07
Well, Josh, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
47:10
was a pleasure chatting with you and I guess I'll see you on the other side.
47:15
I'm looking forward to it, Jeff.