How To Heal Your Gut With Plants | The Importance Of Fiber And How It Can Transform Your Health

welcome to the melissa ambrosini show i'm your host melissa best-selling author of mastering your mean girl and open wide and i'm here to remind you that love is sexy healthy is liberating and wealthy isn't a dirty word each week i'll be getting up close and personal with thought leaders from around the globe as well as your weekly dose of motivation so that you can create epic change in your own life and become the best version of yourself possible are you ready beautiful [Music] dr b welcome to the show i'm so excited to have you here but before we dive in you need to tell us what you had for breakfast this morning oh my gosh melissa you're catching me off guard you're throwing me a curveball right off the bat what's up with that all right um let me be honest i most weekdays most weekdays i don't have breakfast and um but on the weekends i usually do so to put into perspective i'm a believer in um time restricted eating and so what i'll do is during the week i will have dinner hopefully by 7 30 p.m usually even earlier honestly because i have little kids so i'm usually putting my kids to bed by 7 30 and um and then i make a hard rule no food or beverage after dinner like basically it's just water for at least three or four hours i go to bed i get my eight hours of sleep i'm like very sick like serious about my sleep like this is like a big thing for me yeah and then i wake up in the morning and it's at that point it's been like 12 hours since anything other than water has touched my lips and um so and then i'll wake up and i'll have some coffee and i have like this greens drink that i'll have in the morning and then i usually eat at lunchtime and that's it but on the weekends i like uh you know depends if i want sweet or savory sweet is a smoothie bowl with all kinds of problems yeah um and savory is uh an avocado toast on sourdough always with like lots of garlic and lots of cayenne pepper i like it hop so what did you have for breakfast tell us what's the secret yeah oh okay okay what i had this morning was a smoothie bowl so i put in there um a cup of organic wild blueberries i put in there uh two scoops of vegan protein and half a cup of oats so i soaked those oats overnight and then put them in there and then i put in a few seeds today which is really yummy it was so yummy and i just love it like it's so delicious and yeah my husband usually has oats and berries and maple syrup and all of that deliciousness too but for me i like just having a liquid breakfast it works better for me my my stomach loves it and i just love it do you freeze your bananas or do you do it as a liquid smoothie do you do more of a bowl or do you do it as a liquid more as a liquid yeah it kind of goes it goes complete liquidy and i put in a little bit of water as well and i make sure it's like warm water so then it's not a cold smoothie bowl it's like room temperature almost warm which i just love nice um yeah good so i have i've like kind of recently discovered that if you freeze your bananas then it turns your smoothie into nice cream and so and it's such a winner because i love it and also my kids love it and so it's a way to sneak so much good stuff into the diet of my kids so like my three-year-old son it's like he's you know it's like heaven on earth for my three-year-old son and little does he realize the broccoli sprouts and the spinach and all the good stuff that's hiding in there he has no clue he's just like this is a delicious ice cream bowl you know i love that i love that that's something that a lot of people struggle with is getting their children to eat really healthy food so tell us how old are your kids and have they struggled with eating healthy food or has it just been what you've done from day one so they don't know any different yeah i so i give all the credit to my wife by the way my wife gets a shout out here um she's incredible her name's valerie and i my daughter is six my son is three he's three but like he is ready to start shaving soon like he's kind of yeah he has more he has more facial hair than i do my son is like literally it's melissa it's crazy i said we went to the beach and i made a huge mistake because there was another kid another little boy playing with my son and my son was like literally like eight inches taller than this kid and i was like how old is your son is he two and i should have not like said an actual number i should have said how old is your son and they're like oh he's almost four and i was like oh no please don't please don't ask me please don't ask me how old my son is and they're like how old is your son i'm like he's three and like you know my son's over there and he's like driving a car and he's smoking a cigarette you know so anyway yeah he's huge but um uh i have to give all the credit to my wife because i honestly and i think it's a fascinating topic i am convinced that a child's taste buds are determined by the food that mom eats during pregnancy and so my my wife has been a healthy eater for a very long time and like a lot of what i've learned about how to eat i've learned from my wife like i should like be giving my wife even more credit than i do in my book and um so during pregnancy it's kind of interesting my wife ate broccoli sprouts all the time wow and you know i mean they're so bitter right they're so they're so bitter yeah and i've learned to embrace the bitter for two reasons number one i accept that that bitter flavor is like destroying cancer so i'm like okay cool destroying cancer and the second is that it helps me grow hair on my chest and so that makes me feel really good so but the um my wife ate a ton of broccoli sprouts during pregnancy and it's so interesting because when my son started eating solid food he was less than one year old he was eight months old and he was eating broccoli sprouts and he would literally like we would put him on the tray you know how like little kids have that tray and he would just put a whole bunch of broccoli sprouts on the tray and he would just reach out and grab handfuls and smash them into his mouth and um so i'm convinced that my kids got their taste buds because of the way that my wife ate during each of the two pregnancies and they just they've been raised this way so like it's berries for breakfast almost every day and you know there's no they've never had chicken nuggets they don't know what chicken nuggets are unless they've got them at school so yeah so i read somewhere that you shouldn't have broccoli sprouts when you're pregnant and and if you do you could lightly steam them what's all that about the concern that people have is more they're extrapolating to sprouts in general it's not specific to broccoli sprouts it's more so concerns related to sprouts and the spread of infections so like e coli or salmonella could potentially be spread through sprouts and it has to do more with the agricultural practices of trying to produce a fresh product that is not contaminated and deliver it to your local store and then have you bring it home and consume it and the the problem really hasn't been with broccoli sprouts it's actually been with alfalfa sprouts which is a beans right so and many people you know interchange sprouts they say oh do the benefits of broccoli sprouts apply to alfalfa sprouts no they're different they're different plants um so and the same is true when it comes to these infections is that sometimes there's an outbreak with alfalfa sprouts but there's never been any outbreaks with broccoli sprouts and you know for and for what it's worth the the farm that we get our broccoli sprouts from like triple checks and verifies that there's no evidence for any bacteria before they actually package it so so we've never you know we've been eating broccoli sprouts every single day for a few years now and we've never had any sort of issue whatsoever including during pregnancy but i understand the concern yeah my husband is obsessed with sprouts he is the sprouter in the family he's got the sprouting jars he's obsessed with it he talks to them they're his little babies he loves it i just enjoy them but he's the one that's like rinsing them and tending to them and talking to them like it's really sweet but we've only recently got into sprouts this year and we love it yeah no i love sprouts too and it's pretty cool to consider how you could sprout something and enhance its nutritional value and it's really not that hard to do and most people don't realize that you don't need soil to sprout you all you need is a seed and water and that's pretty amazing yeah it's pretty amazing and um i love the vision of your husband talking to the sprouts because that's like me with my fermented food i'm like you know in there with this jar of sauerkraut and i'm talking to it and like when i retire a scoby i have like a ceremony outside to retire the scoby or i eat the scoby just out of respect so anyway um uh i think that's cool and you know i don't know if you've uh come across this book but there's a new book that came out by doug evans and it's called yeah i just i just interviewed him this week oh well there you go boom yeah yeah yeah exactly but it's amazing and um we i actually in the episode i had my sprouts here and i was showing him all my sprouts and he was like oh yeah that looks amazing so um that episode was so great and i learned so much yeah yeah no it's it's really cool and i i think that it's um it's something that's kind of fun that we can all do at home and you just don't even need hardly anything in terms of supplies it's so easy exactly um i want to talk to you about microbiome let's pretend that this is like a microbiome 101 because it's such a huge topic there is loads of conflicting information out there and i want to make this super simple and digestible pardon the pun for people so can you explain to us what is the gut microbiome why is it so important and how can we heal it okay let's do this um i'm going in let's do it let's do it so let's let's take it from the top and you know we think of ourselves as these like powerful dominant creatures humans like we are the masters of our domain but little do we realize that covering us from the top of our head all the way down to the tip of our toes are these invisible microbes and they're as alive as you and i are melissa they have personalities they have characteristics they have food preferences it's quite fascinating to consider and they they live as a part of us a part of our body in what any biologist would consider an ecosystem in the same way that you would consider the great barrier reef or the amazon rainforest to be an ecosystem and the number is absolutely staggering so as i said they're all over us they're all external structures have microbes our skin top of our head inside of a woman's vagina but they're most concentrated inside of us deep deep inside of us inside of our bowels and the main spot is the colon which is the large intestine and so in there you will find this like teeming community that is dynamically evolving literally by the second of these microbes and you can't see them okay which makes it hard for us to fathom but if you were to like look at your thumb right now on your thumb there's as many microbes as there are people in the uk like i'm not saying london i'm saying i'm saying much more than london the entire uk there's more microbes right there on your thumb and um so to put into perspective the number that we use for these microbes is about 39 trillion and it's hard to fathom this number but if we took every single star in our galaxy you would need a hundred galaxies full of stars to equal the number of microbes that every single one of us myself you melissa and the people listening at home have living inside of you and so these microbes let's talk about them a little bit um there's many different types they're mostly bacteria so now we have been taught that bacteria are like they're bad right they're trying to harm us e coli salmonella i just talked about them a moment ago but actually most of these microbes are incredibly friendly and they want to help us they're our friends they want to see us thrive and survive because when we do that then they get to hang out longer and they get to be a part of it so mostly bacteria but we also have fungi which some might call yeast and we have these ones my favorite are called the archaea archaea are not bacteria they're not fungi they're somewhere in the middle and they've been on this planet for four billion years okay humans have only been around for three million so and um it's kind of interesting to consider that we've only had oxygen on this planet for 2.5 billion years so these archaea were like on this weird scorched earth that didn't even have oxygen for 1.5 billion years so i guess the bottom line is this no matter no matter what happens in this planet global warming whatever it may be these are kia they're going to be okay they'll make it through um and uh and then we may have parasites some of us may have parasites and then we have viruses so it's this big complex community and believe it or not there are more microbes than there are human cells so we are less than 50 percent human and they're not we don't carry this like hyper-concentrated community of microbes for no reason they're not just like passively along for the ride they're not for the most part parasites trying to take from us but not give back instead they're our partners they're partners in life for us and it's very interesting to consider like most people don't think about this but you know if you could like hop in a time machine and go back to the very first human you know you can name this human atom if you want to but like go back to the very first human that human had a microbiome and the microbiome has been a part of the human experience literally from day one and our evolution has included them every single step along the way so we co-evolved through the years and so as a result of that it's interesting to consider that what we're learning in modern science melissa is that it's entirely evident that through evolution we grew to really really trust these microbes we grew to trust that they would take care of us and help us when we needed them because if you if you look at the responsibility that we've given them it's like it's everything for human health so we trust them with our digestion which means we need them for access to nutrients it's life that's life like you can't live without access to nutrients we trust them with that with their connected to our immune system you literally cannot separate them from our immune system our metabolism our insulin sensitivity the way that our brain works our focus our our mood our hormones you know estrogen regulated by these microbes androgens male sex hormones regulated by these microbes even our cravings there's evidence to suggest that when we crave specific things it's because these microbes are sending signals that motivate us to crave these specific things basically they are deeply embedded into the way that our body works i'm convinced that it's impossible for our body to function properly without them there's too much science to show us that we need them and and we can get into more detail with this we are living a life in 2020 that over the last 100 years has rapidly changed and virtually all the changes that we've made in terms of becoming more modern in our lifestyle has been destructive to these microbes and so it's time for us to become conscious of the fact that we have these microbes this life inside of us that wants to help us but we can only they can only help us if we acknowledge them and if we nurture them and that's what it's all about yes i've spoken many times on this podcast about the types of things that damage our gut microbiome things like pesticides um you know alcohol toxic food even stress um all these sorts of things roundup all these things that we're exposed to how do you know if you have gut issues and what can we do to heal them sure so let's start with the first question how do how do we know if people have gut issues so i am a gastroenterologist um i am still in practice uh and see patients i i call during the week and you know i'm convinced that literally every person that walks through the doors of my clinic has damage to their microbiome and the way that i see the evidence that i see the proof is like they all suffer with digestive symptoms that's why they're there to see me right so but people who have damage to their gut they suffer with digestive symptoms they have acid reflux gas bloating abdominal discomfort particularly surrounding meals nausea they may have constipation or diarrhea all of these things can may indicate that there's been damage to the gut microbiome but i also see that there's these other symptoms that are a little bit more nebulous in the sense that it's a little bit hard to wrap your mind around what exactly is causing it but but you see this pattern time and time again with these patients where they have brain fog they have fatigue they may have rashes eczema they may have jo they may have eczema they may have joint issues and so you see these other symptoms so there's a list of symptoms that's rather long and then the verification goes like this when i see a person i'll give you an example a classic patient that walks through the doors of my clinic may be there to see me for gas bloating nausea generalized abdominal pain and a change in their bowel habits okay so that person comes to see me for those specific symptoms and you know in our healthcare system in the western world we we break it into specialties in little like buckets when the body doesn't work that way the body works as a whole and so but this person will come to see me and i'm looking at their list of medical issues and they're 36 years old and they have migraine headaches and they have endometriosis and they have anxiety and depression and you know i see these issues they have hashimoto's and so they have low thyroid and i see this and i'm like okay they're here to see me for their gut issue for their gut symptoms but their migraine headaches their endometriosis their anxiety their depression and their hashimoto's every single one of those things it has been demonstrated quite clearly that there is damage to the gut microbiome when people develop those conditions and so i don't need a test to answer the question does this person have damage to their gut microbiome the answer is already there the question for me that i am that i'm always wondering as this person walks through the door is what's the story that got us here yeah because i think it's important to understand the story because that's part of finding the solution you know you have to go to the root of the problem if you want to fix the real issue and so what's the story that got us here and it's not always like a a purely dietary thing could be antibiotics as well so often it's antibiotics so often it's antibiotics um you know many times it's the story i'll ask them i'm saying so when you were a kid did you have a lot of ear infections and they say yeah like i had antibiotics you know uh eight times a year when i was between three right or you know where i'll say so um when you're a teenager acne issues they're like yeah i took tetracycline and you know i took minocycline like every single day or do you have uh chronic sinus issues yes like i have to take antibiotics because i have sinus infections three or four times a year right so okay boom we have our answer but then the other some of the most challenging ones actually melissa and you you touched on this and i thought that this was something that needs to be drawn out and brought up in more detail because it's a huge point the most challenging cases that i take care of the most challenging scenarios with my patients are people that have been the victim of trauma some form of of abuse whether it's physical or sexual or psychological or emotional or people with a history of disordered eating pattern you know something that can be on a spectrum that includes anorexia or bulimia and these are the patients who have been to three four or five doctors before they come to see me and i don't get that history on the first day that i meet them so the challenge is that many times they've been back to see me three four five times and we're not quite getting where we need to be and i'm starting to wonder what's the what's the story and why is this not getting better and the trust in our relationship has grown to a place where now they feel comfortable opening up to me because we have that relationship and when that happens the minute i the minute that that becomes clear that there's a history of abuse or that there's a history of disordered eating pattern i i know i know that this is what's holding them back and it's whether it's conscious or not conscious these these issues are like an engine that never stops and it's constantly working against them and it requires an adequate amount of persistent attention to really grapple with it and so in those patients i have had amazing success but the amazing success really comes from not just trying to fix their gut but trying to fix their gut and being willing to have difficult conversations that lead to us actually taking on these these complex and challenging issues yeah and looking at the emotional side of things it's a huge piece of it the mental and the emotional side 110 and it's and it's not to be underrated and i feel like sometimes we have stigmatized it and we should you know that's that's not um stigma is not helpful you know when we're talking about things that could be considered on a spectrum of mood disorders or mental health issues you know there's there's no shame in seeking help for something that is holding you back we all have our challenges and struggles and it's just a matter of identifying what those challenges and struggles are and getting the right help to get better so but anyway i you asked about how how do we hear yeah and in your latest book fiberfield which is amazing by the way you've got this four weeks to a better gut now i want everyone to go and get the book because it's life-changing information but can you kind of take us through um a rough overview of these four steps and and how we can really thrive and heal our gut and and be the best version of ourselves because when we've got all of these issues we can't show up as the best version of ourselves absolutely no it's it's so true and it's it's quite interesting because i have lived that life myself so and that's an important part of what of what informs who i am and the way that i i practice i i never in a million years thought that i would be the guy talking about plant-based gut health you know like this is not who i thought i was um you didn't you did yeah did you like when you were in high school and after high school did you know you wanted to be a gastroenterologist like did you know that no no no no in fact if you asked me i would have been like a poop doctor yeah what are you talking about you know and um so the now the i actually thought i wanted to be a pediatrician right because i love kids and what i realized when i was in medical school and i was working in the hospital is that i love kids but i love kids when you're playing with kids and you're having fun i don't like giving shots to kids i don't like when they hate me you know and they're crying and all that kind of stuff so i couldn't do it so anyway um so yeah i and i even when i signed up to be a gastroenterologist which was 2005 and i went through a process of eight additional years of training after medical school you know at no step during that process did i think that this is who i was going to come become and i had no intention of becoming this person but along the way i started to suffer with my own health issues i was living this lifestyle where the junk food diet that i was eating with a lot of fast food a lot of processed food it's all it was all about convenience for me i was working you know 16 to 18 hours per day six days a week i was not sleeping um i was kind of narcoleptic like it was weird i could be like at home with the person that i was dating at the time and this used to drive her crazy because we'd like be having a conversation it'd be friday night and then all of a sudden i just pass out like boom out so um so i was living this crazy life and it caught up with me from a health perspective i put on more than 20 kilograms of weight relative to what what i consider to be my baseline i had a lot of anxiety high blood pressure um low low energy um very low self-esteem even though i was doing very well professionally and i got to this place where i was like i was depressed and something had to give i had to break out of this like vicious cycle and so i tried to exercise my way out of it and it just didn't work like i built i could build muscle i could build endurance but i couldn't i couldn't fix my gut and i couldn't fix my health issues and i couldn't lose the weight and it was actually meeting the person who's now my wife my wife valerie you know we started to date and i had never been around anyone that was even remotely close to plant-based and so um we were on a date and it was i was kind of like what is she eating over there because it was all plants and but what i noticed is that she could eat without restriction and um she was enjoying her food she was completely satisfied by it and she had absolute control over her weight and it was very much effortless for her and here i am and i'm like sweating out workouts six days a week and not losing weight so i i started making small changes and it was just like one small thing after another where i progressively made healthier substitutions and started leveling up from a nutritional perspective and next thing i know like the weight is melting off my body the anxiety lifts my blood pressure normalizes i start having my self-esteem surge back i feel like the guy that i should have been the whole time you know and i felt like i was in my 30s again if not 20s to be honest with you i feel like i was reverse aging in a way and so i brought this in my clinic and i started healing my patients and with amazing results so i apologize by the way melissa for that wild tangent no no i wanted to hear i wanted to hear that story and how you got all into everything that you do that's fascinating and usually the reason a lot of people get into health is through a health crisis and that was definitely the case for me in 2010 i ended up in hospital with a whole laundry list of health issues and it was all related to gut stuff which just blows my mind and if i hadn't have gone through that i probably would never have studied holistic nutrition which then led me to spirituality which led me to meditation and led me on the path that i'm on now which i'm so grateful for but yeah it's usually a health crisis that gets us into um learning about health and and taking that path isn't that funny how you know these two worlds converge or like these paths have now converged where 10 years ago you know you and i were both in our own sort of dark place from a health perspective and it motivated us to make a transformational change in our own lives and then to share that transformational change and then experience with the world and now here we are and you're in australia and i'm in the united states and we're talking through a computer and doing a podcast podcasts like barely exist i think rich roll was the only one with a podcast in 2010 were they around then were they around in 2010 i think that they were they were around but they were so basic yeah that it would it would be like comparing an iphone to the old school flip phones and i mean like it was so basic back then but you know rich is the godfather uh and and i'm pretty sure rich had a podcast in 2010 but no one else did yeah exactly yeah well it's it's amazing it's amazing that we're here and we get to experience this and share everything that we've learned yeah exactly so and you know so with regard with regard to what i've learned what i've learned with myself what i've learned with my patients what the science is showing me because a big part of this story for me is that i mean i think it's quite obvious at this point i'm a nerd and so i started digging into research studies and seeing validation of what was happening with my own body and so these research studies showed me this path to optimizing gut health and and i started using it in my practice and now you'll find it in my book fiber field and so what it is is that i kind of view it as being sort of two parts in a way which is that the the most important thing in terms of forming your gut let me say this your your gut no matter what you've done to it so far to date there's good news your microbes forgive you yay yay yeah they forgive you they're not going to hold the grudge they're not going to hold the grudge amazing the body is just so resilient so amazing and so forgiving isn't it it wants to heal yes it comes back to your equilibrium and it wants to help you and the and the issue is you just need to be aware and conscious of the things that are kind of driving driving it away and let's bring it back let's re-embrace it let's make it our friend and then let's thrive together right so and the way that we do this is to acknowledge that these microbes i kind of said this in the beginning but they're alive they're like they're as alive as you and i are it's hard to accept because you can't see them but they're as alive as you and i are they have their own personalities they have their own taste buds and just like us they need to be fed they need energy so if we don't eat we grow weak we recede at some point we become incapable of doing our jobs and we can get sick and things can get worse and worse from there the same is true for these microbes they need to be fed and their preferred food is fiber that's what they want to eat but the problem is that we live in a world in 2020 where we have made a serious mistake because the thing that we've decided to remove from our diet is the fiber so you look and the and this is true in both the us and also australia were very very similar in parallel in this regard we're averaging somewhere around 15 to 17 grams of fiber per day and it is number one insanely low and number two we're probably the most fiber deprived societies in human history and um if you look like the minimum amount that we should be getting is 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men and 97 percent of americans don't even meet that mark wow and i can prove it because if you look it's it's actually quite embarrassing that when they try to do fiber studies in the united states they can't really find anyone who consumes an adequate amount of fiber they'll do a fiber study and what they do is they go let's compare the high fiber consumers to the low fiber consumers but then you look at the high fiber consumers and they're getting like 21 grams of fiber when the minimum recommended amount is 25 for women and 38 for men and this so anyway we are wildly fiber deprived and i want people to understand about fiber like what it is that's so special because this is not the fiber that you heard about from your grandma when she was stirring the orange drink because she was constipated and had to have a bowel movement fiber is unique it is exciting dare i say sexy fiber passes through the small intestine untouched unchanged and it arrives into your colon where your microbes this is where they live they get into an absolute feeding frenzy because you're giving them the food that they're starving for and what then occurs is almost magical like harry potter type stuff where these microbes consume the fiber and they transform the fiber into something called short chain fatty acids butyrate acetate and proprionate and these short chain fatty acids are basically our microbes paying us back rewarding us for the fact that we just fed them and so short chain fatty acids let me tell you some of the things that they do they're incredible they're they're honestly they're honestly probably the most important thing that i've come across in nutrition and yet no one is talking about them which i guess is good for me because i got to write about them in my book and i could have written a couple more chapters if i had the opportunity to so they actually reverse leaky gut they optimize our microbes so short chain fatty acids will actually enhance the healthy microbes in your gut make them grow and simultaneously they will suppress the e coli and the salmonella and the bad guys there are bad guys in there and we can suppress them by getting short chain fatty acids from fiber they directly impair the development of colon cancer colon cancer is the number two cause of cancer death in the united states they have effects throughout the entire body they affect the immune system in a very powerful way where they help the immune system to stay balanced and not get you know to trigger happy trigger a trigger happy immune system causes autoimmune disease or allergic diseases so they balance the immune system they lower our cholesterol they activate the satiety hormones so that we know when to stop eating they improve insulin sensitivity so they're contributing to metabolic health they have effects throughout the entire body they travel to the heart we think that they prevent coronary artery disease in the heart they travel to the brain we have this thing called the blood-brain barrier that's quite similar to the barrier in our gut just like they repair the gut they also repair the blood brain barrier they actually cross the blood-brain barrier and they go into our brain and they optimize our brain function we have studies that suggest that these short-chain fatty acids actually actually can prevent alzheimer's disease like can you imagine what the drug companies would pay for a drug that prevents alzheimer's disease they would pay so much money because it would be used across the entire world guys if you're listening right now don't wait for the drugs just eat some just eat some plants they have fiber and the fiber will heal and so but when we talk about fiber it's important understand that this is not actually about grams of fiber i realize that i've talked about grams but it's less about grams it's more about the fact that each plant has its own unique types of fiber so i said that these microbes they're picky eaters they have their own taste buds they prefer specific foods so some microbes like black beans and some microbes like kale and they don't just generically eat both and so if you if you cut the black beans out of your diet the microbes that thrive when you eat black beans they're gonna grow weaker and at some point becoming capable of doing the job that you need them to do so when we think about the health of our microbiome it's important that we feed all the microbes and the way that we feed all the microbes is to eat as many different varieties of plants as humanly possible and it's not just dr b's idea i wouldn't write a book based upon an idea i would only write the book if i felt that this was scientifically validated and the good news is it is so rob knight who i think may win a nobel prize someday is actually he's from new zealand and he's at the university of california san diego he's doing something called the american gut project but the american gut project is actually completely international includes people from australia and new zealand and in the american gut project they analyzed their data looking at the connection between diet and lifestyle and the health of our microbiome and what they found is clear cut above all the rest the number one predictor of a healthy gut was the diversity of plants in your diet and this was melissa more powerful than whether or not you self-identified as being vegan and a lot of people were surprised by this you're kidding you're telling me that this is more powerful than being a vegan yeah because you could be a junk food vegan that eats the same salad every single day and that's not that healthy of a diet you got to switch it up and get more variety yeah absolutely it's so important and i know so many people that either go to the supermarket or better yet they go to the markets every single week and they buy the same fruits and vegetables week after week after week so intentionally my husband and i every sunday when we go to the markets we try and get things that we've never seen before of course we get some of the same things each week but we try and find different things we're like oh my gosh we've never seen that or what is this thing they're growing and we try and diversify as much as possible and try and get so many different things into our diet otherwise like you said we're just gonna feed that same bacteria instead of getting you know food for everyone which is so important so melissa tell us tell us some like do you have any weird stuff that you've tried recently is there anything cool that you want to share with the audience at home well we obviously a lot of the sprouts are all new like we've been trying heaps of different new sprouts we have never found and this might surprise you but we've never found collard greens here in australia they're not as popular as they are in america like everywhere in america you can get collard green wraps and they're really beautiful so we just found there's this new little stall at the markets and she grows her own collards and um she has different varieties it's this little tiny stall and she has different varieties of radish that i've never seen before i was like i've never seen this vegetable before and she's like yeah it's this type of radish and i was like wow um different types of broccoli lots of different types of kale that i've never seen before um but yeah that's kind of what we've been trying each week and just just making sure we get different things i love that i love that and i think that one of the strategies for so for the people who are listening at home i want to reach out to you and i want to i wanted to say to you right now that if there's literally only one thing that you take away from our conversation today let it be this we need more diversity of plants in our life no matter who you are no matter what dietary philosophy you have whether you are vegan plant-based paleo quito whoever whatever you could be agnostic i don't care what your philosophy is if you want a healthy gut research shows that you need diversity of plants so and i think that there's two general strategies and you just brought up one of them melissa which is try something new so go to the supermarket and switch things up we're you know we are creatures of habit and we need to have this conscious effort to break out of that mold of always getting the same stuff and always doing the same thing over and over again switch it up and try new stuff so and that's one of the approaches um so i'll like you know often go to the tropical fruit section and i'll be like what is that spiky weird orange thing you know but and then i just grab it and i throw it in the basket i take it home and when i get home i try to figure out what it is and then try to figure out how to eat it so um but the other strategy and this is sort of in a way i would say almost my preferred strategy is when you are in food mode which means like at your supermarket or cooking or at the salad bar when you're in food mode i want i want you to to have diversity of plants like i want you to hear dr b diversity of plants and i'm there and i'm telling you like yo don't forget diversity of plants and so let me give you a quick example we will make like no matter what you see on instagram we are a real family and sometimes my wife and i are both exhausted and we got two kids to feed so what we'll do is we'll get some organic whole wheat pasta tomato sauce and that by itself is not super healthy but you can get your kids into the kitchen with you and you can take that sauce and start tossing in some garlic onions zucchini maybe some spinach some mushrooms i don't know i'm sure you guys would all have other stuff that you might even add in there get that sauce simmering the house smells fragrant and amazing your kids are so psyched because they helped you cook it and then when you serve it up get the fresh herbs basil parsley right and now you went from two up to like nine or ten plants it wasn't a lot of effort it tastes way better and your gut microbes are doing the riverboats like they're dancing a jig you know in your honor and then they're also rewarding you with these short chain fatty acids and that is a beautiful thing because all it took was the consciousness of hearing dr b saying get that diversity of plants going yo so um and that's i think that's the general approach that i would really encourage yeah i love that and something really interesting that you touched on another amazing way to get children to eat healthy food is to get them in the kitchen they love cooking and if you have a garden growing some things telling them to go out and pick the tomatoes come in cut them up cut up the carrots they love it so for anyone listening who is struggling to get their children to eat more fruits and vegetables get them involved in the kitchen get them involved in growing the produce and preparing the meal they will feel so satisfied i was chatting to a friend the other day and he was saying that if he gets his daughter to he if he tries to get his daughter to eat a carrot she's not interested but if she picks the carrot from the market and comes home and cuts it herself she wants to eat it but she doesn't want to eat it if she's told to eat it so you know there's so many different things and i know a lot of people out there really struggle with getting their children to eat well so i just wanted to pop that in there and like dr b said diversity diversity diversity it is so important and i want oh sorry you go well i was just gonna say real quick sorry i didn't mean to you were floating and i loved it um the we one of the things that we got in our house so like having a garden is so good for human health and there's evidence to suggest which i talk about in my book a little bit that it may be good for your microbiome as well so gardening is great and one thing that you can do if you don't have access to like the you know patch of dirt is there they have now these these like farm stands where they basically grow vertically and um it is actually very cool because for example we have one it's on our deck it takes up virtually no space it's growing 24 plants right now we have tomatoes we have green beans we've had zucchini i got some watermelon that's in the process of growing we got all kinds of heads of lettuce and my son who's three is so proud of this it's like hey liam who grew the garden he's like i did and then he runs out there and he grabs a big old thing of lettuce and like stuffs his face and so i i just want to rip off of what you're saying and and point out that that's one of the things that i found to be very helpful i totally yeah they love it they love it something else that i love in your book is the acronym f goals can you talk us through f goals yeah actually what a perfect perfectly timed conversation because we just got done talking about diversity of plants um but the reality is this you are not going to eat every single plant in equal proportion that's just not realistic and i kind of look at it like this the plants they are our friends they are our friends they want to support us they want to nurture us they want to help us and you're going to have a lot of different friends but it's okay to acknowledge that certain plants are your best friends so this acronym f goals this is how i remember my foundational foods for optimal gut health these are my best friends and i try to get them if not every day at least a couple times a week so that is fruit f stands for fruit and fermented so like fruit you know i don't understand why we have made it sound so scary fruit does not cause us to gain weight it causes us to lose weight fruit does not spike our blood sugar it actually improves our blood sugar um i just want to i just wanted to say one thing there because i had for many years i had fruit fear because i believed the story that fruit was sugar which equaled weight and so for so many years i literally the only thing i ate was berries blueberries mainly and now i just look back and i'm like all of those that diversity that i was missing out on so can you just clarify and clear that fear up yeah i mean let me let me give you an example uh we have heard do do you guys say this in australia an apple a day keeps things yeah away do you guys have that saying okay so we have it too and um you know it's interesting the apple it's not necessarily considered a sexy piece of fruit it's kind of just considered standard fair but there are there is this really fascinating study that came out where they showed that an apple has a microbiome and you realize actually when you look at this study that it's not just the apple that all life on the planet has a microbiome and so what that means is that the the apple when it goes from flour all the way to fruit basically just like us it has a bunch of microbes that are there supporting it and helping it to evolve so when we eat an apple there's a hundred million microbes that we may be transferring as a result of simply eating that apple and the same would be true for other fruit fruit is a wonderful wonderful source of microbes of different types of fiber of different phytochemicals which are these healing chemicals that you find in plants they have vitamins they have minerals i mean the bottom line is that every single plant whether it's fruit or otherwise has certain positive things that it wants to contribute to your health and so when we eat the variety we're getting as many different unique positives on board as possible and that's that's how we really sort of optimize the way our body functions so and you know a drew um harrisburg who i'm guessing you're probably friends with no no i'm not oh drew harrisburg in australia is someone who um he has type 1 diabetes and he transitions from a ketogenic diet where he actually was losing control of his blood sugar even though he was eating low carb because the insulin resistance was getting out of control he can transition over to a plant-based diet with tons of fruit and actually getting better control of his diabetes because the fruit has the fiber and the phytochemicals that actually optimize insulin sensitivity and help you to keep balance of your blood sugar so it's not actually spiking your blood sugar it's actually giving you better control over it wow so and that's beautiful yes i do know drew but i'm not personally friends with him but his story is incredible so we can put we can put that fruit fear to bed can't we i think we can put that fruit fear to bed and i definitely don't live in fear of fruit i consider it one of the great opportunities for increased plant diversity how many pieces of fruit do you think we should eat a day well you know for me um so gosh it's hard for me to assign a number i look at it more as like opportunities fruit is great with breakfast and fruit is wonderful as a snack so many times what i'll do is i'll i'll take an apple and an orange with me to work and i'll i'll just have that with me and if i start to get hungry at 11 o'clock in the morning and i have to wait another hour for lunch have the apple boom and that holds me over and it's just sort of a nice way to nourish my body so that i don't get into that toxic hunger place yeah okay awesome so uh and then fermented food just briefly fermented food we you know has been a part of every single food tradition in the history of humanity going back you know since the dawn of civilization ten thousand years ago and we give gave it up because we created preservatives and stuff you know that actually is destroying our gut microbiome so i feel like it's time to get back to embracing these food traditions with fermentation where it's a living food it has microbes but it also when i think of fermentation i think of transformation where it's not just the probiotics it's also that it has new types of fiber and it releases b vitamins or different vitamins things of that variety and so i i i feel like fermented food it doesn't need to be a major part of our diet but it should be a part of our diet i know lots of people that go absolutely crazy on fermented food have too much and then a bent over in agony because they've just had too much kombucha too much sauerkraut can you talk to us about that and then also talk to us about the different body types like because some body types can handle more and some you know just a teaspoon so can you talk to us about that because i know so many people come to me and they say i i don't i can't eat that i can't even do that because it just i'm in so much pain afterwards yeah well let's you know what lisa let's let's actually use that and let's talk more broadly about food sensitivity period you know and the idea of i can't eat that whether we're talking about fermented food or we're talking about legumes or talking about grains whatever it may be you know there are foods that may trigger symptoms and what we have discovered is that most of the time what's triggering the symptom is that there is damage to the microbiome this is why people who have food sensitivities they also have other gut issues and usually other health issues so damage to the microbiome and it's not that you're actually causing inflammation instead what it is is it's it's sloppy digestion because you and i talked about this in the very beginning of the show we rely on our microbes for digestion and it's not so simple as just eat the food and expect that everything's going to go the way it's supposed to there's an unpacking process that needs to unfold that includes many different enzymes that our microbes provide so if you have a damaged gut microbiome you may be lacking the enzymes that you need in that moment to process that amount of food so you may be doing more than your body can handle but melissa to me i like to use the analogy of this is like exercise okay think of the gut like it's a muscle a muscle can be trained it can be made stronger if it's seriously injured a muscle can be rehabbed you can rehab to restore function to a muscle but the way that you do that is not by slamming it and going as hard as you possibly can if you if you haven't been to the gym and you walk into a gym on day one you're not going to grab the heaviest weight that exists you're going to grab a super low weight and you're also going to recognize that there's going to be some soreness that comes with the fact that you have to adjust your muscle and train it right so the gut is the same way if you struggle with fermented foods or legumes or whole grains or garlic or whatever it may be there is an approach that you can take where you introduce the food slow and low you use a perhaps fraction of a serving a very small amount and you do that because that's what your gut is actually capable of processing right now but by doing that just like exercise in the gym next time you come back you're going to be a little bit stronger and so now the opposite is also true we need to be conscious of this that when we do food eliminations our gut grows weaker so if you don't use it you lose it so when people do something like they for example say i can't tolerate beans so i'm going to cut them out i'm going to cut out the beans completely you cut them out and then you go to reintroduce them and you're like oh my gosh the sensitivity is worse than before okay the reason why the sensitivity is worse than before i understand that like we we haven't taught you this prior to literally right now but the reason why the sensitivity is worse than before is because you haven't been eating beans so your gut is not adapted you don't have the enzymes that you need to unpack and process those beans so you have to once again reintroduce slow and low and ramp it up over time but as we said your gut wants to forgive you yeah it is adaptable it can be made stronger and you just have to work through the process of reintroducing these foods slowly and you can get it back yeah that definitely was the case for me when i first reintroduced beans into my diet i was like oh my goodness i was in so much pain and i thought oh these aren't for me but then i realized what was actually happening and that i needed to go slow and low because we do need that diversity coming back to what we were saying before no 100 we need that diversity and what i worry about is food category eliminations so if you say look uh doc i'm just gonna be straight up i don't like i don't like chickpeas it's like okay you you'll be okay if you get rid of chickpeas but if you get rid of the entire category of legumes you can't replace legumes with more of this or more of that there are certain specific things that you get from legumes that you need to get from legumes and that's why we need to maintain that diversity in our diet so getting back to the acronym real quick melissa and just kind of running through efficiently f is for fruit and fermented g is for greens and grains again these are my foundational foods for a healthy gut greens and whole grains whole grains not the refined grains o is for omega 3 supersedes we live in a world where we don't get enough omega-3 fats and one of the ways that we can get them is with more chia flax and hemp seeds walnuts too by the way a is for aromatics those are the flavor foods talking about garlic and onions l is for legumes in case you can't tell you guys probably can i consider legumes to be foundational foods for a healthy gut because they're so high in fiber and resistant starches that feed our gut microbiome and that's part of the reason why we can struggle with them when we have a damaged gut because they're so high in fiber and resistant starches and then finally s i kinda didn't like i was having trouble letting go and stopping my acronym so i had so many things to pack into the letter s so i went with shrooms mushrooms all right they're not technically plants but we're going to make them honorary plants they're great for your gut i went with seaweed or sea veg might be more appropriate they have unique types of fiber that you won't find anywhere else and finally you and i have already been talking about this s for sulfurophane which is the phytochemical that destroys cancer that you will find in broccoli sprouts more than any out there wow that's amazing so we definitely all need to get some sprouts into our life that's for sure 100 if you had a magic wand and you could put one book in the school curriculum of every single high school around the world besides fiberfield let's pretend that's already in the curriculum because it 100 should be what is one other book you would choose it doesn't have to be around health or nutrition but just the first book that comes to your mind oh man so complicated because there's so many great books um so let me be honest with you i am extreme i've seen a preview and i'm extremely excited about simon hillsboro that's going to be coming out next year um so and i'm actually going to be writing the forward for that amazing so yeah my brother from down under so um so i so i would say that because i think that's going to be a comprehensive education in not only nutrition but also in understanding the way that our nutrition affects the environment which we need to be aware of it's very important because if we have children we need to care about what the world looks like for our kids um but if you force me to take one book melissa that's already out all right i'm just going with knee jerk i'm going with my knee jerk um which is the first one that came to mind and that is i think i would go with the blues oh yes so good i think so the blue zones by dan buettner and here's what i love about this this book is about capturing what is the spirit of humanity so yes there is a nutritional element and myself i may fixate on the nutritional element or discussion that exists where all five blue zones for those that haven't heard of the blue zones there are these geographic locations on our planet where people live to be a hundred years old at a rate that is off the charts and they are sardinia off the coast of italy icaria greece okinawa japan the nikoia peninsula in costa rica and then shockingly right here in the united states it's loma linda california which is where the seventh-day adventists live and so these these people are you know by all measures profoundly more healthy for example the seventh-day adventists in california they live on average 10 years more than the average american even though they live in the same country with they don't have special health care they don't have a special like supply of food they just make better choices so but the other thing about it melissa is that um it's about human connection it's about stress management it's um it's about having purpose in life so it would be doing a disservice to the beauty of the book to just acknowledge the nutrition when there's so much more to living a healthy life and i think that's sort of part of my point when it comes to the gut is that we can you and i can sit here hang out and talk about nutrition all day long but there's more to it than that um you know it's our lifestyle is just as important as our nutrition and that's what that's the message like for my kids i want my kids to be healthy i want them to be happy and a lot of the ideas of what i see as being important for a healthy happy life you'll find reflected in the blue zones book it's so incredible that book is amazing and want to encourage everyone to go and read that we'll link to it in the show notes as well as fibre fueled because everyone needs to get their hands on that i want to talk to you now about your day do you have any morning routines um do you uh do you meditate how do you set yourself up for success you spoke to us about your eating habits throughout the day um but what about other success principles that you have okay um i think that perhaps the most underrated thing out there is like we spend so much energy talking about nutrition and then we lose sight of the important importance of sleep it's so it's free and all it requires is this i love sleep so much it is the best fun it's so much fun like i get into bed and i'm like yes and my husband's like you are so strange and i just love it do you now i don't nap no i don't really not but i i go to sleep early and i get eight really deep juicy sleep hours and the thing is you said this at the very start you said you take it really seriously i do too like i am like sleep nazi i just love it so much yes serious about your sleep game i so i love to nap my wife will not nap at all but i love to nap and um so that's one of my favorite afternoon activities like a sunday my ideal sunday afternoon is that the there's golf on tv and i'm gonna tell you right now i have zero interest in golf zero interest i could not care less but it is extremely relaxing because they always pipe in the bird noises so you hear these birds chirping in the background and it'll be like the commentator will speak in this nice and very relaxing voice about these strokes and i'm like okay cool i'm on the couch i'm taking my nap i feel great um so but sleep is sleep is actually incredibly important to the microbiome it's very interesting people who are deprived of sleep it's a form of torture in a way and what you see happen in the microbiome is that there will be a shift in the microbiome that will happen acutely like literally one bad night without sleep will shift your microbiome and i want to ask a question to everyone listening at home when you are fatigued when you're tired what do you want to eat yeah usually usually they go for the ice cream the sugar the chocolate exactly so you go for the simple carbs and what's fascinating is that the evidence is suggesting that it's your microbiome that's motivating this because what we see melissa is a shift in the microbiome where your microbiome will start to resemble that of a person who is obese wow and so yes and so you see the shift in the microbiome and when it shifts you start to crave foods that are unhealthy for you because there's these microbes that are more dominant in their influence and they're driving you to go and eat these simple carbs that's what's that's what's forcing that and so and you see in people who are shift workers god bless them god bless our nurses and police officers and our firefighters i've been a shift worker and so i know exactly what this is like and people who are shift workers are prone to metabolic disease they're more prone to obesity to type 2 diabetes even to coronary artery disease and this we believe is the reason why because it's not just getting eight hours of sleep it's getting the proper eight hours of sleep that is that is oriented to your circadian rhythm so going to bed at one in the morning and sleeping to nine is not that healthy you are much better off going to bed at 10 10 30 and sleep until 6 or 6 30. and so timing is really important when it comes to sleep the number of hours is important and then the third part of this which i think is an underrated thing is and look i'll be the first to admit like i am not good about putting down the phone at night i'm constantly like dang man i'm getting all these messages on instagram i need to try to respond to some of these people so i'm trying to catch up on this instagram work that exists and uh but the blue light the blue light from our computer from our phone from our tablet even from our television you should not have a television in your bedroom you should not watch television in your bedroom and the light actually projects onto the back of our eye and our retina absorbs this blue light melissa and then it affects melatonin do you wear the blue light glasses the blue blocking glasses i so my wife is really good about coming down and be like yo you need to put these suckers on right here and so she doesn't actually say that that sounds more like a like me but anyway um she she will come down and have me put him on i am not good about remembering to do this but i'm just going to say that i think that this is an important thing and this is yet another example of how our modern lifestyle you know 30 years ago maybe you had your television but you didn't have a laptop computer you didn't have a cell phone or a tablet and now here we are 30 years later and we have all of these electronics that frankly we're addicted to you know and we didn't we need those dopamine hits and so we have to pick up our phone every two seconds and check to see if you know someone followed us on instagram and we are potentially affecting the quality of our sleep which affects our microbiome so i think so i think quality sleeps super important yeah absolutely try and remember your glasses put a reminder in your phone to put them on thanks mom thanks mom i'll do that i'm i'm the one that does it for my husband so they're in our bedroom beside our bed and i i'm the one that usually goes in gets them both out of our drawers and i walk over tim and i just give them to him and he puts them on straight away um but yeah we it they're they're great like we're so used to that now and it's just ingrained within us it's a habit but it does make a huge difference to the quality of your sleep for sure 100 and then the other thing so we talked a little about intermittent fasting okay um i i love coffee coffee and tea both black tea and green tea have polyphenols which feed our microbiome so there are aspects it's not for everyone there are some people who will have sensitivity to the caffeine but there are polyphenols in our coffee tea that will actually feed our microbiome and so these beverages i i look i'll be honest i'm totally biased if you tell me show me any study that says the coffee's good for us and i'm going to say it's the best stuff ever so but but i i do i do think that there is a place for these beverages and what the mistake that we make is that we will throw junk in with the beverage so like these like i mean particularly these things that you don't even have to refrigerate and i'm not sure if it's dairy or what it is and it comes in a little packet and you just open it up and pour it in and it has the sugar and the weird dairy thing that i'm not even sure with dairy so um you know it's the stuff that we add that makes it worse so i've actually become a fan melissa of using my coffee as a vehicle to enhance my health so here's how i do this i add prebiotics to my coffee every day so i start my morning off with two glasses of water and then i go for my coffee so hydrate first then go for the you know hydration before caffeination but my coffee i will put in either acacia powder uh partially hydrolyzed gorgon or wheat dextrin i'll put one of those into my coffee and then i'll also add spices so i like cinnamon i like pumpkin spice which includes like nutmeg and cinnamon all right um and if i so again i'm a doctor i take call sometimes i get a call at three in the morning and it ruins like totally disrupts my night of sleep because my heart starts racing and it's hard to go back to bed so when that happens here's what i put into my coffee i put in some maca powder and some ashwagandha the makka gives me a boost of energy the ashwagandha is um something that makes me feel very balanced so normally on a day like that i will be exhausted and kind of edgy and you know um maybe even a little snarky and by getting the ashwagandha it helps me mellow out and just kind of helps me to get through my day so that hopefully the next night i get a really good night's rest yeah i love it yeah so good so good so so good um okay i have three rapid fire questions for you now are you ready let's do it okay i think i know the answer to this first one but what is one thing that we can do today for our health okay uh diversity of plants diversity of plants is the number one thing that you can do for your health but you know what let me take it in a different direction there are ways that you can help to heal your gut without even lifting a fork and you and i have talked about some of these sleep intermittent fasting exercise human connection and spending time outdoors yeah so some people call it a forest bath yes spend some time outdoors i love it i love it all right next one what is one thing that we can do for our wealth so more abundance in all areas of our life um all right i believe that we because we love things that we can objectively measure that are indisputable we fixate on things that we can objectively measure like money and there are a lot of rich people that are miserable and we don't we don't adequately value the subjective things that other people may not be able to measure in you but you know the truth and that is happiness and love and i think that those are both tied to human connection we are social creatures we are meant to be connected to each other um ideally in person look melissa i wish that we could be like in australia together right now um it is impossible with the global pandemic but if we could we'd be looking eye to eye we'd be talking to each other and that's uh that's a totally different conversation than connecting through the computer as much fun as it is definitely definitely nothing quite replaces in-person connection nothing no matter zoom calls face time you know what we're doing right now nothing really can ever replace that in person connection and i often say this my parents i have been trying to get them on the health bag bandwagon for 10 years and they're not really interested to be honest they're not really interested they kind of make a few little subtle changes i i got them off commercial dairy which was a huge step and you know they make little little changes here and there but they are so happy and they have so many friends and my husband says to me look your parents are going to be sweet because they have that connection they that is going to work that is going to be what helps them thrive through their whole life my parents are the type of parents the type of people that have 50 best friends you know and and last year at my mum's 60th birthday uh she had 60 people at her birthday and it was a sit-down dinner and every i went and spoke to every person a lot of them were there in couples and i went and spoke to almost every single person there and almost every single person said to me your mum and dad are my best friends you're my and i was like wow like they really do have that in spades and i just want to reiterate how important human connection relationships that intimacy in physical like in the flesh is for our health and happiness 110 and you know the the irony of the whole thing is that we increasingly are connecting through phones and computers and stuff like that and look like you and i were as guilty as anyone i mean between the two of us we have almost 300 000 followers but the reality is that social media is very anti-social and i know that you would say this about your relationship with your husbands because i will say this i i love my followers i am so grateful for my tribe i wish that i could meet every single one of them in person but i will take my core tribe my family i will take my wife and my children and that is all i need that is all i need to be happy but at the end of the day again it's you know there's nothing more sad to me than when i see a family out at dinner at a restaurant and all four people both parents and two kids are sitting there on the on their phone and like looking at their phone like guys put the phone down and let's get back to the way that our grandparents did it let's like have a real dinner let's talk to each other yeah it's so important whenever we have dinner parties i confiscate the phones i'm like okay everyone put your phone away and i put them they're not on the table they are away out of sight and everyone's like oh amazing you know no one objects to it and you end up sitting there for three or four hours and you're like where did that time go that is the best when when three hours flies by over a dinner party the best yep you can throw throw a little wine in there and i'm a very happy man uh okay i've got one more of the rapid fire which this didn't really turn out to be rapid fire but that's okay that's my fault it's my fault it's all good one thing i feel like we've kind of touched on it but what is one thing that we can do for more love in our life connection mic drop i'm out yes yes i had to be i had to be rapid fire on that okay fine i'll elaborate i'll elaborate i think it's just i think i think it really i think it really boils down to recognizing that and this is just unpacking what we've already said which is true wealth comes is completely derived by human connection social connection we are meant to be social creatures and we get our happiness by feeling like we are a part of this community and so let's make sure during this global pandemic when we're all under stress that we double down on on that that we make sure that we're making maintaining those connections with real people yeah absolutely is there anything else that you want to share any last parting words of wisdom or anything that we didn't get to talk about that you wanted to mention honestly i had so many more questions that i wanted to talk to you about but i feel like we need five hours so is there anything else that you want to share i want i want simon to create a health conference in australia like after the pandemic is over and i fly in and we all hang out and we could do a live podcast recording and it would be so much fun but anyway the one thing that i was going to share is that i so i know you have a completely international audience my wife is a fan of yours but i also know there's a lot of aussies um who follow you and i just want to say that i love you guys i love you guys i think you guys are so great and you're so fun i get along with you guys so well obviously you and i get along i get along obviously incredibly well with simon like he's literally like my brother and then i have a new friend named dan churchill yes i know dan very well oh my gosh i'm obsessed with that guy and i i'm almost tempted to fly to new york just to see him because we've we've hit it off so well so i just love you all i love i love the people of australia you guys are wonderful and um i appreciate the support that you guys give me and the other thing that i was going to say real quick is that um so i am extremely excited about my book it's doing incredibly well new york times usa today publishers by the end of the month yeah um i will sell more than 50 000 copies before four months which is pretty darn i've got goosebumps and yeah it's it's wonderful and you know the most important thing is that i'm getting these messages from people from literally around the world you know some that like barely can speak english that are telling me how i've changed their life and that blows me away because as a doctor that's a dream come true and what's really exciting is that i have i i have always felt like the book was a great starting point but it's not the complete point and there's i've always wanted to have a complete conversation like i wish that i could sit down with my own patients and just talk for hours on end and teach them everything that i think that they need to know and so for the last year i've been working on building a course and um i'm super excited i know i don't know exactly what day this podcast is going to launch but september 7th i am launching an online course that's going to be a seven week course taught by me i will be there live weekly doing question and answer sessions videos a workbook a private community of like-minded people who are all working towards the same goal which is healing your gut reversing dysbiosis and i actually it's kind of cool i've been working on this course for a year we beta tested it twice and both times people had amazing results so i um i'm just super excited about some of the stuff that's happening right now and i enjoy sharing it with the people that uh follow me and our big fans from literally the other side of the world that is the one beautiful thing about this oh yeah it's amazing and we'll link to your course in the show notes as well for anyone who wants to go and check that out that sounds amazing and we'll link to your instagram and website everything your book and i just want to thank you so much for not only all the work that you do in the world the books everything that you do this course everything but for everything that you've shared today you have given so graciously so much of your time you have shared so much wisdom and knowledge you can really feel how much you love what you do and that is just so beautiful and i'm a big believer in service and you are serving so many people in your clinic and then all over the world with your books and program but how can we serve you how can we give back to you today myself and the listeners oh my gosh this is i've never i've i'm like first of all i'm watching um second of all i don't even know what to say you you guys when i say you guys i mean like this entire community that is engaging with me both online and through the book and everything that's happening i mean i can't tell you guys how much it means to me when people reach out with messages about how they value this book or when you're when people say something like what you just said melissa or when people reach out to me and say to me you know you changed my life you changed my health i you know i i lost 100 pounds or this happened you know i reversed my arthritis or i reversed my eczema i mean it it's a dream come true and um it is unbelievable and i just you guys don't owe me anything i am so i'm the one who's grateful oh well i'll link to everything and i want to encourage everybody to go and get your book and read it and then share with dr b and i what you got out of it and what you get out of this episode i absolutely love it there's the book here we go guys i love the cover by the way it's beautiful and come tag us both on instagram tell us what you got from this episode i would love to hear what you took away from this episode but dr b thank you so much for being here for all of your wisdom for sharing everything you're a legend and i cannot wait to have a four-hour dinner with you and simon one day i love it i'm so psyched up i can't wait for that day to happen i'm like i'm i'm so excited for that day so thank you melissa thank you so much for having me you're welcome you

Channel: Melissa Ambrosini

Views: 94,310

Keywords: how to heal your gut, importance of fiber, how to heal your gut with plants, heal your gut with plants, transform your health, Will Bulsiewicz, digestive symptoms, damaged gut, embracing the importance of fiber, heal your gut, heal your gut naturally, ways to improve gut health, heal the gut, gut healing diet plan, foods that heal the gut, how to heal your gut lining, how to improve gut health naturally, melissa ambrosini, health wealth love, health wealth love tv

Id: fi9wbuOAnqo

Length: 87min 31sec (5251 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020