Optimize Your Microbiome: Dr. Will Bulsiewicz | Rich Roll Podcast

hey everybody welcome to the podcast my guest today is dr will bolsoewitz dr b is a board-certified and award-winning gastroenterologist he's an author and an authority on the cutting edge of microbiome science he's got a new book out it's called fiber fueled it's an instant new york times bestseller and really a game-changing must-read primer on everything you ever wanted to know about gut health today he joins me for what i think you will agree is an incredible conversation about of course the microbiome why it's so important it's relationship to everything from your immune system to your hormonal health and even your emotional well-being he's quite the compelling authority and i think you're going to find this conversation incredibly informative real quick if you enjoy this video and my channel in general be sure to hit the subscribe button and with that i give you dr will bolsowitz [Music] you look great the only thing that would be better is if we were in the same room but that's not possible i was hoping i was holding out hope that we would make this happen in person but i couldn't wait any longer so nice to nice to see you through the computer screen man it's great to see you too i wish i wish we were together in person i look forward to someday you know hanging out we'll do it we'll do it as soon you know as soon as this lifts we'll get you out into the studio and and we'll go for round two because there's no way that we can explore everything that i want to talk to you about today we're only going to scratch the surface but uh this is long overdue so super excited i'm excited to see where you're gonna take this i i have great confidence in you as an interviewer well the first thing i want to say is that uh i spent the month of uh december in australia and i spent quite a bit of time with our mutual friend simon hill and every time i got together with him he's like you got to meet dr b you got you got to be he's the best and i know that you've been on his podcast i think five times at this point yeah so i went back and listened to all of those episodes and wow there's a lot of there's so much good information there so like i said we're only going to scratch the surface today and if people are left wanting more which i know they will be they can go and and and check out simon's excellent podcast plant proof which is really that was that was kind of a launch point for you initially correct yeah i had uh i had 10 000 followers going into that podcast and doubled that in a month and uh it went viral i mean that's still the most downloaded episode that he's ever had i mean it's over 250 000 downloads for him yeah that's great um so many things to talk about i think an interesting launch point uh launching off point for this would be to um kind of contextualize your work with what's going on currently in this pandemic era that we're all navigating through and what i've been thinking about lately and i'm interested in your thoughts on is how we square this you know need to socially distance and sanitize our environments and kind of cloister ourselves from other human beings and restrict our exposure to a variety of environments with this paramount need to increase our biodiversity not just with the foods that we're eating but with the environments that we visit and the people that we interact with like these two things are at odds this importance of biodiversity maximizing that with this need to kind of over cleanse everything at the moment yeah i i feel like gut health has never been as important as it is right now there is a direct connection between your gut microbiome and the strength of your immune system and for that reason it becomes imperative that we take care and nurture a healthy gut microbiome and you know the the the thing that sort of stands out to me rich is yes like excessive cleanliness um sterilizing our environment not being allowed to socialize and connect with other humans like all those things are there but to me the most powerful influence is the stress the stress the stress is um something that is affecting all of us i mean it to you know we are living through a moment of collective stress we're all forced to take this on there's no avoiding it and that actually has an impact on our gut microbiome and it drives us to this place where we all sort of have different ways that we cope and deal with that stress and for many it's to turn to unhealthy habits and that includes unhealthy food and in many cases alcohol and we're compounding that stress and we're actually compounding the harm that it does to our gut microbiome you know many people when we think about gut health we talk about food and like my book discusses food in great detail the the part of the book that i really wanted to elaborate on and there just weren't enough pages for me to go there is the effect of trauma the most challenging patients that i see as a gastroenterologist are the people who have been vic victims of physical emotional sexual psychological trauma and it changes them and they don't realize the way that it affects their gut and typically when they get to me i'm the fifth or sixth doctor gastroenterologist that they've been to they're looking for solutions related to their gut microbiome or to their or to their digestive issues and what i discover after getting to know them and building that trust and that relationship is that the the solution the path is actually not through food more so it's actually about healing that trauma that is eating at them on a subconscious level and all of us are dealing with trauma right now and i feel like collectively this is affecting our gut microbiome and it's at the worst possible time there's a direct line between gut health and our immune system 70 of our immune system lives in our gut and when we have that you know that emotional trauma that's affecting our gut and then we also compound that by consuming alcohol or by eating junk food we're putting ourselves into a vulnerable place where if we do if we do get the virus we don't have our defense system built up to protect us and that's the scary thing because increasingly we're seeing studies rich that are making connections between the gut microbiome and severe manifestations of covid19 where you know the doctors are all asking the question who are these people they get kova 19. and you know one of the first things that we discovered is it's the people who are that have diabetes and high blood pressure and coronary artery disease and are overweight and then when you think about all of those things that i just mentioned diabetes heart disease high blood pressure being overweight they're all connected back to the microbiome yeah this idea that 70 of your immune system resides in the gut is profound and i want to dive into that a little bit more deeply but let's talk for a couple minutes about the importance of buttressing and maximizing optimizing our immune systems right now i mean there's a lot of talk about social distancing and wearing masks and all the precautions that we're all you know embracing and undertaking to protect ourselves but i think in my opinion not enough communication and conversation around how to buttress our immune system so that if and when we come in contact with the virus we're in the best possible sort of situation in order to combat it and overcome it yeah i totally agree i i feel like we have fixated on ways to reduce transmission of the virus which is a good thing you know you can you can affect um the how contagious this virus is and change the are not with our with these sort of social you know physical distancing measures or wearing face shields things of that variety but that doesn't that doesn't help the person who contracts the virus and a huge percentage of us ultimately will mm-hmm and so i i agree with you i think that we need to to speak more broadly about this and to me the the key in this conversation is this connection between the gut microbiome and the immune system you can't separate them they're completely intertwined i mean i want people to understand that if we if you were to zoom in on a microscopic level what you would see is this single layer of cells that we call the epithelial layer that's so thin that the naked eye can't pick it up and this single layer of cells separates on one side 38 trillion microbes your gut your gut microbiome and on the other side 70 percent of the immune system and they're they're communicating with each other they're in constant conversation and so as a result when things affect the gut microbiome they affect the immune system and vice versa you know when i was when i was researching my book i wanted to compile a list of the immune mediated disease states that are associated with alteration or damage to the gut microbiome so basically we're talking about allergic issues we're talking about autoimmune issues we're talking about inflammatory bowel disease and as i started to look for studies making this connection i didn't find a study where the answer was no in terms of the connection between the immune system and the gut it either had not been studied or the answer was yes every single time that when you have these immune mediated disease states allergic autoimmune type diseases when they look at the gut microbiome they always find that there's damage to the gut microbiome in the setting of these conditions and so i feel like this is really quite critically important and i'm happy by the way to elaborate more on some of the science that makes these connections and shows us how important it is to optimize the immune system as opposed to just have a bigger stronger immune system so when you say that 70 of our immune system resides in the gut what exactly does that mean i'm trying to imagine you know a locus of this or what it looks like like what do you mean specifically when you say that well the what we're referring to are the g-a-l-t the galt which are the um gut associated lymphoid tissues and this is this comprises 70 of our immune system and you know the thing that's interesting is this the the gut our intestines you know our colon which we refer to as our bowels i mean it's literally the deepest part of the human body is actually the place where we interact with the outside world the most our skin is effectively a barrier it's a wall to keep things out our gut is where we are actually interacting with the things that we choose to put in our mouth and swallow down you know basically indicating that we trusted enough to to include it and our gut is where you know our body is basically interacting with it it's our place of most vulnerability and as a result it's no it's really no surprise that this is where the immune system you know sets up shop and performs the task of helping us to identify like what is good what is bad what can we leave alone what should we be attacking you know things of that variety and so you know the immune system isn't just um carelessly floating around the body you know it's it's intentional it's it's intense it has a purpose right this is the first line of defense the the place where the outside world interacts with the you know with your body it's outward facing which is you know sort of people don't really understand that or realize that but is actually outside of ourselves and this is the place where the body decides what comes in and what doesn't yeah this is this is the gatekeeper and the immune system is a critical part of that of that process in terms of protecting us from potential threats and at the same time you know basically standing down and allowing the stuff that's good for us to flow right through and come on in so essentially to to ignore gut health or to not have a optimally functioning microbiome is to put yourself at peril in terms of your immune response to covet or anything i i feel like this connection is critically important in the 21st century period i mean look at the explosion of of immune mediated disease states you know look at celiac disease up 500 percent in the last 50 years look at inflammatory bowel disease that's absolutely exploding and you know there's there's conditions rich that when i was a kid literally didn't exist that i'm diagnosing sometimes twice in the same day that are immune mediated you know things like eosinophilic esophagitis and so independent of kovid i feel like recognizing this connection is really critically important because the problem is once you trip that wire once you cross that line you may find yourself with one of these conditions that i don't i don't believe that there's necessarily a cure i think you can put yourself into remission but once you have one of these conditions i think that you have it and it's there well let's take a step back and define our terms a little bit i mean the microbiome is not a new subject matter for this podcast but i think it would be helpful to kind of talk a little bit about what we're talking about and also to get a little bit of your your background and what got you interested in this field so um the microbiome just to define some of these terms you know the microbiome is an expression that we use to refer to the the collective uh dna that is provided by these microbes that are a part of us you know we're we're these big strong humans and um we think of ourselves as these autonomous creatures that are the masters of our domain when in fact we are covered from the top of our head to the tip of our toes with these invisible microbes you know i i hold up my thumb i mean to the listeners at home you can literally look at your thumb right now and there are as many microbes there as there are people in the uk you know so it's absurd you know how many of them there are and i think you said in the book 39 trillion micro organisms yeah 39 trillion throughout the entire body they're about 38 trillion of which are actually in your gut that's where they're focused and this number is so hard to understand or fathom but you know to put into perspective you take our galaxy the milky way and take literally every single star that exists in our galaxy and you would need a hundred of our 100 milky ways 100 of our galaxy to equal the number of microbes that are a part of you right now like not just you rich role but like the listeners at home yeah yeah you can't even wrap your head around that so it's impossible it's it's completely absurd and you know they're not they're not just there they're not innocent bystanders they're not along for the ride they're not for the most part blood sucking leeches that just take from us we have had a relationship with these microbes going back all the way to the beginning there never was a sterile human you know the very first human going back millions of years they had a microbiome and we rose and fell together co-evolution you know if we survived they survived and so we actually through the years grew to trust them with certain things within our body and as a result we we basically asked them like hey we need you to take care of digestion for us now we're incapable of keeping up with the different varieties of plants that exist across our entire planet we need someone who can adapt quickly more quickly than a human can so that's what they do and you know we have them connected to our immune system to our metabolism i'm sure we'll be expanding on some of these ideas to our hormones to to our mood our brain you know the way it functions and even to our genetic expression so they're really critically important to human health some of the terms you know the original question was let's define the vocabulary so the microbiome is the collective pool you know really we're referring to the genetic profile and the microbiota is the term that we use for the actual microbes and i probably during this podcast i'm going to make the mistake of using these terms interchangeably and i apologize for that how dare you um yeah it's quite common um so the microbiota are the microbes and um so those are those are sort of the key terms and you know what are we talking about here we're talking about mostly bacteria um you know good mostly good guys to be honest with you some bad guys e coli salmonella shigella we've all heard of the scary ones but actually most of them are good and there to help us um we also have yeast or fungi and they're in competition with the mic with the bacteria they're quite similar in terms of what they like to eat their energy source the archaea are my personal favorite archaea are these um single cellular organisms they're not bacteria they're not fungi and they have been on the planet for four billion years which is fascinating to consider because we've only had oxygen for 2.5 billion years and they need to fire their publicist and hire a new one because it wasn't until your work that i even had heard that term before we've all heard of viruses and fungi and bacteria single-celled organisms etc but i had never heard this word before so elaborate a little bit more on on what this is and why why is this your favorite well it's my favorite because they're so they're so hardy they're so hearty and resilient you know i mean they existed for 1.5 billion years on like a fire scorched earth that didn't have oxygen and you'll find them at the bottom of the ocean inside of a rift vent like miles deep you'll find them inside of a volcano and then you'll find them inside your colon i mean i personally think between those three choices i guess i would choose the colon if i had to of those three residences but you know they are um they are a part of the balance as much as the bacteria and the fungi are and they actually are very deeply involved in the production of methane gas we call them methanogens so now some people you know who suffer from gas and bloating will hear this and think oh gosh that means i need to get rid of them but actually they're a part of the healthy balance in terms of processing our food and don't necessarily just unilaterally produce gas they also protect us from heart disease there are studies that suggest that if we destroy them that their destruction would actually put us at even greater risk for for coronary artery disease the number one killer so um they are um they are a critical piece of the harmony and balance that exists within this ecosystem that is the gut the gut microbiota and you know just to sort of round things out rich there's also viruses viruses are not alive but they're actually part of the harmony imbalance you know right now the word virus is sort of almost triggering in a way but there are viruses that don't mean us harm and they help us to sort of keep things balanced within the micro the microbiome and that's a healthy part of that and and then finally some of us may have parasites or protozoa which exist and they in some cases can be part of the healthy balance too so you know the point is that there is this complex diversity of potentially a thousand or more species they live in harmony and balance some of them are good guys some of them are bad guys um what we want is we want the good guys to outweigh the bad guys and you know when they're there they all exist with a purpose in the same way that you would find in in any other ecosystem throughout the world go to the amazon rainforest there's things in the amazon rainforest that i don't particularly like but if we destroy them to the point that they're extinct we would leave a hole in the ecosystem yeah what's interesting is how um everything you know in the macro is is mirrored in the micro we can look at the microbiome and the principles that apply in terms of trying to create a robust ecosystem apply equally to the amazonian rainforest and it's interesting to understand that there there's a kind of a beautiful orchestrated harmony in all of that that helps you to really get that you know we're not separated from nature we're very much you know a part of it and can't be extricated from it in any way and i think you know what's interesting about the work that you do i mean just contextualizing it there's been an explosion of interest in the microbiome and the number of studies that are coming out right now i mean i i think you quoted like you know there's like thousands of them that are coming out all the time but this is a relatively new field and you're dealing with so many variables and trying to wrap your head around the mechanisms that are at play here and how they apply to health and and disease so you know what got you interested in this and you know what does it look like for you in terms of staying on top of what is current versus because it seems like our knowledge base is progressing so rapidly here yeah this this is a um this it is incredibly difficult to study the specifics of the microbiome because it could change in 24 hours and the tests that we have currently are not perfect but you know to answer your question for me i didn't go into medicine thinking that i would be a poop doctor i actually thought i was gonna be a pediatrician to be honest with you like i love kids um to me the idea of like helping teenage kids to orient their life properly was really exciting so i actually thought i was going to be an adolescent psychiatrist and i got into medical school i went to georgetown and i was in my third year which is when you rotate through the hospital and i did my pediatrics rotation and it just unfortunately you know i mean i love pediatricians and god bless them but it just wasn't for me you know the parents frankly were driving me insane because they either were down your throat or they just didn't care about their kid which was incredibly sad and um i just couldn't deal with like the the polar nature of that so i um what i loved about gastroenterology is that i i am an internist first and i get to use my mind to break down and dissect complex problems and i also get to use my hands on a routine basis about 50 of my time is done doing endoscopy and so so that's what attracted me and the gut microbiome really wasn't on the radar in 2006 when i graduated medical school i went to northwestern and things were going really well for me professionally i won the highest award in my residency program i i was the chief medical resident and yet i was miserable you know i was 30 years old i was 50 pounds overweight relative to what i weighed in high school which was hard to swallow because i think of myself as an athlete i was a great athlete in high school i had high blood pressure i had a ton of anxiety i was basically fueled by either like six coffees a day or or red bull uh-huh um i felt like i was 60 and i had low self-esteem which is really weird to say because to outsiders they would see what was happening in my life professionally they would think gosh like everything was going well for you and i needed something to change i was desperate to find a solution and the problem is that my medical training as wonderful as it was you know as as skilled as i became at acute care of the complex ill person who would roll into the icu or the hospital i didn't really have a solution for my problem overweight having low energy low self-esteem and um i tried to outwork it so you know typical guy like a good type a yeah i you know i was like the typical guy i was like i can eat whatever i want if i just work hard enough right and so i was hitting the gym six days a week um not exaggerating 30 to 45 minutes every time of heavy weights and then jump on the treadmill for five to 10k or jump in the pool for 100 laps and i could run a good 5 to 10k and i was getting stronger but i couldn't lose the gut and so anyway i ended up meeting my the person who's now my wife and we would go on a date and she would you know like i would be sitting there ordering rib eyes and pork chops and stuff and we'd go on a date and she would ask the waiter to do something that wasn't even on the menu just like make me a plant plate have to have the chef put a bunch of plants on a plate for me and i was just like what the heck is going on over there you know i've never been around someone like this before and um but what i saw was that she could eat as much as she wanted without restriction she was cleaning her plate she was loving her food she was satisfied very happy with the food and she had no weight issue at all complete control she looked amazing and so for me it just opened up my mind like maybe there's something to that maybe this diet that i was raised on and was okay when i was a teenager maybe this is the problem so did that uh inspire you to start looking into diet and nutrition a little bit more deeply i mean where did where where did you turn i initially i i feel like for me i remember like literally the day that this happened where i usually would go to i mean i would literally a couple times a week go to hardee's i was in north carolina now and i would go to hardee's trust me i figured out whatever fast food joints were nearby wherever i lived that's the one thing i was adaptable i know it well and uh hardy's had this deal it was five bucks and it's like it's i mean it's disgusting to imagine that you could get like 2 500 calories for five dollars like double cheeseburger chili cheese dog an apple pie and a soda and fries for five bucks so um one day i was like you know what i'm just gonna go home and make a smoothie and see what happens and i did that just bananas greens berries um i made it like it was like 35 ounces and i felt amazing i mean it like energized me i felt so light i didn't have the hangover where i have to lay on the couch for a couple hours i went to the gym an hour later smashed an awesome workout and that really motivated me and so i started down this path of starting to make healthy substitutions you know nutrition is nutrition is really just about leveling up it's just about healthy substitutions and so i went down this path and i and then like literally the fat started to melt off my body and these issues the anxiety started to lift i started to feel so much better my workouts were getting better my recovery was better i wasn't as sore and so for me i'm a man of science i you know i i have such great respect for the scientific process and it wasn't enough to like have this experience i needed to see that there were actually studies to back it up so that sent me in this direction where i started to look into it and i opened up pubmed i thought there'd be like five or ten studies and i could not believe that there were literally thousands that i never heard about mm-hmm it just wasn't it wasn't part of your medical school curriculum at all we're so busy learning about thousands of medications and their side effects we're so busy learning about these rare disorders that we'll never diagnose in our entire career that we lose sight of the practical information that the routine person needs coming through the door and so yeah nutritional education is completely devoid in our traditional you know medical education and it just i just didn't have it so when i opened up and saw these studies i was shocked and very quickly i found the connection between nutrition and the gut microbiome which was starting to really take off and it was really affecting my field as a gastroenterologist and that finding you know i just started devouring these studies and you know bringing them into the clinic because i'm taking care of these people with irritable bowel crohn's disease ulcerative colitis and they you know they're real people and they want to know like doc i can't eat without pain what am i supposed to eat i mean it's a basic question and most gi doctors don't have great answers to that basic question and i i needed to find something so i spent you know basically nights and weekends studying and learning um educating myself and implementing this in my practice and was shocked by the results i mean amazing transformations in my patients and it got to the point rich where you know after years of seeing these people who like for me what i discovered is that this is the root of the issue and if we don't affect if we don't address the root of the issue what are we doing just covering it up so taking on the the the root cause of these digestive issues damage to the gut microbiome allowed me to really alter the health of my patients and get them to a much better place and so it got to the point where i was like in 2016 i just felt compelled to share the story and i started my instagram account with zero expectations at all you know i'm gonna have to tell you like when my wife and i were dating it means my wife and i have been talking about how surreal it is for me to be on your show no obviously because you're the dude come on i'm serious man back in 2014 you know when my wife and i were dating we used to do early when we were dating we would call it the best weekends ever and we would be like blasting all over the southeast having fun you know going to asheville or you know going to the beach in charleston or whatever and we would be in the car together on the best weekends ever and we'd be listening to rich world podcasts and so it's really cool now here we are six years later and like i started this instagram in 2016 with zero expectations if i had 500 followers i would have been thrilled yeah but now you're a new york times best-selling author that even that is really weird the book it debuted at like number six right the book debuted number six launching a book in the pandemic in the pandemic too not an easy thing so i think it just listen the book is amazing um we're going to get into the book in a little bit but um the book basically provides you with everything you need to know to begin this journey for yourself and it's written in a way that is digestible for anybody you don't have to be a scientist to understand like you you communicate in a very um in a very practical way but i think it's also an important book for practitioners as well and i'm sure you had that in mind when you were writing it and i think it it really is important because as we speak about preventative medicine it's all about getting to the root cause of what is creating all of these chronic illnesses i mean when we talk about chronic lifestyle disease people are thinking about heart disease cancer diabetes etc but you know just to the side of that we also have all of these autoimmune disorders and all of these food allergies and basically all of this can be tracked back to the health of our microbiome and right now that microbiome is under attack constantly from environmental toxins from processed foods from antibiotics all of these things that we inundate ourselves with that erode our ability to maintain health and effectively combat disease and so to just sort of diagnose and prescribe with the latest medication is to remain blind to this whole world that you're opening us up to about how to um prevent us from getting into this situation to begin with and it begins you know when you're a baby and you know having a vaginal birth and making sure that you're uh you know you're you're adequately um breastfed and all of these things that contribute to creating this robust ecosystem that will ultimately thrive and maintain your health right i i agree with you 100 and you know it's it's fascinating to think about that connection and how it starts you know between us and these microbes early in life because when a child is born this is the closest thing i mean they're not sterile but this is the closest they will ever get to being sterile and they are wide open recruiting new members to their microbiome come on in i want you to be a part of it and you know there's things that happen during this period of time from that point up to age two to three where a child has a fully formed adult size gut microbiome like my son is three and his microbiome is as big as dads and this is a really critical period of time because this is also when the immune system is developing and learning what is good and what is bad and when we disrupt the gut microbiome and its normal development we also potentially disrupt our immune system and we see this you know it's as you were alluding to rich when you pass through the birth canal that is mom basically donating her gut microbiome to this newborn child now it's quite fascinating to think about that at 36 weeks of pregnancy late in pregnancy see mom mom's vagina has a microbiome and it's very different than the gut microbiome but at 36 weeks of pregnancy the vaginal microbiome starts to change to more closely resemble mom's gut microbiome so that the child passes through the birth canal and receives that initial gift and then that child is born and the perfect food is potentially administered and by the way let me say this that i know we have a lot of parents who may hear this and get concerns um that their child was born by c-section both of my kids were born by c-section you are you can have a 100 perfectly healthy child that was born by c-section or that was bottle fed so so don't you know be upset if you when you hear this but you know breast milk human breast milk to me is like literally the perfect food it has everything that we need to nourish a newborn child and what's fascinating to me is that the human breast milk contains these things called human milk oligosaccharides hmos and these hmos literally have zero nutritional value to the child not they do they do nothing for the child because what hmos are human milk oligosaccharides is they are food for the developing gut microbiome they are prebiotics and they actually help the right bacteria specifically bifidobacteria to grow and this also helps with development of the new immune system so when you disrupt this normal process birth by birth by vaginal delivery breast fed frankly as long as possible when you disrupt this through cesarean section or through bottle feeding or through antibiotics early in life you affect the developing microbiome you also potentially develop the effect the developing immune system and this is the reason why we see these children be more likely not that they're all going to but more likely to develop immune mediated diseases like type 1 diabetes or like celiac disease or even metabolic diseases like childhood obesity you know this is the reason why this occurs is that this disruption of this normal development process can have downstream effects that can carry forward through childhood and even potentially into adulthood in terms of of the protocols that we should all be undertaking to you know buttress our microbiome you're not necessarily advising a very a a specific type of diet other than to say plant diversity is king like this is this is the vector of all vectors for you right so it's not about oh it's it's vegan or i mean it's a predominantly plant-based or plant-based diet but the diversity of plants is really what's important in terms of making sure that you're doing everything you can in the interest of your microbiome well i think the critical piece to me so you know the book is called fiber fueled and that's that's because i feel like fiber has been this um ignored superfood well it also needs a new publicist it desperately you are you are that publicist you are yes you're hired i'm the guy so yeah no i'm here to i'm here to fight on behalf of fiber and get it back on the map and part of the conversation because you know we've been ignoring it and part of it is that we've been thinking about it as this orange drink that grandma stirs up so that she can poop when in fact um it's incredible the connection between fiber and our gut microbiome you know fiber doesn't just go in the mouth and shoot out the other end soluble fiber is a specific sort of general category which feeds the microbiome this is their preferred food and when we when we give this to them they consume it they grow stronger our microbes actually multiply grow stronger and then they turn around and they reward us and the way that they reward us is by releasing short chain fatty acids and these short chain fatty acids have healing effects throughout the entire body so you know we've been emphasizing a little bit the immune system short chain fatty acids optimize our immune system there are studies that we could talk about if you want to connecting short chain fatty acids from in terms of protection from respiratory viruses they can have their effect in the lungs on the immune system short-term fatty acids reverse leaky gut you know which is i mean dysbiosis that is the root cause of these digestive issues that i take care of on a daily basis they directly prevent colon cancer they lower our cholesterol they prevent and reverse insulin resistance which is type 2 diabetes they travel throughout the entire body having their healing effects we think that they can actually reverse coronary artery disease we think that they can actually repair the blood-brain barrier for people that have brain fog they actually travel into the brain through the blood-brain barrier and they have their effects they affect our mood our memory they affect um i mean believe it or not we have studies that suggest that they prevent alzheimer's disease these are incredibly powerful and the way that you get them is through the consumption of fiber in your diet and here's the problem 97 of americans are not getting an adequate amount of fiber in their diet and that's creating issues for us everybody's worried about their protein intake but they don't give a second thought to their fiber intake 97 of people are fiber deficient i mean that's a shocking statistic you know and that's well that's with the bose standards i mean the expectation or the standard that we're holding is 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men and the the average american is somewhere in the 15 to 18 gram range and you know you see the problem exists rich when we try to do academic studies looking at fiber and the way that we'll set the study up is we'll say okay let's take the high fiber consumers in the united states and compare them to the low fiber consumers and next time you guys if you ever read any of these studies i'm a nerd so i read these studies if you ever read one of these studies take a look at the high fiber consumers even the high fiber consumers are deficient in fiber wow this tribe that lives in tanzania which is they're fascinating because they are modern hunters and gatherers they don't farm they don't have organized agriculture they live off the land they they eat whatever is available yes they eat some meat and so but they they eat mostly plants and these huds are consuming 100 grams of fiber per day and critical piece like rich let me ask you a question i'm just curious so you i know you eat a very healthy diet if you had to estimate in a given week how many plants do you think you have in your diet give me a general idea yeah i mean you know it's probably i mean it's going to be higher than most but it can't be more than i mean 30 40. okay and i would challenge the people listening at home right now like if you have to hit the pause button take a minute and think about how many plants you actually have in your in your diet okay so most americans are definitely less than 30. the majority are around 15 to 20. and the hudza are consuming 600 varieties of plants in a given year right like 600 600 because they live off the land there are literally 300 000 edible plants on the planet the problem is that we've narrowed it down to the point where 75 of our diet is from three of them you know and we're ignoring this diversity you know we put pressure unfortunately on our farmers where the farmer has no choice but to opt for high-yield breeds of crops and so they we are we are narrowing down the bio diversity within our diet through our food systems and so with the hudson do they so i mean i i presume that they have lower incidences of all of these chronic ailments as a result of this biodiverse you know plant-forward diet they have their challenges they don't they don't live in the united states with the healthcare system they don't have access to a guy like me right but when we actually look at their microbiome what we look at is the diversity of species okay so biodiversity is a really important word these days and the biodiversity within your gut microbiome is a measure of health the more species that you have the more that your gut microbiome is resistant to sort of disturbances it has all the different players that are available you know they're not all the same they have different roles so when you have that diversity you have all the pieces that you need no matter what you throw at your gut it's ready to step up and do the job and so we want that biodiversity and when we study the hudson and we compare their biodiversity within their gut microbiome to that of a person that's say in the uk we see that they have 30 percent more diversity than a person in the uk and you know i hate to break it to all the americans who are listening right now but we're even worse they have 40 more biodiversity than we do and the connection that's really important for people understanding frankly if there's only one thing that you take away from this podcast listening to us have this conversation today this is what i want you guys to hear okay the way that it works is this fiber is not just fiber there are millions if not billions of types of fiber in nature it's so incredibly complicated from a chemistry perspective that we're not even capable of creating an estimate to how many types of fiber there are but every single plant has its own unique types of fiber multiple different types within that plant every single plant is going to have prebiotic fiber that feeds the microbiome this is their preferred food these prebiotic fibers and the key is that they are picky eaters they don't they're like us you know you have different food preferences than i do even though i'm sure that many people would label us as having the same diet you eat differently than i do we have our own preferences and they do too they they have specific food preferences in terms of the different types of fiber you know to put in perspective take a black bean you give these microbes a black bean and there are certain specific species that are going to multiply and thrive and they are going to be stronger and be more prepared to help you because you just fed them they are energized but the opposite is true you take that black bean away you say i'm going black bean free those same microbes that were thriving because you were feeding them are starving right and they're not getting what they need and so you know rich this this looking at the hudson and comparing it to americans and seeing 40 percent more biodiversity within their microbiome that's interesting that's okay that's that's cool but to me i wouldn't write a book based upon an idea and that is not enough for me just to say with confidence that the most important thing for our gut microbiome is the diversity of plant species i need something more and where you find it is the american gut project the american gut project is the largest study to date to take our diet and lifestyle and connect it to the biodiversity within our gut microbiome it is actually an international study even though it's called the american gut project they have they have uh people who are participating from over 40 countries from around the around the world and there is no study more positioned to answer this question what is the number one predictor of a healthy gut microbiome and when they analyzed this it was clear-cut the number one predictor of a healthy gut microbiome is the diversity of plants within your diet and so when we set off this question you said well you're not necessarily ascribing to a specific diet well here's why so i'm vegan you're vegan okay but in this study diversity of plants was more powerful than being vegan because if you are vegan and you eat the same 10 or 15 foods every single day you are not feeding your microbiome and there are ulterior there are alternative diets that you could do where if you really focus on diversity of plants within your diet you're going to feed your microbiome and do a better job so to me it's not about the label that we apply it's about understanding the concept which is that it's critically important to our to the health of our gut microbiome that we incorporate as many different varieties as possible and in the american gut project the line that they drew in the sand was 30 different plants per week now that doesn't mean by the way that there's a magic you know difference between 30 and 29 or that 35 isn't better than 30. the point is we want as much diversity as possible and that's the critical piece yeah that's super interesting and also so different from the way that we're kind of wired like as humans we want to know all right tell me what food is the best and i'll eat that or you know just give me the list of the five things that i need and i'll focus on that whereas you're saying look you got to broaden the aperture here and you got to be trying lots of different things and you know explore and it's not about like you need to eat these three things it's about basically um eating as many different things as possible and getting out of your comfort zone a little bit and then i think what you're saying essentially is that the more that you're in the in the practice of doing that it's almost like an insurance policy that you're taking out for your gut health you're seeding your gut with the the biota um that that will then ultimately be able to grow and thrive the more that you're feeding it those types of plants yeah no i totally agree and just to kind of just to kind of pick up where where you left off every single plant has its own unique types of fiber that's what i've been talking about for the last few minutes but there's so much more every single plant has vitamins minerals phytochemicals like i don't know how much your listeners have heard i'm sure they have about phytochemicals these are the unique chemicals that you will find in plant foods exclusive to plant foods that's what phyto means there's at least 8 000 of them very few of them have we actually studied an example of one is resveratrol so you hear about resveratrol you know it's resveratrol is capable of actually changing the microbiome by itself you know david sinclair in lifespan talks about resveratrol and its benefits for healthy aging and this is just one example of one phytochemical that you'll find in these plants and the other thing by the way that's kind of interesting most people don't realize this the plants have a microbiome of their own every single plant so yeah you don't really think about that no you don't really think about that but they're not sterile every single life on this planet either has a microbiome or is a part of the microbiome and depending on how you choose to zoom out you could almost make the argument that us humans are part of a larger microbial in a way right which is planetary health and the way that it all functions but these plants have their own microbiome if you take an apple for example because we have a study that shows this you know the apple has a microbiome that is there from the seat from like literally the seed through the flower and all the way through to the fruit and that microbiome is dynamically evolving and changing and helping this to actually this transformational process to occur and the apple has literally over a thousand species of microbes more than us humans do and potentially a hundred million microbes and so when you eat an apple when you eat an apple you're getting the fiber you're getting the phytochemicals of which there are many you're getting the vitamins and the minerals and you're even getting the microbiome that the apple contains right wow and so each plant has a story like that each plant has something positive that it wants to bring to your health every single one wants to bring something to your health and if we over emphasize the foods we can you know i could eat kale all day and i'll have vitamin k dripping out of my eyeballs okay way more than my body needs but i'll make myself deficient in other things because i'll be over emphasizing certain things and i'll be missing out on the other opportunities i personally would rather take 10 mediocre plants and put that in my diet than one superfood i mean i honestly think that the diversity because you play off of the strengths of all of them and when you have that you get all of the amino acids you get all the different types of fiber to feed your microbiome you get all the different phytochemicals you just can't get it done with one plan there's no perfect plan right um diversification just like we need to do with our with our finances right it's it's like it's like your retirement yeah yeah exactly um shifting gears a little bit here let's talk about the relationship between the microbiome and and inflammation which is sort of you know at the root of so many of these illnesses that we're seeing absolutely so it you know many people don't realize the connection between inflammation and dysbiosis which is the word that we use to to describe damage to the gut microbiome so let me let me zoom out for a moment and do some new definitions okay so you bios eubiosis eubiosis eu refers to balance and harmony within the microbiome this is the you know what we see in the hudson this is a broad diverse microbiome all the different species yes there are good guys and they're bad guys but guess what the good guys outweigh the bad guys so much that the bad guys can't do anything they're they're incapable of really hurting you all right that is ubiosis and when we deviate from that place and we lose that harmony and balance we are moving into something where there's a loss of species potentially gaps or holes in the microbiome that we don't have the species to fill for us because we're missing them and the bad guys become more prominent to the point that they could potentially cause harm when this happens we call this dysbiosis okay it disposes and dysbiosis is more than just a change to the microbes it starts to affect that epithelial layer that we were talking about before when we were describing the immune system and the microbes that single layer of cells and these cells are held together by things that are like spot welds we call them type junctions and if you break down those type junctions they pop open and now you got a hole that allows things to leak into the body that are not supposed to be there the scientists will call it increased intestinal permeability other people will call it leaky gut i get it we're talking about the same thing we're talking about dysbiosis all right and when this occurs what's leaking from the gut into the body is a specific thing called bacterial endotoxin bacterial endotoxin also called lipopolysaccharide actually activates the immune system and this is inflammation in one word bacterial endotoxin is inflammation that is the word and it can be on a number of different levels you could have smoldering low-grade inflammation and that's the type of inflammation that leads us to developing cancer or heart disease or alzheimer's okay that again is driven by bacterial endotoxin and we can also have a surge or a spike of bacterial endotoxin all at once and that is sepsis sepsis is where you have over activation of the immune system where the immune system actually becomes your enemy in the setting of an overwhelming infection and this is particularly relevant when we discuss covet 19 because we all know that the people who are the sickest with covenant 19 what ultimately is threatening their life is respiratory failure they develop something called acute respiratory distress syndrome ards and ards is not the virus ards is the response of the immune system to the virus a overactive immune system over reacts to the virus basically goes nuclear basically starts unloading all its guns at once the point that it basically breaks down the lining of the lungs and both lungs fill up with fluid and that is not you are incapable of sustaining life unless you're on a respirator in that setting and so so sepsis you know where a person is critically ill with an overwhelming infection may get ards they drop their blood pressure their heart rate goes up they're not even conscious you know they're they're totally confused the pale this is actually driven by excessive amounts of bacterial endotoxin excessive inflammation so and it could be that full spectrum wow i mean that's that's amazing to hear that and so in order to avoid that you know what are the what are the what are the things that we can do that you haven't already mentioned to make sure that we have that gut lining intact and we're not you know basically creating that kind of inflammation so you know to me there's my book focuses a lot on diet because diet is ultimately the most powerful driver of the balance within our gut microbes and we've talked already about diversity of plants so we don't need to go there again but you know just keep in mind how important this is where 97 of us are not even getting the minimum daily amount of fiber nor eating a diversity of plants so that's a great opportunity but you don't want to sabotage your own health and so we need to also take a look at what are the things that are holding us back or causing harm to the microbiome and this is where i start thinking about if we're going to talk on the dietary side of things look at the average american's diet 10 plants 60 processed food 30 animal products meat dairy and eggs to go a little bit deeper on those things processed food okay so basically when we refine grains we strip the fiber not a good idea we're throwing out the healthiest part we're keeping the least healthy part when we build these processed foods that are capable of sitting on the store shelf in a box for like literally a year and not changing they are completely lifeless they have no microbiome and we have pumped them up with chemicals the food and drug administration has approved 10 000 additives that are in our food supply right now i'm not trying to be a fear monger like i sincerely don't have any intention of being that but i think that the issue is this when you allow in a very short period of time 10 000 new things into the food supply that weren't a part of our great grandparents life and the level of expectation for study is it does not require human testing that's at least 80 of them and the 20 that do have human testing it's oh um you're still alive after a week right yeah yeah all right right so but but but rich what happens when you eat that food for 30 years or 50 years right and these foods you know people need to understand that there is a there is a um cycle to our food there is a life cycle to our food where nature naturally will take it back i mean look at a piece of meat or look at a vegetable and at some point it's going to decompose and that process of decomposition is stunned by microbes you had your chance now it's past the point of being human food and the earth is taking it back this is going to become soil for us in the future right um particularly the organic matter that you get from the plants this is compost we will create humic substances and so how do we disrupt that process that natural process get rid of the bacteria get rid of the microbes prevent them from being a part of it you know where do you how how is it possible to have cold cuts that sit in the refrigerator for a year unchanged and you take a couple slices off every once in a while you are reta you are keeping away the bacteria that would rot the meat and that's how it stays that way and so what do you think happens when you drop those those food additives and those chemicals that are designed to [ __ ] microbes what do you think happens when you drop it into 38 trillion living inside your colon right it's impossible to believe that that's good for us [Music] and and then you know moving on to so beyond processed foods moving on to animal products you know in the united states we eat 220 pounds of meat per person per year it's the english-speaking countries that are eating the most meat i mean china is up and coming brazil is up and coming but you know we are setting we are setting the highest mark in the united states and australia in the uk and there are people who are telling us that we should double and triple down on this idea and it's unnatural you know um the hudson are not eating 220 pounds of meat they're eating 100 grams of fiber per day because they're not that efficient as hunters right so let's get into that a little bit we have the paleo diet the keto diet now we're seeing the carnivore diet the low carb enthusiasts all of this are very animal product heavy animal product forward and you'll hear from proponents of these dietary protocols that they are reducing their inflammation that they are overcoming their food allergies it's a very restrictive protocol but you know on the kind of front lines of the nutrition wars on twitter and etc there does seem to be you know a war for the hearts and minds of of people as to which way is eating best and it would appear that these diets are are are in many ways winning that war because people like to hear that they can eat these foods that they like so what does the science say about these protocols and what does the impact of these types of diets have on our gut microbiome and i think that's where i would start to be honest with you is to look at the impact that these diets have in our gut microbiome because that's what i'm here to talk about and that's my area of expertise but i also want to share some of the layers of evidence that exists going beyond the gut because to me you can't prove anything with just one study you know as a scientist what i want to know is i want to know the full complete information and then i want to see what the general like where are things pointing for us and i want to see all the layers if all the layers are pointing in one direction then we have we have scientific power and so when it comes to the gut microbiome one of my favorite studies right there with the american gut project is a study from 2014 that frankly for me was a big was a game changer in my quest to change my diet you know up to this point i was just kind of leveling up making some small changes but when i saw this study it really made me say you know i just don't think there's any role for animal products at all when it comes to the gut microbiome so let me tell you about the study it's the authors were lawrence david who's at duke and peter turnbull who's at university of california san francisco it was published in nature the top medical journal in the world and effectively what they did is they took a group of people and you know let me say this like they're not a part this was not done as part of the diet wars all right these are extremely high level microbiome researchers who were trying to prove in humans what we have seen in animals for years but had never to this point proven that this was possible in a human being okay so now we accept some of these things as as true but this was 2014. they took a group of people they put them on five days of a completely plant-based diet and then those same people would cycle over to five days of a completely animal based diet or vice versa some people started on the animal-based diet first but they wanted to see what's the effect on the microbiome so they measured the microbiome every single day and what they saw in both cases was that in less than 24 hours you can actually change your gut microbiome your dietary changes that you've made like what what you had for lunch today is already changing your gut microbiome and the reason why is because it is evolving so quickly in a way that's hard for us to fathom every 20 minutes there is a new generation of microbes in one day in one day you have at least 50 new generations of microbes that have evolved that's like in one day they're doing human evolution that would take us all the way back to the pyramids yeah wow and so they're they're changing dynamically very quickly and um so what they saw was when people were on five days of a completely plant-based diet your gut adapts to what you are eating and when you're on a plant-based diet you generate microbes that are really good at breaking down fiber and as a result you have what are categorically described as anti-inflammatory microbes that are capable of producing these short chain fatty acids that i was heralding earlier in our conversation okay so basically you eat the fiber you get more microbes and they want to reward you with short chain fatty acids so you get more of those the alternative with the animal-based diet to me when i saw this in 2014 i found it disturbing what i was reading in literally five days you are seeing number one the disappearance and reduction of those microbes that are anti-inflammatory you are seeing no surprise the loss of short chain fatty acids if you don't eat fiber which animal products have zero fiber if you don't consume fiber you don't get the benefit of these short chain fatty acids and instead we saw different types of bacteria emerge bacteria that we would describe in science as being biophilic what this means is they like bile bile from your liver bile from your liver comes in response to fat it's meant to help you to digest and absorb fat in your diet the bile actually changes the microbiome when we consume a high animal fat diet this bile starts to change the microbiome and what we see are the emergence of these bacteria that thrive in that environment less of the anti-inflammatory and these ones we describe as inflammatory so for example one specific bacteria that we saw emerging during this five day period is something called bilophylla watsworthia and biophilisworthia is known to produce hydrogen and sulfide which has been strongly connected this particular bacteria to the to the development of inflammatory bowel disease crohn's and ulcerative colitis we also saw more microbes that are really good at taking the bile and transforming it into what we call secondary bile salts so like look we all produce bile it's in the part of who we are but what we don't want is having microbes that are going to take that bile and actually use it against us and turn it into these secondary bile salts which are carcinogens they have been strongly connected to the development of colon cancer the number two cause of cancer death in the united states and it's no surprise that colon cancer you know just like kind of looking at some of the broader evidence colon cancer is connected to red meat consumption into processed meat consumption so we see these changes but you know perhaps the most uh alarming change was in just five days they actually saw antibiotic resistance within the gut microbes in on this animal-based diet you say gosh what's the deal there is that because the the animal products are are antibiotic laden themselves exactly 80 of the antibiotics in the united states are not administered to humans tons and tons and tons of antibiotics are being administered to the livestock as a part of animal agriculture and what this is showing is that it's becoming a breeding ground for antibiotic resistance you know if this cobit 19 thing is scary to you let me tell you what's way scarier than coping 19 a world where antibiotics don't work because that would be taking us back to 1900 before we had penicillin and in 1900 the top five causes of death heart disease wasn't in the top five the top five causes of death were infections and this is why people were living only on average to be about 50 years old yeah that's that's a scary thing but i think we're we're inevitably headed in that direction if we don't course correct with the extent to which people are eating you know animals that are so antibiotic laden it's it seems like a natural byproduct that we would develop resistance to that we're creating a system for creating a system that where it is like the definition of short-term gain and long-term loss because the animals receive the antibiotic not because they're sick they receive it because the studies show that they will gain 15 more weight which by the way scientifically speaking that's because you're destroying their microbiome when you destroy a person's microbiome they gain weight so but you know the point from my perspective is even if you go okay well we're gonna we'll go antibiotic-free then we'll we'll stop this practice of giving eighty percent of our you know eighty percent of our antibiotics to the cattle and will go antibiotic free it does not change rich even if you go grass fed free range it does not change the biology of these high saturated fat the high saturated fat content that you get from the animal products that causes a disturbance and alteration of the gut microbiome which causes dysbiosis where does tmao come into play with that tmao which by the way was not studied in the 2014 study that i mentioned because it wasn't really on our radar at that time tmao just to define for your listeners in case they haven't heard about this tmao is produced by microbes in our gut okay our microbes will produce tma when they come into contact with carnitine carnitine that you find in red meat or also in energy drinks or choline which you will find in high fat dairy eggs and meat and also some plants so when these microbes in our gut come into contact with those things carnitine and choline they can potentially produce tma which gets transformed into tmao by the liver and tmao is i mean honestly very disturbing it has been connected to the development of coronary artery disease or number one killer to stroke a top 10 killer to chronic kidney disease a top 10 killer okay and so tmao what's fascinating about it is that you can actually train your microbiome and make it incapable of producing it but the way that you do that is the elimination of animal products they had a study where they looked at a vegan and this vegan in the name of science agreed to eat steak and when they fed a steak to this vegan there was no tmao they were incapable of producing it when they fed that same steak to someone who is an omnivore they spiked their tmao levels 600 percent now here's the issue your gut in all cases whether it's for better or for worse your gut is adaptable and it will change and so if you take a group of vegans and you start giving them carnitine and choline whether it be in supplement form or they start consuming animal products they'll start producing in about four weeks they'll start producing tmao so the gut will adapt and start to produce it and this is you know when we think about when we think about the long-term risks of a animal product meat-heavy diet the tmao is a biomarker illustrating for us the connection between these foods and some of our top killers heart disease stroke chronic kidney disease and it's no coincidence that you will find these same foods in population-based studies to also be connected to these same outcomes and this to me rich is why so let me let me say this when i hear people give anecdotes that they healed their autoimmune disease on one of these diets i don't doubt you i don't think i don't think you're making this up okay i want to see more studies but here's what i think about that there are 10 000 food additives in our processed foods those processed foods for most americans are more than 50 percent of their caloric intake when you eliminate those processed foods when you eliminate those processed foods you potentially may heal your immune system that that by itself is a step in the right direction but the problem is that are you going to pay the price when you consume one of these diets over 10 20 30 40 years i'm concerned that with the loss of diversity within the diet you are causing harm to your microbiome and that may come very early in the process but in the long run i don't view these diets as promoting longevity or promoting health span you're not going to live longer because you eat a 100 meat diet that's the issue i'm worried about the risks of heart disease stroke chronic kidney disease as you age and it may shorten your life expectancy which by the way is what we see in population-based studies when they study a low-carb diet it's a shortened life expectancy there's a version of that argument that gets thrown at plant-based people that goes along the lines of the reason you feel better on a plant-based diet or a vegan diet is by dint of removing the processed foods and you will see a spike and benefits in the short run but it's ultimately nutrient deficient and to perpetuate this way of eating over time you will see diminishing results and potentially harm yourself in the process how do you respond you know i'm sure you've seen that argument well of course but it's it's an argument that's being made when people are shooting from the hip and not actually looking scientifically at what they're saying because when you when they have studied all of these different diets and all the different varieties that exist out there a a vegan plant-based diet i mean like you know i i want to separate out that you could be vegan and eat a junk food vegan diet and that's not a very healthy diet sure right so but a plant a 100 whole food plant-based diet when they did an analysis of this that was the most nutritionally complete diet and the the the deficiency that exists is really b12 which is so easy to supplement and you would argue that omnivores should be supplementing because when they've studied omnivores about 40 of them are either deficient or borderline deficient in b12 so they should be taking the supplement too and it's so easy let's talk a little bit about um the gut brain access because this is fascinating stuff and i think it relates back to um one thing we touched on at the beginning of this conversation which is anxiety the anxiety and the stress that's accompanying a lot of people right now and what goes hand in hand with that is you know depression our emotional state and you've done some fascinating work and you talk about it in your book this relationship between the gut microbiome and our emotional well-being you can't separate the two you can't separate the two you were your brain's best friend is your gut and it's really fascinating to think about because we you know in the hierarchy of organs we kind of think of the brain as being at the top and i mean it is it's critical it's a critical part of being a human but brain health goes through gut health you know if you have an unhealthy gut it is going to affect your brain and if you have a healthy gut you have a brain that is being optimized so here's how this works they this is a two-way street in terms of communication they are talking to each other right now i mean they are literally your brain and your gut are like two teenage girls on the phone for six hours straight like how do you talk to one person for six hours on the phone i have a 16 year old daughter so i know well how that works yeah yeah exactly so so anyway they're talking to each other they're talking to each other literally right now your brain has the ability to talk to your gut through your vagus nerve which is the information superhighway between the two through um through hormones that are released from the pituitary gland and even through your your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system so your brain has the ability to affect your gut you know this is part of the reason why we sort of led off the conversation talking a little bit about stress and when the brain releases crf crf has the ability to alter the balance of the gut microbes and induce dysbiosis stress by itself can induce dysbiosis now on the flip side the gut has a number of ways that it will communicate to the brain what's happening downstairs and alter brain function it can talk again through the vagus nerve the gut also produces neurotransmitters literally the gut produces over 30 neurotransmitters which is fascinating because when i was in medical school i didn't even realize there were 30 neurotransmitters i thought they were like 12. 90 of serotonin so serotonin is the happy hormone serotonin affects our mood our focus our energy levels our memory if i want to alter a person's serotonin balance i can give them things like zoloft which is sertraline and that is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor it will boost serotonin all right and that's how i treat depression or anxiety but percent of serotonin is produced in the gut ninety percent yeah that's not i give zoloft only it's only affecting ten percent of the serotonin in the brain and the rest of it is affecting your gut and you know the there are precursors to serotonin and precursors to dopamine and other neurotransmitters produced in the gut that are capable of crossing the blood brain barrier and altering our mood this is the reason why we have studies that show that you can alter anxiety and depression with diet alone and that a plant-based diet is beneficial in many cases and so so it's fascinating to consider these connections but one of the other things that people need to hear about is that short chain fatty acids like butyrate acetate and proprionate which come from the consumption of fiber also have the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier and be and be effectively ways that the gut is able to communicate to the brain and alter brain function so there's all these different ways that the that they're in constant communication and affecting each other and it's dynamically occurring literally right now as we're sitting and talking to each other yeah you also talk in the book about the impact of the gut microbiome on cravings right the signaling to your brain actually like we all think like oh i'm craving this so my body must need it or or something like that but it's it's it's quite literally your gut flora saying these are the kind of foods we need to stay alive because this is what this is what's going on down here right now and we need to keep this going so you need to eat these foods um and i think that's absolutely fascinating and it goes to that point of us being much more micro sort of microorganism than human we're super organism we're a super organism we are we are a human body that is like we are carrying life within us and they're a part of the story and yes they are completely capable of altering the cravings that we have and it's important because it also means that if you change the microbiome you will change your cravings you will change your taste buds so to me the idea you know part of what people don't believe that people have a hard time believing that but that's 100 percent true it's 100 true so you know for me when i was thinking about changing my diet what stood in the way is i my favorite foods i was going to have to give up you know i wasn't eating these foods like just aimlessly i mean i was eating what i enjoyed and so that's what scared me and what was fascinating was that as i made the change the taste buds although it they lag a little bit behind because you need to change your microbiome they came along for the ride and i knew that something had changed for me because like it's kind of like this you go on vacation right you're away from your home for like seven days or 14 days and you come back and there's that one meal that you can't wait to have you're like i'm going to that place as soon as i land and for me back in the day it was always jersey mike's going to get a sub you know um and i realized that things had changed when i started coming back from trips and being like i cannot wait to go to my salad joint and also get a kombucha i can't wait right it's so weird like what the hell happened to me man what the hell how dare you um one of the things that that i hear a lot um and i'm sure you do as well are people that are saying i get it like i want to go plant-based i've tried it it didn't work for me i got super gassy i had all these digestive digestion issues it just it doesn't work for me i understand it works for you um good luck but you know i'm going back to my keto or paleo or whatever it is so can you speak to um the issue of gassiness that people experience the relationship to the microbiome and this idea that you know eating a plant-diverse diet might work for some people but not others try to do a little myth busting here yeah totally well i think this is actually one of the i mean it's potentially the most important chapter in my book which is chapter five how to find your plant passion with a sensitive gut because the people that come into my practice on a daily basis that i take care of for a living these are people who are suffering with food sensitivities when you have a damaged gut you often will have food sensitivities it's not a coincidence that like when you're sensitive to the food that you eat it's not just a coincidence it's it's indicative of dysbiosis it's indicative of damage to the gut microbiome and the the specific categories of foods that people struggle with are fiber and fodmaps fodmaps are the fermentable parts of our food that can be transformed into gas now if you literally just heard that and stopped right there you would go whoa those things sound horrible why do we why would we ever want that odd maps are incredibly healthy actually they are prebiotic they feed and nourish the healthy bacteria inside of us and when you think about fiber and fodmaps what are the foods that are the most rich in fiber and fodmaps it's the exact foods that are creating sensitivities for people beans are huge on fiber contain galactans which are fodmaps and contain resistant starches which are also prebiotic but can be disruptive for some people whole grains again extremely rich on fiber also contain fructans fructans are a fodmap that can be disruptive so what we've been hearing for the last 20 years is that oh if you're sensitive to that you are incapable of eating that food and also by the way that is inflammation that's what we've been told that is inflammation right there first of all it's not inflammation there's no there's no evidence to suggest that what it is is it's sloppy digestion it's sloppy digestion because you have a damaged gut microbiome you know i want i want people to understand the way that this works on a cellular level if we were to zoom in on what is happening when your microbes are digesting your food here's what you find there is this fiber which is biochemically complex and these microbes a team of them multiple different types go to work on this fiber and they break it down and deconstruct it and to do that they use enzymes called glycoside hydrolases now glycoside hydrolases we big strong humans we don't have them we only have 17 of them if we didn't have a microbiome we would be completely incapable of processing fiber completely incapable but we do have a microbiome we've always had a microbiome and our microbiome when they study this may have sixty thousand varieties of these enzymes sixty thousand a single cellular organism that you and i can't even see with the naked eye may have hundreds of these enzymes so when the fiber goes down the track it's untouched by the small intestine because we lack these enzymes and then it gets to the colon where all the microbes live and they go to work using their tools which are these enzymes to break down and deconstruct the fiber and ultimately to release the short chain fatty acids if you're missing the microbes that you need to process and digest that food you're going to struggle and that's what we see in the person who has dysbiosis where there's a loss of diversity there's less species when you lose those species you may not be they may not be represented in a way necessary at that moment process and digest your food but here's the key the gut is trainable the gut adapts that's the key the gut adapts and whatever choice you make the gut will change you know we talked about the study from five days of plant-based versus five days of animal based in less than 24 hours the gut had changed so i want people to think about the gut like it's a muscle all right a muscle can be strengthened you do that through exercise it doesn't just randomly happen it happens because you specifically go to work with that muscle and you work it to a certain point and then you stop and then it becomes stronger and next week you come back and you can do even more but when you're training a muscle if you go to the gym and you haven't been working out and you and you grab 300 pounds you're going to hurt yourself the person who has not been consuming beans and like you know says what the hell and grabs the four bean chili hey like yolo we're going for it right they're going to hurt because they haven't been consuming beans and their gut is not adapted to eating that way for the person who consumes these foods and struggles with food sensitivity if you reduce the amount of those individual foods if you moderated them and got it to a level that your gut was actually capable of doing that's where you want to be because that's when you're exercising your gut and it will become adapted and better the more that you feed your gut with these foods and over time you will get those enzymes because your gut will adapt to what you're doing and become capable of everything that you want but the key rich is this if you if you take those foods away if you say i'm going to categorically restrict these foods so like hypothetically beans and grains beans and grains are gone boom okay all of those microbes that were thriving on beans they are growing weaker by the day all of those microbes that were thriving on whole grains they're grown weaker by the day you are not strengthening your gut by removing foods you're making it weaker and i see these people in my clinic every day that they eliminate food and if they're lucky they get a couple weeks where they feel better and then it's back to the same problem and it's a vicious cycle where they actually get worse and worse with time so with that person that comes into your clinic to extend the gym analogy you give them a light workout by incorporating small amounts of these important foods and then increasing the dosage of them over time so you're seeding the microbiome with the plants that are the prebiotics that are going to lead to the gut flora that's going to ultimately um improve the health and the quality of of the microbiome and make it capable of digesting these foods at a certain 100 100 but i would i i would just tweak the way that i frame it rich to say this a person who has a normal healthy gut okay they can go to the gym and exercise the person that i see who has dysbiosis and they and they're suffering with these digestive issues this is not going to the gym this is going to rehab you know this is this is me with an injured shoulder and i'm not going to the gym to see if i can lift 20 pounds overhead i'm going to the physical therapist to see if i can literally lift my arm and i have to go through a process when you're rehabbing an injury you have to go through the process and you recognize that it's going to hurt it's not necessarily going to be fun but you are restoring function to your body right because your body is healthier when you restore that function right so if somebody's experiencing that gas like just keep keep going basically you're going to get to a point where your body's going to acclimate to this keep going but what you want to do is you want to make adjustments you want to tweak how you're doing it you may need to moderate if you identify what food is causing trouble and many people are good at this they'll say oh it's it's garlic garlic and onions or oh it's whole grains or oh it's it's beans if you identify the food you can moderate the fiber and fodmap content and reduce it down slightly so that you're not putting such a burden on your gut all at once and that's and just take your time go low and go slow it's like the beastie boy song slow and woe that is the tempo yeah yeah does that also apply to food allergies i would think that that might be a different situation so food allergies is activation of the immune system and so it's it's a different concept but actually there there there is an approach which i wouldn't want people to read a book and do by themselves at home but there is an approach with food allergies where conceptually you can do the same thing but even on a smaller level where you reintroduce these foods gradually over time and you can you can actually accommodate the immune system so that it stops activating um let's bust a few more myths okay talk to me about talk to me about lectins a lot of people out there terrified of lectins well first of all i would encourage you if you're terrified of lectins to go to pubmed and search the word wecten and what you're going to find is that probably more than 50 percent of the studies are celebrating and heralding the benefits of lectins for the prevention of cancer lectins are are often anti-cancer molecules i don't know rich how you write a book if you're being balanced i don't know how you write a book and forget to mention this important fact that lectins can actually protect us from cancer which is the number two cause of death in america you know borderline infringing on number one but when it comes to lectins i want people to understand that you know where people worry the most are it seems to be in in legumes and beans okay if you don't cook your beans like you eat a dry bean it's got a lot of lectins and you could actually hurt yourself there was a incident that occurred in japan it's one of the few one of the few publications that showed in humans that lectins truly can have adverse effects there was an incident in japan where they told people to grind up dry beans and then eat that powder and a whole bunch of people got sick because of the lectin content right it was like health day or something like that yeah so and they also there was another incident on health day in a hospital of all places back in the 80s where they served a bean dish that was not properly cooked and people got sick but like that sickness was like they had a bug for 24 hours then they were back normal there's no study saying that people are dying of lectin consumption not there's no human studies you know people i want people to understand the hierarchy of evidence any time that we do a test tube study or an animal model study we should always look to verify those results in real humans i find it interesting when you put in a test tube some weird concentration of lectins and then mix it with human cells and you go oh my gosh look what happens in this test tube all right i find that interesting but what happens when a real person eats beans show me what happens when a real person eats beans you know what happens they live longer with less heart disease and with less cancer the longest lived populations on the planet in the five blue zones are the heaviest consumers of lectin rich foods legumes and whole grains the the lectins are not something that we should live in fear of i'm i'll be honest i feel like we deserve better than to be propping up or creating these these dietary monsters you know to to um basically be demonizing our food to the point that we are actually giving people eating disorders i kept actually seeing this in my clinic people with full bone eating disorders because they get so scared of certain food and they end up on the super restrictive diet and then they and then they end up with a disordered eating pattern we deserve better than this i think that the solution is to stop running away from these food monsters that are artificially created and instead we need to start running towards the food that actually nourishes and heals our body and promotes a longer life with vitality yeah there is a there is a um quite a bit of fear-mongering out there um and and what's interesting about the work that you do is that it's not about reducing certain things you're talking about what you're building it like what you're at it's very additive like this whole diversification of your diet is about building new things into your diet as opposed to focusing on what we're removing i i feel like it's um easily applicable but conceptually extremely sound like from my perspective 50 years from now this is still going to be the best way to eat to consume a broad variety of plants to be as predominantly plant-based as possible you know and i i wrote the book rich to meet people where they are so you know when you say well you're not rigidly inherent to any particular diet i want people to be 90 to 100 plant-based that's what we find in the blue zones that's what i think from a nutritional perspective is the highest quality diet and i do think that when people get to be 90 plant-based they're going to feel so good they're going to want to keep going but i also think that there's an argument that goes beyond nutrition and talks about the health of our planet and talks about you know the compassion for these animals and i think that those should be a part of the conversation even if they are not directly human nutrition i think that kova 19 has taught us that when we abuse this planet we may abuse these animals i kind of feel like it's going to fight back it's beautifully put and that just speaks to the inner relationship of everything you can't talk about the microbiome without referencing the macrobiome the health of our gut is related to the health of the planet and vice versa the soil health connects to human health you know the health of our soil which is the source of our nutrients is critically important to human populations moving forward i have children and i am scared of what this planet looks like a hundred years from now when you consider what it looks like today compared to 1920. and the reality is that we need to just look at population right now we have 7 billion people in 2050 we will have 10 billion people consider that in 1900 there were only 2 billion people consider that in 1800 there was only one billion people we have we're going to have 10 times the population in 250 years and that's putting a strain on the environment on our planet on a strain on these animals biodiversity is the word it's critical to our gut health it's critical to planetary health and it needs to be upheld um i would say that that's a great place to end it but i'm not going to let you i know you got to go in a few minutes here but i'm not going to let you go until we talk about fecal transplants which is like my favorite subject oh man how much time we got i know we can keep it brief because you have to actually go like perform a procedure right in a few minutes here but i'm still a practicing doctor yes i had um our mutual friend robin shutkin on the podcast a while back um but she she uh regaled me with with fantasies of the future in which there will be salons that people will go into and get their very bespoke fecal transplants to buttress our our our microbiome and i think the science here is is truly phenomenal you talk a lot about it in the book and we'll close with the book but the idea that um the adaptability of of the microbiome is so dynamic that you could insert the biota the fecal biota of another human being into a different human being and see tremendous changes in that person's health and well-being as a result it's true it really is related to restoring harmony and balance moving away from dysbiosis and back to ubiosis and having the genetic profile that we need which is potentially missing and that's because 99.5 of our genetics come from our microbiome we are in terms of our genetic code only 0.5 human you know rich you and i are 99.9 the same in terms of our human genetics that close and i'm not saying that our microbiome makes you look the way that you do that's your human genetics but our microbiome may be radically different and it's certainly not the same each one of us has a completely unique gut microbiome fecal transplant really came to become a necessity because of an epidemic infection called clostridium difficile we now call it clusteredioides difficile c diff this became an epidemic infection when i was in medical school in the early 2000s you would see this occasionally typically it was elder elderly women who were on clindamycin a specific antibiotic and they were in the hospital and they would get this infection you would treat it with antibiotics and it would go away in less than 10 years it got to the point where 30 000 people were dying per year that's a ridiculous amount of people and we had antibiotic resistance around 2010 to the point that we would have people perpetually on antibiotics they were just constantly on them we didn't have a solution and in our most desperate of times most dire of need we turned to the gnarliest of places poop and this actually became the healing grace of you know this is 21st century healthcare on the highest level is to use poop as medicine and what we saw is this rip roaring nasty infection that rich i have had people um i have seen people die from this infection i've also had people have their colon removed as a result of this infection this nasty infection if you take a healthy person's microbiome and you basically administer it you know i mean painlessly during a colonoscopy like they don't even realize you're doing it you give them a new microbiome within two days the infection is gone almost 100 of the time i mean on an amazing level and really all you're doing rich is it goes back to an earlier point the good guys suppress the bad guys so when you restore a healthy balance and you get more good guys in the game they will suppress this rip roaring nasty infection the c difficile as nasty as it sounds just get more good guys in there and they can suppress it the future of fecal transplant is exciting we have studies ongoing to look at fecal transplants for everything from acute issues all the way up to chronic issues including autoimmune issues the if if you want me to venture a prediction for your rich here's what i think is going to happen i think that we're going to discover that fecal transplant is really good for dealing with acute issues so when i say acute like this infection c diff that's an acute issue that's not something that's going to chronically affect you and so if you can disrupt the disturbance in the microbiome by restoring a healthy balance you could resolve the acute issue that's why it's so so effective in that particular setting the challenge is the person who has a chronic issue can you fix their chronic issue by changing their microbiome could you take a person with ms change their microbiome with a fecal transplant and move on and get rid of the disease and i don't mean to you know throw a wet towel on the idea but i don't think that this by itself is going to be adequate here's why we have a study rich that i mentioned in chapter one of the book looking at young men who had insulin resistance and they gave them a fecal transplant and what they saw which was amazing because they changed nothing else in these young men they ate the same food when they gave them the fecal transplant their peripheral insulin sensitivity improved so basically you fixed the insulin resistance issue but the problem is that over the course of about four weeks this benefit it dwindled mm-hmm yeah it's like water it's like watering a plant one time yeah and so the issue is if you don't change their diet you give them these bread you give them these brand new microbes you know and you you restore balance and a healthy microbiome but then they continue to live the same way they continue to basically have a lifestyle that disrupts the microbiome they're gonna they're gonna go back to what they were before and so it takes about four weeks for that to happen so now if you could do a fecal transplant new idea if you could do a fecal transplant and pair that with dietary intervention where you change their diet you change their lifestyle you give them the tools to uphold this new healthy gut microbiome now that is an idea that may have some legs but it still requires the dietary intervention which gets back to what my book is all about fiberfields which is that you can change your gut microbiome you can transform it with diet and lifestyle and so i think that this is exciting but you could start doing that today without getting the poop transplant right and the way that you start doing it today is with the f goals right so just rifle through these and i'm going to let you go i promise all right so the f goals it's like this so you know yes earlier in the episode you said look you know we've been taught that we need these super foods and i stepped in and i said oh no no no no we didn't we need ten different plants instead of that one superfood okay here's the way i want you guys to think about this plant-based diversity is the king that is the core philosophy but you're not going to eat every single plant the same amount every single day okay so at the end of the day what i want is if the plants are our friends which they are they they're trying to help us be healthy if the plants are our friends i want you to have as many friends as possible but why not make the superfoods your best friends right so like in in real life if i could have rich role in simon hill as my best friends i would do that that's exactly what i would do and that's what you need to do with your diet make the superfoods your best friends so f goals is my acronym to help you keep track of the main things that you should have in your diet if not every day at least a couple times a week f fruit and fermented g greens and whole grains o omega three super seeds so flax chia hemp put all three of them in your smoothie boom done a aromatics really i'm talking about the flavor foods garlic onions shallots l legumes like i said whole grains and legumes i actually view those as foundational foods for the microbiome then finally s i i i couldn't control myself on s i had so many i wanted to add so here's what i did i got three i'm going to save the best for last shrooms okay technically not plants but we're making them honorary plants for this conversation they do benefit the microbiome seaweed really it's sea veg it's an untapped into resource you want to add diversity to diet i'm not talking about making whole meals out of seaweed i'm talking about a little snack and it's got unique types of fiber and unique nutrients which by the way you know when people criticize the vegan diet you can find many of the nutrients that people bring up in sea vegetables and then finally my favorite out of all of them this is my favorite is sulforaphane it's the nerd in me to me mention a phytochemical yeah you gotta do it yeah we're gonna do two hours on that alone if you want to i'll i'll come in and we'll talk about it but basically sulfurophane is a phytochemical that you will find in cruciferous veg like broccoli cauliflower brussels sprouts etc and it is the most powerful cancer crusher that i've come across it basically impairs cancer through seven different mechanisms there are literally over 100 studies of sulforaphane and so what's cool about sulforaphane is yes you will find it in these cruciferous vegetables but there's one place there's one place where you will find it above the rest which are broccoli sprouts broccoli sprouts contain up to a hundred times more sulforaphane than you will find in adult mature broccoli so today for lunch i had a miso soup bowl and i threw a whole bunch of broccoli sprouts in there and they're delicious and they have the sulfurophane which is nourishing my body helping to protect me from the number two cause of cancer death number two cause of death which is cancer so if you tuned out for this entire podcast and you just need one takeaway from this whole thing it's broccoli sprouts they're magic um thank you so much i know you gotta go i'm gonna let you go uh really appreciate the work that you're doing um you're breaking new ground here and you're helping a lot of people with a lot of difficult problems that they're having i have tons of friends that have gut health issues everything from you know leaky gut to ulcerative colitis and i could ask you a million more questions i got a ton of notes here we didn't get that you know we got to maybe five percent of all the things that i wanted to talk to you about so please come and visit me uh when the pandemic lifts enough so that we can responsibly be in the same room together in the meantime everybody pick up fiberfield thank you for sending me a copy you wrote a nice like thing here appreciate that uh support your local booksellers uh if you can online and uh or you can get it on on amazon i'll put a link up in the show notes to the book um congrats on making the new york times bestseller list it's it's well earned and well deserved and i think that this is all very much just the beginning for you so i'm excited to see um where you take all of this advocacy in the meantime you can learn more about uh dr b at the gut health md on instagram that's the main place right anywhere else um well i i have a bunch of great resources at my website which is the plantfedgut.com and um you know for example i feel like we're living in this confusing time in terms of knowing that you know you hear me say that lectins are totally fine and then you hear a different doctor say lectins are destroying our health right so and people are kind of sick of this and so i wanted to provide a solution so i created a research guide and it's meant to give people the basic tools that they need to understand the fundamentals of clinical research and how to find truth within the noise because the truth is the truth is out there the truth exists with all my training 16 years of training you know masters of clinical investigation i know how to to sift through this stuff and find the truth but i want you guys to have basic tools to know what to do so i created this research guide which also includes all the references from my book completely free for download on my website i also have a kobit 19 guide i have an active email list that people seem to enjoy and then the last thing i just want to mention real quick i hope you don't mind is that i'm super excited um about this book i'm super excited about the response you know to me if you say to me will you got a choice you can be a new york times bestseller and help no one or you can help a [ __ ] ton of people and not be a new york times bestseller i'll hand you the new york times right now all right i'll give it to you right now and so i'm really excited about the messages that i'm getting from people who are feeling the benefits from this book i want you guys to reach out to me i also want you to know that i'm creating additional resources i have a course that i'm launching this summer i've beta tested it twice with amazing results with amazing results in groups of people and it's a seven week course basically to take an even deeper dive into the ideas that you find in my book so that we can really unpack this stuff and effectively what it is rich is i wish like when people read this book i hope they feel that they're hanging out with me and we're just having a great conversation and in building the course what i'm what i'm constructing is the seven week conversation that i wish i could have with every single one of my patients i want to teach you everything that you need to know to transform your health and that's what it's about that's great man um we should also point out that the book has a in addition to being this incredible primer you have a 28-day program here too that you take that you could take people through the second half of the book essentially 28 day 28 day plan it's got basically 80 recipes um it's got i mean and one of the things i'm most proud of with this by the way is with the plan is it is designed to meet you where you are okay so the reason why i didn't write this book to be hey you need to be vegan and if you're not it's a bad choice the reason i didn't write that way is because i want to meet you where you are i want to i want to get a trajectory in your diet and your lifestyle that is going to transform your health i want to point you in the right direction and then let's get the ball rolling and let's do it together and so every single person who's doing this 28-day plan is going to have their own experience no two people will do it the same and i celebrate that and i want people to use the plan as a tool to get the compass pointing in the right direction but also to be comfortable making the adaptations necessary to make it your own and i really think it's going to get people to a better place when they do it hmm great man all right well to be continued be continued my friends yeah thank you so much man really appreciate it um good luck with everything man and look forward to finally meeting you in person at some point 110 all right cool forward to it peace [Music] you

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 378,681

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Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition, microbiome, what is gut health, healthy gut diet, fiber rich diet, how to boost immunity, dr will bulsiewicz gut health, fiber fueled diet, how to heal the gut, dysbiosis, fecal transplant, dr b, leaky gut, gut microbiome, gut health md

Id: EABZqi3HtRM

Length: 123min 31sec (7411 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020