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499: Gut to Glow: Improving Health, Skin, and Collagen with Lactobacillus Reuteri

https://www.learntruehealth.com/gut-to-glow-improving-health-skin-and-collagen-with-lactobacillus-reuteri

It is a pleasure to have Dr. William Davis back on the show today! We discuss the importance of gut health and how it can help us look and feel younger. He has devised a convenient supplement that people can take in lieu of making the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. We are exploring this solution and how it can benefit us.

Ashley James & Dr. William Davis

Highlights:

Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt for depression
How phototherapy patch complements other modalities
Lactobacillus reuteri supplement helps the gut and has anti-aging benefits
Dr. Davis' supplement increases collagen production.

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers, and welcome to another exciting Learn True Health podcast. Episode 499. Oh my gosh, it's almost episode 500. And you guys must be like, where's Ashley? Because it's been weeks since I posted an episode. Since I posted the episode about the phototherapy stem cell patches, my phone has been blowing up. It's been amazing. I've talked to so many listeners. I've had so many client calls every single day. My calendar is full of amazing conversations with the listeners and with my clients about the phototherapy patches. I've had at least thirty clients get on the patches, start using them, and get on them. They had outstanding results using the phototherapy patches in helping their body address different issues, which is exciting. I've been pinching myself because how does something so small have such a profound effect? And that's because it's frequency medicine which is fascinating stuff. You'll want to go back and listen to my recent episode about phototherapy stem cell patches with Trina Hammack. And if you want to have a free phone call with me, go to learntruehealth.com, and in the menu, it says Work with Ashley James. Click on that, and the first option is to sign up for a free phone call with me to discuss the stem cell phototherapy patches. And if there's anything else I can help you with and send resources to answer questions, please jump on a phone call with me. I'd love to help you.

There are some amazing results that we've seen. I had one client with all of the crazy symptoms that she's been experiencing in the last six years. She'd been suffering horribly from weird symptoms that no one knew what they were from. And in about a week using the patches, we corrected her polarity. And she was just so excited that all of her symptoms went away. I'm beyond excited for her because you imagine feeling dizzy and out of it and having all these weird symptoms for six years, not knowing what's happening. And then we use a very gentle yet powerful frequency medicine. When I say gentle, it can be used on babies. It can be used on animals with great success. So it's gentle for everyone, animals and humans, regardless of our size or age. And it doesn't disrupt medications. So there's no contraindication like medications or anything like that. We see fantastic results. I have personally had some amazing experiences.

I have a family member who now has benign tremors. She doesn't have Parkinson's. She's had a battery of tests several times by neurologists, but they don't know what's causing them. But she has a tremor so bad she couldn't hold the newspaper and read it. She can't drink, can't eat soup, because it would just all go everywhere. Her hands and arms would shake uncontrollably. She's had that for a few years and tried many things. We started patching her a few months ago. And she's had great success with correcting a lot of stuff. She has a better sleep, energy, less pain, a happier mood, and better digestion. Everything is getting better and better. And then, about three and a half months into patching, she started noticing that her shakes were diminishing. And just the other day, she could hold the newspaper and read it. It's just a dream come true because she thought she'd never be able to do that again. Her handwriting is improved. She used to do calligraphy, and she hasn't been able to do anything for years with her hands.

So this is giving people freedom. And what's cool about the phototherapy patches is that they complement many other modalities. It complements taking your supplements, and herbs, eating healthy, and exercising. It doesn't add anything to the body. It puts a frequency in the body that asks the body to perform a healthy task more. So the glutathione patch increases glutathione by 300% in 24 hours within the moments of putting on the stem cell patch. People's pain diminishes and sometimes goes away completely, and their inflammation decreases. They're turning on thousands of dormant gene expressions. So this is an epigenetic thing. It turns on healing genes to help the body in amazing ways. So many people who start using the patches to support one thing end up seeing many other things improve.

And then, just for the first aid benefits, I accidentally got kicked in the face the other day. My son, who has been doing Taekwondo for a long time, is a good kicker. And he was kicking the blankets off of him at full force as I was coming in to wake him up in the morning, and he didn't know I was there. And boom, I got kicked in the face so bad that my head spun, and I had a bleeding nose immediately. I had all the concussion symptoms, which was scary for a minute. I immediately took one of the patches designed for first aid use and put them on my nose. The bleeding, inflammation, and swelling stopped. I thought that was so cool. I put the patch for inflammation on the back of my neck with the stem cell patch lowered down on my spine. And then, for the rest of the day, I was using the patches around my head, which you put inside a hat so you can take it off. It's pretty cool to do that. And I used the protocol for concussions. And then, that night, I went to bed with five of the special protocol called brain bouncer, and five of my favorite patches, the ones that decrease inflammation. They do a bunch of other things, but it feels so good. That's my favorite patch. And it's funny because my mom's friends, whenever I give them this patch, they go, “This patch makes me not yell at my kids.” Because it just makes people calmer and happier and puts them in a better mood. It actually helps balance dopamine in the brain and brings down inflammation. So you feel like you can handle more stress without getting frazzled. Well, I put five of these on my head and went to bed that night. And the next morning, I woke up, and 100% of my concussion was gone. My brain was back to my usual self. How cool is that?

Now I've seen testimonials in our wonderful secret Facebook group of practitioners. It's like a team of practitioners that I've been learning from and working with and all of their clients. And even though it feels like an intimate community, it's actually close to 55,000 people, but it's a secret group. So if you want to be in the group, let me know. You must email me or book a free session, and I'll get you into this group. And in this group, people share their protocols and testimonials. And I see people in this group who've had major brain damage and bad concussions where eight months later, they're still in the fog and suffering hugely. They start using the patches to bounce their brain and support healthy brain function. And within ten minutes, they start feeling the fog lift, and the brain returns to balance. Hundreds of studies on these patches show that we're reversing early-stage dementia. There are so many benefits around neurology, but it also helps with fertility, hormone balancing, addiction behaviors, and 66% deeper sleep, which they did studies on this. The list goes on and on. The thyroid is the easiest thing to support the body's ability to fix. We're supporting the body's ability to help itself become healthier. I have seen many people reverse their hypothyroidism to support their body's and thyroid's ability to come back online and produce healthy new thyroid tissue in weeks. It's so exciting what we can do for the body. There are testimonials of people with heart damage and heart disease also reversing that.

So anyway, the list goes on and on. It's very exciting. So if you're wondering where Ashley has been, it's because I've been busy every day, seven days a week, weeks and weeks ever since I published that episode, chatting with amazing listeners and clients and helping everyone get on the phototherapy protocols. So if you want to try it too, I'd love to help you. The things we're helping people with have been amazing. Everything I've ever discovered in the last twelve years, this is the coolest, most effective, most versatile health tool. The thing is, eating healthy is really important. Moving your body in a way that brings you joy is really important. So many things are important to your health, and we must ensure we cover all the foundations. You can't out-patch a bad diet. You can't take phototherapy patches and handle a nutrient deficiency. We must eat healthily, move our bodies, drink a lot, and hydrate. But if you do all the fundamentals and you're still frustrated with not getting on the other side of a health issue, you should try the phototherapy patches. You want to join that Facebook group. And if you don't do Facebook, you'll want to talk to me, and I'll hook you up with the protocols. The protocols supercharge your results because we're utilizing acupuncture points in addition to the phototherapy. So we're putting the patches on acupuncture points, and we see outstanding results. So go to learntruehealth.com, and in the menu, see Work with Ashley James, and book your free conversation with me; I'd love to help you.

Let's finally get to today's episode now that you know what I've been up to in the last few weeks. I had a birthday, by the way. I'm 43 now. After the age of about 35, birthdays are surreal. You're like, I remember my parents at this age, and they seemed really old. I totally do. I totally remember my parents in their 40s. I thought 40 was really old. And I'm like, oh, 40 is not really old. 90 is likely old. I have to change my mindset. 90s is old and 40s is young. So this episode is wonderful. I love Dr. William Davis. He has been on the show before and twice, actually. So this is his third time. And he shares with us some amazing stuff he's been up to since his last episode with us.

We talked about Lactobacillus reuteri about a year ago, which profoundly affected one of my family members. It helped them get on the other side of a major health issue. It also helped me overcome the daily post-traumatic stress panic attacks that I had due to still being in grief from losing my daughter. And the day I started eating the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt, the daily outbursts of crying and sobbing uncontrollably stopped. And it's so cool that it had such an immediate effect. I've never been on antidepressants, but within three days of eating that yogurt, it felt like what I imagined being on antidepressants would be like if they worked. It just felt like the cloud had lifted in my spirit. And I felt like there was a chance at joy. There was a chance at happiness. And that was such an interesting experience to have such a strong emotional response to a gut-healing food. We know serotonin is made in the gut. We know that the nerve that runs from the gut to the brain has this connection. We know that there are neurotransmitters in the gut and that there's a huge connection between gut health, brain health, and emotional health. I felt it so profoundly and so quickly.

So having Dr. William Davis back on the show today, we discuss how he figured out how to develop a supplement that people can take for those who don't want to go through the hassle of making the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. And it is a hassle because you have to get a special instant pot or you have to get a special yogurt maker that holds things at 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 36 hours. You have to sterilize your equipment. You have to get either organic dairy or make it with cashews, which I like. I've experimented with making it with soy, coconut, and cashews, which seem to work well. And then you have to make, mix, and blend it with a high-power blender like a Vitamix. So there are so many steps to doing it. I have made this stuff every two weeks for the last year, so I'm used to it. But it is time-consuming, and you must have all that equipment. So for some traveling people who just want the benefits but do not want to go through all that, he figured out how to isolate and make this beautiful supplement. They call it Gut to Glow. At first, I thought it was a skin supplement, like a skin cream. But what it is, is it's a wonderful Lactobacillus reuteri supplement that helps the gut but also has anti-aging benefits. Women and men also see that their skin looks much younger because it increases collagen production. And that's something we discussed in this episode and the previous one about Lactobacillus reuteri. One of its benefits is that it increases or stimulates collagen production in the body or stimulates that.

So we talk a lot about gut health in this episode, but we also talk about his supplements. If you'd like to try his supplement, go to learntruehealth.com/glow. He gave us two coupon codes. One is 10% off your first order. And that's LTH10. Then if you ever want to get on auto-ship to order it monthly, he gives 15% off to our listeners for the subscription. And that's LTH15. Go to learntruehealth.com/glow to check out his supplement. And enjoy today's episode. Dr. William Davis is amazing. I have really enjoyed his work. I love his books. They are so informative, and he's so generous with his information. He has a really caring spirit. He wants to help people get healthy. He filled this entire episode with wonderful tidbits of health information. So enjoy today's episode. And if you have any questions about all the cool things I do, I'd love to work with you if you want to be one of my clients. If you'd like to get the phototherapy patches, go to learntruehealth.com, and click on the menu Work with Ashley James. Sign up for a free session to chat. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day, and enjoy today's episode.

[0:16:57.0] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 499. I am so excited about today's guest. We have back on the show Dr. William Davis, who's one of my heroes. So it's just so wonderful to have you back. Welcome back to the show.

[0:17:19.7] Dr. William Davis: Thank you, Ashley. Thanks for having me back.

[0:17:20.5] Ashley James: Absolutely. I know Dr. Davis was in Episode 167. We talked about his book Wheat Belly, which was so cathartic for me because my whole family went gluten-free 12 years ago, and it made such a massive difference in our lives. And it was so big, but everyone around us was laughing at us and telling us we were crazy. It was right around when we discovered your book. Finally, there's more validation for us that what we're doing is right. And look, there's so much science behind it. And now, of course, everyone's heard of being gluten-free. But back 12 years ago, it was still so unheard of. It makes such a big difference to remove something in the body that is inflaming the gut. And it just affects everything because inflammation in the gut cascades to our neurotransmitters, affecting our brain and how we think, feel, and behave. It does cascade into our whole life. So for those who've never tried going gluten-free, I'd suggest at least 30 days of no barley, wheat, rye, and oats and see how you feel. I love the takeaway from that episode. Dr. Davis was teaching us that we could use a glucometer even for those who are not diabetic. Use a glucometer to monitor how our body responds to our foods to keep our blood sugar within those good ranges. And then let that be your guide to choosing really good healthy meals. So there are so many great takeaways from Episode 167.

And then we had you on again just a year ago, Episode 476, about the Lactobacillus reuteri. And your most recent book about healing the gut was amazing. My listeners have been raving about that for the last year. We have a Facebook group community where we all make that yogurt together. Since my whole family is allergic to dairy, I've been experimenting with all the different plant-based ways to make Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. I've made over 30 batches in the last year. I perfected making it with cashews. I tried soy, coconut, and cashews. It's delicious. I have that recipe I can share in this episode's show notes and the Facebook group.

I'm excited to hear what's happened in the last year for you and everything you've been doing and producing something really exciting for the listeners. I know they're going to love it. I have to share something with you. Your episode with us a year ago had two huge impacts on my life, and that is when I interviewed you. I don't think you knew this then, but I didn't even realize what happened until I talked to a psychologist friend. I was having post-traumatic stress, PTSD attacks. I was still recovering after losing my daughter. And when I interviewed you, I was breaking down and cried every day. And I'm a very positive person. I'm just the opposite of depressed. I'm just always happy. That's my normal personality. So to break down crying every day, a little something would happen. The glass would fall over and spill, and I would melt into a puddle. I had no idea what was happening, and I was not functioning like I thought I should be.

And then I did the interview with you about the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt, and I was so excited. I immediately ordered all the supplies, and I made it within days. The only thing I had in the house was an open tin of soy milk. I do not recommend making the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt with soy milk. It was not delicious. But I drank it or ate it. However, it was curdled. So it could have been better, but I took it in. And that day, I felt something shift in me. And the daily breakdowns of crying stopped. Three days after being on it, my counselor friend was talking to me, and she said, “How are you doing”? I said, “Well, I'm not on drugs, and I've never been on antidepressants, but I feel like I'm on an antidepressant.” I feel like the sadness is lifting. I'm feeling like a new person. That Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt was such a game-changer for me.

[0:22:05.8] Dr. William Davis: That's great.

[0:22:08.5] Ashley James: It was huge, and the PTSD attacks stopped. Those big attacks stopped, and what I've had since are just tiny events where I might feel overwhelmed or like I need to take a breather and do a little grounding and calm my nervous system. But it's manageable. I went from unmanageable to manageable with the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt.

We go into great detail as to how it affects the body. It increases serotonin. That's episode 476 for those who want to go back and listen to all the benefits of the Lactobacillus reuteri. And I also recommend getting every single one of Dr. William Davis' books. It's all incredible. And you also now have the gut-healing one on audio that came out last year. So that's fantastic.

But here's the second story. I told you there are two. I have a very close family member who, for years, suffered from such bad chronic diarrhea. They could not leave the house most days. They go through cycles where it is so bad that they can't go from the living room to the bathroom. They'd have an accident along the way. And there were times when they did have to leave the house, and their pants were stained with diarrhea. It's so sad for this person to have that level of intensity. They tried everything. They went to various doctors, eliminated some foods, and nothing worked. And I gave this person a batch of the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt you taught us to make, but I made it plant-based because it is delicious. It's cashew yogurt. They'll like it anyway for breakfast. It tastes amazing. And so it's wonderful to tart. It's as creamy, and I thought this person would benefit from helping with sleep. This person was not sleeping well, and I thought it would help them sleep. It has also been known to help people lift that depression, and this person was going through some stuff and not feeling great emotionally. So I was thinking about those benefits. Three days into eating it, they call me and say, “I need another batch. I never want to run out of this stuff. My diarrhea is gone”.

It has been almost a year or about nine months since I gave it to them. And I have been supplying them for the last nine months. Every two weeks, I make that person a big batch that lasts two weeks. I make a huge batch, and we all eat it. But they don't want to be without it because this is the only thing, and there's no pharmaceutical that has stopped their diarrhea. There's been no food change that stopped their diarrhea. The only thing that's ever worked has been this. So it's given this person their life back. Now they're doing up to three exercise classes a week, and they can go and just be so much more productive. So you have changed my life, and you changed their life. I know you've changed thousands of lives, and I want to thank you. And many listeners in our community are making the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt and sharing about it in the Learn True Health Facebook group. So we're having much fun with everything we've learned from you. So thank you, I appreciate you. And I can't wait to hear what you have been doing the last year since we had you on the show. So what's been going on in your world?

[0:25:46.8] Dr. William Davis: Those are some pretty incredible stories. You know, you can see why I get so excited about this, just restoring this microbe that virtually all of us have lost. That is this microbe that all other mammals carry. Squirrels have it, and dogs have it. Camels have it. But we've lost it. Indigenous humans have it, you know, people not exposed to antibiotics, chlorinated drinking water, etc., glyphosate. They all have this microbe, and we've lost it. And you know, these wonderful experiences we're all having, like the ones you describe for yourself and your friend and other things people are experiencing, reflect just how necessary this microbe was. But the thing that gets me excited is the social effects of reuteri. So we boost the hormone oxytocin. If we believe the animal evidence from MIT, we've tried to reproduce that evidence. We're having a hard time measuring oxytocin. Measuring oxytocin has been for decades a very difficult thing to do. And we're struggling to do it also. So we still need to corroborate in humans. But if we believe the animal data from MIT and some other places, that reuteri tells your brain to release more oxytocin, the hormone of love and empathy. And so what people are experiencing, as you have experienced, are emotional and social effects. Mostly it increased the intensity of love and affection, generosity, and my favorite is accepting other people's opinions.

Now, when you think about that, this is all occurring at a time when we've lost that microbe. Almost all of us have lost that microbe. And thereby presumptively, the ability to provoke oxytocin release at a time we're witnessing record social isolation. Even pre-pandemic, this was true. So record social isolation, record suicide, even pre-pandemic, divorce, shootings, and political discord. Humans have always been evil to each other. There's no question about that. But it doesn't seem to think things have gotten worse. Now, that's hard to prove, except that people who get the reuteri restored, as you and your friend and your followers have, will tell you, “You know what, my relationship is better.” I had this one woman come on and say, “You know, my husband is normally not a guy who expresses his emotions very clearly. One time I was sitting across from him, he said, I've always liked you. But I like you more now. Come here and sit next to me.” Little things like that. Or people say, “I'm in line for coffee at Starbucks, and I find myself introducing myself to strangers.” In other words, these little things in social interaction change. And people are getting rid of depressive thoughts and suicidal thoughts. I'm not suggesting it as a cure for everything. But we've pushed the needle towards better social behavior and connection to other humans. And there will be better skin, muscle, libido, sleep, etc. But the thing that really excites me is the change in the social fabric.

[0:29:12.2] Ashley James: Now, when we talked in Episode 476, what they saw in the animal studies was that when we have the correct amount of Lactobacillus reuteri in our gut, our body produces more collagen.

[0:29:29.5] Dr. William Davis: Once again, if we believe the mouse studies and limited human evidence, as some of our own evidence too, by the way, in our first human clinical trial, there is an increase in collagen in the skin, in the dermal layer, the dermis. So in our clinical trial, we did something called high-resolution skin ultrasound to measure the thickness of the dermis, and we got a 14.5% increase in dermal thickness over three months. That's with a product and not just with reuteri. You know, these studies are very difficult and very expensive to perform. So we can only do limited numbers of people. But with a combination of reuteri and some other things, we get an increase in dermal thickness consistent with what they saw in the mouse studies and the limited human evidence. So in the mouse studies, there was a huge increase in dermal collagen, dermal thickness, and thereby loss of wrinkles. And they did take ladies. Remarkably, they had volunteers submit to puncture wounds in the forearm, which is tough to persuade somebody to accept a puncture wound. But these ladies did that. And while healing time in mice is accelerated dramatically, it cuts healing time by 50%. So healing is much faster. It was more like 35% in humans, but still quite substantial. If you think about that and if this holds true in future trials, there might be when incisions after surgery, burns, or injury, we can accelerate healing time. That's something I'd like to see explored over time.

[0:31:11.4] Ashley James: Well, if we can speed up the healing time of the skin, that also decreases the chances of getting an infection, right? Because when the wound is open, we're more susceptible to infection, especially for burn patients, as you said. But if we could take something like a salve that speeds up healing time by 35%, that's worth it. So that's going to help prevent infections.

[0:31:43.9] Dr. William Davis: And it gets even better because we have to be careful in those animal studies. We extrapolate from animals. But so far, everything that's been in this instance where we talk about reuteri and oxytocin and the pieces examined in humans have proven true. What we've seen in mice has held true. We need to explore more, but many of the observations made in animals have also held true in humans. Things still need to be corroborated in humans, though. It was a huge improvement in the immune response in these mice, both in wounds and systemically. So one of the things that happened in the mouse study was something called thymic involution. All that means is the thymus gland, right in front of the heart underneath your sternum, reaches its maximum size and capacity to produce T lymphocytes or T cells that protect you from infections, including viral infections. It reaches its maximum size in T cell productivity at age 15. And then, every year after that, it shrinks. So that by age 70, it's only 10% of its original size and capacity to mount an immune response. And this is a big part of why you can die of flu at age 72 but not at age 18. So, when they gave elderly mice reuteri, they watched the thymus gland restored to its youth. So the reversal of the thymic involution would be very different. It's a tough thing to reproduce in humans. We could try that, but we don't have the budget. I'm hoping somebody does that study. Because when you have a thymus that's restored to youthful capacity, you're protected from things like pneumococcal, pneumonia, flu, and cancer because T cells are responsible for the process of immunosurveillance that is looking for cells that have mutations in them and uncontrolled growth or cancer in other words. The whole reuteri oxytocin thing will be the subject of many examination studies in the coming years because it is so exciting.

[0:34:02.0] Ashley James: For those that have yet to listen to episode 476, a really important point to understand is that, as humans, we're supposed to have Lactobacillus reuteri. It's like we're supposed to have three arms and walk around with two arms. And we all think we're supposed to have two arms. We have all been missing an arm. As you said at our last interviews, if you have one course of antibiotics, it's wiped out. It's passed on through breast milk. So if you were bottle-fed, if your mother, grandmother, or even yourself as a child had antibiotics, even like you said, glyphosate drinking tap water with chlorine. There are all kinds of ways we can kill it. It's quite sensitive, as good gut bacteria go. But we're walking around, as a species, largely missing this piece to the puzzle. And this is where we're walking around missing part of ourselves. What we understand now about the gut, and maybe you can talk a bit about this, is that we're just beginning to understand the microbiome, and we thought the microbiome is about 6 pounds, right? Give or take about 6 pounds of bacteria that live inside our gut, but it's also all over our body. There's a microbiome surrounding our whole body that, like cell-to-cell, we're more bacteria than humans, and these bacteria in our cells help digest our food and assimilate certain nutrients for us. And that if we were completely sterile and had none of these bacteria, we could not survive. It would not be a healthy lifestyle; we need it all over our bodies.

[0:35:56.0] Dr. William Davis: You're absolutely right. I cringe to think how little we knew before we started thinking about the microbiome. I have a new granddaughter, about nine months old, and I watched the baby's mom go through prenatal care, delivery, and early infancy. I saw all the things that she was not told. This girl comes from a wealthy family with no shortage of resources, yet she was told virtually nothing. She got five antibiotic courses during the third trimester and after delivery, so I had to educate them. For instance, if a woman has vaginal dysbiosis, that disrupts the microbial composition of the vaginal canal, which is at least a third of the entire female population on this planet. The vaginal microbiome is much more definable than the gastrointestinal microbiome. It's much simpler. That microbiome is meant to be dominated by specific Lactobacillus species, specifically Lactobacillus crispatus.

If a woman lacks that microbe and allows perforation, which is very common in species like gardnerella or atopobium, you have problems. You're more prone to vaginal infections like candida infections, you're more likely to have a miscarriage during pregnancy, and you're more likely to deliver your child prematurely. Because when you have that vaginal dysbiosis, it's inflammatory. It inflames the cervix, and the cervix tends to relax prematurely. And as you know, if you deliver a child at 30 weeks, that's a catastrophe. That child's going to be in the ICU. It's prone to necrotizing enterocolitis, psychological, etiological, and social deficits and learning impairments. So, why not correct vaginal dysbiosis. It's easy to do. I saw many things not being done. We may have touched and passed on this idea that a very specific species, Bifidobacterium infantis, has been lost by moms and is also not passed on to the babies, which might be passed on at vaginal birth and then also through breastfeeding. If the baby does not get that microbe, it does not grow as well as it should. Neurological growth is impaired. The babies are more likely not to sleep well and have more regurgitation of breast milk or formula. It has more bowel movements, diaper changes for mom and dad, and more health problems. They are more prone to diabetes, obesity, and asthma. But suppose you restore infantis to that child, especially if the mom is breastfeeding, Bifidobacterium infantis would allow the child to metabolize human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). In that case, that baby has accelerated neurological maturation and has a better immune response, has 50% fewer bowel movements, thereby 50% fewer diaper changes, is more likely to sleep through the night, has less asthma, less Type 2 diabetes, less obesity, and has a higher IQ. That's how important getting the microbiome can be.

[0:39:20.4] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, all the moms listening just perked up. Now, if our kid's already born and they have some of those conditions, what can we do to help them? We can give them the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. But is there a specific yogurt we could make for them, or could we ferment something to help them once they're born?

[0:39:47.4] Dr. William Davis: You raised an important issue that is hard for many people to get their arms around earlier. I encourage people to avoid the idea of treating things. That's what they do in medicine, right? They treat high blood sugar and they treat high blood pressure. Never once asked me why that condition emerged in the first place and what we could do to correct the whole situation. So, I encourage people to avoid this idea of treating things. If you treat somebody's high blood sugar with drugs, that person will still have heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, amputations, gastroparesis, etc. What if, instead, we address the factors that allowed those conditions to emerge in the first place, regardless of the label? Regardless of whether the label was asthma, hypertension, coronary disease, cognitive impairment, rosacea, psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, or Type 2 diabetes. Let's address the factors that allow those conditions to emerge in the first place. So we got to go back to the old conversation. We do wheat and grain and sugar elimination. As you've experienced yourself, the underlying cause for so many health problems, despite being pushed on us by government agencies, dieticians, and doctors. So getting rid of these things that never belonged to the human diet, in the first place, corrects common nutrient deficiencies. We're supposed to eat magnesium by drinking water from rivers and streams. We can't do that. It's got sewage.

[0:41:26.2] Ashley James: Especially now, with all that runoff from Ohio. If the listeners may not have known, there was a massive chemical spill, and my friends are just across Lake Erie. And they were telling me, for a week, they could taste the metals. They could taste the chemical smell in it. Even indoors, they could taste and smell it. And now they're saying the air is safe to breathe. The water and the soil are all safe there. Everything's safe. But my friends, who are 200 or even 400 miles away, say they can taste and smell it. This has been ridiculous for days. If you look at the streams from that area in Ohio, that runs off into that basin, into what's in Mississippi, and then goes out into the Gulf of Mexico. And there's our fish or shrimp. If you eat seafood next year, the fish and shrimp will have those chemicals. And I'm terrified of what we're going to face. Is this going to be like Minamoto, Japan, back in the 1930s, where children are born with multiple arms and eyes? It took them 20 or 30 years until they figured out that it was the mercury poisoning the downstream from all the factories dumping the mercury. This is another disaster they're covering up. We have to be very careful with the water we drink. It is tainted, right?

As you said, we can't get our minerals just from drinking clean spring water because there's no such thing as clean spring water anymore. There are eighty thousand man-made chemicals in it. Since I was born, 80,000 man-made chemicals are now in our air, food, water, and soil. It's just prolific. And they say here in Seattle that we detect mercury from the ashes falling on us from China's coal mines and energy factories. So this isn't just, “Oh well, I'm here in this state, or in this province, and it's pretty clean here.” Now we are affected by what everyone puts in the air. For me, this isn't a political thing. I don't care what political affiliation you have. We can all agree on one thing: pollution is bad for us. Let's not talk about global warming because then people politicize it. Let's all agree on one thing. Pollution is bad, and no one wants to drink the water from Ohio after the accident recently. So the point is, pollution is hazardous and harmful for us, killing the microbiome of the soil and our bodies.

And we can't get the nutrients, as you said. I know I went off on a tangent. You were talking about the body's most important mineral, magnesium. It is used in over 1,800 enzymatic processes in the body. It is incredibly important, but we can't get it from nature anymore because of pollution. So, I went off on a tangent, but it's relevant because we can't be naive. We have to take the wool off our eyes and realize that our lives are under the constant stress of the pollution surrounding us and that stress is killing the body's microbiome. So we have to be proactive in supporting our body's microbiome because it's under constant stress from everything around us. Okay. Back to you, sorry. I got on my soapbox. Okay, I'm getting off.

[0:45:06.5] Dr. William Davis: But I couldn't agree more. You are right. It's a scary world out there. But with this idea, rather than treating things, we will address the factors that allowed diseases to emerge. There are more than four, but the four that played significant roles are magnesium, iodine, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamin D. Now, the great thing is, you combine those four and also throw in the diet, and you reverse this very fundamental processes of insulin resistance and inflammation. Those processes lead to obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and stroke. So you've addressed the wide swath of human disease just by doing that. As you know, we all should go to the microbiome, the gathering, and testing microbiome, because what's happened with a lot of people is overexposure to antibiotics, toxic heavy metals, industrial compounds, chlorinated drinking water, and other prescription drugs like stomach acid-blocking drugs, statin cholesterol drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, food additives like preservatives. They kill microbes and food and then you.

The mucus barrier is very important. Many food additives disrupt the mucus barrier, like ice cream's mixing agent polysorbate 80. And so this onslaught of things that disrupt the human microbiome, among the effect is that we lost literally hundreds of healthy species that were doing good things for us. One of the effects that I think should be discussed more and that we have to start talking a lot more about is that healthy microbes keep unhealthy microbes at bay. Those unhealthy microbes, like E. coli, salmonella, and campylobacter, are mostly fecal. Many people recognize those microbes because they are also the microbes of food poisoning. These microbes proliferate, and then they do something extraordinary. They ascend into the 24 ft of the small intestine, and the small intestine is not well adapted to having fecal microbes. It has a thin and fragile mucus layer protecting itself, unlike the colon, where microbes are supposed to be, which has a two-layer and much thicker mucus barrier. So fecal microbes make their way into the 24 feet of the small intestine. They only live for a few hours. So when they die, trillions of these microbes shed their by-products. But there's one that's really bad, called endotoxin, which can penetrate the mucus barrier to the intestinal wall and enter the bloodstream. When endotoxin enters the bloodstream, it is called endotoxemia.

But that is the crucial process that has been corroborated numerous times in clinical studies. Now we understand how microbes in the gastrointestinal tract can be experienced as depression in the brain, Parkinson's disease or Lou Gehrig's Disease or Alzheimer's, dementia, muscle and joint aches of fibromyalgia, or rheumatoid arthritis, or skin conditions like rosacea or psoriasis, or metabolic conditions, like fatty liver, Type 2 diabetes, and obesity. In other words, we now understand that microbes in the GI tract play a role in virtually all common chronic modern diseases.

[0:48:51.0] Ashley James: How would we know if we're over-toxic with endotoxemia? How would we know that we have endotoxemia? You've mentioned a bunch of different things. But if someone wonders if their depression is endotoxemia, would you say go for a lab test, or are there easier ways of telling?

[0:49:13.7] Dr. William Davis: There are a number of ways. One way is to look for what I call telltale signs. Telltale signs would be food intolerances. If you say you can't eat eggplant or other nightshades or histamine-containing food like cheese or wine, or legumes or nuts, maybe not a hundred percent but close to 100% of food intolerance, all these things modern people are experiencing that your grandmother's not. Those are all from this process. So it's called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). And that's the price that causes a high level of endotoxemia. So if you have any food intolerance, think plain SIBO. If you have fat malabsorption, you see fat drops in the toilet. That's a very high likelihood of SIBO and endotoxemia. So if you have certain conditions that are virtually synonymous with SIBO and endotoxemia, such as restless leg syndrome, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's disease, celiac disease, and autoimmune or neurodegenerative condition, or fatty liver, there's a very high likelihood.

At first, I thought this was a rare process until I did two things. One is a consumer device now, and it's called the AIRE. It came out in 2018 and was invented by a Ph.D. engineer in Dublin, Ireland because his wife had irritable bowel syndrome and she was told to go on a low FODMAP diet. When you limit fibers and sugar in a person with IBS, they have less bloating and diarrhea. We saw how often she got tripped up when exposed to something fibrous or sugars and had bloating, diarrhea, etc. So he invented this device to detect hydrogen gas on the breath because that's produced by microbes when they are fed fibers and sugars. Well, I got a hold of this thing. I called him and said, “Angus, that's not really what this thing is.” This is a mapping device to tell you where microbes are living in the gastrointestinal tract. There is a specific way to use it based on timing. That's all on my Super Gut book on my website https://drdavisinfinitehealth.com. It's about $150 to $200, so it's not cheap, but it's far cheaper than a test you can do in the lab or clinic using a similar technology. The AIRE device is superior to the lab or clinic version because you're blowing directly into the hydrogen gas detector with the AIRE device. When you do this in a clinic or lab, you blow breath into a vial, trying to capture the smallest molecule of hydrogen gas. It's very easy to escape. So the AIRE device is superior.

I started having people test for hydrogen gas using this timing issue. What you do is get a baseline level of 0 to 10, and you have a horizon of 4 units. So you get a baseline level. Let's say it's 1.2. You eat something that microbes eat, like inulin powder, which is a good one. It's a prebiotic fiber you put in your coffee. So drink your coffee with inulin and test every 30 to 45 minutes. And if you have a rise, let's say at 45 minutes it is 9.8, then you have microbes that are way high up in your GI tract. Producing hydrogen gas is normal from the colon, but the colon is 24 ft down or more from your mouth. It can't make that 24 feet in 90 minutes or 45 minutes. So any positive reading before 90 minutes, you know microbes live in the upper GI tract. After 90 minutes, we can't tell the difference between the distal small bowel disruption of microbes and colonic microbes. But doing this test, I was shocked. It was the exception of those who tested negative. People were testing positive left and right. So I returned to the scientific literature of all the studies where they took some conditions and asked what proportion of people with this condition tested positive for SIBO. One easy example is a fatty liver. So in the US, with 330 million people, we know that 50% of the US have fatty liver and are on their way to cirrhosis.

Based on the published science, 50% of people with fatty liver have tested positive for SIBO. So if there are 330 million people, half have fatty liver. That's 160 million or so. That's 80 million people there alone. How about irritable bowel syndrome? We know 60 to 70 million people in the US have irritable bowel syndrome. A proportion tested positive for SIBO. It varies from study to study, but it's around 40% or 24 million people. Add up all those other conditions like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, autoimmune conditions, and neurodegenerative conditions, and you have over 150 million people. There's some overlap, of course. How about an obese Type 2 diabetic with fatty liver? There will be some overlap, so it's not an exact number. But you can see, you can get very high numbers very quickly. So the bottom line is it is common. It is, in fact, very common by my estimates. It's somewhere around 1 and 2 people, 50%.

[0:55:00.3] Ashley James: You know, when we look at labs, there are these ranges that say if it's normal. And I question normal, especially hearing what you've just shared because normal doesn't really indicate healthy. We understand what a healthy range is. But naturopathic physicians will look at labs differently than how MDs have been taught in school. And it's interesting because there's normal, which is like, okay, so what's the average population? The average population is in this range. Well, I don't want to be part of the average population, especially if most have endotoxemia. And then, in the naturopathic realm, they typically look up what is optimal when they're looking at lab ranges. They're looking for how to get you to be absolutely in the optimal range. It doesn't sound like optimal is common among Americans. We're talking about Americans, but many other countries are catching up with America regarding our diseased state. 70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication, so we have a very sick nation. We as a nation spend the absolute most on health care. I laugh, calling it health care because it's disease management. Of course, you wrote a book about how the medical system is failing us. So we have to learn, and that's why we're here. We're learning from you so that we can take charge of our health. If most of the population is so sick and has endotoxemia, that is not how we want it to be. We must make decisions to go against the norm to have optimal health. We have to do something different than what everyone else is doing to achieve optimal health.

Going back to the idea that endotoxemia comes from the small intestine, how much does a leaky gut play a role in this? Is the endotoxin being deposited into the small intestine? Is that traveling up into the small intestines because of our diet? Can you go upstream and help us understand what is causing that? Let's say we're super healthy people just doing healthy things. We're exercising or drinking clean water. We're trying to eat as healthily as possible. We're avoiding the polysorbate 80 and ice cream. We're avoiding drugs as much as possible and keep being as healthy as possible. And yet, endotoxemia still exists. So what is causing that to happen? What is causing it to travel up and then die in our small intestines and release the endotoxins to be absorbed into our body? What are we doing wrong?

[0:58:11.0] Dr. William Davis: So, all those factors we discussed disrupt the microbial composition of your GI tract, such as repeated antibiotics. It's not uncommon that by age 40, most people have taken 30 courses of antibiotics. Glyphosate and other herbicides, pesticides, carbonated drinking water, halogenated hydrocarbons — all those things conspire to kill off numerous microbes. That also hints at a solution here. So as you know, if you have SIBO and endotoxemia, that's 30 ft of trillions of microbes that don't belong in the small bowel. If you took a commercial probiotic, would it go away? No. You might reduce some of the symptoms of bloating or some of the diarrhea, but you'll still be left with 30 ft of fecal microbes. And so I asked a different question, a conventional solution. If the mainstream doctors even knew what it was, and most of the time, they'd say things like, “Did you consult doctor Google again, Ashley?” Or, “There's nothing wrong with you. Don't waste my time. There is no such thing.” All these silly answers because they're not keeping up with the science. That's always been true. It takes a generation for the current practicing physicians to catch up with the science. I know you, me, and your listeners are unwilling to wait twenty or thirty years. That's how long you must wait for John Q's primary care to catch up.

So I asked different questions. If SIBO was 30 feet of microbes, including 24 feet of the small intestine, what if we chose species we've lost that have two characteristics? One, they colonize the small intestine. That's where SIBO occurs and produces what is called bacteriocins. These are natural antibiotics effective against the species of SIBO, like E.coli and campylobacter. So I chose three. I chose a strain of Lactobacillus gasseri and Lactobacillus reuteri. Those two colonize the upper GI tract. Gasseri produces up to seven bacteriocins and reuteri up to four. I also threw in bacillus coagulants because it's got a good track record for eradicating irritable bowel syndrome. And by the way, it is the most delicious yogurt you'll ever make. We make yogurt from this, different from what you get in the grocery store. I regret calling it yogurt. It looks and smells like yogurt, but it's not yogurt. It is a fermentation vehicle. So we get these three microbes and co-ferment them together for 36 hours. It's a very unusual extended fermentation. That was a method I developed and we formed something called flow cytometry on the yogurt to count the microbes, and we get somewhere around three hundred billion microbes per half-cup serving.

And so these microbes that we've lost, used to colonize the upper GI tract and produce bacteriocins, are a big part of why we've got SIBO. Now, the good news is there is this anecdote of the forty or so people who made this SIBO yogurt. 90% now test negative by the AIRE device. Even the conventional antibiotic for SIBO, Xifaxan, is only about 50% to 60% effective. I had hoped and would have been thrilled with 50% effectiveness. I did not expect 90% effectiveness. Now we will do a formal clinical trial down the road to validate this. If I said the solution to SIBO is to take out your intestines or some awful thing like that, we better be damned confident of what's going on. But what if the solution is something akin to yogurt? And so I've drifted towards this kind of thinking. If you think you have SIBO, make the SIBO yogurt. This can sometimes happen with the reuteri yogurt. I suspect that's what happened in your instance when you got rid of some of the dark feelings, and your friend got rid of diarrhea. It was probably because of SIBO eradication, the reuteri upper GI colonization, and bacteriocin production. I have a microbiologist friend. Oddly, I just moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to suburban Chicago. But in this general area, especially in Wisconsin, there are numerous and the largest probiotic manufacturers in the world. It's because of the dairy industry and fermentation. But there's a microbiologist, and his name is Suresh. He told me that he sometimes uses Lactobacillus reuteri to clean his fermentation vats that they use to produce microbes. I said, “Really? Come on!” So I called another microbiologist friend, Dr. Raul Cano, from Cal Poly Tech, and said, “Hey Raul, Suresh says he cleans his fermentation vats with L. reuteri. Does that sound right to you?” He says, “Oh yeah.” That's how potent a micro reuteri is. Ironically, it's also extremely susceptible to common antibiotics like Amoxicillin. So if you took Amoxicillin, maybe 20 years ago, for an upper respiratory infection, it killed off your reuteri and some others. That opened the door for small intestine colonization and endotoxemia.

[1:03:36.5] Ashley James: To clarify, with the microbiologist using the L. reuteri to clean their devices, is it because it digests other bacteria or somehow fights them off? How does it effectively help to clean the devices?

[1:03:59.2] Dr. William Davis: The pharmaceutical industry constantly looks for new antibiotics. Do you know where they're discovering them? From microbes as bacteriocins. We don't have to get involved with the pharma people, but it tells you these bacteriocins are potent and specific for fecal microbes. So I think that's why we're seeing many people normalize their breath hydrogen gas. They wouldn't be that interesting if all they do is normalize your breath hydrogen gas. I'm also seeing that something normalized your hydrogen gas and then says something like, “I lost 73 lb in your program, but I hit a plateau. I could not lose the last 35 lbs. I now lost it.” Or, “I was a Type 2 diabetic. My hemoglobin A1C was 11.7, which is terrible. I did your program and dropped the 6.1%. Much better but not perfect, which is 5.0 % or less. I normalized my SIBO hydrogen gas. It's now 4.7%.” Or, “My rosacea is 80% better on the program, but it's not gone. I have occasional flare-ups. I got rid of the SIBO and endotoxemia.” I see case after case of residual health problems finally going away for good.

[1:05:21.6] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. So many listeners are in that spot where they hit a plateau. They'd cleaned up so much of their lives and got good results, and then that plateau happened. But it could be better. Especially the “Oh, I can't eat this, and I can't eat that. Now I can eat this.” And I know some people who can only breathe air. I have one friend who had to resort to the carnivore diet. She loves vegetables, but now she has just reverted to being unable to eat anything except meat. She really would love to be able to tolerate vegetables. I did get her to read your book. I know that she started off with making the cranberry juice ferments, and I need to talk to her and see how that went because I had sent her to you to start studying from you. Lactobacillus reuteri is like nature's version of an antibiotic, which will help clean up the area of an overgrowth of something we don't want.

[1:06:36.4] Dr. William Davis: Exactly! And it colonized the upper GI tract. In other words, it goes where the battle is waged in the small intestine and produces those bacteriocins. By the way, maybe your listeners want to know about that juice you're talking about. So I call that Saccharomyces boulardii sparkling juices. It's so easy. If someone's new to fermentation, it's a really easy and simple way to get introduced to it. You get some juice. Hopefully, it's real juice. It just can't have any preservatives like potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate. Nothing like that, just juice. Preferably a pulpy type juice like apple cider or mango. Empty one capsule of Florastor. It's a commercial probiotic and includes the fungus Saccharomyces boulardii. It is the cousin of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, used to make wine and beer. So empty one capsule, cap it, lightly agitate to mix, loosen the cap, and put it on your kitchen counter. In 24 hours, you're going to see it bubbling. It's producing vast amounts of carbon dioxide. So keep that cap loose because it can explode if you don't. At 48 hours, you have beautiful sparkling juice. The microbes have reduced sugar content by about half, but some sugar is still in it. So use small portions, no more than a quarter cup, several times daily. It's one of the most powerful things you can do to help rebuild a broken microbiome. If you must take a course of antibiotics, this juice is the best thing to protect your gastrointestinal microbiome from further damage.

[1:08:20.7] Ashley James: What I love about that is it so affordable because that one bottle of the Florastor will last you a lifetime. If you're making this juice with one capsule and then drinking small amounts throughout the day, you can use it for a long time. So many people spend $30 to $50 per bottle of probiotics and keep having to buy it every month. Whereas you teach us how to take it and then culture it so that we're only buying one bottle every six months and culturing it to way more than what was in that bottle. Like when we make Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt, we culture it so much.

[1:09:10.0] Dr. William Davis: Good point, Ashley. You're right. You save money because you make the next batch from a bit of the previous one. And you're exactly right. You can do this with probiotics also and save a ton of money. One of the things we need to know is there are ten different microbial species in your probiotic. Several batches, in relative proportions, are going to change. I generally tell people that when you're about seven, eight, nine, or ten batches in, start over again. So you go back to the start if you want to continue. Let's say you plant backyard zucchini, tomatoes, and cucumbers. We know that zucchinis are aggressive and will eventually take over the garden. It happened with microbes. They are competing with each other, and it's going to change relative proportions. So when you're several batches in, think about starting over again. But you're still saving a huge amount of money.

[1:10:07.2] Ashley James: Got it. I've been thinking about skin, knowing that bacteria live on it and that we used these antibacterial soaps in the past. Even things with fragrances can disrupt the microbiome. And now, I understand that our skin's microbiome is very delicate and really needed. Some women have acne that goes away by focusing on protecting the skin's microbiome. You mentioned the rosacea going away, but at the back of my mind, what about people with eczema and psoriasis? How does restoring the microbiome help them as well?

[1:10:54.7] Dr. William Davis: I urge people to start with the basics: diet and nutrients affecting insulin resistance and inflammation. That also plays a significant role in skin conditions. But you're right. SIBO, endotoxemia, and dysbiosis confined in the colon also play a role. If you have a condition like psoriasis or rosacea, what needs to be clarified is how much benefit there is to addressing the skin microbiome directly. There is some preliminary evidence that when you have a skin rash like eczema, there is an imbalance in the relative proportion of the normal skin inhabitant called staphylococcus epidermidis. And there's an increase in unhealthy microbe, staphylococcus aureus. We still need better information, but believing that you can restore staphylococcus epidermidis and other healthy microbes in the skin is tempting. It could further impact the skin rash.

[1:11:58.5] Ashley James: When we say that your skin is a reflection of your gut, and your skin is a reflection of what's going on inside you, and often we see that by removing gluten grains, the skin improves. Even with the Lactobacillus reuteri supporting a healthy gut microbiome, we see skin improvement, just like your studies showing that the dermal layer is increasing. We have an increase in collagen production. We see outward beauty, and there are anecdotal stories about women noticing wrinkles going away. We see the skin become more vibrant when our internal health becomes more vibrant. I don't want to look fifty when I'm fifty. I want to look super healthy because I worked hard on it.

Don't we all want to look super healthy on the outside when we're doing so much to be healthy on the inside? I want everyone to feel amazing inside and have that outward reflection. I don't think he was joking, but I got mistaken for being in my twenties at the bank the other day. He thought I was the daughter of my mother-in-law. He was shocked to hear my age, and I was on a high rest of the day. But I have also been doing a lot to be healthy for many years, and it's paying off. I see it in the mirror.

You talked in episode 476 about the women who noticed that they looked younger and more vibrant when they looked in the mirror after correcting their gut health and introducing Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt into their lives. I want to dig deeper into this. You have done some human clinical trials, and you were talking about something you invented that has Lactobacillus reuteri in it for the skin. Can we get into that?

[1:14:07.1] Dr. William Davis: Sure. Many ladies are making the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt, but they keep saying, “I'm sick and tired of making the yogurt. Do you have some way I can just buy it?” Or, “I'm traveling and don't want to bring my yogurt-making apparatus.” So I formulated a product that included Lactobacillus reuteri and added components like marine-sourced collagen hydrolysates and hyaluronic acid. That combination has been working very well for us. We had a preliminary trial, and we got very nice results. We did a formal clinical trial and did measures like high-resolution skin ultrasounds and did see improvement in dermal thickness as well as the investigator dermatologist and participant ratings on such things as moisture, glow, and luster.

We got very nice results and will continue to explore and validate all these kinds of effects, but I'm very encouraged by what we see in our preliminary trials. It is consistent with all the things seen in the mouse trials and other human evidence. So we're on the right track to providing a product called Gut to Glow that contains Lactobacillus reuteri with added components to stack the odds in favor of better skin.

We know from other people's science that there is much evidence that collagen peptides reduce skin wrinkles and make your joints better because joint cartilage is mostly collagen. There is good science to tell us that when you ingest collagen orally, it gets to the joints and the skin and the hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is the body's master moisturizer. So you take it orally, and it gets to the skin, moisturizes the skin dermal layer and not just the epidermis, like a topically applied hyaluronic acid, and it also adds to joint lubrication. I believe we're going to start seeing evidence that hyaluronic acid also has beneficial effects on the brain because the brain has a lot of hyaluronic acids, and so do the uterus, cervix, and vagina. Dryness is a problem for ladies in their late 60s and 70s. Hyaluronic acid is a major component of the female reproductive tract. So, we will have to validate these kinds of effects over time. But so far, even in preliminary evidence, we've had some very nice results.

[1:16:41.3I] Ashley James: While listening, I thought, is this a face cream? What's going on? So you've created a way to take it internally. It's a supplement, and we see results on the skin. But when you see the skin getting better, we also know it affects the skin on the inside, right? Because the lungs are related to skin tissue, the gut is related to skin tissue. They're very related to its use of collagen, and it won't affect the skin on the outside. It's going to also play a role in helping on the inside as well.

[1:17:25.6] Dr. William Davis: Absolutely. It is reuteri, after all. We use a different strain than the one that was used in the MIT studies, and we're validating how much this one microbe does. We did some animal work, and we're doing some human work with that strain. So much more must be explored, but we see very positive effects. So many more clinical trials are planned, all the way to budget. But we see some exciting early effects as you've experienced in your friend's experience and some of your listeners. So that's why I cringe to think how little we knew just a few years ago.

When you factor in all the effects of the microbiome, you know almost nothing about health. But it plays a huge role in all aspects of health. We are seeing big effects on many emotional and mental issues like anxiety. One of the biggest effects of endotoxemia is anxiety. Also, fungal overgrowth in the gastrointestinal tract is a common symptom of anxiety. I see people being prescribed Xanax and other anti-anxiety drugs when, a lot of the time, it's overgrowth either of bacteria or fungi or both. And we see dramatic reductions in anxiety. Not from the Gut to Glow. This is just addressing the overgrowth of bacteria and fungi. So we see dramatic effects on the reduction of anxiety and depression.

[1:19:00.5] Ashley James: Yeah, I know you have to be careful when formulating and selling a supplement to make medical claims. And I know you need to be very careful with your language. But we can look at the effect, what each ingredient is, how all the science around it, and the results you would get from it. And then, we can hope to get that same result by taking a supplement with those same ingredients. I'm excited to hear more about your clinical trials. Is there anything else you can share specifically about your clinical trials or upcoming projects you are working on around this?

[1:19:44.8] Dr. William Davis: I can't say everything until our patents are filed because of some intellectual property issues. One of the things we saw in our first human clinical trial was an unexpected dramatic change in body composition. So we're going to explore that. And I'll talk about that in the coming months or years as we surpass these patent protections. Suffice it to say that we have the capacity, I believe, or will in the future, dramatically affect the body shape.

[1:20:15.7] Ashley James: Wow, that is very cool. Please share your hypothesis around why you believe that effect happens.

[1:20:27.5] Dr. William Davis: I did design a very elaborate clinical trial. It won't get done for another six months because it's costly, and we will look at things like DEXA for body composition, baseline, and follow-up. So we can measure endotoxin; it's called LPS serum. I believe that we're going to see an improvement in insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is the fundamental process that drives risks for diabetes, heart disease, dementia, cancers, and other modern chronic conditions. If you can improve insulin resistance, you greatly impact that person's health. So we need to document if there is a change in insulin resistance. I think there will be, but we need to prove that. You know these very popular drugs, Wegovy and Ozempic, are called GLP-1 agonists because they reduce blood sugar. But you may have heard that people are scrambling for these drugs because they lead to weight loss also. They work because they're GLP-1 agonists. That's one thing we also have to explore. Do we have a GLP-1 agonist alternative? We have yet to find answers to many things, but we will explore clinical trials.

[1:21:49.5] Ashley James: That's so exciting. We need a listener who just won the lottery to just donate a million dollars. We need someone with just a few million dollars, and it's burning a hole in their pocket. If I won the lottery, I would be spending for some really cool clinical trials. I think it will be a lot of fun to fund holistic clinical trials that could help revolutionize the world and the whole planet as we know it. If we could introduce everyone to these seemingly simple aids, tools, and solutions, make the Florastor juice, or try some of the Lactobacillus reuteri to correct their gut and endotoxemia, many people would get off of anxiety and sleep meds. Many people would get off of antidepressants or antacids. Just think of all the things that people could correct.

This is something that a lot of my listeners know already, but maybe some don't, but every time we take a drug, it depletes the body of key nutrients because the liver and the kidneys have to process it, and it forces the body to do something. It forces a physiological effect. It's not gentle, and it's not natural. And so a lot of times, these drugs people take deplete the body further and further when the body was already depleted, to begin with. I see a world, my kind of Utopia, where everyone is so healthy they don't need drugs, or 90% fewer drugs because we're so healthy, we don't need them. Think about people with chronic pain.

You mentioned fibromyalgia. A friend had a morphine pump surgically installed in her body. That's how much pain she was in. This was fifteen years ago. She brought me into her bedroom and showed me her two drawers in her bedside table dresser. She opened both doors and said these are all my meds. And she goes, “Most of these are pain meds.” She was not overweight, ate very healthily, and she was in chronic pain all the time. And I heard about how certain key nutrient deficiencies can exacerbate and sometimes even trigger chronic pain. And so I got her some vitamins and minerals, especially selenium. There's been a link to low sodium levels leading toward exacerbating that chronic pain known as fibromyalgia. I preached to go gluten-free, but I don't know if she did. Within a few months of doing that, she told me, “You know, those two drawers, just with the changes, I got rid of one drawer.” Fifty percent of her meds were reduced in months by taking some minerals and vitamins. And maybe she did listen to me and got rid of the gluten.

If we can make that change. If we could just increase certain nutrients or correct the gut and someone could eliminate their meds by 50% or 75%, their quality of life is going up and up and up. So that's my vision for the world; to have the tools you teach in your books and on your website. And then now, I love you've created the Gut to Glow formula so that we can help people restore themselves from the inside to glow on the outside. So I get the marketing, and I like the name. It's simple, and it's catchy. I like it.

[1:25:56.6] Dr. William Davis: You make an excellent point, Ashley. That is the unintended adverse consequences of pharmaceuticals. Even drugs that people thought were benign, like stomach acid-blocking drugs, or statin cholesterol drugs, are now known to have very serious impacts on health and on the microbiome. So stomach acid-blocking drugs turn off stomach acid and allow oral microbes. The mouth is second only to the colon in the density of microbes. Think about that when you're kissing somebody. So when you lose stomach acids, oral microbes populate the stomach and duodenum, and fecal microbes ascend in the small bowel. This is all from just blocking stomach acid, likewise statin cholesterol drugs. Even if you're slender and young, it turns your gastrointestinal microbiome into the microbiome of an obese Type 2 diabetic. And that's the presumptive reason to explain why there's a 30% to 50% increase in your likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes when you take a statin cholesterol drug.

[1:27:02.9] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Yes, we did have a conversation in one of our interviews. It might have been the first interview we did about statins. Because I get on my soapbox with them on how absolutely horrible they are for our health, and the benefits are so minuscule in relation to the horrible effects of statins, and you were able to outline that. What people don't understand is that it harms the liver. It makes the liver not produce the cholesterol our body's trying to produce, and it doesn't actually correct. Heart disease isn't caused by the cholesterol. Cholesterol is wrapped up like smoke. You see smoke in anything and call that there must be a fire. It's like smoke is causing the fire, right? It's the other way around. There's inflammation. There's our whole lifestyle that's leading to that disease. Taking a statin is just going to disrupt so many functions. Everyone thinks that they need to lower LDL. With your background, what is the best way to help the body lower LDL cholesterol, have good healthy cholesterol, and be free of heart disease?

[1:28:27.5] Dr. William Davis: I tell people to get a big black magic marker, cross out those numbers, and ignore them. There is a lot there to talk about. But the real tragedy of focusing on cholesterol is that it took everybody's attention away from the real causes of heart disease. You're exactly right. Statin cholesterol drugs reduce cardiovascular events in a very minor way. They help a little bit, but what about all the other causes you mentioned, like insulin resistance, inflammation, vitamin D deficiency, omega-3 fatty acid deficiency, and endotoxemia? Those are all very important causes that any cardiologist hardly ever mentions. So, what I do is throw away cholesterol testing. We do the real test, which is lipoprotein testing, like an NMR Lipoprotein testing. We measure insulin resistance, like fasting glucose, insulin, and hemoglobin A1C. We look at your vitamin D status with the 25-hydroxy vitamin D. We look at your thyroid status with TSH, T3, T4, and Reverse T3 thyroid antibodies.

You can add other things, but if you just do those basic tests, you will see that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. In the 1950s and 1960s, cholesterol was meant to be an indirect marker for the factors, like lipoproteins which are the fat-carrying proteins in the bloodstream, that actually cause heart disease. During those times, it was very difficult to measure lipoprotein. So they devised very crude indirect methods to quantify them, and they said, measure cholesterol. It was not meant to be the cause. It was meant to be an indirect marker. But it became viewed as the cause because it makes a lot of money for the pharmaceutical industry. When you focus on cholesterol, this outdated house of cards, you start to come away with false lessons. That's why 80 million Americans take statin cholesterol drugs, but there's been no reduction in heart disease incidence. And that's why your local hospital can add on a hundred million dollar new cardiovascular wing because heart disease remains hospitals' number one money maker. So the dirty little secret is my colleagues like that there continue to be lots of heart disease because they're not focusing on the real causes. The truth of it is, managing cardiovascular risk is easy and almost free and does not require a drug in 99.9% of people.

[1:31:03.5] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much for clarifying that because our friends and family need to hear this. The second you go to a hospital, you go to your doctor, and you're over a certain age, they automatically want to put you on a cholesterol med. I feel the pharmaceutical industry sends those doctors to Jamaica once a year or something, there's got to be some kind of incentive because of how prolific it is. It depletes the body of CoQ10, and it bruises the liver, which produces healthy cholesterol. People end up with neuropathy, and they're falling down, breaking their hip or whatever, because they're not able to feel. I have an uncle who can't feel his hands and feet and has not been able to feel them for years. He's been on statins for years, and I've been begging him to please get off them. And he's like, “No, my doctor is smarter and knows what he's doing.” Then he just falls down all the time because he can't feel his hands or feet. It's the neuropathy from taking the statins, and it's just mind-blowing. Everyone is just keeping the wool over their eyes. “Nope, my doctor knows what they're doing. I'm not going to question anything. I don't want to be accused of listening to Dr. Google.” It's like, “Advocate for yourself.” This is a for-profit industry, right? Like, people question the dealership more when they're buying a car than they do their doctor when they are being put on a drug.

[1:32:26.8] Dr. William Davis: Very true. That's a critical thing to understand. It is exactly a profit-making venture. Sadly, it shouldn't be that way. But what's put first in the healthcare system is revenue and profit; it's not health.

[1:32:45.4] Ashley James: So I know we've got a bunch of black sheep salmon swimming upstream, kind of listeners who are ready and willing to do what it takes to regain their health. But our friends and family love their statins, and the damage has been done. And, of course, all the drugs people take also disrupt the microbiome. Because it affects the mitochondria, we're really just only beginning to understand everything. I feel like a hundred years from now, we'll look back and look at these drugs like we do now, when we look at leeches and end up bleeding the body. Like in the 1500s and 1700s when bloodletting was all the rage, and now it's like drugs are all the rage. In a hundred years, it's definitely going to be microbiome-based medicine. That's for sure.

I see that we're going into an era where we will be using light as therapy and phototherapy, and we will be using the microbiome and supporting using different healthy bacterial strains to balance the body. Especially if you can take one and increase your collagen. It's amazing that you can make your skin beautiful. How long do people start to notice a difference in their skin? That must take time. Like when you take certain supplements for hair, skin, and nails, it's not right away because the body is doing triage work on the inside. And then maybe three months down the road, you start noticing better hair, skin, and nails when you're taking those kinds of supplements with niacin and the different biotin in those kinds of things. But how long do people see results when they take the Gut to Glow formula?

[1:34:26.4] Dr. William Davis: We've seen subtle changes at four weeks that become more marked at eight and then twelve weeks of the fine, low volume wrinkles like crow's feet around the eyes, and the smile line. Those tend to recede visibly by twelve weeks. The deeper wrinkles, like nasolabial fold along the sides of the mouth, the big ones, or the forehead wrinkles, those require more volume, so we don't know. Our clinical trials have only gone to twelve weeks or three months. We don't know just how much you can expect long-term, but I predict that they'll have an effect longer-term. But we're seeing an introduction to fine wrinkles at twelve weeks, increasing skin moisture so much that they are telling us they don't need to use as much moisturizer on the face and hands anymore, and there's a kind of glow. I think that's the increase in sebum, which is the moisturizer of the skin. That's among the earliest effects. The increased moisture can happen within days, visibly by four weeks, but more so by eight to twelve weeks.

[1:35:30.4] Ashley James: You've mentioned the other areas for females, like vaginal dryness when we age. Are women noticing that by taking this, they're noticing they're less dry in other areas?

[1:35:44.6] Dr. William Davis: We haven't looked at that in our clinical trials because it wasn't among the endpoints we're looking at. Every week, I have a two-way Zoom. Like last night, I did it for two hours with ninety-eight people. I casually asked them, are you experiencing an increase in vaginal moisture? Let's talk about this for a moment. As ladies get older, through menopause, particularly in their late 60s and 70s, it becomes universal that a woman will experience what the gynecologists now label as the genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM). The three facets are loss of libido, vaginal atrophy, dryness, irritation, discharge and pain, and urinary complaints like urge incontinence. You pee when you cry, cough, or repeated urinary tract infections. So it's lost libido, vaginal atrophy, and urinary problems.

I believe we can address the whole thing, but that's another formulation I created. I can't tell you fully. I'll probably talk about that when I'm back within the next year.

[1:36:51.5] Ashley James: Well, come back in a year and update us.

[1:36:56.0] Dr. William Davis: But I will tell you, I think the reuteri may be key here. So we have no clue or data. I'm going by what is known from some other people's science that the reuteri, I believe, is a key component for ladies to regain vaginal moisture. And it doesn't hurt to throw in hyaluronic acid because the cervix and vagina are largely hyaluronic acids.

[1:37:21.7] Ashley James: Love it. Well, I can't wait to hear about stuff happening in the next year. We'll definitely have you back on with this. We should do an annual meet-up over the minds and hear all the updates.

[1:37:35.5] Dr. William Davis: I'd be happy to, Ashley.

[1:37:36.3] Ashley James: I will start hunting for a millionaire to invest in more trials for you. I'll let you know when I find one. I'm sure there's one out there that is excited as me and wants to get where these clinical trials are going. That would be fun.

When we talked about making the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt, you were clear that it needs to be made with something that contains fat. And I remember looking around, going at plant-based options. I need to make sure there's something really fatty, so I came upon cashew yogurt. It works really well with the cashew

[1:38:12.7] Dr. William Davis: I'd love to see your recipe, by the way.

[1:38:13.4] Ashley James: I will gladly share it. It's amazing and so delicious. As I said, I've made over thirty batches, so I played with and perfected it. I make it thick, like Greek yogurt. I tried coconut yogurt with coconut cream. Honestly, it was disgusting. The soy one was even worse, but I got the results. I felt it was the worst thing I've ever eaten/drank. It was like liquid, so I just drank it. It was the worst-tasting thing ever, but I was willing to do it because I felt amazing. But now I've perfected the cashew yogurt. It's thick, like Greek yogurt. It's so delicious, I'm actually salivating right now thinking about it.

But when you said it's really important that we make Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt with a fat component, that surprised me. I guess it shouldn't surprise me, but it does because I always think we need carbohydrates when we ferment. So to hear that, we got to make sure that there's some fat in this, and for me, it's a plant-based fat coming from cashews. But, can you explain why a Lactobacillus reuteri or why this particular formula requires us, when we take or ingest it, to have fat?

[1:39:37.5] Dr. William Davis: I think what's confusing is, most yogurt is low-fat or nonfat. I reject the whole notion that we should limit fat, and so I use organic half and half, which is 18% fat because I think we should get that. Dairy's got tissues, but the most beneficial component of dairy is the fat, ironically. So it's just part of my rejection of the low-fat notion. But you actually don't need fat. You can ferment, for instance, salsa which is very low in fat. Hummus is also a good vehicle. I've never done the cashew, so I'm dying to see your recipe. People always ask, “I don't want to do dairy. What else can I do?” I've been suggesting coconut milk, which makes an okay yogurt.

[1:40:24.0] Ashley James: It's gross. I'll share mine. You'll love it. It's delicious. You'll want to do it instead of cow milk. Does the body need to have fat to utilize Lactobacillus reuteri, or is it just because you see fat as a healthy component of our diets that we shouldn't shy away from it?

[1:40:52.3] Dr. William Davis: As you pointed out, the microbe just needs some kind of either fiber or sugar. It doesn't really need the fat. But you need fat. A total of forty years of this ridiculous experiment in cutting total fat and saturated fat to show us how harmful that is, in some ways, I'm grateful that the government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry screwed up so badly because it shows us what happens. Because we now have an epidemic of unhealthy humans — obese, diabetic, with autoimmune diseases, and greater cognitive impairment all because of misguided dietary advice, absurd pharmaceuticals, and a predatory food system.

[1:41:43.4] Ashley James: Oh, that's so well put. I was just explaining the predatory food system the other day. I do it all the time, but the other day I was talking to a personal trainer who's super into health, and he said, “Yeah, I can't get my kid to stop eating Doritos.” I'm like, “Wait for a second, you have Doritos in your house?” And so, I had to back up in a super loving way. Just something to understand, if any food comes from a manufacturer, that company has hired food scientists to make it hyper-palatable and to tickle your brain as cocaine does. If it comes out of a package, every single company has figured out exactly how much salt, monosodium glutamate, red dye, how much of everything it takes to light your brain scan up, like the Fourth of July, so that you will keep eating their gross excuse for food. We're addicted as a world to these processed foods that are highly Frankenfoods. But they light up our brains and make us feel good, and we think, “Oh, we feel good. We got to keep eating this.”

And as Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, cocaine can make you feel good too, but it's not good for you. So stop thinking that food that makes you feel good is good for you and focus on foods that don't come from manufacturers but from a farm. Eat food that comes from a farm, not a manufacturer, and you'll be doing so much better with your health. I had a food scientist on the show, and she explained that crazy world behind the scenes of how they will look at brain scans. This is like the company that makes these things like Doritos. They will do these neuro studies on exactly how much of each of these ingredients they need to put in to make you as addicted as possible, to make the dopamine go up as much. So we got to be really careful. And then how much do all those chemicals affect the gut microbiome? Whatever we eat is not only feeding ourselves, but it's feeding the bacteria in our guts. You have to be careful because what you feed in your gut is what you're going to get in your life.

[1:44:03.6] Dr. William Davis: I couldn't agree more, Ashley. Modern processed food is a disaster.

[1:44:10.8] Ashley James: I'm spinning thinking about the possibilities. So in your book, there are many other things to look for. I love that you have this table of different strains of bacteria, and it's almost like you're looking at a pharmacy for your gut. If these are your symptoms, you go for this. If this is your problem, then start with this. Athletes can take a different probiotic for this function. I'm thinking about kids because kids don't necessarily need Lactobacillus reuteri. Maybe they do, but can kids benefit from taking Gut to Glow? Or is there a different strain that would be better for them? Or maybe tell me who would benefit most from taking the Gut to Glow formula with the Lactobacillus reuteri in it?

[1:45:13.0] Dr. William Davis: I look at the Gut to Glow as a convenience for someone who doesn't want to make the yogurt and wants a better skin effect because of the added components or does something like travel and doesn't want to bring their yogurt-making apparatus. But there's another question here. Who needs reuteri? The only group I think that should not do the yogurt as written are pregnant ladies because when you approach the two weeks or so prior to delivery, the density of oxytocin receptors goes up to a hundredfold in the uterus in preparation for delivery. That's why, say you want to deliver your child on Wednesday, August 23rd at 8 a.m., you're instructed to come to the hospital, and they put an IV, and they give you the oxytocin injection, and it causes uterine contraction. So it's probably not wise to get that super duper high counts of reuteri, and thereby presumptively oxytocin in a pregnant woman.

But when you think about it, if all primitive humans have reuteri, if all mammals have it and we're the exception, and by the way, there is evidence to show us that only forty years ago, the majority of people had reuteri. Now almost nobody has it. So I think having it is good for everybody, even a pregnant woman. What I don't know is the three hundred or so billion microbes in the yogurt for a half-cup serving. Is that advisable? Probably not. And so what I tell ladies who are pregnant or of childbearing age, or children, is you can make the yogurt, but do a mixed culture yogurt. Think about if all you grew in your 10×10 backyard garden are tomatoes, you can have a lot of tomatoes. What if you grew tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and squash, how many tomatoes will you have? You have far fewer. So you can do a mixed-culture yogurt. One easy trick is to start with your reuteri. You can start with capsules or tablets, or you can get some reuteri yogurt from someone else or probably a batch of your own, and then get a commercial yogurt with four or five other microbes and mix them together. So you have maybe four or five or six different microbes, and you won't get those super duper high counts that are perfectly safe for kids or for a pregnant lady.

[1:47:55.6] Ashley James: Oh, that's brilliant. Now I have noticed since I've been eating it for the last year that I can eat it for a few days and feel the effects for weeks. I feel most of that euphoria, and then I feel it slowly drop off, and then I eat some more. So I don't eat it every day now. I used to, but now I wanted to see how long this lasts. And it does last. I feel like it lasts for a few weeks, and then it drops off. We talked a little bit about this. I want to know if there's any more science that you follow up on all the recent studies around it. Have we figured out, or are we any closer to figuring out how to repopulate the gut with Lactobacillus reuteri so that it sustains itself?

[1:48:49.0] Dr. William Davis: It's a fundamental question. It's a very critical question that we don't have an answer to. So if mom gave you reuteri by passage through the birth canal and breastfeeding and barring exposure to things like antibiotics, you will carry that microbe for a lifetime. But if you get it from yogurt or a capsule, you get it for a few weeks at best. What's the difference? Microbes live in communities, just like humans do. In other words, we don't live by ourselves. We have partners, families, co-workers, neighbors, and communities. Microbes are the same, though it is called guilds or consortiums in the microbe world. We don't know yet who else is supposed to be in the reuteri guild or consortium. So I think the probiotic of the future, or the way we'll do it in the future is reuteri with maybe seven other species that are required, for reuteri to take up permanent residence. So you can take that capsule for maybe a week, and you'll have it for a lifetime. But so far, no one's worked out the details.

[1:49:54.3] Ashley James: I was fascinated to learn that there's a type of bacteria that's very common in the gut that digests and eats candida. Candida is its food. Candida is needed in the body, but 90% less than everyone actually has it. It's food for these bacteria. It made me think; so, when your body is imbalanced, your little bit of candida, which is the food that's growing like grass for cows. It's like the grass growing in your body to feed this bacteria that's really healthy for us. And it made me think maybe that Lactobacillus reuteri is supposed to eat and digest something and it's missing also. Like there's this wonderful colony, like the microbe guild that that lives together that feeds each other and balances each other out and protects each other.

And we've really messed ourselves up in the last generation. From my grandma to where we are now, we've just been messing up the entire human race by wiping out so much of our microbiome. I wish I had a time machine and could go a hundred years in the future and see what kind of advancement in understanding how we can restore the gut. But I can't wait for the day that the labs figure out what's the perfect balance for that microbe guild so that we could really get a leg up. But you're on the right track with teaching us how to ferment and bring it into our bodies within food in such a natural way.

I really feel like you, out of all the doctors out there, have your finger on the pulse of restoring the gut and thus cascade effect of restoring the whole body. So thank you so much for everything you do. I love your work and I love your books. You're so easy to learn from. Like I told you many years ago, just discovering your work was so cathartic for me because finally, it's validation. I'm on the right track with removing these grains from my life and seeing such a positive result. That brings me to one of my last points, which is that some people say, “Well, I don't feel a difference when I removed wheat. So, therefore, I'm not allergic to it. I don't have to remove it.” And I think that that's a misnomer for a lot of people if you don't do an air quotes here, but like feel a difference. I don't think that you're supposed to feel how good an apple is for you when you eat an apple. I'm studying the nutritional aspects of how that pectin is helping you and all the things that are feeding in your gut. You don't feel it. It's not an emotion, just like stress is an emotion, but you could die from too much stress, right? So you don't necessarily feel the body. I am definitely noticing for me the feeling of oxytocin and feeling balancing for me, but some people don't feel anything. Like with changing their diet, they don't feel it at first. But can you give us some hope and some encouragement and say how long should someone sick and going grain-free, for example, or removing the gluten grains, or trying Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. Is this something like, giving it a shot for three months, and then measure some noticeable outcomes? Can you give us some some hope because so many people will try something for a few weeks and say, “I didn't feel a difference.” So then they just stopped.

[1:53:46.5] Dr. William Davis: You're right. There's a mixture of perceived benefits, but there's also a lot of unperceived benefits that occur below the surface. So, for instance, my whole thinking on wheat and grains began to start when I took wheat and grains out of the diet because people had heart disease. By the way, this was born out of fifty-five clinical trials. This is not just some anecdote. What I saw on people with coronary disease is that the most common cause for coronary disease, heart attacks, angina, and sudden cardiac death, is an excess of small LDL particles and not LDL cholesterol, that crude indirect marker, but the actual lipoprotein particles themselves or small LDL particles. These are small particles are not recognized by the liver and so they persist in the bloodstream for 5 to 7 days compared to large LDL particles that lasts for 24 hours. Small LDL is much more prone to oxidation, much more prone to cause inflammation when it gets access into the wall of an artery. In other words, the small LDL is this little evil thing, perfectly crafted to cause heart disease.

When you eat one bagel or slice of pizza, you've got oodles of small LDL for a week. There's no way for you to tell that. You have to do an NMR lipoproten analysis to find that out. So that's one example of the many non-perceived effects of consuming grains. When you stop eating wheat, grains and sugars, and small LDL drops from say, 2000 volume to 0, you won't be able to tell that. Likewise, if your blood sugar drops from a pre-diabetic range to the normal or ideal range, you can't tell that either. If you're exposed to the gliadin protein of wheat that increases intestinal permeability in everybody, not just celiac people, and thereby increases endotoxemia and raises blood sugar and blood pressure and plays with your moods, anxiety, depression. You might not be aware of that. You might not believe that that was due to the fact that once you stop eating grains, a lot of those effects go away. So, there's a lot of things that happen that people don't understand and don't recognize that it's being due to the grain consumption or lack of reuteri or whatever. So, I think it's a mistake to say, “I don't feel any different. Therefore it must not be doing good for me.” Because you'd have to do a more deep exploration to understand the full impact.

[1:56:24.1] Ashley James: Got it. And so it's better to just take the science, take what you've shared and just go with it. Make those changes and give it time instead of judging it too quickly. Because you don't necessarily feel all those physiological changes. But eventually, down the line, people notice their body composition changing. People notice those inches going off. Sometimes you don't see pounds going off but you see inches go off. Sometimes it's just the body shifting and you just give it time. I feel so good off gluten and off those grains. I feel so good with Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. For me it's fantastic. And I'm so happy that you formulated this Gut to Glow because there are people out there, like you said, who can't make the yogurt for whatever reason. Their life is super crazy and busy or they're traveling, and they just want to keep getting the benefits of it.

So you've produced something that's going to help everyone, men and women alike. I think men like the effects of looking good too. But also you said, it helps joints there with the known ingredients that help joints. So overall, everything's good. I want to have you back a year from now or less when you've got these studies and these other things that you're working on down the road. Any other projects you can share with us? You're so busy. I was curious to know if you have ideas for the next book, but I know you're really focusing on this. So, is there anything else, any other projects that are in the pipeline?

[1:58:11.0] Dr. William Davis: I'm thinking about a number of things. One of the things that's changing my life is the fact that people like you and me, other podcasters, YouTubers, and bloggers, have all been blacklisted by major media. I believe it's because the big pharma pump so much money into media. That if you write a book on health and nutrition, you can't get on TV anymore. And so that hurts book sales, of course. I've even had publishers say to me, “You know, if we can't make money publishing books on health, maybe we won't publish books on health.” That's the impact that the pharmaceutical industry has had. So what does that mean for the future of books or other things?

By the way, I'm so appreciative of what you're doing and other podcasters and bloggers. Because if we're all, not just me, blacklisted from major media, how do we get the word of truth out to the people? That's what you're doing. So that's why I support what you're doing, because we have to get this word out to people. So does that mean if you want to write a book on health, do you have to not use a title that suggests about it? I've been playing with that idea. It's still a lot of fun writing books and get your message out and it's a great way to learn something; to sit back in your chair and read about some new ideas because it's not going to come from the doctor. We all know that the last person to consult on health is the doctor. I'm talking about mainstream doctors. The naturopaths, chiropractors, and functional medicine doctors do get it, but the John Q mainstream doctor does not understand it. So how do we get that message out? So, I'm thinking about several books, but we got to somehow work around this off of blacklisting process.

[1:59:57.7] Ashley James: Okay. I've got a title for you; Wink, Wink. This is definitely not a health book. Just make the title Wink, Wink, and have you winking in a lab coat with a stethoscope. That's the next book, and then I'll write your foreword or something. I love it. Well, I'm going to make sure I share my cashew yogurt with you which is super delicious.

[2:00:27.4] Dr. William Davis: I'll give proper credit.

[2:00:29.9] Ashley James: Oh, fantastic. I love it. It's a win-win for everyone. You know, I played around and did some batches with adding other strains that are in your book and it was fun doing that. So not just L. reuteri but also playing around with the other strains and I highly recommend that listeners go and check out everything that Dr. Davis has written and done in his website. Of course, the links to everything is going to be in the show notes with today's podcast of learntruehealth.com. We're going to make sure that we link the Gut to Glow formula so that listeners can get it. And all the links there, including all the books is going to be there in the show notes and in the description of this episode, wherever you're listening from. If you're listening on your Apple podcast or Spotify, Rumble Library, or wherever you're listening from in all the alternative spaces that we're on as well, just look in the show notes in the podcast app and you'll find all the links. I'm going to make sure they're all there.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was so great chatting with you and I'm just such a huge fan of all your work. Thank you for being so approachable and so open and willing to educate us. The root word for doctors is “docere”, which means teacher. That surprises people because our experience is like the old school teacher that would slap you with a ruler; the very not approachable teacher. That's like going to the doctor. You are I think what they meant when they came up with the word “doctor”, the “docere” and the idea of teaching us health. And that's why my podcast is called Learn True Health. As doctors, you're here to teach us, achieve it, find it and create your health. So thank you so much for being such an advocate for us to gain our true health. I so appreciate what you do. I can't wait to have you back on the show.

[2:02:29.1] Dr. William Davis: Thank you, Ashley. Anytime. It's my pleasure.

[2:02:32.7] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today's episode with Dr. William Davis. He's amazing. I love him. If you want my Lactobacillus reuteri cashew yogurt, delicious recipe, please go to learntruehealth.com and you'll find it there. It's also in the show notes of today's podcast. You can also go to the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you'll see the recipe there, along with comments and conversations in the group with other listeners. You don't have to make it out of the oven cashews. You can make it out of other ingredients. And if you want to discuss that, you can jump into the larger Learn True Health Facebook group. And we can chat about other methods to make the Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. Or if you just want to get the benefits, do it without having to make two yogurt.

Definitely check out Dr. William Davis', Lactobacillus reuteri supplement, which he calls Gut to Glow. You could go to learntruehealth.com/glow and use coupon code LTH10 for 10% off your first order or 15% off your subscription with coupon code LTH15. You can book a session with me to chat about the amazing phototherapy patches if you want to increase your body's glutathione production, stem cells, balance your sex hormones, your stress hormones, your thyroid regrow joints, arthritis, lowering inflammation of bone density, increase bone density. People are seeing wear and tear on their body. There are studies showing that this increases bone density. People are getting out of osteopenia and out of osteoporosis, and increasing muscle mass and endurance. People are having an amazing experience. I am especially loving it. I'm loving the amount of energy. I feel like I'm a seven-year-old again. I've tapped into this never-ending deep well of energy. I've been enviously looking at kids for the last seven years wishing I had that abundant energy, and now I do. That's from the phototherapy patches.

If you want to try that too, let's jump on a call together. I'd love to talk to you. Go to learntruehealth.com and up in the menu, you can find where it says Work with Ashley James. Sign up for a free phone call with me to discuss the phototherapy patches. You can also email me at support@learntruehealth.com. Connect with me on Facebook, but it's best if we talked and you jump on a phone call with me. Book a session to chat about it so I can help you specifically pick out the right patches for you based on your health goals.

Awesome. Well, thank you for listening and watch out for our next episode. Episode 500 is around the corner and soon will be filled with beautiful testimonials and stories of success from our listeners who have been impacted by the Learn True Health podcast. If you have a testimonial and you'd love for me to share with the listeners any kind of positive impact that my podcast or my guests have had a difference in your life, please send it to me. There's still time to submit your testimony, as you can submit an audio testimonial, a video testimonial. Just turn it into it audio or you can email me one and I'll read your testimony on. You can put it in the Facebook group. You can email it to me at support@learntruehealth.com and I'd love to hear from you.

Have yourselves a fantastic rest of your day, and I just want you to know I love you so much and I appreciate you so much, and I want you to feel your best. I want you to be as absolutely optimally healthy as you can be every day, building up, healthier and healthier and healthier. That's what I want for you, and for me too. So, we're all building healthier bodies. We're not aging, or we're not going downwards. We're going upwards. We are building ourselves up at any age. We have so much absolute potential at any age to build healthier bodies. And that's what I want for you, and we're doing it together. So thank you for sharing these podcast episodes with those you care about so we can help everyone we love through Learn True Health.

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Books by Dr. William Davis

Super Gut

Undoctored

Wheat Belly