The Natural Way to Fix Hormones & Skin: Restore Your Youthful Microbes

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Every one of these big systems, which is supposed to be promoting our health and protecting us, they're actually making us worse.

We need to reconsider all we thought we knew about health because of the contribution of the microbiome. You don't need to take this exogenous peptide for thousands of dollars that could result in thyroid cancer and diminishing your bank account. The real solution are simple things you do in your kitchen and your backyard garden. Those are the things that really matter. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Evglis, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial 4-month or longer dose dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EPCOLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at 1 year with monthly dosing.

EPCOLIS, lebrikizumab , a 250 mg per 2 mL injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EPCOLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids.

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What if all of your weight loss efforts, all the things you're trying to do diet-wise, taking certain peptides, and even exercise are working against you in your goals to lose weight, balance blood sugar, reverse heart disease, and help your body heal. Well, that's what's happening with a lot of people today, is you think that one thing is the way to go, it's going to help you, and in fact it is working against you. And today I've brought in one of the world's leading experts, Dr. William Davis. He is the best-selling author of Wheat Belly and many, many other books we'll talk about today. And today we're going to be talking about how to heal the root cause of disease and some of the biggest myths in all of healthcare that are actually causing heart disease, diabetes, weight weight gain and more. And another big thing is actually hurting people's longevity. So we're also going to talk about longevity today and so much more. Dr. William, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Oh, thank you, Josh. Thanks for having me.

Well, I'm a big fan of your work. I remember reading, uh, Wheat Belly back in 2011 and just being so impressed with it. And really, you were sort of this— I would say you helped start this whole wave of people being very aware of the damaging effects of gluten and wheat and some of these grains. I remember probably 2 years later, uh, uh, David Perlmutter came out with Grain Brain. I felt like those two books together kind of really made people more aware of the side effects of doing a lot of these processed carbs that people are consuming today. What has changed anything in your viewpoint since writing your book, uh, Wheat Belly?

You know, Josh, so Wheat Belly focused on what has happened to this plant called wheat. So if your readers are unaware, it's not the thing that we thought it was. It's not this 4.5-foot-tall, 5-foot-tall plant that grew wild. It's this thing that was essentially created in a laboratory. It's an 18-inch-tall, very thick stalk, large seed head. So its appearance is different, but it's also biochemically different. And it's very different. When an agricultural scientist changes a plant, whether it's wheat or any other plant, they don't check it, they don't study it for its effects on humans. And they introduce with these changes into the plant, not done for evil purpose, done for good, for increased yield per acre to help farmers and feed the poor and hungry. Yep. They inadvertently introduced a whole host of changes with marked effects on human behavior and on health. For instance, the gliadin protein, a protein within gluten, was changed. Its structure was changed. And one of the things that they did was amplify its appetite-stimulating effects. That is, humans don't have the enzymes to break down the amino acid sequences in the gliadin protein, and it thereby yields— so if you eat an egg, of course, or a piece of pork or beef, you break that protein down into single amino acids. That's how it converts to the cells of your body, the proteins of your body. But the gliadin protein of wheat can only be broken down into 4 or 5 amino acid long sequence. We don't have the enzyme to break it down. Yeah. And those Peptides act as opioids on the human brain, but they don't make you high, they don't relieve you of pain, they increase appetite. So buried in the foods that you have in your grocery store is a potent appetite stimulant. I have to believe, Josh, we won't know this unless we sued them in a class action suit and got the discovery process. I'm sure Big Food knew about this in the 1980s. Wow. That anything with the gliadin protein of wheat amplifies appetite, making us the unwitting consumers of more and more food.

That's amazing. I remember reading this in your book again, which was so— I just— so eye-opening at the time. And I know you, you dove in the structure here of the breaking down of proteins into peptides and how it's acting in the body. One other thing though, I remember you hitting on in the book is how the starches and carbohydrates are actually altered in a way, or amplified as well, or they're different in a lot of this grain versus an ancient grain like an einkorn or red wheat or some those?

You know, Josh, the simplest argument to make is that because grains are promiscuous— we don't think of them that way, but grains share genetics. And so, for instance, rye was a weed in wild wheat fields, but they shared genetics. And so while a piece of rye bread looks and smells different, it's kind of like chimpanzees and humans— we overlap over 98% in our genetics. Same thing here. There's great overlap in the genetics of, of grains. And one of the things they share is the composition of this carbohydrate unique to grains, amylopectin-A. The structure of this carbohydrate make it so while many things in wheat and grains are indigestible or only partially digestible, and that's why there's so many toxic components in wheat and grains, there's an exception, and that's the carbohydrate wheat germ agglutinin that is exceptionally digestible. So digestible, if I took a piece of bread, white bread, whole grain, doesn't matter. Yeah. Put it in my mouth and chew it, but don't swallow. And you check fingerstick glucoses, you're going to see a sharp uptick in blood glucose because the digestion starts immediately by the amylase enzyme in your mouth. And then, of course, you swallow it. Gastric amylase digests it further. But so being told by US Dietary Guidelines, cut your saturated fat and cholesterol, eat more healthy whole grains, is essentially a formula for raising blood glucose. The expansion of abdominal visceral fat and weight gain. So it's no surprise, Josh Rice, no surprise we now have the world's worst epidemic of overweight, obesity, and type 2 diabetes, dementia, etc.

Yeah, well, obviously these big agriculture companies have been pushing, you know, wheat and corn and soy and a lot of these products for a long time. And I'd love for you to explain sort of the hybridization process, because I remember when I first started reading and writing articles myself based on a lot of the research and studies you were bringing to light, I remember people thinking or asking the question, well, is this genetically modified? And I had to explain, well, it's not genetically modified as is, you know, corn is today, but it's hybridized. Would you explain sort of what's happening to the wheat today?

You know, because there is a lot of pushback against genetic modification, no genetically modified, this is a word game that the industry plays. So genetic modification means that I introduced a gene or removed a gene. Genetic modification. So wheat in particular has been changed, but not using that method. They use methods like, as you point out, hybridization, taking two strains of a plant, crossing them, mating them. But even more so, they use methods involving either chemical modification, radiation, and other methods to introduce mutations. And so that's worse. That's the crazy thing here, Josh. It's worse than genetic— because genetic modification is to a great degree a controlled process. I can take a gene, maybe for increased height or decreased height or increased expression of wheat germagglutinin, whatever. I can introduce that gene. It has only limited consequences. But if I expose, let's say, a wheat seed to radiation like gamma rays or high-dose X-ray or some, what's called a mutagenic chemical, a chemical that introduces mutations into the chromosomal, the genes, you get all kinds of changes. But all you wanna know as an agricultural scientist is will the seed, will the plant survive? You don't care that you introduce all kinds of changes into multiple components in that plant. You just sell it to people. If it looks and smells like bread, or pasta or whatever, it's good enough for sale. But that's the source of a lot of the problems, the amplification of appetite, the increased allergic phenomena from wheat grains, the increased immunogenic, immune-stimulating properties, and other factors. So they've created this little monster. And then they had the unwitting complicity of the USDA and other agencies to say, "Eat more of it." Yeah.

Diabetes, cancer, dementia, heart disease. They are coming for many of us and our families, and not for the reason that most people think, which is that it's bad luck or bad genetics. The truth is this: your daily choices are either creating health or setting the stage for disease at the cellular level. And your doctor is probably missing the cellular issues behind your symptoms. Now, I'm currently offering a simple at-home blood test that actually looks for the right warning signs in your blood markers. And just as importantly, it comes with a proper review of your results. This new test flips the script. When you're tired of being dismissed, when you know something isn't right, get my at-home testing of targeted biomarkers including hormones, thyroid, and metabolism, plus a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to help you understand your results and see if you're a good fit to work with one of our cellular healing protocols at the Health Institute. By the way, these protocols are the same protocols that I created for my mom, that I've created for many patients and clients that have seen incredible results in healing. Grab one before they're gone. Just go to mybloodwork.com— that's mybloodwork.com— to get your kit today. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, you know, this whole, you know, the food pyramid has obviously been exposed at this point of being so, you know, corrupt and wrong in terms of what, what we're recommending today. Um, and I know today when I'm working with patients, and likely when you are as well, very similar— it's like we're really focusing on fruits and vegetables and wild organic meats, high in omega-3s. And so the diet that heals people is so radically different than the diet that the government has been pushing for so long. And, um, and I'd love for you to— I'd love for you to talk about this too, because another thing we have come in— we have the— these agricultural companies coming in and impacting our health. We have a lot of these big chemical companies like producing things like glyphosate impacting our health. And then we also have the pharmaceutical companies now and trying to make money off people with these GLP-1 drugs. I'd love to get your take as a physician who's worked with a lot of people. I know you're a cardiologist, worked with a lot of people with losing weight. What are the effects of these GLP-1s? Is that something you're a fan of? Is that something that you are— I would love to hear your, you know, your thoughts on these GLP-1s today.

So, you know, Josh, you push my buttons. So I would say GLP-1 agonists are not the breakthrough that many of my colleagues claim. They are a disaster. Several things to know. So when you lose weight, as many people do by cutting calories, move more, eat less, smaller portion size, all that stuff, or bariatric procedure, Lap-Band, gastric bypass, or a pharmaceutical, most popularly the GLP-1 agonist. Josh, they're all variations on the same theme, reducing calorie intake. If you had a Lap-Band, a band put around your stomach, you reduce stomach volume. You reduce your intake of food, you're satiated with fewer calories. They're all the same. Well, we know with good evidence, if you lose weight by reducing calories, regardless of the method you choose, yes, you'll lose weight at first, 25% of which is muscle. And as you know, that's a major problem. So let's, let's say your wife paid $12,000 for a year's worth of Wegovy injections. She loses 40 pounds. Wow, she's great. She's happy. She looks 20 years older, right? Because of the loss of facial muscle and fat.

Yeah.

But of the 40 pounds she lost, 10 pounds is muscle. Now think about 10 pounds of ground beef on your kitchen counter. It's a lot of muscle. Yeah, it is. Yeah. So she can't afford— most people can't afford that kind of cost forever. So she stops the drug after a year. She regains typically 32 to 34 pounds of fat. So more fat than she had in the beginning, mostly in the abdomen. Does not regain more than maybe a pound or two of muscle. It's very difficult to regain muscle. Yes. Mm-hmm. She's now more likely to be a type 2 diabetic, pre-diabetic, hypertensive, risk for coronary disease, heart disease, dementia, breast cancer. Her risk now, Josh, is greater than it was at the start. Even worse, because of the loss of muscle, we know that she planted a landmine for her future, for the acceleration of falls, fractures, frailty, loss of independence, increased risk for dementia. And we now know— I'm impressed, some of our colleagues have actually done this— tracked people who've lost weight by cutting calories over as much as 10 to 20 years. In aggregate, 60,000 people have been tracked. So it's not a little— it's a big experience. This is from the NHANES database, the EPIC-Norfolk, the ASPRIN, multiple large databases that asked what What happens to people when they lose weight by reducing calories? If a woman loses 10% or more of her body weight, so let's say a 180-pound woman who loses 18 pounds, or a 240-pound guy who loses 24 pounds, so 10% or more, what happens to those people? They die several years younger. So the FDA approved a class of drugs that accelerates disability, your place in an assisted living or nursing home facility, your deterioration in functionality and, and independence and your early death. That's what they approved.

You know, I saw, I saw a researcher say this recently. He said when you are losing, let's say, 40 pounds on, on GLP-1, you are essentially aging yourself 20 years in the course of sometimes 1 year. Because, because muscle mass, to your point, I mean, it's so, it's so critically important as you age, especially for women. I mean, the amount of women who, uh, like, I had a grandparent do this and it was essentially what caused them to pass away, but fall and break their hip, right? Because they were just weak and frail. And so that happens. And so it's, it's, uh, it's a really big deal. I mean, I see right now, I was actually just having a conversation with somebody on how the pharmaceutical companies are really going to, um, push back on anybody marketing anything GLP-1 that's not a drug. Really going to push back on this and, and, um, sue multiple companies and do things because they want to own it because they're just making such a crazy amount of money off of it right now.

Just crazy. Sadly, when they smell money, all kinds of crazy things will happen. Yeah. So my colleagues often— they'll often— people say there's no such thing as kickbacks. Oh yeah, there's such a thing as kickbacks. It's an easy thing to do. You as a group of physicians, maybe 10, 20, 50, whatever physicians, large groups, you make your own pharmacy and you dispense the GLP-1 agonist. You mark up the drug. From what the cost you paid, and you get— you in effect get a large kickback. It's not regarded as a kickback, but it is a kickback. So there's a lot of that going on, all this money involved in dispensing and incentivize. Same thing in bariatric surgery. It pays extremely well. They now hold up gastric bypass as the gold standard for weight loss, even in children.

Well, you know what's crazy is I've got, I've got a couple friends, I'm thinking of one in particular, and, um, and he's having health problems because he can't absorb nutrients because of the lap band surgery. I mean, that's You know, they— so often these doctors aren't going into the details on the side effects of what's going to happen in 10 years and 20 years if you get on a GLP-1 or have Lap-Band or, or do some of these treatments.

You know, Josh, so, so, so this— these bariatric procedures are held up as the gold standard because there have been series where they've watched people in the years afterwards and they all report, oh, it's almost no complications, 1% or less. Well, that's not true. One of the problems we have in the world of bariatric surgery is a lot of the evidence is published by physicians who have close financial ties to manufacturers of the equipment. But if you dig deeper, you find out people who've had bariatric surgery, there's a huge uptick in suicide. There's almost across the board development of SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, because you don't have a stomach. You have a much reduced stomach. You don't have the protective effect. Of stomach acid, and because your basal metabolic rate, the rate at which you burn calories, has slowed, you get more fat back after losing it, you lose more muscle, and that encourages even further SIBO and accelerates your death. So, you know, Josh, in some ways, I guess we should be grateful for all the mistakes made in diet, pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures, because if we if he didn't have all these major blunders, we wouldn't know, we wouldn't have learned all these important lessons.

Yeah, you know, a question for you: when you're taking care of, uh, you know, when you're taking care of people, what do you recommend instead of GLP-1s?

So, uh, follow a diet that mimics our ancestral patterns, the kind of diet built into your genetic code. I tell people, what if you saw a lion In the wild, gore a wildebeest and eat its intestines and heart and brain. You say, "That's disgusting." So you cage the lion and you feed it kale and spinach. What's gonna happen to the lion? Well, within 3 weeks or so, it's gonna be dead. In other words, every creature has a style of eating programmed into its genetic code. Humans are no different. There's a style of eating that we've evolved into over many thousands of generations, and it has nothing to do with grains or extreme quantities of sugar or carbonated beverages or preservatives. So we revert back to a style of eating that allows weight loss with minimal or no loss of muscle. That's the trick, though— try to lose weight without losing muscle. So you have to be, you have to be aware of what your muscle is doing. So there are ways that are easy to follow. You can follow grip strength with with a dynamometer.

Very—

I paid $7.99 for mine, though inflation has increased it. You could use an inexpensive bioimpedance smart scale and track your abdominal visceral fat and muscle to see what's happening in the shift, because you don't want to lose muscle. Now, ladies always say, but I don't want to go to the gym for an hour 5 days a week. You don't have to. We're going to set right many factors that have allowed the loss of muscle. So I remind people that that just by aging we lose, of course, about a third of our muscle mass. And that's why at 70 you see these people with skinny arms and legs. They can't get up out of a chair. They have a hard time getting out of the car. They can't walk upstairs. They use a walker, motorized scooter, etc. Well, how can we preserve muscle? Well, one way would be not follow a diet that has reduced calories. Another way would be to address the microbiome. So there is a very important— and the science is, is getting stronger and stronger the so-called gut-muscle axis. And one of the things that's emerged as being a major influence over muscle and fat is SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So those of your listeners who may not be familiar, it means that our overexposure to antibiotics, you know, there's 650,000 prescriptions written every day, 650,000 prescriptions written every day for antibiotics. Wow. Most of us by age 40 have taken 30 courses. For every 1,000 children, over 1,300 prescriptions are written every year.

Really? That many people have taken antibiotics and that often and often unnecessarily? Repeat that one more time because that's, that's crazy. But by age 30, you said how many rounds?

By age 40, 30 rounds of antibiotics.

30 rounds the average person has taken of antibiotics by the time they're 40.

Even our CDC concedes there's a lot of overuse and inappropriate prescription of antibiotics.

Well, you know, I had the head of the FDA, Marty Makary, on the show here about study last year, and, um, and he had said this, he said something like around, I mean, it's like 90% of antibiotics are overprescribed. I mean, and it's— and we started going through the research on the amount of people that actually have viruses when an antibiotic is prescribed. I mean, it's, it's mind-blowing.

And all it takes, Josh, all it takes, as you know, one course, one, just one course of, say, azithromycin or doxycycline, whatever, and you've killed hundreds of species. Now, these species were doing good things for us. Not all of them, but many of them were. And one of the things they were doing was suppressing the overproliferation of fecal microbes. These are species that may sound familiar— E. coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella— because they're also the species of food poisoning. So when you go to fast food and the kid went number 2 and didn't wash his hands and contaminate your and utensils, and you get fecal microbes in the upper GI tract, you get very sick. Vomiting, diarrhea, fever. Or if you get fecal microbes no longer suppressed by the loss of all those beneficial microbes, and they ascend, which I find is amazing, into the 24 feet of small intestine where they don't belong. Small intestine is not equipped to deal with this.

Yeah, yeah.

Colon is, but not the small intestine. Small intestine is where you and I, of course, are supposed to absorb nutrients. Like vitamins, minerals, amino acids. So it's by design very permeable. But when invading fecal microbes, trillions of them, and of course they live and die over the course of hours, they don't live very long. Yeah. There's a huge turnover. They dump their toxic compounds, but specifically endotoxin and others, into the intestines, then into the bloodstream. That process is called endotoxemia. And endotoxemia Such breakthrough findings. Many of us suspected this for many years. Yeah. Finally officially scientifically validated in 2007 by Dr. Patrice Caney in Belgium. Has since been corroborated hundreds of times. This is a real— what was called gut leak for many years is now known to be a step— well established, a real phenomenon.

You know what's so funny is I remember because I wrote a book called Eat Dirt and I'm trying to think when this was. It was a couple of years after, after Wheat Belly. And there were still people saying in the mainstream medical community, well, we don't actually know if intestinal permeability, a leaky gut, is actually a real medical, um, you know, thing happening. And then of course now, I mean, to your point, there's been so many studies now proving, and now of course it's become mainstream. But it's, uh, you know, one of the things I— we did a, uh, I have a, a virtual practice, and we did a clinical— we did a study on 100 people coming through, and we saw nearly a 200% decrease in CR— high sensitivity C-reactive protein, because our biggest focus with patients is reduce inflammation of the gut. I mean, it's such a big thing. That's been such a big part of your career. Of course, Wheat Belly, there's so much of that, is how wheat and a lot of those compounds in there cause inflammation in the gut. And, and, and this leads to so, so many issues. I mean, pretty much every health condition we can imagine. So I love that you're diving in here because I think this is super interesting. That, uh, how it's not only we, it's just the entire medical establishment, just the entire way it's run. It's feeding disease. It's feeding disease. I mean, if you really think about it, it's kind of crazy. Every one of these big systems which is supposed to be promoting our health and protecting us, they're actually making us worse. Every one of them.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think we— as you've pointed out, we— I think we need to reconsider all we thought we knew about health because because of the contribution of the microbiome. If fecal microbes invading the small intestine results in a large rise in blood levels of endotoxin that gets to your brain and can— has been shown to be— to underlie anxiety and depression and cognitive impairment and dementia and Parkinson's disease, or muscle and joint like fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, or skin like rosacea and psoriasis, or the heart— my area— uh, recurrent atrial fibrillation bouts, coronary disease, and plaque rupture and heart attack. Now we got to reconsider almost everything we thought we knew, and so many metabolic conditions are now proven to be due to— so people get mad, say, I can't do— we talk a lot about restoring microbes by making this thing that looks and smells like yogurt, like Lactobacillus reuteri. Well, one of the effects of reuteri, this microbe lost by nearly everybody, is it produces histamine. People say, I can't take it because it produces histamine, and I am histamine intolerant, I can't eat wine, cheese, etc. Well, So I remind people, histamine is a normal signal molecule. It's like insulin. If you don't have insulin, you're gonna die. If you don't have histamine, you're gonna die. So histamine intolerance, we now know, is due to the loss of microbes that were metabolizing histamine.

Wow.

It just so happens, just so happens that Rotori also produces histamine.

So, well, another interesting, just to your point here, 'cause we were talking about GLP-1s, I think Rotori, I think this is one of the probiotics in a couple research studies that was shown to increase your body's own production production of GLP-1. And there's several—

yeah, many, many— yeah, that's right, many things do. Carotenoids do, uh, some polyphenols. Yeah. So yeah, you don't need to take this exogenous peptide for thousands of dollars that could result in thyroid cancer, bowel obstruction, and diminishing your bank account, making you lose—

you know, what does it cost a month to do GLP-1s?

You know, now that they're wiping out the the pharmacies that are making it and you have to get it from a real pharmacy from the manufacturer, they're typically at least hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month.

Wow.

Wow. So there's a lot of money at stake. And it worries me because pharma is already so powerful. They've essentially kept people like you and me from getting on major media. That's why we do things like this, because we're no longer welcome. Them. Yeah. On major network TV because pharma said to the major networks, hey, we don't want people like Dr. Josh Axe or William Davis on there because they have interests that are counter to our advertising interests at $7 billion a year.

Well, and think about all these companies that are getting into the pharmaceutical game. I mean, Amazon is an example. I mean, you know, Mark Cuban, I mean, all these other companies trying to, you know, get a piece of this. Of the pie there.

Wow. You know, Josh, I don't know what the answer is for society as a whole in this corruption introduced by pharma and the healthcare industry. So I think what you and I are doing is trying to educate people, because if you listen to your John Q primary care or your gastroenterologist, your cardiologist, you're gonna get a corrupt message influenced or dominated by pharma and other financial interests. When, as you know, The real solution are simple things you do in your kitchen and your backyard garden. Yeah, those are the things that really matter.

Well, what are some of your favorite ways? If you could have your top 5 things in ranking order to rebuild and heal the microbiome, what would you suggest?

So if we start with the premise that we've lost hundreds of beneficial species in that— and at least, Josh, in at least 50% of the population— that evidence, by the way, is well worked out. Out. At least half the US population has SIBO, and thereby endotype— in studies like this. So in irritable bowel syndrome, what proportion of people will test positive for SIBO, usually by hydrogen gas?

Well, it should be close to 100%. It's going to be— I mean, at least it's going to be incredibly high.

If we're very conservative and lump all the studies together, it's about 31%. But I agree, it's probably more like 100%. And that's why the current current choice of, of treatment in irritable bowel syndrome is Xifaxan, an antibiotic. Yeah. And yet the idea this— that IBS is a bacterial disease of the gut, of the microbiome, is not being talked about. But if we did that in condition blank, what proportion tests positive for SIBO? If we put IBS in, it's about 31% of the 60 to 70 million Americans with— we're talking 18 to 20 million people there.

Yeah.

How about in In obesity, what proportion tests positive? Take all the studies, about 50%. Well, that's 50% of 110 million. That's 55 million people there. What about type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, sleep apnea, rheumatoid arthritis, dementia, cognitive impairment, rosacea, and part— add it all up, Josh, we're well over 150 million people. If you would have said that to me 10 years ago, I'd say, "I don't think so, Dr. Axe," until a consumer device came out that I I have no association with called the AIRE device, A-I-R-E. A PhD engineer from Dublin, Ireland invented this device that you can use at home. Don't need a lab, don't need a doctor's order. And it tests right here for hydrogen gas, talks to your smartphone, 0 to 10. And I started having people test, came out in 2018. We're testing thousands of people. It's everywhere. I thought, what is going on? Maybe the device is flawed. Maybe the whole premise is wrong. Well, it's since been validated. It is a valid measure and probably, it's probably superior to the conventional method of measuring hydrogen gas in a lab or clinic, because there you have to capture hydrogen gas, smallest gas molecule known, in a tube or a bag, and that gas leaks rapidly, and the technician leaves it on the counter for a week to run tests in a batch, as opposed to right there. Real time, yeah. Testing directly, yeah. And so what I saw was it was everywhere. Now, if, If it's everywhere and someone says this, this is a very common situation. Someone would say, okay, I did your program. No wheat, no grains, no sugars. I did basic nutrients, addressed basic nutrient deficiencies because of the quirks of modern life like vitamin D. We don't live outside, we wear clothes, magnesium because we have to filter our drinking water, etc. I did all that. I did basic efforts to rebuild the microbiome, you know, fermented foods, etc. And my hemoglobin A1C, long-term measure of blood glucose, of course, dropped from 11.1%— terrible and rapidly on your way to kidney failure, heart disease, and dementia— it came down to 6.7%. Much better, but still not perfect, which is about 5.0%. They addressed the microbiome, it drops to 4.8%. So I saw over and over and over again that efforts to address this disruption of the microbiome SIBO as evidenced, for instance, by the air testing, also led to addressing the residual problem. Now people say, what, do I need to get one of these devices? No, you don't. No, you don't. There— because there's— there's— it's so common, and the solution, at least my solution, has been so benign that I tell people, you know, if I said, Dr. Axe, the solution for SIBO is surgical removal of your small intestine, you would say, oh, you better be damn confident that that's true. You better have lots of evidence, right? But what if— what if half the solution with something that looks and smells like yogurt that you make in your kitchen and you have with blueberries and chia seeds. So here's the question I asked: if you had SIBO, 24 feet of fecal microbes in the small intestine, and you took a commercial probiotic, what's the likelihood the SIBO will go away? Uh, zero. It might reduce bloating a little bit or something like that, but it does not get rid of it. So I asked these questions: What if we chose microbes that have been shown to colonize the small intestine where this occurs and produce bacteriocins, antibiotics, natural antibiotics that kill fecal microbes? So I chose 3: Lactobacillus reuteri, Lactobacillus gasseri, and I initially chose Bacillus coagulans, which is a fine microbe, but I replaced it with a different microbe, Bacillus subtilis. Yeah, we fermented ferment it as a yogurt. It's not yogurt, nothing like the stuff in the store, but it looks and smells like yogurt. It's just a way to amplify counts. So for instance, if we start, let's say, with 1 billion or 100 million rhodorrhizae— sounds like a lot, but for this purpose is almost nothing. Yeah, we're going to ferment it. So rhodorrhizae doubles every 3 hours at human body temperature. They don't have sex, right? They just double themselves. So rhodorrhizae doubles every 3 hours at human body temperature. We're gonna let it double 12 times, or 36 hours.

And when we count the number of microbes there's a method called flow cytometry.

We count the number of microbes, we get about 300 billion per half cup or 120 milliliter serving. So all we're doing is jacking up the numbers really high, because if you're going to battle against trillions of fecal microbes in the small intestine, you want really, really big numbers. And to my great surprise, Josh, we've had extraordinary success doing this. Now, we have not validated in a formal clinical trial. I have that that. I hope ready to go 2026. We'll do it formally, but it can't be as yogurt. We can't have people making yogurt in the clinical trial, so we'll encapsulate it and see if we can reproduce those effects. But it's something you do in your kitchen, and there's spectacular benefits of restoring those microbes beyond just eradication of SIBO and relief of all the phenomena associated with SIBO and endotoxemia. For instance, skin benefits, muscle benefits, testosterone vaginal health benefits, emotional benefits, because you're restoring microbes that almost everybody's lost.

Yeah, you know, I did a, I did a podcast episode probably, I don't know, a few months ago on, uh, on, on hormones in, in men. I've done them in women too a lot, but, but on in particular testosterone levels in men. And one of the things we've seen is that just the levels have continued to drop and drop and drop. Like, I know so many men today who are— some of them are— have decided in their 30s to get on testosterone replacement therapy. I mean, people, you know, it's become a real crisis. You know, at what point did, did you start to notice, or throughout history, did these numbers— like, did men and women start becoming weaker physically and start having a lot of these health problems?

You know, I think it started in the '80s or so. We look back at photos of people in the '60s and '70s, for instance, in their bathing suit, it looked very, very different. Uh, of course, it's different for each factor that let us hear. The diet, of course, really got popularized in the '80s when the USDA and U.S. Health and Human Services started coming out with the cut your fat and cholesterol. So that was a big factor. But coincident with that, of course, is the proliferation of herbicides, pesticides, glyphosate. Yeah, right. Uh, maybe EMF exposure, antibiotic residues in food, or overexposure antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. So But it all really, I think, got really bad in the '80s and '90s. And that would coincide with this crude marker of body weight, of course, where we saw body weight increase dramatically starting in the late 1980s. Of course, difficulty is undoing all this, as you know, is a major undertaking. It's confusing to people, and it's contrary, sadly, to a lot of the advice we get from federal agencies and even from practicing— most practicing physicians. Positions. That's why what you're doing— I hope what I'm doing— is so important. It's not coming through major media. Yeah, it's not coming through major print magazines. It's not coming through the news. It's not coming from the doctor, the local doctor.

I mean, this is why— I mean, if you look at the numbers on— I don't know if you've ever seen this, but the amount of people that listen to somebody like, you know, a Joe Rogan or a Tucker Carlson or whoever, it's— I mean, they're, they're beyond what people are listening to on, you know, on mainstream television today. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. And I think because we've been lied to so long, you're like, well, if I want to get the truth, I've literally got to go on YouTube and listen to, you know, the experts there, or podcasts, rather than going to mainstream television today.

To your point, I think there's a number of factors we could blame. It could be some of the industrial compounds we're exposed to. It's the clear-cut expansion of abdominal visceral fat, of course.

Okay.

Yeah, because abdominal fat, as you recall, expresses an enzyme called aromatase. Enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogens. And so it's very common, as we all know, guys who have big tummies also have big breasts. Yeah. And they also develop this kind of gynoid— that's an awful term, isn't it?— this female-like body figure where they get more fat in the buttocks and thighs, a very feminine type of fat accumulation. So both abdominal visceral fat as well as this gynoid configuration. And that reduces testosterone, increases estrogen. The disruption of the microbiome. So there are microbial species responsible for boosting testosterone. So for instance, there's an MIT cancer group that did a mouse study that showed that restoration of Lactobacillus reuteri, the one that we almost all lack, almost nobody has it anymore because it's very susceptible to common antibiotics. Restoration of Roteri in these mice increased testosterone 300%. Wow. So it's— in older mice who have a very sharp decline in testosterone. So that's just some of the factors leading to low testosterone. I'm a big fan of doing things by restoring the natural order, not by giving you things exogenous to compensate. And that has worked very well.

Hey, if you want practical, science-backed guidance for living a healthier, longer, more vibrant life, you need to check out the Biohack It podcast. It is hosted by my good friend Iman Hassan, and it brings a thoughtful, compassionate perspective to wellness that so many women have been looking for. Every week, Iman breaks down the latest research in longevity, hormones, and metabolic health in a way that's clear and easy to understand. Anne leads to important conversations around women's health, fertility, and the steps women can take to protect their energy, balance their hormones, and support long-term well-being. She talks with top doctors, scientists, and health experts about natural healing, nutrition, lifestyle choices that make a real difference, and sits down with entrepreneurs and thought leaders to explore how they stay strong, grounded, and resilient in their personal lives and their work. If you want a show that speaks directly to health challenges women are navigating today while offering hope, clarity, and real solutions, tune in to Biohack It every Thursday wherever you listen to podcasts. It is one of the most educational and uplifting shows in the wellness space, and I think you're going to love it. You know, one of the things I've heard you speak on is statin drugs. You know, to me, I'll just share a quick patient story. So the first— my first patient of all time that I ever had. This was in student clinic. This would've been in 2005 or '06. And his name was Ron. I remember he came into me and he came in because he was having a lot of joint pain. He had lost a lot of his hair. He had muscle wasting. The guy looked really sick. And I said, when did this start? He said, well, about a year ago. He said, my doctor put me on a statin drug. And he showed me a picture of himself a year before. He was 65 years old. And at 64, I'm seeing this guy who was fit, healthy. He was going to the gym every day lifting weights, and he literally lost 20 pounds and looked sickly and like he had aged 15 years. The only thing that was different— well, there's two things that happened. His doctor told him, you need to get on a statin and you need to get on a no-fat diet. Not, not low-fat. They said a no-fat diet.

You know, the statin drug is the equivalent of the GLP-1 agonists of our age. They are disasters. They never worked in the first There's a whole bunch of problems in there. One of the problems is that cholesterol is not a cause for heart disease. It never was. It was a marker for the particles that do cause heart disease. This got its start in the 1950s and 1960s at the NIH, where the researchers there, like Dr. William Friedewald and Dr. William Frederickson, wanted to quantify in the 1950s if you spin blood down, the clear part of blood without red blood cells, high-speed centrifuge, you'll see it layer out. High density, the bottom, low density, top. And they asked this question, how can we count the number of particles in each layer and try to decipher whether they cause coronary atherosclerosis or not? Heart disease. Yeah. Well, they said, it's 1958, how do you— you can't. And so they said, let's pick a component of the particles in each level and use that an indirect dipstick. So they could have chosen apoprotein B, they could have chosen triglycerides, they could have chosen— they chose cholesterol and used cholesterol in the high-density fraction, the very low-density fraction, the total fraction, and developed some crude calculations to calculate, for instance, low-density lipoprotein LDL cholesterol. And that became the, the standard of care that you were going to measure cholesterol and then try to reduce it. Even though cholesterol was not the cause, it was a marker that led to, of course, emergence of drugs like the statin drugs, which has to date made $1 trillion in revenue for the pharmaceutical industry. So there's great incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to educate physicians that you must reduce cholesterol with a statin drug statin drug. Even though 80 million Americans now take a statin drug, there's been no significant reduction in cardiovascular risk. Heart disease, coronary disease, uh, remains number one moneymaker for hot— for healthcare systems. It's all— remains number one killer of men and women. Josh, the real tragedy of the statin drugs and all that'll cut your fat, all that, is that it took everyone's attention off the real causes of heart disease, of which they're easy to identify And easy to correct. But there's no pot of gold. There's no fancy drug or procedure. Because if you turn off that spigot of revenue for angioplasty, heart catheterization, stent implantation, bypass surgery, automatic defibrillators, pacemakers, all the stuff that comes from— Well, now you've collapsed the healthcare system built on a background of this flawed marketing marker, cholesterol, statin drugs, etc.

Well, what is the marker people should be paying attention to?

So the factors that lead to heart disease are, uh, particles called VLDL, very low density lipoprotein, and small LDL. Those are the particles that come from consumption of wheat grains and sugars, the amylopectin A of grains, sucrose, fructose, glucose, because the— our livers are very very good at a process called de novo lipogenesis— brand new making fats. Yeah. So the liver is very good at taking amylopectin of grains and sucrose and other sugars and converting them to triglycerides. Now, the triglycerides can't be released into the bloodstream because fats can't float freely in the bloodstream. If they did, they would coalesce, kind of like your salad dressing. You may shake it, and about a minute later it's going to separate again. Yeah, oil top, aqueous vinegar, water at the bottom. Same thing would happen in your bloodstream. If that happened, you would die within minutes. So, so the, the liver can't release fats, else they would coalesce and infarct, or, or kill your tissues. So the liver packages your triglycerides in a protein coating that is to make it aqueous soluble, water soluble, and has proteins like ApoB and others. That's called very low density lipoprotein, VLDL. VLDL. So there's a big surge in VLDL into the bloodstream. Well, that is a direct cause of coronary disease. But even worse, VLDL particles interact with LDL particles— not LDL cholesterol, but LDL particles, the actual particles— and make them triglyceride-enriched. Now, it's a little complicated, I'm sorry, but LDL and triglyceride-enriched LDL particles go through a series of enzymatic remodeling steps that make them small. Well, small LDL particles LDL particles are better able to enter the wall of an artery. They're much more prone to oxidation and glycation— glucose modification. They're also much more adherent to the structural proteins in the walls of arteries. And because the liver can no longer recognize the small LDL particle, because the recognition apoprotein B is partially concealed, the liver doesn't clear the small LDL. It goes around and around in your circulation, opportunity to add to coronary atherosclerosis. So it lasts about 5 to 7 days as compared to the 1 day if you ate bacon or a piece of beef or other fatty source. You make large LDL particles, liver does recognize, doesn't contribute to coronary disease, and your liver clears it within 24 hours. So the small LDL with a process that is initiated related with consumption of carbohydrates and sugars. Now, even worse, insulin resistance, inflammation, and endotoxemia amplify this. So we address those. For instance, the endotoxemia of SIBO. So we recall that when the gastrointestinal tract empties into the venous system, it doesn't go directly into the venous system. It goes into the portal venous system that drains the liver. So your poor liver takes a beating.

Yeah, it does a lot, doesn't it? A lot.

And all this amplifies this— I know it's a little complicated, but it amplifies this de novo lipogenesis. So how do you correct it? Well, don't consume the amylopectin-A of grains. Don't get those sugary foods. Address common nutrient deficiencies that influence insulin resistance and inflammation. Vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium, iodine that synergize, by the way, to minimize insulin resistance. Address the microbiome. Because of endotoxemia and drainage of the portal venous system to the liver. And de novo lipogenesis goes to a rock-bottom minimum. You're not producing VLDL or small LDL. You've minimized insulin resistance and inflammation. Your arteries relax. And it's a little complicated. And John Q. Primary Care may say, "That's just too much. I just want a pill." Yeah, yeah. So, but you can see how off-base this notion of reduced cholesterol and reduced saturated fat has nothing to do with heart disease. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, yeah, I mean, this is, this is the biggest problem within mainstream medicine is we're not getting to the root cause of what is actually causing the problem. You know, I've thought about this often, is that, you know, um, if we didn't have metformin or insulin or some of these drugs, people would be forced to eat healthy. I mean, they have to do— I mean, people want to do something, but if you give somebody the easiest option, they— human nature is, I'm going to take the easiest path, not to do what's best long term. I'm going to take the easiest path in a lot of cases. And I think that's one issue today that, that we have, is that if we would just do away with these drugs entirely— some of them, um, outside of the emergency drugs that we would need if somebody's in a car accident or those sort of things, or in a surgery— you know, we would be, we, we would be much better off for it. I'm curious your thoughts on this. There have been some different— I've heard philosophies on which fats are worse. Part of my philosophy, I just want to say, is I'm not going to focus on those at all. I'm just going to focus on telling people to just do extra virgin olive oil. But I see these two communities of people saying don't eat industrial seed oils, don't eat the cottonseed, the corn, the soybean, those sort of oils that are, you know, partially hydrogenated. And then I have this whole group of people saying you shouldn't also eat tallow and butter and a lot of these animal fat products. And I've seen actually convincing evidence on both sides. Let me say this, because I've seen some studies, uh, showing that, uh, you know, doing a high saturated fat diet might be worse than doing seed oils. There's one or two big studies showing that. I do— and I— one of these studies, though, I do think they included olive oil as part of the plant-based oil, so it was probably thrown off. But what are your thoughts on different types of oils and fats which might— that can influence or cause heart disease specifically?

We could talk a whole day about that, couldn't we? Yeah. So one of the issues, as we talked about earlier, is we have a style of eating programmed into our genetic code. And so if you and I were in a nice studio, talking on microphones, our smartphone, a nice car outside, air-conditioned home, but we got up this morning, you grab your axe, spear, or club, and you said, "I'm hungry," and you're gonna kill something. You're gonna have to track an animal down. Might take you 6 hours of running and tracking the animal down. While your other clan members are stealing birds' eggs, and gathering shellfish and spearing fish in the lake and digging in the dirt for roots and tubers, like your book says, gathering occasional berries, eating the way we're supposed to. Does anybody say, "Well, I'm not gonna eat that antelope liver 'cause it has too much saturated fat." And by the way, the people, of course, who adhere to this lifestyle, the few remaining groups like the Yanomami in the Brazilian jungle, Venezuelan rainforests, the people who populate the highlands of New Guinea, the Malawi in Eastern Africa, the Maasai in the savanna of, of Kenya, etc. These people have no coronary disease, they have no aortic disease to speak of, they don't get femoral artery peripheral vascular disease. So there is virtually no atherosclerosis in those populations, yet they have no consciousness whatsoever. They don't know what saturated fat is, they don't know what seed oils are, are. So it's a lifestyle of eating oils that occur naturally, such as in the organs and meats of animals, and some of them that occur in wild plants. And so I think a return to that, the evidence would suggest. Yeah. Now, of course, seed oils, as you point out, is a whole mixed bag of things, but it tends to be a source of linoleic acid. Yeah. And that may— there may be some adverse effects. Of course, as you know, the adverse effect is not so much the exposure to linoleic acid, which is in meat.

By the way.

Yeah, yeah. It's the wild overexposure that comes by way of corn oil, mixed vegetable oil, cottonseed oil. So that may be detrimental. But also the other, the quirky thing about that evidence is the excess of omega-6 may be a proxy for the absence of omega-3. Yeah, right. EPA, DHA.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's interesting because again, I see this group happening on kind of both sides. Of arguing about this topic. And again, so for— and again, there's a lot of, I think, mixed evidence. But I think to your point, it really goes back to eat real food, as little processed as it can possibly be. And that really should be the focus, is, you know, is eating by design, you know, eating by design. And so I'm with you on that, you know. But before the interview here, I just— I came from working out at the gym, and I tend to try and get in real early because there's just less people in there, you know. If I'm in there, I mean, really, 9 to 11 o'clock is just, it's so, so, so busy. But you know, one thing that I've, I, I've noticed that's happened really, I feel like even more in the past quite few years with the, with the prevalence of things like CrossFit and, and people learning about Olympic weight training and all this, is I think I see a lot of people overtraining. And I had, I herniated a couple discs in my back about 10 years ago, and I really learned a lesson that, and I realized after not being able to walk for a period of time that, um, I didn't want to work out for vanity. I wanted work out for longevity. Is this something you see? And you take care of a lot of people with heart ailments. People even overtraining or causing actually injuries via the way they're working out?

All the time. I see people— I see a lot of ladies who say, I need to work out 4 to 6 hours a day. I'm gonna bike 100 miles, I'm gonna run 13 miles, and then swim 2 miles, like a triathlete. Yeah, yeah. And then I've seen these ladies— I had one one woman who was walking. She loved long-distance running. Uh, it's not exercise for, for health's sake, it's exercise for some compulsion's sake. And I— she's walking, age 52, she's walking, didn't stumble, didn't fall, she's walking, and she fractured her hip because of exercise-induced osteoporosis. And I've seen that happen numerous times now. Uh, ladies who don't have menstrual cycles in their 30s and 40s because they're overtrained Yeah. Now the emergence of these really weird, what are called cardiomyopathies, heart muscle diseases in long-distance exercise. Um, the presumptive reason is that there's overload, volume overload of the— the left ventricle is part of the heart we all think about as the heartbeat, but it's the right ventricle that receives venous flow. In an extreme exercise like a marathon, there is overload of the right ventricle, and some of these people will have dilated right ventricles, which is a very bad thing. It becomes electrically unstable and may be one of the reasons why there's an increase in sudden cardiac death. Wow. With long-distance exercise, there's also other problems. So when you exercise to extremes, such as a marathon, intestinal permeability increases dramatically. Yeah, yeah. In the hours afterwards. And these people, of course, carb load loaded more often than not, right? They had pasta and sugary foods and energy drinks during the course of having diarrhea. But, oh, you got to wonder what happens with that combination of carb loading, dramatic increase in blood glucose, small LDL particle formation, and, uh, increase intestinal permeability. It's my suspicion, has not been borne out in evidence yet, that that's probably a big reason why we see a lot of people who are long-distance exercisers developing things like Parkinson's disease and other long-term debilitations. So that, that's speculation, but I think it's going to prove true. Yeah, that— but it speaks what you're talking about. Extremes of exercise done for compulsion purposes, not for health purposes, can have very bad consequences.

Yeah, yeah. Like I said, at this point, I'm I'm, I'm doing everything I can to be exercising again when I'm 80 and 90 and inactive. And so I'm very, very thoughtful about that, uh, even in the way I move. You know, it's so funny, when I was younger, I had a, uh, my strength coach in high school would say, tell me things like, of course this is popular today if you're in the fitness industry, uh, don't let your knees go over your toes. Like, I was actually taught some wrong things. And so now I'm working with a trainer on— and the great thing is, like, I was a personal trainer I've trained in this, but still there's so much value in having somebody who's watching you and helping you, you know, retrain yourself and how you should, uh, exercise and live for longevity. So that's been something I've loved. You know, uh, you, as I mentioned to start the show, your background's in cardiology. Heart disease is the number one killer in America today. What are your top 5 supplements in ranking order that would benefit people the most at preventing heart disease?

Vitamin D, big player. It was the first— Josh, when I was— a lot of this started when I started a facility in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the time, 30-some years ago, a long time ago, called Milwaukee HeartScan. It was a CT— actually, it was an EBT device. It was even before CT devices were fast enough. Um, but it generates something called a coronary calcium score as an indirect surrogate for the volume of atherosclerotic plaque in your arteries. Because my good friend John Rumberger, when he was at his Dr. Cao did a series of autopsy series. He took people who died of car accidents, cancer, whatever, and he quantified the amount of calcium in coronary atherosclerotic plaque. And he found regardless of age, sex, cause of death, 20% of total atherosclerotic plaque volume was occupied by calcium, meaning calcium is the thing we can see and precisely quantify in living living people. Yeah. Uh, isn't— is a certain— is an index of how much plaque you have. And that, that was 30-some years ago. And of course, I opened the center, one of the first in, in the Midwest, one of the first in the country. We're doing this left, and when you look for heart disease, you find it everywhere. Wow. It's everywhere. So we're trying to put a stop to it. Now, this is 30-some years ago. Back then, the, the solution was baby ass aspirin, low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, a statin cholesterol drug, maybe a beta blocker, and an exercise program. So we helped publish these data. If you have a score— so 0 is normal, no calcium, no plaque. And people say, "Why are you measuring calcium? We want soft plaque." No, it's a measure of total plaque. But anyway, so let's say you say, "Well, I— my dad had a heart attack at age 63. I'm 52. Is that in my future?" You get your scan, your score is 400, very high. We do nothing, which is not smart. Your score goes up 25% per year. So a year later, 500, 625, and each step of the way you're close to dying, having a heart attack, developing angina that leads you to the hospital, cath lab, stent implantation, etc. What if you went on baby aspirin, Lipitor, outdoor, low-fat diet, exercise program. What my colleagues, Josh, to this day, my colleagues call that optimal medical therapy. How fast will that score? 25% per year.

Still?

Really? A dozen trials, yes. Wow. So what do you do? You and I know we take care of people at street level and we have people freaking out. My score's now 25% higher, I'm closer to dying. Well, of course, my colleagues, They say, let's do the real test, heart catheterization. These are people going to school, work, riding their bikes. These are not people in the emergency room having chest pain. And they're telling them they need protective or preventive bypass surgery or stent implantation, which is absolute nonsense. It's malpractice. It's done every day. That's why we look around these big facilities, $80 million, $100 million for cardiovascular care, because a lot of it's done inappropriately. So what do you do though if, if I, I don't want to do that? How do you stop it? Well, I did a number of things, a lot of zigzagging, trial and error. Talking to the experts was useless because they said, well, you have your patient on optimal medical therapy, don't you? So, uh, one of the things I did many years ago was add vitamin D, and it was the first time I saw scores do that.

Really?

Wow. Wow. A score of, let's say, 650 would drop to 425 or something like that. By the way, you don't have to drop to zero to be sick.

Hey, let me ask you, is that, is the reason alone that vitamin D, of course, has all these numerous benefits for immunity and inflammation and, you know, bone formation, but is it also partly due to, does it act as a cofactor for calcium being absorbed better? This is just a question I would have. Probably. Yeah.

So one of the things I've discouraged my population is calcium supplements.

I've read a couple studies, these are years ago, but that taking certain types of calcium supplements increased your risk of heart attacks.

Yes, there's evidence.

Why is that?

Why would that be? It's only presumptive because they were observational studies. Okay. That is not prospective randomized placebo control, but observations. John, do you take calcium? I do. Mary, you take calcium? I don't. And we follow it. So that's maybe.

Well, I mean, the absorption rate of calcium carbonate, for instance, is pretty low. Low.

Yeah. So one of the things, uh, so as you point out, vitamin D increases intestinal absorption of calcium fairly dramatically. Getting rid of fecal microbes in the small intestine increases calcium absorption dramatically. Yeah. Uh, getting magnesium, uh, supports bone health and a lot of the things that calcium was supposed to do. In other words, this idea of getting a bolus dose— that was the evidence you're talking about from New Zealand in Australia that suggests that people who took bolus dosing, they say, I take 1,200 milligrams of calcium carbonate or calcium lactate or whatever. And you get a big surge of calcium. There's a probable increase in heart attack and death. So yet that remains the prevailing standard. Wow. In conventional care, take more calcium for your osteoporosis, osteopenia.

Wow, that's wild. Okay, so number one, Number 1 of the top 5 is vitamin D.

Next, I think, would be omega-3 fatty acids. So as you know, there's been 20, 30 years of all kinds of nonsense ever since the epidemiologic studies, like in the Inuit and other, Japanese and some of the coastal populations who had higher omega-3 intake had fewer cardiovascular events. Well, so then prospective trial, GISSI-Prevenzione, 1999, 11,000 Italians given 1,000 milligrams, low— what you and I regard as low dose of EPA/DHA, a drop in cardiovascular events that spawned all this excitement. And then a bunch of studies that had serious methodological problems, lower doses, different forms, small numbers of participants, but real problems like failure to weight adjust. So this applies to vitamin D also. If I have two, two people, Let's say two, two ladies. One woman's 110 pounds, another woman's 210 pounds. They both start with a 25-hydroxy vitamin D blood level. Yeah. Let's say 15, which is very common where I live. Yeah. Northern climates. We put them on, let's say, 8,000 units of vitamin D. The 110-pound woman gets a blood level of 73. I'm aiming for 60 to 70, thereabouts. Yeah. The overweight woman goes from 15 to 28. So even though it's the same dose, she didn't achieve— and she says it's likely that woman's participation in the clinical study likely will show vitamin D doesn't do anything. Same thing with omega-3 fatty acids. It's very weight dependent because fat cells sequester vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids. So one of the many methodological problems in those studies. But then Then better studies started coming out, larger studies, including 3 CT coronary angiographic studies. So those, that CT heart scan device I talked about. I tried to do this 18 or so years ago, but the software to reconstruct arteries in 3-dimensional space, the software was inadequate 18 years ago when I tried to do it. Now it's, they can, technology has advanced. 3 studies, HEARTS, EVAPORATE, and another study where they gave people omega-3 fatty acids at higher doses a high dose, and remarkably, they saw regression of plaque. All right, well, even more remarkably, everybody— because the prevailing standard is to take a statin drug— everybody in those studies took a high dose of statin drug. So it was statin alone versus statin plus omega-3 fatty acids, typically 3,300 milligrams or more per day, EPA/DHA. And the people who got statins had worsening, progression. People who got omega-3 fatty acids had regression, reversal.

That's amazing.

Wow. But specifically of the soft plaque that ruptures. That's the stuff that kills you or causes heart attack. It's a rupture of soft components, fatty plaque. And omega-3 fatty acids at doses greater than 3,300 milligrams per day actually achieve regression of fatty plaque, explaining why there's a marked reduction in heart attacks and sudden cardiac death with omega-3 fatty. So omega-3 fatty acids has had a resurgence of of interest in light of the CT coronary angiographic studies.

That's great news.

So that's a big one. Number 3. You know, iodine.

Iodine is really— I've never heard this with heart disease. Let's hear. Obviously thyroid and some of those sort of more metabolic issues.

But, you know, so iodine deficiency was a huge public health problem all throughout human history until 1924. But if you and I went to Paris and went to the Louvre or went to Rome and looked at all the paintings and sculptures of people from that, you would say, see, a lot of them have goiters. Yeah.

And large thyroid glands. Yeah, yeah.

So this was a huge problem. If your great-grandma was alive, you say, "Great-grandma, tell me about goiters when you were a little girl." She would say, "Josh, oh, my next-door neighbor died of a goiter. It infiltrated her airway." Or, "My teacher gained 150 pounds. Her legs were elephant-sized and she died in a coma." coma. This was extremely common. So 30% of school children, for instance, in the Midwest had goiters, an iodine deficiency. Well, it became recognized in the 1920s that was simply due to lack of iodine in non-coastal populations, because iodine's in the ocean. Yeah, it's in seaweed, seafood. And so the FDA says, well, how do you get iodine into an illiterate public? 1924. Yeah, no radio, no TV, no the internet. So they said, "Let's launch a poster campaign. Use more iodized salt." So they asked the salt manufacturers to put it in salt. Yeah. "Use more iodized salt. Keep your family goiter-free." And Americans listened. Wow. They did. People used all this iodized salt. Goiters went away. Many of us never seen a goiter. Yeah. But then, of course, the use of salt led to some people having hypertension, other problems with sodium. But that was coincident with the advice to cut your fat and cholesterol eat more healthy whole grains. So the FDA and other agencies interpreted that as excessive salt or sodium, not recognizing it was a worsening of insulin resistance that causes sodium retention. So the solution is— and in fact, in my programs, I learned this years ago, I'd have to— okay, we're going to cut your wheat grains and sugars, we're going to address common nutrient deficiencies, blah, blah, blah. And they'd call me, I passed passed out, or I had to stop my hydrochlorothiazide, my lisinopril, and my low pressor, my beta blocker, because my blood pressure was so low.

Oh yeah, I was—

so people were passing out from low blood pressure. In other words, complete— so I had to tell them, salt your food and water. Yeah, so it was exact opposite. But became clear it was insulin resistance that was causing sodium retention, uh, but because the FDA and other agencies, the Heart Association, radiation. They tell you to cut your sodium intake to 1,500 milligrams, which, by the way, evidence is good, increases your risk of death. This is the status quo. So, uh, but all that advice that people have tended to listen to caused them to reject intake of iodine. And we're seeing it's not as bad as it used to be because the food supply is global to some degree. So iodine deficiency is not as bad as it used to be. But if you have even just marginal iodine deficiency, your risk for coronary disease, weight gain, SIBO, dementia, all those things increase. And the solution is so easy. It has not trickled down, as you know, to John Q. Primary Care, who says, "You don't need iodine, it's in your diet. You don't need iodine, it's unnecessary." No, it was the largest public health problem for centuries until 1924.

Wow, crazy.

Number 4? Probably magnesium. Yeah. Yeah. We rely on hydroponically grown vegetables and plants and those kinds of things, or food grown in depleted soils 'cause it's been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, or we have to filter what we have to. We don't have a choice. You can't drink water from the river.

Yeah, yeah, right, right.

It's got sewage. So we filter our water. Of course, water filtration is extremely efficient. If you have a water purifier in your house and you read the accompanying materials, say we are very efficient removing greater than 99.9% of all magnesium. Yeah. So your drinking water, your food has no magnesium in it. So we gotta supplement magnesium.

Yeah, it makes sense. How about number 5?

Last one. Well, not a probiotic. So as you know, most commercial probiotics are formulated like this. We say, well, we think that Lactobacillus acidophilus is good, let's throw that in. We think that Bifidobacterium longum is good, let's throw that in. And they're, they're kind of a hodgepodge and they do have some modest benefits, but I've chosen that other way of doing it. Let's choose microbes with specific effects, but importantly to start, microbes that colonize the small intestine and colon and produce bactericins. That's not necessarily a long-term solution, but it's a near-term solution to fight back the invasion and overproliferation of fecal microbes. So I don't know if you call that a supplement, but what I call SIBO yogurt.

Yeah, it makes sense. No, I, I think, I, I think, you know, to me, supplementing is, um, looking at your diet and what you can get and finding something that's maybe easy and convenient. Sometimes it's a capsule, sometimes it's an herbal tea, sometimes it's a yogurt shot, you know, something like that to fill it. Uh, I think that's, uh, I think it's great advice. You know, to your point, like, there's a, there's a probiotic that I've taken that's like 10 times the dose, and it's got Bacillus subtilis in it and humic and fulvic acid and things like that that I think is a is it— there are a few good probiotics out there, but I do think that 90% of the brands out there, there's no thought into it. They're very low dose, they're ineffective. And so I think that's a great point, uh, but, but a need, right, to recolonize the, uh, recolonize the gut. You know, what's your new book that's out?

The name is Super Body, which we had some difficulties with nonetheless. So, but it was meant to highlight the issue that, um, we've lost muscle. We've expanded abdominal visceral fat. Yeah. And all the solutions that come from conventional healthcare make it worse. They work up front to lose fat, but they destroy your health long term because of that loss of muscle. So even if you did a low-calorie diet, bariatric procedure, GLP-1 agonist, those methods we all know with good evidence are selective for losing subcutaneous fat, fat below the surface, kind of like, uh, liposuction. Yeah. But not selective for loss of abdominal visceral fat. That's the truly problematic fat, the fat in your abdomen you can't see encircling abdominal organs like your small intestine, large intestine.

Liver. Liver.

All these areas, yeah. Which by the way is now it's become clear is accompanied by what's called ectopic fat. That is, your body has a hard time collecting more fats, which starts to deposit in odd places. Places like around your heart. Yeah, epicardial fat that accelerates the growth of plaque in your arteries, or in the joints, in your hip and knee joints. And when you see globules of fat on an MRI of the joint, that accelerates the deterioration of your joint cartilage and accelerates bone-on-bone arthritis. Or ectopic fat, say, in your pancreas, that kills off the beta cells and can convert a type 2 diabetic to a type 1 diabetic. That's irreversible, but also so-called myosteatosis, that is the infiltration of fat into muscle. So more abdominal fat, more fat in the muscle, which accelerates loss of strength, the loss of control you have over your metabolic rate, and disability.

Well, obviously this is incredibly important. I know, as you— you know, like I said, I read Wheat Belly years ago, and if you haven't read it, it's an amazing book. I recommend I know you wrote Undoctored. That was a great book. Super Gut. I know that was a book where you were getting into the gut microbiome and now Super Body. And so to the point with Super Body, I think that for all of us, getting rid of the most deadly type of body fat that we store around these organs is such an important topic. And I would encourage everybody to go out and get Dr. William Davis's new book, Super Body. It's on Amazon.com. It's in bookstores nationwide. And I hope everybody takes to heart his incredible advice today. Dr. William, thanks for coming on. I know I learned so much. I loved you getting into the details about what's happening in our heart and our liver and our blood vessels and, and, you know, the root cause of things in terms of what's happening with these big organizations pushing these unfounded and really deadly advices on us and, and what we need to start doing. Of course, you know, a big takeaway here is your gut is connected to even your heart and your entire body. So repopulating and focusing on healing SIBO, healing that gut is incredibly important as well. I wanna say thanks everybody for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show, where each and every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and take your health and life to the next level. Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, let us know what is the biggest piece of advice that Dr. Williams shared with you today. We'd love to hear from you. And also, thank you, all of you, for subscribing. Thanks for sharing this episode, and I'll see you on the next one.