Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Appearances
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Okay. When I'm in the hospital, I will be walking through and I can literally tell when a consult is coming because I can smell this diagnosis.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah. So anyway, the stool will turn black. It will smell terrible and it will be like tar. That's what makes it different than if you were to, for example, take Pepto-Bismol.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So there was a study that was done in the 90s, a long time ago, and it was less than 2,000 people exclusively in the city of Bristol. And it led to the creation of a chart called the Bristol Stuhl Scale. Right here, I'll put it on the screen. Yeah, and we're gonna run through this. But before we do, I wanna mention a few things real quick.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
As the US Medical Director of Zoe, I'm proud of my contribution as a gastroenterologist, as a physician, to the work that we're doing there. And we not only did the blue poo study, which we've talked about already, which is that you can eat your muffins and figure out your gut transit time. But we also did a couple of other things. One is called the Blue Poo Challenge.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Where we had over 20,000 people across the planet who were basically eating blue muffins and then reporting back to us on what was going on with them. And then more recently, so again, the Bristol study was 2,000 people exclusively in the city of Bristol. We recently did the largest study across the entire UK on poop deaths. and what people were doing in terms of their bowel movements.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So it was called the Big Poo Review, and we had 142,000 people from across the UK basically fill out a 17-question survey. And part of what we were looking at was their Bristol stool form. We were also looking at how often they poop. By the way, the average person poops 1.7 times per day. And we were also looking at how it associates with different conditions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So as an example, one in five people in the UK are constipated. One in six people in the UK have diarrhea. So it's interesting to take a look at all these things. So now getting into the Bristol stool chart, the... The dream. That is real poop. It's lovely. This is the dream. This is where we all want to be. And this is a Bristol Four.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
The Bristol Four is the classic where I come walking out of the bathroom in slow motion and rock music is jamming and doves are flying in slow motion. And I just am such a stud. So, and that's after a Bristol four. My wife knows what happens when I come out looking like that. It's soft and formed, okay? And it's like a sausage or a torpedo. So pretty smooth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Now, when we move from a four to a three, a three is not that big of a deal, but it is getting some cracks and crevices in it, all right? So, and we're moving towards constipation. Now, a three, you know, a little more fiber, a little more hydration, some exercise, right? These are simple things that can help to get you back to a four if you're having one of these, a three.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And those vital signs would allow me to have an idea of how you're doing in terms of like just on a basic level, your cardiovascular health. All right. I'm a gastroenterologist. If I want to know the basics of what's going on with you and your body, I need to know how you're pooping.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But that moves us to a Bristol two where we are truly getting into constipation territory here. And basically, this is like if you took a whole bunch of marbles of poop and jammed them together. So it still forms into something, but it looks like a pack of marbles of poop that are stuck together. So that's a Bristol two stool. That's constipation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And then finally, a Bristol one is when you're having the rabbit pellets and they're hard. They're not easy to get out. And sometimes they're a lot bigger than this. These are small. So you would form this up into what would be like a golf ball. And that golf ball would be like a Bristol one.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
All right. You form it up into a hard ball like this, but perhaps even bigger. And it's actually hard for a person to pass this. It's so big. It's so hard that your bottom has a problem relaxing to let it out. Okay. So Bristol 1 and 2 are forms of constipation. Let's go back to the middle. We're going to start from 5. The stool is soft. It's not hard. It's not lumpy bumpy. It's soft.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But it's starting to break into blobs, different pieces of poop. Okay. So, and we're moving towards, we're moving towards diarrhea where like just like fragments of solid stool are Bristol six. And then when it's just like, or the other thing of Bristol six could be like a cow pie. Where there's no form. It's just someone plopped down this formless patty.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And a Bristol 7 finally is straight liquid. Straight liquid.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
There's been now multiple studies, including our work at Zoe on the blue poop study that was published in the journal Gut. There's now been multiple studies where basically what they found is that if you can look at which of these Bristol types you have, it does give us some insights into your gut microbiome and what's happening there. So now, where do we want to be?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
In a perfect world, we want to be somewhere on the spectrum of three, four, or five. We ideally want to be a four. You're not unhealthy if you have a three or a five.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah, interesting question. One of the things that we found in the Big Poo Review, which is our nationwide survey of 142,000 people, we actually looked at what they were eating. And we were able to find associations between fiber intake and specifically plant-based food intake and having a number four.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So in other words, we found associations between fiber intake and basically plant-based food intake and having a number four. So basically what that means is the people that were having a number four bowel movement were consuming more legumes, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
The people who were having whether it be a type 1 or a type 7, they actually were quite similar in terms of their diet, which is that they actually were consuming lower amounts of fiber.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Now, the other thing to look at too is actually some studies have found that people who have more on the spectrum of constipation tend to have a higher fat diet, tend to typically consume more animal products, which of course are higher in fat. And people that are more on the loose or diarrhea side of things tend to be consuming more plant-based foods.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So now you could have a very healthy diet and be having a Bristol 5, and that actually is not problematic. And the reason that you're having the Bristol 5 is because you're consuming so much fiber that actually you're producing a lot of short-chain fatty acids. And those short-chain fatty acids, they're like lubricants for your poop.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
That's right. So a slow gut transit time, which is a gut transit time more than 58 hours. So again, and this is all with the blue muffins. You eat the blue muffin, it comes out 58 hours later. You are more likely to be having a Bristol 1 or Bristol 2, which is the classic constipation form. There's no way. no way that you would have slow gut transit time and have a Bristol 7. That's not possible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah, a diarrhea.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And the reason why this is happening, you know, so when water moves through the intestines, because a ton of water moves through the intestines, and one of the jobs that our colon has, the large intestine, is to pull the water out. So the more time that something spends inside the colon, the more it's actually going to do that, pull the water out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
This is the reason why when we have fast transit, it's high in water. And this is also the reason why when it's slow transit, it's extremely dry.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
All right, let's break this down. So first of all, why is our poop brown? The answer to that question has to do with bile. Bile is produced by our liver. it's actually involved heavily in digestion of fat. So when we, for example, eat a fatty meal, our gallbladder will squeeze. People that have gallbladder issues know what I'm talking about. You eat a fatty meal, your gallbladder squeezes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Bile then mixes in your intestines with the food and the bile helps to absorb the fat. That bile is what makes our poop brown. Now that becomes particularly relevant if we're talking about a white poop, People poop white? Some people poop white. No way. Yes. And the reason why a person would have a white poop is if there's a blockage that stops the bile from mixing with their intestines.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
On the flip side, if you are struggling to process your fat, you could have a yellow poop. And this could be a person who has a pancreas issue, for example, chronic pancreatitis. And so if they're not able to digest their fat... they have a fatty poop, it may come out yellow. And one of the things that they'll notice is that there may be an oil slick at the top of the toilet bowl.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
That's fat, oil is fat. So, all right, you've never had a, have you ever had a green bowel movement?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Answer the damn question. No, I haven't. Okay. I have. Oh, really? Yeah. There's a couple of reasons. Some are healthy, some are not. So you could have diarrhea like from an infectious cause. An example could be something called Giardia, which is a parasite. And that'll give you green poop. But you could also go too hard on the smoothies.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
I was drinking like 40 ounces of green smoothies a day and my poop would come out green. It was interesting. Okay. We're about to get into some that are really important. Before I do that, let me just mention real quick, the blue.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So the blue poo, you could get a blue poo from eating blueberries, particularly if you eat a lot of them, or alternatively, of course, this is the blue muffin, the blue poo challenge. So, and perhaps what we could do in the show notes is give people the recipe for how they can go about doing that if they're interested. All right, red and black.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So we have to talk about, let's start with red, because of course, red, we think about blood. And I have a rule, which is that if you see blood in your stool, that's not normal. And to me, that's grounds to talk to a doctor. And then there's different levels of intensity of how seriously we check it out. But Stephen, colon cancer, which can present with red stool,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
um colon cancer is the number two cause of cancer death in our countries in the united states 150 000 people are diagnosed per year it's highly preventable and it's shifting towards younger people there has been a change in the last few years in terms of colon cancer where you know as an example A person of your generation, you and I are pretty close, I think, but I'm a little bit older.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
A person of your generation is four times more likely to be diagnosed with rectal cancer during their lifetime than my parents were. And twice times more likely to be diagnosed with colon cancer compared to my parents' generation. So there's been this shift and it's also affecting younger people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So my point is this, I've had patients who come to me, they go, I saw a little bit of blood in my stool, do a colonoscopy and discover that they have a massive polyp, which is a precursor to cancer. And by removing the polyp, we just basically stopped them from developing cancer. So I take it seriously when you see a poop that is coated in red, All right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Now that red may be just on parts of it like it is here where that's typically bright red coming from the bottom. So that would be either something in your rectum, could be hemorrhoids, could be an anal fissure, could also be a polyp in the rectum.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But I think what I come back to is I would encourage people to get checked out because just seeing the bright red blood doesn't mean it's hemorrhoids. Don't assume that. Particularly with cancer shifting towards younger people. I think it's important to get checked out. On that point about cancer shifting towards younger people, is that because our diets are changing? I think so.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
I think it's the shift generationally that's taken place in terms of our diets. I also think that there's a microbiome element. The connections between the gut microbiome and colon cancer are as powerful as any type of cancer. And at the same time, what protects us? And I think you know what I'm gonna say, it's the fiber and the short chain fatty acids.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah, and I think that this is an important conversation to have because we have stigmatized poop. We're not allowed to look in the bowl. We should be looking in the bowl. And the reason why is because if I were a cardiologist, I would come over and I would check your pulse. I would listen to your heart.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
And in that study that I was mentioning earlier from Andrew Reynolds, the professor from New Zealand, actually there was a powerful association between fiber consumption and protecting ourselves from colorectal cancer, so powerful, that for every five grams of fiber that we increase in our diet, we are getting a significant reduction in our risk.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So it's not just do you eat fiber or not, it's actually how much fiber do you eat and the more the better. You know what I should mention real quick, red stool can also come from eating beets. It will almost always happen like literally 24 to 48 hours after you eat the beets. So don't be surprised when that's the case, you may see a little bit of red stool.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Well, because it goes back to what you mentioned earlier, which is that 60% of the weight of our stool is actually microbial in origin. So if you want a window into your microbiome, look at your poop. You don't necessarily need to go and do an expensive test. Quite simply, looking at your poop is one of the ways that you can tell what's going on.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Um, black stool can come from benign places. So an example is bismuth. So like Pepto-Bismol. So you have a, you have a stomach ache and then you take some Pepto-Bismol. And, um, so, but the issue with this is it'll actually give you black stool. So if you're having a bad stomach for a couple of days in a row, it could turn black.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
But the other thing that turns your stool black that people need to know about is a slow GI bleed. bleeding into your stomach specifically, because that bleeding is happening higher up in your intestines and then it has to pass all the way through like intestinal transit time, right? Because there's such a delay, by the time it gets down to your rectum, it's now black, it's not red anymore.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
So black stool can be indicative of bleeding. The way that we can differentiate this is when it's blood, it smells terrible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Key Moment: 10 Things Your Poo Says About Your Health: The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist
Yeah. Well, you don't have to stick your nose into it. It's so clear. Like it will be so clear.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Yeah. Do you switch up your exercise every once in a while to see if you can get better gains?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
It's amazing to be in your 40s and thriving. Yes. And I'm actually lifting my heaviest weight in my 40s as well. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah, dude, I'm pumped. Let's go get the cameras and let's go lift right now.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, this is the point, and I don't know that you were intentionally trying to set me up there because we haven't talked about this before, but actually diversity of exercise is actually a relevant idea. Really? Yes. So much we could be talking about different types of foods have a different effect on our microbiome. Different exercises have a different effect on our microbiome.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You go into the supermarket, they've distilled it down to 75% of the calories in our supermarket is three foods. What are those three foods? Wheat, corn, and soy. Wow. Yes. That is 75% of the calories in the supermarket. Now, granted, most of those are ultra-processed. I'm here to advocate for real food. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes, that's at least five.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They did this study where they looked at marathon runners. And they identified that there was this one bacteria called Villanella that was disproportionately represented within these marathon runners. So the scientists, this was, by the way, done, I believe, at Harvard in Boston. The scientists asked the question, what's the deal with this Villanella?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Why would the runners have more of this specific thing? And the answer was quite interesting. The Villanella was breaking down lactic acid. When we run, endurance exercise, lactic acid accumulates in our muscles. That creates muscle fatigue. If you want to be a better runner and have greater endurance, you would break down lactic acid. The microbes are helping. That's interesting.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They have another study done by rugby players in Ireland. All right. And they looked at their microbiome, these rugby players, and they discovered that there is a shift within their microbiome towards actually more anti-inflammatory bacteria that interact with fiber to produce what are called short chain fatty acids, which are the most anti-inflammatory molecules out there.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And these short chain fatty acids, which people may have heard of them, butyrate, acetate, propionate. These short chain fatty acids have healing effects right there in your gut. They help to shape the microbiome. They affect the immune system. They affect our metabolism. And they enter the bloodstream and they travel all the way to the brain.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And they affect the brain, including the blood-brain barrier.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, it's interesting because you think about all the great athletes, for example, in the NFL. And you see these guys do, like Adrian Peterson comes to mind. where some of the recoveries that he had during his career were crazy. And they defy the rules of recovery. And it makes you wonder if there's something- Is that genetics? Is that microbiome? Is that, yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Are there other factors in play here? But what's interesting is because you have this shift in the microbiome towards these anti-inflammatory molecules. Okay, well, I just mentioned that depression has an inflammatory component to it, right? So here we are and we discover that exercise is actually good for helping our mood.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And what I'm saying is what's happening under the hood, if you lift up the hood and take a look, is there's this shift in the microbiome. And now you don't even have to change your diet. I mean, I do want you to eat more plants. Right, right. Right? But exercise alone helps you improve your anxiety or stress or depression. Yes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And that shift that's happening in the microbiome is actually helping you to get more from your fiber. Right. So you don't change your diet. You eat the same fiber. Now you get more from it. But what if you also changed your diet at the same time that you were implementing this exercise? If you did one and two, food and exercise. This is why they synergize so well.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I think that the answer is yes. And the reason why I say that is they have these bizarre studies that they've done where they take people and they inject into them something called lipopolysaccharide. What is that? All right. Lipopolysaccharide is produced by bacteria that live inside of us, like E. coli. So we've all heard of E. coli, okay? So this is like- They inject a disease inside of us.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So they're injecting this thing that you find in E. coli into a person's bloodstream. Wow. Okay. And then they track them over the next couple of hours. We're talking about humans. We're not talking about mice right now. And they see what happens. And here's what they find. Number one, because this bacteria has entered into the bloodstream, they get increased levels of inflammation in the body.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We could add mushrooms. Those are broad categories. We can get more specific if we want to, but to me, it's about getting that variety. This is not just an idea or a concept. This is actually scientifically proven. In a study called the American Gut Project, which, by the way, was international, but it was run out of UC San Diego, what they found is that
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Number two, their mood and their motivation to work dips. Wow. All right. Number three, they socially withdraw. All right. So what's going on here? Basically, what I've just told you is that when they inject this E. coli type stuff, which I, by the way, want to unpack that in a quick moment.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
When they inject this E. coli based stuff called lipopolysaccharide, it basically activates inflammation and which affects their mood, and it also makes them socially withdrawn. And they think that what's happening is that the body is starting to shut down to preserve energy because it needs to fight the infection. So that's number one.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And then they socially withdraw. Why would they socially withdraw? We're social creatures. We come from living in tribes of people, right? And you want to protect one another. If you're sick, you don't want to pass that on to someone else. So, when you feel sick, there's this natural inclination to socially withdraw. To get away.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
To protect the others.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Okay. So, we have these studies where there's correlation. You have a group of people with major depression and you study their microbiome and you discover that their microbiome is damaged. Yes. Okay. They have what we call dysbiosis or a leaky gut, right? Now, what's causing what? That's the question, right?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Because there's a correlation, but you can't prove that the microbiome caused the depression or similarly, you can't prove that depression caused the microbiome change. Yes. Right. So then it raises the question, how do we then prove this? And there's a couple of ways that you prove this through interventions.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And when you take this lipopolysaccharide, basically what you're recreating is what happens when a person has a damaged gut. Interesting. Because when you have a damaged gut, Those microbes, they live inside the tube of the intestine. And as we discussed at the very beginning of the show, that tube is outside of our body.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We have a single layer of cells called the gut epithelium that basically protect us. Because on the other side of the epithelial layer is 60 to 70% of our immune cells. Wow. Okay. So the immune system is there to protect us on the other side. And the single layer of cells, it's like the wall of our castle.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And when our gut breaks down, when our microbes are damaged, when we don't have enough anti-inflammatory short chain fatty acids, you start to see this gut barrier breakdown. We get what people may call leaky gut. And what leaks is the lipopolysaccharide. This lipopolysaccharide that they were injecting in this study, basically what they were recreating, they were not recreating an infection.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They were recreating chronic inflammation.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
That comes from a damaged gut.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
At the end of the day, when they did their analysis, above everything else, there was this one rule. The diversity of plants in your diet was the number one factor in predicting who had the healthiest gut. And the number is 30. 30 per week. 30 different plants per week. Now, all fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes. Include those 30. They count. Okay. All of them, right?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You start to take a smoothie. It could be Monday morning. Take a smoothie, bananas, blueberries. Greens of your choice, whatever ones you like. Chia seeds, hemp seeds. Chia seeds, hemp seeds, flax seeds. We're already up to six. Okay. Right? You want to add in some raspberries or some other kinds of berries. We could easily get this up to 10. Gotcha. Gotcha. You're making pasta sauce. Oh.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Why would you just do pasta sauce? Why not throw some plants in there? Oh, there you go. Right? Onions, garlic, basil, oregano. Those count too.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Adding more and more of the diversity as possible as opposed to just broccoli and spinach by itself. The average person in the United States, 10% of their calories comes from actual plants. The number one plant is the potato, right? We're not talking about optimal nutrition here.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
There's a reason why people in the United States are suffering through the health-related issues that they currently have. We need to make changes. If we simply added more fiber to our diet, we would radically transform the health of this country. Really? Yes. And that person who's not necessarily eating a lot of variety but is eating a lot of plants, number one, I give them a standing ovation.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Their diet's great starting point. They're way better off than the average American is right now, right? We all, though, should be looking to optimize. We all have opportunities to do better. So if you take that diet and you add more variety to it, they will reap the rewards of that.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And the reason why is because every single one of these plants has unique properties that are, number one, going to affect our microbiome, right? So these microbes, they're kind of like us in many ways, Lewis. They have personalities, right? Some of them are not nice. They have cliques. They have certain ones that they tend to hang out with and they work together. They also have taste buds.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They have different food preferences. Not every microbe, believe it or not, likes kale.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You can trade it to like kale but there's going to be a lot of microbes that are going to be hungry if the only thing that you eat was kale. Interesting. Right? So, every single plant is feeding certain families of microbes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Yeah. So, satiation, like feeling full, is an important concept these days, right? We have all seen the rollout of Ozempic and these other GLP-1 type agonists. What is this GLP-1 that we're talking about here? This is a hormone. It's a gut hormone already produced by your body, right? And makes you feel full.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Now I'm not sitting here and going to try to pretend that like what you eat is going to have the same effect on your body that a drug does. That's not what I'm trying to do here. But I want people to understand that here we exist where 95% of Americans, 95% are deficient in fiber. This is our most prevalent nutritional deficiency. And fiber is what actually leads to the release of GLP-1.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
GLP-1 is what exactly? GLP-1 is glucon-like peptide 1, which is a gut hormone, which is what Ozempic is. Ozempic is GLP-1. Okay. And it has these different effects on our body, including helping us to control our blood sugar and making us feel full.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Which is the reason why Ozempic is used for diabetes and for weight loss.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So... First of all, we have to fully acknowledge that these drugs are highly effective. There is no doubt that they work. They're getting results. They're getting results. But what are the long-term effects of these? We have no clue. Right. We have no clue. We don't have the data yet to say what the long-term results of these are.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
What we do know with complete clarity is that if you stop using the drug, by the way, they're very expensive. They're very expensive. Thousands of dollars per month. Wow. Right? And are we ready to commit to doing this for the rest of our lives? Because when you come off of the drug, you go right back to where you were. Really? Yes. You rebound immediately.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So flip side though, I think it's important at the same time as we're having this conversation about Ozempic and these types of weight loss drugs. Again, like I'm not here to vilify them. Okay. But when we're doing that, instead of changing the way that we eat. The behaviors. Right. The problem that exists with this is like, yes, we can measure weight loss.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And when people lose weight, there are different things that can certainly improve and they become more healthy. But is the only thing that matters for human health our weight? That is not the case. There is so much more to us as humans and our determinants of our health beyond just whether or not we're obese, skinny, or what our body habit is. And so we need to look at that bigger picture.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
The bigger picture is that when we optimize our diet, we have opportunities to improve ourselves metabolically, which includes improving our weight, which includes improving our blood sugar control. But we also have opportunities to prevent other diseases far beyond what Ozempic is capable of preventing.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So, the data are clear. That when we consume an ultra-processed diet, which in the United States today, 60% of calories are ultra-processed foods. So more than half. These are foods, by the way, that did not exist 100 years ago. Crazy. Right? So what we're describing was not possible for our great-grandparents.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
There's no way they could have ate the diet that we currently eat because these foods did not exist. And our kids, 70% of calories in our kids come from ultra-processed foods. Wow. And there's no doubt that they cause a shift in the microbiome. It's a shift towards what we call dysbiosis. So it's the opposite of what we see when we eat a diverse diet.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, I'll give you three things and they all connect back to the microbiome. I would start with food. The food is our most powerful lever that we can pull in terms of shaping and changing the microbiome. And there are simple choices that anyone can make. And this doesn't have to fall under a dietary pattern or a label. It's just changing the way you eat.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Diverse diet leads to a diverse microbiome, and that is a healthy microbiome. When we shift towards ultra-processed foods, we're actually contracting the microbiome. We're empowering the ones that love sugar. We're empowering the ones that create inflammation.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
They're telling your brain you need this. There are interesting studies to suggest that our taste buds and our cravings are driven Biomicrobial. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I think that they play a role in that whole, yes, I think that they play a role in that whole impulse. And yes, that certainly exists. But also the beautiful and exciting thing is our taste buds can change, right? Those impulses can change and you can get yourself to a place where what you crave is actually something that's good for your body and nourishes your body.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I think it really, you really start to see the benefits of four weeks. Four weeks. Yeah. Of doing it consistently. Of doing it consistently. Yeah. But by the way, don't, I don't recommend that people try to flip a switch. Now there are some people that works for, but like to me, we want what, what I want is sustainable, right? Something that you can actually stick with. Not extremes. Not extreme.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We don't want yo-yo. We don't want to be swinging all over the place, right? So we want consistency, sustainability, and we want it to taste good. So start with the stuff that you enjoy, introduce simple, sustainable choices and build from there. And as we start to build, we start to build momentum and our microbiome is given a chance to change with us.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So I say four weeks is what it takes to really make this huge change. But really, I would rather that you do it over the course of six months, a year. Because then by consistently doing this, you are actually going to completely reshape your microbiome. Wow. So, getting back to the question about ultra processed foods and brain health.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
What you're going to create with these ultra-processed foods is an inflammatory microbiome. And inflammation is an essential feature that exists in many different cognitive disorders and mood disorders, including depression, including anxiety.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Oh, gosh. It's hard to put an exact number on that. But I think what we see, if we were to zoom out, Even in America then, maybe. Yeah, in America. If we just focus on what's happening here in the States, if you zoom out for a moment, think of all of the digestive disorders that exist. Obesity, digestive disorders.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Metabolic issues, immune issues, meaning autoimmune type issues that are hugely on the rise. hormonal issues, right? And you go down the line and you think of these things and I haven't even gotten to the brain yet. Heart issues. And basically what I'm saying is the gut microbiome is a player in all of these different conditions. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So if the gut microbiome is a player in these conditions and you have these conditions present, you've already proven. You've already proven what the state of the microbiome is. And then the question is, how is it affecting your brain, right? And could you have better energy, better focus, better ability to do tedious, hard things during the day? And the answer would be yes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And the way that that starts is by changing your diet. Wow. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And it was as effective as medication for the treatment of major depression.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Okay, I can give you a top five, but can I start with this essential rule? Yes. Which is diversity of plants. All right, so eating as much variety of different plants in our diet. We have to be intentional about this if this is what we want. Because the problem is the food system is not going to do that for us.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Abundance is the right word for what we're talking about here. 30 different plants or more. I'm asking you to add more variety, not take away, not restrict. Yeah. So it's the opposite of what we've been told by traditional fad diets. Yes. So, all right. Number two. Yes. So we want to improve our mood. Okay. Exercise.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So exercise clearly improves our mood, can be used as something to help in the treatment of major depression. And the question is, how is it doing that? And one of the answers to that question is actually through the way that exercise shapes our microbiome. How do they shape our microbiome? It depends on what exercise you're doing. So what kind of exercise do you like? I'm curious.