I have lots of clients who complain that they can’t think properly. They talk about having brain fog and report that “something is not right in my head.” Often, they’ve had multiple investigations, including MRI scans, CAT scans, and PET scans, and yet the cause of the problem is still a mystery.
The first thing I ask a patient like this is, “What is your digestive health like?” Often, they report years of bloating, gas, and generally having a terrible digestive system. I also have clients report that they are irritable, easily angered, and often regret things they have said in the heat of the moment.
In situations like this, please don’t’ make the mistake of getting fifty tests done upfront. The most important to do if you have cognitive dysfunction, and the obvious has been ruled out, is to do a comprehensive stool analysis (CSA). Correct whatever problems the CSA identifies. You might have to clean out harmful bacteria, boost up beneficial bacteria, wipe out Candida, or hit a few parasites in the gut.
After the gut has been cleansed, verify that all the problems have been addressed by doing a repeat CSA. Only then do I suggest looking at other issues such as kryptopyrroles, mauve factor, MTHFR (Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase), histamine, organic acids, and hair analysis. Don’t do these tests as frontline investigations.
Often by fixing the gut, you’ll already correct the results of other tests such as hair analysis. Toxicities will automatically be improved when you improve digestive health.
The CSA is the foundational test. Most practitioners get it wrong. They order ten tests and give the clients a handful of supplements and then say, “There is nothing we can do.”
Get the gut fixed first if you have a problem with your brain. Look at your diet, who you spend time with, your occupation, but always, always, always rely on common sense: Fix the gut first.
It’s the new year. Well, it’s almost the end of January, isn’t it? Before you know it, it will be 2021. Lots of questions to go through. I always get questions from subscribers and non-subscribers of course, but let’s go through a few of these today.
First question is, Eric, do you recommend an adjustable toilet seat? Is it good or bad for the gut? Well, in case you don’t know what an adjustable toilet seat is, we’re probably talking about one of these, what we call squat devices, one of these wooden devices or a device that goes around the lavatory or toilet bowl to allow you to squat effectively over the toilet bowl. And when you think about it, squatting is a normal position and millions of people around the world squat as a part of normal daily emptying the bowel motions. So lots of studies validate that having a straighter recto anal canal will mean that you’re going to spend a lot less time evacuating or emptying the bowels because it’s a more natural position. You’ve got a straighter position because you’re squatting rather than sitting.
So a study conducted, I think it was a Japanese study conducted in 2010, show that people who squat basically can empty their bowels in under 60 seconds compared to those who sit can take up to twice as long. And it definitely has advantages for people with hemorrhoids or people with diverticulitis and people with issues in that regard. So my mother had one of these devices over her toilet for a while. It’s just a little ply box that was put there that enabled her to step up and sit over the bowl, like squat over it, if you know what I mean. And she found that enormously helpful for her diverticulitis. So if you’re an older person particularly, or a younger person, you have issues going to the toilet, passing bowel motions, I think they’re brilliant. And if you don’t mind squatting as opposed to sitting, you’ll certainly notice a big improvement.
It also tones this whole hip area up. It’s actually quite good for you in many other ways. But is it going to help you with the bowel problem or not? That’s only something that you can figure out yourself. You can often pick up these things for probably under $50 really, if that, and they’re simple to make. I’ve even seen instructions on YouTube or on the Internet on how to make these little wooden kind of devices.
But I mean, if you talk to many Asian people, people in India, for example, squatting’s a normal part of the daily routine, but in the Western world we find that quite strange. But from the studies I’ve read and the people I’ve spoken to, it definitely has an advantage for people who have a harder time going to the toilet.
So think about it. You may have seen these devices, but if you’ve got issues with diverticulitis or constipation, it’s definitely worth a shot. I’m all for them. Thanks for the question.
Thanks for coming back. Let’s talk about fat, especially crappy fat, like takeaway meals, deep fried chicken, cheap cheese, pizza fat, crap like that and how it affects the communication in your gut. I read this interesting study conducted at Duke University. I think it was published in December, 2019. Let’s have a look. Fatty meal can interrupt the gut’s communication with the body, but why? So you’ve got these cells throughout your, particularly small intestine. They’re dotted here or there. The higher concentration would be further up, closer to the stomach, near the duodenum, or the duodenum. So these enteroendocrine cells can produce up to 15 different types of hormones that they secrete, and these influence many things. So basically this is how the small intestine communicates with the rest of the body through these cells. And we’re talking about insulin resistance, we’re talking about the sensation of fullness, about energy storage.
Many different aspects of digestion absorption and particular utilization of the nutrients is effected by the enteroendocrine cells. So these cells basically communicate no different from how an Apple iPhone communicates with the outside world. What they found, they did a study involving fish. I know fish aren’t humans and fish can’t ride bicycles and stuff like that. I know all that, but still, it’s interesting what they discovered with these fish that were bred to be germ free, and they gave them this sort of fatty meal and they found that there was a lag. The communication basically stopped for quite a big period of time and they couldn’t understand that, and they feel that this could be partly responsible for why some people, if they don’t get their communication occurring between eating, and the rest of the gut and the body, that people can overeat, they can develop insulin sensitivity and even push people into type two diabetes.
I have a good friend of mine pass away two years ago, Paul, and Paul only died when he was 58. Paul was a type one diabetic, but Paul couldn’t stop eating. He was a big guy, and he just kept on eating, and eating, and eating. He’d eat a full meal, say, at our place, and then later on, socially, he’d just go through the takeout that McDonald’s, and he’d buy a couple of burgers and some fries, and then go home and eat that. And I remember talking to Paul about how dangerous it was for him to eat like this, and I got the terrible, terrible phone call one day from his daughter that he passed away on a Sunday morning. It was just awful. And I could see it coming. I could see it coming, just like I could see a train hitting, just crashing. You can see it if you open your eyes.
It’s really distressing when you see it happen to one of your own friends. So Paul had an issue knowing when to stop eating, and the cells, these enteroendocrine cells that we’re talking about, they found a bacteria called [actinobacter 00:03:04]. I think they’re … That’s the name of these bacteria. It’s a particular type of bacteria and, yeah, it’s acinitobacter. I call them actinobacter. So they only make up a very small percentage of the gut. And I know they haven’t really pushed this study through to humans, and they probably will do that now. They’ll probably go onto rats, and then probably onto humans. So particularly if they could find a breakthrough here. So what they found is these actinobacter went from 0.1% up a hundred fold or even greater, like these numbers increased after this crappy, fatty meal.
And these bacteria are the ones likely responsible for changing how a person feels if they’re full or not fall, if they’ve got insulin resistance developing or not. So what we can probably gather from this is, if you consistently eat poor food, you’ll develop poor bacteria, which, in turn, will tell you to keep eating that food. Because remember, food calls your name, okay, if you know what I mean? Brian. Susan. Okay. And food does that. It will tell you to go to the refrigerator. It will tell you to go to the drive through. It will tell you, like your wife tells you or your husband telling you, it will command you. And there’s only one thing you’re going to do when you’re told what to do, and what’s that? You’re going to go to McDonald’s. You’re going to stop off at the corner store. You’re going to grab that can of energy drink, or you’re going to grab that choccy bar.
Now, you didn’t want to do that, but something inside you told you to go and do that. It may be those actinobacter. So when you get these feelings, “No, I’m not going to McDonald’s. I’m going to eat some lettuce and tomatoes instead.” Okay? Fight. Fight the power, if you know what I mean. So when you get these little kinds of things saying you need this or that, you know it’s not you, it’s some bug inside you telling you what to do. It’s pushing your buttons. This is when you need to push back because believe me, once you start eating consistently healthier food, all right, you’ll develop those bacteria that will also call your name, and you’ll enjoy the taste and freshness.
I was only saying to Tracy, my partner, the other day, how much we enjoy these fresh salads and nice food that we eat here, and that how much I miss that kind of experience when I go traveling because we just don’t get that taste and that freshness that we do from homegrown stuff. So there you have it, bacteria calling your name. That’s what it’s all about. Thanks for tuning in.
Eric Bakker, the naturopath. Thanks for coming back. Let’s talk about sugar addictions, cravings for sweet foods. It’s incredible. This is just out of my book, Candida Crusher, How to Break the Sugar Addiction. So it depends really how bad your sugar cravings are. I mean, for some people that I’ve seen in the clinic over the years, I worked out it takes sort of on average up to eight to 12 weeks to really properly break the sugar addiction cycle. Eight to 12 weeks, that seems like a long time but the first four days are the hardest.
So let’s just say you’re a person who’s had a cup of coffee, or a cup of tea, or some type of beverage with a few spoons of sugar in it. We’ve been having tradespeople over working on our kitchen now for some period of time and the man who did the roof, our roofing guy, [Al Rordy 00:00:50], the old Scotsman, he would drink seven or eight cups of tea a day with two or three teaspoons of white sugar in each cup, which seems crazy to me.
Now, Rordy’s uninterested really in anything but doing roofs, having some cold beer and drinking cups of tea or sugar. I mean, that’s fine. That’s Rory’s life. He enjoys it. But you’re out there and you’ve got a gut problem and you’ve got a sugar addiction, what the hell do you do? Or, you go an immune problem? The guy who did a lot of work on vitamin C, Sir Linus Pauling, who got two Nobel prizes, quite a remarkable guy, he worked out that the biochemical structure of sugar is very similar to the chemical structure of vitamin C. in fact, they compete with each other to get inside the cell of the human body. It’s quite amazing. So people often who love sugar often have vitamin C problems.
Try this tip. Take one to 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C per day for a few weeks. Start maybe slowly. So if you’re eating a lot of sugar, just start maybe with a quarter of a teaspoon of vitamin C powder per day and build it up. Just make sure that your vitamin C powder hasn’t got sugar in it. When I was in L.A. last time walking the health food stores, I was surprised how many vitamin C products I found actually listing sugars as an ingredient just to sweeten it up. That’s not what you want. You want pure vitamin C powder, and you’ll have to go to a company may be like Pure Encapsulations or Thorne Research, but you will get a pure product if you look.
Now, that product will have no sugar in it just vitamin C. Watch what happens when you start taking one to two grams per day ongoing for several weeks. You will notice that the sugar craving drops off. In fact, many people have told me that on three grams a day, it disappeared after 14 days. So there you go. That’s one trick.
The second trick is, which I wrote about also in Candida Crusher, I wrote about a herb called gymnema. Many people have said, “How do you spell that?” So here, now you can freeze it on the computer, gymnema sylvestre. So I’ll just hold it there. Right, did you get your photo? Good. Off to the herb shop or herbalist and try and get yourself some liquid gymnema. Okay? Now you only need a small amount of the gymnema really, just a little bit of that per day. If you get a killer craving or if you really want to have a candy bar or if you go shopping, that’s a good time to take gymnema. You take just a few drops in a glass of water, you drink that. Take some vitamin C if you want, go shopping, you won’t really be looking at candy bars or chocolate bars or things like that.
So gymnema is extremely bitter and what it does is it suppresses the sweet craving. It really does. It works marvelous. I’ve had gymnema. I’ve used it for so many people with diabetes. I’ve found it to be invaluable for a diabetic because it also helps to improve the sensitivity of insulin in the body. So when you’ve had gymnema for some time, you’ll find that when you do have sweet stuff, it tastes so disgusting that you’ll get sick of just tasting that sweet stuff. That’s how I feel now. If I put a teaspoon of sugar in my mouth, I’d feel like… just like… sick because I just don’t eat sugar. The only sweet stuff I have in my diet is honey because I’m a beekeeper and I love honey.
I’ve had a lot of honey for many years now and in fact, my gut has never been in as good a shape as it has been the last 12 months since I’ve increased my honey intake. So don’t always think that sugars are bad. Some sugars are actually very healthy for the body and good quality, raw, unfiltered, unpasteurized honey is one of those sugars. I use it for basting. I marinated some lamb the other day with the honey, and soy, and garlic. It was fantastic. So not all sugars are Darth Vader. Okay? Not all sugars are evil.
It’s the refined white stuff that’s crap, stuff that we buy from the supermarket. If you get a really high-quality, pure maple syrup without all the junk in it or high-quality honey, small amounts regularly, no problem at all, especially when the tummy’s in good shape. But it’s the refined stuff that really encourages the production of candida in your gut. It’s the refined sugar that encourages the production of the bacteria that you don’t really want like Klebsiella and Citrobacter, bacteria implicated in autoimmune disease.
I don’t need to tell you all the reasons why you don’t need to have sugar. I’m just trying to explain to you that wean yourself off this stuff, you won’t really wanted anymore. You’ll have no need for it, no taste for it. But allow yourself several weeks in that process. Don’t forget the vitamin C powder. Don’t forget the gymnema sylvestre herb. Also, don’t forget the fact that it’s not good to hang around people who drink Sundays all the time and have lots of sweet stuff in their diet. There are other ways that you’re going to get happiness and enjoyment in your life just apart from sugar. Because sugar addictions end up in misery for many people who develop heart disease, autoimmune disease, lots of issues.
I’ve seen this now for so long, the connections there. I saw the connection with sugar very early on in my practice days. So don’t be a sugar addict. Once you’ve understand this principle, you get away from it and your gut turns into a better shape, you’ll find that the sugary foods won’t be calling your name so much anymore. You won’t have those strong desires. The desire will be gone. Why? Because the bacteria have changed? And you will be desiring spinach and healthy food like salmon, and broccoli, and some Brazil nuts. These are the healthy foods to eat. Right? Did we get that right? Good. Watch out for that white stuff.
Right back on the Naturopath. Thanks for coming back. Let’s talk about how you can improve your gut and get back into top shape after the holiday season. Your Guide to Healing Your Gut Post Holiday Season. So let’s talk about that. I’ve got a few tips here which we’re going to go through and I think you’ll get a bit out of this one. Nothing wrong with the holiday season.
Many people enjoy themselves, many people eat too much or they drink too much, but you know what? Life is short. You’re going to enjoy yourself, you’re going to have a good time while you’re here. As people say you’re not here for a long time, but you are here for a good time, as long as it doesn’t wreck your health in that good time process. All right. And that will mean that you’re going to be here for not quite a long time.
What’s the key thing that you would recommend, that I would recommend that you need to do to get yourself back into shape again after the holidays? Fresh year, 2020 January. Well, it’s almost February now. The new year. The key thing is to manage the stress, is to look at the key drivers behind things that really push your buttons, particularly people. We’ve spoken a lot about this in previous videos that the biggest stresses in our lives usually are the people around us and especially the people that we’re close to were the key people. They could be your boss, it could be your employee, could be your grandma, it could be your wife, or husband, or your son, or your neighbor, whoever. But often there’s an issue there with some person and this is what needs ironing out in 2020.
My recommendation for 2020 is to manage the stress, look at the people around you, look at the things that wind you up and try and correct these kinds of issues because they need fixing up because these are drivers behind this functional gut for many people. And also these stresses are drivers behind making the wrong kind of moves when it comes to eating or drinking particular types of foods.
There’s no point in saying, “I’m going to stop drinking. I’m going to cut this back.” Because you need to identify the stresses behind these things. And that’s what needs fixing. Happy people, minimal stress, tend to be healthy people. All right? Second point is looking in the on-off days, which I often talk about you’re having some days where you do the right thing, some days you’re not quite so much doing the right thing, and other days you’re doing the bad thing.
Now, obviously we can’t have these bad days back to back. But again, I’m not one of those people who says you have to live like a priest, or like a Buddhist monk living on a mountain and then breathing in fresh air and drinking pure water. You don’t have to live like that to be happy and healthy, not at all. But you need to understand that it’s important to discipline your discipline. That’s the on-off days. Say on a Monday or Tuesday, you’re not going to be drinking, but on a Wednesday you might have a couple of glasses of wine. But needless to say, you can’t do this every single day. You can’t keep consuming and enjoying constantly without paying a price. So you need on-off days.
The third point is cut back on the alcohol. This is a key one. Point 3 and point 1 would be probably just as important as the stresses, identifying and dealing with those, and the third point is understanding that alcohol is probably one of the most destructive things for the microbiomes, for the gut. So moderating. This is going to be your year. We’re going to moderate and also have off days where you’re not going to be drinking at all. Some people go for dry July where the whole July they don’t drink any alcohol at all. I think that’s a pretty dumb thing. Personally, I think it’s better to identify weekends and multiple days throughout the year where you don’t drink at all. You just drink some times here or there, but not every single day. If you can just do that one point, it’s going to really help to propel your gut to great heights this year.
The fourth one is, cut back on how much you eat. Reduce your portion sizes. You don’t need to have a plate and food all the time. Don’t go to these buffets where you have five or six plates of food for 10 bucks. It’s not a great idea. I can guarantee you most people watching this video now will be putting too much food on their plate, that portion size is too big or they’re eating too much at the wrong time of the day. They’ve got things upside down. They have no breakfast at all, a small lunch and a massive supper at night. Not a good idea. But should you have a massive breakfast and a small supper? Well, it’s up to you. You need to work out what’s appropriate.
But fasting, some days cutting back on a bit of food, some days skipping a meal, not having lunch at all, and allowing your tummy to have that nice rest and digest. Especially important if you’re looking at a low stress lifestyle is in also to push that low stress through to the gut. Don’t stress the gut with too much food. It’s not a great idea. Some days you don’t need to eat lunch for example, or cut right back and just have a small amount of food for lunch, not a large amount. It’s good sometimes to be a little bit hungry.
This could also be the MMC working, the Migrating Motor Complex or this sweeping motion through the gut. Those movements can be seen sometimes as, “Oh my God, I’m hungry. I’ve got to eat some food. I’m going to starve to death.” Well, I don’t think you’re going to starve to death. All right?
Point number five, more fiber in the diet. If you’re going to cut back on alcohol, increase the fiber content of the diet. Make those bowels work really well to clean out lots of dead yeast spores and bacteria, to push lots of garbage and waste out of the body. Include bitter foods in the diet to increase the secretions of bile. Increased fiber to bulk the stool up and also to allow the good bacteria to flourish. Lots of foods, broccoli, lettuce, spinach, beans, there are so many, carrots, cucumbers, so many foods you can need that really have got a high fiber content. These are the key foods to eat to get your gut into great shape after the onslaught of Christmas and holiday season.
Number six, probiotics and enzymes. Digestive enzymes are very, very good for people, particularly to take in January, February, I find the first few months of the year because this really helps to rejuvenate the gut, breaks foods down better, reduces bloating and gas, helps a person to maintain more energy while to get back into fitness and exercise and walking so the pounds will drop off. Just get yourself a digestive formula that contains enzymes and probiotics. CanXida Restore. The green one that I’ve created is perfect for that kind of application, CanXida Restore. That will start really working well in your tummy.
Point number seven, move your butt. Are you walking in? We talked about this, walking, walking, or being active all the time. I did something interesting a couple of weeks ago. I put this mobile phone in my pocket and it had some walking thing on. I went up to Oakland up to a capital city. I went up there to see my son and I did like 17,000 steps, which is quite amazing. I think I walked about eight or nine miles or something I don’t really know what it was.
But now, you can really track your progress if you’ve got one of these trackers on your foot or not those big ones like ankle bracelets. That’s what you get when you’re a bad person. I mean those things on your wrist or in your pocket. The phone will tell you how many steps you take. That will motivate you. But trust me, walking is the best exercise of all. Try and follow some of those seven tips to get your body back into top shape after this silly season. Thanks for tuning in.