Category Archives: Questions & Answers

Questions & Answers

Healthy Gut Indicators

How can you tell if you have a healthy gut?

It’s an interesting question that I’ve been asked many times before. Firstly, what is health? Is health purely the absence of symptoms? What does it mean to have excellent gut health?

Having good gut health stems contributes to having good health overall. More and more research is validating the work I’ve been doing for decades.

Most all aspects of your wellbeing are controlled, and have their origins in, gut function. It’s not accurate to say that a person with anxiety has a healthy gut. In most of the cases I’ve seen, people with major anxiety have problems with their gut. Does anxiety cause gut problems or vice versa? It’s hard to know.

Take a good look at your fingernails right now. Can you see any fine lines in them? Do they flake or crack or break easily? What’s your hair like? Has it got a nice shine to it? Does it fall out or break easily? What about your skin? Have you got nice clear skin? Have you got eczema? Have you got psoriasis or acne? Do you have pockmarks all over your skin or other issues with your skin? I find that the people with the healthiest guts have the nicest looking skin.

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What about your joints? Do they click or creek when you move them? Can you feel grinding movements when you rotate your neck? All of these symptoms are are signs of toxicities and mineral deficiencies.

When you have deficiencies, a myriad of symptoms can pop up. The gut is the seat of health providing you’re eating good food, and your digestion works well. If you have healthy gut flora, you are going to be able to digest and absorb the nutrients in your diet. Your cells can utilize the nutrients and help keep you symptom-free.

Provided your food choices are healthy, and you haven’t been pummeling yourself with antibiotics or pharmaceutical medications, you’re going to have a healthy gut. Remember, though, that your lifestyle, not just your diet, influences the state of your gut.

Eating under stress is not good. A horrible relationship, an awful job, or living through a local crisis, will put a huge strain on your gut.

If you’ve got a very happy, balanced, healthy lifestyle, with good family and good friends, the gut should function very well. There should be minimal sound coming from your GI tract. You may get a little bit of rumbling here or there or a little bit of gas, but that’s normal. But huge amounts of gas and bloating is concerning.

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Questions & Answers

Don’t Be Fooled By These 5 Gut Health Myths

Even smart people can be duped into believing myths about gut health. Here are seven of the most common misunderstandings about the GI tract that I’ve encountered during my years of practice.

1. Many people believe that gut problems are primarily caused by food. Nothing can be further from the truth. I’ve seen many clients who have terrible diets and excellent gut health. I’ve also seen people with amazingly healthy diets who have terrible gut problems.

For many clients, a high-stress lifestyle overrides a healthy diet. If you’re unhappy in life, I don’t care what kind of food you eat; you need to get things sorted.

2. Eating clean doesn’t guarantee good gut health. I’ve seen people eat incredibly clean and yet continue to have gut problems. Eating clean sometimes involve being extremely rigid about food choices. My point is that limiting yourself to four types of quinoa, three types of legumes, and two types of green drinks is often not the answer. A diverse diet that isn’t sterile helps generate a diverse gut flora.

You don’t need to eat super clean to have super good gut health. In fact, ou need bacteria to keep your gut in good shape,

3. Carbohydrates are not the demons they are made out to be. With the ketogenic diet being the rage right now, many people are eating more protein and fat at the expense of healthy carbs. The common symptom I’ve seen in my ketogenic clients is fatigue. Once you take bananas, most fruits, many vegetables, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and whole grains out of your diet, your fiber intake plummets.

Of course, there is no harm in avoiding carbs like white bread, candy, and French fries. But sweet potatoes are a darn good food.

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4. Many people claim that the ketogenic diet is the best way to lose weight. I strongly beg to differ. You don’t need a ketogenic diet to lose weight; you need common sense. Eat the right kind of food and avoid the wrong kind.

I had many clients over the year who lost weight and kept it off by changing their diet and their lifestyle. With time, their gut improved so much, it finally starting to give them the right signals. The donut in the office kitchen no longer tempted them.

5. Writing off supplements as a waste of time is a mistake. I hear people say “food cures all,” and “food is medicine, medicine is food.’ Yet, when your gut is in a terrible place, sometimes supplements make all the difference in the world. I’ve had many clients who tried to get better by following a healthy diet. They weren’t able to achieve gut health until they incorporated an antimicrobial like CanXida Remove into their supplement regime.

Once they cleaned up the bad bacteria, they added some probiotics and enzymes into the mix, and that kick-started their gut back to health. CanXida Restore is a very effective mix of probiotics and digestive enzymes.

Following a healthy diet is essential for the long-term. But sometimes you need some short-term help from supplements.

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Questions & Answers

Bringing Your Beneficial Bacteria Back

When you kill good bacteria in your gut, are they gone forever? Is it just a matter of popping a probiotic, and they’ll come back again?

Firstly, even when you take antibiotics, the beneficial bacteria aren’t entirely wiped out. The levels go down to a tiny number, but they still hang in there. I’ve never had a client experience a complete eradication of all their beneficial bacteria. The trick is to get them back to a high level.

Keeping marine fish has taught me something. I love to keep coral fish, corals, and tropical stuff in my talk. What I’ve learned is just how important it is to keep the parameters at the right level all the time. If I have a colony of coral that’s looking sickly, it’s probably my fault. I’ve either got something wrong with the water or put too much food in there.

When I get all the parameters in the tank correct – the pH, the temperature, the salt content, and the trace elements – the coral looks fantastic.

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The gut is the same way. When the parameters of your diet and lifestyle are in working order, your gut will thrive. You need to eat the right foods, chew properly, include resistant starch in your diet, and manage the stress in your life.

If your parameters are out of balance, your gut flora will suffer. If you add insult to injury by adding antibiotics to the mix the beneficial bacteria in your GI tract pay the price. I have seen a few patients who never bounce back from antibiotic use, but most patients recover. The recovery can range from reasonable to full.

The extent of your recovery depends on what you’re eating and how you’re living. You don’t have to eat clean all the time, or eat keto, or have a specific dietary regime to get the microbiome back in balance. What suits one person may not suit you at all. Your gut health plan needs to be customized to your unique biology and psychology.

Take a holistic approach to gut recovery. Supplements are important in some stages of recovery, but diet, stress, sleep, and lifestyle matter too.

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29854813/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28487606/

Questions & Answers

Your Weight And Your Gut

Losing weight and keeping it off is greatly influenced by your gut bacteria.

If you look back to the ’50s, there was a big push for people to gain weight. It was post-war, and a lot of food industries weren’t up and running properly. People were primarily eating real food.

The artificial foods that came to the forefront in the 60s changed things dramatically.
Today it’s all about losing weight on this diet or that diet. There is no shortage of factory food that damages our health rather than building it up. You need to eat the right food and have the right metabolic rate to get the kind of physique your want. The gut flora plays an instrumental role in weight management.

The following are the steps I recommend to anyone who wants to lose weight or keep their weight in a healthy range.

1. Firstly, you want little to no inflammation in the body. Your immune system needs to be functioning properly so that your gut doesn’t react to gluten or lectin or any other compound in food. Fixing a leaky gut solves a lot of problems that people have with food.

I’ve helped a lot of people fix leaky gut by removing junk from their diet. This allows their intestinal membrane to heal, and the excessive permeability disappears. Low and behold, they can eat foods they haven’t been able to tolerate for years. Now their gut is in a better position to properly digest a wide range of food.When you eat a broader range of foods, you end up with a much more diverse microbiota, which is essential for building good gut and immune health.

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2. Foods with the right amount and type of fiber are essential. These types of foods help control your appetite and metabolic rate. Fiber contributes to a feeling of satiety, so you’re not tempted to eat a sleeve of cookies or a couple of doughnuts. The lack of fiber in the classic ketogenic dieting concerns me. I think it contains too much meat, too much fat, and not enough carbs, including resistant starches.

3. Optimize your gut health. An unhealthy GI tract can increase your tendency to store fat. Many people with poor gut health also have decreased insulin sensitivity resulting in higher blood sugar and insulin levels. This leads to more inflammation, more fat storage, and increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.

It’s crucial to eat the right kinds of fiber, fats, and protein to keep the gut healthy. At the same time, avoid antibiotics if at all possible. This class of drugs can reduce the levels of beneficial bacteria in your gut. When that happens, the door is open for harmful bacteria and yeast to overgrow. This overgrowth can impair your immune system, distort your appetite, increase fat storage, cause fatigue, and trigger brain fog. When you feel that bad, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll reach for the second burger and extra ice cream cone. A healthy gut helps you make healthy food decisions and vice versa.

4. Build up the right balance of microbiota in your gut. I’ve been advocating this for 30 plus years, and my recommendations are being more and more validated by scientific research. Having a healthy mix of bacterial species in your guts helps maintain your metabolic rate, your weight, and your physique.

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Questions & Answers

Benefits Of Mimosa Pudica

Mimosa pudica is also known as “the sensitive plant” because it curls up when you touch it. I’ve seen this plant growing in Australia, and it’s quite a neat sight.

Mimosa pudica has been promoted heavily on the internet for the management of parasites. Now, I can say that there are easily over a thousand Ayurvedic plants touted as being good for parasites.

But be careful. Ayurvedic medicine is very popular right now and it’s a bit of a “flavor of the month.” Many plants used in the Ayurvedic medical system are being applied in the Western world. The trouble is that, in my opinion, the plants are often taken out of context. I think there are definite benefits to using Mimosa pudica, particularly related to gynecological conditions, fertility, and blood sugar.

Mimosa pudica contains many different chemicals and can have a profound effect on multiple systems of the body. But, you have to keep your expectations realistic. It’s not a cure-all for parasites. It’s not something you take to eliminate parasites overnight.

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Plants like Mimosa pudica have been used for thousands of years for many different conditions. However, specific formulations are necessary. If you look at the Ayurvedic Mimosa pudica formulation, it contains up to 30 different Ayurvedic herbs in specific amounts.

Grinding up the seed or putting the seed in a capsule is not the right way to take Mimosa pudica. Everyone’s quick to jump on the bandwagon with the next herb that offers a “miracle cure.” Tulsi (Holy Basil) has been touted to cure anything, including acne, fertility, boldness, syphilis, erectile dysfunction, and dementia.

Most Ayurvedic plants haven’t been adequately studied. We often know that they are GRAS (“generally regarded as safe”), but we don’t know how their antiparasite action compares to what wormwood, black walnut, and garlic can do.

I think Mimosa pudica is worth looking into further. But, don’t take large doses thinking it’s going to eradicate parasites, because it generally doesn’t work that way.

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