8: What Causes Blood and Mucus with IBD (Crohn's and Colitis)?

Blood and mucus aren't random - they happen for a reason. And when we know what this is, we can take steps to fix it!

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Where blood and mucus comes from
• What causes it (your body and others)
• Safe practices to remove/reduce it
• How to reduce blood and mucus in IBD

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Transcript

Josh Dech:

Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and colitis are reversible. Now I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease and I'm here to help you do it too because inflammation always has a root cause — we just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn’s and Colitis Naturally podcast.

Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips, and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below.

Here’s what we’re talking about today. If you’ve ever wondered why you get blood and mucus—what causes blood and mucus with IBD—we're here to tell you about that. We’re here to tell you everything you need to know about blood and mucus and why it’s happening. Now, many people believe blood and mucus is stress. They think it’s food allergies, medication, something else. But blood and mucus show up in your bowel for a very distinctive reason, and we’re going to talk about that.

So in this training today, we’re talking about why you get blood and mucus, why your body creates mucus, what other things are producing mucus that are not your actual body itself—you’re gonna wanna know this one—get foreign bodies. We're going to talk about some safe practices for reducing and removing some of these mucus without causing other upsets and major issues. It can be very dangerous to take out mucus if you don’t know what you’re doing. And we’re also going to talk about how to reduce blood and mucus ultimately in IBD.

So for those of you who are new here, if you don’t know who I am, my name is Josh Dech. I’m a holistic nutritionist, IBD specialist, and medical lecturer. I’m also a physicians’ consultant—physicians… here I’m trying to say “physician’s consultant”—for Crohn’s and colitis and things like severe IBS. And I’ve helped hundreds of people now find natural relief and reverse their IBD entirely, come off medication, and so I’m on a mission to help the world see that IBD is reversible. Because truthfully, it’s an $800 billion-a-year industry that I’d much like to see dismantled—this big pharmaceutical-medical machine.

Okay, so let’s get right into it. If you’re dealing with bowel disease like Crohn’s and colitis, you’ve almost certainly seen blood or mucus in your stool at some point. Sometimes more than others. And so I want to talk about where these things are coming from and what’s really happening. It’s not a random condition. It’s not a condition with no explanation. It’s not your—I mean, your body is producing a large part of it, but contrary to popular belief, mucus and blood are a byproduct of other things.

No, your body is not randomly, arbitrarily waking up one day allergic to your own tissues and decides to attack your colon. That’s not what’s happening. I’m currently writing a book on this one actually, and we’re working with some of the top doctors in the country to prove this. So if you’re dealing with Crohn’s and colitis, if you’ve seen blood and mucus—at the same time, individually—it happens all the time. There’s a few things that are happening here.

So there’s really—we’re going to say—four big things that are happening leading to bleeding. Let’s start with this one first. So the first thing we see in bleeding—the first big one—is going to be erosion. Now I’m going to put this kind of as an extra because they’re sort of one and the same, but they are and they aren’t—is ulceration.

So erosion and ulceration. Ulceration are sores opening up. Erosion is this wear and tear. You’ve heard me talk many times—if you’re a listener, you’re a regular, if you’re on the podcast, wherever you are—you’ve maybe heard me use the analogy of wearing a pair of shoes without socks. Where that rubs and rubs and rubs, your heel would rub ‘til it gets red and blisters and bleeds. That’s how we sort of develop this erosion over time where things start as no big deal, they progress, and eventually get worse until you one day have bleeding.

We also have ulceration. This can often open up very quickly. We have certain microbes in the body, or certain microbes that can overgrow—invasive species or inflammatory processes—that can create ulceration. Kind of like a blister on the inside, a little bit different, but as we open up into these sores—which can get red, inflamed, raised—they can bleed and even turn into fissures in worst-case scenarios, especially in the bowel through things like Crohn’s disease.

So we see erosion and ulceration. These are damaging the gut and the gut lining. This leads to our next piece here, which is going to be tissue damage. I don’t know why I’m going back between capitals and lowercase, but bear with me today guys.

So you see erosion, ulceration—ultimately this is tissue damage. Now, when you have blood vessels underneath something and you wear away that something, the blood vessels are exposed. And naturally they get worn down next. It’d be like having—I don’t know, you’re chopping something under a piece of Saran Wrap, right? You break through the Saran Wrap, you’re going to bust up the thing underneath—it’s going to break up. That’s what happens. That’s the first image that came to my head—bit weird, but you get the idea.

And so what else starts to happen as well—we have impaired healing responses. Now the impaired healing responses are happening for a number of different reasons. Your immune system is overdrawn. It’s overinflamed. Your blood cells—we’re going to get into the different types of cells that actually produce mucus and inflammation here in a second as well. But when your immune system is overreacting—we’ve talked about this many times before—if you’re new, I’ll go over it quickly.

Your inflammation may be long and chronic, but it came from an acute reason that never got addressed. Therefore, it became chronic or long-lasting. Chronic just being a year or more ongoing without much relief or really any change from medical intervention. But medical intervention just suppresses your symptoms.

So if you are inflamed and you only suppress the inflammation, you still have the problem. You can get a splinter in your foot and put numbing cream on it. You may not feel it, but the splinter is still in your foot. And so it’s still causing tissue damage as it’s wobbling and moving around as you walk.

And so when we look at this, we have inflammation which leads to erosion, ulceration, tissue damage, and of course an overdrawn immune response leading to impaired healing. Or something stuck in the body causing the problem leading to impaired healing.

Overactivation of your immune cells can lead to imbalances in the immune system, which could one day lead to autoimmunity, but it doesn’t guarantee you have autoimmunity to begin with just because you have bowel disease. This is the biggest misconception. The biggest—frankly—lie taught by Western medicine is that you have bowel disease, therefore it’s autoimmune.

Many of them don’t know it’s a lie, but it’s a freaking lie. Many of you are on the autoimmune spectrum—sure. You’re on the inflammatory spectrum, where it climbs the rungs from low inflammation to high, to getting more severe, to then jumping up to autoimmunity as disease progresses. Which again, many times can be reversed.

But as autoimmune diseases progress, the imbalances in your immune system get worse. The immune system starts to overreact. You develop more autoimmune conditions. Now you have two, three, five, or ten autoimmune diseases. It’s not a bad luck of the draw—it’s, you still have a splinter in the foot. You’ve been putting numbing cream on it and it’s still causing a problem.

And this is where blood comes from. Erosion, ulceration, tissue damage, impaired healing. That’s effectively it. It breaks down the tissues, exposing your blood vessels, which are rampant inside your GI tract. Of course, we need a ton of blood down there, and that exposure and erosion of these vessels is what’s ultimately causing your bleeding.

Now we’ve lost integrity into the gut and gut lining, right? We’ve worn out the tissues, we’ve lost integrity, the blood vessels are exposed. The immune cells—we have certain things that can release, like cytokines—these are pro-inflammatory. Now we can get these from certain immune cells. We have a great immune system. Your immune system has so many amazing parts and pieces, so many cells programmed that communicate, do all kinds of things.

You have T cells, which are in your immune system. You have macrophages—or macros, if you’re feeling fancy—which kind of come in and like, clean up and sort of eat up all the junk. You have neutrophils, there’s all kinds of white blood cells. But these guys tend to cause more inflammation, wear and tear, and lead to bleeding.

Neutrophils—these are the guys responsible for actually producing your calprotectin. When they’re in the area, they produce calprotectin as a byproduct. Think of it like a car running exhaust. Neutrophils produce this exhaust—this byproduct—called calprotectin. Well, the higher the level of calprotectin, the more neutrophil activity, therefore we can say there’s more inflammation, because these guys are here.

Another one we see is called mast cells. Now, mast cells—if you know what histamine responses are, if you know what allergic reactions are—for example, your throat closes, you get hives, "richie" or itchy rashes—we call them "richies" now—if you get like, the anaphylactic reaction, that is mast cells producing histamine. Maybe it’s low grade— allergy season, runny nose, stuffy head—those are mast cells. We have mast cells all throughout the body, and these guys can lead to inflammation or cytokine release, which can break down tissues, creating wear and tear again to break down those tissues, leading to bleeding.

And so when your immune system is active because something is causing erosion, something is causing ulceration, there is tissue damage and impaired healing, your immune system is overactive. The longer—I believe loams are another one that can cause inflammation long term, that erode tissue over time if they’re there too long.

So again, it’s not your body attacking itself. It’s your body trying to get rid of something it cannot seem to get rid of. So it brings in more cavalry, which happen to be there a long time because they’re not getting rid of the problem—they’re just still working away. And the byproduct is, your tissues get broken down.

It’s not your body attacking itself. It’s your body attacking a thing. But because your body can’t remove it, the byproduct is that your body happens to get broken down in the process—accidentally. Which again, ironically enough, drives your immune system even further. This is where we start to run into problems.

And so if you guys have any questions at any time, drop them in the chat. We’ll get back to you. I want to make sure we can answer your questions.

And so ultimately, this is where your bleeding is coming from. It’s wear and tear in the area from your body trying to clear a thing it cannot get rid of. Your body’s tissues get broken down. The gut lining, the gut barrier—all these things break down, exposes your blood cells and blood—or your blood vessels—which leaks out the blood, and now you have bleeding. That’s how it goes. Pretty straightforward.

Let’s talk about mucus now. Because mucus is actually two different things, really.

Number one, it is your body producing this. Okay? So if we have mucus, something very largely responsible for your mucus production here is going to be goblet cells. Now goblet cells—really, they’re the primary producer—and they produce mucus as a barrier. It’s like a sock in a shoe. It protects you from blisters and wear and tear on the heel and the foot. So do goblet cells.

The mucus are a nice mucosal—they produce this mucosal membrane, mucosal layer, we call it. It’s like the sock for your intestines. It protects it from wear and tear. It provides lubrication, helps things move through. It also can protect your microbiome. It can act as a protective layer. It can allow bacteria—like a slip and slide—things can move through, things can breed and transfer. It protects your tissues from physical abrasion, which we just talked about, leading to bleeding. And so it’s a nice protective coating. It’s a nice lubricant.

The problem is, when you’re inflamed, these goblet cells—we have all kinds of signaling things, these cytokines—are signaling to your immune system saying: bring in the T cells, bring in the macrophages, bring in the loams, bring in the neutrophils, bring in all the eosinophils, bring in all the blood cells, the white blood cells, the immune cells, the T cells and B cells to come on in, help us clean up.

These are the cleanup crew. Well what happens—have you guys ever seen construction? It’s great—they’re going to build and fix stuff—but those big excavators and stuff with those big like, tank tracks on them? They break down the road. If there’s a lot of construction, they typically have to repave the road after, because they chew it up.

That’s kind of what’s happening here. And so goblet cells—they get signaled and say, “Hey, you’re part of the crew, come help us work on this construction to start to repair and rebuild things.” And what happens now is, the goblet cells overproduce. We get excess mucus production. But that’s one half of it.

Yes, there’s excess production because your body’s trying to overprotect—leave extra sock in the shoe, leave extra protective layer, extra lubricant—but there’s also other things happening.

So goblet cells are producing mucus. But something we also have to look at, which is extremely important, we cannot ignore, is microbes.

So if you’re getting mucus—yes, your body is producing it—but there are also microbes producing it.

Now, we talk about the microbiome. The microbiome is an ecosystem of not just your gut bacteria but all kinds of living organisms. There’s viruses, there’s fungi, there’s bacteria, there are archaea—it’s kind of like, sort of like a bacteria. We have parasites—all of them kind of living in harmony.

When we’re inflamed, these guys take over. They’re called opportunistic. They overgrow. They start creating problems. And now we have an imbalance of a lot of these microbes. Well, a lot of these microbes that shouldn’t be there—when they’re opportunistic—they can overgrow in this state we call dysbiosis. That’s imbalance of bacteria.

They can overproduce biofilms. What do biofilms do for microbes? Well, number one, it’s breeding. Number two, it is protection. We talked about the slip and slide—they can move around easier. And they can protect, because it’s actually like a bomb shelter.

If you’ve taken antibiotics and antimicrobials and all these different things and you’ve actually had a rebound, where you’ve overgrown bad bacteria—in part, it’s due to biofilms. Because they protect like a bomb shelter. If you drop bombs on top of the bomb shelter, you can’t reach what’s inside. That’s the point of a bomb shelter.

Well, if you have biofilms covering and protecting this community, like a dome, so to speak, of these bacteria, and you’re dropping stuff on top—you’re not killing them off. You’re killing everything else.

These can be highly protective, which can also lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And now you get your C. diffs and your MRSAs and other mega bacterial infections which are highly resistant. That’s what MRSA or MRSA is—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. So it’s methicillin- or bacteria-resistant microbes.

Now, C. diff—very resistant, very persistent. And we see these problems coming up. And so the biofilms also allow them to move around a bit more freely, to breed. They also store and house some bacteria, and they can hold a lot of toxins—LPS and endotoxins. Okay? So this is a big problem.

So biofilms, because they house a lot of inflammatory things—think of it like… let me draw this on the board. Think of it like we have a couple of layers, right?

Now, up top—this is where we have, let’s say, your bacteria, your microbes, and your food and all kinds of stuff floating through. This will be your intestines here. Okay? We’ll add some little squiggles here. These are your little intestinal bumps and lines.

So underneath this bacteria here, we have another layer before we get to the tissue. We have this biofilm layer. Now under the biofilm, we now have microbes. And then we have your other tissue walls that go, of course, to your bloodstream, lymphatics, etc.

So we have this biofilm layer. Protects your microbes. The problem is when these microbes are stored, or these biofilms are stored in here, they produce toxins which get across the barrier—inside and out.

They produce what we call LPS—that’s lipopolysaccharides, also known as endotoxins, or LPS. These toxins get produced in this biofilm layer. They get stored in there. And a lot of them get injected, they can push into the system, or they can disrupt your microbiome.

It’s like adding **poison into a city—**toxic gas. Of course you’re going to have disruption in your community. So when you’re adding toxins into your microbiome, of course you’re getting disruption of your ecosystem. This is where we have problems.

But one of the big problems—people go and break up these biofilms, and it goes everywhere. This is where things really hit the fan. We’ll talk about that.

But biofilms also can contribute now to more immune responses, which we just talked about—lead to more bleeding.

And so if we disrupt—if we leave biofilms—they disrupt normal gut barrier. They lead to inflammation, can disrupt your gut microbiome.

Now, we want biofilms. They’re natural. It’s the overgrowth of bad biofilms—overgrowth of biofilms holding toxic stuff—that becomes a problem. Okay?

So it just really disrupts your gut in a lot of different ways.

The next thing—we talked about them being sort of a bomb shelter. So these biofilms can protect your pathogenic, your bad bacteria, which is a big, big problem. Again, increasing your immune responses, leading to more bleeding, leading to more mucus. And the biofilms, again, protect from antibiotics.

And so what happens? People go, “Well, I want to get rid of my biofilms. This is causing me a problem.” Right? Because obviously, if you have blood and mucus, you want to get rid of it. You want to reverse the IBD.

Let’s talk about that now. At any point you guys say, “Hey, help me do this safely,” comment solution. We’re going to talk to you about this and show you how it works, okay?

But here’s the deal—and if you guys have questions, drop them in the chat. We’re going to go through those later with you all as well. I want to make sure we go through your questions—that’s the most important part of these lives, is getting your questions answered.

So let’s talk about this. How do you start to reverse this process—this biofilm overproduction, reversing the bleeding, the mucus?

Well obviously, if you’re having a pathogen or a microbe or something in there causing a problem, you have to get rid of it in order to fix it.

Well okay, great. That sounds easy enough.

The problem is—like we talked about—we get rid of these biofilms, it’s holding all these little toxins, these gnarly little guys in here. What do you do?

You open the door. You tear away the biofilms, and now they’re free to go wherever they want to go.

They get to your bloodstream, circulate everywhere. All these toxins produced—they get into your lungs. We literally can see leaky lung. Like, people with asthma typically have gut issues.

We see brain dysfunction—mental health, anxiety, depression, even schizophrenia, bipolar—comes back to the gut for a number of reasons. This is one of those number of reasons.

So we have all these toxins now exiting the body. So if we are busting up biofilms without a backup strategy or plan to capture them, we’re causing a big problem.

And this is where we have to have a really good protocol.

So we talked about—on the last episode, or the last live here—we talked about:

Number one: having proper drainage.
Because it’s great to try to get these things out, but they need somewhere to go. And so drainage is a big part of it.

I won’t go into detail now—we talked about it on the last one—but drainage, that’s your liver, lymphs, lungs, kidneys, sinuses.
It’s going to be your blood, it’s going to be your bowels, it’s going to be bile and bile ducts.

These are drainage pathways. Skin. How things exit the body.

If those are junked up—and if you have bowel disease I can almost guarantee yours are—you’re going to try to get rid of these, they’re not going to be able to exit. So they just circulate, and they find another place to sit and they cause more problems.

Now we get sicker. We get these unfortunate reactions called Herxheimer, where you have headaches and nausea, vomiting, dizziness—people can hospitalize themselves. It’s really nasty.

So we need proper drainage.

Number two: we need proper binders.

Binders are things like charcoal, bentonite clay, zeolite, humic acid, fulvic acid, certain types of fibers—glucomannan, apple pectin, citrus. These are all great binders.

Now, not every binder is good for everyone. One of the things we have to keep in mind is binders work like static.

And so, if I have stuff floating around, right, through my tissues, and I have all this junk—say floating in my blood—I jump on and grab a binder. It’s like static. Picture rubbing a balloon against your hair, or the carpet, and touching your hair. It pulls like static.

So it reaches in and grabs stuff.

Well I can start taking toxins from here and moving it into my GI. If I take like an oral pill like charcoal or something like a GI detox of some kind with bentonite clay and zeolite and fulvic acid, what it does is now I move these toxins from one place to another.

Now that can increase my immune response, because you’re now taking toxins and moving them through layers of tissue where different parts of your immune system are responsible.

You could crank things up.

So you have to be careful. This is my advice:

Do not do this without supervision.
Because you can make yourself very sick.

But we have proper drainage, so we have somewhere for them to go.
 We have binders, so that they don’t end up not only coming in but also finding somewhere else in the body to live. Okay?

So drainage and binders. If these are properly in place, then sometimes it can usually be safe to look at biofilm disruption. Okay?

That’s where this can come in.

You don’t want to disrupt until you have a place for them to go and something to catch them.
And then disruption can start to happen.

But now—what is causing the biofilms?

This is an important part.

This is where you have to go after your microbes.

And so, if it’s parasites, if it’s fungi, if it’s mold, if there’s heavy metals leading to this proliferation of overgrowth of bad bacteria, if we have whatever kind of toxicity going on—there’s bacterial overgrowth, there’s fungi—we talked about mold just briefly, which is also a fungi, but Candida is really prolific as well. These are all things.

E. coli.
These are microbes that can lead to major issues—leading to inflammation, leading to biofilms, which give us—right from the beginning.

If you have an overgrowth of Clostridia, maybe C. diff, maybe another Clostridia species—but you get erosion, ulceration, tissue damage, impaired healing, which leads to overproduction of mucus in goblet cells. It leads to overproduction of your inflammatory responses. It leads to imbalance. It leads to biofilms, and it’s back into the circle.

So we have to have somewhere for them to go. We need drainage.
We need to have binders to capture them.
And then we can look at biofilm disruption—to start attacking, lifting the door off the bomb shelter so we put the bombs in, they have somewhere to go.

That’s another part of the process.

So then we have—I’m just going to put antimicrobial—because it’s not necessarily bacteria—losing stuff off my table here—but it could be everything.

It could be again fungi, it could be bacteria, it could be parasites, could be whatever.

Now if we go too strong on the antimicrobials—what happens?

We get sick.

This is why antibiotics cause a problem.

Now, I recently did a lecture on this one—it’s actually on the podcast as well. If you guys want access to that, just comment “podcast” below—and we recently talked about this, which is: Do antibiotics cause IBD?

Well yeah. Everything works in a community, an ecosystem. Everything’s in balance.

And so, if you have a lot of good bacteria, they’re also typically killed off by the antibiotics. The good and the bad typically die together.

Well the bad guys are opportunistic.

Instead of overgrowing peacefully and rebuilding a colony, instead they bring in all their friends, they start to overgrow, they’re—now they’re dealing drugs and lighting fires and peeing in the street, and now we have problems.

These are the opportunistic microbes.

And so antimicrobials are good—provided we are creating an environment conducive to growth. And this is where we have to start looking at balancing that microbiome.

Which ultimately—I’m going to redo this—because ultimately, it comes back to our Five Rs, right?

We talked about drainage, right?
 We talked about binders.

These aren’t Rs—I recognize that. These don’t start with the letter R.
 But this is where we get to now: removing the problem.

You guys have heard me talk about the Five Rs before.

We have to replenish the nutrients. These are the tools that your body utilizes in order to get rid of things. Your body is a city. Each organ is a factory. The cells in those organs are the factory workers. Those workers need tools—vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc. That’s what they utilize.

We have to remove the problem—right? Maybe that’s biofilm disruption and capturing and antimicrobials or whatever it is.
Replenishing the nutrients.

And then we can start looking at—I'm going to put these on the same line—
 repairing the tissues and rebuilding the microbiome.

’Cause again, you couldn’t live in gangland while your house is currently on fire.
Your microbes don’t want to live in a house that’s disheveled or inflamed.

So we have to repair the tissues and calm the immune system, and we have to rebuild that ecosystem, that community—right? Put the right types of community ecosystem in there, the good microbes we want.

And of course we are rejuvenating—I’m not even spelling that properly today—rejuvenate.
That looks like “rejuvenate.”

Rejuvenate the immune system.
Because if you’re imbalanced and you boost your immune system, you could be driving these pathways contributing to your imbalance rather than restoring homeostasis.

This is effectively how it’s done.
Now it looks really simple—it’s taken a decade to figure it out to put it this simple—but that’s the idea, okay?

And this is what we’re teaching doctors now. Because unfortunately, doctors are treating this—they treat IBD like it is innate to your body.
Disease is part of your DNA.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
And your bowel disease is a “Entyvio” or a “Stelara” or a “Budesonide deficiency.”
“It’s a Prednisone deficiency.”
“It’s all we can do—is manage.”

But there is something causing the problem.
Your immune system is remarkably intelligent.

There are hundreds—if not thousands—of checks and balances in your immune system to make sure everything is happening in the right order.

If something goes out of whack, something captures it.
 If there’s a problem, things come in to get rid of it.

It’s not going to randomly wake up one day out of the blue, arbitrarily, just be allergic to you and start attacking your own cells.

The discussion is now—your body might be attacking your microbiome, but it’s not going to be attacking your own tissues.
Because your tissues are there for good. They’re there to help. They’re part of the community.

You’re not going to get upset and go shoot your neighbor—you’re going to shoot the guy causing the problem.
Right?

And so this is what we’ve got to look at.

Nothing is random.
Every inflammatory response is happening for a reason.

The blood and the mucus are byproducts of erosion, ulceration, tissue damage, and impaired healing, along with overproduction of mucus from either your body’s own goblet cells trying to overprotect you, or your gut bacteria and the microbes in there that are problematic, causing biofilms to protect themselves, to overbreed, and to move.

These are where the problems come in.
And this is what it means to start reversing this problem.

So I’m going to get into some questions now. This is a great time. So let’s go into the chat box and see what we got.

Ann had asked: Is it possible to target biofilms for harmful microbes opposed to all microbes?

No.
So biofilm disruption typically happens with all microbes at the same time. That’s a great question, Ann.

It’s like antibiotics.
 Can antibiotics just destroy the bad guys?

Typically not.
They kind of kill everything.

If we go after biofilms, we can kill or destroy a lot of the good.
 But here’s the thing—biofilms are there, but they’re a much smaller amount.

If you’re literally having bowel movements where it’s all mucus or all blood, it’s way too much anyway.

And so, we’re reducing it, but as things start to regulate—your body has an incredible amount of cleanup mechanisms—it will actually go after these biofilms and start clearing them on its own if we give it the support we need.
The drainage we need.
The binders we need.
These things to start correcting the problem.

And so yes, it will break down all biofilms, but is it going to be detrimental?
Absolutely not.

And if there is a risk—believe me—in these cases, provided you’re under supervision—I will not say to do this on your own, it’s a very delicate touch-and-go process—we have had people jump the gun, go too far too fast, who have put themselves in the hospital.

This does require supervision.
But if you’re doing it under supervision, you’re doing it well—even with the risk—they weigh. The risks of biofilm disruption, rather, outweigh the problem or the risk of maybe taking biofilms too much.

Because your body will restore them pretty quickly, and there’s a lot we can do to also help sort of protect that gut layer and those membranes as we’re breaking down biofilms.

We can use things that have anti-inflammatory properties and help promote anti-inflammation in the body:

• DGL—that’s deglycyrrhizinated licorice root
• Things like aloe vera or curcumin
• Ching dai
• Dragon’s blood

All kinds of things can sort of help modulate these systems until we get to the root.

But again, a lot of people go to natural and say, “I’m trying natural, but I’m still sick.”
Because you’re using plant-based medication, you’re not going after the root cause of the problem.

Maybe you’re using ching dai and dragon’s blood and curcumin as inflammatory management—awesome. There’s less side effects there than say taking Entyvio or Stelara or Humira.

On the other hand, you’re still managing inflammation—not addressing the reason why it’s happening.

So, long story short on that one, Ann—yes, going after biofilms goes after everything, but it’s usually not an issue if you’re doing it the right way.

Next question we have is from Rachel:

I need antibiotics a fair amount because I have lymphoma caused by infection. So I can't allow myself to just fight off infection naturally for too long. How do I repair the damage caused by this?

So here’s the problem.
 If you are constantly on antibiotics, you are constantly creating an environment where your good bacteria will never overgrow. Therefore, they cause more toxicity in the body. They create more of these LPS, these toxins, which do contribute to inflammation, which do contribute to things like lymphomas and cancers and all kinds of stuff.

And so we have to look at this and see that even cancers—I had a fella a couple years back—it was maybe two years ago now—he was like stage three colon cancer. His tumor shrunk by 80-some-odd percent in just two months’ time, simply by going after the inflammation.

There’s a really interesting theory—and don’t quote me on this one, because I’m not a cancer expert—I do have a cancer specialist on my team. He does very well with cancer. He’s actually my mentor.

And so, it’s a really interesting theory that cancer tumors actually form around something your body is trying to protect you from.

Because here’s the thing—your body will never go after itself unless it’s a dead-last resort. But even then, it tries to protect you at all costs.

In cases of like hypothermia—your body doesn’t attack you to make your fingers fall off—it shunts blood away to protect your heart and your brain and your lungs and vital organs.

It’s like, “We can live without the fingers. We gotta protect the main stuff.”

And so, cancer—instead of saying, “Your body is just creating these tumors randomly, and they’re overgrowing the cells, and it’s damaged DNA…”—the theory is that these tumors are actually forming around something your body’s trying to wall off and protect you from.

And so, excising the tumors is better than biopsying.

You biopsy—how many times have you seen someone do a biopsy in like a cancer, for example—and it metastasizes? Because you burst the protective barrier, and things get out. And now you have tumors forming everywhere.

So, what was it trying to protect?
It’s a really interesting theory—but not one, unfortunately, I have enough experience and knowledge to truthfully give an opinion on. Just food for thought.

But we have inflammation in the body. Even cancers—cancer is largely a preventable disease, and it is largely an inflammatory condition. And this comes directly from Dr. Paul Marik, who’s one of the top doctors on planet Earth. I actually had him on my podcast back in the first 10 on The Reversible Podcast. We talked about this.

So it’s really interesting to say—it’s like yes, we’re taking antibiotics to try to keep bacteria at bay. But in doing so, we’re also causing bad bacteria to overgrow, which eventually and inevitably leads to more problems—which could contribute to more cancers.

So it’s really a hit-and-miss scenario.
 And unfortunately, I can’t tell you ever—and will never tell you—to go against your doctor’s medical advice.

But I can say there is a million and one things that we could do that your doctor isn’t even in their scope. They’ve never known about, heard about, educated on.

There’s always something else. Now, Monica had asked:
Can you reverse autoimmune if you find the root cause?

Totally.
Right? The question is: Can we reverse? Or can we cure?

Now—I can’t legally use the word cure, treat, or heal in my practice. I’ll actually get sued for practicing medicine without a license.

But consider other autoimmune cases or diseases out of my scope of practice.

If you guys know Dr. Terry Wahls—I talk about her a lot because I adore her. She is lovely. It was a great conversation. Had her on The Reversible Podcast.

She actually is an MS researcher. She had MS herself—she’s a doctor who got MS, which is an autoimmune neurological condition which attacks your body, nerve cells, leaving you unable to sit up. She was wheelchair bound, dependent, was just declining—and she actually reversed it.

So here’s the idea:
 You have this zig-zag—I’ll put it into an autoimmune ladder.

You have a healthy gut, right? Until you have a slightly unhealthy gut—we’ll call this IBS, something low-grade, right? Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

If you’ve heard me talk about this autoimmune ladder, the next rung we have—we have IBS on one side, and it develops where it gets worse into IBD.

Okay?
 And as you develop IBD—we have colitis on the left side because colitis is not as bad.
I put Crohn’s down here because Crohn’s is worse. It’s mouth to anus.
Whereas colitis is just the colon surface—Crohn’s is deep.

And then we have the autoimmune spectrum, right? I’m going to put AI on the left, and AI++ on the right.

Autoimmunity—you’re on a spectrum.
Autoimmunity is a progressive problem. The more your immune system imbalances, the worse the autoimmune disease gets, the worse the reactions get, and the more the autoimmune diseases pile on.

If you get down here and you have a problem that starts you way at the beginning—the first rung on this ladder of four pieces—this is where your problem starts.

Well—it’s like having a splinter in your shoe.

If you have the splinter, you put numbing cream on it or ignore it—great.
It doesn’t fix the problem.
It just keeps you from feeling that there’s a problem there.

So your gut gets slowly worse.

Now you have IBS.
Well, it keeps going—your gut gets worse.
Now you have IBD.
Well, now you’ve got colitis or Crohn’s. Or you’ve got colitis that turns into Crohn’s.

And now—you’re autoimmune.

Well guess what?

If you can come all the way back to the beginning, and fix the reason why—pull the thorn out of your shoe—this can slowly begin regressing and reversing down the autoimmune disease ladder until the diseases can eventually go away.

This is effectively what Dr. Terry Wahls did.

Now she has a true autoimmune condition—truly has antibodies—so she’s got an ongoing thing. If she stops doing what she’s doing to fight back, it’s likely to crawl back up. It’s a very weak link.

But again—the more barrier you put between you, the more stuff you correct, you pull the problem out, you go through the Five Rs, you open drainage, rejuvenate the immune system, live a healthy lifestyle—you have a lot of barriers keeping your immune system balanced.

You wouldn’t drink from a glass—if you broke a glass and you went to fix it with glue, you could drink from it—but not right away.
In fact, you could put it through the dishwasher eventually, after it’s hardened.

So after your body has more time to solidify its healing responses and build these barriers between you and autoimmune disease, the more range you have—or the more latitude you have—to say, “I fixed my disease. It’s gone.”

So my argument is—look, if you fix everything in between:

• Remove the root cause
• Open drainage
• Open detoxification
• You begin removing the problem
• Rejuvenate and rebuild and rebalance
• Give your body everything it needs
• And the problem is gone
• And it’s got no sign of coming back

Are you cured? Or just in remission?

That’s my argument.

I can’t legally say cure, treat, or heal.
 But there is a lot of hope.
We’ve seen people reverse autoimmune disease all the time.
Happens all the time.
It’s just not published, because you can’t patent that.

And you put somebody on a lifetime of medications at $20,000 a month—it’s a much better business model. We got one more question coming in from Julie:
Why does mucus come back after it's been gone for weeks or months?

So—same reason.

Here’s what’s really interesting. Your body goes through layers and stages.

And so here’s what you have to look at. We have—in the road to getting rid of IBD, over here, we have IBD reversal. Over here, IBD is currently happening.

And so what happens—we have layers along the way, right?

IBD is often what we call multifactorial.
Maybe you’ve got parasites—we see this a fair bit, okay?
Which led to inflammation, bacterial imbalances, all kinds of problems.

Well, those bacteria or those parasites that caused inflammation led to a Candida overgrowth.
And now you've got some immune dysregulation.
Okay?

These are going to be your three layers of problem.

Well here’s what happens:
 You start to repair your problem, because you're at an all-time low right now. You're at a 10 out of 10 inflammation and you want to get to a 1 or a 0 out of 10. You want to be better.

So what do we do?
 Well, we start getting rid of parasites, okay?
 This is what’s going all the way at the top here.

You're feeling better.
We start getting rid of these parasites.
Well, guess what?

You start to feel improved. And as we start to get through those parasites—we hit Candida.
Now we start disrupting biofilms.
Your body goes, "Oh wait a minute. What happened? There's something else we're recognizing now. There’s more toxins coming in."

So you feel this decline in your health a little bit.
Inflammation starts to come.

And we get rid of it.
 We feel a little better.

And now we start to work on the immune system—but the immune system is still trying to balance itself, so it gets dysregulated.

Now we have some biofilms forming because your goblet cells are still learning.

And eventually, we get better.

So as we cross layers and barriers of illness and dysfunction, what starts to happen is—your immune system can start to react, overreact.

Great example—I have a woman in my program right now.
 She had a very major mold infection. Mold was primarily driving her IBD. Caused a ton of residual damage—biofilms, plugged drainage pathways, the works.

What happened to her?

We went through mold.
And so, she was not feeling good.
She wanted to feel good.

So what did we do?

We started removing the mold.
And as we got rid of it—7 to 8 weeks in, she went from 15+ bowel movements a day down to three.
She was feeling good. They were fully formed.

It was like 7–8 weeks—2 months in. She went from 15+ bowel movements, having accidents at work, bringing changes of clothes with her—couldn’t get around the block.

She’d bring two or three changes of clothes to work.
 Wore diapers a lot of the time because she was having accidents.

Well—7 weeks in, she was feeling amazing. She was down to three bowel movements a day.

So what did we do?

We were binding her mold. I added a different type of fiber. It’s called glucomannan.

Now, glucomannan—or glucomin, whatever you want to call it—it’s a great binder for certain types of mold.
So I was like, “Let’s start adding more mold binders.”

What happened?
She relapsed.
She was right back to having 15+ bowel movements a day—overnight.

Her whole system ramped up.

Well, guess what glucomannan is?
It’s great food for parasites.

It loves this.
And so, what did they do?

The parasites came out of the woodwork.
 And they said, "Hey! We’re here to play!"
 The immune system went, “Whoa—what are you?!”

Because now you have this gut wall—we put the fiber in like fish food—and these little parasites like fish came up to eat that food.

And when they came into the gut lining, the immune system—the IgA, the part of the immune system responsible for immune responses in your mucosal surfaces like oral, vaginal, rectal, inside the colon—went, “Wait a minute—what are you?”

As they came up and became noticed by the immune system, her symptoms once again declined.

And then we started getting rid of the parasites—she started improving again.

And so—it’s this up and down, generally upward—but we’re up and down.

Like climbing a mountain—there’s going to be some downs, a little bit of ups, but generally we’re in the right direction.

And this is why things can come back.
Because your immune system along the way identifies new things.
It’s rarely a straightforward process.

Now, probably one in 10 people we see, they’re straight through. Nothing but great—they feel amazing the whole way.
And I do see this a fair bit.

So here’s what I want to do for you:

I want this to make sense.
Everything here should make sense.

IBD is a reversible condition that your doctors tell you is part of your body—it’s part of your DNA.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
We’ve got kids as young as 2 and 3 years old with skin issues and gut issues and bloody bowels—it’s coming from somewhere.

We’ve got people in their 70s and 80s—it’s coming from somewhere.
And everything in between—all over the world.
I think we’re in like 15, 16 different countries now.

So here’s the deal:

It is a reversible condition.
All you have to do is ask.

If you comment the word “solution,” I’m going to reach out, I’ll get you some information.

We help people of all ages, in every country.
 We have solutions available for everyone.
It depends on what you’re looking for—how hands-on you want to go.
Do you want something you can kind of do on your own?
Do you want to work with us directly?

The options are available to you.
 Simply comment the word “solution,” and we’re going to get this back to you.

If you’re on the YouTube video, just check the notes or check the—uh, the stuff. Is it “show notes” on YouTube? Anyway—check below. We’ve got a link. You can schedule a call, and we’ll give you some of the options and see what’s best for you to get you the help you need.

There’s literally one word between you and finding relief, beginning to reverse your IBD. It is the word: solution.

If you comment that, we’ll get you the information you need to show you how this can be reversed.

That’s all we got for you guys tonight.
 Thank you so much for tuning in.
It’s a pleasure to do these with you, to see you here.
And we’re going to see you guys all next week.

[Closing music or outro voice:]
Thanks for listening. Now if you want help reversing your IBD, I’d like to invite you to join the Reversing Crohn’s and Colitis Naturally community, where we give you the tools you need to actually reverse your IBD.

We’ve got courses, live Q&As, coaching calls, done-for-you meal plans, programs, and huge discounts on supplements from some of the top suppliers.

Just click the link in the show notes to learn more.