12: Five Natural Things to Help Your IBD

If you've been told that your only solution for your IBD is pharmaceuticals or surgery, then you've been lied to. There's so much more than you can do on your healing journey, and in this episode, we're going to break down 5 things I use in the process of helping my clients reverse their IBD.


TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• 5 Protocols to fix the root of the problem
• Elimination diets
• Drainage support
• Coffee enemas
• Supplements
• Your Central Nervous System

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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 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.

If you've ever been told that there's no hope for your IBD, that the only options you have are dangerous pharmaceuticals, dangerous medications, or life-altering surgery — I'm here to tell you that's just not true. There are so many other options, and we're talking about those today.

Now, in this training, we're going to be talking about the five interventions — or the top five, I should say — that I use with my clients to help them fully reverse their IBD. For those of you who might be going, “No, this is a perfect condition,” stay tuned. I promise you're going to learn something today.

We're going to be going into actual tangible protocols that we use with our clients to help them get relief so that their bodies can begin healing themselves. And this is what's really important.

Now if you're new here, my name is Josh Dech. I'm a holistic nutritionist, medical lecturer. I am a Crohn's colitis specialist. I help people reverse bowel diseases such as Crohn's, colitis, and severe IBS. We've helped hundreds of people reverse their diseases and come off medication and go back to living normal lives. And now I'm here to show you that there is so much more that you can do for your IBD — it's just not a life and death sentence.

So we're getting right into it today, guys. We're going to be talking about five interventions we use to help clients reverse their IBD, and we're going to talk about why and how you can apply them, why they matter, and what to do about it. Okay?

So without further ado, the first one that we're going to talk about here is called an Elimination Diet. This might seem like a no-brainer. A lot of people go through an elimination diet. But what does it mean and why is it important?

Number one, elimination diet is exactly what it sounds like. We just eliminate as many things from our diet as possible. I've had people cut back to ground beef and rice. I'm not saying you have to. I'm saying that these protocols that we're going to be talking about today have benefits. They have a point and a purpose. Not all of them are forever protocols, but many of them have a purpose.

And so what does elimination diet do? Think about this. Your body — I use this analogy quite a lot. If you're a regular, if you're new, prepare to have your mind blown — your body is much like a cup of water. Now everything that goes into our cup fills this cup up. We have so much going in. I have stress — that fills my cup. I have an injury — it fills my cup. If I get sick, get the flu — it fills my cup. Eating poorly — junk food, fast food, fried food, alcohol, sugars — all these things continue to fill my cup.

Now what happens? Ideally in a day your cup will empty out. But if it doesn't, your cup overflows. And now we have symptoms. And this is how disease starts to happen — we have an overflow of too much. Your body can't handle it. It overflows. Diseases, symptoms develop.

On the other hand, what we have to look at is your cup should be draining. So we're going to talk about this a bit later. But here's why elimination diets actually help: we're simply not adding to the cup. So it's one less thing for your body to have to deal with, to try to manage. And all we're doing is just not adding to our cup. We're not creating more inflammation, we're not creating more immune responses, we're not contributing to immune stuff or bacterial overgrowth or things that cause more problems.

This is the purpose of elimination diet: it's just to not add more problem to the already existing problem. This is why we do them.

Josh Dech: That being said, there may be food sensitivities and food triggers. People ask me about that all the time — what's a food trigger? It's something that you eat that you know causes a problem.

“Well, if I eliminate these, am I allergic to these foods or am I sensitive to these foods?”

This is a whole other topic, but long and short — if your gut is leaky or leaking and you're eating foods that are contributing to inflammation, you become more sensitive to these foods. Because those food particles leak into your gut, they get around your blood, your body says, “That's a problem, you shouldn't be here,” and it puts an immune response.

And now suddenly, you have an allergy or a sensitivity. Elimination, again, eliminates the contribution to these immune problems. That's number one — Elimination Diet.

Now that might look like a couple of them. You can look these up online. You get the SCD and the AIP, which are pretty common diets. That's going to be Specific Carbohydrate and Autoimmune Protocol diets. There's a thousand of them out there — there's carnivore, there's vegetarian, there's Mediterranean. They're all going to be different based on you and how your body responds.

So don't feel stressed about doing a perfect elimination diet. Start by cutting out the obvious stuff — foods that didn’t exist 200 years ago. Just stop eating those for right now. If it grows on a tree, walks on the land — eat it. And that’s what we want to stick to for elimination — so we're not contributing to the cup. That's it. We're not contributing to the problems of your body.

The second thing we want to look at doing is exactly this — it’s drainage support. Now, when your cup is full, it's on the brim, it's overflowing — we all want to know what it looks like when you have a cup where it's just so full, it's like a bubble of water on top. If you knock it, shake it, put an extra drip — it's going to overflow.

What drainage does — drainage is very important because drainage is how things exit the body. If you have inflammation, if you have toxins, you have microbial overgrowths — parasites, candida, clostridia, different things that are overgrowing — they are blocking up your drainage pathways.

Drainage is how things exit the body. Look at your skin, lymphatic system, your liver, kidneys, sinuses, lungs, colon — these are all ways that things exit the body. And one we commonly miss is bile and bile ducts as well — that can recirculate a bunch of junk and toxins. So we need proper drainage. Things need to be able to move and transport around the body and get out.

Well, picture this — if I have a cup that’s full of water, and there are a lot of layers inside your body — things are buried deeply — I’ve got a cup that’s full of water, and I want to get something that’s down here.

Well, if I go to put my hand inside that cup to grab something, what happens? I push more water out. And so a lot of people are trying to go into their body and remove a bunch of junk, remove a bunch of toxins, remove a bunch of things causing problems before they create proper drainage. So they go in there and push a bunch of water out — and now they have disease symptoms. They go into a flare. They start to get worse.

This is the importance of drainage. And the deeper the problem, the more drainage we need to have. We need to empty more of this water out of the cup so I can get down here and grab these things out of the body. We need drainage.

Now drainage support can look like a lot of different things. That might look like lymphatic drainage. That could be a lymphatic massage. It can look like a basic lymphatic protocol — that's going to be rubbing and patting basic lymphatic lines. It can be exercise. Muscles physically pump your lymphatic system. Your blood is pumped by your heart. Your lymphatic system has valves — but it doesn't have a pump.

And so when we actually move and exercise, that physically pumps lymphatic tissues and lymphatic fluids. And so your body can actually circulate things through. It can look like red light, it can look like acupuncture, it can look like sweating — these are ways that things exit the body.

There's a lot of supplements we can use for drainage. And another great drainage support that we can utilize — something I actually use a lot with my clients — is a coffee enema.

Now, I'm not advocating you jump into coffee enemas by yourself right now, especially if you're new, if you've not researched, or if you're not being supervised. But coffee enemas can be a powerful drainage support, and they can be a powerful tool in helping your body eliminate a bunch of things that it's dealing with — emptying the cup.

And it can help with inflammation, it can help with excessive pathogens, it can help eliminate parasites. I've got clients right now coming in, going through proper drainage protocols, parasite protocols — and they’re feeling better. Their inflammation’s coming down, their water retention’s coming down. But they start coffee enemas — and they got worms. Worms. I mean, two, four-foot worms sometimes coming out in the toilet.

And this can really help. It also helps flush out their bile ducts — where a lot of parasites can typically hang out. And so they're hanging out through the liver, the gallbladder, bile duct — and you start getting these coffee enemas in, that caffeine also acts as a static binder. It can precipitate bile flow, building up pressure and pushing things out.

This is how we can work on more drainage and elimination. And again, they're anti-inflammatory. They can help with pain relief. They can help with colon cleansing, bile flow, detoxing, inflammation, and again, immune responses.

Remember, this is drainage. The more stuff you have in your cup, the more likely it is to overflow — the more symptoms you develop. So we work on drainage through many methods. We can use coffee enemas to support drainage and your immune system and pathogens and toxins getting out.

On top of Elimination Diet — look how much water we've already taken out of our cup. We've already reduced so much, which reduces your chances of flaring. And so we can get into this cup and start pulling more things out, more layers.

Maybe we have to remove parasites. Then we have to go remove — maybe there's mold toxicity. Maybe there's some candida in there. Maybe there's going to be gallstones or clostridia bacteria — there's overgrowths.

The deeper we can go into the cup without causing overflow, the better. So we've stopped contributing to the cup with Elimination Diet. We've performed proper drainage protocols, right?

Again — acupuncture, red light, sweating, sauna, supplementation. We’ve adopted coffee enemas, which are great for drainage, detoxification, your immune system, inflammation — the works.

And there's a lot of supplements we can utilize. Now, I’ve done talks on supplements before. I’m not going to go into specific supplements per se because everyone’s different. But here's what I want to talk about in the way of supplements.

Supplements — so many people are on them as a life sentence. And what you've effectively done is you’ve traded medications for supplements. And now you're on plant-based medication.

What we want to do instead is have supplements that have both a start and an end goal. If you have a start and an end for your supplement, it means it has a purpose, it means it has a reason why we’re taking it and a goal it can accomplish — which gives us a timeline and a place to stop taking it.

On the other hand, if you're on medication, you're suppressing symptoms. You're on these things for life. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't change anything because it’s your only hope.

And if you trade your medications for supplements with no start, no purpose, no end in sight — you’re just trying to manage your symptoms. You’ve now got plant-based medication.

So we have to have a start. We have to have an end goal — a purpose we’re trying to accomplish with these supplements.

On the other hand, if you're taking something, again, super arbitrarily — could it be harming you? So many people take supplements without really realizing it. And what they’re doing is they’re taking things that are boosting their immune system.

Well, if your immune system is already imbalanced — it’s constantly in flux and flow. Your immune system — something comes in, it captures it, gets rid of it, it handles it, it calms down. An invader comes in, your immune system spikes back up, it gets hyperactive, it tries to capture something, and then it comes back down. And it’s constantly in flux.

You're high stress? It comes up again. You get rest and relaxation? It comes down again. You get the flu — your immune system spikes up again and it comes back down again.

The problem is so many people — their immune system is constantly like this. It’s not rebalancing. Especially if you’re on the autoimmune spectrum with your bowel disease. Not every case is autoimmune — but if you’re on the autoimmune spectrum during this process, what happens?

You consume something. You take something that boosts this immune system — which is already imbalanced — you contribute to the problem. And now you’ve got more flare. More immune activity. More responses. More sensitivities. More allergy responses — headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding and mucus — these are all immune responses. And we exacerbate them by taking immune boosters.

So supplementation must have a start, because it has to have a purpose. Therefore, a goal — which gives you an end goal. And the supplements are taken for a purpose to come to a conclusion. Which means — you're not dependent.

This is how they differentiate from pharmaceuticals for the rest of your life. It's not medication. It's a supplement for a purpose.

We’ve talked about Elimination Diet — we’re not adding to the cup. We’ve talked about drainage — we can empty the cup. We’ve talked about coffee enemas — that both empty the cup and help with inflammation and symptoms and toxicity, further emptying the cup. We talked about supplements — which have a starting and end goal.

Now supplements — again, if you have parasites, the supplements are designed to remove the parasites. When the parasites are removed — you come off of the supplements. If the supplements are there to support your drainage — when drainage is successful, we can come off the supplements. If you’re on supplements to manage your immune system or to rejuvenate it — you can come off the supplements when your immune system is balanced.

They are simply an end goal.

So the next one we want to look at — and this is a very important one that a lot of people don’t really realize is a problem — this is going to be your nervous system.

Now what is a nervous system? Your nervous system is the neurological system that wires and controls your entire body. We have two main ones we’re going to talk about here — three. You have your central nervous system — that’s your brain and spine. Your peripherals, which is everything out to your limbs. And your enteric nervous system, which is the hundreds of billions of neurons — or hundreds of millions, rather — integrating inside of your gut.

You guys might realize or recognize the term “the gut-brain connection,” which is how the nerves in your brain connect. You have this vagus nerve which comes down, innervates your heart and your lungs and your organs and everything in between. And these communicate.

Now if we are high stress, what happens? Your nervous system is upregulated. We are quite literally in what’s called fight or flight. You have two basic pathways of the immune system. It’s not as simple as on and off. It’s more of a dial.

Now we have what we call rest and digest, and then you have your fight and flight.

Now, it is sort of on or off — but it’s sort of not. And I’ll explain how this contradiction makes any sense.

You're either in rest or digest, or you're in fight or flight. The difference is going to be to what degree you're in each. If you’re somebody who’s high stress and you're freaking out — having anxiety attacks and panic attacks and mood swings and you just can’t seem to settle or sleep and you're constantly irritable, feels like your skin is crawling — you’re in fight or flight.

And the worse those symptoms are, the more towards fight or flight you are.

If you're somebody who’s super chill, super mellow, super relaxed — things roll off your back — you’re going to be in rest and digest.

What’s the difference?

Well, rest and digest is literally what it sounds like — this is when your nervous system is calming down.

An upregulated nervous system cannot digest. That’s what rest and digest is. This is downregulation. If your nervous system is up — your immune responses are up, your inflammation is up, your digestibility is down, your nutrient absorption is down, your irritability of the gut is up, your motility is slowed down — or it’s super upregulated. It’s going to be imbalanced.

This is fight and flight.

Some people are severely imbalanced. They’re way over here. They got 15–20 bowel movements a day. Getting stuck in traffic sets off a flare. Having any kind of dysregulation or imbalance — the flu sets them off.

On the other hand, if you're somebody who’s down here in rest and digest and you're relaxing and you’re super relaxed and you're chill — you are resting, you are digesting, which means your motility is going to be adequate. Your gut-brain connection is not overstimulated. You’re not firing up your nervous system or your immune system.

You’re going to actually break down, digest, and absorb your food — giving your body more nutrients, giving it the tools it needs to heal itself.

And this is the rest and digest challenge.

Now, so many people are in fight or flight. So how do we get out of this?

It can look like food. It can look like relaxation. It can look like sunshine. It can look like proper sleep. There's supplementation. If you find yourself somebody who's highly anxious all the time — we have this feedback loop.

So your feedback loop in this nervous system response — right — it goes between the gut — okay this is intestines, that's my masterpiece — and this is going to be your rock-hard brain, okay?

Now we have a connection between the two.

If I want to slow things down, I need to make sure these are regulated. But if they are dysregulated, maybe I don't have control.

So if you're somebody who’s anxious, and you find that your brain — every time you get anxious — your gut starts to go off. Or every time your gut starts to go off, you develop anxiety — not only is there a neurological connection, there’s a chemical connection.

Up to 90% of your neurotransmitters are made inside your digestive system. That’s your serotonin, your dopamine, right — your epinephrine and norepinephrine. They can be made through here. Of course, your kidneys and other places — but they’re made inside your gut.

And if you have an imbalance of these neurotransmitters, what happens? Your brain gets an imbalanced signal. It goes all haywire. It’s not under control. And everything goes nuts.

But if you can re-regulate the brain and the gut, and you can control your neurotransmitter production — you can increase it with healthy bacteria, decreasing inflammation leaves a good home for these microbes — then we can have a healthy microbiome. We can have a healthy gut-brain connection. And that nervous system can calm down.

And that can start to calm down the nervous system inside the gut.

Remember, you have your enteric nervous system and your central nervous system, and then the arms and legs are going to be your peripheral nervous system. They all communicate with each other.

And if one is imbalanced, it sends a signal back to the other, and it’s imbalanced.

It’s like having communication in a city. If you don’t have your communication — your phone lines — the city can’t call for an emergency. The emergency services are super on high alert all the time — and everybody else doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s chaos.

And so you have signals that are problems, or signals that are disconnected — it sends bad signaling and things upregulate, things get all discombobulated — it feeds back and causes problems in the gut.

So the question then is to ask — is it the chicken or the egg? Did anxiety cause the gut, or the gut cause the anxiety? And are they feeding each other?

And so we have to consider — there are five main protocols that all work together that I've talked about here, and I want to go over one more time what they look like and how they integrate.

So the first thing we talked about is the Elimination Diet. Remember — the Elimination Diet doesn’t contribute to the cup. What we’re doing is slowing down how much water we’re adding to our cup.

So when I want to go in and start removing things that are causing your inflammation — because bowel disease has a root cause, it's never random — there’s something causing inflammation. We have to be able to remove it. But if your cup is full, we cause problems — you overflow.

Elimination Diet is the first step to reducing what we’re putting into our cup.

Our second one is drainage and drainage support. Remember — that’s how we empty our cup. That’s how things exit. So we can again further drain it to get more access to more of these things causing the problem.

Another one we can work on — a big intervention we like to use — is coffee enemas. Now, coffee enemas:

• One, support drainage.
• But two, they support all your other inflammatory pathways, detox pathways, bile ducts, and all these ways that things can exit the body.

Anti-inflammatory benefits, and it's been shown to help reduce pain, get rid of parasites, to help cleanse — and all kinds.

So these are three really good protocols we use.

A fourth one is supplements. Now, we talked about all these things that might be in the body — I mentioned parasites, I mentioned mold, I mentioned candida and clostridia and microbiome issues and all kinds of other things.

Supplements can help support drainage.
Supplements can help get rid of the things causing the problem.
But also — supplements give your body the tools and resources it needs to heal itself.

Everything in your body works together. I picture your body like a big city. All of the organs are factories. And all these little factories — let’s take your liver for example — all these factories have factory workers. These are your liver cells.

Well, the workers need tools to do their job. That’s where supplements can come in — vitamins, minerals, amino acids — all these things your body needs for performance, functions, to support drainage and detoxification, your nervous system, and all the things we talked about.

And so again — supporting that is going to be the nervous system.

Because if you're super high stress, you're basically fighting back against all these protocols we’re implementing anyway.

So maybe this looks like rest, it looks like sleep, it looks like meditation, looks like acupuncture, looks like a vacation, it looks like dropping things that are causing inflammation.

Because when you're inflamed and you have poor drainage — your body has what’s called a cell danger response.

There’s the macro level where you go, “I’m in danger.”

On a microscopic level, when your body’s toxic or inflamed, your cells release a danger response — this is called a cell danger response — which sends back a signal through the nervous system back to the body saying, “We’re in danger,” and we set off everything again.

And so:

• Nervous system
• Supplements with a start and an end goal
• They have a purpose and a finish line
• We’re not plant-based medication
• Coffee enemas to support drainage, detoxing, inflammation, the immune system, etc.
• Proper drainage
• An Elimination Diet to not contribute to the problem

These are the five biggest protocols that we utilize.

Now, everyone’s going to be different. This isn’t one where I can write out, “Here’s a protocol for this. Here’s a supplement protocol for IBD.” I get asked all the time.

Everyone’s different.

And so, here’s what can be a bit of a problem — and I want to caution you guys on this...

Josh Dech: ...implementing some of these things on your own can be dangerous.

Remember — supplements are a big one. Let's start from the top.

Elimination Diet — that’s pretty safe. You can cut back foods on your own. Unless you know they’re causing you a problem, it’s not going to be a big deal.

Drainage support — okay, here's a little skull and crossbones for you. Drainage support can be very dangerous.

If you are going through and trying to drain your cups, but they don’t have open drainage pathways, you're trying to detox your body, but the drainage pathways aren’t open properly, and you open too much drainage too quickly — it dumps into your liver, dumps into your bile duct, dumps down your gut — you can actually cause more problems.

People who try detoxing and drainage pathways — they may find themselves getting sick.

This is often what’s referred to or can be classified as a Herxheimer reaction. You can look it up — really gnarly. You can hospitalize yourself by doing drainage and detoxing without supervision, without doing it properly, without knowing where your body’s at and what those processes look like.

You can cause a lot of sickness.

It can start simple — like flu, migraines or flu-like symptoms — or it can throw you in the hospital: severe bleeding, severe symptoms, a lot of pain. It can cause all kinds of problems.

We don’t want to drive your immune system further.

Okay, the next one is coffee enemas. Now, because coffee enemas are part of drainage, we want to be very careful.

So again — please don’t take these on without supervision if you’ve never done them before. It can cause a lot of problems in the bowel.

Sometimes people do coffee enemas — what happens?

An enema, if you’re not familiar with an enema, is basically — you take a water, a liquid or a gas, and you put it up the rectum. And that can sit in the colon, it can fill up different layers of the colon, and that absorbs into the rest of the body.

The problem is — caffeine, in a coffee enema, works as a static binder.

So picture taking a balloon. You rub it on the carpet. You rub it and put it to your head — and it pulls your hair. It reaches in and grabs things.

What starts to happen — if you have toxins inside the body, and they start to pass through layers of your tissue — different parts of your immune system can start to overreact.

And what happens is — this can cause a heavy immune response, increasing inflammation if you're not careful.

And so — we have to be careful with coffee enemas, because it can over-trigger your immune system if you're not in a place to do it properly.

Huge caution to coffee enemas.

Supplements — again, same reasons as drainage, same reasons as coffee enemas.

And again — your immune system, it’s constantly in balance, balancing itself. But if you start taking supplements that boost your immune system, you start contributing to the problem.

And now you're making your inflammation worse, maybe you're contributing to autoimmune issues. There’s a lot of reasons why we have to be very careful with supplements.

Again — I definitely recommend — especially the worse the condition is, the more supervision I say we need, typically.

Okay, nervous system — this one, pretty safe to do on your own. It's not going to hurt to meditate. It's not going to hurt to rest.

If you go to see, say, acupuncture for your nervous system — just let them know what’s going on and be very careful. There are certain neurological interventions that can be more problematic than others.

Like acupuncture — if you trigger certain pathways that promote drainage, it might cause you a problem. If you hit the liver, it can cause you a problem. If you hit something for the immune system or the kidneys or whatever acupuncture points they use, it can cause a drainage effect — which can cause more problems.

If your nervous system is overdone — it’s a problem.

So feel free to rest. Feel free to go to bed. Feel free — try some magnesium, some l-theanine, some GABA — we call it GABA. I would start low doses, but that can help with relaxation.

Another great one that I like to use is called L-theanine. It’s an amino acid — can be very relaxing.

There’s a lot of things we can use to help us relax — and this is the purpose.
o these are five typical protocols that I will use in some way, shape, or form.

Now keep in mind again — it’s not as simple as “Here’s one thing that everyone can do.” I mean, everyone can go to bed better, everybody can build better sleep hygiene — but it’s not, “Here’s one elimination diet for everyone. One supplement protocol for everyone.”

These are umbrellas with dozens of different options — sometimes hundreds — underneath them. And in every one, I go to pick certain things very specifically based on you and your case.

So please be very careful. If you want to start taking some of these things on — ask me for help.

The Gut Health Solution is a program where we go in and we take two big things:

Number one — we take a history.

We want to know: What’s your story?

What your doctor does is they go, “Here are your symptoms. Here’s your diagnosis. Here’s a medication — one, two, three.” Like a cookbook — meds in this order.

What we do is we want to go through a history:

• When,
• Why,
• And how did this whole thing start?

Once we have that, we send you a bunch of questionnaires. We need a bunch of history, bloodwork, supplements, how this whole thing started, medical history, family history — we want to dive in to what’s contributing.

This gives context to our history.

Once we have that, we go on to another one — we do a second history. Now that we have more context from you, this helps us understand more of what’s going on.

From here, we then create a program for you — based on you, your needs, what’s going on, what’s inside your body.

The steps and processes of all these protocols we listed are made for you, based on your needs.

But that’s not good enough.

Your doctor? “Here’s a medication, see me in 3 to 6 months, we’ll see how you’re feeling.”

That’s not enough.

You know how quickly things can change with IBD.

So what do we do?

We meet with you every week for 16 straight weeks to micromanage this process — to make sure your body is healthy and happy and that we’re not seeing this ⬆️⬇️⬆️⬇️ roller coaster, rather we’re smoothing out this ride as best we can, to make sure you’re continually making progress, and your body is getting better and better and healthier.

And it can begin removing the steps, pieces, and processes that are contributing to inflammation.

Remember — inflammation is never, ever, ever — emphasis on the ever — random.

Everything in the body is a cause and effect.

Me bending and straightening my arm is the cause and effect of contracted and relaxed muscles on a macro level.

Even on a micro level — it’s sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium moving in and out of the muscle allowing this contraction to occur.

If I get pink eye — the cause is bacteria, maybe I didn’t wash my hands after wiping my butt. The effect is inflammation in my eye. It’s trying to heal me from bacteria that shouldn’t be there.

Inflammation in your bowel is no different.

You cannot wake up one day randomly, arbitrarily allergic to yourself.

Something had to cause the problem.

The effect is inflammation. It gets labeled by your doctor:

• Symptoms,
• Diagnosis,
• Drugs.

They never go back this way. They only go towards management.

We want to go back this way — to the history.

When, why, and how did this all happen?

The easiest way to learn about this — just to see if it’s a good fit, if we can help you — I’ll let you know.

If it’s a good fit, best way you can do that is to comment the word “solution.”

We’ll reach out, we’ll have a conversation, see what it looks like, see if we can help, see if this is a good fit.

And you — like hundreds of others — I think we’re just over 300 now — hundreds of others have gone through this process and reversed off medication.

We just did an interview last week — or maybe it was two weeks ago now — with Mary, off all of her meds. She’s now 9 months medication-free, pain-free, drug-free, symptom-free. Calprotectin is a 4, she’s feeling amazing.

Lou — went back, talk about him all the time — we were on a great TV show, international TV, talking about Lou’s case.

Seventeen years of inflammatory bowel disease. Three separate times, his family planned for his funeral. His body was so ill and so inflamed.

Took us 6 months — off all of his drugs, medications. He’s now almost 2 years completely pain-free, medication-free, symptom-free. Just came back traveling and vacationing in Greece — eating and drinking and living his life normally.

Because we removed the things that were causing the problem. We got down there, pulled each thing out — and his body was able to heal itself.

It’s not random. It never is. It’s not just genetic. It’s not just autoimmune. It’s not just unfixable.

There’s a solution.

I’m going to go into the questions right now, okay? Let me go through — there’s so many of you on the call. I appreciate you guys being so active here. Let me get in here and see what’s going on.

Joyce, she says: “Eliminating gluten has helped me.”
Absolutely. Gluten has a protein in it that your body recognizes as a pathogen, which can lead to leaky gut, which contributes to the problem.

Kimberly says: “I'm in fight or flight unfortunately.”
Absolutely. If you’re in fight or flight, recognize — there’s a feedback loop. Remember, it’s a feedback loop between your body and between your brain. Between the neurotransmitters in your gut, the effect it causes on the brain, and everything else it does in between. We have to remember — there’s more than one thing going on at a time.

Miranda’s question is: “Can antibiotics as a child cause IBD?”
This is a fantastic question. I get asked it all the time. The answer is: Absolutely.

Miranda, here’s what we have to keep in mind. Your body — you get microbes in your body from all kinds of different ways.

The first one is going to be in utero — this is when you’re in the womb. You get them from your mom. They transfer from her. You get them inside the placenta — you get these before you’re born.

The second place we get microbes is through birth — through a natural vaginal birth, through the birth canal. You come out covered in microbes. They enter your mouth, they get on your skin, they colonize like brand new seeds growing in a meadow. Think about that. It grows in, the grass starts to grow, it starts to turn into a forest and a rainforest. We have more diversity — that’s the second place.

The third place we get them is going to be from breast milk. You get these from Mom — especially the first three days. There’s a lot of colostrum, there’s a lot of microbes. And over the one year — even if you’re lucky enough, up to two years — of breastfeeding, there’s so many more microbes that get in and they settle and they culture and they grow.

And so these microbes again cultivate — it’s now introducing more wildlife to the meadow. Small things — rabbits and shrews and all kinds of things.

And so now what happens?

The fourth thing that you introduce them through is from life — food, friends, traveling, exposure.

So let’s take this into consideration:

The best-case scenario to develop a healthy ecosystem in your gut — your gut microbiome — is:

1. You are born from a healthy mother with healthy microbes, who eats really well, doesn’t consume chemicals or drink, etc.
2. You’re born naturally through the birth canal — not through C-section.
3. You’re breastfed — not bottle-fed formula.
4. You have a healthy, outdoor lifestyle — you grow up on a farm, you’re playing with animals, you’re traveling, seeing friends, and you're eating healthy foods that contribute to your gut.

Worst-case scenario — your mom’s not very healthy to begin with. You’re born via C-section. You’re strictly bottle-fed. You grow up inside a high-rise tower in New York City. Everything is sanitized. Everyone wears a mask. You have no pets at home.

That’s the dichotomy between best and worst-case scenario.

And so these people get sicker. These people are healthier.

The difference — now if you throw antibiotics into the mix — antibiotics destroy bacteria through a number of different ways. Now, a couple of ways that they'll do it — they actually get in there and they disrupt the bacteria’s membrane.

Your bacteria is actually creating proteins and all kinds of things to synthesize for, like, food for it to live — it can actually disrupt that process. It can cause all kinds of things to shut down. So these bacteria die off.

The difference is — antibiotics attack all the bacteria — not just the bad guys. They can attack the good guys.

So all these good ones you got from in utero, from birth, from breast milk, from life and healthy eating — they’re killed off by antibiotics.

And so you're left with what's called opportunistic bacteria.
It’s not that everything’s dead instantly. The stronger the microbiome, the more you can repair. But the earlier on you introduce antibiotics — early in early childhood — that meadow, it burns down before it becomes a rainforest.

A rainforest will bounce back. A couple of years in a human gut — a couple of months — arguments of 3 to 12 months.

But in a brand new seeding meadow, new grass — you’ve gone in and burned it and salted the earth. It’s never going to grow back as good as it could have been, had it had a chance to grow properly.

And this is what we have to keep in mind — there’s a lot of moving parts.

And so this is why I say — there’s a lot of antibiotic options that are not pharmaceutical grade. You have all kinds of stuff — herbs can actually support the good guys and kill the bad.

You have colloidal silvers, you have all kinds of ways you can bring them down. I did a podcast episode on antibiotics — be sure to check that out. But that’s sort of the quickness on how antibiotics can affect the body — and definitely cause IBD.

Let me see…

Monica: “My body was not ready for the coffee enema.”
We see it all the time. If you’re taking in coffee enemas — again, you’re going through different layers of tissue. You’re pulling things from the body through layers of tissue into the intestines, which is another immune system — we call that your secretory IgA — it gets overreactive and boom, you can flare.

So be very careful with those.

Jessica says: “Antibiotics triggered my son’s UC. He’d never had them until he was 17. Two weeks after he finished his prescription, it started.”
That is very common.

Now — if they have all the best-case scenario we just talked about, Jessica — he has all the levels that we talked about — eventually, they can bounce back.

But if some of these are compromised, what happens is — you cause a further imbalance to the gut microbiome, then we have to go back and rebuild it.

But in the meantime, with these good guys being pushed off, the bad guys — we call them opportunistic — then overgrow.

This is going to be your candida, your fungus. This is going to be parasites that may enter and cause problems. There’s nothing to fight them out of the community.

This can be your clostridia and other gram-negative harmful inflammatory bacterias — they overgrow.

Now his body looks at this ecosystem and goes, “Well that’s a problem.” And now the immune system begins to attack it.

I don’t believe — and there’s many GIs who say, “No, it’s always autoimmune” — I think that’s complete crap.

Some of the top functional medicine GI specialists in the world — Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, for example — we talked about this. He says:

“Your body is attacking the ecosystem — your microbiome. There’s no evidence it’s attacking your tissues.”

It just happens to be near your tissues until they get inflamed.

And this can all be reversed.

Connor asks: “How do you know what to eat and what not to eat? Also, do you think the use of ibuprofen can cause Crohn’s?”

So I’m going to hit the Crohn’s one first because we’re already on this topic.

Can ibuprofen cause Crohn’s?
In the same way that antibiotics can, I’ve seen it be a major contributing factor.

Can I say it caused it entirely? Not necessarily.

But think of it — if you have a leak in your roof, and there’s water leaking — your house didn’t cause the mold. The water leak caused the mold.

And so if you have something that’s already a problem, and you have this residual effect, then absolutely — it can contribute to the problem.

You take ibuprofen in an unhealthy gut — that already starts to take down your bacteria. It already starts to cause inflammation.

Now what starts to happen is your opportunistic microbes overgrow. So you're sliding downhill in the way of health.

Then what happens?

Fungus and other things overgrow, parasites get in your tissue, and inflammation triggers the immune system. There’s a lot of cascades that happen.

I did an episode again recently on the podcast, all about anti-inflammatories — NSAIDs, we call them. N-S-A-I-D stands for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

We did a podcast all about how those affect your gut and how horrible they are.

So — the long and short is: possibly.

Now, the next question is — and this will be the last question unless we have any over there — so this will be the last question I’m going to take:

“How do you know what to eat and what not to eat?”

My friends — this is called trial and error.

Now why trial and error?

The truth is — you can have a list like the AIP diet (Autoimmune Protocol), the SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet), there’s dozens and dozens of diets — Mediterranean, Atkins, Carnivore, etc.

You don’t know until you try.

I can recommend food to one person that will cause problems in another.

Now, I can take a pretty good guess based on your history, based on your symptoms, based on what upsets you and what doesn’t. You already know — if you’re eating anything that your great-great-grandmother would not recognize as an edible substance, it will be contributing to the problem and filling that glass.

Now is it contributing a little or a lot?

The point is — it doesn’t matter.

I get people argue with me all the time:

“Well, it’s just one Pop-Tart.”
 “It’s just some gluten.”
 “It’s just one drink.”

It doesn’t matter — if your cup is already brimming full, it takes one drop to cause everything to overflow.

And this is what we have to keep in mind.

So it’s trial and error. Gold standard for diets — still — even though I can look at your gut bacteria, I can measure it and go, “Well these ones typically react to these foods. Based on your symptoms, it’s probably A, B, C. Therefore these foods will probably cause you a problem.”

At the end of the day — the gold standard is still an Elimination Diet.

Go down to ground beef and rice and every — try that for a week.

And then every 3 days, pick one new food and add it in — and you’ll know if it’s contributing to the problem.

That being said — hundreds of cases we’ve reversed — comment “solution” for help — but hundreds of cases, we rarely make meal plans for people anymore unless they’re already eating horribly.

Meal plans — most people dealing with bowel disease already know what does and doesn’t bother them.

Unless it’s a packaged or processed, frozen and refined food, I’m probably not going to remove it if you know it’s fine for you.

Our job — food can cause this disease, but food doesn’t always, which means food typically cannot fix the disease.

And 99% of cases — the problem is doctors go:

“Food can’t cause it. Food can’t fix it. Eat whatever you want.”

We say:

“Food probably didn’t cause it, therefore food probably won’t fix it — but food is a major part of your healing response.”
 So we have to eat responsibly.

Amar, here’s one more — I will take this one, it’s easy to answer — “Why rice, since it’s a white carb?”

I have no problem with white foods. What I have a problem with is the white diet.

Now I posted about this and somebody was like: “What’s wrong with white people?”
I’m like — that’s food 😂

So the white diet is:

• White rice
• White breads
• White pasta
• White potatoes
• White white white

One — there’s no nutrients.

The reason they say the white diet — picture you have an inflamed ankle, it’s sprained, and you have to walk up the stairs. You have to do labor and mechanical work and movement with your ankle.

That’s not bad to do, right?

If you’re eating things that take very little effort...

But now take a backpack, fill it with weights, and walk on that sprained ankle — it’s harder to do.

And so if you're eating foods — think like beef jerky, right? Or a steak. Or raw broccoli — that is a lot of mechanical work your body has to do. It’s like taking that sprained ankle and carrying weights — it’s more load on already inflamed tissue.

Whereas the white diet — these white foods — they break down in the mouth.

The amylase in your saliva breaks down starches.

You can test this — take a cracker or something and just chew it about 60 seconds — it will start to taste sweet because that carbohydrate is breaking down from a complex carbohydrate to a very simple carbohydrate called sugar.

Fun fact: We call it C6H12O6 — that is a glucose molecule. That is sugar.

Now these complex carbs break down to simple carbs that taste sweet — that’s sugar.

And so the white diet just takes the load off the body. But it’s very void of nutrients, which means those factory workers we talked about — right — they don’t have the tools they need to do their job to fix your body.

White diet comes with a lot of gluten, typically — also inflammatory.

We remove gluten from people when they’re dealing with IBD.

So there’s a lot of reasons why the white diet doesn’t work — but rice being a white carb, I don’t mind it at all.

I have no issue with rice. It’s just that we don’t want you only eating nothing but rice for the rest of your life, because that’s not a solution.

Just like supplements — there’s a start and an end.

Elimination diets — have a purpose to find information — it’s research for you.

And then — we can go back to eating normally.

And that’s how these things work.

So — everything has a purpose. Everything has a cause and effect.

That’s all we got for you guys today. Thank you so much for coming.
We’re going to see you next week.

Thanks for listening.

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