JJ: Welcome to the show, everyone. If you’re hearing this on the podcast, know that we do have a video. You can come on over to jjflizanes.tv to watch. Dr. William Davis and I have this very exciting (it’s exciting to me; it might piss a lot of you off) conversation, because I’m really excited. I’ve been chomping at the bit for weeks. I’m like, “What direction are we going to go in?” So, here’s the disclaimer I’m going to make to you all. Today we’re going to talk about his book, “Undoctored,” which came out in 2017. And nothing’s really changed, I think, in the world. Maybe it’s worse. I don’t know that it got any better. But I’m going to push some limits today. And so, just know that if you’re the person who has had amazing experiences with your doctor, you’ve had to go to the hospital, you’ve had a life-saving procedure, I’m not discounting any of that, and we’re not going to discount any of that. What we want to do is empower you in the ways in which you might be suffering or other people that you know needlessly, when it costs too much, it takes too much time, or you’re given the wrong advice, whatever. So, please know, especially if you’re finding this on YouTube and you’re here for Dr. William Davis, let’s just cut to the chase right now. I started doing this with my more famous clients. Where can they find you if they want more of just you? Because I seem to be a catalyst that piss people off when they don’t want to look in the mirror. So, where can they just find you if they don’t like me?

Dr. Davis: I’m at a transition, JJ, where I’ve had so many online properties that are in all directions. So, I’m consolidating. So, it won’t happen probably until the end of the year. It will be Dr. Davis’ Infinite Health. And we’ll consolidate my Wheat Belly blog, the busiest place of all. That’s had 33 million visits. The Undoctored Inner Circle, Undoctored blog, some of the private Facebook pages. So, it will become Dr. Davis’ Infinite Health. JJ, I’m not about putting myself front and center, as you know. It’s about the message and the mission, not about being on camera. I don’t really care about being on camera. But there’s so much wrong, as you’ve pointed out, in the status quo in healthcare, and it’s become such a burden to carry so many sites. I’m putting them all together in one place. And I have a new book coming out in February.

JJ: I know. We’re going to talk about that too.

Dr. Davis: “Super Gut.” Yeah.

JJ: Awesome. Well, we talked about that on the first episode you and I did together. But in between, again, in one way, I’m late to the party, but I’m not because it’s perfect timing for me. I find things when it’s the right time to bring the message into the world for me, and then for others to be attracted to that message. So, I think it’s very smart you’re consolidating, but I say that upfront because YouTube is different than my podcast community. My podcast community, if they’ve been with me for a while, they know they can trust me. Those that are searching you that find me on YouTube don’t necessarily like me and don’t care to hear what I have to say. I’m warning all of you people on YouTube: I’m going to have a conversation. This is my show. If you don’t like it, tough shit. So, go find Dr. Davis on his own channel and go to town there. I invite you to follow him, buy his books, do his programs, be involved. If you’re searching for him and by the end of this, you don’t like me, totally cool.

All right. Now, literally, this book… I also wanted to make one more disclaimer. The people that are listening to my podcast, again, are seekers of truth. They are mostly older souls. They know there’s something more. They identify themselves as powerful, empowered beings who there’s definitely something more than what the normal mass consciousness is aware of. And so, those people are probably open, even if they don’t agree with everything that comes out of your mouth or my mouth because of whatever reason. But they’re patient enough. Now, those of you that are watching on YouTube and you don’t know me, and maybe you know Dr. Davis because you were searching him, that’s how you got here, we’re going to take a position, and we’re going to take a position in order to empower you. So, it might sound like, at first, there’s a lot of negativity, and especially for my community, they’re not going to like that because they’re going to be like, “Well, that doesn’t help me.” But know that once we have to give you some of the hard facts that you’re unwilling to accept and look at, we’ll follow it up with the ways in which you can help yourself.

So, the title of the book is “Undoctored: Why Healthcare Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctors,” six steps to seizing control over your health. Keep listening. And some of it for me, I don’t know if I explained this to you the last time we had this conversation about wheat belly, I’m a highly intuitive person. I have many planets in Sagittarius. I’m a huge truth seeker. I question everything, and I always have. Not to exhaustion, but I just want to know. I ask questions. I’m not afraid to ask a question. So, to me, that seems like common sense. And when I intuitively know that there’s something wrong with the system, I’ve been working in functional medicine since 2007. I was in a functional medicine clinic as a personal trainer alongside a functional medicine doctor and registered dietitian, all up to date with the newest research in science that comes out about every kind of everything, from bioidentical hormones to keto diets, whatever. Whatever it is that we’re learning about right now, we’re on top of it. So, I’ve been exposed to, for the longest time, and not to mention before that, in the personal training industry, they don’t trust doctors. So, we just had this sort of distrust. And not walking in negative. Just knowing that I’m a person, you’re a person, you’ve learned things, I’ve learned things. I’m going to ask a question, you’re going to give me an answer. If I don’t like your answer, I’m going to ask you another question. But I’m not just going to listen to you blindly. And that’s me.

Now, so what happens is when I read your book and I listen to your book, I get pissed because you are so good at delivering all of the information that I don’t want to know about but I do know it. You know what I mean? Like I know it goes on, but I don’t want to get down to the nitty-gritty. I bought this book for my parents yesterday. Now, my parents, they’re not me at all. They’re not like me at all. And I just bought it because I thought I needed to as a duty. Whether they ever read it is up to them. But you literally lay out in this book, and I want every single one of you, if you do not have this book, you have to get this book. And you also do not want to share this show with anyone not willing or open. Please, please, please. Do me and Dr. Davis a favor. Do not share this show with someone who’s not open. Ask them before you share it, and buy them the book. If you want a way around it, just buy them the book and have it shipped to their house. You could do it anonymously. All right?

So, what happens when I read your book or I’m listening to it, and I have the hard copy on the way, oh my god, I’m so pissed. I’m so mad that I want to go out and scream at everybody, like “Wake up!” But I also know that doesn’t work. I know very well it doesn’t work. So, I have some questions for you. That’s why I wanted to set the stage here for this conversation, because I want to go into it. I want you to share some of these things, but I want everybody to read the book. And then I want to go into the now, of what’s happening now, and then I want to go into what are the ways in which we can start to bring our power back into ourselves. So, I know you have so much to say. One question. How was this book received in 2017 by other physicians, by the medical community? Because you know you would not be able to publish this right now. You’ll be ripped off the shelves immediately right now.

Dr. Davis: Well, it was the first time I realized that all of us, you, me, other authors on health topics, have all been blacklisted by big media. Actually, around the time “Undoctored” came out, all big media outlets, NBC, CBS, cable, convened committees. They actually do this. This is true. They convene committees to bat down specific topics and authors. And that’s why in years past, once a week you’d have a book author on some health topic: nutrition, supplements, something like that, exercise. Now we have zero, nothing. As well as any kind of exposé, like a “60 Minutes” type exposé. Zero on health, because it’s against the interests of Big Pharma, a major advertiser on most media, broadcast and print. I’ve even heard this, JJ, from publishers. If we can’t make money, because none of us get on TV anymore, if we can’t make money printing books, publishing books on health, maybe we won’t publish books on health anymore. So, it’s kind of like a Hitler book burning of a different sort. But this is what we’re up against. And that’s why what you’re doing is so important. I started my own podcast. I’m way, way behind you, but a YouTube channel. Because we have to, otherwise Big Pharma and its exploitative ways are winning.

JJ: Well, they’re very powerful. They’ve got a lot of money, and they’ve got the whole country and everybody brainwashed about this idea that they have their best interests at heart. I mean, in the book, the five myths: healthcare is about healing. I had a walk today. On Wednesday mornings, my partner Doug and I go for a walk in the morning. And I was telling him about one of the, I guess, comparisons that you make in the book that healthcare is no more about health and healing than gambling is about your retirement fund. And you do several of them in the book, right? But we have doctors are all-knowing, like all the myths. And again, I’m like, “Yep, yep, yep.” These are things that, minus the data, and you break down even some of the way that they take the research (that’s skewed anyway), and then they take that 1.1% and the math they do to make it 36.6% in the media, making it look like it’s an amazing thing when actually it really doesn’t do anything. It’s not a big difference. I mean, this is so linear and chockfull of real information for the person who’s skeptical to really look at this. See, I’m not skeptical because I already know it. But it’s like I don’t need to read it or know any more. And when I do, it pisses me off and it gets me into this, like, “Argh!” And that’s not necessarily the best place to be, because I’ve been toeing the line here on this show a little bit during this time and space because of obvious reasons, because I used to hear stories of doctors that would go against pharma and they die. I mean, I feel like everyone who wants to put themselves out there with truth literally has an opportunity to have bad things happen because they want to silence the people that are making people question what’s going on in the world. What happened? I see 800 four-and-a-half-star reviews on the book, but what was the retro at that time for “Undoctored” in the medical community, in the hospitals, in pharma, in anyone?

Dr. Davis: Well, mostly silence, something I call willful ignorance. That is, if your money is made by doing bypass operations, you don’t really care about knowing about how heart disease is caused, for instance. If your money is in chemotherapy, radiation, and cancer surgery, you don’t really care about preventing cancer. And so, there’s this willful ignorance in the part of my colleagues to concentrate on only the things that yield substantial revenues. And the greater the revenue return, the more attention is focused on it. So, that’s why there’s all this attention. For example, organ transplant should be a rare thing, but they’re trying to make it much more of a [12:50] because it pays so well. That’s why biologics are talked about. So, biologics like monoclonal antibodies and TNF-alpha inhibitors to block autoimmune diseases are terrible drugs. They’re horrible. If liver failure is at the top of the list of side-effects of a drug, it’s not a very good drug. Yet they push these drugs because they charge typically $3000, $4000, $20,000 a month. And so, if there’s a way, for instance, to stop, reverse, put an end to, let’s say, rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis, they don’t want to know. Even if the science came out that we had “Just take these five steps,” for instance, “and your rosacea goes away,” they won’t know about it or they won’t care because it has no revenue return on that activity, on that knowledge.

And so, you know, JJ, I’m sure you thought the same thing when you were part of a practice. In what other industry can a purported expert be completely ignorant and have almost no knowledge of what they claim to be expert at? So, this happens. I’m sure this happens to you. You sit in a room with a doctor and you realize you know a hell of a lot more than the doctor does about health. He knows how to schedule a neurology consult. He knows the different MRI and PET scans. He knows which surgeon to use to take your gallbladder out or remove your tumor. But ask about health, he’ll have almost… In fact, he’ll make fun of your notions of health. So, if you say something like “Could you have a 25-hydroxy Vitamin E blood level run for me?” he’ll say, “You don’t need that.” He’d be consulting Dr. Google or he orders the wrong tests because he doesn’t really know what this is all about or says really stupid things. “Your level is 30. You’re okay.”

JJ: And I think I’ve been in the functional medicine scene deeply since 2007, and here we are, 2021, and I’m like, “Why do people not know that Vitamin D will help you not get the flu, would help with bones, would help with pre-cancer, would help with everything?” I mean, Vitamin D is so necessary for so many things and yet, like you said, the standard American care, the standard of care here is not paying attention to that. I don’t know if I told you my fibroid story in our last call, because it wasn’t really around doctors, more around the idea of wheat belly and grains and the effect on the body. I had fibroids for a long time. And I don’t know if you know what’s happened recently since you and I have had this conversation is I started a certification. I have an empowerment strategist certification and I have been hooked up with naturopathic oncologists who use a terrain-based system, and the last part of the terrain is emotional and mental awareness, because the emotions, as we know, in epigenetics, can create disease, can help proliferate disease. So, I’m dealing with cancer patients right now who had cancer three times and have done all the other conventional things but realized that they’ve never dealt with their emotions or with their stress or their repression. So, now I’m specializing in dealing with that kind of stuff.

So, I had fibroids, and I know that a lot of it was emotional and mental. And there were other aspects of it. I actually think it helped protect me in ways. But I did a whole bunch of different kinds of healing, and I met up with doctors, and I did the whole thing, and I listened to my body. And my body said at one point, after all kinds of things, and I even released one naturally by myself. Well, that did not help my hemoglobin because I lost a lot of blood. And when I finally ended up going to the doctor, and I went straight to the specialist to have uterine artery embolization, it was funny because I didn’t go through a gynecologist, I went straight to have the MRI and I sat in the office, and I realized, “Oh, I don’t want her to go through the films with me. I don’t need to see the MRI. Just yes, you’ll do it, or no, you won’t.” So, she comes in and I had the tech tell her, “Just tell her I don’t want to go over them. Yes, you’ll do it, or no, you won’t.” She came in, she’s like, “Okay, yeah, I’ll do it, but it’s not my first recommendation.” And I said, “Okay.” And she goes, “My first recommendation is hysterectomy.”

And I had had Dr. [17:00] on the show four times, when I started back in 2015, and we talked about the over-prescription of hysterectomies and how it’s not necessary. And again, these are fibroids. And I mentioned that I wanted to be open to pregnancy, and she still said the hysterectomy. And I literally felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. And I thought to myself, “Is this really happening to me? At this day and age, she’s really telling me this?” Because I had a 15% chance of it going sort of wrong. And Doug is in the corner freaking out, thinking I’m going to die. And calmly, I said to her she was nuts. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” And then she sends me to the gynecologist as the backup plan, in case something bad happens. The gynecologist, younger woman, lovely, but she looked at me and she goes, “You make me nervous.” And I said, “I make you nervous because you think that something bad is going to happen?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, how about, since it’s only 15%, that means 85% chance it’s going to go well? So, what happens if it just breaks down over time and it leaves my body naturally and nothing happens?” I said, “That can happen, right?” She goes, “Yes.” I said, “Well, that’s what’s going to happen.” And then I proceeded to have that happen. And when I got back, she said, “Whatever you want to do, here’s a prescription for whatever you want.” I convinced the gynecologist that I knew my body well enough.

But through the whole process, because a client of mine said, “Well, I don’t know if I believe your emotional stuff because you couldn’t heal your fibroids.” I said, “That’s fair.” I said, “But I think the reason that I was supposed to go through this is because otherwise I wouldn’t step foot in a hospital for any reason.” And the fact that, in this day and age, with what I know and who I am and how I do speak up for myself, I still had to argue with the doctor the whole way through the procedure and after, argued with every single doctor, and not because… Guys, I have witnesses. I wasn’t a belligerent person. I was very calm the entire time. I have two witnesses the entire time. I basically said, “I’m not staying the night.” And they all said, “Well, you could die.” I’m like, “I’m not going to die.” The scare tactics are criminal. They’re criminal. So, I went through this process thinking, “I’m glad I went through this,” because I needed to understand what a normal person goes through. When they go to a doctor, they give all their power away and they say, “You tell me what to do.” And the doctor decides to take a 15% chance of something going wrong, which, by the way, I came up with five different fixes, because I’m a problem-solver. I’m like, “What if we do this? And what if we do this?” And I got looks, like, “No. No. No. No.” And I’m like, “Well, you’re not a really good problem-solver. Why do you only have one solution to something? Shouldn’t there be multiple solutions to a problem?” I’m like, “This is science. We could break this down.” But nobody wanted to listen to that. It’s one solution where you take it out, where you have surgery. I’m like, “I’m not doing surgery.”

So, at the end of the day, while it was an interesting learning experience, I recorded a podcast about it. I’ve never shared it with anyone because I’m waiting for the time where I’m going to… I want people, especially women, to stop… When they scare you, there’s a reason they’re scaring you. Because, like you said, the doctor gets paid on the surgery. She gets paid on the procedure. And it’s not about power control. It’s about does it feel right in my body? Dr. Northrup and I have talked about this three times on the show. It’s about your intuition about what’s right for you. And the doctor has information. You have your body. You make a combination, and you’re the only person who gets to decide if your information resonates with my body. So, I know some people think, “Well, that’s an arrogant…” I don’t care. It’s my body. And I followed it the entire way, my intuition, and I came out fine. Everything worked out fine. Everything was great.

But “Undoctored,” this book, so nobody said anything? You didn’t get any retro from doctors? You weren’t called a heretic? You weren’t called an arrogant jerk? None of that?

Dr. Davis: Not a whole lot because my colleagues don’t typically read books on health. They might read their little narrow area, if they even read the science. This is a big problem, JJ, and it’s gotten worse. As the mountain of evidence is coming out, good evidence from a whole bunch of different directions, a lot of the practicing docs just don’t have the time or motivation to keep up. So, in other words, if they finish their training, let’s say, in 1992 and it’s been almost 30 years, they are profoundly behind the times. And so, as you encountered, they’re very good at using scare tactics. In my area, one of the things I did over the years, we set up a CT heart scan device. This is back 25 years ago. We set up a CT heart scan device so we could screen people for heart disease, silent heart disease. These are people, like you and me, going about your business. You get a calcium score because calcium comprises 20% of all atherosclerotic [21:35]. It’s a way to track. So, very easy. Maybe your score is, let’s say, 300, which is an important score, but it does not mean you need a stent or bypass. So, we were using it as a preventive tool, because if you do nothing, your score goes up 25% per year. And by the way, if you go on with what the doctor calls optimal medical therapy, high-dose statin cholesterol drug, aspirin, low fat diet, exercise program, it still goes up 25% per year.

So, one of my colleagues, they say, “Let’s do the real test.” Because you know what, you could be a walking time bomb. I can’t be responsible what happens to you if you don’t do this. In other words, a heart catheterization, stent, bypass. Preventive, which, by the way, is malpractice, but it’s done all the time. The science does not support that. You do not benefit… If you have no symptoms, you ride your bike, you go for walks, and yet you have some measure of atherosclerosis, there is no study that shows you benefit. It’s done all the time, JJ. That’s just one field. It’s done all the time in ophthalmology, pulmonology, any of the procedural…gastroenterology. It’s hard to get anything out of a gastroenterologist’s mouth besides “You need an upper endoscopy and colonoscopy.” And so, that’s the sad state of affairs in healthcare. It shouldn’t be called healthcare because it has nothing to do with health. It’s dispensing procedures and pharmaceuticals and other products for profit.

JJ: It’s sick care. You only go when you’re sick. I was 22 maybe when I went. It dates back to before I was in functional medicine. I was 22, living in New York City, personal training, and I had a little pain in my knee. I knew it wasn’t bone. Duh. It’s a pain. And I didn’t break anything, so I was like, “I don’t need to have x-rays.” And again, I’m 22. And the guy is like, “I think you need some x-rays.” I’m like, “It’s not bone. You either do an MRI or we look at what’s going on with the structure of my joint. Maybe I twisted something. It’s a sprain. I don’t know. Whatever.” Anyway, he did four x-rays, cost me 400, 500 bucks. And he’s like, “Oh, there’s nothing there.” I’m like, “I told you.” And then I said, “Can I get an MRI of my whole spine?” I was learning about the spine, so I’m all about, at the time, the structural things with the facet joints and all your vertebrae, and I’m like, “Can I get an MRI of my spine?” He’s like, “No.” And he said, “Would you do anything different if you did?” And at the time, again, I was 22. I probably said no. But the reality of it, I would have. Had I known that I had a bulging disc, I probably would have done something different. I would have exercised differently. I would have looked at something differently. I would have done whatever I needed to do to fix it or correct it or acknowledge that it was there. And that’s always been my sort of preventative mindset. I don’t do it in all the other ways. I’m not as good at it financially. I’m not good with it with my car or my pipes or my house. But with my body, oh… If you know that it’s coming, if you know the effects of aging are this, this, and this, you know the effects of toxicity in your environment are this, this, and this, why wouldn’t you clean yourself out every so often? Why wouldn’t you get ahead of it to know that you can stop these things before they happen? Because they don’t happen overnight. So, when you’re looking at “Undoctored” and all the good reasons why, everyone, that you just shouldn’t blatantly, blindly trust your doctor, you talked about type 2 diabetes in this book being the perfect disease. Can we talk about that a little bit?

Dr. Davis: Well, any disease that goes on for a long time. Here’s a bad disease for healthcare: pneumonia or falling down the stairs. In other words, an injury that has only a limited opportunity for revenue-producing activity or products. So, that’s why Big Pharma is not that interested in antibiotics. They’re not that interested in short term administration of a drug. Big Pharma, healthcare, medical device industry are interested in long term. Even better, lifelong conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It’s going to be a waste of time. Skin rashes, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, migraine headaches. They want things that don’t go away and persist for a long, long, long time. In other words, it’s the difference between maybe two weeks of opportunity versus 40 years of opportunity. And so, that’s why they focus on these so-called diseases of lifestyle.

And by the way, so there’s a very basic observation that I think tells a lot of the story. If you look at people, indigenous populations like the Yanomami in the Brazilian rainforests and the [26:23] in the highlands of Peru, the Hadza in the savannahs of Tanzania, or the Maasai in the savannah of Kenya, or the Malawi on the east coast of Africa, these are people who don’t take antibiotics, don’t have laxatives, don’t have glyphosate in their food, don’t have herbicide/pesticide exposures, and they have no coronary disease, stroke, colon cancer, hemorrhoids, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, hypertension, high cholesterol. They have none of that stuff. They have other problems. They’ve got dengue fever, malaria, and injury, and worm infestations – the stuff that modern healthcare is good at: infection and injury. Modern healthcare sucks for long term chronic disease because they don’t want to get rid of long termproducts. It’s too profitable. But that observation that indigenous populations who live differently than we do don’t have heart disease, there’s a very important bunch of lessons to learn from that.

JJ: So, let’s continue that and continue about the lessons to learn from the fact that they don’t have our literally lifestyle-based diseases.

One of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time doing lately is restoring the microbiome because we have massively screwed up our microbiome. I used to think, for instance, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) was rare. That is a situation where unhealthy bacterial species like E. coli and Klebsiella (these are pathogenic species in stool) have proliferated and then outmuscled healthy species, and then ascended up into the ileum, jejunum, duodenum, and stomach. Essentially 30 feet of unhealthy microbes, they live only hours to days, so there’s very rapid turnover of trillions of bacteria. When they die, a lot of their byproducts enter the bloodstream. That’s a very, very important, relatively recently discovered phenomenon called endotoxemia. Well, now the information and the tools available to your listeners just got a lot better. For instance, do I have my…? Here, the air device. A little device, you blow into it, and then it registers on your smart phone how much hydrogen gas you’re producing. It tells you where microbes are in the GI tract. So, the air device is for… Oh, you have it?

JJ: After our last conversation, I bought this. Is that what this is?

Dr. Davis: Yes.

JJ: Okay. I haven’t used it yet, but I bought it and I was all gung-ho. I’ve been fasting a lot more recently, so in terms of gut replenishment, and between bone broth and water fasting… But I guess it’s the tech part. I’m putting it on my iPad. I don’t have a smart phone. But I absolutely wanted to use it. But I wanted to show you, as soon as you talked about it, I went and bought a lot of things. To make the yogurt, I bought multiple yogurt things and I have been making my own yogurt. But anyway, I digress. So, you talked about the tools that we have to be able to test ourselves, to test our own bodies, that cost hundreds of dollars versus thousands of… And then you don’t have to rely on somebody else to keep doing it for you. You can keep your testing, right?

Dr. Davis: Yes. And you know what, even if you went to the doctor, primary care doctor, a gastroenterologist, and you said, “Hey, I think I have SIBO,” and he says, “Why do you think that?” and you said, “Well, because I have fibromyalgia,” which is essentially synonymous with SIBO, or you have bowel syndrome, also nearly synonymous with SIBO, or you have an autoimmune disease, or maybe you were diagnosed with early Parkinson’s disease, or you’re type 2 diabetic, or you’re overweight, all those conditions, fatty liver. Very high likelihood of SIBO, between 50% and 100%.

JJ: Can we define SIBO and tell me the difference between SIBO and leaky gut?

Dr. Davis: So, in SIBO, where you have 30 feet of unhealthy microbes, typically the so-called Gram-negative species like E. coli or Klebsiella, sometimes the Gram-positive species like Staphylococcus and Streptococcus and Enterococcus. So, that’s why SIBO can present differently because the species that have proliferated can vary. But they proliferate. And then the small bowel… So, the colon has a very vigorous, two-layer mucus barrier, because that’s where all the poop and microbes are supposed to be. But as you go up the small bowel, it’s a very fragile single layer of mucus barrier, very thin, less than a millimeter thick. And so, when you have unhealthy microbes that have proliferated in the small bowel, they are able to breach through the intestinal wall, both breakdown products, endotoxemia, but it’s also becoming clear that the small bowel almost becomes almost porous to the microbes themselves. And so, that’s why now, with better techniques like DNA analysis, many of the microbiology researchers have uncovered microbes in the brain, in the breast tissue, in the uterus, in the placenta, in a pregnant mom, in the prostate, in the gallstones. Now, think about gallstones for a second. When you take gallstones out and you examine them for microbial DNA, you find tons of them. Now, wait a minute. How did that happen? If stool microbes are in the colon, and the bile duct that connects to the duodenum is 24 feet above the colon, how did stool microbes get into the gallbladder? SIBO.

And so, these observations, JJ, are causing all of health to be reconsidered, redefined. Because it’s becoming clear, for instance, if you have atrial fibrillation, or any kind of cancer, or many gynecologic issues, migraine headache, rosacea, you must reconsider it in light of a disrupted microbiome. And so, the air device is the game-changer. I have no relationship with them. I know the inventor, Dr. Angus Short from Dublin, Ireland. Nice guy. But this is the game-changer for intestinal health. Just as finger stick blood sugars was a game-changer for diabetics. You know, when I was in medical school many, many years ago, there was a faculty member. So, before there were finger stick glucose checks, she was about 28 years old and she was already blind, in kidney failure, and had an amputation, because they didn’t have finger stick glucose to check. They had to do urine dipsticks. And of course, when you’re blind, imagine that, right? You can’t even see the damned dipstick. So, if you had a two-year-old running around outside and she passes out, loses consciousness, is her blood sugar 900 and she’s going into diabetic ketoacidosis and shock, or is it 30 and she’s going to die of irreversible brain damage in the next three minutes? Dip the urine, yeah, fat chance, right? So, in other words, finger stick blood glucose, they came out in the mid-1980s, was a game-changer. Diabetes is still a big problem, but it made it a much better, manageable condition. That’s what this is for intestinal health. Now, the problem is the instructions provided don’t really tell you how to use it. So, I have it in my Wheat Belly blog, the real instructions on how to use it. Because the inventor, great guy, he’s an engineer, he’s not a doctor, he’s not a gastroenterologist. He thought it was a device just to navigate FODMAPs intolerance. And it’s not that. It’s that and all other food intolerances, by the way. Histamine, FODMAPs, nuts, soy. You can test it and find out if the real cause is not the food. The real cause is the disrupted microbiome, especially SIBO.

And with the tools, JJ, that’s the great thing. I’m having some yogurt made from Lactobacillus brevis because I was thinking about this. There’s so many fascinating things you could do with the microbiome. So, this species, Lactobacillus brevis, often you can find it in kimchi and get it in fermented sauerkraut and some traditionally fermented meats. I got the microbe itself and made yogurt. It’s not yogurt from the store. Yogurt from the store is garbage. It’s fermented for four hours. Microbes don’t have mommies and daddies, right? They don’t have sexual reproduction. They have asexual reproduction. One bacteria becomes two. Two becomes four. Well, most microbes, like this one here, doubles every two hours. My favorite microbe in the world, Lactobacillus reuteri, doubles every three hours. But the brevis doubles every two hours, meaning if you ferment it commercially for four hours, you’ve allowed two doublings. If you allow it to ferment for 24 hours, in this case 12 doublings, that’s where you get numbers like 200 to 300 billion counts of microbe. You get a much bigger effect. This microbe reduces colitis, kills off cancer cells in the colon, blocks weight gain. It achieves metabolic benefit. But what really interests me is there’s a nootropic, that is, something that makes you transiently smart. It doesn’t make your brain healthier, not necessarily, but it makes you transiently smart and more creative, better able to put two and two together, draw from memory, learn new things. This nootropic is called phenylethylamine or PEA. Not to be confused with palmitoylethanolamide, PEA. That’s something different. This phenylethylamine, it makes you smart for a few hours. It makes you happier. So, you eat this yogurt and this microbe produces this phenylethylamine, and I believe, anecdotally, it makes people just a little bit happier and a little bit smarter temporarily. And by the way, it also increases BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, at least in an experimental model. That’s one of the keys to preservation of brain health. So, it’s a nootropic and it’s also neurotrophic. It makes your brain a little bit healthier, probably based on the preliminary evidence. But that’s the power now of the things we’re capable of doing in the microbiome.

JJ: Okay. Three questions. First, I don’t know that I heard the answer. Maybe you said it and I didn’t hear it. The difference between SIBO and leaky gut?

Dr. Davis: Oh, yes. So, when you have a proliferation of unhealthy species in the small bowel. So, the small bowel is more permeable. But also, the presence of those microbes is very destructive to the intestinal mucus lining as well as the intestinal cellular lining, and so it gives greater access of the breakdown products of bacteria: endotoxemia. And so, that’s leaky gut. Endotoxemia is kind of the more formal name for it. If you were to measure it, it’s not clinically available, but I hope it will in the future, you can measure an increase in the level of what’s called LPS or lipopolysaccharide as well as [38:44] gas. These are breakdown products of bacteria that break through the intestinal wall, get into the bloodstream: leaky gut.

JJ: And so, we’re talking about a specific part of the colon or the intestines, while with SIBO, it travels up? Tell me, because I’m still unclear on how we would be able to determine the difference. Is it just this device? I just had a case study last night with my trainers, and she’s very reactive to all foods, and she’s on many medications. She’s had [39:19]. She drinks too much. And she was talking about…they’re like, “Oh, we’ll replace this.” And I’m like, “Oh, no, no, no. You have leaky gut. And if she doesn’t have leaky gut, she has SIBO.” She’s got something very digestively off. So, we can start there, besides the emotional things that are huge and really the determining factors of whether she’s going to be happy or not. So, how would one test if they have SIBO versus leaky gut?

Dr. Davis: If you had SIBO, you have leaky gut.

JJ: Right. But if you have leaky gut, you don’t necessarily have SIBO, right?

Dr. Davis: Right, because back in my other favorite topic to talk about, modern wheat, one of the components of modern wheat is an altered form of the gliadin protein. And we know with good science that gliadin protein also opens the door to leaky gut. That’s good information. We know that with confidence. Now, here’s a lethal combination: consumption of wheat, and thereby gliadin protein, with SIBO. That’s a really, really…because both those things open the door for intestinal permeability, and endotoxemia is much worse. Notice the people who have all those food intolerances, they have fibromyalgia, they have irritable bowel syndrome, diarrhea, often have one or more autoimmune diseases, they have cognitive problems. So, that’s a really bad combination. But what this thing does, and by the way, there’s a new version of it coming out in a couple of weeks or so, maybe in a few weeks, that also measures methane. They originally intended also to have it measure hydrogen sulfide, but it sounds like it won’t be doing that. But the more gas we can measure, the more we identify different species.

What this really does, JJ, is it sounds out how high up bacteria have gone. So, if I take, let’s say, a prebiotic fiber, let’s say a couple teaspoons of inulin or raw potato starch, these are prebiotic fibers that bacteria like to eat. You can’t digest them. You could ingest them, but you can’t break them down. You can’t digest them. But bacteria, you can. So, normally, I would take, let’s say, two teaspoons of inulin. Do a baseline that’s real low. Zero to 10 scale, by the way, and a rise of 4 is abnormal from baseline. Let’s say you test baseline on 1.2. Okay, good. I take my two teaspoons of inulin, maybe stir it in my coffee. Ninety to 180 minutes later, it should be positive, like a 10, because that’s when the inulin gets to the colon where the microbes are supposed to be. But if you turn positive, say, in 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, up to 90 minutes, that means the bacteria are up high, because you can’t get something here, ingest it, they get 40 feet down your colon. You can’t do that in 30 minutes. It takes a minimum of 90 minutes to do that. So, what it really is is a way to map out where the bacteria are.

JJ: Okay. So, is this a way to see if someone has SIBO?

Dr. Davis: Oh, yes. Yeah.

JJ: Okay. All right.

Dr. Davis: Well, the problem is it doesn’t identify all forms of SIBO. It identifies some of the common forms. But if you have SIBO because of proliferation, say, of methanogenic species, methane producers, like Methanobrevibacter smithii (these are wacky names, I don’t make this stuff up), it won’t identify that form. Or if you have fungal overgrowth, like Candida glabrata or Candida tropicalis or Candida albicans, it won’t. Or Malassezia. It won’t identify that either. And if you have a hydrogen sulfide producer, like Desulfovibrio, it won’t identify that. But it’s still helpful because it does identify the most common forms of SIBO. And if you have fibromyalgia, you test positive. Now you know. Your fibromyalgia has nothing to do with muscle and bone.

JJ: No.

Dr. Davis: It originates in the gut.

JJ: I would even… I would say, I think that most of our issues are… Well, it’s funny because Dr. Nasha, when she first came on the show and I had her say, “What do you think? Is it emotional?” and she wrote “The Metabolic Approach to Cancer,” emotional, environmental, and then, like, food besides environmental. And she said 30%, 30%, and 30%. Now, she’s a Libra so she gave me that answer, but like 30%, 30%, 30%. And I would say, any of these diseases that we’re talking about, or the issues we’re talking about, like fibromyalgia, absolutely, like 50% gut. But I’m on the other side saying, especially since I’ve been talking about this for 20 years, it’s 50% emotional too, in terms of people’s repressed crap that they’ve got going on. I see it in their energetic… I see it. It’s so clear to me. It’s the one area that no one wants to deal with. It’s the most overlooked part of health because it’s hard, it’s painful, it brings up things people don’t like. But the other half of the story is absolutely the gut. And I can’t wait to have that conversation when your new book comes out, which we will because you’ll come back on and we’ll talk about your new book.

But I want to go back to “Undoctored” in terms of looking at… And again, yeah, I agree. And you’ve had this conversation many times and you’ve been talking about this for many years. So, please read the book, get the book, listen to the book. You’ll get pissed off, and hopefully enough that you’ll want to do something about it if you aren’t already. So, let’s talk about, obviously, looking at the microbiome and getting devices and ways to test yourself and changing your diet. Obviously, that’s like one of the biggest things that your platform even started on was Wheat Belly. It was like Wheat Belly to reducing grains and wheat, for sure, to help with blood pressure and cardiovascular issues. Who made that leap, right? And cholesterol, and the myth of cholesterol with saturated fat. I could go on the book and talk about it. Again, this is just common sense. Diabetes. Type 2 diabetes. All right. What do we know about it? We know that you can’t digest carbohydrates. And then, of course, but what does the ADA say? “Oh, do a low fat, low sugar diet. But eat your grains, eat your carbohydrates.” It’s like, “Oh my god. Why are we not questioning that? It’s so stupid.” Anyway, I could go off. I want to be positive. So, let’s talk about other ways in “Undoctored” that you help people, because I want every single person to own this book. And I know there’s the six steps to seizing control of your health, and I don’t need you to reread what’s on the book, but let’s go over some of the newer things. You just went over the air device, which is probably not in “Undoctored,” is it? No?

Dr. Davis: No. Too recent.

JJ: Okay. So, what other things? And I love, in the book, which is why I finally had to just order the hard copy too, because you mentioned some of the, let’s call them, checklists or checks and balances in the works of people who are researching, just what you said, like testing areas of the population where there’s a lot of healthcare, and there’s no less mortality, and there’s no less healing, and then the places in the population that have less healthcare, and the people that are watching those kinds of things and reporting those kinds of things. Because you mentioned having hope in the book about…although, in today’s day and age, what can we do? So, what can we do? How do you feel that we as people who are awake, aware, and empowered can help make a difference right now with what’s going on?

Dr. Davis: Well, it really is just starting with what you’ve already done, that is, recognizing that the doctor is not your friend. The doctor is about profit. It’s churning you and your insurance for revenue. This is actually talked about. You know, I was in healthcare for many, many years. I wish I didn’t have to say this, but when you’re a healthcare insider for many years, including board meetings and those kinds of things, the conversation is not about making health better. It’s about “How do we increase revenue for our cardiovascular program by 18% this year?” That’s what it’s about. So, accept that the doctor is not there to help you become healthy. In fact, his or her job is often to do the opposite. Because if you go through procedure, as you know, they’re not always safe giving a drip, giving a drug. The drugs have all kinds of unforeseen consequences. Even something that seems benign, like let’s say Pepcid or ranitidine or Prilosec, those are very destructive to health, but the doctor will say, “Oh, they’re so benign. Take it for 30 years if you want,” which guarantees major problems in the health. So, that’s step one.

And then step two, recognize… People often think that the list of strategies and supplements in “Undoctored” and “Wheat Belly” and my programs are haphazard. They’re not. They’re there for very good reason. So, the new trends we mentioned earlier are lacking because of the way we conduct our lives now. You can’t drink water from a river or stream. It’s got sewage in it. It’s got pesticide, herbicide residues, and other garbage. We have to filter. Water filtration removes all magnesium. Iodine deficiency has been a problem all throughout human history. If you look at Greek statues, Roman statues, Egyptian statues, you’ll see a good number of them have goiters, enlarged thyroid glands. This was a huge problem all throughout human history. It was recognized that it was due to lack of iodine because we didn’t eat the thyroid glands of animals and/or we were living internally, not coastally, because iodine is all in the ocean, most of them in the ocean.

And so, goiters were a big problem. It was recognized as lack of iodine. FDA says to put iodine in salt, use a lot of salt. Well, coincident with that advice was cut your fat, eat more healthy whole grains, that causes insulin resistance and sodium retention. The problem wasn’t solved. The problem was the diet. So now, a lot of people cut back on salt. Goiters, hypothyroidism is coming back. So, we replace iodine. So simple. It might cost you $3 a year to do that. We do use fish oil because we’re supposed to eat the brains of the animals we kill. We’re supposed to eat the heart and the liver and the intestinal tract of the animals we kill. Nobody does that anymore. Most do not. That’s how we got omega-3’s, as well as fish and shellfish. And now modern fish and shellfish are toxic. You get mercury toxicity. You eat fish more than a couple of times a week. If you eat shellfish, you get cadmium toxicity. And these heavy metal levels are cumulative. They stack up over time. And so, we can’t have free rein and eat all the fish and shellfish we want. So, you got to take fish oil.

Now, what led me down the microbiome path was we were using… I told them, “Get a multispecies probiotic. Make sure you get prebiotic fibers, polysaccharides, polyphenols in your diet. And include some fermented foods.” But it became clear that’s not enough. You got to go further. And so, some of the ideas have been refined since. So, with our choices in probiotics now, we try to steer people towards probiotics that have what are called keystone species, very important foundational species like Lactobacillus gasseri, Lactobacillus reuteri, Lactobacillus rhamnosus and plantarum. There’s some others. Akkermansia. You get these and it starts to rebuild your microbiome for you. It’s also become clear that fermented foods are much underappreciated. They really are powerful. Next, this is a form of fermented food. It’s Lactobacillus brevis that people ordinarily would get from kimchi, sauerkraut, and fermented meats. But put them altogether, JJ, and you get an extremely powerful tool to not have type 2 diabetes, to not have coronary disease, to not have atrial fibrillation, to not have osteoporosis, and on and on and on. The doctor has a long list of meds that he likes you to take for those conditions.

JJ: And again, I know I’m not speaking to these people on my podcast. Those of you that have found this through YouTube, I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you’re about, but if you’re searching Dr. William Davis, you’re probably part of the tribe, I’m guessing. But one of the things that I know I hear my parents in the back of my head say, “Oh, but my doctor is so nice, and they like me a lot, and they seem very kind.” And the doctors that they work with believe the information. They stand behind what they’re saying. They don’t question it, which is part of the problem. They don’t question it. They don’t look for solutions. They’re not asking, “How did you get this?” As a personal trainer, I would always come from the place of…when we’re looking at joints, I ended up being the person who worked with people with seven and ten injuries because no one else knew what to do with them. When I looked at applying force and resistance to motion without having to go against the body structure, looking at the anatomy and how the joint structure and function operates in the body, and the cues, the things you’re really not supposed to do because you pinched a nerve or you’re not really built to move that way, things you shouldn’t be doing. So, I always ask that question: Why did they start in the first place? Because if we figure out why it started in the first place, then we won’t have to repeat it. But we’re such a society of Band-Aids, of “Give me the pill. I don’t want to change my diet. I don’t want to change my lifestyle,” or “I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to go to my doctor and they just tell me what to do.”

And so, for those people, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, when you’re not really curious and you’re not really asking questions, I don’t really have any compassion for what happens when you don’t take stock and get curious about your contribution to your health. But it’s for the people who are a little bit more (and I know I’m speaking to this on the show) the ones that take responsibility, that say, “I want to learn more. I don’t want to blindly trust anybody, and I do trust my intuition.” So, looking at things like the microbiome, that’s why at the beginning of the show, I said to people, “Please don’t share this with people that aren’t interested.” Because my parents love their doctors, their dentists, their whoever. They trust them. They’re not looking to go against them. And it’s not that they’re bad people. They just are indoctrinated and brainwashed by the powers that be. Their training comes from people that own pharmaceutical companies and have a vested interest in the financial plan that they have going on. And it’s just part of the system, and a lot of people don’t want to rock the boat.

I’m a boat rocker, but I’ve been quiet during this time really. I’ll be honest. I’ve been quiet because I also want to bring you… As you said too, it’s not about being on stage. It’s not about being in the media. It’s about the information. And it’s about the information that I see, that we both see, which is why you started this, unnecessarily suffering, death, disease, just things that don’t need to happen if you give people the right information. And again, at the end of the day, the people choose their path. And if you’re not interested in learning or asking questions, you feel like… I know for my mother, years ago, when I started with the functional medicine clinic, I wanted her to get her blood work done, and I wanted her to have a more comprehensive metabolic panel. I ask for B12. I ask for iron. I ask for ferritin. I ask for Vitamin D. I ask for T3, T4. I ask for TSH. I ask for estrogen and progesterone. I ask for cortisol. I ask DHEA. I mean, it wasn’t like off the charts. But her doctor said, “No.” And I said, “What?” And she said, “I don’t need to” because she knows what it says. And I’m like, “Oh my god.” I would have punched the woman in the face had I been standing there. Are you kidding? No, you don’t know what it is. What you know is you think it’s getting less, that it’s low every year. And that would be true, but you’re not even giving my mother the option of seeing if she wants to do anything about it. You literally have taken away her… Now, she didn’t challenge her. Not my mom. She wasn’t going to challenge the doctor. But I just thought, “Oh, the arrogance of that.” You’re the patient. If I want blood work, I got used to finding doctors to work with. Now I just bypass that and go to a Life Extension. I don’t deal with the doctors. Go to Life Extension. Get my blood work. And then I’m around enough doctors and physicians and naturopaths. If I have a question, I say, “Hey, can you look at my blood work?”

But otherwise, I’m that person too with you. And so, I just really want people to take this conversation. Buy the book. Please, buy “Undoctored.” Buy several copies of it. Give it to people who actually are looking. And make sure that they know they have choice, that they can transform their health, they can prevent disease by doing some really simple things, and it has to do with diet and lifestyle. And you have a resource within Dr. Davis and all the work that he does, all his blogs, all his videos, everything that he has to support that. I’ve got some of that. But go to him. And why do I trust him over a different doctor? Because he speaks in language I understand. He’s questioning the narrative. He found this by accident, if you will, right? You were trying to help patients, and oh my god, look at this. You weren’t in this. You put yourself at risk. Dr. Northrup and I had a conversation or a third interview recently, and she said all the doctors that are being blacklisted because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain. It’s like really because it’s the unpopular opinion. You’re going against Big Pharma. You’re speaking out when the media has been paid to push propaganda down your throat to convince you of things and make you afraid of things that you don’t need to be afraid of. And so, that’s why I thought to myself, “I don’t think you could have published this book now.” This book would have been taken right off. You would have been banned from selling this book in today’s day and age.

Dr. Davis: True.

JJ: Absolutely true. Questioning doctors right now? Oh, no, no. Questioning Big Pharma, letting people know that they don’t have their best interests at heart, it’s all about money, that healthcare is a business. I’d like you all to think of healthcare like your used car salesman. Don’t trust them when you walk in, because you have that attitude about a car salesman. So, have the same… No disrespect for the car salesmen because I’m sure a lot of you are very nice. But take that same attitude with western medicine and with just everything. Don’t trust anybody. Not from a scarcity position, just from a “I’m going to take your guidance and I’m going to consider it. I’m going to research it. I’m going to be with it. I’m going to ask more questions.” And then you, the individual, ultimately are the only one responsible for your health, period. And I hope that you will use Dr. Davis as a resource to get more information. Please read his books. He’s going to be coming out with another book. Let’s talk about that briefly, and hopefully, you’ll come back on and we’ll talk about that book. I’d like to help you in the launch so that people will buy it when it’s out. So, tell me about this new book about the microbiome.

Dr. Davis: I appreciate that, JJ. So, it’s a continuation of the conversation started in books like “Wheat Belly” and “Undoctored,” but really expanding the microbiome conversation. It talks a lot about SIBO and how to eradicate it. I think I have a yogurt that gets rid of SIBO, preliminary. So, if you take a commercial probiotic, how are they created? Well, they’re just going to haphazardly slap dab collections of microbes. They’ll say, “Okay, we think that Lactobacillus lactis is good for you. Let’s throw some of that in.” “We think that Bifidobacterium bifidum is good for you. Let’s throw some of that in.” It’s not intended for a specific purpose, just general health. So, you take a commercial probiotic. You may have paid a lot of money for it too. And if you have SIBO, maybe it’s expressed as fibromyalgia or depression or anxiety or migraine headaches or rheumatoid arthritis or IBS or diabetes or fatty liver, you take that probiotic, do those conditions go away? Does the SIBO go away? Does the intestinal leak go away? No. It might get a little bit better. You might have a little less bloating, a little less gas, but it doesn’t go away. So, I ask a different question. I ask, “What if we chose microbes that take up residence in the upper GI tract?” That’s where SIBO occurs. And we choose microbes that produce what are called bacteriacins? These are natural antibiotics effective against the species of SIBO, like E. coli. So, I put together three: a strain of Lactobacillus gasseri, two strains of Lactobacillus reuteri, and a strain of bacillus coagulants. We make yogurt out of it, just like that. We ferment for 36 hours, so we have really high bacterial counts. And we consume it, and then we track H2 afterwards down the road. And it’s normalized about 90% of people with their hydrogen gas.

You also have the option of herbal antibiotics, which I was very skeptical about, but they do work, and there’s published evidence to show they work. There’s also the conventional antibiotic, rifaximin. So, there’s a lot of talk about SIBO, how to recognize it, telltale signs, how to test with the air device the right way, when you should say… Some conditions are so synonymous with SIBO, like fibromyalgia and IBS, that you could say, “Well, you know, I’m just going to go ahead and assume I have SIBO.” A lot of people do that and have a lot of great success. How to recognize fungal overgrowth, how to recognize methanogenic overgrowth, how to use the yogurts to get incredible effects. So, I think I told you last time about Lactobacillus reuteri. Microbe loss by 96% of Americans and responsible, when present, for causing release of oxytocin from the brain. So, think about that. We have a time of record (put aside pandemic) social isolation, record divorce, record suicide, and almost lost this microbe responsible for oxytocin.

So, we make yogurt, we ferment for 36 hours in the presence of prebiotic fibers. We’ve done flow cytometry numerous times on the yogurt. We get about 260 billion bacteria per half-cup serving. You eat it and you have a flood of empathy, of liking your partner and your co-workers better, of getting rid of social anxiety. People introduce themselves to strangers. And you get a restoration of youthful muscle strength, because we lose that as we age. It comes back. Your immune response is much amplified. Sleep is much deeper. You have vivid, childlike dreams. Bone density is preserved. In other words, you have a restoration of many youthful characteristics. The thing that really drives a lot of excitement, though, is it also increases dermal collagen dramatically, and so ladies notice they start losing their wrinkles after about four to eight weeks. And it tastes fine. It tastes like yogurt. It’s not yogurt. People say, “Well, can’t I just buy Fage or Chobani?” No. One, they use ho-hum microbes that don’t really do very much. And two, as we talked about, they only ferment for four hours. That’s why you’ll see gellan gum, xanthan gum, guar gum, thickeners added because there’s almost no microbes. But you can make these kinds. And there’s other things they talk about: ways to restore the mucus barrier. We have something called clove green tea, which is extremely effective for increasing the mucus barrier. It’s very soothing to people who are dealing with IBS or recovering from IBS or ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease or celiac disease.

JJ: Okay. I thought about this earlier and I didn’t ask it, so I’m going to wrap up with this last question. And it’s probably like a little bit left of center, but it’s about what you’re talking about in terms of the microbiome. So, I have a cat. I have three cats, four cats. And I feed them the best food on the planet, Dr. Marty’s. I could eat this food. It’s chicken liver. It’s all the things. Tocopherols are the preservative in it. But it’s freeze dried raw food. I mean, it’s just like the best. And I have a cat who hasn’t…she’s been having blood in her mucus, in her stool for a while. And back when I took her to the vet years ago for something else, they’re like, “Well, you know, that happens sometimes.” Okay, well, it’s been happening for years, and I just have this intuition there’s something going on, that’s been going on. And it doesn’t happen every time, but now she started to have some… And I’ve only switched the food in the last six months. She’s had a thicker mucus on her stool. So, there’s thick mucus in the front end, and then there’s blood on the back end. And then she had some grass yesterday and she threw up, and there was a little tiny drop of blood in the throw-up. So, I know that there’s something in the chain there. If I was to… I’m going to still… And the thing is, the reason I’m asking you is because I know if I take her to a vet, they’re not going to be able to do anything. What are they going to do? I’m going to run blood because I definitely want to see what else is possibly going on. But besides blood work and just palpation, what is a vet going to do for me to help me with some kind of stomach or intestinal issue with my cat? I mean, minus the parasite or worms, and I’ll take the stool sample with me, but what could I give her right now to help sort of correct some of the stuff that might be going on in her gut?

Dr. Davis: I don’t know.

JJ: Okay. Well, I was thinking of, like you mentioned, the clove tea?

Dr. Davis: Clove green tea.

JJ: Okay. Well, she does tinctures very well, and if that’s something that can help reorganize her microbiome… I do give them probiotics. Not every day. I’ve used grape seed extract oil to help with the removal of possible intestinal parasites. So, I’ve got two kinds of probiotics: Dr. Marty’s and then not a really good one, one that’s Purina. But I use it because of the taste, because I want to mask some of the stuff I’m putting. I give them charcoal. I’ve got charcoal in their wet food right now, just little bits, to help eliminate anything else that’s going on in there. So, I just wondered if there was any other human thing I could give them.

Dr. Davis: I don’t know, JJ. I mean, they’re not fussy humans. They have different problems, so I won’t pretend to be an expert.

JJ: All right. Well, I just thought. I mean, I’m going to still… I have pet people, animal communicators and healers and things, and I’ll go that route. But I just thought what you’re talking about in humans sounds very similar to what she’s going through, and in that world, there are not a lot of… I mean, I’m not going to get her to breathe into one of these, right? What else am I going to test her right now? And I know that most regular veterinarians don’t have those kinds of tools to do those kinds of deep dives, unless there’s something really wrong and they’re like opening her up to surgery or something and do exploratory looking around, which I don’t want to do, so… All right. Well…

Dr. Davis: Vets have the same problem that conventional MDs have, which is they’re better on procedures and drugs and know almost nothing about health or diet.

JJ: I know.

JJ: Yep.

Dr. Davis: By the way, the reason why the clove green tea works so well is it just draws from some basic science. Cloves are a source of something called eugenol, which is a terpene that thickens the mucus barrier in the intestine dramatically by causing proliferation of some healthy species of Clostridia. The green tea catechins, like epigallocatechin, cross linked to mucin proteins in intestinal mucus, it converts mucus barrier from a semi-liquid to a semi-gel, much more protective in reducing endotoxemia or gut leak. And then lastly, add fructooligosaccharide (FOS), the prebiotic fiber, because that is a very specific bloomer of a species called akkermansia, which is a keystone species that protects your mucus barrier, provided you’re not on a ketogenic diet, in which case, the opposite happens. That’s a whole another conversation. And so, this clove green tea we make with those three things is wonderfully soothing, and it’s part of an effort to restore order in your microbiome.

JJ: Do you think that would have any negative effect on a cat if I was to try it?

Dr. Davis: I don’t know.

JJ: Okay. That’s fine. That’s fair. All right. And then the next question is, is there a recipe on your blog for this?

Dr. Davis: No.

JJ: You buy it?

Dr. Davis: No, you make it. It’s a tablespoon of cloves. You boil it for like 10 minutes. You use a green tea, Trader Joe’s, by the way. I have no relation with Trader Joe’s, but they have a very catechin-rich organic green tea. Brew for a couple of minutes, as you ordinarily would, and add a teaspoon of FOS.

JJ: What’s FOS? Oh, the inulin?

Dr. Davis: Fructooligosaccharide.

JJ: Yep. Okay.

Dr. Davis: Yeah.

JJ: You said it has a different effect, because I am on a ketogenic…I do a lot of fasts. I mean, I’m more paleo right now, but I do go between paleo and keto and fasting. So, tell me what’s the difference if you’re on a ketogenic diet.

Dr. Davis: So, ketogenic diet might be also called like a no-carb or low-carb diet, right? And so, when you don’t feed microbes, because they need those prebiotic fibers, polyphenols, polysaccharides, like the stuff in asparagus or onions or garlic. So, a lot of ketogenic people, some people on a ketogenic diet are aware of this and do it well and do it right. But if you’re not and you don’t take in those sources of prebiotic fibers to nourish microbes, many healthy species are diminished, but there’s an odd change in some species such as akkermansia. So, akkermansia loves FOS and prebiotic fibers, but if you deprive it, other microbes die off or diminish. Akkermansia flourishes. And the reason for that, the full name for akkermansia is akkermansia muciniphila, mucus lover. It has the added capacity to feed on human mucus, and so it starts to digest your intestinal mucus barrier and you get colitis, you get increased gut leak or endotoxemia, long term potential for diverticular disease, colon cancer.

So, one of the things is here’s the irony. In a lot of dietary questions, we don’t have good science. It’s not funded well. In the ketogenic diet, we have some pretty good science. And the reason for that is that the ketogenic diet goes back a century, you may have heard this, as a treatment for intractable grand mal seizures in children. And it works. It reduces seizure frequency back by 50%. This is a very bad situation. These kids have brain damage, it’s irreversible if they keep on seizing all through the day. So, a ketogenic diet reduces seizure frequency by about 50%. But what happens to those kids if put on a ketogenic diet? They stop growing. They start to get constipated. They develop kidney stones. Kids don’t develop kidney stones, but these kids do. 8% develop kidney stones. Fatty liver. They start to develop metabolic distortions, like a rise in triglycerides, rise in blood sugar, insulin resistance. They develop osteopenia. These are kids.

JJ: But is this them doing it incorrectly, like not having the garlic and the onions and the asparagus and the prebiotics that we need? Is this them doing it? Because how somebody does something, they could do it in a way that negates… Again, it’s not balanced.

Dr. Davis: Right. So, they’re failing to take in prebiotic fibers and related nutrients. And in the beginning, they really make it bad because they use corn oil to up the fat intake. More recently, they’re using things like coconut oil, olive oil, MCT oils, but they’re still seeing all these problems develop. So, being ketotic as a near term strategy is very effective. That’s what people always do. They think, “Oh, wow. I’m doing a ketogenic diet. I’m losing weight. My triglycerides have dropped. My blood pressure has dropped. My blood sugar has dropped. My waist is smaller.” It varies, but about 12 months, 15 months, 18 months, two years into it, that’s when problems start to crop up. That’s when you get the constipation, the reversal of metabolic benefits, weight regain, fatty liver, osteopenia, occasional sudden cardiac death. In other words, bad stuff happens long term. I’m waiting for the uptake in colon cancer as well as diverticular disease. That’s going to come in the years in the future as many people stay ketotic too long. So, as long as you’re getting onions and garlic and inulin and prebiotic fibers and other sources of things that nourish bacteria, you’re fine.

JJ: Yeah. Well, I think, again, there’s doing things well and not doing things well, right? If someone was to do a ketogenic diet and eat processed salami, processed cheese, canola oil, never have a vegetable, we have a problem. But if we’re looking at you’re really paying attention to the quality of the food, because you can do any diet. So, Dr. Winters had a patient, she was a young girl (and we’re going to talk about this at one point in the show) and she got her cancer in remission. And then her mom, because I think the girl had to go through some chemo, ended up giving her a lot of green juices, and then the cancer came back. And it was the green juices, because even though it was organic green juice, it still had glyphosate in it. And so, the glyphosate triggered the cancer tumor again. So, people think, “Oh, well, I should be drinking green juice.” “Oh, but it’s organic.” It still has glyphosate in it possibly, depending on if they cross-pollinate, if they’re still on the same field with where they’re treating one-half of the land with glyphosate and the other half with none. So, you can’t just assume because it’s green juice and it’s organic that it’s actually good for you in some ways, obviously because it condenses nutrition.

As you know, I could talk to you all day long about all this because it’s where I started in terms of caring about my own health to want to take control over my life and my health, and knowing and seeing that if you do things now, it affects you in the future. And so, if you want a different future, change what you do now. And it’s pretty simple, it’s pretty easy, but you have to care about it, you have to care about your body, and you have to be willing to make changes. And if you don’t want to make them now, you might be forced to make them later. So, either pay now for the better quality of food and a little bit of devices, or pay the hospital to house you and do all the expensive procedures later. So, I’m all about the prevention, and I want people to be informed. I want them to follow you. And why don’t we talk about your podcast real fast? Is it launched? Are you doing it?

Dr. Davis: It is launched. It’s called “Defiant Health.”

JJ: “Defiant Health”? I love it.

Dr. Davis: And it’s doing what you’re doing. It’s talking about health in an unrestrained way because it’s not coming from… You know this, JJ. Health is not coming from the doctor. It’s not coming from TV shows on health. I watched some of these shows and it’s horrible the kind of information being passed on by my colleagues. I wish this wasn’t true. I went through 17 years of education and training, and then 25 years of practice. I saw all the dirty laundry. I saw the sauce that’s being made, and it’s not pretty. But that’s what passes for the prevailing standards. It’s terrible. It’s unacceptable. It’s disgusting. But it continues and it makes a lot of money. So, that’s what “Defiant Health” is all about, just like what you’re doing right now.

JJ: Awesome. So, okay, well, podcast listeners, listen to the podcast. So, check out Dr. Davis’ podcast, “Defiant Health.” I know I will be. And maybe he will even consider having me as a guest. So, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. I want to say to everyone who’s listening or watching, he’ll be back with his book. When does your book launch, and when are you coming back?

Dr. Davis: February 1st of 2022, so I’ll come back anytime, JJ. It’s a pleasure talking to you because I know you’re about the same thing I am, that is, the truth. Not BS, not profiting, just the truth. It’s so hard to get the truth nowadays.

JJ: Yes, it is. And the name of your new book coming up?

Dr. Davis: “Super Gut.”

JJ: “Super Gut.” I love it. All right. Thank you so much for your time. And again, I was like, “Where are we going to go in this conversation? There’s so much we could talk about. There’s so much time that we could have.” And I do want to invite you to consider, anytime you have something new you want to talk about and you want to put it somewhere else, you call me. You’re welcome on this show anytime.

Dr. Davis: Will do, JJ.

JJ: There’s so much to talk about. There’s so much to share with people to empower them to make choices that feel good for them and that work and that will avoid doctors and hospitals and pills and prescriptions and hospitalizations and diseases they don’t need because we have really all the information that we need at our fingertips, if we’re just willing to implement it. So, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for being here today.

Dr. Davis: Thank you, JJ.