"The area that I really am interested in talking more about that’s fascinating and not really well known is this area of gut disbiosis or bacterial overgrowth.
"First of all, our body is made up of cells, but it’s also made up of bacteria. People are often surprised to hear this. And we have more bacteria on our body than we do cells.
"If it’s good bacteria, that’s great. This is our immune defense - our gut’s our big immune defense, so this is good.
"But what happens because of poor diet, because of chronic antibiotic use, because of caffeine or alcohol or stress or low stomach acid that happens due to aging. So you’re hearing all these things and you’re probably going me, me, me. You can start to get too much bad bacteria.
"And you might feel gassy or bloated, you’ll have constipation, you’ll have bad skin, you might have diarrhea. You eat and you should be full, but yet you feel full but hungry. You can’t build muscle. All these things could be signs of this.
"The person tells me this and they say, 'no matter how little I eat I feel like I wear it all. I look at food and I store it.' And that is the case with this gut bacteria.
"We think maybe from an evolutionary perspective it was put here to help us survive the famine, because what this bacteria does is it starts to get out of control. It actually stores more calories. It eats the excess calories and so your body burns them off and stores them as fat. So it makes you a better fat storer.
"The other part of gut disbiosis, besides just looking at this bacterial overgrowth, are food sensitivities. The factors that I mentioned prior to this – the low stomach acid, low fiber diet, stress, stress and more stress, antibiotic use – all of these things can damage the gut lining.
"We have that coupled with the fact that our diet is truly made up of four ingredients over and over and over again. If you start to go look at the boxes, and hopefully most of the food you’re buying isn’t in a box, or you couldn’t do this. But when you look at boxes, they have corn, they have soy, they have wheat and they have dairy. And these are some of the most potentially allergenic foods out there, and yet we eat them repeatedly.
"Food sensitivities, and I like to call them food sensitivities rather than food allergies, because when we think of food allergies we think, 'I ate shrimp and my face swelled up.'
"This is very different. And the challenge is you won’t realize you have it, because you eat a food and maybe the next day your knees hurt. Or the next day you notice your eczema got a little worse. Or you’ve got a little dandruff. That’s a delayed food reaction or a food sensitivity.
"It’s called an IGG Immune Response. And it happens because we damage our gut lining, and then we eat the same foods over and over again. And bigger particles of them go out into the general circulation, and then your body launches an immune response to them.
"And what’s amazing is you actually start to crave these foods, because you start to build these immune complexes. And if you don’t eat them, the little antibodies your body built up to make these new complexes sit there and wait for them and trigger your body to want more.
"I remember hearing Rosie O’Donnell on an interview going, 'I love cheese!' And I’m going, 'Allergic! She’s sensitive to cheese.' Whenever there’s something you feel like you can’t live without – and that’s a key question I always ask. Is there a food that you just can’t live without? Pull it out.
"And if for the next three days you feel worse, and then you start to feel remarkably better, this is one that you’ve built up a sensitivity or an IGG food response to.
"And for weight loss resistance, this can make you hold on to what we call false fat. It can create inflammation. It can create an endo toxic – this toxic response in your body. So it can have a big impact on your body being able to lose weight."
