Super Body: The Body Composition Revolution

Music

TalkToMeGuy: Greetings everyone.

TalkToMeGuy: This is the Sound Health Radio Show where we talk about the crossroads of the environment, our health and longevity, with Richard TalkToMeGuy and Sherry Edwards is off working on the Sound Health Portal. I would suggest going to the SoundHealthPortal.com, scrolling down just a bit and clicking on the Watch How button. You'll see a short video explaining how to record and submit your first recording. Then go back to SoundHealthPortal.com, scroll down to current active campaigns such as cellular inflammation, bio-diet, neuroplasticity, or memory.

And choose one that is of interest for you. Click on that campaign and click Free Voice Analysis and the system will walk you through submitting your recording. You receive an email with your report back usually in one to two hours. To hear and share replays of this show, 50 to 60 minutes after you hear the outro music, go to TalkToMeGuy.com, scroll down that page and you'll see this show at the top of the episodes page. There are also hundreds of shows available there as well. There is a microphone icon at the bottom right corner of all the show notes.

If you'd like to leave me a voice message with a question for a guest or a guest idea for a show, you can do that directly from the site and I will be notified. With that, Dr. William Davis, cardiologist, bestselling author, and a voice that's been challenging conventional dietary wisdom for over a decade now. Many of you know him from Wheat Deli, the book that turned the food pyramid upside down and got millions of people rethinking math. Healthy whole grain advice we'd all been sold. Then came SuperGut, where he showed us how modern disruptors, antibiotics, food additives, processed everything, have decimated the microbiome that's supposed to keep us healthy. Now with SuperBody, Dr. Davis is taking on the entire weight loss industrial complex. And he's not pulling punches. Weight watchers, Wagovie, bariatric surgery, he's saying they're all selling us the same broken promise. Why? Because they ignore the one thing that guarantees you regain every pound you lose. Muscle loss. However, Dr. Davis has a way out. A three week program that restores the modern disruptions have stolen from us. Welcome, Dr. Davis.

William Davis, MD: Thank you, Richard. Always happy to come back.

TalkToMeGuy: Always good to talk with you. I know we're going to get down and it's not going to be fooling around. I want to start not exactly in the beginning, but I want to ask about our old friend, El Ruderai. It's become almost famous through SuperGut and your community. And I'm constantly surprised how many friends ask me about it by name. What makes this strain such a superhero in the microbiome?

William Davis, MD: Well, you know, Richard, the first thing is, and it took me a number of months to understand this many years ago, but it's a micro lack of a cellist species that is very susceptible to common antibiotics. And so because most of us have been wildly overexposed to antibiotics, it's typically by age 40. Most people have taken 30 courses of antibiotics. Wow. 650,000 prescriptions are written for antibiotics every day.

So wild overexposure. Now, all it takes though is one course of antibiotic, let's say, chlorethromycin or zithromycin or something like that. And you wipe out literally hundreds of species, perhaps over a thousand species, if we believe the evidence. And they don't come back.

Some come back, many do not. And many of those species were doing good things for us. They've been there for generations and we've just wiped them out. Well, Rhetorhys specifically, if we were to look at the gastrointestinal microbiomes of wild mammals, deer, moose, beavers, they all have Rhetorhys. If we look at hunter gatherer populations in the highlands of New Guinea, or the Brazilian rainforest, or the savannah of Africa, that is people who are unexposed at antibiotics and other things, microplastics, PFOSCAM, all the things that we're all exposed to every day. They all have lactobacillus rhodriol. And they also, so it looks as if this one species is necessary or important to health of mammals, including humans, and we've lost it.

Almost nobody has it anymore. So I got thinking about this and I stumbled across very elegant work, not my work, but very elegant work from a cancer group at MIT in Boston. And they were working on a cancer question because there's a little evidence that Rhodri reduces colon cancer. So they're going to explore that. Well, they started giving this microbe to their mice and started seeing things they didn't expect.

They were dumbfounded at first. Their hair became thick, in their words, luxurious. They inflicted skin wounds and their healing time was cut in half. They watched, even when they fed them a very bad diet, they watched them stay skinny and slender and young until death, as compared to animals without Rhodriol, who got fat, old, lost their hair, stopped mating. They got old fat and died. So I saw all this. Now that was, those are mice. And so I wanted to know if this happened in humans.

So I got the microbe. Interestingly, it was commercially available at the time from a Swedish company, but they had commercialized it strictly for infants for babies. So the dose was appropriate for a child for a newborn or an infant. So how do you get, and there was 100 million of two, two strains. It sounds like a lot, but in microbes, it's nothing. So I asked myself, well, how can we easily get a thousand fold increase and do it at home and fermenting it as something that looks and smells like it's not yogurt, of course, yogurt is something entirely different. It just happens to look and smell like yogurt.

And I just reasoned my way through it, Richard. I used prolonged fermentation because Rhodriol doubles every three hours or so at human body temperature. So I let it double 12 times or 36 hours. I also added some fibers that nourish the mind, kind of like adding cow manure to your tomato garden.

You're going to get bigger and more tomatoes. And so I did this and just playing around and talking about it with people and then thousands of people are doing it and they're experiencing. Usually when you see something happen in mice, it often does not play out in humans. So far, usually everything we saw that was seen in mice has played out in humans.

Youthfulness, restoration of youthful musculature, smoother skin, turning back the clock. In other words, so it was the first microbe I chose to play with and by I think just sheer dumb luck, I happened to pick probably the most important microbe of all.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. I mean, the best of ways that that was the pathogen, the microbe that you chose was this now in my old cinematic world, the Mickey Mouse hero of the whole story. That's really, I didn't know that part, that it was just like, I picked that one and it worked and it's amazing. That is phenomenal.

That really is amazing. And so, well, I have to put a footnote in here about is having a super body microbiome going to help us with the microplastics issue? And I don't mean the environment that's shredded with microplastics.

I mean, our own internal system with our glymphatics having it with every, you know, it's everywhere in our systems because it's microplastics. Is this going to help us with that in some way?

William Davis, MD: Super tough issue, Richard. So yeah, because the science is so preliminary. What it tells us, you're right. If we were to assess a bowel movement stool of your listeners, we would find milligram quantities of plastic in their stool. We'd find so called nanoplastics really microscopic ones you can't even see in your arteries in your brain, in your uterus and everywhere.

So very concerning. The most hopeful thing I've come across is there's now a collection of species of microbes, not so much Rhodo-Rite, but other species like Lactobacillus plantarum, for instance, a very interesting species that comes, will inhabit the body, but also comes from fermented foods like kimchi or kefir. And Lactobacillus plantarum binds plastics in your gastrointestinal tract, as well as some heavy metals, by the way. But what's not clear is that sufficient to yield biologically meaningful reductions in gastrointestinal and body-wide microplastics. No one's done that study yet. Someone will do it.

I probably won't do that study because it takes some technology to actually quantify plastic in stool or in other organs. So someone will do that. I hope that this holds true. One of the problems we have in supplements and health in general is there are many people a little too eager to commercialize things before there's actual validation. And you can actually buy products now that claim to reduce microplastics without actual evidence. So there's no harm in taking them, but I can't say that that is going to be a truly effective remedy.

So until we have that sorted out, it means the best thing for all of us to do is to minimize, and this is one of the toughest things ever, Richard, to try to accomplish. That is to reduce your exposure to microplastics. Don't use plastic. Never drink from plastic water bottles. Don't microwave in plastic. Try to use glass containers. Don't drink tea if the bag is made of plastic. That's the worst of all. Sadly, soil has become so heavily contaminated by microplastics that among the worst foods for microplastic exposure are carrots and lettuce.

Who would have thought? So you got to buy organic. You want to rinse it very thoroughly or grow it yourself. So it's one of the toughest things to navigate. But there are people who have very little microplastics in their body telling us, or in their stool or other organs, telling us that it's probably possible to live a life with a reduced, probably never no exposure, but reduced exposure. One of the most bothersome things from my perspective in management of the microbiome is microplastics because of their surface charge have been shown to attract almost as virtual magnets for organic pollutants like PFOS chemicals and glyphosate and heavy metals and PCBs. So microplastics attract those things, bind them, and all those things, each one of those disrupts the microbiome. Microplastics, PFOS, they all disrupt the microbiome. Well, now we know that microplastics are a carrier or a vector or a Trojan horse for these toxic compounds. Because I've wondered, one of the problems we get into is part of what we do for this preservation of body shape and body composition is managed SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, a very common situation where fecal microbes have ascended up from the colon and have come to inhabit or colonize a small intestine, and that's extremely inflammatory. Well, we have ways to get rid of it. I use something called SIBO yogurt, for instance, I have a recipe for SIBO yogurt, three microbes that colonize a small intestine and produce what are called bacteriasins, natural antibiotics that kill invading fecal microbes.

Well, it works, works great. Consume for four or more weeks. But whether you do it that way, or take an antibiotic or other methods and you get rid of your SIBO, it comes back.

Now, why is it so ready to come back? Well, in fact, nobody knows, but one of my suspicions is it's microplastics in a world where we have exposure organic pollutants and those things synergize and disrupt your gastrointestinal microbiome. And I wonder if that's what, in other words, part of the solution is to also address microplastics.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, in one of the, this is a whole, we could just do a show about microplastics. One of the bad vortexes of microplastics from my old culinary world, the chef thing for 20 years, is that there's, I won't say a high level, but there's always microplastics and salt.

Period. And especially dehydrated sea salts, which are all the rage. Sea salt is a big, you know, oh, and sea salts fine, flavor wise. But it's all, now it's all just got microplastics in it. And which just horrifies me that, you know, the food that everybody uses almost everywhere on the planet has microplastics in it. And I have no happy ending there to say, but it's just, it's a vector of, like you say, never, I can't imagine microwaving something in plastic that just blows my mind. But I've been an anti-plastics person for a really long time, because it's bad, you know, estrogen, mimickers, all sorts of bad things. So yeah.

William Davis, MD: And so, go ahead. The plastics industry is also the oil industry, oil and coal. Yeah. And so, despite you and me and your listeners all agonizing over our exposure to microplastics, there's a big industry pushing for its expansion. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a battle. It's going to be a battle.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah. Okay, so back to the good part is the. So really, what super body is about at its core. This is my critique, my editorial, not even editorial discum, it is using the microbiome is the foundation for whole body transformation. Is that, can I say that?

William Davis, MD: Yeah, so this all comes to a head. So one of the things for listeners to recognize is that, and you likely heard this, we lose about a third or more of our musculature as we age to just with aging, you lose a lot of muscle. So if you start with, let's say 50 pounds of muscle, you're going to lose, what's that 17 pounds of muscle, which is a lot of muscle. If you think about 17 pounds of ground beef on your kitchen counter, it's a huge muscle.

Well, when you lose weight by any method that involves a reduction in calorie intake, we could call it one of those branded weight loss programs or a smartphone app that tells you Richard you're stressing and you're eating that a stress. So stop it. It goes distract yourself. It could be a bariatric procedure lap band gastric bypass that reduces stomach volume. It could be a pharmaceutical that reduces your desire for food and slows stomach empty gastric emptying so that you feel satiate for prolonged periods. So there are all variations on the very same theme reduced calories. And we know, we now know very solid evidence that when you lose weight by reducing calories, there's an obligatory loss of muscle, 25% of the weight you lose is muscle. And that of course compounds the age related loss of muscle. Now this all comes to a head because of this wild enthusiasm for the GOP and Agnes drugs, people are paying all kinds of money, and they do lose a lot of weight, but 25%, just like other methods is muscle. And so we know, we know with good evidence, like there's a very large study called the wilding study from the UK, where people took their GOP Agnes for 18 months lost a lot of weight, stopped it because you know most who can't afford this forever. They stopped it regained almost all the weight and almost all as fat, abdominal fat, not muscle. And they were more likely to be type two diabetic pre diabetic high triglycerides fatty liver increased risk for coronary disease dementia, breast cancer, their risk was now greater after weight regain than it was before they lost the weight.

And we now have in aggregate somewhere between 50 and 60,000 people who've been tracked for up to 20 years. And the question is what happens to people who lose weight, mostly by reducing cows, what happens to those people. Well, the people who lose 10% or more of their body weight. So a woman who is 180 pounds loses 18 pounds 240 pound guy lose 24 pounds so very cop right. Anybody loses 10% of their weight or more will die several years younger. And their last few years are much more likely to be plagued by balls, fractures, frailty, loss of independence, increased potential for cognitive impairment, and early death. So this whole GOP one agonist that stirred up so much enthusiasm. It's a landmine of problems and abbreviated life speak.

And so we have to work on ways to. Well, yes, lose weight but not lose muscle, lose abdominal fat, preserve muscle and there are ways to do this now. We're conducting, we just finished our second human clinical trial and the data is as we speak being unblinded so I can't speak about those results, but we're conducting our own science to validate the idea that you can do this. But it won't involve pharmaceuticals, it certainly won't involve dopey procedures like liposuction or gastric bypass. It is, it all boils down Richard to restoring factors that you should have been that you should have had all along.

TalkToMeGuy: And so you're starting at the foundation of maybe making our gut happy and healthy. And so really the gut, I think of the gut as the second brain. In a certain way, it's almost the primary brain because it's more in charge than the actual brain, I think, because of what it can, what it, how it affects everything we eat. So you're really wanting to bring the microbiome back to a healthy state as the central act so that everything we assimilate actually breaks down and goes where it wants to go and gets assimilated correctly.

Speaker 4: Is that correct? Is that a good overview?

William Davis, MD: This issue of SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So it's a simple equation. You took an antibiotic for an upper respiratory infection or a woman took it for her urinary tract infection and wiped out hundreds of species in her colon. Well, those species used to suppress the over proliferation of fecal microbes. These are species like E. Coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter that sometimes sound familiar because of the cause of urinary tract infections and of food poisoning. Anyway, loss of those beneficial microbes allows the over proliferation of those fecal microbes, which then remarkably ascend into the 24 feet of small intestine. Small intestine is very permeable by design.

And so when those fecal microbes, trillions of them that turn over rapidly, they don't live for a few hours. They release compounds from their cell walls that gain entry to the bloodstream. That's called endotoxemia.

And endotoxin is now clear with good science. Increases weight gain in the abdomen, erodes muscle, accelerates loss of muscle. It raises blood glucose, raises blood pressure, increases risk for coronary heart disease, for carotid disease and stroke.

It increases likely autoimmune diseases of neurodegenerative diseases. In other words, we've got to reconsider all we thought we knew about health in light of, as you would say, this second brain or maybe first brain and a lot of social and emotional effects too. So we know that disruption of the microbiome leads to anger, anxiety, hatred, racism, violence. So it becomes a social problem as well, not just a health problem. And so recognizing this and then being given steps to undo this mess created by modern life can be very powerful.

TalkToMeGuy: I have a friend who had a brother, a twin brother, who was in because of various injuries that occurred to him when he was born. Eye damage, all sorts of things. He ended up in mental facilities. And we used to go visit him. And we used to, for years, I would sit down with her at the annual meet, the twice a year they'd meet with all of his influencers, I'll call them, within the structure of the facility. All the doctors, all the physicians, all the everybody. And there would be endless arguments about his diet, which was, I can't use enough bad words to express how horrible it was. So I'm just, based on what you just said, I can't imagine how it would change that. I hate to use this term, but it is true industry of mental health care. If in the facilities, they were given kind of good food. Just that could be radical. I don't have a question there. I'm sorry.

William Davis, MD: Absolutely. And I see this play out, just taking some basic steps and diet. So as you point out in your opening comments, one of the things we do is banish all wheat and grains. People say, oh, you're gluten free.

No, no, no, no. So people dismiss the whole wheat and grain thing as a gluten free. Well, that's a little part of it. It's like saying the problem with cigarettes is the nicotine. Well, yeah, that's true, but there's a thousand other chemicals in there like cadmium and other toxic pollutants. So likewise in this thing called modern wheat and among the things in wheat and related grains is a protein called glyadin. And glyadin is not fully digestible by humans. So it's broken down into four or five amino acid long peptide fragments that act as opioids in the brain.

And that has a whole range of peculiar effects. But most of it boils down to stimulation of appetite. So people can't control themselves. They can't control their, their eating impulses, but it also trigger all kinds of other behavioral problems, food obsessions. Anger, mania and people prone to bipolar illness, for instance, hallucinations and people who have psychotic tendencies.

So wheat and grains are a mind active drug. And that's just one problem. So it's, it's not a gluten free thing. It's, it is so much more to it. But as you point out, cleaning up your diet, in this case, banishing all wheat and grains. And the thing we were told should dominate diet, right? And then bringing back order into your gastrointestinal microbiome disrupted by antibiotics and other factors.

That alone is a huge advantage and even better. Let's bring back microbes specific microbial species that have outsize influence on where muscle is deposited and how much muscle you have, how much fat you have. And thereby, so what we're doing is taking back control of why I call shape and body composition, which I think is a much smarter way, rather than just talking about weight loss, weight loss means muscle loss and fat loss, shoulder lifespan, falls, fractures, frailty and so on. So what we're trying to do is just be smarter, taking lessons from the most recent science.

TalkToMeGuy: Recent science. What an idea. I love that as a theory. I'm going to step this isn't really sideways. It's still in the same theme. But somewhere in there, you referred to in the book, you referred to the biggest loser study published in 2016 from the, what I refer to as dreaded TV series by the same name. Would you talk about that study? Because it made me after I read a little bit about that it made me flash back to that series, which was really about yelling at fat people that they aren't trying hard enough. I mean, just it was just an S &M series about weight loss. It wasn't really about weight loss.

William Davis, MD: But that study, please, really was misery for the people engaged in that program. Yeah, they were promised a prize of $250,000 if they lost the most body weight percentage. So they were put on a very low calorie diet and an extreme exercise program involving resistance training and aerobic exercise, often two, three, four to six hours, a huge effort. And that's misery when you're cutting calories and being put through extreme exercise. It's absolute misery and people break down. So, you know, there might be a theatrical aspect to it, but it's real.

It is actual misery. Well, the National Institute of Health Group studied the graduates of the eighth season. And they show that these people, yes, they lost a lot of weight and they measured their metabolic rate, their basal metabolic rate at their time of graduation from the show. And then six years later, and it showed for all practical purposes, a permanent reduction in basal metabolic rate. That is the rate at which your body burns energy with the work of living, breathing, digestion, manufacturing proteins. And their BMR had dropped 27%.

And what that means is it guarantees that even if you lost a lot of weight and you maintain a low calorie intake and an extreme exercise program, you will regain the weight as fat. And that's exactly what happened. I talked to Danny Cahill. He was the winner of that eighth season. He's the guy that got the $250,000 prize. He lost, Richard, he lost 239 pounds in seven months, which is kind of a counter to the idea that people are fat because they're lazy and slothful and indulgent. Here's a guy who lost 239 pounds. He looked great.

Though, by the way, all the people on stage who look great in clothes are also wearing spanks underneath to conceal all the loose skin flaps, which are pretty awful. But Richard Cahill wins. He leaves the show. He told me he maintained a very low calorie diet and an extreme exercise program, two hours a day, six days a week.

Who does that? He regained all the weight. He went to the annual reunions hosted by the show's producers and he said he saw all the other people in every season regaining all their weight. And we now know it's programmed into your body. When you cut calories, you tell your body, I'm a wild human living outdoors and I'm starving. And so your body responds by reducing its metabolic rate to keep you alive. It doesn't know that you want to wear nice clothes.

You have a smart watch and a fancy car and a nice house. Your body doesn't know that. It thinks you're starving. So it reduces the calorie burn rate to keep you alive. The problem is it's essentially permanent and you will regain the weight as fat, mostly abdominal fat. You won't regain more than a trivial quantity of muscle.

And so you set yourself up for a long term disaster, falls, fractures, frailty, cognitive impairment, and death a few years earlier. So this is being washed over because there's too much money being made doing the wrong thing. So that's the hill you and I are trying to climb to say, well, there's a smarter way to do this. First of all, never engage in any program that reduces calories, whether it's a drug procedure or program.

Let's instead do it in a different way. There are ways to manage diet, by the way, that don't involve loss of muscle. There are microbe strategies you can follow that reduce inflammation, reduce that endotoxemia, reduce insulin resistance, driver of weight gain. There are factors we can bring back besides microbes.

We're going to bring back microbes, by the way, that do give you control of a body shape and composition like rotari, lactobacillus, gastri, bacillus, subtilis, and others. You know, it amazes me how many blunders resulted from the decades of advice to cut your saturated fat and cholesterol. One of the blunders that came from that advice inadvertently is that most Americans abandon consumption of organ meats like stomach, brain, heart, and it meant that our intakes of collagen and hyaluronic acid dropped in the brain. And those are two things that have profound effects on shape and body composition. Unfortunately, most people don't want to eat brain or heart anymore, so we do it with supplements. But those two things alone, collagen, a direct effect on muscle and fat, hyaluronic acid.

So interesting, Richard. Hyaluronic acid is a fiber, one of the very rare fibers that comes from animals. And that fiber, hyaluronic acid, ladies know all about it, they play it topically, but I'm talking about taking orally in your food. And that indirectly by effects on the microbiome also adds to a regaining of muscle, loss of abdominal visceral fat. So it's really just bringing back things that we've all lost or lack.

TalkToMeGuy: And I was surprised in the book when I read about hyaluronic acid being an animal fiber. I was like, what? I had never thought about it. I've taken hyaluronic acid and used it and talked about it for a long time. But I hadn't known its point of origin, so that was really surprising. And also having been a chef, I've cooked a lot of organs for people who want them or like them. I use them as a, you know, thing like adding a little ground up chicken liver to a meat dish, a stew or something. It adds like amazing amami. But it scares people as soon as you say that, like, what? You did what? Like it's a scary thing.

William Davis, MD: It's almost... It is endlessly fascinating as an animal source fiber. So hyaluronic acid stimulates production of collagen in joint cartilage. So the cartilage in your knees and hips is 70% collagen. Hyaluronic acid stimulates deposition of collagen. So it helps rebuild diseased joints. It increases the synovial fluid lubricant in your joints. Your arteries are lined by something called a glyco-calix, which finger-like projections that sense tension and pressure and regulate arterial health. Well, that glyco-calix is made of hyaluronic acid. And the ladies love it because they're familiar with applying it topically.

Right? Tell them. All right, you put it around your eyes to reduce your crow's feet. What did it do for your skin on your neck or your abdomen or your thighs? Nothing, of course. So the magic of hyaluronic acid is being taken orally. And it goes to all those places. It's one of the effects of hyaluronic acid is to stimulate collagen deposition in the dermal layer of skin and cause moisture retention for that pumping effect that a lot of people want, that youthful pumping effect like teenagers have.

TalkToMeGuy: That would be amazing. I know I have female friends who spend bank on stuff they smear on their skin. Just bank. It just amazes me how much a little container of something can be like. That's what? Mind-blowing.

And versus the idea of, and I've suggested, and especially since I've been studying your work, you know, if you took that orally, you'd get an overall systemic benefit. And they're like, what do you mean? And I explain and give them the thing. But they still are like still buying little tiny containers of, you know, ridiculous expanse, little hyaluronic stuff to smear on their eyes.

They all love the way it affects their eyes. And that, but it's like, yes, but you have interior tissues as well. How about benefiting those? And it's like, what a radical idea.

Speaker 4: So now I have even more to throw on that fire.

William Davis, MD: You know, I should point out what this does not involve. People think, oh, he's going to say go to the gym two hours a day. Several times. No, no, no, no, no, no. You can if you want. But I'm talking, I know about you, Richard. I hate going to the gym. I can't stand.

TalkToMeGuy: I know that's why I'm chuckling. I know you do.

William Davis, MD: So I'll go, you know, I'll go for walks, ride a bike, things like that. But I'll go to the gym, maybe once a week for 15 minutes. Now, one of the great things is all these strategies you were talking about, eradication of SIBO restoration of microbes lost from the human microbiome, collagen, hyaluronic acid, elimination of wheat and grains, all very easily achievable. And then you can see that the SIBO buggy also accelerates or amplifies your regain of muscle.

Now, I think my experience a little over the top. When I first started doing this many years ago in my early sixties, I gained 13 pounds of muscle and my strength increased by 50% in three weeks. Going to the gym 15 minutes once a week because I hate. Wow. Wow. And so I don't think I think one of the lessons I've seen, this is just anecdote is people who had more muscle in their, in their younger years. Like if you were a track, if you played, we're on the track team, or you did some weights, people who had more muscle regain more muscle doing these things.

If you are a long distance runner and you're skinny, you won't regain as much. So it varies. And I don't know how to compensate for that. But it's a way to restore youthful muscle. But I don't want people to hear go to the gym many hours a day, hang out with the body. No, don't hear that.

TalkToMeGuy: I chuckled because for all the well for much of my life, I worked out in the gym, because I enjoyed it, because especially as a working chef, which is a high stress job. Going to the gym and working out got me out of my head. And that's why I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the result. I wasn't a big pumped.

I mean, I was a musketer guy because real working chef is a hard job physically. But I just liked it because of how it felt. It really made me feel my body and be aware of my body. And so I really enjoyed it as a meditation because it made me not think about the horrors of the day before.

So I'm more of a fan of it. So that's why I was chuckling when you started talking about the gym because I know you hate going to the gym so much. And so if I was muscular, which for much of my life I was, and then I had an incident where I had a bunch of surgeries and I was in a healthcare facility for a year. I developed and probably about age appropriate a little younger. I developed sarcopenia.

And I'll ask you to explain that in just a moment. Is there hope for me to recover not to be the big, big musketer guy was, but at least to regain muscle strength that I did have in my arms?

William Davis, MD: Yeah. So all these things we're talking about restoring microbes that govern how much muscle you have. Right. Right. Gas right. Bacillus subtilis and some others getting back factors that are lacking most modern people's diets college and hyaluronic acid, reducing insulin resistance.

We haven't talked about that. So insulin resistance is this very ubiquitous process that over two thirds of all Americans now have that is their muscle, their brain, liver, other organs don't respond to insulin. So the pancreas compensates by producing and fold 30 fold 100 fold more insulin because of insulin resistance. And that high level of insulin is a major trigger for expansion of abdominal fat and loss of muscle. So among the things we want to accomplish is to turn back insulin resistance.

Why do you do that? Well, you can follow a diet starts with wheat grain elimination, sugar elimination to reduce provocation of blood glucose and thereby insulin. We're going to restore common nutrients that are lacking in modern life because of the way we live. So for instance, magnesium, you can't drink from a river or stream or like it's it's dirty. It's contaminated. You'd be sick.

So you have to filter your water water filtration removes all magnesium and modern produce has almost no magnesium. William Davis, MD. I'm a Michigan at the University of Michigan at the University of Michigan at the University of Michigan at the University of Michigan at the University of Michigan at the University of Michigan at the University of Milwaukee, Shawn. another thing that happens to people. Richard in some ways I supposed you should be grateful that so many blunders have been made in dietary guidelines in health care, because doing the wrong thing for 40 or 50 years, like cutting saturated fat, eating healthy whole grains, shows us how destructive it was. Well, one of the other things that happens when you expand abdominal fat specifically is you start to deposit fat in other body locations. You don't have to be obese to do this, by the way. You can be slender and still do it. But you start to deposit fat in other locations. This is the phenomenon some people call ectopic fat. It could be in your liver, fatty liver, everyone's heard of that. It could be in your pancreas, where it kills off the insulin producing cells, in terms of type 2 diabetic into type 1 diabetic. It could be fat globules in your knees and hips that accelerate the deterioration of your joint cartilage, brings you closer to bone on bone or a throat. It could be in your kidneys.

So it's kidney disease. It could be around the heart, epicaridyl or pericardial fat that accelerates atherosclerotic plaque formation and heart attack and sudden cardiac death. And it could be in muscle, so-called myosteatosis.

And when you have abdominal fat that gets transferred into your muscle, myosteatosis, we know you're going to die several years younger. The great thing is, do these basic things. Change your diet. Restore common nutrient deficiencies.

You need to modern life. Address your microbiome, like with the SIBO yogurt. Add things back that should have been part of your diet all along, like collagen, hyaluronic acid. And you reduce abdominal visceral fat, you reduce or eliminate myosteatosis, you restore youthful musculature.

And so, yes, you can gain back. One great thing to do is to sound a little silly though, is to measure your grip strength. There's a very inexpensive device called a dynamometer. I paid $7.99 from mine a few years ago. I think they, between inflation and excessive profit seeking by some companies, they're now more like $25. But the point is, they're inexpensive.

They're almost as accurate as devices, professional device that cost thousands of dollars. So you can get yourself a dynamometer to measure grip strength. Not that grip strength is that important, but grip strength we use as a proxy for overall body strength.

So when grip strength has been compared, say, to leg extension strength, it's 95% the same. And so you can buy a very B in the top 25% or so. And if you look at Superbody, you'll see my blog, or you pull this up online, some of the dynamometer evidence, you'll see how you compare to other people.

You want to be in the top 25%. So you and I want to be pulling something like 100 pounds on our dynamometer. Now, the key is not do wrist curls. It's engaging all these things we've talked about that leads to overall health, restoration of musculature, reduction in myosteatosis, and you'll see your grip strength increase. So it's an easy inexpensive way for you and your listeners and me to track. What is the status of your muscle?

TalkToMeGuy: I would see, and I still see this to this day. I came to my calves organically, meaning that I grew up in a small town where my parents were ugly. I saw them on the top of the hill.

Damn it. And so as a kid, I would ride my bike to school or walk to school because I lived in a small community and I would walk up hills. So I grew up with big calves, big muscles in my legs. So years later, when I'm working out in the gym, guys were always coming up to me and saying, man, what do you do for your calves? You got great calves.

And it's like I grew up and I explained the story. And so I see guys at the gym, and this is true of women as well, where they're from the waist up, they're like, oh my god, they're amazing. And maybe they're thighs, some of their thighs, but then their calves are like nothing.

They have little, thin, weird, spindly calves. And it's always like, well, how does it, there's no balance. People understand this is an actual balance to how you work out to get the whole body worked out. And it always just amazed me that they would do all this work, A and B, they just like abandon their calves.

That's, I don't really have a question there. It's just like, it blows my mind that, and it's not unlike, I suspect, I'll extrapolate it this way, to watch people who do a diet where suddenly they go all in on this, like macrobiotic, or they're a vegan, or they're this or that. And it's always tricky, I think, when you go into that kind of, I'm now a vegan, and I've refused to eat any animal products. And it's like, yes, but we are animals in our history. You know, back in the day when we lived in caves, and our day consisted of going out and trying to kill something and bring it home to feed the family. That's what we ate, because we are animals.

And so I'm not And now that I, again, every time I talk to you, I think, I need to be eating more chicken livers again. And but the idea of, so the ectopic fat can go into our organs, which I suspect lead to all other sorts of stresses within the system, because you're adding fat to an organ, like around the kidney or around the liver. I mean, the liver's got a hard enough job at the end, begin with, with all the toxins in the environment.

My favorite hashtag is total toxic load. So all the external toxins. So if you add ectopic fat to that, like around the liver, aren't you really, it's making the liver having to work even harder?

William Davis, MD: Yes? Absolutely. You know, Richard, I feel sorry for most people's livers, because that effect, the ectopic fat deposition of fat, but there's also two other things to be aware of. There's something called de novo lipogenesis. It's a process that occurs in the liver. And all that means de novo, new lipogenesis, making new fats. So anytime you eat sugars or carbohydrates, like the amylopectin A, or wheat and grains, the liver is very efficient at converting those carbs and sugars to triglycerides. So new fats, de novo lipogenesis. Now the liver can't release triglycerides, fats into the bloodstream, because fats coalesce in the bloodstream. So like your salad dressing, where the water and vinegar separate from the oil, because the oil coalesces. Well, if that happened in your body, you would die within minutes. So the liver packages those triglycerides into water soluble particles. These are called lipoproteins, fat carrying proteins.

And one of those particles is VLDL. And that, by the way, Richard, is how you get coronary disease, not this idiotic conversation about LDL cholesterol and trillion dollars worth of statin drugs. That's not how you get heart disease. It's this pathway, among other things. So the liver is making those triglycerides. Some of them get to the bloodstream as those VLDL particles, but some stay in the liver as triglycerides, fatty liver. Now even worse, if you've got a disrupted microbiome in the gastrointestinal tract, whether it's in the colon or also in the small intestine, the gastrointestinal tract has its own unique venous system. So blood from the gastrointestinal tract drains into a specific portion of the venous system called the portal venous system that goes directly to the liver. So when you have fecal microbes that are overpopulated in your gastrointestinal tract, releasing those endotoxins into the portal vein draining to the liver, your portal liver is taking a beating from your disrupted gastrointestinal microbiome. So put that all together and you get the expansion of abdominal visceral fat that causes fat to be deposited in the liver, liver de novo lipogenesis from consuming grains and sugars, portal venous endotoxemia. This is what causes fat.

So because I'm always marvel at this because I still hear my colleagues saying things like, oh, John, you've got fatty liver. There's nothing you can do about it. Meaning there's no drug or procedure for it.

But there's a ton of things you can do and get rid of it within two weeks. But it has, you can see they educate my colleagues. There's a little bit of education here and most don't care. They're indifferent because it's not as easy as writing a prescription for something.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, and back to our pre-show conversation, although this audience knows who, Gwen Olson, that was her name, the pharmaceutical rep. There's no, their pharmaceutical reps are not educating them toward that. Their pharmaceutical reps, and I'm not saying doctors don't study and don't learn all that. However, the people that they listen to once they're in the biz are the pharmaceutical reps because they're their source for the current what's happening. And there's nobody saying, oh, here's a lipotropic that you could be taking for the liver that would really benefit the liver, which would make everything else you're doing with that patient feel better. But there's no pharmaceutical representation or research on something that we could do or take. And we've moved away from that.

That's a whole other show. We've moved away from the we could eat better or we could take a pill and we've been trained to take a pill. And that's tricky. And again, having been a working chef for a long time, I like good food, and I cannot lie, and I can make it. But why not, if you're going to go to the work to make food, why not make good food? Clean food, healthy food, plastic free food, all of that, and make your liver happier. My father died of liver cirrhosis. So I'm well aware of what can happen with liver, and it's not a pretty way to go. I mean, no, going us, no whole issue. But I mean, when your liver goes, you're bad. It's bad news. Yep.

And so the idea of us and then so if we cleaned up our diet and had a happen what I like to call a happy microbiome, that would also give our bodies a better system of resistance to the amount of toxic load we do have in the environment. I can't make that question. I'm sorry.

William Davis, MD: We know here we're talking about shape and body composition microbiome, but I think the biggest effect we have Richard, are the social and emotional effects we can have. So in all my clinical trials now, we include these well validated questionnaires on well being questions like zero to 10, I am happy with what I've accomplished in my life. Zero to 10, I'm happy with the quality of relationships. I because what I'm seeing is as you do these things, and yeah, you have firmer shoulders and your buttocks are smaller and your abdomen shrinks. Yeah, yeah. But you're also a better person.

You're more empathetic, you're more generous, you're more likely to accept the opinions of others, you're less prone to anger, hostility, hatred. And so we're trying to track that because I think that's what we're seeing. We're all while yes, we're seeing improved musculature reduction of abdominal visceral fat and those other great things. But I think we're also seeing a change in social and emotional behavior.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, it seems to me that again from having been talking to you since Wheatbelly, it seems to me that we're creating a state, you're creating, helping people create a state in the body that takes it, you know, another foot away from being in chronic flight or fight. Because I think when our bodies are dis-eased, and I don't mean you have to have an actual disease, I just mean dis-eased, that that puts our mind in the set of flight or flight because something is wrong, the body can sense it, all the systems that are running around and you know, all the hormones that are flying and everything that's happening. I think when they're in a state of imbalance, that creates a state of imbalance in the like, what's wrong? What's going on? We're monitoring everything, something seems to be wrong, we're not sure what it is. It creates flight or flight. And by having a healthy, happy microbiome, the central engine of processing everything.

William Davis, MD: There's several European groups who've done this. I'm impressed they did this because I would not do it because it's very hazardous, very dangerous. And then take that endotoxin that comes from those fecal microbes, wow, and inject them into people. Yeah.

William Davis, MD: We're talking about like, a millionth of a gram, we're talking about if your calculations are a lot, if you actually kill somebody, nonetheless, a number of groups have done this. So for instance, it's been known for years that people who are depressed or suicidal, who some will respond to SSR, as flawed as those drugs are, the SSRIs, some do respond. But there's a large group of people who don't respond, no matter what the dose, no matter which drug, they never respond. And those people are known to have higher levels of inflammation in their body, higher C-rective protein, higher TNF alpha, higher IL6, all those markers for inflammation. So these groups took that endotoxin from fecal microbes and injected them in TNC, we'd see what, into non-depressed people and saw them become depressed within three hours, in effect that lasts for about 48 hours. And when they scan their brains with an MRI, they had all the hallmarks for depression in their brain.

It's the closest we've come to showing, yeah, depression and all related adverse, so maybe hatred, anxiety can be blamed to a large degree, maybe not entirely, but to a large degree on the microbiome, but specifically the entry back, terrible breakdown products from fecal species into the bloodstream and then to the brain.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow, that makes the biggest loser look like a cakewalk, in my mind. That is astonishing that somebody would do that and volunteer to have that done. I mean, I think it's fascinating science, but wow.

William Davis, MD: So you can see what we've created as a society is this land mine. People still think move more, eat less, smaller portion size, push the plate away, exercise to compensate for that coca-cola, all that nonsense, is all completely untrue. And in fact, programs your body for a long-term problem, which could include premature death, or even if not that, having subscribed to living in an assisted living or a similar facility years ahead of time, because you're, we see these people, right? These are the people who have the motorized scooters, who use walkers and canes.

You and I and your listeners want to be riding our bikes, taking dance lessons, swimming in the pool, chasing your grandkids. You don't want to be using a walker or be debilitated. So yes, we're talking about shape and body composition, but we're also talking about maintaining independent strength, vigor, and the ability to navigate life.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, on being somebody that's definitely well over 55, it amazes me and stuns me how casually people now around me, I'm in my 70s, how people around me so casually take up using a walker, rather than trying to fix the thing that got them into using a walker, like maybe even just getting a rebounder and using it for 20 minutes twice a day to develop balance and do a little emphatic pump, and even just a gentle rebounder, doing that will help with balance and will help with the emphatics and gives you some sense before you can, you know, just something to get away from not the walker. Because once, my experience of, and I have some friends who are using walkers now, and it's once they get into using the walker, they can't not because they get into the habit of using a walker.

William Davis, MD: And that develops into muscles. Richard, that the rebounder or a vibrating plate, I was very skeptical at first because a chiropractor friend of mine said she had great success with her patients using these vibrating plates or rebounder. And I thought, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, can you show me the evidence? I dig up the evidence, I was great because I got one for myself. And I noticed that while you're vibrating your pelvis and your thighs and calves, that I was gaining muscle in my upper body. I thought, how in the world can that be? And it gets into the world of so-called myokines.

That's a really interesting area now, where it's become clear. Why would exercise have a dramatic effect on reducing the risk for dementia? Why would exercise actually increase the volume of your hippocampus? That's the part of your brain that turns short term memory into long term.

Why? Well, it's looking like it's this thing called myokines. These are hundreds of peptide mediators that are emitted by muscle and take benefits other parts of the body. So you can vibrate for instance your thighs or buttocks and gain shoulder muscle and then have those other benefits. So this whole world of myokines is I think in coming years can be very interesting.

TalkToMeGuy: And so from your research, do I need to use a vibration plate to stimulate the myokines or to activate or how whatever the word would be versus a rebounder?

William Davis, MD: You know, I mentioned these devices like a dynamometer to measure grip strength or vibrating plate or we haven't talked about biomedicine scales that include a visceral fat score. There's some others. So it's not as if people have to buy these things, but let people know that these things are available in case you think it has relevance to your experience. So for instance, if you say I feel like I'm losing strength in my legs, my pelvis, well, obviously going for walks up hills as you did as a kid riding a bike with resistance, that really helps. And another thing you can do is a vibrating plate.

And that also increases modestly bone density in ladies mostly prone to osteopenia osteoporosis. And so it's just a tool to be aware of. You don't need a dynamometer to track your strength. If you're out there raking leaves by hand and you're digging in your dirt in the dirt in your garden, you're strong, you don't need a dynamometer.

But what if you did? What if as you did, you went through a period where you were debilitated in the hospital and lost a lot of muscle and you want to track if you got back to a really beneficial like a pulling 100 pounds or 44 kilos on the dynamometer? That's where a device like that might be helpful. So it's not that people have to get these things. It's just important to be aware of them.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, the thing I like about the dynamometer, which I will be ordering after we hang up, is that it's such an easy demo. And it's not a big thing. You know, vibration plate, the reason I chose a rebounder is because it's silent and I have roommates and I can bounce on at any time I want and it doesn't bother anybody. Whereas the vibe, I've been with people that use the vibration plate, which I think are totally cool, but they make sound and they tend to vibrate the floor. And for people who live in earthquake country, that's not such a fun thing. Good thought. I had people who got one and had that very experience like, oh my god, the entire house woke up when I used it at the vibration plate the first time.

Yeah, we're in California. But I like the idea of them and I've seen lately there's been somebody's been pushing on one of the channels or possibly on YouTube, the vibration plates, and you see people squatting down on them. And as I'm watching this slow motion of them, I'm just seeing how their whole body ripples in a certain way. And I'm just thinking, that's got to be good for nerve endings, for muscle tissues, for all the interactions of the tissues, the fine fibers of how the bones and everything, you know, are held up by those little tiny fibers that we never talk about. It's got to be good for stimulating all of that.

William Davis, MD: And there actually is science to tell us that when you do that, when you vibrate your lower body, you get a rise in myokines like interleukin 6, a drop in myostatin increase in iris. And there are measurable changes that explain why you could vibrate your pelvis or legs, but you get benefits in the upper body and other areas of the body as well.

TalkToMeGuy: This is going to take us a couple minutes over, but I have to ask you, so someone picks up super body tonight, or they order the e-version, or I think you have an audible version, and start doing it, you know, today. What's day one look like with the super body in their hand?

William Davis, MD: Well, we still start with diet. Diet still does matter a lot. In other words, if you're eating donuts and bagels and breakfast cereals, no healthy microbial strategy is going to overcome the power, the adverse effects of that.

So diet still does matter. That alone, and we're going to follow a diet that is specifically tailored to reduce or eradicate insulin resistance, because that allows you to release abdominal fat. And that's what we haven't talked about, that of the three locations that fat can be stored, there's abdominal visceral fat, that's fat that encircles abdominal organ, that's the worst. There's the myosteatosis that accompanies abdominal visceral fat, that's also terrible. And then there's much more benign subcutaneous fat, fat just below the skin.

It could be unsightly, it could be too much fat in your buttocks or thighs or neck, but it doesn't have the same kind of metabolic complications that abdominal visceral and myosteatotic fat or ectopic fat have. Now here's something, all conventional methods to lose weight, diet programs, bariatric surgery, pharmaceuticals, including G.L .D. and Agnes, all preferentially cause loss of subcutaneous fat. You do lose some abdominal visceral fat, but they are, they've been proven over and over and over again in human clinical studies to preferentially target subcutaneous fat.

So I'm going to propose, let's instead target abdominal visceral fat, the source of insulin resistance that governs weight and muscle health and things happen faster. So we still start with diet, we add those nutrients, lacking vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, iodine, magnesium. The toughest part of all this are all those microbiome strategies because it means if you embrace these ideas, for instance, making SIBO yogurt, three microbes chosen for their capacity to colonize the small intestine and colon, most microbes don't do that, and produce what are called bacteriocins, natural antibiotics that kill invading fecal microbes. So you have to source the microbes, it's not that difficult, it's not very expensive, then you have to ferment them. We ferment for 36 hours. So there's kind of a several day delay, obtaining the stuff, getting a yogurt maker or instant pot or a sous vide or some device, any device that can keep this mixture to ferment at 100 degrees or so Fahrenheit, a human body temperature. And then we add the collagen and hyaluronic acid. So more time just kind of assembling things.

But these are all everything. Richard, everything we've talked about is restoring life to the way it should have been all along. But we lost because of silly dietary guidelines, because of modern processed foods, misinformation, like cut your saturated fat and cholesterol, antibiotics, micro plastics, PFOS. So we're trying to minimize the impact all the blunders we've made over the last several decades.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, and back to my earlier, not exactly rant, but it could have been called a rant, about the body being in a chronic state of fear or flight or flight, is that my happy takeaway from this is that perhaps if we all did this lifestyle, I'll call it that rather than a diet, we might be happier and perhaps we could be kinder. Hey, what do you think?

Just an idea that it would actually make people in less of a state of fear, because I really do think that there is an undertone of what the body considers to be fear when it's adrenalineized from bad nutrition.

William Davis, MD: Absolutely. And a lot of this builds upon itself. All the things we're doing, for instance, the microbiome has been shown to reduce cortisol, excessively high cortisol or mistiming of cortisol, that inappropriate rise in cortisol at two or three in the morning that keeps people awake. Well, a lot of these strategies, that's by the way, one of the toughest problems to address, the how to not just reduce excessively high levels of cortisol, but also to shift timing.

That can take a long time to do. But you're right. I really think what we're doing here, yes, we're giving you back youthful shape and body composition. But I think we're also helping people become better human beings, more tolerant, more accepting, more loving. So because I see this play out, people tell me, you know, I'm less anxious in social situations, like the store or work or office party or neighborhood get together.

In fact, I introduced myself to strangers in line for coffee at Starbucks. So I see a shift in human behavior. Humans have always been rotten to each other. It's not new wars and violence are not new. But I think it seems to have reached down further into kids, teenagers, young people, it seems to be more widespread. And I think that's why I think the most important thing that we are accomplishing is improving human social and emotional behavior, even though we're focusing right now on shape and body composition.

TalkToMeGuy: I think it'd be amazing if we got this into, well, I'll call it the school lunches. Just start there. It was Zen Honeycutt of the moms of the Cross America organization that had her volunteers nationwide go out and get samples of school lunches and take those school lunches in and have them tested for glyphosate directly. And they found out of the testing across nationwide, about 90% of them had glyphosate in it.

And so how about we stop that? Just give kids an opportunity to have a healthy microbiome and see what they grow up like. Just from that, that would be an amazing study to just have a group of, I know in some cultures, let's say the Seventh-day Venice, where they're more vegetarian, which is a whole other tricky issue.

But they do tend to live longer, be healthier. That's sort of in the blue zone kind of thinking. But just that, that would be my happy takeaway of like, let's start with the kids. That'd be amazing to give them the opportunity to have a healthy microbiome, most of their young lives. So as they grow, they're starting out healthy to begin with. They don't have to, they just have that as a foundation. Like, wow, happy goods. I'm happier.

William Davis, MD: Yeah. And kids are wildly overexposed to antibiotics. Last piece of evidence I saw from the CDC was that for every 1,000 children, toddlers, infants, toddlers, more than 1,300 prescriptions are written every year for an antibiotic. And we know that just as all of us have lost, for instance, lactobacillus rhodorite, babies, children have also lost a species very crucial, for instance, for neurological maturation. So for instance, there's a species called bifidobacter infantis that is crucial for a child to have if it's going to breastfeed. Because the only thing that allows that child to metabolize what are called human milk, oligosaccharides and breast milk. And if a child has both that is breastfed and has bifidobacter infantis, that child will have enhanced neurological maturation, enhanced immune response to various pathogens, reduce likelihood of autoimmune disease, including type 1 diabetes, less likely to become obese and type 2 diabetic as an adolescent, and will have a higher IQ.

That's just one microbe. So there's so much to talk. You raise the issue of children.

That's a huge issue. That's a whole other conversation of all the things that a mother can do. And also, by the way, Richard, all the things a pregnant or reproductive age woman can do, often enhance the health of her pregnancy and of her child. That's often just not talked about. It came through the head for me because my son's wife just delivered her third child. And despite having access to abundant medical advice, no one talked to her about microbiome issues.

In fact, they poked fun at it, said, oh, probiotics have been shown to not be effective, which of course is pat nonsense. There's a lot of things to talk about. Wow.

TalkToMeGuy: I can imagine the rage on your face when somebody tried to do that. Wow. So could she have benefited or could I'll take it away off of her back and put it in all moms? Pregnant women, let's just say pregnant women. Could they all have benefit to their unborn child by actually consuming the El Ruderai yogurt?

William Davis, MD: Well, there's one caution. So we know that all mammals, all humans should have Ruderai. What we don't know is if the super duper high counts we get in the yogurt is safe in pregnancy because as a woman approaches full term delivery, the density of oxytocin receptors in the uterus goes up about 200 fold in anticipation of the uterine contraction of delivery. So while she should have Ruderai, I don't know that that high dose of Ruderai that we get, we get 300 billion per half cup serving.

Is that safe in pregnancy, particularly late in pregnancy, or could it produce premature labor? So what I tell ladies is if you're going to make Ruderai yogurt, don't make it like we do. Make a mixed culture.

One easy way to do this would be get your Ruderai source and buy commercial yogurt that has known microbes and they have lactobacillus bulgarius, streptococcus thermophilus, lactobacillus acidophilus, bifidobacterial lung, whatever, and ferment all that together. So it's like having if you have a backyard garden, 10 by 10, all you plant is tomatoes. You're going to get a lot of tomatoes. But what if you plant cucumbers, zucchini, watermelon, and tomatoes? How many tomatoes are going to have so far fewer?

Same thing here. We just don't know if it's safe in late term pregnancy, but there's so much more. This is a whole other conversation perhaps from the day, but so much more a woman can do. For instance, not micro, but omega-3 fatty acids, largely lacking in modern diets. Most ladies of reproductive age get almost no omega-3 fatty acids. And we know with good evidence that omega-3 fatty acids both reduce miscarriage and increase the likelihood of carrying a child to full term. Because if a woman delivers at 28 weeks, that child's going to have health problems, psychological problems for a lifetime, a lifetime. So something as simple and basic as omega-3 fatty acids that most ladies get almost nothing of, that alone at 3000 milligrams EPHA per day or more, that alone could reduce miscarriage, much reduced likelihood of premature delivery.

Wow. How about lactobacillus crespatus? It's meant to be the dominant microbe in a healthy human female vagina. Many ladies have lost it because like rhodorides, very susceptible to common antibiotics. And if a woman lacks crespatus in her vaginal microbiome, she's much more prone to vaginal infections like candida and E. coli.

She's much more prone to urinary tract infections and incontinence. So that work, by the way, came out of Loyola about 20 miles from my house. Very elegant work. And they showed that restoration of crespatus is life changing for ladies in their reproductive health, both in reproductive years and menopausal years because it restores vaginal moisture and sensation and reduces all those urinary issues. And by the way, Richard, it makes rhodoride with making de-yogurt, but I have to say it's not the most delicious. It's kind of sour, right? But the crespatus is the most delicious yogurt you ever had.

TalkToMeGuy: Interesting. And so this is a whole other show, but I can't help myself. So that means that if a mom, a pregnant mom, has low levels of crespatus in her vagina, that the crespatus, then the child coming through that vaginal cavity, isn't getting the crespatus it really wants to have upon exit. Right.

William Davis, MD: Yeah, mom is supposed to impart these microbes to baby. But if mom doesn't have it, or baby gets antibiotics, which is very common, by the way, at time of delivery and in the early months and years, the child loses it. It loses crespatus, loses bifidobacteria infantis, loses lactobacillus rhodoride, loses hundreds of other species that would have been important for that child's development.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. Okay. I'm stopping now because this is like ping-pong. We could just be keep batting that ball back and forth. That's great. I love talking to you. It's the time where I ask you, where can people find out more about your work? And where would you like people to find out about SuperBody?

William Davis, MD: So of course, SuperBody, which is available in all major bookstores, Amazon, et cetera. And that's the book that focuses on this idea that we need to maintain muscle. We need to focus on abdominal visceral fat by restoring factors lost from the modern human experience. The SuperGut book talked more about how to source microbes, how to ferment them, like that bifidobacteria infantis, like lactobacillus crespatus, more of a microbiome focus. And of course, if you want the full explanation, why, if you say, well, I don't understand this, why is he talking about gluten-free? Well, not, but why this thing about glyc, what about wheat, German gluten, and what about phytates? What about all the other effects?

Glyphosate, that's all in the wheat belly books. But I also make this stuff available through the thousands of posts I have on my blog, which is weandavismd.com, my podcast Defiant Health, and of course, my YouTube channel where I try to make these things also available.

TalkToMeGuy: Great. Thank you. I'm not going to ask you any more questions. We have so many possibilities. That was great. Thank you so much.

William Davis, MD: Thank you, Richard. Keep up your great work.

TalkToMeGuy: Thank you. You too. Everybody have a great rest of the weekend and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

Music