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The Dr. Gundry Podcast
Are Butyrate Supplements Effective? - Dr. Gundry's Quick Health Tip | EP 367.B
00:14:14
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Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone, Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
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Now, have you ever wondered what this trend is about? So much colon cancer. Cancer in young people. Now, you'll see on TV that this is true. And it is. And you see the answer to this on TV is we're now recommending that younger and younger people get colon cancer screening. That's the wrong message, folks. The message is, holy cow, why are so many young people developing colon cancer? Not that we ought to screen people in their 20s for colon cancer. We need to let people know why they're getting it. And that's why today we're going to talk about butyrate, an incredible inhibitor of colon cancer cell growth. Now, if you've read my books, you know I love butyrate. I've talked about it in the energy Paradox in unlocking the keto code and my new bestseller, Gut Check. So butyrate is a short chain fatty acid that's made primarily in our colon by butyrate producing bacteria. Now, what most people are unaware of, we assume that all the cells in our body need to have oxygen delivered to them to live. And they need to have glucose and fat and proteins to live. Except for the lining of the colon. These cells are called colonocytes. But interestingly enough, 90% of everything they require to eat is butyrate. They don't need oxygen, they don't need sugar, they don't need protein, they need butyrate to live. Now, the problem with butyrate and the colon is through the years, we have pretty much number one, killed off most of the butyrate producing bacteria that live in our colon through our overuse of antibiotics. Even either personally or or in the animal food we eat that have been given antibiotics, or in the use of Roundup glyphosate, which is now sprayed on just about everything, we do not have those butyrate producing bacteria anymore and it's hard to get them back. So if the colon cells need butyrate for proper health and we're not making it, is it any wonder that these cells are dying or becoming odd looking? And here's the number two factor about butyrate. Butyrate is well known as one of the most strong suppressor of cancer cell growth that anyone has ever discovered. It's a hdac inhibitor, and I won't go into that, but it literally prevents cancer cells from growing and dividing. So it's a two pronged reason why we're getting an increased amount of colon cancer in young people. Because we're not feeding colon cells what they need, and they're becoming weird looking, and we don't have the butyrate that would stop those precancerous cells from becoming cancerous. So it's a one, two punch. And so is it any wonder that we're seeing increased colon cancer in young people? I'm reminded of a very famous British colon surgeon by the name of Dennis burkitt, famous for Burkitt's lymphoma. If you want to look him up, he wanted to do mission work in Africa and utilize his talents to treat Africans. Good for him. But he got down to Africa, and unfortunately, he couldn't find any colon cancer to treat. Matter of fact, he couldn't find any colon diseases to treat. He couldn't find diverticulosis, he couldn't find hemorrhoids, and he's pretty much out of a job. And he said, what the heck? You know, this is so prevalent in England. How come these guys don't have this? And he started to watch what these people ate, and they ate huge amounts of tubers, yams. And he used to actually go out into the fields and look at their bowel movements, and they would have termite mound bowel movements. Huge. And he said, son of a gun, it's the fiber that these guys are eating that's preventing colon cancer. And so he came back to England, and quite frankly, England didn't have a whole lot of these sorts of foods. Not a lot of sweet potatoes, a lot of other tubers in England. But England had a lot of insoluble fiber in wheat, in oats. And he didn't know that insoluble fiber is totally different than soluble fiber that's in tubers. And he didn't know that the butyrate producing bacteria that were responsible for all these wonderful things that were happening to the Africans can't use insoluble fiber. But cereal companies thought this was great news. And if you've ever noticed, cereal companies jumped on the fiber bandwagon. And since cereal companies use grains as their main fiber, it's no wonder that we see this emphasis on whole grain bread on whole grain muffins. What if I told you your bones.
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On high fiber muffins, on rice bran muffins, on wheat bran muffins, on oat bran muffins. There's no soluble fiber. It's all the wrong kind of fiber. And even if there was the right kind of fiber, as anyone who's read any of my books or watched this know, that these grains contain lectins, which literally are like razor blades. So you've got a one, two punch, your colon cells are starving to death, and then you eat razor blades and slice them. And it's no wonder that we have this incidence of rapid increase of colon cancer. Okay, so the answer is, well, let's just swallow the butyrate and that'll fix things. I had the president and founder of Pendulum Life, maker of butyrate producing bacterial probiotic products, on this podcast and she used a very great analogy that I'll share with you again today. So let's suppose I'm carrying a suitcase with a million dollars in $1 bills in the back of a pickup truck going down the freeway and we hit a bump and the suitcase flies out of the pickup truck, lands on the freeway, springs open, and the million hundred dollar bills go flying around the freeway. And of course, everybody stops their car and starts picking up $1 bills. And everybody gets a few dollars, but nobody gets rich. Now that's exactly what happens when you take a butyrate supplement. Butyrate needs to be in the colon to feed the colon cells. When you swallow butyrate, I'm sorry, the suitcase springs open and everybody gets a little bit of butyrate, but the guys who need it are way down the line and they don't get anything. So it's completely dependent on delivering the butyrate where it needs to go. Now you can make butyrate with all the things I'VE talked about before. You not only have to have butyrate producing bacteria, but you have to give them not only soluble fiber, but you have to give them precursors for butyrate, other short chain fatty acids. And those are in the presence of fermented foods, particularly vinegars. And I've had a full Instagram post on the benefits of vinegars in improving colon health and your health. So the effects of this are so far reaching that I can't even begin to start. So where do you start? Well, I'm a big fan of taking butyrate producing bacterial capsules, no question about it. But I'm also a big fan of getting the precursors for making butyrate into you. Those are fermented foods, those are vinegars, and you have to have soluble fiber, not insoluble fiber. And that's available in lots of great foods. You can get inulin in all the chicory family vegetables, like radicchio, like Belgian endive, like chicory. You can get inulin in asparagus. You can get inulin in artichokes and artichoke hearts. You can get great amounts of soluble fiber in okra. You can get great amount of soluble fiber in root vegetables, particularly like yams or sweet potatoes. So the options are endless, but you got to get them into your system. Now, is there a way to get butyrate delivered where it needs to be? Yeah, but you've got to nano encapsulate butyrate. So you've got to get butyrate where the action is. You can make it yourself through the ways I told you to do. Or if you're going to get butyrate, make sure it's a nano encapsulated form that's literally delivering that million dollar suitcase to where it's needed. And that's the actual colon cells. Without that, you're wasting your money. Now, how long does it take to fix all this? That's the thing. There is no quick fix. This takes time to repair the cell lining of your colon. I used to think that we could fix damaged leaky gut in a couple weeks. I was very naive. Now I've been at this for 25 years and we now have ways of measuring how the lining of your gut is doing, how leaky it is, how healthy it is. And it can take minimum of three months, six months, nine months, a year. I've even seen people take two years. Recently we had a young man with severe fibromyalgia that it's taken four years of concentrated effort to repair his gut and restore his intestinal health. Why is that? Because quite honestly, we should have a tropical rainforest of over 10,000 different species of bacteria in our gut. And quite frankly, some of us are devoid of all but a few strains of bacteria. In fact, some people who take an antibiotic for a urinary tract infection, it may take two years of taking probiotics to re establish even a meager bacterial flora. The point is, it's a process. The other point is don't give up. It is fixable, it is repairable. And this is why I come to you every week, to give you the tricks so that you're not one of those persons who gets the bad news at 35 that you have stage four colon cancer.