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Hey, guys, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to the show. Each and every week, we dive deep into the science and principles behind how you can experience a health breakthrough physically, mentally and spiritually. And today we're talking about one of your body's most important organ systems. And this is important for everybody, whether you're looking to reverse autoimmune disease or promote longevity or help even counsel someone else in their health. You have an organ system, by the way. It's not just an organ, it's actually a community, an army of microbes that are working for you in this system. And this system is important for everything from reversing Hashimoto's to fighting cancer to helping you prevent long Covid or reversing long Covid. Almost every health condition you can imagine is tied to this system and this organ system within the body. And it is your gut microbiome. And today I'm going to be walking through the things destroying your gut microbiome. Many of these things are very surprising. And I'll be going through the top diet, herbs and lifestyle medicine tips that can help you heal your gut for good experience, breakthrough, and so many more surprising things on today's show. Before I dive in though, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the link in the show notes to subscribe to my weekly wellness newsletter to get my my top tips for natural healing delivered straight to your inbox. Now, I do want to start off saying this is not something I share often, but I had leaky gut and a major gut microbiome issue my first two years when I was running my medical practice, I ran a functional medicine practice in Nashville, Tennessee and I was working so many hours a week and probably close to 60 to 70. And I remember getting to the point to where all of a sudden I started having some digestive issues. I started having blo, I started having some loose stool, some skin issues. And I thought, what's going on here? I thought I was eating perfectly and I ran into a Chinese medicine doctor who had told me, you're having a gut issue and it's due to stress. And I started to learn more and more about how to get to the root of my issues and heal my gut. And I was able to completely reverse my gut microbiome issues and leaky gut in about, I'd say, 30 to 90 days. And then I went and wrote a book on the topic. It was a best selling book nationally called Eat Dirt. And in this book I went through the top steps to help heal leaky gut. And this was something that I did in my practice, and I helped tens of thousands of patients reverse autoimmune disease, leaky gut issues, and a number of other health problems. And part of it was due to me learning how to heal my own gut. And I have so much of a heart for people that are dealing with these gut issues. You know, one of my best friends, Jordan Rubin, had ulcerative colitis, crohn's disease, lost 90 pounds and was in a wheelchair. He almost died due to his gut health, and his life was saved when he learned about a diet and lifestyle practices that could help heal his gut. I'll share some of that as well today. I do want to stop here and also say this. If you've got a gut issue, that doesn't just mean you're going to have gut symptoms. So for instance, you think of gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, some sort of gut issue. If you have leaky gut or a microbiome issue, it's not just that you might have a gut issue and your only symptom is autoimmune disease or chronic pain or hypothyroidism. Those all start in the gut. And most people tend to think, well, hey, if I've got an issue, if I've got a thyroid diagnosis, if I have a liver diagnosis, if I have a brain diagnosis like Alzheimer's, those issues are those organs malfunctioning. Note, it tends to be that there's a gut issue which then affects that organ system. And so the reality is, almost no matter what you're struggling with, the first area of your body that's affected is your gut. Now, I do want to mention there is another system that tends to be affected just as much, and that is your nervous system or your neuroendocrine system. And so I think there are really two main hormones that are impacted for most people causing their disease issues. The first thing is your nervous system, which then tends to cause cortisol release, which is then your hormonal system, your neuroendocrine system, that tends to be related to cortisol. And the other one is your gut, which tends to be related to insulin release, and that's poor diet. But if you have a medical issue, rather than running to whatever organ or disease you're diagnosed with first, you tend to need to focus on your gut or your neuroendocrine system if you want to get to the root of the problem. Now back to the gut. Your gut houses approximately 70% of your immune system and a Large portion of your immune cells reside in what's called your galt G A L T. That stands for gut associated lymphoid tissue, which helps your body fight off pathogens and infections. And this gut is home to around 30 to 100 trillion microbes. Now, that's around double to 10 times more bacteria than human cells in your body, most likely. And these microbes play a role in digestion, metabolism, immune regulation, even mood. In fact, I was reading a recent medical study that said probably one of the top supplements you can take are foods you can eat to support weight loss and reaching your ideal body composition. So being more lean and fit is taking a probiotic supplement or eating more probiotic foods. Because your gut is responsible for absorbing nutrients, it's responsible for convert things in your body, it's responsible for creating certain nutrients that stoke your metabolism. And so keeping your gut healthy is crucial for everything from longevity to even fighting cancer to things like weight loss. Now, here are some other important facts about your gut. Your gut microbiome contains over 1000 different species of bacteria and microbes. Now listen, it's not just bacteria as well. I do want to mention this. It's bacteria, it's viruses, it's parasites, it's yeast, it's fungi. So your body or your gut is just beaming with different types of microbes which actually help you survive. They help you adapt to your environment. And some of these microbes and bacteria are known as probiotics, while others are harmful. They're known as pathogenic microbes. And you really want to have a balance in your body. What happens is if you don't have enough good bacteria like probiotics, the bad take over. And that's where you get things like Candida. And that's when you start to have inflammation throughout your gut, which then causes inflammation throughout your body. And so you really want to make sure that your microbe is balanced. We're seeing this with more and more research today that when people are dealing with health issues, it's a gut issue, not an organ issue or another organ, as I mentioned, like a thyroid or a liver or even, even your reproductive organs. Now I want to go through though, the biggest signs of poor gut health that people are ignoring today. If you're dealing with issues like bloating, brain fog, food sensitivity, skin issues, fatigue, autoimmune conditions, these tend to be related to poor gut health, even chronic pain like rheumatoid arthritis, that's an autoimmune disease, to where the body is getting in a cycle of Inflammation that starts in the gut, which then is affecting your joints. Now, I do want to go through some other signs, though, that tend to be maybe less gut related in a minute. Now I want to hit more on the gut related for just a few, and then we'll get into, hey, this is a gut issue. But they're not gut symptoms. So here are signs. Number one sign you've got a gut issue again are digestive issues. It's bloating, it's gas, it's diarrhea, it's constipation. In addition, though, food sensitivities, reactions to gluten, dairy or other foods. Nutrient deficiencies such as poor absorption of vitamin B12, iron and magnesium, and then chronic inflammation, joint pain, muscle aches, swelling. Here's another big one, brain fog. If you're dealing with brain fog issues, it almost always starts in the gut. This could be trouble focusing. Memory issues, mental fatigue. Those are some of the biggest signs of brain fog. Skin issues, eczema, acne, rosacea, rashes, psoriasis, Autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus. Mood disorders like anxiety, depression and irritability. Here's some more frequent infections, such as weak immune system, recurring colds or Lyme disease, mold toxicity, Epstein Barr. These are all signs of long Covid fatigue, sugar cravings, headaches. These are all warning signs that you have a gut issue. Now, I want to answer a question that I get frequently. Somebody just asked me this this week. They said, Dr. Axe, how long does it take to heal the gut? The truth is, it varies. Now, I've had many, many people where we've completely reversed their gut issues in just 30 days if they followed the exact right diet, their exact right treatment protocol, which we'll get into at the end here. But others may even take months to years if they've done a lot of damage to their gut. And again, there are a lot of factors in terms of how much of a transformation are you going to make? Are you taking all the right nutrients? There's also lifestyle factors. There's no doubt that stress really damages our gut as much as diet does. I want to give you an example of this. I've taken care of thousands of patients with inflammatory bowel disease like ibs. And what will cause them to have an IBS flare up, where they might have loose stool and just major stomach intestinal pain and feel like a wreck? What will cause them to feel that pain tends to be eating gluten or dairy or some sort of Very poor diet. But what causes that to also happen is if they're going through relationship struggles, if they have a type of stress from maybe going through a fight with their spouse, or they're worried about their kids, or there's workplace stress. And so stress and poor diet are the biggest factors disrupting the gut microbiome. Now, there's other things as well I'll hit on in a minute, and some of these are going to be really surprising. Before I do that though, I want to mention that gut health problems are rising in people. In fact, when you look at the last 30 to 50 years, the issues of gut related conditions have continued to go up almost every single year. And According to a 2023 study in the medical journal Molecules, they found the most common reason that people struggle with gut health problems include stress, an unhealthy diet, excessive alcohol consumption, antibiotics, and taking prescription medications. Now, let's take a closer look at some of these factors. Let's look at medications, for instance, especially antibiotics, birth control pills and NSAIDs. Antibiotics wipe out not just the bad bacteria in your gut, they wipe out the good bacteria. Use of antibiotics has risen by another 16% over the past 10 years. Now, it already been going through the roof in growth, but even in the last 10 years, it's continued to grow. And this presents a problem for bacterial resistant strains of bacteria like Clostridium difficile infections, which so many people have today. And so we're seeing all of these other types of bacteria and viruses get smarter and they become more resistant to the antibiotics we're taking, and they become even more damaging to our bodies. And so we see this a lot with the use of these antibiotic drugs today. And again, I want to say, I think one of the greatest forms of malpractice today in the entire medical profession is doctors that prescribe antibiotics when somebody has a viral infection. And did you know that when you have a child come in with an issue like a common cold or a flu or an ear infection, over 90% of the time, it's actually close to 98% of the time that that infection is a virus. And an antibiotic, an antibacterial medication can never kill a virus. And so I actually think it's malpractice when doctors are prescribing that, because doctors take an oath first do no harm. When they prescribe an antibiotic for a child, a two year old, a five year old, they take that antibiotic, they're wiping out so many of these good bacteria. And did you know Some of those good bacteria, those kids will never get back. And then that puts these kids on a course once you wipe up that good bacteria, to having food sensitivities, to having learning disorders, to having eczema, to having future autoimmune diseases that have a greater cancer diagnosis in the future. And so the amount of harm that our physicians in mainstream medicine are doing today to our kids when they prescribe an antibiotic drug, it's the most overprescribed drug out there today are antibiotics. Now listen, there's a time and a place for antibiotics to save a life, but it's not for the common cold, it's not for the common flu, and it's not for an ear infection in 98% of cases. And again, we're disrupting and destroying where 70% of the immune system lives in our kids and adults today. And if you've ever taken a prescription antibiotic drug, one of the most important things you need to do is focus on healing your gut microbiome, creating more diversity and greater growth of good bacteria in your gut if you truly want to heal any of the conditions we've talked about today, but especially issues related to the gut in the immune system. Now, the next medication that is causing major harm today are NSTEDs. Those are non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen as an example. This weakens your intestinal lining, leading to leaky gut. In fact, listen to this study. A survey found that around 63% of US adults reported using NSAIDs within the past year. And about 40% of adults over 65 found fill at least one or more NSAID prescriptions annually. And according to another study, they found this, that when you take an NSAID drug, it damages your gut microbiome and causes leaky gut in many, many cases. And so every time you're taking a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug, you're damaging that gut lining, causing leaky gut. Now here's the medication that surprises the most people. Birth control pills, oral contraceptive pills are taken by about 25% of U.S. women between the ages of 15 to 44. And a research study published in the Journal of Microbiology Society indicates this. These pills influence gut health by altering the composition and function of the gut microbiome. Because what it does is when estrogen goes up, it acts as a type of fertilizer for bad bacteria to overgrow, especially yeast. So different types of microbes like to feed off of different things. And so when you have a woman who's eating let's say lots of blueberries, okay, lots of berries, lots of sweet potatoes. You'll have more of the good bacteria thrive and grow. When you're eating a lot of processed sugar, more yeast grows in a very similar way. When you're doing things that alter your hormones and estrogen increases, you're causing more of the yeast to grow, like Candida. And that's one of the reasons why birth control pills are so dangerous and unhealthy for women long term, is that when you have all that yeast and Candida start to overgrow, it also decreases nutrient absorption. And so those women that take birth control pills, they absorb less B vitamins in things to support actually even thyroid function. Which is why when women take birth control, their chance of getting hypothyroidism goes up dramatically. And I want to say this, I hit on three of these medications, but here's the reality. There's not a single conventional medication that doesn't do some level of damage to your gut. So you want to do almost everything you can to take a vitamin, an herb, a peptide, or some sort of natural treatment or therapy instead of taking a conventional medication when it comes to your gut health. Now, in addition to drugs being very, very damaging to our gut, the biggest thing that's damaging our gut today, along with stress, is inflammatory foods. And some of the biggest culprits include sugar, refined grains, seed oils, gluten, dairy, these highly processed foods. When you strip these foods of fiber and nutrients, like when you're doing white bread or potato chips, it acts like sugar in your body. For the most part, it starts to feed the bad bacteria. And the other thing is, gluten itself as a protein, is very inflammatory. So is dairy. Now, if. If you take a grain like a wheat or a rye or a barley that has gluten, and you bring it through a sprouting process or a fermentation process, it actually breaks gluten down in a way that you can now absorb it. And it's non inflammatory for most people. In fact, there's studies done on people that have celiac's disease. That's a major sensitivity to gluten. And when they consumed sourdough bread versus regular bread, the group that had sourdough had zero reactions even though they ate gluten. The group that consumed the actual non sprouted or fermented gluten, I want to say, had well over 50% of the time. It's closer to 70% of the time they had a reaction. And so we see this according to the medical literature. And dairy is the very same thing. When you're doing raw dairy that is fermented like a raw goat's milk yogurt, it's typically not going to cause a reaction or cause it to very, very few people. However, it's conventional dair, the casein, that protein in dairy can cause autoimmune reactions and leaky gut as well. So your diet really matters here. And I'll get into more specific dietary principles here in a minute. Now, I also want to go through toxicity and even our water supply. You know, poor water quality. If you're drinking tap water, it contains heavy metals, chlorine, fluoride, microplastics, and chlorine and fluoride in particular disrupt gut bacteria, while heavy metals of course, also contribute. And that's not an all water supply. But again, chlorine and fluoride is in pretty much all water supplies across the board. And a 2024 study in the medical journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology found this, that microplastics in tap water can alter the gut microbiome and also impact intestinal function. They can increase intestinal permeability, known as leaky gut. They trigger inflammation and cause oxidative stress, which is going to cause you to age more quickly and your organs to age more quickly. So even these microplastics today in our water supply. So we see today that everything from our water supply to medications to diet, all of these things are adding up. And I want to mention another thing that probably isn't talked about much that's been damaging our guts a lot more the past five years. And it's this over sanitation. When we went through Covid, the amount of people using disinfectants, sprays, using hand gels, a lot of these have antibiotics in them like triclosan and these chemicals. These antibiotics kill off the good bacteria on our skin and in our guts. They weaken our immune system. You actually want to have a certain level of exposure to bacteria. This is why that every medical study shows you want your kids to play in the dirt. You want your kids to get dirty. This is why kids innately, they don't even know they're doing it. They put everything in their mouths. I have a one year old right now. You know, we were outside recently and she literally took an entire festival where we have a garden, this garden in our yard, and she just put an entire thing of dirt in her mouth. When we're at the beach, she's putting sand in her mouth. There's nothing she doesn't put in her mouth. God created her body to start to do that so she can expose, expose, expose. It's like she's getting a natural immunization. We know what vaccines are and those types of immunizations where we're putting a foreign disease that's synthetic in a way, man made into our bodies. God created us to naturally have exposure, especially from the years of one to two years old, where kids are getting these micro exposures to dirt and microbes and yeast and all these things, and their immune system is getting stronger and stronger. Stroker. As long as they're doing micro doses, okay, and not going completely overboard, but it's good for their immune system. And what happens if you don't do that? If your kids aren't spending a lot of time outside, especially, which is where they're going to get their greatest level of true immunization and exposure, what happens if that doesn't happen is their chance of having allergies and sensitivities goes up dramatically. And what happens is if they don't have these exposures and later on they start to get them, they'll start to have more. What would tend to have only caused a micro reaction to your body. It'll start to have a larger reaction because your body's on high alert because it's never been exposed to these things. You want to kind of have these many exposures over time and not a big exposure later on, which then your body has a more negative reaction to. And so you really want to make sure that your kids eat dirt. In addition, here's what we're seeing with a lot of our gut issues today. Autoimmune disease. If you have autoimmune disease, in almost every single case of autoimmune disease, you have leaky gut. It's a gut issue. And this is true with Hashimoto's. It's true with rheumatoid arthritis. It's true with lupus. It's true with many of these gut issues. And so, and here's how this works, by the way, a gut health and autoimmune disease. Let's say, for instance, you take a lot of. You took a run of antibiotics and you're on a medication and you've been exposed to glyphosate and you have eaten a poor diet, okay? So your gut has a lot of inflammation. You start to have like. Imagine your gut is a fishing net or a kitchen strainer and it gets a rip or hole in it. Okay? Well, now when you're trying to catch fish or noodles, like in a kitchen strainer, and there's a big hole in it, things start passing through. Well, that's what your gut lining is like. Your gut lining is like a fishing net. It's supposed to allow small things through and not bigger things. Well, when you have bigger things pass through that aren't supposed to, like undigested food proteins like gluten and casein, or toxins such as glyphosate and heavy metals or certain medications, or a number of things. When those pass into your bloodstream and shouldn't be there, your body says, whoa, this is too big. This shouldn't be here. It sets off an immune reaction, and that's inflammatory. And when that happens over and over and over again, eventually your body will say, okay, we've been trying to eliminate this gluten or casein, and we haven't been able to get rid of the problem here for three years now. Okay, now we need to try something new. Let's not just go after gluten now. Let's go after any protein in the body that looks similar to gluten. And sometimes that's your own body's proteins, peptides, and your body's own protein. And so your body will start attacking its thyroid, causing Hashimoto's, or your body will start attacking your skin, causing rosacea or eczema or psoriasis. Or your body will start attacking its joints, like rheumatoid arthritis. Does that make sense? So your body will now start attacking other proteins. So your body is attacking itself, and that's what's going on with your immune system. Now, the good news is you can reverse this. I've helped tens of thousands of patients reverse their autoimmune disease using food, diet, and lifestyle medicine. And so you can do it. But the root cause of autoimmune disease actually starts in the gut. You know, this is something that I've cared for a lot of patients. I have a telemedicine clinic, a virtual practice. It's called the Health Institute. And. And I've helped a lot of patients start to address this via the practices and programs online. By the way, if you're a person who is looking for a practitioner that can help you, you can go to thehealthinstitute.com and watch one of our training videos and then even work with a practitioner on helping you reverse that. But I did want to mention that, because people ask all the time, well, Dr. Ax, I have this do you know Practitioner to help walk me through that. And yet you can go to the health institute and check that out. Now, I do want to mention here another big thing, and we've already talked about this. That causes these gut in microbiome disruption, and that's chronic stress. Just as much as poor diet and toxins, chronic stress will cripple your gut and then your immune system. And what happens when you're under a lot of chronic stress? Cortisol is released. And that when cortisol is released, your body starts pulling energy from other areas. And your body, your gut is not as good as repairing itself. And when your body is not as good at repairing itself, it actually weakens the tissue. So when cortisol is released and your adrenals are overloaded and you're in a fight or flight state, your gut lining gets weaker and it also slows your digestion down and it starts to cause leaky gut. It causes these sort of holes, they're called tight junctions open up in your gut, creating more autoimmune issues. So for a lot of people, if you have a diet issue, the first hormone that tends to be affected is insulin. But if you have a stress issue, it's cortisol that then affects insulin, which then affects your gut negatively is what tends to happen. And so, just so you know, another key factor to healing your gut is dealing with chronic stress. Now there is a study published on this recently in the Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology. And here's what they found. Exposure to stress results in alterations on the brain gut connection or known as the brain gut axis. This ultimately leads to development of a broad array of these GI issues like inflammatory bowel disease. But even basic things we see that are more common, like ulcers, acid reflux gas and bloating and constipation are also affected with stress. And another big thing that will contribute to this is not we talked about stress is alcohol intake. Most people think, oh, alcohol just affects the liver. Well, according to more recent studies, no alcohol damages the gut lining as well. Now, if you had a little bit of wine, something like a half a glass of red wine, it's really not going to affect your body that negatively. But if you have more than one glass of alcohol or if you drink nightly, it really starts to inflame your gut lining. And so you really want to be careful of the amount and how often you drink alcohol. And there are plenty of studies showing this, that alcohol actually damages the liver and the gut and the pancreas, basically your entire digestive system. Now, I want to hit on one toxin in particular that is probably causing the most gut microbiome issues. And it is glyphosate. This is the pesticide or herbicide that's found in Roundup. Now here's what a 2023 study found in regards to glyphosate consumption, even in very small doses. And by the way, what was amazing about this study is they found, even in doses that were found to be considered safe by US Standards, it alters your gut microbiome and disrupts and damages many gut bacteria. These changes were linked to, in the study inflammation of your gut, which led to poor nutrient absorption and activation of pro inflammatory immune cells, which then are linked to autoimmune disease. And so we see glyphosate, which again is on so many foods today, damaging our gut microbiomes. And here's the other crazy part. There's another study that found that glyphosate probiotic can live in your gut for years. It stays there for a long time. This is why there's actually certain types of probiotics I'll mention here in a few minutes that specifically actually helps your gut detoxify from this Roundup, this glyphosate. And so there's a very specific type of probiotic you want to take to actually help your body detoxify this from your gut microbiome. I mean, and for some of you, your gut is essentially think about it like this, it's bankrupt, it's missing. It's not only it's in debt. So for many of you, you need to do a lot of probiotics for many years, and sometimes you want to start small and work your way up. But for a lot of you, you want to really focus on building and building and building your gut microbiome as much as you can over time. Now, if you have certain issues like histamine intolerance, you've got to be very strategic about how you do it and do it in slower. But if you don't have histamine intolerance, many of you can dive right in and do higher doses pretty early on. Now, a few more things I want to hit into in terms of the things causing leaky gut. And then we're going to get into the solutions in terms of the diet, the supplements, the herbs and the lifestyle. But here's another one. Additives and food dyes, artificial food additives, emulsifiers, preservatives, artificial colors. These have also been shown to cause and then mold toxicity. Here's another one. Mold exposure and mycotoxins, whether this be from food or mold in your home, triggers gut inflammation. And these mycotoxins have actually released a toxin called ochratoxin. And it's been shown to increase intestinal permeability as well and cause symptoms like bloating, food sensitivities, and chronic fatigue. This is why people with mold exposure also get gut issues. And again, brain fog and bloating, it affects their gut. You would think that, okay, if you're exposed to mold that's airborne, that would affect your lungs mostly. Well, it does affect your lungs, but it also passes into your gut. And those are the biggest areas that tend to be affected is your lungs and your gut, which then affects your brain. If you've ever been exposed to mold, and there's a very specific way you want to detox it from that as well. And, you know, so I've seen this in clinical practice. I've had many celebrities reach out to me and some well known people with leaky gut microbiome issues. And I have gone through specific plans to help them reverse what they're dealing with. And I've done this with many people. Now, one person in particular I want to mention who's gone through something, he shared it publicly that I haven't worked with. I actually worked with one of his co stars, but it's Ashton Kutcher. He's a celebrity from that 70s show. And he actually said publicly he faced severe leaky gut and autoimmune issues after following an extreme diet. He went on a diet for a period of time of eating only fruits and nuts and seeds to prep for a role. And because of this diet, he developed vasculitis. This is inflammation of his blood vessels. And he started having issues with his sight, his hearing that stem from inflammation. Isn't it crazy that you can have a gut issue and it's causing issues with your nervous system, your eyesight and your hearing? And he had to completely rebuild his gut health with dietary changes and medical support. And listen, you'd think, oh, he's eating mostly fruits and nuts. Doesn't that sound healthy? No, raw foods. Lots of raw nuts and raw seeds in raw fruit. That's not good for your gut. I'll go. That surprises most people, but that's not, you know, raw foods are not good for your gut. You want to eat mostly cooked foods. And this goes all the way back thousands of years ago. We're talking about Hippocrates, we're talking about Chinese medicine, we're talking about Ayurveda. You know, I even think about, you know, ancient Jewish medicine. If, you know, some of the roots there and this, some of it's biblical, some of it's more just the way the ancient Jews ate. You know, there's something called Jewish penicillin, which is chicken soup. And so when somebody was sick in the past and ill, which, remember, starts in the gut, they would have people consume things like chicken soup and ginger tea, lots of soups and teas, lots of liquids that are cooked. And so if you have a gut issue, do not be eating a lot of salads, do not be doing a lot of smoothies. You don't want to do cold food. You want to do raw foods. You want to do warm and nourishing cooked food. A lot of cooked meat, a lot of cooked vegetables, maybe a little bit of rice or sweet potato as carbs, maybe a little bit of baked fruit. Cooked fruit like baked pears and applesauce. This helps heal leaky gut. Getting to the root of these issues. And I've had so many patients who have come in who thought they were doing really well by eating lots of salads and lots of superfood smoothies while they were actually destroying their gut health, making themselves worse. If you've been doing everything right, eating clean, exercising, but somehow you're still not feeling your best, your energy is dragging, your memory is slipping, and it's frustrating because you know there's more to your potential. Well, what if the issue isn't just in your routine, but it's deep down inside your cells? You know you're investing in the best supplements, working out regularly and sticking to a clean diet. But if your cells are stuck in what's called cell danger response, all, all the hard work might not be paying off as it should. Think of your cells like a house under renovation. You can bring in the highest quality materials, like the best supplements and clean foods. But if the workers inside the house or are on lockdown because of a storm, nothing gets done. The materials just pile up unused. That's what happens when your cells are in cdr. They can't fully use the good stuff you're giving them. Getting out of cdr, the cell danger response is the key to unlocking your body's full potential. When your cells are no longer in protective mode, they can finally use the nutrients, hormones and energy you're working so hard to provide. That's when everything starts to click. Your energy improves, your workouts become more efficient, and you start to feel like yourself again. Go to BeyondBloodwork.com to learn how to break free from cell danger response and make the effort pay off. Now I want to walk you through right now the three phases of gut healing and how to truly heal leaky gut. Heal your gut microbiome help you overcome if you have damage from antibiotics, damage from birth control pills, damage from NSAIDs damage. How to start to heal your gut. Here's phase one, remove and detox. Let's talk about if we did a 30 day healing process. Now for some of you it may take a full year, it may take three months. But let's go through what a 30 day would look like. The first phase is remove and detox. Step one is about removing what's actually damaging your gut and starting to detoxify the harmful substances. Here's what you need to eliminate. Processed foods, refined sugars, refined grains and gluten, seed oils and dairy temporarily. Also alcohol and at least cutting back on caffeine. You can have a little bit in the morning if you tolerate caffeine well, but you don't want to be drinking it throughout the day. You got to remove these and non organic foods that might be laden with glyphosate or genetically modified foods. You want to get all of those completely out of your diet. And raw foods and very cold foods and cooling foods like ice cream, get those out of your diet. Raw nuts, raw seeds. That's phase one and what you want to do. Also I want to mention this. You want to drink clean water. Don't continue to drink tap water with chlorine and fluoride in it. Get a really good filtered water or spring water is great as well is going to be important. Now I want to go through some other things we can start to do as well to naturally detoxify your gut. One is exercise. And really it's almost any form of exercise. Now let me say this, you don't want to over exercise. Did you know that doing marathon training, over two hours of CrossFit a day triathlon training where you're doing a lot, a lot of cardio, that actually causes leaky gut and makes your gut worse. But if you're walking, if you're doing regular weight training, let's say for an hour or less, if you are doing a little bit of interval training, if you're doing regular cardio, that's less than 45 minutes especially those are all good for your gut for the most part. So you want to move, you want to sweat. That's going to help detoxify. It's going to move your lymphatic system. Getting on a mini rebounder, that's great as well. But just walking, playing pickleball, swimming, cycling, those are all great as well. So you want to move a little bit. And then in addition, an infrared sauna is amazing. This is going to help move your system. And you want to warm your body. You can get an infrared sauna. You can get an infrared blanket, infrared heating pad. You can do a little bit of heat around your stomach, around your belly button and low back. In fact, if you ever go to certain acupuncturists, they will put a red light over your belly button area, which is really going to be your small and large intestine area, over your intestines, and they will put red light over your low back. And that's because that's going to help heal your gut, okay? It's going to bring more blood flow, more circulation. And so that's something great you can do is get more infrared heat, and you can buy an infrared heating bat on Amazon easily and just keep that over that region of your body to help heal and bring blood flow as well, which can be very, very healing for a lot of people. Now, I want to mention a little bit more about infrared light and the benefits. Um, it's been shown in clinical studies to reduce inflammation in the gut and oxidative stress. In fact, there was a published study in the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. And here's what they found. They said as the primary inducer of circadian rhythms, light, especially infrared light, can influence the human intestinal microbiome. They said photobiomodulation therapy, which is red light therapy or infrared light, can stimulate healing, relieve pain, reduce inflammation, and affect the circadian rhythm and gut microbiome beneficially. Isn't that amazing? New studies are being released showing that red light therapy and infrared light therapy has an incredible healing capacity on the gut microbiome. So this is why so many of my patients, I recommend they get in an infrared sauna or they get an infrared heating pad, and they use that healing light regularly. And by the way, let me tell you something that's even more powerful than that. Sunbathing. The sun gives off not only near infrared light, all forms of red light and blue light and green light, the full spectrum of colors that actually help heal your gut. Now, I do want to say, listen, you don't want to burn your skin ever. It's bad for your skin and bad for aging. But you do want to get regular vitamin D and Regular sunshine on your skin and especially getting that stomach area and low back area, getting that direct light actually helps heal your body. Now, when you can't get in the sun again, this is where photobiomodulation therapy, like doing a red light, better red light panels, has tremendous benefits as well. Or again, infrared sauna or just a red heating pad. So if financially you have the means to get something like an infrared sauna, or go to a regenerative therapy center where you can regularly get in the sauna or do a red light bed, or if you can't afford that or you want to be, you're just being financially conscious, then buy a red light heating pad. An infrared heating pad on Amazon. I think the one that Chelsea and I bought has about. It's like $150. And that's a great choice. It's a great option to do something like that as well. I do want to mention, and this is something that I get questions about all the time, Dr. Axe, should I or shouldn't I fast if I want to heal my gut? And the answer is it really depends on your unique physiology. I have some patients do a certain level of fasting if they have gut issues. I have others that don't. But let me tell you what I do with most patients. I have them eat within a 10 hour window. And so what I'll have them do is eat breakfast around 8am, I'll have them eat lunch around noon and I'll have them eat dinner, an early dinner, around 5 o'clock or as early as we can, ideally. And so that puts you in a ten hour eating window. And so they're not snacking at night, they're not eating the moment they wake up in the morning. Maybe they're waiting an hour or hour and a half or two. But that really puts somebody in a really good position where they're not eating for 14 whole hours. And that's really good for most people. And I think for most people that need to heal, whether it's hormonally or their gastrointestinal system, I think for those people, they're best off not doing a really a six or four or two hour fast. I think fasting. Now listen, I have had some men that were fairly resilient and they did well with intermittent fasting and more extreme fasting. So for some patients, they do well with it. But the majority of my patients, even more so women, I found that that intense fasting every single day is too hard on their hormonal system. And it's not ideal for their healing. So again, I really like about that 10 hour window or so where they're still not eating quite a bit. There's still four hour gaps though, so they can still get the right amount of calories in and that tends to be really, really good. And I've seen the best results in healing leaky gut following that protocol. But again, here's the key. Listen to your body if you feel like and you notice, hey, you know what, I do have energy, I do feel good. Fasting is agreeing with you, then you can fast more than that. Or if you feel like, listen, I really need to eat even earlier and I need to do more of a 12 hour eating window then, hey, listen to your body with that, okay? And the other thing I would say is also listen to the foods that agree with you or don't agree with you. You. I have some people I've treated with leaky gut syndrome or microbiome issues and their body responds incredibly well to rice and potatoes, those sorts of carbs. And then there are others that don't respond to those disaccharide carbs and potatoes or to grains at all. In some, it's the top food that helps them heal. Like in Chinese medicine rice congee, where you're cooking rice overnight towards mush. It's the number one food they heal from. I've had other patients who if they touch any type of dairy, even if it's raw and fermented, they get sick. And then I have one of my closest friends, Jordan Rubin, who reversed inflammatory bowel disease where almost the only thing he ate for three months was raw goat's milk kefir. That was the number one food he ate and he reversed ibd. So listen, all the advice I'm giving you tends to be good for the majority. But listen, remember you are a unique individual and you need to pay attention to what your body does well with. Listen, just because your best friend did the diet and they respond well to a food and saw good results does not mean that that's also going to work for you. Okay? So what I'm sharing with you, these are principles that work for most people, but you still need to adjust and listen to your body along the way. Now I do want to mention here, as well as we're talking about detoxing and cleansing your body, we're still in phase one here. You also need to be aware of things like mold or infections in Candida. So many people today have microbe overgrowth of things like Candida or sibo, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And this is where stress also plays an important role. If you have sibo, the number one issue there is that you're too busy, you need to back off, you need to relax, you need to eat very slowly and give your gut time to heal. And for some people, they need to eat more of what we call low fad diet. And they need to be careful with things like vinegar and like doing even probiotic rich foods because it might impact them negatively. But for many of them, what I found is doing soil based probiotics actually are what work best for them. And then they also need to eat things like jasmine. Rice tends to be very good in a slow cooker where it's mush and chicken and doing those sort of bland, easy to eat foods on a regular basis, they tend to do very well with those. Okay, so biggest things we need to do in phase one, remember, remove the foods that cause inflammation, try and remove the medications that are causing inflammation, try and cleanse your body and the supplement. The number one supplement you want to take in phase one is a soil based organism probiotic. I would recommend a probiotic that's very high dose, very strong, and a type of probiotic. It's called AB22. It's known as bacillus subtilis. This specific probiotic acts like a bulldozer of clearing out Candida H. Pylori and bad bacterial overgrowth. And it's the one your body is least likely to have a histamine reaction to. So doing that one is very good. And I would do, you know, five, I would do very high dose. I would do up to a trillion daily, especially if you have an infection to clear it out. So that's phase one. Get rid of the bad. Use probiotics to help start to cleanse out the bad and do things like red light therapy and Fred sauna. Okay, phase two, we've removed all of the toxins, we've removed the things damaging your gut, the inflammatories, and we want to now repair the gut. Days 11 through 20, this you really want to focus on foods that are easy to digest. Number one food for most people is bone broth. Now I do want to mention there's a group of people that have histamine intolerance and they don't even respond well to bone broth, but they will probably respond well to a bone broth protein or a chicken stock. Okay. And so what happens when you cook bone broth a long time or with a lot of vinegar that's when it has more histamine. If you do a very short cook time, like if you make bone broth at home in a pressure cooker for just, let's say an hour or two, that tends to not have that histamine. And again, don't put vinegar in either when you do that. And that sort of bone broth most everyone tolerates, even those with histamine and sibo reactions. I recommend some fermented foods. It could be a little bit of sauerkraut or coconut yogurt, but introduce slowly. If you don't do well with it, then back off and try again later. Just start with even a teaspoon. And if you don't do well, don't keep doing it. Here's another big thing I recommend to heal your gut. Drink a lot of herbal teas. Ginger, peppermint, marshmallow, chamomile, licorice root, astragalus. Doing these herbal teas, warming tea throughout the day is so healing for your gut microbiome. So healing. In fact, I would say it's probably the biggest therapy we are missing today is doing herbal teas to heal our guts. Now, the basis of your diet here as we repair should be soups. Think about just a classic chicken vegetable soup, maybe with a few little tweaks. You're doing organic chicken, you're doing bone broth, you're doing celery, you're doing carrots, if you do okay with them, onions. If you have sibo, then don't do it. Or if you're having too much fermentation, but that you're grating, a little bit of ginger in there, maybe a little bit of sea salt. And if you want to, you tolerate it well, do a little bit of rice, like a basmati or jasmine in there and consume that. And you can eat that almost every meal. Okay, but that's good. A lot of meat and vegetables, okay. That are cooked. But soups, in addition to meat and cooked vegetables, you could steam vegetables. That's wonderful. Again, sweet potatoes and rice are what people tend to do the best with. I mentioned baked pears, applesauce, baked blueberries. And then I would also say a little bit of healthy fat. It could be a little bit of avocado, a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, a little bit of coconut oil, coconut milk. That's sort of the ideal diet if we're really going to heal your gut, is a diet pretty much like that. Okay. If we're going to reverse verse leaky gut and heal Your gut. Microsoft and I would also say so do soups. You could also do a steak that you grill or ground beef made up into a grass fed burger and then do that with some steamed vegetables and maybe a little bit of something like try a hummus or a tahini or something like that with it. Could be very healing. Now there are also very specific nutrients and vitamins you need to heal your gut. And some of the best include zinc. In fact, zinc is known as your body's repair mineral. You have to have it to heal your gut. I would recommend typically 15-30mg daily. Humic and fulvic acid. These are found in certain probiotic supplements. They tend to detoxify and nourish your gut microbiome. This is especially good if you can find some humic acid or fulvic acid in a probiotic supplement as well. Very good for gut healing. L glutamine is an amino acid, typically a white powder doing 5 grams once to twice daily. Aloe vera juice. If you have a lot of heat in your system now if you have IBSD or you stick out your tongue, it's white. Or if you get cold easily, do not do aloe vera. But if you have a lot of heat in your system, aloe can be helpful then. And if not, if you feel cold, you actually want to do more ginger instead of the aloe. But zinc, humic and fulvic acid. L glutamine Probiotics tend to be the top things you want to do to heal your gut. Along with herbs like ginger, licorice root, marshmallow, peppermint, Astragalus are great for gut healing. I also want to mention as you are healing your gut, not to overdo it by over exercising by being too much stress. Remember, I cannot overstate this. Stress is equal to diet and what's disrupting your gut microbiome. So you need to both follow this diet I'm sharing and additionally you need to schedule things you love. You need to have more margin in your life. Going from thing to thing to thing, being busy every single moment of the day is destroying your gut health. Spending more time in nature, going on many, many more walks. I mean walking in nature is so healing for your gut. Meditating, praying, just spending time praying to God, reading your Bible, reading a personal growth book, reading a novel you love and enjoy is healing. Journaling, doing lunch with a best friend, going out and playing pickleball, whatever you love to do, do more of that and create more margin where you're not as busy, okay, that's going to help you heal. And you might say, oh, easier said than done. I have five kids and I'm working and I'm a mom and I've got everything. Listen, at some point, if you don't take care of yourself, it's going to cost you something greatly. I experienced it with my own mom. My mom was this mom growing up and at 41 years old she was diagnosed with breast cancer and then she got put on antidepressants and then anti anxiety drugs and then she was diagnosed with leaky gut and then she had chronic fatigue syndrome and hypothyroidism and she was always exhausted to where she could hardly do anything. That was my mom growing up. And it was because she did that every moment of every day. She was busy doing something and she was always caring for others and not caring for herself. And looking back, I really, I would have been okay if my mom would have done less if she would have had her health, you know, so that's what I would say. If you're in that situation, really think about it, Prioritize. Only say yes to the great, even say no to the good. Just say yes to the great things. Prioritize. Do everything you can to spend time with God, your family, the things that matter most and doing things you love and cut everything else out, okay? That's going to help you heal. You got to nourish yourself and to have good self care if you're going to heal. And here's another big one, sleep. You got to get enough sleep. That's when your body heals and repairs. If you have leaky gut or microbiome issues or autoimmune disease or hypothyroid or any of these issues, your body heals the most. Your gut heals the most when you're sleeping. And you need to have ideally eight to nine hours of sleep a night. Try to go to bed earlier. That's the best way. Okay? Try and go to bed earlier. Have your room dark, have it cold, use a weighted blanket. Once dinner's over, put on this blue blocker. Sunglasses. It's okay if you look silly. I look silly every night when I do it. Okay, this is going to help you heal. Get that deep restful sleep. Okay? Phase three of healing your gut rebuild. Here's some other things that maybe go out of the box or even more extreme to help you heal. Okay? Now I already mentioned this in phase one, but I want to mention it again. Doing probiotics especiallyand let me mention not Just probiotics, but prebiotics and postbiotics. The best probiotic strain for healing leaky gut include number one, Bacillus subtilis and other SBO strains such as Bacillus clausi, bacillus coagulants but get more soil based organisms and then also Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. And there's other people that also like types of Archimecia which I think is beneficial, but not as beneficial as these. But these are really going to help heal your gut. Okay, so you want to find a good probiotic especially with Bacillus subtilis. And you also want to look for good prebiotics like Triphala which is an ancient ayurvedic blend which is very, very good, especially if you have constipation. Marshmallow root mushrooms like reishi are also tremendous. Prebiotic rich foods are very healing as well. And then certain types of fruit, like I mentioned apples, like applesauce is very good as pectin. This is an amazing, amazing prebiotic food that helps heal the gut. You know, There is a 30 day study involving adults with IBS D with confirmed leaky gut and they found that amongst multistrain probiotic supplement significantly improved intestinal permeability. It healed leaky gut in 81.5% of participants with 37% achieving full and complete normalization of their gut microbiome. So think about that. This is rare for a study to be this effective. Nearly 82% of people that took a high quality probiotic supplement saw a great improvement in leaky gut. Wow. There's nothing else you could probably take. I mean, maybe zinc is going to be up there too, but there's almost nothing else you could take that's going to be as effective for healing leaky gut as probiotics. In fact, they're definitely the most effective. They're also probably the most effective at healing autoimmune disease. And that's what's crazy to me is there's so many people with autoimmune disease and they're not taking a quality probiotic. And listen, I'm going to say this again, quality most probiotic supplements are not good. They're garbage. By the time you take the strains, they're dead. And they don't have the most powerful clinically studied strains. So you get what you pay for. I had somebody recently text me that they're doing all the right things. And then they texted me the brand of supplements they were taking. I said, where'd you get that? And they said CVS and it was, they bought it for like $5, like this probiotic. And it's like, no, listen, I hate to say this. If you want to be effective, you need to buy the $50 brand. You got to buy the quality one. And even if you took way less and your budget was way less, well, then parse it out over time and get more via your food. But don't skimp. You want to buy quality. If you're buying any of these supplements, I want to mention the same study as well. So they continued on with this study. Here's what they found. Patients reported when they took this probiotic supplement significant reductions in abdominal pain and diarrhea. And by the end of the study, 96% of participants felt their IBS symptoms had been significantly or satisfactorily alleviated, suggesting that probiotics might be the most promising supplement for healing ibs. Wow, that's amazing. The other thing I mentioned earlier is prebiotics. And you're basically going to get this from eating a lot of cooked or steamed vegetables and fruit like berries and applesauce. For the most part, those, those things. Now onions and garlic and certain nuts and seeds also have good fiber. But you have to be careful with those because for some people it's going to upset your stomach. So if you do nuts or seeds, they should be sprouted and made into a nut butter or some seeds, like ground up flax can be okay for some people, but if your gut's very sensitive, you even want to wait for those for a little bit and focus more on the applesauce and the steamed vegetables. So remember this, in phase three, you are continuing on with the diet. We talked about a lot of cooked meat, especially meat is very easy to digest. A lot of bone broth, some cooked vegetables, some applesauce, maybe some cooked blueberries, maybe some baked pears, those sort of foods. And doing the supplements, especially probiotics, and then also consider things like, you know, acupuncture can be very healing for the gut. We mentioned red light therapy. Chinese medicine can be very healing as well. So working with a practitioner, an acupuncturist, or a functional medicine doc can also help guide you into other strategies for healing. And the Chinese medicine perspective is this is that part of your digestive system. It's working like a fire. It needs to generate heat and have energy to break down food. And it's much easier to break down and digest foods. This is why, if you like smoothies, but you have leaky gut, you want to Stay away from smoothies unless you're doing what I call a warming smoothie. And here's what I have patients do. Rather than the frozen fruit smoothie, in the morning, I have them do something like a sweet potato or pumpkin smoothie. So I will have a patient take either pumpkin, butternut squash or sweet potato and put that in. And then I will have them do a little bit of just water or a little coconut milk. I'll have them put in a little bit of pumpkin pie spice. And then I'll have them put in a scoop of a collagen or a bone broth or stem cell protein, some sort of more collagen or broth based protein, about 20 grams of that. I may have them put in a little bit of a plant based protein or if they tolerate it well, that's a vanilla flavor, let's say, with this recipe. And I have them do it either room temperature or warm. And the fiber that you're going to get in pumpkin or butternut squash or sweet potato is very healing and very good for the gut. Or I have them do applesauce in this smoothie and do the very same recipe with a little pumpkin pie spice or ginger, cardamom, and then doing again the water, maybe a little bit of coconut milk and the same thing, the vanilla powders. And when they do that. So if you want to do a smoothie or a shake, do that. Okay. That's sort of the ideal that you do something like that in the morning. But you want to focus on more warming foods. Soups, stews, cooked vegetables, rice, congee made into a porridge, herbal tea, so you want to warm the body. That's the TCM perspective in the cold foods, the raw foods, ice drinks, salads, smoothies, dairy, fried and greasy foods, excessive sugar, these all overburden the digestive system. You know, a few of the herbals that are most prescribed and recommended in Chinese medicine, I referenced them earlier, such as licorice root and peppermint and ginger and marshmallow. In addition, though, one of the most clinically backed herbs for healing your gut microbiome is astragalus. Astragalus is an herb that strengthens your immune system and your gut and acts as an adaptogen and actually in studies has been shown to help heal intestinal permeability. You can do this as a tea or as part of a supplement. And it's one of my favorites, probably 1000-2000mg daily. In addition, propolis, which is found in honey, if you have leaky gut and want to heal your gut. Manuka honey is probably the most healing or doing a superfood honey that has propolis in it. Propolis is made by bees and it has this anti inflammatory immune modulating properties and acts as a prebiotic that supports the growth of good bacteria. And specifically propolis combined with Manuka honey kills off H. Pylori and helps kill off bacterial overgrowth. So taking both propolis and manuka together have tremendous benefits. As I mentioned as well, there are lots of other herbs in Chinese medicine that are beneficial. Licorice root for instance has been shown to heal the gut as well. Now last topic I want to touch on because I get many questions about this is what about peptides and peptide therapy? Well, there are peptides that can help heal their gut and what peptides are, they are shorter chains of amino acids. So they're not as long as a protein, but they're shorter chains of amino acids that are found in your body that help with creating hormones, help with repair and tissue regeneration and overall supply the basis sometimes for healing your body. One of the most popular today for healing leaky gut and for helping support gut repair is known as BPC157. And this is an incredible peptide. You can take it as an oral capsule, you can take it as a nasal spray, you can do it as a, an injection like a insulin syringe. And it is very, very good for healing the gut microbiome. And there are many peptide suppliers out there. But BPC157 helps both with that tissue regeneration. If you actually have leaky gut. Another one is called TB500 or Thymosin B4 Beta 4 and it's a peptide that supports tissue regeneration as well, but also reduces inflammation of the gut. And you can take that in the very same way. And another one is really powerful. It's called kpv. This is a powerful anti inflammatory peptide that also helps gut permeability. And again, you're going to take this orally or you're going to take it typically as an injection. And so these are, if you want to kind of go above and beyond, you can do those as well. Now last thing I want to talk about is testing one. Listen, if you have any of the symptoms I talked about, especially gut issues, you know you have leaky gut and a microbiome issue. But generally also remember, if you've got headaches, if you have brain fog, if you have skin issues, if you have autoimmune disease, you know you also have leaky gut or gut Issues as well. And you can do a test called a GI map, which stands for Gastrointestinal Microbial Assay. Plus. It's a basically, it's a stool test that looks at the type of microbes, bacteria and pathogens that live in your gut. And there are markers for leaky gut in there. And so they will test and look at exactly what's going on there, and it can tell you. So a GI MAP is a great way to test. And there are specific tests for leaky gut. One is called zonulin that you can do. There's a newer one out called an oclitin test. This is a key protein that basically manages your gut staying closed. And if it's off, well, then we know that there's leaky gut. And this is a test that's performed via a blood test. But really, I would say the stool test, the GI MAP, is one of my favorites to do with patients. So we know exactly what we need to do to start healing their gut, and we can actually see those imbalances there. But remember this, all disease and all health, for the most part, begin in your gut, and you want to take good care of your gut. This is good for everything from reversing disease to promoting a long, healthy life for longevity and healing. And you want to focus on, remember, removing the things that are damaging your body and then going and doing those positive things to help really restore, repair, and regenerate your tissue. And that's everything from reducing stress by being proactive about doing things you love, to taking probiotics, to eating that diet that I shared with you today. And if you do that, it works again. I've helped thousands of people reverse leaky gut, reverse autoimmune disease. By following these tips. I want to say, hey, thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. Remember, every week I'm diving deep into the principles that are going to help you experience a breakthrough physically, but also mentally and spiritually. And we're diving into topics everything from raw milk to peptides to what the government is doing to either help you or hurt your health. And so I'm so grateful for all of you that are subscribers here that are on mission with me. Thank you for all of you that are sharing these podcasts, getting the word out there, because there are millions of people that don't know that their issue is actually a gut issue. I come across people all the time and they think, well, my autoimmune disease is bad luck or genetics, and it's not there's simple things you can start to do to heal yourself and get to the root cause. So thank you to all of you for subscribing, liking and sharing this episode. I can't wait to see you on the next episode.