the upper fermenting gut is a major major problem it goes almost unrecognized by the conventional doctors we have to get rid of the upper fermenting gut and yes there's a two-pronged approach yes we starve them out with a low carb ketogenic diet and secondly we kill them and there are three fantastic tools which are available to everybody the first of those is there is meat fiber meat and bacteria and yeast will happily digest meat fiber that's senu connective tissue so you want to eat not just pure meats if you want to eat as many cheap cuts as you possibly can there's nothing wrong with LDL it's good stuff high cholesterol and LDL do not drive heart disease heart disease is driven by sugar high blood pressure inflammation and so on not by cholesterol in fact I like to see people with a high LDL because LDL is just a carrier molecule when you're in ketosis you need LDL to carry fat from your fat stores to the liver where it can be converted into ketones the cholesterol story has been hijacked by big food and big farmers atastin which is the most used statin cholesterol lowering agent is worth $1 trillion a year and you can get a lot of propaganda done with that sort of money and there's barely a scrap of evidence that shows statins are effective in fact I can show you some studies that tell the absolute opposite of that sarah I'd love for you to talk about the connection between eating too many carbohydrates and an upper fermenting gut well that is an extremely common problem um uh the normal gut obviously starts in the mouth and ends at the anus and the first 20 it's about 30 foot long and the first 25T should be near sterile now um that is achieved by having a very acid stomach now if we overwhelm that acidity or we overwhelm the ability of our that acid and pancreatic enzymes with too much carbohydrates then the bacteria move in there and the fungi move in there and they start to ferment now this probably happened normally in primitive man during the autumn because during the autumn there would have been an abundance of fruit nuts seeds high carbohydrate foods and yes there would have been some fermentation and we even have an enzyme designed to deal with the products of those fermentation which is gamma GT which can which which mops up um ethile alcohol because of course if you have sugar and you have yeast you produce ethile alcohol so it's almost a normal affair but only for a short window of time in the autumn now the problem with modern diets is that we have those foods all year round carbohydrates and sugars as you know are very addictive and um so we eat them all year round because we can but of course primitive man they would have run out he'd have gone back onto his carnivore his hunter gatherer diet and the fermenting gut would have rapidly cleared itself up but the the upper fermenting gut is a real problem because when you get bacteria fermenting food and when you get uh yeast fermenting food I mean I by food I mean sugars and carbohydrates you get all sorts of toxic products first of all you get toxic products of the fermentation itself and we all know yeast fermentss sugar to produce alcohol but bacteria will ferment sugars and carbohydrates to produce other alcohols propile alcohol butile alcohols ammoniacal compounds hydrogen sulfide deactate all these nasties which then have to be dealt with by the liver and on top of that um um if you look at life from the point of view of a bacteria or a yeast it doesn't want anybody else in its ecological space does it you want that space for itself and so it produces lots of toxins to kill all the other little wretches and bacteria produce lots of bacterial endotoxin and guess what that poisons us too yeast produce lots of fungal micotoxins and guess what that poisons us too but then it gets worse than that because these bacteria and these fungi they live on the lining of the upper gut that the lining of that top 25 foot and when you get uh microbes living there you get inflammation in the gut and you get a leaky gut and a major problem here is those microbes have the potential to leak from the interior from the lumen of the gut into the bloodstream and then they get stuck at distal sites they get stuck in the muscles and they drive fibromyalgia they get stuck in the joints and they they drive arthritis they get stuck in the gut wall and drive inflammatory bowel disease they get stuck in the lungs intrinsic asthma in the skin urticaria in the brain to drive psychosis so the upper fermenting gut is a major major problem it's completely or goes almost unrecognized by the conventional doctors but I'm quite sure it drives a huge amount of pathology and of course in the muscles fibromyalgia so unfermenting gut big problem but easily treated okay we're going to get there but I want to come back to the symptoms you mentioned farreaching symptoms throughout the body somebody right now who is experiencing disease and symptoms how do they know if this is at the core you can sometimes not invariably you get local symptoms so the point is for the if you've got an upper fermenting gut um that often happens because you you cannot acidify the upper gut you can't acidify the stomach because it's leaky the acid is leaking out as fast as it's being pumped in now the emptying of the stomach is an acid sensitive process the plug hole of the stomach is the pyloric sphincter is acid sensitive so if you don't achieve a certain acidity in the upper gut or it takes a long time to get there the stomach doesn't empty so very often people complain of fullness um uh and then they get indigestion with that and then they get reflux so esophageal reflux gird gourd whatever you want to call it um that's often symptomatic of the upper fermenting gut burping and belching bloating that's the gas that's produced by the upper fermenting gut that's another clue sometimes it presents with nocturnal cough because if you reflex at night reflux at night spills over into the um uh airways and then you're coughing at night so these are all local symptoms that point to the upper fermenting gut but as I say then the symptoms present and they're more systemically i'll tell you another major symptom of and that's if you're producing a lot of toxins like ethile alcohol you know propile alcohol but alcohol if the liver can't cope with that it'll spill over and give you a foggy brain and so often people tell me that the first thing they know when they've cleaned up their fermenting gut is suddenly their their mind sharpens up suddenly they can think clearly they're not foggy anymore and there's a second reason why that's important because a huge amount of energy goes in um is used up by the liver in the process of detoxification so to give you an idea of the scale of this at rest the brain although it weighs just 2% of body weight consumes about 20% of all the energy generated in the body the heart consumes maybe 7% the liver can consume up to 27% of all the energy generated in the body that is massive and as soon as you detox the liver doesn't have to do so much work and therefore there's energy available for other departments of the body so suddenly the brain can work better you know you've got more physical energy to run around and get stuff done so there is a multiplicity of ways um by which the upper fermenting gut impacts on our physiology and of course the symptoms an interesting piece of all this is the fact we haven't talked about toxins we haven't talked about processed foods all we've said is this can happen by getting one of the macronutrients out of whack correct and of course that includes ultrarocessed foods refined foods you know any carbohydrate which is very rapidly you know broken down into sugar i'll give you an example of this i was with a on a holiday riding holiday with a friend in Sicily she'd got a continuous glucose monitor on middle of Sicily what do you give for breakfast uh you know for a picnic you know a large piece of bread and a little bit of salami well I ate the salami and gave my bit of bread to the horse but Charlotte she ate the bread and it was a piece of white bread and within a few minutes and she's not diabetic within a few minutes her blood sugar shot up to 11 i have to say I was blown away by that so that white bread was very very rapidly broken down in the upper gut and there was a huge sugar rush which which overwhelmed the ability of her liver to deal with that and she spiked her blood sugar now it came down very quickly which tells me she didn't have insulin resistance and she wasn't diabetic but it was a real eye openener for me yeah I definitely want a caveat we don't recommend eating sugar and processed foods but it doesn't take going there to trigger this if you're eating too much fruit too many grains even too much unfermented dairy you're going to be getting a lot of carbohydrates and then you're going to feed this whole system that you opened up talking about that's right and another astonishing statistic stat statistic is that we've got about five lers of blood in our circulation the amount of sugar we need to maintain you know normal blood sugar between say four and six millles per liter is one teaspoonful it's tiny it's astonishing that the body can maintain the blood sugar so tightly with when it's playing around with such tiny amounts of sugar but what that means is you only have to have a couple of figs or you know an apple and you can double your blood sugar like that okay well let's get practical how many people first of all are in this situation obviously you're estimating and then let's talk about the first steps to working out of it my guess is in the Western world the majority of people are um um because sugars and carbohydrates they're cheap they're addictive they're convenient um and and that's and in the short term they are rocket fuel you know if if somebody wants a a pickme up what do you do they go and have a piece of toast or a sweet drink or something but it's short-term gain and long-term pain and that is of course the pattern of addiction isn't it you know any addiction it doesn't matter if it's sugar caffeine alcohol cigarettes it's a little spike of a little hit of energy pleasure call it what you like and then you get a downer and you're suddenly on this upper downer that you can't and you can't get off that treadmill so this is why they're so they're they're so addictive and then that is compounded by the upper fermenting gut because it's it's just constantly fermenting producing all these toxins and creating all these problems we've just discussed not to mention that if you follow the dietary guidelines they're going to lead you down the path that's going to cause all these problems absolutely absolutely um and and and well you know you you said it all you said it all you know and you know the the the the most helpful thing that my patients find is to appreciate that sugars and carbohydrates are addictive now I'm an addict i'm sure we we're all addicts you know humans evolve to be addicts because that makes them go for those high quality foods when they're available well high quality to primitive woman of course they were rare they were um you know we only had them say for a short window of time in the in the in the autumn and that helped us to get fat and of course getting fat is survival volume value for the winter so so that's why the the carbohydrate addiction gene evolved if you like but you know say I'm an addict now I have to the discipline say no to the first you know piece of fruit to the first you know biscuit um you know but not to the second or the third so I just say no way so if somebody offers offer me a piece I say no thank you I'll have the 90% in fact that is the basis of my addiction test because you know say I know I can easily get addicted to foods if I have a piece of food and I can't stop eating it if I had one fig I'd want two three four five if I had a a square of 30% chocolate the whole bar would be gone uh and that's my addiction to again a bag of cashew nuts i love cashew nuts but if I had one the whole packet would go so if I if a food is like that for me I just say no to the first and that stops me getting addicted okay let's talk about getting out of this so say you're a typical type person eating a high carbohydrate diet you want to work your way back fix what we've been talking about let's talk about the first steps well there are two types of people um um there's there are people who like to dive in at the deep end and people who just like to tiptoe into the water i like to dive into the deep end so I'd say just go cold turkey just cut it out completely and yes you will feel dreadful just like any addict we know if they stop their addiction what do they do they dive into withdrawal symptoms so if you're going to do it that way you choose a time when um you know you it doesn't matter if you feel awful for for a few days because you come out it very quickly and you only consume the non-addictive foods in fact a very good start for many is a carnivore diet there is nothing unhealthy about a carnivore diet meat fish and eggs um and and then the rules are very simple you can have as you know uh well and fatty meats of course are ideal um um and um say for many people that suits especially the bloss cuz they think well I'll get lots of protein i'll get my muscles strong again won't I so so that's a useful start but as I say apply my addiction test to any foods you may be having and uh and just get off those and that is a fantastically good start and what about the carnivore diet long term is there any reason to switch out other than for our taste buds nope it's perfectly healthy i have a very good friend of mine she is a consultant psychiatrist she has been carnivore for over 5 years uh and she's completely healthy in fact that is the starting point for all the patients she's seeing for the schizophrenics for the manic depresses for the for the um bipolars um they do fantastically well on a carnival diet yep you'd add in some vitamins and minerals as well because they we know they're additionally helpful but nothing unhealthy about a carnivore diet that's sustainable for years i mean in the early 1980s when I first started in this whole business you know the classic allergy diet was a lamb pears and rice diet and okay that was fairly low allergen but the problem is it was high carbohydrate and you get occasional people occasional patients you see you put them on a restricted diet and they get stuck on it they suddenly find anything they bring in is a bad idea but the joy of the carnivore diet is you could you know that would not be an issue you can you can happily live on a carnivore diet long-term and be perfectly healthy okay let's bring the microbiome into this because the automatic push back from the conventional thinking would be okay now I'm not taking in any fiber my microbiome needs fiber for food how do you look at that that's a very very good question and I'm I don't have all the answers to that but as as my dear friend Rachel pointed out there is meat fiber and you know bacteria and yeast you know we can't digest everything that's in meat and bacteria and yeast um love um uh will happily digest meat fiber that that's in you sineu connective tissue so you want to eat not just pure meats you want to eat as many cheap cuts as you possibly can organ meats liver heart um um and I'm quite sure the primitive woman would have eaten you know gut um testicle the whole lot so that would impact but um um again when the carnivores do microbiome tests I mean we don't know much about the microbiome but what we do know is the more diverse it is the healthier they are and they do seem to have a diverse microbiome so but I have to say when I tried a carnivore diet it did make me constipated so what I if I have someone who does a pure carnivore diet I say try and get in a few really high fiber foods like linseed for example um that's 26% fiber you know that helps hugely make your bread yes yes and it's very easy to make um I mean I am no cook I can promise you but you know even I can make it i mean I got up early every morning for about 6 months cuz I knew that for a paleo keto diet to be successful we needed a good bread substitute and I got up early for 6 months and I needed something for people who don't have the time the energy or the inclination they had to tick those three boxes and yes um the linseed bread is quick and easy to make i make a loaf most days uh and it disappears either down my throat or or or the rest of the tribes and you can make various um changes to it so yesterday um I did um a long walk with friends and I made a batch of PK bread but I made it with lots of eggs some sunflower seeds um just a few raisins to give it a bit of sweetness and you it's almost like a ship's biscuit you know I just ate that through the day and that powered me through the day no problem at all okay so for somebody who adopts a carnivore diet or low carb diet but they were previously in that boat we talked about early on with the upper fermenting gut talk about that period of time early on and how quickly things start to turn around okay and you did you did mention the fact that it's not going to be easy this addiction piece anything we can do in that early phase to tame that well there are several problems that can arise the first problem is what we call keto flu because what is as important as being ketosis is the metabolic flexibility to be able to switch to being you know sometimes we would be carbohydrate burning maybe you know because guess what at weekends I will feast you know I'm keen gardener I've got strawberries in the garden am I going to not eat strawberries in the strawberry season no so I might be hopping out of ketos occasionally but that's fine that metabolic flexibility to be able to burn sugars for a time and then get back into into um fat burning mode is important but if that's never happened and for many people they've never been in ketosis all their lives because they've never not had three carbohydrate meals a day they've been bought on that and that's what they're stuck with and initially fat burning can be a problem to some people and um we need thyroid hormones to be able to fat burn and you know if the thyroid is not working properly or is is running a bit low then you will fat burn with adrenal with adrenaline instead and that makes people feel terrible it makes them feel wired but tired i think much of keto flu is ketogenic hypoglycemia as I call it dreadful name but you feel hypoglycemic actually you're not um but you feel it because you haven't got the thyroid hormones the fat burn and in fact that's often a very good clue that that person has an underactive thyroid so that's the first thing to bear in mind the second thing is as you get rid of your upper fermenting gut those microbes die off and as they die off they get digested by acid and by um um um enzymes and you can get allergic reactions to the dead microbes it's called a herxheimer reaction so uh that's something to look out for and the other point is is when you get into ketosis and you start burning fat you start to mobilize toxins which are stuck in fat now I've um done many fat biopsies very easy test to do you just stick a needle in in somebody's fat pull the needle out and the fat within the core of the needle is sufficient for analysis now the results come back in milligrams per kilogram if I do a blood test the results come back in micrograms per kilogram that tells you those toxins are in fat as 100 to,000fold higher than in the bloodstream so when you lose weight when you burn fat you mobilize those toxins and you get an acute poisoning so you can get a poisoning result these um problems are detailed on my website under DD reactions diet detox and die- off reactions and that gives you clues the sort of symptoms you can expect and there isn't an easy way around it because just like there isn't an easy way to stop smoking there's not an easy way to come off alcohol you know you just have to make your mind up and do it you know sometimes sipping salty water um water with some salt in it or bone broth helps to mitigate the hunger pangs but it's just the phase you have to go through and then when you come out the other end and you suddenly realize that actually the brain's working again that you have got some energy that you don't need to sleep 12 hours a day that you're not constantly yawning that you can function at a much higher level then you suddenly realize how you can be and that is a real eye opening wakeup call and having appreciated that good health bit then you know you are you are better empowered to stick with the diet but what I can tell you is nobody does it perfectly first time and sticks with it for life i think of it as a bit of an earthquake so the initial earthquake is when you do it for the first time think "Oh gosh yes you know I do feel better." And then you lapse you know oh I'll fancy a bit of chocolate oh I fancy a bit of this i And you and and you go back and then think "No no I must get back on the wagon again." And and you get back on and it's like an earthquake with tremors and you know sometimes I don't even believe the evidence in my own eyes sometimes think "Nah it's a load of rubbish you know and and I see something I'm tempted by and then I consume it and I feel dreadful think no not doing that again." So we we're constantly having to learn and relearn and reinforce that as just a part of normal life it's just just the way that humans are made let's come back to the thyroid piece how many people are affected by that and is this something that just corrects itself when you move through the process if you're young it might so ketogenic hypoglycemia was first described by the pediatricians because in the 1950s and the 1960s and before when we had no anti-epilepsy drugs the treatment for epilepsy was a ketogenic diet and guess what the kids did very well but they didn't like it but they they it stopped their their fitting some kids um develop ketogenic hypoglycemia they just felt so awful on the diet um but um and they really struggled with it and and they were the ones they felt like they got low blood sugar although when their blood sugar was tested it was normal they were the ones that were hypothyroid I think and they just seem to grow out of their problems so yes the young people if they're lucky they can adjust but the underactive thyroid is extremely common especially in women often unmasked at the menopause in fact Kenneth Braman who wrote his American cardiologist wrote a book about this he reckons that about a third of westerners um have an underactive thyroid so it is a very common problem and I think that's because you know the thyroid is easily damaged it's damaged by toxins because so many people are drinking fluidated water or having fluidated toothpaste it's damaged by broomemide compounds and we use polyrominated bphenols as uh fire retardants um um it's damaged by heavy metals and guess what we are all poisoned to a certain extent by lead mercury arsic aluminium it's very susceptible to viral infection it's the first thing to be targeted when there's autoimmunity and that is switched on by vaccines so there are many ways by which the the thyroid gland can be damaged and because the descent into the underactive thyroid is insidious it's gradual it's often not noticed and we know women in particular are just told "Oh you're getting old stop fussing it's the menopause." You know the exc or you're too straight excuses are made instead of people really looking at doctors really looking at the symptoms and really looking at the blood tests and there's a second problem here because doctors so often only diagnose an underactive thyroid on the blood tests they ignore the clinical picture which might be you know slow descent into fatigue slow pulse at rest low core temperature loss of loss of hair in the eyebrows or the hair um uh swelling you know another name for the underactive thyroid mix edema edema retaining fluid carpal tunnel syndrome when um you get numbness and tingling of of of those fingers and half of the ring finger you know that would again suggest the diagnosis of of hypothyroidism voice changes because the larynx becomes adeus and sometimes you get a croaky voice like that like what you've been smoking for 20 years but you haven't you know those or loss of singing voice those are all symptoms that point to an underactive thyroid and of course as we've discussed ketogenic hypoglycemia the blood tests then tell us if there's biochemical scope for a trial of thyroid hormones because the point here is all diagnosis is hypothesis so if somebody comes to see me I say I think you got this i think you got that i think you got the other but the real diagnosis is retrospective if they get better as a result of your interventions then you say yep that was the problem you were eating the wrong food you had a fermenting gut you had a low thyroid your mitochondria were out or whatever but I say the underactive thyroid is very common okay again coming back to our thesis here which is the upper fermenting gut we know the first step is to lower the carbs or go all the way to carnivore you've mentioned the toxin piece a couple times so let's talk about how we address that in the beginning when somebody hasn't addressed that yet and then as maintenance what you're doing because you're living in the 21st century and there is so much to you know clear the system go ahead before we get to the toxins we have to get rid of the upper fermenting gut and yes there's a two-pronged approach yes we starve them out with a low carb ketogenic diet and secondly we kill them and there are three fantastic tools um which are available to everybody they're very inexpensive and they do lots of other good things for the body as well the first of those is vitamin C now it's it's it's vitamin C contact kills all microbes um humans cannot make their own vitamin C you know uh humans fruit backs and guinea pigs cannot make their own vitamin C it's um a big pardon dry nose primates um um and guinea pigs cannot make their v own vitamin C lionus Pauling who was the only guy to win two Nobel prizes in his own right and was only beaten to a third by Watson and Crick he calculated from what animals produce um um that humans should have about 5.7 g of vitamin C a day so everybody should take 5 g of vitamin C that's about a rounded teaspoon full ascorbic acid is very cheap in a glass of warm water it dissolves very easily and that should be your first drink of the day down the hatch in one fell sweep because the stomach is empty if there are any bacteria or yeast there then um um lying in the gut then the vitamin C will hit them in a high dose and that will reduce um the contamination with those the second thing is iodine again iodine is one of my favorite multitasking tools again it contact kills all microbes you should separate vitamin C and iodine don't take them at the same time because one is a reducing agent the other is an oxidizing agent i can never remember which way round it is but it doesn't matter the important point is take them separately so I do mine midday three drops of lugals iodine 15% in a glass of water again that contact kills all microbes and the third intervention which is very helpful is methile sulfonylmethane MSM again it's as cheap as chips it's fast becoming one of my favorite multitasking tools because we're all sulfur deficient and sulfur is essential for fourth phase water which is the subject of another long lecture um uh it's it's essential for the gut for healing and repair it's essential for connective tissue um it's very good at detoxing heavy metals but it has the very desirable property in the upper gut which is aerobic it's oxygenated it kills microbes but in the lower gut which is anorobic it's a it feeds them it acts a prebiotic so it's I say it's very cheap it's very safe it's multitasking and it's a great um treatment for the gut so those are three ways by which um we sort out the upper fermenting gut okay before we move forward let me get into each of these i have follow-up questions to make sure I'm totally clear so the vitamin C you recommend having that all in one bolus rather than spreading that out i do because the interventions I suggest for my patients have got to be cheap effective and sustainable we've got to be able to do them in a frictionless way if it's difficult it's oh a bottle and a little bit here and a little bit there it's not going to happen now I decided to test myself to because we're taught at medical school oh there's no point taking vitamin C you drink it one day in in you know one hour and it's and it's gone a few hours later so I stopped taking vitamin C but I tested my urine every day to see if I was still peeing out vitamin C now you can get these sticks very cheaply from Amazon for less than uh you get 100 sticks for less than a tenner very cheap and the ascorbic acid portion should go from a sort of green color to a yellow color that means you're peeing out the sculbic acid i continue to excrete ascorbic acid for five days so that tells me it's um it is well quite well stored in the system and it takes a long time to deplete so that was the first thing that encouraged me to take it in one fell swoop the second thing is by taking in one fell swoop on an empty stomach you're going to have the best effect on any bacteria and yeast that may be there because in the morning when you wake up the stomach is empty so you're going to get a high concentration of ascorbic acid in the stomach which is where it all happens or much it happens um killing those bacteria and yeast when they're at their most vulnerable i.e you know they're their um the stomach is empty so yes I I recommend taking in one fell swoop and it sounds like you're just dumping powder into a cup and drinking it back how do you feel about capsules oh that's fine it's just um it's just it's cheaper to have a um put it do it and do it in warm water and the other good thing is if that bacterial and um uh fungal contamination extends into the esophagus which it may well do you're giving the esophagus a nice coating of ascorbic acid as well the only thing to bear in mind is as soon as you've done that rinse your mouth out you know or brush your teeth because you don't want acid sitting on the your dental enamel because there's potential for it to dissolve that and you can do without that and how do you feel about these foodbased vitamin C's things like acerola cherry there's always well a lot of times with supplements you can get a food based one versus the chemical ascorbic acid so if somebody were to say I want the whole food version I want to take caps or powder of say acerola cherry any problem there and that's absolutely fine but the trouble is it's more expensive and you know the people you know I tend to see many people with fatigue syndromes people with fatigue syndrome they can't work they're counting the pennies so my interventions I recommend have got to be affordable so um you if you got lots of do'ach and uh and that's not an issue fine to take those food food grade ones but scorpic acid it's biologically identical it's what's been used for decades um it's very safe it's efficacious so I tend to stick with the cheap and cheerful and when you talked about the fact that it's going through and doing all this killing it gets me thinking about our healthy bugs our healthy biome does it self does it preserve that or is it just there's none no healthy bugs in that area exactly i mean say the top 25 foot of the gut should be sterile or near sterile the microbiome resides in the lowest the last 5 foot bowel now the point about the scorpic acid is it's going to be absorbed systemically into the bloodstream and excreted in the kidneys so is iodine so the scorpic acid never gets to the microbiome now the only time it gets to the microbiome is if you're taking ascorbic acid to bowel tolerance in the event of an acute cold or acute fever and then yes you want to take big dose of ascorbic acid in order to get to bowel tolerance very quickly because then that gets rid of the infection before it gets rid of you and in that event some escorbic acid will trickle into the into the microbiome and start to kill some of the friendly microbes there which then get fermented by other friendly microbes and that gives you rumbling tummy and foul smelling wind at that point you know you've overdosed you've taken too much so then you pull the pull the dose back to a sub bowel tolerance dose everybody's different and it will that bowel tolerance will differ in different situations but um and and and sometimes you will overdo things and you'll get frank diarrhea but that's why we have an appendix the appendix is awfully important i mean we are told by the surgeons that the appendix is a oh it's a bit of redundant tissue we don't really need it anymore and if we ho it out you know don't worry about it but if you think about the appendix it's right at the junction of the upper gut which should be sterile and the lower gut which should be full of microbes so should you get an episode of diarrhea and of course guess what you primitive man would have eaten some rotten meat occasionally you know and and got sick he would have eaten the wrong berries and got sick or whatever but the the appendix comes to the rescue because you might sweep out all those friendly microbes in the microbiome that the appendix is there at just the right place to reinoculate the large bell with the friendly microbes okay and continuing this out extrapolating you mentioned for iodine one of the purposes at least is to kill and I think with MSM2 you can clarify with those two as well is it the same principle as the vitamin C where it's not going to affect the healthy bacteria correct but iodine is so well absorbed from the upper gut um it never it never gets the large bowel you know it's it's any excess is excreted in urine and as I mentioned earlier MSM yes it kills the upper gut in the oxygenate environment but in the microbiome it's it feeds it's a prebiotic in an anorobic environment so the point is is all these three kill in the upper gut and have um no impact or or or or with the MSM a beneficial impact in the microbiome okay let's move into iodine now this is one that is quite controversial especially in doses like you're talking about first of all why is there so much controversy around taking this medson in this world is controlled by big farmer big farmer's mantra is a patient cured is a customer lost big farmer wants lots of sick people the last thing it wants is lots of healthy people taking cheap effective nutritional supplements so whenever you find something that works really well that's cheap you get all this fake news put out so for example all doctors in this country when I start talking about scorbic acid oh that's terribly dangerous it'll give you kidney stones rubbish the opposite it's the very good treatment for renal stones to prevent them and it's the same with iodine you know um um you know they will tell you oh you'll send your your thyroid overactive well you might temporarily because we are all iodine deficient and that is a common driver of the underactive thyroid so if you have somebody who has a slightly underactive thyroid and you suddenly give them a good dose of iodine the thyroid says "Yippee we've got some iodine at last." And you know and it goes into overdrive but the but you know the thyroid and the pituitary gland are perfectly intelligent and it's immediately works out oh we've gone into overdrive and it all settles down you know within well two weeks maximum so with iodine it's probably a good idea to start low and go slow and the rules of the game are the sicker you are the slower you go now um if I had somebody who's otherwise fit and well I say "Yeah fine just take three drops of iodine you'll be fine." If I had somebody who's really sick I'd say "Oh no no put one drop in a glass of water and have a sip and if that's okay the next day next day have two sips you and build it up really slowly." And the same is true of MSM these cheap simple effective naturopathic interventions have the potential to do much good and in doing much good you can get a healing crisis that's what the homeopathic the naturopathic doctors call it so as I say the sicker you are the slower you go with the MSM yep start with just maybe a quarter a teaspoon and a day and build up slowly but I like to aim for a window of time of 6 months when you're taking 30 grams of MSM 3 days a week now don't take it all the time because um not only is it it's it's very good at detoxing heavy metals and yes it will pull out the heavy metals very nicely thank you very much but it will also take out some of the friendlies so what I like people to do is take it three days a week 30 grams three days a week Monday Wednesday Friday and then the rest of the week make sure you replenish with all the friendly minerals so um I make up a product called Sunshine Salt which has got you know all all the minerals that I'm allowed to give you know in decent doses in a form that's soluble uh and people rescue with that and of course it's as cheap as chips but a good multi-mineral um I'm sure you can buy them in the States um would be ideal okay we're going to come back to MSM but I want to come back to iodine first any special population somebody with Hashimoto's thyroid problems that need to avoid it nope they all need it because it's not just the thyroid gland that needs iodine every tissue in the body pretty much has a requirement for iodine the brain iodine deficiency is the number one cause of mental deficiency in the world today it's essential for the immune system can't function without um iodine lines mucous membranes in the chest the nose um the genital tract and that protects us from infection it's essential for muscles we can't we can't sweat without iodine we need iodine to make the love hormone oxytocin you know it's just so important for every department of the body i will send you my iodine chapter from my thyroid book which details you know you know the breast for example pe women who have fibrocystic disease the breast you can often cure it just with iodine anybody with any cysts polycystic ovary disease cystic disease um um you know um um um uh you know thyroid cysts it's often symptomatic of iodine deficiency in fact Albert Spence Gorsey who discovered vitamin C he was a medical student during the 1920s and there was a little diddy that they used that the medical students used to say which is which went if ye know not the where and why prescribe ye then K and I you know it was almost the universal panacea it was such an important medicine okay so dosage wise you want to go slow if this is new to you we're working up to three drops of Lugal's iodine in water and that's 15% correct it supplies about 50 milligs of iodine okay and if somebody took more than that say even by accident put four or five drops what does the body do with that does it have systems in place to get rid of it it just pees it out that's the joy of it you if you if you overdose you just pee it out and in peeing it out you keep the urinary tract nice and clean because as we know you know urinary tract infections are common um and it would be a very good treatment for any any woman who's suffering from recurrent cyitis for example okay we'll move into MSM now you've already given us the lay of the land there the fact we want to take is it 30 grams three days a week spread out by one day in between correct and is there a certain source we're looking for is there organic MSM msm source from different things yep i like to use the the organic MSM which is you know clean because there's no point detoxing people if you're putting you know toxins into the system it costs about 30 quid for a kilogram which will last you a jolly long time so it's a very very cheap way of treating and detoxing the heavy metals at the same time and where do they get that from oh I get on Amazon no no but like where do they source it what is it where do they extract it from that's a very good question and I I'm so ashamed i don't know the answer to that somebody asked me that the other day and I never got around to looking it up but the MSM we're using at the moment is a vegan source so my guess is it probably comes from a from a bacterial ferment but that's only my guess but um I'm I'm I do apologize i need to look that up okay and you talked about in between making sure we're upping minerals on those days and you mentioned your salt what other products on the market do you like when it comes to minerals well because my salt is so cheap you know that's that's what I recommend to everybody because it can easily be put into the regime because it becomes part of your diet and it also means you can slip it into the into the family food um so you can treat the family at the same time without them realizing but if you check um the the constituents of my m of my uh sunshine salt find a mineral that's got similar amounts of of zinc copper selenium malamin chromium um um uh etc etc etc because I say I've got all the minerals in there that are important okay so we have the protocol now when it comes to these three supplements is this ongoing or is it just for a period of time while we're clearing out the upper fermenting gut well yes um yeah but my view is we should take those dose of iodine and those dose of vitamin C for life the MSM I recommend a window of time of 6 months when you're taking that high dose i.e 30 grams three times a week and then end up with a maintenance dose of maybe half a teaspoon you know or a teaspoon full you know a couple of times a week just to maintain the status quo because the fact is we're all poisoned you see as soon as we started burning fossil fuels and mobilizing coal and oil from the um the earth's crust we're also mobilizing heavy metals which inevitably get into our soil into the air into our water um so whether we like it or not we are all poisoned by heavy metals now the body can tolerate a certain amount of metal uh poisoning but if it gets beyond a certain level it's going to cause serious pathology and of course the wretched doctors and dentists are using these heavy metals all the time aren't they i mean dentists you know love to use dental amalgam fillings so we're all being poisoned by um dental amalgam aluminium is present in in vaccines as an adguant and so we're injecting it into kids and that cannot be a good thing to do you know they're used in cooking aluminium foil aluminium cans aluminium saucepans um um you know it's a disaster i mean when I do heavy metal tests I'm so often seeing barerium where's that coming from it's not coming from bare meals it might be coming from cloud seeding for all we know i mean we don't know but the point is all these heavy metals are getting into the environment and they're going to end up in our bodies so obviously we do our best to try to avoid them but the joy of using MSM is we can mobilize them and we can excrete them safely well this is good it's all coming full circle because I brought up toxins in the body and detox you wanted to go into the three supplements like we did let's come back to detox and now we know the heavy metal piece but what other toxins accumulate in the body and then other than MSM what can we do to eliminate them correct now um I classify toxins by the the mode by which they are excreted and um obviously those toxins that come to the liver the liver can detoxify and get rid of but to do that it needs some vitamins it needs some minerals it needs some essential fatty acids and it needs some energy and we can do that by taking a good multivitamin some minerals some fish oils um so that's fairly straightforward but then that leaves us with the big one which the pesticides and the volatile organic compounds the fire retardants the solvents the glues the smellies the perfumes um and and and of course the pesticides of which the worst is glyphosate now many of these are fat soluble and they get stuck in fatty departments of the body they get stuck in our brain they get stuck in all membranes and they also get stuck in our fat now we can get rid of those in two ways first of all with heating regimes because when you get hot and it doesn't matter how you get hot it might be going for a run it might be it might be a bath it might be a sauna it might be a hot shower when you get hot you you shake you boil them you warm them up and they mobilize from the subcutaneous subcutaneous fat onto the lipid layer of the surface of the skin from whence they can be washed off with soap and water so my favorite method of detoxing would be an Epsom salt bath because guess what we all most people have a bath epsom salts are incredibly inexpensive you can buy in this country and get 20 kg for about £35 and you need about a pound of Epsom salts per bath soak in that and you warm the body up you mobilize the chemicals as say onto the surface of the skin and then they're washed off because you're in a bath and at the same time the magnesium gets in through the skin into the bloodstream the sulfate gets through the skin into the bloodstream how do we know that work done by Rosemary Wearing who's a biochemist at Birmingham she took 29 of her a big modern 19 of her students and they all did Epsom salt bars every night for two weeks and she measured the level of magnesium and sulfate in their blood and their urine before and after and in every single case the level of magnesium and sulfate rose in the blood and rose in the urine which tells us that the those Epsom salts are well absorbed through the skin and that does much good for the body because guess what we're all magnesium deficient and we're all sulfate deficient but say any heating regime will do so if you're an athlete who goes out running regularly and then showers off that's going to be a great way of mobilizing those nasty toxic pesticides the problem for my fatigue syndrome patients is you know they can't exercise heating regimes often make them ill so they have to go very gently with it some of them are not even well enough to get in a bath so that's tricky so there's another method of detoxing which I'm using at the moment which I think is going to be helpful and that's just to put um organic coconut oil and actually um on your skin now I'm actually making up a mix with organic coconut oil and organic sheia butter with some minerals and ascorbic acid as well to enhance it and the idea here is you just rub it all over your skin after you after you've had a shower and we you know skin is comprised of of of of of skin cells obviously and then there's a layer of of keratin and dead cells on the surface of the skin so this oil will get into those dead scales and and be mopped up by that um you know just those pesticides and volatile organic compounds will get into that oil because they just um uh diffuse through the skin and then as we slough off our skin because we're shedding skin scales all the time we will literally just shed off all those chemicals and of course that would be enhanced by washing so that's going to be a very cheap and easy way to to to detox now we've got two studies um which shows that these heating regimes are effective the most important one is done was done by Bill Ray now Bill Ray was a cardiothoracic surgeon um in the in the 60s and the 70s in America now in those early days of cardiothoracic surgery um a lot of anesthetic gases were used and there was no means for um scavenging those gases from the operating theaters so all the surgeons and the assistants they all had a dose of anesthetic gases as well and he was literally poisoned by those anesthetic gases so much so that he developed a multiple chemical sensitivity and that meant he couldn't operate anymore so um he had to finish as a cardiothoracic surgeon and he set up the um um environmental center in Dallas in Texas which is still in existence today he because he had multiple chemical sensitivity as a result of this poisoning he accumulated patients who were similarly affected and he did he accumulated 210 of these patients and he put them through this very detox regime so um um so they were doing heating regimes which for some it was on an exercise bike for some it was um in a sauna and then showering off afterwards he also did did massage so the patients said so they had three things they had the massage they had the heating regimes and then they had the sauna ring and what was so interesting is that the massage therapists often used to comment oh you know a mass and suddenly they'd get like this outburst of of some smell as if the smell was just coming out of the body you know they suddenly smell petrol fumes they could suddenly smell diesel fumes or or perfumes or something as if they kind of mobilized a hot spot of chemicals so much so that they could smell them um what was so interesting is that 200 of those patients became got detox regimes they got initial worsening um and then they saw improvement subsequently um and um and he was measuring levels of um chemical in the blood before and after and again um the they reduced their chemical load so we've got some good hard data showing that these regimes are effective i've got my own figures which I've collected i've only got 32 patients um but I've done some sort of test of toxicity before and after either fat biopsy DNA addu transicator protein studies or whatever and in pretty much in every single case the toxic load has come down so we know these regimes are effective so these days I don't do the tests anymore why because the tests are expensive and my patients are poor i just say get on and do the regimes do the heating regimes um and roughly speaking 50 such heating regimes will have the total load and the numbers come down exponentially so if if the total initial load was say let's call it 64 whatever after 50 regimes it comes down to 32 another 50 regimes it comes down to 16 another 15 regimes it comes down to eight you never get to baseline there's always a little bit there because we're constantly toxing up however much we you know we we try not to but again if it's sufficiently low the body can deal with that and for somebody that's new to this and they start these regimes do you like them to space it out a little bit to give their body time in between because you've given the numbers now and some people might be in a rush to get through a certain number of them how do you feel about timing it depends on how sick they are it's the it's the old formula the sicker they are the slower you go um and you know for some people they're so sick all they can manage is just putting their feet in a bowl of hot water with Epsom salts in it uh and when they tolerate that then they can do a little bit more and then a little bit more another useful mech way of doing this for the very sick patients would be a far infred sauna and for some people they all they can do is just put their legs in initially for 2 minutes and that's as much as they can tolerate and then as they gradually improve then you put more of the body in for a little bit longer maybe at slightly higher temperatures um until you get a result but yes for the sick people you start low and go slow for someone who's otherwise well I say "Oh just go on and do it boy." You know the quicker we get these toxins down the better okay so we have our three big supplements we started out with you've now brought a handful of others in including a multivitamin the Epsom salt you said fish oil and there may have been another one or two what I'm getting at here other supplements as part of a maintenance routine for people or in special cases things you'll introduce well the fact of the matter is because we live in such a toxic world and because we live in such a micronutrient deficient world we all have to take a package of supplements just to get on the starting blocks and yes that package is a good multivitamin a good multi-mineral fish oils vitamin C iodine and most important of all vitamin D we are all sunshine deficient and my view is we should all be taking 10,000 IU a day of vitamin D at that level there have never been any toxicity or problems whatsoever it's equivalent to about half an hour of sunshine you know how much sunshine did primitive man get well they got 12 hours a day didn't they um so you're not going to get any problems at 10,000 IU a day and vitamin D is highly protective against infectious disease COVID of course cancer heart disease dementia you know it's a proven benefit so that's that's just what I call the basic package of supplements to get on the starting blocks and then if you've got a specific problem after that like fatigue okay there are other packages we can add in as well but if you can do the you know a low carbohydrate diet clean up the fermenting gut and take that bic basic package of supplements that's going to get a lot of people an awful long way okay it sounds like it but just to be clear that 10,000 IU for you vitamin D even in the summer you'll still take that yes because the body um um makes as much vitamin D as it needs from uh sunshine and then it stops making it so you base load with vitamin D as an insurance policy if you like and then if you you get as much sunshine as you like obviously without burning the skin and get as much sunshine as you like that will top it up to optimum and then the body just ceases to make um uh make it once it has a sufficiency okay I want to come back to the diet now and highlight a couple of the pieces there that we didn't get into specifically no gluten no dairy correct so talk about why those are important dairy products and you know whenever you have a difficult question like this go back to evolutionary biology you know we evolved over millions of years eating you know a particular diet and those foods only came into our diet in the last maybe 10,000 years which in the terms of evolution is the blink of an eye now the problem with dairy products is that dairy products evolved for young mammals if young mammals don't grow very quickly then they get eaten by saber-tooth tigers so all dairy products or or b um well all dairy products except butter contain milk protein which is growth promoting and that makes the risk factor for cancer lovely book written by um Jane Plant who was a geologist at um Nottingham in her early 40s she developed breast cancer she had the surgery the radiotherapy the chemotherapy ended up with a plum-sized lump and told two months to live she read that in China no dairy products no breast cancer so she took out dairy products and she watched that watched that cancer melt away and disappear she wrote a book called Your Life in Your Hands she also her name was Jane Plant she also went on to write the plant diet but she didn't get the carb bit because we know that sugars and carbohydrates feed cancer anyway she survived into her early 70s and actually died from as a result of the chemotherapy but it's just an illustration that dairy products drive cancer they're also risk factor for heart disease lovely paper the cow and the coronary by Margaret Moss and David Freed illustrates that point um um they're also risk factor for osteoporosis because they products got high proportion of calcium to magnesium which yes is very desirable for the growing baby but not for the adult calcium and magnesium compete with each other for absorption so if you're having a lot of calcium you'll block your magnesium absorption and that is a risk factor for osteoporosis and heart disease as well uh and again dairy products are common allergens you know at least 30% of the population are allergic and dairy products are number one allergens so the only safe dairy products from nutritional point of view is butter but many of the allergics actually don't tolerate butter so that's why we have be careful with dairy and then gluten grains well gluten the number one problem with gluten is it's a very common allergen and um if you've got any allergic symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome intrinsic asthma migraine um temporal arthritis icaria eczema any of those conditions often driven by gluten allergy but I went to a conference recently and the consensus of the conference was that gluten grains should be animal foder only because they have been bred genetically modified to have a very high level of gluten in them which the cooks love because it gives it that you know that texture that glutenous thing so you can make you know very good you know pillow pastry and and all that but it's it's great for the cooks but not good for us to eat it's high in lectins and for many people lectins are toxic to them um and it's often high in pesticide residues so gluten grains are usually out if you're if you're absolutely 100% you're not allergic to them then the occasional um you know organic um GM free um loaf would be fine but again it's it's going to be high carbohydrate isn't it so that's another issue and another interesting point is that allergy and addiction are two sides of the same coin so you have to apply the myill addiction test so if you have a slice of bread and you and you're not happy with that you want another and another and another it's not for you it's the same with cake and biscuits you have a slice of that you can't stop it's not for you so um uh you know and and I I say I can't I am a horrible addict you know if if I have a taste of something I want more more more so I just have to say no to the first taste so that doesn't happen for you with the linseed bread no not at all you know I have I have a couple of pieces and I'm full i'm satisfied i don't want anymore um Um So so no how do you look at fats you brought in butter and it sounds like depending on how your constitution is that can be okay but talk about things like tallow other animal fats and then some of the quote unquote healthy plant fats like avocado oil olive oil and how you think about all those fantastic they're all good i mean in nature there is no such thing as a bad fat they are all good and we have two types of fat don't we we have the saturated fats now saturated fat is a carbon chain um which might be a long carbon chain which is straight and think of it as my arm it's absolutely saturated with hydrant ions and that makes it very tough so when you heat it it stays it retains its shape when you cool it down you can use it again and of course it's the perfect fuel for the body and then we have the unsaturated fats now the thing about the unsatur you know polyunsaturated omega6 is kinkedked at the at the omega 3 and the omega 6 and sometimes they kink somewhere else so in nature they're all boomerang shaped and they're all left-handed fats but if you hydrogenate them to make margarine or you cook with them some of them will flip into a right-handed fat and the trouble with that that's called a trans fat and it doesn't fit biological enzyme systems you know it's it's like trying to put a right-handed glove on on left hand it doesn't fit and they are the dangerous fats so oils are wonderful foods but they must be coldressed and organic and not hydrogenated and you have to shop around a little bit for for coldressed you know organic you know olive oil because they'll tell you it is and it isn't so you have to be a little bit discerning and find a trusted source um um of of olive oil or whatever oil it is that you want to to to use but many sunflower oils rape seed oils you know are mass-produced they're heavily contaminated and being a fat the pesticides you know concentrate in them or they've been processed in either in ultrarocessed foods or by cooking or by hydrogenation and they're full of trans fats so as soon as man gets in the way um you know the oils um have the potential to become unsafe and unhealthy okay it sounds like it but further clarify your thoughts on vegetable oil seed oils it sounds like you're against them i'm against them how do you think about that whole piece that conventional wisdom that consuming them is good because we're lowering LDL well LDL is is is well there's nothing wrong with LDL it's good stuff i mean LDL I mean you suddenly jumped onto oh high cholesterol causes you know um um uh a highfat diet causes high cholesterol causes heart disease which we know is a load of tosh cholesterol high cholesterol and LDL do not drive heart disease um um you know there are you know heart disease is driven by sugar um high blood pressure um um toxins uh inflammation and so on not by cholesterol in fact I like to see people with a high LDL because LDL is just a carrier molecule it's just the the molecule that carries fat around the body and LDL when you're in ketosis you need LDL to carry fat from your fat stores to the liver where it can be converted into ketones so very often when people start on a carnivore diet or start on a ketogenic diet you see their total cholesterol going up fantastic their LDL going up fantastic hdl going up fantastic you know that's totally desirable you know they are simply the carrier molecules and we are know you know all deficient in in cholesterol or or cholesterol deficient is very common in fact there's a I think it was a Philadelphia study um which looked at total cholesterol and mortality and for every 1% fall in cholesterol increases your mortality by 1% i can show you a plethora of studies that show you that the higher your cholesterol is the longer you live now the cholesterol story has been hijacked by big food and big farmer because it suits their books atastin which is the most used um statin cholesterol lowering agent is worth $1 trillion a year now I can't get my head around these huge figures but a trillion is a million billion which is a million million million dollar it's a lot of do'ach and you can get a lot of propaganda done with that sort of money and there isn't there's barely a scrap of evidence that shows statins are effective in fact I can show you some studies that um that tell the absolute opposite of that well it's important we went there because again conventional wisdom if you have high cholesterol consume these vegetable oils they're heart healthy they're going to help you lower your LDL and you'll be better off supposedly you're using the wrong words it's not conventional wisdom it's modern propaganda that's the word we should be using and I'm delighted to see that um a British cardiologist called Dr asim Malhotra who's written a super book A StatinFree Life essentially detailing what I've just been saying has is now JF Kennedy's right-hand man on the Make America Healthy Again um um um uh uh scheme and um so at last perhaps you know um we can start to see things turning around and and and get big farmers grippers off the medical profession the medical profession has been completely brainwashed by big farmer we just don't have enough good doctors with independent minds who are speaking the truth well we've connected by email and it sounds like he'll be coming on the show so I'm a big fan of his work fantastic all right last question because I know you got to go if somebody has adopted the diet we opened up talking about how do you feel about snacking if they're still staying within those parameters of ketogenic low carb and then also intermittent fasting well that is the next step once you're PK adapted then you don't get hungry you don't get the sugars ups and downers and again back to evolutionary biology you know did primitive man get three meals a day i don't think so they fasted and they feasted and again what controlled populations from of an evolutionary aspect was availability of food so we evolved you know strategies to optimize that so when food is in abundance in in the autumn when there's plenty around we eat and we eat and we eat because we are storing that food as fat and that is survival value for the winter and um in getting fat we also get fatigued because you don't want to be bombing around you know playing football or rugby or or sports and burning off all that precious fat which is I say survival value for the winter so although it's very counterintuitive when you are feasting you are naturally fatigued but then the the reverse is true when primitive man or primitive women were starving they had to use their brains and they had to use their physical energy in order to get food and so when you are fasting the brain works better it becomes sharper and you have more physical energy to get things done to hunt to run down your prey so for example the samurai warriors before any great battle they would fast for 24 hours because their reflexes were faster and they were stronger so and it's very counterintuitive but fasting actually gives you energy once you're keto adapted and you can happily run on fat feasting does the opposite so yes that is the next thing to do the so we should um I I like everybody as as far as possible once they've got their thyroid sorted out and their diet sort out to consume all their food within a 6-hour window and the reason for that is after 16 hours of fasting you switch on autoagi autophagy or self-eing and that's when the body cleans its act up that's when it cleans up all those cancer cells are swilling around and we've all got cancer cells swilling around those cells that are scesscent the cellular debris it gobbles them up so we then have two hours in every 24 hours when we switched on autophagy and then maybe once a week just have one meal a day and then we have you know eight hours uh when we switched on autophagy and then three times a year a big button four times a year do a 3day fast and that allows the gut to clean up its act completely and also it gives the immune system a a reset as it's called now I don't pretend to be an expert on um fasting but there are doctors like Mindy Peltz who does wonderful YouTube videos you must you must interview Dr peltz she's lovely thomas she's been on a few times he's been on fantastic um you know Dr thomas Safe these are Dr jason F you know these people are all interested in cancer as well and I remember listening to do Dr safe saying if if we all did a one week fast a year you'd have the instance of cancer overnight because say we're mopping we're cleaning up our act so yes fasting is really important um I say it's very counterintuitive as to as to what how that will impact on your energy but your overall health will be massively improved sarah thank you for this wonderful conversation i really appreciate you i really appreciate you sharing your truth going against the grain and getting your information out there it's wonderful we're going to link up your website we're going to link up your books thanks again Jesse you're a great interview it's very easy talking to somebody like you you too thank you bye for now now that you're done you're going to want to stick around here and catch this other incredible episode you don't want to miss it i'll see you over there there are no essential carbohydrates whatsoever none zilch Zippo telling people to have at least 55% of their diet in the form of the one macronutrient that we don't even need is the starting point that's wrong