How to Overcome Inflammatory Bowel Disease with Dane Johnson: Rational Wellness Podcast 405

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Dane Johnson discusses How to Overcome Inflammatory Bowel Disease with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

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Dane Johnson went from growing up in a small farm town in Haymarket, Virginia to becoming a successfull actor/model in Los Angeles, before he was diagnosed with both severe Ulcerative Colitis & Crohn’s Disease and his life was torn apart.  His health went down hill and he nearly died in 2014.  Dane not only was able to fully recover from this experience naturally but he has become a Board Certified Holistic Nutritionist and Health Coach and he has helped thousands of patients to heal from these conditions and he is now the CEO and Founder of Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle, the largest and most successful IBD consulting firm globally.  His website is Crohnscolitislifestyle.com.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.

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Podcast Transcript

Dr. Weitz:  Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates and to learn more, check out my website, dr whites.com.  Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast.

Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Our topic for today is how to overcome inflammatory bowel disease with Dane Johnson. Inflammatory bowel disease affects between 2.4 and 3.1 million Americans, according to the CDC and its prevalence is rising. The two main forms of inflammatory bowel disease or IBD are Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Crohn’s disease can affect any part of the GI tract ranging from the mouth to the anus, whereas ulcerative colitis affects mainly the colon and rectum. There’s some other specific differences as well. Dane Johnson is here to tell us his personal journey dealing with inflammatory bowel disease and how he is now helping others overcome this condition.

Dean went from growing up in a small farm in Haymarket, Virginia to becoming a successful actor and model in Los Angeles before he was diagnosed with both severe ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, and his life was torn apart. His health went downhill, and I’ll let Dean tell us about the details, but he nearly died in 2014.  Now, 10 years later, Dane was not only able to fully recover from this experience naturally, but he is a board certified holistic nutritionist and health coach, and he’s helped thousands of patients to heal from these conditions. And he has now the CEO and founder of Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle, the largest and most successful IBD consulting firm globally.  Dane, thank you so much for joining us.

Dane: Thank you Ben, and thank you for that amazing intro. I’m glad to be here and it’s funny to hear it, but yeah, it’s you know, I just wanna dedicate this time to anyone who’s chronically sick, lost not where to go. I’m gonna deep dive today. Anything I can do to help to get those ahas to talk about those root cause issues, to talk about some therapies that actually get real results.  That’s what I’m hoping we can do today. And thanks for being here. Healing is possible.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. So, if you could start by telling us about your personal story with inflammatory bowel disease.

Dane: Yeah, so I had my first symptoms at 19 years old and I was getting blood in the stool, urgency, mucus diarrhea, and I wasn’t sure why and I didn’t know what to do about it.  And it was something that it just kind of plagued me. I didn’t, I never asked for it. I never wanted it. No one in my family had ever had this issue and it just kept getting worse and worse over the years. And like you said, I was fortunate enough to be able to do some I. You know, Zoolander in my life, and I moved from Virginia and moved to LA and

Dr. Weitz: Zoolander, I’m not sure if everybody gets that reference.

Dane: So, you know, I was a kid who moved out to California because I wanted to be in California. And I got lucky enough to be given an opportunity to do some modeling and some acting and you know, years later, that was a long time ago. But I, you know, I’m a terrible actor. I’m not a good actor. And I, and I, as I got older, I said, you know, I really want to focus on functional medicine.  And once I started being able to finally get results with myself my life, my spirit, my mind, my perception of what I wanted to focus on and what I wanted to do, completely changed. And I changed over to start focusing on functional medicine around 24 years old. And I’m 38 now, and I’ve been doing this for about 12 or 15 years.  And I’ve dedicated myself to only helping. People who’ve gone through something like I did, but continue to create a home for those who have IBD that’s my mission, you know, real results, real home, real community. We can come together, we can take back our lives.

Dr. Weitz: So tell us about what happened to you and when you hit bottom.  What, what was going on and how did you overcome it?

Dane: Yeah. One second. Ben. Is it I don’t know if you have an editing thing, but I can’t hear you in my ears. I think that might be throwing off our audio.

Dr. Weitz: You can’t hear me? Okay.

Dane: I can hear. I can’t hear you in my ears. Very weird. Something is going on and so I have a feeling when we’re recording, it’s gonna screw up the audio.

Dr. Weitz: Let me let me look at my audio settings.

Dane: I think it might be my headphones.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dane: I just don’t know why. So the, can you hear me? Good. Check check. Yeah.

Dr. Weitz:  No, you sound good to me.

Dane:  Beautiful. Okay. I can hear. Yeah. So then it maybe is not a problem, but I don’t know why

Dr. Weitz: I just bumped up my audio volume a little bit.  There we go.

Dane: Okay. I think we’re, I think we’re good now. Alright. So we can, I’m sure your editing team. Okay. Sorry, I just didn’t wanna go through a full hour and be like, oh no, it was screwed. So I hope that was okay. I came out. Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Thanks. Okay, good. Yeah. So, Dane, tell us more details about your personal story.  What happened when you got really sick and exactly what was going on, and then also how did you overcome it?

Dane: Yeah. So, you know. I was going under, you know, a lot of stress in college eating what I want. Came from a family where no one really was sick. We didn’t know anything about it. We didn’t know anything better about food or any of this.  So I kind of just ate what I wanted to eat. I wanted to gain weight, get strong, build  muscle. I wanted to just, you know, was drinking beers and eating whatever food, focusing n my macros to try to put on muscle and cut body fat. I was really into weightlifting and sports and all of a sudden I just, it was coming, it was going, it was getting worse and worse.  So the symptoms I was dealing with when it first started was blood urgency, mucus, some weight loss, high stress, a little cramping in pain. And then, you know, I would take, I’d go to the doctor finally diagnosed around 22 years old, and I’d never heard of it before. Doctor goes you’ve got ulcerative colitis.  You’re gonna have this for the rest of your life, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So for me it was like, wait, what? I mean, I, what? What I didn’t even know how to process that. I kind of just said, yeah, whatever. I didn’t look it up. I didn’t. I just wanted to go back to my life. They said, yeah, I got this thing, and I was actually very embarrassed because he was telling me it was a colon issue.  As a young man, I was not willing to talk to my friends, talk to my mother, my father, and he, you know, girls I wanted to date. About this idea of ulcerative colitis. You know, it was very horrible.

Dr. Weitz: It’s not a great topic on a date to talk about how many bowel movements you’re having or whether or not they’re firm.

Dane:  And everyone listening,  I just wanna let you know now I’m getting on Ben’s amazing podcast and speaking publicly about my poop problems. Thousands, millions of people around the world healing as possible. We can get over it. Okay. Shame leads power. Isn’t that funny? Just don’t give up. I know it’s hard guys. And so, you know, but I, and then all of a sudden, you know, a year goes by, two years go by, they put me on Prednisone, Alda Asacol, and it kind of goes away with the prednisone.  I taper off the prednisone, then it comes back with a vengeance and every little stressful event, every time I eat out, every time I’m sudden I’m gaining food. Fear I can’t keep the weight on me. Then I go to UCLA when I’m in LA and then they diagnose me with Crohn’s disease and I’m going, okay, which is it?  And so I’ve got two different doctors, two different hospitals, one saying ulcerative colitis, one saying Crohn’s, one saying, oh, it’s gastritis with ulcerative colitis. One’s going, no, it’s widespread Crohn’s. At the end of the day, I just said, okay, I’ve got Crohn’s col, I’ve got Crohn’s class, I’ve got inflammatory bowel disease.

Dr. Weitz: You know, in, in the end, there’s, it’s amazing how Western medicine has this obsession with getting the diagnosis and in the end, it doesn’t really matter what you call it.

Dane:  It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t. And guys, that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. It doesn’t really matter. We need to fix our gut.  We need to fix the root cause. And I mean, this was extreme amounts of pain. Severe depression, anger resentment at my parents. ’cause they couldn’t fix it. As a young man, you go to mom and dad. Mom and dad, you know, know what to do, right? When things go wrong. Yeah. All of a sudden extreme anger with God because why did I, why did this happen to me?  I’ve always worked hard.  I’ve never done anything bad. I’ve always been good to people.  Why is I didn’t know anyone, anywhere.  I never met anyone who was dealing with this back in 2013, you know, 2011, 2010, I nearly died of this disease in 2014, December. December of 2014 is where I nearly passed away of IBD at 120 pounds.  Unable to walk. I was bed bedridden for three or four months. Housebound for a year.

Dr. Weitz:   How many, how much weight did you end up losing?

Dane:  So right now I weigh 190 pounds. At my lowest, I was 120 pounds six two.

Dr. Weitz:  Wow.

Dane: And it because I lost so much weight because I could not eat, I could not absorb food, Ben, I mean, I would have a sip of water and it would cause me to feel like I have to go to the bathroom.  And at first it was like, okay, I do better if I just eat a little meat. I do better if I just stay away from fried food. I do better if I don’t do salads. ’cause I would see undigested salad in the stool and I would notice, oh, when I have those breads or grains, I get bloated. Okay, so let’s try the specific carbohydrate diet.  Let’s go carnivore. Let’s, okay let’s just do some fasting. And it would temporarily give me relief. But the moment I actually tried to eat food again and get back to my life I’m even worse. ’cause now I’ve lost some weight trying to be, do restrictive eating. [00:10:00] Now I’m in a weaker place mentally ’cause I’ve exhausted my mind on saying I’m only gonna eat this chicken and puree carrot or bone broth for a week straight. So I was just getting beaten down and beaten down. And every action I took Ben, for about four years. I was failing to get results. My family was spending thousands, 30, 40, 50,000. I’m from a middle class family in Virginia.  We didn’t have all this money. At a certain point, my sister’s helping to pitch in with buying at Whole Foods. ’cause hey, we’re reading on the internet I’ve gotta eat organic. I’ve gotta get these organic steaks, I’ve gotta get gluten-free. This, I’ve gotta get almond milk. I can’t have cows milk, you know?  And so we’re trying to go gluten-free. We’re trying to go dairy free. I’m reading about fasting and then while my mom or my dad or the internet is talking me in to doing these crazy IBD diets, I’m reading on the internet. I’m just binging Netflix. I can’t go. I got nothing better to do. Let’s sit in bed all day, be [00:11:00] depressed and angry while someone comes and brings me some kind of chalk to eat, right.  Some kind of soup thinking it’s gonna fix it. And then, you know, seven days later, well, you just lost another three or four pounds. Now what do I, how do I add food back in? And then it got, then I started having serious reactions. 20 bloody bowel movements a day, severe reactions to 6MP, Humira, Entyvio.  Now I’m on the, now I’m looking to the doctors, doctor’s saying, you’re gonna have to take these biologics for the rest of your life. And if, and I’m saying, doc, well I’ve already been on Remicade. You know, you wanna put me on Humira, Entyvio. Now what if that doesn’t work? What if I still don’t get better?  This is like my 12th medication. Well, we’re gonna have to start talking about surgery. Wait, what? What surgery What are you talking about?

Dr. Weitz:   They’re talking about removing your colon or part of the rest of your bowel.

Dane:  Partial or full colectomy with a stoma bag that maybe will be able to reverse this is when something snapped in me.  Because being angry at your parents or your doctors or God is no longer gonna get you anywhere. You know when you’re a kid and you get angry, usually people come try to fix it. Like I realized this was, I started really getting to healing as I went through that deep dark place that I didn’t know what was gonna happen to me is that I realized as I started fixing my mind, ’cause healing starts in the mind that every time something wasn’t my fault in life, it was someone else’s responsibility to fix it.  I get the flu, it’s not my fault. The doctor’s gonna fix it. Some kid tripped me. Takes your lunch money. Not my fault. Mom’s gonna fix it. Oh, someone’s bullying me at my school. Hey, not my fault. Teacher’s gonna fix it. There was always someone to fix something that I was struggling with in life. This was the first time that no one could fix it.  And it was not just one year. It was 2, 3, 4, and it wasn’t about four years until I really started to work, change my life. And by those four years, I’d already spent, my family had already probably spent about $50,000, more than that probably. I had been to Mayo Clinic, UCLA, Cedar-Sinai. I had already been on two biologics.  I had been on two or three different immunomodulators. I had been on Mesalamine, Alsacol, Lialdo. I’d been on prednisone on an allflex, Skittles, 40 to 60 milligrams, taper down to zero, go back on, taper down to zero, go back on, taper down to zero. You know, I was covered in cystic acne. I was having 20 to 25 bloody bowel movements a day.  I was going to the bathroom through the night for over a year straight. There was no sleep. I. I was petrified of food and I had tried so many different types of diets that had helped a little bit. But then once you are only eating this little, how do you get off that? Where do you go? And then I’m dealing with malnutrition, electrolyte deficiencies, anemia because of all the blood loss. I’m getting arthritis pain, back pain, knee pain. I’m covered in cystic acne, bend [00:14:00] covered. Wow. All this while I’m trying to be Zoolander. I had to throw a joke in there. Right. All this. I had made a life out of nothing. No one felt you missed out on Captain America. Exactly. But I was from the sticks in Virginia.  Nowhere, nothing. I just took a one way flight to LA and I was into fitness and being in shape and I happened to be the right dimensions in size and I had sales experience. I was, I ran a business when I was 18. I knew how to talk to art directors and you know, and I fit the clothes and I could talk well, and I just kind of, I’m an entrepreneur.

I’m a fiery soul by nature. That’s what God gave me. And so I made this dream. I mean, I was going to, I was working parties with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio, and I’m at the bath like May, maybe I could do that. You know, I’m getting hired by Natika. I’m on set with Tommy Hilfiger doing Good Day LA I’m shooting campaigns in Europe all while I’m having 20 bloody bowel moments a day living on Pres.

Wow. I’m running into the forest in Jamaica [00:15:00] shooting, commercials, directors going, well, Dane, where are you going? We’re not done. I’m about to poop my pants in your a thousand dollars suit, sir. You know, and I’m running, wiping myself with leaves. Can you imagine? Wow. Can you imagine how that’s crazy?

Can give and take? At the same time, I was so in shame. I remember my agent finally looking at me because some guy wanted to run his campaign around me, liked my look. I mean, I was 175 pounds, 6% body fat with a 315 pound bench, and I could go run 10 miles. Now I can’t even walk. Ben. I had need a, I’m in a wheelchair.  I need a walker. How did I get Smed? What the, how, why did I deserve this? I can even feel the pain coming up in my body right now. I poop my pants over 80 times, but yet I’m in a magazine. Can you, like, how is this possible? This type of pain is what creates us to find real purpose in life. Through the depression and through the anger, you [00:16:00] can, it can either make you or break you.  It’ll swallow you whole or you will be a phoenix outta the ashes. And I just, I was, I, it swallowed me whole for years. I was depressed, I was angry. I didn’t wanna get off the couch. I only put on a face when there was something to do. And luckily in that role I would be reading scripts or going to a few castings, but I only had to work four days a month.

And I was able to stay afloat in Santa Monica, California, where I healed and luck. That’s amazing. I was a businessman and also I was really good at finances. I was an entrepreneur. I ran a company at 18, I started working at 14. I worked 60 hours a week at 14 years old Papa John’s Pizza, 30 hours a week plus high school, 30 hours a week, six hours a day, five days a week at each.

And so that’s what I wanted to do. I was a hard worker. I had my dad’s work ethic that I had my mom’s creativity since I was a little kid. And that’s what saved me is I wasn’t willing to be a victim. My rent was only $400 a month at Santa Monica. Ben, that’s a whole nother podcast. I sold that. Sure is that stupid?

BMWI got a 1998 infinity for $2,000. I took the 13 grade and use it to help give me some cash flow. [00:17:00] I had little bit of side businesses that were paying me out two, $300 a month in cash. That’s how I paid my rent. My cost of living was only a thousand dollars a month. That’s how I did it. Yeah. My parents were trying to pay the medical bills, fly me to Mayo Clinic, pay for biologics, try to pay for all this organic food.

That’s how they helped me or supplements. But those costs I kept my costs very low. I was very smart. And that was one of the big ways of How did you finally get out of this? What was the turning point? Okay, so I’m in the hospital. This is 2014. And then I’ll tell you the funny story about it. You know, I’m hired and when I was on Prednisone, it would give me enough where I could keep my weight at 1 65, 1 60, for a lot of few years.

I could eat a few things. I’d be on like these medications where I was at least okay to make it look like I could continue to work. So I was a, I was lying, trying to work for three or four years. And I had a, I had really good com contract with Uggs. I. Uggs really liked me. Okay. Okay. And this was Dr.

Tom Brady was with ’em and all that. And I was, and they had me at a job in Santa Barbara and I’m there and I’m going, I’m having these cold sweats. I’m shivering, I’m sitting in [00:18:00] a hot tub at a five star resort. ’cause they have this whole thing there. And I’m shivering in a hot tub. I’m having night sweats through the night.

I’m having 15 bowel movements a day. And they’re about to have this show where I’m wearing all this and we’re doing a fashion show and all this type of stuff. And the art director Sierra knew me. I’ve been working with her for five years or so, or four years or something like that. And I’m losing my visions, Ben.

I’m literally going in and out and I’m supposed to lead this stupid thing. Right? Not stupid. It was a great experience and I’m super grateful it, thank you God for that experience. It was, I was losing and I’m talking to Sierra. I’m going, Sierra, I think I’m gonna, I think I need to go to the hospital.

And she knew me. She knew I was a hard worker. And she going and she goes, what? Are you serious? You go and she’s going, I can’t see. I’m going, I think I’m going blind. And I’m 20, 25, 26. Okay. Wow. Again, I’m supposed to be the cool guy, right? Yeah. The good looking cool guy. Lo and behold, you know, that was the irony of this.

And I. And so she eventually, I’m talking to her, I’m like I have to go. I’m driving myself to the hospital. I’m losing vision. I stop at a grocery store. I grab some emergency packets. ’cause I knew if I get [00:19:00] electrolytes I might be able to make it there. I mean, I shouldn’t have been driving. It was that bad.

And it was about, from Santa Barbara, I don’t know, two hour drive. I drove myself straight to the hospital. That hospital, turns out they wouldn’t take my insurance. ’cause my sag after insurance wasn’t working yet. So they told me it was gonna be a hundred grand if I stayed there because they, they immediately put morphine in me.

’cause I was starting to get in severe pain. And I was just, I was losing tons of weight. I was sweating like crate. Wow. I was shivering. And they, so they put me on morphine and then they ended up saying, Hey, your insurance isn’t gonna cover this. So then they put me in an ambulance, took me to another hospital that is, they said they couldn’t take it.

So they put me in another hospital inland, about an hour away where I almost died. Wow. And because I just, I didn’t have, I got, oh, I was 26. Obamacare didn’t work anymore. And my insurance was sag after I wasn’t, I, it wasn’t really working there yet. And, and so I stayed in that hospital for a month straight.  I nearly, he passed away in that hospital. I went from 165 pounds to 120 pounds. Wow. I went on a TPN feeding tube. I went on chemotherapy that saved my life. I went on 200 milligrams of infused prednisone, three or four different antibiotics. I was on [00:20:00] Cipro, Flagal, you name it. All the worst, all the heaviest antibiotics.  My whole family flew in. My two sisters, my mom, my dad, they didn’t know what was wrong with me. The doctors were completely stunned. My mom became the CEO. She came in there ’cause she went to every hospital. She even lost her job trying to help me fly around the world, try to figure things out. And so she took over and she called every doctor that I’d ever seen.  And this guy, Dr. Blum, down in Florida, told my mom that in one of the many colonoscopies I did, in one of his samples, he found cytomegalovirus.

Dr. Weitz: Huh?

Dane: He thought that the Cytomegalovirus had taken over my body from all the immunosuppressants, from all the damage, all the malnutrition that I had been suffering, that my body and I had just gone up through a serious broke breakup where I had a girlfriend for three years.  And literally this happened three weeks after the breakup. I was just, my nervous system went into complete shock and my immune system just could not handle it. And then the, and then he tried to convince the ER doctor that it was the virus that was killing me. ’cause they couldn’t [00:21:00] figure it out. I, so December 14th, 2014, I nearly passed away.  It was like a Thursday, I believe. And they didn’t know if I was gonna live through the night. I lost consciousness. I was hallucinating. I was on I was on three grams of Dilaudid, which is what they give to dying patients with stage four cancer.

Dr. Weitz: Wow. 

Dane: So this is seven times stronger than morphine, by the way.  So this is legal heroine when you are floating, you know, like I hit a button goodbye, you know, and that’s, they gave me this button in this hand for. About three weeks. Wow. That’s what I remember. And my mom’s So how did you get past the cytomegalovirus? Well, first we had to convince the doctors that it was that, and we called my, the, we called the, you know, insurance company that wasn’t that good.  And we told ’em what was happening. They said If we don’t give him this kind of this antiviral chemotherapy, he’s gonna, he’s gonna die. And so they gave me a sample, ’cause this was very expensive stuff. They gave me a sample and I became conscious within about two to three days

Dr. Weitz: I think it was. What was this medication?

Dane: It was I can’t remember the exact name of the medication. I know it was a systemic antiviral that ki helps to kill these types of viruses, but it [00:22:00] also kills your own red blood cells. And so they called it a chemo.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dane: And I was on the IV of that for about a week. There’s a few pictures of that.  You’ll see, I mean, the internet where there’s a black bag and I’m kind of walking around with it. That’s what it is. And then they gave me a capsulated version of that for me to be on for about a month or two. And so after about five days, I kind of woke up, realized there’s nothing they can do, and I decided to check myself outta the hospital against their will.  And I called my naturopath professor and I said, this is, there’s nothing they can, because they were like, you have to cut out your colon. And I just refused. 

Dr. Weitz: And so you were going to naturopathic college at that time?

Dane: Yeah, so I had been working for about a year. So the funny thing is I had been trying natural medicine for about a year and a half, two years prior to that fatal moment.  And I had been getting some SI finally started figuring something out, like the sugars and polysaccharides and I started really working on my mind and that’s a whole thing. But the, my naturopathic professor came back and that’s what really, [00:23:00] because he started saying, let’s take fish oil, let’s take probiotics.  Let’s take curcumin. But it wasn’t enough. And I realized with him and some of the other professors on his staff, and then I started seeing other naturopathics, they had some really great ideas that I’d never heard of in conventional medicine, but they didn’t have any experience with this type of IBD.  They didn’t have it themselves. They didn’t have ex, they couldn’t show me testimonies of helping people. And that’s when I realized, so this is six months later, eight months later, a year later, where I’m learning about mitochondria energy. I’m learning about the nervous system. I’m learning about the gut and how it works in digestion and food and alkalinity and bioavailable nutrients.  And, but I couldn’t put it together. And so. It was, I was housebound for a year and I started working with him and other people, and he did give me some real things that really helped. Like he, he taught me about Benson, I Clay as a binder. And that was one of the key points that helped clean out my colon.

And I’ll talk about some of the big things I noticed that, or the reason we’re so sick and why I failed for years that I know what hundreds of [00:24:00] thousands of people listening to this right now need to know. And I’m gonna share it with you today. But I was able to start getting control of the virus.

That was the big thing that nearly killed me. Okay. And I proved it because I also have labs now with Doc. I work with Dr. Armand in Germany. I do his labs. I also work with Vibrant America, and I able to show that I get, I can get recurring activated cytomegalovirus. I’ve seen it and I’ve been able to see my, I’ve been able to prove I have it and get rid of it.

Okay. And keep that gone. But those viruses can activate if there’s mold problems, if there’s nervous system problems is there’s mitochondria function issues. And one virus can trigger another virus. Like Covid triggers a lot of other viruses. Amen. And I see so many member so many people we work with, they get covid, they get the flu, boom, all of a sudden they’re flaring, they’re getting blood in the stool.

This is a common issue. Then about 30 to 40% of the members that I’ve seen that we test for these viruses are coming back with current active viruses. And it’s could be one, it could be four. We check for about six Epstein Barr, cytomegalovirus, echovirus, coi, varice virus, and [00:25:00] herpes simplex. It’s more than a pimple.

Okay. Yeah. It’s more than a pimple guys. These things can cause serious immune system reactions. And all s all six of those viruses are forms of the herpes simplex virus. Are you using the Vibrate America viral panel? I do. I still like Dr. Armand’s in Germany because it’s very specific. I like what he’s doing with the Ellie spot with his I-G-A-I-G-M and IgG.  Okay. And he’s customized a panel specifically for IBD for me. Oh, interesting. And so, and I really like him. He’s been a great mentor on these viruses and Lyme disease connection and all this stuff. And so he’ll counsel, he’ll lecture with me as well. And so he’s been doing this for 30 years and he’s found a lot of root issues with AIDS or with Crohn or with autoimmune disease or Dementia or Alzheimer’s.  He’s got some really cool stuff there. You should have him on Dr. Armand. If you need a connection I’ll connect. 

Dr. Weitz: Sounds good.

Dane: But his, he’s got a strong accent. He’s German, right? So, you know, that was a big thing. And so this, everything I’m sharing with you [00:26:00] today is over a course of 10 years, guys, this is not some quick thing.  And there was a lot of struggle and pain. My first goal was to be able to walk 10 yards of 15 yards. I lost the ability to walk from all the muscle atrophy. When you lose that much weight, that quick, your muscles don’t work. And it, you know, it was a very strong experience. So things that I had to deal with, okay, I can eat food at this point.  So when I went to the bathroom, it felt like I was pooping, glass prednisone wasn’t enough. The chemo kind of got me conscious where I was alive. But now I’m dealing with such bad brain fog. I couldn’t think you could ask me a question. It would take me about a minute to process what you were saying to me.  I was like, drooling from the mouth. So it took even a month or two just to be able to like, get conscious again. And then I had to slowly figure out food. And then that year, I had already been in, I finished up. Natural medicine school, I was able to do all of it online, really became less bureaucratic over the last 10, 15 years.  And, but luckily, a lot of the professors live close to me. They come check on me, they talk to me, they train me. We, they tried [00:27:00] protocols with me. That really helped. So, things that I started doing as I started learning how to get bioavailable nutrients through my gut where I could start working again.

So I started customizing what I called an elemental shake. So I started researching what like Jeannie Patel was doing. I researched what Jordan Rubin was doing. I researched what Elaine Godshaw was doing, and I researched what David Klein was doing with the Fruitarian diet. I looked at all these different things and I had tried all these diets over the years.  Ben, this was the big thing that changed my life. I started taking from every theory and customizing my own unique answer I gave up on finding one liter. I’m in the carnivore camp, I’m in the plant camp. I’m in the fruitarian camp. I’m in the only disaccharides and monosaccharides camp. I’m in the fasting camp.  I done all that. I started customizing and I journaled for 185 days. Every single symptom I had what I ate, how I felt, how the nights went, I meditated twice a day. I did prayer twice a day. That’s when I started becoming much more connected with God. I started letting go of my [00:28:00] pain.

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Dr. Weitz:   Exactly. Did you make your own elemental diet or did you use one of the products and add to it?

Dane: I made my own. Okay. But I started to. I started to look at trying a little things like Absorb Plus, which is an amazing product, but I still didn’t know what was that? So there’s, I really loved what Jeannie Patel was doing and listened to your gut. She’s still a partner of mine 10 years later. I met her for dinner like five nights ago.  We’re really excited about what we’re gonna be doing in the future and partnering up. But she’s [00:30:00] made some, a product called Absorb Plus where she’s put her heart and soul into how to make this meal absorb, plus absorb, plus meal replacement now, but when you, it’s very hard to put health in a bottle.  It’s just you can’t put a perfect nutritional thing in a bottle. And I was so reactive. Like even the tapioca multi dextrin, which is the cleanest type of multid dextrin you’re gonna need to make a meal replacement. It’s, IM impossible to get the calories and the carbs and all of that. And it’s, you know, a way isolate from an A one beta caine free grass fed New Zealand cow.  I mean, the cleanest protein. You need a full protein molecule to be able to gain weight on a meal replacement. I found that I’ve started you, you can’t just have amino acids like they have in the element diet. Nope, because you can’t gain the weight you have, you can’t have freeform aminos. It’s not enough.  You have to get a full protein complex. And so what Jeanie did is she ended up creating a either a vegan version, which is not as popular, but it’s a sprouted brown rice protein isolate, which is the only way she can get the the amino acid structure to be able to get you a full [00:31:00] protein compound that can gain weight with.

And then what I prefer is the A two new, grass fed, grass finish. I believe it’s a New Zealand based cow whey isolate. What does isolate mean? It means that it’s been removed 99% of the Cain and lactose that most of us are having a reaction to, but it’s still intact enough where you can gain weight on it and get the full protein molecule.  So those, the benefits of whey isolates or these other protein isolates. But you still need that isolated protein to be the cleanest form, right? And so New Zealand’s gonna have some of the cleanest like lamb and cow dairy protein if you want to go that direction. But I started then focusing on things like hydrolyzed beef, which I found even worked better for me and has a better bioavailability score.  But the Absorb Plus was monumental huge for me. And then I started using different stuff from David Klein. So David Klein had been preaching hard about benefits of fruit. And then you have to go on. These are, this is a full debate guys. Well what about the sugar? What about the water? What about enough protein?

Can you really heal on that many carbs? ’cause the carnivore, some fruit [00:32:00] has polyols and sorbitol and other high glyphosate, high herbicide and pesticide. Most of ’em are in the dirty dozen. It’s, there’s a lot of problems. And then you look and the animal based eaters are gonna go, you’re, this is crazy.

But I found benefits. I found little gems bend with the fruit diet. ’cause I did 500 bananas a day for a while. I just, that’s a joke guys. It’s not that, but you do you, a lot of your calories are from bananas when you do that nutrition plan. And I’ve seen, I’ve, we’ve worked with a few thousand, the three, four, 5,000 people with IBDI have seen the fruit diet do wonders for people, but it’s not sustainable long term.

But there are benefits to fruit. Fruit has the ability to cleanse the colon. It’s very good at cleansing. A lot of IBD is like your river turns into a pond. Why is it you’re having five bowel movements in the morning before 8:00 AM Your colon cannot properly evacuate the toxin buildup and the [00:33:00] stool. And that’s where you’re getting tiny amounts of bowel movements with blood and mucus urgency.

It’s a lack of evacuation. It’s a toxic, you have a pond and that fruit is 80% water and it’s monosaccharides, which are way more bioavailable. Okay. And there the type of fiber is really easy to break down. Are you getting a lot of protein? No, I’m just saying it’s not an answer. It’s a debate and you’ve gotta customize it.

You’ve gotta massage it. It’s like you’re trying to work out something in your muscle. It’s not just one thing. You gotta pound it here, you gotta massage it up here, you gotta put some oil on it. You gotta let it rest. You come back the next day, then you do some electromagnetic therapy on it. You it’s a massage.

So that’s where I said the fruit diet’s not gonna work. But then the carnivore diet I would get, I couldn’t break down the fats. I had histamine reactions. This happens, MCA tends to happen when your liver, your kidneys, your lymphatic system is completely backed up. So I couldn’t break down the fat, I couldn’t, I was having severe reactions with red meat.

The iron was causing severe reactions. Just like with IBD, A lot of us, we [00:34:00] take iron pills and all of a sudden we get more blood, more mucus, more urgency. So the doctor gave me iron and I’m saying, I’m losing more iron, taking your iron. So again, I learned about nano sized iron and I had to heal my gut and get my digestion working and get my liver to start working to, to move proper bile.

This is 10 years of learning guys bile to be able to get. The fats properly broken down and I needed to eliminate the toxin buildup because I had b sludge that was backed up that was not moving through my bile ducts. Right. I didn’t have any extra bile in my in my in my gallbladder. And I could see it.

’cause my elastase one was massively high. I had so much fat mal absorption when I finally learned to do functional labs correctly at the right time and see them strategically in my custom plan. And that’s what I started learning. So Ben, a year and a half later I was 182 pounds. I was gonna the gym four, four days a week.

I got, and I was like, in my mind, I was so traumatized by what happened to me. Beard, long hair, can’t walk cane at 26 years old. Wow. At [00:35:00] 28 and a half, 29, I’m back in the gym. I can, and I was trying to get back to my old self. Right? A young kid who liked weightlifting. I was back to a 300 pound bench press. I was back to being able to run.

I didn’t have to worry about the bathroom anymore. I. I went to Thailand, got myself food poisoning in Thailand. Had to go back to that age one. It’s not a perfect system, guys, but I built what I call shield. So I built my shield. I fi, I finally like, I woke up one day and I was like, is this real? I had to pinch myself like I was, and then I was, you know what’s funny, Ben?

About six months later I got booked for Men’s Health Magazine. I booked a lead role in a movie. I’m sitting on set where we’re doing these fake car crashes. I’m doing fake car, I like fake fighting scenes. I’m in this horror movie. I’m the jock getting killed. You know, I’m the asshole getting killed.

Low budget. And I almost died eight months ago, like it was a year. So, you know, when I almost died, it was a year and a half ago, but I’m like, is this real? I’m on set in New York [00:36:00] doing Men’s Health Magazine. I was almost dead. No one even knows, I can’t even tell anymore ’cause I have this hidden disease.

I’m shooting this movie. And it was funny, Ben, this is how much the mind matters, guys. I learned the hard way. Stress, anxiety, pain. You’re smite at life for God and not being able to heal your mind and your spirit. I have to do this scene, Ben on, I got all these cameras around me and I’m a crap actor, by the way, right?

But I got booked for this and I believe he booked me ’cause of all the pain I had from nearly just dying. ’cause my manager calls me and says, they want, they like you. They wanna see you for this role. I didn’t even practice, I didn’t even memorize the script. I had it in my hand reading the role. So I didn’t, I just read it, but I had so much, I had been through so much.

I was like a warrior coming back from Iraq or freaking Afghanistan or something. I was, I’m not trying to compare, but man, the PTSD was real. And so that was coming out, I think. And then I’m sitting on set, and I have to read these lines, Ben, that my, my wife had died. So in this, my wife had been killed, like final destination, if you’ve ever seen that movie.

Okay. And I have to read these lines [00:37:00] the next day. I’ve got these massive welts on my neck. Wow. Next day my bowel movements go from three to six because I’m literally as an actor trying to get my body to believe that the woman I love just died. Acting is trying to get your cells to believe it.  That’s what the camera picks up on. That’s what a good actor is.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dane: And I quit and that was it. I quit. I did that. Then they want me to do some stupid werewolf movie. I quit and I’ve dedicated my life to functional medicine. I haven’t looked back since I walked out. I walked out before they walked out on me.  I walked out on the whole thing. And I dedicated myself to function. As I said, I’m gonna just, I just wanna be myself. I don’t wanna be anybody else. I don’t wanna try to play anybody else. And that’s how I got here. And that’s a lot of that. And I know that’s a long story and I wanna dive into some more about how we can heal and what nuggets we can take away.  Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: Why don’t you tell us right now, what’s your personal health regimen right now to help maintain yourself?

Dane:  You know, the, I can tell you the problem is it’s not what I would do for anyone who’s suffering right now, there’s steps to this thing. Okay? You know, I’ve gotten, I’ll tell you what’s true is that I don’t,

Dr. Weitz: Why [00:38:00] don’t we start with, if you’re working with a client who comes in?  Yeah. What kind of questions do you ask? What kind of testing do you like to do? Do you do testing? Do you do stool testing? Do yes. You know, okay.

Dane: The first thing I wanna do is make sure that we can get the most impact on where the person’s budget is. People are coming in and, you know, my family spent 40, $50,000 and some people I talked to a guy yesterday told me he spent 10 million trying to heal himself.  And so this is, this could be a money pit. The first thing I wanna do with you guys out there, you know, wherever you are, I want you to look for trust and integrity. Find someone, this is not easy and it’s not linear, okay? It’s not like this. It’s a puzzle. Is build trust and integrity wherever you go and really ’cause.  Things can happen. You need to be on the same team. So if someone is on a budget, I’m gonna, I’m gonna in, I’m gonna tell them that we should invest in coaching and a, and supplement or protocol like therapy, like action because the lab work is a north star. That’s great. But when I look at someone, and I’m sure you, Ben, are the very similar, you can already [00:39:00] know a lot of things.

Like if you look at how they’re eating, you look at their symptoms and you can say, okay, we, obviously there’s some common problems everyone’s gonna have. Everybody with IBD or autoimmune has got backed up drainage pathways a hundred percent. Your liver, your lymphatic system, your ability to poop, your kidneys and your ability to sweat.

All stink. Okay. I don’t need a test to know that, okay, your nutrition plan might be clean, but it’s not bioavailable. If you’ve got any kind of gut health issues, you can’t absorb that food. So even though scientifically this diet might make sense, it’s gluten-free, it’s autoimmune protocol properly. The cardinal rule about food is the manner at which it’s prepared.

It’s not whether a food is good or bad, and that’s how I can heal people who wanna be vegan. I heal people who want to eat meat. Is that it’s about the manner at which it’s prepared. So I’m gonna start saying, how can I get more bioavailable, sprouting pressure, cooking no seeds, no skins, okay. And also food mixing.

People want to eat. Like if you are, if you’re having a steak, [00:40:00] what are you doing to help your body properly Break that down. Like I would say, why don’t you start with ground beef over a steak. You cook on lower temperatures, it’s less likely you’re gonna get food poisoning from it. ’cause you have poor di poor digestion.

Everyone with gut health issues. I-B-S-I-B-D almost notoriously has poor digestion, low pancreatic enzymes, low bile production, low stomach acid. So when I know these things off front, that’s what I’m looking for is I’m looking for signs in the symptoms about how I can fix the anatomy. Almost everyone with IBS or IBD has small intestine bacteria overgrowth.

It’s not a diagnosis, it’s a state of the microbiome. So if you are getting bloating, gas, cramping, it’s all I know you’ve got overgrowth, call it what you want, sifo, sibo, what you got over, you got dysbiosis. So what I wanna do is how does a person respond to certain sugars? I know Sibos gonna be the worst with seed oils and polysaccharides.  Right. That’s what made the SCD diet so famous, Ben, is because the dysbiosis is gonna be [00:41:00] exasperated by these complex carbohydrates.

Dr. Weitz: Depends on the person, but there’s a lot of different types of foods that can aggravate sibo. You got fructose, you got specific types of you got legumes, you got grains, you got specific types of vegetables like cruciferous vegetables, basically more fermentable fiber.

Dane: Yes. Abso and never all is different. So that’s why I’m wondering, you know, how do you do, how do you do with a few monosaccharide fruits? ’cause that’s got fructose. Yep. How intense is this versus a sick predominant colon issue? So, you know, you know, looking like if you have bloating. Gas gastritis belching.  This is more of an upper GI issue. If you’ve got a lot of blood and mucus and urgency, that’s more of a sigmoid colon issue or colon issue. So I’m gonna look at your symptoms and start getting some general ideas of where I’m focusing. Okay? So just look at your symptoms and say what part of the GI tract needs work, but the whole [00:42:00] system, if you have undigested food in the stool, that’s a huge example of poor digestion.

And this is what no one’s telling us out in the world, Ben. This is what people can get here. If you guys like and review this comment, this podcast, if you’re loving this right now, this is what no one’s telling us. You don’t just have IBD, you’ve got crap digestion. You can’t break down food. Doctors are telling me you got Crohn’s and colitis.

Why don’t they tell me I have low stomach acid? That’s something I can do something about it. Why don’t you tell me about my pancreas isn’t working properly. That’s something I can do about it. Here are the four things. Anatomy. You have leaky gut. I forget IBD for a second. You have leaky gut. You have a poor microbiome.

You, that’s anatomy, that’s not chronic. Incurable disease you’re gonna have for the rest of your life that we have to cry about in our bedroom saying, why me? God, this is something you could do. You have a crap microbiome. You have poor digestion, you have leaky gut, and you have backed up drainage pathways.

Your liver is not working. Do you know? 30? There’s right. A correlation of people diagnosed with IBD. There’s clinical research showing about 30% of them also develop some kind of [00:43:00] liver disease. 33 outta 10 people with IBD eventually develop some kind of liver disease. The liver isn’t working. Non fatty liver disease, primary disclosing cholangitis, okay, O.

Other types of liver issues. The liver is a massive problem. Why? Because the liver is what makes bile not the gallbladder. The gallbladder just stores it, right? And without bile, you’re gonna have bowel movement issues. The bile helps to absorb proper nutrients into the ileum, the ddu, the jejunum. And it also helps with moving bowel movements properly through the small intestine.

Remember, we have to get through 28 feet of the GI tract properly. So how do you improve drainage and liver issues? The first thing I have to do is decide what they can take. So here’s the best way I can say it, Ben. Let’s say that I want everyone with this gut health issue to imagine that your gut was like a torn, ACL was like a bad knee.

This is gonna help you dramatically with your mindset, oh, why me? And all this. Just imagine you had a bad knee. The problem with the knee is you go, oh, the doctor knows it. It’s not [00:44:00] an incurable disease. We can fix it. But if the doctor didn’t know how to fix your torn ACL and this was 1805, would you ever walk again?

No. No. Okay. So how are we gonna fix the knee? Well, first off, when you say like, how do I the liver, this is all gonna go back to the liver, is that you have to decide what physical therapy. You can do. So this is gonna help change a lot of lives. Right now if your physical therapist to fix your knee, told you to jump rope two days after you tore your ACL, what would happen to your knee?

You’d tear it again, you’d make it worse. Same knee, same person, but now three months of physical therapy that was successful. And then your physical therapist says on day 100, let’s start doing some light jump rope with a brace. It could actually be therapeutic and it could lead to you getting even stronger and healing.

The type of protocol we do can be right or wrong based on the strategy at which you do it for the exact same [00:45:00] person in the exact same disease. It’s about how can, how does your body handle that herms, that pressure, right? It’s the same thing with fasting. It’s the same thing with a lot of this are, is your body ready to do a liver?

So you gotta start low and slow. Yes. So how do we start? What’s the beginning of your physical therapy? Dry brushing, Epsom salt bath. Get rid of the crap you wanna know the first thing you can do. It’s gonna save you money. Do get rid of the stuff that’s not helping you and can only hurt you. So I had a rule when I first finally ki healed my mind, Ben, and I said, I’m gonna be able to do this.

I said, here’s the rule. I don’t know what to eat. I didn’t know all this stuff. I was on a new road. It was completely foggy. I gave myself a rule if it could potentially help me and it couldn’t potentially hurt me, I’ll do it. Prayer purpose. That’s when I started praying. And puring. That’s why there, meditation, going for walks, sunlight, talking to God.

If it could potentially hurt me and maybe help me, I’m not doing it yet. So everyone wants to [00:46:00] go on high dose NAC and milk thistle and do all this these different types of more intense liver cleanses or bio biofilms. I see all these NPO doctors ruining people ’cause they’re putting ’em on biofilm disruption.  They’re putting ’em on parasite cleanse and they’re not ready. You. This is not something just ’cause you read it in a clinical research article that it’s something you do now. It has to be done properly,

Dr. Weitz: right? And

Dane: so it was like when, so the liver, I want you to start and prove to me that your body’s gonna be okay doing a little Epson salt bath, doing a little dry brushing, doing a little bit of maybe castor oil pack for just 30 minutes.  Prove to me you can handle one gram a day of NAC. Maybe start with a meal so it’s less reactive in your body. Then maybe we move up to bile salts like tca. Maybe we move up to high dose kidney liver support. Maybe we move up to also high, higher lymphatic drainage protocol. Maybe we’re doing kidney lymph.

You know, prove to me if you can’t have a bowel movement, you need to be careful. Now if I start on your liver, you might actually start pooping better. I’ve done so many testimonies for people who, with cholangitis collagenous colitis and other [00:47:00] types of microscopic issues or other problems where they’ve tried every diet.

And the moment I start working on their drainage, their life completely changes. So it can be one or the other. So the answer is you have to be like Sherlock Holmes, and you have to get trained. You gotta get self-empowered. How are you gonna get rid of this for the rest of your life by becoming the answer and the cure for autoimmune disease?

In my mind. Okay, listen to me metaphorically here. The cure is not to eradicate, it’s impossible to eradicate anything. So if you’re in your head depressed, that you think you’re gonna have this for the rest of your life, well guess what? You’re gonna have bad days for the rest of your life. You’re gonna get headaches for the rest of your life and you’ve stopped brushing your teeth.

Gingivitis is gonna come outta remission and flare. Okay? Do you understand what I just said? Get rid of this limbing belief of someone allowing someone to stamp you in the forehead and say, I can’t be fixed and I’m broken forever. Okay? Right. Everything is in remission. There’s nothing that can be eradicated.

So the cure, and I use that word to help re-empower us. Metaphorically here. The cure is the ability to respond to adversity, not to eradicate it. So if I [00:48:00] can, if something happens, and then I can know my body and then I can act on it. That’s how I got where I am now, Ben, now you’ve just, that’s the answer to me.

10 or 12 years later, that’s allowed me to eat whatever I want, when I want, how I want, and I’m just prone to gut health issues. But I haven’t taken a medication in 10 years and I never got a surgery because, and it was it easy? No. Did I defy, did I do some stump stupid stuff? What? I would advise myself to do things different over this road.

Absolutely. You know, I was a knucklehead, but I did what I did and I got where I wanted to be and it was hard. And I was in a hospital many times and I had to take a lot of medications and I said that was stupid many times. But, you know, I dedicated my life to getting back to, I’m not a sick person. I was never meant to be sick.  I refuse this reality and I’m gonna dedicate myself to it. And I’ve dedicated myself to helping others find that same path.

Dr. Weitz: So when you talk about this homemade elemental diet, gimme a sense of what you’re putting. Are you putting it in a blender?

Dane: Yes. So homemade when I, what I’ll say whole [00:49:00] Food Elemental diet, and what I’m saying is I’m not using a preconceived mixed powder like Kate Farms or Ensure Absorb Plus.  Now I will use those and if I had to choose one, I’m going with Absorb Plus. Okay. Absolutely. Janie has done a profound job on that product. You know, I’m gonna do the unsweetened. There’s a lot of sugar in there. Some people are gonna get bloating and gas. That’s why it has to be customized. So what I found is when I was doing the Fruitarian diet, I did notice certain benefits, like the bleeding started going down.  I noticed that my colon was getting a little clear, and that’s what had my first aha moment. Holy cow, I can’t evacuate the colon. When I was eating all meat, I would have these tiny little small bowel movements and the pushing would create more hemorrhoids and the, and then I would just, I couldn’t, I would get, I would just get so gassy, I couldn’t break down the fats, and then I’d get histamine reactions.  A lot of itching. Skin reactions and that could handle the red meat. So if you can’t handle the red meat, so I started saying, let me focus on white meats, grounded meats. Let me [00:50:00] focus on chicken rotisserie chickens chicken wings. Let me focus on Turkey and then let me slowly work on ground beef and work up from there.  And then I started learning how to get more digestive enzymes to help me. So I started fixing the fat problem. And then with fruit, I noticed that would cleanse my colon. And then I would, because you can, when you’re that sick, you can feel how swollen and inflamed your colon is. So you like using digestive enzymes specifically from, for people with poor digestions, I will use them.  But then as I get the pancreas working, the, because if once the liver’s working, your digestion’s gonna get better. I, I don’t use ’em long term. I’ll use them long term occasionally. So we don’t, so I don’t believe in cheating. I believe in celebrating. The goal is that you can eat whatever you want.

So if you continue to get healthier and you want to say, DI wanna test my shield and I wanna go out and eat McDonald’s with fries and coke, you know, I, you know, that’s terrible for you. But have at it, go test yourself. It’s like getting in a boxing ring. Like, you know, like metaphorically, men might have self-confidence issues if they if they feel like any person could come awry and just [00:51:00] rob them or take advantage of their wife or anything.  So some guys wanna get in there and just learn to box so they have the confidence to defend their family. Well, it’s kinda like that with food and IBD you wanna have the confidence that I’m not made of glass and I’m not fragile and I can go on vacation and I’ll be okay and my shield is strong enough and that’s when freedom arises.  That’s when I say I can eat what I want, when I want, how I want. I just don’t poison myself. I have no, no desire to. But if you wanna gimme a 10,000 bucks, have me eat a entire large Papa John Pete’s beta chug a six pack and go on a five mile run game on. I’ll do it. Right. And I’ll be Okay. I’ll fix it and I’ll do protocols to fix my gut.

Dr. Weitz: You like herbal bitters versus digestive enzymes? Do you use HCL?

Dane: I’ll use a little bit of HCLA little bit. I like to focus on a lot of pancreatic enzymes, a little HCL, a little bit of oxil. I like a product by Quicksilver. It’s called Bitters X. It’s a liposomal bitters. Yep. And so as I’m trying to get ’em off the battan, right.  I’ll use that. I’ll use [00:52:00] so this, I was, remember I was chugging this? Yeah. This is got, this is TI like in the mornings. So this has got three or four caps. A product called mucosal calm, that’s got slippery marshmallow root and glycerides licorice root. These all calm and keep that gut lining Super strong.  Yeah. Make sure leaky gut’s not a problem at all, right? It helps with microscopic inflammation as well. So then I put a little lemon juice for that can help with digestion. This is all in hot water. Also natural electrolytes, natural vitamin C. Then I put a shot of apple cider vinegar. Apple cider vinegars is acts much like bitters, right?  It helps to enhance the digestion. So this can be really good before I have breakfast also. It’s gonna be good. If you can get yourself salivating before you eat, then you’re gonna be in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is going to help activate your vagal nerve. Your vagus nerve, which manages your digestion, will not work if you’re not in the parasympathetic, right?  Everyone’s always saying they need vagal nerve stimulation. Just focus on getting yourself the salivate before you eat. You’re done. This is the benefit of saying a prayer or breathing [00:53:00] before you eat. Isn’t that beautiful? We used to sit down and actually really work on our meal and cook it, and the kids would be saying, mom, I’m hungry.  Not yet. We’re not done. We’re waiting on the biscuits. Right? And it would be like you’d be smelling in the kitchen. I’m actually salivating right now thinking about it and what my body is happening in my body is it’s getting prepared to eat. Now it’s drive through. Thank you. Shove your mouth, get coffee back to work.

And so, you know, I’m having to swallow ’cause I’m salivating. So that’s the thing. You want your vagal nerve, you want all the, you know, focus on it. The more you fix how life is supposed to be, the less you have to worry about supplements. The more you wanna live in our modern day life and you want to have any kind of alcohol and you’re not gonna cook at home.

It’s a convenience tax, the more supplements you’re gonna need. So just find your level of what you’re willing now you’re gonna need to do supplements and bitters and all these different things to fix your body. And I would say that it’s very possible that you can get. Massive symptom relief within two weeks.

’cause a lot of this stuff is just something no one’s ever told you. Like just going after the candida, candida is a massive [00:54:00] problem. Okay? For IBD, the common problems I see, bacteria, overgrowth, viruses, parasites, candida is a huge one. Mold. And then the deeper advanced problems are gonna be like parasites, biofilms and then heavy metals.  There’s a lot of, there’s great, you know, I’m speaking at cell core in a few months and I was just putting together my presentation and looking at all these clinical research and there’s a lot of clinical research around environmental toxins, pc, PCBs, pfas heavy metals, especially Mercury on leaky gut microbiome disruption and being potentially linked with IBD.

Another one, oh, Ben, I gotta tell you this one. This is gonna be huge for your listeners guys. Please give him five stars reviews for having me on today and doing this with you guys. I because I know what it’s like. This is hard work, what he is doing. It’s. I was using Invisalign for one year before I got diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.  Ah, interesting. Ben, what do you think about that? What’s Invisalign? What do we think? Microplastics? Yeah. There’s been the University of Florida, I believe it was the University of Florida, just put out some clinical research a year or two ago about the [00:55:00] connection of microplastics with inflammatory bowel disease.  It showed that people with IBD had 50% more microplastics found in their gut than the average person. Wow. Using Invisalign for 13 or 14 months. Chewing on that baby through the night, 24 hours a day. Swallowing that for a year before I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dane: And I was drinking the GNC whey protein, you know GNC The store?  Yeah. General Narcotics Center. Yeah. They have that. I was drinking that crap protein, that whey protein for years. I gotta get my, my, I gotta eat 180 grams of protein a day. ’cause it’s one to one body weight. I need my macros up. You know, causing diarrhea, don’t care. My bench press is higher. Give me more of it.  You know, getting cystic acne, don’t care. Gotta get my weights up, gotta get my muscles bigger. You know? So, those are some huge root causes that insist, like, and then this anger, and I know everyone listening to this is going, oh my God, I gotta send this to my son, my, my brother, my friend. Oh my God. What, [00:56:00] why didn’t the doctors tell me this?  That’s the big thing. Now, why didn’t even wanna mention this? I always ask myself, I found massive candida in a, at-home quantitative PCR stool analysis. Why didn’t Mayo Clinic, Jewish Stool analysis? Why didn’t Cleveland Clinic, why didn’t UCLA do a stool analysis? No, they just had the diet. They had to shove something up my butt, which could have perforated me and tell me I have IBD.

Why didn’t they tell me I had blasts, Hominini? Why? Why didn’t they tell me I had h pylori? Why didn’t they why didn’t they? Did they believe there was a connection between h pylori and Ulcerations? Did no one tell ’em this? Why didn’t they tell me I had low stomach acid? Why didn’t anyone bring it up?

Here’s what could have saved us all. What if the doctor told you had chronic inflammation in the bowel? They didn’t know what it caused, and they had some immunosuppressants, antibiotics and steroids they could give you to help. Maybe I could, they could have helped me then search instead of going into this tunnel of ultimate depression as a kid saying, I have a disease for the [00:57:00] rest of my life that I wasn’t ashamed to share with anybody.  Yeah. But that doesn’t fit into the medical model. And you know, and this is what I want to get everyone to get empowered as some of the last things we talk about on today is, at the end of the day, something I could empower you is IBD equals IDK. I-D-K-I-D-K. I don’t know. I don’t know what causes the inflammation, but I’ve got, well, and

Dr. Weitz: IBS was, you know, we recently had Dr. Pimentel on the podcast, and IBS for years was the same thing. We don’t know, take some antidepressants, take some antiacid, takes some anti acids, right? 

Dane: Take something slow down the urgency, right? 

Dr. Weitz: And then just right here’s a drug for the diarrhea. Here’s a drug for the constipation. Who cares what causes it?

Dane:  Ben and I think that the toxins that’s that, that the world we’re living in is making this so worse. In my opinion. What I’m just, my guess on this is I’m seeing IBS is almost the same as like, you know, how we have pre-diabetic and diabetic. I almost consider IBS just pre IBD. [00:58:00] We’ve had lots of members who had IB S for 15 years, then they finally get diagnosed and then we’re getting diagnosis as, oh no, it’s it’s proctitis.  Oh no, it’s pan colitis. No, it’s ulcerative colitis. No, it’s widespread Crohn’s. We’re literally getting people diagnosed like that doctors are disagreeing. This whole idea of a diagnosis is kind of, it’s a little, it’s good in a way, but there’s a sham to it. Yeah. They can keep changing it. And it’s just an opinion.  They’re, yeah. The whole

Dr. Weitz: concept of the diagnosis is you give it a name so it can correlate with a drug and story’s over.

Dane: I’ll take it one step further. Ben, I was with a GI doctor I work with, shout out to Dr. Kenneth Brown. He’s amazing. He does dysfunctional me. Oh, I know Kenneth Brown. Yeah. He’s awesome soul.  He try and tell He’s ama Yeah, he’s in Dallas. So I flew out to see him. We did an interview. He was on I was on his podcast and I was sitting there and he was walking me through all his steps of the colonoscopy and how they prep. And he’s just awesome. But I was just like, well, so how are you diagnosed him?  Dr. Ken? He said, most of how IBD is diagnosed is visual. Yep. [00:59:00] It’s a visual assessment Yes. On a camera that snake threw the 28 feet of track. It’s a visual. What are we, so when this whole diagnosis, it’s his opinion, it’s an opinion that can change it. And then all of a sudden you cut out the colon, you don’t deal with the root issue, and then the inflammation spreads at the other part of the GI tract, and then you need another surgery six years later.

Right. And so it’s and here’s another thing that’s really interesting about it. Through endoscope, endo, endoscopy and colonoscopy, they can’t see the entire 28 effect. Right. The small intestine is so punched together and so ribbed up. Yeah. They can’t even see parts of it. Yeah. So they try to see a part of the ileum, they try to go through with the scope or the camera the pill camera.

And they see maybe 80%. And then they, and then it’s like you have to look at the A-A-N-C-A antibodies. You have to look at the they have to look at the calprotectin. You have to look at the lysosomes. There’s a whole thing to it. Yeah. And if, you know, 90% of our clients, nine outta 10, we check with all our team, all of our doctors and all of our practitioners around the world.

We have coaches in Dubai, Spain, all over America, [01:00:00] Canada. We see everyone everywhere. We check 90, we’re getting 90% sim. We’re getting, 90% of our clients are getting a minimum, the minimum 60% symptom relief in about three to four months. Like if there’s, if this is not, if this is fake and a scam and nutrition doesn’t matter, why are we getting such massive results?

And I know you’ve seen it. I know. You know it’s real. Yes. Your anatomy problems. Forget the diag. The one of the last things I wanna say. Just forget the whole chronic disease for a second. Yes. You, your immune system can auto trigger. That’s something we’re all still working on. But you can fix the anatomy, you can fix the digestion, the microbiome, the gut lining.

You can help to calm down the cytokine reactions. You can clean the cell. As Dr. Papapa likes to say, you can clean the liver, you can make this the worst thing ever happened to you. You can use it as a catalyst to become one of the healthiest people on the planet. And then, so reduce the things that actually kill you.

Cancer right. Heart disease, right? Medical medical error, which is the third leading killer in America right now. Those are the deadly horsemen. [01:01:00] So car crashes, gunshots, Alzheimer’s. This is the Anth guys. This is the wake up. This is what you say. I’m going to use this as a catalyst to wake up.  And once you start getting results, you will believe because you will see what your body can do. And it will feel too good to be true. It’ll feel like it’s as, but I also say it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do in your life. It’s not easy. It’s a huge hill. Get your mind right. It’s one of the hardest things.  Ben’s gonna make space for you. I’m gonna make space for you. I’m here. I hope today was a massive massive change for you. God bless. Thanks for having me. And happy healing, Ben.

Dr. Weitz: Thank you so much, Dane, tell us about your contacts.

Dane: Yeah, so you can find us CrohnsColitis lifestyle.com on Instagram, CrohnsColitislifestyle.com, and just reach out.  We offer free sessions if you want to work with us or need any support and you’re dealing with IBD or something like that. But then again, just thank you, Ben, for having me, and please leave him a review if this was helpful and and give him a five star. ’cause you know, podcasting is really hard and we’re here to make a big difference in life.  And I’m here for you. We’ll work with you if it makes sense and we have trust and integrity.

Dr. Weitz: Thanks Dane.

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Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would very much appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcast or Spotify and give us a five star readings and review.  As you may know, I continue to accept a limited number of new patients per month for functional medicine. If you would like help overcoming a gut or other chronic health condition and want to prevent chronic problems and want to promote longevity, please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310-395-3111 and we can set you up for a consultation for functional medicine, and I will talk to everybody next week.