How to Lose Visceral Fat with Dr. William Davis: Rational Wellness Podcast 440

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Dr. William Davis discusses How to Lose Visceral Fat with Dr. Ben Weitz.  

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Podcast Highlights

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Dr. William Davis is a cardiologist and New York Times bestselling author of a number of books, including Wheat Belly and Super Gut and his newest book is Super Body.  His website is DrDavisInfiniteHealth.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, drweitz.com.  Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast.

Alright, great. Welcome to the Rational Wellness Podcast. I’m Dr. Ben Weitz, and today we’re joined by Dr. William Davis, cardiologist and New York Times bestselling author of a number of books, including Wheat Belly and Super Gut, and his newest book, Super Body.  Dr. Davis shifts the focus from gut ingrained to body composition, muscle preservation, and metabolic rejuvenation. He challenges. The calorie in/calorie out model, he critiques the widespread use of GLP one agonists and bariatric procedures. And he argues that muscle tissue and the microbiome are the keys to restoring youthful vitality and metabolic health will dive into the mechanisms behind this, the practical strategies and what clinicians can take away to better support patients seeking to improve muscle mass, metabolic resistance, and long-term body composition.

Dr. Davis, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Davis:  Oh, my pleasure. Glad to be here.

Dr. Weitz:  Okay, great. So, when I read that the focus of your book was that people who lose weight often lose muscle and that preserving muscle mass and losing visceral fat was the goal. I thought when I read your new book, super Body, you’d be talking about doing heavy weight training, eating lots of protein, maybe taking whey protein powder or amino acids or creatine, but you don’t discuss much of that.  I was surprised. Can you explain how you… 

Dr. Davis:  I want to go beyond the conventional ideas. You know, conventional ideas have kind of gotten us in this mess. That is what’s surprising is the science has advanced considerably and shows us that conventional methods of losing weight, whether it’s a reduced calorie diet, some of these branded programs, for instance, or as our colleagues like to say, move more/eat less, or smaller portion sizes.  Or it could be a bariatric procedure like lap band or gastric bypass. Or it could be even a pharmaceutical, like the very popular GLP-1 agonists that reduce appetite. Well, these are all variations on the same [00:03:00] theme. They all cause reduction in calorie intake. So GLP one agonist, for instance, make you indifferent to food.  And it slows… 

Dr. Weitz:  By the way, for those who are listening who don’t know what GLP one agonists are, those are drugs like ozempic, which a lot of people are using for weight loss right now in the United States.

Dr. Davis: Mm-hmm. So they work, these methods do work in the near term to cause weight loss. The problem is other things happen besides just losing fat.  So one of the problems is that of the weight you lose approximately 25% is muscle. Whether it’s low calorie diet, bariatric procedure, or a pharmaceutical, you lose 25, 25% of the weight loss is muscle. So if you paid, for instance, $12,000 for a year’s worth of one of those GLP agonist drugs and you lost 40 pounds, which is very common, of that 40 pounds, [00:04:00] 30 pounds is fat, 10 pounds is muscle. Now think about 10 pounds of muscle. Of course, on your of 10 pounds, say of ground beef on your kitchen counter.  That’s a lot of muscle.  Well, if you stop the drug, which is very common, most people either can’t afford it forever or they have intolerable side effects. You stop the drug, you typically regain about 32 to 34 pounds of fat, mostly in the abdomen, and you don’t regain the muscle.  You regain maybe a trivial quantity of muscle where your blood glucose, your blood pressure, your inflammatory markers are all worse now, and you’re much more likely to be a type II diabetic or pre-diabetic. Have hypertension, risk for coronary disease, risk, heart, and because, oops, okay. Did I lose you?

Dr. Weitz: You broke up a little bit, but go ahead.

Dr. Davis: Okay. Okay. When you lose that much muscle, we know with good science now, a lot of this work was, they showed that when you lose that much muscle, your basal metabolic rate, that is the rate at which your body burns energy for the work of life, breathing, digestion, et cetera. Your basal metabolic rate drops typically about 25%, and that means you need fewer calories to stay alive.  And if you stay on a low calorie diet and an intensive exercise program, after you lost the weight with one of those methods, you will regain the weight. You know, I had a very nice conversation with Danny Cahill.

Dr. Weitz:  Okay.

Dr. Davis:   He was the winner of the eighth season of the Biggest Loser TV show. So, he lost 239 pounds.  Astounding right and a breathtaking amount of weight, 239 pounds in seven months. He looked terrific, though the graduates typically are wearing Spanx underneath their clothes because they have such awful loose skin flaps. But nonetheless, he wins the program. He wins the contest. He gets a $250,000 prize.  And I talked to him now some years afterwards, and he’s regained all the weight. He told me he left the program. This is a serious guy with a very deep commitment to maintaining his weight. He left the program, maintained a two hours per day, six days per week, exercise program, resistance, anaerobic, and a low calorie diet.  And he regained all the weight. And he said he’d go back to the annual reunions hosted by the producers TV show, and he saw all the other graduates going through the same thing, all regaining the weight. And when I talked to the guy, he was clearly [00:07:00] beaten down, demoralized because he regained all the weight after all that fanfare.  Now, the NIH scientists studied his class of graduates of the program and measured their basal metabolic rate, both at the completion of the program and six years later, and their basal metabolic rate stayed much lower even six years later. So it’s for all practical purposes, a permanent effect, and it guarantees that you will regain the weight as fat, not as muscle, but as fat.

You’re worse off now than now. Even worse. You know, I’m always impressed that there have been groups who did this. They took tens of thousands of people. And tracked them after they lost weight for several years, up to 20 years. So there are several large databases in which this was done. The NHANS, the NIH database, the Western Europe Epic Norfolk database, the ASPR database.  In total, over 60,000 people followed for many years. What happens to those people who lose weight? Well, the people who lost 10% of their weight or more. So a woman who starts at 180 pounds loses 18 pounds. A guy who starts 240 pounds loses 24 pounds. There’s not pretty common stuff. They’re going to die several years younger, and their last few years are much more likely to be spent in assisted living.  Or other facility, they’re much more likely, they’re more prone to falls, fractures, frailty, sarcopenia, loss of muscle loss of independence and dementia, and then they die several years younger. This is what the drugs and all those efforts at cutting calories, the science is now clear is a, you set a bunch of landmines for your life when you lose weight by cutting calories, largely [00:09:00] because the loss of muscle and the reduction in the basal metabolic rate.

Dr. Weitz: So I would argue, and we’ve argued for many years, is that’s why you don’t want to lose a lot of weight quickly. You want to do it slowly. You want to make sure you’re incorporating heavy weight training and adequate protein levels. And if you lose at the rate of say maybe one to two pounds a week or so you can in maximize the amount of fat loss while minimizing the amount of muscle loss.

Dr. Davis: So the studies are tell us that should you incorporate resistance training with your weight loss efforts. So, yet again, another very excellent NIH study. So if you lose let’s say 25% of your basal metabolic rate, when you lose weight, if you incorporate strength training, you lose about 18%. Of your basal metabolic rate, it reduced.  In other words, it blunts it, it does not [00:10:00] avoid it. And so,…

Dr. Weitz:  Even if you lose weight slowly and you include, add adequate levels of protein,?

Dr. Davis: so once again, you blunt it, you don’t prevent it. So all you can do with those kinds of strategies because there’s too many factors that are working against you. For instance, a very common problem I’m sure you run across in your practice is SIBO, is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and thereby endotoxemia, meaning there’s wild overgrowth of fecal microbial species because of our overexposure antibiotics and other factors.  That starts in the colon. These over proliferated fecal microbes then ascend into 24 feet of small intestine. And the small intestine’s not accustomed to this. It’s very permeable by design because that’s where we’re supposed to absorb nutrients like amino acids, vitamins and minerals. But when you have the infestation or colonization of the [00:11:00] small intestine by fecal microbes it’s not equipped to deal with it.  It increases the permeability even more. And when those microbes, trillions of them die, they release their toxic compounds, but specifically components of their cell wall endotoxin. And that endotoxins released into the intestines and then into the bloodstream. A process called endotoxemia. And we know with good evidence that endotoxemia is a major factor that damages muscle.  So in other words, if you lost weight, fast or slow, regardless of method, but you have endotoxemia working against you, you will not maintain muscle because it’s damaging your muscle. And how come it is this? Well, it’s half the country. It’s huge. That’s not being talked about, but the science is already there.  In other words all I did for instance was ask this. Let’s look at the several dozen studies that asked this question in condition blank. [00:12:00] What proportion of people will test positive for sibo? Usually by hydrogen gas, breath testing, some other methods, right? So let’s put in…

Dr. Weitz: SIBO breath testing is pretty much the only way to determine SIBO, right? 

Dr. Davis:  That and duodenal aspirate, but no one wants to do that, right? Yeah. Endoscopy. Yeah. Right. So let’s insert into the blank. Irritable bowel syndrome. So there’s 60 to 70 million Americans with IBS. What proportion test positive? Well, it varies from study to study, but on average about 31%.  Well, that’s about 18 to 20 million people right there. How about we insert obesity into the blank? Well, that’s 110 million Americans right there. What proportion tests positive for sibo? About 50%. So that’s about 55 million people right there. Well, let’s add up all the people who test positive with fibromyalgia.  Type two diabetes, pre-diabetes, sleep [00:13:00] apnea rheumatoid arthritis, and other autoimmune conditions, neurodegenerative conditions. In other words, you’ll see you can rapidly exceed easily a hundred million and more likely more than 150 million people in this country, about one and two. And I didn’t believe it at first, even though the math told us that was true.  I didn’t believe it until I started testing people as a consumer device. I’m in a hotel right now. I don’t have, I’m not at my desk, but I go pull my air device, A IRE. It’s a consumer device. Yeah. Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

That allows people to test for hydrogen gas. It’s a mapping device. It helps you map where fecal microbes are living in your gastrointestinal tract.  And to my great surprise, as I had thousands of people doing this huge numbers tested positive and it correlated with whatever condition they had, sleep apnea, fibromyalgia, whatever. Then we corrected it and I saw all those problems go away. If someone hit a weight loss [00:14:00] plateau, for instance, it would break with correction of the sibo.  If they couldn’t build muscle, they would build muscle because you reduce the endotoxemia if you had high blood, glucose wasn’t coming down. It finally came down once you addressed the SIBO and thereby the endotoxemia. So I became convinced that this is far more common than we think, and among the consequences.  Is so if you have endotoxemia that’s not addressed, you will expand abdominal visceral fat and you will impair muscle, including by the way, the deposition of fat directly into muscle. That’s becoming a big problem, by the way, myosteatosis. That is, as you accumulate fat in the abdomen, which is very common and underappreciated, you will in parallel deposit fat in muscle myosteatosis, and that impairs muscle function, muscle strength, and impairs what’s called myokine production.  That is muscle is, you know, muscle. We thought from [00:15:00] years muscle is this inert thing, right? That allows you to walk and climb that kinda stuff. But no, it’s actually an endocrine organ that produces numerous factors that impact brain health, bone health, gastrointestinal health.  Muscle talks to your gastrointestinal microbiome and vice versa.  And so one of the effects of myosteatosis and endotoxemia those processes, it not only impairs muscle, it impairs myokine production and thereby yet another layer of of interfering with muscle metabolism. And so, in other words, if all we do is lose weight, you have not addressed many of the factors that have are impairing multiple aspects of health, but also muscle health.

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Dr. Weitz:  Dr. Pimentel has said that trying to use that food marble device to diagnose SIBO is not really accurate because what’s been correlated with. W with testing the samples is having the patient drink the lactose and then timing the breath test e every 15 minutes, and not just eating a meal and checking the breath.

Dr. Davis: That’s right. I have great respect for Dr. Pimentel’s work. He’s done a lot of great work, but I think he’s wrong on that issue. There have been validation studies on the air device. I have no relation with the air device, so I’m not defending it because I’m selling [00:18:00] it or something, but it’s been validated in two studies to be as good as or better than getting hydrogen gas testing in a lab or clinic because it’s a point of contact.  In other words, if you were to collect breath in a bag, a tube, or a canister, hydrogen gas is a very small molecule and it’s prone to leak even if you’re really quick about capping your tube or whatever. The air device is direct contact, and so I think it’s actually at least as good and probably superior, and no one’s advocating that we test randomly after a meal.  That’s, that doesn’t work because that’s gonna measure colonic fermentation or production of hydrogen gas. So what we do is there is a prep just as you would, there’s a diet prep at 12, 12 to 24 hours avoiding all fibers, sugars and alcohol. And then you do a baseline and you consume something that most microbes that cause SIBO consume now they [00:19:00] use, as you point out, OSE and lab, which I think is a mistake because we use inulin. ’cause inulin is more, is metabolized by a greater number of species that characterize sibo. In other words, if you consume something like ose that many microbes can’t convert to hydrogen gas, you’re gonna miss that rise in hydrogen gas.  So we use inulin ’cause it’s more widely metabolizable. Now we like to do some formal studies to, to validate all that, but we already know with science with multiple experiments that inulin is widely metabolizable by microbes.

Dr. Weitz:   Interesting. What form do you get the inulin in?

Powder. Just a powder.  Okay. About 10 grams in your cup of coffee or in food and you can have breakfast. Then we test every 30 to 45 minutes. And of course, any rise on this device of four units or more in the first 90 minutes means you have microbes, fecal microbes, living in your stomach, duodenum, [00:20:00] jejunum, and these small intestine where they don’t belong.  And then we have to eradicate those microbes. Now I’ve been taking a very different path, so I think Dr. Pimentel would argue you take Xifaxan or Rifaximin, right? You know, I’ve got some real qualms about that because if antibiotics got us in this mess, can antibiotics rescue us? I have a hard time with that.  Right.  As you know, conventional antibiotics have a lot of problems, and the efficacy of Xifaxan is anywhere from about 55 to about 70%. Well,

Dr. Weitz:  And there’s arguments about whether or not SIBO is caused by antibiotics. I mean, I tend to think they are a problem, but I don’t think that is necessarily accepted by all the researchers.

Dr. Davis: They haven’t read the science then because it’s well established that you have a loss of hundreds of, so if you took, let’s say one course, maybe a few days of azithromycin or clarithromycin, you kill [00:21:00] off hundreds of species–that’s well established. And then you have the, so those beneficial species, these are species like lactobacillus, bifidobacteria, fecal bacterium, Akermmansia, lacto, speria, cia, u bacterium, clostridium.  These are beneficial species. When you kill them, they were doing you a favor. They were suppressing the excessive proliferation of those fecal microbes. So when you lose those. Beneficial microbes suppressing fecal microbes. The fecal microbes go berserk and they over proliferate. This is not my speculation, this is well established.  I dunno why they’d say something as sadly ignorant as that we know with good science that there’s over proliferation, fecal microbes, E coli, salmonella, campylobacter, citrobacter, pseudomonas, proteus, that then ascend into the small intestine. Now there’s more to it, of course, but the science is not well sorted out.  And how much of a role does glyphosate play? Or other herbicides and pesticides. How much of a role do food preservatives [00:22:00] play because they’re antimicrobial food, but also in you? How about things that emulsify the mucus barrier, like Carboxy Methylcellulose, or Polysorbate 80, or those things that emulsify the mucus barrier and thereby impair your protection against fecal microbes?  There’s a long list of things we’re exposed to, but the science is clear. Antibiotics do mess us up. So it’s been a century since penicillin was discovered and in that, now there, of course, you know, no, there are times you must take an antibiotic if you have urinary sepsis or pyelonephritis. You could die.  You need an antibiotic. If you have pneumococcal pneumonia, you need an antibiotic. But what if you just have a dry cough, a fever of a hundred 0.4 from a viral upper respiratory infection? The impulse is course. Here’s an antibiotic, but the wild overuse of antibiotics. 650,000 prescriptions written every day, over 1300 prescriptions written every year for every thousand [00:23:00] children.  Wild overprescription of antibiotics. And that’s, that is with confidence one of the major reasons for why we’re experiencing this, so Xifaxan would be, I think Mark Pimentel solution and other, and I really admire Pimentel’s works. This is not meant to be a criticism of his work, but I think conventional gastroenterologists of which Pimentel is one, tend to revert back to pharmaceuticals and procedures.  We know this, right? This is just how conventional medicine works. So what if you took a probiotic, a commercial probiotic right off the shelf? Would that work to eradicate 24 feet of fecal microbes colonizing your small intestine? No. It might reduce bloating and diarrhea a little bit, but it won’t get rid of all those fecal microbes.  So I asked some different questions. I asked, what if we chose microbes that are known to colonize the small intestine? Most do not, right? Most colonize the colon except for [00:24:00] those fecal microbes that are sent. But what if we chose microbes that are known to colonize the small intestine…d.

Bacterin ne. So I chose three. These are three–reure rotary, a Cho a strain of lactobacillus gase, and a strain of bacillus subtilis. We ferment them because when you have trillions of microbes, infesting the small intestine, and you come in with a probio with a few billion, you’re not gonna have any effect. So we’re gonna come in with hundreds of billions of microbes, and we do that by fermenting them as something that looks and smells like yogurt.  It’s not yogurt, of course, and you can’t buy in a store. We just wanna get super duper high counts. So for instance, if we took lacto rotor, rotary, small intestine, colonizer, bacteria, and producer, [00:25:00] we fermented rotary doubles. They don’t have sex, right? Microbes don’t have sex. They just double themselves.

Well, Reuteri doubles every three hours at human body temperature. So we’re gonna ferment it for 36 hours, allow it to double 12 times. I perform flow cytometry on these yogurts, yogurt like, foods. And we get around 300 billion microbes per half cup or 120 milliliter serving. So we’re gonna ferment these microbes to get these super duper high counts.  And so far this has exceeded all expectations in normalizing breath hydrogen gas and or getting rid of reversing the condition that we thought was due to SIBO and endotoxemia, for instance.

Dr. Weitz: Can you repeat those three microbes? You said lactobacillus reuteri. And what are the other two?

Dr. Davis: So it’s a strain of lactobacillus reuteri.  I I [00:26:00] specify strain because Right. For instance, in lactobacillus reuteri, not all strains produce bacterin. So we choose, right. So which strain are we talking about? So it depends. 

Dr. Weitz: Okay. So particular strain of lactobacillus reuteri. And what are the other two: Bacteria lactobacillus..

Dr. Davis: Gase.  [00:27:00] Okay. And Bacillus Subtlis. Okay. It looks like Subtilis, S-U-B-T-I-L-I-S. Yeah, by way I read my super gut book. They’ll say, oh, but your third microbe was bacillus coagulans. And that was the original recipe. But what we found in our repeated measures of how many microbes we got, bacillus coagulans, a fine microbe by the way, just proved to be unreliable for dairy, for fermentation in dairy.  So I chose bacillus subtlis. That’s much more reliable. It’s very easy to ferment. And we ferment it at nine degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours. ’cause it doubles every hour. It’s much faster. A producer and it’s a champion. The right strains are champions at producing bacteria sensors. So what we’re doing is we’re bringing in microbes that colonize the small intestine receivable occurs and.

Kill those invading fecal might. Now you might have to do this for a minimum of four weeks. It’s [00:28:00] not real fast, not like an antibiotic. And sometimes longer. So some people who have really bad sibo, these are people who say things like, I took three years of antibiotics for Lyme disease or acne, or something other reason.

These people have terrible sibo and they might have to do it for months to get control of the darn thing. Now the thing is though now I have two clinical trial, pilot trial and a randomized trial, what’s called a non-inferiority trial compared it to Xifaxan. And, but what I’m seeing anecdotally in, in hundreds, perhaps thousands of people is very impressive efficacy.

Though it may take some weeks to achieve that. But the other thing is, you know, if I said Dr. Whites, if. We need to remove your small intestine surgically, you should say, well hold on there buser. You better be damn certain that’s necessary. Right? But what if I said, what if the solution [00:29:00] is something you make in the comfort of your kitchen that looks and smells like yogurt that you have with some blueberries and chia seeds that provides all these other benefits we haven’t talked about that those microbes, but specifically the Reuteri and gasseri,  to some degree have other benefits on skin, bone, the immune response musculature.

So in other words, we’re not saying do this and bite the bullet with all kinds of side effects. No, you do this, you enjoy it with your blueberries or whatever, and you enjoy all kinds of other health benefits.

Dr. Weitz: So one of the keys to effective fat loss without muscle loss is curing SIBO using the right probiotics?

Dr. Davis: Yeah, but I wouldn’t really call it a probiotic ’cause you can’t get this in capsule form. Okay. When [00:30:00] we do the clinical trial we will have to encapsulate it only because you can’t have people making yogurt at home for a clinical trial.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Davis: So high,

Dr. Weitz: very high levels of commensal bacteria.  How about that?

Yes, exactly right. Yeah.

Dr. Davis: Now, one thing we don’t know, not just us, but the probiotic industry in general does not have good evidence for what’s called dose response. You know, if we were pharmaceutical people and we rip people off for billions of dollars, we’d have the budget to run these dose re, we don’t have that kind of budget.  When we spend, let’s say, 150, $200,000 for a clinical trial, that’s about as far as we can stretch. We don’t have the billions they can spend for that reason. We don’t often have a good sense for what the number of microbes you need, but I think it’s probably in the neighborhood of somewhere around 30, 40, 50 billion or more.  And so you can appreciate that a lot of commercial probiotics. One of the problem, there’s many problems, by the way, with commercial probiotics, but one of the [00:31:00] problems is very low counts of microbes. So we’re gonna amplify it cheaply. Comfortably in your kitchen with this thing that looks and smells like yogurt.

And by the way, that all the recipes and where to source the microbes are in my books Like Super Gut and Super Body. I tell you where to buy them, how to ferment them. Some of the devices you can use like a yogurt maker or a sous V to stick sous vs. Another good one. Or some people like to use their Instanpot.  It’s very easy to do. Now that’s just SIBO endotoxemia, there’s other things you can do. So one of the things that people need to address is their insulin resistance. And as you know, two thirds of the country has insulin resistance and body’s unresponsiveness to insulin. Could you start up again with you and there who are active, [00:32:00] have a fasting insulin level of one. Oh,

Dr. Weitz: I think we’re back. Yeah, we’re back. Yeah. Could you start up again with insulin resistance?

Dr. Davis: Insulin resistance. Because insulin resistance is the, is a phenomenon that adds to belly fat, abdominal fat. Okay. And so, and that’s two

Dr. Weitz: thirds. And that’s because you end up with high insulin levels that stimulate fat.

Yes. So fat storage,

Dr. Davis: if we took somebody, if we took somebody who was slender and active and had insulin sensitivity, their fasting insulin blood level would be something like one or two or three microunits per liter. We take somebody who’s got insulin resistance and abdominal fat, they have levels of 50.  A hundred, 150. In other words, it’s not 10% worse, [00:33:00] it’s 30 fold worse. It’s 50 fold worse, it’s a hundred fold worse. And that level of insulin cause expansion of abdominal fat. It also damages muscle. So we’re gonna reverse insulin resistance. Well, how do you do that? Well, you stop eating foods that trigger insulin:  wheat, grains and sugars, not fat, wheat, grains and sugars.  And then we address common nutrient deficiencies that when you’re deficient allow insulin resistance. When you restore them, they synergize to minimize insulin resistance. Very common things. Vitamin D, Omega-3, fatty acids, magnesium iodine, put ’em together because these are largely absent from modern diet.

Dr. Weitz: So when you talk about avoiding grains and sugar are you eliminating all complex carbohydrates?

Dr. Davis: No, but the ones that, so with grains, they’re the ones that contain the amylopectin, a carbohydrate unique to grains, [00:34:00] which is a flagrant trigger of blood glucose, of insulin. And by the way, also of small LDL particles, the real cause for coronary disease, for heart attack heart attack has nothing to do.  Heart disease, nothing to do with LDL cholesterol, total cholesterol, statin drugs, saturated diet. That’s all fairytales that came from outdated science from the 1950s and 1960s. But it still persists because it made pharma a trillion dollars. So that fiction persists among many of my colleagues.  And they’ve ignored the science. It tells us that it’s the amylopectin A of grains as well as glucose, sucrose, and fructose. That triggers formation of the real cause of heart disease–small LDL particles.

Dr. Weitz: So you’re okay with, for example, legumes, potatoes, other grains like quinoa?

Dr. Davis: So we do, because so many people are insulin resistant, [00:35:00] and that means they’ll have sky high blood glucoses, even with something like quinoa that we do impose, or I do suggest that at least the net carb limit of no more than 15 grams net carbs so that you don’t get, you don’t trigger high blood glucose, don’t trigger high blood.  Insulin don’t trigger glycation glucose modification of proteins, which is irreversible. And don’t provoke formation of small LDL, you know, this,

Dr. Weitz:  so 15 grams of complex carbs a day?

Dr. Davis:  Net carbs,

Dr. Weitz: total net

Dr. Davis: carbs

Dr. Weitz: fiber. That’s a very small amount.

Dr. Davis: Yeah. We’re not ketogenic. You may be intermittently keto, but we’re not purposely ketogenic.  But I may be kind of militant with a small LDL issue. ’cause I saw, you know, I came from a world where people were dying of heart attacks. Sudden cardiac death survived resuscitation, got bypass surgery, went through multiple stent implantation. But another words, this heart disease is a dangerous [00:36:00] thing.  Right. And what’s so great, the number

Dr. Weitz: one killer in the United States and around the world. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Davis: And it’s shocking how easy it is to provoke formation of the real cause of heart disease, small LDL particles. So a good, I, here’s an example. Somebody would say I’m a survivor of sudden cardiac death.  I got CPR resuscitated, they opened up two of my arteries in the cath lab, or I had bypass search, whatever. And we do their lipoprotein testing. Like usually NMR, nuclear Magnetic Resonance lipoprotein test, which has been around for over three decades, right? I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and they would have something like 2,400 net moles per liter particle count per volume of small LDL.  And so I’d say, listen, John, you gotta eliminate wheat, grains and sugars. The triggers for small LDL, he does it, it drops from 2,400 maybe to 800. So dramatically better, but still bad. We’re still aiming. We’re aiming for [00:37:00] less than 200 or preferably zero. And I say, you sure you’re doing the diet and your Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D mag, et cetera?  Oh, yes I am. I say, you sure? He says, well, every Friday I allow myself one slice of pizza. It’s my bad day. But here’s the thing, small LDL particles, basically small confirmation are not recognized by the liver because the recognition protein, the APO protein B protein is not recognized by the liver. ’cause when the LDL particle is small, the A protein B recognition protein is partially concealed and the liver can’t see it.  And so while a large LDL… By consumption of fats and oils is rests for five to seven days and it goes around and around in your circulation, giving it lots of opportunity to enter the wall of your arteries. 

Dr. Weitz: And this is an interesting point. I heard you make this before, most of the time when integrative cardiologists I know talk about small dense LDL being more atherogenic, they talk about the fact that the smaller particles are easier to penetrate through the endothelium, but you’re emphasizing the fact that they last a longer time in a bloodstream as well.

Dr. Davis: Oxidation. They’re also more adherent to the structural proteins in the walls of arteries like proteoglycans. They’re also more inflammatory. They’re more likely to trigger a cascade of inflammation in the arteries. In other words, this little bastard is perfectly crafted to cause coronary disease, and it’s caused by a diet low in fat and rich in healthy whole grains.  But that is the state, that is the state of affairs in prevailing advice.

Dr. Weitz: But anyway, so, and do you think that saturated fat has any role to [00:39:00] play in this or not?

Dr. Davis: Not a primary role. So the reason why saturated fat has something of a role is, so if I consume saturated fat, it doesn’t trigger formation of small LDL.  ’cause the liver process of forming small LDL starts with the amylopectin, a carbohydrate or other sugars, glucose, sucrose, fructose, that the liver is very good at converting sugars to triglycerides. Triglycerides are fats. Fats are triglycerides. That liver, that process is called liver denovo lipogenesis, the creation of new fats, right?  So eat the amylopectin A of grains, it’s converted to triglycerides. Now triglycerides are fats, but they can’t circulate freely in the bloodstream because fats would coalesce in the bloodstream, just like salad dressing. Even if you shake it, it’ll separate into oil on top. Vinegar and water on the bottom oils coalesce.  Well, if oils coalesce in your bloodstream, they would block your, you would die within [00:40:00] moments. So, so fats need to ride on an aqueous soluble protein. So we call these lipoproteins that contain the triglycerides, but they’re also made aqueous or water soluble by those proteins like Apo Lipoprotein B and others.

So the liver knows this, and it packages those triglycerides created via liver de novo lipogenesis into very low density lipoproteins v LDL low, just like salad dressings, low density floats to the top. So VLDL is very low density and VLDL particles themselves are a flagrant cause for coronary disease.  So that started with your consumption of grain, sugars, and sugars and V LDL particles interact. With LDL particles make LDL particles triglyceride enriched. And then there’s a series of enzymatic steps involving enzymes like lipoprotein lipase and hepatic lipase [00:41:00] that cause that LDL particle to become small.  And that’s where you have what you’re talking about, particles small enough to penetrate the walls of arteries, prone to glycation, oxidation, inflammatory adherent, and persistent for extended periods in the bloodstream. So, and this is not my speculation, there are 55, 55 clinical trials that have established that measurement of small LDL is dramatically superior to LDL cholesterol.  Why? Why isn’t this talked about more? Because there’s no drug for it. Right. So in other words, if the treatment is something you can do in your kitchen and it’s free, well, there’s no pot of gold. There’s no pharma who’s gonna send in this sexy sales rep with a miniskirt or a three piece suit. No one’s making a ton of money, so why talk about it and Right.

Dr. Weitz:  The same reason why they don’t test Lipoprotein (a)

Dr. Davis: Yes. There’s no drug for it. That’s exactly right. They’re trying real [00:42:00] hard, Right?

Dr. Weitz:  It’ll be, there’ll be several drugs out in a few years, and then everybody will get tested for it.

Dr. Davis: Yep. So, but the small LDL and of course in lipoprotein a is a molecule for your listeners that has in many people very high cardiovascular risk.  Well, the lipoprotein a molecule is two parts, has an Lipoprotein a and an LDL particle. And it’s when that LDL particle is small, that makes the lipoprotein a total molecule much more dangerous. We say atherogenic likely to cause athero scle plaque. Wait a minute, so there’s

Dr. Weitz: actually two types of lp little a

Dr. Davis: No, there’s two parts to it.  Oh, okay. Yeah. Lipoprotein a programmed by your liver. Then there’s the LDL particle and they’re bound together. And when the,

Dr. Weitz: But are you saying you can have lipoprotein a particles that are less or more dangerous?

Dr. Davis: Yeah. That whole notion got [00:43:00] started with a study called the a little crazy study called the Luga Laua study about 20 years ago.  It was a study of all things of Bantus in Tanzania. Huh. And there were two groups of Bantu. One ban group lived on Niaa Lake, which is an inland lake in Africa teeing with fish. And they would eat fish for breakfast, lunch, dinner. And they had a group of related Bantus living further inland.  There’s no cars, no internet. Right. And they would live too far from like nysa to eat fish every day. But there’s a lot of intermarriage. And they all had, and they, there was a very high preponderance of lipoprotein a Well, interestingly, this was Dr. Santica Marka studies from University of Washington. He showed that the people, the band who consumed vigorous intakes of fish had very different lipoprotein a molecule structures compared to [00:44:00] the non fish eating Bantu, including a much less dangerous form of the Lipoprotein A and a larger LDL particle.

So since that no one’s done the prospective study that is eating a lot of fish or. What it proved to be due to the Omega-3 fatty acid intake and the estimated intake in the Bantus living on the lake was 5,000 milligrams E-P-A-D-H-A per day. So we’ve been using 6,000 milligram to be safe, and it has worked, it has stopped progression of car.  It hasn’t caused regression of coronary disease like we achieve in non lipoprotein eight people. But in people with lipoprotein, we’re seeing, at least we see atherosclerosis stop progressing by doing what we call high dose Omega-3 fatty acids based on the Lola study from some years of beck.

Dr. Weitz:  Interesting. That’s fascinating….

Dr. Davis:But I long-winded answer to your question about why we limit net carbs be [00:45:00] because I saw people die from eating grains. Sugars and provocation of VLDL, small LDL. And this, I mean, it’s sometimes easy to forget. This is a dangerous disease. People die. And so we’re not talking about, you know, high cholesterol.  You know, 80 million Americans take a statin cholesterol drug, and there’s been no meaningful reduction in cardiovascular risk. That’s why your local hospital probably spent $80 million to add a new cardiovascular wing on, because that’s how they make money. Heart disease remains the number one money maker for hospitals and healthcare systems and my colleagues.  And it’s wrong. If the, if we didn’t have the science, that’d be different. But there are now 55 clinical trials showing that small LDL is a markedly superior marker for risk for coronary disease, and it’s caused by weak grains and sugars amplified by insulin resistance and endotoxemia. [00:46:00]

Dr. Weitz: Alright, so getting back to weight loss.

So the proper way to lose body fat without losing muscle is not to do low calorie dieting, not to do tons of exercise, but to reinforce your microbiome and get rid of SIBO and eat a low carb diet. And then what’s the other wing do? You recommend you recommend incorporating certain supplements to put back in nutrients that were missing in the modern diet?

E Exactly. So what we’re talking

Dr. Davis: about, we’re not talking about treating things with drugs and far, we’re talking about restoring things that you and I and your listeners should have had all along. So you should have had Reuteri eye, lacto basil rotor all along from your mom at birth, but either she or you got [00:47:00] antibiotics somewhere along the way.

It killed all your rotary, likewise gas array. So we’re just restoring microbes that you should have had all along. The diet, we’re restoring a diet that you should have been on from birth. You should have been on this as ancient people were, something similar to their diet we’re also,…

Dr. Weitz:  You mean they didn’t have Pop-Tarts back in caveman days?

Dr. Davis: So another big of course, error that’s been made in modern lifestyles is we were told to cut our saturated fat, total fat. Well, that caused most people to abandon the consumption of organ meats and some to some degree meats in general. And so two factors lost by that and loss of consumption of organ meats is consuming collagen and hyaluronic acid.  So collagen rich in, in tough cuts of meat and organ meats, of course. Well, collagen is collagen by itself reduces abdominal visceral fat and increases [00:48:00] muscle as well as the ladies love it ’cause it increases dermal collagen, it reduces their wrinkles and it also adds to joint collagen, joint cartilage, collagen, cartilage, 70% collagen of course.  So collagen, yet another factor lacking in modern life that. People have not been getting. But when restored has wonderful effects on what I call shape and body composition. Likewise hyaluronic acid. Ladies always say they don’t talk about hyaluronic acid because I buy $150 a month serum and I put it right here.  They say, reduce my ros.  I say, well, what’s it doing for the skin as it’s taking, or fibers

Dr. Weitz: that

Dr. Davis: comes from.

Dr. Weitz: So wait. Can you start up again? ’cause we lost you again. We, you were just talking about [00:49:00] hyaluronic acid. 

Dr. Davis: Okay. So another factor that’s missing from modern diets is hyaluronic acid. Now, ladies always say to me we know all about hyaluronic acid ’cause I put my serum right here and reduce my crow’s feet.  So I ask them well, what did it do for the skin on your neck? Or ab nothing of course. So the real power of hyaluronic acid is consumed orally as you would have had you been eating brain or skin or other organs. And hy hyaluronic acid is one of the most underappreciated fiber. It’s a fiber, it’s a rare fiber that comes from animals.  So what happens when you consume hyaluronic acid orally? Well, it does increase dermal collagen. So ladies have reduced wrinkles. It causes retention of moisture and dermal layers. So ladies love the plumping effect you get from it. It also contributes to more collagen in your joint cartilage increases the the synovial fluid, the [00:50:00] cushioning fluid or lubricating fluid in your joints and your hips and knees. So skin joint, it also is important probably for arterial health. You know, the arties are aligned with something called a glycocalyx finger-like projections that control the tone or relaxation of arteries.

Well, what’s the glycocalyx made of? Hyaluronic acid. How about a woman’s reproductive health? The uterus, cervix, and vagina are made largely of hyaluronic acid, and we know that as women age, particularly into their mid sixties and onwards, they struggle with vaginal atrophy, dryness, discharge infections.  Your candida, bacterial infections say, well, part of the solution is restoration of hyaluronic acid. But there’s another layer to hyaluronic acid because it’s a fiber, it provokes the proliferation of beneficial species in the gastrointestinal microbiome. These are species like Faecalibacterium prausnitzii , akkermansia, clostridia species, U bacterium.  These are species that produce the fatty acid, butyrate, and butyrate produced by those beneficial microbes goes to muscle and improves. Muscle mass and insulin sensitivity. In other words, hyaluronic acid is fiber absent from modern diets, has so many underappreciated benefits. So we restore. Now ideally you eat organ meat, but most people say, yuck.  I can’t do that. So we take these things as supplements. Do you consume organ meat? I do, but I have to say I can’t bring myself to eat brain or heart. So yeah. What a lot of us do are things like this cut your ground beef, like 50:50 ground beef with ground liver. I’ve had pancreas, I’ve had kidney, but it’s tough from a hundred people.  Yeah. And [00:52:00] it’s really tough to even get, because I went to a butcher, I wanted to get some beef heart, over time, maybe 30 years, it’ll get a little easier, but right now it’s a little bit tricky.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I, and I’ve tried eating liver, a number of beef liver a number of times, and if you get it cooked just right, it’s pretty good. But if you miss it, if you over undercook it, it’s not good at all.

Dr. Davis: But you can see the theme here is to restore factors or practices that are largely absent from the lives of modern people. And because, you know, if we went to Equatorial Africa. Or the highlands of New Guinea or the Amazonian rainforest in [00:53:00] Venezuela or Bolivia, we would see slender, muscled people.  And they don’t take Wegovy, they don’t have gastric bypass, they don’t count calories, they don’t count fat grams. They don’t go to the gym for an hour or two, six days a week. They do. They just live, and yet they have heavily muscled sinewy like limbs. They’re slender, they have virtually no insulin resistance.  And by the way, of course, no hypertension, no coronary disease, virtually no dementia, rare cancers, no colon cancer, no hemorrhoids, no constipation. Psychiatric issues like anxiety and bipolar illness and schizophrenia are exceedingly rare. In other words, they don’t have, they. What anthropologists continue to call the diseases of civilization that we have.

Dr. Weitz: So, yeah, but they don’t have to go to the gym because they’re acting physically all day long. [00:54:00] They’re catching their food, they’re preparing it, they’re doing physical things all day long. They’re not sitting in a chair at a computer, in a car, in a hotel room, all those things. They’re not eating processed foods.  They’re they don’t have the ability to eat too many calories. ’cause food is scarce. They’re not being exposed to the toxins we get exposed to on a regular basis. They’re not undergoing the stresses we have in modern life. So.

Dr. Davis: See, in an ideal world, Dr. Ben Weitz and his listeners will all go to the Amazon Rainforest and spend a couple years there.  But of course, no one’s gonna do that. So what we’re doing in effect is trying as best we can in a modern life with smart phones, with nice cars, with air conditioned homes, et cetera, we’re gonna try to mimic, at least it takes some lessons from what, from that experience. Right? Right.

Dr. Weitz: So the way to lose fat and especially you [00:55:00] emphasize the importance of visceral adipose tissue and then there’s another type of fat that you describe, which is fat contained in organs or around organs.

Dr. Davis: Ectopic fat. That’s right. So as people are expanding their abdominal visceral fat, that is fat, that encircles the abdominal organs like intestines and liver, et cetera. In parallel, the body starts to deposit fat odd locations around the heart, epicardial fat that accelerates the development of atherosclerosis.  It deposits fat in your joints like hips and knees. You can actually see it on an MRI. And when you have globules of fat in your hips and knees, it accelerates the degeneration of your cartilage and it gets you faster to bone on bone arthritis. If you deposit fat in your pancreas, it accelerates the death of beta cells and can convert a type two diabetic into an insulin dependent type one diabetic.[00:56:00]  But it al you also deposit, of course, in muscle myo steatosis that thereby reduces strength. We haven’t talked about that so. As we all lose muscle, as we age, we make it worse with accumulation of visceral fat. That results in myos steatosis, that further erodes muscle mass and strength and reduces myokine production.

That is these mediators of multiple beneficial effects. And so, at multiple levels we have screwed things up. So that’s atopic fat. Now the crazy thing is all those conventional methods of losing weight, we met, we talked about reducing calories, bariatric procedures and pharmaceuticals are selective for loss of subcutaneous fat that is fat below the skin.  That’s not as much of a problem. It may be an aesthetic problem, like if you have too much fat in your buttocks or thighs or neck or chest, but it’s not really a metabolic problem like abdominal and ectopic fat are. ’cause those are [00:57:00] the sources of insulin resistance. Inflammation and the driver of ectopic fat and myosteatosis.  Subcutaneous fat is an aesthetic issue, but it’s not a metabolic issue. And those methods to lose weight are all methods that preferentially cause loss of subcutaneous fat and thereby limit the benefits you obtain the metabolic benefits you obtain. Of course, the stupidest thing of all is liposuction because you can’t enter the abdominal cavity. You’re gonna be content with just removing subcutaneous the most, the least bothersome form of fat. So time it, again, conventional healthcare got it tragically wrong. And with all those methods, they’re shortening your life. They’re accelerating your visit to the assisted living center.  They’re accelerating your reliance on scooters, walkers, crutches. Arthritis, a joint surgery [00:58:00] falls, fractures, frailty, loss of independence, sarcopenia, dementia. This is what the healthcare system is doing to us.

Dr. Weitz: I, there’s at least one study showing that GLP ones reduce fatty liver.

Dr. Davis: Yeah. There’s no doubt that GLP one agonists do cause loss, so they’re selective for subcutaneous fat, but you still do lose some abdominal visceral fat and other collection of fat.  So fatty liver would be one form of ectopic fat. So you lose some of the epicardial fat around the heart. You lose some of the fat infiltrating your pancreas. You lose some of the fat that accumulates what, and we say the hilum of the kidney where the arteries and veins end of the kidney. So there’s no question that they do this.  When you stop it though, it all comes back right? Vigorously it comes back worse than it was at the beginning. And so you pay and you put thousands of dollars into the pockets of [00:59:00] pharma, right? And so we’re talking about tens of billions and probably hundreds of billions in coming years. And yet you’re gonna die several years younger.  So, but the gravity of all this, I don’t think you and I can overstate just how important this is, that people in healthcare and healthcare industry are making billions of dollars while you pay the price in your accelerated disability and your accelerated death. 

Dr. Weitz:  So, losing weight the wrong way leads to a shortening of your life.

Dr. Davis: Isn’t that something? And we have that now with huge databases now, lots of details need to be worked out. And one of the things I haven’t mentioned is you know, I call the hormone oxytocin. So people recognize oxytocin as the hormone of love and empathy and it is that, but there’s preliminary animal evidence.  We’ve been working on trying to corroborate the human evidence that you can boost oxytocin. Also, we do [01:00:00] so primarily with restoration of the lost microbe, lacto basils rotary that sends a signal via the vagus nerve to the hypothalamus in the brain to release oxytocin. And we, if we believe the experiment, experimental evidence, there’s a dramatic return of youthful muscle.  There’s selective reduction in abdominal fat. There’s a reduction in hedonic eating that is snacking behavior. You lose your interest in snacking. I should mention, make mention of that. One of the things that happens with this collection of strategies is a dramatic reduction in appetite. So you’ll never hear from me, you know, cut your calories, smaller portion size, move more.

You’ll never hear that from me. Instead, we’re gonna go wheat and grain free. In addition to losing the amylopectin A, you are also losing the glide in protein that is inefficiently digested by humans ’cause we don’t have the enzymes for it. And the glide in protein of wheat is broken down into four or [01:01:00] five amino acid long peptides that act as opioids on the brain and stimulate appetite.

So the glide and derive opioid peptides are a very potent appetite stimulant when you get rid of wheat grains. You don’t have glide and drive opioid peptides driving appetite. So appetite drops dramatically. We don’t limit fat satiating. We use more butter, we use more extra virgin olive oil. If you’re gonna have a ribeye steak, eat the fat, eat the, you know, don’t worry about the fat.  And then lastly, we provoke oxytocin that has that suppression of hedonic or snacking behavior. So what happens to people doing this is you almost have to remind yourself to eat. People will have their breakfast say of maybe a couple of eggs with some sausage, hopefully something fermented as well, by the way, that’s important.

And then maybe it’s three o’clock, four o’clock, you forgot to eat lunch or you had a little something. So a lot of us have reverted [01:02:00] back to kind of a two meal per day pattern. Maybe a breakfast or earlier, late, and then maybe a second meal, and that’s it. We’re not because you’re trying to limit calories, but because you’re no longer hungry.

And by the way, hunger feels different also, the hunger. The hunger we see in average Americans is this. Violent kind of that people call it, I think they call it hangry, right? We wanna knock people outta the way to get to your food. Or you’re getting mad at the waiter or waitress. ’cause it took more than 10 minutes to deliver your order to the table.

That all goes away. You can cruise through your day. And so people who are interested in such things as time restricted eating or intermittent fasting, these kinds of things become much easier because you’re no longer plagued by this ravenous hunger anymore. This desperate hunger. It’s all gone. Hunger feels more like this.  I’m a little restless. Could that be hunger? Very different.

Dr. Weitz: Right? So I think we’re pretty close to [01:03:00] wrapping. Any final thoughts? Other things we haven’t covered?

Dr. Davis: So, you know, I feel strongly about this. Yeah. Because, you know, if you’re talking about just dropping your listeners dropping a couple of dress sizes okay.  Yeah, sure. Great. Or just reducing blood glucose. No, we’re talking about not falling into the trap set there by many of our colleagues, certainly by the pharmaceutical industry and other industries like the bariatric surgery industry, who are not doing you any favors. They look like you’re doing favors, but shaving several years off your life, that’s no favor increasing.  The likelihood you end up in an assisted living center using a walker falling. Losing independence. These are not favors that, and that’s the crazy thing. It doesn’t have to be that way. If all we do is draw from the existing science and use some logic and rational thinking and reject the nonsense, the fictions of the last [01:04:00] 70 years that got us into this global mess, and we pay attention to what fat you’re addressing, what foods are doing to you, what nutrients are lacking in modern life that influence factors like insulin resistance, restoring microbes that are lost, that play a big role in the gut, brain, and gut muscle axis, getting rid of this infestation of fecal microbes in the small intestine.

Like cortisol,

Dr. Weitz: we haven’t even talked about, oh wait, right in. You were just about to say fecal microbes and then you cut off.

Dr. Davis: I forgot. So, so we’re gonna set right, what’s [01:05:00] going on in your gastrointestinal microbiome? Okay. And other factors. And of course, you know, if you go through, by the way, if you have a bariatric procedure, yeah.  Let’s put aside the major increase in suicide that is very under-reported. There’s a huge increase in suicide after. It’s not quite clear why that is.

Dr. Weitz:  But don’t people get bariatric surgery and almost immediately their diabetes goes away. It does. From the weight loss until it comes back because they lost muscle.  And but doesn’t the diabetes go away like the first week before the weight loss?

Dr. Davis: It can. There’s gonna be the consequences of sarcopenia, of loss of muscle, the regain of fat, mostly in the abdominal region, the abdominal visceral fat. And at least 50% of people after bariatric surgery develop SIBO and thereby endotoxemia.  And so a lot of this is under reported. A lot of the studies performed to [01:06:00] support the use of bariatric surgery are performed by my colleagues. Are supported by the manufacturers of the devices used in bariatric surgery. In other words, you know what’s worse than the pharmaceutical industry, the medical device industry, they’re bigger and more powerful.

You don’t hear much about that, but a lot of those studies supporting the use of bariatric surgery were performed by people who are in effect, paid by the industry that manufactures the devices that support that industry, meaning that you really can’t rely on a lot of the reported data. In my experience, bariatric surgery is a lot worse than you think it is.

This really got Dr. Driven home for me when I had a 44-year-old woman who wasn’t that overweight. She was maybe a hundred and seventy eight, eight pound, 180 pounds, something like that, and I counted her on how to lose the weight, diet nutrients, et cetera. But she couldn’t do it. She was kind of addictive.  Personalities just could not do it. So she decided I’m gonna go through bariatric surgery. And I said, [01:07:00] I don’t think it’s a good idea. But she did. She was found dead on her kitchen floor after surgery by her son, like maybe a couple of years later. Very traumatic for the son. This is under-reported.  There’s a lot, it’s a lot worse than people think. The increase in suicide, in this case, it wasn’t suicide. It was, I don’t know why she died. There was no autopsy. In other words, the conventional pediatrics front benefits look spectacular. The long term consequences are terrible.

Dr. Weitz: One more thing I wanted to point out. You also recommend putting back in not only the the probiotics, the commensal bacteria, and the collagen and the hyaluronic acid, but you also recommend putting back in carotinoids, which have been lost.

Dr. Davis: Yeah. So Carotenoids, as you know, underappreciated, beta carotene, lutein, zeaxanthin, cryptoxanthin, astaxanthin these are of course components of food, natural components of food. My favorite is astaxanthin. It’s the orange or pink and salmon or shrimp Lobster. Right. Only because the carotinoids have all kinds of wonderful effects.  Largely anti-inflammatory effects. ’cause part of a lot of what we’re talking about, of course, insulin resistance, endotoxemia, a lot of these are driven by INF inflammation. A lot of the adverse effects are driven by inflammation. So while we don’t treat inflammation, we restore factors that are largely absent from the diet, that one of the, among their benefits is suppression of inflammation.

There’s been this conversation of inflammaging that is the known increase in inflammation that occurs just with aging. Well, the astaxanthin and other carotenoids have been shown to have dramatic effects on reducing inflammaging. So I’ve we also add carotenoids. Now it could be beta carotene from a red [01:09:00] pepper.

It could be you know, other citrus rinds and other healthy foods, or it could be the astaxanthin Now because as you know, we don’t have the luxury of eating all the fish we want because of mercury, nor all the crustaceans or shellfish we want ’cause of cadmium and mercury. And so in many instances we have to resort to some degree, to supplements because it’s just become hazardous to eat fish and other things from the sea.  So that’s one of the options People have to get their asan or other carotinoids via supplements to compensate for the dangers, sadly of modern food.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. And really probably the whole category of phytonutrients, not only OIDs that have all these remarkable health benefits.

Dr. Davis: Yes. Including microbiome benefits.

So we know with food science that polyphenols for the microbes.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Davis: Yep. Yep. So all we’re doing is restoring things lost [01:10:00]

Dr. Weitz: or, there you go. Alright. So, how can listeners and viewers find out more about you and get more access to your programs that you have to offer? So, a lot of this is

Dr. Davis: laid out in the new Super Body book, right?

So

Dr. Weitz: pick Super Body, which is available wherever books are available, right? Barnes and Noble, mm-hmm. Amazon, et cetera.

Dr. Davis: It’s a super gut book that’s predecessor that lays out a lot of these recipes that takes the microbiome a little further. So if you said, well, I want, if you were a woman and said, I wanna have a reduction in some of my menopausal symptoms, or I’d like to reduce some of the agony of menstrual cycles, well, how about lacto bis gas?

Or if you had vaginal atrophy, dryness and urinary tract infection? Let’s restore Lactobacillus Crispus. If you have a newborn baby and you want to ensure neurological maturation with a higher IQ and better health, later on, let’s make sure that child has bifidobacteria infantis and [01:11:00] we can make, we can get these microbes and we can ferment them as yogurt or other foods.

So that’s in the Super Gut book. I have thousands of blog posts, my William Davis md.com. I have my podcast, also Defiant Health, as well as I have a membership site where we do this. Typically once a week we have a meeting with with a bunch of people, usually a hundred plus people, and we talk about these things.

People say things like, I tried to make rotor eye yogurt. Didn’t turn out. It separated. We talk about why that could occur, or fungal contamination or mold contamination of yogurts. All the little nitty gritty details. We talk about it to help people work out the problems.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. And so what is your contact information?

Dr. Davis: So, the blog is William Davis md.com. The membership website has an awful name. It’s got, it’s called Inner Circle dot Dr. Davis infinite health.com. Of course, [01:12:00] Facebook Instagram, all that stuff too. YouTube is a YouTube channel too.

Dr. Weitz: Right. And what’s your YouTube channel? William davis.com or what?  If you put, you know Dr. William Davis, it’ll take you to the, okay. That’s great. Excellent. Thank you so much, doc.

Dr. Davis:  Thank you, Dr. Weitz. Keep up your great work.

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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 ratings 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.