Dr. Stephen Lewis of Green Wisdom Health returns to TSPC today to discuss why so many Americans are dealing with stress, anxiety and depression. The links to diet, life style, gut biomes and what we can do about it.

Welcome, folks. Good Wednesday morning. It is Wednesday, September the 11th, 2024. For this is episode 3, 556 of the survival podcast. We’re bringing back on one of my favorite people to interview Dr. Steven Lewis of green wisdom health. I don’t think he’s been with us since about 2019. If I remember right somewhere in that range, and it’s good to have him back on today.

We’re going to be talking about stress, anxiety, and depression and how, no, it’s. Not all in your head. There’s a variety of environmental and nutritional stressors that are actually causing stress. when you have stress, then maybe you have anxiety.

And then maybe when you’re stressed out and have anxiety. Maybe you get depressed, so you might feel it in your head some, but there are things that you can do to alleviate this and, Dr. Lewis will be with us in just a minute.

Next up today, you know, we’re going to talk about stress and one of those things that stresses people out is money and having your money constantly erode. That’ll stress you out. Well, you know, I don’t ever recommend going in all in on anything, but I’ll tell you, I’ve been recommending alternative investments for as long as I’ve done this show.

Anyway, with that, let’s bring Dr lewis back on to the survival podcast. Steven, man, welcome to the show. Hey, it’s good to be back. Can you just start out with, instead of our subject today, kind of your origin story. Before you decided to go to chiropractic school and then kind of go down this whole world of nutrition with those studies, what was your life like before that?

What led you in that direction to choose this as a profession?

Well, my parents always took us to the chiropractor first and then an osteopath or MB. Later, if the chiropractor suggested it, I always thought there should be a very symbiotic relationship between them. And that’s mostly true now, but, a chiropractor talked me into being a chiropractor and it’s been a really good road, because I couldn’t handle the blood and guts.

I admired the medical profession, but I’ve seen so many people get well. by taking supplements. And I know the FDA says, it can’t help a symptom or cure a disease, but still your body has to have the basics just to work with and our food doesn’t have it. And that’s why I kind of really admire what you’re doing.

You’re teaching people to grow more nutritious food. And you tell them it’s not the soil, it’s the microorganism that’s, fixing the nitrogen, for example. we’re going to talk about microorganisms today and how important that is in your brain health, stress, anxiety, depression, your musculoskeletal health.

early on in my chiropractic career, I was really busy. And I noticed that when I put people on nutrients to stop the musculoskeletal inflammation, Then say well God I see better. I’m not as stressed or my husband’s nicer to me Which meant I’m not as irritable it all works together structure function nerve supply nutrition and choosing a happy attitude.

I think right now people are experiencing more anxiety more depression. but they’re also dealing with kind of, as you alluded to, like, and probably part of this is like gut inflammation and you’re a chiropractor. So I would imagine muscular skeletal issues or something you’d be looking at.

how are all these challenges interconnected? Cause I think people tend to like make these compartmentalized, like anxiety and depressions over here. And that’s exactly what pharmaceutical companies want. Cause then they can tell you, right. Take this drug that’s on the TV where the mentally, mentally, depressed person is dancing through a field.

And then when your hands twitch, take this other drug to go with that first drug. So that’s a great money making formula, but it doesn’t seem like For all the drugs we have for these problems now, it seems like there’s more cases of the problem than ever before. So that doesn’t seem to be working.

Well, you know, before I get into what I think the cause is, I think we should choose to be happy.

We should choose to look at it in a quirky way. just a little over a year ago, I was in hospital and they said, did you get your flu shot? I said, I had a bourbon shot. Did you get your RSV shot? I said, I had another bourbon shot. Did you get your shingle shot? I said, oh, hell no. They said, did you get your COVID shot?

I said, I had two bourbon shots for that. And the nurse that was there trying to save my life at the minute, I had him laughing.

Yeah.

And so that probably helped, you know, everybody. So, you know, hormone imbalances, and I’m going to kind of jump the gun here and tell people I’m way different than I was four or five years ago in a lot of good ways.

If people will look on my website, there’s a book called the Pain Relief Nutrition Program. And it gives the top whole food sources to certain nutrients that you need. And, you know, I asked my patients, I said, have you noticed that most of these nutrients come out of meat or animal products?

Not that fruits and vegetables can’t be important, but I’m not a, I’m not a fan of grain at all. And for example, rice and wheat, they’re already grown nutritionally deficient anyway because of our soil and you cover that real well. But by the time they get through Modifying that, 80 percent of the nutrients are gone once they mill it and process it and then spray, you know, artificial folic acid on it, which makes things even worse.

So, it’s hormone imbalance and the pain nutrition, pain relief nutrition program book on the, on the website. I think it’s brilliant. Of course, you know, I wrote it.

Hey, this looks brilliant. By the way, I wrote it, but I can say it for you

Well, you know this I’m different.

I’ve gone a lot more in depth So, you know, we’ll start if you’d like with hormone imbalances, right? Well number one from poor eating And that’s why I think it’s important. I’m not much of a farmer. I can’t make very much grow, but I like what you do. What you’re teaching people. Yes, I do listen to some of your podcasts and like them.

another thing for hormone imbalance is getting older, which I take great exception to that. you can get old very, very slowly if you choose to. But, you know, your hormones can become imbalanced and it causes pain related symptoms. That’s one thing I noticed in my practice is like, well, what’s really causing this pain?

And I asked a lady the other day, she said, well, my, my right hip is hurting. It feels like it’s 92. I said, well, your left hip doesn’t hurt. How old is that? They never think about it. It’s like, well, you misaligned your car. So it tears up the ball joints and whatever.

That’s a good point from the musculoskeletal structure.

You know, you can put really great tires, expensive tires on a car. If your caster or camber is out, it’s going to tear the tire up. And first turn around and say, Firestone or Kelly or whatever stole me, or Michelin stole me a junk tire. No, you put your good tire on a car that was misaligned, you’re going to have problems.

Well, another way to decrease stress and be happier, and I was in court one time testifying for a sweet little lady that was in a car wreck, and she had, you know, three very degenerated, Discs and vertebrae and she was 67 and I said, well, don’t you think this is just because she’s old had nothing to do with her?

Car wreck and I said, well, I put my mother’s x ray up when she was 62 I said she was in a horrible car wreck 30 40 years ago. Her neck looks real beautiful. The judge says dr Lewis take it down. If you do that again, I’m gonna hold you in contempt of court. So the insurance company attorney They never tell you that’s he’s representing an insurance company.

He said, okay now dr Lewis now that we’ve disregarded your mother’s x rays

Yeah,

you can’t, don’t you think this is just old age? And I said, well, the vertebra above and below the degeneration are the same age. How do you explain that? And they gave the lady 51, 000 for her rec.

So

you have to learn to think outside the box.

And I think we have been. Programmed. If you want to know how I feel, listen to George Carlin. So hormone imbalances, which creates neurotransmitter imbalances, what we call the happy hormones. and I don’t think, you know, and I’m not an MD, I’m a DC, but I don’t think that stress, anxiety, and depression is Paxil, Prozac, or Wellbutrin deficiency.

Agreed. Agreed. I think that that’s, you know, I say it all the time kind of to break it down to going across the board with that, a headache is not an aspirin deficiency.

Exactly.

And it, oh, oh, well then maybe none of this other shit, like you said, is a Paxil deficiency or an Osambic deficiency or whatever.

Somehow humans existed without all of these chemicals for the, you know, for hundreds of thousands of years and if not longer. We’re not really sure. Those are our best estimates that modern humans are somewhere now in the neighborhood of 300 to 400, 000 years we’ve been on this planet. And we made it without Ozambic and Pax Lobet and, It, things to lower our A1C and somehow we actually were actually pretty healthy before, you know, the onset of all this modern food supply and modern living,

The humans, have not needed chiropractors as long, well, they didn’t wear the shoes we wear, they didn’t sleep in the type of beds we did. They were walking around or sleeping most of the time, one or the other. We live much more natural lives. I don’t think my sixth great grandfather in back spent a lot of time sitting in an office chair like I’m in right now.

Or, or, or lean forward looking at the phone for several hours a day. You know, the thing about chiropractic is, and there’s a lot of research that says if you have an abnormal curve in your spine, And they do autopsies on you. The nerves that emanate from that curve go to the diseased organs where it is not diseased above and below that abnormal spinal curvature.

And, you know, another thing I’m getting off subject a little bit, but, you know, I had a smart LA insurance company attorney said, well, you know, whiplash doesn’t occur in Russia. I said, yeah, but they’ve only got a fraction of the car. So whiplash. Statistically, it’s going to be much less and it shut him up.

I love embarrassing insurance company attorneys with my good old boy isms, but, yeah, I think chiropractic is very, very important, for the structural, you know, musculoskeletal aspect. And I think if you put good nutrition with it, that you can live healthier, you can age much, much slower, but more important, you can have the energy.

And have the mental get up and go that depression doesn’t slam you down on the couch in the middle of the day.

you kind of explain like how maybe some of those structural issues can relate to the Mental health aspects of things it makes perfect sense that if I have a spinal injury or compression or something and that goes out to where my lungs are that my lungs may not function as well Because the neural communication to the lungs goes out It would seem that then the same thing could be true of the mind, right?

Like if I have certain things that are off in my alignment or causing me to have less communication between the mind and the body, even, I mean, I would look at it this way. It’s not just about the mind itself, but like the mind is having problems communicating with another part of the body, then that’s going to put the mind in a state of stress.

You know, much, much of the research, and I’m not even talking about chiropractic supporting research says. Vagal Nerve Stimulation. Go to your chiropractor for vagus nerve. And here’s the kicker, and it is kind of what I’m going to tie this into. The vagus nerve, which takes care of all sorts of things and stimulates, good function, good physiological function.

Two thirds of those nerves go from the gut to the brain. Only one third go from the brain to the gut. The GI tract is intricately involved in all this.

Yeah, I’m just thinking one way to think about this is if you were designing a human.

Right. And you would say like the food that this human is consuming and how it’s digested is actually really important. The nutrient intake is really important. if there’s an efficiency, the body should have some way of saying, Hey, I need more of something, right? and the machinery that converts the food into nutrient for the body. There would have to be a comms link. Between those two things and it seems like we have so systematized the body that like Well, there’s a digestive system and then there’s mental health. And the average doctor would tell you, well, of course the two aren’t linked other than, well, if you have a lot of pain in your stomach, you’ll probably have bad mental health, but that’s like, it’s like saying if I punch you in the face every day, you’ll get depressed if you can’t do anything back about it, there is a actual link with that.

communication line.

very much so. I used to have patients that said, well, when you adjust me, I see better. I said, no, no, no, no. That’s eighth cranial nerve root. It comes out of the brain, doesn’t even go through the spine itself.

Yeah.

And I said, that’s got nothing to do with your eyesight. That’s just all in your head.

And I’m glad it’s in your head. And then I was, very humbled to find the research that says, no, they were actually right. It was an indirect link. But it, a very causal link anyway. so you have to go to the gut microbiome. there’s some studies that say, you know, we have 10 times more microbiome or micro organisms than we have cells in our body, billions or trillions in your GI tract, and it’s associated with pain disorders and it, and it’s.

It’s associated with depression, anxiety, poor sleep, fatigue. I hear fatigue all the time or poor sleep. The kicker is you have to stick with it long enough. You know, there’s some people that give up too quick. Physiology takes time. It takes nine months to make a baby and, you know, you’re not going to get well in one month or three months. You know, you can see signs that you’re getting better, but getting the microbiome balanced is a little bit, complicated actually. You have to kill off the, you know, there’s Firmicutes and Bacteriocides, you know, ones that make you fat are the Firmicutes.

so, as you kill these off by, you can do it just by starving them out by getting off your sugar, your artificial sugars, and your Carbohydrates mostly, I don’t do that many carbs and I can tell a huge difference. And that’s why I lean toward more meat and a lot of animal fat.

what are the two biggest problems in society from a food standpoint? Probably seed oils and high fructose corn syrup.

yeah, I’m just gonna for those that are on the audio only I’m gonna slide up right now It looks like it has nothing to do with what dr.

Lewis is talking about. That’s everything to do with it This one’s talking about How many cells in your body, right, are human cells versus how many cells are microbial cells and how many cells are viral? And if you look at the picture in the upper right hand corner, that little red, space on the, it’s just like the knee down on one leg.

That represents how much of you is human cells. The other majority of you is actually, microbial cells and bacteria that are you that you co exist with. And you have over a quadrillion resident viruses in your body at any given time. And you’re not just more bacterial cell. You’re more bacterial genes.

If you look at the bottom one, you see the dudes, like. front of his left hose is red. That’s human genes. You have about 20, 000 human genes in your body. You have two to 20 million microbial genes in your body. Now it fascinates me, honestly, that modern medicine ignores this. It literally completely ignores this.

Like you are more of these things than you are human. So these things might be important. Right, like, and, and a huge portion of those bacteria and microbes that are part of you are in your gut. And if you disrupt that, you, you’ve thrown off the whole system. It’s like, well, I don’t know why all the fish died in the pond.

All I did was kill the plankton, right? If you kill the plankton, then the whole system falls apart. You broke the base of the food chain.

I just stick my hand into one of the aquatic plants and move my hand around. So like, it looks like, you know, kind of like dust and debris and scum or whatever, a little floated cloud comes out of that. Well, the next thing that happens is all the minnows and all the zooplankton come in and then the bigger fish are looking around like, who can I eat?

And I’m like, there it is. Well, that’s your body. It’s just that you can’t see that cloud. That cloud is true microorganisms, but Our bodies can’t be healthy if that system is out of balance no more than the soil can or an aquatic system can.

Yeah, that’s very well put. So, you know, if you talk about what causes inflammation, you know, go to seed oils.

Yes.

It is the ratio of Omega 6s to Omega 3s. I tell people, you need more Omega 3s and they’re not all the same. Be careful who you follow. you know, the problem with the Internet is it’s made up. A lot of slightly educated idiots, basically, you know, one of my patients, very dear.

she’s my age. She looks good. She takes a lot of stuff, but she’s following the guy on the internet that says you shouldn’t do salt. You shouldn’t do fat. You should go plant based. And I see her lab going to hell in a bucket. and so’s her mental health and so’s her inflammatory markers, you know, for her joints and you know, sitting at a computer all day with that head translated forward.

But I said, careful who you listen to. I tell people, listen with a discerning spirit. And I get by by being a little bit of a smart aleck, but I’m too young not to be having fun. So

You know, it’s the salt things always amazed me like this is something that humans and animals both crave.

Yeah For all the talk there’s never been a study that’s actually proven anything to say they say about salt is true They’ll take these non scientific scientific studies, I guess I would put it. And they say, well, these people eat more sodium and look, they have higher blood pressure. What else are those people like?

They eat more sodium. We’re getting it. If they’re getting packets that say, add one cup of water dump and stir and boil for seven minutes, maybe you should look at all the other shit that’s going in there. Because I see these dudes like Dr. Sean Baker that he lives on basically beef and salt and he’s about 66 years old.

And he’s built like a brick shithouse Right. So so clearly the salt’s not hurting him, right? This guy’s an md and like he’s an er physician I’m sure he takes his own levels and if he was killing himself, he’d know And so I don’t I don’t really even understand this War on things like salt, but it’s there and it seems like the only reason they have to do this is because They can’t tell you what the real problem is because well You want somebody not to understand something, make their paycheck dependent on them not understanding it.

some people think too simplistically and that, of course that’s, you know, that’s why Janet and I do lab. the thing about it is people look at it in too much of a simplistic way. It’s like, well, if you don’t eat salt, your chloride starts going down in your lab. And if you don’t have chloride, you can’t make hydrochloric acid.

And they say, well I can’t eat this because I get a reaction. What are your liver enzymes? Why is your liver not detoxifying this toxic environment? and not excreting bile to digest, the fats and the meats and I’m not carnivore, but of the people and I’ve had a lot of my patients, I said, just go carnivore and they did real, real well.

you know, what are your digestive enzymes? What are your probiotics? What’s your vitamin D level, which is not really a vitamin. It’s more like a pro hormone, but, there, there’s a lot of things Figure into the equation. It’s not that simple, but salt, I think is good. I wouldn’t eat Morton’s, but you know, all the other ones, the sea salts, but here’s the problem with the internet.

It was like eat Himalayan sea salt. Then the next one says, don’t eat Himalayan sea salt. It’s full of, uh, heavy metals, you know, eat Redmonds, don’t eat Redmonds, you know, eat Celtic, you know, don’t eat Celtic. It’s like, be careful who you listen to.

I think that one of the things that, cause I’m pro salt.

But I’m also like these people that say, well, you’ll get all your extra minerals. Well, go look at the mineral analysis. I mean, the salt is primarily, no matter what it is, a sodium chloride. And probably the number one mineral that you’re going to find if you check out something like Himalayan pink is going to be fluoride.

And so the same person telling you only use Himalayan pink is also telling you stay away from fluoride.

Yeah.

But before we dig into that, can you just talk about like, What would a person notice about an imbalance in their gut biome relating to our subject today? Which is how it would affect stress and anxiety. How would they kind of identify that maybe this is my issue?

You know the usual things fatigue I hear brain fog quite a bit Poor sleep, loss of libido.

You’d be surprised how many 25 35 year old men says, Doc, I really don’t function like I used to back in the young years. I said, you’re 25 35 years

old. You should be functioning with a breeze.

waking up happy, you’ve got a problem. you know, it can be migraines, it can be different neuropathies, too sensitive to pain, or too sensitive to your spouse being a little bit critical, or being overly sensitive to that, you know, it, good health, here’s the thing, good health comes from the inside out.

Not the outside in and people say, well, I’m getting all these extra minerals from the Himalayan pink is yeah, you’re getting a larger array, but you’re not getting the recommended amounts. That’s the key. And then people say, but I don’t need magnesium because I’m getting it in my foot soak or I’m. Got this magnesium spray and it’s like, well, if you’ve got a rib eye, do you want to rub it on your skin or you want to put it internally?

I put it in a way where people cannot think about it differently. Yeah. Okay. You get magnesium by spraying it on and soaking your feet and that’s fine, but it’s not enough. It’s not complete. So. Pretty much any symptom, in my opinion, is because of the lack of the proper nutrition to allow your body to work.

Your body wants to work toward 100%, but it needs something to work with.

So, to me, there’s two aspects to this. One is, A lack of nutrient and the other is what I would call a disruptor of nutrient cycling, right? I think that like people are very familiar at least with the term The carbon cycle, right?

And so but that’s the carbon cycle or the water cycle and but basically even if they don’t know what it is They’ve heard of it, but you’re like, well your plants also use calcium There’s a calcium cycle, and they use molybdenum, and there’s a molybdenum cycle, and they use manganese, and there’s a manganese cycle, and if you don’t have the biology functioning, you can throw all that shit in your soil, and the plant can’t get it, because the first thing happens, these elements actually begin, you know, this is high school level chem, but they begin to bind together.

When they bind together in certain ways, We can’t access them anymore. They’re now a molecule instead of an individual element, right? And so if we increase the health in the soil, and what that really means is biology, then these different soil organisms actually can break these bonds,

Turns out the plants, and I’ve learned this in the last couple years, With some of the courses I’ve been developing, literally plants are like vacuuming up the microorganisms, like all plants on some level are carnivorous plants. Sorry vegans, right? You cannot elise your conscience that way. And so they’re taking all this in.

Well, so there’s two potential problems. One is we’ve disrupted the microbiology that allows the nutrient in. Or we’ve introduced something toxic that disrupts it or we’re also not getting enough and I think so those three things happen in soil I think those three things happen in the body. The person’s not getting enough of the essential nutrient The nutrient they are getting is because their gut health is off not being actually processed into the body Properly, but they’re also like you mentioned Seed oils

I think that Is I don’t want anybody to take this as being pro high fructose corn syrup But I personally believe that seed oils have done more macro level to overall human health than even HFCS. I really do. It’s, and the correlation is, you know, they say causation does not equal correlation or correlation does equal causation.

But there’s times where it’s exactly perfect and you go, that’s probably not by happenstance. So how do we begin to correct all of that? the lack of nutrient. the disruption of the nutrient, the disruption of the process to get the nutrient.

you got to check different hormones.

sometimes not so much. It goes into a little more depth in that, pain book, but you got to look to thyroid. Thyroid’s like a woman. If thyroid’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy. and it really, Affects pretty much everything in the body then you got the cortisol and that’s one of the things we routinely check Is it too high too low?

It’s like well, here’s the parameters you want to be in optimal parameters and I tell people and this is maybe a little tacky, but I said well these representables cover the average overweight Depressed, pain filled American. And the parameters are different in different countries because I see them.

So you want cortisol, if it’s too low, you’re fatigued as heck, you’ve got adrenal fatigue. If it’s too high, you can’t shut your brain down at night. Excess cortisol actually causes excess glucose, even if you’re eating good. Then you have insulin. I always check that. It says, oh, you can go up to 20 something.

It’s like, well, it gets past 8, 9, or 10. It’s going to create triglycerides, stick it in your liver, create fatty liver, and then it’s going to put excess weight. Insulin is actually a fat storage molecule. So you have to have insulin low. My wife makes the best sourdough bread. I said, well, that’s like substituting cyanide for arsenic.

It’s better than your, you know, whole wheat bread, but it’s not good. DHEA had a patient ask, what’s the significance of DHEA? Well, you want to be on the high level of a healthy 30 year old person because DHEA is not just for testosterone, but it has like 150 repair functions. It has to do with the muscle, bone, and libido, because it’s the precursor to testosterone and the other sex hormones, but it repairs your brain.

I get better cognitive function for keeping mine up at 400, where 450 sometimes in my range because my age is only 188 on the high side. I keep it like a 30 year old man should and it’s not just for the testosterone. then estrogen, you know, that’s a big problem because these plastics, pesticides, glyphosate act like estrogen.

That’s why men are more feminine. That’s why we have the low testosterone centers that we didn’t have when I was a kid. because all these pollutants that your liver can’t detoxify is acting like estrogen. Then It’s really scary, most women don’t have enough progesterone because it’s being overridden by the environmental estrogens and progesterone has to do with fertility and sleeping good and thinking your husband’s still a nice guy.

So the imbalances for the neurotransmitters caused by these, hormone imbalances, you know, it can cause our Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, anxiety, depression, and, but it increases

Then here’s the balance, you know, you were talking about, well, we’ve gone down to systems in our care and it’s like, yeah, we need to look at the whole, like we should the soil, because every neurotransmitter, one’s inhibitory and the other one’s excitatory and like serotonin, well, SSRI, Just stops the reuptake of serotonin.

Why not just make more serotonin? That’s happy overall mood Low serotonin is usually people that have migraines and fibromyalgia Unremitting back pain then you have dopamine. This is one of my favorites people that have low dopamine or addicts sex addicts Gambling addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, and it can be inhibitory or excitatory, and usually you will have migraines along with that, as well as the addictive personality.

You have to have specific nutrients. Think GABA glutamate, think monosodium glutamate, which is excitatory. But the GABA, Brings it down, but they balance each other. You can have a neuropathies. Fibromyalgia, I hear that quite a bit in my patients. Epinephrine, epinephrine, and you know, if you have your adrenals blown out, we know that by your cortisol levels.

It’s too excitatory, then you don’t get the epinephrine or epinephrine, the fight or flight syndrome. You may be too tired for that sometimes. and it comes from gut issues, gut brain connection, because about depending on the research you read, you know, all research says different things. You can have 70 to 95 percent of all your.

Neural transmitters start in your gut.

So you’ve mentioned running labs a few times and people that have heard you before, know what you mean by that. Let’s talk a little bit about that. The type of labs you ordered, for me, for instance, it was like, even the phlebotomist was like, I’ve never seen anything, but this much on it.

And what I really like, I believe the way you put it back then was if you’re average, then that’s you. Your buddy and every fat person in the line at the state fair aggregated together And that’s how they’re determined average and average is good. Well, you know You could be a middle of the bell curve in one school and be a top student You could be the middle of a bell curve in the other school and be a dumbass and our health as a society leans toward the dumbass school instead of the the good student school And so I think it’s important people understand that like they could go to their doctor And be tested for these nutrients and they’d say it lies in normal range.

Well, normal’s not necessarily good, right?

I tell people there’s a difference between normal and common. You’re common, but you’re not normal.

I got you.

And, you know, I try to get them to think a little bit differently. And, you know, that’s huge with back pain. Arthritis, you know, you can have different types.

You can have the psoriatic, you can have the rheumatoid, you can have the osteoarthritis. There’s a connection from the gut to the disc, recurrent meningeal nerve, you know, need that stimulated. But, migraines, I hear that a lot or headaches. It’s like, well, it can be a lot of different, it can be the neurotransmitters or it could be you’re just not excreting, correctly.

It’s very important to have good bowel habits. Janet’s famous for saying, well, if you eat three meals a day and you have three trains going into the tunnel, how many trains should come out on the other side? If you’re not, if you’re eating three major meals a day, shouldn’t you be having two to three bowel movements depending on transit time?

Yeah, so when you do this type of lab work with people and you notice that certain things are deficient, how do you look at remedying that?

You have to look at it several steps down the line. for example, the, the ratio, the amounts and the ratio of different types of white blood cells. You know, there should be a good ratio of Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.

And that’s what your white blood cells represent. So, you know, we put supplements in that your body can use to stimulate your, immune system. There’s a lot of them that’ll do it. I like olive leaf and arabinogalactin, but there are other formulas that are just as effective. That’s just my favorite. vitamin D is very, very important.

Yeah,

and it was already ordered. Thank you for your And you really do need to get it I don’t I don’t push 300 but I keep them around somewhere around 75 to 100 And if it’s 140 150, that’s fine. I don’t think it ever gets hot.

So if you just have to watch the liver enzymes That’s very very incredible So, you know I tell them eat better eat like in in the book, you know, the tryptophan which you don’t get sleep because you ate turkey With the tryptophan because tryptophan is in beef and chicken too. You get sleepy because you gorged yourself like a pig.

Too much alcohol because the family was there.

They took half the team and had them gorge themselves on a typical Turkey stuffing gravy dinner and then they had the other half of the team eat like correct portions.

That’s all it was the same food Literally off the same bird and the half that ate a reasonable portion We’re all like I’m not sleepy at all and the people that had a couple of Bordeaux’s and then pigged out They all wanted a nap

then then I say well We know you need digested enzymes and I like the broad spectrum ones But I kind of tend to go toward the fat digesting enzymes Lipase hydrochloric acid which is more protein, but it helps with the fat You know, I have my favorites that work on most people, and then we can alter it.

but, you know, you’re trying to get some of the B vitamins, and like B3, B6. You can’t get the neurotransmitters from the gut here if you don’t have B6. Well, how do you know there’s a B6 deficiency? Well, because AST or ALT in your liver is going to be a little bit low. And if it’s a little bit low, you know, Most of these are, you know, tuna, beef, chicken, fish, scallops.

You can get some B6 otherwise, but I think it’s important that, you know, you can just have an educated, conclusion that if your liver enzymes are low, it’s not going to excrete. You know, that’s the methylation pathway. I don’t want to get too technical, but Janet says I need to dumb it down. It’s like, okay, throw it in and let God sort it out.

You don’t have to overthink this thing. Like you were talking about molybdenum. You never hear about molybdenum or manganese or boron. You have to have. To create testosterone and to create healthy bones, but you don’t hear many people talk about those. Well, it’s in my multimineral. it’s in the multivitamin in proper doses, and your body knows more how to deal with it.

And I’ve had all kinds of chemistry, organic and inorganic, and I hate it. I don’t even want to talk about it. I passed it, but that was it. And the folate, you know, when they spray the artificial. Stuff in enrich your flower. That’s poison. Most of us have five MTHF genetic mutations So all my vitamins the multivitamin and some other big dogs Have the five MTHF which is five methyl tetrahydrofolate You have to have that before you can convert B6 before you can convert B12 before you can let your energy You Engines the mitochondria work.

So you just throw it in people overthink it, you know Find somebody you trust and I’m not the only one that’s good at this But of course if you want to use me, that’s great, too.

You know What I noticed when I really started kind of going down the keto train and I think people think, I’ll think I’m carnivore.

I’m not carnivore, but I might go three weeks of carnivore. Not because I made a decision, because I don’t feel like eating vegetables.

You

know, like there’s times, it’s very seasonal for me, like where I’m like, I don’t know, like in the winter, I like salads a lot more than I do in the summer. And I know that’s backwards for people, but it’s just the way that it is.

I’m talking like, leafy green stuff. and I might go three or four weeks, but When I did that, I was a little bit worried about coming off of like lots of different colors and fruits and berries. Like they tell you to eat. Before you worry about that, maybe you should look this up.

So I started looking things up. I found like just plain old beef has like nine out of 10 of the things that we’re worried about an abundance of them. And the amount of fruits and vegetables you have to eat to get what you supposedly need, which is how they tell you to do it. Is ridiculous like, what’s that balance of nature products? Just a bunch of freeze dried vegetable and fruit powder and capsules is all that it is And they say you need this because you can’t get enough in your diet of fruits and vegetables You can’t eat like well Wait a minute if if I can’t get enough of the nutrient I need by eating fruits and vegetables Then maybe my primary source of nutrients shouldn’t be fruits and vegetables You Maybe it should be something that naturally has what I’m looking for because I know you’ve read like the work of dr Price and all like There are people say, you know, it’s traditional that we eat vegan or vegetarian.

No, it’s not You can’t show me an indigenous society on the planet that is a vegetarian or vegan society. You can show me a religion, but not an indigenous peoples that had to exist before the modern luxury that frankly lets these people eat diets like that. Like if you were trying to survive as a vegan in the Amazon, you’re gonna have a hard time.

But if you’re willing to put a couple darts and some cappy bears or some howler monkeys, it ain’t that hard to survive. I’m just saying, I mean, I know that sounds Way too oversimplified, but the easiest way to you Acquire calories is a human being in nature is to kill something and eat it You know you can get some you can forage some plants and you can get something out of that But most of the plants we can forage before modern agriculture The work that has to be done so you can eat it without killing yourself is pretty insane.

You can do that with like an acorn. Go see how long it takes to make a pound of acorn meal and how many calories did you burn to make A pound of acorn meal with you know, like 800 calories in it It’s a net loss I don’t know how we’ve gotten here, but I know where we are is in complete denial of where humans ancestrally got these nutrients that we’re talking about.

And we had to get them back then or we wouldn’t be here now.

It blows my mind where people say, well, I’ve got these fruits and veggies and I just love this particular company. I said, well, it’s not a bad company, but do you really think you’re going to get enough fruits and vegetables out of two capsules of fruits and two capsules of veggies?

What they might get is a little bit more of what they should be getting, and they might feel a little bit better. I mean, I’ll acknowledge that, and then that tricks you into believing you found the solution.

You know, I tell people, you’re overthinking it, just find somebody, listen to your gut feeling, your discerning spirit, whatever you want to call it.

Your gut won’t lie to you if your gut is healthy, and that’s those microbes that have some sort of innate intelligence. I know, this is getting a little hooey hooey, but ask your wife about her gut feeling. Well, if Dorothy or my wife, Janet has gut feeling, I’m going to defer to that before I go out of my intellect because they’re almost always right.

If not always,

I will agree with that. Like when I really feel like this is a bad idea, I’m like, okay, it might be.

Yeah. And Janet’s kept me out of all kinds of trouble that way. She said, you know, you’re the most petulant little four year old I’ve ever seen. I said, I am not. I’m five. you know, if you’re not having fun, something’s wrong.

But it’s easier to have fun if you feel like you can, if you have the energy and the mental cognitive function to do that. So it’s not that hard to eat better. you know, you’ve done a good job. I listened to enough of your podcast to know. And you know, that’s part of why I wrote that book. You’re like, man, okay, you just eat this.

And again, maybe three out of four of these nutrients that I say are the top whole food sources of this nutrient, three out of four of them are bad. Animal products,

which again, it makes sense. It, you think, what are we made out of? We’re made out of bone and muscle and nerve and fat, right? You know, it has everything you need to build bone and muscle and nerve and fat.

and all the connective tissue, other things that have all those things, like they say, like one of the reasons if you have a, like chicken sometimes will break an egg and if they break an egg, then they’ll eat it. Yeah. Well, the egg has everything necessary to make a chicken, right? So a warm blooded mammal has all the things necessary to make another.

Warm blooded mammal. And I think it’s only like this, emotional thing where we, we, you know, we don’t want to kill it because it’s a living thing. And because of that, I want to like try to then back nutritional theory into this emotional discomfort. I get it. It was a very different experience for me the first time I took like a chicken that I raised and slaughtered it I went out in the woods and busted my ass for half a day to shoot one grouse It’s about the size of a small chicken I had no emotional qualms in that at all because I had to go out there and meet that thing on its own and get embarrassed by it six or seven times.

The dog looked at me like I’m stupid because I missed and when I finally got him, I’m like, I got him. But this chicken is like, what’s going on? Like, I get having like some emotional compulsion there. But it doesn’t mean that your nutritional reality will change because you don’t like it,

you know I never had head of grouse.

They always dug behind a tree when I shot northern, georgia you know the thing about it is and again I try to say things in a way that gets people to thinking a little differently So i was having this discussion with this multi millionaire real estate developer out of dallas and we were in a nice quiet restaurant She says stephen.

How do you? How do you kill a deer? I said, honey, you don’t want to go there. Please don’t go there. Don’t go there. And she pushed it. And I said, well, number one, you think it’s sinful to kill a deer, but the number one loss, the killer of animals is loss of habitat. So pine plantations, I’ve seen the deer population go way down in East Texas because of the pine plantations.

You’re flooding the oak trees, you know, to make a lake. And I said, so. Out of the pine plantations, you’re making, toilet paper and Kleenex. So every time you blow your nose or you’re killing deer, you’re just not making that connection.

Yeah, yeah. My answer to it would have been, well, there’s lots of lasers at 30.

6. 
   
7. There’s 22. If you’re in a survival situation, I got a bow and arrow. Sometimes people kill them with a car. Like, like, what you just said though made me think of, there was a show called Yellowstone and they introduced this vegan activist into it and of course Kevin Costner is this old crotchety ass, kind of basically like a mafia based rancher I guess, you know, and he gives her this, this speech that lasts about two minutes, it’s probably the greatest two minutes that’s ever been on television.
   

It was like, do you know how you grow grain for your bread? You kill every mole, vole, you know, everything in that field has to die. So you can eat a slice of bread. The only question is how cute does an animal have to be before you don’t want to kill it? It’s kind of how it ends. And it was like, it was like a complete shutdown.

You’re like, how did this get into like a mainstream media production? Cause it would so spot on honest. life begets death and death begets life. I mean, this is as old as humanity. And I don’t know, maybe someday we’ll live in a universe like Star Trek and I can go. I will have a ribeye and a replicator will make me an actual ribeye.

But this 3D printed shit, I ain’t playing that. Right, and until we get to that Star Trek 23rd century shit, I’m gonna stick to like, I’m looking at a rooster right now, that if he doesn’t get off my outdoor kitchen bar, he might be in the crock pot by the end of the week.

Yeah, one of the things we did to prepare, is move to Little Lake. Full of fish, full of fish.

I just had to get rid of his ass.

Yeah, they’re begging us to take catfish out because you know, we’ve got a whole amount of catfish 8, 10, 12 pounds. It’s like they said when you catch them, please kill them and fry them up and the brim are so big. That it’s a sin to throw them back. My granddaughter scooped up five in the net, says, Papa, can you get five brim?

I said, no, baby. My record is three. So, it’s that thick.

and if you don’t, once you get there, by the way, if you don’t start harvesting them, go back in five years and they’ll all be this big. Yeah, we’ll get stunted if you don’t harvest some.

We’ve got a few missing generations. We have some now six, eight, ten inches long.

We need to get rid of the ones that are two foot long. Yeah, they’re thick. But yeah, I like them. I’m not carnivore, but I’m maybe three quarter ish.

I tell people this all the time, you don’t have to do what I’ve done.

Mm hmm,

and it all depends. I have Ken Berry on and we’ll talk about it like that.

There are certain people I feel like, we look at carbohydrates and we gain weight, like, I just can’t, like, there’s certain people that can actually use illegal drugs and they’re alright, and the other person, like, does it once and they’re an addict, right, like, so, I have to just stay away from these heavy carbs, but there’s a lot of people, if they would get the seed oils, And all the multi syllabic crap out of their diets.

Keep their carbohydrate intake to under 100 grams a day. Which is way more than people realize. The average American is eating 400 plus. Right. and no seed oils. And no grains. And that, those five things. That was all you did. Your health, it, and it won’t, here’s the other thing. It’s not gonna turn around tomorrow.

How long, like, I think that’s part of a part when you get a natural solutions, people like expect the same kind of result. You get my back hurt. I took Tylenol and coding it stopped hurting until the drug wore off, but they had that instant relief. And so they’re looking for that. Well, how long did it take you to screw your shit up?

And it’s probably going to take some portion of that time, probably 10 percent of that time, you know, at least to rectify. So if it took you 10 years to screw it up, I’ll take you probably better part of the year. To unscrew it up. And so the other thing that happens, is people get addicted to all the stuff they’re eating.

So, if you have a person that came to you and they have a heroin addiction, and you’re running a rehab, When you take away the heroin, are they gonna feel good the next day? No. Right, but what’s the solution? We’ll give them heroin and they feel good again. No. You have to get through the withdrawal of the thing that you’ve become dependent on.

So you may, in fact, when you make changes like this, feel like dog shit for a few weeks. It’s okay, and I just think we should be more honest that this whole section of the world, carnivore, keto, natural diet, anti grain, anti seed oil, all of us in this space share some overlap in the Venn diagram.

And we need to be honest that, yes, when you take away all the chemicals that you’ve become accustomed to, If not addicted to and all the sugar that you become accustomed to if not addicted to you may not feel well for a while That doesn’t mean it’s a bad decision Anymore than stopping taking meth or heroin would be a bad decision

You know, it’s very wise that you go to that degree of in depth thought and people say well I have Yeah, I have brain fog.

I said, well, did you know you’re feeding Candida? You can assume you have too much Candida by the eosinophils should be zero to two. And if it’s two, three, four, five, six, there’s, there’s a problem. I said, but Candida and overgrowth, that’s going to make you fat. And the thing about it is they put out an enzyme called thiaminase.

It steals what little thiamine you have, one of the B vitamins, and you can do two things. Starve out and or kill the candida or overload the thiamine with other B vitamins.

Okay.

And then they’ll say in two to three days to two to three weeks when I overdose them on thiamine, it’s really not an overdose, they’ll say, oh my god, my brain fog went away.

And

I tell him, I said, well, I want Shiner Bock and dark chocolate to say, thank you.

I had a guy stopped me at a restaurant and said, are you Dr. Lewis, and I said, yeahhow can you tell? He said, well, my wife said, you’re the guy with the big ugly mustache. I said, okay. She told me when she got back to the girl that I’m married that I owed you Shiner Bock and dark chocolate. I said, well, how’s she doing?

She said, where’s your office? I need to make a delivery. All right. So, you know, if you put in enough, and yes, you feel bad when you start starving those candida, you’ll start craving, you know, all the carbs and the sugars. You just have to suck it up and have a little bit stronger willpower.

Yeah, I don’t even remember the documentary I was watching.

It was like one of these things where they figured out what was wrong with somebody in an ER and they’re trying to treat their way through it. And this person had a fungal infection

and

initially they thought they were wrong about that because when they started giving the patient an antifungal, their symptoms got worse.

the older doctor that’s been around a while steps into it and says, of course it did, you’re attacking the fungus. The fungus is not exactly happy about this. So it’s going to flare and it’s going to cause the response to the patient. We need to give them support through that treatment Candida is a yeast, and I would imagine when you start to starve it and it becomes unhappy, that maybe that would make a person not feel so well. So how do we starve it? I would say, not eating sugar would be a good start.

Yeah, cut, cut the carbs and then when you start killing the stuff off, it produces, you know, toxins.

So that’s why I tell people one time a day to have a bowel movement. I said if you’re not going two or three times, you’re going to start excreting or they’re gonna excrete the toxins and reabsorb in that and you’re gonna hate my guts. You’re gonna feel bad, but it’s still a good thing.

So just bear with me there.

I think another thing that happens and I noticed this because I lost over 70 pounds. we store a lot of toxins in our fat cells. So when, and I didn’t like start losing weight immediately. It took a while and then it kind of kicked in and I went where I lost like 25 pounds in 30 days.

And during that phase of it, I had, Pimples that were more like little boils pop up in like inconvenient place like your armpit or something like that But I knew exactly what it was. I also ended up with freaking gout That lasted about a week and I had a whole new sympathy for my grandfather with how bad that freaking hurts It’s hard to even explain it to somebody but it was part of the rebalance right in the part of rebalancing the body And so I think yeah one Like you said, Candida, like it’s going to release toxins.

But at the same time as you. Become healthy toxins you stored if you burn that fat cell, you know I’m still hoping that the one that stored the stuff from 1989 When I saw things moving in the wall, I hope that fat cell’s gone It doesn’t pop someday because I heard that can happen decades later. You can figure that one out.

But you know I burned through a lot of fat cells and I let a lot of stuff go And I think that some people again, we should be letting people know that When you improve your health, it may in fact, at least in some ways, get worse before it gets better.

I have a book on my website also about hormone balancing and weight loss, but since the semi glutide have come on to the market, nobody seems to care. They don’t want to lose weight by, you know, cutting out your donuts and bagels. So that kind of lost interest.

So yeah, y’all want to get by his site now.

If you’re watching the live stream right now and you do what I say, it won’t work because we’re not done yet. but when we’re finished, I will take the audio from the video stream and integrate it like I always do into the audio podcast. And that’s the stuff that goes out on apple and spotify and all that where most people actually listen there’s a link in the video notes below and if you click that link about 30 minutes after the live portion ends and we’re actually done It’ll go over there and i’ve got I’ve got his website.

I’ve got all the social media ways that you can connect because dr. Dr. Lewis actually is squared away when he fills out a guest application and he puts all of the ways that you can follow him in his guest Application because if you do that for me, then I put it all in the show notes.

So that will all be there for you guys can we talk we’ve kind of talked a lot about how this stuff helps with neurotransmission, right? And that’s important. But the other word that we have in this and Do you want to talk about being depressed? A person with inflammation is depressed, right?

Because I’ve had, inflammation that’s not dietary at times. it’s classic what your body does when you hurt yourself. So like you have some sort of sports injury or something and then, it happens to be an ankle or a knee and that immobilizes you. And when you do move, it’s hard and it hurts.

I’ve never been like, gee, I think I’m going to jump off a building over it, but I’ve also never been happy about it. So when you have chronic inflammation where you’re hurting, In general, you like, you say it’s your back, but then when you put your hand on that spot, it like magically disappears and it goes somewhere else because really what you have is like systemic inflation.

That’s going to make you unhappy. I promise you that’s going to make you unhappy. So what are some steps involved in dealing with, chronic inflammation that so many people have? And I guess I never really noticed it before I fixed it for myself, but now I’ll see somebody, like a picture that somebody posts, like a selfie or something, and I’ll go, they have chronic inflammation.

Like, and that’s not what the picture’s about. They’re not complaining. You just, you look at their face and go, this person’s got inflammation. Right. And like I could see it on people from a mile away now, how do we go about starting to correct that?

Well, you know, there are a lot of different ways to do it.

The way that Janet and I found to be most successful is do the lab work and you know, here’s here’s something that you and I have not talked about. I hope you’ll forgive me. But because I hear from these patients and many of them are long term and doing this eight or ten or twelve years. And they love it.

I appreciate what you’re doing because, you know, you’re making the world a better place to live just because people are healthier and we can go do a lot of good things.

Now, we talk about stress, anxiety, and depression. Now, if you have thoughts of hurting yourself, or harming somebody else, go to the emergency room. I love our medical profession. me being structure function as a chiropractor, I’ve noticed that most medical interventions are the ones that are structure function mechanical.

They do a really, really good job with all of that. the chemical imbalances, you know, my favorite drug is caffeine. second favorite is, I’ll bring your favorite drink and we’ll eat biltong because you’re not that far down the road. I’m not a big fan of chemical intervention and sometimes it’s very, very appropriate.

So if you’re that stressed or depressed that you’re going to go hurt yourself, go to the emergency room. But other than that, just do the lab work and let’s see where you are.

Yeah. You talk to people that have a supplement line and they’re like, well, everybody should take this.

Well, you’re like, well, I don’t know what the hell you should take until I know where you’re at. Now, you probably could make a pretty good guess of some basics for anybody that would be helpful, but in the end, if you really want to, zone in on it, both my wife and I worked with you, and we did not end up on the same shit.

Imagine that. Two different people had two different sets of needs. Now, there was some overlap, but a lot of it was unique and individual to us. And so, the other thing I want people to know, like, people talk about, you know, when you hear, like, get labs done and all, they think, you know, All the bullshit you deal with when you go see a regular doctor.

And then the doctor’s like, well, you have a kidney issue. So I’m going to send you a kidney specialist. Hold on doc. Didn’t you learn about kidneys when you was in in medical school?

It’s about five miles from my house. I walked in they took my blood and left It took me less time In there and i’m not going to promise everybody to be that quick But It was really simple.

I got stuck with a bunch of needles and left. So I want people to know it’s really easy. It’s not a big inconvenience you set your time and it’s not like you go to the doctor 9 a. m. Appointment 9 30 First of all, I email you tell you be there at 8 30

You’re still sitting there And there’s like three people in the waiting room and you ain’t back. You go to these labs. If it says 815 and 816, somebody’s pulling blood out of you. At least that’s the experience I had.

Well, we have the prices very, very low. And I appreciate the people that notice the difference.

I told one lady, I said, you know, it’s going to cost you 387, the comprehensive plus female hormones. and that’s two or 3, 000 worth. On the little kiosk, I said don’t put any insurance information. You paid me, I paid them the bulk of the 387. Well, she wanted to get her money back, so she filled out it and then they sent another bill for 1, 800 and she was mad about it.

And I said, honey, I’m not paying it. It’s yours.

you want me to fix healthcare, one of the first things I’m going to do other than change dietary recommendations is say, you medical providers, doctors, nurses, hospitals, all of it.

You can charge any price you want. I don’t believe in price fixing. But here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to charge everybody. The same freaking price and you’re going to publish your price. That’s what you’re going to do. And that would take 90 percent of our problems on the cost side. And maybe not get rid of them, but it would mitigate the hell out of it because that makes no sense, right?

I’m gonna pay cash. How much is my price about 300 bucks? Right. Well, i’m gonna use the insurance. It’s gonna pay more than 300 bucks. Now. It’s 1800

Right.

There’s a dishonest system And that’s why I feel people need to work with folks like you as they’re figuring out how to straighten their life out Because the system itself cannot be trusted.

Like you said you are a fan of doctors. I am too Especially structural issues like I tend to be much more a fan of a doctor that is a surgeon than a description writer, right? Like if I’m in a car wreck and I have part of a yield sign in my spleen, I want to go straight to a level three trauma center immediately.

I don’t want to have, you know, a shark piss sprayed on me and be chanted over. I want a surgeon to keep me from bleeding to death. But if I have a chronic problem, especially these chronic problems, like things you’ve named, this is just what we call it. We don’t really know. Like when you say fibromyalgia, it sounds very sophisticated.

You can have 10 people that all say they have this and say, okay, go give them a test, right? That shows me fibromyalgia Bacteria or something or some specific deficiency. No, no, they’re all be different It’s just a generic name because we have a label shit But what you really have is probably an unbalance of nutritional deficiency and overall poor lifestyle that’s led to this And the patient don’t ever want to hear that because, well, then that means it’s partly my fault.

Well, yes, that would be the case. But it’s a real illness. I’m sure it is. And alcoholism is a real illness, but you drink the alcohol, right? Like you bear some part in this and people get really upset about that. And I think that the whole system has convinced them that Every problem can be solved with a surgery or a pill, and I just don’t believe

And I don’t think everything can be solved by adjusting and nutrition. There are other things, and when I was in the hospital, they saved my life there, no doubt about it. they’re good people. It’s just the system is the problem. And I see more and more doctors, medical and osteopathic, getting out of the system and asking me about functional nutrition. Sure, come on in. I’ll tell you everything I know.

I’m seeing doctors do different things to get out of that system.

I’m seeing people like Ken Berry. It’s Sean Baker. They’re becoming online influencers and they’re focused on the diet and exercise side. I’m also seeing a lot that are moving into like the direct primary care market where like, you know, you pay this guy 140 bucks a month and it’s an adjunct on your health insurance, but then you buy a much cheaper health insurance.

And they do the same kind of thing you do. You need labs. They just order them and you go pay cash.

Right.

Right. And then, you know, because they have high volume and they can push that price down a bit and the provider’s willing to do it because I get paid now, I don’t have to fill out 17 forms.

They don’t have to deal with that. And those are the kind of the two migrations I’m seeing from MDs That are not leaving completely But they are putting themselves in a situation where they’re not wrapped into like basically code based billing Cause Ken explained it to me and I was blown away. Like he’s like, this is how much I can bill if I have you on one medication, but this is how much I can build the insurance company if I have you on three.

So I’m allowed to charge the insurance company more money. If I’m putting you on more drugs that they have to pay for, there’s gotta be some grab ass incest going on in the background between the drug companies and the insurance companies, because if I’m an insurance company, I would