Many experts believe that a healthy gut is the foundation for overall health, and that keeping your digestive system healthy should be a priority. However, maintaining a healthy gut can be more difficult than it seems due to the toxins we encounter every day. There are many things that can disrupt the delicate balance in your gut, and an imbalanced gut can have many different symptoms. Some of the most common symptoms of poor gut health can include food sensitivities, bloating, poor digestion, and much more. If gut health is not addressed and corrected, it can contribute to the development of certain health conditions over time. In this week’s episode, Is Your Gut Healthy? How to Tell, Janet and Dr. Stephen E. Lewis, D.C. discuss how our lifestyles affect gut health, how to know if you probably have a gut issue, and some tips on how to support a healthy gut.

Is Your Gut Healthy? How to Tell

00:00:01 – 00:05:09

Welcome to the green wisdom health podcast, with doctor Steven and Janet Lewis, where you will learn about natural solutions to common ailments. And now, here are your hosts doctor Stephen and Janet Lewis. Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the green wisdom health show. I’m Janet Lewis. And I’m doctor Lewis. And today we are going to talk to you about your gut, which is one of my favorite subjects. It seems everything goes back to it. The name of this show is called is your gut, healthy, and how to tell. And then toward the end of the show, we’re going to tell you a very exciting story about one of our patients and his journey with us. So hang on tight, we got a lot to cover. But we wanted to get started with gut health because immune system is out of the gut and people don’t understand that. And I’m hoping doctor Lewis will explain to us how that’s possible and why it is compromised and what we can do about it. So doctor Lewis, would you tell us what you want us to know about is your gut healthy? Yeah, the quick answer is no it’s not. It’s just how unhealthy is it. The reason I pretty much say everybody has a gut problem is because we have horrible food. It’s not nutrient dense. And yes, food is important, but it’s not complete. So the presence of glyphosate and all these chemicals they put on it. One of the things that messes with gut health and causes leaky gut, and I’ll get into those symptoms in a minute. Is the presence of gluten, but gluten’s not the only bad protein that’s in wheat and barley and hops and rye. What is happening is we fertilize our crops with NPK. The plants say, oh my God, I’ve got this burst of energy. And since I have this, it’s like we’re feeding our food fast food when we’re feeding it NPK. And it grows at an accelerated rate, and it says, oh, I’ve got to put it out in protein, and people think protein is a good thing. Well, that protein is gluten and other bad proteins. And we have four to 40 times more gluten in our food. In our wheat, especially, than we did just a few short decades ago. Gluten is not a good thing, and we test people. It’s like, oh my God, no wonder you can’t get well. You got to cut this out. And it’s just a varying degrees, but we’re seeing more and more of it. Nailed, then we saw, say, 20 years ago, autoimmunity is getting to be it’s definitely on the rise in that starts into gut, even if the autoimmune disease is Hashimoto’s or Socrates or rheumatoid arthritis. So the excess gluten and glutenin and all kinds of other things. When it causes a leaky gut syndrome, what it really causes is what we say, microbial dysbiosis, which means you don’t have the right kind of bacteria yeast and fungus in your guts or the rat ratio. Things that cause leaky gut, we talked about gluten. That’s the main thing. Medications, people that do NSAIDs forever, and I just talked to real sweet men. It says, well, I’ve done all the acid reducers for many, many, many years. Well, that’s covering up the problem, but not really fixing it. Food allergies that goes back to gluten, but there’s a lot of other gluten problems caused by the leaky gut. Chemical sensitivity that’s getting much, much, much, well, it’s way more prevalent because we have more chemicals and the body’s getting in more than it can actually detox out. Celiac disease, I thought head gut cancer, it hurts the bad and did the testing. They said, no, you’re just one tiny step away from being celiac, which causes malabsorption. So Janet gives me gobs of stuff. We’ll talk about today. And it makes me better and leaky gut can help you lead to autoimmune digestive insufficiencies, poor diet. Nutritional deficiencies. And all those kind of things stress, which can be alcohol. It can be too much coffee. All kinds of things. But I’m trying not to tell them myself. Ice cream. Sugar. So the food allergies creates a vicious cycle. And so does the chemical sensitivities. When you start getting brain fog or I think the technical term for that is toxic and cephalopod or something like that. Well, the simple answer is just take some benfotiamine and get the percentage of candida way, way down from 85% down to under 15% in your gut.

00:05:11 – 00:10:03

Nutritional deficiencies we all have them. There’s no way in the world you can even just eat totally organic and have all the nutrition you need and organics is certainly an improvement, but it’s not complete. So if you’ve got that chronic fatigue syndrome, IBS, depression is depression is most of the time, it may not be caused by the gut, although it can be, but that is always part of the equation, is the gut and inflammation in chronic depression. And it’s interesting because when you go to the doctor, they give you something for depression. And doctors are wonderful. They do many lifesaving things, but they take the body apart and they take one area and they treat it. They never think about the body as a whole and why you’re having depression to start with so they give you this pill to cover that up. But you haven’t gotten to the root of it, which doctor Lewis is saying could possibly be your gut. And I wanted to talk a little bit about transit time with the colon because that’s one of my favorite things for you guys have already heard this story. You just have to sit through it. But we have, I had a lady that actually drove up to the office the other day. She drove by and was filming our office and it was almost 5 when we were getting ready to get off and I thought, this is, what is she doing? My curious self had to go outside and see what was up and she parked and she said, oh, somebody gave me your information. And I’m just filming your place here so that I can look it up online with a website and I’ll and I said, well, what’s going on? And she said, well, she said, I’m real bloated. I’m taking the skinny gut shots and I just got myself a vitamin D shot. And I just needed to know why I’m so bloated. And I can’t go to the bathroom. I said, well, what do you mean you can’t go to the bathroom? She goes, oh, I only go about every week and a half. And I said, okay, I said, well, you know, there’s things that help that. And she goes, oh no, I can’t take anything. I don’t digest it. And so I’m going to go every week and a half. How many meals a day do you eat? Oh, I have three. I said, oh, okay. I said, so if you had a train and it had three cars on it, and it went through a tunnel. And none of those trains came through the tunnel for a week and a half. What are they doing? And she said, well, I don’t know. I said, well, they’re obviously stuck in there and every meal you put behind it’s getting attached to that last car. So you’ve got a big clog, and she said, oh no, I do meant a musil. It helps me pass it. I said, yeah, you should look at the ingredients on that. And she said, well, what would you give me because I can’t digest? I said, no, I said it’s not, you can’t digest. You are, you have leaky gut, what doctor Lewis is talking about. I said, you’ve lost the ability for your colon to push those things through. And so we talked about digestive enzymes, and we talked about SBI support, which I’m going to get doctor Lewis to talk a little bit about because she really thought that was her best life, even though she felt horrible. She said, I just don’t know what to do. I said, well, I’m trying to give you answers at low cost lab work would really help because we could see why. Again, thyroid could be involved in some of that. But you know, there are so many people out there suffering thinking that’s a normal way to live. You should be going to the bathroom within 30 minutes to an hour after you eat. Every meal, not every other day, I’ve always done it all my life. That’s the way I’ve been all my life. I can’t tell you the times we’ve heard that. Well, I want to see people are arguing for their limitations. If you’re doing that, change the narrative because whatever you speak is what you’re calling in to existence. Right. And so I brought her in here. I stood in here with her 30 minutes. I tried to explain to her how everything was connected. She looked at me like I had three heads. And she kept arguing for the limitation. She said, I just don’t think I can swallow any of this because I don’t think I can get I can pass it. I said, well, we know you can’t pass it. I said, but you’ve got to start somewhere. So maybe she’ll come back, I don’t know, but that’s a lot of the population out there. That’s the knowledge they have of what’s supposed to happen with their bodies. So that’s why I want doctor Louis to give a little bit of hope here.

00:10:05 – 00:15:07

Can you fix leaky gut? Is that just like, I mean, it sounds so devastating ending, is it a sick body produced? Do you think a healthy body with God’s innate wisdom can fix it? Depending on how you answer that. And it’s amazing to me how many people sitting on a toilet having a bowel movement tell me, I think of your wife every time I have a bowel movement to train you coming through. Well, I bet that’s good. But then I’m gonna give them something else to think about. The perfect poop. Yeah. I bet you’ve never noticed. Oh, I actually had one lady who said, I will not look at my poop. I said, you don’t look at your poop? No, I don’t want to see it once it’s gone. It’s gone. Okay. Well, you might want to observe it to see some healthy indicators to look for. Because that’s actually a good indication of your intestinal health. The Bristol stool scale provides an easy visual reference. Some key things to look for are if the texture, the texture of it, should be smooth. Hard, lumpy poops often indicate constipation. If it looks like a baby Ruth, you’ve got a problem. If you’ve got time to read Facebook thoroughly or to read a magazine, you may have, you may be having issues, right? Yeah, pretty much. The shape, sausage shape is ideal. Overly liquid is typically a sign of diarrhea and pellet shapes or a sign of constipation. Actually, I think you get pellet shapes as you are getting the little pockets in the colon. That’s a possibility. It diverticulosis. Right. Buoyancy. You didn’t know you needed to see if they floated first, did you? Do they sink in the toilet? Poop, that floats, maybe may contain undigested fats. Isn’t this interesting? What about people don’t have a gallbladder? I wonder if they still have if it’s buoyant? Yeah, because it’s not digested in the fat. It’s the way if you’ve had your gallbladder out you well, we all need digestive enzymes to different degrees. But if you’ve had your gallbladder out, you definitely need our digestive essentials. And people had even had their tonsils out, have chronic fatigue. I know that soft subject, but you know how I am. Yeah, any straining or experiencing any pain during bowel movements should be investigated as should any blood. And I’ve had people come in and go have some blood in my stool. I’m like, it’s in your stool like it was dark or was it bright red? What’s bright red? Well, doctor Lewis always says that generally hemorrhoids. Or pals, but I always tell them, go see your GI doctor. They have some really good tests to see if you’re bleeding internally, especially if you’re anemic. So that’s just some stool health there for you that you did not know, or maybe did not want to know. Now that it’s all icky, we can get on something else, maybe. Constipation. And most of us are constipated because we’re too busy and we’ve taught at school. No, you can’t go till the as well. It’s usually constipation is a combination of a lot of things, but it’s the bad bugs that I talked about. And they put out bad toxins that actually intoxicate in almost pretty much paralyzed normal nerve to muscle function. Think vagus nerve. Food allergies, they inflamed the gut lining, peeps, I’m not inflamed. Well, if you’re overweight, you have a chronic inflammatory issue. Nutrient deficiencies, especially magnesium. I take magnesium citrate because it gathers water and helps the stool, but also take the magnesium ultra for other reasons. Processed overcooked fiber poor foods, so to speak is a bad thing. The candidate diet is really necessary for most people to get rid of candida. I think it’s easier to kill it, but easier to kill it than starve it out. But here’s the other thing. The guy that just told me, well, I’ve taken antacids for many, many years, and he said, but I said, well, that’s probably a big part of your problem, but what they don’t realize is the gastric reflux stuff it’s usually because there’s too much alkali from the pyloric sphincter not closing because alkaline comes up from the duodenum. It’s not usually too much as it is too little acid and too much alkali. And they don’t know that symptoms are the same. And if you get the chest pain and chest burning, you have to see a cardiologist for that, but people sometimes say, well, I feel nauseous. Well, there can be a lot of reasons for that. Use this lack of digestive enzymes, and maybe probably food allergies. But especially pregnant women, when they start having the pregnancy, it’s almost always a lack of be 6.

00:15:08 – 00:20:03

Now it needs to be a good B 6. We have the activated P 5 P and most women say, oh my God, my nauseousness is gone. So you don’t have to suffer through pregnancy for that. I wish I would have known that many years ago before I was in nutrition. There’s so many women that need to know that about not having to be nauseous during pregnancy. That is like the flu that doesn’t stop for three months. So B vitamins, that what you’re saying for that? Yeah, goodbye. I’ll take the PPP, but for other reasons, but it’s always good to start with a good multivitamin. I think it’s better to be well rounded. So we’re going to move from stool since we don’t want to talk about that anymore. How about we move to gas? Gas good, maybe not good. Depends on what you read on Facebook, but that’s actually a sign that you may have something going on. Miss in your gut. A little bit of gas is not a bad thing. But yeah, if you have a lot of gas, it could be undigested, proteins, undigested, a battle between the candida and the good bacteria. Right. Black beans. You can help reduce your gassiness by chewing your food slowly and thoroughly. Doctor Lewis and I are usually the last people at a table when we go to when we eat with any of the reps that come to see us learning. I don’t know why. We were so slow. I think we’ve just read so much stuff. It’s just like we want to make sure we’re digesting our food people in hail food. Maybe they’re on a time crunch. Maybe three times faster than we do. You need to make sure you’re slowing down and chewing thoroughly because the more you break down food in the mouth that easier it is to further digest. You need to keep a food diary to identify triggers. Common culprits include legumes and dairy products. Well, that’s the truth. Yeah, and you know, I love the research part, but if you do prolong cow’s milk, it actually challenges the intestinal permeability, which you have to counteract by lactobacillus from journal of gastroenterology. Bugs in the gut, breaking barriers to understanding, you know? Try to take a short walk after a large meal since movement helps stimulate Paris. I remember when I said, I think it was the last podcast that if you exercise and you feel better, it’s usually a low thyroid, if you exercise and feel tired, it’s adrenal issues. So keep that in the back of your head too. Limit your consumption of carbonated drinks. Because that’ll make you gassy. And you know, I was reading something yesterday in a book that I have always thought was kind of more fluff and smoke and mirrors and BS than most of them goes just because it’s in a book that might get true. And it was talking about a high carbohydrate diet was the best for you. It’s like, well, that’s what’s made us all fat and metabolic syndrome and diabetic. And cholesterol too high and the ratios are wrong is the high carbohydrates. So, and I’m more of a keto paleo primal, but that’s not even good for everybody. The point is, it’s not one size fits all. Now, I do lean a little bit toward keto and staying away from the carbs and the sugars. But you have to kind of tone that with what works best for you. And then they say, well, gee, read that book. Eat route for your blood type. Yeah, I read it. I think it’s about 10% true. But we have digestive enzymes that are more geared toward how you ate. Digestive enzymes help the gassiness situation as well, right? Well, especially our chewable digestive enzymes, essentials V, which stands for more vegetables or vegetarian because it has the different things to break down the cell walls of the fruits and vegetables. Most tastes good, I can even get our 8 year old granddaughter to take those. She didn’t believe me. I broke them out at lunch one day. She goes, what are you doing, Nina? I said, I’m getting ready to take my enzymes before my meal. She goes, I want to try one. I said, okay, so I gave everyone she goes, she tells like a piece of candy, ’cause they’re sweet. They taste really good. Probiotics, don’t probiotics also help gassy situations. Yeah, it really does. And let’s get a little deep for just a second. The inflamed intestines causes something called cytokines or cytokines. It’s a chemical associated with inflammation. And it’s not a bad thing, but when you get a prolonged cytokine storm, that’s what they’re seeing in COVID.

00:20:03 – 00:25:07

That’s what they see in cancer. You have to have a way to decrease these cytokines. And by doing that, and the interleukins also, which is inflammatory chemicals, but gut bacteria can induce or repress depending on what type of gut bacteria the P450 pathway of liberty classification, which we talked about with Casey one time. So yes, a good probiotics decrease all of that and causes less fermentation so therefore less gas. So if your husband traps you under the sheet because he thinks it’s funny, he’s passing gas just giving digestive enzymes, which leads me to another question. Janet, do you give me digestive enzymes? Because you love me and keep me healthy or just protecting yourself from gas. I plead the 5th. Oh, and we’re going to change the subject here a little bit and get back to the products that we’d use for this, but we just have to tell you the wonderful story we just had that came in our office. It was this is literally why we do this. Every day, you know, there’s so many people out there that are lives if they just had a little bit of help could be changed forever. We just had a man that’s coming here. I guess he’s known as now for. I don’t know how long doctor Lewis has been practicing, but a very long time when he was doing chiropractic care. And the man came in 5, 6 years ago, and he said my kidneys are failing. And he said, I don’t know what to do. And we put him on some products to help to help strengthen them to give them what they needed trying to help him through that process. And to lower the blood pressure and I’ve always told him you can do it medically, you can do it naturally by cleaning up your diet and putting in some day drinks, but you’ve got to get that blood pressure down because it will kill your kidneys. And that is what happened. He had high blood pressure for a very long time. Don’t ignore it, man. Yeah. And he took a few things, and then you wouldn’t see him again for a little while. He just came in here, well, let me back up about three years ago or so. That probably went on for a few years. And he’d take a few things, still back and forth, about three years, so he came in here and he said, well, if I don’t get this really under control, I’m gonna die. My kidneys are shutting down. You heard that 15 years ago. Why did you ignore it? Because he waited for the car to be on fire first. So his car is on fire. So he came in here. We put him on a bunch of things, doctor was saying him at that point. He was going back and forth. Every time we saw him, he looked more and more gaunt. But he consistently at that point stayed on the products we gave him. And I can’t tell you that lab every time it starts really dipping. I’m like, man, you’re real close to needing a kidney transplant or dialysis. And he’s like, nope, didn’t dialysis because I understand dialysis is very painful. I hope it’s something I never have to experience. But we managed through the supplementation and the lab work to keep him just high enough that he didn’t have to have dialysis. Keep in mind, this is not in replacement of medical care. Medical care in conjunction with that, you can live a healthier happier life and still hang around for your kids and grandkids. He just came in here today and he got a kidney. He told me he went on the transplant list in September. They called him in November. It was the day before deer hunting season. He had already gone the day before to pick out the deer. He wanted. So he was sure he was going to get to shoot it. That was in Coleman, Texas. You don’t tie them steer to a tree. They still free. Range? He said that they called him the night before the season opened. And he said you should have seen how fast I drove to Dallas. He said, I was on the tollway. He said, you know, you’re supposed to have two people in the car. All he had one didn’t care. They sent me a ticket. He said, I was going for my kidney. And he got one from a 19 year old kid. We had not seen him since he got the transplant in November. And like I said, he just came in today and he wanted to thank us for all the help we gave him to not go on dialysis. So he thanked us for not letting him die. And I said, well you know that’s God that we just kind of helped support what needed to be there to try to make it through. We didn’t know how it was going to turn out. He goes, I don’t know why I’m still here. He said, but I’m beginning to gain weight again. He goes, I’m back to feeling like myself. And he said, I even had a bottle of y’all’s vitamins in the hospital and he said, I had him there and the doctor told me not to take those because they were too strong for me.

00:25:08 – 00:30:00

And he said, I’ve been taking these all along, and he said they said they were too strong and he would just peel them out. And doctor Luis always has a great story to go for that peeing it out thing. Which is eating good steak. Well, will because I think God’s a lot smarter than we are. So I was on his podcast as a guest 250,000 listeners. And he says, it just makes expensive urine. So I just had a $42 rib. I did not create expensive excrement, and I said, no, that was reputed 75 years ago, but it’s amazing how much distortion will kind of hang around. Your body with the wisdom of God knows what to take. And yes, we excrete it out once it’s no longer needed or no longer utilized, but you have to put it in there because you have impaired absorption because of these gut problems that we talk about. Right. And so in James knew that because he’d been doing both things, you know, for a long time, so he knew to take that with a grain of salt. He said he got back out. He ran out of the vitamins. And he said, I noticed that my fingernails were not growing back the way they should be. They were very brittle. And fingernails always linked to kidneys as well. And so he said, I came down. He said y’all weren’t here that day. He said I came down, got another bottle of vitamins, and he said, my fingernails are growing back just fine now. So he came in here to give us a hug today to thank us. Well, we gave him one. Yeah, we wanted it or not. We stole it. We stole this hug. Because 5 years, we’ve been going through this. So that’s what makes what we do, why we come to work. But you’ve got to keep in mind, even supplementation, even if you have good ones and there’s a whole lot of not so good ones mediocre ones out there. If you’ve had a transplant, you have to be very careful because you don’t want to boost your immune system at that point and reject the organ. So you have to use these things very wisely. Yeah, you have to get help. From a professional that can help you with it. And speaking of helping, would you go or a little bit a couple of the products that would repair or help leaky gut? I’m especially interested in you talking about SBI of support because people don’t know what that is, but I was in my general lame understanding of it. It’s like putting we always say it’s kind of like putting silly putty in the holes of the guts. Because she says it smells like what? It smells like it smells like play doh. Play doh, the play doh used to play with as a kid and it gets sticky kind of like that. I didn’t hate to ask, I don’t know. I didn’t eat it. I’m just saying it smells that way. The SBI has a serum derived bovine immunoglobulin concentrate. And it gives you the immunoglobulin gs. So immunoglobulin think immune health because as I said earlier, autoimmunity is definitely on the rise. And there’s a link between autoimmunity and intestinal permeability. So since this leaky gut seems to be so prevalent and the gut barrier has to be fueled for lack of a better term to help seal it in the probiotics, which I hope I got a chance to get back to that. But the SBI health has everything to do with good health and I tell my patients when I get a scoop every day and Janice says he don’t know what he gets. I give him two scoops and his drink. And then one thing I really, really, really, really like is GI support. What that does is D glycerides licorice root. It’s aloe Vera leaf gel extract. Glutamine. Now glutamine is kind of a fuel for the cells of the small intestine and it helps the replication of good cells and tissue repair starting in the guts, but then that goes through the body basically. It’s a powder. It tastes fine. And then it’s got the in acetyl glucosamine, which is a really, really good thing. I like it. I take a lot of it. So and while you’re taking these things and people are talking about fasting, you want to take the right thing, even when you’re fast, there’s a way to speed up the gut healing and you’ve got to do the probiotics because this is going to be quick. Allergies and eczema can be caused by an imbalance of flora journal from analysts of medicine, asthma associated with colitis, healthy gut bacteria is used to treat skin infections, folks. That’s from journal of science and journal plants.

00:30:02 – 00:33:05

Probiotics are good for systemic diseases, such as gastrointestinal urinary colon, cancer, cholesterol, et cetera, et cetera. And it goes into the gluten and wait intolerance. The best thing you can do is just cut out weight. That’s the number one bad actor. In our poor health. Well, I hope you guys learned something you’ve learned about bowel movements, stool size, what they’re supposed to do. And if it’s a baby Ruth, something’s not right. So with that, would you like to leave us with any closing words or opinions of yours today, which you have many? Yeah. You know, I’m getting more and more opinionated and I should apologize, but I tell people, it’s not going to get any better because I’m getting a little bit older, but 30 years I’ll be out, but there’s a lot of people out there that need to be healed. And I get so many referrals. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Because you’re helping people get well. And whatever you do to help somebody get better, it’s going to come back. And be a blessing for you in ways that you may not necessarily recognize, but in this time of stress, strife and struggles, we really need to be kinder. But be more urgent in getting well. Don’t wait to get well at 11 o’clock and diet ten 30. You matter, you’re here for a reason. And that’s to uplift and bless other people. So if you want to get started or need to do it again and it’s been a long time, go to our website, green wisdom, health dot com, click on the health survey tab that will allow you to take a little short quiz and it will suggest to you the appropriate lab panel. We guys, we hope you guys have learned something today. We’ll be here for another exciting show. We never know what’s coming next, but we do have some interesting things in the pipe coming down. I think you’re really going to like as soon as I get it together. Yeah, we’re making some really, really good changes to help streamline it for us. So we can handle the business. But more importantly, to take better care of you. It’s going to give you a whole lot more than what you’ve had in the past, which I think we’ve given a lot anyway, but we’re going to get ready to give a whole lot more. If you guys have a blessed week, we’ll be here next time on the green wisdom health show. Once again, our show has come to an end, but you’re hoping your health is only beginning. If you or a loved one are in need of a different outcome and are waiting for a brighter future, take the first step and go to our website and fill out the health survey. Please don’t keep us a secret. If you know someone that could benefit from this podcast, please share the show with your friends and family. You are only one step away from a life worth living.

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You can also listen to Is Your Gut Healthy? How to Tell on Spotify here.