Josh (11:30.226) On this episode, we have a very special guest joining us. He's a cardiologist and chief medical officer and co-founder of Realize Therapeutics. And if that wasn't impressive enough for you guys, he's also in New York Times bestselling author, has written several books like Undoctored, and you may know him best by a series of books called Wheat Belly. So he's here to talk to us about changing your body and composition through gut bacteria. Dr. William Davis, thank you so much for joining us.
Dr William Davis (11:56.578) Oh, thanks for the invitation, Josh. Glad to be here.
Josh (11:59.154) I'm so glad you're here. I mean, I get people all the time thanking me for being here and so glad to be on your show and I'm like, I feel so spoiled. This is, I told Dr. Merrick and Dr. McCullough, they were two guys who I really wanted to meet my professional career. And I said, a lot of people want to meet Tom Hanks or Brad Pitt and other actors. Like you guys, you doctors are the people that I want to meet. Not to, you know, blow too much sunshine up your bum here. But the idea is that.
The medical system and the research to me is tenfold more incredible than actors just performing in movies and memorizing lines. This is the stuff that I think changes the world. I'm really excited we got you here. So Bill, you are obviously very well known for Wheat Belly. New York Times bestseller. You have an entire series of books you wrote on Wheat Belly, cookbooks and all kinds of stuff. You talk about the impacts of modern wheat, its effect on weight gain, chronic health conditions, but you've just released a new book.
called Supergut and between you and I in the audience, I haven't actually had a chance to read it just yet. I have Ben Lynch's Dirty Jeans on my list next and then Supergut is on my list here as well. But can you tell us what that's about and what kind of topics you cover in this book?
Dr William Davis (13:13.934) Well, it's become clear, Josh, that as a society, we have decimated our body's microbiome, that is the collection of microbes. You know, for years, we thought the gastrointestinal microbiome, for instance, was just this curiosity, a nuisance, that caused diarrhea after a course of antibiotics, case closed, and that opposite is proving true. It is this universe of creatures that have astounding positive effects and also negative effects.
And it's also become clear that virtually every disease that you can think of, whether it's type 2 diabetes or obesity or depression or anxiety or ulcerative colitis or Crohn's or inflammatory or IBS or on and on, there's a participation by the microbiome, the gastrointestinal microbiome, either causing the condition or adding to the condition in some fashion. And if you don't pay attention to that,
and you do something really stupid, like take a drug for your ulcerative colitis, then you haven't addressed a root cause, the microbiome. And so even in depression, a lot of depression is all starts in the microbiome. Well, this opens up the door, right? There's so many new strategies and more effective. The great thing is...
We don't have to worry about the long list of side effects like they have with drugs. So liver failure, opportunistic infections, and all that nonsense. We don't have to worry about that. If we have anything, we have side benefits when you bring order back into your microbiome.
Josh (14:52.126) That's really interesting. It's obviously gut health is becoming more and more popular, but it does mean that the information gets watered down, right? Influences pick it up, social media picks it up, it gets pulled out of context, and it really starts to lose its potency. But when we're talking about bacteria, it is everything. I specialize in IBD, I deal with a lot of bacteria, and I tell people, if you were to take a little glass sized, Dr. William Davis, little model of you, and you filled it up with sand, the big toe is DNA.
Everything else is bacteria. It is fascinating how much it actually is pertinent to our health, wellness and wellbeing. We will die if we don't have it. Arguably as important as our very DNA. Very cool stuff.
Dr William Davis (15:36.506) So one of the things I've been doing is really talking about this issue of SIBO, that is small intestinal bacterial ovary. Josh, I was guilty a few years back of thinking that SIBO was a rare thing. Until the air, you know about the air device? Do I have mine here? I have, I think the old one I have here. This is the original.
Josh (15:56.19) I can't say I do.
Dr William Davis (16:03.346) AIRE made by a company. I have no relationship with the company, except I know the inventor, the founder, Dr. Angus Short. He's a PhD engineer in Dublin, Ireland. Well, his wife had irritable bowel syndrome and she was told to go on a low FODMAPS diet, a low fiber, low sugar diet for her bloating and diarrhea. And she does it, but he sees that she frequently gets tripped up. And so he invents this device to detect, you blow into it, hydrogen gas.
Talks to your smartphone zero to 10. And he thought it was a device just for people with IBS on a low FODMAPS diet. So I get it, around 2018, I call him up, I say, Angus, this is what this is. Really, I'm telling the inventor what he invented. I said, this is a mapping device to tell you where microbes are living in your GI tract. Because you consume something with prebiotic fiber properties, like inulin. It's better, by the way, than lactulose or glucose.
used in a clinic or lab. So, inulin, and then you can eat food too, and then you test every 30 to 45 minutes. And if you test positive within 90 minutes, you've got microbes living in the upper portion of your gastrointestinal tract, like stomach duodenum dujunum. And those are typically fecal microbes, the ones that are supposed to be in stool, like E. coli and salmonella and Campylobacter, which are also, as you know, Josh, the species of food poisoning.
So we have these fecal microbes, and by my estimation, in the US alone, 150 million people conservatively have this problem. But you won't know that unless you test it with this device, or you have conditions that are highly associated with this issue, like fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, your area of interest, of course, restless leg syndrome, obesity.
fatty liver. You know, if we just take fatty liver, which is about 35% of the US population, so that alone is about what? About 100 million people. Of those 100 million people, 50% will test positive for SIBO. So just with fatty liver, we've got 50 million people in the US alone with SIBO. How about Irritable Bowel Syndrome? There's about 60 to 70 million Americans with IBS.
Josh (18:07.979) At least.
Dr William Davis (18:24.802) And of those people, typically about 40% test positive. That 40%, another 24 to 30 million people. Add it all up, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative, and you easily exceed 150 million. There's some overlap, of course, obese diabetics with fatty liver. But you easily exceed 150 million people. And now with this device, I've asked people to test, and it's shocking how many people test positive. And unfortunately, as you know, if you go to the conventional doctor, he'll say,
Oh Josh, you've been looking at Dr. Google again, haven't you? Or there's no such thing. I love that one. There's no such thing. Oh, you mean those hundreds of studies don't mean anything? So, because if you don't look, if you don't address the SIBO and you've got a condition, IBS, depression, anxiety, migraine headaches, whatever it is, you're not gonna have a control over that condition unless you take care of the SIBO part of it.
Josh (18:57.39) Classic.
Josh (19:05.044) Yeah.
Dr William Davis (19:22.882) Now, the great thing that I stumbled onto, Josh, is, you know, I asked this question. If you have SIBO, so 24 feet, small intestines, occupied by fecal microbes, trillions of them, and of course they live and die in a matter of hours, not years, but hours, when these trillions of microbes turn over, they release some of their components, especially their cell wall. And that's called, of course, endotoxemia.
The endotoxin of their cell wall enters the bloodstream, endotoxemia. And that explains how microbes in the small bowel, which is very permeable, unlike the colon, which is impermeable. Small bowel is very permeable. Permeable endotoxin enters the bloodstream. You now have endotoxemia. That, but that tells us how microbes in the small intestine can be experienced as rosacea or psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis.
or obesity or type two diabetes or coronary disease or migraine headaches or depression or Parkinson's disease. Oh, no, no. So now we have the equation worked out very well. But how do you get rid of it? Well, you could take an antibiotic, but you know, Josh, you know this, antibiotics got us in this mess. So taking more antibiotics doesn't seem like a good idea, but you could, you could take Zifaxone and it has an efficacy of about 50 or 60%. It's very costly. Of course it has side effects.
like C. diff. So what I did was this, I asked this question. What if we had somebody we know has SIBO, because they have maybe a condition like restless leg syndrome. It's synonymous, fibromyalgia, synonymous with SIBO. What if you took a probiotic, commercial off the shelf probiotic, a haphazard collection of microbes, that's what probiotics are. Will your SIBO go? Mm-hmm. Will your SIBO go away? No, right?
Josh (21:03.094) Sure, it's a gasoline on a fire. Yeah.
Dr William Davis (21:09.454) You might have some reduction bloating if you're lucky or something like that. But what if we chose microbes that colonize the upper GI tract, small intestine, where SIBO occurred? That's where the battle is. And choose microbes that produce what are called bacteriocins. These are natural antibiotics effective against the species of SIBO, the fecal microbes. So I chose three originally. I chose a strain of Lactobacillus rhoderi, upper GI colonizer.
produces up to four bacteriocins, lactobacillus gasseri. Likewise, colonized upper GI tract produces up to seven bacteriocins. I'm not sure how necessary it is, but I also add the strain of bacillus coagulans. I guess because it has a good track record in reducing IBS symptoms and produces one bacteriocin. We make a yogurt. Now, I don't want people to confuse this with yogurt you buy in the store. The stuff you buy in the store has almost nothing in it. And that's because you generate microbes.
via fermentation. They don't have sex, right? There's no male and female microbes. They just have asexual reproduction, right? So one microbe just reproduces itself and becomes two, two becomes four. Well, roderi, one of the ingredients, doubles every three hours at human body temperature. So we're gonna make a yogurt at human body temperature with those three microbes, and we let them double a minimum of 12 times.
Josh (22:12.194) Sure, it's too bad for the microbes, but...
Dr William Davis (22:36.802) and we count the number of microbes using a method called flow cytometry, and we get about 300 billion, with a B, counts per half cup serving. And so far, Josh, of about 40 people who've consumed what I call SIBO yogurt, so far, of 40 people who've done this, 90% have converted to H2 breath negative and had some kind of breakthrough in their health. Very common situation. Somebody says,
I lost 73 pounds on your program, but I have another 40 to go and I'm stuck. They test positive or they think they have SIBO, they do the SIBO yogurt, weight loss plateau breaks. Or they had a diabetic hemoglobin A1C, let's say 11.7% on insulin and two drugs, right? They go on the program, they get off insulin, get off the drugs, hemoglobin A1C drops 6.1%. Much better, but still not great. That's five.
Josh (23:18.807) Hmm.
Dr William Davis (23:35.418) 5.0% or less is the ideal. They address their SIBO and endotoxemia with the SIBO yogurt, A1C drops to 4.8% or some other great number like that. So, over and over again, Josh, what I've seen is people who've addressed the SIBO. And you know what? If I said the solution was to remove your colon or some nasty thing like that or exploratory laparotomy, you better be damn certain that's necessary, right? What if the solution is something akin to yogurt?
We don't have to be quite so confident.
Josh (24:05.858) That would be crazy. That's well, I think big pharma is going to have something to say about that. You know, bill, you might end up in a ditch somewhere if you're not careful. They don't like this kind of talk.
Dr William Davis (24:18.566) So we'll do the formal clinical trial to validate this. But I think I'm convinced it works. We have a way to validate that it works like this, right? And of course, people enjoy the effect. And I also encourage people, once they have four weeks of the yogurt and eradicate their SIBO, it's probably a good idea to continue the yogurt on occasion because those, especially the gasorine, the rhodorite,
Josh (24:27.854) That's amazing.
Dr William Davis (24:48.03) are not only upper-G.I. colonizers and bacterias and producers, they're also what we call keystone microbes. They're foundational, they're very important for other microbes. And so what you're really doing is replacing microbes, by making this yogurt, replacing microbes that you should have had all along your entire lifetime, but they got wiped out because you took maybe amoxicillin for an upper respiratory infection 30 years ago.
So you're restoring it. Now, if we really knew everything about the microbiome, you should be able to take the yogurt once and never have to do it again, because it should colonize you, but it doesn't colonize forever. It only colonized for a few days. So it's probably a matter of not having the full, what we call consortium or guild of microbes. Microbes are just like humans. They collaborate with families and communities, coworkers, but microbes are the same way. If you only replace one or a few microbes,
that might not be sufficient for long-term colonization. So we don't have that information. No one's got it yet. Long-term, it will come. So right now, we're left with, if you have SIBO, four weeks of the SIBO yogurt, if you want to do it that way, and then occasional, like a couple times a week, something like that, consumption, just keep those keystone microbes going.
Josh (26:05.994) Now is this yogurt somethings? You talked about the lack of bacillus roitre, gastrogyne coagulans, and bacillus coagulans is, has the ability to form spores. Can you add spore probiotics to the yogurt so it can have a better chance to colonize and culture in the gut?
Dr William Davis (26:23.73) Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation in the spore-based probiotics. There's this idea that it must be a spore former in order to survive stomach acid and bile. That's not true. Most probiotic species like Rotary. Rotary is very good at surviving stomach acid and bile acid. Gastrocytes are very good. There are some species where there's a drop in counts, but it still makes it to your small intestine. So another thing you can see
some of these probiotic companies are doing things like double encapsulating their probiotics so that it does not dissolve in the small intestine and dissolves only in the colon. Well, that's not a good idea. If the battle is in the small intestine, you want release into the stomach, the small intestine and the colon. So I would avoid those products that have double encapsulation or some other gimmick to delay release of the microbes.
Josh (26:58.082) Hmm.
Josh (27:18.702) Sure.
Well, it's really interesting is we talked about probiotics and it seems to be the researchers mix that yeah, they get in there, they pass through, like you said, they culture for a couple of days in there. Obviously every bacteria is different. I mean, there's one to 2000 different species, seven to 9,000 different strains. We can't put them all into a probiotic. It's just, it's not possible yet. Yet being the operative word, but there's a lot of information regarding, well, some bacteria will get it in culture and they kind of plant, they seed, they grow fruit, they're kind of there forever.
very little research on that most says they pass through just like you said a couple of days they culture they're in they're out they create all kinds of byproducts on their way through they do their effects you have to keep taking them is there any research you're doing right now around the seabokes I mean there's so many effects this is incredible information is there any research you're doing right now about probiotics you can take that will actually get in seed plant and culture like you said you only have to take once
Dr William Davis (28:17.006) I know of no such species, just because I think for that reason I mentioned earlier, and that is we just don't understand the consortia or guilds, the communities that are required. So in other words, if mom gave you lactobacillus roteri, say via breastfeeding or passed through the birth canal, if you didn't get take antibiotics, you'd likely have that roteri for a lifetime. But when we take it as yogurt or as a probiotic, it takes up residence only for days to weeks.
So something's missing here. And I think it's the consortium or guild. That research is ongoing, but it hasn't yielded. This is gonna be true for a lot of things. So the solution for instance, for calcium oxalate kidney stones is almost certainly gonna be a consortium of microbes like oxalobacter formigenes and some lactobacillus species. But here's something important for your listeners to know. So the Sonnenbergs, the husband wife team at Stanford, Justin and Erica Sonnenberg.
published a very important study about two years ago. And they compared the value of lots of prebiotic fibers that nourish microbes versus lots and lots of fermented foods, foods like fermented sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurts, kefir, fermented veggies, those kinds of things. What they showed was very interesting. Consumption of the fermented foods that have microbes in them was best at cultivating
an increase in diversity and return of a lot of those species we've lost. Now, how can this be? Because the fermented food, like let's say, kimchi or sauerkraut, has species like Leukonostoc mesenteroides or Pediococcus pentasaceus or Lactobacillus planterum. So those are fermenting microbes in food and they don't take up residence in your GI tract, but they somehow, but uncertain mechanism, no one knows exactly how, they open the door.
for other healthy microbes, so that you have a greater chance of having colonization by those, like a real important one is fecalobacterium. It opens the door for fecalobacterium to bloom, or acrimansia. And so one of the most important things readers can do, once they're beyond the whole SIBO thing, is include lots and lots and lots of fermented food in your diet, just like your great-grandmother did. Ha ha ha.
Josh (30:39.406) That was the only way they had to store food or they're all starved to death during the winter time. There's something to be said for going back to traditions, back to nature, back to barefoot in the grass, back to prepping and canning your own foods. There's a lot of information out there that's available. Photo biomodulation, getting in the sun, get the infrared light. There is so much more that can be done. I think the further and further we're moving away, the sicker people are getting. As you're probably familiar, they're...
they're increasing now lab-grown meat. In the States, the FDA just approved lab-grown meat. Well, that comes from Gila cells. Do you know that? It's, oh, well, fun fact. So the first species of immortal or immortalized cells right came from Henrietta Lacks. It's the Gila cells that was cervical cancer back in like the early 50s. They took these cells, put them in a Petri dish, and they're like, let's see how long they grow for. They're still growing today. And so what they do in this meat,
Dr William Davis (31:16.578) I did not know that.
Josh (31:36.342) Right now, typically in the meat industry, and this will gross you right out, I actually just made a video or editing it now about this, but they take carcasses, cattle or chickens or whatever kind of edible meat that we have in North America, and they inspect them for cancer lesions and tumors and all that stuff. They pull them out, cut them out, cut the mold off usually before they put it into processing. What they're doing now is they're using those cancerous and precancerous cells and culturing them in a dish
to create this lab-grown meat. It's the greatest proliferation of cell tissue you can possibly have is cancer cells. And so that's what meat is coming from. And they wanna push this through the FDA just to prove it. But not only is it gonna be basically a dead piece of tissue, it'll be protein and fat, right? There's no evidence we have right now that it's either safe or unsafe, cause it's brand new, but it's gonna be a dead piece of tissue, completely void of nutrients, right? There's no biogeochemical cycling where
Dr William Davis (32:10.467) Wow.
Josh (32:34.506) you know, tree falls off the off the fruit falls off the tree gets into the soil, it breaks down, rots, ferments, the soil absorbs those nutrients. It grows nutrient rich grass. The cow eats the grass. We eat the cow. That's your geochemical, uh, geo biochemical mix. So that cycle, it doesn't exist anymore. And as if we're not already void of nutrients with dead soil and dead, everything we're now getting meat. That's going to be completely void of any kind of nutrients. We're moving into a crazy time.
Dr William Davis (33:03.694) Very interesting perspective, Josh. I was not aware of all that.
Josh (33:06.966) Well, I'm so glad I could share that with you. So tonight when you have nightmares, don't call me complaining, cause I warned you. Crazy stuff. Well, Bill, this project you're working on here, the SIBO yogurt is fascinating, but you touched on something, endotoxemia. Can you explain a little bit more in depth for our listeners who may not be so medically savvy, exactly how that works and what we can relate that to? And I talk to my clients all the time, so you can connect gut health.
to almost any disease you can name, like you talked about, right? ALS, MS, Alzheimer's, diabetes, even ADHD. I've cured my ADHD 99% through gut health. I had Provotella, I had Candida, Albicans, I had H.Pylori, I had borderline and SIBO, I had a bunch of overgrows, all kinds of stuff. And I had food sensitivities I didn't know, dairy and gluten and eggs and pumpkin seeds. I mean, they're transient with leaky gut, but once I took care of my gut and I fixed it,
everything went away. I sleep, I focus, I can sit, I can think. Right? It's amazing. So the gut connects to everything. But talk to me about endotoxemia. You mentioned it comes from these bacteria, these byproducts, all this. Can you explain that a little bit more?
Dr William Davis (34:07.782) Great, great. Yep.
Dr William Davis (34:20.834) Yeah, so it was called gut leak for many years until it was finally validated and since corroborated many times by a European group in 2007. And they showed in that early study that endotoxemia is a major cause for insulin resistance. Insulin resistance being the fundamental driving force behind so many health conditions like type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, stroke, breast cancer, visceral abdominal obesity, on and on and on.
Uh, so we've lost hundreds, as you know, of healthy species like fecal bacterium and acrimancy and various lactobacillus species. Well, they were suppressing the unhealthy colonic species, the fecal microbes like E. coli and salmonella and proteus and pseudomonas. So the, those healthy microbes no longer suppress the fecal microbes. The fecal microbes proliferate and then incredibly.
ascend into the 24 feet of small intestine. And the small intestine is just not well equipped to handle fecal microbes. It's got a thin single layer mucus barrier, unlike the colon that has a two layer mucus barrier. The colon is perfectly happy with fecal microbes, right? But the small intestine is not, because the small intestine is where nutrient absorption occurs, and so it's much more permeable. But if you have 24 feet of small intestine colonized by fecal microbes,
as I mentioned, they live and die very quickly, an hour, two hours, three hours, and they release some of their components. There's several of them, but the one that most plentiful is called endotoxin from their cell walls. And so it's those fecal microbes that have those endotoxins. We call them Gram-negative enterics, but they release their endotoxin, and the endotoxin penetrates into the bloodstream. It first enters the portal venous system. That's the vein system.
the venous system that drains the gastrointestinal tract and it goes to the liver. So your poor liver takes a beating when you have endotoxemia. And this is a major contributor to fatty liver, as well as other forms of hepatitis. And then it gets filtered through the liver and it gets into the main bloodstream. And there's about a two to 400% increase in this level of endotoxin. We sometimes call it lipopolysaccharide or LPS endotoxin. When somebody has sepsis,
Dr William Davis (36:50.774) Let's say you had a bladder infection that ascended up your ureters to your kidneys. That's called pylonephritis, kidney infection. And that can sometimes turn into sepsis where the microbes from your kidneys enter the bloodstream. That's sepsis. You get very sick. You can get kidney failure. You can get fluid in your lungs, acute respiratory distress syndrome. It can damage your heart. I mean, it's very bad. You go on a ventilator.
So sepsis is really bad. Sepsis is a situation where endotoxemia is increased 100-fold. So endotoxemia from SIBO is where endotoxemia is increased 2-400%. 2-4-fold. Not 100-fold. Not like sepsis. So you could think of endotoxemia as almost like a mild case of sepsis. Because when endotoxin enters the bloodstream, whether it's sepsis or this kind of endotoxin, we're talking about
It activates cytokine mediators. So people know what that is now because of COVID. You might remember the cytokine storm people talked about with COVID. That's why people got really sick sometimes and had things like blood clots also. And so this endotoxemia, this two to four fold increase in endotoxin activates the inflammatory cytokine system and you get inflammation. That could be inflammation in your skin, like rosacea or psoriasis, could be inflammation in your brain.
Josh (37:58.741) Mm-hmm.
Dr William Davis (38:18.414) like Parkinson's or Lou Gehrig's disease or Alzheimer's dementia. Could be inflammation in your coronary arteries that causes heart attack. Could be inflammation in just about, as you pointed out, just about any organ in the entire body. And so many conditions, Josh, are proving to be, have some kind of connection to the microbiome, largely via endotoxemia.
Josh (38:41.898) So are there any indicating factors? I mean, there's obviously genetic variables and how people express in the genes and their alleles and suballeles and all these things and how people express certain things, inflammation, what nutrients they do or don't have, all of that. But is there any clear indicating factors that someone can trace their disease process of whatever it is, gut, brain, skin, lungs, wherever, back to their gut? Is there any clear indicating factors, blood work?
tests you can do that will say, hey, your rosacea is actually coming from endotoxemia.
Dr William Davis (39:13.862) So that air device to measure hydrogen gas is one way. You could also have that test done in a lab or clinic. I think the air device is superior, by the way. When they do that test in a lab or clinic, they have you breathe into a tube, a glass tube. They cap it real fast. Well, it's hydrogen gas. It's the smallest molecule in the world. So it escapes very easily. The air device, you breathe into it directly, you put your mouth on it, and it measures it. So I think this is superior to what they do in a lab or clinic. That's one way.
Another way would be look for what I call telltale signs of SIBO and thereby endotoxemia. As you point out, Josh, very importantly, food intolerances, all these people who say, I can't eat FODMAPs or I can't eat nightshades or I can't eat fruit that has fructose in it or I can't eat nuts or whatever. All those, those are almost all forms of SIBO. So that's a telltale sign. If you have fat malabsorption, that is fat droplets in the toilet or floating poops,
because oil is lighter than water. That's a sign because when you have fecal microbes in the duodenum way up high, just after the stomach, it blocks the action of pancreatic enzymes in bile. And so you get fat malabsorption, you get fat droplets in the toilet. Then there are conditions that are so highly associated with SIBO that if you have these conditions, you've got SIBO. Fibromyalgia, virtually barren weed, that you have SIBO and you got it really bad. Restless leg syndrome.
fatty liver, obesity, type 2 diabetes. Now those conditions, those metabolic diseases, about 50% of people will have SIBO. But you know, we're talking about, if we regard the treatment as SIBO yogurt, that is just replacing necessary keystone microbes, there's no harm in doing it. We don't have to talk about, oh, you could have liver failure or an opportunistic infection or no.
Josh (41:10.659) Sure.
Dr William Davis (41:12.058) There is die-off though, by the way, with the yogurt. So as you know, if you take an antibiotic, you get sick from killing off the microbes. They release all their products. There's a surge in endotoxemia. Well, the yogurt does the same thing. There's a surge in endotoxemia. So you can eat the yogurt, oh, bloating, and oh, I don't feel good, I'm having nightmares, and a panic attack. So what we do is we just cut back on the dose, rather than a half cup per day, maybe a quarter cup.
or two tablespoons per day. By the way, it's tasty, it's just yogurt, a kind of yogurt. Or you can do something like take activated charcoal or other binders, and that works too. We don't do that chronically because it binds nutrients, but if you have, let's say a panic attack when you're eating the yogurt, take some of the activated charcoal, like a thousand milligrams in a capsule, and within 15 minutes, you're free of the anxiety attack.
Josh (42:05.11) That's interesting stuff. You say it's only yogurt, it's only room temperature yogurt guys, don't worry about it. But it sounds very effective. Now obviously, when I'm prepping someone up, for example, where I get a GI map back and they have a bunch of overgrowth and all these opportunistic overgrows and all these what's classified as autoimmune inflammatory overgrows, where you see Klebsiella, we see Collincella, we see all kinds of stuff that's overgrown there. Citrobacter is a gnarly one. And so a lot of these people, look at them symptomatically, right? I follow a little bit of the
Dr William Davis (42:10.566) I'm going to go ahead and close the video.
Josh (42:35.034) In the holistic field, I pull a lot of tools from functional medicine, Chinese medicine, all kinds of areas. And so look at the tongue, you know, if it's dark in color, it's lack of blood flow. If we see dark deep blue veins underneath the tongue, it can indicate a glutathione deficiency. If we see bags under the eyes, you know, water retention, it's probably their liver is not flushing very well. So just symptomatically, visually on top of if there's the adequate or their stool fat comes up high, right, we can see that the liver is probably not doing its job.
And so what I'll do first before I do any kind of work on the bacteria is actually put them through a flushing phase to help clean up the liver. We take all that junk, shove it through. Some people feel terrible. Some people feel great. And then we address their bacterial concerns if we don't have to do some kind of repair phase first. But in these cases, is it pretty safe, would you say, to use? Because we're using heavy bacterial killers that are all plant-based, right? Oils and all kinds of stuff.
Is it pretty safe for most people to just jump in and try the yogurt and give it a go? Do you need to do any kind of prep, any kind of testing? What does that look like?
Dr William Davis (43:39.738) So as I mentioned, what we're really doing is replacing microbes your mom should have given you at birth. So, you know, mom doesn't give you bad things, right? Mom gave you all kinds of good things. So that's all we're really doing. But almost everybody, like the Rorteri, almost everybody in North America has lost that species. Because these microbes, these keystone microbes, are very susceptible to common antibiotics. And so we've wiped them out.
Josh (43:46.851) Mm.
Dr William Davis (44:08.142) So all we're really doing, so I called it SIBO yogurt only because that was the rationale I used to think how could we use microbes to kill off SIBO. But then it struck me, no, what we're really doing is just restoring keystone microbes that we all should have had all along. Now I'd like to say, we know the entire consortium or guild. So maybe in a few years we say, okay, make the yogurt with these seven species and strains and they'll take up long-term residence.
We don't have that knowledge yet. There's something called a SHIME model. It's a synthetic gastrointestinal tract where it allows a microbiologist to add or subtract microbes to see what happens and whether they're collaborating via metabolites. So it's that kind of science that has to be done. It's in progress right now, but right now we don't know what that collaborative guild or consortium looks like. So for now, we do this kind of somewhat crude workaround of the...
of the SIBO yogurt. Now, by the way, Josh, there's other microbes you can replace, as you know. This gets a little cumbersome, but you can, for instance, make the bacillus coagulans, by the way, makes the tastiest yogurt by itself you have ever had. It tastes like whipped cream. I didn't expect that from a spore former, right? It's delicious, and it reduces joint pain if you have joint pains. If you give a child, by fit it back to your infantis.
Josh (45:21.762) Hmm. Amazing.
Yeah.
Dr William Davis (45:34.154) especially EVC-001 strain called Avivo. It's a commercial product called Avivo, E-V-I-V-O. And you give that to a child, the child sleeps through the night, has 50% fewer bowel movements, and thereby 50% fewer diaper changes for mom and dad. It's less likely to have asthma and obesity later on as an older child. And that child's IQ is going to be higher. In other words, big, big effects.
You could colonize, you could make yogurt out of lactobacillus gastric, the BNR 17 strain, and that shrinks your waist, about an inch, not a huge amount, but you're not exercising, you're not cutting calories, and you just eat this yogurt made with lactobacillus gastric, and your waist shrinks.
Josh (46:24.97) This is interesting. So before we officially started our interview and did our introduction, you're talking about a product you're working on. Now for legal reasons, we'll obviously skirt around with our legalese and not get too into the nitty gritty because of regulations and FTC and all of that. But this product you're working on with some of these bacteria, can you tell us a little bit about that and some of the studies and the results you're seeing?
Dr William Davis (46:49.134) So the Rorteri specifically, not a sibo yogurt, just lactobacillus Rorteri ferment for 36 hours to get 300 billion counts per half cup serving. The animal evidence, I started all this whole thing, Josh, based on the animal evidence out of MIT. They stumbled on this effect. It was a cancer group. They were giving their mice Rorteri because they wanted to see if it had anti-cancer effects. And by the way, it did. But these mice, they noticed.
had as they call it thick, luxuriant fur. So I said, what the heck is this within a week? So they studied the mice and found about a whole bunch of effects. The sebum production increased, that's the moisturizing in hair. The skin thickness increased dramatically because there was deposition of collagen. You know, ladies are berserk for collagen and this increases collagen dramatically. And it restores youthful muscle, takes an...
Josh (47:38.295) Hmm.
Dr William Davis (47:47.714) You take an old mouse, it's all atrophied, and it becomes young again in musculature. It increases bone density. It restores the immune system in an old mouse to that of a young mouse. It actually regrows the thymus gland, which sits right beneath your sternum. It's the seat of your T-cell immunity, where the thymus shrinks, starting at age 15 every year.
To age 70, it's only about 10% of its original size and T cell producing capacity. You give oxytocin or ROTARITE to a mouse and thymus gland grows back to a youthful size and T cell production. The lydic cells in the testicles that produce testosterone are restored to youthful size and testosterone production. So...
So I got that strain, it's called ATCC-6475. It's a commercial product back then. It was a product called BioGaia Gastris, G-A-S-T-R-U-S. Tablets made for babies because this company had data to show that when babies took gastris, they had less colic and maybe a little reduction in diarrhea and a little less fuzziness. Not that interesting, right?
But these tablets were made for babies. So I got the tablets, I crushed a whole, like 10 of them, because fewer tablets didn't work. I made yogurt out of it to amplify the counts. And some of this, by the way, has been formerly corroborated in humans, but not all of it. And me and my community started making this Rotary yogurt and all the things, this doesn't often happen, but all the effects seen in mice, we saw happen in humans. Marked increase in muscle, increased smoothness of the skin.
Josh (49:06.946) Sure.
Dr William Davis (49:37.014) Ladies started losing crow's feet, smile lines, strength increased, libido increased, testosterone increases. The pace of healing is accelerated and appetite is turned off. You lose your appetite. And because this works, we know from the MIT evidence elsewhere that Rhetorite takes up residence, sends a signal to your brain.
release the hormone oxytocin. So there's a boost in oxytocin which comes with an increase in empathy, generosity, liking other people more, and my favorite, accepting other people's opinions more readily even if you disagree. Isn't that cool? Yeah. At a time, Josh, of record, pre-pandemic, time of record social isolation, record suicide.
Josh (50:23.511) Really?
Dr William Davis (50:35.61) divorce, and this is true, not my speculation, the rise in narcissistic behavior, which has done this since the 1960s. And so we're seeing all this. So people say to me, you know what? My relationship is better. I like my coworkers better. I introduced myself to strangers in line for coffee at Starbucks. I feel like I need the company of other people more. I mean, it's really interesting effect. So,
There's these social-emotional effects, the youth effects, muscle, bone density, healing, immune response. So what I'm seeing, Josh, is people turn the clock back 10 or 20 or more years. You know, there's a woman who's part of my community, we have a large community, in my drdavidsinfinitehealth.com, in her circle. And there's a woman named Susan, for instance. She's 77, she's got the figure of a 30-year-old.
She's muscular and rides a mountain bike, passes the 30 year old somethings on the trail, is active, vigorous, strong. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing people who have had their youth restored and the reuterized part of it. There's other things you can do. You know, another thing we've been doing lately is because our research suggested there was a synergy between reuterized collagen peptides.
and hyaluronic acid. Now, so with Rhetorite, we're replacing a microbe that we've all lost. Collagen, nobody gets collagen or hyaluronic acid anymore because we've been told cut your fat and saturated fat. So people say, oh, I don't want to eat heart and liver and brain and tongue, ew. People say, and they're not getting collagen and hyaluronic acid. Well, when you get Rhetorite, collagen, hyaluronic acid, you have this synergy and body composition.
You lose abdominal visceral fat. The source of almost all the problems of obesity is not fat per se, it's abdominal visceral fat, fat encircling the abdominal organs. Fat in the neck, face, back side, buttocks, thighs, may be an aesthetic issue, but it's not a health issue as aside from excess weight bearing joints. All the problems associated with obesity, high blood sugar, diabetes, coronary disease, dementia, breast cancer, all that.
Dr William Davis (53:03.594) all comes from abdominal visceral fat. Well, we have a way now to reduce abdominal visceral fat and rebuild muscle that you lose as you age. So what we're seeing now is these kinds of strategies that start with a microbe and then also address some of the factors missing from modern life because of the silliness of low fat, low saturated fat, is we're seeing a shift in body composition back to youthful and strong.
Josh (53:30.518) That's amazing. You know, so I don't know if you know this, I used to be a paramedic. That was my first career. I moved into personal training. I moved into nutrition. The deeper and deeper I got, I found myself in gut because obviously there's so many connections to every disease process I found. It always came back to their gut health. That's now where I've landed specializing in some of the worst gut disease or arguably some of the worst there is. And throughout this process,
Dr William Davis (53:36.492) me.
Josh (53:56.418) We blame, of course, excess calorie consumption for weight gain. That's just simple mathematics. But on the other hand, we talk about all kinds of foods we see, junk foods, fast foods, fried foods, seed oils. We talk about food coloring, red 40, how they destroy the gut and the brain, they cause inflammation, all these issues. And so it may be or may not be more connected to their effect on the bacteria than the body directly itself, but indirectly on the bacteria, how they affect the body. Would that be an accurate statement?
Dr William Davis (54:27.606) Yeah, I don't think, aside from falling out of a tree or a car accident, you know, or coming back from Costa Rica with dengue fever, virtually everything that we're familiar with, all the conditions we're familiar with, hypertension, high triglycerides, fatulence, all that whole long, long list of health conditions, all have a microbiome component. What I'm impressed by is how many, as you've experienced, how many health conditions go away.
Josh (54:37.176) Sure.
Josh (54:57.538) Hmm.
Dr William Davis (54:57.69) when you address the microbiome. And unfortunately, you know, so you're making yourself an expert in the microbiome. Why aren't my colleagues doing this? Why can you go to a gastroenterologist and he'll say, oh, those probiotics don't work. Or ask the cardiologist or the endocrinologist, hey, can you help me address my gastrointestinal microbiome? Because I think I have a problem there. They say, oh no, there's nothing wrong with you. Or they deny it or they blow it off.
Josh (55:13.07) Mm-hmm.
Dr William Davis (55:26.778) or make fun of you. It's just like nutrition, isn't it? The conventional doctors should be expert first in nutrition and then in microbiome and then worry about your other stuff. But they're not because there's no money in it. There's no pot of gold in it. And it's not being taught in medical school nor in training. And so you have purported experts who are not experts. That's why you and I are so busy.
Josh (55:34.584) Yes.
Dr William Davis (55:55.822) because we're filling the gap of ignorance. And one of my fears is that most conventional physicians don't give a crap and are not going to be educated. It's going to take probably at least two generations, Josh, before you can go to John Q. Primary care or the gastroenterologist and have him talk intelligently about microbiome.
Josh (55:57.624) Yeah.
Josh (56:16.55) That's pretty accurate. You know, working in IBD, right, we specialize in this disease process, which means we're in touch with their clients, they're working actively with a GI specialist. And so they're seeing their GI, they're getting these results in these programs. It's really basic stuff for the most part. I mean, of course we deal with food and nutrition, all that. We address the rebalancing the microbiome. I've had people with 20, 25 and noted on just a simple qPCR DNA stool
Josh (56:45.058) major, major things. It's never even been addressed. And so what I have them do is we go in and we do the protocol. I had one lady she was in 16 years, she saw eight different doctors three specialists went to the Mayo Clinic, they said take the drugs, there's nothing we can do. Constant on symptoms, every biologic, every drug, everything, every anti inflammatory she could find. She wasn't getting any better. I shit you not bill three days, symptom free. So I've never three days, three days and she's
Dr William Davis (57:09.934) No, kidding. That's great.
Josh (57:14.29) screaming this from the rooftop now and she's getting old bullshit doesn't work. I've got another lady, same thing, 15, 16 years, and we're on week seven now, symptom free. Bow movements are fully normal, she feels incredible. Well, I had them take their GI maps and show the difference back to their doctor and they go, now those things don't work. I'm like, so the rationale is that the drugs you've been using for 16 years finally just started working. It's incredible. And it almost seems like a willful, blissful ignorance. I don't get it.
Dr William Davis (57:24.39) Great.
Dr William Davis (57:44.514) Yeah, so I'm very grateful that we have people like you, Josh, who are making it your job to understand the gastrointestinal microbiome because your experience is a lot like mine, where it's not just being more regular. No, it is a transformation in health and people who have been abandoned or have failed the medical system. Because the medical system does not make sense. If you intervene with a biologic,
Josh (57:59.339) Yeah.
Dr William Davis (58:12.002) in some complex inflammatory pathway by just targeting one, like tumor necrosis factor alpha, and it has side effects like getting tuberculosis or liver failure or death. And it has a modest impact on reducing some of the symptoms. You have not addressed the disease. And so that's why it's so gratifying to hear your kinds of stories, you're addressing the cause. And that's how you get a disease, not by intervening in some obscure pathway.
Josh (58:18.38) Mm-hmm.
Josh (58:42.37) That's what I tell my clients, you know, autoimmunity isn't fall out of the sky and drop on your head from nowhere. Something has to trigger the immune system. You have a trigger, you have an inflammatory response and an imbalanced inflammatory response. That's kind of the nutshell version. It doesn't come out of nowhere. It'd be equivalent of going to the hospital with a thorn in your hand. It's been there for weeks. It's swollen, infected. They go, well, here's some ointment for the pain. Well, what is my thorn? You know, what is causing the problem? Something had to trigger it. Thank you.
Dr William Davis (59:07.42) Good analogy.
Josh (59:10.606) It's going to be dysbiosis, it's going to be Lyme disease, it's going to be Epstein bar, it's going to be mold, it's going to be heavy metals, it's going to be food, stress, alcohol, medication, antibiotics. Something is causing it. And I think the day we stop accepting disease for just being there for absolutely arbitrary reasons is the day we can finally start to find some cures.
Dr William Davis (59:34.794) said Josh. Agree 100%.
Josh (59:34.954) I love it. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Well, Bill, I know I've had you, we've actually blocked out our entire hour here. I don't want to take up too much more of your day. I could talk to you for hours. You are a fascinating man to speak to. But before we do, I'd love to open one more question for you, Bill, if I can. It's my favorite question to ask any guest. Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to talk about, discuss, or mention to the audience before we wrap things up?
Dr William Davis (01:00:03.95) Well, you know, the yogurt, by the way, you don't have to ferment dairy, it doesn't have to be dairy. Dairy is just a very easy vehicle. You could use hummus, you can use salsa, you can use fruit purees. If you'll get worried about the sugar, well, fermentation consumes the sugar. So for instance, one of the things we do is we make a Saccharomyces boulardii sparkling juice. We take Saccharomyces boulardii, there's a...
brand in the US, I'm not sure what it's called in Canada, but in the US it's called Flora Store. So a few dollars, empty a capsule into let's say a quarter or so of juice. It just can't have any preservatives. No potassium sorbate, no sodium benzoate, because that kills microbes. So just plain juice, the pulpier the better. Empty the capsule, cap it very lightly, because you're going to see at about 24 hours it starts bubbling like...
Yeah, and if it's kept too tight, it literally explodes. So let it go for about 48 or a little bit more hours. What I do is I taste it, taste at the start, it's very sweet, 18 grams sugar per cup. After about 48 to maybe 60 hours, it's almost not sweet at all, and sugar is cut at least 50%. And so we drink small quantities, it's a really good way, for instance, if you have taken course in antibiotics.
Josh (01:00:58.774) blow up that.
Dr William Davis (01:01:27.694) Sipping this juice like a quarter to half cup a couple times a day Is very effective in preserving the integrity of your microbiome on antibiotics It's delicious. So All these fermentation projects are a heck of a lot of fun. They're easy. They're almost no cost Because when you buy a microbe, let's say you want to do a rhodorai yogurt you buy the microbe
as the bio-guy gastris or now a new product called osfortis, O-S-F-O-R-T-I-S, that's a higher potency capsule. You make the yogurt and then you make the next batch of yogurt from a little of the prior batch. You don't have to buy the probiotic again. Or let's say you have a commercial probiotic. They're expensive, right? Well, you can make yogurt from the probiotic and then make more yogurt from a little bit of the prior batch.
Josh (01:02:09.085) Limitless supply.
Dr William Davis (01:02:21.058) At some point, it's probably worth re-inoculating because it may be a shift in general and relative populations. But this is a huge cost-saving maneuver and because what you're doing is you're jacking up the counts. When you buy an expensive probiotic, it's not uncommon to have one or two billion of each species, sometimes not even that. Where you're gonna get hundreds of billions. So we're amplifying the number of microbes and the biological effects. So all you need to do this is...
some knowledge of the microbes. So in my Super Gut Book, I tell you things like this. If you want a smaller waist, ferment lactobacillus gasoram. If you want to like people more and have smoother skin, let's ferment lactobacillus rhodorite. If you want a healthier child, let's ferment bifidobacterium fantis. You can choose the microbe and that list is growing rapidly. If you want to be relieved from depression, choose this microbe. So all you need to do that is a little knowledge. I list it all in the Super Gut Book.
And a device that keeps your fermentation projects at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, human body temperature. There are occasional exceptions, like Bacillus coagulans, likes 115 to 122 degrees. So the ideal device would be something you can alter the temperature and time with. So the best devices I know of are the stick sous vide devices, stick slow meat cookers. We're not cooking meat, of course, we can use that device.
Josh (01:03:42.421) Mm.
Josh (01:03:46.185) Of course.
Dr William Davis (01:03:47.858) You can use Basin Suvide, of course. You can use a yogurt maker, you can use an instant pot, you can even use a dehydrator. But you want, ideally, a device you can alter the temperature with. So my favorite is a stick suvide. You need a little plastic basin. When you go on Amazon, you buy the stick suvide. It has that thing where it says, people who buy this also buy this, and you'll see the plastic basin. And then I start with organic half and half.
with no additives once again, can have no gel and gum, no xanthan gum, nothing added, just plain dairy stuff, or whatever else you're gonna ferment. If you do coconut milk, there's a couple extra steps you have to take because it likes to separate the fat and solids. So we add a little guar gum, which is a pre-bicofibro, but it also keeps it from separating. We also hit it hard with the mixer before adding the micro. It's all detailed in the Supergut book. My point is, you're being given a tool and strategies.
for amplification of specific microbes that have huge effects, especially when you restore those keystone microbes. And like your people, Josh, every day I see what happens to people who are doing this. They're getting younger, stronger, being free to food intolerances, IBS, and a long list of other problems.
Josh (01:05:06.158) That's amazing. Well, I might just have to put Ben Lynch's dirty jeans on the back burner and pick up your super gut first. Don't tell Ben, but I might just do that. Well, Bill, thanks so much for being here. I mean, it's been an absolute pleasure to meet you, to speak with you, to learn from you, and hope we get to have you back sometime soon in the future.
Dr William Davis (01:05:28.65) Happy to Josh always happy to and anything I do to support you. Let me know because You know, we don't have a place anymore in major media Because the pharmaceutical industry spends too much money on drug ads in the US It's disgusting. It's disgusting. And so there's no more reporting No more expose on problems in health care and health care as you know is filled with problems That no one wants to report on it because it will alienate the advertisers. So what you're doing is so important
Josh (01:05:38.09) Mm.
Josh (01:05:43.586) Oh, it's horrible.
Dr William Davis (01:05:56.578) So anything I can do to support you, let me know.
Josh (01:05:59.042) That's amazing. Thank you very much. Well.
Dr William Davis (01:06:01.626) Thank you, Josh.