How to Heal Digestive Issues Naturally (Leaky Gut, SIBO, IBS, Celiac & more) with Dr. Garrett Smith

Hey everyone, welcome back! I'm Wardy, and I'm joined today by Dr. Garrett Smith. Hi, Dr. Smith.

Hello! We're so glad that you're back again, Dr. Smith. I am so excited to bring Dr. Smith on today for a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Doesn't mean I feel good about it; it's because I've had problems with it. We're going to be talking about digestive issues. I've spoken with Dr. Smith in the past about hormones and skin conditions, and so digestive issues just had to be next to get his expertise. And in fact, this is one of the reasons that I first began working with Dr. Smith and looking into what he does, because a little bit over a year ago, I started having just out of the blue, months and months of digestive issues that I was like, "Why? I've been doing everything right. Why am I struggling with this stuff?" And now, though, after working with Dr. Smith for a little over a year now, things are way calmed down. And I figured it was time to bring some of these answers to all of you. I don't want to take over by sharing too much of my story here today, so just know that I can point you to my story elsewhere if you'd like to hear it. But I really want to focus on Dr. Smith today because so many people are suffering with digestive issues. They're no fun, they make life miserable. There's IBS and IBD and Crohn's and Celiac, and so many things, constipation, diarrhea, that can really make life miserable. So hopefully, we'll get some answers here from Dr. Smith today. A really quick introduction for him is that he's a naturopathic medical doctor in Arizona. He's worked in the medical field for over 15 years. He currently practices medicine virtually and sees patients through his group and private consults, and also works with his online community, the Love Your Liver Network, which is a special community that I really love. And he is known on social media as the Nutrition Detective, and he has a really great approach to helping people. He looks at an individual's vitamin and mineral metabolism, and he does it through simple blood tests and hair tests, and also talking to you, if you were his patient, a lot about what you are experiencing and going through. And this is, is so refreshing because I can't think of another doctor that's so thorough and careful to just take into consideration who you are and what you're experiencing. So I know everybody listening today, you are going to get a lot out of this. So now I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Smith and let him introduce himself a little bit with things I probably forgot to say.

Thank you. Thank you. So you said the basics of it. As a naturopathic physician, when I got out of school, I did what a lot of doctors do, which is you start grabbing onto different theories. People have been through the Candida phase and the toxic metal phase of these other phases of where everybody thinks that all human disease is connected to one cause, and if we just got rid of this one cause, everybody would be better. And anybody who's tried that knows that it doesn't work that way. Maybe one person, you know, did it and it fixed them, and they told you to go do it, and you did it, and it didn't work, or it worked for you, and you told everybody else to go do it, and everybody else is saying it didn't work. So what I was doing as I was going through those things, and I started finding the patterns that worked and the things that made sense, and I just held onto these things. And I did always think there was one unifying cause to medical problems, and I do believe that we've come very close to that, if not found it, in what I call toxic bile theory, which is the idea that chronic disease is just about everywhere in the body is caused by an excess amount of toxic bile in the wrong places, or bile being excessively toxic itself. So that's the background of how I got here. I tend to think that if what people were doing in medicine, whether it's conventional medicine, mainstream conventional, or mainstream alternative medicine, was actually working, there wouldn't be so many sick people. And I think that a lot of the things that people are doing, as you know, Wardy, from my work, the things they're doing are exactly wrong for health. Even the things that are championed everywhere on the internet, like Vitamin D supplements and Vitamin A as being good for people, we do the opposite things, and we often get the exact opposite results of what everybody's getting, which is we actually get results with people, and a lot of other people are left grasping for straws, or at best, they get temporary benefits. So I've always been very big on two specific parts of the naturopathic oath. One of which is "First, do no harm," where I'm not here to make people worse. So if I do simple things, diet, very basic supplements, especially of essential nutrients, not things that are not essential, and we are trying to get rid of basic toxins out of people that shouldn't cause problems. And then the other one is "Doctor as teacher," which is what I'm doing here. It's the idea of like teaching a man to fish. I am here to teach people what to do for themselves so they can learn their body and they can see what works for them and what doesn't. So then they can go off into the future and have tools to recognize things for themselves that are good and bad based on both what I taught them and what their body tells them back. So that's kind of a practice philosophy background for me. But yeah, I've been in virtual medicine since about six months before the virus hit. I moved out of my office. Julie went and worked at her place, and I went and worked at my place. We realized that 99% of our people were not from Tucson. They were from around the country. I believe we've had now clients in 29 different countries, so kind of worldwide now. Yeah, so we just decided we didn't need an office anymore. And now we've expanded into making some of our own supplements, which people really like, with no additives and no fillers and all that stuff. And we got the network now, and it's going really well. So just trying to spread the word and help people, whether they ever interact with me or not. I'm just trying to educate and help people to see what I call the truth in nutrition.

Thank you for sharing that. I think a lot of people listening are going to resonate with the philosophies that guide your practice, and I'm so glad you brought up toxic bile theory because I know we're going to talk about it a lot today.

Oh, it's gonna be good.

All right. Well, let's get into it then. So the question of the day, Dr. Smith, why do we have digestive problems, food intolerances, issues?

Well, it's just one thing now. A lot of people can often look back in their health history and see whether it was something maybe they took as a pharmaceutical medication, maybe it was an extreme diet they did, maybe it was a supplement that they took, maybe it was even a probiotic that they took because they read it was really good for their gut, and they tried it, and it actually ruined their gut. There's lots of things that people may have done. There's usually something around the time that digestive problems arise. Now, one of the biggest jokes I've seen often is like when gastroenterologists, the MDs of the digestive system, is when people go to them, they have a digestive problem, and they ask the doctor, they say, "I heard eating this food might make my problem worse. Should I eat certain things? Should I not eat certain things?" And the gastroenterologist will say, "What you eat has nothing to do with your digestive problems." And this is where a lot of people, I think, lose complete faith in gastroenterologists because they already know that when they eat certain foods, their problem is worse, and when they eat certain foods, their problem is less. They already know this, and the doctor just to their face told them that what they've experienced is not true. I once got to treat a gastroenterologist's wife for stomach problems, which I thought was pretty humorous. There's usually something that triggers the startup. Some people have had digestive problems since birth, don't get me wrong, but a lot of people, as they go through life, they did something that they could look back and say, "This is when it really started." It may have gotten worse along the way, but this is when it started.

Where does all this come from? So in toxic bile theory, the big idea, and this should make sense to people, and so your liver does three major things in your body, and don't let anybody in the health world tell you different. Your liver is a filter. There are people out there in the health world who will say your liver is not a filter. It is absolutely a filter. What does a filter do? It takes something out of something else. So like a filter of your blood, which is what the liver does, takes stuff out of your blood, and then the rest of the blood goes through. Just like a water filter, it takes the toxins out of the water and it lets the water go through. Your liver is a filter by definition. It takes something out of something else. So then your liver is also a storage depot for toxins. The word you want to look up if you want to look it up on PubMed or the other research study sites, the word you look up is "accumulate." People look up the word "store" and they don't find any results, and they go, "Well, the liver obviously doesn't store stuff." And then you go and you look up "accumulate," and you'll find that the liver accumulates lead and mercury and cadmium and arsenic and vitamin A, which is something I don't believe is actually a vitamin. It accumulates copper, it accumulates manganese, and it accumulates lots of things that I believe are often not needed by the body and are actually toxic to the liver, which we can go into the research and look later. So the liver absolutely is a storage depot for toxins. Why does it do this? Your liver takes the toxins out of the blood because if they accumulate too much in the blood too fast, it will affect your heart, it will affect your brain, it could kill you. Your liver is taking the stuff out of the blood that you can't get rid of it fast enough into the bile, which we'll talk about, that's how the liver gets rid of garbage. So you can't get rid of it fast enough into the bile, so the liver has to hold onto it. Just like if you had too much work to get done and you have papers accumulating on your desk because you have to do that work, but you can't like not do that work, but you also have to keep it. You have to have it ready to go so you can do it, so you can go through it as you can. So what your liver is doing, just like you're doing, is you're accumulating a stack of papers of work you have to do, or emails, or whatever, you're accumulating it, and your goal is to hopefully, as time goes on, you're able to cut down on that pile of work and get it done correctly so that it doesn't hurt your job or hurt your body. Because if you just threw the papers everywhere and you didn't have them in order, you'd cause other problems. If you lost papers, you don't do a job that you cause problems. So you have to keep it all. That's what the liver does is it stores it for later processing. And the third thing that the liver does is it's a sewage processing plant, or a waste processing plant. Now, the way you want to think of this is people tend to think they say, "Oh, the liver detoxes," and they act like once a toxin goes to the liver, it just like, poof, disappears. I think people actually think this, like the liver detoxes things and then they just disappear. No, the liver changes the form of things. It can change the form of things into a less toxic substance, and it can change some things into water-soluble things so that they can go into the blood and go to the kidneys, and the kidneys can process them out. But the liver also does something called biotransformation, which is where it takes something that was less toxic to begin with, and as it goes through the detox process, it actually makes it into something more toxic. The biggest example of this that people are usually a little bit familiar with is with alcohol. Ethanol is not what hurts people from alcohol poisoning; it's acetaldehyde. So as you drink alcohol and it gets processed into acetaldehyde, if you don't process that acetaldehyde fast enough, alcohol poisoning is acetaldehyde killing you or causing you to feel real bad. But the other thing that acetaldehyde causes is hangovers the next day. The alcohol, it's not good for you, don't get me wrong, but the acetaldehyde is actually even worse. Methanol poisoning, what alcohol they call it, methanol actually doesn't poison you; it's the formaldehyde that it turns into. I'm not going to go into Vitamin A toxicity on this right now, but vitamin A, retinol, or carotenoids actually turn into retinoic acids through the same process, which could you believe that vitamin A goes through the same alcohol dehydrogenase and enzyme and aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme? Vitamin A goes through the same detox pathways that ethanol, alcohol, and wood alcohol go through. It's weird that these are detox pathways. We know those are toxins. But anyway, vitamin A, it's probably not what you think it is, but it turns into retinoic acid, and retinoic acid is things like this, the same forms of Accutane and Retin-A and these other forms of very huge side effect inducing forms of vitamin A called retinoic acids are created through this biotransformation process. So anyway, so there's the filter, there's the storage depot, and then there's the sewage processing plant. So the sewage processing plant is important now because what does the liver do with these things? It's either stored them, and it's taking them out of storage, or it's processed them into something else. What does it do with them? How does it get rid of it? Because if it doesn't get rid of it, if the liver is just going to get bigger and bigger, right? So it has to get rid of them. It puts them into the bile. So this by definition makes the bile the absolute most toxic fluid in the human body. Absolutely the most toxic fluid by definition. It's got heavy metals in it. It's got fat-soluble toxins in it. If you want to get rid of glyphosate, it's going to be in there. You want to get rid of the forever chemicals you've heard about, or the BPA, it's going to be in there. You want to get rid of copper toxicity, vitamin A toxicity, manganese, copper, lead, arsenic, all these things that the liver stores, it's going to be in the bile. So where does this bile then go? Where do we want it to go? We want it to go into the bile ducts, into the intestines, and out through the poop. That's how you want it to go. That is your biggest and best detox pathway. And only once the toxins have left your body have they truly been detoxed. Because there's a thing called enterohepatic circulation, which is where the bile goes into your intestine, and we actually reabsorb the bile through the portal venous circulation, the portal vein circulation. So your body reabsorbs the bile from the intestines. 95% of that bile is reabsorbed. It goes right back to the liver. What does the liver do with it? It filters it out, and then you go through the whole dance again. You're doing this loop, it's called the enterohepatic circulation. It's a loop, and then you poop out 5% a day. In theory, that would be optimal, that the bile stays in this pathway. Now, we just said bile is the most toxic fluid in the entire body. So what is the bile touching on its way out? It's touching all of your intestinal tract, except the stomach, right? It goes into your small intestine and goes all the way down and coats all of it. Being that bile is the most toxic fluid in your entire body, it probably damages just about everything it touches. I've got research showing that bile can damage the very liver cells that make bile. So if the cells that make the stuff can get damaged, what this means is it can damage the bile ducts, which there's little ones inside the liver that carry it, there's big ones outside the liver that carry it. It can eat holes in that. I have shown research multiple times on my livestream that the bile itself creates leaky gut. So for all of you out there who have read about leaky gut as the root of all human health issues, I want you to imagine this: what causes leaky gut? And I can show you in the research that bile eating away at your intestines causes leaky gut in the first place. All those leaky gut experts you've heard on the internet are not talking about toxic bile at all. So we now know what's eating holes in your gut and causing leaky gut. If the bile goes backwards up into your stomach, this is what's causing your GERD or your reflux. You can say it's acid reflux, but it's really bile reflux. And a lot of people know when, let's say, you get to the point where you're vomiting, what color are you often vomiting? It's yellow. What color is bile? It's yellow. I've shown research before where bile is directly absorbed through the stomach. So if bile goes back up to your stomach, your stomach will absorb it right into the bloodstream. So what happens with all this leaky bile? It gets into the bloodstream. That's where it goes. You're not supposed to have any bile in your bloodstream, zero. You're not supposed to have any. So if toxic bile, the most toxic fluid in your body, leaks into your bloodstream, do you think it's going to cause problems everywhere? Anywhere and everywhere. Your brain, your bones, your heart, your digestive system, whether it's touching it on the inside, or whether it's coming back around in the bloodstream to the outside, everywhere in your body that has blood, which is everywhere, can be damaged by toxic bile.

Let's just come back to Vitamin A for one more second and show you another example of how it can cause leaky gut. Retinoic acid, all-trans retinoic acid, which some of you ladies out there or guys may be putting on your face in the form of a cream known as Retin-A or tretinoin, that is all-trans retinoic acid. That is also used as something called a chemical peel, or it's called a yellow peel because vitamin A is yellow. A chemical peel is used to basically dissolve some of the skin layers on the top layer of your face. So now, what am I telling you? The body puts into bile. I'm going to tell you that by detox, vitamin A into the body, and some of it turns into retinoic acid, which is used as a chemical peel for your face. What do you think the retinoic acid is doing to the lining of your gut? If it dissolves the skin on your face, it's going to dissolve the skin in your gut too. So now we have the toxic bile and the component of the toxic bile of vitamin A as being a chemical peel and then causing the leaks where the bile then gets into your blood, can then cause problems everywhere else.

So how does the bile cause gut problems specifically? There was a study where the researchers took people who were constipated, they had IBS with constipation, or they had controls who had normal pooping, and they had IBS with diarrhea. And what they did was, in the poop, they measured how much bile was in the poop. I rounded these numbers, and I'm not going to go into the units, but the general gist of it was like this: the constipated people, the people who were having trouble pooping often enough, had about 200 units of bile in their poop. The control people, the people with the normal amount of pooping, had about 500 units of bile in their poop. And the diarrhea people had about 1200 units of bile in their poop. Oh my. So what we're seeing is that not enough bile in the poop, people don't poop well. It's like the bile touching the intestines is the trigger for the intestines to move the poop along. That's the signal to get it to move along. So if you got too much bile in there, the intestines do not like it. They're like, "Ow, this hurts." So they get rid of it quickly. The body is intelligent, and the body will say, "I would rather waste all of this nutrition and get this poop out of here as quickly as possible rather than keep this chemical peel burning me to death stuff inside." So then we start going, "Why is there not enough bile in the intestines?" And I want you to think about this: where could it have gone? Well, it leaked into the bloodstream. Either the liver is not making the bile, or the bile is getting stuck in the liver and slowly accumulating, which would be fatty liver, or it's just going right back into the blood. Intrahepatic cholestasis is the fancy term where it just goes directly from the liver into the blood. So you have this bile-driven pooping. Your pooping is driven by the amount of bile in the intestines. So if you get a lot of toxic bile because some people make more bile than others, I talked about this in the program over and under types. I think over types, that's the term I use for them, make a lot more bile. So if you dump a lot of bile into your intestines, you're going to have diarrhea. It's so toxic. This is where, like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's and IBS with diarrhea, you see the tendency for loose bowels and diarrhea, and even bleeding of the intestines, because you're eating away at the lining of the intestines. Constipation is the opposite. The bile is not going to the intestines. It's either not coming out of the liver, or it's going straight back into the bloodstream. And this is why oftentimes you see constipation with like hypothyroid. And I've shown how the different bile acid recipes, the composition of the bile going back in the blood, can be connected to hyperthyroid and hypothyroid states and other things. Like, and then there's one other thing that could cause diarrhea. The intestines have their own blood flow, right? I talked about the enterohepatic circulation, the portal venous system, that's the veins. So think of the intestines as this loop, right? That picture we all think of with the large intestine and all the intestines in there. So those blood vessels go right together into one big vein, and that goes right up into the liver. That's the portal vein, or the portal venous system. So I want you to remember your body, when it absorbs stuff out of the guts, for better or worse, good things, bad things, they go right to the liver. I joke that the liver is like the bouncer. It's going to let certain things through, and it's going to stop certain things. But even vitamins, minerals, protein, everything has to go through the liver. So there's that. But there's also the blood vessels that go to feed the intestines, right? Your intestines need oxygen and nutrients also. So you have blood vessels that go to your intestines and then back from your intestines. So if you're already leaking toxic bile into your bloodstream, and it comes back around in that same blood to your intestines, it's actually been shown that that bile can get into the inside of your intestines and then cause diarrhea that way. So it's a cluster. So we have the toxic bile itself, or just the bile. So people like to talk about dysbiosis or a messed-up gut biome, the bacteria in your gut. You may not know that you can make normal, good bile. But if it goes into your intestines, and you have a dysbiosis, you have a problem with your gut bacteria, an imbalance, that gut bacteria can turn your primary bile acids, the normal ones, into what are called secondary bile acids, which are the really, really toxic ones that can cause cholestasis. So let me back up for a second. Toxic bile leakage into your blood, the other terms for it: cholestasis, stagnant bile, bile going the wrong direction, or another name for it is liver injury. Secondary bile acids can cause liver injury, or toxic leaky bile. Toxic bile can cause leaks itself. So you have this, like, it's a bad loop, and we want to get people out of it.

So if you've been out there and you've ever taken a probiotic and you had drastic results from it quickly, why can't people explain what that did? They usually can't tell you. They're just like, "Oh, you just needed that bacteria." But they can't explain what the bacteria did. I'm going to tell you that I can explain what it did. It changed the recipe of your bile. Like that bacteria can process bile and make it more or less toxic for your situation. They could make less secondary bile acids. That's the big thing. You could fill in a spot where you kick out the stuff that was making a lot of secondary bile acids, and you put stuff in there that doesn't make as many secondary bile acids. Basically, the two ways that you can improve your health in toxic bile theory is you can make your bile less toxic by changing its recipe. Number two is you could keep the bile where it's supposed to go from the liver to the bile ducts to the intestines to out in your poop, and then that loop back. So you keep it in what I call the bile pathway, or you make the bile less toxic. That's how we do it. But we can take leaky gut theory, we can take gut biome theories, and we can link them all immediately, and all the gut problems that are related to them, to toxic bile theory. And it's the only explanation that I've ever heard of that can do all this and back it up with research. That was a big overview. So that's what I got.

That was amazing. I'm shocked. I think we can end now, don't you? That was very informative. Thank you for talking about the functions of the liver, which were filter, storage, and detox, right? Yes, waste processing. Just, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because detox is such a big word. Detoxes itself. I just want people to understand that until something has left your body, it has not been detoxed. Remember, I just told you that 95% of the bile, which is the most toxic stuff in your body, is getting recirculated. And then if it has to go to your kidneys because it leaked into your blood, it's now going to damage your kidneys. Then if it hits the kidneys, between the kidneys and the liver, they can't handle it. Then it comes out of your skin, and then you have toxic bile and all the stuff it has in it coming out your skin, and it irritates your skin on the way out. The problem with the skin is the skin doesn't move. Once it's out, once you push stuff out through your skin, it just sits there. So you've got this toxic stuff just sitting on your skin, like you applied a toxic lotion right there or something. So this is why a lot of things will say, "You got to wash your skin very often." What are they saying to wash off? They don't realize it, but they're saying you got to wash the toxic bile off your skin. The kidneys and the skin take the secondary brunt of it if the liver can't handle it. So sorry, I had to interject there.

No, I'm glad you did. I know in all of our conversations, it does come back to toxic bile theory, and I was expecting this because the reason we're so sick is because the toxins and the bile itself are going where they should not, or they're at unprecedented levels, like that stack of papers you just can't get through, it's piling up. So it totally makes sense, and I was hoping you would make that connection for us with the digestive system. One of the things you said in there, which I'm gonna have to go back and listen again, but I had a big aha moment for my own issues, so I'm gonna have to revisit that and take notes. That's fantastic.

Did you mention Crohn's or colitis? But of all the different colitis, okay, of all the different digestive issues, with Celiac, Crohn's, you mentioned IBS with constipation, IBS with diarrhea, you addressed bleeding. Is there anything else that you could address, hemorrhoids, was anything in particular that you wanted to address specifically in terms of their relationship to toxic bile theory and or what can be done specifically to address them?

I will try to remember all these little ones to hit. Yeah, okay. Celiac disease. Let me hit a couple things on here. So there are people out there, and I'm not against this theory, there are people out there that say Celiac disease is not as big of a problem as it is; it's actually glyphosate toxicity on the wheat. So could that be true? Sure. Some people say, "I eat organic wheat and I'm just fine, but if I eat non-organic wheat, I have Celiac-like symptoms." So then they say, "Well, it's the glyphosate." What if I were to tell you that Stephanie Seneff has written several papers showing that glyphosate inhibits or slows down several of the very specific cytochrome P450 detox enzymes that are needed to turn the most toxic retinoic acids, the most toxic forms of vitamin A, into less toxic forms of vitamin A? So we know now that glyphosate inhibits vitamin A detox. And so could it be the glyphosate? Yes. Is it glyphosate effect itself? Maybe. Maybe it's the vitamin A effect that the glyphosate has. Then we get into another thing on Celiac, which is researchers were trying to create a mouse cell model of Celiac disease. They were unable to get the model to work until they added retinoic acid to it, until they added vitamin A to it. So it seems that vitamin A toxicity is a critical factor in Celiac. And just one other thing that I found in the research was that people with Celiac versus controls, they measured how much bile was dumped by Celiacs when they ate gluten and by the control people who didn't have Celiac when they ate gluten. They found that the Celiacs dumped way more bile when they ate gluten than the controls did. So again, we come back to toxic bile theory. And then what's probably in the Celiacs' bile that they just dumped? Vitamin A, which was necessary to create Celiac. So Celiac, it's the villi, right? Celiac is all about the villi are getting eaten away. Gosh, what did we talk about that eats away at skin? Retinoic acid, vitamin A. Researchers couldn't create Celiac without retinoic acid. Do you see? So that's Celiac.

If people think that this is some like quick road to getting fixed, this is not a quick road to getting fixed. This is, we call it a marathon, not a sprint. We are undoing decades worth of toxicity and probably nutrient deficiencies to fix these things. These are not easy because think about it: as we're trying to fix these leaky gut, these leaky bile pathways, imagine if they needed to fix a road by your house. They need to fix the road, but the cars never stop driving on it. You're still eating, you're still dumping bile, you're still going through life constantly dumping new bile on these areas your body's trying to fix. So without a break, it's tough for the body to catch up. Now, some people then say fasting is the answer, but with fasting, you're not putting in the materials you need to fix it. See, it's a catch-22. So it's just going to take a long time. And these toxins in the liver, I tell people, think of them as like just radioactive waste. It's super toxic. It's toxic to everything it touches. It was toxic on the way in, it was stored, and now it's going to be toxic on the way out. So we have to get it out carefully because if you take it out too fast, I don't know, maybe you heard about a train accident in Ohio where they spilled a bunch of toxic crap, and now a bunch of people feel really bad. If you push detox too hard, as people do often, you can start spilling toxic bile into places you don't want because you're just going too fast and you're unleashing this toxic bile flood. So anyway, that's Celiac in a nutshell. But we have people who are recovering their ability to eat wheat. Even a very, very severe Celiac person is slowly getting less and less sensitive so that she's not laid up for three days if she's ever exposed to some gluten dust. So yeah, she's super happy with it.

Regarding constipation, we talked about that. I'll save the constipation one for when we get to the fiber part because that's a really important thing for constipated people to know about fiber and their frequency of pooping. Diarrhea, we talked about diarrhea is just way too much toxic bile in the intestines, whether it was dumped there by the liver or whether it came in through the blood vessels that feed the intestines. So colitis and Crohn's would tend to fit into those where there's actually bleeding in there. It's eating away so much of the intestines, you're getting to the blood vessels themselves. So what do they usually do? Well, I haven't looked it up yet, but I'm guessing most of the Crohn's and Colitis medications simply stop the bile release. So all of a sudden, you don't have the bile going down in your intestines, and you're not sure bleeding anymore.

Hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids are basically varicose veins of your butt, to put it simply. Why do varicose veins happen? This is the mechanical theory of hemorrhoids. So anything below your heart, especially the legs, but that would include your rear end, has to work harder against gravity to get the blood back up to the heart. This is why spider veins and varicose veins happen in your legs. It's because in the blood vessels of your legs. So if you think of blood vessels going up like this, there are valves like this. So the blood is going to flow this way. The blood flows up, and as the heart pumps and pushes pressure. So remember, the blood is going down the legs, and it's coming back up. So we're talking about the up way. So the blood comes through here, it opens the valve, it pushes it open, and then as the blood starts falling, as the heart relaxes and the blood starts falling, this valve snaps shut, and then there's another valve up here. So then the heart beats again, it squeezes, it pushes the blood down, it comes back up, and it opens up this valve. Blood moves forward. One, think of it's like a ladder, right? So it's moving up one, and this stops. It moves up another one, that one stops, and it moves up in the left. These valves, if there is too much back pressure on them, they blow out after a while. Valves break, right? If you get little valves that break, those are spider veins, and you see stagnant blood in them, like the dark purplish, bluish blood, stagnant, right? The valves are not there to hold it and then move it to the next one and move it to the next one. So there's no ladders, there's no rungs of the ladder. So varicose veins is the same thing happening in a bigger vein. Hemorrhoids are basically varicose veins of the butt. But it's definitely related to the liver. So if you can't get the blood to move up through the liver, let's say the liver is, is what the term is, congested. Let's say the liver has a big backlog of papers that it can't get through fast enough. You ever been so stressed with work and you got so much work to do that it actually your productivity slows down because you're so bogged down, and all you can think about is how much work you have to do, and now you're not even putting the effort into getting the work done because your brain is so stressed? We've all been there. We got so much to do that it actually slows us down instead of speeding us up. So let's say your liver is congested, and it can't move. Remember that big portal venous system I was talking about? That's related to your entire digestive system. Your digestive system ends at your bum. So all that blood is going back up to the liver. So if the liver is congested, and so the venous blood that's going to the liver is like a traffic jam, it's slow. So all of a sudden, that traffic jam backs up along all those blood vessels, puts more pressure on the valves. If you blow out a valve down by your rear end, that's a hemorrhoid. You can wipe your butt too hard and damage blood vessels down there. It's a very tender area. But if you're actually having significant amounts of blood, of red blood, that's generally a hemorrhoid. If you're having dark, like blackish blood in your stools, that's generally from higher up in the digestive system. That's blood that's been around a while. But yeah, that's hemorrhoids. Again, it comes back to the liver. A toxic bile going through your blood will damage the very blood vessels that carry it. If it can damage the bile ducts that are made to carry it, it can definitely damage your blood vessels.

Were there any other conditions we wanted to cover?

SIBO. Oh, SIBO. That's a good one. Okay, so small intestinal bowel overgrowth. Okay. Bacterial. Bacterial, sorry. Yeah, yeah. You were just talking about the bowels. So, so yes, yes. Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Okay. Now, I talk a lot about toxic bile as being a bad thing, but it does actually have functions in the system. It has been shown that when there is not enough bile in the small intestine, which would get there from the liver to the bile ducts in the small intestine, when there is not enough bile in the small intestine, you get overgrowths of bad bacteria. So again, we come back to SIBO and we go, "Well, why isn't the bile going down into the intestines?" And why are these small intestinal SIBO people getting all sorts of systemic symptoms? Are you putting it together yet? The bile's not going down their guts, they're getting overgrowth of bacteria down in their guts because the bile is not there in the right pathway. But they're having all sorts of symptoms everywhere else. Where is the bile? It's not in the intestines. It's in the bloodstream, and it's causing all of their symptoms everywhere else. So then if we can get the bile to go back to where it's supposed to go, that is going to fix the problem itself. Now, this is one of the few times where taking bile acids might be an option for somebody because if they take them orally, ox bile or other things, this might be an option to help get some bile into there and stay in their intestines. But the goal to fix the root cause would be for the liver to make the bile and for it to go the right direction down into their gut. The antibiotics, that's most people who know you can do SIBO and antibiotics for years and years. Antibiotics actually tend to cause liver injury. You can look it up. So then liver injury would then cause the bile to go the wrong direction, which means it's not going to go into the small intestine, which means you're going to cause more problems. And this is where people have seen their SIBO, they go and they get the antibiotics, they feel a little better for a while, and then they get worse. And they try the antibiotics again, and they feel a little better for a while, maybe a little better, and then it gets worse, and it just keeps coming back because, because the problem isn't the bacteria per se. It's the problem is they are missing what is supposed to keep the bad bacteria down, which is the bile going where it's supposed to go. So you can see it always comes. And this is in the research. Go look up small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and bile. They can create SIBO in dogs by simply making the bile go the wrong way. That's where I found this.

Wow, that is so incredible. It makes so much sense. So you talked about IBS. Was there anything you want to say about IBD, which I'm not exactly sure I even understand the difference between IBS and IBD, or if it's basically the same?

It's just chronic diarrhea. In my opinion, as an example of toxic bile theory in action. So somebody in the network brought up a probiotic called LactoSpore, and they said it helped them a whole lot. So I just went, I looked into it, and I found some studies. And one of the big studies was done with severe depression and diarrhea. These folks in the study had both of these issues, and the LactoSpore significantly reduced the diarrhea symptoms and improved the depression. So I had several people who were in the network, they were willing to try it because I didn't have the issue. I would have tried it, but I didn't have the issue. So they tried it. Both of them had really quick improvements to their diarrhea. And then when we're talking about toxic bile theory and how one of the big things that will cause problems in the intestines itself is what I call the recipe of the bile, the composition of the bile. That's what they're calling in the research, they'll call it the bile acid composition. I just call it the recipe. So people understand, like, you can make similar things. How many things can you make out of flour and eggs and water and salt? You can make all sorts of different types of doughs and all that, just by the different ratios of things that you do. And no, I'm not an expert baker, but you understand what I mean. So one of the things that this LactoSpore was very high in, the bacteria is very high in what's called a bile salt hydrolase. So your body will attach things, your liver will attach things to the bile acids. Often, it's so taurine, glycine, sulfates. Sometimes it makes the bile acids less toxic, and sometimes it makes them more toxic. These things are attached. So bile salt hydrolase. And this is normally thought in conventional wisdom about bile, bile salt hydrolases are a bad thing. This bacteria is very high in it, and we started having a couple people try, and also they're like, "My diarrhea just went away." So therefore, bile salt hydrolase is bad. Does conventional medicine understand anything about bile? No. Now they're trying to study it, they're trying to make stuff up now and start to say, "Well, these people with this disease have less of this certain bile acid than the other people," and they're trying to say that you can look at these profiles of diseases, and if you have more of this one or less of this one, you're more or less likely to get this disease. You're not supposed to have bile in your blood, full stop. So they're arguing over which one is better and not seeing the fact that you're not supposed to have bile in your blood. Why would we have bile in our blood? We're not supposed to have it. And actually, the more bile you have in your blood, there's a receptor called the FXR, which the more bile you have in your blood, the more it triggers this receptor, and it slows down your bile production because your body's saying, "We got too much bile in the blood here, over please, stop making so much bile because it's going the wrong way." So then what does your liver do to stop putting it into the blood? It starts storing it, this fatty liver, because it's got to make it. It has to make it. You're exposed to toxins all day long. Your body's going to make the bile if it can't push it out into your guts because you're leaking it. It just stores it. And what does bile help you absorb? Fat. So where would you store bile? You would store it in fat. What color is fatty liver? It's yellow. Bile is yellow. Vitamin A is yellow. Many, many toxic, bitter things in nature are yellow. Yellow is generally a toxic color.

What were we going over? There are so many conditions now. We started with IBD, and you said that's just chronic diarrhea. But anyway, that was really good info. Info. Oh, we were going over the bile salt hydrolase and changing the, though, so it helped diarrhea by changing the recipe of the bile. Like I said, if you've ever had help from probiotics, like you read on the internet, right? You go and you read about this probiotic, and you'll see some people say that this probiotic fixed my problems in a day, and other people will say the same probiotics, some people will be like, "Oh my gosh, this probiotic gave me irritable bowel." Like everybody's reading all you want the good things to happen.

To you, don't want the bad things to happen to you. But sometimes you're not lucky, and you pick the wrong one because everybody's just shooting blindly in the dark. I have an article on the Love Your Liver program, or articles about how to try to use your symptoms and your tendencies as an indicator as to which type of probiotic, if you want to try one, you should try, like Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium. So, yeah, we're trying to turn it into more scientific approaches than just simply, "Here, take a giant shotgun probiotic and hope for the best."

Absolutely. Yeah, which is one of the cornerstones of your approaches. Is let's not do shotguns, let's do what's right for the person. Yes. Is there anything else you want to add about probiotics? That was my next question. Should we be taking probiotics? So you just led right into it perfectly. So what else would you add?

I will say that I've had a tough time with probiotics. So I'm currently not doing any because I feel like every time I've tested it, I either get histamine issues or I get a headache. So for me, it just seems to be out currently. And it sounds like that's the case for a lot of people. But what else would you add?

First, if you've ever taken probiotics and you had a bad experience with a certain type, whether it was Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium, don't keep trying to take it. This should make sense, but there's a lot of people who are just like, "But I read on the internet that based on my symptoms, I should take this." But every time I take it, I feel terrible. This is the definition of insanity, right? If you feel bad when you take something, and you keep taking it, you're probably going to keep feeling bad. So stop. Otherwise, if you're taking a probiotic and it's not helping what you started taking it for, stop taking it. It's not doing anything. Don't go and overload your gut biome because eventually, if you keep taking that probiotic, you may shift your gut biome in a direction you don't want because you just keep pouring. I think of probiotics as seeds. If you think of them as seeds for your gut, like you're trying to grow the right garden in your gut, and if you keep throwing a certain type of seed down there, eventually those seeds are going to sprout and they're going to crowd out others. So if a probiotic is not helping what you took it for, don't keep taking it.

The internet's love of cultured and fermented foods. One thing I always noticed in my history was I never felt good on them. So personally, I was like, why am I taking it? I don't feel good on it. And then I started realizing that fermented and cultured foods have a lot of Lactobacillus in it, and that based on my research was definitely not the type of probiotic that I was supposed to take based on my patterns. I was more of a Bifidobacterium type. So there's that.

Here's another idea about probiotics. If you take the right one, you should be able to, if you are doing the right things to fix your garden. So the thing I want to make sure about the garden is right. The garden. People will say, if the right things are not growing in your garden, look at your soil. What are you doing with the soil? Is the soil toxic? Does it not have a certain nutrient? Does it sound familiar, right? If you need more water, if whatever, if you got too many weeds growing, like that would be like a dysbiosis. You got bad bacteria in there. So we look at the soil and the soil is toxicity and nutrients. So stop putting in the toxicity, start putting in the nutrients. Then, if the soil is right and you put in the seeds for a little while, they should start growing and then they reproduce and they keep reproducing because your soil keeps growing these plants over and over. If you have to keep taking the same probiotic all the time to feel better over months and years, your soil is bad. It's not keeping the seeds growing. You're having to keep replanting all the time.

If you find a probiotic that works, you got to be careful. There are probiotics out there. The spore-based probiotics often, they actually make vitamin A in your gut. So you are planting seeds in your gut that make vitamin A. And I just went over how vitamin A is toxic to your body and to your bile and all of that. And if you haven't seen enough of my stuff on vitamin A, I would go back and watch the other podcasts I did here with Wardee, or you can see the Love Your Liver livestream on YouTube. But yeah, this stuff, it's serious. And you go and you start putting vitamin A factories down in your gut, it's not going to end well. I'm sorry, the spore-based probiotics guy is completely dismissed all of my research there. It's like, we don't believe it. Okay. Okay.

So yeah, just with probiotics, just the one last thing. One last thing on probiotics that I want people to know. Probiotics are one of the only things that I'm okay with a little bit of a negative reaction at the start, a little bit. So what I mean by that is, let's say you put in a new probiotic, a new bacteria, and you get a little bit of symptoms. Sorry, you get a little bit of bloating, maybe you get a little farty, maybe you get a little burpy, whatever. Think of it as it's going in there like when you clean out a place, things actually get messier before they get cleaner because you got to take all the stuff out of a place. That part's not clean yet. Now you've made another part messy. You got to go in and clean it out, put all the stuff back, and then it's finally cleaned again. If you start a probiotic and you have some manageable symptoms at the start, the only way that you should keep taking that probiotic is if the symptoms are fading in their intensity. They should be getting less and less as you take it longer, like over two weeks. If you still have symptoms with a probiotic after two weeks, I don't know that that's for you. But if you get a little bit of symptoms at the start that are fading as you take it longer, and then you start noticing, let's say you notice at the start you notice some symptoms that you don't like, but you also feel better in certain ways, that would probably be a sign that you could keep taking it. And then if you see the negative symptoms going down and the positive symptoms going up, then you can keep taking it and it's probably a good thing. And then again, the goal would be to eventually get off of it. So to not need it, to not have to take it on a daily basis, because probiotics should settle into your gut, establish themselves, and then you don't have to keep reseeding the garden. So that's a little bit of my garden analogy and probiotics.

I think it's a fantastic analogy. Okay, let's go into the fiber discussion, if you would, which I'm really hoping you will set a lot of misinformation straight here, because fiber is so personal and it's so easy to get wrong. So let's have it.

Dr. Smith: I'm mainly going to talk about soluble fiber here. Soluble fiber is stuff that generally gels when it is exposed to water. So things that are high in soluble fiber or things that you'll recognize as soluble fiber, like beans. So think about the way kind of beans gel, right? As if you had refried beans and you let them sit and they harden into a little block, right? That's kind of the gelling quality of beans. Oats, you cook oats and you let them sit and they turn into that little oat brick, right? Oats have a lot of soluble fiber in them. Apple pectin, what do they use to thicken and gel jams and jellies? They use apple pectin a lot. So apple pectin will gel. Psyllium husk, if you've ever had psyllium husk and you mix it with water, it will turn into like psyllium jello after a while. So these things are soluble fiber. Insoluble fiber is too long a topic to go into.

What does soluble fiber do in the body? Joy in the gut, which is where it's going. Soluble fiber does two main things. It triggers a bile release or a bile dump. So it triggers your bile dumping. Next thing is the gel. The more a soluble fiber gels, the better it is at soaking up bile. So it soaks up us. Remember how I told you 95% of that bile in a normal diet, which is not a high fiber diet, right? And a normal diet is reabsorbed and goes right back to the liver. So you poop out 5%. Imagine if you take soluble fiber and it soaks up a bunch more bile. So then you poop out more bile. So you're getting rid of more bile, but you're dumping more and you're soaking it up and you're pooping out more. So this is a key thing to detox, which is actually getting rid of the stuff out of your body instead of reabsorbing it, having to go right back to the liver.

So now we have to go back to that constipation model of bile in the guts. Remember how I said people who are constipated are not putting enough bile into their guts? It's going the wrong way, like back up into their bloodstream or wherever it's going to back up into their stomach. It's leaking from their guts into their bloodstream. It's leaking out the bile ducts. There's intrahepatic holes. You know, there's a thing called vanishing bile duct syndrome. Lots of medications can cause this. Look up vanishing bile duct syndrome. This means the bile ducts from the cells, the liver cells that make it, have disappeared. Where do you think that bile has to go? The cells are still going to make it. It's just going to go straight into your bloodstream. So that's like an example of how the bile never gets down to the gut. It just goes right back into the bloodstream. But the body's mechanisms are probably such that let's say you eat soluble fiber and your intestines are sending the signal to your liver saying, "We just ate soluble fiber." So your liver goes, "Oh, cool. Let's make some bile and dump it." And it does. But it goes right back into your bloodstream, and then you don't poop and you feel terrible every time you eat soluble fiber. Whereas other people, where the bile is going the right way, they eat soluble fiber. I have people who come on the program and they're like, "Dr. Smith, I'm so happy you recommended me to eat beans. I've never felt so good eating so many beans in my life. I never thought I would because everybody said beans are bad." Now, beans don't work for everybody. This is absolutely true. But when people get the right amount of soluble fiber and the right type of soluble fiber, because different ones work better for different people, they can feel a lot better. But some people can hardly handle any because of where the bile is going.

So with constipation, there was a small study done where this one doctor had, I think it was like 12 people, small study. They were chronically constipated and nothing seemed to help. Nothing that they had done in the past, high fiber diets and all this other stuff, laxatives, all that stuff. What this doctor did was he put them on a very, very, very low fiber diet, or even a no fiber diet if they could do it. I forget the amount of time, but at the end of it, they were pooping more often, they had better poops, and they were pooping more often, which was not much more, but it was more often than they were before. And so he then goes, and there's lots of people out there who say fiber is the menace to society and fiber is a big problem, we should never eat any fiber. And other people are out there saying we should all eat more fiber. Can you guess which type each one is, right? One of them, the bile is going the wrong way, and fiber constipates the crap out of them, to use a pun, right? But the other one, their bile is going the right way, and soluble fiber gets them to dump more bile, the soluble fiber soaks it up, and then they get rid of it, and then they become less toxic and they feel better. So this is how soluble fiber can make some people feel better and some people feel worse.

Now, if you're watching this and going, "Oh my gosh, I'm just going to go out and eat a ton of soluble fiber," be careful. So remember, there can be dual effects from the same thing. Like I said, soluble fiber causes a dumping of bile, soluble fiber also soaks up bile. So imagine this. Let's say at some point of eating a certain amount of soluble fiber, let's say five grams, I'm just going to make stuff up here, right? Five grams of soluble fiber. Let's say for a certain person, they dump a good amount of bile, and that amount of soluble fiber is enough to soak up all that extra bile and still have them poop well. So they're still pooping well, they're soaking up the bile, things are good. But let's say that same person doubles their soluble fiber to 10 grams. Let's say that 10 grams of fiber, they don't dump enough bile to fully saturate the food soluble fiber thing. So they don't dump enough bile, so it soaks up enough that then there's not enough bile touching the intestines because remember, it has to touch the intestines to trigger pooping. So all of a sudden, five grams of soluble fiber was great for them, whereas 10 grams of soluble fiber, it soaks up too much bile, more than they dumped, and then it makes them not poop. Or let's say that same 10 grams of soluble fiber, let's say that triggers an even bigger dumping of bile, so more than the soluble fiber can soak up, and they start leaking that back into the system. So now they're leaking the toxic bile into their system because they triggered a bigger dump than the soluble fiber could handle. These are the different situations that we get into with soluble fiber. This is the mystery of fiber that people can't figure out is they haven't put together the soluble fiber and bile thing.

Then, let's say you're constipated and your poop is not moving well. So soluble fiber is a prebiotic, which means it feeds gut bacteria. Generally, in nature, when things are static, stagnant, and not moving, things start growing that you don't really want there, right? Like if you're at a creek and there's a stagnant pool of water, there it starts growing algae and all sorts of nasty stuff that you don't want starts accumulating toxins, right? Because they're not flowing through it. So think of your gut the same way. If you're taking too much soluble fiber and you start slowing down your guts, it's getting stagnant. Soluble fiber is a prebiotic, it's a food for bacteria. Now, just because I said prebiotic and a food for bacteria doesn't mean it's necessarily only food for good bacteria. So if you start accumulating soluble fiber in your guts and let's say the wrong bacteria start really taking a liking to it because it's staying there a long time, not only could you feed a dysbiosis in that way, but you could free up the toxic bile that was bound up. The bacteria chew up the soluble fiber and then they release the bile. And so what you were trying to put down there didn't end up even doing its job.

One of the biggest things that I see, especially with women. This is a generalization, this is in the research. Men make more bile than women. This is just the nature of the beast. So if it makes sense that men make more bile than women, men have a tendency, not always, this is a very important definition of a word, what tendency means. Men have a tendency more towards diarrhea, and women have a tendency more towards constipation. And we also have tendencies more towards the different dysbioses in the gut. So tendencies doesn't mean a rule. My goodness, I say tendency and they're like, "He said it always is that way." And I'm like, "No, that's not what tendency means." All so we just have a lot of women, especially, they start hearing me talk about soluble fiber and they start hammering the soluble fiber. And which of those two groups is least likely to be able to hammer the soluble fiber and have a good outcome? It's women. Yeah. So ladies, be very careful with going bonkers on the soluble fiber. I mean, a couple grams, two to five grams, too much might really slow things down for you.

If you feel great on it, like you can just think back. Most people can just think back to times when you were eating more fiber in your diet, whether it was oats, whether it was beans, whether it was more apples or whatever, or taking psyllium. I had a woman, it was very simple. She's like, "I went to this camp, it was like a summer camp, it was a stay-over camp, and she's like, and I was there and I started thinking, well, I'll get more fiber. They got this high fiber bread at breakfast, like whole grain high fiber bread." And she started having more of it. And I said, "Did you poop better or worse?" And she said, "I pooped less." And I said, "Okay, that was too much. You need to go backwards." Because I think she was coming to me saying she was constipated, and this was early on in the toxic bile theory days. And so I was kind of like going along with it and figuring it out along the way. I said, "Do the opposite of that, right? If more fiber made you more constipated, we're going to go back." And then she started pooping better. Pooping is key to detox. It is really the master key. We want to poop well.

If you want to know what perfect pooping is. Now, people take this idea and they twist it into thinking they have to force themselves to do this, and I'm not saying that. I'm saying in a perfect world, I believe just like babies, babies are supposed to poop once for every feeding they do. We are supposed to poop once for every full meal that we eat. So if you're like intermittent fasting or basically skipping breakfast and lunch, which is what it is for most people, if you're eating once a day, you should poop once a day. If you were eating three meals a day, optimally in a perfect world, you should poop three times a day because each one of those meals moving through you should not come in contact with the other ones. You should have one thing, you know, like those things at the bank, right? Air tubes, right? You should have one thing moving through at a time, and they should not be backing up into each other. That's perfect pooping. Now, I'm not saying that you should run out and take laxatives to crap three times a day, that's not the point. But if you're not pooping once a day at a minimum, we want to get you there. And we might advise using some of the things that we talk about in the Love Your Liver program to poop more often because we want to get that crap out of you. So but yeah, in modern medicine, I think they say now, what is it? As long as you poop every once every two days or something, you're not constipated. It's crazy. I'm like, yeah, you're fine if you just poop once every two days. It's not a problem because they have no way of treating it other than giving you toxic laxatives like polyethylene glycol and stuff like that. So anyway, that's the soluble fiber conundrum is making sure that you're not doing too much, but also if you feel better with doing more, then you can do more. I generally cap it at 30 grams a day, though. 30 grams of soluble fiber a day is the cap. I don't see too much benefit past that.

This reminds me, when I first started learning from you, which was beginning of 2022, I joined Love Your Liver and I just started working through the materials. And I had been listening to other people who were like, "Slowly increase your fiber to help your constipation, you'll get there." And then I went through your materials on fiber or constipation or something. You explained a lot of what you just did and you're like, "You might try having less." And I had less and immediately was like, "Oh, what a relief." And that was one of the few things, I mean, there were like two or three things I could point to like, "I learned from Dr. Smith, they made an impact on me right away." So I'm sold. I'm on the right track here because really, nobody's saying this. It's really funny.

I have some like philosophical mantras that I haven't practiced. And one of which is the definition of insanity, right? If you keep doing the same thing over and over and you keep getting the same, you're going to keep getting the same result. If you expect a different result, it's the definition of insanity, right? I said that totally wrong. If you keep doing something over and over and you keep getting the same result, and you expect something different out of it, that is the definition of insanity, right? We don't do that. So if you've been doing more and more fiber and you're pooping less and less, yeah, the same thing for myself. I just think of it as like, why am I doing this again and again? And is it doing the same thing every time? And then especially if you increase it and the problem gets worse, yeah, then we should know that this is insane. We should stop.

Yeah. And then there's simple things like, "Doc, if it hurts when I do this, well, don't do that." "I feel bad when I take this supplement, don't take that supplement." Even if it's something we think you need. We've had lots of these conversations, you and I, about zinc, right? Yeah, where we might think you need zinc, but you don't feel good on it, so we're not doing it yet. I hear from lots of people who work with practitioners, and the practitioner will say, "The person tries the supplement, the person reacts negatively to the supplement." They suggest the doctor then says, "You have to keep taking this, or I can't help you." Person tries taking it, they continue to feel bad, sometimes they start feeling worse and worse. Eventually, the person goes to the practitioner and they say, "I can't take this, this is makes me feel horrible." And the practitioner says, "I can't help you." Then the practitioner fires the person because they can't take the one magical supplement that the practitioner thinks is going to fix their problem. It's just ludicrous.

And I've had lots of people on the program like with zinc where they're really toxic at the beginning and they can't take zinc in their early days. But the funny thing, the pattern that happens over and over again is that as they get less toxic, eventually they're able to start zinc and they're able to take their doses up a little bit. Does that mean that everybody needs the same dose? No, not by any means. But we see this pattern and we just don't. It's like with kids trying to teach kids things. If the kid, like at a certain age, you think, well, I want to introduce this to him, and you try introducing it to him, and the kid's like, "Nah, I don't like this." You could keep forcing it on them and making them hate it, or you could just pull back, maybe wait, and then later bring it up again, and maybe they'll be like, "Oh, this looks awesome. Let me go do this," and they love it after that. So you could either you could have made them hate it by forcing it on them when they weren't ready, or you just wait and try introducing it later, and maybe they'll absolutely love it and do it on their own accord.

I'm trying to think of the other one that we do. Oh, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? So if people are doing something that works, let's say if we're trying to raise a level on a test, and we see that, let's say after the first six months, their level comes from where they were, it comes halfway up to where we want them. Do we up their dose? You could say, six months, they're not there yet, should we double their dose? Why? It's working. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Let's see how far this takes us. As in another corollary, that is the minimal effective dose. I do use supplements, not very many, but we want to use the minimal amount that gives us the maximum benefit. Because this is a key thing about the liver. For those of you who have been paying attention, everything you put in your body, for better or worse, has to be processed by your liver.

Another correlary to this is water. Every bit of water that you put in is being run through your kidneys. You are not an infinite machine. There's only so much water that your kidneys can filter. And every bit of water that you put into your kidneys is going to have some impurities in it, and that's going to take some wear and tear on your kidneys. If you're drinking water like all day long, I just had a couple from Hong Kong who I'm working with. They told me they watched my hydration video in the network and they realize that their afternoon fatigue, their crushing afternoon fatigue, was caused by them simply drinking too many fluids all day. And they reduce their fluid intake, which, oh my gosh, who does that today, right? Everybody's under hydrated, everybody's dehydrated. No, you're not dehydrated. Your grandparents never had a water bottle to carry around with them unless they were going on like the Appalachian hike or whatever. Nobody carried around water bottles in the past. They drank water when they needed it. So we are, for the most part, probably a lot of people are over drinking. So if we fix that, all of a sudden, you'll get to see my soup analogy in the network, but you fix your blood soup and everything works right again. So there's lots of things that we've been taught that are wrong. And I'm just here, and a lot of people really like what I do. And I like you're kind of saying, because when I explain these things, a lot of them make more sense than the stories that people have been told before that when they tried to apply that story to their health, it didn't work and it didn't make sense. Like the idea of allergies. One person's allergic to certain foods and they cause them all these problems. Why isn't that food toxic to all humans? Or is it just that that person has a leaky gut caused by the toxic bile that certain things are going through and causing the immune system to cause a problem? But you know how we said about Celiac and vitamin A? There's quite a bit of research showing that vitamin A exposure in youth, like with infants and young children, the more vitamin A they're exposed to, whether it's cod liver oil, whether it's fruits and vegetables, whether it's multivitamins, the more vitamin they're exposed to, the more allergic they become. So this is why I like those rotation diets where people will take out all sorts of foods for a month or two, and then the new foods they've been eating, all of a sudden they go and retest and now they're allergic to all the new foods they've been eating because it was a leaky gut problem in the first place. And all you did was replace one group of foods with another. The root cause of the allergies was never addressed.

So yeah. Wow. Wow, that's fantastic. So that just leads us right into the next question, which you kind of alluded to with your Celiac discussion, but is it possible to heal from digestive diseases and conditions? Is this a lifelong sentence when you struggle or suffer?

No, it's not. I tend to find that the gut issues seem to be some of the first to heal for most people if we are able to figure out what. Because every person is an experiment of one. We are always trying to figure out what is the most important thing. Or like an example with probiotics, we might think something fits for a person, but we also say, "If you try and you don't feel good, then stop." The value of that cannot be overstated. "I don't feel good when I take this, stop." Please stop. Don't. It's just like with soluble fiber. "I poop less when I take too much." Stop. Stop doing it. Celiac is a long-term thing. If you get all the way into autoimmunity, actually, I think my livestream number 88 on YouTube is about autoimmunity being a toxicity state. And I lay out a whole research trail showing that autoimmunity is a toxicity state. Because why else would your immune system get dumb? It doesn't just get dumb. There's a reason. And who says what it's trying to do? Who says the body's attacking itself? Maybe the body's trying to get toxins out of cells. I don't know. But we see autoimmunity get better. But autoimmunity is a deep toxicity. So for those of you out there who have autoimmunity, you have a deep toxicity that we have to get rid of. But gut stuff, the good news about the gut is the, the gut turns over its cells very quickly. So if we can start getting the right programming into the new cells, then the old cells are getting replaced very quickly, and then we can get the new ones in there.

So like diarrhea issues, one of the biggest things we use for diarrhea issues is charcoal. Charcoal soaks up bile like crazy. People are out there saying, "What about cholestyramine?" Cholestyramine is a pharmaceutical medication. It is a bile acid binder, and they use it in diarrhea. But if you go and look at the side effects list of cholestyramine, it's huge. I have a client I was working with who says she's totally basically dependent on it, like she can't quit it. I even tried to get her to start replacing a little bit of it with charcoal, and she's like, "I can replace a little bit of it with charcoal, but I can't do very much of it." That she was like totally dependent on. She's like, "If I take it, I don't feel good, but if I don't take it, I feel worse." So cholestyramine is a bile acid binder, and it can help with diarrhea, but it's problematic. It's very problematic. But charcoal can really, really help.

I actually tried something I hadn't used in a while with somebody last week, which was to get her to take a very little bit of charcoal. What she did was she put some charcoal in a glass with water, stirred it up, and then let it settle. And what that made was what I call gray water, which is basically, for all intents and purposes, it's colloidal charcoal. It's charcoal, the tiniest pieces of charcoal are suspended in the water. And all she did was she drank the gray water. She left the charcoal sludge at the bottom. That's just charcoal, but she just left the stuff that settled at the bottom, and she just drank the gray water. And we've actually, she made a lot of progress in that one. We've been trying lots and lots of things to fix her stuff. She's been a very challenging case, not because she's not trying, she's absolutely working her butt off. But if you've ever been in a situation where you've almost died, like chemically, biochemically, she had encephalitis, she had brain inflammation, and she almost died from it. Those are the hardest things because the body gets way out of whack and doesn't know how to balance things out after that. So those are really tough cases. But taking normal doses of charcoal was way too much for her. So we tried the gray water approach, and it seems to be working really well. But yeah, so diarrhea really responds well to charcoal. And constipation, we have to work on getting the bile to go the right direction, helping the thyroid function, making sure that they're not doing too much soluble fiber, and then just let me give the bowels a little help as we need to of things that help in our entire paradigm. They're helping. They help the poop and they help the paradigm.

Absolutely. It's so encouraging. My own experience has been, I just thought for the rest of my life I was going to have to avoid certain foods because they just caused me all this grief. Then I started working with you, and it was just a matter of a few months where, oh, I can eat some more things again. The journey is long, like you said, but there's enough little wins that you can say, "Okay, I'm finally on the right track. I was going the wrong direction. Now I'm going the right direction." And the right direction just gives you confidence and hope. Hope is a big deal. Little wins are a big deal when you're sick. Thank you for the work you're doing, Dr. Smith.

Dr. Smith: Is there anything you would add to our conversation about digestive problems, healing them naturally?

The only thing that I didn't talk about, and one of the things that you've mentioned it a couple times that I do differently. So there's kind of two ways that people can work with my work. There's the Love Your Liver program, which is a do-it-yourself program. Now, everybody who works with me directly, people who work with me directly doing the testing, the hair testing, the blood testing, and the consultation and the follow-ups, which are included, gets access to the Love Your Liver program because that's all the diet stuff that I can't go over in a consult. People have no idea how intensive in terms of the amount of material that the Love Your Liver program is. So people could do the Love Your Liver program by itself as a do-it-yourself. They could just do the do-it-yourself thing. There's 1900 people plus in the Love Your Liver program in the Nutrition Detective Network. So there's lots of people. It's like what I think a social media network should be in terms of a large group of people working together towards a certain goal. So you can ask questions out there, and chances are that somebody out there has had the same problem or tried the same approach, and maybe it worked, and maybe it didn't. Maybe they can tell you what tweaks they made to it or what worked for them, and you can decide whether you want to use that information or not. So that's like the do-it-yourself thing. And then there's working with me or Nathan Weems. He's a physician's assistant. He's somebody I've trained personally who is helping me with the client load. But so one of the things we do differently. So we do the testing, we do the consult, but then the big thing that we do differently is we do what we call the office hours, which is the support, the ongoing support that is given basically two sessions a week. I come on Zoom for sometimes we've been on there, it's typically an hour, but it might even be up to two hours depending upon how many people show up. It's basically two Q&A sessions for the people who are working with me or Nathan. So one of the things I didn't like about typical approaches, like with alternative doctors or regular doctors or whatever, let's say we just did testing and consultation and I give you a treatment plan and you go off and you try taking zinc and you're like, "I feel terrible." But I need to take zinc, but I take zinc, I feel terrible. What do I do? I don't know. And then the thing I didn't like was then all of a sudden now, let's say the practitioner told you how much to take, and you tried that dose, and it didn't work for you, maybe it was too much, maybe it wasn't enough. So then you have to go and pay the practitioner more money for them to fix what they didn't do right the first time. Starts to feel very nickel and diming. And I know that I wouldn't want to go pay. I'd sit there at home being frugal and being a problem solver myself. I'm going to stay at home and just fix it myself. And it might take you a month to fix it, you might never fix it, you might never figure it out. So what we do is we include the follow-up packages. Yes, those Zoom meetings are small group, so they're not private, so people are talking about their health stuff in there in front of other people, but it's only the people who are working in the testing and consultation stuff with me or Nathan. But we talk about it. There are people who come in every week to give updates. People have to do that? No, you could come in no times, you could come in one time, you could come in twice a week if you wanted to, but that's the big, and that's all included in the package. I think that that's actually the magic. That's more of the magic than just here, like we do the testing and consultation, and on the first visit, we're saying, "I want you to go out and I think this will be right, I think this will be right, I think this will be right." And if you think me saying, "I think," shows some sort of weakness in my predictive ability, no, anybody who thinks they know what everybody should take on the first visit, it's delusional. You don't know the person at all. So we say, "I think we'll be working with about this, so go and try this out." And then they can come back to the office hours and say, "If they don't want to come back and say this worked, you don't need to come back." And say, "This worked." You can say, "Oh, this worked. Okay, I moved on to the next one. Try in the next mineral. I'm trying molybdenum now." And we just see how it's going. And then if something's not right, or if people need troubleshooting, it's a lot easier for people to come in and say, "Hey, Dr. Smith, I started doing this, or I had this come up in my life, or whatever, and now I feel this way." And I can be like, "Oh, it might be very simple. It might just be like, oh, that's this, that's probably this. Do this. See how it works." If you want to come back and tell me next week how it worked, great. If it just works, you don't need to come back. And then some people were trying it over time. So it's just the magic is in the follow-up. It's not necessarily in the, "Here, take this at the start, and I'll see you in six months." That's not where the magic happens, in my opinion. It's in the follow-up.

And maybe you can speak to that too. I haven't told you this yet, but I just recorded a video testimonial for you this morning. I'll have it to you next week, and everybody listening, it will be public on Dr. Smith's YouTube channel. So I'll include a link with this interview because probably they'll be up around the same time. But anyway, one of the things I said in it was that the very best part of working with you is the office hours because I can't think of any other doctor where you can check in regularly. And I think the biggest tweaks and the biggest gains I've had is from coming to office hours, checking in, and having you say, "Why don't you try this?" With other doctors I've seen, I mean, they care, but you might not ever get an answer to your email, and then you're waiting a year to talk to them again. And meanwhile, you're suffering, and you're like, "I feel horrible on what you've given me. It's not working." They do help. I don't mean to completely minimize because I think they're trying. But what I'm saying is your model where we can check in with you, that is the magic. It is the follow-up. I completely agree. And I think the significant gain things I've had have come from checking in with you at office hours and you saying, "Why don't you try this?" And then I'm like, "Oh my goodness." My most significant one was three weeks ago, and I'm doing so well the past three weeks because of what you told me three weeks ago. It's just like such a, it's flipped the switch from "I'm still struggling" to "Oh my goodness, I feel good. I'm feeling pretty good."

Awesome. Anyway, I used to do email support. And when I said email support, I was answering emails regularly. It wasn't like just shoot a doctor a random. I'm sure you were. First of all, it was really hard to keep up with all the emails because you can imagine, like with the office hours right now, and then I have the network. I couldn't keep up with the writing. But the other thing that I didn't like about the email was not that it was impersonal, but when we do the Zoom, like if I need a question answered, the person's right there. I can say, "How much of this are you taking? Are you doing this? Are you doing this? Are you doing this?" Whereas like in an email, I have to read the email, interpret it, then try to ask questions, but then still, it's going to be another email back and forth, which might take a whole another week of stuff. And I also, in my writing, I tend to come across very logical and straightforward, which to some people seems kind of cold. I didn't like that I came across that way. I just decided that email was not working, and this office hours thing, it's working so much better. For anybody who's listening to this, if you are a client of mine and you're not coming to office hours, you should. And you're having any issues, you should be like, "Why would you not?" It is by far the most helpful thing in the practice that I've done for people. And yeah, we've really made huge strides for some people.

The sucky thing is when people are really sick, right? Their brain's not working very well. And this is just normal. We're not saying that they're not smart. We're just saying their brain is not working like it normally should. So then expecting them to think their way out of the problem by themselves when they don't know everything that I know, I don't expect them to. So they don't know the solutions that have worked in the past. Their brain's not working as well as they should. They've often spent so much money on health that they don't have the money for the, I'm going to call it nickel and dime. I mean, it feels like follow-up visits feel like to me. The reason I did this was they feel like nickel and diming. You didn't get the solution right now. It'd be like a plumber coming to your house, right? You're like, "Fix my sink." And the plumber comes and he fixes his sink, and maybe he fixed it 90%. Right? But you still have a leak from the plumber's work. And you're like, "Can you come out and fix my leak?" And they'll be like, "That'll be another $150 to come out." And you're like, "But you didn't fix the leak, right? So why are you charging me to come out to fix what you didn't fully fix?" I'm not saying I'm going to fully fix things on the consult. That's what I know I'm not going to do because it's a marathon, not a sprint. So we have lots of tweaking to do along the way to make things work for a person. And sometimes, like when we talked about soluble fiber, sometimes people need to come there and they're like, "Dr. Smith, I'm not feeling good. I don't know what's going on." And I'm like, "So what are you eating?" And they're like, "I'm having oats for breakfast, and I'm having beans for lunch." They're having meat in there too, but I'm just talking about soluble fiber sources. They'll be like, "I'm having oats for breakfast, and I'm having a couple of apples during the day, and I'm having beans for dinner with meat." And I'm like, "Did you increase your soluble fiber recently?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, I just added the beans like two weeks ago." And I'm like, "When did you start feeling bad?" "Oh, about a week and a half ago." And you're like, "Chill out on the soluble fiber." Like, sometimes it's just me telling people, and they'll be like, "I thought it might be that." And you're like, "Yeah, it's probably that." And they fix it, and then they feel better. And it's just, it's something as simple as we as humans often have to feel something in our bodies for us to understand it. We have this thing, it's like the child touching the hot stove. You'll tell the child, "The stove is hot. The stove is hot. You'll burn your hand. Don't touch it. Don't touch it. Don't touch it." The kid just has to, "Ow!" And then they go, "Oh, stove is hot, just like you told me, right?" And sometimes with soluble fiber, in a certain way, you have to test the boundary. Sure, to find out how much you can take. So you have to hit the, like, negative effect point to know, "Oh, that's too much. The stove is hot. I should pull back." Some people just don't remember that when I tell them, and then they get to come to the office hours or ask on the network and say, "I'm doing all this and I don't feel good." And then now people on the network, as you know, they know to say, "Wait, maybe you should take less soluble fiber." And it's not that that's the problem. People are going to think that I'm saying soluble fiber is bad, and I'm like, "No, soluble fiber is one of the most important parts of the whole program. It's getting it correct for the person that is the magic."

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, the community is great for sure. Your consults, the office hours, and the community, it's just, it's a really great package. Thank you for the work you're doing, Dr. Smith.

Dr. Smith: You talked about the Love Your Liver DIY program. Yes. If you do a group or private consult with Dr. Smith or Nathan Weems, you get the Love Your Liver program included, plus all the office hours. Other places people can find you? There's YouTube Nutrition Detective. You're fairly active on Twitter, it looks like, NutraDetect on Twitter. And then of course, you can browse Dr. Smith's website, nutritiondetective.com, to read more about him, and then just check out his shop with his supplements plus all the different offerings. Is there anything else you would add?

I'm pretty sure we've covered everything.

All right. Good. This was a great deep dive into digestive issues. I know it's going to help a lot of people. And so everybody listening, I would suggest just listening again, praying, considering if any of this resonates with you at all. All you have to do is try. Just try and see if you experience any improvement, and that would be telling. I know that was the case with me. I just tried a couple things Dr. Smith recommended, one of which was less soluble fiber, and I knew I was on the right track from that. So I'll be praying for you too, because I know digestive issues are such a problem. It was one of my crux issues that led me to Dr. Smith, was just the extreme distress I was having, and I thought, "Okay, so I'm going to have to eat a limited diet for the rest of my life." Or I could try something different. I think I'll try something different. And now it's healing. So I'm so thankful. So anyway, we'll be praying for all of you listening. I don't know what your specific situations are, but I'm really glad you listened, and I'm thankful it's Dr. Smith for sharing his wisdom, expertise, and caring with us today. Thank you so much, Dr. Smith.

Dr. Smith: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on. And with this recording, you will find a link to the complete transcript. Also, I'll include links to my other interviews with Dr. Smith on balancing hormones naturally, healing skin conditions naturally, and now this one is healing digestive issues naturally. It's quite a lineup of great information. Thanks everyone for joining me and Dr. Smith. God bless you. Bye-bye.

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Thank you.