Transcription
The upper fermenting gut is a major, major problem. It goes almost unrecognized by the conventional doctors. We have to get rid of the upper fermenting gut, and yes, there's a two-pronged approach. Yes, we starve them out with a low-carb, ketogenic diet, and secondly, we kill them. And there are three fantastic tools which are available to everybody.
The first of those is there is meat fiber. Meat, and bacteria and yeast, will happily digest meat fiber. That's senu, connective tissue. So you want to eat not just pure meats; you want to eat as many cheap cuts as you possibly can.
There's nothing wrong with LDL; it's good stuff. High cholesterol and LDL do not drive heart disease. Heart disease is driven by sugar, high blood pressure, inflammation, and so on, not by cholesterol. In fact, I like to see people with a high LDL because LDL is just a carrier molecule. When you're in ketosis, you need LDL to carry fat from your fat stores to the liver where it can be converted into ketones. The cholesterol story has been hijacked by big food and big farmer. Atastin, which is the most used statin cholesterol-lowering agent, is worth $1 trillion a year, and you can get a lot of propaganda done with that sort of money. And there's barely a scrap of evidence that shows statins are effective. In fact, I can show you some studies that tell the absolute opposite of that.
Sarah, I'd love for you to talk about the connection between eating too many carbohydrates and an upper fermenting gut.
Well, that is an extremely common problem. Um, uh, the normal gut obviously starts in the mouth and ends at the anus, and the first 20 – it's about 30 foot long – and the first 25 feet should be near sterile. Now, um, that is achieved by having a very acid stomach. Now, if we overwhelm that acidity, or we overwhelm the ability of our that acid and pancreatic enzymes with too much carbohydrates, then the bacteria move in there and the fungi move in there, and they start to ferment.
Now, this probably happened normally in primitive man during the autumn, because during the autumn there would have been an abundance of fruit, nuts, seeds, high carbohydrate foods. And yes, there would have been some fermentation, and we even have an enzyme designed to deal with the products of those fermentation, which is gamma GT, which can, which mops up, um, ethile alcohol, because of course, if you have sugar and you have yeast, you produce ethile alcohol. So it's almost a normal affair, but only for a short window of time in the autumn.
Now, the problem with modern diets is that we have those foods all year round. Carbohydrates and sugars, as you know, are very addictive. And, um, so we eat them all year round because we can. But of course, primitive man, they would have run out; he'd have gone back onto his carnivore, his hunter-gatherer diet, and the fermenting gut would have rapidly cleared itself up.
But the, the upper fermenting gut is a real problem because when you get bacteria fermenting food, and when you get, uh, yeast fermenting food – I mean, by food I mean sugars and carbohydrates – you get all sorts of toxic products. First of all, you get toxic products of the fermentation itself. And we all know yeast ferments sugar to produce alcohol, but bacteria will ferment sugars and carbohydrates to produce other alcohols: propile alcohol, butile alcohols, ammoniacal compounds, hydrogen sulfide, deactate – all these nasties which then have to be dealt with by the liver.
And on top of that, um, um, if you look at life from the point of view of a bacteria or a yeast, it doesn't want anybody else in its ecological space, does it? You want that space for itself. And so it produces lots of toxins to kill all the other little wretches. And bacteria produce lots of bacterial endotoxin, and guess what? That poisons us too. Yeast produce lots of fungal micotoxins, and guess what? That poisons us too.
But then it gets worse than that, because these bacteria and these fungi, they live on the lining of the upper gut, that the lining of that top 25 foot. And when you get, uh, microbes living there, you get inflammation in the gut, and you get a leaky gut. And a major problem here is those microbes have the potential to leak from the interior, from the lumen of the gut, into the bloodstream. And then they get stuck at distal sites. They get stuck in the muscles and they drive fibromyalgia. They get stuck in the joints and they, they drive arthritis. They get stuck in the gut wall and drive inflammatory bowel disease. They get stuck in the lungs, intrinsic asthma; in the skin, urticaria; in the brain, to drive psychosis.
So the upper fermenting gut is a major, major problem. It's completely, or goes almost, unrecognized by the conventional doctors, but I'm quite sure it drives a huge amount of pathology, and of course, in the muscles, fibromyalgia. So unfermenting gut, big problem, but easily treated.
Okay, we're going to get there, but I want to come back to the symptoms you mentioned: far-reaching symptoms throughout the body. Somebody right now who is experiencing disease and symptoms, how do they know if this is at the core?
You can sometimes, not invariably, you get local symptoms. So the point is, for the, if you've got an upper fermenting gut, um, that often happens because you, you cannot acidify the upper gut. You can't acidify the stomach because it's leaky; the acid is leaking out as fast as it's being pumped in. Now, the emptying of the stomach is an acid-sensitive process. The plug hole of the stomach is the pyloric sphincter, is acid-sensitive. So if you don't achieve a certain acidity in the upper gut, or it takes a long time to get there, the stomach doesn't empty.
So very often people complain of fullness, um, uh, and then they get indigestion with that, and then they get reflux. So esophageal reflux, gird, gourd, whatever you want to call it, um, that's often symptomatic of the upper fermenting gut. Burping and belching, bloating – that's the gas that's produced by the upper fermenting gut – that's another clue. Sometimes it presents with nocturnal cough, because if you reflex at night, reflux at night spills over into the, um, uh, airways, and then you're coughing at night. So these are all local symptoms that point to the upper fermenting gut.
But as I say, then the symptoms present and they're more systemically. I'll tell you another major symptom of, and that's if you're producing a lot of toxins like ethile alcohol, you know, propile alcohol, but alcohol. If the liver can't cope with that, it'll spill over and give you a foggy brain. And so often people tell me that the first thing they know when they've cleaned up their fermenting gut is suddenly their, their mind sharpens up. Suddenly they can think clearly; they're not foggy anymore.
And there's a second reason why that's important, because a huge amount of energy goes in, um, is used up by the liver in the process of detoxification. So to give you an idea of the scale of this: at rest, the brain, although it weighs just 2% of body weight, consumes about 20% of all the energy generated in the body. The heart consumes maybe 7%. The liver can consume up to 27% of all the energy generated in the body. That is massive. And as soon as you detox, the liver doesn't have to do so much work, and therefore there's energy available for other departments of the body. So suddenly the brain can work better, you know, you've got more physical energy to run around and get stuff done. So there is a multiplicity of ways, um, by which the upper fermenting gut impacts on our physiology and, of course, the symptoms.
An interesting piece of all this is the fact we haven't talked about toxins, we haven't talked about processed foods. All we've said is this can happen by getting one of the macronutrients out of whack. Correct?
And of course, that includes ultra-processed foods, refined foods, you know, any carbohydrate which is very rapidly, you know, broken down into sugar. I'll give you an example of this. I was with a, on a holiday, riding holiday, with a friend in Sicily. She'd got a continuous glucose monitor on. Middle of Sicily, what do you give for breakfast, uh, you know, for a picnic? You know, a large piece of bread and a little bit of salami. Well, I ate the salami and gave my bit of bread to the horse. But Charlotte, she ate the bread, and it was a piece of white bread, and within a few minutes – and she's not diabetic – within a few minutes her blood sugar shot up to 11. I have to say I was blown away by that. So that white bread was very, very rapidly broken down in the upper gut, and there was a huge sugar rush which, which overwhelmed the ability of her liver to deal with that, and she spiked her blood sugar. Now, it came down very quickly, which tells me she didn't have insulin resistance and she wasn't diabetic, but it was a real eye-opener for me.
Yeah, I definitely want a caveat: we don't recommend eating sugar and processed foods, but it doesn't take going there to trigger this. If you're eating too much fruit, too many grains, even too much unfermented dairy, you're going to be getting a lot of carbohydrates, and then you're going to feed this whole system that you opened up talking about.
That's right. And another astonishing statistic, stat, statistic, is that we've got about five liters of blood in our circulation. The amount of sugar we need to maintain, you know, normal blood sugar between, say, four and six millimoles per liter, is one teaspoonful. It's tiny. It's astonishing that the body can maintain the blood sugar so tightly with when it's playing around with such tiny amounts of sugar. But what that means is you only have to have a couple of figs, or, you know, an apple, and you can double your blood sugar like that.
Okay, well, let's get practical. How many people, first of all, are in this situation? Obviously, you're estimating. And then let's talk about the first steps to working out of it.
My guess is, in the Western world, the majority of people are, um, um, because sugars and carbohydrates, they're cheap, they're addictive, they're convenient. Um, and, and that's, and in the short term, they are rocket fuel. You know, if, if somebody wants a, a pick-me-up, what do you do? They go and have a piece of toast or a sweet drink or something. But it's short-term gain and long-term pain. And that is, of course, the pattern of addiction, isn't it? You know, any addiction, it doesn't matter if it's sugar, caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, it's a little spike of a little hit of energy, pleasure, call it what you like, and then you get a downer, and you're suddenly on this upper downer that you can't, and you can't get off that treadmill. So this is why they're so, they're, they're so addictive. And then that is compounded by the upper fermenting gut because it's, it's just constantly fermenting, producing all these toxins and creating all these problems we've just discussed.
Not to mention that if you follow the dietary guidelines, they're going to lead you down the path that's going to cause all these problems. Absolutely, absolutely. Um, and, and, and, well, you know, you, you said it all, you said it all, you know. And, you know, the, the, the, the most helpful thing that my patients find is to appreciate that sugars and carbohydrates are addictive.
Now, I'm an addict. I'm sure we, we're all addicts. You know, humans evolve to be addicts because that makes them go for those high-quality foods when they're available. Well, high quality to primitive woman, of course, they were rare. They were, um, you know, we only had them, say, for a short window of time in the, in the, in the autumn, and that helped us to get fat. And of course, getting fat is survival volume value for the winter. So, so that's why the, the carbohydrate addiction gene evolved, if you like.
But, you know, say I'm an addict. Now I have to the discipline say no to the first, you know, piece of fruit, to the first, you know, biscuit, um, you know, but not to the second or the third. So I just say no way. So if somebody offers, offer me a piece, I say, "No, thank you. I'll have the 90%." In fact, that is the basis of my addiction test. Because, you know, say I know I can easily get addicted to foods. If I have a piece of food and I can't stop eating it, if I had one fig, I'd want two, three, four, five. If I had a, a square of 30% chocolate, the whole bar would be gone. Uh, and that's my addiction to, again, a bag of cashew nuts. I love cashew nuts, but if I had one, the whole packet would go. So if I, if a food is like that for me, I just say no to the first, and that stops me getting addicted.
Okay, let's talk about getting out of this. So say you're a typical type person eating a high carbohydrate diet, you want to work your way back, fix what we've been talking about. Let's talk about the first steps.
Well, there are two types of people. Um, um, there's, there are people who like to dive in at the deep end, and people who just like to tiptoe into the water. I like to dive into the deep end, so I'd say just go cold turkey, just cut it out completely. And yes, you will feel dreadful, just like any addict. We know if they stop their addiction, what do they do? They dive into withdrawal symptoms. So if you're going to do it that way, you choose a time when, um, you know, you, it doesn't matter if you feel awful for, for a few days, because you come out it very quickly. And you only consume the non-addictive foods.
In fact, a very good start for many is a carnivore diet. There is nothing unhealthy about a carnivore diet: meat, fish, and eggs. Um, and, and then the rules are very simple. You can have, as you know, uh, well, and fatty meats, of course, are ideal. Um, um, and, um, say for many people that suits, especially the bloss, 'cuz they think, "Well, I'll get lots of protein, I'll get my muscles strong again, won't I?" So, so that's a useful start. But as I say, apply my addiction test to any foods you may be having, and, uh, and just get off those, and that is a fantastically good start.
And what about the carnivore diet long-term? Is there any reason to switch out other than for our taste buds?
Nope, it's perfectly healthy. I have a very good friend of mine, she is a consultant psychiatrist. She has been carnivore for over 5 years, uh, and she's completely healthy. In fact, that is the starting point for all the patients she's seeing, for the schizophrenics, for the manic depresses, for the, for the, um, bipolars. Um, they do fantastically well on a carnival diet. Yep, you'd add in some vitamins and minerals as well, because they, we know they're additionally helpful, but nothing unhealthy about a carnivore diet that's sustainable for years.
I mean, in the early 1980s, when I first started in this whole business, you know, the classic allergy diet was a lamb, pears, and rice diet. And okay, that was fairly low allergen, but the problem is it was high carbohydrate. And you get occasional people, occasional patients, you see, you put them on a restricted diet and they get stuck on it. They suddenly find anything they bring in is a bad idea. But the joy of the carnivore diet is you could, you know, that would not be an issue. You can, you can happily live on a carnivore diet long-term and be perfectly healthy.
Okay, let's bring the microbiome into this, because the automatic pushback from the conventional thinking would be, "Okay, now I'm not taking in any fiber. My microbiome needs fiber for food." How do you look at that?
That's a very, very good question, and I'm, I don't have all the answers to that. But as, as my dear friend Rachel pointed out, there is meat fiber. And, you know, bacteria and yeast, you know, we can't digest everything that's in meat. And bacteria and yeast, um, love, um, uh, will happily digest meat fiber. That, that's in you, senu, connective tissue. So you want to eat not just pure meats; you want to eat as many cheap cuts as you possibly can: organ meats, liver, heart. Um, um, and I'm quite sure the primitive woman would have eaten, you know, gut, um, testicle, the whole lot, so that would impact.
But, um, um, again, when the carnivores do microbiome tests – I mean, we don't know much about the microbiome, but what we do know is the more diverse it is, the healthier they are, and they do seem to have a diverse microbiome. So, but I have to say, when I tried a carnivore diet, it did make me constipated. So what I, if I have someone who does a pure carnivore diet, I say, "Try and get in a few really high-fiber foods, like linseed, for example." Um, that's 26% fiber. You know, that helps hugely. Make your bread.
Yes, yes, and it's very easy to make. Um, I mean, I am no cook, I can promise you, but, you know, even I can make it. I mean, I got up early every morning for about 6 months 'cuz I knew that for a paleo-keto diet to be successful, we needed a good bread substitute. And I got up early for 6 months, and I needed something for people who don't have the time, the energy, or the inclination. They had to tick those three boxes. And yes, um, the linseed bread is quick and easy to make. I make a loaf most days, uh, and it disappears either down my throat or, or, or the rest of the tribes. And you can make various, um, changes to it. So yesterday, um, I did, um, a long walk with friends, and I made a batch of PK bread, but I made it with lots of eggs, some sunflower seeds, um, just a few raisins to give it a bit of sweetness. And you, it's almost like a ship's biscuit. You know, I just ate that through the day, and that powered me through the day, no problem at all.
Okay, so for somebody who adopts a carnivore diet or low-carb diet, but they were previously in that boat we talked about early on with the upper fermenting gut, talk about that period of time early on and how quickly things start to turn around. Okay, and you did, you did mention the fact that it's not going to be easy, this addiction piece. Anything we can do in that early phase to tame that?
Well, there are several problems that can arise. The first problem is what we call keto flu. Because what is as important as being ketosis is the metabolic flexibility to be able to switch to being, you know, sometimes we would be carbohydrate burning, maybe, you know, because guess what? At weekends I will feast. You know, I'm keen gardener, I've got strawberries in the garden. Am I going to not eat strawberries in the strawberry season? No. So I might be hopping out of ketos occasionally, but that's fine. That metabolic flexibility to be able to burn sugars for a time and then get back into, into, um, fat-burning mode is important.
But if that's never happened, and for many people they've never been in ketosis all their lives because they've never not had three carbohydrate meals a day, they've been bought on that, and that's what they're stuck with. And initially fat burning can be a problem to some people. And, um, we need thyroid hormones to be able to fat burn. And, you know, if the thyroid is not working properly, or is, is running a bit low, then you will fat burn with adrenal, with adrenaline instead, and that makes people feel terrible. It makes them feel wired but tired. I think much of keto flu is ketogenic hypoglycemia, as I call it, dreadful name, but you feel hypoglycemic. Actually, you're not, um, but you feel it because you haven't got the thyroid hormones the fat burn. And in fact, that's often a very good clue that that person has an underactive thyroid. So that's the first thing to bear in mind.
The second thing is, as you get rid of your upper fermenting gut, those microbes die off. And as they die off, they get digested by acid and by, um, um, um, enzymes, and you can get allergic reactions to the dead microbes. It's called a Herxheimer reaction. So, uh, that's something to look out for.
And the other point is, is when you get into ketosis and you start burning fat, you start to mobilize toxins which are stuck in fat. Now, I've, um, done many fat biopsies, very easy test to do. You just stick a needle in, in somebody's fat, pull the needle out, and the fat within the core of the needle is sufficient for analysis. Now, the results come back in milligrams per kilogram. If I do a blood test, the results come back in micrograms per kilogram. That tells you those toxins are in fat as 100 to 1,000-fold higher than in the bloodstream. So when you lose weight, when you burn fat, you mobilize those toxins, and you get an acute poisoning. So you can get a poisoning result.
These, um, problems are detailed on my website under "DD reactions: diet, detox, and die-off reactions," and that gives you clues the sort of symptoms you can expect. And there isn't an easy way around it, because just like there isn't an easy way to stop smoking, there's not an easy way to come off alcohol. You know, you just have to make your mind up and do it. You know, sometimes sipping salty water, um, water with some salt in it, or bone broth helps to mitigate the hunger pangs. But it's just the phase you have to go through.
And then when you come out the other end, and you suddenly realize that actually the brain's working again, that you have got some energy, that you don't need to sleep 12 hours a day, that you're not constantly yawning, that you can function at a much higher level, then you suddenly realize how you can be. And that is a real eye-opening wake-up call. And having appreciated that good health bit, then, you know, you are, you are better empowered to stick with the diet.
But what I can tell you is nobody does it perfectly first time and sticks with it for life. I think of it as a bit of an earthquake. So the initial earthquake is when you do it for the first time, think, "Oh gosh, yes, you know, I do feel better." And then you lapse, you know, "Oh, I'll fancy a bit of chocolate. Oh, I fancy a bit of this." I, and you, and, and you go back and then think, "No, no, I must get back on the wagon again." And, and you get back on, and it's like an earthquake with tremors. And, you know, sometimes I don't even believe the evidence in my own eyes. Sometimes think, "Nah, it's a load of rubbish, you know." And, and I see something I'm tempted by, and then I consume it, and I feel dreadful. Think, "No, not doing that again." So we, we're constantly having to learn and relearn and reinforce that as just a part of normal life. It's just, just the way that humans are made.
Let's come back to the thyroid piece. How many people are affected by that, and is this something that just corrects itself when you move through the process?
If you're young, it might. So ketogenic hypoglycemia was first described by the pediatricians because in the 1950s and the 1960s and before, when we had no anti-epilepsy drugs, the treatment for epilepsy was a ketogenic diet. And guess what? The kids did very well, but they didn't like it, but they, they, it stopped their, their fitting. Some kids, um, develop ketogenic hypoglycemia; they just felt so awful on the diet. Um, but, um, and they really struggled with it, and, and they were the ones they felt like they got low blood sugar, although when their blood sugar was tested it was normal. They were the ones that were hypothyroid, I think, and they just seem to grow out of their problems. So yes, the young people, if they're lucky, they can adjust.
But the underactive thyroid is extremely common, especially in women, often unmasked at the menopause. In fact, Kenneth Braman, who wrote his American cardiologist, wrote a book about this. He reckons that about a third of westerners, um, have an underactive thyroid. So it is a very common problem. And I think that's because, you know, the thyroid is easily damaged. It's damaged by toxins because so many people are drinking fluidated water or having fluidated toothpaste. It's damaged by broomemide compounds, and we use polyrominated bphenols as, uh, fire retardants. Um, um, it's damaged by heavy metals, and guess what? We are all poisoned to a certain extent by lead, mercury, arsic, aluminium. It's very susceptible to viral infection. It's the first thing to be targeted when there's autoimmunity, and that is switched on by vaccines. So there are many ways by which the thyroid gland can be damaged.
And because the descent into the underactive thyroid is insidious, it's gradual, it's often not noticed. And we know women in particular are just told, "Oh, you're getting old, stop fussing, it's the menopause." You know, the exc, or you're too straight, excuses are made instead of people really looking at, doctors really looking at the symptoms and really looking at the blood tests.
And there's a second problem here, because doctors so often only diagnose an underactive thyroid on the blood tests. They ignore the clinical picture, which might be, you know, slow descent into fatigue, slow pulse at rest, low core temperature, loss of, loss of hair in the eyebrows or the hair, um, uh, swelling – you know, another name for the underactive thyroid, mix edema, edema, retaining fluid – carpal tunnel syndrome, when, um, you get numbness and tingling of, of, of those fingers and half of the ring finger. You know, that would again suggest the diagnosis of, of hypothyroidism. Voice changes, because the larynx becomes adeus, and sometimes you get a croaky voice like that, like what you've been smoking for 20 years, but you haven't. You know, those, or loss of singing voice, those are all symptoms that point to an underactive thyroid. And of course, as we've discussed, ketogenic hypoglycemia.
The blood tests then tell us if there's biochemical scope for a trial of thyroid hormones, because the point here is all diagnosis is hypothesis. So if somebody comes to see me, I say, "I think you got this, I think you got that, I think you got the other." But the real diagnosis is retrospective. If they get better as a result of your interventions, then you say, "Yep, that was the problem. You were eating the wrong food, you had a fermenting gut, you had a low thyroid, your mitochondria were out," or whatever. But I say the underactive thyroid is very common.
Okay, again, coming back to our thesis here, which is the upper fermenting gut. We know the first step is to lower the carbs or go all the way to carnivore. You've mentioned the toxin piece a couple times, so let's talk about how we address that in the beginning when somebody hasn't addressed that yet, and then as maintenance, what you're doing because you're living in the 21st century and there is so much to, you know, clear the system. Go ahead.
Before we get to the toxins, we have to get rid of the upper fermenting gut. And yes, there's a two-pronged approach. Yes, we starve them out with a low-carb, ketogenic diet, and secondly, we kill them. And there are three fantastic tools, um, which are available to everybody. They're very inexpensive, and they do lots of other good things for the body as well.
The first of those is vitamin C. Now, it's, it's, it's vitamin C contact kills all microbes. Um, humans cannot make their own vitamin C. You know, uh, humans, fruit backs, and guinea pigs cannot make their own vitamin C. It's, um, a big pardon, dry nose primates, um, um, and guinea pigs cannot make their own vitamin C. Lionus Pauling, who was the only guy to win two Nobel Prizes in his own right, and was only beaten to a third by Watson and Crick, he calculated from what animals produce, um, um, that humans should have about 5.7 grams of vitamin C a day. So everybody should take 5 grams of vitamin C. That's about a rounded teaspoonful. Ascorbic acid is very cheap. In a glass of warm water, it dissolves very easily, and that should be your first drink of the day, down the hatch in one fell sweep. Because the stomach is empty, if there are any bacteria or yeast there, then, um, um, lying in the gut, then the vitamin C will hit them in a high dose, and that will reduce, um, the contamination with those.
The second thing is iodine. Again, iodine is one of my favorite multitasking tools. Again, it contact kills all microbes. You should separate vitamin C and iodine; don't take them at the same time because one is a reducing agent, the other is an oxidizing agent. I can never remember which way round it is, but it doesn't matter. The important point is, take them separately. So I do mine midday: three drops of Lugals iodine 15% in a glass of water. Again, that contact kills all microbes.
And the third intervention, which is very helpful, is methile sulfonylmethane, MSM. Again, it's as cheap as chips. It's fast becoming one of my favorite multitasking tools because we're all sulfur deficient, and sulfur is essential for fourth-phase water, which is the subject of another long lecture. Um, uh, it's, it's essential for the gut for healing and repair. It's essential for connective tissue. Um, it's very good at detoxing heavy metals, but it has the very desirable property in the upper gut, which is aerobic, it's oxygenated, it kills microbes. But in the lower gut, which is anorobic, it's a, it feeds them; it acts a prebiotic. So it's, I say, it's very cheap, it's very safe, it's multitasking, and it's a great, um, treatment for the gut. So those are three ways by which, um, we sort out the upper fermenting gut.
Okay, before we move forward, let me get into each of these. I have follow-up questions to make sure I'm totally clear. So the vitamin C, you recommend having that all in one bolus rather than spreading that out?
I do, because the interventions I suggest for my patients have got to be cheap, effective, and sustainable. We've got to be able to do them in a frictionless way. If it's difficult, it's, "Oh, a bottle and a little bit here and a little bit there," it's not going to happen. Now, I decided to test myself to, because we're taught at medical school, "Oh, there's no point taking vitamin C, you drink it one day in, in, you know, one hour, and it's, and it's gone a few hours later." So I stopped taking vitamin C, but I tested my urine every day to see if I was still peeing out vitamin C. Now, you can get these sticks very cheaply from Amazon for less than, uh, you get 100 sticks for less than a tenner, very cheap. And the ascorbic acid portion should go from a sort of green color to a yellow color. That means you're peeing out the sculbic acid. I continue to excrete ascorbic acid for five days, so that tells me it's, um, it is well quite well stored in the system, and it takes a long time to deplete. So that was the first thing that encouraged me to take it in one fell swoop.
The second thing is by taking in one fell swoop on an empty stomach, you're going to have the best effect on any bacteria and yeast that may be there. Because in the morning when you wake up, the stomach is empty, so you're going to get a high concentration of ascorbic acid in the stomach, which is where it all happens, or much it happens, um, killing those bacteria and yeast when they're at their most vulnerable, i.e., you know, they're their, um, the stomach is empty. So yes, I, I recommend taking in one fell swoop.
And it sounds like you're just dumping powder into a cup and drinking it back. How do you feel about capsules?
Oh, that's fine. It's just, um, it's just it's cheaper to have a, um, put it, do it, and do it in warm water. And the other good thing is if that bacterial and, um, uh, fungal contamination extends into the esophagus, which it may well do, you're giving the esophagus a nice coating of ascorbic acid as well. The only thing to bear in mind is, as soon as you've done that, rinse your mouth out, you know, or brush your teeth, because you don't want acid sitting on the your dental enamel, because there's potential for it to dissolve that, and you can do without that.
And how do you feel about these food-based vitamin C's, things like acerola cherry? There's always, well, a lot of times with supplements you can get a food-based one versus the chemical ascorbic acid. So if somebody were to say, "I want the whole food version, I want to take caps or powder of, say, acerola cherry," any problem there?
And that's absolutely fine, but the trouble is it's more expensive. And, you know, the people, you know, I tend to see many people with fatigue syndromes. People with fatigue syndrome, they can't work, they're counting the pennies. So my interventions I recommend have got to be affordable. So, um, you, if you got lots of do'ach and, uh, and that's not an issue, fine to take those food food grade ones. But scorpic acid, it's biologically identical, it's what's been used for decades. Um, it's very safe, it's efficacious, so I tend to stick with the cheap and cheerful.
And when you talked about the fact that it's going through and doing all this killing, it gets me thinking about our healthy bugs, our healthy biome. Does it self, does it preserve that, or is it just there's none, no healthy bugs in that area?
Exactly. I mean, say the top 25 foot of the gut should be sterile or near sterile. The microbiome resides in the lowest, the last 5 foot bowel. Now, the point about the scorpic acid is it's going to be absorbed systemically into the bloodstream and excreted in the kidneys. So is iodine. So the scorpic acid never gets to the microbiome. Now, the only time it gets to the microbiome is if you're taking ascorbic acid to bowel tolerance in the event of an acute cold or acute fever. And then yes, you want to take big dose of ascorbic acid in order to get to bowel tolerance very quickly, because then that gets rid of the infection before it gets rid of you. And in that event, some escorbic acid will trickle into the, into the microbiome and start to kill some of the friendly microbes there, which then get fermented by other friendly microbes, and that gives you rumbling tummy and foul-smelling wind. At that point, you know you've overdosed, you've taken too much. So then you pull the, pull the dose back to a sub-bowel tolerance dose. Everybody's different, and it will, that bowel tolerance will differ in different situations. But, um, and, and, and sometimes you will overdo things and you'll get frank diarrhea.
But that's why we have an appendix. The appendix is awfully important. I mean, we are told by the surgeons that the appendix is a, "Oh, it's a bit of redundant tissue, we don't really need it anymore, and if we ho it out, you know, don't worry about it." But if you think about the appendix, it's right at the junction of the upper gut, which should be sterile, and the lower gut, which should be full of microbes. So should you get an episode of diarrhea – and of course, guess what? You primitive man would have eaten some rotten meat occasionally, you know, and, and got sick. He would have eaten the wrong berries and got sick, or whatever. But the, the appendix comes to the rescue because you might sweep out all those friendly microbes in the microbiome that the appendix is there at just the right place to reinoculate the large bell with the friendly microbes.
Okay, and continuing this out, extrapolating, you mentioned for iodine, one of the purposes at least is to kill. And I think with MSM too, you can clarify with those two as well, is it the same principle as the vitamin C where it's not going to affect the healthy bacteria?
Correct. But iodine is so well absorbed from the upper gut, um, it never, it never gets the large bowel. You know, it's, it's any excess is excreted in urine. And as I mentioned earlier, MSM, yes, it kills the upper gut in the oxygenate environment, but in the microbiome it's, it feeds, it's a prebiotic in an anorobic environment. So the point is, is all these three kill in the upper gut and have, um, no impact, or, or, or, or with the MSM, a beneficial impact in the microbiome.
Okay, let's move into iodine now. This is one that is quite controversial, especially in doses like you're talking about. First of all, why is there so much controversy around taking this medson?
In this world is controlled by big farmer. Big farmer's mantra is, "A patient cured is a customer lost." Big farmer wants lots of sick people. The last thing it wants is lots of healthy people taking cheap, effective nutritional supplements. So whenever you find something that works really well, that's cheap, you get all this fake news put out. So for example, all doctors in this country, when I start talking about scorbic acid, "Oh, that's terribly dangerous, it'll give you kidney stones." Rubbish! The opposite. It's the very good treatment for renal stones to prevent them.
And it's the same with iodine. You know, um, um, you know, they will tell you, "Oh, you'll send your, your thyroid overactive." Well, you might temporarily, because we are all iodine deficient, and that is a common driver of the underactive thyroid. So if you have somebody who has a slightly underactive thyroid and you suddenly give them a good dose of iodine, the thyroid says, "Yippee, we've got some iodine at last!" And, you know, and it goes into overdrive. But the, but, you know, the thyroid and the pituitary gland are perfectly intelligent, and it's immediately works out, "Oh, we've gone into overdrive," and it all settles down, you know, within, well, two weeks maximum.
So with iodine, it's probably a good idea to start low and go slow. And the rules of the game are, the sicker you are, the slower you go. Now, um, if I had somebody who's otherwise fit and well, I say, "Yeah, fine, just take three drops of iodine, you'll be fine." If I had somebody who's really sick, I'd say, "Oh, no, no, put one drop in a glass of water and have a sip, and if that's okay the next day, next day have two sips," you, and build it up really slowly.
And the same is true of MSM. These cheap, simple, effective naturopathic interventions have the potential to do much good, and in doing much good, you can get a healing crisis. That's what the homeopathic, the naturopathic doctors call it. So as I say, the sicker you are, the slower you go with the MSM. Yep, start with just maybe a quarter a teaspoon and a day and build up slowly. But I like to aim for a window of time of 6 months when you're taking 30 grams of MSM 3 days a week. Now, don't take it all the time because, um, not only is it, it's, it's very good at detoxing heavy metals, and yes, it will pull out the heavy metals very nicely, thank you very much, but it will also take out some of the friendlies. So what I like people to do is take it three days a week, 30 grams, three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And then the rest of the week, make sure you replenish with all the friendly minerals. So, um, I make up a product called Sunshine Salt, which has got, you know, all, all the minerals that I'm allowed to give, you know, in decent doses in a form that's soluble, uh, and people rescue with that. And of course, it's as cheap as chips. But a good multi-mineral, um, I'm sure you can buy them in the States, um, would be ideal.
Any special population, somebody with Hashimoto's, thyroid problems, that need to avoid it?
Nope, they all need it, because it's not just the thyroid gland that needs iodine. Every tissue in the body pretty much has a requirement for iodine. The brain: iodine deficiency is the number one cause of mental deficiency in the world today. It's essential for the immune system; can't function without, um, iodine. Iodine lines mucous membranes in the chest, the nose, um, the genital tract, and that protects us from infection. It's essential for muscles; we can't, we can't sweat without iodine. We need iodine to make the love hormone oxytocin. You know, it's just so important for every department of the body.
I will send you my iodine chapter from my thyroid book, which details, you know, you know, the breast, for example. Pe women who have fibrocystic disease the breast, you can often cure it just with iodine. Anybody with any cysts: polycystic ovary disease, cystic disease, um, um, you know, um, um, um, uh, you know, thyroid cysts, it's often symptomatic of iodine deficiency. In fact, Albert Spence Gorsey, who discovered vitamin C, he was a medical student during the 1920s, and there was a little diddy that they used that the medical students used to say, which is, which went, "If ye know not the where and why, prescribe ye then K and I." You know, it was almost the universal panacea; it was such an important medicine.
Okay, so dosage-wise, you want to go slow if this is new to you. We're working up to three drops of Lugals iodine in water, and that's 15%, correct? It supplies about 50 milligrams of iodine.
Okay, and if somebody took more than that, say even by accident put four or five drops, what does the body do with that? Does it have systems in place to get rid of it?
It just pees it out. That's the joy of it. You, if you, if you overdose, you just pee it out. And in peeing it out, you keep the urinary tract nice and clean, because as we know, you know, urinary tract infections are common, um, and it would be a very good treatment for any, any woman who's suffering from recurrent cyitis, for example.
We'll move into MSM now. You've already given us the lay of the land there, the fact we want to take, is it 30 grams three days a week, spread out by one day in between? Correct? And is there a certain source we're looking for? Is there organic MSM? MSM source from different things?
Yep, I like to use the, the organic MSM, which is, you know, clean, because there's no point detoxing people if you're putting, you know, toxins into the system. It costs about 30 quid for a kilogram, which will last you a jolly long time. So it's a very, very cheap way of treating and detoxing the heavy metals at the same time.
And where do they get that from?
Oh, I get on Amazon. No, no, but like, where do they source it? What is it? Where do they extract it from?
That's a very good question, and I, I'm so ashamed I don't know the answer to that. Somebody asked me that the other day, and I never got around to looking it up. But the MSM we're using at the moment is a vegan source, so my guess is it probably comes from a, from a bacterial ferment, but that's only my guess. But, um, I'm, I'm, I do apologize, I need to look that up.
Okay, and you talked about in between making sure we're upping minerals on those days, and you mentioned your salt. What other products on the market do you like when it comes to minerals?
Well, because my salt is so cheap, you know, that's, that's what I recommend to everybody, because it can easily be put into the regime, because it becomes part of your diet. And it also means you can slip it into the, into the family food, um, so you can treat the family at the same time without them realizing. But if you check, um, the, the constituents of my, m, of my, uh, Sunshine Salt, find a mineral that's got similar amounts of, of zinc, copper, selenium, malamin, chromium, um, um, uh, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, because I say I've got all the minerals in there that are important.
Okay, so we have the protocol now. When it comes to these three supplements, is this ongoing, or is it just for a period of time while we're clearing out the upper fermenting gut?
Well, yes, um, yeah, but my view is we should take those dose of iodine and those dose of vitamin C for life. The MSM, I recommend a window of time of 6 months when you're taking that high dose, i.e., 30 grams three times a week, and then end up with a maintenance dose of maybe half a teaspoon, you know, or a teaspoon full, you know, a couple of times a week, just to maintain the status quo. Because the fact is, we're all poisoned. You see, as soon as we started burning fossil fuels and mobilizing coal and oil from the, um, the Earth's crust, we're also mobilizing heavy metals which inevitably get into our soil, into the air, into our water, um.
So whether we like it or not, we are all poisoned by heavy metals now. The body can tolerate a certain amount of metal, uh, poisoning, but if it gets beyond a certain level, it's going to cause serious pathology. And of course, the wretched doctors and dentists are using these heavy metals all the time, aren't they? I mean, dentists, you know, love to use dental amalgam fillings, so we're all being poisoned by, um, dental amalgam. Aluminium is present in, in vaccines as an adjuvant, and so we're injecting it into kids, and that cannot be a good thing to do. You know, they're used in cooking, aluminium foil, aluminium cans, aluminium saucepans, um, um, you know, it's a disaster. I mean, when I do heavy metal tests, I'm so often seeing barium. Where's that coming from? It's not coming from bare meals. It might be coming from cloud seeding, for all we know. I mean, we don't know. But the point is, all these heavy metals are getting into the environment, and they're going to end up in our bodies. So obviously, we do our best to try to avoid them. But the joy of using MSM is we can mobilize them and we can excrete them safely.
Well, this is good. It's all coming full circle because I brought up toxins in the body and detox. You wanted to go into the three supplements, like we did. Let's come back to detox, and now we know the heavy metal piece. But what other toxins accumulate in the body? And then, other than MSM, what can we do to eliminate them?
Correct. Now, um, I classify toxins by the, the mode by which they are excreted. And, um, obviously, those toxins that come to the liver, the liver can detoxify and get rid of. But to do that, it needs some vitamins, it needs some minerals, it needs some essential fatty acids, and it needs some energy. And we can do that by taking a good multivitamin, some minerals, some fish oils. Um, so that's fairly straightforward. But then that leaves us with the big one, which the pesticides and the volatile organic compounds, the fire retardants, the solvents, the glues, the smellies, the perfumes, um, and, and, and of course, the pesticides, of which the worst is glyphosate. Now, many of these are fat-soluble, and they get stuck in fatty departments of the body. They get stuck in our brain, they get stuck in all membranes, and they also get stuck in our fat.
Now, we can get rid of those in two ways. First of all, with heating regimes, because when you get hot, and it doesn't matter how you get hot, it might be going for a run, it might be, it might be a bath, it might be a sauna, it might be a hot shower. When you get hot, you, you shake, you boil them, you warm them up, and they mobilize from the subcutaneous, subcutaneous fat onto the lipid layer of the surface of the skin, from whence they can be washed off with soap and water. So my favorite method of detoxing would be an Epsom salt bath, because guess what? We all, most people have a bath. Epsom salts are incredibly inexpensive. You can buy in this country and get 20 kg for about £35, and you need about a pound of Epsom salts per bath. Soak in that, and you warm the body up, you mobilize the chemicals, as I say, onto the surface of the skin, and then they're washed off because you're in a bath. And at the same time, the magnesium gets in through the skin into the bloodstream, the sulfate gets through the skin into the bloodstream. How do we know that work? Done by Rosemary Wearing, who's a biochemist at Birmingham. She took 29 of her, a big modern, 19 of her students, and they all did Epsom salt baths every night for two weeks. And she measured the level of magnesium and sulfate in their blood and their urine before and after. And in every single case, the level of magnesium and sulfate rose in the blood and rose in the urine, which tells us that those Epsom salts are well absorbed through the skin. And that does much good for the body, because guess what? We're all magnesium deficient, and we're all sulfate deficient. But say, any heating regime will do. So if you're an athlete who goes out running regularly and then showers off, that's going to be a great way of mobilizing those nasty toxic pesticides. The problem for my fatigue syndrome patients is, you know, they can't exercise. Heating regimes often make them ill, so they have to go very gently with it. Some of them are not even well enough to get in a bath, so that's tricky.
So there's another method of detoxing, which I'm using at the moment, which I think is going to be helpful, and that's just to put, um, organic coconut oil on, and actually, um, on your skin. Now, I'm actually making up a mix with organic coconut oil and organic shea butter with some minerals and ascorbic acid as well to enhance it. And the idea here is you just rub it all over your skin after you, after you've had a shower. And we, you know, skin is comprised of, of, of, of skin cells, obviously, and then there's a layer of, of keratin and dead cells on the surface of the skin. So this oil will get into those dead scales and, and be mopped up by that. Um, you know, just those pesticides and volatile organic compounds will get into that oil because they just, um, uh, diffuse through the skin. And then as we slough off our skin, because we're shedding skin scales all the time, we will literally just shed off all those chemicals. And of course, that would be enhanced by washing. So that's going to be a very cheap and easy way to, to, to detox.
Now, we've got two studies, um, which shows that these heating regimes are effective. The most important one is done, was done by Bill Ray. Now, Bill Ray was a cardiothoracic surgeon, um, in the, in the 60s and the 70s in America. Now, in those early days of cardiothoracic surgery, um, a lot of anesthetic gases were used, and there was no means for, um, scavenging those gases from the operating theaters. So all the surgeons and the assistants, they all had a dose of anesthetic gases as well. And he was literally poisoned by those anesthetic gases, so much so that he developed a multiple chemical sensitivity, and that meant he couldn't operate anymore. So, um, he had to finish as a cardiothoracic surgeon. And he set up the, um, um, environmental center in Dallas in Texas, which is still in existence today. He, because he had multiple chemical sensitivity as a result of this poisoning, he accumulated patients who were similarly affected. And he did, he accumulated 210 of these patients, and he put them through this very detox regime. So, um, um, so they were doing heating regimes, which for some, it was on an exercise bike, for some it was, um, in a sauna, and then showering off afterwards. He also did, did massage. So the patients said, so they had three things: they had the massage, they had the heating regimes, and then they had the sauna ring. And what was so interesting is that the massage therapists often used to comment, "Oh, you know, a mass," and suddenly they'd get like this outburst of, of some smell, as if the smell was just coming out of the body. You know, they suddenly smell petrol fumes, they could suddenly smell diesel fumes or, or perfumes or something, as if they kind of mobilized a hot spot of chemicals. So much so that they could smell them. Um, what was so interesting is that 200 of those patients became, got detox regimes. They got initial worsening, um, and then they saw improvement subsequently. Um, and, um, and he was measuring levels of, um, chemical in the blood before and after. And again, um, the, they reduced their chemical load. So we've got some good hard data showing that these regimes are effective.
I've got my own figures which I've collected. I've only got 32 patients, um, but I've done some sort of test of toxicity before and after, either fat biopsy, DNA adduct, transicator protein studies, or whatever. And in pretty much in every single case, the toxic load has come down. So we know these regimes are effective. So these days, I don't do the tests anymore. Why? Because the tests are expensive, and my patients are poor. I just say, get on and do the regimes. Do the heating regimes. Um, and roughly speaking, 50 such heating regimes will have the total load, and the numbers come down exponentially. So if, if the total initial load was, say, let's call it 64, whatever, after 50 regimes, it comes down to 32. Another 50 regimes, it comes down to 16. Another 15 regimes, it comes down to eight. You never get to baseline. There's always a little bit there because we're constantly toxing up, however much we, you know, we, we try not to. But again, if it's sufficiently low, the body can deal with that.
And for somebody that's new to this, and they start these regimes, do you like them to space it out a little bit to give their body time in between? Because you've given the numbers now, and some people might be in a rush to get through a certain number of them. How do you feel about timing?
It depends on how sick they are. It's the, it's the old formula: the sicker they are, the slower you go. Um, and, you know, for some people, they're so sick, all they can manage is just putting their feet in a bowl of hot water with Epsom salts in it. Uh, and when they tolerate that, then they can do a little bit more, and then a little bit more. Another useful mech, way of doing this for the very sick patients would be a far-infrared sauna. And for some people, all they can do is just put their legs in initially for two minutes, and that's as much as they can tolerate. And then as they gradually improve, then you put more of the body in for a little bit longer, maybe at slightly higher temperatures, um, until you get a result. But yes, for the sick people, you start low and go slow. For someone who's otherwise well, I say, "Oh, just go on and do it, boy." You know, the quicker we get these toxins down, the better.
Okay, so we have our three big supplements. You started out with, you've now brought a handful of others in, including a multivitamin, the Epsom salt, you said fish oil, and there may have been another one or two. What I'm getting at here, other supplements as part of a maintenance routine for people, or in special cases, things you'll introduce?
Well, the fact of the matter is, because we live in such a toxic world, and because we live in such a micronutrient deficient world, we all have to take a package of supplements just to get on the starting blocks. And yes, that package is a good multivitamin, a good multi-mineral, fish oils, vitamin C, iodine, and most important of all, vitamin D. We are all sunshine deficient. And my view is, we should all be taking 10,000 IU a day of vitamin D. At that level, there have never been any toxicity or problems whatsoever. It's equivalent to about half an hour of sunshine. You know how much sunshine did primitive man get? Well, they got 12 hours a day, didn't they? Um, so you're not going to get any problems at 10,000 IU a day. And vitamin D is highly protective against infectious disease, COVID, of course, cancer, heart disease, dementia. You know, it's a proven benefit. So that's, that's just what I call the basic package of supplements to get on the starting blocks. And then if you've got a specific problem after that, like fatigue, okay, there are other packages we can add in as well. But if you can do the, you know, a low carbohydrate diet, clean up the fermenting gut, and take that bic, basic package of supplements, that's going to get a lot of people an awful long way.
Okay, it sounds like it. But just to be clear, that 10,000 IU for you, vitamin D, even in the summer, you'll still take that?
Yes, because the body, um, um, makes as much vitamin D as it needs from, uh, sunshine, and then it stops making it. So you base load with vitamin D as an insurance policy, if you like. And then if you, you get as much sunshine as you like, obviously without burning the skin, and get as much sunshine as you like, that will top it up to optimum. And then the body just ceases to make, um, uh, make it once it has a sufficiency.
Okay, I want to come back to the diet now and highlight a couple of the pieces there that we didn't get into specifically. No gluten, no dairy, correct? So talk about why those are important.
Dairy products, and you know, whenever you have a difficult question like this, go back to evolutionary biology. You know, we evolved over millions of years eating, you know, a particular diet, and those foods only came into our diet in the last maybe 10,000 years, which in the terms of evolution is the blink of an eye. Now, the problem with dairy products is that dairy products evolved for young mammals. If young mammals don't grow very quickly, then they get eaten by saber-tooth tigers. So all dairy products, or, or b, well, all dairy products except butter contain milk protein, which is growth-promoting, and that makes the risk factor for cancer. Lovely book written by, um, Jane Plant, who was a geologist at, um, Nottingham. In her early 40s, she developed breast cancer. She had the surgery, the radiotherapy, the chemotherapy, ended up with a plum-sized lump and told two months to live. She read that in China, no dairy products, no breast cancer. So she took out dairy products, and she watched that, watched that cancer melt away and disappear. She wrote a book called Your Life in Your Hands. She also, her name was Jane Plant. She also went on to write the Plant Diet, but she didn't get the carb bit, because we know that sugars and carbohydrates feed cancer anyway. She survived into her early 70s and actually died from, as a result of the chemotherapy. But it's just an illustration that dairy products drive cancer. They're also a risk factor for heart disease. Lovely paper, The Cow and the Coronary, by Margaret Moss and David Freed, illustrates that point. Um, um, they're also a risk factor for osteoporosis, because they products got a high proportion of calcium to magnesium, which, yes, is very desirable for the growing baby, but not for the adult. Calcium and magnesium compete with each other for absorption. So if you're having a lot of calcium, you'll block your magnesium absorption, and that is a risk factor for osteoporosis and heart disease as well. Uh, and again, dairy products are common allergens. You know, at least 30% of the population are allergic, and dairy products are number one allergens. So the only safe dairy products from a nutritional point of view is butter. But many of the allergics actually don't tolerate butter. So that's why we have be careful with dairy.
And then gluten grains. Well, gluten, the number one problem with gluten is it's a very common allergen. And, um, if you've got any allergic symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome, intrinsic asthma, migraine, temporal arthritis, urticaria, eczema, any of those conditions, often driven by gluten allergy. But I went to a conference recently, and the consensus of the conference was that gluten grains should be animal fodder only, because they have been bred genetically modified to have a very high level of gluten in them, which the cooks love, because it gives it that, you know, that texture, that glutenous thing. So you can make, you know, very good, you know, pillow pastry and, and all that. But it's, it's great for the cooks, but not good for us to eat. It's high in lectins, and for many people, lectins are toxic to them. Um, and it's often high in pesticide residues. So gluten grains are usually out. If you're, if you're absolutely 100% you're not allergic to them, then the occasional, um, you know, organic, um, GM-free, um, loaf would be fine. But again, it's, it's going to be high carbohydrate, isn't it? So that's another issue. And another interesting point is that allergy and addiction are two sides of the same coin. So you have to apply the myill addiction test. So if you have a slice of bread, and you, and you're not happy with that, you want another and another and another, it's not for you. It's the same with cake and biscuits. You have a slice of that, you can't stop. It's not for you. So, um, uh, you know, and, and I, I say, I can't, I am a horrible addict. You know, if, if I have a taste of something, I want more, more, more. So I just have to say no to the first taste.
So that doesn't happen for you with the linseed bread?
No, not at all. You know, I have, I have a couple of pieces and I'm full, I'm satisfied, I don't want anymore.
Um, so, so no. How do you look at fats? You brought in butter, and it sounds like depending on how your constitution is, that can be okay. But talk about things like tallow, other animal fats, and then some of the quote-unquote healthy plant fats like avocado oil, olive oil, and how you think about all those.
Fantastic. They're all good. I mean, in nature, there is no such thing as a bad fat. They are all good. And we have two types of fat, don't we? We have the saturated fats. Now, saturated fat is a carbon chain, um, which might be a long carbon chain, which is straight. And think of it as my arm. It's absolutely saturated with hydrogen ions, and that makes it very tough. So when you heat it, it stays, it retains its shape. When you cool it down, you can use it again. And of course, it's the perfect fuel for the body. And then we have the unsaturated fats. Now, the thing about the unsatur, you know, polyunsaturated omega-6 is kinked, kinked at the, at the omega-3 and the omega-6, and sometimes they kink somewhere else. So in nature, they're all boomerang shaped, and they're all left-handed fats. But if you hydrogenate them to make margarine, or you cook with them, some of them will flip into a right-handed fat. And the trouble with that, that's called a trans fat, and it doesn't fit biological enzyme systems. You know, it's, it's like trying to put a right-handed glove on a left hand, it doesn't fit. And they are the dangerous fats. So oils are wonderful foods, but they must be cold-pressed and organic and not hydrogenated. And you have to shop around a little bit for for cold-pressed, you know, organic, you know, olive oil, because they'll tell you it is, and it isn't. So you have to be a little bit discerning and find a trusted source, um, um, of, of olive oil or whatever oil it is that you want to, to, to use. But many sunflower oils, rapeseed oils, you know, are mass-produced, they're heavily contaminated. And being a fat, the pesticides, you know, concentrate in them, or they've been processed in either in ultra-processed foods, or by cooking, or by hydrogenation, and they're full of trans fats. So as soon as man gets in the way, um, you know, the oils, um, have the potential to become unsafe and unhealthy.
Okay, it sounds like it. But further clarify your thoughts on vegetable oil, seed oils. It sounds like you're against them.
I'm against them.
How do you think about that whole piece that conventional wisdom that consuming them is good because we're lowering LDL?
Well, LDL is, is, is, well, there's nothing wrong with LDL. It's good stuff. I mean, LDL, I mean, you suddenly jumped onto, "Oh, high cholesterol causes, you know, um, um, a high-fat diet causes high cholesterol causes heart disease," which we know is a load of tosh. Cholesterol, high cholesterol, and LDL do not drive heart disease. Um, um, you know, there are, you know, heart disease is driven by sugar, high blood pressure, um, um, toxins, inflammation, and so on, not by cholesterol. In fact, I like to see people with a high LDL, because LDL is just a carrier molecule. It's just the, the molecule that carries fat around the body. And LDL, when you're in ketosis, you need LDL to carry fat from your fat stores to the liver, where it can be converted into ketones. So very often, when people start on a carnivore diet or start on a ketogenic diet, you see their total cholesterol going up, fantastic. Their LDL going up, fantastic. HDL going up, fantastic. You know, that's totally desirable. You know, they are simply the carrier molecules. And we are know, you know, all deficient in, in cholesterol, or, or cholesterol deficient is very common. In fact, there's a, I think it was a Philadelphia study, which looked at total cholesterol and mortality, and for every 1% fall in cholesterol, increases your mortality by 1%. I can show you a plethora of studies that show you that the higher your cholesterol is, the longer you live. Now, the cholesterol story has been hijacked by big food and big pharma, because it suits their books. Atastin, which is the most used, um, statin, cholesterol-lowering agent, is worth $1 trillion a year. Now, I can't get my head around these huge figures, but a trillion is a million billion, which is a million million million dollars. It's a lot of do'ach. And you can get a lot of propaganda done with that sort of money. And there isn't, there's barely a scrap of evidence that shows statins are effective. In fact, I can show you some studies that, um, that tell the absolute opposite of that.
Well, it's important we went there because again, conventional wisdom, if you have high cholesterol, consume these vegetable oils, they're heart-healthy, they're going to help you lower your LDL, and you'll be better off supposedly.
You're using the wrong words. It's not conventional wisdom, it's modern propaganda. That's the word we should be using. And I'm delighted to see that, um, a British cardiologist called Dr. Asim Malhotra, who's written a super book, A Statin-Free Life, essentially detailing what I've just been saying, has, is now JFK's right-hand man on the Make America Healthy Again, um, um, uh, uh, scheme. And, um, so at last, perhaps, you know, um, we can start to see things turning around and, and, and get big pharma's grippers off the medical profession. The medical profession has been completely brainwashed by big pharma. We just don't have enough good doctors with independent minds who are speaking the truth.
Well, we've connected by email, and it sounds like he'll be coming on the show. So I'm a big fan of his work. Fantastic. All right, last question, because I know you got to go. If somebody has adopted the diet, we opened up talking about how do you feel about snacking? If they're still staying within those parameters of ketogenic, low carb, and then also intermittent fasting?
Well, that is the next step. Once you're PK adapted, then you don't get hungry. You don't get the sugars ups and downers. And again, back to evolutionary biology. You know, did primitive man get three meals a day? I don't think so. They fasted and they feasted. And again, what controlled populations from, of an evolutionary aspect, was availability of food. So we evolved, you know, strategies to optimize that. So when food is in abundance in, in the autumn, when there's plenty around, we eat and we eat and we eat, because we are storing that food as fat. And that is survival value for the winter. And, um, in getting fat, we also get fatigued, because you don't want to be bombing around, you know, playing football or rugby or, or sports, and burning off all that precious fat, which is, I say, survival value for the winter. So although it's very counterintuitive, when you are feasting, you are naturally fatigued. But then the, the reverse is true. When primitive man or primitive women were starving, they had to use their brains, and they had to use their physical energy in order to get food. And so when you are fasting, the brain works better, it becomes sharper, and you have more physical energy to get things done, to hunt, to run down your prey. So, for example, the samurai warriors, before any great battle, they would fast for 24 hours, because their reflexes were faster, and they were stronger. So, and it's very counterintuitive, but fasting actually gives you energy once you're keto-adapted, and you can happily run on fat. Feasting does the opposite. So yes, that is the next thing to do.
The, so we should, um, I, I like everybody, as far as possible, once they've got their thyroid sorted out and their diet sorted out, to consume all their food within a six-hour window. And the reason for that is after 16 hours of fasting, you switch on autophagy, or self-eating. And that's when the body cleans its act up. That's when it cleans up all those cancer cells that are swilling around, and we've all got cancer cells swilling around, those cells that are senescent, the cellular debris, it gobbles them up. So we then have two hours in every 24 hours when we've switched on autophagy. And then maybe once a week, just have one meal a day, and then we have, you know, eight hours, uh, when we've switched on autophagy. And then three times a year, a big button, four times a year, do a three-day fast. And that allows the gut to clean up its act completely, and also it gives the immune system a, a reset, as it's called. Now, I don't pretend to be an expert on, um, fasting. But there are doctors like Mindy Pelz, who does wonderful YouTube videos. You must, you must interview Dr. Pelz. She's lovely. Thomas, he's been on a few times. He's been on. Fantastic. You know, Dr. Thomas Seyfried. These are Dr. Jason Fung. You know, these people are all interested in cancer as well. And I remember listening to Dr. Seyfried saying, if, if we all did a one-week fast a year, you'd have the instance of cancer overnight, because, say, we're mopping, we're cleaning up our act. So yes, fasting is really important. Um, I say, it's very counterintuitive as to, as to what, how that will impact on your energy, but your overall health will be massively improved.
Sarah, thank you for this wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you. I really appreciate you sharing your truth, going against the grain, and getting your information out there. It's wonderful. We're going to link up your website, we're going to link up your books. Thanks again.
Jesse, you're a great interview. It's very easy talking to somebody like you.
You too. Thank you. Bye for now.
Now that you're done, you're going to want to stick around here and catch this other incredible episode. You don't want to miss it. I'll see you over there.
There are no essential carbohydrates whatsoever. None. Zilch. Zippo. Telling people to have at least 55% of their diet in the form of the one macronutrient that we don't even need is the starting point. That's wrong.