Fix The Microbiome: FASTEST Way To Repair Gut Health (Without Probiotics)

Step one, no carbs, no sugars. Is that right? Keep them as low as possible because the carnivore gut is a sterile gut. Modern foods are a disaster because they are high in carbohydrates. They are very addictive. We eat them in an addictive way. That is metabolic disaster. And it doesn't matter for what reason people come and see me, whether it's cuz they've got headaches or asthma or arthritis, I always start off sorting the gut out. And sometimes that's all you have to do for things to drop into place. Dr. Sarah Myill.

After 30 years of clinical practice, groundbreaking research, and best-selling books, she's here to spill her secrets. I've got three favorite tools that I use. The first is vitamin C. Highly protect against heart disease, highly protect against degeneration, and so on. The second thing I love everybody take is iodine. The average IQ of humans is currently falling and much of that can be attributed to iodine deficiency. And another multitasking tool which I'm exploring at the moment is and we are all deficient in it. Milk keir is helpful for the gut. Is that true? I doubt it. You are not going to change the microbiome by eating something.

Gut health is getting a lot of attention lately and for good reason. If you're dealing with thyroid issues, weight gain, brain fog, or even fatigue, in 99% of cases, your gut is damaged. And most people will say, just take some fiber or take some probiotics. That will fix your gut. But that is not true. My guest today is Dr. Sarah Mahill. She's a functional naturopathic doctor with over 30 years of experience, and she's an expert in fixing chronic disease and fixing the gut. And she'll share the fastest way to fix your gut. And the best part is it won't cost you a thing. She'll also share a very cheap supplement that every man, woman, and child needs to not only protect their gut, but actually fix gut issues.

So, Dr. Myill, my first question, how many people do you think have gut issues without even knowing it? Oh, I think is extremely common simply because we are not eating a correct diet. That the human gut evolved over, you know, hundreds of thousands of years to eat actually a carnivore diet and then some vegetables came in later. Um, it is, you know, the human gut is is is much closer to a dog's gut or a cat's gut or a, you know, um, a carnivore gut than any other gut. And modern foods are a disaster because they are high in carbohydrates. They're high in ultrarocessed foods. They are very addictive. We eat them in an addictive way. And that overwhelms the ability of the gut to remain sterile because the carnivore gut is a sterile gut. And as soon as you start fermenting those foods in the upper gut, that is metabolic disaster. And the fact of the matter is anybody eating a typical western diet with with you know bread for bread and toast for breakfast, cereals, orange juice, all that sort of stuff will have abnormal gut function almost without exception.

Really? Wow. So even all these healthy foods like you mentioned the orange juice, you mentioned a whole grain bread or bread. So I wanted to ask what are these so-called healthy foods that are the worst foods that people are eating every single day. They don't even know it but it's secretly destroying their gut. What are those foods? They basically the high carbohydrate containing foods, the high sugar foods. And yes, you know, we're told fruit is healthy for us. Yes. But remember, primitive man's, primitive woman's idea of fruit would have been a crab apple battle apple. You know, you'd have you'd have a couple and and that would be it. You'd have a sore gut. You had, you know, five or six. And the awful thing is the fruit growers themselves know that humans are sugar addicts. And so they're developing varieties of fruit that are sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. So when I was a child, you know, the big treat for for breakfast on Christmas Day was a grapefruit, but it was so sour gh you could hardly eat it. But you pretended you were really enjoying it. Nowadays, you know, you can eat a grapefruit like you can eat an orange. It's as sweet as anything. And many fruits have been, you know, bred maybe, you know, um, uh, to be sweeter and sweeter. And then, of course, when you crush them, when you squeeze the juice out of them, that's even more concentrated sugar. So, you know, um, a liter of orange juice contains, you know, um, contains about 16 or 17 oranges. Well, even greedy me can't eat 16 or 17 oranges at one sitting. Um, but you could easily drink a liter of orange juice and many do. So, you fill the gut with sugar and it's worse than that because when you eat fruit, fruit is a bag of sugar, but the outside of the fruit will be covered with yeast. And that's how we make cider. That's how we make wine. And if you eat a lot of of apples or a lot of grapes or a lot of pretty much any fruit, plums, you know, um, they overwhelm the ability of the gut to remain sterile and they start to ferment. It's called the auto brewery syndrome and yeast will ferment sugar to guess what to alcohol. In fact, in the early days when I was getting interested in this, uh we used to be able to get um a test done at BAB to demonstrate this. And I would measure um levels of sugar and alcohol in the bloodstream. You would then uh have a sugar load, 50 grams, which is typical of a diabetic glucose tolerance test, for example, and then half an hour later measure the sugar and the alcohol again. The highest result I saw was 19 milligrams per uh per liter. Now the drunk driving I believe in this is about is that's about 30 milligrams at the moment. I think you're not far off a drunk driving level. It's a serious amount of alcohol and that all has to be detoxified by the liver. You know uh it g make for a foggy brain and and and even I know after a glass of wine I can't function with a foggy brain. So, um, it's modern diets that are responsible for the uh the mess that our guts in at the moment for yes reasons of upper fermenting gut also because uh we get an abnormal microbiome with that and thirdly for reasons of allergy and allergy drives many gut symptoms. So my view is that anybody eating a modern western diet will have gut problems whether they know it or not.

Absolutely. You did mention the fruit which is a big problem and I think a lot of people think that fruit is healthy. I do see in the comments that if I eat apples, bananas and cherries and all these different things I feel fine and I don't have any problems. Um but as you're saying that these fruits and these sugars can exacerbate into problems through the the fermentation in the gut and if you have all these sugars they can cause a lot of inflammation. I do want to center on other foods as well. Interestingly oatmeal is another food that is not healthy for you. Why? Yeah, it's very high carb. It really is as simple as that. Um so so no, I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend that. I mean again there is even problems with dairy products and when um you know the great advocate of um um paleo ketogenic diets um Gordon Lorraine was asked are dairy products not you know natural foods? His reaction was have you ever tried milking a wild bison? So whilst dairy products may have been with us for some you know uh thousands of years uh because man is intelligent is clever and learned to domesticate animals it takes much much longer than that for evolution to catch up with those sort of changes. So, as I say, we evolved over hundreds of thousands, probably millions of years with a a carnivore, you know, stone age paleo diet, but the diets have changed so fast in such a short time, the gut simply hasn't caught up and will never c catch up in our lifetime. Uh, and we'll never catch up in a hundreds of years. So, we need to get the best of the old world and the best of the new world. So, the best of the old world means we should be eating a paleo ketogenic diet. And the best of the new world is, you know, you know, I want security. You know, I don't want a tribe, you know, coming over the hill tomorrow and murdering me and all my family. You know, I don't want to be cold in the winter. You know, I don't want to be starving in the winter. I want food security. So, as I say, we're in a we are in a perfect place to have the best of both worlds, the food security, the physical security, the warmth security. But we need to choose our foods very wisely. And if you have a face with a difficult choice, always ask what would primitive women have eaten you know um uh half a million years ago and that will give you a very good clue.

Absolutely. I think people are very confused around what is healthy and that's why I wanted to ask you those foods. So oatmeal and fruit and other foods that we're going to talk about a little bit later and we're also going to talk about how to fix your gut health and fix the microbiome step by step. I think people do need that clarification and guidance because as I said there is so much different information. I do want to ask about a concept that you have termed the upper fermenting gut. What does that mean? Okay. The gut is a tube. It's about 30 foot long. It starts at the mouth and it finishes at the anus. Now, the first 25 foot of that gut should be near sterile. It should be near sterile. I mean, no surface in the world is perfectly sterile. It should be near sterile for the business of um digesting meat and fat and yes absorbing some carbohydrates. The last five foot of gut that's where the microbiome lives and that's a different kettle of fish. That's a vegetarian gut that is full of microbes one or maybe two kilograms of microbes and there they ferment uh fiber fiber that comes from food and they do much good for the body. I think my personal g is that the most important function of the microbiome is to program the immune system to teach the immune system what are the friendly bugs that are the good bugs that it can ignore what are the bad bugs it needs to um react against but it does much other good as well. It fermentss fiber to produce short-chain fatty acids or ketones which are a vital fuel for our body. It produces many um um vitamins and minerals particularly vitamin K is very important. Produces neurotransmitters which are essential for for normal gut function. So it does much good for us. In fact, it's been thought of as as the as another organ of the body and that's how it should be considered. In fact, if you have mice that are rided in an entirely sterile environment so that they are they never develop a proper microbiome, they are not healthy mice and they die young. So looking after our microbiome um is as important as um as looking after our skin you know our and nails our hair everything else.

Absolutely. So when you mention the gut so where it starts from the mouth and it finishes at the anus. Um so I want to ask about the upper fermenting gut because this is an issue that you have mentioned is a big issue causing so many chronic illnesses and problems. So what is that? The upper fermenting gut results when that first 25 ft of gut becomes colonized with bacteria with yeast and maybe other microbes as well. Um now what happens then well many things happen. The first thing that happens is those microbes sit in the lining of the gut and they cause inflammation there and where you get inflammation you get leaky gut and leaky gut is a disaster. The sec lots second thing happens is foods instead of nourishing you um uh and making you um you know providing fuel for you and and vital micronutrients they nourish the microbes instead and those microbes start to ferment and when they ferment they produce all sorts of nasty toxins. Now we've touched on one which is ethile alcohol. So when yeast ferments sugars you get ethile alcohol. But when bacteria and and yeast and other microbes ferment other foods you get propile alcohol, but alcohols um ammoniacal compounds, deactate, hydrron sulfide, all sorts of nasty toxins. Now those have to be dealt with by the liver. The liver is an extraordinary sorting house. So the blood that comes from the gut, it all flows directly to the liver um via the portal vein and the liver sorts out this toxic soup. It pulls out the things that the good things that it needs to nourish us, energy, protein, fat, vitamins, and it detoxifies all those nasty things that we can do without. If it didn't detoxify those things, if those things went straight into the systemic bloodstream, we would be unconscious in a few minutes. They are that nasty and toxic. But the business of doing that is enormously demanding of energy. So if you're consuming a vast, you know, if you got a lot of toxins coming into the gut, that drains our energy. Now I see lots of people with chronic fatigue syndrome and the people with chronic fatigue syndrome, they've got a rather small energy bucket. They don't have the energy that they need in order to function well. And if they're consuming lots of toxic foods and the liver is having to use that energy, you know, uh to deal with those, then it's going to end up you're going to end up with less energy, it's going to make you fatigued. So having a upper fermenting gut, you is a major source of fatigue and foggy brain. If those toxins get into the brain, just like alcohol, it gives you a foggy brain. That's the first big problem. A second major problem is that those microorganisms are as hungry for vitamins and minerals as you and I are. So people taking nutritional supplements when they've got a fermenting upper gut, you know, just feed the fermenttors. Obviously, some will get into the bloodstream, but not much is the waste of money. But I think a third major thing that is barely recognized by the conventional doctors are the microbes themselves. a you know it look at life from the point of view of a bacteria or a yeast in your gut having found a nice home for itself. It doesn't want anybody else moving in there. It wants to keep it that little ecological space safe for itself and it does that by producing toxins to kill other microbes. So yeast will produce a whole range of micotoxins. In fact, many antibiotics that we use are micotoxins and they have fungal names like penicellin, kefosporins, arythramycin, strepto m. These are all fungal names. The bacteria themselves, they produce bacterial endotoxin. And we know those endotoxins can be very nasty indeed. And then the microbes themselves cause a problem because we know they get from the gut into the bloodstream. It's called microbial transllocation. Everybody will know about this because if if anybody has a heart problem, if they go to the dentist, they have to take antibiotics before they have any treatment. Why? Because microbes in the mouth, you can detect them in the bloodstream in seconds, minutes after you've had any dental procedure. And that includes brushing your teeth. So these microbes get into the bloodstream and because they're not evolutionally correct microbes, because the immune system hasn't been looking at these microbes for hundreds of thousands of years, it thinks they're foreigners and that drives inflammation wherever those microbes end up. So if they end up in the muscles, muscle pain and fibromyalgia. If they end up in the joints, joint pain and arthritis. In fact, we know many inflammatory arthritities are driven by gut bacteria. If they get into the gut lining of the gut, you can drive inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's disease or ulcitis. If they get stuck in the skin, chronic heriticaria in the brain, psychosis, that's a really interesting one. In the lungs, intrinsic asthma, you know, in the kidneys, you know, kidney disease, they drive much pathology. So, keeping the upper fermenting gut at bay, you know, preventing uh these microbes colonizing is a very very important part of staying well.

Perfect. Okay. So that totally makes sense and that really explains how these microbes that can be in the upper gut area, so the upper fermenting gut can cause so many problems and inflammation. I do want to ask a question around if somebody cannot lose weight. This is a big thing. People want to lose weight. How can an impaired gut or gut function stop somebody from losing weight even though they're trying to lower calories? It's never that simple. There's never one single thing that can be done. But um the what is important are the satire well first of all the satiety hormones the hormones that tell us um that you are full that you are satisfied that you've had enough to eat. This is where ultrarocessed foods illustrate this point very nicely because ultrarocessed foods are processed to give a nice feeling in the mouth you know the right textures of smoothness of succulents that tell the brain oh you know that's that's a that's a nice food. It's got fat in it. It's got sugars in it. um you know it's got some protein in it. Um so yeah that tastes good but it doesn't they don't fool the gut. They don't fool the gut hormones. So those foods are swallowed but you then do not get the release of essential satiety hormones like leptins and guerllins that tell you you've had enough to eat. You're not hungry anymore. You don't need any more food. And um um and that will drive obesity because these people are hungry all the time and the more they eat the hungrier they get. So there's a certainly a hunger element there. But um a major issue has to do with the thyroid and the underactive thyroid is extremely common and the first thing I like people to do is do a paleo ketogenic diet low in carbohydrate high in fats because we should be fueling our body with fats. But to be able to fat burn you have to have some thyroid hormones there. Now the underactive thyroid is very common. Indeed, my guess and its only guess is that one of the commonest cause of an underactive thyroid is excessive alcohol consumption. We know alcohol is very toxic to the thyroid gland and if you drink too much you will put your you will knock out your thyroid gland. But there are many other causes of underactive thyroid. Lack of iodine and we're all iodine deficient without iodine supplements. The thyroid is particularly susceptible to viral infection. In fact, we know that COVID 19 infection will cause um uh will will has a potential to knock out your thyroid gland. So, I know that's less to do with the gut, but it's an important factor. Um um that difficulty losing weight is often a symptom of of of gut health, but in my experience, it's more commonly due to an underactive thyroid issue.

It makes sense because I just thought I'd ask that question because I do get a lot of people wanting to do the protocol that we're going to talk about which is lowering the carbohydrates and even maybe starting with a carnivore diet in some cases if you want that fast quick option but they say I'm trying to lose weight and why am I not losing weight but it could be your gut function as one your thyroid function as another thing and we always talk about testing your thyroid and all that different thing to understand if you have an underactive thyroid which is very very common. So getting back to gut issues and gut health, what are the symptoms that people would understand to see like they could visibly see I have a gut problem? It's very clear. What would be the symptoms? Okay. Well, one very obvious symptom is the size of the stomach. So um and this is some predicated on some lovely work done by a research called Caroline Pond. Now, um she asked the question, where do wild animals store their fat when um they store their excess calories when there's excess food? Because in the autumn, you know, there's hopefully there's an abundance of of food. There's lots of grass, there's lots of berries, there's lots of roots, there's lots of nuts, and wild animals have the potential to get fat. And of course, that's important survival value for the winter. So, when she was cycling into um work every morning to Milton Kees University, she would pick up roadkill and and dissect it. And what she found is that those animals dump fat where the immune system is busy. Now, that makes perfect sense. And for for wild animals, that was around their lymph nodes because they're obviously prone to accidents, to getting cuts, to getting bruises, and they need a um a a strong immune system to fight any infection there, and also for healing and repair. So, she established we dump fat where the immune system is busy. Now, if you've got an upper fermenting gut, then you've got a leaky gut with potential for those microbes to leak out of the gut into the bloodstream, and that's where the immune system needs to be busy, and that's where fat is dumped. So, if you are apples-shaped, if you've got a big tummy that's, you know, big, then, uh, that's a very powerful clue that you've got an upper fermenting gut. And we know people who are appshaped are at greater risk of heart disease, for example. And, you know, I've often wondered why that should be. And the answer is they've got all these bacteria and yeast spilling into the bloodstream and that drives inflammation and inflammation anywhere in the body will drive pathology. So that's often a very useful clue. Another useful clue is fatigue, foggy brain. They just don't have the brain power. They don't have the energy that they need. And and my view is that you know as a you know now modern humans are much more fatigued than we ever used to be. You know, you look at the old television programs like, you know, Zed Cars and um uh and those and those sort of programs. They were all all slim. They all every policeman you saw was was slim and running around and busy. Every, you know, per people in the street were slim and running around and busy and active. But it's not so. I mean, being overweight and and being appshaped has now become the new norm. So just being overweight and fatigued with an apple shape is is a major major clue that there are gut problems. And then we have symptoms that are local to the gut. So probably the obvious one of our fermenting gut would be heartburn, hiatus hernia, regurgitation, cough at night, acidity, indigestion, bloating of course is a cardinal symptoms. These are all gut symptoms that we can get which are typical of the apermenting gut. And some people think, oh, wait for those gut symptoms to arrive before I diagnose it. No, look at the bigger picture. Look at your energy levels. Look at how your brain's functioning. That gives you a much uh more important clue. And then of course um there are sometimes symptoms of lower gut problems such as constipation, slow gut transit time, noisy gut, um you know, borberigma as they're called when you hear it churning and rumbling away. Those may point to problems in the lower gut. And of course, pain and gut pain, muscle spasm is the most is the nastiest pain you can experience. Anybody any woman who's been in labor, you know, anybody who's had gallstones or um um renal stones can testify to the fact that muscle spasm is extremely painful. So any of those symptoms are going to tell you you've got gut problems. And the fact of the matter is all pretty much all western pathology starts in the gut. And it doesn't matter for what reason people come and see me, whether it's because they've got headaches or asthma or arthritis, I always start off sorting the gut out. And sometimes that's all you have to do for things to drop into place.

Now, as Dr. Mahill mentions, many symptoms can indicate a damaged gut. And the first step is to remove all the toxins that are causing these problems. But this is not just the foods that we eat. There are actually chemicals in our skinincare like parabens and phalates that can actually cause disease. They can disrupt hormones and even lead to insulin resistance because whatever goes in your skin can enter the bloodstream and go into the brain causing disease and long-term health issues. And when I found that out, that completely changed how I thought about my skinincare. Because I have healed so much through a highfat carnival diet, but I still didn't realize I was still exposing myself through chemicals through my everyday skinincare. And that's why we created the Primal Tow Balms as a chemical-free solution, which became really popular and they actually sold out. And I got so many emails from you saying, "What about a chemical-free body wash or a chemical-free soap?" Well, for the past few months, I've been making my own tallow soap and shampoo bar, and it's been a game changer, and it's really helped me with my sensitive skin, and I'm really excited to share that with you. Our tallow soaps are 100% natural and made from grass-fed, grass-finish tallow. They cleanse gently without stripping the skin and keep it hydrated and have even improved my skin texture. They also naturally contain fats soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K2 that our skin needs for proper hydration and health. And the best part is there's no nasties, there's no preservatives, there's no artificial scents. It is just pure tallow. And I personally love to use this unscented bar and I can even travel with it. It is amazing. And right now, the Primal is offering my viewers 20% off store-wide for the next 7 days. So, if you want to pick up a Tow soap or even a tallow balm, just head to shop.primal.com. There's also a link in the description.

Let's move on to how to fix and repair the gut and the microbiome. So, the first step that you call it is starve the bacteria. Now, let's first talk about the dietary protocols to do that. So, what is the fastest, quickest approach if somebody wants to starve and kill that bacteria? Well, as you rightly point out, we have to starve them out. It might be bacteria, it might be yeast, it might even be viruses, it might be parasites. This is why I deliberately call it upper fermenting gut because that doesn't imply an actual microbe. But the approach to treatment is exactly the same. Stop feeding them. And what makes bacteria and yeast um cells and viruses indeed different from human cells is they can only run on sugars and carbohydrates. Whereas human cells, we can happily run on fats and we should. That's the evolutionary correct fuel for our bodies. So we we do a very low carbohydrate diet. That is the starting point. And of course a very easy way to do that is the carnivore diet. Now I have my paleo ketogenic diet which I describe in in one of my um cookbooks, the PK cookbook. And some people say, well, can I have this? Can I have that? Can I have the other? Sometimes the carnivore diet is a very useful start because there's no doubt about that. We all know, you know, what's meat, what's fish, and what's eggs. It's simple. You have as much meat, fish, eggs as you like. And A, that's intrinsically low carbohydrate. And B, it's also low allergen because allergies are major driver of gut symptoms. Uh, and the the three common foods that come up time and time and time again are the gluten, grains, dairy products, and yeast. And of course, the carnivore diet is free from all three of these those things. So, if you really want the shortest route to um getting a result, then you start off with the carnivore diet. The thing about microbes in the gut, as I say, once they're comfortably ensconced, you know, they want to stay there, you know, and so they track from two forms. They track from a form where they're they're alive and actively fermenting and they've got some food on board and they're busy fermenting away. And guess what? These microbes, they can double their numbers every 20 minutes. They're fantastically able to reproduce themselves. But when there's no food coming along, they go into a a quiet phase. They go to sleep. They go into a cystic phase where they just hide and think, well, I'll just keep a low profile until some more food comes along. And though that cystic state can be very persistent. It can last for for weeks and maybe months and who knows, possibly years. So, in parallel with starving them out with a ketogenic diet, what I also like to do is kill them. And I've got three favorite tools that I use. The first is vitamin C. Vitamin C contact kills all microbes. And all humans are deficient in vitamin C because we can't make our own vitamin C. So it's humans, fruit bats, and guinea pigs that can't. So those sheep out in the field in front of me, my little dog Nancy who's sitting beside me, they can make their own vitamin C from from protein, from sugar. But humans lost that ability. And um Lionus Pauling, very clever man, won two Nobel prizes. He devoted the last third of his life to the study of vitamin C. And by calculating what other animals make, he decided that humans all need five grams of vitamin C daily for optimal health. Um now I find many of my carnivores can get away with less than that because I think much of that vitamin C is used up in the business of treating the upper fermenting gut. But five grams which is about a rounded teaspoon of vitamin C. It's very cheap and it guess what it's also highly protective against heart disease, highly protective against dementia. You highly protect against degeneration and so on. So it's a it's a very good allrounder to take. The second thing I love everybody take is iodine. Again like vitamin C, iodine contact kills all microbes and it does much other good for the body. You know obviously it's vital for the thyroid gland. It's vital for our mental health. You know, the average IQ of humans is currently falling and much of that can be attributed to chronic widespread iodine deficiency. So, it's great for the uppering gut. It's essential for the immune system. We concentrate iodine on mucous membranes because that helps protect us from infection. It's essential for the immune system to function tall. Um um it helps us to de detoxify heavy metals. It's a very good antioxidant even more so than vitamin C. So I like everybody to take lugal iodine 15% three drops in a glass of water last thing at night. And another of um multitasking tool which I'm uh exploring at the moment is methile sulfonylmethane MSM. It's the biologically available form of sulfur. Uh and we are all deficient in it. And again it's very good for the for the gut because in the upper gut which is aerobic which is oxygenated um it kills microbes but in the lower bowel which is anorobic no oxygen it acts a prebiotic it feeds the microbi feeds the friendly microbiome uh there so those are three tools that I use in addition to the paleoc gut to cure the upper fermenting gut and guess what it works really well in fact I've written a book called the infection game and I was in that book I asked myself the question I wonder if any of these things have been used to treat helicoacttop pylori now most people have heard of helicoacttop pylori is the microbe that drives douadal ulcers gastric ulcers and causes much inflammation it's one of the upper gut fermenttors and I found a polish study and they took 30 odd patients 36 patients I think and all they did um was give them five grams of vitamin C a day to treat their helicopact pylori. And when I looked at this, I thought, "Oh, there's no way that's going to work cuz you're still feeding them with sugar and carbohydrates. You're not doing anything else." And to my astonishment, that alone cured 30% of those cases. So, I was impressed by that result. But my view is if you combined that with a keto diet and um you gave them iodine and maybe MSM as well, you would get a much better response rate. And guess what? I've had several patients that have cleared their helicopact pylori simply with these simple nutritional interventions because the alternative is heavy duty antibiotics and PPIs and and that's going to mess with your friendly microbes in the microbiome. So, um these interventions say they're intrinsically safe and we should all be doing them.

Absolutely. I want to go back to specifics around how to first starve the microbes. So as I mentioned I mentioned bacteria but it's actually microbes. So they're a collection of yeast, bacteria, fungi, all these little things. There's good guys, there's bad guys. They all do a job, but we want to have a balance. We want to have the good, but take away all the bad, which is coming from toxins and not just from foods, but our everyday environment. So step one is to starve that bacteria. We mentioned the role of a carnivore diet. I just want to ask some questions around there because I know people are going to have questions about vitamin C because they probably think gosh but if I'm carnivore I don't need vitamin C ascorbic acid because I get enough from all the food I'm taking. So I'll answer I'll ask that question a bit later but first question getting back to the food. What exactly should you not be eating? So step one no carbs no sugars. Is that right? Keep them as low as possible. uh I mean um I wouldn't say no carbs and no sugars because actually sugar does have an essential role to play in the body. So much so that if we're completely sugar and carbohydrate starved the body will make sugar from protein. It's the raw material from which we make DNA and RNA which is obviously essential for the genetic code. It's essential material to make ATP which is the energy molecule and it's an essential for detoxification in the liver scheme called glucuronidation. So some sugars in the diet are essential for the body. The problem is they're so addictive and we tend to overeat them and then the body burns them off to get rid of them. So you know it uses them a fuel to get them out the way effectively because we should be running on fat and fiber. So, um so they do have a role but a very limited role um and too much will be will just feed the fermenttors in the upper gut. So yeah, low carbohydrate is absolutely the starting point. So if somebody wants to introduce that type of way of eating, what should they specifically eat if they're eating a little bit of carb? Is it like leafy greens, low um oxalate greens, that kind of thing? Well, you whatever is necessary to stay in ketosis. And this is where tests can be very helpful. And the the thing is you don't have to be in ketosis all the time. You know, primitive woman was not in ketosis all the all the time. In the autumn, there was a a windfall of free food, wasn't there? There was there was loads of fruit, loads of nuts, loads of you know root vegetables and grains and she would have switched on her carbohydrate addiction gene and she would have eaten these foods in an addictive way. And that has evolutionary benefits because by doing that she would have got fat. And getting fat in the autumn is essential survival value for the winter. It's your own personal pantry that a insulates you and keeps you warm and b you nobody else can steal that food, can they? You know, it's all, you know, we we hear about squirrels, you know, storing nuts in the winter, but you know, sometimes they can't find those nuts and they might starve as a result, whereas we, you know, we can always access those fat stores. So, switching in and out of ketosis um is no bad thing. Um um but we just but the problem with modern western diets is we're out of ketosis all the time. We're running on sugars and carbs all the time. So most of the time we want to be in ketosis. But for the occasional feast and guess what? Of course I feast occasionally. You know I'm a keen gardener. At the moment I had a Victoria plum tree that's ripe and the plums are absolutely divine and I can't resist them and I feast on them and I probably knock myself out of ketosis. But it doesn't matter for a short window of time so long as you get back on the wagon. I've got some friends coming to stay this week and they're all carnival. So guess what? I have a carnival week ahead of me. Um so the the answer is to ring the changes and not be stuck in all the time. What's very useful is to measure your ketone levels. And I've experimented with breath ketones and with urine ketones, but really and truly the best are blood ketone tests. And um um and they're a bit of a pain to do. I know that. and they're a bit expensive, but you don't have to do many to to know where the balance lies. So, what what you have there's a little kit you can get. I use one called Keto Mojo. When you prick your when you prick your um uh yourself to get some blood, don't do don't never prick your finger because you destroy the little nerves there. So, always I do the fat pad that's just at the ball of my um base of my little finger or the base of the thumb. So, give it a good squeeze. it goes pink and then um it's almost painless and you can get a little drop of blood. But that will tell you if you're producing ketones and pretty much any amount of ketones will do because the body will always get rid of sugar first and once it's got rid of the sugar then it'll switch into ketones. Now obviously there's a there's a switchover patch where you've got part ketones, part sugar, but I'm satisfied with any amount of ketones. For cancer patients, I want much higher levels of ketone because um ca again cancer cells are like bacteria um and yeast. They can only run on sugar. So for my cancer patients, I'd be much tougher with the diet. But for other people who are who are normally healthy and well um I'm satisfied with with any positive ketone test.

Okay, so that makes sense. So, when I asked about what foods to eat, it's more about keep the carbohydrates as low as possible to get some ketones. And we want to test the ketones, blood ketones, because people want to know this information. And I do want to help people understand what to eat, what not to eat. Because surprisingly, people will do a carnivore diet and then they're hearing that fruit and honey are healthy for you, and they're like, "Well, not really. You should not be having that." So, uh, test your ketones. Why is ketones or being in ketosis so important to fix your gut? Because if you're in ketosis, then you can infer that you are you don't have um um an upper fermenting gut. Um because you need sugars and carbohydrates to ferment the upper gut. If the sugars and carbohydrates are not there, then you can't have an upper fermenting gut. And being in ketosis uh tells us that the sugars and carbohydrates, you know, are not there.

Absolutely. Okay. So it makes sense that when people want so doctors say be in ketosis and it doesn't matter what the number is as you mentioned earlier. So even if it's 3.5 or one it's okay. I get this question a lot that people say why aren't my numbers high enough. I'm not measuring high ketones. Doesn't matter if you're measuring anything at all. It's perfectly fine. And as you said you can be in and out right of ketosis and still have good health and fix your gut. Correct. But again you have to listen to the symptoms as well. you know it's you know it's a sliding scale because as you as you as the as the levels of sugars come down so the levels of ketones um build up so there is a bit of a crossover I mean a very very good way to get into ketosis and get your sugars down is to exercise because as soon as you exercise you burn off all that sugar and the other important point about exercise and keeping physically strong is having a a large muscle mass increases your basil metabolic rate and again that helps to clear sugar out the system. This is why it's such a problem for the patients I see with chronic fatigue syndrome because they're unable to exercise. They don't have large muscle mass and so they have to be even more strict, even more tough with the diet. So, um you know and and for athletes uh this is a very particular problem. So, if I was, you know, I don't pretend to be um an expert trainer, but if I had an endurance athlete who was doing um marathons, you know, iron man challenges, you know, um uh endurance stuff, then I would want them in ketosis all the time because um we, you know, it's a very efficient way of getting energy to muscles and improves your power weight ratio in addition. So, for example, um Michael Morton holds the world record for the furthest distance run in 24 hours. He's a keto adapted athlete. He didn't have to eat. Yes, he had to drink and have some electrolytes, but he ran twi. Now, if I had a power athlete who was a sprinter or a shotputter or a weightlifter, then in the short term, sugar is rocket fuel. in the short term, you can get that little bit more power out of of of running on sugars and and and carbs. So, I would train those athletes on a ketogenic diet. But for a a world, you know, um winning performance, I'd want some sugar and carbohydrates in there to give them that extra little bit of angel dust, as the athletes call it, that little bit of extra to give them the edge on others. It always has to be seen in the clinical context. And the point is is once you're an experienced, you know, keto person, you know when you're in ketosis. You don't have to, you know, religiously measure and see and see and see. You know, you know instinctively when you are there. And there are lots of useful symptoms that give us a clue, which I detail in the PK cookbook. For example, you don't get hungry. You don't get tummy rumbles and um um um well, you may, but you ignore them and they just go away. You don't get power dips. Very often people say, you know, um, running on sugars and carbides, oh, I have to have a snack in the middle of the morning because my brain runs out of energy, my body runs out of energy and and and I have to have a a Mars bar or a piece of fruit or something to whip me up again. That disappears on a keto diet. Your energy levels are absolutely constant again. What follows blood sugar fluctuations going up and down are um as adrenaline levels going up and down and cortisol levels going up and down. So, as soon as you have your uh breakfast of, you know, um um half a pint of orange juice with some toast and marmalade and and and cereals and all that, your blood sugar will be go flying up. And as the blood sugar goes flying out, of course, sugar is so damaging to the body. It's sticky stuff. It's sticky in the hands. It's sticky in the arteries. Um the body cannot permit that. So, it's uh produces insulin and insulin brings the blood sugar down very rapidly. It brings it down by shunting it into insulin. So, this is another reason why people running on sugars and carbohydrates struggle to lose weight because insulin levels are constantly spiking or constantly high. And when you're in insulin mode, you're in fat laying down mode. So, you can feel starving, hungry, but you're still laying down fat. But what follows that spike of insulin as the blood sugars come down is a spike of adrenaline. And so, people feel wired but tired. They've got this high level of adrenaline making them feel, you know, on edge as if you drunk 20 cups of coffee, but they haven't got the energy to live up to those demands. And um anxiety, you know, um um nervousness, tremor, shaking, we call it hypoglycemia, but actually it's not hypoglycemia, it's symptoms of adrenaline. That's what you get when you're running on sugars and carbohydrates. So getting into ketosis, as soon as you've you've you know been in ketosis and and confirmed that with some blood tests, you know what it feels like. And you know, guess what? We're we are a nation of addicts. In fact, we are a species of addiction. We naturally get addicted to things. And um what characterizing addiction is short-term gain and long-term pain. And you know, people fool themselves constantly. And sometimes I do as well. I'm fooling myself with my Victoria plums in my garden at the moment, which are particularly delicious. But guess what? They'll

only be here for a few days and then they'll be gone and and and I'll be back into ketosis again. So, um uh we fool ourselves with addiction and and we use that whether it's caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, you know, um or illegal addictions like cannabis, heroin, we use it for short-term gain and long but it's long-term pain. So, when you get out of that addictive ups and downers, you know you've really arrived.

I thought it was fascinating that you are at this almighty doctor, but you know that you're fooling yourself with that little fruit that you're having. So you think you know that, okay, so I need like a short period of time, but I'm getting back to my proper paleo ketogenic diet. That's very important, especially when people are not moderators. They tend to be abstainers, especially in the carnival realm. And it's natural to have this addictive personality to carbohydrates and sugars. I myself cannot stop if I start. That's why carnival works for me. And that is the basis of my addiction test. So if you gave me a packet of cashew nuts, I wouldn't dare have one nut because the whole packet would disappear. It's the same with if you gave me a bar of chocolate, you know, I wouldn't dare have one square because the whole bar would disappear. The threshold is about the 90% chocolate. I can have 90% or 100%. I just have one square. I don't want anymore. The low carb nuts like Brazil nuts or macadamia or walnuts, I'll have a couple and I don't want any more. But you give me peanuts or cashew nuts and they say the whole bag disappears. So that's my personal addiction test. And you ask any alcoholic, you know what alcoholics celebrate? They celebrate complete abstinence. They know they can have they can't have one drink because then you know they're not happy until they're completely blotto. So that's how I know I'm not an alcoholic. You know, occasionally at the weekend I'll have a gin with fizzy water and lemonade. That's my alcoholic drink. And I only need one and I don't want any more. But, you know, if you gave me a high carb, you know, a sweet in a lucure or something and I'd be drinking drinking. Oh, that's nice. Oh, that's nice. Oh, that's that tells me it's not the alcohol I'm addicted to. It's the sugar. So, use a personal addiction test and that will give you a good idea of of what you can and can't have.

Now, as Dr. Mahill mentions, most of us are addicted to sugar and carbohydrates. So, the best way to fix your gut is to actually get control of your appetite and simply drop the carbs to under 50 grams a day. But some people need to even drop it to zero carb. And with a zero carb or a carnivore diet, I have seen so many success stories. People reversing chronic health conditions like heart failure, thyroid issues, or even diabetes, all while losing weight while eating more food, more fat, and more protein. And I experienced the same when I went carnival 5 years ago. And what I found completely helped me and my community stay on track was medical support through Carnival doctors because I had the same questions as you. What about my cholesterol? How much protein and fat should I be eating? Well, that's why I created a private online community called Go Carnival, which is completely off social media. This is a safe place for you to ask all of your questions to our favorite carnival doctors, including the ones that you see on this health podcast. One of the best features about our community are our monthly challenges. We do challenges like our highfat challenge, even our dairyfree challenge, and our protein challenge. And this is where our members get the best results. So, if you want to try Carnival with the medical support, just head to go carnival.com and try your free 14-day challenge and start your free meal plan.

Let's focus on what to eat. So, what are the most effective superfoods, cheap superfoods that people need to eat to fix their gut? Obviously, I love carnivore and people forget about awful because awful is the most delicious and the most nutritious foods and it's very inexpensive. Um so liver, kidneys, heart um are great great superfoods and um by lightly frying them, whizzing them up with butter and salt and pepper, you can make a delicious, um pate, for example. Uh I am a great fan of paleo bread, which is made from linseed. And you, you know, there's no way you can buy this um in inexpensively, but you can make it yourself very cheaply and very easily. And in my PK cookbook, there's a recipe there for PK bread. And it looks like bread. It tastes like bread, but it's only 2% carbohydrate. I mean, when I started be to become an advocate of of a paleo kegenic diet, I realized that people are always going to miss bread. And I had to make a bread substitute. So, I got up every morning early for about four months and experimented with a whole range of grains and ingredients and this that and the other. Then came up with my PK bread. And I can make a I actually make a flatbread these days because it cooks more reliably. I can make that in less than 10 minutes. And if you've got bread and you've got butter, uh okay, you you can be allergic to dairy, but it's unusual to be sensitive to butter. Or you can use vegan butter. Then that's a great start. And then on that you can have, you know, tin meat. I'm very happy for people to have tin fish, tin meat. So my lunch is often a tin of sardines or tin of of mackerel or something like that. I think I've got some tin salmon. uh wild Alaskan salam for lunch today. That with the PK bread, you know, it's not expensive. It's very filling and it's and it's very nourishing. But eggs are not too expensive. Um I say cheap cuts of meat, they're the they're always the best. You don't have to have the the top stakes. You know, fish, I'm very happy people have frozen fish and you can get packs of, you know, frozen cod and I have mackerel, I have smoked mackerel, I have cods in my fridge freezer all the time. They defrost very quickly. So, you know, they are, you know, um, you know, reasonably inexpensive and and nourishing. And then you need something for what I call the crunch factor. Of course, I'm very lucky. I'm a gardener and at the moment in the garden, I've got peppers and I've got um lettuce and rocket, which gives me that nice crunch factor and celery. Celery is easy to grow and ciler easy to grow, you know, raw carrots, um, raw cabbage that gives us the nice, you know, crunch factor as I call it. And I pretty much live live on meat and vegetables. You know, those are my those are my staple foods. I uh say occasionally I have low carb carb nuts, but they are expensive. So Brazil's and hazelnuts and walnuts, they're expensive, but they're nice for a treat. Again, dark chocolate, that's expensive, but you know, I don't crave that anymore. So, I'm I'm ashamed. So, I've never actually totted up the costs of a week's food. But then I'm a gardener so I I'm I'm making I'm growing quite a lot on my own. So it can be done inexpensively but don't forget awful. You know awful is um is inexpensive, absolutely delicious and very nutritious. Very nutritious. Absolutely.

So it's good to incorporate all of these cheap and nutri nutrient-dense foods including the organ meats. Um and then if people can tolerate vegetables because I know that many people in the carnival space maybe they don't tolerate the vegetables. So, if they do want to focus on the meat only, that's fantastic. What are your thoughts about bacon? Is that good for gut health? No problem at all. Bacon, I mean, bacon is is very, you know, um gets a bad press because the nitrites in it, but there are nitrites in vegetables. And if you're taking vitamin C, I mean, the only risk of nitrites is they get um converted into nitrosamines. And yes, they're nasty toxic chemicals, but um with vitamin C on board, that just doesn't happen. So, I'm very happy to recommend um bacon. In fact, I was just listening to I've just been reading Clarissa Dixon's Wright's book, A History of English Food, and the staple food, the poor man's food, the peasants food in the in the 10th, 11th, 12th century was bacon and eggs. That's what they powered themselves with. Everybody had a pig. Everybody had hens. I'm very lucky. I've got pigs and hens. And that was their food that powered them through the day. And uh look at Nelson's Navy. What did they eat there? Salt pork. They lived on salt pork and peas. and they achieve great things on the back of that boiled peas. So, um you know, bacon is a very good food. I mean, of course, Nelson's Navy, they didn't have vitamin C. They some of them succumb to scurvy, so I'm not recommending that uh for solely, but you know, there's nothing wrong with bacon at all. Ham, salami, that's all part of my carnivore diet. Brilliant.

Okay, let's move on to the three things that you mentioned earlier to help also kill the microbes, the bad bacteria, yeast, and fungi. So, you mentioned the iodine. Uh, carnivals love their iodine. How much do you need? What brand do you take? How often? Okay. Well, the cheapest brand of all is Lou Gold's iodine. On my shop, I've got a 30 mil pot, which I think costs £7. And that'll last you for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. And um, if you're a sick person, then always start off with a tiny dose um, and build up gradually. And I like people depending on their weight to take two or three drops in a glass of water last thing at night. Um and by time I go to bed my stomach is empty. So I'm taking three drops of iodine um on an empty stomach. Now the joy of iodine is it contact kills all microbes at 10 parts per million. So a very weak solution will have a profound effect on on gut flora in the upper gut. And because it's completely absorbed and excreted in the kidneys, it protects the kidneys from infection, but it doesn't get to the microbiome. So, it doesn't kill the friendly microbes in the microbiome. The only thing you have to remember about iodine and vitamin C is you have to separate them out. One of them kills because it's um, you know, one's a reducing agent, the other's an oxidizing agent. One's an electron donut, one's electron receiver. I can never remember which way around, but it doesn't matter. What you have to remember is separate them by at least two hours. So the way I remember take my supplements is in my bathroom. I have a couple of shelves and as I'm brushing my teeth in the morning, oh my eye falls on the top shelf. Oh, I mustn't forget me multivitamin and my CoQ10 and my vitamin C. And then it looks about, oh, I mustn't. And then in the evening, oh, I mustn't take my iodine and my joint mix or whatever it is that I'm taking. So the point about all these regimes is they've got to be easily and simply moved into your life. you know, if they're very expensive or they're um difficult to do or they take time, guess what? You'll do them for a couple of weeks, then you'll forget about them. So, it's got to be frictionless as possible, you know. Uh if if your life is as frictionless as possible, you then means you have the time and the energy to do all the fun things. Um so, my regimes, I say, I like to keep them very simple, very easy, so they can be readily incorporated and um and and therefore sustainable in the long term.

Absolutely. So you mentioned the iodine, we mentioned the vitamin C earlier. So five grams a day. Everybody should be taking that along with if they're doing a carnival diet. Um last one you mentioned was MSM, which is organic sulfur. Now we do have to be careful about that. Don't take that forever. How much, how often? And how do you have that with the vitamin C and iodine? Okay. Well, again, it's fast evolving into my f another of my favorite multitasking tools because it does so much good stuff. Now, the fact of the matter is we are all deficient in sulfur. Not my words, but the words of Stephanie Senaf, who is a um a highly qualified researcher in America. We're all sulfur deficient. And sulfur is so important for connective tissue, for detoxing, for getting rid of heavy metals, um for improving four-phase water. And I could talk all day about fourth phase water, but again, that reduces the friction in the system. And the joy about I mean there are many biological sulfers we can use like nastycyine like glutathione but they're expensive. The joy of MSM is it's very cheap and you can safely take it in gram amounts. So I can buy a kilogram of organic MSM for about 30 quid. That's a fraction of the price of glutathione and acetylcy and so on and it does uh so much good. And because we're all deficient, I mean, the carnivores probably won't be deficient because there's lots of sulfur and meat and connective tissue, but um we should probably all be taking maybe half a teaspoon daily on in the long term. But for the purposes of improving health or for detoxification, uh protection against cancer, for example, then I advocate 10 grams a day for a window of time of 3 months. Now, these are not my words. These are the words of a doctor in America called Dr. GI Janelle. I'll send you my MSM handout that details the benefits. But the point is it doesn't taste too awful. Uh, one of the things that all carnivores does do is you will have bone broth on the go all the time. I've in a slow cooker. In the winter I have my wood burning stove going so it sits on the back of my wood burning stove bubbling away. And um uh so I have a cup of bone meal bone broth in the middle of the morning and then I put in um half a teaspoon of MSM. Doesn't taste awful. With a pinch of my sunshine salt. It's absolutely delicious. It's a a real high point in the morning that I look forward to. Oh, brilliant. And also, your sunshine salt is very interesting. It's molden salt with 14 different minerals that's added in there. I'm going to leave that in the show notes. I really wanted to buy that. I thought, "Oh my god, this is amazing. I really want that." Everyone needs more minerals, even if you're on a carnivore ketogenic diet.

Last topic is just how to detox heavy metals in general. So you have a protocol which is different things but the first one was a heating protocol. Why is that important if you want to detox heavy metals, pesticides, glyphosate? No. No heating won't do heavy metals. Okay. So the heating regimes um I mean the fact matter is we're all poisoned. I have a whole lecture on this but just take my word for it. We're all poisoned. You know I've done fat biopsies. I've done blood tests. I've never found a normal result. We are all toxic. Now I split up the toxins into the mechanisms by which they're detoxed. So we as we've discussed you can get rid of many toxins with the liver and the liver needs energy and raw materials to do that. But the toxins that don't get to the liver that don't arrive there that get stuck in fat the liver can't do those because they don't get to the liver. So uh we have many toxins stuck in our fat and we can get rid of those with heating regimes. Now any heating regime will do. going for a run, um sunbathing, um if you if you're lucky enough to have a sauna, fantastic. Far infred sauna, fantastic. Epsom salt bars, brilliant. So, spa therapies because what the heat does is it warms up the the subcutaneous fat and shakes up these molecules so they diffuse onto the lipid layer on the surface of the skin. And from the lipid layer of the surface of the skin, we can then wash them off. So, the washing off is as important as the heating regime. So go for a run and then have a shower. You know, go for sunbathing and then later on have a shower. Epsom salt bath of course does both because you're in the bath soap. So the toxins are coming out onto the lipid layer of the skin and you're washing them off simultaneously. And as we speak, I'm putting together a detox cream which basically is a mixture of organic coconut oil, sheia butter with vitamin D in there and vitamin C in there. And the idea is you put these nice clean organic oils on your skin. The chemicals mobilize from the fat into those organic oils and make the whole business so much more efficacious and efficient. And of course, those things are also very good for the skin. So that's how we get rid of the pesticides and the volatile organic compounds.

Now, heavy metals are different. Heavy metals, they don't get to the liver because they get stuck in our tissues. So if you're deficient in a mineral like zinc or magnesium or selenium then the body will grab something that looks similar and that something that looks similar might be aluminium or cadmium or lead or mercury or something or arsenic and they get incorporated into the tissues. In fact I read a paper once showing that the levels of mercury in the heart are 10,000 times harder than those in the bloodstream. It just illustrates the point. those metals get stuck in there and once stuck in there they don't come out through the kidneys they don't come out through um through heating regimes we have to use a chilating agent to get rid of them now chilate comes from the Greek it means a claw a crab's claw and these chilating agents will grab hold of the heavy metals and they'll pull them out through the urine and you know um popular ones things like EDTA DMSA DMPS these are very good chilating agents but they're expensive and my poor patients Pats who don't have the money can't afford introvenous collation therapy maybe they can't afford even the oral collation therapy which is expensive and I had a patient who came to see me lovely guy Frank Dalton so I'm not breaking data protection act um who um was really interested in heavy metals and we were doing chalation tests for him with urine um every six months for a couple of years and what was so fascinating is when he took the collation initially yep we got a spike of mercury got a spike of dead. They all came out. But I then started on MSM for another reason, for his gut problem. And when he repeated that collation test, we suddenly saw big spikes of bismouth, of tungsten, um um of of platinum, of tin, you know, things that hadn't come out before. And most importantly, of aluminium because we're all poisoned with aluminium. And I was so excited by that because um and it suggested to me that that there are a whole range of toxic metals we've got on board that MSM is good at pulling out. So as we speak, I'm setting up a little study. Uh and that's with the help of my lovely patients. And the deal is that um um they're all going to do a a heavy metal test using MSM. Um they have the bad news is they have to pay for the test which cost £135. They have to pay for the MSM which cost30 but they get a free interpretation from me. So that's my bit of the study and then we're collecting the results. It's going to be called a citizens paper. So anybody who takes part of it is going to be a named author on the paper. And the joy about doing this is we don't have to get ethical committee approval because you can anybody can experiment on themselves and everybody will be shared in the results as we go along. so people can see the results as they come in that nobody is suffering that it's safe that it's pulling out these heavy metals and then we'll publish that in the journal of orphan molecular medicine. So uh but I've got pretty good circumstantial evidence already that MSM is good at pulling out heavy metals and if we can confirm that with this citizens paper then that will become the method of choice for removing heavy metals. Wow, that's amazing.

So, with all the protocols that you're mentioning, people can not only fix their gut, but take away all of the toxins, pesticides, heavy metals with those three additional supplements. Cheap and cheerful as always. Last question for you, a quick fire one. Uh, three questions, yes or no answers. Do you think that fiber fixes the gut? No. What about apple cider vinegar? Good or bad? Um, it's very good to help the acidity of the upper fermenting gut to help to digest and keep it sterile. But the people allergic to yeast could be made worse by it. Interesting. And I've heard milk keier is helpful for the gut. Is that true? I doubt it. And I say that because milk is a major allergen. Keer contains yeast which is a major allergen. And you are not going to change the microbiome by eating something or you're not going to change it very much because those microbes should be killed by an acid stomach. What's so fascinating is I found a paper um looking at the microbiome of a carnivore and what's so interesting is it's just as healthy and just as diverse of an as that of an omnivore. Um so carnivore diets are not bad for the microbiome.

One last note, the single most dangerous thing from the for the microbiome is glyphosate. Glyphosate is a pesticide widely used in the whole of chemical farming. It can kill up to 54% of the microbes in the microbiome. That is very bad news. And we're consuming um glyphosate in very high amounts. How are we having glyphosate? It's in our food. If you have a food that is chemically farmed, it's from it's from glyphosate. Glyphosate is used as a desicant. What that means is just before it's crop is harvested. So if you got a if you got a field of wheat, what you want is you want to harvest it dry because that saves drying costs in the grain store. And so just before harvesting, the whole field is sprayed with glyphosate. It kills the wheat because it's dead. It stands in the field and it dries out very quickly. But then when you harvest it, it's full of glyphosate. And that's not the only stage of harvesting that glyphosate is used. It's used a weed suppressant as a herbicide. You know, it's used throughout um the farming industry. It's the single greatest used pesticide in the world today. And it's extremely nasty, toxic stuff. So, this is why I don't like my poor patients spending a lot of money on expensive supplements and detox regimes. I want them to spend their money on the best food they can possibly get. Now, meat is going to have a far lower pesticide burden than vegetables and fruit. So, you go as carnivore as you possibly can. Do the detox regime because that will help to reduce the load. And when you do buy vegetables or fruit, try to go for organic. Now, my daughter lives down in Brighton. She has an organic food box um that comes and she spits I think it cost her 20 pounds a week and she says there all the vegetables and fruit that she can eat in a week and for 20 a week delivered to her door and she gets whatever's in season. So, um this time of year, she'll get some some Victoria plums, I expect, and some and a few raspberries maybe, but then she'll get some vegetables, you know, some some lettuce and some tomatoes and some cucumbers. and in the winter she'll have more potatoes and parnips and sweets, but you know it is doable if you shop around um and look for what's best. Brilliant.

Dr. Mahill, thank you so much for your time. How can people find you if they want to see more of your work? Oh, just go to my website drmhill.co.uk. Um I noticed it got had 32 million hits since its inception in 2014. So it's well used. There's no advertising permitted on there. Um, all the techie works have been done very generously by Terry Ellison, who's a incredibly generous guy. Um, so it doesn't cost me anything. Well, it cost me a little bit to keep it open, but it's free for everybody um to have. I wish I could put all my information on there, but I do have some books and if I put all the chapters of my books on there, then my publisher, you know, will have me hung, drawn, and quartered. So, um, there are some books as well that you're most most welcome to purchase, of course. Um, but but much of it is on the website freely available for all. Perfect. All those links are going to be in the show notes. Dr. Myill, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me today on this episode with Dr. Sarah Myill. Now, if you're learning from and enjoying these free episodes, please feel free to hit the subscribe button. That's an excellent zerocost way to support what we do here. You can also find me on other social media accounts on Instagram and on X under the name of the Primal Podcast. And if you love this episode, check out this one by Mary Rodic. It is all about how to fix the gut microbiome and the worst foods that you're eating every single day that is slowly destroying your gut. Finally, thank you for your interest in root cause healing and I'll see you next week.