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Podcast 122: Success with Diet and Nutrition

Leaky Gut, Dysbiosis, Fermentation, Serotonin

After both conventional and alternative medicines failed him and 70 health professionals in seven countries put him through more than 500 different – and often bizarre – treatments, he was sent home in a wheelchair to die. Jordan Rubin fought his way back to vibrant health through determination and a refusal to “give in” to his disease. He believes his survival is a true testament to the power of his faith in God. In the seven years since his recovery, he has shown no symptoms of the disease that nearly took his life.

You can order the book: “The Maker’s Diet” The 40 Day Health Experience That Will Change Your Life Forever. Discover how he overcame his problems and today lives a healthy vibrant life.

Podcast 122: Success with Diet and Nutrition

Scott: Welcome back everybody you are listening to the Life Enthusiast co-op online radio network restoring vitality to you and the planet. I am your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela. Hey Martin how are you doing today?

Martin: Today is yet another fine day and we are here and there is work to be done and I said we are not done until there is not a single vending machine left on the planet and I have my work cut out for me.

Scott: You do and we were just discussing last time diets and we talked about a couple of them and you know the story about and absolutely amazing young man and he was one of these people with had Crohns disease and there was nothing that could be done and he was written off and he showed what could happen when you get good nutrition.

Martin: Yeah right you were talking about Jordan Rubin now Dr Jordan Rubin the founder of a very successful company called Garden of Life I mean the company is wonderful I mean when he was running the company they were the most wonderful outfit with the utmost respect I have ever had. Since that time they have moved on so it has turned into a multimillion dollar company run by spread sheets and accountants and big time investors and it isn’t what it used to be but as far as the focus on quality products the focus is much more on success and marketing or whatever but Jordan’s story is just phenomenal I guess it was fifteen years ago at age nineteen when in a matter of a few months he lost something like eighty pounds and he was down from one eighty to one hundred and five like skeletal he was looking like the concentration camp pictures.

Scott: Right I am actually looking at a picture of him from before and after and he does look like he could be in a concentration camp and then after whatever happened he is looking like a typical young twenty year old hunk on a beach.

Martin: A hunk yeah but not just typical he is top class.

Scott: He is in great shape so what happened to him?

Martin: Well he had bad ecology in his gut you know it was just that the ecology in the gut, he was having the IBS irritable bowel and chromes and all of those symptoms of alternating, diarrhea and constipation and he was not absorbing nutrients so no matter what he ate he was just starving from the inside so I mean we could quote some things.

Scott: So how is that possible that you can be eating something and not getting any nutrition?

Martin: Well this is the gut it is just so underappreciated in our society I don’t know if people really are fully aware of this enteric system you know the nervous system that resides in your gut the fact that half of your nerve cells are actually in your gut so you could call it your second brain and perhaps your emotional brain because you can relate to this right most emotions.

Scott: We talk about when people get emotional you get stomach cramps or you feel it in your stomach far more then you feel it anywhere else.

Martin: Yeah that’s right you get butterflies from anticipation and you get this feeling like someone punched you in the gut with fear and all of these things and we have so many metaphors and sayings I mean society is well aware of it at the emotional and unconscious level.

Scott: Right but not at the conscious level so he was suffering from things like intestinal parasites, Candida, anaemia, food allergies, diabetes I mean he looks so thin with excruciating abdominal pain and frequent diarrhea, poor circulation, liver problems, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, arthritis, insomnia, hair loss, bladder infections, eye inflammation, depression he was a mess.

Martin: Absolutely a mess and so then what right?

Scott: Yeah so that is the bad news the good news is.

Martin: Well you know neither the mainstream medical science could help him but even the alternative health care back in 1994 couldn’t help him they did not have the right tools he had to actually go and invent the stuff for himself and this is typical you know if you go to a typical naturopath and they have just gone to school and that I call the green MD’s they don’t have the skills to be holistic like so many people are banding this term about oh I am a holistic doctor and I am a holistic health practitioner but very few really are they are all suffering from the same blindness like the societal blindness of chasing symptoms instead of going strategic and understanding the whole thing in its entire ecology.

Scott: Right the solution is this pill whether it is a herbal pill or a pharmaceutical pill it is the same problem.

Martin: Right and most everybody does not want to hear well you are going to have to change your lifestyle.

Scott: Let’s do anything but that.

Martin: Well most people would say don’t give me that just what supplement do I buy I mean I hear this so often what single most important supplement should I buy to help with my health or my digestive system and I say let’s start what you are putting in it tell me about your diet how do you eat?

Scott: I was actually speaking to a friend of mine today and he lost thirty or forty pounds and I said wow how did you do it and he said I only did one thing and I said what was that and he said I stopped eating sugar just like that and he said I dropped and I haven’t done anything else differently and I don’t think he was particularly a lazy person like he didn’t lazy around a lot and was a very active person so I think he has continued to be active even though he has cut out the sweets and he is just amazed that it is just melting off of his body.

Martin: Well we talked about this some time ago when you convince your body to switch from burning carbohydrates for burning energy to burning fat for energy you reset the brain that is controlled by the Leptin signalling system and I think he must of succeeded at that because when you reset the brain you actually lose your cravings for the carbohydrates but it takes about three weeks.

Scott: Yeah he has been doing it for about three months now well I said he started a few months ago so it has been a little while.

Martin: So anyway back to Jordan’s story his primary invention is called Primal Deference which is a soil based organism based probiotic shall we call it that and it is a good product but it has one single short coming which is that as long as you are taking it everything is fine when you stop taking it then it is over, meaning the benefits go away.

Scott: And you go back to where you were before.

Martin: Well it’s a required supplement you have to keep on taking it or else. you know fourteen probiotic strains that what should we say about it I actually just looked it up homeostatic soil organisms which is the good stuff you know when you take a carrot and pull it out of the ground out of soil that is rich in hummus and is rich in healthy organic biodynamic soil when you pull the carrot out you should be able to just swish it in a creek or a puddle and you should be able to start munching right there that carrot is going to be covered with thousands if not millions of little critters like nematodes and who knows what else that lives in the soil and what happens in our grocery stores is we wash this in chlorinated water in fact we probably soak it in chlorinated water so of course what happens is that the chlorinated water just kills it off.

Scott: Right because we don’t think of those things as things that are valuable.

Martin: I mean they are dirty you just look at the Lysol commercials on television what do they do? Well they show you that you have to spray your door handles and kitchen counters and toilet seats and everything else because oh my gosh there are these creatures and you need to wipe them out the sad thing of course when you do wipe them out you lose all of your resistance to the bad ones and you lose all of your access to the good ones. I don’t know if you have ever seen little children you know the crawlies like the ones that are still on all fours they put everything in their mouth and that is how they acquire all the bacterial stuff for their gut that they require. I mean a child let’s look back in the 1750’s before industrial revolution somewhere in a hut or a farm house or something like that this child is crawling on the floor between the chickens and the cats and the dog and sticking everything he finds in his mouth including the chicken poop and everything else right.

Scott: Yeah graphic image in my mind but it is true.

Martin: It is true, that’s how it went and so what do we have now we have the child so protected when he encounters something of this sort he is in trouble so now we need to go to a store and buy a soil based organism and supplement with that. So anyway the challenge with their approach to it while it is phenomenally healing that they don’t make that self colonizing. I guess it is good for their bottom line but it is not good for the consumer because you can never quit unlike something like the Exsula strata flora which is formulated by either a benevolent genius or a fool because he doesn’t put his own financial interest ahead right. So with the Strata Flora what you get is when you take some it establishes a little beach hut of the good terrain and then because it supplements all of the other elements that are required for this to grow it will actually culture it is sort of like growing a turf. I don’t know if you have actually watched it grown from scratch like one happy spring time start with bare dirt, first you cover it with mulch and then plant some seeds and then cover it some more mulch and then you water it every day and then a few days later these little wisps of teeny grass start growing and at that point if would stop watering, stop nourishing or taking good care of it the thing would die but if you keep feeding it you will establish a very decent lawn and by the second season it is going to properly matted and be a thick turf that you know if for instance in the middle of the summer the issue of the watering ban in your town, you could actually let it die out and then when the rain comes back in the autumn the lawn just greens up again and comes right back. That wouldn’t happen in the early lawn, that wasn’t well established and turfed and matted.

Scott: And you’ve got all that stuff in the soil too that may go dormant but it will come back once the moisture comes back as well.

Martin: Yeah that’s right so this is how I would like to illustrate the difference between a self colonizing culture and a commercial culture that is not intended to restore you to full functioning.

Scott: And the key here is the digestive system isn’t it?

Martin: Oh yeah right back to the very basic, if there is not the necessary terrain in your gut and I think the metaphor of the lawn is a good one because the villi in the small intestine are a lot like blades of grass and it needs to be thick enough and long enough to maintain this proper barrier. There needs to be certain electric tension between the villi. All of the nutrients need to pass through this barrier but they should be allowed to pass only when they are properly digested, they need to be small enough, they need to be taken apart so for instance you shouldn’t be passing proteins through you should only be passing free form amino acids because if you pass a protein through like under digested chicken or under digested wheat is what will happen when you have a leaky gut you all of a sudden have these proteins, instead of human proteins or chicken proteins or wheat proteins in your blood stream and your antibodies have to attack it because these are foreign invaders and now you have a full blown body allergy.

Scott: So one way of looking at it is there is this war going on and we are basically feeding the enemy.

Martin: Yes and this beginning is this fragile terrain in the villi of the small intestine that has to be long enough and thick enough to permit the passing of these nutrients through but not too soon.

Scott: As I am listening to you Martin what comes to mind is as you said is antibacterial soap and chlorine to kill the bad germs and of course germs itself has the condemnation of being bad so we think of ourselves as this life entity and I was just thinking of another analogy as opposed to these bad germs what is you’ve got a city in your stomach and you’ve got a lot of people that go to work every day trying to do the best job you can and you’ve got some gangsters.

Martin: That is an excellent metaphor and you could allow lawlessness to prevail in your city.

Scott: And if you do let lawlessness prevail in your city you are going to be sick.

Martin: Oh yeah the traffic breaks down and the cops stop showing up and soon enough one traffic light goes out and then another and another you know if you have one light blinking on amber all day long than that is one source of trouble but if you have a whole bunch of them than you are going to produce this grid-lock.

Scott: Well also a lot of these people are trying to do a good job and we need to protect these people and that’s the part that I think that we miss because oh there is a lot of criminals in there so just scoop everybody up and throw them in jail or kill them all or exterminate them all and we have no idea what a trauma that causes to our body.

Martin: Well true if you run a course of antibiotics which wipes out everything unless you bring the right troops in you end up in trouble because the tough guys are actually more resilient and they will proliferate quicker than the good guys and the balance is supposed to be about eighty percent of the good guys and twenty percent of the bad guys you know like the gangsters and if you get the balance the other way around you end up with intestinal dysbiosis where you get the leaky gut and you get the IBS irritable bowel syndrome and who knows what else.

Scott: You know I was just thinking of your analogy of the turf and the grass and that’s really true because if you look at your lawn and it is eighty percent grass and you have a few dandelions and some moss and a few other things like it still looks like a lawn right but if it is basically twenty percent grass and eighty percent dandelions than it doesn’t look like a lawn anymore it looks like a mess.

Martin: Yeah now it is a back lot of some disturbed soil.

Scott: That’s right.

Martin: That is actually a really good way of describing what’s going on. This whole thing there are about three to five pounds of bacterial culture in your body so if you were to kind of visualize it your forearm you know like your elbow down to the finger tip that is about three to five pound depending on what size of a person you are so that is about the size of the creature that is like an ant colony living inside of you.

Scott: And it is a good ant colony we hope.

Martin: Well this is the control we are talking about the importance of the gut health right. I mean in the gut you have all of the mood controllers to manufacture, and all of the opiates I mean your body actually manufactures these psycho-pharmacological substances. I mean all we are doing with the valium that some people would take your body is fully capable of making it by itself.

Scott: Yeah get high on life everybody.

Martin: Yeah and it is so popular lately to see these commercials on television that promote this pro-biotic yogurt you must have noticed it right?

Scott: Yeah.

Martin: And they usually have one or two and now one of them has three strains of pro-biotics.

Scott: Wow three.

Martin: In the Strata-Flora we put in forty-nine and that’s just a start. On top of that we put in fifteen strains of the soil based and we put in the natural ones like the kim chi and sauerkraut, kombucha and those types of ancient fermentation cultures. That is an interesting thing I have a friend who is teaching people how to ferment their foods now thinking I would like to introduce it to our viewers or listeners too.

Scott: So I think of fermentation as making beer.

Martin: Yeah good analogy.

Scott: So what, we are not talking about pickles, that’s not fermenting.

Martin: Well the original fermented pickles were fermented and then in the 1740’s I think it was they invented a pressure cooker and canning. Oh yeah canning was invented for the Napoleonic wars so 1790 to 1810, something like that because there was some phenomenal French fellow that worked on creating foods that they could can and pressurize that they could move for the French troops as they went marching into Russia. That was a big deal because you couldn’t find food in the middle of the winter right so if you could feed your troops with canned food, that’s good. The point here is that you can take natural fermentation and chop up cabbage and put it under pressure in a crock pot with a bit of salt, not much and by itself a process will begin which is driven by lactobacilli that will ferment all of the sugars that are in it from the sugars into the lactic acid and you can’t eat this thing straight you need to wash it out before you can consume it because it is so sour but the food itself is living, it preserved.

Scott: Preserved in a living form is what you are saying.

Martin: Right. What you have there is the enzymes are vital and working and even though this cabbage is a months old I mean it could be years I mean I have seen a bottle that was fermented or set on fermentation in 1989 and it is still living in perfect health and the point here is that culture, that self starts in the sauerkraut is the enzymatic environment that holds it. So anyway the natural process we definitely need to have the lactobacilli and all of these little critters that will start and we need to have them in an adequate supply because if we don’t we end up with gut problems that lead to problems with absorption either you are not getting the nutrients out or you are allowing under digested foods in.

Scott: And that’s not good either and we can see the reaction of the body when those things happen like with Jordan he had all these conditions and lost weight like crazy and it was pretty bad but I guess that’s what happens to us. It’s like a picture of the future if we live in a world that is sterile.

Martin: Oh yeah, that would just be the end of us. That is like the planet getting rid of the insects.

Scott: That’s not a good thing.

Martin: Well you may think of mosquitoes who needs those, let’s get rid of them and gallons of melathione are spilled all over the ditches of certain cities but when you eliminate the mosquitoes well the mosquito larva is an important food source for all kinds of water living creatures. You know you break the chain like the symbiotic chain of all things and its trouble. I heard a prediction that if you got rid of bees and we are actually threatening to do that we have four years as a civilization on the planet before we collapse.

Scott: That’s not good.

Martin: Anyway staying with the gut here is an interesting thing there is more serotonin produced in the gut than anywhere else in the body so people who are depressed have a lack of serotonin produced in the gut and they could take SSRI’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors which allows the serotonin to circulate longer so that your brain doesn’t notice that there is not enough of it. Interestingly a little bit of Prozac will get rid of diarrhea but too much Prozac will cause you terrible trouble. Oh I said it backwards; a small amount of Prozac will cure constipation.

Scott: And a lot of it will cause it.

Martin: Too much of a good thing.

Scott: Well that is really interesting and we are going to be talking about diets for the next few weeks because first of all there is a lot of misconceptions about what we should be eating and dieting on and what we need to get into our bodies and we really felt that it was important to spend some significant time on that and also here is a really good success story about Jordan Rubin and where he was when he was nineteen and where he is today because people didn’t really give him much hope in 1994 and today he is a vibrant healthy man it is just really cool so if you have a problem don‘t think that there is no hope. Get some information and work on making sure your body has everything it needs to build itself properly.

Martin: You said it, start in the gut.

Scott: So if you have a tummy ache you know who to call or who are you going to call. I was thinking that ghost busters three was going to be made in the next couple of years so who you going to call, ghost busters.

Martin: Okay gut busters. I don’t know how we are going to do it but we do have a lot of tools. I mean first and foremost when you find yourself in a hole you must find a way to stop digging but with that you can get some decent advice here and we can help you figure out the tools that you need to add to your program as always call us at 1-866-543-3388 or look us up on the website at www.life-enthusiast.com and you will find the podcast link on the website and you can click through to all the previous episodes and you can enjoy life. This is Martin for Life Enthusiast co-op restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Thank you for listening.