Podcast 109: Bowel Health and Fiber

To produce one pound of vegetarian protein (like hemp) takes a certain amount of water and resources. To produce one pound of meat protein takes 16 times more resources. So the meat eaters are a much greater load on the planetary resources than vegetarians. And the methane gas produced from livestock further exacerbates the climate issues.

Non-smelly flatulence with CO2 is normal, a common after effect of fermentation. But when it smells bad it’s a sign of stuff rotting inside of you. In the long run, that is dangerous, a serious cause for concern.

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Podcast 109: Bowel Health and Fiber

Scott: Welcome back everybody you are listening to the Life Enthusiast co-op podcast restoring vitality to you and the planet I am your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela, hi Martin how are you doing this fine day?

Martin: Winter is back, Scott. What have you done?

Scott: I don’t know I woke up this morning and it was an April fool’s joke what can I say we had an inch of snow and I just assumed you got a little too.

Martin: No snow just a cold wind that I can feel blowing from somewhere like brrr the Yukon.

Scott: Well we are all getting ready for spring and we have had a couple false starts I don’t know what to say.

Martin: I guess people were kind of confused about the global warming. You know I saw a lecture back in 1987 or 1988 with Darrel Coleman he was the CEO of the Algae company I forget the name now Klamath Blue Green algae they were the first people that brought it out and he was then already promoting saying look the CO2 content in the atmosphere is increasing rapidly, we are heading into real trouble and it is not just that the CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t going to cause warming it is going to cause greater extremes. He said it was going to be longer winters more intense winters, more intense summers, greater winds and more storms and general mayhem.

Scott: Yeah and look what happened in Australia during their summer and our winter they had some fierce fire storms in Victoria and New South Wales and they had some evidence that someone had started a few of these fires and they basically said we are calling this murder. If you start a fire and people die we are going to call you a murderer and punish you and prosecute you from that perspective and I wasn’t privy to all the editorials and the talk on the radio and all the stuff that was going on there because we live half a world away but I certainly got the impression that everyone was behind this guy when he was talking about it because hundreds and hundreds of people died because of the fires and lost their homes and animals and the destruction was just awful and they had extreme dry hot weather and any spark would just set it off.

Martin: Yeah I agree we had a pretty nasty fire here a couple of years ago near where I live about five or six years ago and significant portions of the town burned. It was the funniest thing it was the fancy upscale homes that got it because they all have these mini acreages in the forest or at least at the edge of town and right past them is this park the federal reserved land and that whole thing burned so now instead of a beautiful forest it is just black sticks any way part of the town just burnt down too and many houses went with it. It is very traumatic for the people that lose everything, it is a boost for the economy but it is a false boost because of course you have to spend money that you shouldn’t have to spend. So anyway I want to go back to the increased CO2 content in the atmosphere and how Al Gore and all these people are jumping to conclusions that are just wrong. You know he is calling the cause of this global warming the increased CO2 content and in fact the CO2 is tracking behind the climate change and not in front of it. The cause of this weather change is actually outside of the realm of what we can easily do because there was also global warming on Mars and Jupiter.

Scott: Yes I have heard that a lot of planets are increasing in heat but I am not sure if it is coming from the sun or what.

Martin: Yes it has to there is no other place for it to come from. So when the sun is increasing the activity it will warm up Jupiter, Mars and the Earth and no matter how many windmills we put up it is not going to make that much of a difference. The issue with the CO2 in the atmosphere that really in no joke because it does cause extreme weather. Well it is neither here or there I don’t feel like I have a lot to do with it other than the following, to produce a pound of protein that is vegetarian based like hemp or rice protein or something like that takes a certain amount of water resources. To produce a pound of flesh like cattle or pigs takes sixteen times more of the energy resources like water. So the meat eaters are a much greater load on the planetary resources than vegetarians.

Scott: Right and if you are looking at the population and getting the food for the six, seven or eight billion people that are living here now it is pretty obvious that you have to go the vegetarian route or way more vegetables and fruit than through the raising of cattle. Wasn’t there talk in the eastern sea board about all the methane gas the cows were producing through their flatulence and that would cause a lot of problems.

Martin: Yes that is right that is one of the recognized global warming influences.

Scott: It kind of reminds me of my son he came up here the other day and he had a bit of a CO2 explosion and I must say we had to open up all the windows and turn on all the fans and we had to leave the house for a couple hours as we let this big cloud disperse.

Martin: Okay well you know when you have flatulence the non smelly flatulence is just CO2 carbon dioxide that is just common we all have some flatulence going on. It is just a common after effect of fermentation but when it smells like this it is mercaptans and other nasty smelling gases and those are a sign of stuff rotting inside of him and that is dangerous. That is not just something you ate like beans, beans are noisy but they are not that smelly but when you get the smell that means he is rotting on the inside and that is a serious cause for concern.

Scott: And often times we just laugh this issue off which is one of the reasons we brought it up right it sort of like we just laugh it off in the teenage years or young twenties year olds and it is like a badge of honour.

Martin: It starts in childhood the fart jokes it is just so common right so yes I understand.

Scott: He was quite happy with the chaos he caused with his actions you know I think it is really weird because in our society people don’t like to talk about this stuff because this is a by-product of your digestive system and you get a real insight into how your body is working. I can recall when I was traveling through India or South east Asia in the seventies and eighties and you weren’t sure when you ate what impact that might have on your health right and when I am traveling and expelling digested food or remains of digested food out of my system I would always look and oh yeah it is shaped nice and it is not rancid and I am doing good. Of course in our society it just gets plunked into the toilet and flushed down as fast as it can and I am sure if nobody looked at it they would be quite happy. It seems to me that would be a good way to see what is going on in your body if the stool is nicely formed and is it reeking and is it really loose, does it float or does it not float? These are all questions that can give you an insight into how you are doing long before you have to go see a doctor to go get something done.

Martin: Excellent point your health truly does begin and end in your colon and two thoughts come to me, my parents back in Europe have a toilet that is quite popular about thirty or forty percent of toilets in Germany are still installed in this style which it is not a bowl of water it is actually like a pedestal or shelf so when you have your bowel movement that thing that you left behind is presented to you right up there not in water but in open air and when you flush it only then does it move into the water and disappear from view. So it is wonderful for me of course to come there and have the experience you just described knowing exactly how I am doing in the digestive system. You don’t even have to look for it because it is right there in your face all you have to do is turn around. So Germans are apparently quite with it still at least in large numbers and I actually have on my shelf a book written by Bernard Jensen which is Health through bowel management and it is one of those absolutely foundational works and he says if you are sick the first thing you have to address is your colon and you have to get that thing working. So going back to that smelly explosion you really should look after the boy, number one he needs to get more fiber into his diet and he should probably meditate on what it was that he ate that gave him that incredible experience.

Scott: So for fiber should I just go and get some fiber cereal or more vegetables or what would be some specific things that I might be able to actually get a sixteen year old to eat?

Martin: Well all of the above like celery and broccoli is more living food as opposed to all bran cereal but even that is better than nothing. You know the current average for the North American fiber intake is somewhere around six grams a day. The sort of acceptable decent is ten to twelve and we should have about thirty and the ancient man you know the Stone Age tribe man would typically have a hundred grams of fiber in his daily intake. So in the olden days you would have three or four very large volume bowel movements that would guarantee floats because the more fiber you have in it the more likely it is to float.

Scott: Can you say that again, how many bowel movements in a day?

Martin: Oh four or five like huge ones monster size two foot long ones.

Scott: So if you are going once or twice a day you have really got to pump up your fiber intake.

Martin: Well let me put it this way it is common for people to go less than once a day and they definitely have an issue. Once a day is sort of marginally okay you know once per every major meal is what it should be. You know a transit time of twelve or fourteen hours and a bowel movement that follows every major meal so if you have a breakfast at nine than before bed time that is when it should be leaving you and your dinner should be leaving you in the morning.

Scott: So there you go everyone if you are listening to this how often do you go and when are you going and how. I guess another thing is how hard is it to go because sometimes is it painful to go because the thing is just like a rock or does it just kind of come out. So Martin I think that is another issue because I know in my experiences particularly in my youth and you are like oh man and it is like balls are trying to come out and straining and really there should be no straining. You don’t have enough water or fiber if that is the case.

Martin: Actually you know there is also an issue with iodine people who have deficiency of iodine have a lack of urgency to go. You know you should go but there doesn’t seem to be an urgency. You know when you go to the toilet and push to flush it actually goes in the same way in the body that is healthy when the signal arrives it is like the peristaltic motion of the bowel just squeezes and just all comes out and in a body that doesn’t have that signalling it just all kind of rolls out of you and you actually have to really force and breathe and strain and grunt and do stuff to get it out. Not so good, straining is definitely a sign of things being out of order.

Scott: So making sure you have enough iodine, making sure you have enough fiber, making sure you have enough is there anything else? What about colon cleanses? Is that something you should do on an ongoing basis would that help?

Martin: Oh certainly especially if you are eating a high protein diet such as meat and cooked whey protein powders there is a lot of weight lifters that believe a whey protein is a way to build yourself up. I personally think they are mistaken but that causes these weight lifters these smelly gassy bowels, I don’t know if you have noticed that or not.

Scott: I didn’t really notice it when I was in the gym but it was hard to tell between the sweat.

Martin: Yeah it is a bigger room if you know body builders or weight lifters you would notice they tend to be acidic and they have pretty bad bowels and if they are not vegetarian or naturally orientated, they would be buying things like the whey powders and have pretty smelly bowels. Anyway so that is that you had said what causes it the most cooked proteins either from milk or from meats or well that is pretty much it really. Beans can do it to because they are concentrated as well.

Scott: So if you are eating tons of beans and you become quite flatulent then that is not such a big concern.

Martin: No not as big. Well there we solved the world’s problems, didn’t we?

Scott: The world’s flatulent problems at any rate.

Martin: Yeah well go vegetarian and you will save yourself and your friends from the “nuclear” explosion.

Scott: Well also by doing that you help take some of the pressure off of our food system because really if we did eat less beef and we ate less chicken and we ate less turkey, if we ate less fish or pork and venison and stuff probably wouldn’t have to produce and I guess that comes down to it is interesting with this recession and how deep is it and the stock market and we don’t usually talk about it and the economics but the stock market has lost about fifty percent of its value and a lot of homes have dropped significantly in value and a lot of foreclosures and all of those things and part of that is the result of always trying to grow and if we weren’t growing and building more houses and everything else and anything in life will grow and contract you just look at your chest when you breathe it goes out and contracts and comes back in and you know if we are always trying to create bigger herds and bigger stores and consume more when does it kind of end and maybe it would be a good thing if we just had some contraction in parts of the food industry and expansions in other parts of it like organic fruits and vegetables which are maybe a little easier on the land.

Martin: Well it comes up with the word sustainable so sustainable is an amazing word it means something that you could actually sustain indefinitely.

Scott: And continue without destroying anything.

Martin: Right so of course the burning down of the Amazon forest so you can graze some cattle so you can sell some hamburger to consumers in North America that is not sustainable. Maybe for a generation or two but not for ten. Yeah so we need to create dynamic systems that are sustainable that we can continue living with or in and a vegetarian approach to things is certainly a lot more sustainable than the meat eating system and I am not saying it is totally bad to eat meat some people do need to especially depending on their body type they should eat it but they don’t need the quantities the affluent societies such as North America is accustomed to eating. You know the typical farmer like we were talking about a few podcasts ago of the cultural source or origin of the diet that we are eating now. There was this farmer either working in the forest or working on the fields needing to consume five or six thousand calories a day that’s how you get spaghetti and meat balls and pizza or something like that for your daily meal but that same farmer you know he would only slaughter one pig per season, he would only kill a chicken maybe on the weekend you know on Saturday or Sunday for a festive meal but it would not be an everyday experience and it certainly wouldn’t be that you had meat two or three times a day not a chance.

Scott: They just weren’t wealthy enough to be able to afford it.

Martin: Right but that is also the case or style that we should orient ourselves we should not be eating like kings.

Scott: When we are not kings I think that is a great point.

Martin: Yes and I think we need to tell people that they need to think long term and they need to think back to their origins to think back to what actually gave us the means or the lifestyle that fed us for generations for hundreds of generations.

Scott: Go back to the basics in other words.

Martin: Yes go back to the simple and plain that were sustainable and yeah that is what this contraction can be all about maybe the planet does have a consciousness all of its own and it is sort of telling us, no you won’t. Go back you can’t do it the inhalation is over and it is time to exhale I am getting rid of some of the debris that has come in on the inhalation.

Scott: Yeah so time will tell if we learned the lesson and I think we will learn it one way or another there is no doubt about that.

Martin: Oh yes I hear you, I heard this on I think it was the Oprah Winfrey show and she was saying first you get a nudge, then you get a bump and then you run into a wall and then the wall comes down on you so she was saying it in that order because you are not listening and paying attention you know like some people get it on the nudge.

Scott: That’s right, live a sustainable lifestyle in all areas.

Martin: Okay so that is my story and I am sticking to it.

Scott: So Martin if someone was thinking well maybe I am a little more flatulent then I should be and I am not eliminating as often as I should be and I need to do something about this and I don’t know where to start where would you recommend that they start?

Martin: Well the most common thing would be more salad and more vegetables you know the broccoli and the zucchini, cucumber, tomato and the works. We do sell a wonderful product call Exsula Apple Fiber and you can find it in the Exsula foods and this is an amazing product because only a few companies in America are still using the old fashioned style of making apple juice you know there are two methods and one is the centrifuge method which takes out everything out of the apple and the only thing that is left is just sawdust. The old fashioned method is essentially just a bit of pressure where you just squeeze out the juice and what is left is high pectin, high nutrient content of the apples and so we are able to get that and that is fairly rare it is not readily available so this apple fiber is just wonderful for anyone who would like to increase the fiber content in their diet.

Scott: Great and it is not harsh on the body at all.

Martin: No not at all and the other things are something like konjac I don’t know maybe we need to come up with another fiber product because this is the soluble and insoluble fiber that a person needs. Psyllium is another popular high fiber product.

Scott: Right you see that in a lot of health food stores.

Martin: Yeah readily accessible yeah I did an experiment here not too long ago and I used several products and I used a teaspoon of whatever that was in an ounce of water to see how it would expand so I am actually looking at a strained soluble fiber to add to our product mix.

Scott: So if someone wanted to look more at these products where could they go?

Martin: Oh gee I didn’t give it this much thought on the Life Enthusiast website under health education and nutrition I suppose there are so many ideas there for nutrition of raw food that would probably be a good place to start and the product specifically would be the Exsula Superfoods Apple Fiber.

Scott: Wonderful and if someone wanted to talk to you a bit about the diets or any issues with their digestion how could they get a hold of you?

Martin: Oh well I am still here at 1-866-543-3388 and the website is www.life-enthusiast.com.

Scott: Right and if you are interested in listening to previous podcast episodes you can head over to LifeEnthusiast.podomatic.com and of course there is a link on the Life Enthusiast web page and it will take you directly to our past podcast episodes and we have well over a hundred past episodes up there for you to listen to so lots of great information.

Martin: So I would like to actually help people with some digestive ideas I have all of the super foods on sale for ten percent off with the coupon IRD46 so help yourself.

Scott: So if you head over to the life enthusiast co-op site and you want to pick up any of the Exsula super foods just when you are going through the process you will see a little coupon place in the check out you will just put in IRD46.

Martin: Anyway it is ten percent off better than a kick in the shin right.

Scott: It is a great deal because they are excellent product and you will notice a huge difference after you take the product.

Martin: Well let’s call it a day for today, thank you everyone for listening this is Martin from Life Enthusiast co-op restoring vitality to you and to the planet, thank you for listening.

Scott: Bye-bye.

Author: Martin Pytela