Eliminate Bloating: The Ultimate Solution by Dr. Berg

Today, we're going to teach you what's behind bloating so you can permanently get rid of it. When you eat food, you chew it, and it goes through the esophagus down to the stomach, where you have a lot of acid. The reason it's so acidic in the stomach is to break down proteins, and that acid is also going to kill any microbes that are on the food.

Then we have this mixture in the stomach that ends up in the small intestine, where you digest about 90% of the food. You have all sorts of things helping you; you have the gallbladder, which releases something called bile to start breaking down fats, but you also have secondary bile salts made by your microbes. On the left side of your body, you have this organ called the pancreas, which produces certain enzymes to help break down carbohydrates and proteins.

That's where you get a lot of breakdown, as well as from certain microbes in the small and large intestines that help release enzymes. I wanted to point that out because 20% of all the enzymes are made by the microbes. Not to mention, we also get certain acids that are created, such as lactic acid, and that lactic acid helps the microbes thrive because a lot of the good bacteria flourish in an acidic environment.

What does all this have to do with bloating? Well, bloating is basically a problem in digestion. You can have two people eat the same food, and one person bloats while the other does not.

Why is that? One significant difference between these two people is the type, amount, and diversity of gut bacteria they have. A lot of your microbial density and the health of your microbes depend on whether you took antibiotics in the past and how many you took.

The greatest lie about antibiotics is that they cause a diminishing of your microbes, but that within weeks, they will come back to normal. That is absolutely a lie. If you’ve ever had an antibiotic, unfortunately, the composition of your microbes has never returned to its original diversity and amount.

Let me give you a little more detail on the whiteboard. I wanted to show you something really quick: here's a chart of all these different microbes. You don't need to know or memorize any of these, but just realize these are microbes that are normally in your gut.

The "L" stands for Lactobacillus, and the "B" stands for Bifidobacterium. These are just different types of microbes. After someone has a broad-spectrum antibiotic, look at the percentage of loss of these microbes: 50% to 75%, 70% to 90%.

Look at this: a 99% loss of this microbe after you get an antibiotic. If you don't have the microbes, you're not going to get the contributions they make toward helping you with certain enzymes. Just take a look at all of these microbes right here, then take a look at how many of these affect your bile.

You need bile to help you break down fats. In this last column, you can see all the microbes that are involved in decreasing the risk of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. If you're missing these, not only are you going to have bloating, but you're also prone to gas, burping, constipation, and all sorts of issues.

There are other things that mimic antibiotics that you need to be fully aware of, and unfortunately, that could be the reason why you have bloating. For instance, let's take glyphosate. Glyphosate is a weed killer, but Monsanto created a patent for glyphosate as an antibiotic because it kills microbes.

What do you think that's doing to your microbes if you're constantly exposed to it? They use three times as much glyphosate on just drying things out, like non-GMO products. So here you are, buying something because it's non-GMO, thinking, "Oh, this is good," yet you're getting even more of this antibiotic.

Other things that can act as antibiotics include birth control pills, steroids like prednisone, medications for depression, PPIs used for acid reflux, artificial sweeteners, fluoride in the water supply, and even statin medications. I want to bring up one point about antibiotics: if you have to take antibiotics, I highly recommend that you take a probiotic at the same time and afterward because you're killing your microbes, and we want to replace them. We don't want to replace the bad bacteria; we just want to replace the good ones.

A couple of other things about antibiotics: there's some data suggesting that you must take the antibiotic for the full dosage for seven days, two weeks, or ten days. However, some new research indicates that's actually not true. You should talk with your doctor about this, but the new information states that you can take it up until the point where maybe you're feeling better, and then you can stop taking it.

It could be after three days. Sometimes, they're overly cautious, telling you to keep taking it for a long period, which can lead to more antibiotic resistance. Long-term antibiotics are a false narrative; the point is, we've been taking them for too long.

In fact, 80% of the antibiotics sold are for livestock and other animals that we consume, exposing us to a lot of antibiotics. Even people with kidney stones, specifically calcium oxalate stones, may be affected by antibiotics. One probiotic called Oxalobacter is a microbe that eats oxalates.

In fact, I bought some online; I had to get it from Europe. These are probiotics, and what happens is we take an antibiotic. .

. It kills off certain microbes, like that one, and now we end up with high oxalates, which creates damage to our body. So many people cannot digest food anymore simply because they don't have all the microbes in sufficient quantities.

The solution to bloating is to take a really good, high-quality probiotic to put back in what has been missing since you took an antibiotic long ago. The other important thing to consume is regular fermented products: dairy fermented products, like kefir, some high-quality yogurt, and also fermented vegetables, such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and pickles. These can lead to better digestion, but you also have something else.

The majority of microbes in someone's body are dormant; they're asleep. One way to wake up dormant microbes is to bring the pH into the right range to make it more acidic. Then, they will basically come back to life and start working.

So this is why, when you take something really acidic, like kombucha or apple cider vinegar, you are waking up a lot of dormant microbes. Now all these microbes can help support the bile that you need; they can help support the enzymes to break down carbohydrates, like fiber and even fats, and provide the capacity to take a lot of stress off your pancreas, your gallbladder, your stomach, and your small intestine. Once you lose these microbes, these other organs have to overwork to try to compensate; they get tired, and you don't produce the same amount of enzymes, so you end up with all sorts of issues.

The solution is to put back in your gut the missing microbes, and I'm going to put a link down in the description of one that I recommend that may help you.