The Microbe That Changes EVERYTHING

today we have an extremely important topic that revolves around the most important microbe in our body and today I brought on one of the top experts Dr William Davis so welcome doc thanks for being on here thank you Dr ber thanks for the invitation yeah so you wrote a whole book uh primarily revolves around this one microbe and I want to just Dive Right In your book is called super gut which is a fascinating read this microb is called el rudai out of all the thousands of microbes in our like what makes this stand out

as more important than the other ones it's been around for 60 years it's not like it was discovered last Tuesday but it was not recognized just how powerful this micro was in fact the first 40 Years of research around this microbe centered mostly around what it did for babies that's important but it was shown to reduce for instance regurgitation of breast milk or formula reduced KCT you know that kind of fussy restlessness and crying that that babies get and that's about where it ended maybe it abbreviated the diarrhea after an antibiotic but it really didn't

go much farther than that until this group in Boston MIT stumbled upon some unusual effects because there had been some very preliminary cell culture type evidence so very preliminary stuff that showed that ride might have anti-cancer effects particularly in colon cancer so this group very smart very excellent research was exploring that question and they started to see all these unexpected effects that they they're like what is going on here they saw that the animals stayed young they didn't get fat and lose their hair and stop M they played with each other they groomed each other

they stayed slender with thick Rich fur they saw that if they inflicted wounds this is animals this sounds awful but when they inflicted wounds healing time was cut in half they showed that there was a dramatic rise in testosterone and elderly mice a marked increase in growth hormone an amplification of the immune response so much so as you recall as you and I age the thymus gland right here beneath the sternum shrinks starting at age 15 and by age 70 it's almost gone it's about 10% of its original volume and capacity to produce tea cells

that protect us from viruses and bacteria and that's why older people can succumb to flu or pumac pneumonia but 18-year- olds typically don't and that's differentiates between it's not the thyroid it's the thymus which is a little lower it's on top of the heart exactly it's the thymus gland the seat of te- cell immunity of the immune response well that's restored and it's restored back to its original size in in mice in mice wow no one's done that human study yet so all these extraordinary observations in in mice and so I decided to get this

microb and play with it but it's bought it was commercially available as tablets for infants so the dosage for infants is very small so I just simply reasoned how do I increase it well you take a hundred tablets of that product but it's a sugary product so it's not very good um so I just simply Amplified counts by making it as a yogurt it's not yogurt of course it looks and smells like yogurt kind of but it's a way to amplify bacterial counts in this case a thousandfold that's when I saw everything this usually doesn't

happen as you know if you see something in mice it often doesn't translate to a human experience but in this case uh everything seen in mice everything every last observation seen in mice I've been seeing in humans wow and as far as um what percentage is this microb in the western world I mean it's kind of absent right in a great majority of the population yes so Dr Gard reuter he's the German microbiologist first first isolated it in 1962 from the breast milk of a German breastfeeding mother he said back then it's easy to find

it's every it's ubiquitous it's in breast milk it's in stool it's easy to find with his 40-year academic career he made a number of comments that he's finding increasingly difficult to find such that by the 2000s he could barely find it at all that's been corroborated several times by others we have a clinical study on proposing where we do several hundred people and see how many will corroborate that and also correlate s to other biomarkers because so crucial for overall health and youthfulness but it's it's presumptively because lactobacilus rorai as well as other lactobacillus species

there's many of them of course are uniquely susceptible to Common antibiotics all it takes is a round of penicillin or ampicilin or a MOX aylin that you may have taken years and years ago and you've wiped out all the rhide thereby lost all its huge advantages wow I think you mentioned I'm not sure if it was in your book but it's like was it 96% of population doesn't really have very many left or exactly right the best estimates we have from recent uh evidence is about 4% of people one in 25 people still have it

and so that means uh 24 out of 25 don't have it have losses as you recall one of the great effects of this microb you know most microbes in the gastrointes microbiome colonize the colon way way down 24t down from the mouth and that's where they're supposed to be but rorai is unique in that it has the unique capacity to colonize the small intestine and that's where it takes up residents and produce natural antibiotics and these natural antibiotics are effective in killing fecal microbes which as you know is a huge problem now this notion of

small intestinal bacterial overgrowth what we say sibo sip po that is feal microbes like ecoli Etc have colonized the small intestine where they don't belong and they're very destructive when they do that well is the loss of Rai and maybe some related species that have this unique ability to colonize the small intestin produce antibiotics of their own and these are different than the antibiotics you get from the hospital from the doctor um these are these are very selective antibiotics unlike the stuff you get in a in in the hospital where it's it tends to be

broad spectrum wipes that it's an atomic bomb for your GI track and so is the loss of Rai part of the reason why this has become an epidemic that is because explains why sibo has become an epidemic I I believe it is yeah because now we have no protection against these other microbes so it's a I guess it's called what's called a keystone microb right which is kind of a it does more than just one thing it kind of helps the whole ecosystem in that area right it kind of helps balance everything yeah isn't that

wonderful it's fascinating had sibo and I took an antibiotic like zyxin it just kills a bunch of stuff but it doesn't start the process of restoration so exactly right you restore ruite maybe some other microbes and it begins the process microbes are kind of like people we don't live in isolation we have partners and families and friends and neighbors and co-workers and communities microbes are the same way so restoration of ruite is that first step not just in restoring ruite but in cultivating a healthy community of microbes and then now let's just Dive Right into

one of the huge effects that I'm very excited about it causes the body to increase that hormone oxytocin which is kind of a hormone that people know about you know you're bonding with your mother as a baby but it does a little more than that right oxytocin does a lot more now of course as we age oxytocin goes down but tell us a little bit about this oxytocin what that does so it's a brain hormone from the hypothalamus that is released by when you restore Rai if we believe the animal evidence is about three threefold

300% or more we've tried to corroborate that humans were having a hard time with the acid so that's a work in progress oxytocin traditionally regarded as the hormone of love and empathy it is that you get this surgeon oxytocin you'll see this play out in people who either get rotaride by some means like a probiotic preparation or as the yogurt to higher counts and people will say you know I I I like my spouse better I get with my family better their foibles and quirks don't irritate me as much I like my co-workers better my

my favorite I accept the opinions of other people more readily I love that um but I also call oxytocin the hormone of shape and body composition it determines where your muscle is and how much you have and also determines where fat is located so it has a huge effect on your shap shape you know shape is a big thing people say weight loss but I'd like to tell people let's go a step further than weight loss because you know the G Agonist world is highlighted what a flawed area that is you lose fat and by

the way with the GP Agonist you lose subcutaneous talk about OIC right like OIC all those things those are selective for fat beneath the skin not the fat in your abdomen and that's a problem because the most problematic form of fat as you know is the abdominal fat of course geop one Agonist lead to loss of muscle huge losses of muscle and we know we know with excellent long-term evidence when you lose muscle you die younger several years typically as well as your last years tend to be characterized by Frailty Falls fractures dementia Etc so

the loss of muscle is critical yet the FDA approved a class of drugs that permits huge loss of muscle so preserving muscle during any effort to lose weight is absolutely critical so you don't experience those awful effects and including early mortality and oxytocin determines how much muscle you have you know personally so I'm in my late 60s when I was in my early 60s when I started doing these things specifically rotari I gain 13 pounds of muscle and my strength increased by 50% over three weeks I'm know about you Dr Burke I hate the gym

I can't stand going here so I go once a week for 15 minutes get the heck out of there yet I despite that meager effort I gain 13 pounds and 50% in I was doing lat pull Downs for instance 10 repetitions at 130 pounds over three weeks 15 minutes a week I was doing 200 pounds wow so and that's been borne out also by the animal experimental data and what I see in real life is this rest now here's a quirky thing though those of us who had more muscle in our youth tend to regain

more muscle so if you were a longdistance runner had skinny you won't gain as much say as somebody who was a wrestler or a weightlift or a shot put through you know that kind of a thing and when you first told me that I was like is that actually true so I have not changeed my workout uh when I started this probably was have been about six weeks maybe two months ago I went from 185 to 1902 or 193 and uh not fat I'm definitely gaining muscle which I am like wow it's just as wild

because it's like I'm not adding more workouts or anything so this is a game changer in fact I even told my my parents my father lost a lot of muscle mass so he's doing it first of all his hair is coming back he's gaining more weight and this is like a game changer especially with age related muscle loss but also it keeps you independent you're more likely to be able to bound upstairs get in and out of your car with ease go for long walks ride your bike and not succumb to being to loss of

Independence and end up in an assisted living center so preserving muscle is a huge advant and and in guys of course there's a marked increase in testosterone just from that and ladies experience a preservation or increase in bone density so it's part of the formula for combating all the effects of Aging yeah huge I want to go back to this empathy word for because this I want really I want people to understand what that word means because I looked it up and um got a little more data looked at the derivation of it and uh

it really boils down to being able to the ability to see someone's Viewpoint which is like wow if someone could do that they're not going to get in an argument with their spouse because that's really the anatomy of an argument like the person's unwilling to see someone's Viewpoint right even in social interactions if you can't see the Viewpoint you're just going to go back and forth this is huge so what I just want to tell you what happened to me um I didn't really expect too much but I would say a week after taking this

and we'll just call it maybe a cultured uh probiotic not a not a yogurt because it's a little bit different and we're going to we'll talk about how to make it in a second but um I didn't really notice anything except my wife says what is gotten into you I said what do you mean she goes you want to hug me like five times a day and you want to snuggle and I'm like I know it's weird I I don't know what's gotten over me she goes keep eating that yogurt right so I mean that's

it's just really interesting and I just just had another response with one of my staff members and she said I said because she's doing the yogurt I said you feel any change she goes she goes I don't know but other people are nicer to me I said are you sure it's other people maybe it's just your Viewpoint of other people she goes yeah it could be because like everywhere she goes like she's just like very interested in the other person I mean that's like nowadays this is so such an important thing I mean could you

imagine if more people had that ability what's really bizarre about this is that I think that having this full microbiome creates a natural amount of oxytocin this is not something new it's like something we had at one time and I think we had lost right so it's not something that we're adding to the human race it's just something that's lost along the way from these antibiotics and other things you know I think about that a lot Dr Berg because uh I remind myself that we live in a time of record social isolation yes pandemic but

even pre pandemic record suicide likewise pre pandemic there was a 35% increase in suicide of course half of all marriages end in divorce and the psychology Community has been tabulating measuring and tabulating measures of narcissistic behavior since 1963 and the increase has been dramatic so you know there's lots of things at work here social media other things we you and I don't have much control your listeners don't have control over that perhaps but we do have have control over this microbe and thereby the capacity to boost oxytocin and I'm seeing exactly what you're describing people

like other people better they get along better you know Dr Paul Zach is a he calls himself a neuroeconomist in count in LA and he did something crazy he went to the jungles of New Guinea and found a tribe who had never seen Western people before so painted two generations away from cannibalism wow and he says the first thing when cter when you enter their Camp is the stink of unwashed humans because there's no running water but they were friendly and embracing and they welcomed them what he wanted to do was check the oxytocin blood

levels before and after this ritual dance they do well he did and he showed no rise so he never published the data but he mentioned in a book about oxytosis so I called him I said Paul I see you didn't publish that would you share it with me he very generously did and I compared those levels this is a group of people unexposed to antibiotics glyphosate herbus all that stuff and I have data of my own compared it it's hard to compare but you kind of get a crude sense and it was clear that primitive

people have much higher levels of oxytocin because they still have rotor and they've been a study for the presence of Rite they all have it as do wild animals but we've lost it wow and so we see lower levels in humans modern humans and I think it we get it from our mother with breast milk um and how many kids don't get breast milk anymore that could be a big problem too right there's that Mom got antibiotics at time of delivery she probably got it many times over her lifetime probably couldn't give it to the

child and the child gets antibiotics at delivery and gets antibiotics uh thousands of antibiotic prescriptions for every thousand children every year and so we've wiped out Rite and other microbes because bags are kind of stupid they're necessary but it's like an adom bomb you know if we drop a nuclear bomb on a population it doesn't only pick the bad people it picks out the children The Women College professors the the Social Work It Kills everybody yeah and I think the uh the the myth is that people think oh if you take anotic it all comes

back for a couple weeks yeah you're going to be back to where you were a couple weeks later right that is I don't think that's true absolutely not it's quite clear now the tough question is how much can we restore that's that's a work in progress that's why I think this idea of restoring these what what you're saying is Keystone microbes is so important as compared to say an antibiotic you know if antibiotics got us here how can another round of antibiotics be part of the solution and of course the use of fermented foods like

kimchi sauerkraut veggies you ferment on your kitchen counter like cucumbers another spectacular way though the crazy thing about that is those microbes INF fermented foods are not the ones that colonize the GI tract they somehow cross feed they provide nutrients to beneficial microbes and they bloom so you get to bloom in all the beneficial species particularly ones that produce the fatty ass bate that yield such effects as healing of the intestinal lining reduction in blood sugar blood pressure depression anxiety deeper sleep a restoration of youthful childlike dreams oh yeah flying showing up at the school

playing your underwear and not knowing your lines how did you know I had that dream all that stuff comes back wow yeah talk about vivid dreams that's one thing that stands out and definitely my sleep is much better um you know you have a lot of people that have either um rosacea or um a lot of skin issues and I know that's gut rated and I know there's some technical parts of that like there's you know I guess byproducts of bacteria dying which I don't want to get too technical but just in a simple way

how do you explain what's happening between your gut and your skin lot of that wisdom is unfolding I I break down skin rashes into two categories the simple skin rashes that is due to A disruption of the skin microbiome acne would be a good example of that but then the more complex conditions like rosacea and psoriasis tend to start in the gut so in other words if I give somebody a drug that blocks some pathway like like an inflammatory marker all you do is block the inflammatory Mark and get partial response but that person still

has sibo and SEO and is thereby subject to long-term consequences like colon cancer uler of colitis diverticular disease weight gain obesity so the pharmaceutical model is so deeply flawed but it's so deeply ingrained into common practice this is what they do in common practice they give you a Blocker of some pathway that all said it's not entirely clear what the path is to restore a healthy microbiome saying somebody with rosacea but I'm seeing it happen that is uh do these basic things what I love about the microbiome things we're doing is that we're getting away

from the pharmaceutical model which is if you have pacak pneumonia kill it if you have aaak abscess kill it right well there's nothing specific for those pathogens so let's instead the microbiome has a great amount of wisdom built into it as you know so if we restore those Keystone microbes that help us they care take care of it for you you just have to provide the basic building blocks for them to do that do you believe from your experience like these people that have these food allergies and sensitivities they can improve that by restoring the

microbes in the gut yeah isn't that wonderful I see it over and over and over again people say I can't eat fod Maps or legumes or nightshades or histamin containing foods or fructose I only can eat seven foods right or they had IGG testing food intolerance testing I can only eat I can't eat these 43 foods and I see all this go away and the the science is evolving this is sibo It's fecal microbes living in the small intestine small intestines very permeable by Design very thin mucus barrier single leg very thin intestinal lining and

it's per that's where we're supposed to absorb all our nutrients and when but when fecal microbes invade that small intestine 24 feet trillions of microbes that live and die rapidly it inflames the intestinal wall and it makes it even more permeable and lets all kinds of stuff through including bacterial breakdown products this process of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and consumption of wheat the glid and protein wheat is a lethal combination that essentially guarantees you going to get fat diabetic experience dementia and have all kinds of other conditions the neglect of this issue in conventional care

the haphazard administration of antibiotics and the awful awful advice to cut your cholesterol saturated fat eat more healthy whole grains and everything in moderation is is a recipe for absolute disaster that's what we're seeing course playing out around it that's why you and I have so much to do every day it's incredible I mean if you just take a look at a a typical conventional GI doctor right you go to the doctor and you have bloating wow they're going to go through their evaluation and you're going to end up with a some medication that is

just going to manage it to somewhat but then it gets worse I mean like could you imagine if they just had some awareness of what's happening in the the gut and actually restore uh more of the root cause I mean it just it's obvious to me but I think it's just about getting more aware out there it's honestly I don't know how much we can change the medical profession but we can actually educate the person on the street so they can make their own choices what you did is you had this wild idea I'm G

to I'm going to turn this into a yogurt you took it and you mixed it with a fiber kind of just describe what you did to grow this as I mentioned I got the original microb and El m r but it was present at such low count it was 100 million of two strains which sounds like a if it was money but in microbes it's it's relatively trivial so I reasoned how could I increase it without having to take 100 tablets which would be absurd so I simply fermented it of course microbes don't have sex

there's no male and female microbes they just double themselves well lactobacilus Rite doubles every three hours or so at human body temperature so I simply fermented it for 36 hours uh 12 doublings I also added Prebiotic fiber it's kind of like adding calure to your garden you know this on your farm if you add calure or other fertilizer you get bigger tomatoes and cucumbers so I did the same kind of thing and we did quantify we Quantified number of microbes in 12 hours 24 hours 36 hours 48 hours and by sheer dumb luck I happen

to pick the magic number the best number which is 36 hours when you go longer than 36 hours you start to get more death of microbes dead microbes are still beneficial but not as beneficial as live microbes um and so you get this big ramp up in counts we get somewhere around 300 billion so we start with Millions hundreds of millions now we get hundreds of billions so we get a thousandfold increase over the original number we did this using something called flow cytometry and we count the microbes and so that was the key to

I believe now if we had done it as a probiotic you know one of the difficulties with probiotics I formulate probiotics is they're very expensive if you want to put a whole bunch into a capsule say so in other words if you want to put 300 billion lactus roer into a capsule it cost consumers like three or $400 a month it'd be ridiculous no one wants to do that so you can buy the capsules at lower counts at at affordable cost you amplify the counts through fermentation like the like the yogurt by the way doesn't

happy Dairy can be coconut milk can be salsa can be um hummus wow yeah Pik Theo wow and uh uh but Dairy is so forgiving so available and so familiar to so many people it's easy to do yeah so we do that we get 300 billion counts per half cup or 120 million liters serving and I think that's why we saw such extravagant effects in pushing back SEO because we're coming at this with very high counts sufficient to overcome the trillions yeah of feal microbes of sibo yeah you also shared with me another idea which

I think is brilliant there's a certain microbe you can get this probiotic right at Walmart the drugstore and then you could take a capsule of it there's a very specific very well researched microbe in there that you could I guess you mix it with fruit juice for 72 hours you put it outside right and then you maybe put some top on it you don't want to tighten it up because it'll explode but then you're basically making your own soda because the micro will eat a lot of the sugar and uh that's a it's a brilliant

idea I mean like what a great drink it's kind of like kombucha but it actually has microbes in it you know many of us miss juice it was nice to have mango juice and cherry juice and all the pomegranate juice but they're so high in sugar that they're awful for you well here's a way to have the microbe consume the sugar and you can consume it down to zero so the final product is no longer sweet wow but it's effervescent so this microbe is a so we make wine and beer for for instance with sacris

sisia that's in here the micro well it's cousin sacris Bard cousin oh sorry this yeah okay this is a similar cousin and it is a spectacular fermentor if you put it into juice so what I do is a capsule into juice any volume of juice but you have to be careful the juice can't contain potassium sorbate or sodium Ben or other preservative and then as you say cap it lightly because you'll see it 24 hours it's bubbling like a cauldron because it's producing carbon dioxide and if you cap it too tightly you'll literally have a

mess in your kitchen uh so we keep it light may you can vent it you can even go to these beer brewing stores and they have venting caps for like $3 you can do that too but you leave it on your kitchen counter for at least 48 Hours test it we have this wonderful sugar sensing device in our mouth called a tongue we can taste it and if it's sweet let it go another 12 24 hours uh you want it not sweet you and I don't want sugar your listeners don't want sugars but you drink

this it's probably one of the most important things people can do if you need a course of antibiotic let's say one of your listeners says well they're going to put an implant in my mouth they're going to use prophylactic antibiotics or had I had a terrible skin infection whatever and you have to have an antibiotic well you can drink this juice like a quarter half cup couple three times a day and it's the most important thing you can do at least partially protect the Integrity of your gast inest microbiome nothing is fully protective against antibiotics

but it's the best we have if you haven't bought that book super gut get that book right now you also on your website you have a really great ongoing program that people can participate and you coach them and things like that I'm going to put your link down below so people could know about that but I just wanted to have you on just to really talk about this one microbe that's so important and then and I appreciate you coming on and then what I want to do is roll right into kind of a video of

how a person could make this microbe and uh I will so don't click off yet you can just watch that and you can make notes and I'm going to put your stuff in the description but thank you so much for coming on Doc I really appreciate it oh my pleasure Dr Burke always so this is very simple how we make this we're going to take uh the probiotic one capsule and then we will open it up and then we're going to take inulin this is a tablespoon take organic half and half just to make a

paste mix it up really good don't put too much of that uh half and half in there right off the bat just about two tablespoons and then we can pour the rest of this half and half in there one quart I'm going to mix this up really good I'm going to take a container two containers We'll pour some of this in here even it out pretty good okay we're putting this mixture into the yogurt maker we have two of them right very carefully okay now we have to add water to it so we got water

right here so I'm going to pour the water like so and I want that level to be at the same level as the mixture inside the containers so I'm looking to see if it's the same mixture and yes it is so we now have the water at the level of a little bit more than I wanted so that's fine okay here's the next part and of course if you have a different machine you're going to have to just do the same type of thing on the left we have temperature and time so we can press

this once okay and then we want this at 99° Fen so we're going to bring this down okay and then press start on that and then now what we're going to do we have eight hours we're going to go up to 36 hours okay and then we press start again and guess what we're done we're going to put the top on it and then we're going to wait for 36 hours and then after that's done we are going to then put it in the refrigerator for storage okay we're pulling out of the refrigerator after 36

hours and leaving in the refrigerator for a couple hours to cool down and now we're going to consume a half of a cup of this every single day I like to have mine before bed it's amazing it's Rich it's delicious you can add uh berries to it if you need to add a sweetener uh go ahead but I think you'll find it quite delicious a half a cup a day