Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, non-force chiropractor and practitioner of functional medicine.
Thank you for tuning in today.
Today is going to be a really exciting show.
We're going to talk about the microbiome, especially the gut microbiome, which means
microscopic bacteria that live that are essential for health that live in your gut and other
tissues throughout the body.
But the gut is the one you hear about the most that has the most research on it.
We're going to focus on that today.
I've got a really exciting case study of someone who benefited from having testing for the
health of his microbiome, a man who had ulcerative colitis that had been to two or three different
gastroenterologists for years, was under medical care, antibiotics, really miserable results
was still in a lot of pain and having a lot of symptoms, bleeding, et cetera, that I was
able to help a lot by doing proper testing and helping restore a, kill off the bad bacteria
in his gut and restore a healthy population of healthy gut bacteria.
Bacteria like lactobacillus and bifidobacterium and many, many others in there are many, many
known.
The research is largely based on known strains of bifidobacteria and lactobacteria.
So we'll talk more about that.
But before I get into that, I want to just, I, you know, I have to update everyone who
listens to this show knows how important vitamin D is.
And unfortunately, there's been another hit piece by the pharmaceutically funded academic
institutions that publish ridiculous guidelines for vitamin D, which is, it's just really
sad.
So the endocrine society has published new vitamin D recommendations for the prevention
of disease.
So their recommendation, ignore vitamin D. Take the standard dose, the measly paltry
400, 600, maybe 800 milligrams or international units.
Vitamin D is measured in international units.
So 400 to 600 a day for most people, maybe 800 if you have osteoporosis is they're saying
just stick to that.
No one needs more than that.
Just ignore the reams of research and the it's, it's, it's kind of shocking really,
because they're just basically saying that the USRDA is recommendations, which are fine
for prevent for preventing rickets.
Your bones won't immediately collapse from vitamin D deficiency.
If you take the standard recommendation of 400 units a day or a little more, if you're
older or pregnant.
But that's just ridiculous to say that there's no other reason to take vitamin D, which is
exactly what they've said.
Because there are reams of research that show you can reduce your risk of all cancers by
60% by having adequate levels of vitamin D. And those studies were based on adequate
levels that are much lower than the known healthy functional ranges of vitamin D.
So for years, most doctors, if you ask them, if you go in for any blood work and ask your
doctor to add the vitamin D test, they'll do it because there's so much overwhelming
research supporting the fact that it's important and most people don't get enough.
You can't get enough.
No one gets enough vitamin D from the sun.
It would be nice if we could physiologically were designed to do that.
But when you test people, no one gets it because we don't spend that much time in the sun without
clothes and sunscreen on.
So this the healthy range of vitamin D is 50 to 90 nanograms per milliliter is the units
of measure on most tests in America.
It varies in other parts of the world.
But you want your vitamin D level to be between 50 and 90.
So if you get the test from your doctor and he or she says it's okay, say what is the
number?
You don't want to know if someone else thinks it's okay when they don't know what okay is.
You want to know the number.
The number for your blood level of vitamin D should be between 50 and 90.
And if you have an autoimmune condition or if you're chronically getting sick, if you're
repeatedly getting colds and flus for no reason, if you have fatigue, if you have a familial
risk of certain cancers, any kind of stress on your immune system, then you want your
vitamin D level to be more like 70 or 80.
And there's all kinds of research to back this up.
It's widely available.
Anyone can look it up.
Any doctor can look it up.
Any of you can look it up on PubMed, the National Institutes of Health website run by the federal
government that publishes all the basic research that's done throughout the world.
It's mostly US research, but there's European studies there as well.
And there's reams of research that show that deaths from cancers, unnecessary deaths from
especially the elderly that end up in hospital with a cold or a flu, that 30 to 60, before
COVID came out, 30,000 to 60,000 people a year were dying from colds and flus.
That's a lot, and probably half of those could be prevented if those people were taking adequate
vitamin D to keep their immune systems working at their optimum.
Your immune system cannot work at its optimum without adequate vitamin D. And the standard
RDA is not adequate.
The only way you know if your vitamin D level is adequate enough to keep your immune system
functioning optimally is to get the blood test and make sure the number on the blood
test is somewhere between 50 and 90.
And if you have an ongoing stress or suspected stress on your immune system, like you're
sick all the time, then you should target something more like 70 or 80.
It could save your life.
So cardiovascular disease and diabetes, also tremendous reams of research, thousands of
studies showing that various aspects of that disease, your risk of getting those diseases
or the severe effects of them can be reduced with adequate levels of vitamin D.
So back to the gut microbiome, the focus of today's show.
Another common question I get is, what do you think about artificial intelligence?
Well, how do you answer that?
Such a huge thing that we're just barely starting to find out about.
But so there's lots of things about it that are horrifying and some others that are fascinating.
There is some new trickle of artificial intelligence based technology coming out for health conditions,
medical conditions that is promising.
So an example of this is the headline for this paper that came out that was published
in Cell Reports, Physical Science is a Fitbit for the Gut May Aid in Detection of GI Disorders.
So it's not out yet.
It's not available for the public, for doctors.
It's not available for use yet.
But there are studies being done at the University of Southern California's Vitebere School of
Engineering in LA that represents, quote, a significant step forward in ingestible technology,
according to principal investor Yasir Khan, PhD, and his colleagues.
Basically, they've come up with an AI-enabled system of wearable coils and an ingestible
smart pill that can identify and track gases in the gut.
So traditional methods for that these get these are gases that are associated with digestive
disorders.
So traditional methods for locating and measuring and monitoring these gases associated with
such things as irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, food intolerances.
A lot of people think they're allergic to certain foods.
They may just be intolerant to them, which is different than a full-blown allergy, and
even gastric cancers.
So the traditional methods for locating and measuring these, monitoring their progression,
are often invasive and typically require you to go to the hospital.
So this system is a way that you could just swallow a pill and wear something on the surface
of your body that could measure these gases and have real-time tracking to know if you're
getting better or worse.
So it's really exciting.
The technology behind it is explained in the article, but it's probably too complicated.
You can look up the article if you'd like.
Just Google Fitbit for the gut, and you can see that original study if it's something
you're interested in.
But I just thought I'd throw that out there.
There is one, at least, thing that's come out recently that I'm excited about that could
be very useful involving artificial intelligence for detecting disease earlier so that you
could prevent it with better food, exercise, and supplements.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
So a lot of people have heard about the gut microbiome, maybe know a lot about it, maybe
know a little.
If you want a great source for good information about what the microbiome is and what it does,
it's available online to anyone, I recommend going to the Cleveland Clinic's website.
It's just clevelandclinic.com, and there's a section on there called What is Your Microbiome?
What does your microbiome do?
So the gut microbiome interacts with many of your body systems and assists with many
body functions.
It plays an active role in your body that some healthcare providers have described as
almost being like an organ itself.
Well, wow, that's a pretty strong statement.
It's not actually tissue in your body, but something like one-tenth of the cells in your
body are bacteria that are just living inside your body.
And that works for them because in your gut, your gut provides them a consistent source
of nutrients.
It works for them.
They're symbiotic organisms, but it's good for us too.
It's in fact essential for life.
So these bacteria in the gut break down complex carbohydrates and dietary fibers that we can't
break down on our own.
And they produce something called short-chain fatty acids, which is a hugely important category
of nutrients that we can't make on our own.
They also provide the enzymes necessary to synthesize certain vitamins, including vitamin
B1, folic acid, B12, and vitamin K. So micronutrient deficiencies have a huge aspect on your health,
and they're often because people don't get enough of them in their diet.
But oftentimes you can get, well, it's much less frequently than just not getting enough
in the first place, but it's a very important, it comes up a lot, especially in certain diseases,
disease conditions, people who have gut issues, gas bloating, diarrhea, constipation, diagnosed
inflammatory gut conditions like IBS, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, et cetera.
A lot of these people are not, have micronutrient deficiencies, deficiencies of folate and B12
and vitamin K and others because of lack of adequate beneficial bacteria in the gut.
And these short-chain fatty acids that bacteria make also feed cells in the lining of the
gut that help keep your gut healthy.
So that sounds a little complicated.
It is, but the bottom line is all of us have a population of beneficial bacteria living
in our guts that are essential for us to live.
We would die not immediately, but very shortly without them.
How do we know we wouldn't die immediately?
Because if you have a severe bout of diarrhea from some huge gut infection, you're flushing
almost all of them out.
When you take antibiotics, it kills off most of them, so you want to do something to build
them back up.
They will slowly build back up on your own after you take antibiotics, but very slowly.
Anytime anyone, any of you take antibiotics, you should take a probiotic specifically designed
to help build up that beneficial bacteria as quickly as possible and eat fermented foods
like yogurt and kefir and drink kombucha, eat fermented pickles or sauerkraut, kimchi.
Any kind of fermented food is full of beneficial bacteria.
But it's also, anytime just while we're on that topic, if you need to take antibiotics
for an infection, it's really important after that to take a course of beneficial bacteria
to help restore your normal healthy microbiome.
One of the most important ways of doing that is to take, for a month usually is enough,
a course of Saccharomyces bouillardii.
Saccharomyces bouillardii is the best one for rebuilding your gut after an infection.
It's not the best one to take long term.
Forever had a patient recently that had been taking Saccharomyces bouillardii for two or
three years.
It's not going to hurt anything, but for maintenance of your healthy gut microbiome in addition
to eating good foods or if you're not eating good foods or if you test with a stool test
or other tests to identify inflammation that may suggest that you don't have sufficient
good bacteria in your gut, a multi strain, several different bacteria, 10, 12, 15 or
more in a broad spectrum probiotic is better to take for those types of situations.
Gut bacteria, the healthy bacteria in your gut also help metabolize bile in your intestines.
So bile is essential for breaking down fats, fatty nutrients and fats that you consume.
Bile is made in your liver and stored up in your gallbladder.
So if you've had your gallbladder out, then it's really important to, it's usually important
to supplement bile, to take bile acids usually from ox bile to offset that defect.
So for years the medical profession has thought, oh, it's no big deal if your gallbladder,
if you have gallstones, if your gallbladder is inflamed, could cause a problem, could
cause this life threatening problem in some circumstances.
Just take the gallbladder out.
You don't need it.
You don't need the plastic bile.
Why do you need the gallbladder?
Well, you need a gallbladder because your liver produces bile in a trickle.
There's just a slow drop by drop amount coming out into your intestines all the time if you
don't have a gallbladder.
But when you eat a meal, you've got, you know, your intestines don't get a slow trickle of
food all day, most of us, that needs bile to help absorb those nutrients.
You eat meals.
You eat meals and you have a sudden stomach full of food that's slowly trickling down
into your small intestine.
But not slowly trickling, it's a burst of food that needs bile acids to metabolize,
to help break down and absorb the fats and the fat soluble nutrients that are in that
food.
That's why you have a gallbladder.
You need a little storage depot with a whole bunch of bile that's ready on demand right
after you eat.
So if you don't have that, then it's a good idea to supplement them with bile acids.
But healthy bacteria in your gut also help metabolize this bile in your intestines so
that when it's done, the bacteria and their enzymes can break it down so that the bile
acids can be reabsorbed and recycled in your liver.
So there's a technical name for this.
But the main thing to take the takeaway for that is that if you lack a gallbladder, you're
going to lack sufficient bile when you need it.
And having a healthy gut microbiome will help your body recycle as much of it and store
it back up in the liver so that liver production is maintained at its peak.
One of the essential fats that bile is required to reabsorb is cholesterol.
Yes, cholesterol is an essential fat.
It's an essential nutrient that your body needs to produce estrogen and testosterone
and cell membranes throughout your body.
The medical profession, unfortunately, is brainwashed in a large measure by the pharmaceutical
industry to think that everyone should take statin drugs and lower their cholesterol as
much as possible because cholesterol is associated with heart disease.
Cholesterol does not cause heart disease.
Inflammation causes heart disease.
Cholesterol is part of the reaction to excessive inflammation.
So if you lack sufficient healthy bacteria in your gut and the effect of that on bile
reabsorption could increase your cholesterol.
Conversely, if you have healthy microbiome in your gut, an adequate reabsorption of
biophats that can maintain a healthy level of cholesterol.
These beneficial bacteria in your gut actually help train your immune system to tell the
difference between helpful and unhelpful bacteria.
Your gut is the largest part of your immune system.
80% of your body's immune system, 80% of your body's interaction from your internal environment,
your bloodstream and your cells and the outside world is in your gut.
If you were to lay out the surface area of your gut, it's about the size of a tennis
court.
Some say even twice that.
The research is ongoing.
It's kind of difficult to measure that because the lining of your intestines has these little
sort of shag carpet-like fingers sticking in that dramatically increase the surface
area of what otherwise would just be an open tube.
It's not an open tube.
It's a tube filled with these fingers protruding in to the opening, the passageway through
the tube that dramatically increase its surface area to help absorb nutrients and to kill
off bad bacteria.
So there's a war going on in your gut between the good bacteria and the bad bacteria.
Some of the bad bacteria you may have heard of like Clostridium difficile, which there
are different strains of, but one of the most important ones is one of the worst infections
that you can get.
Usually the only place you can get it is in a hospital.
And H. pylori.
So more and more frequently I'm having patients come in and say, oh, I have ulcers and my
doctor found out it's because of H. pylori.
Well H. pylori is apathinogenic, can be apathinogenic bacteria if it's in excess, but most people
have some H. pylori in their gut too.
It's not necessarily, there's no data to suggest that it's beneficial, but lots and lots of
testing has shown that it's present in healthy people all the time in small amounts.
It's only a problem if it becomes dramatically increased.
I'm Dr. Todd Bakley, you're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any
Health Challenge.
Today we're talking about the healthy gut microbiome.
And for those of you who want to know more about this, I'm getting most of this information
from the Cleveland Clinic's website, clevelandclinic.org.
What is your gut microbiome?
You can go there and get more information about this.
So we've talked about several aspects of it so far.
One of them is these short chain fatty acids that are the byproducts of healthy gut bacteria
that are just hugely important for your immune system.
They help maintain a barrier that your gut needs to keep the bad bacteria out and their
toxins and keep them from escaping into your bloodstream.
So out in, that's kind of confusing.
So think of your gut, your gut from your mouth to the other end is a long tube, about 30
feet long, 28 to 30 feet long, that is technically, physiologically still outside your body.
You've heard the phrase, you are what you eat.
Well, you're not really what you eat until that food crosses a barrier, a membrane in
your intestines and enters your bloodstream.
So what enters your bloodstream, you are what enters your bloodstream, not what you eat
necessarily.
The tube between your mouth and the anus is physiologically external to your body because
it's external to your bloodstream.
So this is really important to understand because food we eat contains toxins.
It contains contaminants, things that are really important to not have in our body.
And independent of that, the short chain fatty acids that I've been talking about help maintain
your gut barrier that keep bacteria that are good or bad, that just are fine to live in
your gut, but you don't want them in your bloodstream.
You don't want any bacteria unnecessarily entering your bloodstream and even undigested
protein and other things that aren't necessarily bad that are when they're passing through
your gut become very bad if they leak through your gut.
If you have leaky gut, they pass through the walls of the intestines into your bloodstream
and then trigger autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis and Hashimoto's thyroiditis
and ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, et cetera.
So because these healthy bacteria and the short chain fatty acids they produce help
maintain this gut barrier, they have anti-inflammatory properties for the gut because they prevent
these things entering your bloodstream that trigger the inflammatory response.
Inflammation is a normal function of your immune system.
It's essential to break down if you have smashed your thumb with a hammer or you have a cut
or an infection that damages tissue, then your immune system has an inflammatory process
that's essential to identify, locate, and break down that bad tissue because bad disease
tissue, damaged tissue is ripe for infection.
So your immune system wants to find any damaged tissue as soon as possible, destroy it so
it can be replaced with healthy tissue.
But the problem is, especially in our society of stress and so many things that can interfere
with the natural function, especially in the gut, is you end up with chronic inflammation,
especially in autoimmune disease.
But people end up with chronic inflammation just from stress, from the stress of emotional
and mental stress, from the stress of driving, from being in relationships that aren't working
for you, from your job, from basically anything that you identify that is physically, mentally,
or emotionally, or chemically stressing you.
And they trigger autoimmune conditions.
They can increase your risk of cancer and diabetes.
And the short chain fatty acids produced by these healthy bacteria help prevent those.
As an example, here is a case of a man that came to see me about four years ago, a 48
year old man who was already diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.
He'd been going to two or three different gastroenterologists for treatment, taking
antibiotics, taking steroids to reduce the inflammation prednisone.
They put him on antibiotics on and off for years and a horrible iron supplement because
he was having anemia from that he was bleeding so much that he had anemia from the bleeding,
which is uncommon in men.
The only way you get anemia is from bleeding.
Men have it all the time from menstruation.
Men rarely get it unless they're bleeding from an ulcer or a condition like this.
It was horrible because the iron supplement, ferrous sulfate, is increasing his gut symptoms.
Ferrous sulfate is a stupid form of iron.
99.99% of iron supplements are this and no one should take that.
Probably going to run out of time here before I get through his case, so I may have to talk
more about it again next week.
But he was miserable.
He was miserable, he had severe fatigue, just debilitating fatigue.
It was hard for him to get to work and it was obviously scary to have this bleeding
all the time.
And we are going to run out of time.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
Thank you for tuning in.
I'll continue this case next week right here at 4 o'clock next Friday.
See you then.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
Dr. Binkley at www.BinkleyHealingCenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on
98.3 The Word, KDAR.