The Gut-Brain Connection: Healing Trauma Through Digestive Health | with Josh Dech

Michael: We live in a time now more than ever where gut health is a prominent concern. We talk about the reality of the gut being the second, maybe even the first brain, and the impact it has on how we navigate the world day to day. A sick man only has one wish, and that is for health.

And for many of us, health begins in the gut. But what if you have trauma? That’s what we’re going to explore today with Josh Deck. Thank you for being on the show, my friend. A very simple question: Why should anyone listen to today’s podcast?

Josh: Simply put, Michael, 93 percent of the leading causes of death in North America stem from your gut. If you can learn to understand your gut and the language it speaks, you can prevent death in your family, sickness, illness, and improve your quality and longevity of life tenfold.

Michael: All right, let's get into it. So, when I was in my mid-twenties, I got diagnosed with this condition called SIBO—small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I went on a treatment of some very intense antibiotics. I ended up getting C. diff—something like 500,000 people a year die from C. diff. It’s super contagious.

I was in the hospital for multiple days. Rewind back to childhood—I had been on antibiotics over and over again. In part, this was because of the neglect I experienced from my mom, who was unwilling to take me to doctors. Instead, she just gave me antibiotics. Part of that also was the general lack of knowledge people had back then, especially about antibiotics and their ready availability in the '80s and '90s.

Today, we're seeing a multitude of people in the 30 to 45 age range experiencing gut health issues—gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance. If the wind blows the wrong way, they’re on the ground, and we have to take them to the hospital. Everybody’s sick. Everybody’s ailing. I’m one of them. I’ve done a ton of work to get my gut normalized, but you just told me that 93 percent of deaths in North America start in the gut. Is there a correlation?

Josh: Huge. Here’s what I can say. You had an early adulthood diagnosis of SIBO. Where did that come from? Antibiotics—that led to C. diff. So, we can already see how antibiotics disrupted your gut microbiome, which was already compromised. That led to an infection of what we call opportunistic microbes. They took over and did you dirty.

Now, let’s look at childhood antibiotic use. Here’s what I can say: the perfect way to get microbes into your body is through being breastfed, being vaginally born, playing outside, and living on a farm. That’s the ideal way to get inoculated with this ecosystem of microbes that outnumber us nearly 10 to 1, depending on who you ask.

When you start to disrupt that with stress, trauma, anxiety, and antibiotic usage—which has increased by 40 percent since the year 2000—you disrupt this beautifully balanced ecosystem. So, the opportunistic or bad guys creep in. You get fungal overgrowth, C. diff infections, E. coli. It’s a great opportunity for parasites to enter—or for those that already live in your body to take over—and they become extremely problematic.

Long and short, what happens? Now you have inflammation in your gut. The cells start to spread apart. Your small intestine has only one cell between what’s inside your intestines (which is waste) and your bloodstream. That’s it. So, if that very fine mesh is spread apart or develops holes—what we call leaky gut—toxins leave your gut, circulate around your body, and can attach to anything.

Systemic inflammation, as a whole—from cognitive issues to arthritis, asthma, you name it—could all stem from what started in your gut. Even heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s can be the result of what started 30 years ago in your gut that went untreated.

Michael: And you know what’s so funny? You look at that and go, "Okay, obviously, the correlation is there," but somehow, antibiotic use is up 40 percent since 2000. Right now, I don’t know if we necessarily have to walk the path of big pharma and medication being the reason why everybody’s sick and dying, but obviously...

When we’re in this reality and faced with this stark truth—wait a second, if that impacts my cognitive function, my ability to think clearly and make constructive decisions, but now you’re telling me this could also be linked to anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, or other mental health issues—what do we do?

Plus, I had a traumatic childhood, which we know has a direct correlation to gut health. This has been proven through the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) survey done in the '90s by Dr. Felitti, Kaiser Permanente, and the California Center for Disease Control.

Now, you're looking at a head-on collision where your mental health is in dire need of being cleaned up. Let’s look at this from a really practical perspective. I had trauma. I got gut issues. What do I do?

Josh: I love that you break it down like this, and I can tell you’ve got such a strong understanding of gut health because your questions are so pointed and directed. That’s going to make this conversation smooth and easy to absorb as a listener.

The first thing you have to do—you can’t empty the bathtub unless you turn off the tap. If you are currently in a traumatic environment—actively in an abusive relationship, living in a home that is adding to your stress levels—you’re going to find that you are continually filling your cup, so to speak. Let me break this analogy down.

I look at the body like a cup of water. As that cup starts to fill up, you develop symptoms. You feel fatigue. You get anxiety. You experience bloating, maybe some loose bowels or joint pain. As that cup fills up, once it finally overflows, you go to the doctor with enough symptoms for them to check enough boxes and say, "Yep, you have these symptoms. Therefore, this is your condition."

But it shouldn’t be that simple. If you walked into a hospital with a nail through your foot, and the doctor looked at you and said, "Wow, that nail? I bet it hurts. But there’s nothing we can do because it’s just part of your body now. Here’s some numbing cream. Use it for the rest of your life. And if it doesn’t work, we can cut off your foot," you’d think that was insane.

But that’s exactly what happens in modern medicine when you go to the doctor for cognitive issues, stress, or gut problems. They tell you, "It’s just genetic. It’s part of your body. But here’s some medication to manage the symptoms for the rest of your life. And if it doesn’t work, we have surgeries we can do for you." It’s that same kind of crazy.

They’re not looking to see what filled your cup in the first place. That’s the first thing we have to address. So, let’s stop filling the cup—whether that’s trauma, stress, or food that doesn’t serve your body as actual fuel or healing remedies, so to speak, whatever that is.

That's filling your cup. Number two, we have to look at how to empty that cup. Now, on a biological level, it's different than psychological. This might be EMDR, it might be psychedelics or therapy, or whatever it is that you find works for you. But on a biological level, we call this drainage.

Your drainage pathways are how things exit the body, right? If you think about detoxing, we're always doing it—it's collecting your trash, but drainage is bringing it out to the curb. So how do you do that inside of your body? The primary sources are going to be your liver, gallbladder, and bile ducts. Those are the two most primary drainage pathways.

Everything else, like your skin, your lungs, your sinuses, your kidneys, your lymphatic system, these are all other drainage pathways we can look at, but liver and gallbladder have to go first. We can really support those and open those up through work, through food, through supplements, etc. And the third thing we want to do is now that the cup's overflowed, we have to figure out what else has gotten wet.

What else in your body, what systems have now been compromised? Are you struggling with immune imbalances or deficiencies or autoimmunity? Are you struggling with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or alcoholic fatty liver disease that your trauma has maybe driven you to? These are the things we have to look at.
Let's find out what filled your cup. How do we drain it? And how do we clean up the mess?

Michael: That makes a lot of sense because really, this is a logical conversation, right? One of the problems though is, do you know that the third leading cause of death is medical error in the United States?

Josh: It is. And it's shocking.

Michael: So we're faced with this thing where we have this group of people who we've been told we need to entrust all of our health and being into.

However, they're the third leading cause of death. And now this is not to say that these people obviously are not massively educated and trained, but what they're faced with is what you just said. Here's a list of symptoms. You check all the boxes. This must mean that this is the logical outcome. There's logic in that.

It's really hard to dispel that because you look at it, it's input in and input out. But that leaves a lot of people like myself in this situation where I got put on a medication to solve a problem that almost actually killed me. And this stems from this reality of so much of our gut is imbalanced because of our food, because of our health, because of stress.

You add in trauma, you look at the fact that if you have traumatic childhood experiences, the likelihood of you being an alcoholic is 22 percent more high than a person who did not have childhood trauma. The likelihood that you would smoke cigarettes or use tobacco is 2000 percent more likely than a person who did not have trauma.

And so now these filtering mechanisms are lungs, are kidneys, are gallbladder. They're not only fighting the food, which is full of poison and toxin, the environment, generally speaking, which is full of poison and toxin, but also this self-induced harm, trying to filter the poison and toxin that we've now been led to believe are socially acceptable ways of creating community and connection, right?
So you're being attacked from all sides, and yet you're supposed to live a normal life. And you're supposed to be able to go to work and be productive and have a family and make money and yet go to the gym and work out and not smoke and not drink and all these things. But what you come to find is now you're having this conversation about nature versus nurture.

The depth of this conversation is really about looking at this gut and our health and understanding the direct correlations between our potential longevity and really so many of the detrimental health ramifications that come in part and parcel with having a disrupted gut. Okay, so now I laid that all out.

So let's look at this from a more pointed question. How does our gut health play a role in regulating traumatic responses? And our nervous system?

Josh: That is such a great question. Now you mentioned right in the introduction that your gut may be the first brain. So we have to understand they communicate together in utero. So as a baby in the womb, your gut and your brain are actually the same tissues. The same cell that divide and bifurcate means they split apart and become two separate nervous systems.

So you have this entire brain with billions and billions of neurons in it. Your gut is innervated with 400 to 500 million different neurons, which connect directly through your spinal cord, which of course goes right to your brain. You have what's called the vagus nerve, which maybe many of you are familiar with vagal toning for stress reduction and stress responses. This vagus nerve runs down the left side of your neck, innervates with your heart, your lungs, your entire digestive system. It's extraordinarily important, but this is a bi-directional communication pathway. It's a two-way street. So when you have some kind of stress or anxiety within your brain, maybe a trauma response. What it does is it actually sends a signal back down to your gut and you start to get a bunch of things to mess up. You lose a lot of your mucous membrane or that protective layer inside of your gut. We actually activate these inflammatory pathways. We call them for you science heads out there, interleukin 17, 23, TNF alpha, these different inflammatory responses that trigger.

Inflammation on a local level. So you can actually inflame the tissues of your gut, just like you would if you burned your hand on the stove. This paves the way for nasty microbes to come in. It modifies your immune system for the worse. It heightens stress responses. It can also activate what's called cell danger responses.
And so we look at these to say you have a danger response in your brain in a conscious or subconscious way, identify some kind of trigger, some kind of problem, and it sends a signal to the body saying, let's fight, flight, freeze or fawn, whatever your responses are. On a chemical level, your body can pick up these signals we call cell danger responses, whether it's a toxin or microbe or whatever it is, and instead of your brain telling the body to panic, the body on a cellular level tells the brain to panic.

And suddenly you go, I'm anxious. I don't really know why. Maybe there's a toxin moving around. We also know that up to 90 percent of the neurotransmitters that you have in your brain. So serotonin, dopamine, they're made inside of your gut. So you have to understand there's this bidirectional pathway, like a highway, this big nerve.

We have the massive production of neurochemicals that your brain needs inside of your gut, we know that your digestive system is housed with upwards of 100 trillion microbes that we have probiotics. We have what's called psychobiotics. They produce more neurochemicals. They detoxify you, balance your hormones, which, of course, influence your brain.

They help you detox as a whole, which keeps those cell danger responses at a low grade. They manage inflammatory and immune responses, which keeps your entire body in check. They do so much for us. And I think as a general whole, just where we are with humans today, we have such little reverence, I think, for our gut microbiome because we can't really see it with the naked eye, unless you're a scientist in a lab, so we don't really realize that it's there and things we can't see.
We discredit their potential, their power and their usefulness, their functionality for us, their utility, so to speak. So it's these disruptions that we really start to get imbalances. There's a chemical disruption neurochemical. There's a neurological disruption that vagus nerve. And then we even have a microbial disruption inside of the gut. How stress negatively impacts that environment or that ecosystem.

Michael: Okay, so we're sitting here, we're looking at the reality. Right? Many people are faced with gut health issues today. Can't eat dairy, wheat. You can't go outside. You can't do so many things because of the negative impact. And yet, you're dealing with this trauma response at the same time. Your brain, your gut is telling your brain, "Hey, we need to go on flight or flight. We need to go in to freak out."

And it's—I had this moment, I realized this. Because I've actually recently stopped doing this. If I drank a Celsius, my anxiety level would shoot through the freaking roof. If I just have black coffee with some almond milk, oat milk, coconut milk, whatever, no issue whatsoever.

In fact, I could, because I have an aura ring, I was tracking my sleep pattern. And I did a little self-experiment, which I think time to time we have to do a little self-experiment, and I was trying to get down to causation. Like, why am I not sleeping? Why is my anxiety super, super high? And yet my productivity went through the roof, and I realized that was actually because of what I was consuming.
My diet as a whole is super clean. I eat almost zero processed food minus popcorn on the occasion because I'm definitely addicted to that. When I think about my day-to-day, it's clean. Pasta makes eggs chicken breast, rice fish, fatty meats, avocados, good oils, right? We don't have vegetable oils, things like that. Because I had to learn, through my healing journey, to really take care of my gut.

Because I noticed, depending on how I ate, I might feel a certain way. Okay, so now I'm in this place where I'm on this road trip recently, I get stuck in a city that I didn't want to be in, in a few days because of weather, they lose my luggage, I'm exhausted, I actually find myself in this loop where I'm like, I'm exhausted, I'm gonna drink a Celsius, now I can be productive, get all my work done, but now I'm completely exhausted at night, insomnia kicks in.

Gut feels off, wake up the next day exhausted, let me go back in, grab another Celsius, and I found myself in this feedback loop where suddenly I was doing something that was making myself feel worse. Now, without awareness, which I think is always the integral key component to creating change in your life.
And me actually being like, wait a second, maybe it's the Celsius, which are delicious, by the way, I actually love them. I was like, I can't drink these anymore because I noticed the way they make me feel. However, there is this behavioral pattern that I think many people go through, this is how you end up in this place where you smoke or you drink or you hook up with strangers, whatever the thing may be that is your vice, to change your normal status and your normal state, oftentimes down-regulate how chaotic life can be, right?

Your anxieties do the roof, you're very hyper, maybe you're manic, so you go to this self-soothing thing. As odd as it sounds, for me, that's always been like that. Coffee. I like the up. I never really liked the down. Okay, so now we're in this thing where we're trying to play this game of understanding awareness.

And this self-fulfilling loop of I am actually torturing myself inadvertently. You started this conversation with food. And the reason why I just shared that and went down that path is because I noticed a truism as old as time. You are what you eat. What role does food play in the gut health and how does that impact and affect our cognitive functions, our physical functions, and our mental functions?

Josh: Let's start with the Celsius and break this down a little bit more specifically, right? And while you mentioned Celsius, I actually looked it up. There's guarana, there's caffeine, there's green tea extract, all kinds of stimulants. Here's what we got to keep in mind. These things mess with your brain chemistry, right?
Caffeine in itself. It actually doesn't stimulate you. Caffeine is not a stimulant. It actually is a blocker. So caffeine, when it gets to your brain, it blocks something called adenosine. Now this is a neurotransmitter that promotes relaxation, sleepiness, and calmness in your brain. Caffeine binds to these receptors, which doesn't allow the adenosine to bind instead because caffeine's there taking its place.
So instead of being relaxed, you have this alertness, wakefulness, et cetera, that you get from caffeine or even the jitters. Now, by blocking adenosine, caffeine actually boosts dopamine and norepinephrine levels. So it enhances your feelings of motivation, feeling good, your good mood, your perseverance.

We inhibit something called GABA. This is gamma amino butyric acid. It's his main, we'll say inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. It really helps you rest and relax. You can buy it in a supplement, use it sparingly, but it helps you chill out. Caffeine reduces that activity. So what we're seeing here.

Is instead of your brain being allowed to rest and relax and just feel chill, it actually blocks all those relaxation neurotransmitters, forcing you to be active instead. Food. Everything we consume works the same way. It either works directly on receptors or through some other chain of events. If you swallow something that is really high sugar, for example, carbohydrates, it takes a lot of blood being shunted away from your brain and the rest of your body to come in and digest.

Thanksgiving dinner, traditionally in North America, tryptophan is blamed from the turkey because everyone gets sleepy. It's mostly the carbs. Most of us are in a carb coma because we have so much more blood being shunted away. Insulin and blood sugar levels are changing. That's what makes us sleepy.

When you eat certain foods. Highly inflammatory foods, for example, they are more prone to feeding inflammatory bacteria, which lead to leaks in the gut, which leads to toxins in the body, which leads to issues in the brain and cognition in the body, the skin, the joints, the liver, et cetera. Everything we put directly into our gut affects something that's connected to our gut.

And we just mentioned at the beginning, 93 percent of the leading causes of death are connected to your gut. Therefore, everything in your body, Michael, is connected back to your gut. So what you eat, you become, and if you are eating garbage, your body will become like garbage. It'll start to break down.

You'll be really physically smelly, like garbage in a lot of body odor. When you sweat, it smells sour. These are toxins being poured out. So if you're feeding microbes, we'll call them opportunistic microbes. Alright, they take the opportunity when given the chance to overgrow and be really nasty to you.

So for feeding things in our gut that promote this growth of opportunistic, then you promote the growth of toxins and you promote the growth of, or you promote the degradation of everything else inside of your body.

Michael: What are some inflammatory foods? Because I want to really spend some time, we're going to talk about the healing process and how you heal your gut. We're going to get into that in a minute, but I want to break down how people are actually damaging their gut, right? Because you do hear a lot of times people say, yeah, it's the food, it's the drinks, it's the alcohol, it's the tobacco.

Sure, we can rationalize that, but I want to get into the nuance of it. What are inflammatory foods? What foods do we need to be aware of? What food should we never, ever eat and what food might secretly be causing inflammation that we eat all the time?

Josh: Let's start with the ones that are just not secrets at all. The average American eats over a hundred pounds of sugar a year. Now, just to give you an idea, that's the size of a small panda bear, it's actually substantial how much sugar we consume. And so that's going to feed things like candida or fungus, which is going to overgrow these opportunistic microbes that can overgrow.

On average, the average American male consumes about 15 and a half to 16 liters of alcohol per year. Women, it's about five liters, give or take. Smoking kills about 8 million people per year. 30 plus percent of American men smoke about 19 or so percent of women. Fast food. Just to give you an idea, the average American eats fast food three times a week, which is a total of about $160 billion per year. $730 billion globally per year just on fast food. These are inflammatory foods.
Now, what does inflammatory food mean? It means it's a chemical or a toxin that elicits some kind of immune response through one pathway or another. So if I eat sugar, not only does that spike my blood sugar and therefore my insulin leading to inflammation, what we're also seeing is there's so many preservatives and chemicals.

There's 50, 60 chemicals that go into a McDonald's Big Mac between the bond and the cheese and everything that's fake. It's not real food. We get the argument. Everything's made of chemicals. And all these are like toxic chemicals that if you eat them by themselves, you'll probably die and get cancer.

So they're toxic chemicals. When we consume them, they can feed microbes, which then they overgrow, leading to the production of negative byproducts. We call these endotoxins or LPS. It stands for lipopolysaccharide. They're made on the outer layer of these microbes, like the crunchy candy layer of a jelly bean.

That's where they're made. They get out and get to your blood. Second to that, we have these chemicals, these toxins, which can be absorbed into your tissues, like your cells into your liver and other digestive or elimination organs. Your body doesn't know what to do with them. So it can store them in fat, which also produces things like interleukin six, which is another inflammatory pathway.

We have all kinds of junk that comes in. Your body has to try to clean it up and heal you. What is inflammation from a ground level? Inflammation is an emergency intended to be short-term response for your body trying to protect you or heal you. It dilates blood vessels and it sensitizes the nerves in the area, which also tells you to stop walking on the sprained ankle.

For example, you have an infection. It dilates the blood vessels. You can get more healing soldiers down there, more white blood cells, more nutrients, more everything. And it gets hot because of all this dilation. That's inflammation. Now, if you're consuming foods that create inflammation on a cellular level, you're having that same inflammatory response as if you cut yourself or scraped your knee, but within 10 to 20 trillion cells inside of your body, all experiencing the same thing at the same time. This is what inflammatory foods do.

Michael: Okay, so we know sugar, right? We know alcohol, we know smoking, we get the fast food thing, right? Those are the objective, hey, either limit them tremendously or stay away from them, right? What foods should we absolutely never ever consume and I'll come back to that in one second. But what I was thinking about is Dr. Amen, who is a brain scientist. God, I'm sure there's a better way to phrase that than brain scientist. Dr. Amen scans people's brains for a living and he looks for inflammation and holes that because of the degradation could potentially lead to early death. That's what his work is really based around.

If I scan your brain and I look at your brain, what does and does not make sense. One of the things unequivocally that he has said, and we're hearing it more and we're actually seeing it culturally start to happen, is that no amount of alcohol is good for you. And it actually makes a lot of sense because if you look at it, not only does it damage your liver, which damages your gut, which then tells your brain I'm inflamed.

It's like a really intense process of let me throw this poison into myself. For enjoyment, not realizing the ramifications of doing so. I will say this, as someone who limitly, very rarely or if ever drinks, in fact, it's been almost a year since I had my last sip of alcohol when I drank when I was young, my gut inflammation was out of control. My depression and anxiety were out of control, I could not regulate my sleep or my weight, and I found myself often volatile. Which, all these things are intuitive to anyone who drinks with any frequency. In fact, when I was in my late 20s, I actually had the beginning signs of fatty liver disease. Because I drank a lot.

I was the guy at the party who had a fifth of rum in his back pocket. That's how much it was, right? But I started drinking very young, when I was 13, because societally, that was a norm, right? And so you look at that, and you go, Okay, wait a second, that's childhood rearing its head. Now, today, all of my markers are perfect.

It's incredible how resilient our bodies are. I'm very grateful for the knowledge and information what you're sharing, because it's this knowledge and information that transformed my life, which leads to the place where I don't even know if I'm gonna have a drink this year. So we know alcohol.

No, it's really bad. Sugar is hidden. It's hidden all over the place. Sucrose, dextrose, like it's just given all of these fancy names, but ultimately it comes down to sugar, right? We know that sugar is highly addictive. In fact, sugars—As they say, I can't speak to this more addictive than heroin or cocaine.

So we know sugar. Okay, maybe let's stay away from that Smoking. It's if you're smoking at this point, let's get you in therapy. Let's get you in coaching there's some shit you need to deal with here, right? Totally right and then you got the fast food Look, you're going to have a Big Mac sometimes, fine, whatever, 6 times a week, now we got problems.

So we can look at these and go, alright, we got it, it's clear, it makes sense, let's stay away from these things. Alright, these are the high level, the 10,000 foot view. I want to get more nuanced. What foods should we absolutely never eat that are destroying our gut that are leading to anxiety, depression, insomnia, leaky gut, and that 93 percent of deaths being caused by your gut health.

Josh: Let me take this high level and I'll zoom in here with you. If it's a food, your great grandmother would not recognize as an edible substance, it is making you sick in some way, shape or form. If it comes in a package, in a box, in a freezer, if it has an ingredients label, it's causing you a problem in some way, shape or form. If it's not a whole food that grows on a tree, walks on the land, swims, flies, God forbid it crawls. If you're into that sort of stuff, those are foods that we should be eating. Anything outside of that, we should not be eating. It's that simple.

If you think about it in the entirety of human history, if you were to spread it out into a one-year timeline, so to speak, humans have been eating meats and foods they find growing in the wild for about 360 days.

Probably the last five days. It's when we started introducing grains and refined sugar and all this alcohol and all kinds of other junk that makes us sick in those last five days when everyone became fat, sick, chronically diseased, we've seen autoimmune disease up 1600%. is why it's happening. So it's anything in a box or a package that great grandmother would not recognize as an edible food.

Now, here's the thing. Do I eat some of these foods? Yes, but I know what I'm playing with. Is alcohol bad for you? Yes. But if you have a drink, will it kill you? No. Is it still bad for you? Yes, but you're making an informed decision to say, what's my tolerance level, right? I know I've got a bum ankle. Can I go for a jog, for example, without hurting it?

Yes. If I run a marathon, will it probably break? Yeah, maybe. So you understand your tolerance level, what your breaking points are, and you're just, you're playing a dangerous game in those lines. But at least it's an informed decision once, so you've covered the basics, right? Your alcohol sugars, but specifically things like high fructose corn syrup.

They're hidden Heinz ketchup. It's 25 percent 30 percent sugar or something incredible. And this is high fructose corn syrups that are leading to what? Now I'll pull this back. A client of mine told me she's a medical doctor. She was at a conference a couple of years back and she had suspected the conference was talking about something called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

This is where fat stores in and around and on the liver and it really impairs its function dramatically. They were suspecting by 2025 and here we finally are that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease would be the leading cause of liver transplants in North America. And the number one food they said was causing that high fructose corn syrup.

And it's hidden in all kinds of stuff. It's hidden in bars and snacks and processed foods. Now, you mentioned your processed meats. What about grains? There is so much in the way of grains and gluten, where there are doctors who specialize in this, like Dr. Peter Osborne, Dr. Tom O'Brien, and they say never in your life.
Touch these foods, these grains, these glutens. Now, Americans specifically, or North Americans, can go down to Italy and have some bread or some pasta. They come back feeling great. It's full of gluten, just the same. What's the difference? Over here in North America, we have upwards of 18 to 20,000 different pesticides sprayed on our food, different chemicals, billions of pounds a year covering our food, which punch holes in our gut and destroy our gut microbiome, our gut bacteria.

In Italy, they don't use the same stuff. Not only do we spray it on the crops while they're growing, but glyphosate is one of the most common herbicides in the world. Billions and billions of dollars worth every year are used in purchased, bought, sold. They use it as a desiccant. So not only has it been outside growing, getting sprayed on, absorbed, some washed off.

Once it's been harvested, they spray it on top to help it dry. So you're eating straight chemicals out of the tube, onto your grain, ground in your flour and sent to the store. And that's what we buy. And as a sidebar for you, did you know glyphosate was originally owned, I believe, originally previously by Monsanto Bayer bought Monsanto out Bayer now owns glyphosate.

They recently paid out over 11 billion to settle over 100,000 lawsuits claiming that this glyphosate caused cancer. There's still another 30 to 40,000 lawsuits still pending, and it's still allowed to be used. If you're a small business or somebody else, and you created a product that caused cancer for hundreds of thousands of people, you'd be shut down, fined, and probably put in prison if you kept doing it.
But they do it and get away with it. And these are the things that are making us sick. So dare I say the food of corporate greed, to get that deep, but it really is. So there are a lot of foods that we should be eating or we should think are good for us like your oatmeal that's also sprayed in the same thing, plant-based meats full of junk, seed oils, whatever.

They got to make it taste like meat. Manufacturing coffee, for example, I love coffee, but I make sure I buy certified mold-free Peanut butter. Same thing because these are two of the moldiest foods we can buy and mold disrupts your gut dramatically. It just has to do with how they're stored and manufactured and the grinding of the beans and the processes that end up collecting and creating mold. This is the—these are the things that are making us sick. Mold affects your brain. It affects your lungs. It affects your gut. It can lead to autoimmune disease, all kinds of problems. And it could be coming from your foods, even if you're avoiding alcohol and sugar.

Michael: Yeah. And it's funny because I saw this video a couple of months ago where this guy was making fun of conversations like this, very reasonably. So how, because that's the nature of the world we're in. And, he was like, can I eat anything? And eventually he was sitting there and he was like, I'm starving.
I'm going to eat air for dinner. And I thought to myself that's really funny because we're walking down this path where we're told, Oh, wait, did I lose you?

Josh: No you're good. I lost you for a sec there and just bounce back if you want to. Yeah. I got you back at, I saw this guy and then we started cutting out.

Michael: Yeah, weird. Hey, Ruth, go back to 3505, something like that. So I saw this guy who posted this video and he's talking about how There's nothing that you can eat anymore. And at the end of the video, he's sitting with an empty plate and it was like air. And what's really funny is there's a lot of truism to that.
Because, especially if you do live in North America, you're being poisoned. And then, one of the things we talked about is the fact that there is 40 percent uptick in antibiotics since 2000. It's—I dare you to watch TV and not find a pharmaceutical commercial. Right?

Between Here in New Zealand, there's nowhere else in the world that you can see advertisements for pharmaceuticals on television, on the radio.

We were watching a TV show on Hulu, and I don't have the plus subscription because we don't really ever watch TV, right? It was just like, Hey, let's check out the show. We need a little bit of a detox from work and everything. We're going to hang out. And in an hour and a half show, no, it was a movie.

And this hour and a half movie. Every commercial break was for a pharmaceutical or for a processed food. And it's yeah, it's no wonder we're so sick. And I think one of the really difficult parts is there is so much information that is constantly being given to us. We don't know where to go. We don't know what to do.

You said something that I wrote down that I think is actually incredibly practical. If your great grandmother wouldn't know what it is, it's probably not food. And my first thought was like, I really hope my great grandma knew what popcorn was, which I believe she is. I think, I feel like popcorn is like a super old food.

It's like popcorn is probably one of the oldest foods known to man. Now, would she know what some of the things I sometimes put on popcorn at? Probably not, but we, we try to stick to the salt and butter, we're humans. Okay, so we looked at some things we should definitely never eat.

Our guts are disrupted, our food system is poisoning us, our medical system is reinforcing that. Everyone is fat, sick, and dumb. We're in trouble in a lot of ways. And we're seeing obesity rates skyrocket right now. And there's also this direct correlation between obesity and mental health. We see it everywhere.

I don't know that we'd have to necessarily go down that path right now. But we're in this position where we're effectively at war because I can't think of a better way to phrase it. We're at war with advertising. We're at war with the foods that we're eating. We're at war with ourselves in a lot of ways because man, what is better?
There's this company. I won't say who they are. They make, I'm gluten-free. I've been gluten-free for pretty much my entire adult life. And I probably should have been as a kid. I think it's actually an allergy. I don't think it's something that came on late in life. When I was young and ate gluten, I didn't feel good. Anyway, there's this company, they make gluten-free pretzels. They're unbelievable, dude. I'm not joking, Josh. I can smash a bag of these things in five minutes because they're so good. So I'm really glad that where I live right now, they don't have them, but we're at war. And what I mean is we're at war with ourselves because our salivary glands love the salty, love the sweet.

It's addicting. We want it, but we know that these things are killing us. All right. So how do we stop killing ourselves? And what are the healthy foods? What are the super foods? What are the things we need to be consuming to, to right these wrongs and get this gut health ship sailing in the right direction again?

Josh: That is such a good question. And I love that you brought up these influencers are now making videos of just eating a bowl full of air because you can't eat anything anymore. Here's what I'll say as a preface to this. I don't sit in one camp of one dietary protocol. I'm not carnivore. I'm not pescatarian.
I am anti-vegan. I will say that though. I've never seen anybody with a vegan diet thrive. Some people claim they do. It almost is always inevitably a problem, but you can find that on both sides. You can find people who went carnivore and got sick and it doesn't have to do with the foods so much as to what your body is doing with those foods.

So here's what I'll say. Most of us have some kind of infection, be it a parasitic issue, be it a mold issue, a fungal issue, whatever it is. And this comes from my work specializing in Crohn's and colitis, which a whole other conversation, but they're very reversible conditions. Even though your doctor tells you they're autoimmune genetic and idiopathic, they're not.

And I have a whole spiel on that, but here's the idea. A lot of us are dealing with an overreactive, what's called th2 immune response. This is the one that's going to deal with things like histamines. So my rules are three things. Eat whole foods, eat foods you tolerate, and I don't mean just, Oh, I feel my gut feels fine.

I'm not bloated. You might be chronically bloated and not really notice it because it's your normal, and this is why the elimination diets can work so well where you introduce a new piece every couple of days. But my rules are whole foods. Colorful foods and if you're having any kind of gut issue or cognitive issue on the spectrum low histamine.

So your ferments cured meats anything with vinegar in it all that stuff's gonna have to go fried foods canned foods, etc We can introduce it slowly back over time and test it Those are my three overarching rules as far as the superfoods are concerned There's only one I've landed on which is fatty red meat.

Michael: Yeah. And gosh, there, cause there's so much conversation about where to begin with it. And I think that when you do look at whether you're in the carnivore camp, Or you're in the pescatarian camp, or you're in the low FODMAP camp, or whatever camp you're in. One, I think that because as humans we have to create some hypotheses, we have to walk down the path of trying to solve for X and figure out what makes most sense for us.

And the thing that I've landed on, because I've tried, when you are trying to fix what is wrong, you will try anything. And so I've tried every single diet known to man. In fact, I even did the elemental diet for 21 days, which is a process of where you're only consuming basically what they give people in life support in a shaker.
And it was very difficult. Today, I lean into what you just said. I eat whole foods minus because I'm human. I'm telling you, sometimes I'm going to eat popcorn. It's just like the reality. I don't deny it. I'm going to eat foods that I can tolerate with certainty. I can tell you if I go and I eat eggplant, my day is ruined.
No questions asked. And finally, the low histamine. I get it, let's not inflame ourselves. What I really hear in all that though, which is a thing that I think a lot of people need to sit in a little bit deeper, is having agency and sovereignty over their decision making. Because it's fascinating to me, and I'm not sure how old you are, but as I head to 40, I recall many times as a child being like, you have to eat this thing that you don't like.

And I remember It's funny how aware our bodies are. As a kid, I remember it was my little brother's birthday. My grandmother put on the birthday party because my mom and dad were poor, we were impoverished, there was no birthdays. But my grandma would do these birthdays. And this one particular birthday for my youngest brother, there was a shrimp cocktail platter on the table.

And everyone's eating it and someone came to me, I don't remember who, but they're like, do you want to try one? And I looked at it, I was like, no way, not in a million years, it's impossible, I'm not putting that in my mouth. And yet I was pressured into it, and I was like no, I'm not going to do this. Lo and behold, fast forward 21 years old.

I'm at the nicest restaurant in all of Indianapolis when I lived there at the time. It's called the Eagle's Nest. It's this beautiful rotating restaurant. You guys have a restaurant like that in Calgary called the 360, I believe. I've been there. Beautiful restaurant as well. And so I'm in this restaurant.

We're rotating. We're going around the city. Me and my friends were dressed up. We're celebrating. Here comes a shrimp cocktail and crab cakes. Now, to this point, I never touched them. Never no interest, but I was like, it's a fancy night. I think this is the time no less than a bite after the crab cakes I'm going into anaphylactic shock. The reason why I'm telling this story and why I'm prefacing it because what you just said I think is one of the things that we have to do as humans and that's to really stand in our agency and our decision making around what we know is best for us by no pun intended trusting our gut.

One of the things that I know to be true in all the years that I have. Walk down the path of coaching and podcasting and guiding people on their healing journey Is that I've never in my life heard anyone say ah, I knew I should have trusted my brain But I can tell you of countless times the number I've heard somebody say I should have trusted my gut.

What role does agency play in all of this? What role does actually being your own advocate play in this? What role does being like, I'm going to stand up for myself, I am going to inherently trust I know what's best for me. Where does that play in all of this?

Josh: That's such a great question. First of all, when you're listening to a show like this or an episode like this or whatever it is, that's giving you power in your own hands, that is agency because nobody's going to care about your health more than you do. Now, whether you go down, I like to joke my hairlines as far back cause my tinfoil hat keeps rubbing on it, pulling the hair off. We are in a system where North America, for example, is about 5 percent of the global population. They're 70 percent of the pharmaceutical profits worldwide. It's astonishing. 5 percent of the population has up to 50 percent of the global cases of bowel disease, like IBS, Crohn's and colitis, specifically where I specialize in these gut diseases.

So our system who keeps saying these are safe. These are effective. This is healthy. This is how many times they've done that. Teflon, thalidomide, alcohol. They used to recommend your doctor's favorite cigarettes and give them to pregnant women. And now we know they're a problem. So we have been told by these three-letter organizations for decades.

That this is healthy. This is safe. This is fine. And it's at your expense and their profit that we discover that they're not. Agency is everything because nobody's going to care about your health more than you do. Particularly those of us who are in a system who profits off of illness at the tune of four and a half trillion dollars per year. So we have to recognize that. You are responsible. Agency is in your hands. It's in your control. Everything that you do, every piece of knowledge that you listen to, whether you retain it or not, is a seed planted that later can bear fruit. And you can use that fruit for the benefit to feed your family, yourself, your legacy, who you leave behind coming after you.

Because that's knowledge that you then impart, whether it's one piece of knowledge or a thousand that we've dropped today on this episode and you regurgitate it all like a bloody sponge. That's great. But you taking agency is the first step to taking control out of the hands of the people who profit from your illness, quite simply put, and who really could not give two shits about you and your diseases.

Michael: Obviously, your background and specialty sits in this window of the gut health, of looking at the impact, everything we've talked about in this conversation today. It's something that I, for myself, I take very seriously because I've touched near death because of my gut health in the past. And many people have, whether it be from food poisoning or antibiotics or, just for whatever reason it happens.
If you were to tell we've told people a lot of things to not do and things to avoid and the impact of those on gut health and your mental health. What is one thing that you believe every single person should be doing? To protect their gut health and their longevity.

Josh: That is such a great question. If I had to pick one thing, only one thing to do to protect your gut health, it would be to stop eating the foods that never existed all those years ago. Your gut's very resilient. When we get back to birth, when we get back to breastfeeding, vaginal birth, living naturally on the land, like we started this whole conversation with everything you do outside of that contributes to a problem.

But you and I, if we were meeting, sitting in person, we're traveling, hugging friends and family, kissing a loved one. This is how we're continually re-inoculating our bodies with microbes so we can get them from food and all these things. But you cannot build and repair a house that's actively on fire.
And if you're the one pouring gasoline on it, there's nothing you're gonna be able to do about it. So much in our modern world, do we want to look for a silver bullet, the one thing, the thing that's going to help us a new pill, a new powder, but we're not willing to do the non-sexy stuff. Some of the hard work, which is at war with ourselves, our taste buds, our brains, our addictions, our preferences, our comforts, getting uncomfortable is the only way to do that.

And sometimes it means an elimination diet. Sometimes that means doing something we don't like or eating something that may be, it's I'm sick of this, but I'll eat it because it's good for me. That's the best thing we can do. And bringing it back to agency, you're the only one who can do that for yourself. No one's going to force-feed you.

Michael: Yeah, it's so true. And, it makes me think of nothing tastes as good as healthy feels. And I think part of the problem that we're facing right now is there's so many shortcuts. The fact that, and we know it to be true, and maybe it's because I had to do a lot of work, I find myself resistant to this, but things like Ozempic on the market and this push to let that be the reason why you transform your life.
And I go, that's the shortcut. That is not the solution. Now look here, this is just me speaking experientially. I was 350 pounds. I now walk around at about 2.15. I work out four or five times a week. I eat very clean. I don't drink. I stay away from sugar. I've walked down the path of this journey from someone who had to put in the work.

And let me tell you this, you're not big-boned, you're fat. It doesn't run in your family. You're fat. And it's like the acknowledgement. And this is me speaking to me. I realized that people will hear this and go, you're fat-shaming. Maybe I am, because maybe that's the thing that you need to sit in and bring to your awareness so that you don't become another person who dies younger than they have to.

So that maybe you get to walk your son or daughter down the aisle because you lived past 45. Maybe it's time to step into this comfort of the journey of doing things you don't want to do because there's a direct correlation between our longevity and our waistline and to like to ignore that is so stupid.

And my hope is, and we don't know the outcome because of things like Ozympic, we don't have enough study behind it to know the long-term potential detrimental health ramifications. We could be poisoning a whole generation right now. If our children's children, if we're lucky enough to even conceive, because conception rates are also the lowest they've ever been in human history.
And the reason I bring this up And I share it from my perspective is because I just recognize there's no shortcut in this. There's no shortcut in our mental health journey. There's no shortcut in our physical journey. A lot of it is dark and grimy. And I don't know about you Josh, but I've just seen every single time I took a shortcut, there was a price I had to pay.

Josh: Yes, absolutely. Here's the thing about shortcuts. Every single step is a foundation. Imagine they built the pyramids with half the rocks on the bottom. It wouldn't make any sense. It wouldn't be able to stand up. Eventually, it would fall apart. And that's what a shortcut is. You're cheating yourself out of the base foundation layers.

You need to sustain whatever growth you're trying to build from that. If you don't have a base layer, everything falls apart. And this is the one thing that we've been trained to do is purchase a shortcut in the form of an injection or the form of a pill. Or something else we can just do or just take and that's a big problem because that's what's contributing to all of our illnesses is these shortcuts for food.
I don't have the time to cook. We're now put into it. We have a system in a lifestyle. With modern day, we have to work a job that we hate to pay for health insurance, to pay for medications that we should never have had to have in the first place. And so our entire life is built around shortcuts and conveniences to make up for the time we no longer give ourselves and this is another reason why we're all getting so bloody sick.

Michael: And my hope is really, and again, I'm not intentionally shaming people. I'm just saying on the backside of doing the work, what you're actually doing is you're creating habit change. And habit change is the key to transformation.

Josh: Yes.

Michael: And it's like the people, you saw the show Biggest Loser, almost every person who ever went on that show gained all the weight back, almost all of them, right?

And so you have to understand human behavior at its core. We don't value things we don't earn. And my hope is that not only do we, we give people permission and agency to take ownership over their life, but hopefully we'll give them permission to go and earn some difficult wins. Around their nutrition around their health around their gut and around their future because there's there was a moment I remember I'll never forget this.
I was sitting and I was reading The Paleo Cure, if you've ever read that book, it's an incredible book it is A book that transformed my life because was so sick while I was in this journey at the beginning, Chris Kresser wrote this book. And so I'm reading The Paleo Cure and I realized maybe self-care is the food we put into our body. Maybe self-care is how we eat. And I think that's a big takeaway for people today. Josh, I want to say thank you for being here today, my friend. This has been an amazing conversation. Before I ask you my final question, where can everybody find you, learn more about you and what you do.

Josh: easiest place I always like to give one link to go to you can find everything about what we do the podcast We run all that at gutsolution.ca. That's all singular gutsolution.ca for Canada. We've got information on reversible, the ultimate gut health podcast. We talk about all diseases, their connection to the gut.
Currently working on a book on that as well. I've got my colitis naturally podcast. All the information is out there and it's accessible. If you're the one with the agency taking control and saying, I'm going to listen, I'm going to learn and find a new path. And that can all be found at gutsolution.ca.

Michael: Amazing. And guys, of course, if you check out thinkunbrokenpodcast.com, you'll get Josh's episode. We'll have that and more in the show notes. My last question for you, my friend, what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Josh: I don't know if any of us really ever can be. Unbroken. And I think that's the beauty of it. So many of us deal with so many things. It's, I think it's just part of our human nature. Whether you believe that just being human, you believe it's the world, you believe it's biblical sin nature, whatever it is, we are ultimately unbroken at our core. Being unbroken is just the state of continually bettering today than it was yesterday. Whether that's your mental health, whether that's your relationships, your habits, your lifestyle, whatever it is, it's trying to improve. On something that it was yesterday to make it better tomorrow, my ultimate goal to be unbroken is to leave this world when I'm done.

When I die, I want to leave this world better than it was when I got here. I want to make an impact to somebody or something or change something that would not have been changed had I not been here. That to me is being unbroken. It's reversing the damage for the better.

Michael: Beautifully said, my friend. Thank you so much for being here, Unbroken Nation. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you found value in today's episode, please share it with a friend. Check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, leave a review, hit the subscribe button. And even if you're like, Hey, I hate you guys. This sucked. I want to know, we want to make this show as good as possible.

And I can't do that without your feedback. And so that means the world to me.

So until next time, my friends take care of yourself, take care of each other.

And Be Unbroken.

I'll See Ya.