 The foods that help with occasional constipation and diarrhea. All right, when it comes to constipation, we basically have two problems. Number one, and probably the biggest problem, is that we have almost no soluble fiber in our diet. Because of our highly processed food, we have stripped almost everything in our diet of any form of fiber, most particularly soluble fiber. Believe it or not, the vast majority of what constitutes our bowel movements is bacteria, not leftover waste. It's the bacteria that form the bulk of our bowel movements. And bacteria have to have foods that they eat to make more little baby bacteria. And those foods, unfortunately, are soluble fiber. I remember back in the good old days of the Adkins diet, and now the Carnivore diet, which is just a renamed Adkins diet, one of the biggest complaints of the Adkins diet, was pretty impressive constipation and very small bowel movements. And that's because a Carnivore diet, or an Adkins diet, pretty much deprives gut bacteria of what they want to eat and grow with. And so naturally, your bowel movements become hard little pebbles. So getting more soluble fiber back into your diet is one of the first steps to fix constipation. Where do you get them? Well, just about any tuber you care to name has soluble fiber. Hecuma. Hecuma is easy to get in your diet. A lot of stores now already sell Hecuma in slices, munch on it like carrot sticks, use it as a dipping chip to get into avocado guacamole. We'll talk about avocados in a minute. Sweet potatoes. Fennel root, which is actually a cousin of celery. Fennel root is great in salads. It's great sliced on its own. Fennel root is great roasted chicory. The chicory family of vegetables, I can't tell you how important that is in terms of soluble fiber. In most grocery stores, that red ball of some people call it Italian lettuce is radicchio. Radicchio is a great source of soluble fiber. Last night for dinner, I had radicchio wrapped in prosciutto, grilled and then drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Talk about a taste delight. I had two friends over that had never had it and both of them went crazy for it. Easy to do. Put it on a grill pan, throw it on your barbecue. Same with asparagus. Asparagus is another great source of soluble fiber. Asparagus is so easy. You can boil it. You can steam it. I like to grill it. Get yourself a grill pan. If you live in a cold climate and do it indoors, light up the Barbie and do it while you're doing other things. So it's really easy to get this stuff in your diet. Another exciting development in terms of non-nutritive sweeteners, that is sweeteners that don't have any calories, is allulose. Allulose is a true sugar. It's a rare sugar that has no calories, but excitingly allulose was the first product approved by the FDA as a prebiotic fiber. And that means that allulose added to your coffee, for instance, or baking with it actually gives your gut buddies things they want to eat. So these are easy ways to get soluble fiber back into your diet. Now the second problem with our diet is, and I've done lots of videos on this. Our soil is now nearly completely devoid of important minerals and micronutrients because of our farming practices. We've done intense agriculture. We've never allowed the soil to recover. We've killed off the soil microbiome. And interestingly enough, it's the soil microbiome that actually allows plants to absorb these nutrients if they were in the soil in the first place. So the foods that we eat may look like the foods our parents or our grandparents or a great-grandparents ate, but modern produce has none of the nutritive value that it used to have. Now there's two main minerals that really help with bowel motility. One of them is magnesium. Most people know that milk of magnesium makes you have a bowel movement. That's because it's concentrated magnesium. And interestingly, once all of us get a certain amount of magnesium in our diet, you will have an easy bowel movement. Now finding that sweet spot is frequently challenging. You can add magnesium to your diet. And most adults are so deficient in magnesium that I have almost all of my patients take a magnesium supplement. There are a number of magnesium supplements out there. And quite frankly, they're all pretty similar, except some people will notice a benefit with one and not another. And half the time is kind of fun to play with. As a general rule, women are far more sensitive to magnesium than men in terms of frequency of bowel movement. Some women are so sensitive to oral magnesium that I have you buy magnesium oil spray, which is readily available on the internet and in health food stores. And you spray it on your legs or your body. It's not an oil at all, but it feels oily. And it is magnesium that is absorbed through the skin. And the great thing about it is it gives you the benefits of magnesium without necessarily having you run to the bathroom. I particularly like a combination of potassium and magnesium because potassium is the second mineral that's really devoid in our soil and our produce. And potassium and magnesium are really one to punch for stabilizing even heart cell membranes. I use it a lot to prevent extra beats in my heart patients, atrial fibrillation in my heart patients. So potassium magnesium aspartate is readily available. Most of the time we have people take one or two a day. It's just part of their regimen. But you can get potassium in green bananas. But bananas are not a great source of potassium. That's an old wives tale. Avocados are a great source of potassium. So again, get yourself some hecoma sticks. Get yourself some guacamole that hasn't been made with tomatoes. And get your potassium from the guacamole and some fiber from the guacamole and some fiber from the hecoma. And you're well on your way to having relief of that constipation. Now, occasional diarrhea happens and it's often caused because your gut wall is irritated by lectins or by dysbiotic bacteria. And you're actually actively trying to get these guys out of you. Now, what the heck is a dysbiotic bacteria? Well, as you know, you've got good guys in your gut and you got gang members in your gut, dysbiotic bacteria. And they're normal parts of your intestinal flora. And the good guys kind of keep the bad guys in check. And the bad guys are there. They're actually part of that tropical rainforest community. But you can get a disbalance between the good guys and the bad guys. Often it's because you have been eating antibiotic tainted food in commercial beef, commercial pork, commercial chicken, farm raised fish. That farm raised salmon you have is loaded with antibiotics. Or you took a course of antibiotics for whatever and you decimated the good guys in your gut. Interestingly, a lot of the bad guys are fairly resistant to the actions of antibiotics. So the good guys get killed off. That balance is disturbed. And now there's gang members shooting up the town and your gut's response to that is we got to get these guys out of us as quickly as possible. And it actually promotes putting water into your gut as a way of literally washing them down the drain. You got to give your good bacteria reasons to populate and grow and come out of hiding. And to do that, they have to have prebiotic fiber. But here's the important thing. I talk a lot about it in the upcoming book. You not only need prebiotic fiber to get these guys to grow. You actually have to have postbiotic messaging. And one of the exciting work that's come out of Stanford with the Sonobroad husband and wife team is they took human volunteers, one group got prebiotic fiber. The other group got not only prebiotic fiber, but postbiotics, primarily in the form of yogurt. And again, postbiotics are what the bacteria produce when they eat. The prebiotic fiber group didn't have an increase in diversity of their bacteria and they didn't have any change in their immune system response to those bacteria. But the group that got the prebiotic fiber plus the postbiotics had a greater diversity of bacteria and their immune system was told to calm down. So it's the one to punch that's actually critically important that's been missing in most of our education. So not only do you have to give these bugs what they want, but you got to give them a message to come out and eat this stuff. And those messages are postbiotics. And one of the easiest ways to get that is fermented foods. And it can be as simple as goat kefir, goat yogurt, sheep yogurt, it can be as simple as apple cider vinegar or any other vinegar for that matter. It can be as simple as making my fake coke with balsamic vinegar and sparkling water like San Pellegrino or simply, you know, any other fermented food like cabbage, like kimchi, like sauerkraut. And the good news is you don't have to have living raw sauerkraut to do the job. You're actually looking for what's in the juice, the byproducts. That's all you need. You need prebiotic fiber, but you also got to tell these guys to come out of hiding. And it's the signaling from fermented food that gets things started. And that's really important to remember, because it's not just the prebiotic fiber. I think you're going to love this next one. Great apes only gain weight during fruit season. And contrary to popular belief, fruit only ripens once a year, even in the jungle.