 We all have some beneficial bacteria, or we should have them living in our guts. And why are those so crucial? Well, microbes fight other microbes. They're all trying to occupy a certain ecological niche. And if you have friendly ones that are beneficial to us occupying the niche of your gut, when a pathogen comes in, those microbes won't want to give up their space and they'll try and kill that pathogen. So this is really the first line of immunity for you. And if you have a low microbial diversity, that means there are unoccupied ecological niches in your gut. That means pathogens have an opportunity to take up residence there and then they can spread into your body. So if you don't have a good gut flora, you're at risk for getting infections. And also you're at risk that the bacteria that you do have, more and more of them are going to be pathogenic. And in general, and this is true in both humans and animals, in humans we observe it, in animals we do experiments and prove it, more species diversity in the gut leads to better health, lower risk of poor health outcomes. We also know if you give, for instance livestock, low dose antibiotics, so not big enough to eradicate all the germs, but enough to reduce microbial diversity and make them vulnerable, what happens? They become obese. So that's actually a common tactic used by food producers to help fatten their animals before slaughter, is you give them low dose antibiotics. And humans can do the same thing. If you take antibiotics, you'll reduce the microbial diversity in your gut and you'll promote poor health. And so what can you do to address that? We'll eat diverse sources of fiber. You need to eat starchy foods. They have a form of fiber called resistant starch. Best way to get it, take your starches, cook them at night, several days before you're going to eat them, refrigerate them. And then take them out at mealtime and prepare them. You can just warm them up. And then make fermented vegetables and eat fermented vegetables regularly. So those will have a very healthy bacteria and over time that will increase the diversity of the flour in your gut. So evidence that it works, I mentioned at the beginning, my wife and I and a partner, Whitney Ross Gray, who cured her multiple sclerosis on an ancestral diet and our diet, have started a health retreat in North Carolina on the beach. And we call that the perfect health retreat. It's primarily an educational program. So we've got science classes. We've got four exercise classes a day looking at different aspects of movement. So in the early morning will be things like it could be yoga sun salutations, it could be posture breathing. Late morning is an... Late morning, late afternoon, we have two moderate intensity things that entrain daytime rhythms. In the evening, meditation, stress relief, preparation for night, relaxation, calm your body. And we create the environment so you can see in the daytime, bright natural light, at nighttime, orange lights. Here's a property, you see it lit for nighttime. We do various exercise classes on the beach. We teach things like healing, massage, fascia, release, other techniques. We have cooking classes. We teach cooking. And the whole week models a healthy lifestyle. So you get to experience everything implemented in the perfect health way where we've optimized every aspect of nutrition, of lifestyle, environment, and health. And by modeling it, we hope to teach people how they can implement these things in their daily life and get the full benefit of them going forward. And now I've started publishing some results from the retreats. So it's sort of like a short clinical trial. We bring people in, they adopt all of our diet and lifestyle advice for a week or two. We've had people up to 30 days. We've had tremendous results. The very first woman who went through it, she was scheduled for two knee replacements and a hip replacement. She walked with a cane. She took like six pain pills every day. And by within 30 days, she had thrown away her cane and almost cut out the pain medication. 75 days later, she was working as a gardener and was completely cured. She didn't need any surgery. We just finished a retreat last weekend. And one of the attendees wrote on Facebook that when she came, she had been hobbling up and down stairs. She'd had shooting knee pain that she'd had for many years. And she had to go downstairs very carefully one at a time. And she said, she's only been back home four days and the knee pain has gone and she's going quickly down the stairs each step. So you can have very significant changes in a pretty rapid period. And we've had great results for weight loss. Also great results for underweight. So everybody's weight normalizes. And we're hoping over time to build up a record of really good health improvements for all kinds of diseases and to publish, demonstrate things. And I put a few things up on my website, PerfectHealthDiet.com and eventually PerfectHealthRetreat.com And I invite you if you really want to learn all these things in the most expeditious way, you get a thorough education on how to be healthy and see it modeled and hands-on learning, then the retreats are a great thing to come to. So in summary, what should the food look like? That's a tendon stew on the left, seafood, shellfish, great source of zinc, liver and onions. And you can have ice cream. You can have desserts. We actually recommend having some dessert as your very last food of the day. And the lifestyle, go outdoors, interact, exercise, eat natural whole foods, have a loving, comfortable environment at home and get a good night's sleep. You can sum that all up. Live like an animal, like a successful animal. Live our ancestral lifestyle. Thank you very much. All right, let's give it up for Paul Femini. Thanks, Paul. That was fantastic. I missed some of it, but I got most of it and I'm really glad I came or was able to be present for it. During the presentation, do you feel a little bit further to that? Specifically, if you have any preferences for them when working with the doctor, did you feel any damage to your gut and such? Yeah. Well, you know, I've had three courses of antibiotics in my life. Twice they damaged my health and once they really fixed it. And, you know, so you have to view these things, you know, all of the therapies that doctors have, have risks, you know, and they can have benefits as well. And so antibiotics can be extremely beneficial in the right circumstances. You know, but they are going to damage your gut flora and they can also damage other aspects of your health like your mitochondria or, you know, liver kidney function. So it's, you know, it's something you really do need to consult your doctor and try to make an intelligent decision to weigh the pros and cons, the risks and rewards. But I would say, you know, if you think you need them, you always want to implement all of these diet, lifestyle tactics first because very often you'll find you no longer need the antibiotics. Even if you do still need them, they'll work much better. And so the one time they worked for me, I had ended up with, apparently some kind of bacterial brain infection and, but I fixed all of my diet and lifestyle things first and that really helped me diagnose what was going on and then the antibiotics worked really well. And now some of them, the one that helped me most was doxycycline which enters the brain and is relatively benign toward gut flora and that's a good broad-spectrum antibiotic. But it's really, you know, consult your doctor and also know some of the negative effects, you know, so, you know, like a commonly prescribed antibiotic is ciprofloxacin and that can give terrible side effects to people who are deficient in magnesium. So you should really make sure you're replete with magnesium before you take it and supplement magnesium while you're taking it. And, you know, doctors won't necessarily tell you everything, you know, that you ought to know about these things. So you really want to manage your own health as much as possible, you know, create the best possible context for treatment through diet, nutrition, lifestyle and then think along with your doctor about how best to treat your condition. One more question. Paul, I really enjoyed your talk. I'm a medical resident from Canada and I was wondering, you know, I have a month coming up where I'm going to be doing 24-hour shifts every few days and I want to ameliorate the damage to my circadian rhythm. You know, I thought about things like, you know, the next morning possibly just getting some blue light and cranking it up just to get my body back in the groove. I'm just wondering what tips would you recommend for someone like me who has to go through that? Yeah, that's what I would do. I would invest in some blue-blocking glasses. You can get ones that fit over your regular glasses and, you know, define your own 12-hour day, 12-hour night. All right, so in your 12-hour day, you know, also have these bright, you know, you can get like a little desk lamp that has, you know, a very bright natural light. You know, carry that around with you, you know, wherever you're working, you know, set it up, you know, so that it's shining near your eyes and then during your night, put that away and put on the blue-blocking glasses. Make sure all of your food intake is during the day, fast during the nighttime while you're working. You can have black coffee, things like that, but don't have any calories. And, you know, similarly, you know, in the work environment, you're not in control of your social interactions, but you can try to, you know, tamp back the social interactions at the nighttime, you know, so do lots of talking to colleagues in the daytime, you know, but at night, if you have time to withdraw a little to rest, you know, do things like reading, that would be a good time to do it. Also, you can do things like slow breathing exercises, and this actually works really well with biofeedback from heart rate variability. So if you have a heart rate monitor, you can check your heart rate variability on your smartphone, and, you know, you can do deep, slow breathing. You know, so breathe in deeply slowly for five to seven heartbeats, breathe out, exhale very slowly for seven to nine heartbeats, and that will de-stress you. And it's a very effective means of reducing the level of stress in your body. So in the daytime, no need to do that. Stress is not bad for you in the daytime, but at night, you want to, you know, do that kind of breathing exercises, you know, do a little mindfulness meditation, you know, keep yourself as calm as you can. So, you know, all of these tips, there may be things you can control in your work environment, and, you know, try to make the environment as close as possible to, you know, a good circadian rhythm in training environment as you can. All right. Thank you so much.