 Thank you so much for coming to my talk and having open discussions about the gut, it's such an emerging new field and we're learning so much and even today's talk is just a sliver of what's going on. I have a new Twitter and I'd love to put up new gut updates so please follow me on there and I'd like to share a lot of secrets I learned about the gut there. So my talk is called resavaging the gut to solve the identity problem of our modern dyspeptic gut. A famous gut researcher, O-staff, he said, we survived because we adapted to a world of microorganisms because literally, microorganisms are all over us. They make up 100 trillion organisms in our gut whereas we are just only 10 trillion cells so 90% of actually humans is actually bacterial microorganisms. We're like hybrids and for these water bottles is 2 kilos, that's how much bacteria we have on our body so it's quite a bit. So we have, they have 10 times more cells and 150 times more genes so they are able to do much more biochemistry than us and that's why they digest a great deal of our food and we derive energy from it. So they're all over us in every nook and cranny. They direct and guide practically every part of us and new research is emerging all the time showing how they direct our thoughts, our minds, how we look, our phenotype. So when I talk about microorganisms, I'm talking about the beneficial ones, the symbionts are mutual commensals that live on us through the millennia. I call them probiotics, technically they mean life-giving organisms and they're all over. Here, oops, sorry, here are our tiger nuts, they are essential to our history actually for our diet and maybe even expansion of our brain and development of this AMY1 gene, the amylase gene that allows us to break down more plant polysaccharides like carbohydrates and they're all over. They're in the dirt, they're from cows, they're in raw milk. Some of the best bacillus strains help us break down gluten and casein, proteins found in sourdough, gluten breads and dairy, A1, A2, casein and that can cause quite a lot of gut disruption for some people but when we have these organisms, they secrete the enzymes to help break it down. So a lot of people who follow the gut protocol that I have, they can tolerate gluten and dairy again. I'm not saying that these should be paleo, but they give us a much better buffer especially if we have more intolerances like celiac or somewhere in between for silent celiac. So let's go back to the history. So a couple hundred million years ago, our ancestors were synodonts and they were carnivorous. They had a carnivorous gut which required wicked juices, a lot of acidity, a lot of things to break down just raw meat and these were our pre-mammalian ancestors. They pretty much had everything that mammalians had. They had a heightened sense of hearing, sight and smell because they lived nocturnally. They had to stay away from all the Jurassic dinosaurs that were trying to kill them and eat them and they even had glands out of their skin that secreted milk, a milk-like substance and it's believed that the users were probably antimicrobial and I believe that they probably were full of probiotics because that's how breast milk is. It's actually not sterile as some early scientists thought but it's full and rich of over 700 different species of our gut bacteria and they had hair, they had heat, body heat, they're getting higher metabolisms and many other features that were wonderful. 200 million years ago these evolved into mammals, our early ancestors and at the Jurassic they all died, except for mammals and some other treasures but 75% of species on earth died and this radically changed our gut because no longer were we carnivorous, we became herbivorous guts and things changed, our hind gut became longer to become compost bioreactors to break down more food and from plants. 75% of earth is actually plant polysaccharides and no doubt when we took to the trees our guts took advantage of this because this was most of the food that we ate, stems, leaves, fruits, a little bit of funnivory like insects but mostly fiber so our colons got really long and bulky and then already came along. That's one of the first skeletons that showed that we were bipedal and by returning to terra firma to the ground we became re-associated again to soil organisms, soil organisms are innate to our gut, they did many things, they help break down all our food, produce lots of butyrate which is like air for our gut, our gut would suffocate if it did not have air, if it did not have butyrate and studies show that without butyrate the gut will atrophy and soon many diseases and inflammatory conditions will ensue. So already was one of the first soil walking hominids and the next one that changed our history is nutcracker man who learned how to dig, he had tools a little bit and his grain, he lived for a million years on earth and his brain grew quite bigger during that time and it's some researchers believe it's because of the starch that he ate in the C4 tubers. At the time there was a ratification, the air got a lot drier and these C4 grasses and sedges started to proliferate and the tubers were rich actually in a new form of polysaccharide, a starch and a sweet one because it would help protect against cold and drought. These were sweet tasting so naturally I think our early Australopithecine ancestors started to eat a lot of them, they taste kind of raisiny or sweet and caramelly. I believe he also probably started roasting them but there's not clear evidence of that. So he lived quite a while and by eating tubers that were called tiger nuts and other sedges that were tubers, he got carbs and protein. So tiger nuts actually like other nuts they actually have quite a bit of protein. So he in a way returned our gut back to a carnivorous gut but these are vegetarian sources. And tiger nuts are also rich in RS2. Anyone here into potato starch? Potato starch is RS2. So we have some ancient roots to eating some raw starches and they jive with our gut. We do quite better. I've had a lot of clients do really well with different starch granules like green banana flour and raw potato starch because they help fire up our gut and this is partly why because of the history. Now as we continue on the path of history, Homo erectus came along and for almost two million years even substantially longer he reigned on earth. He's also known as Turkana man and Java man and Beijing man. So he had a huge radius of geography across the earth. And he hunted, he roasted dwarf elephants and bison. He returned I believe our gut to the true omnivorous nature and in doing so he expanded our gut brain axis and our brains got bigger and he gave rise to the next segment of human life. Homo neanderthalonus and homo sapienus. And here with the ice age things radically change. So on earth there's been five major extinctions and I believe the same analogy occurs to our gut. We've had massive changes over the last just 100 years alone but it started with agriculture 12,000 years ago. So like earth we've gone through these extensive changes and they change our health, they change our phenotype, they change our inflammatory status in our brain even. So the first one it all started with the neolithic at the end of the ice age and only homo sapien was left after Homo erectus died out at 70,000 years ago and neanderthalonus died out about 25,000 years ago. So with gluten grains I believe that kind of changed a lot. Also we reverted to more of a less of an animal based system of food which probably changed many things. As you know we have so many fat soluble nutrients in there including omega-3. Now the next massive extinction didn't occur until more like maybe the last 100 years. Although cities have been increasingly grown in the last couple thousand years but it's really the more the modern cities where we have a lot of concrete and less exposure to soil and locally grown foods, gardens, no more village gardens. And without those our bodies that have co-evolved with a core microbiota don't have exposure to these soil microorganisms. The next is electricity. It brought along with the refrigerator and our grandmas and aunts and other community members they stopped fermenting food. My parents actually grew up in Taiwan they didn't have much electricity or even running water or a toilet. They had an outhouse and a lot of their food was actually fermented and this is actually the natural normal way of life except for the last, perhaps the last 100 years for most countries except for the industrialized ones. Sliced bread. Did this not kill our gut? So now we have gluten. We don't have sourdough ferments with some spores from bacillus and other soil organisms that help us digest food and prompt anti-inflammatory compounds and more butyrate in our body. But now we have this processed food, no more probiotics and sliced bread which is full of gluten and more hybridization of wheat because people love gluten and it's so addictive. So the fourth major extinction is really the one I think that is killing our gut. About 80 years ago, livestock started to be given special feed with low dose antibiotics. It was discovered antibiotics fatten the animals up. So in doing so, some of the drug probably stayed in their system and then entered into our bloods, our water supply and runoff and then it's in our soils but it changes the soil ecology. So now our soils no longer as healthy either but this later the antibiotics went into our healthcare supply and now so many doctors give it out like candy and it wreaks absolute devastation into our gut. There was a Russian scientist a couple of years ago in 2008, Sakharov. He showed that by giving low dose antibiotics to mice, even though the total bacterial count did not change, there was a radical change in the composition. No longer were there so many of the good commensal bacteria but there are a lot more pathogens and then when he exposed them to salmonella, many of them could not resist the colonization compared to the original composition. So antibiotics, although they're lovely to help treat a sinus infection or Shigella or they're probably not the best things for our gut and especially if you've had 10 rounds or a six months worth for like tetracycline for an acne condition. So your acne may get better but now you've ruined, the gut is now like a wasteland with many endangered rainforests. And then lastly, I mean, obviously there's many other gut disrupting factors but I think the fifth one is more tremendous because now we have new generations of children born with not much gut flora and I'll be showing you a couple of slides to illustrate that. Maybe their mom didn't have it or they had a C-section birth and did not get the full spectrum, the broad spectrum. We usually call that for a parmsyticals but the broad spectrum of probiotics that mom provides protect the baby for quite a long time despite the baby not having an immune system. And now we have baby formula. So again, the breast milk is not sterile but formula is and they're lacking a lot of vital organisms like lactobacillus and bifidil. And lastly, super sanitation. That's just the end cap on it. So today we have a modern gut, it's very confused. There's discordance and mismatch. When we lack the barrier that's protected and even produced by our gut bacteria, what happens is a lot of imbalance and a breakdown of the barrier bacteria and my other microbes like yeast can translocate into our bloodstream and even other organs. There's conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome where proteins of microbial origin are just clogging the brain. Normally there's very little proteins and in chronic fatigue or other symptoms like autism, there's sometimes over 800 foreign proteins of all of gut and microbial origin. So hopefully by looking at the gut and learning more about it and ways to treat it or to resavage it, rewild it back to our original origins, we'll be able to overcome a lot of these conditions like IBD, irritable bowel syndrome, gut syndromes, brain and skin conditions, joints and mostly inflammation and cancer and heart disease. So for one condition, inflammatory bowel disease, there's been a lot of study on it. Dr. Fedorak and his colleagues in 2006, they produced a study. They've also done some real-time sort of analysis of the gut microbiota and you can see from early on, even within birth, there's a tremendous difference. Within weaning, the pathogens, these are, I call them renegades because once they take flight because they're not held in check by our gut guards, the commensal ones, they have altered behavior and they become more aggressive and break down our gut barrier, but E. coli, some rheumatochoccus and enterobacter, they are much higher even in days of weaning and it continues that way through the disease presentation. And in this population, when you compare it to a healthy control, you can see very on within just days, they lack certain gut commensals. These are part of actually our ancestral core microbiota and just within days, they don't have it and at weaning, they still don't have it and throughout life, they are missing the core commensal microbiota. So in trying to find out what is the ancestral microbiota, I went back into looking at data, poop, fossilized poop and it does, copper lights, they're called copper lights and they do yield a lot of clues. So really interestingly, in a rural part of Northern Mexico, 1400 years ago, they found some fossilized samples and interestingly, almost half represent a rural traditional community like Western Africa, an area known as Burkano-Faso and yet they still had some primate gut bacteria, similarities, so I think that harkens back to what Professor Blaise was talking about with our origins with primates and the other sample had a little less and then looking at data from a mummy captured in at least 5,300 years ago, he also had a very herbivorous gut, a lot of fiber apparently and microbes very similar to primate gut and that was even longer further ago and then if you look at less than about 100 years ago, much less, all much less and we don't know anything about these individuals, we don't know if they're healthy or not but these are just, I think, interesting tidbits of data. So if we look at Burkano-Faso, there was a PNAS study done in 2010 by DeFilippo, they compared the gut microbiota of children in Europe and compared it to children in Burkano-Faso and this is land which is kind of an ancient geography, they eat whole foods, they process very, very little things, everything is local and sustainable around their village, they eat a lot of millet and sorghum, whole grain and a lot of black IPs, legumes, some chicken and during the rainy season, they have an interesting probiotic that they eat. Can you guys guess what it is? Termites, yes. So when they compared the gut microbiota, they had a lot of unique probiotics, gut microbes, that happened to come also from termites because termites have a gut and they have a microbiota. So and these bacterioids are very important, they break down a lot of starch for us and in the end I'll tell you about one probiotic which can help supply it, we can emulate actually eating termites. Very interestingly, the healthy Burkano-Faso kids had three times full bacterioids and Actinobacter, these all soil based. Even more inter-telling is that their gut was really healthy, they have four to five times more butyrate which is the inflammatory molecule, the short chain fatty acid that we all need in our gut, it supplies energy to the gut as well as being a substrate for ketones. So that was meant for Jimmy, he's not here. So we need butyrate, we need a lot of it. It's anti-inflammatory and it's linked to a lot of benefits for healing and keeping the gut barrier tight without letting pathogens through. More interesting is that children in Europe had three to even 10 times more renegades pathogens, more E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, Clebsiella and as we know, they had much less bacterioids, one of the core members of our ancestral gut. So I continued searching and there's a really wonderful, got my microbiota researcher named Julian Tapp. He was also curious to know what is the core phylogenic microbiota in humans. So he took 17 healthy humans, nine omnivorous from France and eight vegetarians from the Netherlands. And he compiled some data, 66 OTUs showed up out of the thousands of species available. OTUs are operational taxonomic units and they just mean species or really tightly grouped related species. And bacterioids came out really huge, they're a huge part of our gut. Numerically, they're one of the most abundant or the most abundant. But there were bifida, which normally we find in children but they're actually in adults, especially healthy adults. And Clostridia cluster four and 14A and again the bacterioids. Studies have been done by other people. There's a researcher named L80 in 2013. He found that tolerance to pathogens are completely reliant on the percent population of these two groups. So in modern diseases, we have a fingerprint of disease and it's all based on the microbiota. In two human studies regarding diabetes, just by looking at the microbiota alone, they can fingerprint and determine reliably and characterize who is diabetic and who's not. So we can see vast extinctions of some core ancestral microbiota in every disease from type two diabetes to obesity. And these aren't considered gut diseases like IBD or Irritable Bowel Syndrome but these are clearly gut diseases. And the same goes for celiac and rheumatoid arthritis. And you can see the pathogens are very, the renegades have taken over. And here you see lactobacillus but there's actually different kinds of lactobacillus. There's good lactobacillus and bad lactobacillus and probably likely these are the not so great ones. So I have to bring up the F word, sorry. I hope I didn't punk you guys because I called the slideshow resavaging the gut. But I'm talking about plant polysaccharides. We've introduced or we have these gut microbiota in our guts living as co-inhabitants in our gut. Yet, it's just like taking home an animal from the humane society. If you don't feed it, it's gonna die, right? So we have all these special core microbiota and they need to be fed. So of course, they all eat fiber but they also love starch. So many studies now show they even like starch even as much as regular fiber. And if we look at a couple of romaine who loves salads here, great. But two cups of romaine is only two grams of fiber whereas if you have a roasted tuber that our ancestors roasted since the last one million years at least, how much grams of resistant starch, cooked resistant starch is in a roasted tuber once it's cooled? About 20 grams, that's 10 times more. So for the gut bugs, they just go nuts. That's much better than stems and leaves and even fruit. But a lot of our gut bugs, they're cross feeders. This is a happy little community. So some do well on one fiber and then they feed others. So it's kind of like the butcher. Like for instance, ruminant caucus bromide, he's like the butcher. So if your butcher and your village goes on vacation, can you eat much beef? It's really difficult. So these help to break down food and provide smaller fragments so that the others can eat. And although all of them like starch and resistant starch, some of them prefer some better tasting or more delicate kind of fibers that are found in other root vegetables like onions, leeks, scallions, things like that. And lignans, lignans are very powerful. They become anti-inflammatory in body after being transformed by our gut microbiota. So keep in mind these names, allostypes putridinus and bacterias vulgulis. There's a really neat study where they cohabited mice. They had obese mice and lean mice. These were taken from humans that were discordant human twins for obesity. One was lean, one was thin. So they had put them into mice. And you could see after cohabiting for a number of days, they had an invasion of the lean microbiota. They came directly in and it was bacterias vulgulis and allostypes putridinus. So this is an obesity study and it's not a gut-derived disease state but yet we can see improvement will, by just by changing the microbiota, we can change the phenotype really radically. And you can see the obese are missing the ancestral core. Of course, I like fecal microbiota transplants. They also illustrate the same thing. If someone is sick with C. diff colitis, they're missing all, because of antibiotics, it's an antibiotic-induced condition. They're missing all the ancestral core. They are missing a lot of castridia, castridia cluster 14A and a lot of the bacterioids. And at day one of the donor, you can see he's very rich in butyrate, producing bacterioides. And by 14, with the succession into day 33, you see firm establishment of a member of the cluster 14A, which is part of the core and a big butyrate producer, the cluster four uremicoccus and bacterioids. So when we have dysbiosis, my seven steps helps many things. It doesn't help everything. So with sophisticated testing, we can go further. But the first is to introduce fermented foods, which are rich in a lot of our ancestral core like lactobacillus and bacillus subtilis and other ones. And then feeding them with good fiber and resistant starch. Soil-based probiotics are really great. Unfortunately, a lot of the members that I talked about, like Rosberia and Presnauti, they're not in a bottle at this time. So we need to still have whole foods from healthy gardens. But in the meantime, we have SBO probiotics and we also have bionic fiber, which is made with a higher dose of these bionic fibers. And exercise really helps because it doubles actually our bruterate, just the movement. We want to avoid GMOs because they have a lot of gut disruption in the chemicals they secrete. And in many ways, we have to support the thyroid gut and adrenal glands because these are all interlinked. But for others, they need more sophisticated testing. And fortunately, we have a lot of functional medicine testing that can look at organic acids that are spewing into our bloodstream and into our urine to help elucidate. And in many ways, we can also look at what clostridia, bacterioids, lactobacillus, and bifida are present. So hopefully by looking at our gut and just doing a few simple steps, you'll be able to avoid the need for this product. It's called poo puri. I saw it on my YouTube the other day. It's really funny. But you spray it into your toilet bowl so you don't smell anything. But actually, if you have a really healthy gut, you won't have epic farts. Literally, your feces should smell like compost, like mine on a good day. Okay, so thank you very much for your attention. Go to the restroom. If you have questions, we can take maybe two or three questions and we'll alternate between these. Hello? Is this on? So you just very briefly touched on tests at the very end about establishing your gut health. What would you recommend? And is it good for somebody who's already more or less healthy to see it anyway, to see if there's anything there? Personally, because I'm so into the gut and I think there's just been so much devastation over the last few decades and generations. I think it should be part of everyone's physical, to be honest, because we sometimes don't show signs. Just like the IBD, during weaning and childhood, they didn't have very many signs, likely. And some things probably can be caught really early. So yeah, I hope that answers your question. Go ahead. Okay, so the gut-infermented foods are my pet topic in this movement. So I'm very happy to have seen your talk. I have very much been interested in knowing how we could see what the prehistoric gut had in it, in the way of bacteria. So I liked that you mentioned the fossilized poop and the frozen mummy. And so what I'm wondering is, how do we know that the bacteria that we find in that didn't come in later? Wait, so that's part of it, I'm sorry. So you said we found bacteria in fossilized poop. How did we know that it didn't recolonize later? Or is it- I think the body was intact, most likely, yeah. But they did try to minus out contaminants because that was really common. Yeah, that's a big challenge. Some samples had composted apparently and they weren't useful. That's a really good question. Thank you for your attention. Thanks. I had an experience recently where I was in the Southwest standing next to a canyon and I just had this urge to lick the rock. And I don't know how legitimate that is. Maybe it was like a mineral deficiency or something but it makes me wonder a couple things. One, can we crave sources of healthy bacteria? And two, you mentioned maintaining healthy gardens to maintain like a healthy gut flora community. And I think that speaks to the value of maintaining wild spaces, whether in our backyards or national parks or whatever. And so my other question, so can we crave healthy bacteria? And secondly, to what extent can we actually just pick around and forge to make an appreciable difference on our own gut flora? Okay, the second question I don't know. I'd love to have studies so we can see how much dirt that we mouth will make a big difference for us. And you spoke about pica. Pica is actually a clinical nutritional diagnosis where people are low and they crave things. But I'd like to elicit the thoughts of Seth Roberts for just a second because he was so into the flavor of unami, that salty animal carnivore flavor of fermented foods, which are all produced by our bacteria and wild yeast. And I do think we crave that because we have had this intimate co-evolution with the co-CEOs in our gut for just hundreds of millions of years. And I think they've instilled that into us, yeah, into our brain. Thank you for your questions. Last question. Thank you so much for your lecture. It was really informative. Thank you. I'm just wondering, in the beginning slide, you talked about all these different conditions, autoimmune conditions. What percent of those do you think are related to the bacterial translocation through like a leaky gut? Oh, I would say probably 100%. Studies are all coming out. There are cybo or cypho, small intestinal fungal overgrowth, and there's clear breakdown of that barrier. Yeah, if you go into PubMed now, there's so many articles now about intestinal permeability, and that's all about microbial translocation. And they find these organisms on the organ or in the organ because we're connected by lymph and the lymph nodes too. Right, and I've seen a lot of people recommending to rotate the probiotics that you're taking. Yeah, there's so many ways. You could pulse some high-dose, take a break, do random. I think anything that emulates our ancestral intakes is all good, yeah. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Bray.