The Natural Way to Fix Hormones & Skin: Restore Your Youthful Microbes

22:13Dr. William Davis:Really, that many people have taken antibiotics and that often?

22:17Dr. Josh Axe:And often unnecessarily.

22:18Dr. William Davis:Repeat that one more time because that's crazy. But by age 30, you said how many rounds?

22:23Dr. Josh Axe:By age 40, 30 rounds of antibiotics.

22:25Dr. William Davis:30 rounds the average person is taken of antibiotics by the time they're 40.

22:29Dr. Josh Axe:Even our CDC concedes there's a lot of overuse and inappropriate prescription of antibiotics.

22:34Dr. William Davis:Well, you know, I had the head of the FDA, Marty Makery, on the show here about last year. And he had said this. He said something like around, I mean, it's like 90 % of antibiotics are overprescribed. I mean, and we started going through the research on the amount of people that actually have viruses when an antibiotic is prescribed. I mean, it's mind-blowing.

22:54Dr. Josh Axe:And all it takes, Josh, all it takes, as you know, one course, one, just one course of, say, azithromycin or doxazol, whatever, and you've killed hundreds of species. Now, these species were doing good things for us. Not all of them, but many of them were. And one of the things they were doing was suppressing the overproliferation of fecal microbes. These are species that may sound familiar, E. coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella, because they're also the species of food poisoning. So when you go to fast food and the kid went number two and didn't wash his hands, contaminated your food and utensils, and you get fecal microbes in the upper GI tract, you get very sick, vomiting, diarrhea, fever.

23:39Dr. Josh Axe:Or if you get fecal microbes no longer suppressed by the loss of all those beneficial microbes and they ascend, which I find this amazing, into the 24 feet of small intestine where they don't belong. Small intestine is not equipped to deal with this.

23:53Dr. William Davis:Yeah, yeah.

23:54Dr. Josh Axe:Colon is, but not the small intestine. Small intestine is where you and I, of course, are supposed to absorb nutrients like vitamins, minerals, amino acids. So it's by design very permeable. But when invading fecal microbes, trillions of them, and of course they live and die over the course of hours. They don't live very long. There's a huge turnover. They dump their toxic compounds, but specifically endotoxin and others, into the intestines, then into the bloodstream. That process is called endotoxemia. And endotoxemia, such breakthrough findings. Many of us suspected this for many years. But finally, officially scientifically validated in 2007 by Dr.

24:37Dr. Josh Axe:Patrice Canney in Belgium, has since been corroborated hundreds of times. This is a real phenomenon. What was called gut leak for many years is now known to be, well, established a real phenomenon.

24:48Dr. William Davis:You know, what's so funny is I remember, because I wrote a book called Eat Dirt, and I'm trying to think when this was, it was a couple of years after Wheat Belly. And there were still people saying in the mainstream medicinal community, well, we don't actually know if intestinal permeability or leaky gut is actually a real medical, you know, thing happening. And then, of course, now, I mean, to your point, there's been so many studies now proving, and now, of course, it's become mainstream. But it's, you know, one of the things, I have a virtual practice and we did a clinical, we did a study on 100 people coming through.

25:21Dr. William Davis:And we saw nearly a 200 % decrease in high sensitivity C-reactive protein because our biggest focus with patients is reduce inflammation of the gut. I mean, it's such a big thing. And that's been such a big part of your career. Of course, wheat bellies, there's so much of that is how wheat and a lot of those compounds in there cause inflammation in the gut. And this leads to so many issues. I mean, pretty much every health condition we can imagine. So I love that you're diving in here because I think this is super interesting that how it's not only wheat. It's just the entire medical establishment, just the entire way it's run.

26:00Dr. William Davis:It's feeding disease. It's feeding disease. I mean, if you really think about it, it's kind of crazy. every one of these big systems, which is supposed to be promoting our health and protecting us, they're actually making us worse. Every one of them. Yeah.

26:16Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah. You know, I think we, as you've pointed out, I think we need to reconsider all we thought we knew about health because of the contribution of the microbiome. If fecal microbes invading the small intestine results in a large rise in blood levels of endotoxin that gets to your brain and has been shown to underlie anxiety and depression and cognitive impairment and dementia and Parkinson's disease or muscle and joint like fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis or skin like rosacea and psoriasis or the heart, my area, recurrent atrial fibrillation bouts, coronary disease and plaque rupture and heart attack.

27:00Dr. Josh Axe:We've got to reconsider almost everything we thought we knew. And so many metabolic conditions are now proven to be due to – so people get mad and say, I can't do – we talk a lot about restoring microbes by making this thing that looks and smells like yogurt, like lactamacus roteri. Well, one of the effects of roteri, this microbe lost by nearly everybody, is that it produces histamine. People say, I can't take it because it produces histamine, and I am histamine intolerant. I can't eat wine, cheese, et cetera. So I remind people, histamine is a normal signal molecule. It's like insulin. If you don't have insulin, you're going to die.

27:33Dr. Josh Axe:If you don't have histamine, you're going to die. So histamine intolerance, we now know, is due to the loss of microbes that were metabolizing histamine. It just so happens that ruterite also produces histamine.

27:48Dr. William Davis:Well, another interesting, just to your point here, because we were talking about GLP-1s, I think this is one of the probiotics in a couple of research studies that was shown to increase your body's own production of GLP-1. Yes. And there are several, yeah.

28:01Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah, that's right. Many things do. Carotenoids do. Some polyphenols. Yeah. So, yeah, you don't need to take this exogenous peptide for thousands of dollars. That could result in thyroid cancer, bowel obstruction, and diminishing your bank account, making you lose. You know who's celebrating? What does it cost a month to do GLP-1s? You know, now that they're wiping out the pharmacies that are making it and you have to get it from a real pharmacy from the manufacturer, they're typically at least hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month. Wow. Wow. So there's a lot of money at stake. And it worries me because pharma is already so powerful.

28:43Dr. Josh Axe:They've essentially kept people like you and me from getting on major media. That's why we do things like this, because we're no longer welcome on major network TV, because pharma said to the major networks, hey, we don't want people like Dr. Josh Axe or William Davis on there, because they have interests that are counter to our advertising interests at$7 billion a year.

29:08Dr. William Davis:And think about all these companies that are getting into the pharmaceutical game. I mean, Amazon is an example. I mean, you know, Mark Cuban. I mean, all these other companies trying to, you know, get a piece of this, you know, of the pie there. Wow.

29:20Dr. Josh Axe:You know, Josh, I don't know what the answer is for society as a whole in this corruption introduced by pharma and the healthcare industry. So I think what you and I are doing is trying to educate people. because if you listen to your John Q primary care or your gastroenterologist, your cardiologist, you're going to get a corrupt message, influenced or dominated by pharma and other financial interests. When as you know, the real solution are simple things you do in your kitchen and your backyard garden. Those are the things that really matter.

29:52Dr. William Davis:Well, what are some of your favorite ways, if you could have your top five things in ranking order to rebuild and heal the microbiome, what would you suggest?

30:00Dr. Josh Axe:So if we start with the premise that we've lost hundreds of beneficial species, and at least, Josh, and at least 50 % of the population, that evidence, by the way, is well worked out. At least half the U.S. population has SIBO and thereby endotype. In studies like this, in irritable bowel syndrome, what proportion of people will test positive for SIBO, usually by hydrogen gas?

30:24Dr. William Davis:Well, it should be close to 100%. At least it's going to be incredibly high.

30:28Dr. Josh Axe:If we're very conservative and lump all the studies together, it's about 31%. But I agree. It's probably more like 100%. And that's why the current choice of treatment in irritable bowel syndrome is Zyfaxan, an antibiotic.

30:43Dr. William Davis:Yeah.

30:43Dr. Josh Axe:And yet the idea that IBS is a bacterial disease of the microbiome is not being talked about. But if we did that, in condition blank, what proportion test positive for SIBO? If we put IBS in, it's about 31 % of the 60 to 70 million Americans with IBS. We're talking 18 to 20 million people there. How about in obesity? What proportion tests positive? Take all the studies, about 50%. Well, that's 50 % of 110 million. That's 55 million people there. What about type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, sleep apnea, rheumatoid arthritis, dementia, cognitive impairment, rosacea? And add it all up, Josh, we're well over 150 million people.

31:28Dr. Josh Axe:If you would have said that to me 10 years ago, I'd say, I don't think so, Dr. Axe. Until a consumer device came out that I have no association with called the Air Device, AIRE. A PhD engineer from Dublin, Ireland invented this device that you can use at home. Don't need a lab. Don't need a doctor's order. And it tests right here for hydrogen gas, talks to your smartphone zero to 10. And I started having people test. It came out in 2018. We're testing thousands of people. It's everywhere. I thought, what is going on? Maybe the device is flawed. Maybe the whole premise is wrong. Well, it's since been validated.

32:03Dr. Josh Axe:It is a valid measure. And it's probably superior to the conventional method of measuring hydrogen gas in a lab or clinic. Because there you have to capture hydrogen gas, smallest gas molecule known, in a tube or a bag. And that gas leaks rapidly. and the technician leaves it on the counter for a week to run tests in a batch as opposed to right there. Real time, yeah. Testing directly, yeah. And so what I saw was it was everywhere. Now, if it's everywhere and someone says this, this is a very common situation. Someone would say, okay, I did your program. No wheat, no grains, no sugars. I did basic nutrients, addressed basic nutrient deficiencies because of the quirks of modern life like vitamin D.

32:45Dr. Josh Axe:We don't live outside. We wear clothes. magnesium because we had to filter a drink of water, etc. I did all that. I did basic efforts to rebuild a microbiome, fermented foods, etc. And my hemoglobin A1c, long-term measure of blood glucose, of course, dropped from 11.1%, terrible, and rapidly on your way to kidney failure, heart disease, and dementia, it came down to 6.7%. It's much better, but it's still not perfect, which is about 5.0%. They address the microbiome at drops of 4.8%. So I saw over and over and over again that efforts to address this disruption of the microbiome SIBO as evidence, for instance, by air testing, also led to addressing the residual problem.

33:32Dr. Josh Axe:Now, people say, well, do I need to get one of these devices? No, you don't. No, you don't. because it's so common. And the solution, at least my solution, has been so benign that I tell people, you know, if I said, Dr. X, the solution for SIBO is surgical removal of your small intestine, you would say, well, you better be damn confident that that's true. You better have lots of evidence, right? But what if the solution was something that looks and smells like yogurt that you make in your kitchen and you have with blueberries and chia seeds? So here's the question I asked. If you had SIBO, 24 feet of fecal microbes in the small intestine, and you took a commercial probiotic, what's the likelihood the SIBO will go away?

34:14Dr. Josh Axe:Zero. It might reduce bloating a little bit or something like that, but it does not get rid of it. So I ask these questions. What if we chose microbes that have been shown to colonize the small intestine, where this occurs, and produce bactericins? Antibiotics, natural antibiotics that kill fecal microbes. So I chose three, lactobacillus roteri, lactobacillus gaseri, and I initially chose bacillus coagulants, which is a fine microbe, but I replaced it with a different microbe, bacillus subtilis. We ferment it as a yogurt. It's not yogurt. It's nothing like the stuff in the store, but it looks and smells like yogurt.

34:53Dr. Josh Axe:It's just a way to amplify count. So for instance, if we start, let's say, with 1 billion or 100 million roteri, sounds like a lot, but for this purpose, it's almost nothing. We're going to ferment it. So rotaride doubles every three hours at human body temperature. They don't have sex, right? They just double themselves. So rotaride doubles every three hours at human body temperature. We're going to let it double 12 times or 36 hours. And when we count the number of microbes, there's a method called flow cytometry. We count the number of microbes, we get about 300 billion per half cup or 120 milliliter serving.

35:28Dr. Josh Axe:So all we're doing is jacking up the numbers really high. because if you're going to battle against trillions of fecal microbes in the small intestine, you want really, really big numbers. And to my great surprise, Josh, we've had extraordinary success doing this. Now, we have not validated in a form of clinical trial. I have that. I hope it's ready to go 2026. We'll do it formally, but it can't be as yogurt. We can't have people making yogurt in the clinical trial. So we'll encapsulate it and see if we can reproduce those effects. But it's something you do in your kitchen. and there's spectacular benefits of restoring those microbes beyond just eradication of SIBO and relief of all the phenomena associated with SIBO and endotoxemia.

36:10Dr. Josh Axe:For instance, skin benefits, muscle benefits, testosterone, vaginal health benefits, emotional benefits, because you're restoring microbes that almost everybody's lost.

36:20Dr. William Davis:Yeah. You know, I did a podcast episode probably, I don't know, a few months ago on hormones in men. I've done them in women too a lot, but in particular, testosterone levels in men. And one of the things we've seen is that just the levels have continued to drop and drop and drop. Like I know so many men today who are, some of them have decided in their 30s to get on testosterone replacement therapy. I mean, people, you know, it's become a real crisis. You know, at what point did you start to notice or throughout history did these numbers, Like, did men and women start becoming weaker physically and start having a lot of these health problems?

36:59Dr. Josh Axe:You know, I think it started in the 80s or so. We look back at photos of people in the 60s and 70s, for instance, in their bathing suit. It looked very, very different. Of course, it's different for each factor that led us here. The diet, of course, really got popularized in the 80s when the USDA and U.S. Health and Human Services started coming out with the cut your fat and cholesterol. So that was a big factor. But coincident with that, of course, is the proliferation of herbicides, pesticides, glyphosate. Yeah, right. Maybe EMF exposure, antibiotic residues in food or overexposure antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals.

37:37Dr. Josh Axe:So there's – but it all really, I think, got really bad in the 80s and 90s. And that would coincide with this crude marker of body weight, of course, where we saw body weight increase dramatically starting in the late 1980s. uh and of course difficulty is undoing all this as you know is a major undertaking it's confusing to people and it's contrary sadly to a lot of the advice we get from federal agencies and even from practicing most practicing physicians that's why what you're doing i hope what i'm doing is so important it's not coming through major media it's not coming through major print magazines it's not coming through the news it's not coming from the doctor the local doctor i mean this is why i mean

38:17Dr. William Davis:if you look at the numbers on, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but the amount of people that listen to somebody like, you know, a Joe Rogan or a Tucker Carlson or a whoever, it's, I mean, they're beyond what people are listening to on, you know, on mainstream television today. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. And I think because we've been lied to so long, you're like, well, if I want to get the truth, I've literally got to go on YouTube and listen to, you know, the experts there or podcasts rather than going to mainstream television today. To your point.

38:48Dr. Josh Axe:I think there's a number of factors we could blame. It could be some of the industrial compounds we're exposed to. It's the clear-cut expansion of abdominal visceral fat, of course. Okay, yeah. Because abdominal fat, as you recall, expresses an enzyme called aromatase that converts testosterone to estrogens. And so it's very common, as we all know, guys who have big tummies also have big breasts. Yeah. And they also develop this kind of gynoid. That's an awful term, isn't it? This female-like body figure where they get more fat in the buttocks and thighs, a very feminine type of fat accumulation.

39:23Dr. Josh Axe:So both abdominal visceral fat as well as this gynoid configuration. And that reduces testosterone, increases estrogen. The disruption of the microbiome. So there are microbial species responsible for boosting testosterone. So, for instance, there's an MIT cancer group that did a mouse study that showed that restoration of lactobacillus roteri, the one that we almost all lack, almost nobody has it anymore because it's very susceptible to common antibiotics. Restoration of roteri in these mice increased testosterone 300%. Wow. So it's in older mice who have a very sharp decline in testosterone.

40:06Dr. Josh Axe:So that's just some of the factors leading to low testosterone. I'm a big fan of doing things by restoring the natural order, not by giving you things, exogenous to compensate. And that has worked very well.

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40:55Dr. William Davis:She talks with top doctors, scientists, and health experts about natural healing, nutrition, lifestyle choices that make a real difference. And sits down with entrepreneurs and thought leaders to explore how they stay strong, grounded, and resilient in their personal lives and their work. If you want a show that speaks directly to health challenges women are navigating today while offering hope, clarity, and real solutions, tune in to Biohack It every Thursday wherever you listen to podcasts. It is one of the most educational and uplifting shows in the wellness space, and I think you're going to love it.

41:31Dr. William Davis:You know, one of the things I've heard you speak on is statin drugs. You know, to me, I'll just share a quick patient story. So my first patient of all time that I ever had was in a student clinic. This would have been in 2005 or 2006, and his name was Ron. I remember he came in to me, and he came in because he was having a lot of joint pain. He had lost a lot of his hair. He had muscle wasting. The guy looked really sick. And I said, when did it start? He said, well, about a year ago. He said, my doctor put me on a statin drug. And he showed me a picture of himself a year before. And he was 65 years old.

42:07Dr. William Davis:And at 64, I'm seeing this guy who was fit, healthy. He was going to the gym every day, lifting weights. And he literally lost 20 pounds and looked sickly and like he had aged 15 years. The only thing that was different, well, there's two things that happened. And his doctor told him, you need to get on a statin and you need to get on a no-fat diet. Not low-fat. They said a no-fat diet.

42:30Dr. Josh Axe:You know, the statin drug is the equivalent of a GLP-1 agonist of our age. They are disasters. They never worked in the first place. There's a whole bunch of problems in there. One of the problems is that cholesterol is not a cause for heart disease. It never was. It was a marker for the particles that do cause heart disease. This got its start in the 1950s and 1960s at the NIH where the researchers there, like Dr. William Friedewald and Dr. William Fredrickson, wanted to quantify in the 1950s. If you spin blood down, the clear part of blood without red blood cells, high-speed centrifuge, you'll see it layer out high density, the bottom, low density, top.

43:12Dr. Josh Axe:And they asked this question, how can we count the number of particles in each layer and try to decipher whether they cause coronary atherosclerosis or not, heart disease? Well, they said, well, it's 1958. How do you – you can't. And so they said, let's pick a component of the particles in each level and use that as an indirect dipstick. So they could have chosen apoprotein B. They could have chosen triglycerides. They could have chosen – they chose cholesterol. and use cholesterol in the high-density fraction, the very low-density fraction, the total fraction, and develop some crude calculations to calculate, for instance, low-density lipoprotein LDL cholesterol.

43:54Dr. Josh Axe:And that became the standard of care, that you were going to measure cholesterol and then try to reduce it. Even though cholesterol was not the cause, it was a marker. That led to, of course, emergence of drugs like the statin drugs, which has to date made a trillion dollars in revenue for the pharmaceutical industry. So there's great incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to educate physicians that you must reduce cholesterol with a statin drug. Even though 80 million Americans now take a statin drug, there's been no significant reduction in cardiovascular risk. heart disease, coronary disease, remains the number one moneymaker for healthcare systems.

44:39Dr. Josh Axe:It remains the number one killer of men and women. Josh, the real tragedy of the statin drugs and all that'll cut your fat, all that, is that it took everyone's attention off the real causes of heart disease, of which they're easy to identify and easy to correct. But there's no pot of gold. There's no fancy drug or procedure. Because if you turn off that spigot of revenue for angioplasty, heart capitalization, stent implantation, bypass surgery, automatic defibrillators, pacemakers, all this stuff that comes from, well, now you've collapsed the healthcare system built on a background of this flawed marker, cholesterol, statin drugs, et cetera.

45:25Dr. William Davis:Well, what is the marker people should be paying attention to?

45:27Dr. Josh Axe:So the factors that lead to heart disease are particles called VLDL, very low density lipoprotein, and small LDL. Those are the particles that come from consumption of wheat, grains, and sugars. The amylopectin A of grains, sucrose, fructose, glucose. Because our livers are very good at a process called de novo lipogenesis, brand new making fats.

45:56Dr. William Davis:Yeah. So the liver is very good at taking amylopectin of grains and sucrose and other sugars and converting them to triglycerides.

46:04Dr. Josh Axe:Now, the triglycerides can't be released into the bloodstream because fats can't float freely in the bloodstream. If they did, they would coalesce, kind of like your salad dressing. You may shake it, and about a minute later—

46:16Dr. William Davis:It's going to separate again.

46:17Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah, oil top, aqueous vinegar, water at the bottom. Same thing would happen in your bloodstream. If that happened, you would die within minutes. So the liver can't release fats, else they would coalesce and infarct or kill your tissues. So the liver packages your triglycerides into protein coating. That is to make it aqueous soluble, water soluble, and has proteins like ApoB and others. That's called very low density lipoprotein, VLDL. So there's a big surge in VLDL into the bloodstream. Well, that is a direct cause of coronary disease. But even worse, VLDL particles interact with LDL particles, not LDL cholesterol, but LDL particles, the actual particles, and make them triglyceride-enriched.

47:04Dr. Josh Axe:Now, let's get a little complicated. I'm sorry. But triglyceride-enriched LDL particles go through a series of enzymatic remodeling steps that make them small. Well, small LDL particles are better able to enter the wall of an artery. They're much more prone to oxidation and glycation, glucose modification. They're also much more adherent to the structural proteins in the walls of arteries. And because the liver can no longer recognize a small LDL particle, because the recognition apoprotein B is partially concealed, the liver doesn't clear the small LDL. It goes around and around in your circulation, giving it lots of opportunity to add to carnary atherosclerosis.

47:45Dr. Josh Axe:So it lasts about five to seven days as compared to the one day if you ate bacon or a piece of beef or other fatty source. You make large LDL particles. Liver does recognize, doesn't contribute to coronary disease, and your liver clears it within 24 hours. So the small LDL with a process that is initiated with consumption of carbohydrates and sugars. Now, even worse, insulin resistance, inflammation, and endotoxemia amplify this. So we address those. For instance, the endotoxemia of SIBO. So we'll recall that when the gastrointestinal tract empties into the venous system, it doesn't go directly into the venous system.

48:29Dr. Josh Axe:It goes into the portal venous system that drains the liver. So your poor liver takes a beating. Yeah, it does a lot, doesn't it? A lot. And all this amplifies this – and I know it's a little complicated, but it amplifies this de novo lipogenesis. So how do you correct it? Well, don't consume the amylopectin A of grains. Don't get those sugary foods. Address common nutrient deficiencies that influence insulin resistance and inflammation. Vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium iodine that synergize, by the way, to minimize insulin resistance. Address the microbiome because of endotoxemia. and drainage of the portal venous system to the liver.

49:10Dr. Josh Axe:And de novo lipogenesis goes to a rock bottom minimum. You're not producing VLDL or small LDL. You have minimized insulin resistance and inflammation. Your arteries relax. And it's a little complicated. And John Q. Primary Care may say, that's just too much. I just want a pill. Yeah, yeah. So you can see how off base this notion of reduced cholesterol and reduced saturated fat has nothing to do with heart disease.

49:36Dr. William Davis:Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, I mean, this is the biggest problem within mainstream medicine is we're not getting to the root cause of what is actually causing the problem. You know, I've thought about this often is that, you know, if we didn't have metformin or insulin or some of these drugs, people would be forced to eat healthy. I mean, they have to do, I mean, people want to do something. But if you give somebody the easiest option, human nature is, I'm going to take the easiest path, not to do what's best long-term, I'm going to take the easiest path in a lot of cases. And I think that's one issue today that we have is that if we would just do away with these drugs entirely, some of them, outside of the emergency drugs that we would need if somebody's in a car accident or those sort of things or in a surgery, we would be much better off for it.

50:22Dr. William Davis:I'm curious your thoughts on this. There have been some different, I've heard philosophies on which fats are worse. Part of my philosophy, I just want to say is I'm not going to focus on those at all. I'm just going to focus on telling people to just do extra virgin olive oil. But I see these two communities of people saying, don't eat industrial seed oils. Don't eat the cotton seed, the corn, the soybean, those sort of oils that are partially hydrogenated. And then I have this whole group of people saying you shouldn't also eat tallow and butter in a lot of these animal fat products. And I've seen actually convincing evidence on both sides.

51:00Dr. William Davis:Let me say this because I've seen some studies showing that doing a high saturated fat diet might be worse than doing seed oil. There's one or two big studies showing that. One of these studies, though, I do think they included olive oil as part of the plant-based oil. so it was probably thin enough. But what are your thoughts on different types of oils and fats that can influence or cause heart disease specifically?

51:28Dr. Josh Axe:We could talk a whole day about that, couldn't we? Yeah. So one of the issues, as we talked about earlier, is we have a style of eating programmed into our genetic code. And so if you and I were in a nice studio, talking on microphones, have a smartphone, a nice car outside, air-conditioned home. But we got up this morning. You grab your axe, spear, or club, and you said, I'm hungry, and you're going to kill something. You're going to have to track an animal down. It might take you six hours of running and tracking the animal down. Yeah. While your other clan members are stealing birds' eggs and gathering shellfish and spearing fish in the lake and digging in the dirt for roots and tubers, like your book says.

52:10Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah, yeah. Gathering occasional berries, eating the way we're supposed to. Does anybody say, well, I'm not going to eat that antelope liver because it has too much saturated fat? And by the way, the people, of course, who adhere to this lifestyle, the few remaining groups like the Yanomami in the Brazilian and Venezuelan rainforest, the people who populate the highlands of New Guinea, the Malawi in eastern Africa, the Maasai in the savanna of Kenya, etc. These people have no coronary disease. They have no aortic disease to speak of. They don't get femoral artery, peripheral vascular disease. So there is virtually no atherosclerosis in those populations.

52:52Dr. Josh Axe:Yet they have no consciousness whatsoever. They don't know what saturated fat is. They don't know what seed oils are. So it's a lifestyle of eating oils that occur naturally, such as in the organs and meats of animals and some of them that occur in wild plants. And so I think a return to that, the evidence will suggest, does not. Now, of course, seed oils, as you point out, is a whole mixed bag of things. But it tends to be a source of linoleic acid. And there may be some adverse effects. Of course, as you know, the adverse effect is not so much the exposure to linoleic acid, which is in meats, by the way.

53:29Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah, yeah. It's the overexposure that comes by way of corn oil, mixed vegetable oil, cottonseed oil. So that may be detrimental. But also the other, the quirky thing about that evidence is the excess of omega-6 may be a proxy for the absence of omega-3.

53:49Dr. William Davis:Yeah, right.

53:49Dr. Josh Axe:EPA, DHA, yeah.

53:50Dr. William Davis:Yeah, because it's interesting because, again, I see this group happening on kind of both sides of arguing about this topic. And again, there's a lot of, I think, mixed evidence. But I think to your point, it really goes back to eat real food as literally processed as it can possibly be. And that really should be the focus is eating by design. You know, eating by design. And so I'm with you on that. Before the interview here, I came from working out at the gym. And I tend to try and get in real early because there's just less people in there if I'm in there. I mean, really nine to 11 o 'clock is just, it's so busy.

54:28Dr. William Davis:But one thing that I've noticed that's happened really, I feel like even more in the past quite few years with the prevalence of things like CrossFit and people learning about Olympic weight training and all this is, I think I see a lot of people overtraining. And I herniated a couple of discs in my back about 10 years ago. And I really learned a lesson that, and I realized after not being able to walk for a period of time, that I didn't want to work out for vanity. I wanted to work out for longevity. Is this something you see, and you take care of a lot of people with heart ailments, people even overtraining or causing actually injuries via the way they're working out?

55:09Dr. Josh Axe:All the time. I see people, I see a lot of ladies who say, I need to work out four to six hours a day. I'm going to bike 100 miles, I'm going to run 13 miles, and then swim two miles, like a triathlon kind of thing. And then I've seen these ladies. I had one woman who was walking. She loved long-distance running. It's not exercise for health's sake. It's exercise for some compulsion's sake. And she's walking, age 52. She's walking, didn't stumble, didn't fall. She's walking and she fractured her hip because of exercise-induced osteoporosis. And I've seen that happen numerous times now. Ladies who don't have menstrual cycles in their 30s and 40s because they're overtrained.

55:54Dr. Josh Axe:Now the emergence of these really weird, what are called cardiopathies, heart muscle diseases in long-distance exercise. The presumptive reason is that there's overload, volume overload of the – the left ventricle is part of the heart we all think about as the heartbeat. but it's the right ventricle that receives venous flow. In an extreme exercise like a marathon, there is overload of the right ventricle, and some of these people will have dilated right ventricles, which is a very bad thing. It becomes electrically unstable and maybe one of the reasons why there's an increase in sudden cardiac death with long-distance exercise.

56:33Dr. Josh Axe:There's also other problems. So when you exercise to extremes, such as a marathon, intestinal permeability increases dramatically in the hours afterwards. And these people, of course, carb-loaded more often than not. They had pasta and sugary foods and energy drinks. Of course, they're having diarrhea. But you got to wonder what happens with that combination of carb loading, dramatic increase in blood glucose, small LDL particle formation, and increase in intestinal permeability. It's my suspicion. It's not been borne out in evidence yet that that's probably a big reason why we see a lot of people who are long-distance exercisers developing things like Parkinson's disease and other long-term debilitations.

57:23Dr. Josh Axe:So that's speculation, but I think it's going to prove true. But it speaks to what you're talking about. Extremes of exercise done for compulsion purposes, not for health purposes, can have very bad consequences.

57:37Dr. William Davis:Yeah, yeah. Like I said, at this point, I'm doing everything I can to be exercising again when I'm 80 and 90 and inactive. And so I'm very, very thoughtful about that. Even in the way I move, you know, it's so funny. when I was younger, I had a, my strength coach in high school would say, tell me things like, of course, this is popular today. If you're in the fitness industry, don't let your knees go over your toes. Like I was actually taught some wrong things. And so now I'm working with a trainer on, and the great thing is like, I was a personal trainer. I've trained in this, but still there's so much value in having somebody who's watching you and helping you, you know, retrain yourself and how you should exercise and live for longevity.

58:15Dr. William Davis:So that's been something I've loved. You know, you, as I mentioned to start the show, your background's in cardiology. Heart disease is the number one killer in America today. What are your top five supplements in ranking order that would benefit people the most at preventing heart disease?

58:32Dr. Josh Axe:Vitamin D, big player. It was the first, Josh, when I was, a lot of this started when I started a facility in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the time, 30 some years ago, a long time ago called Milwaukee heart scan. It was a seat. It was actually, it was an EBT device. It was even before CT devices were fast enough. Um, but it generates something called a coronary calcium score as an indirect surrogate for the volume of atherosclerotic plaque in your arteries. Because my good friend, John Rumberger, when he was at Mayo did a series of autopsy series, he took people who died of car accidents, cancer, whatever.

59:09Dr. Josh Axe:And he quantified the amount of calcium in coronary atherosclerotic plaque. And he found regardless of age, sex, cause of death, 20 % of total atherosclerotic plaque volume was occupied by calcium. Meaning calcium, this thing we can see and precisely quantify in living people, is an index of how much plaque you have. And that was 30 some years ago. And of course, I opened the center, one of the first in the Midwest, one of the first in the country. We're doing this left. And when you look for heart disease, you find it everywhere. It's everywhere. So we're trying to put a stop to it. Now, this is 30 some years ago.

59:51Dr. Josh Axe:Back then, the solution was baby aspirin, low fat, low cholesterol diet, a statin cholesterol drug, maybe a beta blocker and an exercise program. So we helped publish these data if you have a score so zero is normal no calcium no plaque and people say why are you measuring calcium we want soft plaque no it's a measure of total plaque but anyway so let's say you say well my dad had a heart attack at age 63 i'm 52 is that in my future you get your scan your score is 400 very high we do nothing which is not smart your score goes up 25 per year So a year later, 500, 625 And each step of the way you're close to dying Having a heart attack Developing angina That leads you to the hospital, cath lab, stent implantation, etc What if you went on baby aspirin, Lipitor, low-fat diet, exercise program What my colleagues, Josh, to this day My colleagues call that optimal medical therapy How fast will that score?

1:00:58Dr. Josh Axe:25 % per year Still, really? Shown in a dozen trials, yes.

1:01:03Dr. William Davis:Wow.

1:01:04Dr. Josh Axe:So what do you do? You and I know we take care of people at street level and we have people freaking out. My score is now 25 % higher. I'm closer to dying. Well, of course, my colleagues say, let's do the real test. Heart catheter. These are people going to school, work, riding their bikes. These are not people in the emergency room having chest pain. And they're telling them they need protective or preventive bypass surgery or stent implantation. which is absolute nonsense. It's malpractice. It's done every day. That's why we look around. These big facilities,$80 million,$100 million for cardiovascular care because a lot of it's done inappropriately.

1:01:45Dr. Josh Axe:So what do you do though if – I don't want to do that. How do you stop it? Well, I did a number of things, a lot of zigzagging, trial and error. Talked to the experts with useless because they said, well, you have your pace on opal medical therapy, don't you? So one of the things I did many years ago was add vitamin D. And it was the first time I saw scores do that. Really? Wow. A score of, let's say, 650 would drop to 425 or something like that. By the way, you don't have to drop to zero to be safe.

1:02:15Dr. William Davis:Hey, let me ask you, is the reason alone that vitamin D, of course, has all these numerous benefits for immunity and inflammation and bone formation? But is it also partly due to, does it act as a cofactor for calcium being absorbed better? Is it just a question I would have?

1:02:33Dr. Josh Axe:Probably.

1:02:34Dr. William Davis:Yeah.

1:02:34Dr. Josh Axe:So one of the things I've discouraged in my population is calcium supplementation.

1:02:39Dr. William Davis:I've read a couple studies, these are years ago, but that taking certain types of calcium supplements increased your risk of heart attacks. Yes.

1:02:47Dr. Josh Axe:Why is that? Why would that be? It's only presumptive because they were observational studies. Okay. That is not prospective randomized placebo control, but observations. John, do you take calcium? I do. Mary, you take calcium? I don't. And we follow. So that's maybe.

1:03:02Dr. William Davis:Well, I mean, the absorption rate of calcium carbonate, for instance, is pretty low. Yeah.

1:03:08Dr. Josh Axe:So one of the things, so as you point out, vitamin D increases intestinal absorption of calcium fairly dramatically. getting rid of fecal microbes in the small intestine increases calcium absorption dramatically yeah uh getting magnesium uh supports bone health and a lot of the things that calcium was supposed to do in other words this idea of getting a bolus dose that was the evidence you're talking about from new zealand and australia that suggests that people who took bolus dosing they say i take 1200 milligrams of calcium carbonate or calcium lactate or whatever, and you get a big surge of calcium, there's a probable increase in heart attack and death.

1:03:50Dr. Josh Axe:So, yet that remains the prevailing standard in conventional care. Take more calcium for your osteoporosis and osteopenia. Wow.

1:03:59Dr. William Davis:That's wild. Okay. So, number one of the top five is vitamin D.

1:04:04Dr. Josh Axe:Next, I think, would be omega-3 fatty acids. So as you know, there's been 20, 30 years of all kinds of nonsense ever since the epidemiological studies, like in the Inuit and other Japanese and some of the coastal populations who had higher omega-3 intake had fewer cardiovascular events. Well, so then prospective trial, Gisi Prevencioni, 1999, 11 ,000 Italians, given 1 ,000 milligrams, so what you and I regard as a low dose of EPA, DHA, a drop in cardiovascular events. That spawned all its excitement, and then there were a bunch of studies that had serious methodological problems. Lower doses, different forms, small numbers of participants, but real problems like failure to weight adjust.

1:04:53Dr. Josh Axe:So this applies to vitamin D also. If I have two people, let's say two ladies, one woman's 110 pounds, another woman's 210 pounds. They both start with a 25-hydroxyvitamin D blood level, let's say 15, which is very common where I live, northern climates. We put them on, let's say, 8 ,000 units of vitamin D. The 110-pound woman gets a blood level of 73. I'm aiming for 60 to 70, thereabouts. Yeah. The overweight woman goes from 15 to 28. So even though it's the same dose, she didn't achieve – it's likely that woman's participation in clinical study likely will show vitamin D doesn't do anything.

1:05:35Dr. Josh Axe:Same thing with omega-3 fatty acids. It's very weight dependent because fat cells sequester vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids. So one of the many methodological problems in those studies. But then better studies started coming out, larger studies, including three CT coronary angiographic studies. So those, that CT heart scan device I talked about. I tried to do this 18 or so years ago, but the software to reconstruct arteries in the three-dimensional space, the software was inadequate 18 years ago when I tried to do it. Now they can. Technology has advanced. Three studies, the Harts evaporate in another study where they gave people omega-3 fatty acids at a higher dose, and remarkably, they saw regression of plaque.

1:06:25Dr. Josh Axe:Right. Wow. Even more remarkably, everybody, because the prevailing standard is to take a statin drug. Everybody in those studies took a high dose of statin drug. So it was statin alone versus statin plus omega-3 fatty acids, typically 3 ,300 milligrams or more per day, EPA, DHA. And the people who got statins had worsening progression. People who got omega-3 fatty acids had regression. That's amazing. Wow. But specifically of the soft plaque that ruptures, that's the stuff that kills you or causes heart attacks. It's a rupture of soft components, fatty plaque, and omega-3 fatty acids at doses greater than 3 ,300 milligrams per day actually achieve regression of fatty plaque.

1:07:09Dr. Josh Axe:Explaining why there's a marked reduction in heart attacks and sudden cardiac death with omega-3 fatty. So omega-3 fatty acids has had a resurgence of interest in light of the CT coronary angiographic studies.

1:07:20Dr. William Davis:That's great news.

1:07:21Dr. Josh Axe:So that's a big one.

1:07:22Dr. William Davis:Number three.

1:07:24Dr. Josh Axe:You know, iodine. Iodine is all boring. Really?

1:07:27Dr. William Davis:I've never heard this with heart disease. Obviously, thyroid and some of those sort of more metabolic issues.

1:07:34Dr. Josh Axe:You know, so iodine deficiency was a huge public health problem all throughout human history until 1924. But if you and I went to Paris and went to the Louvre or went to Rome and looked at all the paintings and sculptures of people from that, You would say, see, a lot of them have goiters and large thyroid glands. Yeah, yeah. So this was a huge problem. If your great-grandma was alive, you'd say, great-grandma, tell me about goiters when you were a little girl. She would say, Josh, my next-door neighbor died of a goiter. It infiltrated her airway. Or my teacher gained 150 pounds. Her legs were elephant size, and she died in a coma.

1:08:15Dr. Josh Axe:This was extremely common. So 30 % of school children, for instance, in the Midwest had goiters and iodine deficiency. Well, it became recognized in the 1920s. It was simply due to lack of iodine in non-coastal populations because iodine is in the ocean.

1:08:32Dr. William Davis:Yeah.

1:08:32Dr. Josh Axe:It's in seaweed and seafood. And so the FDA says, well, how do you get iodine into an illiterate public in 1924?

1:08:38Dr. William Davis:Yeah.

1:08:39Dr. Josh Axe:No radio, no TV, no internet. So they said, let's launch a poster campaign. Use more iodized salt. So they asked the salt manufacturers to put it in salt. Use more iodized salt. Keep your family goiter-free. And Americans listened. They did. People used all this iodized salt. Goiters went away. Many of us never seen a goiter. But then, of course, the use of salt led to some people having hypertension, other problems, sodium. But that was coincident with the advice to cut your fat and cholesterol, eat more healthy whole grains. So the FDA and other agencies interpreted that as excessive salt or sodium, not recognizing it was a worsening of insulin resistance that causes sodium retention.

1:09:22So the solution is – and in fact, in my programs – I learned this years ago.

1:09:28Dr. Josh Axe:I'd have – okay, we're going to cut your wheat grains and sugars. We're going to address common nutrient deficiencies, blah, blah, blah. And they'd call me. I passed out. or I had to stop my hydrochlorothiazide, my lisinopril, and my low presser, my beta blocker, because my blood pressure was so low. Oh, yeah. So people were passing out from low blood pressure. In other words, complete. So I had to tell them, salt your food and water. Yeah. So it was exact opposite, but became clear it was insulin resistance that was causing sodium retention. But because the FDA and other agencies, the Heart Association, They tell you to cut your sodium intake to 1 ,500 milligrams, which, by the way, evidence is good, increases your risk of death.

1:10:13Dr. Josh Axe:This is the status quo. So – but all that advice that people have tended to listen to caused them to reject intake of iodine. And we're seeing it's not as bad as it used to be because the food supply is global to some degree. So iodine deficiency is not as bad as it used to be. But if you have even just marginal iodine deficiency, you risk for coronary disease, weight gain, SIBO, dementia, all those things increase. And the solution is so easy. It has not trickled down, as you know, to John Q Primary Care, who says, you don't need iodine. It's in your diet. You don't need iodine. It's not unnecessary.

1:10:50Dr. Josh Axe:No, it was the largest public health problem for centuries until 1924. Wow, crazy.

1:10:57Dr. William Davis:Number four.

1:10:59Dr. Josh Axe:Probably magnesium. Yeah. Yeah. So as you know, we rely on hydroponically grown vegetables and plants and those kinds of things or food grown in depleted soils because it's been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. Or we have to filter what we have to. We don't have a choice. You can't drink water from the river.

1:11:16Dr. William Davis:Yeah. It's got sewage.

1:11:18Dr. Josh Axe:So we filter our water. Of course, water filtration is extremely efficient. If you have a water purifier in your house and you read the accompanying materials, they'll say, we are very efficient. We're moving greater than 99.9 % of all magnesium. Yeah. So you're drinking water. Your food has no magnesium in it. So we got to supplement magnesium.

1:11:38Dr. William Davis:Yeah, makes sense. How about number five? Last one.

1:11:42Dr. Josh Axe:Well, not a probiotic. As you know, most commercial probiotics are formulated like this. We say, well, we think that lactobacillus acidophilus is good. Let's throw that in. We think that bifidobacteriolongum is good. Let's throw that in. And they're kind of a hodgepodge. And they do have some modest benefits. But I've chosen that other way of doing it. Let's choose microbes with specific effects. But importantly to start, microbes that colonize the small intestine and colon and produce bactericins. That's not necessarily a long-term solution, but it's a near-term solution to fight back the invasion and overproliferation of fecal microbes.

1:12:22Dr. Josh Axe:So I don't know if you'd call that a supplement, but what I call SIBO yogurt.

1:12:26Dr. William Davis:Yeah, it makes sense. To me, supplementing is looking at your diet and what you can get and finding something that's maybe easy and convenient. Sometimes it's a capsule. Sometimes it's an herbal tea. Sometimes it's a yogurt shot, something like that to fill it. I think it's great advice. To your point, there's a probiotic that I've taken that's like 10 times the dose, and it's got bacillus subtilis in it and humic and fulvic acid and things like that. There are a few good probiotics out there, but I do think that 90 % of the brands out there, there's no thought into it. They're very low dose. They're ineffective.

1:13:03Dr. William Davis:And so I think that's a great point, but a need to recolonize the gut. What's your new book that's out?

1:13:10Dr. Josh Axe:The name is Superbody, which we had some difficulties with nonetheless. But it was meant to highlight the issue that we've lost muscle. We've expanded abdominal visceral fat. And all the solutions that come from conventional healthcare make it worse. They work up front to lose fat, but they destroy your health long term because of that loss of muscle. So even if you did a low-calorie diet, bariatric procedure, GAP1 agonist, those methods we all know, with good evidence, are selective for losing subcutaneous fat, fat below the surface, kind of like liposuction. Yeah. But not selective for loss of abdominal visceral fat.

1:13:55Dr. Josh Axe:That's the truly problematic fat, the fat in your abdomen you can't see, encircling abdominal organs like your small intestine, large intestine.

1:14:03Dr. William Davis:Liver. Liver. All these areas, yeah.

1:14:04Dr. Josh Axe:which by the way is now it's become clear as a company by what's called ectopic fat. That is your body has a hard time collecting more fats, which starts to deposit in odd places like around your heart.

1:14:18Dr. William Davis:Yeah.

1:14:18Dr. Josh Axe:Epicardial fat that accelerates the growth of plaque in your arteries or in the joints in your hip and knee joints. And when you see globules of fat on an MRI of the joint, that accelerates the deterioration of your joint cartilage and accelerates bone-on-bone arthritis or ectopic fat, say, in your pancreas that kills off the beta cells and can convert a type 2 diabetic to a type 1 diabetic that's irreversible. But also so-called myosteatosis, that is the infiltration of fat into muscle. So more abdominal fat, more fat in the muscle, which accelerates loss of strength, the loss of control you have over your metabolic rate and disability?

1:15:02Dr. William Davis:Well, obviously this is incredibly important. I know as you, like I said, I read Wheat Belly years ago and if you haven't read it, it's an amazing book. I recommend it. I know you wrote Undoctored. That was a great book, Super Gut. I know that was a book where you were getting into the gut microbiome and now Super Body. And so to the point with Super Body, I think that for all of us, getting rid of the most deadly type of body fat that we store around these organs is such an important topic. And I wanna encourage everybody to go out and get Dr. William Davis's new book, Super Body. It's on Amazon.com.

1:15:34Dr. William Davis:It's in bookstores nationwide. And I hope everybody takes to heart his incredible advice today. Dr. William, thanks for coming on. I know I learned so much. I loved you getting into the details about what's happening in our heart and our liver and our blood vessels and the root cause of things in terms of what's happening with these big organizations pushing these unfounded and really deadly advices on us and what we need to start doing. Of course, a big takeaway here is your gut is connected to even your heart and your entire body. So repopulating and focusing on healing SIBO, healing that gut is incredibly important as well.

1:16:15Dr. William Davis:I wanna say thanks everybody for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show, where each and every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and take your health and life to the next level. If you're watching on YouTube, let us know what is the biggest piece of advice that Dr. William shared with you today. We'd love to hear from you. And also thank you all of you for subscribing. Thanks for sharing this episode and I'll see you on the next one.

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