In the last episode, Dr. Martin talked about oxalates and how they are the main cause of kidney stones. Oxalates also cause digestive issues as they can irritate your gut.
We all suffer digestive issues from time to time, but if you’re always struggling with IBS and other stomach problems, you may have diverticulosis. It’s a condition where you develop small pouches in the transverse colon of the gut and they cause bloating, pain and discomfort. It can become a very dangerous situation that will put you in the hospital.
Dr. Martin also discusses what kills your gut. Without fail, again and again, the number one thing on the hit parade for digestive issues is antibiotics! They’ll save your life, but the overuse of them sets you up for a lifetime of digestive problems.
Join Dr. Martin in today’s episode to learn how you can improve your gut health.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well, good afternoon, everyone. Hope you're having a great day thus far. We're going to talk about the gut this afternoon. We're going to talk about one of the things that we see so much of. So let's get going guys. We're just going to talk a little bit about something that I see that is much, much, much more prevalent today than it used to be. Now, as you can well imagine, IBS has been around for a long time, long time. And whenever you get the diagnosis of IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, well, you don't have to be a doctor to make that kind of a diagnosis.
If your gut's bothering you, there's a good chance that we can call it IBS, but what is the actual cause of the gut? Now we talk about a condition that you're very familiar with if you've listened to me at all in the past, and that's a condition called leaky gut. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about leaky gut when I talk about IBS, because people have this idea that leaky gut means you have digestive symptoms.
Well, you might, but not necessarily, because remember now the gut, Hippocrates said it a couple of thousand years ago. What did he say? All diseases started in the gut and believe you me, when I was in school in the seventies and this continuous education, there was some doctors said, "Yeah, the gut is really the root of your emotions, the seed of your emotions is in your gut." You've got more hormones in the gut like serotonin and dopamine and things like that in your gut than you have actually in your brain, but they never really related any other things like skin conditions and autoimmune conditions and autism and lung conditions, sinus conditions, brain conditions.
At their own peril, medicine made a big mistake because they often didn't ever think of the gut as being that the root of a lot, a lot of problems. But I want to talk to you today a little bit more specifically about diverticulosis as one of the root causes of IBS, that people don't even realize. Now, what is diverticulosis? It happens usually on the transverse colon. So if you would take to your left side of your gut, and you've got a transverse colon going down that left side, and then off into it takes a direct turn to head off to your rectum.
And your transverse colon is often a place that gets affected by diverticulosis. Now diverticulosis can get infected and become diverticulitis, which can be very, very dangerous and usually you end up in the hospital. Now, what is diverticulosis? It is when you start to develop small pouches in the transverse colon, and these little pouches can give you lots of symptoms. Bloating, pain, discomfort. A lot of people mistake food intolerances with diverticulosis.
And I never found it all that difficult to diagnose even without doing a colonoscopy or whatever, because I literally would, if a patient was in and complaining about their gut, I would do a physical examination. I'd put my finger right on it and say, "Man, you got diverticulosis. You got pain on that left side, and I'm telling you now, why are we even talking about it?" Because it is so much more prevalent today. I'm telling you guys in the 1970s, I hardly ever saw diverticulosis. Not that I never saw IBS. Of course I did. But it isn't like today. It seems that what is it, one out of three people have some form of IBS. One out of three. And it starts young, young people with digestive issues. Now I never, or rarely, will ever single out the gut and just say, "Oh, that's diverticulosis."
But there's always a reason that people get digestive issues. So I want to start by talking about what kills your gut, what kills it, and the number one thing on the hit parade that the gut for most people, what starts sometimes years or a lifetime of digestive problems, the number one thing is antibiotics. Antibiotics, because antibiotics, as you well know, destroy the normal microbiome. You don't have enough good bacteria. That can destroy it. Nevermind, leaky gut, but also destroy your digestive process.
You need bacteria. You need it to be in harmony with each other, between good guys and bad guys, to assimilate, to breakdown, to take up food. And a lot of people have digestive issues and they don't realize that they were on antibiotics as kids. And sometimes it's years later and that gut starts to flare up. So I look at that a lot. I was talking yesterday about oxalates and kidney stones. And that's another thing that we're seeing a lot of. And what are oxalates? I'll just remind you. Oxalates are little tiny molecules that bind themselves to calcium.
And what causes oxalates? Where do they come from, these little molecules? Well, they're mostly in the vegetable kingdom. Oxalates are mostly in the vegetable kingdom like potatoes, spinach, Swiss chard. These are oxalates, nuts, seeds. And guys, I got to tell you something, I'm very big on not irritating your gut all the time. I always tell women, "What gets caught in your teeth?" Spinach, right? You're talking to somebody, you just had a salad, and you got spinach caught in your tooth. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's happened to me. I didn't even realize it.
The same thing happens in your gut. Spinach. Am I saying not to ever have spinach? No, I'm not saying that. Okay. All I'm saying is when you have digestive problems, you have to start eliminating things that can irritate it. And we have been given wrong information, in my opinion, but we buy it with this idea that we all need to have lots of fiber in our diet. That came to you directly from the cereal companies. They started on my kids in the 1970s. Fiber, you've got to have fiber, All Bran. It's so good for you. Who told you that? Well, they did, you see.
Look, you know what I think about cereals anyways, cereals is you're having dessert for breakfast. That's what I think of cereals. Why would you have dessert for breakfast? Why would you have something that will give you very little nutrition for breakfast? There's very little protein, lots of carbohydrate, and too much fiber. It'll irritate your gut. Now, if you've got a good gut and nothing bothers your gut, then you got cement as a stomach and gut, nah, good for you. You get away with a little bit more, but I know thousands and thousands and thousands of patients over the years that just had a hypersensitive gut and they were bloated all the time. They were in pain often. They were very uncomfortable.
Have you ever had a sore stomach? Yeah sort of, it takes away from your quality of life. I used to tell people a lot of times and it wasn't always women, but a lot of women, they had this idea that they had to have so much fiber. And look, I don't want you to be constipated either. Okay? I don't want constipation, but a lot of times when you are consuming insoluble fiber, all it does is irritates your gut. You're not absorbing it. It's going to end up in the toilet and you don't win prizes for number two. Okay? And again, don't misquote me. I don't want you to be blocked up and constipated, but the key to getting regular bowel movements isn't fiber. That again was propaganda. It wasn't true. And I hear it too about fibers feeding your good bacteria.
You know what? I don't buy it, guys. I really don't. I don't buy it. And most of the people that do the reset, there's an adjustment to be made the 30 days. They're used to so much fibers, so much carb, there's nothing folks that will give you a bigger stool than carbohydrates. Think about that for a minute. There's nothing that will give you a bigger stool than carbohydrates. Oh, they must be good. No. Think about it. If they give you a big stool, that's waste. Your body's smart. It's saying, "You insist on feeding me bread, pasta, noodles, cereals. I'm going to throw it out." It's going to end up in the toilet. And you got a big stool.
You know what that big stool does? That irritates your bowel. It irritates your bowel. The key to bowel movements is water. It really is. A lot of people don't realize how dehydrated they really are. And if you want things to move down the river of your bowel, the best thing you can do is drink water. The second one, and I found this by experience, because I've been using probiotics for over 40 years, is probiotic. And this is why even in our probiotic, I put a high, high dose of acidophilus bifidus, because bifidus and certain strains of the bifidus are one of the best things to regulate your bowel movements, to move the stool along.
One of the things that happens in diverticulosis not only oxalates like spinach irritate and start to carve little holes, little pouches in the colon. One of the things that really irritates them is fibers, insisting on eating a lot of fiber. And I know it goes against the grain guys, but I've been treating IBS for a long, long time. And I'm telling you, I used to get the best results when I got them to settle their gut down, get off the oxalates, no potatoes, no spinach. No, salients, no Swiss chard and then no lectins.
What are lectins? Nuts, seeds. And we're still in January so I'm going to talk about weight loss for a minute. One of the worst things you can snack on are nuts and seeds. They taste good. Do I like nuts? Yeah, I like nuts. Do I like seeds? Yeah, I like seeds too. Now have a little bit of flax seed. And by the way, somebody asked this the other day. I'm just going to go off on a rabbit trail for a second about flax seed. Flax seeds are phytonutrient estrogens. Okay. You have xenoestrogens. What's that mean, Doc? Xeno means they come from the outside. They're chemicals. They look like estrogen. So when you spray your room or you spray all these chemicals to clean in your kitchen and under arm deodorants and whatever that have chemicals in them, those are called xenoestrogens.
Your body thinks that's estrogen. So they're attracted. Your body likes estrogen. It says, "Come here, come and see me." Those are xenoestrogen. They come from outside. Plastics and things like that, and air fresher, whatever is aerosol is usually the worst. Secondly, you have phytoestrogens. Okay. And certain phytoestrogens I'm not big on. One of them is soy. You know what guys, I'm going to tell you something about soy. I talked to you, was it earlier this week about oil and fat and the number one oil in the world is soy oil. Oh, soy, that's protein. It's good for you and hmm. In this day and age with all the xenoestrogens, I wouldn't touch soy with a hundred foot pole, ladies and gentlemen, because estrogen is at the root of breast cancer, ovarian cancer.
I'll give you another one because I was listening to a commercial the other day. And this was a legal company, a law firm advertising on radio for women who had ovarian cancer, which is a very deadly cancer, by the way, that Johnson & Johnson had settled for, I think, $4 billion. You know why? Talc powder. You ever put talc powder on a baby's bum? You ever use it? Well, I mean, this law firm was saying that Johnson & Johnson paid a huge for their baby products and for Shower to Shower or whatever. And I imagine that's why certain women, what would that do, talc?
I mean, talc is carcinogenic, but it also elevates your estrogen. So I don't know necessarily it'd be classified as a xenoestrogen, but it was interesting listening to that. Now another phytoestrogen is flax seed, but here's the difference between flax seed and hemp seed, for example, or sunflower seeds or whatever. What's the difference? The difference is the amount in flax seed of the blocking, they're called lignans and there's nothing like flax seed that block, even though it's a phytoestrogen, it blocks estrogen a hundred times more than almost anything else. That's why I like it because of the amount of lignans, L-I-G-N-A-N-S, lignans.
So when it comes to the gut, things that kill your gut, antibiotics, I put it at the top of the list. Fibers, oxalates, which are part of fibers, lectins, which are part of fibers. Another one is cellulose. I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Cellulose. You know what enzyme you don't have? You don't have it. I don't have it. It's called cellulase. You don't have that enzyme. Cellulase is an enzyme that breaks down cellulose. What is cellulose in? Vegetables, celery. Okay, again, guys, please. I'm not against them. I'm just telling you, you don't even have an enzyme for that, that breaks down the cellulose. You don't have cellulase.
I told you yesterday, cows have cellulase and rabbits have cellulase to break down. That's why they can eat grass. They can eat a carrot. You don't have that. That's why I was used to tell my patients, don't eat too many vegetables, raw vegetables. Be careful. You're going to irritate your gut. You are going to start a diverticulosis. You're going to literally start pouches in your bowel. I'm telling you one thing you'll read. If you Google this, you'll read that, "Oh, well, if you don't go to the bathroom three, four times a day, you're going to be more susceptible to diverticulosis." No, you're not. That's fake news.
So it's really important, and the other one is gluten. I try and keep you off gluten. I sort of say gluten schmootin. I used to say that all the time in my office because they'd go, "Doc, I'm gluten intolerant." I said, "Gluten schmootin." You're really carbohydrate intolerant. What? Yeah, you're eating too much bread. Don't go buy gluten-free bread. That's garbage. guys. It's usually full of sugar. It's full of carbohydrates. Then they take the gluten out. If you take the gluten out, it tastes like cardboard.
But I used to say gluten schmootin because you know what it is You're eating too many carbohydrates. You're irritating your bowel with carbohydrates. You're making too much waste product. And if that waste sits there, what's worse is if you're making a lot of waste and then you get constipated and you can't even get the waste out, well that'll really start irritating your bowel. But it didn't start with constipation. It started with too many carbohydrates. That's why I'm yeah, gluten, I'm not saying there's no such thing as celiac or I'm not saying that, but I tell you I would get unbelievable results when I put them on a 30-day reset program for their gut.
What will kill your gut, guys? What can develop a diverticulosis in your body? We talk about it quite a bit. Seafood, small intestine fungal overgrowth. We at the Martin Clinic named that together. Do you remember that? How does that happen? Even up into the small intestine, when you get an overgrowth of yeast, antibiotics, feeding bears. You know what I mean by feeding bears? Don't give yeast sugar. Don't give yeast sugar. They'll call your name. They'll ask to be fed. Don't feed them. Sugar feeds yeast, and then it grows, grows, grows yeast. You know what yeast is. It makes bread rise. It also makes your gut rise in flame. Don't feed it sugar, man, sugar.
Cut down on the carbs, cut down on the sugar. One of the things they're really starting to see too, by the way, the research is coming in on irritating the gut, artificial sweetness. I'm very careful with those things. I tell people even like, "Oh, it's very low in sugar, doctor. It's got the sugar alcohols like xylitol and maltitol, and erythritol. Whenever you see an ol, read your label guys, but if you've got gut that's irritated, be very careful. No, aspartame. You're drinking a soda and it's a diet soda, I know, but that can really irritate your gut. Really irritate the gut, those artificial, and even what they call natural alcohol sweeteners. Be careful.
I tell people your gut is sensitive. If you've got a sensitive gut and you've got any form of IBS whatsoever, you've got to be super careful. And then of course you could have food intolerances. You got to figure that out. Someone was asking yesterday online, you know they don't do well with eggs. Well, if you don't do well with eggs, don't eat eggs. Don't irritate the barn. You know what I mean? Don't get the gut irritated with stuff that you know, I know, but I like that stuff. I wish I could eat it. Yeah, me too, I wish you could eat it. And some people it's cheese. Most people can have cheese, most, but if you're in that little percentage that you do not tolerate cheese or eggs, then you know what? Then don't have them. Don't have them.
You've got to take care of your plumbing. And one of the things that I saw so often, it was like an epidemic. And I wasn't the first guy to say this, but one of the reasons that you see so much colorectal cancer today ... today it's in young people like unreal. I remember talking to a GI specialist in my hometown and she told me, she said, "Doc, you wouldn't believe how often I see that and I diagnose that." Terrible cancer, colorectal. And she said, "You got some thoughts on it?" I said, "I do. I do." Young people, they're living on oxalates. They're living on lectins. They're living on estrogen, soy. They're living on omega-6 instead of omega-3 because their foods are loaded with omega-6 and that creates inflammation.
And I said, "I'm a big guy doc on fungus, on yeast." She thought it was fascinating. I said, "Yeah, I'm a big guy on changing the diet man." Young people are carboholics and crappy carboholics, and they eat way too much cereal. Way too much. Your body was never meant for that much fiber. Anyway, what else would irritate your gut? Let me just finish with this. Like I said, fibers, oxalates, lectins, then gluten schmootin. You know what I mean, too much carbs, antibiotics, alcohol. Yep. Be careful. Be careful about alcohol. It's one of the things that I used to see in the office. Our lady friends having a glass of wine every night.
I said, "I think you ought to take a few nights off of doing that. That really can irritate your gut. And you're feeding the bears in there. You're feeding that yeast. Don't do that." And the best thing in my opinion, okay, kike some of the gut healers, I'll just mention them in parting. There's nothing like probiotics, guys, for your gut. Nothing repairs the gut more than probiotics. And then you have what we call our mucilages. Okay, like slippery elm, for example, marshmallow root and others that I liked over the years. I put them into a combination in my IBS formula. You know what's really good for your gut too, to regenerate your gut? Bone broth. If you don't make it on your own, we make a real good bone with lots of L-glutamine. L-glutamine literally regenerates the gut. So I used to have a process of regenerating the gut. Diet, certain supplements, lots of water, lot less fiber, and we got good success with that.
So I just wanted to give you an idea why we see so much gut problems today. That is truly an epidemic in our society today. And especially when it turns into cancer, horrendous. So these are some of the things that you can do. Okay. Now tomorrow is question and answer Friday. Okay? So send your questions. Not too late. Send your questions in. Going to be happy to answer them and our private Facebook group, you know all about it. If you don't, if you're not a member, you can join up, go to MartinClinic.com, sign. Get into our Facebook and join. We'd love to have you. If you don't get our emails, make sure we have your email, guys, so that we can send you an email. Just sent one this morning on blood sugar and insulin, insulin resistance. Okay? We do a lot of teaching through the emails, so that's exclusive to our email followers. Okay? Okay. We love you guys. We'll talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!