Restoring Healthy Gut Flora Reverses Diseases and Infertility with Dr. Natasha McBride – #21

0:27 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome back to another episode of The Fertility Hour. Our next guest, you know, we had a little trouble connecting. She’s over in the UK and we had some day time issues. But I wrote her and I said, “You know, I just really need to make this happen,” because the book that she wrote and when we talk about it, I think you’ll get a feel for how important this work is. I personally think it is one of the most important books on health ever written. I honestly do.

Well, anyways, before I just go into that, let me introduce our guest today – Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, MD, with two postgraduate degrees: Master of Medical Science in Neurology and Master of Medical Sciences in Human Nutrition.

She graduated as a medical doctor in Russia. After practicing for five years as a Neurologist and three years as a Neurosurgeon she started a family and moved to the UK, where she got her second postgraduate degree in Human Nutrition. She practices in the UK as a nutritionist and no longer as an MD.

She is well known for developing a concept of GAPS (Gut And Psychology Syndrome), which she described in her book “Gut And Psychology Syndrome – Natural Treatment for Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Depression and Schizophrenia,” now in its second edition. Thousands of people around the world follow the highly successful GAPS Nutritional Protocol to help themselves and their families. You can learn about GAPS on www.gaps.me.

In her clinic Dr Campbell-McBride works as a nutritional consultant with many patients with heart disease, high blood pressure, arrhythmia, stroke and other complications of atherosclerosis. She has become acutely aware of the existing confusion about nutrition and these conditions, which spurred an intensive study into this subject. The result of this study was her book “Put Your Heart In Your Mouth! – What Really Is Heart Disease And What We Can Do To Prevent And Even Reverse It”.

Dr. Campbell-McBride is a keynote speaker at many professional conferences and seminars around the world. She frequently gives talks to health practitioners, patient groups and associations. She is also a Member of The Society of Authors, The British Society for Ecological Medicine, and is a Director on the Advisory Board of The Weston A. Price Foundation. She has contributed to many books on nutrition and a regular contributing health editor to a number of magazines and newsletters.

Welcome, Dr. Natasha.

Dr. Natasha McBride: Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m glad to be here.

3:10 CL: You’re welcome. Sorry to cut off your bio. You’ve done so many things and I was trying to condense it a little. But gosh, impressive. I wanted to bring this up because I was reading about you and of course a neurologist and a neurosurgeon, but was it the birth of your son that compelled you to go back to school and study nutrition? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

NM: Absolutely. My first child at the age of three was diagnosed with autism and then quickly I discovered that my own profession had absolutely nothing to offer my child. So that, to me, was a very steep learning curve. I went back to University in Britain and studied human nutrition and went to many conferences, read many books. As a result of all that study and my little one being the guinea pig in the family, I have developed the GAPS Nutritional Protocol which is very successful, which has been in use now for 20 years or so. It is very successful in helping people with all kinds of conditions.

So initially I worked just with autism because my child has autism. And families with autistic children, they talk to each other and they will help each other, so I have a community of these families around. I started helping these families, that’s how my clinic began, and as I was working with these autistic children, I realized that their siblings are not well as well. They have digestive problems, they have asthma, they have eczema, they have allergies and many of them are hyperactive or dyslexic or dyspraxic, clingy or fussy eaters. Then I’ve looked at the parents and I’ve realized that the parents are not well either, that many parents of these children have chronic syndrome or fibromyalgia or multiple sclerosis. IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) is almost universally present. Other digestive disorders, allergies, chronic cystitis, and various other conditions. I’ve realized that all of those conditions actually stem from the same place, from one place.

Hippocrates all those thousands of years ago said that all diseases begin in the gut. And the more he’s researching without modern scientific tools, the more he realized just how correct he was. Indeed, every disease begins in the gut.

It is my own child and all these other thousands of children in my clinic that taught me that these patients have abnormal gut flora. Recent research has discovered the fact that about 90 percent of all cells in the human body are in all gut flora. Ninety percent. So that means that our human bodies are just 10 percent a shell, a habitat for these muscle microbes that live inside us. They are in charge, make no mistake about it. Their activities and what they do in our bodies reach far beyond the digestive system. They reach to every organ of every cell everywhere in the human body.

So, what happens with these patients? And I have called them GAPS patients, I have developed Gut and Psychology Syndrome which abbreviates to GAPS and it is my patients that gave the acronym “GAPS”. And later on I have developed another diagnostic box and diagnosis called Gut and Physiology Syndrome to cover the rest of the body because Gut and Psychology focuses on the function of the brain, while Gut and Physiology focuses on the rest of the body of the person. In the English language, thankfully, that abbreviates to the same GAPS as well. So GAPS now stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome, and Gut and Physiology Syndrome.

So what we have here, we a have person with abnormal gut flora. That means that the person cannot digest and absorb foods properly and the person is developing multiple nutritional deficiencies. At the same time, the pathogen microbes which overgrow in the digestive system of these people damage the integrity of the gut wall making it porous and leaky, so foods don’t have the chance to be digested properly before they absorb. The absorb in a partially digested form, in a maldigested form and then the immune system finds them there in the bloodstream, looks at them and says, “You’re not food. I don’t recognize you as food,” and attacks them. The immune system attaches to various cells and various immune complexes to these bits of food and whatever these large molecules get you in the body, they cause symptoms, they cause illnesses which fall under the heading of food allergies and intolerances. And if you look at the Western population now, about 70 percent of people will tell you that they react to some sort of food. This is a very real condition now.

So it is in the food that we need to focus on. It’s not the fault of the food; it’s the fault of your gut lining. Your gut lining is like a sift. What we need to do and what we do in the GAPS nutritional protocol, which my son helped me to develop and all those thousands of children helped me to develop, we heal and seal the gut lining. We’ll close up all those holes in the gut lining of the person.

The result is food starts digesting properly before they absorb and food allergies and intolerances disappear in these people. At the same time, these pathogenic microbes that overgrow in the digestive system, they eat the food that comes alone that we eat and convert it into hundreds and hundreds of very toxic, downward poisonous chemicals. And these chemicals also absorb into the bloodstream and get distributed around the body and cause absolute havoc in the body. Whatever they get to, they cause disease, whichever organ they get to these chemicals. And alive microbes get through and various other substances get through.

So the digestive system in the GAPS person instead of being a source of nourishment for the person becomes a major source of toxicity. A river of toxicity flows from the gut into the bloodstream, goes around the body. When this river of toxicity gets in the brain, it causes autism, hyperactivity, dyslexia, dyspraxia, epilepsy, schizophrenia, depression, eating disorders, anorexia, addictions, bipolar disorder, you name it. Any kind of group of symptoms that our brain can produce, it would produce in these people because it is under attack. It is under attack by pathogenic microbes, by various chemicals, undigested foods and at the same time, the immune system tries to deal with the whole situation and it launches inflammation and it launches autoimmunity. So the brain is under autoimmune attack as well. That is why these people develop mental illness. That is the cause of mental illness. From my point of view, all mental illnesses are GAPS disorders and they come out of the digestive system of the person.

And this wave of toxicity gets in the lungs, the person develops asthma or some other lung condition. When it gets into the heart, the person can develop palpitations and heart disease, arrhythmia and various other problems in that area.

And then you have these toxins when they leave the body, they may leave through urine. When this toxic, acrid urine accumulates in the bladder, it causes damage to the bladder and it causes chronic interstitial cystitis. This is the more common cystitis, and unfortunately, other medical professionals are not familiar with it yet. They will, it will take them years but they will be. They’re not familiar with it yet. So they will do a test of urine, they find no infection in your urine and they say, “Well, you can’t have cystitis. Something is wrong with your brain and quite often these people get referred to a psychiatrist. This is a chemical cystitis. This is a cystitis that is not caused by infection. It is caused by chemicals which were produced in your digestive system, finished up in the bloodstream and then finished up in the urine.

11:26 CL: I’ve known people who have suffered from that and it’s an incredible, incredible struggle.

NM: Very. And one thing that is related to that as well, if these toxins live through sweat, through skin because our skin is a major cleanser in the body, a major cleansing organ, the person develops eczema, psoriasis, various rashes and various unpleasant skin conditions. So whatever these toxins get you, they will cause problems. This is a summit about infertility, is that correct?

12:02 CL: Absolutely, yeah.

NM: Well, recent research has confirmed what we’ve known for decades that our gut flora is a major endocrine organ in the body. It is the biggest endocrine organ. All those little microbes sitting there, they’ve got hormones of their own. They got their own glands, their own hormones. And those hormones absorb through the damaged gut lining and they talk to your hormonal balance in the body. They interfere in your hormonal balance.

Abnormal gut flora in GAPS causes major disruption in the hormonal balance in the body. Thyroid gland usually is low, adrenal is usually high and usually then they collapse and they become low. Sex hormones are all over the place. You may have some estrogens are high, some estrogens are low. Progesterone might be low, high and testosterone might be all over the place. So all of the hormones in the body are all over the place. And they work as a team. They all talk to each other, they support each other, the endocrine glands. So when one endocrine gland goes out of balance, the rest of them go out of balance to compensate for that. And of course, our sex hormones have to be normal in the right balance in order for us to conceive, in order for us to be able to have children. That is a major, major cause of infertility epidemic in the world, the GAPS condition.

13:30 CL: When you were talking about the gut being the biggest endocrine organ, I mean that’s really fascinating. I’ve never thought of it that way and I guess it’s not common knowledge for that. But I also think there’s many, particularly women who have thyroid issues and then they’re put on levothyroxine or whatever, and it’s just never addressing it, it’s sort of bandaging. Because isn’t the thyroid in a sense it’s a little bit like an indicator light in your car? It’s not that the thyroid somehow one day just goes kaput; it’s something is bringing it out of balance and as you’re communicating to us, it’s usually gut imbalances.

NM: Absolutely, it is. There are several mechanisms of this problem. Not only the thyroid gland gets out of balance, and usually it becomes hyperactive. That might only last a short period of time and then it gets exhausted quite quickly and it becomes a low thyroid function. And low thyroid function is usually one of the symptoms of that infertility, inability to conceive, and depression, lack of energy, lethargy, not being able to lose weight and greasy skin and various other unpleasant symptoms. It isn’t nice.

Very often, a major mechanism of that is actually not the thyroid gland itself but the toxicity that is coming out of the gut of the person. Because often these people go to the doctor and this is a typical severe clinical picture of low thyroid function that’s sitting in front of the doctor. The doctor does the blood test and it’s all normal. They say, “Well, all your thyroid hormones are normal in the blood. You couldn’t possibly be hypothyroid.” And yet, the clinical picture is right there in front you.

What’s happening in this case? That is a functional deficiency of thyroid hormones. Those chemicals that the pathogenic microbes manufacture in the gut and their hormones have been manufactured. They’ve got their own hormones which are similar to thyroid hormones. When they absorb, they like to attach themselves to proteins in the body. They look for compatible proteins where they can fit in like hand in glove with those receptors. Many chemicals are compatible with receptors of thyroid hormones. Because the thyroid hormones leave your thyroid gland and go into the blood, they go around your body. In order for them to do their jobs in different organs, in your muscles, in your heart, in your skin, and in every cell, they have to attach themselves to a receptor on that organ, on that tissue. But if those receptors are occupied by toxins which came out of the gut, the thyroid hormone has nothing to attach itself to. It just floats idly around the body, gets excreted, gets destroyed. You are developing a clinical picture of low thyroid function while your thyroid gland is working very hard manufacturing all these hormones trying to compensate for that situation. And your brain probably is working even harder producing thyroid-stimulating hormones, stimulating the thyroid gland all the time, saying “come on, come on, work. We have a deficiency here.” But there’s nothing the thyroid gland can do. The only thing that we have to do in this situation, we need to clean all those and fix this up, we need to remove those toxins. And in order to do that, we need to stop that river of toxicity coming out of the gut. Because if your tap is leaking in the kitchen and there’s a puddle on the floor, before you start mopping the floor, what do you need to do first?

17:08 CL: Fix them, yeah.

NM: Stop the leak and fix it up, don’t you? So we need to heal and seal the gut wall. We need to normalize the gut flora in the person. We need to close that gate and stop that river of toxicity coming into the body. And once that happens, the body cleans itself up. Because human body has a marvelous system called the detoxification system with the headquarters in the liver and departments in every cell of the body. Every organ, every cell cleanses itself all the time. So when the influx of these toxins stop, this organ then will say, “Oh, I can now attend to that and I can clean it.” And your thyroid glands will clean up and all those receptors will clean up and your thyroid hormone will start working. I had no end of patients in my clinic who would come with PMS and various other hormonal problems and infertility as well, and their symptoms disappeared very quickly as soon as they started working on the GAPS Nutritional Protocol. Because that’s a major indication for us that the gut has healed itself and that river of toxicity stopped and the body started cleaning up and the hormones now have the chance to rebalance themselves.

This functional deficiency happens with many hormones, neurotransmitters and nutrients in the body. Not only with thyroid hormones. It can happen with your adrenal hormones, with your sex hormones, with your vitamin B6, your vitamin B12, with your minerals, with your enzymes, with neurotransmitters, with any kind of molecule. If their working site, if the receptor is flat occupied, contaminated by chemicals coming out of your gut, they’ve got nothing to attach to in order to do their jobs, their work. And as a result, you develop deficiency in that particular nutrient or that particular molecule, that hormone or neurotransmitter, while your blood levels when we do tests are perfectly normal.

19:04 CL: Can you find out the health of your gut? Like food allergy tests, they’re able to give you a score on like a leaky gut assessment. What do you think of using that as a diagnostic tool?

NM: The best thing to do is to see, have I got digestive symptoms? Have I got bloating? Have I got indigestion? Have I got reflux? Have I got diarrhea or constipation, or pain in the digestive system? That’s the first thing that will give you immediately an indication because if your gut flora is normal, you cannot possibly develop any digestive disorder. It simply cannot happen because your gut flora is the housekeeper of your digestive system. It will make sure that it’s healthy and well and vibrant and doing all the work it’s supposed to do and nothing wrong can go there. So before you develop any digestive symptom, you’ve damaged your gut flora first usually through a good course of antibiotics or several courses of antibiotics, any other prescription medication.

Contraceptive pill is an absolute onslaught on women’s gut flora. It messes it up seriously, it decimates it. And women have to take contraceptive pills for quite a few years before they decide to have a child and that’s a long period of time to be damaging your gut wall. And there is a problem with that, a big problem because babies acquire their gut flora from the parents, largely from the mother. So if the mother has abnormal gut flora herself, that is what she will endow a child at the moment of birth. So these babies start their life with abnormal gut flora and that is a major cause of the GAPS baby and major cause of an issue of colic and eczema and diabetes type 1, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, rheumatoid arthritis, psychiatric disorders, you name it. Anything. We have an epidemic of these disorders. Because what I see in my clinic that that damage to gut flora passed through generations is getting deeper with every generation, particularly after the Second World War, when antibiotics came on the market in the ‘50s and ‘60s for the first time.

So if a grandma had a particularly okay gut flora and she had a couple of courses of antibiotics, before having her daughter maybe in the ‘60s or ‘70s, so she passed a slightly damaged gut flora to her daughter at the moment of birth. Then the daughter grows up in the modern world, with antibiotics that were given to her throughout her childhood for every cough and sneeze damaging her gut flora further and further. Junk food came on the market at the same time, which feeds almost exclusively pathogenic disease or microbes in the gut, all these processed carbohydrates. And then at the age of 14-15 she went on a contraceptive pill which she took for quite a few years before she was ready to start her family. So by the time she’s ready to have her first child, her gut flora is seriously damaged. That is what she’s passing to her baby at the moment of birth. We have an epidemic of GAPS, epidemic of abnormalities in the gut flora and with every generation, that epidemic is getting deeper and deeper. That is the epidemic that is underlying our epidemic of autism.

I don’t know if you know this fact but when I started practicing as a medical doctor some 25-30 years ago, we were diagnosing 1 child (autistic) in 10,000. Today, we’re diagnosing 1 child in 35-37. And scientists have already projected that curve, that graph by 2025 or 2020, sometime in that area, we’ll be diagnosing 1 child in 2 in the English-speaking world. Half.

23:02 CL: That seems unbelievable to me.

NM: It’s a disaster. It’s an absolute disaster. And the other half of children is not going to be healthy either because they will have ADHD and dyslexia and diabetes type 1. Diabetes type 1 is another huge epidemic coming on in babies. I have a group of babies in my clinic with diabetes type 1. And leukemia in children, that’s another huge epidemic. All of this coming in. Very soon, we will hardly see any healthy children around. Another trend that is happening now is that many families now bury their children at a young age. Children do not outlive their parents. Proportion of these children is growing every year. It’s another very sad fact that is happening.

Gut flora is a major, major factor behind all of that. Apart from the gut flora there is another factor that women, before they conceive, need to be aware of. Not only women but men as well. Both partners need to be aware of that. And that is the toxic load we give to our child.

24:10 CL: Dr. Natasha, I’m hearing a little background noise on my side. I need to pause for one second because I just want to make sure. Hold that thought please, okay? I’ll be right back. Sorry for that interruption. Okay, so if you can capture your thought again and continue.

NM: It sounds cruel and unfair but the way Mother Nature designed a woman’s body is that it uses pregnancy as a chance to clean up by dumping toxicity into the fetus. This has been now demonstrated conclusively in animal research. So what’s happening in the western world, in the modern world, increasingly generation after generation, women have more and more toxins accumulating in their bodies before their first pregnancy. First of all, women are having babies later and later in life. The generation of my mother, for example, up to the age of 24 they already had their children done. They already had them. Now, women don’t even think about having a child until their 30 or even in their mid-30s. So that’s a longer period of time.

Also, we live in a world where we are exposed to many chemicals through personal care products, through our shampoos and our makeup and our hair dyes and all the other luxurious chemicals that endow our bathrooms in colorful bottles. Chemical industry is self-regulating which means it’s not regulated and up to date it’s created about some 80,000 new chemicals which don’t exist in nature. What people need to understand is that our skin is not a barrier, it’s a sponge; it absorbs everything you put on it. In seconds, when you put a deodorant under your armpit, you can taste it in your mouth in seconds because it’s already in your blood and it’s already in your saliva. And women now are seduced to use more and more of these chemicals on their bodies and from a younger and younger age. We have little girls now using makeup and painting their nails and dyeing their hair and all sorts of things like that. And all of these chemicals accumulate in the body and they store in various places.

So when this woman gets pregnant, her body thinks, “Great. I’ll clean up by dumping all of these chemicals into the baby, into the fetus.” If that toxicity is enough to kill the fetus, then the woman will have a miscarriage, will have an epidemic of miscarriages. Quite a few women nowadays have to go through 1 to 3 miscarriages before they’re capable of producing a viable baby. But if that toxicity is not enough to kill the child, then the child is born with a very high toxic load that means poor constitution and that means being vulnerable to damage by bacteria, by food, by infections and the development of chronic illnesses, mental and physical.

The following children in the family usually receive a cleaner pregnancy because the mother cleans her body up on the first child and then she has a second and a third, and those are cleaner pregnancies. Her body is cleaner and as a result, usually the siblings of these children are not as ill. They have a better constitution, they’re a bit stronger. And if you look at the statistics of autism, ADHD, diabetes type 1, allergies, asthma and various other serious chronic diseases, a vast majority of these children are firstborn in the family due to this toxicity.

27:42 CL: And it’s not uncommon for there to be multiple siblings with autism.

NM: Exactly. Because if the mother has enough to share for the following siblings and if she continues exposing herself to toxic chemicals and continues accumulating them in her body, then she will have plenty to give to other children as well. And unfortunately, that is one of the major factors as well in the world for all of these epidemics.

So nowadays, a husband and wife cannot just go ahead and get pregnant without a thought. We have to now plan our pregnancies. We have to go through 1 or 2 years of cleansing our bodies, healing our bodies, cleaning up our household, cleaning up our lifestyle, removing all these toxic chemicals, removing all this toxicity, healing the gut, healing the body, dealing with the chronic conditions before we can consider to get pregnant.

28:45 CL: That’s what we preach at Natural Fertility Prescription, that there is a preconception care time and we’re saying, unfortunately, people plan their weddings for a year and they don’t plan creating another human life. But I want to backtrack for a second. I know you had a son with autism. I feel protective of the parent with autistic children. I don’t want them to listen and go, “Gosh, now I already feel guilty enough and now as the mom, I feel like I’m being told I’m to blame for my child having autism.” I mean, you must have kind of gone through that. It’s a fine balance because I do understand how you’re educating people and yet I know that parents really suffer thinking, “Did I cause this?” But it’s really to how you can prevent it from happening. Because you probably went through that when you had your son and you go, “Was I a part? What role did I play in my child having autism?”

NM: Well, life has a steep learning curve. A very steep learning curve for all of us. And the steeper it is, the more we learn and the more we evolve and develop as human beings. My son was a blessing in my life. He was my teacher. I do believe that children come to us as teachers. Yes, we teach them mundane things. How to eat, how to dress, how to drive a car, how to live in this world. But they teach us the most profound universal truths, that all throughout they change us, they mold us, they shape us. No matter what you’ve achieved in your life, no matter what you’ve done in your life, your biggest achievement in your life will be your children, without a doubt. You will realize that. I’ve done a lot in my life but my children are my biggest achievements. My son, today, he’s in his mid-20s and he’s a normal, healthy young man He’s living a normal life. So autism is curable as long as you catch these little ones young enough and put them on the GAPS Nutritional Protocol. It will fix the problem. And then you need to teach the child intensively so the child can catch up and learn all the skills that they’ve missed out when they were autistic, when they were stuck in that toxic fog.

So, it is curable and so is every other physical and mental illness which are pronounced incurable in mainstream medicine. When you do it the natural way, when you work with your body, it is curable including infertility in most cases. Because make no mistake, your body has all the healing mechanisms programmed into it. It is a miraculous creation. It is a pinnacle of evolution on outlining the human body. All you have to do is just provide all the resources for your body to do the work and the body will do it. It will thank you and it will do it. It will do the work and it will heal the damage and reverse chronic illnesses and it will provide you with a baby.

When also talking about fertility, women need to understand that the mainstream propaganda in nutrition is a major cause of our infertility epidemic as well. Our world is full of nutritional misinformation. We have to understand it. And the prevailing dogma that is going on around and has been going on around for decades now is the low-fat recommendation. It all began in 1953 when a diet hypothesis was proposed which was a tentative idea at the time saying that maybe dietary fats cause heart disease. It was only a hypothesis. It wasn’t the truth. A hypothesis needs to be proven before that idea can be taken as a truth. No other hypothesis was worked on so much in the whole world in every country of the world. Huge funds have been spent on that hypothesis. And the more the scientists have been researching it, the more they were proving it entirely wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. The problem is that while that was happening, while the science was working on it, a huge and very influential, very powerful political and commercial machine grew on this hypothesis. Pharmaceutical industries making billions on it, food industries making billions. Our agriculture industry, our government, our medical profession is making billions. The more the scientists say, “look, we’ve proven this. Fats are not only not causing heart disease, not causing obesity, not causing cancer, they’re actually preventing these things,” the more this political and commercial machine is releasing that. And unfortunately, they are in charge of the information and the propaganda in the world.

33:26 CL: Their message is so strong and loud that people who have been on statin drugs for years, I mean they are so scared to death of that belief, it’s so ingrained. They can’t look at another.

NM: Absolutely. Statins are a major cause of Alzheimer’s epidemic in our world. Because the brain is made out of cholesterol to a degree, it’s a structural element in the brain. And also the brain cannot function without large amounts of cholesterol delivered to it on a minute by minute basis. When you start taking statins, you reduce the level of cholesterol in your blood, your brain starts starving. One of the major side effects of statins is loss of memory, loss of ability to learn, cognitive ability, and dementia.

34:10 CL: What about its effects on sex hormones? Because cholesterol is a builder.

NM: Yeah, exactly. In order to manufacture sex hormones and adrenal hormones, these molecules are steroids. They are all made from molecules of cholesterol in the body. Cholesterol in the blood doesn’t come from food. That’s another fallacy that people believe in that “if I eat eggs and butter, my blood cholesterol will go up.” Nothing of that sort. It doesn’t come from food. It comes from a little factory that is sitting in your liver and that is manufacturing cholesterol. Cholesterol is one of the most essential elements for the human body. No tissue in the body can function without cholesterol. It is a structural element for your brain, it is a structural element for your adrenals. It is the molecule that your sex hormones are made from, your steroid hormones are made from and many other molecules in the body are made from. It’s a molecule that the immune system requires large amounts particularly when there is an infection in the body.

Your blood cholesterol will go up because when there is an infection, your immune system will start to fight, start dealing with the infection and it needs huge amounts of cholesterol to repair the damaged cells and to give birth to new cells to replace the dead ones, to deal with the infection. So your immune system will shout to the liver and say “Hey, hey, I need cholesterol.” So that factory in the liver will switch on and start manufacturing cholesterol just as fast as it can, packaging it into those little satellite dishes called LDLs because cholesterol is fat-soluble substance. It can’t travel in a water-based blood without being packaged appropriately, so it gets packaged and sent to the place of damage, to that place of infection, to feed the immune system, to deal with that infection. So your blood cholesterol will be high because cholesterol is being delivered to the place where it’s needed very, very much.

When you’re under stress, your adrenals are working very hard manufacturing these hormones, manufacturing adrenaline and steroids and other hormones in there. Again, the adrenals will shout to the liver, sending a message saying “I need cholesterol. There’s all this stressful situation going on in life and I need to pump out all these hormones to deal with that situation and I need to make them from cholesterol.” So the liver again switches on that factory, manufactures the cholesterol and sends it to the adrenals. So when we’re in a stressful situation, your blood cholesterol level will be high.

The same goes for many, many other situations in life. No healing in the body can happen without cholesterol. Because cholesterol is a structural element of every cell membrane and every membrane of every organ out inside the cell. It’s major. In some cells, 40 percent of the membrane is made out of cholesterol. So when there is a damage in the body and a trauma for example or infection happens or something else and disease happens, the body has to produce and manufacture lots and lots of new baby cells to replace the sick ones. In order to make them, cell membranes need to be built and in order to build those, you need building materials. You need cholesterol. So that wound will be shouting to your liver “I need cholesterol. Lots and lots of it.” So the liver will be manufacturing it just as fast as it can and sending it to the place of damage.

So when you had a surgery or you’ve been to your dentist and your mouth is a mess or you had a trauma or you had a stressful situation or you’re recovering from a chronic illness, your blood pressure will be high – and that’s good. That is good news. You need to celebrate that that is happening. So whatever your blood cholesterol is at any moment in your life is the right blood cholesterol for you. I recommend that people stop testing because testing only causes anxiety and pressure to go on statins.

People who are in trouble are people in whom that little machine, that factory in the liver is broken down. And these are usually drug addicts, alcoholics and people with various nutritional deficiencies. Because in order to manufacture cholesterol in the liver, various nutrients are required as cofactors. Also many toxins in the body can block that manufacture process, they can block that factory. And the body, as a result, are unable to manufacture cholesterol. What happens with these people, they’re usually angry people, aggressive people, people with poor self-control, people who get into trouble right off the handle, cranky people and people who get into criminal situations.

An American researcher, Dr. Pfeiffer, did an amazing pioneer research in American prisons in the ‘70s and ‘80s where he looked at the community of prisoners who committed violent crimes, murder and some other violent crimes. What he discovered is that more than 80 percent of these people have low blood cholesterol because that little factory inside the liver is broken down and is unable to manufacture cholesterol in these people. So these are teenagers, our grumpy teenagers who are constantly dismayed about something and angry about something and hanging up on optional good. If you give them eggs and bacon in the morning, you’re giving the body a hand in manufacturing cholesterol. They’re angry and cranky and unhappy with that because their liver is unable to manufacture cholesterol. Any person like that. So that is a very, very important thing. Low cholesterol diets and low fat diets are a major cause of infertility epidemic because in order to manufacture our sex hormones, without sex hormones you can’t conceive. You simply can’t. In order to manufacture that, we need fat and we need cholesterol. Large amounts of it.

So instead of being on a low-fat diet, if a woman then goes on a high-fat diet, if she has cream, sour cream and butter and deli pork for dinner and eggs for breakfast, fairly quickly a proportion of this women conceive without any effort, without any treatments, without any medications or anything else. Women who have GAPS, who have abnormal gut flora and there’s a river of toxicity going to the liver and blocking that factory manufacturing cholesterol, they need to take longer, they need to heal their gut. They need to heal their gut flora, they need to deal with that situation to remove that toxicity from your body. Only then they can conceive. It is a good idea to fix that situation in your body because you don’t want to pass that abnormal gut flora to your body. You don’t want to struggle to conceive for years and then get an autistic child, do you? Or a child with diabetes type 1 or a child with some other disaster. So the child is suffering, you are suffering. The whole family will be suffering as a result. It will not be a happy situation. I don’t think anybody wants to plan for that. You have to fix your gut flora before you conceive.

41:17 CL: I absolutely agree. I was reading what other people were talking about. I went on to Amazon. You have glowing reviews about your book. And these were people who had been chronically ill for a long time. They did the GAPS protocol and they said it essentially saved their life. It totally turned their health around. But if someone’s listening today, can you give us a couple examples or sort of practical tips? I know you have a whole protocol, therefore it’s called the GAPS protocol, but what are some things that you would recommend to us as starting out? Like some people recommend bone broths for healing the gut lining, obviously probiotics, fermented foods. But give us some kind of practical tips that we should start considering.

NM: Read my book. Read the GAPS book.

42:07 CL: Okay. Is there a lazy man’s guide to the GAPS protocol?

NM: Well, there is my website, GAPS.me, where the whole diet is outlined. This is an information website. It’s got all the information there. My book has been translated into 17 languages. So if you needed them in various foreign languages you can find it there on the website. And also, if you’re struggling and if you find it too much to wrap your brain around, I have trained the best part of 2000 health practitioners. They are now certified GAPS practitioners. They’ve been trained specifically how to implement the GAPS nutritional protocol and there is a comprehensive list of these practitioners on my website which says “Find a GAPS practitioner”.

And then the part 4 of the book is dedicated to conception and new baby. It is an important chapter for you to read. Very important because it will give you a lot of information on how to prepare for the pregnancy and how to make sure that you have a health child and you have a happy family as a result of your pregnancy and you’re not heading into another disaster because you haven’t been prepared properly for that.

43:22 CL: A couple of things I want to give a plug too. I’m in the Bay Area. There’s a kitchen called Three Stone Hearth that I’ve used many times. They prepare food, deliver it to your house. It has many GAPS-friendly meals on it. ThreeStoneHearth.com. Then also if you like the content and the guest that we have, please subscribe to The Fertility Hour and we really appreciate your support.

I wanted to ask you because we had another guest that talked about hidden epidemics in the mouth causing issues, you were talking about it a few minutes ago, but also when you go to the dentist that you really need to kind of prepare your body for that. Can you touch upon that for a few minutes?

NM: Absolutely. Our modern dentistry, God bless it, without our modern dentists probably a majority of us will have no teeth in our mouth at all. Yes, they do a good service for us but everything a dentist puts into your teeth is toxic. And you’re swallowing those toxins for weeks, months afterwards, sometimes forever. If it is an amalgam filling, for example, it will be leaching mercury for the full time of its existence in your mouth. And these things are very toxic and they store in your body and they will be dumped into your fetus causing problems in your baby. So these things have to be sorted out before you conceive. It is very, very important.

Dentistry is a major cause of chronic illnesses in the world, in the western world in particular nowadays. Multiple sclerosis – a fair proportion of those patients are ill because of dentistry. There’s no mistake about it. No doubt about it whatsoever. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and all these other debilitating chronic conditions – they’re caused by the dentists without a doubt.

There’s no such thing as a clean root canal. Every root canal is infected. Every one of them. There’s no such thing as a safe amalgam filling or a safe implant or anything else safe that the dentists do. So it is important.

We have a new breed of dentists in the world called holistic dentists which know things which ordinary dentists have no idea about because they haven’t been trained. Holistic dentists are far and few between and they’re expensive. But it is an investment that is worth doing if you have a situation in your mouth. If you do have amalgam fillings, if you do have many teeth that have been damaged and filled, it’s a good idea to find a holistic dentist because long-term in your life and your children’s life, you may pay much, much more for the health issues and the problems that you will be suffering because of that, because of an inappropriate dentistry.

Another issue I would like to talk about which is connected to fertility is vegetarianism.

46:24 CL: This might be a part 2. Yes, I know you wrote a book about it. Please touch upon it. But yes, I might have to have you back on for this, yes.

NM: I have to look into this area because in my clinic I have a lot of anorexic girls that come to me, had a few boys too with anorexia. What I’ve discovered there that more than 90 percent of this youngsters have become anorexic because of misguided vegetarianism. That stirred me to on another steep learning curve and research this area to understand what exactly is going on. The result of that study is my new book called Vegetarianism Explained. It has unique information in it. You will not find that information anywhere else, in any other book, any website, online or anywhere else. Because there is a very possible propaganda for vegetarianism going on particularly in the western world. And it’s evangelical, it’s based on emotions and of ignorance, I’m afraid. There isn’t much solid scientific research to rely upon. There isn’t. The few studies that have been done are flawed to such a degree that they cannot be taken seriously. When you start analyzing those studies, looking at them, they were not conducted properly and they were founded by people who were pro-vegetarian to support the propaganda.

So in the book I explain how animal foods work in the human body, how plants work in the human body. I haven’t got time to go in-depth into all of that but I will tell you that if you want to conceive, do not become a vegan. Do not become a vegetarian because plants do not feed human body to any degree. It sounds paradoxical, the statement, but it is true. And if you read my book, you will understand why. Plants are not the feeding foods. The feeding foods for the human body are the meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. They are the ones that feed and build your heavy bones, your heavy muscles, your big heavy brain, your heart, your lungs, your liver, the physical structure of your body. And they also allow us to maintain our physical structure to heal, to rejuvenate and to produce children. Because in order to build a body for a baby in the woman’s body inside her womb, building materials are required. If you take a human body and you subtract water, about 70 percent of our body is water, the dry weight is about 50-50 protein and fat. That is what we’re made from, the structure.

When we analyze the structure of the human protein that our bodies are made from, the amino acid composition of those proteins, it is very, very similar to proteins in meat, fish, eggs and dairy. And these are the foods that will provide you with the right building materials to build a healthy, happy body for your baby and to maintain your own body’s physical structure. Plants are full of protein, gluten is a good example. But these proteins are completely inappropriate for the human physiology. Their amino acid composition is wrong for building our own proteins. Certain amino acids are missing, other amino acids are in excess, and on top of that, these proteins are indigestible for the human digestive system.

You probably heard about gluten, how much misery it causes. The more we research in gluten, the more we’re realizing the scientists now, we’re realizing that nobody can digest gluten. It is damaging everybody. It’s just the person may not be aware of it because of their constitution, because the body is coping with that situation. The body is strong enough to cope with it. But if you do a battery of certain tests, you realize that that gluten is actually damaging your body. Because gluten is indigestible and it is inappropriate for human physiology. Other proteins in plants, secalin, and proteins in soy and other various proteins, they can never possibly replace animal proteins because their biochemical structure is inappropriate for building our protein in our bodies and they’re also extremely hard to digest. They’re indigestible. They are anti nutrients, they damage the integrity of the gut wall or when they absorb they then damage the integrity of your joints, collagen in your body, connective tissue in your body and many, many other organs in your body.

When it comes to fats, the same situation. When we analyze the biochemical composition of human fat in your own body, and fat is a structural element of your body, every organ inside your body is sitting in a bed of fat, hard fat, thick bed. Your heart is sitting in its own energy stores because the heart derives its energy from fat almost exclusively and it’s all energy stores right there, the heart is sitting in this bed of a thick layer of hard saturated fat. Your liver is sitting in that, your intestines, your spleen. All your organs are sitting in subcutaneous, are embedded in fat. This is the structural fat. So when we eat animal fats, it goes into the structure of your body. It doesn’t go into your thighs, it doesn’t make you fat. The simplistic idea “eating fat doesn’t make you fat.” Just the opposite. The animal fats go into the structure of your body. And they’re essential because their composition, the fat and the meats and in the butter and in eggs and fish, their biochemical composition is very similar to the composition of our own human fat, in our own bodies and very digestible and it’s readily available to build your physical structure and to build the physical structure of your baby’s body. Building materials are required to build the body for a baby. You have to supply good quality building materials and they come from animal fats.

The fat in plants, vegetable oils, are completely inappropriate for human physiology. They have inappropriate fatty acid composition. They overload us with certain fatty acids and they do not provide other fatty acids that are essential for the human body. We need these fats in tiny amounts as a supplement. And just eating a nice salad and a handful of nuts maybe per day will provide you with enough of those omega-3 and omega-6 fats for your body to handle. The bulk of fat consumption has to come from the animal foods.

52:46 CL: Dr. Natasha, I’m sure you would agree when you’re talking about animal proteins because here in America we have conventional livestock and it’s horrible how they raise livestock here. So we really emphasize that it’s pastured, it’s grass-fed, it’s grass-finished. People are very particular about the type and using organ meats and things like that, but being selective of where you get your meat essentially.

NM: I agree with that. There is another aspect to it. Majority of the population of our planet is not fed by industrial agriculture. Fed by small organic mixed farms. And there are lots of farms like that in the US and in other western countries. You just have to look for them. And governments subsidize our big industrial agriculture while organic farms, the governments not only not subsidize, they make their life difficult with their legislations and their regulations. The only organic farmers who really survive in this world are the ones who have a strong customer base. So, find a local farm. Do not buy your food in supermarkets. If you don’t want to be unhealthy, if you don’t want to develop illnesses, do not buy your food in supermarkets because supermarkets are stocked by industrial agriculture. And that’s a recipe for illness because it isn’t a quality food.

Find local organic farms. Find local people who grow their own vegetables, who have a few chickens in their backyard and talk to them and see the chickens and see what they feed them. You will buy food which will be less expensive overall for you and you will have quality and you will be supporting some good farmer who loves his animals, whose animals are those that are happy and healthy. They’re on pasture, they’re on grass in the sunlight. And that piece of meat that you’ll be eating will be happiness of that animal that you will be eating. The piece of meat that you buy in a supermarket is misery because those poor animals grew up in a prison, in a confined factory operation, standing in their excrement. They’re sick and they’re only kept alive by dosing them with antibiotics and steroids on a daily basis and also other chemicals. So that is very important.

But what we have to understand, I have many families, in fact majority of patients in my clinic are not wealthy people. Many of them struggled financially so they could not afford organic meats. They could not afford to buy expensive. So they bought what they could, whatever they could and buy these things, and followed the GAPS nutritional protocol with these foods and they have recovered. What we have to understand is every animal on our planet has a powerful detoxification system in their bodies, just like we do with the headquarters in the liver and departments in every cell. So the chemical log that the animal is taking, that detox system in the animal will neutralize a large proportion of those chemicals. Make them neutral, make them less toxic, make them more safe for us.

So it is actually safe to eat non-organic meat, if you can’t afford to buy organic. It is much safer than buying a carrot that has been directly sprayed. Because plants do not have such powerful detox system. So I do recommend buying vegetables and fruit organic, or growing them yourselves in your back garden. Plow and dig up that lawn in your back garden. Start growing your own vegetables. Or patronize and support people who are doing that in their lots and in their garden or on their farms. And eggs are also important to get natural. Chickens are so easy to keep. I’m a farmer myself. In the last 5 years we bought a farm, 28 acres and we have everything. I will tell you now as a farmer, we have a milking cow and we have two milking goats and pigs. I don’t know how many geese, ducks, chickens, and guinea fowl roam all over 28 acres. It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful.

What I’ve learned as an organic farmer: that keeping animals and birds is easy. Absolutely the easiest thing that you could possibly do. You give them pasture and you give them sunlight, you give them grass and you give them freedom, they’ll find their own food. All you have to do is just release them in the morning and feed them and then feed them in the evening and then put them to bed. The middle of the day, most of the day is free for you. Easy.

However, growing organic vegetables is a completely different market. That is the hardest thing to do. It is extremely hard. No matter what you do, no matter how you work on it, it rains at the wrong time, it’s hot at the wrong time, there are pests, there are insects, there are rabbits, there are deer, there are birds. You just don’t get the yield, you just don’t get the supply. And what every organic farmer will tell you, that it is not possible to feed even one vegetarian out of an organic private garden for a year. It is not possible because growing organic fruit and vegetables and plant matter is very hard, extremely hard.

58:09 CL: Unless you want to eat zucchini all year. Hey, a question about milk. I agree with the butter because butter is like 98 percent fat. Ghee is wonderful but I question milk and milk products, casein, lactose. I would think casein would cause gut issues for a lot of people, their sensitivity. And there’s talk about people who are sensitive to gluten, if you’re correct, that most of the population also have cross-sensitivity with dairy. It’s full of insulin growth factors, full of hormones because it is milk of another animal. I don’t know what’s the thought on milk.

NM: What we need to understand is that milk that is in the supermarkets is not real milk. It comes from a breed of cow that has been developed in the ‘60s and ‘70s in laboratories in Europe. They take a species of animals that have a tumor on their hypophysis which made them to produce too much growth hormones. So these cows produce three times more milk than a normal cow was able to produce, and they’re bred from those animals. They have created a new breed of a milking cow called Holstein Friesian, these huge black and white cows which produce huge amounts of milk. These are Frankenstein animals and they produce “Frankenstein” milk. And all the milk in your supermarket and all the milk products in the supermarket are Frankenstein milk products.

I have a stack full of scientific studies demonstrating that these dairy products cause every disease under the sun including infertility, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, you name it, mental illness, anything. That is not the milk that mother nature intended for us. Not at all. What mother nature intended for us are natural breeds of Jersey cows or African cow or Asian cow and there are some other natural breeds of cow. Mother nature designed these animals to be on organic pasture. Not some hybrid grass species sprayed with chemicals to make it green and then put cows on it. No, no, no. You want 50-60 species of herbs and grasses in that pasture completely natural and you want the cow to live there all year round in the sunlight so she can manufacture vitamin D in her skin and then from the sunlight, and then her butter, her milk will have that vitamin D. And mother nature intended for us to drink her milk raw, not pasteurizing it. Because milk of any animal is alive. It’s the white blood of the animal with the red blood cells removed, including human milk. Everything that’s in your blood will be in your milk.

So if a woman has abnormal gut flora, her blood will be full of toxins from her gut flora and full of antibodies and full of immune complexes and other things. All those things will be in her milk and that’s what she is giving to her baby in her milk. The same with the cow. If the cow is unhealthy and is just eating these wrong things, if she’s on commercial food, if she’s eating genetically modified soy and grains, and then sprayed with glyphosate and other chemicals, all that will be in her milk. Plus, lots of other good things to cause diseases and cause illnesses. No. We want a natural breed of cow on organic pasture under the sunlight. Milk may be only once a day and we have that milk raw.

There is a wonderful organization in America called Weston A. Price Foundation which publishes a list of farmers all over United States who manufacture this kind of milk, who produce this kind of milk. If you look in that direction, you’ll be surprised to find that milk quite easily. I had known a handful of people who were lactose intolerant and when they switched to this milk, this kind of milk from a real cow on pasture, raw, they had no reaction. The lactose intolerance disappeared. Because raw milk has an enzyme in it called lactase which digests the lactose in the milk for you. Your digestive system doesn’t have to do any of that work.

When we pasteurize milk, we kill it. It is a living substance, it’s full of alive immune cells. It’s full of active enzymes, full of vitamins, minerals, proteins and other things in their alive and active form. When we pasteurize it, we kill it. It becomes a dead substance. Lactase gets destroyed. So as a result, we can’t digest lactose and become lactose intolerant. All the proteins get damaged and enzymes get damaged and various other things get damaged. So it is not a good idea to consume pasteurized milk. It is important to consume it raw.

63:07 CL: I feel kind of embarrassed asking you this with raw milk because there are some local stores in my area. They carry raw milk. My daughter drinks a lot of milk. And I got scared off because of some people saying “Oh, so and so got kidney failure from raw milk,” or, “there was some bacteria in the milk.” Is that a real concern?

NM: Not really. There was an experiment done when they took a jug of raw milk and a jug of pasteurized milk. They put salmonella and E. coli in both. In the jug where the milk was pasteurized, these microbes just grew, exploded. But in the jug with raw milk, they disappeared very quickly because raw milk has immune complexes, immune cells in it which killed all that bacteria, killed salmonella. So raw milk has protection. It protects itself from infections.

Of course, any product can be contaminated. So when the cows are milked in an organic setting like that when they’re selling raw milk, they need to be washed properly and everything needs to be clean. It’s important so that the milk doesn’t get contaminated after it has left the cow because you can contaminate anything. That is important. And these organic farmers who manufacture who produce raw milk, they adhere to much more stringent regulations and hygiene standards than farmers who don’t produce raw milk. Because they know that if infection went into the milk, then it will get pasteurized and the infection will be destroyed in there. But of course, the chemicals will not be destroyed.

Another thing that we need to understand is that casein intolerance is not linked to gluten. I know many, many, many people who cannot tolerate gluten ever but they have lots of milk, and they’re absolutely fine and it does them only good. So try that.

But of course, there is a proportion of people whose digestive system is damaged enough and they’re unable to digest casein before it absorbs. Casein absorbs in a partially broken down form in the form of peptides, particular 12 amino acid chains of peptides which in their structure are very similar to morphine and heroin. In fact, they’re called casomorphins. It is one of the big mechanisms of causing learning disabilities in children. If a child has damaged gut wall which is porous and leaky and the child is unable to digest casein, then that can cause a lot of brain damage in a child. So in these kind of children and in many other patients in whom the gut wall is very damaged, we have to go through a period of healing and healing the gut wall first before we introduce dairy products with those people.

66:03 CL: I forgot my thought, let me think about it. But then another thing came up. I’m just thinking about relatives who live on things like Prilosec because you can’t live with heartburn. It’s kind of this backward thinking of they just don’t know.

Oh, it was about probiotics because you were discussing about. Obviously there’s hundreds of brands of probiotics and I’m guessing you probably think a lot of them are pretty inefficient because you were talking about certain strengths of probiotics that are needed. Can you touch upon that?

NM: I use Practitioner probiotics in my clinic and I do recommend that if you want to use Practitioner probiotics, you go to a practitioner. Work with a practitioner because you can waste an awful lot of money on brands of probiotics which simply don’t work that will not do you much good at all. There are many good brands on the market but they’re usually practitioner prescribed. Usually practitioners know which brands are good and in what situations to use them. But for the majority of people what I recommend is to ferment, going to fermentation. Every mouthful of fermented food is teeming with beneficial microbes and not only bacteria that you will have in a probiotic. A very important part of our gut flora are beneficial fungi and beneficial viruses and beneficial protozoa and other creatures that probably haven’t been researched yet.

A mouthful of sauerkraut or kefir or yogurt or homemade cheese will have all of those species of microbes in a community together. Every batch of sauerkraut is different because depending on where the cabbage grew, what the weather was like, what the season was like and what the quality of the soil was, it will have a different nutritional composition. When you present microbes with different nutrients, certain species diminish in numbers, other species flourish and grow. So every batch of sauerkraut will have different microbial composition and it will be a leading microbial community. Very complex and it will provide you with much, much more than any commercial probiotic will do and it will do pretty much for free for very, very little investment. It’s very, very affordable to do that. So I’d recommend that people start eating fermented foods.

What we need to understand is that fermented foods are not optional for us human beings. Because for millennia, maybe from the beginning of our existence on this planet, we didn’t have supermarkets. We eat and buy everything and anything out of season. And we didn’t have refrigeration. So when your cabbage is ripened in September and you put so much effort – growing cabbages is hard, believe me – and all your cabbage is suddenly ripened together in September and if you don’t do something with them, that cabbage will not keep longer than a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. It will rot away. And the rest of the year you’ll be left without cabbage.

So people develop fermentation methods because fermentation preserves food for a long period of time. Sauerkraut can keep for 5-6 years, even longer. Getting better and better every year. The older it gets, the better it is. And the same with everything else. You can ferment everything. People have been fermenting everything all over the world in different cultures. You can ferment fruit, vegetables, grain, beans, meat, milk, fish, anything. Pretty much anything can be fermented. And because availability of food was not like it used to be, when you killed an animal and if you can’t eat the whole animal within a few days, you have to do something with that meat. Otherwise, it will just rot away and wild animals will get it and you’ll be left without meat, so people fermented meat. They made prosciutto or they made Pršut in Croatian or they made all these hams and all these other preserved salumi. There are many different varieties of salted meat and that is a fermented meat. And that will keep for years and years.

So all year round for breakfast, lunch and dinner, quite a portion of all of our meals were fermented foods. People supplemented their digestive system with probiotic microbes for breakfast, lunch and dinner all their lives from infancy till death. And normally in the last hundred years when our food industry has blossomed and chased women out of the kitchen and changed all our recipes, we stopped doing that. We stopped eating fermented foods and that is another part of the cause of all these epidemics of degenerative illnesses. We’re depriving ourselves of something very important that our human physiology has evolved with and requires on a daily basis. These are not optional things. So it is very important for us to relearn how to ferment our foods and to introduce this food back into our diet.

71:01 CL: And everything’s become so sterile. Like I was treating some patients with SIBO and they were saying it used to be that a farmer would pick something and brush off the dirt and then pop it in their mouth, but now it’s washing it and stripping it up the skin and making sure. That connection. They were using like baby feces to re-implant good bacteria into the small intestine to treat SIBO. I might be going off on a whole different thing but it just seems like we’ve removed ourselves. Now, fermented foods. Like I live in San Francisco Bay Area. Every supermarket that I shop at, they have a whole refrigerator of sauerkrauts and different things. People love it and they know about it.

NM: It’s a revolution.

71:49 CL: It is a revolution, yeah. But I don’t know about the rest of the country. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s an acquired taste. I love it but I don’t know.

NM: The thing is the vast majority of microbes in our planet are not only neutral and harmless to us. They’re actually beneficial to us. As far as microbes go, the more the merrier in your body. Sterilizing everything comes from chemical industry. That’s the propaganda that is constantly on our TVs and advertisements and in our popular media and everywhere else because they’re selling products to us. They’re selling all the sterilizing soaps and solutions and lotions and potions. People were much, much healthier when they were less clean than in the times when everything is sterilized and cleaned.

72:41 CL: Absolutely. We’re towards the end of our interview. Can I invite you for a part 2? Because I do have more questions. We can go a little bit deeper into some of the ideas and concepts of your book and also of your new book. What’s the Vegetarianism Explained? Is that the title of it?

NM: It’s Vegetarianism Explained. It’s an important book and if you know any young person or anybody else either should become a vegetarian or even a vegan, give them that book first. Tell them to read that book first before making that decision because misguided vegetarianism is rapidly becoming a major cause of mental illness amongst our young people for themselves.

73:29 CL: I know one little person. She’s 5 years old, she’s my daughter. She loves animals, refuses to eat them. So I’m constantly having to give her bone broths. She doesn’t know what they are because she wouldn’t eat them. For her, it’s like it would break her heart to eat an animal and so it’s a struggle.

NM: You need to take her to organic farms. Maybe volunteer on an organic farm.

73:54 CL: She has been. That would not help because it makes her more impassioned to animals. So it’s something we’re working out.

NM: But she can eat eggs and she can eat dairy products, can’t she?

74:03 CL: Yes, yes. No problem with that.

NM: So these are the two animal foods that will provide her with the building blocks and to sustain her.

74:13 CL: Because I think it’s an important topic, I hope we do the second part of the interview about vegetarianism. Because when I look at pregnancy forums, sometimes when people are in the middle of just trying to figure out what’s wrong with their bodies, they go, “Well, I’m going to be vegetarian or vegan for a time period going. I don’t know what else to do. I’m going to switch up my diet entirely,” which I know can be devastating for people.

NM: I will be very happy to come back and talk about it.

74:40 CL: Okay. Thank you. All right. I loved interviewing you. You’re so extremely knowledgeable. And like I said, I’m going to say it again, really, read the book The Gut and Psychology Syndrome. When you read it, it’s going to impact you so much. And I know you’re biased but it is one of the important books written about our human body. It honestly is. And it’s like now it’s just slowly creeping in to mainstream. I was getting my hair done and my hairdresser, I was telling him that I do a health podcast and he goes, “Did you know your immune system starts in your gut?” And I said I do. “Did you know? Because I listened to an interview and it blew me away.” I said, “Well, I’ll share another interview. It will blow you away even more.”

NM: That’s wonderful.

75:36 CL: All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Natasha. I appreciate you so much.

NM: A pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me. And thank you for doing your work because you are spreading the word.

75:45 CL: Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. I will reach out to you soon for part 2.

NM: Okay.

75:52 CL: Thank you. Bye-bye.

NM: Bye.