203: How to Safely Eat Wheat

Transcript of Episode 203: How to Safely Eat Wheat

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. John Douillard

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and we have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line. Today, we welcome a very special guest, Dr. John Douillard, and he just put out a new book. It’s called Eat Wheat, and this is a really, really hot topic for us on the show and for all of you listeners and viewers out there. This is going to be a really fun discussion on some of the pros and cons of eating wheat.

Before we jump in with the discussion, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Douillard. Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP, is a globally recognized leader in the fields of natural health, Ayurveda, and sports medicine. He is the creator of lifespa.com, the leading Ayurvedic center and wellness resource on the web, with six million views on YouTube. Lifespa.com is evolving the way Ayurveda is understood around the world with over 800 articles and videos on proving ancient wisdom with modern science. Dr. John is the former director of player development and nutrition expert for the New Jersey Nets NBA Team, bestselling author of seven health books, including his newest international bestseller, Eat Wheat, a repeat guest on the Dr. Oz show, and featured in USA Today, LA Times, and dozens of other national publications. He has been in practice for over 30 years and has seen over 100,000 patients. Dr. John directs LifeSpa, the 2013 Holistic Wellness Center of the Year, in Boulder, Colorado.

Welcome, Dr. John, to Cellular Healing TV! We’re so excited to have you.

Dr. John:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, John, you know I loved your book, by the way. Matter of fact, I have it right here.

Dr. John:
Oh, cool.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a lot of pages folded down and highlights. You know it’s a good book when you see that when I read it, but you know, we’re singing the same tune. I wrote an article probably a couple years ago now, and I said it’s not just gluten, meaning that, okay, gluten can be problematic for certain people. However, in the article, I talked about the fact that it’s the toxins disrupting our digestion, creating poor digestion, leaky gut, and driving this gluten epidemic, if you will, that people are under. I think there’s so much. This is going to be a huge show for people, because right now, I think it’s so in fad and in vogue to avoid gluten. I think I read in your book that maybe three to seven percent of the population actually has a gluten sensitivity, and we’re going to explain why those people actually have that sensitivity and what they should do about it, so hang onto every word we speak here, but many people are avoiding gluten unnecessarily, and it can even be leading to health problems by avoiding certain grains, gluten, etc. A lot to learn on this show. This is going to be one that you’re going to want to share with people, because I promise you, especially our viewers, many of them, are avoiding gluten and avoiding wheat, but maybe, just maybe, you could actually be causing problems. I wrote an article called “Diet Variation,” so I’m a believer in eating grain and changing our diets, but John, how do we explain that people take gluten out of their diet and yet they feel better? Some people do, John. How do we explain it?

Dr. John:
Oh, yeah, and I write that in the very beginning of the book. I get it. You eat wheat. You feel bad. It makes perfect sense. Don’t eat it if it makes you feel bad, but that’s not the solution, taking the wheat out of the diet, just take something that you’re having difficulty digest, and it makes you feel better. The reality is, it’s a $16 billion a year gluten-free industry, okay? We have up to 60 percent of the population being gluten-free and only one percent of the population have celiac, and they should not eat gluten. Only three to seven percent have actually gluten sensitivity, so there’s a lot of people who are avoiding gluten and buying into the gluten-free industry, which is $16 billion, which is giving us nothing but highly processed foods in replacement for whole wheat.

Now, the science is amazing. First of all, we know that in the Mayan diet and in the Mediterranean diet, those diets where two and three servings of wheat per day reduced the Alzheimer’s disease by 53 percent in one study and 54 percent in another. Two major Harvard studies came out in the last six months. Both of them, over 100,000 people – both studies over 25 years show that the people who ate the most wheat compared to people who were gluten-free had less heart disease and less diabetes than people who were eating gluten-free foods, so what is it? Why do these massive studies show that, when people are eating wheat, they’re in fact healthier? They have less diabetes and less Alzheimer’s, and I did a big debate with Dr. David Perlmutter, author of The Grain Brain, and found – my mother said I won the debate, by the way, so clearly –

Dr. Pompa:
That doesn’t count.

Dr. John:
No, it has to count, but it was really cool, because it was back and forth with the science on both sides of the aisle, and when you look at whole wheat, not highly processed, refined bread, whole wheat actually has a low glycemic index. What David did was, he said, wheat has a high glycemic index, bread has a high glycemic index, therefore it does what sugar does, which causes Alzheimer’s, but whole wheat doesn’t have a high glycemic index. It has a low glycemic index. It lowers the risk of diabetes in study after study

We have to look at what happened. In 1960, when they took cholesterol out of our diet, they replaced it with polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are seed oils, which are very unstable. They had to bleach, boil, and deodorize them to make them stable, and they stuck them in loafs of bread. The loafs of bread would stay on the shelf now for, I don’t know, a week, two, three, four weeks and never go bad. We know that the microbes are everywhere, or we’re 80, 90 percent microbe. You put a loaf of bread on the counter, anything on the counter, it should go bad in short order. Anything that’s packaged that has these cooked vegetable oils in it that uses preservatives that are in most of the foods you’ve been eating for the last 60 years are indigestible, and where do they go? All the oils and all the bad oils, stuff we can’t digest, goes to the liver, and the liver becomes congested.

The number one abdominal surgery today in America is gallbladder surgery. They are being taken out like crazy. The gallbladder is the kingpin of the digestive process, and when that gets congested, it leads to your inability to burn fat as a natural source of fuel, so you crave more sugar. It actually doesn’t allow you to get rid of your own fat, so you become obese. Fats and delivering good fats supports brain function and mood stability, so we have people who are depressed and critically fat. Burning fat and having good bile flow from your liver is a buffer for the acid in your stomach, so if your liver’s congested, and your gallbladder is not making enough bile, you’re not going to have the buffer for the acid in your stomach, and when you eat a ham sandwich, your brain says, I just ate a ham sandwich, and I need four ounces of bile to emulsify the fat in the ham and break down the gluten, and I’m going to need that buffer, that bile, to neutralize the acid from my stomach. If you don’t have that bile flow, your stomach will eventually stop producing the acid, and that’s why people can’t eat wheat or hard-to-digest foods any longer.

The simple solution, which you and I probably did 20, 30 years ago when we were getting started in practice, is, yeah, get off of wheat, get off of dairy. You’ll feel better. They do for six weeks or six months, but the problem came back. It was never a real solution, so that’s why I dove into really helping people reboot digestive strength and got so frustrated with the whole gluten-free industry, because people were actually putting themselves in harm’s way down the road. We should talk about why

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, I was one of those people. When I was sick and challenged, I couldn’t eat gluten. I would react, and matter of fact, I took all grains out of my diet. I felt so much better. However, again, it’s certain things, symptoms that weren’t going away, where there were deeper-rooted issues upstream, but then, as my digestive health came back, I dealt with the toxic upstream issues. Then, all of a sudden, I could eat wheat. I could do these things, and of course I can eat all the gluten that I want today. I’ve watched it. My doctors, their patients, their clients, we see it. As their digestion improves, then they’re able to introduce these foods again, and we actually see benefits to these foods.

Look, you said something, though, and it’s so true, about the bile in the liver. This is why we have an epidemic of heartburn, where people are trying to deal with the acid, when really it’s the liver or gallbladder, the bile, its effect on the acid. That same thing, that same bile, it gets thick, and that bile that we need to digest fat, well, it interferes with the pancreatic enzymes that we need to break down some of these hard-to-break-down things, so your argument is, look, it’s not the gluten. If we’re able to break it down, if you have good digestion, then that’s the answer, so then people are now saying, watching this, okay, what do I do, because I’m one of those people that seem to have trouble with gluten and other grains, so how do I improve my digestion? We’re talking about cleaning the liver and the bile, and you probably have some suggestions there. I liked a couple of your suggestions.

Dr. John:
Right. You’re so right. In 91 percent of the people, the pancreatic duct, which is liver and digestive enzymes, it joins up with the bile duct, so they go in together. If you have thick, viscous bile, your digestive enzymes aren’t going to get into the small intestine, and neither will your bile. The real problem is that those digestive enzymes can backflow into your pancreas and gobble up your pancreas and cause pancreatitis, and lots of doctors think it’s a risk of diabetes. The fats go back to your liver, causing fatty liver, two major epidemic issues of our time, and the bottom line is, it dials down your digestive strength. When the stomach says, hey, I have a ham sandwich here that I need to digest, and there’s no bile that’s being delivered, your stomach will just hold on to the acid and wait for the green light to go on. That’ll give you heartburn and reflux and indigestion, so I think people are starting to see, wow, this makes sense. This is why I have heartburn. This is why I have indigestion. This is why I have undigested food in my stools.

These are all because of weak digestive issues, so clearly, the very first thing is, you’ve got to get rid of the processed, cooked vegetable oils that have been put in most foods to preserve them that are literally blocking our ability for our liver and our bile to flow. That has to go. Very, very important.

The second thing, there are foods that are called cola dogs. Cola dogs are foods that actually help move your bile. Beets and celery and apples are natural cola dogs. You can actually have a small – you don’t need a 20-ounce shake, but you can take a small shake of beet, apple, and celery juice in the morning to get your bile flowing. You can take artichokes, powerful cola dog, to get your bile to move. Turmeric increases the contractibility of your gallbladder by 50 percent. Fenugreek as a tea in the morning with your food, it’s actually not too bad-tasting. It increases the contractibility of the gallbladder by 75 percent

All of these foods, you can do to get that gallbladder to really start to contract and bring that baby back online, and then, once you get your gallbladder kicking in, you want to make sure your stomach can actually start producing acid again, because you remember, if your stomach says, hey, there’s no bile down there, and she hasn’t made or he hasn’t made bile in years. I’m just going to stop producing the acid, because if I keep making all this acid, I’m going to burn a hole through something. Then, your body will slowly stop producing the acid, so before we can turn the acid on with something like hydrochloric acid – everybody takes hydrochloric acid, and the body’s going to be like, who’s turning the fire on? I turned that off years ago, because there’s no bile to buffer that acid, so we have to first amp up and strengthen the bile flow and give you the buffers that you need first and then turn the stomach fire back on in a natural way that does not create dependencies, and that’s – I use spices like ginger, cumin, coriander, fennel, and cardamom, all the ancient recipes that actually the science shows that they actually increase the production of your own stomach acid, your own bile, your own duodenal and pancreatic enzymes versus an enzyme or HCL supplementation. They do the job for you, so my goal is always, hey, let’s use herbs, foods, pills – herbs and foods to get you to do the job so you can get off the pill and -inaudible- and not be dependent on anything, reset function.

Dr. Pompa:
I love that, and I think that’s great. People are going to watch this show twice, man, just to write those down, but you know what? Get the book. It’s in there. I think another great advice that you’ve had – this is from your training, your Ayurvedic training, was sipping warm water all day, so explain why that’s something you’ve used for years. Explain that. Why does it work? What does it do?

Dr. John:
There’s two things about water. They did a study, and they found that, if people drank a big glass of water 45 minutes to a half-hour before the meal, it actually helps them lose weight, and they digest it significantly better. Now, the stomach is very easily and commonly dehydrated, because the buffer that protects your stomach lining from the acid burn of your stomach is about 80 to 90 percent water. If you drink a big glass of water a half-hour before the meal, that water will prehydrate your stomach lining and actually give you that buffering bicarbonate layer to protect you from the acid, so when you eat – you drink that water an hour or 45 minutes before the meal, the stomach goes, well, I got all this buffer, I have all this water, I have all this bicarbonate, I can make as much acid as you want, so it’s one way to turn the digestive fire back on without any risk.

Sipping hot water throughout the day as a two-week lymphatic detox is an ancient remedy, and there’s studies to show that, when you drink hot water, the little cilia in your respiratory tract, they beep, and they move mucus about 200 times per second to kind of clean out all the yuck in your respiratory tract. When you drink hot water, it amps that up by two- or threefold, so we know that, when you increase the hot water, it increases the activity of the cervical respiratory lymphatics and keeps that mucus in the right consistency. The mucus in your gut and in your respiratory tract is like the three little bears. It can’t be too dry. It can’t be too wet. It’s got to be just right for the microbes to give you the immune support that we desperately need, so hot water’s one of the ways to accomplish that, and it’s a very powerful way to hydrate you.

Dr. Pompa
It works. It is one of those little tricks. It’s been around for years, but people kind of forget about it. My grandmother used to do that, but you brought something up in there that is really important, because some of the problems with why people can’t break gluten down and arguably other proteins, maybe casein as well, the system that surrounds our GI is congested via toxins and undigested glutens. The key is getting that lymphatic system opened up again. It improves digestion. It has a big impact on what we’re able to break down, so talk about that a little bit.

Dr. John:
Such a great question, and it’s a question that really answers the David Perlmutter Grain Brain question. It’s not a grain brain issue, it’s a brain drain issue. When you have – we talked about how the digestive strength becomes weaker, therefore you don’t have the fire, the acids, to break down the gluten or the mercury from the coal mine plumes and all these undigested proteins now, because the digestion got weaker. They go undigested into your small intestine. They are now too big to get into your bloodstream and feed you as a protein, so where do they go? They get uptaken into the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system, and there are enzymes for gluten specifically in the lymphatic system in case some rogue gluten got through there, but if you overwhelm it with processed, undigested foods, toxins, impurities, and environmental pollutants and clog up that lymphatic system, those lymphatic vessels will get congested.

When the lymph gets congested, three things happen. One, you get extra weight around your belly. Your lymph system is trying to delier triglyceride fats to every cell of your fat as a source of energy. Your baseline energy supply system is fats via your lymph. When that gets blocked, you’re tired. That’s the chronic fatigue and the food coma you get after wheat if it wasn’t digested properly. We now know – three or four years ago, University of Virginia found there were lymphatics in your brain that drain three pounds of chemicals and plaque out of your brain every year while you sleep, and when those lymphs get congested, they give you brain fog, anxiety ,depression, cognitive decline, and autoimmune conditions. When you have a lot of wheat that is not being digested, and it’s clogging up those lymphatic channels, it’s going to clog your lymph under your skin, give you skin rashes. The brain can’t drain and gives you brain fog, so it’s not a brain grain issue.

It’s a brain drain issue that’s giving people the mental clarity concern that they have when they eat wheat, and I get it. They do feel brain-foggy when they eat wheat. They do get skin rashes when they eat wheat, but it’s not the wheat. It’s a breakdown of the digestive system, and the key point here is that your digestive strength is directly linked to your ability to detoxify. You can take the wheat out of your diet, but what about the mercury on every organic vegetable from the coal mine plumes? If you take the hard-to-digest food out of your diet, you’re setting yourselves up for vulnerability for this toxic environment, which can end up in your brain, cause cancer, and cause a host of real serious conditions down the road, so we’re just kicking the ball down the road, not addressing the real problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. Yeah, I mean, look, people have silver fillings leaching mercury in their gut all day, 24/7, and that lymphatic system is clogging up. No wonder you can’t break down a protein or gluten you should be able to break down. All right, there’s one more big thing that you brought up in your book that I think is – it’s right on line with what I say. You talk about America – well, most of the planet, we’re eating gluten and grains all through the season, all year round, every meal, every meal. We’re eating them all through the season, but when we look at ancient cultures, and that’s one of my favorite things to do as far as how we should live, ancient, healthy cultures, they ate it mostly in the fall, early winter, because that’s when they had it. It was harvested. Now, we can harvest it anytime, so talk about that, John.

Dr. John:
Yeah, amazing research. First of all, they found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans three and a half millions years ago, so to say that we’ve only been eating wheat for ten thousand years is simply not the case. We now know that you and I, modern humans, have an enzyme called amylase, which we genetically acquired to digest starch about two million years ago. It’s a starch-digesting enzyme that we acquired a gene for to make our own two million years ago, probably because we were eating some starch, not just meat and vegetables. Today, we now know that that enzyme is cyclical. It increases in your body and my body in the fall and in the winter, exactly when the grains are harvested.

Why? Just like you write about and talk about, this time of the year, we’re now to – it’s the end of the fall. The fall is the feast time. We’re eating fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and grain stuff, just to amp us up and overwhelm us with nutrition to store extra fuel, food as fat as insulation, to handle the winter drought and get ready for the famine of the spring. Then, in the spring, we go into the famine, and we’ve been doing that. We should continue to do that. We should eat light, leafy greens, sprouts, berries and cherries, light, low-fat harvest in the spring, a high-carbohydrate in the summer, and a very high-protein and high-fat diet in the winter. Those are the three bestselling diets. I wrote a book called The Three Season Diet. I actually published a grocery list and a recipe list and a seasonal superfood list for every month of the year for free for folks at my website at lifespa.com, where folks can get exactly what they need to eat for January, for February, for March, for April, for free, because the research is so compelling.

Dan, there was a study that was done that blew my mind. I wrote a book called The Three Season Diet about the three harvests back in 2000 about seasonal eating. Then, I read a study a few years back where they gave deer bark in the winter, and they have microbes for bark in the winter. They gave the same deer leaves in the summer, and they have diferent microbes in the summer for digesting leaves. If they gave the deer bark in the summer, they had the wrong microbes. It would literally give the deer such indigestion, it could kill the deer, and I was like, wait a minute. Deer die when they eat out of season? What about us?

We eat the same food, like you said, all year long, no cyclical changes whatsoever, and that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m putting this information monthly for people for free so they can start to get reacquainted with their seasonal change. The soil bugs change from winter, summer, to spring. Big study. You probably saw it. It came out about three, four weeks ago. Stanford study. They actually measured the Hadza tribe, and they found that their gut, hunter/gatherer bugs, changed dramatically from season to season to season. I wrote those studies, in terms of soil bugs changing and bugs on the foods. That came out years ago. I wrote about that years ago, but now we have the hard times. The Inuit cultures, traditional cultures, that’s exactly what should happen, and we should all begin to start to get reacquainted with what is in season and why.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, I couldn’t agree more. Even the position of the sun, we know, affects our microbiome, right? We see the microbiomes changing on the foods. Hello? Doesn’t it make sense that we are designed to change our diet, and what are we doing today? Nobody changes their diet. They’re eating the same diet, whether –

Dr. John:
So simple.

Dr. Pompa:
– whether it’s paleo, whether it is, they’re locked into their diet. The reason why is because it worked for them at one point, right? They went on a vegetarian diet, and it worked. They went on a paleo diet, and it worked. They went into ketosis, and it worked. The problem is staying there. I think that’s when you end up with trouble, so yeah, John, I couldn’t agree more. I think your principles are fantastic and well spoken. How do they get the free resource where they can get the foods?

Dr. John:
You go to my website at lifespa.com, and on the homepage, there’s a banner there for the Three Season Diet Challenge, and that’s where we give you the free information about how to get the recipes and grocery lists and superfoods for every month of the year. Of course, I got a newsletter there. We put out three videos, newsletters a week for people to get all kinds of information for free to learn about how to connect ancient wisdom with modern science, so it works like that.

One more study – if I can tell one more study, I think which is important, which I think I didn’t write about in the book that you may be interested in hearing as well. There were a couple of studies that showed that, when people were gluten-free, they had four times the mercury in their blood than people who actually ate wheat. Another study showed people who actually ate wheat had significantly more good bugs and less bad bugs than people who were gluten-free. Another study showed that people who were gluten-free had less killer T-cells measured for immunity than people who ate wheat, all of those suggesting that, when you eat hard-to-digest foods, which we ate poisonous foods for millions of years, in an evolutionary sense, and we figured out what was good and what was bad. Those hard-to-digest foods like the lectins, they are the immune stimulations for our gut immunity. When we just take them out because we feel better when we eat more processed, predigested food, what we’re losing is the evolutionary gut immunity, and if we do that for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, where is our immune strength going to be to fight the next epidemic bacteria or virus that comes along? We are really putting ourselves in harm’s way, and that’s why I want to thank you so much for having me and helping to get this message out.

It’s not about wheat. It’s not about should – or a diet. It’s about getting our digestive strength, which is our immune strength and our detox strength, back onboard so we can live the second half of our life and generationally in a healthy way and not be in harm’s way, because this diet of being on processed, highly gluten-free foods and taking foods out of our diet and not fixing the cause is really risky. It’s an insurance policy for disaster.

Dr. Pompa:
It really is, and you look at these gluten-free products. They’re all super sugars. I mean, it’s just remarkable what the starch is. The potato starch is all processed garbage, and yet people – you know, it’s the same thing over and over again. It was the fat-free, right? The worst products on the planet were fat-free. Sugar-free became the worst products. Now, gluten-free products, the worst thing, but beyond that, let’s say that we have our viewers out there just eating gluten-free, saying, well, I’m not eating those products, but your point is that it’s still unhealthy. You just quoted studies showing that the glutens and the lectins are actually arguably good for your health, and by avoiding them – so you’re saying, look, you can avoid them for a period of time while you’re upstream, working on the stressor that’s causing the poor digestion, but you need to get these things back into your diet in some aspect, seasonally, whatever it is.

Dr. John:
They don’t talk about the studies that have showed that the lectins actually reverse colon cancer, that the phytic acids are beneficial for bone health, and they don’t cause osteoporosis. They support. They deliver minerals. People who eat high phytic acid diets don’t have mineral deficiencies. They don’t have bone density issues. You don’t hear the other side of the science, which is why I have six hundred references in Eat Wheat, because I needed to let people know, there’s a lot of science out here on this side of the aisle that nobody’s talking about, because everybody’s preaching to the choir. Wheat’s bad, wheat’s the new poison, and we’ve got to get rid of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you know, and we interviewed Gundry, Dr. Gundry, on the show about lectins. I pressed him on just the Mediterranean diet, right? I mean, come on. They’re not following to the thing. They’re not fermenting everything. They’re not doing – but yet, their diet’s still – even if they were doing everything to de-lectin foods, the diet is still loaded with lectins, right? How do we answer that? You answer it even in a further way of not only is it not bad, you quoted studies in your book and just now that the lectins actually charge up our immunity, and they’re actually healthy. I just back up often and say, wait a minute. Okay, the lectins are in the tomato skins, and the Italians remove the skins and the seeds, but let me tell you. I just got back from Italy. They may do that in the sauce, but they’re eating the skins and the seeds in everything else they’re doing, so the point is, they’re there. The lectins are part of the food in just about every vegetable. How can they be bad? Again, poor digestion can make lectins very difficult, but we have to fix the digestion.

Dr. John:
What I do usually is I help guide people to help them troubleshoot what part of their digestive system broke down and also how to reintroduce wheat back into their diet, using sourdough breads, which have been rendered gluten-free if it’s done properly, sprouted breads, spelt breads, and how we can get back to eating bread that isn’t the processed, cooked vegetable oil, loaded with preservative bread that is really nothing short of toxic for you.

Dr. Pompa:
You and I, we’re both a fan of still eating ancient grain, right? These ancient grains, sprouting them, doing the old way of processing, making your own bread, for goodness sakes. I mean, if you don’t have time to make your own bread, and by the way, it’s only three ingredients, right? It’s wheat, water, and salt. You can even do just wheat and water, right? It’s like it – by the way, when you’re in Italy, that’s it. It’s the best breads in the world, and that’s the ingredients. Anyway, there’s different websites that you can buy these breads made correctly with organic flour. I think you gave some in your book.

Dr. John:
It has recipes, how to make it. There’s bakeries you can go and get some stuff online. You can definitely – nowadays, you can find good bread. Just when you go to your health food store or your local bakery, just make sure there’s no oil, like you said. It just needs wheat, water, and salt. An organic starter is usually a really good idea. That helps break down some of the glutens and some of the lectins and makes it easier to digest, and those are good to start with. Sprouted breads are good to start with. Rye is really good for your blood sugar. Spelt is really low on phytic acid, so depending on what you’re sensitive to. If you have high blood sugar, do rye. If you have issues with antinutrients like lectins or like phytic acids, you can do really good quality spelt bread, so there’s many, many ways to break bread again and do it in a safe way, of course doing it seasonally, and then, when you go into the spring, you reboot fat-burning with natural intermittent fasting that takes place with a low-fat diet that’s naturally occurring.

Also, the other study showed that this digestive strength in our body, not just the amylase increases in the fall and the winter but also the actual strength of our digestion. The parasympathetic digestive strength amps up in the winter when we’re harvesting the nuts and the seeds and the grains, and we’re hunting more, eating more meat, all of these more dense foods. In the summer, the digestive strength is weaker, because the food is cooked on the vine. You’re eating vegetables off the vine, and we don’t want to increase internal heat, because part of the reason why we’re here and the Neanderthals aren’t is because we figured out how to dissipate heat better than they did, because the Earth was heating up. The summer is the time where we didn’t need to heat up and eat all these hard-to-digest, heavy, dense foods, although we do that. We barbecue everything in the summertime, but the harvest in the summer is right off the vine, cooling foods, fruits, and veggies that cool the body down, and the heavier, higher-protein, higher-fat foods are warming and heavier, and they heat the body up, which gives up the perfect solution to the extreme of those seasons, cooling in the summer, heating in the winter.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, diet variation. How do we answer Norman Borlaug – we’ve spoken about this. Wheat Belly made it more popular, Bill Davis’s book, Wheat Belly. He did change gluten in the 70s when he created dwarf wheat, right? Arguably, these are new gluten strains that our body could be more reactive to, but your point is that, okay, he did. However, if you have good digestion, it doesn’t matter. Is that your point?

Dr. John:
Yeah, absolutely, and if you really look at the science there, in the Wheat Belly book, he talked about one study that had – they measured a whole bunch of, I forget the exact number, modern strains versus ancient strains, and they measured the immune reactivity to those strains. They found that there were some strains that were – the ancient strains had less reactivity, but they also found that the modern strains actually – let me get this right. I haven’t read this study in a long time, but they showed that they were – the immune response was either ones that caused an immune reaction, or it caused no reaction, and the modern strains – many of the modern strains showed no reaction, but he just talked about the fact that just a handful of the modern strains showed an immune reaction, but the vast majority of them showed no reaction, so again, and I’m not maybe explaining that as clearly. It’s been a while since I read that study, but it was just, again, when I actually read the actual study, it was a misinterpretation of the science. He spoke from the study what he wanted to make that case. He cherry-picked the study and cherry-picked how he interpreted the study as opposed to actually telling us the facts.

The reality is, when they first hybridized wheat thousands of years ago, they wanted the wheat that was bigger. It would -inaudible- and get it off better. The bigger the wheat kernel, the more gluten it had, so they actually were selecting for wheat that had more gluten, because it was bigger, and so the issue was not really that gluten was bad for us. From the very beginning, we were actually selecting wheat that was actually having more gluten and also more sugar, so the problem was never the gluten. It was always the sugar. There’s a lot of issues there that, when they look at the science, they say ancient wheat versus modern wheat. The big study in Canada, they took ancient strains and modern strains, and they found no genetic differences whatsoever.

The bottom line is, we overdose, eating three times a day in a processed world for 50 years. Not going to be good for anybody. Neither would any food like that, so there’s a – so it’s really eating it in moderation, eating it in a seasonal way, eating it in a nonprocessed way, booting your digestive system back up from the pesticides that are on a lot of these foods like wheat, and also, more importantly, the processed, cooked vegetable oils that they’ve been poisoning us with for the last 60 years. That has to go, and if we do that, start to reboot digestion with herbs and spices, the natural way, the next thing you know, you’re starting to get digestive strength back, detox strength back. You can break bread again.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, just in review, right? It’s the fact that we eat it all year round, eating too much of it every meal, not challenging our digestion. Number two, toxic, right? I mean, all the glyphosate sprayed on it, all the mercury, everything, causing it to get into the lymphatic system, not breaking it down, causing the liver to get toxic, the bile to get toxic, which now we can’t break down. It affects the digestion, so dealing with the toxins, eating it seasonally, and obviously, the last point I missed. What was the last one? There was three that you gave.

Dr. John:
They found out that the glyphosates and the pesticides literally kill the microbes that make the enzymes that specifically digest wheat, so right there we have a reason why people are wheat-intolerant. We have to obviously stop eating the glyphosates, but then, of course, there’s the cooked vegetable oils, and that was the other piece that you were trying to say was the cooked veggie oils. That’s just the thing that’s just taking us out piece by piece for the last 50, 60 years.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ve done a lot of shows on the polyunsaturated fats, and we just did a show on even the dangers of fish oil, because again, it’s a polyunsaturated fat that people think is good, and really there’s a whole ‘nother side to that. If you didn’t watch the show, it was a few shows ago.

Dr. John:
I’ll check it out.

Dr. Pompa:
Where we interviewed – what was the title of that, Meredith?

Meredith:
There are two, one with Dr. Jeff Matheson and one with Professor Brian Peskin. The one with Professor Peskin just aired last week. I think it’s episode 197, and it’s part two on fish oil. It’s really amazing research he presented.

Dr. Pompa:
We love it, Dr. John. It’s been what you’re saying here, too, but yeah, so looking at those things, this is why we have all these people – well, like you said, we have some people reacting to gluten. Let’s go back – we’re saying, hey, eat it. I think that people are saying, okay, but I still have trouble with it, so again, you’re also telling them to introduce it slowly, introduce it in the season, improve your digestion. You gave a lot of tips there. Is there any other tips that you can give them of how to introduce wheat back into their diet?

Dr. John:
I think we touched on it a little bit, which was the lymphatic system, which is the biggest circulatory system of our body. It’s the system that takes the waste out, carries the immune system, and feeds us with baseline energy and fuel.

Dr. Pompa:
Sipping the hot water was part of that lymph – that’s what it –

Dr. John:
Yeah, a big part of that, and when people get lymphy, their rings get tight on their fingers. Their joints ache. They get tired. They’re stiff in the moring, tired in the morning, achy, skin rashes, brain fog, bloating around their belly. When they did a study, they found that – three studies they found – three things that are linked to the aging process. One is the breakdown of the intestinal skin. Two, the breakdown of the lymphatic system that drains the intestinal skin. Now, they determined that lymph, the mesentery to be the 79th organ of the body. It’s now its own organ. The third thing is, the health of the microbiome that depends on the lymph that drains the intestinal skin and the intestinal skin. I call it the most important half-inch in your body. When that breaks down, the quality of your intestinal skin, we’re in big trouble and sort of a leaky gut thing, so you have to support lymphatic drainage. The things that do that – exercise, of course, does it really, really well, but anything like a berry or a cherry or a cranberry or a beet, anything that would dye your skin or shirt red, a blueberry, they have antioxidants, and the science shows those antioxidants work through your lymphatic system. They scrub clean, detoxify your lymph, as well as your leafy greens, so exercise, leafy greens, and all your berries and cherries and anything that will dye your skin, those are your lymph movers. People need to understand that that’s a really important piece of the puzzle, because if the lymph’s clogged up, your drains are clogged. You know, if your drains are clogged in your house, you can fix the faucet all day long. You’ve got to take care of the drains.

In Ayurvedic medicine, traditional systems medicine, we always look at the drainage systems first, the waste removal channels first, and if they’re not working, nothing else is going to work, so that’s something we don’t do in America. We check the blood. Do you have high cholesterol in your blood? Then, we try to lower the cholesterol in your blood. We don’t ask the question, how did it get there? Why did it get there? Was it toxins in your blood because your body’s not moving waste out effectively? How are your bowel movements? How is your lymphatic system? How is your skin? How is your breathing?

I wrote a book called Body, Mind, and Sport, where we compared nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, and it turns out that, when you breathe through your nose, you actually activate lower lobe activation of parasympathetic receptors that turn on your digestion and activate a parasympathetic neurological calm that allows the body to detoxify and rejuvenate. Memory doesn’t make you calm, and you produce alpha in your brain during vigorous exercise, and it makes exercise more enjoyable. It also has this parasympathetic alpha brainwave effect, but also the new studies show that, when you actually breathe through your nose when you exercise, it increases nitric oxide production, which actually increases cerebrospinal fluid, lymphatic flow, so your brain can begin to drain.

I love this ancient medical science where they talked about all these things, and now we have all this modern science going, wow, those things made a whole lot of sense. Yeah, it’s your digestion. It’s are you exercising? Are you eating the right foods in season, and are you getting your lymphatic foods at the right time of the year, your digestive-strengthening foods at the right time of the year? When you put the high-protein, high-fat in the winter and the low-fat in the spring and the high-carb in the summer together, you get an annual nutritional cycle, and after one year, you get all your nutritional needs met, so yeah, in the winter, more protein, more fat. In the spring, you’re cleaning house. You’re burning fat. You’re eating a low-fat diet. In the summer, you’re starting to build your body back up. Historically, that was the time for reproduction and mating, and you needed all your nutritional energy for that. It’s just something that was completely lost, and this is circadian science, and it’s this year’s Nobel prize-winning science that we now have to look at, because it’s Nobel prize-winning science. It’s really important.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. A fact that you and I have in common and love is ghee. I eat ghee every day. I have for years, and it’s a great way to clear out that liver, gallbladder. You need to dump bile to break the ghee down, and myself and the doctors I train, we use that, the dense fats, to dump the bile and then bind it, so we pull out that hepatic biliary sludge holding all those toxins, fouling up the digestion. It’s a strategy that’s been around for a long time, to dump that bile using something like ghee, but yeah, give them your little ghee recipe that you’d like to do.

Dr. John:
Yeah, we have a – Ayurvedic medicine used ghee as a source of cleansing for thousands of years, and we have two cleanses, one called the Colorado Cleanse, which is a two-week ghee cleanse, and one is a four-day cleanse called the Short Home Cleanse. It’s a free download. You get a 50-page e-book for free about how to do a four-day ghee cleanse, but what the ghee does is just exactly like what you said. It forces the bile to flow. It’s a natural cola dog, but the ghee is also the highest source of butyric acid. Butyric acid is the number one fatty acid in your gut. We have bugs in our gut, Clostridium butyricum, that literally made ghee or butyric acid for a living to strengthen your gut immunity, to heal and repair your intestinal tract and support blood sugar health and all that.

That’s just the part that blows my mind is, how in the world did ancient humans know that, if you take milk, and you boil off all the milk cells and make an oil out of it, you end up getting this ghee – there you go – that has the highest source of butyric acid on the planet, and it feeds the healthy bugs and the immunity of your gut? That’s where I just think it’s so fascinating, and of course, there’s cleanses that have been around for thousands of years, using what’s called lipophilic-mediated detoxification where the fat in the ghee will hook onto the bad fats in your body and pull them in -inaudible- out of your body. We do those cleanses as a group as part of our Colorado Cleanse twice a year. Wonderful way to not only get the junk out but to reset digestive strength and reset your ability to be a good fat burner in a natural way without having to do excessive ketosis.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but here’s the products that I like. There’s the ghee. You can buy these in most health food stores. Just make sure you get the grass-fed. This says grass-fed right on it. This one has some Himalayan pink sea salt in it. In the cleanse, how much do you do?

Dr. John:
The way the cleanse works is, you start the first day with two teaspoons of ghee in the morning, then four, then six, then eight. As you get better, you can amp that up a little bit and take more, and then, during the day, you have a no-fat diet. You have a bunch of ghee in the morning. That forces you into fat metabolism. Then, you have no fat all day long. Now, if you ate a dietary fatty meal, you would just burn the dietary fatty meal, but we want to get you to burn your own fat, so by giving you a big amount of ghee in the morning, you go into fat-burning. With no fat in your diet, you stay in fat-burning the entire day. Women’s World magazine downloaded my Short Home Cleanse e-book. They did a little forum with about 40 people. They did the cleanse, and they wrote a feature article, and they said people were losing 10, 15, 11 pounds effortlessly in your four-day Short Home Cleanse by using just the ghee, a no-fat diet for four days. The diet is based on Kitchri, which is an ancient Ayurvedic recipe of split yellow mung beans, which is an anti-gas, really easy-to-digest bean with rice, cook it with herbs and spices, and you eat that for four days, as much as you want really, with the ghee in the morning, and then you do a little intestinal flush at the end. Super simple, really easy to do. Start on Thursday, finish on Sunday. You’re done, and you get a powerful digestive reset, fat-burning reset, and lose a bunch of unwanted pounds.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I love mung beans. You can make soup from it and everything. I love that stuff. Yeah, you – well, look, this is great. Sharing such incredible stuff here, Dr. John, so we so appreciate it. I know our viewers appreciate it. I’m almost tempted one more time, and you kind of – you did hit on it, but I think I want people to hear it one more time, because I know I’m going to get this question. The paleo people out there, and there’s many, their argument is, well, we haven’t been eating grains in our diet. You did hit on this, but I think I want you to hit on it in their argument, the Paleo argument, just one more time, as a wrap-up.

Dr. John:
The study was done at the University of Utah, and they found that ancient – it was three and a half to four million years ago. They found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans three and a half, four million years ago. They also found that they could gather enough wheatberries, which – now, remember, Africa was covered in grasslands, filled with wheat and barley, and they were able to gather the wheatberries off the wheat stalks in just two hours, enough to feed them for an entire day. Now, when you’re sitting in four-foot grass, and you can just pick out some wheatberries – they found bowls that they ground the wheat in to make porridge in them, and they ate that. It’s a lot easier – if the whole, entire continent is filled with grasses of wheat and barley, it’s a lot easier to eat that than try to kill a wooly mammoth or try to hunt down some animal, because in fact, three and a half million years ago, we didn’t hunt. We didn’t start hunting until maybe five hundred thousand or maybe a million years ago, depending on how you look at it. We were scavengers. We would go kill – eat other people’s kills, but it was a while before we actually started eating our own meat or cooking our own meat, for that matter. We’re talking about three and a half million years ago, they were eating – they were gathering their own wheatberries, so it’s hard to ignore that fact.

Two million years ago, we acquired an enzyme for amylase, which is for digesting starches like wheat, so that science just seems to – I don’t know. It just seems to be – no one wants to talk about that, and that’s just sort of odd to me, but if you read the story of the ancient – The Story of The Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard professor. He wrote a book about anthropology, and in his book – really amazing – -the amount of proteins and fasting carbohydrates that the ancient humans ate and we ate are pretty much identical. The two things that jump off the page, the amount of fiber that they ate, a hundred grams of fiber that they ate, we eat about 15, and the amount of potassium they ate, which was about seven to 11 thousand milligrams. We get about 500. When you look at the amount of protein, fats, and carbs that ancient humans and modern humans eat, according to the most modern science, not the Paleo diet, but the paleolithic research, it was the same, so it’s – if you talk to a Harvard anthropologist or any anthropologist, they will tell you that the Paleo diet is nothing like what the paleolithic people actually ate.

It’s a diet that has come on the heels of a high-carbohydrate, pre-diabetic people who are eating way too much sugar and processed carbohydrates, and it’s the pendulum swinging to the other side of the fence. It makes sense, but the pendulum’s got to stop swinging, and we’ve got to get back to eating seasonal food, because no one can argue, because you agree that that’s what we’ve been eating for thousands and thousands of years, and that’s what we’ve got to get back to, just simply getting the food, getting the bugs that attach to the soil in the winter, summer, and spring, and eating those in season so we get the right bugs in our gut to change our microbiome to support immunity in the winter, dissipate heat in the summer, get rid of mucus in the spring, and help us get back to being connected to the rhythms of nature, because that’s what got us here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s no doubt. Look, I think that what happens is people go to a Paleo diet. They feel so much better. Of course they do, right? They were eating all these carbohydrates. That comes down. Of course they feel better. Then, they stay in that diet, and then problems can arise. The vegetarian diets. People were eating all these horrifically toxic meats, grain-fed meats, etc., all the toxic dairy. They take it out. Of course they’re going to feel better. Then, they stay a vegetarian. Problems arise. It really is. When we look at every healthy culture, they vary their diet. They were forced into times of ketosis, which no doubt resets microbiome, etc. Then, they would – the moment they had carbohydrates, they would come out again, right? It’s like the Eskimos. The moment they had carbohydrates, they ate them. The point is diet variation, seasonally, all of it. It really is a message that not many of us are touting, that’s for sure. John, thank you for being on the show. I think it’s a great message. People are going to share the heck out of this one, that’s for sure. You gave a lot of great tips.

Dr. John:
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Meredith:
Thanks, Dr. John. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thanks, everyone, for watching. We want to hear from you. What’s your feedback? Are you going to start incorporating wheat again into your diet if you have not had it in your diet for a while? Let us know what you think, and thanks so much for watching. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Dr. John:
Bye-bye.