COURSE TRANSCRIPTS · 2018. 5. 12. · environment is contained only in one place inside your body....

COURSE TRANSCRIPTS

MEDICAL AND SITE DISCLAIMER:The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Kevin Gianni, TheRenegadeHealthShow.com and KMG Associates, LLC. We encourage you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional.

MODULE 1

/ THE Perfect DIGESTION PLAN

www.PerfectDigestionPlan.com

Kevin: Welcome everyone. My name is Kevin Gianni and I want to thank you for your interest in “The Perfect Diges-tion Plan - Four Steps to Healthy Digestion and Radiant Health.” In this program I’ll be sharing tips and tricks that you can use to start repairing your digestion and feeling better right away. So grab a pen and piece of paper because you’re going to want to take a lot of notes.

Before I start I do want to remind you, the information in this program is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified healthcare professional and is not intended to be medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Kevin Gianni, RenegadeHealth.com and its affiliates. We encourage you to make your own healthcare decisions based on your research and in partnership with a qualified healthcare professional.

So are you ready to go? Let’s get started!

[MUSIC]

Lisa: Hi, my name is Lisa Miller from RenegadeHealth.com. I want to welcome you to “The Perfect Digestion Plan - Four Steps to Healthy Digestion and Radiant Health.” In this program I’m going to be speaking with health author Kevin Gianni as he shares his tips and tricks to transforming your digestion for better health, more energy and a more youthful you.

Kevin has overcome his own digestive challenges, as well, and studied alternative and functional health with some of the top experts in the subject. He’s the author of five books on nutrition, healthy eating and exercise. In this first module we’ll be talking about how the digestive system works and how you can identify issues you may be having.

Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks for having me. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Lisa: Thanks for being on the call. We’re very excited to hear about what you have to say about digestion. Kevin, tell us a little bit about your own digestive story.

Kevin: My digestive challenges started when I started to eat a healthy diet. Not a lot of people had this experience that I had, but this is what I was faced with. What happened was I started to experiment with my diet. I did a lot of different things that some people, or even myself looking back now, that might not have been the best thing that I could have done for my health. But what was beneficial about this was I learned a lot about digestion.

Some of the issues that I had was I had to take antibiotics due to a Lyme infection. I got bit by a tick. I grew up in Connecticut so I’m very familiar with this type of illness. I got a tick bite. I got Lyme Disease and had to take antibiotics. That completely wiped out my good gut flora. We’ll talk about gut flora in a little bit. That left me with bad fungus, candida, in my intestinal tract. That was something that wreaked havoc on my body for a good number of months, maybe even up to a year. So my experience was that. I was able to get rid of that in my intestinal tract as well as some experiences I had with low HCL, in ability to digest food that I was eating even though I was eating a really healthy diet. So these are some of the things that I’ve learned.

Since I’ve been exploring my own digestive health I’ve had the opportunity to be on the phone with literally dozens of health experts who have been working with people in their clinics to get their digestion back on track.

http://www.perfectdigestionplan.com

TRANSCRIPTS MODULE 1 / PAGE 3


So this is the information that I’m going to share with you. Not only my own experience but the experience of practitioners who are actually in the field getting the results that people want to get, so transforming people’s health. When we say to get a more energetic and more youthful you, this is what good digestion will do for you.

This is what this program is about. We’re going to take you through the steps that it takes to get good digestion. We’re also going to take you through some very specific issues that I know a lot of people are experiencing. From our day-to-day experience with the blog and the Renegade Health Show we hear from you what kind of chal-lenges you have. Then we’re going to take you through a lot of frequently asked questions about the digestive tract. We’ll also cover things like food combining and a few other certain issues people could have. We consider this a very complete and thorough program on digestion. We really want to make sure that we get you the best information as possible and we do it in a way that’s really easy to understand. I’m going to break it down in a very easy and effective way so you can start taking action now. That’s really the important thing. You can’t waste any time. When your digestion is off what happens is your nutrition doesn’t get into your body. Then your body starts to degrade.

So we’re going to get you focused on that. We’re going to put you through these four steps. On the other end you’re going to feel good and you’re going to be happy that you got involved with this here and are listening to the whole program.

Lisa: Great. So I’m sure everybody wants to hear what you have to say. The first question that we have for you is how exactly does the digestive system work?

Kevin: We’re going to kind of give you a little anatomy course to start. It’s not going to be too detailed and not going to be too long. We’re going to run over some of the basics so you really understand what’s going on and where things can break down. This is really important because the person who knows the system, they know how to fix it. For instance, if you know how your water heater works and you hear a knocking or you just know something is off, you can go in there and you can fix exactly what it is. If you don’t know what’s going on you look at the thing and say, “I don’t know. Let’s just replace the whole thing.” That’s great with a water heater, but with your body you can’t do that. There are very few things that we can completely replace that will do the same exact thing. With the water heater we can get the same exact model. With our body we can’t do that. So we need to understand what’s going on with our system and what signals it gives off so that we can take a look at how to help fix them.

When we refer to the system, the system goes from your mouth down to your throat to your stomach, your small intestines and then your large intestine. First we start with the mouth. The role of the mouth is to one, chew, masticate the food, to start breaking down the fibers so some of the minerals and nutrients are released, as well as to produce saliva. What saliva does is it has enzymes that start to break down complex carbohydrates in your food. So it starts to break down those starches into simple sugars. So that’s the very simple process of chewing and breaking down the food, the complex carbohydrates, with your saliva.

As the food goes down your throat we move into the stomach. The stomach is to break down your foods with gastric acid. That’s the role of the stomach. It’s going to break down proteins. It’s going to turn your proteins into amino acids, which is what your body uses to help build its own proteins. It’s going to help break down the minerals in your food. So it’s going to eat away at the fiber and it’s going to release minerals. Acid breaks things down.

An interesting thing about the stomach and how things digest is that your macronutrients, which are your




carbohydrates, your protein and your fats, they digest in different times. So it takes different times for them to digest. For instance, your carbohydrates digest the fastest. Protein stays in the stomach a little bit longer. And fats actually take the longest to digest. So when you think about food combining, which we’ll talk about a little bit more in-depth, this is something to really consider because if you’re eating carbohydrates, protein and fat all at the same time, some of the foods that are digested already might not leave the stomach so quickly because they’re still stuck in the stomach waiting for some of the other foods to digest.

Your stomach produces HCL. HCL is hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid plays a very important role in the stomach. Here’s what it does. It acts as a barrier against microorganisms. Your stomach pH is a 2 on the pH scale. That’s a very harsh environment for any living thing to be in. This environment will actually help destroy food-born bacteria or any other bacteria that get into your stomach after you’ve eaten it, that may actually cause some sort of problem inside of your intestinal tract. It’ll stop them from getting there.

HCL has an incredibly low pH. What this does is it actually starts to breakdown protein. It denatures them so they start to break down into their amino acid components. The neat thing about hydrochloric acid is that your stomach contains this and it creates mucus around the actual outer-lining of your stomach so that this acidic environment is contained only in one place inside your body. This is a very acidic place inside your body. Once that leaves, if it was to remain at that pH, what would happen is that the rest of your intestines would actually disintegrate because they don’t have the same protection the stomach does. So what happens afterwards is that once the food in your digestive stomach gets into your small intestine it is neutralized by sodium bicarbonate.

Lisa: So what are some of the digestive issues that occur in the stomach?

Kevin: Some of the biggest digestive issues that occur in the stomach are indigestion and ulcers. Those are the two larg-est ones. I previously thought that stress and coffee and spicy foods caused ulcers. A lot of the research now is showing that up to 60 percent of stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria infections.

We’ve got to look at this in a few different ways. First off we need to ask what came first. Did the stress and the spicy foods and stimulants cause the body to be mineral-depleted and then that in turn caused the stomach to produce less HCL and did that in turn cause the stomach to not be able to destroy the bacteria that then started to cause the ulcers in the gut? We can look at it in a few different ways. The reality is that there’s not a low enough pH in the gut to destroy the bacteria. What happens is that ulcers are created.

Two other possible causes of ulcers are aspirin ibuprofen and other things such as cigarettes. Those are the main things. So bacteria, mainly in the form of H. pylori, aspirin ibuprofen and then cigarettes and other causes as well.

The other thing that I mentioned is low HCL. Low HCL is going to cause multiple issues in your stomach. It’s going to cause you to not be able to digest your nutrients properly, in particular your protein and minerals. What we’ll see over time is that if you’re having trouble with your digestion your HCL will continue to struggle to be produced. You will see outward signs of it. In particular you’ll see hair and nails that are starting to weaken. Those are two very sure signs that you’re starting to lose some of your HCL. We’ll talk about some things to help rebuild the HCL in the next module.

Lisa: Awesome. I’m sure everybody is excited to hear about how to heal themselves from ulcers and low HCL. We spoke a lot about the stomach and the physiology of the stomach. Moving on to the small intestines. Can you tell us more about the small intestines?




Kevin: Sure. The small intestines are the next step in the process. We go from the mouth, down the throat, into the stomach and then the small intestine. The small intestine’s main function is absorption. In your small intestine is there are villi in your small intestine. They have their feelers out and they are looking for nutrients to absorb that your body can use. Each one of them has a special code that helps identify what it’s looking for. That’s what’s pulled in. What is left goes into the large intestine.

The pancreas, which is not in your small intestine, it’s outside of it, produces a wide array of enzymes that break down carbohydrates, fat and protein. Other enzymes are also active in the process. They come from glands in the wall of the intestines. So the wall of your stomach produces HCL and gastric acid and the wall of the intestines are to produce some of these enzymes that will help digest your food.

The liver also produces bile. Bile is stored in between meals in the gall bladder. At mealtime it is squeezed out of your gall bladder, through the bile ducts, and it goes into the intestine to mix with the fat. This is going to help digest the fat that is in the foods.

Lisa: The bile will help to dissolve everything? Is there anything that the bile does not dissolve?

Kevin: The main function of the bile is to help digest fat. That’s its main role. If their not dissolved into the lipids they need to be in, then your body is not going to be absorb it the way that it needs to.

Lisa: All right, great. What are some of the issues that come up in the small intestine?

Kevin: First off, what most people are dealing with when it comes to their small intestine is that they have issues of inflammation. So they’re eating foods that are causing the small intestine, or the gut, to become inflamed. What happens when this happens is if you think of anything that becomes inflamed, maybe even acne on your face, it becomes clogged. When you look at your small intestine, if you’d look at it under a microscope you’d see tiny little perforated holes. That’s where your nutrients are being absorbed, in addition to the villi. They have to actu-ally pull it through the small intestine. So when your gut is inflamed what happens is that these holes become closed off and they interfere with the production of the enzymes being released and they also interfere with how food is being absorbed. It also creates really awful pain for some people as well. It can create diarrhea and a lot of other issues in the gut, a lot of discomfort in the gut, gas as well. This is one of the biggest challenges people are being faced with. They’re eating foods that are causing this type of inflammation.

The second thing is gut imbalance of flora. So if you look at your gut, your gut is not just tissue. It’s also a huge ecosystem of bacteria in your stomach that are actually helping to digest your food. They play very specific roles, particularly in the immune system, as well as the digestion. If this flora, this ecosystem, is out of whack, what happens is that you don’t digest properly.

There are very specific bacteria that are healthy for digestion and other bacteria that are not healthy for your di-gestion and actually cause more inflammation. These all kind of come together. There’s also the opportunity of a fungal infection in your gut. This can come generally from the use of antibiotics, fluoride, chlorinated water and from excess stress and excess sugar in the diet. This is called candida, a yeast overgrowth. The yeast overgrowth in the gut is easier to take care of than a yeast overgrowth that has become systemic, which is entirely through your body. It’s still difficult to take care of because once something is overgrown, if you were to look at a yard that’s overgrown with weeds, it takes a little bit of time for the ecosystem of that yard or in this case your gut, to actu-ally rebuild itself to actually come back to its natural homeostasis. So these are some of the biggest issues with the small intestine and why some people are having a lot of challenges. Again, we’ll discuss all these in detail when




we get into the steps on how to rebuild the gut.

Lisa: Kevin, how common is candida? I know just a couple of years ago I had no idea it even existed. I think a lot of the public also has that experience. Is it relatively common?

Kevin: Here’s the thing. For people who don’t know about it, it’s probably more common than with people who do know about it, it’s probably less common. Let me explain that. For people who have been eating a lot of starches, drinking a lot of alcohol and who have been eating processed foods, white sugar and things like that, for a long period of time, there’s a chance that their gut flora could be incredibly imbalanced. They’re much more likely to have a candida infection either in their gut or systemic. This is something that needs to be addressed in order for them to really reach out into health.

People who are already into health who kind of already know about this stuff and have been working through their challenges, whether they came into it with a health challenge or didn’t, they tend to think that they prob-ably have more candida than they really do. Some of the issues may actually just be allergic reactions to foods or something like that. They tend to be a little bit over-interested in the health challenges that they or other people might have than people who don’t know anything about it and are under-interested in the health challenges they might have, they don’t have any idea of what’s going on.

The other thing is this, we all have yeast in us. So we need to make that clear, too. The question is whether or not it is unbalanced. Yeast does play a role in the body. It will eat sugar. So to make sure that your blood sugar doesn’t get too high--this is one of the reasons diabetics have a higher incidence of candida, because their blood sugar is really out of whack.

Lisa: I have one more question for you regarding candida that you might plan on addressing later. How is it diag-nosed?

Kevin: In terms of diagnosis of candida, if you do an Internet search you can find a specific test where you spit into a cup and if the spit actually grows legs, the bacteria actually cultures a little bit, then people say you have candida. The validity of that is not as precise as actually doing a stool test that actually tests for yeast. So that’s going to be the most effective way to see if you have candida in your digestive tract.

If you have it in your digestive tract there’s a chance you might have an overgrowth inside your body, as well.

Lisa: You would do that test through a naturopath or a medical doctor?

Kevin: Definitely.

Lisa: Thank you for that information about the small intestine. Let’s move on to the large intestine. How does that play a role in the digestive process?

Kevin: The large intestine has a few very specific roles. They continue the absorption process. That’s kind of the number-one thing. So as the chyme goes into your ascending colon--it comes up and that’s your ascending colon. It goes across and that’s your transverse and then down, which is your descending colon. Your colon pushes, through peristalsis, your chyme through your colon. It starts to absorb liquid and water, as well as the minerals that are actually still in the water. Through that process, as the stool becomes less moist, that is actually the formation of the feces we eliminate. A lot of the feces is fiber, as well as bacteria.




The colon also contains dozens of different varieties of micro flora to aid digestion, which means further digest-ing your food, maintaining pH balance. It also prevents, just like in your small intestine, the overgrowth of harmful bacteria. These bacteria, as they’re in the stool, what they’re doing is they’re synthesizing folic acid, which is a B vitamin. It also synthesizes vitamin K and more of the B complex. This is where a lot of the B complex vitamins start to actually, they get absorbed through the small intestine, but also through the large intestine. The bacteria in the large intestines, bacillus coli and acidophilus, they are the major ones. You might even recognize bacillus or acidophilus from the yogurt container. This is the type of culture that’s being grown in yogurt. Not to say that yogurt is a good or a bad thing. For some people it can actually mess up their digestion and for some people it can actually help them. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.

Lisa: Kevin, what are some of the issues that go along with the large intestine?

Kevin: The first issue with the large intestine is that it continues with the same challenges as the small intestine. You can have inflammation. Where does inflammation come from? It comes from being dehydrated, so you don’t have enough liquids so there’s actually friction as the stool is pushing through your colon. It can come from the fact that there’s not even enough liquid in your foods. What inflammation does is it causes the walls of your large intestine to expand to a point where some of the nutrients can’t be absorbed.

Another challenge with the colon is that if the flora become imbalanced then what happens is that we can cause a lot of pretty nasty things to happen. We can get diverticulitis, which will cause pocketing in the colon. If those diverticuli become infected that can really cause challenges and some of these can actually become so inflamed that there’s blood in the stool and there’s other challenges that happen within the digestive tract that cause infec-tion, which can become very dangerous. If your large intestine flora is full of harmful bacteria and then you have some sort of bleeding or open sore in your colon--I know it sounds gross, but it’s true. That bacteria can actually get into the bloodstream and that can cause a lot of nasty problems.

Colon cancer is another big issue, as well. A lot of people on a high-meat, low-fiber, chronically-dehydrated type of diet, they really run the risk of having a very high incidence of colon cancer.

Lisa: Kevin, some people, regarding the diverticulitis…You had mentioned it creates pockets. Can you explain that in a little bit more depth?

Kevin: Are you sure you really want to know?

Lisa: Not so much, but it would be good to know.

Kevin: The common theory is that these pockets are formed by high pressure in the colon. So stools that are very hard and abnormally large and are causing pressure cause the colon to actually bulge. Once it stops bulging, once you’ve eliminated it, then it creates this uneven, sometimes pocketed, formation in the colon. It sometimes can be caused by inflammation as well. If your colon has experienced years of inflammation, years of a low-fiber diet, years of bad bacteria, then what’s going to happen is it’s going to become wrinkly. It’s going to become pocketed, just like your skin. It’s not that far removed. The lining of your colon is actually an external surface. It sounds kind of weird but it’s true. From your mouth to your anus, that is actually outside of your body. There’s no entry into your body besides the small pores that are in the small intestine and in large intestine. So any sort of abrasion or any sort of inflammation or rash can cause some of these pockets. When it gets really bad is when the pocket starts to get infected - that’s the big issue. They can become so infected that they can actually tear and then parts of stool or even bacteria can get into the abdominal cavity and that becomes a big problem.




Lisa: Once a pocket is created, is there any way to get rid of it, to heal it or is it there forever?

Kevin: What you can do is you can reduce the inflammation. You can stop the low-fiber diet and then you can see what happens. A lot of times what you can do is you can work with someone who can do that with you and then monitor it. Generally you’re going to see these things through colonoscopy. You can monitor and see how it im-proves. For some people, once your skin becomes wrinkly and pocketed then sometimes it’s hard for it to rebuild itself completely. We want to work on the prevention side of it as much as we can. If you have it then we want to work on getting it the best that it can be, again. It’s like stretch marks. Once skin is stretched and pocketed, sometimes it’s hard to remove that type of damage.

Lisa: Thank you. You had mentioned that if there’s inflammation the nutrients are probably not going to be absorbed in the large intestine. Do those nutrients just escape with the feces?

Kevin: Yeah, they do. They just leave the body. Here’s the thing. Some nutrients will get absorbed. But we want your digestive tract working at a level of a ten. A lot of people’s digestive tract, if you were to go on a scale of one to ten, they’re operating at five or six, four, three, two, maybe even one. You could be eating the healthiest diet on the planet, regardless of what you think that is, but if you’re not actually absorbing your nutrients then you’re going to be wasting your money and wasting your time. That’s why it’s so important to fix the digestive tract, from the mouth to the anus. This is our first contact with the outside world in terms of our food. Before our food does anything else it has to go through the digestive tract so that we then can take in the nutrients and do what it needs to do. It’s our fuel. The food is our fuel. If your fuel lines are clogged or if your fuel lines are inflamed, or if your fuel is of low quality, then we’re going to run into a lot of issues. That’s what this whole program is about. It’s really working on the fuel and the fuel system to be able to get that running optimally.

A lot of times the things correct themselves so we don’t even need to focus on some of the other things. We have to take a systemic approach to this, a holistic approach. Then a lot of times when we look at the bigger picture, instead of just looking at the stomach or instead of looking at just the gut or the large intestine, which a lot of people do, they just look at these singular spots or even just the mouth. When we look at the whole system then we can say, “Oh, now I understand.” If you just look at a certain stomach issue, say for instance low HCL, you can take HCL but what are some of the other things that you can do to help rebuild the production of HCL? We have to look at the larger picture because once we just take one thing, well that might be a temporary fix. We want to look at a complete fix.

Lisa: Let’s move on to the hormones. What role do the hormones have?

Kevin: What the hormones do is this. I’m not going to get too much into hormones. Generally they control the release of different secretions from the different organs that are required for digestion. What they also do is help regulate your hunger. Some of the hormones will tell you when you’re hungry and some of them will tell you when you’re full.

First off, gastrin is one hormone. This causes the stomach to produce the acid. When gastrin is released it causes the stomach to produce acid. It’s also necessary for normal cell growth in the lining of the stomach, small intes-tine and colon.

The next one is secretin. This causes the pancreas to send out digestive juice that is rich in sodium bicarbonate. This helps neutralize the chyme as it comes into the small intestine. Secretin also stimulates the stomach to pro-duce pepsin, which is an enzyme that digests protein. It stimulates the liver to produce bile, as well.




There’s another enzyme called CCK. This causes the pancreas to produce enzymes. It also causes the gall bladder to empty.

The two hormones that I was talking about that help to modulate your appetite are ghrelin and peptide YY. Ghrelin is produced in the stomach and the upper small intestine when there’s no food. It actually stimulates the appetite. Peptide YY is produced in the digestive tract in response to a meal and it actually inhibits your appetite. This is the hormone that’s released once you’ve eaten your meal. This is where we get our feelings of hunger and our feelings of satiety.

I was talking about how things can be holistic. When we look at the larger picture, if our endocrine system is out of whack--I’ve done a lot of work on the endocrine system with Dr. James Williams on the thyroid and we’re working on a program now about the adrenal system. When all these other hormone systems are out of whack, what can happen is this hormone system can become out of whack. Just like if your saliva is not producing well enough or you have bacteria in your mouth, that will actually go down into your stomach. If there was bacteria in your mouth and it went in your stomach and you’re not producing HCL then the HCL wouldn’t destroy the bacteria. The bacteria gets into your gut and then it causes overgrowth of bad bacteria. So this kind of snowballs.

The same thing happens with the hormone system. If your hormone system is out of whack, say if your choles-terol levels are low, then your hormones will not be produced at levels they need to be produced and some of these hormones can be affected. That in turn can affect your entire digestive system.

Lisa: Interesting. You just discussed the anatomy and physiology of the digestive system. Let’s move on to some of the outward issues that poor digestion causes. Can you talk more about that?

Kevin: Absolutely. Here was a brief explanation of how the digestive tract works. You could take an entire college course on the digestive tract. We’re not interested in teaching you that. I just want you to know the basics. I feel I need to know the basics, too. What we need to know is how to know if our digestion isn’t working well. What are some of the outward signs? What does our body tell us? Our body tells us a lot of different things all the time. So we need to be tuned in and honed in to the things that mean something and listen to them.

One of the first things I’ve seen when it comes to poor digestion is acne, on the face, on the back, full-body acne. It can generally be categorized into two different places. One is digestion and the other is hormones. This program we’re not going to be talking about hormones, we’re going to be talking about digestion. So acne is one place. Generally where acne is coming from is some sort of gut imbalance or some sort of imbalance that may cause a hormone imbalance that in turn may cause acne. Generally it’s in the small intestine and large intestine. That’s generally where acne comes from. In module two and three we’ll actually discuss very specific things you can do to actually correct it.

The second thing is allergies. In most cases, when we’re digesting things--this is food allergies. When we’re di-gesting things in our small intestine and our small intestine happens to be inflamed, that means larger particles actually can get into our bloodstream. This becomes a really big challenge because when these larger particles of food or maybe undigested or partially digested food get into your bloodstream what happens is that your body sends out a message and says, “Hey, we have an intruder here.” What that does is cause an increase of white blood cells. These will actually go and try to take care of it. At the same time your body can create histamines to actually try to stop this infection and look at these things as they were intruders and as if they were something it needs to immediately get rid of. This is where the allergies come from. It comes from proteins that are causing an allergic reaction inside of the body, in some sort of defense, to warn you this is happening.




Lack of nutrients can lead to a lot of different challenges in the body. If our digestion isn’t working properly poor hair, ridges in your nails, nails that don’t grow very well, brittle nails, brittle hair, those are indicators or diges-tive issues. Skin rashes can be an indicator of digestive issues. Dry skin can be an indicator of digestive. There’s a lot of things that fit into a lot of different categories. Digestion is really one of the first places to look. And then overall inflammation. Inflammation can actually be measured in terms of C-reactive protein. C-reactive protein is a blood test that you can take that can show the amount of inflammation that you actually have in your body. By doing this you can see if your body is inflamed. When you are inflamed you create heat. When you create heat you can offset the pH balance of the body. This will actually start to lead to possible disease. Even regular doctors now are talking about C-reactive protein and its role in inflammation. This is actually a very good indicator of what’s to come. This is kind of a preventative indicator. If your numbers are good you have a lower risk of all the diseases associated with inflammation, which can be anything from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, we could run down the list.

Lisa: How do you know if you’re experiencing problems with your digestion? The second part of the question is how do you identify what parts of your digestive tract are not working properly?

Kevin: You notice things. That’s really what we’re looking for. This expands on some of the stuff I just talked about. First off, let’s start with the mouth. In the mouth you’ll experience tooth decay or plaque. Tooth decay can be a number of things. A lot of times it’s lack of minerals. Your teeth will not have enough of the minerals that it needs to grow and at the same time the bacteria that will be living in your mouth, what they’re doing is actually producing acid that are causing some of the tooth decay. So they’re creating a very acidic environment and you don’t have enough minerals in your diet or in your bones or in your bloodstream so you’re dealing with this acid/alkaline balance in your mouth.

The second thing is thrush. Thrush is a pretty sure sign that you have candida. It definitely is a sign that you have a yeast infection. You’ll see that in the back of your throat as white marks. This is a very sure sign that you have a yeast problem.

The other thing that you can identify is hot and cold sensitivity in your teeth. Hot and cold sensitivity is linked to mineral deficiency. This may actually lead to challenges where you’re not able to digest your minerals. Your HCL may not be high enough to actually digest your minerals, or break them apart from the fiber and digest them through the small intestine.

In the stomach indigestion is a pretty good sign that you have low HCL. A lot of people think indigestion is a highly acidic environment in the stomach. That’s not true. It’s actually a low acidic environment in the stomach. So indigestion is a sign of low HCL. Pain is a sign of ulcers. Anyone whose had ulcers before knows what that pain feels like.

Looking at your stool will give you a lot of indication of some of the things you might be experiencing in your small intestines. In general poor digestion is indicated by undigested stool. Stool that isn’t nicely formed and is a strange color should set off some alarms that maybe your digestion isn’t working properly.

The next thing is rashes, particularly people who turn red or get red spots or red face after they have alcohol, or if someone has a lot of carbohydrates and they start to get red. That could be an indication of candida in the intestines. Also, a sure sign of candida is if you start to eliminate white cottony stools, almost like cotton balls. That’s a pretty sure sign that you have a yeast or candida infection.

We haven’t talked about this. Some people who have tapeworm or other types of worms, they might even see that




in their stool. That’s a pretty scary thing, a very humbling thing to see. Know that that can be taken care of.

The final thing is general intestinal unrest in the mornings. Sometimes it can be corrected very easily by not eat-ing so late. Sometimes people wake up and their stomach feels really off. This could mean a number of things, but it generally means that there’s some sort of gut flora imbalance or that there’s something happening where your body is not able to digest properly and it is turning itself knots to get that food out quickly.

The final indications are for the colon. The first one is constipation. If you’re constipated that’s a pretty sure sign that something is sluggish. Diarrhea, on the other end, generally means that there’s some sort of bacteria infec-tion or other challenges causing your stool to be evacuated quickly. Blood in the stool is very bad. If you have blood in your stool you shouldn’t be listening to this program, you should be going to a doctor. Painful or hard stools can be indications that your digestive tract and maybe even part of your colon are experiencing challenges.

Lisa: What makes up those white cottony things in the stool?

Kevin: That is very simply candida. It is a ball of yeast that has grown so large that now you can see it in your stool.

Lisa: Oh my gosh. It’s the actual candida that’s coming out.

Kevin: Yes. In most cases of candida you won’t see that. But in some extreme cases, generally if someone has taken a lot of antibiotics, that might actually show up.

Lisa: Digestive issues can happen in anybody from 0 to 100 plus, right?

Kevin: Absolutely. The younger the child is, a lot of the digestive issues are going to be coming from either what the mother is feeding them. First off, a lot of digestive issues in very, very young are coming from what the mother is eating and then transferring from mother’s milk. That’s where a lot of babies’ digestive challenges happen. Those can be corrected by the mother adapting to a more healthy diet. When it comes to older children eating food the parents are feeding them, the child is very well-tuned as to what it needs. A lot of times we take a lot of the information that we’ve learned and try to fit a square peg into a round hole when it comes to what we want our kids to eat. Our kids generally will tell us what works and what doesn’t. Kids tend to like fruit and if you make it right, vegetables, as well. So that’s a pretty sure indication that that’s what we need to be feeding them.

As people get older, in their teens and before, a lot of antibiotics are given. This can start to cause a very serious imbalance in the gut flora. I remember when I was a kid I would take a lot of antibiotics. I had really bad acne. I’ve overcome that. A lot of it has just been over time rebuilding my gut flora, not consciously, and then as I got older, consciously.

Someone in their 50s and 60s and 70s, what happens is their digestion starts to decline. The reason is because they have, over time, depleted themselves of certain minerals and certain foods that are really essential for good digestion and not allowed them to maintain their levels of HCL. A lot of times that’s what happens. As someone gets older their HCL levels decrease and then that allows them to open up to the possibility of them having some digestive issues.

Lisa: Going back to the beginning of the spectrum, say young children. In the past nature has raised us to gravitate towards fruits and the sweeter foods because they’re been known to be less poisonous when we were gathering our food. But often you see young children getting the processed foods. Their makeup of what they crave is dif-




ferent then. If you are feeding a young child a wholesome diet with a lot of fruits and vegetables, but since they seem to gravitate towards fruit. Do you think that might be an indication that they have candida because people generally gravitate towards sweeter foods to feed the candida? Do you think that if a child is gravitating more towards the fruits and doesn’t want as many vegetables or other foods that there’s a possibility they might have candida?

Kevin: There’s always a possibility that they might have candida but I don’t think that…Our fruits are far sweeter than they used to be. So I do think we have to regulate to some degree the amount of sugar. On the other hand, what feeds healthy bacteria is sugar as well. So there are times, particularly in a young child’s life, where they’re getting the healthy bacteria from the mother’s milk and the mother’s breast, where a lot of this bacteria grows. They’ve actually taken swabs of mothers’ breasts and they’ll find some of this healthy bacteria. So in that process, that transition, what’s happening is that some of that bacteria is getting into the milk. If you look at milk if you put it out for a day or two, it starts to ferment, even over 24 hours if you make it warm enough. That’s how you make yogurt. So as the milk and now the bacteria have mixed in the child’s mouth, go into the gut, what happens is the bacteria are not necessarily destroyed by the stomach acid because in some cases the child’s stomach doesn’t produce a ton of HCL or as much as a normal adult would. Then that bacteria then gets into the intestinal tract. That’s when it starts to ferment. This is where the bacteria cultures. This is one of the ways that the fermentation process and the gut flora ecosystem starts to build. So sugar does help. Breast milk sugar is one place. Sugar does help, to some degree, to help create this ecosystem.

Lisa: Thank you for that explanation. Moving on, are there any tests that you can take to identify if you have any issues with digestion?

Kevin: Yes, there are. They’re not the easiest ones to deal with because generally they involve the stool. A lot of people don’t enjoy taking stool samples and sending them off to labs. But that’s what we have to do. Bacteria or parasites, those are things that are definitely going to be best identified by taking the stool test. You can go to a medical practitioner. You can ask them if you have any bad bacteria or parasites in your intestinal tract or digestive sys-tem. They will say, “Here’s the test you need to take.” They will generally have that test at Geneva Labs. You can’t have an individual order that test but your practitioner will be able to do that.

For HCL there are two different types of tests you can do. One is the one that you would go to if you went to your doctor. That’s called a Heidelberg test. This is really an invasive test. Not surgery, but basically what you do is you swallow a pill that’s attached to a string. That is dropped into your stomach. After it is there for a certain period of time it is pulled out and the reading is taken to identify what your levels of HCL are. That’s a pretty invasive test but you can have that done.

Another way to test to see if you think HCL might be an issue is to do it with supplements, an HCL supplement. What you do is eat a meal and you take one HCL pill. What you will find is that if you have enough HCL your stomach will feel very warm. If you don’t have enough HCL then your stomach will not feel warm and that will mean you need a little more HCL. If your stomach does not feel warm then the next time you eat a meal you have two capsules of HCL. If your stomach feels warm that means one is generally pretty good. If your stomach still does not feel warm then you really need to go to a doctor and see what’s going on. You don’t want to start taking a whole bunch of HCL pills because this is a very acidic substance. If your HCL is kind of OK and you start to overdo it with the HCL it can start to eat away the stomach lining. That’s not what we want to have hap-pen.

Finally, for H. pylori, which has been indicated in a lot of issues with stomach ulcers, there are a few different




types of tests you can take. You can take a blood antibody test. This will show if there are antibodies for this specific type of bacteria, the antibody for H. pylori. If you have antibodies that means the H. pylori has been present or you were infected in the past. So that’s kind of a challenge because if you were infected in the past and you don’t have it anymore then you may think you have ulcers when in fact you might just have a little bit of indigestion and low HCL.

Urea breath test is one way. What you do is you breathe and it will show if you have the bacteria, in a culture. Then there’s the stool antigen test. Again, this is generally what you’ll do for bacteria and parasites. So you might be able to get it all in one, at least with one sample.

And then stomach biopsy. A stomach biopsy is not a pleasant type of procedure. The other three are a lot less invasive and a lot easier to do.

Lisa: Thank you, Kevin. This is the end of module one. Be sure to listen to the next module where we’ll be discussing the four step process for correcting your digestion. Thanks for listening in. We’ll talk to you next time.

[MUSIC]

Kevin: Thanks for listening to this module. For more information, please be sure to review the course materials you received with this program. Start taking action on what you’ve heard today. If you have any questions, please visit our website at www.perfectdigestionplan.com.



MODULE 2



Kevin: Welcome everyone. My name is Kevin Gianni and I want to thank you for your interest in “The Perfect Digestion Plan - Four Steps to Healthy Digestion and Radiant Health.” In this program I’ll be sharing tips and tricks that you can use to start repairing your digestion and feeling better right away. So grab a pen and piece of paper because you’re going to want to take a lot of notes.



[MUSIC]


Kevin has overcome his own digestive challenges, as well as studied alternative and functional health with some of the top experts in the subject. He’s the author of five books on nutrition, healthy eating and exercise. In this second module Kevin will be going through the four-step process to fixing your digestion issues.

Welcome, Kevin. We’re excited to hear more.

Kevin: This is going to be a lot of fun because today what we’re going to be talking about is how you can actually take action. We wanted to do it in a way that was really easy for you. Four steps is going to be the easiest for anyone to do because it doesn’t require a lot. It just requires the few very specific things that you can do, depending on where your issues are coming from, to help get you on the right track. Remember, if you have some of these problems and you are really feeling that you need to work with someone, please feel free to. This information is not medical advice. This is to help assist you and to educate you about digestion. We really prefer that you do work with someone who is a practitioner, because they can actually look at what’s happening to you and use their experience and use their judgment to actually create the best protocol for you. We’re going to give you a lot of very specific protocol, but again, when you’re working with a practitioner, just like any expert or any athlete or any business owner who is successful, they have coaches. In the same way you should have a successful coach for your health.

Lisa: Awesome. Let’s get into it. The first question we have is, how do you start to repair your digestion?

Kevin: I’m going to take you through the four steps here. The first step you might think is kind of incongruous, but it is not. What we’re going to do is work on cleaning out your mouth. We’re actually going to work on cleaning it out with soap. How weird does that sound? Here’s what we need to do. We need to be very specific about your mouth because we do not want your mouth to start to become a Petri dish for bad bacteria. If your mouth does become this Petri dish what happens is that as you’re swallowing and eating your food you’re actually swallowing more and more of this bad bacteria. Once the bad bacteria gets into your gut, if by chance it happens to get into your small intestine, it can colonize there. We don’t want that to happen. We want to make sure that we’re only




introducing really good bacteria into our system, which I’ll talk about in step three. We want to make sure that we’re eliminating this bad bacteria in our mouth.

The steps to clean out your mouth are this. First what we need to do is we need to make sure that you use antibacterial-type substances when you’re brushing your teeth. We like to use soap. There’s a product called Tooth Soap that we like to use. Soap is a natural anti-microbial substance. So what soap will do is it will help penetrate between the teeth as it is sudsing, and it will actually help kill the bacteria that are in your mouth. That’s really an incredible tool considering the fact that a lot of our toothpaste contain a lot of harmful chemicals in them. We want to be as clean and simple as possible. We can do that with soap.

Some people choose to use neem oil as well. Neem oil can actually be antimicrobial. The trouble with neem oil is it doesn’t taste good. Tooth Soap uses essential oils which can be really helpful in flavoring the soap so it doesn’t taste bad. Neem oil just tastes pretty awful. But neem oil is good for the teeth and is antimicrobial.

Other people use a system call oil-pulling. What you do is take either sesame oil or sunflower oil, maybe a tablespoon or two in your mouth and you swish this oil through your mouth for a period of 10 to 15 to 20 minutes every day. This is actually antimicrobial as well. Some people use coconut oil. Some of the compounds in the oil are antimicrobial. So this is effective, as well. Most people don’t have 10 to 15 minutes to sit around and swish oil through their mouth. This is why the soap is very effective.

The second thing about cleaning your mouth out is making sure you floss. The reality is a large percentage of people don’t floss on a regular basis. When you don’t floss on a regular basis what you do is you allow bacteria to grow in between your teeth, first on pieces of undigested food and then they start to colonize there. This creates a lot of acidity and the colony that your body may actually swallow. That can get into your gut. So flossing is really important to dislodge those particles from your mouth and make sure you clean in between your teeth. You’ll know that you’re not flossing enough if your gums are bleeding when you brush. So you need to make sure that you’re flossing on a regular basis so your gums are not bleeding when you brush. Then in that case you’re probably flossing enough.

We like the Tooth Soap and when it comes to flossing there are two different types of floss we like, Tom’s of Maine and Smart Floss, by Dr. Tungs. What we like about the Smart Floss is that it has almost like pockets that will help work as an abrasive when you floss between your teeth. This will actually help pull some of the particles out. It’s also biodegradable and the wax is from a non-petroleum source. So we’re really excited about that specific product.

If you’re already using a Tooth Soap or a neem oil or oil-pulling to work as an antimicrobial in your mouth, one thing you do want to do is make sure you use some sort of abrasive every week. In this case Tooth Soap actually has a product called Tooth Brightener that will work as an abrasive to help keep your teeth clean and help eliminate stains. If you’re not using an abrasive, which you’ll normally find in a lot of toothpaste, what you’ll find is your teeth will become a little bit discolored, particularly if you’re eating a high plant-based diet. So if you’re eating a lot of greens, drinking a lot of tea, drinking coffee, you want to make sure you use an abrasive, like a tooth brightener.

Lisa: Great. How about step two? What is the second step you can do to repair your digestion?

Kevin: Step two is to move on down the line and fire up your stomach. A lot of times what’s happening is we’re having trouble digesting our protein and our minerals. Yes, we’re having trouble digesting the protein so the enzyme and




the acid isn’t breaking down the protein into the amino acids that our body needs. Our body doesn’t need protein necessarily, it needs the amino acids from the protein. So if your HCL levels are low, and your enzyme levels are low, then you’re not breaking down the protein. The same with the minerals. If you have a diet that has a lot of fiber in it, which is good, one of the challenges might be that you’re not breaking the minerals away from fiber. That’s the role of HCL.

So what we want to do is we want to make sure that your HCL levels are in check. We want to test them using the testing process that I talked about. I’ll explain it again in case you missed it or in case you want to hear it again. The way to test for HCL is to eat a meal and then take an HCL supplement, one pill, and see if you feel any warmth in your stomach. If you feel warmth in your stomach then chances are your digestion and your HCL levels are pretty good. If you don’t feel warmth after that one pill then you move on to the next step. The next step is when you eat your next meal you would take two of those capsules of HCL. If you take two and you feel warmth then generally you should probably take one until you start to feel warmth, for as long as it takes, after every meal. Never take HCL on an empty stomach. What you can do is over time decide if that one pill is enough and you start to actually feel that warmth then you’ve probably brought your HCL levels back. The reason why is that the production of HCL requires some of the minerals that you may not be digesting because you have low HCL, as well as amino acids. All these processes, it’s kind of like a catch 22. If your HCL is low, the B vitamins that are required to run all the systems that actually create some of the HCL, they’re never going to get up to speed to be able to produce the HCL. So then you end up with a catch 22 of not being able to get the raw materials to produce the material, the substance that actually helps you get the raw material into your stomach, if that makes any sense. It’s this ongoing cycle that never gets corrected if you don’t correct it. So in this case we might need to get some HCL. If you take two HCL pills and you still don’t feel warmth in your stomach after your meal, then you really do need to go see a practitioner because you don’t want to mess around taking too much HCL. That could eat away your stomach lining and create a much worse situation than you already have.

Lisa: Is there a place you would recommend to get the HCL from or can you get it anywhere?

Kevin: Any major health food store will have Betaine HCL. Go with a company that you trust. I haven’t taken HCL in a long time so I’m not exactly up on the specific companies. Ask the person that is there and if they’re knowledgeable they’ll be able to recommend a good one for you.

Lisa: What else can you do with step two to fire up your stomach?

Kevin: If someone happens to have ulcers, what we want to do is work on making sure that they have foods that will actually help with digestion and with the pain that comes with it. Ulcers are aggravated by spicy foods, stress and acidic foods. So we want to make sure that we have foods that are helpful to them. Some of the foods that are really helpful to them are celery juice and cucumber juice. Celery juice is very helpful for ulcers because of its mineral content. This creates a very soothing effect on ulcers. So people who have ulcers, it’s really a good protocol to start the day with celery juice, or even celery and cucumber juice, and continue drinking it throughout the day to help soothe the pain.

Also to help fire up your stomach is to eat less protein-dense foods or pre-digested proteins. The HCL that is in your stomach is working to help the gastric acid, as well as the enzymes helping to break down things. They’re all looking to break down your proteins and your minerals and everything else in your food. If we can give them a little bit of a break, particularly if we have poor production of them, then our digestion is going to improve. So what we need to do is by eating less protein-dense foods, meaning less animal products, less beans, less rice, a lot




of times what we can do is give our digestive system a break for a while. That doesn’t mean you have to give up these foods for life, but it does mean if you do give yourself a break your gut may actually be able to repair itself so that you’ll be able to digest them easier.

People do need protein though. The way that protein works is that you could be eating the healthiest diet filled with a lot of protein but if your digestive system isn’t breaking down that protein into amino acids, then you’re not going to get the amino acids that you need. For instance, you could be eating 10, 20, 30 percent of your diet as protein but if your digestive system is working at like a 3 or a 4, then you might only get 5 or 10 percent of that protein into your system. It might not be enough, even though you’re getting your protein. So I hope you understand that.

When it comes to protein, we do have some solutions. This is the good news. Pre-digested proteins are a really good source of amino acids. What does that mean? It just means fermented proteins. You can get fermented proteins from some of the fermented soy products. Those can be effective for your digestion. But you don’t want to eat too much soy because there are other challenges with hormone regulation. Soy can actually cause imbalances in estrogen, in males and females. So you want to be a little bit careful but you can eat some soy.

Then on the other side we now have the technology where we can have fermented rice protein. We can have fermented protein from algae. We can have fermented protein from a whole bunch of different sources. This can be really effective and it will actually lighten up the process of protein digestion and absorption. So the amino acids can almost directly go from powder, into your stomach, into your small intestine and then into your system to actually help rebuild your body from the degradation that happens on a regular basis.

Two of the products that we like. Potent Proteins is a product from Body Ecology, and Sun Warrior Protein, which is a fermented rice protein. There’s three actually. Warrior Food from a company called Healthforce. So these three are really good sources of pre-digested protein. Some people ask about whey, goat protein or other types of animal proteins. First off, we’re going to talk about dairy products and how they can be abrasive to the system. I really would like us to go towards a more plant-based type of diet, particularly because it is easier on the digestion. This is a digestive program. So we’re going to make sure that we do all that we can to make the digestive process as easy as possible, particularly for someone who may have either a minor or major digestive challenge.

Lisa: The products that you are recommending, are they on your website so people can easily go and purchase them or should they go to the health food store and pick up the products or at the retailer’s online site? What is the easiest way for them to do that?

Kevin: The products that we’re recommending, a lot of them you can find on RenegadeHealth.com. Some of them you can find in your local health food store, too. It just depends on where you are and where you’re located and if you choose to order stuff online or you want to get it right now. It’s entirely up to you. A good number of health food stores will at least know some of these products. If not, you can find them online or you can ask them to order them for you as well.

Lisa: Now onto step three, cultivate your gut. Let’s hear some more about that.

Kevin: What we really need to do is we have to think of our intestinal tract just like a big old garden, even larger, almost like a big forest. A lot of times when we take things like antibiotics and we take things like chlorinated water or we have stress, what happens is this precious forest in our gut gets wiped out. If you were to think of a forest




having a forest fire, what happens is the forest doesn’t grow back in a day or two. It takes thousands of years for it to grow back. It’s the same with your gut. Your gut doesn’t take thousands of years to grow back, but what it does is it does take a while for everything to get set back into place and for your gut flora to be properly balanced.

So the first step about cultivating your gut is not adding to it yet. The first step is to get the bad stuff out. Getting the bad stuff out depends on what your situation is. What we want you to do in the perfect world is we want you to get a stool test and determine if there’s any bad bacteria. If there’s not any harmful bacteria or everything seems to be OK, then we move on to the next step , what you can eat. But if there is bad bacteria, depending on the amount of infection, then you can go one or two ways. If the infection is somewhat minor then you can use some herbs and you can use a few different protocols that actually help eliminate that bad bacteria. I’m going to talk about that very specifically in a protocol in module three so I’m not going to get into that right now. Sometimes the bacteria infection can be so bad that even a natural health professional will recommend antibiotics or antifungal. You have to think about it this way. Sometimes an infection like this is so harmful or is so hard to overcome that we might need to use a little bit of modern medicine to help wipe it out. Then we can work on rebuilding it ourselves. It’s already in bad shape. Sometimes you’ve got to completely rip up the garden in order to help it grow and replant it in a way that is going to be beneficial to you so you’ll get the most out of what you need. The same here with our gut. Sometimes we might need to use these different types of tools that we have. Think of all this stuff as tools. We might need to do antibiotics or antifungal to wipe out what we’ve got and then start to rebuild with some of the next steps. That’s something you’d go over with your health practitioner. We’re giving you as many options as possible to make sure that we run through all the things that even some natural health practitioners will talk about.

Once we get the bad stuff out what we need to do is get good bacteria into our system. What are examples of good bacteria? Eating fermented foods. Fermented foods come in a few different types of forms. Keifers, yogurts and cultured vegetables. There are some fermented soy products, but these fermented soy products aren’t generally raw. Some of them are, but not all of them are raw. Fermented products like miso are raw. The beans are cooked, that the bacteria is grown on, but the bacteria grows and becomes a culture and they actually are raw. So the bacteria is still alive. A fermented product like tempeh, that’s been cooked, is no longer an active culture food. So we have to be sure we’re eating the right fermented food.

Keifer, yogurt, cultured vegetables. Let me explain these very quickly. Keifer is a combination of bacteria and yeast. Yogurt is a combination of bacteria. You can create a keifer with a few different things. Some people create water keifer where they put a little bit of sugar into water and grow a culture that way. Some people create a milk keifer or a dairy keifer. They take the keifer starter or keifer grains and they grow it that way. Other people use coconut water. Coconut keifer is a very powerful food not only in terms of it’s ability to help rebuild the gut but in terms of its electrolytes. A lot of people are demineralized and this is one way to get our minerals back, by drinking coconut water and coconut keifer.

Yogurts you would use a culture. You can get a culture starter and make your own yogurt with anything from nut milk to regular milk. That’s how you can grow your own yogurt. Or you can buy your yogurt from the store. We’ll talk about the dairy challenges coming up soon. Getting a nut milk yogurt or coconut yogurt that you have created yourself is going to be much more effective at rebuilding your gut for a few reasons. We’ll talk about that in a second.

Then cultured vegetables, sauerkrauts. Not the sauerkrauts that you probably have seen before that’s in a bag in the store but live sauerkraut. Most sauerkrauts have been pasteurized and the pasteurization destroys the bacteria. So we want non-pasteurized, fermented foods. Cultured vegetables are generally grown on cabbage but can be




grown on anything - beets, carrots, kimchi, which is a Korean food. These are really good cultured vegetables. We want to eat these on a regular basis. Someone who really needs to rebuild their gut can benefit from eating these two or three times a day. Someone who just needs maintenance can get away with eating them once or twice a day.

What do good bacteria do? This is important, as well. They help to rebuild the system but they also, as they’re growing and colonizing, they actually help release chemicals that change the pH of the gut so other bacteria don’t hang around. Bacteria, just like people or just like any other creature, what they do is they release compounds that actually create a favorable environment for bacteria that work in symbiosis with them, other than bacteria that don’t work in symbiosis with them. So bacteria that are favorable to the environment, the pH and the chemicals that they release, those bacteria will grow around them and the other bacteria will be eventually pushed out. So getting the gut back into balance is always a give and take. The more good bacteria that you get in, the more favorable the environment will be because they’ll be producing compounds and chemicals that are released that are favorable. Eventually the good bacteria will overtake the bad.

What they also do is they also help with the synthesis of proteins and they help with digestion. So they help break down amino acids. They also help with the break down of B vitamins. B vitamins are also released through their own metabolic synthesis. So the bacteria will release B vitamins and other compounds and amino acids that are important for your immune system. That’s the fourth benefit of good bacteria, their ability to support the immune system. So B vitamins are very valuable for the immune system, as well as amino acids.

If our gut is not inflamed and the ecosystem is good, then chances are our immune system is very good as well, because if our gut is inflamed and there’s an immune reaction or some type of inflammation always around the gut, then our immune system will always be weakened. It’s just like if you have a cut on your arm and you continue to pick it. It becomes a scab and then you pick it, then it becomes a scab and you pick it. Eventually that’s going to turn into something really nasty. Your body is always going to be working on trying to protect itself from that area. The same with your gut. Your gut just happens to be a lot bigger than a little cut on your arm. Your body is always trying to bring some of its immunity troops to your stomach, or at least your white blood cell troops, to your stomach and your gut. If that’s always working then you’re always going to be in a weakened immune state. Once something else happens you can’t rally all the troops all at once.

Lisa: Going back to the fermented foods. You had mentioned with the cultured vegetables that you should have them maybe two to three times a day. With each serving, how much should it be? Should it be a tablespoon, half a cup, a cupful? What’s the serving size?

Kevin: It depends. With the cultured vegetables, you can eat them as a side with your meal. So a couple tablespoons are fine with the vegetables. With the yogurt, half a cup or a cup, depending on what it is. If it’s dairy yogurt than some people might be very susceptible to irritation from that so you don’t want to eat a lot of that, or any of it. But if it’s coconut yogurt then maybe that’s something somebody can eat a little more of.

Coconut keifers what you can do is you can actually take one or two ounces. That can be effective enough because it’s a pretty concentrated substance. There’s a lot of sugar in the coconut water. There’s enough sugar in the coconut water for that to ferment in a way the bacteria will grow and it will flourish very effectively.

Lisa: Great. One more question regarding the fermented foods. You had mentioned something as sauerkraut, that it’s important to buy un-pasteurized. I usually get my sauerkraut from a farmer’s market. Is that typically un-pasteurized or is that something you need to ask?




Kevin: The sauerkrauts you are getting from the farmer’s markets should be un-pasteurized, as of now. There are a lot of different things being sent through legislation right now that may interfere with the ability of small farmers to sell fermented foods that are un-pasteurized, raw milk and things like that. This may change in a couple years but as of right now, yes, they should be un-pasteurized.

Lisa: Great. Is there a guide or something that you would recommend if people want to make this stuff at home? I know you had mentioned starter kits. Where can people find this information to make these items at home?

Kevin: I’m going to be talking about at least how to make some of these things in module four. So stay tuned.

Lisa: Awesome. Moving on. What is the difference between fermented foods and probiotics?

Kevin: This is a great question. The reason why it’s a good question is because a lot of people have been taking probiotics for a long time but they may not be getting the same results that they would if they were taking fermented foods. Here’s why. Fermented foods, when you use a culture starter or whoever is growing them uses a good quality culture, strong strain bacteria, what happens is you know this culture and this food is alive. You know you’re getting the amount of bacteria that you need and you know you’re getting it in a source, in this case a medium, particularly if it’s cultured vegetables or yogurt or things like that, that you’re getting this and it’s intertwined with the food. It’s starting to pre-digest it. Not only is it in the food and it has the ability to actually get through to your gut, what it also has it it’s already released some of the metabolites which are some of the B vitamins, some of the amino acids I was talking about before that are really powerful for the immune system. So you get this kind of double-punch. For instance, if you’re just taking probiotics you’re not going to get the B vitamins and the amino acids that come with the fermented foods that are broken down in the fermentation process. At the same time there’s no guarantee that these supplements contain the amount of probiotics and bacteria that they say that they do. That’s really important too because they could be saying that at the time of production there were 15 billion actual bacteria in the actual supplement. But by the time it gets to you and by the time you take it how much of that bacteria has been destroyed and how much of it will actually survive the gut. So you need to have hardy strains. There’s a few different products that do have hardy strains. The Body Ecology products are some of the best out there. That’s what we use to start our own fermented foods as starters. These are hardy strains that have been known to survive the HCL levels and acidity in the stomach.

That’s why we like fermented foods better. Now, does that mean you stop taking your probiotic? No. Why don’t you try taking some fermented foods too and see if that improves the issue that you happen to be having. That’s how you can go about deciding what works best for you. This is not like one thing works for everyone. This is a system devised for you to create optimal health with your digestion. Some people react differently to some things. Like I said before, some people can have coconut keifer and some people are fine on goat keifer. But some people are really, really awful having goat keifer. It creates a lot of gut unrest and it creates a lot of challenges within their digestive tract, inflammation and even allergic reaction.

Lisa: So you really have to experiment and pay attention and see what works best for you and then go with that.

Kevin: Absolutely.

Lisa: Great. Kevin, what food should you avoid for good digestion?

Kevin: This list of foods, I have four. There are probably more but these are the four biggest culprits. If these four are eliminated from the diet generally all symptoms improve, not just digestion. I want to kind of start with that




preface before I start talking about them. The other things is this, if your digestion is on that one to ten scale, if it’s anywhere from a three to a ten right now then chances are you might be able to repair it to a point where you can bring some of these foods back into your diet and see if you have some of the same reactions. If your digestion is at like a one or a two then we might have gone too far and your healing process is going to take a little bit longer. You might not want to ever reintroduce those foods into your diet.

With that said, number one of foods to avoid for good digestion is dairy. There’s a few reasons why dairy is not great for digestion. Number one is because of the lactose. Our body has a very difficult time digesting the lactose. That’s why we have lactose intolerance. That can create a lot of stomach pains. It can create cramps in the stomach. So we want to make sure that lactose is not in our diet if we want to really improve our diet.

Here’s the thing. This is kind of interesting. 70-75 percent of people are lactose intolerant. It’s actually the norm, not the minority. African American or even Asian people, as well as Hispanics, that number increases anywhere from 80-90 percent. So most of us, Asian, Hispanic, Anglo, African American, that’s generally pretty much the entire world. So most of us are lactose intolerant.

Here’s where dairy gets a little bit messy in terms of lactose. You’ll find out right now why I say messy. When you ferment dairy what happens is it eats away at the lactose. So the bacteria uses the sugar as its food and fuel. That’s why some people can have yogurt but can’t drink milk. Or some people can have a cow’s keifer with milk sugars and they can actually digest the fermented food but not the unfermented food. So that’s why I believe some cultures, like the Hundas, have survived up in the mountains of Turkey using some dairy products, because they don’t have the lactose because they’re generally using fermented dairy products. That’s kind of a pro and a con. You have to decide.

The other negative thing about dairy is this. The protein from most dairy is a protein that is much more difficult to digest. A colleague of mine talks about this. There’s two different types of protein that’s found in milk. There’s casein, which is the milk protein. There’s A1 and A2. A1 casein is protein that we typically have a problem digesting. Maybe this came from hybridization. It came from breeding. It came from different ways that cattle is raised. So this A1 protein is much more difficult to digest. A2 protein comes in the form of ruminant so goat, sheep, other animals like that. The A2 protein is actually easier to digest. In some countries, after I had talked about this recently in a newsletter, some people had written to me that in some countries like Australia and Canada they actually label some of the milks as either A1 or A2 casein. The A2 casein is actually easier to digest.

So you want to make sure that if you have bad digestion you avoid dairy for two or three weeks, four weeks, a year, until you repair the digestion. Keep in mind that it’s not just a black and white picture. Maybe your challenge is digesting A1 protein, which comes in all of America’s cattle. We’re not able to find A1 in any cattle, any cow’s milk, in the United States. Maybe we can see what the different challenges are with us and then experiment. Experimentation is very important with digestion. What I recommend is you clean these things out. You just don’t eat them for a month. You kind of do a 30-day challenge. Then you see how your symptoms are. If your symptoms are really good then keep doing what you’re doing. Eventually if you want to reintroduce these things into your diet what you can do is try to reintroduce it and see what happens.

In my own personal experience, when I first stopped eating dairy, I did it for a two-week experiment. It was a challenge. I went to a Tony Robbins seminar. He was up on stage talking about how dairy is a product that you don’t want to eat. I said, “I don’t know if I believe that yet. I’ll do a two-week challenge and see if I can get it out of my diet and see if that makes it feel any better.” After two weeks my razor burn that I had always gotten had completely disappeared. All the acne that was there under my chin completely disappeared. I said, “Cool. This




is working. I really want to go back to dairy and see what happens.” So my friends and I ordered a big pizza, a cheese pizza. We ate the pizza and probably had four or five slices. Within 30 minutes my stomach was in knots and it felt awful. On top of it my razor burn came back the next couple days. So this was sure sign that dairy was something that I was not going to be eating for a long time. I didn’t eat it for a very long time after that.

The second thing is excess meat in the diet. If you have poor digestion you want to make sure that you eliminate either all or most of the meat in our diet. Don’t worry about your protein. We can introduce some of the fermented proteins I was talking about for the interim to see if your digestion improves. If you want colon cancer, if you want diverticulitis, if you want colon problems, excess meat is going to give them to you. So we want to make sure that you limit the amount of meat that you have. The diseases happening in the colon are diseases of excess and in most cases they’re diseases of excess meat. So we want to make sure that you take a step back and say, “Meat is difficult to digest.” So if you’re having these digestive issues let’s give yourself a meat-break. Take a meat vacation and put yourself in a position where you can improve your digestion and then decide if you want to go back to it or not. There are plenty of nutrients that you would find in meat that you can find in plants. In fact, you can find all of them. This is not an issue of you getting yourself into a position where you’re going to become deficient as much as it is an issue where you eliminate the meat and you’re going to get better digestion. This doesn’t mean for the long-term. It means until you get better. Then you can decide to maybe reintroduce these things into your diet and see how things go.

Two other things. Gluten. Many of us have been talking about gluten intolerance for a long time. Gluten is the protein in wheat. As wheat has been bred for thousands of years it has become hybridized and the protein content has been increased. Generally one of the reasons why the protein content has been increased is because high glutinous type substances are better for baking because the protein is what actually binds the baked good together. So that’s why gluten excess in our foods and our diet…Plus, wheat is cheap. That’s why there’s so much food.

Excess protein, larger protein, indigestible protein, what they’re going to do is cause inflammation. This is what is caused in the gut. This is what dairy does as well. So the protein that is not being properly digested by maybe low HCL levels or even just not being able to be digested by the HCL properly and the HCL and the enzymes that are near it in your stomach. When that chyme goes into the stomach these undigested proteins or these partially-digested proteins cause inflammation in the system. Once inflammation is caused what they do is they can actually go in through the small intestine into the bloodstream and then that can create an allergic reaction and an immune reaction. So autoimmune-type issues can happen as well as allergies. So we want to make sure to eliminate gluten as well.

Then finally, excess sugar. I mean excess sugar in the form of processed sugars. Fruits, in most cases with the exception of maybe candida, are fine. We want to eliminate all processed sugars, all processed white flours, sweet sugary drinks and things like that, until our digestion is back on track. For the most part I would say that you should never reintroduce those things into your diet. You may introduce a little bit of wheat back into your diet, if that was just causing a little bit of irritation and you’re not truly gluten intolerant.

Let me go back to that. There’s two types of gluten sensitivity. One is just gluten sensitivity and the other is gluten intolerance. Gluten intolerance is a little bit different, someone is not going to reintroduce gluten into their diet. Someone who has a little bit of gluten sensitivity can over time, probably because with all the other things happening in the digestive tract, once that’s all cleaned up they might be able to introduce a little bit back. Then when it comes to wheat and dairy that’s something that you can determine if you need or not. Again, know that you do not need the amount of meat or dairy that most people are eating. We are definitely eating an excess




amount of that. Excess sugar, in terms of processed sugar and white flour, those are things that we never have to reintroduce to our diet. As much as you like them, those are things that we don’t need at all.

Lisa: That was a wonderful, in-depth description of what we should be staying away from for healthy digestion. On the opposite end of the spectrum, what should we focus on? What are some of the foods that we should be eating?

Kevin: I already talked about fermented foods so I’m not going to go into that again. The next thing is pre-blended foods, or blended foods or pre-digested foods, and green juices. These each have their own special qualities. First, blended foods are going to help with taking the load off of your mouth and taking the load off of your stomach. Most of us don’t chew 30 times before we swallow. I think it’s important to chew 30 times before you swallow, which is called Fletcherizing. Fletcher was the guy who created that. He was onto something. But a lot of us aren’t going to do that. So what can we do? Well, we pre-blend our foods. We make fruit smoothies. We make green smoothies. Smoothies with plenty of fruits and vegetables in them. Maybe even put in some of our fermented protein powders. That will actually create a very highly-nutritious food with the fiber already broken down to some degree, particularly if it’s done in a high-speed blender. So the fiber is already broken down. That’s really important because then the food doesn’t need to stay in the stomach as long. It will, but it doesn’t need to because the HCL is not being bothered, to some degree. It’s not being completely bothered to break down all the fiber and even some of the enzymes that are going to break down some of the proteins. So blended foods are very important.

On the other side green juices take the fiber out completely so you have a highly concentrated food that has a lot of minerals in it and can be easily absorbed into the system. One thing about green juices you want to be careful of is if you do have candida issues you don’t want to drink a lot of carrots or apple or any other sweet juices. I generally recommend a green juice that contains celery, parsley, maybe a little bit of cilantro if you want to switch out the parsley, romaine lettuce, a little bit of lemon and a little bit of ginger, cucumber as well. You can play around with that recipe and maybe include some other green things that you like or take things out. That type of recipe is going to be really good green juice to get the minerals back into your system so you can actually boost your HCL production. It can boost your digestion.

In terms of recipes for blended foods I like to have a big handful of greens, a piece of fruit. You can blend your fruits and just have fruit smoothies but you do want to make sure you get in a lot of minerals. Fruits have minerals but you want to make sure you get a lot of nutrients from green vegetables. By blending them you really have a better chance of digesting them.

Second, we want to talk about minerals - more than a supplement than food. I was talking about green juices and that’s important, but sometimes you might need a little bit more of a concentrated source. The next step to go towards is seaweeds and sea vegetables. You can put your sea vegetables in your smoothies and blend them up. That will create a highly-mineralized food. People are big on super foods, that’s like super times 100 food. So you can blend your sea vegetables in there. A lot of people complain about the taste. You won’t taste them at all. Some seaweeds taste really good, like nori. A lot of people aren’t opposed to eating nori around sushi.

Other than that you could get an ionic mineral supplement such as a product called Liquid Light or some of the other ones you will find at the health food store. You can also use some mineral drops that you can actually drop into your water, like Cell Food and some other products, trace mineral drops, that you can drop into your water and that can add minerals.

Finally, in this category there’s also a product called marine phytoplankton. That is actually plankton. It’s actually




a plant source from the ocean that is highly mineralized. This contains a lot of different trace minerals and can be a valuable product for you to help rebuild your minerals.

Next up we have fermented protein products. You can add one or two scoops of these into your daily protocol, particularly if you have poor digestion, particularly if you have issues that may show signs of protein deficiency like weak nails, hair that starts to become brittle. Make sure that you can incorporate some of these things into your diet. For people who do have low HCL this is a really important thing.

B12 and B complex vitamins. B complex vitamins are important for a bunch of different systems. They’re important for adrenals. They’re important for your thyroid. They’re important for your digestion. All these things B vitamins help with in the entire body. Again, if you’re not getting them through digestion, or if you’re not absorbing them, then you need to supplement with them. B12 is essential and especially important because if your digestive tract is not working properly then you’re probably not absorbing the B12 you need to absorb. This is something that a lot of people have been talking recently. When B12 gets into your stomach what it does is it binds what they call the intrinsic factor. Without that intrinsic factor B12 wouldn’t be able to be absorbed through your intestines. Think of it like a key. The B12 alone is actually the wrong key and it doesn’t fit into the receptors that are on the lining of your small intestine. When it is paired with the intrinsic factor then it becomes the right key and the small intestine villi will pull that in and they’ll recognize it and then bring that B12 into your liver to go into your bloodstream.

So for people who have digestive challenges, they’re probably not producing enough intrinsic factor, either. Then their B12 can become very low and that can create neurological issues. So we want to take B12. But in this case what we don’t want to do if our digestion isn’t working properly, we want to make sure that we take it in the form that’s effective. If your levels are really low you can take shots because that goes directly into your bloodstream. The second is a B12 patch which you put behind your ear for 24 hours, so maybe once a week or twice a week depending on how low your levels are. That will raise your B12 levels also.

Some of the B12 pills that you take in the mouth, you’re actually supposed to have them sit and have them dissolve in your mouth because the B12 is not supposed to be swallowed. It’s supposed to be absorbed through your mucus lining in your mouth. So that’s how that gets into your bloodstream. If you’re just swallowing your B12 supplements or just taking them by mouth, sometimes there’s not enough B12 to get into your system. That’s where the other two processes can be helpful, the shots or the patch that goes behind the ear.

Other foods that you can eat for good digestion. Let’s move onto the colon and the gut. Aloe. Aloe is a cactus. It’s a very beautiful cactus. Aloe is a very mucilaginous type of food. You can find aloe in some health food stores. You cut off the outer green skin. What you’ll find is this very clear, slippery gel. This aloe gel is just as slippery and just as slimy inside your stomach. For those people who have challenges of inflammation of your gut, this can be very soothing. It can help actually bring things through your gut without having them be very abrasive. Some foods and some fibers are more abrasive than others. So this aloe will actually help to bring things through your gut.

Some people like aloe juice. One of the challenges with aloe juice is that a lot of them are denatured because they’ve been around for a long time or they’re in clear containers. If you’re going to buy aloe juice you want to make sure that you get it in a dark container. A lot of studies they’ve done on aloe have been done on real fresh aloe. The aloe juice is not as effective as the real thing. So you can try the aloe juice but a lot of times you want to make sure you get it fresh. You can order fresh aloe online, as well, and get that shipped to you.

Also to help with moving things through the gut and through the intestines is chia. Chia is hydrophilic, so not




mucilaginous, but it becomes mucilaginous. It is hydrophilic, which means that it takes on water. It can take on up to ten times the amount of water in terms of its size. So you have these little seeds that can expand very large. They’re not huge, but they can expand. This can create that same type of smooth, steady flow through the small intestine and the large intestine. You can make a chia porridge in the morning or you can add these things into your diet.

Someone who has these challenges, we want them to do the best to introduce as many of these things into their diet because this is a holistic type program. We want to make sure that you do all these things to help. A lot of people ask about psyllium. How is psyllium related to chia? Well, chia is much less abrasive. Chia is not as abrasive as psyllium because psyllium is the husk. Psyllium does expand and it is hydrophilic, just like chia, but chia is not as abrasive. So chia is actually better for the gut system.

For someone with diverticulitus, you don’t want to have chia at all. You don’t want to have any small nuts or seeds because those can get caught in the diverticuli and they can actually start to cause infection.

Two other things here, enzymes and herbs. Digestive enzymes are very good to take with meals, particularly if you’re having high protein or high fat or even a high carbohydrate type meal. This will help your body take a little bit of a break and not overuse some of the enzymes that it’s producing. You body can produce enzymes as long as it has enough amino acids. So we want to make sure that we get some enzymes. We want to make sure that our enzymes are working. We want to make sure our body is producing enzymes, but at the same time we can actually take enzymes to help through the digestive process, particularly until our digestion heals.

You can find digestive enzymes through Healthforce and a few other companies. They’re very good products and they actually do what they say they’re going to do.

Finally, there are herbs that you can take, particularly for the small intestine and even the stomach, that can be really helpful. These are not herbs that will destroy bacteria yet. I’m just talking about supporting herbs. Number one is ginger. Ginger has been known for many, many years. Ginger tea, ginger and lemon tea can be really helpful for soothing stomach pain. Peppermint essential oil or even peppermint tea can be very effective for soothing the stomach as well as soothing the gut. Fennel is another herb that can be used. Where we live in northern Connecticut it grows like crazy. You can just go out and pick it and use it however much you want. And then even cinnamon is very good for digestion. It’s good for regulating blood sugar as well as speeding up the metabolism a little bit so you might be able to burn through your food a little bit quicker, as well as just helping with overall better feeling in terms of your gut and how you’re digesting. So ginger, peppermint, fennel and cinnamon. These are all herbs that you can take. Cinnamon comes from the inner bark of a tree. Ginger is a root. Peppermint is from the mint family. Fennel is a bulb or you can actually take the herb, the actual leaves, you can make them into tea for your own digestive tonic. Ginger, lemon and fennel can be made into a tea. Fresh ginger, fresh fennel and fresh lemon and you boil that up. That’s a really powerful digestive tea.

Lisa: Awesome. Everything that you’ve just given us was related to step three, how to cultivate your gut.

Now we’re onto the last step. Step four, clean out the colon. Would you take us through step four please?

Kevin: Sure. First, the large intestine is an extension of the small intestine. So a lot of the same things will work. A lot of the same things will help, particularly aloe, chia, blended foods, the enzymes and green juices. So these things kind of transfer over. Any high-fiber, low animal product diet is going to be helpful for the colon. That is absolutely, positively something that just works and is effective for the colon. The colon needs fiber in order for it




to not become inflamed, in order for it not to become strained, in order for stool to move very easily and quickly through the bowels.

So if we have a higher fiber diet we’re going to move things very quickly and we’re going to have two to three bowel movements a day, right after meals. That’s when you should be having your bowel movements. Everything is going to work like clockwork.

Two other things that are effective specifically for the colon are colonics and enemas. A lot of people think this is gross stuff and, “Why would you stick a tube where the sun don’t shine and clean out everything?” Well, studies have shown that this can be an effective way to start the cleansing process and the rebuilding process of the digestive system. So people who have had sluggish bowels for a long time can get a few colonics or they can go for a series of colonics and they can start to move their bowels regularly. Enemas as well. Enemas are something you can do at home. So seeing a colon hydrotherapist or considering a colonic is very important. For someone who has never done one before, it might be valuable to go four or five or six times. Just check with your colon hydrotherapist and see what they say, just to get everything moving and make sure everything is cleaned out.

Enemas are important because what you can do is you can actually use implants. The implants have some very specific roles when it comes to cleaning out the colon. Wheatgrass is one. It’s high in chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is an antimicrobial substance so it can actually help cleanse the colon as well as your colon will absorb some of the chlorophyll and some of the minerals from wheatgrass. That will actually improve your nutrition, because the colon does absorb minerals and water as we talked about before. Just the act of adding water to the colon will actually create more hydration for you. You’re going to be absorbing some of that water through the colon walls.

Probiotic implants can be helpful for rebuilding the flora in your colon. We talked about that earlier. When the gut flora is in balance in your colon then you’re able to maintain a pH and it keeps the bad bacteria from growing. That’s really important because that can cause infection. It can cause a whole bunch of other issues.

And then coffee enemas are another type of enema that you can do. The Gerson Institute has used coffee enemas for a long time because it actually stimulates the liver to release some of the toxins and release some of the chemicals and the things that it might be containing that are causing it to be sluggish. The liver is part of the digestive system. We talked about the liver releasing bile. It’s also filtering your blood. If the liver is functioning properly then you’re able to create the bile you need to digest the healthy fats or digest any fat and break it down so your body can absorb it.

Lisa: Kevin, would you run over the steps again, just so we know what to do?

Kevin: Absolutely. This is a lot of information. I want to make sure that you get it all. You start with step one. You start with cleaning out your mouth. You make sure that you have an antimicrobial soap or tooth product and you start flossing so you remove the bad bacteria.

Step two, fire up your stomach. Check your HCL levels. If you have ulcers we’re going to deal with that in a very specific way in the next module. You want to make sure that you eat less protein-dense foods or you use pre-digested proteins or pre-digested protein powder.

Three, you want to cultivate your gut. Get a stool test and see. If you have really bad bacteria you might consider using an antibiotic or an antimicrobial or antifungal so not only bacteria but yeast. Or you might try an herbal approach. We’ll talk about that in part three. You want to add fermented foods into your diet. You want to




make sure that you avoid dairy, excess meat, gluten and excess sugars. Some of the foods that you introduce - have a green smoothie in the morning, or a green juice. Get some sort of mineral supplement, whether it’s the Liquid Light that I spoke about, some sort of trace mineral supplement or seaweeds. Get yourself one scoop or two scoops of fermented protein a day, particularly if you feel like you need that protein. B12 and B complex. Introduce aloe or chia or both. Get a set of digestive enzymes or a product with digestive enzymes. Then use these herbs as needed - cinnamon, ginger, peppermint, fennel.

Step four. If you’ve never cleaned out your colon before what you want to do is you want to meet with a colon hydrotherapist and you want to see if that works for you. If not, you can try enemas. Make sure that you eat a lot of high fiber foods. By eliminating the processed foods and eliminating the excess meats and dairy in your diet you’re going to be eating plenty of high fiber foods.

So that’s the whole process.

Lisa: Great. Thank you so much, Kevin. This has been extremely informative and we really appreciate your time and your knowledge on this subject.

This is the end of module two. Be sure to listen in to the next module. We’ll be discussing specific strategies for specific issues. Thanks so much for listening in and we’ll talk to you next time.

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MODULE 3






[MUSIC]


Kevin has overcome his own digestive challenges, as well as studied alternative and functional health with some of the top experts in the subject. He’s the author of five books on nutrition, healthy eating and exercise. In this third module Kevin will be speaking about specific protocols for specific issues.

Kevin, welcome to the call.

Kevin: Thank you, Lisa. This is going to be a really fun part of the call because this is usually, when we do a talk around

the country, this is usually what people want to know. They say, “Well, I have this. What can I do for it?” Today that’s what we’re going to be running over. We’re going to running over some of the things that I’ve learned over time, some of the things I’ve personally experienced, some of the things that have worked and some of the things that have not worked. There are certain things that do not work or they just don’t work as effectively as people would like them to. So we’ll be talking about those.

Just keep in mind that it’s really important to work with a healthcare practitioner as you’re going through these issues. This information is for education and research. Work with a practitioner. I can guarantee you that the practitioner, if it’s a good practitioner, will be able to shorten the time that it takes for you to be able to get from point A to point B without having you mess around with all the different things and get some results but be confused about what might be working and what might not. A practitioner will have some of the real knowledge that will be able to help work specifically for your situation.

Lisa: Awesome. I’m excited to get started and get into the information that you have for us. My first question for you is, what are some of the specific protocols that are needed for digestion issues?

Kevin: Absolutely. What we’re going to do, we had talked in module two about the basic type of digestion protocol. That would be a protocol that you would do if you were looking to maintain good digestion. Today what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be talking about some very specific issues that you may be having and how




to address them first and then move on to the one, two, three and four steps, or just do the one, two, three and four steps as well as do some of these additional things. You’ll find that a lot of the recommendations in these specific protocols are somewhat similar, depending on what we’re talking about. A lot of the situation that you’re in is being caused by your poor digestion. So as we start to fix it and tweak it, it will get better.

First we’re going to start talking about bad digestion, indigestion and ulcers. So basically things that are starting

off in the stomach and how we can specifically address them. We talked about HCL levels in the first and second modules. Today we’re going to work very specifically on indigestion and bad digestion.

So this is what you’re going to do. First you’re going to take betaine HCL that you can find at the health food store. You’re going to take digestive enzymes. The question is how much? We talked about how much HCL you should take. Do that test that I mentioned in the second module. Take that and then for digestive enzymes take one or two capsules with every meal. The digestive enzymes that we recommend are from Healthforce Nutritionals. You can find them in the Renegade Health store. The third step with HCL levels is to lighten up your protein. We talked about this before. Lighten up your protein. If you want you can introduce some of the pre-digested proteins in the form of Sun Warrior, in the form of Warrior Food, or some sort of Potent Proteins, which is a Donna Gates Body Ecology product. Take one to two scoops of these every day.

I do want to tell you about indigestion, because I really didn’t understand the connection between low HCL levels and indigestion until I did a water fast. I did a water fast at the True North Clinic in Santa Rosa, California. Some people think that’s crazy. Some people think it’s cool. I did a five-day water fast. The purpose of a water fast is to give your body a break and allow itself to heal. There are actually some issues that we’ll be talking about in module four where water fasting is really appropriate, some digestive issues that water fasting is phenomenal for, when you’re dealing with inflammation.

So what I did was five days of water. When you do a water fast your HCL levels do drop. You do lessen your production of HCL. The day that you break a water fast, what you do is eat a lot of fruit, maybe some green juices. That’s for a short water fast. A longer water fast you might just do juices. On the second day I got a little bit antsy and had some of the beans and rice that they had at the buffet. True North has a vegan kitchen without any salt or oil. So it’s kind of very plain, but very good food. So I ate maybe about a half a cup of rice and about a half a cup of beans with my salad. I had never really experienced indigestion before. But within 20 minutes or so my stomach was feeling awful. To the point where I said, “What did I eat?” What had happened was I was actually feeling heartburn, feeling indigestion. It was because my HCL levels were so low. What I did was I took some HCL after my meals, after that, knowing that, and cut back on the rice and beans. That’s why I want you to lighten up your protein a little bit. Everything felt fine until my HCL levels came back to homeostasis, or came back to life, if you will.

So that’s what you’re going to do if you’re having indigestion or if you’re having some bad stomach/heartburn type issues or if you feel like you know you have low HCL. Those are the things to do.

I’ll go over it one more time. You take betaine HCL with meals. Digestive enzymes with meals. So that’s one to two capsules of Healthforce. Lighten up your protein. So excess meat, excess dairy, even rice and beans, let them go for a little bit. Just do a simple week-long protocol where you do a lot of blended foods and make smoothies . If you feel like you want to add some protein you can add some of the pre-digested proteins, the Sun Warrior, Warrior Food and the Potent Proteins. That’s going to be your simple protocol to start. Once you start to feel better then move in through the one, two, three and four steps that we mentioned in module two.




Lisa: I just want to intercept for a second. I know a lot of women who are pregnant have indigestion. Would the protocol for them be the same or would it be different?

Kevin: That would be absolutely the same. As long as it’s due to low HCL levels, then that’s going to be the same.

Let’s move on. Next is ulcers. If you’re having ulcers, definitely go to a medical practitioner and see what they say. Maybe they can even test for H. pylori. If you have H. pylori then there’s a couple things that you can do. First you want to work very specifically on the infection that’s causing the ulcers. What you can do is you can do this naturally. There is a specific tea called matula herbal tea. This is a mixture of wild olive, wormwood, aloe, licorice, thorn tree and a bunch of other herbs. This has been clinically shown to eliminate H. pylori in the stomach. This is a tool that you can use. It’s a tea. You just brew it and drink it on a regular basis. That will help eliminate the H. pylori. You can even go back and take a test and see if it worked for you. You’ve now eliminated what is causing 60 percent of the ulcers in the stomach.

The next step is, while you still have the ulcers and they’re trying to heal, what you want to do is load up on celery and cucumber juice. Take one head of celery, one cucumber every day in the morning. Maybe even more if you need it. Juice it. Get a Jack LaLane Juicer, a Twin Gear Juicer. Depending on your budget. A Jack LaLane Juicer is 99 dollars. A Twin Gear Juicer can be upwards of 600 dollars. It just depends on how committed you are to this. If you’re just doing celery and cucumber juice and not doing any greens or anything like that, the Jack LaLane or even the Juice Daddy Juicer are great juicers that you can use. Drink celery and cucumber juice in the mornings before you do anything. What you’re going to do is create an environment with some minerals, which the celery has. Cucumber is soothing, has silica. What you’re going to do is create an environment in your stomach that is very soothing in the morning, particularly for people who have pain from ulcers.

The other thing that you’re going to do is you’re going to increase the minerals in your diet. You’re going to add some mineral-rich foods, green juices, seaweeds. Seaweeds will actually be helpful too because they’re mucilaginous so they’re going to be soothing to the stomach. Aloe is going to be helpful as well. And again, absorbable protein, pre-digested protein because that’s going to give your digestion a little bit of a break while you’re healing and while you’re getting yourself better.

Lisa: Can you take mineral supplements or do you recommend getting your minerals all from food?

Kevin: You can take mineral supplements. I like to go towards the natural source. So green juices, seaweeds, even marine phytoplankton. Some of these products, particularly green juice or marine phytoplankton, or even a green powder like a Sun Warrior green powder, the Ormis greens that they have, or a Vitamineral Green, these products have a lot of minerals in them. So you don’t have to have some sort of chemically-concocted mineral supplement. You can have mineral supplements that have minerals in a format that the body is very ready to digest and ready to accept. That would be the first place.

A lot of people ask how do they know if it’s working. For minerals what you do is you can get your hair tested. Hair is actually the most accurate test for minerals. You can order a hair test. Personalabs.com, only one “L”. You can actually use the code “renegade five” and get a five percent discount. They will test the amount of minerals in your hair. This is the most accurate mineral test. If you’re really curious about whether your mineral supplements or your mineral foods or your mineralized green juice is working for you, you get a hair mineral test, see where your levels are and then you take the foods or the supplements that you’re doing with your protocol and then three to six months later you test again and see if your levels have increased. That’s really the best way to know if something is working for you.




When my minerals were low due to some of the experiments that I had done, I did a hair mineral test and my magnesium and my calcium were in the 16th and 20th percentile. That’s ridiculously low. Magnesium is very, very essential for a lot of our different body functions, particularly to help eliminate muscle cramps. I was getting a lot of muscle cramps. Potassium as well. So I got the hair test and saw that these were low and I started to do a protocol to rebuild my minerals. What I did was do green juice, seaweeds, marine phytoplankton, an ionic mineral supplement, which is Liquid Light, and I did a trace mineral drop produce, Cell Food. There’s some other ones as well that you can use. This is what I used. Some people may ask which one worked for me. The reality is that it doesn’t really matter. What matters is my mineral levels were brought back to normal using this specific protocol. I would prefer to use minerals in foods and dry food supplements, that’s what the green powders are, to try to rebuild your minerals first. And then move forward. Just because they’re what nature has provided for us. When you dry a food it’s not exactly what nature has provided for us, but it’s what nature has provided for us in a way that’s complementary. So the minerals are all in complementary amounts.

Lisa: Speaking of hair. Can you tell us a little bit more about weak hair and nails? I know you’ve discussed the minerals, but tell us more about it.

Kevin: Sure. Weak hair and nails is almost directly related, one, to digestion and two, to not being about to get the amino acids that you need from your food. You’ll know it if you have it. People have asked why their hair and nails are weak. You look at them and you’re like, “Yes, I can see it.” The hair is frizzy and it looks almost pale. It doesn’t have like a shine to it. The same with the nails. The nails will be dull. They’ll be cracked. They’ll be ridged. They might even be too thick or they might be too thin. They might be very brittle. You’ll know. You’ll absolutely know if you have this. Again, this is directly related to low HCL, low enzymes and to your protein absorption.

So what we need to do here is we need to get you some HCL and some digestive enzymes, just like I said before for the issue of low HCL. You’re going to take HCL with your meals, just like I had outlined in module two. You’re going to take digestive enzymes with your meals as well, one or two capsules with every meal. You’re going to increase your minerals and absorbable protein. So you’re going to use some of the mineral things that I was just talking about before, the mineralized foods, and work with those. You’re going to get some Sun Warrior protein. You take that in a smoothie, either in the morning or afternoon. It doesn’t really matter. One to two scoops of that.

Two other things for strong hair and nails. What you’re going to do is get some MSM, which is a sulfur compound. Sulfur is important for almost all your body functions. By getting some more sulfur into your diet it will increase the growth of hair and nails. So MSM, methylsulfonic methane. You can find this in a health food store. You can find it online. It’s very readily available. You take a couple capsules of those once or twice a day until you see improvement.

Another thing to take with MSM, just because it’s going to be beneficial for everything… MSM is not only going to be good for your nails, it’s also going to be good for your collagen and your joints. So another thing to take while you’re taking MSM, you might as well take some vitamin C. I like vitamin C in the form of a camu camu berry or acerola cherry or rose hips. You can find those in a product called Purely C. Or you can get Truly C. Purely C is from North American Herb and Spice. Truly C is from Healthforce. We sell that in the Renegade Health store. Truly C is camu camu berry. Purely C is camu camu, acerola cherry and rose hips. Vitamin C is going to help synthesize collagen. Generally if your nails are starting to get brittle and your hair is starting to get brittle, chances are some of your other collagen-type areas are going to be weakened as well . So you might as well kind of wrap it all up and do it all at once so you can not only get external support but some internal support as well.




So weak hair and nails you’re going to take HCL with every meal, you’re going to take one to two capsules of digestive enzymes. You’re going to take some green juice or maybe a green smoothie or even add seaweeds into your green smoothie, or some other mineral-type supplement. You’re going to get some absorbable protein. This is going to be the Sun Warrior food. And MSM, a couple capsules once or twice a day. And then vitamin C. If it’s in a powder form you’re going to take a tablespoon or so in your smoothie or mix it into some water. It doesn’t taste that bad. It has kind of like a sour, sweetish kind of taste. If you’re going to take some capsules make sure you get about the equivalent of a tablespoon with your capsules.

Lisa: Great. Now Kevin, you’ve had first-hand experience with candida. What would your protocol be for people dealing with candida?

Kevin: If there’s one thing that I feel that I really know very, very strongly it’s how to help your body eliminate candida. I’ve done so many protocols. I’ve been online. I’ve ordered every single protocol. I’m sure there’s more out there that I haven’t, but I’ve taken 10 or 15 different protocols to try to help eliminate candida. What I found was that there were a few things that really worked and there was a lot of other stuff that really didn’t do anything.

What we’re going to do with this candida portion, which I think is very important, is I’m going to go through the things that really worked for me and I’m not going to include the things that didn’t work. What you can do is you can use this and it will cut down the time that it’s going to take you messing around and trying to find all the different things online and testing and trying and going to different doctors. Some will tell you that you need to do this and some will tell you that you need to do that. Some will tell you to do that and you get all confused and don’t’ really get the results because you really don’t know what’s working or you don’t even know if you have candida anymore. There’s plenty of things that can happen.

So here’s what we need to do. For candida the first and most unpopular thing that we need to do is eliminate the sugar from our diet. We need to do it for an extended period of time or at least until we’re able to take control of our gut flora again. So we need to go on an incredibly low-sugar diet. There is information out there that says that you don’t need to do this, that you can eat a high-sugar diet, high-fruit diet, as long as you eliminate the fat that’s going to eliminate candida. This is not the case. I’ve never talked to anyone who has clinical research or clinical information, evidence, that shows that this eliminated candida. If there’s someone out there, I would love to talk to them, love to have them send me this information. But it’s only been anecdotal and that, to me, is not good enough.

In my case, I had candida. I actually had those white cotton ball candida balls in my stool. Now I don’t have candida anymore. So for me I have clinical evidence. I even have pictures, which I’m not going to show you, but I have pictures of before candida and after. This is really evidence. This is a protocol that really did work.

So, first eliminate the sugar out of your diet. People ask what that means. It means no fruit. It means no sugar. It means very little grains, very little potato, very little root vegetables. It means fresh fruits and vegetables, some nuts and seeds. I’ll tell you what nuts and seeds you shouldn’t have. For some people it means making different types of cultured foods, as well as some people may need to get more calories. This is where yogurt or keifer comes into play. So a dairy yogurt or dairy keifer or a coconut keifer can be very helpful. So low sugar. That’s the number one thing. I didn’t eat sugar for one full year. My infection was that bad.

The reason you eliminate sugar is because sugar feeds the candida. Sugar feeds the yeast. I noticed that every time I would eat something with sugar my acne would flare up. This was kind of my barometer. My acne was my barometer. You might have a similar barometer, too. You might get a rash. You might get acne. You might




have itchiness. You might get a yeast infection. These are things that will be your barometer for your candida for as long as you have it until it’s gone. Then they’ll start to go away. So when you’re doing this low-sugar diet one thing that you have to do is you have to know that it’s for the short-term. It takes a lot of resolve. What happens is when a lot of people have candida is they do this for two weeks and then they fall off track and they go and have a piece of chocolate cake or they have a dessert at a restaurant or potluck. They eat something that they know they shouldn’t. Guess what happens. Just that little bit of sugar creates a little bit of a re-growth and the candida flares up and then you’re back to where you were before. So you have to have a lot of resolve. In this case you need to have a little bit of willpower. I don’t normally teach about willpower, but you do need to have willpower and say, “This is short-term. When this is over I will be able to eat some of the foods that I enjoy. I’ll be able to have smoothies with fruits and with all the things that I enjoy. But for right now I really need to take care of me.” This is an infection. This is not like something that’s an energy thing, like if you eat too much fruit or nuts and you get a little bit tired. This is an infection. This is something that can eventually cause serious issues in your body. So you need to get rid of it and then you can go on living your life. This requires a different set of circumstances and a different mindset.

So the first thing is the low-sugar diet. What you can eat, you can eat almost all the vegetables that there are. You can even eat carrots. Don’t drink carrot juice but you can even eat carrots. I know they do have a little bit of sugar but I don’t imagine that you’re going to be eating 10, 15, 20, 30 carrots, enough to actually get your gut flora or your candida happy to see sugar again. You can have lemons, in terms of fruit. Lemons and limes are going to be two citrus fruits that you can have. Nuts and seeds. There’s plenty of different nuts and seeds. Even buckwheat, which is kind of a good staple when you have candida. Yogurts, keifers, may be very effective to help rebuild your gut. If you’d like at times you can have, if you’re not opposed to eating meat, you can eat free-range grass-fed beef. You can eat free-range local chicken or turkey or whatever else. In this case you might need to do that because you’re not going to be getting your calories from carbohydrates. So you might need to replace the calorie intake or shift around your macronutrients. In this case you’re not eating carbohydrates so you might want to get some of your calories from a protein source. Again, you can do the Sun Warrior protein and you can get some calories from that as well. Again, you don’t want to be eating too many beans, too much rice or too many yams or potatoes because those can cause an outbreak or a flare-up because of the sugar content in them.

The second part of this is herbal extracts. What you’re going to do is you’re going to do a two-week rotation protocol with some specific herbal extracts. You can choose some of these, if you like, or you can just kind of go through the ones that we have here. The reason why we do a two-week rotation protocol with these herbal extracts is because these are potent herbs. What potent herbs do over time, if you continue to take them, they can become a little bit toxic to the liver and to some of your other body systems. So what we want to do is we want to go two weeks on, switch on to another one and then switch on to another one, switch on to another one, until you’ve seen some results.

The first one and one that’s pretty notable for candida antifungal is Pao D’arco. Pao D’arco is a bark. What you do is you would make a tea out of this. Or you can get a supplement from the health food store. But you really want to make sure that you’re dealing with a very good herbal company. There are some herbal companies out there that have sub-par quality herbs and there are some that have very good ones. You can even get Pao D’arco in a tincture that’s already extracted for you. In terms of tinctures we like Herb Farm. We like Gaia Herbs. In terms of the tea or just the actual bark, you can get that from Star West Botanicals or you can get it from Mountain Rose Herbs. Those are two places where they have really high quality and well-sourced herbs. What you do is make a tea and drink the tea two, three, four times a day for two weeks. Then you would switch on to the other two or three things that I’m going to talk about here.




The next step you would take is oregano oil. Oregano oil is very good for clearing up the gut. It’s incredibly antimicrobial. It can have some antifungal properties as well. So oregano oil is going to be the next one that you would take. The oregano oil from North American Herb and Spice is one of the best. It tends to have a low thymol content. Thymol, when taken in excess, even in the form of a not as pure oregano oil, can be a little bit toxic. But this has the low thymol so it’s something you could actually take tonically if you want. Oregano oil is very strong and is very strong to the taste. If you take it you will be burping it up for a couple hours. What I prefer with oregano oil is you get little capsules and you take it that way. If you take it with a dropper it’s going to be a very powerful flavor and it might change the foods that you’re eating for the rest of the day and make everything taste like pizza, which may or may not be a bad thing. But it is a very strong and powerful herb. So oregano oil. You would take two or three capsules two or three times a day with meals. Pao D’arco you don’t have to take with meals. The oregano oil you do. It’s very strong. It can be very irritable to the stomach if you don’t take it with meals.

The third part of the rotational protocol is this, Dr. Schultz’s Herbal Detox Tea. Dr. Schultz’s Herbal Detox Tea is a combination of a bunch of different herbs and a lot of different antimicrobial and antifungal herbs. This kind of takes the place of replacing a few different things. You can use this and you can cover a lot of different bases. This product does have a little Pao D’arco. It has cinnamon. It has cloves. It has a whole bunch of different antimicrobial, antifungal herbs. You would make this like a tea, just like the Pao D’arco, and you would take one, two, three cups a day, depending on how powerful your infection is. You would do this for two weeks.

How to make the tea is probably the question that some people would have, or what’s the most effective way to make the tea. The best way to do it is this. Get yourself a crock pot. For the Pao D’arco you would put your bark in the crock-pot, add water, turn it on and just keep it on. Keep it on for 24 hours, 48 hours, something like that, so you really get the compounds out of the bark. Then you would turn it on low and you would take that for two or three days, four days, however long it takes. Then you would just clean it out and start again. The same with Dr. Schultz’s Herbal Detox Tea. Put it in there. Let it simmer. Let it brew. Let it do what it needs to do. Then just leave it there. The stuff is so antimicrobial and antibacterial that it’s not going to go bad in the two or three or four days that you’re going to be drinking it. Then make a new batch and move forward from there.

So those are the three herbal products that you can use for candida. Again, two weeks of Pao D’arco, two weeks of oregano oil, two weeks of Dr. Schultz’s Herbal Detox Tea. Then you can rotate back up and go through. I would suggest doing this for about two months. Then take a two-week break and let everything come back to normal. Then you can start up again.

Let me just mention two other herbs that I people have heard about that may be effective as well if you wanted to put these in the mix, too. One is wormwood and the other is grapefruit seed extract. They’re also pretty promising for candida as well as for antimicrobial, antibacterial things.

One thing I want to say that I prefer you do not take is colloidal silver. The reason that I prefer people not take colloidal silver is not because it’s not antimicrobial and antifungal, but because colloidal silver is a rare metal. If we have herbal products that can do just as well with removing infection and bacteria or even fungus, why would we want to use a rare metal? We can use some of these herbal tinctures that are much less harmful. I know there’s a lot of information out there about colloidal silver but let’s try the herbs first because they don’t have the rare metal in them. They might have traces of the rare metal but not in the amount of the colloidal silver. Any sort of rare metal over time is something that we don’t really want to be messing with in our bodies. It can create a little bit of a toxicity. It builds up in the body, too. We just haven’t’ studied what that does over an extended period of time.




Lisa: I have a question. You were talking about the Pao D’arco and Dr. Schultz’s Herbal Detox Tea in the crock pot. How long should each of those brew before you drink your first cup?

Kevin: At least 24 hours. How we’ve done it in the past is you brew it for 24 hours and you start drinking it and then what you do is you’ll take whatever is leftover so you can start another batch, because it does take another 24 hours. Take what is ever leftover, pour it into a pitcher. You can even refrigerate it. It doesn’t need to be warm in order for it to work. Then you can just switch on and put the other batch in and then go again. Do that for another 48 and rotate through.

Lisa: Great.

Kevin: Number three is medicinal mushrooms. We use medicinal mushrooms for immune support as well as for the antimicrobial and antifungal properties. This is something that you can take tonically. What does tonically mean? It means you can take it on an every day basis.

The reason medicinal mushrooms are so antimicrobial and antibacterial is because they need to protect themselves from becoming decomposed as they are growing on dead and dying trees. So if you picture a tree mushroom growing off of a dead tree, a dead birch tree, there are microbes and bacteria and fungus growing inside of that tree that is living off of the dead material, as is the tree mushroom. So the tree mushroom has certain compounds in it that repel those microbes. The science behind the mushrooms -- Paul Stamets has done a lot of work on this. He said, “If they can repel these microbes and this bacteria from the tree, is it possible that it can do it for us?” The answer is, yes. So medicinal mushrooms are very powerful.

You can take medicinal mushroom compound or medicinal mushroom blends. We prefer the products by Paul Stamets. You can find those online at Fungi.com. There’s also a New Chapter medicinal mushroom supplement. Or you can even get medicinal mushrooms from Star West or Mountain Rose Herbs. Some of the ones you’d be looking for are chaga, reishi and cordyceps. You can take this tonically.

The fourth step here is minerals and absorbable protein. So when you have some sort of bacteria or fungal condition or infection like this, candida in particular, your body is going to turn a little bit acidic, because of the fact that it’s working very hard to fight off the infection, as well as the fact that there’s inflammation. Any sort of area of inflammation is generally lower in pH and more acidic than it normally would be.

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to take your minerals. You can do green juices, seaweeds, that whole list that I mentioned before. Then absorbable protein in this case it’s even more important because you are going to be getting your calories from proteins. You want to make sure that you do get your protein powder in. In this case, too, what you’re going to be doing is you’re not going to be adding necessarily to your green smoothie or fruit, you’re going to be adding it to a blended salad or you’re going to be adding it to a green juice and then mixing it in. It actually tastes OK. It doesn’t taste that bad. I actually enjoy the taste of it, adding the protein powder to my green juice.

Lisa: Kevin, what are some things that you should avoid if you have candida?

Kevin: Great question. Through my own experience and through my own experiments, as well as through talking to a bunch of other people, there are some things you should avoid and some things you can use that some people say you can’t use. We’re going to go through a bunch of those things right.




First off is any sort of sugar sweetener - agave, honey, maple syrup, anything like that. You just have to absolutely eliminate it, as well as any other type of sugar. Candida feeds on sugar. So we need to get this out of our system for however long it takes in order for us to rid ourselves of the infection. Again, it takes a little bit of willpower but the results are 1,000 times better than the continual acne break out or rash or digestive problems, diarrhea, all the other things that come with having some sort of candida issue.

Fruits can absolutely not be used for the beginning. What you can do with fruits is to know when you can bring some of them back is to start introducing some of the low-glycemic fruits back into your diet. So what you would do is maybe introduce some blueberries or some strawberries or some raspberries or something like that, currants -- fresh currants, not dried currants. That will be something that you can slowly introduce and you can see if some of your symptoms come back. If they don’t then you have improved enough to be able to add those things into your diet. That’s how you know. That’s how you’re going to get back into your normal type of eating. You’re going to test it a little bit. The first thing to test it with are with low-sugar, low-glycemic type fruits and grains, things like that.

Dried fruits are things that you’re going to avoid as well. You want to avoid the dried fruit because they’re concentrated sugar.

The fourth thing is something that people get really upset about, because they’re absolutely delicious and everyone loves to eat them, but they actually have a high carbohydrate content for a nut. These are cashews. Cashews will definitely set off a candida infection or set off a candida flare-up. So you want to make sure that you avoid cashews as well. I know that’s disappointing to some but that’s really how it is. I know a lot of people who have been struggling with candida issues and they continue to have flare-ups. When we’ve identified that it’s been the cashews they’ve gotten much better afterwards. So those foods you should avoid.

Again, this doesn’t mean that you have to avoid these foods for the rest of your life. What it means is that for this period of time while you’re dealing with this specific infection you need to just let go of them and know that they’re just not working for you right now and one day you can try them again. I wouldn’t recommend having processed sugar or agave at any time. But this is entirely up to you. This is your personal decision. This is your personal journey.

Again, how you introduce them back, just like I said with the low-glycemic fruits, you slowly go about it, even take note of when you did it because your mind might play tricks on you and you start introducing blueberries and then four days later you’re like, “Maybe I should try cashews again.” That’s not going to be the approach that’s going to work for you.

Things that are OK, that some people say may not be OK or things there’s a lot of confusion about, we’ll go over them right now. Stevia is an OK sweetener. Stevia is an herb. It is a green-leaf herb. If you’re going to use stevia please use a green powder, which is just the ground-up herb. This is going to be the best way to use stevia. There are white powder stevias. That’s an extract of some of the sweet compounds from the stevia. That is a processed food. We don’t want to add a processed food into our diet. We want to eat the real thing. Green-leaf stevia is a very good product that you can use to sweeten things up. Take note. Don’t use a lot of it at first. You’ll get very well adapted to stevia.

One of the things that I would eat on a regular basis while I was working with candida was I would make a chia porridge. I would get some chia seeds and I would mix in some buckwheat as well as some sunflower seeds. I would add a little bit of stevia and I would mix that together. When I could finally add a little bit of fruit back I




would put some blueberries in there as well. But that was my buckwheat porridge. That was a nice, filling meal that I could eat that gave me the feeling that I was eating some calories and eating something dense. That was something that worked for me for a long time.

Other things, to go back to the things that you should avoid, any of the powdered extracts like Lucama or mesquite, anything like that is going to aggravate your candida as well.

Nutritional yeast is OK for candida. Some people seem to believe that because nutritional yeast and candida are both yeasts that it will cause flare-ups. That’s not the case. Nutritional yeast is completely pasteurized and dead. It’s been cooked. All that’s left is the proteins and the B vitamins and residual metabolites that the yeast produced. It’s actually highly nutritious and good for you. I wouldn’t eat 16 tablespoons of nutritional yeast, but if you want a tablespoon of nutritional yeast added to something that is OK.

Definitely fermented foods. This is kind of the fifth step of this whole protocol. We did the low-sugar diet, the two-week rotation protocol, medicinal mushrooms for immune support, minerals and absorbable protein and fermented foods, any type of fermented foods you can get your hands on. Do it every meal if you can. See if you can do it every meal, just to overpower the candida, overpower the yeast. Then of course, all vegetables besides root vegetables and grains are going to be very good for you. They’re going to get you a lot of minerals and a lot of nutrition and they’re not going to aggravate the yeast problem.

So that’s the protocol. That’s the five steps. One more time I’ll go through. You’re going to eliminate the sugar from your diet. You’re going to start a two-week rotation protocol - Pao D’arco, oregano oil, Dr. Schultz’s Herbal tea - and rotate through those. You can add wormwood or grapefruit seed extract into that rotation if you’d like. Some people find that some things work better for them. Take medicinal mushrooms on a regular basis for immune support as well as antimicrobial, antifungal properties. You’re going to add minerals and absorbable protein. The minerals will help your body become more alkaline and absorbable protein is going to give you some calories from a macronutrient that is not carbohydrates. You’re going to add fermented foods into your diet. In this case, this may be a time where fermented goat’s products may be very effective to help with your energy levels as well as help sustain the amount of calories that you need, particularly for people who are very active. This is what I used. I used the fermented goat’s milk. It took me a long time to come to terms with that because I had been vegan for a very long time. The fermented goat’s milk allowed me to regain some of my body weight. You do get somewhat thin doing this protocol. The goat’s keifer and goat’s dairy did help me rebuild my energy and rebuild some of my body weight. Like Hippocrates said, let food be thy medicine. Goat’s keifer is much different than just a goat’s milk because the milk sugar is eaten up by the bacteria. Now you have a wonderfully cultured food where the protein is broken down by the bacteria. You have a cultured food.

Some people would disagree with me on that, but I look toward some of the research of Norman Walker, who lived to be 101 years old. That’s fairly compelling to me. I’ve listened to a lot of people who’ve healed their gut challenges with fermented yogurts and fermented keifers, fermented milks. I look towards that. I think there’s something of value here. Let food be thy medicine, just like Hippocrates said.

So that’s the candida approach. How do you move from it? Once you’re seeing results you start to reintroduce some of the foods, low-glycemic foods, and see how it goes and move on. For me, for a year I didn’t have any sugar. I started to have some berries. Then I started to introduce some cooked and steamed yams, some of the steamed grains. Sometimes I introduced them too soon. I wouldn’t take them again for another month, two months, and then I’d introduce them again and see what happened. Eventually what happened is I was able to eat all the foods that I liked again and don’t have any candida. So that’s really valuable information.




Lisa: I love hearing your experience, Kevin. You’ve done so much research on it because you have gone through it. It takes all of the legwork out for somebody who is experiencing candida or if they have a family member or a friend or somebody close to them who is dealing with this. They can just give this to them or look at it and know step by step exactly what to do.

Kevin: The hardest thing is the sugar, because people will sabotage it over and over and over again. I did. I have this strong willpower and sense about me and I sabotage myself. It’s frustration. There’s a mental side of it. It’s very frustrating looking towards all these things. “Maybe I should just take antibiotics. Maybe I should take antifungal.” If you stay the course and you’re very strong with it then you might not need to.

In some cases the antifungal may be the best way to clear it out and then you work on rebuilding your gut. This is where a health practitioner comes in and they might be able to help you out. I know Dr. Mark Hyman, who is a functional medicine doctor and someone who I look up to, he at times will use an antifungal medication because it just does the work real fast and then he works on rebuilding the gut flora that’s been low. Maybe even antifungal and antibiotic and then rebuilding the gut. Donna Gates recommends that as well, sometimes.

Each case is very individual. You have to think about it. A lot of people don’t like to think about it. But if you think about it and use good judgment you’ll be able to find the answers for yourself.

Lisa: Is there any place you would recommend people going for support? You had mentioned there’s a big mental component to this. Any support groups or anything of that nature?

Kevin: The best place to get support is through some of the online forums. We have one at Renegade Health at social.renegadehealth.com. There are plenty of people there who have experienced this type of thing. Just start asking questions and being around. You can also go to local potlucks and see if anyone has dealt with it. Go to health food potlucks, vegetarian, potlucks, vegan potlucks, Paleolithic diet potlucks. Go there and meet a lot of new people. They’ll be able to help you through a lot of stuff.

Lisa: Awesome. How about bad gut bacteria and poor gut bacteria?

Kevin: Bad gut bacteria, poor gut bacteria, what we’re going to be doing is first identifying what you have. This is kind of important because if you have something that’s really kind of potent or dangerous, say e.coli or salmonella, something like that, this is a case where antibiotics might be very appropriate. So by doing some sort of stool testing you can identify what’s going on in your system and then you can kind of pick and choose the different protocols that you’d like to do.

So first with bad gut bacteria, we need to wipe out the bad stuff. That doesn’t mean that there’s one pill or one substance or one supplement that will kick e. coli and then maybe leave your bifidus or your acidophilus alone. Any sort of antimicrobial or antifungal type of substance has an effect on all different types of bacteria. Some are more effective for certain strains. But they all do have some effect on the gut flora.

So we want to go through some different foods and different things that you can take. The rotation protocol is very effective in this way, that two-week rotation protocol. So identify what you have and then what you can do is you can do oregano oil, grapefruit seed extract, wormwood, Dr. Schultz’s Herbal Detox tea. This starts off to be very much the same as the candida approach, because it’s very similar. In one case there’s fungus and in this case there’s just bad bacteria, there’s a bacteria overgrowth. So oregano oil, grapefruit seed extract, wormwood, Dr. Schultz’s Herbal Detox tea.




Number two is medicinal mushrooms. Again, we’re going to be taking medicinal mushrooms because they’re antimicrobial.

The third part of this is culinary herbs. You can use this for candida as well but particularly with bad gut bacteria, culinary herbs can be very effective for eliminating some of the bad imbalance in your gut. If you think about some of the very warm places around the planet, they’ve used spicy foods, India, Southeast Asia, even some parts of Africa, they’ve used spicy foods for thousands and thousands of years. They’ve realized that it can almost be a way to help preserve the food because some of the spices are very antimicrobial. Chilies are very antimicrobial. Cinnamon, cloves, rosemary, garlic. Using these herbs in your foods can actually help while you’re doing some of the other things. So let your food work with you.

In the case of bad gut bacteria, the difference between candida and bad gut bacteria is that you don’t need to necessarily eliminate all the sugars. You can still have some fruit and you can still have some of the other foods that you want. Candida just happens to be very aggressive when it comes to sugar so we want to make sure that we eliminate that.

Number four, minerals and absorbable protein again. The same deal as with candida. And number five is fermented foods. Fermented foods in the form of cultured vegetables, yogurts, keifers, into your diet on a daily basis.

Lisa: Kevin, how about allergies? What’s the protocol for that?

Kevin: Allergies can be complicated. I’m going to address a protocol that will help you determine if your allergies are directly related to your diet. Allergies can be related to a lot of things. They can be related to pollen. They can be related to dust. Or they can be related to foods that you’re eating. Or the foods that you’re eating can cause just enough of a histamine and allergic reaction that the other things in your environment then start to give you an even more allergic reaction.

The best way to understand if your allergies are coming from your digestion is to go on an elimination diet. A lot of people don’t like the idea of that because it does eliminate foods from your diet. But it’s going to give you the most information, out of all the other techniques. Maybe even more so than some of the allergy testing. This is real hands-on experience for you. By eliminating certain foods for a certain period of time you’ll be able to see what really is working and how it feels when you get better. An allergy test will just give you a list of different foods that you’re not supposed to eat. You can look at those and say, “How could I be allergic to that?” Or, “I’m definitely not allergic to that.” Or, “I wonder if I am allergic to that.” That doesn’t really mean anything. There’s no emotional attachment to it and you haven’t really felt what it feels like to be without allergies. When you work on an elimination diet what you can do is remove something from your diet, like let’s say dairy, and then you can start to feel better and be like, “Wow, I really could possibly be allergic to dairy.” In my own personal experience, I had mentioned this before, when I went to that Tony Robbins Seminar and I removed dairy from my diet for two weeks and then ate it again, after that two weeks my stomach was so upset and my razor burn started to come back, I said to myself, “Wow, this elimination diet is really, really powerful.”

So what you can do for the elimination diet is to pick one or two or three or six or all of these things and you can eliminate either them all from your diet or you can start one at a time and see what makes your symptoms better or see if anything changes.

Here’s a list of things that you can eliminate from your diet and see if your symptoms improve. The first is dairy.




Second is nuts and seeds. Third is wheat. Outside of nuts and seeds, I have it separate here, is sesame seeds. Chocolate. Legumes. Soy, soy is a legume. And then anything else you may think is affecting you negatively. So dairy, nuts and seeds, wheat, sesame seeds, chocolate and anything else that may be affecting you negatively. Legumes. Soy, soy is a legume. Maybe certain herbs as well. Maybe berries. Things that you’re taking too much of. Maybe you’re allergic to the pollen that’s on apples or pears or any sort of other stone fruit.

What you want to do is this. You want to sit down and make a journal of this. You want to take notes and make sure that you have all the information. What you’re going to do is pick one and eliminate it for two weeks and see what happens to your body. See if you feel better. See if your allergies go away. If your allergies do not go away then what you can do is choose to introduce that back into your diet or you can move on to the next thing and eliminate both of those things. For instance, if you are eating a lot of dairy and you decide dairy might be the culprit and you eliminate that from your diet and two weeks later you don’t feel better then you move on to nuts and seeds. You can either incorporate the dairy back into it or just go without the nuts and seeds too and see what happens. I would recommend that type of approach because then you can really kind of clean out your system as well from some of the things that may be a little more clogging in your body than they are beneficial.

You would do that over a period of time and if you go through this list of dairy, nuts, seeds, wheat, chocolate, legumes, anything else that you may be thinking might be affecting you negatively, if you go through that process chances are you’re going to find it. These are some of the most allergenic foods that there are. There are certainly more but these are some of the most allergenic foods. So if you can identify these things and you can eliminate them, chances are your allergies are going to get better. I’m not going to say they will 100 percent but they might be due to some sort of external issue. This type of protocol will work for the majority of people. Then you’ll really know. You can do this with kids as well, who may be getting rashes or eczema. You can eliminate these things from the diet and see if that improves. Sometimes, particularly if it’s a rash or if it’s some sort of abrasion thing that starts to happen, even open-sore type of issue, it does take a little bit of time for those things to heal. So don’t lose faith right away if it doesn’t seem like the rash or something is healing because sometimes it does take two or three or four weeks for something like that to kind of completely go away.

Lisa: Kevin, you can also go to a naturopath who would be able to test you for allergies or food sensitivities, to make this a little bit easier. But the elimination diet is really the most tried and true way to go, even though it does take a lot of time. Is that true?

Kevin: Like I said in the beginning, I’ve taken plenty of different allergy tests. One thing that my aunt, who used to do allergy testing, used to say to me is, “I can have someone come into my office and I can test them one day and they can have a set of different allergies that come up and then I can test them two days later and a different set of allergies come up.” So she really questioned a lot of the accuracy of some of these tests. I think it could drive you crazy. This is really one of the most effective ways to do it in a way that actually gives you results, too, so you can physically feel how you feel instead of just looking at a sheet of paper that says you’re allergic to 100 different things and you don’t even know where to start.

Lisa: Great. Before we end the call, do you want to summarize everything that we’ve talked about in this module, the specific protocols that are needed for digestive issues?

Kevin: Sure. Let’s run through it. Again, you’ll have an outline of these in the program. But I’ll run over them one more time.

So bad digestion, indigestion and ulcers. What you’re going to do is raise your HCL levels, you’re going to take




betaine HCL, digestive enzymes, lighten up your protein.

H. pylori and ulcers, you’re going to try matula tea, take celery and cucumber juice, increase your minerals and your absorbable protein.

Weak hair and nails you’re going to increase the minerals and protein as well, MSM, which is a sulfur compound, and vitamin C.

Candida what you’re going to do is a low-sugar diet, two-week rotation protocol of herbs, medicinal mushrooms, minerals and absorbable protein, fermented foods. You’re going to avoid agave, sugar, honey, dried fruits, fruits. Cashews, stevia and nutritional yeasts are OK.

For bad gut bacteria and poor gut bacteria it’s very similar to the candida approach. You’re going to do an herbal two-week rotation protocol, oregano oil, grapefruit seed extra, Dr. Schultz’s Herbal tea. Number two, you’re going to take medicinal mushrooms. Number three, you’re going to add culinary herbs like chilies, garlic, cinnamon, cloves, rosemary into your diet. There’s other ones, too. Just go through the ethnic foods and pick some of the ethnic foods you like and those should be fine. You’re going to add minerals and absorbable protein as well as fermented foods.

Then for allergies you’re’ going to do an elimination diet. So you’re going to remove some of these things from your diet on a two-week basis and see how the results go - dairy, nuts and seeds, wheat, chocolate, legumes, soy and anything else that you think may be affecting you negatively.

Lisa: Awesome. Thank you for that, Kevin. This is the end of module three. Be sure to listen in to the next module where we’ll be discussing the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about digestion. Thanks so much for listening in and we’ll talk to you next time.

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MODULE 4






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Kevin has overcome his own digestive challenges, as well as studied alternative and functional health with some of the top experts in the subject. He’s the author of five books on nutrition, healthy eating and exercise. In this fourth module Kevin will answer specific questions on digestion that we haven’t addressed yet. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you.

Lisa: Thank you. Today we’re going to talk about, in this module, frequently asked questions. Do you want to give a brief overview before we start?

Kevin: Sure. There’s a lot of questions about digestion that we haven’t covered yet. So today in this module what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be talking a lot of it. One is acne. We’re going to be talking about sugar replacements and even addiction to sweets. How to ferment for yourself. So we’re going to run down how to ferment yogurt, kefir, cultured vegetables. How to deal with constipation. How to deal with diarrhea. Food combining. What are the best times to eat? What to do if you have colitis or Crohn’s issues. And what to do if you have leaky gut type issues, as well. We’re going to run through all of these.

Remember, working with a practitioner is really the best advice. But when you learn this you can take this to the practitioner and then the two of you can have educated experience and educated sharing of information and your treatment, likely, will be better. That’s what we’re going to do here for you today.

Let’s get right into it.

Lisa: So acne, it’s something that many, many people deal with. What would you like to say about acne?

Kevin: What would I like to say about acne? Well, it’s very frustrating. It’s a very emotional thing to deal with if you have acne, particularly if you have very bad acne because at times you feel like you’re grasping for answers and




every day you look in the mirror and you can continue to have these pimples that kind of work to destroy your self-esteem. I know that from first-hand experience and I know that from the experience of other people that I’ve worked with over the last ten years or so.

For me, my acne was directly related to candida. So there’s two types of things that we need to be looking at. What’s causing it internally and what’s causing it externally? In most cases acne starts on the inside. It can either be digestion or hormones. We’re not going to be talking about hormones in this module because that’s a whole different program. But we are going to talk about if it happens to be digestive. Usually what’s happening is we’re having some sort of digestive issue where there’s an overgrowth of some sort of either candida, some other type of yeast or bad bacteria. This will cause acne on your face and back. The other side is if it happens to be an allergy. All these things will cause acne on the face, back, stomach, arms, legs, everywhere.

So first we need to look internally. The first step internally is to identify if it happens to be allergy or not. Acne is a compounded type of protocol based on some of the other protocols we talked about in module three. First we do the elimination diet. So we eliminate the foods that are generally more allergenic than others. Dairy, nuts and seeds, wheat, chocolate, legumes, soy and anything else that you may think is affecting you and causing your acne. So that’s what you start with, elimination diet.

The second thing you can do is if you find that it is allergies then you might just clear up your acne right there. If it is not allergy and it’s related to some sort of gut flora issue or some sort of yeast issue, then what you can do is you can get yourself tested, if you like. You can do a stool test and then you would need to go through the candida protocol or the bacteria protocol that I mentioned in module three. I’m not going to go over those again. You can look at the course materials and they’re in there and you can use those and you can work on it on your own.

Supplements for acne specifically, we talked about minerals. We talked about absorbable proteins. Those will be very effective. Fermented foods, whether you call them a supplement or a food, it doesn’t really matter.

The fourth thing that you can use for acne is going to be omega-3 oils. If you want plant-based omega-3s one of the best sources of plant-based omega-3s is sacha inchi oil. There’s also hemp oil or flax oil. The reason we like sacha inchi oil best is one, because of flavor. It tastes really nice. You can add it to salad dressing. And two, because 90 percent of the oils are essential fatty acids. So it’s a really high source of essential fatty acids. If you want it from animal sources then you would get it from krill oil or fish oil. The challenge with krill oil and fish oil, fish oil even more so, is they do have a possibility that they could be contaminated with heavy metals or other industrial toxins. So we want to make sure if we’re going to use a fish oil we’re going to use a product that has been tested and has kind of gone through some rigorous protocol in terms of the toxicity in them. Carlson’s, Nordic Naturals and Sonne’s, are good fish oil products. Krill oil products, Source Naturals and Dr. Mercola have those products. For sacha inchi oil you can get that at Renegade Health. We bring that in from Peru. So those are some supplements.

The reason why we want omega-3 oils is because we want to make sure that our skin is hydrated. We can do that externally but we can also do that by adding oils into our diet internally.

What’s happening topically with acne is that it generally tends to be an over-drying. It’s not necessarily because your skin is so oily. It’s because your skin is dry, your body produces more oil and the dry pores, the dry skin around the pores, clogs the pores and then the oil actually gets stuck behind the clogged skin. This is what causes the acne. So if we can internally take omega-3 oils it helps make our skin moist, as well as externally use some




different type of oil products, astringent oil products, herbal oils. Annmarie, my wife, has a whole line of herbal oils and one specifically for acne. I’ve been using this for a long time. It’s a very fine oil. It doesn’t leave your face greasy. It also has some antimicrobial herbs in it that will help deal with some of the microbial issues that happen around acne, the pussing and inflammation and redness. It will help eliminate that. You can create a really nice herbal and natural protocol to help eliminate and work with your acne.

One of the things that is also important with acne is changing your soap. Most people use a sudsy type soap when they’re in the shower. What’s happening over time is that generally sudsy soaps have an alkaline pH. There’s something on our skin called acid mantle barrier. The pH of the acid mantle barrier is about 5.5. This protects from harmful microbes that you may come into contact with on a regular basis. So if you use a very alkaline soap to wash your face, you’re going to destroy that acid mantle barrier. The alkaline soap will neutralize the acid mantle barrier. That’s what acid/alkaline does. It neutralizes things to 7. If you damage that then you’re much more susceptible to infection and your acne could get worse. So you want to have a soap or cleanser that has a pH of around 5.5. Annmarie’s cleanser has been formulated to do exactly that, to have that 5.5 pH and make sure that you don’t damage your acid mantle barrier for really healthy and preferably acne-free skin.

So to run over what to do with acne again, you want to work on that elimination diet first. See what’s going on. See if you can eliminate some of those foods. If it’s not an allergy then work on the digestive protocol, either for candida or for bad bacteria, parasites and things like that. Then supplements are pretty much the same as the all the others, with the exception of the omega-3 oils either from animal or plant sources. Try plant based sources first , like sacha inchi, hemp oil and flax. Animal sources are like krill or fish oil. The reason why the plant based oils are sometimes not as effective, and they can be very effective, for some people they have a really hard time converting some of the medium chain omega oils into long chain omega oils. Whereas the fish oil tends to have these already converted so your body absorbs them better. But again, the plant oils 10-15 percent is generally converting and for most people that is enough.

Lastly, topically, we’re a little bit biased because Annmarie does have a full skincare line that’s actually formulated and researched to do this sort of stuff. So we’d love for you to use that. The acne oil, the oily-skin oil, is very antimicrobial. It’s a very fine oil so it’s very good for people who tend to have oily skin. Then changing your soap to a cleanser that is pH balanced at 5.5. You can find other ones, we just tend to like Annmarie’s.

Lisa: Great. Those are awesome tips. Thank you.

The next frequently asked question that comes up is something that I hold very close to my heart, because I have had this addiction for years and years and years. It secretly sucks you in and it’s hard to escape its grasp. This is sugar. So many people have a problem with this, too. It’s hard to escape it. So what would you recommend for sugar replacement?

Kevin: The best sugar replacement is stevia, green leaf stevia. There are other ones on the market. There’s xylitol, yacon syrup, coconut sugar, coconut syrup. I swear every month or two a new sugar comes out, which is OK. But particularly if you’re dealing digestive issues you want to make sure that you don’t eat excess sugar. So stevia is definitely the gold standard. If you have the green, leafy powder you can add it to your teas. You can add it to some of your recipes. You can add it to whatever else that you’re sweetening. You can do this in a way that won’t interfere with some of the digestive challenges you’re having.

The biggest thing about the sugar replacement is kind of the mentality it comes from. The mentality is, “I can’t have my sugar. What can I replace it with?” What I would say is this. If you’re having trouble getting rid of sugar




I want you to look internally and say, “What am I trying to replace here with this sweet food?”

Some people say that obesity is actually a lack of sweetness in your life. Any addiction is a lack of sweetness. What you do is go out and replace it with external things instead of looking internally and seeing what really is working for you and what is not. When it comes to health I really, truly believe that people who are satisfied with their job and their relationship, they’re going to get really good results. If you look at people and you poll 30 people who love their job and love their relationship, I guarantee you that 90 percent of them are at a healthy weight, 95 percent of them are at a healthy weight and the other five are probably working towards their healthy weight because they just found a job or they just found a relationship that they’re really satisfied with.

So what we want to do with our sweet addiction is really look at the things that externally in our life are causing us to be a little bit sour and we’re looking to replace the sweet to kind of mask that. Let’s work on the real things that are at issue here and then you’ll be able to deal with your sugar cravings, you’ll be able to deal with your sweet addiction. They’ll go away once you find things that satisfy you in your life.

Lisa: I like the way you put that. That’s extremely helpful information for a lot of people out there. Going back to the stevia real quick. You had mentioned that you can use it in baking. If the recipe calls for a cup of sugar, would you use a cup of stevia or would it be less or more? What would the ratio be?

Kevin: It’s definitely not a cup of stevia. You would absolutely ruin your recipe. What you have to do is you have to experiment. I’m not a baker, so I do not know how to even bake anything, to be honest with you. What you can do is I’m sure you can find a very good baker online who has experienced this over and over again. You can get some real good information on how much you should use. One thing to be careful about is that if you’re getting it in the green stevia form sometimes they have a little bit of different potency. So you really have to figure out what’s going on.

A better way to sweeten things in this case would be to see if you can use different fruits, maybe dates or bananas. That’s another way to sweeten some of these baked goods without having to add extra sugar to it.

Lisa: OK. The next frequently asked question fermentation. You’ve touted the benefits of fermented food. I’m even adding more fermented foods into my diet because I see the importance of it. I would like to know, and many other people would like to know, how do you ferment food for yourself? Can you give us some instructions on that?

Kevin: Sure. What we’ll do is go through cultured vegetables. We’ll go through kefir and we’ll go through yogurt. We’ll teach you how to ferment.

First let’s start with cultured vegetables. A real simple recipe is to chop up a bunch of cabbage, add a little bit of caraway seeds and maybe some carrot if you like. Again, this is real simple. Maybe even a little bit of garlic. You would chop this all up and then you would put it all into a bowl. Then what you’re going to do is take a couple handfuls of that mixture, put it into a blender and you’re going to add some water to it, a couple cups of water to it. Add a teaspoon or tablespoon of honey. Then you’re going to blend. After it’s blended you’re going to add a cultured vegetable starter. Then you’re going to add sea salt. You pour that mixture back into the mixture of all the chopped vegetables, mix it around with your hand and then you start to pack that into jars. You can pack it into Ball jars. That’s usually the best way to do it. You can buy Ball jars at your local grocery store. Pack it all the way up to the top and then close the tops. Put it in a place that’s about 70 degrees. You can even cover it if you’d like. You wait about seven days and after seven days that will be cultured and ready to go.




A lot of people ask, “How do I know if it’s bad? If it sits for seven days, how do I know? I’ve never done this before.” You’ll know if it’s bad. It will look kind of a nasty brown. There will be brown spots and splotches all around. It will smell. The cultured vegetable smell is pretty bad, but it will smell off. It will smell very off. That’s how you know that you’ve done it too much or that something has gone wrong. One of the things you want to be sure of is that your glass, you spray hydrogen peroxide inside of your Ball jar. Spray it inside of it and spray it inside of your blender as well, just so you can eliminate some of the potential for maybe having some bacteria contamination. You also want to wash your vegetables with hydrogen peroxide as well, particularly if you’re using a culture starter.

The reason we use the culture starter is because you are then assured that the bacteria in there is good. You can still ferment. You can ferment cabbage and you can ferment your own vegetables and sauerkraut and you can do it without having to add the culture starter, but you don’t know exactly all the different bacteria that are in there. So we want to be able to control and ferment in the best way possible.

Kefir is very similar. I’m going to teach you how to make coconut kefir. You’re going to get coconut water from the store or fresh from a coconut. That’s obviously going to be the best. You warm it up, just to about 90 degrees. Then you would add your kefir starter into it, or kefir grains. I prefer kefir starter because the kefir grains can grow bad bacteria on it as well. You would pour the kefir starter into it and then you would put it into a Ball jar or some other container that would ferment. Just like the cultured vegetables, about seven days. You would put it in a space that’s about 65 or 70 degrees. That will ferment. You’ll know that this is good and is finished when you open it up a little bit and it gives off some gas and it has a little bit of bubbly, fizzy kind of taste to it. That’s how you make coconut kefir.

You would do the same with milk kefir. You would do the exact same thing with milk kefir, the exact same process. There’s no difference.

Yogurt is a little bit different. You can do this with coconut yogurt or milk yogurt. For coconut yogurt, you’d take the coconut meat--not the coconut meat from a supermarket around you, unless you have access to fresh young coconut meat. You take the young coconut meat and you blend that up. You add a little bit of honey to it. You would heat it up to about 90 degrees and then you would add your culture. We use a yogurt maker. YoLife yogurt maker is the one that we use from TriBest. You can find that in the Renegade Health store. You would take that culture and what the yogurt machine does is it keeps the temperature at 90 degrees and you would let that culture for 24 to 36 hours. That’s how you would get your coconut yogurt. The same with dairy yogurt. It’s the same exact process, you just wouldn’t use coconut meat you’d use milk. You’d add a little bit of honey into it and heat it up to about 90 degrees. You would add the culture, pour it into the little containers and put it in the yogurt maker. One thing about the yogurt maker is you want to make sure that you don’t put it by a window because the sun might come in and heat it up even more than 90 degrees and that might destroy your culture.

You can also make yogurt with different types of almond milks, and kefirs as well, with different types of almonds or nut milks. You can make hemp yogurt and almond milk yogurt. You do the same process. Make the almond milk, which is one part of nuts or seeds to three parts of water, blended up in a blender. Squeeze it through a nut milk bag or cheese cloth to get all the fiber out of it and then your milk. Heat it up to about 90 degrees with a little honey in there. Then you would take the culture starter, add it, put it into the yogurt maker. That’s how you make your kefir, your yogurt and your cultured vegetables.

Lisa: That sounds easy enough. I’m very excited to get started on that now.




Kevin: Yeah, it’s not bad. Even I can do it.

Lisa: Awesome. So onto the next frequently asked question. This is about constipation. What would you recommend if somebody is constipated?

Kevin: The first thing is, what are you eating? A lot of people who are constipated are eating a lot of fiber-less or very low-fiber type of foods--meat, dairy, cheese (cheese is dairy but you have to put that separately because some people say, “I don’t drink milk but I eat cheese). We want to make sure we take into account what we’re doing and realize that it could be causing the constipation. The less meat and less dairy you eat the less likely you are to be constipated.

That’s not good for someone who is constipated right now, because they’ve already eaten the dairy and they’ve already eaten the meat. So what do you do? Just like you would do before a colonoscopy, one of the ingredients in that mixture that you drink is magnesium citrate. Magnesium citrate is notorious for loosening up the bowels. There’s a product called Natural Calm that you can find in most health food stores. This is 100 percent magnesium citrate. If you take a couple tablespoons of this a day you should loosen up very quickly. This is a great way to get yourself cleaned, as well as to re-mineralize your body. A lot of people are deficient in magnesium. This will help in two ways. It will actually work with stress levels as well. So you could be constipated, agitated and all stressed out. You take a little bit of magnesium and now you’re clean and you’re cool and calm and collected . So the magnesium citrate is really good.

Coconut water is also good as well. Coconut water will work to help move your bowels also, because of the minerals and high potassium in it.

Some people choose to use an herbal product like senna, which is OK for short-term, but for long-term the bigger issue here is the lack of fiber in the diet. People who have high-fiber diets don’t get constipated. Are you going to try to use a little bit of herb to help push through the fiber-less materials that are in your stool or are you going to change your diet so that you don’t have to use anything and you’re going to be healthier in the long run? Remember, constipation, hard stools, things like that can lead to a lot of different colon issues. A lot of Americans are dealing with colon issues, diverticulitis, colon cancer, things like that. We really want to make sure that we take care of the root cause, not patch it up with some sort of fix.

Also with fiber you can add more chia, more flax to your diet. You can make that chia porridge that I mentioned earlier with some of the other foods, nuts and seeds, things like that. If you do add more fiber to your diet, particularly in the form of chia or flax, or even psyllium--I don’t necessarily recommend psyllium. I would recommend chia or flax on top of it. What you need to do is drink more water, too. Those are hydrophilic. They take on water and expand. If you’re not drinking enough water throughout your day and you’re eating a lot of chia, that could clog you up as well.

So for constipation, magnesium citrate, coconut water. If you want to try herbal, senna, you can try that. Work on getting more fiber into your diet, in terms of chia and flax, and then drinking more water.

Lisa: Great. On the other side of the spectrum we have diarrhea. What would you do if somebody had diarrhea? What would you recommend for them?

Kevin: We need to know where it’s coming from. What’s causing the diarrhea? If it’s something that’s chronic…This could be a gut flora issue. It could be a candida issue. So you want to get tested. It could be worse. If it’s acute




it could be really bad. So acute diarrhea, like you get after going to Mexico or something like that, we’ve got to get you to a doctor because they have to figure out what’s going on. Maybe they’ll test you, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just give you antibiotics. In some cases you might need to just take antibiotics from acute bacteria because bacterial infections with acute diarrhea symptoms because you want to make sure that you make it out of this situation. People die from not being treated from very serious bacteria infections that they get in other countries.

So get tested. Drink a lot of water. Coconut water. Coconut water is really important for minerals and electrolytes. Get more minerals. Green juices. Again, if things are moving through you quickly, and particularly in your colon, moving out of your colon very quickly, there’s not time for your body to reabsorb that fluid and to reabsorb the minerals that are in that fluid. That’s why we need to have the coconut water and the minerals, seaweeds, to make sure that we get those electrolytes back into our body.

Then if it’s something that is some sort of bacterial infection you need to work with your practitioner to decide if antibiotics are going to be the right choice for you. There are herbs, like oregano oil, cloves, cinnamon, black walnut husks, grapefruit seed extract, garlic, rosemary and wormwood that all can be helpful. Just like that bad bacteria protocol that I mentioned above.

One last thing about traveling and diarrhea and going to places where the food might not be that clean. Always bring with you a little bit of cayenne or chilies, oregano oil, cinnamon and garlic. What you do is you can take these with every meal. What you will do by doing that is you will greaten your chances of coming out of that country without getting sick. All those foods and supplements will act in your stomach, with the food, as very strong antimicrobial mixtures that can help you get out of that place without having to be sick or to be dehydrated or in bed for a good portion of your trip.

Lisa: Kevin, what time should you eat? Tell me about times of the day when we should be eating.

Kevin: Two times are really important. One is right when you get up in the morning. What you want to do is you want to make sure that you start your digestive process. I see a lot of people, particularly interested in weight loss, who don’t eat in the morning and when they don’t eat they drink coffee or they have coffee and a little bit of a bagel or something like that. Then they have a very small lunch and then they come home and eat from six till ten at night. They wonder why they’re overweight. It’s because they never got their metabolism going in the morning. So you need to eat in the morning, absolutely.

To have really good digestion and to have really good sleep, which good sleep implies good digestion as well, you want to eat your dinner before 8 o’clock, maybe even before 7:30 or 7 o’clock. What this will do is give your body a chance to digest your food before you go to sleep. Annmarie and I would wake up sometimes in the morning with some digestive unrest. I said one day, “I think it’s because we’re eating late.” We were eating at 9 or 9:30. So we decided to eat no later than 8 o’clock. After the first day of doing that we woke up and our stomachs were fine. So we continue to do that. That’s kind of like our family rule. Nothing feels better than getting up in the morning and not having an upset stomach.

Those are the two most important times to eat. Before 8 o’clock in the evening and when you wake up.

Lisa: Kevin, how about food combining? Does it really matter which foods are paired with different foods?

Kevin: It does, to some degree, particularly for someone who is having bad digestive issues. So if you can’t digest your




protein or your fat and you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates, you’re going to cause some digestive challenges and they’re going to show up in the form of bloating and gas. So if you have any sort of gas and bloating then you’re going to want to look towards your food combining. You’re also going to want to look towards allergies, as well. But in most cases you’re going to want to look towards food combining.

What we want to do is, I’m going to keep it simple with food combining. Macronutrients digest at different times. Carbohydrates first, then proteins, then fat. The rules with food combining are keep your meals simpler. Two, three, four or five ingredients max in your meals is going to be easier on your digestion.

The other thing is if you eat melons you want to eat your melons alone. That’ll be better for your digestion.

Don’t do starch and meat thing. That’s going to get your gut really out of balance.

When it comes to plant-based food generally plant-based foods are easier to digest so I wouldn’t be as concerned about the foods combining as with melons or as with people who are having digestive issues.

Lisa: Great. Kevin, let’s move on to the two most well-known digestive diseases, colitis and Crohn’s Disease. How do you help somebody with colitis or Crohn’s Disease?

Kevin: This is something that I really feel is best done with a health practitioner. The reason why is because it’s pretty serious, colitis or Crohn’s. What’s happening is this is an inflammatory type of disease. There’s massive inflammation. Whether it’s due to bacteria or infection, abrasion or allergies. There’s a few different theories and a few different ideas about what causes it. But we do know that it ends up in inflammation and inability for people to even stomach a lot of different foods.

When it comes to these things taking a break is really one of the most effective ways to start. I was just recently on the phone with a colleague of mine, Dr. Alan Goldhammer, from the True North Health Center in Santa Rosa. They’ve had a lot of success with colitis and Crohn’s because they do water fasting. Supervised water fasting is very, very safe and it’s very well monitored. It’s not some sort of fly-by-night kind of place. It’s a very good and well run medical institution.

What you would do is go there and you would do a water fast. They would run over all the things that you need to do. But this has been very effective. Alan has told me he’s had a lot of success with colitis and Crohn’s. That would be the first place to start. Then I would find a practitioner who is able to deal with some specific issues that you may be dealing with , based on your specific condition.

Again, the power of water fasting is that you stop everything from going through your gut so it actually has time to heal. With all the other protocols a lot of times things are still going through your gut, still causing irritation, still causing abrasion. You never have a chance to heal. Whereas a water fast can actually help stop everything, reset and then allow you to reintroduce some of the foods and see what happens. So that’s the first step for colitis and Crohn’s.

I’m not an expert in these things and I’m not going to tell you that I am. But I do know some experts who’ve had some good results. So that’s where I’m going to send you. True North Health Center, healthpromoting.org.

Lisa: If you have colitis or Crohn’s would you only recommend doing a water fast with the help of an expert or physician like Dr. Goldhammer or is it something you can do on your own?




Kevin: You would only go to a health practitioner. I would not recommend doing this alone.

Lisa: OK. One of the last frequently asked questions is about leaky gut. How would you address that? How would you help somebody with a leaky gut?

Kevin: Leaky gut is kind of a combination of all these things. Leaky gut is a breakdown of the digestive tract. Maybe this is what you have. Leaky gut can be low HCL, inability to digest, diarrhea, undigested food, irritation and abrasion, inflammation, all these things. So leaky gut kind of falls into some of the same categories as some of the protocols that I mentioned.

So what you’re going to do is do the elimination diet. You’re going to eliminate some of the foods that cause allergy. These are dairy, nuts and seeds, wheat, chocolate, legumes, soy. You want to eliminate these types of foods, see if you get any better and then what you want to do is go through some of the protocols. You want to get HCL into your diet. You want to get some digestive enzymes into your diet. You want to get some absorbable protein, some minerals. You want to get more fiber into your diet, less meat. And you want to use pre-blended foods. You might even want to do a smoothie for a week or so, or two weeks, just to kind of get your digestive tract to relax a little bit and give it a break. In this case you may also want to try something like a water fast to see if that improves it as well. Anything that deals with inflammation tends to do very well with water fasting. With leaky gut this may be a chance to do some of that and then rebuild as well.

Lisa: Along with the water fasting would you also recommend your seven day Raw Food Challenge? I know in the beginning part of it it’s completely blended foods for the first few days.

Kevin: Definitely. The Raw Food Challenge is a great way to have a pre-made smoothie diet, seven days. You can even do it twice for 14 days. There’s plenty of great different smoothie recipes there that can help you along your way.

Lisa: I can also attest to that. The Raw Food Challenge is awesome. I still use the recipes to this day. It’s great.

Kevin: One last thing about digestion. This is something that a lot of people have. Gas and bloating. Gas and bloating can be a little bit complicated, kind of just like leaky gut. It could come from issues stemming from allergies, from poor overall digestion, lack of enzymes, lack of HCL, or from bad bacteria or parasites. So when you’re dealing with gas or bloating or you’re dealing with your spouses gas or bloating or you’re dealing with a friend’s gas or bloating or something like that, what you need to do is you need to breakdown these individual things, just like you did with leaky gut or like we’ve done with this whole protocol and really work on each individual thing and identify which one is likely. So work on the elimination diet for allergies then move on to maybe adding some HCL and some enzymes to see if that improves it or working through the protocol with the specific herbs. You can kind of work your way down. One of those things is going to address the bloating and the gas. You will be thankful and everyone else will be thankful when you finally address that and take care of it.

Lisa: So Kevin, would you please summarize for us the frequently asked questions that people usually have regarding digestion?

Kevin: Sure. I summarized the acne so I’m not going to go through that again. But sugar replacements, stevia is going to be kind of the gold standard. In terms of sweets, think about where you’re coming from when it comes to sweets. Are you looking to replace something that you don’t have internally with something externally? That’s a very important thing to think about. For fermenting, in terms of how to ferment for yourself, yogurt, kefir, cultured vegetables. We’ll put some of the materials and instructions in the manual. I don’t need to go over all of that.




Constipation, magnesium citrate, coconut water, senna, more fiber, more water. Diarrhea, get tested. Again, we want to make sure you don’t have something nasty. If it’s not something that’s very nasty then water, coconut water, minerals and electrolytes. Obviously, work with a practitioner. You might need antibiotics. Then herbs like oregano oil, cloves, cinnamon, black walnut husk, grapefruit seed extract, garlic, rosemary, wormwood. Times to eat, in the morning. Always eat in the morning and always eat before 8 o’clock PM in the evening. If you eat protein in the morning, you eat carbohydrates and fat in the morning, it doesn’t matter so much as the fact that you do eat in the morning. In terms of food combining, same deal. We’re not going to get too far into food combining but we want to make sure you do is that you eat your melons separately and you eat less ingredients in your foods. Crohn’s Disease is an inflammatory disease. See a practitioner who knows about supervised water fasting. And then leaky gut, it’s kind of your choice where you want to start, but you can go through the elimination diet and some of the protocol that we talked about, low HCL. You can even try water fasting to see if that helps as well. Pre-blended food. You can do a seven day smoothie feast like the Raw Food Challenge. That will be very helpful to kind of eliminate some of the things that might be irritating as well as help you heal.

Lisa: Awesome. Thanks for that, Kevin. We appreciate it. This is the end of module four. Thanks so much for listening in. We hope that this information has helped. Be sure to check out our other programs on thyroid health, adrenal health, exercise, nutrition and more at RenegadeHealth.com. Take care and we’ll talk to you soon.

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COURSE TRANSCRIPTS · 2018. 5. 12. · environment is contained only in one place inside your body....

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Transcript of COURSE TRANSCRIPTS · 2018. 5. 12. · environment is contained only in one place inside your body....