Super Gut Quotes

“2 cups water 1 tablespoon whole cloves 1 teabag green tea 1 teaspoon FOS powder 2 teaspoons allulose (optional) Additional sweetener to taste 1 cinnamon stick (optional) In a small saucepan, combine the water and cloves and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and cover to maintain a low simmer for 10 minutes. Add the teabag in the last 1–2 minutes of simmering, then remove from heat. Discard teabag. Stir in the FOS, optional allulose, other sweetener, and optional cinnamon stick, and serve or sip throughout the day. MATCHA,”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“But even if you do not have SIBO or SIFO, it is likely—virtually guaranteed—that you have, at the very least, dysbiosis. Substantial disruptions of the bacterial and perhaps fungal species inhabiting your colon still pose implications for health, whether or not you are regular or require a stack of magazines for bowel habit success.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Like death, taxes, and marital spats, fungi are an inevitable part of human life.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health and Lose Weight

“Here are some lethal combinations: Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, the gliadin protein in wheat and LPS endotoxemia.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health and Lose Weight

“Modern lifestyle habits have therefore primed your body for unhealthy microbial expansion. If there is no benefit to curtailing your carbon footprint or erecting levees against the equivalent to rising oceans in your body, what can you do to turn the tide against microbial expansion and invasion? Thankfully, you can do plenty.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health and Lose Weight

“Convenience, mass food commercialization, and the lack of blood and dirt under our fingernails have contributed to a silent but massive health epidemic.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health and Lose Weight

“1 capsule Bacillus coagulans GBI-30,6086 2 tablespoons prebiotic fiber (inulin or raw potato starch) 1 quart half-and-half or other liquid”
― William Davis, MD, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“SIBO manifests in a breathtaking variety of ways. SIBO and, to a lesser degree, SIFO can appear as the aches and pains of fibromyalgia, the bowel urgency of irritable bowel syndrome, sleep-disrupting restless leg syndrome, gallstones, food intolerances and allergies, skin rashes, social isolation and feelings of hatred, anxiety, or depression, and hundreds of other health conditions and social”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“As a starter, choose a probiotic with ten or more species but with no Saccharomyces, Candida, or Kluyveromyces fungal species (these will cause it to ferment into alcohol). Ideally, choose from the list of recommended probiotics in Appendix A. You will also find a list of recommended fermentation devices such as yogurt makers and sous vide devices in Appendix A, devices that maintain a temperature conducive to microbial reproduction (which differs for each species and which is specified in each recipe).”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“In a number of clinical studies, brave volunteers without depression have willingly received injections of the LPS endotoxin derived from the cell walls of bacteria. Within hours of receiving this artificial increase in LPS, they developed the signature emotions of depression: dark moods, anxiety, loss of motivation, disinterest in everyday activities, impaired cognitive function. Imaging of brain function in these people revealed all the brain hallmarks of depression.5 The unavoidable conclusion: the products of bacterial breakdown that enter the bloodstream play a role in causing depression, especially depression unresponsive to conventional treatments. Not surprisingly, this has prompted the pharmaceutical industry to explore adding various anti-inflammatory drugs to conventional antidepressants in order to block some of these inflammatory”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Like humans, bacteria and fungi live and die. Although their relations don’t conduct funerals for them or erect headstones over their graves, their life cycles, unlike our many decades, are measured in hours to days, reflecting a lightning-fast rate of turnover. With that much life and death cycling in your GI tract, involving trillions of creatures, where do the by-products go upon their death? Without wills or estates to settle, the remains of trillions of microbes are recycled by other microbes, some are metabolized by you, and others are passed out into the toilet. But in dysbiosis, some remnants also invade our bloodstream and thereby are “exported” to other parts of the body. In 2007, a French research group reported on this critical phenomenon. They labeled this flood of toxic bacterial breakdown products “metabolic endotoxemia,” and it has been found to underlie numerous modern health conditions, especially those driven by inflammation, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and neurodegenerative diseases.4 The main driver of endotoxemia is something called lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, which originates in the cell walls of organisms such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Klebsiella, common inhabitants of the colon and stool. When those microbes die, their cell wall contents are liberated, and if the integrity of the intestinal wall has been compromised by pathogenic species, the LPS can pass through this broken barrier into the blood. The consequences of endotoxemia are especially powerful when all thirty feet of the GI tract are filled with unhealthy microbes.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Consumption of refined sugar triggers rapid changes in the intestinal bacterial species present, causing loss of healthy species and yielding symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome within days of increased sugar intake.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Many people have inadvertently lost species from their microbiome. Follow a strict low-carb diet—whether you call it ketogenic, paleo, carnivorous, Atkins, or something else—and fail to include a variety of prebiotic fibers, polyphenols, and other nutrients microbes need that can only be sourced from plants, not animal products, and you do damage to your microbiome because the species you’ve starved out will not just reappear.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“prior to the adoption of agriculture, dental decay was unusual among hunter-gatherers, with only 1–3 percent of all teeth recovered showing decay.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“L. reuteri yogurt”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“intestinal health advantages into a simple cup of tea. Use this tea to help repair, rebuild, or maintain your intestinal mucus barrier and as part of your dysbiosis/SIBO/SIFO management program because it may make the journey smoother. This tea combines the mucus-increasing effect of eugenol oil from cloves, the mucus protein cross-linking effect of green tea catechins, and the Akkermansia growth-stimulating effects of fructooligosaccharides (FOS). Whole cloves, rather than ground cloves, work best in this tea. Ground cloves include too many solids that cannot be separated from the eugenol, so if you filter the tea, you are removing much of the beneficial eugenol. Whole cloves, on the other hand, retain their ingredients well, so I have found that you can reuse whole cloves three or four times without sacrificing quality. Choose a green tea, preferably organic, that is high in green tea catechin content for maximum benefit. Matcha teas are high, as is tea brewed from Trader Joe’s Organic Green Tea, Pique Tea Crystals, Newman’s Own Organic Green Tea, and Numi Organic Gunpowder Green Tea. Optionally, you can sweeten the tea with allulose, which has the properties of prebiotic fiber. (FOS and allulose both readily dissolve in tea, unlike some other powdered prebiotics.) For added flavor, add a cinnamon stick to the tea upon serving.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“An important insight has emerged from a series of simple studies that did nothing more than obtain ultrasound images of the gallbladder of people who had no gallstones at the start and who then initiated a diet of reduced calories, reduced fat, or reduced calories and fat. The ages of participants, proportion of females to males, strictness of the diets, and other characteristics differed across these various gallbladder ultrasound studies, but one thing they had in common was that as many as 55–62 percent of participants engaging in such diets developed gallstones; many of them had to go on to surgery to have their gallbladder removed. In short, cutting calories, cutting fat, or—worst of all—cutting both calories and fat sets you up for gallstones within a few weeks.11–14 The concept is simple: Consume foods with fats, and the gallbladder is prompted by the hormone cholecystokinin (CCK) to squeeze out the bile required to digest dietary fats. Reduce calories, fat, or both, and the gallbladder is left idle, having no opportunity to squeeze out its stored bile. Over time, bile crystallizes (bile stasis), the process that leads to gallstone formation. It is therefore well established that cutting calories and/or fat leads to high likelihood of gallstone formation.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“There are numerous toxic components in the seeds of the grasses—grains—that humans mistakenly adopted as food twelve thousand years ago: the gliadin protein (within gluten) disrupts the intestinal barriers and initiates autoimmune diseases; gliadin-derived opioid peptides are potent appetite stimulants and impair intestinal peristalsis; the amylopectin A carbohydrate raises blood sugar higher than table sugar; and phytates bind essential minerals such as iron, zinc, calcium, and magnesium and cause them to be swept out of your system and into the toilet. Banishing all wheat and grains therefore begins a powerful journey back to health.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“humans have been consuming wheat and grains for less than one-half of 1 percent of our species’ time on this planet.)”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Anytime you exceed 15 grams net carbs in a meal, you raise blood sugar, raise insulin, contribute to insulin resistance, and gain weight.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“The noncaloric artificial sweeteners aspartame, saccharine, and sucralose are no safer, having been shown to trigger changes in bacterial species that exaggerate insulin resistance and lead to type 2 diabetes and obesity.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Kids invariably choose the $1 million. But the penny that doubles every day—$0.01, $0.02, $0.04, $0.08—nothing to get excited about at the start—ends up totaling over $5 million! $5,368,709.12 to be exact after thirty days. Hard to believe, but that is the power of doubling or, as they say in financial circles, “compound interest.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Another bacterial genus largely lost from most modern people is Oxalobacter, bacterial species that can dwell in the colon and that enthusiastically consume oxalate, a common naturally occurring compound in foods such as nuts, spinach, beets, and chocolate. In contrast, the majority of indigenous people such as the Hadza and Yanomami carry plenty of Oxalobacter species. As more modern people lose these species, they develop painful calcium oxalate kidney stones, especially following exposure to antibiotics. Most concerning, there has been a major increase in calcium oxalate kidney stones in children, especially after taking a course of antibiotics.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Although few Americans have heard of SIBO and SIFO, tens of millions of us are affected by them. We now know that 35–84 percent of the thirty-five million Americans diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, as well as the equal number who remain undiagnosed but grin and bear bowel urgency and bloating, have SIBO.6 We also know that of the twelve million Americans with the pain and disability of fibromyalgia, up to 100 percent have the bacterial overgrowth of SIBO, as do the majority of people with restless leg syndrome, fatty liver, diverticular disease, various food intolerances, gallstones, autoimmune and neurodegenerative conditions, and type 2 diabetes.6–12 The bacterial overgrowth of SIBO is also present in about 50 percent of the 150 million American adults who are overweight or obese.13 We also know that about a third of people with SIBO also have SIFO.14 It may not pillage the countryside or terrorize people in their cottages, but it is a monster that modern life has created, and it dwells in the thirty feet of your GI tract.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

“Convenience, mass food commercialization, and the lack of blood and dirt under our fingernails have contributed to a silent but massive health epidemic. Many of us were delivered by C-section and fed synthetic baby formula that led to food allergies, obesity, and diverticular disease later in life. We survive a urinary tract infection or pneumonia by taking antibiotics, only to develop ulcerative colitis or compulsive behaviors months or years later. We refrigerate food to prolong its shelf life but deprive ourselves of the fertile growth of microorganisms that appear naturally in fermenting foods, and thereby set ourselves up for autoimmune thyroid disease and rosacea.”
― William Davis, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight