344. Good Bugs, Bad Bugs: Achieving Gut Microbiome Balance for Optimal Health - Josh Dech

Josh Dech

Kara Goodwin: [00:00:00] Welcome to the meditation conversation, the podcast to support your spiritual revolution. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin. All right, friends, buckle in and get ready to learn a ton about gut health and how it is so closely tied to your overall health.

Josh Dech is a gut health expert, and while his focus is on bowel disease, he's a true wealth of knowledge about all things gut, including how it's even tied to your mental health.

Josh is an ex paramedic and holistic nutritionist specializing in gut health. It was the successes his clients have had with complex digestive diseases, previously thought to be impossible, that got him connected to some of the world's most renowned doctors. Since then, he's been a medical lecturer, helping to educate doctors on the holistic approach to gut health and complex digestive [00:01:00]issues.

So I'm going to warn you that this episode is packed with a ton of really important insights that will change how you understand your health, so I highly recommend that you do not listen to it on a fast speed. Even recording it live and having some exposure to the holistic nature of gut health, I still felt that the insights were coming in super fast.

So you may want to listen a couple of times, as there may be info in here that can really be a missing key to helping you resolve your own health issues.

So we'll get going just as soon as we talk about best made homeopathic remedies. Homeopathy is always my first line of defense when things are getting Out of balance in my or my family's health. I've had such great experiences with BestMade. They have so many free resources on their website, which you can get to through the link in the notes, and they have products for a wide range of issues.

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Welcome, Josh. Thank you so much for being here today.

Josh Dech: It is a pleasure to be here. I'm looking

forward to the conversation.

Kara Goodwin: Me too. So I'd love to start with just talking about the path that led you to specializing in gut health.

Josh Dech: Well, it's a very interesting circumstance of falling forward. You know, gut health is one of those things that now we know today that it's a very important thing. It's become more popular in the media, and mine was just a bunch of series of happy accidents, you know. Back when I was in my late teens, I was going to college.

I was gonna be a paramedic, and I graduated and I went on and got my first job as a medic and I really enjoyed it. And it was more about the traumas and the medicals and really having to think on your feet that I really liked, but didn't take long to, I realized it was sick

care, [00:03:00] not healthcare. You know, you pick people up and just try to make sure they didn't die on the way to the hospital where they either, if it wasn't a, a trauma. When they need surgery or emergency intervention, it's heart disease or diabetes or strokes or things that they get medications and more medications are new of a different medication. And it just wasn't, healthcare people weren't healthy. And so by a series of happy accidents, I ended up in my early twenties getting a job as a personal trainer, which I loved, you know, I really enjoyed that.

And there was a woman I started working with named Lynn, was early in my career. I think she was one of my first clients. And she was 57 and we started working together. Breakfast was 17 pills and a shot of insulin. She had nine more pills in insulin for bedtime, so

26 pills a day. She had high blood pressure, slept with a CPA machine, and everyone says Wow.

And shockingly. It's not that uncommon. There are millions and millions of people living like that. she was on disability, at work and like all kinds of stuff going on in two years time we're working together. Kara, by the time we were done, she was off all but two [00:04:00] medications just due to a surgery. Her eyesight, she actually changed her glasses 'cause

her eyes got better because she was no longer diabetic. So there's better blood flow and oxygenation, right? The tissues weren't so inflamed. And anyway, age 59, she ended up breaking her first world record as a power

lifter in the raw division here in Canada.

Kara Goodwin: What? Oh my word. That's a huge turnaround.

Josh Dech: the power of the human body when you give it the circumstances to heal itself? Whereas doctors were just patching things with medication. We're like, let's see what we can do with health and wellness and food and exercise and just better circumstance. That's all it took for her. And so as my career went on, I. I found more and more people coming to see me for stuff, and the more we address their general health, nutrition and ultimately their gut, that's what I distilled it down to over the years is that gut was at the center of all of it. And then I was at a trade show. Well jump forward a couple more years and now mid twenties, I was at this trade show and I heard someone talking about this school where I ended up going for, for my, formal education [00:05:00] and they were talking about the microbiome and how it makes a difference when you're born vaginal versus c-section and the foods and breastfeeding and bottle feeding, and what the microbiome is and what it does. And it blew my mind. My jaw was on the floor for a 30 minute presentation.

I said like, love it. First sight. Like that is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. I just was hooked ever since. And then I started working in the gut space and gut disease and the more people who came to see me, the more severe the cases. Until one day I had my first ulcerative colitis client come to see me.

We turned her around in 90 days and her doctor was like, what the hell did you do? Let's talk. They were working together for three years. And now I've been just connected with some amazing, amazing physicians. I get to travel, I just came back from the states doing international TV and like talking about how we're reversing Crohn's and colitis so successfully. And it's sort of taking medicine by storm. So we're just thrilled to be doing this and I love the space of not only gut health, but inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's

colitis.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. That is, I mean, [00:06:00] I have chills. I'm so excited to hear all of this. So, so can you share with us, I love hearing about your journey. Thank you for taking us through all of that Why is the gut so paramount to overall health?

Josh Dech: I like to say, why isn't the gut, I know it's kind of a stupid way to flip it on its head, like Jesus answering a question with a question, but consider it this way. You have, we look at the gut. It's interacts with everything, your gut bacteria. We know through different studies we've indicated your gut is responsible for weight gain, weight loss, how social you feel like being in a given day, your mindset, your moods, mental clarity and focus, memory. We know it's associated with energy levels. We know it's your immune system, like 70 to 90% of your immune system is made in your gut. If you struggle with anxiety, depression, mental health issues and conditions, it comes back to your gut where 90% of your neurotransmitters or the communication signals are made. And not only that, Kara, but [00:07:00] think about this. We talked about briefly about what fascinated me about birth to life. Well, here's something that I think your listeners might enjoy. When we are born, right in utero, in the placenta, you get some microbes from mom, right? What comes across the barrier, or it comes through the placenta, 33 or 36% of all metabolites in your blood.

These byproducts are actually made by bacteria. So 36% of what's in your bloodstream, that's not blood cells is bacterial byproducts. But when we're born, we're 99% human cells, 1% bacteria. Well over our lifetime, that bacteria actually starts to grow and cultivate and actually spreads out throughout your skin, your eyes and mouth, and vaginal cavities and rectal canals and all kinds of stuff until you're covered in microbe is when you die. You are 90% microbes and

10% human.

Kara Goodwin: What? Holy cow.

Josh Dech: They outnumber us nearly 10 to one. There's a hundred trillion bacteria inside of your gut, which if you're a 200 pound person, that's three to [00:08:00] five upwards of six pounds of bacteria

inside of your gut.

Kara Goodwin: Is that like across the board, like or is that the average healthy person or the average diseased person or how?

Josh Dech: the average healthy person. Two to 3% of their entire body weight is

just microbes. Just bacteria, and we are all microbes and bacteria. There's this ecosystem, there's about a hundred trillion living inside of your gut. They communicate, like I said, with everything, every cell, every immune response, hair growth, they signal things back and forth from the immune system in the brain.

They help shuttle and move resources. They produce vitamins and help digestion and break things down. They detoxify. They do

everything for us, and I

Kara Goodwin: So that's interesting because when you're saying bacteria, I think immediately bad bacteria, and I know there's like good bacteria. So is this just bacteria in, in the sense of it's not our non-human parts, what we're hosting And it can be good, it could be bad.

Josh Dech: Well, that's such a good question. I'm glad you asked. So let's say [00:09:00] microbes because in your bacteria or your microbiome, your microbiome is just a, it's just a fancy word for

tiny ecosystem, right? so picture poly shores, biodome from back in the nineties, you have that little thing living inside of your gut, and so just the a hundred trillion little poly shores running

around. And so this.

Kara Goodwin: do I wanna picture that

Josh Dech: No, no, you don't. I'm

Kara Goodwin: shoe fly? Don't bother me.

Josh Dech: So we have these issues with little flies running around, but here's what we got. Inside the bacteria is about a hundred trillion. Inside of there, there's an estimates about 35 to one ratio of viruses now to bacteria. Then we have fungi and we have parasites and all kinds of stuff living in harmony. And so it's an ecosystem of harmony imbalance. So there is what we call the quotes good bacteria or the bad bacteria, but in reality, they all play a role in the ecosystem matter what they do. Right? You have. Police, and you have people in prison. You have drug dealers in baristas, you have [00:10:00] moms and dads, and you have iron workers and engineers and all kinds of people that make a community.

They're all just different. But the reality is, in a society, they all have a role of some kind. And so the problem is when the imbalance comes in, right? Imagine you have no police, no moms, no dads. You don't have any kids. It's just a bunch of middle-aged men shooting each other, right? You got a big problem, like society's not gonna survive very long, and that happens inside of the gut. Where you have these, these areas where it needs harmony and balance. It's overgrowths of either good or bad, right? If all, if you went into a neighborhood and it was nothing but coffee shops, no groceries, no gas, no schools, it would collapse as well. So it's all about balance. And when we have that inside of the all the, the. Say the optimal gut microbiome, that's when health can flourish and thrive. That's when your body can do stuff. Like we look at Candida as being a bad bacteria or a bad microbe. We wanna get rid of candida. Well, it's a fungal bacteria or it's opportunistic, fungal microbe, but we need it. It's very important.

It has different roles. It's when [00:11:00] it's overgrown, it becomes highly toxic. And so. Our microbes inside of our gut. They are vital to our wellness and our life and lifestyle and wellbeing. But it's how we treat them, how we balance

them, how we measure them, what we do to them from birth to life to death.

It's all

about the microbes.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. Okay. I have a gazillion questions. Um, let's see, where do we start?

what about parasites? Would you include parasites as being a necessary part of the, of the environment?

Josh Dech: you know what I would. Because I would, because parasites live there. it's all about harmony, right? It is really hard to say. Parasites aren't something I

study, particularly myself, but I know that they do live in, like, they play a role in what we call biodiversity maintenance, right? So they contribute to diversity of species in general, and so they interact with us.

Our hosts, they interact with the bacteria in the area. The truth is, I would love to give you a really like detailed explanation as to why it [00:12:00] all works together,

but we don't know. At least, I don't know.

We're still learning. You know, we know we have anywhere from one to 3000 different species of microbes, give or take.

Some will say 5,000, upwards of seven to 10,000, or even 20,000 different strains of those species. So we have tens of millions of different bacteria. Now, even on a GI map that's a stool sample. We measure all these bacteria as best we can with the technology we have. We can measure these guys and see what's going on, but in the best of the best we can maybe measure a hundred. Maybe unlike the super high end, still in research, 200 different things, that's a grain of sand on a beach out of millions, tens of millions of them. And so to say exactly how do parasites work inside the gut? I would venture to say we probably don't know. Now we know like it's this ecological interconnectedness.

So. They have integral components to these ecosystems. They participate in intricate like ecological relationships within our gut. They talk and communicate to certain things like a bacteria or a fungi. They send out [00:13:00] chemical signals or chemical messengers back and forth. they can be players in like food webs and different things where their presence can influence, you know, other species in the ecosystem. It's, imagine if you have really high engagement of police activity, right? You get more engagement in an area. The more crime there is, the more reports there are, the more statistical issues there are. A city will divert resources and there's perhaps these communications between parasites and other bacteria that communicate back and forth contributing to how your body builds, grows, or distributes certain resources around the area.

That's sort of the thought, but how well we know them in great detail. I would say we hardly

do at all. Now, obviously there are some parasites that are bad and very problematic. That's a gimme. But for the most part, we know there are probably hundreds if not thousands of different species down there, and we're

still just learning.

We've only known bacteria has been like a good thing for probably. 40 years. You know, we started going, Hey, maybe we shouldn't kill it. It was right to the nineties where doctors were still taught bacteria bad [00:14:00] kill, give antibiotics. We didn't even discover its existence or the possibility of its existence till 1856.

That was the first time they went, wait a minute, we should start washing our hands and see what happens. And so it's, it's all

relatively new, which is in one way, scary and daunting in another, remarkably exciting.

Kara Goodwin: It's fascinating. you're right. I mean, thinking of it as a whole ecosystem really, really changes the perception of it. And I'm curious, you mentioned this before, and I've heard this before, the impact of gut health on mental health. can you talk a little bit more about that?

Like how, how is it, I know you said there are neurotransmitters and so forth, but. I don't know that that's a logical connection for people as to like, oh, my mental health, it's directly tied to my gut health. So how is that?

Josh Dech: Well, we talk about neurotransmitters are a big one. So those are your chemical messengers. So those are the things that'll tell your body how to send signals back and [00:15:00] forth. And so we talk about the gut brain axis, right? Or this gut brain connection, for example. So number one, we know that, like you said, that 90% of that serotonin, for example, some of the feel good, even dopamine, norepinephrine, like some of these things are made inside of the gut, a massive amount of them.

If your gut is inflamed, for example, your brain isn't getting the right chemicals to balance it, and you can get misfiring and changes of. Signals, you might get anxiety, you might get depression. I would venture to say nearly a hundred percent, not being in the mental health space, but having myself spoken to experts in the mental health space, who would venture to say nearly a hundred percent of people with any kind of mental health condition, be it anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, whatever spectrum of severity will have some kind of gut

connection. That's number one. And that's a lot large part due to the chemical influence. But then we have to look at the microorganisms again. These microbiota, these microbiomes, right, they maintain the health and digestive system, which influences different physiological [00:16:00] processes. we know, for example, the composition and diversity of gut microbes can be connected to certain outcomes in your health.

We can predict with not relative certainty, but we can say. If you have a certain genetic code, A, B, C, or D, with this microbial imbalance, you might be more prone to things like Alzheimer's or certain autoimmune conditions or arthritis or acne or gut disease or whatever it may be. And so we dive into the gut relationship to the body. We can see it in a few levels. One, like we talked about, those neurotransmitters. Two is actually neurological. In utero. That's as we're being born, you're developing in the womb, your gut and your brain actually

start as the same thing. And then they split and they be, yeah, they become their own differential factors, but they are made from the

same tissue originally as they start to develop and they break apart. And so we have billions of neurons, these nerves inside the brain, these communicating electrical pathways. We have about four or 500 million just inside of your gut. And so your gut reaction is a very real [00:17:00] thing. We know that your gut can communicate with the rest of your brain, your body, your subconscious.

We get these gut feelings before your, your conscious brain actually decides like, here's what we do. And your gut even communicates faster than your brain looking at your gut reaction. For example, that subconscious process, if you had to compare them like cars driving on the highway, your conscious brain at the rate it processes information, it's about a hundred miles an hour.

It goes pretty quick. It's a good zip, but your subconscious is a hundred thousand

miles per hour. That's like a turtle versus the Millennium Falcon jumping into hyperspace, right? It's slow versus freaking light speed. In your gut instinct, that gut reaction you feel when you walk into a room, you catch a, a frequency of vibration, a feeling. There's a reason. There are crazy stories about people listening to their gut is because they just know intuitively without having to think because the chemical electrical signals are so fast. And so that's our second. We have the chemicals, we have the nerves, and we actually have like that transport of lymphatics and blood directly across.

It's one cell, which is like one [00:18:00] 100th of a hair, one cell to go from your small intestine to move things into your bloodstream. Well, where does your blood go? Everywhere. The blood brain barrier things can cross that. If we have toxins in the gut, even the lymphatic system communicates with the brain and all kinds of tissues throughout the body to drain and move things. So you have inflammation passing through the. gut into the blood going through the blood-brain barrier into lymphatic system from the gut through your gult or the malt. We call it that gut associated lymphatic tissue. It transports the super highways around the body. It's now you have stuff getting into places it should not be.

You have pathogens, you have toxins, you have bacterial lit. If it leaks are big enough, literal pieces of food getting in that aren't like broken down into the smallest forms, your immune system goes, Hey man. We got an issue. This shouldn't be here. It elicits an inflammatory response. Inflammation is trying to heal you, but long-term inflammation causes breakdown and dysfunction.

Now you have mental health conditions. Now you have arthritis, now you have autoimmune disease. You have these issues connected that all came from and stem [00:19:00] from

the gut.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. So that one I know. Mind blowing that one. Cells worth of barrier. You said that's from the small intestine into the bloodstream. Is that

Josh Dech: blood and your

lymphatic system. Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: Okay. Is that the what they, is that the microbiome or is the microbiome the whole environment?

Josh Dech: Oh, love that you asked. So the microbiome is the bacteria, the viruses, the fungi, the parasites, all these living organisms that live together, and then that microbiome communicates with everything. Then you have your, your physical

gut barriers, the

cells, that's the

Kara Goodwin: the barrier. Okay.

Josh Dech: right? Your microbiome of the

people living in the house. And so this is actually a great segue. Because it'll put some clarity for some of the listeners who might wonder, okay,

what's a probiotic then? What's a prebiotic? A post biotic? I can

jump there if you'd like really

Kara Goodwin: Yeah, I'm curious about that too.

Josh Dech: Okay. That'll help shed some light on the microbiome. So we talked about the house.

So better [00:20:00] yet, picture fish in a fishbowl, right? Your fish are the living swimming organisms. That is your bacteria. These are the things that make the microbiome. It's the fish in the fishbowl. Prebiotics are fish food postbiotics are fish poop. So your bacteria move around. They eat, they need to eat food.

They eat what you eat, and they poop But they poop byproducts called postbiotics. These can be like short chain fatty acids. They can be vitamins and they can be all kinds of stuff that they produce as byproducts we need for our health, and that is your microbiome. They are the fish in the fish bowl. The length that that thickness of the fish bowl glass, that is your gut barrier where things pass through to get outside into the highways

around the body.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. Okay. And so, and it's it's not uncommon in people who are dealing with disease to have like holes in the barrier, and that's part of the underlying cause. Is that correct?

Josh Dech: Yeah.

Damn near everyone who has any kind of disease is gonna have a [00:21:00] gut issue. In fact, there's actually a paper by Dr. Alessio Fasano. Um. He's actually like, been recommended, like they, they believe he's gonna win a Nobel Prize. he's one of the most lauded researchers we'll say, in the world of gut space and gut disease.

He discovered leaky gut and actually coined and, and named the protein zonulin, which contributes to leaky gut. So he's like the leaky gut guy. And he recently released a paper called All Diseases Begin in the Leaky Gut, talking about the role of sonna and leaks in, in disease. And so the connection now is that every disease.

All diseases you can possibly imagine, you can think of, you'd name anything, any condition, any breakdown, any disease. I don't care if it's like dry, itchy skin, psoriasis to acne, to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, even. It all comes back to the gut in some way. And so we look at the gut's role of these disease processes.

We can really understand it's, it's a role in our wellness and our life and why it very well may be as important, if not in some regards more so than our very DNA.[00:22:00]

Kara Goodwin: Well, that's really crazy. I mean, that, it's just mind blowing. It really is mind blowing.

Josh Dech: it's, it's wild. And so you can picture this, right, A leak in the gut. You have your cells, imagine like a quilt, right? Like a, like a blanket. That's actually all these squares like stitched together. Think of that as your cells and these stitches that hold them together. These are called gap junctions in the gut. And so your cells are physically like they are held together. And what happens when they become inflamed is they start to spread apart those gap junctions let go. Now, normally this is like a border crossing between these two cells and things can get through as they're per missed, right? Your body says, yep, you're broken down.

You're small enough, you're whatever. We'll transport you through the membrane and put you into the bloodstream and move that nutrient around the body. What happens though, as these, these cells start to break down, they spread apart big things that should not get through, get through. They cross the borders illegally.

We'll say they get through. Big pieces of like a piece of chicken, for example, that's not broken down to its smallest parts. It's still like a, a molecule, not an [00:23:00] amino acid. It gets through to the bloodstream that causes inflammation. Wherever that piece of chicken may land in the body, it causes inflammation in that area. If you have, you go, well, genetics or, you know, my family, it's, I get arthritis runs in my family, or thyroid disease runs in my family. No, no, no. You have a genetic predisposition. To express an inflammation or breakdown through that pathway, through your joints, through your thyroid, through your skin, through your whatever.

It's the leak in the gut of the inflammation or whatever it is that has expressed that gene genes turn up and down like a volume knob, and so if you have inflammation, it turns it up. If you're lacking nutrients, it turns it up. If you have autoimmune conditions, it turns it up until you're at maximum volume.

Now you go, oh look, it's a genetic condition. No, no, no. We can turn that volume way back down by controlling all the factors

around it.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. So that, and that's epigenetics, right? The, the, whether things express or not. So the gut is, is that correct?

Josh Dech: Sort of, yeah. So, so epigenetics, the way we look at epigenetics, it's, it's a whole thing. And there's a [00:24:00] whole study of epigenetics itself. What I'm looking about here is more called nutrigenomics, where the nutrition, for example, expresses

inflammation. Right. And how that genetic, yeah, how that genetic expression, comes through.

But the epigenetics is the study of like. Hereditary changes or

gene expression, right. And how that comes through. So it's not wrong to say epigenetics as per how things translate from person to person. that's a really interesting discussion. I'm not a genetics

expert, for example.

Kara Goodwin: Well, it just sounds like how you're saying, you know, like, oh, you get a certain amount of inflammation, it starts to turn that dial, so it starts to express like that. That propensity, propensity

Josh Dech: guess, I would say you're right that that's, that would be epigenetics. But I don't want to be quoted 'cause I'm not, truthfully, the, the term itself isn't something I have background on the pole threads through and say, yeah, that's your epigenetics, but we can't, I'll just use the

term genetic expression so I don't sound stupid by accident. But that's, that's how it translates through. Yes. Is what is hereditary, what's passed. [00:25:00] On from ancestors previous, those genes you get and how your body will express those conditions or what

you're prone to getting. I am prone to gut issues, right when I get inflammation in my body. Some people get a candida issue, they get a skin problem or an arthritis issue, or they get a DHD. Well, I get acne. I get, A DHD symptoms. I get brain fog. I get a little bit of like irritability, depression, anxiety when I have a candida issue and I've had candida issues in the past. And so as those start to proliferate, then we can, we can pick back these problems. Somebody else like, say mold infection, common one.

I get people I see all the time in the Crohn's colitis space. their primary driver is actually mold in mycotoxins and they develop because of their genes. They develop. Inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's colitis, whereas someone like one of my family members, for example, has asthma instead or rheumatoid arthritis instead because they're genetically predisposed to expressing inflammation more so that way

before the others,

Kara Goodwin: Wow. So when you are working with [00:26:00] clients, 'cause you're talking a lot about the. The individual expression and all that. And I mean, I still keep coming back to that woman who, who was, you know, taking a gazillion,

Josh Dech: Oh, Lynn. Yeah.

The personal training days. Yep.

Kara Goodwin: right. And then she, you know, was down in, in what, 90 days did you say to two?

Josh Dech: Oh,

 two years.

Kara Goodwin: Okay.

Josh Dech: Two years. Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: But down to two medications that, and so she'd gotten rid of all that, gotten rid of diabetes and all of that. So when you're working with clients, how individual is your work? is there a baseline, like are there things that you can tell people across the board here is some, some good advice for everybody or, you know, is it, is it really, specific to the individual?

Josh Dech: It really does depend what we're diving into. you know, I like to say you gimme a hammer eventually, everything looks like a nail. And so as a gut specialist working in the Crohn's colitis space, probably 80, 90% of what we see is mold, or it's fungus or it's [00:27:00] parasitic or something else. We do see a fair bit of Lyme disease on the east coast of the US and stuff like that, but there's a lot of common threads. The challenge is I have to do my due diligence as a practitioner and be aware of my faults being human right? Just like any doctor, you go in, here's my symptoms. Oh yeah, no problem. They don't ask questions. Here's your disease, here's your drug, your diagnosis, and they brush you past. I don't wanna do that. Our job is to do our full due diligence and investigate as deeply as possible. Every individual who comes in with IBD wants it successfully reversed. Now the challenge with that. Is, there's a lot of, there is good advice across the board. You know, I've, I've worked with hundreds of people, reversed hundreds of cases of IBD, full clinical histological remission, no signs of it coming back, no needs for medication, no pain, no blood in the stool, no nothing for years.

And they feel amazing and their doctors are sitting there going, well, you should still be on the drugs. Right? So we, we kind of have this really different understanding of the body as a whole, but. Moral of the story is I've spoken to a couple dozen gis over [00:28:00] the years, GI or gastrointestinal specialists, or who have been interested or communicated through their patients, said, you know, I'd like to learn and see what this is.

Maybe one or two dozen over hundreds and hundreds. in my entire career, I sat down and spoken to one doctor. One actually made the time to sit down and say, what are you

guys doing? Let's learn. And that's for a lot of different reasons. Some it's arrogant, some it's, they're just too busy. Their hands are tied, they don't have the time, whatever it might be. but it's really unfortunate. So a lot of these doctors will say, eat whatever you want. Food doesn't matter for this disease. Food will make a difference to your gut health. Like that's third grade knowledge, man. Like you put sugar in a gas tank, it's gonna mess up your car. You put junk into your body, it's gonna mess up the rest of you as well.

Like, don't put shit into your engine. And so we have this battle back and forth between understandings of training. Like really doctors get. Half a day, couple hours worth of training on nutrition. The rest is nutritional deficiencies and what the problem is, not how to improve those deficiencies. It's how to medicate the symptoms of deficiency. And so they don't get that education. And so the things across the [00:29:00] board I give people, right, they have our individualization of individual disease process because those matter, we have to do our due diligence. Even though 80, 90% might look like this, we always want to dive in and figure out, specifically, it takes us hours to go through an individual, through the paperwork and interviews. But as a general overview, 100% it will say

what you eat matters. Your food matters, your stress levels matter, your sleep, your sleep hygiene matters. These are the most basic components of health and healing. Even a healthy person with no gut issues or gut disease, if they eat poorly, if they don't sleep very well, if they're high stressed all the time, they don't have stress coping mechanisms or stress management, be it meditation or prayer or, you know.

Infrared saunas are laying on a beach, whatever your method is, if you don't have that, you will deteriorate. You will cause immune problems, and it will turn up the dial on those genetics causing more expression and inflammation. It will burn through more nutrients and resources causing issues throughout the body and more deficiencies. So those are very basics. It's just food, water, sleep, sunshine, [00:30:00] exercise like. Everyone should be doing that every stage. It promotes good, healthy toxin drainage, like the works. And so that's our basics. But the individualization of a program can take a very long time to do, several hours, sometimes hundreds of questions and, and interviews if we need to.

For some, some it's like

15 minutes. We know exactly what it is. It just depends on

the individual.

Kara Goodwin: Wow, it's so fascinating. what role do supplements play? I.

Josh Dech: So supplements can be a vital role. In some instances we need them. Here's a great example. A fellow came to see me 22 years old, and he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis proctitis. So the last 15 centimeters of his rectum was inflamed with ulcerations and blood. And so he went to his doctor, and his doctor said, yep, here's your diagnosis. And I kid you not care. He says, well. He says, why does this happen? His doctor goes, well, you're Jewish and Jewish people get it more. So it's a genetic thing and it is what it is. It's a Jewish person's disease. And I'm like,

that's dumb. Again, genes and expression and [00:31:00] propensity, not guarantee genetics might load the gun.

Something has to pull that trigger, right? It makes you prone to letting that go off. And so it took us all a 15 minutes to sit down with this kid to figure out. He started a new job. Two months into his new job, he was diagnosed with IBS having been previously healthy. Six months after that, it kept getting worsely.

He had blood and his doctor goes, oh yeah, it's, it's ulcerative colitis. It's IBD proctitis, and here's your medication. It's 'cause you're Jewish. Well, it took us 15 minutes to figure out his new job was in hvac. He didn't wear his personal protective equipment as mask, so he thought, well, you probably got a mold infection.

We did a urine test. It came back positive for a mold called okra toxin A. That's OTA, well known to cause kidney disease, liver disease, neurological conditions, and of course colitis 10 weeks in and out. He's still the same amount of Jewish with a hundred percent

less painter problems. And so it's just, this is, this is where we split it down to like. Just naming diseases for no reason.

It doesn't make any sense. And so if we wanna get to the bottom of these things and do a history and figure out like what's causing the problem, that's where

[00:32:00] individualization matters. Just do a history and figure it out.

so what role do supplements play? Well, for this kid, we needed things specifically to buffer his system. Now picture it like having a well. Right. You're living on well water in your home. You don't have a tap, you don't have a limitless water supply, and so you have just enough in your well. To bathe yourself, to shower, to cook, to clean, to whatever water the, the plants inside, whatever you gotta do, that's all the water you have. Well, if your house is on fire, right, you are inflamed, you are sick, you need excess water to put that fire out, and that's excess of nutrients. Your body uses nutrients.

As a source for the body to perform certain reactions and chemical reactions and enzymes and cellular process. That's what vitamins and minerals do. And you burn through that water, those resources at an excess rate when you're sick or you're inflamed or whatever else. And so supplements do a couple different things.

Number one. They fill that well faster than you can possibly fill it up yourself through food, through natural resources. they also can help bind to [00:33:00] detoxify. So for him, we had to bind his mold. We had to detoxify his system. We had to give him nutrients for his body to naturally do its own processes to detox and clean stuff out. We also had to get supplements in that you won't get through food typically to bind onto those toxins. We had to support new supplementation to bridge the gap from sickness to health until the body was able to do its own processes. By itself and Reregulate. And now he's out completely drug free.

Medication free pain. Free blood free. And he's still Jewish and his doctors are going well, we're perplexed. It must be a miracle like. There's this sort of, this gap between understanding, here's the basics of what we did, and that's really the role Supplements play. They give your body what it's lacking.

They do what your body is unable to do at the time, and they bridge the gap, right? Like plant medicine for thousands of years. If you, if you have a really bad infection, for example, whether it's medication or plants or antibiotics, whatever you use. Your body's not powerful enough or able in these cases to fight that infection by itself. And so we can take a medication or use an herb or a plant [00:34:00] or honey or whatever you use on that infection to draw things out so they aid the body until you heal and your body can just regulate itself

on well water.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. It's so interesting. So what about detoxing? Like do you have detox protocols? Do you recommend detoxing? And again, is this something that you recommend, you would recommend if, if at all for everybody or, including those who are healthy or what are your thoughts?

Josh Dech: Well, I think that's a great question. So we have to look at how we detox. What does, what does detoxing really mean? Right? Your body is full of toxins. There are toxins inside. So by definition, detoxing is just getting rid of the toxins, like, duh, that makes sense, right? And so how do we detox? Well, we have to look at this in two ways.

I, I think talk about it like you have two cups, for example, you got a red cup. In a blue cup and your red cup is a cup full of toxins, right? The red cup is the one that, it's all the mold in the system, it's the fungus in the system. It's all these things that have built up, [00:35:00] and then you have this blue cup, for example. A different cup. and this blue cup is that your detox pathways, and this is your body trying to get things outta the system. This is your liver, your lymphs, your kidneys, your bloodstream, your skin, respiration, all the things that off gas or sweat or detox and push things outta the body. So you have all these toxin in the red cup built up. You can't just dump that cup out. It has to go somewhere. It has to go through the drainage pathways. So it has to go through from the red cup to the blue cup into your liver, your lymphs, your kidneys, your whatever, and then outta the body. That's who you express or expel these toxins. And so, so many people come and go, I want to detox right away if they try to empty the red cup. Not realizing the blue cup, their liver, their limbs, their everything is full of toxins. It's backed up, your drainage is backed up, your sink will overflow, and that's when we get a lot of negative symptoms, a lot of problems.

And so we try to get rid of these toxins right away. What we need to do instead in my definition of detox, is promote drainage the right way. Empty that blue [00:36:00] cup out. So when you empty the red cup, the toxins in the body to the detox pathways to get out of the body, that cup doesn't overflow and spill all over.

That's when we get really bad symptoms. We get this Herxheimer reactions we call it, where you get flu-like symptoms, headaches, migraines, illness, nausea, vomiting. Even like lip, severe liver and kidney damage, we've had people hospitalize themselves from doing things too quickly and not going slow like we're told. And so if you don't detox the proper ways you have to empty this cup first, then you start running into issues. And if that's what's happening to you when you're trying to detox and you're getting sick, you have to promote your natural detoxification first before you try to detox the toxins in the system.

You have to promote it through your liver, lips, kidneys, et cetera. Which can be exercise, it can be sunlight, it can be sweating, it can be binding. Sometimes it can be high doses of certain specific vitamins and minerals to promote your liver tries to detoxify. It needs vitamins and minerals and so my process, I really use this, what we call the five Rs of reversing gut disease like Crohn's [00:37:00] colitis, but you can use it as well for any stage of gut health. Because really they're all the same disease doctors have spent years trying to differentiate IBS, for example, irritable bowel syndrome from IBD or Inflammatory bowel Disease or Crohn's colitis. But if you even look at these studies, they do. It's

a Venn diagram. The symptoms are almost identical. It's just a matter of severity. And so we work back the clock, and I believe it's why we're so successful. 90, 95% success in reversing disease is because we look at this like a heel and a shoe. If you're wearing socks, for example, in a shoe, you're protected. But as soon as you take that, that sock off, you have some kind of disease process that causes a problem, right?

You have a toxin in the body, like mold, like this, this, this young fella here, I. It's like wearing a pair of shoes without socks where that heel rubs red until it gets red in blisters and bleeds, and that is raw. That's the spectrum of IBS to IBD. It's a severity wear and tear process of inflammation that wears down until you have ulcers and blood. And so the first step to reversing this, we have to remove the [00:38:00]problem. That's where detoxing comes in. We're still trying to empty that red cup. First we go, let me remove the issue. No, no. You have to empty the blue cup. Drain out your drainage pathways first, and then you can work on removing that issue out the proper, pathways. And then there's four more state, I call 'em the five Rs of reversing gut disease. But that's the role that toxins really play or, or detoxing, really plays in that process. It's the first step typically, but we have to do a different

detox than most people think.

Kara Goodwin: Mm. That's so insightful. Thank you. Well, Josh, this has just been, it's, I've learned so much and, and so quickly also. It's just been amazing. how can people learn more about you and from you and work with you?

Josh Dech: Yeah. Greatest way to reach out to me is just through the website. You can find everything there. It's at gut solution.ca. That's gut solution, all singular, gut solution.ca. you can find information, you can reach out, you can contact email, [00:39:00] you can get information on our podcast. just, I love this podcast.

I'm a bit biased, but I do it 'cause I love it. We get to meet with world famous experts every single week. Dr. William Lee and Steven Gundry. We got Mindy Pells coming on, and Cynthia Thurlow and all kinds of really big names in the wellness space. we've just been very blessed to work with them.

It's been incredible. So we do an interview once a week talking about your gut, how to help heal your gut, but how your gut's connected to other areas of your life, be it anxiety, depression, disease, whatever it is. And then we do another short episode where listeners. Like you guys can write in and say, Hey, I've got a question about A, B, and C, and I'll do an episode just talking to the audience about that question to answer that through stories or analogies or whatever it is we do. and that you can all find all of that information, everything you need through gut solution.ca.

Kara Goodwin: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing all of this wisdom and, and for everything that you're doing to help progress people on their health path. I, it's been a joy to talk to you today.

Josh Dech: Oh, it's been a pleasure to be [00:40:00] here and just thank you so much for opening this platform for the listeners and especially those dealing with gut disease or gut issues or really severe stuff like IBD, most of these people are left thinking it's impossible, right? Their doctor says, well, it's genetic, or it's autoimmune, or There's nothing we can do, and that is no longer true. That's been debunked. I, I debunked this two weeks ago on international television saying like, there's a route, here's what it is. So this, these, these episodes like this just give people some hope to know something can be done. So thank you for, reaching out and, you know, connecting with me and being

here and bringing me on.

Kara Goodwin: Beautiful. Thank you.

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