TRANSCRIPT

Tim: Good evening, everyone. This is Tim from RawlsMD. I’ll be your moderator this evening for the Leaky Gut and Lyme Connection, where Dr. Bill Rawls is going to tell you about how to overcome leaky gut naturally. The plan for the evening is Dr. Rawls is going to give presentation explaining ins and outs of leaky gut and how to overcome it naturally. Then we’ll have a special offer and a Q&A session.

In just a moment, Dr. Rawls will join us. He is a licensed medical doctor and cofounder of Vital Plan, as well as RawlsMD, and he’s written a lot on chronic illness and natural health in several books including best-selling book, Unlocking Lyme. He’s also been featured recently on People’s Pharmacy, and he’s got a lot of passion for this topic, so I won’t delay it any longer. Dr. Rawls, if you can go ahead and join us.

Dr. Bill Rawls: Thank you, Tim.

Tim: Go ahead.

Dr. Bill Rawls: Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Bill Rawls. I’m a physician, but my best credential is that I’ve had Lyme disease, and as part of that, I’ve had a lot of gut dysfunction including leaky gut. They’re part and parcel; they come together. They have a lot of common causes. It’s very unusual to talk to Lyme patients or similarly fibromyalgia, or any disease process or chronic disease, and not find that people have gut dysfunction. It’s a very important topic for an awful a lot of people. Having experienced it personally, struggled with it, worked through it.

When I did my food sensitivity testing 10 years ago, I had sensitivities to every food imaginable, so it was really hard to figure out something to eat. I’ve long since recovered my gut function. My gut works great now, but I still follow a fairly limited diet as far as not eating a lot of processed food, and I eat a lot of fresh food. I enjoy food. It’s become a central portion of my life. You can work around the things that are causing some of the problems.

Interestingly, this morning, I got an e-mail. I signed up with the service called Medscape. It puts out medical education. Today, this morning, I put out their state-of-the-art report of irritable bowel syndrome. Most physicians don’t recognize leaky gut, so irritable bowel syndrome is close as they come. It was interesting. They described all the symptoms and all the criteria to fit the diagnosis.

I actually played lip service to diet and supplements and other kinds of things and noted that they really worked well, but most people just aren’t going to do that, so without really discussing any of the how’s or why’s of how irritable bowel syndrome occurs, zipped right in to the drugs and discussed. Really focused on four drugs, all of which had terrible side effects, one including death. They’ve been around for 10 or 20 years and they’re really a poor solution.

What I can tell you is I’ve worked with awful lot of people with gut dysfunction and helped them both in my medical practice and through all of the information that we’ve been putting out through the Internet and books. I have a lot of faith in people. If you help them understand their condition and teach them what they need to do to overcome it, they will do those things and get well. One of the real deficiencies in our medical system is we don’t spend time to actually do that. This is what that webinar is all about. It’s helping you understand these things so you can overcome them.

What is leaky gut? Technically, it’s increased gut permeability allowing undigested proteins to leak across the intestinal barrier into the blood stream. That’s a mouthful. We’ll talk about it. By the end, you’re going to understand what that means. How common is it? Everybody has it a little bit, just a little bit, everybody. We all have a little bit of a leaky gut. Proteins leak across, but it’s not until it becomes symptomatic that we really notice it. I’m going to turn it back over and let Tim do a poll with you.

Tim: So, we know there are a lot of different issues that you may be concerned about with your GI health. If you would, just cast your vote here. What do you think you have? Is it leaky gut? Is it small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO? Is it irritable bowel syndrome or IBS, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, reflux, gastritis, several of the above or all of the above?

Got the votes rolling in here. It’s always interesting to see how these things may overlap. Dr. Rawls, of course, is going to get on to a lot more depth on this gap. 38% of people coming on here, so majority it looks like they think they have leaky gut. You’ve come to the right webinar. The rest of you as well, you’ve also come to the right webinar because they’re definitely interrelated. I’ll go end the voting and show what results did you have and let Dr. Rawls dive back in.

We see 26% of people said “leaky gut” and 23% said “several of the above”. There are a few others in there, reflux, SIBO as well, and then even a few all of the above. Take you back to Dr. Rawls.

Dr. Bill Rawls: All right. Thanks, Tim. Yes, it’s a big question. Do you have leaky gut or if you got all of these things going on all at one time? Often, that’s the case because these things are all interrelated.

The medical system tries to define these each as separate diagnoses. What you find is that the margins between the diagnoses blur. A lot of people have multiple things or at least recognize they have multiple things. A lot of people would gut dysfunction have other chronic illnesses because what you find is when you look at the causes of gut dysfunction and the causes of chronic illnesses, like chronic Lyme and fibromyalgia and many other chronic illnesses, you’re going to find a lot of commonality in the causes.

What are the signs and symptoms? Obviously, a lot of people have bowel symptoms if they think they have a bowel problem: Gas bloating, abdominal distension, often reflux is part of that and indigestion, and abdominal discomfort.

One of the telltale things about leaky gut is that people also have systemic symptoms: Muscle pain, brain fog, headaches, just feeling miserable, flu-like, and all of these things actually have a lot of overlap with the symptoms of chronic illness. Sometimes it is hard to separate the two out. We’re going to talk about what other symptoms occur. To get there, you have to understand what the problem is.

If you look at gut dysfunction overall, this is a fairly busy slide. What I want you to pay attention to right now is these three red boxes. Those are the primary causes. Those are the contributors to leaky gut.

Gut disruptors, we’re going to talk about those and that is exacerbated by lots of carbohydrates in the diet and chronic stress. That is affecting everything that leads to leaky gut, which you can see everything is connected. We’re going to build this out, so don’t get too uptight about this busy diagram right now.

Our first category is these gut disruptors, things that adversely affect the lining of the gut that cause it to become permeable or leaky. The primary gut disruptors, you obviously recognize some of these things but possibly not others. One that I searched out and found it was really a big problem was lectins and we’ll talk about what they are.

Storage proteins. You know probably the biggest storage protein that we worry about is gluten.

Microbes. Microbes, we all have microbes, but if you pick up the wrong microbes, they can cause you chronic problems. There’s a lot of overlap with Lyme here with some of the same microbes.

Antibiotics. So many people with Lyme disease end up on antibiotics for months and months and months and that just destroys the gut along with drugs and some toxins.

Lectins. What are lectins? A lot of people haven’t heard of lectins During all of our plant foods, they are present in all plants but the highest concentration of lectins are in seeds. Why are they there? They’re there to protect the seed from things eating it. There are different kinds of seeds out there and some plants what things to eat their seeds, like a blackberry bush wants a creature to eat the berries and consume the seeds and then spread the seeds all over everywhere in a fertilized fashion.

Weeds and grasses don’t really want things eating that. Those things are carried by the wind, so they don’t necessarily want things eating up all the seeds. They actually load things that affect the intestinal track of creatures that might need it, so they might eat at least less of it. What these things do is they bind to carbohydrates in cell membranes and disrupt cell membranes, causing irritation and damage to the membrane.

Primary sources of lectins. Your grains, which are grasses, so that’s a huge source of lectins. It’s actually found in the bran. Whole grains are higher in lectins than regular. Beans are really high in lectins. If you do not soak and cook kidney beans for a long time, they’re actually poisonous. If you eat a lot of kidney beans, they can do you great harm. Nuts have them. I’ll show you nightshade vegetables: Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplant.

We all eat lectins of course. Everybody eats lectins. You can’t eat plant matter without getting some lectins in your diet, but a lot of it has to do with the concentrations you’re eating and other factors that are going on. Our gut is protected by a mucus layer, throughout the gut, from the stomach all the way down through the colon. This mucus layer has these carbohydrate complexes in it that basically bind these lectins, so they don’t actually damage intestinal cells. It really depends on the mucus layer to protect our tissues.

When you look at the average American diet, it’s really loaded with lectins. We’re eating a lot of grain products and beans. If you’re eating dairy, grain-fed dairy has lectins in it. The vegetables we eat, potatoes and tomatoes and some peppers. We’d like to throw in some peppers. We’re really eating a pretty high-lectin diet.

Storage proteins. This is another type of protein that’s in plants that can be problematic. It is not in the bran; it’s in the endosperm, the inner part of the seed where the seed puts the nutrients. What do these specialized rich proteins do is provide amino acids for that sprouting seed. If you would think about it though is these proteins are very foreign to us. They are very foreign substances, so if we get a lot of them in our system, it is really irritating to our entire immune system.

Gluten is the big one. Everybody thinks gluten is a thing. It’s actually a family of proteins. There are many types of gluten. Gluten as the primary … The form of storage protein called gluten is in wheat, barley, rye, and the ancient wheat forms. What’s unique about gluten is it’s sticky. That’s what makes bread rise. When you add yeast to the bread and the yeast fermenting create little bubbles, the bubbles stick together. It makes bubbles because of the stickiness of the gluten.

If you had eaten bread in 1900, it would have been like a brick. What we’ve done over the years is cultivate bread to have higher concentrations of sticky gluten, so we can get those nice lovely soft rolls that we love so much.

When you eat something with gluten, when you’re eating bread, when you’re eating doughnuts, think eating glue; it’s sticky and it’s really irritating to your digestive tract. If you’re eating small amounts of it along with a lot of other foods, you’re okay. If that’s a major part of your diet, you’re in trouble; very allergenic.

Now, some people are worried about celiac disease. When you look at people out there that are eating so much wheat. A large portion of our population probably anywhere from 25% to 50% of people have eaten enough wheat that their system is sensitized to it, so they’re gluten sensitive. Then they eat gluten, it makes them feel bad. Celiac disease is a really severe form of that. It occurs in about 3% of the population, so it’s not as great as you might think. There are a lot of people that have gluten sensitivity that don’t necessarily classify as celiac disease. Celiac disease is characterized by very severe inflammation, autoimmune phenomenon, and just really bad symptoms, terrible symptoms.

Personally, I think part of the link of why people pick up gluten, bad gluten sensitivities and get this is disruption of the gut bio bacteria. There’s a microbe called mycoplasma that’s actually quite common. If you test any given population in the world anywhere from a third to three quarters of people will be carrying mycoplasma. It’s very small bacteria; it’s very common. Lots of us carry it, it is very common in Lyme disease.

About 75% of people with Lyme disease are also carrying mycoplasma. There’s a lot of ways to get it. You can get it from ticks, but you can also get it from respiratory infections, your classic walking pneumonia. Most people don’t really get pneumonia. They think they got a bad cold with a little bronchitis and they actually picked up mycoplasma and they never got rid of it. Because once it goes deep systemically, it’s all through the body. You can also get … There are different forms of it that you can pick up sexually 00:16:43]. This is a really common microbe.

What’s unique about mycoplasma is it infects linings of things. It infects the linings of the lungs. It affects the linings of genital tract, the bladder. Once it gets systemic, it can infect the lining of the gut and actually damage villi and damage cells. I think that could potentially be a pathway to some of these sensitivities and part of that leaky gut syndrome. That’s one of the ties between that and Lyme disease. I think that’s one of the reasons we see so much of it.

Borrelia may play a similar role and there could be lots of other microbes that we don’t even know about yet. Making these connections is difficult. When I talk about the connection between mycoplasma and leaky gut and possibly celiac disease, that’s speculation. We don’t have any proof of that, but it’s something that I’m concerned about just because I see so many little connections in talking to people with positive mycoplasma and other things.

Then there’s the antibiotics. Lots of people are using antibiotics and we’ve disrupt our microflora. The more diverse the spectrum of all the microbes you have in your body, the more healthy you are. When you use antibiotics and you kill off a lot of those important things, it’s a big part of disease and it’s like cell pathogens. Something that people don’t really appreciate either is it disrupts biofilms.

Now, I talked about that mucus layer. When you get down into the distal small bowel and into the colon, that mucus layer is actually filled with microbes and it’s actually a very important biofilm. We all have biofilms in our body that are favorable. Biofilms protect our lower intestine and our large colon. When you’re taking all these things to disrupt the biofilms as part of your therapy and antibiotics, you’re disrupting all of those really beneficial biofilms in your body.

In addition, antibiotics destroy mitochondria that are in intestinal cells, which is a real problem. Mitochondria are ancient bacteria that are cells-incorporated in a long time ago to produce energy, and antibiotics actually have an adverse effect on these things especially in the intestines. We think that is one of the reasons why people get fatigue when they take a lot of antibiotics.

Then there’s the drugs. There are too many drugs to talk about that affect the bowel. The top of the list is the nonsteroidals, ibuprofen and aspirin. They mainly affect the lining of the stomach. When you get started with that in the stomach, it ends up going all the way down the line.

Number two, excessive carbohydrates. All those green products are loaded with carbs and then all the starch isn’t quite enough, so we load sugar on top of that. Any kind of sugar is a problem. Table sugar, organic cane sugar really all of the sugar derivatives, it’s sugar. High fructose corn syrup, all of the food sugars. It’s all sugar and it can present a problem.

In addition, dairy. Dairy has a lot of lactose, which is a sugar. Galactose and glucose, when it goes in your gut, it splits out into glucose so it’s another form of sugar; it’s another carbohydrate. Then there’s all the processed food products that we eat — goodness! You can pick up these healthy fruit drinks and you look on the bottle and it’s got 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrate in 12 ounces. Man, is that a carbohydrate load!

The effects of all these excess carbohydrates. You can’t digest all these things and so a lot of them gets presented to your intestines. It’s not necessarily they can select out and grow bad bacteria, but they grow good bacteria, too. One of our favorable bacteria in our gut is Lactobacillus, but you don’t have very high concentrations in the upper part of the small intestines. If you present a lot carbohydrates to those bacteria, they’re going to grow. They’re going to start reproducing, and they’re going to start fermenting.

Then you got the yeast. Everybody has yeast in their gut; everybody has yeast. That’s not something you acquire or get as an infection; everybody has it. It’s not a problem unless you’re eating all these wrong foods. The excessive carbohydrates lead to insulin resistance which affects Type 2 Diabetes, and it suppresses the immune function. Also importantly, it slows gastric motility. Your stomach doesn’t empty like it should. It appears to inhibit enzyme production.

Dairy, in addition to the lactose, also has casein proteins. Casein proteins are proteins that have characteristics that are similar to gluten. About 80% of the proteins in milk are casein proteins. They can be as much of a problem as far as an allergenic point of view as gluten can. Now, those of you who are putting whey protein in your smoothies, whey is a different set of proteins that come from milk and it can be separated out. Whey is actually very well tolerated by most people.

Here it is. The average American diet is a lectin-loaded, carb-saturated, gluten-filled, nutrient-deficient mess; that’s a bad problem when you look at bowel function. Then you throw in a little bit of stress; we’re all stressed. We’re all running schedules and we’re got to have too much on our plate, we’ve got too much responsibility. We’re constantly in that fight or flight mode all the time. When your body is on constant alert, it puts all your resources toward taking care of confrontation. It puts your GI tract on hold, so it slows motility. It disrupts immune function.

Much of your immune system functions are in your gut. Because of all these things that you’re having to deal with in your gut, you have to have that immune system ready and waiting to take care of those things. It affects serotonin. We talk about serotonin in the brain, but most of your serotonin in your body is in your gut. It’s really important to keep gut function moving, really important.

All in all, it compromises things, starting with the stomach all the way down. Everything gets backed up. If you’re not emptying your stomach, you’re walking around with a slurry of stuff in there and that’s where reflux comes from and all that just sitting in there irritates and strips the lining of the … You got all of this lectin-loaded, gluten-loaded carbohydrate food and it strips that membrane away. It’s not surprising that people start having ulcers. You back up into the liver and you start getting gallstones forming because things aren’t emptying like they should, and you inhibit acid and enzymes.

Now, you’ve compromised that digestive process right there in the stomach, and you’re not digesting all these foreign proteins that are coming in. You’re not breaking down these things like you should. You’re not producing the acid and enzymes to get rid of the lectin proteins, and the gluten proteins and all the other weird stuff that comes through. You’re not breaking those carbohydrates down either, so you’re presenting these undigested carbohydrates to all these microbes. They are ready and waiting and hungry.

That’s where we start talking about the small bowel intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Basically, what that is is the bacteria are there. They’re normal bacteria. If you’re not eating a lot of carbohydrates, they’re not a problem. You start overloading your system with undigested carbohydrates, you stimulate their growth and they start fermenting and so they produce gas. Fermentation, you know that produces gas and the gas gets trapped. It can’t get down to the small bowel. It can’t go back up through the stomach, so people get bloating, distended and uncomfortable.

Gradually, that whole process works its way down to the lower portion of the small bowel and colon, and then you get gas passing out, discomfort and just everything is terrible, and that’s what we call your irritable bowel syndrome. Dysbiosis is the technical term for the imbalances of bacteria that whole process it causes. It can make you pretty miserable, and you can get an awful lot of discomfort that comes with it. That’s pre-leaky gut. People often have that. They can have it separately, but the two often come hand-in-hand. Irritable bowel syndrome is just a progression of that to the point that it’s getting worst.

Here we are. We’ve come a little bit of ways on our diagram. We see that these three causes contribute to gastric dysfunction which affects the proteins, and we see that it also causes the dysbiosis, the overgrowth, the bacteria, and the shift in the bacteria which goes all the way through the system. Those bacteria, you toss this end with the mycoplasma and then all of this other overgrowth of bacteria, and you start stripping that membrane away and you start affecting the gut. Then you start getting problems.

When you’ve got all these things in there and it strips away the protected mucus layer, you start inflaming the cells and they start contracting, so you end up opening up spaces. This is what a normal gut is a lot like. The spaces aren’t completely tight. Like I said in the beginning, everybody has a little bit of leaky gut. Some proteins do sneak through this into the bloodstream, so they sneak into the blood.

It’s not really a big problem that they’re in small amounts, but you strip away that protective layer and you start affecting these cells. Those tight junctions in between the cells open up, and then you’ve got these undigested, irregular proteins that flooding across into the bloodstream. So, basically leaking and that’s where the name comes from.

That pushes the immune system into really big overdrive. We all have these white blood cells called B lymphocytes that line our gut. Like I said, a live immune system is in the gut. When these occasional proteins come across, we label them with antibodies. That’s the type of antibody, and I mentioned these names because people are looking for testing for IgA and IgG antibodies when they’re looking for food sensitivities.

The IgG, IgA antibodies are the ones that are produced by the lymphocyte right there in the gut. If you’ve got that occasional protein coming across, it’s no big deal. Those proteins get labeled with antibodies, they circulate through, they get stopped in a lymph node, and white blood cells gobble them up, and it’s no problem.

What if you got leaky gut and there is a flood of foreign proteins coming across? These cells get overwhelmed, and so you got your back-up cells. Your B lymphocytes that are in your general system, they start becoming sensitized to all of these. Then you got these floods of things coming across, that activates inflammation, and histamine, too which is your classic response. When these things circulate through your whole system, they are very inflammatory. They circulate throughout your body so your brain is affected, your joints are affected and your muscles are affected.

I used to have terrible muscle pain in my legs. That was the one differentiating factor that I was able to say, “Okay, this is food sensitivities. This isn’t really as much Lyme disease.” When my knees are really hurt bad and they started getting crunchy, I felt like that was mainly microbes and associated with the Lyme. When I had really bad muscle pain, I began to associate it with leaky gut and it’s because of these immune complexes circulating throughout the system. It causes all these systemic symptoms that can be really, really uncomfortable and make you miserable.

I’m going to stop for about a second and let Tim have our poll.

Tim: As speaking of food sensitivities, the next one is a true or false question for you guys. Food sensitivities are the same as food allergies. Simple true or false, what do you think about that? While all you guys are answering, just remember, we are going to have a replay, so you can just let this wash over you and you’ll absorb everything and then you can watch it again later to really soak it all up. The first round is to get things going.

All right, we’ve got … Most people responded; a few more moments here. The majority think false though. I’ll go and tell you that and share the results. You see 65% said false and the other 10% said true. Dr. Rawls will unpack that for us and let you know what the right answer is.

Dr. Bill Rawls: All right. Thanks, Tim. We have an educated audience. Yes, you’re correct. I have a food allergy, and I’ve got many food sensitivities. When I was a small child, I found out that if I was exposed to raw shrimp, if I got raw shrimp on my skin, I would break out in hives and feel miserable, absolutely miserable. I’ll have that allergy for the rest of my life whenever I’m exposed to raw shrimp. It’s a nice, convenient allergy though because I can’t peel shrimp, but once they’re cooked, I can eat them, which is really great.

Food sensitivities, I had food sensitivities to virtually everything I was eating. It’s a whole different part of the immune system that’s being affected, and these are not generally permanent allergies. Sometimes the margins blur between them, but it’s generally the foods that people are eating the very, very most.

You can see from the list there, these are the food sensitivities that are considered the most common. If you look at that list, those are the foods that everybody’s eating. Everybody’s loading up on corn and wheat, and they’re nuts and lots of things that have yeast in them and tomatoes and beans and eggs and bananas. We eat more bananas than any other fruit. This is where most of your food sensitivities occur. It’s those undigested proteins that are leaking across.

If you stop the flow for long enough and calm the immune system down, most of these things will go away or get better; that was my experience. I was sensitive to so many things that I have to circulate foods around, and I could eat something for a few days, and then I’ll have to stop it and eat something else, but gradually, I improved. Now, I can eat a lot of things. Now, have I’ve gone back to the standard American diet? Not a chance. I eat mostly really robust, healthy, fresh foods, and I enjoy them.

Most of my food sensitivities have gone away. If I’m in a good restaurant serving sourdough bread, which seems to be tolerated a little bit better than the grocery store stuff, I can have a piece of that. It doesn’t bother me. My only disappointment is that I still have really strong nut sensitivities. That’s the only thing that’s held over. I have to be really careful about eating nuts, but most things I can eat fairly well.

We’ve got all of that, and if that wasn’t enough, then there’s oxalates. What are oxalates? Oxalates are chemicals that are present in plants, and they serve purposes in the plants. Genuinely, we don’t absorb them very much. They just go right to your system, they bind to calcium in the gut, and we don’t ever see them. If you got leaky gut, you got a lot more oxalate coming into your system than you should and that when it binds with calcium forms crystals. It can be really irritating to tissues.

Early on in my career as a gynecologist, I treated people with vulvodynia. One of the things we used to do is put him on a low-oxalate diet and that helped a lot of people, because it gets concentrated in certain areas or the body.

Kidney stones are mostly calcium oxalate. It’s really interesting. I found a study that people with Crohn’s disease, which is really an extremely form of leaky gut as much as anything else, have very, very high rates of kidney stones.

Now, we’re moving along in the diagram. We’ve got these undigested proteins and finally the leaky gut. You got the different antibodies that are produced, the immune complexes and oxalates. They’re irritating our system and making us uncomfortable. If things get really, really bad, it can progress on celiac disease or inflammatory bowel disease, but fortunately, that’s not the case. Even if you get this far, there are things that you can do about it.

This diagram is just to illustrate a little bit about what happens in the gut. These are what are called villi. When you look at a gut in the small intestines, you got all these of these little projections, and you can think of this mix of food, nutrients and stuff that’s moving through. It just gives the gut a lot more surface area to absorb nutrients. These are not cells. The cells are the little teeny things along there. These are all lined with cells. When somebody has really, really severe gut inflammation, i.e. Crohn’s disease or celiac disease, they wipe out all the villi. It just scrapes them right off.

Most people with just leaky gut and irritable bowel syndrome and things like that, don’t get anywhere near this severe, their villi start to get moth-eaten. You can just you see the damage where the leaky gut is occurring and so that’s part of it.

Fortunately, even folks that get to an extreme level, I’ve worked with quite a few people with Crohn’s disease, and if they really stick to the diet and stick to the supplements and do the things that they’re supposed to do, they restore. All of this does affect nutrient absorption. Of course, the worse it is, the worst the nutrient absorption is. I find that with most people, it’s not that bad but that is a concern.

Then just very quickly, other kinds of gut hazards. Mycotoxins, I mentioned it because a lot of people hear about mold and food and it is a problem. I looked it up and I couldn’t find any evidence that mycotoxins, the toxins produced by mold, actually cause leaky gut. You do get more of them to come across if you’re eating moldy foods. It’s an issue if you have leaky gut.

Old vegetables have mold. Dairy products, all dairy products, with the exception of fermented dairy like kefir and yogurt, have mold. Cottage cheese has greater concentrations of mold than anything. Then in the wrong situations, if it gets moist, wheat, corn, and oats can grow black mold. It produces one of the most notorious toxins of all.

Toxic fat. We’re eating, in our processed green products, we’re getting a lot of bad fat, hydrogenated vegetable oils, trans fats. That thing that, “We make our doughnuts without trans fats.” Here’s a story. If you take polyunsaturated vegetable oil and heat it to high enough temperature, it will form trans fats. They may be using oil that when it went into the bin didn’t have trans fats, but by the time it’s made that doughnut, it definitely does.

Goitrogens — I’ll mention very briefly just because we addressed on the diet. Goitrogens are things that inhibit uptake of iodine and they can affect thyroid. Hyperthyroid individuals should be more aware of that. A lot of us with chronic illness find that our thyroid is affected, so it is an issue.

Some cruciferous are worse than others. Mostly cooking will get rid of it, but this is craze of eating fresh raw kale, I’m a little bit concerned about because kale is really hard to digest. Not to say a little of kale here and there isn’t a good thing, but when you’re eating just lots and lots of raw kale, it could really obstruct your ability to absorb iodine and the kale is very difficult to digest.

Cabbage is probably one of the best of the cruciferous. Soy, peanuts, and strawberries are mild goitrogens. There are a lot of toxins in our food: Pesticides, heavy metals, drugs, and alcohol. All of these things can have adverse effects on our guts.

Moving on. Getting over leaky gut. You know a little bit about it how it comes be, so now we’ve got to get over it. When somebody has all these symptoms, the first thing they do is go to their doctor. As I said, the conventional understanding of gut disease hasn’t changed very much in 20 years or longer, so they’re not thinking about these things. If you have really severe conditions, it may be worth doing some testing.

Now, that being said, most people with mild to moderate symptoms do not need to do extensive testing. If you have really bad stomach problems or severe diarrhea, bleeding diarrhea, severe abdominal pain, it’s probably worth going to someone just to have an endoscopy to look in the stomach and look in the colon and screening — More routine colon cancer screening over the age of 50, that’s something that’s really important for everyone.

Food sensitivity testing, I think it has value; I did it. It helped me get in the ballpark. I did a test; it was about $130. That really gave me what I needed to know about how to start arranging my diet as far as things to specifically avoid and not. I don’t think people need to spend $1,500 or $2,000 to test every known food, because it’s going to change. As you change your diet, sensitivities are going to change as long as you have leaky gut. Doing a really expensive panel generally isn’t necessary.

A lot of people are doing stool cultures for parasites. What they’re concerned about is worms. We really don’t have big worm problems in the United States, because you’ve got to have a continual fecal contamination of your food to actually perpetuate that cycle. Unfortunately, most hospital labs don’t do a very good job of it.

Then there’s a comprehensive stool analysis. This is a specialized test to a lot of integrated physicians too. It has a place. It is expensive; its $600 to $1,000. It will tell you basically what your symptoms have already told you. If you’ve been paying attention and you’ve noted these, you have the different types of symptoms, these things are present. Getting a test that tells you that it’s present, it’s not always necessary. This is more important if you’re not getting well.

Then basic labs. If you’re really severe, test for the celiac. Test your liver, do a basic blood panel; do the basic things.

Really the best way to know about your progress is your symptoms. If your symptoms are improving, then things are healing; as simple as that.

Stool quality can also be a helpful way to monitor, and I won’t go into detail on that one tonight, but I did write about it in the book and it just helps you. It’s a good monitor. You can actually look at your stool and tell you a lot of things your $600 stool analysis would tell you.

Overcoming leaky gut. To overcome leaky gut, you have to undo the things that are causing the problem; it’s simple as that. You’ve got to minimize the gut disruptors and part of that is dietary. I find that a lot of patients come to this on their own. They don’t have to be taught by a physician. A large portion of Lyme patients and fibromyalgia patients that I’m seeing are already gluten-free and they’re already cutting back on their carbs, and they are doing the things that they need to do.

You have to go beyond that to really promote healing. You’ve got to protect that lining. You’ve got to do the things necessary to allow to create that healing environment. You’ve got to enhance digestion so that you’re breaking down proteins and you’re breaking down the carbohydrates that you’re getting in. You’ve got to find ways to get beyond that stress, and you to restore the gut microbiome.

These are the foods that we need to avoid [46:13]. A you can see from the list, these are most of the foods that most people in America are eating and it’s tough right at first. I didn’t have anybody to educate me, and it took me years to come around to changing my diet. It was a real struggle because these are the things that I lived off most of my life. What I learned is you can get around it. We live in a world that … We’re about as close to the Garden of Eden as you can be. We have lots of great foods.

Yes, the grains. You got to minimize the grains. The nuts have to go for a while; the beans, the nightshades. If you feel like you may have severe leaky gut, you really have to not eat high-oxalate foods until the healing occurs.

Cabbage, cooked cabbage, is really good for the stomach; don’t take that one off the list, but your other cruciferous are just harder to digest, and they’re probably better left off the list for at least a while. High sugar foods, of course. Meats, generally the beef and pork with a high saturated fat are harder for you to digest so it’s those things.

A lot of people are sensitive to eggs, to dairy. Black tea and coffee are put on the list because they’re gastric irritants. Most people get into the bathroom at a later time, but in the early stages, they can really irritate your stomach. Soft drinks, alcohol obviously, refined oils, and food that’s just old.

What’s left? Is there anything left to eat? Actually, lots.

There are so many wonderful foods. I’m going to give you the short list right now [48:15]. This is the basic list that I start most people out on. Now, you’re going to get a list. You’re going to see a popup which you can get a grocery list from us. It’s not quite this type, but that’s all I could fit on one of these slides. It gives you the basics.

There are things that you can have. You do have to learn how to eat vegetables. There’s not much way around that. Cooked white rice and cooked wild rice do really well. Most people tolerate those greens and it’s because the storage proteins and rice aren’t that bad. The lectins don’t seem to be that bad and the carbohydrates break down really fast, so you’re absorbing the carbohydrate.

Of course, you can become a diabetic eating too much white rice, but as a supplement to your diet, especially people that are wasting and aren’t absorbing nutrients, white rice can be a real savior but you absorb. You break down as carbs and absorb them before they get to your bacteria.

Meat, fish and poultry predominantly, a lot of salmon. You can have some berries, just the temperate fruits. Avocados are fine.

It gets a little dicier. I found that most people do okay with coconut milk, rice milk, and oat milk. I’ve got a lot of people report that they’re doing fine with goat’s milk, too. Some oils and seasonings, beverages —

Green tea can be an irritant to the stomach. If you’re doing coffee and tea or other caffeinated beverages, you going to have to have something with caffeine and probably green tea is the best. Green tea has a lot of health characteristics. When we’re limiting this food, we’re not talking about general health as much as we are gut recovery. Herbal tea, ginger tea is a really wonderful thing.

Vegetables, most of your foods need to be cooked. If you’re trying to recover from a gut dysfunction with a raw vegetable diet that’s loaded with grains and nuts, what you’re going to find is you’re going to get really, really sick. Most all of your foods with some exceptions need to be cooked. You need to do everything you can to make your food easier to digest.

Big question is, how long do you have to stay this limited? That really is highly variable; it depends on the degree of dysfunction.

Some people that have mild dysfunction, it’s only two to four weeks and they can progress. We have a whole program that we phase it out into several phases that this is phase one and people start on that. I’ve had people who have to stay on it for six months or a year though. Those are exceptions, but sometimes it takes that.

Then we gradually start adding to this diet again. As the symptoms are decreasing, then is pretty good evidence that your leaky gut and other symptoms are resolving, and especially if you’re supplements to enhance your digestion, then it’s not so bad.

Cultivating a low-stress lifestyle. That’s about making your world small, making your life easy, things like putting all your bills on automatic draft and cutting off and limiting your media. You’re not aware of things in the world that are happening that you really can’t do anything about. Restoring your sleep and walking, I think, is one of the best stress reliefs out there.

Walking is fantastic. It generates endorphins. It balances all of your hormones and it helps digestive function. Just getting out and walking one to three miles a day or the equivalent is one of the best things that you can do yourself.

Protecting the gut lining. There are a lot of great things out there that can do that. On top of my list is chlorella. Chlorella is a freshwater algae. You get it dried in little tablets. The typical maintenance dose for chlorella is 5 to 7.5g total a day. For additional support, you may want to take 10g total a day. It’s like a functional food. Deodorizes the gut and really does a great job for healing. The only exception to chlorella is that some people that have diarrhea can’t use it at first because it makes it a little worse, but most people can incorporate their chlorella.

Ginger tea is fantastic. Now, that’s not something out of the bag; that’s raw ginger peeled and made into a fresh tea.

D-limonene is the oil that’s in orange peel; really great for reflux.

Good old Pepto-Bismol can be helpful.

Sangre de grado, that’s a favorite of mine. That’s something that everybody should have in their first aid kit; it’s great stuff. It is from a tree that’s grown; it’s from Malaysia but it’s grown all over South America. They tap the tree like you would tap a maple tree and drain the sap. The sap is blood red and the consistency of blood. They put it right into a bottle. You can get bottles of sangre de grado.

It has a Spanish name but the English name is dragon’s blood, because it looks like blood; great stuff though. If you have a cut or a scrape on your skin, wow is it good. You put a little dragon’s blood on there and it will stop the bleeding. It will sterilize it, and it will form a protective coating when it dries, and wow does it heal fast. They actually use it in South America for stomach ulcers which is really cool.

There’s actually been a study done in animals where they showed that taking just a dropperful of sangre de grado and water two or three times a day would enhance healing of the stomach ulcers, cut down the healing time almost into half.

Demulcents, deglycyrrhizinated licorice. It’s a form of licorice and it comes in wafers.

Slippery Elm — it comes from a tree. It also comes from the marshmallow plant and not the marshmallows you get out of the bag at the grocery store. These things actually … We help re-establish that mucus layer.

Then the carminatives are cardamom, the spice, and also peppermint oil are really good for decreasing cramping.

Promoting normal digestion. Now, your digestion is compromised. You want to knock those foreign proteins out. Take two or three, four digestive enzyme capsules when you eat can really help your digestive process, and apple cider vinegar tend to help that too.

Stimulating bile production, another called milk thistle which is great for protecting the liver and stimulating bile and then andrographis. Andrographis is one of the top things that we use in Lyme disease in your Lyme protocols. It also stimulates your gut, you’re bile, and protects your liver.

Then just nourishing tissues. Glutamine is an amino acid. You can take it as a supplement and then your basic A, B, C vitamins and then the omega-3 some fish oil or also eating salmon. Krill oil is also an excellent source.

Now, we’re getting down to — we want to kill off those bad bacteria. We’d like to get where the mycoplasma in the gut. We like to get rid of all the other things that have become dysfunctional in the gut. A lot of people are using probiotics; we’ll get to that. That’s kind of hit or miss thing. Once we’re starting to heal the stomach and the gut, we want to get some good antimicrobial herbs.

Very interestingly, when you look at the processes of Lyme and a lot of the microbes of Lyme, you find them associated with these gut dysfunction problems too like mycoplasma, like Borrelia. We’re getting double duty here that a lot of these herbs were using in her primary Lyme protocol like andrographis and cat’s claw, and garlic, and berberine are also really great for restoring the gut microflora and they do it. Instead of making the gut worse like antibiotics, they’re actually making the gut better.

For those of you who do you think you have worms, the herbal of choice is artemesia, black walnut, and clove. Generally, you don’t want to do those long-term because they do have some toxicity.

Probiotics. Probiotic is a hit or miss thing. We’re still learning about them. Lactobacillus is the bacteria that you mainly find in your small bowel. Bifidobacteria is what you find in your colon. Some of these things, if you have irritable bowel syndrome, can be helpful.

Everybody is a little bit different because all other gut microflora are different. If you’ve got SIBO, the small bowel overgrowth and you’re still feeding your gut bacteria all those carbohydrates and use a probiotic with this Lactobacillus in there, it’s like fuel on the fire. It’s just going to make things worse.

Then one of my favorites is Saccharomyces boulardii. That is actually a friendly favorable yeast, and it will suppress growth of the candida yeast. It also suppresses C. diff, Clostridium difficile, which is a common pathogen that people get when they antibiotics a lot.

Then there are other diets out there. What are our other choices? One pretty particular, I do have my own diets that I have devised over the years. What some of the other things going on out there? There are a lot of diets. You hear about so many things. I’d say the most favorable movement I see out there is the paleo trend.

Paleo is trying to select toward foods that were pre-grain age in human evolution. It’s foods that humans we’re eating more than 10,000 years ago, but actually none of those foods, the things that people are eating all of their cultivated foods weren’t available before 10,000 years ago. It’s more the thought that counts.

The big thing with paleo is people are getting the grains out of their diet and their getting the beans out of their diet which is where lectins and the glutens and problematic stored proteins are coming from. I think it’s a good movement. The only problem I have with it is that a lot of people are using it as an excuse to gorge on meat.

If you’re looking for just general recipes, there are a lot of recipes in magazines and on the Internet. That’s a nice place for recipes. We also have a whole lot of recipes in our diet guides to really get people where they need to be. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing. I think the main thing that makes a vegetable good as far as health point of view is vegetables. If you’re not eating half of your food coming from vegetables, you’re not eating a healthy diet no matter what you’re doing.

Then a little bit of an extreme is the ketogenic diet; this is cutting all carbohydrates out. To follow ketogenic diet, you’ve got to stay at 100 grams of carbohydrates a day; that’s really going out. A lot of people are trying to shoot for 30 to 50 grams of carbohydrates. You basically force your body into running off of fat instead of sugar, and a lot of people do well on it.

It has been associated with a decreased cancer risk, Lyme symptoms do get better. The only problem with the pure ketogenic you’ve either got to do it or you don’t do it. You cut your carbohydrates that you’re only burning fat or you’re not doing a ketogenic diet. It’s really, really, really hard to do. There’s folks that can do it; I think there’s a good health trend as long as you’re still getting the vegetables.

How do you know when you’re getting better? Your symptoms get better. You start feeling better. If the bowel symptoms go aways, then the systemic symptoms go away.

When you look at indicators of wellness, we’re trained to, “Okay, I’m going to give you this medicine, and then I’m going to test you again in a month to see if you’re getting better.” You know if you’re getting better. If all your symptoms go away, you bet your gut is healed and you’re on your way to wellness. It’s simple as that. Symptoms are the best monitor of any kind of illness by far.

That concludes the presentation and I’m going to turn it back over to Tim. Thank you everybody for staying around.

Tim: Great. Thank you, Dr. Rawls. I hope everyone learned something from that.

Now, we’ll move on to the Q&A. I know that that was about an hour so a lot of information. We’re going to answer as many questions as we can here. Dr. Rawls, if you will try to be as speedy as possible, I know that’s always hard, but we’ll do our best.

Dr. Bill Rawls: Okay.

Tim: I will again switch it around. What’s that Dr. Rawls?

Dr. Bill Rawls: Thanks, Tim.

Tim: All right. We’ll switch it around and I’ll go off the first question, Dr. Rawls, do Lyme and leaky gut always coexist?

Dr. Bill Rawls: No, they don’t. It has to do with the microbes, I think. We know that about 75% of people with the Lyme have mycoplasma. There’s a lot of hype that testing positive — The testing isn’t that good so there may be even more people that have it. It’s a potentially big player in leaky gut and GI dysfunction, in general. I don’t have any proof of that; it’s just speculation over years of studying this problem. I do talk to people that don’t have very much gut dysfunction and the gut dysfunction is variable. A lot of it depends on how bad their diet was before the other factors came together.

When you look at Lyme, it’s this perfect storm of chronic immune dysfunction that leads to this thing that we call Lyme disease or chronic Lyme disease, and the same players are going on with fibromyalgia so it’s affecting the gut. It’s affecting everything in the body.

Some people have a lot more neurological symptoms. Some people have more joint symptoms, but a lot of people have gut symptoms. I do talk to people; I would say maybe 10% or 20% of Lyme patients or fibromyalgia patients have more minor gut problems. I think it depends on just how those variables came together with the stress and the diet and other microbes that they picked up.

Tim: How about detoxing? That’s another one we get frequently at Rawls MD. Do you need to do a gut detox before you start a Lyme protocol?

Dr. Bill Rawls: Just to pass that information along, a couple weeks ago, I did a full webinar on detoxification. You can go to the RawlsMD.com website and find that and take a look at it. It’s a little bit more thorough than I can go into right here.

Basically, this idea that people need to do a 10-day detox. I think it might be valuable as an introduction, but a lot of them are taking products that are basically just laxative, and they feel better because they flush out all those bad bacteria, but they’re not really removing it very much in the way of toxins in their system. Detoxification is an ongoing process, and it’s a matter of reducing toxin inflow into your body and enhancing the body’s ability to detox. That’s part of the whole recovery process. The entire recovery process can be thought of as detoxification.

Tim: Great. How about coffee enemas? That’s another one people always … We get pretty frequently. What’s your take on those? Are they helpful?

Dr. Bill Rawls: I can’t say I’m a huge fan especially after becoming aware of the past seven to eight years that we have these really important biofilms in our colon. If you’re doing coffee enemas every day, you’re going to disrupt those biofilms and that can cause a lot of problems. People feel better with coffee enemas because the caffeine stimulates bile flow and it cleans out all the bacteria that have built up in the colon.

There are better ways to do it. Andrographis, milk thistle, there’s so many nice herbs that stimulate bile flow that you don’t need to do something as far as putting a foreign body all the way inside your body to do these enemas repeatedly. There are a lot of problems with them. People are reporting perforations, chronic colitis. The incidence of reported problems is actually quite high, so I’m not a huge fan of coffee enemas myself.

Tim: All right. Thanks. We got one here from Tom. Tom has been a reader of ours for a while. Good to see you here, Tom. Tom says, “I hear you should take digestive enzymes at the start of a meal and HCl 40 to 60 minutes after the meal. The reasoning being that HCl will deactivate enzymes. Is that true or does it really matter?”

Dr. Bill Rawls: Basically, enzymes are proteins so your digestive acid is going to inhibit a lot of those proteins, but certain proteins are more sensitive to digest than others. So, most of your digestive enzymes are built to be a little bit more resistant to stomach acid. Yes, probably ideally take your enzymes as soon as you eat the food and then drink the apple cider vinegar afterwards. Usually, the apple cider vinegar is like one or two teaspoons in a glass of water.

I try not to make things too complicated, because if you make things too complicated, people won’t do them. My thoughts are do as much as you can the best you can and do it consistently as you can. That’s what really matters.

Tim: Yes. Great. Thanks. You’re answering these very succinctly. Thanks everyone for sticking around for these. We’ll get to as many as we can so a few more here. Patrick would like to know what your stance is, Dr. Rawls, on juicing with leaky gut?

Dr. Bill Rawls: Juicing is probably fine. You’re taking out … Juicing, you’re basically using a vegetable juicer to squeeze all the juices out the fresh vegetables that haven’t been cooked, and fruits, and your excluding all the complex carbohydrates, the fiber. I think the juicing is fine. The issue of juicing is just being inconsistent with it, because you have to juice so much vegetables to do it.

If you have the time and you don’t mind taking the time to juice all those vegetables every day, or even if you want to do it occasionally, I think it’s great. That’s an exception. That’s something that’s very, very, very easy to digest and easy on your stomach, so that would be an exception with fresh vegetables and the fruits. Yes, go right ahead with that one. Celery is especially great.

Tim: All right. I hope that helps, Patrick. One from Jean here. “I have read that so that’s severe leaky gut can cause joint problems from toxins. Will the mobility issues go away when the gut is healed?”

Dr. Bill Rawls: Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, all of the stealth microbes, and the chronic immune dysfunction, and what is actually the immune complexes. These immune complexes circulate throughout the body and they generate just whole body inflammation. Joints seem to be part of that, but I think when you’re talking about joints, you’re talking about the microbes.

Mycoplasma infects joint linings have been associated with rheumatoid arthritis. Borrelia, we know, is affecting joints. I think if you got some really bad joint problems going on maybe that’s a concern that’s more with the microbes. Like I said, I could tell when I was having a Lyme flare up. My knees would hurt really bad. If I had eaten the wrong things and I had food sensitivity problems, my muscles would hurt really bad.

Tim: Thank you. Since this is about the Lyme and leaky gut connection, we got a couple of more Lyme-oriented questions here we’re going to field. This one is kind of a doozy, but point Robert wherever you can here. “How can the effects of 10 years of taking antibiotics for Lyme treatment be reversed?”

Dr. Bill Rawls: By not taking antibiotics. Sorry about that. The further I go with this, the less I am of antibiotics because we found so much good in the herbs. If you read the book, I’ll talk about antibiotics and other kinds of heroic therapies that are sometimes indicated with Lyme. I think you have to be putting things in perspective.

You can restore your gut; it does take time, but if you do all of the things that we’re talking about here very consistently, you will gradually restore your gut flora back to normal. You’ll increase your diversity. You’ll heal the tissues. How long it takes? You might have to be on those really particular stages for a while, and you might have to do the supplements. I would definitely be drinking ginger tea every day and taking chlorella every day — right now.

Tim: Great. Let’s see here. I got another one from … Actually, I don’t have a name for this one, but she says, “My son and I both with chronic Lyme just keep adding more and more food sensitivities to our list even though we’re doing everything we know how to treat leaky gut. He’s down to about 12 foods that he can tolerate. What can we do?”

Dr. Bill Rawls: Yes, that’s a tough one. It’s like I think you have to … It’s just continuing to do the things persistently, and it’s not just the diet. The supplements really, really have an important role. If you’re not doing those things, you need to do more of them. There are other things beyond that that I do mention in the book. I’m searching every day for new things that I can add on that help that healing process, but you have to do all of it.

You can’t just do the diet. You have to affect the microbes. Again, personally, I think mycoplasma and microbes like it are a problem. You have to protect the gut. You’ve got to re-establish that mucus layer. It can be a struggle at times. I found that virtually everyone who is persistent enough will gradually start turning in the corner and pushing in the other direction.

Tim: Now, we’ve identified that healing your gut is important piece being able to absorb herbs, but a lot of attendees are wondering how they know at what point the gut is really well enough to use full strength herbal protocols.

Dr. Bill Rawls: That’s a little bit by trial and error. Most people, the things … The herbs can irritate your stomach. If you got a bad stomach, restoring the stomach with the things that I mentioned is more important than addressing leaky gut. If your stomach is okay and you’re able to get the herbs in, you start off with a little.

We start everybody off on fairly low doses and we progress from there out to larger doses. Sometimes people have to separate different ones out to find things that they tolerate, but it’s has to be part of a protocol. That’s the thing that’s going to gradually restore the gut back to normal more than anything else.

Symptoms are a good guide, but sometimes it’s trial and error. If it’s part of the dietary protocol that I use, it has what’s called an elimination diet that you eliminate categories of foods. We start with that really, really basic diet most people can tolerate though there are exceptions. Most people tolerate those foods fairly well. Then we progressively add other things on, and if you’re still reactive, then you know that the problem is still there.

Again, some people will have to stay on that limited diet for fairly a long time to really get well. The supplements do help, and it’s a give-and-take thing. There’s no lab that can measure it. Most doctors don’t even recognize leaky gut or really understand why all these problems are occurring in the gut. Symptoms are a good guide and just trial and error — a little bit of this, a little bit of that, trying different things as you go along.

Tim: Great. Just to confirm here from someone, “If the immune system is strong and we get our gut in good health, can we fight off Lyme?”

Dr. Bill Rawls: Yes, that’s a bigger one than just a question here, but yes, that’s the whole idea. The things that you have to do in Lyme are suppress the microbes, which is different than trying to eradicate them with antibiotics. That’s where the herbs come in and other kinds of things come in is to suppress the microbes, but at the same time doing all the things that you need to do to restore your immune function.

All of this is tied together, so when you’re doing these things to restore immune function, you’re affecting the gut and you’re affecting the microbes and you’re affecting everything in your body. I tell people all the time it’s not a battle that’s won in days and weeks; it’s months and years, patience, persistence, consistency. It’s an up-and-down thing. People get worse; they get better. You fall off the wagon and go back to eating the foods that you were eating and I started having problems again. We all do that and it’s just part of life, but it’s a learning process. The more that you learn and the better you get at it, then you start crawling out of that hole.

Tim: Great. All right. I think we got time for just one or two more here. We got a lot of questions about the best tests for Lyme. Where would you point them?

Dr. Bill Rawls: There’s a lot of information on Rawls MD. Just briefly, I will say that none of the testing is very good. To me, if someone has most all of the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease, you’re carrying Borrelia. It’s not a disease of an infection with one microbe. You’re always carrying other things too.

You have to look at Lyme differently. Doctors are looking at infections from the point of view of one microbe causing one illness. Everybody that gets the microbe get sick, and you’re not going to get well until you eradicate the microbe. It doesn’t work that way. That’s not what chronic Lyme disease is. It’s a reflection of chronic immune dysfunction.

Everybody always has a perfect storm of factors that come together and disrupt immune system and they happen to have all these microbes on board and different microbes cause slightly different presentations. You can do all the testing you want and I can tell you, you have things that they can’t test for. There’s no way around it. If someone has most of the symptoms of chronic Lyme and they go out and spend $600 on an iGeneX test that tells them that they don’t have Borrelia, there’s a pretty good chance that test is wrong.

All of the testing is designed for acute diagnosis. All of the people you have wanting to be tested have chronic illness, and by then the immune response is attenuated and the concentrations are some so small of the microbes that the testing is just fair at best. What we’re going to find is as we get better at testing, we’re going to find that an awful a lot of people have these microbes that aren’t sick.

Tim: Great. All right, last question for you, Dr. Rawls.

Dr. Bill Rawls: All right.

Tim: Since a lot of folks are dealing with Lyme as well as leaky gut and that it can feel overwhelming that you’re fighting two battles here. They’re just wondering, is it possible to ever get back to their pre-illness self?

Dr. Bill Rawls: Oh, yes. No doubt about it. It’s not really two battles; it’s one big battle. When you look at Lyme disease, you’re looking at basically a disruption of all of the immune system and healing functions in the body, so the recovery process to getting well is undoing that. It affects the gut and the brain and the joints and it affects everything in the body. If you are doing the things to suppress the microbes, restore normal immune function, balance the hormones in the body, then you’re going to get well and it’s as simple as that.

What we’re trying to do with our website, with our company, is create pathways for people to be able to do this without spending enormous sums of money to go to specialized clinics. I was able to do it. I didn’t have the luxury of being able to go fly across the country to see a specialist. I was trapped in a situation where I couldn’t leave a small town, and I had to use the resources I had. I had to learn things from the Internet and books, and I had to bring things that would help me heal to my doorstep, and I was able to do that. It took me about five years, but I got my health back.

When I was 50, I had terrible leaky gut, hardly any foods that I could eat, lots of bowel symptoms, terrible joints. I thought for sure, at some point, I would be having knee replacements and hip replacement, and chronic back pain and be on all kinds of medicines for all of those things.

Guess what? I turn 60 next month. I don’t have joint pain. I’m doing all the things that I want to do at this portion of my life. Still, I have that nut sensitivity, but hey, I eat great food. I sit down every day and go, “Wow. I’m blessed to be able to enjoy such a wonderful food and not be trapped in that processed food vortex that traps so many people and ruin so many people’s lives.”

Yes, I was probably as ill as anyone I’ve ever talked to, with a few exceptions, but not many, and I got my life back. I live differently. I don’t really appreciate the concept of aging very well because I feel so much better at 60 than I did at 50; it seems backward to me. It’s very odd. I’ve also been doing all of these things consistently for over 10 years. I’ve been taking herbs. I take my herbs every single day religiously and I have been for a long time. Every year, just seems to get a little bit better and that’s what it’s all about.

Tim: Great. Thank you for all the answers to the questions. I know everyone really appreciates that so — time to say goodbye to Dr. Rawls. Thanks for being here as always.

Dr. Bill Rawls: Thanks.

Tim: All right. We’ll see on the next one, Dr. Rawls.

Dr. Bill Rawls: All right.