Happy Gut, Happy Immune System
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The gut impacts EVERYTHING from respiratory wellness to immune function to mental clarity to how much disease-causing chronic inflammation is in your body.
It’s true!
Science is now showing that this gut-body connection isn’t only REAL…but there’s a PROFOUND connection between what’s happening in your gut, and how your body functions.
Dr. Zach Bush M.D. is one of the most brilliant medical minds working today transform our understanding of health. In an unforgettable podcast with Zach, he shares steps you can take to restore optimal gut health to promote a healthy immune system.
Zach is a triple-board certified physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He is an internationally-recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and our food production systems.
One of the most mind-blowing parts of our conversation was when Zach shares insights on how just a couple of tablespoons of fermented calories every day is an amazingly powerful way to get complexity and biodiversity back into your diet.
Here’s what he said is the mosts effective way to incorporate fermented foods into your daily routine…
Zach Bush: “Kathy, you mentioned fermented foods. Huge fan. We’ve been fermenting foods since the dawn of food preparation. It wasn’t until we developed widespread refrigeration that we really stopped fermenting our food in homes. And, so, we’ve got to get back to that. We need to start doing our own home fermentation. Incredibly, get wild ferments from the air around your house, reduce your allergy loads, etc., etc. So, wild fermentation’s really great bonus to put back into your food. It only takes a couple of tablespoons of fermented calories with your sauer kraut or sour reuben with your turnips or whatever you’re doing. These are just amazingly powerful ways to get complexity and biodiversity back into your diet.
And, then, as you mentioned as well, the more color you try to go after in your diet – the more fruit, vegetables, etc. – while they may be less nutrient-rich than they were in the 40s, that’s still the only source you’re going to get from, so, going after something like that.
And, of course, many of us in the medical field are now turning to juicing as a powerful way to increase that nutrient load. With juicing, of course, you can get a couple of grocery bag fulls worth of fruits and vegetables into just a few glasses of contents that you compound as an enormous volume. Since each piece of fruit is less dense, you’ve got to eat more of it and juicing is an easy way get that massive volume of fruits and vegetables in. So, for my critically ill patients, they’re juicing a large volume. So, those are some of the tricks.
But one of the neat things, when you turn your attention away from the intestine is your breathing. And you breathe much of the microflora or the bacteria that you’re going to populate and pass through your gut. And that is an amazing oversight that we’ve had in my field of gut health. But I have all my patients, once they’re started on the Restore, we’ll have them start travelling out into the greater Virginia area. They’ll go out to Virginia Beach and spend a couple of days there breathing the ocean environment. They’ll go up to the Appalachian trail, some waterfalls. They’ll find these different ecosystems, each one delivering thousands of different species to their nasal sinuses and ultimately to their gut. And, so, that’s really something that I’ve got a growing passion for is where is your ecosystem and can you get your ecosystem bigger?”
