121: Gut Health Essentials with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz joins the show to break down gut health—focusing on the power of addition, not restriction. We dive into the benefits of fiber, microbiome diversity, and how adding more plant-based foods can improve health. Dr. B shares actionable tips for bloating, constipation, and food intolerances, plus insights on fiber, magnesium, and why extreme diets like carnivore may do more harm than good. CHAPTERS: 02:11 Personal Health Journey and Gut Health 03:01 Challenges with Whole Grains 10:26 Generational Changes in Gut Health 14:13 The Impact of Ultra-Processed Foods 23:56 Dr. B's Personal Transformation 34:08 Public Health and Missing Elements 37:53 Challenges in the Healthcare System 45:15 Common Gut Issues and Their Roots 47:00 Understanding and Addressing Constipation 51:09 Magnesium and Fiber Supplements 59:55 Prebiotics, Probiotics, and Postbiotics 01:08:14 Pandemic Effects on Gut Health 01:10:35 Carnivore Diet and Gut Health 01:15:38 Personal Experiences with FODMAPs and Histamines 01:19:08 Understanding Histamine Intolerance 01:30:51 Exploring FODMAPs and Their Impact 01:40:20 Practical Tips for Managing Food Intolerances ORDER DR. WILL BULSIEWICZ BOOK: Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, andOptimizing Your Microbiome https://www.amazon.com/Fiber-Fueled-Plant-Based-Optimizing-Microbiome/dp/059308456X FOLLOW DR. B ON IG: https://www.instagram.com/theguthealthmd/?hl=en FOLLOW NICK AND BPN: Become a BPN member FOR FREE - Unlock 20% off FOR LIFE https://bpn.team/member IG: instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: youtube.com/@nickbarefitness

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Bare?

  It's not the focus on subtraction, it's a focus on addition. Like we're talking about how can we incorporate more plant into our diet? And why? And what is the benefit regardless if you eat meat or not?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And I don't think people should feel bad about eating meat because that's not, that's not what my platform is about at all. I take a step back and I go, hold on. Look at the health benefits that come from fiber. Look at the way in which this can power our microbiome. And here we are, and 95% of America is deficient in fiber. And if we're going to say, okay, what kind of changes do we want to make on a public health level? That can improve the health of America? We need to start with the things that are missing. So if you make your platform about something that people are already doing, what's the point? Right? If I want to actually like pull a lever that can impact a person's health. Really, the most powerful lever is going to be the one that's a combination of a powerful tool that simultaneously they're not doing.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  If a person's already exercising, you can tweak those approaches. You can make them better, you can make them more efficient. But you're not going to get the benefits that you would get in the way that you would if you take a person who's sitting on the couch and you get them up and moving.

• 1:15Nick Bare?

  Today on the podcast, we have Dr. Will Bolswitz. Dr. B, welcome back.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Thank you, Nick. It's good to see you in person for the first time.

• 1:25Nick Bare?

  It's been a while since we, uh, our first podcast was probably over two years ago at this point.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  I think it was even more than that. I mean, time is flying. It feels like the pandemic is just like sort of made things go either fast or slow.

• 1:38Nick Bare?

  It's very true. It's very true. Well, I'm excited for this conversation. It's, it's been really fun following your journey over the years since I came across your content, reading Fiber Fueled. And you being an educational resource has been powerful in my journey with like diet and health. And I know you're a huge resource to so many other people. So first of all, before we say anything else or dive in, just want to say appreciate what you're doing in this space.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  I appreciate you saying that. I mean, I think that that's one of the things that I love about you is that you keep it real and it's honest and you're on your own journey and you're trying to figure it out. And you're, and you're incorporating pieces from different people. And it is meaningful to me that like part of what you're incorporating is the things that I talk about.

• 2:27Nick Bare?

  On that note, we'll get into it in a little bit, but I was, I was listening to one of your,

• 2:34Nick Bare?

  your recent podcast you did, and it was all about whole grains. And every day I eat rice with like my meat for my second meal. But I decided to switch out the rice yesterday and it was, I don't know why I'm blanking on the sorghum.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah.

• 2:50Nick Bare?

  Sorghum.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  It's high protein, actually.

• 2:52Nick Bare?

  I, I saw that. I flipped over. I was surprised by how much fiber and protein.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57Nick Bare?

  Was in sorghum.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's got a nice texture, too.

• 3:00Nick Bare?

  I, I enjoyed it. However, I find, we might as well talk about this now. I find that when I consume certain whole grains.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10Nick Bare?

  It wrecks my gut. And there's, there's a lot of different like fiber sources that don't bother me at all. But like sorghum, for example, yesterday, and it might've been the dose that I consumed it in. Super bloated, super gassy in like the back half of the day. And the only thing I changed in my diet yesterday was from the sorghum.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:31Nick Bare?

  So I guess before we like, we dive into anything else.

• 3:36Nick Bare?

  I'm curious, is it introducing the new type of food potentially? Is it the dose that I consumed that? Cause it was about a cup and a half of sorghum.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:46Nick Bare?

  Or is like a, an intolerance that I might have to whole grains?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  My, my suspicion, based upon what you're sharing with me, is that, you know, your gut is adapted to what your routine is. Right? So your gut is adapted to having rice, rice and, and meat at lunchtime. And then you basically like shifted hard in a very different direction.

• 4:09Nick Bare?

  All in.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  That, right, exactly. And, and that your gut had never been exposed to sorghum before. So you're now asking this to do a new thing. It's kind of like, look, we can talk about, we can talk about, being in good cardiovascular fitness. Back in the day, when I used to go from soccer season to basketball season, I felt like I was out of shape. Even though I was running all over the place for soccer season. Right? And so I feel like sometimes when we make that, that pivot to a new food, we have to just acknowledge the fact that, hey, you weren't eating sorghum before. This is the first time you're exposing your gut to it. So let's not go a cup and a half. Maybe let's start with a half of a cup and work our way up from there.

• 4:47Nick Bare?

  Yeah. I was laying in bed last night thinking about that.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Cursing my name.

• 4:50Nick Bare?

  Well, I was so, I was so excited, you know. When I listen to a podcast or I read a book and something grabs my interest. And in this case, it was actually the conversation you were having with Max Lugavere.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:05Nick Bare?

  On Max's podcast and you're talking about whole grains and gluten free, whole grain sources. And I never heard of sorghum before, never.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:15Nick Bare?

  I was like, let me look into this. And based off of the photos I found, it kind of reminded me of couscous.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:22Nick Bare?

  Even though it didn't really taste like couscous, but it looked like couscous. So as soon as I got back from my run, which I did this all the time, I went on Instacart and I ordered three bags of sorghum.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Uh oh.

• 5:34Nick Bare?

  So I then go to work, it gets delivered and my wife sends me a photo of, it came from natural grocers. And your natural grocers delivers in cardboard boxes and it's these three big bags of sorghum. And she goes, I think someone accidentally delivered this to our house. But then she said, or did you listen to a podcast this morning?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 5:57Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I listened to a podcast, it was Dr. B and he recommended sorghum. Cause I'm like, how can I get more whole grains in my diet? How can I get more fiber in my diet? What can I replace? I'm like, well, yeah, my second meal is white rice every day. What's a better potential option?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:14Nick Bare?

  And as I was laying in bed last night, I'm thinking, did I, did I overdo it? Should I have done like half white rice, half sorghum?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:23Nick Bare?

  So what is the approach? I know we're kind of jumping right in, but I'm genuinely curious.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:30Nick Bare?

  If I was going to start incorporating new, different foods, especially foods that are higher in fiber, maybe whole grains, how do you kind of ratchet that up to allow your gut to get used to those?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Well, you had a very firmly established routine. And part of this is that white rice is like extremely easy to digest, but also not a challenge, not a challenge to your gut. So it's not really making the gut stronger and more capable of processing and digesting whole grains. So I think that when you make that transition, like it depends on the individual person. Like I don't think of you as being a person who has gut issues. I don't, I don't think that you're really, you really do.

• 7:08Nick Bare?

  No.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, in general.

• 7:09Nick Bare?

  I don't generally have gut issues.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:11Nick Bare?

  But like you said, my diet is very routine.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Sure. So, so with a person who doesn't have gut issues, then like the way in which you approach this, I don't think you need to be too gentle. Until you get to where you are right now, which is that, okay, that was a shot across the bow right there, right? We gotta, we gotta, now we have to be a little more attentive to how we go about doing this. So for you, where you are now, as of this morning, I would probably start with like, you know, three quarters rice, one quarter sorghum, give it a couple of days, work your way up to half sorghum, half rice, give it a couple of days. Within two weeks, you're probably at full strength sorghum. Flip side, if you were a person who has underlying gut issues, you have your little bowel syndrome, you have a history of bloating, you have a history of food intolerances, then I wouldn't, you

• 7:59Speaker 01

  know, I would actually be gentle right from the very beginning. I would just take a very cautious approach, acknowledging that the rice is easy for your gut and the sorghum is going to be more challenging for the gut, but the sorghum will also make your gut stronger as a result.

• 8:14Nick Bare?

  Do you find that with some, some of the patients you work with, or even people you interact with online, this is sometimes what I do, is I go from zero to a hundred, and then I have a negative effect. So then I just go back to my old ways. I'm like, well, this, this food doesn't have a place in my diet. I must have some sort of intolerance. Do you find that's common? And then to caveat off of that, should we expect some sort of adjustment, acclimation period as we start introducing new foods?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Well, okay. So first of all, in terms of, in terms of the last question, like, should we expect an acclimation period? I mean, not necessarily, but I do think that gut issues are number one, highly prevalent in the United States right now, right? So like, we're clearly more prone to these types of problems than the generation before us with our parents. Things have changed. So our baseline, our normal is much more vulnerable and susceptible to gut issues than it was in the past. And your first question, Nick, you have to remind me, what was the first question?

• 9:18Nick Bare?

  Do you work with a lot of patients or interact with a lot of people online? Who goes zero to 100, feel the negative effects and then go back to their old ways and don't

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do.

• 9:30Nick Bare?

  Anticipate the acclimation.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they totally do. And I think that this is, you know, this is part of what my responsibility is with my platform. And when I go out and have a conversation on a podcast is to educate on this topic, because the issue is that if you went to the gym, if you hadn't been working out, I mean, obviously you do. If you hadn't been working out and you go to the gym on January 1st, there's a very high probability that you're gonna get sore. And like, for some people, it hurts a lot. You need ibuprofen, you need like, probably seven to 10 days of rest before you can go back. Right? Would that be a barrier to you going to the gym? Does that make the gym something that you don't want to pursue? Is that something that, you know, does that make it seem like the gym is incompatible with your life? No,

• 10:11Speaker 01

  of course not. You went too hard, too fast. You got some soreness as a result of that. You recover from the soreness and then you work your way back into the gym, acknowledging that this time around, we just got to take it a little bit more easy.

• 10:24Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  It's the exact same thing.

• 10:26Nick Bare?

  You brought up a interesting point there. How like, our digestive systems now, in today's environment, may not be as responsive or durable as they once were potentially decades ago.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:43Nick Bare?

  What's changed?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a number of things. There's an interesting, so I guess let's start with this. There's generational loss of diversity within the gut microbiome. And that's not our fault. That's basically the industrialization of our diet that's happened over the last 100 years. And there was an interesting study that is done by the Sonnenbergs. So Justin and Erica Sonnenberg, who are microbiome scientists at Stanford. And they did this, of course, in a mouse, because you can't do this in humans. It takes us too long to procreate. But they looked at multiple generations of mice, and they deprived these mice of fiber in their diet.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  And what they found is that, okay, so let's imagine that grandma has a hundred, I'm sorry, a thousand different species of microbes in her gut, right? But by the time grandma has mom, she's down to 700 species. So that's what mom gets. Mom gets 700 species. And then mom is still on a low fiber diet. And by the time she has her daughter, she's down to 400 species. So her daughter gets 400 species. So basically, like, there's this impairment that took place. And what they found in the study was that if you reintroduce the fiber, you can get back some of it, but not all of it. So the concern that exists is that there's a generational loss that's taken place

• 12:08Speaker 01

  because we're not the first generation to be low on fiber in our diet. Our parents' generation was. But the problem is that if it started with them and then it transfers on to us, we're sort of receiving the baton and then carrying that forward. Part of the problem is our diet. Like you and I, we grew up in the eighties and like ultra-processed food was taking over, right? Like I routinely grew up eating junk food, chips, drinking Kool-Aid, SpaghettiOs for lunch. SpaghettiOs? Yeah. Forgot all about SpaghettiOs. Chef Boyardee? Chef Boyardee, yeah. Man. Yeah. So, and this is the kind of food that we grew up with.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yet, at the same time, like, I specifically remember, I was born in 1980. I specifically remember when Nintendo, the original Nintendo, came into the world. And it changed everything. Because prior to that, I was playing outside constantly. And from that point forward, everything that I did was so that I could get some time to play Nintendo. So maybe I played outside for a little bit, but then I wanted a couple hours of Nintendo time. Right. Right, so all of these changes that if you think about, our sedentary lifestyle, the devices, like the average adult in the United States spends six hours a day on their devices. Right? So, I mean, that's six hours that we could be doing something that's building our microbiome, but instead we're sitting somewhere staring at a screen. I hate when I get the notification on my phone that says, like, your daily average.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  It's brutal, isn't it? I'm like, dude. Yeah. How, first off, and like, why? Yeah. Are we doing this? Well, because we don't even realize how many times a day we like pull out our phone and check because we get a little mini dopamine hit. Yep, that's a thing. So. Yeah, so and you know, it's this combination of things, including the exposure to bright light in the evening that's disrupting our sleep, that ultimately is putting us into into a position where in general, you take the average microbiome in the United States, and it's a third less species of microbes compared to someone who lives in a third world country. It's a pretty substantial loss.

• 14:12Nick Bare?

  What has caused the reduction in fiber in the diet over these decades? Is it the introduction of processed and ultra-processed foods?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I would argue yes. I would argue that it's really an ultra-processed issue because the average, the average percent calories from ultra-processed foods for an adult in the United States is 60%. That's the average. So if we went to eating real food, right? If we actually ate real food, then you would have some combination, like if you're an omnivore, you would have some combination of meat and then a combination of different plants. And that's your plate. And that's pretty basic. And that's like actually a formula for success in 2025. Like, it's amazing how far we've drifted that we have to make an argument to eat real food to try to bring people back to normal. It's insane.

• 15:02Nick Bare?

  You have a stat that's like a certain number of, of plants you try to eat per day, or is it per week?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Per week.

• 15:09Nick Bare?

  How many, how many plants is it?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Well, the goal should be 30.

• 15:11Nick Bare?

  And it's 30 different?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  30 different, but like, first of all, let me say this, because sometimes I think people hear this and they kind of panic. It feels too much.

• 15:22Nick Bare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Okay. So this is not 30 different vegetables. This is not 30 different raw vegetables. This is all fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, legumes, herbs, spices, all that counts.

• 15:37Nick Bare?

  Okay.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Every single one. And, and if we, if we, you know, here's the issue, Nick, like truly, that our food system will not do this for you.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  So if you're relying on the food system to help you to make choices of what you put into your body, it will fail. And then your body fails as a result of that. The flip side is that if, if I successfully install this into your consciousness, so that when you walk through the door of that supermarket, I'm not just talking about the fresh produce section. I'm talking about the whole supermarket. When you walk through that door, if you're thinking, what can I add? What can I add? You're gonna be successful. And it's not a matter of did he hit this magic number of 30? Because that's not what it's really about. It's about where are you today? And then where can we move this to increase the variety of different plant-based foods in your diet?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  So, and the reason why, by the way, this is so important is that we have to think about like, what is the, what is the makeup of our food? And when it comes to plant-based foods, there's certain specific things that we should be chasing in our diet that we get from unique plants. And that includes fiber. Fiber is not a generic thing. That's like saying protein is a generic thing. That would be like saying that the protein in a bean is the same as the protein from a steak. They're not the same. Right? The protein, the fiber in a, in a plant is unique to the individual plant. So every plant has unique types of fiber. And those unique types of fiber will feed different families of microbes.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  So when you eat kale, it's not the same effect on your microbiome as if you grabbing a handful of nuts. They're not the same. That's why we want both. Because then we can feed all the different families. The other issue is the polyphenols. So polyphenols are basically responsible for the colors of the food. So when you hear people say, eat the rainbow, basically what they're saying is eat a wide variety of different polyphenols. So again, every single plant has a unique mix and blend of polyphenols. So when we start to piece this together, then we're creating actual biodiversity in our diet in terms of the chemicals that we're bringing into our body that can provide benefits to our microbiome and to our whole body.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Biodiversity in our diet translates into biodiversity within the microbiome. And that ultimately is a strong, resilient microbiome that protects us from disease. So, and this is why this concept works. But the problem is like, you walk into your supermarket and 75% of the calories come from three plants. Yeah.

• 18:14Nick Bare?

  One of my favorite messages that you share on social is just the simple concept of addition rather than subtraction. Yeah. And I remember when I first came across your content, that's what really stood out to me. Where it's like, a lot of people, a lot of people struggle with nutrition and how to clean up their diet and what they should be focused on. And there's so much fear mongering out there that people are looking at what they should remove or reduce and eliminate. Right. But if we shift the focus and the thought process and do, what can I add? You will naturally eliminate things because you're adding the right things too.

• 18:56Nick Bare?

  But you can't just add, I can't add broccoli, seeds, nuts, kale, vegetables, fruits, all of these things on top of what I'm already eating. If some of those things were bad, because I'd be overly full and uncomfortable. So one of my favorite ways to get, and kind of like you said, it probably sounds intimidating, thirty different sources of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, all of these things a week. One of my favorite things to do, like tonight's dinner is a good example. We make these just like big nutrition bowls. It's just the only way we can describe them. And we'll do like a, we'll do like a base of quinoa and then we'll have a protein in there.

• 19:39Nick Bare?

  And I'll add pumpkin seeds, avocado, bean sprouts, diced up tomatoes, some kale, pickled onions, peppers, like I'll just load it. Sure. And then I'll do like an olive oil lemon juice on top. And for me, it's knowing that I just got so much nutritional value out of this meal. Yeah. And I probably knocked out. Ten to twelve of these thirty sources that I need for the week.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. And the key there is that you just thought about it, right? Cause you thought about it and you're like, okay, this opens up the opportunity for me to crack open my pantry, see what seeds and nuts are in there, crack open my refrigerator and see like, what are the options that I have that I could potentially throw into this thing? Right? And that's how you ultimately made that happen. But the other thing to bear in mind is like, as you're sitting there and you're talking about this dude, I'm getting hungry. It sounds delicious.

• 20:32Nick Bare?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Right? And there's different things that have different flavor profiles, like the pickled onions. They kind of stand out. There's nothing else that can replace that. It's highly unique and it adds a lot of great value. And also the textures, right? Like I love the idea of having the crunchiness in there so that like the quinoa by itself doesn't provide that, but some of these other things do.

• 20:52Nick Bare?

  We'll do crunchy chickpeas.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:56Nick Bare?

  All the time. We get some crunch, some texture in there.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, I mean, I think that that's, that's a beautiful thing. Like when I think about opportunities similar to that, I think about smoothies where you can just like pull out your Vitamix and just start dropping stuff in there. Like, don't miss the seeds when you're making a smoothie. Chia, flax, hemp, basil seeds, they should all go in there.

• 21:19Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Soups, like what's better than like a hearty minestrone, right? Where you could literally throw twelve or fifteen different plants in there if you wanted to and the cooking of it, because it's slow cooked, it's very easy for your body to digest that and you're still getting tons of benefits from that. There's no loss of benefit there. So, and then like sauces, like we're a big fan in our house. We go to Costco and we get Rayo's, Rayo's tomato sauce.

• 21:47Nick Bare?

  Yep.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  And I never, I never thought that I would be someone enthusiastic about paying eight to ten dollars a jar for sauce, but it, to me, it's worth it. And you set that up on the stove and then you just kind of figure out like, what do you want to throw in there? Right? Tomato sauce by itself is nice. Tomato sauce that basically you've thrown in six different plants, including garlic and onions, maybe some, maybe some spinach, mushrooms, peppers, like there's so many options of what you could put in that sauce and it cooks it down, it makes it delicious, adds flavor, right? The addition is to your benefit on so many levels.

• 22:25Nick Bare?

  Do you add that to pasta? How you eat that sauce?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we'll do like, in our house, we'll do an organic whole wheat pasta, but like, Rio's tomato sauce is so versatile, you could throw that over anything. You could throw it over your quinoa, your white rice, your sorghum, you could throw it, you probably could throw it over your steak if you wanted to, like whatever you want.

• 22:44Nick Bare?

  Yeah. Honestly, that's one of my favorite sauces is like a tomato sauce.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:48Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  How can you get away from that?

• 22:51Nick Bare?

  All right, so we dove in real quick. I want to pull back a little bit just to set the, the stage and provide some more context as we explore the rest of this conversation. I find it really important that people, individuals need to feel and be connected to their work. And by being connected to your work, that's the power of narrowing your focus often on like that thing, having your thing. I'm curious, how has your thing become gut health and even more specifically, pooping?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Well, I'd love to take a fantastic dump. So that's, that's part of it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But as a gastroenterologist, I'm the one who is given the professional freedom to actually go out and talk about it.

• 23:43Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's a great thing. It's liberating. You know what? I think that there's actually like, this is an interesting story. So let's talk about this for a moment.

• 23:52Nick Bare?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Because, so.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  For those of you who are meeting me for the first time, this story really started in like roughly 2012 for me, where I was 32 years old, I was well into my medical training, but still in my training. So I spent 16 years total, including college, all the way through to the finish line in order to like become a board certified gastroenterologist. So, and I was 50 pounds overweight. I mentioned earlier, like I played soccer, I played three sports in high school. Right? So I was an athlete, but here I am, and I was 50 pounds overweight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, I was anxious, depressed. And even though on paper, everything was going my way,

• 24:39Speaker 01

  in real life, I was like basically had extremely low self-esteem. So I was struggling and I knew I was struggling and I needed to fix this and I needed to figure out. All right. And so what I did, being at this time, single in my early 30s, being a dude, I went to the gym and I started doing like really quite intense workouts where I would like basically smash the weights for 45 minutes. And then if it was cold, then I would run for anywhere from a 5 to a 10K. And if it was warm, I was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I would jump in the pool and do 50 to 100 lengths. So that's what I was doing. I got faster, I got stronger. I did not lose the gut. I didn't lose the weight. I didn't fix the issues.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  That's not to devalue exercise. It's important. But what I was missing nutrition, that was the issue, is that I was raised on a diet where my parents were divorced. I lived in upstate New York. My mom was at work. I would come home. I had two younger brothers. And we would fire up the grill and we would eat hot dogs every single day. Right? That's, that's my normal. And so I had to come to the realization that my food that I loved and that my family celebrated was actually my problem. And that required me to make a change. What worked for me was to initially start with a blender and create smoothies. And I felt instantly so much better. I was so energized when I did that.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  It was like the thing that was missing from my life had come back in and I was filled up with color.

• 26:14Nick Bare?

  What were you putting in these smoothies?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Um, just like a mix of different, like basic smoothies. So banana, bananas, berries, um, like heavy on the greens. Uh, maybe some, maybe some chia or some hemp seeds, something like this, right? It's not a magical formula, but those things weren't in my diet at all. And that allowed me to transform my health. I did have gut issues and my gut issues improved as a result of me doing these things. Now here's the part that I think is important to, to point out. So this, as a medical doctor, changed my life. I had to bring this into the clinic to help my patients, right? And that's what led me to where I am today because I became compelled to do that because of the way in which it changed my life.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  But it's interesting because you mentioned the Max podcast and I was, I was just in LA, you know, hanging out with him. He's a really nice guy, really good guy. We got along really well and I understand, like he, he has a different take than I do, right? And there's actually a lot of common ground there that people may not realize.

• 27:17Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I really appreciated and respected how you guys acknowledged that in the episode.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:22Nick Bare?

  Because for, for most people who follow Max and then potentially follow you too, you would almost think that you are complete opposites.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:33Nick Bare?

  And going to debate these two different topics, but I came to realize during that, that conversation that you guys align on a lot of things.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  We align with a lot of things and like the stuff that we don't align with is not 90% of the, your diet, right? So, and I think that you can absolutely take the concepts from both of us and achieve massive health gains as a result of that.

• 27:52Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  So, um, but the interesting thing is that I understand from Max's perspective that his mom.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  A vegetarian diet to try to protect her health and then her health failed. So I understand how that emotional element for him informs the way that he has a view to nutrition. And I get that and I have no issue with that. And in the same, in the same sense, my friend Simon Hill from The Proof, and he's a very close friend of mine. He's actually my business partner on 38 Terra. Um, Simon, he grew up and his dad had a heart attack at 42 years old. And his dad was a heavy meat eater. So from Simon's perspective, that's a problem, right? So my point is that I get how there's these elements of like, um, something happens in our life

• 28:46Speaker 01

  that changes our worldview and it's really hard to like get away from that. And I don't think there's a problem there because at the end of the day, again, like even though Max and I are not exactly the same when it comes to nutrition. I think that if you were to take the boundaries of where he is and where I am and operate in the space that exists in between them, you're in a really good place.

• 29:04Nick Bare?

  Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is that, uh, the concepts are few, but the methods are many.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:11Nick Bare?

  And I think it's very applicable to health and performance and even diet. That the concepts that we're talking about, there's, there's very few that we know are, are effective and they work. But there's so many different methods to get there.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:28Nick Bare?

  And I also do appreciate that people come from different experiences and backgrounds and potentially dramas that have shaped what they prefer, what, what methods they prefer to incorporate into their life to accomplish the things that they're trying to accomplish.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 29:45Nick Bare?

  Uh, and even if, you know, I don't necessarily.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Align or do exactly what someone else might do. I can respect and appreciate that. Yeah. Well, I'm a, you know, at the end of the day, um, I, as a medical doctor, am driven by outcomes. So this is not about, like, from my perspective, my, my platform is about helping people to achieve better health, period. And so it's not that I plant my flag and say, hey, you have to follow to a T the way that I do things, and if you don't, you're a bad person. Like, that's not what it's about for me. If a person achieves better health, that's where I want them to be. That's all I care about. That's what, and I'm happy if that's the case. Right. Yeah. At what point did you go plant-based and stop eating meat?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  So it was a transition that took place for me. And, you know, and I guess, first of all, uh, some, some terminology that I think is important is like, I believe in a plant-based diet. And to me, a plant-based diet is not necessarily the same as a vegan diet. So to me, veganism is an ethical choice, and it's the absence of animal products because of the ethical concerns that you have. And there's a couple of different versions of how that exists. Right? Whereas to me, plant-based is the idea and the concept of valuing plants, acknowledging the health benefits, and not necessarily saying that your diet needs to be 100% made up of plants. There are many versions of plant-based diets that are not, that are actually omnivorous

• 31:19Speaker 01

  diets, and that I, uh, absolutely believe can provide the health benefits that people are looking for. So to me, plant-based is an umbrella term that would include a Mediterranean diet, that would include a flexitarian diet. Interesting. That would include versions of a paleo diet, or even versions of a keto diet, or would include a vegetarian diet, and would include some versions of a vegan diet that we would probably call a whole food, plant-based. You know, 100% whole food, plant-based. So to me, that's, that's sort of the lay of the land as I see it. And ultimately, what I'm looking for is like, a guy like you, I'm looking to basically, um, help you to understand the value that comes from eating a wider variety of different plants and making that a priority, so you don't lose track of that.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Right? And then whatever that makes up in terms of your diet, if it's, if you're thriving and you're feeling well and you're where you want to be from a health perspective, I've accomplished my goal. I feel really good about that. Okay. That makes sense.

• 32:17Nick Bare?

  But you don't eat meat, meat, correct?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I don't eat meat.

• 32:19Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  I don't eat meat, but like, and I guess to that, let me acknowledge. The reason that I'm absolute in not, so I don't eat any red meat. I don't eat any poultry. And the reason why I'm absolute in that regard is, is basically from an ethical perspective for me.

• 32:40Nick Bare?

  Okay.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Right. But again, like I fully acknowledge that a flexitarian diet or a Mediterranean diet, where like, again, you're prioritizing plants, those are healthy diets. I have no issue there. So like from my perspective, those things, the fact that I don't eat meat is not really a part of my platform. At least I don't feel that way. Because I'm not telling people that you have to be completely devoid of meat in order to be healthy.

• 33:06Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I think it's a really clear message to distinguish at this point in the conversation is you're not pushing this position or narrative to not consume meat. But I, I love the way that you phrased it before where it's, you're focused on being plant forward.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:26Nick Bare?

  So an emphasis on how can you, and again, it's not the focus on subtraction. It's a focus on addition. And like we're, we're talking about how can we incorporate more plants into our diet? And why? And what is the benefit regardless if you eat meat or not?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And I don't think people should feel bad about eating meat because that's not, that's not what my platform is about at all.

• 33:48Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Right. So, but I think that like, if you take a step back, if you, if you put yourself into my shoes, I take a step back and I go, hold on. Look at the health benefits that come from fiber. Look at the way in which this can power our microbiome. Right? And here we are, and 95% of America is deficient in fiber. And if we're going to say, okay, what kind of changes do we want to make on a public health level? That can improve the health of America? We need to start with the things that are missing. Right? So if you make your platform about something that people are already doing, what's the point? Right? If I want to actually like pull a lever that can impact a person's health, really the most powerful lever is going to be the one that's a combination of a powerful tool that simultaneously they're not doing.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Right, so you know, I think like there's diminishing returns that exist where if a person's already exercising heavily, you can tweak those, you can tweak those approaches, you can make them better, you can make them more efficient, but you're not going to get the benefits that you would get in the way that you would if you take a person who's sitting on the couch and you get them up and moving.

• 34:54Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Right, so that, I think that's a big part of like also sort of laying the framework of the way that I approach these things is that people are not eating plants, the average American is 10% plant-based, right, people are not eating plants, people are not consuming fiber, and here are these foods that have an opportunity to really power our health, and it doesn't need to go from 10% to 100%, it could go from 10% to 60 or 70%, and I'm in a super good place because I think you're going to feel the benefit from that regard.

• 35:20Nick Bare?

  I want to really get into fiber here in a little bit, but before we do, I want to spend a little bit of time around your experience in med school, and prior to your discovery of food's ability to transform the gut, specifically fiber's ability to transform the gut, what were you being taught in med school that is the solution to some of these gut issues? And then simultaneously, what are doctors in your field doing or prescribing that don't have this emphasis on food and fiber specifically?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so I think that the big issue is that medical education is completely disconnected from diet and lifestyle, right, so, and I think part of the reason why this happens is that medical education happens inside of a hospital where you meet a person for the first time, they're acutely ill, they're so severely ill that they need to be hospitalized in order for you to get them like reoriented and back on track, and in that particular moment, that's not where your focus is, your focus is on medications, what are the medications that I can use on this person who's acutely ill for me to get them back on track, out

• 36:38Speaker 01

  of the hospital, back home and healing, right, so I understand why medical education is structured the way that it is, but the problem is, it's a total failure in terms of our goal of having a healthier America, because at the end of the day, we have completely missed the opportunity to prevent the person from ending up in the hospital in the first place. Right? And how can we have a healthcare system that doesn't care about your health until you're actually diseased? That's insane.

• 37:05Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And in medical school, the amount of nutrition that we're taught is, so you have to keep in mind, here I am, it's 2025, and I was in medical school from 2002 until 2006. In 2003, I had two weeks of nutrition education. And that was not, how do I talk to a patient about what they should eat in order to improve diabetes, or to improve their blood pressure, whatever it may be, or to lose weight? That two weeks of nutrition education was, what happens if a person is deficient in vitamin B6?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Well, how often do we diagnose that? How relevant is that to like, having a real practical conversation with your patient? So this is the issue, is that doctors are not provided any sort of formal training on how to talk to their patients. And then simultaneously, the other issue that's happening, Nick, in the healthcare system, is that doctors don't have control over their time. Basically, the insurance company dictates the compensation to the doctor, which dictates the amount of time that a doctor has with their patient. Because in order to make ends meet, when the cost of, you know, renting your office space is going up, and the cost of employing people is going up, and the cost of the medical devices and equipment that you buy is going up, doctors are basically forced into more patients and less time. This is what's happened over the last, you know, 30 years.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  And so here we are, and like, there's no time to actually talk about nutrition. You just write a prescription, you walk out the door. It's really sad.

• 38:33Nick Bare?

  I don't want to act like I'm on the side of the system by any means with this question or comment, but isn't there an assumption that you would bring in a specialist at that point? And isn't that the point of a registered dietitian? Or is it the fact that just the registered dietitian doesn't get integrated or implemented enough in those situations?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Doctors are trained, dietitians are trained, but they're not trained together. They're not talking to each other. I know no, I know zero registered dietitians from my medical education. I never met any.

• 39:04Nick Bare?

  That's wild.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never met any. So, so we're in our space, they're in their space. And then the problem is that there's not this integration. There's not communication between the parties. And if truly, if our healthcare system cared about nutrition, they would allow people to use their health insurance, uh, the, the money that they're spending, which obviously is a ton of money, on health insurance. You would be allowed to take those funds and apply it into seeing a dietitian. And you're not. There are very limited opportunities where a person can get their health insurance to cover the expense of going to see a registered dietitian. So for the average person to go and see a registered dietitian, have to pay out of pocket in addition to their health insurance fees, they're not willing to do it.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  So we end up getting stuck where basically like, yes, there are dietitians out there. And I agree, doctors should be integrated with those dietitians where they're working hand in hand. Ideally, in a perfect world, they're in the same office, in the same room with the same patient at the same time. Like, that's the way the healthcare actually should be done, is we work in collaborative teams on, in, in the same space as opposed to communicating through charts.

• 40:14Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Right. But, you know, here we are. And the problem is like, if I refer to someone to a registered, registered dietitian, there's a high probability they're gonna have to pay with their own money for that.

• 40:23Nick Bare?

  Yeah, that seems like it's a, some sort of broken line of communication there.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 40:29Nick Bare?

  And like, an opportunity in, in some way. Is that why more people like yourself are leaving traditional practice and pursuing different routes? Because you can actually make differences outside of the traditional medical system?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so for me, I, um, I guess there's a bit of a story that leads into this.

• 40:49Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Which is that I made the decision. So I started my social media in 2016. And like this was to share the story of what was happening in my clinic, because I felt like the world deserved to hear this, right? It's like the democratization of knowledge, which is that you can change your diet, you can change your lifestyle, and it will radically transform your health, and it will ideally prevent you from having to come see me as a gastroenterologist, right? That was the message that I was trying to put out there. It led to Fiber Fueled, my book, which came out in 2020. I didn't know anything was gonna happen with this book, right? From my perspective, I was a gastroenterologist in the community, taking all different forms of insurance,

• 41:33Speaker 01

  including the lowest forms of insurance that exist. And I was taking call every third night, and I worked really hard to write this book. And then all of a sudden, I have like literally journalists and new patients and like all these different things that are coming out of the woodwork and coming at me. And my time was getting completely consumed and dominated. So I was in- Do you self-publish that book, or do you get a publisher? No, I published it through Penguin Random House. Okay. So my publisher is Avery, which is one of the divisions of Penguin Random House. So but like it was a one-book deal. I'm gonna write this book. I'm gonna continue in my career as a gastroenterologist. But then like all of this work, I didn't anticipate that all of this work would come out.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  And so I was basically getting spread so thin that I got to a place where it's like, okay, here's your choice. You can only have two out of three things. And the three things are, number one, you can continue to be a very well-respected gastroenterologist in your community who cares for a few thousand patients. Number two, you can be an author, and you can scale and try to get out and connect with millions of people, right? Using the exact same information concepts. And number three, you have a family. You have a family. So as you know, I have four kids now, and at that time I had two.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  And I could see where me not being home at all was starting to affect my kids. So I felt like, okay, I have to choose. And if I don't make a choice, it's my kids that are going to suffer.

• 43:10Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  And that's not acceptable to me. So ultimately, it was the decision, I want to pursue this dream of like, I think that I can get out there and try to use what I've learned to try to help millions of people, right? And make this information publicly available. So that was the choice that I made. Now, with that in mind, I, I feel that there is an opportunity that exists for all physicians to take a step back and ask the question, is there a better way for us to do this? Right? So this is a question that I'm constantly asking. And it's not just in how I present things with like social media or doing a podcast. It's also like creating a clinic where I'm going to interact with people and try to guide them personally to health outcomes.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Right? Peter Attia has done this where basically like he has healthcare version 2.0, which is conceptually what I'm talking about right now, where he's stepping back and saying, our current system is broken. I'm going to do it a different way. We're going to see what happens. I have many friends that are in the business who are not public figures that are looking at, how can I take a step back and create something different that will help people to achieve their goals? The system is forcing this on us. Because when you squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, at some point, things break.

• 44:23Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And they pop. And so you force doctors into a position where they have to look elsewhere. And that's what's currently happening. But I think that what ultimately is going to happen is that pressure is going to lead to the creation of new opportunities that could be good for us.

• 44:38Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I know some people in my life who have gut issues. Gut issues are such a common occurrence in so many people. I feel like every, every time I meet someone new, like there's some sort of gut issue they're experiencing. And I'm constantly hearing about how they are let down and failed by the traditional system. So they end up fixing their gut, most likely through someone they find like you on social media or going through a functional doctor or reading a book or just trying new things and trial and error and experimentation.

• 45:15Nick Bare?

  When you were in practice, like what were the most common gut issues that you were witnessing?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  I think constipation is epidemic in the United States. Like I think like there's way more people who are constipated than they even realize it. They manifested with bloating.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Uteral bowel syndrome is, uh, was about 20 or 25% of the people who came through the door. Acid reflux is very common. The number one most prescribed drugs in America are Nexium and Protonix and, uh, Prilosec and, and things like this, which are the drugs that we use to treat acid reflux. So we know we have a problem there because those are the top, you know, three of the top 10 drugs there.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  And then like, uh, health conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, celiac disease, microscopic colitis. These are, um, diseases of the immune system that manifest in the gut that are clearly on the rise. So these are the common things that I would see. But you know, the reason why people don't get good results by going to their gastroenterologist is that if the root of the problem exists in the microbiome and we don't even acknowledge the microbiome, let alone start to pull the levers that allow us to heal the microbiome, then you're never going to actually fix your problem.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  You can patch it up and you can put a sheet over it with medication, which may help you to reduce your symptoms. But the actual disease exists within the microbiome. That's the origin of the disease. And so you'll be in a constant battle to fight those symptoms because you never actually healed anything.

• 47:00Nick Bare?

  Can we talk about constipation a little bit?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:04Nick Bare?

  It's such an interesting thing to say. Can we just talk about constipation a little bit?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  I'm very comfortable talking about these things.

• 47:12Nick Bare?

  You mentioned that a lot of people who are actually constipated don't realize they're constipated.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 47:18Nick Bare?

  And they, they cover it up or they blame it around just being bloated. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Cause I think that's a pretty common. Thing that I hear is like, "Oh, I just ate this." I'm really bloated.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:31Nick Bare?

  Or I'm like, "Super gassy." Like, what is constipation? What are the levels? And what do you, what do you mean when you say that?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, so the issue with constipation is that many people, when they hear constipation, they think, "Oh, it must mean that you haven't pooped in a week." Well, if you haven't pooped in a week, you're definitely constipated. I don't need any additional information to make the diagnosis there. But actually, there's many different variations and forms on constipation. And the way that I would characterize this, Nick, is that, to me, constipation is the inadequate relief of your bowels. So you're just not, you're not mobilizing your bowels enough to keep your gut in a rhythm. And if, if they're not, if it's not moving out, then it's backing up, right? And it doesn't need to necessarily come out as a hard, lumpy, bumpy stool

• 48:22Speaker 01

  that you had to strain in order for that to count as constipation. You are backing up, and because you are backing up, your gut is out of rhythm. And because your gut is out of rhythm, the food that you put into your body is going to create gas bloating, and you're not going to feel well, right? So what you experience from a symptoms perspective is gas and bloating. I want to say that gas and bloating is the number one symptom associated with constipation. It's commonly tied to pooping. If you, for the listeners at home, here's a, here's a, here's a trick. Pay attention to your bloating symptoms around your bowel movement.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  If you have a good bowel movement and your bloating is gone for at least a few hours, you have just proven to me that your symptoms are tied to pooping. And then the argument becomes, are you pooping enough? Do we need to poop more? There are some people who poop every day, and they're still constipated, right? And the reason why is because of that one poop. It was not enough to completely evacuate their bowels. So they're backing up.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's that they have a small poop. Sometimes it's that they did a partial. And then like 45 minutes later, they feel like they have to go again because they never actually completely emptied. So and then sometimes there's people that are like, I poop three, four times a day. But like, if you actually dig into the details with them, you discover that every single one of those poops was just like a partial because they had to strain to force it out.

• 50:01Nick Bare?

  So what's the sweet number? The sweet spot?

• 50:04Speaker 01

  The sweet number is when you're completely devoid of symptoms. So because you are completely and effortlessly emptying your bowels, you are satisfied, you feel good, like it actually is slightly blissful after a good bowel movement. And you have no symptoms because your gut is not backing up as a result of this. So and for some people, that might be once every two or three days. And that's okay. If you are free of symptoms and you're pooping once every two or three days, you're perfectly fine. Right? But it could also be the person who's pooping four times a day, yet they're super bloated. And they're not really having good, healthy evacuations. So it's the acknowledgement that there's this tie between gut symptoms and our pooping. And that if that if that's the case, if pooping improves your symptoms,

• 50:48Speaker 01

  then there's a very strong possibility that by increasing how often we poop or the volumes of our poop can actually make us feel better.

• 50:57Nick Bare?

  So how do we accomplish that? Like the tactical next step, if someone's listening to this right now, I'm like, holy crap, no pun intended.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:05Nick Bare?

  This is me.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:07Nick Bare?

  What do I do now?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So typically where I like to start with this is a combination of a fiber supplement and some sort of laxative. So let me unpack that. First should come the laxative and what I like is magnesium. The vast majority of America is actually deficient in magnesium, even when they're eating a healthy diet. So we could actually use more magnesium in general. But if you choose the right magnesium, there's many different forms. Magnesium oxide, magnesium citrate, magnesium sulfate. Those are the three that are good for constipation. The reason why is because they don't get absorbed by the body as easily. Whereas if you do like magnesium glycinate, magnesium 3-ane, things like this, those are great for sleep.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  You should take them at night. Those are great for restoring magnesium levels in your blood, but they're not good for pooping. So again, oxide, citrate, sulfate. And what you do is you start to gently increase the amount of these. So you start off at like 400 or 500 milligrams, and you start to gently increase the amount. So don't go too hard, too fast, because that will give you diarrhea. Right? So start off at, let's say it's 500 milligrams. Give it four days. How do you feel? Are you pooping any better? Have you noticed an improvement in your symptoms because you're pooping better? Right? If you're not where you need to be, then I would go from 500 milligrams to 750. Again, give it four days. Right? Allow your body to readjust, re-accommodate. Continue to work your way up.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  You can get easily into 1,000, 1,250, or 1,500 milligrams per day. We have research studies with magnesium oxide at 1,500 milligrams per day. Now, the key here is that like you shouldn't just do this on your own. You should do this in conjunction with your medical doctor just to make sure it's okay. If you have chronic kidney disease, you should not be doing this. And the thing to bear in mind is that you can very easily get your blood magnesium levels checked. So when you get to the other side where you're on a stable dose, and you're maintaining that stable dose of magnesium, you just get your blood level checked and you make sure that it's where you want it to be. My experience is that the vast majority of time, even when people are taking what sounds like a large amount of magnesium,

• 53:20Speaker 01

  they're actually right where they want it to be because they started deficient, and this magnesium is not really absorbed very well. So they end up actually somewhere in the middle of the range of where they're supposed to be, the desired range. So magnesium is the laxative? Magnesium is the laxative. Yeah. And the way it works is by pulling water into the intestines to help to keep things moving through. So, and then what you do is, once you're pooping... Phase two is to sprinkle in the fiber supplement. The reason that I don't do the fiber supplement in phase one is because for some people who have pretty significant constipation, that can actually make it worse. So, and then they, you know, they, they have more bloating, they may even be more constipated.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  And then they curse my name and they say, Dr. B, you told me the fiber supplement and I'm feeling worse now. Okay, get the bowels moving first. Once the bowels are moving, then next comes the fiber supplement and the fiber supplement helps you to keep them moving. And it gives it form so that it's a nice, healthy sausage shaped bowel movement. It's not loose, it's not mush, it's not water. It's shaped like a sausage, but it's soft, soft and formed.

• 54:33Nick Bare?

  Interesting. So do you take magnesium daily?

• 54:36Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't take magnesium daily because I don't.

• 54:39Nick Bare?

  So you don't need it?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Time out. I take magnesium, but not the type that I'm talking about.

• 54:42Nick Bare?

  Okay.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  So like I take magnesium glycinate at night as part of my like nighttime supplement protocol.

• 54:48Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Um, but I don't take like magnesium oxide because I don't need it because I'm having good bowel movements.

• 54:54Nick Bare?

  When it comes to a fiber supplement, what source of fiber are you recommending?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Um, so there's many different brands. So first of all, full disclosure, I am the founder of a supplement company. And our product that we offer, which I'll talk about more in a moment, would be something that can address this specific issue and was designed by me. Um, so, but let's, let's get the lay of the land first, which is that in gastroenterology, it is standard medical care to include fiber supplements for this kind of issue. Like this is, this is, you know, what we're trained to do. Cilium husk is a classic, that's Metamucil. You can also look at alternative choices would be like there's Benifiber, which is wheat dextran, there's Acacia fiber, there's partially hydroized guar gum. So those are some of the classics.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Now, the issue from my perspective is that in my medical practice for many years, like going back to 2014, I was using fiber supplements routinely for probably 90 to 95% of the people who came through the doors of my clinic. And with good effect, but the problem is that a few things. Number one, these are mono fibers, right? So we sit here and we talk about how variety is key. And then we go and we supplement with just one type of fiber. That would be like supplementing with just one amino acid as opposed to looking at the spectrum of amino acids. So that's one of the issues. The other issue from my perspective is that these, these sources of fiber, there's absolutely no transparency. An example, wheat dextran, right? It's a wheat

• 56:27Speaker 01

  product. Glyphosate is commonly sprayed on wheat to dry it out. Do we know that this product does not contain glyphosate? No, we do not. It's not, it's not certified glyphosate free. There's no transparency. There's no third-party testing. Okay, so the reason that I started 38 Terra, my supplement company, was basically to address the issues that I'm pointing out right here, which is that we've learned a lot from science in the last 10 years. And that should be incorporated into our supplements where we're not doing mono fibers. We have a blend. So our daily microbiome nutrition has seven different plant-based ingredients. They're all seven are prebiotic. They're given in specific amounts that have been proven in human clinical studies to provide microbiome benefits and

• 57:12Speaker 01

  benefits for pooping. And then we test aggressively this product. So we do about $5,000 worth of tests on each batch, which, which amounts to over 120 different tests on every single batch, including glyphosate, including like 50 other pesticides, including heavy metals and all the, like the, the full assortment. So the, I think the point from my perspective, Nick, is that you're not required by any means to use that. But if you're, if, if, if that sounds attractive to you, then that's something that you could absolutely check out. But then there's these other choices that exist. Partially hydroized quargum, you can get organic acacia fiber. These are the ones that I would be looking at.

• 57:49Nick Bare?

  I want to take a quick break in this episode to talk to you about one of our products at BPN, and that is our Peak Sleep gummies.

• 58:00Nick Bare?

  Now, Peak Sleep is one of those products that everyone can benefit from. Everyone can benefit from better, higher quality sleep. And the way that we formulated this product, like I said, it's in a gummy format. You consume about four gummies, 30 to 45 minutes before winding down in the evening. And it has ingredients such as magnesium, GABA, 5-HTP, leuvinin plus, theanine. These ingredients were put together to work synergistically and formulated to help you wind down in the evening, have better quality sleep throughout the night and wake up feeling refreshed,

• 58:44Nick Bare?

  recharged, and ready to take on the day. It is non-habit forming. We did not use ingredients such as melatonin that might leave you feeling tired and groggy and foggy and struggling to get out of bed in the morning. No, we didn't want any of that. We wanted to help you wind down, sleep better, and wake up ready to perform. Peak Sleep is much more than a sleep supplement. This is truly a recovery and performance amplifier. So try Peak Sleep today. They are delicious. It is a berry flavored gummy. I look forward to taking my Peak Sleep gummies every single night.

• 59:27Nick Bare?

  I count down the minutes until I can take my Peak Sleep gummies because they taste that good, they help me wind down, they help me sleep great, and they help me show up the next day ready to perform. Now, back to the episode. So with your product specifically, did you guys take a pre-pro fiber approach? Because there's prebiotics, prebiotics in your powder, correct?

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, so let's zoom out for a moment and just sort of address prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics.

• 1:00:02Nick Bare?

  Yeah, it's something I wanted to talk about.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Okay, perfect.

• 1:00:04Nick Bare?

  Yep.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  So, so everyone has heard of probiotics. By definition, probiotics are living microorganisms that provide benefits to human health.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  All right. But now you probably are starting to see in your supermarket, the word prebiotic. This is starting to show up. What is that? Well, that is food for our gut bacteria. So in other words, this is basically something that it powers the probiotic bacteria. And then we get a benefit as a result of that. Postbiotics is the third. And postbiotics is what they produce.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  That's actually what really matters is the postbiotic. So, but in order to get there, you have to basically combine prebiotics and probiotics. You have to put them together. So when we put them together, then like, for example, you take fiber and you combine it with healthy gut bacteria. And what gets produced by that are the short chain fatty acids. Butyrate, acetate, and proprate. Fiber by itself would just run through you. It would do nothing. Microbes without fiber, they can't produce something from nothing. But when you combine the two fiber plus the gut microbes, you get this beautiful thing that can power your health. All right.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  So I tend to favor the prebiotics. It's not to say that there's no value for probiotics. We can dig into that more if you want to. I'm happy to do that. There's definitely value to probiotics. But I tend to favor as a first line approach, the prebiotics. The reason why is because what I'm saying is that if you have the probiotics, but you don't have the fiber, you can't make anything. What's missing is the fiber. So if we bring the fiber, we can actually grow the probiotics. So the ingredients that exist within 38TERRA, our daily microbiome nutrition, have human clinical studies to show that they increase bifidobacteria, ecromancia, and fecal bacterium. And these are three probiotic forms of bacteria that you actually grow as a result of taking

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  the product. Right? So I guess the point from my perspective, Nick, is that I'd like to start with the concept of feeding them with the prebiotics. In terms of the probiotics, it's a targeted approach. So it kind of depends on what you're trying to accomplish. There is a role there, but like my supplementation protocol starts with prebiotics.

• 1:02:32Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I'm really curious. I'd actually like to talk about probiotics for a little bit.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Nick Bare?

  I have never personally had success with probiotics.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Nick Bare?

  Where, you know, I purchase an over the counter, uh, high quality probiotic supplement. It has large quantities of CFUs and multiple different strains of probiotics. Nothing targeted specifically based off of testing on myself and then identifying what I need. And it almost always destroys my gut.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Nick Bare?

  Why is that? And what's the problem with this mass blast probiotic approach?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. So first of all, the reason why it's probably destroying your gut is it's too many CFUs. So you're opting for a more is better approach. Um, but it's probably overwhelming your innate microbiome. And the result of that is like, everything's upset as a result of that. Um, so we have to zoom out and, and sort of like, let me, let me present the way that I would approach this if I were you. Okay. So you have a unique microbiome that is distinctly yours. There's no one on the planet with the same microbiome as you. I can't tell you whether a probiotic is going to be good for you or be net neutral, meaning it does literally nothing, or actually be harmful and cause trouble for you.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  I can't tell you that until you try. There's not a test that exists, including a microbiome test, that will answer that question. What answers the question is trial and error. You try it, you see what happens. But before you try, we want to be smart about what we choose to actually put in there. And it should be, I, I mentioned earlier, it's targeted. So the concept that exists out there of, hey, there's this one probiotic that's going to fix your metabolism, your immune system. It's going to make you feel full. It's going to fix your digestion. Like that one probiotic, because it's got 20 strains, it's going to do all those things. That's, that's complete hogwash.

• 1:04:39Nick Bare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  So, by the way, I was looking forward to seeing hogwash while we're here in Texas. Like, um, so that's complete nonsense. Instead, the approach should look like this. Um, I have gas and bloating. I'm looking for a solution that's going to address my gas and bloating. What is the probiotic that has a human clinical trial to prove to me that in general, this is helpful for that particular goal? That's the one that you want. You want to use it in the amount that was proven in the study. But then it still comes to the trial and error. Where, okay, yes, we have a human clinical study. It says that it works. Now I'm going to try it. And when you try it, you do it for anywhere from 30 to 60 days.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  But if you're not getting the benefit that you're looking for, it's time to move on.

• 1:05:27Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Right? Even if it's proven by a study, it doesn't mean that it's proven for you. What's proven for you is what actually works. So that's the key from my perspective. So it really starts with though, asking the question like, what am I hoping to accomplish here? And based upon that goal, going out and finding the thing that's actually proven in a human clinical study to work.

• 1:05:46Nick Bare?

  But I'm assuming the issue could be that you find the one strain that is identified for your problem. But that product has seven other strains of bacteria in there that could be disrupting another part of your gut. So you're not actually experiencing the benefit because it's being covered up by an intolerance to another strain.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  It could be that you have an intolerance to another strain. It could be that, look, your, your personal gut microbiome, this just doesn't work. It's not, you know, it's not that the product is worthless. That product, that same product will, may work for someone else. But it's just not going to work for you. And you, it kind of gets back to this broader question of like the individualism that we have within our gut microbiome. You know, why is it that I can take a medication that would work for nine out of 10 people? But yet there's this one person out there that's going to give them a horrible adverse effect. Right? And I can't predict that. And if I could, clearly I would not have given it to them in the first place.

• 1:06:46Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  So why is it that the exact same thing could be so helpful to so many people? And yet potentially cause serious harm for someone else? I think the answer to that question exists within the microbiome.

• 1:06:57Nick Bare?

  Is there anything more unique in our body other than the gut that requires so much specificity?

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Um, so there's nothing so unique as that in terms of, in terms of being highly individualized. So, you know, put it this way. Um, if you had an identical twin.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  They have the same genetic code as you, same parents. They, in the vast majority of cases, grew up in the same house, eating the same type of food, many times same similar activities, right? So, yet, you would only share 30% of the same microbes. You would be 70% different with your identical twin. And then it's way less when you're talking about a brother or sister. And then it's even less than that when you're talking about someone that you don't even know. Where you and I sitting across from one another, I mean, look, I think that there's actually quite a significant amount of similarity in terms of dietary choices that we make, regardless of whether I eat meat or don't eat meat. I think there's a lot of similarity that exists there.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  But yet, despite that, our microbiome may only be 10% the same, right? Whereas our human genetic code is going to be more than 99% the same.

• 1:08:14Nick Bare?

  This is a one-off question, but I'm just curious. Talking about the differences in one another's gut microbiome. Do you have any data or research or findings from what happened to people's guts? And bacteria in their stomach, their gut during the pandemic?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I haven't seen any significant data. So we have to sort of reverse engineer it, which is to say, if we go through and think about some of the things that were happening during the pandemic, where like forced isolation, right? Let alone masking, right? And like intentionally disconnecting us from other humans. There's no aspect of that.

• 1:09:05Nick Bare?

  Like over sanitizing.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Over sanitizing, exactly. There's no aspect of any of those things that is good for your gut. There's no aspect of that, right? Like those choices that were being made and forced upon us are, you know, the argument that was made was for protection, right? You don't want to get exposed to this virus. Yet, I think as we sit here today, I think that like many of us have reconsidered what that looks like and whether or not those choices were appropriate, particularly for our kids.

• 1:09:37Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Nick Bare?

  Yeah, because I just think about like. The, the lack of diversity you're getting from interacting with other people.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:46Nick Bare?

  Or being outside, or just the health of, of socializing and over sanitizing and over cleaning everything and just the reduction of exposure to these different bacterias.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:58Nick Bare?

  That ultimately end up in our gut. You have to assume that it'd have negative consequences from isolation.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. In the same, in the same way that people who isolate themselves and avoid illness actually become more vulnerable to health-related issues.

• 1:10:16Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Where their immune system can become confused and then you start to see the emergence of allergic diseases or autoimmune diseases where they think that they're actually improving their health, yet actually in a way, it's healthy for your immune system to be forced to step up and fight once in a while.

• 1:10:33Nick Bare?

  Yeah. I'm, I'm curious about people who pursue the carnivore diet and I have a few questions around that.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:10:41Nick Bare?

  Because as you described and as we know, we have bacterial strains in our gut. We consume these prebiotic fibers that fuel and feed the probiotics, which then produce the postbiotics and maintain the health and integrity of the gut digestion, bowel movements. I know there's certain people who go on the carnivore diet for short periods of time and they get release, relief from some of their gastrointestinal distress.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Nick Bare?

  Why is that potentially?

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  All right. So I think this opens into a broader conversation that you kind of touched on earlier, which is you, you mentioned the value of addition as opposed to elimination or subtraction.

• 1:11:27Nick Bare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Right. So let me explain the way that I see that addition versus subtraction.

• 1:11:33Nick Bare?

  Okay.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Okay. The the issue with addition is that adding new things is in fact challenging to your body. But there's value that comes from that challenge where you are actually adding functional ability and you are growing and you are getting stronger as a result of that. That is the benefit of addition. It's conceptually, again, conceptually similar to exercise, right? Creates an adaptation. Right. And when we think about our long-term health, where we want to be in five years, 10 years, 30 years, that ultimately is what we need in order to get there, right? Is to add functional ability and be and become stronger as a result of that. So I viewed this concept of addition as being the long-term play.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  But the problem, the challenge to this is what happens in the short term, which is that when you make this move to to add, conceptually similar to going to the gym on January 1st, you feel some discomfort and then it's it actually invoked symptoms. Like you actually brought out symptoms as a result of adding, right? The opposite is is restriction elimination, which is a symptom-oriented approach. So what you're saying here is that I don't want to feel symptoms. Therefore, I'm going to reduce my exposure to these things that that cause symptoms. And by reducing my exposure to these things, the symptoms improve. But the problem is it's the opposite of challenging your gut. It's less of a challenge.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  So in the same way that I think about exercise where, you know, look, if I hurt my knee, right? I could create a an approach where I never feel pain in my knee for the rest of my life. And that would be by laying on the couch. And the problem is that I suffer the consequences of making a choice where I'm not actually challenging myself to restore that functional ability again, right? Whereas healing the knee can be done, you know, working with a physical therapist, can be done in a way where you attempt to reduce the exposure to symptoms. You're not like just written through it. You're working through it, but in that journey, there may be some discomfort along

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  the way, right? And then you ultimately restore that functional ability so that you can get back to playing basketball again. So with the carnivore diet, this is the ultimate elimination diet. Like there, to me, there's not really such a thing as eliminating more than this, because if you're going true 100% animal-based carnivore, then there are no plant-based foods in your diet at all. And the only sort of thing that's in there that could really sort of trigger your symptoms in the way that plant-based foods might is the dairy, because it has lactose. So, and you're, you're sort of going into this place where it's like an extreme in terms of symptoms orientation, protecting yourself, reducing your symptoms.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  There is no doubt, your symptoms improve. There's no doubt. But the problem is, what's the five-year play? What's the 10-year play? What's the 30-year play? And we see many of the people with respect, no disrespect intended at all, who go this route, and even public figures who are forced to abandon it because they have health-related issues.

• 1:14:45Nick Bare?

  You see it all the time.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  You see it all the time.

• 1:14:47Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  So, is there, is there a, are you required to add, add, add, add, add at all times according to what I'm saying? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Is there a balance that exists in the, in the place in between these two concepts that can help people to achieve their health goals? The answer is yes. My second, my second book was The Fiber Fueled Cookbook, and I saw that as a protocol for food intolerances. So it had two specific

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  food intolerance-based protocols, one for FODMAPs and one for histamine intolerance. Both of those were elimination diets, right? But I'm not telling people to subtract in perpetuity and to subtract, subtract, subtract. I'm telling people, sometimes you take one step backwards so that you can power up to take those three steps forward. That's the idea.

• 1:15:38Nick Bare?

  That's actually the next thing I wanted to talk about on my list was FODMAPs and histamines.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:15:45Nick Bare?

  Because I I found a lot of interest in FODMAPs and histamines this past year.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Nick Bare?

  Where I never even thought about histamines, low histamine diet. But I did this genetic testing about a year ago. And I I met this this person at this wellness retreat. And I would have never done this on my own, but they they offered it to me for free. So I tried it out and I was just curious. And it came back and showed that I was highly sensitive to histamines.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:21Nick Bare?

  So I just asked, started asking questions. I was genuinely curious.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Nick Bare?

  Because occasionally what would happen is I would, throughout the day, I would eat something and my stomach would would bother me and I couldn't figure it out. And my diet's always very clean and routine and organized, but there were certain things in certain parts of the day that were triggering my stomach. So I started researching like what are high histamine foods? And some of those came back as specifically dates, bananas,

• 1:16:55Nick Bare?

  canned fish, like sardines, I was eating a lot of sardines at that point.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Nick Bare?

  And I just started eliminating and reducing a lot of these like high histamine foods. And then at the same time, I also reduced a lot of high FODMAP foods as well. And it was almost overnight that like I just stopped experiencing some of these issues I was having.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 1:17:17Nick Bare?

  And I slowly started reincorporating things back into to see what I could manage and handle. And it was like, it blew my mind. So I'd love to talk about what are FODMAPs? What are high histamine foods? And what are the potential dangers or

• 1:17:35Nick Bare?

  negative consequences of these foods for people who are not tolerant to them?

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, great. This is a, this is a good topic. And first of all, let me just comment and say that the way that you approach that is the way that, like, this is what I'm encouraging. Is that You built an understanding about your own body. You identified where the problem exists. By identifying where the problem exists, it allowed you, it empowered you to understand how to reintroduce these foods in a more moderate way. And then you eventually were able to get to a place where you were able to consume, it sounds like you can consume these foods on some level without really having a significant issue. Is that fair?

• 1:18:16Nick Bare?

  Yeah, there's one food though. For the past like two years, I've been eating pickled beets and a ridiculous amount of pickled beets.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:18:27Nick Bare?

  Like, it might have been the dose that I was consuming them, but it was probably like a jar of pickled beets every three days.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:18:33Nick Bare?

  I'd give them to the farmer's market, loved them. But then I, I stopped eating pickled beets in this pursuit of finding out what was bothering my stomach. And I've realized when I stopped eating the pickled beets.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Nick Bare?

  All my stomach issues I was experiencing went away.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Nick Bare?

  So it's the one thing I haven't reintroduced and I just share it to say because I used to, for the last two years, I've been like praising the, the pickled beet gods.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Nick Bare?

  And the reason I haven't recently is because I stopped eating them altogether.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Nick Bare?

  Because I realized they were bothering me.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, all right. So let's talk about histamine first.

• 1:19:10Nick Bare?

  Okay.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Okay. And then we'll come back to FODMAPs because what you're talking about right here is histamine.

• 1:19:13Nick Bare?

  Yep.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  All right. So, uh, histamine, we hear about histamine. Uh, histamine exists within your body. And it would be wrong for me to make it sound like it's a bad thing. It's not, it's not a bad thing. When histamine is in balance in your body, it is a signaling molecule and it helps your body to work the way that it's supposed to. You need histamine on some level to be healthy. But histamine can also be something that is found in our diet. I'll explain where that comes from more in a moment. Or it can be something that's found within your own body where your immune system releases histamine. And when the body releases histamine, what happens is it, it disrupts all kinds of cells within the body. So like in your nose, histamine release causes a runny nose.

• 1:19:59Nick Bare?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  In your blood vessels, histamine release can create things like headaches, things like this. And in your gut, histamine causes people to feel bloated. So the number one symptom of histamine intolerance is bloating. But you can have symptoms that exist throughout the entire body. And this is an important thing for your listeners to understand because you might go to a doctor for your headache, you might go to a doctor for your bloating, you might go to a different doctor for your seasonal allergies and not realize that actually there's this one thing that's tying them all together. It's a whole body phenomenon.

• 1:20:33Nick Bare?

  Yeah, so I'm gonna share really quickly on that.

• 1:20:37Nick Bare?

  Yeah, it's funny when you, when you start learning and realizing this stuff because you're so aware of, of your body and you're in tune.

• 1:20:45Nick Bare?

  When I started just like researching histamines, I realized that when I eat crab, after I eat crab, stuffy nose.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:20:54Nick Bare?

  Sore throat.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:20:55Nick Bare?

  Clawed ears.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  There it is. Yeah.

• 1:20:58Nick Bare?

  Clockwork.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  So, and, and pay, pay attention to if you, because I think that this is more common than people realize, where you might have a meal and maybe you don't get bloated, but you do get a runny nose. And it's like, where'd that come from? Like, I was feeling totally fine and then an hour later I have a stuffy nose. This is what we're talking about right now. That might be a histamine related phenomenon. Okay, so now histamine exists in our food supply and it's, it's ubiquitous. All food has some level of histamine. It's a question of how much. So what we're going to talk about today are high histamine foods, things that have like a disproportionate amount compared to usual. And the reason why they have so much has to do with the life cycle of our food and the relationship that microbes have.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  So basically bacteria are capable of producing histamine. And when food goes from first, like, food has a microbiome. So when you first harvest food, it's going to evolve and it will, for example, take a banana, start green, turn yellow, then turn brown, then turn disgusting. And then it needs to be turned into soil. Right? That's the life cycle of the food. It's the microbes that are helping to advance the life cycle of that food. And in the process, they're creating histamine. So you mentioned bananas earlier. And the reason why a banana can potentially cause histamine intolerance is when it's ripe.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  As it ripens up, it becomes higher and higher in histamine. You mentioned sardines and crab. Fish and shellfish are classic examples of high histamine foods. And a lot of it has to do with if you were to go out and catch the crab yourself, you would be able to eat that crab and you would be perfectly fine. If you were to go out and catch the sardines yourself, you could eat them and be perfectly fine. But the problem is that's not what's actually happening. They're getting smoked or they're being stored in refrigerator. And then eventually sometime later, you consume them. And during that time in between, there's histamine that got basically brought into this food. Okay, so histamine doesn't mean rotten.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  It's just a normal part of the food, but it's part of that life cycle of the food. The further along you get from the source, the higher the histamine becomes. So the classic high histamine foods are number one above all else, fermented foods. This is why alcohol could potentially trigger these issues for people. Right, and in the case of your pickled beets, this is the problem. And the reason why it's triggering is because you're eating something that's the size of a tennis ball. Right, as opposed to when you do pickled onions, it's like shavings. Right. Right, so it's a different amount in terms of the quantities. But fermented foods and vinegars of fermented food are going to trigger histamine intolerance because the histamine gets produced through fermentation.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  So be aware, if you're the type of person who can't eat fermented foods because you don't feel well, this should be on your radar. You should be thinking about histamine intolerance. Fish and shellfish are the classic among the animal products, but other animal products could trigger issues as well. Dairy products could do it. Of course, fermented dairy can do it. Of course, cheese can do it. All right, and then in terms of the plant-based foods, the classics are spinach, avocados, tomatoes, and eggplant. Those are the classics. But if you take a banana, as it ripens, it gets higher in histamine. If you take dried fruit like dates, it gets high in histamine. So these are the things to be conscious and aware of. The way to approach this issue is not to say, hey, you need to be zero histamine food for the rest of your life.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  What you do is you reduce your histamine intake and then you focus on healing your gut. The research shows, Nick, that if you can repair the gut barrier, then the histamine that's in your food doesn't get easy access to your bloodstream. The problem that's occurring is that when a person has leaky gut, the histamine that's in their food supply is able to sneak through that gut barrier, get into the bloodstream, and then spread throughout the body and cause trouble. Because you have excess histamine in your blood that you're not supposed to have. That's not physiologic anymore. So the solution to this is repairing the gut barrier. By the way, our product, Daily Microbiome Nutrition, the supplement, has an ingredient called Solnol. Solnol is resistant starch.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  And it's very interesting because they have a human clinical study where they showed that by using Solnol at the dose that you have in our product, which is 3.5 grams per day, it lowers blood histamine levels. And they asked the question, how does it do that? And as they unpacked that, what they discovered from a scientific perspective is that actually it was healing the gut barrier that was preventing the histamine from getting into the blood. So what you want to do is you want to lower your histamine intake, and then you want to focus on healing your gut. And that's how you approach that specific issue, histamine intolerance.

• 1:25:59Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I didn't necessarily eliminate all of the histamines in my diet, but I tried to reduce. And just by reducing, it made a big difference.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you want to get yourself to a place of being asymptomatic. Now, it's not, I don't want to sit here and make it sound like the fact that you get symptoms is the end of the world. It's not. But let's also acknowledge what's happening here, which is that your normal physiology is being disrupted by this food. Right? So it's not just benign symptoms. It's disruption of your physiology. So we don't want to allow ourselves to remain in a place where we're just sort of enduring these symptoms. You did the right thing. You got to reduce your intake to get yourself into the safe zone. So, and again, you're never going to be zero histamine. That's impossible. That doesn't exist.

• 1:26:42Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  Right? So what you're doing is you're just getting it to the safe zone where you're no longer having symptoms.

• 1:26:48Nick Bare?

  I have a question about that.

• 1:26:51Nick Bare?

  I prepare rice twice a week. I make it in the rice cooker and I put that rice cooker, I take the pot out, I put it right in the fridge. And I've heard people say that when you make certain foods or you have leftovers, specifically like a grain like rice, you let it sit in the fridge, it's already cooked, that the longer it's in there, the more histamines it will kind of build. Is that, is that true? Is that accurate?

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  So it's true, it's true that when we cook our food and then we store our food, you are building histamines. It will be slower when you put it directly into the fridge as opposed to having it sitting on your counter, as an example. But the other, the flip side of that though, is actually, so let's assume that you're asymptomatic, that you can eat that rice with like a cup and a half and feel perfectly fine. Zero concerns for histamine. Here's the, here's the flip side of what you just did though. You took a starchy food and you cooked it, heated it up, and then you placed it into your fridge and you cooled it down.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  The way it tastes, I'm sure you would agree, I'm sure your listeners would agree too, is not exactly the same anymore, right? Rice that you cooled down does not taste the same as rice that is fresh and piping hot, right? You created resistant starch. So the process of taking a starchy food and then actually cooling it down helps your, helps the starch molecules to recreate in themselves, what we call retrograde starch. And this resistant starch, for people that haven't heard this terminology before, is prebiotic for the gut microbiome. So you can think of it, it's starch, it's not fiber, it's starch. But it's starch that your body is not able, not able to break down and digest.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  So as a result of that, it passes all the way through your intestines and gets to your gut microbiome, and then it feeds and fuels your gut microbiome and gets turned into short chain fatty acids. So this concept of like cooling off, whether it be potatoes, Or rice, or even our bread helps to actually create starch in the process, resistant starch in the process.

• 1:29:06Nick Bare?

  I knew that was the case for potatoes, but I didn't even realize that was the case for.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Any grain.

• 1:29:10Nick Bare?

  Okay.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  And legume.

• 1:29:11Nick Bare?

  And green bananas are higher in resistant starch too, correct?

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Green bananas are higher in resistant starch naturally, and that's a different type of starch. So there's different types of resistant starches. There's four main types. Green bananas have a different type of resistant starch than what we're talking about with the retrograde starch. And so much like when we talk about variety of fiber, in the same way, you know, variety of plants. I'm also saying here that these different types of resistant starches, you don't, you wouldn't lean into just one. You would want all of them if you can.

• 1:29:38Nick Bare?

  Do you still get the benefit from the resistant starch if you reheat the food or should you eat it cold?

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  You're better off eating it cold because when you heat it back up, you are at least on some level, breaking down the starch molecules. So now there is an argument to say that if you reheat it and then let it cool again, you get even more resistant starch. So what we think is it keeps leveling up.

• 1:29:59Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I always find that, because I knew that with potatoes, like I said.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Nick Bare?

  So I will cook potatoes and I'll put them right in the fridge and I'll eat them cold. They are the most easily digestible potatoes I ever eat. And when I eat cold rice, now that I think about it, it digests much easier than the warm rice does.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Yes. And the cool thing about this is that many people who struggle with fiber. So for the person who does have gut issues, as we sort of led into the episode, talking about like what happened with sorghum. For the person who does have gut issues, the beauty of this is that you can get your resistant starch in a package that's easy for your body to process and digest. You feel well, you don't have, it's not challenging you and making you feel bad. And yet at the same time, you're healing your gut by consuming this type of food.

• 1:30:48Nick Bare?

  That's awesome.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:49Nick Bare?

  So without histamine.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:50Nick Bare?

  I've been talking about FODMAPs.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, cool. So, all right, FODMAPs. This is a super nerdy, so it's an acronym, FODMAP, F O D M A P, which stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. Now saccharide is another word for sugar. And what we're talking about here when we talk about oligosaccharides is where you take a bunch of sugar molecules and you actually link them together and you're creating a chain. And as that chain starts to build out, you're creating complex carbohydrates. So it's no longer a simple carbohydrate like a, like a single sugar or like two sugars put together. Now it's getting more complex. And as it gets more complex, it actually gets harder for our body to digest.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  But that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. This is what fiber is. Like I'm literally describing what fiber is right now. Because then ultimately, because it's hard for us to digest, it will get down to your gut microbes and they will digest it for you. The issue that exists though, for people that have gut issues, is that these things that are, you know, I'll describe more like some of the categories of what they are, but they're fermentable. The problem that exists for the person who has gut issues is that their gut is damaged. And because their gut is damaged, it is struggling to process and digest these foods that you need your gut to process.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  So that leads to bloating and leads to other symptoms. An important point of distinction between FODMAPs and histamines real quick. Again, histamines are whole body. So like we have evidence that histamine, histamine treatment, low histamine diet helps people that have headache issues, right? But the FODMAP issue is pure gut. Pure gut. So you shouldn't have headaches from FODMAPs. All right. Now, within, within FODMAPs, I'm going to name some of the categories that exist. And I would imagine that like people, as they listen to this, you're going to hear ones that may be applicable to you and you're going to go ding ding ding, there it is. So some of the categories include, of course, dairy products.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Lactose is a FODMAP. That is the number one food intolerance that exists in the world. 70% of the world is intolerant of lactose. All right. Number two, legumes. They contain things called galactans. They're really good for us, but they can be hard to digest. Number three, whole grains contain something called fructans. So fructans, specifically wheat, barley, and rye, are complex carbohydrates. You'll also find fructans in garlic and onions. So this is why some people will struggle with those types of foods, whether it be garlic and onions, the flavor of vegetables, or whole grains.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Fruit contains fructose. Fructose is one of the FODMAPs. So, like, I'm of the opinion that, and, you know, driven by science and data, that fruit is not unhealthy. Fruit is healthy. Can make a great snack. I would never advocate for a fruit-only diet. That's crazy. But like, including fruit in our diet is a good thing. We shouldn't be fearful of fructose. But for people who have gut issues, fructose can trigger their symptoms. So that's what they need to be aware of. And the last are the polyols, which are basically sugar alcohols. And sugar alcohols can exist in food that we're eating, for example, watermelon, right?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Or, sugar alcohols can exist as a part of products that we're buying, such as the artificial sweeteners.

• 1:34:32Nick Bare?

  I didn't realize that sugar alcohols can be naturally occurring in foods.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  There's some that naturally occur. You know, some of the artificial sweeteners are truly artificial and not found in nature.

• 1:34:40Nick Bare?

  Right.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  Right? But also some of the non-caloric sweeteners that exist, they do exist in nature, but they're being chemically extracted and then used to sweeten products.

• 1:34:53Nick Bare?

  Got you, okay.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and so there is some overlap that exists between these, and they can exist in our food. So, okay, now, with this whole concept of like FODMAPs, you'll hear people say low FODMAP diet is the solution. And a low FODMAP diet is to prioritize the food that has lower concentrations of these FODMAPs. The problem is that you don't want to do that long-term. Because FODMAPs, for the most part, are prebiotic. Which means that this is, this is what we're actually looking for. This is what we need more of to feed and fuel our microbiome and to produce short-chain fatty acids. So, when you do a low FODMAP diet, the intent is not to permanently reduce FODMAPs.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  The intent is to temporarily reduce FODMAPs, feel better, and then start to go through the process of reintroducing them.

• 1:35:45Nick Bare?

  That's what I actually did myself.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:35:48Nick Bare?

  I found a lot of success with that.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51Nick Bare?

  So how do you, how does someone know if, you know, going back to my experience with sorghum?

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Nick Bare?

  How does someone know if

• 1:36:04Nick Bare?

  they have an intolerance to FODMAPs and they need to go low FODMAP diet? Or if they're just in that acclimation period of introducing new things into their diet? So for example, if,

• 1:36:18Nick Bare?

  if I ate this sorghum, hurt my stomach. And now in the beginning of this conversation, I was thinking, okay, I just need to eat less of it. But maybe it's the fact that it's high FODMAP that's actually causing the issue.

• 1:36:34Nick Bare?

  What's the, what's the approach?

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is, this is a good question. So let's take the concept of food intolerances in general, and let's zoom out for a moment.

• 1:36:44Nick Bare?

  Okay.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  Which is to say that to me, a food intolerance is where you eat a food, and then you have symptoms that you believe are a result from that food. And obviously, these are symptoms that you don't want, the bloating or something else. Okay. We talked a little about constipation. Constipation creates food intolerances. When you eat food, you're going to feel unwell. I have had patients that literally just the thought of food gives them bloating. They haven't even eaten anything. And they're already getting bloated. That's because anything that you put in your body, even water, can make you feel bloated because the motility is thrown off. And that's what's creating the bloating. Right?

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  So be aware that if you're the type of person that you're sitting here and you're saying, I have bloating and it doesn't matter what I eat. Everything, even low FODMAP food is making me feel bloated. Think about constipation. You need to think about that. All right. Whereas with these other choices that we've now put on the table, FODMAPs and histamine. Think about what are the specific foods? It shouldn't be everything. There should be specific foods that are triggering your symptoms. And then you process that information to give yourself guidance as to which of these issues is in fact the problem. Right, so if you are someone who's struggling with fermented foods, with vinegar, with fish, and with

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  some of the foods that we've discussed, like spinach, tomatoes, avocados, you know, a banana that's brown, things like this. If you're struggling with those things, think about histamine intolerance. But if you're struggling with beans and whole grains and garlic and onions, or when you eat fruit, then you should think about, or dairy products, you should think about FODMAPs. Ultimately, the way that you prove it is by doing an elimination diet. Okay, and actually going like either low histamine or low FODMAP. And then when your symptoms go away, you just proved it. With the sorghum, the question that you're asking me is, is this because of the FODMAP content of sorghum? Or is it that I just went too hard and too fast?

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  And I think that the answer to that question is just too hard and too fast. Right, but embedded in your question was how does a person at home sort this out? And to me, if it's a one-time deal where you had an issue, but yet you can go back to the food and feel okay, a one-time deal, I wouldn't make that much of it. But when you find that there's a consistency pattern that exists where a particular class of foods is causing trouble for you, then that's where we have to sort this out and clarify the answer to the question. With whole grains, wheat, barley, and rye are the ones that are high FODMAP. So farro is actually a form of wheat. You wouldn't necessarily realize that, but farro is a form of wheat.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  But sorghum is actually gluten-free. And so sorghum actually should be low FODMAP. So I think, I think it's not the FODMAPs. I think it's just like the fiber and your body getting adjusted to it.

• 1:39:52Nick Bare?

  Yeah, tonight with my salad, I'm gonna put like a quarter cup on. I mean, I went all out, man. I did three, I weighed out 300 grams of sorghum. And I didn't even think about it. I was like, that'd be good. But uh.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  But you're excited. I mean, you just bought three pounds, so.

• 1:40:08Nick Bare?

  Yeah, I was like, I'm gonna completely like, remove my rice, I'm gonna add this origami in. And I was fine. And it was a few hours later, I was like, oh, I definitely, I feel it.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Nick Bare?

  I can tell. Yeah, when I experimented with high histamine food and high FODMAP foods earlier this year. Cause I'm, I'm assuming the listener right now is like, holy crap, this is a lot of information. Where do I get started?

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:33Nick Bare?

  What I did is I just downloaded a free app in the App Store.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Nick Bare?

  Where I could just type in the food, or I could even scan it. And it would say, you, you could, um. You could distinguish on this app, I forget what the app was called, like what you're looking out for. And I would scan it and it would, it would show like, green or yellow or red for histamine, green or yellow or red for FODMAP. Because I didn't want to carry a list around with me all the time, or just Google search stuff.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:00Nick Bare?

  But I had this app and it just, it helped me become more aware of, okay, these things that I'm eating, they're high histamine, they're high FODMAP, these aren't. Let's eliminate some of these and then reintroduce. It was a pretty easy process. It wasn't as complicated as it might sound or seem.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I absolutely see where this could feel overwhelming and complicated. I agree, this is the way to, to, this is one way that you can approach doing this. The other, the other option that you, that you could potentially do is like, this is the reason why I wrote the, my second book, which is the Fiber Fields Cookbook. Because the entire strategy is, is, is this, like, okay, yeah, these topics are complicated. But here's a simple approach. If you follow the low FODMAP recipes for two weeks and your symptoms go away, you just answered the question.

• 1:41:46Nick Bare?

  That's super helpful.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Right? If you follow the low histamine recipes for two weeks and your symptoms go away, you just answered the question. It starts with answering the question, making the diagnosis, and then how to, how to proceed from there is the, is, um, you know, is, is what would come next, but. You don't need to worry about that until you first identify whether or not you even have the issue in the first place. So that, that's one, one other way to sort of look at that.

• 1:42:10Nick Bare?

  Sweet.

• 1:42:12Nick Bare?

  This was one of the the most tactical strategic conversations I've had in a while in terms of like, if I was a listener of this, like clear evident takeaways of how to identify if you have gut issues, you're experiencing something, and then next steps. So why I just want to say thank you for for sharing all the information the way you did, because it's a very, it can be a very complicated conversation. But I think you did an amazing job blowing all that out. Like, I am now, I now have key takeaways of, I'm actually gonna go start on one of these magnesium supplements. I'm gonna increase my dosage. And then I'm gonna

• 1:42:55Nick Bare?

  try experimenting with a little bit of a fiber supplement post magnesium supplementation. That's my next steps key takeaway.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a few things. First of all, thank you for saying that. I think getting tactical is kind of fun, actually, because it should be, it should be actionable. And it's like you said earlier in the show, which is that ultimately, like nutrition or science or this world that we exist in, it's about identifying these like, simple truths. So that's what I think we've been kind of doing is like, identifying these simple truths, and then allowing people to apply that to their life, whatever, in whatever way works for them.

• 1:43:31Nick Bare?

  For sure.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  So, and then I also think, though, that like, you and I both exist in a world where there's supplements, and I want to just comment on that real quick, not even being brand specific, that I get frustrated and frankly, kind of annoyed when there are people in the world who want to convince us that you're only allowed to be healthy by eating, or that you're only allowed to be healthy by taking medication, which is what our current healthcare system is, right? Or, or like in some cases, that the only way to be healthy is like, here's our supplement protocol, right? And we're gonna ignore everything else. What I come back to is, again, I'm outcomes driven.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  And it feels silly and stupid to leave opportunities on the table that could improve our health.

• 1:44:21Nick Bare?

  I agree.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  So I think it starts with food, right, which is the way that I live, and that's the way that you live. It starts with food. You add in the lifestyle elements. Again, this is the way you and I both live in our own way of exercise and sleep and fasting and human connection. And, you know, and sauna and all these other elements that we can, that we can layer in. All right, you start with those two things. But then to me, you come to supplements. And supplements are not medications, they're not the same. But they're for optimization. Right, we're going to take it as far as we can with diet and lifestyle, and then we're going to tweak it and perfect it with supplements. And then we still have the medications on the backend, which are really, to me, intended to be, you use them if you need them.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  But that's not our primary strategy. That's our, that's our fallback strategy if we really need them.

• 1:45:13Nick Bare?

  Yeah, like from my perspective, the supplement industry has made so many great strides in the last

• 1:45:22Nick Bare?

  decade and a half. And I think sometimes people are still tainted by what the supplement industry used to be back in the day. Where it was untrusted, it was untested. And now a lot of these companies, like the companies we've created and products we've created. They are there, they've been created to solve problems and fill gaps to, like you said, optimize and create solutions. And both you and I invest a lot of money into our products and testing programs. I think I heard on, on Max's podcast, you were talking about entering your products into the NSF certified for sport.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  Yep, that's, that's imminent coming any day, huh?

• 1:46:02Nick Bare?

  Yep, so, so we're enrolled in that program because we believe in it.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Nick Bare?

  It is not a cheap program to be involved with.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 1:46:08Nick Bare?

  But it, it comes with a lot of due diligence and it comes with a lot of certification and trust and test. And I believe in that, I believe in this industry, I believe in these products. And like you said, there is a place for them for specific use cases to help optimize the consumer and the people.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, and so like the way that I think about this is that I'm of the belief that every single person should be prioritizing their gut health. Even if you're as healthy as you could possibly be, you gotta keep it that way. Right? So to me, prioritizing your gut health is part of what you should be doing on all of these levels. And that includes the choices that you make, like chasing after 30 different plants per week and chasing after fermented foods if you can, and working on all these different elements from a lifestyle perspective. And that also means feeding and fueling your body with the proper supplementation protocol. I think that like that whole thing. And then like, you know, the way that I see it is that like, for example, as someone who was looking to optimize from a fitness perspective,

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  right? This is where companies like BPN come in, where it's like, yes, you're going to do everything you can in terms of exercise and in terms of your diet, but there's also this element that exists that can take you to the next level.

• 1:47:21Nick Bare?

  Agreed. Dr. B, I appreciate you. This was great. Good to finally meet in person.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:28Nick Bare?

  And

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  You're as big as I thought you would be.

• 1:47:31Nick Bare?

  Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:34Nick Bare?

  How tall are you, by the way?

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Six four.

• 1:47:36Nick Bare?

  Man, I was gonna say like, you're, you're tall dude.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  It's funny because you're a tall guy. You're six two.

• 1:47:41Nick Bare?

  I'm six foot.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  That's good. You got good posture. So it's funny though, because like, you know, Thomas Delauer, I'm sure you've met Thomas.

• 1:47:50Nick Bare?

  Yep.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  He's a beast. He's a beast. He makes me look small and I don't feel like I'm a small guy. But it's funny because we got so many comments when I stand next to him. I'm very tall and he's not, he's, I don't know, he's probably like right around six foot two, but

• 1:48:03Nick Bare?

  I think he is, yeah.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. But like all these people are coming out like, whoa, Thomas, you're not tall anymore. And so it's just kind of funny that, you know, you can't tell how tall a person is when you just see him like from the waist up.

• 1:48:15Nick Bare?

  No, Thomas is broad though.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Oh, he's a, he's a monster.

• 1:48:19Nick Bare?

  Yeah, dude's dense.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  Well, and the thing is with him is like, I could do everything right. There's no way I can get as big as him, even if I had the time to do it. I don't think I could.

• 1:48:27Nick Bare?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  He's got, he's got a lot of stuff going that's really good.

• 1:48:30Nick Bare?

  He was here, it's probably two years ago on the podcast, we trained together. Solid guy. Yeah, really good guy. Yeah. Dr. B, thanks as always. Good to see you. Thanks, Nick.