Fix The Microbiome: #1 WORST Food For Human Gut Health: Mary Ruddick (Transcript)

That one can be neutralized, but that if it’s not neutralized, it sticks. It’s a sticky protein and it damages both the gut and the nervous. Well, actually not both, all three and the immune system, all the areas we’re having trouble with. So that’s not great. Right. But traditional societies, if they ate nightshades at all, very few did they had ways of neutralizing that.

The bigger issue is the solanine and the glycoalkaloids. These are fat soluble toxins that bind that lectin and keep that damage going for months on end. So it’s not something that if you just stop, you’re going to feel better tomorrow. You’re going to have to wait a long time to see if you feel better. And it’s not individual, it’s species based. These are not foods that are meant for humans.

The Spinach Problem

RINA AHLUWALIA: So this is the thing that when I speak to a lot of people in my carnivore community, so I do have a carnivore community, it’s full of people wanting to do carnivore or even the ketogenic keto diet. There are so many people that eat these problematic foods. You mentioned potatoes. And it leads to so many different chronic conditions.

But there’s also other problems and other problematic foods. I have some here, spinach, that is also a very healthy food that people eat, but it contains a lot of toxins. What’s bad about spinach?

MARY RUDDICK: Well, I would say that it’s not healthy. That’s. Let’s start there. Because most of what we’ve been told is healthy and not healthy was really not based in science or in history. So when I was being raised, I’m 43. So when I was being raised, spinach salad was the rage. And if you ate a spinach salad, it was like you got a gold star. And then it moved to the spinach smoothies, and I still see those today.

The issue with spinach is not that humans can’t ever eat it, it’s that it’s a very short season. It has a lot of toxins in it, plant toxins that are meant to keep humans and other mammals from eating it. And the bigger issue is that we really require very specific microbes in our microbiome to even handle small amounts of spinach, the oxalates.

And most people today are not born with those. Our C section rates are through the roof. Our antibiotics. I actually just. I screen microbiomes daily, and I finally found one person who actually had the right microbe for it. But it’s so rare these days because you have to get it from your mother. It’s not something you can get from ferments or soil. But I told her, I was like, “you should sell your stool to those FMT places because that’s worth a lot of money.”

But even those little guys, one main species is Oxalobacter bacteria that breaks down the spinach oxalates. But if you overfeed them, they combust. They actually combust. And so then you don’t have them anymore. And let me give you a parameter for that.

So a cup of spinach on average has about 700 milligrams of oxalate. Oxalate are these little crystals. Right. We hear about them a lot in the carnivore community. But outside of the carnivore and the very ill communities where they’re trying to heal themselves, general public still doesn’t really know what an oxalate is. So they’re these little shards of glass.

And unlike solanines, the human body can break down some of them the only 50 milligrams. So if you’re having one cup of spinach and you’re doing that daily, you’re. Even if you were born with that microbe, it’s no longer living. It over ate and exploded.

The White Rice Issue

RINA AHLUWALIA: Absolutely. There’s other oxalates as well. I do want to talk about the plant toxins in categories so that people can understand what that means. But still going back with the healthy foods that people are eating, that’s causing the gut problem. So potatoes is one, spinach is another. Now, quite interestingly, white rice is another one.

MARY RUDDICK: Traditionally, it wasn’t as problematic. It did cause problems in certain individuals. But if we look at the regions of the world where white rice has come from, really before that, there was taro, if anyone is familiar with that vegetable, that was actually the staple, not rice in many of these regions. But with white rice, it’s very important what is combined with as to if it’s problematic or not.

Now there’s the issues that probably some of your other guests have talked about, some of the toxins that come along with white rice. But the problems that I see the most are the thiamine binding issues. Thiamine is B1, and we have very little thiamine in our diet these days.

Now, B1 is incredibly important for nerve remyelination. And even in traditional societies, when someone would just happen to. Not pork or fish, the two foods that had a lot of B1, especially pork. So take a traditional Japanese culture is a perfect example of this. If everyone in the family is eating the traditional Japanese diet and one person just happens to, “I don’t pork,” they don’t eat it.

What happens over time is that you get something called beriberi. In some countries it’s called “I can’t” in their language. The legs stop working, you get small fiber neuropathy. It’s basically dysautonomia today or what you see with post viral conditions or post infection conditions. And it’s because without the B1 you can’t produce the ATP, the energy and you can’t remyelinate the nerve.

And so today I find rice very problematic unless someone is in perfect health. And it’s an occasional consumption, not a daily, not a food eaten for health benefits.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Well, most people are not in perfect health, so probably people having white rice. So as you mentioned, the deficient. So it the thiamine, which is the B1. So quite interestingly you’re mentioning the demyelination or the lack of the myelin. The myelination. So the myelin sheath is what coats the nerves. So it helps with brain function and then your brain function as well.

So that’s very important when it comes to things dementia, when it comes to things Alzheimer’s. So we want B1, we want the thiamine. So why should we be having white rice if it’s going to interfere with that? So but we’re going to talk about some other good foods that people can have. Now there’s a next interesting food that people think is really healthy. I bet people are still having it. Oatmeal.

The Oatmeal Deception

MARY RUDDICK: Oh, it’s the worst. Well, it’s not the worst. Okay, potatoes are the worst. But honestly, because it’s people can’t get out of their brain even after going through incredible healing journeys where they’re, you know, they were bedbound or disabled for years and now they’re in remission. They’re “But certainly oatmeal.”

We have it programmed into our brains that oatmeal is this morally good and bodily good food to eat. But it has never been that in history, ever. It was a food that was for horses, not for humans. And it is for their digestive system, it is not for ours. And it was used as punishment for slaves in the Roman times.

It is a food that makes us weak. It is a food that drives down our sex hormones. It sounds drastic, but I promise, y’all fact check me, because I promise, I’m not being dramatic. And when it came about, really pushed more in the early 1900s, it was done through religious movements who were trying to suppress sexual appetite in their individuals. And that is very effective for that.

It, too, has a lectin that mammals are not meant to break down. There are ways to neutralize, but it is a food that makes us weak, not strong.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So how does it also affect the gut and inflammation? Because people just think, “oh, it’s got fiber. It’s very good for you.” What is it in oats, apart from the lectin that’s so bad?

The Microbiome Connection

MARY RUDDICK: I’ll tell you, it’s not just the guts. So we talk about the microbiome as if it’s just the gut, but it really used to be called the hollow biome, and technically it should be. I gave a huge talk in Oaxaca this year about the microbiome of the skin and how we have a microbiome of our eyes that’s completely different from the microbiome of our brain, which is rather relevant in a lot of the conditions we’re having now, which is separate from the microbiome of the nervous system.

So when we talk about something that damages the gut, it’s not just the gut. The lectin, the damage that goes in it pierces a hole in the gut. Lining in that area is only one cell thick. And we’re. We’re talking about someone with a healthy body. Find me one of those today. Okay, so we’re talking about putting oatmeal into that.

Right behind that cell are your nerves and your mucosal layer, which is not something I’ve talked about on podcasts, but I will tell you is the most important thing and is the missing piece as to why a lot of people get stuck on carnivore forever. I don’t want to say stuck. They often don’t feel stuck. They’re grateful to feel good. That’s wonderful. But not being able to come back to flex and things that.

So oatmeal has a number of toxins in it. I would say the lectin is the most problematic. But the other issue is who it feeds. We are not what we eat. We are what microbes. We have the microbes we were lucky enough to get from our mother, and we are whatever they produce.

So if we take a lot of B1, but we don’t have the microbes to eat that, and then to produce B1 or transport B1. We can be eating all the B1 in the world and have MS, Parkinson’s and all these B1 deficient disorders. So these foods aren’t as benign as they seem.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Does that also have to do with methylation?

MARY RUDDICK: So with methylation, with CBS, with a number of the detox genes, they’re turned on and off by different microbes and the environment. And the microbes are completely different than us. You know, they communicate through vibration and light and sound and quorum sensing. And they need different things that we have that we need. And they also have a different circadian rhythm than we do. So it is actually a fascinating world when you start to look inside it.

RINA AHLUWALIA: I do want to talk more about the things that we can do to help our microbiome. So that was a few of these healthy foods that people are eating. So you’re saying out of that potatoes is worse than oatmeal. I do also have a list of things that people need to avoid. And it’s actually not the worst food for our gut and our gut microbiome. I want to see if you agree. Later on when I bring up the food, it’ll be interesting to see.

So let’s move on to plant toxins so that we can understand that. Now, you mentioned oxalates, lectins. Let’s first talk about oxalates. This is something that carnivores have really heard about people in the ketogenic realm. What are oxalates?

The Plant Defense System: Understanding Oxalates

MARY RUDDICK: They’re essentially small crystals. All right. So plants have a very intricate defense system. We were raised in kind of a time, and I know the younger generation is going to have a different interpretation from when they were raised. But we were raised at a time when plants were at an all time high. Right. It was like, “eat more plants and you’re healthier.” Meat is maybe not good to eat, maybe not even moral. Right? There was a lot of that in our culture.

Well, anyone who spends a lot of time in nature, anyone who’s raised on a farm, I personally have spent a lot of time in the bush. You start to watch really beautiful things and really interesting things happening. And one of the things that I really love to do is to root things in history so that they make sense, so that we don’t get lost into a dogma that we’re not even aware that we’re buying into. Because that’s so easy for us humans. Right. And probably inevitable. But you know, you have to try.

So I like to root things into history and to find patterns. Now, when I’m in certain parts of Africa and they have the acacia trees out there with the big thorns, the giraffes, that’s their favorite food, right? So they go in and they go and they start to nibble. Well, that acacia tree has all these defenses. And I want to share this short story so that I can explain how intricate the plant protection system is.

When the giraffe comes up, it’ll start nibbling. And within one to two minutes, the tannin percentage, the tannin, which is a bitter, it’s a toxin for the giraffe, shoots up by hundreds of percentage. And at the same time, it calls. And we don’t know how this happens, all right, but it attracts, probably through quorum sensing, attracts this form of ant to climb up the tree, which is a carnivore ant, and start eating the giraffe’s eyes.

At the same time, the acacia tree will off gas. And if the wind is on its side, it will take a warning to all the other acacia trees for a mile down the road to produce their tannins so that the giraffes will not nibble on any of those leaves because they can smell it. And if the wind isn’t working with the acacia trees that day, then instead it will shoot through the mycelium, the mushroom layer underneath the earth, to communicate to all the acacias. So the giraffe will have to walk a full mile to be able to nibble again.

Now, in human terms, we have known about these plant toxins. So when I go to regions, when I go to cultures that are still on their traditional diets, which let me tell you how hard that is to find. But when they are truly on their traditional diet from that region, they either don’t eat certain foods that we call superfoods, or if they do eat food with some of these toxins, it’s very seasonal. It’s processed through an elaborate method to remove those toxins. And therefore they don’t have the issues.

Yeah, there’s a lot of respect given towards these plant toxins. So these plant toxins are meant to slowly weaken a mammal so that it doesn’t keep coming back. There are certain plants that want to be eaten. We help to propagate the seeds. So it’s not found in all plants. And some plants are far more insidious, like the nightshades. Anything with the fat soluble toxins are going to be more problematic.

Some have become more problematic over time due to our microbiome shifting and our lack of respect for seasonality. Like spinach. Right. Spinach was eaten in ancient times in the Mediterranean, but it was consumed for two weeks a year with a lot of cream and cheese, which the calcium in cheese, not in vegetables, binds to the oxalates and prevents the absorption. So in traditional standings, a lot of these plant toxins were not an issue. Today, they are a minefield.

High-Oxalate Foods and Safe Reduction Strategies

RINA AHLUWALIA: So when it comes to oxalates, then you’re saying that it’s oxalic acid. So it’s a crystal that forms in the body, and it binds to things like calcium. And then you have these problems that occur in the body. So some people, when they go carnivore, you have these crystals that come out of their eyes and all these different things, and they say they’re oxalate dumping. So what are the foods that are high in oxalates? So not just spinach. What other foods?

MARY RUDDICK: There’s quite a few foods with this. So most nuts and seeds are very high. Most grains as well. Tea, like black tea, is very high. In fact, a lot of the teas are very high. Not all herbal tea, though, but the black tea for sure is rather high. Some things that aren’t eaten as much now, like sorrel, some of the medicinal herbs are very, very high. So if people use them in the traditional sense for a week or two, not a problem, but not monthly.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Okay, I’ve got a list here. So apart from spinach, beets, sweet potato, that was shocking to me. Almonds. So you mentioned nuts. But, you know, so many people that do keto, they do almond flour, they do almond butter. That’s all high in oxalates. Cashews as well, and black beans as an example. So we should be avoiding that. So question for you. When it comes to people, if they want to avoid oxalates and lower the oxalate load, should they just go to a carnivore diet?

MARY RUDDICK: A lot of people do. And it’s not how I guide. I guide to go because I’ve worked with so many kidney folks and because I had real kidney conditions before, too. And if your body gets excited that it’s not consuming oxalates, it can suddenly release them, which can change the pH of the blood and can cause an acidosis state, which can actually be dangerous in some individuals. Not in all, but I try to work in as safe a realm as possible. So if it can do it to any, then I take that route. I take the safest route.

So with oxalates, I usually get a good read on how many oxalates someone is consuming on a daily basis. So let’s say they’re consuming about 600 oxalates a day every week. I would go down by 50. So I would just tell them what food to reduce slightly if symptoms really rank up, if they start to drop their blood sugar drastically. So now with CGM continuous glucose, so easy, it’s great. Otherwise, you can get a blood glucose machine.

There’s also symptoms when your blood sugar drops that are pretty noticeable. Your teeth start chattering, you get apathetic, you’ll stare at the wall but be very happy about it for eight hours, you know, so there’s some obvious signs you’ll get very cold. But I want to go down by 50.

Now, I’ve been working with oxalates since the onset of my career, long before they were in the public sphere and being talked about. It’s so wonderful how now people are learning about them. And so because I knew about them from the onset, because I had dealt with them way back when, I may deal with them a little bit differently, which isn’t right or wrong. It really depends on the individual and how severe their problem is.

But how I usually did it wasn’t to avoid them in entirety. It was to have them in very minimal amounts if you’re having plant foods. So if you’re not on carnivore. So it wasn’t that you could never have berries, it was that you don’t sit down and have an acai bowl.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So that makes sense. So just to clarify, for people that might be on a carnivore diet, so basically, if you’re having plants and you’re eating carbohydrates and plants and different foods, you don’t want to do the carnivore overnight because you can just have this drastic effect. And especially when we’re going to talk more about the microbiome, and that changes drastically. It changes every 10 to 15 minutes, depending on your environment, everything. So you don’t want to make such a drastic change. As Mary is saying, you just lower the oxalates a small amount every week or so. Was it every week?

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah, I want to do it every week. And that way if we’re starting to see symptoms of dumping, we can pause, right. And wait another week or two or even go back to the reduction from the week before, because then we don’t get those really negative symptoms that people can get from oxalate dumping. We do want to be there’s areas in healing that are counterintuitive, that are going to be uncomfortable. And then there’s areas where it’s, in my opinion, much wiser to be gentle and slow. And oxalates for me is a gentle and slow.

Lectins: The Hidden Damage in Modern Processing

RINA AHLUWALIA: That’s oxalates. So as we say, they’re in very healthy foods that people think are healthy that we still need to avoid. The next plant toxin is lectins that you mentioned. Why is that not good?

MARY RUDDICK: So lectins traditionally were not really a problem because the traditional processing method would remove them. The issue with lectins today is that we don’t remove the lectins. And in fact we almost, we do the opposite. We do everything to keep them in. And not intentionally, of course.

But let’s take corn, right? Corn is a very traditional food. It’s been eaten for thousands of years. And when I’m with my Mayan friends and in many parts of Latin America and in Mexico, corn goes through a five step process to remove the lectin in it. And if that is removed and you’re eating that corn cooked in lard and putting it into a moderately healthy body with a pretty good microbiome, you don’t see the ill health effects.

But if you don’t remove that lectin now, you’ve got a massive problem. And in America, in Australia, in the countries that do a lot of corn syrup and definitely did until very recently, we were getting corn in all sorts of ways without even thinking that we were eating corn, right? So we had just a huge percentage of our diet from corn.

And that protein in corn, that lectin, it again, pierces the gut lining, it’s sticky, it tears into the nervous system and the immune system and it also causes a deficiency in B3. Now if you want to look up what that causes, we’re looking at schizophrenia, serious mental disease, addiction. Do you know how people feel they can’t control themselves these days? That’s a big part of it. There’s other parts, but B3 is a big part of it.

And so you’re not only damaging and weakening your body with that, you’re also creating a deficiency that’s going to cause problems all over, mentally, physically, relationally. So the lectins traditionally were not as big of a problem. Right? If you go to a culture that eats beans, they would be soaking and getting rid of the water, soaking, getting rid of the water multiple, multiple times before they then cook it.

The beans are not the staple that they have been told to the world that they are, there is seasonal food that’s a side dish that’s small, it’s not the main protein. And it allowed people, you know, in traditional cultures, it allowed them to eat toxin based foods without getting sick.

I think soy is one of the best examples for that. You know, because soy was not eaten until a thousand years ago in the time of the Yellow Emperor. And it wasn’t eaten because it was a known human toxin that actually made you very sick. And the farmer who figured out how to ferment it and ferment it long enough then could bring it into the diet. But it was then brought into the diet as a condiment and a very well fermented condiment, not as a protein.

So it’s in the loss of the knowledge of processing that the lectins have been a problem. Now I need to buffer that because we now are in a state and we can get into this when we get into the microbiome more, but we’re in a state that we can’t just do what people did a thousand years ago. Our microbiome is crashing quickly. And so the plant toxins are becoming more of an issue with each year.

The Connection Between Plant Toxins and Nutrient Deficiencies

RINA AHLUWALIA: So that would explain if somebody does a protocol to fix their gut in the microbiome it might not work because they don’t, as we discussed, they don’t absorb the nutrients or they have the anti nutrients to fight against the healing. But that was interesting that you mentioned about the B3 causing so many other problems in terms of deficiencies with maybe with concentration, energy focus, mood behavior, maybe causing a rise in ADHD, for example. And then we’re thinking that could be, you know, something that needs to be medicated. But it’s coming from deficiencies. So we spoke about oxalates, lectins. You do mention that phytates aren’t really a big problem.

MARY RUDDICK: It’s not that they’re not a problem, it’s that they’re already in the foods that we need to minimize in order to recover from an illness. And so it’s, I tend to talk about them glibly as they’re not a problem, but it’s because we’re already taking care of that. So yeah, so that’s what it is. Phytates are an issue. They change the pH, the mineral balance of the body. They absolutely need to be handled with respect, which is not done again today. But that’s already covered. If you just remove the lectins from your diet and the high oxalate foods, the phytates are already gone.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Okay, so I do have a list here of lectins, because I forgot raw nuts, lentils, turmeric as well, and as you mentioned before, nightshades, which includes things like potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers. Geez. These are things that imagine a vegetarian or a vegan that really suffer.

MARY RUDDICK: I know.

The Truth About Antioxidants and Plant Toxins

RINA AHLUWALIA: Okay, so they’re plant toxins. I do want to ask about antioxidants. People say that we need to eat plants for antioxidants. Is that true?

MARY RUDDICK: Not in the way that it’s been told. So antioxidants have been oversold, and it wasn’t based on science and in condition, which sounds crazy, but it’s actually true. It was a theory that was put out without any rigorous study.

The antioxidants are largely problematic to us today, but there is a place where you need them as well. So if I may answer in two parts. If someone consumes a lot of antioxidants, you know, they’re taking these supplements that are advertised on TV and maybe they’re doing IV antioxidants. In certain states, especially in states of cancer, it’s hugely problematic.

The antioxidants create inflammation. That’s how they work. So they come into the body, they create inflammation, they attract the immune system to come. But many things in our world know about antioxidants and will use them to their favor. So a cancer cell, for instance, will surround itself with antioxidants, and the immune system will not see the cancer cell, and that will allow it to propagate.

So in a case of cancer, you do not want to be eating a lot of antioxidants. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have any at all. There are places for things. You know, there’s so many different ways to go about cancer. But I saw you have Thomas Seyfried on your podcast, brilliant cancer researcher, and he works a lot with glutamate. And while the glutamate drugs haven’t hit the market yet, they’ve been in studies for ages, it feels like. But the three cups of green tea a day will block the glutamate.

So there’s some antioxidants in green tea, but in a state of cancer, that may be worth it, right? You always have to look at the cost benefit analysis, but for the general person, probably not.

RINA AHLUWALIA: It doesn’t just come down to what you eat. And a lot of people try to say “take this to fix your microbiome” or your gut or your inflammation, “do that.” But it’s a host of things and as you mentioned, it’s really about making your microbes really healthy so that they can just produce a very good colony of bacteria and microbes to feed the whole body.

Because we have 100 trillion microbes. But when you have 10 trillion cells, so we have more microbes than we are cells. So taking care of the microbiome is very important. I do want to hear about your success stories. How many clients have you had and helped transform their health?

MARY RUDDICK: I honestly have never counted. I have no idea we could find out. But it’s a lot because I used to see 24 to 36 people a day every day for years and years and years. And then I did groups and. Yeah, so it’s a lot.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So what is your biggest success story? Somebody that has healed their gut or transformed their health or healed some inflammation with your protocols?

A Remarkable Recovery Story

MARY RUDDICK: I have to be honest, and I love Spitfire and I really like Spitfire Question. But that’s a really hard one because I’ve seen incredible miracles on a level that, you know, when you see things so beautiful, you get that feeling of awe, right? You get the chills and the tear in your eye from beauty. I get that on a daily basis of seeing people go through this journey.

So I’ve seen truly remarkable things and sometimes I forget what they’ve healed from until they write me a letter, you know, because I see. I think of them as having one thing and it’s 12. But there’s some fun ones. I’ll give you one of someone who I deeply respect.

So she was an ER nurse and she had a vaccine injury, which was surprising, you know, because she’s an ER nurse. And it caused a horrific form of neuropathy, the same form I had, the most painful type, that is unrelenting and doesn’t go away. She had this for over 10 years. She obviously couldn’t work or do anything else after that. She tried all the traditional methods and was really at her breaking point. You know, she luckily had a very good family.

But anyway, she came across my work because her daughter had POTS, which is also something I work with Dysautonomia. And so I started working with her family and she was just an ace in a hole. You know how some people, it doesn’t matter what you tell them, they just go and do it. They don’t even need motivation, they’re just done.

And I would talk to her the next week and it was already done. And I give a lot, I give a lot of information and a lot of instructions. It is a full overhaul because the microbiome is light, it is mood, it is movement, it is interaction with others, it is so many things. And so I try to space it out through the weeks to bring it in so that it’s a little less overwhelming. But I give them it all in the beginning in case they’re a self starter like this woman is.

And she was just constantly on top of it. And very soon after, I forget the month mark, but it was maybe three months. I’d have to check. Her neuropathy was totally gone. And she could go to her son’s graduation and she could stand, which with that form of neuropathy you can’t do. It’s too painful to stand, for anyone. It doesn’t matter who you think you are, that will humble you.

And her daughter’s POTS was in full remission and her daughter was going back to college or going to college actually. You know, they can eat other foods now. They’re not stuck on the diet. I tend to use diets like you would wear a cast after a broken bone. Having been sick myself, I really try to get someone to a place of flexibility. I think flexibility and resilience is true health.

And so most of us will choose to continue to eat extremely healthfully and live the same way because they become habits. But you know, in my mind I feel like I’ve failed someone if I haven’t gotten them to that place of flexibility and change. So she was great because not only did it happen rather quickly, but also she did every single lifestyle thing and it was great. I love her. Effy.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Effy. That is so incredible. If somebody can walk and stand again, that is absolutely life changing. And the fact that I mean, that would bring tears to my eyes if I was doing that work. Your work is so incredible. And that’s just one person that you’ve helped and you’ve helped probably thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. And if people can follow what we’re going to talk about, they can help themselves.

And that’s what we want to talk about. Okay, let’s talk about some things that we need to avoid if we want to heal the gut and heal the microbiome. So these are the top gut killers categories. Alcohol, is that one thing that you told your client to avoid?

The Truth About Alcohol and Gut Health

MARY RUDDICK: Actually, no. So I don’t. I know. Yeah, I know. I might give you some surprising answers. I don’t have people drink alcohol in the beginning, but if there’s alcohol in a tincture, that’s not a problem. Hard alcohol is not too damaging for the microbiome. It would be damaging in large amounts, but one or two. No, that’s not damaging to the microbiome.

Wine is technically not damaging to the microbiome, but I find it far too histamonic. And people get lubricated on it and they just keep you know, people come around and fill the glass. So I really don’t want people to drink wine, champagne, too many histamines. But by technicality is not a problem for the microbiome. Beer, the way it’s produced today, huge problem for the microbiome.

RINA AHLUWALIA: But if somebody’s healing from a chronic disease or they have inflammation, they should probably try to stay away from alcohol. Do you think?

MARY RUDDICK: Oh, yes. Yeah, I don’t recommend it. Yeah, so usually it’s not done in the beginning at all. And then once you get to a level of say 60, 70% better, if you want to try a cocktail, it would be like a whiskey soda. Right. Then you could at a holiday. But it would be like half of one or one.

What I did when I was. Because I’m asking or I’m answering technically for does it damage the microbiome? Okay. The problem with alcohol that I see being the biggest hindrance is that it slows down the liver processing of toxins. And we have a lot of fat soluble toxins that need to go through the liver when someone is healing. And so you’ll see that I see that in my diabetics the most, they don’t want to give up their alcohol. And that is a huge problem for diabetics because they need their liver functioning, but an occasional one is fine.

Now personally, what I did when I was healing, I didn’t drink at all. When I was able, healthy enough to go out and visit with friends, I wouldn’t go out late. I stuck to my routine. I would eat before the restaurant. I would have sparkling water, the real kind. And if it was like a bar scene, then I would go up to the bar and order sparkling water with lime and a rocks glass. And no one knew I wasn’t drinking a gin and tonic. So that’s how I handled it.

But technically it doesn’t damage the microbiome as much as we think it’s the liver that’s the issue or the excess, doing it daily, having more than one, that kind of thing.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So when you said that you were healing from your condition, what problem or issue did you have?

Mary’s Personal Health Journey

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah, I had an infection in my brain when I was 18, living in a tropical region, subtropical, that caused 106 fever for six days. That damaged my hypothalamus and gave me a very severe form of dysautonomia where the nerves from the chest down went into extreme neuropathy. And then disease in all the organs.

So I had rather severe kidney disease, liver disease, two thyroid diseases, lungs. I was on a breathing machine. I couldn’t hold food. So I was, I’m 5’7″, 5’8″, depending on who measures. And I was I think 89 or 86 pounds. So I was so thin and so weak that I couldn’t hold a coffee mug.

But yeah, so that’s what I dealt with. And at the time, no one had reversed it. And it got much worse through the years. Some years I thought couldn’t be worse, but you know, it gets worse. That is how illness is. Right. And it affected my ability to be able to speak to things. Think I couldn’t read for a very long time. So that is what I came back from.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Wow. And you’re so positive now. It’s amazing. You have such a big smile on your face. I mean, that’s the thing when people go through chronic health conditions. It’s just amazing how much that can change their life. And when you heal and when you can see the bright side and you can turn around from all that, just amazing what you can do with these lifestyle things that we’re going to talk about.

But let’s first talk about the gut killer. So alcohol you say is okay, but we need to avoid it mostly. But it doesn’t destroy the microbiome. What about glyphosate foods like wheat, you mentioned corn, oats, and soy.

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah, I would totally avoid.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Okay, so we agree on that entirely.

The Hidden Dangers of Industrial Chemicals in Food

MARY RUDDICK: Because it really does damage the microbiome. And there are. I’ve been working on charting all of those industrial chemicals and what microbes you need to break them down. But the ones for some of the ones you just mentioned we can’t get yet. They’re in labs and I don’t know that we ever will. They’re anaerobes. They die when they touch oxygen. So it is best to avoid and not just rely on organic labels because they only test a very small amount in an organic batch. So I just avoid those foods.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So we should not do anything like organic soy, organic soy milk. If we have anything corn based, don’t touch it. If it’s like wheat, organic wheat organic wheat flour, like all these things, don’t touch it.

MARY RUDDICK: That would be the easiest and the smartest.

Artificial Sweeteners: Natural vs. Synthetic

RINA AHLUWALIA: Okay, next one is artificial sweeteners. What do you think about those?

MARY RUDDICK: Well, they get lumped in with natural sweeteners too that are not as problematic. Like stevia is a natural and traditional sweetener. And different practitioners will have different votes on that. But I’ve seen it used in traditional context and I’m a fan. If it’s a green powder or an alcohol tincture, I’m a fan. Not the white mixed thing.

Malitol is hugely problematic, which I see in a lot of the sugar free sweets in Europe. It’s hugely problematic for the microbiome. So there’s a number that are problematic and then there’s natural ones like xylitol, which if from birch trees is actually a traditional food. I’ve had it with the sammy and all sorts of cultures. And that regulates the microbiome. It actually prevents a number of infections, especially ear infections and can be very good for you.

So it’s important not to lump them together. And you didn’t do that. But I do hear a lot of people do that. I would be cautious of anything that’s been invented, honestly.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Yes. So for example monk fruit, stevia, xylitol, even allulose. Dr. Ben Bickman says that’s totally fine. Doesn’t increase your blood sugar as much. Would you agree?

MARY RUDDICK: Allulose was invented 200 years ago about and it’s far less insidious than the others. So I think if someone is in remission, they’ve been in remission for a time, long, long time. They want to use it for like a birthday or a celebration. Fine. But I wouldn’t do it for a daily is what I wouldn’t do.

Ultra-Processed Foods: Context Matters

RINA AHLUWALIA: Perfect. Okay, next 1/4 one is ultra processed foods. I think people would know this. But why should you Never touch like McDonald’s. Some people have McDonald’s still even you know what’s interesting? They might have the beef patty. So carnivores might have the beef patty. Do you think that’s okay? Like in a hamburger from McDonald’s?

MARY RUDDICK: I think it’s so case by case, I mean in general. No, but you also have to factor in like. Because I know someone personally who does that. But I think you have to factor in how sick you are. If you’re very sick like I was or if you’re really. If your goal is really to get into a true remission, you have to cook everything. It has to be at home, period. Non negotiable.

But if you are a professional who is healthy and you, you need a quick meal and you didn’t pre plan cheeseburger without a bun from somewhere is not going to kill you. Now personally I wouldn’t pick McDonald’s but I never liked McDonald’s so that’s up to them, you know, So I, I think we have to take it, I would like us to see more flexibility based on people’s lifestyles and real goals.

Just like if, okay, let’s say if you were a gym coach, all right, and you get, actually, we’re going to change it to dance coach. You’re a dance coach and you get someone new who comes in and just wants to dance for fun. That’s very different than someone who wants to dance for competition and very different from someone who has never danced before but wants to win the salsa world champ. Right. I work with people who want to win the salsa world champ, but if my friends are, you know, just eating for general health and they cook most of their food and they run in and get a hamburger, I, I, I say less, less judgment. Let’s judge them less. They’re doing good, they’re good, you know, so for, it depends how you ask the question. If it’s for health, not the best, but, but it depends on your goals.

RINA AHLUWALIA: It’s quite controversial because some people are really against it and some people say it’s okay. But as you said, focus on being the progress and not the perfection and understand who you are as a person. How severe is your chronic disease or inflammation? Are you like Mary, where, I mean, I would do anything just to, you know, I probably eat everything organic, just probably do carnival or something. Go out in the light, the sunshine, sleep nine hours, listen to the, I think it was 128 Hz music, all these things that we’re going to talk about, all these things just to fix my health. So it really depends on, on the person. The next food is a food that Dr. Eric Berg says is the worst food for human health.

MARY RUDDICK: Oh, I can’t wait. I love him.

The Worst Food: Seed Oils

RINA AHLUWALIA: Are you ready to hear what the worst food is? The worst food is seed oils. What do you think?

MARY RUDDICK: Oh, he’s right. I wouldn’t have said that years ago. But the more damage we see to the cell membrane, the less our body can communicate. And that cell membrane is made of those fats, nuts. And it takes two years to get them out. So honestly, Dr. Berg is right about most things. He’s really good. But, but yeah, probably seed oils. They also happen to be extremely high in lectins as well.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Now, as Mary mentions, if we really want to improve our gut and lower inflammation, we need to remove all the toxins, including vegetable seed oils. And really, we need to get back to an ancestral way of eating, which tends to be a lower carb diet. And in this day and age, some people need to even go zero carb or try the carnival diet.

Now, when it comes to a zero carb or a carnival diet, I have seen so many success stories. People losing hundreds of pounds and also reversing chronic health conditions, things like thyroid issues, diabetes, heart failure, all while eating more fat, more protein, and actually more calories. And I experienced this myself when I went carnival five years ago.

What I found kept myself and my community on track was medical support through our team of carnivore doctors. Because I had the same questions as you. Well, what about protein and fat? And what about all that saturated fat that I want to be eating and my cholesterol? Well, that’s why we have weekly doctor meetings with our carnivore doctors to ask all of your questions. The best thing about our community is our monthly challenges. Every single month, we have these brand new challenges. Things like the Dairy Free challenge or the high Fat challenge. This is where our members get the best results. So if you would like to try carnival with medical support, plus get a free meal plan, just head to go carnival.com and get 10% off your next month.

People that are on a carnival diet now, they do really well without having fiber, then they’re going to see a doctor. It could be a conventional doctor. That doctor is going to say, “you need to have fiber to have a diverse microbiome, and you need that bacteria because the fiber feeds a bacteria, it doesn’t feed your body. You have to have fiber.” But that person is doing very well on a carnivore diet. In that case, is fiber important?

The Hidden Truth About Fiber and Microbiome

MARY RUDDICK: Okay, do you want to go into something that I’ve never shared in a podcast?

RINA AHLUWALIA: Oh, what is it.

MARY RUDDICK: Traditionally? So I would say until about maybe 10 years ago, when microbiomes were more intact, you really didn’t want to eat fiber to heal. In general, the less fiber you had, the better chance you had. Because there’s three categories of bacteria, but there should really be four. And that’s why this is a nuanced answer that you’re going to get first.

So the good bacteria, they’ll eat anything for the most part. There are exceptions like Akkermansia, but they’ll eat a lot of things, right? They’ll eat fat, protein, all sorts of things. The opportunistic bacteria, they like starch and sugar, but many of them will eat mucin. Pathogens eat starch and sugar.

So the general recommendation by anyone who really studied the microbiome was cut out the fiber and specific forms of fiber in Particular. So some fibers are not going to feed the overgrowth. Like carrots, that fiber does not, whereas sweet potato does. Okay. So you kind of just have to know the chemical makeup of it. So that’s where like the SCD diet specific carbohydrate, then GAPS diet, and these have all kind of come through. And then it kind of transitioned to carnivore.

But we need more now because the issue is that these diets have done for a period of time in someone who wasn’t born C section or had incredible amounts of antibiotics, they would cause the birth microbes, which actually do require some fibers to go into hibernation, which hibernation is fine. Right. We can let those guys hibernate, but if they get to starvation because it’s been so long since they’ve been fed, now we have problems because those are mucin producers. Right.

And so what I’m seeing is a lot of people starving out the birth microbes. Takes a long time if they were lucky enough to get them. And this other. I mean, if I ruled the world, I would give another classification to microbes because we really need one more. And that’s the ones that they’re not really overgrowths and they’re not really pathogens. They’re like a mix because you can’t starve them out. These are things like strep that cause pandas. These are things like Klebsiella. And these are the ones staff is one as well. These are the ones that will eat your mucin when you don’t feed them.

So when you don’t eat starch for a long time or a certain kind of fiber, each microbe needs a different food. It’s not so blanket with fiber. Like for instance, fermentum, cec, a birth microbe. It absolutely requires hmo. Right. Akkermansia needs a little antioxidant, you know, so there’s like different foods for each of them. But it’s okay, I have your back. I charted it so you guys will get that one day.

But the. Yes, you can like eloquently put it back together. But, but so in a case like my own, having had a healthy microbiome and getting the damage from that fever, I could do one of those diets and then regrow my birth microbes because they were just in hibernation. So when I started to bring fever foods back in, they. I actually got healthier. Right.

Then there’s cases which I’ve seen in my practice, and then I suspect some of the famous ones that we all know of, where it’s like red meat, salt and water forever, which is fine. I mean, that’s great. You feel better, that’s great. Do what makes you feel better. But not being able to move on indicates that you lack the mucin, which usually means you have this fourth classification, if I can be so bold. That does not starve out and that does eat your mucin. And that makes you have a histamine response to everything. And so you can’t bring things back in.

And so I find that the longer I practice, the more I am bringing in the foods for the microbes sooner in tiny amounts. We’re not talking about a quarter of a cup. These little microbes can use like a pin drop of a food practically. So I like to bring in the foods to start feeding the birth microbes as soon as I can. So I’ve got this timeline where I can starve out the overgrowths that are causing the problem that were really the bigger driver of the chronic illness until recently, and then keep that mucin layer going and feed the birth microbes as soon as I can without feeding the overgrowths. And then we really feed the birth microbes. And when that’s done, people kind of catapult into health. And it’s a completely different picture. You’re more resilient, you’re more healthy, and it’s easier.

Understanding the Mucin Layer

RINA AHLUWALIA: Interesting. So basically, when you’re born, you get a set of bacteria and microbes which can be destroyed by use of antibiotics or a bad diet or different things. So in your case, for example, you had good microbiome from when you were born, but you just had to fix those. And then when you did, all your illnesses kind of went away.

But then you’re saying that you have this mucin layer as well, which if you just do meat, salt and water, perhaps somebody can’t go back because their mucin layer is still affected. That’s one thing. But then you also have this nasty bacteria that’s not doing anything great that you just want to get rid of. And obviously, if. If you do a ketogenic carnivore diet, that’s going to fix that, fix a good bacteria. But this mucin layer is what you’re talking about. Maybe it doesn’t fix that. What is a mucin layer then? How do you fix that? What are those little foods that you have to add back in?

Chronic Pathogens and Testing

MARY RUDDICK: That’s such a great question, because what a lot of us practitioners are seeing is that some of the pathogens that were so deadly before and still are in the hospitals like C Diff are going chronic. I just had two cases earlier this week of Parkinson’s that had C Diff A and B for over 10 years on their tests and they were not addressed. That C Diff, by the way, blocks B1 so you can’t remyelinate your nerves. So you see where this all goes.

So we’re seeing more and more of these chronic pathogens and these pathogens are getting at the mucin. I used to be a very “no test” person because I usually get people where they’ve been over tested and they haven’t been helped by tests. But I am now finding certain ones very helpful. Like a GI MAP is great. Now it doesn’t tell you your whole microbiome. It’s going to be totally different in your eye. Microgendx, that company will tell you all over the body – they’re great, you can order them yourself.

You can see if you have one of these, if you have like the pseudomonas, if you have the strep, if you have one of these, because those you will get a lot of mood issues, a lot of sleep issues. So you won’t handle the illness as well as your own character would because you actually cannot make all the dopamine and the feel good chemicals. Well, you can make it, you can’t transport it.

And so there’s this huge issue of people that aren’t being served because they’re doing all the things – they’re getting the light in the morning, they’re starving out the microbes. Maybe they’re even starting to dance and do some of the community things that we really need. But what’s not coming in is a real evaluation of do you have one of these pseudo pathogens? Because if so you do, you do want to address that or you’re going to be white knuckling for a very long time.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So what you’re saying is somebody has a test to see if they have this bacteria which is a pseudopathogen, which is a pathogen that perhaps the body doesn’t work well with. So it’s pseudo pathogen and that it could be causing diseases even though you’re doing all the things. In how many cases would that be with people? So if they do these things that we’re going to talk about now to fix the microbiome, how many people would still have those pseudo pathogens?

MARY RUDDICK: Well, I’m seeing them more and more, and that’s why I say it’s a problem. It’s becoming very common. Here’s how I would do it, because I’m still not a big tester. I think this whole field should be an art form. It always was. But if someone has done all the right things and they’re doing the limbic work and they’re eating at the same time so their body feels safe and they have the morning routine and they’re getting eye contact and they’re doing, they’re getting to a place of awe with their gratitude journal, and they’re eating right and they’re cooking all their food and they’re doing all the things. And after a year or two, they’re not in remission. That’s when you look.

The Importance of Natural Light

RINA AHLUWALIA: Good answer. That makes sense because I don’t think that people are doing exactly everything we’re going to talk about now. So let’s talk about things that we can do to heal and seal the gut. Very easy things. And it’s very interesting because you talk about natural light in your eyes and your skin is actually more important than your diet. Why is that?

MARY RUDDICK: It technically is – it shifts the microbiome 51%, whereas diet shifts it about 50%. So if someone is staying indoors all the time, which is natural, you get sick. Even getting to the bathroom can be really hard. So getting outside can be Herculean. But one of the reasons traditional societies, at least in my opinion, had those screened in tuberculosis rooms was so that people, when they were sick were outside without effort. We really need things like that.

The light in our eyes stimulates the entire cascade of dopamine, melatonin, serotonin, and later at night, melatonin, which is so hard to come by today because if even just one marker of melatonin is in your bedroom at night, it’s four hours until you start producing melatonin in a healthy individual. And so getting good melatonin just in our daily life without an illness is a task.

So if we also are not getting natural light in the morning, and if we are staying inside and we’re looking down instead of up all the time, which is how we stimulate dopamine, and we’re stressed, we’re on the computer – let’s say this is not my work, so I don’t want to misrepresent the research. But I remember reading something on this new form of apnea. It’s called email apnea. People stop breathing while they’re on the computer. It’s a problem, it’s real. But I don’t know the full details. But most people notice your heart rate goes up when you’re on the computer.

You go outside, you feel so much better. Well, we really need the light on our eyes and our skin for a multitude of reasons. Not just the hormones that I mentioned before, not just for the circadian rhythm, but also because it communicates to our entire microbiome.

On the flip side, you know how everyone is getting into limbic work and trying to feel safe and trying to figure out what trauma caused them to get into this illness? Well, do you know what makes the body feel the most unsafe other than being at war? It’s being inside. It doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert who loves to read romance novels inside. It doesn’t matter what you emotionally feel about it. The physical body is stressed by that.

So it’s really imperative that we not just try to eat our way to health. Health is a yoking. It’s a yoking. I’ll often compare it to sitting on a chair – you have four chair legs, so there may be 60 chair legs, but if even one is missing, that chair is not going to – it’s going to topple.

The Four Pillars of Health

So one is going to be your diet, one is going to be your lifestyle. And that includes the light. One is community, which is so hard when you’re sick because you often don’t have a choice. People leave that, you get abandoned. You don’t have the energy to go get to people. But honestly, healing in isolation is one of the hardest tasks because we are communal beings. Elephants die from loneliness and the markers on our cytokines are just as bad.

And then you have mindset, or presence, and there’s probably more. But if you get those four going equally, that’s where you see really good results.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Well, I like to be a bit specific. So the first one, the natural light is brilliant. Being outside, I can’t tell you how many people, including myself, although I am trying to be outside more. Especially learning about the benefits of sunshine. Again, not wearing sunscreen, don’t wear sunglasses, don’t wear hats. The sun on the skin is so important, as you mentioned and in the eyes. Very interesting that if you look up, you get dopamine. Amazing.

Body Position and Hormones

MARY RUDDICK: Oh, yes. All sorts of body positions we can directly affect. Our hormones are relational. So while you can take herbs or you can take supplements to raise your hormones, you can eat certain ways. The real way to get at them in this moment is how you hold your body and what positions you go in and how you relate to other people. So the eyes are one, but there’s so many.

RINA AHLUWALIA: What’s some other ones?

MARY RUDDICK: Like if you slouch or look down. So, you know, chronically ill people, they’re often on a couch here and they’re in this position. It’s like the position of being chronically ill. That shuts off your serotonin, which is your willpower, and it keeps the lymph from draining from the face and the head, which is incredibly important. But hormonally, it gets at the serotonin. And if you don’t have your serotonin, you don’t make your melatonin at night. These people can’t sleep at night. They can’t wake up in the morning.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So if you’re just having your phone and you’re lying on the couch and doing – is that also affecting your serotonin? And you don’t. Wow.

MARY RUDDICK: Everyone does that.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So the counter of that is to sit up nice and straight.

MARY RUDDICK: Yes. This ratio is the most important. But posture, it was always taught to be proper. But do you know what being proper is? Calm and relaxed and able to handle things with grace. Who doesn’t want that? Posture gives you that. It gives you, your hormones, the ability to do that, actually.

So posture is big. And most people I work with are too sick to even sit up. So we have them lay on their back flat, and then we start working on those muscles at 10 seconds at a time or 30 seconds. But if they’re sitting up, we have them sit up proper. Otherwise they’re horizontal. So you can go about it that way. So that’s a really big one.

Best Foods for Gut Healing

RINA AHLUWALIA: Let’s move on to best foods. So what do you think are the best foods for people to eat to heal their gut and lower inflammation in general?

MARY RUDDICK: It’s going to be your meats, your fishes, your specific vegetables. But it’s specific by people and they’re not required. It would be like carrots, onion, garlic. But again, it depends if someone has a FODMAP issue. Small amounts of beets are not a problem. They’re not as high in oxalates as some of the others. So it’s not a hard no on those. It’s a quantity and a frequency.

I really like some of the vegetables that I know some of my colleagues and friends don’t. I love the broccoli and the cauliflower. I love the cruciferous because it’s so good for binding to the excess estrogen which is really helpful for people today. But it’s not historical to eat a lot of that.

But as far as the rebuilding the gut microbiome goes, the foods that help the most are things like shrimp shells. If you grind them up into a spice, parts of bone marrow are very good. The best way to rebuild depends on where your mucin layer is. So if you’re at a level full level collapse, there’s five stages then you really need to be on the carnivore. You’re not going to be able to tolerate any fibers at all. And that’s wise.

But as you start to get a little bit healthier or if you haven’t gotten that far yet, very small amounts of things like larch, arabino galactins, acacia fiber, inulin, but inulin, not if you have strep. Small amounts of antioxidants like here I’m having a hibiscus tea at room temp but it’s, you know, I’ll have maybe one glass a day. I don’t really do it to feed my akkermansia, I do it because I enjoy it.

But there’s little foods that are really important to come in. And it actually is slightly case specific. If you have someone with mucin collapse and cancer, you don’t want to give them glutamate foods which can be so brilliant at building the stomach lining in someone with a nervous system disorder who is usually very, very deficient in that. So as long as someone doesn’t have cancer, you can use the glutamate based foods but it’s less so the things like the ferments and the things that have been taught.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Interesting. So largely you would say an animal based approach sprinkled in with some vegetables that you might tolerate because you mentioned the broccoli and the cauliflower and I’m just mindful with the broccoli of the goitrogens. So somebody has thyroid issues. So it’s very, as you said, very dependent. There’s no one size fits all. But I love that when we talk about animal based or either carnivore diets that the bulk of the food should come from animal fats. And even you’ve visited these tribal people like the, in East Africa, the Hadza, and even these people that are eating animal based diets, they’re thriving from eating animal fats and meat.

Strongest Traditional Cultures and Dietary Approaches

MARY RUDDICK: Yes, I would say the strongest cultures I’ve seen. The Mongolians are probably the strongest I’ve seen and they’re traditionally in parts of them where I go still carnivore. Their carnivore is very different in each region. So I’ve been to many different carnivore tribes and they vary differently from each other. They have some things that they have in common, but they’re unquestionably the strongest.

What I like to do with people, I like to do a bit of an Indiana Jones map of the traditional diets. And so the more sick you are, typically you go more towards the Mongolian, the Maasai, and then as you get healthier, you go up to the Chaga diet. They do the green plantain, which is one of the best feeders for the birth microbiome, but won’t be tolerated by someone at, you know, the full mucus collapse.

So there’s a timing to it where you bring it in and that too then keeps you healthy when you go into remission because you’re still eating traditionally. So yeah, the issue with broccoli, I mean, I healed both thyroid conditions eating broccoli, but I didn’t eat a lot of it. You know, I think our culture tends to say, “oh, if this is okay, then we should have this much.”

All right, we definitely do that in America. America, we stack it high and price it low. So sometimes it’s a quantity issue or a cooking or a non cooking issue or a non seasonality issue. If you just go to seasonal eating, if at all possible within your diet, that is a great thing to do both with meat and vegetables. But some people are too sick for that, to be frank. They just need to go with the meat that they tolerate. And if they tolerate a vegetable, then that vegetable that say carrot.

And so, so sometimes repetition is needed, like the cast over a broken leg. It’s not ideal for a lifetime, but it can be done for a short period of time.

The Role of Akkermansia in Weight Management

RINA AHLUWALIA: Interesting. You mentioned the Akkermansia. Now that is a bacteria in the gut that also helps. That has a GLP1 effect. Is that correct?

MARY RUDDICK: It does.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So that was going to help. So this is the thing. When people want to lose weight and they can’t lose weight, you say it’s not about calories, it’s about your gut microbiome.

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah, completely, yes. Why is that? Yes, because we don’t eat our food, our microbes do. So our microbes can turn 400 calories of ours into 3,000. So for people who are eating perfectly and eating small amounts like 800 calories and they are overweight, that is not an issue of character or discipline or calories. That is an issue of what their microbes are producing.

If their microbes are producing toxins, fat soluble, that the body then can’t handle, so it needs to create fat cells to store those toxins and so the person gains weight or if that person is producing GLP-1 and all the other wonderful hormones, because leptin, ghrelin, all of these appetite suppressors or stimulators, these are produced by our microbes. Right. We tend to think rather arrogantly that we do all these things, but we don’t. We’re a little universe and it’s our universe that does it and it just looks like it’s out from us, but it’s really that.

So it’s not so surprising that when you go to places like France or you go 50 years back, you look at the videos from the 70s at the beaches and things like that, you don’t really see overweight people. And now everyone struggles, everyone diets, everyone goes to the gym. People weren’t going to the gym yet. Right. That was just starting. So it’s really an issue of not having the right microbes to produce those.

And Akkermansia, which works, I shouldn’t make a medical claim, so this is not a medical claim, but it works as well as Ozempic and all of those other ones. It does, it does what those are trying to do. Right. We’re born with those. So if we receive section, if we’ve lost that at any time, if we starved it out, which that one in particular likes very unique foods, then then we need it.

And that one we can plant kind of. So that one you can buy. There’s a few different brands that sell it, but it’s not the true microbe. How do I explain this? Akkermansia is an anaerobe, meaning that if you didn’t get it through the birth canal, it’s going to die immediately because it dies the second it touches oxygen.

Now they’ve been able to change it so that you can get the benefit while you take it, but it doesn’t colonize because it’s not fully alive. Right. So you can get great benefit from it, just like taking Ozempic without the side effects. And you get the other added benefit, like it helps you absorb fats. So if you’re someone who has bile issues, you usually need Akkermansia or F. Prausnazi, some of these real fat breaking down ones. Plus it produces vitamins for you. It fights off very specific infections. It keeps you from getting sick from those infections. It’s kind of amazing, but I mean it’s just one of 200. They’re all amazing.

Creating the Perfect Sleep Environment

RINA AHLUWALIA: Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. If people want to lose weight, they should fix their gut. And Akkermansia is important to have as well. So getting back to how to heal and seal the gut. So we mentioned the best foods, animal based. Bone marrow. Bone broth is also good as well. Getting into natural light in your eyes and your skin. So the next one is avoiding blue light. People know this. But what’s interesting is that when you sleep at night, you have to have a blackout room. Now if you have light fixtures and there’s light coming, you know, like flickering light, is that going to affect your. You going to sleep?

MARY RUDDICK: Yes. Your sleep quality, your melatonin production and therefore your cortisol production in the morning, your serotonin and your dopamine in the morning. Yes, all that is affected. Yeah.

RINA AHLUWALIA: How do we have a completely blackout room?

MARY RUDDICK: It takes work, you know, and it depends if you travel like I do, but I would get. There’s nursery curtains that pin onto the back of your curtains. Get those real shutters. You know how people used to use shutters on their windows. Get those on top of the glass. Put a towel at the base of the door so that nothing comes in.

If you have any electronics in the room, which usually it’s best not to, but if you do get out the electrical tape, do that. Wear an eye pillow too. But know that we do the, the light on the skin affects us too. So the eye pillow is usually crucial for people, but on the skin is also very important.

And, and you know, they’re creating these tents now, which is a great idea, these blackout tents. And I have been trying to build one for myself. But you know the problem with them, they’re all made out of polyester.

The Hidden Dangers of Synthetic Fabrics

RINA AHLUWALIA: That’s the next one. So, so what we wear so polyester, so plastic. Anything of those fabrics are really going to affect our gut microbiome because it gets into our bloodstream wildly so.

MARY RUDDICK: And our weight, it affects our weight a lot. So people that are working out in their polyester yoga pants, it’s shooting yourself in the foot. Because as with both heat and cold, the plastic is absorbed, right. And we absorb more through our skin, through most things.

And honestly, the issue with polyesters in the home. Home is more through the lungs. The tiny particles are in the air and they come in through the lungs. And this is something that we do not yet have a way to remove. And when we have a toxin that we can’t remove, we balloon out. We create the fat cells to store the toxin. Right. And so. And it also dysregulates our sleep wake hormones for us.

And I can tell you from visiting the tribes, like when people have those donations and they want to donate T shirts and things, it causes huge problems for the tribes. They’ve never seen polyester before. It damages their skin microbiome to a degree I cannot tell you. And we know that about our own as well.

So all the polyester underwear that we’re wearing, it’s deregulating our sex hormones. It’s making people sexless, frankly, and fertile, slowly but surely. But more than that, it’s damaging the skin microbiome in each region that it’s worn. So now you don’t have your sebum, you don’t have your protection, and now you’re very vulnerable to anything that comes along. And we live in a stew of microbes. We’re meant to, but we’re meant to have resilience.

Natural Fabric Alternatives

RINA AHLUWALIA: So what should we be wearing instead? What materials?

MARY RUDDICK: Well, my favorite is silk. And it is. My favorite is silk. I like silk because it’s good for both heat and cold, so you can wear it year round. It doesn’t break easily. It also doesn’t burn, so it’s good for the kitchen and things like that. And my favorite version I’m not wearing today, it’s a silk jersey. It looks like T shirt. You don’t even know you’re wearing silk. So that’s what I work out in.

Cotton is fine for summer and hemp is starting to make a resurgence, which really it should because it’s one of the strongest fibers. It’s a fiber that’s going to last for a long time. It’s not going to burn, but that’s something that’s very cool about natural fiber.

I just want to mention briefly natural fiber, whether it’s wool, hemp, silk, unless you have a flame underneath it actively, it doesn’t burn. So the second the flame is off, you’re good. Whereas polyester lights like lighter fluid. So if you have a house full of polyester, you wear Polyester in the kitchen, it’s actually very dangerous.

But also, these materials are antimicrobial, so they don’t smell. Right. And they regulate your skin microbiome so that you don’t smell. Your feet, your underarms, they should not smell. If they do, you’ve got an issue in the microbiome there or systemically. And these clothes, they actually regulate that. And so whether it’s merino wool, which is also another good workout clothing. So is the hemp knit. You could do those, but all of them are helpful.

And if you go with the more tailored, like I’m wearing today, it’s very. It’s very hard to gain weight if you’re wearing tailored clothing, because the second you gain a pound, you notice.

Natural Skincare Solutions

RINA AHLUWALIA: Very, very, very interesting. Okay, I want to ask about skin care now. Why should we never use something that is like a conventional skincare? Why is that a problem?

MARY RUDDICK: It damages the sebum layer. And the sebum layer is. Is your oil regulator, but also your immunity and your protection. So if you go swimming or you travel or you go to a region and a microbe gets onto your skin, it’s going into your bloodstream, whereas we should have protection from that. Yeah.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So what should we use instead?

MARY RUDDICK: We have options, and they come from all the reaches of the world. I’m a really big fan of making rice water. Rice water from scratch is fabulous. It’s used in many of the Asian cultures, and especially where the hair goes long, like down to the ankles. Very, very shiny. I use it less often than I would like because of my travel schedule, but you just make it at home.

And I want to tell your listeners that the recipes that you’re getting online are not good. Yeah, they all use. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, but they all use raw rice and soak it in water, drain it, and then ferment it for 72 hours. You have to cook the rice first to get the real benefit. But it has rare microbes in it, like L. Fementum and certain ones that regulate the sebum of the scalp. But it’s also used especially in Korea, for your face as a toner, and it is very good.

The other thing that’s really good for skin, well, there’s two that are really good for skin that aren’t a fat yet. We’ll get to those. But the egg yolks are amazing for regulating the sebum of the skin. So if someone has acne, and it’s real acne, it’s not like something that’s like an infection in the lymph or B5 deficiency. Egg yolks on the skin. You let it soak in dry. You can wear it overnight and then rinse it off with cold water. So you don’t make a scrambled egg on your face. Heat will do that.

The other one, and one that’s used in a lot of cultures is yogurt. Yogurt is naturally acidic and that acidic nature will be slightly. It will slightly just like gently take off the dead skin skin. So that makes your skin look amazing when you wash your face with yogurt or the rest of your body with it.

And then lastly are the fats. You can use a ton of fats, whether it’s tallow or lard, like pork lard. Those are my favorites. Almond oil can be very nice too. That’s where you can use some of the seed oils. Not less for your face, more for like your legs and things like that.

Sound Therapy and Nitric Oxide

RINA AHLUWALIA: But yeah, well I’m glad that you said the fats because we do produce the primal tallow balms, which is just pure tallow and it’s just chemical free. We actually give a recipe so that people can make it at home but in case they don’t want to make it, then they can buy it. But it’s one ingredient. It’s pure and it’s clean. You don’t have to use all these nasty chemicals in skincare. So I’m glad that you said fats.

And yoga is very, very interesting. So let’s move on to light therapy and sound. Sound therapy. Now there’s a certain hertz, 128 hertz which increases nitric oxide. How does that sound and the nitric oxide then affect and heal the microbiome?

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah. So this is really awesome because most of the ways to increase nitric oxide that are told to the public actually don’t work unless you have the right microbes for nitric oxide which belong here and most people don’t have them. So eating nitric oxide rich foods doesn’t work. Taking most of the supplements doesn’t work. But 128Hz does even when you don’t have the microbes.

So you can do that with a tuning fork. You can hum. It’s like an “N” sound basically. I just did a terrible job at it. But I’m not a musician and I can do it. But it stimulates the body to produce nitric oxide. I actually have a whole presentation on this so maybe I’ll try to upload this on to you, too, because I think it’s fascinating.

It’s something that you can do whether you’re bedbound or you’re fully functional, but you can actually get that nitric oxide up. Now, there are conditions where you don’t want a lot of nitric oxide. There are very few conditions that exist with too much. But in general, your readers, mostly, I would guess at least 98% of them, they need more nitric oxide. So that would be very, very helpful.

Our breathing, our breath and our sound impact our health far more than we’ve given gravitas for. And it can stimulate our own pharmacy in our body. So when I go to the traditional cultures, like when I was staying with my Mayan friends, a lot of the songs that you sing or the things that you do when you’re taking a canoe across the islands or you’re doing your daily work or you’re in the temazcal, I’ve timed the breath, and it’s doing the same things that we’re now trying to biohack our way, too.

And so our body belongs in a rhythm, just like the tides of the sea. And the more outside of that rhythm we are, the more we need to bring it in. So 128 is very good for that. There’s several other hertz that are very good.

And there I might. This is a theory at this point, but I’m going to throw it out there because I think it’s pretty solid. We know that certain vibrations and hurts can stimulate fungi. I go so many places where they are moldy as sin and no one is sick with mold. And then I come to places where it’s also moldy as sin and people are sick with mold.

And the frequencies and the vibrations in our houses from the electronics that we have, from also the closed doors and windows to not having free air, there’s more to it. But I do think sound and light are the true medicine of the future. They have the power to do incredible amounts. So you can actually get biochemical stimulation through making certain sounds and just like you can with your posture.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So the sound that you said was a…

MARY RUDDICK: Yep.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Okay. So people can practice. And it’s the 128 hertz. So it’s like maybe a lower frequency. Is that correct?

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah, I have a tuning fork, but it’s not in this room. Yeah. Yeah, it’s really nice. You can get a tuning fork for $10 on Amazon for that.

Dancing: The Ultimate Ancestral Movement

RINA AHLUWALIA: And that is just to help with the microbiome. But it’s also very calming. So if you hum or if somebody sings, and probably along with that, the dancing also helps. I also want to ask about movement in relation to the microbiome and with health. What is the best ancestral movement that we need to do?

MARY RUDDICK: Dancing.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Oh, why is dancing so good?

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah, dancing. Okay. So I have a big thing on my arm right now. I’ve been doing all these worksheets, basically to see how people can get their HRV up the highest. And knowing what I know about the cytokine markers and inflammation and immune suppression of being alone, I was like, well, obviously a lot of people can’t dance yet, but when you can, I’ve been testing out all these different things.

So, like, ketosis helps HRV, right? HRV is heart rate variability. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a measure of your nervous system balance and basically, like, your overall resilience. So you want a high number. And I found some info on dancing, and I have to tell you, it is true.

So I just started three weeks ago. I’m now obsessed. I want to move to Argentina and study tango six hours a day. I’m totally obsessed. It’s so much fun. It’s so much fun. You leave so happy and think about it. You’re getting physical touch, you’re getting eye contact, you’re getting community, you’re laughing and you’re moving side to side, which gets your parasympathetic going.

In addition, depending on what kind of dance you’re doing, it typically stimulates gamma waves in the brain. Like tango definitely gets gamma waves. And usually there’s a combo. You’ll get like a gamma and an alpha. Alpha. I think salsa is gamma and alpha. I’d have to check, but so you’ll get two. So you can actually start to retrain your brain to get to those places that we need it to go to when you have circadian disorders or you just wake up feeling awful every day.

But yeah, definitely, definitely dancing. Plus, a lot of the places I go, honestly, they don’t do a lot of physical labor. They’re relaxed. They’re very relaxed. So dancing is kind of like the thing they do.

Fasting and the Microbiome

RINA AHLUWALIA: Well, that was part of the question because in the Western world, people, they have a gym membership, they’re doing weights or trying to be physically active. But it takes away the ancestral component of dancing, walking, moving, carrying some heavy things from now and then. But the main thing is, as you mentioned, the light therapy is so important. The sleep quality is so important, not just the foods that we are eating because a lot of the time people do focus on food, eat this, don’t eat this. And we can even see with diet there’s so much varied variability, but an animal based approach seems to be the best. Last question for you. Fasting, is that good for the microbiome?

MARY RUDDICK: Yes. For in most cases, absolutely. Yeah. So especially short fasting, like under 72 hours, you want to follow your own body. If your blood sugar drops, you should eat. It’s a, it is a stress like exercise. So there’ll be times when you can do longer periods and shorter and that is something that you should follow according to how it feels. It’s also very good for self challenge. People train for marathons, training for fasting, very good character development.

But for the microbiome it is excellent. Now, over three days it’s not as good for the microbiome, but there’s benefits to those for certain conditions. As we all know, eating once a day is one of the best things for the microbiome because it allows the nervous system, the migratory motor complex within the gut lining to rebuild. When we’re snacking and eating all the time, we can’t do that.

I do want to say though, because I am now getting all of these mucin cases and all of these cases of chronic C Diff and strep, which are very different than the immediate, that there are certain microbes like strep that get in the way of fat breakdown and actually ketosis. So if someone has eaten in the correct ratios for a long period of time, not overeating protein and those kind of things. And they’re not getting the deeper ketone levels. It may not be the time for them to be trying to force that or to fast more frequent, smaller meals, like three a day would be more indicated in that case. But those are rare. They’re not the norm.

Signs of a Dysbiotic Microbiome

RINA AHLUWALIA: Interesting. And then if somebody does have a microbiome that’s not like. What’s the word? Balanced or good? Like, how do you say that the microbiome is not good? What’s the word that you use?

MARY RUDDICK: Dysbiotic.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Beautiful. If somebody has a dysbiotic microbiome or they have gut issues, what would they. Is there any symptoms that they would visibly see on their body so that someone could say “I have a bad microbiome or a gut issue” that they could see?

MARY RUDDICK: Yeah, if you want to see with the eye, dark circles, funky skin, patchy skin, an odd distribution of weight, bad hair, puffy face because they’ll have more histamine issues, nail fungus and a lot of dead skin on the bottom of the feet. So those would be things you would physically see with the eyes.

But a way you can know just period is if you’re anything less than joyful, relaxed, you can handle stress well, you sleep well, you wake well, and life feels easy.

RINA AHLUWALIA: I think that’s like 99% of the population.

MARY RUDDICK: I know. That’s why I’m working as hard as I am on fixing this issue.

Working with Mary Ruddick

RINA AHLUWALIA: Wow. So do you still see clients? Can clients still book with you?

MARY RUDDICK: Only kind of. So I do on the Minecraft app. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. It’s great. People can ask me any question on that app. So I do it there. I’m about to relaunch my big groups again. So if anyone is interested in working with me, you should jump on my website. It’s maryruddick.com get on the waiting list because you’ll get notified.

And otherwise I still see some of my old clients one to one because I love them and two because I actually love one to one. I just, it’s a time factor. I prefer it. But the so I see some of them on a very small basis but otherwise it’s Minecraft and then I’ll be doing my groups.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Perfect. Well, I’m going to leave all the information in the show notes your website and so people can also try to contact you, maybe join the wait list, all these great practitioners and doctors, there’s a wait list and then people get frustrated. But you see, there’s so many people that need people like you to get help. Mary, thank you so much for your time and I’m sure we’re going to see you very soon.

MARY RUDDICK: Thank you for having me.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Thank you for joining me today on this episode with Mary Ruddick. If you’re learning from and enjoying these free episodes, please feel free to hit the subscribe button. That’s an excellent zero cost way to support what we do here. You can also find me on other social media accounts. I’m on Instagram and on Twitter under the name of the Primal Podcast. And if you love this episode, check this episode with Dr. Eric Berg. It’s all about how to lose visceral fat and lose weight with his best 61 tips. Finally, thank you for your interest in root cause healing and I’ll see you next week.

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