262. Gut Expert Reveals The Best Herbs for Parasites (Evan Brand)

Colostrum supplement for gut and immune health

Discussion of grass-fed colostrum from New Zealand as a supplement for gut health recovery, with a user review describing reversal of mold-induced digestive issues after one month of colostrum combined with a meat and fruit diet.

"Well, I'm 13 years into the podcast, but about 10 years into the clinical practice. So I was in a brick and mortar and I started helping the patients in the brick and mortar so much that the doctor I was working for was getting mad because he's like, dude, you're getting my people so well, they don't need to come back in for visits. Did he really say that? He did. He did. He said, you're literally affecting these patients because I remember one particular older lady, her back, it was mainly back pain. Okay. So he was treating her. He was doing some decompression therapy. He was doing x-rays, putting her on these different supplements, like food grade stuff. And all of a sudden we look at her gut and we start fixing her gut. She had parasites and bacterial overgrowth, which eight out of every 10 people I test do. That's insane. So we give her some dysbiosis herbs. All of a sudden her back pain goes away and she's like, hey doc, I don't need weekly visits anymore. I'll see you in a month. So month passes by, he gets the front desk lady to call her. Hey, we haven't seen you in a month. What's going on? She's like, I'm fine. And so she had this, what I suspect was some sort of radiating pain from the gut wrapping around, creating issues with the back. There's probably some level of kidney involvement as well. But I was like, okay, well, what I'm doing is working. And so a decade ago, I went out full 100% telemedicine a decade ago. And so you work with people from around the world doing these type of tests. Yeah. That's amazing. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, even in Kenya, we've had supplements delivered to Ecuador via a donkey for last mile delivery. No, you didn't. That's what they told us. The client told us, they said, hey, we got it by a donkey. They're like off a dirt road. Oh my God. I can't verify, but that's what they do. Oh yeah. That's incredible. All right. So let's start with gut testing and we'll break this down for people. Before we do that, I've got some gifts for you. Thank you. Everybody that comes on the podcast gets gifts. You got some air dried steak from Lineage. You got some protein powder from Lineage, which you already ate yesterday. Yes, yes. You already opened that. You already opened this and you were sitting in my house yesterday and you were like, hey, I need some protein powder. And I said, I've got this. I'm going to gift it to you tomorrow. But there you go. And then Lineage knows the tail collagen, which is something we just came out with. Yeah, I was going to say I haven't seen it on the website. Yeah, that's the new one. And then got to give Heart and Soil some love here. We got some Heart and Soil dick pills. That's whole package testicle pills. Thank you. I need a honey. Oh, yeah, we'll get you some of that too. We'll get you some of that too. But those are your gifts for the podcast. We'll put them here. So, let's start talking about gut testing. We're talking about GI map primarily, right? So quantitative PCR gut testing. And my friend, Gary Brecca was recently on Rogan and he was talking about parasites. Whenever I tell people that I eat a lot of meat, they always say, aren't you worried about parasites? Especially when I tell them that I occasionally eat raw meat. So let's break it down. Like what are gut parasites? Should people be worried about them? How do you test for it? And what is dysbiosis? How do you test for it and how do you fix it? Sure. Yeah. Well, when most people say parasites, we were talking about this yesterday. It's like people think they're going to see a worm in the toilet, like this scary footlong creature. How did this live inside of me? And we have seen worms. So you will see worms come out. Typically, if we're adding mimosa to the protocol, you will start to mobilize some worms. Yes, it is. Technically, it's a seed. It's a mimosa pudica seed, and that will help mobilize worms. So we have, I mean, I have an inbox full of hundreds of pictures of worms and weird stuff. I mean, literally people with, you know, knife and fork cutting apart their stool to send me photos for me to identify. And I'm like, okay, I'm not a parasitologist, but I'll try to help. And we have seen some weird stuff, but typically parasites, they're microscopic. You're not going to see them. And I had these years ago. I lost 30 pounds without trying. I didn't know if I had cancer. I didn't know what the hell was wrong with me, but I was freaking out. I went to the GI specialist. They want to do a barium swallow. They want to do a chest X-ray, all this conventional testing, right? To look for a GI cancer in the stomach or the gut. Yeah, or ulcer or something like that, right? And so, of course, they say, Evan, you have IBS. I'm like, okay. Some catch-all term that means nothing. It's junk. And so fortunately, I was able to get a GI map test done that back then it was three samples. Okay. So if people complain about doing one sample, a decade ago, it was three days of collecting stool. And that's where I discovered I had not only H. pylori, but two parasites. I had cryptosporidium and giardia. Now, my history, I love being out in the water. I love being out in the river, the lake, creeks, streams, in all surface water in the United States. This is not a tropical disease issue. You don't have to go to Mexico. You don't have to go to Costa Rica to get these bugs. Trust me, Giardia is live and well in the U.S. And I had those bugs. I lost 30 pounds. I couldn't gain weight. I was eating grass-fed meat by the pound and I was trying to hit the gym and it didn't matter because I had these bugs. So what are they? Typically, they're microscopic pathogens, but it's very rare to just have parasites in isolation. Typically, it's going to be bacteria, and it's going to be yeast or fungal issues as well. My opinion, this is my analogy. If it sucks, tell me. I'll come up with a new one. But my analogy is you've got a nightclub, okay, and you get exposed to a toxin. It's a virus. It's a bacteria. It's a parasite. It's maybe E. coli, okay? You had some bad food. The back door is now open. Maybe you had mold exposure in addition to that. So the back door to the club is open. All these other bad guys get invited to the club. And so the bouncer kicks them out, but you don't clear one, two, three other root causes there. So the back door stuck open. And so this is why people, even if you get to a naturopathic doctor who says, Hey, I'm going to treat you for dysbiosis, SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, another generic term that's not very helpful because it's more important to know what specific strains of bacteria you have, because you can use different herbs depending on what bug it is. But let's say you go to the naturopath and they say, Paul, we're going to treat you using oregano oil. Oregano oil is the sledgehammer of natural medicine. It's going to come in and it's going to decimate pretty much everything there. You're probably going to have die off. You're probably going to have diarrhea and you may actually do some good with it. However, there may be some bugs left and then you spin your wheels. And so this is the thing I see. Some bugs left that are pathogenic. Yes, absolutely. And so usually it takes one, two, maybe even three rounds to fully clear someone's gut. In a way, it's almost a whack-a-mole game at first, depending on how many layers of infection there are. Okay. Now, so what we're talking about here, I'll just clarify for listeners. We talked about worms, right? Very few people have worms when they think of parasites. I've heard of it though in Costa Rica. I have had friends who have taken mimosa and they do look in the toilet and they're like, wow, there was a big worm in there. But as we were talking about, it's mostly like Central America. It's rare in the United States. I've not seen worms necessarily on GI maps. You've done a lot more of these than I have. I don't do this anymore, but I did a little bit for a while. And so I don't, most people think parasites, they think, oh, I've got worms. I've got a tapeworm. Most people don't have that. It's rare, but it does happen. Mostly the parasites we're talking about are things like cryptosporidium, blastocystis, which we'll talk about, giardia, which you were talking about there, H. pylori plus minus. And you can see all these on like a GI map test. And what we do for this is you or a functional medicine practitioner sends you a kit, you do this sort of, you know, interesting experience where you poop in a fry basket, then you scoop your poop into a vial and you send it off for analysis. They spin it down and they do use PCR. So they use polymerase chain reaction to amplify the DNA in this sample. And they try to identify organisms, usually this cryptosporidium, blastocystis, H. pylori, Giardia, by DNA sequences that are specific for those organisms. They do quantitative PCR and they amplify. So one of the things we'll do on the video side of this podcast on YouTube is we'll put in a sample test so people can see what we're talking about. Can we do that? Yeah, absolutely. So we'll do a sample test here so people can see on the screen at this point, if you want to watch the video of what a report on a GI map might look like. And you're saying with the nightclub analogy that sometimes when one bug gets in, other bugs can kind of come in because it's all this, it's almost like a community, it's like a, yeah, it's like a, it's a community thing. It's all based on the relationships of these organisms in your gut. And when one bad thing comes in, sometimes other bad things come in. So you're saying when you have these parasympathetic like Giardia or Cryptosporidium, you can also get bacterial issues, which is the term dysbiosis. Am I right so far? That's right. And then dysbiosis is a term that I see thrown around a lot. I see dysbiosis very commonly. And then you see symptomatically, people have this term SIBO, like we talked about, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And dysbiosis, SIBO, these are all kind of synonymous. They're all kind of nonspecific, but what you're talking about is using herbs to potentially address these both parasitic and bacterial improper overgrowth. Am I correct? That's right. Let's talk H. pylori and antibiotic resistance because this is a huge deal. Before we do that, can we talk about herbs versus antibiotics? Sure. Why would you not want to use an antibiotic? Because I agree with you that I think that herbs are better, but Western medicine, which number one, Western medicine doesn't test for these things, right? They're going to do a stool, ova, and parasites by microscopy. Western medicine, mainstream Western medicine, doesn't do quantitative PCR DNA testing of stool that I've ever seen. You go to a board certified gastroenterologist and they're going to say, you don't have anything in your gut. We looked at a stool, ova, and parasites, right, by microscopy, mostly. They might do an ELISA, which is an enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay, but it's not as specific or as sensitive as a quantitative PCR. But if they find something in your gut, Western medicine is going to treat it with an antibiotic. They're going to use a gun. Like, I don't even know what they would use. Metronidazole for giardia or cryptosporidium. Herbs versus antibiotics for gut stuff. Yeah. So, I mean, they may use nystatin or itraconazole. If they have a fungal issue. Yeah. If you've got like a yeast problem, which like I said, typically it's parasites, yeast, it's fungal, it's all these, it's honestly, it's a big colony, as you mentioned, like a community of bad bugs. And some argue it's like this terrain theory and you have to strengthen the host, right? If the host has mold toxicity, which I did, I built the house with my wife, we got exposed to mold. I was a weakened host. I was immune compromised. And we'll give also for the video, we'll give a chart from the lab that shows all the different mechanisms of mold toxicity and how this actually shifts you into a more immunocompromised state including tnf alpha interleukin-6 there's a lots of inflammatory cytokines that are created by the exposure to these airborne toxins and the epa estimates that 85 of commercial buildings potentially even the building we're in right now, could have mold exposure. And therefore, you're breathing this stuff in everywhere you go. And if genetically you don't detox well, it builds up, therefore keeping immune suppression low, meaning you and I go out to eat together, we get a nice steak, maybe your immune system is better than me, maybe I pick up a bug and you don't, or vice versa. Now, back to the antibiotic question. So there's damage to the mitochond mitochondria and we can measure this on the Krebs cycle metabolites on an organic acids test, which is something else we want to introduce to the audience. Let's talk about that too. So this is a urine test that can measure mitochondrial function and typically we'll see elevated succinic acid. This is number 24 on the oat test. We always look at that and someone who's done antibiotics, they're always going to be elevated indicating there's mitochondrial dysfunction. What does this mean symptomatically? Well, it's chronic fatigue. And so a lot of times people will go in and they'll go for Cipro. This is the new scary one. It's a bad one. Yeah. People are getting phloxed. Cipro, phloxacin. This is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic. It's terrifying what I'm seeing because these people are going to Mayo Clinic. They're going to Cleveland Clinic, all these prestigious hospitals that are supposed to fix them. And then I see the protocols from there and I'm like, oh my God, that's what they did. So it's amoxicillin, it's a fluconazole, it's potentially Cipro or it's rifaximin. Okay. I don't know why, but doctors love rifaximin for SIBO. They do. And here's what it does. It's going to knock the load down. Let's just role play. Let's say your dysbiosis, which there's a competitor lab who they actually give you a zero to 10 score on your dysbiosis. Okay. So this other lab, I've seen cases where the dysbiosis is a 10. This is someone who has massive irritable bowel syndrome. They've got chronic fatigue. They have diarrhea, constipation, alternating anxiety, depression, skin condition. So eczema, rosacea, and this can happen in young children as well. Rifaximin will come in and take the 10 and drop it to a six, but now you've damaged the mitochondria. So now they're more tired. They potentially have nutrient deficiencies because all the good microbes that are helping us to make B vitamins in the gut, we actually make nutrients in our gut. It's not just like take a multi. No, we have a multi-factory in our gut that can make nutrients. However, when you have dysbiosis, meaning too many bad guys, not enough good guys, this whole cascade of energy production falls apart. And so long story short, has antibiotics saved people's lives? Yes. If I were dying, I would certainly do antibiotics if I had to save my life. But the CDC even admitted, this is almost a decade ago, they put out a paper and they said, we are now in the post-antibiotic era of civilization because there's so much antibiotic resistance happening to these pathogens. they've evolved they're smarter than us you come in with this single mechanism drug and all of a sudden the bug evolves and evades that just like a just like a guy running from the cops okay he takes this off-ramp instead and the bugs like You come in with this single mechanism drug, and all of a sudden, the bug evolves and evades that."