Hey, my name’s Olly, and I want to share with you what I have started to understand about the gut microbiome from people much smarter than me and walk you through the shifts and skillsets I believe everyone must know to help not only upgrade your energy, mood and metabolism. But completely shift how you look after your health and the health of the people you love around you.
From a birdseye view, we see advances in food production, advancements in medical science and the general extension of the lifespan of the population.
However, as I’ve had the opportunity to work with thousands of clients at a much deeper level, my team and I have uncovered so many silent “health anchors” making it nearly impossible to drop the stubborn body fat, have strong energy all day and stay healthy & active long into your 70, 80s and even 90s. And I’d like to share with you.
There are so many people that I feel have been labelled with a certain condition or disease without being given a strategy to manage or even recover and instead simply accept a new limitation and new drug prescription.
And while my intention is to by no means belittle any condition you or others around you are struggling with, I feel many of us are living lives through limitations set out for us rather than empowered with further environmental, lifestyle and nutrition changes that could greatly impact the improvement and even recovery of certain conditions.
I believe the world is slowly waking up to the limitations of going to their local GP for health advice but ultimately I do not think it is their fault or yours. Medical degrees do not include sound nutrition guidance nor is it supposed it, it’s simply a lack of awareness of their scope. Health within the lens of medical practice is simply the absence of disease. If you aspire not just to be alive, but also to live and thrive, you need to take ownership of your own health journey.
In today’s training, I want to show you where you must start to take control of your health and body, so you can lead and be a role model for the people in your life you care about in a body that matches the task.
Although we are seeing advances in acute solutions for disease, we are seeing a silent killer emerge in the form of more chronic conditions.
These advances in antibiotics, cleaning processes and sanitisers have had life-changing results in the medical field that are not to be dismissed. However, when this is taken from a field focused on the prevention of disease and given to the masses, there are very real consequences.
When we take an antibiotic to kill off a deadly disease, it saves a life. However, in the process, it also decimates the gut.
If we start to demonise all bacteria like we historically have with dietary fats (which many of us know are crucial to our health), we start to see a huge reduction in gut microbiota and the body’s ability to regulate its own natural defence response which has seen rise to huge levels of chronic inflammation.
While acute inflammation is a very normal and helpful process in the response to injury, chronic inflammation is becoming a very real epidemic in the modern world and is growing at a rapid rate.
Examples of how widespread this is seen are in the rise in autism. We had one in 5,000 children with autism in 1975. Today we have one in 36 children with an autism spectrum disorder. Between 2012 and today where we’re seeing a doubling time, every two to three years in that autism rate at the current rate, we’ll see one in three children with autism in 2035.
From my interactions, the huge rise in infertility cases seems to still be under the radar. The use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) by infertile couples is increasing by 5% to 10% per year. “If it continues at this rate, the human race will be unable to reproduce itself and by 2050, many couples will have to turn to technology,” says Shanna Swan.
The incidence of type 1 diabetes has been increasing throughout the globe at rates that range from 3 to 5 per cent per year. “Increases such as the ones that have been reported cannot be explained by a change in genes in such a short period,” says Giuseppina Imperatore, who leads a team of epidemiologists in the Division of Diabetes Translation at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “So environmental factors are probably major players in this increase.”
All of these diseases are on the rise, yet there is nowhere near enough time for genes to change in this time frame, it’s our environment that has. Which really begs the question, what’s the root cause and where do we start to really be able to take care of our health, possible prevent disease and understand the role of the gut.
We must start with the soil.
We have drastically changed the way we farmed this the late 1800s.
We went from stone grinding the steel grinding which allows for a much more refined carbohydrate with this fibre. The increased demands in produce by our soil through increased crop rotation that led to a massive death of topsoil and the nutrients it contained.
This led to the massive dust bowl crisis in the southern plains region of the states in the 1930s. All of this soil that has lost its topsoil was getting swept up and blown around causing havoc on the people and animals in the region, and forcing food production to be imported because the soil was no longer able to be used for crops.
After world war 2, which saw a huge rise in demands for petroleum now drastically changed, they started to uncover that they could extract nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from the petrol which saw the rise of the chemical-based fertilizers.
This became a very easy sell to farmers at the time because the quality of the solid was still suffering from the lack of topsoil to grow crops. The message was a very easy sell as rather than crop rotation and caring for the soil, they simply start spraying the soil with fertilizers.
Now, this is where things start to go downhill, remember we are what we eat, and if we see this development in plants first, it’s not long before it happens to us.
Through the chemicals sprayed on the plants, the farmers were getting positive reinforcement because they saw green plants, but what they didn’t know is nitrogen and phosphorus will turn plants green, but it also made the plants weak and unable to fight off viruses, pests and have a strong root system to stay strong. Along with that, the plants didn’t contain the same nutrients so the immune system of both the plant and eventually humans was also weakened.
Rather than identify that these chemicals were causing the plants to be weak, they did what we are seeing with humans now. Rather than seek the root cause, they developed herbicides that allowed farmers to fix the problem their first product had caused to keep them alive while not fixing the weakened plant below the surface. As long as it looked good and was growing, they continued.
As we see in the medicine world, many drugs are being used in the same way. We are given a drug from an initial diagnosis and then we are given another drug to deal with the symptoms that the drug has caused and as with the farmers, you enter a co-dependant relationship with these drugs.
Around the same time as this fertilizer was invented, modern medicine had a big breakthrough with penicillin, our first antibiotic that was developed in the 1940s. Essentially we had an antibiotic to kill off bacteria for the body and we developed an antibiotic to kill off the weeds.
Glyphosate was never even patented as a weed killer, it was patented as an antibiotic. The trouble is, this herbicide doesn’t just impact the weeds. Glyphosate works by blocking a chemical pathway in plant. The reason glyphosate was originally deemed safe for humans is that human cells don’t use the Shikimate pathway to make amino acids.
However, all of our gut bacteria do. Micro-doses of glyphosate in our food, may not actually cause damage to our human cells but it can harm our gut bugs, leading to reduced gut diversity.
This has become the most successful chemical warfare on the planet. We currently use 2 billion kilos of glyphosate on our soils every year. The trouble is it’s reported that less than 0.01% of the glyphosate on the planet actually hits weeds. The other 99.99% gets into the soil and the water system, from there it is evaporated in the air we breathe and then dumped back down through the rainfall.. So even before we look at the food you are eating, you’re being hit with an antibiotic.
This reduction in gut diversity is associated with many health issues from weight gain, to chronic inflammatory conditions and digestive issues.
Since it was originally deemed safe, glyphosate has been reclassified by the World Health Organisation as “probably a carcinogen” due to emerging evidence of its impact on other areas of human cell function.
The key point is that its primary negative effects were not first recognized because when it was first made we basically knew nothing about the role of gut bacteria in health and well-being.
In the last 15 years, we’ve completed adjusted our body’s abilities to build a strong gut microbiome not just through the food but now through the air, water and normal house products we use.
If we don’t stop this vicious cycle of these “chemical deletes” from happening, not only are you going to see it harder to drop body fat and feel energetic, we are going to see a catastrophic increase in autism, diabetes, infertility and more defects.
We have become so good at fixing acute issues by clearing everything out, that in the process we had killed the bacteria balance in our gut which has led to massive surges in chronic inflammatory conditions in the human race.
This is ONE of seven “system spoilers” that we address with all of our clients to rebuild their gut health, energy and body to live a long, strong and healthy life in a body they feel in control of.
This is not an issue that is fixed with a pill or 6-week detox.
This is only fixed through taking ownership of your own health and awareness to the world around you.
It can be so easy to sit here and blame whole industries and governments for this information, but as we know from the outdated nutrition recommendations that are 30yrs behind, we cannot wait for anyone to save us.
This comes from the ownership of your own health and the decision to understand how to look after your health and the health of the people you care about through the power of the gut.
If your body is feeling sluggish, run-down and getting in the way of your feeling and functioning at your best day to day, please feel free to dive deeper into our free trainings HERE.
Alternatively, if you want us to help you build out a game plan to work with you personally to get your health and body back on track, click here to book in a time with one of our coaches.