Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Potpourri: Hyaluronic acid, allulose, L. reuteri and reproductive health
There are a great many emerging ideas to discuss, but sometimes these topics are just not big enough to fill out an entire podcast episode. So I decided to start something I call “Potpourri,” a collection of unconnected but interesting topics that may be helpful in guiding you in your health journey. I’d like to say “Ask your doctor about these issues,” but you and I know that they will, more than likely, know absolutely nothing about these questions because 1) it’s not a pharmaceutical or procedure, and 2) it will make no money for them. But just because your doctor is indifferent or ignorant does not mean that they don’t pack a wallop of potential health benefits for you.
So in this episode of the Defiant Health Podcast, I’d like to talk about hyaluronic acid, the sweetener allulose, and the relationship of Lactobacillus reuteri and reproductive health.
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Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
There are a great many emerging ideas that we can discuss, but sometimes these topics are just not big enough to fill out an entire podcast episode. So I decided to start something I call Poperie, a collection of unconnected but interesting topics that may be helpful in guiding you in your health journey. I'd like to say, ask your doctor about these issues, but you and I know that it will more than likely know absolutely nothing about these questions because 1. It's not a pharmaceutical or a procedure and 2. It will make no money for them. But just because your doctor may be indifferent or ignorant does not mean that they don't pack a wallop of potential health benefits for you. So in this episode of the Defiant Health Podcast, I'd like to talk about hyaluronic acid, the sweetener allulose, and the relationship of lactobacillus rhodorite and reproductive health. I'd like to also tell you about Defiant Health sponsors, paleo Valley and Biodiquest. Paleo Valley is our preferred source for many excellent foods, such as fermented beef, pork and chicken sticks sourced from organic pastured animals, bone broth, protein and delicious low carb superfood bars. Biodiquest is my preferred source of quality probiotics crafted by academic microbiologist Dr Raul Kenno, probiotics created with the attention to collaborative metabolic effects among microbes the only probiotics available with this built in feature. So, as I mentioned in the opening comments, this episode of Defiant Health Podcast will be a series of shorter conversations about some issues that are still very interesting, just not big enough, perhaps, to fill out an entire Defiant Health Podcast episode.
Speaker 1:Let's start with this idea of hyaluronic acid. So hyaluronic acid is very interesting. It has great potential to add some major benefits to your health program, not just in your physiology but also in your appearance. So lots of women know about hyaluronic acid because they pay a lot of money for these hyaluronic acid serums, that is, these topical products. They're put around their eyes, for instance around their mouth, and hyaluronic acid applied topically does indeed partially reduce the depth of wrinkles, especially the finest wrinkles, such as the crows, feet around the eyes and the smile lines around the mouth. But if you apply that to those areas, what does it do for the skin on your neck or the skin on your thighs or your abdomen? Nothing, of course, because it's a topical, local effect. There's very little penetration of that hyaluronic acid beneath the epidermis. The epidermis, of course, is the external part of your skin. Just below the epidermis is the dermis. The epidermis is largely dead skin cells. By the way, the dermis is living and that's where skin health is determined in the dermis, because that's where the cells are that produce the components of skin, like collagen. That's where moisture resides. That's where hormone exerts their effect, that's where various inflammatory or anti-inflammatory factors exert their effect. All that action occurs in the dermis.
Speaker 1:Can we increase the dermal content of hyaluronic acid? Yes, you can, and you can do it dramatically. But that means taking hyaluronic acid orally. Now the odd thing, the great iron about hyaluronic acid is it is a common component of organ meats, especially brain, skin and other organs. Modern people, given the advice to cut your fat and cholesterol, have largely abandoned the consumption of hyaluronic acid as well as collagen, yet another important component of diet. So the modern diet has almost no hyaluronic acid because of the abandonment of eating such things as brain, skin and other organs. That means that skin aging is accelerated. So a restoration of hyaluronic acid can be very important.
Speaker 1:Hyaluronic acid in the dermal layer of skin is responsible for retaining water. Hyaluronic acid is unique in its great capacity to retain water. Hyaluronic acid in the dermal layer also stimulates production of collagen, so it stimulates the fibroblast cells to produce more collagen. So hyaluronic acid is a crucial component of your skin, health and appearance. When taken orally, it does it in there, though, so hyaluronic acid is also an important component of your joints, such as your knees and hips, so your lubricating fluid in your joints is made largely of hyaluronic acid. That is, the synovial fluid, that is, the lubricant in your joints, is largely hyaluronic acid, and you can increase the moisture and the lubrication of your joints by ingesting hyaluronic acid. This thing absent from modern diet, and the increase in hyaluronic acid also stimulates chondroblasts, cardilage cells, to produce more cartilage, and so getting hyaluronic acid orally is a big first step in rebuilding joint cartilage and thereby preventing or even reversing, at least in its early phases, arthritis.
Speaker 1:Another very interesting effect of hyaluronic acid is that it is a component of the so-called glyco-calix of your arteries. This is a polysaccharide or sugar coating on your arteries that determines how relaxed or constricted your arteries are the process called endothelial dysfunction. It's called that because the thin lining of arteries, the endothelium that contains this glyco-calix that is the principle determinant of how constricted or how relaxed your arteries are. Thank you. Chronic constriction of arteries is a problem because it leads to atherosclerosis as well as hypertension, so we want our arteries to be relaxed, and getting hyaluronic acid ingested orally rebuilds the glyco-calix, restores normal arterial relaxation and thereby helps prevent the development of atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is a process that leads to such things as heart attack, sudden cardiac death, the need for such things as stents and bypassing your arteries.
Speaker 1:Now, yet another very interesting aspect of hyaluronic acid is that the woman's uterus, cervix and vagina are largely made of hyaluronic acid, and there's emerging evidence to suggest that a lack of hyaluronic acid impairs a woman's reproductive health, may lead to such things as vaginal atrophy, dryness, irritation, pain upon penetration, restoration of hyaluronic acid orally. So remember that hyaluronic acid you put around your eyes topically has no effect on the reproductive organs, so we're going to ingest it orally and it increases moisture in a woman's reproductive system. Now there's more a woman can do to reestablish vaginal health, such as supplement the microbe lactobacillus crispatus. That's a conversation for another day. But know that the wisdom in managing reproductive health in females, which is terrible. Ladies have terrible choices, like whether they should take estrogen in some form, some that increases risk for endometrial cancer and thromboembolic disease like deep vein thrombosis. Well, there are better choices emerging and among them, restoration of this factored loss from the modern diet, hyaluronic acid.
Speaker 1:Now hyaluronic acid is kind of a commodity product. You don't have to be too particular about brands Dose. Most studies have used 120 milligrams. Those are studies examining the effect on skin, on the dermal layer of skin, also on joint pain and joint cartilage. The few efforts that used higher doses don't seem to suggest that higher doses yield better effects. So we're sitting with 120 milligrams.
Speaker 1:We always ask if 120 milligrams is good, is more better? Well, let's ask how much did primitive humans obtain when they consumed organ meats? Well, if you eat a four-out serving of sheep's brain or other animal's brain, you get about seven milligrams of hyaluronic acid. So 120 milligrams is really kind of a very confident dose. It's the equivalent of eating four pounds of an animal's brain. So I think 120 milligrams is a very confident dose. That's subject to future update as the science becomes better. But right now if you buy hyaluronic acid as a powder or as a capsule, 120 milligrams or thereabouts is a very confident dose.
Speaker 1:Another very interesting aspect of hyaluronic acid's behavior is that it's a fiber. Even though it's sourced from animal organs like brain and skin, it is a fiber recognized that most fibers come from plants, right from legumes and root vegetables and things like that. But hyaluronic acid is sourced from animals, yet it is a fiber. It's one of the very few fibers sourced from animal products.
Speaker 1:When you consume hyaluronic acid, very interesting things happen in the gastrointestinal microbiome. First of all, there's a bloom in beneficial species. These are species like fecalobacterium prusnitsii or acromansium eucinophila, or species of lactosepiration or rheumatic acacia. Why is that important? Well, those microbes, when stimulated, when fed with hyaluronic acid, in turn produce a fatty acid called butyrate or butyric acid. And that fatty acid is the mediator of multiple beneficial effects in you, such as facilitation of weight loss, especially from abdominal, visceral fat, inflammatory fat, reduction of blood sugar, reduction of blood pressure, reduction in some resistance, preservation of cognition, deeper sleep, vivid dreams. So that boosts and butyrate that occurs from consumption of hyaluronic acid is very important. It goes farther.
Speaker 1:Hyaluronic acid also reduces fecal microbes or proteobacteria in the small intestine and colon. Because fecal microbes work against us. They're destructive, so we want to keep them at bay, we want to minimize them, and hyaluronic acid reduces the burden of fecal microbes in the GI tract and thereby reduces endotoxemia. Remember that when fecal microbes, especially when they inhabit the small intestine, when they die, they release some of their toxic compounds, such as endotoxin. That enters the bloodstream through the very permeable small intestine and you get a process called endotoxemia, which drives high blood pressure, high blood sugar, weight gain, especially in the abdomen, cognitive impairment, heart disease risk, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, on and on and on. Well, hyaluronic acid reduces fecal microbes, reduces endotoxemia, achieves a wonderful panel of benefits. And then, lastly, hyaluronic acid also reduces multiple inflammatory mediators, which provides even greater advantage in losing abdominal fat, reducing blood sugar and all those other effects. So hyaluronic acid very important, now absent from the modern dietary experience restore it and regain all the health, shape and body composition advantages that this natural nutrient can provide.
Speaker 1:Let's now shift gears and talk about the natural sweetener, alulose. So those of you who've been following my conversations know that we reject the synthetic non-caloric sweeteners like aspartame, niotame, acesulfame, saccharin and sucralose, because they have been shown with good evidence that they cause distortions of the gastrointestinal microbiome, such that it takes the microbiome of a slender, healthy person and makes it look more like the GI microbiome of someone who's obese and type 2 diabetic and it pushes that normal, slender person closer to being obese, closer to becoming a type 2 diabetic. So we don't use those synthetic sweeteners. Now we have been using natural sweeteners, especially monk fruit, the various fractions of stevia, which there are many. In case you don't like the taste, try another one. Rithritol there's some issues with the Rithritol, we'll discuss in another time and then alulose. Well, we've been using these things. They're delicious, they allow you to recreate some dishes. A lot of people in my community say well, we've lost our taste for sweet dishes, we don't need these things.
Speaker 1:I learned long ago that if I just tell people eat whole natural foods like eggs and avocados and salmon, and don't limit fat and eat no wheat or grains, holidays come around and people would come back starting with wonderful metabolic markers and being slender and being freed of type 2 diabetes and hypertension, all the other kinds of common conditions. They'd come back after, say, thanksgiving, 14 pounds heavier and absolute disasters. Maybe they dropped their triglycerides from 200 to 47 and they come back after an indulgent Thanksgiving with triglycerides of 300 or an explosion in the small LDL particles that actually cause heart disease. So maybe their small LDL was 2400 nanomoles per liter, very high level, dropped to zero with the program and now it's 1800. Now you expose yourself to extravagant risk for heart attack and death that lasts for weeks.
Speaker 1:So I learned that in order to help people navigate holidays where you have kids and grandkids and company and neighbors and entertaining, that, it helps to provide you with alternatives, ways to recreate, for instance, a cheesecake or biscuits and gravy using alternative ingredients. So instead of using wheat flour, for instance, we'll use almond flour, coconut flour, ground golden flax seed and other ingredients. But for sweeteners, in case you want to make some muffins or cookies or cheesecake, we're going to use safe, non-caloric or minimally caloric sweeteners and that has worked out very well for us. Well, there's been the recent emergence of a new sweetener, a natural sweetener that you can find alulose. You can find it in raisins, maple syrup and some fruits in small quantities, but it's a naturally occurring sweetener in many of those sources.
Speaker 1:Well, alulose is proven to be different in that it's not just safe and does not provoke glucose or insulin, as some of those synthetic sweeteners do, but actually reduces blood glucose, reduces insulin, not a little bit, but quite dramatically. So several studies, for instance, have shown that alulose a dose of approximately 8.5 to 10 milliliters or grams that's about two teaspoons worth of liquid or powder you can get either form reduces blood glucose by about 10 to 20 milligrams, which is huge. It also reduces insulin. When you consume something that raises blood glucose it provokes a rise in insulin and with alulose in the vicinity it reduced that rise in insulin by about a third, about 35%. So it's dramatic. And it reduced waste circumference.
Speaker 1:Now it seems to be selective, more for the subcutaneous fat, fat just below the skin surface, not so much for the more problematic visceral fat and that's kind of a curiosity I'm not sure anyone understands yet. But it does help you lose abdominal fat and it reduces triglycerides quite dramatically and reduces blood pressure systolic blood pressure by about seven millimeters, diastolic blood pressure about five millimeters, which equals the effect of most anti-hypertensive medications with none of the side effects. So alulose very benign, non-chloric and has some pretty surprisingly spectacular effects on reducing body fat, reducing blood glucose, reducing insulin and reducing blood pressure. So alulose has become my sweetener of choice and it's very soft, it has a good flavor, doesn't have funny aftertastes. If you're interested in taking advantage of this sweetener for its beneficial metabolic and body shaping effects, the intake is a teaspoon or two per day or per meal. It's not a supplement, of course, it's a sweetener. So use it as a sweetener. Please don't hear that I'm trying to advocate this part of our program. It's just something you have an option to use for further advantage.
Speaker 1:Now, before I talk about lactobacillus rhodorite and reproductive health, let me tell you something about Define Health Podcast sponsors. The Defiant Health podcast is sponsored by Paleo Valley makers of delicious grass-fed beef sticks, healthy snack bars and other products. We're very picky around here and insist that any product we consider has no junk ingredients like carrageenan, carboxymethylcellulose, sucralose and, of course, no added sugars. All Paleo Valley products contain no gluten nor grains. In fact, I find Paleo Valley products among the cleanest in their category. One of the habits I urge everyone to get into is to include at least one, if not several, servings of fermented foods per day in their lifestyles. Unlike nearly all other beef sticks available, paleo Valley grass-fed beef sticks are all naturally fermented, meaning they contain probiotic bacterial species. And now Paleo Valley is expanding their Wild Pastures program that provides 100% grass-fed, grass-finished, pastured beef and pastured chicken and pork raised without herbicides or pesticides, and they just added wild-cut seafood caught from the waters of Bristol Bay, alaska. Among their other new products are pasture-raised fermented pork sticks, chocolate-flavored grass-fed bone broth, protein and grass-fed organ complex and capsule form, and new essentially electrolytes in powder form to add to potassium and magnesium intake, available in orange, lemon and melon flavors. And for the fall and winter season they've brought back pumpkin spice superfood bars. Listeners to the Defiant Health podcast receive a 15% discount by going to paleo valley dot com.
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Speaker 1:Now let's get back to our discussion. Let's now shift gears once again and talk about a very important topic, that is, the relationship of this microbe, lactobacillus rotari, with female reproductive health. Now, if you're a guy and may not care too much about female reproductive health, I urge you still to listen, because I'm sure you have a woman close to you or a female close to you, such as your wife, your daughter, your girlfriend, your granddaughter someone who could benefit from this information, because it's not being passed on by the great majority of gynecologists or primary care doctors. Yet these are very, very crucial issues. Now, there's more to reproductive health, female reproductive health and lactobacillus rotari, but let's start that conversation with this microbe.
Speaker 1:There are other microbes that are very important for female health, but lactobacillus rotari plays a central role. So, one of the effects of lactobacillus rotari as you recall, this microbe lost by the great majority of people because it's susceptible to antibiotics like amoxicillinate you may have taken 10, 20, or 30 years ago, but thereby lost this microbe. Well, lactobacillus rotari takes up residence in the GI tract and one of the things it does is it stimulates contraction of the uterus at time of delivery. That's why, when a woman wants to deliver a child at a specific time, she schedules her delivery, let's say Wednesday, august 23rd, at 8 am. She comes into the hospital, they put an IV in and they give her an infusion of oxytocin, often called pitocin. It's the same thing that causes a uterus receptive to contraction to contract and the cervix to relax, and the child is delivered.
Speaker 1:So that for many years was thought to be the only primary application of oxytocin. That couldn't be farthest from the truth. So the higher levels of oxytocin that develop at time of delivery, or supposed to develop at time of delivery, have largely been lost. Because if we've lost lactobacillus rotari, we've thereby lost the capacity to get this extra high boost of oxytocin. What that means is a woman delivers her child, often with the artificial support of intravenous oxytocin, and then relies on breastfeeding.
Speaker 1:Well, the process of releasing milk for breastfeeding requires oxytocin. So a common cause of failed breastfeeding, which is a very that's a major impairment to a child, because breastfeeding is a major advantage that child's development, especially neurological maturation and immunological maturation. So depriving a child of breastfeeding is a major detriment to that child's health. So not being able to breastfeed, as often happens in modern females, is a major problem. So restoration of rotari, and thereby the boost in oxytocin, is instrumental in allowing a woman to breastfeed, to release milk from her breast. Another factor is that the oxytocin boost that you get from rotari also increases the no-transcript cultivates the mother-child relationship.
Speaker 1:Ladies who are low in oxytocin can often experience postpartum depression. That's a major problem because it threatens the survival and health of the child. If the mother can't seem to generate a bond, it doesn't pay attention to the child's needs. That can be a major threat to that child's welfare. So having lactobacillus rotari and thereby oxytocin at the postpartum period can be very important in generating that very important bond between mother and child. Now lactobacillus rotari and oxytocin play roles outside of the delivery period. It also plays a role in vaginal moisture. So we know that oxytocin is instrumental in increasing vaginal moisture and restoring a normal lining to the vagina. So as women age, as females age, especially into their mid and late 60s, it becomes very common, virtually universal, for a woman to experience vaginal atrophy, that is, loss of the lining of the vagina becomes coarse and dry. It's prone to develop discharges and odd scents or smells and also cause pain with penetration of any sort.
Speaker 1:Another aspect of rotari and oxytocin is that as women age, many lose libido or sexual interest. Now that's some that interest you. You want to regain. So not everybody does. But if you do, the choices are very poor.
Speaker 1:There are two prescription drugs that purport to restore libido but hardly provide any effect at all. There's an oral drug, there's an injectable drug. The injectable drug, for instance, called phlebancerin. You have to inject it into your thigh 40 minutes before anticipated sexual activity. Who knows how to do that right? Who knows how to anticipate that precisely sexual activity? And it increased libido barely at all. In fact, these two drugs are so ineffective that the FDA is contemplating withdrawing their approvals. There's also DHEA, which can help a little bit, testosterone, which does help some ladies, but we're talking about not very good choices If it's estrogen, whether it's intravaginal, topical or oral.
Speaker 1:Once again a woman has to make a choice. Does she regain libido at the cost of risking endometrial cancer and thrombombolic disease, blood clot diseases? So it's a very poor choice that women have. Well, now we have the choice of rotari and oxytocin, because we know that oxytocin boosts libido. That's true also in males, but it's very true in females. So now ladies have a key to many aspects of reproductive health, whether it's facilitating delivery, breastfeeding, generating love for her and attachment for her infant or whether it's restoration of vaginal health in a mature woman.
Speaker 1:Now just one caution we restore rotari by fermenting it as a yogurt. It's not yogurt, of course, it looks and smells like yogurt. But we use prolonged fermentation my method of prolonged fermentation so that we allow the microbe to double 12 times. Lactobacillus rotari doubles. They don't have sex, right, they just double themselves Every three hours at human body temperature. We allow it to do that 12 times and when we perform a count of microbes using a method called flow cytometry, we get around 300 billion microbes per half cup serving. That's how we get these big effects.
Speaker 1:Now the one caution is we don't know how safe that is during pregnancy. During pregnancy, the uterus increases its oxytocin receptors up to 200 fold in the last few days to weeks preceding delivery. We don't know if getting these high counts of rotari are safe in the setting of pregnancy, so I would not do this if you are pregnant. Instead, if you want to restore rotari because everybody should have it anyway right, you are supposed to have it since birth from your mom, but we've lost it. So if you want to replace rotari and there may be a modest boost in oxytocin, don't make the yogurt like we usually do, that achieves high count of extended fermentation. Instead, I would use a mixed culture yogurt, for instance.
Speaker 1:Take your rotari starter. It could be an osfortis capsule. It could be tablets of gastris that you crushed, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, see my super gut book for the recipe, see my drdafusinfinitehealthcom blog that has the recipe also, and there's also many YouTube videos by other people not just not me who show you how to do this. So take some source of rotari and combine it with other microbes. It could be a capsule of another commercial probiotic. It could be some yogurt you bought at the store that has a mixture of microbes at least two like lactobacillus bulgaricus, streptococcus thermophilus, bifidobacterium bifidum and some others and ferment them all together. So it's just like having a backyard garden.
Speaker 1:If all you do is plant tomatoes, you're going to have a lot of tomatoes at the end of the growing season. But what if instead, at the start of the season, you grow tomatoes, an eggplant and zucchini and squash? How many tomatoes will you have? Well, far fewer, and you'll have tomatoes to enjoy. Likewise here, cultivate lactobacillus rotari in the company of other microbes that you don't get these high counts, so that you do get the microbe, but not these very high counts, because we really don't know what happens to a pregnant woman's uterus. Now, if you learn something from this Defiant Health podcast, I invite you to subscribe to your favorite podcast directory. Post a review, post a comment and join the conversation. Help build this community of people who want to be free to the health care system yet have magnificent health. Thanks for listening.
