Episode 120 | Mar 6, 2025

Heart Disease and Gut Health, With Dr. William Davis

Could the key to preventing heart disease be found in your gut? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes cardiologist and bestselling author Dr. William Davis to explore how conventional medicine has overlooked the real drivers of heart disease—and how diet, gut health, and probiotics play a far greater role than previously thought. Dr. Davis, known for Wheat Belly and Super Gut, shares how his personal and professional experiences led him to rethink everything he once believed about heart health and prevention.

“This is the new age of the health coach. You don’t need a medical license to dispense ideas about nutrition or the microbiome. The real solutions to heart disease and chronic illness aren’t in procedures or prescriptions—they’re in what we eat, how we nourish our gut, and the lifestyle choices we make every day.”

William Davis, MD

Dr. Davis didn’t always challenge the medical establishment. He started as a conventionally trained cardiologist, specializing in cutting-edge procedures like stents and coronary interventions. But when his own mother died from sudden cardiac death, despite receiving standard treatment, he began to question everything he had been taught. His research led him to see heart disease not as a cholesterol problem, but as a metabolic and inflammatory one—one heavily influenced by diet, micronutrients, and the gut microbiome. Over time, he moved away from procedural medicine and toward a root-cause approach, helping people prevent heart disease before it starts.

In this conversation, Dr. Davis unpacks the flaws in traditional heart disease prevention strategies, from the overreliance on cholesterol numbers to the ineffectiveness of statins in stopping disease progression. He explains how wheat, grains, and sugar contribute to small LDL particles—the true culprits behind heart disease—and how removing them can transform health. He also dives into the critical role of the microbiome, describing how imbalances in gut bacteria can drive inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and even cognitive decline. His latest work focuses on specific probiotic strains that promote optimal gut health, reduce disease risk, and even influence emotional well-being.

Health coaches are on the front lines of a major shift in how we think about chronic disease. As Dr. Davis points out, people don’t need a medical license to educate others about the real drivers of heart disease and metabolic health. Coaches have the unique opportunity to guide clients toward dietary and lifestyle choices that address root causes, rather than simply managing symptoms. From cutting out inflammatory foods to introducing beneficial probiotics, the insights from this episode offer practical tools that health coaches can use to help clients improve their cardiovascular and overall health.

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Transcript

Dr. Sandi: I have a real special guest on today’s episode of “Health Coach Talk.” He was a trailblazer in advocating for a wheat-free and a grain-free diet, and now he is passionate about educating people about the health of the microbiome and specifically advocating for some strains of probiotics that will lead to much better health. Let me tell you about Dr. William Davis. He’s a renowned cardiologist, author, and health advocate. He is best known perhaps for his groundbreaking work on the impact of diet on health in his best-selling book, “Wheat Belly.” He has also written “Undoctored” and “Super Gut.” And in that book, he focuses on reprogramming the microbiome for enhanced health and weight loss. So, I know that you are going to enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed our conversation.

I first learned of you many years ago when you published “Wheat Belly,” and I followed your work. And then we ran into each other, and I met you in person at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. And I am so excited to bring you to our audience. So, let’s start out by talking about how you got into this work because you didn’t start out there. You were trained conventionally as a cardiologist. So, what was the defining moment or experience that led you on this different path?

Dr. William: Sandi, thank you. I’m embarrassed to admit that so many of the lessons I’ve learned, so many of the detours I’ve taken are because of blunders or tragedy. Not because one day I sat in the bathtub thinking and some great insight. No, it was always some blunder. In this case, it was the death of my mom. I grew up in New Jersey. She was living in New Jersey. I had just moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they brought me in, as you point out, to set up all their new technologies. This was the age of when stents and atherectomy cutting devices, drilling devices in your heart’s arteries were all brand new. And I was brought into a system to teach the other cardiologists how to do these new methods.

Well, just a few months into that, I get a call that my mom had died of sudden cardiac death just a few months after her coronary angioplasty, two-vessel coronary angioplasty, the thing that I was doing setting up in Wisconsin. And so, here, the painful irony, of course, is that here my mom died of the disease I thought I knew something about. Well, it drove home the idea that, even though I was good in procedures, it really is not the way to manage a disease. It’s no better than taking out a tumor once it’s developed and metastasized. I mean, it’s way beyond the point of no return. And so that, kind of, changed my direction thinking over the ensuing… This has been now 35 plus years since that all happened. But it made me realize that taking care of people in a hospital laboratory, a procedural laboratory, or with drugs is not the solution. But it completely changed the direction of the things I did.

It took about a decade to stop doing what I was doing. To be honest, I was very good at it and so teaching other physicians how to do these things. But it took me about a decade to undo and relearn a whole bunch of new things. Because as you know, physicians are not schooled. They’re not educated in health. They’re educated in procedures and pharmaceuticals. There’s virtually no talk of issues like nutrition, nutrients, physiological advantages gained by other things like sunlight or exercise, and certainly not the microbiome. And in their defense, a lot of education occurred before a lot of these insights were obtainable. But you know, the great thing, Sandi, of course, is that a lot of these things are now crystal clear like the microbiome. And you know what? You don’t need to be an MD to do it. That’s what I love about the health coach world is this is the new age of the health coach. You don’t need a medical license to dispense ideas about nutrition or E. coli or lactobacillus reuteri or hyaluronic acid. So, it’s a new age, Sandi. I’m grateful, but I had to learn the hard way.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, it is a very exciting time. And to see the evolution, and I can certainly relate as I started out as a psychologist trained very traditionally. And I really early on was doing mind-body medicine. And I was helping people with anxiety, the panic, and who had heart disease. They were getting better. And I remember one cardiologist, I was speaking with him and he said basically, “Get out of my office. There’s no science behind what you’re doing.” He held up the New England Journal of Medicine. When there’s a study about breathing in this journal, then I’ll refer patients to you. Well, yes, there have been studies and many of them now. So, we’ve seen the evolution of this field. So, you initially were advocating in a grain-free diet in “Wheat Belly,” and then you evolved further. So, how has your thinking changed since you published that book in I think it’s 2011?

Dr. William: Well, because of what happened to my mom, I asked myself, “Well, what could I have done 2 years, 5 years, 10 years before that happened, to give her some idea that what was ahead and what she could do about it?” Well, in the conventional world, they use this idiotic thing called cholesterol, for which there’s virtually no evidence and never was evidence to support the idea that cholesterol causes heart disease. It was meant to be a crude, indirect marker for risk for heart disease. It is not an index of the disease itself. So, what could I have done for my mom maybe, whatever, sometime before she died? Well, the only device, this is back now about in 1985, long time ago, the only device, and this remains largely true today also, is a CT heart scan that generates a coronary calcium score as a crude and indirect index of the volume of atherosclerotic plaque in coronary arteries.

Well, back then, so I put together a place called Milwaukee Heart Scan. I was living in Milwaukee at the time. And at the time, there were very few scanners. There were two in Chicago. There was one in Wisconsin and a handful nationwide. So, it was a brand new technology. It was actually an electron beam tomography. It predates the current CAT scanners. That’s how long ago this was. So, we called it EBT. But anyway, so we’re scanning people left and right in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And these are people like you and me who say, “You know what? I feel fine. I ride my bike. I go swimming. I go for walks. I don’t have chest pain. I didn’t have a heart attack. I just want to know, because my dad had a heart attack at age 62. My mom had died of sudden cardiac death at 75, whatever.” And you want to know if that’s in your future.

So, you get a coronary calcium score. Normal is zero. No atherosclerotic plaque, no calcium. We’d be scanning people, thousands of them, and they’d have scores of 300 or 400 or 1,000. So, if your score is 400, say, as a 60-year-old woman, we know with good evidence that you’re going to be dead within 6 to 7 years, or you’re going to have a heart attack, or you’re going to need a procedure like bypass surgery or stent implantation or something like that. In other words, it’s a virtual crystal ball unlike cholesterol. If you say your cholesterol is 240, you’re going to die tomorrow, 10 years. You can’t tell because it’s garbage. It’s nonsense. But with the current account, you can’t.

Well, here is the thing. This is 30-some years ago. So, 30-some years ago, you come in and we say, “Your score is 400.” What’s it going to be in a year? So, we helped publish these data. It’s going to be 25% higher if you do nothing, so it’d be 500, 625. And with each step, you’re close to dying, heart attack, etc. So, back then, we helped publish these data. What if we do the best you can do in conventional medicine? A high-dose statin cholesterol drug, a low-saturated fat diet, baby aspirin, exercise program, all the conventional stuff that my colleagues, Sandi, to this day still call optimal medical therapy. So, how fast will the score increase on optimal medical therapy? 25% per year. It has no impact at all.

And so what do I do? I’ve got thousands of people freaking out on me and my unscrupulous colleagues, which means a lot of them, are saying, “Well, let’s do the real procedure, heart catheterization, to see if you need a preventive or prophylactic bypass operation or stent.” And so even though we know with good evidence, that does not provide a person with no symptoms and people not having heart attack, people like you and me just going about our business, who have silent coronary disease… They obtain no benefit by putting somebody through a preventive procedure like that. Yet it’s done every day because it pays so well.

So, what do we do? Well, it took some years of fiddling around, hit and miss, looking at the evidence, and it led to all kinds of new observations. One, if you add vitamin D, you have a dramatic effect on reducing coronary calcium scores. If you reject the cholesterol argument, that cholesterol is the cause for heart disease, instead look at the particles in the bloodstream that cholesterol is meant to guesstimate. So, we look at lipoproteins and you quickly learn and this has now been played out in 55 clinical trials that no one talks about because there’s no money being made from them.

You learn very quickly that it’s the small LDL particles, not LDL cholesterol, an indirect measure, but small LDL particles because small LDL particles are more adherent to artery walls, they’re more inflammatory, they’re more prone to oxidation and other effects, and they last five to seven days in the bloodstream unlike large LDL particles, large normal LDL particles persist for about 24 hours. So, if you eat some bacon and you get some large LDL, it’s gone. Your liver clears it. If you eat some sugar and you provoke formation of small LDL, it’s here even next week. So, it’s a huge factor driving cardiovascular risk.

So, I asked this question, well, gee, I’ve got all these patients and we do the lipoprotein analysis. Back then, we used a lot of NMR. There are several methods to do this, but we used nuclear magnetic resonance to fractionate those particles. And you see, some with coronary disease where they had a heart attack, sudden cardiac death, bypass surgery, cardiac calcium score of 700, whatever, they all had small LDL to really high numbers like 2,000 nanomoles per liter, particle count per volume. Well, I asked this question, what foods, what things cause small LDL? Well, the science 30 years ago, Sandi, 30 years was clear cut from people like Dr. Ron Krauss at UC Berkeley, the Hopkins people, this has all been laid out 30 years ago. What foods cause formation of small LDL? Wheat, grains and sugars amplified by the way, by insulin resistance, abdominal visceral fat and inflammation. So, that’s another layer of all this.

But I asked my patients then, “All right, listen, your score’s going up. Statin drugs aren’t doing it. Let’s take out wheat, grains and sugars.” I give them a two-page handout how to do this, how to make bagels without wheat flour, how to have pumpkin pie without wheat flour and sugar. It’s all doable. And they’d come back, small LDL would now be zero or some other low number. But they’d all say to me things like, “You didn’t tell me I’d lose 8 inches off my waist. You didn’t tell me my triglycerides would drop from 380 to 44. You didn’t tell me my rosacea would go away. You didn’t tell me I’d no longer be a type 2 diabetic.”

So, maybe the problem is me. Did I somehow misinterpret all the evidence? Are all the dieticians in the world, almost all practicing physicians, the USDA, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition, are they all wrong? Are they right? I’m wrong. Well, it became clear, the deeper I dug that, yes, they were wrong. They made a huge blunder. And it’s become codified, of course, into conventional thinking and U.S. dietary guidelines. But it also became apparent that the agribusiness world had inflicted dramatic changes on the wheat plan. Not to say that traditional wheat is good for you. That’s a confusing issue. It’s not. But it’s been made much worse. Not because they’re evil. They are evil. That’s beside the point. They did it for agricultural purposes, for yield per acre. And they inflicted huge changes such that, if I said to your listeners, “Hey, go find me a wheat field,” they would say, “I can’t find any. Even though I live in Kansas and Iowa, I can’t find any,” because they didn’t recognize it. It’s this weird looking thing that stands about a foot tall, thick stalk, large seed head, large seeds. It’s completely different biochemically and genetically from what you and I would regard as what we thought was wheat.

Dr. Sandi: This is where, as you mentioned earlier, health coaches can play such a big role in educating people about this and guide them to different diet and lifestyle. There’s just so many ways that we can help people lead healthier lives, but so much of this is still not known. And I really applaud you for getting this information out. And you now have another interest. And you’ve been focusing on microbiome and strain of probiotic. And I was thrilled because I had been making a special type of yogurt, which is delicious as well as having many health benefits. So, can you speak to the microbiome and the particular strain that you are now so interested in?

Dr. William: So, it was part of my effort to zigzag towards better answers. In my basic programs from a few years ago, we’d go wheat and grain, sugar-free, huge benefits. We’d address nutrient deficiencies common to modern people, not because of the diet but because of the way we conduct our lives. Vitamin D. We live indoors. We wear clothes. Omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil because no one eats brain anymore or organ meats. So, we have to get our omega-3s from fish oil. Very important, by the way. Now shown to regress coronary atherosclerotic plaque. Not just reduce cardiovascular events but actually facilitate regression of coronary atherosclerotic plaque. Iodine, people have forgotten iodine deficiency was a worldwide epidemic that was crippling about 20% of the population up until 1924. So, we add back iodine because people have been told cut their sodium, which is ridiculous, by the way. That’s a whole other conversation. And then magnesium because we have to filter our drinking water because it’s got sewage and other things in it. So, we filter it and it removes all magnesium.

So, we address those things, and those address insulin resistance and inflammation. The combination of the diet and those simple nutrient corrections have huge effects. But it was clear that there was something missing. People would say, for instance, “Hey, I was a type 2 diabetic. My hemoglobin A1c was 11.7%. I did your basic program. It dropped to 6.1%. But short of perfect, less than 5%. What’s missing?” So, it became clear it was the microbiome that was missing. Better efforts to address the microbiome. This is in spite of, by the way, fibers and probiotics. Even those were insufficient. So, I started to ask tougher questions. One of the questions I asked was, what microbes are driving this process? It became clear it’s fecal microbes. These are microbes that are supposed to be in your colon, the four to five feet of colon, E. coli, Campylobacter, Citrobacter. Sorry about these names. I don’t make these names up, right? But they’re supposed to be in the colon. But oddly, in modern people, they’ve been allowed to proliferate and then ascend into the 24-feet of small intestine where they don’t belong. The small intestine is ill-equipped to deal with this flood of trillions of fecal microbes because those fecal microbes in the small intestine are very inflammatory. They inflame the small intestinal wall, and they increase its permeability. Small intestine’s permeable to begin with to facilitate absorption of nutrients like amino acids and vitamins and minerals. But when fecal microbes infest, the small intestine becomes even more permeable. That means the breakdown products of these microbes living and dying over just a few hours enter the bloodstream. That’s called endotoxemia. And it’s become clear, Sandi, with most recent evidence of the last decade, this is a major driver of weight gain, especially in the abdomen, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, multiple forms of cancer, heart disease, coronary disease, atrial fibrillation, rosacea, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s, dementia.

In other words, we’ve got to reconsider what we thought of all these diseases in light of the contribution of the microbiome but specifically infestation of the small intestine. So, this is called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, we say SIBO, of course, and endotoxemia. The great thing is, as you pointed out, one of the things that we’ve done… So, I ask this question. You’ve got SIBO because you’re depressed, you’re anxious, or you have early signs of cognitive impairment, or you have insulin resistance and hemoglobin A1c of 5.8, whatever. We address the microbiome, but how do you do that? How do you get fecal microbes that are infesting the small intestine to go away? You could take an antibiotic, but an antibiotic is part of the reason we’re here. It’s a cause of the problem, so it’s not likely to be a good solution. What if you take a commercial probiotic of whatever, 10, 20 different species, will the SIBO go? No. It might reduce some bloating and diarrhea, but it won’t get rid of it.

So, I ask these questions. What if we chose microbial species that are known to colonize the small intestine? Most do not. So, you take a probiotic, it does not colonize the small intestine, and produce what are called bacteriocins. These are natural antibiotics that kill fecal species. So, I chose three. I chose lactobacillus reuteri, lactobacillus gasseri, and bacillus coagulans. These are species that will colonize the small intestine and produce bacteriocins. To my great surprise, Sandi, I did this hoping for some kind of… I was hoping people would say, “Oh, reduce my bloating.” I did not expect it to eliminate SIBO in about 90% of people.

And I know this because we have this device now, in case your listeners don’t know, the AIRE device. This is the original device that measures hydrogen gas, and this is the more recent device, AIRE2, that measures hydrogen gas and methane. But it’s hydrogen gas that’s most important. You blow into it, and it talks to your smartphone and registers the amount of… Now, we use it as a mapping device. So, it was not intended to do this. I had to call the inventor, Dr. Aonghus Shortt in Dublin, Ireland. I said, “Aonghus, I thought it was a device to navigate the low FODMAP diet.” I said, “Well, you could use it for that, but it’s really a mapping device. You can use timing of hydrogen gas production to tell you where microbes are living. Are they in the stomach and duodenum and jejunum, or are they in the colon where they’re supposed to be?”

So, using this device, I started seeing dramatic reversal. It takes about four weeks or longer, sometimes much longer. So, people who say things like, “Well, I took antibiotics for three years for my acne,” whatever, those people have to stay in this microbial mix for months sometimes. And we ferment it as yogurt. It’s not yogurt. So, I kind of regret calling it yogurt, but it looks and smells like yogurt. It’s just a way to amplify bacterial counts. So, for instance, reuteri, lactobacillus reuteri, doubles. So, microbes don’t have sex. There’s no male and female microbes. They just double themselves. So, reuteri doubles every three hours at human body temperature. So, if we made yogurt in a factory, we do it for 6 to 12 hours, you get nothing. We’re going to do it for 36 hours, allow it to double 12 times. We count the number of microbes using flow cytometry, and we get 300 billion microbes per half cup of that yogurt.

And that’s what led to the very high percentage of eradication of SIBO and all the health benefits that accompany it. You break a weight loss plateau, your hemoglobin A1c drops to 4.8, but whatever. Your anxiety is gone. Your irritability, frustration, hatred recedes. Your mood is better. Your skin is better. You regain youthful musculature. All these wonderful effects just by cultivating three microbes at high counts. And so because it’s been so beneficial, I kind of regret… I call it SIBO yogurt. I kind of regret calling it that because it gives the impression that it’s only useful for SIBO. No, it’s actually useful long-term, even in the absence of SIBO.

So, what I encourage people to do, yeah, make the SIBO yogurt to high counts for the first four or so weeks, then consume it intermittently, two, three times a week, because especially the reuteri. Better skin, you lose wrinkles, youthful musculature, increased libido, amplification of the immune response, all the effects that derive from oxytocin, the hormone of love and empathy. There’s an increase in generosity. There’s an increase in the desire for human companionship. There’s an acceptance of other people’s opinions. So, it changes social and emotional behavior as well.

Dr. Sandi: I have to say that I tried it. And first of all, it’s super easy to make. A lot of people are turned off by the process of making yogurt. And I want to ask you about this because I’ve been having a debate with my daughter who’s also making it and loving it. It’s delicious. And she does the method where you heat it as you’re preparing. So, you heat the milk and then you take a thermometer and you keep measuring until it gets down to the right temperature. And I’m just a quick start. And I had read the yogurt maker’s website and I think it was… You said because you’re getting ultra-pasteurized milk to start with. And so I just do it from that way and I don’t heat it. And it’s delicious. So, I don’t know if that’s the appropriate way, but I have to say it is yummy. It tastes really good. The texture, it’s like the Greek yogurt. And so I just like it for that, but the health benefits as well. And I gave it to twin toddlers, grandkids, and they, “More yogurt.” They love it. They’re lapping it up. But I just wonder in terms of the heating, because that turns a lot of people off. They don’t have the thermometer to measure the temperature. So, is that 100% necessary if you are using as you recommend the ultra-pasteurized milk?

Dr. William: We’ve learned some lessons along the way. And initially I said, don’t preheat, because people who make conventional yogurt do that because it yields a better texture. When you use whole milk, we use organic half and half because we reject the whole idea of cutting fat. So, fat calories do not matter. Fat calories do not matter. Because we use organic half and half and get great texture to begin with, I said to everybody, “Don’t bother preheating.” But we’ve had occasional instances where you make the yogurt and something weird happens. It smells weird. It tastes weird. It separates. It looks kind of gross. So, I was having a conversation with a scientist friend. And he said, “Well, you know that you’re using is not sterile.” I said, “Oh, David, you’re right.” So, I got the analysis on about a dozen different commercial forms of inulin and he’s right. There’s a very low count of microbes in inulin or other prebiotic fiber.

So, I’ve been thinking about, is there a way for us to sterilize it? Well, ideally we do something like ultraviolet light, but it’s not easy because you have to expose it for about three hours. It has to be very thin. So, it’s not commercially viable to do this. So, here’s my current conclusion, because it may change. It’s preheated. It’s preheated if you’re getting some bad results. Now the problem with preheating is you only kill non-spore forming microbes. You don’t kill the spore. Spores are notoriously resistant. That’s why you can get spores that are 40 million years old. They’re still viable. You can heat them. You can bake them and they still survive. So, spore-forming microbes are incredible survivors. So, preheating does not kill the spore formers, but it will reduce the likelihood of getting a weird result. We’re waiting for DNA analyses on some failed batches to see what species there are, but they’re probably bacillus species. But anyway, so preheating, optional. But if you’re getting some weird results, consider preheating to 180 to kill the non-spore formers or change your brand of inulin. But there’s no such thing currently as sterile inulin.

Dr. Sandi: Gotcha. Well, I’ve been fortunate that I have not had any bad-smelling, bad batches to date. So, this is something that health coaches can teach people to do, because it sounds like it is really vital to get this probiotic into your system. And so many of us have disrupted gut or we were bottle-fed, and we had years and years of antibiotics and C-section. And so it is critical plus stress. The stress of living can really have a big impact as well.

Dr. William: And, you know, Sandi, that’s one microbe or, in the case of SIBO, three microbes. But a lot of things people don’t know is restoration of reuteri that we’ve all lost, by the way. Almost everybody’s lost because it’s very susceptible to common antibiotics, even though indigenous hunter-gatherer humans all have reuteri, wild mammals all have reuteri, suggesting it is essential for mammalian health. But it also plays a role in reproduction, not only increasing libido but also increases testosterone in males. It also increases the expression of breast milk in breastfeeding mothers. Oxytocin is the hormone of breastfeeding. And it encourages the maternal-infant bond after the delivery of a child and reduces postpartum depression.

We get into the whole world of reproductive and, by the way, also menopausal health using microbes. So, the reuteri is wonderful. There’s a lot more to do, like the restoration of lactobacillus crispatus. That’s the primary vaginal microbe that ladies are all supposed to have from birth till death, but many have lost it. And when you lose crispatus, the likelihood of miscarriage is much higher. The likelihood of premature labor, which is catastrophic for the child, is increased because it inflames the cervix and causes premature relaxation. It encourages the acquisition of STDs. It increases the likelihood of Candida vaginitis and E. coli vaginitis. It causes dryness, irritation, and discharge. In other words, this microbe lost by many ladies, lactobacillus crispatus. And you know what? It makes the most delicious yogurt. So, as much as you like the reuteri, you’re going to say, “Oh, I just love this crispatus.”

Dr. Sandi: All right, I’ll have to try that. So, it could get confusing for people, and many will just go to their grocery store and they’ll buy yogurt, and it’ll say so many live cultures. Oh, they’ll just go to the shelf in their local store and they’ll buy a probiotic. If you’re a health coach and you have a client who is saying that and they think they’re fine, what would you say to that?

Dr. William: It would be like saying, “You know, Sandi, you want health, take a placebo.” It’s no different besides being tarted up with high-fructose corn syrup, sugar, other sweeteners, thickening agents like gelling gum, xanthan gum, all the garbage they put in processed foods. Besides that, the microbes used to make conventional yogurt are typically Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. No one has to remember that except to note they don’t really do very much. That’s why no one said, “I ate Stonyfield or Yoplait or Fage, and it changed my life.” No, it doesn’t do anything. It might have a minimal beneficial effect because the microbes they choose don’t really achieve much, and two, they only ferment for a few hours. So, if a microbe like reuteri doubles every three hours… It varies from species to species. But if you ferment in a factory for 6 to 12 hours, you really don’t have much in the way of microbial numbers.

So, for a whole long list of reasons, what you buy in the store is not all that beneficial. It may, in fact, be harmful because it has an emulsifying agent, high-fructose corn syrup, and all that kind of garbage. So, we’re going to do a lot better. And the difference is stark. It’s not subtle. It’s a completely different thing to do it on your own because your listeners are not going to add high-fructose corn syrup. They’re not going to add xanthan gum. They’re not going to make all the mistakes of commercial production.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, absolutely. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Where can people find you?

Dr. William: So, of course, my “Supergut” book lays out the recipes, the rationale, where to obtain the microbes, how to do this, not just for reuteri but Bacillus coagulans to reduce knee arthritis and encourage muscle recovery after strenuous exercise. Bifidobacterium infantis to your newborn baby so that it has a higher IQ and is less likely to have autoimmune disease and obesity later in life. So, there’s so much you can do. It becomes a little overwhelming at times. So, you got to kind of pick and choose what you want to do. The “Supergut” book is a good place.

I have a blog. It’s williamdavismd.com. It has several thousand articles, including a lot of these kinds of recipes and how-to. I also developed a series of products. One is MyReuteri. Another is Gut to Glow. These contain the reuteri that can be used either you can take them directly or you can use them to start your yogurt culture. As you point out, once you get the hang of it, it’s really very easy.

Dr. Sandi: It’s so easy.

Dr. William: People tend to think it’s harder than it is.

Dr. Sandi: If I can do it…

Dr. William: It really is very easy.

Dr. Sandi: Well, this has been wonderful. You have contributed so much to this field. So, thank you for being with us today.

Dr. William: Thank you, Sandi. Thanks for all you do.