Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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Hashimoto’s and S.I.B.O. S.I.B.O. is interesting. I’ve read online. After I had so many patients come in with it, I started reading online like why people were so freaked out about it. And I started to realize why, because there’s a big S.I.B.O. board out there and you look at the board and everybody’s like, “You can never get rid of this. You’re going to be on a FODMAP diet for the rest of your life.” The botanicals don’t work. The only way to get rid of it is a fecal implant or you got to take antibiotics. And then it always comes back and on and on and on and on.
S.I.B.O. is a huge, huge, huge, huge deal with Hashimoto’s. And I would say it’s kind of interesting because I was talking to Dr. Ketring, who is my partner in crime here, and does most of the dietary work that we do. And I was saying, “Does everybody that comes in here have S.I.B.O.?” I mean, I didn’t know it was that prevalent.
And I read an article literally about two months ago, I think it was, that said 70% of Hashimoto’s patients experience small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. That’s about, I honestly think it’s higher in my patient practice, but that could be accurate. I mean, 70% is a lot of people and a significant part of my practice, the patients either have Hashimoto’s when they come in or we figure out that they had Hashimoto’s and it wasn’t diagnosed. It’s a big, big part of my practice. And so we’ve gotten pretty good at S.I.B.O., to say the least, because we’ve had to.
And so small intestinal bacteria growth, why is it so important? So in the hierarchy of things that you have to do relative to getting your immune responses under control with autoimmune thyroid disease. So quick recap, you have autoimmune thyroid disease. You have an attack against your thyroid. There’s 42 different triggers. You have to find out what the triggers are. And then you have to start figuring out how to get rid of those triggers. And it’s not just a matter of, okay, I’ve got 12 of those triggers. I’m just going to stop that. Some of these things you got to fix and some of them have to fix in an exact order, or if you don’t fix them in the right order, you’re going to get sabotaged. And as more people than not on those boards say, “It’s going to come back,” and there’s a way to stop that from happening. But that’s another time, another subject for another time.
Why is it important? So basically what happens is you develop S.I.B.O. because you get a broken down digestive system. You’re not sterilizing your food properly. You’re not digesting it properly. So you’re not making it into an alkaline piece of food by the time it gets into your intestines. You’re not digesting it properly so you have undigested proteins getting on the inside of your stomach and into your intestines and your intestines doesn’t like that. Okay.
Why do you have, again, why do you have digestive system problems, is a topic for another day. But the two biggest reasons are stress, chronic stress, and hypothyroid problems, or most of them are Hashimoto’s hypothyroiditis. One slows down your gut. The other one just paralyzes your gut. The stress paralyzes, the thyroid slows down. A lot of people that come in here have both of them.
So their gut’s not working right. Their stomach’s not working right. Their pancreas isn’t working right. Their gallbladder’s not working right. They’re breaking everything down. Now they start getting constipation. Okay. Which is number one cause of constipation of people coming to my office. And now things aren’t getting out in the toilet. And the next thing you know, you’re getting bad bacteria in there in your large intestines, not your small, in the large intestines. You start getting bad farts. You start getting really bad foul smelling gas, as we put it in our questionnaire. And you go, “Oh, well, everybody got foul smelling gas.” No, they don’t. No, they don’t. If you have bad bacteria you have foul smelling gas.
And then the gas opens up a valve between the large intestines and the small intestines. And it opens up this ileocecal valve. That’s what it’s called. And that valve is designed to stop anything bad, bacteria, toxins, from getting into your small intestines, where things are supposed to be sterile, pristine, no bad bacteria. Now those bacteria come in and they don’t just come in and stay. Now, your small intestines is 26 feet long, 24 to 26 feet. It crawls all the way up those frigging intestines, all the way up to eventually where it can affect your gallbladder, your stomach and your pancreas and it can even… And then all that and stress and more creates leaky gut. Creates leaky gut.
And then a lot of the toxins that are in your system that could be going into the toilet, start going through your leaky gut and your bloodstream. They don’t belong there. And so does the bad bacteria that break down that are your S.I.B.O. And when you have small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, what did I just say? It can affect… This is the third biggest cause of constipation, by the way. It can cause your stomach, your gallbladder, and your pancreas to stop digesting. So now you have this vicious cycle where the broken down digestion caused the S.I.B.O. and now the S.I.B.I. in turn is going back and causing the broken down digestion in this huge vicious cycle. Okay.
And then you have the leaky gut and you have these particles of the small intestinal bacteria break down and there’s cell walls. When the bacterial cell walls break down, they are massively toxic. Look up capital L, capital P, capital S. Lipopolysaccharides. I don’t have a particularly long presentation on it, because you could be reading on Lipopolysaccharides for days in all the things that they do to you. There’s a big part of joint pain. There’s a big part of muscle pain. This is a big part of fibromyalgia pain. This is a big part of brain fog. It can trigger autoimmunity. If it’s affecting your gallbladder, this is number one cause of like, by the way, distension and bloating, like the number one cause of distension and bloating. And if you have alternating constipation and diarrhea, it’s like the number two cause or number three cause of this, of alternating irritable bowel syndrome. Okay.
Is that a big deal? Well, most of my patients have bad gas when they come here. So it’s a pretty big deal. 75% of your immune system is there. If you’re trying to stop an immune attack against your thyroid, you don’t want 75% of your immune system exposed to this all day long.
And then these bacteria get out, the leaky gut that it has helped to create. And now, all bets are off. Because these bacteria attach to your white blood cells. Where do your white blood cells go? Everywhere. Everywhere. They’re part of your immune system. This is why I have a chart on this and when I show it to people, they gasp as to all the things.
And this can cause your insulin not to work. So you can be somebody who’s got diabetes or prediabetes and you’re going, “But I eat perfectly. And I run 20 miles every day. And how can I have prediabetes or diabetes?” This is how you can have it. Because the S.I.B.O. will actually cause your insulin to not work right and screw you up and cause you to have prediabetes.
It can cause chronic inflammation. It can cause obesity. It’ll cause you to not be able to digest your fat soluble vitamins. So one of the many reasons people come in into vitamin D is like the toilet and like nonexistent is because their gallbladder’s not working right. It’s not working right because the S.I.B.O. has creeped up there. They might have chronic hydrochloric acid problems in their stomach because the S.I.B.O. has creeped up there and it’s covered the cells so that you can’t get it out. It can affect your pancreas.
And then what happens when those three things are affected, now your blood sugar may affect. It’s insane. It is. It can cause iron deficiency anemias. It can cause B12 anemias. It can cause proteins to not be able to get there.
This is small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. This is why those of you go online and talk to people or look on these boards and people have all of these symptoms and you might think they’re crazy. They’re not crazy. Especially if they have S.I.B.O. as part of their overall picture. So S.I.B.O. is a big, big deal on all of this. Literally every single thing I just mentioned. Flares up thyroid, antibodies, every single one.
So how big is that? So how big is that? And there’s a hierarchy as to how you take care of these cases. And I would put S.I.B.O. at probably, let’s see, number one, two, three. I would probably put S.I.B.O. at number four or five out of 42 things, out of 42 different triggers that you want to address. And it might even be higher than that. It’s hard to say. There’s like all these vicious cycles going on, but it’s way up there. It’s way up there.
And so now you do so and so’s leaky gut protocol, but it doesn’t address S.I.B.O. You’re spending $650 for two months or three month’s worth of supplements or maybe one month’s worth of supplements. You’re doing their S.I.B.O. diet or their leaky gut diet and it doesn’t touch the S.I.B.O. Good luck with getting your thyroid under control.
Or you may do the low FODMAP diet or the S.I.B.O. diet. I did the S.I.B.O. diet and I did all the S.I.B.O. supplements. And I did the berberine and I did the oregano and it felt better for a little while. It came back.
I put it fifth. I didn’t put it at first, which means there’s four or five other things above it that need to be handled, not only to get rid of it, but to keep it away. And I have presentations on why the S.I.B.O. comes back. So you can look at that.
So S.I.B.O., huge, huge, huge, huge, huge player in… The article said 70% people have Hashimoto’s, have small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. And it’s at least that. It’s at least that. I think it’s a fair… It made me feel better, actually, when I saw it. I thought, okay. I’m not crazy. All these people coming in with, like I’m treating S.I.B.O. every day, all day long. It’s like, okay, I’m not crazy. These people really do have this. So.
And I can get, and the testing on it, that’s not for today. I’m just telling you how important it is, because the testing on it is tenuous. It’s not perfect. I know my mentors that when they’re doing symposiums, they hesitate to say that. I don’t know why, but they hesitate to say that, because there’s not that many tests out there and they’re not that great. If they tell you got it, you got it. If they tell you don’t have it, there’s still a good chance that you have it. So there’s other ways of figuring out if that person’s got S.I.B.O. that are literally more effective than that. They’re a little bit more labor intensive, but they are more effective than that. So I’ll throw that in there at the end.
So that’s S.I.B.O. and Hashimoto’s and I think all the main points that you really need to understand about the clinical relevance of S.I.B.O. when you have Hashimoto’s.
