Listen

Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE

Transcript

Download PDF

Top Takeaways

  1. After Summer became an herbalist and health coach, she began to do detoxes with people, and learned that a certain percentage of people would be fine, but over time, more people were struggling to detox effectively, or were feeling ill while detoxing.
  2. There are a lot of road blocks when trying to detox with gut infections, dysbiosis, candida, and parasites, that can lead to excess internal toxicity that thwarts detox efforts.
  3. Bacteria and probiotics live primarily in your large intestines, in the cecum, which is the human fermentation chamber.
  4. As long as that gut microbiome is balanced it can digest your food more fully, create vitamins that you can absorb on site, communicate with your immune system, convert thyroid hormones, rid extra estrogen, and much more.
  5. When the micro biome is weakened, from things like antibiotics, birth control pills, and stress, an influx of toxins enter the body from the pathogenic organisms that are no longer being regulated properly.
  6. With this influx, the liver has to work twice as hard to rid the body of these excess toxins on top of the environmental toxins we are exposed to.
  7. Not being able to process all of the toxins, the toxins spread to other areas of the body, causing skin rashes, digestive issues, brain fog, energy issues, depression, and many other symptoms.
  8. When you begin to do things like colon cleansing and coffee enemas, that purge the liver and colon, you can reduce many of these negative symptoms.
  9. The more antibiotics you use, the harder it becomes to normalize your micro biome.
  10. Increases in cortisol, created through stress and trauma, actually communicates to certain bacteria, primarily pathogenic bacteria, that they need reproduce and flourish.
  11. Summer strongly recommends tackling stressors and past traumas in your life in order to keep cortisol levels down, as pathogenic bacteria reproduce faster in a high stress environment
  12. One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to recover their gut is thinking there is a magic bullet answer, loading up on probiotics and other supplementation instead of eating a healthy diet with foods with nutrients that can help the gut regrow naturally.
  13. Fermented foods contain a wide variety of probiotics with natural acids that act as fertilizer for the gut micro biome, help keep pathogenic bacteria at bay, and help nourish the environment so that more probiotic bacteria can live there happily.
  14. When you’re detoxing your body is utilizing vitamins, minerals, and its natural resources to help support all of your channels of elimination, which can be a depleting process that requires you to rebuild your mineral levels, nutrition, digestion, and the micro biome.
  15. Detox rebuilding is like a digestive tune up where you focus on digestion, rebuilding the gut, getting the body absorbing nutrients properly, and stock pile these resources so that your body is ready for your next cleanse.
  16. There are 7 channels of elimination where we excrete metabolic waste, our blood, kidneys, liver, skin, our lymph, colon, and our lungs.
  17. We must do whatever we can to support each channel to do its best, by focusing on whats going into that channel, raising the quality of whats going into that channel, and focusing on what we can do to open that channel up to excrete more effectively.
  18. Some of the key things that you can do in order to rebuild your nutrients is take bitters 30 minutes before a meal, eat meals when you actually feel hungry, eat when you are in a relaxed parasympathetic state, laughing while eating, and eating fermented food.
  19. Summer has a 3 Major Mistakes People Make When Trying to Fix Their Gut webinar where you can learn how to begin to fix any type of gut related illness. You can find this at gutrebuilding.com/myers

 

Wendy Myers: Hello everyone, my name is Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com. Thanks so much for tuning in to The Myers Detox Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about how to prepare your gut for a detox. So, really, really interesting show today. And talk about how to rebuild the gut. So many people are taking antibiotics, so many things working against the gut. We’ve got antibiotics. We have glyphosate, Roundup Ready herbicide that’s on 70 foods, conventional foods. And we have mercury fillings, and the silver mercury fillings, and stress, and EMF, and cigarette smoking, and just so many different things working against our gut microbiome.

Wendy Myers: So Summer Bock is going to be coming on the show. She is a gut expert, and she’s so eloquent. She did such a great job, very clearly and eloquently explaining what’s going wrong with the gut today, and how to repair and rebuild it and prep it in anticipation of a detox.

Wendy Myers: So this podcast focuses on detoxification. And so this is a very, very good conversation to have. I know so many of you guys listening to this podcast are concerned about your heavy metal levels and how they affect your health. I created a quiz that only takes two minutes to do that base on some lifestyle factors answering some questions about your diet, or product use, or mercury fillings and the more mercury filling that you have. We can get a baseline. We can take a look at the potential levels of heavy metals that you have in your body and the next steps to take. And you get a free video series after you take this two minute quiz. Just go to heavymetalsquiz.com, take it and see for yourself.

Wendy Myers: I had a really interesting week this week. I am in a rental home. You guy can see behind me. Because on Saturday night I came home to my landlord deciding they needed to change all of the plumbing in the entire house. So now I remember why I owned my own home before and now regretting selling it last year. I had a home in Los Angeles, I sold. And I’m now renting a house and though I love the house, the owner decided that based on a leak that was happening that he needed to replace all of the plumbing. And so Saturday night I had to scramble to find a new home to rent because the entire house was destroyed under construction and dust everywhere and I was concerned about molds. So, I’ve been here for about a week and doing lots of podcasts and working to help you guys get healthier.

Wendy Myers: So I’m looking forward tonight to finally going home, so I just want to let you guys know that. I know it’s just really can be frightening when you are living in a home and there’s a water leak, what was happening in my home. And you have concerns about molds, you have concerns about the landlord paying for you to have to get out of the house. I mean, it’s just, I’ve been arguing with the landlord like, “You know you are required by law to pay for me to move into a comfortable home.” And talking about proper mold clean-up, which they had zero clue about. So it’s just been an interesting week. But I look forward today to going home.

Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Summer Bock and this is such a good podcast. It’s so important to be really thinking about what is impacting your gut, what is impacting your probiotics, your good gut bugs. And how to optimize gut function, optimize digestion, optimize nutrient assimilation because that is really a foundational component to health. You cannot be healthy unless your gut is working properly. So such a good show today.

Wendy Myers: Summer Bock is a trained herbalist, certified in integrative nutrition through Columbia University. A raver in her early twenties, devastating allergies emerged that left her exhausted, high-ridden and only able to consume 30 foods without a reaction, an outlook that stumped the medical community. Leveraging her background in microbiology and fascination with gut health Summer healed herself through research and formulation of various digestive bitters which she now produces for her Guts & Glory Apothecary online.

Wendy Myers: Summer Bock coined the phrase gut rebuilding, which is now cornerstone terminology in the integrative health conversation. She’s also the founder of the fermentationist certification program, you can learn more about her and repairing the gut at gutrebuilding.com/myers. Summer, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Summer Bock: Yeah, you’re welcome. I’m so excited to be here. This is fun, I love talking about detox.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. So, this is a really important topic because a lot of people have concerns about if they should detox if their gut is not functioning so great or if they have leaky gut. So let’s talk a little bit about why some people struggle with detox.

Summer Bock: Well, when I first started this journey myself, just my own personal journey, I didn’t even know I was sick actually and I did a detox and it was amazing. I felt on day five like a wall blanket had been pulled out of my brain. And I was like, “Oh this is how normal people feel.” Clear, no anxiety. And I was like, “Wow, I haven’t felt like this my entire life and I’m 21 years old. This is crazy.”

Summer Bock: So I, of course, was very excited and got trained in herbalism, got trained as a health coach and started doing detoxes with people. And what I learned was that a certain percentage of people would be fine and then there was over time as I kept doing this with a larger and larger percentage of people were struggling to detox effectively or deeply without having major cleansing reactions. Even early on.

Summer Bock: And so every time I’d lead a detox I was starting to see people who were ending up vomiting, they were ending up in bed, they were with full body pains, they were going through these huge Alzheimer reactions. I was like, “This is not … this can’t be good.” That wasn’t my personal experience when I did it. I was like, “This just cannot be good.”

Summer Bock: So, I realized they weren’t ready. Their body wasn’t ready because they were maybe even too toxic or their gut was in total dysbiosis, which means that a ton of toxins are being created by these organisms. And then those toxins are then basically going to the liver, going to the kidneys, also in the bloodstream and your body is constantly trying to just maintain homeostasis by trying to filter out all these toxins that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Summer Bock: And then we’re like, “Okay body, clean up, detox, do your work.” And I feel like people were just like… their bodies were like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, this is too much too fast,” and they were just flying into this Alzheimer reactions. I was like, “We’ve got to do something different. This isn’t the right first step for this group of people that I’m working with here.”

Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah and that’s the case with a lot of people. I just did a webinar yesterday where I was talking… did a poll if you’ve done a detox before, did it make you really, really ill to the point where you were scared to try another detox again? And this is unfortunately some people’s experience. And so there can be a lot of roadblocks to detox. You talked about gut infections, dysbiosis, maybe candida and parasites. And these can make parasite poop and the candida release toxins. So, let’s talk about how dysbiosis can create excess internal toxicity that thwarts detox efforts.

Summer Bock: Absolutely, and when you think about your entire gut ecosystem a lot of people know there’s the gut microbiome. Some bacteria, these probiotic they live in your gut. But where? And the truth is that they live primarily as long as you’re decently healthy they’re living in your large intestine. In really just one section of the intestine, they’re living in your cecum. And that’s our human fermentation chamber.

Summer Bock: And as long as that gut microbiome is balanced and you’ve got the right balance of probiotics with all the other random microbes that are living there, then everything is good. They’re helping you digest your food more fully, they’re creating vitamins that you’re absorbing onsite like vitamin K and vitamin B.

Summer Bock: They’re also communicating to your immune cells and telling your body, “Hey, we’re the good guys. We’re okay here,” right? And talking to our immune system and our immune system stays chill with them. And in general, it creates a healthier environment for us because they’re doing so many things. I mean, they convert thyroid hormones for us, they help get rid of extra estrogen, they tell us things, the list is so long of all the many ways that they help us.

Summer Bock: Now, if somebody is taking antibiotics or birth control pills or has had a lot of trauma or they’re really stressed out, just even shifting your body in those ways can kill of the microbiome. And can start to destabilize it and over time creating imbalance where there’s more pathogenic bacteria or commensal bacteria that have overgrown. And they really don’t need to be in the numbers that they are. And when you have that imbalance, like what you said, parasite poop that’s exactly it.

Summer Bock: The reason that that is so detrimental to us is because of all the toxins that are being excreted by these pathogenic organisms. And if they excrete toxins essentially that our body now has to filter it goes straight into your bloodstream right through the walls of the intestines and then that goes to the liver. Because any nutrition goes straight to the liver first so that our body can detoxify anything there before that blood goes to the brain.

Summer Bock: It’s a really important step. I think of it as a metropolis, there’s all these bacteria living in the metropolis of your intestines. And the bloodstream is their sewage system. It’s cleaning everything for them. So when we have all the good bacteria, we have the right balance of probiotics, then they’re creating organic acids, bacteriocins. They’re creating all these parasite groups as you say. I think bacteria pee, is sometimes what I joke around and say. I know that sounds disgusting.

Summer Bock: But they create organic acids and bacteriocins that are not toxic for us, so our body actually utilizes what they’re creating, we know what to do with it, it doesn’t create excess load on our channels of elimination. But as soon as we have what I call the human sewer situation where all these bacteria are out of balance, all those toxic excretions go into the liver that’s more work than the liver needs. It’s already just trying to process our day-to-day metabolic activity, right? It has tons of work to do breaking down hormones, regulating our neurotransmitters and just making everything work normally.

Summer Bock: And then often we add all these extra toxins coming from this internal environment plus all the environmental toxins obviously that we’re getting more and more exposed to. And now people’s liver are so backed up, so they’re just overloaded. They can’t quite keep up the workload, and so to me that’s really what’s happening here. It’s just like, okay, we already have a lot to do. The liver has work cut out for it and then with dysbiosis we’re saying, “Oh hey, here, we’d like you to work overtime and then stop.”

Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah and it’s funny you say we’re like a human sewer system because when you’re not feeling like a toilet you feel like crap.

Summer Bock: You totally do.

Wendy Myers: Yeah and when your body is dealing with all these extraneous parasite poop it’s stuffing up your detox pathways. It is creating additional toxins on top of the already inordinate amount of toxins, thousands and chemicals and dozens of heavy metals it’s already tasked to deal with. So we just want to create an environment that’s not conducive to candida and parasites and fix our guts so that our body isn’t having to deal with this. So it’s totally fixable, it’s totally preventable.

Summer Bock: Absolutely. I mean, I think you know when there’s dysbiosis present when there’s skin reaction, people are seeing acne, they’re seeing strives of eczema rashes, things like that. Because that’s the liver not being able to detoxify everything and stuff just getting pushed out into our largest detox organ, which is our skin. So I think that’s one really common symptom. Obviously digestive issue, any kind, gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, indigestion, all of these digestive upsets indicate something is really off here. As soon as you start balancing the microbiome that stuff start shifting and going away.

Summer Bock: But then I think that also just brain fog, energy crashes, just not being as energetic and clear and focused and happy, those are actually symptoms of this, right? Symptoms of over-toxicity. So, I think it’s really important for people to know this. What symptoms am I tolerating? What do I chock up to aging? “Oh this is happening because I’m getting older.”

Summer Bock: I just really dislike that excuse because I know so many people who that’s not the case is they get older. Then there’s always a genetic component, but I think that as long as you are doing the right things you’re being as proactive as you can to keep those toxic levels down, your body can actually handle it. It can process it, you can be energetic, you can be focused, you can be joyful. And honestly, I think those are some of the first things to go once those levels of toxicity go up.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and the converse is true also when you start fixing your gut and when you start, say, doing colon cleansing or coffee enemas or things that purge the liver and colon your skin becomes super clear, super glowing and healthy. Because all these toxins aren’t coming out through your skin.

Wendy Myers: And so there’s so many things working against our gut, working against our microbiome, working against or digestion. Can you talk about some of the things that kill off our healthy gut bacteria and contribute to this gut dysbiosis that throws a wrench into detox?

Summer Bock: Absolutely. I really think of this as a forest as the best metaphor for our gut microbiome. So, when you look at a forest you have all these animals, major diversity in animals and insects. And that to me is the bacteria, the probiotics, all these little organisms living inside of us. And then we have all the plants, right?

Summer Bock: And to me the plants are the food, right? That’s what we’re eating. And then you also have the soil. And the soil is all of our tissues. That’s just like what is there, it’s part of the environment that sustains the overall environment our body tissues.

Summer Bock: And just like in a forest you can have a forest fire that’s man-made or naturally caused. Whether somebody lights a fire or lightning strikes it’s still going to have the same effect, it’s still going to create destruction. So for us in our gut, that look like antibiotics, right? Or it can be food poisoning. That’s what I would consider more of a naturally occurring way to create dysbiosis is simply food poisoning or getting the flu, getting really sick.

Summer Bock: You also have birth control pills and many other pharmaceuticals will impact the gut microbiome in a fairly negative way. And what we see is like when you look at the studies that people are doing on the gut microbiome, the more that people take antibiotics the harder it is to recreate a balanced, native, natural gut microbiome.

Summer Bock: And I think that’s really important, I mean, I know a lot of people know this. I might be preaching to the choir for a lot of folks, but I can’t say it enough because it’s still is very, very prevalent. There are still so many doctors overprescribing antibiotics.

Summer Bock: And there are so many patients going into doctors not wanting to leave without antibiotics as well, right? And so there’s a little bit of, “Yes, give me this pill, fix me. I don’t like being this uncomfortable.” And what we don’t realize is that there are major long-term effects, just even nutrient deficiency and things like that. Those are some of the main ones but then one that is often overlooked really is trauma and stress.

Summer Bock: I mean, we can destroy our gut microbiome with trauma and stress. And trauma obviously we can’t help when that happens, it just happens in life. It’s a part of life. But the way that we deal with it, the way that we process it, the way that we move through it is very instrumental in how well our body can be resilient and how well our gut microbiome can be resilient to this.

Summer Bock: Because you raise cortisol level through stress, through trauma, you raise cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone. Hormones are essentially text messages to ourself. Bacteria are cells. So, if we’re texting to our cells, maybe we’re on AT&T, okay these bacteria are on the rising. We can still text them, it’s still reading all these text messages, right? So they’re like, “Oh my gosh cortisols, hi?” And that cortisol, that hormone, that message tells certain bacteria to flourish, “Oh my gosh, we need to reproduce like now.”

Wendy Myers: Out of time.

Summer Bock: Totally and I mean, unfortunately, a lot of the bacteria that are going to be most affected by that are pathogenic bacteria, they tend to reproduce faster in that high stress environment, candida response and can often even start rooting in with that cortisol presence. And there’s all different kinds of reactions that happen like this.

Summer Bock: So I think it’s really important for people to understand how impactful that trauma that you haven’t dealt with, that’s still running your life, that’s still in your subconscious, that you’re constantly on guard, hyper-vigilant about. Or just the simple day-to-day things that you aren’t handling. If you walk through your house do you feel more stressed? Are there activities that you do every day that make you stressed? Are you commuting to work for 40 minutes and you’re just, by the time you get to work you’re so amped that you can barely stand it, what is it?

Summer Bock: Everybody has these things that they’re tolerating and they feel like they have to keep doing them. And I have just become a very strong advocate for people to start learning how to manage their stress better and do that by actually starting to figure out how to remove the stressor rather than being like, “Oh there’s a thorn in my arm. I need to put some essential oil on this thorn,” no. You need to pull the thorn out.

Summer Bock: How do we handle your stress? How do we get you to where you’re not text messaging these bacteria, and these pathogens, and these candida and all these organisms all the time. Very, very important. And so just take this forest analogy full circle. Let’s say that you have experienced a lot of distraction in your gut microbiome for natural or unnatural reasons. And you want to restore that. Most people’s first idea about how to restore this is pretty much in the stake. I really want to say it, I really want to dig into that in a minute if you want.

Wendy Myers: Yes I would love to because I know a lot of people think, “Oh I don’t need to fix my gut, it’s time to drink a gallon of bone broth a day and take two, three grams of L-glutamine and probiotics.” What is the mystic and the disconnect that people are having there?

Summer Bock: Well, the major underlying flaw in our thinking is that we’re looking for a magic bullet. We believe that we are one thing in our life that we’re missing and with that one thing everything will be okay.

Summer Bock: So we have magic bullet thinking. The best example I saw this recently when somebody was like, “Raspberries,” and somebody came in and they were like, “Raspberry are super foods. Try testing raspberries every day. And I was like, oohh, like you know.”

Wendy Myers: That was all of us at the beginning of our healthy journey.

Summer Bock: That’s true. You get excited and into it but once you realize that it’s really getting a major diversity of foods and being balanced and enjoying the food that you’re eating and not being so hyper-vigilant about good food, bad food, stressing yourself out with food. I think that’s really important. But I think the magic bullet piece has translated into probiotics.

Summer Bock: So people right now are very excited like maybe probiotics are this thing that’s going to fix it. Maybe this is the true answer. So if we go back to this forest analogy, if we are taking probiotics, it’s the equivalent of having a forest fire happen, all the trees are down, everything is in a state of destruction and it’s going to grow back. It will. That is what nature does, it grows back.

Summer Bock: We don’t go into those forests and try to remediate by adding a bunch of bunnies back and snakes. We’re like, “Hey, bunnies and snakes. You three guys. You little critters. Go in there, you’re the good guys, you go in there and we want you to fix it all.” They’re like, “Yo,” like, “Hey, I can’t do anything.” I mean, I’ll eat some mosquitoes and some rats for you and I’ll nibble on some grass but that’s all I… they’re an essential part about ecosystem because those creatures actually really help feed and proliferate the ecosystem in a major way, they’re major players.

Summer Bock: But they’re not in charge of that. What’s in charge of that is really just like this process of natural succession where the wild flowers grow and that’s all the food, right? You get good food in there, you get good nutrients. And you allow that to feed the organisms and let that process regrow. If we’re just giving these certain strains of bacteria, these three to 10 strains of bacteria that are in every pre-biotic the responsibility of rebuilding the gut, we’re missing the point entirely.

Wendy Myers: Yeah and so where does fermented foods play a role in that in rebuilding the gut microbiome?

Summer Bock: Yeah well, fermented foods are awesome because they contain a wide variety of probiotics. And it’s a natural balanced ecosystem in that jar. Like let’s take sauerkraut for example or dairy kefir. Inside there there’s all these organic acids that were created by these probiotics like lactic acids and sometimes there’s a little bit of acidic acid depending on what kind of ferment you’re talking about which is vinegar.

Summer Bock: And these organic acids act as fertilizer for the gut microbiome, and they help to keep some of the pathogenic bacteria at bay. And they help nourish the environment so that more probiotics bacteria can live there happily.

Summer Bock: And then we have the probiotics themselves. I mean, when you’re talking about sauerkraut, or kimchi, or dairy kefir or water kefir, some of these ferments have dozens and dozens of probiotic bacteria, so it’s much more diverse. And I think that’s really exciting. And they’re balanced. They’re all living in harmony already.

Summer Bock: Like when you eat that, they’ve already established their own community, their own microbiome balance within that fermented food. You have all these pro, excuse me, prebiotics that are feeding the probiotics. So to me a fermented food is just a more whole food version of a probiotic. And I think that’s a really important thing for people to think about.

Summer Bock: But, I just listed some really important ferments, I call them functional ferments. And out of these ferments like when you buy water kefir at the store, it’s not the same thing as making it at home. So if you want that diversity, you have to learn how to make this at home, you have to learn how to make it the traditional way.

Wendy Myers: Oh yes. Yeah. And a lot of the products in the grocery store have been pasteurized to kill all of the bacteria, to beneficial or no. And so you have to be really savvy sharp and make sure you’re getting the raw. Is there any issues with purchasing a product that says that it’s raw that it’s got a mass produced store product? What are some of the issues with those that you can tell us?

Summer Bock: Absolutely, you have to find out how they made it. Did they make it in plastic? A lot of these large producers of sauerkraut are fermenting their cabbage in plastic. And cabbage, excuse me, sauerkraut once you ferment it, it starts to get more and more acidic. The final product is usually somewhere between a pH of 3.5 and 4.5, that’s acidic. And that acidity reacts with plastic. That’s one of the known ways that we leach chemicals out of plastic, time, plastic, heat. That is time, acid, heat, I mean, these are key components that will leach those chemicals out.

Summer Bock: So, this is really important make sure you find out where your producer is making this, how they’re making it. Ideally they’re making it in stainless steel or ceramics. Very important.

Summer Bock: And then are you buying it in plastic or are you buying it in glass? You want to be buying these foods in glass. So again, if these are the decisions that the producer is making around saving money to make it easier to produce, to make more money off the process. I think that’s understandable but it’s not helping us because those chemicals are endocrine disrupters. So that’s one key thing that you really have to look out for when you’re shopping for your ferments.

Wendy Myers: And then if you’re making a ferment that contains garlic, I mean, garlic kills bacteria. So, can you talk a little bit about how that may be problematic when you’re trying to repopulate your gut with beneficial bacteria. How does garlic affect a ferment?

Summer Bock: Yeah, so garlic is actually pro-gut microbiome. Garlic, yes, it has some antimicrobial components, but in general what we find with most herbs is that when you’re eating them in a food they tend to not go after the probiotics. They tend to not go after the good bacteria. They can modulate it a little bit, but they’re not going to go in there and wipe it out the same way that they’re going to have… they’ll a stronger effect on candida. They’re going to have a stronger effect on some of the pathogenic bacteria. And I think that’s why we evolve to eat many of these spices and these herbs is because they do help rebuild the microbiome.

Summer Bock: So these are the good guys and not the bad guys. And I say good guys and bad guys because we need them all, we just need then in the right amounts, right?

Wendy Myers: Yes.

Summer Bock: And the garlic also contains inulin which is a prebiotic starch that supports the growth primarily of bifidobacterium. So bifidobacterium is a fantastic bacteria, we get one form of it from breast milk as a little baby. But it’s a challenging bacteria to find in food. So feeding it with prebiotics like inulin is really important because it helps to make sure that they grow more and that those levels get higher, because it’s such an important one for the immune system and for keeping us healthy.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s one question I had because sometimes I’ll have kimchi and like, “God, this has a lot of garlic in that.” I was just curious what your thoughts were on the garlic effect on the probiotics.

Wendy Myers: And so let’s take our conversation back to detoxification. And so, you talk about cleansing and rebuilding. And maybe taking some time to rebuild after doing a detox. Can you talk a little about that?

Summer Bock: Absolutely. So when you’re doing the detoxification process your body is utilizing vitamins, minerals and its natural resources to help support all of your channels of elimination to escort toxins out of the body. So for some people, they came into the picture depleted and I think it’s really important to understand that for some folks cleansing can be a little bit of a depleting process especially if they’ve been malnourished for years through having disordered digestion or they’re not ever absorbing enough nutrients are more under a high stress and a lot of the mineral reserves have gone down, their buffering system is low which means that they can’t naturally balance the pH very well in their body.

Summer Bock: So, once somebody has gone through that cleansing phase we have to remember for some folks this is going to be a depleting process, so we need to rebuild. And when I say rebuild, I mean, we need to rebuild the minerals levels, we need to rebuild nutrition, we need to rebuild digestion and we need to rebuild the microbiome.

Summer Bock: So we take time while we’re creating sustainable daily habits that actually support the body’s natural detox functions. Ideally you want to be focusing on eating your fermented foods on a daily basis. You want to be getting the right food in every day. And this doesn’t have to be as restricted as what you do when you’re cleansing. And you’re ideally trying to create a sustainable habit so that everything that you’re doing is going to help support your body to naturally open up the channels of elimination so that you can detox a little bit at a slow pace every day rather than trying to do that big monster cleanse.

Summer Bock: I think the monster cleanse is very important. You got to go in there and do it for a little while, but then backtrack out of it and focus on rebuilding. Because what a lot of people do is they cleanse and then they just go back into this crazy mode, “I didn’t eat any ice cream for two weeks. Oh my gosh, I got eat a bunch of ice cream, and eat some cookies.” They just go nuts.

Summer Bock: And then I want you to focus on really healthy habits, sustainable habits. Get all of your energy levels back, get your mineral levels up so now that the pH can buffer. And you basically need to focus on digestion so that you can be breaking down a protein into free amino acids that your liver can use for more detox work.

Summer Bock: And that’s what I see with most of my clients as a big factor. Most of them aren’t digesting protein well enough, and so they really aren’t getting at all the amino acids that they need so that their normal detox functions can happen within their liver.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I mean, and so many people have absorption issues because their gut isn’t functioning well, or they have leaky gut, they have gut dysbiosis. And so they can be eating all these amazing foods, taking all these really expensive super high quality supplements but they’re not absorbing them. And that can really throw a huge wrench into any recovery, any detox, because you just don’t have the nutrients you need.

Summer Bock: Yeah, rebuilding is really thinking of it as a digestive tune up. Focus on digestion, get your absorbing, get you actually assimilating these nutrients that are coming and stock pile so that when you do your next cleanse you’re ready and it’s going to be much easier.

Wendy Myers: Yeah and so let’s talk about opening up the channels of eliminations. So what does that mean exactly? So many people know they need to detox, but some people don’t have… their lymph isn’t working well or their channels of elimination aren’t working well, let’s talk a little about that.

Summer Bock: Yeah, absolutely. I think that I think of it as seven channels of elimination. We have our blood, our kidneys, our liver, the skin which is so crazy because it’s so huge, our lymph, our colon and our lung. These are all the ways that we excrete normal metabolic waste. And these are the channels of elimination, that’s how we get these stuff out of our system. And so when we’re talking about detox we want to enhance those channels of elimination.

Summer Bock: We’re going to do whatever we can to help support each channel to do its best. So we have to ask ourselves two questions. What is coming into that channel and can we change the quality of that, can we raise the quality of what’s going into that channel of elimination so that it has less work, has less to process, it’s easier, easing a load?

Summer Bock: And, what can we do to open that channel of elimination up in terms of allowing it to excrete more efficiently, more effectively? Right? So, that’s what I always ask myself with each of those things. I have people do a review. What are the channels for you that you need to focus on first?

Summer Bock: I tend to look at liver and skin a lot with folks because I think those are two… first of all, you can see your skin. You can see how things are doing, and I think it’s a really great mirror into the body. And quality of skin, I’m sure you see this a lot, right? Quality of skin changes very quickly as you shift your diet.

Wendy Myers: Oh yes.

Summer Bock: Yeah. So, that’s a really important one to look at. That’s your way of being… I call it an inner spy. You can actually be a spy by looking at what’s going on inside, by looking at what’s going on your face, on your skin, how does it look? And then with the liver, I mean, obviously it’s doing so much. So, my goal with people there is just improved digestion, let’s get the quality of everything coming in the digestive tract higher and higher so the liver isn’t as inundated.

Summer Bock: And then like I talked about it early with the human sewer situation, your blood obviously we’re creating more toxicity if the microbiome is imbalanced, if we have that human sewer situation there’s more gunk going into the bloodstream. So, balancing the microbiome becomes extremely important, it becomes critical on this list to help open up those channels of elimination by decreasing the toxic things that’s present.

Wendy Myers: And so why is the gut the easiest thing to focus on first as the lowest hanging fruit?

Summer Bock: Well, I think there’s multiple reasons, one is because obviously you’re eating multiple times a day. So you have food coming in, you have control over what you put in your body, that’s a big one. And also because all the food that you’re eating those are the nutrients that we use. Those are basic building blocks for all of our cells, all of our tissues. So you have to start at the base. How do we build our body? How do we build the cells? How do we regenerate the tissue.

Summer Bock: It all comes through what we eat. And what we eat is important, obviously, but if we can’t absorb it, if we can’t digest it, then, like you said earlier, it’s like people can eat really healthy food but if they can’t get that nutrition out of it, it’s somewhat useless. It’s good, don’t stop doing it. Don’t stop eating healthy but you have to focus on getting that digestion improved and I really work with people on this so much.

Summer Bock: Of course, I love fermented foods as a good option but looking at herbal bitters as a way to help increase digestive juices, help to shift the pH of the digestive organs so that the enzymes are functioning more effectively, that’s really important. I found that herbal bitters are a really good way to do this.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. I love taking bitters and especially if you have digestive upset bitters can really help with that nausea, just have a lot of good functions. And so I deal with a sick population as well. People come to me when they’ve just tried all kinds of different things, gone to different doctors, functional medical doctors and people that tend to be very ill, the first thing we see on their functional medical tests are low nutrients.

Wendy Myers: So their gut’s not working, they’re not absorbing nutrients. What are some of the key needle movers for people that need to rebuild their gut and improve absorption of nutrients?

Summer Bock: Okay. There is a few that I think are so important. Bitters I recommended that one. I just said that one. Bitters before every meal. I generally love that people do it 20 to 30 minutes before a meal to really get all these digestive and gastric juices flowing. And you want to sit down and eat and be hungry. Right?

Summer Bock: A lot of people aren’t really hungry when they’re eating, they’re eating because they’re bored, they’re eating because they’re stressed, they’re eating for all these other reasons. But you want to actually be hungry when you eat because you will absorb and digest that food so much better.

Summer Bock: It also means that your body is in a state of parasympathetic nervous system. So, parasympathetic that’s rest and digest. It’s the opposite of fight or flight. So when people are rolling throughout their day, drinking their coffee, eating in the car, doing their thing like a lot of people do, you’re not going to absorb your food because your blood is not in your digestive tract. It’s out in your limbs, it’s doing the groundwork of getting you through the day. You need your blood and your oxygen to all go to your digestive organs so that you can be absorbing that food more effectively, more efficiently.

Summer Bock: And so that involves literally getting out of fight and flight and getting into a state of parasympathetic. And digestive bitters help do this, but it also involves you taking some deep breaths, relaxing, getting into that mode of receptivity. I think most people skip over this. Actually I think prayer is a really helpful way for people to remember to be humbly receptive of the food that they’re about to eat. I mean, prayer has been a traditional way that folks have done this.

Summer Bock: But so many people skip over those first few moments before they take a bite. They just rush right in, shovel the food in their mouth. Perhaps just slow down. If I could get people to do this for every meal I would. I don’t know how well this will work because so many people are eating alone, but laughing while eating is one of the best ways to digest your food better.

Summer Bock: And I know this from multiple experiences that I’ve had personally where I was wearing a continuous blood sugar monitor for a period of time, just doing some biohacking work on myself. And I will admit, I love cupcakes. That is my favorite. Like if I’m going to eat a treat I want a freaking cupcake. And I want it to be good. It’s going to be gluten-free and dairy free.

Summer Bock: But a good cupcake is my thing. And so we were at a family wedding, and I remember sitting down, and it was my… we were doing a little celebration for my dad’s birthday that had just passed and my aunt’s birthday. And so they brought cupcakes and there was a gluten-free, dairy-free and I was so excited.

Summer Bock: And I ate this cupcake while laughing and cracking up with my family, and my blood sugar it barely even peaked. I mean, barely. Like you would not have been able to tell that I ate a cupcake. It looks like I had eaten a low carb meal.

Wendy Myers: Really interesting.

Summer Bock: It was very fascinating because I know because I ate that same cupcake a month before that and that same cupcake a month after that and both times my blood sugar… I had a straight blood sugar spike and then it plummeted right afterwards. So it was really fascinating to me. I’ve gotten a chance to see that over and over in my own personal life was like just wearing this little monitor and going, “Oh my gosh,” I guess even just affecting my blood sugar, what else is it affecting?

Summer Bock: Because that’s huge when your blood sugar doesn’t spike it means your insulin doesn’t spike, which means your cortisol doesn’t spike. These are all parts of stress. Insulin spikes, cortisol stress spikes and it’s very damaging to the body. So yeah, laughter during every meal. Please, if you can make it happen, laugh as hard as you can while you’re eating. I picture a bunch of people eating in their office by themselves being like, “Ha ha ha.”

Wendy Myers: Yeah, turn on the comedy channel at dinner.

Summer Bock: Yeah, whatever it takes. I don’t even care, but I think it’s really important. And then, let’s see, another needle mover for just really helping to rebuild the gut I would say fermented food. I mean, it’s so essential and if somebody is listening to this and they’re like, “Oh, I can’t eat fermented foods I have SIBO, I have histamine issues, whatever, that’s just gut healing work that needs to happen and the fermented foods can come later. You don’t have to focus on fermented foods now, focus on healing the gut, healing the gut, calming down the histamine, calming down the immune system. There is works that can be done there first and I always work with people on that first before we go into the ferments.

Summer Bock: And it takes some time for some of those folks. Like some people can take a little while, it’s okay. No need to panic. You don’t need to panic if you can’t handle probiotics and ferments right now.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, you have to work with your body where you’re at. I work with a lot of people that are not ready to detox, we had to do some pretox work, lay that foundation and get their body ready to detox. And so, you touched on this earlier but what is the one mistake that people make when rebuilding the gut? Because I think so many people are trying to do this maybe aren’t really sure the way to go about it. What’s one big thing that they’re missing or mistake that they’re making?

Summer Bock: The biggest mistake I’d say is that thinking that probiotics are enough. That you’re taking your probiotics and you’re good. So, just know that first of all that’s like the bunnies, basks and snakes and saying that they’re going to rebuild that entire forest on their own. No, they’re not. And just like that those probiotics aren’t going to be able to balance your gut on their own. They are going to just increase in their levels but they can’t mitigate the rest of that system.

Summer Bock: So you need to be focusing on all the other things that we talked about here today. Like bitters, and fermented foods, and stress and all these various things getting in high quality food. Obviously foods that feed the good bacteria. It’s a multi-faceted lifestyle approach and you have to be doing all of these things.

Summer Bock: So, I can’t say it enough, probiotics, you can’t just take probiotics and say, “Okay, I’m doing my part, my gut is fine.”

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and so people that want to take probiotics is there a kind that you like and should people diversify? Like I tell people to take maybe a different brand or a different type when they’re done with one bottle, let’s go to another strain or another brand. Is there any recommendations you can make about probiotics?

Summer Bock: Most of the probiotics recommendations I make are for people based on what’s showing up in their stool test. I mean, I often look at people like see… look at their test and see what’s missing here and then we add in from there. I think that’s an important step because you really don’t know what’s going on in somebody’s gut. So, recommending a certain blend of probiotics is hard for me unless I know what the breakdown is inside their own individual gut.

Wendy Myers: That’s good, test don’t guess. That’s great. Applies to probiotics too. And heavy metals. And so let’s talk a little bit about you have a webinar, it’s three major mistakes people make when trying to fix their gut webinar. Can you tell us about that and how to learn how to join that?

Summer Bock: Absolutely, so I obviously shared one big mistake with you guys here today about probiotics, but there’s two more on that webinar. And it’s a short webinar, it’s really fun, it’s really important for people who have any issues with digestive problems at all. Because gut-based illness is so crucial to get handled and get dealt with. Because it leads to so many chronic conditions. I mean, that’s something we didn’t really touch on is how having dysbiosis later leads to obesity, it leads to being overweight, it leads to type 2 diabetes, and autoimmunity. All these other disorders, thyroid issues, skin issues, they all start in the gut. But I think getting the gut fixed and handled is very important especially from a detox standpoint as we discussed.

Summer Bock: So, I’d like for people to go check that out, and gutrebuilding.com/myers if you go to that link we have a special little place to sign up thanks to you Wendy for that.

Wendy Myers: Yes. Yeah, so everyone go check it out. Summer I love your work, I love how well you speak about this topic, and it’s so important because there are so many things working against our gut today. And it’s a big driver of illness, people that are not well or people just looking to get healthy or have awareness that maybe their nutrient levels aren’t where they should be. You got to think about gut repair. And so it’s a very important thing to master and get down because you can be doing all these stuff for your health, eating all these unbelievable food, taking a shopping bag full of pills and spending all this money and it’s just not getting in. You’ve got to fix your gut. So, go to gutrebuilding.com/myers, gutrebuilding.com/myers M-Y-E-R-S.

Wendy Myers: Well, Summer thanks for coming on the show. Is there anything, any parting word or anything you want to leave the audience with?

Summer Bock: Well, I think I will just plant a little seed for everyone. And this is just… Okay. So, when you cleanse, and you feel really good on the cleanse, you want to tell everybody about it. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, it’s a cleanse.” But you can’t actually explain the experience to someone. They have to have that experience for themselves in order to understand what it’s really like.

Summer Bock: And I will just say the same thing’s true in the world of fermentation and gut health. When you learn to ferment and you start eating fermented foods and start to balance your microbiome, it is a totally different experience of life. I think we start to… it awakens us to the fact that we’re not alone. There are bacteria in our gut working with us to help us be healthy, and we’re creating a home for them. We’re actually working in harmony, in partnership.

Summer Bock: The further you go into this world of gut health, and fermentation, and healing, you start to realize, “Oh, it does…” We have a relationship with every being on the planet, and on soil. And all these relationships with the outside world become more important to us. And that’s just the experience I want more and more people to have because then I think we would do a better job at caring about throwing things away, putting trash in the world, making things be full of chemical because ultimately it all comes back to us that we’re going to eat those chemicals later on.

Summer Bock: So, it’s those little circle life thing that happens once you get into the world of fermentation. And I just I can’t be excited about it enough. I just hope more and more people get to have that experience.

Wendy Myers: Well Summer, thanks so much for coming on this show. And everyone thanks for tuning in every week to The Myers Detox Podcast. It’s really a joy and an honor to wake up every day and educate you guys about your health and putting together those missing pieces of the puzzle for you, helping you to make those connections so that you can have some aha moments to just help you on down the road on your healing journey.

Wendy Myers: So thanks for joining me on this quest, and I’ll talk to you guys next week.