Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis

We’ve been urged to include plenty of dietary fiber in our daily routines, fibers that come from vegetables, legumes, grains and other plant sources. But there is an animal-sourced fiber that has nearly disappeared from the modern human diet: hyaluronic acid. 

Hyluronic acid has nearly disappeared from the diet because it is primarily sourced from animal products, especially organ meats like brain, skin, and tongue. But hyaluronic acid is a fiber crucial for the health of many human organs: skin, joints, uterus, cervix, vagina, arteries. It is also a fiber with significant benefits on the gastrointestinal mic...

LDL cholesterol, apoprotein B, saturated fat, TMAO, statin cholesterol drugs: Over the last 40 years, we have been inundated with misguided advice on how to reduce your risk for coronary heart disease, i.e., risk for such things as heart attack, need for heart procedures such as stent implantation or bypass surgery, or sudden cardiac death, serious and often life-threatening events. Has it worked? 80 million Americans now take statin drugs to reduce cholesterol yet there has been no meaningful reduction in such events and, in fact, I’ll bet some of your local hospitals have added multi-million dollar wings for ca...

Go to any supermarket and you will see the impressive variety of products in the dairy aisle labeled "yogurt." You have a mindboggling collection of choices: non-fat, low-fat, full-fat, flavored, unflavored. Single-serve cartons, quart containers, squeezable tubes, jars. Will consuming any of these products change your life in any significant way? Will you be heathier, have better bowel health, skin health, metabolic health, mental health? 

Let’s discuss why, no, you will not experience any dramatic life-altering effects from consuming these products. They may be tasty, but they will not change your life in any meaningful way. But...

The practice of immersing your body in ice water is growing in popularity based on claims of improved mood and well-being, muscle recovery after exercise, even longevity. But this ignores the well-established fact that sudden cardiac death is a real risk due to coronary spasm, causing heart attack, and unstable heart rhythms due to a situation called autonomic conflict. There are a growing number of lawsuits that have been filed for the many sudden cardiac deaths that have occurred. So let’s discuss what we know about this concept of cold water immersion and why it is such a da...

Over 50% of Americans are, at any one time, trying to lose weight. So it’s understandable that the GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro have become so popular, given their spectacular upfront results. Others have used reduced calorie diets in their various forms: counting points, assigning foods red, yellow, or green lights, meal replacement products, etc. Or bariatric procedures like lap-band, jejunoileal bypass, or gastric bypass. But there is a lot that people are not told about these methods. The near-term prospect of losing weight is so enticing to people and so profitable to doctors, the healthcare system, an...

I first met Dr. Eric Westman at a low-carbohydrate meeting a number of years ago where he discussed an extremely important and insightful human clinical trial he had conducted in which he counseled participants with type 2 diabetes to follow a very low-carbohydrate, essentially ketogenic, diet. He was almost prohibited from conducted the study because some colleagues felt it was too dangerous. Nonetheless, the study was completed and demonstrated that type 2 diabetic participants no longer needed insulin and most diabetes drugs while achieving improved blood glucose measures by engaging in a lifestyle that was the direct opposite of conventional dietary...

We all recognize that American healthcare is a badly broken system. Wildly overpriced, exploitative, with a focus on pharmaceuticals and medical procedures to the exclusion of basic issues such as nutrition, the role of nutrients, and the microbiome. Can we expect doctors, healthcare executives, pharma or medical device executives to find better solutions? 

I highly doubt it. One of the problems plaguing conventional delivery of healthcare is that doctors lack the time, knowledge, and frankly the interest in spending more time with their patients, hearing about their issues, then creating solutions that address their unique concerns. 

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Over the past decade, most of us have converted our home lighting to light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, as they save a significant amount of energy, requiring 75-90% less energy than older incandescent lights. Personally, I converted the 50 or lightbulbs in my house to nearly all LEDs.

Most current LEDs emit, of course, visible light. But they also emit a significant amount of blue light and very little red and infrared (IR), in contrast to old-fashioned incandescent bulbs that emit some blue and a lot of red and IR. Remember when you had to change an incandescent bulb...

I’ve touched on the topic of endotoxemia in past episodes of the Defiant Health podcast. In this episode, let’s dive deeper into this topic that is absolutely crucial to understanding and managing SO many aspects of health, from subduing anxiety and panic, to depressive, to joint pain and skin rashes, to gastrointestinal conditions, even weight management. 

What is endotoxemia? Fecal microbes, so-called Gram-negative species because of the way these microbes take up stain for examination under a microscope, species such as E. coli and Salmonella, have something called lipopolysaccharide endotoxin in their cells walls. Other speci...

I’ve been showing thousands of people how to restore this microbe lost by the majority of modern people, Lactobacillus reuteri. But, of all the spectacular improvements in health we can gain by managing our microbiomes, such as an increase in empathy and generosity, reduction in anxiety and depression, deeper sleep, increased libido, restored youthful musculature and strength, the females in my audience have repeatedly said something like, “Well, that’s all well and good, but I’m mostly interested in the skin benefits.” So I’ve spent a good deal of time, energy, and resources in exploring this question, in...

I’ve spent some time reflecting back on all my years practicing in hospitals, often not sleeping for extended periods, sometimes days, covering hospitals floors and ICUs, resuscitating people who experienced cardiac arrests, taking them to the cath lab to open arteries, but also witnessing people with all sorts of other health conditions: cancers, wound infections, sepsis, delirium, the various stages of dementia, and hundreds of other debilitating disease. 

I now recognize that, looking back, so many health conditions can be better understood in light of the contribution of the microbiome, i.e., the trillions of microbes occ...

Those of you who follow my discussions that started with the Wheat Belly series of books already know that there is a long list of reasons why humans made an enormous blunder when we first resorted to the consumption of the seeds of grasses, meaning wheat and related grains. We know this from the anthropological record of human disease, we know this from modern science that has exposed the many problems that arise with their consumption from tooth decay to arthritis.

But in my many conversations with people, I find that, because we are all bombarded with...

Over 30 years ago, I help set up the first CT heart scan device in Wisconsin, one of the first in the entire midwest. This was so long ago that it was really an electron beam tomogrraphy, or EBT, device that predated the more recently developed CT devices. The point is that these devices acquired images quickly, about 1/10th of a second. This is important because the heart is perpetually in motion through various cycles of its beating rhythm, with motion also provided by breathing. But these devices allowed us to precisely quantify calcium in the coronary arteries of the...

“Everyone coming in the door were sick and had already been to 8 or 10 healthcare practitioners and weren’t better yet. This is all wrong.”

“It’s not just what you eat. It’s the air you breathe and the water you drink, the personal care products you use, household cleaning products. . .” 

Here is a conversation I had recently with with Reed Davis, a board-certified Holistic Health Practitioner (HHP) and Certified Nutritional Therapist (CNT). Over many years of experience, Reed has developed expertise in applying functional lab testing to pinpoint environmental, hormonal, nutritional, and other health disruptions and...

Over the last 30 years, the question over whether omega-3 fatty acids from fish has been the subject of controversy, swinging from exuberance over its potential benefits to skepticism over whether they provide any benefit at all. It seems that one day we hear that fish oil reduces risk for heart attack, while the next day we hear that there is no such benefit, even harm. We’ve also been subjected to numerous marketing claims for competing products with claims such as “40 times more potent than fish oil” or “You can’t buy this in a health food store” that further mudd...

Atrial fibrillation, or A fib for short, is the most common heart rhythm issue that plagues people. About 30% of people will experience this rhythm disorder at some time in their lives, an issue that becomes more and more likely as we age. 

The rhythm is typically experienced as the sudden onset of breathlessness and lightheadedness, and sometimes chest pain, even while you are sitting or relaxing. This is because, with A fib, the heart rate is typically in the range of 150-220 beats per minute, way above the normal resting heart rate of 60-70 beats per minute. I...

Sleep issues represent a major struggle for millions of people: too little sleep, trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, early morning awakenings followed by difficulty falling back asleep. Some people complain that, despite having a full night of sleep, they awake feeling like they didn’t sleep at all, struggling with sleepiness, fog, and fatigue all through waking hours. There are also known associations of health conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome and Parkinson’s disease with disruptions of sleep. 

The science that explores the role of gastrointestinal microbes in sleep are yielding new and exciting lessons. Recen...

You’ve likely heard the headlines gushing about the weight loss effects of the GLP-1 agonist class of drugs, agents that go by names like Wegovy, Mounjaro, Rebelsus and others. Doctors are declaring these drugs as breakthroughs or even magical, witnessing the rapid and dramatic weight loss they can achieve. 

People appear willing to accept the side-effects of nausea, vomiting, even bowel obstruction, a catastrophic complication, or thyroid cancer, or pancreatitis that can irreversibly damage your pancreas and make you a type 1 diabetic. They also accept the costs that vary widely, depending on who dispenses it, but not...

The oral microbiome is second only to the colon in the density of microbes living there. The mouth is really a collection of varied ecosystems that differ in composition. For instance, the microbiome of the teeth is different from that of the tongue that is, in turn, different from the microbiome of the gumline. The oral cavity is therefore teeming with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species of bacteria, fungi, Archaea, and viruses. It is a virtual tropical jungle of life. 

But what is especially remarkable is that the oral microbiome is an ecosystem of life that plays a...

Despite having written 7 books in the Wheat Belly series pointing out the harms that this “food” has inflicted on people, harms that doctors nearly always misdiagnose as an opportunity to “treat” with pharmaceuticals and procedures, questions and ideas to the contrary continue to crop up. Some of these ideas are simply due to the barrage of advertising that comes from Big Food and Big Agribusiness, industries that continue to make a lot of money by propagating fictitious claims that grains are healthy. Some of it is due to the continued repeated urgings by the U.S. government, insisting that grains s...

Achieving an optimal level of vitamin D provides numerous health advantages, from relief from winter blues to reduction in cardiovascular risk to reduced risk for several forms of cancer. It’s one of the most important nutrients to get right, i.e., achieve an ideal blood level of the primary blood marker for vitamin D, 25-OH vitamin D. 

But, even after many years of I and others discussing the importance of vitamin D, I still see plenty of people getting it wrong, often on the advice of their doctors. Sadly, you would think that doctors would be cha...