Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast, where Dr. Stephen Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone.

Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.

First things first, what is bloating? Well, the truth is, bloating is a natural consequence of bacteria

eating the foods they want and fermenting them and producing gases. They're producing these gases,

which we now call postbiotics. These gases are actually incredibly beneficial to your health.

In fact, I devoted an entire book, The Energy Paradox, to try and convince you to step on the gas. Now, the whole idea

that we should try to eat foods to prevent bloating is actually one of the dumbest ideas I've ever

heard. Just this past week, a beautiful study was published showing that hydrogen gas, yes, that gas that the Hindenberg blow up

with, is incredibly important for giving bacteria that make buterate, which is the holy grail

of short chain fatty acids that I wrote about in unlocking the keto code, the substances they need to make butyrate.

And that the more hydrogen gas that you have, that you produce, the better you are at making

butyrate. You think that's not important? Well, as they've written about before, a study in Japan, looking at Parkinson's

patients and mild dementia patients, they did not have bacteria that made hydrogen gas. As compared to

people who didn't have these problems, they had bacteria that made hydrogen gas. When they gave these individuals

hydrogen water to drink, hydrogen dissolved in water, they got better. Their symptoms improved.

So the idea that we don't want to form gas, that's completely wrong. Now you hear that gas production is a marker that you have small

intestinal bacterial overgrowth, sebo. Now where did this idea come from? First of all, up until a very few years ago, we had no idea that there were any bacteria that lived in our small intestine.

We knew that there were bacteria in our mouth.

We knew that there were bacteria in our colon, our large bowel.

We even knew that there was a bacteria that liked to live in our stomach, H. Pylori.

But we really had no way of sampling whether bacteria were in our intestines or not.

And I won't go into why we didn't know, but let's just say we didn't have sampling techniques.

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