Beauty & Her Bowels: Exploring David Wolfe’s Star Wars Theory on Probiotics & Natural Beauty
-An interview with Tera Warner and David Wolfe
In this call David delivers a low down on what’s going on in your gut and on every inch of your beautiful skin. This is an important call that will help you better understand what’s going on in your body and some of the things you can do to improve your health and well-being very easily. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for easier, faster reading. You can find the original interview and download the audio below.
How Are Probiotics Affecting Our Skin & Beauty?
David: We have more DNA of friendly bacteria in our body than we have our own DNA.
Tera: WHOA! Say that again!
David: [tweet_box design=”box_12_at” pic_url=”https://www.terawarner.com/hhh/images/david-wolfe.jpeg” author=”David Wolfe”]We have more DNA of bacteria that are friendly to us than we have of our own DNA in our bodies.[/tweet_box]
We’re really like a walking containment for certain types of bacteria. It’s kind of like “the Force.” In the old story of the Force that was told in the Star Wars movies, the Force is controlled by organisms that live in our bodies. They’re called Midi-chlorians. That’s really like acidophilus, which is one of the great friendly bacteria of the upper gut.
The great friendly bacteria of the lower gut is bifidus infantis. These things are actually, in some ways, using us. They’re symbiotic with us, but they, in some way, are using us to grow themselves. That’s actually what we want, because friendly bacteria clean up your whole inner digestive system and they cover you, actually.
The latest research in dentistry is all about biofilms and the same with skin care.
What you really want to do is develop and nurse your biofilms, which are layers of bacteria and their excretions that seal off your gums and that are good for your gums. It’s when we use these very powerful antibiotics, namely Scope, Listerine, Crest, Colgate, you know these varying brands of toothpaste. What we’re doing is destroying the natural biofilm and an unnatural biofilm. We’re just killing everything off.
It creates a very disturbed system because all the friendly bacteria are not able to populate our mouth in a way that’s natural and healthy. The same is true with our skin. Probiotic bacteria protect us. They’re a huge ally for us. They have their own intelligence and their own consciousness. I would say that that intelligence and consciousness is like “the Force.” It’s a very good energy in the universe.
[tweet_box design=”box_12_at” pic_url=”https://www.terawarner.com/hhh/images/david-wolfe-2.jpg” author=”David Wolfe”]I would say that that intelligence and consciousness is like “the Force.” It’s a very good energy in the universe.[/tweet_box]
Tera: I love that! This feels like the first time I totally bond with the idea of probiotics. Thank you.
David: Right on. I love probiotics. You really develop a friendship with the probiotics when you have a really powerful experience. One time I was having a colonic done, and at the end they put in bifidus infantis, which, again, populates the lower gut. I held that in, and I got such a rush out of that. I was like, “whoa,” and I finally felt it. That was when first really felt what probiotics are really all about and what they could do for us.
Tera: That’s an interesting idea, because I think some of us who are kind of new to health food or transitioning into a whole food/ raw food organic diet may feel like something taking, I can speak to myself, someone who takes probiotics semi-regularly and does her fair share of fermented foods, I can’t say that I perceive that kind of a difference.
David: When you’re dealing with probiotics, really a good place to start is probiotic capsules because you don’t really get billions of bacteria, you get millions. Your body can absorb it better and deal with it more. Then after you’ve been developing your body to take on probiotics more and more and you’re doing cultured food, for example, then you can start hitting your body with billions of organisms. That’s a little bit higher of a dosage. Again, you don’t start there but you eventually get to that point. That’s when you start feeling it. That’s when you realize, “Whoa! My cravings for sugar are gone completely, totally. It’s gone. It’s out of my reality.”
All of a sudden things like that will happen to you, and you’ll be like, “what’s going on here?
What Happens When We Recolonize Good Bacteria in Our Gut?
David: Well, definitely it’s improved immune function. A big part of our immune system has to do with friendly bacteria and what they excrete into our bodies. We know, for example, that the friendly bacteria secrete B- vitamins into our bodyB-5, B-6, B-9, B-12. Those are natural excretions of friendly bacteria. Also, they can excrete vitamin C into your body, apparently. So, really, you start developing this idea that maybe if we had the right bacteria, we’d actually get enough nutrition from the bacteria that we wouldn’t even really need to eat that much.
There’s a lot of evidence of that. Another benefit, too, is that let’s say you’ve had a long-standing digestive infection or you want to prevent any digestive infections, you want to prevent candida, now you’ve got a shield. Now you’ve got a stress defence shield, which is those colonies of micro-organisms that are perfectly designed for you. They’re designed to actually help you fight off candida, cancer, viruses, everything, pretty much. They’re part of your defence mechanism.
How Do Probiotics Improve Our Beauty and Skin Conditions
Let’s talk about a side effect. It’s just more complete digestion, more complete break-down of fat and protein takes a burden off your liver and actually improves your skin right there.
You’re actually getting better nourishment into your system. You’re getting the nutrients actually transported across the intestinal villi and going towards your liver. That’s a big upgrade. As you develop probiotic health, there are certain things like for example, bad breath.
Bad breath and beauty do not go together, right? There are people who have chronic bad breath and they don’t know what to do about it. Nobody even tells them. That’s a big factor as well.
There’s shine. There’s definitely a shine to probiotics. If you’re doing a ton of probiotics, you start getting a glow on. This is one of the big things back in the early days of the sprout revolution brought in by Ann Wigmore and the wheatgrass revolution. A big part of that whole thing was doing tons and tons of fermented rejuvelac. When you ran into these people, they’d be glowing. It was amazing.
How Can Pimples Be Related to What’s Going On In The Gut?
Your skin itself should have a nice biofilm of friendly bacteria on it, and so this can get disturbed by chronic and habitually touching your face with your fingertips, basically making your skin dirty. Basically, what happens is you disturb that natural healthy environment that the probiotics like to live on, namely your skin.
Then more dangerous organisms, harmful bacteria can get a hold, and that’s part of what triggers acne and it’s part of what triggers skin problems. I always advise people to watch for subconscious habits of touching your face with your fingertips. Then there’s the idea of making a whole culture and then you put it on your face. The enzymes are like an exfoliant. These bacteria, they produce incredible medicines, not just vitamins and nutrients. They produce enzymes, a huge amount of enzymes. So, for some peels, you’re going to have active enzymes present.
How do we go about choosing clay and probiotics as part of our supplement regime?
First you want to try different products. You want to find a product that you like. The way you can tell if a product’s good, let’s say you get a bottle of capsules. Is you take something like coconut water and you ferment it. So what you do is, you actually put it in a pitcher. You need three things, you need a pitcher, you need a rubber band and you need a cloth. You fill the pitcher up with coconut water. So you actually need the coconut water, too; that’s four things. Then you need the actual probiotic capsules, that’s the fifth thing.
Take the coconut water and then mix the probiotic capsules into it. Maybe you do eight of them just to make sure it’s going to work. Then you stir all the powder in there. Then you pull the cloth over the top. You put a rubber band around it to make sure that no flies can get in there, fruit flies or anything like that. So it can breathe, but you’re not going to get a bug in there or something. Then you just leave it sit out for 24 hours.
Then you come back, and you say, “Okay. Let’s see what the difference is.”
If you can, shake it up every two hours, just kind of swirl it every two hours, but you don’t have to. I generally like to swirl it up so it gets more intermixed. But anyway, after 24 hours you’re going to have a live culture beverage and you’ll see that actually certain probiotic products work better than others, if you do that experiment on different products. You also have to find the ones that not only work really well, but the ones that you like, the certain mix of bacteria. For example I really like acidophilus, I like bifidus, I like bulgaricus, I like [interrochestacia]. These are little organisms that are good for me.
Tera: I love that.
David: They could be your friends, too.
Getting High On Probiotic Vibes
L. salivarius with plantarum, those two together. There’s really amazing research on those two together. Usually, you have a product with all those in there anyway. It’s got five of them in there, ten of them in there. That’s part of it too. The different bacteria have different properties and then they really are interesting when you get them going if you’re really into them. I kind of go into them, then I fall out of them.
Sometimes I’m really, really into them, and there are some feelings and experiences and highs they give you that are really exceptional.
They’re part of longevity. In my research about longevity that started with the books that were written in the 1800s about people who lived to be 120, 130, 140, it seemed like every case there’s also this thing about cultured food. People really liked cultured yogurt or goat yogurt, there was always this cultured food part of it. It seems to me like with this friendly bacteria alliance, there may be an extreme longevity potential in it and a youth potential in it that we really haven’t popularized yet but it’s definitely part of the phenomenon.
What Are The Benefits of Clay for Beauty?
You had mentioned clay. One of the things that’s been found about clay is that clay contains an enzyme that is formed by certain friendly bacteria called catalase. Catalase is extremely healing for the skin. It draws off certain toxic minerals like iron. A really amazing thing that’s been isolated about using clay for healing is that it contains live enzymes.
David: Over the years I started out with just clay. I used to order this big thing of clay, two different kinds, from this clay company. You had to get the kind for eating, had no lead in it. This is a company that supplies clay for ceramics. In the beginning, that’s where I would get it. A friend of mine, we call him the Wheat Man he’s kind of a legend in raw food circles this guy believes you should live on water, clay, wheat berries and wheat grass. That’s it.
That’s the best thing ever. I’ve heard everything, but I love the Wheat Man because that’s one of the more hilarious things that I’ve ever heard.
Anyway, this guy’s really into clay, seriously into clay. He taught me a lot about clay eating. I had no idea.
All these years we’ve been friends, he’s just turned me on to a lot of amazing things about the wheat diet and also about clay. I used to get it back then in these big chunks and then actually eat the clay, which was very good but not easy to do, most people are not doing it. Over the years I realized people are not going to do this. There’s no way. Nobody’s going to eat a quarter-size ball of clay. It’s not happening; so, that started me on the track of encapsulated clay, maybe people would do that. Then I started finding out about the super clays. That’s where things like fulvic acid, shilajit and zeolites come in. Those are easy. The liquid’s usually squirted in, boom, done. You don’t have to worry about it. Anybody can just squirt that into a smoothie.
Tera: So that’s the form you recommend?
David: Yeah. That’s what I recommend. I recommend that you go to a super clay, like a fulvic acid or a shilajit or a zeolites and get the benefits of clay in a way that you’re actually going to do it.
Tera: Awesome. Thank you so much!
You can find David’s ridiculously quickly-expanding Facebook empire here, and his wildly entertaining website here.