I’ve personally struggled with insomnia for years, unable to sleep more than a few hours at a time, experiencing frequent awakenings, sometimes awakening at 3 or 4 in the morning and unable to get back to sleep. And I tried almost everything short of prescription sedatives: tryptophan, 5-HTP, megadose melatonin, GABA, theanine, the antihistamine diphenhydramine, self-hypnosis, YouTube videos that claim to help you sleep within minutes. The few that worked left me feeling drugged the next day and, if they did not work, I was often left irritable and fatigued. 

All this changed when I began experimenting with microbiome strategies. It’s become clear that the gut microbiome plays a major role in determining the quality, length, and content of your sleep. An outsized role is played, however, by the phenomenon of endotoxemia, the entry of bacterial breakdown products into the bloodstream and that is the topic I’d like to focus on in this episode of the Defiant Health podcast. The experience is so preliminary that it has not yet been validated in clinical studies. But if the solution is as easy, inexpensive, and accessible as something that looks and smells like yogurt (it’s NOT yogurt, of course), then why not give it a try? You may be among the roughly 50% of people who experience dramatic improvements in the duration and quality of your sleep.

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YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamDavisMD

Blog: WilliamDavisMD.com

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Books:

Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health; revised & expanded ed