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All About Elemental Diets

Jini Patel Thompson with Nicole Paull

Jini: Hi, I'm Jini Patel Thompson and today, Nicole Paull and I are going to be discussing all about elemental diets. So we're taking a lot of questions today and we're also talking about the different kinds of elemental diets and the pros and cons to going on each. We also, both of us, get a lot of questions on the forum and the blog and so we're going to just try and give people as much information as we can.

If you want more information about natural healing methods for digestive diseases, you can go to www.ListenToYourGut.com

Nicole, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by handing it over to you because you're the main person on the forum and I know you do a lot of phone consults for people assisting them with implementing an elemental diet. So I'm going to hand it over to you to start with.

Nicole: Okay. One question (or idea) that people often get, which I see, is the elemental diet, as we know, is fairly expensive. So they'll say, "You know what, I know I want to do this but the only way I can do this is if I work and do it at the same time." What would you say to somebody who tells you that?

Jini: That is such a difficult question. First of all, I'm going to start by, because we may have total newbies on this call, and I want to start with what an elemental diet is.

Nicole: Okay, yes.

Jini: An elemental diet is where you go on a completely liquid diet where the nutrients themselves have been processed in a way that they're pre-digested. So there's very little digestion required and with the product that I formulated, the elemental diet product I formulated called Absorb Plus, the nutrients are in the bloodstream within about 20 minutes of drinking it. So, this way, let's say your digestive capability is very reduced and your absorptive capability is very reduced, so even though you may be taking in a lot of calories, you're still losing weight because you can't absorb the nutrients from those calories. So an elemental product, a good quality one will get those nutrients straight into your bloodstream.

Now, when your GI (your gastroenterologist) recommends that you go on an elemental diet to provide bowel rest, that's again because they want to give your GI tract a break from the digestive process but they also want to reduce the stool volume that's going into your colon. Because you're on a liquid pre-digested diet, you pass very little stool and it's usually liquid and watery. I mean there are a certain percentage of people ith who it leads to constipation because the maltodextrin component, the carbohydrate component, can absorb a lot of water. But for most people it results in what feels to them like diarrhea, but it's actually not; it's just you're taking in a liquid food source, so you're passing a liquid food source.

When your doctor recommends you go on an elemental diet, they will normally recommend the hospital/pharmaceutical elemental products. If you check the ingredient list on those products, very high in oil, super high in sugar, artificial flavorings, artificial colorings, not – the protein source is usually a combination, often containing casein - which is a highly allergenic protein. They're just ridiculous products in my opinion but often, in Canada, they're covered by Medicare so that's what you get. So your results using that type of an elemental product are one thing and then your results using the product that I formulated, as a result of looking at those products and saying, "Oh my gosh, there's no way I'm putting that into my system," are very different. So I formulated Absorb Plus, which is 100% natural, the highest, most expensive whey protein you can find because it's a pure isolate. So it has a very low rate of people being allergic to it. There's no lactose, et cetera, et cetera and then you combine it into my elemental diet program called the IBD Remission Diet which is not just an elemental diet, okay. So it's bone broths, which are extremely nourishing and rebuilding to the body. It's a targeted supplementation plan. Absorb Plus itself also contains a custom blend of 10 different amino acids that I selected specifically for people in, basically, any disease state.

The IBD Remission Diet is also a very different thing from the elemental diet, which is why a lot of people with colitis and IBS have really good success rate through the IBD Remission Diet.

Nicole: Because it's really a targeted, almost like a healing spa for your body instead of only giving bowel rest and nothing else.

Jini: Exactly, that's right. That's right. And the supplements are geared to eradicate the pathogens from the gut, repopulate with good bacteria, they heal the mucosal lining, so any inflammation, ulceration gets healed. But here's the thing – as you pointed out, none of these is covered by your standard healthcare, although we do have certain people who have been able to – and there's no standard for it; I think it just depends on how persistent you are or maybe the luck of the draw, but we have heard some people who've been able to either get the cost written off against their income tax. So it's a tax write-off. They can get it written off that way or they can get a portion of it written off that way. Again, this depends on what country you're in, probably depends on what state you're in.

We have one guy here in Vancouver, Canada who he, through getting letters from his gastroenterologist, proved that Absorb Plus is the only thing he can eat and he will die without it and so he gets it 100% covered... and really it is; it's all he eats. It's all he's eaten for like three years now. He gets it 100% covered by Medicare. And then I had heard from other people, they said they've – and we keep saying to them, can you send in a list of how you do it and we can make it available to people? but so far nobody has sent that into us, but we have heard from a couple of people who had said depending on their health plan, they've been able to get coverage for it. But I think it's a very casespecific type of thing.

To answer your question, someone is saying that they can't do an elemental diet because they can't rest properly, they have to keep working in order to generate income?

Nicole: Exactly, exactly. I've heard that from a few people and it is a difficult question because, really, rest is so necessary to heal.

Jini: It is.

Nicole: Healing takes a lot of energy and when you're using all that energy to go to work or go to school and do errands or whatever, you're taking away from energy that could be used for healing.

Jini: That's right and the other key point is when you're consuming any elemental product, because the nutrients are boom into the bloodstream, there's no sustained release of nutrients or energy. So I will hear from people who say, "Oh, I feel so great, I've got so much energy," but for myself, I feel a great drop in energy when I've gone on any kind of elemental diet because there isn't that sustained release of nutrients. So even though you're getting an adequate number of calories for the day, personally, I feel really tired and I think also, I mean, if you're going on the elemental diet, it's because you've got some heavy duty healing to do. That, as you've pointed out, that takes a lot of energy, that takes a lot of rest.

So I guess my answer would be for somebody who absolutely cannot rest and they have to work, I wouldn't go to the expense of a full elemental diet because I don't think you'd see good enough results to justify the cost. What I would do is – and I've just, a couple of weeks ago, posted on my blog about this at www.ListenToYourGut.com about a half elemental diet and this is wonderful. Some researchers in Japan said, "Hey, people, we get such great remission rates with 100% elemental diet, let's try a half." They just called it a half elemental diet. And so what people do then is they combine the Absorb Plus shakes with their regular diet – I mean they would have worked out in their diet which foods they tolerate the best and so they mix it.

In the study, the participants ate half regular food and half elemental product. So for someone who's working full time, I would just really let your body be your guide and let your energy levels be your guide, and I would try to get as much of the diet elemental as possible just to give that bowel rest, just to get the improved uptake of nutrients into the system because just getting adequate nutrition can do a lot of healing for people.

Nicole: Sure, sure.

Jini: So I would do that and I would get as much elemental as you can, and then for the rest of it – or here's another way, if someone can get access to raw milk and they can tolerate raw milk, because raw milk contains special enzymes used for its digestion. It contains lactase. The proteins are not denatured. So even somebody – I mean, there's hundreds or thousands of people who cannot tolerate pasteurized milk, who are just fine with raw milk; so if they can tolerate raw, unpasteurized milk, they could do half raw milk, which provides a more sustained release of nutrients and half Absorb Plus. That might be a way to go and then that, of course, is also going to be cheaper.

Nicole: So before somebody embarked on something like that, how would they want to test the raw milk to make sure that they can tolerate it? I know how to but our listeners might not, so if you can describe that.

Jini: They would start with say a quarter cup a day at room temperature, because room temperature is the most easily tolerated and just start at that and gradually build up and just watch their body for any signs of intolerance and that will give them a good overview.

The other thing is that people have found if you want to test for tolerance even more, you take your raw milk and you make it into raw milk yogurt and you start with that because it has a higher probiotic content. So you could do either way.

You could start with making raw milk yogurt – and we have a recipe for that on JPT Wellness Circle which is www.JPTWellnessCircle.com or you can – because, again, you don't want to make normal yogurt because if you make normal yogurt, you boil the milk and you're killing all those beneficial enzymes and the beneficial probiotics that are in the milk.

To make raw milk yogurt, you only heat it to about 100-degrees and then you add a bit of gelatin if you want to firm it up but if you're okay with it being more liquidy – kind of like the Indians use yogurt when they make a lassi – then you can have it liquidy. It's really your choice.

Nicole: Some of the signs of intolerance when you were testing would be like headache or rash or diarrhea, bloating, any others? I know there are others.

Jini: Yeah, pain. The bloating one though, you know that's another one where we're getting back into that thing where its: is it intolerance is it the Herxheimer?

Nicole: Right. Or possibly even diarrhea.

Jini: Yeah. Yeah. Diarrhea could also be a clearing of pathogens. So I think a lot of it has to be intuition, like you're just going to feel good or you're not, and then a lot of it is time, you have to test it because as you know, raw milk contains a lot of beneficial bacteria. It's also one of the few sources, other than a fecal infusion, where we can get beneficial E. coli, which is like the predominant species in the human gut and people with IBD are usually deficient in many of the beneficial species. So when you start getting them in, you get the die-off and it does take your system awhile to adjust. But that's the other reason you want to start really small.

I also had a client. She started with colostrum from raw – she gets it from Organic Pastures in California and they sell raw colostrum and she started with that which is also an immune boosting substance. So she went raw colostrum, then she went raw milk yogurt, then she went raw milk.

Nicole: Right, excellent idea. And now say you were doing like a half elemental diet, whether it's half Absorb Plus and half food you know you tolerate well, or half Absorb Plus, half raw milk, whatever, would you probably be looking at a longer duration than you would on a full elemental diet or no?

Jini: Yes, I think so. And again, like we can't predict someone's healing process, so it would be hard to know, but if you look at just – just logically, if you're resting and devoting yourself to your healing and just taking in nutrients that are 100% pre-digested, the targeted supplementation plan, you're not getting stressed, you're not getting exhausted, all your body's resources can go towards healing, then yeah, you would definitely see faster results from going 100% elemental and taking the time off to heal – and you don't want to lie on the couch all day. You want to do things because health is not just lying in bed. That gives you bedsores and that can almost decrease your health, but you want to do healing things, like you want to go for long walks in the woods and breathe some fresh air, go down to the beach, you want to do yoga classes or tai chi, things that you can do at a very low energy level but that get your blood
moving, get your energy moving, you want to spend the time doing things you enjoy, maybe playing music, reading books, things that nurture yourself.

Nicole: Right, absolutely. Now, here's another one, talking about the duration thing. Another thing I see, people think sometimes and, of course, theoretically it could happen, it just doesn't, in a practical sense, seem to happen that often, are people who think, "I'm going to do six weeks of the IBD Remission Diet and I'm never going to have to think about IBD again or if it's done." Now what would you say to that?

Jini: I'd say I really hope that would happen for you but you know – and this is the thing with using words like remission, I think people equate the word remission to cure and in everything we do, Nicole, we never use the word care because we all understand that this is a Healing Journey. Something that took years and in some people, decades to manifest is not going to be healed completely in six weeks.

Nicole: Even logically speaking.

Jini: Yeah, exactly. Like the amount of – unless you're the one in however many thousand people who receive a miracle healing. Fine, that's certainly possible but it's not the norm. So you have and then as well, once you've injured the gut, that's your highly sensitive area. So unless you change everything else you're doing in relation to your gut, which of course because it has 60% of the neurotransmitters in your body is affected more than your brain or any other part of your body by your emotions, by your stress level, you have to heal everything connected with your gut; otherwise, it's highly triggered. So even for people who are used to what they consider a normal diet, it is extremely toxic to the gut. Stress levels that people think are normal, because everybody lives like that, are actually disease-producing. So you have to – and you know from your own life, we all know, that changing everything about your life takes time.

Nicole: Absolutely, yep. Even with something like EFT which can be very fast, you're still going through different layers and facets and aspects. So that takes time.

Jini: Exactly, exactly and even getting into the mind-body therapies like EFT, you know, hypnotherapy, or craniosacral therapy, same thing. Anybody who's done those therapies realizes that it's not that you just have a few sessions and voila, you're a new person. Because as you said there's layers that need to be – and for some people who've come from childhood trauma, it takes years of doing those mind-body therapies to clear everything. But the encouraging thing is, you're always getting better, you're always getting stronger, your life is becoming more positive, more enjoyable. It's not like oh, you're in this tunnel of healing for years before you see the light, no, you're always seeing some good results and I guess that's what provides us all with the encouragement to keep going.

Nicole: Absolutely. Yes. So we talked a little bit about duration and how you probably – if you go a half elemental route, you'll need to follow that for longer than if you went a full elemental route. So going into another kind of quantitative thing, in the IBD Remission book itself, you talk about how to figure out how many servings of Absorb Plus you would need per day to maintain your weight or to gain weight, have there been any updates at all regarding that?

Jini: Yes, thank you very much for asking that. When I wrote the IBD Remission Diet book, and it's still in its first edition, I went by the calorie charts that were available and they are calorie charts for normal people and I thought okay, well, let's take the amount of calories that they have listed for an active person to maintain their weight, because when you're ill, you need a little bit more. Well, we really had no idea how many more calories an ill person needs just to do the healing, let alone maintain, let alone gain weight.

In the book, we recommend people calculate the number of calories they need based on 15 calories per pound. So if you weigh a 110 pounds, you multiple 110 x 15 and whatever you get, that's the number of calories you have to consume each day just to maintain your weight. However, based on experience and you can confirm this for me, Nicole, based on your experience with clients, we're finding that for someone who is ill and they're not active, so they're pretty sedentary, they're sitting down a lot of the day, working in an office or what have you, just to maintain their weight, we're looking at about 20 calories per pound.

Nicole: Especially, and even multiply that or increase that if you're dealing with a child or an adolescent who's still growing.

Jini: Exactly, exactly.

Nicole: Then you're adding even more.

Jini: I was going through some of the people who have had their kids on elemental diets and these are kids who weigh 50 pounds, 40 pounds – they're very underweight kids – and I was looking at what we eventually figured out that they had to take to gain weight based on their initial weight and it was coming out to something like 50 calories per pound for a growing child who is in a disease state. So because the growth alone takes so many calories, and the other thing is these kids are behind in their growth and then, of course, you run into the problem of how do you get seven to eight shakes a day into a child because they are...

Nicole: That's what I was going to ask next actually because another thing you hear sometimes, you know be it with consultation clients or on the forum is, "I just can't make myself have more than three shakes a day," and that's like not even enough to maintain weight, when you think about it.

Jini: Yeah. Well, and see, this is one of the reasons why people say, "Why didn't my gastroenterologist tell me about an elemental diet?" Well, this is one of the reasons, because the compliance is so low. So they figure it's not worth it because nobody sticks to it anyway, because it is really, really hard. I experienced that myself a couple of times, the few times I've been on it. It's nasty. When I went on it the first time and I went from 99 pounds to 136 pounds in six weeks, I was drinking nine shakes a day. That basically means you get up and you're mixing a shake till you go to bed continually – something is always going in your mouth, whether it's broth or homemade jello, or a shake. So you're having basically a shake every hour to hour and a half from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed and yeah, it takes – I mean EFT can help to deal with the emotional aspect of it, but at the end of the day, it's just got to come down to your willpower and how badly you want it.

Nicole: Right. Right.

Jini: So in that way, it's not a tool for everybody because some people, they're just – and that's why I say to people, when people say, "I'm having a few symptoms here and a few symptoms that and I was thinking about going on the elemental diet," I was like, "Are you crazy?! Why would you want to do that to yourself unless you're hemorrhaging and your back is to the wall and you have no other choice?" For me, I find it extremely difficult to adhere to and to take in enough.

So for someone like that client you mentioned who can't get in more than three a day, well, they're going to decline on that intake because that's not even enough calories or nutrition for maintenance. So for someone like that, the solution is to mix it up, to do the half elemental diet.

Nicole: So they get some bowel rest but they still get some regular food too?

Jini: Yep. Or here's another thing that I've heard people do, instead of doing, say, a full six weeks on the elemental diet uninterrupted, they'll mix it up because they'll say, "You know what, I can handle it for a week," so they'll do six or eight shakes a day for one week and then they'll go half elemental, then they'll mix it with food, and then they might do that for a week or two and then they're like, "Okay, I can handle another week," and they'll do another week. So, no, you still won't get the same results as if you do exclusively elemental for six weeks but you'll get a lot better than if you just kept eating a regular diet with inadequate nutrient absorption.

Nicole: You're at least going to make progress and that has to be worth something. Absolutely.

Jini: Yeah, exactly.

Nicole: Now for the rare – in my experience they are rare – but for the rare person who is intolerant to something in Absorb Plus, what steps would you go through, number 1, to determine if you are actually intolerant, before just abandoning it completely?

Jini: Yes, it's a very good question because again, then we're back into that Herxheimer reaction, pathogen clearance issue, which Absorb Plus and the elemental diet definitely facilitates and accelerates in people. So you'll often get people who will go on it and they will feel absolutely miserable for a week and they'll have massive bloating and they'll have nonstop diarrhea and so some people may think, "Oh, I'm intolerant," but actually what they're doing is they're clearing the pathogens and they're having a detox.

On the other hand, you can get someone who does that and they actually are intolerant. This is the gray area about it that I wish we could give people a clear cut answer but we just can't, nobody can. So that's where each person has to just plug into their intuition, tune into their gut, and try to figure it out and if they can stick with it in two weeks, if you can – okay, maybe here's the better answer. Stick with it for two weeks. If by the end of two weeks you still feel sick as a dog, then it's likely an intolerance, because the pathogen clearance should be done by two weeks.

The other thing is if the person is simultaneously doing the Wild Oregano Oil Protocol and the probiotic supplementation, that helps a lot with that clearance reaction, that detox. It helps to tone it down, it helps to get it done faster, but helps you feel better while it's going on, so that's the – and when I rewrite – in fact, I'm in the middle of rewriting the IBD Remission Diet – I'm making the Wild Oregano Protocol a part of the diet because I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen from people, that they get much faster results if they start the pathogen clearance right at the beginning of the diet rather than waiting till the end.

Nicole: Yes, so let's say you have somebody who is in a really delicate condition and we know how hypersensitive people with IBD can get, so say we're taking somebody who is in a condition like you were, when you were at that 99 pounds and hemorrhaging and just really, really sick and malnourished, would you start all three right away, the IBD Remission Diet, the wild oregano oil, and the probiotics, or would you do it in a somewhat staged strategy or what would you do in a case like that?

Jini: Knowing what I know now and seeing different people test out different strategies, I would start on it right away, but I would do a very gradual ramp up in the dosing. So when you're full on Jini's Wild Oregano Oil Protocol, you're taking 10 drops three to five times a day. So what I would do is if you're in that highly, very rundown trigger hypersensitive state, I would start with say three drops twice a day and then gradually increase both the number of drops of wild oregano and the frequency, likewise with the probiotics and Phase 1 of the Wild Oregano Protocol. You're supposed to take a teaspoon of each probiotic species every night before bed. I would start with a quarter teaspoon or half a teaspoon and then gradually ramp it up.

Here's the other thing, and I'm going to address this now because we had a question come in about this over the webcast. Coralee from San Francisco, she says, "Since wild oregano oil can produce a hot sensation, it seems that regardless of diluting with water, it would also produce that sensation in a gut that is already inflamed and trigger more inflammation and pain?" Okay, that's your question. So here's the thing – wild oregano is one of those herbal things that how it presents is not how it is. So even though you put it in your mouth and it is like, "Oh my gosh, it's like the hottest chili pepper, it's burning me." So you think it's burning me, right? It's actually not and, Nicole, you experienced this yourself, you did a little test for JPT Wellness Circle – wild oregano is used to treat burns.

Nicole: Yes, and you know what, it didn't hurt on the burn at all. I did dilute it somewhat the second day but it was not uncomfortable on that burn and that was already sensitive, I mean like a second-degree burn on my neck.

Jini: And they use it with burn victims because it actually is (#1) an anti-inflammatory and (#2) it is a wound healer. I know it seems counterintuitive that you put it in your mouth and it feels like it's burning, but it's actually not. It's actually soothing and healing. It has the same effect in the gut; it is anti-inflammatory and it does heal the inflammation and the ulceration. It can be used in that way throughout the entire digestive tract, because some people will hold it in their mouth for mouth ulcers and then other people, if you've got any kind of a sore throat or an infection in your throat, you just dilute it with water and just keep taking sips so it's really coating your throat. As it goes down, it heals that. So again, it is a substance that although it seems harsh, it's actually not.

The only caution with it is you can't use the essential oil, because any essential oil is too concentrated for the body, but any commercial wild oregano oil that you buy – and the brands that I recommend, the Joy of the Mountains and the North American Herb & Spice – they are already diluted with olive oil. And then from there, if you're using them in a sensitive area like genitalia or the inside of your nose, you then dilute it further with wild oregano.

Nicole: Have you ever tried putting it on the inside of your nose? I have to ask that.

Jini: I have. Oh my lord, it's the worst. Water pours from every orifice. Your eyes stream. Oh, it's seriously nasty. So yeah, not recommended.

Nicole: That's funny. This was kind of a rare question but it is one that has come up a couple of times. You mentioned the odd person and I've noticed, especially if somebody is diseased or the problem is manifesting itself more towards constipation versus diarrhea, then they can become very constipated on the IBD Remission Diet. Now, what would you recommend for that? Could they take some psyllium to help move things along? Of course, then it's not really elemental anymore.

Jini: Yeah, technically, if they're on like the six-week strictly elemental diet, no. They can't take any of the stool motility agents. They can't take psyllium, they can't take flax seed but what they can take for the constipation is magnesium citrate because that will mobilize the bowels. They can take vitamin C in ascorbic acid form. Some people don't like that because it can make the poo acidic so it kind of burns your butt as it comes out, but other people, it doesn't affect quite like that – so you basically have to test it and see.

You can also increase the oil content and maybe have some of the flax oil, or Udo's oil on its own. If you're really bunged up, I would just start taking some castor oil, some cold-pressed castor oil on its own and you can take that, like even just a teaspoon might be enough to just provide that motility to get things going.

Nicole: Right, move things a little bit.

Jini: And then the other thing is intermittently like if you use it, say, once a week, you could use the senna. So you can get that in tea bags, the senna tea. That's a laxative that you don't want to use long-term because it can create dependency but certainly, if you just use it – actually, I just found out my grandparents, they used senna for about 50 years.

Nicole: Wow.

Jini: They were Indian, Hindu and they were quite concerned about having that daily bowel movement. If they ever missed it, they would use the senna tea but I – oh no, actually, they used senna powder and I asked my Mum, "Well, how often would that happen," and she said, "Actually, no more than once a week." So it seems that if you're taking any of that, you actually can use it long term with no ill effects.

Nicole: Because you're only taking it really once in awhile, not like everyday.

Jini: Yep, yes, exactly and actually, that's one of the questions that came in on the webcast too. For people, even if they're not on the elemental diet... this person said magnesium irritates their gut so they were asking for any other ideas. So you could do the – remember people used to take a teaspoon of castor oil a day?

Nicole: Nasty. It is nasty stuff but it does work.

Jini: Yeah, and actually I was at a friend's house and her husband just started on the cod liver oil and he takes a tablespoon a day and he said, "Wow," has it ever improved his bowel movements and I said, "Oh, I had not heard of that from cod liver oil," because I mean I take it every day and I haven't seen any result, but I guess everybody's different. So you have to do a bit of experimenting.

Nicole: Right. To see what actually is going to work best for your body.

Jini: Yeah. Oh and I'll give everyone another tip – if you're not on the elemental diet, this is another remedy. I just heard about it. My brother is a doctor and one of his patients came in and she told him, "I was constipated for 23 years and I've cleared it completely just taking molasses." I went on the internet and I thought because I said, "Well, how is she taking it?" And, of course, he didn't get me the details; so I went on the internet and I looked it up as a constipation remedy and I tested it and so basically, what you do is you take two tablespoons of organic blackstrap molasses and you dissolve it in hot water to your taste, because I find it quite sweet so I kind of have to add about eight ounces of water, and you just drink that on an empty stomach before you go to bed. I've got to do some more research to find out why it moves the bowels, but it works really well.

Nicole: Hmmm... interesting.

Jini: If you can't do that, you can't do the molasses on the elemental diet because molasses obviously is a disaccharide.

Nicole: But if you were doing like a half elemental diet in that case...

Jini: Yes.

Nicole: ...and you were struggling more with constipation versus liquid stools...

Jini: Right and see, if you were doing a half elemental diet, then you could do the psyllium or the ground flax seed.

Nicole: Right, yep.

Jini: And just a tip for people, Jim Ehmke, when I did a teleseminar with him, he shared that flax seed, he finds is better tolerated than psyllium. I've just been testing this myself and I would have to agree. So I would say to people go with the ground flax seed first and see how that works with you and then test the psyllium. Also, you get the omega-3's.

Nicole: Right. Now, you can buy like Spectrum, I know makes bags of pre-ground flaxseed and then you're kind of encouraged to use it up fairly quickly because once you open the bag, it starts its process of not being fresh.

Jini: Yep but you know what I like because I don't like that hanging over me, that you've got to finish it, you just go to whatever your cheap little department store is and you can get a coffee grinder for $10-$20 and the coffee grinder is the perfect thing to just grind up a tablespoon at a time.

Nicole: Exactly and then because the whole flaxseeds will stay good for a long time you don't have that – and you can buy them in bulk, you don't have to worry about it going bad.

Jini: Yeah. Keep it in your fridge and scoop out a teaspoon or a tablespoon each day and you can mix it with your oatmeal, yogurt, or however really you want to take it.

Nicole: Yeah. I know you have a Book Updates page that's on your old forum at www.JiniPatelThompson.com but even so, questions seem to come in that are covered in them. So could you just briefly tell us what some of the updates are to the IBD Remission Diet, the first edition – like probiotics; starting them right away or not doing bacterial soil organisms?

Jini: Let's start with that. The book updates of the IBD Remission Diet are... the first one is do not ingest bacterial soil organisms. At this point they are still highly experimental and again, if you want the reasons for these updates, please go to www.JiniPatelThompson.com and just click on Book Updates, they're all there. No soil organisms.

The other thing is that people would often say, "I'm having really urgent explosive frequent bowel movements. I'm getting diarrhea. This is not working," and here's the thing you need to know that first of all, that's totally normal when you're on any elemental diet product and because the nature of what you're drinking is liquid, the nature of the stool you're going to be passing is usually liquid and because it's liquid its more urgent and explosive. Also, as a result of that, sometimes people can get some cramping with that because the bowel, of course, is not used to having liquid stool.

The ways to make that a bit easier are you can start by reducing the amount of oil per shake. So you would start let's say only a quarter teaspoon of Udo's or flax oil and work up from there. Also, many people tolerate the Udo's Choice oil better than just straight flax oil and personally, I prefer the taste and I like it.

Nicole: Me too.

Jini: There are so many beneficial oils like the Evening Primrose in Udo's that I think it's well worth the extra cost. The other thing is in the IBD Remission Diet, I'm getting everybody to add vitamin C because not only it's an immune boosting but it really aids with blood clotting, but some people are finding that even though the vitamin C is in mineral ascorbate form, it's still resulting in increased bowel movements, so you can reduce that and then again, as you stabilize, try to increase it.

The other thing is you start taking – and this is again what I said I'm going to be changing in the new edition – I'm going to get everybody on probiotics right at the beginning. So even before you start on the elemental diet, start getting those probiotics going because ideally, what you want is you want to be on 7 to 10 billion CFUs of each species everyday during the diet.

Because what happened when the book first came out, according to the research at the time, there was no undigested carbohydrate matter that passed into the colon, therefore, all the bacteria would die off. Well, now the research is showing that actually there is some – no one can really quantify it – but there is a certain amount of carbohydrate that is still passing into the colon. Therefore, you do need to start on the probiotics right away, right at the beginning of the diet and then ideally, you want to do the Wild Oregano Oil Protocol and that's not in this edition of the IBD Remission Diet.

So you've got to get it. It's in Listen To Your Gut but if you don't have Listen To Your Gut, I've also made it available for free on my blog. Again, go to www.ListenToYourGut.com go to my blog and you can just type in "wild oregano" in the Search box, and it will pull it up because I've offered that for free there for people.

The other thing that can really accelerate people's healing is to do – if they're fine with enemas – to do the probiotic retention enema. So that's a way that you get a megadose of probiotics directly into the colon and you hold it until it's all absorbed or just for as long as you can and that can really jump-start the whole healing and tolerance process.

The other thing that we've noticed with people is most people who are at the point where they need to do an IBD remission diet have a Candida albicans yeast infection. As you know, Candida albicans is a natural resident of our GI tract. It only becomes a problem when it gets too prolific. So it gets out of balance, basically. So that's why we now recommend that people start the Wild Oregano Oil Protocol again on day 1 of the diet so that they are addressing the yeast problem simultaneously. However, if you can't or if you don't want to do that, it's actually fine because this is the other very common question that we get a lot is about – doesn't the Maltodextrin and the fructose in Absorb Plus feed Candida and it's going to make...

Nicole: Right, yeah.

Jini: Right? Here's the thing and this is what we tell people is you have to heal in layers. When you're looking at inflammation, infection, ulceration, and hemorrhaging, a Candida infection is very low on the priority list and you need to address the more serious deficits in your body first, which the elemental diet will do. Then once you've healed all that, then you can address the Candida...

Nicole: The smaller.

Jini: Exactly, but people, especially in the naturopathic community have gone a little rabid on the Candida count and they just make people nuts about it.

I had one reader, she was bleeding continually and she wouldn't go on Absorb Plus because she said, "Well, I'm going to wait for the fructose-free version," and I'm like, "You don't need to do that. You can do this now and then you can..." But no, she was like, "No, I'll..." I mean, obviously, she had a lot of other stuff going on in her life because she was trying some alternative healing methods, the Sedona method, things like that which are very beneficial but you can't rely on those alone and she actually ended up dying because she wouldn't do what would help her now, because she was so concerned with this Candida. Probably she was at a point to where she was so malnourished, she probably wasn't thinking properly either.

That's the other thing is we're going to say okay, either don't worry about the Candida
until you're done, or, start treating it right away, which is my preference – and what we
found with the wild oregano is unless you're having (and even if you're having)
hemorrhaging, I think you could still start it just at a reduced dosage, just a couple drops
three times a day I think would help to stop the bleeding. I haven't personally tested...

Nicole: And then you just very gradually ramp up.

Jini: Yeah.

Nicole: A quick question about the probiotic retention enema, because sometimes you have somebody who decides, "I'm going to start my probiotic supplementation with this mega dose," and they have like a massive Herxheimer reaction.

Jini: That's what happened to Jay over at www.crohnsboy.com

Nicole: Yes. Would you say it's a good idea to make sure that you have your oral supplementation at a therapeutic level or at least that it started and you've been taking it for some period of time before you do the enema, or is it kind of a matter of preference that as long as you know you might have this Herxheimer reaction that...

Jini: Yeah. I think it's personality, because Jay over at crohnsboy.com, he's a "go hard or go home" kind of person. I think he quite enjoyed having such a "Whoa!" you know. And a lot of people do, they love to feel like they're really hammering something, clearing it out. So if that's your personality, go for it and you know for someone like that, if they maybe did a probiotic retention enema every, say, three to four days, they probably could be... just completely change their bacterial flora in a couple of weeks.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jini: That would be great, right? But then for someone else, there's like, well, that's not worth the downtime. It's not worth the Herxheimer. It's not worth the detox for someone to go through.

Nicole: Exactly.

Jini: So for that person, yes, I would do what you suggested; I would start with the oral supplementation. The difference is that the oral supplementation takes a lot longer to get the bacteria established.

Nicole: Absolutely.

Jini: I mean, it can take – I've seen in some people it can take six months to a year to get a good bacterial flora established just by oral because again, we're dealing with imbalances that have been there for decades. Many people that we hear from, from infancy they've been on antibiotics and never given probiotics to follow.

Nicole: So you can just imagine the kind of imbalance that perpetuates itself over years in a case like that.

Jini: Yep, and then when we did our probiotic teleseminar, people are also getting much faster results doing probiotic layering. So they're doing the oral powders, they're doing the oral capsules, and then they're also doing the probiotic retention enema.

Nicole: I'm glad you mentioned that too and just for anybody who's new to the Wellness Circle, the teleseminar that Jini mentioned is I think it's just called Probiotics 1. It's with Natasha Trenev and Jini and it's available in the teleseminar section of the JPT Wellness Circle site. So if you haven't heard it, that's well worth listening to.

Jini: Yeah, it's an excellent one. Nicole, I'm going to jump in here with some of these questions on the webcast that people have sent in.

This person says, and again, this can sort of be related to what you said before, she says she's been diagnosed with Crohn's in the colon and small intestine. Her GI feels she could benefit from the elemental diet as it would start mucosal healing. "My question is after coming off the elemental diet, would the inflammation return again?"

Again, it all depends on how much healing you need to do. We've had some people who have to stay on an elemental diet for three months. So they have to do 12 weeks rather than 6 continually and then thereafter, you have to keep taking the supplements, which keep your bacterial flora strong and healthy, you may still have pathogens that need clearing because – in Listen To Your Gut I talk about pathogens like mycobacteria, which have a two to three year lifecycle; so they go dormant and then they go active. So every time they come active again, you've got to go back on the Wild Oregano Oil Protocol and you've got to kill those ones that are active, then they'll go dormant, then they'll go active.

So it's not that this is a cure. It's not that you go on an elemental diet and that's it, you're done and you can go to McDonald's everyday for the rest of your life. You have to keep going with all the immune protocols.

On the other hand, Nicole, you're an example of this, didn't you just do the elemental diet once?

Nicole: I actually did do it twice but the second time I did it, it wasn't because I was ill, it was actually I got it into my head, I wanted to do a detox and that's a very, very gentle way of detoxing the body. So I just did it for two weeks the second time.

Jini: Right. And again, but after you had done it the first time, you have never had to do it again.

Nicole: Oh no, nope, I never did. Now granted, my situation was exactly like what you said, I did stay on the Wild Oregano Protocol and I cycled through the various phases just depending on whether symptoms were active. I never had my symptoms get bad like they were before I went on the elemental diet again. And of course, I was very mindful about what I ate and how I took care of myself, making sure I got enough rest, I got very into EFT. So I was using that to help me heal some bad patterns that had contributed to being ill.

Jini: Let's just talk about that briefly. For the people who are not familiar, EFT is short for Emotional Freedom Techniques and it is an acupuncture tapping technique. It's a healing tool that integrates the mind with the body. And again, this is the other thing; if you think that you can just do physical healing and see long-term results, you're not going to be pleasantly surprised, because you can't. Because these diseases are centered in the gut, which is the emotional center for the body, again, it contains more neurotransmitters in the brain itself, you have to heal your emotional contributors. So that's either past or present trauma, it's unhealthy behavior patterns, unhealthy belief systems, fears, there's a huge amount of fear that underlies gut issues, and so you need some kind of mind body healing tool. Just psychotherapy or going to a counselor, that's not going to do it, because it doesn't integrate with the physical body. So the people, like Nicole, who have the high degree of success with these protocols are working as hard on healing the emotional as the physical, would you say that's correct?

Nicole: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely and the people who, you know they say, "Yeah, well, that's interesting," or they might do one EFT session and so they don't see a miracle cure and so they say, "Okay, well, EFT must not work." Again, you're going into different layers and it takes time to go through all that but yes, I have absolutely seen in myself and in consultation clients the people who get the best results are the people who are simultaneously and with equal weight pursuing healing in both the physical and the emotional/spiritual, absolutely.

Jini: Yeah, exactly. A quick question here from someone. She says... this is funny, this is Kate, she says, "I absolutely love Absorb Plus and this is part of my problem." That's a new one. "What would you consider to be too much Absorb Plus for a 115-pound moderately active 45-year old woman who has a great deal of hormonal issues?"

Again, too much Absorb Plus, I would say that if you're gaining weight that you don't want to gain, that's too much. Up until that point, you should just go for it because again, the amino acids and the trace minerals and all the micro nutrients that are in Absorb Plus also help to resolve hormonal issues. So you're not just getting nourishment from a calorie point of view. You're really getting foundational body building nutrient nourishment. So I would basically say go ahead, and I would think that 115 pounds and you're moderately active, I would say six to seven shakes a day would probably be normal for maintenance.

Would you, Nicole?

Nicole: Yeah, especially if you have some activity going on. Yes, that sounds about right to me.

Jini: Yeah, so if you need to gain weight, you probably can easily be taking eight or if you wanted to gain weight really fast, you could do nine a day. So yeah, I wouldn't worry and that's what I say to people. I say because everybody's different – and you see this with people, right? Metabolism is different from person to person.

Nicole: Yeah, and it can change over time too in the same person.

Jini: Exactly. So you really shouldn't get locked into the calorie count. What you should do when you're on an elemental diet is go by your weight. So if you want to be gaining weight and you're not, just keep taking more, more, more, more up to 12 a day, 12 a day is the maximum, until you're seeing the weight gain that you want to see and likewise, if you want to lose weight, then do your calorie calculation. Okay, let's say your ideal weight is 130, do your calorie calculation for what it would take to maintain 130 pounds and eat that number of shakes but if you're losing weight too quickly, increase it a little bit or I'm sure people would say like, "Are you kidding? Who can lose weight too quickly?" {laughing}

Nicole: Although you can because you can put your body into like a famine mode where it will really slow your metabolism down.

Jini: That's what I'm talking about; you don't want to damage your metabolism so that you get a kickback reaction when you go back to normal food.

Just gear it towards how your body is doing and how your weight gain is doing. And if you don't, if you're not tolerating fats well, that's fine but try to get something into each shake. Even if it's just a quarter teaspoon a shake, start with that and then as you heal and as your hormones normalize and all those things happen, you will be able to tolerate more and more good fats, which you absolutely desperately need because the cell membrane is 40% fat. I think that's the other thing people – because when people have had Crohn's and colitis for a long time, you get really anti-fat and the GI's will tell you, "don't eat any butter or oil, you can't tolerate it."

Nicole: Yep, yep.

Jini: And sure, at some points you can't but as you heal your digestive ability and your absorptive ability, you can tolerate those fats and then your body is desperately needing them.

Nicole: Absolutely. Can I put in one more question? How about the occasional person that has been, and possibly still is, on various medications and wants to use the IBD Remission Diet as a support to the weaning process?

Jini: Yes, they can definitely do that because as we know, none of these drugs heal, they just suppress the symptoms. So they drive them deeper into the body, they drive them underground, but meanwhile, systemically, things are getting worse and worse. When you remove the drugs, all the damage that is there but not evident, becomes evident and so all of a sudden...

Nicole: It's like a mask has been taken off.

Jini: Exactly. And so the person feels a lot worst and their symptoms come roaring in and so yes, definitely, the IBD remission diet, because it is so gentle and supportive, can definitely help during the weaning process and also can help-- again, when you remove that suppressive mechanism which is the drug, your bleeding can really come in heavy then. That's definitely when you want to be on something like the Absorb Plus and the probiotics and the wild oregano and the amino... everything that's in there and also, you would probably, at that point, use the Healing Implant Enema. You have all those tools to actually heal what's caused the bleeding.

Nicole: Right, not Band-Aid, but actually heal the cause.

Jini: Yes, exactly. Dr. Silvio Najt who is a medical doctor who healed his daughter's colitis using my protocols, he and I are about halfway through a book we're co-writing. This is going to be wonderful, Nicole, because he is getting into all the drugs that they use for IBD and he's telling you what's the mechanism, how they work, and why nobody should take them.

Nicole: How neat.

Jini: Yeah, which of course is an area that me – I'm not even a health professional, let alone a medical doctor, I've just not gone there but because he is a medical doctor...

Nicole: He knows.

Jini: He knows and because of his daughter, he has basically been bathing in IBD research for the last few years. He's pulling it all together for people and showing them, like your GI is telling you this, but here's the facts and here's what's going on underneath the symptom suppression, here's what it's actually doing to all of the systems and tissues, et cetera, to your body and et cetera, et cetera. I said to him, I said, "Well, I just hope you realize that the FDA could get really angry at you. You might suffer a bit of a backlash, but you know Silvio, he's like, "Bring it on!" {laughing}

Nicole: Very good. I can't wait to read that. So it's about halfway done and, of course—

Jini: We're about halfway done, yeah.

Nicole: Life happens in the meantime but ideally, when would you hope to have that available?

Jini: Oh gosh, you know what, if it was me writing it, I could tell you because I know how long I take. Silvio has had a book published in the medical field, so he's not a stranger to writing but still, I don't know. If we say a year, then we're covered, right? I mean, we're working on getting it out as fast as we can because we know that... because the other thing, him as a medical doctor, he says, "Listen To Your Gut is great, but" he says, "it's too complicated. It's too much information. Patients don't want that. They want to know just tell me what to do, step 1, step 2, step 3." And you and I know that when you're truly healing it's a lot more complex than that because of all the factors we've discussed just on this call about how everybody is so different and coming in with different pathogen infection rates, someone who's had gut issues for one year is going to have a completely different healing path than someone who has had them for 30 years.

Nicole: Exactly.

Jini: But having said that, there still are the same key steps to eradicate pathogens, heal the mucosal lining, repopulate with the good bacteria. So the book we're working on will be a simplified version of the healing protocols that will likely work for most of the people, most of the time.

Nicole: Right, right, right.

Jini: I've got one more question here on the webcast. This person says – this is Barry, and he says, "I have had IBS for 15 years. In the last year, things have gotten significantly worst. I am told I have SIBO," which is an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria in the small intestine. He says, "I recently had the ALCAT test for food intolerances and they say I have a mild intolerance to whey protein. I have a very irritated small intestine and find it very difficult to eat as almost everything seems to irritate it. I recently tried Vivonex but it seems to give me a lot of indigestion. I'm currently on your Wild Oregano Protocol and would like to try Absorb Plus. Do you think I should trust this ALCAT food intolerance test? Even if the ALCAT test is accurate, might the benefits of Absorb Plus outweigh the negative? Your opinion would be greatly appreciated."

Okay, so first of all, the ALCAT, if I'm not mistaken, is a blood allergy test and I had one of those done myself because I was interested in seeing what the accuracy of it is and then I also spoke to a couple of doctors who specialized in food allergy testing and they confirmed for me that the accuracy rate of the blood test, which basically tests for the immune antibodies such as IgE, IgA, et cetera, they are about 75-80% accurate. So they're 20-25% inaccurate. And what I found when I did the test is, I wouldn't say they were accurate, I would say they're maybe 50% accurate in my case because, of course, having been on the – your best, best, best form of testing for food intolerances and allergies is to actually do an elemental diet so you clear everything and then you start reintroducing foods one by one and you test to see what your body actually tolerates and what it doesn't.

So having that as my guide and I compared that to my blood allergy test results, I would say it was about 50% accurate for me. So I would say go ahead and test it because if you – and again, as he pointed out, if your intolerance is mild, the benefits in terms of the gut healing and, Nicole, you must have experienced even in your own body, as you heal yourself, your food intolerances disappear.

Nicole: Absolutely, yep, absolutely.

Jini: Often you will have an intolerance because your gut is so inflamed and because the mucosal lining is damaged, but if you're doing a healing therapy that reduces inflammation and heals the damage to the mucosal lining and to the microvilli, ooohh, all of a sudden you're not intolerant to a whole ton of things that you previously couldn't tolerate.

And then, Nicole, as you pointed out, the EFT, I have in one of my infoletters an article written by someone who had massive, really intense food allergies. She would have a trace amount of something and she would have anaphylaxis or she would have a rash or something, and she healed it completely using EFT. Because again, there's a whole mind-body component to food allergies. People think food allergies are just a physical thing but they're not and the strongest evidence that I've seen for this is people with multiple personality disorder. When they're in one personality, they are...

Nicole: Allergic and when they're in another...

Jini: ...they're allergic to peanuts. If they have even a trace of peanut oil, they will go
into anaphylactic shock. In another personality...

Nicole: Same body.

Jini: ...they can eat a peanut and peanut butter until the cows come home. Same physical body. The only that is changed is the energetic and emotional aspects of that body. So that's the other thing.

I would say in answer to your question, Barry, yeah, go ahead and test it and if you want to cover yourself, do some EFT at the same time on that issue.

Nicole, did you have any last thing before I – I'm just going through these questions that came in.

Nicole: No, we covered all my FAQs.

Jini: This person is saying, again – Do you have any experience or information about the new drug Apriso (mesalamine) which helps with inflammation and leaky gut? Results from trials have been very positive according to the GI doc.

Again, mesalamine is not a new medication; they've probably just reformulated it slightly and put a new name on it so they can market hard on it again.

No, again, as we discussed, all of these drugs, they don't help, they don't heal, they just suppress and meanwhile, everything's getting worse underneath. Again, I would just encourage you to do your research and then, of course, make whatever decision you feel is safe and right for your own body.

Nicole, let's open up the lines and see if we've – sometimes we do have people still who phone, amazingly. Most people are on the webcast. Let's open up the lines and see if anyone online has a question.

Janice: My name is Janice Walker and my son has ulcerative colitis and has finished four weeks of the IBD Remission Diet. He only got up to four shakes and then he started throwing them up so he couldn't do anymore than that, so he had to come off that. He also weaned off of prednisone at the same time while on the diet and was taking high dosages of probiotics. He actually started the whole IBD Remission Diet on your retention enema, the probiotic one, and that cleared out everything, it did a good job at that. He was on the probiotics, started the wild oregano two weeks ago. We're starting to build it up. We're at six drops three times a day.

I was talking to Nicole on the forum and she suggested – because he's got sort of bad diarrhea, it tends to happen more at night. He's only taking one drink a day in the morning, so most of his bowel movements are through the night, very explosive – to do the clay and the psyllium powder or the flax seed powder. He's done psyllium just before the diet started and it did form stool quite quickly.

You mentioned the flax seed. It's a flax seed powder. I found a really good one that's sprouted flax seed powder. Is that what you're referring to?

Jini: Yes. You can buy it in any form. You can buy it already ground up or you can buy them in whole flaxseeds and then you just use a coffee grinder to grind and press them yourself.

As Nicole pointed out, if you're buying one that's ground already, the shelf life is shorter so you just have to use it faster. Because they have those omega-3 oils, they go rancid very quickly. So that's something you really want to stay on top of because, of course, rancidity is going to increase diarrhea.

Janice: Right.

Jini: And just smell it. When you first open it, stick your nose in there immediately and you'll be able to smell.

Janice: And I'll be able to know then because I was wondering about that with the flax seed oil he was having, how would I know if flax seed oil tastes like flax seed oil; so I guess you would know if it tastes bad.

Jini: It tastes bad but also, even with the flax seed oil, you can smell it. You'd be able to smell when it goes rancid. It's just that old oil smell.

Janice: So sprouted flax seed is supposed to be better. That's okay as well?

Jini: Oh, yes. Yeah, that would be fine and you know, I would experiment mixing it with the bentonite clay and just start with say – if you want to be really cautious, start with a quarter teaspoon of bentonite, but if he's tolerated bulking agents in the past, maybe start with half a teaspoon because that will also help. Bentonite traps any toxins or pathogens and carries them out of the body. So I would do that for say two weeks and then go to just the flaxseed.

Janice: Okay. So he can sprinkle that on some rice cereal or something like that. That would be fine, right?

Jini: Yeah.

Janice: He was taking the Natren at three times a day at one teaspoon each. So since the wild oregano we put that down, right?

Jini: Right.

Janice: Okay, so now we're just doing it once. He can't take it at night because he goes to the bathroom all night long and he finds that probiotic actually stimulates it.

Jini: Oh right, okay.

Janice: Which is odd because I haven't heard that. I've been reading it. I've been researching for it so long and I think...

Jini: Yeah, normally, it calms the bowel but maybe he's got some stuff he needs to keep clearing. Have you tried taking it in the morning then, the probiotics?

Janice: We're taking it just before dinner because now we're doing the wild oregano as well. So it's time... like you have to space these things out, right?

Jini: Yes.

Janice: And he's taking the MucosaHeal. So he's taking that with the wild oregano spaced at 15 minutes apart, then two hours later, we have to take the probiotics so we just decided to do it before dinner and take the wild oregano before bed with the MucosaHeal.

Jini: Yeah, that's fine.

Janice: But now his probiotics are less than seven billion. You said 7 to 10?

Jini: Yes.

Janice: And how long can he stay on it like that?

Jini: What he can try, and you can experiment with, is increasing the dosage. It's two billion per half teaspoon, right?

Janice: Right. So he's taking one teaspoon.

Jini: So one and a half teaspoons would give you six billion.

Janice: Yeah. It's okay to do that...

Jini: You could do two teaspoons of each in the single dose.

Janice: Oh, could I; because I was doing one and a half before because I couldn't do it three times a day because with all the other liquid in them.

Jini: No, you can.

Janice: So the two teaspoons one shot, one shot deal just before dinner, 15 minutes before should be fine?

Jini: Yep.

Janice: Okay, I'll do that.

Jini: Yeah, good idea.

Janice: So that sounds good. Great. Thank you.

Jini: You're welcome, Janice. Does anybody else have a question?

Female: Yes, hi. This is my first time I have joined you. I just came across you on the
web two days ago and I have been...

Jini: Oh, wow.

Female: Yeah, I mean and I am a big researcher. I don't know how I missed you but I have every book on GI stuff for a couple years now, and I am so thrilled to find somebody that offers such comprehensive information because I don't want to know what to do; I want to know why I'm doing it. I want to know all the layers of the questions that come up. So I appreciate your approach so much.

Jini: Oh, thank you.

Female: You're welcome. I was thinking about which products to try to experiment with that you suggest and one of the things – I sent in the question regarding the wild oregano oil about it burning. I have irritable bowel and I am okay some days and some days not, and I am more of the constipation type. My system is extremely sensitive to the point where supplements are – I just don't do well. I do better on natural things. One of the things that has come up in my system that is one of the causes of the irritable bowel is a parasite... it's a pathogen actually called Blastocystis hominis.

Jini: Oh, yeah.

Female: In some places, it's considered pathogenic and some not in terms of being symptomatic. The drugs to eradicate it are very, very harsh and my system couldn't take it to begin with. So I am wondering if you know much about that in terms of what it does to – I think in Canada they don't even consider it as pathogenic as they do in this country. I'm not sure but that's what my GI doctor said anyway.

Jini: Yeah, it varies.

Female: Would your Wild Oregano Oil Protocol, could that help to eradicate it or control it or would that help in any way?

Jini: The short answer is nobody knows because, of course, there's no funding to hold clinical trials with these substances where we can take people who have confirmed hominis infection and put them on a Wild Oregano Protocol and then test them at the end and see what happens.

Female: Right, right.

Jini: That's a problem with it. So what a lot of people are doing is they are just – the Wild Oregano Oil Protocol will benefit you regardless. So what you can do is you can
do it and see how your symptoms are by the end of it basically, because don't forget the
Wild Oregano Protocol is not just wild oregano, it is wild oregano and the high dose
probiotics. It's a combined benefit to the body.

The other thing that might interest you since you're brand new, we've talked about it a few times, we refer to the JPT Wellness Circle. This is for people who want the full body healing, not just the gut centered healing and then also we go really more in-depth into the gut issues because as we discussed, there's a lot of people who – Listen To Your Gut being a 500-page book already and I've heard from people, they will book a consult. I'll say, "Well, when did you read the book..." and they're like, "Oh, I haven't read the book yet. I just can't face it. It's too big." So JPT Wellness was set up to give those kinds of people, or people who are really going in-depth, the one-on-one help in the forum. The website for that is www.JPTWellnessCircle.com and in there, recently actually, I've just posted some articles exactly on parasitic infection and yes, I give my opinions about it which are a bit different.

Like the mainstream in the west, we tend to be so sanitized and we tend to freak out at having to share our body with any kind of microorganisms, and so I'm sort of taking the other position too, that is you know what, for thousands of years, humans lived with their animals. Our immune systems have evolved to coexist with a large number of microbes and I believe in the theory that part of the reasons that allergies and autoimmune diseases are getting to be so high is because we're too sterile. Our immune system is faced with the way of functioning that it's never functioned with before.

I don't know if you've heard with the kids with allergies now. They bring in dirt from Africa and they let them play in it and their allergies heal because there are so many microbes in the African dirt that it sort of restores the body to more of its proper balance.

That's just one aspect of it, but let's say you do have a parasitic infection but it's giving you negative symptoms and it's lowering your quality of life, or giving you pain or what have you. Okay then, yes, you do want to address that. As part of the ongoing experimentation that I'm always doing – and the great thing about JPT Wellness Circle is because we're all really in touch with each other, I have a lot of people who are testing these protocols along with me and then we sort of say how did that work for you, and okay, well, let's maybe adjust the dosage... that's how the Wild Oregano Protocol came into being actually.

I would suggest you go there and have a look because I have an article specifically and I've got a brand new – it's called the Quad Synergy Anti-Pathogen Protocol and I have two dosages in there. I have one level for people who just think that they have tenacious pathogens and then I have another for people who actually have parasitic infection. And again, these are very new, they're experimental but I've tested them myself. I don't put anything out there that I haven't done myself already. And so that would probably be very interesting for you to go in there and have a look because we're working with substances like DMSO and nanoparticle silver, and then, of course, the wild oregano in with that as well.

So that would be the place I would steer you to.

Female: Thank you. I will definitely check that out because I'm a huge...

Jini: And from your approach, like you're not the "just tell me what to do" kind of person, you'll probably really enjoy what's going on at the Wellness Circle.

Female: Yes, I do. I love all that stuff and I love that your book is 500 pages and it will be better than a novel for me.

Jini: Oh, thank you so much.

Female: Thank you.

Jini: That's awesome.

Female: Yes, thank you.

Jini: You're welcome. Does anybody else have a question?

Janice: Can I ask one further question about the probiotics?

Jini: Yeah.

Janice: My son is taking the powders and I think how it makes him bloated and then you mentioned not taking the Healthy Trinity, the capsule, until you actually have formed bowels but then I'm thinking maybe... it's all the liquid that's causing him the bloating and this grief. If he took the Healthy Trinity, would it cause him further diarrhea?

Jini: You said he was getting the diarrhea predominantly at night, right?

Janice: He gets it all day then it picks up at night, so he's up every couple of hours running to the bathroom. That's how it started in the first place before any symptom started, he started going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and he's had it for almost two years – it's two years in February. Even prednisone didn't even stop it from going in the night.

Jini: You know what you might even want to try is take him off the probiotics for now like completely off and just work with the psyllium and the flax to see what reduces the diarrhea.

Janice: Okay because he has been on probiotics since day one. I didn't put him on any drugs since beginning the Diet and did the probiotics and it worked quite well and then, of course, it got out of hand but...

Jini: Why don't you experiment? Check this out with his gut, okay, because he'll get a feeling, but I'm thinking, take him off the probiotics completely. Keep going with the wild oregano and experiment with the psyllium, the bentonite, and the flax to see what's the best combination you can get to reduce that diarrhea. If possible – because I know it's hard to get all this stuff in on an empty stomach – you also might want to experiment with the L-glutamine.

Janice: Yeah, we've done that too and that's not a problem.

Jini: Okay. So experiment with those four substances – the psyllium, the flax, the bentonite, and the L-glutamine – and get that diarrhea greatly reduced. Once you have it reduced... like say three bowel movements a day, then start experimenting with the probiotics. So maybe when you've got it down to three a day and even if he goes more at night, it's okay because let's say if he's down to three a day, give him the capsule probiotics in the morning.

Janice: Right. That's what I was thinking. I just didn't know if it suddenly would cause a huge problem and he'd start bleeding and on and on...

Jini: No, no, no, no.

Janice: Okay, it's not going to do that. Okay.

Jini: No, because it shouldn't take you more than a week or two to figure out the stool bulkers, right?

Janice: Right, and I know you said not to stay on the wild oregano for more than two weeks without probiotic supplementation so two weeks should be our max trying this out.

Jini: Yeah.

Janice: Okay. And then I'll try him with the Healthy Trinity because that has more cultures in it anyway, right?

Jini: Yeah.

Janice: The number is higher.

Jini: Experiment – like try him with that and if that works brilliantly and you've got something that works, just stick with it. And if not, then maybe try the encapsulated powders, maybe try the loose powders and then start experimenting.

Janice: Okay, because loose powder seemed to be – that's what we've been using for months and months now, because we started this in September before when were on prednisone still. We started the Absorb Plus and everything and it looks like it's working but you're on prednisone so you can't tell until we start weaning from prednisone and then it comes ranting back and that's why we've decided we stopped the drug and to do the Remission Diet which has helped. It helped tremendously.

Jini: Excellent. Yeah, I would try that because the other thing too is that the body – and I don't know what would be the scientific explanation for this, but the body just sometimes needs you to mix things up a bit. So like if you've been doing that form of probiotics at this dosage for this length of time, sometimes your body just needs you to change it.

Janice: That makes sense, yeah.

Jini: You know how that goes?

Janice: Yeah, that does make sense. Yeah. Okay, I will try that, great. Thank you very much.

Jini: You're welcome and then you're on the forum, right, at JPT Wellness Circle?

Janice: I am, yeah.

Jini: Yeah, I know. As soon as you said Janice Walker I'm like, "Oh, yeah."

Janice: That urgency in my voice.

Jini: Yeah. So just let us know how it's going on the forum there and we'll take it from there.

Janice: Great, thank you.

Jini: Awesome. Take care, Janice.

Janice: Okay, bye-bye.

Jini: Okay, last call for questions? Nope. Nicole, I think we're done.

Nicole: Okay. Well, thank you very much, Jini. This was a fun conversation.

Jini: Definitely. Do you know what I forgot to give out, Nicole, is the website for Absorb Plus in case people want to have a look at the ingredient list and learn more. We've also got a really great free information package on that site and a special offer where you can get the IBD Remission Diet book for free. The website for that is www.AbsorbPlus.com

Nicole: On that same website, don't forget to look at the FAQs on there too because there are close to 40 of them and they're great.

Jini: Yes, exactly and actually, I should say today, we're shipping the product through the border so we have to disable the website, otherwise, the FDA goes on there and give us hassle. You know how the FDA is. So what we do now, what we've learned is that – because currently we're manufacturing in Canada and we're shipping down to the States and when it hits the border, they hold it, they test it, and then they pass it but in the meantime, they go and they look at the website and, of course, if the website is saying too many beneficial things, then they hold the product for longer and they say, Well, you need to change this," and then we have people saying, "Where's my Absorb Plus?"

So what we do now, if you ever do go to that website and it's down, that's why; it's because we're shipping product and we have to disable the website.

Nicole: Good grief.

Jini: I know. Actually, do you know what, they make money from it because when they hold the product at the border, they charge us for storage.

Nicole: You've got to be kidding.

Jini: I am not kidding and it's not cheap. So they must be making... I wouldn't be surprised if they're making a couple million a year just from holding supplements at the border and making people pay storage charges on them.

Nicole: Good grief.

Jini: Yes... the lovely world of health supplements. Okay, so www.AbsorbPlus.com

Then if people are interested in a lot of-- like this teleseminar and the higher learning and the personalized forum where myself, Nicole, and Dr. Silvio Najt, who is a medical doctor, will answer your questions one-on-one. That's all at our membership site: www.JPTWellnessCircle.com

For everything else and the blog which is where I give away a ton of information, I put podcasts, free reports, that's www.ListenToYourGut.com

We're all done here, So thanks so much, Nicole.

Nicole: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.