S9 Ep64: The Custom Gut Fix: The Missing Link to Finally Heal Your Chronic Digestive Problems with Dane Johnson
"The cure for disease is not to eradicate disease, it is the ability to respond…The more self-empowered you get, the more you can respond." —Dane Johnson
You're eating "perfectly" but still dealing with bloating, pain, and fatigue. What if the problem isn't just the food you're eating, but your body's ability to handle the world we live in? It's a frustrating truth that requires a completely new approach.
After being told his Crohn's and colitis were incurable, Dane Johnson took his health into his own hands and discovered the life-changing power of customized healing. He now helps others move from a place of fear to one of empowered action, cutting through the confusion with real-world strategies.
Tune in to hear Dane’s uncomplicated take on drainage pathways, toxic buildup, biofilm breakdown, and the critical mindset shift from defensive to offensive health. Justine and Dane also cover everything from seed oils and spiritual health to parasite cleanses and why your detox might be failing—all wrapped in an actionable plan to finally start healing.
Connect with Dane:
Dane Jonhson is the founder of CrohnsColitisLifestyle, inspired by his life-threatening battle with Crohn’s/Colitis, which he reversed using natural practices. As a Board Certified Nutritionist and one of the most successful Crohn’s/Colitis coaches in the world, he has helped thousands around the world find their unique answer to IBD while building a community of supporters, doctors, and healers!
Episode Highlights:
00:50 Meet Dane— From Patient to Advocate
07:02 Relapse, Temptation, and the Cycle of Bad Habits
09:24 Customizing Health
13:57 Food Industry Realities and the “Appeal” Controversy
18:39 The Mind-Body Connection— Stress and Health
21:56 Playing Defense vs Offense in Health
28:30 Wellness Key: Take Control of Your Health
Tweets:
What if your "healthy" diet is actually keeping you stuck? Stop playing defense with your gut health. Our latest episode breaks down how to finally go on the offensive. Listen for insights on drainage pathways, detox, and customization with @justine.reichman and @crohnscolitis_lifestyle founder, Dane Johnson. #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #ChronsDisease #Colitis #GutHealth #IBD #HolisticHealth #CustomizedHealing #Wellness
Inspirational Quotes:
01:11 "I just built what I needed." —Dane Johnson
02:18 "Doctors told me there’s nothing I could do about it. I changed my eating habits and I started feeling better." —Dane Johnson
03:29 "It's intimidating when you see the guy with the white coat come in and give you this diagnosis and tell you there's nothing you can do." —Justine Reichman
05:59 "I had suffered enough where I was no longer willing to be sick." —Dane Johnson
08:25 "The best life I could ever hope for, building that, and healing yourself of disease are the exact same thing." —Dane Johnson
13:42 "You cannot scale health… the food industry has been broken since we tried to scale food." —Dane Johnson
15:02 "Capitalism is built to be money over morals. We need conscious capitalism... to say I'm going to do morals over money." —Dane Johnson
16:01 "I'm a benefit corporation because it means as much to me to have an impact as it does to make money. They're equally as important." —Justine Reichman
17:56 "You want to find purpose? Find pain." —Dane Johnson
18:47 "How you feel and how you perceive reality directly impacts your health, longevity, peace, and ability to live, to love, to be vulnerable, to connect." —Dane Johnson
19:47 "I love so many foods, but I focus on what I can do, and it changes my whole mindset around it. And then it allows me to have joy around it because I love to eat." —Justine Reichman
20:13 "We're making a choice. We're knowingly making a choice. Because we're like, 'okay, it's not gonna be bad.' Sometimes that works, but a lot of times that does not work." —Justine Reichman
22:54 "In order for things to go right, you must risk things going wrong." —Dane Johnson
26:14 "We live in an alien world. You need exogenous amounts of certain types of vitamins, minerals, or supplements... Your body needs help." —Dane Johnson
29:09 "You don't need an issue to have to take control of your health." —Justine Reichman
29:20 "The single most valuable thing in this life to gain is self-empowerment over your health because when you do it for you, you can do it for your kids, you can do it from your parents, you can do it for your friends." —Dane Johnson
30:02 "The cure for disease is not to eradicate disease, it is the ability to respond…The more self-empowered you get, the more you can respond." —Dane Johnson
Transcription:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I want to welcome our guest, Dane Johnson. Welcome Dane. Dane is not just a guest, but he's also really integral to making sure that this podcast is being recorded. But in the meantime, we're also going to talk to Dane. He has started something called CrohnsColitisLifestyle, and I'm excited to hear about this. Hear about your journey, and why it was important for you to launch this, because I think this is a topic that so many people are talking about now.
So welcome, Dane.
Dane Johnson: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I just want to put an affirmation out there. I want to get real results. I want to bring the real heat today. I want to give you real solutions, get away from the sales pitch, and get into the dirt. Get into the dirt, get dirty. Let's get some results. So I'm happy to be here, and I love to pay it forward. Honestly, Justine, I just built what I needed. I was so sick, and a diagnosis with one doctor said Crohn's disease. The other doctor said ulcerative class. The other doctor said Crohn's disease. This doctor said Crohn's is Ulcerative Colitis gastritis. I started calling it Crohn's Colitis. I got widespread inflammation in the bowel. IBD equals IDK. That's as far as I got. No one could tell me what was happening. Doctors told me that diet didn't matter. I would start reading about candida, or mold, or parasites, or biofilms. Or I'd start reading about the power of certain herbs to be great at enhancing digestion or helping in liver function, phase one, phase two, detoxification, or supporting a healing response, or helping with ulcerations. I had ulcerative colitis. But yet, I shouldn't take aloe vera. What are we talking about? What do you mean?
There's tons of clinical research on aloe vera helping to reduce ulcerations, or licorice root, or mastic gum, or demulcent herbs, marshmallow roots, slippery elm, all this stuff. And there's tons of clinic research that Doctors never heard of it. Doctors know it says there's no root cause. There's nothing I can do about it. And as a young kid who wasn't a doctor, I could put two and two together. You tell me food doesn't matter. I change my eating habits, and I start feeling better. Not perfect, but better. So when I started seeing obvious common sense correlations, and then this guy in the white coat tells me there's no correlation? It's like, I'm looking at something. I can see it, I can touch it, I can taste it. But then you tell me it's not real. And then you wave your degrees in front of me, and I'm going, this is a really hard pill to swallow, Doctor. I don't know if I could. You're not selling me. I was a bit of a revolutionary. I never did well with too much authority. I was respectful, but I always was a self thinker. I fell on my butt a few times there. It wasn't perfect, but I think that gave me the audacity, back in 2009, 1011, to say, food does matter. My body can heal. There are root causes and root issues to what you're calling an incurable chronic disease, which have been labeled Crohn's disease.
Justine Reichman: That's amazing. First of all, kudos to you because it's intimidating when you see the guy with the white coat come in and give you this diagnosis, and tell you that there's something you can do.
Dane Johnson: It's depressing, because you want to believe in it. I wanted the doctor to give me the answer. Justine, I wasn't into all this Captain Jack Sparrow pirate life stuff, woo woo. I wanted my life back. I went on prednisone. I went on a TiVo. I went on the TPN feeding tube because there's nothing else we could do. I went on mesalamine. I went on 6-MP. I went on methotrexate. I went on painkillers. I did steroid enemas. I stopped when they started talking about cutting out my colon. Oh, my goodness, that was terrifying. Oh, my gosh. At 23 years old, at 25 years old, and I was an actor, a crappy one. A terrible, horrific actor. I was better at taking pictures and doing some Zoolander. That way I could do it. I could not act. That was an acting class for two and a half years, aggressive acting class. It just didn't work for me. But it was life debilitating. Depression, anxiety, loneliness. And I'd never met anyone. I had no community.
Justine Reichman: Wow. So when you went being alone for a year and navigating this, and 23 is young.
Dane Johnson: I nearly died. I was housebound at 27, but 23 is when I started suffering. So it was four years of medications and trying diets, and I went doctor to doctor. We spent 30,000 bucks the first year, and I was from a middle class family. We were not rolling in the dough. It was just my mom. I know there's a lot of parents listening right now. My mom was just convicted. She was like, my son just got diagnosed with an incurable disease. She was the one researching it, seeing all the horror stories and seeing people live in this terrible situation for the rest of their life. I was numb to it. I was a kid. I was out drinking beers, hanging with the guys, lifting weights, going on runs, trying to get ripped. I was a classic dude. And I was just like, oh, yeah. The doctor's gonna fix it. I'm just gonna go about my life, go back to the gym, take some pre-workout, hit it hard, and then just put me on prednisone. And on point, 40 million with prednisone, I was like, oh, it's getting better. And like, oh, it's getting better. So four years of getting a little bit worse.
Justine Reichman: What was that moment where you're like, okay, I'm taking this into my own hands. Let me see what I can find. And I gotta fix this. I gotta solve this.
"I had suffered enough where I was no longer willing to be sick." —Dane Johnson
Dane Johnson: When I had suffered enough where I was no longer willing to be sick, and that's a weird thing to say when you are sick, but yet you keep eating poisonous foods, you keep drinking alcohol, and you keep watching Netflix and binging till 2:00 in the morning. You're outsourcing your health to your parents, or you're outsourcing your health to your doctor, and it's someone else. So you're waiting for someone else to fix you. I just waited hard. The thing is I got a little bit better on the medications where I could go back to my life. So okay, great. I'm down to eight bowel movements instead of 20. And so for this month or two, I'm gonna go back to the gym. I'm gonna go back to eating what I want. I was so justified in not changing, because my parents weren't going to live this way. No one else around me, none of my friends, none of the professors, the doctor, sure as hell wasn't living this way. How could the world ask me to give up gluten, soda, alcohol, fried food when they all did it themselves? I was angry at having to be an alien.
Justine Reichman: I gotta tell you that I can relate in the sense that while I didn't have other issues, and when I'm feeling fine, I go back to eating those things that I know are not good for me. But I'm like, hey, I feel good. Let me have that. All of a sudden, it's debilitating. I'm like moaning, I have bloating and gas back, fracked gas, and now I can't get rid of it. I'm like, oh, my god, what am I going to do? And I'm trying everything in that cupboard that has bins and bins of supplements, from charcoal tourist to no rhyme or reason. It's just me trying to do something. I'm not a certified nutritionist like you. I'm just somebody that tries to solve my problem. And when it gets really bad, then I call the doctor. Because I'm like, okay, I feel like I'm dying. And I call the doctor, they're like, okay, we'll give you some prednisone for this, or we'll do this for that, or maybe you should do the low FODMAP. But you can't live on that. It just allows you to choose the things you want to pull out of. There really has to be a better solution.
Dane Johnson: Okay, let's go from first things first. The way I won in life is I had to get rid of the pain, anxiety and fear. You are taking action. You just said you did everything because you had pain. So you're doing it out of fear. You have to do it out of desire. I realized that the best life I could ever hope for, like a total life, is to take a step back and just look at your life. The best life you could ever hope for, building that and healing yourself of disease are the exact same thing. I totally agree. What if you paid me $10,000 right now to increase your chance to live to 95, and feel vibrant the entire time? What would be the difference between that and healing disease? Because if we want to talk about longevity, get rid of snacking, get rid of seed oil, get rid of glyphosate. Start doing more meditation. Make sure you're sleeping. Get rid of EMF and blue light in your bedroom. Make sure your circadian rhythms on point. Regulate your cortisol and your melatonin. Optimize your microbiome. Optimize your digestion. Work on healing leaky gut. Reduce lipopolysaccharides at a systemic level that increase antibody reaction, and kill off brain cells, kill off liver cells, kill off all cells and increase chance of senescent cells that increase chance of cancer. Get rid of things that mess up your cholesterol, and increase heart disease, diabetes and insulin problems. It's all the same.
Justine Reichman: I'm just gonna ask you, whether you have colitis, whatever it is, this is a solution to be able to for us all, to be able to be healthier, live stronger, feel better.
Dane Johnson: Yes, with an exclamation part. Now, we just focus on IBD. Maybe one day, if God calls me to it, I'll build a shield for every disease. Because what I built was a foundation on how to take the overwhelming nature of self healing and make it simple, make it executable, make it customized, and do it with others.
Justine Reichman: That was the word I was looking for, customize, because it's the biggest mistake.
Dane Johnson: Yeah. I did the SCD diet. I did a carnivore diet. I did a fruitarian diet. I did intermittent fasting. I had ketosis. I did water fasting. All of it is, you can't be consistent for the long term. With customization, understand this, if you have a histamine problem, I need to customize what you take and why. If you have poor drainage, you have methylation issues, I need to customize what you take and why. So you start with a proven system, and then you take the person. If I have a person with hormonal issues, I have a person who's pregnant, if I have a person who's nine years old, if I have a person has a problem taking capsules and they need powders, or they need dropper, if I have a person who doesn't do well with certain ingredients, or they have candida overgrowth and they don't do well with certain sweeteners or sugars, I'll take 100 people with IBD. I've worked with thousands, literally. Not just saying literally, I've worked with thousands. My team has helped more people with IBD than anyone on the planet. There's not a coach, clinic, hospital or doctor in the world that has more testimonies reversing IBD symptoms than our team. We are a team of practitioners, coaches, professors. We are global in what we do. And I'm not just saying that talk about us. I'm talking about how you get real results. It has to be customized to you. If you don't feel like it's your plan, you're just doing the plan, you're going to fail.
Justine Reichman: I really appreciate the fact that you surround yourself with all these other experts, researchers, and other people.
Dane Johnson: I hire them. Why didn't I go get my MD? Because I was about to go back and become a doctor myself, and I realized it was going to cost me $1.2 million. I had to shut down my company, had to do four years of school, and it's going to cost me 200 grand to get it. So I was going, I was making 2, $300,000, but working three jobs. I worked three jobs for three years. I bootstrapped my company. I needed to figure out what was working for other people. and figure out how that could work for me. I need to integrate, right? I cherry pick. The number one thing I did to heal is I cherry picked. I took strategies from Dr. Gundry. I took strategies from Jordan Rubin. I took strategies from the Paleo diet, from Elaine Gottschall, from everybody, and I started tweaking it for me. So when I really healed, if you looked at my plan, it was completely unique. I use fruit. And specifically, I use meat. I was very specific with polysaccharides, because almost every famous diet told me to be careful of polysaccharides, starches, refined sugars and stuff. So what does everyone agree on? If every famous diet's agreeing on certain principles, there's a great place for you to start not doing that. No matter what diet you look at, they all agree that gluten and seed oil is bad. So get rid of that. And then it was like, how do I heal on a budget? Well, I realized that I didn't know how to eat perfectly. But if I only ate what I cooked for 72 days, which is what I did, then it would drastically reduce my cost. And then it was obviously gluten free, seed oil free and dairy free, and then I could double my intuition of what worked for me and why.
Justine Reichman: Every time I make myself a meal, sometimes I go out for it, but if I make myself something simple, let's just say a piece of protein, fish or steak, even if I use butter, use oil or something, and then I grill some vegetables or make something, I feel great. But if I go out somewhere else and they marinate that steak--
Dane Johnson: Look on that teflon, they cook it on high heat with some crappy oil. They're not getting a good quality source, Even though organic, we're even questioning organic nowadays. I read something from a local farmer that said that organic only because what they do is they mash the meat together to make meat, and they only need a percentage of that meat to be organic, to call it organic. Three different types of cow you're eating in one the whole game is just crazy. What I've learned through all this is you cannot scale health. I can't do it.
Justine Reichman: Want to just go back to something that you mentioned, for those listeners that may not be familiar with what Apeel is. You and I are familiar with Apeel, but I just want to make sure that we bring it into the conversation.
Dane Johnson: Breaking news, this company called Apeel that uses a synthetic wax is now allowed on USD organic food, and it's to increase the lifespan of organic foods. So now, you can get a USDA organic label with this Apeel on it, and they aren't even legally required to permit you to disclose what's in it.
Justine Reichman: Concerned about that.
"You cannot scale health… the food industry has been broken since we tried to scale food." —Dane Johnson
Dane Johnson: It's just another Fugazi. It's another government hack to watch to help industry be able to make money on a food industry that was broken from the first place. The food industry has been broken since we tried to scale food. When you tried to get these massive plants that feed 30 million people, how the heck can you have fish every single day at 500,000 locations around the United States and think that that's healthy? So now you look at it, and we have McDonald's, and we have all these things where we're trying to keep the cost of food down to 15% of total take home. But in all actuality, it was never that low. There was never that low. It's just capitalism. Capitalism is built to be money over morals. We need conscious capitalism to come in and say, I'm going to work hard and not just go for the money. I'm going to do morals over money, and I'm going to build something that actually works. Because I'm not here for money, I'm here for impact. We just need more of that, and it's hard, and it's a longer road. And without money, a company can't survive. It dies. So it's kind of against the innate need of the company. And as a guy who built my own company, I own 100% of my company. I bootstrapped it, and I'm here to serve and help people get real impact. It's really hard. I employ people that want to buy houses, want to go on vacation, want to have kids, want to have time off, want to make a good wage, and we also want to make an impact. Because I don't care how much you want to make. You want to make an impact more than you want whatever amount to raise, because that's the mission. Why are we here?
Justine Reichman: Well, everybody always asks me, are you incorporated? I'm like, no. I'm a benefit corporation, because it means as much to me to have an impact as it does to make money. They're equally as important.
Dane Johnson: And the way I get free of that, like I want to get free of health worries, and I want to get free of financial worries. My goal is not necessarily to make more money. My goal is to get to a place where I don't even think about money. People who could go, I want to make 50 million, 100 million, a billion, you're missing the point. The point is to get to where you no longer make any decision based on money.
Justine Reichman: So if we go back to the beginning, well, not the beginning, but let's say around 27 when you're figuring some of this stuff out for you, and you decided to go to be a nutritionist, what specifically did that provide you with that you can now do this because you were already doing the research?
Dane Johnson: That's a great question. It gave me courage. I talked with naturopath doctors, chiropractic doctors, I sat down and met the most famous doctors in the world with this, and a lot of them, a lot more brilliant and way smarter than me in a million ways. School is not where you get great. School is where you build a foundation, passion, experience, willingness to try. I got great because I was willing to try. I had a bit of a following from what I was doing in acting, modeling, commercials and all that. And I just stopped posting pictures of being the cool fit guy, and I started posting real things of pain, doubt and fear. And I started posting what I looked like when I was sick, which looked like I just got out of a war camp. I dropped to 120 pounds at 6'2", into 190 at 6'2" right now, today. I think that it's really hard to lead or have the courage to do something great in life without great pain. When I was younger, I heard a younger person say, I just don't know what I want to do with my life. One of my first questions I asked him, well, what's the hardest thing to ever happen to you? You want to find purpose? Find pain? I don't think we go seeking pain, but I was lost in a prison for so long. How hard it is creates a paradigm of how much you can care, and how passionate you can be.
Justine Reichman: It's interesting, recently, her name is Alyssa Goodman. I don't know if you know her. She was talking about her issues, and the one thing she said was a doctor asked her about her emotional state. And it's not that often that I've heard that from a regular MD. I thought, wow, maybe things are evolving, because I think what you're saying resonates with me, and I hope that it resonates with every human.
Dane Johnson: We're just scared because it's so woo woo, and it's like measuring air. Every single person on the planet knows that how they feel and how they perceive reality directly impacts their health, longevity, peace and ability to live, to love, to be vulnerable, to connect. We all know it, because every single person on this call will guarantee that stress makes them more sick. Stress is energy. It's whoa. It's not even real stress. What is stress? Oh, I'm stressed out about my job. Then walk away and go to the beach. You're done right now. No one's actually holding you. It's a perceived imprisonment. If I call you and say the worst thing in your life happened and you believed me, you'd start flaring. But it does not because it happened. It's because you believe me. That's a perception. If I called you back and said, April Fool's got you. You'd be like, oh, my gosh, you son of a - you had me believing that that was the reality. So the first thing you do when you get healthy is to be able to dance in the rain.
"We're making a choice. We're knowingly making a choice. Because we're like, 'okay, it's not gonna be bad.' Sometimes that works, but a lot of times that does not work." —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: I'm with you. I love so many foods. I focus on what I can do, and it changes my whole mindset around it. And then it allows me to have joy around it. Because I love to eat. You name it from steak to vegetables, to whatever. I like them in their purest form, so I don't feel like I'm giving up. It's just those moments where I want a fork full of something, because you see it. And the thing is, we're making a choice. We're knowingly making a choice because we're like, okay, it's not gonna be bad. We're gonna have one fork full. I'll get the taste, and I won't have any more. Now, sometimes that works. But a lot of times, that does not work.
Dane Johnson: I wanna ask you a question, Justine, that's gonna help everyone listening right now. Were you always that way? Or did it happen over time?
Justine Reichman: In terms of the way I like to eat? Yeah, I grew up loving to eat. I came out of the womb.
Dane Johnson: No, no. Did you grow up loving to eat foods in their natural form and eat organic foods? Or was it so you didn't have to condition the way you eat over time?
Justine Reichman: My mother was telling me, Justine, you can't eat dairy. It's not good for you. You get very congested. So she'd buy me Tofutti at the time. I didn't really like pasta as a kid, and I didn't like sandwiches, so nobody ever gave me bread because I was not interested in it.
Dane Johnson: Okay, well, Justine, you're a unicorn. Most of us have to live this healthy life, right? I grew up on Papa John's in the subway and cereal. I was the worst. But what happens? Maybe you can notice this. But over time, the more you feel better, the more you vibrate with natural earth foods and not fake poison, toxic western man made like quote, unquote food, the more you stop desiring it because you just don't want to go back into the matrix of fakeness.
Justine Reichman: I also think that while my body's changed certain things, I don't feel well eating anymore that I used to eat well. And I wonder what role agriculture plays in that? How things have evolved to now change the way that I digest things and feel when I eat them?
Dane Johnson: Yeah. Well, that's more of an offensive strategy. I believe that what happens with us with restrictive eating is we have to get more strict and more strict, and we start losing. I have 23, now I have 19, and now I have 17 things that I feel comfortable with. And to me, I think that's one of the problems with playing defense too long. When you only play defense and you restrict your microbiome, your nervous system can continue to get weaker and weaker. Because our only way to defend is to back up, not throw a punch, and we just keep circling this ring, and trying not to get hit. And what happens, metaphorically, is the microbiome gets weaker. The nervous system gets more dysfunctional, more fearful, more worried, and feeling more defenseless. And then our digestion might get worse. Our liver gets more clogged up because you can't completely eliminate toxins. You can sit here and get rid of parabens in your health and beauty products. You can get rid of VOCs, PCBs, microplastics. You can keep getting rid of this, but you live in this world, and you're going to breathe it, you're going to touch it, you're going to drink it. It's impossible to get rid of all of it. And then what happens is our body is also losing its ability to properly detoxify. That could also beat the toxin, but also could be age. As we age, we drastically reduce our natural stomach acid. So if your cells are sitting there with a toxic burden for 10 years, even if you could keep a neutral toxic load for 10 years, your cells will get weaker against that same load. That's where you are, Justine. We got to get on the offense.
Justine Reichman: I also think that there's so many people that live like that, that they take those things out--
Dane Johnson: Most of us. 80% of us in this world are stuck in defense. I was stuck in defense for years. But you have to be a Jedi to learn how to do offense, and do it safely. Because everything offensively can actually make you worse. See, once you get on the offense, there's a chance of an interception. If I'm gonna keep in my football analogy here, once you throw a punch, you're now open to get hit because your hands block your face. I could give you a few more metaphors. In order for things to go right, you must risk things to go wrong. I had a girl I was working with, shout out to Jackie. She let me use her presentation when I spoke at CellCore. She came to us, and she spent so much money, made so many detox plans, and got rid of her house like a perfect bubble of cleanliness. But her calprotectin and inflammation was taught at 850. Part of her colon was removed from colorectal cancer, and she was diagnosed with colitis, and she had failed for biologics with elevated inflammation, eating a perfect diet, and she was at a loss. What could we do now? We see a case like that. We're also looking at it like, okay, this is not easy. I don't walk on water, okay. This is hard. I'll tell you her answer before I tell you the missing problem. She's had two normal colonoscopies with a perfect endoscopic score, no sign of cancer, no sign of ulcerative colitis, and like a 14 calprotectin, no inflammation in her blood, in her stool, test and perfect colonoscopies back to back years, and she got off, I think she was on rinvoq or infliximab, but got off on both, still in remission. Now, she's writing to us, trying to apply and work for our company, because 90% of our team are. People with IBD.
We don't talk to you from an ivory tower. We're on the boat. Half my team are members of the program. I've just hired them, giving them jobs because they're great at certain things, right? So we were talking about hiring her today. But Jackie, strong Christian, strong woman, risks a person of belief. To get cancer at 20 something years old and just fight after surgery and still have all these problems, and still eat perfectly and do all that stuff. So here's the missing thing. I'm gonna put it in real simple layman's terms. She got rid of toxic exposure, but she never was able to get rid of the pre existing toxins in her body. Her liver, her cells and her lymphatic system, her drainage pathways were still backed up, even though she reduced all the toxic load that she was getting experienced through her air, food and water. She couldn't detox the chemicals in our environment. These are alien to your body. You think your liver has the ability to deal with glyphosate, these mycotoxins and microplastics? It doesn't. We have an innate detoxification system, but it's not perfect. It can't handle all this alien stuff. One of the biggest things you need in your plan is supplements and herbs. And this is why people who always say, I hear certain plans out there, they're saying that we don't use supplements, or we don't believe it. I'm like, you're crazy. We live in an alien world. You need exogenous amounts of certain types of vitamins, minerals, or supplements. Or even certain medications. Itraconazole is an antifungal, ivermectin, right? That can help deal with this craziness that has been put on the body. We are being exposed to hundreds of chemicals in our air, food and water daily, and so your body needs help.
The single missing ingredient is we worked on her extracellular matrix, detoxification, cellular detox. We built unique plans for her liver, her lymphatic, and then we went after biofilms. Okay, you need to know what biofilms are. They're advanced. If you don't know what you're doing, you're gonna get your butt kicked as you start dealing with biofilms. So biofilms are natural with your beneficial bacteria, but biofilms also house toxins parasites to make natural biofilms. Mycotoxins can make biofilms. This is why they're so dangerous, and this is one of the reasons why we can't find them in our stool analysis. You never think that you have parasites, that you check your quantitative PCR stool test and there's no parasites, and evangelical parasite cleansers will tell you that the tests aren't good enough that there's still parasites in there. Parasites house heavy metals, they house mycotoxins, they house microplastics, they house bacteria like Clostridium difficile. If you start breaking apart biofilms, you could also start testing positive for E. coli and C. diff, and go, where did this come from? It's been in your body the entire time. It's been in a sup biofilm.
And when I interviewed a brilliant doctor on this, he was telling me that after five years of chronic disease, your body starts creating super biofilms where they're even harder to break down. So you might not even need conventional medications to really break down those biofilms. It's like breaking apart a beehive. If you break apart that beehive, you are releasing a massive amount of toxins in your body that you're already backed up by detox pathways. And then if you have leaky gut, if you have poor microbiome, if you have SIBO, what's going to happen is you're gonna get metabolic endotoxemia. Your liver is going to start to flush those toxins. Well, the liver is going to flush them by putting them in bile, pushing them through the bile ducts, into the duodenum, and dumping them into the duodenum, the upper GI now to be released through the bowels. Well, guess what? You've got a leaky gut, poor microbiome, and your body can't properly release that through the bowel so they get reabsorbed back into the bloodstream, and now your liver has to re-deal with what it just pumped out. It's like dumping garbage in your living room.
Justine Reichman: Dane, we're gonna have to continue this conversation again. I have so many more questions, and I wanted to talk about your ability to continue to learn, and what are the innovations and all these different things that are so interesting. Maybe we'll have a follow up conversation to continue this. But in the meantime, there is so much that our listeners and our viewers can take away from this for themselves, a couple things to consider, things to look at a new way to create that narrative for themselves, and maybe take the bull by the horns and take control of their health if they're experiencing these things. Or rather, just in general, to take control of your health. You don't need an itch to have to take control of your health.
Dane Johnson: Absolutely. I want to leave everyone with this one thought. I know it's overwhelming. I said a lot of crazy stuff that you probably maybe haven't heard of, and maybe it's overwhelming you. The single most valuable thing in this life is to gain self empowerment over your health. There's nothing more valuable on this planet. Because when you do it for you, you can do it for your kids, you can do it for your parents, you can do it for your friends. Billionaires are running towards it. This is it. This is it. This is the most valuable thing on the planet. Get self empowered and do it your way, make it custom for you, find people who want to do it and share in that. The conversations are fruitful, they're colorful, they're exciting, and it gives us an avenue to be 70 years young and always have hope to be able to do something with whatever happens with us in life. The cure for disease is not to eradicate disease. It is the ability to respond. The more self empowered you get, the more you can respond. Happy healing. Thanks.
Justine Reichman: Dane, thank you so much for joining me today in this conversation, and helping me make sure that everyone could hear us. And for those folks that do want to learn a little bit more about you, learn a little bit more about your clinic and want to get in touch, what's the best way?
Dane Johnson: We're Telemedicine. So a lot of people say, hey, can I come here? Can I fly? I'm like, no. We do everything on Zoom and online. We have practitioners all around the world. And we do that. We see people in Africa, India, Europe, all that. We have all the systems you need. But just check us out. We're all over the internet at crohnscolitislifestyle.com. Do some research. We do a free one hour session, Justine. Let's make sure we'll put that link below so we know you came from Justine. But it's a free one hour session, and we deep dive, and we look for IBD. If you suspect IBD or IBS, we're open to that too. We just want integrity. We want integrity and trust, and see if it's a good fit, and we can help you out. But Instagram, find us on crohnscolitis_lifestyle. On Google, you'll see us on YouTube and all that stuff.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Dane, thank you. Thank our guests for tuning in each week. And for those folks that are tuning into Spotify or wherever you listen to a podcast, know that you can also watch our video cast on our Essential Ingredients YouTube channel. So don't forget to follow us on Instagram and YouTube, and leave us a note. If you want to hear more from Dane, if you've got questions, we want to hear from you. We want to hear what else you want to talk about, so we look forward to continuing these conversations. See you next week.
