Gut Symptoms Are Common, But They’re Not Normal
- Natalie
- May 26
- 20 min read
Bloating, constipation, belly pain, urgency, and digestive discomfort are easy to brush off.
We blame stress. We blame aging. We blame something we ate. And sometimes, we just decide this is how our body works now.
But what if those gut symptoms are not something to ignore?
In this episode, I’m joined by gut health expert Josh Dech for an honest conversation about why so many digestive issues are normalized, especially for women in midlife. Josh shares the personal story that led him into this work, including serious gut health challenges in his own family and his own struggle with severe digestive symptoms.
Together, we talk about why “common” does not always mean “normal,” what may be driving gut issues, and why getting to the root cause matters.
This conversation is not about fear. It is about paying attention, asking better questions, and taking small steps that support your body.
In This Episode, We Talk About:
Why bloating, constipation, and belly pain should not be ignored
The difference between common symptoms and healthy digestion
Why gut issues are often dismissed or misread
How food, toxins, stress, sleep, and environment may affect gut health
Why Josh believes many people need to look deeper than a diagnosis
Simple ways to reduce toxic load in your food, home, and daily routine
How small health habits can add up over time
About Josh Dech
Josh Dech is a gut health expert and host of the Gut Health Solution podcast. After seeing serious digestive issues in his own family and experiencing severe gut symptoms himself, Josh began studying root-cause approaches to gut health. Today, he helps people better understand what may be driving their symptoms and how to support healing from the inside out.
Learn more about Josh at gutsolution.ca.
Disclaimer
This episode is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always talk with your doctor or qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health plan.
Transcript
Natalie Tysdal (01:56)
Josh, it's so nice to talk to you. Gut health is one of my favorite things to talk about.
Josh Dech (02:03)
Mine too. And I'm so glad we have a chance to talk about it because the tech issues, I'm telling ya.
Natalie Tysdal (02:08)
People
home listening or just on a walk have no idea what we deal with behind the scenes, but we made it work. And I appreciate you so much. Tell me how you got into the world of gut health. For me, it was having my own problems with gut health, which is why many of us start diving deeper. But how did that happen
you?
Josh Dech (02:30)
It's probably a very similar story. It was in my family. I had it. My mom was, I don't want to say how old she is now. That seems rude. Anyway, when I was a preteen, she had some gut issues her entire life. And I remember one night after baseball, we went to McDonald's. just grabbed a little snack and some ice cream as we always did. And afterwards she went upstairs and she was laying on her left side. She always does this gas pains come up. She's let them pass. She's good. But that time it just kept getting worse and worse.
And my stepdad said, I gotta take her to the hospital. She's like, you know, I hate the ambulance. I'm never going again. I'm fine. Until she started sweating and getting pale and a little bit gray. Picks her up, puts her in the car, drives her down. She's thrown into emergency surgery that night and they were moved over a foot of bowel. What ended up happening was her lifetime of low grade gut issues ended up wearing and tearing the integrity of the tissue till she perforated her colon. So a little hole formed and she was leaking bowel contents into her abdominal cavity.
which if you don't know, puts you into something called sepsis. So very fatal, horribly deadly, and very, very painful to have to go through. So that was her first bowel surgery of three. She ended up having her gallbladder removed. She ended up having another foot of bowel removed in time. They put mesh into her belly, then tried to remove it, but her organs adhered to it. It was this whole to do. My dad had gut issues and I had them. And the doctor said, yup, it's just genetic. It's irritable bowel. There's nothing we can do.
they say well try some Imodium do this do that nobody talked about diet or lifestyle or infections or anything long and short Natalie I got to a point in my early mid-20s I was 15 bowel movements a day 10 minute transit time or less whole undigested food in the bowl I dealt with constipation diarrhea blood in my stool mucus to the point where we know our gut and brains are connected I went from
calm, cool, collected. was a paramedic in my first career. Loved chaos. I loved going to a scene. There's rollovers and helicopters. I mean, my first year on the job, I'm controlling this, this multi-casual scene and calling in choppers. Like that was, that was, I loved it. Going to the grocery store started causing a panic attack. And so it got so bad. I ended up planning my own suicide. like something is wrong. So I started talking to friends and diving into people in the quote functional health space.
Learned about the basics of fundamentals of gut, started talking about it online. Somebody came to me. said, I've got ulcerative colitis. Can you help? I kid you not, Natalie. I went to Google. I'm like, what is ulcerative colitis? And I just thought, wait a minute. None of these things look to be what everybody says they are. All these health conditions, these digestive conditions, these quote autoimmune conditions, none of the math added up. So I started diving a little bit deeper and I was like, let me try. I said, I don't know anything about it, but I'll try.
And within 90 days, she was about 80 % better. Her functional medicine doctor, who she had seen for three years, got on the call with me. He says, tell me everything, whatever you did, I need to know. And that's my huge shout out to Dr. JP Youssef Salebi out of Carolina Holistic Medicine. He was the first doctor to listen to my methodology. And because of him, I made connections all around the world with top doctors and top researchers because he was willing to listen. And since then, we've seen now over 600 cases of bowel disease, which are supposed to be...
irreversible, incurable, fully reversed, medication free. Yeah.
Natalie Tysdal (05:45)
Wow.
You know, I think a lot of people, think, oh, those are, those are the serious cases. Like those are the, oh yeah, I hear IBS or hear Crohn's or hear colitis, scary things. But the average person doesn't think that could be me. Even though the problems that they're having, be it flatulence or just, you know, pain in the gut every once in while, a little bit of constipation, all those things, like you're saying, they add up. Like it's not normal to be constipated.
Josh Dech (05:51)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, if you're not pooping twice a day. Yeah.
Natalie Tysdal (06:15)
It's not normal to have a lot of flatulence, right?
Josh Dech (06:18)
You're absolutely right that we call it normal because it's happening so much, right? Your doctor sees so many people coming in pooping twice a week and they go, it's normal. Normal is not optimal. The problem with normal is it always gets worse. It gets a country song. And the thing is,
We do our sliding scale of normal gets worse and worse and worse until this is what we accept as the norm because everybody's doing it, but it's not optimal. And there are some really simple things that are actually driving disease. But I want to put a preface on this because you just mentioned, well, those are the severe cases. It couldn't be me. Car accidents, cancer, heart disease, tragedies. It could never be me. It's always somebody else. But I'm going tell you right now, statistically, it is going to be you. At least if you get a thousand listeners on this podcast.
You're going to have at least 10 of them will have bowel disease in the next 20 years. And I'll tell you why. Statistically speaking, right now up to 20 % of the population has irritable bowel syndrome diagnosed. That means you went to the doctor, you said, this is primarily in the USA, but you went to your doctor, they checked the box and said, yep, you have a diagnosable criteria for this condition called irritable bowel syndrome, which the nuances of it, it's a diagnosis of exclusion where it's not this, it's not that. So it must be, that's how they do it. But the point being 20 % has enough
instance to visit a doctor and get a diagnosis, give or take. Now what we're seeing is up to 70 % of the population has irritable bowel syndrome like symptoms at least once a week. Constipation, diarrhea, cramping, pain, etc. So you've got 20 % or nearly 20 % being diagnosed up to 70 % who's symptomatic, who could arguably get diagnosed. I'd say it's an epidemic, but here's where the math gets really crazy. Back in the 1950s, one in about
a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people had a diagnosable condition of Crohn's or colitis. And it was a small percentage, something like three to five percent who might have had irritable bowel syndrome like symptoms, not the 70 % we're seeing today. So here's how the math converges. There was a Nature article published just last year that estimated by 2045, we're going to see one in a hundred people with Crohn's or colitis. So we went from one in a hundred thousand
To the 90s was one in 463, to today it's about one in 215, and by 2045 they're expecting one in 100. So if 20 % is diagnosed ear double bowel, 70 % is symptomatic, and we know 20 % of Crohn's colitis cases did previously have a diagnosis of ear double bowel syndrome, what's this gonna look like? This is why we're seeing this trajectory skyrocketing for bowel disease. So to answer your question, you ask what are the culprits? It's simply an increase of toxins.
Natalie Tysdal (08:33)
Wow.
Josh Dech (09:03)
microbes and deficiencies in our environments. That's it. That's those are the three major umbrellas driving which is a huge epidemic and it's it's I Don't I don't know how to put it into words how serious the problem is ⁓
Natalie Tysdal (09:04)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, what's
really frustrating to
is that I try to be good. And I think for the most part, we're like, I'm going to try to eat healthy. I'm going to try to eat clean, you know, this clean eating. But it's it's not really easy to do that. Our grocery stores don't make it easy. You know, the restaurants don't make it easy. So if we're aiming to be clean or to avoid those toxins and we live in the United States, you mentioned how
bad it is in the United States. How do we do that?
Josh Dech (09:52)
It's such a great question. And here's what I can tell you. I'm very much, reason my hairline's up here, Natalie, for those of you who can't see, I very much got a five head not a four head. And I accept that, but that's likely because my tinfoil hat is keeping rubbing my hair off and pulling my hairline back further. Here's the thing. We have governments and institutions which are lobbied by corporations. And lobbying is just corporate speak for bribe is really what it is. We give you money, we do the things you want. We put the policies in and you give us these things and everybody.
scratch each other's backs and the people that win are the politicians and the corporations, the people that lose are you and me and your listeners. So what we end up having is a situation or the system where the profitable food is shelf stable, it's manufactured, it's artificial. Real raw ingredients are expensive to source. There's a reason now a lot of chocolates across the USA have been legally downgraded, they're no longer chocolate. Where you've seen a lot of ice cream if you go to the grocery store, it's no longer called ice cream, it's called dairy dessert or dairy flavored dessert.
or frozen dairy dessert, whatever they're calling it now. But the point being the amount of actual real food that's in these things is getting less and less and less and less. This is why you see videos of people taking ice cream sandwiches and leaving them in the sun and they don't melt. Three weeks later, they're still hard and the ants won't touch them because the food we're getting now are food like substances. It's a few molecules, I'm sure away from bloody styrofoam. And so these are shelf stable. They're easily manufactured to higher profit margins. And then
These corporations wanna make these foods acceptable. So what do they do? They lobby the government to say, we'll make this acceptable. But even further yet, let's look at the Bill Gates situation. Again, tinfoil hat, but hear me out on this one. Right now, they're trying to push out red meat. That's been pushed all across. They're saying it's bad for the environment. The cows and the methane farts are causing climate change. If you killed every single human being on earth, and they've done the math on this, like true climate scientists have done the math.
If you killed every human being on earth, you'd eliminate something like 0.00004 % of carbon. So it's not going anywhere. And what we're doing is we're pushing out red meat. We're saying it's bad for your health when the studies are completely flawed. We know that carnivores, Inuit people in Canada eat ketogenic raw meat diets. They're fine. Back in the 1940s, Dr. Weston A. Price studied these largely animal-based or carnivore tribes and found they had no disease. The minute they involved the Western diet, wheat-based sugar diet, they had disease. He was a dentist, but studied other things.
And so we're seeing this push out of red meat in our current day. But what are they pushing in instead? Lab-grown meat, because it's quote, good for the environment. We're ripping down forests and acreages and farmland to put in solar panels and data centers. Your institutions don't care about the climate. Otherwise, they wouldn't be burning up your water and killing your actual nature to put this stuff in. They want you eating lab-grown meat because the corporations push it in and it's profitable. So...
Natalie Tysdal (12:40)
Yeah.
Josh Dech (12:45)
That's what the problem is. And how do we do it? Vote with your dollar. Shop local. Get a couple of friends together. Go buy a cow. Spend $1,500 on an entire cow and that feeds three families for a year. Yeah. Yeah.
Natalie Tysdal (12:55)
Yeah, right. Shop your farmers markets like local local. Yeah, and
it's more work. It is. But once you get once you get into that rhythm and you find those things, it's not that hard. So what are the top three things you would say to do?
Josh Dech (13:05)
It's hard.
Yeah.
Well, if we want to hedge against those toxins, microbes, deficiencies, we have to understand what they are so you know what to do instead. So I'll preface with it saying this, toxins is a huge label. And I know I've already put the tinfoil hat on so somebody might have tuned me out already and I accept that. It's kind of the rabbit hole we've ended up down today. But the idea is toxins are everything from environmental, air pollution, what's sprayed in the air, what's sprayed in the chemicals. In France, they've done tests from the rain and there's glyphosate in it. Your soil, your
Water, if you're not filtering your water, right? Alcohol, chronically high stress, chronically high blood sugar, food preservatives, emulsifiers, chemicals and food dyes, all these different things, mold, these are all toxins to your system. So we have to reduce toxins, number one. Number two, we have to look at deficiencies. Deficiencies of what? Fresh air, sunlight. We get about a hundred times too little light during the day and a hundred times too much at nighttime because of screens. We're deficient in good relationships. We're deficient in rest and recovery and sleep.
We're deficient in fresh air, vitamins, minerals, cause soil's being depleted. And then of course our microbes, which they imbalance themselves in these types of environments. So you have your parasites, viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Those are the three umbrellas, toxins, microbes, deficiencies. So what we can do to heal ourselves is simply to begin doing the opposite. And this is where we start looking at improving the other three umbrellas of your inputs, your recoveries.
And I had another umbrella, I just put this together the other day, which I'm now forgetting. But, your environment, sorry, thank you. I put it together for a slide show and was like, this will sound good. And I couldn't remember it, but your inputs, your environments and your recoveries, inputs are your sun, your exercise, your real foods. If you're going down the center of the grocery store, don't eat those things. Eat what's on the outside of the grocery store. If you're buying non-organic food, cool, but at least wash it. Do a baking soda rinse or something else. There's tools out there to get the large part of the pesticides off.
Your body's resilient. You'll never eliminate toxins entirely, but you can reduce them enough so your body can keep ahead of it. That's all. Get a nice water filter. Instead of getting your nails done once a week or once a month or going on vacations twice a year, which a lot of people do, invest in your home, invest in your water, invest in your environments first. That's it.
sleep better, set alarms, turn your screens off. It seems so simple. I'm not saying this is a solution for Crohn's and colitis, these major autoimmune conditions, but these are the major things filling your cup is toxins, microbes, deficiencies. So if you focus on the big umbrellas of inputs, environments, and recoveries, suddenly you start healing or at the very least reducing your symptoms until you can do the fine tuning work to heal the other factors. But it really is that simple.
Natalie Tysdal (15:40)
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, I always say, I know you'll agree that it is a sum of all of the little things. Your health is a sum of your habits in the little things. You're not going to fix it overnight. But when you set those alarms, when you go to bed, when you, set an alarm to remember to take my vitamins. Otherwise I just don't remember, but it's a sum of the habits that we have. Yeah.
Josh Dech (16:01)
Yes.
Mmm.
Totally. Yeah.
That's right. Yeah.
And we're sick. It's death by a thousand cuts, right? They often, well, it's a little bit of this and it's a little bit of a glyphosate. It's a little bit of sugar. You're right. It is a little bit, but a little bit of a thousand things fills your cut pretty freaking fast. And we're just not aware of the thousands of things around us. This isn't a message of doom and gloom because it's really not that bad. It sounds terrible, but your body is so resilient. It's incredible. So if you just reduce the toxic load enough, your body starts to heal.
Natalie Tysdal (16:23)
Yeah.
Josh Dech (16:47)
This is all I do with our clientele. It's all we do in any other disease. Any specialist in the functional space says, look, deal with your environments and your inputs first. Make sure you're sleeping. If you're not doing the basics, don't spend the money on interventions. Don't hire a practitioner. Take care of the basics first and see what's remaining. Then work with a specialist.
Natalie Tysdal (17:04)
Yeah.
Can you give a couple of specific examples? Because we're talking pretty big picture. And for someone listening, they're like, I want to cut toxins, but where am I getting most of them? Like, just give me a couple of examples. We know processed stuff. So anything in a box and a can, if you can shop the perimeter of your grocery store, that's the best tip I think I've ever heard. Just don't go in middle. It's hard. It's really hard. We're used to these simple things.
Josh Dech (17:21)
Totally.
Yeah, that's it.
Natalie Tysdal (17:34)
But what are some of the other examples that we can give people today to start making a difference in those little things?
Josh Dech (17:41)
Yeah, it really is. It really is habits and it's here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to give you a couple of things you might do the math and go, oh, that's going to be $2,000. I don't have the money for that. Right. It's not about that. It's about incremental changes over time and slowly fading into the changes. All right. Little things. Look at your laundry detergent. If using the full of colorings and dyes and chemicals and perfumes and scents, those are hormone disrupting chemicals. Hormone disruptors also can just your liver. There's these huge downstream effects.
which linked to dozens and dozens of different diseases. Well, it's just a little laundry detergent, you're right. But then you have your deodorant, you have your hair products, your hairspray, you have makeup, you have all these other things, these different chemicals. They've even done studies on mothers who wear, with phthalates, who wear fake nails versus using real nails and no nail polish at all, very natural. And they found that the birth defects in babies were substantially higher in those who simply use nail polish and gel nails because of the chemicals. So a little goes a long way.
So what we're talking about here is you set it. Basically, if you can't grow the food or kill it, you shouldn't eat it. It's that simple. The second thing is what are your chemicals? You go, well, I've got this laundry. I just bought my laundry detergent. You know, you've been using it for a decade. Finish it. Then the next time you go to the store, buy the clean one, buy the scent free version, buy, you know, the minimal ingredient. Some people wash the clothes in vinegar, right? There's ways to do it otherwise. Look at your toothpaste. Is it full of fluoride and other chemicals and parabens and different...
Toxins to your system, which you know, I spit it out. Yeah, it absorbs into your gums and so quickly when I was a paramedic Someone who was low sugar if they were dying, of course We give an IV and shove sugar into their veins But otherwise they literally had little sugar gels in the ambulance you give them to suck on it and they would just put it in between their gums and under their tongue and within minutes they start feeling better that's how quickly things absorb seconds they get to your bloodstream minutes that starts taking effect into your body and so
what you brush your teeth with matters, what you put on your skin. ⁓ Next time you go to the store, I wanna buy that shirt. Look at the chemical composition. Is it rayon and polyester and microplastics? Or is it like a cotton or a linen or something natural? Are they a bit more expensive? Yes. Do they last longer? Yes. So it's just making these little transitions over time and being mindful of what you're putting in or on your body. Because if you put it on your skin, you may as well put it in your mouth because it absorbs as well.
Natalie Tysdal (20:02)
Wow,
yeah. When you're talking about, switch gears just a little bit, when you're talking about gut
health and someone who has bowel issues and they know like when I gotta go, I have to run or I'm constipated, do those things take time to heal or can you fix those pretty
Josh Dech (20:23)
It depends on the severity and how it got there. I've had some people in, we had a woman in our program, she had severe, we'll go with ulcerative colitis for her. And again, I'm going with the ulcerative colitis because it's the severe end of the bowel spectrum. So you can understand how quickly things can change. She had diagnosis back in 2013, and we saw her around 2024, 25, so severe. It was full of ulcers, hugely inflamed, spontaneous bleeding, 15 to 20 bowel movements a day, never solid, chained to the toilet.
and her doctors are begging like we need to cut your bowel out. We need to remove the entire colon. Within 16 weeks she went back. It was perfectly, there was one little speck left, healthy pink, perfectly clear. A bit of a freak instance doesn't happen that commonly, but it happens. So we can see severe things reversed very quickly. Some people take longer, depends on their environments, depends on how hard they're willing to work, how many changes they're willing to make. Sometimes there are other pathways in your body that can be congested.
So if you have somebody who's full of mold and they're living in a moldy environment, again, sometimes getting out of the environment, I mean, it's always the best thing, but sometimes they can't get out of that environment. So maybe we just simply support liver and bile flow. These are called drainage pathways, right? If detoxing is collecting your garbage, drainage is when you bring it out to the curb. It's how it leaves your body. So by simply supporting some of these pathways, you can see major improvements very quickly.
I had a woman in, same thing, it 10, 15 years. She was so constipated, she had one bowel movement every two to three weeks, and it was induced by drinking a full bottle of magnesium citrate on the toilet for about three days, headaches, migraines, the works, rinse and repeat for over a decade. And within three weeks, she was pooping every day. Now, the difference here is that there were simple lifestyle interventions that needed to be made to begin reducing those symptoms that we can pick up very quickly, right? Dropping high histamine foods if you're histamine sensitive.
getting out of your moldy environment. These are basics. So you can see things very, very quickly. Others, I have people come in to see me. Like we talk about diet and lifestyle. They're binge drinking on the weekends, eating Chick-fil-A four days a week. And can you help me with my bowels? I'm like, no, like do the basics first, then come back. So everyone's going to be different, but big things can happen very quickly.
Natalie Tysdal (22:35)
Wow. Well, that's encouraging for someone. And again, like what we started with, you may think being constipated, and that's kind of normal. Americans are just kind it's not normal. And it adds up over time to a lot, a lot of issues. Any other just major takeaways you'd like to tell people before we wrap up?
Josh Dech (22:43)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, here's what I'll tell you. Never accept blindly a diagnosis. In my opinion, a diagnosis is BS and I'll tell you why. What your doctors do is they look at you and they do these assessments. All let's go with a bowel issue. They do a colonoscopy or an endoscopy. So they scope up and they scope down. They take your symptoms, they take your blood and do all these things to check the boxes to go, yep, you have this condition. It must be genetic, it must be whatever. You just have this condition.
So here's the medication to manage that symptom. That would be like me going into the doctor with a nail stuck in my foot and my doctor goes, ooh, yep, you have this condition called nail and footyitis. There's nothing we can do about it. It's genetic. It's autoimmune. Here's some numbing cream for the rest of your life and just try to stay off your foot. That will be insane. Right? We look at them like they got four heads. Pull the nail out. Like obviously I'm inflamed. I'm having pain because there's something wrong.
There is a toxin, a microbe, deficiency, something in my system. So when your doctor's looking at you going, you have this condition, why? Well, it's just genetic. No, it's not. If it was genetic, you'd had it from birth. It's like a birth defect. You develop this disease 30, 40 years down the road, it's not genetic. Something has been pulling on what might be a weak link being your genes, but it didn't break itself. And so they give you these explanations of, you have it because you have it, saying the sky's blue because it's blue. It's not. Your diagnosis simply tells you what is happening.
where it's happening and how severe it is. At no point does their assessments, analysis or explanation tell you why it is happening to you. And once you understand the why, all diseases can be reversed, arguably all.
Natalie Tysdal (24:29)
Yeah.
Yeah. Ignorance is not really bliss. When we go, it's fine. I'll just get better. No. ⁓ Tell people what you do, how you help people, where they can find you, ⁓ because you're helping a lot of people. But I want to give them the place to go.
Josh Dech (24:36)
No, no.
Yeah, absolutely. You can find everything over at gut solution.ca. That's all singular.ca for Canada. gut solution.ca. You can access my social medias from there. We got podcasts. I have two of them as well. ⁓ one specific to bowel disease. One's all broad health. We've got a YouTube channel with all kinds of resources and videos and you name it can all be found joshdeck.health across socials. yeah, it's all there. gut solution.ca is a great place to go.
Natalie Tysdal (25:19)
I know you're helping a lot of people and I love the education. love how you simplify it and you're just very real about it. thanks Josh. Thanks for dealing with the tech issues as well as the digestive issues.
Josh Dech (25:29)
Well,
these hiccups happen and we have to be very patient in things tech, in things gut. I'll tell you, like I said, I've seen over 600 cases of bowel disease reversed and there's nothing that can't be reversed. So keep your heads up, do your research guys, never accept a thing, whether it's a gut issue or a tech issue, there's always a solution and Natalie and I found the solution. So I don't know what it is, she found it, but.
Natalie Tysdal (25:37)
you
We were patient. We worked through it.
Yes. Thank you so much. I don't either, but it's fine. We're going to get it figured out. Thanks, Josh. Take care.
Josh Dech (25:57)
That's right. I still don't know what was wrong. My pleasure, Natalie. That's right. Thanks for having me.
