And

it's only until you come and you realize that this is the earth, this is real air, this is real food.

So I went through a spiritual journey that said, you know what? I had this aha moment.

This is who I want to be.

Because everything that kept me in the gym and kept me strong and kept me young and all that energy to go hit that interval training and get my bench press up and go on those runs and feel like my wife, I was deserving of my wife and deserving of my family.

I had a lot to prove.

It was the same thing as healing Crohn's and colitis.

That's it.

Are you starting to see changes? What causes the changes? And then what kind of gets you out and in the trajectory from there?

A lot of people don't understand this about my story.

I was already in natural medicine school for a year, practicing natural medicine for two or three years before I almost died.

It did not work for me.

It was not easy.

It was the hardest thing I ever did.

And I'd start to get results and I'd regress and lose all the results.

blood test to go take immediately.

Right.

Talking about bowel movements and the GI tract and the biology.

It really was pain to purpose.

I got sick as a young kid, and I went to all the major hospitals, and I had the same kind of treatment plan, whether it was Mayo Clinic, UCLA, or Cedars-Sinai, which did help save my life, but it was let's use steroids like prednisone, budesonide as an immunosuppressant.

Let's use a 5-ASA stomach coating like mesalamine or Lialda.

Uh, those don't work.

Let's go ahead and put you on immunomodulator like, uh, methotrexate or 6-MP, azathioprine.

Absolutely.

And then I invited everybody in.

And it was a win for you, too, even though you owned it.

It was a godsend.

It was godsend.

So when you go through that much pain that you and I did, it was like I was housebound for a year.

I was 120 pounds.

I had to relearn how to walk.

It's the

Yeah.

There's great clinical research on B infantis for pregnancy and its need to develop a healthy microbiome in your baby and reduce the chance that your son or daughter gets IBD and IBS.

So what my, uh, wife, we kept her on powdered probiotics.

We use Natren.

That's the one we were like.

It's single ingredient, powdered probiotics, and we focused on B infantis, Bifidobacterium bifidum.

And then because she didn't have histamine issues or MCAS, any of those issues, we started, uh, making sure she was getting an acidophilus, Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus.

... how we can get this couple a baby.

Oh, that's good.

You can't think of your problems and read.

You'll lose track on the page.

So if I could just practice, I'd wake up and I'd make my Mikosa healing tea.

I want to share with some people some great gut strategies to make your gut feel good today.

So I'd make my Mikosa healing tea.

I put on my robe with my slippers.

Yeah.

for

you or me? And I just eventually, I was talking about it for two years before I finally did it.

And I just, and it goes into your question of how do I handle the stress? So I run a company.

I have 35 people who work for me.

There's usually two to 300 people who are working with my team who have IBD at any given time.

And, you know, we have a real organization, a real passion, real mission.

My mission is to build a healing home for people with IBD so they're not alone and they can get real results through a customized plan.

So what are you seeing when you're working with patients in that arena? Yeah.

And let's switch and focus slightly for those that are listening that either maybe are currently, you know, have the condition or they have family or otherwise, like what are some takeaways that anyone with IBD can do to make some impact? And obviously you're not giving medical advice, but like what, what can, where can they start? You know?

Well, there's a few places you can start in.

First, just understanding what we know and what we don't know.

And IBD, inflammatory bowel disease, is chronic inflammation in the bowel.

And this is good.

Anyone who's listening who has IBS, SIBO, constipation, GI issues, this is all true.

Because all of that stuff is basically just pre-IBD, like pre-diabetes, you know.

right? You

No, stop that.

No, I was, you know, as a kid, I always had an entrepreneurial bone.

And I put that towards acting and modeling commercials.

And I just got lucky.

I got lucky.

I moved.

I lived in New York.

Tell me how that helped your evolution along to what you're doing today, which is your bucket list career helping others.

It's preventative.

Yeah, it's preventative.

Our whole life is preventative.

What happens if you sit on the couch and you never eat a solid food again? Did cancer just come? Was it in remission? So this whole idea is this stuckness of pain and trauma, this identity and this perspective of truth.

You can't cure anything.

If you stop saying I love you, divorce is going to come out of remission and flare.

It's like, you know, if you stop living in balance, we become imbalanced.

tube at one point, right? How did you gain? How did you go from that to gaining 60 pounds of muscle?

Let's talk about these root issues that a lot of people like me, like you, that have suffered with autoimmune disease in the past or somebody listening who might be going through at the moment, what do they need to be thinking about?

Okay, great question.

So let's just continue to organize so everyone has their thoughts.

The first step I want you to do is I want you to combine step one to get in remission.

is combine everything together.

Become the CEO of your health, learn natural medicine no matter what you do, learn to get yourself empowered, and then don't sleep on your doctor and use a doctor who will listen and help you build your dreams conventionally.

Combine them all together, that's your chance of getting remission is a lot greater, and then you can decide if you're going to use conventional moving forward.

But the mold issue seems to be getting worse.

But today, we want to ask you, why are so many people struggling with gut health issues in 2026?

Raquel, Kristen, thank you so much for having me.

I'm honored to be here.

I wanna dedicate this time to anyone who's struggling with chronic GI issues.

You can heal.

I know it's hard, and I will make a stand for you.

Hopefully today, we can get those massive moments, so really appreciate being here a second time.

Like-

What, what do you think happened to you?

Sean, I was eating a terrible diet like most of us were back in the, in the '80s and '90s, man.

I was e- I worked at Papa John's Pizza.

I was eating McDonald's.

But great question.

Highlights.

About two months before I was finally diagnosed first with left-sided ulcerative colitis, and then it was Crohn's disease by a different doctor.

You know, if you were to say like, "These are the top five things that we commonly consume in our diet," whether they be emulsifiers or plastics, what do you think are the things that are most likely driving a lot of the problem? Is there, like, things you would say, "I'd just never eat this stuff"?

Yep.

You know, we can go to school, we can study, we can do this, but if you don't have it in your heart to really become the CEO of your health and really try to understand what's happening and just go for it, you can't get past it.

You can't unveil what's possible in our lives, and that's really what happened to me.

You know, I had one of the worst things that ever happened to me, diagnosed with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis by two different doctors at two different hospitals, two different times, and it just came out of nowhere.

No family had it, no past history, no experience.

I was a normal kid, but at 19 years old, I'm getting blood in the stool.

I mean, I'm, I'm out playing sports.

Mm.

Okay, so give me an example of someone stressed at work.

If someone is stressed at work, you have to realize that it's all about energy.

So this is an ironic thing that a four or five-year-old understands how to do this.

You have to walk towards a smile.

This means you have to take action towards things that help you experience love, gratitude, peace, a sense of reset, recharging, hope.

These are synonyms of how the energy works, right? The emotion, and you'll feel it because you'll emotionally know, energy in motion.

See, the spirit can't be bought.

Okay