TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the USA in 2016 by Ghost Mountain Books, Inc.
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © 2016 Travis Stork, M.D.
Travis Stork has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473544758
ISBN 9780593079300
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Cover design: Nadeem Mushtaq Jass, nadeem.jass@gmail.com
Cover photo: Kremer Johnson Photography, www.kremerjohnson.com
Interior Design and Production: Dovetail Publishing Services, www.dovetailpublishingservices.com
It may seem silly, but I’m dedicating this book to my pup of nearly 17 years, Nala. She was a rescue whom I adopted during my first year of medical school. I wasn’t planning on getting a dog but it was pet adoption day while I was at the store. As she cowered in the corner with her fur coat covered in red clay, she kept looking my way. After a few minutes, I knew she was going home with me. Since that time, she’s been by my side. From every exam in medical school to the writing of this book, she has taken every step with me. Even if her steps these days are taken a bit more slowly!
The anecdotes in this book are used to illustrate common issues and problems that I have encountered and do not necessarily portray specific people or situations. No real names have been used.
As with all books, this one contains opinions and ideas of the author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, psychological, or any other kind of personal professional services or therapy in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, psychological, or other competent professional before adopting any of the concepts in this book or drawing inferences from it. The content of this book, by its very nature, is general, whereas each reader’s situation is unique. Therefore, as with all books of this nature, the purpose is to provide general information rather than address individual situations, which books by their very nature cannot do.
The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.
Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version. Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances.
I want to personally thank Alice Lesch Kelly for her dedication to this book and her excitement for helping me bring this important project to life. A special thanks to Lisa Clark: your guidance and commitment to getting things right is refreshing and quite frankly, awesome. Andrea McKinnon for helping me hatch this idea while waiting at the airport in Austin, TX. And to everyone else who played a role in the development and evolution of this book, I thank you!
LET ME START by saying that I love food. Let me also say that the most important health lesson I’ve ever learned is to let food be my medicine and not my poison. This has been my guiding principle for quite some time now. But here’s the truth: our knowledge of how food affects our health and weight is always changing and evolving. The Lose Your Belly Diet is a book I was inspired to write because of our rapidly changing knowledge of the human gut microbiome and its effect on our health and weight. If you don’t know what “human gut microbiome” means, don’t worry, because you soon will! It’s exciting stuff, and my goal is to be there with you every step of the way as you learn how to optimize gut health and maximize weight loss—especially the loss of harmful belly fat.
This plan focuses on food choices and portion control strategies that help you eat more of the high-quality foods that nourish you and make you feel full and satisfied, and fewer of the low-quality foods that lead to excess weight gain and fat accumulation. It checks all of the healthy-eating boxes while filling you up with delicious, enjoyable foods.
The Lose Your Belly Diet is an evolution of The Doctor’s Diet, a book I wrote a couple of years ago. I loved that book, because it’s such an effective, easy-to-follow plan and was the way I used to eat. But since that book came out, we’ve learned so much important new information about gut health and the impact of beneficial bacteria on our overall health and weight. It’s changed the way I eat and it should change the way you eat, too.
This plan tells you the how and why of enjoying life-supporting foods, and it does so without deprivation. In fact, it gives you more freedom and flexibility than pretty much any diet out there. Not only does it encourage you to eat an abundance of gut-supporting foods, but it makes room for bread, pasta, and other whole grains that so many diets cut out these days.
And even more fantastic: this diet makes room for things like chocolate, wine, and coffee, which not only make life worth living (in my humble opinion) but appear to be beneficial for your gut bacteria, too!
I wanted to write this book because I believe we’re in the midst of a dramatic change in our understanding of human health. The discoveries that scientists are making about the human microbiome are so important that I feel we should all start implementing them into our lives immediately.
Here’s where it all started. I keep a pretty close eye on medical news. Not only is it my job—both as a physician and as the host of The Doctors—but it’s also my personal passion. I want to live the longest, healthiest, most vibrant life possible, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve my health and the health of my family, friends, patients, and viewers.
During the past few years, one of the areas that has grabbed my attention on an almost daily basis is the growing field of human microbiome research—the study of the various tiny organisms that live in our bodies, especially in our bellies. Nearly every day, another piece of research reveals previously unknown connections between our overall health and the well-being of the microbes that live in our gut.
This may come as a surprise. We’re accustomed to thinking of bacteria and other microbes as being bad—and some, such as E. coli or salmonella in contaminated food, can indeed cause serious illness. But these bacteria bullies give their fellow microbes a bad rep. Most of the bacteria and other microbes in our bodies are actually very good; they do amazing things, such as working with our immune system to fight off dangerous invaders and helping our intestines digest food. When the microbe communities in our guts are healthy—when they are diverse and in balance—there seems to be a higher likelihood that we will be healthy, too. And, when our personal microbe community is in bad shape, it raises some big red flags for our overall health. Having an unhealthy personal microbiome has been linked to problems with immunity, gastrointestinal health, and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, allergies, and asthma. There’s also evidence that it may be associated with obesity and other difficult-to-solve health problems.
This is a time of great discovery for microbiome researchers. In fact, the findings about gut microbes have been so promising that I am convinced the human microbiome is one of the most exciting new frontiers in medical discovery that we’ve seen in quite some time.
In a nutshell, here’s what we know about the human microbiome: When scientists analyze individual people’s microbe communities, they find that healthy people have many more beneficial microbes overall and a much greater variety of microbe species in their bodies than less-healthy people. We don’t know all the details yet—hundreds of microbiome studies are still under way—but one thing is clear: having a vibrant, balanced, diverse microbe community is the way to go. So it makes really solid sense for us all to be protecting and supporting the population of our personal microbiome.
Gut microbes play such a crucial role in our health that it’s kind of amazing that it’s taken so long for us to start giving them the attention they deserve—but better late than never. Now that we are learning about how to take care of our gut microbes, it’s time to start figuring out how to incorporate that research into our everyday life choices.
That’s exactly what we’ll do in the Lose Your Belly Diet.
The Lose Your Belly Diet is built around a simple concept that comes up over and over in human microbiome research: making choices that protect and support the microbes in our guts paves the way for better health—not just for our guts, but for our whole self. These choices do more than just help sustain our gut microbes. They lower our odds of developing various diseases. And they raise our chances of reaching and maintaining a healthy weight, and of burning off dangerous belly fat. In the pages that follow, I’ll tell you how to do all that and explain the many ways—most of which are fairly simple—that you can immediately start to protect and support the microbes in your gut.
I like to think of the microbes in my belly as my Little Buddies who are helping me stay healthy every day. I owe my Little Buddies a lot, and I want to do everything possible to take care of them.
Despite my enthusiasm for the subject of gut health, I understand that not everyone wants to delve into the down-and-dirty details of it the way I do. I get it: most people don’t relish the idea of reading the latest JAMA study on fecal microbiota as they drink their morning coffee. (Yes, I admit, I’ve done this.) But living a long, healthy, vibrant life is a major goal for just about everyone I know. So, even if you don’t like thinking about stool samples, you probably do like the idea of finding out simple ways that you can apply the cutting-edge discoveries about microbiome health to your everyday life.
That’s where the Lose Your Belly Diet comes in. I’m not a gut researcher, but I am intensely interested in microbiome research. The patients I work with and the people I talk to every day want to know what they can do to improve their health, boost the quality of their life, feel better, and live longer. So think of me as your own personal gut guide. I’ve digested the major microbiome studies (I know, bad pun) with one goal in mind: to figure out how you and I can apply this new information to our daily lives and diets.
The recommendations in The Lose Your Belly Diet reflect the latest research about gut health. But here’s something important to keep in mind. Although we have learned so much lately, there are still many things we don’t know about gut bacteria and how best to support it. So when we come across questions that don’t yet have clear answers—for example, the jury is still out about the benefits of probiotic supplements for the general public—I promise to be frank with you. When we don’t know whether A is better than B or C, I’ll level with you and share whatever guidance is available to help you make choices that are best for you.
But don’t think too much about what we don’t know, because there is so much we do know about how to support your Little Buddies. Using the advice in this book, you can start taking steps to help your gut bacteria immediately.
Many of my microbiome-enhancing recommendations in the Lose Your Belly Diet involve food, because the foods we choose to eat and avoid have a major impact on the health of our Little Buddies. Because diet plays such a huge role in microbiome health as well as overall health, I’ve created a diet plan that supports your gut and your entire body—a plan that does a super job of feeding your gut and enhancing your overall health while helping you slim down (if that’s your goal).
But this book is way more than just a diet. The Lose Your Belly Diet will provide you with all kinds of recommendations that reflect the growing knowledge we have about a healthy gut microbiome. I’ll walk you through all the changes you can make—from the foods you buy and the medicines you take, to the way you think about dirt and germs. I’ll also cover some of the choices you make as a parent that will positively benefit your family’s microbes.
Most of these changes are easy to make. For example, the Little Buddies in your gut benefit when you eat raw or less well-cooked foods, so I’ll share some delicious ideas for including more raw produce in your diet, including a new kind of veggie dish that is an innovative twist on an old American favorite. Some remarkably simple changes help, too: believe it or not, simply cooking your wholegrain pasta to the al dente texture that most chefs prefer—rather than boiling it until it’s very soft—can give your gut microbes a boost because it leaves more of the fiber in the pasta intact, which makes a better feast for your gut bacteria.
To make things even easier for you, I’ve developed simple meal plans and quick, delicious recipes that will make it a breeze for you to follow the Lose Your Belly Diet for the rest of your life. And I’ll show you, step-by-step, how you can start eating some of the foods that are especially helpful for gut health, such as fermented foods and probiotic foods that deliver beneficial bacteria to your gut.
A nice side effect is that when you do good things for your gut, you do good things for your physique, too. The Lose Your Belly Diet can be customized to support your own personal weight goals, whether you want to take off excess pounds or just look leaner. You’ll find that by following the Lose Your Belly Diet, you’ll not only control your weight, but you’ll also be making choices that lower the risk of potential killers such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain kinds of cancer. That’s pretty great news.
Here’s one more exciting benefit you can expect when you start following the Lose Your Belly Diet. Our focus is on the inside of your body, where as many as a thousand different kinds of microbes are playing a part in your everyday health. The Lose Your Belly Diet can help you shed the harmful belly fat that interferes not only with your health, but with the way you look in your swimsuit. While you nurture your gut with the Lose Your Belly Diet, you’ll also be supporting just about every other part of your body.
In The Lose Your Belly Diet, I start off by sharing information with you about your gut microbes and the various things that help them. Then I get down to brass tacks, giving you specific advice on diet and other lifestyle choices that protect, support, and increase gut bacteria. If you’re anxious to get started on the Lose Your Belly Diet, feel free to jump ahead and get going right away—it starts here.
The Lose Your Belly Diet is so simple that you can easily start following it at your next meal. You probably already have many of the recommended foods in your refrigerator or pantry.
If you do decide to fast-forward to the Lose Your Belly Diet, make sure to come back and read these beginning chapters when you have a chance. I’ve found that it’s much easier to make smart choices about diet and health when you have a clear appreciation of why those decisions make sense. I don’t want you to opt for an apple over a bag of chips only because it’s what I told you to do. I want you to embrace the Lose Your Belly Diet because it’s what you want and because you are making an informed choice based on your knowledge and commitment to your Little Buddies and yourself. When you really understand the “why” of good health as well as the “how to,” you’re much more likely to stay motivated and reach your goals.
So feel free to jump ahead to the Lose Your Belly Diet if you’re excited to start making changes. But don’t forget to learn all about why it’s so good for you and your Little Buddies!
I’m happy to tell you that change happens fast when you start following the Lose Your Belly Diet. In one study, researchers found that improvements in microbe diversity—one measurement of gut health—began to occur surprisingly quickly among study participants who started making microbiome-supportive diet changes. Researchers thought it might take weeks, months, or even years for improvements to occur, but much to their surprise, gut health started getting better within days of making simple diet adjustments. To me, that’s a sign that our bodies want to be healthy, and they are primed and ready to receive our help and to start benefitting from positive change right away.
With all that in mind, let’s get going—there’s no time to waste! Your Little Buddies are ready for you to rock their gastrointestinal world!
WHEN YOU WERE a kid, you probably spent a fair amount of time rooting around in your backyard. And you probably discovered that there are a lot more living things in a yard than most of us realize. At first glance you might have seen a squirrel or a couple of birds. But when you lifted up a big stone, a whole new world would come into view—an entire community with all kinds of bugs and worms and little tiny critters with lots and lots of legs.
That’s kind of what it’s like in our bellies. Check out your belly in a mirror and you don’t see much aside from skin and a belly button. But if you could peek inside, a whole new world would come into view—solid organs, blood vessels, nerves, and yards and yards of intestines.
Then, if you were to delve even deeper—and if you could strap on some kind of high-tech sci-fi glasses with super-microscopic vision—you’d see an even more amazing world, a community that is bursting with life. You’d see the microbes that make up your own personal slice of the human microbiome.
In this section of The Lose Your Belly Diet, we’re going to focus on what’s going on in your belly—what kinds of microbes live there, what jobs they do, and the roles they play in disease and weight gain. We’ll also start looking at some of the steps you can begin taking—starting today—to repair damage to your gut. By making some simple changes, you can go a long way toward protecting and supporting the Little Buddies in your belly.
You think of yourself as an individual, but in reality, you have a huge number of Little Buddies riding around in your gut.
Your belly is populated by somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 trillion microbes. Wow! I don’t know about you, but I find it pretty hard to wrap my head around that number, which is a 1 followed by 14 zeroes. Although your gut microbes’ numbers are enormous, their footprint is small: all together they weigh a total of just two to six pounds. The microbes in your gut have a huge number of cells—10 times more than all of the other cells in your body. And they contain a total of about 1,000 more genes than are present in every other part of your body. Amazing!
Even if you can’t quite picture all those organisms nestling in your belly, it does make sense for you to know about them—and to thank your lucky stars that you have them. In fact, we humans wouldn’t be able to survive without them.
This community of microbes—which scientists refer to as the human microbiome—helps us in many ways, some of which we understand and many of which we have yet to discover. But like every other community of living things, gut microbes do their jobs most effectively when they are residing in an environment that supports and protects them. In that respect, our Little Buddies are no different than most living beings, including you and me.
I’d like to tell you a little about these microbes, because understanding a few things about them will help you do a better job of taking care of them. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a medical school lecture on the gut—just a quick intro to the incredible population of microbes in your belly.
Microbes are tiny organisms that are so small they can be seen only with a microscope. Most of the microbes in your body are bacteria, but there are also viruses, fungi, and several other kinds of microbes in and on you. Healthy adults are home to up to 1,000 different species of bacteria. All of the microbes in the human body together are referred to as the human microbiome; I refer to the microbes in your own body as your personal microbiome. Most of these microbes live in your large intestine, but they’re also found throughout your digestive system (which also includes your mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, rectum, and anus) and on your skin, genitals, nose, ears, and sinuses. Since most microbes are bacteria and the vast majority of them are in your gut, they’re frequently referred to as “gut bacteria.”
Human microbe communities are a little like our fingerprints: no two are alike. Although certain species of bacteria are found in most people’s guts, some are unique. Bacteria vary from person to person, from family to family, and from population to population. Families tend to have similar microbiome profiles—probably because of genetic factors and because families live in close proximity to one another and eat similar foods. We even share some of the same gut bacteria with our pets.
Personal microbiomes also differ based on geography. The microbiome profile of an American’s gut is likely different than a Brazilian’s or a South African’s, for example—and a New Yorker’s would probably be different than a Texan’s. Many factors contribute to this, including genetics, hygiene, diet, health history, previous infections, antibiotic exposure, environmental toxins, and more. As humans have evolved, so too have the microbes in our bodies—and as you’ll soon see, not always in a good way.
When we talk about having a healthy microbiome, we’re referring to two main considerations: the total number of beneficial Little Buddies in our bodies, and the number of different species of microbes that call our bodies home. A healthy microbiome is diverse, which means it has a greater number of species of microbes. When scientists analyze the gut microbiomes of people who are not healthy, they often find fewer species of microbes than they find in the guts of healthier people. Although there is some question as to whether lack of diversity leads to disease or vice versa, scientists feel confident that microbiome diversity is a very positive thing, and lack of diversity isn’t good.
You may be wondering why the human microbiome is getting so much attention lately—I mentioned earlier that hardly a day goes by that I don’t read a new study about the human microbiome. But why is all that news coming out now?
Amazingly, the human microbiome was not generally recognized until the late 1990s. It wasn’t even mentioned when I went to medical school. But a lot has happened since then. Most of the discoveries about the human microbiome have been spurred by big progress during the last decade or so in the field of gene sequencing. This is a process that allows us to identify genes based on the specific makeup of their DNA. Gene sequencing was first used to identify human genes. However, after researchers started decoding the human genome, they realized that in order to understand the human body completely, they’d also need to understand and sort out the genetic makeup of the microbes that live within it. So they turned their focus to the human microbiome. As gene sequencing identified, decoded, and cataloged the genetic makeup of gut microbes, scientists began using this information to launch in-depth studies about how the various kinds of microbes affect overall health.
The National Institutes of Health Human Microbiome Project (HMP), which was established in 2008, has supported much of the research that explores connections between health, disease, and the condition of the human microbiome. If you’re interested in delving more deeply than this book does into the nuts and bolts of the microbiome, a great place to start is the HMP website (www.hmpdacc.org).
How do all of these microbes enter our bodies? It starts at birth (or possibly before birth—scientists aren’t completely sure). As babies move through the birth canal during delivery, they are exposed to the microbes in their mothers’ vagina. This is referred to as “colonization.” More microbes enter their bodies during breast-feeding and as they interact with people and their environment, and it continues throughout life. Our personal microbe communities reach maximum diversity during adolescence, and if we treat them well, they can stay relatively stable until our senior years.
As we make our way through life, various things—good and bad—can impact the health of our Little Buddies. I’ll tell you more about all of these things throughout the book, but here’s a quick rundown.
Based on what we know so far, the microbes in your gut community benefit from a healthy diet; exposure to people, animals, and plants that carry a diverse mix of microbes; being born via vaginal delivery; and being fed with breast milk during infancy. There’s even evidence that exercise helps our Little Buddies, too.
Eating a healthy diet is one of the best ways that we can support our gut bacteria. That means choosing more of the foods that help our Little Buddies thrive—especially the dietary fiber found in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes—and choosing fewer refined foods, sugars, processed meats, and other foods that we know are not very good for our health and that seem to be detrimental to our gut microbes, too. In particular, when we don’t feed our gut bacteria the high-fiber food they need, they can starve, die off, or be overtaken by less beneficial bacteria. Or they may feed on the mucus membranes that line our intestines (a bit of an unpleasant thought, if you ask me), which can lead to inflammation and other health problems.
Some of the other things that can harm our gut microbes include chemical cleaning products, certain health conditions, antibiotic medications, antibiotics used in our food supply, delivery via Cesarean section, formula feeding, and alcohol abuse. We’ll look at all of these more closely in upcoming chapters.
Those are some of the things we know so far, but I’m sure there are many more discoveries on the horizon. For example, studies in mice have found that cigarette smoke damages their gut microbes—no surprise there, since cigarette smoke has been found to cause harm to so many other parts of the body. These results come from mice studies, but I’ll bet you 100 to 1 that the same will be found with people. I’m also guessing that as this type of research progresses, we’ll discover that many of the other types of environmental toxins that damage cells and organs—air pollution, pesticides, heavy metals, you name it—may hurt our gut bacteria. And I think we may also find that many of the factors that boost our health in other ways—good sleep and stress relief, for example—may turn out to benefit our Little Buddies as well. In this respect, I think we have a lot in common with our little friends.
It’s kind of ironic: just as we are discovering the amazing contribution that our gut microbes make to our health, we’re also realizing that over the past few generations, the human microbiome has been changing, especially in developed countries such as the United States. The typical Western lifestyle seems to be fairly harmful to our Little Buddies. “Our microbiome has changed significantly over the past century, and especially over the past 50 years,” said New York University microbiologist Martin Blaser in an article in The Atlantic magazine. “We’re losing microbes with each generation; they are going extinct. These changes have consequences.”
Among the consequences Blaser is referring to are dramatically increasing rates of allergic diseases such as asthma, eczema, food allergies, and some other health problems that are much more common today than they were in past decades. This is no surprise to me—I’m someone who has suffered from asthma and seasonal allergies for much of my life, and since I’ve been focusing much more on eating to feed my gut microbes, my symptoms have improved significantly. Coincidence? Maybe, but it certainly isn’t hurting that I’m decreasing my body’s overall inflammation with the changes I’ve made in my diet and lifestyle.
Unfortunately in modern society we eat too much of the foods that act like poison to our health and our Little Buddies: highly processed foods and “natural” foods raised in an unnatural way with synthetic pesticides and antibiotics. We also eat too few of the foods that act like medicine for our health and Little Buddies: fiber-rich vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, for example. Also playing a role in the destruction of our Little Buddies’ health is the rampant overuse of antibiotics (more on this later because it upsets me that healthcare providers are largely to blame for this!) and changes in the ways in which babies are often delivered (more C-sections) and fed (formula rather than breast milk).
Scientists also point to the cleanliness of our world in the twenty-first century. By relying so heavily on antimicrobial sanitizers and other germ killers, we also reduce our exposure to the good Little Buddies that help build up a healthy microbiome.
So what can we do about all this? Some of it is beyond our control, but fortunately there are many steps we can take to improve the health of our microbiome community and subsequently our overall health. With the Lose Your Belly Diet, we’ll focus on the changes that are within our control.
Before we go any further, I want to stop for a minute and talk about something important. A few of the things I mentioned that can harm the microbiome might upset you. Maybe you gave birth by C-section, ate a poor diet for many years, were prescribed a lot of antibiotics, or smoked cigarettes. If so, I hope you’ll think about it this way: What’s done is done. When it comes to your health, it’s not helpful to spend a lot of time looking back and regretting past decisions. Instead, focus on now. For instance, I was formula fed. But I don’t spend a second of my life worrying about that, and I certainly don’t blame my mom. You can’t change the past—but the future is wide open. What matters is what you do now, beginning this very moment. Let go of any regret you may have and use that energy to start making choices today that will benefit your health and start rebuilding your gut microbiome from this day forward.
Now that you’ve met your microbes, we’ll take a look at why it’s so important to have a healthy microbiome. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about some of the many jobs your Little Buddies do every day.
The Little Buddies in our guts perform so many important jobs that many scientists think of the human microbiome as a “forgotten human organ” that is as important to our health as our heart, lungs, or liver. I like to picture all those trillions of microbes as busy workers in a teeming factory, where everyone is busy doing work that benefits our health.
We’ve known for a long time that gut bacteria exist in our bodies, but it’s really only recently that we have figured out how many jobs they do. Take digestion, for example. We always assumed that the major players in our digestive system—the stomach, intestines, liver, gallbladder, and pancreas—did the lion’s share of the job of breaking down our food to release and absorb nutrients and energy that can be used by the body. But now, on further study, we realize that our gut microbes also play a huge role in digesting food. It’s kind of amazing—like thinking that instead of having five or six guys painting your house, there are actually 100 trillion.