90% of Americans spend 22 hrs/day indoors
According to USA Today data cited in the episode, 90% of Americans spend close to 22 hours inside every day, and roughly 20% never go outside regularly.
Snapshot · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Vitamin D Expert: The Supplement World Is Giving The WRONG Advice!
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Jul 27, 2026
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Why Spending Too Much Time Indoors Is Hurting Your Health
At 1:37:23 · chapter starts 1:36:44
Dr. Gominak addresses diet head-on, framing the core insight as: your diet determines which bacteria live in your gut, and those bacteria determine which B vitamins your body receives. She is deliberately agnostic about specific diets — humans cover the globe and succeed on widely varied food — but she points to two clear historical examples of what happens when diet becomes purely carbohydrate. In World War II Japanese prisoner-of-war camps (the Bataan Death March), soldiers eating only rice outside all day developed beriberi: heart failure, non-healing leg ulcers, bright shiny skin, and burning in the feet — a thiamine (B1) deficiency, resolved by reintroducing meat and vegetables. In the institutionalised populations of the 1930s–40s American South fed corn gruel, pellagra emerged: a niacin (B3) deficiency with dermatitis, diarrhoea, and dementia. The lesson: a purely carbohydrate diet selects for bacteria that do not produce the full spectrum of B vitamins. She also addresses probiotics versus prebiotics: probiotics dump bacteria into the gut, but without the growth factors those bacteria need, they cannot reproduce and are flushed out within days. Prebiotics feed the existing bacteria. Fermented foods do both — they deliver bacteria and the B vitamins those bacteria produce — but the clinical timeframe for correction is unpredictable compared to the supplement protocol.
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