The Root Causes of Anxiety – A Functional Medicine Approach | Podcast #370
Conventional medicine labels anxiety as a neurotransmitter imbalance and relies on pharmaceutical drugs to dampen the symptoms. Although, prescription medications can be a helpful and even necessary tool in periods of overwhelming anxiety. But we have so many more tools at our disposal than just medications!
Dr. J and Evan explain that they recognize that anxiety is often the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” in functional medicine. It’s the clear and present warning that something is going on below the surface that needs our attention. Our current circumstances may have been the breaking point, but the anxiety manifests in underlying issues. That’s why rectifying these issues is necessary to make anxiety more manageable or even eliminate it!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:06 – Acute and Chronic Stress
4:06 – Amino Acids and Herbs
11:24 – Gut Issues
16:26 – Functional Medicine Approach
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the root causes of anxiety, a functional medicine approach, and how to get to the root cause. Really excited about this topic. We see many functional medicine patients with these exact issues and we always want to get to the root cause of why that is so. Evan, how are we doing man?
Evan Brand: I’m doing good. You know the anxiety story for you and I talking about anxiety goes back literally eight years. It would have been late 2014 when I was in my luxury apartment in Austin and I was calling you and I was saying, “dude, I can’t stop this”. My heart is pounding. I’m freaking out. What the heck is going on and you said, “man, if you go to the emergency room, all they’re gonna do is they’re gonna give you some sort of anxiety medication. So why don’t you go and take about a gram of magnesium and see what happens.” And so, that’s what I did. I think I might have had some pharma GABA or some other tools on hand, maybe some passion flower and luckily, I calmed it down but little did I know back then that I had some of the big root causes of anxiety that were unresolved which included mold toxicity, Lyme, Bartonella, some of these tick-borne infections that drive up the nervous system, unfortunately. Now, knock on wood, anxiety’s been a minimal to non-existent part of my life and It’s incredibly freeing because anxiety can be so debilitating that people become housebound or they become afraid to travel, they become afraid to go on planes. They become afraid to seek the raise at their job. They just want to live in this little cocoon because they’re so afraid and anxiety is also very debilitating for children too. It affects their confidence and their self-esteem and their motivation for school and how they get bullied and so, I mean, we could do an hour on this but think just to open this thing up with a bang, I would say that infections are a big driver of anxiety so whatever that is a tick-borne infection like a Bartonella, Babesia, Lyme situation or gut infections like we’ve talked about a thousand times in the last 10 years together which is parasites, bacterial overgrowth, worms, Candida, anything that’s gonna release a toxin or aggravate the immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So anytime you look at anxiety, you always have to get to the root cause, right? Obviously, if it’s unresolved emotional stress, your body is designed to create anxiety for a certain situation, like if you, I don’t know, if you have lived in a forest across the street and there are bears, there should be a healthy amount of anxiety so you know, don’t leave food out and you’re just a little bit more careful with your habits so you don’t get attacked by a bear, right? There’s a healthy bit of anxiety there which is good to kind of keep you on edge so you are alert and you make good decisions. We’re talking about things that are, you know, unhealthy amounts of anxiety where you don’t have those types of emotional stressors, right? Obviously, if those emotional stressors are there, kind of take inventory of them and figure out what that corrective action is you need to kind of close the anxiety loop. I always say close the anxiety loop. What is that action? You have to take that allows you to feel confident that you are not ignoring the reason why there is anxiety there. If you did that, great, awesome. Check that off your list. The next thing is like you mentioned, obviously, any type of chronic stress or acute stress can create anxiety, right? And so, chronic and acute stressors do different things to your body. They’re going to cause B vitamins to get recycled and used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna cause magnesium to get used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna put you in a fight or flight position, where your body goes into fight or flight and then that’s gonna cause increases of cortisol, increases of adrenaline and it’s gonna cause your brain to get hyperactive and obviously at the same time it’s gonna affect digestion too when you’re in fight or flight. It’s gonna decrease your body’s ability to make stomach acid and enzymes and it makes it harder for you to break down your food. And so, and then of course, the more stressed you are, now you’re gonna start craving more processed foods that increase dopamine and increase a lot of those, uh, feel-good brain chemicals to buffer that but so, I always look at like what’s the constructive vehicle to fix this, what’s the destructive vehicle. Destructive vehicle feels good at the moment but creates problems down the road. Constructive helps at the moment. May not, maybe not quite as fast but then actually gets to the root cause over time. And so, some of our constructive vehicles like you already mentioned, magnesium, right? Theanine, right? B6, B5, right? And I always look at nutrients first, like nutrients are in the hierarchy before herbs so nutrients first and then, in the hierarchy coming down would be herbs, Ashwagandha, passion flower, Valerian. Those things are nice herbs that kind of activate and stimulate GABA. So, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So, it’s the brake pedal on the nervous system. So, think of the gas pedal as adrenaline, as cortisol. That’s the fight or flight nervous system response and the gas pedal is gonna be GABA and the things that are gonna help with GABA are gonna be Taurine, Theanine, GABA in and of itself. And then on the herbal side, things like Ashwagandha have multi-adaptogenic effects. They can increase cortisol and increase stimulation when things are too low but they can also tamp it down when it’s too high. I like my wife. She was really stressed the other day. We are getting our kids out for an easter party and she’s like, “you have something to give me? I am so stressed.” And I’m like, “here you go”. And I gave her a bunch of GABA, Taurine, and Theanine and magnesium, some B5 and vitamin C and some Ashwagandha and she looked at me like two hours later, she’s like, “what the heck did you give me. I’m on cloud 9.” I’m like, yeah, you know that, the better living through chemistry right there.
Evan Brand: That’s great. Yeah, and motherwort. I love motherwort too. It’s great for the anxiety when you’re having, like, heart palpitations, blood pressure type issues as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hyperthyroid too. They use it on hyperthyroid, as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah. That makes sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Too high thyroid, it can also be. It can help dampen that down, as well, which is nice.
Evan Brand: It’s great for grief too so like the cool thing about certain herbs is they can be an emotionally calming tool but they can be a nervous system calming tool too. So, like, as you mentioned, there could be an emotional thing like a bad boss, a bad spouse, a bully. You know that type of emotional anxiety driver but it could be a chemical driver too, meaning like a toxin driving the nervous system to be ramped up. Also, we should talk about blood sugar. I know we’ve done podcasts on this before but you know there’s a big impact on issues with blood sugar. Thank the Lord, my blood sugar is so good now, I could eat dinner at five and not eat till 1pm the next day and I’m stable, like, I can fast for extended periods of time as needed and I don’t have any issue but however when my gut was a wreck which I want people to pay special attention to, if your digestive system is compromised, you’re not gonna be tolerating fasting that well because you’re already so likely nutrient deprived because of the malabsorption due to the infection. So, years ago when I tried doing this type of fast, I would have major anxiety and that’s low hanging fruit so do what you got to do but you got to get your gut tested and then fix the infection first.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, just kind of looking at a bunch of different things. So, on the emotional side, right? If it’s unresolved emotional trauma that’s creating anxiety, you know, someone wrote about DNRS, that’s great. You know, this NLP, where you kind of visualize a stop sign or something to kind of do a pattern interrupt. That’s excellent. EFT, EMDR with eye movement or different tapping on meridian points to kind of dampen down that sympathetic nervous system response. And again, these are gonna be good, you know, uh, more chronic issues. Yeah. If it is an acute issue, you know, a lot of times, just get to the root underlying issue where that issue is acute.
Evan Brand: I was on a plane one time and the turbulence was so bad and I started tapping on the plane. That really helped. I’m like okay. Even though it feels like this plane is about to crash, I love and accept myself and I’m like okay that’s fine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Especially things like that. You don’t have control, right? There’s nothing you can do outside of just sitting there and getting through it. And so, it’s better when those things are kind of the case but you know, it’s kind of like, I’m just trying to think of you know an example, it’s kind of like, you go upstairs and don’t turn the alarm on for the house or like maybe did I leave the front door unlocked, right? And so, there’s a natural bit of anxiety. You start going down to bed and that little bit of anxiety kind of creeps in, you’re like, I’m not gonna be able to get to sleep fast if I don’t at least just check on the front door, right? So, let me make, oh good, it’s locked. Oh good, the alarm is on. Good. Now, that anxiety can go down because it’s there for a reason, right? So, if there’s a root cause, act on it, right? If there’s isn’t a root cause, right, but it’s more emotional, you can do some of the tapping and you can work with a practitioner to get to the root cause on that and then of course having better biochemistry will get will make every bit of anxiety better because you’ll be able to adapt to it and deal with it better. And so, of course, like we already talked about with cortisol, chronically high levels of cortisol and adrenaline are gonna be big so you have to get to the reason, the root cause why. And again, foods could be a reason why like gluten, too much processed sugar that can drive up that anxiety. Again, you already mentioned blood sugar fluctuations. If you’re on this reactive hypoglycemia roller coaster ride where blood sugar goes up because you ate too much processed carbohydrate, refined foods, junkie, vegetable oil, omega-6 fats. Blood sugars up and then it can crash right back down. The crashing is where you tend to get a lot of adrenaline cortisol stimulation and on the way up, you get lots of insulin so you get this insulin-cortisol-adrenaline kind of tug of war happening and that can be very stressful on the body. And then, of course, if your blood sugar is chronically high and you’re making tons of insulin that can also be a problem too. High levels of insulin can cause all kinds of problems with hormones, especially in women, it can cause issues with ovarian cysts and testosterone problems. And then, high levels of blood sugar deplete a lot of your B vitamins and magnesium. And so, if we have poor levels of B vitamin and B6 and B5 and B1 and B2 and B3 and folate and B12 and magnesium is depleted, that’s gonna cause more stress and more cortisol issues and it’ll be harder for you to deal with and adapt to that.
Evan Brand: And I would say, if you have anxiety longer than the week, I would almost consider that chronic. I mean, it’s crazy to me, how many people you have and I’ve talked to over the years who’ve had anxiety for a decade or longer and sometimes as one person commented that anxiety and OCD together is terrible. A lot of times OCD does come hand in hand with anxiety. We’ve done podcasts specifically about amino acid therapy and we use amino acid therapy in our clinics but if you have OCD, anxiety, low self-esteem, worry, negativity, depression, disturbed sleep, those are all symptoms of low serotonin. So, what you need to do is to get an organic acid test so we can measure this and look at the brain chemistry because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing. So, when you’re listening to this conversation about anxiety, I swear to you, you’re never gonna find a psychiatrist that’s gonna say, “hey, maybe we need to run an organic acids test, maybe you have low brain chemistry because you have bacterial overgrowth. So, we’re also gonna run a stool test. If they’re out there, send them our way, we’ll do a podcast with them but I doubt your psychiatrist is ever gonna consider running functional medicine testing on you to investigate this. I don’t care if you do lorazepam or the klonopin or whatever. It’s not the root cause and it’s gonna dig you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Any benzo
Evan Brand: Yeah. Any benzo is gonna dig you further in the hole because now you’ve got this dependency issue and now you’ve got his issue of withdrawal and I don’t know if you’ve read some of the stories on this but my God if people try to acutely stop those benzodiazepines, there’s major major major side effects. So, it’s just not around
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Especially, if you’re on doses, you know, above one milligram or so on a benzo, it can be harder to get off and sometimes the taper can be, you know, six months to a year coming off of it. If you’ve been on it for a while or been on a higher dose. Yeah, you need to kind of do a slower type of taper for sure.
Evan Brand: And there’s so much, I mean, just think of how many millions. I didn’t look at the numbers here but how many millions of people are on prescription anxiety medication and they never ever get to the root cause. It’s so sad to think about someone that’s been on like a Lorazepam or another benzo for 20 years and they’ve never once asked about the gut. The question came in, how does dysbiosis cause anxiety. What are the mechanisms? Well, I think, one, right out of the gates is gut inflammation. Number two would be nutrient malabsorption because as you mentioned, a lot of these B vitamins are necessary for many processes in the body including energy production so sometimes you have anxiety and chronic fatigue and that sucks too because now you’re too tired but you’re anxious so that’s not a fun recipe either. What else would you say about the gut anxiety connection?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, so anytime you have chronic gut inflammation whether it’s from food, whether it’s antibiotics. Antibiotics are creating rebound yeast or bacterial overgrowth. We could put H. pylori in that category, and other infections, as well. That’s a one you and I already mentioned, creates malabsorption just from indigestion, right? Not enough enzymes, not enough acids, not absorbing things well. Two, you’re gonna have exogenous production of lipopolysaccharides which in and of itself are a toxin, right? They’re produced, they’re part of the gram-negative bacteria in the gut and they’re stressful on the liver and there’s also can go to the blood-brain barrier. And when they’re in the brain, they can create mood and anxiety issues as well. So yeah, lipopolysaccharides, you could have acetaldehyde and mycotoxins from fungus. You could have issues with the parasites producing their own type of internal toxins for sure. Of course, your body also produces through healthy gut bacteria, a fermentation process to make its own B vitamins, vitamin K. Those kinds of things. So, if we have dysbiosis, we typically are gonna have low levels of beneficial bacteria so we don’t have that good endogenous production behind it. And then, of course, that’s gonna over activate our immune system. So now, we have all these toxins kind of slipping through our bloodstream. We have undigested food particles, getting through our bloodstream. Now, our immune system starts becoming hyperactive and that can suck up energy. That can suck up resources. So, there’s studies on for instance H. pylori creating mental health issues, mental, emotional issues, depression and anxiety partly because of the lipopolysaccharides and endotoxins are the same thing by the way. LPS or endotoxins and obviously nutrient absorption problems too.
Evan Brand: Man, when I had H. pylori, I was super anxious. I don’t know if I was depressed as much but I was definitely anxious and you remember how skinny I got, I mean, I lost so much weight too. So, a lot of people, you know, they look at anxiety on the surface right. And everyone looks anxiety is just like this mental thing and you just need to watch some hoorah motivational video and just get over your fears and that I was like no anxiety goes way deeper than that. You just eloquently illustrated this, the aldehydes from the yeast and the fungus toxins and the bacterial toxins and the parasitic toxins and the mycotoxins. You guys, this anxiety is not in your freaking head. It’s not. It may manifest in your head but the root cause is not in your head unless you’re describing like, this toxin getting across the blood-brain-barrier but beyond that, the gut I would say is the biggest driver of anxiety. I’d say, if I had to pick one place to look, it would be the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, when we look at this, what’s kind of the hierarchy of addressing this? So, of course, you fix the foods, right? Because the foods are one. You’re gonna decrease inflammation from the foods. And the inflammation in the foods is gonna cause gut permeability so you cut out the gluten, the dairy, the processed refined sugars and flours, the junky omega-6. You focus on good high-quality animal-based fats, good healthy proteins, you know, more carbohydrate from fruit and starch, especially if there’s blood sugar issues and then from there, then you work on digesting it. So, make sure enzymes and acids and good digestion are there. Get your gut looked at especially if there’s any type of chronic bloating or motility issues or indigestion, unadjusted food in your stool, diarrhea, then you get your gut looked at and of course if this issue is more chronic, you want to look at your stress handling system so the interplay sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in your body and your nervous system is your adrenals and so you can get your adrenals looked at cortisol rhythm wise, you can do a cortisol panel. Look at your cortisol in the morning and throughout the day. Make sure it’s not too high or it’s reversed. On a good organic acid test, we can look at neurotransmitters like Vanilmandelate which looks at adrenaline. We can get Homovanillate which looks at dopamine, right? We can get the DOPA which looks at dopamine. We could also get 5-hydroxyindoleacytate to look at serotonin and then of course we can look at B6 like a kind of urenate or xanthurenate, right? We can look at brain inflammation markers like picolinate and quinolinate so there’s inflammation in the brain that gives us more indications. We can look at oxidative stress markers like 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine. There are good markers out there to look at these different things to give us a window of what’s happening so you know, we work on the food, work on the lifestyle, sleep. Make sure we’re digesting and breaking things down. Look at the nutrient deficiencies, look at the gut, look at the infection, look at the digestion and then of course, you know, we can always branch out and look at mold or mycotoxins or heavy metals or more toxic burdens down the road. That’s the foundation first and then I would say on top of that, if there’s any type of chronic pattern where there’s an emotional trauma involved that’s more unresolved definitely bring in a good practitioner, you know with some tools in their tool bag of NLP or EFT or EMDR or hypnosis. Anything that you want techniques to get into the subconscious but again the healthier you are the better the emotional stuff is to resolve so if you’re doing EMDR and EFT and NLP and you’re eating processed food and crap, it can still work, but it’s gonna be better when your brain chemistry is healthier.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah. Amen. Well, think about all the people that are in talk therapy and then they go and they go eat a subway sandwich for lunch, thinking that they’re doing themselves a good favor by eating turkey on wheat bread with processed cheese and then they get mayonnaise or sweet and sour sauce on it or whatever the heck they’re doing and then they feel like crap, I mean.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m not a big fan of talk therapy in the long term. I think, talk therapy is good did you kind of just consciously process something like how did this happen maybe you’re learning some tools to enter into your life from a habit standpoint to fix whatever that issue was but then most of that trauma sits in the subconscious area of the brain which is where 90% of all your thoughts are subconscious and so that’s where you want some of these techniques like we talked about but I think talk therapy is good to acutely process what you’ve observed whatever your experiences are and then talk about, hey what can you do, you know, as a person today as an adult today, um, you know, from a habit standpoint to address it but then after that then you gotta, you know, if you’re in talk therapy months and months later and you’re still just ruminating over the same thing then it’s a subconscious thing you got to work on next.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and look, don’t let me talk people out of doing it. I’m not trying to do that but what I’m saying is I’ve had people that said, “oh yeah, I’ve been with this therapist for 3 years and I meet with them every week or every other week”. And I’m like, “okay and what do you do with this therapist?” “We talked.”, “Okay and what else do you do?” That’s it. It’s talk therapy and I go, okay, you’ve been doing talk therapy every week or every two weeks for 3 years and you still have anxiety that’s this bad. We got to dig deeper. So, like I said, there’s a role for that but it’s not gonna get you out of the woods. The person who commented about the dysbiosis and anxiety question, they also commented in here said they did have a stool test that showed H. pylori. They have extremely high Morganella which is one of those bacteria we’ve talked about and calprotectin which is gut inflammation over a thousand. Fatigue and anxiety were the main symptoms. We see this everyday all day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Exactly. I’m familiar with that case for sure. And inflammation in the gut can definitely create those types of issues and get to the root cause of it too. And then, someone writes in, about Accutane too, I mean, this is super common if you get into the dermatology world. I mean, dermatologists, they either cut something. They burn it off with a laser. They freeze it off or they use some type of antibiotic, topical or internal or they use some kind of like, synthetic vitamin A. That’s it. That’s the dermatology world you know in a nutshell and they tend to not get to the root, you know, we’re talking like more chronic acne, chronic skin stuff. They tend to not ever get to the root cause of how or why that’s even there. Diet, sugars, junky, omega-6, poor digestion, poor fats, poor proteins. They don’t really get to the root cause of what that is and so, they recommend synthetic vitamin A, which is Accutane, which again, will decrease the amount of oil produced by your sebaceous glands which can be helpful in the short run if they’re producing too much oil but they can create chronic skin and eye dryness in the long term and they’re not even getting to the reason why your skin’s producing too much oil to begin with. Usually, it’s too much insulin. Insulin is a huge driving factor of excess oil and then of course, you have different food allergens, gluten, dairy, too much sugar. That can also cause a lot of problems with the skin cells.
Evan Brand: And not to mention, the connection between people that have anxiety and acne. Guess what, they’re both linked to the gut. So, if you have acne and anxiety, you gotta investigate your gut. Please. Please. Please.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. And again, you know, outside of that, you know, we look at different toxins down the road. If we look at heavy metals, there’s different tests. We can look at, to do a challenge test on your metals with a DMPS or some kind of a challenge agent. We can definitely look at mold if there’s mold in the environment that’s important to look at. And again, if you’re in an environment where you feel better leaving that environment then there could be some mold in there, especially, if a history of water damage that was unresolved, definitely want to get your mold looked at or just your home looked at too, especially if it’s something that the whole family is dealing with just get the home looked at to start. It’s usually cheaper and more effective out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah. well said. And, heavy metals too. I’m glad you brought that up. You know, mercury and other heavy metals that can stimulate the nervous system and cause issues. So, if you have a bunch of silver fillings in your mouth, you’ve got to consider that. May not be your number one smoking gun, sometimes it is but heavy metals are a big problem and even detox too can make people feel too sick. I mean, you and I have seen this many times. Other practitioners that have handled people before they come to us or they’ve done something too aggressively with chelation or other detox methods and then they’ve ended up worse. So, there’s like a tight rope and that’s where the art of medicine comes in. Everything is not just like cookie cutters. So, too much is a problem. Too little is a problem and that depends on gut and detox and beta glucuronidase and liver and all of it. So, like if your friend got better and you tried what your friend did and you didn’t do well, that might not be your right protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Exactly. And then, just to kind of highlight the nutrients in, compared to talk therapy, Julia Ross is out there. She’s like a family therapist person but she’s done a lot of books on amino acids and diet and she had different clients that she used to use talk therapy for years and years and years and said, “hey, let me just try adding in some amino acid therapy to their protocol and let’s see how they do with their talk therapy when we add in the amino acids”. She started to do that and then these patients would come the next week and they’d be like, “Yeah, just, I’m just good. I just don’t even feel the need to talk about it. I’m over it”. And it’s like wow so it’s like it gives people the equipment to kind of, like, process these issues and again I think talk therapy acutely may be fine. It’s just when you’re talking about the same thing for years and years and years, you’re probably not getting to the root cause, right? This is probably just covering up something else, you know. Now, I think it’s better than being on a drug, right? So, if it’s helpful and you don’t need a drug that’s great but, in the end, you know, if you can do some of these nutritional things along with it, you may find that you can just deal with the issues better you know I, the analogy I get patients is, try dealing with difficult problems around the home and not having slept for a couple nights. You’re gonna lose your patience with your wife with your kids. You’re not gonna be able to think right, you’ll be foggy, get some good night sleep and then wake up and deal with the problem. It’s like you’re gonna be way more equipped to deal with it. I think that’s kind of how brain chemistry works when you’re dealing with these stressors.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I remember in that book too, talking about how, like, amino acids were administered, right? At the beginning of a session and then the people would just immediately like, smile or loosen up or relax and so it’s amazing no matter how much you talk. Long story short, I know we’ve beat the drum on this for a minute but last thing, no matter how much you talk. It’s never gonna change your levels of serotonin just by talking it out. If you have a gut problem that’s affecting your nutrient absorption which is affecting the tryptophan and the conversion with the B6 over to 5HTP and then over to serotonin and then to melatonin so sleep issues too. So skin, sleep, anxiety, they’re all connected depression. We’ve already talked about that. This person here’s putting a bunch of question marks like they’re mad at us. What is the connection between Accutane and depression?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s just a side effect. It’s a side effect of the drug.
Evan Brand: It could be a side effect. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Just the side effects of the drug. That’s all it is. Yeah. So certain drugs, you know, are gonna have side effects. Ibuprofen can cause ulcers and liver issues, right? Just a drug side effect.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well, we got to wrap this thing up. But if you need help clinically, you can feel free to reach out. We work with people around the world. We send these functional medicine labs to your door. We have an incredible logistical team on both sides where it’s incredible. We can help people in literally every part of the globe where people like us don’t exist or maybe they do but we’re better. So, if you need help, you can reach out directly to Dr. J, that’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani at justinhealth.com for consults or me, Evan Brand at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help. You guys, don’t give up. We’ve been through it. We are warriors ourselves and we’ve worked on our health for years and we love what we do and we love helping people and there’s so much possibility when you can beat an issue like anxiety. So, like I said in the beginning, whether it’s seeking that raise, that new promotion, that new job, that new spouse, you know, that partner, that relationship that you want to grow but you can’t because you’re held back by anxiety. This is a huge huge problem and you can overcome this. So please don’t give up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. If you guys enjoyed it too, look down below, you’ll see a little link where you can write us a review. We appreciate the review and if, also, it’s benefiting you, feel free to share with family and friends and there’ll be links where you can reach out to us directly to get that extra bit of help. All right guys, have a phenomenal day. Take care. Bye everyone.
Evan Brand: Bye-bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
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The Top 5 Causes of Bloating | Podcast #364
Abdominal bloating occurs when the gastrointestinal (GI) tract is filled with air or gas. Most people describe bloating as feeling full, tight, or swollen abdomen. Your abdomen may also be swollen (distended), hard, and painful.
Dr. J and Evan describe that gas is the most common cause of bloating, especially after eating. Gas builds up in the digestive tract when undigested food gets broken down or when you swallow air. Everyone swallows air when they eat or drink.
On the other hand, they also talk about different components of why you may be having to bloat that you may not notice. Plus, available testing and lifestyle modifications you need.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:57 – The role of acid-pH level in the digestive system
5:01 – The link of depression and anxiety to bloating
10:02 – The benefits of probiotics and effects of stress to digestive health
18:17 – Functional medicine strategies and testing to find the root cause of bloating
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really excited to have a podcast today. We’re gonna be diving into a couple of different topics. The big one here is gonna be bloating – one of the big root causes of bloating. We’re gonna talk about it from a biochemical functional medicine perspective. Evan, how are you doing man? What’s going on brother?
Evan Brand: Doing pretty well, excited to dive in and talk about gut infections. I think that’s probably the first place to start because you and I have run thousands of urinary organic acids and genetic stool tests over the years. And years ago, you know, we used to use a three-day stool test. Now, with technology improvements, we could do a one-day one sample stool test and we can uncover so much. So, I’ll just kind of riff on things. I know we like to title things just for marketing purposes and call it top five but we may go into 15 by the time we’re done because just right off the top of my head here, high gut inflammation like how calprotectin may be an issue, low pancreatic enzyme function, bacterial overgrowth, where we’re gonna measure the dysbiosis, H. pylori infections, parasites, worms, specifically Clostridia and Candida can cause a lot of issues with bloating. So, in general, I would just say any gut infection but we can break that down as much as you want to. It could be a huge cause of bloating. And, the problem is this, when you go to a conventional medical doctor or a gastroenterologist and you get some sort of bloating remedy or some sort of digestive aid, maybe an acid blocker, antispasmodic medication. Obviously, these are not addressing these infections. You could take acid blockers for the rest of your life and never clear the H. pylori that’s driving the low stomach acid which then drives the fermentation in the gut which then drives the bloating. So, I just want people to have in their heads a clear mindset of what are you taking, is it actually fixing the problem, are you just masking your symptoms. And in the case of an acid blocker, you’re actually putting yourself deeper in the hole because you’re taking low stomach acid that’s driving heartburn or an infection and you’re making it worse.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, you know, the first catalyst for good digestion is a nice low pH. That good acid pH, we need good hydrochloric acid to make that happen. So, we need essentially hydrogen ions to bind to chloride in our gut and so we need chloride from minerals. So, we need good minerals, good quality sea salt that helps make stomach acid on our own. Now, if we’re under a lot of stress and our adrenal glands are in stress overdrive, it could be cortisol high or low imbalances, as well as adrenaline issues, right? It could be high or low cortisol stress issues that could put us in a fight or flight state and that sympathetic nervous system stimulus is gonna negatively impact our body’s ability to start with making stomach acid and digestive secretions and of course that stomach acid is almost like an antimicrobial. Think of like using lemon or apple cider vinegar is a natural cleaner right. They recommend these online. You can make natural cleaners usually some kind of acid as the foundation of the formula because acids are antimicrobial and so think of acids in your intestinal tract as being antimicrobial. They also, some kind of help tighten the sphincter, the esophageal sphincter from the stomach into the esophagus. It gets tightened with good acidity and so part of the reason why we get bloating and a lot of these gases rise up to the esophagus is inadequate levels of acidity and that keeps the esophagus open and then what happens when that esophagus is open over time, the fermentation acids that occur can actually, eventually irritate the bottom of the esophagus because we didn’t have enough acids to trigger that good closure in the beginning.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. So, then you’ll get these, what are called silent reflux issues sometimes it’s called GERD. And once again, prescription drugs are what’s the common remedy but once again it’s not the root cause. It may reduce the symptoms because if you have that backwash it’s gonna help slow the backwash down but it’s not gonna fix the sphincter so we might come in with extra betaine hydrochloric acid or if you’re extremely inflamed which is that someone can’t tolerate a low dose of it but then we could do something like apple cider vinegar with a meal sometimes bitters. I personally don’t do bitters, I just do HCl and enzymes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We can always test it with ginger. We can always test it with an acid like lemon, lime, or apple cider vinegar, start with a teaspoon of that and mix in a couple ounces of water and then kind of work our way up from there. So, acidity is a really important first step. Of course, if we have inefficient, um, inefficient acidity levels we can almost guarantee, we’re probably gonna have poor enzyme levels and probably gonna have poor bile acid levels, right? Bile acids are important because they help break down fat and bile acids are also slightly acidic, right, in the name of bile acid and it’s also antimicrobial. So, just like we talked about the acids having an antimicrobial benefit on the HCl side, also, bile acids have an antimicrobial benefit. We see in SIBO, a hallmark of SIBO is bile aids insufficiency and so with SIBO we don’t have enough acids there on the bile side so then we have a hard time breaking down fat and then a lot of times that fat will create indigestion, petrification because it’s not being broken down. Now, when we run certain stool tests, we’ll see increases in a metabolite called steatocrit, which is a breakdown of the fat that means it’s not being broken down in the stomach. It’s coming out at higher levels which means we’re not breaking it down. So, steatocrit is a big deal because steatocrit, if we don’t have good fat digestion, we probably have some protein digestion issues, we probably have some enzyme and acid issues and we probably have, um, some gas issues, bloating issues because these things require good digestion and if they’re not being broken down well, we’re probably getting some methane or hydrogen gases kind of rising up from that.
Evan Brand: And you know, we’re taking on the subject of bloating but it’s very common that someone with these issues you’re describing, they’re also gonna have issues with energy and probably mood like anxiety and depression because you’re mentioning this issue with fat digestion, protein digestion. Now, you’re not gonna get the aminos that you need to fuel your neurotransmitter so it’s very rare that somebody’s gonna come to us and say, hey I’m just bloated and I have nothing else. Usually, along with that bloating, you’re gonna have these tangential symptoms too like anxiety, depression, fatigue, and so I encourage people, you can focus on one smoking gun like bloating as your big thing you’re coming in for but you gonna make sure you understand there’s a bigger, deeper connection to your mood issues too. So, this is the person who’s on break, uh, someone just commented about severe brain fog. We could hit that too, uh, but somebody might come in and say, hey I’m bloated and then you tease apart their case and you go, oh so you’re actually anxious too. You’re on antidepressant and an acid blocker and this happens every day, all day. So, just to clarify, number one, we hit a low stomach or we hit infections first. Number 2, low stomach acidity, you mentioned low bile in the gallbladder. Also, let’s give a shout out to people that don’t have a gallbladder, what about these poor people, they’re gonna need a lot of supplemental help for the rest of their life. And so, unfortunately, this is a very very common procedure done in the U.S., where the gallbladders are removed and so these people are gonna need some purified bile salts forever in my opinion. Well, what’s your…?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely! They’re definitely gonna need bile salts and some extra enzymes like lipase but again, you gotta get to the reason why that gallbladder issue even happened. Now, most people, it’s women in their 40s who have an overweight issue and so what tends to be driving, that is usually food allergens whether it’s grains or inflammatory foods but also estrogen dominance. So, if you have an imbalance in estrogen, estrogen is gonna help promote more fat storage so you obviously have more estrogen more fat storage. A lot of times you’re gonna have PMS issues too so you may be moody, irritable, um, sleep issues, uh, you could have fibrocystic issues, uh, tenderness, a lot of pain around PMS time. So, you gotta get to the root cause of that as well. So, we started out with just bloating but you can see how then this estrogen issue can affect bile levels and good bile flow because estrogen causes everything to get really stagnant and not flow well and then you’ll start having mood issues and PMS issues and maybe even fertility issues. So, you can see how you start at one point which is bloating, which is the topic of the video but then it can spiral down this other kind of tangential pathway.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Not to mention two, let’s just say it started out with heartburn, I just want people to kind of visualize this. So, let’s say it starts out with heartburn. You go to the target and you buy Prilosec, which is over the counter acid blocker medication, you reduce your stomach acid even more but you feel some relief from the heartburn and let’s say your spouse had H. pylori, you guys pass that between each other, so now you’ve got even more reduction of stomach acid levels, you’re on the acid blocking medication. Now, you’re anxious, you’re starting to get depressed, you’re getting a bit of fatigue. As you mentioned, now, you’re getting some hormonal issues, some hormonal issues like breast tenderness or PMS or ill ability, you’ve got this dysbiosis growing in your gut so you have this bacterial infection. It could be multiple things, Strep, Staph, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, Bordetella. And now, you’ve got beta-glucuronidase issues. Now, you’re recirculating all this estrogen. You’re creating more problems with the gallbladder. Maybe, you get the gallbladder removed. Now, you’re in really big trouble then that leads to the diet so then you read some guy on the internet who says, you need to be doing 70 – 80% vegetables. So now, you’re doing all these veggies and you’re even more bloated and you’re even more gassy and you don’t know why. So, you’re eating broccoli, you’re trying to force all these leafy greens down, a lot of vegetables. Maybe, you’re doing a lot of avocados, these higher FODMAP foods that are fermenting in the gut. This is the case where you’ve got a really, to me, the best, most beneficial thing I’ve seen for these cases, get the diet very simple, focus on good quality animal proteins and for a time being minimize your vegetables so that you can let the gut rest.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Absolutely. From a solution standpoint, yeah, good proteins, good fats and then if we’re gonna do vegetables, make sure they’re cooked steamed, sauteed, maybe use an instant pot and try to make sure they’re on the lower fermentable side. Now, that being said, next, what’s another driving factor of bloating? increase in fermentable vegetables. Now, people are hearing all kinds of things about probiotics being helpful. Well, they are. There’s a lot of good benefits to probiotics and the microbiome and the endogenous nutrients they produce. They, um, whether it’s vitamin K2, whether it’s different B vitamins, really helpful. It also produces acidity which helps keep a lot of bugs and bacteria from growing in the gut, totally helpful. Now, if you already have a lot of bacterial overgrowth and bad bugs growing, sometimes, these extra good bacteria can actually cause more bloating, more gas. And then, of course, because they’re fermentable they can also create histamine too. So, the histamine may create more brain fog or headaches, more destruction there. So, you may have more histamine symptoms, you may have motility issues because they’re producing hydrogen methane gases maybe and that may cause either diarrhea on one side or maybe more constipation on the other side, definitely possible.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. Good call on the histamine. And so, some of these bacteria on your gut, they’re gonna be releasing histamine too. So, if you’re combining high histamine foods, you’re doing leftovers, let’s say, last night, you made a steak, you’re cooking that leftover protein. That’s gonna be higher in histamine. Combined with the histamine being produced from this bacterial overgrowth problem, yeah, you mentioned brain fog, skin flushing, rashes. So, once again, here we are talking about bloating but we’re trying to elucidate this big spider web of other symptoms that may be going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Evan Brand: Um, also, what about a stress component meaning someone just simply not chewing enough, they’re rushing through their meals. I think this from a mechanical perspective. If you look at your average person, I mean I saw somebody on the highway the other day, I don’t know if it was a donut, a piece of pizza, it was some kind of junk. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was but either way there’s still people trying to do makeup, scrolling on their smartphone, eating a piece of pizza, all while driving on the highway at the same time and we wonder why they have digestive problems. So, maybe we talk about the impact of not being settled when you are eating and this sort of like, this parasympathetic process that digestion is supposed to be our ancestors, they didn’t have that level of stimulation while they were trying to eat. I mean, maybe there was a wolf trying to come, get their bison killed but beyond that there wasn’t this big sympathetic stress underneath all of our meal times.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We kind of started out the video talking about the parasympathetic-sympathetic balance and how important that is because the parasympathetic is part of that rest and digest that gets the digestive secretion going. It stimulates all the blood flow into the organs, the intestines. So, of course, setting really good boundaries for your meal, you know, I recommend kind of kind of go into a meal five times or ten minutes, just kind of relax, do some deep breathing, have some appreciate, appreciation about your day, the food in front of you, you know, just whatever blessings you have in your life, just try to really get to that parasympathetic state with just good breathing in the nose, right, four to five nasal breaths in and out. Focus on whatever’s good in your life, appreciation. Whatever you have to do, whatever kind of resonating prayer to put you in that state when you just feel better and then go into that meal keep it quiet or if you want to listen to something that kind of allows you to feel good and feel rested or relaxed, that’s fine. And then, go into that meal and make sure you chew your food really well. Try to avoid a lot of hydration with the food, you know, a couple of ounces of water for swallowing some pills or digestive support is fine but try to get into that meal, like, I just had to have a good routine. Get some good hydration ahead of time, try to go into some kind of meditation or prayer for five or ten minutes ahead of time to really get that parasympathetics going and then go into your meal and really just try to chew things up pretty well too, you know, about 30 chews per bite of food on the average, kind of get your food chewed up to about an oatmeal like consistency so it’s really broken down well that’s allow the enzymes and the acids to work a lot better too.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You know, what’s interesting is a lot of people are kind of pressure into these business meetings like with their boss or with their co-workers, there’s this like work-meeting-lunch deal where people are going out with people they probably wouldn’t associate with outside of the workplace and they’re going and eating with those people. And so, I would just tell you, if you don’t like it and that’s not your vibe, don’t do it. If you feel more comfortable, more relaxed eating by yourself, don’t do it. I mean, I remember, l had some stressful conversations over lunch and dinner tables before with people over the years and I leave feeling like I didn’t eat anything and that my mind was so focused on even if it wasn’t a negative conversation. If it was on some sort of business deal or the state of the world or something and then I’m eating. I would get up from the table. I’m like, oh crap, did I eat and I didn’t process that and it would sound maybe like unnecessary advice but I think a lot of people need to be picky of what they talk about it at the dinner table.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think anything that’s gonna keep you in that parasympathetic state is great, you know, save the more stressful things before or after and I think, also, just have good boundaries. Try to make sure you get at least 20 minutes for a meal, um, to yourself, you know, I mean, if you don’t have 20, if you can’t put 20 minutes in your schedule for you to consume some good food and put yourself in that parasympathetic state then you got some boundary issues and you got to really work on roping in your schedule and getting some control over it, at least so you have that 15-20 minute to yourself and you can really process that food well. And again, I’m not saying there won’t be some exceptions or some stressful days here or there but on average try to make sure 80 to 90% of the time, you really have control over your schedule to that degree.
Evan Brand: One of my favorite things to do even in the wintertime here, if I’ve got blue skies. I’m taking my shirt off, I’m going to sit on my front porch where I’ve got a nice comfy front porch patio chair and that chai is warmed up by the sun so I just take my shirt off sit there barefoot and in the chair and eat my bison burger for lunch and the sunlight is a mast cell stabilizer so I noticed the sun helps me if I have any kind of food reactions, the sun will stabilize that, obviously there’s nitric oxide benefits. There’s likely some nervous system benefits circadian rhythm benefits. So, for me, if you can get fresh air on your lunch that’s great and what the heck does sunshine have to do with bloating, well, I mean there’s even some studies on sunlight improving the diversity of your gut and we’re outside all the time now. So, if you just type in like sunlight microbiome, you can read the papers on this, it’s in a microbiology journal about how exposure to the UV rays can improve the gut diversity so it’s no surprise that all these people in offices buildings all day, they got poor diversity. Obviously from other things but lack of sunshine is a negative factor for your gut health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, also, there’s other bugs that are out there I think we already kind of talked about H. pylori because that can affect the stomach and that can decrease, um, acid production and thus when acid production is down, we know enzyme production is also down and then that can also affect biliary function, biofunction, so we know H. pylori is a big thing. Other bugs can be problematic, right? We already mentioned SIBO, which could be a whole bunch of different bacteria that are overgrown in the small intestine that could be Citrobacter, Prevotella, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, Morganella, right? It doesn’t really matter the actual bugs but if there’s an overgrowth there, they can definitely disrupt digestion creating different gases on the methane and hydrogen side and that can create obviously more bloat. Other parasites can cause problems too. So, we see things like Blasto, Blastocystis hominis, right? E. histo, D. fragilis, Giardia, Cryptosporidia, these are all other bugs that could be problematic. Then even things like fungal overgrowth like Candida overgrowth, whether it’s a Rhodotorula species, Albican species, these types of imbalances can cause problems. So, it’s good to test and really make sure that we look at the whole microbiome and see what’s out of balance or not and then from there food wise, I mean, of course, general refined sugar, refined grains, right? These processed foods, excess fiber, lots of raw vegetables, uh, fermentable carbohydrates, right? These things are gonna be on the list, as well. And so, we’ll kind of add those. There are a lot of different things that we have to look at so I kind of gave you the top five or six on this list. Anything else, um, Evan, you wanna add to it?
Evan Brand: Well, I would just say that if you’re coming into this conversation, you’re listening, maybe you don’t have much background and listening to people like you and I talk about functional medicine strategy. Some of this may just go right over your head. You may just tune out because you’re hearing these things which sound exotic and they sound rare, like H. pylori. I don’t have that. Giardia, what the heck is that? Blasto, though I don’t have that. You know, I just have bloating. The reality is these are very common things. The problem is the testing that’s used in the conventional gastroenterology world is very outdated and very insensitive, meaning there’s a lot of infections that go missed and even if these infections are tested for, it’s not likely that you’re gonna find an accurate result. And so, what we’re talking about, these are not rare situations, you and I, between us both, we’ve seen several thousand clients and patients across the world over the last decade and we can tell you that these issues are something we see every day, all day. So much so that in fact when I see a whole big list of infections on the stool test, I don’t get shocked by it. Yep. Uh-huh. That’s it. That’s what we’ve got. So, if you’re listening to this, you’re like, ‘man, that’s not me. I’m just bloated and tired.’ Well, there’s a reason for that. And so, I highly recommend you get tested, figure out what the heck you got, going on because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing and if you’re going and taking probiotics or random enzymes and you don’t feel better or you’re confused about what you should actually taking and not taking and you’re building up a supplement graveyard. It’s time for you to get tested and figure out what the heck you’re up against. And so, if you need help, you can reach out clinically, Dr. J is at justinhealth.com. you can reach out and do consults worldwide. So, we jump on a video call just like we’re doing here, Zoom, facetime, skype, we can look at your labs that you run at home and we can figure out what’s going on and make you – a game plan to get better. And if you need help for me, it’s Evan, evanbrand.com and either one of us, Dr. J, justinhealth.com, evanbrand.com, we’re here to help you and the cool thing is you can reverse these issues and you can get to a point where you don’t even recognize your gut health. I mean, if I look back at myself even 10 years ago, I had such severe IBS. I did every diet under the sun and I made some progress but it wasn’t until I looked at my gut that I really made the magic happen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so, just to kind of highlight a couple of things out of the gates, um, we’ll put some links below as well to some of the lab tests that we recommend, whether it’s the stool testing, whether it’s the organic acid testing which does look at bacterial and yeast metabolites. I love the organic acid because it’s very good at picking up Candida and yeast overgrowth, where a lot of times those tool testing will miss that and of course the, um, breath test will not touch any yeast overgrowth. So, it’s nice to have whether it’s stool test, whether it’s the GI map, whether it’s an organic acid, whether it’s a conventional lactulose, breath test, these are all good tests. We’ll put links down below. So, if you guys want to look at getting some of those to start out at the gates, you feel free, you can. Also, I like to compare and contrast like what we do versus the conventional gastroenterologist. So, most gastro docs, they’re just trying to rule out significant pathology, significant disease and so they may cross off the list by doing some kind of an endoscopy, which is camera down the mouth to look at inflammation in the stomach or esophagus and if they see esophagitis or gastritis, you know, what they’re going to do, they’re gonna recommend some type of PPI or Gaviscon or some type of a coding agent to kind of help reduce the inflammation but they’re not gonna really fix the root cause. Most of the time, they pull you off acids, which may be helpful in the short run but it’s forever altering your ability to break down protein or fat and it also can shift your bugs in a negative direction because now you don’t have the good acidity to keep the microbes down. You need the acidity to activate enzymes, you need the acidity to activate your bile salts. So, someone’s jumping in on the questions here saying that hey they feel better on keto but now they’re feeling more constipated. Yeah, super common because what’s happening is you’re cutting out a lot of the foods that are causing problems but you haven’t fixed your digestion, you don’t have enough acidity, enzymes, bile, there may be some bugs that are still impacting digestion and this is why being on good proteins and fats can be helpful but they also reveal weak links in your digestive chain if you’re not breaking down food well. So, just kind of getting back on the gastro doc kind of bandwagon, they’re gonna be looking at pathology inflammation in the stomach, you know, ruling out the big things like blood, um, in the ulceration in the stomach, you know, usually you’re gonna know that because you’re coughing it up but you’re seeing it in your stool. If you have irritable bowel disease symptoms like Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, usually, you’re gonna have significant inflammation in the stomach, usually significant diarrhea, blood in the stool, they’re gonna rule that out and then what and then for the most part, once the big pathology things, ulcerations, cancer, massive amounts of inflammation are ruled out, they’re gonna typically give you like IBS diagnosis, whether it’s IBS-D for diarrhea or IBS-C for constipation and they’re gonna just manage whatever symptoms whether those symptoms are with different drugs. So, if it’s constipation, they’ll use laxatives. If it’s diarrhea, they’ll use things like Imodium or Pepto Bismol or anti-inflammatories. They’ll just modulate the symptoms with drugs and that’s it and they’re not gonna really get to the root cause. They’re gonna just try to spot the treat and then that’s where people come to us because overtime, those drugs will become less and less effective, you have more and more side effects, you’re not fixing digestion, you’re creating more nutritional deficiencies, maybe more gut permeability issues, maybe more autoimmune stuff and so these patients then come to us because they’re just tired of putting band-aids over band-aids.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. I forgot to mention the endoscopic procedure that is super common, uh, they wanted to do that on me, years ago, when I had IBS and I denied that because I even back then I had read about these infections that people were acquiring from getting scoped meaning the last person that they put the tube down, they didn’t properly clean or sanitize that so then they stick it down your throat and then you leave the hospital just to investigate and as you said, the only thing that’s gonna come out to that is they may say gastritis which is super generic. It doesn’t tell you anything about these infections and they’re not gonna give you an herbal protocol to address the infection causing the gastritis. But now, you’ve left the hospital with Clostridia or some other possibly antibiotic resistant infection that’s involved to evade the sterilizing and cleaning procedures. So, I’m all about non-invasive, accurate, functional medicine testing and that’s why we love what we do because there’s a very rare, maybe one every five years, yeah, is there a case where I’m like yeah, you need an endoscopy because there’s something crazy here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Usually, with an endoscopy or colonoscopy which is gonna be going up the rectum to look in the colon. Usually, there’s gonna be blood in the stool, some type of significant inflammation, whether it’s excessive diarrhea, excessive inflammation, excessive blood in the stool, excessive weight loss. It has to be at the extreme ends for that to make sense. Most people just have inflammation and a lot of times the tests won’t kind of tell you enough about the root cause, they’re just gonna put you on medications to manage the symptoms and that’s where you’re kind of stuck in between. Now, a lot of my ulcerative colitis, IBD patients, they’ve already done that. Yeah, so then, it’s like all right, they’ve kind of already crossed that off their list any weird cancers, ulcers, it’s already done, they know, they’re just being managed with Lialda, Prednisone, a biologic and then it’s like, now what, right? And so, we still have to get to the root cause of that and get the immune system chilled out and figure out what stressors are there so we can get on top of that too.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean, I know you and I have seen countless emails being sent to us with pictures of colons and you know different things from these scopes like hey there’s my scope results, you know, what do you have to say about it and the answer is always the same. Okay, there’s something there, let’s work on the infections. And so, uh, yeah, someone in the chat, uh, shelly said, yes that they all recommended me, every time, I go to the doctor. So, yeah, that, I mean that’s all they’ve got, they don’t have the stuff that we’re using maybe in 20 years from now you can go right down the street and get done what we’re talking about but for now you’ve got to seek out somebody like us that’s gonna be able to help you, uh, there’s one person in the chat too asking about a viral impact on the gut, it’s real. I did a whole section of that in my better belly course about that virus in the gut and so it’s definitely a big factor.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and just to kind of, uh, speak, kind of on the line here, so, um, we can, we don’t get censored, there’s certain viruses that are out there, right? There’s an ACE2 receptor site that gets impacted in these different viruses and the ACE2 receptor site, there are a lot of them in the gut and these receptor sites are really important for absorbing amino acids and so if you have any of these maybe chronic viral issues, one of the good things that you can do is actually extra free form amino acids to allow these receptor sites to absorb these amino acids easier, right? I think the free-form amino acids are already broken down. So, if you have this chronic immune stress and you’re having a hard time recovering from the immune stress adding in some additional free form amino acids can be very, very helpful on the healing side.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot and there’s papers on this too but I’ve seen it clinically too. People post viruses that will look at their stool, there’s gut inflammation, there’s low secretory IgA, so we can see there’s been some damage and so we have been able to resolve it. So, yeah, we’ll wrap this thing up but if you al need help, please reach out clinically, we mention the websites one more time, Dr. J, that’s justinhealth.com, me evanbrand.com and we’re here to help you guys, so you can reach out and we’ll get to the bottom of this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And sometimes, we’ll even use some kind of an elemental diet with people that have chronic digestive issues just because it can be hard, breaking protein and fat down and these are really good, important nutrients but sometimes we just got to break it down for them and using some kind of an elemental or a modified elemental, where maybe you make the first four to six hours of the day, really easy to process in some kind of smoothie or shake that has most of the amino acids in free form, maybe the fats more easy to process like in an MCT oil or something like that and then we use a lot of the vitamins and minerals all broken down. That could be very helpful and give the digestive system a chance to rest and some people they notice this because they just feel really good when they fast and so if you fast and you feel really good that’s excellent but you’re still not fixing the problem of getting nutrients in the system so that’s where using some kind of an elemental type of shake can be really helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. Well, I’m done. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of good stuff here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Yeah. I mean someone asked one question about flour substitutes. It just depends on where someone’s at, so flour, it’s a processed food so out of the gates, if someone wants, um, like a starch, um, I recommend maybe a greener banana, maybe yucca, cassava, maybe a Kabocha, spaghetti squash. Just look at some of the fibers, uh, non-starch, I should say, more starchy carbohydrates that are gonna be grain-free, see how you do with that. And then, if you want an actual flour, you can look at it like an arrowroot or you can look at it like a cassava is pretty good because it’s still grain-free but it’s still gonna be on the processed side. So, ideally, try to keep it grain-free so you don’t have extra gluten sensitivity connection with those.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Definitely. That’s what I was gonna say too. Potatoes, rice, a lot of these things can still create problems for people. I’ve had many people feel like crap on some of these gluten-free breads. So, yeah, it’s still processed garbage in my opinion.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And then, someone wrote in about the, um, the onions there. Onions are very high in FODMAPs and that can be a problem and so if you head, your gut feeling a lot better and you can come back in and you’re noticing FODMAPs are creeping into your diet and causing a lot more bleeding definitely kind of, you know, rain that back in and see how much that back in and see how much that kind of brings you back to homeostasis.
Evan Brand: Yeah. This person told, uh, they said that they’ve had similar issues with cabbage, brussels sprouts, and other similar veggies. So, yeah, I mean I would go more animal-based. See how you feel with just some meat and some berries for a little while. Maybe if you tolerate a little bit of some organic pecans, if you want to do a little bit of nuts but do like a bison burger and a handful of blueberries for lunch and see if you feel better. I suspect you will.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. At least, just try, you know, cutting out the higher FODMAP foods because when you address microbes, right? You starve it on one side with restricting certain foods that can feed it, you can kill it with certain herbals and then you crowd it out with probiotics. And so, sometimes, we have to go back to the killing side and kill the microbes out a little bit more but I always just see how much the starving kind of works. Get the starving going again and then if you have to kind of return to a protocol, where we knock down the microbes with herbs, we can always do that too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and we’ve made these protocols a lot. It’s really fun to combine and mix and match and get the synergistic effect of this herb plus that herb. I mean, that’s where the magic really happens and there is an art to this too like you said when to cycle things on when to cycle them off, so there’s not just this one cookie cutter thing that you have to do. You really got to just work with the person. Certain herbs are used for certain parasites, certain ones we use for bacteria, certain ones we use for fungus. It depends on what you got, most of the time it’s a combination of all these bugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Hey, Evan, great podcast today. Hope everyone at home listening enjoyed it. Feel free to share with friends or family. Put your comments down below. Let me know what things that you guys have tried at home that have worked well or haven’t. Really appreciate the conversation. Evan, have an awesome day man.
Evan Brand: You too, take it easy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye.
Evan Brand: See you. Bye-bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-top-5-causes-of-bloating-podcast-364
Recommended Products:
Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile
International DSL GI MAP Genetic Stool Test
Post Viral Immune Support To Improve Energy | Podcast #363
What you eat after a viral infection, when symptoms of fatigue persist, can have a marked impact on your speed of recovery. Dr. J and Evan discuss that specific foods need to be avoided or included in your diet to improve your immune system. So what are the truth and the evidence about diet and post-viral immune support?
The good news is that most people will benefit from some considerations when recovering from illness or infection. Having post-viral fatigue means that you will not have your usual energy to think, shop, prepare or eat as before. Be very practical and kind to yourself. Dr. J and Evan added that diet modification is vital in your recovery.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
1:57 – The role of acid-pH level in the digestive system
5:01 – The link of depression and anxiety to bloating
10:02 – The benefits of probiotics and effects of stress to digestive health
18:17 – Functional medicine strategies and testing to find the root cause of bloating
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J in the house with Evan Brand. Evan, how you doing man? How are your holidays? How’s everything going brother?
Evan Brand: Everything’s going pretty good. I’m trying to start 2022 off with a bang. I suspect it’s gonna be a better year than 2021. People are becoming smarter. They’re becoming more educated. They’re becoming more resourceful. People are waking up. There’s a lot of, we’re in the great awakening and so I think, this is an important time to be alive and an important time if you’re a parent, if you’re a husband, a wife, if you’ve got kids, if you’re a teacher. It’s important time to keep your eyes open and keep your ears to the ground because stuff changes quickly and you got to be like a little speedboot. You got to be able to take turns quick, you don’t want to be the titanic right now, you don’t wanna be slow in taking big turns, you gotta be nimble in these times and so what I’m alluding to is just you got to be able to navigate the world of health which is quickly evolving and that’s true. What we’re trying to talk about today is post viral fatigue and really that’s just the title but this really could apply to bacterial infections and parasites and mold exposure but we just wanted to try to zoom in a little bit specifically on post viral fatigue and things like Epstein Barr virus, many people are familiar with and there’s a lot of people that report their chronic fatigue, picking up after something like EBV, we’ve seen it a lot with the virus going around now which would probably get flagged and censored so we won’t say it but you know what it is and there’s a lot of post, uh, viral fatigue going on from that and so you and I have dealt with some of that, you’re still going through the thick of it right now but I think you’re coming through pretty well, you’re still working and obviously you’re on your feet right now literally standing so that’s exciting and yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For the listeners, I had COVID last week, actually symptoms started on Wednesday. Really two hard days of symptoms, I was able to work the whole time though, I mean I think that the symptoms for my COVID that were, um, tough was I would say achiness and then like sensitivity to cold like it was like 45 degrees out and it felt like it was minus 10. So, I would say sensitivity to cold and then also getting really hot at some points, getting out where I would sweat through my shirt. So hot and cold, achiness/ headaches and then like easily out of breath but I mean for me I mean, it was still fine where I could work and still do the things I had to do. So it wasn’t that bad, I mean, I had a flu in 2013 where I was literally laid up for over two days and I couldn’t do anything so I know laid up feels like it wasn’t even close to the flu of 2013 for me, that was really hard. So, definitely, um, not as bad, I actually was my own worst enemy because on Friday I was feeling like really good like 80-90% better and did like 2-3 hours of housework like cleaning my house like doing all this different stuff because it was a beautiful day and I’m like all right let me get on top of some work, work 3 hours probably walk like 15,000 steps and that next day there was a major relapse in how I felt. It was probably like I went backwards 30-40%. Here I was at 80% probably going backwards to 50. I was like whoa what happened and so then I just kind of got in the straight and narrow and just said okay I gotta really make sure I kind of make sure I kind of keep it easy until I get back to 100% because, you know, um, it just you didn’t realize how much, uh, things could go backwards so fast so you really gotta wait till you get a 100% on things and so overall I mean the only thing lingering for me right now is a slight bit of um out of breathiness and, uh, this little lingering deep tickle cough like right now you can feel it like someone’s tickling the back of your throat with your finger and you want to cough to scratch it, kind of like that and so that’s where I’m at now. That’s like kind of makes it feel like I scratch it right there, right. So, I’m doing some ginger tea, I’m doing with the Manuka honey that soothes it like that helps with the irritation. It’s not knocking the cough down. Doing some, Elderberry, um, doing some thieves, uh, natural cough drops with essential oils, um, also doing some nebulizer so I’m doing some glutathione nebulization so those are couple of things I’m doing and then obviously sinus flushes, the amount of mucus that is coming out of me is out of control so sinus flushes are really, really important because if you do not flush your sinuses, the amount of stuff that stays inside of you, oh my God. So, flushing my sinuses out 3-4 times a day, you know, really good saline reverse osmosis with a little bit of silver in there to kind of keep things flushed out is helping a lot. So, that’s kind of where I’m at but honestly feeling pretty good, um, the whole family got it purposefully, my wife had it and I’m like come over here honey gave her a big kiss and then I kissed all my kids, I’m like we’re done. We’re gonna get this thing all together, be done with it all that way we’re not, you know, I get it next month and then I’m isolating for two weeks and then my kids get no we’re gonna get it all at the same time and surprisingly my kids’ symptoms were 80% less than the adults, super, super minor. I couldn’t believe how minor it was for the kids, so very interesting. So, that was kind of my experience with, uh, with the big C, uh, so to speak. And also, the big correlation I was listening to someone talk about this, the, a lot of the post C symptoms that we see after, right, people that have dysglycemia, and blood sugar issues tend to be a big driving factor of a lot of these post viral symptoms afterwards. Talking about post-viral fatigue, one of the big things is make sure you manage your glycemia, meaning you’re having good protein, you’re having good fats, you’re not eating a bunch of refined sugar, grains, those kinds of things. Make sure you put good metaphorical logs on the fire, good proteins, good fats to really work on blood sugar stability.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll I’m glad that you’re coming through it. Regarding the shortness of breath, I would kind of put that in the same category as the post viral fatigue because that shortness of breath can create fatigue and the best thing that’s helped me and has helped many clients is doing the color oxygen. So, ChlorOxygen, you can get that on amazon, it’s readily available. And it’s just a, it’s a liquid chlorophyll extract. So, when you do that within probably 5-10 minutes, you can feel a difference, so it’s like C-h-l-o-r-Oxygen, ChlorOxygen. I would probably do 10-20 drops up to 3 times per day. That thing is absolutely incredible. You can go as high as one tablespoon in 20 ounces of water and just sip on that throughout the day. I had one guy in New York, major, major issues with shortness of breath in the acute and the long term and that ChlorOxygen literally just turned his situation around. So, I’d get some of that stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, it’s C-h-l-o-r Oxygen?
Evan Brand: Yeah, ChlorOxygen. Yeah, and it comes in a little bottle tincture and it’s incredible. Also, something I’ve used personally, I’ve used with several clients too is Ailanthus. Ailanthus is three of heaven which is an invasive tree. I see a lot of it in Kentucky but you can buy Ailanthus tincture and that one is also really, really good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Is this the one, right here, Is the ChlorOxygen?
Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s the one. Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Cool.
Evan Brand: Get you some of that but should help because that’s the problem is, you know, the shortness of breath was pretty bad for me and I felt better, you know, I got infected a long time ago. It was like August 2020 and then six months later that’s when I started to have some shortness of breath which I was like, holy crap and so luckily, I was able to knock it out, uh, with Demectin and uh, yeah, Demectin really helped me and then the nebulizer and the ChlorOxygen, I would say that combination was an absolute game changer, luckily, I haven’t had any issues since then. But what we are seeing is that the mitochondria have a role in this and some of this post-viral fatigue we’re seeing is due to mitochondrial damage so I’ve been fortunate enough to see a few dozen people now. And in terms of organic acids testing after the virus, and we are seeing that the mitochondria definitely showed dysfunction. You and I talked about this many times on other podcast about the mitochondria. We can measure the dysfunction and so what we’re doing is we’re coming in with mitochondrial support nutrients so CoQ10, we’re coming in with carnitine, ribose, a lot of these amino acids and B vitamins like riboflavin which can help fuel the krebs cycle and then also we can use things like PQQ to help get the mitochondrial biogenesis going, meaning we’re literally making new mitochondria so we can measure this on paper. So, if you guys are suffering, you know, one of us can reach out or you reach out to us rather and then we can get the urine looked at because we can measure this. You don’t have to guess where is this fatigue coming from. If it’s a mitochondrial induced problem, we can measure that. Now, you have permission to have multiple things wrong with you so there could be a dopamine problem, there could be a mitochondrial problem, there could be toxin problem. So, rarely is there one issue causing this fatigue but the goal is for us to try to get as many puzzle pieces laid out in front of us and then make an appropriate protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I’d say, the worst thing about COVID for me right now, coffee tastes bitter like it tastes bitter, almost a little bit sour, does not taste like coffee. I’ve almost been like I’m not even gonna drink it right now until this thing gets better because it does not taste that good but for me I’m just alright, I got, you know, 20 grams of collagen in there, I got some good fats, I kind of look at it as like a meal replacement for me. So, that’s probably the worst thing the whole time. For me, it kind of felt like a cold. I’d say a mild, mild to middle of the road cold. The only thing that really surprised me was that, that back swing where I was like 80% better and then went backwards that was the hardest thing.
Evan Brand: And, it could have been you overdoing it for sure, I mean,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: oh, you totally did.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean I did have a little bit of that too where I kind of felt like I was better, overdid it and then I heard it again, so.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So, excuse me, anything else you wanted to highlight on that so far? I would say post-viral stuff, the things that I’m doing right now and I recommend people do, in general, are gonna be Adaptogens and I like medicinal mushrooms. So, Shiitake, Maitake, Reishi. Reishi is great. I love it because it does deactivate viruses. It does build up and support the natural killer immune cells so I do like that, uh, any type of ginseng, Ashwagandha, these are things that help support energy production, support the adrenals, help buffer the HPA excess. So, any of these types of things are gonna be, uh, helpful too.
Evan Brand: You need to get on some Lion’s Mane too for your taste because what I’m finding is that the nerves are damaged and that’s affecting the sinus. So, the sense of smell, sense of taste, some of that is related to nerve damage. So, I would probably hit Lion’s Mane, maybe like two caps twice a day. That’s been helpful to restore the sense of smell and taste in some people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s probably not damaged. It’s probably just more inflammation, right?
Evan Brand: Well, the long-term stuff, I’m talking to people just long-term. I’m talking to people that you know 6-8 months later say, I still can’t taste or smell. Bringing in Lion’s Mane, like 2 caps twice a day. It takes a few months but you know it does increase nerve growth factor and so I think that’s the mechanism.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s interesting. Yeah. I do have some Lion’s Mane. I’ll definitely add that in. I mean, I think medicinal mushrooms are gonna be really good to, um, be on top of, uh, just supporting your immune system and like helping with, um, the body regenerate and heal better.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Gabe was asking a question in the live chat on YouTube. How did you guys catch it? I don’t know, I mean I work from home. You know, I’ve got a home office, uh, Justin has a home office as well, you know, I do go out, uh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Personally, it’s the new variant. The new variant has an R-naught of seven, which is that’s equal to, uh, measles so the delta variant had an R-naught of 2 or 3 so that means for every one person that gets it, it can be passed to 2-3 on average, right. The new omicron variant, it’s seven, so you can literally pass it to seven people so I think my wife was in a yoga class with three people and they were like spread out across that broom like they were like way you know spaced apart, you know, for just all the safety reasons and it was still able to get it so my whole take on omicron, it’s very, um, I think the symptoms are milder than delta for sure. That’s what everything’s been reported but, um, it’s way more contagious. Everyone’s gonna get it at this point, you just gotta have your plan and, um, be ready ahead of time, right? People don’t have a plan and then when they get it then they get stuck and they feel like they have to go to the hospital and you don’t have as many options there so try to have a, um, outpatient plan ready to rock and roll but yeah, you’re gonna get it because the, um, our knot on this thing, right, is that seven which is at a level close to measles so it’s right there. So, if you haven’t got it yet, you will. Anything else you wanna highlight on the immune side, on the post-viral stuff obviously I’m a big fan of ginger, I think ginger is nice because it’s anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, uh, helps with lymphatic. So, if your kind of like have a lot of like stagnant lymph in the chest area or in the neck I really keeps the lymph moving all that’s very helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. There was, uh, one person that commented if you’ve had delta you should have some memory T cells that will help if you get infected. Yes supposedly. Supposedly, um.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. You definitely should have memory T cells as well as memory B cells, right? So, even if you were to get sick again, um, you’re gonna be able to recruit antibodies way faster, right? Normally when you get sick if you’re first time getting exposed to an infection it takes about a week or so to really get those antibodies ramped up and so even if you were to get sick twice, you’re gonna be able to make those antibodies inside of, you know, 24 hours or so. So, you’re gonna be able to bring those antibodies to the table a lot faster and so that’s, um, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Other strategies, uh, post-viral fatigue hyperbaric oxygen has been helpful. I’ve seen several clients that luckily have lived in a city where they’ve had access to do hyperbaric oxygen. Essentially, what it is, is it’s replicating being under water under water about 10 to 12 feet so that pressure is helping to get oxygen deeper inside of you. So, some of these tissues may have been starved of oxygen. This sort of mild hypoxia or hypoxemia, you know, you can basically reverse that by getting the hyperbaric oxygen. There are some people that can do there’s oxygen cans, little portable oxygen shots, if you will but it’s nothing compared to an oxygen concentrator with the hyperbaric oxygen so that’s good ongoing, I mean, I’ve had clients with Lyme that have done hyperbaric we know that’s incredible for traumatic brain injuries and concussions and that sort of thing. So, even if this is just a long-term fatigue problem, not related to viral issues at all, you know, hyperbaric is another good tool, you’re looking at probably around 100 a session but, you know, what, what’s your health? What is your health worth? So.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. One thing I did was very helpful was use my infrared sauna the last couple of days. That was helpful, just getting a really good sweat in felt very good, you know, raising that body temperature up can be very helpful just at um at your body knocking down viruses. That’s part of the reason why you get, um, chill while you get the nutshells but, uh, why you get a fever right. It’s part of the reason your immune system is actually knocking down some of that bacteria and or viruses by doing it that way so using an infrared sauna can be helpful too.
Evan Brand: So, look at your mitochondria, get your organic acids test done, we can measure that and look at mitochondrial function come in with specific support whether it’s B vitamins, adaptogenic herbs like Rhodiola, you mentioned, Siberian ginseng or Eleuthero. There’s medicinal mushrooms like cordyceps which there is some benefits. There are some papers on cordyceps and athletes and improving blood flow. There may be some level of oxygenation that happens with cordyceps too. So, cordyceps, reishi mushroom, I think the Lion’s mane for the brain and for the nerves would be beneficial, the ChlorOxygen for any of the shortness of breath along with the fatigue, rest, I mean just getting good quality sleep, making sure you got to do whatever you can to get good quality sleep. So, all the same sleep hygiene habits we’ve talked about for a decade together apply in regards to candling down at night if you need some passion flower. Even melatonin, there’s some really cool studies on melatonin. We know, it’s a very powerful antioxidant and we are seeing higher doses of melatonin be beneficial. So, in general, somewhere around 5 milligrams but there are some papers going wat up 30 – 40 – 50 milligrams and beyond. I don’t know a ton about the high dose so I’ll just tell you that the regular dose standard dosing is better than nothing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It was that melatonin?
Evan Brand: Melatonin. Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Usually, it’s like the higher dose is like 10 milligrams and that’s gonna help with the oxygenation and then 30 – 500 milligrams for the arginine that’s to really increase the oxygenation.
Evan Brand: Yeah. The arginine for like nitric oxide production. Beet powder, you know, beet powder would be good too. So, anything you could do to create some vasodilation is gonna be smart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Anything else you wanna add, Evan?
Evan Brand: I think that’s it. If you need help, reach out, get tested, hopefully you get back on the full mend here so, keep, keep rolling. You’re doing a great job and hope everybody is doing well and we’ll be in touch next week. If you need help clinically, please reach out. You can reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com or me, Evan Brand, at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help you guys. Keep your head up. keep moving forward.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think the big thing out of the gates is to make sure you have time to sleep, rest. Don’t overdo it. Just know your body still needs more time even when you, when you’ve gotten through the whole thing to recover. Don’t overdo it. That’s really important. Keep the foundational nutrients dialed in so that would be like zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, you know, you can keep those things in there. You may not have to use them at such a high level that you did with the infection but keep some of those nutrients. Don’t go from something to nothing. Keep something in there the whole time, find a medicinal mushroom that you like, find an adaptogen that you like. Maybe keep a little bit of ginger tea going. Something that has some antiviral support and um, you know, try to get a little bit of movement but if it’s making you feel winded then just try to do just enough where you can feel like you’re doing something but not where it’s overly taxing you. I think it’s really important to kind of meet that right in the middle.
Evan Brand: Last thing, two last things, a low histamine diet is generally pretty helpful because there are a lot of issues with mast cell activation being triggered from this. So, a lower histamine diet, fresh meat, and no leftovers is very important. And then, histamine support. I’ve got a product called histamine support but essentially it’s quercetin plus some other nutrients so anything, you can do to stabilize your mast cells that’s gonna be helpful because muscle activation can cause fatigue, meaning, after the viral issue was over, the immune system can sort of have PTSD for lack of a better terminology and the immune system will go into this crazy state where it will shut you down so that fatigue trying to rebuild that energy back up is re-regulating the immune system so like the quercetin, other mast cell stabilizers are very helpful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Love it. Love it. Makes total sense and again not everyone’s gonna have that issue but you know, it’s kind of good to know if you fit into that camp. Those are a couple of strategies out of the gates. Anything else, Evan?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. Take it easy. If people need help, reach out justinhealth.com and evanbrand.com will be available.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’re here to help you guys. I’ll probably be back later on today here. So, keep a lookout, comments down below. Let us know your thoughts on the topic, we appreciate a review. We appreciate shares to friends and family. Really helps us get the word out. You guys have a phenomenal day. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: Take it easy. Bye-bye
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye you all.
References:
Recommended Products:
NeilMed Sinus Rinse Complete Kit
Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile
Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/post-viral-immune-support-to-improve-energy-podcast-363
Recovering From The Holidays | Podcast #362
The holiday season is meant to be a joyous occasion that brings family and friends together. But even amid all the excitement, there are often moments of stress and anxiety. If you are recovering from health issues, this broad spectrum of holiday emotions can challenge even your best intentions for recovery.
Dr. J and Evan Brand talk about these issues and handle them. Though the risk of relapse runs high during the holidays, it is not inevitable. If you are in recovery from any health issues, you can take steps to stay healthy and safe. Becoming aware of potentially triggering situations and knowing how to prepare for them can help minimize your risk of relapse and allow you to enjoy your holiday season truly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction;
3:15 – The link of EMF to overall health
8:43 – Helpful enzymes, foods, and tests for health recovery
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand, our post-holiday show. Today’s gonna be just a quick podcast on how to recover from holidays, uh, case you don’t know, my whole family has COVID right now, so we are dealing with that and doing all kinds of natural immune support, all the things that I talked about with my patients and talk about on the past to help improve and boost your immune system, so overall feeling actually pretty good, feeling pretty good, my family’s actually doing pretty descent so we are plowing through it, feeling great. Evan, how you doing man? How are the holidays for you?
Evan Brand: Doing really well and yeah like I told you before we hit record, sorry to hear that but also, it’s good to get it over with. We know that natural immunity is the best immunity far better than any other immunity that other people might like to convince you and that it is free and the best and most robust immunity. So, it’s amazing because paying attention to the media, you would think that you should be like laying out right now but here you are standing up at your standing desk, you’re doing your normal thing and you’re here on a podcast so I love to just blow through the narrative of the and blast through the fear. So, beyond that we’re doing great over here man, we’re ready to dive into the holiday talk and this time of year is where you get like 50-50. Like half the people are like, okay I’m gonna go haywire, I’m gonna eat whatever the hell I want and I don’t care and then the other people like, no way I gotta get dialed in, new year’s coming and for some reason January 1st is this symbolic day where people feel like they want to get stuff together. I encourage you to do it now, don’t wait until January to try to get yourself better and so this idea of like cheat days or the holidays are here so I’m gonna go off the rails, I personally don’t do that at all. I stay completely dialed in just because I know it’s gonna affect my brain it’s gonna affect my gut, I don’t wanna have that bad poop, I don’t wanna have bad sleep, I don’t wanna have skin outbreaks, so for me, personally, I do the same thing I always do. If I want like good treat and I want to feel like I’m getting something good, I might go for like a Siete cookie and it’s like maybe one gram of sugar per cookie max but I’m not just gonna go eat a bunch of gluten and rolls and dairy and all that just because it’s the holiday so I personally think like this idea of like a cheat day or a cheat weekend, I just think, it’s crap because you and I’ve talked about this before but like gluten antibodies, they can go up for months after eating gluten so for me, I’m not just gonna go do that and set off the immune system for potentially that long.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know, I totally agree. So, what we kind of did is we had, um, squash pie from a true food kitchen, we bought one or two of those and we used that as kind of our dessert so it’s kind of a gluten-free, grain-free dessert option. So, we had that true food kitchen’s great. Their desserts are amazing. We also had some bacon-wrapped dates which were awesome, I mean you get the sweets and savory there and then we also got some poblano peppers, we put some cream cheese in it, again, cream cheese is a little bit better than regular cheese, a little more lactose casein, um, lowering that at least but a little bit of dairy and we wrap bacon around that. So, those were kind of our two I got the grill fired up. Got some atria buys just cut them really, really thin. Put some toothpicks in them and just had a lot of finger food like that and that was nice, really simple, really easy, um, so we try to, you know, try to mitigate a lot of the destruction by choosing healthier, less inflammatory options but also things that allow us to feel pretty satiated and pretty full and not have these blood sugar swings that people get when they don’t have enough protein or fat with their meal either.
Evan Brand: Yeah. If you want a crazy book, we had a question coming on the live chat about detoxing from EMF coming back to work with headaches and this does pertain to the holidays too. I’ve been reading this over the past weekend. It’s a book called, “The invisible rainbow”, it’ll blow your mind so if you want to read that book it’s all the scientific studies organized into one place about EMF exposure and how we’ve known since the 1800s when the telegram and the telegram wires first came out, people were having reactions to electromagnetic fields and this certainly does affect you. So, all the people just got new, uh, apple air pods, and apple watches and all these, uh, cell towers that they keep on their wrists and in their pocket, you know, I think it is smart to try to mitigate some of that going into the new year. There’s some studies in that book too about EMF and blood sugar and how even people that were dialed in with their diet had elevations and fasting glucose simply by being exposed to radio frequencies so all you with your new tech toys that you got over the holidays, I would encourage you, I think seeing is believing, not everyone is sensitive, meaning they’re not going to feel it but at a biological level there probably is something going on so you could get an rf meter, there’s one out of Canada called Safe and Sound, that’s what I used and I’ve measured, I stood face to face with the cell phone tower and that was about 10,000 microwatts per square meter, an apple watch that a friend of ours had was 2 million microwatts per square meter so people freak out about cell towers but they’ve got. I can’t even do the math, a 100x the radiation of a cell tower on their wrist all day so on the EMF subject, I would not use or recommend those devices.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, what I do is I have a little tripod here. I take my phone and I put it on a tripod and I put it in front of me and I’ll just use siri to kind of call my patients like that so I’ll put it away from me which is nice. That way it’s not on my person and then I use, um, just little holster like this and I tuck my phone in like this and a couple of things you can do so you can actually, I don’t do this personally but you can slit the side here and you can put some aluminum foil in and that will create a protective barrier with the phone going into your skin so that’s an option if you’re really sensitive. I put it on my back right hip so there’s a lot of tissue there. There’s a lot of bone, a lot of meat, a lot of glute muscle, um, and the cell phone. It really is exponential, it has a logarithmic intensity so the first inch is the most intense and that it logarithmically drops off. Now, if you put the, your phone in your front pocket and it’s right over your ovaries or uh, genitals, that’s a problem, right? Because that’s gonna negatively, now your like inside a couple of inches of that tissue and it’s more sensitive tissue and you don’t have a lot of meat i.e., thick muscle like the glute or a lot of bone in the way, right, that tissue’s kind of much more dense and so ideally, you know, if you’re a female, keep it in your back pocket, don’t put it over tissue like that. That’s bad. Don’t put it in your front pocket female or male, keep it in your back pocket or get a holster like I do, put it right in the back part of your hip and if you’re more sensitive just a little slit in and put some aluminum foil right up against it and that’ll give a protective barrier.
Evan Brand: Yeah. A lot of times, they sell like silver fabric too, like, I got, I’ve got a shirt that’s like a silver lined shirt, I’ve tested it. it literally, I mean I had a cell phone right in front of me, it was like a million microwatts per square meter, throw in the meter just haywire and I put the shirt on put the meter inside my shirt and it was nothing it was in the green so a lot of these are lined with silver. These fabrics that are really cool so I have had some sensitive clients in the UK who, we’ve got them some of that EMF protective clothing and it has been helpful like you said distance is your friend so getting away from that is key and then I do all my calls just on my computer so I use google voice or I’ll use skype and so I’m just on a hardware connection so I’m using, I’m making zero, uh, radioactive calls during the day or like you and I know we do a lot of zoom calls with our clients too, so zoom, facetime those are good options if you guys are having to do a lot of calls for work and mitigate your risk, you can do facetime on the computer which is what I do and it’s a zero RF way of talking to people and then were hardwired, I’m hardware, I know you go, like wireless headset but I go hardwired on everything.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And I use this headset right here so then the signal, the receiver’s here versus so there’s about an inch or so of tissue, uh, you know, fabric here because the phone really is the first inch is the most and where it’s really concerning is when you have those I, uh, with the little pods in the ear, they go right deep in the ear and everything the receiver is right in there and so there’s not a lot of tissue between you and your external auditory meatus and going into your brain. Something like this where it’s denser and it’s actually more outside or I use these on purpose because it’s the signal is in here and it’s farther away from the head. But in general, um, Bluetooth is pretty weak though, in general, like, Bluetooth only can travel like 30 or 40 feet so I’m not really worried about that. I’m not worried about the 5g signals that are traveling miles upon miles upon miles. A 30-foot signal isn’t as big of a deal as one that can go miles and miles so, I think, if you can plug in, that’s great or use a speakerphone or you have the talk on your phone at least an inch or two away because even apple in their handbook when I understand fact, check me or not, it says you wanna hold your phone at least an inch away from their head, your head. So, that’s really important.
Evan Brand: I think there was something in the fine print about that about the emissions that come from it. Yeah. On the topic of more, you know, back of back, back to like diet and food exposure and that kind of thing I know you and I both sell professional enzymes that we use clinically with people so I think that’d be a good strategy if you do feel like for some reason, you’re off the rails or maybe you’re not dialed back in yet. I do recommend, like, a broad-spectrum enzyme. Just because you can start to break down dairy and gluten molecules using enzymes so I’m not telling you to eat those things but people got to live and people are not always gonna be dialed in. So, I think a good broad-spectrum enzyme would be a smart thing to do and then first thing of the year that I know you would recommend as well as me is I would get some labs done, I would look at your stool, I would look at your urine and start your year with some data so that you’re not coming into the year blindly. You’re coming into the year with some information about your mitochondria, how they are performing. What do your neurotransmitters look like? How’s your dopamine and serotonin levels? What about your nutrients? How’s your vitamin C? How’s your B vitamins? What’s your glutathione status? Do you have bacterial overgrowth? Do you have Candida? Do you have parasites? Do you have gut inflammation? Do you have gluten antibodies? And your immune system is pissed off right now, I think it’d be a great strategy to start off the year with getting data. So, if you need help clinically, you can reach out to us, we can run these labs on you, we send them to your home, you do an at-home stool and at-home urine, we’ve done this literally thousands of times, you can get over a hundred pieces of data just with one stool and one urine sample so I’d highly recommend that, I think that’s the best thing you can do. I think, it’s great to get all the foundational pieces in order but when you really want to tease things apart and figure out what you’re up against, you’ve got a test not guess and so if you go buy some random energy supplement or some random fat burning supplement or some random, you know pre-workout formula, you don’t really know what you’re doing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, just kind of foundational things out of the gate, you’re through the holidays, try to mitigate the damage by choosing foods that are gonna be less inflammatory still give you the feeling of your enjoying life right, you’re cheating a little bit but it’s mitigating the damage like Evan said, higher quality broad-spectrum enzymes and acids especially when you’re eating those food. There’s a lot of foods that you’re more intolerant to. You have a hard time breaking it down and the lack of breakdown of that food can create more bloating and gas and constipation. So, we’ll put our recommended digestive supports below in the links below so you can see them. We have different HCl, enzymes and bile support products and then we have different binders or detoxification support with glutathione or sulfur or aminos, down below. Also, the immune support I’m using right now, just to give you kind of top five things I’m taking right now, of course vitamin D, of course an acetylcysteine, really important, um, vitamin C, quercetin, and I would say reishi mushroom is an excellent thing, these are all things that I’m doing right now, of course, a couple other things that I’m doing, uh, preventively are going to be sinus flushes where I rotate between either a sinus flush with saline between iodine, silver and hydrogen peroxide, all diluted and I’ve been doing a little bit of nebulizing hydrogen peroxide. Now, I’ve been just taking the 5mL saline blister packs and doing about 3 to 4 drops of hydrogen peroxide in there which brings the amount to about point one percent and that works really good just trying to keep, um, kind of disinfecting that upper respiratory tract airway. That’s where the virus tends to replicate and grow and if we can knock that down with flushing or nebulizing that prevents the viral load from going up which that’s what creates all the inflammation right so if you keep the viral load down, keep some good natural anti-inflammatory going, keep your immune system supported of course, sugar suppresses your immune system get 12 hours of sleep at night all these are foundational things out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And your lungs believe it or not make hydrogen peroxide so when people, there’s you know, the internet supposed fact checkers which in the court of law now Facebook admitted that their fact checkers are simply opinions and they’re not truly fact checkers so that’s important for people to know but there’s been some stuff online about hydrogen peroxide telling people this is dangerous and all that. We make hydrogen peroxide in our bodies, so you’re taking it at a diluted rate. I took it straight, I did this straight three percent to see how it was, it burned a little bit in my nose but other than that it was fine, I did a whole podcast with doctor Thomas Levy on this. He’s a cardiologist, who’s been speaking, I think, he did, uh, a talk with Dr. Pergola about the topic so if you wanna listen to it, it’s Thomas Levy, we talked all about the hydrogen peroxide nebulization and the IV vitamin C which he’s using for the rouleaux formation from people that are getting the injection, uh, he’s using IV vitamin C to help break up the blood so really, really cool resource. Thomas Levy, he’s a genius.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Yeah. So, you want to bring it down to about point one percent so it’s more gentle. If you go a little too much, you know, it’ll just give you a little burning and such and make sure it’s saline that you’re using. I use blister pack saline. I’ll put the link down for that as well. You want one that’s specific for a nebulizer just so you don’t irritate your respiratory tract. You wanna make sure it’s good, clean, and sterile saline with just the right amount of minerals to be in harmony with that, um, mucosal tissue. Well, anything else here, Evan, you wanna highlight? We’ll keep it really quick today.
Evan Brand: I’m happy you’re doing good and you’re doing all the right thing so definitely all the things that should be headline news, the things that are very safe and effective and as Dr. Levy made the point to me, you’re talking pennies or less than pennies per dose and some of the supplements and nutrients that you’re taking so just in regards to cost this is almost free, the protocol you are using, this is very safe at-home early treatment protocol so I’m just really proud you’re doing that and spreading the word and hopefully we can help more people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, Evan. Really appreciate it and guys listening if you wanna get your 2022 off the right start and you have some health issues you wanna dive into feel free to head over to evanbrand.com to reach out to Evan or myself, Dr. J in justinhealth.com, we are here to support your natural health kind of root health needs. We’re here for you, we’ll put our recommended products and things that we chatted about in the description notes below and if you guys enjoyed, shared with your friends and family and write us a review, we’ll all the links down below, you guys have a phenomenal holiday season and I hope your Christmas and holidays are great.
Evan Brand: Yep. We’ll see you all soon. Take it easy, stay strong, keep your head up, and stay motivated. Don’t give in to fear, everything’s gonna be okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care you all. Bye now.
Evan Brand: See ya.
References:
Recommended Products:
Xlear Rescue Nasal Spray with Xylitol
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/recovering-from-the-holidays-cheat-meals-podcast-362
Why Do I Have Low Motivation – Functional Medicine Solutions | Podcast #358
Motivation is the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. It is what causes you to act, whether getting a glass of water to reduce thirst or reading a book to gain knowledge.
In this video, Dr. J and Evan Brand talk about the physiological issues behind your decreasing motivation and the functional medicine strategies, hormones, and lifestyle changes you need to do to improve your mood and overall health function.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 Introduction
1:41 What are the root causes of low motivation?
4:14 The physiological explanation of low motivation
8:39 Functional medicine strategies to improve motivation
10:53 The role of thyroid function to your body’s overall function
16:38 Lifestyle upgrade to boost your motivation
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are going to be talking about motivation. Really excited to have a nice podcast on this topic. Evan, how we doing today this morning?
Evan Brand: I’m doing really well. I’m feeling really motivated. Hence, this topic on motivation. You know, I look around on society and I just see the way that people carry themselves. You know, we’ve become so casual in terms of dress. I mean, when you see people that are just coming out at restaurants, they’re wearing Crocs and sweatpants and, you know, hoodies. People just don’t appear to take good care of themselves, in general. And maybe that’s different in other cities but even talking to people when I bought a sports coat. I talked to the guy at the suit store, and he agreed with me that over the last 20 years, people just become so casual. And with that casual dress, I think that changes people’s level of motivation. When I’m in sweatpants and a hoodie, I feel less motivated, and less ready to charge the world as opposed to when I have on even something like a polo. I think, maybe that’s part of it, but I know there’s a lot of chemical, neurotransmitter, and gut reactions, you know, better involved too. So, what do you think, I mean, am I, am I onto something with the clothing? Have you seen a change even in your lifetime with people?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I think people like, I talked to a lot of patients and friends and like, ‘oh you get to work at home and see patients all over the world. That’s awesome, that must be so easy to just kind of get up and get ready’. I’m like, well I still shower and kind of get ready like I’m going to the office anyway, I wanna look good, I wanna feel good, I wanna feel clean, I wanna feel fresh, plus I wanna be able to jump on a video or see a patient, I wanna have a higher level of professionalism on how I look. So, I do think there’s energy just like you said, in just that look in the park, dress in the park feeling good, right? I think that all helps. I think it moves the needle. That makes sense.
Evan Brand: Well, let’s see some of the root causes of that. I mean, low motivation, in general, the first thing that I think of and maybe your average listeners thinking of, they listen to us for a while, they’re gonna think of dopamine. And that certainly one potential cause and we can measure that using urine organic acids testing. So, we’ll look at the markers for dopamine on that test that we can see, and I would say that 90% of people I test are pretty low and the other 10% are people that have Clostridia bacterial overgrowth. You and I have talked about this before, we did a whole show of Clostridia, I believe, but the mechanism is that if you have Clostridia which is a certain type of bacteria in the gut that will actually inhibit the enzyme dopamine beta hydroxylase and then you have this build up of dopamine. So, you have some of these mood issues that’ll happen because of your gut. So, if you fix your gut, that high dopamine markers normalize. But otherwise, I see, generally, pretty low dopamine and maybe you and I can kind of break down why is that happening. I think chronic stress is a big one. But I wonder if there’s a role of like excess caffeine, have you seen anything look like too much coffee, your stimulants depleting dopamine, what about drugs like the Adderall drugs, that kind of stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think we’ve, with motivation, it’s a couple things right. We have kind of the psychological kind of mindset aspect, I think that’s really important. So, I think number one, you gotta enjoy what you’re doing or you have at least kind of know what your talents or your skills that you’re at. So, you can work on doing things that one you enjoy and two you are actually good at. So, you can perform at a higher level, right? I think it’s a combination of those two things. And I think, also, there’s some people that what if you’re not good at things, right, so I think early on if you’re younger and you’re listening to this as you grow up, you really wanna look at developing talents. tacks and skills set. And you really wanna look at the marketplace and say, ‘where, um, where’s your gaps in the marketplace in regards to skill, whether on the health side or on the tacks side or on engineering. We really wanna look at where you kind of plug yourself into the marketplace, whether there are opportunities and then it’s also good to evaluate your kind of natural talents and skill sets. You kind of look at, you know, what people tell, I’ve always told you good at. There’s different tests out there whether it’s a Myers-Brigg personality test or, uh, I think another test out there called DISC, D-I-S-C test. There’s different tests out there that kind of help you understand, kind where your natural talents are at and then also just really observing and being aware of what you really enjoy doing. Usually, things that you enjoy doing, tend to be better at it because you don’t mind working harder at it. I think those are important, so then when you start doing things, you’ll really enjoy it. Now, on the physiological side, chronic stress well either acutely raises cortisol all over time. That cortisol can become lower which can affect energy and mood and cause your body to break down faster. And of course, that same level of adrenal stress can also lower dopamine, lower adrenaline which can then affect focus and motivation at a biochemical neurological level too. So, I think it’s good to look at both of those, so we can test the adrenal gland and know what’s happening at the adrenal level. We can also look at the neurotransmitters, the organic acid testing and look at various metabolites for Homovanillate, which is a metabolite for dopamine and then Vanilmandelate, which is a metabolite for adrenaline. We can get a window and into both of those metabolites and see how the brain is functioning on the inside.
Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s a great point. People that are just doing stuff that they don’t enjoy, I mean, how are you gonna be motivated for life if you make up, you don’t enjoy it. I talked to a guy who picks up our garbage and he loves it. He loves his job. He loves driving around with a big truck all day and he makes a great money doing it. He’s happy. So, some people are gonna look at that and say, ‘oh, this garbage man, what a terrible life’. And some people, they enjoy it. So, I do think ultimately as they say if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I still love what I do but I still, I feel like it’s still work, I mean, I enjoy it but when I’m away for too long on vacation, I don’t enjoy this much. I rather be working, I really do. I love helping people. I’m really addicted to the hustle and grind of helping people feel better. There’s so many people suffering. For you and I, I think, we’re in a good spot-on loving what we do, but then on the brain chemistry side, I would say that I certainly struggle on. I had gut issues, I certainly struggled with low energy, and partly low motivation and low focus and for a period of time I had trouble reading certain books, like my brain, I just couldn’t process. I had to read, read certain phrases or if someone said a phone number to me, I couldn’t remember just a simple 7-digit phone number. So, I definitely had some brain fog associated with gut issues. And on paper, my endorphins and my dopamine were a bit low. So, I think looking at these mechanisms, I would say Candida, something we could mention too because we know Candida produces acetaldehyde, which is kind of similar to an alcohol molecule and so some people are a little bit drunk on their own Candida overgrowth. So, if somebody that has a lot of sugar cravings or if you have a white coated tongue or if you tested positive for Candida on urine, organic acid, stool testing, we gotta fix that Candida because that’s directly gonna impact your mood, your motivation and your focus.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Now, I work with patients, right? And I look at a lot of the physiological imbalances. So, let’s say there’s hormonal issues, let’s say it’s a female, it’s estrogen dominance, right, lower progesterone, estrogen out of whack, there’ll be a lot of PMS, mood issues, irritability issues. They’re poor energy because of chronic adrenal stress, they’re not digesting their food well. There’s a lot of mitochondrial imbalances, B-vitamins, CoQ10, L-carnitine. You know, it’s hard to be motivated when you have a lot of these physiological imbalances, because it takes fuel to run this system. So, when I look at patients, I get them motivated to fix these things. You know, it’s hard to get someone motivated to just fix their mitochondria or fix their adrenals. So, I always look at, hey what are these health challenges that you’re having right now. What is preventing you from being, doing, or having in your life right now? Like, what do you want to be doing, being you’re having in your life that you’re not able to because of your energy or because of your chronic digestion, because of your, um, mood issues? What is that? I try to get really clear what those things are because if I can figure out, hey, we’ll it’s affecting me for working out whole day, it’s affecting me, um, being able to spend quality time with my kids, then we can lean on, okay we are gonna make these diet changes, so we can help you get back to spending better time with your kids or so we can have you focusing and doing better at work at closing deal, whatever that is. So, if we figure out the why, then we can lean on that why to get people to make the right changes because it’s the really the why is the essence of it. And that really helps to get people motivated. So, there’s the mindset motivation and there’s the physiological biological biochemical side. So, we wanna work on both. So, when I tell people to make these diet changes, not just making these diet changes, we’re gonna do these so we can help move the needle in this area or that area. So, it’s kind of like using psychological tactics that help keep your patient motivated. It’s also important.
Evan Brand: Nice. That’s really a good point. We have some part of our population, where there are just biohacker people who wanna see the numbers, right? They wanna see the numbers get better, and they’re happy enough to see succinic acid go from a 24 down to a 5. And we go okay, great we had major progress, the mitochondria look better on paper. Some of our people, they’re cool with just the numbers, but I agree with you, you gotta bring the emotional piece to. It’s not enough to say, ‘hey, I wanna get your dopamine higher because I want you to have enough energy to get out of bed, make your bed, get dressed, wear something nice, get to the office as you close the deal’. There’s a whole symphony of emotion and the neurotransmitter, the mitochondria, the adrenals, all firing together to make life nice and make life enjoyable. And I just see that the number one leading cause of disability in the U.S. is depression and so, I don’t know, I just feel like there’s so much on top potential, on top productivity out of the population, if we can just simply get the gut improve, get the mitochondria improve, get the neurotransmitter improve. I mean, we could totally transform the country.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, I think simply, out of the gates, it starts with food. So, it starts with high quality food, organic, right, low toxin, eating good proteins, eating good fats. I think being more of a fat burner for most people is super important because we just tend, if you just look at micronutrient trends over the last 56 years, we just consuming more processed carbohydrates and of course the fats are shifted to more, kind of polyunsaturated omega-6 kind of vegetable oil. I think number one out of the gates is we switch to higher quality, better, more stable fats whether it’s on the grass-fed meat, high quality fish or if we do any plants it’s gonna be more on the mannose, right, olive oil, some avocados, those kinds of things. That’s important on the fat and then we try to restrict the lot of the refined grains, refined sugar and that’s some kind of first step and make sure that the quality there. in regards to organic, um, no added hormones, some things like that in the pot. That’s a good start for anyone right there. And then from there, we can look at the different hormonal systems. So, if we have chronically high cortisol, usually that’s more of an acute thing but that can cause anxiety, that can cause irritability. Usually, there’s a tire of wire that kind of thing there. And then of course as we have chronic stress, that adrenal pattern can move more to a lower cortisol stay, and that can cause energy low motivation low mood. So, we wanna really look at the adrenals. They’re part of that stress handling system. So, when we look at things that drive the adrenals its physical, chemical and emotional stress and so we wanna make sure there’s nothing on the emotional side that’s driving a problem, right? Marriage issues, kids issues, financial issues, whatever that is, we have to make sure, we’re at least addressing it and it’s in our forefront, we’re not just kind of putting your head on the sand. Physically we need to make sure we’re not overexercising or under so we’re getting some movement or we’re moving our muscles or we’re not overly sedentary, we’re not doing things that cause us pain, right? So, that’s important. Of the chronically in pain, we see a soft tissue person or a chiropractor to really get to the root of that. And of course, what we really focus on is the underlying hidden chemical stressors, that’s just the food sensitivities, the gut imbalances, the dysbiosis, the leaky gut, the hormonal imbalances, the low thyroid, the adrenal imbalances, the hormonal issues, um, the mitochondrial dysfunction, the toxicity, mold, heavy metals, right? So, this is where we, we come in there, we focus on the chemical stressors that play a major input on the adrenals and we chronically stress the adrenals, adrenaline is also produced by the adrenals to kind of get cortisol mobilize and chronic adrenaline stimulation will pull dopamine because adrenaline is a post cursor essentially to dopamine. So, it goes dopamine 🡪 adrenaline. It’s over chronically sti, in a stressed-out state. Your body will make adrenaline and will pull from dopamine to make adrenaline. And dopamine is important for that I love you feeling, it’s really important for focus, dealing with stress and staying motivated. So, we have to get that, the underlying reason why we pullin’ out that dopamine downstream, we have to get the adrenals fully supported.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. I’m glad you mentioned heavy metals too. I mean, people and their brain issues could simply be related to mercury toxicity. If you’re someone just walking around and you’ve got a mouthful of amalgam fillings, we know those are estimated 50-ish percent mercury give or take and we know that mercury directly affects dopamine. If you simply just type in, mercury and Parkinson’s or mercury and Alzheimer’s. There’s a lot of links to these toxins and brain neurodegenerative issues. So, if you’re somebody who’s just so poor motivation and it’s more on the extreme side, you might get this amount of amalgam out of your mouth. And for my grandfather, he’s pushing 80-years-old, believe it or not, the local, biological then said he’s already having memory issues, it’s too late. The issue of pulling out the mercury could create more problems. He just said, leave it alone. But if you’re 40, 50, 60, 70 maybe you’re still at that age where you can start working at heavy metal detox, maybe you’re using some sort of binder for the meantime but ultimately, you’ve got to remove the source. So, I mean, if you got heavy metal in your mouth, no matter how much chlorella, charcoal, or clay you take, you’ll still get metal on your mouth. So, that could be a huge issue for your motivation and you gotta resolve it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% out of the gates. Also, low thyroid can be a thing. Low thyroid can affect mitochondrial function. It can affect mood. It can affect energy. Obviously, thyroid hormones play a major role in your overall metabolism. And if your metabolism is low and slow or more than likely your motivation would be low. So, it’s really good to look at thyroid function. Now, if you go to your conventional doctor that just gonna look at TSH typically and again if your TSH is overly high, let’s say greater than three and a half four. You know, that’s probably be pretty good sign. There’s probably thyroid issues downstream happening with T4 being on the lower side or T3 being, let’s say, below that 3.0 marker in the United States metric. Um, but again, TSH may still be adequate, let’s say below three and you may still have problems with thyroid hormones downstream, with T4, with T3. Maybe there’s an elevated antibodies because there’s some autoimmunity. It’s kind of like smoldering there. So, you really wanna look at running a full thyroid panel and your conventional medical doctor would typically not do it. So, you gotta reach out to kind of more natural, functional medicine first to do it. So, if you guys want to get that kind of testing done, Evan and I, we all do that testing. So, evanbrand.com, justinhealth.com. There’s links there where you can work with us if you want that type of in-depth testing. But low thyroid can be a deal breaker and it can, in most thyroid issues are autoimmune. So, you have to fix the gut. You have to fix the food. You have to fix all of the digestive issues to really get that usually under control.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Good point bringing up thyroid. So, I’ll bring up another kind of related one which could be anemias, right? If you got low ferritin, for example, you’re gonna be so exhausted if you have some type of anemia that that’s gonna really affect your motivation as well. So, I get kind of annoyed, to be honest with you, when I see people posting these motivational tracks. It is usually some super fit dude, possibly he’s on steroids, he’s flipping a tire and then yelling over the microphone, and it’s like, ‘you gotta get up and you gotta just do it’. And it’s like, you can’t just do it, like, I love that you’re, you know, 28 years old or maybe you’re on growth hormone and you’re flipping this tire and you’re motivated. But that type of talk goes only so far. And from our functional medicine mindset, like I said, I kind of get annoyed, because then you have this woman, maybe 50, 55 and she looks at herself in the mirror and she’s not happy on what she sees. She got insulin resistant, the diet is not dialed in, the guts affected, the neurotransmitters are low, but mitochondria are damaged because she got exposed to, uh, tick bites and molds. This motivational dud ranting over the microphone, he does not have a friggin’ clue about any of these functional strategies. And so, people then think that motivation is just this simple thing that you could just turn on or turn off. If I could just give motivated, I could do this or that. And it’s like, look, it’s way deeper than that, it’s way deeper than this dude just giving you some hoorah jumping the CrossFit class. And that’s why, that’s all this day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m not a big fan of RAW, RAW stuff because it ignores physiology. I mean, I think there’s the RAW, RAW stuff can be helpful if it shifts your mindset. But mindset cannot be overcome physiology in the long run. It’s like people gonna, uh, an Anthony Robbins, I think Tony Robbins is great, he has a lot of strategy mindset stuff but you come out of this event so motivated. And it’s like, now what, right? It’s kind of like you’re driving your car, right, your old, used car, nothing’s wrong with it but your own E. Some guy comes up next to you and in like a Ferrari and it’s like, ‘man, you just got hit the back gas pillar, go’. And it’s like he hits the gas pillar, he’s out of sight and you’re like, ‘yeah, I don’t have fuel in my car and I kind of force cylinder under horsepower car, yeah I can’t do it. So, the first thing you gotta do metaphorically is you have to fill your tank of a gas. Get the car, get the gas in the tanks if you have fuel. And overtime, upgrade your car, upgrade your health, right? And we start with food quality, we start with good fats and proteins, we start with addressing glycemic issues, not overdoing or removing the processed sugar and the grain, dialing in the carbs on what you need, sleeping better. That’s like trading in your car at the car dealership, right? Literally, just by doing that, you’re starting to upgrade internally and of course from there we can always go down the functional medicine path and look at these hormone systems, adrenals, thyroid, gut function, mitochondrial issues. But we can at least upgrade the car and the fuel by making these simple lifestyle choices that are free and then from that, that gives you more motivation, now you have more energy, now your brain is clearer, so now you can, you know, be clearer on what your goals are. You can get very motivated, you can set timelines to your goals, right. What’s the difference between a goal and a dream? A goal has essentially a dream with an endpoint, a timeline on it, right. I’m gonna achieve this point, right? Take your dreams, make it your goal by putting an aid on it and some action items to go on it. And that takes energy and focus. And if your brain is foggy and overly tired, that’s gonna be problematic. So, I think, just work on those simple things and then once you get a little more motivation there then what’s next. And so, the things that I looked at when people are stressed and depleted, brain inflammation plays a major role with low motivation, so if we can cut out the foods, if we can add in B-vitamins, B6, magnesium, good health omega-3 fatty acids, that’s gonna help with the brain inflammation. That’s gonna help with the neurotransmitters. And then from there, we’re gonna look deeper at the box. This could be SIBO, bacterial overgrowth, H. pylori, parasites and getting the gut really cleaned out is gonna help shell out a lot of the brain inflammation because inflammation is bidirectional. Inflammation in the body can make its way to the gut and create a problem. Inflammation in the gut can make its way out of the gut into the bloodstream by leaky gut permeability causing inflammation in the brain.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. We could start to bring in some of those vitamins, like the omegas, we can bring in some phosphatidylserine or phosphatidylcholine, we can bring as you mentioned the B-vitamins, maybe some Ginkgo, possibly nootropics like the racetam family, pretty common phenylpiracetam or others oxiracetam. A lot of nootropics out there that you could use, but there’s so many people like in the that they’re taking these different nootropics but they’re not addressing anything in regards to their gut or anything, whether hormones. So, I think it’s…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I have a product in my line could, Dopa Replete Plus which has tyrosine and will have an actual pure L-dopa. That’s a good one. Or someone’s coming out of the gates, I would just even just be using pure tyrosine, pure L-tyrosine with some high-quality B-vitamins can be really helpful because you need the B-vitamins as a cofactor to really help convert to some of these neurotransmitters, some of these amino acids to become the actual neurotransmitters.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You can feel it pretty quick. I mean, that’s the cool thing about amino acids, is that you mentioned. A lot of times, you know, when we pitch people our services, we’re like hey, sign up, you know, give us a call evanbrand.com, justinhealth.com. People haven’t, they haven’t enough motivation to be miserable to do that. Sometimes, I don’t even think about people, they know they want to help but I think they haven’t enough motivation to even call us and reach out to us. So, if you’re one of those people, we’re here but, in the meantime, yeah, maybe you use a little bit of tyrosine. It gets you motivated enough to even reach out to get further health because I think a lot of people get overwhelmed at what’s gonna entail in regards to diet changes. Like, oh, that’s overwhelming, you’re gonna make me cut this out, lifestyle changes, you’re gonna make me cut that out, like oh my God or now I gotta go to bed at 9’oclock, you know, that’s too hard. So, we used this little tool, this functional medicine tool to help motivate people to get them through the protocol. Because you and I could design a perfect protocol, mitochondrial support. We’ve got the gut dialed in. We’ve got the detox, the binders. We got the liver, the gallbladder, the adrenals. It’s all taken care of. But, it’s only if somebody follows through so then you get to the part of compliance which we could do part 2 on that of you want. Like, how do you stay on track but making the plan and getting the labs is the first step and getting the people to follow through is the second one. I think progress ultimately gets people going, because they’ll feel how much better they are but somehow, so, what we’ll use somebody’s brain nutrients just to get them off to get through and follow through.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. From a mindset perspective, it’s kind of like if you have pushed a car before right. You push the car. The hardest thing we’re pushing a car is overcoming the initial inertia of the car, from not moving to moving, right? That’s the hardest part. And so, when we’re dealing with people’s health inertia, it is just getting a couple of habits of moving in the direction that allows the car to start moving. Now, the amount of energy you need to put into that car to keep it moving is far less, right? It’s far less because you overcome the initial inertia of it being stock to moving. That’s kind of health is. You kind of make like a couple of small changes now’s the ball’s rolling and then now you can add, you know, you just can sleep for a little bit, add a little movement in there, and a couple of supplements and now we have a lot more now it becomes even easier to keep that going. And then of course, the key is now, okay, all the energy going into it was moving to the four steps of learning right. It’s unconscious incompetence, you don’t know what you don’t know. Now, you’re consciously incompetence, you know what you don’t know, you’re at least aware of these things. And then you go from step 2 to step 3 you’re consciously competent, someone’s helping you but there’s a lot of energy to keep doing the right things and then ideally you start to move into the level of unconscious competence where it’s automatic, right? It’s like someone who drives a standard transmission, everyone who’s done that they know, like, they’re starting on doing clutch, shift, what, their heads going down looking at the gearbox to stir up. It’s tough, right? But then eventually it’s like, clutch, shift, 1,2, 3, right? It’s easy, downshifting no problem. You don’t have to worry about it, it’s like you’re in automatic transmission because you get the whole thing. So, that’s kind of, well, where habits are, you just start with the ones that really bears the most fruit and then you go up from there. So, that’s kind of kind of look at out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Well, look, you just did a live on camera because you’re like oh, we’re talking about in that booby. Whip up a capsule, and then boom you pop your aminos just like that. That’s kind of how I am too with protocol, I mean I’ll just feel how I am; I need a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And I’m just consciously making these micro calculations throughout the day. Oh, little low heat, op stressful day, hit the adrenals a little harder. We’re constantly making these twigs, it’s just a really good place to be.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. I’m gonna go hit some push-ups and some kettlebells, wings, and a little bit of rowing here in a minute. And I’m gonna, um, you know, use some. So, I just try, you know, surround myself with good tools that I could plug into throughout the day to keep that momentum going and then, you know, foundational things, food, water, sleep. So just make sure you, and then of course you can plug in some movement along there right. Those are your three to four big check marks that you gotta hit during the day. And as you start getting that, you can build up from there and that gets you that foundation you need.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Sleep is huge. So, we’d done a podcast on that but we’re always happy to do more. So, we’re wrapping out for now though. People can reach out if they need. We work around the world via facetime, uh, zoom, skype, you know, phone. We can do. We send labs everywhere and you can reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com and you can reach out to me, evanbrand.com and we’re happy to help. And we’ll look at some of these things and we’ll help investigate what could be going on, why’re you struggling. We know that you wanna get that dream business that dream goal, but you gotta make that a reality by optimizing these systems. So, that’s exactly what we do on ourselves on a day-to-day basis. Just literally just boost these neurotransmitters as we’re talking here. So, once you get these tools and place, you’re just gonna be driving, you can take over the world if that’s what you want.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% evanbrand.com, justinhealth.com. We’ll put links and recommendations for different things that we talked about product wise in the description of the video. Evan, awesome chat with you as always, my friend. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: You too man. Take care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Evan and I, we’ll go now. Bye-bye.
Evan Brand: Bye-bye.
References:
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Audio Podcast:
The Neufit Method wtih Garrett Salpeter – Faster Healing and Optimal Performance | Podcast #354
In this video, we have Dr. J and Garret Salpeter, the founder of Neufit Technology. Performance and recovery go hand in hand when training or doing physical activities, regardless if you’re an athlete or not. The Neufit Method improves performance and muscle health and optimizes recovery. Further, this video will tackle optimizing performance in fitness, improving the recovery process, and breaking down the significance of The Neufit Method.
Garret Salpeter emphasizes that even if you are not an athlete, you should know how to let your body rest, heal, and recover properly from any form of injury or physical activity. Everyone has their activity levels to maintain. It may not be sports-related, but everyone demands effort from their bodies on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
4;49 – What makes The Neufit Method different?
7:48 – The neurological response to injury and trauma
17:12 – The link of soft tissue of mobilization and nervous system
21:35 – The recent add-ons of Neufit Method
32:31 – Foundational diet changes to improve healing
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here. I am with Garrett Salpeter, who is a CEO founder of NeuFit technologies down in Austin, Texas. Garrett is a great friend, as well as, an amazing colleague and he’s got a new book that we’re gonna chat about today. So, I’m gonna go through some of the, I think, the biggest take-home items that anyone listening can use to help accelerate their body’s ability to heal and perform better. Really excited to have Garrett on the podcast today. Garrett, how you doing man?
Garrett Salpeter: Thanks, Justin. It’s awesome to be here. Great getting to catch up with you before hopping on here and, uh, I’m excited to be on and appreciate the opportunity to talk about the book.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Very cool. Love the graphics, love the cover, um, really nice, really enticing, been kind of going through some of the aspects of the book different parts of the book. What was the process of, you know, your last ten-year journey writing this book? I mean, do you just kind of go through and think about your biggest clinical wins with patients like how do you kind of go in and get this thing moving because there’s so much that you can talk about over the last 10-12 years of seeing thousands of patients? How do you go about and just start crystallizing that?
Garrett Salpeter: It’s, you know, it’s an interesting process. It’s something that was on my mind for a while like for a couple of years before I finally decided to start and then I worked on it, you know, in early morning hour before the kids woke up and in evenings and you know, so I worked on it off and on again for a couple of years. The original catalyst for doing it was a combination of two things: one is people telling me hey you know you gotta write a book to share you know you here all these great stories about how these technology helps these create these miraculous recovery stories and then what really motivated me to finally do it is I kept getting ask by people like hey where can I read more about this, hey where’s the book in this and I my answer until recently was well it’s you know stuff that I’ve learned by combining reading textbooks and combining different mentorships and workshops and experiences that I’ve done in the field of physical therapy and functional neurology and pedagogy and physiological psychology. And so, there wasn’t a place where everything was kind of brought together in one way and so that was a big motivating factor for me was to have a resource, to be able to share with people and then, um, and then I kind of fell into this trap of making it, you know, just going like super deep on all these areas that I’m interested in. Originally, the first version of the book was probably too dense and academic and so I had written, you know, I’d got to get up in the morning for an hour before the kids wake up and write this over the course of, you know, a year and a half probably. Got to 130,000 words, which is like a, you know, a huge like a thick textbook encyclopedia type thing. And then, we finally, you know, we’re talking with our team about hey what’s gonna be the most valuable thing that we can offer to people and we decided that it would be something that was more accessible that more people, you know, clinicians and lay people alike would be able to read and so I worked with an editor to help break it down from, you know, from 130, 000 words to 60, 000 literally like cut it half and then this is the finished product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Because I know you started off your PhD in this type of field in exercise physiology, human performance and a lot of, uh, electoral physiology technology and how it connects to healing. So, you kind of had this thesis kind of in mind and took that and kind of translate it back into a handbook that people can apply kind of day in day out for performance. So, it’s a big shift at the doctoral level, back to the everyday human level.
Garrett Salpeter: That’s right. It’s been kind of interesting thing, you know, like that it’s very true what I describe to people when ask me for the book before this was out was, you know, I’d say it’s a kind of this breadcrumb trail that I’ve been following through the research and these different disciplines and as part of my journey in trying to piece together this knowledge base in a meaningful way that can be beneficial clinically and in all these different settings, you know, part of my journey like I was so passionate about learning about this stuff and that I ended up going back to school into this neuroscience based PhD program in emphasis in motor control and I ended up ultimately leaving that in order to launch our product and, you know, do the other things that I’m doing now but we have a PhD neuroscientist who’s our director of research now, who’s been able to do that even better than I could or would. So, that’s great but, yeah, I mean, I literally have had to go all these different directions to piece it together and it’s just, you know, it’s very exciting to be able to come back full circle and package it together into a book like this that draws on all those different disciplines.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Very cool. Because how I first came across you before I moved down to Austin is I found a lot of your YouTube videos online. And one of the things that struck me was you had a lot of these, you know, stories, this kind of timeline, um, situations. Where someone would come in with an injury and you would kind of timeline their ability to heal over 2 or 3 months or so of major injuries that would take six months – twelve months and I was blown away with the idea that you could take people that hey this injury according to conventional orthopedics is a one year to finish to heal and you would take these people and get their injury recovery time down in half or even 60 or 70% faster. I thought that was amazing and it kind of sold itself that hey what you’re doing is working and so that was pretty cool. Can you talk about, you know, some of the tenets that you are applying that you were applying that was allowing you to do better than what the conventional PT, Orthopedic surgery route was?
Garrett Salpeter: That’s a great question and that is, is kind of like, okay what’s the special sauce, what makes it different and that’s one of the biggest themes in the book that we talk about is making this distinction between hardware and software, between how most typical therapeutic interventions, most traditional physical therapy orthopedic medicine, is focused really enamored with and obsessed with tissue and structure whereas, there’s a whole other side of that coin, right? There’s function like hardware and software. The software, the function, which is of course is controlled neurologically is so often overlooked and ignored in these traditional models. And we’ve found that being able to prioritize the neurological response to injury and trauma is a huge catalyst for this breakthrough and a lot of it, is just as simple as, you know, look if you’re if your body naturally bracing and guarding and creating a bunch of tension around an injury, it can be impairing, blocking some of the blood flow and impairing the ability of the body to send nutrients and raw materials to heal there. So, the tissue of course that hardware component is important but the neurological response to injury is an impediment that blocks or delays that tissue healing process. By putting that first, by looking first at that neurological response to injury by finding where in the body it’s being imposed and resetting ang recalibrating that to an appropriate level, we’ve been able to open the floodgates if you will. So, the body’s natural healing process can progress without impairment and when it goes at its normal rate it’s not like we’re not doing anything we’re just allowing the body to heal and it’s just, you know, so if few people have been able to experience what the body can do when it’s really unleashed so to speak, that those faster healing times seem miraculous and really the miracle is in just removing those impediments, getting them out of the way and allowing the body to do it’s thing because it is a miracle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, essentially, conventional medicine they’re just kind of, they’re cutting out the injured inflamed tissue, there’s not really a lot of look at how that tissue got injured from a mechanistic standpoint then they hand them off to the PT that’s just stretching, typically stretching or strengthening that area without really looking at that whole chain. So, essentially, you’re looking at everything like it’s connected to the kinetic chain. So, you’re looking at all the muscles and the joints above and below, and you’re looking at the nervous system’s ability to recruit and stabilize those different areas. So, you have your Neubie device, so you’re using that as a means of one I think rehabbing and strengthening the muscle and the nervous, but you’re also using it as a means of detection. Can you talk about how it has dual purposes?
Garrett Salpeter: Yeah, absolutely. So, when we talked about this neurological response to injury and trauma, there’s the concept and then there’s actually the process of finding where in the body it exist and what it’s doing in the body and to understand what it is, one of my favorite metaphors is actually to talk about this notion of imagine a snake was, you know, come in, so I’m in my home office here imagine a venomous snake was coming into my office for me to react like this and you kind of run away or mobilize some energy so I can protect myself, that’s useful, that’s a valuable, you know, it’s a fear-based flight-or-flight response that mobilizes me to take action so I can you know fight or defend or protect myself or run away and flee and that’s valuable. However, if I react the same way to a rubber snake that my rubber snake that my daughter put there, that’s an over reaction that’s inappropriate. I’m wasting this energy, um, you know, trying to protect myself from something that’s not a real threat and our brains and nervous systems do this to us and you know forgetting these examples of like pain and injury for example. A lot of people have these experience, you know, thinking about someone who gets really nervous before they go public speaking for example, something like that. That’s the brain’s way of saying, hey this is life threatening we gotta protect you from this risk of being embarrassed because if you go out there and make a fool of yourself, you could get kicked out of the tribe for example, there’s like a deep survival fears associated with that. I think we all recognize that, you know, that fear is a kind of a hypersensitivity or it’s an overreaction or it’s a little bit mis calibrated to the situation like we recognize intellectually that we’re not really gonna die, if we go out on stage, because it feels like that because we’re overreacting. And the similar type of thing happens where, if we have an injury, you know, it’s football season, we’re working with a lot of professional and college and high school football players, you know, if an athlete goes out and sprains his ankle and they are totally shutting down as a response to that injury and that trauma, if they’re you know creating tension to lock down some muscles and totally shutting down others, that can be potentially productive if like if they were gonna roll that ankle again, it could that bracing could be protected there but if they’re not doing that if they’re trying to rehab and get to normal movements those patterns actually stand in the way, they delay that recovery process, they’re reacting, you know, as if they’re as if they’re pounding that ankle again, like there’s a real snake coming in when really it’s a rubber snake and they’re safe now, they just have to get themselves in the right state where they can heal. And by shifting by first of all identifying where so, to actually answer your question, if we’re able to take the Neubie device and scan around in their body, we can find where those hypersensitivity are in the nervous system where the brain and nervous system are shutting down muscles or creating these bracing and guarding patterns where they’re holding on in other muscles. We can find where those are and then send this very unique direct current stimulation to rest and recalibrate the nervous system and what does that really mean, well, it means, you know, an athlete who comes in with a sprained ankle who’s on crutches or can’t put any weight on their leg often times after that first session can walk normally it can load that weight, the load weight on their leg without pain and they make these amazing transformations in 15 minutes and you think, gosh, what happened to that 15 minutes. Did the ligament that was partially torn, you know, if it was a grade 2 and it’s a partial tear of the ligament, did that ligament heal in 15 minutes? No of course not. What happened was you reset and recalibrated those that suite of neurological protective patterns which some of which are tension, some of which are inhibition or turning off muscles and part of that is also pain. Pai is a protective output of the brain that’s part of that whole host of protective patterns and by resetting that, you immediately restore function back to a normal healthy level. They’re not ready to go back on the football field after that session, however, they’re in a state where they can move better, their muscles can better support that injured tissue as it heals and you’ve opened those floodgates, so healing mechanisms can actually work at their normal rate and do what their capable of doing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What was always fascinating for me is when you would use the Neubie device to kind of search and scan the different tissue. Let’s say, you had direct pain on the knee, when you would search, you know, let’s say, from the hip down the quad right biceps femoris to rectus femoris into the calf, you would find hot spots or pain areas that would that the Neubie would pick up that you would perceive as pain but they wouldn’t necessarily be in the areas of pain. I think this is kind of what you’re taking about is conventional medicine would say oh I feel pain on the knee they’re focus on the knee. But you would scan it and you would get this feedback, that the patient would feel and they would feel areas of pain totally away from where that is. How does that happen, how does that work?
Garrett Salpeter: So, that speaks to a couple of these really powerful concepts like the difference between structure and function and also this notion that you talked about a lot about getting the root cause of the problem, right, you know, if you’re walking around all day and part of your quad muscles doesn’t work, you’re just kind of collapsing into that knee joint all day long and you’re gonna be setting yourself up for injury and you know eventually the knee starts hurting and you go and treat the knee but you’re not if you don’t go upstream and address that dysfunction or why it happened in the first place, you’re never gonna have a true long term resolution of the problem. And so, what the mapping allows us to do is to find where the dysfunctions are, which..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How do you measure that, like what’s the Neubie putting through like is there resistance in the tissue due to inflammation, lack of blood flow, like what’s causing that feedback at the tissue from a biochemical physiological level?
Garrett Salpeter: Ah, yes. So, the reaction, one of the things we’re working on is being able to measure some of these quantitatively and that so we should have some really cool information on that, you know, in the next couple of years as we build out our research program. What we know now, and what we’re identifying are areas where these exact neurologic protective mechanisms are present. So, what we’re doing as we’re scanning around, so if I have an electron pad, like this, and I’m scanning around the body what’s really cool about this current, so traditional first, we need a little context here so this makes sense, traditional electrical stimulation device is alternating current, tens units, Russian stim, they, when you turn them up to a high enough level to really make a difference, they cause muscles to contract and that becomes the limiting factor whereas with Neubie, we can at least to some degree, we can bypass a lot of that protective muscle contraction and speak more directly and powerfully to the nervous system. So, again, a little bit difference between structure and function, thinking directly about the nervous system. When we scan over the body, we’re sending a signal to the nervous system in the brain saying hey this area is being used, this area is being loaded, then we go here, hey this area is being used, this area is being loaded, here, hey, this area is being used being loaded. And wherever the body is working well, the brain sees that and says, you know, if were scanning it says oh that’s just Dr. Justin’s deltoid doing its normal thing, that’s just Dr. Justin’s biceps doing its normal thing. There’s nothing alarming about that, but if we stimulate a muscle or an area that either hasn’t been working recently because that habits or an area where one of these hypersensitivity and these, you know, these protective patterns that are being imposed on the body, if we scan one of those, the brain sees that and says whoa whoa whoa that’s threatening that’s alarming and it fights it, it reacts kind of a trigger point. If you were working on somebody and that you find that trigger point area that’s more sensitive. So, we find these areas of hypersensitivity and then we want to stimulate them and teach the, ultimately the brain, teach the brain and the nervous system that it can calm down that hypersensitivity. So, it’s, instead of you know, it’s like if you’re driving your car either you hit your throttle down harder or you can just take your other foot off the brake. Here, we’re trying to train you, you know, train your body to take the foot off the brake where it hand been imposing these limiting patterns.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. So, I know with the Neubie, unlike with your typical tens unit, right, you’re typically not gonna be exercising with like a tens unit, it’s like more like an electric aspirin. It’s kind of blocking the pain going into the brain. Here you’re actually able to move it in rehab. I’m just curious, a lot of different techniques in soft tissue world like Graston and active release technique, part of the reason on how they promote healing is they work on improving blood flow and they help release the fascia from the muscle belly. My experience using it, when I exercise with the pads on the various areas that in the current, I feel like there may be fascial release on that muscle helping to improve pain. Just curious, what’s your take on that fascia and the muscle kind of being mobilize and moving better?
Garrett Salpeter: This is really an interesting topic and there’s a few thoughts I have on that. One is people are doing manual therapy, it’s kind of this interesting..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m sorry just to add one little context. If this is my muscle belly, the fascia is like my shirt on top of it, so when tissue gets inflamed it’s like wearing a wet t-shirt it’s hard to get it off and so, just kind of giving people a visual imagine the we t-shirt on someone’s body that t-shirt is stuck and so helping to mobilize that t-shirt so to speak can help promote healing, go ahead.
Garrett Salpeter: So, there’s really, really important interesting connection between the movement of tissues and the function of the nervous system, so like in your example if that fascia or that shirt is glued down on the tissue underneath it, you miss out on that gliding and sliding between layers and you don’t get the neurological input from that area, so it goes out, you lose out on that, so the nervous system is this big feedback loop and all of the outputs of the nervous system which of course includes movement and pain. It also includes hormones, it includes heart rate and blood pressure, digestion like the nervous system controls our visceral organ function. So, all of these outputs of the nervous system that are relevant for health and cognitive performance and athletic performance and overall well-being. All of these outputs of the nervous system are vitally dependent on the inputs given to the nervous system and that can that of course is the things that you talk about in functional medicine, nutrition and diet and these lifestyle factors. It all absolutely to do with movement, also these neurological inputs of, including the tissues gliding and sliding over each other are super relevant for the overall health of the nervous system which is super important for the health of the overall body. So, being able to, there’s a few things that happen, being able to get movement in into those tissues is very important. A lot of manual therapists, when they say, you know, I’m releasing adhesions or I’m feeling this tissue move or something like that. A lot of what we’re learning is that, what they’re really doing is not making as much of those structural changes as they think, but they’re actually giving neurological inputs, the mechanoreceptors, the nerve receptors. They’re actually activating those to create more functional changes than structural changes and ultimately though, you need both, like you need the tissues to move over each other and you need to move them through enough ranges of motion to create the inputs so the brain gets enough inputs so they can maintain healthy function and get all the inputs it needs to drive appropriate controls of the body for movement and everything else. And when we’re working with the Neubie, you’re affecting both, you’re moving and affecting structures, you’re getting mechanical tension which can, uh, which can definitely move, you know, create the kind of friction that helps break up issues between the layers of those tissues and you’re getting the neurological input. So, it can work well in combinations with those other, you know, manual therapies and ultimately you need both. I mean, you need good structure, you need good function and, uh, I hope that adequately addresses the question but I think ultimately, we’re trying to work on both.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, we’ll put some links below for people that want to get more information either about seeing Garrett or Garrett’s clinicians at his clinic or if you’re a practitioner and you want to get more information on, um, being able to use this device at your clinic or if you’re someone abroad that wants to work with Garrett’s stuff virtually, we’ll put some information down below. So, someone comes in, right, you give them a work up, you have a full physical exam, you’re looking at neurological signs, you’re testing muscles as well, to help find which muscles are off and on for compensation pattern stuff. You’re using the Neubie, you’re scanning looking for all these areas of dysfunction, you’re always evolving your method, right, the NeuFit method. What else has been plugged into the NeuFit method, the last year or two that you kind of added on recently?
Garrett Salpeter: So, the biggest thing that we’ve done in the last year is really explored the benefits of using very specific frequencies and this is one of the biggest champions of this type of work is a doctor named Carolyn McMakin, who has seminars on frequency specific microcurrent and the basic premise is that if you, uh, basic premise is resonance so for example, if I have the keys to my car and I go out in the parking lot, I hit the unlock button, this key only unlocks my car, it doesn’t unlock your car or my friend’s car or the other car across the parking lot. It only unlocks my car because that signal resonates with that car. It’s also the same thing if you ever heard of like the opera singer who hits that note, oh, you know, much better than I would dip, and that particular frequency of that note resonates with the lead atoms in glass and it breaks the glass. So, we can apply certain frequencies in the body that will resonate or preferentially go to and interact with certain tissues. So, if you’re trying to recover from an Achilles tendon injury, for example, we can, in addition to our usual treatments working on neuromuscular function, we can use a particular frequency that would direct that signal to the tendon tissue and help even further speed up the healing and amplify the healing effect of that, increase more blood and more resources specifically to that tissue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is this a new feature on the Neubie, where you can adjust the frequency?
Garrett Salpeter: So, it’s something that, um, we’ve had, we built it in to the Neubie, because I had kind of glimpses of this and we’ve only started to explore the, you know, the full benefits or more of the benefits of that in the last year and it’s part of, you know, clinicians who are in our, have completed our certification. It’s actually, that’s part of the level two stratification that we put out, um, in the, sometime in the last year and that’s been really exciting to see some of the, some the, you know, outcomes that people have been able to create with that and, you know, that can go down, that goes down a whole road of, you know, like Dr. McMakin, for example, has frequencies for different organs and things like that. We with the Neubie, our work and our scope is more around, you know, neuromuscular conditions and pain and things like that, so you know, we’re not necessarily able to, you know, speak about or make direct claims related to the health of certain organs or things like that, um, but, you know, there are some really cool things that people are able to do with this concept.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. There are two more things I want to hit on the book. You talked about heart rate variability which is essentially the unevenness between the heart beat and it’s a good window into recovery and the parasympathetic nervous system response. How are you gauging the amount of workload that the people you worked with can handle? Are you using HRV? How do you know, you’re doing too much? How do you know you’re on the sweet spot? How do you apply that with your patients?
Garrett Salpeter: That is, that’s a great question and this is I think part of the future of medicine and sports performance training is this notion of stress management and what heart rate variability, what it basically shows us is, it answers the question of how well are you, this individual standing in front of you, how well are you able to keep up with all the stressors in you life right now, you know, if you are, if you’re not, if you’re just like holding on to keep up with everything, you don’t have as much bandwidth to adapt to these subtle changes in air pressure as you don’t have these minor fluctuations in your heart rate, whereas if you are able to keep to keep up with that then you have more bandwidth to adapt to these subtle changes and so, heart rate variability is a great measurement. So, we look at a couple of different things that’s a big one, you know, if we look at someone’s HRV status when they come in for a session, and we see like dang they’re really in a stressed-out state. We may have a more recovery-oriented session with them that day. Over time, we also, you know, for people who have these wearable devices that tract their sleep, check their HRV, we have them do that, we just completed a study with Biostrap, who makes this one that I’m wearing in my wrist. It’s the best clinically validated of these, you know relatively inexpensive wearables, uh, they’re within one percent measurement of the gold standard, uh, of electrocardiograms like when you put electrodes all over the body and
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: that’s called Biostrap
Garrett Salpeter: Yeah, uh, so they have, you know, we worked with them and we saw that doing sessions on the Neubie, that people increased their heart rate variability, they decrease their resting heart rate without doing any cardiovascular training at all, um, also improved sleep and arterial elasticities, blood flow and blood vessel health and so, you know, all of that factors into, to saying looking at heart rate variability is something that we like, we don’t always look at it within a session, sometimes it’s you know, there’s a little bit of a delay in feedback. It’s well, you do something that day, see how their numbers were that night and the next day and then dial it back in the next time they come in. So, sometimes you get real-time feedback, sometimes it’s, you know, a day or two and you have to, you have to kind of start slow, see how much they can handle walk up to that line and you also have to factor in the stresses, you know in there because someone one day, if they’ve slept well and eat well might be and it’s, you know, weekend or something, might be able to handle a lot more than if they come in, in the middle of a week when they have a deadline, if they just have, uh, a fight with their spouse or fight with their boss at work or something like that and they didn’t slept well the night before and they’re sick and they’re going to be able to handle way different amount of stress and input in those days too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Which is totally different training philosophy, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago was kind of like no pain no gain, you have to build a character, this is to toughen you up and it’s like well, really the goal of training is to add a stress into the neuromuscular system so your body can adapt from it and get stronger not so it can get weaker because if you can adapt to that stress, you just breaking your body down versus building it up and training and so it’s really kind of being training smarter versus harder kind of mindset.
Garrett Salpeter: Amen. Yeah. You know, I just think about it as, if I’m gonna invest the time and effort and possibly money to go to a physical therapy session or to a training session, you know, I just wanna have a return, I wanna have some benefit to show for that. So, it’s about, you know, ultimately about finding, you know, it’s not minimal or maximal, it’s optimal, it’s that kind of bell curve, it’s finding the right amount of input to get the correct output.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Very cool. You also started working with Terry Wallis, who is a popular figure in the functional medicine community, especially, on the autoimmune side. Dr. Wallis’ kind of story is for the listeners, she had multiple sclerosis was that one point even in wheelchair bound and couldn’t, you know, couldn’t walk and then was able to make different changes in her diet to help reverse her MS and MS is an autoimmune condition that affects the myelin which is the coating around the nerve so she was able to change her nervous system or her change her immune system, uh, attacking on her nerves so then she could actually start to heal and recover and now she’s fully walking. So, you’re using the Neubie device as a means to help stimulate growth, healing. Can you talk more about that application is?
Garrett Salpeter: Yeah. So, Dr. Wallis, I’m glad you mentioned some of her story, because it’s super inspiring and she’s now been able to help through her Wallis protocol and her book and her research, been able to help hundreds of thousands of people, stop the progression of or even reverse their MS and it has to do with a functional medicine approach reducing the inciting or damaging influences that are causing the immune system to haywire and create this autoimmune environment. All this stuff that, you know, you know more about than I do and that you talk about your podcast and the reason we worked with her is that she had this limitation in her program where she could get, she could help people stop the progression of their MS and then they get to the point where they say, okay that’s awesome. Now, what can I do to restore the function that I lost, now what can I do, if I wanna be able to drive my car again or you know, not to have caregiver at home or I wanna regain autonomy, I want to be able to walk or play the piano again, like okay, like that’s awesome. We stopped further damage but now, how can we do that and that’s where we got connected by a mutual friend and she saw, you know, I was describing NeuFit to her and some of the work we’ve done with some other neurological patients and she saw, hey, this kind of fills in, you know, this next step in our program, and since then she’s you know, invited me to speak at several of her, uh, seminars and live and virtual events and she very graciously gave an endorsement for my book and we’ve been able to work with her to share this message and kind of plug in NeuFit as part of her program and so through her, we’ve been able to introduce this to hundreds of thousands of people and many thousands of people have, you know, some have worked with us or gotten their own machine and worked remotely and many more have found NeuFit practitioners, we have on our website, we have a directory that we can link to, a directory of certified practitioners around the world who offer NeuFit and so many of these patients have gone and found people in their community, you know, sometimes they can find someone across town or, uh, nearby that they can go see and do this work, and we’ve seen people, you know, sometimes restore a little bit of sensation and function. Sometimes get out of a wheelchair and walk again and we’ve seen some of these transformational, really inspiring and amazing stories.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, when you work with patients like that, are you doing a scanning method throughout that muscle belly area or are you just generally hitting the major muscles that aren’t working appropriately?
Garrett Salpeter: So, we typically will do a scan so that we can direct that stimulation, you know, in basically the areas where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck and we typically would do a scan, sometimes you can guess where you’re gonna put the pads and you can guess correctly based on knowing where their impairments are but sometimes there’s some nuances or different segments or different areas that pop up so we do like to do a scan , you know, at least in he first session as part of an assessment and then there we get the information to build a custom program and figure out, okay, where we need to stimulate to help get sensation or function back in the hands and feet or start to build enough strength so they can work towards standing and then walking or start to rebuild, uh, dexterity to be able to do the activity is that they wanna do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. And then last question I have for you out of the gates here would be, nutrition is obviously important, right? It’s the building blocks of all of out nerves, our muscles, right? Quality is important, we don’t wanna add more toxins via, you know, plastics and hormones and pesticides, those kinds of things. What are some of the foundational diet changes, that you work on with your patients to really accelerate improvement? Is it the quality of the protein? Is it a certain amount, is it fats? What are the best bangs for your buck with nutrition to get better, your healing?
Garrett Salpeter: So, we’re looking at everything through a neurological lens and when we do that, we end up drawing many similar conclusions as you do through a functional medicine lens so there’s a ton of overlap. Maybe the way we speak about it or maybe the, you know, something some of the things we prioritize or emphasize are a little bit different but for us, one of the biggest in, especially in these autoimmune conditions right when you talk about the immune system and inflammation gone haywire but also just for brain and nervous system health overall. Inflammation is such a key, because if you eat an inflammatory meal, you’ll see IQ drop 10 or 20 points because the inflammation impairs brain function so significantly, and impairs peripheral nervous system function. [inaudible]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Blood flow too.
Garrett Salpeter: Yeah, absolutely. So, for us reducing inflammation is one of the highest priorities be whether you’re adding in overall health or you’re looking specifically through that lens of trying to optimize neurological function. So, that becomes a big deal, reducing inflammation. So, we’re looking at you know reduce, cutting out as many Omega-6 seed oils as possible but getting more saturated fats from good heathier sources. I mean, we’ve talking about, you know, grass-fed beefs or pasture-raised other animals or wild-caught fish, different things like that, you know the sources of fat become really important in reducing the Omega-6, having good monounsaturated fats like avocado and olive oil, you know, assuming someone is screened for food sensitivities and none of these things are gonna be like an individual’s person’s kryptonite or something like eggs can be great for some people, have a good health profile, if they have those nice, good dark orange yolks, um, but for some people have sensitivities and shouldn’t have them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, essentially, you’re really pulling out the inflammatory stuff, the refined sugar, the grains, those kin of things, maximizing good fats, maximizing good proteins, obviously having enough building blocks so the tissue we’re breaking down. There’s enough reserve to build that tissue back up as well.
Garrett Salpeter: That’s right. Yeah. So, you know, all those sources of fat I mentioned, the meats and eggs, you know also happen to have good, very good sources of protein associated with them, I also like collagen protein, if we’re trying to help someone rebuild tissues, um, and then also when we talked about inflammation and health of the nervous system, the gut is so important. So, you know, I’m a big fan of, uh, you know, different fiber powders that I put in my drinks every morning, um, and then, uh, you know the nervous system also is a big, big, big input. So, trying to do what we can to get that parasympathetic activation, you know, as many times as we can throughout the day to help with digestion is also a huge deal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Are you still doing the ample drink every day?
Garrett Salpeter: I haven’t done those in a while. I like those, uh, I haven’t done them. Let’s see, nut there was a reason I stopped. Oh yeah, I think I didn’t, I didn’t, I really like the concept, I just didn’t love as much of the like whey and egg white proteins. I’m more of a collagen and you know meat guy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m a big collagen guy too. You just don’t get enough connective tissue, amino acids, the hydroxyl proline, proline, glycine, interesting. I have the same situation. What’s one clinical pro you’ve come across recently that you think most of the audience will be able to benefit from like, just anything in the last couple of months that’s like a real heavy hitter that would help a lot of people?
Garrett Salpeter: That’s a good, that’s a good question. Um, I mean in our realm, when we’re doing a lot more of this, you know, pain, movement, dysfunction, injury, helping people, uh, you know, the frequencies that I already mentioned, the biggest thing that jumps to my mind the last few months is some of this, some of this work that we’ve done on frequencies and, um, being able to find these resonant frequencies that it’s really cool when you feel this kind of resonating effect, it feel like this, you almost get these charges building up so it’s something that admittedly someone would have to you know, find a provider who has our device in order to experience it but for our practitioners being able to identify this and initially this frequencies were only used really in the micro current realm but use them with stronger power delivery with stronger current levels and deliver that power, that’s been one of the biggest things that really jumps out and, um, I just I have seen, already seen some really cool things happen there so that’s one of the biggest, uh, more for practitioners who do have access to this device admittedly but, uh, it’s really, it’s a really cool effect when you see, when you feel that resonance happened.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Awesome. Well, thanks for all the excellent information, Garrett. Again, the NeuFit method, all kinds of good info and more we talked about the couple of things in the book here as well, um, take a look at it. If you have chronic pain issues, and you’re not healing or you have lingering injuries that aren’t getting over the top, we’ll put a link down below, where you can reach out to Garrett and his staff and we’ll put a link to the book as well. Appreciate it. Anywhere else Garrett, the listeners can go and check your information on it?
Garrett Salpeter: So, we’re most active social media wise on Instagram and the handle is NeuFit RFP and its N-e-u like neurological F-i-t and then RFP for rehab fitness performance. So, I’m on there, our team’s on there, we respond to DMs and comments and everything about, uh, we’d love to interact with you there, and hopefully if you’re, you know, if you’re interested with the book, hopefully, you’ll, uh, read it, if you check it out on amazon, please do leave an honest review on there. That feedback is wonderful. It helps us know what people like, what people don’t like. What content we can provide more of and I can assure you that having put in the hours on the book, I really appreciate that feedback very well much.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. If you guys are listening and driving, we’ll put links down below where you guys can reach out and support the book. Okay, Garrett, awesome chatting with you. Have a great day man. Good chat. Take Care.
Garrett Salpeter: Thank you, Justin. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Same here. Bye now.
References:
Audio Podcast:
Recommended Product:
Dr Bernd Friedlander – Immune Support, Extend Life Span, Best Supplement, Perfect Diet- Podcast #353
In this video, Dr. J and Dr Bernd Friedlander talk about immune system in general. Immune system is the natural defense and it’s an complex network of cells, tissues, and organs that band together to defend your body against invaders. Those invaders can include viruses, bacteria, parasites, even fungus, all with the potential to make us sick. They are everywhere – in our offices, homes, and backyards. A good immune system protects us by first creating a barrier that stops those invaders, or antigens, from entering the body.
The immune system can acknowledge millions of contrasting antigens. And it can make what it needs to eliminate nearly all of them. This detailed defense system can keep health problems ranging from cancer to the common cold at bay when it’s working correctly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
2:20 – The issue behind immune stress
6:25 – Things to know about natural light
17:04 – Who are good candidate for extra glucose?
26:37 – How and when does adding sugar good?
46:46 – The important role of full spectrum light
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Dr. Bernd Friedlander. Dr. Bernd Friedlander has been around, uh, the health space for I’d say more than 50 years. He’s been a health consultant to many professional sports teams and he’s a, let’s just say a quite a figure in the health expansion national health community in the Silicon Valley area for many many decades. Bernd, how are you doing? Welcome to today’s show.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself. You’ve been around the block, I mean professional sports, natural health kind of life extension community for quite a long time. How long has it been and how did you get into the space?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Um, I’ve been sort of like when I graduated from college, I got into physical therapy and I was an assistant physical therapist for about ’72 – ‘78 and I worked with, you know, clients with structural injuries and back problems, neck problems, and physical therapy and rehab and recovery from ‘72-‘78. And then I went back to chiropractic school in ’78 and graduated in ’81 and I started working out at UCLA and I was asked by a number of coaches and athletes to work with them since they found out that I was, my background was physical therapy nutrition, which I picked up in 1972 and my other background was chiropractic. So, it, you know, marriage was perfect and I was also a track and field runner in college and I also played, um, semi-professional soccer. So, I had a very good foundation and tool and so, because of that, I started working with UCLA athletes and then later on, they asked me to come in and start working with the Olympic team and develop them for the ’80 – ’84 and ’88 Olympics and we have people from all over the world coming to us at UCLA to work out with us and to perform with us and to learn about that we have and nutrition and all that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Very cool. So, you’ve been even in this space for 40 – 50 plus years. That’s amazing. Let’s kind of dive in, we have a couple of topics that we chatted about ahead of time that we really wanna dive into. So, immune stress is a big issue that we have today. A lot of immune stressors from our environment from food to different infections, etc. You know, one of the top things you are doing to help improve your immune system, like you know, let’s forget about hydration obviously getting some sunlight, you know, good whole food diet, you know, just kind of all the foundational things. What things that people talk about, um, that you want to add here, people that haven’t, different things, people haven’t talked about enough that you wanna add in that really would help improve people’s immune function and stress?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yeah. Well, the first thing I look at is quality of life they have, how do they sleep at night, how do they get up in the morning, how much indoor activity are they getting in front of a computer, a cellphone, all these EMF is affecting our own system, our immune system. It’s, um, not able to function as well as we want to so I just tell them to get out in the sun in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening, go for walks, just be in outdoor not indoor. You know, we were trained to be outdoor most of our lives. Our ancestors are outdoor. We developed from, uh, from the sun and from nature and from the ocean. And that’s why we got here. And by ruining us by being indoor, we’ve changed the attitude of our DNA and RNA and how it functions and that’s why we’re seeing a lot of people getting sick today. It’s not getting out in the sunshine, not developing natural vitamin D. So, I have to tell them to take additional vitamin D everyday and some vitamin A and E and I always include aspirin at night because that promotes many anti-inflammatory mechanisms and it has a tremendous benefit in our blood, in our circulation, in our mitochondria. And first thing I do, because of my background, I wanted to know who we were, how we did get to this stage, where we are today as humans, how did our brain develop and that’s important and it was all related to four billion years ago. Our mitochondria, an organelle bacterial mitochondrion that created everything and started the living systems life in on the planet earth and plants. Everything is developed through these mitochondria and so I went into it and I wanted to research it so much as I can become a sponge for this one organelle, how it works and how important it is. And there’s a fellow named Douglas Wallace, who wrote many articles and is like the father of mitochondria. So, by researching him and reading about him and also about repeating his work in mitochondria, I started learning that everything is based on this one organelle, how do we improve that organelle that mitochondria efficient energy that’s what gives us energy to every cell in our body. And I wanted to learn everything I can about what makes these mitochondria efficiently. An immune system functions on mitochondria, stem cells function on mitochondria repair, regeneration and all disease and aging is a factor due to this efficient mitochondrial function. And cancer cells also are involved because of the mitochondria, how effective is the mitochondria is producing energy, it’s oxidative metabolism and that’s the foundation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. So, you get put a couple of things out there, I want to just break them up one by one. Some people maybe listening to this saying, “hey I can’t get outside that many times a day, what can I do to improve, uh, healthier monitors, low blue light, low flicker light, full of spectrum lightning”. What can people do to kind of change their office and their house where they’re out all day to improve light, um, um, uh, light activation via says, um, say like I have full light spectrum on now? What can people do inside their home to improve light, if they can’t get outside as much?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Good question, Justin. I see a lot of patients, uh, there are in cubicles, you know, in dark rooms working. The first thing, I tell them is get close to a window or get enough natural from the sun by being exposed to, uh, somewhere that has windows or in condensing lights that are natural lights, you know. We want to bring back the natural state of light closes to the sun, so we can bring. All these LED lights are not natural. We’re not getting the natural lightning and like you said blue light is dangerous and that’s where the computers and cellphones and nighttime television and nighttime to, you know, working on texting or using cellphones for, you know, um, you know, being on it too much is creating problems and neurological problems as well and that’s why people can’t sleep well because they’re bombarded by blue light which is dangerous to our brain.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There are some good monitors out there that are eye care monitors that are low flicker, low blue light monitors. Those are great, I have three big ones in front of me that will help decrease the flicker and the blue light, the lighting I have here are full spectrum, so you can look at investing some full spectrum light bulbs to plug into those sources where you have lighting in your office. That helps a lot. Anything else that you personally, um, apply or do in your home or office?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Well, I also to get them out for several minutes at a time. So, if they’re indoors, just go outside for about 5 – 10 minutes, at least expose yourself to some light and then you can go back to work. Don’t stay indoors all day long without exposing yourself to natural light. Because that what creates mitochondrial function, that’s what creates, um, all that natural biochemical process that we need to perform better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. That’s great. Let’s talk about the mitochondria. You kind of already hit it right? The mitochondria are essentially the powerhouse of our cells. They generate ATP, which is like the cellular currency of our body. Vitamin D or I should say sunlight helps charge it. What about diet? There’s a lot of, I should say, a lot of, um, conflicting ideas about it right? I’ve seen many places where the mitochondria runs off of glucose and creates dirty fuel that we really wanna be using the carnitine shuttle and using fatty acids and being a little bit more ketogenic to run the mitochondria and not fueling up with too much carbs. I know guys like Ray Peat talk about more using orange juice and more refined juices. What’s your take on that? I know you’re a little bit more controversial on some of the carb stuff but go ahead.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Um, well, I’ve been, you know, I’ve been following Ray Peat but I’ve also had a chance to meet and work with, um, Linus Pauling and he was a big advocate of orange juice and he explained to me the importance of orange juice with the flavonoids, the vitamin C is natural in orange juice. And the flavonoids, like Apigenin, Arginine and Naringin and Fisetin. These are very important compounds that increase the electron flow into the mitochondria so there’s efficient ATP production and CO2 is the byproduct of efficient ATP. Lactic acid is inflammatory. It becomes an inflammatory nature, and that’s how cancer cells derived themselves by lactic acid.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is lactic acid a powerful stimulator for growth hormone too? Don’t we make that when we exercise as well.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Um, we do but lactic acid causes inflammation in our body and we get cramps and deterioration and joint problems and we break down cartilage and ligaments and tendons. And just simply I used to do with my athletes, I used to give them baking soda, a quarter of a teaspoon to a teaspoon every day, twice a day to help them recover from lactic acid so they have more energy and their recovery is much faster and they don’t break down as fast and then I started adding the collagen bases, the vitamin D, the calcium, and the vitamin C from orange juice. That all helped. So, what I wanted to look at is how do we increase the oxidative metabolism and reduce the reduction state. So, you have oxidation and you have reduction state. And the reduction state is the byproduct of ATP burning in our body for fuel and energy and we wanna be able to bring back the oxidative state so we have the electron flow that breaks the food that we eat into energy which is glucose and that glucose is the metabolism of the gasoline of our body that fuels us and allows us to produce and function and be able to repair ourselves.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, what kind of glucose sources are we talking in, um, from fruit which is gonna be mostly fructose but some glucose or starch which will be more glucose. I mean we’re not advocating lots of refined sugar or processed grains right. What kind of sources and then would this still be a good idea if someone’s maybe more sedentary and insulin resistant? Are these people from who are more flexible, metabolically flexible and more active, how do you make that prescription?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Well, myself in working with many patients, many athletes, I found that one of the best things I did in the morning for my athletes to perform better and I work with the Rams, Raiders, Lakers, uh, you know, all these, um, Kansas City Chiefs as you can sees in the background, I have Howie Long back there, who was one of my patients, is I found that if I can increase uncoupling protein, increase mitochondria, what increases mitochondria, it’s what we eat and the supplements we take like anything that we, uh, if we have coffee. We did a study and we found out that coffee with sugar and cream, actually the athletes perform better and we saw an increase in mitochondrial function. And if we, did it with tea, we found that if we put sugar and cream of milk, we found the same result. So, it’s that, process of in the morning, have the orange juice, have your coffee with sugar and cream and the same thing with tea, we need sugar to operate on glucose metabolism.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is these for every person, I mean obviously you’re a lean kind of more ectomorphic kind of body type, you’re active. So, for you, is that makes sense but that makes sense if you’re overweight though as well? And you’re more insulin resistant, would that be a good recommendation for them or should we allow some of these people to go off of gluconeogenesis to help convert maybe glucose in their body via protein, which is more time released? How do you make that more specific?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Working with, you know, going back to this ‘80s, ’81, ’82, I wanted to study on performance and recovery. That was my job at UCLA. That was what given a job and I worked n caloric restriction diet, I worked on you know mitochondria performance, uh, with the university. And what I found is that, since we start consuming too much carbs, you know pastas and breads and flours and iron rich foods, we have caused more obesity and diabetes and heart attacks. When the oils came into play, all the seed oils from canola to sunflowers, pollock, cotton, all those, we had an increase in heart disease and diabetes and cancer. So, the two things we saw was, when we start producing grains and pastas and breads and flowers, this is a new part of our diet, you know, it wasn’t in a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, we were a gatherer and a hunter and we ate from the roots and we ate fruits. So, when we changed our diet, we saw a difference in disease stages increasing. And so, people who are, uh, overweight, it has nothing to do with sugar. Its people are not getting enough calcium and vitamin D in their diet, they’re consuming too much phosphorus and there’s a gene called Klotho, k-l-o-t-h-o, and that gene regulates kidney function, biologically all our function is controlled by that one gene, uh, upregulating calcium into our bone. Osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, if we have too much phosphorus, we’re removing calcium out from the bone, and we’re generating as an inflammatory condition in the body and that’s why we have osteoporosis, arthritis, and cancer and heart disease. But if have more calcium in our diet from dairy products, from eggs, from cheeses and predominantly those kinds of foods and they’re higher in amino acids utilization foods. You know, we found that eggs and milk are the two highest in AAU, amino acids utilization, in our body and by consuming those kinds of foods, we found that people are healthier.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, what about, so, you’re talking about, um, calcium is good, we need more of that. What about magnesium? Where does magnesium sits on that hierarchy?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: It is essential. There’s no doubt because of cardiovascular disease and also it helps calcium absorption into the cells, into the bones, into our bone marrow.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And other patients that you would say, you shouldn’t be doing these orange juice, you shouldn’t be doing the extra sugar, who are these people? You’re dealing with a lot of athletes, someone who’s 30, 40, 50 pounds overweight and more insulin resistant, would you say hey maybe be careful on that stuff?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I’ve taken on a lot of patients, uh, since I retired from chiropractic and I have a group of people that I work with and I have a friend at Ohio State University food and science department and he and his mother have diabetes. They’re not active, you gotta understand, so when I started giving them more sugar fructose or sucrose in their diet, I was able to completely reverse their diabetic problems.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, I would, I’d wanna know what was their diet before. Are you reducing the amount of glucose because, we know diabetes has to do with high amounts of, um, glucose in the bloodstream, so there tends to be a resistance to the insulin right and so we have glucose accumulating, so how does giving more of that actually lower your glucose level? Physiologically that doesn’t make sense to me.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Okay. I had a chance, there was a fellow at UCSF and he and I spoke about two years ago right before the COVID came on, we met at, uh, we met and he was doing stem cells for, uh, the pancreas, how to improve, uh, insulin function again, how we repair the body back to natural state where we don’t have to give them diabetes medication and I had, uh, I asked them one thing, would you do me a favor when you do a stem cells, would you do me a favor, increase the sugar intake in the patient. He reported back to me that he double the effects of the stem cells in diabetic patients and we came into conclusion that glucose and fructose improve the mitochondrial function and produces insulin more efficiently. And he was, he didn’t even thought about that, he didn’t even think that glucose was that essential and
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s in the presence of stem cells, right? What if you don’t have stem cells because I mean we know that, we know that, um, type 2 diabetes over 20,30 years, we know beta cell function of the pancreas and insulin production actually drop and they become insulin dependent over a long period of time. So, if that theory were to make sense, why are people becoming insulin dependent over decades later.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I want you to go back and study a guy named Peori and Bronk, B-r-o-n-k and Peori is another fellow. One from France and one from England. Ray Peat has it in his newsletters, I reviewed their studies. They gave 16 ounces of sugar to diabetic patients and they give a collagen type of diet with, you know, oxtail soup or a lamb shank, things that were high in collagen. They completely reverse all diabetic patients. I have taken retired athletes, you know, had diabetes and heart issues, okay. I studied their diet, I looked at them and these guys are not like active anymore. They’re not like football players or athletes that they were when they were young. They had all these issues with, uh, diabetes and heart disease and I look at their diet and I stopped them having them have breakfast with just toast and peanut butter or oatmeal or you know, without protein. I asked them to start using orange juice, apple juice, grape juice and sugar in their coffee and tea. I monitored them. I was able to get them off any diabetic medication completely and these about 30 to 40 people I monitored and I have so many people that are, uh, one person came to me, um, that was, uh, a fellow who started, was involved in a company that got the solar technology going especially in one of the ballparks that the 49ers played and he was a retired football player as well and he had diabetic problems and he was gonna be put on insulin and he asked me if I would work with him and I said, absolutely. He trusted me enough because of other people in the family that use, uh, were, you know, using me for nutritional consultation all recovered and one of them was a lung cancer patient who recovered 100 percent. And I put them on this higher sugar diet meaning fruits, orange juice, coffee and sugar and all that and his doctor in San Jose says, a month later, two months he came back and he says all your blood report came back perfect. He’s never seen anybody recover that fast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it’s interesting because I have, I have hundreds of, you know, observations the opposite right? Restricting a lot of those sugars and allowing the body to start burning more fat and then the cells become more sensitive. I guess, the question I would ask is, what was their diet like ahead of time because if someone’s diet’s worse and even though you’re adding all this sugar it could be less sugar and then three would be, how much activity are they getting? Are they burning it all up with their muscles and mitochondria right after they consuming it? Are they sitting all day doing an office job and still, um, maintaining insulin sensitivity while being sedentary?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yeah. No, I got it. I understand, you, uh, nutrition and diet is very important. What I look at, I look at things that causes oxidative damage to the thyroid and to the mitochondria. What are they? High phosphorus foods, unsaturated fats, okay, those and, and overload with iron. Too much iron, causes damage to our blood cells okay. And so, I’m looking at increasing cytochrome oxidase enzymes by increasing copper, by increasing NAD output, so that’s your B3 niacinamide, your B1, B2. All of these are important. Vitamin D and vitamin A and breaking, and having them eat more of high protein, high cholesterol diet. In my study, I did a lot of research in longevity, and the people that I’ve study and I just lost one patient, three months four months ago, it was on national television. She was 114 years old. Her diet was very high in dairy. That’s how I had her on since ’92 and she was eating that before. Her diet was basically milk, cheeses and a piece of bread. That was her diet pretty much and her coffee and sugar and that’s it. And so, I’ve been looking that for a long time, is studying people that live the longest like in Bolivia, in the area of Georgia and Turkey, and what do they consume is they consume mostly dairy products and they consume things that are natural. They don’t eat much of the pastas and breads and grains and oat meals because that’s not their diet. So, I look at their diet, I wanna make sure if I can raise the NAD+ levels, you know, the oxidative metabolism, that’s the secret. How did I do that? I studies with Douglas, uh, I studied with so many of the great minds out their in mitochondrial research and Klotho research, and I found out that glucose metabolism is a secret, how do we increase that and how do we bring down unsaturated fats, increase saturated fats because high cholesterol actually increases longevity and most of my..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s an antioxidant
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yep. It’s an antioxidant. It helps with brain development. It helps with libido and hormones. And I put everybody at not to worry about high cholesterol, I put them in a diet that’s rich in cholesterol, saturated fats, steric acid, all these things that we need to develop with. And I found by doing all of these with my patients and increasing the glucose metabolism and giving them sugar because most of my patients are very fatigued, they’re tired, they’re depressed, they have anxiety issues, and by just changing them, increases some sugar in their body, I’ve been able to see a difference in all of them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But I would imagine though, these people that are already sick though, probably have a lot of sugar in their body already. They’re probably eating lots of processed grains and flowers and sodas. So, my chole rationale on this whole thing, how does adding more of what’s already there, how does that fix anything because they’re already eating a lot of processed grains and processed sugars, how does adding that in a different form fix it?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Okay. You set the magic work. We’re eating too much grains, pastas breads, what is, those are very high of what? Phosphorus foods.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But they’re also going to break down the sugar in the body, they still break down the sugar.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yes. They break it down differently than if I eat a fruit, okay. If I eat a fruit. What is around that fruit? Minerals.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Potato fiber. Fiber as well. Some vitamin C and bioflavonoids.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yes. So, If I’m eating that, I have sugar from a natural source that is not converted, doesn’t have anything to do with phosphorus. Phosphorus is one of the leading causes of diseases today and I’ve studies the Klotho gene from universities, from Stanford, from UCSF, from UCLA and I’ve learned that most of the grains and pastas and breads and processed foods are very rich and high in phosphorus and we’re losing vitamin K, we’re losing calcium in our body and it’s affecting vitamin D levels. And that’s why I agree with you, these processed foods are not our, uh, the foods that we should be eating and they’re not nature, you know, they’re not coming from nature.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Isn’t there a natural ratio too with calcium, phosphorus. So, is it the fact that phosphorus is a problem or is it more that we’re not getting enough calcium to combat the phosphorus?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Both. You hit it both.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, if you’re getting phosphor, because you’re going to get phosphorus in animal products too, right? You’ll be getting in meat so, we’re not saying meat ‘s bad, you’re just saying make sure you get enough calcium to balance it off is that what you’re saying?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I don’t eat much meat anymore. Okay. I’m learning..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How much meat are you consuming but you’re still doing a lot of collagens though, right?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I do collagen but my predominant diet is now shellfish
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. So, you’re still doing animal protein, you’re just choosing on the crustacean side. You’ve got it.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I’m using more copper rich foods in my diet because cytochrome oxidase enzyme, a complex for, is essential for mitochondrial function and we’re not getting enough copper rich foods anymore. We’re getting too much iron, we’re getting too much phosphorus, we’re not getting enough copper in our diet. So, I’m choosing foods that are higher in copper and less in iron and less in phosphorus and I see a difference in myself. You know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But I know for a long time, you were a big fan of grass-fed meat. Are you still a fan of grass-fed meat?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: No. I think, grass-fed beef, if you’re gonna go for meat, grass-fed is the only one because, it is higher in vitamin E and less in unsaturated fats than the hormone or the estrogenic meats that we’re seeing today because of the hormones and they [inaudible]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The hormones. And then also you’re getting a lot of goof fatty acids because these grass-fed cows, they’re essentially bioaccumulating the GLA fats from the grass, correct? So, you’re getting a really good high quality, um, uh, I think saturated fat from a lot the, um, fats that are concentrated from the grass. Is that correct?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Exactly!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, you talked about these polyunsaturated. Why are these fats so bad, obviously, the processing of a lot of these fats whether it’s canola or soy, etc., damages a lot of them, right? And so, once they’re damaged and oxidized, they essentially create our building blocks for our membrane. So now, we have a really crappy cell membrane it’s depleting our antioxidant reserves. So, it’s depleting vitamin E, vitamin C. Is that correct? And these fats stay in our cells for a long time. Can you talk more about that?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Okay. In lipid chemistry at Stanford. I had a chance to meet several people there and at the Back institute. And I was asking them questions about cell membrane and mitochondria, and Linus Pauling Institute. They told me in their research that if it’s not saturated fats, if it’s not mono or medium chain triglycerides, anything that is high in unsaturated fats causes cell membrane oxidative damage to the mitochondria, uh, lipids okay, and they become oxidize and become damage, the RNA and DNA of the mitochondria gets damaged. And so, all unsaturated fats will do that to the, um, mitochondrial lipids, okay? And, um, I read several, major published articles on it and also not only does it damage our mitochondria. It also damages our cells in all other parts of the body and parts of the brain as well. And it causes oxidative damage to the thyroid. The thyroid is so important. It’s the organ that controls metabolic function, hormonal function, metabolism, everything. Polyunsaturated oils damage the T4 – T3 conversion. Okay?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Yeah. Make sense.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: And so, every..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Probably effects the autoimmunity, right? Because most thyroid issues have autoimmune component. So, if you drive these polyunsaturated that are damaged, you’re probably just driving more inflammation, right, and you’re depleting a lor of these antioxidants which are anti-inflammatory as well.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: You’re absolutely right, Justin, that we’re seeing an increase in inflammation due to these fats. In nature, we weren’t using oils from seeds. That’s something else. Seeds were made to grow things. They weren’t made to eat and..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or if we ate them, we soaked them. There was a way that we try to deactivate a lot of these anti-nutrients and lectins via certain methods.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yes. You mean sprouting?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. Exactly. Yep.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: So, that’s the other problem with the, um, with the unsaturated fats and there was a lot of, uh, Gilbert Ling showed that it was causing a lot of, uh, cell membrane issues to and, um, the other thing also not only that but it can, it raises estrogen in our body and estrogen is a promoter of growth of cancer and it’s also an inflammatory marker and lowers oxidative metabolism in the mitochondria. Vernon Stevens at Ohio State university and Cleveland, um, cancer clinic showed that estrogen is a predominant marker of all cancer cells. It’s in the cell membrane of all cancer cells and he showed that in his studies that estrogen leads to all these processes and by reducing unsaturated fats, therefore reduce some of the estrogen. By increasing progesterone and DHEA in our diet, we also lower estrogen. And estrogen can cause many oxidative damages, inflammation and raises serotonin and histamine and we have autoimmune disease from that as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Makes sense. Now, with estrogens, are you also worried about aromatase in men for instance high levels of insulin primarily driven by too much sugar. Are you worried about aromatase causing that high level of estrogen and thus increasing cancer risk n men for instance?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Can we put a hole for a second? I have the people here. Hold on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sure, no problem, we’ll pause it really quick here. Or actually, I’ll just, I’ll keep chatting here while you, uh, jump over. So, it’s a couple of things that we want to highlight here, mitochondria, very important, I mean, I guess some of the things that Dr. Bernd and I may disagree on is about how much glucose a person needs. I would say out of the gates, um, glucose you can get away with more processed glucose and more refined sugars, the more active you are and the more genetically you ten to be more towards an ectomorph, right. Look at Michael Phelps back and I think it was maybe, two Olympics ago, they showed his breakfast or what he ate during the day. It was like pancakes and junk. I’m just saying, it was 10,000 calories, I was thinking, I’m like man, if that guy actually ate 10,000 calories of food that was more nutrient dense imagine how much better he performed. But again, when someone’s that active, they can deal with all the refined carbohydrates and sugars and they can handle it. Now, again, if someone has a gluten sensitivity and, uh, other food allergens such as dairy and cheeses that maybe problematic and that may cause IBS and other types of issues. So, I would say carbohydrate loads should really be dependent upon on how active someone is, um, their genetic predisposition to be able to handle that high level of carbohydrate and also with their what their activity level is. Some people they consume a bunch of carbohydrates bunch of pasta. They are prone to getting tired. Some eat a bunch of glucose and pasta and they actually get more active. Now, I would say also better to do things that are more starchy, squash, sweet potato, an anti-inflammatory because gluten sensitivity is a big deal, uh, the more gluten that you’re consuming and the more sensitive you are to it, the more that may drive inflammation, uh, create gut permeability issues and also, um, increase chance of autoimmunity and so we want to choose safe starches that are gonna be anti-inflammatory, nutrient dense and low toxin. All right, he’s back. I was just chatting with everyone here as we go. So, let’s just kind of dive into the mitochondria, you mentioned aspirin. Now, are you worried about any of the side effects of the acetylsalicylic acid which is essentially is aspirin and then could people also do white willow bark as well if they wanted to avoid the actual pharmaceutical maybe due to the actual bark it said? And are you worried about those side effects?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Not at all. I’ve been using aspirin for I’ve got 40 years for now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For listeners, aspirin is derived from white willow bark. So, if you want to try it, you can also get the actual whole herb, the whole bark, can do it that way too. Go ahead.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: So, about 1984, when I was working with, uh, Olympic athletes then I became, uh, I worked with the Raiders and Rams that year and then Lakers, the following year. I studied from a cell physiologist at UCLA. How to improve, you know, mitochondria, uncoupling protein, energy into the, uh, individual performance. And there was a study that somebody showed me that, um, aspirin helps with coffee in raising uncoupling proteins. So, when I gave people aspirin with coffee, with sugar and cream, they doubled their performance level. It was almost like a steroid they said. It was so much they couldn’t believe it. Not only that, we saw, uh, less injuries in our athletes. Our injuries levels were going down dramatically. So, we knew it had to be what the aspirin as well because weren’t getting the strains and strains of calves and ankles, that you know, in athletes that were performing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, hold on. One second, what does that mean uncoupling proteins. Can you kind of break that down what that means?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: That means your improving the electron flow into the mitochondria. You’re getting more, new, uh, ability to take electrons and oxygen and there’s a chemical reaction in the mitochondria, there’s a spin there that goes on. The ATP spin, you know, that gives us that spin to make energy in the mitochondria.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what’s the mechanism is that from aspirin decreasing inflammation and improving just the flow, it’s improving the blood flow of these nutrients? What’s the mechanism?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: It has to be the combination of the coffee, the caffeine,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The alkaloids
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: the high magnesium and the anti-inflammatory mechanism of the coffee and the aspirin that increased that electron flow through the cell membrane and it created a faster spin, so you’re getting more efficient ATP production. And you know, aspirin is also can lower fatty acid sequences which is a major factor in all cancer cells. It’s Otto Warburg says, if you don’t have sufficient oxygen to, uh, as a respiratory function in a cell, then you’re not gonna have efficient energy and cancer cells don’t have efficient energy. They break down to lactic acid and that’s the problem. Well. Aspirin protects us from the lactic acid production, that’s another factor and helps with raising CO2, carbon dioxide, which is the byproduct of energy and why we train in high altitude is because we want more CO2 which helps us in energy and metabolism and this improvement and quality of endurance because of steel too and so we found that aspirin also helps with raising CO2 levels which is essential form more energy and recovery from injuries and all that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Well, anything else you want to leave the listeners with? And by the way would you recommend just any day generic baby aspirin or do you have any brands that have less fillers or dyes or preservatives in there?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I go and I want you to have. I just get Walgreens brand. Their brand, it’s aspirin Walgreens or any brand that’s not, you know, like bears it’s I see less recipients.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. And if people wanna still get that benefit, they could still try to find some White Willow bark which is what aspirin is made from. So that’s another option natural alternative. If someone wants it to be a little bit more natural in their approach that’s a good option as well.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: About 13 years ago, I was lecturing at an anti-aging conference in Las Vegas and San Jose, and one of the cardiologists, who was also lecturing, we started talking about the importance, there was a lecture on aspirin at the same conference by one of the scientists at Bayer. He showed that aspirin increases a gene called Foxo, f-o-x-o, which is a longevity gene that’s found in longevity people. And aspirin increases this function of Foxo gene to be more efficient and to keep it from burning down or help to over express it. So, we found that it works phenomenally well. And we went to that conference and we saw all the values of aspirin. It helps with bone growth and bone development and cartilage repair and lowers inflammation, increases CO2 levels. The cardiologists, I asked them, how does this work in your sense of understanding of the heart and the blood flow. He says that aspirin protects us, if we take it every night, from developing a clot, from developing a stroke, from platelets aggregating each other, from oxidative damage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But, what would you recommend other things like systemic enzymes or higher dose fish oil, would you recommend other natural things or curcumin or ginger first or do you really think aspirin is just as good or if not better than those natural compounds too?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I have studied every herb out there with Elizabeth Mazzeo. She’s the world leading expert in inflammatory plants. Aspirin was by was far, the only plant, the only natural thing that has prostaglandin 1, prostaglandin 2, which is COX1 and 2 inhibitors. There’s not a compound out there that inhibits both prostaglandins 1 and 2 and many do 1, many do 2, but nothing comes close to doing 1 and 2. Boswellia was the second most powerful under aspirin, Boswellia.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Boswellia, okay, which is essentially Frankincense. And were not putting things like Ibuprofen or NSAIDs in the same category that increased chance of ulcers and liver damage, right? I mean those kill about 20 thousand people taking a year. Taking correctly, they work great but they have some side effects. You wouldn’t put aspirin in that same camp, right?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: No, aspirin by far so much better because it doesn’t cost liver damage and the other, you said something very interesting, all these other ones, they have a problem, they cause a hypometabolic function. They don’t improve mitochondrial function. That was the second thing that we did a study with. In lipid chemistry is what increases mitochondrial function and aspirin seems to be the only one besides Fisetin, which is gonna be the next future, that increases electron flow into the mitochondria. And that’s what we’re seeing and I take 325 milligrams every night before I go to bed. That’s what the cardiologist told me that protects us against strokes, blood clots by, uh, you know, anything that causes platelet damage or anything like that, 325. 81 did not do much at all in that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Okay.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: And then, I have many athletes still that I work with, I haven’t taken aspirin in the morning as a protective mechanism against injury, inflammation and at night and they seem to do better when they’re doing that then their recovery is better, the less injuries. And again, anything that I can raise the oxidative function of our metabolism, our mitochondria is what I consume in foods and also what I do with nutrients like B1, B2 and niacinamide and vitamin D and vitamin K. All the quinones are very powerful that’s what William Coker came up with his cancer treatment. How to increase quinones in our body and it was basically oxidative metabolism improvement.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what was the dose of aspirin again? Was it 350 milligrams?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: I take 325. I’ll share with you, there’s a doctor in San Diego who called me up 15 – 20 years ago. I did an article, I did a lecture podcast on Methylene blue, which also helps with increasing oxidative metabolism and increases mitochondria. I got a call from this doctor, he’s very well known in San Diego, very alternative of thinking, you know, he’s not your conservative doctor, but he thinks above the outside the box. And he wanted, he had a patient that had Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. I forgot, I think, it was Alzheimer’s and he saw my, uh, video on podcast from Silicon Valley, and he asked me about methylene blue dosage. He wants to try it on his patient and I told him what to do, how much milligrams per day and all that. Then he asked me, I got a question for you, my father has stomach cancer. So, he asked me what can he do. So, I gave him a hope program and everything and I told him to do a thousand milligrams of aspirin to 2,000 because I saw the research that aspirin and vitamin D3 can reverse cancer. Okay. So, I told him about the D3 and I told him about the aspirin. Six months later, he calls me up wants to know about Parkinson’s and methylene blue and then I realized I was, I realized who he was, I said how’s your father with the cancer? He said, he’s completely cured. I said, “how long did it take him”. “Six months”. “Wow. What did you do with him, I said, “What did I tell you because I forgot it was six-seven months ago”? Yeah. He took a thousand milligrams of aspirin every day, 3 aspirins, morning, afternoon, evening with vitamin K and also baking soda, so he didn’t have an upset stomach. He’s one of the third people that I talked to with colon or stomach cancer that reversed it just by using aspirin. I was amazed, you know, that it just took aspirin to do that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow. That’s great.
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Many reports and I went to PubMed and Medline and PLOS and I read of Ray Peat’s articles. Aspirin is a wonder drug and I didn’t realize until that study that we went to the anti-aging conference in Las Vegas, where the fellow from Bayer spoke about the importance of aspirin, not only inflammation but prolonging longevity and other factors that are necessary.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Very cool. I mean, I think anyone listening here, if they’re on the fence that’s an option. They can also jump on the herb, I think also keeping inflammation down be your diet’s probably, you know, probably the best thing out of the gates like you mentioned like vitamin D. Anything else you want to leave the listeners with here, Bernd, that you we didn’t have enough time to get but you wanna highlight it before we go here?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Well, again, like I said, I think the most important is reduce the indoor, you know, climate, uh, get more sunlight, get natural lighting like you said in condensing, full spectrum lighting is important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct, full spectrum, that makes sense
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: You know, and make sure the most important thing here is what I found in people with weight problems and anybody. I try to get them to have a good breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal. If you’re gonna have it at 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, it is the most important meal and it should be 50 grams, 25 to 50 grams of protein. Don’t have a starch, don’t have a croissant, don’t have a peanut butter sandwich, don’t have an oat meal. Worst thing to do in the morning, you wanna build that thyroid function and you wanna increase mitochondrial function. So, good protein, I love pasteurized, uh, pasture eggs, I love cheeses like Manchego, anybody know or Feta cheese or goat cheese and cottage cheese and I have my orange juice and my coffee every single day. Never have any problems with weight problems or tiredness or fatigue and I sleep like a log every day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good. Excellent. Well, I appreciate the really good feedback here, Bernd, I mean your wealth of knowledge. You’ve been in this field for nearly 50 years, so I appreciate it the clinical information. Hopefully listeners can take one thing out of this here. I think it’s great, um, again, Bernd website, is it berndfriedlander.com?
Dr. Bernd Friedlander: Yeah. berndfriedlander.com
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: berndfriedlander.com. We’ll put the link down below here for you all. Bernd is a great friend and a wealthy of knowledge. Bernd, thanks for everything. Thanks for chatting here today.
References:
https://www.drberndfriedlander.com/
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Signs and Solution for Gut Inflammation and Leaky Gut | Podcast #351
In this video, Dr. J and Evan stress the importance of what you eat and how it impacts the rest of your body. However, what you might not realize is how your food is digested in your body, and when it gets inflamed and leaky, how do you fix it?
A lack of digestive enzymes can cause leaky gut syndrome—another unfortunate result of chronic inflammation in the digestive system. Many culprits cause leaky gut, including stress, medications, poor food choices or quality, alcohol, cigarettes, and even hormone changes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
1:08 – Poor Gut Health Connection to Virus.
4:31 – What is the role of bile movement and production?
11:16 – The influence of gut michrobiota on Inflammation and Insulin Resistance
19:29 – General recommendations on carbohydrates and for a healthier gut
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hi! Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the signs and solutions of gut inflammation and gut permeability or leaky gut for short. Really exciting topic. We see it a lot in our patients every single day. Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Hey. I’m doing really well. I can’t remember if we covered this on the podcast or not, this specific study but there was a paper that came out all about leaky gut and worsen outcomes with the virus and so people could put in the, you know, what virus in PubMed and leaky gut and we’re finding that a lot of people with leaky gut that’s actually one of the precursors and that’s what’s leading to worse outcomes so this is more important, It’s always important but this is more important now because we know that there’s a massive link and I’ll actually pull this up here and I’ll show you this, American Society for Microbiology, they did this. Did we talk about this yet or not?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s talk about it. Let’s go ahead.
Evan Brand: This particular paper. Let’s bring it up there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me check here. Oh yeah. Let me add it on. Go ahead.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, there we go. So, poor gut health is connected to severe blank, new research shows and long story short, you can go into this microbiology article but long story short they actually show a picture too. Let me see if I can get to that picture. Here we go. That was the picture. I think, we already showed this picture but forgive me and people listening on audio. Basically, we’re just showing that viral particles with a leaky gut are gonna be able to get into the circulation and that’s gonna increase your inflammatory response so the real goal of today is making sure that your gut is in good shape because therefore you’re not gonna have leakage into your circulation. You’re gonna be far far better if you have that healthy gut barrier. So, that was really kind of the spark notes of that but that’s like a 19 pages paper that you can dive into and many people I think have thought of leaky gut as kind of trendy topic that only people like you and I talk about but this is finally, actually getting into the mainstream. So, I hope gastroenterologists are gonna realize the importance of addressing the gut and I hope they actually start taking it more seriously. Right now, it’s just antibiotics that’s really the only thing that gastroenterologists do for gut, right? I mean steroids maybe and immune modulating drugs in the case of like, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s but beyond that there’s not really much leaky gut conversation going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. There’s not and again, really, a leaky gut has an effect, right? Or we’ll call it gut permeability, right? If you go on PubMed, a leaky gut is like a slung. If you want to really find it, you want to look at, you know, gastrointestinal permeability, right? These are gonna be the big things, it’s the tight junctions, the epithelial cells and the small intestine, they start to come apart like my fingers here interlocked like I’m saying a prayer, they come apart and then you can see lipopolysaccharides undigested food particulate can slip out. So, this is, um, this is part of the major, major mechanism. Now, with gut permeability, it’s an effect not a cause so I always tell patients, we don’t go in and treat leaky gut, we treat the corresponding vectors of inflammation that drive gut permeability so that could be food allergens, that could be immune stressors like virus, parasites, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, general dysbiosis, poor digestion, antibiotic exposure, creating rebound overgrowth, fungal overgrowth, you know, just poor digestion, lots of stress, increased sympathetic tone and adrenal stress, that’s shutting down the digestive system and making gut permeability more probable. So, these are the big vectors so we always wanna draw a line. What’s the root cause and what’s the effect and gut permeability is in the effect not necessarily a cause.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of, even advertisements now on social media for all these leaky gut healing formulas and that kind of stuff and it always has the word heal involved but you could take as much glutamine and whatever else you want. You could go into an elemental diet and all of that. It’s not gonna get rid of these big root causes and certainly for me, I tried some gut support but ultimately it was resolving my parasite infections. That was the most important thing for me and so, you can test for this. This is not an uncommon situation; you and I personally and clinically see parasites every single week. So, when you hear this idea of like, oh, it’s a third world country problem, you haven’t traveled to Mexico or anything like that. That’s just crap, I see it all the time and I had them and I was not out of the country and I had multiple parasite infections and then that affects your bowel flow, right? Can we talk about the bowel for a minute, what’s the role there, because you and I talked about how you have to have adequate bile to act as sort of a natural antimicrobial but how is this happening. What do you think are the big driving factors for why bile production is just not good?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, first off, we look at the domino rally of digestion. The first thing that has to happen is good, nice aesthetic pH in the stomach. So, we need adequate HCl in the stomach, hydrochloric acid that lowers the pH and again, lower pH tends to have an antimicrobial effect, right? So, if we have to bring the pH down a little bit, that makes it harder for bugs to grow and that pH is also responsible for activating a lot of proteolytic enzymes in our stomach so if we have a good pH, we activate our enzymes, that starts the digestive cascade, we make it harder for bugs to grow and then once all that kind that mixed up food and enzymes and acids and all the stuff in our stomach is all mixed up. That’s called chyme, C-H-Y-M-E, that gets released into our small intestine, our pancreas then produces a bunch of bicarbonate to bring that pH back up to around neutral but that pH being nice and acidic, it triggers bicarbonate and then it also triggers cholecystokinin production, CCK, which then causes the gallbladder to contract so then you get a whole bunch of bile that comes out, you get a bunch of bicarbonate that comes out of the pancreas but then you’re also gonna get a bunch of lipase and proteolytic enzymes, trypsin, chymotrypsin lipase, lipolytic enzymes is coming out of the pancreas as well. So then, you bring the pH back up, you add the fat digestive enzymes, the proteolytic enzymes and then you also stimulate that bile production which then emulsifies that fat. Think of emulsification as you have a nice greasy pan where you cook some bacon on, right? Throw under water, you feel the fat on the pan, throw some dawn soap on there, it emulsifies it. It breaks that up so then you can get it all out the intestinal tract and be able to absorb it, carry on, mycells and be able to use it for lipid bilayer, hair, skin, nail, energy all that stuff. Prostaglandins.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. And though bile is produced by your liver but it’s stored in your gallbladder so people that have had their gallbladders removed which is a very common surgery, a lot of surgeons are very happy to remove gallbladders, I think in many cases, they may have been saved with fixing these other upstream issues but, well, once it’s gone, it’s gone. So, people listening that have no gallbladder, you have to take that into consideration. There was a study here in 2018, it was in the annals of gastroenterology, it found that poor bile flow can contribute to the development of inflammatory bowel disease. So, you’re really setting yourself up and find all the time with people clinically when they come in, they’ve had gallbladder removal, we see a lot of issues, we see massive bacterial overgrowth problems in these people and I think that’s partly due to not having enough bile being stored anymore like you and I have talked about it before, I think you said it was a 10x concentration in the gallbladder, is that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 10 to 15x. Yeah.
Evan Brand: So, you’re missing out on that when you have just liver production, you don’t have that storage facility. I mean you have some but just nowhere near what you would have had if you had your gallbladder. So, please. Try to save your gallbladder. You got to fix these upstream infections because that’s gonna be and get off proton pump inhibitors with the help of your doctor if you can because we know that, that suppression of stomach acid is gonna lead to the overgrowth which then fuels these downstream issues to not happen the domino effect, it literally gets stopped or prevented by the PPIs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so, we need good, think of bile, it’s an emulsifier, it breaks down fat, it’s also an antimicrobial and so we create antimicrobial environments by having good, nice, low pH by having good enzyme and acid levels that also helps and then also by having good bile output and plus the longer that food sits there and rots and putrefies because we are not breaking it down into its constituent parts, right? Then it’s gonna create future petrification, fermentation, and rancidification. Essentially proteins and fats and carbs are rotting, right? Then you can get gas and bloating and that just creates this incredible breeding ground for bugs to grow. It’s like you can have this beautiful home that you take care of but if you leave the garbage in there like, a week too long it’s gonna get like, stinky and then you’re gonna get a whole bunch of bugs attracted to it, right? Same kind of thing in our microbiome so it’s really important that we stay on top of, you know, those good health practices.
Evan Brand: Let’s hit the symptoms and signs and symptoms because people know most of the gut ones but there are some that you and I find clinically that maybe people wouldn’t think are a gut symptom, right? It might not manifest outside of that so we can cover the stuff like unusual color texture, smell, messy poops, you have floating stool. You have maybe alternating diarrhea, constipation, bloating, gut pain. But, what about like, skin issues and what about anxiety and depression and hormonal imbalances and brain fog. I mean, you and I have seen, we lost count how many times we’ve seen cases where we simply just fix the gut and all the sudden, this depression is lifted. I had one client named Miranda, who she had been depressed for, she said quote 20 plus years, all we did is do a gut protocol. I gave her no antidepressant herbs. We simply just did a gut protocol and when we did a six-week follow-up, she said her depression was 90% better and when she said 90% better, she didn’t even sound too excited and I said, are you realizing what you just said to me. You’ve been depressed for over 20 years and you’re 90% less depressed in six weeks of doing a gut protocol like do you realize how profound that is and she goes oh yeah, I guess that is amazing. Thank you. And, I think people, they get so used to feeling a certain way that when the clouds lift. They’re almost not even ready for it but depression, anxiety, I would put at the top of the list for mental health issues connected to these gut inflammation problems, I will tell you. And, you and I discussed this I remember calling you one-night years ago is probably like coming up on be six, seven years ago was like 2014, 2015 and I was like man, I’m having like a panic episode or something and this was when I was living down in Austin and it was H. pylori. It was driving that because as soon as I cleared the H. pylori, all those weird episodes of panic completely disappeared and I’ve seen that more than just the n equals one, me, I’ve seen it many, many times. So, if you have anxiety problems, you go to the psychiatrist. They’re not going to suggest you have gut infections but that’s something you need to be thinking about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yep. 110% for sure. Anything else you want to add in that topic?
Evan Brand: If you’ve got mental health issues, look in the gut maybe even look in the gut before you look in the brain. Now, obviously, we’re gonna be doing organic acid testing and other things to look at neurotransmitters so we’re gonna check out dopamine, serotonin. We’re gonna look at what’s called quinolinic acid so we can look for actual brain inflammation or brain toxicity related to gut infections like sometimes Clostridia, we’ll see will drive up the quinolinic acid markers but we still have to fix the gut. So, if you have a family member, they’re anxious, they’re depressed, they’re fatigued. We’ve seen a massive link between chronic fatigue and gut infection. So, there’s another big one that people may not recognize, the gastro doc may not suggest your chronic fatigue is from a gut infection but it certainly can be skin issues as well. My skin was a wreck years ago. I had major acne even though my diet was clean. It was my gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. I also wanna highlight one other kind of variable here. I think it’s really important. I’m gonna pull this on screen here. I think this is really interesting. So, an interesting abstract here and it’s looking at the influences on the gut microbiome on inflammation and insulin resistance so this is interesting because we talk about insulin resistance, right? Consuming too much carbohydrate and refined sugar. All carbohydrates get broken down typically into glucose, fructose or a combination of the two, right? And so, the more sugar that gets released into our bloodstream that gets broken down whether from refined sugar, sucrose which is fructose in glucose, high fructose corn syrup is fructose in glucose 55, 45 concentration and then of course we have starches which get primarily broken down into glucose and then we have fruit which is more on the fructose side. These things all have an impact on our blood sugar and the more insulin resistant we become, we, it drives inflammation. It’s hard to utilize these fuel resources and these fuel sources to get deposited in our fat because our muscles don’t have the ability to store it. our liver loses the ability to store it. We don’t have the activity level. We don’t have the mitochondria stimulation to burn it so we store it as fat. Now, this article is interesting. It talks about obesity as the main condition that’s correlated with the appearance of insulin resistance. Think of this as when your cells get numb to insulin. Now, this is on screen here. People that are looking if you’ve got mental health issues on the audio version, we’ll put the link below for the whole video. Whole bacteria, their byproducts and metabolites undergo increased translocation through the gut epithelium. Translocate, let me give you the translation on that. Here’s your gut. Leaky gut happens, right? Where it talks about gut permeability and things start to translocate meaning move from the inside of the gut back into the bloodstream, right? So, it translocates through the gut epithelium into circulation due to the degradation of tight junctions. This is a leaky gut, right? Here. And it increases intestinal permeability that culminates in inflammation and insulin resistance. So, what this says is the inflammation caused by gut permeability caused by gut permeability caused by lack of enzymes, bile, food allergens, all the gut microbiome issues can actually drive inflammation and insulin resistance. Now, it makes it harder for your mitochondria to generate fuel because you’re not able to get that fuel into your cell and you start to become more of a sugar burner. It’s very difficult to burn fat when you have high levels of insulin, Very, very difficult. So, several strategies focusing on modulation of the gut microbiome using antibiotics, again, we would use antimicrobial herbs, probiotics and probiotic fibers are being experimentally used to um, in order to reduce intestinal permeability, increase the production of short chain fatty acids. Guess what, things like butyric acid, medium chain triglycerides. Those are all very helpful. And again, this helps promote insulin sensitivity and counteracts the inflammation. So, really, really important here. This study, influence of gut microbiome on subclinical inflammation here and this is the 2000, see what’s the study, 2013 study so we’ve known this stuff out for a long time here that the gut microbiome plays a major role on your blood sugar, blood sugar handling and if you’re a diabetic or someone with insulin problems, you need to be looking at the gut. Yeah. look at the diet, look at, you know, getting your diet and your macros in order, make sure your food quality is good and then look at really getting the microbiome dialed in to really help. That could be a missing piece of the puzzle for people that have really changed their diet but not quite gotten the metabolic benefits of losing weight yet.
Evan Brand: Wow. That’s a good point. You know, when I think back, when I had gut infections, my blood sugar was definitely not as good. I mean, 2 to 3 hours is as far as I could go without having to eat a meal. Now, I could fast all morning and not eat till 1 pm and I’m perfectly fine. I think there is an adrenal component too. I think I’m in a lot better place with that but I can tell you that certainly after mixing my gut, my blood sugar and blood stability is much better. So, I think you’re onto something with that paper and how people that even have gone paleo or animal based or keto. That still has issues with blood sugar regulation. That could be a sign of gut issues and I think even If diet dialed in in some cases what like you’re showing here, there could still be issues with the blood sugar. So, sometimes, it’s portrayed as like just fix your diet and everything else falls into place but you have to consider these other factors and also, I’ll throw in at the, you know, 11th hour here, mycotoxins, we know that mold toxins significantly affect the gut barrier and create a leaky gut. They damage the mitochondria, and we know that certain mycotoxins promote the overgrowth of bacteria like Clostridia and Candida. In fact, the lab will tell you that on paper, for example mycophenolic acid, it’s a very common mycotoxin that we see that comes from water damaged buildings. You breathe that in, that’ll then affect the gut and allow the overgrowth. So, if you’re just treating the antimicrobial herbs or fungal herbs and you’ve missed this giant mold exposure that can still affect the gut, still affect the brain and people won’t get fully better. So, that’s really the beauty of what we do is we try to work through all these puzzle pieces and help you because you could have this guy who says everything is gut and you go all the way down this gut rabbit hole and not get fully better or you go all the way down this insulin resistance rabbit hole and you still miss the smoking gun. You got the leaking dishwasher and your whole kitchen cabinetry. We had a woman in Texas last week, her dishwasher apparently leaking for years. Her entire kitchen has to be replaced now. She’s looking at 25k, just to replace her whole kitchen and she’s been to 10 doctors, 10 practitioners and nobody’s figured it out and I’m not trying to toot my own but I’ll just say I kept suspecting something because she said that she would always feel weird while she was washing dishes at her sink. She would get a little bit of a headache, feel a little bit sick to her stomach, said, ‘huh, is it possible that something’s leaking?’ and then boom brought in the remediator and they found it. There was a leaking dishwasher black mold everywhere.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Mold plays a major role in stressing out the immune system. It can create gut permeability within itself and then obviously drives the insulin problems. And also, people that eat this type of diet, I mean, it’s natural when you have microbiome issues to create a bunch of sugar because these foods are from an evolutionary standpoint, things that had a lot of sugar in it ended up having a lot of nutrients in it, right? Oh, a bunch of berries, some honey, right? And they were very rare in society. It was hard to find a lot of these things. Even fruit, you know, back then, tended to be a lot more sour and bitter and we’ve kind of hybridized and you know selectively grown fruits that tend to be sweeter and more, uh, and more plump and luscious now they taste. And so, we have sweeter fruits today and so it’s natural for people to want to crave all the crap that feeds the bad bugs because the bugs are producing chemicals to make you crave these foods. So, you have to be educated and understand that these foods, even though you’re craving them, you need to like not listen to those cravings sometimes and really shift your gut in it. If it shifts your macronutrients in a way to starve out some of these bugs, it can make a big difference.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. I mean, a lot of fruits hybridize now too as you mentioned to be sweeter, so like a strawberry. I’ve seen strawberries as big as my hand sometimes, like, ‘God’, you know wild strawberries, they’re tiny. I mean they’re like the size of a fingernail, if you’ve ever seen wild strawberries out in the yard, very tiny and definitely not anywhere as sweet as the other ones. So, when you hear people talk about fruit, like our modern fruit, like you said it’s not really, it’s more like candy with some, it’s like natural candy as opposed to the more ancient fruits so If I can find like some heirloom apples and that kind of stuff, I’m totally into it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And you know, my general recommendation with carbohydrates, just make sure you earn it, make sure you’re not in a place where you’re inactive and try to get some activity because sugar goes three directions: gets stored in the liver and muscle, okay, so, if you’re working out, you’re always draining that muscle every day, you have a storage reservoir for it a little bit in the liver; It goes to fat or it stays in the bloodstream and gets burned up by the mitochondria essentially. It gets burnt up mitochondria-wise by the muscles etc. So, it’s gonna go either stored, burnt, you know, it’ll stay in the bloodstream but burnt up by the muscles of mitochondria or it gets converted to fat. So, if you’re doing things that allow you to utilize the glucose in that bloodstream, not as big of a deal, but that’s what you really have to look at what activity level is and you have to work with your functional medicine doctor about dialing in those macros and some people they need to starve out certain macros especially the fermentable carbohydrates and a lot of the inflammatory foods especially grains, legumes, dairy. Those things are really, can be, drive a lot of inflammation and that can keep your sympathetic nervous system and your immune system on high alert which just drains a lot of energy from you. Food allergens can make you fat and they can drain energy from you. Yeah. Seeds too. You know, I cut out almond seeds, nut seeds. Yep, even some eggs too for sure.
Evan Brand: I cut out eggs for her while greens, I mean, some people are way overdoing it on the leafy greens. I can’t tell you the last time I ate a salad. I don’t really care. I don’t do leafy greens. I used to but, you know, I see way too many people doing these like kale smoothies. I had a lady doing like a pound of kale a day. Oxalates were off the chart. We know those affect the gut barrier too so there are downsides to plants.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I mean, it’s all about, you know, how you tolerate it, can you eat and feel good afterwards, how does your stool look? Do you see a bunch of undigested particulates? If so, you may want to work on just chewing your food up more. Taking some enzymes. See if that helps or sauteed it a little bit and see if that moves a needle. Again, there’s almost always a way, we can adjust things so it works but everyone’s a little different.
Evan Brand: If you need further help, you can reach out to Dr. Justin at his website, justinhealth.com. Now, we do worldwide consultations, phone, facetime, skype, whatever it can connect to, we do it. Lab tests are sent around the world. It’s awesome we have distributors to work with. We can get these things to your door. We sign off on it and get you rolling so we can investigate and look deeper. So, justinhealth and then for me Evan Brand, it’s evanbrand.com. You can reach out and we’re both happy to help you. We love what we do. We’re very blessed for the opportunity to be in the trenches. We’re always improving our own health. We work on our families, our children. We work on everybody around us. We’re always trying to improve them and to be able to do it clinically too is just great. We learn so much from you all and we like to be the shining light in a world of darkness where people have been to countless practitioners and the stuff that to you and I is just common everyday conversation, functional medicine stuff. This stuff to some people is like wow why has nobody ever mentioned that to me before. And for us, it’s like, oh yeah uh-uh, we do it with everyone. So, we look forward to helping you uncover your root causes if you have gut inflammation, what’s going on. There’s something under it so don’t give up, keep pushing forward and please reach out if you need help. We’d love to help you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Evanbrand.com, work at Evan. Dr. J, justinhealth.com, works with me. We are here with you guys. And, put your comments down below. Let us know the different things that you guys are applying, what’s working, what’s not and if you get overwhelmed listening to this. Try to take at least one action item out of it. I would say action items from a supplement standpoint. We’ll put our recommended supplements down below. We have different hydrochloric acid and enzyme support products that we’ll put down below for links. That’s always low hanging fruit. Again, diet wise, you know, a good autoimmune, lower fodmap diet can really be a good starting point and I would say for liver gallbladder, you know, we have our different formulas. I have one called liver supreme and again some of the hallmark nutrients in these products are gonna be bile, phosphatidylcholine, taurine, some products will have things like Tudca, which can be very helpful for biliary flow. Beetroot can be really helpful. if I didn’t mention Ox Biles. These are all maybe some milk thistle, very supportive for liver, gallbladder function, liver-gallbladder flow. So, very beneficial, we’ll put the links down below so if you guys enjoy the information and you wanna take action feel free to take a look at some of those links and support the show by grabbing some of those products and Evan will have his links down below as well. Anything else, Evan, you wanna add?
Evan Brand: I think, I said, we give people the links. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you’re listening on apple that’s probably where most people find us if you’re looking up. Justin’s show, make sure you subscribe there or my show, Evan Brand. We don’t care how you’re listening, you know, obviously we cross pollinate. We put these on each other so make sure you’re subscribed to both of them so you don’t miss it and we appreciate it. give us a review too. I think we should probably do a giveaway. I know some people giveaways so we can give away a book or you know free supplement or something but, in the meantime, give us a five star review on apple, we would love it. That’s how we stay up in the rankings so that we can actually share true functional medicine education to the masses because right now there’s still a lot of people that are in the top charts just theory. They’re not clinicians. They’re not in the trenches every day, all day, I mean we look at an exhaustive amount of lab testing that helps us to really dial the stuff we’re saying in. We then sprinkle in some studies and we stay up on the research but you could keep your head in the research all day and totally miss what actually works and it’s all about what actually gets people the results. So, keep that in mind and make sure you subscribe. Give us a review on Apple, we’ll love you forever. Thank you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% All the links will be below for you guys. Alright, thanks a lot. Evan, great chat with you man. Have a good one. Bye everyone.
Evan Brand: You too, take it easy. Bye-bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/signs-and-solution-for-gut-inflammation-and-leaky-gut-podcast-351
Recommended products:
How to Address Acute Tummy or Stomach Upset – Podcast #347
There are several things worse than having an upset stomach and diarrhea. This situation may completely throw off your day, limiting the foods and drinks you can enjoy and keeping you tied to your toilet. Understanding the root causes of these symptoms and how to manage them effectively can automatically cut down the effort and time you spend dealing with them.
Most of the time, tummy issues are treatable at home. As soon as you feel sick, begin regulating your diet to clear liquids in small amounts and frequents. Make sure to drink enough water to keep your urine clear or a pale yellow, and don’t hesitate to seek medical attention when things are getting worse after first aid treatments.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1: 53: Natural Strategies to get things under control
4:13: What’s the possible root cause?
10:49: This you can do with diarrhea
14:56: Natural strategies and Testing
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We’re really excited today. We live on a bunch of different social media platforms at the same time. So excited to interact with a lot of different people; not just from youtube but, facebook, instagram, linkedin, a bunch of other still periscope as well. So really excited. Evan, how are you doing today my man. What’s cooking?
Evan Brand: Well not too much i was dealing with little vomiting this morning with some kids. So I thought, well, why don’t we do an acute to me upset video and hopefully that will help some people. You know a lot of people at first, you need to have… Anytime, anybody’s sick now i mean, everybody’s like COVID until proven innocent right? Whether you have sinus issues or smell issues, tastes issues, tummy issues, people freak out you know. Luckily, there are some really good at home rapid test that you can do with a 15-minute result now. It may be difficult to find those. You may have to order order them online but, Abbottt makes a good one so if people are at home and they’re worried, they get sick like, “What do i do?” you know. A lot of people, they are just stuck In this fear response like, “Oh my god.” I’m going to die as soon as anything’s wrong. So you can get these rapid tests and have them at home. So i think that’s a good strategy just out of the gate for people. If you get into acute issues whether it’s vomiting, diarrhea, shortness of breath whatever you think is going on. For me, before you feel like you got to run out and go to the hospital, i think it would be good to do an at-home and mess before you could always go to a local clinic where you can get a rapid test. Supposedly, a little bit more maybe a few percentage points more accurate than at home.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah i think those are good things out of the gates. Now one of the things we are heating today is because your daughter had a little bit of tummy upset over the weekend into today, and you know, there’s a– we’re parents, we have kids you know. Obviously, we see patients all over the world and we deal with some of these acute tummy upsets. Weather it’s vomiting or acute diarrhea, and what are some natural strategies to fix that? What’s the root cause? What are some natural strategies to atleast get it under control? So first off Evan um well, how did you handle your daughter? What happened with her over the weekend? What did you do that helped?
Evan Brand: Yeah she had sinus issues first where she just had really really tough time breathing out of her nose. So i tried to get her to do some sinus spray with a five-year-old. hey really don’t want stuff squirted up their nose so that wasn’t too successful. We were able to get some argentin in which is a professional silver hydrosol. So we did a little bit of that early and then with hit some antimicrobial drops. So we did some liquid antimicrobial, it depends on what you got going on. For us we did kind of a broad-spectrum formula but, there’s different ones that you can use. So olive leaf is a good option. There’s some that are full spectrum like microbes layer used called uh poseidon drops can be helpful too. So a few options we’re just kind of rotating through some of these, and then We are doing binders so just because you don’t know what’s going on If it’s bacteria or some sort of pathogen, it’s going to be pooping out these lipopolysaccharide endotoxin some kind of garbage. So we do Some binder within a half capsule of some binders Before bed with applesauce that seemed to calm things down but then, with the vomiting, we were talking about this before we hit record, You know what the coolest thing was in the most effective so so far was homeopathic so we did two of them; we did cinecom album and then did nux n-u-x vomica. So those two homeopathics, i would say really really changed the progression and helped her go down the fork in the road where it stopped the vomiting. Now, is it possible that she just got it out everything out of of her system and it was good on its own? Or Is it possible these homeopathics really you know, stop it? I’ve had a lot of success personally and clinically with homeopathics. It’s something that i didn’t know a ton about until i started experimenting but, these are very very good, safe things that can be tried and worst case scenario it’s not hurt. It can only help. So arsenical is going to be more For vomiting and nux is going to be more for nausea. There’s actually like if you look on the label either one of these could be used for food poisoning but, i’m finding that nux is better for the symptom nausea whereas arsenical is better for the actual symptom of vomiting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. Excellent. So out of the gates here you know, what’s the root cause? You know, most of the time i find when you have a root kind tummy upset, it’s usually going to be some kind of food poisoning thing out of the gate. So of course I think some kind of e coli or some kind of toxigenic e coli or maybe a salmonella, or campylobacter. Some kind of like food poisoning bacteria out of the gate. It could also be a parasite too! I find food poisoning tends to be a little bit more acute and that’s kind of how you know at the moment. You may not be clear enough but out of the gates like you mentioned a couple different things, silver can be helpful, higher dose probiotics – probiotics can be very helpful because especially the bifidobacter and lactobacillus because one they are anti-inflammatory so they bring the inflammation down in the gut. Probiotics are shown to help with gut permeability issues so with the acute food poisoning or acute tummy stress there could be a lot of gut permeability which then increases the immune Response because then you have all these toxins leaking into the bloodstream potentially creating gut stress in immune stress. And then i would say after that, um, they’re going to help crowd out a lot of bad bugs so if you had a big whack of e coli or a big whack of campylobacter or salmonella something like that, listeria it’s gonna help crowd some of it out and so probiotics i think out of the gates for it’s calming effects and i think you can look deeper in run a stool test if some of these issues or more chronic. Parasitic issues maybe more chronic and then of course my good old favorite ginger tea is wonderful because ginger is anti-inflammatory, has some mild antimicrobial benefits as well and especially bacteria and also has some anti-biofilm benefits. So you can combined ginger with probiotics you can combine ginger with some antimicrobials as well, Two kind of help those herbs to be more Let’s just say virulent because you essentially are taking the shields out of these bacterias, you know, arms right. Biofilms are the protective shields the bacteria use and when you take the shields out, the bacteria are more vulnerable and then the herbs work much better, and they help kill them much better. So those are a couple of strategies out of the gates anything else Evan that you’re doing?
Evan Brand: We tried to go for the ginger tea her tummy was just so upset she couldn’t Keep liquids down so we just said ok to intense right now. We’re just going to just let it rest so luckily with a palette homeopathy she was just able to just put it under her tongue. Therefore she didn’t have to take in any new liquid so we tried to do just some other liquid tinctures. There were a couple mils but It was just too much so luckily, without It, we just gave the tummy a break. No more liquids hit the homeopathic and then boom! The gut’s calm for now, so we’re still in the middle of it at the time this is recording but, she has not vomited since we did those homeopathy remedies. So hopefully she’s, she’s over the hump now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah homeopathy is interesting i don’t see A lot of it as being like root causal like it’s not Fixing like lexi your daughter ate some food or Head of food allergen exposure or eat it, was eating while stressed, not enough stomach acid or got a bug It may not fix that but It’s going to help control sum of the symptoms, modulate the inflammation kind of help bump physiology back into the normal direction. Which kind of buys you time to fix whatever is going on. So i like that, so i think that’s a pretty good strategy out of the gates. I think also too is…
Evand Brand: The microphone depend on it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah i think also modifying…
Evan Brand: I’m just gonna say I’m not gonna depend on it. I wasn’t gonna depend on solely but, if i can buy your time like you said, and then If you see in a week there’s still an issue when boom! We’re going to run urine or we’re going to run stool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly yep and i like the idea of you want either fasting out of the gates. If it’s really a bad infection and there is really a lot of nausea, you could also do things like bone broth. Just where you get a lot of nutrition but it’s pre digested, so there’s not much digestion that has to happen to grab that glycine or grab those fatty acids because it’s pretty well digested. So some kind of bone broth is wonderful, some type of a ginger tea is great, some type of collagen amino acids is great. I think all those are you know, really good strategies out of the gate just to kind of help provide nutrition but not what a lot of stress on your tummy to be able to digest it and access it because when the gut’s really inflamed, It can be stressful absorbing those nutrients.
Evan Brand: Yeah good point she was complaining of stomach pain too. So as soon as her tummy settles down i think she can handle liquid. What were going to do, we’ve got a couple different formulas i know. You and i, we manufacture some but, there’s also some other good professional competitor brands. There is one from Innate response that i like it’s a GI like soothing formula That’s got like some raspberry flavor into it. It’s got some glutamine some larch tree extract. I believe it’s got some mutant chamomile aloe, those type of blends. So kind of a leaky gut permeability support those are good in this situations too. When did make sure like you said you don’t know what it’s from It could be bacteria, virus, parasite; whatever this to me, honestly, at this point It doesn’t matter. I’m just in the acute phase, i’m trying to calm her tummy down. So if i can get her to do over the period of today a couple grams of glutamine, need some of these extracts that’s going to calm the gut down too. You and I have seen clinically beneficial like ulcerative colitis, crohn’s, any type of diverticulitis, any type of these flare-ups or autoimmune flares. We’ll use Use some of these licky gut remedies, so i would then use that as a crossover right. I would use it in the same in the same situation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly. Now, out of the gates when deal a lot of these situation we always want to understand the root cause. Now, the nice thing about acute traumatic situation, like in your situation here, is the root cause is usually is a one off right. It’s going to be a food poisoning episode. It becomes more Of an issue if it’s an acute parasite and it lingers. And most of the time it’s a one off, and as long as someone’s diets reasonable, and they have decent health, you don’t really have to go super upstream and, and look at all of the underlying systems. You can find out just do triage with natural medicine which is kind of cool, Command bear with some of the different nutrients and herbs that we talked about, support some of the lymphatic system with ginger, or burdock root right. Slippery elms wonderful for the lymph, wonderful for calming the gut lining. L-glutamine is also wonderful for calming, Aloe’s also wonderful for gut lining. So there’s a lot of great things That we can do to calm the gut lining. Support barrier integrity get the inflammation under control. We don’t really have to worry about getting the root because usually, that root is an isolated situation especially when someone’s relatively healthy and then they have an acute episode.
Evan Brand: Right and then your system is going to get back to baseline on its own. We’re just kind of helping it. So like you said it might not need much more attention then just a couple of days which would be great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s pretty cool out of the gates. So we talked about diarrhea, a couple of things. We can do with diarrhea is a lot of times, you have to understand why the body is doing what it’s doing. So the body is usually getting exposed to some kind of bacteria, parasite, some type of toxin that is very irritating on the gut lining. And the body is thinking hmm, how can we dilute it, Dilute whatever that compound is and flush It out of the body as fast as possible. So what the body is typically doing and say, “Ok. Let’s bring a whole bunch of fluid and water into this system here.” Let’s flush it out, let’s increase motility time. Now what it’s going to do is it’s going to screw up your electrolytes a lot of times, It’s going to screw up your hydration status. And it’s also going to make it hard to absorb nutrients. So what’s the first thing we do? First thing is we can put some binders in so we can bind of those toxins so they are less irritating, less inflammatory. So are different binders could be activated charcoal, bentonite clay, different zeolites, different pectins. These fibers are great because they will bind up that toxin, and it will make it less mobile, less inflammatory. Kind of put straight jackets or handcuffs on it right. The next thing we’re going to do is make sure we are hydrating because the solution to pollution is dilution. We want to make sure there is enough water there. So we can dilute and not get dehydrated. And the next thing is make sure there’s enough electrolytes. Electrolytes are a big deal because, if we are low in sodium, and potassium, and magnesium, when you start having a lot of these bugs, what you start to notice is you may start getting dizzy, vertigo , or heart palpitations , or just feel totally off, and a lot of that can be from a lot of electrolyte issues due to the infection. And so we get the electrolytes right The hydration right, and then we also provide some good binders there that can prevent these toxins one from being as mobile, and being an inflammatory and um, and that can create make a better environment for the body to move the bowels out slower without losing all the nutrients as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah good point and this is kind of an Art right this is where the art comes in Ab medicine when your Trying to integrate these things at the right time That someone can tolerate so right now If i try to give her a big cup of electrolytes She might not be able to because she had trouble keeping down The mcqueen so you kind of have to know when Like you might hear this and go oh my god i’m going to do all the Things because i want to get better but there can be an o order of options. I think get Your got come down first if you can go on an hour or two if you’re in an active vomiting situation. If you can go an hour or two without vomiting, that might be the cost might be clear enough for you to try to work some of the other stuff, and whether its a liquid tinctures to kill or if you are doing something like a bio site or other antimicrobial drops, We use the dosage is usually so small, that i think you can keep it down because you’re not going to have to do a ton of drops right. If you could just do like five drops, That’s tiny your body is barely going to recognize that. And if it’s the tongue, i don’t think that’s going to create more vomiting but that’s kind of where the art comes in paying attention to what’s going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I agree doing some of the liquid drops are wonderful. Because if you can’t do a full capsule, hopefully you can right. But if you can’t you know getting some liquid drops in near epsom herbals can be super helpful, maybe some silver. Also, like you mentioned if you really have a hard time keeping things down, that’s very good iv iv fluids, iv electrolytes, iv nutrients maybe a good Idea because that bypasses the whole digestive system. So then it gets right into your bloodstream and does what it has to do so you can find some liquid iv services come to your house or find a facility near you where you can pop in, get it done. Ideally, if it’s acute Probably better off paying the money and having someone come to your house. Probably feel a lot better and i think it’s better than going to an ER. Unless you’re you know, really in rough shape. Then go to an Er but if not, but if you’re better off doing it at home because there’s less um, infectious material You know at home than in the hospital right. So i think that’s good strategy out of the gates for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well. And to take it a step further not only that but, if you do these mobile services, like i did this last summer you’re able to customize what you want. So the hospital is not going to put glutathione in IV like they did no i’m not going to give you 10 Grams of vitamin c like i requested. So you’re going to get a much much better menu if you will of nutrients if you were to go to th e hospital.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep! I agree. I 100% agree. So first thing out of the gates i would say is, Try to do liquid or even just fast and then if you really having a hard time with the with the nutrition try to do liquid whether it’s an elemental diet, or some collagen and amino acids, or someBone bro that’s great , and if you can’t eat the food down ideally try to get some kind of an I be going on there i think that’s a good strategy out of the gates. I think the next thing that would probably happen it would be like IV antibiotics if you absolutely had to but ideally, we don’t want to go there unless unless all the other natural strategies aren’t working. So we want to Really try the low-hanging fruit That’s going to have the best bang for the buck, The least amount of side effects, the least amount Collateral damage, And kind of go up from there so of course, try to look at what cost the problem. Did you eat some bad mayo, Did you eat some crazy seafood , what happened, try to isolate the cause If there’s a lot of vomiting or diarrhea. And um, vomiting is going to be harder because it’s not moving Through the intestinal tract it’s staying in the stomach essentially and the intestine upper small intestine and moving out right. So you’ve got to do things to calm yourself down. So i think the big things like you mentioned the homeopathic i think are great. I think the probiotics are great too. I think ginger can be great um, for the vomiting components but, Everything else i think the diarrhea stuff you know, The binders , the hydration , getting all that stuff going to calm down, the ginger. All that stuff’s wonderful. Anything else you did besides the homeopathics for the vomiting, Evan?
Evan Brand: No so far that was all she could get it down. But luckily it’s been good enough.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool. Yeah, that’s really cool. I like that. Alright! So Out of this out of the gates here um, We’re kind of hitting things like on an acute level right. So patients are coming in, they have these acute symptoms that are the kind of some of the strategies we would look at. Of course it’s easy for some of these people to move into the crowd. I’ve heard a lot of patients that are like, oh yeah. Like three years ago, i went To this place and i eat this food and i felt realistic for a week or two and then i started getting better but I didn’t get all the way better and now this stuff is lingering. And of course for some people this type of acute scenario, you may get over it but you may not all the way recover. And why is that? You can get another kind parasyte infection, you can get h pylori, There could be some food poisoning which we see on some of the testing we do. We’ll see some of the Shiga toxin some of the toxigenic e coli, What is it What is it truethe 0Oh157h right. This is the food poisoning type of e coli that you See in the spinach once a year and such so Lucy song on these things on testing. And some of these things can cross the acute Level into the chronic sphere. And People have had these experiences. Then they may not recover all the way and then, that’s where we think start to have to start integrating more tool testing to look at and see what’s happening.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. I mean there’s so many people that say they have Bali belly right. Name go to Bali, or they go Mexico or they go somewhere; they come back and then they are never the same. And it’s an interesting phenomenon because a lot of times We’re just trying to find them at the acute phase like ok, binders whatever but, then If they don’t fully recover, or sometimes they will reach out to us, we never got to help them in the acute phase. They’re just coming to us in the chronic like hey i’ve been sick for three years after this Mexico poisoning event. When that’s where we come in with a testings uh, you mentioned infections. We will see salmonella, we’ll see giardia, we’ll see crypto. If there was like a lake trip we’re maybe, got some fresh water contamination, or a backpacking trip where they got some parasites. Ee will find that on stool test pretty accurately, gut information we can measure. That’s where we might do a test for you know, just because i do it a couple of times a year but, If she get over this. Then I might rush to do it right away so it depends on the person right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah i mean i have a lot of Australian patients and it’s funny In that culture, um, it’s because they’re so close to Bali, a lot of them will take trips over there. Ang of course, the the I mean it’s like one out of every two of every two of my Australian patients they got sick in Bali and it is actually a cultural thing. I look it up we’re a lot of them would do this This raspberry cordial cordial drink it was a big thing and they would bring it with them to Bali, and we would drink it prevent totally while they are in Bali to mitigate the Bali berry uh belly, and i did a little research on it. Some of the berries that we’re used To make that drink actually have some antiparasitic antibacterial effects so they are kind of taken. Even though it is a sugary kind of not so great drink there is still some therapeutic benefits of some of those berries being antimicrobial. And so even people in australia kind of know, okay. We’ll take this raspberry cordial drink and bring it with us to Bali to sip it over for the next couple of weeks to prevent a tummy infection.
Evan Brand: That’s cool. Well, you and i talked to about That before i think we did whole podcasts on like travel supplements but, i mean that’s yeah enzymes, oregano oil, silver. Those kind of things, binders would come in handy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah i did a food poisoning podcast i think about two years ago. I was in a friend’s wedding and i remember i was In the north end and i had a nice rib eye steak In the north and right. Anyone that knows the Boston area north end’s a big Italian area, big restaurant Italian area. What a nice rib eye steak and i eat it and it was Just like it was like someone punched me in the stomach. It was like woah oh my gosh like i felt totally just incredibly a lot of nausea. And then i brought my GI Clear 4 with me. I hit that i remember I had like two, i had my GI Clear 1 and some oil of oregano and a hit that hard. It didn’t quite do it and the next day i hit the GI Clear 4 and within 30 minutes, It went away. I couldn’t believe it, it was like someone flipped a switch. It’s crazy! So sometimes you need synergistic herbs sometimes you know, the goldenseal and the high dose berberines, and some of the burdock root. It can’t really really calm down the gut lining.
Evan Brand: You know when people see my pantry or my cupboard full of different supplements, they’ll look and be like. “Oh my God. This is crazy! You’ve got like 50 60 bottles of stuff.” and i tell them look, I I don’t go to the doctor. I mean, if i’m dying, I’m gonna go but otherwise I’m gonna be working on myself, and i think it’s a very empowering thing to get experience and learn some of these herbs, learn some of these protocols. I just want people to not be fearful sickness you know, i think a lot of times even my why i told her i was like, “honey, you’re like freezing up” because you know, here’s my daughter vomiting and i’m running over there sprinting I want on the other side of the house but i’m sprinting over there with the trash can to give it to her because my wife was just kind of froze up and i was like, no you got You gotta get yourself out of this freeze response, don’t be afraid of this, we going to help her through it. I just want people listening to know that there so many good options and things that we’ve done for thousands of years period. We’re not talking crazy stuff here; these are not new inventions that we’re discussing. These are things that have been used traditionally in India and China, and other countries for forever. So these are things that are so powerful that i would say in the majority of cases, you are not going to need to hit as you mentioned like IV antibiotics. That’s on the extreme end of treatment. I think in most cases, these type of situations We are talking about will lead to that level of intervention.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So people Listening here, hopefully you have some strategies regarding acute situations of vomiting and diarrhea. Now why does one vomit over diarrhea? That’s a great question. I mean i would say the inflammation has to be stomach area upper intestinal tract, for vomiting to occur, and probably Information has to be more lower intestinal tract because once things have gone so far right. You just have natural gravities and two things downhill versus uphill. So i think a lot of that may depend upon where What inflammation is and how uh where all this toxic burden in the intestinal tract higher of i think on the vomiting side, Lower up in the diarrhea side. So either way i think you’re going to have similar root causes of why it is Happening and hopefully will give you a couple of ideas to kind of triage that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I would say certain infections just attack certain parts of the body. More certain infections are going to go more for the stomach, like each pylori you know you’re going Do you have more heartburn in digestion type symptoms. You are not going to have so much diarrhea necessarily Web h pylori wear something like giardia or crypto. Those are to me, going to be more intestinal based you are going to. Because those are intestinal parasites so you have More diarrhea so i think it depends on what you are dealing when too. And that’s why we will use some of the testing To if this becomes more chronic we will use the testing to kind of, guide us on what to do because if it is more tummy upset. We made you this set of blend but if it’s more colin we might go this set . So there’s kind of that’s that’s the reason we have a toolbox that’s the reason we have testing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like it. well if you guys are listening and you want to reach out Deeper you need some acute health or you want to You know get a long-term strategy 66 song on face chronic issues In your health see you free head over to evanbrand.com, Evan’s available worldwide for consultation support, and again I’m Dr. J justinhealth.com Is my site feel free there will be a little button, click in schedule we are available worldwide. Again we’ve been doing this for many many years many thousands of patients, of feedback, and support so kind of have learned over the years. I tell you, In school you develop a really good foundation. But then, In practice that is really where it gets you good because you see so many people, and you figure out what works and you develop the common themes and you can just rinse and repeat that over and over again.
Evan Brand: Yeah, getting your hands dirty, getting in the trenches. I mean it’s been a blessing for us you know, You and I learned so much from the people we work with. I mean More than probably any book or any course I mean it’s A real blessing to have like you said. Once you see the trend of people, it’s fun. It’s really fun to help people. It’s addicting. We love it.
Dr. Justin Marchagiani: 100%. Ok guys feel free to give us a share, thumbs up, like, put your comments down below. Let us know what you think and we’ll be back. Have a great day. Take care y’all. Evan Brand: Take care now bye bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-address-acute-tummy-or-stomach-upset-podcast-347
Recommended products:
Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile
International DSL GI MAP genetic stool test
How Your Iron Levels Are Negatively Affecting Your Health | Podcast #346
Iron is a mineral part of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that transports oxygen from the lungs and throughout the body.
Dr. J and Evan also discuss identifying underlying issues to deal with them effectively. You could be having digestive problems, menstruating for women, or you’re not eating the right foods to source iron or adequately absorb it. So if your body doesn’t have enough iron, it won’t get enough oxygen, and your cells (powered by oxygen) won’t function efficiently. Suppose you’re experiencing symptoms of iron deficiency.
In that case, Dr. J and Evan suggest consuming vitamin C to help increase iron absorption, eat iron-rich plant foods, and have yourself tested to have comprehensive test results and fix your health issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:19: What is iron deficiency and how to test it?
5:36: Iron-rich food template
10:04: Other issues to consider when dealing with iron deficiency
17:09: Iron deficiency in men
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are are live! It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today we’re going to talk about about iron levels and how can they negatively impact your health. Of course, we have two sides of the same coin here. We have high iron and low iron. And then, high irons going to be a bigger issue, right? Men don’t menstruate and women potentially, low iron is going to be a bigger issue because women menstruate every month at cycling; it’s a cycling age. Menopausal women, when their cycle tends to cease, then there could be more issues there. But out of the gates, women iron is going to be an issue. Most of the time if it’s hormonal issues and men’s going to be the opposite. We’re going to dive in and give you guys a crush course on both sides of the fence. Evan, how are you doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Doing well! Let’s jump right in. So looking at blood work. If you’re looking at a female, you and I test ferritin which we find conventional medical doctors rarely test ferritin. Ferritin being the iron storage protein and I did a whole video on Youtube. Those are my most popular videos ever on low ferritin and hair loss. We’ve seen how if your ferritin is let’s say 20, that’s far too low. You’re going to experience maybe some shortness of breath, major hair loss. If we can get the ferritine to 70, 80, or 90, women feel much better. Their hair stops falling out and they can catch their breath. So do you mind like, teasing a part when you’re looking at these labs, like total iron versus a ferritin. If you see a female with low total iron, are you really prioritizing that or are you after ferritin or are you going after both? How do you approach it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well the first thing that we look at with iron, we have to see how low it is.Okay? There’s func- I consider functionally low levels of iron. And um, and there could be um, you know more, I just say more acute levels of iron that are are more low. Right? We could have functional imbalances versus the more anemic that conventional medical doctors would say you’re low in iron. We have both side of the fence, right? We have the functional issues, and we have the pathological issues. So the first thing we look at is going to be a CBC, right? On the CBC we’re going to look at red blood cells, hemoglobin, and hematocrit. If we see those start to get low, especially red blood cells you’re going below 4, hemoglobin into the 11, hematocrit below 30s, we have problems. Danger will rob– the red blood cell size is dropping which is the hallmark of low iron. Because we need iron that attaches to hemoglobin that help us carry oxygen. So we have hypochromic microcytic anemia. These are going to be smaller red blood cells, right? Smaller blood cells are going to be on the iron side. On the B12 side, it’s actually the opposite; they’re actually bigger. It’s called megaloblastic anemia. They’re actually too big. The red blood cells are opposite. We think of humans, we start off as babies and as we get bigger right? Red blood cells, they start off bigger and they actually get smaller as they get older. And so, B12 is needed to mature. Red blood cells, and so if we don’t have enough B12, you’re stock in this more immature state which is bigger, and you don’t have enough B12 than you can’t get smaller. Now with the iron, it’s actually the opposite. You actually get too small when the iron is too low. And of course, you can’t carry oxygen which is really important because aerobic metabolism which is how we mostly generate energy requires oxygen. And so that’s like, you know partly the kreb cycle, the electron transport chain, and all that stuff um, requires oxygen. So on that front, just kind of out of the gates there, we’re looking at um, iron from that perspective. Red blood cells, CBC, hemoglobin, and then we can dive deeper into an actual iron panel. And that’s we’re going to look at serum iron, that’s going to look at iron in the blood. Then we can look at ferritin. It’d going to look at our storage form of iron. So iron serum and ferritin are two different things. So think of, You’re driving a car, right? You have your check engine,Or should say you have your gas gate, right, for your fuel, right. Your fuel gauge that’s kind of your ferritin. Are you on full are you an empty? The iron serum, that’s the fuel that’s in the– ready to be, ready to be um, combusted to generate energy. Think of iron serum, that’s what’s in the engine, that’s what’s in the blood right away. Ferritin is going to be what’s in the gas tank. So you know of course If you see iron low on the serum side, you wanna look deeper but it’s not beol or endol. You have to look deeper on what’s in the gas tank. That’s where iron serum um, sorry, that’s where ferritin will be more helpful and other markers like Iron saturation can be helpful too. Because that tells you how saturated the cells are, and also things like binding proteins. Um those tend to do the opposite, those tend to go up When iron goes um, goes down. So think about it, thinking about iron binding proteins is like fingers right. The more or hands right, the more hungry you are the more hands reaching out to grab stuff right. And so your body creates this protein and will try to reach out and grab these extra irons to create more binding proteins when iron is lower. It’s trying to get that much iron into the cells as possible. Does that make sense out of the gates?
Evan Brand: Yeah it’s a great breakdown. The analogy is super helpful. Because you know some of the blood chemistry training that you and I have looked at, some of the doctors, they will talk about the importance of ferritin. But that visualization of the gas tank Makes a whole lot of sense because you have doctors, if they do recognize low iron, they’ll treat that. But then if you see low ferritin, The woman still doesn’t have the results she’s looking for with regards to hair loss and catching her breath and all that. So once you get the ferritin levels up, Which typically I go for lactoferrin. What are you doing in terms of trying to get the ferritin back up? I know optimizing the gut is some of it, we can talk about that. But what about just straight supplements?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So first thing is you may see higher levels of iron in women that may have low iron. So you have to look at all the markers that I’ve mentioned because if they are inflamed, iron is also a reactive oxygen species right? Think of it as like It’s kind of inflammable if you will and so, and so when you are in inflamed because of poor food, poor diet issues, or toxicity issues, you may have higher levels of iron ferritin because of inflammation. If you’re really inflamed i always I like to make sure that it calm the inflammation down a little bit first before throw iron in there, it’s like gasoline in the fire. So you really want to make sure you know if iron’s really high or looks really high and then we see some inflammation markers like CRP also high, we see a lot of symptoms, right? Brain fog, joint pain, energy issues; Maybe we wait a little bit before we jump on that iron train right away. Maybe we just chew some iron rich foods, you know on the animal side and work on getting the inflammation down. So it depends upon where they’re at.
Evan Brand: That’s smart, let me comment on that real quick. That’s really smart and really wise to say, because people would just jump on that iron train right? Those doctors who prescribe iron probably low-quality form which is going create constipation and other problems. And if they are already having high iron Information due to some toxicity, that makes them worse. I had one high iron when I was first exposed to mold. I actually look back on some of my olde levels. My ferritin was high, my iron was high. And i did some pretty high potent seed turmeric extract, and i was able to get the iron back down. And i’m sure the blood donations may have helped too. But it was interesting to see that on paper, how my exposure to toxicity cranked that up a little bit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly and then There is a marker called Seruplasman Which is a marker for copper So sometimes copper and also affect iron as well. Again i’m not too worried of copper If you’re like Paleo and you’re eating high quality organic meat and high quality animal products. close your typically going to see the zinc and iron products cause you also have copper in there. So i don’t typically get worried about copper unless we’re really I don’t know, eating a lot of plant-based products. And we’re kind of deficient and some of those minerals, and so eating good quality animal products may not be that big of a deal. And also it’s good to look at if we’re doing iron, If someone is vegan or vegetarian, you know there’s different kinds of iron that we use right? So in my line, i have a product called vegan supreme which is an iron disglycente which is found in the glycine, which is good. It it’s better like conventional medicine which is ferrous sulfate which will be more constipating, leaving the stool black-er and darker. Glycinate tend to be pretty well absorbed so i like that in the glycine Which is same kind of amino acid and collagen and bone broth so i like that. Also, i would say depending on vegan vegetarian you may want to add some grass fed liver. Something like that that’s going to have some other nutrients like B12, vitamin A in there as well. Just depends upon how good or bad someone’s diet is too, if they can eat animal products. And so…
Evan Brand: How about lactoferrin? Do you use lactoferrin?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean lactoferrin it’s like it’s like a protein right? It’s gonna also… Yeah, it’s like a milk protein like it increases iron levels, kind of vitamin C in a senseWhere it increases that binding in absorption of iron, is that correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen like a couple of iron lactoferrin combos that we’ve used. Man, it’s like rocketfield to get women back up really quickly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah for me i don’t typically use lactoferrin in general. I’ll do my iron supreme which is the bisglycinate, And then i’ll throw in some potential iron granular Is there a not eating enough animal products (Evan: like a liver) Yeah, like a liver glandular and a little bit vitamin C on top of that. But um, don’t you know, I see a lot of guys out there. I see people say “Don’t eat vitamin c, it’s going to increase your iron.” No, if you’re a guy, eat vitamin C it’s not a problem. It’s in every leafy green vegetable, every high quality fruit that’s out there, it’s too Important. Guys the solution to iron is just give blood. Get a comprehensive blood test once or twice a year. Maybe give blood once a year um, twice a year depending on how many blood tests you get, just give blood is the solution. Don’t avoid nutrient dense food that have vitamin c that would increase your iron. Just give blood and do some testing. Keep it simple.
Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s the fun part. When you do comprehensive panels like we’re doing. I just donated a blood, got blood work this morning. I gave a lot of tubes. It was probably not much as a donation, it wasn’t a pint but for me, it was a good slow drip out of my system If i’m running some blood panels throughout the year. And you get data. You get data out of it too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s fun for sure So we talk about you know how to assess these are patterns right? We have our general cbc, we have Iron panel that will include Iron serum, ferritin, Iron saturation um, TIBC, UIBC, which are your similar binding proteins. You can also look up reticulocytes for baby red blood cells you’re losing blood. You’re gonna see a lot more red blood cells because the babies are being formed to kind of filling the gap of the older adult cells that were losing it; it there’s an ulcer or some kind of tummy bleed, IB you know, Irritable bowel disease kind of bleed in the intestines or colon or wherever. So that’s helpful to look at. And in general, you know, if you’re vegan, vegetarian, and you have a history of not getting iron in your body, you gotta fix that. That’s whole different podcast conversation about animal products. We’ll, you guys can go back to our channel, search for that, we had conversations, just on those topics. The second issue for women Is just to get rid of the hormonal Imbalances that are causing you to bleed too much. So if you are bleeding four more tampons, 4-2 days or more, probably just menstruating too much, you know classic cases of hemorrhagic if you will. And there’s probably a lot of estrogen dominance, way higher estrogen, lower levels of progesterone. Maybe progesterone is falling out soon in the cycle and some of the things are diving just excess bleeding and that’s possible too, and you gotta get to the root cause of why that is. Estrogen dominance usually some adrenal stress that affects some underlying issue that is causing that. And of course if you have a lot of digestive inflammation, whether in the stomach area or intestines, or lack of stomach acid, or enzyme you may not be able to break down the high-quality animal products that you’re consuming that could also create a bottleneck of absorption.
Evan Brand: Yeah when somebody here’s that, they might not realize how big of an impact that could be, right? When somebody here’s what you’re saying. It’s like “oh this gut Ingestion, digestion blah blah blah” But we’ve seen it on paper and clinically Where you have women that are eating paleo, doing breastfed meet, doing a great job with diet, and they’re still very low. Some of it like you said high you know, the excess menstruation but, i’ll tell you personally i’ve seen big changes with my wife’s energy levels after clearing her gut infections out. And we knew that she was having malabsorption. So, and so I mean when your 40 50 or 60 and beyond, you are making Left stomach acid due to age even if you’re eating that grass fed steak, and that liver capsule, who knows how much you’re getting from that. So to me, i think enzymes will be part of a good Iron supporting protocol because you know, people will say you are what you eat. But really, you are what you digest from what you eat. So i think This is a good point to bring up enzymes and acids to make sure that if you have H.Pylori Infection that could be something to address, that will be driving the low iron. Is that a safe statement to say? Is h pylori that big of a smoking gun, that it could drive blow iron due to the malabsorption?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, i mean there’s always you know. There’s always going to be different degrees of how that infection is causing a stress in your body. If it’s there, it’s chronic, it’s creating a lot of inflammation, digestive wise enzymes have dropped significantly. That may impair your ability to absorb usually there is going to be symptoms that will tell you the severity you know, just things like not having a good bowel movement, having a lot of bloating, or gassing, or flatulence, and gut inflammation, those are pretty good signs there’s stress going on there. Um, looking at your stools, how formed do they look, are you regular, are there undigested stool pieces in your stool? Those are all pretty good ideas that you’re on a bad track. So it’s good to look at that. Of course if you have chronic iron, and you’re fixing menstruation issues, you’re eating meat, you’re adding in Digestive support that’s all great. You probably want to look deeper and get your got tested and see if there are other bugs in your gut like SIBO, or just general dysbiosis, or parasites or h.pylori, or other issues that could be in place. You gotta look at all of it.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And you mention the inflammation I mean. That could be exposure, that could be the diet, it’s simple. It sound simple but It’s still worth mentioning. We still have so many women that are going to the starbucks drive-thru and getting a pastry, a bagel or a muffin, or whenever, and they have their coffee and that’s it. That’s it for their breakfast and they wonder why they are exhausted. I mean nutrient density is just foundational.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, nutrient density is really important and um, to really have good nutrient density You have to be eating some level of animal products. You’re just not going to get same level of nutrient density from an amino acids standpoint. You’re not going to get the iron, the b12. It’s harder to get the fat soluble vitamin A, I mean you can get some from b12, I mean some from beta-carotene but, you won’t get enough. And if you have insulin resistance, you won’t convert b12, you won’t convert beta-carotene well. You also won’t convert a lot of your ALA-based omega 3. It’s like flax and Chia. You won’t convert that to your longer chain EPA and Your DHEA fats which are good for inflammation in your brain. There’s a lot of precursor things that We just assume like “Oh, we’re getting iron from spinach. I’m going to convert that non-heme iron to non-heme based iron right.” No, I’m getting enough bioflavonoids In my vegetables that are vitamin A right? Well, no. That’s beta-carotene you may not convert that. Or same thing with um, i’m trying to think here what other analogies that you can do. So You have the plant-based iron, you have beta-carotene stuff, you have the vitamin, I’m trying to thank you for what else um, zinc and a lot of your minerals may be tied up in antinutrient plants. You might think you’re getting a lot of this vitamins and minerals but you may be having them tied up with a lot of antinutrients – the lectins, fitates, the mineral blockers, the trypsin inhibitors, and so you might think you’re getting some of these things on the nutrient label but, there might be some absorptions because of this nutrient blockers. Proteolytic enzyme blockers.
Evan Brand: That’s a good point. So far vegetarians-vegans listening, if you could get them on liver capsules, you’d say get them on some pastured liver would be a great option. If their opposed to that even, I mean what do you do? I’ve seen women from paper suffered for years, and I honestly just used the labs as justification to push them harder into something like liver capsules if they just absolutely don’t wanna do the meat.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah liver capsules or going to be ideal That’s where i put my iron supreme which is a ferrous-glycinate, and add in some amino acids like collagen and some kind of free form amino acid to get the protein of without antinutrients and carbs in there as well ‘cause a lot of vegan vegetarian proteins, they’re just very carb heavy right? Rice and beans, quinoa, they’re just you know, they’re just 60, 80% carbohydrate for the protein to get in. So it’s hard if you need to keep your carbs down for insulin, For inflammation or fat burning means it’s hard to do that If you try to stick to a vegan vegetarian diet I need you can do that if you’re adding some protein or rice protein but then, you’re heavily reliant on processed food for most of your protein. And that’s not great so we don’t want to have things to be so processed, like we have to be overly reliant. It probably tells us that your diet needs to be tweaked and adjusted if you’re heavily reliant on processed food to get your nutrients up.
Evan Brand: Yep. Well said. So men definitely get your iron tested too I mean females are probably gonna be more symptomatic than men, meaning, the fatigue, the hair loss-that kind of thing with the low iron. But man, you can have symptoms from that. I will tell you i’ve had, when i went to donate blood, I found my hemoglobin was very high. They’ll cut you off by 20 It’s above 20. You have to get a prescription to donate blood, and then back at the therapeutic blood donation but I would like a 19.6. I felt like I was going to be mentally foggy, mentally cloudy and certainly more brain fog, and I would say my energy levels were a little bit less. And I ask some of the donation people like, “What would you think i will experience based on this level of hemoglobin?” They were like “Oh, man you’re high.” And I go like, “Ok, what should I feel like?” And they actually said exactly what I felt. They thought you would feel cloudy and then I would remember this feeling when donating a pint, boom! It was like this release. Like literally almost like an energy drink after I got that excess iron out. So i tell you, it’s very very therapeutic.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and again iron is going to cause oxidative stress. So if you’re a male, and you are over accumulating iron you know, give blood. Get some therapeutic functional tests doneSo you’re actually losing blood via the testing means. And make sure that you know, taking in a really good high antioxidants you know, through organic vegetables, maybe low sugar fruit. Because at least the antioxidants that you’re getting in will help at least buffer the oxidative stress from the iron right? So at least you want to make sure Antioxidant levels from fruits and vegetables Are dialed in and we’re getting healthy. You know antioxidants and maybe through curcumin or other high quality nutrients that help buffer some of that, help offset some of it.
Even Brand: Yeah yeah cool well If you want to get tested uh, Dr Justin able to run blood work, I’m able to run blood work, we do it around the world which is pretty cool; I guess, technically blood work that we do In the United States. Little tricky internationally for blood work (Dr. J: It’s still better but it’s harder), yeah it is harder but for the other, for the functional testing which you can do functional blood testing and that’s what we do. Our panels are much more comprehensive than what you’re going to get down the street from your doctor. So if you need help you can you can reach out And just please let us know If you have trouble a lot of time people are begging their physicians to run a comprehensive fire oide panel, run the antibody, to run the ferritin, you shouldn’t have to beg someone to get these markers done. This is very simple we can literally get your requisition form the same day. You go straight to the lab, you don’t have to beg somebody to run it. So if you need help, please reach out to Dr. J justinhealth.com or me Evan Brand evanbrand.com. We would love to help you with this and other related things too. Whether it’s gut Infections we need to look for Four sources of inflammation driving this. There’s probably some root cause It’s not just magically going to happen like this. There’s probably a couple others– you know, It’s an entangled spider web If you will. So we’re going to kind of tease that. We love doing that; it’s very rewarding when you see a woman who is buying all these hair loss control shampoos and these special products and their get sucked in into by their hair salon, and they just simply needed to optimize their ferritin levels.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah if your iron levels are low, It can impact your thyroid. If your iron levels are low, it can impact your adrenals because you need high quality you need to carry oxygen to be able to um, you have aerobic metabolism, you need to carry oxygen to have good thyroid function. If you don’t have good thyroid hormones Important for stimulating hair to grow, and of course if you’re not breaking down your protein, and or iron you’re not going to be absorbing all the proteins and facts to build up your hair to make our hair healthy. So all those things can play a major role. So guys get blood, get some testing done. Women, make sure people in general, women especially make sure you’re eating high quality animal products or at least something right. Maybe eat some egg yolk. Maybe eat some liver capsules. Just try to do something that ‘s going to meet the middle of it. And then outside of that, get tested as well, and if you’re female and you’re bleeding, you gotta look at the estrogen dominance, and you gotta look at the progesterone. Conventional medicine is just going to throw birth control pills at you and that’s not going to fix the issue. It’s actually going to compound and make the problem worse because estrogen pills can lower B vitamins-B-12, and Folate, and calcium. It can lower other nutrients and it actually makes your estrogen dominance worse right. It’s giving you more estrogen; giving you a consistent level which is better you know, having the up and down but, it’s not fixing all of the hormonal imbalances; Just covering things up. So If you want to get to the root cause, reach out to Evan Brand evanbrand.com or myself Dr. J at justinhealth.com, we’re here to help.
Evan Brand: Amen! You did a great job. I think we killed it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright. Excellent. By the way, what are my ranges, uh, ferritin 30-40 enough for women, uhm, men you know 60-80sh i think pretty good for that, iron saturation 25 and up. And i think it’s a pretty good kind of starting point there. Maybe binding proteins below 300 that’s a pretty good thing out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah, i had a woman with a ferritin level of 6 She can hardly get up a flight of stairs because she was so short out of breath, her hair was falling out In clumps, her husband is mad at her because she was clogging the shower all the time. Once we got her ferritin back up to the 50s, her hair stopped falling out. She felt so much better. She can run of the stair without passing out. I mean, it was just incredible so don’t underestimate this. I know you guys listen to us on a regular basis. Even some clients they tell us they listen to us while going to sleep. Don’t sleep on this issue. This is something you really got to address.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s an important issue for sure. And for guys, with low iron yeah, vegetarian-vegan, make sure you’re not doing that. Vegetarian vegan, look at the gut. You are probably not absorbing or digesting or breaking It down. Get the gut, look deeper. All right Evan, have a phenomenal day, man! Great chatting with you!
Evan Brand: Take care now you too.
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