How to Get Your Energy Back Post-Infection | Podcast #365
When people start to feel better after an infection, it is often tempting to return to previous levels of work, leisure, and social activities. However, too soon, trying to do too much can often be counter-productive. It is easy to get caught up in a ‘boom and bust cycle of activity that can prolong your recovery.
Dr. J and Evan discuss that if fatigue and other symptoms persist, it’s important to remember to allow yourself time to recuperate by finding the right balance of rest, relaxation, and activity for your circumstances. It is essential to listen to your body and gradually build a physical and emotional recovery plan that can help you get back to your life and stay on track without experiencing too many setbacks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
5:11 – The essential vitamins to boost your immune system
10:12 – What is the goal of the Krebs Cycle?
14:06 – Mitochondria and microbiota dysfunction in viral pathogens;
17:12 – The role of mitochondria, oxidative stress, and the response to antioxidants in chronic fatigue
20:08 – The neurotransmitters from amino acids and tryptophan pathways in B6 deficiency
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: With Evan Brand, really excited today. We’re gonna have a nice conversation on how to get your energy back post-infection. This is the topic that we’ve been getting a lot from our patients and again a lot of our inspired podcasts and videos come from real life clinical work with patients. So, we’re excited to bring you the real-life actionable information here to improve your health. Evan, how you doing today man? What’s cooking?
Evan Brand: Hey. Doing pretty well, uh, cooked some bacon this morning and that was about it with some organic blueberries and so I’m feeling good. my brain is clear and I look forward to helping people on this energy conversation, you know, so many people have chronic fatigue post-infection and they’re not fully bouncing back and so, I think that there are some easy low hanging fruit strategies that we can talk about but I’m just gonna jump straight to the big smoking gun which is looking at your mitochondria. We’re seeing a lot of issues with mitochondrial dysfunction or mitochondrial damage. I’m also seeing issues with neurotransmitters. So, I think, if you are to pick one and only one functional medicine test to look at to investigate yourself after this infection and fatigue, it would be the organic acids because you can get a great window into not only your gut health. We know that with infections, it does damage the gut, we know that there are ACE2 receptors in the gut so people that are ending up with irritable bowel or diarrhea or other problems during and post infection, we can look at that. A stool might be smart too but if you had to start with only one thing maybe the window into your gut via urine organic acids would be good enough. But more importantly, I want to see what the heck is going on with mitochondria and what kind of damage do we have because once you have the data then you can put together a protocol to fix it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% agree. So, we know with chronic inflammation, especially like, post-viral inflammation. We know one of the biggest drivers is gonna be oxidative stress, right? So, oxidation is nothing more than your body losing electrons, right? And one of the big things that helps oxidation within any type of infection pre, ideally, we’re doing these things pre to mitigate al of the oxidative stress that’s happening at the mitochondrial level but simple low hanging fruit, out of the gates, is gonna be glutathione, vitamin C, these are really powerful antioxidants. Vitamin D even kind of fits in that category, right? Your big antioxidants are ADEK, um, I’m sorry, no, those are your fat-soluble vitamins but E is gonna be an antioxidant A is gonna be an antioxidant, right? I would even say E and K would for sure but your B and C are gonna be your water-soluble kind of more antioxidants for sure but the big are gonna plug in, you know, post-viral oxidative stress and/or pre is glutathione and vitamin C, out of the gates. And we can also look at low-hanging fruit on the mitochondrial side, which plugs into the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain is gonna be B1, which is thiamine. I would say B vitamins as a whole was great but B1 has a major, major role and I’d even say B5, as well, pantothenic acid. So, you have thiamine, B1, right? You have Riboflavin, B2. You have niacin, B3; Pantothenic acid, B5; Pyridoxine, B6; biotin, B7; folate, B9; B12 is your methylcobalamin or hydroxyl or adenosine. And so, we’re talking B1 and B5 are gonna be big when it comes to post-viral fatigue. Those are really, really important nutrients that we can add in out of the gates and, why it’s all of this oxidative stress that’s happening when this infection is present. And so, the more you can do things like hydrate, keep inflammatory foods down like the excess Omega-6 fatty acids, um, keep the carbohydrate and the sugar in check, right? That’s gonna play a major, major role in not adding fuel to the fire if you will as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and you can do oral glutathione. So, we have a combination product, which is an acetylated glutathione along with an acetylcysteine. So, you can give your body the nutrients to make more. You can give the precursors but then you can also take just straight glutathione. There are some liposomal versions. There’s reduced glutathione. There’s a nebulizer version that you can take so you can inhale glutathione if you feel that there was some lung involvement. You may consider doing both. I personally did both. I did oral and I continued to do oral glutathione daily and then, also, during the acute situation, nebulized glutathione with silver. And then, you mentioned B vitamins and you can measure all this, right? So that’s the important thing is, you know, you’re shouting out all these different names but people can look at this, right? We can look at this on organic acids. We can look at the various B6, B12. You can’t look at every single nutrient in the body but you can look at a ton of nutrients from one urine sample. So, it’s pretty awesome. And then, vitamin C, believe it or not, we’re seeing a lot of issues with viral infection and acute scurvy, which is pretty interesting. If you just put it some of this data and scurvy into the research, I guess, it’s due to the oxidative stress. It’s happening quickly and every single person I’m seeing post-infection is showing low vitamin C. So, we’re just keeping people on 2 to 3 grams every day. We’re doing a powdered version with a mixed ascorbate. So, you probably don’t want to do just straight ascorbic acid and you probably wanna do like a sodium ascorbate, magnesium ascorbate, if you can get some citrus bioflavonoids in there too and just take it ongoing. Don’t wait until you’re sick. We, as a family, we just take vitamin C ongoing because we know it’s important for the health of your capillaries and all that. Can you speak on that for a minute? Like vitamin C and skin and collagen, I mean there’s a role in other things. People think vitamin C, immune, but there’s other benefits to see, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Vitamin C plugs into making collagen, which is all of the connective tissue for your skin, uh, hair, you know, cartilage, vitamin C is really important for that. Vitamin C is a very similar molecular structure as glucose, right? Don’t quote me but it’s similar to I think C6H12O6 or O8, it’s right in that molecular area, looks very similar. So, what does that mean? That means, vitamin C has a docking site on the macrophage that actually goes and gobbles up bacteria and potential viruses and it’s gonna use that vitamin C that docks onto that macrophage to deal with the oxidation. So, I kind of think of it as like a firefighter going into a house and the vitamin C is like that fire fighter bringing that hose to squelch that fire, to squelch it, right? That’s kind of what I see vitamin C as, right? And, it’s almost like with the macrophage, it has a docking site and that glucose can actually come in there because it looks very molecularly similar to vitamin C and it can almost dock on that receptor site on that macrophage and take that vitamin C where to be used. It’s almost like giving the fire fighter a water hose, taking the water hose out and giving him a gas hose and he doesn’t even know. It’s almost like that and that’s why glucose and high levels of glucose and when it comes to a lot of these post-viral illnesses, you’re gonna see people that have very high levels of blood sugar, insulin resistance and even the extreme on the diabetes side are gonna have most of the side effects of most of the issues partly because of the oxidative stress, partly because of poor levels, you know, when you have insulin resistance that’s gonna affect oxygenation, right? Because, you’re not gonna have good blood flow and when you have poor blood flow and poor oxygenation, we need oxygen to plug into that mitochondria as well. It’s part of, you know, the key nutrients, right? We talked about B vitamins, B1, B5, very important to plug into the Krebs cycle. Well, guess what, when you have a high level of blood glucose and you’re on that pre-diabetic to diabetic side, right, 110 to 126mg/dl on the blood glucose side, your body has to process that and if you just go pull up, you know mitochondria, Krebs cycle and nutrients, right, you’re gonna see all the nutrients that are involved in that Krebs cycle to process that glucose because how it works in the Krebs cycle, everything gets funneled down to acetyl CoA, right? So, you have glucose comes to acetyl CoA, fatty acids come to acetyl CoA, they can also go this way into ketones and then you have protein coming down to acetyl CoA. Acetyl CoA pumps around the Krebs cycle twice and if you look, there’s gonna be nutrients that have to come in there to help that acetyl CoA to come around and a lot of those nutrients are gonna be B vitamins, magnesium, amino acids and so, if you’re coming in with lots of glucose and you’re not bringing in a lot of nutrients to funnel down to the acetyl CoA side, you’re gonna run that Krebs cycle twice and you’re gonna be using more B vitamins than you’re coming in. So, you can actually create a lot of nutrient deficiencies and oxidative stress when you consume a lot more glucose because it’s a transaction fee for your body to process energetically.
Evan Brand: Nice. Nice. That’s a great way to put it. And, the truth is people are coming into this infection with nutrient deficiencies already due to bacterial overgrowth problems, Candida problems, maybe post-antibiotic therapy, you know, they have issues with the gut now and they’re not making enough of their nutrients in their gut. And so, a lot of people will just depend on diet and they’ll simply, well, can I just get enough on diet, can I just eat liver and grass-fed steak and all that and get enough nutrients from that and I’ll say, look I’ve tested and I know, you have too. Over a thousand people and many of those people were already dialed in with their diet for years before they got to us. Paleo, carnivore, autoimmune, paleo, we’ve had people that have been doing an incredibly job with nutrient density and they still show up with nutrient deficiencies and so I would love if everyone could just eat their way out of this situation but I just think with the modern stress that we’re under we’re dumping a lot of those Bs. You’re mentioning all these that are fueling this cycle. We’re so depleted and burned out emotionally, physically, chemically, we’re exposed to toxins. We’re just not living in Paleo time, so Paleo, you can’t just like paleo your way out of this and you know, that’s why I used to call my podcast years ago ‘Not just Paleo’ and then I got rid of it, just call it Evan Brand now but, um, that was my whole thought at the beginning. It was like, man, if everybody could just eat their way out this and get enough Bs in the diet then you and I wouldn’t be needed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Let me just kind of break this down for people just so they can get a better understanding of what’s happening here. So, when we have oxidative stress, oxidative stresses, we’re losing electrons. What’s the whole goal of the Krebs Cycle? The whole goal of the Krebs cycle is essentially gathering up electrons. Okay, so, you have fats like I mentioned before, they’re all funneling down to Acetyl-CoA. Proteins all funneling down to acetyl-CoA, right? Then you can see on the carbohydrate side like I mentioned, look at a lot of the nutrients that are involved in funneling the carbohydrates down to acetyl-CoA, different B vitamins, okay?
Evan Brand: Zoom in so,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: B1, B2, B3, magnesium, all play really important roles and then look at the carbohydrates, look at the amino acids that are involved. Cysteine, that’s a major precursor of glutathione, serine, really important for stress. Glycine, that’s your major amino acid in collagen, right? This is why, when you’re stressed and you’re sick, it’s why your grandma tells you to have chicken soup, right, especially with the whole bone in there because you’re getting a lot of these amino acids in a liquid form. So, if your tummy doesn’t feel good and you’re nauseous, right, because the infections tend to really cause nausea because your energy is going to fight an infection versus digestion. So, it’s trying to shut that down. That’s why your grandma said chicken soup, right? Ideally, we keep the noodles out now. Now, look at the fats, right, look at where the fats can go so the fats go down to acetyl-CoA but it can also go and create these ketones, right. This is beta-hydroxybutyrate. This is a ketone, okay? Now, really important here. So, we have this acetyl-CoA, right, this is kind of our energy currency that everything gets converted from our three major macronutrients, fats, carbs and proteins. And again, if you’re listening at home, there’s a video version of this of me going through it. I know, it’s a little confusing but I’m going to try to make, break it down. Acetyl-CoA comes around this citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle. It’s the same thing. It goes around twice, okay? And you can see GSH that stands for glutathione. Fe stands for Iron. So, if you’re a female and you’re very low iron or you’re anemic or vegetarian vegan, that could be a problem.
Evan Brand: So, let me pause there, really quick, because I want to point out something. You’re showing here on this cycle that you’ve got to have not only glutathione but you’ve got to have iron so you gave a shout out to the anemic women and what I want to point out is that the women that came into this infection, anemic, which is extremely common. Women have hormonal imbalances. It’s an epidemic problem so many women have heavy periods or maybe post childbirth, their period was screwed up and they’re having heavy menstruation. So, they’re coming into this anemic or they’re coming into this with low ferritin and then that’s compounded by maybe a mold exposure where now they have low glutathione levels. The way you’re showing this cycle here, if you come in with low iron and low glutathione, you’re in big trouble.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re in big trouble. And, women are more predisposed because if they have hormonal imbalances, guess what happens to their period, they get heavier. Heavier period, they’re just gonna lose that iron. Now, men on the other side, men have it, you know, they can have increased iron. They can cause oxidative stress because iron is like, you know can be like gasoline on the fire if it does get too high, right? But you can see glutathione, iron, you can see B vitamins, you can see magnesium, you can even see manganese here and you can see different B vitamins. And, what they do is you’re creating NAD and FADH and they’re grabbing hydrogen, they’re grabbing electrons, okay? So, typically comes around here twice and you get usually two NADHs and one FADH2 per cycle and then essentially all of these things will jump into the electron transport chain next. If I could find that section here, but the electron transport chain is the next big step for that kind of gathers nutrients but for really, for today’s talk, this is the really most important thing and then just kind of highlight, you can see some of these toxins over here that come in, right? You can see fluoride, Hg is Mercury, As is gonna be, uh, arsenic, Al is gonna be aluminum. So, you can see some of these toxins, how they can kind of come in there and sabotage some of these things. And, to kind of highlight one thing, this is an article we saw here. Mitochondria and Microbiota dysfunction with post-viral issues, you can see how the gut microbiome also plays a certain role and why is that? Well, I think, because 80% of the immune is in the gut so if you have a pathogenic or dysbiotic microbiome, it’s gonna affect toxins being produced, right? It’s gonna put you right here in a hyperinflammatory state, right? We already have a lot more cytokines being produced if we have an illness and so we have to be able to calm down our immune system’s inflammation to what’s happening from an immune stress standpoint. And so, the microbiome plays a big role, iron dysregulation, reactive oxygen species, right? Vitamin C plays a major role here. Vitamin, uh, glutathione plays a major role there as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, right there, look at that one, the mitochondrial, the heightened inflammatory oxidative state may lead to mitochondrial dysfunction and so this is what we’re seeing on paper. We’re seeing this in the stool test. We’re seeing this in the organic acid test, this issue with the gut with the mitochondria.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. It talks about platelet damage too which is important because what do platelets do, those are your clotting factors. And so, if we can have increased coagulation cascades, that means more clotting, right? And, you can see more clotting events, more thrombosis is that’s a blood clot, right? And so, you can see furthermore, mitochondrial oxidative just make, may contribute to microbiota dysbiosis altering coagulation and fueling inflammatory oxidative response leading to vicious cycles of events. So, this is really important and so things that we can do to be on top of the fatigue is gonna be the same things that we can do to help mitigate a lot of the inflammation. That’s gonna be keeping blood sugar in check, adding in some of these additional B vitamins, um, adding in anti-inflammatory anticoagulants. What do those look like? That could be ginger. That could be curcumin, which has anti-inflammatory and anticoagulation effects. That could be adding some extra Cod liver oil that has more vitamin A in it, which is a really powerful antioxidant but it also has natural blood thinning aspects because of the extra omega-3s in there. So, there’s different things we can do to really help reduce a lot of that inflammation. Any comments on that, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah. On the more intense side of supporting hypercoagulability, lumbrokinase is gonna be your most powerful. That’s your earthworm-based enzyme, which is just a cool, cool thing. Natto, there’s also serratiopeptidase, so there are other enzymes that you can use and I personally take those. I take lumbrokinase, one per day just ongoing and it’s been very helpful. I also did a podcast with Dr. Thomas Levy, all about vitamin C IV and he’s got some dark field microscopy photos of people that we’re having blood clotting issues and the vitamin C along with ozone and IV was like a game changer and vitamin C can help energy too, so I don’t want to get too deep in the rabbit hole of blood clots but we’ll just say that the vitamin C is helpful for energy also.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I want to show you guys one other journal article here, role of mitochondrial oxidative stress and antioxidants when it comes to chronic fatigue and so one kind of thing here, it talks about the known role of oxidative stress and how it can relate to essentially fatigue, as well as, potential, uh, specific therapeutic treatments for the mitochondria so that’s really powerful. And, you know, here are some of the big things, they’re gonna talk about vitamin C, talk about B vitamins, talk about glutathione and then also some of the more natural anti-inflammatory things but you know, each study is going to find out focus on a couple of their major things but, people in the literature are looking at these things. It is real and, um, we’re seeing it in our patients and we’re trying to apply some of these things to get people’s health back.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So, the way you look at this is what you can do to protect against oxidative stress, we covered that glutathione. What can we do to help support the Krebs cycle? We talked about B vitamins. You’ve also got just things that are gonna help the mitochondria in general, like CoQ10 and then also you can do things like PQQ and there’s other nutrients that actually create what’s called mitochondrial biogenesis where you can literally make new mitochondria. And so, I don’t think it’s in that paper, it does mention CoQ10 there but
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right here in the mitochondria, there are enzymes and coenzymes such as vitamin E, CoQ10 to remove ROS, that’s reactive oxygen species to prevent DNA damage. So, these are really powerful things that we can add in. For example, low CoQ10, they’ll see an increase in damage, so Coq10, PQQ, you know pyro quinolone, right? Vitamin E, and then, you know, we try to give Coq10 with vitamin E together for that same reason to prevent a lot of the oxidative stress while fueling the mitochondria. Any comments on that?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Look at the next part there too, talking about exercise. People that come in with chronic fatigue and how they’re having an increased oxidative stress after exercise and that’s a problem that we’re seeing a lot too is people that now are having, uh, post-exertional fatigue, people that are crashing. Even athletes that were really high performing people that now their performance is just in the tank and a lot of that is just this ongoing oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage that’s not, that’s not been supported and you can’t just exercise your way out of this and I get kind of annoyed when I see like those motivational videos of people that are really sweaty like you just nee to suck it up, you know, pain is weakness leaving the body. It’s like, no, you’re wrong, you got to fix the mitochondrial damage. I hate those like raw-raw videos because it’s ignoring all the nutrients. That video really needs to be talking about, hey get your glutathione up, get your ribose up, get your CoQ10 up, come on people, like that’s what he used to say.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this is a similar marker that we use on the organic acid test, the one that we use 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, this is very, very similar to that. But this is a marker for oxidative stress so we’ll actually use the same marker on a, um, on a mitochondrial test on the organic acid. So, we’ll look at some of these things to get a window of how stress these pathways are so that’s very powerful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Ribose is amazing. Carnitine is amazing. Acetyl-L-carnitine is amazing. Also, you know, let’s hit the, let’s go up a little bit like that picture there was a like a neurotransmitter picture there that you had. Maybe, we should talk about that a little bit because it’s not directly gonna be a mitochondrial support, yeah, right there, but I think, that’s cool to point out too, which is that, if we’re coming in with nutrients like phenylalanine or tyrosine, eventually some of that may convert over to your neurotransmitters but then also your adrenal hormones like epinephrine and I think a lot of people and I know you see this too, a lot of people are showing up with just low brain chemistry across the board. And so, I’m thinking out loud with you that like, the real magic remedy is the mitochondrial support plus throwing in some of these neurotransmitter supports as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, that’s why we talked about B vitamins and I kind of went to the gamut, look how important B6 is in regarding the synthesis of tryptophan to serotonin, really important so you can see how B6 deficiency is really important in this process to convert this inflammatory product here, quinolinic acid, uh, back to tryptophan, it needs B6 or to avoid that whole thing it needs B6 so that’s really important. So, B6 is really important in the synthesis of amino acid tryptophan to serotonin, very important.
Evan Brand: And so, vegetarians, vegans, obviously, you’re gonna be at increased risk of issues and your recovery is not gonna be as good as someone who’s getting these good animal proteins because you’re gonna be getting adequate tryptophan and other nutrients from your animal-based products. So, even if we could get these people on eggs, if we could get these people on organ capsules, if we could get these people on even like a protein like, I’ve got one we call carnivore collagen, which is a like a beef peptide, I mean something you gotta supplement at some level if you’re not eating those foods. So, please, if you’re a vegetarian vegan and you’re exhausted then look at some of this and hopefully we can convince you to change and improve your diet a bit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think that’s really important. I want to see if there’s anything else here, I want to highlight now because that’s enough, that’s powerful enough. Anything else, you wanted to highlight there?
Evan Brand: Well, we hit the urine, we hit the stool. Looking at the gut, you showed the study about the gut changing, we’ve seen that, I mean, you and I were talking about that march of 2020, I mean that was 2 years ago. We were talking about being affected. And so, obviously, our message is the same that it’s always been is get your stool looked at so we can see what kind of dysbiosis do you have going on because if you’re taking all these supplements, you’re doing all these foods but you’ve got malabsorption or you’ve got gut inflammation. You’re not gonna, you know, people say you are what you eat but you really what you digest from what you eat. So, if you have all these other issues in your gut, the grass-fed steak is not gonna be as valuable to you. Now, I’m not saying stop eating it, I’m saying still eat it but we’ve got to improve the digestion and assimilation of that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110%. And one thing here, I just want to highlight here, just to kind of this article, it’s talking about mitochondrial function in infections in the gut because we’re trying to talk about mitochondrial and energy post-illness, that could be a viral illness, it could also be a gut illness, right? Because, it’s talking right here, even virus dedicated virulence factors and talks about downstream of an infection. It’s fascinating that a plethora of immune responses but, uh, be it against viruses, bacteria or LPS. LPS is lipopolysaccharides or endotoxin, this can come from H. pylori, this can come from SIBO, or dysbiotic bacteria and they strongly impact tht mitochondria which is really, really important because they’re toxic, they kind of throw a monkey wrench in how the FADH and the NAD is kind of moving around the Krebs cycle, collecting hydrogens and then bringing into electron transport chain. It talks about, um, governed by the mitochondria can be translated into active therapeutics to boost immunity against pathogens to over immune responses under control in the case of inflammatory disorders. So, essentially, the more you have these infections there, the more inflammation your immune system creates that can actually impact your mitochondria. Again, when you have a lot of these illnesses, it’s not just the stress from the illness, it’s the immune response from your own immune system that creates inflammation that can actually disrupt your energy pathway. So, sometimes, you’re just fighting against yourself. And so, using nutrients to help modulate the immune response i.e., glutathione, Vitamin D, vitamin C, right, really important nutrients there. I’d also say, you can do things like curcumin, or resveratrol as well. You can have immune modulating effects. These are powerful. So, it’s good to kind of get your immune system in check. Most people that are having longer term, we call it kind of long haulers type issue. It’s typically their immune system has over responded and it’s just creating so much inflammation. So here, this illness, they’re no longer testing positive for whatever this illness is and they’re prolonged 2 to 3 months out and they’re feeling like crap still, it’s because they really didn’t get their immune system’s inflammatory cascade in check afterwards.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. So, a couple comments. Number one, you can improve your energy by simply fixing your gut and that’s exactly what that data is showing and that’s exactly what you and I have seen and done clinically, hundreds and hundreds of times. People that were exhausted coming in, we give them a gut protocol, sometimes, not even giving them energy supplements because on paper they look good and all of a sudden, their energy level doubles and all we did is fix their gut so that’s the number one comment. And then number two comment is that, people need to stop waiting for some illness like this to take them down before they take this stuff serious. I mean, you and I are all about preventative approaches meaning getting your mitochondria, you gut, your brain chemistry getting all that stuff optimized now so that you’re a warrior on a daily basis so that when you do come across something like this and there probably will be more things like this that you do to get exposed to, you’re ready and you’re able to handle it and you’re not coming in so sick and looking for this emergency therapy at the end stage, it’s, in some cases, it’s too late. I think, a lot of times you can turn it around but you should have been working on your health years ago before you got this stage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And a lot of it is, you know, anytime you have some type of illness coming up, the more you can be on top of a lot of these key immune modulating anti-inflammatory nutrients ahead of time and or during versus coming in at the end when the inflammation is super high. It’s like coming in when the fire is a little baby fire and knocking it out versus having a full five alarm and trying to stop it, right? That’s kind of the analogy. So, I always recommend telling people have a couple of nutrients. You may not be taking it everyday but they may in your medicine cabinet is kind of like a, um, you know, last ditch kind of effort to kind of come in there if you start to feel a little bit ill so on my line, we have Immune Supreme, which is nice because you have some green tea in there, you have some echinacea, you have some medicinal mushrooms, you have some antioxidants and some immune modulators, that’s kind of cool. Have that in your medicine cabinet. You start to feel the tiniest thing, start taking that to get that immune system, obviously, you can ratchet up, vitamin D, vitamin C. These are easy first line things, if you have any NAC or glutathione, we can ratchet that up. These are easy things that we can do to kind of take charge of our health and prevent our immune system from throwing us off.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. And, if you need help clinically, we do offer one-on-one consults around the world with people so we’re very blessed to be able to help so many people by getting the proper testing done, making the proper protocol to get you better. So, if you don’t test, you guess, you got to see what you’re up against first, look at your Bs, look at your gut, you know, once we get the data, we can help you more accurately and you’re gonna save a lot more money, a lot more time and a lot more suffering and you’re gonna get out of the dumps out of the trenches, out of the depths of hell, depression, whatever you’re dealing with. You’re gonna get out of that faster if you’re using clinical data and you have a tour guide to your body. So, if you need help clinically, you can reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com for consults worldwide or me, Evan Brand at evanbrand.com and we’re here for you guys. So, we look forward to helping you out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I appreciate it. Yeah. Anyone that wants to reach out, Evan already gave you the links, really appreciate it. Comments down below, I really appreciate your feedback on that and also, we’ll put links down below with some products that we chatted about. We have different ones that we recommend in our line. Just wherever you go, make sure you get them from a professional grade company because raw material does matter in the supplement world. You can buy, you know, the equivalent of the grass-fed steak from the local farmer or you can get it from McDonald’s, right? And so, we want to get the high-quality raw material that’s tested to make sure there’s no impurities and just building blocks are excellent. Evan, excellent chatting with you man, really appreciate it. Guys, um, have an awesome week and we’ll talk soon. Take care you all.
Evan Brand: Take care, now. Bye-Bye.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
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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:
The Gut Lung Connection – Your Gut Health Can Affect Your Breathing | Podcast #348
In this podcast, Dr. J and Evan talk about the connection between the gut and respiratory system. You might not immediately associate gastrointestinal problems with lung disease, but the two frequently coexist. The tissue and glands in your lungs and intestines are the same and react to the same triggers.
At first look, the operations of your digestive and respiratory systems appear to be somewhat dissimilar. Though, the systems are connected in a variety of ways. The digestive tract can function because of the outcomes of respiratory action and vice versa. In addition, the systems collaborate to deliver energy to the body’s cells.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
3:08: Key factors of lung inflammation
7:48: Probiotics as regulator of immune response
11:56: Foods major role in gut-breathing connection
20:17: Available Testing and Herbs
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 gut, lung connection. This is really important. Lung health today, it is very important. We have to get good oxygenation. We have to make sure that inflammation from different microbes in the environment, whether it’s allergen or infections, we have to make sure that we’re able to still breath and transfer oxygen even with those stressors in the environment. We’re gonna talk about how the gut is connected to that, how inflammation in the gut can be bi-directional and can affect the lungs as well. So, let’s dive in. Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Hey. Doing really well. Starting this thing off, I was looking at some papers this morning. I told you this was just too important for us not to cover so in the journal of immunology from this year 2021, I’m just gonna read you one, really, really big thing here which is the fact that intestinal dysbiosis is associated with increased mortality in respiratory infections due to an exacerbated inflammation and decreased regulatory or anti-inflammatory mechanisms in the lungs and the gut and they say here, pointing to this important relationship. So, this was actually the first time I’ve heard. You and I have been talking about stuff for years, I mean, we’ve done between us both close to, you know, thousand podcasts and we’ve been talking about gut-brain axis, we’ve talked about the gut-thyroid axis, we’ve talked about the gut-skin axis but I don’t think we’ve ever hit on the gut-lung axis and so this paper is just really reviewing the literature on this and it’s absolutely incredible because guess what, the beneficial bacteria helps respiratory infections and there’s 30 pages, if not more, I haven’t even had a chance to review all the papers on this but there are countless, countless papers now and pages of papers showing that the probiotics actually can reduce the inflammation in the lungs, however, if you’re in the hospital or if you were in the unfortunate situation of being in a critical care unit, an ICU, you’re gonna be getting antibiotics more than likely and you’re not gonna be getting probiotics. And, we could go into the mechanisms but I think the mechanisms will probably bore people but long story short, there’s an increase natural killer cells and obviously decreases in inflammatory cytokines and there’s many, many other mechanisms but long story short, probiotics are absolutely amazing and we know that the antibiotics that you’re gonna get in these situations are gonna do the exact opposite.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Here’s a great study here. I know, we’re kind of referring to some of it. I’m going to share my screen here with the audience so everyone can see it, all right. Let me know if you guys can see this here. I’m gonna pull this up here so you guys can see it. All right. Can you see my screen there? All right. Awesome. All right. So, off the bat right, one of the key driving factors of lung inflammation is gonna be dysbiosis, right? Why is this? A lot of this has to do with the fact that bacteria, 80% of the immune system is in the intestinal tract, right? You have some in the GALT, which is gonna be the gastric associated lymphoid tissue, that’s in the stomach, right here. And then, you have the MALT, which is the mucosal associated lymphoid tissue. So, the mucosal, uh, that’d be the intestine. So, the small intestines in the middle here and then the peripheral on the outside is the large intestine. And so, a couple of the big things that you’re gonna see is when the immune system is overactive. One of the first things the immune system does is when it’s overactive, it actually creates inflammation, right? Part of inflammation is vasodilation so it can bring the immune system, the immune cells there to help fight it off. Think if you get bumped in the eye. What happens to the eye? It gets swollen, right? And so, you create this low-grade inflammation which is part of how the immune system works. The problem is, you know, most that inflammation that we’re seeing in people, it’s not an oops, I broke my elbow, it’s gone in a day or two, it’s a chronic low-grade inflammation and so you can see, um, when we add in things like probiotics over here, right, probiotics do a bunch of different things, they regulate the Th1, the Th2 immune cells, right? So, Th1, Th2, right, so that’s gonna be the natural killer cells on the Th1 side versus the antibodies on the other side and so, we have this balance between helper natural killer on the one and we have the antibodies on the two. So, we have this good balance and if they have it out of killer, like, let’s say we have higher Th2, you may see more allergies and things like that which can obviously stress out the lungs and obviously if we have some kind of infection in the lungs, we want good Th1 modulation because if the Th2 is really high, the Th1, those natural killer cells are gonna be lower. And so, you can see, obviously, it’s gonna express several viral defense genes. It inhibits various cytokines and chemokines so the chance of you having, um, what’s that, what’s the expression they call it here, it’s the inflammation after a virus kind of comes in and ravages the lungs
Evan Brand: Like the cytokine storm
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Cytokine storm and so this really helps modulate the imbalance in cytokines after the fact, right? And obviously, it’s gonna modulate immunoglobulins, that’s your antibodies, your IgG, IgA, IgM, IgG and then to modulate your innate and adaptive immune system and obviously it’s gonna help with the allergenic anti-allergenic property, so that’s gonna be a Th2 stimulator. So, you can see, it’s gonna really help modulate this here. And again, this article doesn’t even really address it but if we don’t have good gut absorption of let’s say of vitamin A or vitamin C or vitamin D, right, if we don’t have good absorption in the gut then obviously all those nutrients play a major role in modulating the immune system too. Any comments on that, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. So, I’ll take it a step further. We see all sorts of dysbiosis, bacterial overgrowth, Candida, parasites, worms, gut inflammation coming from the diet. You alluded to the malabsorption. So, let’s say, you’re giving someone X amount of zinc, let’s say you’re giving someone X amount of quercetin and vitamin D and vitamin C and you’re thinking that you’ve got a good protocol, well, we talk about this all the time. It’s not really about what you eat or what you take, it’s about what do you actually digest, what do you absorb and what do you assimilate from that so the problem is I have first-hand experience now with some really, really intense medical cases, we’ll just leave it at that for now. And, this particular person has been getting vitamin C in a crushed-up tablet form where in reality, we should be getting IV vitamin C. So, it’s not just about what you get, it’s how you get it, it’s how much you get it, it’s how much what you get from what you’re taking. And, there’s a lot of issues and if you say you’re getting 2 grams orally in a crushed-up low-quality form, we know that Vitamin C. In general, we see it low all the time on organic acids testing. Maybe, you’re getting a tenth of that so you’re really just gonna get the therapeutic amount so a lot of people I find are either being fairy dusted or fairy dusting themselves because they’re putting so much hope into the products they’re taking and they’re just not getting much from that due to these underlying issues with the gut. And, you and I have beat the drum on the gut for freaking 10 plus years and we’re still having to beat the drum on the gut but I hope that you feel as good as I do about all the work we’ve done because we know that everything, we’re doing with the gut is improving people’s responses so that if they do get exposed to something, they gonna have a much, much healthier, better response to it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I want to show one more article up here if you don’t mind. We’re trying to incorporate some of these new systems here so people can kind of see what’s happening with some of the articles that we’re looking at while we go live. I think it should be helpful. All right, there’s one thing I wanted to post here. So, we’re looking at different infectious stress on the lungs and what’s happening but look at what’s happening with probiotics, right? Probiotics are having an effect on modulating TNF alpha, Interleukin-6, it’s having also effects on modulating over here, your CD4 cells, these are your natural helper cells. Probiotics, actually, have a major role in modulating this whole immune response and so, you know, I think one of the best things you can do if you have poor gut health out of the gates here is potentially adding in some probiotics, uh, maybe adding in some fermented foods as long as you are getting bloated or gassy. Now, some people that have SIBO, these things may make it worse and so if you’re one of those people that probably won’t be the best thing but if you’re trying to be more in preventative mode, we probably want to get some of this dysbiosis under control and work on building up good bacteria after the fact, kind of my general analogy is you get your car washed before you get it waxed. You go and throw down seeds only after you’ve done the weeding in your lawn. Anything else you wanna add, Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah. Except for like in acute situation, you might have to change the order of operations, you might have to go hardcore in it maybe some bloating, some burping, some gas, some kind of reaction, you know, you gotta make a pros and a cons list, right? There’s always a risk benefit analysis and those short-term effects from a probiotic if it were in the wrong order per se are not gonna be a huge deal, long-term.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Absolutely. Let me just kind of, all right, good, so I think that’s really good. So, first thing I wanted to add on top of that is we know gut permeability is a major stress on the immune system because you’re allowing undigested food particulate potentially or potentially like endotoxins which are like the outer shell of the bad bacteria, potentially even mycotoxins from fungus or mold, right? These things affect gut permeability. When the gut is more permeable, that allows more foreign antigens, think of antigens as like foreign proteins, right, so you could put bacteria, viruses, food, all in that kind of anagen category. It exposes more things to the immune system and the more you expose bigger chunks of things to the immune system, the more responsive the immune system will be. And so, ideally, we don’t want to poke the bear, right? Think of it like, gut permeability is poking that sleeping bear and we don’t want to over stimulate that and create immune responses unless we really need to.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You know, what’s crazy too, this, I mean, we’ve seen so many things with obesity and you know worse outcomes and diseases and you know. I went to the restaurant yesterday, I got some delicious chicken wings, some grilled chicken wings and I look around and everyone, this is on a Sunday, everyone’s drinking mimosas and bloody Mary’s and whatever else and the majority of the people are obese and they’re getting pretzels and nacho cheese and then they get donut holes delivered to their table and then they get a sandwich with like six pieces of bread and the cheese is going off the sandwich and then they go and get chocolate cake afterwards. It’s like, my goodness, just imagine how much better we could be if people just had chicken wings like me for lunch. I didn’t have donuts, I didn’t have queso, I didn’t have freaking pretzel, I didn’t have bloody Mary, like, come on. People, it’s like, they don’t care about their health until they are forced to care about their health but by the time you get to that point it’s already too late so I guess my little rant here is just, I really want people to start taking their health seriously now. Stop waiting until you’re at rock bottom before you decide you wanna change things. Use this information that Dr. J and I are providing and implement it now, like, people listen, listen, listen and then the implementation is just not there. I really hope people implement the stuff you and I talked about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani:100%. So, I mean, out of the gate, I mean, of course, you know, you have caught people on a bad day, maybe they’re 90%, you know good and 10% off and you caught them on their cheat day, right? But odds are that’s probably not the case but we have patients who are really good and may have a bad day every now and then. And so, hey fine, if you’re doing great and you’re on point and you’re in great health and you want to cheat every now and then, I always recommend trying to choose the least damaging cheat possible, right? That probably isn’t the best example of that but in general, food plays a major role, right? Because food’s gonna have nutrients to run your immune system, right? Our fat-soluble vitamins, our antioxidants, you know zinc, magnesium, selenium, all play major roles with the immune system. Our antibodies are made from proteins so if you’re not getting and digesting good protein, you’re not gonna be able to make good antibodies for your Th2 immune response and then obviously, if you’re eating inflammatory food, the more omega-6, the more you stimulate your prostaglandin E2, that’s more the side inflammatory side, the more you’re gonna have unprovoked immune responses and you’re just gonna be chronically inflamed and then you may have this cytokine storm we talked about because you don’t have good balance to your immune system and so, also, on top of that, right, we know how much carbohydrates, especially refined processed carbohydrate. It feeds a lot of bad bugs. So, if you have a lot of fungus overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, these bugs prefer refined processed foods, right? It’s gonna just be easier to digest, easier to feed them and so you’re gonna create overgrowths like that. And these bad bugs, obviously, produce other types of toxins in your body, right? Bad bugs eat your nutrients and poop. And then, instead, versus eating your poop and producing nutrients, right? Bad bugs take the nutrients you’re eating and they’ll produce more toxins and endotoxins and different metabolites, lithocholic acid, etc., versus producing B vitamins, producing vitamin K, producing different beneficial acids that prevent the colon from overgrowing, right? Probiotics, acidophilus, literally, translates to acid loving and so good probiotics actually produce and lower the pH in the intestinal tract which actually makes it harder for bad bugs to grow, right? Bugs tend to prefer an alkaline type of environment to actually grow in the lower intestines.
Evan Brand: That’s a great point. I don’t think many people know that about acidophilus. I’m glad you broke that simply for people that you actually want lower pH environment because that’s not really a place for these pathogens to thrive versus when you’re on proton pump inhibitors, for example, acid blocking medications or if you’ve got an H. pylori infection, you’re gonna have that higher pH, you’re gonna have that more alkaline gut and then that’s where things really get into trouble, I mean you and I, I think we’ve done a whole podcast on this but the brief spark notes are lower stomach acid, age, stress, not chewing your food, that’s gonna increase malabsorption and feed the bugs too. So, this once again goes back to the same thing and we’ve said 100 times you get your gut tested. Figure out if you’ve got this overgrowth going on. Don’t wait until you’re in a critical situation. We got to get your gut fix now. Think of working on your gut as preventative medicine. How revolutionary is that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And then also, when you consume too much carbohydrate, we talked about how you’re gonna feed the bad bug. We talked about what the bad bugs do in regards to impeding nutrients, adding more toxins, pooping poop, right? There was one more thing I wanted to kind of highlight on that realm, we talked about the gut permeability and the overstimulating immune system. Also, high levels of carbohydrates, glucose looks very similar molecularly to vitamin C and so you have these macrophages, little Pac men and Pac women that go along in the lymphatic system and in your bloodstream. They gobble up bacteria, gobble up viruses, gobble up crud.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Also, high levels of carbohydrates, glucose look very similar molecularly to vitamin C, and so you have these macrophages. These little pacmen and pacwomen that go along in the lymphatic system and in your bloodstream. They gobble up bacteria, gobble up viruses, gobble up crud. Vitamin C kind of docks on that macrophage and and kind of supercharges the macrophage so it can gobble things up more. Guess what glucose can actually come in there, and docks on that macrophage, and it can decrease the macrophages’ ability to gobble things up. Now in literature, the literature logs to make things confusing, so there’s kind of like two sets of language. There’s like the lay language right where we’re kind of communicating it in a way that everyone gets it. In the literature, they’ll call it the phagocyte index, right P-H-A-G-O-C-Y-T-E-S, so phagocyte with a P-H, right? So go on PubMed, type in phagocyte index and you’ll see, that’s the macrophage. The ability to gobble critters and bacteria up, and so if we decrease the phagocyte index, it’s going to be just they’re not going to be able to gobble things up as much, and so this is really important and so high levels of glucose, high levels of insulin, which, again, glucose and fructose stimulate insulin production, right? And so, you’re going to have. Less gobbling of your pacman and pacwomen in your bloodstream to be able to control these critters.
Evan Brand: That’s crazy. Ok, so you’re saying if I’m in the hospital and the nurse or whoever brings me my lunch, which I saw when my grandmother was in the hospital couple years ago for heart issues. You know what they brought her for lunch? It was this little like packet of peanut butter which was corn syrup and like peanuts. And then I think it was probably a piece or two of bread and then it was a little Jelly packet. And guess what that was? Corn syrup and like fake artificial flavor and purple dye and whatever else. So, you’re saying that’s not the optimal diet for good macrophage. I guess you would call it bug eating per southeast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. One, it’s going to feed a lot of despotic bacteria. Two, it’s going to decrease the phagocyte index, so your body’s ability to gobble up the bacteria and such. And then I would say on top of that, the more insulin resistance you have, ’cause, how, how It works is right? You take in glucose, you take in fructose, right? When there’s fiber attached to it, it actually decreases; glucose and fructose is damage. I.e. like if I consume some fructose from blueberries 1, there’s a bunch of antioxidants with the blueberries. Bunch of different course. It ends and bioflavonoids and vitamin C on that. There’s also fiber so fiber kind of blunts the effects that you may get from fructose when you consume things like blueberries or strawberries. But when you consume fructose without the fiber, i.e., high fructose corn syrup, right or table sugar, which is sucrose to gross is fructose and glucose. High fructose corn. Syrup is just like 55-45 fructose to glucose. Where table sugars, half and half right? When you consume it without the fiber and out the nutrients. What happens is the body says ok, we gotta go store it in the liver. So, in the 1st place it goes to to dump that fructose is stored In the liver. Once the the fructose sources are done. There can’t store it anymore. It starts to convert it. With that, and then once the liver starts getting fatty, all this fructose just hangs around in the bloodstream and it’s creating all this oxidative stress. It’s like putting a barbecue sauce right on your chicken before you barbecue it. It creates this browning effect. And so when you have all this high level to fructose in your bloodstream because your liver saturated, your liver is now fatty. It can’t store anywhere else. You have high levels of insulin now you start browning all the arteries. And then what does that do? It creates inflammation and makes your platelets and your blood cells just more sticky. So you have increased chances of clotting. What’s going to happen when you have clotting in the lungs? It’s going to create a whole bunch of lung stress, right? Obviously hard issues if it’s in the heart. Brain issue is in the brain. And so if we can get the fructose and the high levels of insulin down, one, that’s going to help blood flow. It’s gonna decrease your oxidative stress reserves and so when you have high levels of oxidative stress, what does that? Due to your needs of vitamin E and vitamin A and vitamin C? It increases it, because your body is having to put out these fires and think of these antioxidants is like the fire extinguisher. So, it’s wanting to use all these antioxidants. And of course the fuel that feeds a lot of this stuff is going to be high sugar and crap that also feeds the bacteria, which then makes the immune response worse so you can see all these things, they kind of compound on each other one after another.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, that was a great way to put it out so I was kind of picture in my head. This snowball effect that gifts. You and it gets nasty quickly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It does. It really gets nasty.
Evan Brand: And then if you’re really, really bad and then you’re on the feeding tube, I mean we’ve seen, and I know you’ve talked about this before with your some of your work in the medical industry years ago. I mean, you’ve talked about some of this stuff they feed people. It’s it’s bad. These feeding type solutions. I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s just straight garbage. I don’t have an ingredient list in front of me, but I know it is not good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, 100% and uhm… You know sugar is used, it hits that opiate receptor, right? It’s, it’s people use it to kind of modulate pain, modulate all the bad stuff that’s happening so it’s you know it’s very addicting. You know, once you’re stuck on it. We had a question come in, “How do you test for some of these things with the bacterial overgrowth?” So you can do a SIBO breath test Lactulose breath test. We can do one of the different organic acid tests that we’ll look at some of the bad bacteria metabolites like benzoate, hiparate 2, fat 2 3 phenylacetate, Indicam; These are different organic acid or bile acid markers that we can look at. Will also run good, comprehensive DNA stool tests that will look at some of these bacteria, and if they’re overgrown right, some of the common bacteria will see, or Klebsiella, citrobacter, prevotella, morganella, Pseudomonas, right? There are some of the common ones that we’ll see, and there will be elevated way outside the reference range when this happening.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you’ve got strep. You’ve got staff. We’ll look at Candida on the stool, even though it’s not as accurate as the urine will look at. The parasites too. What about like blasto and crypto and Giardia? What about H. Pylori infections? All these things add up against you, so our goal is really trying to get everything on paper and figure out what all you’re up against and the. Cool thing is. A lot of times, you and I are knocking out infections that maybe we didn’t even know were there because we can’t test for everything like we have really, really good testing. But I’m sure there are still different pathogens that we don’t even know, but the cool thing is with these herbs and with these synergistic formulas that we’re using clinically with people is that you may have some antiviral, antifungal, antimicrobial antiparasitic properties all to these same compounds. So you may knockout 4 different infections with the same nutrient as opposed to, let’s say a specific drug designed to target a specific pathogen, like an anti-giardia antiparasitic medication. Whereas herbs we may come in and knockout, giardia plus crypto, you know. Plus the H. Pylori all in one fell swoop, so that’s the benefit and not to mention. Let’s say it’s berberine, that we’re using for antimicrobial support. We may help support glucose there. We may, with some of these.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, yeah, there’s some of that.
Evan Brand: We may. We may lower inflammation at the same time as we’re eradicating the infection, so that’s just really beauty. Once you get the data, the beauty is that you can work on multiple mechanisms at the same time getting someone to the finish line fast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and also when you take some of these herbs, these herbs are going to have antioxidants in it so the oxidative stress that you kind of create with the killing of these microbes. These herbs are going to have some antioxidants present in them just due to their their phyto signature. Obviously when you take in an antibiotic, right, you’re not going to have a lot of nutrients or antioxidants present with that. They actually they can create more oxidative stress. Just going to PubMed type in antibiotics and oxidative stress or antibiotics and mitochondrial stress. There is a study supporting this, so the part of the benefits with the herbs is that you’re going to get some antioxidant nutritive properties ’cause based on their phyto signature and again, this is all going to be dependent upon. These herbs being higher quality right, not cheap ones, and if they’re grown in soils that have high levels of lead or mercury then that could obviously be a negative impact. So we want to make sure we’re sourcing out high quality herbs. That’s why we want to have a professional grade where we have third party testing on them to make sure they’re adequate. The next thing on top of that is there’s synergy between some of these herbs. So, for instance, you talked about berberine’s right very helpful. Barbarians also help modulate lipids, right, triglycerides, cholesterol, right. They also help with blood sugar and guess what? Berberine’s combined with warm wood our shown actually have antiviral qualities which is very helpful. So if you have any kind of lingering viral stress that can also be very helpful. I see people when we do gut killing, they, they may start to flare their herpes because their immune systems going after it. Sometimes that can happen too. Or there may be very helpful with their EBV or something else going on in their bodies. So we gotta keep an eye on all those things.
Evan Brand: That’s cool. Yeah, that’s really fascinating. Oregano 2, right? We love oregano will use that as a broad spectrum too. That has a lot of cool different antiviral into microbe properties olive leaf is another great one. That we use and…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, olive liters of antiviral properties to anti inflammatory for sure.
Evan Brand: Sure, and it’s gentle. You know some of these things are just so gentle that even in young children that were seeing with these issues, I mean, I know with you and. I you know. I’ve actually had couple clients, they they’ve really tooted you and eyes horn. They say you know that you and doctor J or kind of the only guys out there with young kids that actually are doing functional medicine because so many people are doing like, functional medicine theory you know? Or maybe they’re clinician and they’re older. Maybe they don’t have kids, so I wanted to pass that feedback on to you that are our clients. They they really love that about us that we’ve got young kids, ’cause we’re implementing this stuff with our kids too. I know you and I have both done antimicrobial nutrients and other supportive stuff for our children, and it’s been really great because there’s so much fear and I, I guess you would just call it misinformation when it comes to to kids. Kids are so resilient, but they do sometimes need help and you know, you’ll often get the recommendation or the the comment that, Oh well, the pediatrician doesn’t know anything about that. For the kids, I will tell you, personally herbs are great for kids and we use protocols and kids all the time. There’s so much to be done with kids.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, just kind of out of here just if we kind of re summarize what we’re trying to, you know, make sure you. Guys extract from here. Is number 1, beneficial bacteria is going to help modulate the immune system, decreased permeability, immune permeability, which or gut barrier permeability, which takes stress off the immune system. it’s going to modulate the cytokines the interleukins. So, when your immune system comes in there you’re not going to create more damage from the immune system, so it’s kind of like the firefight is coming in and you have a small fire and instead of putting it out with one of those portable little fire extinguishers they bring the whole big ladder and truck in there and spray so much water they knock down all your walls. It’s kind of like, well, that’s kind of an inappropriate response to that kind of fire. Same thing with your immune system. We don’t want your immune system to be creating stress and inflammation because the response is inappropriate, right? We could see this with other stress infection. We see it with allergies, right? And so we want to make sure we have good immune stress. We want to make sure that your gut is healthy where it’s extracting all of the nutrients we’re putting foods in there that aren’t feeding the bad bugs, but also providing lots of good beneficial healthy fiber and healthy full spectrum antioxidants and nutrients that help the gut in the immune system as well. Any comments on that Evan?
Evan Brand: Well, you know that just kind of spurred the five and we could do a whole Part 2 on this, but I mean there is a role of some leaky gut support outside of probiotics. During this, you and I have our own custom professional formulas that we use with various nutrients like Aloan, Muk and cama meal and other things that you can use to actually support the gut lining. So this would be another great thing to. Implement if you’re in these situations, maybe you’re unable to get testing because you know it takes. You know, couple weeks, turn around time or a little more, depending on what you’re doing. So if you’re kind of in a more acute situation, I think not knowing what you’re up against, you still could bring in some of these leaky gut supports now. And then if you’re in a situation like I’m telling you to wait before you hit rock bottom, wait before you know, don’t wait before you hit rock bottom. Don’t wait before you have to go. To the hospital work on your gut now. If we have all the data we can work you through these steps here and then we may have already gotten you to the gut healing point to where you’re not coming into this infection with a leaky gut. I would much rather someone come in with a healthy gut. We know we’re gonna, they’re gonna do far better and with this discussion you and I talked about today of the gut-lung axis, now is the time to focus on your gut, so you don’t have to focus on your lungs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and it gets great. Makes a lot of sense. So you guys listening to you enjoy today’s content here, we’ll put a list of some of the products that we use. Some of the probiotics that we that we specifically like in use with our patients. I’ll put some of the the immuno-nutrients that we’d like to kind of modulate the breathing pathways- quercetin stinging nettle-all excellent. I love ginger tea as well, we’ll put that in the links down below those are all excellent things. And of course some of the herbs that we like as well will put some of the clearing herbs that we like for the dysbiosis and such in the comments or in the comments, ah description below. And if you want to support us, you can purchase some of those things there. If you also want to reach out, we’re available for functional medicine consultation support all around the world. Will put that link down below as well; evanbrand.com to reach out with Evan. Doctor J, justinhealth.com to reach out with myself. Thanks so much. Evan, any last things you want to highlight?
Evan Brand: No. That’s it. If people need help, feel free to reach out. We’re here for you. We’d love to help you do, do an overhaul. You know what I mean? If we got to look at your system, let’s look at your system. Please reach out if you need help. Doctor J at justinhealth.com me, Evan, evanbrand.com. Would love to help you and we’re here for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome! Alright. Have a good one everyone! Take care. Bye now.
Evan Brand: Take care. Bye, bye.
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The Gut Skin Connection – How Your Gut Health Can Impact Your Skin | Podcast #330
The gut and skin enjoy a constant dialogue via what has become known as gut-skin axis. In this video, Dr. J and Evan are discussing that while symptoms of gut health issues can be incredibly varied, the skin is often a great barometer for what’s going on inside the gut.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:51 Different Skin Aspects
5:37 Getting Good Skin
13:12 How Gut affects Skin Health
20:28 Collagen Benefits
28:52 Tips to Remember
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here today we’re going to be talking about the gut skin connection, how your gut health can impact your skin. This is a, you know, quite a big topic of discussion. A lot of my patients have gut health hormone health. And part of that whole sequelae of symptoms is going to be skin issues. And it’s important right skin kind of is your first representation to the world of who you are and your health. And if you’re healthy, you want good skin as a byproduct. So we’re going to dive into that and talk about, you know, things you can do to improve your skin and your gut health. If it’s not at an optimal level, Evan, how are we doing today, my friend?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. And you’re right, when you see someone your initial gut reaction, you know, they say, Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Pun intended.
Evan Brand: Exactly. When you look at somebody, you go, oh, wow, they don’t look healthy, or they look pale, or they look frail. Or they look weak. I mean, we make a lot of quick judgments on people. So you know, for the people listening that are like, well, I don’t really care about my vanity, you know, that’s so vain or whatever. It’s like, Well, do you want a good paying job? Do you want a good spouse? You know, you might not even get to the second date. If the person looks at you and goes, Oh, wow, you know, this person looks unhealthy. They look sickly. So I think it’s, it’s important to try to go beyond feeling vain about it and know that as you mentioned, your skin is it’s it’s a picture of your health picture. And my skin was a really good barometer. For me going through some of my detox protocols, my wife would look at me and say, Honey, you look pale, and I would go take a binder and then all of a sudden my skin tone would get better. It was almost like I was recirculating toxins. And then when I took my liver detox or binder support, my skin looked better. So for me, I kind of personally use it as a barometer. Or if I eat dairy as a treat, I may see acne pop up and I’m like, Oh, look at that. Look what I did. Here’s the effect of that dairy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And the pre show, we were trying to figure out effect versus a fact. Right? And so effect is the end result. A fact is, is the verb so we’re trying to wrap our heads around that the English language is quite the the crazy thing. So yeah, absolutely. So skin is very important. So there’s a lot of different aspects of skin right? Its first aspect is, you know, just keeping acne and skin rashes under control, whether it’s psoriasis, or eczema, or just general acne, there’s different food allergens that can have effect on that. There’s different enzyme and acid and just indigestion with foods, not breaking them down, that can have a big effect on that. And there can also be things like hormones. So whether it’s elevations in testosterone with women, whether it’s, you know, testosterone, androgens, that can have a major impact on women’s skin. Also just inflammation in general food allergens, in general, high levels of insulin can create more oil from that sebaceous gland. And that sebaceous gland, that oil can feed a lot of the bacteria on the skin, which can create, obviously the acne vulgaris bacteria feeding and creating acne. So there’s a lot of different mechanisms, right. So when you look at skin health or anything, is a lot of different components. And so food allergies are one component in digestion, not enough acid and enzymes, a component and of course, things like H. pylori, and bacterial overgrowth and fungal overgrowth, and parasitic infections can all impact that. And then of course, female hormones can play a big role. estrogen dominance is a big thing. Insulin resistance is a big thing. Insulin resistance can feed excess androgens and women, that’s a big thing. And then of course, increase aromatization. And estrogen in men can also feed skin issues as well. So there’s a lot of different connections here that play a big role. And of course, certain nutrients, if you’re deficient in zinc or vitamin A, can also play a big role in skin health as well. And then, of course, poor detoxification, because your skin is the integumentary system. And it plays a major role in detoxifying. So the biggest organ of detoxification in the body. So there’s a lot of different mechanisms here. And we’ll kind of dive through them one by one.
Evan Brand: Imagine how much profit we could reduce from the makeup industry. If Well, I guess it would be a multifactorial process, right. And number one, you’d have to convince women that natural skin is beautiful, and that you don’t need the six inch long eyelashes and all that. But imagine how much of a hit we could put into the makeup industry if we were to improve people’s skin because you have so many women that they’ll say oh, well, I wake up with bags under my eyes. It’s like, well, it’s not the bags that are the problem that needs to be covered up by makeup. Those bags under the eyes are the clue that maybe there’s some lymphatic issues or there’s some detoxification issues. And so many women, yeah, food allergies. You’re right. I mean, I have so many women that report that just by working through some of the protocols that you and I use that they need less makeup, and of course their husbands are always wanting women to look more natural anyway, at least my wife, I look at her and I’m like wow, she’s naturally pretty, I don’t think you need or should be putting stuff on. So and of course, there’s the mental brainwashing of society and the psychology behind makeup and all that that we don’t have to get into. But I think from a biochemical perspective, women should embrace the way they look and use that as a motivating factor. to work on these underlying issues that we’re talking about, meaning don’t just go for the foundation or whatever, it’s called to cover up the bags, let’s fix the bags.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and ideally you get healthier so if you want like a natural healthy makeup option, there’s some decent ones out there, you need less of it to kind of get the job done. You know, because some women it’s, it’s, it’s part of who they are is they’ve been doing it for so long. So let’s just try to reduce it and try to use healthier ones that are going to be less toxic, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, and the Environmental Working Group will just get that out of the way now the Environmental Working Group has done a great job of their skin deep database you and I’ve covered that I know you’ve mentioned some of the micelle products and some of these others that that are that are helpful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I like the Marie Veronique has a couple other good companies from a skincare standpoint. So the first rule of thumb when you’re supporting your skin is do with food. Right? Don’t put toxins and food allergies, fix your gut. Use good nutrient dense foods right your skin needs high quality fats. It needs high quality amino acids. It needs collagen in each vitamin A it needs zinc. It needs a lot of good nutrient dense foods to support it. We also want to decrease inflammation right? A lot of the junky omega six fatty acids, trans fats, foods that are refined processed grains lots of sugar that drives insulin. Insulin feeds the sebaceous glands to make oil oil can feed bacteria on the skin and create acne. And then of course, food allergens can also drive eczema can also drive psoriasis, sub harangued dermatitis right, a lot of these things that are fungal or bacterial or autoimmune base can be driven by a lot of these things. So foods really important. And again, there’s a big disconnect in the dermatology community, like you go to a lot of conventional dermatology offices, they’ll say in some of the pamphlets like food does not influence your skin. And that’s an absolute crock of crap. Right. And part of the reason why that’s the case is because dermatologists aren’t educated in nutrition. They’re not doctors in medical school, conventional allopathic doctors have very little education and nutrition. And when they do, it’s primarily from the aspect of disease, vitamin connection, right? scurvy, but low vitamin C very, very low B one, right? A lot of these diseases that are connected to low nutrient levels. But we know health is not about diseases, it’s about a health is on a continuum. And so the extreme end is a disease but there’s a lot of stuff in between, that we’re looking at. And part of that could be skin issues. And so certain nutrients play a big role. And I can tell you having seen 1000s of patients and hundreds who have skin issues, and I’ve been able to have you know 95 99% resolution with these issues, partly because of the fact that diet plays a major influence. So foods, keeping carbohydrates in check reducing insulin, insulin and women drives lots of androgens, androgens will create more cystic acne, inflammation, even dairy like even sometimes butter in really healthy people could be a problem. So I always say anytime you have any acne issues, we’re cutting out 100% dairy, even carry gold grass fed butter out of the gates. And that’ll be one of the first things we try to add back in as the skin gets clear to see if it’s kryptonite or not. But that plays a very important role. I’m trying to get more zinc in your diet, whether it’s like pumpkin seeds or oysters or just high quality grass fed beef zincs very important can always throw in some extra zinc in your molti or in a zinc lozenges things are very important for the skin vitamin A very important some studies back in the 1920s on to dermatologists called Pillsbury and Stokes and they found that probiotics and called Never Oil were very important for skin health. This is 100 years ago. So the fact that dermatologists aren’t up on this literature is just ridiculous. It’s because they aren’t interested in a nutritional intervention. When you have retinae and clindamycin and Accutane and tetracycline and, and different, and you chrissa and you know, all these different medications that are used for skin, right, that’s what their go to is and that’s what they’re educated on. And it doesn’t fix any of the problems anyway, it’s it covers it up. And so a lot of other things that can be done and have been done for a very long time.
Evan Brand: It’s funny that you and I are not dermatologists, but that we have, in most cases, better results than dermatology offices. And at least if it were a comparable success rate, like with their drugs, that’s palliative care. And what we’re doing is root cause care. So maybe if you took Joe Blow and Jane Doe over here, and let’s say they work through you and I and our protocols and testing, and then they go to the dermatology office and just get the Accutane or whatever, maybe in terms of look, maybe you’d make the person look similar because those drugs do work. But then you get off of them and things go backward. But man, all I’m saying is I think we’re better at skin now. I don’t know how to recognize melanoma. My grandfather’s had it and he’s got it cut out. So in those skin cases, yeah, go to your dermatology office. But if it’s more of these chronic issues, these more functional scan issues. I tell you, we’re gonna have much, much better results and somebody listening may hear what you said and go oh my god, he said 95 to 99% success rate. You’re not you’re not inflating those numbers. at all, I can tell you with confidence those numbers are legit that you’re saying because I’ve seen the same thing, even within just six weeks of Gut protocol, sometimes we’ve had 80 to 90% improvement in skin symptoms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think dermatologists do a really good job at handling skin cancers. You know, I think that can be very helpful picking up melanomas. There’s also a lot of the autoimmune stuff that they recognize, it’s typically you know, they’re just going to recommend corticosteroids or some kind of, you know, immunosuppressant like Ella dal or you chrissa. They’ve done a lot of options, or they’re just throwing a lot of antibiotics on the skin, which can screw up your skin microbiome as well, your skin has its own microbiome. So some of these things acutely may be fine. If you have a teenage kid that has an acne flare, and you want to decrease the chance of scarring, right? That makes sense. But you know, what’s the long term solution, right, you need a long term solution outside of that, and they may not have those options for you. So it’s good to have someone in your back pocket know where they’re good know whether or not there’s getting to be more holistic ones out there that understand diet plays a big, big role. And that’s good to know. I mean, I think, you know, if, if your kid eats like crap, and your dermatologist says it doesn’t matter, and then that keeps your kids acne flaring. Well, that’s not going to fix any problems. And plus, we know skin requires nutrition, amino acids, fat soluble vitamins. So just kind of from like a foundational level, you need to consume good building blocks. So your body can repair and turn over and use those good building blocks to help your body becomes stronger, right. Food and calories that you consume and nutrients you consume. They’re not just for energy, they’re actual building blocks so your skin can turn over. So very important there. I think also with sunlight and things like that getting some sunlight don’t burn, right, minimal urothelial dose, if you’re going to go outside, make sure you’re using you know, for a long periods of time where you would burn make sure you’re doing a full spectrum sunscreen that’s in a block out UVA and UVB for a long time, we’ve only blocked out UVB light, and we let a lot of UVA come in and people will damage their skin because the collagen will get destroyed. If you’re chronically allowing a lot of UVA exposure, the UVB that gives you the burn is kind of the it tells you whether or not you’re out there too long. But if you block the B and allow the A in, you’re basically allowing yourself to potentially destroy collagen. So if you’re going to be out in the sun, use a full spectrum, UVA UVB maybe even a UVC to make sure you have coverage if you would get burned, and then try to get yourself some sunlight. And then for me topically, I’m going to be using some natural retinol not a lot of the retina the retina has a lot of side effects can create redness and irritation, don’t love it. But I’ll use some of the retinol with some vitamin C and glue to fire and in some of the skincare products that I use, I use a really excellent prebiotic probiotic miss that have good bacteria for my skin. Because I want to really support my skin microbiome. Those are really important things for me on the skincare side. And then of course, like keeping the food allergies down. Now, for some people coming out that have a lot of acne, we’re going to come out of the gates with some autoimmune stuff out of the gates because I’ve seen eggs and nuts and seeds, dairy and butter be problem. So we’re going to be a little bit more strict out of the gates. We’re going to make sure we’re digesting our foods really well indigestion is a problem. We’re going to look at the gut, the gut can play a major, major role. And I’ll pause there and you can you can kind of dive a little bit.
Evan Brand: Sure. Yeah, I’ll take it further. So the gut, to me, the big mechanism is h pylori. Now parasites are big. I mean, you saw my skin was six, maybe I can’t keep up with yours, maybe six or seven years ago, my skin was messed up. And it was because I had various gut infections. I do believe parasites are a big contributor. But really, it’s hard to pick a smoking gun for the gut, because Candida bacterial overgrowth, parasites, they all contribute to the same thing, which is an issue with nutrient absorption, they create this malabsorption problem. But I think h polarize is one of the big ones for people because of what it’s doing with the parietal cells and reducing your stomach acid because then what’s really happening is you have this domino effect of the H pylori, then allowing the purification of your food which then creates the overgrowth of even more pathogenic bacteria, which then may allow parasites to thrive because now there’s not enough stomach acid to kill them off. So I really do think that h pylori was one of my big variables for my skin. And I can tell you with confidence that I’ve seen it in countless countless teenagers and people in their 20s that are still dealing with acne. If we get rid of H. pylori alone, we may have 60 to 75% improvement in the skin just based on that. And then the question is, well, can you bring in enzymes to help reduce some of the malabsorption and 99% of the cases? Yes, rarely is there too much inflammation or gutter rotation where we don’t do enzymes and acids out of the gate. But really, if I were a dermatologist running a brick and mortar practice, you know what I’d have on my shelf, I’d have digestive enzymes, and every client that comes in with skin problems, here’s your enzymes, and that would fix it.
Enzymes and HCl as long as there’s not so much gastritis or gut irritation, definitely a combination of the two for sure. I 100%. Agree and then a good elimination diet plays a big role. These you know, if you have bags under your eyes, that’s called allergic shiners and allergic shiners. They’re basically a pool of the lymph under the iron because there’s a lot of lymph in this area. And so lymphatic increase lymphatic fluid increase is going to happen with inflammation. Think about if you bump your head or get in a fight and get a black guy, what happens there’s inflammation and pulling, while you’re doing that at a at a micro level when you have inflammation from food, and you’re going to see it in the eye area, because that’s where there’s a lot of lymph. So if you’re having allergic shiners, right, don’t carve it up with makeup, try to cut out the foods out of the gates, that’s gonna be a big one out of the gates. Make sure you’re consuming enough water, people that have chronically dry skin, it’s not a hydration issue. Remember, fats provide a lot of the moisture to your skin to be moist and not overly dry. So if you’re having a lot of chronic dry skin, you know, eat consume good water, right, but also really make sure your fats are up and make sure you’re digesting those fats that’s really important. And if you want to topically add some shea butter or some coconut oil to your skin, if it’s the winter and you’re in a really, really low humidity environment, you know, you may need to topically add a little bit of that to during the winter months if it when it’s drier out. So you may want to topically hit it. But you don’t want to get into the habit of only doing the topicals because you got to support your skin inside and out.
You know what’s amazing now that you mentioned it like that. When my wife and I first got together, it will be 11 years ago, our diet was not like it is today. And every winner her and I both we would get really itchy our skin would get red, we get really dry skin. I’m telling you, man, I did not put lotion on but maybe once this entire winter. And I used to have to do that all the time. How funny is that? We could put the lotion industry out of business with this advice too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, you may topically need to add a little bit but you’ll be able to reduce the 80 to 90%. I remember when I was first trying to get healthy 15 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I was trying to low fat thing. I’m the gates and I remember one winner, my skin was so itchy and dry. And I remember I came across an article and I started adding in coconut oil and an olive oil. And I was just doing a tablespoon of a day and I remember being like Wow, my skin the dryness just it reduced at 90% with just internally adding fats, because I’m thinking like oh dryness, that just means more water, right, you need more water, but you need to be able to carry that water to the skin. And the fats provide that kind of support, the fats help bring that hydration to the skin. And so fats for me played a huge role. And I’ve seen that as well. And of course with all this fat phobia, the more dry your skin gets. That means the more inflamed is going to get the more inflamed the more redness and and and potential for other issues are going to happen. So if you don’t have enough fats on your skin that can create this cascade of a lot of other skin issues.
Evan Brand: Well, you know what else is I’ve noticed too, you know, Irish descent, at least some Irish some German. And years ago, I would never be able to get tan, I would just straight burn. And I rarely wear sunscreen, maybe you advise me different. But I typically just wear like a big sun hat in the summer. If it’s like 95 degrees and it’s frickin hot. I might do some zinc oxide if I’m out all day, but if I’m just out like half an hour plane in the garden, and then I’m gonna head back in and cook lunch or something I’m not putting sunscreen on I’m just out there with no shirt. And I used to just burn so bad even from that dose. Now, I don’t burn. The fats are helping me not burn now. Maybe it’s the meats to the collagen. I mean, there’s something changing where I just, I can I can bronze now, which is pretty interesting, especially for an Irish guy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, the fats definitely play a big role and helping to bring calcium to the skin that can be I’ve seen that be something also having a lot more of the bioflavonoids whether it’s Grapeseed, or a lot of the antioxidants, those can go to the skin and also have an SPF kind of factor. I know Grapeseed extract plays a big role. A lot of these oligomeric proanthocyanidins, which are like these antioxidants, and in fruits and vegetables can play a big role. The fats, like I mentioned, the omega threes play a big role.
Evan Brand: Oh, you make a good point. Yeah, sorry, I forgot to I forgot to mention that. Yeah, I mean, I do a ton of blueberries like come spring, early summer, I’m doing a ton of blueberries, I think you’re right, there’s probably some antioxidant factor too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Antioxidant factor, there’s a good fat factor, the fast to play a big role with bringing calcium up to the skin, which I know helps. And then obviously having enough zinc plays a big role because we typically, the more natural skincare is going to use like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide for kind of natural sun scare sun skincare. And so of course that that has a deflective aspect to it. And I imagine that the zinc that you consume orally is also going to play a big role. So like in summer months, you know, I’ll bang down six to eight oysters in a week. And you’re getting you know, eight milligrams of zinc per oyster. So if you bang down eight or nine oysters, I mean you’re getting 70 or 80 milligrams of zinc and you know the daily requirements only like 10 so you can get like a week’s worth of your zinc in one oyster session.
Evan Brand: Wow, that’s impressive.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so it’s really good and you can also get some extra from pumpkin seeds too as long as you tolerate the seeds.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I actually had some pumpkin seeds yesterday they were good just some I got some sprouted ones supposedly those are easier to digest so if someone reacts, maybe tried to sprout it I personally don’t have an issue either way. So some one thing to consider Alright, so we hit the gut infection piece. You did great hitting on some of the nutrients Stephen some of the good nutrients that would be in a multi which you and I make some really professional multis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright guys, you’re gonna have 20 or 30 milligrams of zinc in there. So that kind of gives you a good whack and then if you’re adding in, you know, mushrooms or grass fed beef, right or any some of the healthier nuts and seeds that are out there, that and obviously, that’s gonna play a big role and then collagen, collagen really helps because we’re just not getting a lot of collagen based amino acids, right, we’re getting a lot of muscle meat, we’re not getting a lot of skin or joint. So having the skin on your chicken or chicken thighs very helpful, right having soups or bone broth helps. And you can also really take an excellent collagen amino acid support. I know mine, we use collagen from grass fed cows and we also use proteolytic enzymes to help break down those amino acids to make it easy and you can mix them in your water you can mix them in your tea or your soup or your coffee. So it’s just a great way to get extra building blocks for your skin. And it also helps your hair and your nails and your joints.
Evan Brand: I was speaking to college and let me do a little rant here and an anti plug. So the bulletproof collagen bars I used to eat those. Dave Asprey is bulletproof company, who he was the CEO of and then he stepped down couple years ago and now the ex or current CEO of hostess who makes like ding dongs now he’s the CEO in charge of bulletproof product. Anyway, I was at Whole Foods a couple weeks ago, I used to love eating those collagen, like the collagen bars, you know, it’s like a hydrolyzed collagen with like a little bit of stevia or monk fruit in there with some organic cashews. And I go in there, and there’s a new box, and it’s like new and improved recipe and I’m like, Yes, this is gonna be delicious. And I didn’t even read it because I just thought, okay, it’s gonna be awesome, right, you know, and I get home and I start to eat it. And it’s like real slimy. And it used to be kind of crumbly. I’m like, What’s weird wise, it’s slimy. Maybe I got a bad batch or something. And I flip it around, I look at the label. And it’s no longer organic cashews. Now it’s just regular cashews. And then now there’s safflower oil, which Dave was extremely anti bad oils. So now there’s safflower oil in there. And there was one other thing that tripped me out. But yeah, so safflower oil from organic to non organic nuts. And then there was one other thing. So luckily, I was able to return them and get a refund. But that used to be my go to thing that I’d recommend for people to get a good easy source of collagen as a snack, and I can no longer recommend that product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Yeah, I had an experience to where I bought a mainstream collagen brand at Whole Foods, I have my own called Tru collagen, but I ran out. And I needed something right away, because I typically put it in my coffee or tea in the morning. And I grabbed the you know, good one, or named a brand that everyone will recommend put it in my coffee and my coffee tasted sour as heck. And I’m like, this is unflavored what’s going on. And basically, there’s two ways you can manufacture collegen. Of course, like you buy the best raw material you can, but then you got to break that cut, you know that collagen into peptides, right. And so there’s two ways you can do it. You can do it with sulfuric acid, or you can do it with enzymes. And so mine we do it with enzymes, which gives it a very, very neutral taste. So when you mix it and stuff, there’s not an extra taste. But this brand, I guess had used sulfuric acid because that’s the major side effect is you get that little bit of sourness or a little bit of a bitter aftertaste when you mix it and things. Now it’s like, oh, okay, got it, even though it’s unflavored. And you don’t see anything in the ingredients. You know, how you extract those, how you extract those amino acids matters, and it can really affect the taste.
Evan Brand: Wow. So I’d love to put them on blast. But if you don’t want to, that’s fine. And we’ll just tell people that storebought is not the best. And there’s a reason that Justin and I have professional healthcare manufacturers. And there’s a reason that what we have is considered a practitioner grade, you know, I get kind of annoyed when, when people will market supplements as like pharmaceutical grade because pharmaceuticals are crap. They’re filled with corn and fillers and all kinds of garbage. So when I see like, you know, pharmaceutical grade, like vitamin C, it’s like, ah, get out of here with that crap. So I would just prefer that we use the term professional, professional quality. And that’s not bs marketing. That truly is a difference.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, when people say pharmaceutical grade, because there can still be a lot of crap and pharmaceuticals, it’s more like the cleanliness of the factory or the manufacturing facility is very clean. But you could still add a whole bunch of crap into the supplement that’s not clean. But because the the manufacturing process is clean. It’s it’s pharmaceutical grade, right? And so yeah, so it’s professional grade, because we’re also cutting out all of the extra crap that we know isn’t going to be as good fillers, dyes, corn, you know, potential glutens all those different things that aren’t not going to be as good so for sure we keep all that in consideration and then We also do testing, right? I mean, we, I tested bunches of ashwagandha from major, you know, manufacturing people that we get it in and we test it and it’s got lead in it, we’re like nope, see later, you know, because we need to have the highest quality of product because we’re working with patients and we need to, we need to have a clinical outcome. It’s not just selling something and making some money, I need a clinical outcome, I need the highest quality because that matters, the outcome really matters. So you’re 100% right on that professional grade, so where to go. So we talked about collagen, I think low hanging fruit anyone, you could always do tablespoon of cod liver oil a day, tablespoon or two across the world, the vitamin A, and there’s excellent central fatty acids really good at eating high quality animal products is obviously going to be great. If you’re not doing high quality animal products, we’ll fix your digestion. But you could always do some seafood. If you can do that, you could always do some egg yolks, you could do that. You could also do some nuts and seeds, as long as you can tolerate them, especially the pumpkin seeds can be really good or chia seeds can be really good, or at least some algae on that side of the fence can be great. And then I would say make sure you’re pooping every day, make sure your bowels are regular. If you’re not going every day, you can be reabsorbing a lot of toxins in your gut. And if you have a lot of bacterial overgrowth, what happens? The bad bacteria Creek creates an enzyme called beta glucuronidation, this enzyme de conjugates metabolize estrogen. So what happens is you bind these proteins to estrogen. And these proteins are that you’re basically conjugating you’re binding this protein, and that allows you to excrete these hormones. And this enzyme comes in their ad conjugates. It breaks the handcuffs and allows those hormones to go back into general circulation. And so it’s possible that bad bacteria can really create hormonal imbalances. And if you’re a female, and you have potential estrogen dominance, that can be part of what’s going on. And so estrogen dominance can drive hyperpigmentation and skin issues as well. So you got to be on top of that. And of course, if you’re taking the birth control pill, you can almost guarantee that you’re going to be in that estrogen dominant state as well, because you have all this synthetic typically ethanol estradiol in your bloodstream as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. So we technically could have called this something like the SIBO hormone skin connection or something, but it is all connected. And we do find that when you get gut infections resolve skin’s better. And also, when like you mentioned, you’re knocking out the gut infections, you’re able to lower the beta glucuronidation. And now that pathway, the glucuronidation pathway works more efficiently. And then you get other toxins out to like mold toxin. So you can have skin issues with mold toxin, I certainly did. And that’s because we know that mold toxin can affect the gut barrier, mold can create leaky gut. So if you are treating the infections, you don’t get that toxin out to you’re not fully out of the woods. And in regards to testing, let’s mention that real quick. And then we can wrap up. So if you’re working with somebody like Dr. Justin and I what we’re going to be doing is a GI map stool test or similar, we’re going to be using organic acids testing, maybe some hormone profiles, and maybe some other toxin profiles. So with urine and stool, we can get so much information into this. And your dermatologist is never going to run a stool test. They’re never going to run an organic acids test and find that you have clusters and Candida and strep and klebsiella, Giardia and H pylori and give you herbals to kill it herbal antibiotics antifungals. That’s never the protocol. So I’m not saying don’t go to them. I’m just saying if you want root cause solutions. These are the types of tests and solutions you need to implement. Not a topical steroids, which is exactly what my wife got prescribed when she had a lot of issues. They did a good job with testing, but it was a patch test. And they found that she was reacting to some parabens and all the garbage that was in her conventional skincare products at the time. So they at least did a good job of testing that. But they never tested the actual body. They just tested the chemicals. They didn’t go and say hey, what are the deeper underlying issues? Oh, you’ve got poor methylation poor detox function. You’re not pooping. You’re pooping once every three days. They don’t go into that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, 100% you know, so we got to try to get to the root underlying issue. The problem is when you do steroids, you also weaken your connective tissue, you weaken the skin, and then it sets you up for more dependency. And then it also weakens the immune system and it could also create more blood sugar imbalances, especially if you’re having to use a lot of steroids. And that blood sugar, guess what, that can increase insulin and increase insulin increases what more sebum oil production, potentially more acne. So a lot of times these medicine medications can create a vicious cycle. So you got to be very, very careful with that. So out of the gates, kind of what’s the Reader’s Digest version, work on the diet, work on your carbohydrates, work on certain nutrients, fat soluble vitamins work on digesting your protein, adding college and adding vitamin A and zinc. Get your gut looked at work with a good functional practitioner. If the low hanging fruit things aren’t working? Right, it’s okay to you know, stop guessing and assess what is going on. Also, put your comments down below. Let us know things that have already helped you in the past. I’m curious to know, let us know your successes. Also feel free and share this information with friends or family that are suffering or dealing with issues and want to dive into the next step or want to do deeper testing into it. Give us a thumbs up, I really appreciate it. And we’ll put our links down below you want to reach out to Evan EvanBrand.com, great place to go. You can schedule with Evan worldwide, as well as myself, Dr. J JustinHealth.com. As well, we’ll put links underneath as well where you guys can review our podcast, we appreciate your feedback. This helps us to help more people. So if you’re enjoying this information right now, give us a quick review just a sentence or two, let us know if we’re doing good. And if we’re not give us some feedback, we always want to do better, Evan, anything else you want to highlight?
Evan Brand: Yeah, if people are just sitting there like maybe they’re like halfway awake, or they’re daydreaming, snap back into reality, review us, we will love you forever. We really do need the reviews, it helps us beat out other people. You know, we don’t do ads on this show. Maybe one day I’ll go back to doing some if I have a good partner that we work with again, but for now, this is a non ad show. And so many other shows are just filled with it. You just have to put up with the spam, we try to give you guys all killer, no filler. So I hope you recognize that. Take the two seconds go on your your app. for iPhone users, it’s probably the easiest. That’s the best place to review us on your Apple podcast app, see the show, click write a review. Boom, give us the stars you think we deserve? Give us a few comments. It really helps motivate us, you know this kind of a thankless job, you’ll get hundreds of thousands of downloads and then maybe two people are like, yeah, that was a good episode. So we really want to hear it. And we really appreciate it. It’s what keeps us fueled up and just mentioned the links, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re going to save you more time and more money. Yes, you got to pay to play, so to speak to get labs and console’s done, but I tell you if I knew what I know now, man, I could have saved myself years of suffering with my skin issues throughout high school. I mean, I just had, it wasn’t the worst that wasn’t the pizza face, kid. But I certainly have my my issues with acne. And man, if I would have been able to get it dialed in now like we do for some of our kids and teenagers that you and I work with. Wow. And we’re literally changing the trajectory of their entire life. It doesn’t go this is like I said the beginning. This is beyond the vanity. I mean, I had a kid in California who’s 17 and now that his skin is so much better he’s so much more confident he got a promotion at work so he’s making more money. He’s feeling better he’s got a new partner so he’s you know, he’s he’s with a female now and he was previously too like embarrassed to to want to date anyone. So I mean this this could affect everything. Career finances, this is not just how you look in the mirror. So I want people to go beyond that and think about how much more could you achieve if your skin was better? And I think the sky’s the limit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, also scanning god are intimately connected. If you have skin issues, you may not be breaking things down. You may be gassy. You may be bloated. So look within right above below inside out. Alright guys, hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. Really appreciate it. Share, care, thumbs up review links below.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-gut-skin-connection-how-your-gut-health-can-impact-your-skin
Recommended products:
Detox with the Correct Binders | Podcast #324
Dealing with toxic substances can be an overwhelming experience. With that in mind, it helps when things are simplified and made into relatable terms. Intestinal binders are a crucial part of any detox protocol. When the liver processes toxins, they get excreted through bile and into the small intestine. If the toxins are not bound to anything, most of them will get reabsorbed in the gut.
It is important to note that certain health conditions may make binder types more or less desirable. Having a good practitioner help determine those choices for you is always advisable. Also, there are some circumstances, such as in autoimmune disease and infectious conditions, that require the use of precaution and targeted choices with binders. Proper sourcing is critical as with all supplements, as each of them can come with unnecessary risks if they are not high-grade/quality.
Binders are like free hall passes! In using a binder, your body is spared the work required to process a toxin through the liver and gallbladder and is, instead, excrete from the body. Check out this podcast to know more about what suits you!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:18 How Binders Work
8:38 Binders’ Mechanism
15:11 Detoxifying
21:20 Different Kinds of Binders
29:44 Detox as a Side Effect
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. Today we’re gonna be talking about using binders to help detoxify, exciting podcast because we are utilizing all the things that we are chatting about with our patients every week. And we’re excited to share with everyone else, some of our natural strategies, Evan, how you doing, man?
Evan Brand: I’m doing really well excited to dive into this. This is something that you and I got into several years ago. And it’s been really helpful for our practice, because we’ve been able to take people that were not tolerating protocols, and then we were able to get them to tolerate the protocol. And so when you’re coming in and working on something like gut infections, whether it’s h pylori parasites, bacterial overgrowth, Candida, sometimes, if people have been sick for a really long time, they may not tolerate the protocol we’re giving them. And that doesn’t mean the protocol that we’re giving them is incorrect, or there’s something wrong with it, or there’s an herb reaction or I don’t know, like a, you know, a supplement, it’s not working well for them. That’s not usually the case. In fact, that’s extremely rare. But what rather is happening is that the process of killing off these toxins, I kind of use the analogy of like a bad breakup. And when you’re kicking out the girlfriend, she’s taking off the pictures off the wall, and she’s breaking them and there’s a bunch of glass shards in the hallway as you kick her out. It’s not a clean breakup. And so when you’re killing off these bugs, they don’t want to die, they don’t want to leave. And so they may release toxins that make you feel bad in an effort to get you to stop killing them. Hence, that’s where binders will come in, and they’re acting as the janitor, and they’re going to come sweep up the glass shards that the bugs left behind. interesting way of looking at it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like it, like the analogy that I typically give is imagine you got a trash barrel right in your home, well, it may not be a big deal until you go buy a whole bunch of groceries. Now imagine you got a smaller trash barrel. Well, once you throw it away the egg carton and all the other trash from everything else it’s going to overflow. And that overflowing is where you start dealing with die off. And a lot of people, people that are more sick tend to have smaller trash baskets to begin with. And so essentially giving yourself a bigger trash basket or increasing the frequency that we take it out, right, empty it out, is going to help. So I think either analogy works. So in general, I think the first thing I want to highlight off the bat is well, I like to prepare patients to get there you know, to get killing done in the right way. So I’m always working on hormones and adrenals and diet and blood sugar indigestion first, I find that is the most important component to all this. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So before you go in and start having to do all this killing and and use binders, first, get yourself ready for it. And most people do not like that they want to go in there and Kill Kill, kill, kill, kill, but preparations and be really important.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and it sounds really attractive. And people, they get really excited when they find pathogens on a test. So we’re going to run a comprehensive stool panel, we’re going to run an organic acids test. And we’re going to be jumping on a call with someone to discuss the lab results. And then they’re going to say, Oh my god, I have to get this stuff out of me. I knew I had parasites. I knew I had this. I knew I had that. And then they’re ready. But we kind of have to pace people, you know, when we’ve done this thousand plus times between the both of us. So we know that, hey, based on their constitution, how do you pick up on that as a practitioner? Well, it all goes into stress management? What’s in their bucket of stress? Are they going through a divorce? Are they moving cross country? Are they a teacher? Are they working overtime? Are they a CEO? Are they not sleeping? Well? Are they doing too much alcohol? Those things are going to make us say, Hmm, well, you know what, we probably can’t go full strength with this person. Or if we do, we’re going to need to come in and bring in the binders. And the binders are these tools that they can be used in isolation. And we often use those in isolation. However, the majority of time we’re going to be using them as just part of a protocol, meaning maybe during the day, we’re going to be killing bugs. And then maybe at night, we’re going to be using binders or maybe first thing in the morning when they’re fasted and we know fasting increases the excretion of toxins, including mold and mycotoxins. Maybe we have someone do a binder first thing in the morning at six or 7am when they wake up, and they don’t eat until eight or nine when they take their killing or something like that. So there’s a lot of ways to work these into the protocol. And that kind of depends on the person. It depends on the Constitution. It depends on whether it’s a kid or an adult. But these are amazing tools. And we’ll break it down here in a minute.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, I like that. I think it makes a lot of sense. So one of the first things we can do to help it die off as decrease inflammation. We know agglutination happens or cells become really sticky when there’s a strong inflammatory environment. So like imagine walking in your kitchen and like the floor is really sticky. It’s like you’re like creeping around that icky feeling on your feet. That’s kind of what happens when you’re inflamed and you start doing detoxification, your body is just all inflamed, things aren’t moving, things are sticky. And we want to keep things loose and flowing and slippery. So the first thing kind of in preparation For all this is getting the inflammation down. So one of the things that I love doing for die off support, we talked about it before. One we’ve already worked on the diet, right inflammations down food allergens, our digestion is better. We’re working on sleep, we’re working on hydration. Getting your hydration up is super important, right? Every time you consume water, you’re diluting the amount of toxins in your body, alright significantly. And so solution to pollution is dilution, high quality, filtered water, reverse osmosis or some kind of really good filter spring water, maybe add some extra minerals in so that you’re getting some minerals to add in some ginger tea. Ginger is natural anti inflammatory, and it’s also a natural anticoagulant. So prevents things from sticking, you could do ginger tea, burdock teas also really good, that’s a good starting place. And then things are moving, your cells aren’t clumping up and sticking together. And then from there, that’s where it’s a good place to maybe add in some binders. So a good first binder would be a really good activated charcoal, especially ones that are kind of more coconut shell based at bedtime, two hours after food and supplements. So it’s kind of in your bloodstream, it’s kind of filtering things out. It’s not getting binding up to all your food and all the nutrients in your food, unless you want to because you’re eating some bad food. That’s a good first starting point to kind of get you moving.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s break down charcoal just a little bit. So people understand what it is they hear it but they’re picturing maybe the charcoal, you know, petroleum based block that your dad used to put lighter fluid on and burn them down and put them in the grill. And then you cook some hot dogs as a kid or something.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, totally.
Evan Brand: That’s not the charcoal we’re talking about. So basically, what they’re going to do is they’re going to heat these coconut shells, that’s going to be the best. And that basically, they’re decomposed coconut shells. So they’re at a very, very, very high temperature. And then they’re going to combine it with oxygen to, quote, activate the charcoal. And then what happens is, if you were to look at it under a microscope, you’ve got millions and millions and millions of what they would call micro pores on the surface of the charcoal. And it’s when people say bind, it sounds like a magnet, but it’s really not, you know, it’s called an adsorbent agent. And so you’ve got just make sure you had it right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it’s not like a sponge. It’s more like a magnet.
Evan Brand: Yeah, right. So it’s like you’ve got but it’s a weak magnet is my point about the magnet is, is it’s weak, meaning that you actually can create a hurts if you do too much charcoal, for example. So I did it personally, when I went really high dose like 810 capsules, several times a day of charcoal, I actually, I started to get just a little off like I was detoxing too much. And so I found Yes, it is kind of a magnet, but it’s a weak one. Meaning that if you picture like the lava rock, that’s probably the best example in in a big form that people can visualize as those lava rocks. Maybe you had though, that was like old school landscaping. I know as a kid, we had lava rocks in the front of our house. Yep. And so the lava rock, you saw these tiny little holes in it. And that’s kind of the charcoal but but at a bigger level. And so let’s say it’s mycotoxins or heavy metals or pesticide, whatever else is kind of in those little holes. But remember, you still have to move this microscopic lava rock with the, with the toxins on through the intestinal tract. And if you have a leaky gut, some of those things can kind of fall off the law of rock and then go back into the bloodstream, which is why you can hurt even from binders alone. And so this is a really important point I want people to know because more is not always better when it comes to binders. So sometimes you can only handle one cap of charcoal three times a day, some people can handle more than that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% so you kind of highlight a couple things. What’s the mechanism? Well, there’s gonna be an adsorbent mechanism thing absorbed more magnet absorbed more like a sponge, right? absorbent sponge adsorbent more magnet. Again, we want to take it after food and supplements. We don’t bind up nutrition. I like starting in a bedtime. So it’s working overnight because a lot of how we detoxify happens around one to 3am. So I like having it in the intestinal tract when the liver and gallbladder dump. That way, it’s there binding stuff up and we can excrete it better. Now, one of the big side effects of activated charcoal on binders is constipation. So I always tell my patients Make sure your bowel movements are regular before you go into killing and use any binders because if we’re adding things that could slow down the motility more well that’s that’s a problem. Now, it’ll at least help pull toxins in but it’s still going to be slowing down your body’s ability to get toxins out of your intestinal tract. So that’s not good. So if that’s the case, we’re going to be adding in things to help move our intestinal tract and make sure we’re passing all of our bowel movement out in 24 hours or less 18 to 24 hours. So we have that effective mechanism of elimination working. So first thing is first check is like hydration. Second check is making sure your bowel movements are working and then if they’re not, we’re going to be adding things in to make sure our intestinal intestinal tract is moving appropriately before we add in binders. And if we have Side effects of constipation with the binders, we’re going to be adding more support to keep the bowels moving.
Evan Brand: And it’s honestly pretty easy. I mean, it’s a very common kind of gut reaction, oh my god, charcoal, constipation. But I’ll be honest with you, it’s rare that it’s something that requires special attention. Because a lot of times we’re doing extra vitamin C, because most people are low in that most people are deficient in magnesium. So we’re doing extra of that already. A lot of times the herb formulas that you are using for gut infections, those may have some extra bow moving support in those and just by clearing out infections you and I’ve talked about, in the past how bacterial overgrowth can create certain gases that will slow the transit time down, just by eradicating those infections, the bowels can return to normal. So yes, constipation can happen. But it’s usually not a huge wrench in the gears. And we can overcome it pretty easily with minor tweaks if needed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly. So it can go either way. Some people when they get inflamed, they’re pulling a whole bunch of water in to flush things out. If you’re more prone to be constipated, you just have to be mindful of it. That’s why when we’re adding in binders, we’re doing it like one capsule at a time. So there’s no big jump, where people get into trouble is they just kind of come in there with a higher dose or they jump too fast. And that’s where the problem comes in. And again, like Evan mentioned us some of the herbs that we give may have a really, you know, good laxative effects are really healthy intestinal migrating motor complex work well, if not, I’ll be using special special things like magnesium and things like that to keep the intestinal tract moving. Ginger is a really good pro kinetics. So we’ll be adding that in and really just helping to support the natural migrating motor complex of the intestinal tract while adding some binders now, once we start adding some binders at nighttime, we may do it sometime midday as well that way we kind of have coverage within a 12 hour timeframe. So we have some coverage at night, some coverage during the day. But I always start at night first, partly because that’s when we were dumping a lot of toxins at night.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let me just address this concern real quick. And then we’ll move on to my next favorite binder, which is chlorella. So just like oh, charcoal, constipation, people go Oh, charcoal mineral depletion. I’ve talked with a guy named Neil Nathan, who wrote a great book called toxic. I often recommend people buy that to look into binders. He has worked alongside a guy named Dr. Michael gray, who’s a toxicologist, I believe he’s out of Arizona, he’s a guy who’s been working on treating mold. For decades, this guy has been using, I’ve heard insane numbers like 50 to 100 grams of charcoal per day, we’re talking literally 8090 100 capsules of charcoal a day for years. And there’s never been an issue of mineral depletion, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. So his kind of argument after I probed him on that question was, well, what about mineral depletion? He goes well, so what if you lose one or 2% of minerals? If you’re getting 98% of your nutrition and minerals, still, the the pros outweigh the cons in the sense that you’re removing toxins that are affecting hormones, the brain, the liver, the kidney, so he’s like, yeah, maybe you lose a couple percent. But it’s never been something that’s called like a heart attack. Because you’ve lost so much potassium or anything crazy like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you’re just going to be taking it away, you’re going to be just taking it away from it. So that’s going to mitigate most of it. If you’re taking activated charcoal with your food all the time. Yeah, maybe you have a problem. But you’re going to be one you’re going to be kept getting a lot of minerals in your water and food throughout the day. And then you’re going to start by taking it at night when you’re not, like overly hydrating anyway, and to at least two hours after you eat and so it’s not that big of a deal. And so yeah, as long as you time it up, right. I just think that’s a moot point for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah. All right. So let’s let’s go into chlorella, because I really love chlorella, and I didn’t know too much about it. Besides that you’d see like little chlorella tablets, it always comes in these little green looks like a little Pez or something and they’re kind of hard to chew, but they’re a little awkward to swallow. And then Luckily, I found a couple companies that make micronized liquid chlorella, and that’s what I often use. chlorella is an algae. But it works amazing as a broad spectrum. So a lot of people kind of market it as a heavy metal detox because it has a really unique ability to bind on to heavy metals like mercury and lead and cadmium and arsenic and aluminum things that every modern human has, whether it’s from breathing and car exhaust, to having amalgam fillings in their mouth, but it’s awesome. And I’ve seen I could show you several case studies on pesticides, herbicides, and mold toxins, and chlorella being used to pull those out. We’ve got in fact before and after results of seeing even little kids, 234 year olds that I’ve worked with where they had major, major major pesticides. These were kids that were diagnosed autistic, are on the spectrum. We give them as high doses we can go with chlorella, we retest after three to six months and guess what the pesticides herbicides are gone. And oh my god. I mean, sometimes it just almost makes you cry because it’s like, wow, how is something like this so beneficial, but you’re not hearing about this on the nightly news?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing we can do to detoxify I always tell patients is stop adding toxins in. So first stop adding toxins in so look at your pesticides right? Look at the food that you’re eating, make sure it’s organic, no GMOs, you know, make note, no added hormones, don’t consume foods and plastics. If you use plastic, you know, try to keep it in the fridge out of the sunlight out of heat out of the microwave. Excellent clean water, filtered water, clean water, if it’s aro, no big deal, add some minerals back in there, I see a lot of people complaining about our water, hey, I rather have my water cleaner, and then add minerals back in and have water that’s more toxic, because you can’t, you can’t add things into the water that make it more or less toxic. It’s either got to be filtered from toxins, and then you can add minerals back in on the flip side. And that’s totally okay. And then from there. And then from there, that’s going to kind of give you that the first foundation because your food’s good, your water is good. And then all your hygiene products make sure deodorants and skincare and soaps were free of toxins there. And that way when we add in binders, there’s going to be just less things that have to be binded. So our body can work on binding up more things that are released from our tissues that are more stored toxins versus toxins that are coming in every day from our environment.
Evan Brand: That’s a great point. I even forgot to mention that which is duh. Why did people have to get into the situation where they need binders in the first place? Well, it’s they’ve been exposed to toxins. Now, some people they weren’t exposed to toxins on purpose, it was just they ate organic, but then they, you know, stayed a month in a moldy Airbnb or something and they got exposed that way. So it’s not always your fault. But you’re right, you got to empower people and say, hey, look, you can make a choice, you can either eat organic, and not get exposed, or you can eat conventional. But now you’ve got to do the cleanup work. And it’s much better to stop it before it gets in than having to remove it once it’s already in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Now, outside of that we can do things that help our livers function better, we can work on phase one detoxification support, which will take a lot of these fat soluble toxins and convert them into water soluble. Now these toxins are mobile. So the activated charcoal really works great when toxins are now mobilized, if they’re not mobilized, these binders aren’t going to really work well because everything’s kind of be in the tissue kind of stored up so to speak. So it’s gonna be hard to really grab it. So getting phase one detoxification support dialed in B vitamins, antioxidants, these are going to be key nutrients, maybe liver tona fine herbs like milk thistle, or dandelion or artichoke root. I have a supplement called liver supreme or antioxidant supreme are both my phase one detoxification support that gets things mobilized. Now if they’re mobilized now we can come in there with binders and we can soak it up a little bit.
Evan Brand: Yeah, phase two is important to now a little involved, I would suppose with the with the binder conversation, because if phase two is not working, you know, phase one can be up regulated. But if phase two is not working, it’s like you’ve got a fire hose going into a garden hose and the backup can happen there. And I’ll tell you personally, and clinically, when I start to use nutrients to fuel phase to like some of the amino acids. I’ve taken it too far like with everything, you know, because I’m a guinea pig. But I’ve noticed massive, massive improvements just by helping out phase two. And then if I ramp up phase two too much, I’ll throw in binders and then the binders will kind of help mitigate the hurdles from up regulating phase two. So it’s a it can be a little bit of a seesaw sometimes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Evan Brand: All right, what else what else should we hit on? We should hit on the the Clay’s a little bit as well. You and I love clays that are awesome. You’ve got zeolite you’ve got bentonite clays, those are kind of your top big ones you’ve got like green clays and such clays are awesome. I find that they are really good at heavy metals and molds and will often use it in a blend. So we’ll use a little bit of clay a little bit of charcoal a little bit of chlorella all at once. And they’re well tolerated. I haven’t seen that many people who works from clay so I don’t have any, you know, evidence beyond clinical with this, but I would say that you seem to have less hurting with clays than you do like chlorella or charcoal. I find you can go too much with the others.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, yeah. So just to highlight a couple of things here regarding the sulfur. NAC. glutathione glutathione is a tri peptide anyway. So that’s made from glutamine, glycine, cysteine, right, taurine, MSM, alpha lipoic acid, just getting a lot of our sulfur nutrients on board is going to be huge. That’s going to help provide a lot of the building blocks for phase two. And that way we’re going to be able to, you know, and acetylation, glutathione, conjugation, methylation, right, these are going to involve a lot of our phase two nutrients and so Phase One, like methylation will evolve, like b 12. And full eight, right? So we want to make sure all those things are working if we need Now, some people, we’re not going to be pushing the toxification directly, we’re going to just be, it’s gonna be there more to help pick up the dead debris from things that are being killed in the gut. But if the activated charcoal still not enough, we may have to push more of those phase one and phase two, just to make sure those toxins are releasing, and then the binders will be there to catch things a little bit as well. So a little bit of a push catch, if necessary. If not, we’ll just be doing more of a catch and the push will be more from the killing side. So everyone’s a little bit different. And I tend to a lot of times this isn’t a problem when you have the foundation built in first.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the funny thing is going into this podcast, I thought, oh, wow, this will be you know, pretty easy to explain. But the more we dive into it, the more this thing gets a little tricky. And so case specific because some people, they don’t tolerate up regulating phase two that much, and other people they have trouble with the binders. So we try to make this stuff as simple as we can. But keep in mind people this is not This podcast is not designed to replace one on one functional medicine care. So if you really want to get to the bottom of these issues, you need help you need us to help guide you through this because I don’t want you to go in and just pop in a bunch of charcoal and you feel bad. You don’t know why. And then you’re confused about what you’re going to do next.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So let’s talk about some binders. So activated charcoal, you mentioned the heating like that the you know the which is going to really have a big binding effect. It’s also going to help with mold as well. We have things like bamboo, bamboo binders are excellent as well. We have things like citrus pectin, which are shown to be very helpful for lead. We have zeolite binders which are very helpful for mold. I think activated charcoal is also very helpful for mold. We have things like beetroot powder, which has some natural binding effects for mold as well. Obviously, we have the medication coolest I mean, which is a really good mole binder. There’s some side effects, though, which can lower your sex hormones fulvic minerals, which have some mold and some binding effects to any comments on the different kinds of binders having chlorella, more on the metal side more for Mercury, though more in the intestinal tract. Anything else?
Evan Brand: Yeah, the colas. darmian is strong stuff. I used it. And, man, I tell you it works. But I do believe that it affected my gut negatively. I do believe that. Now I don’t know if I don’t know if that’s a direct influence, or is it a byproduct of dragging mycotoxins out of the system? I’m not too sure. But I would try to tell people don’t use the prescription binder unless you absolutely have to. And you’re just so miserable. You can’t get yourself out of the rabbit hole with it. Because for me necessary for most. Yeah, for me, I just I really struggled. And I was doing the natural binders for months. And I needed a little extra help. So I did it short term. But I would try to stray most people away the natural binders can be really good if you have enough patience and time to resolve the issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you’ve like for you it’s more of a mold thing. So we’re kind of talking for binders for most people is more in the killing side. Right. So for that you had no problems with it. Right? It was more on the mold side, correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then you find you fit on the mold binding side, you found that which is better for you when you had what more glutathione and more so for support in along with the binders? Was that true?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, the glutathione definitely helped as long as I didn’t do too much. And then also helping the glucuronidation pathway that’s also part of this whole conversation. And so calcium D glucose rate did great things for me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, calcium to glucose. It’s good. And that’s a estrogen binder as well as a mole binder.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, it really helps with z, what’s called [inaudible], which is something we test for on the urine. So, you know, like we’ve talked about today, you can have a kind of a broad spectrum approach, but we really try to dial it in if we can, if we see specific mycotoxins, we’ll try to give a little more specific.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So I think that’s really important. Anything else you wanted to highlight on that?
Evan Brand: I think that’s it. I would just say the first step is really trying to get the data, right, because, you know, people hear the word detox and like, yep, I need some of that. And it’s kind of trendy, which is, I guess, good, but also bad because people just jump into detox not knowing why or what they’re doing or what they’re after. So my recommendation as always our philosophies test, don’t guess and figure out what do you have that you’re detoxing? Do you have a heavy metal burden? Let’s find out. Do you have a mycotoxin burden? Do you have pesticides and chemicals? Do you have all that? Okay, great. Now, let’s make a plan to go after these things. So, like I said, Don’t just run to Whole Foods, buy coconut charcoal and take it if you don’t know why you need it. I prefer people have a reason.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% I totally agree. So a couple things, right. So number one, people say toxification. Right? Well, number one, you’re always detoxifying. The question is, are you detoxifying at 100%? Are there enough toxins and stressors in the environment that are impairing your detoxification? where certain toxins are accumulating in your body more than are being eliminated. So number one, you’re always detoxify. Number two, it’s more optimizing your detox vacation systems. Also number three people that talk about cellular detox. That’s marketing garbage. Okay. detoxification is happening at a cellular level. It’s called their cytochrome p 450 oxidase pathways that’s happening biochemically at a cellular level. amino acids, vitamins, minerals, nutrients, these pathways are being upregulated all the time that’s happening at a cellular level. So when people talk about cellular detox, that’s just marketing hooey. Anything you do to help detoxification just drinking more water, guess what you’re enhancing, so detoxification just by you, decreasing inflammation. You having really good nutrition in your food, you’re enhancing the certification. Okay, so don’t get don’t get caught up with a lot of these marketing buzzwords.
Evan Brand: Yeah, unfortunately, detox is probably the most what would you say? Maybe sleazy snake oily type part of functional medicine?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it is for sure. I think a lot of the time it is because people come at it from that’s the first step. So they’re taking people and they’re just trying to upregulate these pathways right out of the gates. And people have gut issues, and they’re being nutritionally deficient for a while. And there have a lot of toxins that they’re consuming food wise, or in their life. Yeah, they can really feel crappy and sick. So it’s probably the last thing I do out of the gates again, specifically, right, we’re always detoxifying. So if I see a patient and I don’t hit the toxification, specifically with those nutrients, but I get them drinking better, cleaner water, and get them going organic, and get them pooping every day. I am enhancing their detoxification, like, tenfold just doing that alone. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s just funny, I guess, it gets a little-
Evan Brand: Cheesy, because that’s one of the few things that your average person who knows nothing about functional medicine knows about is the word detox. They probably heard it before their friend drinking detox tea or something silly like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? And then you have like the master cleanse detox, right, which is, hey, that’s cool. You’re giving your digestive system a break, and you’re not necessarily detoxifying. When you when you do that, I mean, you’re not enhancing nutrition, you’re enhancing fasting and autophagy. And, and that can help with stem cells. And that can help detoxify a little bit, because you’re, you’re fasting. So detoxification is a little bit higher there, but you’re not specifically pushing those pathways. Most of those benefits happen because you’re not consuming a whole bunch of food allergens. People feel better doing a Master Cleanse, it’s typically because their diet usually isn’t that great. So when they go on a Master Cleanse, they’re avoiding a lot of those foods that are inflaming them all the time. The more healthy Your food is, when you go to a cleanse, you’re kind of like, Oh, well, it isn’t that big of a deal, because your food’s already really high quality.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. silica is on the list, too. There are small nutrients. I mean, there’s there’s boron, there’s trace minerals. Or you may be helpful. Yeah, molybdenum can be helpful. So I think we hit on a lot of the big ones, though, a lot of the big tools that you mentioned the pack, then I’ve done packed and I’ll be honest, I haven’t noticed much from it. I do use it in combination with some other binders. But I’ve never done just like a pectin trial by itself and notice any significant difference, meaning I haven’t taken it. And my head’s clear, like with charcoal, if I’m kind of fuzzy, I’ll take a little charcoal and then boom, you know, I’ll notice the clarity. I don’t know if it’s pectins different maybe it’s not binding on to the type of toxin that’s causing the head drunkenness in the first place.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s better for lead I think and Merc, okay, yeah, we’re for the heavy metals, but it’s still helpful, you know, ya know, if you’re gonna be detoxifying, it’s not gonna hurt having that in there. It just wouldn’t be the only thing you’d have in there.
Evan Brand: Right, right. Yeah. And so, and maybe heavy metals, they don’t have as much of a quick turnaround time on your symptoms, whereas mold does, like, I know, if I’ve taken a mold hit, it’s like, Whoa, it’s a pretty quick symptom reaction. Whereas, hey, I breathe in a little car exhaust, I’m probably not going to feel anything right away from that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Exactly. Yeah, totally. So anything else you want to add? And I think we really went to town on all this stuff. I mean, I think the key thing I want to highlight for everyone listening, if you’re having a lot of issues or hormone issues of detoxification issues, you know, do the foundation’s out of the gates. But if you’re still struggling, you want to reach out to someone like myself, and Evan, so we can help you all out. We’re available worldwide, and Evan’s at EvanBrand com. I’m at JustinHealth.com, you can click on our schedule buttons, and we can support you and help you during the process. If you need that extra help. We’ve helped thousands of patients together. So we have a lot of experience. And a lot of people have other issues going on, like gut infections, like hormone imbalances, like inflammation issues like other thyroid or autoimmune issues that are part of the issue. And just supporting detoxification by itself won’t be the fix for that. It’s part of a bigger broader plan. Yeah, on the fence. Feel free to reach out guys.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good point. And some of our mentors that said you really have to kind of market to people for what they think they need, but give them what they truly need. So a woman may say, Oh, I need detox. Okay, so I’m like, Okay, yeah, we can help with that. But hey, guess what, detox is not your number one priority based on these labs, we really need to do this. And as a side effect of working through this, yep, we’ll detox you as well. So, don’t always assume in your head, you’ve got it all figured out. Because there may be a different set or of priorities or a different order of operations.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s always interesting when patients come in, and they kind of have an idea what they want. But then the question is, I’m gonna try to give you what you need. And I’ll try to connect the dots. Because if your goal is to get better and address these issues, then we’re totally in alignment, you just may be, you may think this is what you have to do to get there. But as long as you’re open to guidance, then hey, we can adjust that for sure.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s always a fun process. So Justin mention the links I mentioned a moment of time, Dr. J at JustinHealth.com. available online. And me, EvanBrand.com. And that’s it. So we’ll be back next week. take great care. If you have questions, concerns, comments, you know, write us a review and tell us what kind of topics do you do you want us to cover we’re happy to dive into all of it. We live we eat, we breathe this stuff every day, all day. I mean, this is our life. So we’re very passionate and we would love to hear what you want to hear about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And we’ll put a link down below under references for products that we specifically use and formulate to help support some of the pathways and the objectives that we chatted about in today’s podcast. So if you want to support the show, you can also purchase those products that which we believe in personally use for ourselves, patients and family. Awesome, everyone. You guys have a phenomenal day. It was great chatting with y’all. Take care now. Take care.
Evan Brand: Bye bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/detoxing-with-the-correct-binders-podcast-324
Natural Herbal Support to Help Reduce Inflammation | Podcast #323
Inflammation is our bodies’ natural response against infection, injuries, wounds, and other forms of harm. However, inflammation can cause problems too. It is when some conditions are causing continuous inflammation resulting in tissue injuries along the way.
In this podcast, Dr. J and Evan Brand talk about some herbal remedies that might help you deal with yours or gear you to avoid unnecessary inflammation. Although there are anti-inflammatory drugs available in the market, some of these lead to unwanted side-effects or, perhaps, not useful.
For people with inflammatory issues, it’s also good to consider natural herbs to manage it. Some natural herbs you can try are turmeric, ginger, and green tea since some evidence claims its effectiveness. These are generally safe, but it’s still good to consult or discuss this with your physician to make sure that it fits you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:27 Natural Herbal Support for Inflammation
4:09 Key Ingredients for Reducing Inflammation
11:08 TNF Alpha Pathway, Cox Pathways
16:54 “You are what you digest from what you eat”
18:03 Natural Cortisone & Natural Anti Inflammatory
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Evan, how are we doing today man? What’s going on?
Evan Brand: I’m doing good. I’m feeling better. I don’t think I even told you about this off the air. But I had a bat house on the side of my house.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A bat house?
Evan Brand: Yeah, bat house. Yeah, to try to get to try to get some bats to basically, you know, take take residents there. So they would eat all of our mosquitoes. And they never came. And I was up on the ladder. I don’t know, this may be two months ago now. And I was up on the ladder. And I was unscrewing the bat house from the house. And as soon as I did that, I noticed it was a wasp nest in there. And as soon as the, as soon as I saw that, a wasp landed on my hand. And last time I got stung, it hurts super bad. And so I wasn’t thinking straight, I thought, okay, there’s a wasp on my hand, I’m gonna get stung, it’s gonna hurt, I might shake my hand and fall backwards off the ladder, this is really bad. So I just turned around and just jumped. And it was probably not crazy high, but maybe eight feet up. And I just jumped and just tried to like, you know, cushion my fall as much as I could and kind of roll after I landed on the grass. But ever since then, man, I’ve had a little bit of some cervical, I probably need to see a chiropractor. I haven’t yet but I’ve had like some cervical tightness. And if I sleep the wrong way, it like flares up the cervical tightness. And so I’ve been using some herbal anti inflammatories and nutrients that we can dive into to help me. But I wanted to tell you that and see if you had any other suggestions of things I should be doing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s really great. Yeah, so we’re going to be talking all about inflammation. And we’ll be talking about natural herbal support to kind of help her natural functional medicine support to help kind of reduce that inflammation. Now, structurally, in your situation, there’s probably some level of inflammation directly to that area. So some level of soft tissue, whether it’s active release technique, or myofascial just to kind of help with that tissue. Because when it gets strained or damaged or inflamed like that, it can get a little bit fibrotic, you can get some scar tissue, it can maybe lose some blood supply and oxygenation. So getting some good movement in that tissue to kind of help with oxygenation, make it more pliable, helps making sure those joints are moving well. So really good chiropractic adjustments through there to make sure everything is moving well, alignments, good. So those are the first things out of the gates that I’d be pursuing. Outside of, you know, just some good soft tissue support in your own like a good massage guns helpful just kind of day in day out. And then seeing good massage therapists, maybe some red light to kind of reduce inflammation, too. I think that’s great out of the gates. And of course, you know, we can kind of go into all of the different natural anti inflammatory, inflammatory support that we use typically in practice, and we’ll talk about what what you’re using already as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I appreciate it. I need to get back in touch with my myofascial lady. I just haven’t reached out to her yet. But I think she left town for a while. So she’s still around. I should probably try. I just got fearful I thought, Oh, god, what did I do to my spine? Am I screwed forever? You know, you hear about these people having like car wrecks. And you know, my wife used to work in a chiropractor’s office, and she would see people that were injured from 20 years ago. And I’m like, ah, why, like, surely it doesn’t have to be that way. And I think we have some good strategies that can definitely shorten the recovery timeline. Let me just talk about the topical aspect first. This one thing’s been very beneficial. It is a company called Ned. Hello, Ned is their company. And they actually just send it to me like a year ago, just as like a free Hey, we want you to sell our products. Here’s some free stuff to try out kind of thing. But I loved it so much. I bought more of it, but it’s called a body butter. And it’s just loaded with CBD oil and frankincense and a bunch of other essential oils. It has Arnica in there. So this is just a topical body butter. And I tell you, if I put that stuff on, it’s a significantly reduced pain. And my range of motion is almost 100% if I’m using that topically, so CBD Arnica frankincense, you know, something like that a good blend, or if you like by that body butter, that might be a good option topically.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like that. That makes a lot of sense. So out of the gates, what’s the first thing so more than likely you get some kind of a mini whiplash? I’m guessing you kind of fell more into flexion. Right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you probably had a little whiplash because you probably went forward and then your body had to like kind of seize up to kind of stuff that forward flexion and so it probably just strained you probably had a little spray sprain strain in those back ligaments in the neck. And so getting some good soft tissue out back there will help making sure that joints are moving appropriately will help the problem with like ligamentous tissue, it’s more a vascular, right, you don’t get great blood supply. Or like if you strain your muscle like a muscle belly issue, right, it’s going to heal a lot faster because that tissue is just more vascular, it’s got a lot more blood flow. So anytime you have a vascular tissue, you really need good soft tissue support to really help break down and break down fiber optic tissue, scar tissue and then help that will improve oxygenation and that will improve blood flow. And of course, you know, soft tissue and or red light therapy are all going to be amazing things to really work on the on the blood flow and the inflammation reduction aspects. So that’s good out of the gates. And of course like my good thing in my line, we use something called curcumin supreme. Which is a liposomal curcumin, I like that. I think that’s excellent because it has natural anti inflammatory pathway. So like the big inflammatory pathways that you’re going to see a lot of the medication use are going to be the Cox pathways right cyclo oxygenase pathways. And so like cyclooxygenase, two and cyclooxygenase one are going to be some of the big ones right? Now we can do natural herbs to kind of help produce Cox one and Cox two. So Cox one typically will be reduced by things like aspirin or n sets the problem with these things that can be a little bit more irritating to the liver into the gut. So maybe acutely, it’s okay, but chronically not the best, right? And then we have Cox two as well which these were like the old fashioned, like Vioxx drugs, remember, those, like 15 years ago, caused a lot of stroke and heart issues. Those are like our Cox two pathways. So Cox one and Cox two are some pretty good ones, that major pathways. And of course, we have like our prostaglandin e two, which is an inflammatory pathway as well. And prostaglandin e two is what drives constriction. And it’s what causes more platelets and more stickiness to happen. And so we want to work on reducing some of those pathway. So we want to knock down prostaglandin e two, what’s the best way to do that? Well, high dose fish oil or fish oil in general, of course up a really good whole food, pasture fed kind of paleo templates, it’d be great. And you’re going to reduce a lot of inflammation coming from conventional meats. Again, healthy grass fed pasture fed meats better, right? Less arachidonic acid, which feeds that PG net prostaglandin to pathway, of course, keeping the insulin and the grains and the refined sugar, all that crap in check, all of that inflammation feeds these Cox two and Cox one. pathways, right. And so we want to inhibit those pathways, we want to block them. So more Cox one, Cox two, the more inflammation is going down those pathways. So all the dietary crap sets the table, like my analogy is, imagine you walk into a kitchen and the gas is on the burner. Okay, let’s say it’s been on for a couple hours you smell it? Well, let’s say you pull out your lighter, right? Just a little spark, boom, how’s it gonna explode? Okay, but if you did it without the gas there, no explosion? Well, it’s the same thing. If you have the gasoline going, that’s a systemic inflammation from all of these things we chatted about, that allows the little spark of an injury like that, to set off this whole inflammatory cascade, that’s going to be a lot more, let’s just say amplified in the wrong direction, if you will.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s, that’s a great analogy. So let’s kind of spotlight some of the the key ingredients that we use here. Now some of these we can provide to our clients and to me personally in blends, and then some of them we can do in isolation. So I think the the best one or kind of the best combo for me is really some of the enzymes and then plus tumeric and the boswellia I think that’s been kind of my game changer because I noticed that when I added some extra serapeptodase into my system, I have a blend, I’m using the has some in there, but when I added extra serapeptodase, and also some lambro kinase, my issues, definitely, I would say I felt definitely more mobile, like I have more blood flow. And then of course, my hands and feet were warming up too. So I just know from like a circulation standpoint, that that’s also helping and then we know that tumeric has like an anti coagulating ability. So whether it’s like a tumeric tea or like you mentioned a life was almost a product or even just like a standardized curcuminoid product, something like that is going to be awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I like it. So if we kind of break things down by Cox one, Cox two, there’s also the locks pathway that’s like the the leuco trying pathway or the light bo oxygenase pathway. Alright, so lipo oxygenase versus cyclo oxygenase. These are both going to be inflammatory pathways. So if we start with like the Cox, one pathways, things like ginger are also going to be very helpful in that. So ginger is really good. Excellent. You can also do things like you mentioned lumberg kinase, or serrapeptase, that’s gonna just sit in your bloodstream, you’re taking it away from food, it’s not like a digestive enzyme. And that’s going to help hit all these inflammatory chemicals that are in the bloodstream, it’s going to start breaking them down and digesting them. And we already talked about the fact that we have a lot of platelet aggregation. So what that means is over time, those platelets are going to increase scar tissue and in decreased blood flow. So what are the enzymes are going to do is they’re going to break up those platelets isn’t help improve blood flow, improve oxygenation and improve nutrition. So and it’s also going to decrease scar tissue formation. So part of the enzymes are helping blood flow. They’re reducing. They’re increasing oxygenation, and they’re reducing scar tissue so then it helps a lot of the other nutrients also work better. So we already talked about like, some of the Cox one stuff is going to be ginger. We talked about that already. Some of the Cox two things are going to be things like curcumin, lipids, omo curcumin, and my line I have one called Curcumin Supreme, which is a really good one. And then you already mentioned a couple things earlier like Frankincense or boswellia. That’s also going to be another cyclo oxygenase ACE inhibitor and the thing I like about boswellia or frankincense, it’s the same thing. By the way, guys, frankincense is the essential oil version of that frankincense, you can kind of put topically on it. And then you can also take boswellia internally, so you can kind of hit it from both ends, which is really good.
Evan Brand: Yeah, also omegas, I am boosting up my omegas, I’m doing about five grams per day of pure omega, that’s my formula. It’s a triglyceride form of omega as it works amazing. And then also, I’m doing extra course attend, just to really help you know, I’ve had some histamine issues after getting exposed to mold. So for me, I do course attend with an enzyme, there’s a special enzyme we use, it’s a course it’s an enzyme blend that I love. And I actually may start manufacturing it soon. But for now, I’m just mixing these. And the course attend for me is a mast cell stabilizer. Now I don’t know about like trauma, necessarily physical trauma, aggravating mast cells and creating a histamine release. But it would make sense if there’s a stress response from the body, you may be pulling out more histamine, I’m thinking of like a, I don’t know, a car crash or some sort of immediate trauma, you’re probably going to have some histamine to really help increase inflammation, but overall, you don’t want that long term.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Yep, that makes a lot of sense. So there’s other pathways you mentioned, right? So the course attend, like you mentioned earlier, that’s going to help with the TNF alpha pathway. So TNF alpha is another inflammatory cytokine. So think of a lot of these cytokines are like inflammatory chemical messengers, we have cytokines, we have interleukins, we have nuclear factor, Kappa beta, we have TNF alpha, these are all these chemicals, signalers. And so when we have inflammation happen, these type of chemical messengers can amplify inflammation, the effects of inflammation, systemically. And the problem with inflammation is it’s helpful in the short run, because it helps drive blood flow and helps the healing repair process. The problem is, is when it hangs around too long, right? So for like an acute injury, it’s probably good. I think part of the reason why that pain and inflammation is there is to keep you on your butt, so you’re not continuing to damage that area. So I think part of it is, it’s Hey, you hurt yourself, let’s kind of like rest a little bit right part of its that it’s also going to aggregate a lot of immune cells to help heal the injury, preventing infection, it’s also there to help with healing the body up, right, because the body is not about performance when it’s injured, it’s about band aiding the crap out of that area. So the problem with that is the body doesn’t care if it laid down a whole bunch of scar tissue. And that area is now going to be less flex, less flexible, and less mobile. It just wants the body to heal. So now you have to say, Well, I’m also interested in performance too, right? So then you have to look at the fact that like, Okay, I’m going to reduce inflammation, I probably should still be more mobile, I’m sorry, less mobile moving less, because my body wants me to move around less. I’m reducing the inflammation, pain naturally. But I still have to make sure I don’t overdo it. So you have to make sure if you reduce the inflammation, you still don’t overdo it because your body’s creating that pain to keep you from not moving as much. You probably want some movement, but not as much to hurt yourself. And then number two, you really want to remodel that inflammatory scar tissue. And that’s where you know, massage, soft tissue work, adjusting, maybe some some rolling, some foam rolling, gentle things like that to kind of help realign that soft tissue. So it’s more functional and structurally stable. That’s better in the long run.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah. Good point. I forgot to mention that. It’s not called the Theracane but it’s similar. I’ve got this wooden like cane from like a physical therapy office like it’s a, it’s a wooden cane basically, and it’s got the wheels on it. I’ve been kind of digging that into my upper mid back area kind of work in my traps. I’ve been just doing some light stretches. I’ve been doing some lateral pull downs, I love lat pull downs, I’ve been doing some seated rows. I’ve been doing my roll machine. So just gently trying to work the area. And I do that after I take these enzymes. And I do notice that it definitely warms up the area and I do feel more loose. So I’m trying to think of you like you and I always talk about you have this stacking effect, right you’ve got the anti inflammatory diet as the foundation, you’ve got the omegas coming in to hopefully help lubricate reduce inflammation. We’ve got the anti histamine anti mast cell course attend. We’ve got the ginger working on the Cox pathway, you’ve got the tumeric you’ve got the boswellia. I mean, that’s just really the synergistic thing here. And I’m not I haven’t taken a single aspirin. So I’m not actually in pain anymore. But like I said, if I sleep wrong, it might kind of flare me up. So I don’t think I’m fully out of the woods yet, but I think I’m 95% there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. That’s good. So in general, we kind of have our Cox pathways right. Now, arachidonic acid can feed those pathways. So a lot of excess omega six junkie, refined omega six excess junkie animal products can definitely feed those pathways that sets the table like I mentioned gas in the kitchen right below spark and can take it off. And then we have our natural herbals like like ginger can help with Cox one. Fish Oil is actually For Cox two at high doses now if you do high doses of fish oil, you can increase what’s called lipid peroxidation. Because fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid, it’s more unstable, right? It’s got a lot of these. It’s got more double bonds in it, right? omega three means three double bonds, the more double bonds that are there, the more unstable the fatty acid is to heat and things like that, the more let’s say it can be oxidized. So having extra vitamin C, or extra vitamin E on board when you’re taking extra fish oil, just to make sure you don’t have oxidation is great. And we already talked about things like systemic enzymes talked about, like, you know, curcumin, liposomal curcumin is better due to the absorption, or something with black pepper in it helps with absorption to already talked about things like Frankincense or boswellia is great, you could always do some white willow bark, which is kind of how aspirin is naturally made, right? aspirin works more on Cox one. So aspirin is going to be your other natural source. And you can do white willow bark, which is the natural form of aspirin, which is great. There are things like Tylenol, but Tylenol works more on the central nervous system perception, right? So it decreases the nervous systems, perception of pain. And then of course, at the extreme example, we have opiates, which block the pain receptors in the brain, the the opiate receptors in the brain, not the best thing because you’re just decreasing perception of pain. Obviously, the opiates are way more addictive, right. But we can block some of these natural pain perceptions with CBD oil. So CBD is another great way to reduce perception of pain. But we got to be careful of, you know, Tylenol, or things like opiates, you know, opiates due to their addictive qualities. And Tylenol actually chronically can reduce gluta file and you can just type in Tylenol and low glutathione level. So if you’re taking Tylenol longer term, you definitely want to take it with NAC and or some cloudify and just to be on the safe side. But in general, we want you to try to do more of the herbals and more of the natural stuff out of the gates because that really, really, really can help reduce inflammation.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. Yeah, and the acetaminophen glutathione yeah, it’s a big problem. So that’s why I stayed away. So people listening, if you’re didn’t jump off a ladder like me, and you’ve got osteo arthritis or rheumatoid arthritis, or sports injury, or you’re just trying to heal up maybe post operation, these things we talked about today may be something to implement. And then obviously, working on all the other root causes too, because you are not just what you eat, you are what you digest from what you eat. So if you’re doing all these good nutrients, but you’ve got some type of malabsorption issue in the gut, you’ve got ridges on your fingernails, you’ve got thinning hair falling out here, you may need to look deeper at the gut and try to find some of these more root cause issues that led you to that amount of inflammation or slow recovery in the first place. So if you need to reach out, please do so. Our websites are JustinHealth.com. That’s for Dr. J. He works worldwide via phone, FaceTime, Skype, zoom, whatever. And then me Evan Brand, EvanBrand.com. So JustinHealth.com, EvanBrand.com please reach out if you need help. We love helping you guys. This is just a wonderful situation that we’re in to be able to help people across the globe get solutions to their health issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. And one last thing to comment is people talk about what we know about cortisone and prednisone injections, right for chronic pain, right? This is a common thing. Well, what’s our natural cortisone? What’s our natural anti inflammatory? Well, our adrenals. So if you have weaker adrenal is going into this stuff, you may not be able to make good amounts of our natural kind of anti inflammatory hormones like cortisol or cortisone, right? This is important. Now I had a family friend come up to me recently, they had chronic pain issues. And it was asking me some questions about things. And they were telling me Oh, I just got a cortisone injection. It’s doing really great right now I said, Well, number one, that’s that’s a really big mistake. I said, you can do a cortisone injection only, only one if it’s really debilitating, and you need that to buy you time to fix the underlying issue. The problem with any injections of steroids is they start breaking down the tissue and the cartilage and the ligaments and the bone in the joint. And actually, over time, they’ll stop giving you cortisone injections in an area after two or three injections sometimes, so then now what now you’re kind of stuck. So the only way ever support a cortisone injection, is if that’s buying you time to do all the other stuff and the pain is so debilitating, you’re just doing that to buy you time because if you’re not figuring out and doing all the other stuff, while that quarter zones working, you’re just going to just repeat its pattern over again three to six months later. And that’s not a good situation. So ideally, you maximize the low hanging fruit, hopefully you won’t have to go to that. And then if you have to go to it, you at least use that time to do more of the right things regarding soft tissue chiropractic work anti inflammatory, there’s another device we we use here we’ll put a link below for the newbie device which is a bio electric device that I have and I use that helps reduce inflammation with special bio electric wavelengths. Electricity wise that reduce inflammation, improve blood flow, help improve the muscle integrity in that area. So the muscles take over the stress the joints and the ligaments and that’s cartilage would normally absorb right we want our we want our shocks to absorb The force not the sensitive material in the in the vehicle so to speak, right we have shocks for a reason. Think of shocks in your body as like muscles. Think of the sensitive tissue as ligaments and cartilage, right? Those are going to be more a vascular right poor blood flow the muscles more vascular. So what’s good let the vascular shocks absorb most of that issue most of the inflammation and for so I’ll put the link down below for that too. So you guys have that for references. Anything else, man?
Evan Brand: Yeah, the sauna. The sauna has been helping me too. I love sitting in there. Yeah, that obviously warms me up to so I have the infrared heaters in the front and then the ceramic around the edges. So I do try to rotate make sure that the infrared does hit my back and it does help me quite a bit. So that’s also another beneficial thing. Epsom salt baths are very helpful potentially using a floatation tank, a float tank with just tons of Epsom salt and their magnesium and that’s that’s also another great strategy. So hope this helps people and take care yourself. Like I said, if you need to reach out please do JustinHealth.com or EvanBrand.com look forward to helping you soon.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We’ll be right over recommended products down below so you guys can see that and take advantage of the things that we use clinically for our family, ourselves and our patients worldwide.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/natural-herbal-support-to-help-reduce-inflammation-podcast-323
Recommended product:
To access or learn more about the Neubie
Enhancing Your Immune System With Vitamin D This Winter | Podcast #321
Getting enough vitamin D is essential to your long-term health. It’s relatively easy to get vitamin D through sun exposure most of the year, but that changes come wintertime. So here is Dr. J and Evan discussing why vitamin D matters and how to keep your levels up, even when the days are short and the skies are snowy and gray.
Vitamin D absorbs calcium and helps you maintain healthy bones. It also contributes to the health of your muscles, nerves, and immune system. So if you don’t get enough vitamin D, you may be at risk of developing rickets, osteoporosis, other bone disorders, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer. Older adults, people with dark skin, and obesity are more likely to have a vitamin D deficiency.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:49 The Importance of Vitamin D in Winter
5:15 Viruses in Winter Season
11:20 Vitamin D Supplements and Benefits
14:03 Vegan Vitamin D
19:01 Vitamin D as Epigenetic Regulator
22:55 Respiration Issues and Blood Pressure Issues
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live is Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today we’re going to be talking about vitamin D to help enhance your immune system is such a good topic because in the winter months, we’re exposed to all kinds of viruses and bacteria out there and immune stressors. There’s less sunlight, more cold, more sugar, more sweets, more holiday stress. And we really want to make sure that you guys have a strong immune system to be resistant to what’s happening in today’s environment. Evan, how are we doing today, my man?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. I’m ready for the sunshine to come back. You know, I was looking at my D minder app the other day, and the vitamin D window just opened back up. So and the which, technically, according to the way the earth is tilting, we’re actually past the deepest, darkest parts of winter. But you know, late December, because of Northern latitude, and the angle of the sun and all that you literally cannot make vitamin D, even if you’re outside, but naked, you just can’t. But luckily, according to my app, the vitamin D Window, at least from my latitude, just opened up about six days ago. So if there is Sunshine out from about 12 to one or two, there’s a good like two hours a day right now based on my latitude, where I can get adequate vitamin D with enough skin exposure. But the problem is, most people in the middle of the day there may be on their lunch break at their office, you probably can’t get outside enough to get the sun. And if it’s cloudy, of course that cancels it out? And can you undress enough at your office building to get enough sunshine to get enough vitamin D? So, in general, the answer is no. And this is why I would say 90% of people that we’ve tested via blood, we’re going to see vitamin D deficiency. And this is just something you cannot afford to be deficient in
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110%. So in today’s environment, with the winter being where it’s at, and depending on your latitude and longitude and, and your ability to be outside and expose yourself, getting vitamin D naturally to the sun, and it’s forming kind of these pre cholesterol d3, and that d3 being absorbed into your kidneys and liver, right, it’s odds are going to be pretty low. So we’re gonna have to supplement this time of year, that’s going to be without a doubt. And we got to get our vitamin D levels up to an optimal range as well, because we need to be at least above 50 on the United States metric for vitamin D, that’s important. If you have an autoimmune issue, if you have any cancer predispositions, you probably want to be even as high as 70, to 100, but at least 50 on the vitamin D side to really maintain optimal immune function.
Evan Brand: And this is something you can actually test at home now, which is pretty cool. So there are some labs that you and I can work with, where we can get people some dried blood spot testing. But if you’re working with us clinically, we might as well just run a full blood panel looking into thyroid and everything else. Because if you have other symptoms, you could take vitamin D and not fix yourself, meaning it’s great to optimize that. But you could still have other issues. So you could just do the at home blood panel or if we’re going to get you to the lab, we might as well look at everything else. And you’re not looking at an expensive test. It’s kind of hard to believe that this is not standard practice. But you go to your conventional doctor down the road, and they run basic blood work on you, they’re not going to run vitamin D, unless you ask for it. And even then they may say, Oh, it’s not covered by insurance. So what is your reply? Because it’s generally only going to be maybe 20, maybe $50. US max to test this is not an expensive test.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, no, it’s definitely not an expensive test. Now in general, and give you guys a couple of markers here in regards to the ranges. So off the bat, I already mentioned 50 to 70 is a pretty good range to be in I think for most people, right? If we have cancer, heart issues, autoimmune stuff, we can go 70 to 100. And the metric we want to look for is going to be nanograms per milliliter nanograms per milliliter. In Europe they do or Canada they do nano moles per liter. And the conversion on that I want to say is about two, you multiply whatever the level is here and you multiply it by about 2.25. And that gives you that conversion, right? So for at about 50 or so on the vitamin D here is sufficient, right? That’s the nanogram per milliliter multiply it by 2.25. That’s about 125 nano moles per liter if we’re talking Europe or Canada so you guys can make the conversion 2.25 All right, so 50 to 70 is ideal 70 to 100 is going to be you know if we have cancer, heart disease, immune issues. Now when we supplement with vitamin D, we want to make sure we’re taking d3 if your diets really great, lots of green vegetables, high quality gi butterfat, good kaitou then you’re probably fine. You don’t need k two if your diets not awesome or not great or you want that extra bit of insurance, you can always do vitamin K to with your vitamin D, just to make sure there’s an adequate balance there. A lot of your fat soluble vitamins tend to come and work together vitamin D vitamin K work importantly well because k helps calcium get into the bone D helps calcium be absorbed. From the gut as well, so it’s nice to have some k there. So we’re really helping to put all that calcium back into the bone that we’re now absorbing better in our gut from vitamin D. So it’s nice to have that as an insurance policy to make sure we’re putting and telling that calcium where it needs to go.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, I just put another paper in the chat for you if you want it. This was from 2006. And it was just talking about how there was back in the 1980s, a guy Edgar hope Simpson proposed that a seasonal stimulus was intimately associated with seasonal epidemic, influenza. And long story short, the fancy way of saying, hey, winter comes and then boom, all of a sudden, you know, viruses become more of a prevalent issue. And then long story short, there was this whole interventional study, which there’s many, many, many, many on this long story short, vitamin D is reducing the incidence of respiratory infections in children. So this is specifically talking about kids. But there are countless of these for adults. And so what’s happening when the vitamin D levels are sufficient, are a multitude of things. But in particular, it’s helping to reduce interleukin six, which is one of those inflammatory cytokines that we’re seeing get people in trouble. So if you can reduce your cytokines, that’s going to be beneficial. And then also another cool benefit is not only as sort of an anti viral, but there’s some anti microbial benefit, which I honestly didn’t know much about this and start till I started reading these papers here that it can actually activate your immune cells to produce some anti microbials. So sort of like a natural antibiotic, if you will, by upping vitamin D concentration. Now, the question is, well, how do people take it? Is it just an ongoing thing, if you think you’re getting into trouble with the illness, do you go high dose of it, I think it depends on what your levels are. So would you say you probably want to get a baseline first to know where you’re at and how you should address it or-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Baseline first, I mean, I would say the wider your skin is, the more fair your skin is. Probably the more efficient you are going to be at converting vitamin D from the sun, right? The darker your skin is think of your your the darkness in your skin, that’s melanin, right, the more melanin you have, so you have kind of different spectrums full on African American, that’s the highest amount of melanin, melanin is like your natural UV block, right, it helps block your skin from the sun’s rays. So due to evolution, and where we evolved, people that evolved closer to the equator, more UV light based on the angle of the Sun hitting it, they naturally evolved with more melanin in the skin, people that have all further away from the equator, less direct UV light, less melanin in the skin, because it’s all about making vitamin D. So the more efficient you are at making vitamin D, you probably are going to be, you’ll probably be able to get away with not supplementing as much or as frequent. The more melanin in your skin, the more you have to be on top of your vitamin D, because unless you’re going to be outside six to eight hours a day, and you’re at a, you know, mid to low 30 latitude, you’re probably just not going to be able to ever make enough vitamin D, therefore, you really have to be on top of everything. And you’re testing. So lighter skin, I think in general, a good rule of thumb is 1000, I use per 25 pounds of body weight, especially in the fall and winter months. And then if you want to take a break in the summer, that’s fine, just make sure you get a test here there to confirm it, the darker your skin is, you may even want to double that in the winter months. And then you may want to follow up and retest come the early spring and see where you’re at kind of monitor where you’re at. If you’re someone that works outside, that’s you have to make that adjustment. If you’re an office person you’re inside all day, you also have to make that adjustment to so in general 1000, I use per 25 pounds of body weight. And then if you have darker skin, you may want to double that for the winter months. And then it’s always good to confirm in the summertime in the winter, and sometime coming off the winter, early spring summer to see where you’re at. And then we can always adjust accordingly. And if there’s any risk of autoimmunity or cancer, we probably want to be testing just a little bit more frequently. Once you kind of know where you’re at, you can kind of guess based on how well you’re doing. And then in regards to vitamin D, you know, I mean, vitamin K, K2, you probably want anywhere between 100 150 micrograms of K2 is kind of where you want where you’re going to be at per day on average. And so if you’re doing lots of green vegetables, if you’re doing sauerkraut fermented foods, you’re doing kaitou from grass fed butter or ghee, you’ll probably be fine. And then if you want that insurance policy of about 150 micrograms, you can always just find a good vitamin d3 with that in there. And then that gives you that extra assurance that you’re okay there.
Evan Brand: Yep. And the other cool thing about this I mean, in terms of how big of a game changer This is for your health for your immunity, we’re talking minor dollars for testing. We’re talking minor dollars for actually buying something now, we’re still going to advise you to go with the more professional product just because that’s what we’re going to use clinically. That’s what we’re going to sell to people so we still do Want you to get a good quality product, but in a pinch, could you get away with something just a typical store brought brand, probably. So we just have a lot of sensitive people. So we’re going to want to avoid a lot of the fillers, you’ll see soybean oil, sometimes you’ll see other things that we don’t like, and some of the cheap brands. So we’re going to try to get you just like a straight d3, possibly with a little bit of gelatin. But even sometimes we’re gonna do like a veggie cap, when you’ve got maybe a little bit of cellulose but-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: MCT oil or olive oil, some kind of a healthier fat versus like you mentioned a soy or something more junky or more like polyunsaturated.
Evan Brand: Yeah, but once again, I mean, you’re looking at, in general, I know some of the professional brains, you and I use, cost wise, you’re looking at, like 50 to 60 bucks for six months. So I mean, you’re talking maybe 10 bucks a month, and that’s for like professional quality. And there are liquid versions that you can use for children as well. I’ve got both of my kids taking vitamin D. Now we do give them some different cod liver oils and omega. So you can get some vitamin D naturally from some of the cod liver oils, you can get a few 1000 iu, but we are still doing a little bit of extra K1, K2 and D3 for the kids. And that’s easy. And my daughter calls it Hummingbird food, because it’s clear just like our Hummingbird food and it tastes a little sweet. So she loves it. It’s like her favorite part of the day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, cuz it’s got a tiny bit of stevia in there. Right. And then you also have, you know, it’s clear liquid vitamin like the MCT oil in there. That’s Yeah, good. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. So 100% on that, I would say supplementally. Like you mentioned cod liver oil, very good. You can also look at other fat soluble vitamins, the other ones may be vitamin A, right. So if you’re doing high quality, ghee or grass fed butter, you’re probably getting a good amount of vitamin A in there, especially if you’re doing something your tea or coffee in the morning. If you’re eating good grass fed grass fed beef and you’re doing good quality pasture egg fed egg yolks, then you’re going to be set on a lot of that, if you want some additional insurance, you can do some cod liver oil, like I mentioned, you can get a vitamin D that has some vitamin A in it, or just use some of the extra cod liver oil and get some good egg yolks in and you’ll probably be totally fine with that. Anything else you want to add?
Evan Brand: Yep. I would just encourage people not to do. Yeah, I would say I just encourage people not to do the conventional D2 supplement that you’re going to get from a local doctor. For example, if you ask your neighbor down the road to give you some vitamin D, they’re probably going to give you D2. They may give you like a 50,000 iu or possibly even like 100,000 iu that you’re going to get from a pharmacy, it’s going to be loaded with a bunch of binders and fillers. And we find that just those really high doses for a few days don’t really do as much as a lower dose over a longer period of time. So it’s not where you just come in and do 100,000 for a week and you’re cured. Now you really need to just optimize it over a slower period of time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, like myself, I’m not gonna lie, I’ll do sometimes 40 or 50, once a week, to kind of keep my levels pretty good. But I think it just kind of depends on where you’re at. Right. So if if for some reason, you know, you forget to do your vitamin D, I’d rather have people do it like at least once a week. So it’s there because it is a fat soluble vitamin. So it will kind of build up in your system. It’s not like a B vitamin where you just pee it out. But ideally, every day is good, especially in the morning time because think about it, you wouldn’t naturally make vitamin D in the middle of the night or at nighttime, if you’re taking it right, you’d make it more in the morning to afternoon. So take it more in the morning and afternoon. Right, that makes more sense to me from a kind of day in day out how vitamin D will be made in general. And then the other thing is, if you miss it or you forget it, I think doing it at least getting it in there once a week as a fat soluble vitamin, just make sure you test make sure you’re doing well on that. And like you said having d3 is in the B that’s more of the animal version, I think is a lanolin more of a plant version on the D two side. And the thing with it’s more synthetic and it doesn’t equate to improving your vitamin D levels because as to get converted in the body. So there’s a conversion issue that tends to get lapsed on and it won’t move your vitamin D levels is good.
Evan Brand: I have seen some like vegan D3, I want to say they’re like an algae based product. Yeah, I haven’t looked too much into them. I mean, I have had some vegan clients who were like, Hey, I’m just really opposed to any other source of vitamin D. I’m like, okay, fine, we’ll get you some of the vegan ones. I think it’s a lichen. Maybe a lichen or an algae. I mean, I’m okay with it. But I don’t have enough long term evidence to say where I’ve looked at people and regards to their test results to confirm that their levels we’re getting up from the algae or the like and based one, I’m sure if it’s D3, and it says 5000. I mean, in theory, it’s good enough, but I just haven’t I don’t have enough data to say whether you should go for that or not. I would just go with your typical D3
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. Now vitamin D has a couple of different benefits. You already mentioned a couple things, let’s kind of go over some of the benefits for the listeners. So we already chatted about the the natural antibiotic that’s being produced by vitamin D. It’s called cathelicidin. It’s a kind of an antibacterial enzyme. That’s super helpful at being able to knock down bacteria, okay? It also has antiviral mechanisms as well. It has the antimicrobial peptides, like I mentioned, it also has some antiviral mechanisms. Part of that is it stimulates and can modulate the th one immune response and the th one immune system, that’s where you’re making a lot of your natural killer cells and your helper cells, which are really good. And then also good helper cell can also help you know that your antigen presenting cell can help make antibodies more efficiently. So you’re also going to have better TH2 immune response. So you’re going to make antibodies to whatever that infection is, those tend to come a little bit later in the game, but good signaling to make your antibodies is super helpful as well. I would also say as a couple other studies here that we’re talking about different things, so we have a reduce in our MMP 9 concentrations, we have a reduction in Brady Keinen storm, and our original reduction in our cytokine storm. So basically, we have a lot of inflammatory molecules that get produced, right, Brady keinen cytokines interleukins, MMP9. And basically these are inflammatory type of chemical messengers. And vitamin D can help modulate that and prevent that from being overproduced, which because the more we over produce those, the more our immune system responds, right, and we can create more cytokine storm issues because our immune system kind of is on this positive feedback loop, responding and creating more issues with these cytokines. So we can kind of modulate and bring these cytokines down a bit. And when there’s less cytokines, there’s less chance of a cytokine storm, which is basically our immune system responding. And imagine a fight between two people, you know, one person yells, the other person, that person yells back down, then we’re pushing them we’re shoving, then we’re hitting, and the violence escalates. That’s kind of what happens with the cytokine storm, with your immune system and all the different cytokines and immune chemical signals, so we can keep that modulating a bit, which is very helpful. And vitamin D plays a really important role in that.
Evan Brand: Awesome. I don’t think there’s really, really any other mechanisms that are important for this. I mean, I’m sure there’s other stuff that we could, we could pick out. But, you know, I would argue that, you know, if you’re darker skin in Canada, you’re in trouble. If you’re in New York, you’re in Michigan, you’re in Montana, you’re in Seattle, Washington, I mean, even, you know extremely fair skinned people, Irish people like me, if you’re that far north, and you’re not supplementing, I’ll bet you $1,000 you’re deficient. So it’s pretty easy. It’s pretty easy. This is so easy. But such a game changer. I wish it were the front headlines everywhere.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I would at least kind of convince people here just get on vitamin D, from thanksgiving to spring. Yeah, at least do that right, at least make that investment get on vitamin D supplementation from thanksgiving to spring. Or if you want to come off the rest of the year, as long as you’re getting some sunlight, fine, but at least do that that’s gonna give you a good bump. And the fat soluble nutrients, you’ll get over those four or five months, we’ll hang around months afterwards, too, because it takes a while for that for that vitamin D level to build up. Now, what are some symptoms of vitamin D excess. So if you’re not testing and you’re just doing a lot of vitamin D, well, you may have high levels of calcium, you may notice hypercalcemia hyper calcium iya. So if you run a comprehensive metabolic panel, you may see high levels of calcium. You may also notice you’re more nauseous, you’re vomiting, you’re weak, a lot of urination, bone pain, kidney issues, calcium stones, if you’re having any of those symptoms, and you’re not really monitoring your vitamin D, you may want to just double check on that. I’ve also seen clinically that vitamin D toxicity happens less when you have other fat soluble vitamins present. So if you’re noticing that you may want to back off a bit, you may want to really focus on getting good vitamin A and good vitamin K in there, as well, just to make sure you’re not creating a fat soluble vitamin imbalance, I think is a really good kind of thing out of the gates.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s pretty easy. Oh, a couple other things I wanted to mention, this is at the top of the the paper you and I were looking at, you already mentioned like benefits for autoimmune diseases like MS. But also in regards to just helping with epigenetic switching. So you know, all this reading here, because it’s pretty simple. Vitamin D is a powerful epigenetic regulator influencing more than 2500 genes. So what that tells me is you and I seriously, we don’t even fully understand what all this benefits. I mean, we have a clue based on knowing how many genes that can positively influence but who knows, you know, you don’t know what you don’t know. So how many other beneficial things are we doing? That science hasn’t even uncovered yet? Probably a ton.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% right. So when you talk about the different epigenetic signaling that can happen, that’s pretty powerful, right? Because we know that I think 800 900 It’s a bunch of different DNA, a bunch of different genes are being affected, and so on. It’s important. We don’t know all the things that could be affected. But we do know that if you get your vitamin D levels up, you don’t really have to worry about everything that you’re doing. That’s kind of the, that’s kind of the important component there, you don’t really have to worry about it, you just got to make sure that you’re doing the right thing. And you’re set. And you’re pretty much good to go.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve got my grandfather testing his now I- Well, I’ve got my grandfather, he’s been on vitamin D for several years now. And I’ve got his doctor to the point where he doesn’t question it anymore. He just runs it. So we’ve got him up, we just got his blood work back. He’s up around 60. And he’s doing 5000 units a day, and he’s hanging out around 60. It took a little while to get up there. So we did 10 for a while. And then now we’re just staying at a baseline of five a day. And he’s doing great with it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. So can you repeat the dose again?
Evan Brand: Yeah, we had him at 5000 a day. For a while we went up to 10, because he was only at around a 30 or 40. So we went up to 10 for a little while. And then we backed him down. So now he’s at a five. So we went five, up to 10 for a while now he’s at a 60. So now we’re just going back down sticking with a baseline of 5000 a day with K and it’s working really well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So my kids, they get some vitamin D out of the gates every single day, which is helpful. And then we make sure they get some cod liver oil. And then they’re also getting some really good fat soluble vitamins via gi and such like that. And so out of the gates here, you know anyone that’s supplementing their kids or their family or friends, just make sure you’re getting other good fat soluble vitamins along with the vitamin D, and you’re going to be pretty darn safe out of the gates. And I would say at least try to do some kind of testing going into the winter and or coming off the winter just to make sure you’re on track.
Evan Brand: Yep, and we’ll put some links below I believe you’ve got a professional vitamin D that you use. I’ve got one that I use, there’s liquid, there are different soft gel capsule versions. So we’ll put a couple links for people if you want to check them out. Once again, this is one of the most cost effective but most health impacting supplements to be using it this time. And I think it should be in your pantry and your cabinet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thinks so too. So out of the gates, we talked about all of the immune benefits the immune modulating benefits, we talked about the natural antiviral antibacterial mechanisms. We talked about how they modulate cytokines, decreased chance of a cytokine storm. We talked about the the modulating of all these different chemical messengers. Also important benefits in regarding breathing, right, because we talked about vitamin D can help modulate high levels of angiotensin right. So we have a lot of blood pressure medications, angiotensin converting enzyme medications, right, or ARB right angiotensin receptor site blockers, vitamin D modulates angiotensin two rennen right it modulates it, and that can help with blood pressure. And blood pressure is important, right? Anytime we have respiration issues or breathing issues or blood pressure issues, modulating NAC can help. Alright, I would say the only other thing I really like adding in, especially if I’m having breathing issues outside of vitamin D is throwing either in some Bluetooth ion or some NAC and or both because that can one help reduce mucus when you have less mucus, you have better transfer of oxygen from the alveoli to the bloodstream, right? So you can take oxygen, deoxygenated blood, bring it back in get oxygen, so you just have better transfer of oxygen back into the bloodstream, which is important. And that’s going to help you help you breathe better and it’s gonna help keep your oxygen levels up. If oxygen levels dropped too much, you’re gonna be really fatigued and tired. So the only other thing I would throw in with vitamin D is maybe some NAC and or some glutathione.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said yeah, oral and or in bigger situations, more problematic situations. nebulised bluetooth ion, we had one client who had a brother who had a lot of issues, got him on the nebulizer with the Bluetooth ion and he was stellar within just a few hours. So I think that is another essential supplement to keep in your pantry.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I had a patient just last week she’ll probably listen to this podcast, but she had some breathing issues due to a winter cold, some significant breathing issues and she had seen my podcasts and video on using lipids omo or shoot using nebulised bluetooth ion and I my little nebulizer right over here. Right under there. And I use the nebulizer to fire on with some saline solution. And she said right away her ability to breathe and respirate improve right right out of the gates. Oh yeah shows that you know getting really good glutathione obviously orally into your body is low hanging fruit. But if you need to get it internally right to your lungs, there’s a lot of studies on showing how beneficial that is in helping your breathing and just helping to reduce inflammation in your lungs.
Evan Brand: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. My mother in law she had diagnosis of COPD even though she’s never smoked. We think it was due to chemical exposures probably virally. bacterial issues as well. Same thing got her on the nebulizer. She said it’s a game changer she got off of her inhaler completely after using the nebulizer so it’s pretty unreal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So what we’ll do is we’ll put some links here we have some vitamin D products and glutathione products that we like and we personally recommend, we’ll put some links here below so if you guys are interested and you want to take a peek and you want to support the podcast, that’s one way to do so. And again we only we only recommend products that we personally use with our family, ourselves and our patients and because we’re in the thick of it rolling up our sleeves dealing with patients clinically every week it’s it’s into our it’s let’s say it’s part of our best interest to have the highest quality product so we can get the highest clinical outcome.
Evan Brand: Totally, totally well if you need help clinically as well if you need advice, we work around the world with people via FaceTime, Skype, phone etc. You can reach out to Dr. J at Justin Health. JustinHealth.com for Dr. J. Me, Evan Brand at EvanBrand.com and we’re available worldwide. So you can use the scheduling links you can book intro calls you can book new client calls, but we are here so please reach out if you need help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Hey Evan excellent chatting with you my man. JustinHealth.com, EvanBrand.com. Sharing is caring if you guys enjoy it please send us a review we really appreciate it. JustinHealth.com/iTunes, EvanBrand.com/iTunes we’ll put a review link below. We really appreciate you guys. Alright, you guys have a phenomenal day. Take control of your health. Keep your immune system strong during the winter months. Take care y’all. Bye now.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/enhancing-your-immune-system-with-vitamin-d-podcast-321
Recommended products:
Winter Skin Care Tips: Get Rid of Dry Skin | Podcast #320
Winter can wreak havoc on your skin — making it dry, itchy, and irritated. And it can feel like there’s no escape: Cold, blustery conditions outside can leave your skin feeling raw, while indoor heat zaps moisture from the air and from your skin.
In this podcast, Dr. J and Dr. Evan are talking about skin problems that you might encounter during this season. There are many simple ways to combat the causes of dry winter skin and help keep your skin feeling moist and supple all season long, including some easy changes to your everyday routine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:23 Skin Issues
4:43 Detox Pathways
13:24 Infections
22:00 Humidity Issues
24:07 Proper Digestion
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Evan, hope you had a great new year great holiday season so far. Today we’re going to be diving into skin issues dealing with skin issues coming the wintertime, all the different things that may happen due to dryness, cold. Lots of sweets from the holidays in the New Year’s all that stuff. Let’s dive in man. How you doing?
Evan Brand: Doing well. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year to everybody. This is the first podcast of 2021 Hooray, we need to like clap for a minute. Yeah, exciting. 2021 All right. So skin issues. While I was telling you about my daughter, Jenna, my little 1- 19 month old, she was having some really dry skin on the back of her arms and legs. And so we’ve done a couple of things to help her which is pretty cool. So I’ll share that right off the bat and then we’ll dive into some more root cause stuff. So we really upped up her fish oil we were giving her about it was two squirts of a liquid and it was a professional version so I don’t remember the milligrams but we just doubled their dose so we just kind of doubled her doubled the normal dose of omegas and that seems to help especially if we think what’s happening is like a keratosis Polaris, which is a common situation. And then secondly, we did a babo botanicals brand and it was called a colloidal oatmeal lotion and it was fragrance free. And it’s mainly just like shea butter. We tried coconut oil topically that’s always kind of my first go to for skin issues, but it didn’t touch it. It didn’t help it at all. But when we got this Colloidal Oatmeal Babo Botanical product, it was a game changer. And no This podcast is not sponsored by them. But hey, if you want to sponsor us reach out to great product above to share it with more people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Very cool. So we have the keratosis Polaris, which is where the [inaudible] and kind of just accumulates in the pores and, and you can get this bumpy chicken skin feeling usually like on the back of the arms on the button stuff, right? Is that what you’re referring to?
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you’re saying that the omega threes really helped that omega threes really make a difference and help improve the extra keratin deposits in the pores?
Evan Brand: Yeah, my wife had it too real bad when we first started dating and we’ve got around like, two to four grams a day of omegas and her back her arms feel perfectly smooth now. I mean, of course we got her gut better, we got her diet better, but I honestly think the biggest factor the biggest variable was the omegas.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, the extra omega threes can make a big difference. Also good zinc, extra zinc too can also help. That’s really good to know. So we also talk about skin diet plays a big role. So we have to kind of rule out things like gluten extra refined sugar can feed yeast and bacteria and these things can produce, you know various mycotoxins or endotoxins that can put stress on the liver in the body and you may see the skin reacting as a means to that you may see skin issues and breakouts as a means of that. Also, large amounts of sugar can cause insulin which can cause insulin surges, which can cause extra sebum and sebum, can cause can feed bacteria on the skin which can create more acne and more skin inflammation. Also, things like gluten can potentially drive autoimmune reactions like eczema, psoriasis, potentially even rosacea issues. So you got to look at dairy you got to look at gluten, you got to look at refined sugar that could be driving a lot of that insulin that could be feeding a lot of the microbe was the fungal the yeast, the bacterial overgrowth, which can obviously affect the skin too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. So what about eggs? I think that’s important to mention, too. I personally feel that pulling out eggs is a good strategy for people if they’re unsure of what’s happening with their diet and reactions, that eggs may be a culprit. And then also, conventional dairy. I know that was a big culprit for me. I would like to cheat on it a little bit and do like some grass fed cheese every once in a while but then even that sometimes I’ll notice a skin reaction to it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so eggs could definitely be a role. So for unknown I’d probably want to go autoimmune out of the gates, no grains, legumes, dairy, nuts, seeds, nightshades or eggs and keep the sugar down just so we’re not overfeeding bacteria and yeast which could be causing skin issues like I mentioned earlier. So that kind of be a first step. I always want to look at omega threes, right? Because that can help to KP the keratosis Polaris that can also just help inflammation. Your skin needs really good healthy fats. So if you’re a female and a lot of your skin issues tend to be more based around your cycle. I tend to like fats like borage or black currant seed oil, which are GLA omega six fats, a good omega six, but it can these kind of omega six like GLA fats can really help decrease a lot of the sebum and a lot of the stuff that may clog the pores of the skin. So I do like a lot of the black currant seed oil can be very, very helpful for women’s skin issues. That’s excellent out of the gates. Usually women tend to help it more but if you’re a guy and you’d have more of the KP or the bumps, that’s where really up in the omega threes can make a big, big difference.
Evan Brand: Yeah, awesome. How about detox pathways? Maybe we should mention that I think just supporting the liver I’ve seen personally, especially with kids, when we see skin issues will come in with some liver support. If it’s a kid who can’t take pills, we’ll give them some kind of a liquid liver support tincture and I’ve noticed a big difference especially under the eyes, you know, if we’re talking scan, we’re not just talking like bumps on the arms. We’re not just talking acne, we’re talking possibly like dark circles under the eyes. That’s often at least in Chinese medicine, they say dark circles under the eyes, his liver, and I’ve actually noticed that correlate quite well. When we bring up liver support dark circles under the eyes go away. So if you’re a woman, every morning, you’re doing your makeup. And here you are doing your powder foundation or whatever the heck you’re putting on under your eyes. You might not have to do that if you just support your liver. It’s funny how women, they can just cover stuff up with makeup, but man, we’re not going to cover up it. So we’re going to see the dark circles, we need to treat it root cause we’re not just going to, you know, put some powder on it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah. And so with the we call allergic shiners, so what you see is a lot of lymphatic pooling, so you have a lot of lymph in the face area. And a lot of times what you see is the pooling of the lymph right under the eyes. And a lot of times that’s going to be food allergies, just go on Google type in allergic shiners, okay. And that’s a lot of times because of it’s not like an aging thing. It’s a lot of lymphatic stress because of certain foods. So like I mentioned, cut a lot of those big foods out, see how much that helps decrease the lymphatic pool. And you can also do things to support the lip, right? You can do rebounding, you can do whole body vibration, you can drink ginger, or burdock tea or essiac tea, things that naturally bright clover tea, red roots, etc. Things are naturally support the limp that can be helpful. But if you’re doing that, and you’re still eating foods that are inflammatory, that may still kind of counteract it. So ideally, you know, support the limp and cut out some of those commonly offending foods that may really help decrease that pooling underneath the eyes.
Evan Brand: That’s smart. I didn’t know the the food connection there with the allergies. So what about the darkness? Do you think that’s tied into any kind of toxicity? Or do you think just with the lymph in general, it’s just going to appear dark just because it’s stagnant no matter what.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, a lot of that just has to do with the length. I mean, we’ll pull up a couple pictures here in a minute. But anytime you really increase an immune response, you’re going to just get more lymphatic pooling, and you’re going to see it underneath kids eyes, or Yeah, it’s interesting on kids, and you also see it in, in adults too. But you know, it’s people put they go to the spa, you put a cucumber over it. Why? Because the cucumber telling tends to help disperse a lot of that lymphatic fluid. That’s the reason why. And let me pull up a Google image here so you guys can see.
Evan Brand: And sometimes it’s dark. And then sometimes it’s bags too. Oh, yeah. Yes. You look at the one to the left, though with the little girl. That one. No, go to the second one there. That’s what I’m used to seeing with people. Yeah, just that kind of darkness.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, it just has to do with the increased blood flow and lymphatic pooling. It’s really what it is. Wow. And just cutting that out can make a big, big, big, big difference.
Evan Brand: Yep. I wonder if there’s, there’s got to be a histamine connection to this too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, anytime you have a food allergy response, part of a allergenic response is going to be histamine at so-
Evan Brand: Oh go back up, go back up on the top there on that screen. The very top of there, it said, Oh, this is interesting. So it was talking about indoor allergens. So mold could be a trigger of the allergic shiners, too. I never even thought about that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, anytime you breathe stuff into that sinus cavity, right? Whether it’s outdoor allergens, like dander or cedar or things like that, grass pollens, right of course, those can be a big role. But you know, you can see right here what causes it, right. So what happens is the the tissues and the blood vessels in the nose become swollen and a lot of excess fluid happens. People don’t understand when you have a histamine reaction. And a lot of times that causes things to vasal dilate. So these blood vessels get swollen, so you get a lot more blood, you get a lot more lymphatic flow, you get a lot more immune reaction. And that’s why all that stuff sends a pool right there because all that the sinus cavity kind of coming together right in this T zone here.
Evan Brand: There you go. Look at that pollution and perfume and other irritants. So women if there’s any left listening to the podcast, it’s still wear perfume. Stop doing that. That’s so bad. Do essential oils if you want to smell.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. If you want a nice scent do a good really good essential oil, do a lavender do a.. see trying to think of a bunch of other feminine herbs or feminine essential oils if you’re a guy do rosewood or do cedar keep it really simple. You know there’s a couple of really good blends that are out there that I like Frankincense is a pretty good neutral one. You know, I just tend to rely on my nice essential oil based deodorant tends to be really clean and, and works well. But yeah, so you want to not put in, rub toxins on your skin, toxins on the fragrances, all of that can affect bags under the eyes. All of that can affect your skin too, because it’s going to just create more toxicity, more stress on your liver in your body. Now getting back to the hormone stress, if we have more, let’s say detoxification problems that could create issues because if we have estrogen dominance, right, well we have high levels of androgens as a female, right high levels of estrogen estrogen dominance, and it can be low estrogen, but it’s just higher relatively speaking than progesterone, right? That ratio is off that 20 to 25 to one progesterone, estrogen often maybe it’s 10 to one or 15 to one That ratio starts to skew that could put more stress on the liver. And if you have estrogen issues that can be a problem. A lot of women when they consume too much refined carbohydrates and inflammatory foods, they tend to convert more of their estrogens to androgens, testosterone, right stauss rounds and androgen, it’s in the androgen umbrella, right. And those can cause like I mentioned a lot more sebum and more skin issues and more acne that way, and then having prostaglandin imbalances prostaglandin two, which is more inflammatory. Having them one in three supported with a lot of those good fats, like I mentioned, are going to be helpful. So you’re going to really help a lot of the inflammatory pathways with good fish oils, you’re also going to help prostaglandin one and three, which are going to help with the skin with the black currant seed and the borage oil. So those can be very helpful too.
Evan Brand: Good Good call. Also, when we’re coming in with detox support, you mentioned estrogen we’re going to come in with like some phase two detoxification support anyway, so we may come in with something to help with glucuronidation, maybe some calcium D glucose rates, so you wouldn’t think of it like your average person, maybe even a naturopath or a functional Doc’s probably not even going to think calcium D glue, great for skin issues. But if you think that the mechanism of helping with estrogen dominance, it may be a game changer. And then let’s go into the infections a bit. I–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Also calcium lucre could help with some mold too, because it was any mold exposure that could also help by enough to mold too.
Evan Brand: Totally, yeah, binders plus a little calcium D glue. Great. I think you’re on your way. Let’s Let’s hit on infections. I’m surprised you and I haven’t brought this up here we are this far. And we haven’t thought about infections. I mean, that was a big one for me. I think my face was already better. But I was still suffering quite a bit when you and I first became friends my skin was still not very good because of all my gut infection history.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think you were also still consuming some higher quality dairy that may have been a problem. So some people that are doing a lot of cheese or like milk even if it’s raw. Right and good quality, you may still have a problem with that even if it’s really good clean dairy. Usually butter or ghee tends to be okay because there’s less casein less lactose in there almost none. But if you’re doing other stuff, it could be a problem. Was that an issue? Evan? Do you remember the dairy being a problem?
Evan Brand: Man, you remember Central Market and all their amazing cheeses I would do some of those grass fed organic cheeses. It wasn’t often though I’ll be honest, it would maybe be like a chunk of cheese every few days or so. But I think even that was too much for me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and you know, I tell you I can do well with butter or ghee, but I do not do well with milk or cheese as well. What happened is gassy, tend to get loose stools and then skin issues will tend to manifest shortly after for sure. So even high quality dairy not that good. Now the fat based dairy, right? Butter and ghee tends to be different because it’s primarily 99% fat. There’s very little casein, very little lactose, which is the sugar in dairy. And so of course, gese even cleaner than butter because there’s virtually zero casein versus virtually zero. lactose in there. So I tend to be a lot better.
Evan Brand: I mean, it’s curious. How do you do with whey protein? Are you okay with it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I do. Okay, with wakers weighs 99% casein and lactose free? Mm hmm. Yeah. tends to be a lot better. Yeah, I do okay with it. My favorite is gonna be collagen, you know, high quality grass fed collagen peptides. So I do my true collagen blend, which works great. Because there’s really it’s it’s in a peptide form. So there’s no other larger proteins in there. It’s really clean and well broken down. So that tends to do my powder standpoint does really well.
Evan Brand: Awesome. All right. Well, let’s just talk a couple minutes about infections. I think this is an important part to consider if you have skin issues, I’ve worked with countless small children and teenagers and we always are going to look at the potential for infections. There’s nothing in particular, I’m not going to say hey, it’s got to be blasto. Or it’s got to be this or that. I would just say in general, any type of dysbiosis bacterial overgrowth SIBO Candida H. pylori, the whole party that usually happens together is going to be a potential. And I think the one of the big mechanisms here is just to reduce stomach acid by the H. pylori. So I think enzymes to fix the skin are also another important strategy we’re going to implement.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anytime we have indigestion and our protein and our fat and carbohydrate molecules of the food that we’re eating are larger and are broken down. You’re going to have intolerances, foods not going to be broken down all the way. And those large globules, proteins, fats, etc, can get into the bloodstream create more immune reaction, also, there’s going to be a fermentation that happens when those food molecules are not broken down all the way and that can create bacterial overgrowth. And we know hydrochloric acid does have a way of being disinfected in a way it really decreases. bacteria and yeast flow to the intestines. And if we have low levels of acid, it’s kind of like missing the natural disinfectant on your table. Right? That you know that can help clean things up in your body so that that’s definitely a real thing there. And the other component i would say is being because we were kind of talking about the holidays and Christmas is it can get very dry in the wintertime and a lot of places in this country. And so having a really clean moisturizer can be helpful. Now it depends So we’re just talking about, you know, person with dry skin, we may just choose a really, really good clean shea butter, or coconut oil or just a really clean, moisturizing product from a high quality company. And you can use skin deep cosmetic database Environmental Working Group database to look at healthy skin products that have really good ingredients in there. I like to use the Marie Veronique products. I like their lipid barrier complex and their barrier restore serum. They work amazing. I use that on my skin. And I had one child that had eczema, he’s kind of gotten over it, he’s done really well. We’ve kind of cleaned out the his diet and his mom’s diet too. So things like salicylates could be a potential problem outside of just your autoimmune foods. And then we use a really clean, hypoallergenic moisturizer called Vannapply. Again, it’s not anything like nutritious for the skin. But sometimes when the skin’s inflamed, immunologically, from an autoimmune skin issue, sometimes the skin just needs moisture and not things that could potentially stimulate the immune system. So sometimes a clean thing like that can be very helpful. So that applies very good. There’s another product called La Roche-Posay, I’ll pull it up, it’s a French brand of a moisturizer. And that works very good, as well as providing just really good moisture. And then sometimes we may have to change the environment, sometimes it gets very, very dry, you know, 20, to 20%. And humidity, we may have to add a humidifier into the kid’s room or into the adults room to get a little bit more humidity in the room. The big X Factor is don’t just leave it on non stop, because you can actually create mold it with a humidifier if it’s unchecked, unchecked Uncharted. So you have to make sure that if you’re adding humidity to the room, it’s for a season, it’s for a reason it’s for a short period of time. And you may want to have a humidity detector in the room just to make sure you don’t get above you know, 50% where mold could grow.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you know what I was thinking I’ve never seen it, maybe it exists, it’d be cool to have a humidifier that actually has an hygro hygrometer built in. So like you could set your for you know, 40% and then you’re pumping humidity in and then it hits 40 and shuts off. That’d be super cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I 100% agree. Yep.
Evan Brand: So I think the x layer would be good too for just to implement this as a tangent, not related to skin. But the xylitol spray for the sinuses are is awesome too, because that can help moisturize it. And the next layer is kind of a good, natural antimicrobial, if you will, it can help a little bit with the sinus cavity. But yeah, back to the skin. So how we’re going to investigate this was peoples, we’re going to start with diet, we’re going to come in and say, probably remove the eggs, definitely get off the dairy, get off the gluten. And then we’re going to come in and do stool testing, we’re going to do urine organic acids. So we can look at all the different bacteria that may not show up. You see, sometimes what happens I had to happen last week, we had a guy who, on the organic acids, he looked pretty good. There wasn’t any kind of bacterial overgrowth evidence, but when we got to his stool test, he had Prevotella and klebsiella, and all sorts of bacteria off the chart. And so if someone’s on an extreme budget, maybe one test would be sufficient. But in most cases, we’re going to try to get the full picture because it’s hard to make a puzzle complete if you don’t have all the pieces. And so that’s really why we’re gonna want to look at multiple things. And then as you mentioned environment, we’re going to factor that into, and then potentially improving the indoor air quality. So what if you are having some sort of an allergic reaction to your environment, whether it’s mold or dander, pollen, or whatever, something like a really good charcoal filled air filter, it’s going to be a game changer, possibly putting charcoal in your body, you know, supplementing with binders, and then addressing any infections we see supporting the liver bumping up omegas. I think stress has a factor. We talked about hormones, we talked about the estrogen we talked about glucuronidation. I think those are really the main variables. Do you think we’re missing anything else?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, I think we hit it pretty well. My only other component is if you have eczema or psoriasis, and your skin’s overly dry and you’re trying to get the dryness down while you’re fixing the root issue. I mentioned the vanapply vanicream product being good. And the other one was the La Roche-Posay, and it’s the lipikar balm is a nice one. It’s just a lot of moisture, which can decrease a lot of the dryness and then when the dryness is decreased, that decreases the itching and when the aging is decreased, that can help decrease a lot of the inflammation. But you have to make sure a lot of people when the eczema psoriasis kind of Facebook groups because I follow a lot of them just to read what they’re doing. They want a magic solution. They want something to rub on their skin and have it all go away. But that’s never how it is. So you typically have to get to the underlying issue with foods and guts stuff too. So make sure if you do something that’s a lotion that’s topical, make sure you’re not ignoring the internal stuff.
Evan Brand: Well that one sounds so fancy. It’s got to be good just based on the way you pronounce the name of it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know like a nice little long French name there with the Amazon links in the description so you guys can access it. And then you mentioned the other one that had the oatmeal in there. That was really clean. What was the product?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ll give it the link to it it’s like a there’s like a kid’s, like fragrance free version. It’s like a colloidal oatmeal product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It began with a B right?
Evan Brand: Yeah Babo. Yeah let me look I’ve got it here. I was like colloidal oatmeal lotion and this stuff is awesome I tell him my wife’s like honey this look at look at her skin and I was feeling these areas on our little girl’s skin like man it’s it’s crazy and yeah here it is nine bucks can’t beat it. So it’s called Babo Sensitive Hydra lotion, Chamomile Calendula. And then like I said, it’s got the colloidal oatmeal, I’ll put you the link in the I’ll put it in your chat here if you want to look at it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And is there any worries at all with that due to gluten sensitivity in the oats?
Evan Brand: I don’t think so. We haven’t seen any type of issue. I know there’s a possibility. You’ve got that Avena Sativa Kernel Flour. So it does have the oat flour in there. I mean, if I thought that was some autoimmune possibility, we may stay away with it. But it’s a pretty rare situation. I’ve only seen a few people where we thought that they were going to be sensitive enough to it, you know that we should pull it out or find something without oats I’m not doing like oatmeal bass or anything like that, you know, this is just like the the spot of maybe a quarter at most on the areas and that’s like maybe once a day, if that issues-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -any kind of here and there to kind of knock it down. It’s not like a staple.
Evan Brand: No, no, no, we’re not lathering her in it or anything. It’s just like a spa treat is is all we’re using it for. I know some people get crazy with lotions or lathering the whole thing. Now I think I’d probably stay away in that case, but for spa treats, probably. Okay,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s smart. Excellent. I think we hit a lot of good skin stuff. Today we talked about some of the hormone stuff with female hormones. We talked about some of the androgen component and how that can tie into insulin. Don’t forget guys, high levels of insulin can drive excess estrogens in guys. And that can cause other issues too, and put stress on the liver. We talked about some mold stuff. We talked about allergen issues, food allergies and stuff and some of the eye stuff. We talked about the humidity issues in the winter, where it gets drier, maybe get a humidifier really monitor the percent humidity if you can get one that has engaged that test the environment and let’s say it doesn’t go above 40% or 35%. That’s better, because that way you kind of have a limiter on there. It doesn’t go over the top. We at one point had the humidifier on too much. This was years ago, and we noticed a little bit of mold in the in the carpet nearby. And we never made that mistake again. So if you use a humidifier, like put a timer on it, like an hour or two, boom, have it go off. Don’t leave it on all the time. Be smart about it.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s interesting. When you think about a humidifier, right tip tip, typically, people are going to just sit it on like a wood, night nightstand or something and then that wood is probably just absorbing all that moisture. It sounds like a recipe for disaster if you overuse it for sure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So you may be like if you can, if your kid has some humidity issues, skin issues, maybe put it on for an hour or two at night, put a timer on it done. Yeah, and that way, it’s not going to go the whole night. But we’ll provide a little bit of relief and and help the mucous membranes that may be a little bit overly dry.
Evan Brand: And then also, you know, don’t overbake don’t over with your soaps or shampoos or conditioners make sure everything’s clean there. Don’t over soap yourself. I mean, you’re not you don’t need to lather your whole body and soap. I think that’s an easy one. Regarding hand soaps, I mean, I know a lot of the conventional ones are gonna dry out hands and skin. So we got to mention that also water filters are key. That’s why you and I both have whole house water filters, because the chlorine and the trihalomethanes and all the irritants in the tap water can irritate your skin in the shower.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a big one. Yeah. So if you have a lot of chlorine and a lot of chemicals in the water that can be very irritating on your skin. So we really want to make sure that that is addressed with a high quality filter. And that will take stress off your skin a ton really well.
Evan Brand: I don’t travel with it. I even bring like the Berkey or a comparable shower filter. Like when we went to Florida last winter, I brought a portable shower filter with us man, it was a game changer because, you know, we wanted to fill up the bathtub for the kids because the chlorine was so strong. So luckily, we just filled the tub with the showerhead filter. And it was awesome. So we didn’t take the kids and they weren’t just breathing in chlorine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. That’s really good. And the only other thing I would just say beyond that is just making sure you’re digesting your fats and proteins well. So people think oh, I’m gonna just drink a whole bunch of water that’ll get moisture to my skin, it’s like well, you need a good fat carrier to bring that hydration to the skin. A lot of times the skin and the you know, these are that layer there’s a hydrophobic layer in the skin so it does not like water. So you need fat to kind of bring that moisture to that skin. So if you don’t have enough fat you will get very dry skin and dry skin can get more irritated, you tend to scratch that dry skin more and then that scratching creates inflammation and that inflammation just it’s a kind of a self defeating cycle. So you really want to make sure you have good healthy fats in there and at least half those fats should be saturated fats coconut oil, it should be high quality grass fed animal products. It should be pork, pork fat lard and if you want to do any plant fats Keep it to high quality olive oil, avocado oil, maybe some palm, obviously coconut is going to be a great fact that it’s saturated and it’s plant. So those are a couple of good things to do just to make sure you have good fats. And of course, if you don’t have good digestion, you know, at least get into enzymes and some HCl In the meantime, while you work on fixing your stress or fixing your gut In the meantime, for better absorption and digestion.
Evan Brand: You know, the way I look at it, it’s rarely going to be just a skin issue, there’s going to be possibly bloating, gas, burping, some type of food sensitivities, food reactions, right skin issues are rarely going to occur in isolation. So I think of it as a clue, right? You and I talk about clues in functional medicine, the skin is really just a clue. And then we think Oh, interesting what’s going on under the hood. So that’s where we come in, and do the testing. And if you need help clinically, please reach out. We would love to help we work with people worldwide, via phone, FaceTime, Skype, etc. We’re very blessed to be able to provide lab testing to people across the globe, and to provide solutions to healthcare that other practitioners and doctors have failed before. So if you need to reach out clinically, you can reach Dr. J at JustinHealth.com. You can reach me Evan Brand at EvanBrand.com and we look forward to 2021 together so let’s have some fun. Give us some comments and questions if you’re on watching listening on Dr. J’s YouTube channel. Put some potential topic ideas in there. We’re always open to new topics. We talk about stuff we think’s important, but if you have some issues or concerns, you know, we’re happy to do kind of like some q&a stuff too. So please give us some feedback.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. If you guys want to reach out and dive in deeper it could be a good issue could be a hormone issue. EvanBrand.com for Evan, JustinHealth.com for myself, we are here to help worldwide. Thank you guys, and I hope you guys are having a great start to 2021 and we’ll be here you guys take care. Bye now.
Evan Brand: Take care.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/skin-care-tips-to-improve-dry-skin-podcast-320
Recommended Products:
GPL Mycotox
Omega Supreme
La Roche-Posay Lipikar Cream
Mother Of All Cream
Babo Botanicals Sensitive Skin Hydra Therapy Lotion
Air Doctor Air Purifier
Whole House Dehumidifier
Water Filtration Device
Whole House Water Filter
Clearly Filtered
Pelican Water
Organic Grass Fed Meat
The Affects of Mycotoxins On Male & Female Fertility | Podcast #318
Mycotoxins exposure from food occurs globally but is more common in hot humid environments, especially in low-income settings, and might affect pregnancy outcomes. However, frequent mold contamination of maternal diet can therefore affect anyone. In this video, Dr. J and Evan talks about mycotoxins and how it can affect men and women’s fertility.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
2:52 Zearalenone, Mold Toxins
11:38 Mold Toxins from Food and Grains
14:32 Binders
21:20 Fertility Issues
27:13 Detox Support
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani in the house here with Evan Brand, Evan, how are we doing today my friend?
Evan Brand: Doing awesome, ready to dive in, have some fun together. So you and I, we don’t really market ourselves as like fertility doctors, fertility practitioners, anything like that. But we’ve both between us had many successful healthy babies not only in our own family but that our clients have had. And it’s interesting because fertility really comes as a side effect of getting healthy. And so that’s the first big key point of today. When you look at the fertility industry, you’ve got the in vitro fertilization, you’ve got all these shots, all these different drugs. They’re not they’re not really addressing root cause in most cases, most cases, they’re just trying to come in and just find a way to sort of short circuit or hijack the circuitry to make a baby happen. But we would argue there’s a better way, which is get someone healthy, and I was looking into I’m doing a mold presentation, and I was looking to do some research on mycotoxins and something that you and I test for via urine are various mycotoxins and there’s one in particular called z everleigh, known z like zebra z everleigh known, and this is a highly, highly, highly estrogenic mycotoxin, far more estrogenic than soy. And people freak out about soy and they should but nobody freaks out about z or linode. And that’s really, to me the bigger issue and so we have a paper here that we found called maternal mycotoxin exposure and adverse pregnancy outcomes, and there’s many many papers on this. This was just a review of them. And it was talking about the different mycotoxins so anything from aflatoxin, to okra toxin to Fusarium based toxins. And here’s what can happen. hypertensive emergencies in pregnancy, neural tube defects, increased risk of preterm birth and late term miscarriage, neonatal jaundice, impaired fetal growth. And I mean, just straight infertility. So, when we see women that are infertile, I mean, I just look at some of the friends I had from high school and college. And many of them have had issues with fertility. Some of them did IVF. Some of them had miscarriages. Some of them had pre preterm birth at a friend actually just have a baby and their baby showed up six weeks early like wow, what is her Mold Test look like? So this is a really, really big piece of the puzzle that I think people are missing. And we’re inside all the time, right? We’re on technology. So we’re inside a lot more than we used to in the farmer days. And so now we’re breathing this stuff in all day, whereas before, it maybe would have only happened when you were sleeping in the farmhouse. But during the day, you’re out on the farm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah. 100% Yep. 100%, the zerion alone. mycotoxin is that’s made by the Fusarium fungi. So it’s a mycotoxin actually made by that level of mold. And it’s in the food and it’s in the in the the animal feed. And that animal feed is designed to fatten those animals up. So I have one kind of study here. It’s called zuranolone. All the study is called by Science Direct. And it’s looking at the absorption of zuranolone on body weights, and how it increased the size of the pigs 15 to 25 kilograms. And basically, it increased body weight. And then one of the big things they found with zuranolone. In reproductive tissue, it actually decreased. Fertility is one of the side effects of this study. I’ll pull up the exact study on screen here in a minute, I have it up here in front, I’ll find the exact paragraph on there, and I’ll show it to y’all. But mold toxins is going to be one of the big conversations here with fertility. Now we can plug that into xeno, estrogens and plastics, we could potentially plug it into pesticides as well, which are going to be found in food. We can plug it into growth hormones and milk and dairy and hormones and animal products. The problem is it’s all a hormonal stress load. It’s not just one thing. So when you look at different studies on one topics on one thing on one toxin on one hormone on one mold, it may not be enough in one person or globally to pop up as an issue. I mean, here we’re finding studies on an off the bat. But we know it’s all about your stress load. And so I want to get people’s mindsets kind of around that stress, that metaphorical stress bucket and all of these different toxins, whether it’s mold, or pesticides or hormones, or plastic type of hormones, they’re all adding into that big stress bucket. And of course, fertility is going to be significantly impacted by that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, here’s something crazy, too. It’s a little bit related. You and I were looking at this a little bit ago. The onset of puberty is massively dropping. So why am I bringing puberty? Well, because this is connected into hormones, and what’s happening with hormones. So in 1860, and you had a graph of this, that was really cool, too. But in 1860, the average age of onset of puberty in girls was 16.6 years. So over 16 years old, 16 and a half years 1860. That’s puberty. In 2010. It is now 10 and a half years old. That is insane. And that’s probably the most I mean, I can guarantee you that’s the most rapid change in puberty age in in human history. And it all happens less. And it all happened in the last What’s that about? 100 and 150 170 years. That’s insane, right? Isn’t that crazy? I’ll pull that graph up here for everyone to see here. So you guys can see it. I think now really important to visualize. Yeah. Now while you’re doing that, they’re just talking here, just like you said, there’s this really this stress bucket, so endocrine disrupters, various chemicals in the environment, acting on hormones, widespread industrial and pharmaceutical pollutants. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff here. diagnosing recently high in sugar and fats declining physical activity. Yeah, here’s the graph. So people listening, you’re not going to get to see this, but the graph is pretty nuts.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so you can see here the, the y axis, the up and down access, so you can see the age right 16 to 15. And then you can see the x axis is time. So as we go from the 1860s, up to current day, you can see we kind of flat plateau between, you know, 13 ish, 13 ish for puberty age versus, you know, 15 to 16. And a lot of that has to be influenced due to mold toxins, and some so here’s one article here that Evan talked about here, maternal mycotoxins, and again, mycotoxins are toxins produced by the mold. So a lot of times, it’s not necessarily the mold that’s causing the problem. It’s the toxins produced by the mold. So it’s good to look and test for mold, but also test maybe for the urinary mycotoxins as well, but you can see exposure and adverse pregnancy outcomes. And and this is a very interesting study talking about increase in puberty, increasing in puberty age, like I mentioned, also fertility, right. preterm birth, late miscarriage inclusion, some evidence for toxins or pregnancy may have detrimental effects on pregnancy outcomes. Now, of course, there’s limited studies, right? No one makes a whole bunch of money, studying this kind of stuff. But we know it’s, it’s there. And there’s some data already on it. And we also have a lot of common sense. We know something’s a toxin, and can affect the hormones that it makes sense why that may be effective.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And I’ve seen several women who are going through a protocol spontaneously get pregnant, which is really cool. Now, some of these women came to me with the intention of getting pregnant. They’re like, Hey, you know, I’ve been told the fertility specialist are unable to help me. Can you help? And I’ll say yes, Probably so. And then some of these women just had spontaneous pregnancies as an accident because they thought they were infertile. They thought they can’t get pregnant, we put them on a protocol, and then all of a sudden they get pregnant. So let’s go into some of the the action steps. I mean, what are we doing for these people? I think it’s important to know about what we what we discussed is everyone owns bad news affects hormones affects fertility affects puberty. But what do you do about it? So as you mentioned, number one, we’re going to be testing the environment. So using-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hold on one thing, I want to go a little bit deeper into what you just said, we talked about some of these mold toxins and in fertility, right, we have this one study here, which we already mentioned, which is maternal mycotoxin exposures and adverse pregnancy outcome, which is a new new study, right? mycotoxin research may 2020. That’s important. And this is actually on humans. There’s lots of studies on zearalenone, that’s i’m pronouncing that good in farm animals, because it’s been used in farm settings to fatten animals up for many years to the feed. So there’s a lot of data on this. And that’s important. So we know for instance, studies on in vitro effects allowed to understand the mechanism of action, right in vivo means the actual animals, and they see an impairment of semen quality and female reproductive function. So we talked about fertility, right? Most people think of fertility as women, right. But we know it can affect men as well. And it takes two to tango, right? And zearalenone could be a factor responsible for Reproductive failure in farm animals. And so if you go to the reproductive MD, are they going to be testing you if you’re having issue with pregnancy for mold toxins? Probably not. And look here, one study here, under allanon. Here, if you look here on the bottom part, so zearalenone is a nonsteroidal estrogenic mycotoxin. It’s produced by several species of the fusarium fungi, okay, so it’s produced by this Fusarium fungus, it’s a mycotoxin. And you can see here it’s supposedly it’s not it’s low in grain content, but it’s the storage of a lot of the grain where the moisture is greater than 30 to 40%, where this mold and fungus is produced, okay. And then right here in this one part, typical clinical signs are hyper estrogen ism, which explains the increase in puberty. Are the decrease in puberty age, right? More hormones sooner in life increases puberty, swelling of the vulva mammary gland hyperplasia, secretions prolonged uterus, increase in pseudo pregnancy, infertility, decreased libido, complications of rectal prolapses, stillbirth, small literary. So we know it has a lot of fertility issues. And a lot of the studies first tend to happen in animals. So it’s good to know the data here in animals, as well as some of the human stuff here we talked about earlier.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the whole thing’s crazy. I mean, it’s hard to believe they would use this in the feed. I mean, like you said, maybe not intentionally, but it’s kind of a byproduct of storing grain in a, you know, in a moist thing. I mean, it’s like, you’d have to have a dehumidifier on your grain, or how about you just pasture your animals? So you don’t need to feed them moldy grain? How about that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I can tell you one story I had with Dave Asprey. He told me and I can’t find the data on this, but they would use zearalenone pellets, that put the pellet in the cow’s ear. And that was enough to cause this increased fat absorption. Because those hormones were so concentrated, they were going into obviously, the the blood supply via the ear, and it was causing the animals to get fatter. And of course, farmers, you know, sell their animals based off of weight. So we know that zearalenone may even be used in a way outside of just Incidentally, in the fee, we know, it may just be there to fatten them up as well.
Evan Brand: I’ve heard that too. I can’t find anything on it. But if any old school farmers are putting zero unknown pellets in your cow’s ears, let us know. Tell us about it. Give us the story on it, because we’d like to like to share this stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I know. It’s totally interesting. I believe there’s something to it. I believe, you know, someone like Asprey wouldn’t, wouldn’t say that unless he had some actual good info on that. But very interesting. So off the bat, we have mold toxins, we talked about that. And that’s important. Now again, and humans, you could get mold toxins from eating crappy grains and crappy food. So eating foods that are going to have lower mycotoxin counts, and to be important. So you know more from vegetables more from fruits more from high quality, fresh pasture fed animal products, good high quality fats, that’s going to decrease a lot of your mold and mycotoxin and xarelto load right there out of the gates, okay. And then the next component is going to be making sure your house isn’t moldy. So if you have a history of water damage, or flooding, you want to make sure you go back and listen to our podcasts on looking at and dealing with mold and mycotoxins in your home. But of course, any history of water damage, or any leaks, you want to leave or any visible mold, you want to at least get a really good high quality amino Linux plate test that looks at the mold as well as mold toxins. I’ve had some patients that have ordered the plates and just say, Well, I’m gonna let it culture and just look at it myself. It’s like, well, you want to send it to the lab, because you want to know what the mold species is. And if there’s any mycotoxins associated with that mold species, because you may look at it and see the culture, right. But you may not know if it’s a friendly mold or not. So you want to know if it’s Is it a, is it a mold that’s from the environment and the soil? Or is it something that’s actually from water damage type of mold species? That’s important to know.
Evan Brand: On a retest, it’s probably fine to do the self test, because you can look and just see this, hopefully, colonies show up. But yeah, on the initial I tell people the same yeah, definitely. Because also too, we rarely find that the house correlates to the mycotoxin in someone’s urine. That’s pretty interesting. So that tells us most people are sick from a previous exposure, but in a few cases, we have found where the molds in someone’s house and the mycotoxins those would produce for example, Aspergillus and Penicillium producing things like okra toxin, mycophenolic acid, will then look at the house and see Oh, yeah, you’ve got a bunch of Aspergillus growing, that matches up to the urine. So it’s cool to see, but it’s not necessary to to get someone better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I look at it just a tiny bit differently. Like if I see someone with a lot of mold, like weird kind of neurological symptoms, I always do the foundational things first, because a lot of times that can move the needle without having to go into any crazy mole protocols off the bat. But then if I see their home is very high and mold as well. You know, it’s easy, it’s sometimes it’s easier to decrease the exposure than to accelerate detoxification, especially if their guts not working well. So then there may be some easy simple strategies, like let’s just get a high quality air filter, let’s maybe get like a citrus bass, anti mole candle. If there’s any active leaks, let’s get someone in there that can work on remediation process, at least patch the leak or decrease humidity in the area. We can work on a couple of those things. And that can move the needle a lot.
Evan Brand: Yep. Let’s go into binders. So this is where the magic happens. Like you said, you may need to do some work on the gut First, we may come in and help support the adrenals because detoxification it is work and it’s not easy, and you can get worse by trying to make yourself better and I’ve certainly overdone it on binders. I’ve certainly overdone it with glutathione and had a bad headache for a long time. So that wasn’t fun. So the good news is you can pull this stuff out of the body and in regards to that yerlan own, the some of the most effective binders are going to be your clays. Now charcoal can help a little bit so we often use like a broad spectrum you can come in and spot treat. And there are certain people that say you need to spot treat mold toxins meaning you need to use charcoal for okra toxin you need to use zeolite clay for zearalenone. But the truth is, a lot of people are not showing up with the true amount of mycotoxins on their first urine sample, meaning you may just show up with okra toxin, but you also may have zearalenone. But if you’re a bad detoxifier, you may not be urinating out all of those toxins. Therefore, I do kind of spot treat, if you will, but I still like to use broad spectrum full spectrum binders just because of this issue because what’ll happen is on a retest, maybe we took care of one toxin and then a new one shows up like well crap, we could have been addressing the other mycotoxin say we were just using charcoal for ochratoxin we could have been using a little bit of zeolite clay as well and that would have took care of the zero unknown but boom, now’s your will unknown shows up on the retest. Now we’ve got a whole new mycotoxin to focus on. So long story short, full spectrum, broad spectrum and multiple binders are what we like to use. And then I’m a huge fan of the micronized chlorella there’s a couple brands we use they have a liquid chlorella, that can be amazing. There are some tablets of broken cell wall, chlorella, that can be awesome for heavy metals as well. And then sweating. I mean, I tell you I feel much, much more clear, you know, clarity mentally, right after I get out of the sauna, you can have like a detox hercus reaction from a sauna as well. But if you’re healthy enough and you’re supporting adrenals you’re doing electrolytes. To me sauna is a game changer and even just a hot bath. If you don’t have access to a sauna, even if you just get hot enough to sweat in the tub. That may be a little too hard on someone if you’re weak adrenally like your constitution is weak. But or if you have blood pressure issues, you know, a hot bath may make you feel bad. But if you can do it, you can sweat you know it’s free, compared to a sauna may cost you 1000 bucks minimum.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah, I mean, you can always add in some, you know, really good magnesium salts like Epsom salts, which can be very helpful and relaxing for you as well. So yeah, so the problem is a lot of the binders that we may add in or if it’s necessary to add them, and they could also decrease or cause bowel motility issue. So if you already have a lot of bowel issues, this is why it’s so important that we kind of deal with the hierarchy. And a lot of times the gut needs to be fully addressed. And working so we can have good detoxification because the gut is so important. Hepatobiliary why’s liver gallbladder, it dumps a lot of those bile and toxins that are mixed in with the liver and the gallbladder back into the intestines, and it has to move out. And so we give maybe things like Evan mentioned, various pectins are activated charcoals, or clays or fulvic minerals to bind up a lot of these things. But if we have really slow motility, it could really jack up with our absorption of nutrition and a reabsorption of other toxins, we want to make sure our bowels are still moving. So some people may not be able to handle that. And also, you kind of alluded to getting a false negative on some of these urinary Mold Test. That’s why it’s very important that you probably do one to two weeks worth of glutathione ahead of a urinary mold test to make sure we’re adequately dumping it. Because people their detoxification may be so weak, they may not be dumping it, they may look to that Mold Test, hey, look, I’m good, but you may not be. So I do a week or two. And I tell patients that if you are really feeling crappy during that loading phase, you probably have some level of toxins, and may not just be mold, it could be other pesticides or metals or other things in the environment you’re dumping. But it’s always good to do that load period. And if you feel too sick or just too achy during that timeframe, you know, feeling lethargic, malaise, achy brain, foggy Moody, it’s probably not the right time to do any testing yet, maybe you want to wait a little bit longer, get things moving better, and test the home, see what’s happening in the home and wait a little bit more till everything’s working better on the detoxification side, just getting your diet better, decreasing your inflammation, improving your nutrient density, surprisingly, that actually moves the needle a lot. And then you could always add in some gentle sweating protocols like Evan mentioned as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you know, you and I’ve talked about this for years, this idea that when people figure out there’s something going on, they want to take care of it immediately. Remember, we’ve done shows on parasites, and we talked about how, as soon as you see parasites show up, the the gut is, you know, the gut feeling is Oh my god, get this out of me and you and I’ve kind of discussed that you do want to do things in the correct order. And I would agree that happens with this toxicity issue as well. So if we’re working with a mom who’s had infertility problems, or you know, issues with pregnancy, and we want to help increase her health, we still are going to focus on the gut because there’s a right place in the right time. And if you’re really weak, you’re really sick, and then you try to go straight into a detox protocol. You could go the wrong direction. And it Trust me, I want this stuff out of you as fast as you want it out of you. But there is a right place in the right time. So we’re still going to be doing other testing, like looking at stool to try to investigate these gut infections. You know, you mentioned some of the reabsorption of toxins, too. That’s a big problem. If you have bacterial overgrowth because of this whole beta glucuronidation issue that we see. And so, there may need to be a month or two of just fixing the gut and fixing the enzyme production before we even get into detox. So don’t rush, don’t rush, don’t rush. That’s the whole message here. And can you do this on your own? That’s a question we get a lot. Well, can I just go online? Go on Amazon, buy a bottle of charcoal and be done with this? I would argue No, I will speak for Justin and say he would say no, as well, because we’ve done this 1000 plus times. And we know that if you’re just trying to detox and you’re not addressing everything else, you may send yourself backwards. What does that mean? Well, it means if you’re overwhelming your system, so like when I took charcoal, I’ve got some right here on my desk. I thought, well, I feel so good on four capsules a day, I’m going to go up to eight capsules a day. And I didn’t do anything in regards to my gut, my liver adrenals. And I crashed hard, I had way too much charcoal is like whoa, you can’t have too much of a good thing. So that’s why I would argue it’s better to have a practitioner kind of prep your body and build up the other pillars of health. Before you go into the detox pillar. detox is sexy, right? Like detox tea and all of this, it’s kind of a trendy thing to do. But people don’t have the disclaimer that you need to be ready, you need to have a constitutional strength to do this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% I totally agree. Sometimes we detoxification slow and steady, is the better way to deal with the issues, especially if a lot of these issues came slow and steady. If they came over decades, then it makes sense. If it you know a little bit more of a short term kind of toxic issue, you could probably hit it a little bit faster and harder, especially if you’re younger and more healthy. That totally makes sense. So when we talk about, you know, fertility and mold, I know a lot of women out there are going to be like, man, I knew it’s mold, maybe maybe not. So I just want to make sure anytime we talk about a specific issue, and we connect it to a thing like fertility that resonates with women, right. Like if you have fertility issues, you know, it’s it’s a very stressful thing for women that want to get pregnant, and they can’t, it’s very, very stressful. And so you want to look at the goal of pregnancy holistically. So you always want to look at diet and nutrient density. And all of the building blocks in your food. And being able to digest those foods adequately is core foundational, you want to be able to get sleep and having high quality water, you want to look at mitigating toxins, whether it’s molding your food, whether it’s eating crummy moldy grains, whether it’s consuming a lot of hormones, or pesticides, you want to look at those things as foundational. And then we can look at the hormones, we can look at your luteal phase hormone levels, we can look at your adrenals we can look at thyroid, autoimmune gut permeability, gut infections, and then we can eventually work our way to detoxification. And mold levels down the road, there’s an order of operation. So just kind of look at things as what’s going to give you the best bang for your buck. I always tell my patients if you’re going bowling, right and it’s your first role, you’re not trying to hit the outside left pin, you’re trying to hit the pin right in the middle, why hit the pin in the middle and knocks everything else down. So it’s kind of that’s how we want to look at this and mold maybe a pin that’s off to the right or left with some people. Some people that may be the center pin, right. But we always go with that center pin. And that’s always gonna be the foundational things to start and then we build on that as we go.
Evan Brand: Nice. bringing out the bowling analogy. That’s a new one. I like it. I like it. That’s awesome. Excellent. So for men, I mean men listening to they’re like, Well, you know, this is all about her. Nope. Did you hear the part about the reduction in sperm quality? So men, you are not exempt? I get frustrated with these fertility practitioners that people have seen before they come to me because why is the male not on this phone call? Like, this is so important. Why is the male not here? What is he doing? And so we know just the mold toxin, but anything else in regards to the diet, the lifestyle, the gut, that all affects male fertility as well. And I think this is really the missing piece. The women take all the blame the emotional blame the physical. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a big issue for them to, to not have fertility, and so the men are just sitting back with their arms crossed, like, Oh, poor you, but they got to get involved too. And so there may be a male protocol that we’re implementing as well, a lot of the foundational nutrients for women, you know, we’re doing prenatals omegas, vitamin D, vitamin K, possibly some trace minerals, enzymes, electrolytes, liver support, did I say adrenal support already? adrenals. So those are some of the pieces that we’re implementing. And good news is, a lot of this stuff we’re talking about. It is reversible. Now, if you’re age 50 I’ve had some women literally age 50 52 coming to me because they want to have babies. I’m like, Ah, you’re 52 I’m gonna help you get healthy, but I’m not signing in blood. You’re going to have a baby at age 52 like this is Wow. So, you know, I think there is a cut off. But, you know, if you’re 40 listening to this, and you’ve had issues, I think you still have time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So I mean, my wife, we had our first child she was 41 and then 43. We had no problem getting pregnant. For the most part. We had a little bit of a fertility snafu in the beginning because she had a fibroid that was kind of embedded in the uterine lining. We didn’t know about it and was just sucking a lot of blood flow. So I always recommend patients that have fertility goals just to get a good general fertility workup to make sure there’s no ovarian tube or fallopian tube blockages, no weird, fibroids or anything weird that endometriosis that could be affecting fertility, because those things are pretty easy to remove. If we have to surgically Of course, there’s natural ways to do it, but it takes time, right. So if you’re under fertility window, you don’t have years to help these things reabsorb on their own. Sometimes a surgical intervention can be helpful when the clock is ticking. But guys, it’s pretty easy to roll out guys, we can do a high quality sperm test we can look at motility how the sperm are moving, you know what percents moving forward, what percent not moving, what percent. moving backwards, we can look at shape, which is morphology, we can also look at overall sperm count. So sperm count cut off, I think most the average firm comm for guys is around 20 million, we want at least 50 million. So we can look at that and there’s also expanded sperm panels, we’ll look at all look at DNA damage. We’ll look at oxidative stress as well. Now the key thing with guys is going to be just making sure insulin resistance toxins are under control, maybe a little bit of lifting some resistance training, you know good quality organic food right enough protein, enough fat that tends to be enough for most guys, adequate Selenium and zinc right adequate levels of good amino acids like Argentine that tends to be enough to really support good healthy sperm count where it’s going to be high enough. We can also add in things like co q 10 and carnitine. Like I mentioned, to support it extra. So it’s pretty easy to rules rule guys out in the beginning, Okay, good, hey, we’re at an adequate level great. Oh, we’re not let’s look at DNA damage. And then we can always then look at toxin load. Or if a lot of the guys are eating conventional standard American or eating a lot of GMOs, we can we can tweak a lot of that we can run a specific intercellular nutrient panel to look deeper at the nutrients and work on spot treating those on top of a good diet as well. But that’s essential. I like to get that if fertility is a goal to get the guy ruled out right away in the beginning.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s that’s great. Yeah. And that’s where like we said, Good multi comes in maybe some adaptogens too, because some of the herbs we use, they do have some supportive effects on hormone levels with man regulating testosterone estrogen levels, you know, some of the detox support may help in regards to estrogen. If men have had have a toxin issue and they’ve got, you know, breast tissue, they’ve got gyno, maybe they’ve done steroids. I mean, there are some issues that they kind of throw a wrench in the gears, but yeah, in general, you definitely make it sound like it’s much easier for men.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, out of the gates, I mean, women’s hormones are just so much more delicate. They’re like a beautiful Symphony and men’s are kind of like a foghorn. As I’ve always said, and, and with a symphony. If you just have the string the strings off or the percussion instruments off, you know that Symphony could turn to noise pretty fast. Definitely. We want to make sure that that’s you know, fully dialed in. And we want to look at the toxic load. So really important if you women are listening and you want to dive in deeper and with fertility goals kind of being there or even energy your mood goals being there to write I recommend clicking down below you can schedule with Evan, EvanBrand.com, you can also schedule with Dr. J. Myself, JustinHealth.com, we’re here to help you here to serve. Here to educate, we recommend taking advantage of all the low hanging fruit, we try to provide tons of low hanging fruit in this day and age. Everyone has access to it based on you know, the internet and everyone having these smartphones that are so cheap. Now it’s great. So everyone can kind of get access to a lot of this great Intel and start applying it. And then if you want to dive in deeper if you want to start stop guessing and start testing and figure out what’s happening under the hood. That’s where I really urge you all to reach out. And if you’re enjoying the content, please refer us to friends and family and shoot over a podcast the best way you can thank us for all that we’ve done is just kind of send the content to your family and friends so they can get healthier. Evan, anything else you want to say man?
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s all I want for Christmas is for everyone listening to share the podcast with your friends, your family, let’s make 2021 and even better, healthier year, less stress, less worry, more health, more vitality, it’s all possible. We try to give you guys action steps every time and this stuff is free. I mean, it’s a thankless job. So the best way you can think of sharing is caring. Thank you so much.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks, everyone. You guys have a phenomenal holiday season.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-affects-of-mycotoxins-on-male-female-fertility
Mold Problem?
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Activate the Parasympathetic Nervous System to Improve Recovery | Podcast #310
While often overlooked, the role of the nervous system in recovery is paramount. In this video, Dr. J and Jodi Cohen – a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oil. They highlight the key physical and mental/emotional factors that stress the nervous system, activate the parasympathetic nervous system for optimal recovery, and how it is connected to your vagus nerve, and how it can affect motility.
We often hear meditation and massage are two potent techniques to help with physical recovery from exercise and lower the body’s mental stress response. Jodi here also introduce oils that are so stimulatory, most especially to your vagus nerve, which large divisions of this nerve extends to the digestive system. Also, the vagus nerve sends commands (when the body is not under stress)that slow heart and breathing rates and increases digestion.
Check out this podcast and learn more on how you can apply this to your daily living!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:18 Parasympathetic
3:54 Vibrant and Blue Oils
7:38 Clove and Lime
20:08 Nutrients that Support the Oils
23:02 “Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here really excited to have a awesome podcast guest today Jody Cohen is going to be talking about the parasympathetic summit, which is going to be all about how to promote parasympathetic nervous system, which is about helping your body heal and improve. Jody, welcome to the podcast.
Jodi Cohen: Oh, my God, so honored to be here. Thank you. And I feel like the timing is perfect. For people who don’t really know what parasympathetic is your nervous system, your autonomic nervous system, which controls your automatic functions like breathing, heart re digestion, immunity has kind of two gears, when your body thinks there’s danger and it has to survive, it presses the gas pedal, and kind of routes all of your blood flow and your oxygen to your arms and your legs so that you can either fight back or flee. And then the danger passes, and you hit the brakes, which is the parasympathetic, and everything returns to normal. And it’s kind of like cleaning up after the party, right? You can digest your food, blood flow routes back to your digestion. And what happens especially now when we’re so anxious, you know, anticipatory stress makes the body think it’s in danger, we kind of get stuck in the wrong gear. And so all of those maintenance cleanup health functions, kind of get put on the back burner. And if they stay on the back burner forever, your health kind of suffers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: People talk about the parasympathetic nervous system, a lot of times that’s connected to the vagus nerve, correct?
Jodi Cohen: Yes, exactly. Your Vegas nerve is really the gearshift between that fight or flight, sympathetic state and the rest and digest parasympathetic state.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and the Vegas that that terminology means the wanderer, so it’s the nerve that goes from the brainstem and kind of wanders down and it hits all of the, the organs like you talked about a lot of digestive impacts regarding the parasympathetic because we need good HCl and enzyme so like to be able to get access to all of those nutrients. And to break all your proteins and fats and antioxidants down, we need good digestive support and getting into the parasympathetics helps that.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, I could actually the Vegas nerve wanders through every organ of digestion. So it triggers your mouth to release saliva, which helps start to break down those proteins so that they’re better absorbed and your stomach releases hydrochloric acid, it helps the pancreas release digestive enzymes, the gallbladder release bile. And then the most important thing that people don’t know is it kind of helps with the motility wave. Think of it as kind of like, you know, the moving walkway that goes through your system and make sure that things don’t stay too long in your gut and cause like cebo, or, you know, IBS or any problems, you know, and also make sure that you don’t get constipated, so that things leave, so that when you’re kind of stuck in fight or flight sympathetic dominance, all you know that the moving walkway doesn’t go and that’s when problems occur.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So anyone listening to this right now, if you’re liking what you’re hearing, make sure you click down below, we’re gonna put a link for the parasympathetic summit right down below, so make sure you subscribe. I was part of that summit along with a 30 other-
Jodi Cohen: I know, I know. I can’t. Well, you know what it is I am anxious. And so I started really early. And so I had almost everything done a month before the deadline. And then wonderful people like you who I’ve loved and admired said Oh, can I get on? I’m like, oh my god. Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. That’s Yeah, very cool. So I urge everyone listening to subscribe to get access to that awesome info. So you have a website vibrant and blue oils? Yeah, you use a lot of oils that kind of help people promote healing relaxation. Can you give me like a top three lists that you use to kind of get that parasympathetic nervous response activated?
Jodi Cohen: Yeah. And I just want to back up the reason I found oils, um, I, my now ex has been attempted suicide and had to be hospitalized. And once I knew he was safe, and it wasn’t my job to keep him alive. I hit rock bottom, the kids were five and seven at the time, so it wasn’t super convenient to sleep all day. And I you know, I knew enough and it was my adrenals I kept trying to ingest remedies to help the adrenals and nothing was working. Um, a friend brought over oils, and I kind of made up a blend that I topically applied for the adrenals and it worked right away. And what I didn’t realize is chronic cortisol leads to inflammation of the gut. So my gut was so damaged, that nothing I was taking, like ingesting was really getting absorbed and assimilated. So that’s how I got into oils because I realized, oh, even if your gut is really messed up, you can still smell things you can still you know, we know that like nicotine patches or hormone creams go in through the skin. So that’s why I got started in oils. And then I started realizing because I’ve been in clinical practice. The blind spots, you know, if someone is deficient in vitamin D, that’s easy. You can supplement with vitamin B, if they’re stuck in parasympathetic or a second sympathetic, that was hard, you know, in a lot of the remedy is that, you know, you can teach people to breathe or meditate people, that’s hard. It’s not like an instant skill, you can say splash your face with freezing water, you know, which causes the blood flow to come to warm it up. People don’t like it either. It’s uncomfortable. They didn’t like gagging cells with a tongue depressor. But what I realized because the anatomy of the vagus nerve, as you said, it starts at the back of the head. And then it splits and whines around both sides. And it’s actually most accessible and the thickest, kind of right here. Like if you touch behind your earlobe, on your master bone. It’s like the width of a piano court there, you know, and it’s smaller and other places. So that’s why they actually do this kind of surgery, it’s a little bit like a pacemaker surgery. And they implant an electrical device here, and then a battery down below me, it’s pretty invasive. But you can use oils, oils are super stimulatory like clove, which has a million other benefits. And then lime has really small molecules, it’s kind of like, you know, when you combine colors, you can take blue and red, put them together and you get purple, which is different than you can add white and make it lavender. You know, you can combine oils, and it kind of draws the best from both of them. So I created this blend, parasympathetic, that’s clothing line. And what’s super cool is, you know, you might not be able to deep breathe, you might struggle with meditation and fall asleep, but you can dab a little thing right here, you can carry this in your purse, this is a really easy thing to comply with. And then you feel better. You’re like, Okay, I’m not constipated. Okay, my I don’t feel bloated. Okay, I feel a little bit like calmer and less anxious. You know, and, as you know, like the supplements that people know, help them, like they feel less tired. They’re really good at compliance. Once you figure out this is working for me, you’re all in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s a good replacement. For some people, they’re they’re already used to like reaching for a medication, well, let’s try something a little bit more natural. That’s going to have a good benefit. It’s not going to have the side effects. And it’s the least you know, good step to other healthy things. I imagine. Yes. What you’re doing oils, you’re probably now thinking about the food you’re eating and other Yes, your habits too. So it kind of creates an awareness, I imagine as well.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, and definitely that cascade. Yeah. You know, it’s like crawl before you walk, walk before you run. Yeah. Once you’re like, Okay, I did that, like I used to in yoga. You know, sometimes these teachers would be so sneaky and suddenly you’re doing like a handstand or headstand. And you’re like, had no idea I could do that. What else can I do?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? That’s awesome. Very cool. Yeah, you have that parasympathetic lead, I think you say clove and lime. Is that true?
Jodi Cohen: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would think like, you’d have maybe like a lavender or something like that. I’m just curious what your –
Jodi Cohen: Well, you know, originally, no, no, and a lot of people that’s a great question. Originally, I was thinking like, Oh, it’s parasympathetic. It should be sedated. You know, when oils like lavender Kammen meal. No, we know that they’re all relaxing, you know, frankincense, even the resins? Yeah, um, but I realized that what it is, is you need to stimulate it. It’s kind of like, if you think about, you know, the old cars, we actually have to manually shift gears is to do something active and energizing to kind of change lanes. So this stimulates the vagus nerve, and in stimulating it, it’s like, oh, you know, I’m switching gears.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you’re using that access point, with the nerves a little bit more superficial and more Yes, to get access to it.
Jodi Cohen: Exactly, exactly. And the other cool thing is, um, you know, there’s a researcher out of tufts Michael Vanek, or talks about the vagus nerve infection hypothesis. And basically, it’s this idea that the vagus nerve has such a broad depth and you know, it gets into your system everywhere. So any kind of small minor infection can basically the body can pick it up as you’re infected, and it goes into like cell danger response or sickness response. So you get tired so you don’t move chronic fatigue syndrome, you have pain so you don’t move fibromyalgia. A lot of these things can be traced to an infection in the Vegas nerve and the most likely one of the doctors on the summit, Marco Rubio, he did this extensive research where he was taking ultrasounds of people’s necks, and he was finding that often the Vegas nerve was infected there because, you know, we have all these toxins in our mouth that drain out and you know, and they’re exacerbated if you have like metal amalgams or any kind of cavitation you know, that has been compromised your root canal. So think about, you know, congestion point a bottleneck. You have toxins draining along the trigeminal nerve, they intersect with the Vegas nerve, you know, the neck has the structure of the limb, the blood vessels, the nerves, you know, any kind of compromise if you know as a chiropractor if things Aren’t flowing that can get congested. So the toxins accumulate here. clove actually has, it has this constituent called eugenol. And it’s been used in dentistry for years because it does two things. It numbs the pain and it actually helps to address the underlying toxins. So if there is a toxicity or an infection, that’s, you know, think of it like you’re on an airplane, right? If you’re in a row of seats, and you’re in the middle row, and the people on either side of you are not petite people, you’re not getting that armrest, you know, you’re really compressed and congested. So if the Vegas nerve is congested, it’s bumping into the vascular system, you’re not getting the blood flow, it’s bumping into the lymph, you’re not getting the drainage. So anything you can do and Dr. Russo actually walks you through step by step, how they started to, you know, topically apply remedies to cause less congestion in the lymph and all of a sudden the Vegas nerve. You can see it in the pictures. It’s kind of amazing. What kind of evidence was he doing his trials. He was using Christine sharpeners, he created their Sophia flow cream, which is a combination of essential oils and then other remedies. But what’s interesting is that most people don’t think about topically, you know, most people are kind of like have lymphie need to dry better shirt rebounder, you know that we don’t really have anything for that. But we do. It’s these topically applied remedies, we actually have a limp oil. It’s a lot of menten and things that kind of help open up vasculature and drainage. And she uses some oils in her product too. They’re both good, right? You know, it’s kinda like you get out there, right? Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There’s a lot of ways you can skin a cat so to speak. Did you choose those oils? Was it your own clinical experience? Was it research that you saw? How did that?
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the reason I got into nutrition was my own squirmy kid. You know, my first kid was super easy. I just assumed I was this great. Mom had another 120 minutes later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve seen that having two kids now I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah. And he was just wild, a wild child. Like I really thought, like, you know, like, you have the parenting baby proof people come to your house. And they’re like, and here’s this oven lock, because some kids climb in the oven, you know, and with my first one is like, no, no kid, kid climbs in the oven. Oh, number two, you just like that, that I had that kid that did those things. And a friend noticed that he was being really well behaved. And then another mom handed out like a Ritz cracker and he Jekyll Hyde. And she said, You know, my brother was on Ritalin his whole life. And it turns out, he was just allergic to weird foods, you should check that out. I thought, I’ve done everything else, I can certainly do that. And we took them to nutritionist. She said he’s really sensitive to corn, soy and dairy. So we changed his diet. And we had a different kid the next day. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, how did I not know this? So I went back and got a degree in nutrition was trying to work with other screaming kids. And I mean, you know, like, if they can’t, if they’re wiggling all over it, it’s really hard to like, assess them. So I learned this technique called muscle testing, that’s a really good way to kind of ask the body questions, and it’s what I was doing in my practice to help identify what remedies were good for kids. And so when I first got introduced to oils, I was really, I have never been at this kind of rock bottom, like just so mentally and physically exhausted, like literally getting up to do anything felt like a strain. So, you know, someone gave me this box, and I’m so drained, I’m like, all right, I can muscle test. So basically, it’s intuition I muscle test I, every we have a blueprint in the body, right? There’s a blueprint for what healthy adrenal tissue is supposed to look like. And sometimes you do things and you don’t really realize that’s what you’re doing. That’s what I’ve been doing my practice the whole time is kind of identifying what organisms stress, and then using supplements to help return that organ to balance so it would function well. And so that was kind of the lens that I was looking through when I was making these formulas. So I was like, Alright, what what combination, you know, we humans have a blueprint. And plants also have blueprints. And humans and plants are bio familiar. So we share similar blueprints. So kind of like you can combine different colors to you know, match a picture in a landscape, you can combine different oils to match the blueprint of a healthy organ. So I was using intuition to come up with the formulation, you know, for a start, kind of identify this needs to be in it. And then I would play with what you know, 10% of this 20% of this, the different variables and then I have a team of people that kind of help me test it, and they test and then they can kind of mentally say like you We increase, you know, the Roman kameel from, you know, 12% to 13. So we’re just constantly refining and tweaking it. And then I go and I research, you know, okay, why? Why does balsam of Peru, which is a resin that’s drawn from these plants in you know, the Amazon in Peru and Brazil seem to help with sleep? What chemical constituents are present in this plant? Why is it working? And I would every single time be like, Oh, that makes complete sense. Why this is helping. And so that’s, that’s my process. It’s a little bit nutty, but it always seems to work.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. And you know, I also, I’m just curious, though, with your son, what were the oils that really helped because one thing I like about oils with kids, is some kids don’t want to swallow stuff. And they may be something in reverse, right? So it’s hard to get them to do stuff. So you can kind of covertly put some on your fingers rub their behind their ears and kind of get it in their bloodstream. So I like that what oils that you found were the best on on Macs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here really excited to have a awesome podcast guest today Jody Cohen is going to be talking about the parasympathetic summit, which is going to be all about how to promote parasympathetic nervous system, which is about helping your body heal and improve. Jody, welcome to the podcast.
Jodi Cohen: Oh, my God, so honored to be here. Thank you. And I feel like the timing is perfect. For people who don’t really know what parasympathetic is your nervous system, your autonomic nervous system, which controls your automatic functions like breathing, heart re digestion, immunity has kind of two gears, when your body thinks there’s danger and it has to survive, it presses the gas pedal, and kind of routes all of your blood flow and your oxygen to your arms and your legs so that you can either fight back or flee. And then the danger passes, and you hit the brakes, which is the parasympathetic, and everything returns to normal. And it’s kind of like cleaning up after the party, right? You can digest your food, blood flow routes back to your digestion. And what happens especially now when we’re so anxious, you know, anticipatory stress makes the body think it’s in danger, we kind of get stuck in the wrong gear. And so all of those maintenance cleanup health functions, kind of get put on the back burner. And if they stay on the back burner forever, your health kind of suffers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: People talk about the parasympathetic nervous system, a lot of times that’s connected to the vagus nerve, correct?
Jodi Cohen: Yes, exactly. Your Vegas nerve is really the gearshift between that fight or flight, sympathetic state and the rest and digest parasympathetic state.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and the Vegas that that terminology means the wanderer, so it’s the nerve that goes from the brainstem and kind of wanders down and it hits all of the, the organs like you talked about a lot of digestive impacts regarding the parasympathetic because we need good HCl and enzyme so like to be able to get access to all of those nutrients. And to break all your proteins and fats and antioxidants down, we need good digestive support and getting into the parasympathetics helps that.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, I could actually the Vegas nerve wanders through every organ of digestion. So it triggers your mouth to release saliva, which helps start to break down those proteins so that they’re better absorbed and your stomach releases hydrochloric acid, it helps the pancreas release digestive enzymes, the gallbladder release bile. And then the most important thing that people don’t know is it kind of helps with the motility wave. Think of it as kind of like, you know, the moving walkway that goes through your system and make sure that things don’t stay too long in your gut and cause like cebo, or, you know, IBS or any problems, you know, and also make sure that you don’t get constipated, so that things leave, so that when you’re kind of stuck in fight or flight sympathetic dominance, all you know that the moving walkway doesn’t go and that’s when problems occur.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So anyone listening to this right now, if you’re liking what you’re hearing, make sure you click down below, we’re gonna put a link for the parasympathetic summit right down below, so make sure you subscribe. I was part of that summit along with a 30 other-
Jodi Cohen: I know, I know. I can’t. Well, you know what it is I am anxious. And so I started really early. And so I had almost everything done a month before the deadline. And then wonderful people like you who I’ve loved and admired said Oh, can I get on? I’m like, oh my god. Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. That’s Yeah, very cool. So I urge everyone listening to subscribe to get access to that awesome info. So you have a website vibrant and blue oils? Yeah, you use a lot of oils that kind of help people promote healing relaxation. Can you give me like a top three lists that you use to kind of get that parasympathetic nervous response activated?
Jodi Cohen: Yeah. And I just want to back up the reason I found oils, um, I, my now ex has been attempted suicide and had to be hospitalized. And once I knew he was safe, and it wasn’t my job to keep him alive. I hit rock bottom, the kids were five and seven at the time, so it wasn’t super convenient to sleep all day. And I you know, I knew enough and it was my adrenals I kept trying to ingest remedies to help the adrenals and nothing was working. Um, a friend brought over oils, and I kind of made up a blend that I topically applied for the adrenals and it worked right away. And what I didn’t realize is chronic cortisol leads to inflammation of the gut. So my gut was so damaged, that nothing I was taking, like ingesting was really getting absorbed and assimilated. So that’s how I got into oils because I realized, oh, even if your gut is really messed up, you can still smell things you can still you know, we know that like nicotine patches or hormone creams go in through the skin. So that’s why I got started in oils. And then I started realizing because I’ve been in clinical practice The blind spots, you know, if someone’s deficient in vitamin D, that’s easy. You can supplement with vitamin B, if they’re stuck in parasympathetic or a second sympathetic, that was hard, you know, in a lot of the remedy is that, you know, you can teach people to breathe or meditate people, that’s hard. It’s not like an instant skill, you can say splash your face with freezing water, you know, which causes the blood flow to come to warm it up. People don’t like it either. It’s uncomfortable. They didn’t like gagging cells with a tongue depressor. But what I realized because the anatomy of the vagus nerve, as you said, it starts at the back of the head. And then it splits and whines around both sides. And it’s actually most accessible and the thickest, kind of right here. Like if you touch behind your earlobe, on your master bone. It’s like the width of a piano court there, you know, and it’s smaller and other places. So that’s why they actually do this kind of surgery, it’s a little bit like a pacemaker surgery. And they implant an electrical device here, and then a battery down below me, it’s pretty invasive. But you can use oils, oils are super stimulatory like clove, which has a million other benefits. And then lime has really small molecules, it’s kind of like, you know, when you combine colors, you can take blue and red, put them together and you get purple, which is different than you can add white and make it lavender. You know, you can combine oils, and it kind of draws the best from both of them. So I created this blend, parasympathetic, that’s clothing line. And what’s super cool is, you know, you might not be able to deep breathe, you might struggle with meditation and fall asleep, but you can dab a little thing right here, you can carry this in your purse, this is a really easy thing to comply with. And then you feel better. You’re like, Okay, I’m not constipated. Okay, my I don’t feel bloated. Okay, I feel a little bit like calmer and less anxious. You know, and, as you know, like the supplements that people know, help them, like they feel less tired. They’re really good at compliance. Once you figure out this is working for me, you’re all in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s a good replacement. For some people, they’re they’re already used to like reaching for a medication, well, let’s try something a little bit more natural. That’s going to have a good benefit. It’s not going to have the side effects. And it’s the least you know, good step to other healthy things. I imagine. Yes. What you’re doing oils, you’re probably now thinking about the food you’re eating and other Yes, your habits too. So it kind of creates an awareness, I imagine as well.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, and definitely that cascade. Yeah. You know, it’s like crawl before you walk, walk before you run. Yeah. Once you’re like, Okay, I did that, like I used to in yoga. You know, sometimes these teachers would be so sneaky and suddenly you’re doing like a handstand or headstand. And you’re like, had no idea I could do that. What else can I do?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? That’s awesome. Very cool. Yeah, you have that parasympathetic lead, I think you say clove and lime. Is that true.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would think like, you’d have maybe like a lavender or something like that. I’m just curious what your –
Jodi Cohen: Well, you know, originally, no, no, and a lot of people that’s a great question. Originally, I was thinking like, Oh, it’s parasympathetic. It should be sedated. You know, when oils like lavender Kammen meal. No, we know that they’re all relaxing, you know, frankincense, even the resins? Yeah, um, but I realized that what it is, is you need to stimulate it. It’s kind of like, if you think about, you know, the old cars, we actually have to manually shift gears is to do something active and energizing to kind of change lanes. So this stimulates the vagus nerve, and in stimulating it, it’s like, oh, you know, I’m switching gears.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you’re using that access point, with the nerves a little bit more superficial and more Yes, to get access to it.
Jodi Cohen: Exactly, exactly. And the other cool thing is, um, you know, there’s a researcher out of tufts Michael Vanek, or talks about the vagus nerve infection hypothesis. And basically, it’s this idea that the vagus nerve has such a broad depth and you know, it gets into your system everywhere. So any kind of small minor infection can basically the body can pick it up as you’re infected, and it goes into like cell danger response or sickness response. So you get tired so you don’t move chronic fatigue syndrome, you have pain so you don’t move fibromyalgia. A lot of these things can be traced to an infection in the Vegas nerve and the most likely one of the doctors on the summit, Marco Rubio, he did this extensive research where he was taking ultrasounds of people’s necks, and he was finding that often the Vegas nerve was infected there because, you know, we have all these toxins in our mouth that drain out and you know, and they’re exacerbated if you have like metal amalgams or any kind of cavitation you know, that has been compromised your root canal. So think about, you know, congestion point a bottleneck. You have toxins draining along the trigeminal nerve, they intersect with the Vegas nerve, you know, the neck has the structure of the limb, the blood vessels, the nerves, you know, any kind of compromise if you know as a chiropractor if things Aren’t flowing that can get congested. So the toxins accumulate here. clove actually has, it has this constituent called eugenol. And it’s been used in dentistry for years because it does two things. It numbs the pain and it actually helps to address the underlying toxins. So if there is a toxicity or an infection, that’s, you know, think of it like you’re on an airplane, right? If you’re in a row of seats, and you’re in the middle row, and the people on either side of you are not petite people, you’re not getting that armrest, you know, you’re really compressed and congested. So if the Vegas nerve is congested, it’s bumping into the vascular system, you’re not getting the blood flow, it’s bumping into the lymph, you’re not getting the drainage. So anything you can do and Dr. Russo actually walks you through step by step, how they started to, you know, topically apply remedies to cause less congestion in the lymph and all of a sudden the Vegas nerve. You can see it in the pictures. It’s kind of amazing. What kind of evidence was he doing his trials. He was using Christine sharpeners, he created their Sophia flow cream, which is a combination of essential oils and then other remedies. But what’s interesting is that most people don’t think about topically, you know, most people are kind of like have lymphie need to dry better shirt rebounder, you know that we don’t really have anything for that. But we do. It’s these topically applied remedies, we actually have a limp oil. It’s a lot of menten and things that kind of help open up vasculature and drainage. And she uses some oils in her product too. They’re both good, right? You know, it’s kinda like you get out there, right? Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There’s a lot of ways you can skin a cat so to speak. Did you choose those oils? Was it your own clinical experience? Was it research that you saw? How did that?
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the reason I got into nutrition was my own squirmy kid. You know, my first kid was super easy. I just assumed I was this great. Mom had another 120 minutes later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve seen that having two kids now I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah. And he was just wild, a wild child. Like I really thought, like, you know, like, you have the parenting baby proof people come to your house. And they’re like, and here’s this oven lock, because some kids climb in the oven, you know, and with my first one is like, no, no kid, kid climbs in the oven. Oh, number two, you just like that, that I had that kid that did those things. And a friend noticed that he was being really well behaved. And then another mom handed out like a Ritz cracker and he Jekyll Hyde. And she said, You know, my brother was on Ritalin his whole life. And it turns out, he was just allergic to weird foods, you should check that out. I thought, I’ve done everything else, I can certainly do that. And we took them to nutritionist. She said he’s really sensitive to corn, soy and dairy. So we changed his diet. And we had a different kid the next day. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, how did I not know this? So I went back and got a degree in nutrition was trying to work with other screaming kids. And I mean, you know, like, if they can’t, if they’re wiggling all over it, it’s really hard to like, assess them. So I learned this technique called muscle testing, that’s a really good way to kind of ask the body questions, and it’s what I was doing in my practice to help identify what remedies were good for kids. And so when I first got introduced to oils, I was really, I have never been at this kind of rock bottom, like just so mentally and physically exhausted, like literally getting up to do anything felt like a strain. So, you know, someone gave me this box, and I’m so drained, I’m like, all right, I can muscle test. So basically, it’s intuition I muscle test I, every we have a blueprint in the body, right? There’s a blueprint for what healthy adrenal tissue is supposed to look like. And sometimes you do things and you don’t really realize that’s what you’re doing. That’s what I’ve been doing my practice the whole time is kind of identifying what organisms stress, and then using supplements to help return that organ to balance so it would function well. And so that was kind of the lens that I was looking through when I was making these formulas. So I was like, Alright, what what combination, you know, we humans have a blueprint. And plants also have blueprints. And humans and plants are bio familiar. So we share similar blueprints. So kind of like you can combine different colors to you know, match a picture in a landscape, you can combine different oils to match the blueprint of a healthy organ. So I was using intuition to come up with the formulation, you know, for a start, kind of identify this needs to be in it. And then I would play with what you know, 10% of this 20% of this, the different variables and then I have a team of people that kind of help me test it, and they test and then they can kind of mentally say like you We increase, you know, the Roman kameel from, you know, 12% to 13. So we’re just constantly refining and tweaking it. And then I go and I research, you know, okay, why? Why does balsam of Peru, which is a resin that’s drawn from these plants in you know, the Amazon in Peru and Brazil seem to help with sleep? What chemical constituents are present in this plant? Why is it working? And I would every single time be like, Oh, that makes complete sense. Why this is helping. And so that’s, that’s my process. It’s a little bit nutty, but it always seems to work.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. And you know, I also, I’m just curious, though, with your son, what were the oils that really helped because one thing I like about oils with kids, is some kids don’t want to swallow stuff. And they may be something in reverse, right? So it’s hard to get them to do stuff. So you can kind of covertly put some on your fingers rub their behind their ears and kind of get it in their bloodstream. So I like that what oils that you found were the best on on Macs.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, so I definitely use parasympathetic. But you know, kids are so intuitive. Like, I think as we get older, we forget or we feel uncomfortable that you know, when the phone’s ringing, we somehow know it’s going to be our mother or, you know, we lose track of that. So with kids, I always kind of do a smell bar and I let them pick whatever they like best he loved orange. And orange is, you know, all of the citrus blends are really calming. And they also help with focus. And you know, a lot of them that are expensive, like Neroli and bergama. You know, those are kind of touted, but orange is super affordable, and kids love it. So he would like to smell that we’d have him do that before he did homework. You know, I give him a little foot rub before bed. But that was just I just let him pick it That was his favorite. But the ones that helped him the most. Definitely parasympathetic adrenal, because he’d get really wire you know, he was like a firecracker. He was always on. So just helping him to calm down. And then sometimes like liver because he, you know, he he inherited my ashkenazic liver, which is, you know, I think the reason that a lot of the traditional Jewish foods are like beets, borscht, chopped liver, you know, we eat all of the foods that we need so that our liver actually works because I think we have a little bit of a genetic detriment-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: When you use that adrenal and liver, what would those oils be to support those organs?
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, I have it all listed out on my site. But and actually in the I have a book coming out in March of 2016, that I’m going to share the recipes because with COVID It breaks my heart, you know, you really can’t get anything into Australia these days. And it’s super hard to get things to Europe and I and India and I have these people that are like I think my, my poor husband could really benefit and I’m like, Oh my gosh, I’m just going to give out the recipe.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s March 2021. Right?
Jodi Cohen: March 2021, March 16. It’s an essential oils to boost the brain and heal the body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. That’s great. So what else can people do? We talked about parasympathetics. Right. We know the adrenal plays a major role and different things. Obviously, food nutrition can help with that. What are some things clinically they use? Yeah, clients or on the oil side that you see adrenals.
Jodi Cohen: So Titus, two, who’s a colleague and a functional neurologist, which means that he is looking at what part of the brain You know, it was cute. At one point, I took my son to a functional neurologist, and he had all these little personality things that I thought were him, you know, like he couldn’t walk a straight line to save his life. He would like what diagonal Walker, he would always spill stuff on himself, he had no spatial awareness. And it turns out, his left brain was much more dominant than his right hemisphere of the brain. So we have Dr. Robert millio, who really talks about using oils to kind of balance the hemispheres. And to kind of a quick parasympathetic trick Titus two talks about how anxiety and panic attacks is over activation of your right frontal lobe. And so to kind of calm and balance that you then activate the left frontal lobe, and that puts the two hemispheres in balance. And functional neurologists use essential oils a lot in their practice, because your your nose, your olfactory nerve, you know, number one goes directly to you know, sometimes in the body, the right brain controls the left body, your olfactory channels go directly to this frontal part. Yeah, exactly. So you can just smell something, you know, it can be anything you like, it can be lavender, it can be orange, it can be parasympathetic, you know, you can actually like dry breathing, plug one nostril, smell through the left nostril, that activates the left frontal lobe balances the brain, you feel less anxious. I anxiety is my thing. My daughter’s thing too. I have panic attacks, I have all these things and that always helps you I basically, even if I’m walking my dog, this is in my pocket in case I need it. So that is my favorite quick fix.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What about high levels of cortisol? Obviously, high levels of cortisol can cause anxiety, right? So you mentioned maybe that plays a big role. Anything you do to help with the high adrenaline or high cortisol state? Yeah, add any like nutrients in to kind of be supportive to those oils.
Jodi Cohen: I mean, there are tons of nutrients that are helpful. And you know, if you’re able to digest like, there are a lot of adaptogenic herbs that I love, like ashwagandha rhodiola. But one thing that I’ve, I think that oils work like adaptogenic herbs, like one of the things, you know, I’ve done those 24 hour cortisol tests where you’re spitting in the tube. And what I found is that it’s not flatline. It’s not like my cortisol level is either too high all the time or too low all the time. You know, it’s too high at night when I’m trying to go to sleep and too low in the morning when I need energy. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And you know, if you think about the nutrients that you can take the supplements, you kind of have to turn it right. You know, like, if you’re already too high, and you’re taking something that makes it higher, that’s not going to be such a positive experience. So with oils, we have two blends. One is the adrenal blend that just kind of evens you out. If you’re too high, it takes it down or too low brings you up, and then one for the hypothalamus. And this is something that most people don’t talk about, they just assume that all cortisol is related to the adrenals, not realizing that it’s a bit of a cascade, the hypothalamus, pituitary axis, your hypothalamus in your brain controls all your endocrine organs, it’s constantly reading the environment and signals in your body to figure out how do we return it to balance you know, like, when you’re driving, at one point, you might be a little too far to the left. So you just course correct, your hypothalamus is your course corrector. And it does that by sending chemical messages to kind of the COO, the one who executes your pituitary gland, which then sends message to your thyroid, your adrenals, all of your endocrine organs. So sometimes it’s called this negative feedback loop, the hypothalamus sends these messages out, then messages come back. And it kind of course, corrects, like, oh, we’re good on cortisol, we don’t need more. And if the, you know, the hypothalamus is kind of overwhelmed, you know, like, my friend likes to say you can’t move along when the house is on fire, you know, if there’s so much going on, it can be like your phone, and it just doesn’t get the right information and send things out. So we have a blend, it’s hard to get things into the brain. I mean, that’s the biggest challenge. And the biggest Aha, with oils, they’re super small and fat soluble. So they cross the blood brain barrier. So we have one, it contains pine, which has a lot of research on it, but you just put it right here. And it’s almost like it sends the right frequency, the right blueprint, whatever you want to call it, to return the hypothalamus to balance so that it’s then sending better messages to the adrenal so that you’re not so hyper cortisol or hyper cortisol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. Excellent. Yeah. So you got your book coming out this March 16 2021, what’s the book gonna be called?
Jodi Cohen: It’s called “Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body.” And you can grab it on Amazon presale, Amazon pre sells anything, you know, you basically they match the best price ever. So if you if you’re a bargain shopper, and we’re actually going to have a gift card so that you can add a stocking stuffers so that if you want to buy the book, you know, we’ll send you a little coupon that you can put into the stocking with like a deal on getting an oil like parasympathetic to go with it. It’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and your favorite so far as what parasympathetic.
Jodi Cohen: I love parasympathetic. And honestly, with everything that’s going on, we have a blend called circulation that has a lot of Cyprus, I’ve found and a lot of clinicians have found like, if you’re concerned about getting sick, Cyprus does a really wonderful job of kind of protecting the lung lining. So, you know, they talk about this current concern, it kind of happens in two phases, right? It either gets into the lungs and the lungs lining a solid and it doesn’t go any further and it was a minor cold, or it gets into your system and causes a cytokine storm. So you kind of want to make sure that that bouncer at the gate of your lungs is really working well. And so the circulation oil, I just put over my lungs and also helps if I need to, I’m on deadline and I have to get something done. I put a little bit at the base of my skull, because that improves oxygen flow in the blood and when you have more blood and more oxygen flow, it’s easier to focus.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love that. That’s awesome. Very cool. Well, any other clinical pearls so we have the parasympathetic summit, um, in that but other great speakers 50 Plus you said we’ll put the link down below so if you guys are loving it, click down below make sure you register. We also got the link for Jodi’s website, vibrantblueoils.com those are gonna be there for you as well. March 16 2021, we’ll get the book up there pre presale Amazon like anything else. Go you know, listen to the show. Listen with?
Jodi Cohen: You know what’s funny? Like we’re about to come into Thanksgiving, holiday gratitude. And the fastest way that you can shift yourself into parasympathetic is mindset and gratitude. So if you’re worried about what’s going on in the world, just focus on what you’re grateful for. It could be something as simple as the ability to move your body and to take a breath and to have you know, it’s a gorgeous day here in Seattle to have a sunny sky, you know? Yep. So, you know, I guess I would just like to leave on that. Note that how you choose to experience the world is in your control, and you can always be grateful for things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like it. Yeah. When you need the world to kind of conform to the things that you want, then you tend to be like, let down yeah. When you can basically put your focus on the things that you want to appreciate, right? Yeah, in the driver’s seat. So like, that’s definitely an empowering.
Jodi Cohen: Yes. Yes. You always get to be you always are in control of how you feel and how you think.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, thanks so much, Jody, head over to vibrantblueoils.com, parasympathetic summit links down below. Hope you guys enjoyed today’s podcast. Have a good one. Jodi, great chatting with you.
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, so I definitely use parasympathetic. But you know, kids are so intuitive. Like, I think as we get older, we forget or we feel uncomfortable that you know, when the phone’s ringing, we somehow know it’s going to be our mother or, you know, we lose track of that. So with kids, I always kind of do a smell bar and I let them pick whatever they like best he loved orange. And orange is, you know, all of the citrus blends are really calming. And they also help with focus. And you know, a lot of them that are expensive, like Neroli and bergama. You know, those are kind of touted, but orange is super affordable, and kids love it. So he would like to smell that we’d have him do that before he did homework. You know, I give him a little foot rub before bed. But that was just I just let him pick it That was his favorite. But the ones that helped him the most. Definitely parasympathetic adrenal, because he’d get really wire you know, he was like a firecracker. He was always on. So just helping him to calm down. And then sometimes like liver because he, you know, he he inherited my ashkenazic liver, which is, you know, I think the reason that a lot of the traditional Jewish foods are like beets, borscht, chopped liver, you know, we eat all of the foods that we need so that our liver actually works because I think we have a little bit of a genetic detriment-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: When you use that adrenal and liver, what would those oils be to support those organs?
Jodi Cohen: Yeah, I have it all listed out on my site. But and actually in the I have a book coming out in March of 2016, that I’m going to share the recipes because with COVID It breaks my heart, you know, you really can’t get anything into Australia these days. And it’s super hard to get things to Europe and I and India and I have these people that are like I think my, my poor husband could really benefit and I’m like, Oh my gosh, I’m just going to give out the recipe.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s March 2021. Right?
Jodi Cohen: March 2021, March 16. It’s an essential oils to boost the brain and heal the body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. That’s great. So what else can people do? We talked about parasympathetics. Right. We know the adrenal is play a major role and different things. Obviously, food nutrition can help with that. What are some things clinically they use? Yeah, clients or on the oil side that you see adrenals.
Jodi Cohen: So Titus, two, who’s a colleague and a functional neurologist, which means that he is looking at what part of the brain You know, it was cute. At one point, I took my son to a functional neurologist, and he had all these little personality things that I thought were him, you know, like he couldn’t walk a straight line to save his life. He would like what diagonal Walker, he would always spill stuff on himself, he had no spatial awareness. And it turns out, his left brain was much more dominant than his right hemisphere of the brain. So we have Dr. Robert millio, who really talks about using oils to kind of balance the hemispheres. And to kind of a quick parasympathetic trick Titus two talks about how anxiety and panic attacks is over activation of your right frontal lobe. And so to kind of calm and balance that you then activate the left frontal lobe, and that puts the two hemispheres in balance. And functional neurologists use essential oils a lot in their practice, because your your nose, your olfactory nerve, you know, number one goes directly to you know, sometimes in the body, the right brain controls the left body, your olfactory channels go directly to this frontal part. Yeah, exactly. So you can just smell something, you know, it can be anything you like, it can be lavender, it can be orange, it can be parasympathetic, you know, you can actually like dry breathing, plug one nostril, smell through the left nostril, that activates the left frontal lobe balances the brain, you feel less anxious. I anxiety is my thing. My daughter’s thing too. I have panic attacks, I have all these things and that always helps you I basically, even if I’m walking my dog, this is in my pocket in case I need it. So that is my favorite quick fix.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What about high levels of cortisol? Obviously, high levels of cortisol can cause anxiety, right? So you mentioned maybe that plays a big role. Anything you do to help with the high adrenaline or high cortisol state? Yeah, add any like nutrients in to kind of be supportive to those oils.
Jodi Cohen: I mean, there are tons of nutrients that are helpful. And you know, if you’re able to digest like, there are a lot of adaptogenic herbs that I love, like ashwagandha rhodiola. But one thing that I’ve, I think that oils work like adaptogenic herbs, like one of the things, you know, I’ve done those 24 hour cortisol tests where you’re spitting in the tube. And what I found is that it’s not flatline. It’s not like my cortisol level is either too high all the time or too low all the time. You know, it’s too high at night when I’m trying to go to sleep and too low in the morning when I need energy. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And you know, if you think about the nutrients that you can take the supplements, you kind of have to turn it right. You know, like, if you’re already too high, and you’re taking something that makes it higher, that’s not going to be such a positive experience. So with oils, we have two blends. One is the adrenal blend that just kind of evens you out. If you’re too high, it takes it down or too low brings you up, and then one for the hypothalamus. And this is something that most people don’t talk about, they just assume that all cortisol is related to the adrenals, not realizing that it’s a bit of a cascade, the hypothalamus, pituitary axis, your hypothalamus in your brain controls all your endocrine organs, it’s constantly reading the environment and signals in your body to figure out how do we return it to balance you know, like, when you’re driving, at one point, you might be a little too far to the left. So you just course correct, your hypothalamus is your course corrector. And it does that by sending chemical messages to kind of the COO, the one who executes your pituitary gland, which then sends message to your thyroid, your adrenals, all of your endocrine organs. So sometimes it’s called this negative feedback loop, the hypothalamus sends these messages out, then messages come back. And it kind of course, corrects, like, oh, we’re good on cortisol, we don’t need more. And if the, you know, the hypothalamus is kind of overwhelmed, you know, like, my friend likes to say you can’t move along when the house is on fire, you know, if there’s so much going on, it can be like your phone, and it just doesn’t get the right information and send things out. So we have a blend, it’s hard to get things into the brain. I mean, that’s the biggest challenge. And the biggest Aha, with oils, they’re super small and fat soluble. So they cross the blood brain barrier. So we have one, it contains pine, which has a lot of research on it, but you just put it right here. And it’s almost like it sends the right frequency, the right blueprint, whatever you want to call it, to return the hypothalamus to balance so that it’s then sending better messages to the adrenal so that you’re not so hyper cortisol or hyper cortisol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. Excellent. Yeah. So you got your book coming out this March 16 2021, what’s the book gonna be called?
Jodi Cohen: It’s called “Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body.” And you can grab it on Amazon presale, Amazon pre sells anything, you know, you basically they match the best price ever. So if you if you’re a bargain shopper, and we’re actually going to have a gift card so that you can add a stocking stuffers so that if you want to buy the book, you know, we’ll send you a little coupon that you can put into the stocking with like a deal on getting an oil like parasympathetic to go with it. It’s great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and your favorite so far as what parasympathetic.
Jodi Cohen: I love parasympathetic. And honestly, with everything that’s going on, we have a blend called circulation that has a lot of Cyprus, I’ve found and a lot of clinicians have found like, if you’re concerned about getting sick, Cyprus does a really wonderful job of kind of protecting the lung lining. So, you know, they talk about this current concern, it kind of happens in two phases, right? It either gets into the lungs and the lungs lining a solid and it doesn’t go any further and it was a minor cold, or it gets into your system and causes a cytokine storm. So you kind of want to make sure that that bouncer at the gate of your lungs is really working well. And so the circulation oil, I just put over my lungs and also helps if I need to, I’m on deadline and I have to get something done. I put a little bit at the base of my skull, because that improves oxygen flow in the blood and when you have more blood and more oxygen flow, it’s easier to focus.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love that. That’s awesome. Very cool. Well, any other clinical pearls so we have the parasympathetic summit, um, in that but other great speakers 50 Plus you said we’ll put the link down below so if you guys are loving it, click down below make sure you register. We also got the link for Jodi’s website, vibrantblueoils.com those are gonna be there for you as well. March 16 2021, we’ll get the book up there pre presale Amazon like anything else. Go you know, listen to the show. Listen with?
Jodi Cohen: You know what’s funny? Like we’re about to come into Thanksgiving, holiday gratitude. And the fastest way that you can shift yourself into parasympathetic is mindset and gratitude. So if you’re worried about what’s going on in the world, just focus on what you’re grateful for. It could be something as simple as the ability to move your body and to take a breath and to have you know, it’s a gorgeous day here in Seattle to have a sunny sky, you know? Yep. So, you know, I guess I would just like to leave on that. Note that how you choose to experience the world is in your control, and you can always be grateful for things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I like it. Yeah. When you need the world to kind of conform to the things that you want, then you tend to be like, let down yeah. When you can basically put your focus on the things that you want to appreciate, right? Yeah, in the driver’s seat. So like, that’s definitely an empowering.
Jodi Cohen: Yes. Yes. You always get to be you always are in control of how you feel and how you think.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, thanks so much, Jody, head over to vibrantblueoils.com, parasympathetic summit links down below. Hope you guys enjoyed today’s podcast. Have a good one. Jodi, great chatting with you.
References:
https://parasympatheticsummit.com